Lords of Blood, page 31
They turned onto the Sanguinian Way. At its far end was the Place of Choosing, where the giant statue of the Great Angel spread his arms and wings to face the eastern sky. Immense though Sanguinius’ effigy was, the fog obscured it totally. With the majestic statue hidden, the cramped, low buildings that made up Angel’s Fall seemed ruder than ever. It did not look like a holy city. The fog forced attention onto its inadequacies. Even the Sanguinian Way was meanly proportioned, and crooked. Without Sanguinius, Angel’s Fall could have been any town on any backward, arid world in the galaxy.
Gongs boomed from unseen towers, signifying the start of the Peaceday markets. Only a handful of stalls had been set up at the roadside, and foot traffic on the way was low. Uigui reckoned visitors to Angel’s Fall would be fewer than usual, though there were always some. The Red Mist discouraged travel. Not only was it toxic, but Baal’s violent wildlife hunted under its cover. He cursed his luck. Water was expensive to both the buyer and the seller. The price he’d get for his stock barely covered the cost, and he owed a lot of money to Anton the reguliser. Anton took prompt payment of debts very seriously. Uigui rubbed at the stump of his left little finger, a reminder of the last time he’d been late with a payment. Anton had been nothing but apologetic; he had said he had no choice.
Uigui thought they would have to stay out late, selling to people exiting the city to travel in the cool of the night. Assuming the mist lifts today at all, he fretted. Such a fog was rare. Baal Secundus’ principal weathers were wind and dust storms, but there was not a breath of a breeze today.
‘This weather is unnatural,’ he said.
‘A day of portents,’ said his mother-in-law in satisfaction.
‘Shut up,’ he said. ‘It’s just a day. Boy. Here.’ Uigui pointed out a patch of ground in the lee of the Temple of the Emperor. The temple occupied a whole block by itself, and another of Angel’s Fall’s major streets intersected the Sanguinian Way there.
‘This will do.’ The gongs continued to ring. ‘Why all this racket?’ Uigui said.
‘Happenings. Baalfora has much in store for us today,’ said the old woman, using the local name for Baal Secundus. She settled herself down. Her joints grumbled, and she grumbled back at them, forcing her old legs to cross. Upon skirts held taut between her knees she set her tarot deck and began repetitively clicking at the workings. Uigui bared his teeth at her. He took out his irritation on the boy.
‘Come on, boy, set out the table! Where are the cups? By the Emperor, we’d all die if you were in charge here!’
‘S-s-s-orry, father,’ said the boy.
‘Don’t call me that,’ he said. ‘My son is dead. Stolen by angels. There is no one to inherit my business once I am gone. Do not presume your place.’
The boy bowed his head to hide his tears, showing the ugly scar running across the top of his head. Uigui hated the sight of that most of all. He was sure had his boy not fallen he would be up there on Baal as a warrior of the Emperor. He stared at it as the boy set up the little table that folded out from the side of the cart and put out a set of small bronze cups. Something like grief hurt him. He responded with anger.
‘Quicker!’ he snapped.
The gongs were still booming long after they should have stopped. He squinted into the dim morning. There was another sound, a distant rumbling, under the clamour of the gongs.
‘What is that?’ he whispered.
‘V-v-void ships?’ ventured the boy.
‘Silence!’ snapped Uigui. But even as his anger flew out of his mouth, he thought the boy might be right. Angel’s Fall was no stranger to the ships of the Angels. There were offworlders too, who came to pay their respects to the place where Sanguinius, purest of the Emperor’s progeny, was discovered. But rarely did they arrive in such numbers that the sound of their descent was so constant.
Uigui heard the crunch of heavy feet on sand coming down the way. He swore at himself. Angels. They would have no use for his water.
‘Bow! Bow!’ he hissed. He dropped his head, and forced his idiot son to kneel.
A huge armoured figure emerged from the murk. Armour black, his helm cast in the shape of a skull. A Space Marine priest, death incarnate. Uigui trembled. He dropped to his knees in fright, waiting for the figure to pass by.
He did not. The footsteps stopped by the little cart. Uigui felt the Angel’s regard upon him. His bladder twinged yet again.
‘Be at peace, blessed son of Baal Secundus,’ said the warrior. His voice was inhumanly deep and thickly accented.
Uigui looked up. The grimacing skull glared down at him. Breathing hoses were clamped between its stylised teeth, and eye-lenses of glowing green set below the angry brow. The armour hissed and whined in response to microshifts in the Space Marine’s posture, making Uigui more afraid.
The warrior looked down both streets of the crossroads.
‘The great square. Where is it?’
Though made hollow and booming by its projection machinery, the warrior’s voice was kindly. Still Uigui could not see past the terrible visage glowering at him. He stared dumbly back.
‘Waterseller, I mean you no harm,’ said the Angel. ‘I come to pay my respects to my lord. Where is his statue?’
Uigui trembled and flung up his arm. He intended to say ‘That way, my lord!’ A strangled mewl came out of his mouth instead.
‘My thanks, and my blessings,’ said the Chaplain. ‘The Emperor keep you.’
He glanced up at the great temple, then strode away.
‘W-w-why does he not know?’ said the boy stupidly.
‘I do not know,’ said Uigui. Still upon his knees he gazed fearfully at the departing giant.
‘M-m-m-more!’ said the boy, and shrank back behind the cart.
Uigui followed his son’s wavering finger. More Space Marines, dozens of them. Uigui had never seen so many at one time and his body shook in terror. They walked past, armour dull in the foggy daylight. Uigui could see clearly enough to know they were not Blood Angels. Their armour was adorned in a similar manner to that of the masters of Baal. The heavy plates were beautifully formed, covered in scrollwork and delicate embellishments, and decked with bloodstone drips cased in gold, but the red of their armour was an unfamiliar hue, their helms and trim were white, and their markings were strange.
Uigui watched, amazed, as the column of warriors moved by in solemn silence, voiceless but for the growls and hum of their armour. It was not unusual to see other angels claiming descent from the Great Angel in Angel’s Fall, but only in ones or twos. When a second group in yet different colours marched by, these armoured half in black and half in bloody red, Uigui’s mouth fell open. The gongs boomed. Outside the wall, the roaring of braking jets grew louder.
‘Th-th-there’s hundreds of them!’ stuttered the boy.
For a moment, Uigui forgot his anger, and put his arm around his broken son.
‘W-w-w-why so many?’ the boy said.
‘They come to pay respect to their father. They come to pray,’ said Uigui. ‘It is a marvel.’
The old woman chuckled, a low growling sound like a felid about to bite. The tarot tiles rattled.
‘What is it?’ Uigui said.
The old woman’s smile was evident in her voice. ‘The burning tower, the bloody angel, the falling star, the foundered void ship – these are fell signs.’
Uigui looked sharply back at her. ‘What do you mean?’
The old woman regarded him through the cloth of her veil. ‘They are not coming here to worship, you foolish man,’ she said. ‘They have come here to die.’
CHAPTER TWO
THE COMING SHADOW
Across the central deeps of the Ultima Segmentum the Red Scar spread its sanguine pall. A stellar desert tinted bloody, hard and inimical to man. The suns imprisoned within its bounds were all red in colour, whether senescent supergiants or early sequence infants. Deadly radiation bathed this benighted subsector, rendering its worlds uninhabitable by any sane measure.
The Imperium had long passed the point of sanity.
Perhaps because of their situation, the planets of the Scar were rich in exotic resources, and so generations of humanity had lived out brief lives under baleful stars, toiling at the will of the High Lords of Terra. Sustained by elixirs manufactured on Satys, the inhabitants of the Cryptus, Vitria and other systems afflicted by the Scar’s poison lived a life, of sorts, in service of the species.
Against all the odds, by human ingenuity and for human greed, there had been billions of humans in the Red Scar region. So it might have been for generations more, but nothing is permanent and mankind no longer held sway.
The tyranids had come to the Scar, scouring every world they encountered down to the bedrock to feed an ancient and powerful hunger, extirpating humanity in the process.
The invader was Hive Fleet Leviathan, by Imperial designation, though the governing intelligence of the hive mind made no such distinctions between the component parts of its body. To its incomprehensibly vast intellect, Leviathan was a limb, a foot or an arm. If the hive mind regarded Leviathan as distinct from the other fleets devouring the galaxy in some way, it was by categories too alien for men to understand.
From across the cold gulfs of intergalactic space the hive fleets had come, moving from one feeding ground to the next. The hive mind did not know and did not care what its food called itself, but noted, in its alien way, the strangeness of this prey-cluster; an environment where the realities of the mind and form were intermingled. There was risk there, but good hunting in the dangerous shoals. The galaxy teemed with life, and the hive mind glutted itself on a staggering array of biological abundance.
From the human point of view, the tyrannic wars had raged for close to a half millennium. In that time, hundreds of Imperial worlds had been devoured. Several minor races had been consumed. Thousands of unknown planets outside the Imperium’s notice had been turned from living orbs to rocky spheres that would never bear life again. Had the High Lords of Terra known how devastating the tyranids truly were, they may have acted sooner.
Like the mythical plagues of locusts of Old Earth, the tyranids stripped everything they came across bare. With each feast the hive mind became stronger, absorbing the genetic profiles of everything it devoured and adding their strengths to its own. With every new creature eaten, its repertoire of genetic tricks grew. When it encountered a threat, it adapted. Its methods became more efficient, its fleets more numerous. Its creatures proliferated and multiplied, the essences of the galaxy’s worlds converted into yet more elements of the never-ending swarms. So overwhelming was the threat it posed, the race had been declared Periculo Summa Magna, and was deemed by many departments within the Imperium’s higher echelons as the most serious challenge to mankind’s continued existence.
They were wrong about that, but only by a little. These were dangerous years, well blessed with horrors.
Nevertheless, the hive mind did not advance unopposed. There were brave men and women, heroes all, who stood against it no matter that the odds were impossible, and death was their only reward.
Imperial losses were many. Victory was rare. At many junctures the Blood Angels Space Marines had defied Hive Fleet Leviathan, stealing away its food, and in some cases destroying its splinter fleets in their entirety. The hive mind responded to them as it did to other threats in the prey-cluster, creating new beasts to beat the defences of its prey, improving those it already possessed, and devising new strategies. All to no avail. Though pushed back, the red prey warriors fought on. At Cryptus the Blood Angels performed one last supreme effort, destroying a tendril of the greater whole, in truth a trivial victory at the cost of a rich system.
Nothing could halt Leviathan’s encroachment on the Red Scar. After Cryptus there was Baal, home world of the Blood Angels, lying directly in the swarm’s path.
This was not accidental.
The sages of the Imperium thought the hive mind a non-sentient intelligence. They believed the actions of the myriad creatures in its swarms were performed instinctively, and that the sheer numbers of interactions between them gave rise to complex behaviour. At the very highest level these behaviours were remarkable, but only had the semblance of thought. Ultimately instinct drove the hive fleets, they said, not free will. Similar false intelligences had been witnessed so very many times in social animals across space, after all, from the ants of ancient Earth to the thought-trees of Demarea. The hive mind’s actions could be ascribed to sentient consideration, but the sages insisted they were nothing of the sort.
The biologans held the hive mind to be only a complicated animal, a supreme predator driven by a devastatingly powerful reactive mind, nevertheless devoid of soul. It was an automaton, they said. Unfeeling. It was as unaware of what it did as the wind is unaware of the cliff whose face it scours away, grain by grain. The hive mind was biological mechanics writ large. Mind from mindlessness.
The Imperial scholars were wrong. The hive mind knew. The hive mind thought, it felt, it hated and it desired. Its emotions were unutterably alien, cocktails of feeling not even the subtle aeldari might decipher. Its emotions were oceans to the puddles of a man’s feelings. They were inconceivable to humanity, for they were too big to perceive.
The hive mind looked out of its innumerable eyes towards the dull red star of Baal. It apprehended that this was the hive of the warriors that had hurt it so grievously, who had burned its feeding grounds and scattered its fleets. It hated the red prey, and it coveted them. Tasting their exotic genomes it had seen potential for new and terrible war beasts.
And so it drew its plans, and it set in motion its trillion trillion bodies towards the consumption of the creatures in red metal, so that their secrets might be plundered, and reemployed in the sating of the hive mind’s endless hunger. This was deliberate, considered, and done in malice.
The hive mind was aware, and it desired vengeance.
Commander Dante walked the Arx Murus, the great encircling wall of the Arx Angelicum, as the Blood Angels fortress monastery was known. The Dome of Angels was closed against the coming war. Its huge armourglass blister rose gently behind him – several square miles of triangular panes sparkling in Baal’s midday sun capped the Arx Angelicum’s ancient caldera in impenetrable diamond.
The Arx was a double spike of dark rock that stood alone in the sands of the Endless Desert. Of the primal form of the volcano it had been, little remained, for it had been carved into something more fitting for the dwelling of Angels long ago. The fires in its heart were extinguished. Where lava once flowed Space Marines held court. A trained geologian would have guessed at its natural shape. But though both peaks had been thoroughly remade by the hands of man, a hint of their origins remained; for all their adornment their base form was that of twin cones, one smaller than the other, their throats open to the sky.
In every other way, the Arx Angelicum was the work of mankind. The caldera rim had been remade into the high walls of the Arx Murus, the broad and mighty wall-walk broken by the many towers of the Blood Angels’ sub-orders. The murus plunged forty sheer yards to the uppermost of a series of tiered firing galleries that, reinforced by towering redoubts, marched belligerently down to the sand. From towers shaped as gaping angels’ faces or screaming eagles the muzzles of defence lasers and macrocannons aimed at the ever-present threat of the void.
Other, smaller outcrops around the Arx had been refashioned into towers and squat forts bearing guns big enough to down a void ship. The fury of the world’s heart that had boiled within the volcanoes might have gone, but a different rage had taken its place.
To Dante’s right the Heavenward Redoubt, the fortress monastery’s keep, swelled out of the inner wall, the skull-faced Citadel Reclusiam atop it squatting athwart the wall-walk, beyond which the cursed Tower of Amareo speared the sky. The uppermost towers of the librarius fringed the walls on the far side of the Dome of Angels, while the Sanguis Corpusculum, the bulwark domain of Corbulo and his Sanguinary priests, thrust up from the lesser peak, its flat head joined to the main wall by a broad, armoured bridge.
The interior of the volcano was as heavily transformed. The throat had been widened to the same diameter as the giant lava chamber beneath it, so that the floor of the Arx was many storeys beneath the level of the desert. The inner walls had been smoothed and carved. Buttresses fashioned as giant angels ringed the interior, and the walls between were pierced with thousands of gleaming windows. All was done with exquisite care, and gloriously embellished with stone and metal. When the star Balor shone directly overhead, the throats of the Arx blazed with a rubicund refulgence, dazzling those lucky enough to witness it.
The Arx Angelicum was truly among the most beautiful fortresses in all the galaxy.
Towards the bottom of the shaft the tiered steps of the fortress exterior were repeated, but these sprouted with greenery, not guns – the Verdis Elysia, the marvellous farmlands where the Blood Angels grew their food, and parklands that preserved the fragmentary remains of Baal Primus’ and Baal Secundus’ once vibrant ecosystems.
Baal had forever been a desert planet, but not its moons. Their toxic wastes were of man’s doing.
Baal’s cloudless sky was busy with the crossed contrails of landing craft. Shoals of blunt-nosed Space Marine attack craft crowded the planet’s anchorages. Dozens of battle-barges formed the nexus of fleets arrayed in cramped formation. The largest of the vessels were miles long, and clearly visible at the height of day as pale, dream-like shapes. Their attendant escorts were albedo phantoms, and the smallest were bright stars moving rapidly in dense clusters. Baal Secundus was rising in the west, Baal Primus setting in the east – the two rarely shared the same sky. For shame, local legend had it.
