The black-brown sludge at his feet rippled and built up upon itself, assembling the shape of a hulking figure. It grew something resembling a face and pointed it a Stele, hot coppery breath issuing from the steaming orifices. “Ssssssssservant.”
Ulan could not see for the blood streaming from the brass plugs in her skull or weeping in tears from ears, nose and eyes, but she knew where the creature was. The blazing power of its nova heart burned into her mind-senses. Ulan struggled to stumble away, what rationality she still had lost in a primitive desire to flee.
“Come, daemon,” Stele cried out to the mud-form. “Bear witness with me to this victory. Take shape and release the Way of Change. The Blood Angels will turn to the glory of Tzeentch, they will know and revere him as I have always done.” He stabbed his ruined hand at the shaking woman. “Fill this vessel and come forth!”
Ulan tripped and fell, the mud sucking at her, holding her down. She shook her head in some feeble gesture of refusal.
“No.” The voice was slime on cold rock. The slurry of living mire flashed forward in a wet surge, but not toward Ulan. It rose up around Stele’s legs and rooted him to the spot, coiling about him like liquid snakes, filling his clothing.
The inquisitor tried to scream, but as he opened his mouth the blood-mass poured in over his lips and drowned him in thick ooze. Your reward comes now, said the Malfallax, each word a psionic hammer blow, not lordship of these men-prey, not riches and powers as you were promised. You will know the glory of me. You shall carry my essence, become my mount and flesh-proxy…
Ulan felt Stele’s terrible, silent screams as the daemon forced itself into the inquisitor, turning the man into the unwilling vessel for its bloated psychic substance. As much as she hated the malignant blackguard, she found a spark of pity for the man as he was subsumed inside his daemon lord’s self. Betrayal and anger, fear and terror so sweet that they clogged her throat with the backwash of their taste; the emotions flooded out of the twisting bag of skin. The creature denied his puppet the chance to frame his feelings as he died, tearing understanding from Stele’s mind. He was nothing but carrion for it now: his plans were Malfallax’s plans, his grand schemes tiny puzzles in the Spite Lord’s rounds of parlour amusement.
And so only Ulan truly witnessed the death of Inquisitor Ramius Stele, of his flesh and his sinew, of his mind and his soul. She heard it rip through the ether and catch her in its razored wake. The psy-witch gibbered and wept, ruined by her proximity to it.
The daemon stretched at the meat surrounding it, and with slow and purposeful motion it unleashed the way of mutation upon its new organic shell. Spewing out the dead mud that had briefly contained it, Malfallax adopted the unhallowed aspect that all his kindred wore as the mark of their fealty to the eightfold way. Stele’s bones shifted like putty, hollowing and distending. The pallid human flesh glittered and took on a multihued riot of colours, flashing rainbows as sunlight caught through a prism. The face pressed forward against itself, becoming a hooked beak with deep-sunk eye pits burning with ruin. Gossamer feathers burst from the remnants of the Hereticus uniform, and great scarred wings shook loose from the prison of the skin. Hooks and talons dressed the creature and it gave a long, languid yawn.
Staring out at the human world from inside its new sheath of matter, the Lord of Change glanced at the cowering Ulan and decided it was hungry. Black-barbed claws caught the psyker woman in a pincer grip and brought her to the wicked beak, as a warped voice bayed for fresh, new blood.
Malfallax ate this meal and studied the mad war ranged about it, considering where it would begin.
Delos looked on, appalled. At first, the cleric had thought it was more of the mind-trick that Stele had turned upon him, but the stink of the shifting, sinuous beast told his senses that this monstrosity was as real as the hammering rain and the cold mud. His crozius was gone, lost and broken, but he still had his bolter and his blade. Delos drew both, running his fingers over the litany inscribed on the frame of his weapon. He came to the last etching where he had transcribed his oath to Arkio. “All lies now?” he asked the rushing skies above. “Have I damned myself?”
There would be no more for Delos to inscribe after today. The Chaplain blinked rainwater from his eyes and leapt at the daemon, calling out the name of his primarch.
Malfallax cocked its head in a quizzical gesture and turned to present itself to the figure in black. It stood on something wet and breakable, hot liquid spurting about its clawed feet. The daemon glanced down, shaking off the blood and organ-matter. Stele’s lexmechanic had been too slow to get out of the way, and now the speaker-slave was a paste of bones and metals in the mud.
Delos’ shots found purchase in the beast’s hide and Malfallax swallowed the pain of them like rare sweetmeats. The daemon curled a taloned finger at the Chaplain and spoke a word of blasphemous power. A rift opened like a bloody wound before his hand and a streak of rose-coloured fire jetted forth, engulfing Delos.
The cleric wailed as the pink flames surrounded and clung to him, burning through his sable power armour. The Lord of Change left him screaming and dying there in the mud and strode away, looking for more prey. Malfallax reached into a sucking void in its chest, its hand disappearing to the wrist. It returned with a hilt in its grasp, and with slow and careful motions the daemon withdrew an edged weapon made from dead men’s bones and solid delusion.
The humans had a name for such a sword—they called them warp blades, semi-real constructs existing half-in and half-out of the empyrean, raw funnels of mindform woven into killing blades. Malfallax tested the Chaos weapon in its grip, feeling the weight of it, judging the reach. Satisfied, it drew up the sword and plunged it into a mass of fleeing slave troopers, liquefying their bodies with the speed of its passage. The blade rippled and gasped in pleasure.
“Emperor preserve us,” hissed the sergeant. “It makes me retch just to lay eyes upon it…”
“What manner of thing is it?” added the Techmarine.
“Tzeentch-spawn,” Mephiston replied. The psyker felt the edges of the agony-sphere cast by the warp blade, and his eyes could not focus on the blurring shape of the sword, his vision slipping off the unholy geometry of it. “A Lord of Change.” He tapped the skull medallion at his throat and spat out an order. “Regroup. Concentrate fire on the creature—”
The Blood Angels commands were silenced by a screaming crash of sound from the mass of the enemy force. The daemon lord drew arcane runes in the air and unleashed a flood of cold fire across the square. Men caught in the white core of the flames were instantly turned to vapour, disappearing into ash. Those on the edges of the blast caught fire and stumbled about, blind and mad with pain; the ones on the periphery became cursed with the fallout of mutation, spontaneously growing new limbs, bursting out of their wargear or imploding. Mephiston saw several men turn their own weapons on themselves rather than accede to the revision of their throbbing flesh.
Space Marines died on the tip of the monster’s ten-metre sword, adding their crimson to the ankle-deep blood swamp. The warp blade left brief tears in the fabric of space where it passed, and things emerged from the hole, chattering with hunger. Saucer-shaped and dripping with toxic cilia, the disc-like warp freaks fell on the injured and the dying like vultures.
Emboldened by their new ally, the Word Bearers flooded forward, shoving aside or killing the hesitant loyalist Marines. Mephiston met them with Vitarus singing death, beheading and bifurcating, his plasma pistol hissing hot with discharge. The traitors met steel and died, but for the first time since he had arrived on Sabien, the Lord of Death took a step back as the press of the enemy turned tight like a ruby vice.
“The eye of a hurricane,” murmured Turcio, “we are caught in a storm.” He fired again at the gaggle of Word Bearers that sniped at them from the remains of a smouldering Thunderhawk, firing past helot soldiers who seemed oblivious to the crossfire passing through their numbers. He ducked to reload and Bro
ther Corvus took his place, pacing his shots. “By my life… The confusion… What are we doing here?”
“Surviving.” Corvus retorted, killing a Word Bearer with a headshot. “We are worth nothing if we die.”
“But the Blessed… where is he? Has Arkio deserted us?”
“No!” Corvus snapped back at his battle-brother, but in truth the same fear filled his mind as well. “He… he must be fighting elsewhere.”
“Where?” Turcio demanded, coming up to join the conflict once more. “This day had turned to madness. Our hated enemies arise from nowhere, daemons take shape from nothing… Arkio is gone and we are fighting everything that moves.” He grabbed Corvus’ arm and looked him the face. “I don’t know what I am anymore! Blood Angel? Warrior of the Blessed? Traitor or loyalist? There’s nothing but death here, no answers—”
Bolt-fire from the Chaos lines chewed off a chunk of their cover and both Marines threw themselves aside as lascannon shots followed through. Turcio rolled over in the mud and found himself staring up at the sky, the endless curtain of grey rain pelting them. Misgivings clouded his mind. Suddenly it seemed like everything that had happened since Cybele was being called in question. “Sanguinius preserve me, what is our fate to be?”
“Look.” Corvus pointed toward the gutted tower of a long-fallen cathedral, one of only a few structures that still stood above ground level. There was a human figure up there on the stone canopy, atop a broken gargoyle. Lighting gave him form and colour—a Blood Angel, and in his arms a mess of golden shapes, pale flesh and white feathers.
Rafen looked down on the battlefield and filled his lungs with breaths of wet, metallic air. When he spoke, his voice carried on the wind, echoing through the vox channels of every Astartes on the ground.
“Blood Angels!” he cried. “Sons of Baal, hear me. The lie has been dispelled, our twisted fate undone. Know this, brothers. We have been betrayed!”
The conflict raged on, but Rafen’s voice still reached every corner of the fight, even the helots and the enemy turning to cast an ear toward him. “All of us hold the blood of Sanguinius inside our hearts.” Rafen called. “Every man of us is the Pure One in some small corner of his soul… But our primogenitor, our lord and founder… He lies dead!” The word thundered across the sky. “Sanguinius is ashes, millennia gone, no bones, no heart, only blood! Sanguinius died at the hands of hated Horus, he perished at the blade of Chaos!”
Angry howls bubbled up from the throats of all the Blood Angels, to a man all of them stirred to violence by the stark truth of Rafen’s statement.
“And now the archfoe seeks to turn us all, to drag us to their blasphemy by a false idol…” He held up Arkio’s body, high above the throng. “See. Look at what has been done! My blood kinsman, mutated and warped by the hand of a traitor…” Rafen’s voice was choked with emotion. “They made him think he was the Pure One Reborn… They made us believe. But he was corrupted, poisoned by the pawn Stele! The daemon that walks among you did this, so we would follow blindly, blindly into the abyss.”
A chorus of denials came up to Rafen on the wind, anguished refusals from men who now saw the lie they had granted their fealty to.
“See the truth!” Rafen screamed. “See my brother fall.” He tipped Arkio’s corpse over the edge and let gravity take the winged body from him. In a moment of terrible silence, only the rain spoke as the dead man tumbled end over end, ruined wings flapping, to land in a broken heap on the cathedral steps.
Turcio scrambled to the body and turned Arkio’s face to his. He recoiled with horror and stumbled away.
“What do you see?” Corvus asked, his hearts tight in his chest.
“Ruin.” Turcio said in a dead voice. “Ruin and damnation. Our messiah is black with untruth, brother… Rafen does not lie.”
“Arkio is dead!” came the cry from the tower. “My brother perished for this mendacity and it dies with him!” Rafen drew up the Spear of Telesto and let the weapon’s golden light haze the sky around him. “By the Holy Lance, reject your flawed allegiance to Arkio and remember the true lord, Sanguinius.” He pointed the weapon into the melee and felt it turn hot with willing power. “See the foe among you and destroy them.”
On the steps, Turcio stood back and called to the sky. “Aye. Aye. I renounce the Reborn. I am a Blood Angel!” The battle-brother leapt off the cracked stones and threw himself into the helots and traitors. “For the Emperor and Sanguinius!”
Corvus yelled the same oath and followed him and across the square, Arkio’s loyalists threw off their misguided devotion, the burning power of the spear tearing the shroud of Chaos’ confusion from their minds.
Malfallax’s anger pierced the Warmaster’s mind like a white-hot arrow, the thread of psychic communion between them so strong it killed two lesser Word Bearers beside the Witch Prince.
“Garand! The man-filth’s ridiculous catspaw is cold meat! You promised me this elaborate charade would be a success!”
The Word Bearers commander glanced in the direction of the shambling Lord of Change, far across the battle, and bowed. “The fool Stele, great heirophant. I tried to control his scheming, but his vanity was his undoing.”
“I have consumed his flesh,” said Malfallax. “I know his goals. This day may still be won by us, and we may still turn the Blood Angels for our master’s pleasure.”
“Forgive me, excellence, but how? With the boy dead, these Blood Whelps will not follow us into darkness.”
Psychic laughter battered at his senses. “You see only the battle to hand, Garand. There is another way.”
Realisation flooded into the Warmaster. “The Flaw. The gene-curse of the Baalites.”
“Yessss,” murmured the daemon. “I tasted it on Cybele through my bound psy-slaves. We will conjure it from these fools and let it consume them—and when they are deep within the black rage, I will lead them to a well of blood the likes of which they will never escape, to the very heart of the Maelstrom itself.”
Garand nodded, awed by the daring of it. “Your glory, Lord Malfallax.”
They made way as Rafen walked from the cathedral’s interior to the place where Arkio’s body lay. In his mailed fist, the spear glowed as it had that day on the Bellus, when the light of the primogenitor had touched every soul aboard. Gently, he curled the broken wings around his sibling’s corpse in a death shroud, while Mephiston’s men looked on in silence.
Rafen rose to find the Chief Librarian at his side. The Lord of Death proffered a thick glass injector in his hand. “Your wounds are severe, brother,” said Mephiston. “Take this. Corbulo himself gave it to me. It will lend you the strength of the lords.”
He gathered up the exsanguinator and turned it in his fingers. Thick, heavy blood glistened inside it, drawn from the highest Sanguinary Priest of the Blood Angels Chapter. Once this blood mixed with Rafen’s own, the essence of Sanguinius would flow even stronger in his veins.
Mephiston nodded at the dead man. “The time has come to avenge him.”
“It has,” agreed Rafen, and with one single sweeping motion, he plunged the needle into his chest and emptied its contents into his heart.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
For hundreds of years the landscape of the shrine world Sabien had been silent of human voices, the desolate ruins speaking only with the mournful winds that chased dust and rain through the streets and open spaces. In its own way, Sabien was a mournful twin to the planet Cybele, a sister sphere light years distant toward the coreward marches of the galaxy. Both worlds were markers for the dead, and both had run crimson with the life of both Astartes and traitors. Fate, if such a thing existed, had cast a circular path for Rafen and his brethren to follow. Their journey into darkness had begun among tombstones and memorials, and here and now it would end among the same.
Sabien had known the unbridled passion and fury of the Sons of Sanguinius all those centuries ago, when the long-since dead had fought and perished in order to
hold this planet against the legion enemies of the God-Emperor. That power had come again to the silent world, raising up against the thunder of the storm clouds in a brilliant tide of virtuous malevolence.
The Blood Angels did not simply attack, they detonated across the war zone in a wave of unfettered rage, a red tide of men plunging into the lines of the Word Bearers and the maddened helot soldiers. They rushed to the fight, rejecting the relative safety of a stand-off battle, throwing caution to the wind in shattering chants and war cries. The unholy hymns of the Chaos Marines were drowned out by the lusty roars of their opponents, and then by the massive crash of the two forces meeting like a hammer on an anvil. Metal on metal, chainsword against ceramite, bolter striking flesh, the hissing snap of laser fire—and the screaming. The horrible, heart-chilling screaming. All of it came together in an orchestra of unchained war. The earth quaked beneath the awesome release of mayhem and destruction.
The Blood Angels had returned to Sabien, and a crimson hell came striding with them.
Only in the crucible of close combat could a man truly understand the measure of himself. It was nothing to stand aside, in the cockpit of a fighter or behind the barrel of a ranged cannon, to press a button and watch a distant foe vanish in a puff of smoke. How could a Space Marine ever know the colour of his heart unless he stood toe to toe with his most hated enemy and took their life as they looked him in the eyes? What truth was stronger than the final moment of reckoning, when weapon matched weapon and the pulse of shed blood sang its symphony?
Mephiston knew this; it was the greatest glory of the Lord of Death’s existence to cast the aberrant and the reviled into shreds. He was at the very tip of the arrow of red ceramite that marked the Blood Angels advance, slashing through the lines of Word Bearers and the helots who dared to assault the Marines that towered over them. The psyker killed a man, a commoner whose mind had been addled by the Chaos demagogues, killed him with a look from his flinty, iron-hard eyes. The over-spill of Mephiston’s Quickening brushed the errant fool and stopped his heart, bursting blood vessels all over the slave trooper’s rough-hewn robes. The hot fluid spattered the psyker’s muscular body armour and droplets found their way to his cheeks. Mephiston wiped them from his pale, sallow face and licked the blood from his fingers. It was the most perfect wine, a lustrous red vintage filled with heady adrenaline. The Blood Angel’s fangs drew out over his thin lips. He was suddenly filled with the anticipation of more, more, more! He threw aside the dead man and cut wet streaks through a Word Bearers Havoc trooper, bisecting the barrel of the lascannon he held and cutting into the pallid white meat of the enemy Marine’s neck. The force sword’s downward fall did not end there, blue lightning clashing and spitting into the body, severing it into unequal chunks. Black liquids issued up from the gaping voids he cut in thick, oily fountains. This was an altogether different draught, raw with the pollution of a thousand years, stinking and putrid. To let such a libation touch his lips… The very idea made Mephiston ill.
Blood Angels - The Complete Rafen Omnibus - James Swallow Page 50