If Yriel had one regret, in these final moments of her life, then it was this: that no one had ever understood her. No one ever really looked at Yriel Malechan, after all, so no one had ever been able to see her for what she truly was.
Her neighbours, the people who passed her by every day, had seen the face of a plain and awkward teenager, a downtrodden washerwoman, a wizened crone and now, finally – the only face they would remember – that of a convicted witch.
But, inside, Yriel was none of those things.
Inside, she was just a lost and lonely little girl who missed her father. A girl with an aching void in her heart and nothing good in her life with which to fill it. A girl who had only ever wanted to be noticed and respected and, yes, loved.
A little girl who, even now, still wished that she could have been a princess.
Redeemed
James Swallow
A fall of night, red as rust and blood, followed the transporter.
It ranged up high over the scoured, mirror-bright line of the main rail, casting a wall of shadow out beyond the prow of the train as the line of five carriages snaked across the desert. A tokamak reactor in the heart of the engine car at the rear of the coaches propelled them at breakneck speeds, surging down the straightaways, wheels skirling and gushing sparks on the curves as it raced to stay ahead of the storm front.
The razorwinds had come in fast, gathering up sharp dust and stones as large as a man’s fist from the plains of the Oxide Desert. Turbulent and deadly, the sandstorms could flense the flesh from an unprotected body in moments, turning dust into blades and flecks of gravel into bullets. They were a fact of life on the planet Baal, drawn into existence by the complex tidal pulls of its two large moons and their intertwined orbits. Even now, Baal Secundus lurked low in the late day sky, reflecting the ruddy light of the far sun, watching the train run like the eye of a patient hunter.
The rails spread like web threads across Baal’s surface, radiating out from the starport at Arch Rock, connecting to the great Fortress Monastery of the Blood Angels at Mount Seraph, the relical donjons at Sangre, and elsewhere to all the satellite compounds and facilities the Chapter maintained on their homeworld. It was a system borne out of necessity; the cruel weather patterns of the desert planet often grounded atmospheric craft and the sands slowed ground vehicles, while the trains could forge their way through all but the harshest of hurricanes. Still, it did not do to tempt fate, and the Chapter serf driving the engine opened the throttle a little more as the leading edge of the winds buffeted the trailing coach.
Inside the sun-seared bare metal of the carriages, there was little but freight, rows of storage pods and supply modules bound for the terminal at the end of the line. There were just three passengers on this run, and they had been granted an entire car to themselves. For them, and their singular cargo.
They were Adeptus Astartes, all three brothers of the Blood Angels Chapter. The elder two were Sternguard veterans, men of taciturn character who took their duties seriously. Neither had shown their faces since they boarded the train at the Fortress, their crowskull helmets perpetually scanning the interior of the carriage and the item they were watching over.
The third passenger wondered if they had been communicating on a private vox channel that he had not been invited to join. He went unhooded, his helm maglocked to the thigh plate of his armour, just below his bolt pistol’s battered holster. His attempts to engage them in conversation had been met with terse, single-word utterances, and finally he had given up. They had continued on for hours with only the rattle and grind of the wheels beneath them as accompaniment.
Brother Rafen let his attention drift to the scratched glassaic port and the view of the deep desert flashing past beyond it, and he wondered: what did they think of me?
The hard and damning truth about what had transpired on the planet Sabien, the confrontation that almost became a civil war among the Blood Angels, the deaths from Space Marine fighting Space Marine: these things were still ghostly and yet to be fully revealed to the rank and file of the Chapter. And yet, some element of the truth found its way out in barrack-room word and suspicion. Many had seen the Europae return wounded from the engagement against the traitorous Word Bearers, and battle-brothers in similar condition. Men talked – it was inevitable. Rafen had been told that Chapter Master Dante would issue a formal statement within a few days, but in the meantime men talked, and they wondered.
If they knew the truth, would they speak to me then? He asked himself. Or would they distrust me even more than they do now? Rafen pushed the questions away. It served nothing to dwell on such thoughts. He was here because there was one final duty he needed to perform. A ritual, of sorts, although not one that would be found in any books of catechism or battle rites.
His gaze was drawn back, inexorably, to the load that shared the carriage. A steel-grey titanium tube some three metres in length, hinged along its long axis and lined with warding runes, the container was suspended in the air by flexing cables strung from the walls, ceiling and floor of the rail car. It swayed gently with the motion of the train, the lines chiming as they alternately pulled taut and relaxed.
There were three personal seals next to the bloodlock that held the container closed, parchment tapes dangling from them. He could see the golden mark of Dante’s signet next to that of the High Librarian, Mephiston, and Brother Corbulo of the priesthood. There should have been a fourth, the mark of Sepharan of the Sanguinary Guard, but the praetorians had not been present on Baal when Rafen had come home with this prize. He heard tell that Sepharan and his men had been deployed into the Eye of Terror on a mission of great and secret import, but it was only a rumour.
More rumour, he mused. The enemy of fact. Rafen felt the sudden need to be sure of something, and he rose quickly, drawing the sharp attention of the veterans. Without pause, he advanced to the container.
The other warriors exchanged a silent glance, and their hands went to their bolters. They did not raise them; it was not yet a challenge. But when he reached for the burnished steel surface, from the corner of his eye he saw a gun muzzle shift slightly.
‘Step away, brother,’ said a grim voice.
‘You do not give me orders,’ Rafen replied, without looking up. On the forearm of his power armour he bore a recently applied chevron of yellow, designating the rank of brother-sergeant that had been newly awarded to him on the voyage back from Sabien. Despite the seniority of the Sternguard and their laurels, by technicality he outranked them both. He pulled off his gauntlet and laid his bare hand on the container.
Nothing. He wasn’t sure what he had expected to feel – some answering pulse of warmth, perhaps? Some echo of the magnificent power he had briefly experienced on the battlefield? Rafen wanted to open the container, but the veterans would never permit that, even if he could defeat the bloodlock.
Rafen felt conflicted. He was here on Master Dante’s sufferance, and likely then only because Lord Mephiston had spoken in support of his request. That last fact troubled him in a way he found it hard to articulate. The Lord of Death saw things with his witchsight that no man or transhuman could know, and it made Rafen uneasy to think that the Librarian had seen something in him.
But this… this strange, almost funereal obligation that Rafen had imposed upon himself, was the last line of connection between him and his sibling, Arkio.
Poor Arkio, dead upon the steps of a ruined shrine-world cathedral. Poor Arkio, unknowingly corrupted by the forces of Chaos. Rafen’s brother in blood, not just in battle-name, dead at his hand for the price of his Chapter’s deliverance. The promise to their long-perished father to protect his kindred had been broken, while his oath to the Emperor of Mankind remained whole.
Rafen drew back his hand and looked at the scarred, calloused skin of his fingers. For a moment, the red sunlight reflecting off the desert through the window made it appear as if his hand had been dipped in blood. Then the instant passed as he sensed the train
making a wide turn, its forward velocity slowing.
‘We are approaching the Regio,’ said the other veteran.
‘Aye,’ Rafen relented, and turned away.
Baal was a world of extremes, from its frozen polar regions, heavy with dense metallic snows, to the searing radioactive belt of the equator, and much of its surface could barely be considered habitable by human standards. It was a landscape of sparse, desolate places, the legacy of a long-ago atomic war only remembered by the stubs of obliterated cities, lying like broken memorial stones in the places where the rust-sands had not engulfed them.
Thousands of years ago, in the deep erg where not even the hardiest of native tribal nomads would dare to venture, the first Techmarines of the Blood Angels had built the complex known as Regio Quinquaginta-Unus. Its High Gothic name drawn from an ancient Terran legend, the Regio was their holdfast outside the great Fortress Monastery. From orbit, it could be seen at the heart of a skein of lines cut into the desert, which traced the twenty-kilometre long design of a droplet of blood. The facility’s uppermost level was a ferrocrete disc dotted with landing bays and portals, ringed with stark battlements and bristling with guns. This was only the face it showed the world, however. The bones of the Regio extended far down and out into the crust of Baal, sprawling into a network beneath the burning wilderness like the taproots of cacti. There were hundreds of sublevels and countless kilometres of tunnels, cavernous chambers and blocks of habitat and research units. Many of the deepest tiers had not felt the tread of human feet for hundreds of years.
Here, the Blood Angels of the Armoury, under the command of Brother Incarael, the Master of the Blade, kept their machine-works where the weapons and vehicles of the Chapter were maintained and sanctified for their eternal service in the Emperor’s name. An army of Techmarines, Chapter serfs and indentured artificers preserved the legacy of the Chapter’s precious wargear. It was the minds of the Regio’s genii who had crafted weapons such as the Angelus boltgun. They sustained the slumber of the Chapter’s Dreadnoughts between wars and preserved the treasured Standard Template Construct device that allowed the Blood Angels to build the unique mark of Baal-pattern Predator tanks. More than once, the rare STC had been the target of avarice from within and without the Imperium, and the Techmarines of the Regio guarded it aggressively.
The complex performed one other function. It was also a trophy house for weapons and technology deemed too important, or too dangerous, to be displayed openly in the reliquaries of the Fortress Monastery; it was said that between fighting alongside their battle brothers and engaging in their sacred duties, the Techmarines of the Armoury conducted works into the study of enemy armaments and archeotech so as to sharpen the combat edge of their kinsmen.
Rafen watched the crenels and watchtowers of the Regio rise from the sands as the transporter drew closer, following the silver rail toward the yawning mouth of an entrance tunnel. Watery shimmers of heat rose off the desert all around, giving the complex a ghostly cast despite the oncoming glower of the razorwind.
A flicker of movement caught his eye. Up on a raised landing disc, a workgang of helots were drawing a segmented dome over a winged vessel parked there, as protection from the approaching storm. It wasn’t a standard craft like the Thunderhawks or Stormravens in use by the Chapter, more like the guncutters favoured by fringer crews and privateers. Rafen was struck by the livery of the ship as it vanished from his sight. The hull had been painted a red so dark it was almost black.
Then the train passed out of the waning day and into the unlit depths of the entrance tunnel. He felt the occulobe implants in his eyes tense as they immediately adjusted for the sharp drop in ambient light. The carriages rattled and growled as speed bled away to nothing. With a final hissing of brakes, the transporter rolled to a halt and great hatches in the walls of the rail cars fell open like ramps to allow servitors to begin the unloading cycle.
The Space Marine took a step toward the platform, looking around, taking it in. Rafen had never visited the Regio before, and it seemed a stark contrast to the ornate interiors of the Fortress Monastery. The complex had a heavy, brutalist ethic to its design, every surface sharply-cut from dense stone, blocky in form and function. There was no lack of regalia, but it was more martial, more practical than the elaborate ornaments of Chapter and honour in the Grand Annex, the great audience hall and the Silent Cloister. The first thing he saw were the twinned insignia of the Blood Angels and the Adeptus Mechanicus; the winged blood droplet of the Chapter was several scales bigger than the cyborg skull-and-cogwheel, and stood placed above it in symbolic recognition of who held superiority over this world.
‘Like battle-forged steel, our loyalty endures,’ said a voice, gruff with the effect of a vox-coder implant.
Rafen turned to see the approach of an Adeptus Astartes in red armour; not the vitae incarnadine of the Blood Angels, but something harsher, like the warning crimson of an alert sigil. Only one part of his wargear, his left shoulder pauldron, was the correct colour. It sported the Chapter’s insignia, but trimmed with a cog-tooth edging that repeated in other places over the other warrior’s armour.
The Techmarine made no move to doff his helmet, but he gave a small bow to the sergeant. The motion seemed strangely elaborate. The other Blood Angel’s power armour was equipped with a heavy, complex array of servo-arms emerging from his backpack, and they moved slightly as he did. Two of them ended in large manipulator claws, while a third sported the thick drum of a tool module. He carried no visible weapons.
‘I am Brother Krixos, warsmith of the Chapter arsenal,’ he intoned. ‘Welcome to the Regio, Sergeant Rafen. The Master of the Blade sends his regards, but I regret that issues of duty compel him to be elsewhere. I will be standing in his stead for the completion of this… this obligation.’
Rafen frowned at that but said nothing. The intentions of the Techmarine cadre were sometimes difficult to fathom. It was not a question of distrust – these warriors were Adeptus Astartes and Blood Angels to their marrow – but more one of dissimilarity. Every battle brother who set foot on the road to the rank of warsmith was first sent to the dominions of Mars, where he was trained by the priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus in the arcane lore of machine-spirits and technologia. They were as much servants of the Emperor upon the Golden Throne as they were adherents to the Cult of the Machine God; the Mechanicus cog-and-skull device on Krixos’s armour signified as such, showing the Techmarine’s dual fealty to his birth Chapter and his teachers. It was true to say that the kindred who called the Regio home stood aside from other Blood Angels because of who they were.
The emerald lenses of Krixos’s helmet stared impassively back at Rafen. His headgear was an unusually modified piece, thick with armour plates and additional sensor pits, lacking the fierce breath grille of Rafen’s Mark VII Aquila-pattern helm. Krixos turned slightly to beckon a heavy-set servitor with lifter blades instead of arms, and the helot ambled past Rafen, up into the carriage where it set to work taking on the weight of the container. The two Sternguard stood warily aside, maintaining their silence. Their job is done, Rafen reflected.
Krixos seemed to sense his line of thought. ‘I take stewardship of the weapon,’ he announced, in a formal, final tone. ‘You may return to the Fortress and rest assured that–’
‘I will see this to its ending,’ Rafen spoke over him. A jag of sudden, sharp emotion lanced through him. A reluctance. Fear, even?
The Techmarine hesitated before finally giving a careful nod. ‘As you wish.’ The hissing, plodding servitor emerged from the open rail carriage with the container suspended between its lifters, and walked away on its pre-programmed course. Krixos fell into step behind it and Rafen followed.
They made the descent into the lower levels of the facility aboard a wide inclinator platform the size of a duelling arena. The slab of steel decking creaked with the resonance of massive wheels turning beneath their feet, falling slowly down the angled shaft on heavy rollers in guid
e channels cut from the stone.
Standing in the middle of the inclinator, the blank-eyed servitor had the mesomorphic build of one from a heavy-gravity world, densely muscled and stocky with it. The slave stared unseeing into nothing, a punch-card command unit implanted in his chest ticking with clockwork. Rafen watched it for a moment. It seemed wrong that this servile, this commonplace mind-wiped thing, was carrying the weapon to its repose – there should have been ritual and ceremony, great circumstance and chronicles being written of the moment. This was a homecoming, after all.
Instead, the duty was being undertaken almost without note, in the shadows, and that sat poorly with Rafen. So many men had died to bring them to this point, not to celebrate their sacrifice with parades and hymnals seemed like a cheapening of their honour.
But that choice was not his to make. The Council of Angels, Commander Dante’s personal assemblage of advisors and confidantes drawn from the ranks of the Chapter at large, had ordered it so. The Blood Angels had been gravely wounded; this was not the first time such a thing had happened, nor even the worst occurrence, but the circumstances of it were troubling. The shadow of civil war had loomed briefly over the Chapter, a horror not seen since the terrible days of the Horus Heresy ten thousand years earlier. Although the threat to unity had ultimately been exorcised, the shock of the possibility of such an event still resonated, and many of the senior officers among Rafen’s battle brothers wanted all mention of this incident burned away and cast from their history, cut out like a cancer.
Imprudent to deny it, he thought. The battle may have been won but the echoes of the aftermath are yet to fade.
‘Brother-Sergeant?’ He became aware of Krixos at his side. ‘As you are here, there is a question that occupies me.’
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