The Chapters Due

by Graham McNeill

  Two Ultramarines Rhinos led the way, one containing the Swords of Calth, the other Pasanius’ Firebrands. Following them was a liquid black Rhino in the livery of the Raven Guard and a maroon coloured vehicle with the skull-stamped “I” of the holy ordos emblazoned on its side. Namira Suzaku preferred to work in the shadows, but when she operated in the open, she wanted it known.

  Ardaric Vaanes was secured in the lead vehicle, sitting next to Uriel and chained to the bulkhead stanchions with unbreakable fetters. Two of Suzaku’s acolytes sat opposite Vaanes, each holding a man-catcher fixed around his neck. With a flick of a switch, the spiked collars would contract and crush the renegade’s throat, and their thumbs hovered eagerly over those switches. Uriel’s higher self told him not to trust Vaanes, but his gut was telling him that the warrior might yet be seeking to salvage what shreds of honour were left to him.

  Captain Shaan and Inquisitor Suzaku had been hard to convince, but with time against them, they had reluctantly concluded that there was no choice but to accede to Vaanes’ demand that he lead them into the depths. They had set off immediately, driving through the shattered remains of Castra Occidens and into the softly-lit tunnels that led deep beneath the planet’s surface.

  They travelled for nine hours, stopping only once to refuel in one of Calth’s cavern cities, a sprawling agricultural community named Apamea Ragiana. Set within a range of rolling hills and thick forests, the town nestled in the lee of a towering cathedral of the Emperor, its spire a mighty representation of a soaring eagle.

  Journeying onwards, the small convoy left the main thoroughfares through the caverns and split off onto the side tunnels more commonly frequented by mining rigs and prospecting teams. Ever onwards they travelled, and the temperature slowly climbed the deeper they went, each turn of a passage or corkscrewing loop downwards taking them further and further away from signs of civilization.

  The tunnels became progressively more rugged the deeper they went, eventually casting off all signs of artificial construction and resembling clefts split in the rock by tectonic movement. Something about these tunnels was familiar to Uriel, as though he had travelled these ways before. His eidetic memory sifted through the times he had returned to Calth since becoming a warrior of the Ultramarines, but he could recall nothing save blurred memories of clambering over rocks and across treacherous ledges. “Take the right-hand tunnel and follow it for three kilometres,” said Vaanes, his voice strained with the effort of speaking.

  “Where are you taking us?” said Uriel, watching the pict-slate display of the caverns beyond the armoured hull of the Rhino. “These caves have been abandoned for centuries.”

  “You’ll find out soon enough,” said Vaanes.

  “If you think you are leading us into a trap—”

  “You’ll what? Kill me?” laughed Vaanes, though the effort made him wince. “If that’s all I wanted, I’d have had you kill me up on the surface. Why bother with this charade?”

  “To help Honsou kill me?” suggested Uriel.

  “He doesn’t need my help for that,” said Vaanes. “And it’s not just about you, Ventris. Honsou wants to destroy everything you love, and he doesn’t care how it happens. There’s a daemon lord that thinks it’s running the show, but that’s only because Honsou’s letting it think that. It wants to destroy Ultramar just as much as he does.”

  “Why?” said Uriel. “I mean, why specifically Ultramar?”

  “You think it confides in me?” snapped Vaanes. “It’s a daemon lord, what other reason does it need?”

  Uriel shook his head. “I do not pretend to know the minds of daemons, but this is the third time it has attacked Ultramar. There must be a reason it hates us so much.”

  “Perhaps Roboute Guilliman looked at him the wrong way.”

  “Don’t say his name,” hissed Brutus Cyprian. “You’re not fit to speak of the primarch.”

  “Touchy, isn’t he?” smirked Vaanes.

  “He is right,” said Uriel. “You are not worthy to speak his name.”

  Vaanes shrugged and lapsed into silence. The journey continued for another hour, taking numerous turns down into the rock until the Rhinos emerged into a wide, cylindrical cavern some three hundred metres wide with ridged, volcanic walls of glistening black rock. The heat was incredible, and steam gusted from cracks in the glassy floor. Moisture dripped from the ceiling and walls, pooling in sinkholes and running along heat-carved channels.

  Vaanes leaned down to study the pict display, noting the childish representations of dragons on the walls, murals hacked into the rock or painted with broad sweeps of blue and green paint.

  The renegade sat back and said, “We’re here.”

  Uriel frowned and popped the hatch of the Rhino, climbing out to survey the cavern in which they found themselves. Moisture immediately beaded on his armour and he felt the awesome humidity on the skin of his face.

  “I know this place,” he said, his mind opening up with childhood memories.

  He climbed out and dropped to the rock of the cavern, remembering running through here as a youngster with his friends. The walls were covered in images of dragons, large and small, elaborate and simple. From where they had entered the cavern to beyond sight, every square metre of wall was covered in them.

  The passengers of the Rhinos debarked and gathered around Uriel, looking to him to explain why they had stopped.

  “What is this place?” asked Suzaku, looking at the thousands of carved and painted dragons. Uriel turned to the inquisitor. She had changed since the battle of Four Valleys Gorge. Her acolyte had been killed during the fighting, and he supposed they must have been closer than he had imagined. Perhaps she wasn’t as cold and aloof as she made out.

  “The Dragon’s Gullet,” explained Uriel. “That is what we used to call this place.”

  Pasanius smiled, looking up at the ceiling, a look of forgotten wonder creasing his open features in a wide smile.

  “We thought this place was the mouth of a buried dragon,” said Pasanius. “It became kind of a dare for children to come down here and paint a picture of what they thought the dragon looked like on the walls. Calth’s children have been doing it for centuries.”

  Pasanius gave Uriel a knowing look. “And if I remember right, you got the highest one.”

  “It’s probably been bettered since,” said Uriel.

  Vaanes laughed. “I can’t imagine you as a child, Ventris. I just bet you were a barrel of laughs with that oh so serious manner of yours.”

  “Shut your mouth, Vaanes,” said Pasanius.

  “As much as I enjoy reminiscing over childhood memories, I don’t see how this gets us closer to defeating Honsou,” said Aethon Shaan.

  Uriel walked away from the group, casting his mind back over a hundred years ago to when he ran these caves as a youth. He remembered the games, the dares and the contests of strength, speed and endurance played by the boys and girls of Calth in preparation for the selection games when warriors from the Ultramarines would judge who was worthy to be taken to Macragge.

  “It was a test of courage to see how high up the walls you could get your dragon,” said Uriel, letting the trickle of memories build as they seeped from his life before the Adeptus Astartes. Shaped before his cerebral architecture was remade by ancient science, these memories came slowly, only gradually coalescing in his mind.

  “I wanted to be the dragon painter everyone talked about for years to come and climbed over a hundred metres up the wall with two pots of paint hanging from my belt.”

  “Here?” said Suzaku, looking up at the walls. “Which one is yours?”

  “Mine is about three kilometres further in,” said Uriel, waving down the tunnel. “It was insane: the rocks were slick with water and razor sharp. If I had fallen it would have killed me, but I saw a jutting corbel of rock I thought it would be a safe perch to paint from. I almost fell three times, but I made it, though my hands were raw and bloody with the effort. My arms were shaking and
I could barely hold the brush, but I painted a red-gold dragon with wide wings and a barbed spine higher than anyone else had ever managed. I finished my dragon, and was getting ready to climb down when I saw a deft in the wall that led deeper into the cavern, a lightless tunnel that twisted into the rock for hundreds of metres until…”

  “Until what?” said Shaan.

  “Throne of Terra!” hissed Uriel, running back to his Rhino. “I know why Honsou is here.”

  THREE KILOMETERS FURTHER along the tunnel, they came upon a scene of devastation. The floor of the cavern had collapsed in a vast sinkhole and portions of the wall had fallen inwards, forming a steep, nibble-strewn slope that led up to a scorched wound torn in the rock. A giant tunneller reared from the sinkhole, its iron flanks buckled and dented. Steam and hot gasses vented from its blunted snout and pulverised rock dust cascaded from its body.

  Its hull doors hung open. Whoever had penetrated this deeply into Calth was long gone.

  And Uriel knew exactly where they’d gone.

  The Rhinos slewed to a halt at the base of the rubble slope and Uriel vaulted from the troop compartment with the Swords of Calth behind him. The Raven Guard were already ahead of him, ghosting up the rubble towards the gouge in the rocky walls. Uriel scrambled up the slope towards the corbel of rock he had once clung to as a young boy.

  “What is beyond here?” demanded Shaan, as Uriel reached the rock face.

  “Something forgotten,” said Uriel, twisting to look at Vaanes as Suzaku’s acolytes laboured to manoeuvre him up the slope. “Something I never told anyone.”

  “You didn’t need to,” said Vaanes. “You knew it, so the Newborn knew it, even if it didn’t know why.”

  Uriel almost smiled as he saw the faded image of a red-gold dragon painted on the walls next to the hole blasted in the rock. Pasanius knelt beside the painted dragon.

  “Not bad,” he said, tapping the rock. “Looks like yours is still the highest.”

  “Calth must not breed them as tough as you anymore,” said Vaanes.

  Uriel ignored him and examined the blasted hole in the rock. Shaped charges had blown the cleft wide enough for three Space Marines to walk abreast. He took a step towards the cave mouth, but before he could enter the tunnel, Aethon Shaan took hold of his arm.

  “Let us go first,” he said. “Walking the darkness is Raven Guard work.”

  Uriel wanted to tell him that this was Calth, which made it Ultramarines work, but he saw the sense in Shaan’s words. Reluctantly, he nodded.

  “Very well,” he said. “Go.”

  Shaan turned to his immediate subordinate and said, “Kyre, wing left, claw low. Raven’s shadow, high and dark.”

  Kyre nodded, though Uriel had no idea what Shaan had just ordered.

  The dark-armoured warriors slid into the tunnel, and within moments Uriel had lost them in the gloom. He blinked, enhancing the vision mode in his augmetic eye, but the Raven Guard were invisible.

  “How do they do that?” said Pasanius at his side. “Even old Telion isn’t that good.”

  “I’ll tell him you said that,” replied Uriel, setting off after the Raven Guard.

  He entered the tunnel, with Inquisitor Suzaku and her retinue sandwiched between his Swords of Calth and the Firebrands. The glow of Pasanius’ flamer bathed the black walls in a bruised colour, flickering from the humid moisture dripping from the walls and throwing their shadows out before them.

  Uriel remembered scrambling along this tunnel in the dark, and the thrill of exploration returned to him, though a hundred and sixteen years separated him from that young boy. He remembered returning home, filled with pride at his achievement, yet knowing that to boast of it would lessen the accomplishment. What he had seen beyond the walls of the Dragon’s Gullet was his secret and his alone. Or so it had been until his enemies had wrought that abomination with his gene-seed.

  The tunnel narrowed, its sides tapering inwards and smooth, sheared apart thousands of years ago by the awesome underground forces that shaped Calth’s subterranean world. Then, like stepping from a darkened room into the light, Uriel emerged from the tunnel. As it had one hundred and sixteen years ago, the breath caught in his throat.

  The cavern was lit with a bioluminescent glow like a forgotten seabed, jade green and misty. Hundreds of metres wide and tall, it was no natural formation, but a compartment hewn from the rock nearly ten thousand years ago by artificers with great skill and even greater determination.

  In the centre of the cavern was a building of pale, polished marble. It was a magnificent structure, square in shape and topped with a glittering dome apparently fashioned from a single vast sapphire. Each, facade of the building was reached via a triumphal set of steps carved from the rock of the cavern floor, and entrance was gained through vast porticos supported by pillars as thick as the legs of the largest Mechanicus battle engine. Each pediment was carved with colourful murals that had survived the passage of centuries without the lustre of their imagery diminishing. The murals were broken up into panels, each depicting a noble Ultramarines captain leading his warriors in battle against wicked, red-armoured foes.

  The eastern facade was smashed and broken where a portion of the cavern roof had collapsed. Cyclopean blocks larger than a Land Raider were strewn like child’s bricks and two of the pillars lay tumbled like fallen giants. As magnificent as it was, there was an air of melancholy to the building that had nothing to do with its ruin. Sadness hung over its sepulchral architecture like a mourning shroud or unending grief.

  Though he hadn’t appreciated it as a child, Uriel now knew why this should be so.

  This was a tomb, the resting place of a great hero.

  Pasanius squinted at the murals, matching the imagery to his knowledge of the Chapter’s history. Uriel saw the realisation of what he was seeing in his friend’s eyes.

  “Is this what I think it is?” said Pasanius.

  “The lost tomb of Ventanus,” said Uriel. “The Saviour of Calth.”

  LOOKING DOWN FROM the shadows of the giant portico, Cadaras Grendel watched the Ultramarines and their mortal helpers enter the huge cavern. He grinned, imagining the despair that must have seized them knowing they were too late.

  Grendel shouldered his melta gun and spoke into the vox-mic at his throat.

  “He’s here,” he said. He didn’t need to elaborate.

  “Ventris?” asked Honsou, his voice grainy with fuzzy static.

  “Who else do you think I mean?” snapped Grendel. “Him and that big sergeant. Sixteen of them, all told. There’s some mortals with them, and… damn me… they’ve got Vaanes too.”

  “Vaanes? Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure,” said Grendel. “You think I wouldn’t recognise that arrogant bastard when I see him? He’s here, but he’s a captive.”

  “Don’t be too sure about that,” said Honsou. “Send Xiomagra’s Blade dancers to take the Ultramarines, but I want you to kill Vaanes.”

  “I can do that,” chuckled Grendel. “How are you getting on in there?”

  “We’re still setting the charges to blow this place off the map, but we’ll be done soon.”

  Grendel nodded and shut off the vox, turning to face the lithe warrior woman in rippling silver armour standing behind him. She and her fifteen warriors had their swords drawn, long, elegant blades with subtle curves to their length.

  “You heard the man,” said Grendel, jerking a thumb over his shoulder. “Go kill them.”

  Xiomagra glided past him, her movements so supple that Grendel wasn’t consciously aware of her moving her limbs. He glimpsed her cat-like yellow eyes flash with anticipation for the fight to come before the liquid metal of her helmet rose up to swallow her features. She held the black bladed sword up before Grendel.

  “The Law of Swords compels me to obey,” said Xiomagra, “but know this: if your master falls, yours will be the next soul claimed by this blade.”

  “I’ll be waiting,” said Grendel,
aiming his meltagun at her. “I’m not frightened of you.”

  “You should be,” said Xiomagra.

  Before Grendel could answer, the Mistress of Blades leapt gracefully down the steps of the tomb with her troupe of Blade dancers flowing behind her.

  “Time to kill me a Raven Guard,” said Grendel.

  TWENTY

  HELICAS SENT A missile though the doorway, and it exploded in the chest cavity of a warrior in the rust-red of the Skulltakers. Bone and armour fragments scythed down the warrior behind him, and the Shockwave of detonation hurled the rest down the stairs. The explosion had bought them a few seconds more, but with no time to reload, Helicas discarded the launch tube and took up his bolter.

  Scipio fired his bolter into the doorway, hearing the cracking echoes of booming detonations as his shots found targets. Coltanis held his fire until another hulking form threw itself through the doorway. The berserker died with half his torso missing as a blinding dart of plasma obliterated his body with a hiss of boiling blood and melting ceramite.

  More warriors pushed up through the shattered remains of the passageway onto the tower’s roof, only to be met with a storm of bolter fire and sword blows.

  Scipio swapped weapons and drove his chainsword through the neck of a berserker, wielding the weapon two-handed to ensure the wound was fatal. He wrenched his blade free and kicked out at the warrior behind his victim, pushing him back down the stairs.

  “This tower will forever be Ultramar!” he shouted.

  Furious volleys of gunfire from below aimed to prove him wrong as the Bloodborn surged and broke around the gatehouse like a garish tide. Hurled grenades exploded against the tower’s silver ramparts, and hundreds of lasrifles chipped away at the stonework as the enemy sought to unseat them from their pedestal. Fragments of stone filled the air and the sound of gunfire was a constant roar in his ears.