Blood Rite - Rachel Harrison Read online

  Cultists.

  ‘Blood,’ they hiss, and it sounds just like the storm that Darrago fell through to get here. ‘Blood for the Blessed.’

  They come for him, leaping and running, moving with misfiring twitches of their limbs. Darrago plants the standard, splitting the stone underfoot even further.

  ‘Not mine,’ he roars, and he fires on them with his storm bolter. ‘Not today.’

  Muzzle flashes light the ossuary. Two of the cultists are ripped from their feet. Ripped asunder by the explosive rounds. Darrago catches the scent of their blood in the air. It is old. Sour. Corrupt. It makes his canine teeth ache up into his head.

  A third cultist collides with him bodily. That glittering knife she carries scores a deep line across his armour though it should be able to do nothing of the kind. Not to Terminator plate. Smoke rolls from the blade and the gouge it leaves. The sackcloth mask the cultist wears is torn open at the mouth. Darrago can see the way she grins with filed teeth as she tries to go for his throat with that smoking blade.

  ‘Blood,’ she says, again. ‘Blood for the Blessed.’

  Darrago backhands her. The blow knocks her clear off her feet and collapses her chest with a wet crunch. She lands amongst the dead and goes still. Darrago turns to face the other cultists to find that Victorno’s squad have joined the fray.

  To find that he cannot see Donato, or Phaello, or any one of his squad.

  ‘The others,’ Darrago says, over the vox. ‘Where are they?’

  ‘I cannot raise them,’ Victorno answers as he knocks a cultist aside on the face of his storm shield. ‘The vox is fouled, just as the damned teleportation was. Auspex too. It was something in the storm.’

  Something in the storm. Darrago remembers Zalak’s needle-teeth grin and he snarls.

  ‘The Dark Apostle,’ he says. ‘This is his doing.’

  ‘Then we will make him answer for it.’

  Victorno’s thunder hammer connects with one of the cultists and the flare of light prints on Darrago’s vision. The sound echoes in his ears. The impact of the power weapon shatters the cultist completely. Victorno roars, already moving. Not fast and erratic like the cultists, but unstoppable. Maeklus fires on the heretics with his flamer, lighting the ossuary with purifying flame. The promethium clings and steals the cultists’ screams but they do not stop. Darrago puts them down with bolt rounds. Ebellius catches one leaping at him in mid-air and closes his power fist around the cultist’s body with a snap of ozone and of bones.

  ‘This is just like Corolis,’ Ebellius says. His voice is loud and booming. ‘Just like the caves. The heretic militia, and their damnation engines. There must have been sixty of them. Not a bolt-shell left, but I had the launcher.’ He rolls his gauntlet into a fist and thumps it against his chestplate. The cyclone launcher mounted on his shoulder clicks and grinds in sympathy. ‘I emptied the missile rack,’ he says. ‘Caught them in the collapse. I was the only one to walk out–’

  ‘Through the dust,’ Maeklus says, interrupting him. ‘We know. If you plan to collapse this place too, then please catch me in it. I would rather be buried than listen to another of your old boasts.’

  His voice is not loud, or booming. It is a seldom-used rasp. Maeklus rarely has much to say, but if anyone can draw him, it is Ebellius. To one outside the Archangels, it might seem that they antagonise one another, but Darrago has known them both long enough to know better.

  It is just a kind of balance.

  ‘Look at them run,’ Ebellius says, ignoring Maeklus. ‘I said it was just like Corolis!’

  But Darrago can see what they are doing. They aren’t running. They are redirecting. Moving like the tide to crowd around Sanyctus.

  The cultists scrabble at his armour plates and try to pull him to his knees, even as he cuts them down with his lightning claws. They are targeting his armour joints to destabilise him. Trying to maim him and pull him to his knees, all the while screaming those same words, over and over.

  Blood for the Blessed.

  Darrago kills his way through to Sanyctus, reaching him only as the last of the cultists falls to his brother’s claws.

  ‘Adiccio,’ Darrago says.

  Sanyctus takes a breath. Darrago can see it in the fractional movement of his armoured shoulders.

  ‘Arthemio,’ Sanyctus says, and there is not just anger in his voice then, but grief too. ‘He is gone.’

  And Darrago sees. The fifth member of Victorno’s squad, Arthemio, is lying amongst the dead, surrounded by those timeworn bones. His armour is still glittering with ice from teleportation.

  ‘I saw him fall. Before the heretics swarmed us,’ Sanyctus says. ‘He did not say a word. I saw him and he saw me, and then he just fell. It must have been the teleport.’

  ‘Something in the storm,’ Darrago says, absently.

  He has lost many brothers in service to the Throne. It is always painful, but it is more so when the death is quiet. When it is the kind that cannot be fought or answered.

  Darrago bows his head.

  ‘May the Angel watch over him,’ he says.

  ‘We must go.’

  The words belong to Victorno. The sergeant’s armour is chipped and scored and the heavy head of his thunder hammer is blackened from the power field’s activation. From the slaughter. Ebellius and Maeklus stand beside him. Darrago knows that there is grief in them too, just as he knows how they will cope with it. Ebellius will make jests that he does not mean. Maeklus will say nothing, until they return to the Tear.

  ‘The mission still stands,’ Victorno says. ‘We make for the Crown before they can complete the rite. Before the storm breaks.’

  Darrago nods. Sanyctus is still looking down at Arthemio. Darrago puts his hand to his shoulder guard to draw him away.

  ‘Aye,’ Sanyctus says. ‘Before it breaks.’

  Not far from the first of the ossuaries, Darrago and his brothers find those amongst the shrine’s mortal defenders who did not defect. Darrago remembers the Militia Gloria from the thirty days he spent at the shrine. Everywhere in the Imperium has a standing army, especially if it is deemed sacred, and Sanguis Gloria is no different. They are pilgrims too, of a kind – those who chose to stay and take up arms to defend the shrine, rather than returning to their far-flung homes.

  The bodies of the Militia Gloria surround Darrago as he treads the memorial hall alongside his brothers, crunching broken glass underfoot. The dead are not clean and timeworn as they were in the ossuary. These deaths were messy. There is very little white and gold left to their uniforms. Everything is blackened and reddened. Shell casings and discarded powercells lie everywhere.

  ‘They fought bravely,’ Victorno says. ‘Desperately.’

  Darrago looks around and nods. The Militia Gloria are not the only dead. The cultists and converted were bled here too. Their linen-wrapped bodies lie alongside the militia. Their jagged knives and their scavenged guns. With the mess that has been made of them, the two factions are almost indistinguishable. He curls his hand tighter around the banner pole.

  ‘They were devoted,’ he says.

  The memorial hall is one of the main thoroughfares into the shrine proper. It is clad with plasterwork murals on both sides that depict the Passing of the Chalice. The murals show hundreds of mortals clad in white with their hands outstretched as the primarch Sanguinius holds out the chalice to them. Sanguinius himself is rendered entirely in gold leaf and rubies. He catches so much light that his shape becomes unclear. Hard to look at.

  ‘They meant to hold them here.’ Maeklus is at the head of the group, as always. The heavy flamer he carries makes him a pathfinder. A clearer of ways. He stands before an archway which was once a doorway. It was once barricaded, too, but now splintered wood is all that remains of either. Blast marks pock the stonework and plaster, and dust is still spiralling in the air. That is where most of the militia lie. Darrago notices that even in death, they are still gripping their lasguns tightly.

  ‘Devot
ed,’ Sanyctus says, looking too. ‘You are right about that.’

  Darrago can hear gunfire echoing from the way ahead. The shrine carries and bends the noise.

  ‘We keep moving,’ Victorno says. ‘Succeed where they could not.’

  Victorno takes another step towards what is left of the door that the militia tried to hold, and there is a noise. Movement amongst the dead. Then a bright light and a crack of air. Las-fire splashes harmlessly across the face of Victorno’s raised shield.

  ‘No further!’

  The voice belongs to one of the Militia Gloria. She pushes herself upright against the wall and holds her lasgun pointed at them in shaking hands. Her white and gold uniform is blackened and spattered with blood, but Darrago sees the mark of rank on her. Shrine-sergeant. He sees, too, the marks that the enemy left on her.

  A deep wound bisects the shrine-sergeant’s face, from her jawline to her shaved scalp, marring the faith-tattoos there. Speaking opens the cut afresh, sending beads of blood into the creases in her skin. The woman’s heart rate is elevated and thready, her breathing shallow.

  Victorno lowers his shield.

  ‘Enough,’ he says. ‘We are not the enemy.’

  The shrine-sergeant blinks. Her pupils are dark and dilated.

  ‘We do not have time for this,’ Maeklus says.

  His words come over the vox so that the mortal cannot hear them. They are not callous or cruel. Maeklus is neither. He is being logical, as always. Victorno only sends one word in reply.

  ‘Wait.’

  ‘You say that you are not the enemy,’ the shrine-sergeant says. Her words collide and run together. ‘Neither were they, either. Not to begin with. But they became enemies all the same.’

  It is Sanyctus who takes another step forwards then. The shrine-sergeant snaps her rifle over to him, but she does not fire.

  ‘No further,’ she says, again.

  Sanyctus moves slowly. Carefully. He unlocks his helm and lifts it free to reveal his face.

  ‘If she shoots, she could have your other eye,’ Ebellius says, over the vox.

  Sanyctus does not acknowledge Ebellius’ words, but Victorno does. He fixes his eye-lenses on Ebellius, who nods.

  ‘Merely an observation, brother-sergeant,’ he says, in his smiling voice.

  ‘We mean you no harm, shrine-sergeant.’ Sanyctus modulates his voice to speak to the mortal, softening it. ‘We were sent here to save this place. We are Blood Angels.’

  She blinks again, then looks at each of them in turn. Her eyes fix on Darrago last of all and the company standard he carries, and then her face falls as she realises what she is looking at, and what that means.

  ‘Blood Angels,’ she moans. ‘I fired upon angels.’

  The shrine-sergeant lowers her rifle.

  ‘Forgive me, lords,’ she says, and she goes to one knee amongst the dead. ‘I have failed. In defence of the shrine. In deference.’

  ‘No,’ Victorno cuts her off. ‘There is no forgiveness due. No failure either. Not yet. Not while you live.’

  ‘What can I do?’ she asks.

  ‘You have a choice,’ Victorno says. ‘You can allow your injuries to claim you, or you can fight.’

  The shrine-sergeant glances down at the lasgun in her hands. The weapon is clean and well-maintained. An aquila has been carefully hand-painted onto the stock. It is fine work. When she looks back at them, her eyes are still dark and dilated, but they are clearer now.

  ‘That is not a choice,’ she says. ‘I swore to protect this place. The chalice. I will fight.’

  ‘There is fire in this one,’ Ebellius says.

  Victorno puts down his thunder hammer, head first. The sound of it on the stone is like a tolling bell. He puts out his gauntleted hand to the shrine-sergeant.

  ‘Then stand,’ he says.

  She reaches out and takes hold of his hand and he pulls her to her feet. She is still shaking when he lets her go, but her face is set and she keeps her balance.

  ‘What is your name, shrine-sergeant?’ Darrago asks.

  ‘Orako,’ she says. ‘Talina Orako.’

  In answer, the Blood Angels name themselves in turn. Darrago sees Orako mouthing the shapes of their names with a kind of reverence that he has seen many times in mortals. It is a reverence that has always made him feel vaguely uncomfortable.

  ‘Know this, Talina Orako,’ Victorno says. ‘We will not slow for you. We cannot protect you. We will take you as far as we can to allow you to rejoin what remains of your militia, but we can take you no further. Our path leads us to the Crown, and it will be bloody.’

  Orako puts one hand to the icon pinned to her uniform. The golden chalice.

  ‘Yes, lord,’ she says. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘There is no need to thank us,’ Victorno says, and this time Darrago can hear the smile in his voice. ‘Nor to call any one of us “lord”. Names and ranks will do.’

  Victorno has always been the same. He has no patience for graces. Deeds are his only concern.

  Orako blinks again. She nods, slowly.

  ‘Yes, brother-sergeant,’ she says.

  They follow Orako through the shrine. It is a labyrinth of arch-roofed corridors that twist and divide, leading to other ossuaries. To cathedrals and prayer chambers. To the unadorned billets of the Militia Gloria, and the spare halls used by the pilgrims. Those in particular are filthy and worn. Sheaves of prayer paper scud across the floor as the Terminators pass through, pulled into eddies by the static cling of their weapons’ power fields.

  ‘This is the swiftest path,’ Orako says, sweeping her lasgun side to side. ‘It will take us to the central spine, and the lifter platforms that lead to the Crown.’

  Darrago knows that keeping pace with them taxes the shrine-sergeant. He can hear it in the beat of her mortal heart. He knows that it is more than just the pace that taxes her, though. More even than her injuries. It is the whispering, too. The ever-present words spoken in reverse that carry on the cool air. Despite what Darrago is, those whispers pull at his edges and set him ill at ease. He watches the way Orako’s fingers tap a nervous rhythm on her lasgun’s stock and listens to the quick and thready beat of her mortal heart, and wonders how much of it she can endure.

  How much of it they should allow her to endure.

  ‘Your militia,’ Darrago says. ‘Where are they?’

  Orako frowns. Her pace falters, as if thinking and moving are a struggle to do at once.

  ‘The Climb,’ she says. ‘They were evacuating pilgrims and innocents down through the Spinal Climb.’

  Darrago has seen the Climb before. It is narrow and twisting and runs up from the shrine’s feet to its crown. Much too narrow for power armour, never mind Terminator plate. For a moment, he cannot help thinking of the pilgrims and the innocents pushing their way down that spinal stairway. They will be afraid. Their hearts will be loud.

  Like prey-animals running.

  Darrago shakes his head, hard. He shakes the thought clear, too. The vile thought.

  ‘And you know this from the vox?’ Victorno asks. ‘You have communications?’

  Orako shakes her head.

  ‘The shrine-general sent a runner,’ she says, then she stops walking completely. ‘He sent Luriet, because of his quick feet.’ Her face twitches and she sniffs. ‘He was quick, but not enough. They cut him to ribbons. The traitors. The Devoted.’

  Orako blinks. Her heart rate is quicker still. To Darrago it sounds like drums.

  ‘The things they did,’ she whispers. ‘The things I saw.’

  Victorno is watching her carefully, his helmed head slightly tilted. Darrago can read that look and knows what the sergeant is thinking. What Orako’s fate will be if she has seen Tur Zalak, or one of the creatures summoned by his rites. Mortals cannot be allowed to know of such things.

  ‘What did you see?’ Victorno asks, his voice deliberately level.

  Orako’s tapping on the gun stock stops and she looks at him.


  ‘Violence,’ she says. ‘Such violence.’

  Then she shakes her head too. That same quick shake.

  ‘Forgive my distraction,’ she says, and the barest smile flickers on her face. ‘This day has been wearing.’

  Ebellius laughs at that. It is not as loud as usual, as if he has tempered it to keep from startling her.

  ‘A truth if I ever heard one,’ he says.

  Together, they press on through the pilgrim halls, past crumpled sheets and rolled blankets and over stone worn smooth by thousands upon thousands of bare feet. There are picts and inked drawings pinned to the walls around them. Hundreds of faces look out at Darrago, watching with frozen eyes. Some picts are new. Some are yellowed by time, tattered and frayed. They are pinned over and on top of one another and they ruffle and turn in the cold air that blows through the shrine.

  ‘The picts,’ Darrago asks. ‘Why are they pinned here?’

  ‘They are the devoted dead,’ Orako says. ‘Those who died on their path to the shrine, or on the Climb itself. Those who live pin the images here as a memorial. To commemorate them.’

  ‘What claims them?’ Sanyctus asks. He has set his helm back in place now, so the question is accompanied by the snarl of external vox. ‘Why are there so many dead?’

  Orako glances at him briefly.

  ‘Many things claim them. Starvation. Thirst. Exhaustion. There are no provisions made for those who make the Climb. Faith will take them to the summit. To the chalice.’

  ‘Have you ever made the Climb?’ Sanyctus asks.

  Orako nods. She is back to tapping that insistent rhythm on the stock of her gun, a nervous action.