‘You’re suggesting we evacuate and destroy it now? Assume Sanguinius is dead?’
‘Do you think he is?’
The Lion shook his head. ‘I don’t. His passage is too…’
‘Inconclusive?’ Guilliman suggested.
‘Yes. We would know. I cannot believe his death would not even cause a ripple.’
‘You are sounding like Sanguinius now, but I agree. For no reason I can call rational, I agree.’
‘So we are condemned to wait in this trap,’ the Lion said. ‘Our forces stranded while our fleets engage.’ He approached the portal. He slashed at it with his Wolf Blade. The chainsword’s teeth scraped against stone, then flashed when they touched the rip in the materium. Energy leapt in an angry arc, then subsided. The vertical line had no width at all.
The Lion eyed the chainsword. Coils of smoke rose from its black length. He had caused a response, no matter how momentary. He exchanged a look with Guilliman. ‘We cannot wait any longer,’ he said.
Guilliman nodded and flexed the Hand of Dominion. ‘We have run out of time and options. Forwards then, if we can.’
The Lion called to Holguin and Redloss. When they entered the chamber, he pointed to Curze’s chains. ‘Take him out of here,’ he said. ‘Hold him fast. Don’t be gentle.’
They dragged Curze out to the hall. He did not resist. He barely seemed to notice them. His gaze never left the portal, and even when they pulled him through the doorway, there was no change to his expression.
The Lion turned back to the portal. He brought up the sword with both hands. It snarled, the silver teeth sparking light. The hexagrammic patterns in its hilt glowed an angry red. He nodded, and together they struck the line of red and white light. They hammered craters into the wall on either side of the portal. Rock splinters flew across the chamber. The portal shrieked at them. The energy unleashed by the weapons clashed with the power of the warp. White and crimson lightning flashed across the chamber in clusters. The Lion looked up the hundred feet of the cylindrical chamber. The tear in the materium vibrated. It thrummed. With anger, he thought. With pain, he chose to believe.
‘The gate feels our blows,’ he said.
‘We will make it bleed yet.’
The Lion and Guilliman struck faster, hammering the portal to fury. There was no pause in the lightning now. Stones fell from the far wall. The energy burst arced up the height of the cylinder. Light the colour of blood and bones spiralled to the ceiling and dropped again in zigzag patterns, blasting the ancient stonework to powder. Fireballs of violet plasma blew straight out of the portal, shattering the altar forever. The monument where Horus had fallen was now a pile of charred rubble.
Dust and shrapnel rained on the Lion’s shoulders. A blast of daemonic light hit him in the chest, scarring his armour. It forced him back half a step. Electric pain shot through his torso. He shouted in anger, and lunged forwards with even greater force. The flare when the blade hit the portal was so bright, so wide, this time there was no damage to the wall. The sword seemed to cut into the flesh of the realm beyond.
He thought again of how perfectly he had been manipulated. How close he had come to damning himself as completely as Horus. He had set out to conquer the Ruinstorm. In his hubris, he had almost been swept away by the tempest. Here, now, each blow felt like he was beating down the barrier between himself and redemption.
He barely heard the alarm of the legionaries in the hall. Movement in the corner of his eye made him turn his head for a moment as he brought the sword back again. Azkaellon and Drakus Gorod had pushed their way into the chamber.
‘Hold your positions!’ Guilliman commanded. ‘Stand ready, but leave us.’
‘This task is ours,’ the Lion said, and he felt the truth of those words with the force of an oath of moment. There was no space for anyone else to enter the fray. There was also a necessity to the act. One brother had entered the portal. Two others must struggle for his salvation. The Lion knew the strengths of myth on Caliban. He valued the light of his father’s reason above all superstition, but he understood the power of symbolism, and of the foundational truths that could animate it. The barriers the Legions had fought through on the journey to Davin had been as much symbolic as they had been physical. There was a principle to the warp and its denizens that the Lion could still see only imperfectly, but appeared to be in the order of a reification of the abstract. Ideas became things. Symbols became fortresses. And so he had to fight the daemonic on the very grounds that gave it so much awful power. His attack had to have symbolic strength, too. If anyone other than Guilliman and himself struck the portal now, they would dilute the strength of the moment.
He and Guilliman were hitting the portal with more than their own strength and the power of their weapons. They were turning the force of meaning against it. Meaning had almost destroyed them. They had pulled back from the edge of their ruin. They fought back in the hope of saving Sanguinius from his own fall.
‘The enemy wants him,’ the Lion said. He hit the portal again, and cut an even deeper wound. Psychic fire burned the length of the sword and up his arms. The pain was ferocious. His fury was greater. He ripped the chainblade savagely from the portal and Guilliman’s power gauntlet hit again. The flare became a fountain of violet flame that washed over them. It burned, and it was proof they were striking home. ‘This trap was for Sanguinius.’
‘We were secondary targets,’ Guilliman agreed. ‘Why?’ And he struck again.
The Lion thought about the height of the fall, greater still than Horus’. He thought about the power of symbols and of meaning. ‘Because he is the Angel,’ he said.
They struck again, and again. Their attack turned the chamber into a furnace. The walls began to glow. The heat was monstrous. Ethereal flame surrounded the Lion. It wreathed his armour. It seared his flesh and it cut like knives. Blood coursed down his face. Guilliman was as badly off. His lips were pulled back in a determined, wrathful grin. The Lion saw his emotions reflected in his brother’s face. Each blow was retaliation for the way they had been manoeuvred. The raging bursts from the portal were the wounds of the enemy. They were finally making it pay. The action was so small compared to the destruction of the fortress gate of Pyrrhan, yet it felt more real. On Pyrrhan and in the Episimos System, their actions had been planned by the enemy. Sanguinius’ triumph in the manufactorum was a lie. Now they could see the trap. Now they were fighting back in earnest. Now the battle was finally joined.
The Lion cut through the portal from left to right, its light bleeding over the blade’s hilt. The scream from the portal was sound as well as light. The wall behind tore like flesh. The flash from the other side bathed the entire chamber in a sheet of coruscating red and searing white. Guilliman was a barely discernible outline beside the Lion. He slammed the Hand of Dominion into the explosion.
The second blast was larger yet. Violet flames roiled within. It hit the Lion and Guilliman with the force of a hurricane. The portal howled. It roared. It was a dragon of myth, breathing fire against its tormentors. They leaned into the fury, and the Lion saw the portal open once more. It was the jaws of a wounded beast. The light of uncreation and madness shrieked in torrents through the chamber. The far wall cracked. Its stones turned molten. The Lion’s skin blistered in the volcanic heat.
The portal tore wide open. The jaws of the monster opened as if to swallow the materium. Then there were shadows in the light. There was heaving, scrambling, leaping movement. Unclean shapes charged down a tunnel of nothingness towards the chamber. They were moments from taking on form. The Lion braced himself for their arrival, the sword crackling with power eager to burn the daemonic to ash. Guilliman raised the Arbitrator.
Another shadow appeared behind the others. It was much larger, a mountainous shape that strode over the smaller beings. It was powerful, gathering material form to itself faster than its kin. It appeared to rush fo
rwards suddenly, and its bellow of rage preceded it out of the portal. The silhouette became defined. The Lion saw six massive legs, arachnid in shape yet machinic in their angularity, supporting a massive torso. It swept a forelimb ahead, and the claw smashed clear of the portal. Muscle and metal were fused in the shape of a vice larger than a man. It caught the Lion full in the chest. It knocked him across the room, then slammed into Guilliman’s flank, hurling him into the flowing stone of the left-hand wall.
The towering daemon forced its way through the portal, its sheer size smashing the walls of the chamber. Its horned head looked down on the primarchs twenty feet below. Its gnarled, muscled flesh was the crimson of rage. Its other arm held a sword twice the height of a man. One of its legs came down on the remains of the altar and smashed them to fragments. Roaring its challenge, the daemon charged the primarchs.
Sanguinius was in a cavernous hall. There were mountains ahead of him. Their flanks rippled, worms under flesh. Eyes opened and closed down their length. Maws gibbered at their base. Tongues thirty feet long licked up at the eyes. The mountains heaved. They were living things, yet there was metal in them too. They were engines, larger than a capital ship. The hall was a nightmarishly huge enginarium.
The waves of the warp maelstrom withdrew. Sanguinius was in the materium again, inside a reality that was losing the war for its sanity. He and Madail were in the middle of a miles-wide deck. Its stones were smouldering skulls. It was surrounded by scores of levels of galleries, rising a thousand feet high and more. Their railings were brass, encrusted with red and black growths, tumours of metal. Banners of sanded skin hung from the railings. Each bore a single rune daubed in dried blood. Four different symbols repeated hundreds of times around the enginarium: a twisted, waving tear; a triangular assemblage of arrows and circles, like the face of an insect; a diagonal intersection of lines like a closed fist; a pendulum embraced by a scything curve. The banners were flags of allegiance, acts of fealty to murderous gods. There was a fifth rune. It dominated all the others. It was carved into the deck, taking up its entire width. It formed the dome of the enginarium. It was an eight-pointed star. The spears of its arms extended from a spiked circle. Its radiant lines came to embrace the eye and gather the universe within its shredding embrace.
Far to Sanguinius’ right, to port, near a wall so distant it should not have been part of a single vessel, a line of white and red light rose from deck to dome.
Hordes of daemons crowded the galleries, chanting, jabbering, snarling. Thousands more had gathered on the deck. An army surrounded Sanguinius. Monsters lithe and corpulent, armoured in brass and rotting with disease raised a chorus of damnation as Madail pressed its advantage, its huge staff forcing the Blade Encarmine back.
There was a rush of movement behind Sanguinius, the slithering of reptiles over stone. Clawed hands and talons seized his arms and legs and wings. The sheer mass of daemons toppled him onto his back. He fell against a struggling mass. The abominations pulled him up a slope of their own bodies until his boots were off the deck. A four-legged behemoth whose hide was brass armour pressed a paw onto his chest. It snarled, and the breath of a blast furnace washed over Sanguinius. It lowered its head. Dual horns in the shape of axe blades scraped against his gorget. A female creature stabbed one of its pincers into the side of his neck. The daemon smiled. It whispered to him. He did not understand the words. They felt like barbed wire slicing through the inside of his skull. And they sounded like a welcome.
Immobilised, Sanguinius held fast to the Blade Encarmine and the Spear of Telesto. The weapons felt as if they were stuck in a quagmire of scaled and pustulent bodies. He had no leverage. He could move his head, and that was all. But he held the weapons. He was not disarmed. He strained against the grip of the abominations, testing their strength, searching for the weakness.
When the daemons pulled the Blade Encarmine beneath their mass, Madail straightened. It planted the end of its staff on the deck and stood over Sanguinius, a monster of sickening majesty. The blank eyes of its skull glowed incandescent orange. The eyes of its chest looked down at Sanguinius, contemplating. He saw now that some of them bore scars, and a few sockets were empty. The daemon had been wounded. The sight gave Sanguinius strength. I will make you bleed anew, he thought.
‘You shall serve,’ the daemon told him again. ‘Serve by reigning. Serve as power.’ Madail lifted its arms in praise. The monstrous assembly wailed, shaking the hall. ‘You have seen the wonders. You have seen the works of faith. The works of my faith. I travel in glory, and glory blossoms where I pass.’ Its voice rumbled, the depth of mountain roots grinding over skulls. And its voice was high too, soaring to the heights of madness, scraping thought with claws of pain. This was a being very different from Kyriss and Ka’bandha. It preached. When it turned its body and gazed upon its flock, it looked upon all the daemons in the same fashion. And all the factions of daemons looked to Madail with the same ecstasy. There was unity in this hall. There was nothing like the fault lines that had split the daemonic efforts on Signus Prime. The huge daemon was wreathed in a monstrous charisma. It spoke, and its words mattered. Reality itself was compelled to listen. ‘By wrath and change, by vice and plague, I am the bringer of truth and the proof of belief,’ Madail said. The daemon leaned in, and though its words thundered through the deck, it seemed to be speaking for Sanguinius’ ears alone. ‘I mark the path and forge the way. By eight, to four, I bring the Angel. I am the unity of Chaos. I serve Tzeentch and Khorne and Slaanesh and Nurgle. I am the conduit of a single purpose. I am the prophet, and you are the fulfilment of the will of the gods.’
Sanguinius spat. Acid dripped down Madail’s chest and into an eye. The orb shut against the burn. There was no other reaction. ‘I am not what you will have me be,’ Sanguinius declared. ‘I am he who will destroy you.’
Madail hissed its amusement. Its left hand made a pass over Sanguinius, the talons crooked in blessing. ‘You would choose death? You would embrace the emptiness of defeat, and fall at your brother’s feet? This is the choice. This is the choice.’
‘I will fight Horus with my own strength. I will not choose the lie you have shown me. I would give my life for my father a thousand times.’
‘To what end? To no end.’ The daemon rocked its head back and forth, mocking him in sing-song rhythms. ‘To what end? To no end.’ It stopped. ‘You shall serve. You will see the glories, and you shall serve. It is written.’
‘I have been tempted before,’ Sanguinius snarled. ‘I did not fall then. I will not fall now.’ He tried to lift his sword. It would not move. The female daemon tapped his neck, warning him to cease, inviting him to try again.
‘Tempted,’ said Madail. ‘Tempted by the divided. You shall be, as I, the undivided. Before was not for you. Now is for you. Now is destiny. Now is the truth of fate. Become what your form decrees. You are the Angel of Ruin.’
‘I will not.’
‘No? You will embrace futility? You choose death? To what end? To no end. No, you will not die.’
‘I will,’ Sanguinius declared. ‘I will die before I betray the Emperor. I will die before I bend the knee to foulness.’
‘Bend the knee. Bend the knee.’ The daemon’s eyes blinked at his foolishness. ‘You do not comprehend. You do not see the path. I will show you. I will teach. You will follow.’ Madail turned around, embracing the colossal space of the enginarium. ‘Veritas Ferrum,’ it said. It stretched the syllables out, the inhuman voice mocking the mortal language and savouring the irony of a name made into a greater, more appalling truth than its makers could have guessed. ‘Behold the transcendence. Ship of glory, ship of legend. What was it before? A thing among many. What is it now? Shaper of worlds, breaker of real, destroyer and sovereign. Kill Horus, the imperfect vessel. Become perfection. Chosen of all, beholden to none.’
Madail raised its staff. The blades glowed blindingly. The daemon pointed them at Sanguinius,
and the light shot into his eyes. Visions assailed him, and he knew they were visions. He was living the reality of the future. He was seeing the promises of the daemon. At first, the visions were vague. He felt triumph. He was surrounded by a golden haze, and the sound of fanfares. Then there were figures in the haze. They were kneeling. Gradually, they resolved themselves into Lorgar and Perturabo. The vision became defined. It was the surrender at the Imperial Palace again. Sanguinius pushed away from the vision. He struggled to tear himself free. The daemons held him down, but the vision obeyed his command. It disintegrated. Other images took its place. He sat upon a high throne, receiving the tributes of a million worlds. He marched across fields of battle, and his enemies fell at his mere gesture. He reached out, and armies burst into flame. On another world, he lifted a hand and he summoned towers of silver into being.
He encompassed the galaxy with his wings, for he was a god.
No, no, no, no. This is not my fate.
He struggled harder. His anger grew with the succeeding visions. They came faster and faster, probing his reactions, seeking the future that would be the key to his acquiescence. There would be none. The effort was futile.
But when I thought my father stood before me…
When I thought He made me regent…
When I thought I would save the Imperium…
He had almost submitted then. If he had continued to believe, he would have made the choice the daemon wanted.
The visions became more intimate. He saw his loyal brothers, alive. He saw the Emperor, alive. He saw his sons, shining and perfect. Flawless.
In the distance, there was a sudden boom, as of a knocking at an iron door. The visions trembled. The images became jagged. The booming repeated. It did not relent. It was so insistent, so real, it cracked the visions. Their lies were obvious, and he rejected them.
He was on the monstrous ship again, and Madail stood above him. The daemon leaned down. Its jaws were wide, its tongue snaking out to capture the remains of the vanished dreams. ‘Will you die, then? Will you die?’
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