Fear to Tread

by James Swallow

  ‘The Blood Angels will turn upon each other…’ The skinless, sinuous daemon said the words with growing relish.

  The Bloodthirster’s grotesque snout bobbed. ‘And only the most brutal, the most blood-hungry of them, will survive. The essence of their pure souls burned away until only the mindless beast remains.’ He extended his clawed hand, as if in a gesture of twisted, abhorrent comradeship. Upon the beast’s upturned palm, Kreed saw a complex glyph of angular lines crossing one another; the writhing, burning shape of the sigil hurt him to look upon it. ‘In that moment I will offer them the Mark of Khorne, and they will take it without hesitation. Can you imagine the heart of the Angel in that moment, Kyriss? How his love for his sons will strangle him with a flood of the bleakest despair? His heart will break and the Blood God will have a new army.’

  ‘And the Angel will weep.’ Kyriss licked its lips, savouring the thought, wavering between his orders and this new possibility. ‘That would be delectable.’

  Ka’Bandha nodded, then pointed at the other daemon. ‘Of course, that flesh-proxy you wear will need to die along the way. But your essence will be freed to return to the warp through the meat-death.’

  ‘What?’ Kyriss’s pinkish-grey flesh flushed red with renewed fury, the pendulum of its manner swinging back toward anger. ‘No! I am no sacrifice for this maggot! I am the mistress-master, high beast and exalted! I did not manifest in this place to be manipulated like some ephemeral. The Warmaster will obey!’

  ‘You’re wrong,’ said Kreed, finding a new boldness with the words. ‘The Bloodthirster sees it, even if you do not. You underestimate the Warmaster at your cost, daemon. Your champion has plans of his own that you will never be able to control.’

  He opened his eyes and rose from his knees, red sand swirling about him with every movement. Kano staggered forwards, and pain was his reward. Each footstep across the rust-coloured stone was knives jammed into his chest.

  He marched on his agony, clad only in a hooded fighting surplice. Blood sluiced from his body, fat red droplets of it tapping out a cadence across the stonework, painting his path.

  So much blood. Could the body hold such a volume? Kano was wet with it, the slow and constant flow from the seeping punctures in his throat. I should be dead. The stream was steady as rainfall. It should have stopped. It should stop! The healer implant, the organ of Larraman, was failing him. The wounds should have clotted and closed by now! Kano had never bled for so long. He did not understand why he was still alive. He did not understand where he was.

  Out beyond the arches of the endless cloister he saw a burned, post-nuclear desert and, closer to hand, the towers of a fallen citadel and the broken stubs of shattered statues. This was Baal, the home world of the Blood Angels, and he was walking the ruins of their fortress-monastery.

  But that was not so. Baal thrived! The fortress was intact and whole, the Legion strong and steady–

  But not here. In his bones, Kano felt an uncountable weight of ages, a span of time and distance so broad he could not measure it. The bleak sky over his head was filled with dying suns and only a handful shone brightly, clustered as if watching over him.

  This was not now, he realised. He was looking into an age unhappened, a vision of a remote tomorrow ten or twenty or a hundred thousand years hence.

  Is this all that will remain of us? The question chilled him. Ruins and dust?

  The nerves in Kano’s bare feet caught fire and he staggered back, glancing downwards to find the source of the pain. There, snaking away along the unending cloister, were two thick ropes of heavy, woven silk. One black, one red.

  He stooped awkwardly to gather them up, flinching at the pain that coursed through his hands at their touch. Hissing, Kano pulled at the cords and threaded them between his stiffening fingers.

  I have to follow. He was here for a reason. I have to see. He was here to see something. To find someone.

  The bright stars dazzled his eyes. He looked up at them and felt his world turn suddenly, inverting, the walls of the stone arcade becoming drenched in blackness.

  Through the far arch the red rock became dark metal whorled with quivering, ever-shifting glyphs. The passageway had changed. Now it was a portal into a different place, a scene that sickened Kano to observe it.

  A ship, a throne room, a mad lord’s lair. He saw a baleful eye with a slit black pupil against a blood-crimson field and beneath it a great portal looking down upon a world that could only be Terra. Fires in the space around it. Ships burning in their thousands. A war of unspeakable ferocity, but all of it rendered insignificant by the two titans who faced each other alone across the blood-streaked deck.

  One, a god in gold and platinum with laurels about his head and a sword made of righteous fury in his hand, a being of such majesty that Kano was thrown to his knees by the aura of his perfection.

  The Emperor, beloved by all.

  The other, night-clad in black iron and brass, glowering and tall like a war engine wearing the face of a man, the skulls of dead heroes jangling from his belt, a great claw clasping at the air and a spiked mace raised high.

  Warmaster Horus, traitor son.

  Kano saw and knew it could not be happening. He saw it and he knew it did happen, would happen, will happen, could happen.

  Sword crossed armour and fell away in sparks. The Warmaster shouted defiance at his father and shattered the blade with his mace. Incredibly, the Emperor staggered beneath the blow.

  And then with a sound like mountains colliding, the Warmaster’s leviathan claw pierced the Emperor’s armour and he bled fire. Son murdered father, and Kano watched it occur, the shock of the sight turning him to stone.

  He was not there.

  When Kano opened his eyes everything was different.

  Gone were the black iron walls of the battle-barge and in their place he saw the polished marble of the Imperial Palace’s crystal arboria, the air full of smouldering flowers and the great crystalflex dome raining down in fragments. Above, a cluster of bright burning stars. Only five now.

  Joy surged in him to see the Angel, alive, in full force and presence, storming forwards with a glittering spear in his grip, his wings rising high and wide in gales of white. At Sanguinius’s back, an army of his battle-brothers with fury chained for war.

  They ran toward a battle host of dark armour and screaming, horned faces. At the head of the enemy legion, shouting curses in dead languages, Horus stood wreathed in a stygian cloak.

  Sanguinius gave a shout and hurled the spear with such force that a sonic boom shocked across the ruined gardens. The blade-tip fell true, piercing the black-slit eye upon the Warmaster’s chest. Horus perished, his body erupting into flames.

  His brother is dead.

  Everything was different.

  Now the ruins of Signus Prime returned to his sight, the great bone temple no more than an ossuary heap, skeletons slagged to black ash by warp-fire.

  A new monument to horror stood in its stead, alike to the trees of the world called Murder, a scaffold built of dead legionaries. Four stars shone down upon it. Around its base stood the last of the Blood Angels, each chipping at their armour, defacing the wings of the aquila that they once bore so proudly. Etching instead, with acid and broken swords, a new shape. Angle upon angle, heavy thick lines that resembled an iron skull, a throne for a God of Blood. Consecrating their new, heretic loyalty over the bodies of their dead brothers and the broken spirit of their father.

  His Legion falls to hell.

  A blink of reality and nothing was the same.

  And so again, in the halls of the Vengeful Spirit, as Sanguinius struck out at his brother, cutting a fearsome crack in the Warmaster’s nigh-impregnable armour. But it was not enough, and the Angel’s great red blade broke. Warmaster Horus’s monstrous claw clasped at Sanguinius’s throat and Kano felt it about his own. The Angel’s bones shattered as the life was crushed from him. Another star flared and faded.

  He dies there.


  The world changed.

  A chamber of kings once more, but on no world Kano knew. A crowd of warriors from a dozen Legions gathered, in colours across the spectrum under pennants of glory and promise. The Angel and a cluster of his brothers, solemn and determined in equal measure. Overhead, a star died.

  Legionaries, humans and primarchs, all of them bowed to Sanguinius as he sat himself upon the throne of empire, the laurel about his head.

  Kano reached out, but the only word on his lips was ‘master’.

  He is Emperor.

  And the cloister returned, the sand and the endless sound of the winds; but this was not a distant tomorrow. It was far closer. He saw the gates to the caverns beneath Baal’s red desert, where the Hall of Heroes resided. The last star slowly dimmed.

  Kano heard the Angel’s voice. I dreamed of you, my friend. He spoke of Raldoron, and Kano saw the First Captain crossing the corridor. A majestic grav-litter of gold and ruby followed him. I saw you on Baal. You were in the caverns beneath the fortress-monastery. You were filled with pride.

  And Raldoron was proud; but he wept with it and bore a black band of mourning across his arm. He led the body of their father towards its final resting place.

  He will die.

  Kano opened his eyes for the last time and beheld a warrior in heavy, archaic armour glistening with wet crimson and hellish radiance, raised aloft by a pair of massive wings drenched in vitae, every feather dripping with tainted blood.

  A screaming, red-stained angel.

  EIGHTEEN

  In the Company of Death

  Ragefire

  Vengeance

  The red tide broke upon the walls of the great cathedral with unspeakable violence and the clash of a hundred thousand weapons. Leaderless and out of control, the Blood Angels acted on lethal instinct, converging at the towers of bone with only one impulse powering them forward. Hate drove them into the cohorts of bloodletters and succubae defending the approaches to the temple, and they tore the daemonic creatures into shreds. The sons of Sanguinius were no longer a Legion, but a force of nature laying waste to everything that stood in their way.

  Bolters screamed and filled the air with fycelene smoke and explosive fire; and when the guns ran dry they became clubs, or else they were forgotten in favour of blades and chainswords, battle mauls and power fists. Space Marines, Terminators and Dreadnoughts united in one single emotion: rage.

  That fury manifested itself in a need for blood, an unquenchable thirst for the spilling of their enemy’s life essence. The pitiful colonists of Signus Prime – the ones who had not the fortune to die quickly for sake of the gargantuan ossuary or to turn to the perverse worship of the hell-cults – had been the meat upon which the daemons had built new bodies for themselves. Every flight of furies, every harrier or foot soldier beast had been reborn from a man or woman who had once been wholly human. The lesser daemons could not manifest completely in this place, and so it was that they needed meat to clothe their twisted soul-energies. The warp spawn inhabited them, malformed them, made them flesh-proxy.

  But that flesh could bleed, and it could die. On the steps of the Cathedral of the Mark, the Blood Angels painted the ground red.

  Perhaps it had taken them an eternity, or perhaps the blink of an eye. Time seemed malleable inside the bone temple, moving in fits and starts instead of linear progression. Meros had lost count of the number of creatures they had dispatched as they climbed the wide spiralling staircase that rose up inside the central tower. As before, when they had flown across the battle zone towards the cathedral, they seemed to move without travelling, and more than once he wondered if it were all some trick of the mind.

  It was Niobe who showed them the way. He carried her, for she could not keep up with their pace, hoisting her to his shoulder in the way a parent might cradle a child. The woman lost her voice – through fear or something else, he could not be sure – but she pointed this way and that, directing them along arcades of bone and through the endless passages. The beasts looked through her, ignoring them, and Raldoron used the advantage well, killing anything that could threaten them.

  But as they came to the tall, wavering curtains of tanned human flesh, Niobe let out a whimper, which became a sob and then a cry, low and pained. Blood flowed freely from her nostrils.

  Guns and swords drawn, the legionaries stormed into the chamber and found the masters of the horrors they had been fighting for so long.

  There were two of them: one was the bat-winged bastard that had struck down the Angel and taken the lives of Nakir’s company, the other the serpent-goat freak that had dared to challenge the primarch on the bridge of his flagship. Meros had never felt any hatred as righteous as the one that burst inside him at that moment. The reaction was pure: these creatures were simply not supposed to exist. All he wanted at that moment was to make that a certainty.

  The Bloodthirster reacted with a roar of fury and flew at them across the pit in the centre of the chamber, black wings snapping as it soared up and dove down at the legionaries.

  Raldoron shouted the order to scatter and the warriors broke apart in a flurry of motion. Meros shoved Niobe into cover as Orexis moved with him, both Blood Angels turning as they ran to fire at the screeching daemon lord.

  The one that called itself Ka’Bandha landed like an earthquake and struck out with axe and whip. Meros saw Racine and two more battle-brothers sliced open. He shouted and fired at the beast’s head, aiming for its eyes, but the creature blocked the shots with the flat of its massive axe.

  Spears of fire erupted into being as the legionaries released a salvo of plasma bolts at the monster’s torso and its gnarled legs, shots striking home in flash-cracks of burned, rotten tissue and oily fluids. It roared as the warriors hurled fire into its path, stomping forward and taking the hits as if it relished the brutality of the pain.

  The other beast-lord, the thing Kyriss, danced and spun at the far side of the chamber, giggling and braying with harsh amusement as it watched the fight unfold. Close to the sallow-fleshed monster, Meros glimpsed figures that rang a wrong note in his mind. He saw two warriors of the Legiones Astartes, silhouetted in the daemon’s repellent aura. The armour was unmistakable, Mark IV warplate.

  But the colour was wrong. These were not Blood Angels. He could make out what looked like odd runic texts carved into the defaced ceramite, and where there should have been a sanctioned sigil of the Imperial Legions upon their shoulder pauldron there was only the grotesque icon of a howling devil-face.

  ‘Kreed,’ hissed Sergeant Orexis, recognising the traitors. ‘Harox. They dare show themselves…’

  Any lingering doubts about the alliance between the Word Bearers and the architects of the Signus atrocity melted away and Meros cursed them. He went to take aim, but a group of horn-crested monsters clambered out of the glowing pit, hellblades burning in their claws. They rushed forward to join the Bloodthirster, cutting at the air and roaring.

  Raldoron and the rest of the squad retaliated, splitting their fire between the great monster and its soldier-minions. The brass whip cracked like thunder and more men died. Crimson-skinned daemons scuttled forward, stabbing as they went, wailing as they tasted the aura of Niobe’s null-zone about them.

  The First Captain vaulted from cover and killed one, blowing it apart. ‘Orexis!’ he shouted. ‘Converge fire on the leader!’ He shot Meros a glare. ‘The witch-mind! Bring her, keep her close! She pains them!’

  The Apothecary turned to Niobe, who shook her head violently. ‘No,’ she cried. ‘Don’t you hear him?’ The female suddenly grabbed at Meros’s arm and looked at him with wild eyes. ‘Can’t you hear him screaming?’

  ‘Come with me,’ he insisted. ‘I will keep you safe–’

  ‘You can’t save him!’ Niobe shouted. ‘They have already killed him a million times over!’ Her hand jerked, and she pointed furiously up toward the apex of the tower above. ‘There is nothing left!’

  Both Meros and Raldo
ron looked where she indicated and saw the massive brass-and-crystal mechanism hanging from its tethers above them, swaying as eldritch energy flicked around its corners. It seemed to waver and then grow clearer, as if Niobe’s scrutiny made it more real. The thick crimson mist inside was swirling with turbulence, almost as if it were trying to escape from the confines of the arcane capsule.

  ‘Look what they have done to him!’ yelled Niobe, tears streaking her smoke-dirty face. ‘Can you not see?’

  The light from the haze touched the anger kindling in Meros’s hearts and he remembered the moment on the battlefield when Ka’Bandha had shackled the same force to kill a whole company of his brothers. Kano had spoken of a source to all the fury and pain that cast its shadow over the Signus Cluster, and there was no doubt in the legionary’s mind that at this moment, he looked upon it.

  He could not describe it, the emotion that ran through him with such stark force. It was beyond fear and know-ledge, beyond certainty. Meros had no experience with which to frame this understanding. He simply knew that this thing had to be destroyed.

  It was then he saw the face.

  The boiling, churning mist gathered and thickened, and for one brief instant it tried to make the shape of a man. But not a man. A legionary. A Blood Angel.

  The half-formed image wavered, as if it could not quite remember how to hold itself solid, but it was enough for Raldoron to utter a vehement Baalite curse, enough for the blood to drain from the First Captain’s face in a moment of ghastly recognition.

  ‘I know him,’ Raldoron husked. ‘In the Throne’s name, it is Tagas! The captain of the 111th!’

  ‘No,’ Meros shook his head. ‘That cannot be… Captain Tagas died on One-Forty-Twenty, the world called Murder.’ He remembered the memorial scrolls upon the Red Tear’s honour wall, Tagas’s name there along with all the others. ‘It’s a trick!’

  ‘His body was never recovered,’ said Raldoron, emotion choking his words. ‘I knew him better than any battle-brother in the Legion! I swear it is he! He is trapped–’