Ruinstorm

by David Annandale

  The torpedoes hit. Toc Derenoth shouted with two voices. A daemon laughed in triumph, and a human exulted in the joy of revelation.

  The De Profundis had no shields. It welcomed the impacts. They completed the ritual. Explosions blossomed on its bow and across the face of its superstructure. The bridge took a direct hit. The fissures blazed, ignited by the blast. Toc Derenoth reached forwards with both arms, his claws spread, lunging for prey. The fissures yawned wide.

  Quor Vondor roared, his voice drowned in the screaming thunder of the sundering of the De Profundis. The illusion of hull integrity vanished. The battle-barge shrieked its last. Adamantium tore apart. Conduits split and split again, filling disintegrating halls with streams of burning plasma. The engines raged, then fell silent in a blinding flare that incinerated the light cruiser Levana, which had strayed too close to destiny.

  The De Profundis screamed, and it screamed in victory. It streaked towards the Samothrace, its course as unalterable as prophecy. Its crew was dead, but the splinters were not mere shrapnel. They had coherent form. They were daggers. Inside scores of them, Word Bearers­ crouched, hurtling towards their prey.

  The physical self of the battle-barge disintegrated, but its soul and its purpose did not. The one of the ship ceased to be. It transformed into legion.

  It became the undivided swarm.

  The Lion confronts his brother, Konrad Curze

  Three

  Dark Unities

  ‘Where are we?’ the Lion demanded.

  ‘Still unknown,’ said Holguin, voted lieutenant of the Deathwing. He observed the fury in his primarch’s eyes. There was far more than frustration there. The Lion had truly expected to reach Terra. He was reacting to the failure and confusion with anger reserved for betrayal. Holguin could guess why. He wished he could not. He felt the urge to speak, to sound a warning. He knew how it would be received. He said nothing. The right moment might never come. This, though, was the worst.

  The Invincible Reason shuddered, straining to keep to its course. Roiling gravitational forces battered the Dark Angels fleet almost as violently as the tempest in the empyrean. The vessels had translated into the materium on the edge of a system caught in a maelstrom. The boundary of the system was marked by a barrier of furious warp flame. Ahead and to port, billions of miles of madness exploded and stormed.

  The wall was an aurora of blood. It billowed with such violence that the Lion could hear the roar of tortured existence in his soul. Cyclonic currents the size of gas giants collided, merged and broke asunder. The engines of the fleet strained to move the ships away from the embrace of disaster.

  Beyond the barrier, the Ruinstorm boiled across the void. A violent bruise of eye-searing colours filled the darkness. No stars were visible. The auspex officer was in communication with Lady Theralyn Fiana, the Chief Navigator, in her cell. They were struggling to get a fix on the fleet’s location with almost no viable data.

  ‘Your disapproval is deafening, Lady Fiana,’ the Lion said.

  ‘I have not spoken, my lord,’ she said over the ship’s internal vox.

  ‘Even so.’

  ‘I have no control over our journey,’ she said. ‘I therefore have little to go on to discover where we are. I think the means of our jump would be the first place to turn for answers.’

  ‘I want your evaluation first,’ said the Lion.

  He doesn’t trust it, Holguin thought, and was glad. Some distance between the primarch and the thing in the dark chamber would be welcome.

  In the near space of the barrier, between it and the Dark Angels fleet, was a graveyard of ships. Metal corpses tumbled slowly, caught in the random currents and bursts of gravity. Holguin saw two ships collide. They disintegrated, fragments spinning lazily off, glinting dully in the glare of the Ruinstorm. ‘Do we know anything about this wreckage?’ he asked.

  ‘The craft are not warp-capable,’ Fiana said. ‘Beyond that, we can’t tell. If we could identify where they came from, proximity might suggest where we are now.’

  The Lion’s gaze was fixed on the warp storm. Holguin could not look at the vortex for more than a few moments at a time. The colours and movements ate at his mind, filling his thoughts with monstrous irrationalities, the fragments of waking nightmares. The Lion stared at the storm as if he would pierce through its secrets by will alone.

  ‘This system,’ said the Lion. ‘It is so far gone. The event here is immense. Its traces must be felt from this location.’

  ‘I agree,’ said Fiana. ‘If we had any readings at all of other stars, we might be able to factor in the distortion and form a hypothesis. The upheaval might even be detectable by others, much further away.’

  ‘A dark beacon,’ Holguin muttered.

  ‘Exactly. But we are too close.’

  ‘So there is nothing you can tell me,’ the Lion said.

  ‘That is correct.’

  The primarch glared at the oculus a few moments longer, the green of his eyes going beyond ice, becoming sharp as a rapier. ‘Keep at it,’ he ordered. He turned on his heel and strode from the bridge.

  Instinct urged Holguin to follow the Lion and be present when his lord confronted the thing that had brought the fleet here. Wisdom told him to stay where he was. The Lion in his fury would not tolerate any other presences at this encounter.

  The servitor-puppet walked towards the Lion as he entered the chamber of Tuchulcha. The stench of the degrading body wafted before it. The boy-thing’s gait was stiff. The puppet was already halfway to the entrance when the doors slid back. Tuchulcha’s anticipation of his arrival was unpleasant. It was too knowing.

  ‘I read anger in your face,’ said the boy. ‘But that is too easy a task to count as progress, I think. Your expression at this moment is not a challenge.’

  ‘I told you to take me to Terra,’ the Lion said. He looked past the puppet and addressed Tuchulcha itself. The gold flecks in the black-and-grey sphere moved more quickly for a moment, as if they were the shifting thoughts of the artefact.

  Cables linked Tuchulcha to the spinal implants of the servitor. A split second after the burst of movement in the gold, the boy smiled, revealing blackened gums. It had lost more teeth during the passage through the warp. A clump of lank hair dropped from its mottled scalp to the deck. ‘True,’ the boy said. ‘You did ask me to take you there.’

  ‘You disobeyed me,’ the Lion snarled.

  ‘Did I say that I would bring you to Terra?’

  The question gave the Lion pause. Before every other jump, Tuchulcha’s puppet had confirmed the destination. This time, the boy had said, ‘I will make the necessary jump.’

  ‘Your sophistry will be your doom,’ the Lion said. He drew his chainsword and it growled. It was an ancient weapon. Too large to be wielded by any son of Caliban except the Lion, it had been forgotten in the depths of Aldurukh, waiting for the Lion to appear and claim it. Its provenance had been lost. It had had no name before his coming. For the Lion, it would always be the Wolf Blade. With it, he had carved his way through the Knights of Lupus, ending their challenge to the Order and their corrupt use of the Great Beasts. The blade was a dull black except for the silver inlay of runic teeth. The chainsword was a brutal exterminator. It had none of the beauty of the Lion Sword, and there was no artistry in its kills. There was only finality.

  The Lion raised it now, a single provocation away from cutting down the servitor. He did not know how to destroy Tuchulcha, but he was ready to explore every method.

  The servitor cocked its head at the snarl of the Wolf Blade. The expression on its decaying face was simple interest. ‘I did not betray you,’ Tuchulcha said.

  ‘Then why are we not at Terra?’

  ‘That journey is too far, the storm too great. It is beyond my reach.’

  ‘I find that hard to believe.’

  ‘It is the truth. Do you
prefer to believe I am omnipotent?’ the thing mocked. ‘Is that more comforting?’

  The Lion lowered the chainsword, though he did not silence its engine. The teeth whirred around the edge of the blade. ‘Tell me what you have done,’ he said.

  ‘I have taken you where you must go, if you wish to find Terra.’

  ‘Have you?’ He was suspicious, but he had not known Tuchulcha to lie to him yet. ‘So where are we?’

  ‘Pandorax.’

  The puppet smiled, and the Lion’s vox-bead buzzed for his attention.

  ‘My lord,’ said Holguin, ‘a warship is approaching.’

  The bells tolled, and the daemons chanted. They spilled through the tear in the real and onto the bridge. Their voices were thick with phlegm and the buzzing of flies that flew in streams from between their lips. They were bulbous, rotting monsters. Their stench was an assault, a wall of gas emanating from ruptured organs and weeping innards. Clusters of open sores covered their flesh. The daemons were diseased. They were shambling creatures in the full blossom of decay. Yet their chanting, low and liquid and hollow, was also a kind of laughter, an expansive celebration of their condition and a promise to the universe that they had come to share the gift.

  The abominations were joyful. Their joy was a horror, but it was also freely exultant in a way that Sanguinius could barely imagine any more. Joy had been foreign to him for so long, he was not sure he had ever truly experienced it. What happiness he could remember was a shadowed thing, haunted by the curse his blood had brought to his sons.

  That monsters could revel in such unbridled joy was intolerable. In fury, Sanguinius launched himself across the bridge, wings opened wide, and came down in the midst of the daemons. Azkaellon called out to him as the Sanguinary Guard rushed forwards. Sanguinius barely heard him. He allowed himself the luxury of this moment of rage. Even then, he attacked with precision. The Angel struck the daemons midway between the front of their horde and the rear. A daemon burst apart under the impact of his descent. Bile, pus and rotting ichor splashed wide, liquid plague tainting the Red Tear’s bridge. Sanguinius swept the Blade Encarmine before him. It sliced through daemonflesh as if through air. Its purity burned the bloated tissue and boiled ichor to steam. Decapitated horrors fell, their pitted blades clattering to the deck.

  ‘Begone from my ship!’ Sanguinius bellowed. He thrust the Spear of Telesto before him. The blast from the tip cut a swath through the daemons, incinerating them in a line that reached to the mouth of the breach. The edges of the fissure trembled as if recoiling from the Angel’s wrath.

  Iron blades clashed against his armour from behind. Sanguinius ignored the attacks, and in the next instant, the daemons turned away from him to confront the advance of the Sanguinary Guard through their ranks. Sanguinius marched forwards, destroying abominations with sword and spear, cutting short the obscene chants.

  ‘We destroyed worse than you on Signus Prime,’ he shouted at the daemons. ‘You insult us with your presence.’ His anger was mixed with contempt as he slashed the monsters apart. Even so, he did not lose himself in the battle. Be cautious, he thought. He had not seen these daemons before. They were distinct in kind from the ones the Blood Angels had fought on Signus Prime. The difference was important. It spoke to the very nature of these beings. They were embodiments. Sanguinius had a vision of disease itself become sentient, become divine. He wanted to deny the vision and the horrors it implied. He knew better than to give in to the impulse. Gods were real, and they were malign.

  The Sanguinary Guard reached him. ‘My lord,’ Azkaellon began, an edge to his voice stopping just short of chiding.

  ‘I know,’ said Sanguinius. ‘I make your task difficult.’ He loosed another blast from the Spear of Telesto, turning a rush of daemons to ash. ‘You are at my side now, Azkaellon. Destroy the foe with me. These things are fit only to be trampled.’

  ‘They are still dangerous.’

  Blood Angels were containing the plague daemons in the vicinity of the warp breach. But the traces of their foulness were reaching the wider area of the bridge. Officers had collapsed at their stations. Some vomited and shook with bone-wracking fever. One man was still, his face a mass of overlapping boils. Servitors were slumped, liquefying flesh drooping from their machinic parts. Illness marched ahead of the battle, laying claim to the Red Tear.

  ‘Hurl them back!’ Sanguinius shouted as two squads of Blood Angels thundered onto the bridge to join the Sanguinary Guard. ‘Their taint goes not one step further. Tear them from reality.’ Send them back to the darkness of myth, he was about to say. But there was no going back to that state of history. Daemons walked the galaxy. The myths had flesh and drew blood.

  We should have known, Sanguinius thought. We should always have known. My sons and I most of all. How could we believe there could be angels without daemons?

  He thought of the inner monsters his Legion had long fought, and how the horrors of the warp had brought them to the surface, almost destroying him and all the Blood Angels.

  My father told us there were no such things, and because we believed this to be true, we were vulnerable to them.

  Enough. These doubts were unworthy. If he did not know why the Emperor had denied the existence of gods and daemons, then the reasons were not his to know. Yet. He must have faith that he would learn in time. And he had faith. Faith that would burn the galaxy with its purity.

  He charged deeper into the daemons, and the plague withered before his wrath. He brought light to the darkness, a purging, incinerating light. It blasted from the head of the Spear of Telesto. It blazed from the length of the Blade Encarmine. But it came, too, from his being. He was in the centre of a blinding fire. He was the centre. The daemons cried out. They fell, they burned, they disintegrated. Their existence was an insult to him and everything he had given his life to forge.

  Yes, he would return them back to the darkness of myths. He would expunge even the memory of the myths.

  Bolter shells screamed on both sides. They were a destroying wind, ripping the abominations apart. Sanguinius marched towards the rift. He was inexorable. The daemons’ advance halted. It reversed. He waded through a dissolving mass of bodies and disintegrating weapons. The bell still sounded, but he thought he heard alarm in its toll now, a frantic, futile call to arms.

  At the mouth of the rift, daemons still tried to force their way onto the bridge. They were hampered now by the immobilised crowd of their kin. Behind them, howling in the writhing darkness and infernal colours of the warp, still more daemons raged to break through. There were other kinds of monsters there, alongside those the Blood Angels had fought on Signus Prime. Mingled with the daemons of rage and change were creatures whose movements were sinuous, corrosive invitations to unnameable sensations. The tear in the bridge was a glimpse into an abyss of every foul hunger. It was an eye that opened onto the reality of souls, and that reality was hideous. ‘I deny you!’ the Angel shouted. He scythed through the daemons.

  He slashed the Blade Encarmine across the front of the rift, from edge to edge. ‘I deny the lies. I deny the madness. My father’s kingdom of reason will triumph!’

  Sanguinius cut through unflesh. A gash opened wide in the invisible veil between the materium and the warp. Blood erupted out of the air. The outline of the rift trembled. Sanguinius aimed another burst of the spear’s power into the centre of the tear. He bellowed a curse and defiance as the cleansing lightning enveloped the abominations. They burst into flame and fell to ash before they could manifest themselves on the bridge. The daemonic horde fell back. Around him, his sons battered the plague monsters out of existence. The smell of burned fyceline filled his nostrils, the clean sting of battle cutting through the viscous stench of bodies bursting like overripe fruit.

  The breach trembled violently. Its edges lost definition. The space beyond became vague. The forms of the daemons smeared into one another, and then
into the contusions of the warp. Whorls of unreality swept over them. The wall of the bridge became visible behind the breach, and then, with the hiss of a wounded serpent, the rift vanished.

  Sanguinius paused, reining in his anger. He turned around to survey the bridge. Many of the diseased crewmembers had stopped moving. Most of the officers were still at their posts. From the other side of the sealed doors, he heard bolter fire and the ululations of daemons.

  ‘The Encarnadine has repelled its incursion,’ Neverrus called, her voice unwavering. ‘New breaches on the Nine Crusaders and the Victus.’

  ‘The Victus,’ Azkaellon said. ‘Amit will welcome the chance to exact some vengeance for Signus Prime.’

  Sanguinius picked up the undercurrent of concern in his voice. Of all the Blood Angels, the Flesh Tearer and his Fifth Company were the most vulnerable to lapsing into the savagery of the Thirst.

  ‘We will all wreak that vengeance,’ Sanguinius replied. I have faith in you, Amit, he thought. I must. ‘We shall seal every breach with the blood of abominations.’

  He strode towards the door, the Sanguinary Guard flanking him.

  The Red Tear shook again. The deck heaved as if the battleship were cresting an immense wave, and then dropped, gravity tilting at a sharp angle. The Blood Angels kept their feet. The mortals had to cling to their workstations to stay upright.

  ‘New contact,’ said Jeran Mautus. The auspex officer sounded worried.

  ‘Identity?’ Sanguinius asked.

  ‘I don’t know, my lord.’ Mautus frowned at his screen. None of the adjustments he was making to the scans were satisfying him. ‘It’s a shadow. I can’t get anything more precise than that.’

  ‘Is it attacking?’

  ‘Approaching, but as for a vector…’ Mautus trailed off.