Fear to Tread

by James Swallow

  ‘Be sure our angelic hosts are not aware of that,’ Redknife warned. ‘The black-armoured one watches you for witchery.’

  Stiel gave a thin smile, pulling at the ink-vine scar that crossed the length of his face. ‘My deeds are as opaque as my words. They can see through neither unless I wish it.’

  The captain did not return his amusement. ‘You underestimate our cousins, skald. Their gold and jewels mask a killer’s soul, and we would do well to remember that.’

  The Rune Priest stood and began a slow orbit of the dormitory chambers. Unlike the spartan spaces aboard Space Wolves vessels, the quarters aboard the Blood Angels ship were fabricated with a degree of artistry that Stiel found interesting but ultimately needless. He picked up a water goblet from a nearby table; even that seemed detailed with decoration beyond the need for such a common object.

  ‘We know what must be done, brothers. From this moment onwards, a Space Wolf must be within reach of the Angel at all times.’ Redknife continued his address to the rest of his squad, each of them collected in a close group around the captain. Only one other stood away from them, at a guardian stance near the door that led into the corridors beyond.

  The legionary gave Stiel a nod. So far, no Blood Angel or Legion serf had come within earshot of their conversation. Even though they spoke in the near-impenetrable words of the old tongue, it was important they not be overheard; one of Redknife’s Techmarines had swept the chamber for monitoring devices the moment they had arrived there.

  ‘Those were Malcador’s orders,’ said Stiel. ‘Until he countermands them.’

  ‘If he countermands them,’ Redknife replied.

  The Rune Priest halted, and the question that had been pressing at him since the moment they set off for the Nartaba system pushed to the front of his thoughts. ‘Have we considered… if we enact our orders to the full letter… What will become of us?’

  ‘That is obvious, skald,’ said one of the other Wolves, a young blade named Valdin. ‘We will die. They will kill us all. Did you think there would be any other outcome?’

  Stiel ignored the comment. ‘He will want to see us. The Angel. He will ask us the same questions as the Guard Commander.’

  ‘I will give Sanguinius the same answers,’ Redknife told him.

  ‘You will lie to the brother of Russ?’ said the psyker. ‘To his face?’

  Redknife’s eyes became flinty. ‘I did not say there would be honour in it. I said I would do it. Malcador ordered this, by the Emperor’s fiat and the Great Wolf’s agreement.’ He stood and crossed to Stiel. ‘Do you understand, brother? I know what I have accepted in this duty. I know what it means. If the runes fall poorly, I know it will be dishonourable and marked with bloodshed. But I do it just the same, for the Allfather.’ He sighed. ‘Our deaths are assured. But we must do this. We must be ready to enact the ultimate sanction upon Sanguinius, if the moment comes.’

  Stiel shook his head. ‘I hear you say the words and I obey. But I cannot accept that we might attempt to kill a…’ He faltered, unable to say the words.

  The import of what remained unspoken hung heavy in the air. Slowly, the captain reached out his hand and placed it on the skald’s shoulder. ‘We are the only ones who can carry this duty,’ said Redknife, and suddenly there was sorrow in his tone. ‘This is the burden of the Space Wolves, the reason we were made in Russ’s image. We are the executioner’s sons, bred to do the unthinkable, to fight the impossible battles. It is why we are here.’ He looked away, grimly taking in the faces of his men. ‘It is why our battle-brothers followed the Great Wolf against the Crimson King to censure him for his sorcery.’

  Stiel found a sudden jolt of understanding in his commander’s words. ‘The witch-lord Magnus disobeyed, and we are here to make sure that Sanguinius does not do the same.’

  ‘If one son can defy his father…’ Redknife gave a nod, his hand dropping away. ‘That is the matter of it, skald. And know too that we are not the only ones. Other jarls are on other ships, or else in transit, seeking to place themselves in line-of-sight to all of the Emperor’s sons. To be ready. To watch.’

  The thought of such a thing, of such further betrayal, sickened the Rune Priest, but he pushed the sensation away. ‘The Blood Angels would slit our throats for even daring to voice such a possibility.’

  ‘True. So we will remain silent and stand sentinel.’

  ‘And what of Magnus the Red?’ said Valdin. ‘We were far from Prospero when these orders came to us. We have no word of what followed the Wolf King’s reprimand of the magician.’

  ‘Aye,’ muttered Stiel. ‘Are we to mention nothing of the Thousand Sons and their misdeeds?’

  ‘What could we say?’ Redknife asked him. ‘That the Sigillite keeps this truth silent on Terra? If that were common knowledge, there would be mayhem. No, Valdin is right. We do not know the full scope of what has transpired, either to incur the Emperor’s displeasure or the punishment of Prospero.’ He nodded once again. ‘For now, the matter of Magnus’s disobedience will not be revealed to the Blood Angels. We will stand to, and we will wait.’ The captain looked away. ‘And in the name of Fenris, I beg the fates that we will not have to do anything at all.’

  FIVE

  Sight

  Something Like a Name

  Remnants

  He was falling forever.

  That had never happened before, not in centuries of war. On myriad worlds, in a thousand different skies, he had never fallen. It was not possible, it defied reality.

  I cannot fall, he told himself, but even as the words formed in his mind, he tasted the sour untruth of them. Gravity, heavy as regret, had him in its thrall, pulling him down and down into an abyss beyond reckoning. There was a blackness surrounding him that had no depth to it, so stygian and formless that even his superhuman senses could register nothing of its scope or scale. The raging, shrieking torrents of air ripping past him beat hard against his face, his limbs, his torso. The generous cut of the robes he wore had turned them into flails, the heavy cloth snapping at him, beating his flesh. Ornate medallions, honours and battle tokens were ripped from their mountings, and they tumbled away in blinks of gold, pearl and red jade, parchment tapers flapping behind them. The impossible fall was trying to tear him out of his adornment, pare him down to what he was at his core. Skin, bone and spirit.

  His senses filled with the hurricane noise of the winds and the foul, clogging stink of the air. A portion of his mind sifted the scent by reflex, breaking the streams of it into levels and sub-components. An overpowering odour of old blood, clotting and polluted like fouled oil, the sour midden-pit bass of shit and decaying meats, a warzone’s cordite-stew of fycelene and spent promethium, dead flowers and burned sand. Each polluted breath sickened him, forcing him to isolate his gag reflex with a muscle-twitch.

  Particles of wet ash – or were they? – rained past, floating as if suspended in the foetid air. They blossomed into speckles of liquid as he struck them. When he spun about, trying to wipe the stinging little impacts from his bare skin, bright crimson blood, rich with the colour and warm to his touch, streaked across his long-fingered hands.

  And still he was turning, wheeling, falling.

  I cannot fall, he told himself.

  The refrain grew into a sound – not words, but an angered snarl of defiance. He tore at the robes around his chest and his back, balling bunches of the material in his fists, ripping at it. The fabric parted with a sound like shredding muscle and the hungry updraft took it away; a flicker of motion swallowed by the dark.

  He knew it was a dream, and yet he did not. These two conflicting truths existed in his mind at once, each pulling against the other, but neither so strong as to shatter the reality that was unfolding. The pathway back towards the real was high up above, within reach if only… if only…

  His clawed at his back and with shock, he found only broken stubs of bone protruding from beneath the planes of his shoulder blades. Where two magnificent wings had on
ce risen to cleave the sky, pitiful stubs of cracked white drooled slick trails of spilled marrow. He touched raw, exposed nerves and torn arteries, and a scream boiled in his chest, trying to escape his lips.

  He swallowed it and his vision fogged, the sudden sickening truth filling him with icy certainty. Struggling, he turned inwards, trying to find the way to break his mind free of the torment it had created. The dream would not let him go.

  Faster and faster, until the speed became immeasurable, he cannoned through the yawning, endless chasm towards the ending that had to be hiding far below.

  I cannot fall. Now the words sounded foolish and misguided, like the insistence of a primitive who believed that sunrise would not come unless he offered a sacrifice to make it so.

  Without his wings, he was… what?

  The same as all the rest of them? A hobbled parody of his former self, a spectre, a pale warning?

  Rage flared in his chest, detonating like a bomb-blast. A red haze of instantaneous fury boiled through him, and he saw it in his veins, invisible threads of intent churning and intertwining with the spirals of his gene-matter. Anger unlocking something dark and monstrous inside his spirit; two great shadows lurching forwards.

  One rising fast, growing large, red as hell and screaming its thirst for blood.

  Another, coiling in the distance, yet to truly form, as black as space and blinding in the terrifying madness of its rage.

  ‘No!’ The shout echoed without ending. He held up his hands to stop them, deny them. ‘I… cannot… fall!’

  The echoes rebounded off a shape in the gloom below, a thing of speed and sinuous curves, flashing slick darkness, coming towards him on sails that cut the stinking air. Rising towards him. Screaming. Bleeding.

  A warrior, ironclad and daubed head-to-toe in crimson vitae, the glow of dead singularities and murdered stars enveloping him, nauseating light leaking from the joints and cracks in his sundered armour. Ashen tresses stark about his howling, unknowable face; and against the surging current of poison air, the skeletal wings of a carrion eater reaching from his back.

  Each feather of the pinion was soaked to the core with polluted blood, trails of it streaming away behind into a new storm. The screaming, red-stained angel was reaching for him, coming up to meet him. Brimming with hateful reproach and accusation.

  He knew that this hate was deserved. In his hearts, he knew it without hesitation or compromise. The shrieks of abject pain were razors over his spirit, stoking growth of the black and red shadows.

  He could not stop the fall. They spiralled close, the impact impossible to escape; and in that instant, their gazes met.

  He saw fear and hate and other, darker things.

  He saw a Red Angel–

  The primarch’s eyes snapped open, and if Azkaellon or any of the other Sanguinary Guard had been looking at him at that precise moment, they might have captured the sight of a micro-expression upon his face that broke the beatific lines of his countenance.

  He looked inwards, and his perfect sense of the passage of time told him that only instants had passed between the moment he closed his eyes and then opened them again. A few seconds at the most; but then linear time meant nothing in dreams, or in the warp. In that way, both places were the same, and not for the first time, Sanguinius wondered how close the connections between the sea of sleep and the immaterium really were.

  The dream; it could not be a coincidence that it had come to him, here and now, outside the bounds of his usual regimen of meditation and inner reflection. They were deep in warp-space, surrounded on all sides by growing storm fronts of wraithlike energy. The Legion’s Navigators had been pushed hard to steer the fleet across such a great transgalactic distance, and the unstable topography of the ethereal realm had not been with them.

  The Angel’s flash of emotion – perhaps sorrow, perhaps fury – passed in the blink of an eye and his hands relaxed from the fists they had made. At last the Guard Commander sensed something and cocked his head, a quizzical expression forming on his face. ‘My lord?’

  ‘How long?’ Sanguinius leaned forwards in his control throne and indicated the viewing portal across his chambers, heading off any further questions. The far wall was part of the great dorsal hull tower of the Red Tear, an angled plane open to space through a massive dome of armourglass and ribbed plasteel. On the other side of the thick transparent barrier, out past the shining membrane of the battle-barge’s Geller fields, a boiling sea of madness forever churned and spat, lashing at the human starships as the grand fleet passed through its domain.

  ‘Any moment now, sir.’ Azkaellon peered discreetly at a monitor panel built into the vambrace of his battle armour.

  Sanguinius did not acknowledge the reply, his focus momentarily elsewhere. The dream-instance had been broken, but the sense of it clung on to him, as if he had brought a measure of the experience back with him into the waking world. Sense memory of the winds and their foetor dwelled in his thoughts, and worse still was the horrible echo of the emptiness that he had felt for his lost wings.

  The Angel did not dismiss the dream as some might, as a random collection of harmless images created by the repose of an active mind. There was always more, lurking in the symbology and portents.

  The sight of the Red Angel troubled Sanguinius, and he wondered after his brother Angron, for that name had, on occasion, been hung upon the warlord of the World Eaters. But even as the thought formed, he knew it was erroneous. Angron’s vital, elemental rage was not what he had felt in the vision; it was something different, something personal. That he did not know what it was troubled him greatly.

  Sanguinius looked up and gazed through the armourglass dome, out into the warp. It seemed to swirl around the triangular bow of the Red Tear, forming a rippling tunnel down which the Blood Angels fleet raced; but no, not a tunnel. A pit.

  The image swam and the primarch’s jaw set as his perception altered. The fleet was suddenly spiralling into an abyssal deep, diving into the yawning nothingness.

  ‘I cannot fall.’ He was unsure if the words had actually left his lips in a low whisper, or merely played out in his mind; then it became a moot point as a chime sounded from the speaker grilles hidden in the corners of the primarch’s chamber, the devices disguised by the sculpted faces of silver cherubim.

  ‘All hands, this is the Admiral.’ DuCade’s voice was strong and clear, but the stressor harmonics buried within – indicators of a deep fatigue – were not lost on the Angel. ‘Prepare to translate. Brace for return to realspace.’

  Azkaellon glanced at his wrist-auspex once more. ‘All ships are reporting ready. Our objective lies before us.’ The Guard Commander looked up as a sheet of brilliant emerald-green lightning washed over the bow of the Red Tear. A massive, planet-sized torus of smoky non-matter puckered and opened ahead of the flotilla to reveal black sky and the distant stars beyond.

  Then the warp was gone, a fast-fading memory, and the ships of the massed Blood Angels warfleet thundered back into realspace. Shedding great bow-waves of exotic particles and extreme energies, the flagship and her sister vessels deployed in good order, expanding out into a huge conical formation.

  Sanguinius left the command throne and walked to the dome to watch the intricate dance of his starships, each captain performing flawlessly as the fleet became a great dagger poised and ready in the night. He bid Lohgos to hold the ship-to-ship vox-channels open, so that he might listen to the crosstalk between the vessels. In his mind’s eye, the Angel saw the motion of the fleet elements like a dozen games of regicide, one atop another, as each craft found its place for the coming battle. The complexity and the art of it soothed him like the music of a fine symphony. There was such beauty in all things, if only one knew where to look.

  A crimson star hung high against the velvet dark, shining hard. Signus Alpha was a red giant of no marked abnormality, a vector at the end of many a colonist’s journey out here to the galactic rim. Rendered smaller by distance was the
far blue sun Signus Gamma, and barely visible with it the white dwarf Signus Beta. As before at the rendezvous point, this was a system at the edge of a spiral arm, but further up the curve. From the approach angle chosen by the Blood Angels, the stars and their planetary cluster seemed to lie against a bed of pure, seamless black. The ghost halo of an Oort cloud glistened far above and below, and there were shimmers of strong albedo here and there where the glow of the trinary suns reflected off the planets turning in their long orbital paths.

  ‘The Signus Cluster,’ announced Zuriel, speaking it aloud for the record of the vox-thieves and hololithic recorders that documented the Red Tear’s missions. ‘Combined Expeditionary Fleet Group, insertion begins. This record made in the name of the Imperium and the IX Legion Astartes.’

  Sanguinius spoke to a vox-bead concealed in the gorget of his armour. ‘Admiral, begin standard communications protocols. Scan deep for ship-sign or perimeter drones.’

  ‘Your will,’ she replied.

  ‘Imager,’ ordered the primarch, and from above a slender brass rod unfolded like a spider-leg, reaching down from the ceiling to present the glassy head of a holograph emitter. With a mutter of microscopic lenses, the device projected a globe of ghostly blue light several metres across; a tactical map of the Signus system, mimicking in miniature the current positions of the planetary bodies in the cluster.

  ‘Seven worlds, fifteen moons…’ Azkaellon mused, approaching his master from behind. ‘Most likely all of them in enemy hands.’ As he spoke, the hololith cycled through a series of attack profiles, showing the optimum transit vectors for the Expeditionary Fleet.

  ‘My compliments to the Navigators,’ Sanguinius noted. ‘Our exit point is exactly as predicted.’ He reached into the image and it rippled slightly, as if he were touching the surface of a still pool. The Angel’s index finger traced the orbit of the outermost planet. ‘If we continue on this heading, we will cross inside the trajectory of Phorus within the day.’