The lofty, vaulted corridor widened, presently becoming a circular atrium, and two great curtains made of tanned human skin parted to allow Kreed and Harox entry. One wall of the chamber was a circular mandala of thin limb-bones that mimicked the frame of a chapel’s devotional window, and ruddy light leaked though it, staining the yellowed shades of the uneven walls. In the middle of the floor was the entrance to a shaft that ran the height of the tower, the edges of it spiked like a maw. Skeletal arms and hands formed a ring around the sheer edge, and an unsettling azure light emanated from deep below. There was a great blood fane down there, Kreed understood, a sacrificial altar like the ones on Kajor and a dozen other annexed worlds. So much pain and anguish had been poured into it that a hole had opened into the immaterium; the light was a trickle of the non-space of the warp, bleeding into this dimension, and it enticed him to come closer, to reach for it…
Kreed forced himself to look away. More tapestries of agony, flayed skins of different ethnicities sewn together to make artistic forms, hung from the walls. Thick hawsers that resembled tanned leather threaded with horsehair were strung here and there, rising up through the mouths of skulls to suspend a glittering, indistinct shape in the ruddy gloom overhead.
Kreed did not glance up, however. His attention could not be drawn away from the pair of creatures that stood in the middle of the atrium, posturing and spitting at one another like a pair of fighting animals.
It was a shock to see the winged, horned monster fully revealed in all its maleficent glory. What the Acolyte had only glimpsed a fraction of in its ghostly manifestation aboard the Dark Page was now here and real and immediate. Everything about it threatened to overwhelm him, from the brimstone stink of its body to the fuliginous aura that moved with its every step. The Bloodthirster saw Kreed and broke off, cocking its head to study him.
‘The messenger,’ sneered Ka’Bandha. ‘I had thought you fled.’
‘No,’ he replied, turning away a moment to wipe an errant trickle of blood from his nostril. The same pain, the same pressure he had felt before, tightened around his thoughts. Kreed resisted, pushed through, refusing to buckle, even as he saw Harox at his side suffering the same and faring little better.
The other creature defied any description. Its soft, pink body resembled human flesh of flawless, silken perfection. Kreed imagined it as the expression of a naked nymph-like form pulled and twisted through a shroud of surreality until its handsome flawlessness had been corrupted by the bloom of new limbs, crustacean claws and a monstrous head that was more horned bovine than humanoid. The rapacious gaze it laid upon him made the warrior feel somehow soiled.
‘See how it shows more bravery than you, scion of Khorne,’ hissed the other daemon. ‘It did not abandon the battle after striking only one blow.’
The bat-winged creature blurred and slapped the goat-face with the back of its clawed hand. ‘Question my resolve again and I will send you back to Slaanesh speared by iron.’ Ka’Bandha prodded its opposite in the chest, making it squeal in pleasure-pain. ‘I’ll hurt you so you won’t enjoy it, Kyriss.’
The other creature picked itself up and gave a demure curtsey. ‘Your promises excite me, Bloodthirster. I only wish we had time to explore them together.’
Ka’Bandha snorted in derision. ‘Messenger. Have you come to watch the endgame? Above, the void-war is fought to a standstill, and down here the tide of battle turns in upon itself.’
‘Sanguinius laughed at your offer of fellowship.’ Kreed dared to say the words, regretting it instantly when Ka’Bandha advanced angrily toward him, seizing upon the implied insult. The Acolyte stood his ground. ‘The Warmaster was right. The Angel is too pious, too enraptured by his father-god to ever consider going against him. His loyalty runs deeper than you could ever reach.’
Kyriss gave an arch snort. ‘Anyone can be turned, if one knows where to apply the correct pressure. Even a primarch.’
‘The Angel must fall and never rise,’ intoned Ka’Bandha, repeating the words that Horus had said. ‘Without him, his sons will embrace the scarlet path.’ The daemon laughed, fangs clashing. ‘I have set this in motion. Sanguinius has been struck from the battlefield, and his precious Legion are leaderless and enraged. They will soon give in to their baser instincts. The cry of blood for blood’s sake screams in their ears.’ The creature’s jaws flexed in sympathetic hunger. ‘Only I can understand the glorious release of bloodlust, and only Khorne can share that with them. I smell it on them, messenger. They are so very close.’
Kreed imagined that moment; the Blood Angels stripped of their sanctimonious, arrogant nobility, the armour of their hauteur dirtied by mindless, animal rage. A fitting degradation for the favoured of the Emperor, he thought.
‘They will burn in the fires of their own fury,’ growled Ka’Bandha, relishing the thought of it, ‘and it is then that they will kneel, if only for the taste of more blood.’
‘You make it sound so easy!’ Kyriss snapped. ‘But I should expect nothing less. Your intellect is as brutish as your tactics, Bloodthirster!’ The gangly daemon stalked around the pit mouth on spindly, sculpted legs. ‘It is I who have prepared the way for this, I who marshalled the whispers of the aether and the unlocking of the sorrows of Signus!’ Kreed watched it flex its body in unnatural ways. ‘This flesh I took as my vessel from the Davinite priest was remade just as I remade truth and terror and fear on these worlds.’ Clawed hands clacked angrily together. ‘While you sharpened your blades and looked for things to kill, it was the emissaries of Slaanesh that opened the way. Mine were the cults that arose here, not yours, warrior of Khorne! I planted the seeds for the witch-cabals on Ta-Loc, Kol and a dozen other outposts. I led their psykers to the slaughter. I answered the summons!’ Kyriss stamped its taloned feet on the bones beneath them. ‘Remember that!’
The creature turned on Kreed and pointed a long, thin finger at the Word Bearers. ‘Ka’Bandha is not master of the Signus Cluster, ephemeral, no matter how loud he may beat his sword against his armour. And neither is your mortal Warmaster. I am.’
Kyriss’s arms all rose, as if in supplication, towards the dull light entering the chamber from an orifice at the pinnacle of the conical roof. Kreed’s eyes followed the gesture, compelled by the silent demands of the daemon’s motion.
‘In the name of the Book,’ muttered Harox, ‘what is that?’
Kreed looked up and he beheld the object that he had, until now, been unable to see. It had been cloaked from his vision, he realised, hidden behind some kind of glamour cast by the daemon Kyriss’s presence.
There, suspended by four of the thick skin-and-hair hawsers through pulley-weight mechanisms made of hip-bones and cogs cut from spinal columns, a huge frame of burnished, dirty brass sheathed in misted crystal swayed gently to and fro. Lit by a malignant blaze within, a livid crimson mist alike to the one that had coated Ka’Bandha’s battle-axe frothed within its confines, spilling out in coils of hissing, spitting noise. Now that he could see it, now that Kyriss had revealed it to him, the Word Bearer felt a wave of emotion fall from it, passing through his body like particles of radiation. The mix of potent feelings made him falter, robbing him of his balance for a moment before he could recover.
Kreed shook his head as the sensation passed. In a split-second he had felt a powerful melange of sensations, and the ghost of them echoed in his head like a haunting refrain from a half-heard melody. The timpani of deep, rolling agony; the carillon of heart-lost sorrow; the strident strings of despair; and louder than all, almost drowning them out, the heavy, thunderous brass of a pure and undiluted fury.
‘Behold the ragefire,’ spat Kyriss, leering at the sorcerous device. ‘A magick of the senses, captured and corralled. Weaponised. Did you feel it, ephemeral? Even the sight of it amplifies the baser nature of those so exposed.’ The daemon pointed at Ka’Bandha’s huge axe. ‘The blow struck against the Angel’s warriors was so tainted by this power. The kill-force of their deaths was magnified a th
ousand-fold… enough to shock their primarch into a fathomless sleep, where he will remain until the Ruinous Powers no longer wish it.’
Ka’Bandha grimaced. ‘Foul psi-magick. It sickens me that I must be in its aura…’
The fragments fell into place in Kreed’s thoughts. ‘Without their master, the Blood Angels will descend deeper into their own fury… And if Sanguinius rises once they have torn through all false veneer of their dignity–’
‘It will break the little angel’s spirit,’ said Kyriss, grinning hatefully.
Meros looked, but he did not see.
It seemed to him that he was in what had once been a corridor aboard the Red Tear, a wide passage the width of a hive-city boulevard. A great swathe of the outer hull was gone, torn away by the battle-barge’s headlong fall from orbit and catastrophic crash landing, and now the corridor had become a gallery open to the elements. Caustic sands and ash blown on Signus Prime’s howling winds pooled in the lee of support stanchions. Fingers of light from the primary star and its companions threw a sombre cast over everything.
Meros was here and he was not here. He felt as if a part of him was still out on the battlefield, rooted in the mud and fire, as if some fragment of his spirit was lodged there while this flesh and bone vessel had been ripped away.
Each time he tried to think anew, tried to move forwards, the horror of what he had witnessed cycled back through his thoughts and tortured him as he relived it.
The thought was like a raw, unhealed wound. The Angel fell. He remembered the weight of his bolt pistol and his chainaxe. Heavy, but not restrictive, powerful and ready to kill. The snarl on his lips as he stormed forwards to be in the primarch’s radiance as the battle was joined. Cassiel off in the distance, firing and culling the maddened hordes of turncoat Signusi. Captain Nakir, a call for war on his lips, heard over the bubbling growls of the devil-dogs and screeching cries of winged furies.
There, before him, Sanguinius and the Bloodthirster trading barbs and then titanic blows that cracked the earth. It would have been easy to become distracted, to behold that glorious duel to the exclusion of all else.
Meros remembered cleaving the skull of a bat-winged daemon, the ripe stink of the ichor that spattered from the killing wound. The fight taking him away to a place where only attacker and defender existed. When he looked up again, shaking tainted blood from the spinning teeth of the chainaxe, he saw the Angel strike a lethal blow upon the Bloodthirster–
The Angel fell.
Meros closed his eyes. He wanted to be wrong. He wanted to unsee what he had seen.
The whip of barbed brass, striking his liege lord in a moment of supreme betrayal. Sanguinius, his face contorted in pain, crashing to the ground. Meros remembered losing all sense of self-preservation, of doubt, simply breaking into a headlong charge to come to his master’s aid.
But then the red fire, and the blinding sweep of the daemon-lord’s axe. The cataclysm as it descended into the mass of hundreds of Blood Angels, all of them storming forwards with the same intent as Meros.
He had been looking at Brother Gravato when the monstrous battle-axe landed its blow. A bolus of incredible energy, liberated from nothingness, exploded across the ranks of the warriors.
The Angel fell, and my brothers perished.
An inferno of hate crashed in the wake of the blow and suddenly hundreds of legionaries were gone. Flesh and bone, adamantium and ceramite, obliterated by a power beyond reckoning. Bodies burned to cinders, armour crushed to blackened fragments, legionaries Meros had known well erased from the face of the galaxy in a single heartbeat.
And the greatest cruelty of it was the sharing of their deaths. Meros felt them all ending at once, felt it in his blood and his bones, a shock that shuddered through him and every other son of Sanguinius. If the Apothecary had believed in such a thing, he might have said that it burned a hole through his soul
He fell to his knees, struggled, stumbled back into a run. All he could see was the primarch, lying in a shallow crater. The Angel’s wings were curled about him like a white shroud, his flesh deathly pale.
Meros’s hearts seized in his chest. Sanguinius lived, but he was lost to them. The Apothecary reached out to touch his master’s face and felt the flutter of warmth; in that moment the shard of fear that had pierced him – for it was that emotion and no other – became fire and fury. Deep in his psyche, Meros was aware of something breaking, a chain shattering, a barred door ripped from its hinges. The shock touched something primal and deadly in him, and he knew without question that every warrior who shared his bloodline was experiencing the same thing.
‘Get back!’ Strong arms shoved him away and he fell against the mud. The gold armour of the Sanguinary Guard surrounded him, gathering around their lord. Azkaellon looked stricken, his eyes wild. ‘Protect the primarch!’
Meros remembered standing up, glimpsing Raldoron at the run, the First Captain’s warplate smeared with polluted vitae. The pale cast of astonishment on his face. ‘We must fall back to the flagship,’ Raldoron shouted, ‘Regroup!’
The Apothecary lurched back toward his fallen commander, forcing away all thought of what had happened, concentrating on the moment. ‘I will aid him,’ he began. It was his calling. It was what he was trained to do.
The Angel fell. And so did I.
The buzzing of a teleport beacon sounded close to his ears, but Meros paid no heed to it. He reached for the primarch once more as emerald lightning engulfed them.
And now he looked, and he saw.
In the infirmary, a dozen Apothecaries crowded around the comatose form of Sanguinius, trying every method to recall him to wakefulness and failing. He had watched for a time, his body still shaking from the rematerealisation trauma of the wide-sphere teleportation effect, repeating what he had seen to the stunned disbelief of the warriors who had stayed to defend the Red Tear.
In a way, all of them had known the moment it happened. Not just those on the battlefield, but here in the grounded flagship, and doubtless those up high in orbit, among the endless flashes of las-fire that marked the ongoing space engagement.
Meros leaned forward and held on to a broken guide rail for support, as if the deck beneath him were pitching like that of a galleon in a storm.
When the air deadened around him, he knew who had come.
‘Did they kill him?’ asked the woman, a sob caught in her throat.
He shook his head. ‘You should not be here, Tillyan.’
‘How could they kill him?’ insisted Niobe, demanding an answer like a needy child.
‘The Angel is not dead.’ Meros ground out the words through gritted teeth. ‘But he has… fallen. Into a deathless slumber. The shock…’ He faltered, unable to frame his thoughts. ‘I don’t know how.’
But that was not entirely true. He suspected.
At first, when word had come to him of the suicides and mental breakdowns among the crew-serfs and remembrancer contingent in the fleet, Meros had considered the possibility of a disease vector as the root cause. A virus of the mind, something that left the genhanced untouched but infected the common human. Now he wondered if the cause was non-corporeal in nature. It was no secret that the energies of warp space could ruin a man exposed to them, just as the glare of a sun would burn out eyes or radiation contaminate unprotected flesh. The stench of the warp was on these monstrosities, these daemons. If they corrupted and tainted the matter of the world as Meros had seen them do, then it would be within their power to cast a malign influence over minds unready to resist them.
He remembered poor Halerdyce Gerwyn, terrified by the sight of the immaterium, afraid to sleep for fear of what he would see in his dreams, finally driven to seek suicide in his search for peace of mind. The action of Meros’s catalepsean node implant had enabled him to go without stasis-sleep since before the flotilla had arrived in the Signus Cluster. If I embraced sleep now, he wondered, what would I see?
And a far greater question loomed larger. What
if the Legiones Astartes are not immune to such powers?
‘He’s trapped,’ Niobe was saying. ‘And without Sanguinius, we will all die here.’
The woman’s words lit a sudden, towering anger in Meros’s chest, and he rounded on her with enough speed to make her cry out in fear. ‘Be silent!’ he roared, his choler turning to rage out of nothing. ‘Get below and stay there! Now! Now!’ In that moment, all he wanted to do was swat her aside, crush her fragile meat into pulp against the broken bulkheads.
Niobe fled, and Meros’s surge of fury ebbed with her, dissipating as quickly as it had come.
He grimaced and took in a long breath, reaching deep inside to quieten himself.
He did not succeed.
The battle was spiralling toward madness.
Brother-Sergeant Cassiel dropped into cover behind a grounded speeder; the contra-gravity flyer had been swatted from the sky by a hybridised horror that merged the characteristics of a gigantic hornet and a battery of scimitars. The crew died in the impact, but Cassiel’s squad had avenged their deaths with plasma fire and a cascade of frag grenades. For all the sheer, sickening presence of these so-called daemons, they could still die if you poured enough fire into them. This single grim fact was all the veteran had to hold on to. Everything else was crumbling around him, coming apart like wet sand.
The din of blind guns and the crash of claws and blades came from all sides. Unit cohesion was gone. Communications from squad to squad were a mess of overlapping channels and broken protocols, and then only when the vox could actually be coaxed into working. In the past hour, Cassiel had received a dozen conflicting orders, some from the same voices only moments apart. His company commander, Captain Furio, had ordered an advance and then a retreat, on both occasions missing out vital code phrases to authenticate his directives. It was either a ruse or a failure of will. Either option was unthinkable.
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