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

  Outside the natural stadium, they would have sported tribal pennants and colours—and some would have been at each other’s throats because of it—but here within the walls of the proving ground they were no longer sons of the tribes of the Blood: they were postulants clamouring for a chance to ascend to the near-godhood of the Adeptus Astartes. From the stone ridges around them, hooded figures kept watch with slug throwers and long blades. These men were the unchosen, the warriors who had pledged to guard the place of the trial until death. They scanned the skies and waited; the sons of Sanguinius would arrive soon.

  In the weeks leading up to the time of challenge, Rafen and Arkio had set out from the lands of the Broken Mesa clan with three more youths. They were the very best that the tribe had to offer, each of them lethal fighters hardened at an early age by living in one of the planet’s most hostile regions. They were ideal candidates to be risen, so the clan masters said. Rafen thought otherwise. He was a firebrand youth then, undisciplined and wild, quite unlike the man he would one day become. Some of the tribe said that he was sent to the trials not because he was capable of winning, but in hopes that he would die. Rumour had it that they were to rid them of his recklessness.

  Rafen was determined to prove them wrong, even if he was honour-bound to protect his younger brother Arkio. For his part, Arkio’s heart was strong and open. He was forever willing to see the wonders of the universe in every new experience, but he was guileless and trusting, too naive for the brutal future that awaited them as Space Marines. Along the way, the other three were killed: one was turned to a dry husk by thirstwater, another dashed on to rocks when his angel’s wings—the primitive gliders the Blood used to navigate the canyon winds—came apart in a sandstorm. Rafen was forced to break the neck of the last when he succumbed to the incurable venom of a shellsnake.

  And so the trials began. The sky chariots fell from the air; the machines that he would later know as Thunderhawks landed in screaming gusts of flame. From within came men in shining red greaves and vambraces, and helmets adorned with the most holy symbol of the pure one. The Blood Angels walked among them like figures from some fantastic dream, picking out aspirants who sported the taint of mutation for cancellation, or dismissing those they saw as wanting. One Marine approached Rafen and Arkio, his helmet clasped under one arm.

  “Do you whelps have the temerity to think you could serve my beloved Chapter?” His face was grizzled and iron-hard.

  Arkio had been properly reverent in his answer, but not Rafen. “Test me and we shall see who has the courage, old man.”

  The Marine did the last thing Rafen expected of him: he smiled. “Indeed we will. I am Koris, brother-sergeant of the Blood Angels Fifth Company. Impress me, if you can, lad.”

  They made them fight with lances and staves, knives and short-swords, staffs and weapons made from chains and weights. Koris pushed them-through mazes where the walls sprouted blades and arcs of electricity; he made them run races with heavy pack and gear while other Blood Angels strafed them with gunfire. They drilled and they fought and many of them died. Rafen would see Arkio in passing as the brothers went to and from each gladiatorial combat; they would exchange a nod or a wave with a bloodstained hand. Each time, there were fewer and fewer of them, and as the tournaments extended into days, the numbers of the aspirants dwindled still further. From the survivors would be drawn the fifty who would board the sky chariots for Baal, the mother world of the secundus moon that hung across the night like a baleful eye. Rafen excelled even his own arrogant standards, beating off every challenger until he found himself under the gaze of Koris once more. The veteran sergeant was an arbiter of the challenges, and those chosen by him would join the Space Marines.

  With Koris as his audience, Rafen soundly beat his opponent—Toph, a pup from the junkhunter folk of the great sear—never realising that the sergeant saw his insolence as the seed of his undoing.

  “Do you believe you can fight all your enemies alone?” Koris asked him. Rafen sneered. The question was ridiculous. “Of course.”

  “No Blood Angel fights alone,” said the sergeant. “All Blood Angels fight as one, as a brotherhood in the name of the Emperor. If you cannot understand that, then you have already failed.” Perhaps Koris believed that Rafen could be trained, that he could be broken of his complacent manner. In any event, he allowed the boy to remain in the trials, and for his next test he faced a youth named Sachiel. “Are you ready to face defeat?” Koris asked him. “I will never be ready to fail!” he retorted hotly. Sachiel was the very opposite of Rafen: he talked too much; he appeared soft, almost pretty compared to the hard aspects of the other aspirants. But he was cold and capable in the fighting pit. Sachiel felled Rafen and mocked him for it. “Ready for that, were you?” he sneered, “Rafen the Ready, ready to lose?”

  Arkio helped him patch his wounds as best he could and in a moment between bouts the younger brother implored the elder to curb his nature. “Rafen, you and I can survive the challenges if we are strong for one another. Our bond mirrors that of the Blood Angels. Together, we are unbeatable.”

  Rafen waved him away. “You are too credulous, boy. A man fights alone; he dies alone. That is the way of it.” Arkio said nothing more. Rafen’s fierce determination to become a Blood Angel initiate consumed him. It was born from the overwhelming desire to prove his worth to Axan, their father and war-chief of the Broken Mesa clan. If Arkio returned a failure then it would be expected and accepted because he was the second son, but as the elder brother, Rafen would suffer a disgrace that would follow him for the rest of his life. The next day they ran the shifting maze, carrying an electrified baton in a relay race to the finish and Rafen—arrogant, purposeful Rafen—ran it alone, leaving his team mates behind to beat Sachiel into second place. He lit up the air with his fierce defiance. “Anyone!” he growled. “I can beat anyone!”

  “Can you?” Koris stepped forward and removed every piece of his armour, until he stood disrobed before the youth. “The time has come to make an object lesson of your pretension, lad.” He threw Rafen his bolt pistol. “I have no armour to protect me, nothing to augment my strength. Hit me with the gun, just once, and I’ll declare your trials complete… But if I touch you, you fail.”

  Ignoring Arkio’s pleas, Rafen picked up the pistol and let fly, chattering bullets snapping through the air at the Blood Angel. But Koris was no longer there, he moved like a hawk, impossibly fast. Rafen had barely felt the recoil from his first shots before the sergeant kicked his legs from under him and ground the youth’s face into the dust.

  “To become a Blood Angel, a man must know the pride of great Sanguinius, but also his humility as well.” Koris told him, “You wallow in the former and show none of the latter. You are dismissed.”

  The sergeant left him there in the sand, and on his knees, he watched the old veteran cast his endorsement of Sachiel and Arkio to become initiates to the Chapter. Unable to meet the gazes of those around him, Rafen drew up what little of his strength remained and left Angel’s Fall behind. Broken and dispirited, he wandered out into the desert without direction; a colossal storm descended on him. There, in the razor-winds, Rafen waited for death, too late at an understanding of what his insolence had cost him.

  He had been found wanting and in this harshest lesson Rafen realised that he had squandered his chance at greatness. He took what little, bitter comfort he could from the knowledge that Arkio would walk with the Astartes. But for him his life was over. In the midst of the raging tempest, Rafen became lost in the territory of the fire scorpions, Baal’s most fearsome predators. Soon an immature warrior male was stalking him, acidic flame-venom dripping from its barbed tail in anticipation. As big as a full-grown man, the beast fell on the youth, enraged by his violation of its domain. So overcome with despair was he that Rafen was almost willing to let the animal end his life, but then in the thunderclouds he glimpsed a vision of something impossibly bright and powerful. Perhaps it had been a tric
k of the mind, some hallucination brought on by melancholy and fatigue, but in that moment Rafen saw the face of Sanguinius watching him. The pure one stood in judgement of the boy, and Rafen realised that this was the true test of his mettle: if he died here, lost and alone in the wilderness, then he would truly have failed every tenet that the tribes of the Blood and the Adeptus Astartes lived by.

  Fuelled by his revelation, determination flooded back into the lad, and with the fierceness he had shown in the arena, Rafen pierced the creature’s carapace with a stone knife and killed it, just as Sanguinius had done in the legends of the angelic sovereign’s childhood.

  It was only then that Rafen realised the lights he had seen in the sky were those of a stricken Thunderhawk plummeting to the ground. Damaged by a violent blast of lightning as it made for orbit, one of the Blood Angels’ ships crash-landed a few kilometres away from him, in the very heart of the scorpion hunting fields. Rafen rushed to the aid of the survivors and found a handful of aspirants there: Arkio, Toph and Sachiel among them. The old warrior Koris lay bloodied and unconscious, and the rest of the senior Blood Angels aboard were dead. Sachiel stepped forward to assume command and demanded Rafen leave them; a failure had no place alongside true sons of Sanguinius.

  Such an insult would normally have boiled Rafen’s blood, but he had taken the sergeant’s lesson to heart and stood firm. He had hunted in these lands since he was old enough to carry a spear and he knew the ways of the fire scorpions. With such an outright invasion of their territory, the pheromone scents of the beasts would go mad and they would attack in massive numbers. Resisting the urge to do battle alone, Rafen rallied the aspirants to fight as a team, holding off the warrior scorpions until the insect’s giant queen revealed itself amid the swarm. The youths fought like lions, and even as the brave Toph died in the claws of the queen, Rafen killed the animal and set the scorpion pack in disarray. When the storm broke and a rescue ship arrived, they came to find Koris still alive and a dozen young men surrounded by a sea of dead enemies.

  As the veteran was awakened from his healing sleep, Arkio relayed the tale of Rafen’s leadership and argued for him, even to the extreme of refusing his own ascension if his brother’s victory was not acknowledged. For his part, Rafen bid to take his leave and wished Arkio a fond farewell, believing that he would never see his sibling again. But Koris commanded otherwise. “The veil lifts from your eyes, boy,” the old warrior said. “You have at last understood the teaching that eluded you for so long.”

  “Yes.” Rafen admitted. “He who fights alone dies alone, but those who battle as brothers will live forever.”

  The veteran smiled again. “You have redeemed yourself, Rafen of the Broken Mesa, and with the death of the aspirant Toph I have need of a courageous soul to take his place.” He held out a hand to the youth. “Will you follow me, Rafen? Will you tread the path of the primarch and embrace the brotherhood of the Blood Angels?”

  The words leapt from his lips. “I will. This day I vow to become a Blood Angel worthy of the Lord Sanguinius himself!”

  And so for the first time, the sons of Axan left the cradle of their birth and crossed the chasm of space between Baal Secundus and the mother world Baal. If they thought they knew hardship, then Rafen and Arkio were proven wrong as they crossed the arid wastes of the massive desert world. Here they glimpsed the crumbling stumps of what had once been magnificent cities. There, amid the pinnacles of mountains that cut at the sky with blade-sharp peaks, stood the fortress-monastery of the Blood Angels. None of the aspirants had ever seen so huge a structure before, not even the mighty carving of Sanguinius cut from the bare rock of Mount Seraph. It thrilled and terrified them in equal measure.

  Koris led them into the chambers of the abbey keep where they walked among the number of the Blood Angels’ brethren, eyes wide as saucers at the inhuman nobility and beauty of the warriors. Like their primarch, the fully-fledged Blood Angels carried the genetic mark of Sanguinius and the shadow of his exalted countenance in all their aspects. In comparison, the malnourished and weather-beaten youths of the Baal moons were feeble waifs. The Sanguinary Priests in their armour of white and crimson came for the aspirants, and took the fifty to the great chapel where they were locked in for three days and nights. They stood vigil without sleep, without food or water. Alone, Rafen would not have been able to endure the test, and as the hours crawled by, he saw some that dropped from exhaustion. They were removed by the priests, and their fates never spoken of, but with Arkio at his side, the brothers kept each other strong. When at last the fourth day dawned, they were still standing to meet the bearers of the red grail when they sundered the holy seal on the chapel door.

  The handful of men who remained drank from the sacred cup, and Rafen’s weary mind came alive as the fluid touched his lips. Rich and coppery, the liquid in the chalice flowed from the veins of the most senior of the Sanguinary Priests—and through their bodies flowed an iota of the very blood of the angel lord himself. Energies and thoughts at once alien and familiar to Rafen coursed through his body, the touch of the fluid laying his soul bare to scrutiny by the Chapter’s brethren. Rafen embraced it and cast away the last ties to his old life. The warrior boy of the Broken Mesa clan was gone now, and in his place stood a man whose future stretched away before him in a golden path of glory and adventure. Darkness, warm and calming, enveloped the aspirants, and the sleep of change was upon them.

  Rafen remembered with absolute clarity the moment the sarcophagus was opened and his altered, enhanced eyes took in their first sight. Perhaps fittingly, it had been of Arkio. His brother was standing in mute shock at the changes wrought on him, and studying his fingers and his hands as if they belonged to someone else. Rafen saw the face of the Marine before him—for he was no longer a mere man—and knew it to be his kinsman, even though this new Arkio stood twice as tail, was broad with muscle and crowned with a face that by turns mirrored his countenance, his father’s, and that of Sanguinius. The gazes of the two siblings met as the blood-servitors removed the probes and channels from their bodies. As one they broke into laughter, amazed and relieved and surprised at what fate had granted them.

  Rafen could not be sure how much time had passed. Later he learned that they had been taken from the chapel after the vigil and locked in the hall of sarcophagi under the chants of the credo vitae. There, they had lain for a year in the sleep as a potent cocktail of nutrients, modificational potions and blood from the red grail coursed through their systems. In those months, the servitors had implanted the hallowed gene-seed of the Chapter and watched it remake them.

  As Rafen, Arkio and the other aspirants had slumbered in blood-warm dreams kindled from the genetic memory of the primarch, their bodies accepted the potent new organs that made them into Space Marines—the secondary heart, the catalepsean node sleep-killer, multi-lung, occulobe, the omophagea, ossmodula and others. They stepped into the light as the living avatars of the gods they had once worshipped, but this was just the first of many steps. No human would have been able to withstand the training they endured, the impossible hardships and extremes of physicality that the instructors forced upon them. At all times, Koris was there, pushing each of them beyond the limits to achieve more, to go deeper, to fight harder. Through every challenge, Arkio and Rafen supported one another, kinsmen in blood and brothers in battle, drawing strength from their unbreakable bond. And as much as they changed, their hearts remained the same. Rafen’s unswerving fortitude and his relentless bravery grew tenfold, while Arkio kept his courage and his unbreakable spirit of adventure.

  Until now.

  Rafen’s reverie faded as quickly as it had come and he returned to the moment. His brother’s gaze was steady and cool on him under the dim glow of the grand chamber’s candles. He could see it in Arkio’s eyes as clearly as if it were inscribed like the scriptures in the stonewalls. The humble soldier his younger sibling once was had vanished, subsumed into the man before him now, just as the wiry cla
n boy of his youth had been transformed inside the hall of sarcophagi.

  With effort, Rafen pushed a question from his mouth. “I cannot believe that you… that you liken yourself to our primarch? No man could dare to take such a mantle upon himself…” His lips trembled as he spoke.

  Arkio smiled, and the gesture made Rafen’s heart freeze in his chest. “But I am not a man, brother. I am a Blood Angel.”

  He was unable to speak. Then, a shape in jet-black armour adorned with bone-white skulls and purity seals hove into view. “Brother Arkio,” said the Chaplain, “if you would attend me? There are… questions.”

  The Marine nodded and came to his feet. “Do not fear, Rafen,” he whispered. “Trust in me.”

  Rafen gave no reply. He was locked in a cycle of dread about what his brother’s words could mean. He is lost. The thought shocked him. My brother is lost to me and I am caught between the ties of blood to my family, and my duty to the Chapter…

  CHAPTER NINE

  The shenlong minefield was a death zone. As Bellus edged her way into the outer reaches of the belt of warheads, Brother-Captain Ideon registered the shapes of broken hull metal and shattered rock. The mines were complex and intricate devices, so his Techmarines had explained to him; they possessed a logic brain capable of determining the difference between an inert form like an asteroid and an active craft like a manned warship. Scattered about the battle barge were the remains of men who had not possessed such information, who had blindly charged into the zone, casting their fates to chance in hopes of running the forge world’s blockade. He detected pieces of an ork rok and other remains that might have been from reavers or perhaps an Imperial ship caught when the Word Bearers took the planet for themselves. Shenlong had become enemy territory, a vast trap for the unwary.