Fear to Tread

by James Swallow

  The hull vibrated and the cloudy horizon banked sharply as grey smoke and engine components burst into the air. Raldoron swore a curse as the Stormbird’s wings dipped and it began to spiral toward the ground.

  They fell short of the projected landing point by a good measure, and the Stormbird collapsed as it hit the thick mud, wings cracking with the finality of the impact. Small fires began inside the troop bay, filling it with black smoke. Meros disengaged from his restraints and vaulted across the compartment to where Tillyan Niobe was curled in a foetal ball, and he ripped away the tether web holding her in place.

  ‘Are you hurt?’ She managed a weak shake of her head. ‘Then move.’ He placed his hand on the flat of her back, and propelled the woman towards the yawning hatchway.

  Outside, the noise and the stench of the battleground assailed them. Niobe coloured at the sensations, picking her way across the shallow, blackened crater formed by the Stormbird’s landing.

  Meros looked up as Raldoron vaulted on to the top of the downed aircraft’s hull. The First Captain cast around, his bolt pistol and power sword in his hands, attempting to get his bearings. A moment ago, their path towards the enemy stronghold had seemed clear, but the fog of war was mercurial and ever-changing. To the Apothecary, it seemed as if they had flown for hours and still come no closer to the Cathedral of the Mark.

  He followed Raldoron’s gaze. To the edges of Meros’s sight, there was only war, the unfolding combat between the strange forces of the enemy and the furious ranks of the IX Legion. He tasted a mist of vaporised blood at the back of his throat.

  A shape flashed over his head, and Meros spun about, pulling up his gun. A gangly creature, taller than a legionary, landed atop the Stormbird and collided with Raldoron, the two of them tumbling into a roll as it knocked the captain onto the slope of a fallen wing. Cloven hooves clattered against the plasteel hull and claws raked at the First Captain’s armour.

  Raldoron slashed blindly with his sword and the blade flashed, a lucky cut beheading the beast in a fountain of blue liquid. Niobe baulked as the beast’s head spun into the mud before her.

  Meros grimaced. It was somehow still alive. A slavering, wide-jawed mouth in a skeletal face, an elongated skull rising high into a bony cone and great antler-like horns of dirty ivory. The face opened its maw and a long, purple tongue uncoiled, probing toward them. The Apothecary fired a bolt round into the middle of the forehead, blasting it apart in a welter of bone and gooey matter.

  ‘A bloodletter,’ said the woman, turning pale and gulping in air. ‘That’s what they call them.’

  ‘More!’ shouted Orexis from close by, as Raldoron scrambled back over the wreck to join them.

  Packs of the lesser daemons crowded in around the crashed aircraft, and these ones carried glowing hell-blades that sizzled cherry-red with heat, like pokers drawn from a fire; yet they did not attack immediately. Instead, the bloodletters prowled around an invisible perimeter, snapping and hissing, occasionally daring to venture close before releasing atonal yowls of distress. The creatures swiftly focused their attention toward the woman, pinpointing her as the source of their anguish.

  ‘They know it’s her,’ Meros muttered. The ethereal null aura centred on Niobe was anathema to these warp spawn. ‘She pains them by fact of her presence.’

  ‘Not for long,’ said Raldoron. Even as he spoke, the creatures were closing the circle, steeling themselves to resist. As one, they broke into a charge and fell upon the squad.

  Brother Cador died beneath three hellblades, each monstrous sword piercing his torso from a different angle. Meros glimpsed his body burst into flames and burn inside his armour. The Apothecary shoved the woman back against the wreck and fell into a fight with two more, gunning them down, using the chainaxe to finish the job.

  But for each one cut or shot there was another beast rising to take its place. Meros counted his rounds, fearing they would be overwhelmed and die beyond the sight of their target.

  A new roar – mechanical, heavy and dangerous – drowned out his doubts. Over the lip of the crater came a smoking, war-scarred vehicle on four grinding caterpillar tracks; the Mastodon was designed for deployment of full squads into the middle of combat zones, but this one had seen better days. Much of the armour plating had been melted away by baleful fires and many of the sponson guns were hanging broken and useless.

  Legionaries rode atop the vehicle as it drove over the packs of the bloodletters, scattering them so the Blood Angels could pick them off. Those too slow to run became twisted flesh, foul bodies bursting under the spinning treads.

  Meros saw a figure in black armour emerge from the vehicle: Annellus. The Apothecary’s spirit leapt to see his trusted brother Cassiel at the Warden’s side, but the emotion faded when he saw the veteran’s bleak, hollow-eyed gaze.

  ‘Warden!’ shouted Raldoron. ‘Our thanks. Your aid was–’

  ‘We’re not here to aid you!’ spat Annellus, growling out every word. ‘We are here to kill!’ His declaration brought a yell of agreement from Cassiel and the ragged group of legionaries aboard the transport. ‘Either join us or get out of our way!’

  Raldoron gave Meros a glance, then beckoned the woman Niobe to him. ‘Annellus,’ he replied. ‘I’ll forgive your lack of respect this once, but never again.’ He strode to the Mastodon and mounted the vehicle in one swift leap. ‘This machine, your legionaries, you are under my command now, understand?’

  The Warden came at the captain, threatening him with his sparking crozius. ‘You flee the field and then return to give me orders?’ He waved the rod angrily in Raldoron’s face. ‘I kept these battle-brothers alive while all around us turned renegade and gave themselves to fury! I resisted–’

  Raldoron backhanded Annellus across the face and put him down on the hull of the transport. It was not an act of anger, but of control. ‘You resisted,’ the captain agreed, ‘but not well enough.’ He offered the Warden a hand, and gingerly Annellus took it. ‘But now we have an opportunity. A real chance to strike back; instead of letting this madness eat away at our control like a cancer.’

  Meros helped Niobe climb into the transport. ‘She can keep us safe.’

  Annellus’s face showed first annoyance, then confusion, and finally a reluctant acceptance. ‘Forgive me, First Captain,’ he replied. ‘My temper was beyond me… I meant no disrespect.’ His gaze bored into the woman. ‘This one. She is a witch, then?’

  ‘A pariah,’ corrected Raldoron. ‘And the key to our attack.’

  Cassiel met Meros’s gaze and gave a shallow nod. ‘Brother,’ he said. ‘We feared you had been killed when…’ He trailed off, the silent fear in his heart left unspoken.

  ‘Sanguinius is not dead,’ Meros told him.

  ‘We saw him fall,’ said Kaide, grim-faced, not daring to believe.

  ‘The primarch lives, although his wounds are great.’ Raldoron spoke loud enough for all to hear. He pointed toward the towers of agony visible in the distance. ‘But if we do not destroy that edifice, then all lives – the Angel’s and ours – will be forfeit.’

  Kano screamed, giving voice to a pain that went beyond the physical, beyond the corporeal. His body was gone, forgotten to him. It was only his psyche that contained him, and the essence of Mkani Kano was in agony.

  He was a fragment of glass propelled on a wave front, brittle and easily destroyed. He was ash in a storm, disintegrating. He was paper, touched by an inferno. The ex-Librarian reached deep within himself and opened the gates to the power he had kept silent since the day of the edict. Whispers of that force had escaped, now and again, but Kano had never let them go too far, even if there was a part of him that had wanted that release.

  Not so now. He drew the full psychic force within him and clad his mind in it, as if it were ethereal armour. Steeling himself, he plunged into the red fog of the empathic barriers imprisoning the Angel’s spirit. Kano felt his brothers at his back, each of them the wind in his sails, lending their might to the ta
sk.

  Kano screamed, and they all screamed with him. He was aware of seven bright stars flickering about him, one for each psyker who stood in that far-off place aboard the Red Tear, out in the real world.

  With a flash, one of the stars burned bright and faded to blackness; Brother Deon was the first to die. He had given his life to take Kano this far, the force of his will spent as the warp-borne curse reacted against the Blood Angels, repelling their attempt to reach their master.

  Sorrow engulfed Kano, but he pushed through it, falling deeper. There would be time to mourn the lost when this deed was done, and Deon would not be the last name taken for the Sepulchre of Heroes.

  Every step through the red fog was pain, but he could not falter. A dreamscape crowded in around Kano, the head-rush of the endless fall fading into the unreal certainty of ground beneath his feet.

  He was in a stygian void, a cavern of impossible dimensions where the only illumination was a sickly band of light falling from a ragged source kilometres above his head. Things wheeled and turned up there, catching the ill glow. They looked like angels of decay and horror. The ray moved across the colossal chamber with the metronomic regularity of a distant lighthouse. Each time it passed over Kano, he felt soiled by it, and he shrank from its touch. The distant stars of his brothers were feeble and indistinct.

  Every surface in the cavern was draped with a profusion of cords and threads, some as thin as spun silk, others thicker than the legionary’s arm. The threads ran back and forth, snaking over the ground, webbing the air, one atop another in snared knots. They snagged Kano’s bare feet as he tried to press forwards, pulled at his arms and whipped over his cheeks. The threads were red and they were black.

  The red burned his flesh when he touched them, a seething acidic fire that spread fast and hollowed him out inside. It made Kano dizzy and furious; it conjured a sudden arid thirst in his gut, a hunger he instinctively knew no meat or drink would ever sate. The black seared him with cold harsher than the breath of space and rang a bell-chime echo in the depths of his self; it pulled at an old, directionless anger that was borne of something primal and amorphous in the human soul. A rage waiting to be unleashed.

  And there he came upon the Angel Sanguinius. His primarch hung suspended like some hunter’s trophy or the art of a cruel sculptor, the web of threads holding him high above the ground. Cords pulled him with wings spread and arms wide in cruciform posture, his face tilted back to bear the pitiless sweep of the light.

  Kano climbed, ignoring the pain in his hands and feet, pulling himself up over and over. The ascent went on for days or seconds, time stretching away from him. Then Kano was at the Angel’s side, and with no blade to cut the threads he pulled and uncoiled the black and the red, cursing in frustration as he tried to bring freedom to his master.

  ‘Lord, do you hear me?’ he gasped.

  Sanguinius’s eyes snapped open and there was only an ocean of crimson staring back at him. Before he could react, the primarch’s mouth split in a snarl, baring bright, sharp fangs.

  The Angel pulled Kano into a brutal embrace and bit savagely into the flesh of his neck, piercing the artery. Blood, rich and red and heady with the stink of iron, flowed in a great, unending outburst.

  SEVENTEEN

  No Turning Back

  Cursed

  Visions

  The Mastodon raced across the war-torn plainsland, rising and falling over blast craters and shallow vales, fording stagnant streams choked with human dead and other, less identifiable remains. Ahead of the transport, the glistening bone towers of the Cathedral of the Mark grew larger, looming across the sky, their barbed points raking the bilious clouds.

  Meros was at a broken gun-slit where a shattered lascannon had been mounted; the device was a ruin of torn parts and heat-slagged crystal, too cumbersome even to form a decent club if ripped from its pintle. Foul air gusted in through the breaches in the Mastodon’s armour, and he peered out, catching flashes of the fighting all around them.

  He saw fury, not warfare. Battle was an ordered thing. Even the close combat that was the speciality of the Blood Angels was a rational and calculated action forged from focus of skill and years of training. What Meros witnessed out there was more akin to the fray of gladiatorial combat, an undisciplined wildfire of warriors moving against anything that dared to stand against them.

  Every legionary he laid eyes upon was lost in the thick of their own personal hell, reason far behind them and blood-thirst in full control. He saw battle-brothers he knew, good warriors and proud legionaries, drenched from helm to boot in fresh gore and hungry to take more of it. Seeing it close at hand for the first time, Meros was horrified, and yet he was not shocked. To accept that such a furious heart beat within his chest and those of his kinsmen was not impossible. Perhaps he had always known that this potential was there, glimpsed in the darkest moments and the blackest of rages.

  The enemy dead littered the battleground in numbers beyond his reckoning, and ahead of the unkempt berserker advance, the ranks of daemon-things were falling back in clusters. They retreated as the Blood Angels closed a red noose about the temple of bones, the beasts dying in droves.

  For all the hollow, empty sense it gave Meros to see it, the sons of Sanguinius were winning the battle for Signus Prime. And all it had taken was to plunge them into the depths of despair.

  He wanted to shout to them, to bellow the truth into the vox-channels. The Angel lives! Our father lives! But would they heed it even if he did? The blow that felled Sanguinius, the strike that killed five hundred legionaries, had brought something to the surface that would not be so easily silenced.

  In the next moment, his reverie was forgotten as a horde of daemonette cavalry crested a rise and bore down on the transport. Their mounts resembled skinned brood-fowls, blind steeds with heads that were nothing but snapping mouths.

  Meros shouted a warning and killed the first of the mount-beasts with two rounds into its centre-mass, exploding it in a concussion of purple meat. The rider went down, trampled into the dirt by her companions. Then they were flanking the Mastodon; their bony claws snipped off chunks of flapping armour as if it were paper.

  The Apothecary fired again, but the damaged sponson took up too much of his aim arc and he cursed. Meros turned away and found himself falling in with Leyteo and the Warden as they shouldered open the long gunnery hatches on the transport’s roof.

  There was no option but to bull their way on through the enemy lines; the Mastodon could not afford to slow down, for fear that the slower enemy units would catch them and overwhelm the transport’s meagre defences. The mighty engine roared and spat promethium-laced smoke as they thundered onward.

  Leyteo went down on one knee and began a steady pattern of aim-shot-repeat, leading his targets to blast the nymph-like riders out of their saddles. Annellus wielded his crozius, the crackling power field around the winged tip spitting as he swung it in fizzing arcs. He shouted eager defiance to the sky, and Meros gave him room to engage the daemonettes that dared to vault aboard the fast-moving crawler, engaging the riders who dodged Leyteo’s pinpoint shots. Engaging the mag-locks in his boots to secure him, Meros leaned into his attack and steadied his pistol with his off-hand, making every shot he fired a kill.

  Behind his helmet, his jaw was set in grim determination as he fought, but Meros could not deny that a trickle of bloodlust was forming in his hearts, slowly gaining power. Even with the Niobe woman at close hand, it was hard to resist the need to kill that permeated the very air itself. The closer they came to the cathedral, the worse the sense of it became. He thought of Annellus and Cassiel, caught up in the same turbulent emotions.

  He blinked, and his distraction cost him a kill. One of the succubae sprang from its mount, sending the hapless beast to its death beneath the Mastodon’s track cluster. She clattered on to the hull using her claws to punch holes in the plating, then coiled and sprang at the black-armoured Warden. Meros shot at it a moment too late, th
e mass-reactive round deflecting off the deck with a crash of detonation.

  In his zeal, Annellus had not engaged the boot-magnets in his armour to hold him fast, and the daemonette batted him off balance with one of her huge arthropod claws. The blow was hard and connected across his helmet. Ceramite cracked, metal splintered, and the skull-mask twisted off him and tumbled away. Revealed beneath, Annellus’s face was streaked with blood and fierce with anger. Before he could stop himself, the Warden lost his footing and vanished over the back of the Mastodon’s engine compartment, the creature leaping after him with a shriek of joy. Meros twisted in place and emptied the rest of his pistol clip into her back, killing the creature in mid-air.

  The Apothecary unlocked and slid toward the rear of the shuddering vehicle. He saw Annellus back on his feet from where he had fallen, rising as the succubae riders whooped, disengaging from the vehicle to surround him.

  ‘Warden!’ he shouted, his voice hissing over the vox. Meros called out to the Techmarine at the controls. ‘Kaide! Bring us about, Annellus has fallen!’

  ‘No!’ The Warden bellowed the word at the top of his lungs. ‘Don’t stop for me! To the tower, get to the tower!’ He spoke again, but Annellus’s words became a string of animalistic shouts. As the distance between him and the aura of Tillyan Niobe increased, so did his fury overwhelm him. Meros saw the daemonettes charging, heard the crash of his bolter. Annellus leapt at the closest of the succubae and brought it down in a gush of polluted blood.

  ‘We go onwards,’ said Raldoron over the vox.

  Kreed listened to the orchestra of murder beyond the walls of the Cathedral of the Mark and closed his eyes. The music of it was strange and powerful to him, and it stirred emotions that he had long thought dead inside him. The Acolyte’s life had once been a tapestry of passionate joy and fulfilment at his work in his master’s name; then there had come the years of doubt and uncertainty, and now the renewal and rebirth in new purpose. But it was still a difficult time, and there was much to be relearned. Kreed wanted it more than he could express: the thought of taking a place in the Gal Vorbak, of wedding oneself to the mightiest of powers… That inspired him in a way that nothing in his life ever had. But he could not deny he had reservations. Not doubts, because those were things for weaklings. Concerns, perhaps. Matters he wished to understand before he took that final step.