His sight grew hazy as prickles of gold-white light unfolded out of the air around him. Rafen’s words choked off in a gasp as a pressure rose inside his skull, pushing at the edges of his perception. He glimpsed a halo of honeyed illumination glitter about the brass icon in the seconds before the light overwhelmed him. Radiance touched his bare skin with delicate warmth, like the kiss of a perfect summer day. Rafen’s heart swelled, the pain, the blood, the misery all swept away from him.
His vision collapsed to a single point: a face, a figure, a shape opening there in the void before him, coalescing from the fines of dust in the air itself. It towered over him, made him childlike in comparison; it filled the room even though the chamber could never have contained it. The golden form accreted and took on features – eyes, nose, mouth. Rafen gasped, the thought of it thrilling at his lips.
‘Sanguinius…’
This was no pretender, no Reborn Angel, no mere changed man before him. The mellifluent, achingly perfect face of the Blood Angels primarch bore down on Rafen, a vision of the Great Progenitor of his Chapter invoked from the very matter of the blood surging in his veins. Every battle-brother carried an iota of the Pure One inside him. Since the foundation of the Blood Angels, the conclaves of the Chapter’s Sanguinary Priests had kept the living vitae of their long-dead master in the sacred Red Grail, and on their induction into the Chapter initiates would drink from a holy cup that held a philtre of this hallowed fluid. Rafen felt that blood within his blood sing out as like touched like. The Crimson Angel ran a hand over Rafen’s face and, with infinite tenderness, drew away the bloody knife. Suddenly the blade seemed his again, his body responding to his commands once more and not the suggestions of another.
Rafen lowered his face to the flat of the knife and licked his own blood; the rich coppery taste was strong and heady. The violence within, the clawing feral might of the red thirst ebbed as he drank, receding – and with it went the vision, the gold aura about him disintegrating. Rafen’s hand stabbed outward, fingers reaching for his primarch. ‘Lord, help me!’ he cried. ‘What must I do?’
The crystal blue eyes of Sanguinius took on a sad distance, glancing down at the stained weapon in Rafen’s hand, then back to meet the gaze of the Blood Angel. Rafen mimicked his master’s action, studying the weapon in his grip.
When he glanced up, he was alone. Rafen sat there until sunrise, weighing his knife in his hand and wondering.
There came a heavy pounding on the sturdy nyawood doors and it insinuated itself into the mind of Ramius Stele, dragging him unwillingly from a deep, healing slumber. The noise had been going on for quite some time, so it seemed.
Stele turned where he lay on the floor, a dried patch of dark blood from his mouth and nose sticky on his cheek where it pressed to the careworn stone tiles. Swearing a curse beneath his breath, he pulled himself from the ground to a semblance of standing, the sickly weakness in his stomach making him wince. Energy had returned to him, but he still felt lethargic with the effort of his psionic exertions. He gave a slow shake of the head, forcing away such thoughts. It was time for a communion once again, and it would not do for him to show fragility.
Stele strode to the door, wiping away the caked matter from his face, and opened it. A Blood Angels serf reacted with shock as he did so; the servant had been about to knock again and his hand was raised as if to strike the inquisitor. The serf backed off a step, bowing contritely. ‘Forgive me, Lord Stele, but I was afraid you did not hear me…’
Stele held up a hand to silence him. ‘I was detained with another matter.’ If the helot saw any indication of fatigue in his face, then he gave no sign. ‘Where is it?’
The Chapter serf tugged at something behind him in the shadows of the corridor, and, with atonal footsteps, a crooked woman came forward, led into the wan light by a rope about her neck. Stele pulled a ragged cloth sack from her head to reveal her face and the serf recoiled at the sight, nauseated. The woman had no eyes; the Word Bearers had taken them. Her ears and nostrils had also been sewn shut, and there on her forehead in a parody of Stele’s Imperial aquila electro-tattoo was an eight-pointed star.
The inquisitor nodded. This would be an acceptable vessel. He snatched the rope from the serf and dismissed him. ‘Go now. I will send for you later to dispose of the remains.’
The poor unfortunate had not been asked to take the mark of Chaos Undivided willingly. More than likely, she had probably expected to die in the Word Bearers attack. Instead, some subordinate cohort of the Castellan Falkir, the corrupted invader who had taken Shenlong before the Blood Angels arrived, had picked her to serve as a messenger-slave. There were many of these poor wretches still alive in the warrens of the manufactories. Most had been put to death as a mercy soon after their Chaos masters had been routed, but some had escaped into the industrial zones. Locals had taken to hunting the remainder and bringing them to the fortress as some sort of offering, in the way a feline pet might present its master with half-dead prey. When they brought ones that were relatively intact, Stele arranged for them to be quietly kept in the dungeons below the stronghold. Innocents spoiled by the touch of Chaos; their profaned bodies offered much in the way of arcane potential, if correctly harnessed.
Stele released the rope and let the woman wander blindly across the vast room. It amused him to see panic grow on her face, her hands stabbing out in anxious motions, desperately searching for walls that were nowhere nearby. He watched the slave reach the centre of the room and blunder into the ornate table he had placed there. The jar of ichor sitting atop it upended and spilt on her fingers. A quizzical look on her ruined face, she held up a hand dirty with the matter and touched it to her lips – the only sense she still possessed.
Stele smiled; the concoction brewed from dead Word Bearers hearts stung her throat and she choked off a strangulated scream. The slave dropped to the floor and began to melt like hot wax. Bones and organs, bunches of nerves, raw muscle, all of it shifted and changed, shimmering wetly in the light of photon candles as a whispering metamorphosis took place. Presently, the slave stood, and in the dead sockets it grew new eyes with which to look at the inquisitor.
Stele made a theatrical bow. He had seen this parlour trick too many times to be affected by it. An ephemeral, potent splinter of monstrous psionic will was now inhabiting the helot, turning it into a mouthpiece for his hellish cohort full light years distant from Shenlong. ‘Warmaster Garand. So nice to see you again.’
The tiny piece of the Chaos warlord’s essence examined itself, the molten skin and mealy matter of the messenger. ‘A poor frame for such a force as I. It will not last for long.’ Even as Garand spoke through a broken throat, the Witch Prince’s energy was burning up the life of the slave woman. ‘Perhaps for the better.’
‘How so?’ Stele asked, approaching the possessed form.
‘It means we can forgo your usual tedious prattle.’ Garand bubbled blood. ‘You have been on this blighted sphere for over a solar month, and yet you seem to have made little progress.’
A nerve in Stele’s jaw jumped. ‘What do you know of it?’ he snapped, his fatigue briefly allowing his annoyance to surface. ‘Your blunt intellect has little comprehension of the subtlety of my enterprises.’ He made a dismissive motion at the helot. ‘These communions I am forced to take with you do nothing but divert my attention from the tasks ahead.’
Garand’s fleshy avatar gave him a sideways look. ‘Indeed?’ it mocked. ‘And yet it was my, what did you call it, “blunt intellect” that allowed you to cement your position of authority with these boneless human cattle.’ The proxy padded over to him, the psionic stink of Garand’s mind-spoor clouding Stele’s telepathic senses. ‘I broke the sacred compact of the Word Bearers codex in order to lay the path for your scheme, man-filth! I sacrificed an entire host for this endeavour. Never forget that!’
Stele’s face soured. ‘Don’t make it sound like such a hardship, Warmaster. You yourself would have taken the head of Iskavan the Hat
ed if he had not died here. He and his ninth host were of no value to the Ruinous Powers.’
Garand made a negative noise. ‘But still… I have fulfilled my part of the bargain. You are tardy with yours.’ It spat a globule of necrotic flesh on to the floor. ‘There are larger plans at work, Stele. Larger than the turning of these mewling Blood Whelps… If you cannot fulfil your responsibilities–’
‘I need more time,’ Stele snapped. ‘Already, events gather their own momentum. Arkio’s powers are still unfolding, the faith of his followers grows stronger by the day–’
‘You waste your breath explaining it to me,’ Garand said, and nodded to the shadows. ‘It is not I you must justify your dilatory manner to–’
Stele’s breath caught in his throat as something dark and cold fell across the room like a psychic eclipse. A foetor that could only exist in the unreality of the warp entered the chamber; for miles around, plates of food suddenly spoiled, wine turned to vinegar in corked bottles, births came stillborn. In high orbit aboard the Bellus, Ulan’s blind eyes wept tears of thin blood.
‘No,’ said Stele, the denial puny, minuscule. The word fell against a black curtain of shapes that hissed and whirred about him.
From every dark corner came insects, not in mad swarms or crazed armies, but in careful, quiet and orderly ranks. There were flies of every size and colour, spiders and beetles by their hundreds of thousands. They came together into a formless mass, and in moments they became an unholy daemon-shape, united by a single hideous intent.
‘Malfallax,’ Stele spoke the warp-lord’s name and bowed his head. ‘I had not expected to greet your magnificence.’
‘Better this way,’ it said, in breathy tones that were chitin wings rubbing against each other. ‘Unexpected.’ It bent down and licked absently at the dry patch of blood.
Garand’s avatar dropped to the floor in genuflection. ‘Great Malfallax, Changer and Monarch of Spite. Your presence honours us.’
The daemon did not acknowledge the Word Bearer. ‘Ssssssstele.’ It savoured the name. ‘Our long-held bargain comes to its fruition, but you tarry. Why?’
The sheer psychic presence of the daemon beat at Stele. ‘They… cannot be forced, lord. To guide these Astartes from the corpse-god’s will to the way of eight requires time and guileful purpose.’
‘A luxury you no longer possess,’ the creature replied. ‘In the Eye, time changes and shifts as all things do. You must accelerate your plans.’
Stele frowned. ‘Lord, if we move too quickly, all I have done may become unravelled. Garand’s offering will be forfeit…’
On the mention of his name, the Warmaster’s avatar interposed itself. Parts of the flesh-form were alight now, crisping and burning. ‘He has spoken. You proceed too slowly. You will move forward at once or I will have this world ended and you along with it.’
Baal. The planet had been green once, hundreds of thousands of years ago, back before the Imperium had existed. Once, lush forests and oceans rich with life had covered the world, but those were forgotten myths now. Their legacy remained in fossil records as the planet moved on, catastrophic forces scouring the surface until it was a fierce sphere of blood-red rock and sand. The name of the world came from the depths of human history, a cognomen that men had once given to a daemonic beast king. Like its namesake, Baal was an unforgiving master, a place that would destroy the unwary and the faithless.
Fitting, then, that the Blood Angels had come here and turned it to their own purpose. Commander Dante crossed the battlements of the fortress-monastery, the constant desert wind tugging lightly at the hems of his robes. Above the horizon he could see the shapes of Baal’s moons in the evening sky, their surfaces glittering.
The constant storms of rusty fines in Baal’s upper atmosphere made the skies shimmer with a faint pink glow. Dante’s eyes ranged down over the landscape, tracing the lines of the Great Chasm Rift to the north and the towing caps of the Chalice Mountains. After millennia, the warrior was still touched by the sight. Baal lived in his heart, as it did in all of his battle-brothers. In the Book of the Lords, there was a passage that talked of the planet’s birth, as a place created by the God-Emperor to test the faithful. If that were truly the purpose of Baal, then the Blood Angels had succeeded here. They had taken a world that threw death at anything which dared to stride across its surface, and made it their home. Baal would never be tamed – that was a thing for gods to do, not for men – but it had been taught to respect its masters. The harsh environment lived in harmony with its people. It was only here, in the inner sanctums of the fortress, that the ancient and long-passed character of the planet could still be found.
Dante passed through an ornate airlock made of brass and synthetic diamond plates, and into the arboretum. The air was warm and moist, quite unlike the rasping dryness outside; the slightly sweet smell of rich loam reached his nostrils. From soft soil of dun-coloured earth, trees and plants grew toward a domed ceiling made of oval lenses. Each pane was as large as a leviathan’s eye, forged by some process lost to the depths of history. Perhaps, in the beginning, the diamond windows had been clear, but now they were scarred white by untold centuries of scouring sand, shedding only a milky, indistinct light across the vast garden.
The Blood Angel walked with care through the riot of foliage, picking his way around the boles of tawny trees. Some of his brethren questioned the value of this place; they asked why it was that valuable servitors be maintained in order to keep the arboretum alive. Dante suspected that they saw the place as some eccentricity of his, a personal diversion for the master of the Blood Angels. Perhaps it was all of those things, but it was also a vital link to Baal’s past. Every plant that grew and thrived here was extinct in the wilderness outside. The garden was a portal into deep time, a reminder of how things could thrive, only to become dust as the future encroached upon them. It was a living reminder of life’s struggle against the weight of history.
‘Calistarius,’ Dante said gently as he approached a clearing. Before him, a man in simple prayer robes knelt on one knee, tracing his fingers across the petals of a bed of white flowers.
‘My lord,’ said Mephiston, glancing up at him. ‘I have not heard that name spoken in many years.’ The Chief Librarian of the Blood Angels gazed at Dante with hooded eyes, the burning gaze that so transfixed the minds of his enemies at rest. ‘I have not been Brother Calistarius for an age.’
The commander studied the face of his friend and comrade. Dante had been there on planet Armageddon on the night that he had emerged from the rubble of Hades Hive, reborn as Mephiston, Lord of Death. Calistarius had been lost to the red thirst and buried alive, thought dead until a vision of their primarch had guided him back to life. ‘Forgive me,’ said Dante. ‘For a moment, my mind took me back to days past. To simpler times.’
‘In this place it is easy to lose one’s self in ancient history. Others may doubt the merit of this garden, but not I.’
Dante gave a slight nod; the psyker had picked up on his thoughts. ‘You sent word you wished to speak with me.’
‘Yes, lord. I thought it best we talk alone, less incautious ears or minds catch wind of what I must tell you.’ He gestured around. ‘I often come here to meditate, commander. The tranquillity of Baal’s past smoothes the path into the empyrean.’
Dante’s face became grave. He could tell from his old cohort’s tone that Mephiston’s news would not be good. ‘What have you to tell me?’
‘Vode’s mind was silenced, Great One. Even as I rested here and projected my thoughts into the void, I felt the edge of a ripple from his psychic shriek.’
‘Killed?’
‘Aye,’ Mephiston said grimly, ‘and Gallio along with him. Every man we sent to Shenlong, ended in a blink of fire.’
‘You are certain of this?’ Dante asked.
‘The ways of the warp are never fixed,’ replied Mephiston. ‘Like desert sand, the real slips through my fingers. But on my sword, I tell you. Those men
are dead.’
A cold, sickening familiarity touched Dante, one he had known a million times over since his first command as a Blood Angel warrior. He felt the death of each battle-brother as keenly as he had the very first to die under his stewardship. ‘How?’
‘I can only guess,’ the psyker added, ‘but if this Arkio is touched by the ways of Chaos–’
‘There must be another explanation,’ snapped the commander. ‘An accident perhaps, an attack by enemy forces…’
Dante’s old comrade gave a slow shake of his head. ‘No, lord,’ he said, with grim finality.
‘You would suggest our own kind have drawn blood against us?’ Dante growled. ‘I pray you are mistaken.’
‘As do I,’ Mephiston agreed. He was silent for a moment before he spoke again. ‘The Amareo’s mission will not remain concealed from our brothers forever, commander. Despite my best efforts, word of it spreads among the men. Soon, questions will be asked.’
Dante shook his head. ‘I will not reveal news of this “transformation” until we know the truth behind it. If talk of a second coming of the Great Angel grows, dissension in the ranks will follow.’
‘And a schism is something we cannot risk.’ He met Dante’s gaze. ‘My doubts are gone, lord. I believe this boy Arkio is a false messiah. Only out of fear would he have killed Gallio’s party.’
‘But you said that you cannot be sure that is what took place.’
Mephiston frowned. ‘Dark threads gather out there. They knit together in a web of deceit and we are caught in them. Shrouded forces, hatreds incarnate are at work manipulating events. This Arkio is at the hub of them, commander.’
‘We can only be sure by facing him in person,’ said Dante. ‘Until then, he remains an unknown, a tarot card unturned.’
The psyker fell silent again, studying the delicate plants at his feet. ‘You know this flower, commander?’
‘Redkin,’ Dante replied. ‘It has not existed on this planet in the wild since the thirty-eighth millennium.’
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