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

  “Rip them apart!” he bellowed, as much to himself as an order to his warriors. “Kill for us or be killed by us, you maggot-blood wretches!”

  Tancred was suddenly at his side. Perhaps the torturer has been there all along but it was only now that Iskavan noticed him. It mattered little, and it took a moment of effort to pull the crozius away from the neck of his second. The weapon moaned at the blood denied it. “Magnificence, the bound daemon-forms are tearing themselves apart!”

  He gestured with his tentacle hand and the Dark Apostle saw the rank of wheeled black bone cages, marooned now in the midst of the infighting helots who were supposed to be dragging them toward the enemy. Inside each enclosure a minor daemon beast was held. They were throwing themselves against the bars in bloody madness, and beating their skulls and limbs against the confinement. These were not the towering princes of the warp that the followers of the eight-blade star lived in fear of; they were smaller, bestial life forms, the empyrean’s equivalent of animal predators. They possessed a savagery that nothing from the mortal realm could match, and in conflict they would sow fear and disruption in enemy ranks, provided they were directed properly. Now they were spoiled and crazed, worthless in battle for anything other than cannon fodder. Iskavan cast a disgusted look around and watched the keepers of the beasts fighting one another while others were being chewed apart by their very charges.

  “Wasted! Wasted!” he spat, lamenting the finely wrought battle plans he had laboured on in the days prior to their arrival on Cybele. The Dark Apostle drew up his crozius with its red blades shining like a beacon, and bellowed out his commands. “Clear a path through these chattering bastards! Cut the daemons free!”

  “My lord, the creatures are broken minded—they will tear apart everything in their path!”

  “Of course, you fool!” Iskavan spat, waving his weapon, “but all that will be there will be the corpse-god’s men and those fit for death! Now by my decree, release them!”

  The Word Bearers parted like a falling wave and drew back from the skirmish lines. At Tancred’s direction, sharpshooters blasted the fat phase-iron padlocks off the bone cages from a safe distance. As one the inhuman ravagers threw themselves into the melee, fighting and eating and gorging on fresh meat.

  Sergeant Koris and his men met the largest of the things as it stumbled toward them, licking gore from its mouth-parts. For a moment, the veteran thought the daemon had two heads, as it appeared that one of them was attached to the end of its arm. But then it popped the skull into its mouth and crunched it down, flicking the blood of one of its unholy brethren aside in an almost human gesture. It threw back its head and hooted wetly.

  The daemon had too many legs, some of them arched upward in spindly arcs of bone, others low to the ground with fat ropes of muscle. A nest of barbed forelimbs snapped at the air as it came toward them, on its sinuous neck bobbed a broad oval head that seemed to be a random collection of eyes and teeth. It spat out a thin line of black drool before surging forward, to come at the Blood Angels in a stumbling run.

  Koris had no need to remind his men to maintain fire discipline. All of them knew just how low on ammunition they were, and not a single Marine would waste even one bolt round on a chanced miss. When the warp-beast was close enough that its fetor engulfed them, they shot it. Rounds clacked off the bony claws and egg sacs in its torso with hollow sounds, leaving no mark of their passing. Other more precise shots blinded eyes or gouged divots of hairy flesh from its hide. It was heedless, however, and the Blood Angels scattered as it dived into them. Koris saw Alactus sweep away under the thing, but by the luck of Sanguinis he dodged each crushing footfall as it passed over him. Corvus was not blessed by the same fortune: he spun out as the beast ripped at him with a sickle barb. Another Marine, one of the Bellus contingent whose name Koris had not learned, died as his bolter choked on an empty magazine. The daemon opened him up with mad fury, shaking its head so that the razor teeth in its mouth could crack his ceramite cladding. As it swallowed him, Koris gave the command to fix bayonets, snapping his combat knife into the magnetic mount on the bolter’s foregrip.

  And then, through the mass of screaming, dying helots came a dozen more Blood Angels, their guns fat with ammunition and spitting fire.

  “Koris!” Sachiel’s voice hummed over the communicator. “Cover fire!”

  “With what-?” The sergeant demanded, but his words were ignored. He saw the Sanguinary High Priest come forward. He was brandishing his chainsword and pistol and laying rounds into the mottled hide of the warp-beast. The eager fool! He’ll be killed!

  The creature sensed the white and red shape in its peripheral vision and spun in a tight circle. As it did so, it whipped out its barbed tail to knock down a dozen more Blood Angels with callous relish. The shock of the strike pushed Koris reeling against a tilted headstone, so that his fire was directed away from the creature’s head.

  Rafen saw the beast’s move coming a split-second before Arkio and he dropped, snapping out a kick at his brother’s ankle. His sibling fell just as the spiny club of meat at the end of the creature’s tail thrummed over their heads. “Watch it!” he added.

  Arkio’s eyes were elsewhere. “Sachiel! Guard yourself!”

  The priest went off-balance. The beast was far faster than he had thought; its huge legs belied the thing’s nimble movement. He slashed the chattering chainsword at one of the meaty limbs, but his cut was shallow and did nothing but anger the daemon-beast more. With its hindmost claw, it tore into the Marine who stood to Sachiel’s right, then threw his corpse into the priest. The impact tossed Sachiel into a shallow crater and the lanyard connecting his sword to his gauntlet snapped. The blade buried itself upright in the mud, teeth growling.

  Dark malice glittered in the creature’s myriad eyes and it flicked at the dirt. It resembled a housecat with a rodent, unwilling to bring the kill too quickly for all the sport it would lose. It ignored the bolt rounds that bit into it from the other Marines. It wanted to play.

  Rafen squinted into the target sight of his gun and saw Sachiel’s face behind his half-mask. The priest’s skin was pale and drawn with exertion. With unfocussed eyes he was winding up his flank where the beast had casually cut him. Rafen’s finger froze on the trigger. If he had to he would grant the priest the Emperor’s peace rather than let him be a meal for this monster.

  Then, like a rising rocket, Arkio burst from his cover and crossed the distance to the beast in a dozen loping steps. The daemon gave him a desultory swipe, angry to be interrupted in its game, but the young Blood Angel dodged easily. He swooped to snare Sachiel’s fallen chainsword. He brought the buzzing blade around in a flickering arc and cut cleanly through a knee joint. A leg as thick as two men fell away in a gout of thick blood, and the creature let out a thunderous shriek. With one splayed claw it pinned Sachiel to the dirt, and snapped at Arkio with the others, probing and shifting in place.

  “He’s going to kill it.” Rafen heard Turcio’s comment over his ear-bead. The Marine was unable to keep the awe at Arkio’s daring from his voice. Rafen fired into the beast, doing his best to cover his brother’s actions. Arkio darted back and forth beneath the animal, slashing at soft parts that lay between iron-hard pads of chitin. Gushes of black fluid spurted from the wounds with ropes of slick, slime-covered intestines drooping from their open mouths.

  Sachiel made some sort of strangled yelp—possibly a call for aid, or a warning to Arkio—and his hand flapped feebly at the creature’s claw. The Sanguinary Priest attempted to stab the beast with the acus placidus on his wristguard, but the steel needle could not penetrate the hard bony spines. A shiver ran though the daemon, and for a second Rafen saw a shimmer of pain in its eyes. The agony of its wounds was at last making its way to the thing’s tiny feral brain, enraging it even further.

  Before he could react, the monster coiled all its movement into one lightning-fast spin, lashing out at the irritant beneath it. Arkio did not cry out
when one of the creature’s blade-quills rammed through his armour. The yellow cartilage emerged from his shoulder with a mist of bright blood about it.

  Rafen felt his stomach fill with ice; such a wound would surely be mortal, and his sibling’s life was measured now only in seconds. Rafen’s vision blurred crimson with a haze of hate and he bounded from cover, heedlessly racing at the creature. From the edge of his rational mind, something hot and black began to uncoil. The dark shadow of the gene-curse boiled up inside him, desperate for release. He bellowed an incoherent war cry, his bolter running red-hot as he emptied it into the beast. Rafen saw Arkio dead, cast aside in the mud, with the whirring chainsword still ticking over in his mailed grip. As lucidity threatened to flee from him, Rafen had a mirror-bright flash of memory of his father, on the day that he and Arkio had set off for Angel’s Fall and the place of challenge. Watch over the boy, Rafen. I ask nothing else of you. His father’s face seemed to flow and merge like mercury, shifting into that of the primarch, and Arkio.

  Then the impossible became real before his eyes. Arkio rose in one swift motion from a puddle of rainwater and his own blood, apparently ignorant of the vital fluids that streaked his wargear or the black tear in his chest. With a single stab, he drove the sputtering, buzzing teeth of Sachiel’s weapon into the throat of the daemon-predator, and buried the weapon to its hilt. The gnashing blade severed the thing’s vocal chords and cut off its cries in mid-scream. Arkio rolled the weapon back through the beast’s gut and it came apart with a noise like ripping cloth. Organs and undigested pieces of men emptied on to the grass in wet heaps. The beast wheezed and died.

  As quickly as it had appeared, Rafen’s rage abated, and he was at his brother’s side, holding him up. Arkio gave him a wan smile and wiped black gore from his face.

  “How could you…?” Rafen began, words failing him. “The wound…”

  Arkio face was pale with blood loss but his eyes were as hard as diamond. “Faith is my armour, brother. Sanguinius protects.”

  “By the grail, he speaks the truth!” Sachiel approached them, favouring his injured flank. “Did you see him, Rafen? The Lord Primogenitor himself would have been proud to witness such bravery!”

  Rafen said nothing and nodded. He was unable to draw his eyes away from his brother’s injury; the cut was deep and bloody, but where it should have torn open arteries and exposed his gory bones, the gash was wet with life, almost as if it were knitting together as he watched.

  “Arkio, you are touched!” Sachiel added with a gleeful spark in his voice. But a seed of uneasiness was being lodged in Rafen’s heart.

  The artificial flatlands of the starport, once drab and featureless, were now stained with thousands of gallons of blood in all shades of crimson, from the rust-brown of humans to the bright scarlet that coursed through the veins of the Adeptus Astartes, and the night-black slicks of ichor from the corrupted ones and their minions. Cybele’s grasslands, which for so long had consumed the flesh and bone of the Imperium’s war dead, were now dyed with the gore of those who fought upon its soil.

  Surrounded by the ragged remains of his warband, Iskavan the Hated turned his too-wide mouth to the sky and screamed his rage at the dirty clouds. The sound of his anger cowed his men. It drowned out the constant impact of wreckage plunging from orbit. They were on the verge of losing the engagement to the Imperials, and it drove the Apostle into apoplexy.

  At last he recovered enough to speak coherently, instead of hissing and spitting. “What ill-starred fate is this?” he demanded of the night. “By the eight, we were promised victory this day!” Almost the instant the words left his corpse-like lips, the Dark Apostle was turning on Tancred, his crozius humming loudly. “You.” The Word Bearer champion loaded the word with absolute loathing and ire.

  The torturer willed himself into stillness, terrified that even the slightest gesture would reveal the duplicity of his earlier prognostication.

  “You told me you saw success, Tancred,” Iskavan’s voice hovered dangerously low. “Where is it?” he growled. “Where is my victory?”

  “Th-the manner of the Empyrean cannot always be—” the torturer fumbled at an excuse, but the Apostle backhanded him across the face.

  “Silence, pestilent fool!” He pushed Tancred away and advanced on his men. “The eye take these subhuman dregs! We are the sons of Lorgar, bearers of the word!” Raw fury blurred his features with an unholy psychic light. “We have lost our ships, our beasts and helots, but yet we still have our hate!” Iskavan pointed his crozius at them. “Hate enough to choke the bloody mongrels of the carrion god!”

  Iskavan expected the Word Bearers to roar back at him with hungry approval, but only silence greeted him. The Apostle was about to strike the nearest Traitor Marine dead for their intransigence when he suddenly realised why. A hooded form was walking through the unkempt lines, glittering with dark witch-fire.

  “Iskavan, my servant. Hear me.” The voice it spoke with was a breath from a rotted tomb.

  “Warmaster Garand…” For the briefest of instants, the Chaos champion’s face twisted in a sneer, but then he dropped to one knee and made the sign of the eightfold star. Without hesitation, the remainder of the Word Bearers mimicked his actions. The only sound was the thin keening of the accursed crozius. The weapon was nervous and afraid at the outpouring of ebon psi-energy that lapped about the hooded one’s body.

  “I would know your mind. Your intentions.” Breathy and disordered, the speech seemed to come from the hazed air itself.

  Iskavan could barely keep from spitting as he grated out a reply. “I intend no less than to fall on the man-beasts with the curse of great Lorgar on our lips! Kill and kill and not yield!”

  “No.” The shock of the denial was so great that Iskavan actually dared to look up and into the Stygian depths of the hood. A null void stared back at him. “You will leave this place. I command it.”

  A vein throbbed in the Dark Apostle’s face. “Lord, I… You cannot! We are Word Bearers! We do not retreat! Not again!”

  Malice hung in the air between them. “I must be mistaken. For a moment, I thought you had dared to question me, Apostle.”

  Iskavan forced himself to be calm. “No, warmaster. The error was mine.”

  “Just so.” The hooded figure shimmered, and for a moment it became ghostly and insubstantial. “Even now, your personal cruiser evades the mongrels to reach transport range of this world.” It pointed a crooked finger toward the horizon. “Recover your teleport beacon and prepare to evacuate.”

  “My lord—” began the Apostle, in one final, imploring entreaty.

  “Go now,” the voice added as an afterthought. Then as suddenly as it had appeared, the figure dissolved into the dark, leaving a psyker-helot quivering in its place. The twisted slave had briefly hosted a fragment of the warmaster’s essence. But that fleeting contact had been enough to warp it into a mess of singed flesh.

  Iskavan exploded with anger and roared, smashing the helot into bloody chunks with the crozius’ blades. “Tancred!” he shouted, eyes afire. “Gather the men! As the Warmaster commands—” he paused, the emphasis on Garand’s rank dripping venom, “—we quit this blighted place!”

  And so as dawn crept over the forest of broken monuments, Cybele once more was a domain of the Imperium of man; but the blight of the Word Bearers’ filthy touch was on everything, from the earth itself to the scars that crisscrossed the orange-purple sky. Rafen returned from a sweep of the port with Alactus to find Sachiel ministering to Arkio. He was blessing the works of Lucion as the Tech-marine fixed a ceramite patching solution over the gouges in his armour.

  The priest ended his litany with a whisper of the primarch’s name and turned, as if noticing Rafen for the first time. “Brother,” he began. “What of the enemy?”

  For a moment, Rafen was at a loss for words. He spread his hands to indicate the silent battlefield around them. “Gone,” he managed, at length.

/>   Arkio grinned, his perfect white teeth showing through his dirt-coated face. “I knew it would be so! In my bones, I felt it!”

  “There’s nothing left but the dead and the dying… and us.” Alactus noted. “We found a few helots here about, and they were dispatched without incident. They appear to have done our job for us, killing one another.”

  Sachiel nodded. “I have word from the Bellus. Inquisitor Stele will reach orbit in a matter of hours.”

  “They live? Emperor be praised.”

  “Indeed.” Sachiel continued. “The comrade inquisitor informed me that their long-range scanners detected the Dirge Eterna on a departure course. It seems we gave the sons of Lorgar a bloody nose that sent them scurrying back to the maelstrom!”

  Rafen shook his head. “That… cannot be. The Word Bearers do not retreat. It is not their way…” His jaw tightened. “Perhaps this is a ploy honoured priest. They may have salted Cybele with munitions or some sort of delayed-action weapon—”

  Sachiel’s lips twisted. “Rafen the Ready, always ready to find fault, eh?” He took a step closer. “Can you not accept that perhaps our strength of arms was enough to drive them back? Must you belittle our victory even as we hold it in our hands?”