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- Aaron Dembski-Bowden
Blood and Fire
Blood and Fire Read online
Prologue
These Words, These Lies
Grimaldus. They lied to us about the Mannheim Gap. They sent us there to die.
You know of whom I speak. We cannot outrun the echoes of Khattar. We pay the price now for our virtue in the past.
We are sons of Dorn and we know nothing of surrender, even when victory is out of reach. What concerns us is injustice. Ignominy. If we could be said to fear anything, it is the shame of our legacy being fouled by lies.
And if the Imperium remembers us at all, it will be as one of mankind’s most grievous failures. But we have not failed mankind; mankind has failed itself. The bitter hearts and closed minds of weak men and women will see us dead before dawn.
So be it.
Our enemies do not move in the light, where they run the risk of facing our blades. Nor are they truly in the shadows, but they occupy positions of power so far above us in the hierarchy of man that exact identities become meaningless. They have the power and influence to deceive us, and deceive us they did.
The Celestial Lions will never leave this world. A handful of us remain, but we know the truth. We died at the Mannheim Gap. We died the day the sun rose over the scrap-iron bodies of alien gods.
I
Season of Fire
We were warned, as if we needed warning, not to go out into the storm. The air was already severe enough to scald unprotected flesh, and while our armour offered a shield against the elements, it wouldn’t protect us for long. All trace of our sacred colours was already flayed away by the gritty wind, leaving us clad in gunmetal grey, stripped of paint and heraldry. I wondered, just briefly, if there was a metaphor in that moment. If so, it remained for one of keener humour to uncover.
The downed gunship was a beached, smashed memory of a thing, all lethality stolen by the savagery of its crash landing. In contrast, the Valkyrie we had acquired from the 101st Steel Legion sat hunched on the sands, a bored crow with its curved wings spread wide. I’d had cause to use this vehicle many times in the past month, and I could not dissuade myself of the notion that its machine-spirit despised me. If gunships could scowl, that one most certainly did. I looked back at it, its turbine engines still howling impatiently, its grey-green hull being abraded to dull silver by the desert wind. I could hear just how little the engines enjoyed eating this dust.
The pilot was a uniformed blur behind the scratched windshield. He had volunteered for this mission, despite its risks. I admired him for it.
The weeks since my convalescence had passed slowly. I was coming to believe I would never be wholly comfortable with the humans’ regard. The people of Helsreach looked upon me as some kind of icon, purely for the virtue of doing my duty. Why did it make me uncomfortable? There are a hundred difficult answers to that. We of the Adeptus Astartes are a breed apart from the humans we might have been. Let that be enough of an explanation.
I turned back to the downed Storm Eagle. Whatever colours it had borne into battle were long gone, stolen by the storm. Its symbols of allegiance were similarly eroded by the ash and dirt in the turbulent air.
Cyneric ducked under the slanted wing, one side of his armour still black in patches where it hadn’t yet faced the storm. In his left hand, an auspex scanner sputtered and clicked, murdered by the storm’s interference. He said nothing, which was answer enough.
I climbed the rolled hull, braced against the wind by the magnetic locks on the bottom of my boots. The last oath-scroll on my armour was ripped away. I let the wind steal it, to take my inscribed Litanies of Hate into the storm. It felt curiously apt.
The bulkhead was sealed from within. I drew my crozius maul, and heard its energy field buzzing against the grit in the air. It took a single blow, with the sound of a muted belltower, and the bulkhead was gone. I hauled the mangled door free with one hand, and cast it down to the ground. Cyneric still said nothing. It was a habit I liked to encourage.
The interior of the crashed Storm Eagle was set at a stark angle, with equipment crates and loose weapons scattered across the confined crew bay. The cockpit was no better, but what the reinforced visor screen hid from the outside was revealed at once: a lone Space Marine, clad in burnished gold, lying in ungainly repose where the deck met the weapon-racked walls. I knew those colours. I knew the Chapter’s heraldry.
What I didn’t know was what this gunship was doing all the way out here, so far from Hive Volcanus.
Cyneric dropped down behind me, the chains binding his weapons to his armour rattling in sympathy to his movements. I heard his breathing over the squad’s vox link, then came the curse, as he saw what I saw.
‘It is the Lions,’ he said.
It was just one Lion. The pilot. And from the faint signs of darkening decay in evidence once I removed his azure helm, he was several days dead. None of this made sense.
Before I rose, I pressed my rosarius amulet to the dead warrior’s forehead. Cyneric questioned this. Why offer the Lion these last rites? Was he not of another Chapter?
It was not disrespectful to question my actions. It was his duty. He must learn what I do and why I did it.
As I stood again, I asked Cyneric why he objected to this salute of a fallen warrior’s soul.
‘Because he is not a knight,’ he told me. ‘The Lion was not one of us.’
I had used the very same reasons myself, often enough. Even with the noble Salamanders, not so long ago. Yet there were exceptions.
‘He does not wear the cross of our calling,’ I admitted, ‘but he was Dorn’s son, as surely as we are. Bloodlines reach beyond Chapter heraldry, Cyneric.’
‘Forgive me, master.’
‘Forgiveness is irrelevant. There is nothing to forgive.’
Cyneric had only served at my side for three weeks, and still felt the weight of tradition and expectation that comes with the chance of bearing a skull helm. It would be my choice whether to admit him into the sacred mysteries of the Chapter cult; he would be a Chaplain at my command, or he would return to the rank and file.
Cyneric was my Lord Helbrecht’s idea. Conversely, going out to the gunship was my decision. I could never abide mysteries.
Mag-locked to the dead warrior’s belt was a hololithic imagifier the size of a human fist. Once freed and activated, it gave rise to a flickering blue image – the ghost of another warrior in another city – wearing the heraldry of the Celestial Lions and carrying a skull-faced helm beneath one arm. Despite the wraithly image, I could see that the warrior’s face was black, the black of birth on a distant jungle world. By contrast, my flesh was as white as veined marble. I had no clear memory of childhood. All I recalled of my pre-initiation infancy was howling white wind and the bite of frost on the fingers.
‘Julkhara,’ I greeted the hololithic ghost.
‘Grimaldus,’ it said, and its voice wavered the same way as the image itself. ‘They lied to us about the Mannheim Gap. They sent us there to die.’
As the recording finished in a spurt of flawed electrics, I heard the storm waiting for us outside. It was getting harder, heavier, surely more abrasive. The Imperial Guard gunship we had acquired would never make it back to the city if the weather worsened any further. This venture had already been delayed by several days, until an adequate break in the storm front.
‘Master,’ Cyneric said.
I sensed the questions coming and warded them away with a shake of my head. None of this made sense. I needed time to think.
Without a word, we emerged back into the fiercening wind, moving to the Valkyrie. Its troop bay was an orderly mess of untouched crew seats, too small for either Cyneric or myself in our armour.
‘Back to the city.’
The city. My city. Helsreach, the hive that claimed me as its champion; the city that changed how I see my own oath of service. We are Templars, and we attack, we advance, as the last proud knights of the Great Crusade. But we were crusading for the right of mankind to exist. Our wrath must be pure, else it is worthless and futile. We are judged in life for more than the evil we destroy. We are judged for what virtues we represent, for the ideals that lie behind our blades.
I had thought I would die on this world. I was certain of it, until the very moment death came for me. The enemy entombed me beneath the fallen Temple of the Emperor Ascendant, doing me the honour of a cairn while I still drew breath. Weeks after my recovery, I thought of it in the quiet hours of each day: the privilege of such a sacred tombstone. It was almost a shame to survive.
But Armageddon didn’t kill me. We would leave the world soon – in three days I would sail with the High Marshal aboard the Eternal Crusader, back to war. The wounded hive I was sworn to defend had granted me its relics, and I would take them with me as we waged war across the stars.
Caution brought us in low over Helsreach. Several of the city’s districts were still in the hands of the mongrel invaders, and although the Season of Fire had forced an unwelcome cessation of hostilities, there were nonetheless forces from both sides willing to risk the breaks between dust monsoons in the hopes of bleeding their entrenched foes. Anti-air rockets were a cursed hope in the wind, but they still spat skywards at our gunships and supply landers with irritating frequency.
I heard the city-wide sirens even before we were over the fallen outer walls – another storm warning, wailing of worse to come.
Helsreach itself no longer existed as anything more than a battlefield. We had killed the city while fighting to save it. Its skyline was an amputated thing of cleaved towers and – in the rare hours the wind died down – pillars of black smoke. The central spire – modest by the standards of many hives – still stood despite extensive shelling from both sides, now home to huddled masses of stinking alien invaders taking shelter from the storms.
The true city that spread around the spire’s foundations was a flattened ruin. Of the millions that had lived there a year before, perhaps a quarter yet drew breath. Most were holed up in underground bunkers, or in what precious few intact districts were still warded by the steel ring of Guard armour battalions. The city had been reinforced by huge numbers of fresh Guard soldiers, just in time to linger in a seasonal deadlock. Tens of thousands of rifles going unfired.
The pilot took us through the stumps of shattered buildings, veering between fallen habitation blocks to minimise the risk of enemy sky-fire. It also shielded us from the worst of the wind, calming the Valkyrie’s judders.
Soon enough, we cut over the corpse of Stormherald, reduced to a collapsed castle of scrap and slag, spread across two city blocks. The wind had scored away all sign of Imperial loyalty upon its armour plating, and the wrecked spires of its shoulder battlements were too ruined to speak of any gothic majesty. Salvaged metal alien effigies resisted the storm – iron war banners erected by whatever foul clan flooded aboard the downed Titan at the end of its proud life.
We passed overhead, over this monument to defiance in the face of failure, and I thought of Zarha, the Crone of Invigilata, whose mangled remains lay there still. She would be rotting in the cold fluid of her life support cradle, unburied and unblessed. That injustice grieved me. Would that I could have done something to change it, but Stormherald’s corpse lay deep in enemy-held territory.
Cyneric stood with me in the troop bay, watching the city roll below from the open bay door.
‘By forcing the gunship out into these storms, do we abuse its machine-spirit?’
The philosophy of biomechanical life was not beyond me, but I needed Cyneric’s mind on more relevant matters.
‘Focus,’ I told him, and his reply was a curt nod. He was learning.
We touched down on the Kruja-17-SEC landing platform – a barricaded and bunkered landing pad built over the broken straits of Hel’s Highway’s westernmost run. Baneblades and multiple patterns of Leman Russ front-line tanks sat in the storm, scratched bare by the wind. As the ramp slammed down, Cyneric walked away first, out into the wind and towards the closest entrance to the flakboarded forward command bunker.
The sky was black with ash and the promise of a vicious night at the mercy of the coming storm. I hesitated, looking back to the pilot, but he was already unbuckled and throwing on his environment suit for the short run to the bunker. Three months before, instinct wouldn’t have told me to look back. If nothing else, I thank this world for the lessons I have learned while walking its surface.
Organised chaos reigned in the command bunker. Against the walls, cogitators, auspex relays and vox-engines clicked, ticked and pulsed. Humans scattered before us in the screen-lit darkness. Several saluted, not yet shaken from the habit; their signs of formality and respect were meaningless to me.
‘I require a clean vox link to the Eternal Crusader.’
Officers and technicians scurried to obey. Contact with the ships in orbit was sporadic at best, and contact with the other cities was relayed through the fleet in the rare hours it functioned at all. The planetary satellite network, and the convenience of communication it brought, was naught but a memory.
One of the tech officers saluted as she came before me. ‘We have a link, Reclusiarch. It should hold until the storm breaks.’
‘My thanks.’ A moment’s attention activated my helm’s own vox-reader, scanning for uncorrupted local channels. Icons flashed and chimed on the left edge of my retinal display. Three of them flickered red, then settled green.
‘Reclusiarch,’ came a voice half-killed by vox crackle – one of the countless Chapter serf bridge crew aboard the flagship. ‘I live to serve.’
‘I require four tasks completed within the hour. First, you are to make contact with every vessel of the Celestial Lions Chapter still in orbit – I need a full accounting of their war fleet. Second, contact whatever command structure remains in place at Hive Volcanus and acquire a detailed report of every Adeptus Astartes casualty in that region since the war’s commencement. Third, Cyneric and I need a gunship to return us to the Eternal Crusader. If the storm hits before you are able to arrange it, we will risk teleportation.’
‘Your will be done, Reclusiarch. And the fourth order?’
I had to be careful.
‘Make contact with the ranking officer of the Celestial Lions, garrisoned at Hive Volcanus. The transmission will be monitored, no matter what encryption processes we run. Record the following message, deliver it, and say nothing more.’
‘As you command. The message, Reclusiarch?’
‘Only six words. “No pity. No remorse. No fear”.’
II
High Marshal
Ten thousand years ago.
So many of our stories begin with those words. Ten thousand years ago, when the Chapters were Legions. Ten thousand years ago, when the Emperor’s sons walked the stars. Ten thousand years ago when the galaxy caught fire, as though it hadn’t been burning ever since.
The Adeptus Astartes are the keepers of the oldest lore, and even among our archives so much has been lost. Truth twists and warps over time, as the stories change to reflect the reader’s vision. Whole swathes of the galaxy know nothing of the Heresy and the Crusade before it. Thousands of worlds pray to the Emperor not as a man, but as a god or a spirit; a warrior-avatar; a benevolent entity beyond the grave; a seasonal avatar that brings annual floods and commands the sun to rise each dawn.
Each time I return to the flagship, I find myself dwelling on th
e nature of truth. Our archives are among the purest in the Imperium, but even they are little more than fragments of what happened. Our reverence isn’t reserved for scripture and story. When the words ten thousand years ago stir the blood of any Templar, it is not because of the scrolls and holorecords we have preserved through the generations. It is because of vessels like the Eternal Crusader.
She sailed the stars ten thousand years ago, fighting in the wars that forged our species. We walk in the footsteps of those ancient knights of the Great Crusade. We command the same vessel, train in the same chambers and bring the same wrath. When so many words have been lost, this is a truth we can cling to.
I thought all of this again that day, as Cyneric followed me from the landing bay. I could sense his uneasiness at the respect we were both shown, as well. When I had been a Chaplain, Chapter serfs would salute me. As Reclusiarch, they showed much greater reverence. We allowed our serfs to carry ceremonial weapons of their own – usually unpowered blades and daggers. They drew their swords and knelt, head down against the reversed hilt. When we passed other Templars in the dim corridors, they did not make the sign of the aquila. They crossed forearms, banging their fists to their breastplates, forming the crusader’s cross.
Cyneric was still silent when we walked alone. He wasn’t used to his equals showing him such elevated respect.
‘The discomfort passes,’ I told him. This was both true and untrue. My liege Helbrecht had told me it passed, and he was a warrior who would die before speaking a lie. The discomfort had not yet passed for me, but I trusted my lord’s assurance.
The Eternal Crusader is a fortress in the void; it would take months to traverse if one walked every hallway and chamber. I led Cyneric through the corridors, taking the grinding elevators between decks, heedless of whether we moved through populated areas or not. My targeting reticule leapt from door to door, figure to figure, scrolling with biometric data and basic scanning lore. As we stood on one of the ascension platforms, rising up through the decks, I turned to regard Cyneric’s plain, scarred features and a thought occurred to me. To my shame, it was one that should have occurred to me much earlier.