“Strength of arms?” He couldn’t keep the incredulous tone from his voice. Tell me, Sachiel, did you take part in some other battle last night, and not the one where we were outnumbered fourfold by the Traitors? They had us on the brink, and then they let us live! Do you not wonder why?”
The Sanguinary Priest shook his head. “No, I do not, because my faith answers that question for me. Why did we win?” He placed a hand on Arkio’s shoulder plate. “Victory came to us through the spirit of the Lord Sanguinius himself.” He turned away from Rafen, dismissing him without a word, and addressed the rest of the ragged group of men. “Hear me, warriors of Baal, sons of the blood! This day you may meet the rising sun with pride and honour, as we drink deep and remember the fallen! Know this,” he paused, drawing his grail from the drawstring pouch on his belt, “By the credo vitae, Sanguinius is watching over us, guiding our hands.”
Arkio came to his feet as Sachiel spoke, sparing his sibling a brief, troubled glance before he joined the other men in genuflection.
“The primarch walks among us.” Sachiel intoned, studying Arkio’s face. “He moves through our actions.”
Rafen considered Arkio for a long, leaden moment; it was subtle and almost invisible, but the Marine could see something changed in his younger brother’s manner. It was not the confidence, or the strength that he had grown into in maturity, but an unknowable shift in his eyes. There was a distance, a preoccupation with some inner conflict that he could only guess at.
Overhead, more trails of vapour from debris inched across the heavens, their feathered edges blurred into blades of white.
CHAPTER SIX
The Dirge Eterna moaned. Throughout the cruiser’s decks, the bondsman crew and the Word Bearers aboard her felt the vessel’s lament. The ship’s mood was a reflection of the minds she carried. They had been buoyant and bristling with savagery as they had approached Cybele, but now they were mournful and dispirited as they left the world behind them. Their mission had been a failure, and there was not a single Traitor Marine on Dirge Eterna that did not burn with impotent anger and shame.
There had been a very real moment when rebellion flashed in the eyes of these once-men. Iskavan had reappeared on the transmat pad, and as he kicked away the twitching form of an Assault Marine that had malformed in the teleporter, he gave out the order to retreat in a baleful voice that brooked no argument. The Word Bearers had been stunned to hear the words fall from his lips, and only the terrible aspect of his face had kept them from rash and hasty recriminations.
Retreat. It made the ship sick to have that order spoken aboard her.
In the lower decks, where the corrupted practised the unholy consecrations of their wargear or prayed for blasphemous guidance from their gods, word spread of events on Cybele. The Dirge’s crew had seen the death of the Ogre Lord first-hand, but none of them had expected it to cost them the fight. Some of the bolder dissenters wondered aloud if Iskavan had lied about the orders from Warmaster Garand; they gave voice to the opinion that the Dark Apostle had become craven and fled the field of battle in disgrace. Those Marines were all dead now; Tancred’s trusted agents had ensured that each one had been isolated and killed with the maximum of agony. To placate his master, the torturer had kept two alive and performed some intricate pain works upon them, as a diversion for Iskavan—but even this amusement did not cheer him and the Apostle had wanted nothing more than to remain in his chambers and nurse his anger.
Once or twice in the past few hours, Tancred’s thoughts had drifted towards plotting an escape or some other scheme to hold off the end he had glimpsed on the planet, but each feeble idea flickered out against the inexorable certainty of it all. He might delay or avoid his fate, but Tancred knew that spilled blood never lied to him. It was not that the torturer was a fatalist—he had simply come to realise that he had nowhere else to go.
The cruiser was beyond the gravity shadow of Cybele’s gas giant world now, in the free space between the inner orbit zone and the system’s asteroid belt. Like everyone on board, as well as the ship herself, Tancred felt directionless and empty. He wandered the decks. Now and then he would brush his tentacles over the breathing walls between the bone stanchions and coo softly to the Dirge. Like Iskavan, he too had a fondness for the vessel that extended back for decades. Both of the Word Bearers had been foot soldiers aboard it in earlier black crusades, and Iskavan had come to consider the cruiser charmed. When he had ascended to the command rank of Apostle under Garand, he demanded the Murder-class vessel be the one to bear his flag. Other host masters made their commands on bigger, heavier craft like the Executor-class hulks or even the huge Despoiler battleships, but Iskavan preferred the speedy, nimble cruiser. Both he and Tancred understood its moods; they could sense the ship’s will leaking out through the deck plates and the baffles. But on this day, even the sightless, deaf and psi-blind servitors labouring in the cesspools would know that Dirge Eterna was dispirited.
The torturer walked without a conscious route in mind, and so it was with mild surprise that he found himself in the gallery above the aft-deck arena. It was a diamond-shaped space, open to the stars above through a glassteel window that was etched with runes and long lines of text that moved like a maggot nest. Below him, a single figure was fighting a dozen scopus drones. Two plasma weapons screamed hot against the fleshy target-servitors. He recognised the Apostle’s fighting style in an instant: Iskavan liked to press in close to his foes, even when using a mid-range weapon, and his master’s feral anger brought his motions a frantic pace that even the most accomplished warrior could not hope to match. The energy coils atop the plasma pistols burned blue-white with radiation backwash, singing through the spaces between Iskavan’s blurry form and the hapless drones. When only two were left, the Apostle suddenly threw the guns away—even though they still glowed with charge—and rushed the servitors. Before the bulky men-forms could react, he was on them, one in each spike-fingered hand, grinding the meat of them together. He roared as he twisted their flesh, folding bone and skin and organ into an indistinguishable mass that oozed between his gauntlets.
Iskavan drew back and spat. The sparring match had fuelled his irritation, rather than cooling it. “Tancred,” he growled. “I know you are up there. Come down.”
The torturer did as he was told, and with each step his fear increased. If the Apostle was to end his life for failing him on Cybele, it would be here and now.
As he approached, Iskavan was crouching next to one of the drone’s bodies, picking at it. The Word Bearers’ commander snagged something fat and grey from the body and ate it. He chewed with a faraway look in his dark eyes. The drone sobbed weakly, barely clinging to its pathetic semblance of life.
“My victory is still on that planet,” he said quietly. “I would have it now if only we had stayed.” Iskavan threw Tancred a glance. “Is that not right?”
The torturer nodded. “As you decree it, magnificence.” Iskavan stood up and indicated the scopus at his feet. “Indulge me, Tancred. Perform your augury again. Here, now. With this.”
The demand surprised him and put him off-balance for long moments. “My lord, that would be… inappropriate…” Tancred fumbled for an excuse.
“Inappropriate?” The Apostle’s voice was loaded with menace. “Do not test what little patience I still have, old ally.”
Resigned, the torturer knelt by the servitor and began to make the sacred signs across the flesh, removing his vibra-stave from the scabbard on his hip. “My reading may not be accurate,” he said through dry lips. “This body is not properly prepared.”
“Do it.” Iskavan snarled.
Tancred mouthed a word of power and cut the drone open, spilling its innards on the scratched metal floor of the arena. Almost instantly, he saw the same patterns emerging that had come to him in the camp on Cybele, but now they were more urgent. The light and shade were screaming a warning to him. Death was close at hand; it might even be in this very roo
m.
“What do you see?” The Apostle’s mouth was at his ear, breath hot and foul with corpse meat.
“I see death.” Tancred blew the words out. “Death and death and death.”
“The Blood Angels, yes?” Iskavan demanded, pressing into him. No. Yours and mine. “I cannot be sure—” A swift kick took Tancred off his feet, landing him in the charred remnants of another corpse. “Be sure!” Iskavan roared, eyes afire. “Or else you are useless to me!”
Above, on the fascia of the glass roof, a glittering shape unfolded from amid the snarls of text, and Tancred was momentarily distracted by it.
“Answer me!” said Iskavan.
“Dark one, above you—”
The Apostle turned just as the sense of a heavy, frigid presence entered the arena space. On the glass, the words merged and shifted into a horned visage that was cut from nightmare cloth. “Iskavan, and your little lie-spinner. Heed me.”
Tancred’s master dropped to one knee. “Warmaster. I had expected you to contact me via my astropath—”
Garand’s sketch-face became a death mask with a crooked grin. “This manner of address amuses me. It has so much more bearing than a mere proxy manifestation, yes?”
“By your will.” Iskavan said. “My flesh and my soul for Chaos, liege. What would you have us do?”
There was laughter, hollowed by the distance it had travelled across the Immaterium. “Oh, I taste your anger from here, Iskavan. Your rage is barely contained at the indignity I have forced upon you.”
As if the Chaos lord’s words had given him permission, the Apostle’s self-control snapped. “Yes, rot and blood, yes! Every black soul aboard my ship seethes at this abuse of our war doctrine! I ask of you, warmaster, what possible cause could force us against Lorgar’s way?”
The sinister humour faded like vapour. “Insect! You seek to question me, to seek the meaning in my plans?! Your mind is fit for direction and orders, not the match of wits with the Chaos-blessed!” Garand’s face loomed down on them. The glassteel distended and warped with the force of each word. “Do not presume to comprehend the scope of my intentions, Iskavan. A larger plan is at work and you are merely a small part of it. You are a tool, Apostle, you and your host. Be thankful I grant you a mind at all, unless you desire to become a servitor-vessel for my will!”
For a moment, Tancred thought that Iskavan would explode with an angry tirade against his master; but instead, the leader of the ninth host closed his eyes. “As you say it is so, and I ask once more. What would you have us do?”
The warmaster’s voice began to dwindle, as if he was losing interest in the conversation. “Take your ship and return to our base on Shenlong. Reinforcements await you. Assume command at the Ikari Fortress in the capital city and hold there.”
“And the humans we did not kill on Cybele, what of them?”
The ghost of a dark smile glittered on the glass, fading. “The Blood Angels will come to you, Iskavan. Of that, you can be certain.”
The lander settled on spears of white fire. Retro-rockets blew a thin nimbus of smoke away from the starport’s main landing pad. Sachiel brought the Marines to order as the drop ramp yawned open, allowing a trio of servo-skulls to escape into the air, with their null-gravity impellers humming.
The inquisitor was the first to disembark, advancing fearlessly ahead of the gold-helmeted honour guard that accompanied him. Stele was dressed in field battle dress now. He had discarded the formal cloak he had worn on his first landing and chosen something more practical. He made a show of surveying the ruined starport. One hand clasped the sacred symbol of his order where it dangled from a necklace, the other rested on the grip of an ornate, custom-made lasgun. He gave a grim, measuring nod. “You have done the Emperor’s work this day, Blood Angels.”
“As is our duty,” Sachiel added. “Comrade inquisitor, what state is the Bellus! We feared you might have fallen to the foe.”
Stele gestured to a gaggle of serfs aboard the shuttle and they clambered down in awkward steps with cargo pods in their hands. “Brother-Captain Ideon is a fine officer, but even his rare skills could not protect her from injury. It will be another day before the ship returns to full operational status.” He allowed himself a thin smile. “We claimed two archenemy ships and drove one from our sight.” Stele patted Sachiel on the shoulder. “But you, priest, your actions here were nothing short of Herculean. The killing of a grand cruiser from the ground… Magnificent.”
The Blood Angel bowed. “Your praise is wrongly directed, lord. It was one of my men who conceived of the plan to shoot down the Chaos hulk.” He indicated Arkio. “Bloody, bold and resolute, as the best of us are.”
Stele accepted this. “Brother Arkio, isn’t it? Yes, I remember you. I have observed your actions for some time. I sense a bright future stretching out before you.” He glanced at Rafen, standing close by. “Who is this?”
“Brother Rafen, if it pleases the lord inquisitor,” he replied. “Of the late Captain Simeon’s company.”
“Ah, one of Sergeant Koris’ troops.” He turned slate-grey eyes on Rafen, examining him as if he were looking for flaws in a gemstone. “I see something between you and brave Arkio here. You are brothers by birth, yes?”
“We shared the same parents on Baal Secundus, lord.”
Stele nodded. “A rarity. It is most uncommon that two siblings from a single generation be found suitable for Astartes recruitment. I’ll warrant none here would know the bonds of bloodline as well as you two.”
The comment hung in the air for a moment, and Rafen’s eyes narrowed, unsure of the inquisitor’s meaning. “We are all brothers under the wings of Sanguinius,” he said after a pause, repeating the words Sachiel had said a day earlier.
Stele seemed to be content with the answer, and returned his attention to the Sanguinary Priest as the serfs continued to unload the transport ship. “I have brought fresh supplies from Bellus and narthecium for your wounded, Sachiel. You have secured the port?”
“If you wish to call it that,” he said, weariness colouring his tone for the first time. “Our counter-strike sent confusion through their ranks, to such a pitch that they ran from the field of battle. Brother Lucion detected the energy patterns of multiple teleportation signatures just after dawn. If, as you said, the Word Bearers’ surviving starship left orbit, I would say that they were soundly defeated.”
A nerve jerked in Rafen’s jaw, but he kept his mouth closed. Stele eyed him. “You have something to add, Brother Rafen?”
Sachiel aimed a pointed glance at the Blood Angel as he answered. “Such behaviour is uncommon for the Word Bearers, inquisitor. We should be wary of any victory that comes so easily.”
Stele glanced around at the heaps of the dead. “One would hardly call this skirmish an easy one, Rafen… But yes, I see your point. It would be unwise to…” The inquisitor’s words faded into silence. On the ramp, his lexmechanic froze in place.
Sachiel’s face creased in concern. “Comrade inquisitor? What is wrong?”
“Heed Rafen’s words,” Stele intoned. “I sense the archenemy’s taint nearby.”
The land raider had come apart in a storm of shrapnel in the first wave of bombardment from the Word Bearers. While Simeon and his men had been caught unawares at the distant Necropolita, other barrages of laser fire and crude warheads had lanced into the Blood Angels’ units left to defend the port. The raider crew had been one of them, and as they had churned up the broad treads of the tank to ride it out of harm’s way, the ionised air at the lip of the beam blast flattened it like a hammer. The forward half of the vehicle was torn off in a hurricane of volcano-hot gas, while the rest of it spun away to eventually come to rest, cherry-red and steaming, on the scorched ferrocrete. Throughout Cybele’s night cycle, the raider wreckage had contracted and cooled, the metal ticking and snapping. Word Bearers and Blood Angels alike had used the machine for cover in the thick of fighting, but now it stood igno
red and forgotten in the lee of shadows cast by columns of smoke. It was less than six hundred metres from the spot where the lander had put down.
Inside the raider’s torn hull were many dead men, and the pieces of many more. It was a red profusion of warped ceramite and torn plasteel, the mass of corpses so badly disfigured that it would be difficult to distinguish enemy from ally at first glance. But amid this litter of cold flesh there was one single thing that still lived, although its life was ebbing from an orchard of livid wounds across its torso.
Noro’s breath rattled in his clotted throat. He tried very hard not to move each time he sucked in and pushed out a breath. Every last muscle flexion sent darts of pain from his bloated gut, where the cold, leaden weight of a dozen bolter rounds lay lodged in him. In the firefight that took place at the defence battery, Noro took a spread of bullets at close range, and by rights he should have died, but his sheer bad luck and the layers of fat on his corrupted hide had prevented death from taking him easily. And so, with sweet agony lighting him up inside, Noro had finally risen from unconsciousness to crawl on his hands and knees from the missile bunker.
No one had noticed him inching his way across the ground. Above him, cannon fire and hot flame gushed back and forth as he dragged his carcass from one piece of broken cover to the next. With slow and ponderous execution, Noro’s thoughts had gradually come around to the matter of what he was going to do. The Word Bearer had been unable to find a medicae or even a helot with rudimentary field surgery skills, and with each passing hour he had grown more and more angry, pressing himself back from the edge of coma through sheer force of hate. When his winding blood trail brought him to the debris of the land raider, he discovered a bolter, undamaged and fully loaded, still gripped in the severed hands of a Blood Angel. Noro took the gun and made himself a hide within the wreck. Quietly nursing his pain, he waited.
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