“And so it begins again,” muttered Tanthius, signalling to the gunners in the Land Raiders to start their bombardments and bracing his own weapons, ready for the combat to come.
The eldar ranger was sitting silently in the cell. Its legs were crossed and it was sitting on its heels. Its eyes were closed and its lips were working silently, as though muttering silent prayers to some unspeakable eldar god. The silence was abruptly shattered as the door to the cell burst open, smashing back against the wall with violent force, leaving the shape of Gabriel filling the doorway.
“Get up!” snapped Gabriel, taking a step into the tiny chamber.
The alien did not move. It didn’t even open its eyes.
“Get up!” shouted Gabriel, his eyes burning with anger at the indefatigable composure and quiet of the creature.
Still no response.
“Get up, now!” yelled Gabriel, his fists clenching automatically as his anger started to boil. Taking another step forward, he swung a thunderous punch against the eldar’s face, striking it against the side of its head and knocking it sprawling onto the ground.
“I know you can understand me, ranger,” he whispered, stooping down and lifting the alien off the ground by the collar of his cloak. “I have spoken to your kind before. I know that you can understand me.”
Gabriel straightened his arm and slammed the eldar back against the wall of the cell, pushing his hand around the creature’s neck and holding him off the ground, half-choking the infuriatingly calm alien. “You will help us, or you will die. It is that simple,” explained Gabriel, glaring into the smooth, unwrinkled face. “Do you understand? Do you understand!”
The alien opened its eyes and looked down at Gabriel, letting an aura of sadness wisp out through its gaze.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” stated Gabriel, ignoring the melancholy eyes of the creature in his grasp. He withdrew his hand and let the eldar slump down the wall into a heap on the ground. Then he snatched at the creature’s slender wrists, clamping them into the vice-like grip of his own hand, before turning and dragging the alien out of the cell, towing it behind him like a dead weight.
After nearly a kilometre of winding passageways, Gabriel kicked open the huge, heavy doors of the librarium and dragged the limp, unresisting eldar inside, striding up the central aisle towards the magnificent stained-glass windows at the far end.
With a swing of his arm, Gabriel dumped the alien into an unceremonious pile on the floor next to the old wooden table under the window.
“What does that say?” he snapped, pointing at the wraithbone tablet on the tabletop.
The eldar didn’t even sit up.
“What is that?” demanded Gabriel. “This is not a game, eldar. We have no time for your tricks or your games—we are not your toys. People are dying because of this. What is it?”
The ranger stirred, propping himself up on his arms and looking up at Gabriel. The ranger’s emerald eyes glowed with complicated depths, but he said nothing.
At the limit of his patience, Gabriel reached down and grasped the alien’s long hair, lifting it off the ground by its scalp and thrusting its head towards the tablet, pushing its face right up against the shimmering wraithbone.
“What does it say?”
For the first time, the ranger offered some resistance, struggling against Gabriel’s grip and recoiling from the tablet, pushing against the edge of the table with its arms. It shook its head, and its eyes blazed with sudden awareness and shock.
“What does it say?” demanded Gabriel, holding the creature firmly in place, ignoring its flailing attempts to get away. “Tell me, and I’ll put you back in your cell.”
The eldar thrashed impotently, rising urgency written across its face.
Ishandruir! Yngir Ishandruir!
CHAPTER TEN: COLLABORATION
“It was no eldar,” said Jonas, sitting up with his legs thrown over the side of the medicae-tablet in the monastery’s apothecarion. He looked older and more tired than usual, as though part of his life-force had been drained out of him by his recent traumas. In the background, he could hear the dull thuds of impacts against the walls of the monastery.
In the temporary absence of an apothecary on Rahe’s Paradise, Tech-marine Ephraim of the Ninth Company was administering to the damaged librarian. He could do little more than check the integrity of the ancient armour’s seals and ensure that its more mechanical features were functioning properly. Jonas had regained consciousness by himself, once he had been carried to the apothecarion and deposited on the adamantium tablet. He didn’t appear to have suffered any physical wounds that his own enhanced physiology could not deal with on its own.
“You’re certain?” pressed Gabriel, momentarily concerned that the great scholar’s memory might be playing tricks on him: there had certainly been eldar down in the excavation, as he and Prathios knew to their cost.
“I am certain, captain,” replied Jonas, pushing himself off the edge of the tablet and trying his weight on his feet. He shook slightly with the effort, as though it took more of his strength than he anticipated to keep himself upright.
“Then what was it?” asked Gabriel, sidelining his scepticism for the time being and instinctively reaching forward to help steady the father librarian. He was certain that the eldar were at the centre of it, even if it had not been the eldar themselves that had attacked Jonas.
“I cannot say,” replied Jonas, leaning back against the heavy tablet for support but lifting his eyes to meet Gabriel’s. “But I am sure that it was no eldar trickery. I was inspecting the new find—that fascinating black pyramid—I assume that you saw it? There was nothing around. No footfalls and not even the hint of a psychic presence—the eldar give off such a psychic stench that it is almost impossible for them to take a Blood Ravens librarian by surprise. There was nothing…”
Gabriel waited as Jonas lapsed into his memories. He could see the librarian’s eyes lose their focus as he stared into his own past, replaying the events of earlier that day in his mind.
“It was a shadow. Just the suggestion of a figure or a form, like the wraiths found in the ancient legends of this world. It was as though it was something not quite real, not quite alive, not quite… there at all.”
The librarian sounded wistful, as though genuinely amazed by what he had seen. Gabriel watched him carefully, unused to this kind of sentimentality from one of the Blood Ravens.
“I don’t know how to describe it, Gabriel. It rushed at me, as though from everywhere at once, engulfing me in its darkness. Then it vanished, as suddenly and inexplicably as it had appeared, leaving me drained and semi-conscious on the ground.” Jonas paused, recalling something else. “It vanished when the eldar arrived,” he realised. “They came before you and it fled from them, as though recoiling at their stench as it flowed into the cavern.”
Gabriel nodded carefully, unsure what to make of Jonas’ account. He looked over towards Ephraim, looking for some kind of sign, but the techmarine just shrugged, unable to judge whether the librarian had suffered any psychological trauma.
“Rest easy, Jonas,” said Gabriel at last, placing his hand on the librarian’s shoulder. “We will have need for your skills before this affair is finished, I am sure.” Jonas was now the only sanctioned psyker on the planet, which did not bode well for a conflict with the eldar. Even Chaplain Prathios, with his finely tuned psychic sympathies and sensitivities, had been put out of action. It was as though the eldar were systematically removing the Blood Ravens’ ability to manipulate warp energy. Thinking back to the Blood Trials, Gabriel realised suddenly that the rangers had focussed their attacks on those aspirants that Prathios had suspected were psykers, including that green-eyed boy with the blond braids who kept appearing in Gabriel’s mind.
Turning away from Jonas with a comradely smile, Gabriel strode over to the other side of the apothecarion, where Prathios was lying in an elaborate, ceremonial sarcophagus. His limbs had been shattered beyond the skill of anyone on R
ahe’s Paradise and his neck was broken. His eyes were wide and wild, although they seemed blind. The Third Company’s apothecary was still light-years away aboard the Litany of Fury. Despite a number of attempts, Gabriel had not been able to get a message to the battle barge to try and encourage them to hurry through the Blood Trials on Trontiux III. The apothecary was needed badly, not least to tend to the grievously wounded Prathios, but also to maintain the recently erratic implants of a number of the scouts based on Rahe’s Paradise, including Caleb.
In the absence of the apothecary, Gabriel had no choice other than to seal Prathios in one of the ancient sarcophagi that were kept in the walls of the monastery’s chapel. He had no idea how the archaic and revered cabinets worked, but there was a legend in the pantheon of the Blood Ravens that told how the Great Father Azaraiah Vidya himself had been mortally wounded in a terrible battle against the unclean powers and then enshrined into the hallowed confines of such a device. It is recorded in the Apocrypha Azaraiah: Travails of Vidya that the Great Father floated freely through space for many decades, encased in the ceremonial purity of his sarcophagus, until he was finally recovered by the Ravenous Spirit, which was the strike cruiser of the Commander of the Watch even then.
If it had worked for the Great Father, it should work for Chaplain Prathios, thought Gabriel, holding fast to his faith as he closed the heavy lid over the face of his oldest friend.
“This is not the end, Prathios, chaplain of the Blood Ravens’ Third. We will see each other again, Emperor willing,” muttered the captain in tones that only Prathios would have heard, had he been able to hear anything at all. “The Emperor protects.”
The lid clunked shut heavily; jets of steam hissed out from around the seam as the interior of the carved and illuminated sarcophagus pressurised, sealing the chaplain in until such a time as expert help arrived.
The corridors were silent. Nothing seemed to move as the row of Devastator Marines stood sentinel around the entrance to the Implantation Chamber—it was an entire squad. Their armour glinted crisply, and they held their weapons ready across their chests in pristine and perfect attention. The Ninth Company had three librarians and they were all there, standing side-by-side directly in front of the huge armoured doors with the other Marines spreading out on either side of them. The Implantation Chamber had its own separate protective field, which activated automatically when even the tiniest glitch appeared in the Litany of Fury’s own warp shields. The Chapter Priests within worked hardest of all when the Litany slipped into the warp. Within that chamber was the future of the Chapter itself: not only the half-finished form of the neophyte still strapped to the ceremonial tablet, but also one of the armoured repositories of the Blood Ravens’ gene-seed itself.
The Litany had dropped into the warp about half an hour before, heading for the Lorn system, just after Ulantus had finally dispatched Sergeant Saulh with the Rage of Erudition to inform Gabriel of the recent developments and to request his aid on Lorn.
Captain Ulantus had waited for as long as he could before dropping into the warp, conscious that the young Ckrius was at a very vulnerable stage of his implantation. His concern was only partly for the youth himself, since he would be unusually vulnerable to the curdling insanities of the warp that engulfed the vessel, but it was mostly for the integrity of the Litany of Fury. Although the ancient battle barge had sailed its way through countless warp storms throughout the course of its long and venerable existence, it was never wise to be complacent about the unearthly and incomprehensible forces that swam through the empyrean, stirring time and space themselves as though they were merely water. The unspeakable powers would not be unaware of the presence of a vulnerable soul in the bowels of the Litany, even though it would be shielded behind the massive geller-field of the ship itself and then behind the psychic walls that were maintained around the Implantation Chamber at all times.
Ulantus had been right to be cautious. For a short time, the journey had seemed to be progressing smoothly, but, after only a few minutes in the warp, one of the Litany’s Astropaths had collapsed, flinging itself out of its station with blood pouring out of its eyes, dead. Something had slipped through a phase variance in the ship’s shield and emerged into the open and sensitive mind of the astropath. However, even the disciplined, trained, controlled mind of the astropath had been unable to contain the presence, and it had ripped itself clear of the organic container, shredding the astropath’s mind, brain and eyes.
Immediately, the Implantation Chamber had locked itself down, sealing the priests, the Apothecary and the neophyte inside. But Ulantus was not about to take any chances: he dispatched the Ninth Company’s librarians and a detachment of Devastator Marines to stand guard over the vital chamber. He could not afford to take the Litany out of the warp until it had reached its designated extraction point—there was no telling where it might emerge, and the imperative of reaching Lorn before the suspected eldar fleet drove him on.
The lights in the brightly lit corridor flickered slightly, as though a power surge threatened to overload the glow-orbs in the ceiling. In the failing light, a faint purple light shimmered out from the walls themselves, as though weak veins of power coursed through the structure of the corridors.
“Prepare yourselves,” murmured Librarian Korinth, planting the tip of his force staff onto the deck between his feet. A crackle of blue flame sparked at the gentle impact. “It approaches.”
The librarian stood in the very centre of the line, with the imposing figures of his librarian brothers Zhaphel and Rhamah on either side of him. Unlike the majority of other Space Marine Chapters, it was not unusual for a Blood Ravens Company to have a number of librarians in it, and they were quite accustomed to fighting alongside each other.
As Korinth spoke, the Devastator Marines braced their weapons, hefting chainswords and levelling flamers along the corridor in front of them. Zhaphel took a step forward from the line, swinging his force-axe in an arc around his shoulders, loosening his muscles in anticipation of the conflict to come. Meanwhile, Rhamah remained completely motionless; he had an ornate force-sword bound into a custom-holster on his back, but he made no attempt to reach for it. Instead, the librarian stood with his arms folded defiantly across his massive chest, with tendrils of warp-fire playing around the contacts that protruded from the psychic hood which obscured much of his face. Inside the hood, his eyes burned with a startling blue.
The lights flickered again, more violently than before. At the far end of the corridor, one of the glow-orbs overloaded and exploded, shattering glass down onto the metallic floor. The rest of the lights continued to flicker and pulse, throwing the passageway into a fit of strobe-lighting. Then another orb blew, and another, raining shards of glass down into the corridor.
The Marines remained motionless, with their feet planted firmly and their resolve undaunted. They were simply waiting for something to appear that they could kill.
The flashing of the lights grew faster and faster, and the frequency of exploding orbs accelerated as they drew closer to the Marines and the Implantation Chamber. After a few seconds, the line of exploding glow-orbs became a strafing run, ploughing along the ceiling and racing towards the Blood Ravens, scattering glass like shrapnel. Keeping pace with the vicious rain was a ring of purple flame that looped around the floor, walls and ceiling, burning forward towards the Marines in a crackling halo of fire.
Korinth struck his staff against the deck, sending out jabs of energy through the metal panels, making the floor buckle and buck. As the bolts of energy from his staff met the advancing halo of fire, there was an abrupt, cackling shriek, like a thousand voices raised in agony.
The walls trembled and appeared to melt as the inferno intensified and tendrils of dripping energy started to reach out into the corridor. The screams of pain echoed along the passageway, bouncing from wall to wall and crashing against the staunch Marines that stood against the wave, even as the wailing scraped and grated against their minds.
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For the merest fraction of a second, the Blood Ravens awaited direction, but then Zhaphel launched himself forward, spinning his force-axe in great sweeps around his head, hacking it through the daemonic tentacles and releasing spurts of phosphorescence from the severed protrusions.
Nothing shall pass! His voice echoed into the minds of the Marines around him, filling them with resolve and certainty.
Rhamah stayed planted before the great doors, but brilliant cracks of energy flashed out from his fingertips and from around the amplifier modules in his hood, lashing out against the daemonic incursion and bringing it to a standstill. At the same time, the Devastator squad stormed forward through plumes of their own flames, brandishing chainswords and powerfists, meeting the warp-daemon with the righteous fury of the Blood Ravens.
“For the Great Father and the Emperor!” they yelled as they charged forward into the fray.
Since Prathios had left the little cell, Ptolemea had simply settled back onto the floor, drawing herself up against the back wall and pulling her chin down to her knees. Her mind raced through the implications of what she had said to the Blood Raven, wondering whether he had passed her confession along to Gabriel. Her thoughts spiralled in confusion as she tried to keep track of moral correctness: it seemed to slip and slide through her grasp even as she attempted to focus on it. Nothing would settle. Her thoughts floated freely, as though no longer even constrained by her mind. It seemed that she had lost the ability to stand in judgement over her own thoughts.
She tried to rehearse the scenario in her head: she had been sent to Rahe’s Paradise on orders from the Bethle sub-sector of the Ordo Hereticus, charged with investigating allegations that Captain Angelos had been tainted and was consequently suffering unsanctioned visions; since arriving, she herself had started to suffer from dreams that may themselves constitute visions; assuming that Sister Senioris Meritia had suffered the same visions, she had found them so unbearable that she had been forced to kill herself in order to escape the possibility that her soul was tainted; rather than killing herself, however, or even permitting herself to be wrongfully executed for killing Meritia, Ptolemea had confessed her suspicions of her own taint to the chaplain of Captain Angelos himself. Perhaps her confession had been a subconscious plea for execution? Rather than being the righteous investigator of Gabriel’s alleged taint, she was now at his mercy, apparently sharing with him the affliction of which he stands charged. Even if he were guilty of all the things Isador accused him of, would this really make him any more tainted than her?
[Dawn of War 02] - Ascension Page 22