This is a vision, he thought. Only a vision. It has no reality. Not yet.
He turned his spirits away from the experience of his death. The effort was so great, the taste of blood flooded his mouth.
‘My lord.’ Azkaellon was at his side. ‘What is happening to you?’
‘A psychic attack,’ Sanguinius rasped. Giving it a name was necessary. It was a means of regaining control, the truth as counterstrike. He straightened. ‘We finish here, and we return to the bridge.’ He had to see the enemy in the warp. He had to lead the struggle against it.
His mind kept slipping back to the Vengeful Spirit. His mind, only his mind. He looked out upon the burning Exaltatio, and focused his anger on what had been taken from the Blood Angels here. He held tightly to the loss he felt now, and the future’s grip on his spirit slipped just enough. With the Sanguinary Guard forming a wedge behind him, he brought the final flames to the abominations in the librarium. As he fought, the shadow began to pull away. He saw more clearly. The oppression lifted, and the hull shudders ceased. When he turned from the ashes and smoke of the purified hall, he knew before he reached the bridge that the enemy had pulled away from the Red Tear.
Carminus was speaking with Mautus when Sanguinius arrived.
‘I’m sorry, fleet master,’ Mautus said. ‘There is nothing more we can tell. There is nothing.’
‘What is it?’ Sanguinius asked. ‘Has the foe retreated?’
Carminus looked grim. ‘It left us for different prey,’ he said. ‘The Sable is gone.’
The corridor heading towards the bridge of the Word Bearers strike cruiser Annunciation was heavy with shadows. Walls, floor and vaulted ceiling were black marble veined with crimson runes. Muzzle flashes lit the hall as the defenders were cut down. Two Word Bearers, slow to retreat, tried to hold back the Destroyers while the rest of their squad pulled back quickly up the corridor. Hierax’s squad rushed them, each legionary wielding two bolt pistols. The hail of mass-reactive shells punched through armour and blew apart the flesh inside. The traitors staggered and fell, blood splashing out behind them.
Leading the charge, Hierax fired after the other traitors, alternating blasts with his pistol and his volkite serpenta. The shells cracked open one Word Bearer’s helmet. The serpenta’s heat ray incinerated his skull. Flame burst from inside the helmet, followed by the cloud of ash that had been the legionary’s head.
The rest of the squad reached an intersection. As they turned off the main hall, one of them pulled a detonator from his belt.
The corridor flashed white before Hierax could shout a warning. A series of demolition charges blew out the sides of the vaulted ceiling. Tonnes of marble and ferrocrete crashed down. Hierax threw himself back with his men. They were at the edge of the destruction and narrowly escaped being crushed. A chunk of the upper decking struck Hierax’s shoulder. It was a glancing blow, but still hard enough to smash him to the side. He hit the starboard wall and shattered the cladding. When the dust settled, Legionary Kletos said, ‘We aren’t getting through that.’
The rubble blocked the corridor completely. The charges had gone off down a length of more than a hundred yards. There was no point trying to punch through the wreckage with melta bombs. There was no corridor at all, only compacted decks.
Hierax cursed. His squad had moved fast since the three Caestus assault rams had struck the upper levels of the Annunciation’s superstructure. He estimated they were a few hundred yards from the bridge. The strike cruiser had undergone dark transformations, but the layout of the decks was familiar enough. As close as he had come to the goal, though, he might as well be miles distant now.
‘Aphovos,’ Hierax voxed the sergeant of the second squad, ‘we’re blocked. Tell me you have the bridge in sight.’ Hierax and Aphovos were leading attacks along parallel paths, port and starboard, direct runs straight to the bridge.
‘The Word Bearers just tried to drop a ceiling on us, captain. We can’t go any further in this direction.’
The simultaneity of the demolitions made the tactics look less crude. ‘Hold your position, sergeant,’ Hierax said. ‘We need to understand the trap they’re trying to set for us.’ He opened a channel to the third squad, advancing two decks below. ‘Gorthia, has the enemy demolished your way forwards?’
‘No, captain. We have reached a sealed door. It’s very large. From its markings, I believe there is a fane on the other side.’
‘Lorgar’s wretched sons want to funnel us into their hall of worship,’ said Hierax.
‘They want to bring the destruction of battle into their shrines?’ Aphovos asked.
‘More likely they think to make a sacrifice of us.’
‘Let them try,’ said a slow, grindingly mechanical voice. Antalcidas, the ancient Deredeo-pattern Dreadnought, marched with Gorthia’s squad.
‘I think we will.’ Hierax looked again at the rubble. ‘Gorthia, I want the precise dimensions of the door and its wall.’
‘Do we make for his position?’ said Aphovos.
‘No. Stand by.’ The trap was effective. If there were other routes to the bridge, it would take time to find them, time the Word Bearers could use, and the Ultramarines did not have. The traitors knew the Destroyers would have no choice but to enter the fane, where the ambush would be waiting. But if the hall was as big as Hierax suspected it was, there was another option.
Gorthia relayed the data, and Hierax compared it to what he knew of the deck plan of the superstructure. He couldn’t know the length of the hall behind the door, though it was clear it ran parallel to the blocked corridors. More crucially, the fane appeared to be at least three decks in height.
Hierax turned to the starboard wall and punched it, breaking off more marble. ‘Prepare melta bombs,’ he said. ‘We’re going through this wall. Aphovos, we’re moving laterally. Break through the wall to port. Gorthia, take the door on my signal. We’ll make the ambush ours.’
The bombs ate through the wall, turning stone and metal to smoking rivulets. The tunnel glowed with heat, and Hierax had the impression of moving through the flesh of a living thing. The ship’s hull groaned with the rhythm of the Annunciation’s guns and the impacts of the Cavascor’s assault, but the walls here trembled too much like wounded muscle.
The second set of melta bombs broke through to the other side of the wall. ‘Go,’ Hierax voxed Gorthia. ‘Hit them now!’
He rushed forwards. He was prepared for the breach to be forty feet up a vertical wall. Instead, it opened onto a high gallery. The Word Bearers’ temple was larger than he had expected. His and Aphovos’ squads had entered twenty yards forwards of the main door, and the huge hall extended several yards to Hierax’s right. Its ceiling was another fifty feet up, and was ribbed, stained armourglass. The sick light of the Ruinstorm shone through, refracted into rays that touched on the altar and pews like the blessings of a corrupt god. The wide central aisle sloped upwards until the forward doors, leading to the bridge, were two decks above the aft entrance. The altar stood ten yards from the top of the slope. It was a massive slab of granite, etched deeply with designs that taunted the eye with the suggestion of squirming movement. Dried blood stained the engravings, and a huge, eight-pointed star of iron surmounted the altar. A triforium ran the length of each wall, sloped like the floor. Hierax had to fight off a wave of vertigo as he stepped into the gallery before him. The fane felt more than oddly sloped. Its angles seemed to be adrift from the precepts of architecture, as if the space were floating in its own poisoned reality.
Across from Hierax’s position, melta bombs seared away the shadows of the triforium’s arches and Aphovos’ squad broke through. Aft, a massive explosion blasted the great doors off their hinges and Antalcidas marched into the fane. He was a colossus in black. His sarcophagus bore the same grim colours as the armour of the Destroyers. The blue of the XIII Legion was a splash on the pauldron, a vertic
al streak down the helm, a mark of honour and allegiance in the midst of the black. The Destroyers were the company of war at its most brutal, the Ultramarines of last resort, and their colours spoke of their grim purpose.
Antalcidas fired straight ahead with his twin-linked hellfire plasma cannonade at first, destroying the central aisle with the flame of suns. Then the Word Bearers retaliated, and he turned his weapons up to the triforia. The traitors had taken up positions in the arches and in the four corners of the fane. Had the Destroyers entered as a single unit, they would have been caught in a withering crossfire. As it was, the Word Bearers outnumbered the Ultramarines two to one, but Hierax and Aphovos’ squads disrupted the cohesion of the ambush.
Antalcidas moved forwards, shaking the floor with his steps, weathering the bolter fire coming in from all sides, shielding Gorthia’s men. The Word Bearers had only a few seconds for a concentrated volley. Then the Destroyers were among them. Antalcidas took on the starboard side, sweeping the cannonade from the triforium to the corner of the fane. Word Bearers and the structures of the hall alike melted and vaporised in the inferno. Gorthia and his squad charged the traitors on the port side. Rows of pews exploded in the exchange of fire. Hierax and Aphovos took their squads forwards, sending a steady barrage of bolter shells ahead of them down the narrow confines of the triforia. The Word Bearers’ superior numbers did them little good here in the initial moments of the struggle. There was barely space for three legionaries to march abreast, and the traitors could not bring their fire to bear effectively on the intruders on the upper level.
Hierax used the momentum of surprise, blasting through a full squad of the enemy. ‘This is for Calth!’ he snarled, pumping shell and flame through the head of another traitor. Then a huge shape barrelled through the next line of Word Bearers. Its armour still bore the insignia of the Serrated Sun Chapter, but the ceramite had mutated to contain the form of the swollen monster. The legionary’s hands had split his gauntlets and turned into huge claws. His face was inhuman, his mouth a raging beast’s maw. Fangs as long as mortals’ fingers parted as he attacked. He fired his bolt pistol past Hierax, blasting Kletos in the chest. He seized Hierax, his claws punching through the captain’s armour, and swung him against an arch, slamming him through stone and suspending him over the drop.
Hierax fired his serpenta into the Word Bearer’s face. The creature staggered back, roaring, as flame engulfed his flesh. His claws convulsed, digging deeper into Hierax’s armour. Flesh burned through to bone, but the beast did not fall. He hurled Hierax against the far wall again and again, fighting now like a wounded animal, his eyes blazing with unnatural fire brighter than the flame that consumed his skull.
Masonry crumbled around Hierax. Ferrocrete girders rammed into his back as the Word Bearer drove him deeper into the wall. Beyond the monster, the clash between the Destroyers and traitors was a maelstrom of chainblades, lightning claws and power fists. Bursts of warring energy tore the gloom of the triforium. Hierax tried to fire again, but the monster batted aside his pistols. The Word Bearer seized his arms, pinning them to his sides. His armour began to buckle under the grip of the distorted talons. The light from the Word Bearer’s eyes now enveloped his entire body in a shimmering, scarlet aura. The skull had shed all burned flesh. It was a howling death’s head, animated by something utterly beyond the human.
Kletos swung his chainsword against the Word Bearer’s back. Mechanised teeth ground through the armour. The Word Bearer hurled Hierax down and whirled, striking Kletos a blow that knocked him back against the triforium’s balcony, then turned on Hierax again.
The Destroyer was already on his feet. He slapped a melta bomb to the creature’s chest plate. The fiery eyes flickered with dawning comprehension. The claws hesitated. Hierax crouched low, and his auto-lenses clicked shut against the flare of the blast. Damage runes flashed warning as the heat washed back over him, further disintegrating the wall. The full force of the explosion went through the Word Bearer. An inhuman thing shrieked. The sound took too long to fade, as if whatever had screamed were falling into an abyss beyond the materium. A pool of molten armour and charred fragments of bone lay where the Word Bearer had been.
Hierax lunged out of the ruined wall, guns in hand once more. The death of the monster had killed another Word Bearer, and the traitor’s squad had retreated a few yards, laying down heavy suppressive fire. The forwards doors of the fane burst open, and reinforcements poured in. The Destroyers had survived the ambush, but their advance was stymied.
‘Venerable Brother Antalcidas,’ Hierax voxed, ‘two missiles to the forwards doors. Destroyers, pull back and take cover.’
The rockets streaked from the Dreadnought’s Aiolos launcher. Hierax grinned tightly as they roared across the fane and exploded just past the altar, blasting the eight-pointed star to shrapnel.
‘Burn,’ Hierax muttered. ‘Burn, you treacherous scum.’
The missile warheads were phosphex shells. A cloud of burning mist erupted at the far end of the fane. Currents roiled within it as streamers latched on to the movement of the Word Bearers. It crawled over them, covering them in the white-green flame. The cloud billowed down the central aisle and along the triforia. It moved like a living thing, leaping and crawling over its prey. It burned armour, stripping it away layer by layer until it devoured the flesh beneath. The Word Bearers’ barrage faltered as the phosphex cloud moved down the forwards half of the fane, a grasping hand of agonised death. The traitors tried to escape. Many stumbled blindly, human torches of chemical fire, and spread the horror with them.
In the triforia and in the central aisle, the Destroyers formed a black wall. With bolter and plasma fire, they drove the Word Bearers back into the phosphex and cut down those who staggered out.
‘Scorch this hall,’ Hierax ordered.
Antalcidas advanced, rotating left and right, blanketing the fane with cannonade fire. Legionaries from all three squads fired rad missiles into the cloud. Nothing could live in the forwards half of the fane. Hierax’s auto-senses tracked the spiking rad levels. The phosphex cloud flowed closer, swallowing the last of the Word Bearers, edging towards the Destroyers. When the leading edge was less than ten yards away, he spoke to the Dreadnought again.
‘Time to cleanse the battlefield, venerable brother. We still have to reach the bridge. All squads, prepare for atmospheric voiding.’
Antalcidas aimed the cannonade towards the ceiling and opened fire, vaporising the armourglass. A gale shrieked upwards. Deprived of oxygen, the phosphex burned itself out. Flames extinguished and smoke rushed into the void. The space of the fane became clear and cold, an irradiated waste of incinerated corpses.
The doors to the bridge were still open. The Ultramarines advanced as an impassable wall of black death. ‘Burn everything that moves,’ Hierax said.
‘Not the controls?’ Kletos asked.
‘No. We have a use for this ship.’
The Destroyers crossed the threshold, and bathed the bridge with flame.
They came at Guilliman with their dark blades.
The Word Bearer in front of Guilliman was an apostle of madness. The grey flesh of his face and clean-shaven skull was covered in a dense inlay of runes. The bones of his head were beginning to distort, sprouting growths that might develop into horns, or into more eyes. Left hand outstretched, he unleashed a blast of warp flame at Guilliman’s face and lunged forwards, bringing the athame up to stab at the seam of the primarch’s armour beneath the arm. At Guilliman’s back, he sensed the other attacker springing to plunge the knife into the back of his neck.
His mind raced ahead of the actions. The ambush was strong. The absolute certainty was injury. The absolute need was to avoid being hit by the athames.
Practical: choose your wound.
Guilliman threw himself into the blast, turning his face to the side. His flesh burned and rippled. His skull rang like a bell.
In the depths of the fire, there was a voice, inhuman, knowing, a speaker of blood and ruined fates, a whisperer of bones.
Your path is chosen.
Needle-sharp, precise as doubt, the words sank into his mind, a sliver shooting past his defences as surely as the De Profundis splinters had struck the Samothrace.
Deep in the blaze, moving forwards, half blinded by flames, Guilliman fired the Arbitrator. In the same instant, the rear attacker slashed at his neck. The passage of the athame breathed against his skin, the nature of the blade so powerful, so toxic, he could feel its presence even through the pain of the warp fire. The Apostle’s primitive blade scarred ceramite and cut through layers of ablative armour.
Guilliman’s bolt shell struck. The Apostle grunted in pain. Guilliman dropped below the flames and spun, thrusting with Incandor. The blade shattered the right poleyn of the other Word Bearer’s armour and punched into his knee. The traitor stumbled and threw himself back. The defensive move, trained into instinct, spoiled his opportunity for a suicidal second attack with the athame.
Guilliman tore the gladius free of the Word Bearer’s leg and rose with his back to the wall of the splinter. The Apostle, hit in the right pauldron and sent into a spin, recovered a few yards away. His arm hung limp, and he held the athame in his left hand now.
The Word Bearers hung back, a few paces on either side of Guilliman. He held them at bay, his attention switching back and forth between them. They were still fast enough that if he shot one, he would leave himself open to a suicidal attack by the other. ‘Do you know us?’ the Apostle asked.
The markings on their armour were familiar. So was the distorted face of the Apostle. ‘Quor Vondor and Phael Rabor,’ Guilliman said.
‘Good,’ said Quor Vondor. ‘You should know the authors of your fall.’
Guilliman sniffed in contempt. ‘You are authors of nothing,’ he said. ‘You are messengers at best.’
Phael Rabor growled, but Quor Vondor looked past Guilliman to where the ragged end of the splinter marked where the Unburdened had vanished, and he smiled. ‘We are undivided,’ he said. ‘Chaos acts through us.’
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