As if he was summoned by the thought of him, the rumble of the cursed crozius announced the Dark Apostle’s presence. Iskavan scowled at the scraps of his army where they stood in sullen groups around the perimeter of the flood chamber. His displeasure flowed off him in waves, more potent than the stinking fetor of the drain ducts.
“Shall we proceed?” Falkir asked.
Iskavan spat and pushed him away. “Stand aside.” The Apostle reached under a ruddy skin-cloak that dangled near his bolter holster and removed a fat tome from within its folds. There were chains around the book that glittered with threads of rare orihalcium. Each link was worth the price of a man’s life. The Word Bearer commander looped them around his wrist and the sorcerous codex obediently snapped open at pages filled with spidery text in iridescent inks. “That one,” he said, pointing at the closest offering—a swarthy-skinned man in the garb of a balladeer. Falkir grudgingly clasped the man by the scruff of his neck and bent him down. The bard had soiled himself in fright.
Iskavan began to read aloud from the book. The words were sounds that did not fit in the material world. They resembled inhuman ululations and strange cadences that made the air shiver with their passage. As he spoke, the Apostle reversed the grip on the crozius and used the sickle-sharp blade on the lower end to slit the offering’s throat. A fan of blood tore out of him, but instead of falling to the floor, it whirled into the air, each droplet hardening into a ruby bullet. The eight other humans screamed and wailed, sensing their deaths would be next. They pulled fruitlessly at the chains, only to stumble and fall as the bloodstorm ripped into them and cut them to ribbons. The globules spun about in a swarm of red.
Flesh and crimson fluid began to coalesce in the middle of the remains of the sacrificial victims, organs and meat tearing out of the corpses to come together in a purplish mass of matter. Iskavan waited patiently for the shape of a Khornate bloodthirster to form, but no daemon emerged. Gradually a formless blob of protoplasm congealed into something barely recognisable as a face. The wet orb of gore spun in the scarlet rain.
“Not enough!” it screamed. “Need more! More! More! More!” Iskavan studied it with a frown. This was not supposed to happen. The summoning should have been sated and allowed the chosen of the skull throne to manifest, not beg for more.
“It’s still hungry,” said Falkir. “What else can we feed it?”
“You.” The Apostle didn’t hesitate, and kicked Falkir’s legs out from under him. The Word Bearer swore as he fell face-first into the bloodstorm.
With a gust of coppery vapour, the rain of liquid engulfed Falkir and filled him up like a vessel. Iskavan watched intently, waiting for the telltale horns, tail and batwings of a bloodthirster to burst from the seams of his armour. The Khornate creature would corrupt Falkir’s body still further and it would emerge from his mortal form armed with a hellfire whip, a heartseeker axe and a desperate desire to kill.
But to his slow dismay, that did not occur.
Whatever possessed Falkir slowly got to its feet and confronted him. Where the Word Bearer’s ruined face had been there was now an ever-shifting mass of warped flesh. It was never static, it constantly morphed from form to form. It seemed to smile at him.
“What are you?” the Apostle demanded. “By Lorgar, I summoned the child of Khorne, not some pathetic changeling!”
“Show respect to the servant of Tzeentch, beastling!” it cackled. “No bloodthirster for you! The Warmaster Garand has forbidden it!”
Iskavan’s tongues twitched. “How dare you presume—”
“A messenger instead for the master of the ninth host. Hear this! I am the conduit for your lord’s most black and hurtful displeasure!”
Before the eyes of the Word Bearers, the daemon’s chimera face took on the terrible aspect of the High Warmaster Garand, battle commander of a thousand hosts and the Dread Witchprince of Helica. Many of the Chaos Marines knelt in demonstration of their allegiance, but Iskavan remained standing. The dark realisation that was building at the back of his mind kept him on his feet.
“Iskavan, you blind, stumbling fool!” Garand’s voice spat from the changeling’s mouth. “In the maelstrom’s name, you cannot even be trusted to fail!”
“Why have you interfered with my summoning?” growled the Apostle, ignoring the insult. Iskavan’s black heart hammered in his malformed ribcage. The Warmaster’s powers were potent indeed to have reached across the Immaterium and turned aside the daemonic invocation.
“You shall have no reinforcements from the warp, worthless dolt! You should be corpseflesh now! I sent you to Shenlong to perish on Blood Angels’ blades, and perish you shall!”
“No!” Iskavan snorted, waving his crozius, fighting away a sudden confusion. “You could not… It is not—”
Garand’s psychic presence was like a lead weight pressing down on the warriors in the chamber. “Weakling! You are the least of my army, Iskavan! The victories you brought me have never been sufficient, your conquests irrelevant, your temples to our gods found wanting! Now I rid myself of your dead, useless band!”
The Apostle tried to deny the charges, but a voice inside him saw the truth in the Warmaster’s words. The ninth host were the poorest of the Word Bearers; they were constantly one step behind the glories and honours of their corrupted brethren. “My warriors have served the greater cause of Lorgar’s word for centuries!” he retorted hotly.
Garand’s voice roared with cruel laughter. “As cannon fodder, perhaps. You are fit for nothing else. Even now you are too dense to comprehend! You are a throwaway, Iskavan! The ninth host is nought but a grand sacrifice!”
“The retreats you ordered on Cybele?” said the Apostle. “The orders changed without reason or purpose? What have you done?”
The Falkir-thing stepped closer. “Know this. I have willingly renounced your forces in order to bring the Blood Angels to Shenlong, wretch!”
Garand’s words aboard the Dirge Eterna flooded back to Iskavan. A larger plan. The daemon nodded as realisation dawned on the Word Bearer’s face. “Yes, you see it now? The design that I oversee is no less than the corruption of the entire Blood Angels’ Chapter!”
“Impossible! Their sickening loyalty to the corpse god is unquestioned! It cannot be done!”
“I have allies,” Garand was dismissive. “In the despoiler’s name, I will rival Horus in his grand turning with this deed—and you, Iskavan, your blood will oil the wheels of its consummation!”
“No, I will not allow you to throw away our lives—” he began, fighting the waves of controlled agony that radiated from the Warmaster’s psi-surrogate.
“Allow?” Garand jeered, “You cannot prevent it! The lie-spinner Tancred knew it to be true, he saw your doom in the entrails of the dead!”
“Tancred? But he said he saw nothing…”
Again, the laughter pealed off the stonewalls. “Look how useless you are! Even your minions hide the truth from you!” Falkir’s possessed body launched itself at the Dark Apostle. “You are a disgrace to the eightfold star! Iskavan the Hated? You are Iskavan the Mocked! You could not live like a warrior of Chaos, but perhaps you will be able to die like one!”
“NO!” The Apostle’s bellow shattered the spell Garand’s voice had cast, and with a strike of his crozius, Iskavan batted the messenger daemon across the chamber. The flesh-form cracked against the far wall and shivered. The Warmaster’s face began to melt away as the psychic link faltered. The Word Bearer commander stormed across to the creature and roared into its face, his rage manifesting in coils of searing lightning. “Hear this, Garand! We are sons of Lorgar and not mere pawns for you to play and discard in your games! I’ll raze this world to ash before I surrender!”
He dropped the daemon to the floor and turned to face his men, the full force of his dark soul boiling to a murderous intensity. “Gather all weapons! Muster the furies and the hounds!” The Apostle’s venom made his crozius wail in sympathetic anger.
“For hate’s sake,” he cried. “We will put this world to death!”
The effect of Iskavan’s passion was instantaneous. With one voice, the Word Bearers cried out, “Unto the blood of revenge, we bring the word of Lorgar!”
Without the stifling edicts of the Warmaster’s orders to shackle him any longer, a hundred horrors scratched at the edges of Iskavan’s mind, a hundred terrible revenges to inflict upon the Blood Angels and the Shenlongi cattle. He smiled. He would begin with the wounded, the women and the children.
Something nudged his leg and he glanced down. There, coiled at his feet, the warped flesh that had once been Falkir blinked back at him in hopeful entreaty.
“The messenger daemon still lives,” remarked a grizzled Havoc Marine, drawing a bead with a man-portable las-cannon. “What is to be done?”
“Bring it.” Iskavan said after a moment. “I’ll find someone for it to kill.”
The wind was the colour of old blood. It carried flecks of rusted metal in whirls of razored fines. And it carried something else to the plaza, where Rafen stood alone in contemplation. The wind bore shrieks of the like that only the worst of fears can conjure, sounds that death itself would recoil from. Rafen’s enhanced hearing read them as clearly as if they were broadcast over his vox-link, and he remembered the winds of another world’s screams.
Another Blood Angel beside an idling Rhino pointed southwards. “Do you hear that? I think it’s coming from the valetudinarium.”
“The wounded.” Rafen gasped, and then in a flurry of motion he grabbed at the transport’s roll bar. “You can drive this thing?” he asked.
“Like the wind,” said the Marine.
“Then we go,” snapped Rafen. With a thunderous roar, the Rhino’s tracks bit into the stone road and it leapt forward, into the screams.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The rapacious pace of conflict in the 41st millennium was fed by myriad worlds, each churning out megatons of military hardware by the freighter-load. Shenlong’s speciality was its shells: from tiny, low-calibre bullets suitable for an assassin’s kissgun to the colossal ship-cracking torpedoes fired from battleships. Munitions rolled out of the forge world’s manufactoriums to stoke the unending inferno of the Emperor’s wars. Every inch of the rusty planet’s surface was thick with factory complexes, worker-towns and warehouses. There was nothing that did not orbit around the needs of the mills: schools and cathedrals, agri-domes and heat sinks, water plants and sewerage works were all squeezed into the gaps between the looming walls of the weapons shops.
In such a place was the valetudinarium of Saint Mande the Amber, a hospital founded by the Order of The Eternal Candle in the wake of the Hoek Insurgence. Built atop a cavernous factory, the clinic dealt mostly with the outbreaks of military-grade viruses that regularly affected the workers. These men and women fell foul of the toxins they were forced to load into planetary-denial bombs and other scorched earth munitions. In the careworn halls of tile and stained glass, priests ministered to wounded civilians crowded into the overflowing wards. Few of the Adepta Sororitas hospitallers posted there had survived the initial Word Bearers’ attack. Those that had lived made their prayers to the Throne and paid thanks for their liberation, only to discover they had been premature.
Buoyed by rage at Garand’s deception, Iskavan’s Word Bearers emerged from the watercourses under the valetudinarian in a tide of murder and hate. The lowest levels of the hospital were the most fortified, and it was there that the sisters had hidden the sickly children, the pregnant women and the old. The Traitors rose among them, their nightmares given horrific, blade-sharp form. Iskavan personally murdered the last Sororitas on Shenlong as his brethren hung innards from every wall, painting the corridors with innocent blood.
They met weak resistance from a handful of hobbled PDF soldiers as they rose into the main levels of the clinic. The blinded and crippled took up guns and fought to the death. Iskavan let his men have their butchery without sanction, while he slipped away to find a tool that would enable him to unleash his hatred on the entire planet. The screaming horrors wrought inside the valetudinarium leaked into the air.
Black jets of smoke shot past Rafen’s face from the Rhino’s exhausts, popping as the vehicle’s over-charged engine roared like a caged animal. The driver cut sparks from the roadway as he forced the transport around a corner without losing momentum. The Rhino’s tracks bit into the ground and clawed through debris. A makeshift roadblock built of pieces of furniture and oil drums exploded as the Rhino’s spiked dozer blade swept it away.
Rafen’s torso protruded from the vehicle’s rooftop hatch, and he held fast to the pintle-mounted storm bolter. A coil of belt-fed shells fed from under his feet, clattering over his armour as he turned in place, lancing tracer where enemy troopers appeared to snap-fire at him.
“There it is!” The driver’s voice yelled.
The road terminated in the forecourt of the hospital. The arching gates that had once blocked the way were long gone, destroyed by whatever had blown down the walls. Beyond, Rafen spied the flares of gunfire inside the building. The Rhino rumbled over the entrance. “Full throttle!” Rafen shouted, “Shock deployment!”
“Aye!” came the hearty reply, and the transport’s motor revved louder.
Rafen let fly with the bolter, cutting into the hospital’s portico, and at the last moment he dropped down into the Rhino’s hull. The driver reversed traction on the starboard track and the transport came about, the portside face turning into the ruined entranceway. The Rhino broadsided the building and took down a length of wall as it did so, sliding to a screeching halt in the main atrium.
Rafen knocked out the pintle’s anchoring pin and tore the storm bolter free. Then he was out of the hatch and firing. Glass as old as the Blood Angel himself crunched beneath Rafen’s boots as he ran. Ruined urns spilled plant matter in drifts where stray rounds had cut them open, and everywhere there were corpses. Figures in white, clinic functionaries and medicae; others in rags, the sick and injured.
The Space Marine saw the shape of a Word Bearer warped to slag by a melta blast and grinned. At least the enemy was not advancing without cost.
Something moved at the edge of his vision and he twisted. A soldier loped toward him, a pistol in one hand. The man’s face was hidden behind bandages, and below his left knee there was only a ragged stump.
“Lord,” he said. “We were afraid no one would come…”
“We heard the screams.” Rafen said grimly. “Report?”
“Swarmed on us like ticks.” The trooper halted. His breathing was laboured, and Rafen could see where his fatigues were coloured with blood. “Got in through the lower levels and cut us to pieces.” He gestured with the gun.
“It’s madness in there… Traitors gunning down anything that moves, no rhyme or reason, just killing for the love of it…”
“How many other troopers?”
The man reloaded as he spoke. “Too few to make a difference.”
Explosive charges grunted on the upper levels, and a fresh shower of broken glass rained down on them. Rafen followed the sound and saw shapes in magenta ceramite moving along a raised balcony. “There!” As one, they opened fire, storm bolter and pistol bellowing a murderous harmony.
A hapless Word Bearer took the brunt of the salvo and danced a frenzied jig as he was torn apart. Lascannon bolts seared the air in return and Rafen made for cover. The trooper stumbled after him. He fired again, the ammunition belt whipping and snapping at the air as it fed into the weapon. Rafen’s fire ate chunks from the pillars and statuary as the enemy tried to use them as cover. The wounded trooper was careful and slow with his weapon, firing at Word Bearers as they popped up or unwittingly exposed a limb in their haste.
The storm bolter fell silent and Rafen discarded it without hesitation, unlimbering his trusted bolter from the strap on his back. He glimpsed movement on the upper level, and for a second he saw the hulking form o
f the Dark Apostle between two gnarled columns; then the loathsome figure was gone.
“If he is here, then hell will be two steps behind him.” Rafen said aloud.
The noise of the explosion reached Arkio’s ears. “There!” He stabbed at the air with the spear, and the holy lance hummed. “Do you see it, the smoke rising from the hospital?”
Sachiel gave a curt nod. “Blessed, there’s nothing in that quadrant but sickly natives. It’s a diversionary raid.”
Arkio turned on him with such swiftness that the priest actually recoiled. “No! There will be no diversions, no feints—The Word Bearers have nothing to lose, and we must meet them before they can use that against us!”
“What can they do?” Sachiel scoffed. “After your victory there can be no more than a handful left. We could garrison here and let them batter themselves to death on the walls of the fortress if you wished—”
Arkio’s face was hard with fury. “I do not! They have presented themselves and we must destroy them! No other outcome will suffice!” He stepped away from the priest and vaulted up on to the parapet. “Remain here if you will, Sachiel. I go to take the fight to the foe!” Without warning, Arkio projected himself off the balcony and dropped, plummeting downwards.
Sachiel reached for him, too late to stop the young Blood Angel. The priest saw Arkio’s fall, convinced that he would witness the blessed broken apart by the impact of his landing. The blazing rod of the spear glinted as he descended.
Men in the plaza saw him coming and parted like a breaking wave. Arkio struck the stone with a concussion that cut a shallow bowl in the square. Without a scratch or an injury upon him, Arkio rose from the crouch where he landed and crossed to the ranks of a bike squadron. Awed silence followed him, and no one, not Blood Angel or Shenlongi, dared to speak.
Arkio selected a bike and mounted it, kicking the starter into life. He swung the humming spear across the handlebars, like the lance of a jousting knight. “Men who would follow Sanguinius,” he called, gunning the motor, “Follow me.”
Blood Angels - The Complete Rafen Omnibus - James Swallow Page 23