Fear to Tread

by James Swallow

  The temper of the room was grim, and the presence of the Great Angel did little to lighten it. Officers of good and level bearing were showing signs of irritation and division. These warriors had gathered expecting to fight a definitive battle of the Great Crusade, to end a threat to humankind, but what they had found at Signus Prime continued to defy categorisation.

  Captain Nakir completed his report to the assemblage and there was obvious dissent, even towards the battle-brother’s unembellished description of the enemy engagement on the fifth planet.

  ‘These creatures...’ began High Warden Berus, sharing an arch look with his subordinate Annellus, who stood nearby. ‘Did you think to bring a dead one back to the fleet so that it might be examined in the apothecarion?’

  Nakir’s lips thinned. ‘Of course,’ he snapped. ‘But the corpses denatured on the way back to our vessel.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’ asked Zuriel, from the cohort of the Sanguinary Guard.

  Nakir glanced at the legionary standing beside him, a line Apothecary from the Ninth Company. ‘It melted, Guard Sergeant. Like ice upon a griddle. All that remained was a foul, toxic residue that could not be analysed.’

  ‘The survivors, then,’ said Captain Amit, his gaze steady and intense. ‘They live still? They were examined?’

  ‘Aye, brother-captain. The group are being held under guard in a secure compartment on the lower decks.’ Again, Nakir looked at the Apothecary. The younger warrior’s head was bowed. He was clearly in awe of being called to the presence of so many of the Legion’s greatest heroes – not the least of whom was the primarch himself. Raldoron considered him and drew slow recognition of his face from memory. Melchior and Nartaba. The warrior had served in both conflicts with fortitude and honour.

  ‘Meros.’ Sanguinius said his name and the Apothecary looked up, stiffening to attention. ‘My son, you have dealt directly with these people. What is your opinion of them?’

  The Angel’s manner was solemn and calm, and Meros seemed eased by it. ‘Lord. The survivors carry no signs of chemical alterants or invasive implantation.’ He hesitated, as if in consideration of something, then continued. ‘I found nothing unusual about them, save that they are alive while every other Signusi we have seen is a boneless corpse.’

  ‘Reason enough for us to have left them where we found them,’ said Annellus coldly. ‘They could be another ploy on the part of the xenos. Collaborators.’

  ‘We will not grace the suggestion of abandoning these people with a moment of consideration.’ Sanguinius did not raise his voice, but his censure was clear, and the Warden was visibly cowed. ‘We are not callous. We came to Signus to save it.’ He nodded to Meros, indicating for him to go on.

  ‘I have taken testimonies,’ he said. ‘Along with data recovered from the wreck of the Stark Dagger, it may be possible to reconstruct a partial timeline of events to show what happened here.’

  ‘What do they know of the nephilim?’ demanded Azkaellon. ‘Any indications of force disposition and tactics?’

  ‘They were shown picts of the xenos and their ships,’ said Nakir. ‘Not one of them had ever seen the giants before.’

  ‘Then what attacked them?’ The question came from the commander of the 216th, his holo-image wavering slightly.

  Meros’s expression stiffened. ‘Captain, they spoke of armies of beings that were a mixture of… of life forms. Humanoid-animal amalgams, winged beasts and things of fluid flesh. An army of daemons.’ He frowned. ‘That was the exact word used, my lords.’

  Berus snorted. ‘It is as I said before. This is the result of psychological warfare, doubtless enhanced by the use of mind-control methodology. Drugs or chemicals, mental programming. The untrained human psyche is a malleable thing, open to manipulation and corruption.’ The Warden threw a brief look across to where Raldoron was standing – but no, not to the First Captain, instead to his adjutant. At his side, Brother Kano said nothing, remaining in the shadows.

  ‘With respect,’ said Meros, ‘no trace of such manipulation has been found in the survivors. They believe in what they are saying.’

  ‘I’m sure they do,’ said Berus, earning him some dry mutters of agreement from a few of the other captains.

  ‘They say an inhuman warlord leads this army of monsters,’ said Nakir. ‘A being that calls itself “the Bloodthirster”, a killer that revels in violence and suffering.’ He paused. ‘A second leader, another creature, is also known to exist.’

  ‘How many of these so-called daemons are there?’ asked Galan.

  ‘The accounts conflict,’ admitted Meros. ‘Some of the survivors spoke of a human, a man named Bruja. He came to them claiming to be an agent of the Imperium, but he appears to have been responsible for the collapse of the Signusi government.’

  ‘One man?’ Azkaellon’s doubts were clear. ‘How did he do it?’

  ‘With magick.’ Raldoron watched Meros force the words out, his brow knitting. ‘Bruja was allegedly subsumed by a creature of the warp, a perverse mastermind that conducted terrible acts of desecration and cruelty.’ He stopped abruptly. ‘I have no further explanation for you. I merely repeat what the survivors said to me.’

  ‘He repeats a wild fiction!’ said Annellus. ‘And does so as if it has merit.’

  ‘I am forced to agree with the Warden.’ The words came with a hiss and crackle, broadcast from the bridge of the Dark Page. Acolyte Kreed, his image cloaked in duty robes, had until now offered nothing to the conversation. ‘These descriptions of horrific creatures, the insistence that they are somehow unreal… They are the fanciful creations of uneducated minds that cannot grasp the scope of something alien.’

  ‘Are you certain?’ said Amit, grim-faced. ‘Is that how you explain the troubling phenomena we have encountered? What of the incidents aboard our own ships, the epidemic of suicides among the crew-serfs and the remembrancer contingent? No cause has been found to explain it.’

  ‘Some allow their fear of the unknown to destroy them,’ Kreed said. ‘We have all seen the xenos in their many forms, the strange and the inexplicable. Yet, nothing that cannot be explained in the light of reason. These poor fools whose lives were saved by Captain Nakir’s bravery… They are not a source of credible intelligence.’

  Raldoron held his tongue, even as he saw Galan and several other captains nodding in agreement with the Word Bearer’s comments. He weighed the words in his thoughts. Kreed had a fair point, but it could not be denied that there was more at hand here than could be easily dismissed.

  It was Helik Redknife, watching from the wings, who finally said what many were thinking. ‘Do not be so quick to deny the words of the humans. They may not see with the eyes of a Space Marine, but they see. No warrior here assembled can deny that they have not glimpsed the raw madness of the warp from the corner of their eye, and wondered what swims in its depths.’

  Raldoron could hold his silence no longer. ‘Riddles and talking in circles do not serve the mission. Whatever the origin of the enemy forces we have encountered in the Signus Cluster, they are still the enemy. Nakir and his men showed we can fight them and kill them. That is all that matters. Our orders from the Warmaster have not changed. We liberate this system from the hands of those who have taken it.’

  ‘What is your opinion, Brother Meros?’ Sanguinius’s question silenced any other voices in the chamber. ‘You have seen these creatures close at hand twice now. I would have you give us your honest, unvarnished thoughts.’

  The Apothecary looked up at his liege lord. ‘The nephilim are not here, my master. These horrors are not their work. Whatever name we wish to give it, xenos, daemon or unknown… I believe we face something outside the experience of any son of Baal or Terra.’

  Kano left the chamber as quickly as he could, taking leave of his commander. He found Meros in a corridor radiating off the atrium. The Apothecary’s face betrayed his troubled mind. He seemed lost in his own thoughts.

  Kano had to call out to him twice
before his old friend snapped out of his reverie. ‘Brother, a moment.’

  Meros nodded. ‘Come to ask me why I didn’t keep my damned mouth shut?’ He grimaced. ‘Furio will probably discommend me. Now every captain in the Three Hundred thinks I’m a soft-brained idiot.’

  ‘Not every one of them,’ Kano offered, with a dry smile. ‘Just the ones who think they know better than you.’

  Meros rounded on him, suddenly animated. ‘Where have you been, Kano? After we came back from Holst, you vanished. You never breathed a word about–’

  His brittle good humour crumbled. ‘About what we saw down there, you mean? No. I did not. In all truth, I had questions that I had to find answers for.’

  ‘And did you?’ Meros advanced a step, frustration and anger beneath his words.

  Kano spoke quietly. ‘It is my burden that I see with different eyes to you, my friend.’

  ‘I echo Captain Raldoron,’ said the Apothecary. ‘Riddles serve nothing. Speak to me plainly.’

  ‘I think what you told the Angel is right,’ Kano told him. ‘And I’m not the only one.’ He put his hand on Meros’s shoulder. ‘You saved those people’s lives. They trust you, yes? They will confide in you?’

  He nodded. ‘The woman, Tillyan Niobe… She called us the Emperor’s Angels. As if she believed we truly were the seraphs of old myth.’

  ‘Speak to her. Find out all you can about these “daemons”. Whatever Annellus or Berus may think, they could have the key to the truth about Signus.’

  ‘Aye.’ Meros was silent for a moment, then he looked up again as something occurred to him. ‘What truth?’

  A shadow passed over Kano’s face. ‘When I know, I will tell you.’

  As he walked back to the lithocast chamber, intending to seek Raldoron for his duties, Kano found his path blocked by another officer.

  ‘You.’ The captain of the Fifth Company was waiting for him. ‘I will have words with you, Librarian.’

  Kano’s eyes narrowed, but he bowed as protocol demanded he should. ‘I no longer carry that duty or title, Captain Amit. You know that full well.’

  ‘I was at Nikaea, that is so. I know that rank and title may be excised with a single word of command, but a duty… Not so easily forgotten, in my experience.’

  He kept a neutral aspect. Amit was a hard man to read. At first glance, all that he was seemed there on the surface, quick and fierce. Kano knew that was only the edge of him, though. Amit ran deep and dark, and kept much more of himself hidden than many realised.

  ‘I know what you have been doing,’ said the captain. ‘I’ve watched you, Kano.’

  ‘I do not–’

  Amit cut him off, his face splitting in a snarl. ‘Lie to me and I will deem you worthless, Librarian.’ He leaned closer. ‘I know you have been abroad in the fleet, seeking word of your psyker kindred in secret.’

  Kano went cold. He had not yet reconnected with enough of his former comrades to gain a consensus. If Amit were to try and stop him…

  The captain showed a feral smile. ‘I don’t need your talents to know what you are thinking. Rest easy, Kano. I don’t want to hinder you. I’m going to assist.’

  ‘Why?’ The question came immediately. ‘I… We risk censure from the Warden cadre, or worse.’

  Amit’s smile broadened. ‘That threat carries little weight within the Fifth.’ Then he was cold and serious once more, his manner changing like the dousing of a lamp. ‘I don’t trust the words of narrow minds like Berus, or that zealot Kreed. What I glimpsed when I came to rescue you on Holst, the words of those survivors. All of it. It connects to something from our shared past. Archetypes of the subconscious, otherworldly forces that are more than just alien. I see that, even if others do not. You see it too.’

  Kano nodded slowly. ‘More than you know, brother-captain.’

  ‘I believe that the entire Signus Cluster is some grand snare, Kano. A trap in which to hold the Blood Angels and destroy us. I won’t let that happen. We will not let that happen.’

  ‘And if to do so we must defy the orders of the Council of Terra? Or an edict of the Emperor?’

  ‘We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it,’ said Amit.

  The stories Niobe told him were a collection of nightmares. Meros listened and kept his silence, careful to do nothing to show any kind of judgement about what the woman said.

  Before they came to Signus, even before his near-death experience at Nartaba Octus, the Blood Angel might have found doubt in what she said. Now, he thought differently. Hour by hour, the unreal became more real to him.

  Meros found Niobe in an alcove of the medicae chamber where the survivors from Scoltrum were being held. She was as far from the rest of them as was possible without leaving the chamber. A naval trooper from Admiral DuCade’s crew stood guard at the door to make sure that none of them could.

  The others were gathered in a loose knot, talking in low tones or else saying nothing at all. She was tending the sleeping form of the woman Rozin, who rested fitfully on a low pallet.

  ‘Her dreams are troubled,’ Niobe told the legionary, quietly stroking Rozin’s hair from her face. ‘They torment her with what she was forced to witness. She told me she can only find rest when I comfort her, so I do so.’

  ‘Did you see what she saw?’

  ‘Rains of blood and nature turning on men.’ She nodded wearily. ‘Horrors that made me doubt my own sanity. Oh yes, warrior. I saw that.’ Niobe looked down at her hands. ‘I want so much to go home, back to my quiet garden, but I know it no longer exists.’ A brittle smile crossed her face. ‘I must seem selfish to you. I have always lived alone and had little contact with others. I liked it that way, and so did they. Just me and the plants. No one came to see the gardens, but I tended them. It was a fine arrangement.’ She sighed. ‘I’ve never had great empathy for my fellow man.’

  Meros nodded at Rozin. ‘The care you give this one puts the lie to that.’

  ‘Does it?’ Niobe looked up, glancing over at the rest of the survivors. ‘They never liked me. Dortmund and Hengist always arguing in that dark compartment. The thief swore I was in league with Rozin, and that she in turn was in with the creatures. Always saying, “Open the door. Throw the witches out.” He wanted us dead.’

  ‘Dortmund didn’t let that happen.’

  ‘Aye. But more by lassitude than effort.’ She paused. ‘Rozin was there when that whoreson Bruja came to Signus Prime. The others treat her like she is tainted.’

  ‘This man Bruja… He was a turncoat, then?’

  She shook her head. ‘He turned his flesh, legionary. And good people followed him down that path in fear of their lives. They were consumed.’

  ‘But not you.’

  ‘Not us.’ Niobe looked up at him. ‘A daemon’s cruelty means nothing if it is not witnessed.’

  ‘That word again.’ The Apothecary folded his arms. ‘There is no such thing. No magick, no devils and gods, no–’

  ‘Angels?’ She broke in. ‘Then what are you? What is your master?’

  Meros’s answer faded on his lips as a motion at the hatchway distracted him. The remembrancer Halerdyce Gerwyn had cross words with the guard at the threshold and pushed past him. Gerwyn was pale and drawn in his face, and the look in his eyes was vacant and cold. He didn’t see Meros, didn’t really seem to be registering anything at all as he crossed the chamber towards a maintenance bay, ignoring the looks he got from medicae serfs and other Apothecaries.

  The guard was shouting now, and Meros stepped away from Rozin’s slumbering form, sensing something amiss.

  Gerwyn pulled at the handles of a secured panel and wrenched it open. Inside, Meros saw a bank of switches for emergency control systems, the local control boards for the medicae chamber’s fire retardant nozzles and anti-decompression vents.

  The naval crewman reached the remembrancer before Meros did, placing his hand on Gerwyn’s shoulder. The sequentialist spun, still dull-eyed and blank of face, and struck the you
ng man with a heavy cudgel that had been concealed in his sleeve. The guard fell bleeding to the deck and Meros broke into a run.

  Gerwyn grabbed the purge lever for the retardants and twisted it a half turn. Vents in the ceiling puffed a weak breath of acrid white vapour; a full turn would release an immediate surge of dense halomethane mist that would smother any naked flame in a heartbeat.

  ‘Stop him!’ someone shouted. ‘He’ll kill us all!’

  The chemical haze would also suffocate anyone without a legionary’s augmented lungs – every survivor of Signus, every crew-serf, everyone who was not a Blood Angel would choke and die, including the remembrancer himself.

  Another one, Meros thought, even as he shouted Gerwyn’s name. Another soul crushed by a madness spun out of nothing. His bolt pistol was in his hand. A single shot would reduce the hapless artist to a bloody smear.

  He hesitated as panic exploded around them, and heard Hengist bellowing as the survivors fled for the hatchway. Meros liked Gerwyn; the man deserved better than a lunatic’s bloody death. He stood frozen, his pistol trained.

  ‘What is he doing?’

  Niobe had followed him, and all at once Meros felt the same strange deadening of the air that he had sensed in the sealed compartment on board the Stark Dagger.

  Halerdyce Gerwyn’s face shifted, expression returning to it. He blinked like a man waking from a dream. The remembrancer saw Meros, saw the bolt pistol, and he broke into weeping. His long fingers fell from the purge lever and he dropped to the deck, burying his face in his hands. Meros lowered the gun and snapped the lever back to its safe position.

  Kneeling, Niobe clasped Gerwyn’s arm and spoke to him. She was asking him what was wrong. ‘Why did you do that?’

  ‘Peace,’ he managed, through his sobs. ‘Wanted. Peace.’

  Meros heard the man’s words, but his attention was on Tillyan Niobe. He was thinking of Gerwyn’s sudden calming, Rozin’s troubled dreams now banished, the succubae that had not seen them, and the raw impossibility of the survivors themselves.

  With slow inevitability, the light of the three suns was eclipsed across the Red Tear’s bow as at last the planet Signus Prime came into sight before the Blood Angels fleet.