Fear to Tread

by James Swallow

  Without hesitation, Sanguinius threw himself into the air in a flash of white and gold, soaring upwards in a spiral after his errant son.

  He committed the act without uncertainty. He knew it was right. If there had been time to doubt, Meros might have wondered after such abstracts as fate or destiny, but he was not one to think in those terms. There was only the question of what needed to be done, of the immediacy of the action.

  He cannot fall.

  Ever since the moment he had been shot on Nartaba Octus, when he felt the soulseeker round penetrate his gut and lodge in his flesh, Meros had known that a ghost of his own ending was close at hand. He had been ready to die; that was the lot of a legionary, to always be ready to perish in glory and battle, for the Imperial Truth.

  But death had not claimed him that day, and in the sarcophagus where he lay as his blood was cleansed of alien taint, whatever intangible quality of man that could be called his spirit wavered close to the edge of life.

  Warmaster Horus.

  The warrior he met on the dreamscape of the healing blood-sleep had said that name. A warning. Only now did Meros fully understand. At first, he thought that it was a caution, come too late, but in this moment it seemed otherwise. Was it, instead, that he had been prepared for this event? A Blood Angel who should have already been dead, held back from his end for this choice? This act?

  It seemed right. It was right.

  The shrieking cable burned as it rattled through the pulley mechanisms, hauling the heavy mass of his body and warplate upward, a dense counterweight dropping down toward the floor in return. Meros’s vision clouded as he plunged upwards into the crimson haze and he let go, spinning free. Velocity shoved him aside and the Apothecary fell hard upon one petal of the open psi-capsule, cracking the crystal matrix. He scrambled, ceramite-sheathed fingers scraping across the slick surface, and rolled. Meros caught himself before he could lose his grip and tumble back the way he had come. He rose and got his bearings.

  The capsule, which from beneath had resembled a great box of misty crystal and brass filigree, was now open and lit with flares of energy. The colour of the bursts struck him in synesthetic jolts of emotion; the shade of hate, the tone of frenzy, the hue of anger.

  The opened container should have ended, but within its structure there seemed no dimension, no form that was real. The inner space of it extended away into infinity, like a mirror looking into a mirror.

  Red smoke moved around him as blood moved through clear water, in billowing, aggressive surges. It had intent and malice in its motion. Meros was reminded of the manner of a stalking carnodon, circling its prey.

  He opened his arms. ‘Come, then. Before I realise the fool that I am, come. Take your sacrifice.’

  A heavy rush of air and the rumble of beating wings sounded a new arrival. Meros turned and suddenly there was the stern face of the Angel, alighting behind him. ‘Stand down, my son,’ he said. ‘I command you.’

  Meros took a breath, and then he spoke the most difficult words he had ever uttered. ‘No, my lord. I must respectfully refuse.’

  Sanguinius’s eyes narrowed. ‘You disobey your primarch.’

  ‘Aye.’ From nowhere, a strange mutter of sentiment rose through the Apothecary and he gave a rueful laugh. ‘I suppose that makes me a traitor.’

  ‘Meros. You cannot do this.’ The Angel’s wings folded close and he pointed toward the writhing mist. ‘No mortal soul can survive contact with such a force. If it is what the beast Kyriss said, it is the raw force of the warp. It is the crude power of all our rages. You will not be able to control it. It will destroy you.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, taking a step closer. ‘It will destroy me. Not you.’ Meros raised his hand, turning the wrist where the medicae gauntlet rested across his armoured wrist. ‘You have taught us many things, Lord Sanguinius. The nobility of our spirit. The warrior prowess of our hearts. Humility, in the face of a universe of grandeur and magnificence.’ Meros nodded to himself. ‘And duty. The great weight of duty.’ He looked up, meeting the Angel’s steady, questioning gaze. ‘You are a primarch, Emperor’s son and warlord, the most numinous and gallant of your kin. I am but a warrior, born of the dust of Baal and raised high to fight in a great cause. And I see no greater cause than this.’

  ‘I will not have my sons die in my stead,’ whispered Sanguinius.

  ‘That choice is not yours to make. It is ours. It is mine.’ Carefully, Meros extended the gauntlet’s cutting saw and placed it against his neck seal. ‘If a single legionary is consumed in fire and fury, the galaxy will spin on, unheeding. But if you fall…’ He grimaced. ‘If the Warmaster has turned his face from Terra, then you cannot fall. Only you can meet him on equal footing. When the battle comes, you must be there to face him, brother against brother.’ Meros hesitated. ‘I do not have your sight, master, but I see that. And I know.’

  With a gush of sparks and a growl of pain, Meros forced the cutter down the front of his armour, opening a jagged tear through the ceramite that ran from throat to groin, down through the layers to the flesh beneath. He guided the barbed tip of the reductor to the correct places, as he had so many times before upon the bodies of legionaries about to die. The device whirred and bored through skin, raising a rasp of pain. Meros flexed the digital controls and, with wet pops of spilled blood, he removed his own progenoid glands. The device sucked the nodules of gene-rich tissue into a reservoir pod, sealing them inside for preservation. Meros’s bequest to his Legion now lay secured.

  Crimson spotting his lips, the Apothecary twisted the medicae module and it detached from his armour. ‘My lord, if you will?’ Reeling from the shock, Meros tossed it towards the Angel, who snatched it out of the air with a flash of gold. ‘Take this… and let something of me live on.’

  Then he turned his back on his master and threw himself into the churning heart of the ragefire.

  It was more terrible than words could describe. It was rage in its purest form, an utter vacuum of all other sense and emotion. There was no love to temper it, no peace to foster tranquillity. There was no control or reason by which the fury could be marshalled and commanded. No intellect to focus it, no morality and instinct through which it might find boundary.

  There was only rage, burning red and livid, summoning a thirst for blood and blood and blood; and somewhere deep beneath, waiting to follow the crimson path, there was a night-black fury beyond even this. A madness, a frenzy of towering psychotic dimensions.

  And all of this was within them.

  The burning smoke poured into Meros as wine would fill a cup, in through the breach in his armour, entering him by his eyes and his ears, bleeding through the pores in his skin.

  The last tiny vestiges of the legionary that had been Captain Tagas, battle-brother and lost soul, passed through him, gossamer-light and then were gone forever. Meros caught the dimmest fraction of Tagas’s self. The warp had changed the captain, the psychic power of the capsule slowly denaturing his flesh until poor, tortured Tagas had disintegrated into this directionless energy. For so long they had kept him undying, held him on the edge of fury and madness, that it had literally consumed him. The daemons had trapped a warrior in a crucible of hatred until all that was left was the most base, most flawed part of his spirit. Flesh become energy. Self become emotion.

  In this impossible alchemy, Kyriss and his sorcerers had made the ragefire from Tagas. They had turned one ordinary warrior soul of the Blood Angels into the key to destroy them all.

  Meros would avenge him, if he could. He held on to that thought as the rage and the thirst overwhelmed him, slowly encroaching upon all that he was. The fire would consume him, overwrite his mind and character.

  And it was here, at the end, as he willingly made the choice to sacrifice himself, that Meros felt the presence of another mind. Not Tagas, for he was long dispersed, and only his echo had remained. No, this was something newborn.

  A consciousness of the warp aggregated and growing, becoming an
imate.

  Some said that the crazed tides of the immaterium were a literal sea of emotion, the unreal reflection of the corporeal. If that were so, then this mind was born of that. A gathering of rage and thirst, of need and desire, so powerful that it now achieved sentience itself. By degrees, that presence swept in and drowned the mind of Brother Meros, filling him, changing him, becoming real. In a cataclysmic detonation of red, the crystal capsule exploded into a burning rain of glittering dust.

  Kano felt his friend’s ending, and he stumbled, the shock shoving at him like a physical blow. He staggered and fell against a broken stanchion, blinking away the sympathetic pain, his head rising. Kano stared out through a jagged slash in the Red Tear’s hull, out over the wastelands of the warzone toward the high towers of the daemonic temple. Lightning in spears of emerald and crimson flashed from turbid clouds swirling overhead, illuminating the ashen sky. The sparks of searing colour were like the swords of warring deities, chasing each other back and forth.

  The greasy, electric tang of raw psychic energy was in the air, the careless toxic overspill of the warp’s denizens liberated in their death-throes, polluting the world from their point of entry into this universe. Through all that, Kano felt Meros being taken away. It wasn’t a death; that was a regrettably commonplace effect, felt many times over in the service of the Great Crusade. Meros’s end was more a slow erasure of his self from the surface of reality. Kano’s psychically-attuned mind saw it happening, though his physical self was many kilometres removed from the Cathedral of the Mark.

  What he saw without seeing was the retreat of an invisible tide of furious hatred and blood-charged frenzy. All upon the surface of Signus Prime and within the span of its orbit had bathed in a ghostly radiation of anger, a spectral texture of it that spoke directly to the heart of a Blood Angel. That cloak of gloom, like the great black veil that still shrouded the entire Signus Cluster, was made of the unmatter of thought, and its touch was poisonous. Soberly, Kano considered that it would have ended them all eventually, robbing even the best of them of restraint and reason.

  But now this shadow-that-was-no-shadow drew back, falling away like the scales of wild fury from the eyes of his battle-brothers. As it passed, legionaries with guns raised and swords at the high found the snarls in their throat stilled. The flaw within them remained undimmed, its power still strong, but the control that had been stolen from the IX Legion was at last repaid to them. Their temper changed as the storm broke.

  The ragefire of over a hundred thousand warriors collapsed in on itself, growing heavier, becoming solid and distinct. Like an unborn star condensing from stellar gas and dust, the fury accreted within the soul of Kano’s battle-brother. It brought a gasp of pure sorrow to his lips as he understood the supremacy of the sacrifice the Apothecary had made.

  Meros was a warrior of good character, but he had never been what others would have called a champion, a hero of the Legion. He was simply what the rank and file of the Blood Angels had always been: loyal, noble sons of Terra and Baal, selfless and ready to fight. Ready to die.

  Kano closed his eyes but he could not shut out the vision. The telepathic surge was too great, dragging his inner sight to it with the sheer gravity of its effect. In his hearts, a cold and slow certainty began to form, and Kano steeled himself. This felt familiar. He had seen it before.

  He remembered the deck beneath his boots breaking apart like brittle ice and falling through into a bottomless void of black.

  ‘No.’ The denial left his mouth in a whisper. The word was a weak, fragile thing, it was sudden understanding; it was memory and regret. It was truth.

  He remembered a human figure coming up out of the darkness, straight towards him, screaming. A warrior in heavy armour that glistened with wet crimson and hellish red radiance.

  Ranged in the endless mental chasm of the psychic realm, Kano knew now what the vision he had experienced back in the meditation cell had revealed. The eyes were known to him. In a way, he had always known who it was. Everything had been moving, turning as worlds turned about suns, event upon event, all to bring this moment to pass.

  Meros transformed, writhing in the grip of an infernal glow as the burning power merged with every atom of his being. The flesh of his face distorted into a hollow mask far beyond the guise of pain. His armour became dark and disfigured, joints steaming, the shell of it trembling as it fought to contain energies never meant to be bound to this reality. In the warp’s shadow, Kano saw a pair of ghostly, blood-drenched wings briefly unfold from the wounded Apothecary’s back, anointing the ruined bones beneath with a rain of phantasmal blood; then they were gone.

  Brother Meros ended, and the Red Angel began.

  The crystal matrix of the capsule rang like dissonant bells as it came apart, brass and crystal shards becoming lethal shrapnel. The beast Kyriss bolted forward, arms raised in what could have been supplication, screaming in tongues. The strident, inhuman noise was deafening; it was the sound of an emotion dying, a deceit so stygian and ghastly that even the blackest of human hearts would not have been able to encompass it.

  The daemon howled, it wept like a bereft widow, it hammered in great tantrums at everything around it. Finally it turned and spat bile towards the ragged line of Blood Angels who moved to keep the creature in their sights. ‘You had no right to do this! You mewling, ignorant animals! How dare you ruin it all? You are our pawns! This is Signus Daemonicus, our beachhead, our war-ground! And here you do as we bid!’ Kyriss’s melodic voice crackled and broke, becoming hard-edged and spiteful. As it changed, so did the daemon’s tattoo-patterned face, the bland pinkness of its bovine snout gathering newer, more malignant shades. ‘The pieces upon the board have no right to rebel! You take what we give, you adore it–’

  A winged shadow broke the words of the beast as white pinions cut the smouldering haze above, and the red-shaded iron of a heavy warlord’s blade flashed. Kyriss fell back and squealed, the tone ringing up and down a cascade of chords, a whickering atonal siren-song that blasted the Blood Angels back with the force of a graviton cannon. The claw-hands of its borrowed flesh came up, snapping and raking at the ground, and it drew a weapon cut from seamless, shimmering silver, as if out of thin air.

  Raldoron, Cassiel and the others needed no orders to press forth the final attack, knowing as much as their enemy did that it was the last daemon standing. Bolter shells lashed at the fiend, chopping twisted divots of meat from its warped body.

  Kyriss spun in a mad, dizzying pirouette, trying to kill whatever it could. Thick, rheumy tears oozed down its face, spittle foamed over lips and across its shivering breasts. ‘You must love us!’ it bellowed. ‘We give you blood and hate and you will love us for it!’

  The Angel was there for the killing blow, looming large behind the creature. He stood magnificent and terrible in his sun-bright armour, his great sword held in a reversed executioner’s grip. ‘I will take your silence now,’ he said, and crossing his hand over his chest, Sanguinius put the red blade through the daemon’s throat from shoulder to shoulder.

  Kyriss’s voice ceased. With a cascade of polluted blood jetting from the killing wound, its body tumbled forwards, freed from its head. The primarch snatched at a curved horn before the cut could separate both parts and let the corpse drop. He slowly turned the severed head to study it with dispassion, examining the trophy he had made of the thing from the warp.

  It whispered words that only Sanguinius was close enough to hear. Then he smiled, the instant so brief it was barely there.

  Raldoron ignored the pain of his wounds and limped towards his master, lowering the muzzle of his bolter. He watched the primarch discard the daemon’s head with a cursory flick of his wrist, sending it over the lip of the great pit. Noxious fumes that sickened even the hard constitution of a legionary were already curling from the corpse of the dead fiend.

  Quickly, like an accelerated pict-feed, the headless body of the thing that had called itself Kyriss the Perverse decay
ed, melting away into a ugly slurry that resembled some flyblown trough of offal. Flesh became gluey liquid, oozing into cracks of the floor, and misshapen bones became visible before these too blackened and denatured like old, yellowed wax. The First Captain had a killer’s knowledge of anatomy and organic structure, but nothing of the creature’s remains followed any logic of biology he could recall. For a disturbing moment, he thought he saw the outlines of a man’s skeleton, somehow trapped inside the bones of the daemon, as if one had grown out of the other; but then it became gritty powder, aged millennia in seconds. The last fragment to dissolve was the blackened nub of a heart organ.

  Cassiel drew a line through a drift of the rotting matter with the tip of his sword. ‘Is it over, then?’ There was such weariness in his voice, one might have thought a century had passed in the prosecution of the Signus pacification. It was hard to accept that it had only been a span of days.

  ‘Look,’ said Kaide warily, the heavy servo-arm emerging from the Techmarine’s backpack whirring as it turned to point toward a figure standing at the edge of the pit.

  Raldoron looked and looked again. In fact, the figure did not stand. It floated, just a short span off the floor, drifting slightly. The same sickening light that he had seen boiling inside the psychic capsule, that he had felt pressing into his thoughts, was now concentrated in this one individual. A halo of hell-flames burned about him, rumbling low and hateful.

  ‘Meros,’ said Cassiel, making the name a memorial. ‘By the throne, he lives.’