The Death of Integrity

by Guy Haley

  Sometimes Caedis was aware that he was not Holos even as he experienced the hero pulling himself over the sharp rocks. At other times Caedis found himself crawling through wrecked corridors of spacecraft. He, unlike the ancient hero, could still walk, and he would become confused, then pull himself upright and stagger on. As Caedis, he went through places of intense cold, places with no air and no gravity, or choked with poisonous gas. He should have died, but something more than his engineered physiology allowed him to survive. Perhaps, like Holos, it was his will alone. Perhaps not. Fate has a way of saving those it values.

  He was Holos for a time, falling painfully back to the floor, and the peak of Mount Calicium was so far away. And then he was Caedis, naked, his armour all gone. He was in a ship that was lit and warm and full of air sweeter than any he had ever tasted, pure and untainted by volcanic fume, pollution, or the rot of old blood. He marvelled at the vessel; proportioned for men but not like any ship he had ever seen. He looked groggily for a crew, but found none.

  Time pulled him away to its own whims. He felt blood on his hands, the death of a genestealer; it passed. He went elsewhere.

  The slope of the peak rose steeply from the rim of the crater. Holos stared up at it. A lesser man would have stopped. Holos did not. Reaching out his good hand he hauled his battered body upwards. Betrayed by his armour, he proceeded by the dint of his will alone.

  The suns were rolling behind the horizon, taking day away with them, when he attained the summit.

  Holos rolled onto his back. He lay gasping, his great strength spent. The sky turned from orange to a deep purple, heralding the oncoming night. Ash clouds streaked the dome of heaven in herringbone patterns. The air at the summit was thin and full of poisonous gases. They burned his throat, his birth lungs. His multi-lung laboured to drag what little oxygen there was from the air.

  He wavered in and out of consciousness, back and forth in time; to the days of the primarchs, and far into the future.

  The first stars pricked at the sky, and it bled hard light.

  ‘There is no one here,’ Holos said, his voice strange in his ears, thick with exertion and dust. ‘The vision was a lie!’

  He fell into a dark sleep. Dreams of wings tormented him.

  He awoke with a start. The last hold of day was slipping. The shadows were as long as time, rocks moulded by the volcano burned orange again with the dying fires of the setting suns.

  Something had changed.

  He craned his neck, tilted his head backwards. His scalp grated against grit, but Holos was past the point of pain.

  The peak ended in a spur, a weirdly sculpted branch of stone that stood out over the steep sides of the cone. A vertical ellipse of blinding light shone at the top of this spur. Within it, a figure was waiting, the figure from his dream.

  Holos’s battered body filled with adrenaline. His feet scrabbled at the stone as he righted himself. The armour was as heavy as sin. He got to his knees and, cradling his injured arm against his chest, crawled slowly to the foot of the rock spur.

  The figure waited. It was impossible to make out its features. A silhouette attenuated by the glare was its body, its face a shapeless blur. Only its broad wings, feathers shimmering with iridescent colours, were clear.

  With great effort, Holos got himself into a kneeling position. He was afraid, for this was something beyond the material world. This was not something that would yield to the bolter or the sword. He stared nevertheless into the light. It seared his retinas, but he felt the Rage retreat within himself, and he felt the blessed return of sanity.

  ‘I am Holos, son of Dolkaros of the tribe of Sumar, Initiate of the Blood Drinkers Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes. I am a warrior of the Emperor, and I would save my kin from the madness that afflicts us. I have come,’ he spoke boldly. ‘I have followed my dream. I have passed the test given me. Tell me how to save my brothers, as was promised,’ he said, his voice quavered. Emotions long suppressed broke through his conditioning.

  ‘You have come,’ said the figure. ‘You have passed the test. You are worthy of what I must tell you. Hearken, hearken to the secret that will save your brethren.’ Its voice was old and harsh as dry parchment, the sibilants hissed, tailing off into half-heard words that meant something quite different to what the figure seemed to say. The conversation between Holos and the figure continued, but muted. Other conversations began to overlay it, one at a time, as Caedis became aware of himself as separate to Holos. The conversations overlapped each other like ripples in a pond, and Holos’s exchange with the saviours of the Blood Drinkers became unintelligible.

  ‘Welcome, Caedis, Lord of the Blood Drinkers. You too have been proven worthy.’

  ‘Worthy enough to join Holos on his endless climb,’ said a second voice from the light. It was raspier and less wholesome than the first.

  Then Caedis was on the mountain, not Holos. How it came to be, he could not say. The scene had a hyper-real clarity. If it were a vision, it seemed more real than life.

  Caedis shaded his eyes. He got a fleeting impression of a pair of heavy heads moving on sinuous necks before his vision blurred, disarmed by the light around the figure. This was not how he imagined Holos’s visitor, or was it how he had imagined it all along, and was unable to capture the figure in glass because his mind would not accept the truth of it?

  ‘Why am I here?’ said Caedis. ‘Why do I not suffer the Black Rage as my brethren do, reliving the last hours of Sanguinius? Who are you?’

  The figure shifted, as if it leaned upon a staff. Caedis glimpsed a large, inhuman hand tipped with claws.

  ‘You are worthy,’ repeated the second voice.

  ‘I am he who gave to Holos the secret of how to preserve your Chapter. I am the saviour of the Blood Drinkers. You do not suffer as other sons of the Blood Angels do because I have decreed it to be otherwise. Would you know the secret? Would you know what I told Holos?’

  Caedis did not answer. The thing in the light went on anyway.

  ‘I told him to embrace change.’

  ‘Embrace it!’ said the other voice.

  ‘Only through change can one survive, only through evolution is there life. Your gene-seed is corrupt, you are changing. You try to deny it, and that is why you were dying. But to embrace it… Ah!’

  ‘To embrace change is to live,’ said the thing’s other voice. ‘Reject it and die.’

  A sense of terrible horror gripped at Caedis’s hearts. There were things few men knew of; things that made the most degenerate xenos creatures in all the galaxy seem benign. All Space Marines had some knowledge of the Ruinous Powers. Few among their number were fully aware of the Dark Gods’ actual influence on the material universe, or the nature of their servants, or how those servants could manifest themselves.

  But Caedis knew. Caedis was a Chapter Master, and thus the most awful secrets of the universe had been laid open to him.

  Before him was a Chaos daemon.

  ‘What do you want of me?’ he said, determining to say as little as possible. Some of the daemons were master tricksters, and would bend his own words against him.

  ‘What do I want of you?’ the thing’s voices spoke as one, the harmonies between the two carrying another layer of meaning. ‘I would ask you a question, that is all.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why would I not wish to? All change is Chaos, all Chaos is change. Change is inevitable, and so Chaos is inevitable. I ask you, will you embrace change? Will you embrace Chaos?’

  ‘Never!’ Caedis shouted as loudly as he could, his spirit crawling in revulsion within his skin. What had Holos done? What diabolical pact had he made to save the Chapter? His mind rebelled against it. All his life’s work, his service, a lie!

  ‘You fight the war of the mountain against the rain and the wind. The mountain seems strong, but in the end, the rain will win,’ said the other voice.

  ‘I will never submit to a power that is not the Emperor of mankind!’

  ‘
Who says you have any choice, Chapter Master? Does the pawn choose whether it is black or white? Does it have a say in its movement across the board?’ said the first voice.

  The creature’s other voice spoke. ‘You oppose change, and yet you are the epitome of change yourself, altered by the weak science of your kind, you are far more than that which you once were.’

  ‘And far less than you were intended to be.’

  ‘You are not untouched by Chaos,’ the thing was staring at his lengthened teeth. ‘Yet you are weak still. You are weakened by your loyalty to the corpse that is your lord. Cast aside your loyalty.’

  ‘It is a chain that weighs you down as your armour weighs Holos down.’

  ‘That strangles and binds.’

  ‘A chain of servitude.’

  ‘I should cast aside the service to which I have sworn myself, to serve a daemonic master?’ said Caedis. ‘And what will be my reward? Betrayal of my kind? Eternal torment? My soul fed to the creatures of the warp? I am no fool. Our struggle is daunting, but I will not abandon it!’

  ‘The warp will prevail. The long war has been waged for far longer than you reckon it, and soon it will be done. Follow me, bring your warriors to fight. Victory is pre-ordained. I will make you powerful.’ The thing was beguiling. Caedis fought its promises with all his might.

  ‘Go back and eternal suffering awaits you. There will be no respite,’ said the other voice.

  ‘No rest.’

  ‘You will not die, we will not allow it.’

  ‘You will experience the depths of the Black Rage. You will suffer what Holos prevented; you will see the depths of your monstrous nature. Your humanity will burn in its fires, and you will be powerless. Your Emperor made you as you are, not we. What then is just?’

  ‘Change, change is Chaos. Change is inevitable. Chaos is inevitable. Embrace Chaos, or be consumed by it. Embrace change!’ the second voice shrieked.

  Caedis stood and stared into the light unflinchingly. He drew himself up to his full height. His voice was firm as he replied.

  ‘No. I defy you. My soul remains my own. If I must suffer the torments of hell itself in order to serve the Emperor, then I will. Service is life.’

  ‘Blood is life, is that not how your ritual goes?’ said the first voice mockingly.

  ‘No. The blood is a means, it is regrettable, but it is the road to service. All is done in the name of service. I do not know what Holos agreed with you, but we defy you still, two thousand years on. Can you not see? We will never turn to Chaos. It is we who have tricked you.’

  The creature shifted in the light. Its form wavered, flickering through a myriad other indistinct shapes before settling back upon the form it had before. Caedis was sure he could make out two heads now, heavy and beaked, not unlike the astorgai, held upon long necks.

  ‘And you think this a secret, this dealing of Holos with we?’ said the first voice. Wisdom and wickedness were at one within it.

  ‘Shanandar was the name of the Reclusiarch, it was he to whom Holos told the whole truth,’ said the second, and listening to its voice, one became aware that death and life were the same.

  ‘From Shanandar to Melios, Melios to Dravin. Down the line of your skull-masked priests, to Gurian, Canandael, Solomael and Curvin,’ said the first voice.

  ‘From Curvin to Doloros, from him down to Quiniar, and from Quiniar to…’

  Caedis spoke the last name, his voice a deathly hush. ‘Mazrael.’

  Caedis got the impression of a head turned sideways, a laterally mounted eye, bird bright and calculating, regarding him. ‘My master’s brother has his warriors of blood, though they know it not,’ said the daemon’s first voice. ‘I will bring my own to present to my master in time for the final war. You will submit, and if you do not submit, one of your predecessors will,’ said the first voice.

  ‘Or those that follow.’

  ‘One has.’

  ‘A change, a change from “no” to “yes”, and that, mortal, is the easiest change of all to make. You may say no, and you do. Very well. Another will come, and another, then another still. As long as your kind utilise the rite…’

  ‘The rite of blood given, and the rite of blood taken.’

  ‘…to defer your rightful fate, those like you will continue to follow Holos in his trek up the mountain. They will fight, and they will struggle, and they will come to me.’

  ‘Many may say “no”.’

  ‘It matters not; only one need say “yes”. And one will.’

  ‘We have seen it. It has already happened,’ the voices spoke as one. ‘Your Chapter will fall, as your brothers fell before you. Now,’ they said, ‘fall!’

  Caedis lunged at the light, hands outstretched, aiming to break the neck on the right. He brushed against something that felt like feathers and flesh, but which made his skin shiver with revulsion. A stench of old carrion, the dry scent of birds, the astringency of electricity, and then he was past it. The light winked out, taking the being with it.

  He twisted, his feet catching on the end of the rock spur. His arms windmilled as he sought balance. He caught a glimpse of Holos, head bowed at the rock, deep in his own conversation two thousand years ago, and he wondered at what price the hero had bought the temporary salvation of his Chapter.

  The daemon’s prophecy came true. He fell into the volcano-smogged air of San Guisiga, and plummeted toward a field of fanged granite far below.

  He hit with bone-jarring force. His legs broke. His fused ribs caved in, crushed by a point of stone. His skull shattered.

  The vision ended.

  Caedis coughed. He was fully himself. The Thirst had abated for now, taking his strange visions with it. But it writhed in the pit of his gut, making him nauseous and hungry at the same time. He thought of the daemon’s words. It would return redoubled, and soon. He had to get out of the hulk and tell the others what he had learned. He had to put a stop to the rite before it was too late. He thanked the Emperor that he, as Chapter Master, had the power to do that, to undo the evil that Holos had wrought.

  He rolled onto his side, hands pawing at smooth metal. He was so damned weak!

  A long tendril of something wrapped itself around his ankles. Two more grabbed his wrists. His arms were pulled apart, and he was lifted into the air. He had no strength to resist.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ said a silken voice that came from everywhere and nowhere. ‘What have we here?’

  Caedis opened his mouth to address the voice, but no sound came.

  He was trapped.

  Chapter 21

  The Power of the Ancients

  The doorway led to a sloping corridor several metres long that joined an arterial way wide enough for four Terminators to walk abreast. The ship’s interior was eerily untouched. Its artificial gravity was functional, the curved ceiling glowed softly. There was little dust, and no corrosion. The air was far purer than that aboard the Novum in Honourum, an atmospheric mix of rare quality. The design of the ship was superior in virtually every way to those on which Galt had been. Like the exterior it lacked the heavy embellishment so beloved in the Imperium. Even so, it was as beautiful in its way. Sinuous lines defined its architecture, the parts of it seemingly all of one piece. Only close inspection showed that this was not so.

  The mage priests chittered to one another in their screeching code as Plosk called a halt by something that might have been a sculpture. If it was, Galt could make no sense of it; it was a series of abstract curves and intersecting planes of quicksilver-bright metal.

  ‘I have located a data portal,’ said Plosk.

  ‘I detect nothing,’ said Eskerio. The contempt in his voice was growing every time he spoke. He no longer used the tech-priests’ honorifics.

  ‘These technologies are beyond our own, but not beyond understanding,’ said Samin. ‘Allow my master peace so that he might commune with the vessel’s spirit.’

  Plosk and Nuministon stood close, their helmets almost touching, and f
ell silent. If they spoke with the ship it was not apparent.

  ‘I have never seen a ship such as this, Brother Clastrin,’ said Galt over a private channel.

  ‘Do not be seduced by its simple beauties, brother,’ said Clastrin. ‘This ship dates from a time when technology was given freely by the Omnissiah, but was used ignorantly and left unhallowed. For that, he turned his back upon mankind.’

  ‘Is there threat here?’

  ‘There may well be. At the least there will be a test; the Omnissiah will not return to the unworthy that which he took from the unworthy.’

  Plosk and Nuministon stood apart. Plosk undid his helmet clasps and pulled it free. He breathed the air deeply and smiled.

  ‘I have accessed the machine’s datacores. What we seek is located on the bridge.’

  Galt spoke publicly. ‘How long do we have, Magos Nuministon?’

  ‘The warp fields that gather themselves about the hulk will push the agglomeration into the empyrean in one hour, forty-two minutes and seven seconds, lord captain.’

  ‘The reactor?’ asked Galt.

  ‘It is to the aft, five decks down. Repair is necessary if we are to teleport free. Samin is ready, are you not, Adept Samin?’

  Samin looked anything but ready.

  ‘To split our forces could be folly,’ said Sandamael. ‘But I see little choice in the matter.’

  ‘I will lead the party,’ said Voldo. ‘Lord captain?’

  Galt hesitated. This was the time, he knew it in his bones. This was the real message of the Shadow Novum, the death of his mentor, and it was upon him. He looked at Voldo. From behind his helmet lenses, Voldo looked back.

  ‘Now is the moment of peril for you,’ said Galt to him privately.

  ‘If it is ordained, so be it,’ said Voldo. ‘It is the mark of a leader that he send his brothers willingly to their deaths, should mission parameters make demand of such sacrifice. Now is one of those times. I will go, and you should not stop me, lord captain.’

  Galt was quiet. ‘I… I should not. The Emperor protect you, Brother Voldo.’

  ‘Do not despair, Mantillio. We shall meet once again in the Shadow Novum, and fight the war to end all wars side by side with the Emperor himself. It has been my honour and pleasure to watch you grow from boy to man, and my pride to serve under you.’