Mephiston Lord of Death

by David Annandale

  If there were only the visions of Quirinus calling us to this planet, this city, this moment, then I might consider the size of our deployment madness. But Pallevon has been invaded by a massive force of traitors. Of this truth, there is no doubt. To such a desecration of an Imperial world, there can be but one answer. We are bringing it.

  Standard-Bearer Markosius joins us. He raises our banner to the skies as Castigon lifts his arms, bolter in his right hand, chainsword in his left. In this moment, the politician is gone. There is only the warrior, the champion of the Emperor, and there is no doubt that here is the worthy leader of Fourth Company.

  ‘For the Emperor and Sanguinius!’ Castigon shouts. Vox-casters carry his voice to the far reaches of the host.

  ‘Death!’ comes the answer. ‘DEATH!’ There is so much power in that single word, such a concentration of collective will, that it is almost enough on its own to batter down the walls.

  We advance. We smash the gates aside. Beyond them, a wide parade avenue leads into the deeper precincts of the city. It runs in a straight line for two thousand metres. We move down its length as a single entity, armed with fire and gun and rage. Above us fly the gunships, in formation at first, then splitting off to manoeuvre around the spires of Vekaira. The avenue ends, dividing into narrower streets. We move down them all, the fingers of an immense crimson gauntlet.

  We are unopposed. We are not even witnessed. No lights appear in the blind windows of the towers as night drapes the city. There are no curious or fearful lining the street. There is no chanting of hymns and prayers of thanks from the faithful. The narrow canyons resound with the booming refrain of our march. Beyond the reach of those echoes, there is silence. This is not a city - it is an agglomeration of monuments.

  A cemetery.

  Is that why I feel a kinship with this place? Am I the Lord of Death finding, at last, his true domain? If so, it is a fine one, rich, vast and majestic. Vekaira is not a hive, though it is clear that, before its end, it was approaching the critical mass of density that would push it down the spiral of insect-crowding that is the life and doom of a hive. The towers of Vekaira crowd each other, and like the trees of a rain forest, they reach for the sky, attempting to outgrow their competitors and snatch a piece of the near-death sun. Street level is the realm of eternal shadow. As night falls, the towers fade from view. They become presences no less massive for being fragmentary as the lights of our vehicles play over them. They are also heavy with the majesty of antiquity. This is an old city. Its death did not come with the arrival of the Sanctified. Nothing has lived here for a very long time. Stone rises in towering facades. Windows are either no more than murder holes or grand, stained glass rosettes, now filmy and blank in the dark. Vaulted walkways link spire to spire. But the glories are faded, eroded, crumbled. Time has gnawed at Vekaira. The streets are littered with fallen stone. Some walkways have collapsed altogether, blocking routes, forcing detours. The buildings are worn, pockmarked. The lines of the city are ragged. Millennia have passed, with not a single hand raised to counter them, battering stone with wind and rain, hail and frost. Nothing has been repaired since the Age of Apostasy.

  For all the decay, for all that Vekaira is slowly returning to dust, it deserves respect. Something destroyed the city. Its death must have been sudden, as there is none of the damage inflicted by citizens descending into anarchic barbarism. The cathedrals stand proud, untainted, undamaged by anything other than time. The vitality of life has been stolen from Vekaira, yet it retains its identity. The city has remained true to the Emperor.

  I salute its faith.

  The stoic death that we march through is a balm. A needed one. I do not like the reception that Quirinus’s tale of vision has received. The Blood Angels have been hurt by grandiose religious claims in the past. I will not have us fall into that trap again. Our encounter with this city of silent towers undermines unthought enthusiasm. I see, with no small satisfaction, that Quirinus is also being affected by our surroundings. For one thing, he has ceased his prophetic utterances for the moment. He walks in silence, his helmet turning from vacant doorway to empty window to deserted street. He, Albinus and I march in the lead of our column. Castigon has joined the Rhino Echo of Zoran, and leads from this mobile command post two streets over.

  Quirinus says, ‘This city is troubling.’ He is as honest as he ever was. There has never been any dissembling in the Reclusiarch. He is not speaking for my benefit. This is not a dialogue. It is an observation.

  I respond all the same. ‘Is this death a sign of the Emperor’s blessing?’

  ‘Is yours?’ he shoots back.

  I give him an ironic half-bow. I move off to the side, not breaking formation, but embracing the shadows.

  Albinus joins me. ‘What do you seek to accomplish?’ he asks.

  ‘To teach him the value of mistrusting himself,’ I answer. ‘Is that not also the essence of being a Blood Angel? To remember that we are flawed?’

  ‘You have no faith in our goal.’

  ‘None. Do you?’

  ‘I believe that we are moving towards something momentous.’

  ‘We most certainly are.’ I sweep my arm, taking in the entire city. ‘The barrier to the immaterium is thin here, and it grows thinner.’

  ‘Might that not be evidence that Quirinus is correct?’

  ‘It is not. I have warned Captain Castigon that we march toward darkness. We have known this since the Eclipse of Hope.’ That daemon-haunted battle-barge reappeared as a warp ghost five thousand years after its loss. Aboard, I was confronted by a statue of myself and a star chart of the Pallevon system. The mockery of Chaos was palpable. Ever since, I have felt us caught up in the gears of an infernal engine. An engine whose work began, not when we boarded the phantom ship, but at the moment of the real vessel’s death.

  ‘You have the authority to overrule him.’

  ‘Yes, but the Sanctified must be crushed. Our hand is forced. We should be wary, however. Not eager.’

  ‘Perhaps what you saw on the Eclipse was not a dark omen.’

  I snort. ‘Since when do you hold with such foolishness?’

  ‘Since one of the greatest Chaplains our Chapter has ever known speaks of hope.’

  ‘He is wrong to do so.’

  ‘There is no hope?’

  ‘There is duty. There is faith. There is death. That is enough.’

  Albinus shakes his head. ‘It is not,’ he says, and moves back closer to Quirinus.

  My eyes are on the city. It understands me. If there were still a population here, the people would be prone to mirages of desire.

  But empty, desolate, the city makes no pretences. It knows how thin the veil of reality is. It has been shorn of illusions.

  I am only a few metres away from my nearest battle-brother. The Baal Predator Phlegethon growls mere paces behind me. But the distance between myself and the other Blood Angels is profound. They cannot comprehend the dark-shrouded routes I now travel. Nor will I pretend to leave those paths. They are a reality from which I will not turn my gaze. They are also the source of the power I wield in defence of the Imperium. I will not turn from that, either.

  I speak as if I had the choice.

  Quirinus calls out: ‘Forward, brothers! We draw very near the shrine! The touch of the Emperor is at hand!’

  As he shouts in triumph, I sense the rapid fraying of the materium. The epicentre of our destiny is almost upon us. At the same moment, I realise that some of the windows in the buildings around us are not as blind as they appear.

  Missiles slash the night.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE STREETS OF VEKAIRA

  The ambush is well-chosen. The street narrows here, and bends sharply. Our forces have bunched up, pressed together by the restricted space. The passage between the buildings is an oppressive defile between towering cliff walls. All of this occurs to me in the frozen split second while the lethal light descends upon us. The missiles rain from three sides. It
is a perfect crossfire. There is no escaping it.

  I throw myself against the Phlegethon as blast waves overlap. Flames replace air. I am swallowed by the maw of a dragon. One rocket strikes the rear armour of the Phlegethon, propelling the tank forward. It smashes into me, knocking me down. But the injured vehicle provides cover enough from the worst of the explosion. The fire that fills my view is paltry beside the inferno that ignites behind my eyes. I feel myself divide into a binary opposition of war. My lips curl back in rage. I salivate for the blood of my foe. At the same time, the cold of a sunless planet reads the battle zone, and flies back up the line of the rocket attacks. They have come from windows thirty metres up in buildings to our left, right, and front, at the bend in the road. We are in a kill zone a block long.

  I will break its hold.

  The attackers to the fore are my target. Raging, calculating, furious, detached, I stand and spread my wings. They spring from my shoulders, crimson spans of eldritch energy. Their creation is effortless, so strong is the flow of the warp. A dozen metres behind the wounded Phlegethon, the Predator Intemperate retaliates, firing its main gun at the building to my left. I fly forward and up, blade drawn, to a window lit up by another rocket flash. I burst through the frame. I am wrath cloaked in annihilating blood, and all must fall before me. There are three Sanctified here. They stand in a chamber that might once have been sleeping quarters, but is now empty, its contents turned to dust by the passing millennia. One of the traitors is reloading his missile launcher. The second, a champion of their foul gods, lunges at me with his chainaxe shrieking. The third is a witch, and I will save him for last.

  I refocus the energy from my wings into my blade. I make a horizontal slash. The air where Vitarus passes is cut and bleeds. The sword slices through the shaft of the chainaxe like an afterthought. This traitor is barely worthy of my notice. My consciousness has become three now. It is the rage, it is the dispassionate observer, and it is the blade itself. My will is destruction on the molecular level. Action and thought are one, the grace of purest death, and I decapitate the champion. His head flies backward, bouncing off his brother’s shoulder, while his blood fountains up, showering the room. It gives me my taste. It isn’t enough.

  The Sanctified with the missile launcher raises his weapon. Perhaps he is stupid. Perhaps he realises who and what I am, and will not pause before sacrifice. Perhaps both. He fires the launcher, point blank, in the confined space. His action cannot keep pace with my will. Before his finger has pulled the trigger, I have summoned a shield. It shimmers, a gold as brilliant as the faith of Sanguinius. The rocket explodes against it. The backwash incinerates the room. The traitor is smashed open by the force of the blast. Beneath his ravaged armour, he is turned to coal.

  That leaves the witch. The explosion threw him against the far wall of the chamber. He is dazed. He staggers to his feet, whatever daemonic spell he was preparing disrupted. My will seizes him before he can try again. I reach inside. My mental fist clutches his skeleton as if it were a doll. He feels me there. He struggles, his immobilised body dream-twitching. His will is puny against mine, an ant trying to dislodge a colossus. I favour him with the full measure of my contempt. This is what the dark gods of Chaos would have me become? This is the best they can do? With a thought, I lift the traitor from the ground. Suspended in mid-air, he vibrates with tension. He is a plucked cable. He manages to move his lips. His breath rasps. There are the beginnings of words. He is trying to complete his summoning.

  I take a step forward. Around me, reality and the warp collide and destroy one another in crackling bursts of lightning. The room wavers, its existence bending with the gathering force. It is not a coming daemon that troubles the space. It is Mephiston. ‘I have killed a daemon prince with my bare hands,’ I tell the Sanctified witch. ‘How can you hope to call something worthy even of my attention?’

  I squeeze the fist. The chanting becomes a strangled gasp of unimaginable pain. There is a sound like the crushing of dried twigs. It is his skeleton being smashed to dust.

  The gasping stops. I drop the ceramite-wrapped bundle of rags and return to the window. The facade that the Intemperate fired upon is a smoking, crumbled heap. From the facing side of the street, the breath of a flamer gouts from the window. I hear the dug-dug-dug of bolters. A moment later, bodies plummet to the street. The ambush is over.

  I return to street level. The Phlegethon is damaged, but still mobile. Albinus stands beside the idling tank, waiting for me. ‘What is it?’ I ask.

  ‘Brother-Sergeant Saleos was killed.’

  The Phlegethon’s commander. ‘His gene-seed?’

  Albinus shakes his head. ‘I could not salvage it. He took a direct hit.’

  A grievous loss. One for which the Sanctified will answer dearly. ‘How many others?’

  ‘Eleven.’ He slides open the narthecium built into his gauntlet. He shows me six cylinders containing the precious legacy of our fallen brothers. The missiles left nothing of the others to recover.

  The mere existence of the Sanctified is enough to justify a war of extermination. Now, they have incurred a special wrath.

  Their corpses will be the kindling for their own pyres.

  We push forward. We follow the turn of the street, hungry for blood. It will be given to us. The Sanctified have set up a barricade there. The Phlegethon surges forward as if its machine-spirit were seeking vengeance for its injury. Its front-mounted blade will smash through the barricade, but the tank’s fury will not wait for the impact. The flamestorm cannon gives form to its wrath. The Phlegethon speaks with a voice of fire. The cannon is well named. It is no mere flamer blast that washes over the barricade. It is a horizontal vortex that strikes with the obliterating force of a solar flare. It immolates, melts and vaporises. Power armour is a poor defence. The traitors defending the barricade are blasted to ash.

  And beyond the barricade? Beyond, the streets now narrow, twist and split as we enter the older regions of Vekaira. The buildings are more worn and gnawed by age. The roads are patchwork segments. We face an intersection where only the avenue going to the right is wide enough for the vehicles.

  Quirinus eyes the choice. ‘If we all go down the same path…’ he begins.

  ‘We will deserve what happens,’ I finish. Such a concentration of force in so little space would not be able to manoeuvre.

  At least the Sanctified face the same restriction.

  ‘Announce our presence,’ I call out. The tanks send out a barrage of fire ahead of our advance. Facades explode and collapse. Dust and smoke are our heralds, choking the streets. We divide our forces, as before, now getting down to squad formations. Agile, adaptable units of destruction, we race into the warren ahead.

  The Sanctified come out to meet us. We fight block by block, building by building. The struggle is vicious, ugly, savage. It would be very easy, in that maze of violence, to lose track of the direction of our advance. But fate will not be cheated. Quirinus drives us toward the centre of the city, his vision pulling him and the company ever closer, with ever more urgency. ‘This way,’ he calls out at each cross-street. I need and accept nothing of his guidance. I can see our path just as vividly, but my vision is a darker one than his. We are caught in a maelstrom of energies, spiralling in until we are smashed to bits on the rocks of tortured destiny. I cannot divine the nature of the blow that awaits us, but I feel its presence. It gathers strength as we approach. Already, I hear the distant echoes of cruel, daemonic laughter.

  Why do I fight so hard to reach our doom? Because my brothers do. So many of my links to my fellow Blood Angels have rusted and snapped in the years since my resurrection that we are barely on the same plane of reality anymore. Where I exist (I cannot use the word live with certainty) is the realm of imminent death, the perpetual coming-to-destruction. My gift, my strength, is to be an end of things.

  So am I now. Metre by metre, doorway by doorway, the battle rages. The ancient city, so majestic in its stilled tragedy, i
s battered into ruins. Buildings collapse, their foundations demolished by shelling. Streets become mountains of rubble. I slash through a brace of traitors, and I round a corner with my squad. We hit a rare bit of road that runs straight for at least five hundred metres. At the far end, one of our other squads has emerged from the labyrinth ahead of us. As they grapple with the enemy, a fatal explosion hits the base of a tower looming over them. ‘Brothers!’ Albinus yells, but there is no time, and so his cry is not of warning, but of grief. The edifice makes a complete spin around its vertical axis, a valedictory pirouette, as it falls, crushing Blood Angels and Sanctified alike.

  We climb over the rubble. Above us, the battle for air superiority rages. The Sanctified have deployed two corrupted Thunderhawks. The gunships are the red of clotted blood, and their form appears distorted by scabs. They are restricted in their movements to the larger gaps between the buildings. From high above the skyline, they rain fire down on our forces. One passes over us while we are out in the open. We dive for the cover of shattered stone as the high explosive strike hits. It gouges a crater in the mountain of debris, disintegrating Brother Buerus. The rest of us scramble down the other side of the shattered tower, into the canyon of the street. A hundred metres ahead, some twenty Sanctified have gathered. They wait while the Thunderhawk returns for another pass, still high above the rooftops, beyond our reach.

  It is met by the Stormtalon Sublimity of War. Our craft are smaller, more nimble, and the Sublimity pops up from between the spires a few streets over, raking the Thunderhawk from below with its twin-linked lascannons. The Sanctified pilot, maddened, pursues the Sublimity down into the thicket of towers. The Sublimity plunges right, toward a massive hab-block, a hulk of a building that appears squat even though it is taller than any of the nearby structures. The two vessels streak in like comets. At the last second, the vectored engines of the Sublimity rotate, their thrust suddenly aimed diagonally forward. Momentum arrested, the gunship shoots up, its course vertical.