[Dawn of War 01] - Dawn of War Read online

  “Where is Brom?” asked Gabriel curtly, as Isador came up the ramp of the Thunderhawk. “This concerns him also.”

  “He is smoking, captain, out in the forest,” answered Isador.

  “I would have thought that he would have better things to do,” replied Gabriel. “His men need discipline and courage drilling into them, Isador. After the fiasco on the walls of Magna Bonum, there is worse to tell.”

  “What has happened?”

  “The scouts returned with news of an excavated crater about ten kilometres from here,” began Corallis. “They were ambushed by a group of eldar rangers as they closed on its location, but successfully repelled the xenos. Strewn around the rim of the crater they found the bodies of a mob of orks—evidently they had also been interested in the crater for some reason—”

  “—and evidently the eldar did not want them to see it, for some reason,” interjected Gabriel.

  “Indeed. The scouts proceeded down into the crater, where they found a disturbing artefact. Some kind of altar, marked all over in runes that they could not decipher. They hastened to bring this news back to us, so that Librarian Akios might have the chance to see the writing,” finished Corallis, turning to Isador.

  “The involvement of the eldar on Tartarus is certainly unexpected. It bespeaks something terrible—the eldar do not concern themselves in the affairs of others without a reason, even if their reasons are often incomprehensible to us,” said Isador, distracted by the casual mention of the ancient, alien race. Then he realised why the eldar had been glossed over in the story—there was something more pressing between the lines. “What does this have to do with Brom?” asked Isador quickly.

  “Stretched over the altar, gashed and torn with sacrificial markings, was one of Brom’s Guardsmen, Isador,” explained Gabriel.

  “One of Brom’s men was sacrificed? We should inform him, of course,” said Isador, still not quite understanding what all the fuss was about.

  “There’s something else,” continued Gabriel. “The man was executed by a single shot to the head. A shot from an Imperial Guard officer’s laspistol.” Gabriel could see the Librarian’s mind racing with the significance of these facts. “He was sacrificed and executed by other Tartarans, Isador.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Standing on the edge of the crater, Gabriel stared down at the altar, a spread of Blood Ravens lining the rim of the pit with their weapons trained. Gabriel had selected a small detachment to check out the reports about the altar—just the command squad, some scouts, and Matiel’s squad of Space Marines. In the end, he had decided against telling Brom about his scouts’ reports, and the team had slipped out of the makeshift camp in the valley before Toth could ask any questions. No doubt it would not take long for the inquisitor to realise that they were missing, but, hopefully, by then Gabriel would understand what was going on.

  “So, the good inquisitor senses no taint of Chaos here. How fortunate for the Imperium that such keen-eyed eagles stand vigil over her gates,” said Gabriel, shaking his head and laying his hand onto Isador’s shoulder.

  The decapitated body of an Imperial Guardsman still lay across the face of the altar, with his head visible in the swampy ground a stone’s throw away. As Matiel surveyed the territory surrounding the crater, casting his intricate and suspicious gaze over the mess of dead greenskins, Isador made his way down into the pit, letting the force of gravity ease his weight down the crater walls in a smooth landslide.

  Satisfied that the pit was secure, the Marines broke away from their vigil around its lip and followed Matiel’s lead, stalking between the corpses of the orks and prodding them with blades and gun barrels. The orks might not be the smartest race in the galaxy, but even animals could play dead when it suited them. But these orks really were dead. Some of the them had been shredded by thousands of tiny projectiles, others had been felled by a single, precise shot through the soft tissue just below their jawline, and some had simply been sliced into pieces.

  Stooping to pick up a fallen weapon, Matiel gasped audibly. It was a boltgun—the distinctive weapon of the Space Marines. But the designs etched into the material of the gun were not very clear—the ork had obviously tried to scratch them away in an attempt to make the weapon his. Deep grooves and scars were dug into the metalwork, wrought by claws or teeth, but they could not fully obscure the markings that were set into the weapon when it was first made. Wriggling out from under the clumsy marks of the ork were the points of a star, each at the end of an axis that bisected a smaller circle. The eight-pointed star, thought Matiel: the mark of the Traitor Legions and the forces of Chaos.

  He turned the weapon in his hands; he was repulsed slightly by the touch of a weapon that had been twice damned: once by the unspeakable evils of the heretic Marines that had turned their backs on the Emperor himself during the galaxy-shattering horrors of the Horus Heresy, and once by the taint of grotesque xenos savagery.

  The metal was cold, and it lay just out of reach of the ork that had fallen next to it. Inspecting it more closely, Matiel realised that the gun had not been fired. The trigger-happy orks had been slain almost instantaneously, and it looked like most of them had not managed to get off a single shot. Not even the Blood Ravens would hope to kill a pack of orks so efficiently, reflected Matiel, his opinion of the eldar teetering perilously close to admiration.

  Meanwhile, Gabriel was watching Isador climb down into the pit and approach the altar. He turned as Matiel approached him from behind, and took the weapon held out in the sergeant’s hand.

  “A boltgun,” said Gabriel with mild surprise. “So we were right about the presence of a Traitor Legion here on Tartarus,” he added, pressing his thumb against the markings on the weapon’s hilt, as though trying to divine their origin.

  “It has not been fired, captain,” explained Matiel. “The eldar must have laid an ambush for the orks, and then slaughtered them like animals before they even had chance to react.” A mix of repulsion and admiration were evident in his voice.

  “They are animals, sergeant, so that is only fitting. We would do the same,” said Gabriel, drawing an un-self-conscious comparison between the Blood Ravens and the eldar, “if we could.”

  Matiel nodded, acknowledging Gabriel’s shared admiration for the mysterious aliens, realising that respecting the skills of another warrior, even an alien warrior, did not necessarily make you a heretic. “Perhaps there is something that we can learn from them,” ruminated the sergeant, almost to himself.

  “Yes indeed,” replied Gabriel confidently “Knowledge is power—we must seek it out. From this,” he said, casting his hand around the remains of the ork mob, “we learn not to underestimate the potency of an eldar ambush.” There was a smile on the captain’s face as he turned back to watch Isador in the crater.

  “What dark crafts have these eldar invoked?” asked Matiel, following Gabriel’s line of sight.

  “I do not think that this is the work of the eldar, Gabriel,” said Isador, looking up from the remains of Guardsman Tavett. “I am reasonably sure that it was the eldar who removed the man’s head, but he had already been dead for some time by then. For one thing,” he added, “this man had already been shot through the brain with an Imperial issue laspistol.”

  “So, did the Tartarans sacrifice this man themselves?” asked Gabriel, walking around the altar and inspecting Tavett’s remains for himself. Despite the evidence, Gabriel could not quite bring himself to believe so little of the Imperial Guardsmen of Tartarus. Most of them had fought valiantly at the side of the Blood Ravens, and some had died as heroes of the Imperium. In the main, the Tartarans were a credit to the spirit of the Undying Emperor, and this was such an epic betrayal that Gabriel refused to make the logical leap. Whatever his personal feelings about Brom and the smattering of cowards in his regiment, he should not prejudge them.

  “No, I’m not sure that they did,” replied Isador thoughtfully. “It looks as though the shot was designed to kill this man befo
re the sacrifice was complete. Perhaps the Guardsmen interrupted the ritual.”

  Chaplain Prathios was stooped over the altar, staring into the stone where the Guardsman’s head should have been. He seemed transfixed, and almost motionless, as though watching something complicated and partially hidden.

  “This man was not the first sacrifice on this altar today,” said Prathios, lifting his head and looking at Isador. “You should take a look at this.”

  The Librarian stepped over to the position indicated by Prathios and looked down into the slick pool of blood. Tiny little stalagmites of red poked up through the blood and, for a moment, Isador thought that they were merely small spikes designed to prevent the victim from slipping off the tablet during its agonies. But then he saw them move. They vibrated and pulsed microscopically, swaying like a miniscule forest.

  Looking back along the stricken figure of the Guardsman, he could see that these tiny tendrils had worked their way into his flesh. They appeared to be dragging him down into the stone itself, drawing him bodily into the material of the altar. In a sudden moment of understanding, Isador realised why the Guardsman looked so odd—he was not all there. Crouching down to look at the side elevation, Isador could see that the prostrate trooper, lying on his stomach, was half absorbed into the altar—his chest had already been assimilated, as had his thighs and feet.

  In horror, Isador drove his staff under the body of the man and levered him off the tablet, ripping the tendrils free of his body as it slipped from the altar and squelched to the ground in a bloody heap. The man’s body looked as though it had been sliced roughly in two, parted lengthways to separate front from back. All that was left was the bloody pulp of his headless back.

  The tendrils on the altar shot out after the falling body, questing blindly for the source of their sustenance before shrinking and slurping back into the surface of the tablet. Where the threads of blood touched it, Isador’s staff flared with power, spitting sparks of blue fire into the coagulating pool on the altar. The pool hissed and steamed as the righteous energy spilled into it, but Isador pulled his staff clear and peered into the fizzing surface.

  Beneath the sheen of slick rock, Isador could see the suggestion of a face wracked with agony, a flock of swirling daemonic forms tearing at it from all sides. A number of the curdling images seemed to be reaching for the surface with immaterial claws, scraping at the substance of the altar from within, as though swimming through an impossibly dense medium. The face pulsed and oscillated, thrashing from side to side in death pains, or birth pains. Then it stopped abruptly, spinning round and resolving into focus in an instant, staring straight into Isador’s soul.

  With an audible gasp, the Librarian drew back from the altar, pushing his staff into the ground to support himself. Prathios and Gabriel reached for their battle-brother, steadying him with their powerful arms, and watching the colour gradually return to his face.

  “Brother Isador, you have one hour to study the altar. Document everything—let us see whether we can fill in some of the gaps in the history of this planet for ourselves.” With concern amounting to worry, Gabriel was watching the pale expression on his old friend’s face. “Then we will destroy it, lest its vile taint infect us all.”

  The Librarian’s face was still white and his blue eyes were wide and icy. “Gabriel, we must not destroy this artefact. We are Blood Ravens, and we must not turn our backs on the search for knowledge, no matter how distasteful it may seem.”

  “You had better not let Toth hear you saying such things, Isador. He views our Chapter with suspicion enough already, without you giving him the idea that we covet the knowledge of heretics.” Gabriel’s voice was only half mocking, for his point was serious. “Learn what you can, brother, but then we will destroy it. There are boundaries between research and complicity, and we must be careful to stay on the right side of them.”

  With that, Gabriel turned and started to climb back up the earthworks towards Matiel and the Space Marines that stood sentry over the distasteful scene, leaving Isador and Prathios with the altar. “One hour, then we move on,” he called over his shoulder, as though worried that Isador might have already forgotten.

  The carvings and etchings were buried beneath a thick treacle of congealed blood, and Isador struggled to make out the runes. He pulled his gauntlet off and pushed his fingers into the cracks in the stone, scooping out gobbets of viscous ichor and tracing the unfamiliar lines. His fingers scraped against the rough surface of the stone, catching on the pointed nicks and grooves, drawing tiny beads of his own blood into the mix. But he worked methodically, struggling to uncover the ancient engravings in time to give them the attention that they deserved.

  The runes seemed dead under his touch, cold and hard like inanimate stone, and Isador lamented that he had been so hasty to rip the Guardsman from its diabolical embrace. Without the flow of new, rich blood, the altar was nothing more than a monument, albeit a monument covered with ancient, runic script.

  Here and there, Isador could just about make out some of the words, but the language of the runes was old and unfamiliar to him, and many of the symbols were still obscured under a thick coating of blood. The characters seemed to tell a story about a quest, a heroic mission to uncover the key to salvation for Tartarus and the surrounding worlds. There was an icon representing a mountain and then the phonetic symbols for Korath. There was some mention of the Blood God and the appearance of his messengers, but Isador had seen enough of these artefacts before to know that all of them contained such slogans. He was unimpressed.

  One rune struck his eyes and drew his attention, pulling him in with its own gravity. Treraum—storm. It was an ancient rune, and for a moment Isador did not recognise it. Not since his years in the Blood Ravens’ great librarium sanatorium had he seen this style of rune—ornate and twisted, as though it strove to hide its own meaning from the prying eyes of men. The characters next to it were even more obscure and intricate. They sounded little bells in Isador’s memory, but he could not quite place them. He had seen them before, he thought.

  “Isador!” called Gabriel from the top of the earthworks. “Time to leave. Do you have what you need?”

  The Librarian looked from the altar to his captain and then back again, thinking of what he could say to waylay their departure. But Gabriel saw his movements and assumed that he was shaking his head.

  “Isador—I said one hour, and I meant it,” he said, waving his arm to Matiel. “Sergeant, rig that monstrosity for destruction, and then let’s get out of this Emperor-forsaken place.”

  Matiel kicked in the burner on his jump pack and rose noisily, if gracefully, into the air. Behind him, two other members of his squad of Marines did the same, each carrying clusters of melta bombs. And the three of them descended rapidly into the pit, like red angels carrying the promise of redemption.

  Isador turned back to the altar, a wave of desperation spilling into his mind. Those idiots were about to destroy one of the most valuable artefacts found in this sector in centuries. Gabriel was just too narrow-minded to see what he was doing. Cyrene had made him weak and paranoid. The path of the Blood Ravens was not supposed to be easy—the pursuit of knowledge required certain sacrifices, but its use could transform a Space Marine into a god. Who else but a god could command the lives of a planet’s entire population? Gabriel was too short-sighted, and his guilt threatened to wreck his judgment.

  When Matiel touched down behind Isador, he found the Librarian muttering to himself, as though reading from a foreign text. He hardly seemed to notice the arrival of three Space Marines roaring down with their jump packs blazing.

  “Librarian Akios, time’s up. The captain wants us to blow this place right now. And good riddance to it, I say,” said Matiel, gesturing for his men to fix their charges to the other side of the altar. “The stench of the xenos and the heretic is almost overpowering. It is an offence to the Emperor.”

  “Just give me another minute,” hissed Isador, snapp
ing his head round to face the sergeant and fixing him with narrowed, blue eyes. “I need just one more minute. Alone,” he added, as Matiel nodded but showed no signs of moving.

  The sergeant nodded again and then turned smartly, walking round to the other side of the altar to check on the progress of his team. Turning his attention back to the runes, Isador produced a small combat knife from a holster on his belt. He muttered something inaudible as he ran his finger along its blade, and the sheen of the metal seemed to burst into effervescence. When he pressed the blade into the side of the altar, a trickle of blood seeped out of the stone, as though he were inflicting a wound. The blade hissed and vibrated under his touch as he cut through the altar, defining a neat rectangle around the constellation of runes that surrounded Treraum.

  As Matiel came back round to set his mine on Isador’s side, the Librarian was tucking something into his belt and wiping blood off the blade of his knife on the grass.

  “Matiel! Let’s blow this thing and get out of here,” yelled Gabriel, standing on the rim of the crater.

  “Yes, captain,” replied Matiel. Then he dropped his voice and turned to Isador. “Time’s up, Librarian.” Isador was already on his feet. He nodded a quick acknowledgment, strode away from the altar, and started to climb up towards Gabriel.

  What are you doing, Librarian! For a moment, Isador thought that the words were his own, swimming around inside his head as though they had always been there. But there was an unusual quality to them—something slippery and immaterial. Whenever he tried to grasp one of the thoughts, it eased clear of his mind, vacillating in and out of his memory like a ghost.

  I know that you can hear me, Blood Raven, came the voiceless words again. What are you doing, hiding artefacts from the heroic captain… acting against his orders!

  Isador did not break his stride as he climbed the banks of the crater. He doesn’t appreciate the value of this find, and I had no time to convince him. He will thank me for my vigilance, when the time comes.