The Sanctified craft has no recourse. It ploughs into the tower, transmuted by the alchemy of war into thunder and flame. Burning wreckage and bodies scatter down over the street. And now it is the turn of the Sublimity of War to make its strafing run. It flies low, its side-mounted heavy bolters chewing the Sanctified into pieces.
We do not stop. There is no pause as we and our enemies hammer each other. There will be no end, even if we reduce the planet to a cinder, until the extermination of the foe.
We fight to the death to reach the maw of fate. Yet I know why we fight. The traitors must be destroyed. There is no question, no doubt, about that goal. What, though, do the Sanctified want with Pallevon? Why do they struggle with such ferocity to stop our advance? I sense a ghastly irony lurking at the centre of this war.
Let that be. Before me now is duty, the archenemy, battle. And the Red Thirst. My brothers think me a being of ice. Perhaps the sepulchral chill has replaced my soul. They are wrong, though, if they think that the Flaw has been purged from my being. I feel it. I know the Thirst. I know the gnawing abyss of the Black Rage. They have not left me.
But there is something else, isn’t there? Beyond the Red, beneath the Black, isn’t there something, a hunger that is darker, older, vaster? One that keeps the others at bay that it might keep me for itself. Isn’t it there?
No. I deny it. I refuse it. I embrace the rage of battle, feeding my hate with the blood of the enemy. I exult in the unleashed holocaust of the warp, a holocaust that is nothing less than my will made into the end of all flesh.
The enemy engages in an act of foolish blasphemy. Sanctified forces have taken up positions inside a cathedral that looms over a square that might once have been grand in proportion to the house of worship, but has been encroached upon over the centuries by Ministorum complexes. The cathedral is a relic, already ancient when Pallevon’s history stopped. It is clearly from an early age of man’s creed. It should be honoured. It is a testament, an expression of faith that has itself become holy. Its desecration is a tragedy beyond repair. The traitors emerge from the parvis, sending forth a hail of mass-reactive rounds. My squad is pinned. Frag grenades land in our midst. Brother Merihem is hit directly, shrapnel piercing his brain. For a moment, we are at bay.
I trust the enemy has savoured this moment. It is his last.
What happens next takes no more time than a death cry. I reach deep into the warp. Arms outstretched, I become the channel of infinite annihilation. A maelstrom forms around me. The air darkens. The twin rods of my psychic hood turn a blinding crimson. Reality is nothing in my hands. It is the plaything of my rage, fit only to be smashed. And so I smash. I unleash the energies. My anger is a colossal, final judgement. The parvis is sundered by empyrean sheet lightning. The real collapses in the grip of my will. The ground wails as it erupts in violet fire. With the thunder of an avalanche, the cathedral falls on its defilers, martyring itself in a final act of devotion. There is a monstrous, incandescent flash of energy. It is no colour of the spectrum. It is the colour of wrath, of pain, of eternal entropy, and of terrible, all-consuming hunger.
The light fades with an electrical crackle. The gaping wound in the real closes, but not without leaving a scar. The agonised ruin before us has too much emptiness. Matter has been unmade, its existence seemingly erased from the past as well as the future. The rubble is twisted. Stone has been warped as if it were contorted muscle. Its sub-aural scream is perpetual. Blood, so dark it is black, pools over the surface of the wreckage. It will pool forever.
These are my works.
This is my being.
I feel Quirinus’s gaze upon me.
Baal Secundus. The fortress-monastery of the Blood Angels.
Calistarius was the first to greet Quirinus when he exited the Reclusiam. Black armour emerged from black stone, shadow from shadow. The skull-faced helmet nodded to Calistarius. ‘Brother-Librarian.’
Calistarius bowed low. ‘Reclusiarch.’ He was the first outside the tower to address Quirinus with that title.
Quirinus didn’t answer at first. He stood motionless, and Calistarius felt that his old friend’s eyes were on an interior vista. Finally, the Reclusiarch said, ‘The honour is great, and a great weight.’ A pause. ‘I wonder, can any of us be truly worthy of what we receive?’
‘We are all unworthy of the grace of our primarch and his Great Father,’ Calistarius answered. ‘We are all flawed. It is our duty to accept that, to strive for the impossible, and to accept the roles that fate and our Chapter assign to us in the eternal crusade.’
Quirinus laughed. It was a good sound, the laughter of a warrior at one with the truth of his life. ‘Well spoken, brother. How very ecclesiastical of you. There are times when I think you should be walking this path with me, and not that of a Librarian.’
‘No.’ Calistarius shook his head. ‘I am where I must be. Do not mistake my statement of fact for philosophy. Our titles are not honours. They are descriptions of who we are. ”Reclusiarch” is not an address. It is your identity.’
‘Lord of Death,’ Quirinus says. His voice emerges from his helm as a flat, electronic rasp. There is no emotion. The horror resounds, however. There is no missing his theological disgust.
‘So I am named, and so I act,’ I retort. I do not look back at him as I stride towards the devastation. My attention is drawn by something more important. Beyond where the cathedral stood, there are no more towers. There is a gap, revealing the dawn sky of Pallevon. There are no clouds. The light is a tired, ancient red, dim for the moment, but slowly growing in intensity as the giant sun returns. The cold, serene beauty of the sky is cut by a black silhouette. Narrow, tapering, to the naked eye it is nothing more than a deeper darkness. And I know, with icy certainty, that that is precisely what it is.
It is the deepest darkness.
It is the epicentre.
There is a lull on either side of us. The vox-traffic has calmed, too. With the loss of the Thunderhawk and the fall of the cathedral, perhaps the Sanctified are in retreat. Their remaining gunship races by overhead, pulling away from us into the dark, no longer attacking. The enemy must realise that we have a way open to us now. There will be no holding us in the streets of the city.
Quirinus, too, has fallen silent as he realises the significance of what lies before us. Without a word, we make our way over the rubble. We reach the gap. Before us is a scene of dark wonder.
The centre of Vekaira is a perfectly circular amphitheatre. Buildings come right up to the lip of the bowl, and then stop. Some have lost their facades and stand with the interiors exposed, as if they had been sheared open with a blade. The bowl of the amphitheatre is immense, large enough to have been created by a meteor strike, and indeed, the exposed rock surfaces shows signs of shock-metamorphic effects. Something struck the city here, struck it with enormous force. At the same time, the circle is too perfect to be natural. The bowl is symmetrical, and marked by concentric rings. The gradient of its slope is uniform. The bowl is an artefact kilometres wide that was created in an act of sudden violence.
No human technology could accomplish this.
In the outermost ring, I see, at last, the population of Vekaira. What remains of it. Perhaps it is the final vestige of any human inhabitation on Pallevon. These people are fallen. The surrounding city no longer belongs to them. They are barbarians. They number in the handful of thousands. They live in clusters of huts and shacks that are nothing but thrown together bits of rubble. They are clad in rags. Their hair has grown into sorry, filthy manes. Their flesh is coated in a patina of dust and mud. They huddle together in terrified clusters, trembling and howling whether they are looking uphill at us, or down to the Sanctified position. Though vegetation is growing in this ring of the bowl, there is no sign of cultivation, livestock, or any other means of subsistence. I cannot see what keeps these people alive. I am tempted to say that they live on fear. I revise my first opinion. They are not barbarians. They are animals.
&nb
sp; Below the rabble, the bulk of the amphitheatre is a vast, frozen battlefield. I am staring at a tableau. Thousands of warriors are locked in unmoving combat. Blades are forever about to strike death-blows. Bolters are raised, eternally in the moment before firing. There is an awful, majestic beauty to the sight. This is war captured at the instant of infinite potential. Every warrior is perpetually seizing victory. None is suffering defeat. The might on display would be earth-shaking, were there movement, for the warriors are Space Marines, clad in armour of a make that is millennia-old. Though their actions have been arrested, they are not in a stasis field. Time exists for them in a partial way, for their armour has been eroded by the centuries. Markings and colours have been stripped away as if sandblasted. I cannot tell what Chapters are here. Are they Loyal? Traitors? Both? There is no way to tell. There is no identity here, only the endless perfection of battle.
I suspect the warriors are gods for the savages. The people live in the outer ring, drawn to a spectacle of wonder. I see no sign of habitation within the battlefield, however, and indeed, even I feel the aura of the sacred radiating from the stilled majesty. This is a graveyard with the promise of resurrection. It is not to be defiled.
At the centre of the bowl stands the tower. It is a tall, tapering spire, still night-black in the bloody dawn. It comes to a point so fine that it should cut the air itself. It is a stiletto made for an assassin of gods. At its base, the Sanctified are making their stand. They are indeed retreating, their crimson stain receding over the land. They are digging in behind the low wall that surrounds the tower. It is more of a boundary between the space of the battlefield and that of the tower than it is a barrier. The traitors’ position is further reinforced by the presence of their Rhinos. The armoured vehicles were, ten thousand years ago, the pride of the Great Crusade. Now, they have undergone a daemonic transformation. Bristling with spikes, daubed with blasphemies, they crouch low to the ground, their engines growling like feral beasts.
I find it interesting that the Sanctified have chosen this as the site they would defend. The cover is not ideal. They have surrendered the high ground. They have wilfully given themselves serious disadvantages. The tower must be of extreme importance for it to be worth such clear tactical mistakes.
Quirinus has been staring at the tower with rapt attention. The skull of his helmet conceals his emotions. The vocaliser flattens and distorts his tone. Yet when he speaks, there is no mistaking the adoration in his voice. ‘That is our destination!’ he shouts, over speaker and vox. ‘Brothers! There lies our goal! Before you stands a shrine most holy. We must reclaim it from the abominated traitors. To see them before this sainted place is to witness the most grievous offence to the honour and glory of our primarch! Purge them from existence! Soak the ground with their blood! Then shall we march into the most magnificent celebration of our faith!’
I look again at the tower. There is nothing about it that suggests it was built to honour either Sanguinius or the Emperor. I see a work of jagged precision. I see the shape of a weapon. I see no disjunction between it and the Chaos warriors who guard it. I wonder again about its importance to them. Quirinus believes it holds a special significance for us. It makes little sense that the Sanctified should risk so much merely to insult the honour of the Blood Angels.
I open a private vox-channel to Quirinus. ‘And those immobile combatants,’ I ask, ‘who and what are they?’
‘I do not know.’
‘Are they part of the holiness you say awaits us?’
‘I do not know that, either.’ He pauses for a moment. ‘They must be part of the great plan. They are too remarkable a feature to be an accident.’
Of course they are part of the great plan. But whose? How is it great? A Black Crusade has its own form of greatness. It is not one we can embrace. I say nothing of this to Quirinus. He has not been open to an alternative argument since he emerged from the warp. His rigid dogmatism kept him alive during his ordeal. It could prove to be the death of us all, now. ‘You are very sure of what you say,’ I tell him.
‘Do not doubt me, revenant.’
I brush aside the insult. It is beneath me. I am surprised that Quirinus stoops to such pettiness. His intemperance is not a good sign. He is not thinking rationally about either the tower or me. He forgets my rank. But I am not concerned with slights. I am concerned with the path on which we are engaged. ‘I do not doubt your conviction, Reclusiarch,’ I answer.
‘Nor can you doubt the truth of what I say,’ he retorts. He gestures at the tower. ‘If you cannot sense the power of the shrine, then you are unworthy of the title you bear.’
Again, I ignore the offence. I am not interested in exchanging pointless barbs. Quirinus is correct. To deny the power of that structure would be to engage in deliberate blindness. It is the eye of the warp storm I have been following. Energies are gathering there, building second by second. That is the centre of the maelstrom. It is the point to which Fourth Company and I have been led since we arrived in the Supplicium system and encountered the ghost ship Eclipse of Hope. Our free will has been reduced to a sad mockery. Our every step has been planned by an outside force, a force that has nothing to do with our venerated primarch. As I gaze at the ancient tower and the immobilised Space Marines, I know that this moment has been approaching for thousands of years. Quirinus, one of our most storied Chaplains, celebrates this manifestation of the inevitable.
He is a fool.
And I? I have a duty. I have an oath. I have a mission.
I have no choice.
And truly, even without Quirinus pushing us forward, there would be only one path to take. Traitors stand before us. They must not be suffered to live.
At the lip of the bowl, the strength of Fourth Company comes together once again. Yet it must restrain itself from using its full destructive might. Our mission is to capture territory, not smash a world. Even as Castigon begins to speak to the tank crews, Quirinus intervenes. ‘The tower must not be damaged,’ he says.
I do not believe it could be, not by something as mundane as artillery. But lacking certainty, we must act as the Reclusiarch directs. I am also struck by unease at the thought of high explosives landing in the mist of the frozen warriors. Though I do not know their allegiance, the possibility of desecration is real. I will not be a party to that. Nor will any of my brothers.
Castigon confers with Quirinus, with me, with the sergeants. An idea is born, grows into strategy, becomes action. The attack will come from two directions. Castigon will lead the frontal assault. I will lead the other.
We shall strike from the air. We shall be a most terrible rain.
CHAPTER FOUR
ICON
Our primarch had wings. He was alone among the Emperor’s twenty sons to bear such a mutation. Only he could fly unaided by any technology or psychic force. We who take to the skies to bring Sanguinius’s wrath down upon the forsworn do not have that gift, but we have the genetic memory of it. The nature of our attack, then, is a form of worship. We are the echo of our primarch. His noble fury resounds down the millennia. His vengeance for the Great Betrayal shall never cease, not while a single Blood Angel lifts blade or bolter.
Or flies.
Castigon and the bulk of Fourth Company attack first. They descend the slope of the amphitheatre, a crimson spear aimed at the heart of the Sanctified. Crimson is the colour of justice, and it is the colour of wrath. Where we are concerned, there is no distinction to be made.
There is little room for vehicles to move between the ranks of the frozen warriors. Only the luxury of time permitted the Sanctified to drive their Rhinos down the circuitous path to the tower. I note that the traitors were just as careful as we are not to disturb the combatants. The significance of this fact is, for now, a mystery to me, and of little interest to my brothers.
I come in with two assault squads. They fly with jump packs, flaming comet tails marking the arc of their attack. I spread my blood-red wings again, and in their creat
ion I feel the hand of Sanguinius. My primarch guides my flight. He guides my hand. He is at my shoulder as I descend on the enemy. His wrath is in the death I bring.
The Sanctified see us coming. Our advancing ground forces unleash a storm of bolter fire their way, disrupting their response. The shots that reach up for us are too scattered to divert our purpose. Even so, we lose Brother Kimeres when well-placed rounds punch through his jump pack. It explodes. Wreathed in flame, he plummets to the ground. The blast does not kill him. The fall does not, either. He lands badly, though, and wounded. The traitors do not give him the chance to recover.
We come down between their lines and the tower. We send death ahead of us with our guns. The assault teams rake the enemy lines with their bolters. Caught between perpendicular lines of fire, several of the Sanctified can do nothing except die, their bodies and armour cratered by shells. My mind reaches out before me. I grab the very space behind the nearest Rhino. I tear the real wide open. The immaterium pours through, a shrieking vortex. These traitors have pledged their allegiance to Chaos? Well, then, let it have them. Existence twists and shatters. Energies that do not belong on this plane flash hungry, devouring and dismantling. The vortex drags the Rhino out of position. It crumples the rear of the vehicle, distorting the very being of the machine. The real and the imagined, the actual and the impossible meet in one object. The paradox is too much. The Rhino explodes. Armour peels, armour shreds, armour spins through the air as giant shrapnel. The blast is huge. It is the collective death cry of munitions and promethium. The area is bathed in fire. The toll is savage. The hole in the materium closes, leaving surreally mangled, incinerated bodies in its wake.
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