by Guy Haley
‘This we swear! This is our oath!’ shouted the Novamarines.
‘Unity! Honour! Strength of purpose!’ said Odon.
‘Unity! Honour! Strength of purpose!’ roared the Novamarines.
Minds cleansed by the waters of their homes, oath reaffirmed, Odon led the Novamarines in prayer. Silently the brothers of the Third and Fifth Companies filed out of the Grand Chapel and returned first to their arming chambers, and then to their cells. In the confines of their simple rooms, they spent the night fasting and checking their weaponry, preparing themselves for the morrow. The cloistered habitation decks were alive with the clicking of guns disassembled and rebuilt, and whispered prayers.
The First Company veterans remained in vigil in the Grand Chapel, thoughts bent only on their duty to the Lord of Man, and through that duty, victory.
They did not sleep.
The Hall of Life sat at the centre of Lux Rubrum, the very heart of the mighty vessel, and a heart it resembled; red and hot.
In shape, the hall was a wide circle, the walls bulging like a ribcage as they ascended, curving back inward to meet as a pointed dome. From this high ceiling censers depended, clouding the air with fragrant blue smoke that reeked of the fireblooms of San Guisiga.
Six-sided pillars of porphyry quarried from the flanks of Mount Calicium braced walls of red-brown granite. These alternated with pillars of skulls, the stacked trophies of five thousand years of war. Slabs of the same granite that made up the walls made up the floor. This stone was polished bright, so that all who looked into it would see their face reflected as from a pool of drying blood. Lights were set within bowls carved into the pillars, casting a ruddy glow on the ancient battle honours and standards that lined the stone walls. Glass sarcophagi topped with elegant metalwork and statuary held the bones of the Chapter’s most honoured dead, skull-faced cybernetic vat-children crouched at the head of each vitreous tomb, ready to whisper the great deeds of those within to any who would pause by their sides.
At the centre of the chamber a depression was sunk into the granite, the shape of the blood drop of the Chapter. Square channels cut into the floor led to it, turning this way and that in a continuous line, so that they formed the chalice of the Blood Drinkers insignia below the blood drop. Thirty more channels ran out from it, to alcoves set within the walls. At the narrow end of the drop, an altar soared high. A relief of helmetless armoured brothers circled it carved of red carnelian, each one with a skull for his head, bowed over hands clasped around the hilts of swords and axes.
Upon the altar channels were also cut, below manacles of bright adamantium, leading from places that would correspond to the major arteries of the human body’s limbs should a person be laid out upon it: carotid, femoral, ulnar and radial. The channels ran from these points to gather, then as one led to the apex of the blood drop.
The altar was empty and it gleamed. Behind it, a stained glass window five times the height of an adept. Holos’s stern features, captured in glass, stared down at the hall in eternal judgement. The fires burning on the other side of the glass made his eyes glimmer with life.
A pulpit was above the altar, an angel’s wings spread wide formed its sides. The angel also was of carnelian, and had a fleshless face. It held a sword in one hand, an hourglass in the other. Everywhere in the Hall of Life were skulls: skulls of the righteous dead, skulls of stone, skulls of volcanic glass. This was a place of life only for the brothers of the Blood Drinkers, to all others it brought death.
The room was hot as the volcanic caverns of San Guisiga were hot, the light red as the light of the lava canyons, the air thick and sweet as the air of their home world was thick and sweet, ripe with the scent of copper, iron and incense.
All one hundred and seventy-nine battle-brothers of the Blood Drinkers Chapter present in the strikeforce stood around the chalice cut into the rock, their upper bodies bare. None were absent. Serfs and machine-spirits watched over the fleet. The wounded stood alongside the hale.
Baggy scarlet trousers cinched at the ankles were their robes, black tabards embroidered with the yellow blood drop and chalice of the Chapter hung between their legs. The decorated belts they habitually wore, denoting their role and rank within the Chapter, were absent. Techmarine stood with battle-brother, neophyte with initiate; stripped of their badges, all were equal for the Rite of Holos. They stood shoulder to shoulder in an arc, facing the altar. For the duration of the ritual the matter of their brotherhood was paramount. Distinction of rank or suborder was unimportant, a distraction from their fundamental sameness in the face of the Thirst.
Only the strikeforce’s Sanguinary Priests and Chaplains stood apart, all four armoured and bearing their marks of office; crozius and chalices gleamed in the chamber’s febrile light. They flanked the major portal leading into the room, Reclusiarch Mazrael and Chaplain Gorwin facing the white garbed Apothecaries Zozymus and Feir. Ten Sanguinary Guard stood behind them, armed and armoured also, five with the Chaplains, five with the Sanguinary Priests.
Teale, however, was not among them. Teale would arrive separately, for the Rite of Holos was a ritual of blood, and the Sanguinary Master had the lead role to play.
Caedis stood among his brothers, his own badges removed. Like them he swayed slightly, his mind drugged with anticipation of the coming ritual. The remembered taste of blood filled his mouth. He drooled freely.
The stone doors of the Hall of Life swung open, as silent as death’s approach. A procession of serfs came first, bearing holy icons of Holos and Sanguinius. Sanguinary Master Teale walked at their centre. Behind him came a serf carrying a wooden box. Behind him, more serfs – one hundred and fifty of them, all thin, metal tubing all over them; the ways to their arteries and the fluids that sustained the Chapter. These latter arrivals fanned out as they entered the room. They proceeded to the heads of the thirty channels, five to an alcove.
Sanguinary Master Teale walked to the pulpit, ascended its steps, and took station inside. ‘Brothers!’ he called.
A low sound escaped the lips of the Blood Drinkers, halfway between song and a moan.
‘One and a half thousand years ago, our Chapter stood upon the brink of destruction. We were ravaged by the Thirst, the Black Rage descending upon scores of our brothers at a time. Barely had they finished the rites of initiation before brothers were taken. The Flaw revealed itself strongly within us. Extinction beckoned, but would we go the way of the Exsanguinators, the Brothers of the Red or the others of the scions of our lord lost entirely to the Black Rage?’
The torpid minds of the Blood Drinkers shook themselves at this. ‘No!’ they called. ‘No, no.’ Not as one, but individually these shouts came. They were tinged with sorrow, anger, and with shame.
‘No brothers! We would not!’ bellowed Teale, his voice rasping and sinister through his helmet. ‘And now, look at us. We are strong! We are powerful! We have persisted in glory and service for a further fifteen centuries! All thanks to Brother Holos! Were it not for him and the secret he brought back from his vision upon Mount Calicium, we would be a red footnote in history. And yet we serve! The enemies of mankind fall before us and fear our wrath.’
‘All praise Brother Holos!’ shouted the Chaplains and Sanguinary Priests.
A ragged repetition from the brethren.
‘The blood is the key! Denial is not the answer! We shall not quake before our appetites as our brother Chapters do, but take them to our hearts! The monster within us all cannot be defeated, it cannot be denied. But it can be fed, it can be sated, and if sated, its strength can be borrowed! The blood is life!’
In the alcoves, the serfs bent over the heads of the channels. They held out their wrists and twisted the taps on the tubes that ran into their skin. Blood ran out from the taps, gushing in thin streams into the channels. Thirty red rivers nosed across the floor toward the chalice. In the heat of the chamber, the smell of the blo
od was carried from the floor, instantly filling the room.
The brothers woke a little more. Their eyes glittered in anticipation. Their shoulders and chests heaved with ragged respiration.
‘The blood is life!’ they repeated. Their eyes followed the blood as it ran into the grooves depicting the Chapter chalice.
‘In life there is service!’ shouted Teale.
‘We live to serve!’ replied the brothers.
‘To deny life is to deny service!’ said Teale.
‘To deny service is to betray the Emperor!’ they shouted.
‘Do we choose service or betrayal?’ said Teale.
‘We choose life! We choose service! We choose blood!’ They roared as one.
From a wooden box, Teale took forth a heart, a human heart.
‘What is blood without a heart to force it round the body? The rite demands a heart. I give you the heart of Brother Genthis!’ he handed it to a serf, who took it to the blood drop, and placed it at the bottom. ‘He comes home to his brothers to share his courage with us one last time!’ A laser beam emitted from the eyes of a soaring angel in the ceiling hit the heart. The smell of roasting meat joined the tang of blood. It abated, as the heart blackened rapidly, then turned white. Fine ash collapsed in on itself. The laser beam cut out.
‘In blood is life! In life is service! In service purpose and honour!’ shouted Teale. ‘Blood freely given!’ he continued, sweeping his narthecium out to encompass the serfs patiently bleeding themselves, adding in a low voice, ‘And blood taken.’
Through the doors came two further Sanguinary Guard, resplendent in golden armour, their faces masks of Sanguinius. Between them they held a man, not a serf, some poor soul snatched from one recruitment world or another the Blood Drinkers used; kept in stasis, perhaps for centuries, all for this one moment. He was the Chapter’s monstrous price, the blood-tithe.
His hands were bound before him, his mouth gelled shut. As he came into the room, his eyes widened and he began to struggle harder, but before the giant adepts his efforts were those of a child fighting an ogre, and the guard dragged him forward. They pulled him to the altar. His hands were freed, and then quickly trapped again as he was roughly spread-eagled on the altar. The fear in his eyes told that he knew what the grooves in the stone were for.
‘All must serve the Emperor!’ said Teale. Zeal poured from him, further exciting the others in the room. ‘We serve as we can, we sacrifice all; our lives entire, our souls, our individuality, our very beings! Others must also do their part!’
He dipped his white helmet toward a serf below. The serf activated a mechanism. The man on the altar’s back arched as blades emerged from the altar and penetrated his body at the sites of his arteries. Blood gushed from his bucking body, pouring into the channels and thence in a squared red fall down into the blood drop. The blood of the serfs filled the channels forming the chalice, and overflowed into the drop, mingling their given blood with that taken, both soaking the ash of the heart of Genthis. The Chapter icon shone, painted in liquid red.
Teale undid his helmet’s seals, and removed it. He placed it upon the pulpit. His eyes glowed with savage delight, a touch of fervour, a touch of madness. This was his time, the time of submission, the giving in to powerful appetites. ‘Now brothers! Drink! Drink so that the monster might be sated, and that you might steal its strength.’
The Blood Drinkers fell to their knees, an awful keening escaping their lips. The Chaplains and Apothecaries and Sanguinary Guard undid their own helmets and approached the dying man on the altar, cups extended. The brothers lapped frantically at the stuff of life. In the alcoves, those serfs that were still conscious shut off their taps and those of their collapsed comrades. They retreated quietly, leaving their masters to their debased appetites.
Their faces smeared red, the brothers fell upon the altar, and tore the dead man to pieces.
Later, when the Thirst was quenched, Reclusiarch Mazrael would lead them in prayers of atonement and then of preparation. They would reaffirm their oaths to the Emperor, and beg forgiveness of one another for the lives they had taken. The Techmarines would take a measure of blood from the brothers themselves to placate the Chapters’ weapons and armours. Only then, with the beast inside them tamed, would the brothers’ minds turn fully to battle and the destruction of man’s foes.
Later. For now, the Blood Drinkers lived up to their name.
They fed.
Chapter 12
The Stirring of the Rage
Galt waited patiently for Chapter Master Caedis. The Thunderhawk’s ramp was open, its red-lit interior exposed. Two of the Blood Drinker’s ornately attired honour guard stood to attention either side of the doorway, and servitors wearing the red of that Chapter clumped about the ship, mindlessly fulfilling their duty. Of Caedis, there was no sign.
Galt relaxed into the wait. There was opportunity in reflection in all things, and he allowed his mind to wander where it would. He ran his gaze over the vessel’s lines, so red, so shocking in the drab, starkly lit hangar bay of the Novamarines.
There was a movement under the wing. A shape. Too small for an initiate, too nimble to be that of a servitor. He walked closer to the vessel, and caught sight of a serf working on an atmosphere filter. It was the first of the Blood Drinker’s human servants Galt had seen. Where the Novamarine’s servants were tall and well-formed, this creature of the Blood Angels seemed less than human. He was stooped, and thin to the point of emaciation. He was bare to his waist, wearing a long kilt emblazoned with the yellow blood chalice. Metal tubes sparkled on his limbs and torso, disappearing under the skin in places Galt’s trained, killer’s eye could not help but notice were close to major blood vessels. Ritual scarification criss-crossed the man’s back.
The serf paused in what he was doing, feeling Galt’s eyes on him. He turned and looked directly at the Novamarines First Captain. His eyes were fierce and defiant above his face mask, and he did not drop his gaze from the lord captain’s face as he should have. Galt raised his eyebrow at the servant’s boldness. The serf dipped his head, and disappeared into the red gloom of the Thunderhawk passenger compartment.
Seconds later, Caedis strode out.
The lord of the Blood Drinkers wore Terminator armour, its magnitude accentuating his already imposing size. He wore a double-handed power sword at his waist. He was focussed, eyes bright, his skin ruddy where before it had been pale. But there was still the trace of strain behind his confidence, he was holding something in.
‘Well met, Captain Galt,’ said Caedis. The taller man looked down at Galt.
‘Well met, Lord Chapter Master,’ replied Galt.
‘I apologise for dragging you away from your duties, captain. I wished to see you one final time before the mission commenced.’
‘Then allow me to take the opportunity to thank you for allowing me overall strategic command.’
Caedis looked over Galt’s head, and smiled as if he had seen an old acquaintance somewhere, the kind of smile that was welcoming yet condescending. A pained look marred his features and he swayed a little. His yellow eyes flicked back to Galt’s face. They took a while to focus in the Novamarine’s face, but when he spoke, he did so clearly. ‘Cousin, your talents are better suited for this particular role. I would lead my men from the front and smite our foes alongside them. A cool head such as yours is better employed coordinating the greater action.’
‘You will be unable to give effective orders once you are away from your insertion point, my lord. The radiation fields are too strong for suit vox to penetrate. The Adeptus Mechanicus boosting web will not be installed until the genestealers are driven towards the killing zone.’
‘I am aware of the limitations this action imposes upon me, but I trust in your direction, first among captains of the Novamarines. Give me and mine an order, and we will obey. And Captain Sorael is an excellent co
mmander,’ said Caedis. ‘I am sure he and your Captain Mastrik will excel themselves in the killing zone whether I can comment upon his actions or not.’
Galt nodded, somewhat reluctantly conceding the point. ‘Captain Aresti leads our men in the Hammer of the Emperor. Our men should begin the venting of the hulk’s atmosphere soon enough.’
‘Once I am on the hulk, I will order my men to follow him.’
‘You will not lead them yourself?’ said Galt.
Caedis shook his head, and for a second, Galt thought he might falter.
‘No, there are certain… Rites, rituals that I must complete. My attention will be elsewhere. I defer command to him.’ He was struggling with his words, whether in finding those that were appropriate or because he was exhausted Galt could not discern.
‘Might I ask, Lord Caedis, are you well?’
Caedis smiled as if that were an amusing jest. His smile dropped quickly.
‘Yes, and no. My time grows short, Captain Galt. We of the Blood Drinkers can… We know when our end approaches. Do you understand?’
Galt hesitated. He thought of the Shadow Novum and the messages delivered there. Who knew what beliefs the Blood Drinkers held?
‘I do, Lord Caedis.’
Caedis nodded thoughtfully, and for a moment Galt saw respect there. ‘Then I shall return to my ship and gather my men,’ said Caedis. ‘The magi?’
‘They wait as commanded. I will accompany them on their retrieval mission when I deem the hulk safe.’
‘Very well,’ said Caedis. He offered his hand. Galt took his forearm in the warrior’s clasp. His grasp was firm and unwavering, if his gaze was not. ‘Until we meet again, captain. May the Emperor’s foresight deliver our foes to the points of our swords, and his mercy shield us from theirs.’
Talking to Galt took all of Caedis’s remaining self-control. The Rite of Holos had been held only hours before, and already the Thirst clutched at his throat. Flashes of light accompanied by starbursts of pain vexed his eyes and mind. When he closed his eyes, glimpses of something that was not his own life dazzled him, cast him adrift from the flow of time. His ears buzzed. He walked with all the dignity he could up the ramp into the Thunderhawk. The craft was empty but for a trio of serfs and Chaplain Mazrael.