Deus Sanguinius

by James Swallow

  The new arrivals were greeted with a welcome of cold-eyed glares and veiled threats. He lost sight of the PDF officer as the men wandered into the junkyard community, the law of the wild taking precedence as figures among the groups tussled for places to bed down. Rafen left the Chapter serf behind and walked through the encampment, picking his way along creaking gangplanks and between sagging trestles cut from salvage. There were loudhailers dotted about the place, each connected to the ship’s primary vox network with knots of wires, the hasty work of servitors under the direction of Inquisitor Stele. Spitting with reverb and interference, data-slate recordings of Sachiel’s speeches from the victory on Shenlong were playing, interspersed with snatches of Imperial hymnals. Conscripts clustered around some of the speaker rigs, joining in with the broadcasts. Everywhere the symbol of the Reborn Angel was daubed. Rafen paused at one such display and ran a finger over the still-wet marking. He raised his glove to his breather grille and sniffed: it was human blood.

  The Space Marine peered over the edge of the gantry he stood on, wondering how many of Arkio’s chosen had already met their end in the darkness below. For all Sachiel’s high words and oratory, the thousand-strong army seemed to be filled only by the most heartless or the most fervid of Shenlong’s populace. To cast them as men in service to the glory of Sanguinius was an insult to the Great Angel.

  Rafen moved deeper into the decks, losing himself in the dimly lit spaces. Down here, there would be no man that knew his face and no one to call attention to him. He would hide in plain sight and prepare; when the Warriors of the Reborn were called to arms, he would be there to stop his brother – or to die in the attempt.

  ‘The last group of lighters is docking now,’ Solus announced in his sombre, level voice. ‘Engineseers report power to drives is optimal. All rites of passage are complete and Bellus is free to make sail.’

  ‘Proceed.’ The static-choked order issued out of the vocoder implant in Brother-Captain Ideon’s neck, his face immobile. ‘Make preparation for warp transit the moment we reach the translation point co-ordinates.’

  Solus hesitated; another man might not have noticed it, but Ideon had served with the Blood Angel as his aide-de-camp for decades and the man’s moods were as clear to the starship captain as the temperaments of his vessel’s machine-spirit. ‘Was there something else?’ Ideon prompted.

  As Bellus moved away from Shenlong, the planet slipped from the forward viewport, and with it the wreckage of the Amareo, some of it still burning as it tumbled in a higher orbit. Solus glanced at the fragment and then away. ‘Lord, I–’

  The brass leaves of the bridge iris retracted into the walls with a well oiled hiss of hydraulics, and Sachiel entered, his ubiquitous honour guards two steps behind him. Ideon watched him approach through his own eyes and those of the bridge’s sentry servitors, the data flowing into his brain through the complex forest of mechadendrites connecting him to his command throne. Solus fell silent, his words swallowed.

  The Sanguinary High Priest seemed fatigued, there were dark circles beneath his eyes and his face was paler than usual. Through the infrared monitors Ideon registered a slightly higher skin temperature for Sachiel. Still, he seemed no less animated than usual, and the brightness in his eyes was a strong as ever.

  The priest threw a nod to the captain. ‘Brother Ideon, what is the disposition of the Blessed’s battle barge?’

  ‘Fully prepared, Sachiel,’ he replied. ‘The navigator assures me that the prayer-computations for the course to Sabien have been completed. Bellus will enter the empyrean as scheduled.’

  ‘Excellent. Great Arkio demands nothing less than total efficiency.’ Sachiel’s voice rose at the end of the sentence and he blinked, as if the effort of the words were difficult for him. His eyes ranged around the bridge, over the hunched chorus of servitors ministering to cogitator consoles, until he found Solus at the wide oval observation window. He homed in on the Blood Angel. ‘Brother?’ Sachiel began innocently. ‘You seem distracted. What can it be that vexes you?’

  Solus looked up, not at Sachiel, but to Ideon. The captain remained – as ever – an unmoving statue on the raised command dais. Solus turned to the priest after a long moment. ‘Sachiel, I would have you answer a question for me.’

  ‘Name it,’ the priest snapped back, a little too quickly.

  ‘What enemy do we go to face, brother?’

  Sachiel nodded again. ‘Ah, I see. The matter of the Amareo’s destruction, yes? It troubled you to give the firing command on a Chapter vessel, did it not?’ When Solus did not answer, he pressed on. ‘Brother, listen to me. The men aboard that ship were assassins, sent to murder the Reborn Angel and purge anyone who gave fealty to him. That truth is self-evident.’ He came closer and touched Solus’s arm. ‘You did the only thing you could – you helped save the Blessed’s life.’

  Solus would not meet his gaze. ‘I… I have taken the oath for Arkio and the Holy Lance, Sachiel, and I would not flinch against its demands but this…’ He glanced out the window at the stars. ‘Those men were our battle-brothers, we fought alongside some of them. That we were forced to exterminate them like some common heretics turns my gut.’

  The priest’s voice was low, but it carried across the room. ‘Solus, friend Solus. I understand your feelings. At prayer, I too confessed my mis…’ He halted, his face colouring. Sachiel ran a finger over his twitching eye, as if he were banishing some inner pain. After a moment he continued as if nothing had happened. ‘Misgivings, yes. To Lord... Lord Stele.’ He smiled. ‘But I realised, those men had ignored the path of the primarch. That they came here with murder in their hearts made them our enemies.’

  ‘We could have talked to them,’ Solus blurted out, ‘reasoned with them. Perhaps they would have thought differently if they had understood Arkio’s great miracle–’

  ‘No, Solus, no.’ Sachiel’s expression became one of deep sadness. ‘They were lost to us before they even reached Shenlong. Like those who fell from the Emperor’s grace in the dark years, those men had chosen a path that pitted them against us. It was their choice, brother, not yours. You and I, all of us remain true to the Pure One.’ He nodded at the distant wreckage of the strike cruiser. ‘They forced our hand. Those deaths are on their own heads.’

  ‘Yes,’ Solus said finally. ‘Forgive me my outburst, priest. These past days have tested my faith.’

  ‘As they should,’ Ideon’s voice buzzed and rumbled from his vox-implant. ‘Arkio brings us a new lease of life, and Bellus will be the chariot that carries it to the ends of the galaxy.’

  Sachiel’s head bobbed. ‘So shall it be.’

  By the power of forces that dwarfed human understanding, the fabric of space began to writhe and shift around the prow of the Bellus. From the places where thought and energy became a unified melange, the raw mind-stuff of the warp spilled into the reality of matter, slicing open a raw, bleeding gate in the void. It was a violent miniature supernova in the blackness, a whirlpool into which the battle barge threw itself. Time, elastic and flowing like molten wax, enveloped the ship and projected it across vast distances. Bellus vanished from the realm of men and was gone, cast to the wild currents and energy storms of the immaterium.

  In another place and time, the same unthinkable inversion of natural laws was occurring. A leviathan ship emerged from the phantasm of the warp in a violent burst of exotic radiation, coruscating colours and sickly hues of lightning trembling across the vast iron hull. Space itself seemed unwilling to let the vessel exist within its body, as if the vast craft were some metallic cancer growing and polluting the void with its presence. Shedding energy in sheaves of arcane power, the battleship fell from the empyrean realm and reverted to steady, obdurate reality. Engine maws, their exhaust bells as big as volcanoes, took on bloody glows as thrust spewed forth from ancient fusion drives, and with deadly purpose the warship Misericorde made speed toward its destination.

  She was a horrific sight, an engine of torture almost
a mile in length, and on Misericorde’s guns many mewling human worlds had been broken just as men had been broken on the racks of her dungeon decks. In aspect, the battleship was a broad dagger, a serrated arrowhead forming her prow, a haft of razors growing backwards to present the dorsal castle of her bridge, and below the plunging knives of skeletal stabiliser vanes. Guns protruded from every shadowed corner of the craft, punching through the red skin of the hull like broken ribs. The ship was adorned with skulls by the thousand. The largest were made from bones, ravaged from the bodies of dead enemies and fused into shape as badges of victory. At the very bow of the vessel, a design had been shaped out of broken pieces of hull metal and ceramite; centred on an eight-pointed star was the screaming face of a toothed, horned daemon, shouting defiance and black hate at all of Misericorde’s foes. Like the skulls, the sigil was constructed from war salvage, but instead of bone, the monstrous face was cut from the ships and armour of Adeptus Astartes unlucky enough to fall before the vessel.

  In the command sanctum atop the bridge citadel, figures moved in a precise, careful ballet around the presence of the Warmaster Garand. The flayed shapes of servitors passed to and fro, clawed metal feet scratching across the decks as they went about their business. There was no speech except for the low, bubbling bursts of machine code between the slaves. The sound reminded Garand of the chattering predator insects on his Chapter’s blighted forge-world, Ghalmek.

  Before him, he could see the Misericorde’s hololithic display presenting their destination – the shrine planet Sabien. It resembled a ball of age-worn iron, like the warshots spat from cannon on primitive pre-nuclear planets, it made Garand think instantly of Fortrea Quintus. Recall of the planet sent the Chaos warlord’s mind back through the veil of memory, thousands of years dropping away in an instant.

  The Warmaster’s thin tongue slipped out of his lips to lick absently at his chin barbs. Yes, the similarity was quite marked, and the connection brought a glow of anticipation of the commander’s dark heart. Although ages had passed since the day Garand had set foot on Quintus, his memory of the glorious campaign there was still as vibrant and sensuous as ever.

  The scent of spilt blood came to his nostrils and he closed his eyes, allowing himself to wallow in the luxury of it for a moment. Garand had been the second-in-command to Brother-Captain Jarulck in those days, when outwardly the Word Bearers still paid lip service to the corpse-god of men. He smiled. Even then, the Chapter had already embraced the perfection of the eightfold path, and the blind fools of the other Legion Astartes had been too pathetic to see the touch of Chaos in their midst. Great Lorgar, primarch of the Word Bearers, had personally charged two thousand men to the subjugation of the planet, and they had taken to it with battle-lust in their eyes. Garand recalled Jarulck’s fiery oratory to the Quintian natives, the words of power that had drawn the commoners to their banner in their droves. When they marched on their enemy’s stronghold in the last days of the conflict, their hordes of followers had perished in the thousands while the Word Bearers lost little of their original number, the bodies of the zealots forming the ramps that Garand’s troops used to ford the battlements. Fortrea Quintus fell, but not for the Emperor. With Jarulck’s blessing, Garand had been charged with the indoctrination of the locals. He ensured that although the world outwardly paid fealty to Terra, its secret face would forever be turned toward Chaos.

  When Horus rose on his great jihad against the weak men-filth, Garand had swelled with pride to learn that the Quintians slaughtered every Emperor-fearing lackey on their homeworld within hours. For his part, Garand cemented his place on the path to high command of a Word Bearers Legion with the blessing of Great Lorgar, but Fortrea Quintus had always remained close to his black heart as the site of his first great victory. Now the smile on Garand’s horned and twisted face fell away, his aspect becoming crooked with ill temper.

  The Quintus Conversion was at once the source of the Warmaster’s pride and his enmity – for it had not been soon after the death of Horus, when the Legions of Chaos were in disarray and scattered, that his prized victory was rendered into ashes by the supercilious Blood Angels. Garand and his hosts had been distant, fighting running battles toward their nest-worlds in the Maelstrom. The Word Bearers had been cut off from the planets they had turned; they had not been there to resist the so-called ‘cleansing’ by the corpse-god’s legions.

  Garand listened in impotent anger to the screamed transmissions of astropaths as the Blood Angels swept across Fortrea Quintus and left nothing alive in their path. The prized achievement of his youth was burnt to ashes, kindling within him a dense, diamond-hard hate for the Sons of Sanguinius. Centuries had come and gone since then, but the rancour had never dulled. In a world of warriors who nurtured their hate like keen knives, Garand honed his loathing of the Blood Angels into something utterly murderous and unyielding in its purity.

  Sabien filled the shimmering holoscreen and beyond it, the real planet was visible as an occluded disc eclipsed by a swollen, red-orange sun. The Warmaster was almost salivating in anticipation of the battle to come. He loved the impotent screams of idiot piety his enemies released whenever a Word Bearers host made planetfall on one of their pathetic ‘holy worlds’, how they wailed and wept to learn that the legions of Chaos had sullied their ridiculous worship of that dead freak they so revered. As the Book of Lorgar commanded, the Word Bearers were unique among the apostate Legions of the Chaos Space Marines. They alone retained the priests and dogma that their Chapters had kept during their fealty to Earth, but once they had bent their knee to the Ruinous Powers, their soothsayers and psykers embraced the mark of Chaos Undivided, the Blasphemous Hex. Now, when worlds fell beneath their might, the Word Bearers would erect massive monuments to the dark gods of the Maelstrom, they would profane the human churches and ritually deconsecrate anything that purported to glory the name of the Imperium. This and much more was precisely what Garand intended for Sabien.

  The planet was a shrine world for the Blood Angels; the Warmaster knew little of the reasons that the Astartes whelps had named it thus, and he cared even less. It had been the site of some great conflict and in their asinine, maudlin way, the Blood Angels had isolated the planet and made it a place of pilgrimage. Sabien had absolutely no tactical value. It had no bases, no minerals waiting to be exploited, not even a population to be tormented and killed – but for the Word Bearers to set foot here would be as much a blow to the Astartes Legion’s honour as a spit in the eye of their precious Sanguinius.

  ‘Great Witch Prince,’ a servitor addressed him from the control pit at his feet. ‘We will achieve orbit momentarily. The assault force awaits your blessing for deployment.’

  Garand did not grace the slave with eye contact. ‘Send them. Have my personal shuttle prepared. I will attend once the troops have begun their concealment.’

  As much as he detested the turncoat Stele, he was forced to admit that the human had provided exactly what was needed. With the galactic co-ordinates of Sabien – a world whose location was hidden from all but the most secret Blood Angels star charts – it had been easy for the swift Misericorde to reach the planet before the other players in Stele’s little drama arrived. He found the inquisitor an unctuous, arrogant sort, far too enamoured with his own intellect. Had circumstances been altered, Garand would have been only too pleased to have torn the psyker’s throat from his neck – and perhaps I may still have that opportunity, he told himself – but it was the High Beast Malfallax’s wish that Stele be the tool they would use against the enemy.

  He frowned; the eye of the mighty Abaddon was upon their endeavour here, and it would not go well if it came to nothing. Garand had given much of his Legion to the scheme, allowing that fool Iskavan to be sacrificed for the sake of Stele’s complex gambits, but he could not have anything but cold dislike for the inquisitor. After all, a traitor to his own species was still a traitor, and who could know if he would not turncoat again? Of course, there were those in the I
mperium that called Garand and his kinsmen traitor too, but like most of the Emperor’s sheep, they did not understand. No Chaos Space Marine was a traitor. If anything, they were the most loyal of them all, casting aside everything that made them weak to give fealty to the most ruthless forces in all creation.

  Garand’s reverie fell away as he studied the thick ring of asteroids girdling Sabien in a wide elliptical belt. He imagined they were all that remained of some moon, no doubt obliterated in the conflict that made Sabien the blighted sphere it was today. Repeaters from the battleship’s machine-spirit confirmed that the shaggy cloud of stones was rich in dense, sensor-opaque ores that would adequately mask the Misericorde’s presence. He glanced up, and saw the twinkle of lights swarming away from the vessel’s hull. The Warmaster’s clawed hand tightened around the blackened iron railing before him in rapt expectancy. The grand plan of his daemon lord Malfallax had moved one step closer to its deadly conclusion. This day would end with the Blood Angels throwing off their allegiance to the Emperor and embracing Chaos, or it would end with their bones joining those of their brethren already perished in Sabien’s crypt-yards.

  The dream.

  At first it had been a minor irritation, some piece of his past life impinging on the changes that fate had wrought upon him. It came in those moments when he was at rest, the brief periods of repose now less and less necessary as the wonders of his new body revealed themselves to him. In the beginning, it was only when Arkio slept that the dream came to him – but now, as the Blood Crusade took its first steps, the apparition had begun to infiltrate his waking moments. Whenever his mind began to drift from the matters at hand, it was there.