Blood and Fire

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  I wanted to tell him the Imperium would know. I wanted to reassure him that his entire bloodline had not died in vain. I meant to say it, yet the words that left my lips were more instinctive, and somehow more honest.

  ‘You mean to die on this world.’

  Ekene’s dark lips curved into another sickle-smile. ‘Of course. We will die alongside our brothers, as it should be. Deathspeaker Julkhara wished you to know the truth behind our coming last stand, and ensure those that share our primarch’s blood never speak ill of our fall.’

  I said nothing. They had asked me to come, but I would decide just what my involvement would be.

  Cyneric leaned forward, and his helm’s vox-speakers couldn’t quite steal the passion from his voice. ‘You have to return to Elysium. Endure the shame if you must, as the Crimson Fists endured their shame. You have to rebuild your Chapter – the galaxy must not lose the Lions forever.’

  ‘Elysium? Brother-knight, the Chapter is savaged beyond resurrection. Men, materiel, knowledge… All of it is gone. We have nothing to hand down to any generation that would follow us. You advocate cowardice to fuel false hope?’

  ‘I advocate survival.’ Cyneric snarled the words. ‘Survival to preserve precious blood, and to rise again to fight another day. I hope to die in glory, as any son of Rogal Dorn. But even in our legends of the primarch, when he bled his warriors to purify them, he never let them taste annihilation. Sometimes, the more virtuous path is to carry the shame and survive.’

  I looked between them both. The truth was that there was no wrong answer here. No right answer, either. A glorious last stand was no more or less respectable than preserving the infinite value of a Space Marine Chapter. One would earn more glory, no doubt. The other would better serve mankind. I appreciated Ekene’s zeal to finish what he began, and die with unbroken loyalty alongside his brothers.

  But I also appreciated Cyneric’s surprising wisdom, to preserve the Chapter’s soul at the cost of carrying personal shame. Few Templars would commit to such a burden. It spoke well of him that he had the insight to consider both paths, but I wondered if he would advocate shame if he were the one facing the prospect of so glorious a last stand. Easier to speak of shame than to survive it.

  In the minutes of silence that followed, we touched down in Hive Volcanus. Whatever solution arose from all this had to appease the Lions’ hot-blooded need for vengeance at Mannheim, as well as their cold-blooded need to be vindicated by spreading word of their betrayal. Both were essential, and both would see the Celestial Lions wiped clear from the ranks of the Adeptus Astartes.

  And yet, the Chapter also had to survive.

  As we disembarked, Cyneric opened a vox channel, speaking so the Lions would not hear.

  ‘One question plagues me, Reclusiarch.’

  I could guess. ‘You would ask how this all began – what the Lions did in the past to earn this fate.’

  ‘Every vendetta has a source, does it not?’

  ‘True. And the truth here is a bleak one, dating back decades. The Lions are being punished now for trying to tell the truth fifty years ago.’

  ‘I do not understand.’

  We made our way across the landing pad, and how glorious it was to see a city skyline that was still intact. Volcanus had endured a lesser siege than Helsreach, with many more defenders manning its walls. The central spire was an ugly monolith that lived up to the name hive, with anaemic industrial sectors and transit stations spread around its wide foundations. Most of the city’s manufactories were protected in the hive tower’s shell, making life wretched for its citizens who were forced to live shut inside with the fumes of their own forge fires eternally tainting the ventilation. It meant, however, that the city was monumentally harder to take than Helsreach, and with no central highway, the enemy could not simply run free through the city’s core.

  ‘Every Chapter carries a thousand secrets of past wars, unabsolved shames and slights against its honour. This is not the first time that the Lions have dealt with the Inquisition.’

  ‘Julkhara’s recording,’ Cyneric replied. ‘He spoke of the “echoes of Khattar”.’

  ‘Khattar is the world where this pathetic grudge began. It is where the Inquisition first betrayed the Celestial Lions.’ I finally turned from the Volcanus skyline, watching the Lions unloading their gunships. ‘You could argue, as other Chapters have argued upon hearing this rumour, that it was also where the Lions damned themselves by their own naivety.’

  That gave Cyneric pause. ‘You admire them, but consider them naive?’

  ‘Anyone who trusts an agent of the Inquisition has earned the right to be named naive, Cyneric. There is a reason the Adeptus Astartes stand apart from the Imperium – autonomous; loyal to the empire’s ideals, but rarely its function. The Lions’ most grievous error was forgetting that.’

  IV

  Stories at the Fire

  The Inquisition does not exist.

  It does not exist in the sense many Imperial citizens believe – as a cohesive, interlinked cobweb of organised power. Individual men and women are granted immunity from all persecution and autonomy from all law. They are granted that most nebulous of virtues: authority. Everything else comes down to what they achieve, and what personal power they amass. When an inquisitor calls upon Imperial resources, he or she relies on the threat of authority, rather than any real organisation lending support to their needs. Their power is both utterly real and a cunning illusion, all at once.

  Men and women with wildly differing ideologies, tactics and goals do exist, and they are invested with ultimate authority, but that is not a collective enemy we could face and fight. Inquisitors will often ally together, but rarely permanently. Even their precious ordos are lines of alignment, philosophies of specialisation and intent, not armies of organised allegiance.

  They are, in all ways, the exact opposite of the Adeptus Astartes. Our temporal authority has been stripped back since the Heresy, yet we are essential to the Imperium and need no illusions of commanding great power. Our war fleets and brotherhoods speak for themselves.

  Given the nature of the war, Armageddon’s cities were fairly thick with warbands of Ordo Xenos agents and their militant ilk, but to move against the Inquisition was to move against a colony of vermin. Trap one rat and it may still mean nothing to the nest. Any number of the inquisitors involved in the war would have nothing to do with the Lions’ persecution, and care little if they even knew what was being done to the Chapter. I could not simply approach the closest Inquisitorial representative and demand he reveal what he knew, for the chances were that he would know nothing.

  Time was my worst enemy, for it was not on our side. I needed to cut right to the heart of the matter, but the Inquisition was not a beast with one heart. Every Inquisitorial warband was its own sovereign entity.

  Few Chapters knew of what happened at Khattar, and even fewer ever spoke of it. Of those that were aware of the planet’s annihilation, I would wager that most did not regard it as a true threat to the autonomy of the Adeptus Astartes, preferring to focus on their own concerns and their own wars. As for the others, I can only speak of the Black Templars with any conviction, and even our Chapter is more akin to several dozen individual Crusade fleets with their own goals and traditions, united in lineage rather than united side by side.

  What little I knew of Khattar came down to a conflict of pride and duty between the Lions and their Inquisitorial allies – the kind of conflict that takes place a thousand times each year across the Imperium’s vast spread of worlds. Many of these disagreements turn to bloodshed; what made the Lions’ situation so galling was that they had reacted with a measure of composure and reason, when they had every right to draw their bolters and finish it in a blunter, more efficient manner.

  The Lions are a Chapter of storytellers and saga-singers. As the sun set over the besieged city walls, we remained
in the outlying industrial sector, circled by tanks in the Lions’ makeshift armoury at the heart of a powered-down foundry. Beneath the rumble of growling, idling engines, I could almost hear the ghosts whispering among the bare bolter racks and empty ammunition crates.

  We had agreed to speak of Khattar. I had the story of how my cousins had paid a butcher’s bill since coming to Armageddon. Now I wished to know what had happened before.

  Seven Lions had gathered – the survivors of Ekene’s own squad – while the others prepared for the final assault to come, or patrolled on sentry duty. Cyneric was aiding them; I thought the experience of living among another Chapter would aid his perspective.

  The air was charged with the expectation of attack, even this deep in an Imperial-held city. It left a foul taste in my mouth.

  So I sat around a wreckage-fire with Ekene and his proud Lions, the firelight sending amber shadows dancing across our armour. This was how they had told tales on Elysium, though their savannah campfires would be set out under the stars, not beneath the arched ceiling of an abandoned manufactory.

  ‘You first,’ Ekene prompted me.

  I did not understand, and said as much.

  ‘You first,’ he repeated. ‘You have come to our hearth and home. Tradition states the first tale must be yours.’

  ‘Outsiders always speak first,’ one of the other warriors said. ‘It is how they pay for their food and rest at a tribe’s camp.’

  ‘I have no stories.’

  The Lions chuckled.

  ‘Everyone has stories,’ one of them said.

  ‘Tell us of Helsreach,’ said Ekene.

  ‘No.’ The word came out as sharp as a bolt shot, and they tensed at the suddenness of my reply. I had no desire to speak of Helsreach. The lessons I had learned were still scoring themselves on my soul.

  They accepted my refusal with shared glances and murmured agreement, but a warrior with the name Jaur-Kem etched on his breastplate cleared his throat in almost amusing human politeness.

  ‘Reclusiarch,’ he said. ‘Tell us the tale of how you earned a Deathspeaker’s grin.’

  I felt a strange discomfort creeping down my backbone. ‘The events of the Pelegeron Cluster are recorded in any number of accessible archives.’

  The Lions laughed again, though there was no mockery in it. They were far too wise to insult a Chaplain, even one of other allegiance. Their laughter was for the many difficulties in two Chapters trying to share time in companionship, and the endless differences Space Marines of divergent bloodlines always faced in such moments.

  ‘Official records are dry and lifeless things, Reclusiarch.’ Ekene gestured in encouragement. ‘Tell us what happened through your eyes. You would do us great honour.’

  I looked between them, from one face to the next, gunsight reticules chiming and unfocusing as they identified null targets.

  ‘Very well.’ I took a calming breath. ‘There is an ancient saying, a sentiment wedded to humanity’s bones, I think, for it emerges from countless cultures with slightly different phrasing each time. My mentor, Reclusiarch Mordred, despised it, saying its very core ran counter to the precepts of the Eternal Crusade, but I always enjoyed its funereal poetry. “There will never be a war to end all wars”.’

  The Lions spoke in agreement. They had a similar sentiment on their home world.

  ‘On the fourth world of the Pelegeron system,’ I said, ‘they believed the opposite was true. Their sedition became secession, and their rebellion became war. “The Last War”, they called it. The “war to end all wars”. If they could throw the Imperium back with enough defiance, then mankind’s empire would let them drift away in peace, to live as they wished in the filth of their heresy. They truly believed this.’

  Strange, how fierce the memories felt as they came back. There is always such bestial comfort in sweat and screaming rage.

  ‘Imagine a fortress formed from a most diseased mind,’ I said. ‘The capital of a world at the whim of tectonic rage, on one of the few landmasses stable enough to inhabit. Imagine this world’s priceless rock made living among lava rivers a necessity for hundreds of thousands of mining settlers, but the planet itself still cringes back from all human touch. That is Pelegeron IV, cousins. That is what it was like. A world only half-formed, still writhing in protracted birth throes, with magma for blood and smoke for air.’

  Ekene was smiling. ‘You are a better tale-teller than you give yourself credit for, Deathspeaker Grimaldus.’

  I was warming to the idea, myself. It was not so different from giving declarations of judgement, or reciting the Litanies of Hate.

  ‘This final fortress was called Apex, as was the volcano within which it was built. Few geological archives have ever chronicled a volcano to match the scale of Apex, for the mountain eclipsed even the Olympus forge-peak on Sacred Mars. Apex was a boil on Pelegeron’s crust, the size of lesser continents on saner worlds, with its infected roots digging all the way to the world’s core. In times of peace, the Imperium hollowed it out, and drilled ever deeper. When war came, it became the enemy cult’s final fortress. We had to strike at their last bastion before they could seal themselves inside.’

  ‘You said the foe called it the Last War,’ one of the Lions interrupted. ‘What did your black knights call it?’

  ‘The Vinculus Crusade,’ I replied. ‘And it ended at the Battle of Fire and Blood. Many archives record the final duel between Vinculus himself and the arch-heretic atop the cathedral.’ I shook my head. ‘It never happened. But when has the truth ever mattered to Imperial chroniclers?’

  That earned a few grim laughs. I barely acknowledged them. I could feel the heat again. The insane heat of those final hours under the mountain.

  ‘Though the volcano had great transit vents wide enough for tankers and cargo haulers to drift in and out of the mountain’s industrial chambers, they had been sealed and shielded from aerial attack for weeks. It left us facing an assault on the main thoroughfare gate, despite the impossibility of landing an army there.’

  I looked to each of the warriors with me, unsure if I was doing justice to the day itself. They listened, paying full heed to my words.

  ‘I stood among the Sword Brethren of High Marshal Ludoldus at the assault’s vanguard. We had to hold the fortress gate while the rest of the army marched up the mountainside. With no room to deploy in force at the gate, the Sisters of the Bloody Rose Order and our own brothers landed at stable plateaux and struggled up the rockslides from there. The vanguard deployed by drop pod, through atmosphere thick enough to choke a man without a rebreather. Thirty of us. Thirty knights – the High Marshal’s chosen.’

  I met the Lions’ eyes, though they saw nothing but my eye-lenses. ‘That was how it began. Hold the gate, our liege lord demanded of us. Hold until the others reach us. Nothing more.’

  He wants to vent his anger, but lacks even the breath to shout. Weary rage pulls at his limbs, miring him with its sluggish caress. Never has he felt so drained, so leeched of all vitality. War has become work – an exhausting slaughterhouse chore, reduced to the rise and fall of blades, with the push and pull of burning muscles.

  Slain foes blanket the rocky ground in every direction. His brothers, those still standing, fight behind a barricade of armoured enemy dead. The shrieking madmen that come against the knights know nothing of fear. They spend their lives like copper coins, charging in a screaming horde.

  ‘Ai-ai-aiiiiiii,’ the bastards keep shrieking as they run to the butchers’ blades. ‘Ai-ai-aiiiiii.’

  The knight hears his liege lord above the chaos. Not shouting orders, for no orders are needed when there’s nothing to do but fight or die. Neither is he crying defiance, for the knights’ refusal to run is defiance enough. No, he hears his lord – that golden warrior – laughing.

  It is Ludoldus’s way. The High Marshal stands with one boot on the barr
icade of bodies, his ancestral sword swinging and spearing down in a ceaseless blur of charged steel. Laughing in the heat of battle-fever.

  By contrast, Grimaldus barely has the breath to curse. The knight’s chainsword sings for him, its snarls switching between the roar of whirring teeth and the meat-muted growl of carving through human flesh.

  Down the mountainside, the Imperial army hauls itself higher. At the main gate, the cultist-soldiers of Pelegeron, faced with their rebellion’s collapse, are no longer fighting for their twisted truth. They are fighting to survive, and they are losing. Their cities are in dust. Their stronghold endures siege.

  Then it comes. That moment, disgustingly sharp and impossible to predict, when the defenders are no longer defending at all, but fighting a retreat. It’s a change in the toxic air, a divergence from the angry cries that rise from any army like an aural tide. Everything is different without any real warning, but it spreads the way fire devours a bracken forest. It is no longer a fighting retreat, but a rout. The defenders are broken, and the slaughter begins as they turn and flee. Soldiers who had faced the invaders with fanatical pride only moments before now die with their wounds on their backs. To the knight’s eyes, there is no surer testament to a coward’s death.

  Grimaldus fights at his lord’s side, beneath the gaze of towering stone angels that beckon the faithful into the subterranean stronghold. His helm is gone, torn away almost an hour before, and his enhanced respiration labours in the thick air. But he stands, and he fights, and his sword never falls still.

  The enemy flood around him, sacrificing their lives for the chance to pull at his limbs, seeking to drag him down. He kills them with blade, with boot, with fist. They are only human, he tells himself. Only human. Their bones break. Their blood stains his tabard a sick pink. He kills most of them fast enough that they can scarcely cry out. As for the others, without their insect-faced oxygen masks, they strangle and die without the need for a death earned by the blade. Smashing their respirator tanks is enough to leave them dead.