Black Tide Read online

  He nodded to himself. The other fire warrior, the one Kayne had killed… The spines upon it could so easily have been from a kroot organism, or perhaps even a tyranid. Here then was the signature of Fabius Bile, the callous experimentation on these pitiful xenos the detritus he had left behind him.

  “This is the renegade’s work,” he told his squad. “These are the spoil.”

  “Brother-Sergeant!” Kayne called out across the killing field. “The xenos… The prisoner? It’s gone!”

  “Must have slipped away during the engagement,” muttered Turcio.

  All eyes turned to Ceris, who accepted the unspoken question with a nod. He hesitated, his hooded gaze turning inward for a moment. The force mace, the tip still shimmering with tics of ethereal energy, rose to point towards the sphere-construct. “In there.”

  The tau, the one that called itself La’Non, was not difficult to find. At first, they followed the regular spatters of thin blood that the xenos had left behind it, as it staggered its way up into the construct; but once inside the building proper, the trail of fluid became lost in the layers of older and darker vitae, dried out in a cracked layer over the floor like a coat of ancient varnish. The xenos blood left splash patterns up against the walls that became more pronounced the deeper the Astartes ventured, high-water marks that showed where some vast reservoir of the fluid had been emptied heedlessly into the corridors and left to find its own level.

  There were, of course, bodies. Scattered remains of tau and some of their servitor races—the feral kroot and the insectoid vespid—some of them in states of death that defied explanation, others killed in more commonplace ways by shot or blade, or each other. A cloying stink that recalled rotting flowers permeated everything, and presently Rafen replaced his helmet and let the breathing filters do their work. They forded an inner barrier of tightly knit binder fungus, cutting through with swords and knives, boots sinking into the mushy flooring where accursed symbols had grown out of the damp mould. Ajir murmured a litany of protection beneath his breath, and Ceris echoed him on each word; the other Blood Angels kept their own prayers mute.

  Kayne pointed out strange capsules lined up on stands through the next ward they entered, their skirmish line moving with steady care. Rafen examined one and found soft cloth bundled within; it was a natal clinic, he realised, and the pods were support units for tau newborns. All were empty, and he did not dwell on what the layer of white ash that lay at the bottom of the pods might have been.

  When La’Non’s blood trail ran out, they sought him in another fashion. They followed the sound of his lament.

  The iris doors were open and sagging, bent outward as if by a powerful pair of hands. The keening of the sorrowful tau echoed out to them, and Kayne led the way in, taking point. The pin-lamp atop his bolter searched the damp, close gloom, picking out stone tables coated in cracked enamel, angled to allow fluids to gather in clogged blood drains beneath. Pieces of corpses dangled from makeshift meat hooks on the ceiling—objects Rafen identified as parts of an ork, a human female, tau and orubon and xexet and other species he could not place. Kayne’s torch found the corner of a strange design upon the wall and it was only when the youth recognised the sigil of the Eightfold Path of Chaos that he let out a curse and turned away.

  The place had the sense of a work interrupted, and Rafen’s heart sank. It was Nadacar Hive all over again. Fabius had been here, in this very room, conjuring his horrors, and then fled them.

  This thought foremost in his mind, he found himself at one of the tables. Upon it, the tau called La’Non sat, legs dangling like those of a child in an adult’s chair. Its shoulders were stooped and it moaned. He saw it had a heavy blade in one hand, almost a cleaver of the kind a butcher might use to cut a carcass. The tau was sawing back and forth at the place where the strange distorted arm had been connected to its body. Blood emerged in rivers, but the alien was making little headway in severing the alien limb. The blade was too dull, too broad, ill-suited for the task.

  The xenos looked up at him, as if noticing the Astartes for the first time. “The voice, gue’la,” it sobbed. “I can still hear it. It will not be silent.”

  “Where is the pain-bringer?” He met the alien’s watery gaze. “Where is Fabius Bile?”

  “All around you!” came the shouted reply. “His lies, his works, all here. All here!” The tau showed him the distended, muscular arm, and the limb flailed weakly, as if it were trying to escape. “He lied, made us promises. And look what he did!” The creature’s reedy, emotion-choked voice was rising. “Everything is madness, yes? That is true, but all else is lies! Lies!” It rocked forward and tapped a thin finger on Rafen’s chest, blinking away tears. “You lied just as he lied!”

  Rafen shook his head, a grim certainty gathering in his thoughts. “I did not lie to you, xenos,” he told it. “I said I would end your agony. I will.”

  With a swift motion, the sergeant drew his combat knife and buried it in the alien’s chest. The tau heart, as he recalled from his training, was in the centre of their torso, beneath a dense, bony plate in the middle of their ribcage. The fractal-edged blade slid easily through La’Non’s flesh and resisted a little as it bit into bone; Rafen applied even pressure and the weapon went in to the hilt, the very tip emerging from the alien’s back. The incision was clean and fast, cutting the heart in two. La’Non died silently, and Rafen allowed the body to fall off the edge of the knife.

  Turcio watched him clean his weapon. “I didn’t know they could weep,” he noted.

  Kayne gestured at the room, and his answer was Rafen’s. “Look around, brother. Any creature would weep to have such horrors forced upon them—”

  He never finished his words; Puluo, on guard at the door, gave a sudden shout and dragged his cannon up to firing position. “Movement!”

  Rafen’s gun came to his hand as a shape shuffled into the chamber from the far side of the room. In the shadows, it was a hulking humanoid form the equal of a Space Marine in stature and breadth, shoulders broad and heavy, a shorn scalp with a halo of long white hair, and raising hands; hands that were fine and clever and capable of such horrors.

  “Fabius!” The silhouette was the very profile of the man Rafen had pursued through the lower levels of the Vitalis Citadel on Baal, the renegade and traitor. At once, every Space Marine in the room opened fire, and a flashing storm of bolts ripped into the figure, tearing it apart in a razored hurricane.

  Rafen was rushing forward even before the body hit the floor, the burning bite of vengeance surging through his veins.

  His moment of thunderous elation died, quickly and silently. Kayne’s lamp lit the face of the figure, still discernable despite a bolt wound that had eaten away a fist-sized chunk of skull. The face was grey, pallid, a slit down its midline where a human being would have a nose. Eyes, large and wet, bulged out at him.

  It was a tau, after a fashion, but monstrously bloated, bulked up by veins filled with generative compounds and muscle transplants. A xenos, made to mimic the mass of an Adeptus Astartes. Perhaps left here to be found so just such a trick could be played on whomever had come seeking the twisted Primogenitor.

  Something fell from the freak’s twitching fingers and fluttered to the wet floor. A scrap of paper. Rafen knelt to recover it before the fluids scattered all about soaked into the vellum and rendered it useless.

  On the paper there were words in high gothic, rendered in a careful, studied hand. Just words, just ink upon a piece of dry parchment; and yet they raised in Rafen a rage so high his vision hazed crimson.

  You have failed.

  TWO

  With a fluidity and pace that belied the bulk of his armoured form, Rafen strode through the corridors of the warship Tycho, the hard glitter of chained anger in his eyes enough to ensure that no Chapter serf, machine-helot or crewman dared block his path and question his passage.

  His boots ringing on the iron deck plates, the Blood Angel climbed the shallow ramp leading from t
he cruiser’s main spinal corridor, up towards the highest tier of the ship’s hull. He entered a cloister lit by windows of starlight and colour, the glow trailing in shafts through the smoky air of the Tycho’s chapel. Stained glass arranged in intricate designs showed the faces of warriors who had commanded the vessel in the past or commemorated great battles it had participated in. Over the entrance, a hexagonal mosaic showed a portrait of the man the cruiser drew its name from; Brother-Captain Erasmus Tycho, his face partly concealed by a golden half-mask. Rafen did not pause to meet the impassive gaze of the hero of Armageddon. The smell of incense was heavy here, reaching out from the nave, into the ship proper. Through the open doors ahead of him, the heavy copper gates lined with runes and inlaid obsidian, he glimpsed the altar and the statues beyond it.

  “Lord?”

  The question stopped him dead, and he turned in place. Behind him, Brother Ceris stood, studying him. Like Rafen, he had not yet removed his wargear, and his armoured bulk filled the doorway.

  Ceris approached, and the sergeant mused on the realisation that he had not heard the Codicier following him. Perhaps it was because his anger was so fulsome, his attention elsewhere, that the psyker had managed to come so close without registering on his awareness; or perhaps not. The other Blood Angel walked to a bowl protruding from a wall, and reached in. Water—purified fluid recovered from the ship’s reaction mass store, blessed daily by the Tycho’s resident sanguinary priest—flowed from a nozzle in the shape of a cherub’s mouth, and Ceris used it to dampen a cloth he recovered from a brass rack. In turn, he offered it to his commander.

  Rafen took it without comment. It was protocol; on their return from the tau colony, the brother-sergeant and his squad had undertaken a brief ritual of purification to ward off the influence of the xenos and the stain of Chaos, but even so, it would have been wrong of Rafen to enter the chapel without taking a moment to pass a measure of the sanctified water over his armoured hands. He frowned inwardly; he should not have needed another man to remind him of that, even if Ceris did it without reproach. Rafen’s mind was indeed unsettled, and it stoked his ready anger still more that it was so.

  Ceris watched him as he completed the brief sacrament. The white cloth in the warrior’s hands turned an ugly reddish-black as gummed oils and alien vitae, still caught in the hinges of his gauntlets, were dissolved.

  “I spoke with the shipmaster,” began the psyker. “He has taken your orders, sir. Tycho is turning to bear.”

  Rafen nodded once. On the floor, the discs of waxen light cast through the windows were moving slowly across the floor as the starship came about. He looked away. “Once it is done, tell him to prepare the vessel for the warp.” The sergeant balled the cloth in his hand and threw it at a waiting servitor in an alcove. The machine-slave caught the cloth from the air and carried it towards a fire grate for disposal.

  Rafen took two steps before he noticed that Ceris had not taken the implied dismissal in his tone. The psyker studied him, and the sergeant found a churn of resentment turning in his chest. “You have something else you wish to say to me?” he demanded.

  “The blame is not yours.”

  The statement was blunt and firm. The sergeant’s expression tightened. “You are dismissed,” he growled, enunciating the words clearly so there would be no further misunderstanding.

  Still Ceris made no move to obey the command. “You cloud your thoughts with recriminations, and it does you ill, sir. It takes your focus.”

  “Stay out of my mind.” Rafen’s voice was low and menacing.

  “I need not exercise my abilities to read you, brother-sergeant. You wear your ire upon your sleeve as clearly as our Chapter sigil.”

  Rafen took a step closer to the blue-armoured warrior. “For one they say is a chosen man of the Lord of Death, you seem to lack the sense to keep your opinions to yourself.”

  “My master Mephiston expects honesty and directness from his Librarians,” replied Ceris. “He told me I was to give the same to you.”

  “So you have, then.” Rafen gestured at the ramp leading back from the chapel. “Go now, and be content you have done your duty.” Bitterness laced his words, hard and unexpected.

  “I have not,” Ceris continued, remaining irritatingly unruffled, stock-still and fixed upon the other warrior. “Mephiston bid me to join your squad to aid you in our mission, and this I have not done.”

  “The mission!” Rafen spat the reply at him. “The mission is a failure, Ceris! You saw it with your own eyes! Fabius has slipped out of our net at every turn, confounded us. He mocks us, and we have no choice but to countenance it!” He turned away. “And you are wrong. The blame is mine.”

  “Can you be so sure?” Ceris asked. “The renegade Bile has been at large for over ten thousand years, sir. He travelled the stars in the time of the high traitor Horus and the fires of the Heresy. Thousands have been killed at his hands, across countless worlds. He is a singular foe, a man who slipped even the grasp of Chapter Masters and primarchs alike—”

  “And you would have me take succour from that, would you?” The sergeant snorted. “You were not there on Baal, psyker! You did not have him in your sights. You were not the one who failed to stop him!”

  For the first time, Ceris broke eye contact. “I was not,” he admitted. “I was many light years distant, at the conflicts on Beta Cornea. But consider my anger, lord. Imagine my fury at learning that our home world had been attacked by the forces of Chaos. I and the battle-brothers with me were too far away to lend our arms to the defence of Baal… We could not even see the face of the enemy, let alone chance to strike at him as you did.”

  “You’re a fool, then,” Rafen grated. “You ought to think yourself blessed for being spared the shame.”

  The same black skein of thought that had plagued the sergeant every night since the Tycho’s mission began rose in him.

  In the wake of the Chapter’s losses following the insurrection on Cybele and the dark schemes of a turncoat inquisitor named Stele, the Blood Angels had called a conclave of all successor Chapters. This historic gathering on Baal had but one aim—to bulwark the Chapter’s forces by drawing a tithe of warriors from each force of Blood Angels descendants—but the plans of the Chapter Master Dante had been set awry by the blind ambition of a single, misguided sanguinary priest. One man, convinced he could rebuild the Chapter’s losses not through a tithe, but by the use of ancient, forbidden science, had unwittingly allied himself to a biologian of the Adeptus Mechanicus; or so he had believed.

  The priest opened a door to Baal, joining forces with a magos who called himself Haran Serpens. To their cost, the Blood Angels learned that this identity was merely one mask, one falsehood among hundreds spun by the arch-traitor and self-styled Primogenitor of Chaos Undivided; Fabius Bile.

  In the madness that followed, great horrors were wrought. Mutant creatures that merged Astartes DNA with rapacious animal hungers were created, freakish aberrant Bloodfiends running wild, pillaging and despoiling everything the Blood Angels held sacred. In a final battle beneath the Chapter’s great fortress monastery, Rafen and his battle-brothers came together with their kinsmen to fight and vanquish the Chaos-spawned monsters. There, in sight of the tomb of their primarch, the golden Sanguinius, father of their Chapter and Lord of the Blood Angels, the invaders had at last been defeated and sanctity restored.

  The future of the Chapter was secured; the Blood Angels would live on. But in the anarchy of the battle, slithering through the mayhem he had set in order to hide his crimes, under cover of lies Fabius Bile had stolen a most precious relic. A crystal vial, and in it, a measure of the purest blood plundered from the holy Red Grail. Drops of the vitae of Sanguinius himself.

  Even now, after months had passed, Rafen was still sickened to his very core by the thought of this high transgression against his Chapter. His mind reeled at the horrors that a twisted genius such as Fabius might wreak with so rare and powerful an artefact in his clutches. The
enormity of this monstrous theft shook him, the resonance so strong it was as if it had happened only yesterday.

  To let this sin go unanswered could not stand. The renegade had committed a grave offence that could only be resolved by his execution, and by the recovery of what he had stolen.

  Rafen and his squad had dedicated themselves to fulfilling this need; but all they had to show for it were empty hands, spent bullets and a string of failures. Those, and a single piece of bloodstained paper.

  “Have you learned nothing?” The psyker’s question shattered Rafen’s moment of reverie. “After all that great Dante said, were you deaf to it?”

  The sergeant’s anger rushed through him, and with a sudden movement, he grabbed the other Blood Angel and forced Ceris back hard against the wall of the cloister, slamming him into a stone pillar. “Damn you!” he shouted. “What do you want from me, brother? Answer!”

  For a brief instant, there was something like shock on the psyker’s face; but in the next moment it was gone, and his blank, steady aspect returned to its place. “Are you so arrogant, Brother-Sergeant Rafen, that you think yourself elevated above all the rest of us?” Ceris’ voice was rough. “I know Lord Dante’s words and I was not even there to hear them with my own ears! Remember what he said, there in the great sepulchre before the battle with the Bloodfiends. We are being tested! Every single one of us, not just you!” The psyker shook himself free of Rafen’s grip, and he allowed it. “You have no right to take this burden upon yourself. It is not yours to hold alone. We are the Sons of Sanguinius, we are Blood Angels, and we face challenge every day of our lives. This one is no different, only the scale of it changes. We find this enemy and we kill him. All of us. As one.”

  Rafen tamed away, the bitterness rising again in his gorge. “Find him? How? Tell me, Codicier, can you pluck his whereabouts from the tides of the warp with your witch-sight? Do not think to accuse me of wallowing in despair! I do nothing of the kind!” He pressed a finger against the other man’s chest. “Know this. I would take this ship blindfold into the Eye of Terror. I would cut my own hearts from my flesh. I would sacrifice every one of my kinsmen here aboard, and more, if that is what it would take to find this renegade!”