Blood and Fire

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  ‘Put your helmet back on.’

  He hesitated before obeying, from surprise rather than disobedience. As it clicked into place at his collar seals, he looked back at me through the red eye-lenses of a stylised, riveted Mark VI Corvus helm. The question was within the gaze. I offered him the answer.

  ‘You may remove it with the Chapter’s lord-commanders, but never with your other brethren. You are no longer you, Cyneric. A Chaplain is the Chapter’s history and its future, manifest in one man. Your features must be the deathmask of the Emperor.’ I tapped the gaunt cheekbones of my helm’s silver skull faceplate. ‘Your brothers must forget your face, as they have forgotten mine.’

  Cyneric nodded, though I sensed he was not convinced. He knew he must use these months to prove he deserved a skull helm, but the logic of my order escaped him. After all, his helm’s faceplate was not the visage of immortal death I wear. Not yet, at least.

  I could have replied to his doubt by reciting a cold truth: that he still wore the helm of an Adeptus Astartes warrior, one of the Emperor’s genetic descendants, and the galaxy was conquered by millions of those emotionless, impersonal masks in the era we sought to embody. If he lacked a skull helm, his warrior’s visage was almost as appropriate.

  But there was a time to preach, and a time to teach.

  ‘Cyneric,’ I replied. ‘Behave as if you already carry the responsibilities you seek to earn.’

  Another nod, less hesitant and more satisfied.

  As we walked down a thoroughfare hallway, doing our mutual best to ignore the obeisance we were both shown by the human thralls, I added another warning over a shared vox channel.

  ‘When we stand before the High Marshal, do not meet his eyes.’

  More confusion. ‘Master?’ Cyneric voxed back.

  ‘Just trust me.’

  He waited for us in the Chamber of the First Proclamation, more often known as Sigismund’s Hall. Legend tells us it was there that the first High Marshal of the Black Templars stood with the brothers who would become the first Chapter lords, looking out over the battlefield known as the Iron Cage, and swore that the Great Crusade would go on, no matter what wounds the Imperium still bore. The other Legions were free to protect mankind’s domain, bearing no shame for their decision. But Sigismund’s Imperial Fists would darken their armour for the battles to come, and continue their charge to carry the Emperor’s message out into the void. They would not defend. They would attack. And so were born the Black Templars, the only warriors for whom the Great Crusade never ended.

  Alien worlds and long-dead warriors were portrayed in paintings – each one a masterpiece rendered by a different hand – lining the dark iron walls. The statue of Sigismund himself stood as eternal guardian, flanked by sculptures of our Chapter’s original marshals and castellans. Each of these bronze warriors was stained green with the patina of time, but lifted a defiant blade to the age-greyed banners hanging from the arched, gothic ceiling.

  Their armour was archaic: rough, overlapping plates in a style rarely seen even among the true successors to the Legion: those noble Chapters of the Second Founding. Outdated helmet crests marked these legendary warriors apart from those of us who had taken their place ten millennia later. One could not help but feel judged, and to wonder if we bore their legacy with the same honour they displayed in life.

  The entire hall smelled of dust and the stately, stale parchment scent of old memory. At the far end awaited Helbrecht.

  My liege is a man of great resolve, but equally great sorrows. His humours have ever tended towards the melancholic – not from introspection or emotion, but from ambition and devotion. His duty is never done. He cares nothing for personal glory, displays no overt offering of emotion, and spends every second of his life upon the Eternal Crusade. I have never once seen him display any emotion beyond the faintest smile, during the decades of calculated planning; the acid anger of the battlefield; and the cold rage that always follows a fight. He does not feel emotion as other sentient beings. He has mastered it.

  His face is a cartographic map of wars won and scars suffered in the name of humanity’s dead messiah-king. His voice is unspeakably controlled, impossibly soulful. He has seen more blood, fire, iron and hatred in life than almost any man or woman still drawing breath.

  That day, he greeted me by name; one of the few among the Chapter with the rank to do so. Cyneric, he called ‘Brother-Initiate’, and offered a nod in the younger warrior’s direction. Both of us knelt before our lord, as tradition states when first entering his presence. I prayed Cyneric had heeded my words and avoided our liege lord’s eyes.

  I remember thinking, so clearly, He is warfare given human form. No other words could describe him so completely. Armour of black and gold marked him out from the rank and file, not for exaltation but so he drew the enemy’s eyes and ire. When Helbrecht pulled steel, he wanted to be seen. My lord was always the first in the fight, at the centre of the front line.

  His red cloak was a brown rag, scarcely clinging to his battered, cracked war-plate. Blood had dried across his armour in rainspray flecks, doubtless in patterns of mystical relevance to the alien soothsayers and shamans among the tribes we were butchering on the surface. His bionic arm was bared, the mechanical servos and clicking pistons doing their visible work through damaged portions of his armour. No desire had ever driven him to sheathe the limb in synthetic skin. Such meaningless cosmetic detail would never enter his mind.

  ‘Sire,’ I greeted him. Reaching up, I disengaged my helmet’s seals, pulling it free to fully taste the antique air of the chamber. The Sword of the High Marshals descended to aim at my throat. My lips brushed the proffered blade in knightly obeisance, the traditional kiss to confirm one’s loyalty to the Chapter and its lord-commander.

  Next to me, a moment later, Cyneric did the same.

  ‘Rise,’ Helbrecht told us. He sheathed the blade at his hip – the blade that, if legend is true, was reforged from shards of our primarch’s own sword. We rose as bid.

  ‘Speak, Merek,’ said my lord.

  Cyneric tensed at the use of my first name.

  Instead of speaking, I produced a handheld holorecorder. It projected a life-size avatar of light, an Adeptus Astartes warrior addressing all three of us.

  ‘Grimaldus,’ it said. ‘They lied to us about the Mannheim Gap. They sent us there to die.’

  Helbrecht was silent after the message ran its course. He looked into the space where Julkhara’s image had stood moments before and spoken of the basest treachery.

  ‘Could this recording have been manipulated or falsified?’ He didn’t mean doctored by the enemy. The greenskin xenos were far too crude for such subtle measures.

  I shook my head. ‘The traitors Julkhara spoke of would profit nothing by such a message. I believe it to be true.’

  ‘As do I.’ Helbrecht turned back to me. ‘What is it you wish, Grimaldus?’

  ‘I am still seeking to establish contact with the Celestial Lions and take stock of their losses.’

  ‘And you intend to destroy those who have betrayed them.’

  ‘I doubt that will be possible, sire. No matter how much it appeals to me.’

  Helbrecht looked to the statue of Sigismund, resting his hand on the pommel of his sheathed sword. The bronze replica of the First High Marshal carried the same sword, rendered there in the same bronze as the statue itself. Sigismund stood with the blade drawn, aiming it at the wide windows, at the world that turned and burned below.

  ‘You risk dragging the Chapter into direct conflict with the Inquisition.’

  There was no denying it. ‘Yes, sire.’

  ‘I do not fear that conflict, Grimaldus. Injustice must be opposed. Impurity must be purged. But the Eternal Crusader sets sail in three days, my brother. The warlord has fled from Armageddon and our first duty must be to hunt him down.’

&nb
sp; I had expected that. ‘Then leave me behind.’

  For the first time I could recall, surprise crossed my liege lord’s scarred features. ‘You, who were so reluctant to fight on this world, now plead to stay?’

  The irony was not lost on me. ‘I can leave on another ship, sire. The Virtue of Kings will remain with the remnants of Amalrich’s fighting company. If I survive, I will travel with them.’

  ‘I lose my Reclusiarch, either way.’

  ‘Then promote another. The Eternal Crusade will continue without me, Helbrecht.’

  It was strange to see him like that, caught between the purity of a war against external enemies, and a just war against an internal foe. He would fight both, if he could. The alien king’s death, however, took priority over all else.

  ‘You have been up here,’ I said, as he still looked above at the towering statue, ‘fighting the xenos in orbit. You have seen the void war with your own eyes. Tell me the reports of Celestial Lions fleet losses are wrong, sire.’

  Helbrecht turned, regarding me with eyes far too old for even his war-weathered, time-cracked face.

  ‘The reports are true.’

  It was my turn to look through the great window, at the world slowly rolling below, as Helbrecht continued. ‘They have been with us, side by side, in almost every engagement. As we speak, they have but three vessels remaining.’

  ‘That cannot be.’

  My voice was cold, but my blood ran hot enough to boil. We were speaking of the death of an entire Chapter. ‘How can they have sustained such losses?’

  My liege has never been a man prone to even flashes of humour. He took a breath that could not quite be called a sigh. This war had enraged and wearied him in equal measure, and now the final blow was ready to fall; I brought him the threat of another delay.

  ‘Their devastation is the principal reason I believe your concerns are valid,’ he said. ‘You know the ebb and flow of void war: the endless relay of orders; the voices in the murk; the shouting above cannonfire and the thundering flames of structural damage. Hundreds and hundreds of ships moving in every imaginable angle – firing, ramming, crashing, dying. Facts and fiction twine together.’

  But Helbrecht was a void commander without parallel. That was why he had been chosen to oversee the Imperium’s forces in orbit. I knew his words were not an excuse for a personal failing. Unfortunately, neither were they an apology for him consigning me to Helsreach with the wider war taking place up here. I was no longer bitter about it, merely regretful at the moments of brotherhood I missed.

  ‘I know,’ I nodded.

  ‘The Lions have fought well,’ he allowed. ‘I would never cast aspersions on their fighting character. Their straits have arisen from apparent ill fortune: orders given but never received, or too slowly answered. We have had many reports of vox breakage and orders never reaching their warship’s captains. Much of it reeks of enemy guile.’

  I had to hear this. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘The battle-barge Serenkai was boarded and overwhelmed when it pulled free of our spearhead, failing to heed orders to maintain formation. The cruiser Lavi took four hours to die from structural haemorrhage when it collided with the wounded Flesh Tearers flagship Victus. The Nubica destroyed itself when it was boarded, choosing sacrifice over capture.’

  He listed another dozen ships, another dozen deaths. My teeth clenched harder with each name.

  ‘It is difficult,’ he finished, ‘to know what events were born of sabotage or treachery, rather than honest battle. It has been eventful in Armageddon’s skies, brother. And those who might have borne closer witness are in their graves. If the Inquisition moves against the Lions, it is doing so with a tenacity and subtlety I have rarely seen from its agents.’

  ‘Nevertheless, we are left with a Chapter devoid of its fleet, with its remnants annihilated on the surface.’

  Helbrecht closed his eyes, musing in solemn silence for several beats of my heart. When they opened again, all doubt was banished. This was how he always acted, and I admired him greatly for it. A man of action, not reaction. He attacked, always attacked.

  ‘Justice calls to us,’ he said.

  A Chaplain should not smile, for we are avatars of morbid rituals and righteous death in battle. I could not help it. My blood caught fire with his words, the way it does in those holiest of moments: when he declares a Crusade.

  ‘At the very least, we must learn the truth of this matter,’ he said, and both Cyneric and I were already making the crusader’s cross over our breastplates.

  ‘As you say, sire.’

  ‘Go to Hive Volcanus,’ he told us. ‘The bulk of the Chapter must sail in three days, Grimaldus. The Old Man requires it, and the arch-warlord responsible for Armageddon cannot be allowed to flee from our grasp, for retribution calls as loud as justice. We cannot commit the Templars to the field again and endure another week or more of recovery, rearming and resupply. But make planetfall and learn the truth of what happened down there. If the Lions are destined to die, I would hear the truth of their tale before it is too late.’

  ‘It will be done.’

  ‘I have no doubt.’

  He did not ask me if three days would be enough. There was no choice: it had to be enough. ‘Do you require more knights?’

  I glanced to Cyneric. ‘No, my liege. Not yet.’

  ‘Good, for we have few to spare. Three days,’ he said again. ‘Go. Cut to the truth and cry it to the sky.’

  Cyneric was silent as we left. His quiet was actually a disquiet: a silence born of words unspoken, rather than a need to say nothing at all. Few human serfs walked those austere decks, but both of our helmets clicked back into place. My vision was washed with red-tinted target locks and streaming bio-data.

  ‘You looked into his eyes.’ It was not a question.

  Cyneric nodded. ‘I did.’

  ‘I warned you not to.’

  He nodded again. ‘You did.’

  I knew what he was feeling. He felt as I always did before the statues of our Chapter’s legendary forefathers. He had passed beneath Judgement Incarnate. How best to explain this to him?

  ‘Our liege has seen everything the galaxy can offer, on both sides of reality’s veil. He has killed every enemy imaginable and has stood in the ranks of countless Crusades. And he is not a subtle man. He wears his victories and defeats as plainly displayed as any scar. You feel as if your worth was being weighed, and that is only right. He was measuring you, as he measures everything and everyone that falls beneath his gaze. Helbrecht has old, keen eyes that see right into a warrior’s heart. I do not know him well, for no one outside his Sword Brethren can claim to know our lord well, but trust me when I say he did not find you wanting, Cyneric.’

  Cyneric mused on this as we walked through the dark halls. ‘Never have I felt more judged than when my eyes met his.’

  ‘He is the heir of Sigismund and the avatar of the Eternal Crusade. It is right to doubt you will ever live up to his life’s legacy, just as it is right to be inspired by him in the same breath. High Marshal Helbrecht finds you worthy. You are with me now on our lord’s wishes. He asked that I judge you for initiation into the Chaplain Brotherhood.’

  I heard the servos purr in Cyneric’s neck as he turned to regard me. ‘You did not request me yourself?’

  The very idea.

  ‘No, Cyneric. I did not.’

  ‘It was spoken among the brethren that you were seeking to rebuild your command squad.’

  Artarion. Priamus. Cador. Nerovar. Bastilan.

  ‘Then it was spoken wrong,’ I replied. ‘Let that be the end of it, Cyneric.’

  III

  The Last Officer

  The Codex Astartes – at least, the Eternal Crusader’s incomplete copy of that ancient text – detailed several thousand logistical concerns in the preparation, establish
ment and fortification of an Adeptus Astartes firebase. Humanity did not invest so much into us in order that we should grind frontline to frontline in protracted theatres of war – that is the purview of the Imperial Guard. The Adeptus Astartes are the falling hammer, the spear to the vitals, striking and withdrawing with the force of a killing thrust to the heart.

  But no plan survives contact with the enemy. Fortification and digging in during extensive worldwide Crusades are a necessity of the wars we fight. While the Templars may not cling to the Codex Astartes with a tenacity bordering on worship of holy scripture, it is still the most comprehensive treatise on Space Marine warfare ever written, penned by the hand of the Emperor’s own son, Lord Guilliman of Macragge. Its value is immeasurable to any commander, no matter what divergences are found in a Chapter’s culture.

  It is said that no complete copies still exist in the Dark Millennium. Even the original document’s origins are shrouded in more myth than truth. No records even exist as to whether Lord Guilliman wrote the Codex by hand across several dozen tomes, dictated it to nuncio-processors and servitor scribes, or compiled it himself into a hololithic library.

  There it is again, of course. Ten thousand years ago, when we were not forced to rely on flawed records and fractured accounts.

  The Season of Fire raged hottest and hardest on Armageddon Secundus, the easternmost landmass, where Hive Helsreach and its sister cities drowned in the storms of dust. On the west coast of the continent Armageddon Prime, Hive Volcanus was still besieged by the enemy and the winds were more often free of the burning sand and ash that so blighted the other side of the world.

  The Celestial Lions firebase was atop a natural rise in the landscape, supremely defensible, with great battlements and sacred statuary of fallen heroes staring down at any who would dare bring the fight to those dark walls. Turret-defended bunkers within the compound sat beneath barricaded landing pads, which in turn stood above repair foundries, vehicle garages and arming barracks.