Delos saw the dark shapes of the Chaos Space Marines and felt his gut churn with revulsion. The optics of his death’s-head helmet streamed with rainwater and spatters of mud as he fought to clear them. For a moment, he thought he had seen Inquisitor Stele actually standing toe to toe with a monstrous Word Bearer, then the raging mob had obscured his view and the Chaplain found himself pressed against a fallen wall. The weight of his ceremonial crozius arcanium was dead in his hand, desultory glimmers of energy fizzing around the device’s ornate skeletal carvings. The weapon mirrored his mood sullen and uncertain. The Chaplain grasped it in his mailed fist and spoke a silent prayer to his God-Emperor. If what Delos had seen was correct, then the man who had been the architect of the Reborn Angel’s Ascension was consorting with humanity’s vilest enemy. He had to be mistaken. He had to be. The alternative explanation made him feel dizzy with dread and horror.
Pieces of gold and tatters of blackened purity parchments fell away from Arkio’s wargear, leaving scored metal below. The artificer armour, once unsullied and flawless, was now webbed with scratches and scars. Yellow flecks streamed into the wind like a dust storm, and the crazed blemishes seemed to shift and move in the half-light, tricks of the eye making them into vicious maws and screaming faces. New, inhuman muscles bulged beneath Arkio’s chest, and his wings beat hard to hold him in a hover. The inky stain of his wound was grey and pallid, lines of toxin threading into the pinions and feathers, mottling them.
The very smallest glimmer of regret formed in Arkio’s mind as he stared down at the yawning crater in the crypt, and he stamped on it mercilessly. No, Rafen would not be graced with a moment more of his attention. His troublesome brother was ended, and at last Arkio had the freedom he had coveted in the dark corners of his soul since childhood.
A low moan, a raw and feral sound, issued up from the void in the stone floor. It sent the Spear of Telesto twitching in his hands once more, as the weapon writhed and shuddered. The sky whitened as lightning flashed daybreak-bright around him, and the dazzle picked out a man-shape in glistening crimson below. On wings of jet fire, Rafen punched into the air and struck Arkio with all his might.
He caught his brother by surprise, and the Blood Angel felt his bones ring with the impact as they hit. Arkio spat out a strangled yell of anger as they flew up into the thick grey clouds. Rain and wind lashed at their faces from the oily banks of vapour, buffeting them. They exchanged blows, Arkio struggling to regain the advantage, unable to bring out the spear to strike back at so close an aggressor. Lightning shrieked close to them, the hot ozone of tormented air searing Rafen’s lungs. In the flash of illumination, he saw new lines of the black seed-boils emerging along Arkio’s cheekbones, arranged there like ritual scarifications. His eyes were shaded with the purest, darkest hate.
Rafen fought to bring his bolt pistol to bear, squeezing off a salvo of shots. Shells sizzled off Arkio in mad ricochets, some cutting out divots of necrotic flesh, others deflecting from the pieces of armour that still clung to his brother’s changed torso. Arkio made a wordless sound of raw rage and snatched at the handgun, his fingers forming a fist around the blocky metal shape. He grabbed the weapon and crushed it to powder in a bony grip. Rafen cried out as his fingers snapped.
Arkio batted him away with a languid backhand, sending Rafen on a wild course as the rockets in his jump pack spat and laboured to keep him aloft. The winged figure turned after his target, in the clouded shadows, his aspect like an angel of death. He tried to aim the Holy Lance after Rafen, but the weapon resisted him. It bent and bowed as he pulled on it, as if the spear was frozen in the air. “Obey me!” he shouted, yanking ferociously at the haft. “I am your master!”
In his rage, the darkness hidden inside Arkio came flooding to the surface, the sullen beauty of his countenance shifting into an aspect as thunderous as the clouds about him. The change raced through him, down to the molecular level, the cells of the blood hammering in his veins blackening. Cradled in his grip, the potent technologies of the Spear of Telesto tasted Arkio, sampled him through the genome sensors threaded into the weapon’s ornate haft. Ancient science awoke in the lance, so far removed from the advancements of the Imperium as to border on magic. It knew Arkio then, as it had known him in the first moment he laid hands on it—and this time the spear found him wanting.
It rebelled. The scent of Chaos was black and thick in the Reborn Angel, and the Telesto weapon went white-hot in his grip, melting the mastercrafted gauntlets to muddy gold slag. The pain was instant and heartstopping, and by sheer animal reaction Arkio released the burning lance, superheated steam hissing from the burning tissues of his hands. Tumbling end over end, the Spear of Telesto fell toward the ground, lightning catching the teardrop blade, wind whipping the purity seals.
The weapon landed like a thrown javelin, the blunt pommel at the shaft’s end cracking the stones of the church floor as it struck them. Whirring with power, the spear came to rest upright, a naked standard in defiance of the forces that had tried to abuse it.
Overhead, Arkio swept toward his brother with his ruined hands opening into claws, the madness of kill-lust in his gaze. His rage was titanic now, and with it he would rip his sibling to shreds, spear or no spear.
Rafen shook off the dizziness threatening to wrap him in its coils and brought up his fists in a fighting stance. He bobbed as his thruster pack choked and coughed. The Blood Angel dared not chance a look at the repeater gauge about his wrist cuff for fear it would confirm what he suspected already—the jet pack was starving of fuel and damaged, and he had only moments of flight left before he fell back into the embrace of Sabien’s gravity.
He blinked rainwater from his lashes as Arkio fell upon him, and then once more the two siblings were locked in a tumbling embrace, wrestling amid the storm with nothing but footless halls of air surrounding them. Arkio viciously kicked Rafen where the spear had cut a line through the flesh of his thigh, cracking open the wound again where Rafen’s Astartes blood had already begun to clot. He howled and butted his brother in the face, gaining the reward of a fan of oily vitae gushing from Arkio’s flaring nostrils. A flurry of punches danced across Rafen’s ribcage as impacts dented his ceramite chest guard. He tasted the hot copper of his own blood as the blows rattled his teeth in his head.
Rafen clutched at his brother, raking his fingers down the thick skin over his hairless chest. The mailed red fingers of his battle gloves drew scars across the pallid and gaunt tissue; runnels of tainted blood gathered at wounds where hard marbles the shade of space protruded. He flailed as Arkio crashed him to his breast in a crippling bear hug.
Rafen heard his bones breaking with the pressure. His Space Marine physiology made him and his kind uniquely aware of their own bodies, so it was with certainty that Rafen sensed the biscopea organ in his chest burst as his ribs pressed in on it. He was bleeding internally in a number of places.
A blink of white sheet lightning turned his world into a washed-out sketch, just lines and impressions dazzling his enhanced vision. Leering out of the blindness came Arkio’s twisted face, framed by the halo about his neck and the beating tides of his mottled grey wings. The sound and the fury of the thunderstorm swept away his younger brother’s words, but Rafen could still read the declaration of hate on his lips: You will die.
There was a word that no Blood Angel would ever choose to speak. It was a cognomen that their enemies and detractors had used since the day Sanguinius took up the Emperor’s cause. The name was as old as Terra herself, born from times before men strode the stars, forged in the fears of superstitious hearts. It conjured all the deepest terrors of beasts that feasted upon life and bore the fangs of a blood-letter. Vampire.
Arkio’s mouth split into a smile as wide as his face, a forest of needle-sharp canine teeth blooming from his jaws. He became the avatar of the Blood Angels darkest and most horrific aspect, a monstrous parody of the predator legend. Rafen’s brother was crushing the life from him, his las
t breaths of air escaping in choking, wheezing gasps. As the wind and rain lashed about the tumbling pair, Rafen felt his fury rise as Arkio’s hot breath tickled his skin. The winged Angel pressed into him, his red maw of a mouth hungry to tear the meat from Rafen’s neck and feast on the hot gush of pulsing life within.
“No!” he roared in defiance. Vision fogging, grey tunnels coiling around his sight, Rafen once again teetered on the abyss of death; and once more, he refused to yield to it.
His hands moved though motions drilled into the marrow of his bones by countless turns of muscle-memory, fingers finding and clasping the hilt of his fractal-bladed close combat weapon. The Space Marine knife had not differed appreciably in its design since the earliest days of the Imperium, the monomolecular edges of the Sol-pattern weapon as familiar to Rafen as they would have been to the first Adeptus Astartes ten thousand years earlier. Yet for all its age, the knife was no less lethal.
Rafen struck violently, bringing the weapon about and thrusting upward into the spaces between his brother’s ribs. The knife slid on slick, matted skin and fell into the mouldering wound he had given Arkio in the square. He pressed the blade into the writhing, maggot-infested cut, all the way to the steel hilt.
From Arkio’s empurpled lips came a scream of inchoate pain that parted the clouds around them with its force. Suddenly, it was no longer Arkio’s beating wings that kept the locked pair in the air, but the chattering, dying thrust from Rafen’s assault pack. The grey-white sails fluttered and curled as Arkio’s fingers dug into Rafen’s wargear, slipping over rain-slick ceramite.
Lightning blazed a strobe image on to Rafen’s retina, freezing the instant there in shades of white, orange and purple. He saw agony on Arkio’s face the like of which he had never encountered upon any battlefield, and a word, a single word, on his sibling’s lips.
Brother.
Arkio’s hands skidded away from purchase and his weight detached itself from Rafen in a whirl of streaming rain and falling feathers. He snapped out his arm, fingers reaching to scrape the gold sheaths on his shoulders, missing as Arkio drew away, sinking through the low blanket of boiling grey cloud. Rafen’s brother, the Blessed, the Reborn Angel, the Deus Sanguinius, tumbled away like a downed prey bird, falling to earth.
Below, amid the shining wet cobbles and glistening mosaics of the ruined church’s nave, the Spear of Telesto sensed him coming. The upright weapon twitched and jerked of its own accord, shifting and turning about its axis to bring the teardrop blade to welcome him. Arkio plunged from the thunderheads and his spine found the head of the lance where his shoulder blades met, at the centre of his outstretched wings. His impact sent the fatal spear through the dense altered bones of his skeleton, bisecting his primary heart and exploding out again though his sternum. A perfectly circular hollow formed in the stonework from the force of the fall, and Arkio lay in it, his corrupted blood thinning in the deluge, casting all about him with a rich pool of purple fluids.
The tear-shaped leaf glowed with golden flickers of colour, evaporating every last drop of his vitae from its immaculate, polished surface.
The sky turned to hell.
Misericorde brought her fanged flanks to bear upon the two Blood Angels warships, unleashing salvo after salvo of heavy rockets, hull-burners and laser fire into the zone of space about them. Mephiston’s flagship Europae had speed and motion on her side, using generous bursts of vectored thrust from her tertiary drives to turn and move beneath the sister ship Bellus. Spinning about its axis, Europae weathered the onslaught, distributing the strikes that reached the battle barge across the ship’s glittering void shields.
Bellus, damaged and wounded, reacted more slowly. To the untrained eye, the two Blood Angels barges seemed identical, but at close hand the injuries and scars Bellus carried were raw and obvious. Europae was fresh from Baal’s orbital docks, fully crewed, perfectly maintained and at the peak of her performance; by contrast Bellus was tired and worn. The engagement over Sabien was just one more battle in a string of conflicts that the old warship had weathered—the wounds from the fight against the cruiser Dirge Eterna at Shenlong, the battleship Ogre Lord at Cybele and even the lasting lacerations from the mission into ork space, all of them took their toll on the Bellus. She was strung out and hobbled in comparison to her adversaries.
From his command throne, Captain Ideon opened up his ship like a shattered hive of hornets, releasing every weapon and warshot at once. About the barge, space became a clogged web of fire and destruction, heat haze and spheres of detonation falling off Bellus in radiant waves. “Report,” he demanded, automatically turning his attention to Brother Solus’ station, but Solus was dead, heaped there in a mess of plasma-seared meat and ceramite. The stink of human flesh came to the captain in a dozen different ways through the senses of the ship’s machine-spirit.
Over the crashing din of secondary explosions, a sense-servitor babbled out a reply. “Multiple critical hits along starboard hull. Breaches on fifty-two per cent of decks. Enginseers report imminent collapse of the fusion core’s spirit-monitor.”
“Bow guns,” he roared, thrusting his consciousness through the cybernetic links in his skull to touch the powerful ship-killer cannons in Bellus’s prow.
The servitor answered even as the question formed in Ideon’s thoughts. “Inoperative. Crew loss due to atmospheric venting.” The mind-wiped slave chattered in a flat monotone, as if it were discussing something no more vexing than a change in weather.
Ideon glimpsed the ragged metal where the bow of Bellus used to be, the tide of fragments and vacuum-bloated corpses streaming out into the black. Hate building inside him, the captain drew every last piece of the ship’s offensive capability together and held it in his mind. His normally immobile form on the control throne was rocking back and forth, twitching like a palsy victim from the force of his anger. A strange, inhuman noise threaded out of his voxcoder, the peculiar ululation crossing the din of the bridge. Ideon willingly let himself fall into the screaming embrace of the black rage, his mind disintegrating into the madness of race memories from thousands of years past.
“Kill them all!” crackled the metallic voice.
Europae’s patience was at an end, and with unrestrained force she opened fire with every weapon at her disposal, crossing the orbital range to punish Bellus for the perfidy of its crew and Misericorde for the crime of daring to sully the Emperor’s space. In turn, the Chaos warship spat hate back at the Blood Angels, pouring it into the darkness until the emptiness was thick with radiation.
Bellus lay between them, striking out at everything and nothing around it, a mad wounded beast alive with pain and the smell of death. Arkio’s flagship was caught in the crossfire of the battle and fell into the hellstorm. In the absolute silence of the void, Bellus detonated, breaking into huge splinters of steel, her fusion reactor giving birth to an instant new sun.
On the planet below, the light of her death was lost in the thick clouds.
Rafen’s thruster pack ran dry when he was still a thirty metres from the ground, and he tumbled and dropped as if he were made of lead. Slamming his balled fist into the release switch on his belt, he felt the dead weight of the pack detach, and freed of the burden he turned into a spin, crashing through age-rotted beams to land with a bone-jarring crack of sound. A ring of water scattered away from him in a ripple. From his kneeling stance, Rafen rose, his eyes narrowed against the biting winds. He scanned the interior of the church, afraid of what he would see.
And there he saw it.
Pinned to the stone as a gigantic collector might exhibit some rare moth or butterfly, Arkio lay with the Spear of Telesto run through him. All about his sibling was a spreading aurora the colour of autumn, a most unearthly golden light. Favouring his injured leg, Rafen jogged across the transept and came to Arkio’s side.
“Brother…”
Rafen gasped in amazement; despite so brutal an injury, Arkio still clung to life with
fierce tenacity. His sibling’s hands were clasped the haft of the spear, the burning glow crisping away the flesh. Arkio seemed not to notice the pain.
“Brother,” Rafen repeated, searching his sibling’s face for the shroud of contamination. Arkio seemed as ruined as the shattered landscape of the city-shrine about them, hollow inside. The black trains of poison boils still seethed beneath his marbled skin, but his eyes… his eyes belonged to the Arkio that Rafen remembered from their youth, the naive and bold soul that had given him strength and loyalty.
There was pain there, of a kind Rafen had only ever seen in the eyes of sinners and turncoats fallen to the law of the Inquisition. Before, he had never questioned it, but now he saw it for what it was. Regret, so powerful and so heartbreaking that the emotion could barely be contained by a human will.
“What have I done?” Arkio rasped, holding his brother’s gaze. “I have broken every compact and promise… I have turned my back on what I am and embraced the void…” He shuddered and wailed. “Oh, Lord Emperor, I have betrayed all I hold dear.”
His hate-rage ebbing, Rafen found only one answer in the echoing chasms of his heart. “Yes.”
The humming of the spear gently rose and fell in the fading rhythm of Arkio’s secondary heart. Each peak and trough grew longer as life ebbed from him into the stones and the rain. “I was weak…” he managed. “I thought I could protect myself from this—” he gestured feebly and his wings jerked in response, “—from falling from the path. My arrogance… I… I believed I was… believed it…”
Blood Angels - The Complete Rafen Omnibus - James Swallow Page 48