Within, a hell-light bathed everything. Crimson warning strobes blinked incessantly, although Rafen had swiftly silenced the braying of the alert klaxon in the troop bay. “How much longer?” he shouted.
“We are on final approach,” replied Kayne. In order to convince the pilot-serf to take the Thunderhawk on a suicidal suborbital dive, the sergeant had dispatched the youth to the cockpit to provide some encouragement with his bolter. The plan had worked, and their return flight had taken a fraction of the time of their outward sortie; the only problem was the cost. This ship would never fly again; at best, the Techmarines would use it for scrap.
And that is if we can make it the last few kilometres without coming apart in mid-air, Rafen thought grimly. But the Emperor had taken them this far without calling them to His side, and He would not take His favour from them now, not with Mount Seraph and the fortress-monastery in sight.
Noxx had his head bowed and his lips were moving. He was leading his battle-brothers in a prayer, amid the juddering, plummeting flight. Rafen saw the words he spoke and echoed them. “We are the Emperor’s Chosen. Hear His great anger in the roar of the bolt pistol. See His almighty fury in the blades of the chainsword. Feel His undying strength in the protection of your armour.”
The simple litany brought him focus. Each word seemed right and true. Back there, in the citadel, Rafen had felt a small sting of doubt in the moments before he passed judgement upon Caecus. The poor fool; the Apothecae’s intent had been pure, even if his methods had not. He shook his head. There could be no forgiveness, now. Caecus had opened the door to corruption though his arrogance and brought disgrace to his Chapter.
Rafen’s gaze went to Noxx once more and he wondered: do all the successors see us as men of that stripe? Superior and wilful, convinced of our Tightness even to the point of irresponsibility?
“Stand by for egress!” Kayne’s shout was loud.
Rafen bowed his head once more and whispered a final invocation. “Lord of Terra, Lord of Baal. Grant me safe landing. Let me take my fury to those who should know it.”
The words had barely left his lips when the Thunderhawk shuddered as if it had been hit by a gigantic hammer, and crashed into the monastery’s great courtyard.
The ship bounced off the flagstones, snapping a trio of pennant masts before landing again, this time so hard that the undercarriage crumpled, the metal skis snapping from the wing roots. Churning out coils of heavy smoke, the craft skidded and lost first one wing, then the other. Reaction fuel gushed out in spurts as the armoured fuselage was punctured. The Thunderhawk shed pieces of itself and flipped on to its port side, slowing as it carved a black streak toward the great statue on the central podium in the middle of the quad. Velocity bled away and it creaked to a halt, sparking, aerofoils twitching in machine-death.
The drop-ramp blew out on explosive bolts and the Space Marines disembarked in a flood of armour. Rafen and Kayne were the last to exit, dropping to the stones. “The pilot?” said the sergeant.
“Expired,” said the youth. “The strain of the flight was too much for his heart. He died as the aircraft did.”
“His duty was done. That’s all that matters.” Rafen looked up at the statue of the primarch Sanguinius towering over their heads, and he gave it a silent nod of thanks.
On the thin, cold desert winds came the mournful sound of a hollow tolling and every warrior stiffened. “Cloister bell,” hissed Corvus. “We were right to hasten back.”
“Those creatures are here,” said Ajir. “I can smell them.”
Rafen looked and found Noxx a short distance away, crouching at the edge of an impact crater. As he watched, he saw the Flesh Tearer spit and then made the sign of the aquila, his men following suit.
“Roan,” said Puluo, his face unreadable. “Aye,” nodded Rafen.
Beside him, Kayne’s attention was still on the statue. “Lord, do you see that? Something up there… But nothing visible on preysight…”
Rafen spun around, bringing up his bolter, in time to see a flurry of muscled shapes throw themselves from the shoulders of the great stone angel, webs of skin flapping open beneath their arms to slow their fall.
Gunfire erupted around the wreck of the Thunderhawk as a pack of the Bloodfiends attacked. The largest of them, still drunk upon the rich cocktail of vitae it had swallowed in the chapel, hung back and let its smaller brethren take first cut.
Within the collection of animal drives and base impulses that were its mind, the mutant clone was torn by a kind of madness. Chattering meme-voices, fragments of self and old, dead personalities warred with each other. They could only be stopped by the drowning of them in the deluge of stolen lifeblood.
The creature was, like every one of its kind, a shattered mirror reformed in the image of a Blood Angel, but lacking in any of the qualifies that could be thought of as human. If it had a soul, a spirit, then that too was a broken and distorted thing. Given hundreds of years of test and study, of careful experimentation and practice, the replicae might have become something akin to a man; instead, the mutations that cursed them had been accelerated by the machinations of Fabius Bile, and with each drop of bright blood they consumed, the thirst that dominated the Bloodfiends grew stronger. The pack alpha perched upon a piece of wreckage and sniffed at the air. It could smell the coppery scent on the wind. Not the commonplace blood that spilled now about its feet, torn from the veins of the Space Marines, but something more, like the fluid from the grail but much, much more potent.
It would seek it out. Consume it; and perhaps, in the taking, finally silence the madness.
“They will seek it out…” Mephiston froze, his armour suddenly tight around him, his crystalline sword in his hands.
“Lord?” At his side, the honour guard shot him a questioning look.
The psyker hesitated in the corridor beyond the great hall, the faint light of the burning Thunderhawk catching his dark eyes through the arched windows. The strength of the feral animal-thought was so sudden, so strong that it caught him unawares. It was there and then gone, a flash of lightning on a stygian night. He blinked and refocused, seeing Corbulo racing toward him. The sanguinary priest had a drawstring bag of heavy leather clutched to him and his chainsword in the other hand. Blood stained the edge of the blade and Corbulo’s robes. Mephiston’s battle-brother was marked with contusions across his face, but he didn’t seem aware of them. Instead, he bore an expression of mingled distaste and horror.
“Librarian!” Corbulo gasped, shaking his head in disbelief. “I have… What I have just seen sickens me! Those beasts, they invaded the chapel!”
“Yes,” Mephiston tried to hold on to the fleeting though-pattern of the Bloodfiend, but it was like mercury, breaking apart, slipping away. He saw images; the chapel, the Red Grail. He sensed the echo of sensation; the deep taste of old, old blood, blunt iron upon torn flesh. “It took the draught. All of it…”
Corbulo nodded, shamefaced. “I could not stop them.”
“It won’t be enough,” said the psyker, as the brief spark of contact finally guttered out and died. “They want more. By the Throne, brother, they want it all.”
“They can’t bleed every one of us!” snarled the priest.
Mephiston’s face became stony as an understanding came upon him. He whirled about, his crimson cloak flaring open, and raced back into the chamber.
Lord Dante turned at the sound of his name. His eyes narrowed. He had seen the Lord of Death in many aspects, from warrior to scholar, but never with the face he saw now. Revulsion, pure and unadulterated, was etched upon him. “Brother, what is it?” He halted in mid-dress, the golden vambrace on his armour still hanging open.
“Infamy!” shouted the psyker. “Atrocity and desecration, master! They must be stopped!”
“It is the witchsight,” said Orloc, nodding grimly. “What have you seen?”
Mephiston halted, all eyes upon him, and made a visible effort to control himself. “The creatures… Th
e Bloodfiends… They penetrated the Chapel of the Red Grail, took the vitae of the chalice!”
A surge of shock went through everyone in the room. Dante heard Daggan crackle out a curse.
“The blood,” said Seth, the colour draining from his face. “Throne and damnation… They went for the blood of the grail!”
“And they want more,” husked Corbulo. “They are feeding off it, enhancing themselves with every mouthful. I saw it with my own eyes.”
The psyker nodded. “The Red Grail won’t be enough. Now they have the taste of it.”
Seth’s eyes searched Mephiston’s, then turned to meet Dante’s gaze. “If this is so… Then there can be only one place to which they will be drawn.”
“The Sarcophagus,” Dante’s voice was a whisper in the sudden stillness of the hall. “The flesh of the primarch himself. If they absorb that, they will be unstoppable.”
To consider such a thing was a horror, an offence of such dimension that not one of the Astartes spoke; it fell to the Master of the Blood Angels to break the silence.
He turned to Corbulo. “Brother,” he began, “contact Lord Sentikan aboard the battle cruiser Unseen. Disclose to him the scope of this… outrage. Relay this request.” Dante sighed. “Tell Sentikan that he has authority to stand as acting commander of all warships in Baal orbit.” None of the other Chapter Masters showed any signs of disagreement, all of them certain of the seriousness of this moment, and of what Dante was about to say next. “Tell him to have lance cannons trained upon the planet, to this location. If we fail to stop these creatures, Mount Seraph is to be destroyed. We will not suffer abominations to live.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Light came upon the silent cadre of warriors in a slow wave as they entered the ossuary antechamber, biolume floaterglobes rising from their cradles to cast colour and shadow about the hall. A pathway made of iron crossed from one side to another, narrowing as it did to the width of two battle-brothers shoulder to shoulder. Every other surface was dull white with bone. Hundreds of skulls stared sightlessly out from the walls and the ceiling, some of them unadorned, others whorled with etchings of devotional script or illuminated pictographs. The bones of the chosen few were of men whose deeds were of such magnitude they were allowed to be interred so close to the body of their primarch. These dead had not just been heroes, for all Astartes were heroes; they were men of singular courage, soldier-saints of vision and utmost purity.
Dante, the light glittering off the polished gold of his wargear, was at the head of the group, and for an instant his gaze dropped to one single skull, low down among the others. He knew where it lay, because it was his hands that had put it there. Kadeus, the Chapter Master who had ruled before Dante, a mentor and a friend, long dead now but still watching over him. He wondered what advice the old warrior would have had to offer him if he were alive at this moment. Every Master was here in this room, from the brothers who had been granted the fortune of walking in Sanguinius’ shadow, to the men who had led his Legion through ten millennia of ceaseless galactic war. Dante hoped that he too might one day be laid to rest among them, but for the first time he wondered if that fate might not be open to him.
If we fail, Sentikan will follow his orders to the letter. He looked around. All of this… It will become vapour and ashes.
Dante stiffened as he approached the massive circular door at the far end of the antechamber, dismissing the thought with action. He twisted the wrist of his golden gauntlet and removed the glove. In the middle of the door was a fist-sized hole, and the Blood Angel thrust his hand into it. With a sharp clank, metal pins stabbed out from the door’s inner mechanism and clamped his forearm tightly in place.
“I am Dante,” he said to the air. “In Sanguinius’ name, know me.”
A cowl of thick needles coiled around his bared flesh and sank to the hilt, penetrating his veins and deep to the marrow in his bones. Arcane gene-sense technologies tasted him and considered for long moments, before snapping away, releasing the master’s arm. He wiped away a stray droplet of blood and replaced his gauntlet. “Open the doors,” he commanded, and so they did.
Mephiston followed his master into the sepulchre with a reticence he had thought himself incapable of. At the edges of his thoughts, the psyker felt a distant pressure upon his telepathic sense, like a faraway storm. As the antechamber’s cogwheel gate rolled away into the walls, so did two others at equidistant points around the circular shrine, the priest’s door and the penitent’s door. Overhead, the walls vanished toward a curved roof covered with elaborate frescoes that showed spacescapes and the arc of the galactic arm. Picked out in clusters of gemstones and precious metals were the locations of Terra, Ophelia, Sabien, Signus and dozens other significant systems from the Chapter’s history, arranged as if glimpsed from the surface of Baal on a clear night. But there had not been a clear night on Baal since the War of the Burning that scourged the planet with nuclear fire; and the surface was high above them, through layers of rock and countless tiers of the fortress-monastery.
Free-standing ramparts taller than a Dreadnought ringed the centre of the space, set out at regular distances. The middle of the chamber was an open pit, in cross-section an inverted cone. From where he stood. Mephiston could see the ramp that dropped away, following the walls downward in a spiral walkway leading to the very bottom, and to the great and holy resting place.
The other Astartes filed in around him, sharing his silence, his reverence for this place. All of them looked to the dark pool of shadow that was the vast opening, all of them knowing what lay down there, untouched and forever preserved. As one, without command or gesture, each warrior bowed their heads and sank to one knee, making the sign of the aquila across their chests.
When they rose again, Mephiston found Dante looking at him. “Speak, my friend,” said the Chapter Master. His words were quiet, in respect for the place in which they stood. “Say what is on your mind.”
Mephiston glanced down at the force sword sheathed at his belt, his hand suspended over the weapon’s hilt. “This is a place of veneration, lord. Yet we cheapen it by bringing blades and guns into its environs. What does that say of us?”
Dante placed a hand on his comrade’s shoulder. “Battle is our church as much as any stone-built cathedral, kinsman. Our faith is dust unless we are willing to kill for it. And die for it.” The Chapter Master nodded toward the pit. “He knew that. And he will forgive us this trespass.”
Brother Corbulo led them down through the corridors, along the great tunnels and passageways with the screams and hoots of the Bloodfiends as their constant companions. The beasts were following them, of that Rafen was certain.
The sanguinary high priest had gathered them from the courtyard as the mutants fell back to regroup, explaining on the way what had transpired in the fortress. Rafen listened, aghast, as Corbulo told him of the confrontation in the Chapel of the Red Grail, of Lord Dante’s orders to Sentikan and the massing of the men inside the holy walls of the great sepulchre.
At that, the muscles in Rafen’s legs stiffened and he halted clumsily. “I… We cannot enter that place, priest.” He cast around at his own men, at Noxx and the squad of Flesh Tearers. “We are unworthy.”
Corbulo fixed him with a hard glare. “Don’t be a fool, lad. Have you learned nothing in recent days? We face a threat unlike any other, and if to fight it we must bend rules and ancient doctrine, then that we will do.” He gave a grim smile. “Once it is done and all is well once again, we shall ask the Emperor’s forgiveness. He will grant it if we do not fail him, I have no doubt.” Corbulo turned to Turcio, looking at his penitent brand. “Dogma cannot oppose the realities of battle, it can only form a framework for the fight.”
“Unusual to hear a blood priest say such a thing,” said Noxx.
Corbulo gave a weary nod. “We are all of us learning many lessons this day.”
As difficult as it was to put the greater meaning of the place behind him, Rafen and the o
ther line Astartes did so, following Corbulo through the antechamber and, at last, into the sepulchre. They paused to kneel and show deference before stepping forward once more. The sergeant saw the mix of men from every successor at the conclave, all of them handling their guns and swords with care, as if they feared to make too much sound and disturb the worshipful air about them. Noxx gathered the survivors from his squad and marched to his master’s side, and for a moment Rafen thought he saw a flash of genuine empathy on Lord Seth’s face at the return of his warrior and the absence of Brother-Captain Gorn. Scattered around, the men of the other Chapters were in similarly close-knit groups, speaking quietly of what was to come.
A figure in hard planes of gold emerged and came to them. Rafen bowed his head to his Chapter Master; even in the dim light of the sepulchre, Dante cut an impressive figure in the shining artificer armour. In respect for where they stood, the commander went without his combat helmet; fashioned in the image of the primarch’s death mask, to wear it in this place seemed unmannerly. He rested one hand upon the butt of his Inferno pistol, casting a measuring gaze over the Space Marines. “Was your mission a success, brother-sergeant?” Argastes and Mephiston approached in his wake, watching for Rafen’s answer.
Rafen met his master’s eyes. “The Vitalis Citadel is no more, lord. In its destruction, all trace of the replicae laboratorium was obliterated.”
“A high cost. And what of Brother Caecus?”
“Dead by my hand.”
Dante’s eyes narrowed. “Why?”
Rafen frowned, framing his reply. “Chaos, lord. The hand of the Ruinous Powers was corrupting his work, although it was only in the end he saw it. He accepted my judgement without question.”
At the Chapter Master’s side, Mephiston’s lip curled. “I knew it! The moment in the annex, and again in the halls… I sensed something unhallowed, too fast to be seen in the light of reason.” He showed his teeth. “These clones, these Bloodfiends. They are tainted by the touch of the warp.”
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