Fear to Tread

by James Swallow

  ‘We’ve done it a hundred times before, master,’ said the captain. ‘It is the crusade.’

  ‘Is it?’ The Angel turned to face him. ‘Nothing about this mission has been what it purported to be. Our enemy unknown to us until this day, hiding behind a lie. The forces ranged against us, twisting the possible like threads of silk… And then the terrible question Amit brought to voice.’

  ‘Brother Amit always takes to the extreme,’ offered Raldoron.

  ‘He does,’ said the primarch, ‘and it is why I keep him close. My savage son is unclouded by concerns that occupy others too greatly. As I and my brothers are shards of my father’s will made manifest, so you as my sons are shards of mine. So Amit says what no other will dare to say.’ It seemed like an age before Sanguinius spoke again, and the weight of his words made Raldoron’s breath catch in his throat. ‘Could my brother have turned his face from my father?’

  ‘Why would Horus do such a thing?’ The captain blinked. ‘Why would he send us out here, into this madness?’

  ‘To keep me isolated, so I might not dissuade him from some foolish choice?’ said his master. ‘He has been distant ever since he fell on Davin. Words between us were no longer warm and comradely. I paid it no mind, I thought it a hold-over from his injuries…’ He smiled ruefully. ‘It is a great shock to be brought to the edge of one’s mortality. More so for one such as Horus.’ The smile faded. ‘In my mind, Ral, I play a cruel game, a torment upon myself. I imagine that Amit is right. And I imagine the full scope of what that will mean.’

  Raldoron had kept his doubts buried, but now they returned with force and he struggled to accept the dark possibility they represented. If Warmaster Horus had sent the Blood Angels to Signus knowing full well what they were to face, if he had done this with the collusion of Lorgar and his Word Bearers… then two Legions now stood in treachery’s shadow. And perhaps more, he thought. The Thousand Sons, already in rebellion for their own cause? The Dark Angels or the Alpha Legion, both ever seeking their own agendas? Who would side with the Warmaster, if it came down to schism?

  He shook off the bleak thoughts before they could gain momentum, and he found the Angel watching him. Sanguinius nodded grimly. ‘Yes. It pulls at one’s reason, doesn’t it? More than the strange phenomena we have encountered in recent days.’ He sighed, and Raldoron saw that fleeting sorrow once more. ‘I have regrets, my son. And I fear that there will not be time enough to undo the fate that awaits us all.’ Then the instant passed, and Sanguinius brandished the great sword. ‘We will fight the battle in front of us and then return to seek out Horus. And I will know the truth in that moment.’ He saluted with the blade. ‘Give the command. We go north. To the war.’

  From the flanks of the Red Tear, a rush of windblown sand kicked up into the air as flyers and transports and the boots of thousands of Space Marines moved forth across the blasted landscape of Signus Prime. Predator battle tanks and grav-attack vehicles, speeders and jetbikes formed the tip of the formation, while mobile carriers took heavy support units, Dreadnought talons and Terminator divisions by the hundred. Matching their numbers, Blood Angels squads in serried rows advanced at a swift march. They broke out toward the distant enemy stronghold, the dull sunlight flashing off bared blades and ready bolters.

  Assault units buoyed on screaming thunder-jet backpacks ate up the distance in long, loping jumps powered by flashes of yellow fire – and at their lead, the elite companies marshalled around the gold and white of the primarch and his honour guard.

  Sanguinius drew his sword, and a full-throated cheer rippled down the length of his army like a great wave breaking across a shore.

  The enemy answered by opening the gates to hell.

  From the walls of the distant cathedral-city, out of the thickening miasma of the cloying white haze, an army of the unknown advanced across the Plains of the Damned, and the bleached sands turned black in their footprints. A host of battle the like of which had never been fought by humankind revealed itself. It had no aircraft, no armoured vehicles, no machines of war in the way that a warrior of the Legiones Astartes would think of them. Instead, this army had beasts borne out of black legend. Monsters and fiends, for there was no other way to describe them. Manticores and chimerae, hellions and harriers, ogres and trolls, succubae and death’s-heads – hundreds of thousands of dark spirits ripped from countless generations of terrifying legend, the spawn of the fears of the human heart cast from soiled meat and corrupted bone. Living, screaming, baying for the blood of the Blood Angels.

  The warp’s great army outnumbered the warriors of the Legion by thousands, even with the representation of battle-brothers from almost every single company of the mighty Three Hundred. At the fore, running wild and mad at the behest of the beasts, there were the last living remnants of the people of Signus. These ones believed that they were, in some arcane manner, blessed. These were men and women who had given themselves fully and completely to the Ruinous Powers, many before the full invasion from the warp had even begun.

  Some of them had kept their dark cults secret for generations, hiding in bleak places and smothering the foul light of their beliefs in the face of the secular truth of the Emperor and his Great Crusade. Imagine their joy when the emissary of the night had come to them and told them to prepare for a new rebirth. Their illegal religion was suddenly blazing anew across the planets and moons of the Signus Cluster.

  When the strange and the fearful came, they knew what it was, when Bruja came in his carriage of lies, they knew. They were happy.

  These were the men and women who had led their unheeding families, their neighbours and comrades like sheep to the factories retooled to be slaughterworks. These were the ones who drank deep of the bile of newborn daemons and willingly accepted the invasion of warp spawn, not just into their universe and their worlds, but into their flesh.

  These were the willing vassals of Kyriss’s army, who wanted more than anything to be ridden like mounts, to give themselves to become skin-proxy to undying predators from the immaterium. And with this in mind, and songs made of forbidden words on their lips, they ran forth to choke the guns of the Blood Angels.

  The enraptured cultists and turned psyker-slaves had guns and arcane weapons, blades and shatter-bombs and a hundred other ways to kill and maim. A horizontal rain of bolter fire and shrieking plasma met their advance and cut them down, ripping flesh into ribbons or ashing it with greasy chugs of meat-smoke. The warriors of the IX Legion took first blood on Signus Prime, as was their right and their intent. They committed to the fight without hesitation; it had been long enough, and they were hungry for it. Too much skulking in the shadows, too much waiting and watching and weathering attacks from the hidden. The Blood Angels unchained their controlled fury and released it by waves, battling the tide of spite and frenzy.

  Ranks of Terminators, combi-bolters howling, cut down the second and third wave of the cultists, thinning their numbers still further. Rocket salvos from hundreds of man-portable launchers briefly darkened the sallow sky as their smoky contrails arced overhead and fell into the enemy deployment. Rippling black spheres of smoke and fire gouged craters in the dead sands and consumed everything within their reach.

  Most of the cultists died in thrall to their obscene madness, reduced to dust and flecks of bone; those rare ones that did not perish were all immediately taken by base intelligences from the warp, little-minds no more advanced than animal apex predators found on any one of thousands of colonised worlds. Flexing and stretching in this new existence, they remade the meat they wore into innovative forms that would please their masters and disgust the eyes of men.

  The attack elements landed with crashes of ceramite against stone, weapons snarling as they fired into the throng of the foe. The primarch bounded to the top of a low rise, swinging his blade to cut through the neck of a yellow-skinned fiend; the creature resembled some merging of insect, bovine and human, a whipping scorpion’s tail quivering as its fleshy head fell to the
dust. Azkaellon and Halkryn were at his sides, their Angelus bolters blazing righteous fire.

  Slits opened in the ground nearby, and from beneath the dead sands a buzzing, writhing cloud of shimmering black motes emerged. Swarms of dark battle-flies were vomited into the air, the sound of their myriad beating wings harsh and grating on the ears of the legionaries. They dallied over the dead to feed, then swept down toward the Blood Angels.

  Sanguinius did not need to give voice to the command; his warriors had already been made ready for such an attack. The Angel simply pointed, and his legionaries did the rest. Lines of high-pressure flamers and plasma guns turned on the swarms and spouted infernos into the air. With a noise like human screams, the insects perished, and krak grenades were sent into the vents in the earth to seal them shut.

  The primarch came about as the sound of snarling, canine fury met him. From the fog of war came beasts that resembled dogs, but ones created by the mind of a tortured madman. These great flesh-hounds were dripping with fluid, as if they had been skinned alive, and spines of sharpened black bone emerged from their torsos. Eyes red and bright as lasers glared out over fanged maws filled with an impossible number of teeth. Each hellhound was the size of an unarmoured legionary, and they threw themselves at the assaulting troopers, biting clean through ceramite or clamping their monstrous jaws about the heads of those too slow to avoid their death-leap.

  The Angel speared one, running it through to half the great sword’s length, then bifurcated another before the first had even slid apart from his blade. Azkaellon bolted forward, and jammed the muzzle of his wrist-gun into the neck of a hellhound that had knocked down a warrior from Lorator Squad. A single bloodshard round beheaded it and the body fell away. Incredibly, it still had animation, walking around in circles. Mendrion came from out of nowhere and stamped it into a red slurry.

  The waves of attack gave no quarter, and with each surge new and more unspeakable horrors joined the freakish mass blockading the smoke-shrouded cathedral. Next came flying things, the furies that resembled bats or hawks or some abhorrent, reptilian-like fusion of the two. Sanguinius and those with jump packs across their backs rose into the air to meet the airborne horde, gun and blade flashing as plasteel met flesh over and over. Polluted blood and pieces of meat rained down on the engagement below in cascades of wet gore.

  A wing of jetbikes blew through the mass of the aerial fight, their heavy bolters hammering, swiftly followed by a chariot on droning grav-motors. A legionary on the open platform panned a beam cannon across the sky, immolating any of the furies that strayed into his fire zone. Bodies fizzed and melted.

  A dozen of the creatures fell on the winged primarch at once, hoping to take him by surprise, but he twisted in the air, his wings extending to their full reach. The pinions slammed into the creatures and knocked them aside; with the sword and the golden fingers of his gauntlet, Sanguinius cleaved bodies and crushed throats. He let gravity take him back to the ground, and there a keening wail broke around him.

  The Angel turned to see a lithe figure of what resembled female proportions, taller even than he, moving across the sands in steps that resembled a dance. The body of the woman-form was draped in shimmering silks and her head was lost in the gloom of a hood. Thin, corpse-pale arms emerged from the diaphanous robes, their hands pressed to the hidden face. Sanguinius was briefly reminded of the Acolyte Kreed’s astropath, but he knew without doubt that poor Corocoro Sahzë was long dead. This creation was something far more foul.

  It howled like a widow, a poisonous lament-song oozing into his ears. Then, from the depths of the robes, other identical arms emerged – one more, then two, then four. Each fingertip ended in a tiny human eye, each palm had a mouth with which to scream. The widow’s limbs flexed and spun, opening in gestures of embrace. Tears flicked from the spread hands, and where they landed they burned like acid.

  Halkryn snarled with pain as a fleck of the fluid caressed his vambrace and sizzled through the gold sheath; another warrior, a son from the 48th, died screaming as the corrosive tears ate away his face and into his skull. Others fell with similar injuries, brought low by the tears of this witch-thing.

  ‘No,’ spat Sanguinius, and vaulted forward, his mighty blade turning in a wheel of red. Lightning from distant guns flashed off his armour as he closed the distance with the widow. It screamed from its cowled face and biting mouths, fingers growing pearlescent talons with which to slash and slice. The Angel cut away the flesh-hounds that gathered in packs to bar his approach, even as the screaming creature danced and writhed across the sands, trying to stay beyond his reach.

  Then he was upon the widow, and the red blade rolled in his hands, becoming a rising and falling arc of shimmering plasteel. The Angel severed the claws in one great sweep, six stumps spurting oily matter; the hands fell to the dust and skittered away like panicked spiders. He crushed them beneath his boots as the creature at last showed its face to him. There, beneath the hood, was a skein of pallid flesh covered with human eyes and devoid of all other features.

  Sanguinius grabbed a fist of the shining silks as it turned and tried to flee, pulling the widow back off its sinuous legs. He drew his ornate infernus pistol and pressed it to the creature’s neck. ‘Weep no more,’ he said, and executed it with a single shot.

  He stepped away from the kill and cast about, finding his Sanguinary Guard close at hand, each engaged in the killing of another such obscenity. Clawed seductress daemonettes and more of the hoofed fiends were coming at their lines, whooping and hollering in unnatural chorus. The lines of battle between the Blood Angels and enemy were mingled now, the clash surging back and forth as the opposing forces battled for supremacy, gaining and losing ground from moment to moment.

  The primarch gave a cold smile, feeling the charge of battle-anger ignite deep inside him, sensing the same deadly rage in the hearts of his warriors; the Blood Angels were pressing back the freakish defenders of the great stronghold, breaking their attack with ruthless, unflinching martial prowess. Whatever the origins of these bestial horrors might be, they could die all the same – and the sons of Sanguinius knew how to deal death like no others.

  For an instant, his gaze fell again upon the hellish citadel erected on the blighted landscape, and he recalled the words of the creature Kyriss. The Cathedral of the Mark. That had been the name the monster had given to this place, and true to that description there was a sigil of immense size cut into the towers that showed itself to the Legion. Again, he saw the star of eight as burned into dead Phorus, visible among the wreckage on Scoltrum, etched into the hulls of the hell-ships over Signus Prime, marked on the countless numbers of boneless corpses they had come across since the falling of the veil.

  ‘The bones…’ A cold, slaughterhouse wind swept over Sanguinius and his wings flexed, rising in the gust. He was aware of Azkaellon and Zuriel coming to his side, their armour flashing.

  ‘My lord?’

  ‘The bones,’ he repeated, and now the primarch was sure of what he saw. He nodded toward the arching, rough-hewn towers of the blood-smeared cathedral, a grim understanding settling in his heart. ‘Look, Azkaellon. The mystery of the millions dead is now answered.’

  The Guard Commander scowled as he came to the same understanding. ‘I see it, master.’

  The Cathedral of the Mark had not been constructed from stones and mortar, nor ferrocrete and plasteel. Every metre of its towers, every span and archway was built out of bleached human bone, cemented with fat and gristle. The skeletons of dead Signusi citizens, drawn from every planet and moon in the cluster, from common child to elder noble, gathered here to become the raw material for this atrocity.

  ‘What black heart could ever conceive of this?’ Disgust choked Zuriel’s words.

  ‘You will know,’ vowed the Angel, ‘when I cut it from the chest of our foe.’

  They deployed from the Phobos under cover of the Land Raider’s heavy lascannons, the searing white spears of light sizzling through the
misted air and into the defences of the enemy.

  The daemons. Meros had trouble pushing the name from his thoughts. It had lodged there like a splinter and he could not expunge it.

  ‘Forward!’ shouted Cassiel, aiming with his plasma gun. ‘Forward for the Ninth and the Legion!’

  The rest of the squad echoed the sergeant’s cry and stormed from the shadow of the tank, joining the advance of their company into the fray. Up ahead, Meros caught a glimpse of Captain Furio brandishing his honour-shield and the power sword that was his signature weapon. The Apothecary had his chainaxe revving and ready, his bolt pistol cocked and loaded.

  Sarga had his helmet off, his hair loose in a wild mane, and his teeth bared in a snarl. He grinned at his comrade, pulling away as he drew his bolter to his shoulder. Nearby, Leyteo and the Techmarine, Kaide, were doing the same, pacing their first few shots into the enemy line. They were a handful of warriors among many thousands, a single element amid phalanxes of red-armoured legionaries; but still the battle seemed like it belonged to them alone.

  Meros joined his brothers, peering through the tele-optics of his helm to track the oncoming rush of a gnarled, horned fiend, its claws snapping and tail whipping angrily about. The target lock seemed to slide off the creature as it moved, unable to gain solid purchase. He grimaced and put a trio of bolt shells into it with dead reckoning, blowing off a limb with a lucky hit.

  The beast released a strident, whinnying skirl and beat its hooves toward him, lowering its head and the barbed, dripping stinger on its tail. Clouds of soporific pheromone spray misted the air, jetting from glands on the creature’s back. It moved faster than he expected, butting aside legionaries in the rank ahead of him. Black, pupil-less eyes glared at Meros, and the legionary knew it wanted to kill him.

  He kept firing, and suddenly the shouts of his pistol were joined by the voices of a dozen more bolters. Unable to halt its headlong charge, the fiend ran into the kill zone and was blown apart.