Angron's Monolith - Steve Lyons Read online

  ‘There is nothing to forgive,’ he said.

  Priority level: Magenta Alpha

  Transmitted: Adeptus Astartes battle-barge Blade of Vengeance

  To: Master of the Administratum, Holy Terra

  Date: 3031999.M41

  Transmitter: Astropath Prime Galdorian

  Receiver: Astropath-terminus Stranx

  Author: Lord Commander Dante, Blood Angels Chapter Master

  Thought for the Day: Knowledge is power – hide it well.

  The Relictors Chapter has departed from Armageddon. I instructed the blockade to allow their Thunderhawks to pass. I take full responsibility for this decision. The only other option would have been a violent confrontation, which we can ill afford at present. I have repeatedly tried to contact Chapter Master Bardane, without success. I will prepare a fuller report for you in due course, and forward copies of all relevant communication log entries to you. We will need to discuss this matter at some length.

  Sixteen

  The stained-glass windows of the fortress-monastery had been shuttered.

  It had generated a protective bubble about itself in preparation for being towed through warp space. It took the entire Relictors fleet to move the Ramilies-class star fort in this manner, and the journey was fraught with peril.

  Decario, however, was confident that his Chapter would survive. The Emperor had chosen a path for them to follow, and this was not where it ended. Today, they had harnessed the power of Chaos again and lived to tell of it; this would be no different.

  Once again, he followed a series of winding staircases to the lowest part of the sky fortress. He stood before a solid iron door. Once again, a battle-brother stood in front of the door beside him. This time, it was the newest and youngest member of his Chapter’s secret Conclave.

  Decario stood patiently in the light of the Vault’s black candles, as Tarryn explored. His eyes drank in the diminished collection of relics, with a sense of wonder tempered by a healthy respect. He didn’t need to be told that every artefact on display had been acquired at a price. He had already learned that lesson.

  He lingered before the daemon-possessed dreadaxe, which Captain Harkus had wielded to such noteworthy effect on Armageddon. He examined the fragments of an ancient Chaos talisman, which Decario himself had unearthed on Pythenia and pieced together. He asked about the Artekus Scourge, and Decario showed him the gilded reliquary in which it had once again been frozen.

  He halted, finally, by the carved pedestal in the centre of the room. He peered through its dome at the two obsidian shards nestled in their bed of crushed velvet, and he asked about the third, the one he had taken from Angron’s Monolith.

  ‘I took it to the purifying chamber,’ Decario explained. ‘I have Librarians praying over the shard day and night, attempting to tame the daemon within it. They will bind it with powerful wards and seals to keep the daemon force contained.’

  Tarryn nodded, sombrely. ‘It was in my head, wasn’t it? It smashed its way through my defences and it was screaming in my head, goading me until I lost myself to its rage. I don’t even remember fighting it. I only know I did because you told me–’

  ‘You didn’t fight it,’ Decario interrupted him. Not like I tried to fight it, the first time. ‘Thank the Emperor for that mercy. Had you attempted to resist the shard’s power, it is likely your mind would have snapped.’

  Tarryn stared at him, uncomprehendingly. That hadn’t been what he had expected to hear. ‘You are young,’ the Chief Librarian explained, ‘still trusting, still innocent. Your faith in the Emperor is absolute – and that, nothing else, is what saved you. The power of Chaos flooded into your mind, but it could find no foothold there.’

  ‘I am no longer innocent.’ Tarryn glared at Decario again, as if defying him to disagree. It had been a day and a half since Decario had sat across from him, in a shuttle in a clearing in the heart of an alien jungle, and his eyes had been bright and clear and open, then. He appeared much older in the candlelight, today.

  Decario wouldn’t lie to him. Not again. ‘The shard has left its mark on you, on your soul, and nothing can be done to erase it, as I know only too well,’ he confirmed. ‘However, I can teach you rituals and prayers that will enable you to know that part of yourself and find strength in it. I can teach you how to wield the tools of Chaos – that is, should you choose to tread this most treacherous of paths alongside me.’

  ‘The Emperor has chosen my path for me,’ declared Tarryn, without a moment’s hesitation, ‘and I will do as He wills me.’

  No matter where it might ultimately lead you? Decario wondered, but he didn’t give voice to the words.

  He thought about the tense events of the previous night. Bardane had summoned the Chapter’s fleet of Thunderhawks to the Armageddon jungle. It had taken two trips to evacuate the Relictors. The Fourth Company had been slow to reassemble and so had been in the second group to board, along with Decario and the Chapter Master himself. The Imperial Navy had let their ships pass once, but not a second time.

  Bardane had claimed to have urgent Chapter business, and demanded that the battleships in his way stand down. The lord admiral in command of the blockade had declined and insisted that the Relictors return to the planet and do their duty. Any problems, he had said, should be taken up with Lord Commander Dante.

  Bardane had replied that if the blockade didn’t part for him, he would punch a hole through it. He was badly outgunned, but he was counting on the fact that no one wanted a fight, not here and not now.

  The standoff had lasted four hours, during which time Bardane’s resolve had never wavered, at least not visibly. Decario could only wish for half his confidence. Bardane had known this day would come, however, and had long since prepared himself to face it. In the end, his instincts had been proven correct. Dante himself had intervened in the dispute, and – after his overtures to his fellow Chapter Master had been ignored – he had had the blockade ships stand down.

  He wouldn’t let the matter rest there; of that, there was not the slightest doubt.

  Decario thought about the final battle too, around the monolith. He thought about Tarryn in the grip of a berserker rage, determined to hunt down every last feral ork and slay them. And he thought about Baeloch, struggling in vain to stop him.

  Decario had warned him that Tarryn was beyond all reason. He had still been weak from his own attempt to take the shard. He could have done more, all the same. He had even taken a step forwards, intending to intervene physically, but he had felt a heavy, restraining hand on his shoulder. Artekus Bardane hadn’t spoken, but the message in his eyes had been perfectly clear.

  And what was one more stain on Decario’s soul, after all?

  ‘Sir, what about the monolith?’ Tarryn’s voice brought him back to the present, to the Vault. ‘If I may ask?’

  ‘Ought we to destroy it? Perhaps,’ Decario mused. ‘I would have preferred to examine it, had there only been more time – for who knows what other secrets it might reveal to us. Perhaps, once the war for Armageddon is over…’

  That, he thought, and the greater war to come, should any of us survive it.

  Tarryn nodded, as if he understood. Maybe, thought Decario, one day he truly would. For now, however, he dismissed the young Relictor, with a promise that his training would begin in earnest tomorrow. Tarryn snapped to attention and saluted before he left. Decario listened to the metallic echoes of his footsteps, as he climbed the steps back to the fortress’s main levels.

  He was left alone, finally, with his thoughts.

  Inevitably, those thoughts drifted back to the Stygies System, a hundred and fifty years ago. Decario was back in the Captor of Sin’s engine room, in his Fire Claws colours, with the Excoriator’s sword lying next to his outstretched fingers.

  Would I have grasped the sword, he wondered, had I been able to see the future?

  He thought about Inquisitor de Marche. His calming voice had been the lifeline that had guided him
back to sanity. He remembered the inquisitor in chains, his head stooped as he was led away to an ignominious death. Did he know? Had he already seen, on the space hulk, where the path he had chosen to tread must lead?

  Could he have warned me? Would it have changed anything if he had?

  He thought about Bardane, and the path along which he had guided him. He thought about the inevitable consequences yet to be faced. He thought about Tarryn, and the path that stretched before him – and even about Baeloch, a sacrifice to the Xanthite cause, and not the first.

  The Xanthite cause…

  Those were de Marche’s words again, he realised.

  Decario had never thought of himself as having a cause. He had never identified with those shadowy daemon hunters, congregating in their underground temples, cloaked in their dark secrets. He had always simply done what he knew to be right. He had based the choices he had made throughout his life on necessity and unassailable logic, and he wouldn’t remake a single one of them now if he could.

  He had had the vision again.

  It had happened while he had been aboard the Thunderhawk, awaiting the fateful outcome of his Chapter Master’s gamble. The bleeding eye had appeared to him more vividly than ever. He had felt as if he could fall into it, and had known that, if he did, he would never be able to climb free. He had clutched at the chest that contained the shard, for strength. I am doing the best I can, he had promised. We shall be ready.

  His choices had been the right ones. Decario was sure of that, more so now than he had ever been. The Emperor knows I have wished it were not so often enough. He was following the path that the Emperor had chosen for him.

  A century and a half ago, his questing fingers had reached for a fallen weapon.

  Had he not taken up the daemon blade then, he would certainly have died.

  His brother Fire Claws, however, would doubtless have avenged him, and the tale of that battle would have been a glorious page in their history, not a shameful one. They would not have had their name and colours stripped from them, nor had to endure their banishment from Neutra, the birthplace of their ancestors.

  Inquisitor de Marche might have enjoyed a kinder fate, while certainly Artekus Bardane – without a doubt the noblest warrior that Decario had ever had the honour to serve with – would not now stand accused as a heretic.

  He couldn’t count the number of Space Marines, like Tarryn and Baeloch, who would have served the Emperor faithfully, and never questioned the manner of that service. They wouldn’t have risked their souls, and Decario’s soul would have remained untarnished too. He would have died without regrets, in blessed ignorance.

  And the Holy Imperium of Man would have been doomed.

  About the Author

  Steve Lyons’s work for Black Library includes the Space Marines audio drama The Madness Within, alongside the Imperial Guard novels Ice World and Dead Men Walking – now collected in the omnibus Honour Imperialis – and the audio drama Waiting Death. He has written numerous short stories and is currently working on more tales from the grim darkness of the far future.