The Passing of Angels - John French

  'If gods did not exist mankind would conjure them into being.

  If god did exist He would will monsters into life and cloak them in the light of heaven.'

  - attributed to the Unspeakable King

  I do not want to be here. I do not want this present, and I want the future that follows it less. Yet the future is inescapable.

  My head is bowed, my eyes closed, and I listen as the present rushes past.

  The tick-buzz of armour servos…

  Breath vibrating inside the tarnished silver helms of the Host…

  Wind gliding across the skin of the Storm Eagle as it drops from the dawn sky…

  Fire feathering from the wings…

  The wind running amongst the clouds…

  And beyond that shell of air - silence…

  Silence…

  There, beyond the sky, is the only place where it is truly quiet. The song of the spheres is not a sound. It is that silence that sits between earth and moon, that marks the passing of comets, and sings the birth of stars. Heaven - from where the angels of an unenlightened past looked down on creation.

  'My lord.' It is Alepheo. I hear the damage in his voice, the old wound to the throat, still healing. I hear the control, and the deference, and beyond that, pain. 'We have reached the drop mark,' he says.

  I open my eyes, and the world crowds back in through them, bright and dark and consuming. I see the Host of destruction. I see the scars and burns on their crimson armour. I feel my senses rush to enfold every angle of form, every mutable scrap of colour, every stutter of movement. On and on, each nanosecond a tableau, and each shift of hand or eye causing the universe to shatter and remake itself in my sight.

  There is so much in even the smallest moment of life, so much that humans cannot see. My senses pour down through layers of detail. There is tarnish on the tear drops that sit on the cheeks of Alepheo's mask. There are five droplets. The second droplet is a micron out of alignment. The artisan who made it had been disturbed during the sculpting. The interruption had disrupted his equilibrium. It had taken a heartbeat for him to settle back to his task, but in that time the damage to his work had been done. I can see it in the error, and I can feel the flaw in my heart.

  I catch myself, and pull my senses back to the level of the beings that stand at my side - my cruel and beautiful children. I read them and their hearts with a glance. So much is written in the way that Alepheo hangs his head, so much more in the way his hand rests on the holster of his pistol. I see the weight of his fears, even though these half-angels know no fear. You cannot cut the core of fear from a human, you can only make them deaf to the screams. And inside, these angels of death - made to bring enlightenment like falling lightning - all are screaming.

  'Doors opening.' The pilot's voice echoes in the compartment.

  Red lights begin to pulse. Sirens blare. Doors along the flank of the craft slide open. Sound and air rush out into the brightening night. I can see the Storm Eagles, Lightning Crows and Thunderhawks following us down out of the dome of the sky, red streaks in deepening blue. Like drops of blood. Like tears.

  I step to the edge of the open assault ramp. The air pulls at me. I look down. The summit of the mountain city rises from dawn-stained cloud. I turn my back, balancing on the edge. Sixty silver faces look at me from the compartment.

  'Leave none alive,' I say, and I step back into the rushing air.

  Shar-General Galen did not look up from the battle plans as the crowd of officers drained from the strategium. Bright sunlight poured through the dome above. She could feel the warmth on the back of her neck. She knew the plans by heart, but still she did not look up.

  He was still there, on the other side of the planning table. He had not moved. She found it hard to look at him sometimes, even after a decade of war at his side. Part of her did not know what she would see.

  'Please, general, ask your question,' the Angel said.

  'I am…' She almost looked up at him, but caught herself and began to shuffle sheaves of field reports together. She shook her head, breathed out. 'I am clear on all of the operational elements involved. There is nothing that needs to be clarified.'

  'But you have a question, Galen,' he said. His voice was a melody, clear as the note of a struck bell. 'Not all matters of war exist in bullets and orders. Ask what you wish.'

  She stopped, her eyes on the parchment under her hands.

  'Why did you insist on this?' she said at last, and finally looked at him.

  Sanguinius, primarch of the IX Legion, Archangel of Baal, stood in the cold light of the strategium. An ivory white tunic and toga was wound and folded over muscle and smooth skin. Golden hair framed a face set in an expression that spoke of wisdom and understanding. It was a perfect face, a face that called to the ideals of humanity. She met his eyes. His furled wings shifted at his back, and she was suddenly struck by the fact that the feathers were not just white, but every hue of shadow. He was beautiful, more beautiful than life, and more terrifying than anything she had seen in half a century's worth of warzones.

  'It must happen,' he said, and she felt the terror and adoration fade from her. 'You were at the assault on the H_______'s settlement. I was not there, and yet I saw it in your words, and in the words you choose not to say.'

  Galen felt her eyes twitch as the memory returned…

  When the H_______ had detonated the first mine, the gravity for five kilometres around the blast had broken. Even ten kilometres away she had felt herself lift from the ground. Vomit had risen to her tongue. Then she heard the cry of her adjutant, and looked up.

  The detonation unfolded in silence, stacking up and up and up to the scuffed blue of the sky. It shimmered like water. She could see through it. Thousands of tiny flecks danced in the expanding column. She blinked. The skin of her face was prickling. Then she realised that the flecks were people: tens of thousands of troops that she had sent in to the settlement and the hundreds of thousands that lived there. Light bent and folded. Motes of darkness grew and burst like bubbles. And out the silence rolled, as though the sound was swallowed by the atrocity of what she was witnessing. Seconds touched eternity as the column of broken reality touched the dome of the heavens.

  Then it collapsed.

  Everything within ceased to be.

  Air rushed in to the space left. The pressure wave ruptured Galen's eardrums and scattered her command cadre out of their transports.

  Where the mine had detonated there was nothing. Just a black wound that hung like mist above the ground, drinking light.

  Galen blinked, and the memory vanished into Sanguinius' gaze.

  'Even so, my lord, even though the H_______ are willing to use such devices…'

  'It is not just the inhumanity of what they have done. Resistance to the truth is a tragedy, but the weapons we choose to fight with speak to eternity. The Emperor has decreed that such weapons will not be tolerated to exist, and their use will earn His wrath.'

  'I have said I understand what must be done, my lord, but…'

  He bowed his head. She felt her breath stop in her lungs.

  There was something in the gesture, something so simple, so human. When he looked up, the pain on his face almost made her cry out.

  'I understand too, general.' He reached out and took her hand in both of his. His gaze was still steady on hers, but it seemed to her that shadow had drained into the recesses of his face. 'The question you want to know the answer to is not why I insisted on this, but how I can do such a thing.'

  'The weapons we choose to fight with speak to eternity,' she said to him.

  He nodded at hearing his own words, but she could see only a hardening in
his eyes.

  'And I am the creation of the Emperor, Galen. Though I am His son, I was engineered, not born. I am as He made me. I was made to perform a function for mankind.'

  'But by doing this, how can we claim to be better than the people we wish to drag into the light?'

  'We cannot make that claim.' He half-turned away then. His pupils vanished as his eyes caught the light streaming from the crystal dome above. 'You and humanity can claim the light that is left after our passing, but I can claim only that I know my nature.' He looked back at her then, his eyes clear. 'And even in the myths of the past, angels were not created for kindness.'

  I am falling through the light of a new-born day alone. Behind me the Host of destruction falls with me. Clouds whip past. The mountain city grows beneath us, fog peeling back from its flanks. I can see tiers of buildings set behind curtain walls. I can see roads, and people moving in the last shadows of night. The lights of domed force-fields glitter as the fog passes through them. The guns on the high towers do not turn to greet us. We are too few and too small for their machine systems to notice. Those that set them to watch the skies have made the mistake that ancient kings made before their realms burned for pride - they forget the oldest lessons.

  The first gunship comes into view high above us. The tower guns see it. Barrels sweep up. Energy flushes into charge chambers. Calculations race through silica.

  We fall on, and the city rises.

  The guns fire. Columns of blinding light rise into the sky, burning cloud banks away. The air shrieks. The gunship corkscrews through the burning energy.

  I can see the force-field beneath us, a glittering skin. There are figures on the roads and ramparts looking up, and one of them raises a hand and points. I spread my wings, the dew-heavy air catching in the feathers. Above me, my sons trigger their jump packs. Fire cuts their fall just as we touch the force-field dome and pass through.

  Above us the air is burning; beneath us the waking city sees us. My wings are spread, and my spear is raised in my hand. I can see the condemned. I can see their faces. I can see the terror in the face of a soldier as he steps into the light beside his squad. I can see his eyes. I can see that he was not a soldier until the coming of war. I can see that he has killed. I can see his fear of death and his cruelty in the tremble of his rising gun. I can see his love of life in the eye behind the gun. I can see all humanity in that look. The tip of my spear strikes him in the middle of the forehead.

  The first blood of this reaping sprays up to fleck the beat of my wings as I land.

  Alepheo, commander of the Second Seraphic Host of the IX Legion, held his breath and counted. As he felt the time seep into his muscles, he lifted the brush. Its tip was black, heavy with soot ink. He had ground the pigment himself using charcoal that he had made from a single tree he had felled in the forest of Macragge during his time amongst the XIII. The handle of the brush was bone, in this case human. Hollow-cored, it was light and perfectly balanced when the bristles were loaded with the correct amount of ink. The bone had been his birth brother's, given to him after the last of his kin fell in the trials to become one of the Angels.

  He smiled as the sorrow of that memory touched his thoughts. He let it settle, feeling it combine with the subject he had chosen. A paper scroll hung in front of him as white as fresh snow, seeming to glow in the dusk light entering his chamber from the high windows. The ruined fortress they had taken for their base in the compliance of the H_______ was filled with shadows and marked with the scars of forgotten wars, but here in the high central tower there was light.

  The tip of the brush touched the paper. Alepheo paused a second and then his thoughts unfolded through his nerves and muscles. The brush slid over the surface of the paper, leaving a black trail. Now it was in motion, it did not stop. The flow of strokes followed a rhythm set by the beating of his hearts and the song of his thoughts. The dipping of the brush, the flick and flow of ink, the smell of it as it dried, all were the rhythm of creation.

  When he was done, he stepped back and looked at what his soul had brought into being.

  ' "And by my being is desolation wrought," ' said a voice from behind him. ' "And by the shadow of my sword does dew fall and the sun rise" - the Harabic scholars of the past would wonder at such an evocation of their tongue and art.' Alepheo turned and knelt in a single movement. His black robes rustling the brush still in his hand.

  'My lord,' he said.

  'Rise,' said Sanguinius. 'You must clean that brush before the ink clots the bristles.'

  Alepheo obeyed, moving the brush between seven stone bowls of water and drying it with the cloths he had folded and set beside them. Sanguinius took a single step forwards, eyes fixed on the calligraphic poem spiralling across the paper screen.

  'Dead languages speak more clearly than the voices of the living don't you think?'

  'Are they dead if some still speak them?' asked Alepheo, dabbing the brush head on the soft black fabric of the second cloth. 'A song sung is still a song even if it has not sounded for millennia.'

  'Quite so, my son,' said Sanguinius, and lapsed into silence as Alepheo returned the clean brush to its stand.

  'How may I serve, lord?' said Alepheo, turning back to his primarch.

  'I have given the order - the H_______ are to be decimated. The population once compliant will be scattered across the Imperium. Others will come and make new cities under this sun. But they and all they have made here will cease to be. Their name will be obliterated, their cities levelled.'

  Alepheo was still for a second and then nodded once.

  'It was written as soon as they used such weapons.'

  Sanguinius' eyes moved over the black words painted onto the paper screen.

  'The judgement decreed requires more,' he said.

  Alepheo was very still, and then turned to the bowls of water used to clean his brush. He began to pour them into a rough clay jug. Black ink swirled in the splash.

  'We must all bear the burden of our nature,' said Alepheo, without looking up as he poured ink and water from the sixth bowl.

  'We must. It is a terrible thing to be the bearer of the wrath of an enlightened age.'

  Alepheo looked around as he heard a soft clink of something metal being set down on the stone floor.

  A helmet lay at Sanguinius' feet. A serene face moulded in tarnished silver looked up at Alepheo with empty eyes. Tear drops marked its cheeks and a rayed halo ran across its crown. It was a death mask, made by a dying brother of the Legion in the last hours of his life and then cast in silver. They were worn only by those called to put aside their names and serve amongst the Legion's Destroyers. To hide one's face behind such a mask was to take on the burden of atrocity, a necessary evil in an age both of enlightenment and war. It was a burden shared by all the Legion, to be taken up and then put aside when all was done.

  'I would call you to be the Dominion of the Destroyer Host,' said Sanguinius.

  Alepheo looked at the helm but did not pick it up. The seventh bowl of water was still in his hands. The surface of the liquid within was mirror smooth.

  'Of course, my lord,' he said, aware of the control in his voice.

  'You will not be yourself in this, my son. You will be your function. Alepheo dies for the time when your hands do this deed.'

  'But you are always yourself, my lord. If I must be a part of this why am I granted the absolution of anonymity when you are not?'

  Pain ghosted across the Angel's face as he smiled, the expression equal parts affection and sorrow.

  'You were all made from humanity, my son. I am not. The darkness that we must bring is not something I can put aside. It is me. In the shadow of my wings life withers and blood salts the ground.'

  Alepheo bowed his head, and knelt to pick up the silver helm.

  Then he stood, the bowl of black-stained water still held in his other hand.

  'I will become death,' he said, and poured the seventh bowl onto the stone floor.

/>   My sons descend around me. Grenades scatter from them like seeds. Phosphex ignites, burning white as it flares and eats the stones of buildings. Radiation grenades land, and rest silent amongst the spreading flames. They will not kill now. They will linger here, the shadow of our passing.

  Troops pour from towers. Light shatters from the angles of their black glass armour. One of my sons lands on a tower top. The launcher slung under his arms roars, the radiation missile bursting amongst a dense cluster of soldiers. I can taste the uranium and barium as it salts the air.

  A buzzing clank echoes up the streets. I turn, knowing what I will see. The H_______ have kept many wonders from the ages before Old Night, but have also preserved many of its horrors. The things that stalk over the stone and steel road are black mirror-skinned, beetle-carapaced, and skitter on seven legs. Eyes held in crystal capsules stud their abdomens. Human eyes, lidless, blood-shot and rolling. These creations were punishment for the crimes of dissent or treachery against the monarchs of the H_______. Each one is a family stripped of flesh and remade. Brothers, mothers, sisters and fathers - their nerves, mutilated brains and sense organs spliced into a single cyborg frame. At their core is blind rage and confusion, and lethal purpose.

  I look into the eye clusters of the nearest one as it races up the road. A blur of needle-fine rounds sprays from its weapon pod. My wings raise me into the air. It looks up at me, guns and blood-shot eyes tracking as I rise. I throw my spear. It strikes the first abomination and lightning rips through it. Shards of black glass armour, chrome and flesh scatter out. For a second the reek of static blots out the smell of the burning city. I land on top of the dead thing as it collapses, pull the spear free and am striking the second and the third cyborgs without pause, spinning and bounding through the air.

  Above me, I see the shield pylons topple from the summit of the mountain city. The skin of its energy shields blinks out of being in a boom of dry thunder. The gunships and fighter bombers come out of the cloud layer an instant later. They loose their payloads. Inferno bombs, phosphex cylinders and radiation missiles burst amongst the tiers of already burning buildings. The heat lights the edge of my wings. Through and above it, my sons, my destroying angels move, silver-faced, armour darkening with soot, firing at anything that moves.