‘There is no time,’ the Lion corrected. ‘We are in contact with the fleets again.’ He glanced up through the broken roof. Sanguinius followed his gaze. The night was greyer than it had been when they entered the temple. The void flashed. Stars blazed and died. There was war in the void, and the firmament itself seemed to be drawing closer, cracking, closing in on the world. ‘The Veritas Ferrum is laying waste to our fleets,’ the Lion said. ‘It has withstood cyclonic torpedoes.’
‘Not easily,’ Sanguinius said. He thought of the eruption inside the ship.
‘Easily or not, it lives. And every ship the daemons kill becomes one of their number.’
Sanguinius moved forwards. His legs were weak. His chest felt like a ruined shell. Pieces of him, physical and psychic, had floated free and were grinding against each other like bone. If he confronted all the ways in which he was broken, he would not walk at all. ‘Davin is the target,’ he said again. ‘The ship is vulnerable through its master, and we hold its master.’
‘Then we must withdraw our forces while we still have fleets to use,’ said Guilliman.
As they moved away from the portal, Madail called to Sanguinius. ‘The Rage will come!’ The daemon said no more, roaring in helpless anger at the herald. The last shout fanned the flames of grief in the Angel’s breast. He glanced at Azkaellon. Will I warn you of the curse that will fall on our Legion?
I cannot. Not without revealing its cause.
He could not tell Azkaellon that the loss he had faced a few moments before was inevitable. He could not destroy the hope of the Blood Angels in the midst of war.
The primarchs and their guards made for a breach in the eastern wall. Sanguinius paused at its threshold. He could feel time slipping away. From outside the temple came the thunder and angry rattle of combat. The armies of the three Legions had engaged the tide of daemons. In the sky, ugly blossoms of fire marked the deaths of more ships. And the void was filled with a grey fog, the shell of bones completing its contraction, coming to enclose Davin in its final tomb. There truly was no time. Even so, he paused. He looked back at the portal. It twisted on itself. Wave after wave of mutating fire bellowed from the interior. A storm had turned on itself, and was lashing out with the force of its ruin. In the heart of the maelstrom, the herald stood bowed, his sword planted. He radiated his own light. The silhouette shone golden. At the last, just before he turned away, Sanguinius was sure he saw the shape of wings spread from the herald’s shoulders once more.
The Red Tear came about through the ignited plasma fog that had been the Sable. The cruiser had died a second time, but not before inflicting fratricidal wounds on the battleship. The scars of the daemonic burn festered on the lengths of the hull. Carminus turned the Red Tear away from its run at the Veritas Ferrum. The huge abomination had recovered from the wound inflicted by the Samothrace. It was accelerating again. Its salvoes were frenzied, indiscriminate. It was a maddened predator, attacking as if it would destroy the entire fleet on its own. Carminus thought it might yet succeed. The combined fleets had lost a third of their ships. They had held the daemon fleet at a constant size, but that was not even stalemate. That was a slight delay to defeat. And the bones of the necrosphere smashed though the battle zone, breaching hulls, shearing off cannon batteries, ramming through sterns and destroying engines. When they hit the daemon ships, they stuck like tremors to the hulls, accumulating grotesquery and strength.
Carminus had brought the Red Tear parallel with the Veritas. He vowed to sell the life of the vessel and its crew with honour. They would hurt the monster again, even if they could not kill it. The Samothrace had set its pyre, and had died well. It was ash in the void now, and had not come back. The Red Tear was not alone in making a last, bloody stand. The formations had collapsed into disorder. The near space of Davin was a cloud of individual battles. The commanders of the three fleets saw the end coming, and the vessels that could do so converged on the Veritas Ferrum. It welcomed their sacrifice with jaws agape.
Then the call had come. Sanguinius had returned. The ground forces were withdrawing in haste. The order was given by all three primarchs. Return to Davin and destroy it.
The Red Tear changed heading. It turned away from the Veritas Ferrum. Carminus’ hope raced ahead of the gradual turn of the battleship’s prow. His hope ran before them, seeking time they did not have. The void shields flared again and again as bone clusters battered the hull.
‘The Veritas Ferrum is altering course,’ Mautus warned. ‘It is closing with us.’
‘The enemy senses its end,’ Carminus said. ‘It is desperate.’
Not as desperate as we are, he thought. He could feel the shadow of the daemon ship pressing down on his shoulders.
Not soon enough, Davin came into view. Not soon enough, he saw the transports and gunships rising from the atmosphere, heading for the vessels that had remained on reserve. The stream of the departing ground forces would not be done soon enough. Carminus’ will joined his hope in urging the gunships to greater speed.
‘The Encarnadine is gone,’ Mautus said.
The cruiser had been a short distance ahead of the Red Tear before the turn. The Veritas Ferrum bit it in half.
Carminus cursed the treachery of time. ‘Target cyclonic torpedoes on the temple valley,’ he said. Then he waited for his primarch’s signal, or for the death ship to devour the Red Tear.
The Vyssini was among the last of the ships to leave the corrupted world. Sanguinius ordered it to fly a holding pattern over the Delphos until the evacuation was complete. The outer walls of the structure fell at last, exposing the portal. Sanguinius stared at the raging wound in reality, and knew that the herald still held Madail in place. Had the herald fallen, the daemon would have commanded the hordes of lesser abominations in the land beyond.
Caught between Davin and the Veritas Ferrum, Madail formed a link between the ship and the planet. Davin had been inert when the primarchs had come to the temple. Now it was violently alive in the place where the fate of the galaxy had been altered once before. Now there was an unstable fusion of the materium and the warp, and fate hung in the balance once more.
At last the Talon rose from the crater blackened by tens of thousands of rampaging abominations. The Vyssini turned away from Davin. Ahead, the Veritas Ferrum loomed behind the Red Tear. The ship was so vast, it seemed much closer than it was. There were other vessels between it and the Angel’s flagship. They were insignificant prey before it. Sanguinius had seen the interior of the monster. The exterior was a new form of horror. The malevolence of the vessel surpassed the will of Madail. It did not need its master. It would ravage the galaxy forever. It was coming now to destroy the Imperial vessels before they could destroy Davin. It would finish what its master could not. It would swallow whole the remaining hope of the Imperium.
‘Brothers,’ he voxed Guilliman and the Lion. ‘It must be now.’ They were on gunships that had started their climbs at the same time as the Talon.
Azkaellon, a few paces away, said, ‘My lord, we are barely free of Davin’s gravity well.’
‘We must run the risk.’
‘I concur,’ said Guilliman. ‘The moment is about to pass.’
Sanguinius saw the moments to come. He saw the Red Tear murdered and transformed. He saw the turning point join them, and the fleet falling quickly to the plague of revenants.
Is this what it is like for you, Konrad? he thought. Always to see, always to know, what will and what must be?
Everything was too close to Davin now. The density of conflict turned the vicinity of the world into a charnel house. The immense guns of the Veritas Ferrum unleashed a continuous barrage. Vessels died off its port, starboard and bow. The first of the bone clusters were falling on Davin, taking out transports and gunships in fiery collisions.
‘Launch the torpedoes now, Carminus,’ Sanguinius shouted. ‘Do it now!’
> The Red Tear fired its cyclonic torpedoes. So did the Invincible Reason and so did the Gauntlet of Glory, and the Ultimus Mundi, and the Intolerant, and the Decimator. A superabundance of death burned through Davin’s atmosphere. Three Legions struck at the world with the fury of a last, desperate hope. They struck with anger, determined to see the cursed origin of Horus’ rebellion annihilated, erased forever from human sight.
They struck, because it was written they must, or on this day three fleets would perish, and then the Imperium would surely fall.
The cyclonic torpedoes hit the site of the temple. The Delphos and all its surroundings vanished, the initial blast flashing the region to dust. Then the more terrible wounds came, one after another. The entire surface of the planet turned molten. The core was hit by overlapping blast waves, creating a destructive force many times greater than the one that had broken Episimos III. Davin exploded. The bane of the Emperor’s dream hurled its death cry outwards. The shockwave and the burning fragments of its crust slammed through the near space. The last of the gunships, those that had not been able to dock with the retreating vessels, took frantic evasive action. Some fell to luck, or fate, and died with the planet. The blast strained the void shields of the great ships. The Dark Angels grand cruiser Culverin, its hull badly damaged by a strike from the Veritas Ferrum’s cannons, blew up. The fireball exploded from the bow, and the ship drove forwards, disintegrating, into its own flame. The entire combined fleet rode the wave of annihilation, ships in a storm. They were tossed by the violent ocean of forces they had unleashed. Some sank. Most survived.
The torpedo salvo caused two explosions. The destruction of Davin was the weaker of the two. The greater blast did not touch the vessels of the Imperium. The souls aboard them felt its passage, and they witnessed it. Sanguinius gasped as the wave passed through the Vyssini. It felt like a huge severing. Fragments of time, present and to come, bled and died, and he sensed a falling away of possibilities. Enormous destruction and the final creation of a single future were one and the same.
The second overlapped with another, birthed at the same moment. The Delphos vanished, and the Veritas Ferrum. The huge maw at its prow loosed a monstrous scream. In the Vyssini, the Blood Angels staggered. Sanguinius winced. He stood firm against the sound in his skull. He heard the voice of Madail, and the voice of the monster the daemon had created. The resurrected, corrupted machine-spirit of the Veritas Ferrum raged against its end. The howl went on and on, and the ship swelled. The skin of its hull cracked opened, bursting with the pressure of the conflagration within. Violet unlight speared the void. The Veritas Ferrum flew apart. Wreckage of mouths and eyes and bones raced ahead of the expanding ball of inchoate warp energy, and the scream went on.
At the centre of the explosion, the void was torn, and the immaterium reclaimed its own. An implosion began. Its energy ball reversed its growth, shrinking in a single moment to a point. It caught the fleeing rubble of the ship, and pulled it all in. In its absolute violence, the implosion unleashed the second shockwave on the aether. It collided with the first. In their intersection, they reduced the daemonic fleet and the swarm of bones to dust.
The scream faded as the revenant ships returned to oblivion. Deprived of the force that animated them, their bonds broken, they lost substance. They became ragged phantoms sailing through the uniform void of grey. Then they were shadows. Then echoes. Then only memories in the minds of those who had seen them.
The destruction of Davin and its works rushed outwards from the system, further and further, carried by the agony of the warp, transforming the materium at speeds far greater than light.
Sanguinius looked out through the viewing block of the Vyssini, and he saw the wound before he heard the new cry. With the necrosphere gone, the Ruinstorm was visible again, and it was in agony. The aurora of madness still twisted across the galaxy, but there was a gap. A chasm of untainted void broke up the storm, as if a break had been blasted through a firestorm. Or a spear thrust through the body of a great beast.
Sanguinius tightened his hold on the Spear of Telesto, feeling the muscle memory of his strike. The blow he had struck on Pyrrhan, slicing through the knots of fate, had been a lie. His blow on the Veritas Ferrum had been an act of truth. It reached just as far.
Davin had died as the forces linked to it tried to shape his path and the Imperium’s. The convulsion of power and destinies had cracked open the barrier of the Ruinstorm.
There were stars in the gap. Sanguinius could see the face of the galaxy again. Among the stars was the brightest light. He could not see it, but he felt its return like the sudden warmth of dawn after a flood. Its light was the cause of the new cry, the one that came on the vox. The cry was voiced first by the Navigators of every surviving ship, and it spread to every member of the crew, and every legionary.
‘Terra!’ came the cry as the Astronomican blazed. ‘Terra! Terra! Terra!’ A shout and not a scream. A chorus of triumph.
‘Terra! Terra! Terra!’
Sanguinius closed his eyes. The shouts washed over him like a balm. There were no screams, for now. He had purchased the triumph at the cost of a scream in the future. He listened to the roar of his sons. He tried to forget what that roar would sound like when fate came to collect its ransom, the Black Rage in its claws.
Epilogue
The way to Terra was clear, and it was not.
The primarchs met once more aboard the Red Tear. They spoke in the Sanctorum Angelus. ‘The astropathic messages paint a disturbing picture,’ Guilliman said.
‘I am grateful that we are receiving them at all,’ said Sanguinius.
‘We are receiving intelligence,’ said the Lion. ‘That is very much to the good. But I agree, the news is far from reassuring.’
‘Multiple blockades,’ Guilliman mused. ‘If Horus didn’t anticipate we would defeat the Ruinstorm, he was leaving nothing to chance.’
‘Your Navigators concur with ours?’ the Lion asked.
‘They do. A single warp jump to Terra is impossible. The empyrean is still too unstable.’
The Lion drummed his fingers on the hilt of the Wolf Blade. ‘They’ll tie us up,’ he said. ‘They seek to entangle the fleets and delay us until Terra has fallen.’
‘Our information is far from complete,’ Sanguinius pointed out. ‘We don’t know the full scale of their deployment.’
‘We know enough,’ said Guilliman. ‘We know they are more than three Legions. Our brother is correct. Even if we hit them with our combined force, that will be nothing more than what Horus wants us to do.’
Sanguinius hissed with frustration. Then he closed his eyes for a moment. He calmed himself with the knowledge of what had to be. ‘The blockades do not stop me,’ he said. ‘I will reach Terra, because I must fight Horus. It is written. The fate of the Imperium will be decided then. Even the daemon believed that.’
Guilliman and the Lion exchanged a look. Guilliman was no happier with the idea of predestination than he had been on Macragge. There was far less resistance in the Lion’s expression.
‘Then we must learn how we achieve what we are fated to accomplish,’ said the Lion.
Guilliman’s brow furrowed in sudden pain. ‘You reach Terra,’ he said to Sanguinius. ‘That does not mean we do.’
‘I don’t know. I have never seen you or your Legions in my visions.’
Guilliman nodded slowly, looking off into a future that already caused him agony. ‘There is a way,’ he said. He turned to the Lion. ‘But after all this, we will not reach Terra. We will not fight at our father’s side. We hit the blockades ahead of the Blood Angels. We tie Horus’ forces up instead of the other way around. We run interference for Sanguinius.’
The Lion thought for a moment, then said. ‘We can also draw some of their strength away.’
‘How so?’
‘By applying the lesson I have learned at Episi
mos and Davin. Your fleet is the largest. I will attack their bastions, Roboute. I will destroy their home worlds. That is the judgement that awaits them. Let it come now. Burn the corrupted planets. How many of our treacherous brothers will stay with the blockades if their worlds are directly threatened? Not all of them.’
‘Very well,’ said Guilliman. ‘It makes sense for my Legion to be the battering ram against the blockades.’ He turned to Sanguinius. ‘We will open the way for you.’ He sighed. ‘I never thought, if Terra still stood, that I would not be at Father’s side in the struggle. Perhaps this is my expiation.’ The pain in his eyes was hard to look at.
The Lion was expressionless. Sanguinius wondered if he might not be finding some real satisfaction in his path, in being the hand of judgement.
The three primarchs stood in silence for a few moments. The paths were set. The moment of the Triumvirate’s dissolution had truly arrived. They would fight for the common cause, but separately now.
‘When shall we three meet again?’ the Angel said.
But he had told his brothers what waited for him on the Vengeful Spirit, and they did not answer.
The chamber was dark. Though it was not a cell, it could easily have been. The vault door at Sanguinius’ back was sealed. Azkaellon and a full squad of the Sanguinary Guard waited beyond it. Azkaellon had been reluctant to leave Sanguinius alone with Konrad. ‘His bonds are strong,’ Sanguinius had told him. ‘They are about to become stronger.’
The stasis coffin stood against the far wall. It was open, angled backwards, waiting for its occupant. It was embedded in a generator that protruded into the room, bulking like a mausoleum’s vault. Energy coils sparked, their power contained, ready to generate the field.
The Night Haunter stood in front of the coffin, unconcerned. ‘You think your faith has been rewarded,’ he said.
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