Fear to Tread

by James Swallow

  Harox dutifully bowed, but Kreed had turned his back on him and was already stalking away to the sacellum’s door, leaving a trail of bloody footprints.

  The octagonal portal rotated open, the entrance turning on a central pillar-hinge. Harox caught the odour of hot stone and rust, and the cloudy air trembled with the hollow tone of a woman weeping. He watched a headless servitor hand Kreed another, identical sword as the Acolyte crossed the threshold; then the door was closing again and the gloom returned.

  Harox heard a whispering from the corners of his senses, as if something had been allowed to escape the room and linger out here with him. He went on his way, reluctant to remain where any spoil from the ritual might fall.

  ‘We will begin again,’ Kreed said, marching through the lines of waiting supplicants. The test kill he had made was lying off to one side, discarded by one of the litanic helots, who stood over it, rocking back and forth. The servile had many mouths, all of them moving to form secret, noiseless words.

  Four men kneeled to either side of him, each one of the eight marked with the octed across their bare chests. The skin and fat beneath had been carefully flayed away by a laser, so that the lines formed channels down which to guide the flow of blood.

  Out on the floor of the chamber, the astropath Sahzë lay in a heap. She attempted to climb up to her knees. ‘I’m not ready,’ she wailed. ‘Please, lord. A moment.’ Her hands fluttered, white doves of pale fingers grasping at nothing.

  ‘Harox’s imposition gave you that and more,’ he snapped. ‘Don’t disappoint me now, mamzel. You promised so much. You’ll bestow it all.’

  ‘I will, but… the veil, the veil, the veil. I cannot see through it.’ She didn’t have the words beyond that, and she wept in pain.

  ‘I’ll give you what you need to burn through.’ Kreed nodded, considering it good. He didn’t spare the men on their knees a glance as he moved inside the arc of the sacrificial blades in his hands. The spin and cut was a remarkably light-footed motion for one as large as a gene-forged; it was almost elegant.

  Four heads and four again lolled back from their shoulders, ripping away from necks which had become stumps, pillars of blood making brief fountains before falling in slicks across the desecrated mosaics in the floor.

  Kreed pointed with the swords, guiding the motion of the pools of vitae like a conductor before an orchestra. He smiled. The Acolyte liked that metaphor: an orchestra with a single instrument.

  The blood flowed and became a shallow wave. Sahzë screamed as it rose towards her face, up like a cobra to strike. The noise she made was choked as the fluid engulfed the astropath. It hung in the wet air around her, boiling and steaming. There had been such dedication in the eight dead crewmen. They were among the longest-serving ratings aboard the Dark Page, and in their life of attachment to this starship there was a bond that went beyond the corporeal. Kreed used that now, the force of their existence and the permanence of their souls chained to this vessel.

  The litanic helots began a new silent chorus, and Kreed smelled burning meat. He had personally sewn the warp flask into Sahzë’s belly, tethering it there in an obscene and very deliberate echo of motherhood. Her blood power and that of the dead men would peak in this ritual. Thus it was important to draw the octed correctly, or risk a catastrophic collapse of the sacrament.

  The iron walls of the chamber and the starship beyond were dense with icons and glyphs from the Ruinous Powers, eyes of hell and myriad other devices looking inwards to hide all trace of sorcery from the psykers in thrall to the Blood Angels. If the rite were to fail, it would all be for nothing. The Dark Page would be consumed in a warp schism – and worse, their true intent would be revealed too soon to the sons of Sanguinius.

  But then Sahzë did her trick, and Kreed was laughing. With a horrible, bass gurgle that never should have come from the throat of someone so delicate, the astropath ejected wreaths of smoky, blood-shot ectoplasm into the air. The foul mist gathered to itself, swirling into balls of acrid yellow vapour.

  Gravitation inside the sacellum fluttered and Kreed staggered back a step or two. The smoke moved, congealed, gained colour and form.

  ‘I see you, Word Bearer,’ said Horus Lupercal’s avatar. ‘A sketch of your face, at least.’ The Warmaster seemed disgusted. ‘Speak now.’

  ‘The jaws of the trap close on the Angel,’ he said, bowing low. ‘He does not know.’

  ‘Don’t presume to see into my brother’s thoughts, Colchisian. Such arrogance makes a fool of you and burns my tolerance low.’ Hard planes of annoyance resonated through the reeking chamber. ‘Sanguinius could outwit you with a single breath. Underestimate him at your peril.’

  Kreed pushed on. ‘The scions of the Three Hundred companies are not of one mind as to what they have entered into. This disunity hides beneath obedience but it will be made clear and turned to our use when the axe falls.’ His head bobbed. The stink of sulphur was growing strong, overpowering the odour of blood and metal. ‘The fleet makes quarter-speed for Signus Prime and the core of the trap.’

  Horus loomed, the haze-shape growing a cloak of ash as it shifted, passing over a still lake of arterial blood. ‘You have not told me everything, Kreed. You are all so like Lorgar. Holding on to your secrets as though they were more precious than gold.’

  The Acolyte stood his ground. ‘Ask any question of me, Warmaster.’

  ‘Russ sent legionaries to join the expeditionary fleet. You did not think that important enough to tell me?’

  Despite himself, Kreed snorted. ‘A handful of wolf-whelps, my lord? Grains of dust on the scales, nothing more.’ He swallowed a poisonous breath. ‘If it pleases Great Horus, I ask you to task me. What more may I do to make this grand turning come to pass?’

  A low rumble sounded, and it took a moment for Kreed to realise it was the primarch’s laughter. ‘More arrogance. You hope to attain a greater role.’ The smoke-face grew cold. ‘You are nothing but a messenger, Tanus Kreed. A servile. Now be silent. I did not make this communion to speak to you.’

  It was not the answer he had been expecting. I don’t understand was what he wanted to say, but the cloying, overwhelming stench was now so great that it robbed Kreed of the ability to speak.

  With a final, ululating shriek that cut into his soul, Sahzë burst. The Word Bearer turned to see her consumed by a torrent of witch-fires that burned with black flames, acid fog billowing from her pores that ate her flesh and made it into cinders. She crumbled away around the shimmering glass horror of the warp flask, which remained utterly untouched by her tormented death. The container rocked back and forth as if something within wanted its freedom. Kreed decided that he did not want to know what that was.

  The communion should have broken immediately, but it did not. Horus – or what ghost-proxy there was of him – was still present. Kreed’s flesh crawled as a different energy filled the chamber: another power, something much greater, old and primal and hateful, was holding the conduit open. The Warmaster looked up, over the Word Bearer’s shoulder, into the shadows above his head.

  The dark up there was a mercy, he realised. It was protecting him, hiding the full sight of the monstrosity in there with them. Wings the colour of blood and fury were visible at the edges of the gloom, but Kreed could not look at them for long. He was a blinded man trying to see through a cataract, only here it was the universe itself repelling the sight. Opposed forces of reality and illusion, shimmering and lensing as they fought for supremacy.

  Had it been there all along? Shrouded in some way, hiding behind a folded dimension? The possibility turned Kreed’s gut to ice.

  He could only hold parts of the great beast in his mind, segments of it that his psyche allowed him to perceive – and even then it was a hardship that drove the Acolyte to his knees. Kreed saw teeth as long as missiles, the tails of a whip thicker than anchor lines. The wings and the horns, chains made of souls petrified into iron links, bronze armour tempered in baths of molten flesh. Cloven hooves
and jangling cascades of god-skulls.

  His thoughts reeled with the effluent aura of this monster made of hate. The echoes of a million incidents of anger and bloodshed pulled at Kreed like a burning tide, the spillage of emotion running across the spectrum. The petty, selfish rage of a spoilt child; a victim’s towering and impotent fear-fury; the lust of a deranged psychopath; the singular, mass-minded hate of an army unleashed. And these were only the discards of the creature, the footprints it left as it walked.

  Kreed went to the floor, partly in pain, partly in hopes that he would not draw the attention of the creature, for instinct told him it could end him with a glance.

  ‘Horus Lupercal,’ said the daemon, teasing out the name with open relish. ‘Samus sends his regards. And now the game begins.’

  TEN

  Hidden

  Unholy Communion

  Old Names

  Five drop-ships put down on the harvest plains, landing nose to tail in a battle ring. Tactical squads from the 24th Company lay down the perimeter in moments, securing the small patch of Scoltrum’s surface as a forward operating post. They set up guns and lines of attack fanning out in every direction.

  It was the middle of the day on the agri-world, but much of the sunlight was swallowed up by the drifting black clouds of fire smoke that wreathed the sky. Colonial pict-records of the planet showed grain fields that went from horizon to horizon, flatlands of amber wheat-analogue broken only by the narrow spindles of bone-white wind turbine clusters. Those fields were alight now, smothered by advancing lines of orange flame that were visible from low orbit, moving slowly across the landscape as they were pushed by the planet’s constant winds. Someone had set a torch to the farms and left them to burn.

  Visibility on the ground was poor, so for the most part the Blood Angels relied on preysight and thermographics to navigate across the scorched wastes; but their objective was too large to be totally hidden by the smoke.

  Before it had destroyed itself in a terminal fall towards the surface of the planet, the ship had been a frigate called the Stark Dagger, part of the Signus Cluster’s outer defence squadron. It was not clear exactly what kind of mishap had befallen the vessel, but by the pattern of the debris dispersal, it was apparent the Stark Dagger had come in across the atmosphere at a low angle and broken apart as it crossed the line of interface. Ripping into three sections, the plough-shaped bow and the midships had carved muddy, ashen paths that ran kilometres long through the crop fields. The heavier stern was much further distant, lost in one of the shallow inland seas over the eastern horizon. Plumes of radiation from the cracked power cores of warp engines were visible as scintillating fountains of colour via rad-scan optics, showing like distant aurorae.

  Saviour pods from the frigate had fired too late, and they peppered the long crash site of the ship, most of them buried in the harvest world’s soft brown loam.

  Captain Nakir sent squads out on jetbike chariots to conduct a survey of the escape capsules, but they reported in the same thing from each they found: many had deployed empty, the rest had mis-fired and killed whatever occupants they might have had on impact. Not one of the pods showed signs that those who fled the Stark Dagger’s destruction had survived.

  The rest of the advance units moved on foot, breaking into a pair of formations to make for the two sites where the wreckage was most dense. Nakir himself led the group making for the bow section, and on the insistence of his fellow captain of the Ninth, he had brought men from Sergeant Cassiel’s squad along for their ‘perspective’.

  Meros and Cassiel followed Madidus, Nakir’s second-in-command on the ground; the last time the Apothecary had seen the dour veteran was in the Red Tear’s airdock, as he examined the remains recovered by the crew of the Numitor. Kaide and Sarga were on the surface as well, temporarily posted to the other advance formation venturing to the midships remnant.

  Meros felt very much an outsider among the men of the 24th. After their debriefing at the hands of Azkaellon, Berus and Raldoron, the legionaries who had been at Holst-Prime Hive were being treated differently by their battle-brothers. It was a subtle difference, to be sure, but Meros saw it.

  They’ve heard the rumours of what we witnessed, he told himself, and they think we’re either fools or madmen.

  It troubled the Apothecary to admit he had entertained the same thoughts about the scouts aboard the Numitor, when they had come back with talk of the strange and unusual among the wrecks surrounding the Signus Cluster. But they had not been mistaken. If anything, they had only glimpsed the edges of the impossibilities rife in this place.

  He frowned. The whole fleet had seen the sign upon Phorus, and the crews of a handful of ships had been witness to the killing of Holst… And yet no one had answers that could fit the facts. There were only more questions.

  One of Madidus’s warriors, a severe hulk of a man called Gravato who carried a meltagun, was watching him with a questioning gaze. ‘Brother-medicae,’ he called, and Meros knew before he said any more what he was going to ask. ‘Is it true what I hear? That the xenos attacked you with scrap iron in the upper city?’ There was an edge of challenge in the words, even shading towards mockery.

  ‘At first.’ He saw no reason to be less than honest. ‘They killed two legionaries in as many seconds. Then, they…’ He faltered, trying to find words that didn’t sound fanciful. ‘I do not believe they were robotic proxies. I do not…’ Once more, words failed him, and he glanced towards Cassiel. The sergeant gave a slight shake of the head.

  Gravato gave a soft, sneering grunt, sharing a look with his squad mates. He raised his weapon. ‘Show me them. I’ll put an end to such tactics.’

  Meros’s temper flared. ‘I hope it will be that easy.’ The grim, cold-eyed conviction in his reply smothered any further possibility of scorn in an instant. He wanted to say aloud that what they had faced on Holst smacked more of myth and magick than weapons born of reason, but to utter those words would make Gravato and the rest of Nakir’s men doubt his sanity.

  And they would have good cause. His thoughts turned to Kano; he had not seen his friend since they returned to the fleet, and they had barely spoken on the flight back from the ice world. At this moment, Meros would have welcomed his comrade’s counsel.

  ‘Look sharp,’ said the captain, as a giant harpoon-shape hove out of the smoke above their heads. As they approached, it revealed itself as the tip of the frigate’s prow, sweeping away into the blade-like planes of the armoured fore-sections. The massive segment of wreckage was inverted, the dorsal surface disappearing behind a thick bolus of churned earth that had been compressed by its passage across the fields. All around them pieces of hull metal lay in fragments, shorn off in the crash. Here and there fires burned in ponds of spilled promethium.

  Sergeant Madidus halted abruptly, raising his fist. ‘Do you hear?’ he said.

  The warriors fell silent. Meros thought he caught a faint noise, like the sound of static on a dead vox-channel. It was inconstant, rising and falling at the edge of his hearing.

  Captain Nakir advanced slowly towards the hull of the Stark Dagger. The plasteel plates of the fuselage were stained with a layer of what appeared to be black ash. It glittered faintly in the feeble daylight.

  Without warning, Nakir raised his gauntlet and struck the hull with his fist, hard enough to sound like a gunshot. The static-noise suddenly became a ripping buzz-saw chorus, and what Meros had thought was ash suddenly exploded away into the air, swirling around.

  ‘Flies,’ said Madidus. ‘A swarm of them.’

  The insects made an angry, snarling drone as they rose and contorted into a dark cloud. For a moment, they dithered over the Blood Angels, as if they were considering them; then the swarm coiled away, deeper into the wreckage.

  ‘Some kind of local insect pest,’ offered Nakir. ‘The fires must have attracted them.’ He beckoned the rest of the legionaries to follow him. ‘Come, this way.’ The captain pointed up the slope of the fallen h
ull to an impact crater. ‘We’ll make our entry there. Once inside, sweep for any working cogitator consoles, log records…’

  ‘Survivors?’ said Meros.

  ‘Survivors,’ repeated Nakir, although his tone was doubtful.

  Using cables and the mag-locks in their boots, the Blood Angels climbed aboard the Stark Dagger, emerging in a long, low arming chamber beneath the frigate’s torpedo bays. They broke into ten-man teams, and set off into the wreck’s infrastructure, using the pin-lamps on their bolters to guide the way.

  Meros activated the illuminator on his backpack and illuminated the path for Madidus, who took point with Nakir a step behind. Cassiel stayed close. The veteran had said very little since they left the Red Tear, and he eyed each heap of wreckage they passed with a glower, as if he expected it to rise up and attack them at any moment.

  The passage into the grounded frigate was slow and careful. They had no deckplates to walk upon; with the wreck upside down, the ceiling became their floor, forcing them to pick their way over arches and decorative crenellations. Meros’s bio-implants rendered any possibility of disorientation moot, but still it remained a tricky descent.

  Madidus found bodies soon enough, but they were burned to a crisp, blackened shapes resembling human beings but with little other definition to them. One of the other legionaries reached out to touch one of the dead and the corpse-form immediately broke apart like poorly-fired clay. Pausing a moment, Meros offered his auspex to the remains, but the readings gathered by the sensing device shed no light on the exact manner of death.

  They moved on, past the weapons decks to the service tiers. The wreck of the Stark Dagger was not still in its repose. All around them, the bulkheads creaked and moaned, either from the passage of wind through gashes in the hull or the slow settling of the starship’s dead weight. Rains of rust flakes fell like snow, glittering as the beam of the flood lamp caught them. Vessels like the frigate were never designed to operate inside a gravity well, and their own mass pulled against them. Given time, sections of the wreck would eventually collapse under their own weight. High over their heads, metal scraped on metal, and Meros fancied it was the noise of bared talons against the twisted plasteel.