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Brother Corbulo studied him for a moment, and felt a curious pang of sorrow for Lemartes. What anguish it must be, he thought, to lead your tormented kinsmen into certain death, and each time remain the last man standing.
Lemartes held out his hand. ‘Give him to me. He will find a kind of peace in the cells above.’
Corbulo shook his head, snapping back to the matter. ‘No. No. Not yet, brother.’
‘Then why bring him to my tower at all?’ Lemartes retorted, showing his fangs. He pushed past the Sanguinary Priests to the marble table. ‘Look at him. Release him, Corbulo! It will be a kindness.’
‘It will be a waste!’ retorted the high priest. ‘You understand what he went through to bring the essence back to us? The battles fought and lives lost?’
Lemartes glared at him and spoke in a low whisper. ‘What I understand is that none of that would have been needed if not for the failures of the Sanguinary Priesthood!’ He leaned in. ‘Brother Caecus was one of yours. His hubris opened our home to the forces of Chaos!’ Lemartes spat the last word. ‘You are responsible for the Red Grail, Corbulo. You allowed our enemies to steal a measure of our Primarch’s holy blood.’ He jabbed a finger at the warrior in chains. ‘You brought this upon him!’
Corbulo said nothing. The hateful truth was, there was damning weight to the guardian’s words. The Blood Angel lying before him had been set on a quest to recover a vial of Sanguinius’s precious vitae, kept alive for ten thousand years – and he had done so, wresting it from the grip of the self-styled primogenitor of the eightfold path, the traitor Fabius Bile. But in doing so, the warrior had been forced to find the one safe place in which to protect the holy fluid: he had injected it into his own bloodstream.
And now it was killing him. The powerful essence was too much, even for the enhanced physiology of an Adeptus Astartes. The warrior had barely made it home to the fortress-monastery on Baal before he collapsed in the throes of a crippling fever. The astonishing potency was destroying the Astartes, consuming his own blood and transforming it into something of incredible, lethal power.
‘Rafen.’ Lemartes intoned the warrior’s name. ‘He is strong, but not strong enough. Soon the Rage and the Thirst will consume him, and he will not return. We must let this run its course.’
‘I believe he can survive!’ Corbulo insisted. ‘Each of us, every Blood Angel and successor is a Son of Sanguinius. Each of us carries the smallest measure of our primarch’s blood within us, gifted during our ascension to Astartes–’
‘The smallest measure,’ Lemartes repeated. ‘Aye! A mere drop, and that alone is enough to make a man into an angel of war! But Rafen has taken a dose a million times more potent! He cannot survive that.’
‘So we take it from him,’ said Corbulo, shooting a look at Salel. ‘We purge Rafen of what he fought so hard to recover.’
‘You… mean to employ the sarcophagus?’ said Salel, his expression stiffening. ‘Can such a thing be done?’
Lemartes shook his head. ‘It is foolish to even consider it. If Astorath were here, Rafen would already have found peace at the edge of his axe blade–’
‘But the High Chaplain is not here!’ Corbulo insisted. ‘His duties carry him far from Baal, and so the matter is left to us.’
Lemartes folded his arms over his chest. ‘What would Lord Dante say of this?’
‘He will endorse whatever path brings us back to equilibrium.’ Corbulo looked down at Rafen’s straining, tortured features, and tried to imagine the raging pain of the god-fire coursing through his veins. He could not let the warrior perish; Lemartes had cut him to the quick, and the guilt the priest felt was all too real. He had failed to protect the holy blood and allowed Fabius to steal it. He would not let the Chapter pay another cost by losing one more of their kinsmen to this matter. ‘Take Brother Rafen to the Hall of Sarcophagi,’ he commanded. ‘Find The Touch of Sanguine Dawn, and place him within it.’
With a frown, Lemartes stepped back from the side of the table and allowed the servitors to gather up the twitching body of the Blood Angel. ‘This will only draw out his suffering and make his death twice the agony. Where is your mercy, priest?’
Corbulo looked the Guardian of the Lost in the eye. ‘There will be no death today, Chaplain. I will not permit it.’
The great chamber was some strange melding of hospice and sculpture garden. Dotted with plinths of stone, each crested with a great orb-like carving of gold and brass, the Hall of Sarcophagi pulsed with a heartbeat like a living thing. Trains of thick cables and fluid-carrying conduits snaked from one orb to another, others gathering in bunches that vanished through gridded iron plates in the floor. Above, life-support nodes extended down from ornate silver racks, threading into openings atop each sphere.
The smell of blood and stone was here as well, but somehow not so coarse as it was in the tower. There, it was the smell of death; here, it signified new life, rebirth.
Many of the golden orbs were occupied, each minded by a sleepless menial constantly at work adjusting the flows of gene-active philtres and the operation of nourishment tubules. Corbulo studied the sarcophagus closest to him; he knew it well. It was Angel’s White Sun, one of the oldest in the Chapter’s inventory, forged in the years of the Great Crusade before the Heresy of Horus ten millennia ago. Like each of the orbs around it, Angel’s White Sun was a master-crafted piece of machinery, so advanced that even the Techmarines under the command of Brother Incarael could not fully fathom the intricacies of its workings. It was as much a work of art as it was a device for remaking men. Inside each of the operable spheres lay a Blood Angel aspirant, their flesh drifting in a bath of amnio-fluids mingled with alterants and accelerants that worked at their genetic structure, rewriting their bodies cell by cell. These mechanisms, combined with the powerful implant technologies created for all Adeptus Astartes, could transform a normal human being into the majesty of a Blood Angel. The aspirants who entered the sarcophagi as men would one day emerge as warriors of Sanguinius – at least, those that did not die in the course of the changing.
Some Blood Angels, when not at their duties or called to battle, would come to the Hall of Sarcophagi and slumber inside the very orb where they had been quickened. Many, Corbulo among them, believed that such periodic returns to the womb of their rebirth, spent connected to the blood-sifts, could cleanse the soul and stave off the eventual encroachment of the Rage and the Thirst. The devices had the power to heal a man as well as to change him.
He hoped such a thing might save the life of Brother Rafen.
Corbulo walked the rows of the orbs until he found The Touch of Sanguine Dawn, a fine example of the most noble sarcophagus, tooled in white gold and platinum, plated in brass and polished glassaic. Like Angel’s White Sun, it too dated back to the days before the Heresy, and it had been in service to the Chapter all that time, lovingly cared for by legions of helots and blood-servitors. Legend had it that The Touch was one of several sarcophagi carried into the battles of the Great Crusade itself, aboard the ships of the Blood Angel fleet.
Salel was supervising the menials; they had set Rafen inside and were almost complete in their preparations. Exsanguinator channels and vitae-guides had been bound into his flesh, blood pumps primed and ready to begin.
The senior Sanguinary Priest ran his hand down the open leaf of the sphere. Inside, the surface of the sarcophagus was etched with countless lines of tiny script in High Gothic, each one the name of a brother who had been quickened within it. He searched and found Rafen’s name there, a way down the roll of honour.
‘It is time,’ said Salel.
Corbulo nodded and looked up. He found Rafen staring at him, in the first moment of lucidity he had seen from the Blood Angel in days. ‘Brother-Sergeant…?’
Rafen’s hand gripped his arm. ‘I see…’ he whispered. ‘I see… him.’
‘And he will guide you,’ said the priest, signalling to Salel to seal the sarcophagus. ‘To life… Or elsewhere.’
Salel turned away. ‘What now?’
The Touch of Sanguine Dawn shimmered like a jewel. ‘We wait,’ said Corbulo, ‘and let the bloodline do its work.’
They left the chamber, neither of the priests once thinking to glance up at the gallery above; the thought to do such a thing was plucked from their heads and discarded. Unseen by them or any other, a single figure stood up there, half-shrouded in shadow, watching. His preternatural aura made him a ghost, and that was just as he wished it.
Mephiston, Lord of Death, Librarian and master psyker of the Blood Angels Chapter, leaned forward on the balcony and peered into Rafen’s sarcophagus, listening to the turmoil of the mind within.
He saw fire and pain and the colours of raw agony. The psyker’s hands tensed into claws around the stone balustrade of the gallery, knuckles whitening. Rafen’s psychic trace danced there before him like a stark flame in a hurricane, always on the verge of being snuffed out, fighting back with every spark of energy. Mephiston pushed his mind deeper into the maze of sensation, feeling for Rafen’s conscious thoughts.
Rafen was captured in the throes of a terrible fever-dream, a maddening flood of pain that manifested as baking heat and cloying dust. Mephiston could sense the warrior’s self, reaching the echo of it. He saw a measure of what Rafen saw; an unreal, nightmarish landscape of horror and destruction. He saw a battlefield piled high with eviscerated corpses, awash in lakes of freshly spilled blood.
The Flaw. It could only be the power of the gene-curse, he realised. The darkness within every Blood Angel given terrible freedom by the power of the primarch’s blood. The force of it staggered the psyker, and memories of his own boiled to the surface, threatening to pollute the clarity of his telepathic connection – memories of Hades Hive and his own journey toward the madness of the Rage.
Grimly, Mephiston detached the invisible feelers of his psychic power from the turbulent mind of the younger warrior. He could do nothing to help him now.
As he severed the last link, the Librarian took with him one final image from Rafen’s churning psyche – that of an aloof, winged figure clad in a magnificent sheath of golden armour, observing from a distance. Judging him.
‘Take cover!’
Brother-Sergeant Cassiel heard the cry ring out across the landing bay of the starship Hermia, and threw himself into the lee of a support stanchion just as the crimson-hulled Stormbird fell through the atmosphere shield and collided with the deck. The steel beneath his boots resonated with the impact. He flinched as a howling, rising shriek filled the bay: the Stormbird’s forward undercarriage had collapsed and it was riding on a pillar of fat yellow sparks, cutting a gouge through the decking. The proud winged teardrop of blood on the prow was scarred and wreathed in metal-smoke.
The craft slowed and finally halted, moments later to be swarmed by dozens of legion serfs bearing tanks of fire retardants. Cassiel swore a Baalite curse under his breath and approached the wounded craft. Beyond it, he could see the main hatch sliding shut like a gigantic iris; a sliver of green planet vanished out of sight. That would be the last he would see of the world called Nartaba Octus, the last any man would see of it as it was. The final few drop-ships were being taken aboard as the Hermia climbed up to a high combat orbit. From there, the ships of Task Force Ignis and the Blood Angels aboard them would conclude their work. The orders were clear, ratified by Sanguinius himself and struck with the signet of the Warmaster Horus Lupercal.
All human survivors from the scientific colony on Octus had been recovered; the xenos infesting the planet – a horde of dark eldar that had defied full extermination on the ground – would be shown the displeasure of Terra with a space-to-surface barrage from the flotilla’s laser batteries.
The alien reavers had fought hard, and with great tenacity. Cassiel had faced their kind elsewhere during the Great Crusade and punished them, but it seemed the xenos did not learn the Emperor’s lesson. When they were done here, Nartaba Octus would forever bear the scars of this conflict as a warning to those who defied the Master of Mankind and his Sons.
But for the moment, more immediate matters held his attention. Reaching the Stormbird’s hatch, he levered it open and extended his hand to help a brother exit the smoke-filled craft. He knew his face. ‘Sarga? Are you injured?’ he asked.
The warrior shook his head. ‘No, Cassiel. But we have a casualty… Then the reaver scum damaged the ship with a drone… We barely made it back in one piece.’
Cassiel beckoned a medicae servitor to bring a grav-litter closer as a second Astartes emerged from the ship, carrying another over his shoulder. The wounded Blood Angel wore the white and red armour of an Apothecary, but the ceramite was marred with splashes of dark arterial crimson, still wet from the spilling.
Cassiel saw the source of the wound and almost recoiled in disgust. Through a rent at the waist of the warrior’s power armour a length of something that resembled crystal, or perhaps ice, protruded from his body. Gruesome, sickly light glittered within the fragment, casting baleful colour across the Apothecary’s pale face.
‘He was tending to a civilian,’ Sarga explained, his voice flat with anger. ‘One of the sallow-eyed bastards shot him in the back. I killed it, but Meros had already fallen...’
Cassiel leaned closer. ‘Meros? Brother Meros, do you hear me?’
The Blood Angel’s eyes fluttered and he muttered something incoherent.
‘He fought through a raider squad alone,’ Sarga was saying. ‘Must have thought he’d dealt with them all.’
‘He’s not dead yet,’ Cassiel insisted, although Meros’s corpse-like pallor put the question to those words. The sergeant placed him on the litter and moved with it, out toward the infirmary elsewhere on the same deck. His eyes were drawn to the glassy splinter in the Apothecary’s side once more. Cassiel knew it for what it was: a soul-seeker.
The dart was the war-shot from an Eldar splinter gun, the venomous shard poisoned by conventional means, but doubly so by some monstrous form of psionic impregnation. So it was said, the toxin it exuded would not only destroy flesh, but also disintegrate a man’s very soul.
Cassiel, like every servant of the Emperor’s secular Imperium, paid little heed to such superstitious notions as spiritual ephemera, but he had seen the work of a soul-seeker before, seen it dissemble an Astartes from within… and part of him had been left wondering if the weapon had first killed the man’s essence before it murdered his flesh.
Sarga was at his side, his expression bleak. ‘He will die,’ he said.
Cassiel shook his head. ‘No. There’s still time to ensure his survival. We will purge this from him.’
‘How do you propose to do that?’ Sarga demanded. ‘Any attempt to dig out the round will shatter it–’
‘There may be another way,’ said the sergeant.
It seemed strange to see them inside the steel walls of the Hermia’s hull, in the compartment below the starship’s infirmary. The very sight of the great golden sculptures lying here, set upon the deck plates, was somehow wrong, as if the contents of a familiar room had been upset and rearranged.
The lines on Sarga’s worn, leathery face deepened. ‘The sarcophagus…’
Cassiel directed a serf to guide the grav-litter to the closest capsule. ‘Aboard ship on the orders of Master Raldoron himself,’ he said. ‘Several have been distributed among the flotillas, to serve as critical care centres for the fatally injured.’
Sarga shot him a look. ‘A wound that is fatal to an Astartes is a wound that cannot be survived by any man.’
‘We will see.’ Cassiel had the serfs place Meros inside the closest of the orbs.
‘I cannot let this pass without comment,’ Sarga went on. ‘The shard in his side… It is tainted with alien sorcery! What if that taint c
ontaminates the sarcophagus? There is no way to know what effect the psionic spoil may have–’
Cassiel silenced him with a glare. ‘Sorcery? It is only a strain of poison, virulent indeed, but no more than that. It is not magick. And it will be purged.’ He signalled to the helots to close the petals of the orb. ‘The dark eldar took the lives of our brothers down on that blighted world. They will not take this one after the fact, and I will argue the will of my order with the Warmaster himself, should he see fit to challenge it!’
Rafen was buried in sand. The particles were made of ground bone and flecks of metal, glittering redly in the punishing light of a bloated, hellish sun. With slow, deliberate motions, he dragged himself out of the clinging mass, the powder sluicing from him, pooling in the crevices of his wargear.
He found a bolt pistol and a sword nearby, both rusted and decrepit. He wondered if the gun would survive a pull of the trigger. The blade was a pitted, cracked thing.
The Blood Angel lurched forward, shaking off the last of the dust, and he stumbled; the power armour was sluggish, and he felt the full weight of the ceramite and steel across his shoulders. Heat in shimmering waves rose up all about him, and pinpricks of sweat blossomed on his brow.
Rafen grimaced; every movement seemed like a colossal effort. He felt uncharacteristically weak, as if his vitality was draining away. The Blood Angel set his jaw and drew himself up.
He began to walk across the desert battlefield, across the lines of the dunes against the harsh winds that bore gusts of stinging sand. He placed one foot in front of another, moving like an automaton. The masses of corpses and litter of blood he left behind, wandering into the dust and heat, searching. When he ventured to look back, there was nothing behind him but sand and more sand.