Rafen was acutely aware of the thundering noise of his heartbeat rushing in his ears. He clenched his hands into fists to stop them from trembling and tried to keep his focus; but it was difficult to hold on to his warrior’s detachment. The Blood Angel looked straight ahead, not daring to let his gaze drop down to the resting place. His eyes found the intricate murals that followed the spiral path, the paintings and carvings in varicoloured stones, metals and gems; a mosaic that chronicled the life of Sanguinius from his creation at the Emperor’s hands to his death by the blade of the Arch-traitor Horus. Here, Rafen saw a depiction of the primarch at Signus, engaged in battle with a swarm of Furies, surrounded by battle-brothers under the command of the noble Chapter Master Raldoron.
For a moment, Rafen lost himself in the sapphire eyes of the man in the frieze. It was Brother Raldoron who had built this place beneath the fortress-monastery, and he, it was said, who alone had borne the Golden Sarcophagus down the spiral ramp on the day the primarch’s body had returned to Baal. Rafen tried to imagine the incalculable sorrow the man must have endured at that moment. To have lived when Sanguinius was alive, and then to have seen him struck down… What horror that must have been.
The Blood Angel found himself drawing strength from the image. If Raldoron had survived such grief to carry on the legacy of his Chapter, then in comparison the challenge laid before Rafen was insignificant. Fight until the Emperor claims you, Dante had ordered. So we shall.
He allowed himself to look down, and there he saw the honeyed glow of rippling gold light, thrown from the shifting, liquid heart of the primarch’s casket.
The Dreadnought was an obelisk of war, a living, moving monument to the battle prowess of the Blood Swords and the honour of Sanguinius. A leviathan of the field, Daggan had served first in flesh and bone and then encased in steel and ceramite for more than four hundred years. His was to be part of a heritage of great heroes, Astartes who fought beyond injuries that would have killed lesser men. Like the noble Furioso, first and greatest of the Sons of Sanguinius to live again within a sheath of steel, and his descendants Ignis, Dario and Moriar, Daggan was a fist of flesh encased in an iron glove. His coffin was his weapon, his injuries the spur that turned him to fight anew.
But the pack leader of the Bloodfiends saw only meat; meat shrouded in metal.
It struck Daggan with clawed hands, landing hard enough to rock the Chapter Master back on his hydraulic legs. Too close to employ his assault cannon without blinding his sensors with the muzzle flash, Daggan pressed his chainfist into the clone and spun the toothed blade.
The beast howled and tore at the Dreadnought’s ornate faceplate, gouging great scars through the armour plating, cracking the outer surface with punches that rang like a tolling bell. It brought down its bony, ridged skull and butted the narrow armourglass slit over Daggan’s casket-pod with a heavy blow. The glass webbed and shattered.
The meat-stink of the Blood Sword warrior’s corpse flesh body issued out. The monstrous clone caught the smell and it brayed; tormented rage aroused by the scent of ancient tissue kept alive by the engines and biological arcana of the Mechanicum.
Daggan’s chainblade scored through layers of skin as hard as plasteel and bony discs of natural armour. Thin fluids oozed from the wound, but the beast-warrior only attacked with greater fury, shredding the Chapter Master’s votive chains, his purity seals and the fine inlaying of ruby and white gold across his faceplate.
His battle-brothers attempted to rally to his side, but the defence of the penitent gate was shifting, pushed back by the sheer pressure of Bloodfiend numbers. Clones shot down and thought dead would recover and remount their attack, even with stumps that trailed blood or flesh in tatters; anything short of decapitation seemed to be uncertain of stopping them.
Daggan tried to snatch at his assailant, but the Dreadnought’s clumsy mass worked against him. The pack leader scrambled about, shifting out of the Chapter Master’s grip, constantly defeating any attempt to pin him.
A hand of talons raked his facia and found purchase in the broken-open eye-slit. With a monumental roar, the Bloodfiend’s distended biceps knotted and metal gave way with an agonized screech. The faceplate, decorated with bones and shards of red jade, was torn free and sent spinning back down the corridors. Revealed, the remnants of Daggan’s organic body lay in a thick soup of processor unguents, haloed by coils of mechadendrites and neural ducting.
He had taken the Path of the Steel and Eternal in the wake of a battle on a nameless planetoid, after coming a heartbeat’s count from dying in the burning acid discharge of a tyranid spore-mine swarm. From that day until this one, no breath of air had ever touched Daggan’s flesh. In the midst of all the melee, the sense of warmth across his skin sparked strange recall in the Chapter Master’s mind.
But he was granted no time to savour it. With lightning speed, the Bloodfiend alpha opened its jaws wide and bit deep, tearing Daggan into shreds, ripping him from the husk of the Dreadnought to be consumed like the sweet meat of a splintered crustacean.
The iron warrior twitched and collapsed with a crash into a kneeling stance, as if Daggan were mirroring the penitent figures carved into the stonework around the third gateway.
As one, the Blood Sword warriors let out a cry of anguish. The mutants took up the sound and made it a feral howl. The stink of blood heavy in their nostrils, the clones surged forward, shattering the lines of the Space Marines.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
It was at once more beautiful and more terrifying than anything Rafen had ever encountered. In silence, for each one of them was struck mute by the sight of it, the Blood Angels stepped off the last length of the spiral ramp and gathered in a cluster at the far edge of the tomb platform.
Argastes, as was his duty, took to his knees, bowed his head and began a prayer. His words were so quiet that Rafen could barely hear him speaking; but none of them needed to. Each warrior knew the invocation as well as their own names, and they took the same stance, mouthing the verse without a sound, eyes averted.
Mephiston glanced over his shoulder and bid them to rise with a slight gesture of his hand. Rafen did so, fighting back a tremor in his legs as ingrained training told him he should still be on his knees in the face of such glory.
“Look,” husked the Lord of Death, pointing toward the far end of the circular stage. “We do not shy away like virginal pilgrims. Show your liege-lord your faces. Let him see you.”
Each of them removed their helmets and let the amber glow wash over them. It was like standing in sunlight on a perfect, cloudless day. The colour was magnetic, it was transcendent. It was this and a hundred other things, reaching deep and stirring emotions in Rafen that he could not find a voice to describe. From the corner of his eye he saw Puluo wipe a tear of joy from his scarred cheek.
It seemed like an eternity ago when Rafen had laid his hands upon the Spear of Telesto, the ancient weapon that had once been wielded by his primarch; and when his fingers had touched it, there was a moment when the Astartes believed some fragment of the Great Angel made itself known to him. A vision, perhaps. Some manner of connection awakened briefly, and then gone before the power of it could burn out his warrior flesh. The ghost of that sensation now returned to Rafen, and he felt fearful, as if he might be consumed by his proximity, charred to ash by it.
Rafen wanted so much to reach out and touch the aura of his demigod, but he could not. There was an enchantment upon them all, a binding that held them in place before such magnificence. Awe, veneration, wonderment; each of these words were stripped of colour and made meaningless by the sheer intensity of divine radiance that moved through the Blood Angels.
The heart of the great sepulchre was a monolith at the opposite side of the platform, cut from three tall blocks of red granite. They were polished to a mirror-bright sheen; each mined from the living rock of Baal and its two moons, and crested with a single Terran ruby the size of Rafen’s fist. The granites a
nd the gemstone signified the worlds of Sanguinius’ birth, his childhood and maturation. Emerging from the monolith were two huge extended angel’s wings, curving up and around to form a protective cowl. The individual feathers were made of steel and silver and brass, each one etched with words of remembrance. So the Chapter’s chronicles said, many of them were cut from the hull metal of loyalist starships that fought during the time of the Heresy, given in tribute by brother primarchs such as Guilliman, Dorn and Khan, by the Legio Custodes, even the admirals and generals of forces that had fought in the shadow of Sanguinius and counted themselves in his debt.
And between the wings; amid them a single giant hoop of spun copper burnished to the colour of Baal’s red giant star, suspended there upon rods of milky crystal that intersected the ring like the points of a compass, in echo of the design upon the floor of the Grand Annex.
Inside the copper halo lay the glowing heart, living and yet dead, forever in motion but always still. The Golden Sarcophagus was not a casket in any conventional sense of the word. It was a sphere of molten gold, rippling and flowing, pendant in an invisible stasis envelope generated by unknowable technologies buried beneath the stonework. In the ebb and flow of the fluid form, one might imagine they could see brief conjunctions of motion that suggested a face, a countenance of most pure and handsome aspect.
Contained within a globe of suspended time, the mantle of liquid metal had never been allowed to cool and solidify, not once in ten thousand years; for beneath it lay the flesh of the Emperor’s son, the Great Angel and Lord of the Blood, Master of the IX Legiones Astartes, primarch among primarchs, the most noble Sanguinius.
“My life may end now, and I will be content,” Ajir managed, forcing a faint whisper out of his dry, bloodless lips. “For I cannot witness a greater glory than this sight.”
“That is not for you to choose,” Mephiston said, making a physical effort to turn away. He pointed toward the sarcophagus once again. “It is for him to decide.”
“In his name,” intoned Rafen, without hesitating.
“In his name,” repeated the rest of the men, their eyes shining, each of them ready to hold back hell itself to keep this place inviolate.
High above them, a torrent of rage was breaking upon the defenders of the three gates.
Daggan’s killing drew away balance from the Space Marines and forced them to regroup, to bulwark the gap cut into the line. At the priest gate, a coalition of warriors from five different Chapters fought in serried rows, red upon red, crimson upon crimson, bolters and plasma guns answering the approach of all foes.
Lord Orloc’s gun ran dry and he used the inert firearm to club down a Bloodfiend brandishing a pair of knives; the clone’s mutation was more progressed than some of the others of its kind, limbs strangely warped into forms more tentacles than human arms. It growled through a toothed mouth and tried to bite him.
The blade of a power sword burst from its chest and tore upwards along the line of its sternum, cracking bone and spilling innards across the tiled flooring. Fluid spattered across Orloc’s face and he turned away as the blade ended its cut. In pieces, the clone fell apart revealing Lord Armis standing behind it, sneering.
“These damnable monsters,” began the Master of the Blood Legion, “they’re tenacious. They seem to know our tactics by rote!”
“I appreciate the assist,” Orloc allowed, quickly reloading his storm bolter. The Astartes licked the spent crimson of the creature off his lips, measuring the essence. “Curious…” he allowed. “It has a strange musk to it.”
Armis raised an eyebrow. “As long as these things bleed, I care nothing else about them.”
The Bloodfiends moved like ocean waves, slamming into the lines of the defenders, retreating, returning and attacking again. They gave little time to react to each frenzied assault.
The Blood Drinker aimed on the move and the storm bolter sang; his fellow Chapter lord followed suit, lending his pistol to the fray. “They’re coming in again!” Orloc shouted, as a horde of red-tanned figures forced themselves through the arch of the priest gate.
Armis spun about, opening the neck of a beast with his sword-point. “How many this time?” he demanded.
“All of them,” growled Orloc, as the wave of killers struck.
The great gate of the sepulchre was the largest of the three, and so it was the largest of the Bloodfiend numbers that burst through it, the clone-Marines hurdling one another in mad abandon, screaming, driven by their desperate thirst.
Seth knew the thronging, wild melee of hand-to-hand battle as well as any Son of Sanguinius. In the depths of such conflict, the fight drew away from issues of tactics and forethought, gradually becoming nothing more than an exercise in steady butchery. A warrior’s war diminished to the patch of blood-slicked stone on which he stood, the victory or loss weighed in the spaces within the reach of his hand or the sweep of his sword. The Flesh Tearer gave the right to his name, with the blade in his hand cutting deep into any mutant that came too close, tearing flesh, rending it, slicing it.
He had become separated from Dante; he was dimly aware of the blink of smeared golden armour somewhere to his right, he saw the fall of a terrible swift axe blow and the spin of a head cut clean away. Seth swung his sword in a flashing arc, the plasma gun in his other grip hissing sun-white death into the attacker mob again and again. But still, despite every punishing kill, the defending line was compressed backward under the mass of the assault. Blows that would have broken ranks of ork or eldar did little to deter these bestial parodies of Space Marines. They were simply obsessed to such a degree that pain was not a barrier for them; the lust for the pure blood down in the pit was blocking out everything else. Seth thought of the men he knew who fell into the Black Rage, strong-willed warriors destroyed by the gene-curse and condemned to fight to their ending in the Death Company, under the watchful eye of his Chaplain, Carnarvon. These Bloodfiends shared a similar madness, but without the balance of duty, of ingrained obligation bred into every Adeptus Astartes. The mutants were a force of nature, feral beyond even Seth’s definition of the word.
The plasma gun was sizzling in his grip, heat hazing the air around it as overload runes blinked fiercely at him. He turned the weapon away just as a wiry Bloodfiend collided with him. Seth barely had time to react before he was shoved to the rear by the impact, his boots sparking as they skidded over the stones. A sinewy hand with too many joints grappled his wrist and held it rigid, preventing a swiping riposte from the sword. The mutant pushed and pushed, forcing Seth back toward the sharp drop at the edge of the pit. Its neck, an elongated and sinuous thing, wove back and forth like a snake, the head snapping at him.
The plasma gun stalled, the weapon’s machine-spirit refusing to release another shot until it cooled for fear of an explosive burnout. Angered, the Flesh Tearer snarled and forced the weapon’s white-hot muzzle into the meat of the clone’s bare chest and held it there.
Flesh crisped and smoked, drawing a hooting cry from the mutant. In furious agony, it pounded on Seth’s armour and threw him to the floor, pushing the Flesh Tearer over the rim, on the cusp of a sheer fall.
For one dizzying moment, Seth saw down into the depths of the chasm, catching sight of the golden sphere shimmering below; then the moment of elation at seeing the sarcophagus with his own eyes was torn away as twisted shapes rushed past him, dropping into the pit on vanes of thick, misshapen skin.
Argastes cried out, pointing upwards with the glowing rod of his crozius. “To arms, Blood Angels! They’ve broken the line!”
Rafen glared toward the mouth of the chasm high above them, his lips twisting in fury as dark shadows fell toward them, dropping through the glow of the photonic candles, spinning and turning to dodge the pulse-blasts of laser turrets concealed in the sepulchre’s walls. Kayne gave a cry of victory as one of the mutants exploded, the lasers converging to boil it in an explosive burst of concussion; but that was only one kill, and
there were so many more of them.
“Wings!” snarled Ajir. “The damned things can fly!”
“They glide,” Mephiston corrected, drawing his sword. “The flesh between their limbs only slows their fall.” He aimed the force blade and blue lightning crackled around his psychic hood. The sword twitched and a pulse of ethereal energy leapt from the tip, channelled from the psyker’s blazing mind. It swept up and found a mutant, smiting it from the air. “It makes them better targets,” he concluded.
“Squad!” Rafen shouted. “Weapons free!” Every gun fired, the storm of shot and shell rumbling like thunder about the walls of the pit.
The Bloodfiends fell upon them as raptors coming after prey. Puluo’s heavy cannon ate up bandoliers of ammunition in shining brass ribbons, the blazing muzzle sending rounds tearing through flesh and bone. At his side, Kayne sighted down the auto-sense targeting scope atop his bolter, carefully pacing bursts of three rounds into each mutant that came within range. He frowned behind the gun at the paucity of immediate kills—the shots were only slowing the attackers - but he did not hesitate, reloading with quick, mechanical motions.
Through the sights, he saw the clone-beasts cleaving to the walls of the chasm, some of them dropping to land on the spiral ramp, others digging their clawed hands into the ornate sculptures to gain purchase. Part of Kayne felt sickened by the idea of these polluted freaks penetrating so far into the heart of the fortress-monastery, and he lamented the damage that each errant shot or mutant talon wreaked on the perfection of the chamber’s walls. He felt the warmth of the Golden Sarcophagus upon his back, but did not turn to look at it, as hard as it was to resist the temptation. Instead, he let the glow guide his focus, he allowed it to centre him. He ignored the nagging pain from the knitting bones in his hand and fired again. This time, he marched the rounds up a creature brandishing a pair of short swords and saw it plummet into the steep walls of the ramp. To his disgust, a pair of the mutant’s comrades surrounded the fallen Bloodfiend and fed upon it.
Blood Angels - The Complete Rafen Omnibus - James Swallow Page 79