The Lion thought of the Iron Hands he had encountered on Macragge. They bore the loss of Ferrus Manus and the shattering of their Legion with a mix of stoicism and brooding, vengeful silence. And those were the fortunate ones. They had reached Ultramar. They could become part of a multi-Legion alliance against Horus. This ship was alone. Its warriors must have been fighting a war of skirmishes since Isstvan V. The Lion doubted they had had any chance of resupply. Their survival was impressive.
‘Captain Khalybus has asked to be received,’ Stenius went on.
‘We will welcome him and his escort aboard,’ the Lion said. ‘With all due ceremony.’ Meaning all due caution.
‘Understood,’ said Holguin.
An honour guard would receive the Iron Hands captain in the landing bay, and in the hall leading from there. There would be full respect and full security. The Lion accepted that the ship was the Sthenelus. After this long in these storm-wracked regions, so close to the Maelstrom, there was no assurance that what walked the frigate was what it claimed to be.
He waited until a Thunderhawk pulled away from the Sthenelus. Then he withdrew to the ship’s council chamber to wait.
The hall was a large, solemn space, dimly lit as if jealous of its secrets. Six iron chairs were placed in an arc around the Lion’s throne, three on each side, one for each voted lieutenant of the Hexagrammaton. The circle took up the centre of the chamber, and left a vast expanse of shadows between it and the walls. The banners of the Six Wings hung from the high dome. They were barely visible in the gloom, whispers of strength. They swayed with slow, deliberate movements in the ventilation currents.
The Lion took his throne, flanked today only by Holguin and Farith Redloss, voted lieutenant of Dreadwing. The chamber was a long march from the landing bay. By the time Khalybus arrived, the primarch had received a full security evaluation of the captain. He was who he said, and there was no taint of the warp around him.
Khalybus entered the chamber accompanied by two other legionaries. One was his sergeant, Raud. The other was a Raven Guard, Levannas. The Lion was struck by the choice Khalybus had made for his escort. The Iron Hands would not include the Raven Guard out of politeness. Relations between the two Legions had sometimes become heated on Macragge. They shared the trauma of Isstvan V, but the Iron Hands held the tactical decisions of Corvus Corax as being in part responsible for the death of Ferrus Manus. Levannas’ presence spoke to an unusual level of trust. The Lion wondered about the length and cost of the campaign that had forged this kind of a bond.
The appearance of the three legionaries suggested much. Their armour was as pitted and scarred as their ship. It was polished, and clearly treated with honour. But the means to repair it were lacking. The cost of the war was also in Khalybus’ face. By the faint hum of servo-motors, the Lion could identify the captain’s legs and right arm as bionic. That was no surprise. He had known Iron Hands who had even less flesh prior to Horus’ treachery. But Khalybus had lost more flesh recently, and it had not been replaced by the strength of metal. His head had suffered what looked like severe plasma burns. His hair and eyebrows were gone. His skull was mottled black and angry red. The flesh looked melted, and it shone as if varnished.
‘Captain Khalybus,’ the Lion said, ‘well met.’
Khalybus dipped his head forwards in respect. ‘Our thanks, Lord Jonson.’ His larynx was evidently still organic, though his vocal cords had been damaged. He spoke with a voice of stones rubbing against each other.
Levannas said, ‘The sight of the strength of your fleet revives our hopes.’
Khalybus grimaced slightly at the mention of hope.
‘What forces do you have?’ the Lion asked.
‘The Sthenelus is all we have left,’ Khalybus said.
‘We have been hunting the enemy since Isstvan V,’ said Levannas. ‘We have hurt the traitors. But over time…’
‘It has been years,’ Holguin said, impressed and sympathetic.
‘Does the Emperor yet live?’ Khalybus asked.
‘We believe so,’ said the Lion. ‘We are making for Terra.’
Khalybus cocked his head. ‘By way of Pandorax?’
‘The size of our fleet does not change the difficulties of navigating through the warp,’ the Lion said, his tone cold.
Khalybus seemed to realise he had spoken disrespectfully. ‘I had hoped your experience was different from ours,’ he said.
You’re right, the Lion thought. It was. He waved the question aside. ‘I misspoke. We seek the way to Terra. And what about the Sthenelus. Is Pandorax your hunting ground?’ It seemed unlikely. There were no warships in the wreckage outside the warp storm.
‘No,’ said Khalybus. ‘We came hoping to find my brother-captain, Atticus. We know his strike cruiser, the Veritas Ferrum, reached this system and made for the world of Pythos. We know he left at least once, and carried out a raid that destroyed the Third Legion’s battle-barge Callidora. That is the last evidence we have of him.’
‘Why do you think he would have returned here?’
‘In our last communication with him, he was tracking an anomaly, one that made transmission impossible, but provided the mistress of his astropathic choir with unsurpassed awareness of the sector.’ Khalybus was clearly dissatisfied with his description. ‘He knew little when we spoke. The effect seemed to be the reverse of the Astronomican.’
The Lion nodded. After the Pharos, he found the concept easier to accept than Khalybus did. ‘You think he was successful.’
‘He was able to ambush the Callidora and its escorts,’ Levannas said. ‘A single ship destroyed them.’
‘And you have heard nothing since then?’
‘Nothing,’ Khalybus confirmed. ‘We expected that, as long as he was on Pythos, he would be impossible to contact. But there has been only silence since the Callidora. That was years ago. We can no longer be effective against the enemy, not with a single frigate. We have been unable to find any of our other brothers. So we came here.’
‘Our choices have been reduced to desperate ones,’ Levannas added.
‘That is true for us all,’ the Lion said. ‘Have you found any sign of him?’
‘No,’ said Khalybus. ‘Though that is hardly surprising, given that we cannot enter the system. The presence of wreckage outside the warp storm is curious, though. Atticus sent us the Veritas Ferrum’s auspex scans of Pandorax before communications ended. He did not encounter these ships.’
‘Do you know where they came from?’
‘That is what we’ve been trying to determine. They are all civilian, antiquated, and appear to have been in poor condition long before they met with disaster here. Much of the wreckage we have examined shows signs of having been patched up repeatedly and badly.’
‘Have you boarded any of the hulks?’
‘We had only just identified a few promising targets when your fleet translated.’
‘I see.’ The Lion thought about Tuchulcha’s words. I have taken you where you must go. There was a confluence of too many events at Pandorax to be ignored. He did not trust Tuchulcha, but it had never lied to him yet, at least not in any way he had been able to detect. He would act, for now, as if what it said was true. ‘I cannot say if your captain is to be found here,’ he said. ‘I believe, however, that there is a secret here, one we must uncover.’ Somehow, Pandorax is the gateway to Terra. ‘We will examine your target vessels with you, captain.’
Khalybus nodded once, his acknowledgment curt but respectful. ‘I did not think the task worthy of such resources.’
‘It may prove to be vital,’ the Lion said.
The gold-plated double doors of the Exaltatio Angeli librarium had been ripped from their hinges, and their engravings bubbled, the shapes of heroic war transformed into a nightmare tangle of insectile limbs. Plague daemons stumbled down the aisles, their rotten swords hac
king at books, turning them into liquefying pulp. In the centre of the great hall, there were other abominations. They were vortices of flesh and flame, headless cones of screaming mouths that breathed the fire of nightmare against the towering shelves. They whirled from lectern to lectern, and rampaged through the marble bookcases. Vellum or data-slate, metal or stone, whatever they touched burned and changed.
The Exaltatio Angeli had been badly damaged in the Red Tear’s fall to Signus Prime. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of irreplaceable tomes had been lost, swaths of the history of the Blood Angels and the culture of Baal swept into oblivion. Sanguinius regarded what had been salvaged as even more precious. These books were more than records now. They were survivors in their own right, every scar and burned page a mark of the new chronicle, and of the cost it exacted. Now they were dying, and worse. The corpulent monsters, their bodies leaking decay, were killing the memory of Baal, turning it into a rotten swamp. Fungus and mould sprouted on the spines of books at their passage. Tentacles and grasping fingers grew from the volumes. Data-slates spread wings and flew about the wide central space of the librarium. Scrolls became tongues. They slipped off the shelves like long white slugs, babbling words that belonged to no tongue in the material galaxy. As they chanted, the air flaked into ash around them.
A squad of Blood Angels led by Sergeant Orexis fought the incursion in the librarium. Two five-man teams had taken up positions on opposite sides of the bronze-railed gallery that ran around the centre. They had a wide field of fire and were pumping bolter shells into daemons on all six levels. Each shot was sniper-precise. They fired in short bursts, keeping firm control over the spread of their projectiles. They were trying to preserve the Exaltatio Angeli as much as purge it of the daemonic presence.
The Angel swept his gaze over the first level of the Exaltatio and had to transmute despair into anger. The mutations were worse than the destructions. What had rotted was dying, already gone. What was changed was more insidious.
On the first level, Sanguinius slashed the Blade Encarmine across the torso of a spinning abomination. Pale blue daemonflesh parted. Two halves of grotesquery twisted away from each other, their mouths wailing anguish. The Angel charged to the centre of the floor, wading deep into the spawn of the warp. Jawed arms snapped at him. Unnatural flame washed over him, and he felt his bones try to change. He hurled the madness away. The destiny of his visions waited for him in the future. He was not going to fall here.
Beneath the peak of the Exaltatio’s dome he paused. As Raldoron and the Sanguinary Guard formed a cordon around him, he struck the ground with the end of the Spear of Telesto’s shaft, splintering a flagstone. The spear’s blade glowed brighter and brighter. ‘Put everything to the flame,’ Sanguinius ordered, his voice thunder over the din of battle.
Raldoron looked at him sharply. ‘Everything?’
‘My lord,’ Orexis voxed. ‘We might yet save part of the archives.’
‘We have already lost them,’ Sanguinius replied. ‘We cannot know the full extent of the corruption. The changes we cannot see are the most dangerous. History altered is worse than history forgotten. The poison must be excised. Burn it. Burn it all.’ He fired the spear in anger, in anguish, and most of all in righteousness of purpose. Purity blazed magnesium-bright. The beam sliced through clusters of whirling daemons. Their babble turned into a choir of screaming distress, and then they were consumed. The blast took out five shelves at a stroke. Flame raced through the histories, the treatises and the literature of Baal. The untouched and the corrupted alike burned.
Raldoron’s gasp was almost as subtle, and as deeply felt. Azkaellon’s agony came through in the anger with which he ordered flamers deployed. ‘Give me fire!’ he yelled. ‘Give me flames as high as the dome!’ There was a desperate fury in his voice that was closer to the violence of Amit than Azkaellon normally allowed himself to come. The Sanguinary Guard obeyed. Three of the legionaries stepped forwards with heavy flamers. Streams of burning promethium arced across the space of the librarium, igniting a firestorm around its periphery. They marched around the ring formation, gradually raising their weapons’ nozzles, creating a spiralling conflagration. Daemons lurched and danced through the blaze. They resisted the burn, but it devoured the archives before the warp flame could transform them further.
The other Blood Angels sent mass-reactive hell into the fire. There was no more restraint now, and the full-auto bursts of shells shredded the monsters of disease and flux. From beyond the veil, the dark bell tolled and tolled, and its clamour sounded angry now.
We defy you, Sanguinius thought. And we deny you. Defeat is insupportable to you. You will come to know it well.
The bell tolled and tolled. The daemons rushed the Blood Angels and fell back, rushed and fell back again. When their forms lost coherence and they could no longer fight, the fire burned their remains faster than they could deliquesce. The Exaltatio Angeli descended into a tempest of devastation. Sanguinius hurled blasts from the spear without cease, mourning the knowledge and the art he destroyed, but made resolute by the necessity of what he did. The flames rose, and he was standing in the heart of a furnace. It roared, destroying what should not exist, bringing absolution to the tainted space of the Red Tear.
In the midst of his sorrow and anger, Sanguinius sought the solace of victory. He spread his wings. They beat the air, sending smoke curling in violent eddies. He rose straight up through the rage of flame and battle until he reached the dome of the Exaltatio. He wheeled around its circumference. The firestorm reached up for him and he looked down at the struggle between his sons and the daemons. At this height, the figures were small, yet the majesty of the Blood Angels shone brightly. They cut down the abominations with resolution and glory. There was anger in their attacks, but it was controlled, honourable. There was no sign of the blood thirst. He saw only discipline. He saw his sons as they could be, as the best part of himself, and for a short while he could believe in the illusion that the flaw was not just beneath the surface, waiting for its chance to erupt again.
He gazed at the daemons with contempt. There might always be new horrors for the warp to reveal, but the Blood Angels had the measure of these, and they would all be destroyed. We have faced worse, he thought. We have defeated worse. The loss of the librarium was a blow, but Baal still lived. The Imperium still lived. There was hope, and so the chance to rebuild, to create new art, new knowledge, new chronicles. He vowed there would yet be a new dawn. And from the peak of the dome, he sent the beams of the Spear of Telesto stabbing down into the abominations, fuelling the fire. The Exaltatio’s pyre blazed with purifying light.
The shadow came for him. The immense weight on his hearts suddenly moved to crush them. ‘Mautus,’ Sanguinius voxed, about to ask if the Red Tear had engaged the contact. But the darkness attacked before he could speak again. It was not a presence. It was the mere approach of the thing in the warp that hit, a bow wave catching him and drowning him. His wings folded under the blow and he plummeted from the dome. He fell into the mouth of the fire vortex. Daemons leapt for him, the mouths at the ends of their limbs snapping in hunger. Then they were gone, and he was falling in a blackness that was absolute, but not empty. Its substance knew him, and at a level beyond the conscious, he knew it. Before he could think what it was he recognised, the dark was gone.
Sanguinius wasn’t falling any more, and he wasn’t on the Red Tear. He was running down the hall of another ship. He knew this hall. He knew the tapestries that had once hung here. He knew the runes and monstrous carvings that had replaced them. And he knew what chamber waited at the end of the hall.
He was aboard the Vengeful Spirit. He was about to enter Horus’ throne room. He was going to fight his brother and die.
This was no vision. It couldn’t be. It was too real. He had no consciousness of his body being elsewhere. He heard the hammering thuds of his feet against the deck. He smelled the foulness of the s
hip’s corruption. He felt his wounds. He was bleeding, and his armour had been damaged in earlier fights. He had slipped from time. The future had come for him, and the time of visions was finished.
As Sanguinius closed in on the throne room, the Red Tear slipped away. Its reality faded and became a memory. The present was the Vengeful Spirit, and Horus was waiting.
Sanguinius burst into the throne room. A colossus in black armour stood before him.
There was a roar, and the chamber shook so hard it blurred.
Then it was gone.
Sanguinius was dropping through the firestorm of the Exaltatio Angeli again. He was not in the future. The roar had travelled with him, or it had summoned him back. It was louder than any of the explosions in the librarium. The Red Tear shook as the Vengeful Spirit had. A massive thrum rang the length of the hull. The dome of the Exaltatio cracked, and bookshelves twenty feet tall collapsed.
Sanguinius spread his wings wide and held them rigid, breaking the speed of his descent. He regained control of his flight and landed in the centre of the Sanguinary Guard formation. Above, the gallery was collapsing, the railing dropping into flame. Orexis and his squad jumped down onto the sloping wreckage and made their way to the ground floor, trapping the plague daemons between them and the Sanguinary Guard.
The roar came again, and a shudder that sickened Sanguinius. It was the mark of a profound wound to the Red Tear. ‘Mautus! Report!’
‘The contact, lord. It’s hitting us.’
‘With what? Is it a ship?’
‘Unknown. But it’s overwhelming the void shields. We’re firing. No way to tell if we’re causing any damage.’
Sanguinius opened his mouth to answer, the roar came again, and the Vengeful Spirit forced itself onto his consciousness. He didn’t believe himself to be on Horus’ flagship this time. His perception flickered between the Spirit and the Tear, and when Horus’ blade struck him, the intensity of the vision almost brought him to his knees.
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