Fear to Tread

by James Swallow

  Sanguinius reacted faster than the eye could follow. He flashed into the air, wings crackling, and caught the razored tips of the whip before they could reach him. The cords burned where they touched the ceramite, pennants of vapour issuing from between his armoured fingers. The primarch dove at the Bloodthirster, dragging the lash with down him, and before the creature could react, he pulled the whip into a loop across the howling monster’s throat.

  Angel and daemon collided, crashing to the floor. Ka’Bandha released its grip on the lash, but it was too late; the brass cables pulled tight. Sanguinius gave the whip a violent tug and the Bloodthirster’s howls became strangled, frenzied barks.

  The beast tried to break free, swatting at the primarch, grasping at air. Its bat-like wings unfurled, the talons at their tips, scratching gouges in Sanguinius’s armour.

  With cold and lethal precision, the primarch arrested the wild, beating motion of one of the freakish wings with his free hand. ‘Only angels may fly,’ he said darkly, tearing out the black pinion.

  The sound was like the splitting of a great sack-cloth sail, and the daemon Ka’Bandha screamed loud enough to shake the walls. Warpfire gushed from the stump of the wing and it shuddered in agony, a sensation it had only known previously from the cries of its enemies.

  With the whip still coiled about its neck, the Angel dragged the spitting, wounded fiend to the lip of the pit in the middle of the chamber, then lifted it up so he could look it in the face. The daemon cackled through its pain, convulsing as it tried to shake free. ‘I will take your skull yet.’

  The primarch’s eyes flashed with a powerful hatred. ‘If you truly do hail from the realm that men once called hell,’ he intoned, ‘when you return there, tell your kindred it was Sanguinius who threw you back.’ With a grunt of effort, the Angel took hold of the beast and shoved it over the spiked edge.

  Ka’Bandha’s curses echoed all the way down, before it finally vanished, shrieking, into the warp-flames.

  Meros’s spirit soared as the primarch dispatched the winged daemon, and for an instant he dared to hope that they might yet still find a shade of victory in this bloody clash of attrition. He beat his fist off his armour to echo his master’s triumph, even as the Apothecary knew that the battle was far from ended.

  About him swirled a nightmare of screaming, bestial forms that threw themselves against the guns and swords of the Blood Angels. Orexis was at Raldoron’s side, hoisting the captain to his feet, firing with his off-hand. He glimpsed Cassiel, Leyteo, the Techmarine Kaide and a handful of other legionaries held off from Kyriss by a rampaging pack of bloodletters.

  Meros turned to reach for the woman Niobe, where she cowered in the shadow of a bone pillar. ‘Tillyan! Come with me! We need you!’

  She shook her head violently. ‘I can’t. I can’t!’

  He grimaced. Niobe’s eyes were filled with fear. Nothing she had experienced could have prepared her for the horrors that were unfolding about her, or the path that had brought her here. It was a miracle that her spirit had not broken under the strain.

  But Niobe’s life, just like his, or any of the Legion’s number, counted only in how they could be turned to the defeat of their enemies. He reached for her, and from nowhere a bolt shell creased his thigh, the impact blasting him from his feet.

  The concussion was a hard fist of pressure that slammed Meros aside and into the fractured bone flooring. He rose quickly, shaking it off, and glimpsed Niobe lying in a heap; for a heart-stopping second he feared the bolt had struck the pariah, but there would have been little left of her if that had been so. The woman was bleeding and insensible. The edge of the blast that had put Meros down had knocked her unconscious, and even as he realised it, the legionary felt the strange null-aura around her retreating, dissipating.

  Meros feared Niobe might still perish. She was frail compared to a Space Marine, easily the casualty of internal injuries – but he could not spare a moment to attend to her.

  Another shot tore into him.

  Agony flared in Meros’s leg from torn flesh and splintered bone, sparks jetted from his damaged armour. The fibre-bundle muscle array beneath the ceramite of his cuissart misfired, making him stagger. He felt for his chainaxe but the weapon was not there. Too late, he realised it had been torn from its mag-lock when he fell.

  He saw the bastard Acolyte Tanus Kreed coming at him, firing again and aiming low. Meros dodged, attempting to draw him away. If Niobe was killed, whatever vague power shielded the strike team from the malignant energy of the ragefire would be lost, and so would they. Even now, Meros felt the tide of anger building in him. It felt horribly true. This blood thirst was not something created from without and forced upon the Blood Angels. It was a thread of the poison lying dark and dormant within them all, waiting to be dragged to the surface.

  ‘You are lost, Blood Angel,’ said Kreed. ‘Never to know the glory. Your eyes forever blind!’ The Word Bearer ran him down before he could draw his pistol, and the Acolyte bludgeoned Meros with the heavy mass of his boltgun. He stumbled again as Kreed fired point-blank, the shout of the rounds ringing in his ears.

  The heavy barrel of the bolter, still searing hot from its discharge, struck the Apothecary in the face, his flesh sizzling. He lost his balance and went down.

  ‘Change is coming, but you won’t live to see it.’ Meros blinked; Kreed’s voice was close and resonant, rising on a symphony of gunfire and screams. ‘Only those who embrace the truth will march with us.’

  ‘You…’ Meros managed, coughing out a lungful of smoke. The pain was intense. ‘You are weak. Like Lorgar. The Word Bearers have always… been weak. Never with the strength to stand alone. You’ve always needed an excuse.’

  ‘You know nothing,’ growled Kreed, raising the bolter to aim it squarely at Meros’s face. He could see tiny lines of prayer text acid-etched into the metal of the barrel.

  ‘You always had to find a power to hide behind. A false god to justify your frailty of spirit! First it was the Emperor… and now these warp-freaks.’

  Kreed leaned close, savouring the moment. ‘Our gods love us.’

  ‘Then go to them!’ Meros lunged, bringing up his medicae gauntlet with all the strength he could manage, twisting away from the bolter muzzle. The weapon discharged, deafening him, but the shot went wide. Meros did not miss; with a flex of his fingers, the gauntlet mechanism extended a serrated bone-cutter and he forced it up through the underside of Kreed’s jaw, ramming the keen edge up into his nasal cavity and skull. He pulled back and ripped the blade away, splitting open the Acolyte’s face in a splatter of gore. The Word Bearer died with a hissing gargle and the Blood Angel skidded free of his kill.

  He recovered his chainaxe and went to Niobe, scowling with each weighty step he placed on his wounded leg. Gathering up the woman over his shoulder as if she were no more than a roll of cloth, he left Kreed’s corpse behind and approached his battle-brothers.

  From elsewhere, in the halls of the Cathedral of the Mark, came the echo of clashing blades and hatred unleashed.

  NINETEEN

  Sacrifice

  Drink Deep of Victory

  Remember the Fallen

  At the halls of Signus Prime’s profane basilica, the massed might of the Blood Angels Legion had gathered in their numbers, drawn from all across the battlefield to press the daemonic enemy back into their lair. Dead cultists and the deformed bodies that were the flesh-cloaks of the spirits from the warp carpeted the bone floor and the great ruined plaza outside. Slicks of fluid painted the ground or pooled in shallow lakes. Elsewhere, the spent blood of the culled beasts was spattered in arcs across the walls where throats had been opened. The scene was repeated all across the planet, in every stronghold of the enemy and upon the ships that even now still duelled in the dark of high orbit.

  The sons of Sanguinius had lost themselves in the riot of killing. Careful, drilled lines of company and Chapter had become broken and mixed, and from hour to hour, the Legion had sl
owly transformed into something wild. They had become a red hurricane that tore across Signus Prime leaving nothing in its wake. The Blood Angels fought as they had never fought before, not with cool reason and righteous might as their guides, but with hearts beating for vengeance, a berserker’s blood-thirst on their lips. Unstoppable, all that stood in their path was obliterated.

  The foe had gravely miscalculated the will of the angels. Far from being broken by the vicious, brutal attack upon their beloved Sanguinius, they had been cut loose by it. The bonds that held them in check were slipped, and a darkness previously hidden had been unleashed. Each of them bayed for the blood of their enemy, but it was a thirst that could not be slaked – only given respite for a brief interval.

  The last of the daemon guard were backed into the wide, echoing annex at the base of the Cathedral of the Mark, pressed into a mass of writhing, unspeakable flesh. The horde had lived high in their rule of the Signus Cluster, tormenting and killing the common human colonists that had called these worlds home. The last of them had been butchered by the daemons in this spot, and so it was a fitting place for the killers to be killed.

  The Blood Angels cut them down, their numbers thinning as the blades rose and fell. Bodies were ripped apart in spurting tides of gore, daemonic essences shrieking as they evacuated the dying meat to fall into the great pit in the temple’s bowels. The last of the soldier-creatures was massacred under a whirlwind of swords, but when it was done the rage did not abate.

  A sullen, brooding silence descended, broken by the dripping of blood and the low grind of breather grilles. Only the mewling beast Kyriss now remained alive, up above in the great chamber of pain, but here upon the battlefield there was nothing left to kill.

  Every enemy lay dead, but the blood-thirst still burned, seeking new hatred to fuel its unending hunger. Without words, hundreds upon hundreds of warriors raised their heads to look upon the faces of the legionaries around them, to see not their battle-brothers, but rivals and the sources of old, petty enmities. Knuckles whitened around the grips of swords, fingers strayed toward triggers.

  In the stillness, the future of a Legion balanced upon a blade’s edge.

  The daemon was weeping and laughing in equal measure as it placed its slender fingers about the hilt of the Angel’s sword, agonisingly forcing it out of the gaping cavity in its torso. Ropes of stinking matter followed it in a gush as the blade crunched out of the wall and finally fell free, clattering to the bony floor.

  Raldoron steadied himself, bringing up his gun. ‘I want to be the one to kill it,’ he spat, furious beyond measure. His wounds seemed vague, forgettable things. All he wanted was to slay the thing called Kyriss, to hear it screaming.

  The captain blinked and tried to shake the sinister impulse away, but it only retreated to the edges of his thoughts, colouring everything around it.

  The pink-skinned monstrosity spread its four arms and rolled its bovine head. ‘Destroy this flesh and I will find more. That won’t end the madness.’ It stuttered as Sanguinius crossed the chamber toward it, golden light radiating from him. The Angel’s face was set with wintry fury, a baleful glitter in his eyes.

  Here was an aspect Raldoron had never seen of his master until this moment. There was pain in him, an intense hurt that could have stemmed from the wounds he had taken from the Bloodthirster’s crippling lash. And more than that; Raldoron looked upon Sanguinius and saw a wound in his spirit, so deep it might never be healed.

  But this was buried beneath a towering vehemence of such scale that only a gene-forged warlord could contain it. Sanguinius crouched and took up his crimson sword from where it had fallen, and the blade came alive with heat and colour, as if it had been drawn fresh from a blacksmith’s forge.

  ‘You are defeated, creature,’ he rumbled. ‘This war of horrors is over.’

  All around, the survivors of Cassiel’s and Orexis’s squads had their guns trained on the beast, holding it in check. Raldoron saw Meros at the far edge of the group, gently placing the woman Niobe on the floor. His chainaxe twitched in his hand. All of them were feeling the same fraying of their tempers.

  Kyriss cackled, clutching at the ragged wound in its gut. ‘You know that is not so!’ It pointed at the Angel’s face. ‘You have sight. You see into the changing of ways and the ways see into you. This present is your past vision. You dreamed it!’ It threw back its head and hooted, black blood foaming at its lips. ‘Today is the day your flaw emerges, Sanguinius of Baal. All your sons will see it. Some will not live to tell the tale!’

  ‘No!’ the Angel brought up the sword for a killing blow.

  ‘Yes!’ Kyriss threw up its hands, staggering backwards. It jabbed its claws at the smouldering crystal capsule above, rocking back and forth on its thick hawsers. ‘The ragefire is lit, and it burns now, ceaseless.’ The daemon leered at the Angel. ‘It is the manifestation of the darkness inside you, abhuman. The same threads of red and black that spin through the molecules of your flesh and blood. The flaw dormant in your sons…’ It cocked its head, toying with the words. ‘The flaw that you have carried since your birth, Sanguinius.’

  ‘What lies are these?’ spat Kaide. ‘My lord, destroy it and be done!’

  ‘They are not lies,’ said the primarch, the pain rising in his eyes once more. He glanced at Raldoron, sharing the brief anguish with him. The captain remembered a warrior in the ruins of a sunken church on Melchior, and the handful of others before that.

  ‘We know you, Angel,’ Kyriss said, stifling a cough. ‘We always have. Did you never wonder, in the long darkness of the night, when you were alone and troubled? Did you ever dare to voice thought about the origins of…’ It trailed off, pausing to make a shape in the air, tracing the lines of Sanguinius’s wings. ‘…your gifts?’ The low, brassy cackle sounded once more. ‘When you were cast from your errant father’s arms to settle in the dust and the rad-lands of Baal, the Ruinous Powers watched you. They laid hands upon you.’

  ‘Now you lie,’ said Sanguinius. ‘I am my father’s son, and always will be. I am the angel of his pure wrath.’

  ‘Then kill me and watch your sons fall to that power.’ Kyriss rose up, drawing itself to its full height, ignoring the suppurating wounds across its ruined torso. ‘Wrath. It is what you are, it is what you hide beneath your noble mask. But if you do not embrace that flaw, if you continue to deny it… then the cost will be the lives of all your sons!’ The daemon spun about, forcing the legionaries to drop back, out of range of its claws. ‘That thug Ka’Bandha’s artless game is over, and I will salvage some morsel of victory from this debacle. Submit to me!’

  ‘Never.’

  Kyriss roared in annoyance. ‘I give you a choice, primarch. The ragefire cannot be doused, only experienced. It is self-sustaining. Look upon your sons. Even these warriors of great renown chafe at the bit and long to be released to the berserker’s craving! If not for that ghost-mind witch they brought with them, it would have happened already. The rest of your Legion are but a breath away from turning upon one another!’ Its claws clacked angrily. ‘And this red thirst is only the beginning. It will become more powerful than anything you have yet dreamed.’

  ‘What… choice?’

  When Sanguinius said the words, Raldoron felt as if a blade had pierced his hearts. ‘My lord, no–’

  ‘What choice, daemon?’ thundered the primarch.

  ‘Take the ragefire into yourself,’ said Kyriss. ‘Accept it. Come with me, walk with your beloved brother Horus. Do this and your sons will be released. I make this promise. Your Legion will be spared, Angel. They will never know the flaw again. It will be your life for theirs.’

  Raldoron saw the question unfolding in his master’s eyes. Ever since the captain had learned of the legacy of the lost, of the threat that hid in the genetic matrix of the Legion, he had kept it silent as his liege lord had asked; but he could not close his eyes to how this know-ledge brought pain to his primarch. There was no fate the Angel feared but the s
uffering of his sons.

  The tip of the great crimson sword wavered, and dipped toward the floor. Raldoron heard a chorus of shouts from the warriors at his side, cries of disbelief and censure. The First Captain struggled to his master’s side, shaking his head. ‘This is what the traitors want,’ he insisted. ‘This is why they brought us here, my lord! To bring us to this, don’t you see?’

  ‘I see,’ said Sanguinius, and the words seemed to age him centuries.

  ‘Is it so much to ask?’ the daemon simpered. ‘A father giving everything for his children. That is what you intended all along, isn’t it, Sanguinius? To die for them?’ Kyriss’s hands crossed to perform a complicated string of gestures, and in return the crystal capsule above rattled and unfastened, plates of psychically-resonant material opening like a baroque mechanical flower. The red smoke within breathed into the air, billowing.

  Raldoron tasted the haze on his tongue. It was bloody like wet iron and rich like bitter hate. ‘You cannot trust this thing,’ he spat.

  ‘We will never lie to you,’ said Kyriss, echoing Ka’Bandha’s words on the Plains of the Damned. ‘We will give you what you need. What you desire.’

  The Angel cast a long, sombre look out through the ruined frame of the shattered window, down toward the masses of crimson-armoured warriors surrounding the cathedral. His beloved sons.

  ‘If there must be sacrifice,’ said Sanguinius, his wings slowly unfurling, ‘then it will be made.’

  ‘It will be made!’ The shout sounded in echo of the primarch’s words, and Raldoron spun toward the voice, hearing the abrupt drone of a chainblade weapon. ‘But not by you!’

  He saw Meros, brandishing his axe high in one hand. The Apothecary snatched at one of the broad fibre-bound cables where it was bound to a ring of bone fused into the far wall, coiling his arm about the thick rope’s circumference. Before anyone could stop him, Meros brought his chainaxe down on the rope and severed it in one buzzing cut. Released and free, the ragged cable’s tension recoiled and it reeled up toward the complex web of massive pulleys and weights suspending the crystal construct. The Apothecary held on tightly, and let himself be hoisted up with it, into the cloying mist spilling from the open capsule. Meros’s axe was wrenched from his grip and it tumbled away as he disappeared into the blood-shaded smoke.