‘That is not life, sergeant,’ said Sanguinius, stepping forwards to place himself between his warriors and their transformed brother. ‘He gave that up for us.’
Raldoron signalled to the other legionaries to be ready, and they took aim. ‘Must we kill him, then?’
The Angel waited for the apparition to make the next move. ‘Something different exists inside that body. Of the legionary we knew, only a fraction may remain.’
The thing that had been Brother Meros abruptly looked up, as if Sanguinius had called its name. ‘A fraction remains,’ it said, and there was the ghost of the Apothecary’s manner in the words. ‘Just enough so that he may be tormented by what he has done.’
It drifted slowly toward them and the legionaries held off an instant from opening fire. Sanguinius stood his ground, blade at rest, waiting.
‘I am here now,’ it went on. ‘Within your fallen son. I know your dark heart. This one will not perish as the other did. Tagas’s weakness was that he believed he had been abandoned. That is the key through which the Ruinous Powers destroyed his soul. This one…’ It paused, examining its broken, armoured hands. ‘He knows what he did for you.’
Raldoron was closest to his master’s side, and so it was only he who glimpsed what might have been the shimmer of a tear upon the primarch’s fire-seared cheek.
‘Heed me, creature. Let Meros hear this.’ Sanguinius raised the great sword and pointed with it, right at the transformed warrior’s chest. ‘Your gambit has failed. Whatever these powers are that you call master, whatever irrational choice my brother Horus has made to seek a pact with them, you stand defeated this day upon the cusp of victory. Do you understand the reason why?’
‘This one.’ The broken legionary traced the smouldering breach down the front of the shattered armour. ‘An exemplar of your kind. You were underestimated. The thirst would have taken you–’
‘But it did not.’ Sanguinius’s face hardened with defiance. ‘Because as long as one single Blood Angel lives and breathes, he will be master of his spirit. He will not let the abyss that lies in the hearts of us all take him into darkness.’ He looked away, fierce pride in his eyes as he surveyed Raldoron and the rest of his battle-weary sons. ‘That is the truth you did not understand, the truth that Horus has forgotten. It is not the descent towards the shadow nor the rise toward the light that makes us superior. It is in the endless struggle between the two where greatness of character resides. We are tested, and we do not break.’ The Angel’s voice became a sudden shout. ‘We will never fall! Take that to my brother and tell him!’
The broken warrior turned, giving a doll-like nod, and drifted toward the great pit. The warp-fires within it grew loud and agitated, as if they sensed its approach.
To Raldoron’s surprise, Sanguinius took a few steps after the phantom. ‘Meros?’ he said, and his words were low so that they would not carry. ‘If you hear this, know my oath. I swear upon the Legion, whose honour you have upheld, that your noble sacrifice will be repaid. You will not end in silence.’
The fire-wreathed form did not acknowledge him. It stepped off the edge of the floor, and crimson wings of arcane lightning flashed from its back. Raldoron heard a throaty, bass rumble from beneath them that grew until it was as loud as the world breaking open.
An inferno of warp energies fumed with volcanic force, swallowing up the body of the transformed warrior. Sanguinius spun to put his back to it, spreading his wings wide to shield the bodies of his legionaries from the punishing wall of hellfire.
An instinct screamed in Raldoron’s thoughts – a sense buried deep in the core of his brain, something that stemmed back millions of years to the most basic element of the human psyche. He bellowed out a command to the legionaries. ‘Turn away! Do not look upon the fires, brothers! Turn away!’
Horrors untold and unfathomable in word or thought screamed and cursed the Blood Angels as their last foothold on Signus Prime was broken. The upper storeys of the temple’s thick conical tower were blown to pieces as a seething globe of raw warp-fire tore free of the surface of the planet. Broken fragments of bone scattered wide, tumbling from the sky in an obscene rain.
The warp-mass lost its grip on the material universe and was dragged shrieking through the sky, searing the ash clouds, breaking through the thin membrane of atmosphere and accelerating. It consumed great gulps of wreckage from the death belts in low orbit, and the surviving ships of the Blood Angels flotilla burned hard and fast to get out of its path, many of them becoming the battle’s last victims as their ships reacted too slowly to avoid obliteration.
The swirling sphere of immaterial witch-fire lost cohesion and, like a dying, drowning man striking out with mad violence as death encroached, it clawed at the planets and suns of the Signus Cluster, ripping at their surfaces and sucking in matter. But it could not hold. This time the psychic scream was suffocated and a brief supernova blossomed before the fire bled out into embers and at last, nothingness.
Slowly, tentatively, the veil of shadow that had engulfed the full span of the star system broke apart, dissipating like a storm before the wind.
There, up on the surface, standing in the ruins of the broken tower, Raldoron looked up into a sky where there were no clouds. Little by little, in the black above them, the stars that had been blinded returned their light to look down upon Signus Prime once again.
Cassiel was the first to speak. ‘Is it over now?’
Sanguinius spared him a look. He shook his head.
TWENTY
Price to Pay
Sorrow
Imperium Secundus
The ground trembled as the earthquake resonated across the desolate plains, and there was a moment when Signus Prime seemed to hold its breath. Then, on spars of nuclear fire that burned rock and sand to vapour, the gigantic hulk of the Red Tear began to rise. Slowly at first, sloughing off broken shards of metal and sheaves of falling sand deposited by the mournful winds, the battle-barge pulled free of the earth that held it. Fighting gravity every metre of the way, the ship seemed to defy reason as it lifted into the dull air. The monolithic, city-sized craft resisted the planet’s attempts to hold it where it had fallen. This was the last battle that would be fought in the Signus Cluster, the final match between the might of the Blood Angels and the wastelands made from human misery and warp-sorcery. The IX Legion would win it as they had those before; to fail would be to dispute the will of the Angel.
On Signus Prime, on Holst, and in orbit, in every place where their warriors had set foot, their primarch had commanded that his sons excise all evidence that the Legion had ever come to this place. Over the days that passed after the final charge on the Cathedral of the Mark, an army of servitors and Wardens had gathered up every battle-brother’s corpse, every broken vehicle, every torn piece of armour or blunted sword. The work was almost complete, but for the spent casings of a few bolt shells lying lost and buried in the sands, but little more. Sanguinius had ordered it so. The Blood Angels would leave nothing behind in this blighted, murdered place. Not their ships, not their relics and not their precious dead.
Wounded but still imperious, the Red Tear lifted faster and faster as its mighty engines pressed it into the sky. The warship’s damage was great – deep within her internal spaces repairs were still underway – but like the Blood Angels, she had defied the odds and the plans of a deceitful enemy to ascend again. The white glow of the dwarf sun Signus Beta, high overhead through the pall of airborne dust, shone down and was briefly eclipsed by the Red Tear’s silhouette. The shadow it cast in mirror of the Legion’s sigil passed over the battlefield, and away.
Raldoron watched the mighty barge recede into the ranges of the Signusi sky, he and all the other captains gathered in the tumbledown ruins gazing up in salute to see it go. They were the last Blood Angels on planet, anywhere in the system. A short distance away, a flight of Stormbirds were waiting to take them from this disfigured wilderness. Once they turned their back on Signus Prime, t
hey would never return.
No one would return. It had already been etched into the Legion’s book of hours, by the primarch’s own hand. The Blood Angels would not build a monument or grave marker here, as they had on other planets where such bloodshed had occurred. The hundreds upon hundreds of the dead would be taken home to Baal to be buried on the slopes of Mount Seraph, the injured ships to stardocks for repair and re-armament. Warning buoys and automated beacons were being deployed all about the star system’s perimeter, there to turn back any ships that might come this way in the years ahead.
The Signus Cluster had been declared Mortae Perpetua; forever dead. It would be left lifeless and rotting until its suns burned cold, with nothing but the echoes of those who perished there to bear witness.
Raldoron turned away from the burned sky and the bloodstained desert, his gaze crossing the faces of his comrades. He saw Galan and Furio, Carminus and Azkaellon, each legionary outwardly at attention in their master’s presence, but each under some aspect of the same brooding shadow that lay across the entire Legion. In the aftermath of the bloodbath at the cathedral, when the witchery of the ragefire had finally been broken, the character of the Blood Angels had turned to morose mien and the bitter sting of misery. Slowly, like men emerging into day from decades of life in a lightless dungeon, they had come to understand that this particular nightmare had passed. Some even affected brighter manner and hopeful mood, but the First Captain could not help but wonder how much of that was forced. It was only Amit whose conduct had grown darker. Even now, he lurked at the edges of the group, engaging no one, his eyes hooded and lost in his own thoughts.
Raldoron frowned. The Legion had been wounded in this place, a cut that had pressed to their very core. Like their primarch, the Blood Angels had been blindsided by those they called kin. The distant perfidy of Warmaster Horus and the closer lies of the Word Bearers had brought them to the brink of the abyss. We have been shown the worst of ourselves, he thought, and it is a sobering truth to behold.
Time would tell if they would heal this wound, or if it would fester within them for eternity. For now, the captain remembered Sanguinius’s words in the bone temple. We are tested, and we do not break.
He stepped aside briefly to allow a servitor to grind past him, ambling towards the Stormbirds. The machine-slave was one of a handful that had accompanied the battle captains to this place. The sevitors bore the mechanisms for a tactical cyclonic device, which now sat in the middle of the ruins. A stubby bollard of plasteel, it contained a warhead of incredible destructive power. The weapon had been programmed to detonate when the assembled officers reached a safe distance; the resultant blast it would create would be enough to rip a massive chasm in Signus Prime’s surface, and eradicate all trace of the Cathedral of the Mark forever.
Sanguinius considered the weapon, then turned to face them. ‘Our enemy has made a grave error, my sons. He did not kill us all when the chance was open to him.’ The Angel’s expression was grim. ‘And now we will exact the blood cost for that mistake. The cost, for the lives of your battle-brothers lost in this madness. For the innocents sacrificed to draw us here.’ Fury glittered in his eyes. ‘The cost of betrayal and treachery.’
The primarch glanced at Azkaellon, and the Guard Commander took his cue to offer up a nugget of information. ‘Our ships have conducted a search for the Dark Page, but the traitor vessel has eluded us. We can only assume that the Word Bearers have fled the system and made space for the warp. I imagine they carry word of their failure back to...’ He faltered suddenly, stumbling over the words.
‘Horus,’ intoned the Angel. ‘You may say my wayward brother’s name, Azkaellon. We will all be called to speak it, when the moment comes that he must be named arch-traitor.’
Raldoron knew that his master was in pain with every breath he was taking; although he gave no sign of it, the crippling injury he had suffered on the battlefield still had to heal. A lesser being would never have walked again without sacrificing their broken limbs for augmetic replacements. Sanguinius mastered that pain, holding it where none could see it. But not so the other pain, the agony of his soul. That, he could not keep from the warriors of his inner circle, the legionaries who knew the Angel best. Raldoron saw it in his eyes, heard it in his words. The Warmaster had awakened at first a great sorrow in his angelic brother, but now that had burned down and been rebuilt as a great and powerful hatred.
The primarch’s sword slid from its scabbard and Sanguinius placed his bare hand upon it, drawing blood. ‘I swear that the day will dawn when I face Horus and put him to the question, and to the blade. There is no doubt in my mind that my brother has turned away from the rightful rule of the Emperor and the banner of Terra’s glory. He has united with monsters to prosecute his rebellion. I do not know why, but that shall not stay our hands. It may be madness, the influence of the alien or the corrosion of his heart, but I will learn that truth when I meet him face to face.’ He gripped the sword with fierce intensity. ‘And then I will kill him for his treason.’
As a mutter of grave assent passed through the assembled group, Raldoron felt compelled to speak. ‘My lord, if the Sons of Horus and the Word Bearers have united against the rest of the Imperium, then we face a battle like no other in human history.’
Sanguinius nodded. ‘It is much worse than you think, my friend. This day, Azkaellon brought me news of a communication deciphered by one of our few surviving astropaths.’
Raldoron listened intently. While the arcane veil had been in place, no astropathic signals had been able to reach the Blood Angels flotilla. It seemed that while they had been locked in their peculiar prison, time had stuttered in a freakish pattern and events had moved on around them. This new war, it seemed, was not confined to the Signus Cluster or the Blood Angels.
The primarch announced that the message bore the seal of Rogal Dorn, the Imperial Fist himself. A cheer went up. Many feared that traps similar to the one that had ensnared the IX Legion had been sprung upon other steadfast sons of the Imperium, and word of Dorn’s wellbeing was met with relief.
‘Aye, it is well he lives,’ said Sanguinius, his mood unchanged, foreboding. ‘But his word came with greater import. Dorn marshals the defences of Terra, but warns of the rot of betrayal spread wide. The Emperor’s Children, Word Bearers, Night Lords, Alpha Legion. The Iron Warriors, World Eaters and the Death Guard. All of them now march to the Warmaster’s drums.’
A shocked silence fell. Raldoron heard the rumble of his blood in his veins, felt his breath catch in his throat. If any other but the primarch had said those words, he would have decried them on the spot. The First Captain saw his battle-brothers struggling to process this information. It was a dizzying, horrific revelation. The Legiones Astartes, sundered by lies. A civil war ignited between colossal armies of gene-forged fighters, which could only end in fires of conflict burning across the galaxy.
And this was only the beginning of it. Dorn’s blunt, matter-of-fact message had carried not only word of disloyalty but also of death. The Salamanders, Raven Guard and Iron Hands had taken the brunt of the betrayal, their forces smashed. Mars was ablaze in factional warfare. The fates – and the fealty – of the White Scars, Ultramarines, Dark Angels, Thousand Sons and Space Wolves were unknown.
Sanguinius’s voice revealed nothing but hard, fiery anger as he spoke of his brother Ferrus Manus, reportedly slain by Fulgrim himself, and of great Vulkan, also presumed dead. ‘We have broken out of this hellish oubliette, and found ourselves in a different universe from the one we left. Everything has changed.’ He placed a hand over the ruby heart on his chest plate, marking a line of blood upon it. ‘Even us.’
Each warrior knew what he meant. The red thirst had come upon them all, and staggered them with its power. Furio spoke the words they all felt. ‘What took place here can never be allowed to happen again.’
‘But it will,’ said Sanguinius. ‘And when that fury comes once more, know this. The Blood Angels will be ready
. The flaw in us is not something that can be dismissed or defeated with ease. It is the inner enemy, the reflection of the conflict without!’ The burning fury in his manner shifted, and Sanguinius walked among them, giving each warrior a nod or a touch of his hand upon their shoulder. ‘Aye, it is part of what we are. Our gift and our curse. And we will master it, if we are to win this war, the war of brothers against brothers, for the Imperium and the future.’
‘For the Imperium!’ The call left Raldoron’s lips, and his battle-brothers carried it high, drawing their swords and raising them in salute.
The Angel gave a nod. ‘We take our leave of this place, my sons. Turn from it and guide your eyes to the battles ahead. With these steps, our Legion embarks upon its greatest challenge.’
They filed back to their ships, and none of them glanced over their shoulders to see what they left behind. A glitter of gold and red by his boot caught Raldoron’s eye and he stooped, plucking an ornate honour-sigil in the shape of a teardrop from the sand. The decoration was fine with etched text; he recognised it as belonging to a legionary of Squad Vitronus, and he resolved to return it to its owner’s side.
When he looked up, the Angel was there. ‘Ral,’ he began, ‘when we reach the flagship, I want you to send word to my brother. Tell Dorn what we fought here, if you can find the words. Tell him that the Blood Angels are on their way to Terra with all possible speed.’
At his primarch’s side, the Sanguinary Guard Commander, Azkaellon, offered a thought. ‘That may be easier said than done, lord. The Navigators aboard the ships at the edge of the system are reporting a strange confusion in the void.’
‘What do you mean?’ said Raldoron. ‘Something to do with that veil effect?’
Azkaellon shook his head. ‘No, this is different.’ He frowned. ‘The Navigators spoke of… a “dislocation” of the Imperial Astronomican. The eternal light of the great beacon on Terra is not where it should be.’
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