The Devastation of Baal

by Guy Haley

  A flare of power shoved away the alien presence. Mephiston lifted his head. Blood ran from his eyes. ‘Fly faster!’ he snarled at Rhacelus.

  Hearing their lord, the pilots pushed the engines to their limits, and the Thunderhawks sped onward to the Cruor Mountains, leaving the aerial swarm labouring far behind.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Lord of Blood

  A spray of bolts finished the ’gaunt mid-leap. The quarry cliffs echoed to their detonations long after the thing’s broken shell crunched upon the rock.

  The Thunderhawks were already away, racing fast from the gaining aerial swarms. Out from the Arx Angelicum the tyranid presence was minimal; there was not much on Baal other than the Space Marines, but small groups had evidently been dispatched to deal with places like the bloodstone quarry. Servitors lay dead where they had fallen, their loads of stone and tools spilled. These had no combat protocols, and they had been slaughtered while they were working. Rhacelus trudged up a low fan of angular, machined rock, grimacing when he spied a small tyranid organism nosing through the innards of a dead cyborg. He killed the creature with a casual twitch of his mind, and toed the remains of the servitor with his boot. The remains lay in a sticky pool of mixed blood and oil. Its metal torso casing had been melted through by acid spray, the organics inside part consumed. The dead cyborg looked up at Rhacelus with open, dull eyes. They never seemed more human than in death. Such pity stirred in the epistolary that he bent to close the thing’s eyelids with his hand.

  Another series of bolt shots rang out. Rhacelus looked down to the wide open space in front of the mine gates. Space Marine Librarians swept the area clear. They relied on their weapons in the main, conserving their psychic might for the coming ritual. At that moment they were the galaxy’s most over-powered combat patrol, he thought.

  The mine’s machinery was untouched. The tyranids had no interest in it, and saw no threat from it, so the conveyors, rock crushers, earth shifters and more stood ready for service. Only the servitors were dead, and they had been comprehensively exterminated. The mine was completely autonomous, and had gone into lockdown as soon as the xenos attacked. Its armoured gates were closed fast against the alien hordes. The outer part had been an open cast facility. With its load of bloodstone worked out millennia ago, the servitors had followed the veins of crystal into the mountain. The Cruor Mountains were the sole source anywhere for bloodstones, with which the Blood Angels and certain favoured successors adorned their armour. They were of immense importance to the Chapter, for the stones held ritual and spiritual meaning that few outsiders were allowed to know of.

  Square-cut machine cliffs surrounded the central pit. To the south a road for automated haulers led up to the surface. The Cruor Mountains rose, flat peaks to the south east, south and west. The quarry was enormous, a pit, but it was a mean atrium to the vast mine workings hidden under the ground.

  Rhacelus sniffed the air. Powdered rock, spilt oil and thin cyborg blood, the aseptic scent of tyranid vitae, wholly unpalatable, and the moistureless expanse of Baal’s global desert.

  ‘As good a place for a last stand as any,’ he muttered bleakly.

  ‘It is this way.’ Mephiston was leaning on Antros, pointing to a path that led up from the quarry through interleaved piles of tailings away from the main mine entrance.

  The Lord of Death’s voice was a whisper in Rhacelus’ vox-bead. He wondered how many times the Lord of Death could stretch himself like this and survive. Each major expenditure of effort in this crisis wore him down a little more. His strength had yet to return from his ­battle in the sky, and he leaned heavily on Lucius Antros. Rhacelus was disturbed at the sight. He did not trust the younger Librarian entirely. Antros was too eager for power. There was something unseemly in the way he fussed over the Chief Librarian. He had known people like that in Kemrender, back before his apotheosis. The ambitious were always drawn to the strong.

  Mephiston was a distant, strange, isolated figure. He remembered Calistarius, the man Mephiston had been. Sometimes he thought he could see bits of his old brother in the Lord of Death, but he could not speak out to Mephiston in honesty like he could have done with Calistarius. No one could. The words could be said, but Mephiston was so immured in his own, strange state they were not heard. Rhacelus had asked the priest Albinus to speak with him; he was arguably his only other friend, but Mephiston had shut Albinus out at the mere suggestion that Antros’ power was growing too quickly.

  Rhacelus rebuked himself. These thoughts would not do. Antros was of the librarius. Mephiston judged him worthy, so should he. He was getting intolerant in his old age. Antros was the same as any psyker. They were all strange, it was in their nature. He forgot, sometimes, that he was no different to his brothers.

  ‘My eyes glow all the damned time, and I am charmlessly misanthropic,’ he scolded himself.

  He went to join the others.

  The path led them through heaps of crushed spoil to the side of the mountain. A small portal of thick plasteel barred the way within. Mephiston withdrew a signum-key from his belt and bid the lock’s machine-spirit open.

  ‘Obeying,’ sighed the door, with a voice as worn and empty as the desert. The door clunked into its housing. Mephiston went in first. Rhacelus beckoned the rest after, his gaze ever on the skies.

  They went into a wide corridor carved from the bones of Baal. Rhacelus felt something down there. He had read widely, and spoken with psykers of many kinds. He recalled the idea of the ‘world spirit’, a confusing eldar concept that seemed to apply both to their artificial pseudo-organic informational networks and to the native animus of a world. Everything the eldar believed was offensive to the human mind, possessed of diametrically opposed duality that made a nonsense of their philosophies. Sometimes, though, Rhacelus thought there might be something to what they said. Their understanding of the warp was dangerously flawed, but even so, there was a feel to places. Rhacelus had been witness to many strange things that the teachings of the librarius poorly explained.

  Baal’s spirit then, if that was what he felt; it was huge and immobile, an ossified thing with little life but great presence, like a towering mesa of dry stone.

  In the dim past, unusual tunnels had been uncovered by the giant grinding machines of the Imperium at the ends of these workings. The passage ended abruptly. Concentric marks of a machine drill’s teeth forever marked the spot where the Blood Angels servants had broken through into the labyrinth.

  The machines the Blood Angels employed plundered the stone with little regard for the mountains, making tunnels that were straight and broad and obliterated everything in the process. The passages beyond were surgical, a confusion of intersecting galleries as delicate as a circulatory system, precisely following a single seam of bloodstone. There was a suggestion that these older workings were contemporaneous with the Carceri Arcanum. Perhaps they were not made by human hand. They were certainly oddly proportioned, being wide and low.

  Mysterious as they were, the tunnels were unimportant. Where they led was. The tunnels went far into Baal, abruptly terminating at one spectacular cave that not even the Imperium had the heart to pillage. This sacred place, the Ruberica, or the Heart of Baal, was the Librarians’ destination.

  A bloodstone blood drip was a mark of honour of a Space Marine’s kinship with Sanguinius. Several variations were awarded for notable deeds on and off the battlefield, including mastery of the Five Virtues and the Five Graces.

  The jewels were not only symbolic, each one was also mildly psychically resonant. Individually, the stones were too small to have any effect on the bearer, but where there was a large amount of the crystal they amplified psychic power. The warp itch in Rhacelus’ eyes intensified. The light they emitted burned brighter. His limbs felt stronger, his mind sharper. The auras of his companions became bright enough to see in the mortal realm, and struck glimmers of reflected empyrical power from the w
alls of the caves. Gradually, the pressure of the shadow in the warp slipped away, taking Rhacelus’ headache with it. He breathed easily for the first time in days.

  Mephiston also drew strength from the site, effecting a remarkable recovery. Early on he shook off Antros’ helping arm, and soon he was walking steadily with great purpose. Physically the tunnels were also a balm. They had a never-changing pleasant cool. In the deeper chambers there was a hint of invigorating humidity.

  By the time they neared the wide mouth of the Ruberica, the party glowed with warp-born might. Rhacelus felt invincible. He reminded himself that he was not, for nobody was. A false sense of power could undo their efforts of the next few hours, possibly damn them all.

  Rhacelus ordered their veteran bodyguard to remain outside, and the party made their way within.

  The cave mouth was worked partway. Whoever had made the ancient tunnels had stopped their excavations when the glory of the Ruberica had become apparent to them, much as the Space Marines had ceased their excavations when they had encountered the labyrinth. Chisel marks of unfathomable antiquity still scored the wall. Rhacelus traced them with his fingers until they suddenly stopped, and the Space Marines were in a tube of convoluted, natural stone untouched by any tool. It was volcanic in origin, there never having been enough water on Baal to create caves by hydrological process, but how exactly it had been formed was another mystery.

  The tunnel opened out into a wide, dark space. Mephiston was first into the Ruberica. Once he had passed into the room it did not remain dark for long. Tendrils of psychic power wisped out from his head. Where they touched the cavern’s sides, light kindled in the hearts of the giant crystalline formations encrusting every surface. Tall, hexagonal pillars of pure bloodstone pointed towards the centre of the chamber, as if the cave were a giant geode.

  On the floor the crystals made an uneven but passable pavement that stepped up and down in pretty geometric blocks of translucent stone. As the other pyskers came within the chamber the light grew, glowing from every surface, so that shortly the Librarians moved through a world saturated in bloody light. Those Space Marines still wearing their helms removed them. Their skin was stained all the same shade, the whites of their eyes and enamel of their teeth delicate pink in their ruddy faces.

  There were many strange things about the cavern. Among these was that the crystals healed themselves, like a living, siliceous organism. The finest example of this was a servitor from an earlier millennium encased up to its waist in the floor. Crystals sprouted all over the rest of it, hiding its human form in immovable armour of ruby shards. Accidental nicks and cracks inflicted by the weight of Space Marine battleplate were always repaired the next time the cave was utilised by the librarius for its rituals, but elsewhere the crystals did not grow, and remained marked when damaged. Far from encouraging harvesting of the Ruberica, this strange phenomenon only increased the librarius’ veneration of the site.

  The floor rose up to a natural podium. Mephiston made for this place and stood upon it. He waited for the rest of the party to file in and take up their stations at lesser raised points of the floor, until all the Librarians were arrayed at differing heights in a loose circle around him. Then did the Lord of Death speak.

  ‘I have told you all what we must accomplish here, in this most sacred of places, and that it is dangerous and heretical,’ said Mephiston. ‘Know that we have no choice. The daemon known as Ka’Bandha has long coveted our souls. He is moving against us while we are at our most vulnerable.’ Mephiston’s voice had an unusual vigour, as of one who has recently fed upon warm blood, but the crystals absorbed the sound, preventing echoes, and so his speech was curiously flat. ‘If he is not stopped, the consequences for our bloodline will be catastrophic,’ he continued. ‘All of us here wish that we could stand beside our brothers against the xenos. What we do in this cave today is as important, if not more so. The tyranids represent the gravest threat to the corpus of the Imperium, but Chaos, the ancient foe, is the greater danger. It imperils the soul. If we are not successful here, our brothers will lose both life and spirit. But we will be successful. We shall bind the daemon Ka’Bandha, and abjure him, so preventing his ingress to this realm. Then we shall rejoin our Chapters, and scour the alien from this world with the power of the warp.’

  Mephiston nodded to Epistolary Marcello, designated the caller of the word for the ceremony. Rhacelus took a deep breath. This whole enterprise had been dug out of an ancient book in Mephiston’s personal collection. It stank of sorcery. The line between magic and the pure, Emperor-sanctioned utilisation of the warp was silk thin and wavering, but this was no misjudgement; they were about to leap over the line with both feet.

  ‘Begin!’ called Marcello. ‘Share the blood.’

  In major ceremonies at the Arx, blood thralls aided them. Chaplains stood by to guard the Librarians against spiritual corruption. Sanguinary priests attended to protect the purity of the Blood. There would be singing to calm the spirit, and incense to cleanse the psychosphere. None of that was utilised. The Librarians stood alone on the brink of damnation.

  Grimly, Rhacelus twisted the release seal on his left gauntlet and pulled off the armoured glove. He flexed his hand in the red light. His eyes met with the Lexicanium to his left. He did not know him beyond a psychic impression and a name on a scrollplate. Understanding passed between them.

  Rhacelus offered up his wrist.

  The other bent his head to Rhacelus’ bared flesh and fastened his mouth around it. Rhacelus gasped as the needle-sharp angel’s teeth of the other pierced his skin. The Librarian drank with increasing urgency.

  ‘Enough,’ said Rhacelus.

  The other did not relent.

  ‘Enough!’ he said firmly, and pulled his hand free. Three drops of blood dripped from his wrist before his Space Marine physiology closed the wounds. The Lexicanium blinked and stepped woozily back, blood drunk.

  The warrior on the right offered up his wrist to Rhacelus. The Codicier drank sparingly, ashamed and excited by the rising of the Red Thirst.

  The sharing done, the Space Marines replaced their gauntlets. Rhacelus’ wounds already itched with the formation of scar tissue. The deep ache of the wound in his flesh faded.

  The blood they had taken from one another did anything but fade. It warmed their stomachs, and shortly thereafter sang in their veins. In each of the scions of Sanguinius was a tiny portion of the Great Angel’s vitae, and to taste it afresh awakened their souls. Brotherhood bound them together more tightly than ever. With men he barely knew Rhacelus now had an intimate bond.

  At the centre of it all stood Mephiston. He took no blood, but drank in the potency of the sharing nonetheless. He seemed to swell in size, becoming dark in countenance, shadows gathering around his back like flexing wings.

  ‘Brothers,’ he said, and his voice was in their ears and in their minds, thick with stolen life. ‘Lend me your arts.’

  The ruby light flared, becoming not brighter but more intense, taking on a consistency beyond that which light should possess. Mephiston’s form wavered and grew. He was speaking words no servant of the Emperor should ever utter.

  A wound appeared before him, a slice in reality that dripped blood and tore like rent flesh. It split wide, and its edge bled fire and vitae.

  Through it Rhacelus saw terrible things. Two armies of daemons, one black, one red, battled upon a plain of bone. A gate of scarlet light in the shape of an angel opened from the daemons’ world into his own. There were stars on his side, and the curve of a red world with two moons encircled by warring fleets. Baal – he was looking at Baal.

  A titanic monstrosity was only yards from the gate, ape-faced and wide-horned. Blood-red skin strained with every swing of its axe as it fought its way through the last few beings barring its way. Hideous foes, almost as mighty as the creature, fell before its blade. From the daemon emanated a terrible, all-encomp
assing fury that resounded from Rhacelus’ soul like the striking of a bell calling him to an eternity of war.

  Mephiston had opened a way into the realm of the Blood God. Heresy of the first order. Worse by far, it spoke of a dark power in the Chief Librarian that exceeded that of all those who had come before him.

  Mephiston drew hard on the other Librarians; Rhacelus winced at the pain. The vital brotherhood between the psykers strained like a bulging net. Instinctively, Rhacelus knew the bond joining them was all that prevented them from falling head first into the no-places of the warp.

  The view changed, swooping down over the battle. Mephiston sprouted wings, blood red and huge, traceries of fine veins visible through the stretched skin. His body was black as night, and eyes aglow. The view through the rip in space and time halted in the maw of the gate as the daemon slew its last opponent.

  Ka’Bandha roared at the sky, and his followers screamed out their praises of him, and fell in a frenzy on the last of the black-skinned daemons, putting them to the sword and finally breaking them. Triumphantly, the Angels’ Bane stepped towards the gate, ready to fall upon Baal.

  The Lord of Fury stopped, his triumph turned to ­puzzlement. He reached a hand to the gate to find his way barred. Snorting mists of blood from his nostrils, he peered downward, and there spied Mephiston. He grunted a laugh, his angry face twisting with mirth. Heavy dreadlocks bound in brass rattled upon his breastplate. Yellow eyes shone with fiery delight.

  ‘What is this? Little angels stop the gate. I have won the right to pass this way by blood and might. Begone! We shall see each other soon enough. I shall call for you and you will join me.’

  ‘Back!’ spoke Mephiston. The space between he and the daemon shimmered with heat. ‘You cannot pass. The sons of the Great Angel do not permit it.’