Fear to Tread

by James Swallow

  Even as he said the words, the face in the red mist broke apart and it became inchoate again, as if the essence of fury had been distilled into an elemental mass and contained, chained like the sun-bright plasma of a fusion reactor’s core. The brief moment of coherence was lost forever.

  An instinct drew Meros’s line of sight back toward the creature Kyriss, its doe-eyed gaze meeting his for a brief instant. It laughed at him, great mocking shakes of its muscular torso resonating out in chugs of derision from its bovine snout. Meros glimpsed the unending cruelty in that predatory stare and knew that Raldoron was not mistaken. ‘I think they killed him long ago, captain. They have bound him into that infernal device.’

  ‘Can you hear his screams?’ said Niobe. ‘What have they done to him?’

  A brother of their Legion, a dead legionary yet undying, and these monsters had committed their greatest act of desecration upon him. If anything of Tagas had still remained, it was the wisp of a soul, the faintest echo of what he once had been, and he had spent it on warning them of what they were about to face.

  Kano came back, and the transition was punishing. His thoughts were a jumble of incoherent images and half-felt emotions, pieces of his self left scattered in the trail of a rough awakening. He had been so close to his master’s thoughts, barely touching the trapped mind of the primarch, but then it had all gone away. His connection snapped, broken into flaming threads. The dream-realm and the visions, the strange future scenes he had witnessed, all were dragged back into nothing and Kano was ejected from the ethereal.

  Reality interposed itself on him with crushing force and the legionary collapsed to the deck, his hands flat upon the metal floor of the medicae chamber. The odour of burned flesh and hot ash stung his nostrils and he blinked, trying to see through rheumy eyes. Kano heard a low, gasping moan and raised his head. He was so weak; there was barely enough energy in him to take a breath. The meta-concert of minds had drained him to the marrow.

  He looked up to see Ecanus sink to his knees, a fountain of arterial blood spurting up from a grotesque wound in his neck. Kano’s trusted friend and battle-brother died then, the light fading from his eyes, his body toppling forwards to land in a heap.

  Ecanus was not the only one. The others had perished, but in a manner more horrific, more fantastic. Salvator, Novenus, Deon, all of them were burned grey effigies of themselves, their bodies consumed from within by uncontrolled psi-fire. His brothers had surrendered themselves to project his consciousness into Sanguinius’s mind, through the veil of darkness – and all for nought.

  Kano tried to rise, and he saw how Ecanus had been killed. A figure stood over the dead psyker, a human with a mad gaze and a heavy blade in his hand.

  Murder, then, not sacrifice.

  A legionary’s blood glistened on the knife, but as Kano watched the metal seemed to drink it in, absorbing the vitae into itself. The man was one of the survivors Meros had recovered from Scoltrum. Just a man, an ordinary human being.

  And yet he had killed a Space Marine, tearing open poor Ecanus as he drifted insensate in the depths of a psychic trance. A coward’s assault.

  ‘I will… end you for that…’ Kano struggled, unable to gain a footing. Anger flashed in his eyes. His body refused to obey him. ‘Why…?’

  ‘This is always how it was going to end,’ said the man, and there was an echo under his words, as if another voice was making him parrot its own speech. ‘Hengist was always loyal, embedded from the start, born and raised to obey. A weapon-son, a piece upon the board placed to be ready.’ Suddenly his face twisted in a leering, snarl. ‘I always knew!’ He shouted the words, spittle flying from his lips. ‘Hengist and Lutgardis, Horsa and Phyria, the cult-brothers were ready.’ The blade came up; now it was clean. ‘Always ready,’ he muttered.

  Kano watched him pull back the hood over his scalp and saw where the man had cut a ring studded with eight points into his forehead. Ecanus’s killer stalked towards him around the cruciform dais where the primarch still lay, silent and unmoving.

  The warrior dragged himself to his knees, pulling at a pillar to support his weight. This madman would murder him as he had murdered Ecanus, striking when he was weakened and unable to fight back. Sanguinius would never be re-awakened.

  Kano lost his grip and crashed back to the floor. His vision blurred and he tried desperately to pull himself away from the moment, from the betrayal of his flesh toward the eternal strength of his soul.

  ‘You will die now,’ said the madman.

  ‘You first,’ grated Kano, as his thoughts touched a burning kernel of power lost and deep inside his spirit. A power he had kept corralled for far too long.

  The psyker raised his hand and let go. The air shrieked as a crackling bolt of ruby lightning erupted from Kano’s palm and strobed across the chamber. Hengist exploded even before he could scream in pain, blood and meat vaporising in a wet mist that darkened the floor and ceiling. After-light energy discharged randomly, crawling across the metal decking, short-circuiting sense monitors and biolume stacks.

  It could have been a hundred years before Kano dragged himself from the compartment, lurching into the corridor. He fell against the walls, stumbling like a drunkard. Signus Prime’s wan light spilled into the broken passageway, the dust in the reeking air coating the bodies of the dead that littered the floor. Human corpses lay everywhere he looked, and sat upon the chests of some of them were winged harpies feasting upon their cooling meat.

  The creatures spat when they saw Kano coming. They burst into frantic flight, wings droning as they spun out into the dead sky through the places where the Red Tear’s hull had been ripped away.

  Kano stumbled again, falling against the broken wall. It took all he had in him to come this far. He wanted to drop to the deck and slumber, let the lull of his sus-an membrane overtake his taxed body and rest. To do so would be to admit the truth.

  ‘I have failed…’ he breathed. The promise he had made – to give his all to reach out to the mind of his primarch, trapped there in a cage of tormented visions – that promise had crumbled beyond his grasp, and the very warriors who might have turned the tide of this war lay dead because of it. He had been so close. Just a few moments more, if Ecanus had not been killed…

  All around him the empty halls of the grounded battle-barge were mute witness to this unfolding truth. His brothers were gone, the Red Tear abandoned as the great thirst for blood had finally overwhelmed the Legion. Kano peered at the distant tower of the hellish cathedral. The tower of bone was calling to him as it had called to them all. It would be the monument to their ending.

  A tide of wretched misery swept over Kano, so great that it robbed him of his breath. ‘I have failed my Legion. My kinsmen. My primarch.’ He closed his eyes to the shame of it.

  ‘You have not.’

  Kano jerked, eyes snapping open as if bolting awake from the deepest sleep. Despite the chill and the foetor of the air, despite the bleak radiance of the Signusi stars bleeding through the sickly sky, there was bright amber and shining white before him.

  A towering figure, a mythic form carved by light and forged from gold and crimson. Sanguinius stood over him, the Angel’s expression that of a father filled with all the conflicting emotions his soul could contain. Pride and sorrow, dread and elation, these and a hundred more.

  ‘My lord,’ Kano whispered, afraid to believe it. He reached out to touch the primarch’s arm. This was no vision; his fingers met sun-warmed ceramite.

  For a moment, the greatest sadness weighed the Angel’s patrician face. ‘You gave much to bring me back, my son. You paid a high cost.’

  ‘We did what we thought was right…’

  He raised a hand to silence him. ‘We’ll speak of that, but not now.’ He frowned. ‘Where are your brothers, Kano?’

  The legionary raised a weary hand and pointed toward the Cathedral of the Mark.

  Sanguinius nodded gravely, his amber eyes surveying the wreckage around them with d
ismay. ‘Look at what has been wrought here, set in motion by lies.’ He stumbled back on his injured legs, his powerful wings unfurling to their fullest extent. ‘I swear to you, it will go no further.’ Kano’s liege lord spared him a look, briefly placing a hand on his shoulder. ‘Your battle today has been fought and won. Now I will end this.’

  With a storm-roar, the Angel vaulted into the sky, drawing his great crimson sword as he rose. Polluted clouds broke, scattering away from him as if in fear, and the primarch became a streak of golden fire, falling toward the temple of bones like a blazing comet.

  A single feather, pure and dazzling white, settled slowly to the deck at Kano’s feet.

  Since the war for Signus had begun, Captain Raldoron had seen much that had tested his reason, his stoic character, and for want of a better word, his faith. Yet it seemed that there would be no end to the obscenity of betrayal that patterned every assault the Blood Angels had suffered. Lies and hidden truths, creatures out of myth and fable, all these things were hard to take – but none so difficult as the risible horror of treachery.

  Raldoron discharged his bolter into the screeching face of a bloodletter, beheading it with the gun’s back-blast. The crimson-skinned body stumbled about, sword still swinging wildly. He finished it with a hard kick that sent the daemon-form stumbling back over the lip of the glowing pit and down toward the eldritch fires writhing below. Warp-flame licked hungrily at the walls of the broad flue, emerging from some non-space pierced by the psychic pain of millions of victims.

  As the battle raged about the chamber, his warriors continuing to engage Ka’Bandha and the other monstrous fiends, the captain’s gaze slipped for a heartbeat. It dropped toward the alien light of the pit. The illumination leaking from it soured everything. It was as if the Cathedral of the Mark had been built atop a wound in the flesh of reality.

  The distraction almost took his life. A curved scimitar flashed at the edge of his vision and he spun, narrowly avoiding a cut that would have opened him wide.

  Harox. The taciturn Word Bearer had come to make a trophy of the Blood Angel.

  ‘Why have you done this?’ Raldoron snapped, the question escaping him. ‘Why did you turn?’

  ‘You will never know, nor would you ever understand,’ Harox grunted, feinting, striking back with his sword.

  ‘Damn you, then!’ The curse exploded from Raldoron’s lips in a violent shout, and he felt his control slip away. The captain’s bolter barked twice, the rounds slamming into Harox at close range. Divots of armour blasted free and the Word Bearer stumbled. ‘Damn you!’ Raldoron’s fury took him and he clubbed Harox down to the floor of skulls with the smoking barrel of the gun, batting his sword from his grip with mad ferocity.

  His armoured fist opened and without conscious thought, Raldoron tore across Harox’s neck, ripping it open. The Word Bearer’s blood jetted out in a cascade of crimson, splashing across his attacker. Before Harox could scramble free, Raldoron finished him, caving in his opponent’s skull with his armoured boot.

  He rocked back, shocked at the abrupt pulse of aggression that had moved through him. Tainted blood covered his armour, smoking into vapour.

  Kyriss watched it all, and threw him a mocking bow, cackling at the scene. Immediately, the anger returned and Raldoron took a step toward the serpentine daemon, his thoughts filling with the desire to tear it open and see the colour of its blood, just as he had with Harox.

  He halted, pushing back against the impulse, refusing to let it take control. Raldoron instinctively glanced up and saw the roiling crimson aura bathing him, the hideous glow of the captured rage in the crystal capsule. The malevolent influence of the daemonic device was growing stronger with every passing second. It had to be destroyed.

  The captain sprinted for the edge of the chamber, toward a ladder made of limb bones that rose toward a ribcage gantry ringing the walls. If he could get close, find an angle to take a shot…

  ‘Where are you going, insect?’ Hot, cloying breath washed over him with a foul stink like rotting flowers, and suddenly Kyriss was there in front of him, the creature’s sinuous legs and multiple arms twitching. The beast skipped toward him, blocking his path. ‘So transparent,’ it lowed, sniggering. ‘Do you not yet understand? You cannot win! You can only give yourself to the ragefire.’ Kyriss nodded toward Harox’s corpse and burst out laughing, spiteful and loud. ‘You already have!’

  The fury rose again and Raldoron let it propel him forward. He coiled his muscles and sprang at the daemon – but not in attack, as it expected. Instead, he dodged right, twisting to slip past beneath its guard toward the ladder.

  The captain’s boots cracked across the crowns of broken skulls, but then the world became a wall of pain and his ruse was blunted. Kyriss pirouetted like a dancer and one of the black claws on its secondary arms raked across his chest and shoulder, shredding ceramite and ripping away his pauldron. The talon closed, and Raldoron felt his innards being crushed as his armour was compacted.

  ‘Khorne-child!’ Kyriss called out to its daemonic companion. ‘Deal with this.’

  The bat-winged goliath across the chamber knocked away a pair of warriors firing on it and turned. Kyriss discarded Raldoron like a distasteful piece of meat and he spun from its killing grip, tumbling across the mottled floor to halt beneath the sickly illumination of the vast cathedral window.

  Ka’Bandha stalked closer as Raldoron struggled to his knees, grasping for the handle of his sword. The captain saw the wicked smile on the monster’s lips, saw the rise of its massive, rough-hewn axe. ‘The blood of the weak will oil the blades of the strong.’ The words bubbled deep in its throat.

  The axe-head rose for the killing blow, just as a shadow passed across the maimed suns in the sky outside. A shadow in grace and swiftness, moving with unstoppable purpose.

  The beast Ka’Bandha hesitated.

  Glassy matter and bone frames exploded into millions of fragments, the circular mandala-window destroyed by the force of the Angel’s arrival.

  Sanguinius landed with a thunderous roar at his back, his wings rising in shimmering arches of white, the shine of his battle armour as dazzling as the light of daybreak. A pure force of will radiated from him, magnificent and unending. The primarch was at that moment the very antithesis of the shroud of hate and horror that had taken root on Signus Prime; it was as if the universe itself had decided to express its disgust at these daemon-things through his martial fury. Sanguinius rose like a golden storm, vengeance incarnate, the righteous power of a brother betrayed and a father wronged crackling at his fingertips.

  Lightning-swift, he surged forwards, the length of his crimson-bladed great sword lifting to cut the ashen dust. He did not turn to lay his gaze upon the goat-headed Kyriss, not even for an instant, yet Sanguinius’s sword left his hand with a flick of his forearm and it sang as it sliced through the air toward the pink-skinned daemon.

  The tip of the blade pierced Kyriss’s muscular gut with such force that ran it through, slamming the beast back into the walls of the bone temple. The creature released a high-pitched, ululating scream as it struggled in place, pinned there by the full length of the sword, like an insect of curious nature captured for study.

  This was done, on fleet foot, in the blink of an eye. The Bloodthirster was already turning towards the Angel, its execution of Captain Raldoron forgotten in the face of this new attack. Axe and lash flexed in brawny, clawed hands as it squared up to meet him.

  Sanguinius crossed the yellowed tessellate of the chamber floor, the cheers of his noble sons echoing. Bloodletters baying for murder rushed to meet him, hellblades red as hate rebounding off his armour. The primarch gave them little heed, smashing them aside or crushing them into the ground with heavy swinging blows from his mailed fists.

  Ka’Bandha spat and threw the arc of his whip out in a downward stroke. Sanguinius did not falter in his approach, his left wing snapping forward to cloak his face, meeting the barbed tip of the lash, blood jetting wh
ere the hooks bit deep. He hissed in pain but shrugged off the assault, closing to point-blank distance, reaching for his foe. The daemon was ready for him and the Bloodthirster’s other arm fell with the axe set to cleave the Angel’s skull in two. Sanguinius’s hands came together in a strident crash of sound, catching the blade between them.

  For a brief moment, the two titans struggled against each other, eyes locked, muscles bunching.

  ‘You came back,’ grated the daemon.

  ‘My sons found me.’

  ‘That changes nothing, little angel.’ The axe trembled, shifting back and forth. One mistake and the blade would fall.

  Across the chamber, the impaled Kyriss bellowed over the sound of the Angel’s legionaries in battle with its foot soldiers. ‘Kill him!’

  Ka’Bandha’s tongue flicked. ‘Your precious Legion will be destroyed, Sanguinius. You cannot stop it. Even now your chosen are caught in the depths of a killing rage they cannot escape. It is too late! The poison is in them. You know that as well as I.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ hissed Sanguinius. ‘But they will not fall today. I will not permit it.’ He bared his fangs in a snarl. ‘This ends now… daemon.’

  With a wordless shout, the Angel twisted his arms, his hands tearing at the strange, grisly material of the axe-head. A sickening crack broke about the room like the snapping of a spine, and Ka’Bandha’s weapon shattered across its length, scattering pieces of shrapnel. Before the creature could react, Sanguinius grasped one of the Bloodthirster’s curved horns and jerked it forwards with all his might. The primarch brought up his fist to meet the beast’s snout and landed a flurry of quick blows from the knuckles of his gauntlet before Ka’Bandha shoved him away.

  Spitting out gobs of black, fuming blood and broken teeth, the daemon growled. ‘Look at you. Where is the noble angel now, abhuman? Better the sweet blood to smother you!’ Ka’Bandha’s arm swung back, the brass cords of its whip scraping across the bone floor, flicking up into the air for another lethal blow as powerful as the one that had struck down the Angel upon the Plains of the Damned.