DEUS SANGUINIUS
BY
JAMES SWALLOW
CHAPTER ONE
In the midst of all the madness, the warrior found himself a small corner of darkness where he could shut himself off, a tiny sanctuary of silence. It was his shelter, after a fashion, a bolthole in which he could shutter away the churn of doubts and fears and concentrate instead on finding answers to the questions that plagued him. The room had once been a basement store for volatiles and dangerous chemicals, and it still carried the tang of free hydrocarbons in the thick air, the very stink of them embedded into the dull iron walls.
He peered out of the doorway to ensure that he was not being followed, and then shouldered shut the heavy hatch. It met the frame with a low booming, and he closed the latches. The biolume in the ceiling was cracked and dull, a thin trickle of greenish glow-fluid staining the cage around it. The chamber’s only real light source was the grille near the top of the wall, which peered out at ground level to the streets beyond. Now and then, the faint snap-crack of a las-gun discharge passed through the vent, and the wave-like rush of a distant cheering crowd.
He removed the heavy hessian sack from the cord across his shoulder and dropped the bag to the floor. The delicacy he displayed seemed at odds with the huge, muscled figure he presented. Even out of the characteristic power armour of the Adeptus Astartes, the warrior manifested an impressive sight in his tunic and robes; he would tower over normal men even when barefoot, and the Space Marine filled the room with his presence. Gently and with reverence, he drew the sackcloth from the object he had so painstakingly recovered from the rubble of the street chapel. It had been buried there, forgotten by the people who had once paid fealty to it in favour of a new subject of devotion. That thought brought the beginnings of a glower to his hard, blunt features, and he forced it away.
The hessian bag fell away and in his cupped hands the Space Marine held an icon of the One True Master. It was a representation of the God-Emperor of Mankind, there in his infinite sagacity at rest atop the Golden Throne of Terra. He ran his fingers over the old, careworn idol; it had been made from brass off-cuts, from a factory that forged shells for the Leman Russ tanks of the Imperial Guard. He placed it on an upturned wooden box so that it rested in the shaft of light falling from the vent grille, the rays of the tepid orange sun casting it with a faint halo. He folded his arms over his chest, hands like flat blades, wrists crossed; the fingers and thumb taking on the shape of the double-headed Imperial aquila, one eye looking to the past, the other staring into the future, unblinking.
The Blood Angel bowed his head and sank to his knees before the Emperor, then spread his arms wide to show his wrists to the air. A mesh of faint scars caught the light on his forearms, the silent trophies of a hundred battles. Across one limb there was the red ink of a tattoo, showing a single drop of blood framed by two wings.
“In the name of Holy Terra,” he said, his voice low, “in the name of Sanguinius, Lord of the Blood and the Red Angel, hear me, Master of Man. Grant me a fraction of your most perfect insight and guide me.” He closed his eyes. “Hear these words, the contrition of your errant son Rafen, of Baal Secundus. I beseech you, Lord Emperor, hear me and my confession.”
The inquisitor Ramus Stele rose to his feet, his meditation at an end, and gathered himself together. He rubbed a hand over his brow, touching the aquila electoo on his bald pate, and frowned. The closer he came toward the fruition of his plans, the more it seemed to fatigue him. He sniffed and his fingers wandered to his nostrils; they came away with a trickle of blood on them, and the inquisitor grimaced at the dark, purple-black fluid. Cautiously, he dabbed away the liquid with a kerchief and watched the stain spread across the cloth, moving like a cancer over the cotton threads.
Stele balled the kerchief and stuffed it into an inner pocket of his robes, dragging the heavy coat of his office about his shoulders. The symbol of the High Inquisition, the stylised capital “I” in brass adorned with a white gold skull, hung from a chain about his neck, and Stele fingered it absently. There were times when it felt as if the medallion was a noose upon him, weighing him down, tying him to the petty world of men. He glanced at the emblem, rubbing away a faint bloodstain from its surface. Soon enough, he would be rid of it, rid off all the trappings that bound him to the corpse-god.
Stele took a moment to look about him, at the walls where dull brown handprints and splashes of old gore still marred the walls. In the battle for Shenlong, this place had been the site of one of the Word Bearers Chaos Marines’ most brutal atrocities, where civilians had been gutted alive as a penitent sacrifice to the Ruinous Powers. While many of the chambers in the Ikari fortress had been cleaned and reconsecrated, Stele had quietly ensured that the death room had remained as it was. Here, where the screaming souls of the brutalised dead had etched their pain into the stone and mortar, the inquisitor found the membrane between the world and the warp to be thinner.
Resting here, letting his psyche drift free of its organic shell, Stele could taste the faint, seductive texture of the empyrean just tantalisingly beyond his reach. It was for him a far more divine experience than kneeling in false piety to the Emperor of Man.
Stele left the dank room behind and exited, to find his honour guards waiting outside. Towering above him in their crimson sheaths of ceramite armour, bolters at arms, they seemed less like men and more like animated statues cut from red rock. Only the brilliant polished gold of their helmets set them aside from the rank and file of the Blood Angels Space Marines. Stele paid them no heed. He had no idea of who these men were, their names, hopes and dreams, anything; in truth, he cared less for them than he did his automaton servo-skulls, which rose from the floor on gravity impellers as he strode away. The silver orbs hummed after him, watchful as hawks, with the Marines two steps behind.
At the junction of the corridor, Stele’s lexmechanic stood waiting, lurch-a-backed. Its head bobbed by way of a greeting. “Your meditation is concluded?” The servitor became nervous in the confines of the room and it had elected to remain outside for the duration. “Matters present themselves for your attention.”
“Indeed,” he replied. The last traces of the dark miasma clouding Stele’s mind faded away, the seductive vestiges of the warp’s caress retreating. He missed it.
“Your servant Ulan has descended from the Bellus with news,” the lexmechanic continued. “A concern which she was unwilling to confide to me.”
Was there wounded pride in the servitor’s voice? Stele doubted it; his helot’s mentality had been so thoroughly expunged in its service that there was little vestige in it that could be considered to be a personality. “She waits in the chapel for your indulgence, inquisitor,” it added. “Good, I will attend to her before I—” An anxious, wordless shout broke through the air and Stele whirled in surprise. His hand drifted toward the butt of the elegant lasgun in his belt, but his action was slow and leisurely compared the whip-fast movements of the honour guards. The Blood Angels had their bolters to bear in an instant, training their weapons on a trio of figures framed in a side corridor.
At the head of the group was a man, florid-faced with watery eyes. His clothes, and those of the two women with him, were worn and slightly unkempt but in a rich, opulent style. Stele decided that they were most likely from Shenlong’s mercantile class, dispossessed land-owners still clinging to the courtly ways of life from before the Word Bearers invasion. “My-my lord inquisitor!” said the man, lips trembling. “Forgive me, but—”
He took half a step closer to Stele and suddenly one of the Marines was there, blocking his path like a crimson wall. “Stay back,” grated the Blood Angel.
The lexmechanic turned on the other Marine. “How did these civilians get in here? These levels of the Ikari fortress are prohibited to all but the servants of Arkio the Blessed and the God-Emperor.”
A pair of gasps fled from the lips of the two women at the mention of Arkio’s name. The man made t
he sign of the aquila and bowed his head. “Please, forgive me, lords, but it was in devotion to his name that we dared to venture past the wards below.”
Stele raised a quizzical eyebrow and stepped forward, gently pushing the Marine’s bolter away. “Really? And what devotion do you have to share?”
The man licked his lips. “I… We… Hoped to lay eyes upon the Blessed himself. To ask for his benediction.” He wiped a tear from his eye. “All that we have was taken in the invasion. We have nothing now.”
Inwardly, Stele sneered. This pompous oaf was weeping over the loss of his money and chattels while others on Shenlong could barely feed themselves. The man’s words did nothing but reinforce the inquisitor’s hatred for the corruption of the Imperium, the maggot-ridden carcass of a society that served only to glorify the empowered and the rich. Stele betrayed none of these thoughts outwardly. “Those of us who show our devotion to the Blessed will be rewarded,” said the inquisitor. “Will you do so?”
A flurry of nods came from the merchant. “Oh yes, yes! For the one who liberated us, I would gladly give all that I can, and ask only for his beneficence in return.”
“You would give all that you can.” Stele repeated, allowing the hint of a smile to cross his lips as he studied the women. The resemblance between them was clear. The younger of the two, perhaps no more than sixteen summers, watched him with wide eyes. She was attractive, in a virginal, parochial sort of way. The other, closer to his age, had the docile look of enforced pliancy about her. Stele considered them both; perhaps he could grant himself a distraction. “This is your wife and daughter?” he asked, the question trailing away into the air.
“Uh…” The man fumbled at a response and found none.
Stele nodded. “Take them to my chambers,” he told the honour guard, and the Marine obeyed, ushering the women away under the eye of a bolter. “I’ll call upon them at my leisure.” The inquisitor threw the man a nod. “Your devotion is great. The Blessed has a worthy servant in you.”
As he continued on his way to the chapel, Stele heard the man mumble out ragged, broken words of thanks.
Rapen had not dared to enter any of the tabernacles inside the Ikari fortress, all too aware of what he would see inside. Troops of Shenlongi had taken hammers and chisels to the intricate mosaics and the friezes that the Chaos invasion force hadn’t already destroyed, and pulled them up. The enemy was gone now, routed and killed, but the people they had briefly subjugated completed the deconsecrations the Word Bearers had begun. Only the object of their veneration differed. In place of sanctioned Imperial idolatry they had daubed crude renditions of the Blood Angels sigil and the newly-created icon of their Blessed Arkio, the golden halo crossed by a shining spear. The sight of it burned in Rafen’s heart like a torch, but he could not dare to speak openly of the doubts that thundered about him, much less even consider giving a confession in such a place. There was no doubt in his mind that any words he spoke would be spirited away to the ears of High Priest Sachiel, and to have him listening to Rafen’s heartfelt thoughts would be a grave mistake.
Neither could Rafen visit one of the churches that the commoners and citizens used, down in the city-sprawls crammed into the gaps between Shenlong’s kilometres-high factory cathedrals. The sight of a Space Marine, even one without his hallowed armour, would never pass unnoticed among the populace—and just as the people had taken Arkio to their hearts in the fortress, so the man they called the New Blood Lord had also supplanted the Emperor in chapels all across the forge-world.
So here, in a dim and ill-lit chamber, in a street ruined by shell fire and abandoned by life, Rafen had created his own place of worship, some small and safe conduit to his messiah where no prying ears would spy upon his prayers.
“I must confess,” he told the brass idol of the God-Emperor, “I was forced to forsake my oath to the liege lord of my Chapter, to turn from Sanguinius to my sibling… the man they call Arkio the Blessed.” Rafen bit back the tremors in his voice. “I know not what my brother has become, but only that my heart cannot accept what Sachiel and Stele claim to be self-evident. I cannot accede that Arkio is Sanguinius Reborn, and yet knowing this I took an oath of fealty to him.” He shook his head in answer to an unspoken question. “This is not cowardice on my part, I swear. The Sanguinary High Priest Sachiel would surely have executed me had I not knelt before Arkio, but with my death there would be no voice to speak out against this insanity. Forgive me, lord, for this duplicity.”
Rafen drew a shuddering breath. “Grant me insight,” he said, entreaty in his voice, “show me a path. I ask of you, what do you wish of me? On Cybele, against the assaults of the foul Word Bearers I was ready to give my life and come to your right hand at the Throne, but in your wisdom the warship Bellus came to our aid and with it my young brother. I thought I was blessed to see my sibling after so long apart… Our ties of blood are as strong as the fellowship of my battle-brothers.”
The Blood Angel recalled the instant on the war grave world when Arkio rose in their moment of blackest despair, with a plan to turn the fight against the Traitor Marines; Arkio’s uncanny flash of brilliance led them to bring down a Word Bearers warship and beat back the Corrupted from Cybele. At first, it seemed no more than a chance insight from Rafen’s sibling, but then the young Marine had single-handedly saved Sachiel’s life from a daemon creature, rallied the men and become the figurehead which turned the tide against the Chaos forces. By the time they had left Cybele aboard the Bellus, there were men wondering aloud if Arkio was not touched by Sanguinius himself, and then came the moment when the Spear of Telesto seemed to prove the truth behind the whispered rumours.
Stele left his guard at the tall copper doors to the chapel and strode inside, the lexmechanic’s clawed iron feet clattering after him. The astropath Ulan stood in the centre of the chamber, arms folded. Her sightless eyes glanced up from the hood of her dark robes and she gave a half-bow. “My lord inquisitor,” she began, her quiet tones a whisper of wind through gravestones.
He approached her, for one brief moment letting his gaze stray to the titanium canister that lay atop the altar. The thought of the coiled power inside the long container made him thirst in a way that nothing else could slake. With a near physical effort, Stele turned his whole attention to the thin psyker girl. “Speak to me.”
Ulan glanced at the lexmechanic, and Stele nodded, turning. “Servitor, wait outside.”
The machine-slave turned on its heel and left them to their privacy. As the chapel door thudded shut, Ulan began to talk. “Matters aboard the Bellus proceed, Lord Stele,” she said carefully. “Questions as to the fate of the astropath Horin and his chorus have been suppressed. There is no other conduit to the galaxy at large now, save me.”
Stele made a dismissive gesture. “You came to tell me that which I already know?” Without his notice, the inquisitor’s trigger finger twitched, unconsciously repeating the action it had performed when Stele executed the Bellus’s cadre of telepaths. “I installed you aboard the battle barge to be my eyes and ears.”
“And so I am,” she replied. “I have news. The warning that was sent from Shenlong to Baal, the message to the Blood Angels Commander Dante… It has been heeded.”
“Dante has replied?”
She shook her head. “The master of the monastery on Baal favours a more direct approach, Lord. A ship is on its way. I have intercepted the shadows of signals from the depths of the immaterium. It will arrive soon.”
Stele accepted this with a nod. “Do you know what kind of vessel? Something more powerful than the Bellus?”
“Unlikely,” she noted. “There is but one Blood Angels ship matching the tonnage of the Bellus within operational range of Shenlong, and that is the Europae, the Lord Mephiston’s personal command.”
“Dante would not send his lieutenant Mephiston without good cause.” Stele spoke his thoughts aloud. “Not yet, at any rate. No, it will be a smaller craft.”
“The advent of any Adeptus Astartes reinforcements will jeopardise the strategy.” Ulan said flatly. “They will be outside our sphere of influence, an incalculable variable. The matter must be addressed.”
“Yes, and so it will be,” said the inquisitor, considering the situation. “Return to orbit and maintain your post. You are to contact me the instant Dante’s envoy reaches contact range.” Stele toyed with the silver purity seal stud in his ear. “I must prepare.”
“New arrivals will not be turned so easily to loyalty to the Blessed,” the psyker warned. “Termination presents the better option.”
“You are too narrow-minded, Ulan. Commander Dante is about to deliver me a valuable object lesson.” Stele dismissed her with a wave of his hand. “Go now.”
When he was alone, the inquisitor let his control slip away and he crossed to the altar and the metal box upon it. The grey cylinder bore sigils and purity seals showing the oaths of the Ordo Hereticus and the Blood Angels, some engraved in the titanium itself, others on strips of sanctified parchment, fixed by fat discs of sealing wax embossed with devotional symbology. He laid his hands on the surface of the container and felt the warmth radiating out from the object inside. The Spear of Telesto, one of a handful of battle weapons and hallowed objects forged—so the myths would have it—by the very hand of the God-Emperor himself. The inquisitor felt himself drawn magnetically to the umbra of the device, even now as it lay in quietus.
Stele smothered a surge of jealousy; the reaction was the same each time he considered the Marine Arkio and his affinity with the artefact. On the mission of the Bellus into ork space to recover the archeotech weapon, it had been Stele who wrested it from the grip of a greenskin warlord, Stele who held it high in victory, but only in Arkio’s hands had the Holy Lance awakened. On some basic, animalistic level, he could not excise the constant core of resentment he felt for the young Astartes.
Blood Angels - The Complete Rafen Omnibus - James Swallow Page 29