Lords of Blood, page 23
His thoughts remained his own. Not one trace of his exhaustion or his doubt entered his voice. Sanguinius’ mask amplified his words to fill the chapel in a way his warriors could not.
‘Brothers, brave soldiers of the Imperium. Sisters of the Ministorum orders. We ask you here today to share in our grief at the loss of so many brave souls. Yet do not despair! By their efforts, the progress of the Hive Fleet Leviathan has been slowed, and it might yet be turned away from Baal. We shall never relent in our defiance, not until every last drop of Sanguinius’ blood has been spilt from our veins.’ He looked down at the list of names before him. The tragedy of the losses at Cryptus gnawed at him. He was empty inside, tired beyond comprehension. War no longer fired his soul. If he could, he would lay down his burden and depart into the trackless wastes of the galaxy, but he could not.
‘We remember Brother-Sergeant Pharael,’ he intoned. ‘Sergeant of Squad Pharael, Tactical Squad, Second Battle Company. Hero of the Dirian Purge, master sculptor, beloved by his brothers, respected by his captain. Slain upon Aeros securing our victory. Brother Pharael.’ He held out a hand to the first corpse. Blood thrall bier bearers went to the slab Pharael rested on, and lifted the board bearing his corpse high onto their shoulders.
The names were in no order, the intention not to raise the deeds of any brother over another. They were equal in death by dint of dying. Differences in rank no longer mattered.
‘Brother Moriar, Specialist Weapons for Squad Arias, Tactical Squad, Second Battle Company. A fine shot, and calmer of machine-spirits. Accomplished poet. Brother Moriar.’ Again he lifted his hand. Four more blood thralls came forwards and lifted up the corpse.
The list went on and on. Slowly but surely the chapel emptied of the dead, and a small weight was added to Dante’s burden.
He came to the name of Ancient Cassor, slain on Asphodex fighting alongside Karlaen. Dante’s memory was no longer perfect; there is only so much information a man can hold in his mind, enhanced or not. But he could recall the loss of every man he had ever fought alongside, their triumphs and failures, their habits, their faces and their prowess. How many Cassors had he known? Cassor was the name of the Dreadnought. Kezellon had been his original name, unbeaten until cut down by the eldar. There was another Cassor obliterated by the daemon Skarbrand at Pandemonium. He remembered both men, their lives separated by a hundred years. Four more warriors named Cassor he could bring to mind that he had known personally. Their deeds ran into each other, preserved in Dante’s recollections. Then there was the Cassor who had given his name to the machine when first it was activated. There were others in the records. It was of no consequence. The Blood was all, Sanguinius’ sacred vitae, and it had been spilt in tragic abundance.
‘Ancient Cassor of the Death Company, who died his second death in the service of the Emperor. Ancient Cassor, who was Kezellon before his first death. Sergeant in the Second Company in life. Sword champion. Thereafter in his first death, the fury of the Blooded. Many foes fell to his blade. Now he is Cassor no more, and he is Kezellon again in the second death. May his deeds be remembered under both his names.’ The corpse he gestured to was smaller than the others. Dante remembered his first death well. The captain had been cut in half and left to die. Sheer will kept him alive long enough to be interred in the Dreadnought. ‘He died his second death honourably,’ said Dante. His departure from the ritual made the Chaplains and Sanguinary Priests look to him in curiosity. ‘He was defiant to the end, as we shall all be.’ He pulled himself back, before he could reveal the true nature of his feelings.
The body was taken away. The next name awaited his utterance. Many others followed.
When the last of the names were spoken and the bodies taken away, Dante bid his guests goodbye, and went with his captains and his priests of red and black to lay his men to temporary rest.
Marmoreal silences greeted the Blood Angels as they entered the Sepulchre of the Fallen. Marble shelves waited for the bodies of the dead, to carry them home to Baal where they would be interred with the heroes of the ancestors. That could be decades hence, and the Sepulchre of the Fallen was chilled to a hundred degrees below zero to preserve their mortal remains for their burial.
Carbon mists curled around their feet. The party did not have far to go down the shelves. The catacombs were mostly empty. The Blade of Vengeance had been at home often in Dante’s reign, for Baal had been threatened several times. The shelves stretched off in frozen quietude, with spaces for more bodies than there were Space Marines in the entire Chapter.
Dante waited in silence as the warriors were laid into their niches. Ordamael and Corbulo carried out their brief ceremonies over each one, whispering words into ears that could not hear them. The bodies were sealed beside heavy glass screens that fogged immediately.
Frost spidered the gold of Dante’s armour by the time they had finished. Ice cracked from the joints as he moved.
‘It is done, my lord,’ said Ordamael.
Dante nodded in acknowledgement. He did not have the heart to say more.
They approached the Aegis Diamondo not long after. Dante took to the command deck of the Blade of Vengeance as the wall of ice and rock approached. Asante and Bellerophon directed the efforts of the ship and armada. Most of the other officers had dispersed among the fleet to their own vessels and companies, leaving Dante to contemplate the barrier with Corbulo and Mephiston.
The area was free of tyranid vessels. Occasional activity around the gunnery stations preceded the thrum of energy discharge or the muted rumble of a solitary cannon, barely audible over the constant vibration of the ship as it pushed its way through the void. Weapons fire grew rarer, and eventually stopped.
The Aegis Diamondo was a field of ice that filled the ship’s oculus and displays, an uncountable number of objects tinted a rose pink by the light of the Red Scar. The ices were compressed to unimaginable density by temperatures that, somehow, exceeded absolute zero. It was a total barrier to Imperial shipping. Anything that attempted passage was frozen out of existence. The Aegis’ presence forced a risky in-system warp exit. The resources of the Cryptus System had been so vast that the inevitable losses had been regarded as acceptable. It had been hoped that it would provide an uncrossable barrier to the tyranids. The deployment of any military force to Cryptus at all evidenced unusual foresight on the part of the High Lords.
The Aegis had not stopped the tyranids, nor had the military. Cryptus was dead, locked into its frozen tomb as Dante’s warriors were preserved in the sepulchre.
Planetoids of superfluids and exotic ices resolved themselves from the mass of objects. According to Dhrost the hive fleet had passed through, freezing over with a protective sheath of ice and emerging alive despite its organic nature.
If the likes of the Aegis cannot halt the tyranid advance, nothing can stop them, Dante thought, but kept his misgivings to himself.
‘How was it possible, my lords, that the tyranids breached the Aegis?’ he asked instead.
Corbulo answered first. ‘The physical explanation is thermal regulation of the tyranid vessels, but their output would have to be equal to that of a dwarf star. Vessels warmed by fusion reactors have frozen solid, killing every soul on board. The tyranids do not appear to produce their energy this way. Mere biochemistry could not have warmed them enough. They are dormant as they travel across interstellar space, where the temperature is low but still greater than that of the Aegis. My opinion is that they should never have woken from their hibernation after passing the Aegis. There is no physical explanation for what they accomplished.’
‘The metaphysical explanation, my Lord of Death?’ asked Dante of Mephiston.
‘The whole of the Red Scar is shot through with anomalous phenomena, my lord. There is the touch of the warp upon the Aegis especially. Weak, but enough to pervert the natural order of the material realm. Perhaps the shadow of the hive mind afforded some additional protection. Its blanketing of the warp may have divorced the Aegis from whatever cools it so, allowing them passage.’
‘That makes some sense,’ said Corbulo. ‘Testing of the regions they breached would have to be undertaken to prove your hypothesis.’
‘Such work is for the adepts of the Adeptus Mechanicus, not for we Blood Angels,’ said Mephiston. ‘The Aegis did not stop them. We must find another way. That is all we need to know.’
‘My brothers,’ Asante said to them from the command podium. ‘We approach the thermal tunnels.’
‘All ships prepare to follow these exact coordinates,’ said Bellerophon, voxing the captains of the fleet.
For a while the fleet slowed, rearranging itself from broad battle formation into a column headed by the Blood Angels with the Flesh Tearers as rearguard. The Aegis was now directly before them, a boundless field of eerily still objects. It looked like the messy space of objects that mark the borders of most star systems, but Dante could feel the supernatural chill of it through the warding of the ship’s shields and hull. Asante ordered the hololith lit. A cartolith of the passages through the Aegis showed, dull orange on blue-white. There the rules of reality held sway, and the void was the temperature it should be.
‘Helm, engage on my mark,’ said Asante.
The Blade of Vengeance slid like a dagger into the field, moving past giant rocks and balls of dirty ice. The thermal passage looked like every other part of the Aegis. One mistake would see them all frozen for eternity. The temperature of the command deck fell. Clouds of steam issued from every unshielded mouth. Dante’s cooling systems reduced their efforts, allowing the reactor strapped to his back to warm him, but it was a feeble heat, as if someone were holding a warm coal a foot away from his naked back on a winter’s night. Warning runes blinked on his faceplate display; temperatures tumbled away. The ship’s ventilation system roared as it pumped warm air onto the command deck, but it could not lift the chill.
An equilibrium was struck. The ship laboured hard to keep its fragile occupants alive in the face of this cosmic anomaly. The unnatural cold reached out to kill them. Without the thermal tunnel, death would have been inevitable.
Asante ordered the ship to accelerate.
‘What is your estimation for emergence, Brother-Captain Asante?’ asked Dante.
‘We will be through in nine hours, my lord commander,’ he said.
‘Inform me when we break out of the system,’ he said, and departed the command deck. He had promised Arafeo that he would sleep, so sleep he would.
Dante slept little away from Baal. There was always too much to do, too many decisions that had to be taken, and the actions of his underlings to be overseen and reversed if necessary. Thousands of souls looked to him for guidance. Billions more depended on his protection. His Space Marine’s physiology kept him alert. Sleep did little for him. Only with respite in the Hall of Sarcophagi could he restore his soul.
Ultimately he was human, and needed to sleep, else he would never have agreed to Arafeo’s request. When the message came he was twitching on his ornate bed, enmeshed in dreams awash with blood. Armies of Traitor legionaries marched across the faces of burning worlds. The Traitor primarchs led their twisted Legions upon the path of blood, and the screams of trillions of human beings shook the fabric of reality.
The universe rippled. Hosts of daemons poured from bleeding cuts in the sky. Brazen bells, thick with dripping verdigris tolled, Doom! Doom! Doom!
Dante was surrounded on all sides. Overhead a giant face manifested, leering down at him with the certainty of triumph.
‘Horus!’ gasped Dante.
A giant, clawed hand reached down to pluck him up and crush him.
‘My lord.’ Arafeo’s voice was muffled by the hellish tumult.
‘My lord!’ Small hands shook his arm.
Dante came awake all of a sudden. Still ensnared in the horrors of his dream, his hand shot out and grabbed Arafeo by the throat. His teeth bared, his face flushed. His gifts pushed his system into battle readiness.
‘My lord! Please, it is I!’ Arafeo’s arthritic fingers pried unsuccessfully at Dante’s crushing grip.
Dante’s fangs pricked at his lips. The blood thrall’s pulse thrilled under his fingertips.
‘My lord, please!’
The crushing pressure at Arafeo’s throat released. The lord commander’s face cleared. Arafeo staggered back. Dante leapt out of his bed and went to his equerry’s side, steadying Arafeo with hands that moments before had tried to choke him to death.
‘My servant!’ Remorse choked Dante. ‘I… I am sorry. Have I harmed you? My dreams have been dark of late. Are you hurt? Look at me!’
Arafeo sagged against a couch. Dante grasped his face gently and turned it from side to side. The wrinkled skin of Arafeo’s neck was discolouring.
‘How long did I sleep?’ demanded Dante.
‘You have slept not seven hours, my lord. I obey your command as you asked.’
‘Then we are not free of the Aegis Diamondo. Forgive me. You have done your duty well. I am out of sorts.’
‘I understand, my lord.’
The rebuke that Arafeo could never understand fought to be free of Dante’s throat. ‘I could have broken your neck. You were seconds from death.’
‘But I am not dead. I am well, my lord,’ Arafeo gasped hoarsely. ‘It was I who asked that you rest. I should be more careful in my care in future.’
Dante smiled a little. ‘Your spirits are unharmed, at least, my friend.’
‘There is a messenger here for you from the astropathicum. Adept Koschin?’
Dante shook his head. He had no knowledge of the man. The servants of his Chapter numbered in the thousands, all told, and they lived and died so quickly the lesser of them did not register on his notice.
‘Alert my arming thralls. Send refreshment to this Koschin. I will greet the adept in my armour.’ He turned his face further away from Arafeo, into the shadows.
‘Of course, my lord. It shall be done,’ said the aged thrall.
Dante came to his audience chamber garbed and masked for war. The room was sized appropriately for its purpose and decorated to emphasise the majesty of the Blood Angels. The adept, a mortal servant of the astropaths, looked lost under the painted dome. The servants of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica rarely had cause to leave their quarters, and he eyed the statues ringing the chamber as if they would smite him. His posture became submissive when Dante strode in.
The adept quaked under Dante’s inscrutable red-glass gaze and averted his eyes, his expression a mix of awe and terror.
‘I do not know you.’
‘I am Adept Koschin, my lord, translator extraordinary to Lord Astropath Prime Jareth.’
‘You are blessed. Jareth has served me well for two centuries. He is a good man.’
Koschin nodded too fervidly. ‘It is an honour to serve him. My post is a new one. I have never had the pleasure of making your acquaintance.’
The man was terrified. Dante took a step back and moderated his tone, mindful of his effect on mortal minds.
‘I am sure you will also give my Chapter many good years of devotion, adept. You have a message for me?’
‘I have. It is here, my lord.’ He held out a parchment. ‘It is from High Chaplain Astorath the Grim.’
‘I was told communications would not be possible until we were further from the mind shadow of the Great Devourer, and that would not be until we were free of the Aegis Diamondo.’
‘The shadow in the warp lessens, my lord. This message was sent at extreme boost through astropathic lensing stations at the highest priority grade, and so we knew immediately that it was of the gravest import. Astropath Prime Jareth received it an hour ago. We expedited its translation and have been processing the message for you since its arrival.’
‘Text or image encoding?’
‘Text only, my lord. There are image components, but the transliteration of the astropath’s reading into finished picts will take time.’ He held out the scroll with shaking hands. ‘It was highly encrypted, iambic hexameter duo-coding. The metaphors were of the rarest kind and required three shifts of translation.’
Dante took the message delicately in his gold-armoured fingers, searching for something positive to say to this cowering man.
‘The ink is still wet,’ he said. ‘You did well to bring it to me with such dispatch. You have my thanks.’
The adept bowed but tensed as Dante opened the seal and unrolled the scroll. Koschin knew the content and feared the reaction it would produce.
Dante read the message in one glance. His gauntlet clenched, rumpling the parchment.
‘Thank you, adept. You are dismissed.’
The cold anger in Dante’s voice shook the mortal to the core. He left bowing, turning to hurry off as soon as he thought he was out of sight.
Although he had memorised the message, Dante read it once more, scarcely believing it to be true.
Framed between the humdrum information of the astrotelepathic process – the heraldic coding of the Fifth Company, Astorath, signum data of relay stations, the names of the astropaths involved and every paragraph signifier rendered in exquisite calligraphy – was news of such import that Dante was at a loss for the first time in centuries.
Lord Commander,
Grave tidings from the Cadian Gate. Abaddon has emerged from the Eye of Terror at the head of a Black Crusade of unprecedented size. Auguries are unclear but ill portent is everywhere to be seen. The daemon primarchs are abroad. Thousands of ships essay into real space. Cadia is attacked. I have reports that the thrice-damned Skarbrand has emerged once more into the material realm, and comes in the van of the traitor’s hordes. The Diamor System is assailed. The priests of Mars have been conducting excavations there, and I cannot think it by chance that the arch-traitor leads his forces against the system now. Whatever the tech-priests have uncovered cannot be allowed to fall into the hands of the enemy.
