Blood Angels - The Complete Rafen Omnibus - James Swallow Read online

  Table of Contents

  41st MILLENIUM

  THE FURY

  DEUS ENCARMINE

  BLOOD DEBT

  DEUS SANGUINIUS

  REDEEMED

  RED FURY

  BLACK TIDE

  BLOODLINE

  REFLECTION IN BLOOD

  41st MILLENIUM

  It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

  Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperors will. Vast armies give battle in His name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst his soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion; the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants—and worse.

  To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

  THE FURY

  BY

  JAMES SWALLOW

  The power sword falls in a screaming arc, more a thing alive with its own anger than a weapon controlled by his hands. He sees it descend, the fractions of seconds extended by the chem-stimulated processing of his genhanced brain. He sees it at point of impact, the molecule-fine edge slicing though the armour plate of the traitor cultist’s wargear. The momentary flash of sparks as metal is torn apart. The blade sinks into flesh, easy and quick, cutting and burning. Meat-smell. Seared flesh, heavy in his nostrils, triggering scent-memory of a grox butchered for sustenance months ago. The enemy makes a sound that is not a scream, not truly. It is more a moan, a cry of futility. There is understanding in it, now at the end. The cultist knows he is finished.

  The blood gushes like wine from a cracked urn, a stream becoming a spray, a jetting, throbbing pulse that pools at the murdered man’s feet. He comes apart, shoulder and arm and half his chest cleaved away, the bone-crack sound as it breaks off.

  The traitor dies and the warrior moves on, crushing his opponent’s skull with one great boot of crimson ceramite as he passes. The act is not deliberate, not planned. It is simply that the Blood Angel has finished his task with this particular foe, and there are so many more yet to be killed. A numberless horde, foul of tongue and screaming their black hymns to Chaos. The Blood Angel and his kinsmen will murder them all before the day is done, and soak the earth of this inconsequential world with the spoil.

  He is firing the bolt pistol. It bucks in his armoured gauntlet like a living thing, eager as if it could leap from his fingers if so allowed. Echoing crashes of shot blast thunder-calls cross the reeking battleground, and with each expended round a death follows closely. Skulls explode into pink haze. Limbs are turned to red slurry. No moment of kill-power is wasted. It is how he was trained; it is how his primogenitor fought. Fury, marshalled and controlled like lightning in a bottle. The power of rage, harnessed. A darkest of potentials hidden beneath a mask

  And yet, the mask may slip. At his side, a brother fights with greater and greater abandon. His knows this man: Celcinan, of the Third. He is far from his unit, perhaps propelled by the fog of war and the crush of battle. But Brother Celcinan does not seem to pay it any mind. He watches Celcinan fighting as he reloads the pistol.

  Celcinan has removed his helmet, but not for any good reason that can be intuited. The warrior’s face is drenched in crimson, the back-spray of hearts burst open to the air. His armoured fists end in steel claws, barbed talons that can tear the hulls of tanks. They are smoking with newly spilled blood, hot vapour steaming off them into the cold air. Celcinan is in a fury, and it comes from the Blood Angel like radiation.

  He feels it like the aura of an inferno, lapping against him. Rage, black as space. Thirst, red as blood. Celcinan is deep, swimming in it, awash in it. His battle-brother’s anger is something quite magnificent to behold.

  Until Celcinan is killed. A brilliant rod of purple light bursts from within the cultist lines as a heavy lascannon discharges at near range. He flinches away, nictating membranes flicking closed over his eyes to protect him from the dazzle-flash. When he blinks back to full sight a tenth of a second later, Celcinan is quite dead.

  A charred hole large enough to fit a fist through has cored Brother Celcinan’s torso, penetrating armour, flesh and bone. He topples like a felled tree and sinks into the squelching, blood-thick mud. Celcinan’s last act is to look at him, and something unseen crosses the gap between the two Blood Angels.

  That ghostly thing is anger.

  The moderated wrath of the warrior suddenly ebbs away and he feels himself fill with a kind of rage that only titans can know. His battle-brother is lost, and now all he wants is to take back the blood cost of Celcinan’s murder. It is a death undeserved, for every warrior of the Adeptus Astartes is worth a thousand of these screaming, mewling whorechild zealots. He wants to take the payment now.

  The Blood Angel forgets his bolter; this is a deed to be done close at hand, eye to eye. Those who perish must go to their warped gods knowing who killed them and why.

  Bellowing his primarch’s name, the son of Sanguinius hurls himself into the enemy line, his sword becoming a bright and shining blur. Death follows close. The killer with the lascannon is unmanned by the thunder of the Blood Angel’s battle-roar, and not even the hypno-imprints of the dark acolytes that turned him can blot out the sound of such anger and such revenge.

  The warrior’s sword goes through the cultist’s sternum and explodes from his spine in a welter of crimson fluid. They draw closer, into a murderous embrace, and by freak chance the traitor still lives. The warrior acts without thought, and with his free hand he rips open the cultist’s throat.

  Blood.

  Blood erupts in a steaming fountain from his enemy’s ruined flesh, spattering across his faceplate and staining his vision red. It clogs the breather grille, the hot coppery perfume saturates the inside of his helm. His mouth instantly floods with saliva, and he wants nothing more than to tear off his armoured helmet and drink deep of the spill. He savours the desire for that rich taste, and the wine-dark flow of the vitae across his tongue and down his throat.

  He feels the mask slipping off his face. The perfect, patrician mask of nobility and humble heroism, the outward eternal character of the Blood Angels cast in the likeness of Great Sanguinius. He feels it crumbling, becoming dust. Beneath, the curse-power of his primarch’s burning blood rises to the surface. The gift of strength and courage that makes him a superlative warrior now turns dark.

  Rage, black as space. Thirst, red as blood.

  In this moment, he balances on the edge of the abyss.
An Angel of Death, cursed and blessed in equal measure, doused in the vitae of those deserving his fury.

  The battle without will be won this day; victory was never in doubt. The battle within…

  It lingers still, hidden beneath the mask.

  DEUS ENCARMINE

  BY

  JAMES SWALLOW

  CHAPTER ONE

  Amid the graves, it was difficult for Rafen to tell exactly where the sky ended and the land began. He became still for a moment, halting in the shadow of a large tombstone in the shape of a chalice, the muzzle of his bolter calm and silent at his side. The wind never ceased on Cybele; on it came over the low hills and shallow mountains that characterised the planet, moaning mournfully through the thin stands of trees, rippling the grey-blue grass into waves. The gently rolling landscape flowed away from him toward an endless, unreachable vanishing point, an invisible horizon where grey land met grey sky. The distance was lost in the low clouds of stone dust that hovered overhead, stained like a great shroud of oil-soaked wool. The haze was made up of tiny particles of rock, churned into the sky by the torrent of artillery fire that had etched itself across the planet hours earlier.

  Cybele wailed quietly around Rafen. The wind sang through the uncountable numbers of headstones that ranged away in every direction as far as his visor’s optics could see. He stood atop the graves of a billion-fold war dead and listened to the breeze as it wept for them, the familiar hot battle-urge of caged frenzy boiling away beneath the veneer of his iron self-control.

  Steady and unmoving, an observer might have mistaken Rafen for a tomb marker. Indeed there were places on Cybele where stone-carved likenesses of Space Marines topped great towers of granite. In those hallowed grounds, men bred from Brother Rafen’s own bloodline were buried as a measure of respect for the planet and the great memorial that it represented to the Imperium. The moon of a vast gas giant, Cybele was a war-grave world, one of hundreds of planets declared Mausoleum Valorum throughout the Ultima Segmentum. Rafen kept his statue-like aspect as a flicker of movement danced on the edge of his auspex’s sensors.

  Presently, a figure emerged from behind an oval sepulchre carved in pink vestan stone, and it nodded toward Rafen before making a series of sign-gestures with a gauntleted hand. The two of them were almost identical: their man-shapes broad and hulking in red ceramite sheaths, the colour glistening from the soft, reverent rain.

  Rafen returned the nod and emerged from his cover, low to the ground and swift. He did not pause to check if Brother Alactus was following him; there was no need. As Alactus followed Rafen, so Brother Turcio followed Alactus, and Brother Bennek followed him. The team of Space Marines had drilled and fought alongside each other for so many decades that they functioned as pieces of the same machine, each a finely-tooled cog linked to the other, operating in perfect unison. To move now in silence, without a single spoken word between them, was child’s play for soldiers who had trained to fight under the most testing conditions. He could sense their eagerness to meet the foe; it was like a palpable scent in the air, thick and coppery on his tongue.

  Rafen slipped around a smashed obelisk that rose like a broken bone from the cemetery grass, an accusing finger pointing upward and decrying the foul clouds. He dropped down into a shallow valley. A day earlier, this sheltered place had been a devotional garden dedicated to naval pilots lost in the war for Rocene, but now it was a ruined bowl of broken earth. A stray round from the enemy’s opening sub-orbital bombardment had landed here and carved out a hemisphere of ground, fusing the dirt into patches of glassy fulgurites. Brown puddles gathered where ornate caskets were torn open and their contents scattered around Rafen’s metal-shod feet: bones and decayed, aged medals crunched into the dirt where he walked. The Space Marine picked his way through the skeletons and traversed the opposite lip of the crater, pausing to check his bearings.

  He glanced up to see the shape of an angelic statue curving away above him, arms and wings spread as if about to take flight. The statue’s face was unblemished and perfect; its eyes were raised to stare at some exquisite heaven that was an infinity away from the crude reality of this earthly realm. For one serene moment, Rafen was convinced that the stone seraph was about to turn its countenance to him, to display the face of Lord Sanguinius, the hallowed founder and primogenitor of his Chapter. But the instant fled, and Rafen was alone with the dead once more, stone angel and Blood Angel alike both wreathed in the mist and rain. He looked away and allowed himself to listen to the wind once more.

  Rafen felt a churn of revulsion in the pit of his gut. A fresh sound was being carried to his helmet’s auto-sense array, buoyed along with the ceaseless moans of the breeze: screaming, thin and horrific. It was a noise torn from the very darkest places in a man’s heart, an utterance that could only have issued from the lips of one truly damned. The Marine surmised the Traitors were preparing to make an augury from the entrails of one of their slaves before they began another sortie.

  Rafen considered this for a moment. If the archenemy were getting ready for another attack, then it made his mission all the more urgent. He moved off, a frown forming behind the formidable mask of his breather grille. A troop of lightly armoured, fast-moving scouts would have been able to accomplish the same task in half the time. But every single one of the pathfinder squad in Rafen’s detachment had been killed in the first assault, when a fusillade of krak shells had torn through their ranks. He had been standing in the lee of a Rhino’s hull when the shriek of superheated air signalled the incoming salvo, and in his mind’s eye Rafen recalled the moment when a scout bike had spun up and over his head, as if it were nothing but a plaything discarded by a bored, petulant child. All that remained of the young Marines were some torn rags and flecks of burnt ceramite.

  He buried the dark ember of his anger deep and pressed on, shuttering away his recriminations. It mattered little now what they had been told before arriving on Cybele, that the posting here was purely a ceremonial one, that it was a matter of honour rather than a battle to be fought. Perhaps he and his battle-brothers had been lax to believe that the corrupted would have no interest in a cemetery world; now they would repay that mistake with the blood of their foes.

  Rafen slowed to a steady walk as they closed in on the grove the enemy had chosen for their staging area. The pristine, manicured lawns of the graveyards elsewhere were no longer evident here—around the perimeter of the Traitor camp, great dark tendrils of decay were trailing out through the grasses, emerging through an expanding ring of soiled plants and toxic slurry. In some places, the ground had broken open like an old wound and disgorged the dead from beneath it. Grave markers lay slumped and disfigured next to black twists of bone vomited from the newly putrid earth. Rafen’s finger twitched near the trigger of his bolter, his knuckles whitening inside his gauntlet. The rush of righteous fury was tingling at bay within him, the longing for combat singing in his veins. He gestured for the other Blood Angels to stand back and hold their positions. He found a vantage point at the corner of a ruined vault and for the first time that day Rafen laid eyes on the enemy. It was all he could do to resist the urge to riddle them with gunfire.

  Word Bearers. Once they had been an Adeptus Astartes Legion of the most pious nature, but those days had long since turned to dust. Rafen’s lips drew back from his teeth in a sneer of disgust as he watched the Traitor Marines move to and fro, marching arrogantly between tents of flayed ork-hide and the still steaming orbs of grounded dreadclaw landers. He closed his ears to the pestilent shouts of the enemy demagogues as they wandered about the edges of the encampment, spitting their vile prayers and chants over the cries of the slave-servitors, and the incessant cracks of neuro-whips against the backs of the helots.

  The Word Bearers were a dark mirror of Rafen and his brethren. Their battle gear was doused in a livid scar-red the shade of fresh gore, their armour dominated by a single sigil—the face of a screaming horned demon against an eight-pointed star. Many of
the Chaos Marines sported horned helms with filigree and fine workings cored from children’s bones, or pages of blasphemous text drawn on skin-parchment and fastened into the ceramite with obsidian screws. Others went about bareheaded, and these ones displayed faces rippled with ritual wheals, tusks or hooks of warped cartilage.

  It was one such Traitor Marine who was carefully ministering to the torture of the slave whose screams had carried so far on the wind. One of his arms ended in a writhing cluster of metallic tentacles that flicked and whipped at the air as if they had a mind of their own. In his other hand, the torturer held a vibra-stave that he used like a sculptor, lopping off slips of flesh with infinite care. The victim’s cries wavered up and down the octaves and Rafen abruptly realised that the enemy soldier was playing the man like an instrument, amusing himself by composing a symphony of pain. Rafen looked away, concentrating on the mission at hand. His squad leader, Brother-Sergeant Koris, had made the orders quite clear—Rafen and his team were to merely locate the enemy camp and determine the strength and disposition of the foe. They were not to engage. Training his auspex on the assembled force, he picked out assault units and the massive bulks of Terminators, but only a handful of vehicles. He considered the options: this might be a testing force, perhaps, maybe a blunt brigade of heavily armed troops sent in to probe the defences of the planet before a larger attack could begin. For a moment, Rafen wondered about the fate of the ship his company had left in orbit; it was a forgone conclusion that if so large a Traitor force had made planetfall, the skies already belonged to the enemy. He did not dwell on the prospects of what that would mean for them. With a full half of their force dead or crippled in the initial surprise bombardment, the Space Marines were reeling and on the defensive; the momentum of battle was on the side of the foe.