From the entrance comes the sound of our brothers’ voices raised in a hymn of praise. Quirinus has begun a service of thanksgiving.
Castigon is unapologetic. ‘We have been blessed with a decisive victory, and the Reclusiarch’s vision has proven true.’
‘And you see nothing ominous in the links that have brought us from the Eclipse of Hope to here.’
‘I did not say that. But what would you have me do, Chief Librarian? Should I ignore what we have found inside this tower? Can I? Can you?’
No. None of us can. There is too much truth in that depiction of Sanguinius. Somewhere in that truth, however, is a lie. That, or a terrible truth that seeks to wound our Chapter.
I shake my head, once, and Castigon moves on to organise the defences. Inside the tower, there is a pause in the chanting. In that moment of quiet, I hear something that, at first, I think is an echo of the service, rolling back from the top of the amphitheatre. I listen, and in the next interval between stanzas, I hear the sound again. It is not an echo. The intonations and rhythms are correct, but the voices are too thin, broken, mortal. I look up the slope of the bowl, puzzled. A few metres in front of me, standing beside the Phlegethon, Sergeant Gamigin is gazing in the same direction. I walk over to him.
‘Do you hear it too, Lord Mephiston?’ he asks.
‘I do. Come with me.’
We leave the tower and make our way slowly up the bowl of the amphitheatre, weaving our way through the motionless warriors, observing the crawling humans. Many of them have left their decrepit village to engage in worship. They are not the source of the echo. That sound comes from the top of the bowl. But as we pass each one, I can hear a whispered prayer. These savages, too, are mimicking the prayers of my brothers. The imitation is a blasphemy. The sounds are similar, but the words are gibberish. Every worshipper is ranting nonsense, and each worshipper is ranting different nonsense. I choose one subject and examine him more closely. His eyes are glazed with desperate passion. He ignores me, his attention focussed on the tower to the exclusion of all else. His knees are a gory mess as he crawls on, reaching out for something. I doubt that he even knows the nature of his desire. The words spill from his throat in an avalanche of pleading need, yet are barely audible, as if constricted by holy fear. His emotion has shattered language with its strength.
But what is his need? What is it that torments him? His face is as dull as it is frantic. Any true comprehension fled long ago, if it were ever there at all. I turn from him to the woman a pace away. She is no different. These people are not sentient. Their need and their worship are vestigial. The intensity is there. The meaning is dead. I wonder what killed it, and when. I suspect the moment of the amphitheatre’s creation.
‘Are they mocking us?’ Gamigin asks.
‘No. They hear the sounds of worship and imitate them because they come from the object of their veneration.’
We reach the village, following the sound of the grotesque parody of prayer. It is even more pitiful than I had thought. Not one of the shacks is recent. Many of them are collapsing, held up only by the chance of walls leaning against each other. The first two I look in are abandoned. It would seem that these people have lost even the cognition necessary to seek shelter. But the third is different. It is larger than the others, and in better condition. This is not because it has been repaired. It was built more solidly, that is all. It is windowless. It is rectangular, with actual doors at one end, and is at the centre of the cluster of huts. Its position and size suggest a feasting hall or a church. And it is from here that the chanting emerges.
‘The smell,’ Gamigin says.
‘Yes.’ It grows stronger as we approach the building. It is the stench of corruption, as if the hymn itself were rotting. Gamigin raises his bolter as I open the door.
I was right. It is feasting hall. And a church. And it is still in use.
Old, rotting blood pools around my boots and oozes towards the entrance. Daylight penetrates no further than the first third of the space, as if ashamed to go further. I see well enough with my augmented vision. I see what the Vekairans are eating.
Each other.
This is a charnel house. I cannot say the bodies are butchered, for that is too neat a word for what is done here. The victims are dismembered, torn to pieces by hands, the flesh ripped from the bones by teeth. There is a chimney in the centre of the ceiling, and below it, the archaeological trace of a fire pit, but no flame has burned here for centuries. Bones, spoiled flesh and half-eaten organs are piled high in heaps of waste. The culture of Vekaira comes together for me, the scraps of evidence forming an obscene portrait. This is a population of cannibals, devouring itself faster than the birth rate can renew it. Though the city once held millions, it is astonishing that there are any people left here at all. But that is a wonder I will not pursue. There is no point. The Vekairians have nothing more to tell me.
But they try. There are dozens of people here, chewing on flesh both new and old, and chanting their idiot mimicry of holy rite. I do not know if they are giving thanks or begging for favour. I doubt that they know, either. Those near the door cringe back. They gaze at us with stupid, feral eyes. The lowest ork has more dignity than these creatures.
‘You are not worth saving,’ I tell the humans.
They do not respond, other than to continue cowering, eating and chanting. Gamigin and I walk back outside and close the doors. We look at each other. ‘They are beyond the light of the Emperor,’ I say. Gamigin nods. To think we rescued these worms from being fodder for the heretical rituals of the Sanctified. It is surprising that such material would have been a sufficient sacrifice for the traitors’ ends. Perhaps it was not.
‘We should have a flamer,’ Gamigin says.
‘We’ll manage,’ I reply, but before we can begin the purge, I see Albinus making his way toward us. I wait. He pauses a few metres away. He removes his helmet. His eyes are still shining from the glory of the statue, and that is enough, it seems, for him to ignore the noises and the stench. He has been in the presence of the sacred, and the grime of mortals is beneath his notice. I know he is going to plead with me to return. The air temperature around us drops precipitously. When Albinus says, ‘Mephiston,’ his breath mists.
I cut him off. ‘Go in there,’ I say, pointing to the hall. ‘Then we will speak.’
He obeys. When he returns, some of that glow has left his eyes. Doubt - healthy, necessary doubt - has taken root.
‘Imagine,’ I say, ‘that we had arrived here unguided by Quirinus’s visions, and the Sanctified were not present. Imagine that all we saw were these debased creatures and the spectacle before us. What course of action would we have taken?’
Albinus does not hesitate before answering, and this gives me hope. ‘We would destroy everything.’
‘And yet we are not.’
‘Because we would have been wrong. We would not have stopped to discover what is in that tower.’
‘Surrounded by the obscene, how can that thing not be more of the same?’
‘Did you not see it?’
‘I did.’
‘Truly? I think not. That is Sanguinius, in every detail. I know, with as much certainty as I know the blood that flows in our veins, that I have at last gazed on the true resemblance of the primarch. You have, too, Chief Librarian.’ When I do not answer, he insists, ‘You have.’
He was honest with me. ‘Yes,’ I admit.
Albinus sighs. ‘Then…?’
‘I have seen a resemblance. The work is extraordinary. And? That tells us nothing about the provenance or nature of the statue. The appearance of sanctity and its reality are very different. Our Chapter has learned this lesson most bitterly. We should know better than to be taken in by a false idol yet again.’
‘The situation is different. There is no counterfeit possible in that statue.’
I want to argue, to shake Albinus from this delusion, but I cannot. I know, at a level most disturbing, that he is ri
ght. There is a truth in that tower. But it is a partial one. It must be. I turn from him in frustration and confront the festering village once again.
‘What would you have us do, Chief Librarian?’ Gamigin asks.
I point to the church. ‘We will destroy this filth.’ I grit my teeth. ‘And then we will complete our mission.’ I will not countermand Castigon’s plans to preserve the statue. Quirinus would fight back, and a schism would be inevitable. I love the Chapter too much to visit another such nightmare upon it. And the Sanctified must be destroyed.
With grenades, with bolter fire, and with my frustration transmuted into scouring lightning, we level the church. We scrape the land clean of these animals. And still we walk down the path that has been prepared for us, further and further into the shadows, where something is waiting.
And laughing.
CHAPTER SIX
PYRRHIC
The Sanctified renew their campaign at the end of the day. It takes them that long to regroup. By that time, we are more than ready behind our defences. We have brought our tanks into position. They surround the spire. We have taken care not to disturb the peace of the frozen warriors. Precisely why we treat them with a care approaching reverence, I am not certain. We are conscious of these stilled presences, but we do not discuss them. The shroud of mystery that hovers over them is woven of the sacred, the cursed, and the familiar. We do not know who these warriors are, but somehow, we are as reluctant to desecrate their rest as if we were faced with a graveyard of Blood Angels. We will do them no harm. But why, the question lingers, did the Sanctified show the same care?
So when the traitors come, they face cannons able to blanket the top of the amphitheatre with high-explosive shells. We have heavy armour, air superiority, and sheer numbers. We hurt the Sanctified badly in the initial clash. It would take an act of madness, or a special sort of desperation, for them to attack us.
But they do. Against all sense, they come. What drives them, I wonder, as the Phlegethon and its brothers commence their punishment of the foe. There is no possible strategic value in Vekaira, or the Pallevon system as a whole. There are no weapons here. There is only the statue, and it can have no meaning for the traitors beyond the blow to the morale of the Blood Angels that its loss would represent. Such a paltry form of victory would not compensate for the massive loss of warriors and materiel.
And yet they attack.
Sunset on Pallevon, when the world drowns in blood. The already red tinge of daylight becomes a deep crimson. A high, wounded tide fills the amphitheatre, a perfect stage for the carnage that now begins. While the tanks tear the enemy apart at the ridge of the bowl, the rest of us wait, holding back on the charge.
The shelling strikes the collection of shacks. This is no loss. It is a necessary burn. The barrage scatters chunks of Sanctified and cannibal over the landscape, the traitor mixing with the debased. The Sanctified do not retaliate with what heavy armour remains to them. The preservation of the tower seems to be of paramount importance to them, and now that we know what lies inside, this mixture of obsession and restraint is even more mysterious.
‘What are they doing?’ Castigon says. ‘This is madness.’ He sounds offended.
We are standing together beside the Phlegethon. We witness the Sanctified charge through the shelling and down the slope of the bowl. Our bolter shells pummel them. They seek no cover. They barely dodge our shots. A half-dozen well-placed rounds hammer a traitor to the ground, and the warrior behind him barrels over his body without hesitation. He is hit in the shoulder. He doesn’t alter his course. He keeps coming until he, too, is shot to pieces. That is the behaviour of orks or tyranids. They are simply rushing towards us with all speed. It is a tactic that is not unlike the one we used to take the tower, but for two significant differences. Their assault troops come in on their jump packs at the same time as the tactical squads. And they are grievously outnumbered. They cannot overwhelm us.
They are running to a slaughter. Their own.
‘I have never known traitors to be suicidal,’ I say. ‘Have you?’
‘No.’ His bolter sends a stream of mass-reactive shells into a single target. Castigon’s precision is peerless. The rounds pulverise the traitor’s helmet, and then his skull.
‘Then there is a reason behind their actions. We should be wary of that which is too simple.’ Yet even as I speak, lightning streaks from the tip of my sword. It plunges deep into the carapace of one attacker, fries both his hearts, then leaps to his brother behind him, and kills again. The traitors’ fingers twitch, and each warrior fires a few more shots even though he is already dead. Then they fall.
‘What would you have us do?’ Castigon asks me. ‘Hold our fire?’
‘No. But we should question the worth of what we are defending. Captain, the warp currents here are extremely powerful. We are standing in the centre of a vortex.’
‘And here we shall stand until the last heretic dies. Gaze on that icon once again, Chief Librarian. That will assuage your doubts.’
Leaving a wake of their dead, the Sanctified draw closer. They are numerous enough that we cannot cut them all down from a distance. They are firing back, but we have cover, and their accuracy is compromised by the speed of their rush. The bulk of their forces are almost upon us. I feel the anticipation build for the close-quarters clash of rage.
‘This is not war,’ Castigon growls. ‘This is stupidity.’ He is more than offended. He is angry. The most basic aesthetics of conflict have been violated, and he will not let such an insult stand. I can sense the rage gathering in the rest of the company. The air is taut with an approaching storm. The passions of war are about to slip their leash.
Rage is the fuel of Blood Angels at war. It is our danger, but it is also the medium of our lethal art. But this rage is coming too soon, too easily. We are rushing down the predestined road.
The storm breaks. The bulk of the Sanctified are well into the field of eternal combat, and their forward elements are nearly at our defensive line. ‘Sanguinius!’ Castigon shouts, with more emotion than I have ever heard before.
‘SANGUINIUS!’ our brothers roar. Joy and rage are present in equal measure. When have we ever had something so precious to defend? When has an enemy offered himself so eagerly to our vengeance? But these questions are not asked. There is little space for conscious thought. The time is now for the savage instinct of war, and the Blood Angels thunder out from cover to grind the enemy into the ground.
The rage infuses my sword, and I attack with the energy of hate. The traitor before me trains his bolter at my face, but I cut off his hand before he can fire. He lunges forward, seeking to run me down, but I take a step back and bring Vitarus down in a two-handed, overhead swing. I slice down through the top of the Sanctified’s helmet, bisecting his head, his neck, and cutting down into his chest. Deeper yet, stealing precious seconds to feed the thirst for violence. I do not stop until the Sanctified falls to either side of me. Ahead, more enemies rush to meet the death I bring them. On my right, something splashes me: blood from a traitor shredded by the chainaxe of Techmarine Phenex. His servo-arms dismember the corpse.
When we took the spire, the Sanctified fought back hard. Their fury then is nothing compared to what animates them now. They attack as if possessed, their anger a match for us. Reclaiming the tower means more to them than any consideration of tactics or survival. They are willing to die recklessly for their goal. I have never seen such behaviour in traitor Space Marines. But if this is their wish, so be it.
We smash into them like a gauntlet through glass. We have a two-to-one advantage over them, and we make full use of it. Bolter rounds hammer armour, while chainblades snarl through limbs. The world is now red to the core: the red of light, of clashing armour, of gouting blood, and of vision distorted by rage. Over the din of gunfire and clashing steel, the savage cries of the combatants coalesces into a single, unified, all-encompassing howl of war. The collective expression of rage has a perfecti
on to it. The sound is a concerto of murder on a vast scale, an orchestra of weapons with a choir of hate. I become aware that some larger whole is being created. The battle is a means to something other than the ends of either party.
I cannot stop it. I cannot even remove myself from its creation as I fight and kill alongside my brothers. I share Castigon’s disgust with the Sanctified. I hunger to see them punished for their treachery. I feel the rising thirst for their blood. It is not enough to kill them. They must be devoured. A traitor lunges at me, swinging his chainaxe at my neck. He is fast, and the blow is a hard one. I lean back, and the revving blade misses my throat by a whisper. My will takes his skeleton and blows it apart. I shatter him with such force that fragments of bone shrapnel escape through the joints in his armour. His scream is brief, but satisfying. It is also insufficient. I turn to my next opponent with my blade searing the bloody twilight with its power. I slash down, carving a diagonal through the Sanctified from left shoulder to right hip. I channel so much of the warp’s destructive energy into the sword that it cuts as though there were no armour, no flesh, no muscle, no bone. Blood washes over me, and at its taste, I feel an old madness stir.
No.
I step back from the edge. If I fall into this trap, then there is no hope for the company. I am too submerged in the close-quarters fighting. I need to see more, so I gather my warp wings and fly straight up. Fifty metres in the air, I see the broader pattern of our struggle. Near the tower, the war of Blood Angels and Sanctified is a roiling mass. Though my brothers still block the Sanctified from the tower, the defence of the structure has given way to the slaughter of the foe. Armour slams against armour, and I hear relatively little gunfire. This is a battle of blades and fists, and of wading through the enemy’s blood. In the brief moment that I watch, there are three decapitations. Free of that frenzy, I see what I had missed, and should have looked for from the beginning. I see the anomaly. A small group of traitors has remained at the lip of the bowl. They are not firing weapons. They are doing something far worse.
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