Dante shot him a razored glare. “You have questioned my leadership once today,” he replied. “Do it again at your peril.”
Seth stiffened. “I only give a voice to that which is obvious to all. And I say this to you now, master to master, one Son of the Great Angel to another… Do the honourable thing, Dante. Accept responsibility for what has happened and step down from the stewardship of Baal. Allow another Chapter to take the place of yours.”
A bark of humourless laughter broke from Dante’s lips. “You dare talk to me of hubris and then this is what you demand?”
“There are many who feel as I do,” Seth retorted. “And more who will be swayed to that same thinking at the conclave tomorrow.”
Dante turned away, toward the window, and Seth sensed the anger rekindling in him. “Despite what you may think of me, my age does not make me a senile, coddled old fool, and I will meet in the arena any warrior and ten of his brothers who argues that! Leave now, Flesh Tearer, and I will overlook this brazen attempt to wrest control from me as over-eagerness on your part!”
“Do you think I do this for myself?” Seth grated. “This is not personal, Dante! I want only what is best for the Imperium!”
“Aye,” came the reply. “I believe that you do. And for that reason alone, I will not have you and your delegation put aboard a ship and thrown back toward Cretacia.” The Master of the Blood Angels faced him once more; Dante’s eyes were daggers. “But if you remain in my chambers a moment longer, I fear you will test my patience beyond the limit.”
Seth hesitated, and then bowed low. “We will speak tomorrow, then.”
Dante gave a slow nod. “I do not doubt it.”
Caecus walked as a man would toward the gallows, lost inside himself, his thoughts in a ceaseless turmoil. Ahead of him, Brother-Captain Rydae strode with ready purpose, the Angel Sanguine with a bolt pistol holstered at his hip and a communicant helot trailing along behind. The Apothecary was aware of the woman Nyniq walking at his side; on his exit from the arena, a single look from him had been enough to silence her. He had no need to explain what had taken place in the fighting pit. His ashen expression spoke volumes.
The wide corridor rose slowly toward the upper tiers of the monastery, toward the southward-facing protected dome where the fortress’ compliment of shuttles and atmosphere craft were garrisoned. Caecus imagined those walls closing in around him, the pressure in his thoughts betrayed by his morose mien and the clenching and unclenching of his long surgeon’s fingers into tight fists.
Everything was slipping away from him. He admitted a truth to himself. For all the great efforts he had put into the exploration of the gene-flaw, nothing he had ever done toward eradicating the Black Rage and the Red Thirst had so filled him with the sense of achievement he had in the work of the replicae. The researches of the sanguinary priesthood had been going on for millennia and achieved only little. For a questing mind like Caecus’, to be engaged in a work of that dimension ate at his resolve, knowing full well that he would never live to see a cure for the flaw even if he mirrored the age of Dante himself.
But the cloning… The quest to learn the art of replicae had been different, something that fired his imagination. The discoveries he made had grown and changed by the day, energising him with their tantalising potential. He was so close! Caecus could taste it on his lips like cool water. If he could only follow the process through to its logical conclusion, the fate of the Blood Angels would be secure. They would be able to recover from the grave losses incurred at Sabien, and every other battle to come. The replicae was something he could bring about, if only he had the time, the facilities, and the trust of his brethren.
A flash of resentment burned hard in him for a brief moment, the force of it directed at Dante; but then just as swiftly it ebbed, overwhelmed by the bleak certainty of his failure. I was too hasty, and now I have paid for it with my reputation, my work, my future…
The great burden of his fault weighed him down. He wondered what Fenn would say when he heard of the Chapter Master’s orders; Caecus had no doubt his loyal serf would be distraught.
“Wait here,” said Rydae, leaving them at the edge of the hangar bay. He crossed quickly toward a rank of parked shuttlecraft, each of them in the varicoloured reds of the successor Chapters. A pilot-servitor bowed low and began a conversation with the First Captain, discussing the flight plan that would take them back to the Vitalis Citadel. Close by, an Arvus-class ship ran its engines at idle, hot exhaust gasses rippling the air.
Caecus railed at himself. I cannot go back in failure! Had it all been for nought? Every hour of work, every distant place scoured for scraps of information on the process of replicae?
“Wasted,” he whispered. “All of it, wasted.”
“Not so,” said Nyniq, placing a gentle hand upon his forearm. “Lord Caecus, you have done incredible things. You have come so far in so short a time! You should be proud of what you have achieved.”
He rounded on her. “How can I have pride in the birth of abominations? I have done nothing but create monsters, horrible things forsaken by the light of the Emperor!”
“The Emperor… Emperor…” Nerves in Nyniq’s face twitched in strange ways and her mouth moved in breathy gasps. She seemed to be having some peculiar form of seizure. “For… Sake…” Her voice deepened, becoming basso and husky.
“What is this?” Caecus asked, frowning. He pulled her hand away from his arm, and the thin, pale wrist throbbed in his grip. The Apothecae tasted a strange, greasy tang in the air, mingling with the spent-fuel scent of the hangar bay.
Nyniq’s eyes rolled up, showing whites, a light flecking of foam collecting at the corners of the woman’s lips. Trembling, her face moved towards his. The blank orbs shimmered and moved, turning again to reveal new silver-black pupils lined with threads of gold.
Her lips pulled up in a parody of a smile, an odd mimicry of an expression Caecus had seen upon the face of her master, the tech-lord. “My… friend,” she gurgled in a low whisper. “Listen… to me.”
“Serpens?” Caecus could not have explained how he knew that the mind animating the woman was no longer her own, just that he was certain of it. Something about the change of the motion of the flesh upon the bones of her face, as if it were a thin mask of skin stretched over her master’s features.
“Forgive me if you find this method of communication alarming, but it is the only way open to us at the moment.” It was Nyniq’s tortured vocal chords forming the words, but the manner, the pace and meter of them, they were all those of Haran Serpens. “The girl has been altered by me. She can function in this manner for a short time, although it is harmful to her.”
Caecus nodded, grotesquely fascinated. Blood was trickling from Nyniq’s eyes in pink tears. The analytical part of his thought process wondered after how such a thing was possible. A vox device implanted in her brainstem, perhaps? Or some form of psyker conditioning?
“I know what has transpired…” continued the breathy echo-voice. “I am truly sorry, Lord Caecus. I see now that your blood, while potent and strong indeed, was not enough to stabilise the genetic structure of the Bloodchild. The amalgam compound degrades before it can bind with the clone’s cellular matrix.” Nyniq shook her head in exaggerated, puppeted motions.
“Then… we will never be able to overcome the replication errors.” Caecus said mournfully. “My blood is pure, it is…” He broke off, suddenly silenced by a thought so shocking it struck the breath from him.
“Yes?” prompted the puppet-voice.
“If we could craft a solution of the amalgam based upon a sample of blood utterly untainted by genetic drift… It would be strong enough to resist the impression of any mutagenic factors…” He felt his heart pounding in a thunderous rhythm.
The reply was disordered and hissy. “Such a thing does not exist!”
Dare I say it? Caecus looked down at his hands and saw they were trembling. “It does
,” he countered. “Here, in this very fortress. The purest of blood, free of contamination, protected and unsullied. The preserved essence of Sanguinius himself, drawn from his body and guarded by Corbulo and the ranks of the sanguinary high priests…”
“They would not allow you to take it.”
The Apothecae’s flesh chilled. “I would only need the smallest amount… Only a drop…” He shook his head wildly. “Impossible! I cannot! It would be a crime, a desecration!” Caecus shot a look toward Rydae; the Angel Sanguine officer was still in conversation with the pilot.
“A crime, a greater crime than allowing the Blood Angels to die out?” Nyniq’s twisted voice came out in quiet sobs. “Do you have a choice? This is your last chance, Caecus! You must, you must you must you must…” The woman stumbled away and broke into a sudden run. “You must!” she bellowed, and ran screaming from him, toward the resting lighter.
He watched with horror as Nyniq beat her hands against herself as if she were trying to resist the sudden impulses that controlled her body. The girl stumbled into the wake of the lighter’s rumbling exhaust nozzles and her flesh blackened; in a moment, she was a shrieking torch, staggering back and forth across the landing platform.
The attention of Rydae, the servitor and every other helot in the bay was instantly on the flaming figure.
The opportunity upon him, Caecus moved to the shadows, slipped away, back into the corridors of the fortress-monastery. He knew where he was heading, even as he tried to pretend he was as much a puppet of fate as the girl had been.
Rafen bowed his head slightly as Mephiston approached him in the hallway beyond the Silent Cloister. “Lord,” he said.
The psyker’s taut, hawkish face studied him; and as before, as always, the Librarian’s penetrating gaze swept through him, searching him, measuring him. “Where is your charge, lad?”
“Lord Seth and his delegation have retired the chambers granted to the Flesh Tearers in the northern tower,” he explained. “Brother Puluo and Brother Corvus are attending them.”
“Acting as watchmen would be a more accurate description.” Mephiston’s lip twisted and he was silent. Rafen found it hard to articulate, but ever since that moment in the Grand Annex, the psyker had seemed…distracted. “Brother-sergeant, you will be honest with me.”
“My lord, such is your insight I doubt I could be otherwise.”
That drew the smallest of smiles, but then it faded again. “Tell me the disposition of the brethren. You walk among them while I have been forced to remain with the other Chapter Masters. How does the business of this conclave sit with the men of the line?”
Rafen paused, formulating an answer. “Each Blood Angel understands the seriousness of the situation.” And none more than I, he added silently. “We will place ourselves wholly at our master’s command, to follow whatever orders he deems fit.”
“What do you think of this… replicae?”
He suppressed a grimace. “I do not know what that thing was in the fighting pit, lord. I know only that it was not an Astartes.”
“It was hard to kill?” Mephiston asked.
“I have faced worse.” He hesitated, a troubling fragment of recall rising to the surface. “It…spoke to me, lord.”
The Lord of Death was listening intently. “Indeed? What did it say?”
Rafen shook his head, dismissing the moment. “Nothing of consequence. It matters little.”
Mephiston’s gaze was steady. “You would not have mentioned it if you believed that. Tell me, what words did the beast utter?”
“It called me brother. I felt for a moment as if… as if it knew me.”
“That is not possible. It was a tabula rasa, Rafen. An empty vessel awaiting commands, not like you or I.”
The Space Marine hesitated. “I wish I could be certain of that, lord.” Rafen’s mood grew dark. The shadows playing at the edges of his thoughts threatened to encroach once again. “After what I witnessed today, after the fight and the conduct of our cousins, a foreboding fills me.” The words spilled out; he had kept the bleak musings to himself since Eritaen, but now he felt a compulsion to voice them, to confess in some fashion to Mephiston. “After Arkio’s death and the repatriation of the Spear of Telesto, I had hoped the wounds of the Chapter would heal.”
“And yours as well,” added the psyker, reading the thought in his eyes.
He nodded. “The traitor Stele tried to sunder us, and almost succeeded. Now the unity of our bloodline is under threat from within as well as without, and we approach the abyss once again. The brink of conflict, of open dissent. What will be next, lord? Civil war?”
Mephiston shook his head. “On the grail, I swear to you that will not come to pass, brother-sergeant. Master Dante will not allow it.”
“But if that is the destiny that the Emperor has for us…”
The Lord of Death turned away, gazing out through one of the windows. “Only He knows the answer to that question, lad. And He will make Himself clear with the turning of the worlds.”
Among the crenulated battlements of the fortress-monastery, a single cylindrical minaret stood out among the sharp faces of the towers of rusty stone that reached toward the night sky. Shorter than the rest, the upper tiers were no less impressive. Inlaid with mosaics of ruby and white gold, the decoration was protected from the abrasive storms of Baal by a molecule-thin layer of synthetic diamond. At dawn, the detail would catch the light of the rising red sun, but in the darkness, all that could be seen of them were glitters, fractions of reflection from the lamp-glow of the other towers that clustered about it like a cohort of bodyguards.
The minaret lacked the knife-like tip of its neighbours; instead, it ended in a sphere made of gently curved hex-cut blocks. Around the equator of the vast orb, a ring of oval stained-glass windows looked out in every direction. The dim haze of photonic candles flickered behind them.
The Chapel of the Red Grail was silent within, the brothers who attended it at the evening prayer in the chambers far below. Only the guardians remained, the two machine helots-at-arms in the alcoves at the northern and southern ends of the chamber. Each of them rested down upon one knee, bowing toward the centre of the open space. They were fabricated from metal and ceramite, a thickset approximation of a man-shape cut to resemble an angel at rest. Steel wings of razored feathers were eternally folded at their backs. Their heads were the hollowed-out stone faces of old statues, within them remnants of brain meat and delicate mechanics programmed to ceaselessly watch over the chapel environs. Where men would have had arms, these cyborg slaves had drum-fed bolters, with ornate muzzles and flash guards fashioned in the shape of hands. They were at rest, palms together, as if in prayer.
The mid-level of the chapel was without walls, only a forest of mica-laced granite pillars arranged in arrows to support the upper levels of the spherical construction.
Both guardians inclined their heads toward the shallow dais that was the room’s only other feature. Cut from a huge slab of cultured ruby the size of a Rhino troop transporter, the disc-shaped podium glittered with the light spill from the candle rigs. A pillar of faint, blue-white radiance reached down from a concealed null-field emitter hidden in the ceiling; and resting in the grip of that envelope of energy, floating without apparent means of support, was the Red Grail.
In the western alcove, the place of arrival, part of the tessellated floor retreated into itself to allow a rising wave of steps to emerge. Brother Caecus climbed to the top and tasted the blood in the air immediately. He halted and savoured it.
The texture, the invisible aurora of the vitae was rich and heady. A deep, burned copper, it filled his Astartes-strong senses and threatened to make his head swim. His eyes went to the gleaming chalice; there was the cup that had held the blood of his primarch, the contents kept potent by a process of constant exsanguination and exchange. Upon the death of their liege-lord, the sanguinary high priests of the Blood Angels had taken on the
holy duty of ensuring that his vitae would never be allowed to perish along with him. His blood kept safe in their very flesh, for ten thousand years the priests had ritually injected and returned the blood of Sanguinius in an endless cycle, bolstering it, never letting it fade.
The Red Grail was the very chalice that had captured the first drops of the primarch’s spilled blood, and it was said that it still retained some untouched elements of that first spilling by some arcane manner of technology lost to the ages. It was no lie to say that a measure of Sanguinius would remain captured in that sacred cup for all eternity.
His hands were trembling as Caecus walked across the chapel. The guardians rose smoothly upon their mechanical legs and turned to face him, opening their hands in a gesture that seemed to offer him greeting; but the black maws in their palms betrayed the truth. Inset about the edge of the chamber were a line of glassy tiles. Anyone who crossed that border without due sanction forfeited their life. The machine-helots would kill him where he stood if he was a transgressor.
But he was Caecus, brother of the priesthood, the great and respected Apothecae Majoris, and in the dim recesses of their conditioned organic brains the guardians recognised him as one whose presence here was not prohibited… only uncommon. A mechanical analogue of mild confusion was shared by the twin angels and they hesitated, exchanging clock cycles to co-process this information, unsure of how to proceed. By the letter of Chapter law, in this place Caecus held rank only second to Brother Corbulo; and yet in decades he had not set foot here, not engaged in any of the blood-transfer rituals. In addition, no such rites were scheduled to take place at this time. The helots chattered at each other in machine code, unable to decide what action to take.
Blood Angels - The Complete Rafen Omnibus - James Swallow Page 71