Ruinstorm

by David Annandale

  Unwillingly, he looked back at every step of the journey since Macragge. Everything he had seen, every battle and every victory had led to this point. Events had shaped him. Events had shown him the need to destroy Davin.

  He didn’t know what he was fighting. He marched faster to prepare for war. He could not escape the shadow that followed him, eroding every certainty, spreading doubt like plague.

  Beware of yourself.

  Though the Lion’s words were intended as a shield, they stabbed like daggers.

  ‘Ready our ships,’ Guilliman ordered. ‘We launch for Davin immediately.’

  ‘What should we prepare for?’ Gorod asked.

  ‘The worst.’

  He left them then, and made for his quarters, where the athames waited. He had kept his turmoil from his face and words. The effort had been considerable. His blood was running cold. Be sure of my decisions? he thought. You have no idea how long I have been second-guessing them.

  And he had been right to do so. The Lion had almost made the worst possible one. We are so fragile. We command this much might, and we can fall so easily.

  He touched his neck where Kor Phaeron’s dagger had pierced the flesh. He reviewed decisions, questioned logic and saw the pattern. The reasoning that was pushing him to ruin was always strong. Its strength was its temptation. It disguised its true nature.

  Some decisions he might never be able to judge properly. Imperium Secundus would, he was sure, pursue him with doubts until his death. Others, though, he saw clearly in this moment of crisis. He had used the Word Bearers’ Navigators, and because he had used the enemy’s weapons successfully once, the urge to keep the athames had grown stronger. He wondered how long the voice in his head had been speaking to him, shaping his thoughts even though he did not hear it.

  He arrived in his quarters and opened the vault. He turned off the stasis fields and took out the daggers. He handled them with care. They were inanimate, simple crude daggers, and yet much more than that. He placed them on the central flagstone of the chamber’s deck.

  Behind his desk was an iron door. It was embossed in blue and gold. The aquila embraced a gleaming sword with its wings. Guilliman pulled the door open and entered his private armorium. The weapons before him were the opposite in every way of the athames. The daggers of ruin were crude, ugly things. They would pass beneath notice were it not for the dull, light-killing menace of their blades. The weapons of Guilliman’s rule were works of majesty. They were the summits of the weaponsmith’s art. They were tools of war, of death, of destruction, but in the service of reason and light, and their intent was as clear as that of the athames. They brought purity to the battlefield. Their means were war, but their ends were peace and order. Gazing at the intricacy of the engravings on the barrel of the Arbitrator and the hilt of the Gladius Incandor, Guilliman felt clarity. His path was clear now.

  We all walk the assigned path.

  No. He walked according to his duty, but his will was his own.

  Guilliman reached for the Hand of Dominion. The power gauntlet was the purest expression right now of his will, and of the action he knew he must take. He pulled the gauntlet on and made a fist. A blue nimbus of lightning crackled around the fingers. It was the light of purity, the power of duty.

  The equation before him was simple. Theoretical – the athames are a poison. Practical – destroy them.

  Guilliman knelt over the athames. He raised the Hand of Dominion…

  And the thought occurred that his action was predictable. It would be the simplest thing to manipulate him into taking precisely this action. In the name of purity, he was about to deny himself, his Legion and the Imperium insight into what they fought, and weapons that were as dangerous to the daemonic as any he knew.

  Strike a blow, and you harm yourself.

  His fist was suspended. Caught by a web of doubt.

  Beware of yourself. Do not trust your impulses.

  What impulse had been more forceful than the urge to destroy the athames?

  He thought of the Lion, poised on the brink of committing the unthinkable, convinced that he was acting to save the Imperium, preparing to kill his brother and open a new front of the war between the Legions. If he had not pulled back in that moment, three Legions would have burned inside the sphere of bones.

  The Hand of Dominion wavered.

  The currents of destruction swirled around Guilliman. The storm had him, he knew it, and he could not see his way out of the raging dark. The storm had rushed the Lion to a monstrous choice, and it had pushed him to take action on a gigantic scale. The tempest had caught Guilliman in a more intimate trap. Instead of forcing him to recklessness, it had him caught in doubt and indecision. The action he would take or not would have no immediate effect outside his quarters.

  The range and skill of the attack took his breath away. The enemy moved against him and his brothers on the smallest and largest battlefields at once. Its precision was lethal. He could see the attack now, yet he did not know how to counter it, and the enemy was still invisible, untouchable.

  Sanguinius, he thought. How has it attacked you? Are you aware it has? Have you already made your choice? Have you doomed us?

  His thoughts wandered. He began to analyse the Angel’s actions from the end of the Imperium Secundus until now. He unclenched his fist. The Lion is right. Be sure of your decision before you make the wrong one.

  He would return the athames to the vault.

  His blood froze. He saw what he was doing. He saw himself falling to inaction and keeping these malevolent, corrupt knives. If he did not act now, he would never get rid of them.

  A storm surge of doubts crashed against him, but his arm was moving. There was too much force in the blow to arrest it. In the fraction of a second before the Hand of Dominion struck the athames, he was torn between hope and dread. He tried to stop himself, and he fought that effort. He cried out, the roar of the self at war ­shaking the walls of his quarters.

  Thunder boomed. Guilliman raised his fist. The hilts of the athames were flattened, twisted metal. Their blades had shattered into dozens of shards, all of them sharper than darkness.

  Guilliman tore through the thoughts that tried to hold him back. Roaring still, hurling himself into the frenzy beyond reason, he smashed the blades again and again. He created another storm in his quarters, one of purging lightning and a thunder of desperate rage. He beat the deck, buckling it, sending tremors through the ship. The shards of the athames became dust, and then less than dust. The remains vanished. He kept going until the roar ended, and he fell back, exhausted.

  He was numb. That was better than the acute edge of doubt.

  Guilliman staggered out of the crater. He returned to the armorium and took the Arbitrator from its bronze case. Then he crossed to the chamber’s entrance. The frame of the doorway was warped and cracked, holding the door shut. One blow with the Hand of Dominion knocked the door free and smashed it against the far wall. Gorod and a squad of Invictus were running down the corridor. They halted when Guilliman emerged.

  ‘My Lord Guilliman?’ Gorod asked.

  ‘I am well, Drakus.’ Well enough, at least.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I fought our first battle of this campaign. I was victorious.’ He would hold to this position until forced to relinquish it. ‘It is time we descended to Davin,’ he said, ‘and stood by the side of my brothers.’

  Fourteen

  Delphos

  On the cracked esplanade of the temple, before its huge gates, Sanguinius said, ‘This is, truly, the eye of the storm.’

  Guilliman and the Lion looked sceptical.

  Curze smiled, reptilian. ‘You are feeling lyrical,’ he said. ‘Does that mean you’re ready to be swept away by the winds of fate?’

  ‘We will defeat the storm,’ Sanguinius told him.

 
; ‘Nothing will be defeated,’ the Lion said, ‘because there is nothing here.’ He spread his arms wide, taking in the temple, its grounds, and the entire crater. ‘This is what you risked so much for, Sanguinius. Is it worth it?’

  ‘Not yet,’ said the Angel. He felt serene. He had since the moment he and Curze had set foot on the soil of Davin. He felt more certain, more eager for the future than at any time since he had first known how he would die. He and his brothers were standing on the threshold of culmination, and he was ready.

  Even though the Lion was right. There was nothing. The landscape appeared to be beyond calm. It was as dead as the necrosphere.

  The drop pods of all three Legions had come down in the crater, and hundreds of Legiones Astartes had taken up positions at the end of the causeway leading to the Delphos. Blood Angels, Ultramarines and Dark Angels surrounded the esplanade. With no sign of threat, they did not know if they came as invaders or defenders. Half the guns pointed towards the crater rim, ready for a foe to come over the peaks of red stone, or through the valley that led to the crater. The other half were trained on the temple. Squadrons of Thunderhawks and Stormravens flew above the crater on escort missions for the columns of heavy armour rumbling through the valley. Big as the crater was, it was too narrow to land the larger transports. They came down in the plains to the south, disgorging the tanks and thousands more troops. The first vehicles were arriving now, and the bowl of the crater was slowly filling with the might of three Legions.

  Twilight had fallen. There was no wind. The roar of engines and the tromp of boots against stone seemed thin, unable to crack the stillness of Davin. The Delphos was a colossal octagon, built from monolithic blocks of red stone. A tower rose from each corner. A dome covered the central mass. The spires of two of the towers had fallen to the esplanade, and the dome was cracked. A fissure, gaping darkness, ran from the crown of the dome to its base. The primarchs stood beside a wide basin. It had been a pool, but it was dry now. The once-smooth sides of the basin were flaking and pitted, and the bottom was covered in a thick layer of dust. A canal running along the base of the temple wall had once fed the basin. It too now held only dust and crumbled rock.

  Tall columns ran on either side of the staircase to the esplanade. They were eroded, as if ferocious sandstorms had blasted their features away. A few isolated patches of gold scale were still visible on the serpents that coiled around the pillars. The sockets of their eyes were deep and hollow. The serpents gaped with blind ferocity at the army below.

  Two colossal iron doors formed the entrance to the temple. They were rusted. Their engraving, of two serpents entwined around a spreading tree, was worn down, its details fading into the metal’s decay. The doors were open. The left had dropped from its great hinges. It leaned against the entrance, a corpse fossilised in the act of falling. Great sconces dotted the esplanade, their flames long extinguished. Everything was cold. Everything was still.

  The dust was red, the stone was red, but in the gloom of the evening, all was grey. Overhead, the lights of the fleet glimmered. They were the only stars above Davin.

  ‘So much silence,’ Guilliman said. ‘The galaxy burns because of this world, but there are not even embers here any longer.’

  ‘These ruins mark its history,’ said Sanguinius. ‘I feel its weight. I feel the corruption that shaped every stone. Don’t you?’

  ‘That history is finished,’ the Lion said, but he was looking intently at the ruins, as if studying them for the secrets they held within the rock.

  ‘Our presence here begins another chapter,’ Sanguinius told him.

  ‘I’m not sure.’ Guilliman looked up at the pervasive grey of the necrosphere. ‘Histories have died here.’

  ‘Ours will not. The Imperium’s will not.’

  ‘We risk our histories if the true threat is in the necrosphere and this landing is a distraction.’

  ‘It isn’t,’ Sanguinius said. He faced the temple’s broken gate. ‘Look at the decay,’ he said.

  ‘What of it?’ the Lion asked.

  ‘This was a place of worship when it was pacified. You saw the records from before Horus’ arrival. This is a ruin, but the early surveys said it was intact.’

  ‘You think it decayed since then?’

  ‘Yes. So much erosion in a period of a few years? This is the work of centuries. Horus was brought to an unnatural place, and it is unnatural still.’ He walked towards the doors. ‘Let us face the enemy,’ he said. He pulled Curze along at the end of a length of chain. The Night Haunter regarded the Delphos with interest. Sanguinius thought he saw a frown cross Curze’s face. It was gone before he was sure. Curze’s pallid features were shadowed, unreadable.

  The primarchs walked at the head of a contingent of their elite warriors. Squads of the Sanguinary Guard, the Invictus, the Deathbringers and the Doombringers followed. The Ultramarines marched between the Blood Angels and the Dark Angels. The men of the I Legion glared at those of the IX. The Blood Angels did not react, but Sanguinius could feel the tension in his sons. They did not share the serenity that had touched him here. They were alert, wary, braced, as they had been since Signus Prime, for an attack that might come from within as easily as from without.

  The darkness beyond the gate was heavy, dry. It was a husk. Helm lights pierced it, revealing eroded walls. They looked as if sandstorms had blown through the temple’s chambers. Reptilian frescoes were faint dying whispers of images. Their content was a mystery, though what remained slithered against the eye.

  The rooms were deserted. The echoes of marching feet bounced dully against the walls. The primarchs and their guards moved deeper and deeper into the Delphos, deeper and deeper into nothingness. The Lion muttered under his breath with each succeeding empty chamber.

  ‘This is a waste of time,’ he said at last.

  ‘Patience, brother,’ Sanguinius said.

  ‘Patience until what?’

  ‘I don’t know. But it will come.’ He was certain. The knot of fate was tight before him.

  ‘Konrad,’ Guilliman said. ‘What do you see? Is Sanguinius right?’

  ‘What should I tell you?’ Curze answered, his rasp hissing against the stones. ‘Something you would believe, or something true?’

  ‘Maybe I should break your back again,’ the Lion said. ‘I might believe what you said then.’

  ‘My answers would be the same. So, I think, would your disbelief. You can’t accept the absence of hope.’

  ‘You can’t accept its presence,’ Sanguinius said.

  ‘You keep disappointing me,’ said Curze. ‘You, of all our brothers,­ should know better.’

  The frown appeared again. This time Sanguinius was sure.

  In the centre of the Delphos, they found a room that had been secret. There were no iron doors over its entrances. Instead, there were openings in the walls where masonry had fallen in. There were faint patterns of dried blood on the floor.

  ‘We are close,’ Sanguinius said.

  ‘To what?’ Guilliman asked.

  ‘I’m not sure.’ He looked at the Avenging Son. ‘Can’t you feel it?’ The temple’s air had been stagnant and dead since the main gate. In the last few minutes, it had grown charged, as if building up to something.

  ‘I don’t feel anything,’ said Guilliman.

  ‘Nor do I,’ the Lion added.

  Sanguinius wondered if he was wrong, if his conviction was manufacturing anticipation.

  Curze was silent, his expression closed.

  On a level directly up from the hidden room, under the dome, they found an altar. It was the first object they had seen. It was in the centre of a chamber so narrow it was more like a cylinder. The walls went up a hundred feet to the dome, but the floor was less than twenty feet across. The primarchs entered by the single doorway. Their legionaries waited in the larger hall outside. The altar was a sin
gle large slab, over ten feet long and five feet high. It was a much deeper red than the rest of the stone of the temple. It was almost black. There were stains on the surface too. Unlike the pattern in the chamber below, these appeared to be the pooling from a wound.

  Sanguinius stopped on the east side of the altar with Curze. Guilliman and the Lion stood on the west. The gaze of all four alighted on the stain, and lingered.

  ‘He lay here,’ said the Lion.

  Guilliman nodded.

  Sanguinius said, ‘This is where his fate took shape.’ He struck the altar with the pommel of the Blade Encarmine. The ringing of metal against stone was loud and hollow. ‘Here,’ he said again. ‘The war began here.’ He wanted to say the war would end here too. He could not. Yet there was symmetry at work in the presence of four primarchs here. The journey from Macragge was a descent further and further into the very heart of the war.

  They were there now, at the fulcrum of space on which the galaxy had turned and fallen into flame.

  The air should have trembled with the import of this moment. Instead, there was nothing. The event Sanguinius anticipated did not arrive. He considered the possibility of self-delusion, and discarded it. This was where he and his brothers were meant to be.

  And yet.

  Stale air hung in the chamber. The altar was covered by the layers of the past.

  ‘Sanguinius,’ said the Lion, ‘we have been deluded again. Both of us.’ For the first time since he had arrived on Davin, he spoke without anger. He was grave. The altar and what it meant weighed on him too. ‘The Delphos is dead. Davin is dead. You were wrong to bring us here. I was wrong to believe in the imperative of destruction.’ He sighed. ‘This world was corrupt. Now it is a corpse. What happened here is reason enough to destroy it, but there is no military reason to do so. It will not get us any closer to Terra.’

  ‘You were the first to show us the way here,’ said Sanguinius. ‘The road to Terra led to Pandorax, and from Pandorax to here.’