PHALANX

Ben Counter

Chapter 8

Luko kicked in the door of the archive. Musty air swept out, mixing with the cordite and rubble dust that rolled off the Soul Drinkers. The archive was a high-ceilinged, dim and age-sodden room with rolls of parchment mounted on the walls for several storeys up, and huge wooden reading tables over which bent the archivists, who looked up in surprise as almost sixty Space Marines stormed into their domain.

‘Not too bad to defend,’ said Salk, taking in the sight of the archives. ‘Lots of cover, not many entrances.’

‘At least we’ll have something to read while we’re waiting,’ replied Luko.

The archivists fled. None of the Soul Drinkers had any heart to pursue them. They would tell the Imperial Fists where the escapees had holed up, but the Imperial Fists would learn that anyway, and too many people had died already.

‘Spread out!’ ordered Luko to the other Soul Drinkers. With Sarpedon and Iktinos elsewhere, it had seemed a natural fit for him to take command. ‘Find something we can use! Weapons, transport! It’s too much to hope to find a shuttle that can get us off this can, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t look.’

‘And get me something to take this damned thing off!’ Librarian Tyrendian was still wrestling with the inhibitor collar around his neck. ‘Until then I have to think down to your level.’

Luko caught sight of movement and his eyes flickered to the dim interior of the archive. From the shadows shuffled an old, bent figure, wearing the same robes and symbols as the youth who had blown himself up to free the Soul Drinkers from the Atoning Halls. The archivists had all fled, but this man, who seemed more decrepit than any of them, showed no fear.

‘Hail!’ said the old man. Luko saw the rosarius beads and aquila icons of a pilgrim, and the symbol of the blinded eye embroidered on his robes. ‘Brethren of the Chalice! How my heart grows to see you at liberty!’

‘Who are you?’ demanded Luko. ‘One of your pilgrims died to free us, though we didn’t ask for it. What do your kind want from us?’

‘I want only for the path of fate to be walked true,’ replied the pilgrim. ‘Time has sought fit to grant me the title Father Gyranar. My brothers and I are the Blind Retribution, the seekers of justice, the instruments of fate, the Blinded Eye. For longer than I have been alive, fate has taught us of the part we are to play in the fulfilment of the Soul Drinkers’ destiny.’ Gyranar limped forwards and took Luko’s huge paw in his tiny, dry hands. ‘I rejoice that I have lived to see that time! When I drank from the grail, I dared not to beg of the fates that I witness the day the chalice shall overflow!’

‘Explain yourself,’ said Luko.

‘We are a long line of those who have been tasked with making this day happen,’ continued Gyranar. ‘The Black Chalice, the Silver Grail, and countless others, have all followed the same path, one that would ensure they crossed paths with the Soul Drinkers so they could help destiny become reality. You must go free, Captain Luko, you and all your battle-brothers! You must fight here, and see that what must be, shall be! I have broken your shackles, but only you can strike the blows!’

‘What fate?’ demanded Luko. ‘If we are here to do something, then it is news to me. We were brought to the Phalanx against our will, and at the risk of sounding ungrateful, our freedom was something equally unsought.’

‘But now you fight one last battle!’ said Gyranar. The old man’s eyes were alight, as if he was looking beyond Luko to some religious revelation. ‘Instead of a dismal execution, you die fighting, and in doing so your sacrifice will change the Imperium for the better! All human history hinges on this point, captain!’

Luko pulled Gyranar close. The old man barely came up to Luko’s solar plexus. ‘He who longs for one last battle,’ Luko said darkly, ‘has never truly fought a battle at all.’

‘Fate cares not that its instruments are ignorant of their importance,’ said Gyranar. ‘I have been given the blessing of knowing what is to come. You, captain, are no less blessed for having it revealed to you at the moment of your glory.’

Luko let Gyranar go. The pilgrim had no fear. A Space Marine knew no fear because he mastered it, broke it down and discarded it as irrelevant. Gyranar had no fear to begin with, as if even an angry Space Marine bearing down on him was a scene from a play which he had seen many times.

‘You remind me of someone I once knew,’ said Luko. ‘He was Yser, and much like you, a believer. He was the pawn of a power greater and darker than he could have imagined, and it killed him. You will find few friends among the Soul Drinkers, Father Gyranar.’

‘As I said,’ replied Gyranar, ‘there were others. I am merely the most fortunate.’

‘Captain!’ yelled Tyrendian from deeper within the archive, among the shadows that clung around the many archways leading out from the main chamber. ‘I’ve found something. You want to see it.’

Luko followed Tyrendian’s voice. The Librarian stood in an archway leading into another chamber, this one lit sparingly by a few spotglobes that shone their shafts of light onto hundreds of exhibits, like the inside of a museum.

Almost a hundred suits of power armour stood there, on racks that made it look as if their owners were standing there in ranks. The armour of the Soul Drinkers, still spattered with the mud and ash of Selaaca, still with the scars of necron weapons and the claws of the wraiths that had nearly killed so many of them. Sarpedon’s armour was there, battered by his struggle with the necron overlord. Luko’s own armour, too, with the haphazard heraldry of his career as a renegade painted over the dark purple of the Chapter’s livery.

Beside the armour were the weapons. Boltguns racked up as if in an armoury. The Axe of Mercaeno, Sarpedon’s own weapon. Sergeant Graevus’s power axe and Luko’s lightning claws, the huge armoured gloves with their paint scorched and peeling by the constant discharging of the claws’ power fields.

‘The evidence chamber,’ said Tyrendian with a smile.

‘Arm up!’ yelled Luko. ‘Tyrendian, check around and find ammunition and power packs.’

‘Perhaps we can make a stand after all,’ said Salk as he saw the arms displayed before him. Several Soul Drinkers were already going for their armour, while Sergeant Graevus had gone straight for his power axe. With the axe in the sergeant’s mutated hand he suddenly looked more like a Soul Drinker, more like a warrior, and less like anyone who could have been held captive.

Luko slid a hand into one of his lightning claw gauntlets. Its weight felt tremendous, and not just because Luko hadn’t yet donned the power armour that would help compensate for its size.

‘I used to dream,’ he said to Salk, ‘of all this ending peacefully. At least, I told myself, an execution is not a battle. But there is one last battle now. You would have thought I’d have learned by now that there is always one last battle.’

‘Captain?’ said Salk.

‘I hate it,’ said Luko. ‘Fighting. Bloodshed. I have come to hate it. I have lied about this for a long time, Sergeant Salk, but there hardly seems much point now.’

‘I can barely believe you are saying these things, captain.’

‘I know. I disgust myself too, sometimes.’

‘No, captain,’ said Salk. ‘You don’t understand. You hate war, but you fight it because you know you must. There is nothing to disgust in that. Sometimes I take pride, or even pleasure, in it, and I take that and carry it with me to bring me through the worst of it. But without that, I do not know how I could fight. You are braver than I, Captain Luko.’

‘Well,’ said Luko, ‘that’s one way of looking at it.’

‘Let’s make our execution a little more interesting, brother,’ said Salk.

Luko clamped one of his greaves around his left leg. ‘Amen to that, brother.’

The commanders gathered in the Crucible of Ages, safe from the decompression zones around the Observatory. In the ruddy glow of the forges they first counted off their surviving battle-brothers, appointed officers to take note of the dead, and then turned to the task of recapturing the Soul Drinkers.

There was no doubt that the Soul Drinkers had engineered their escape, with the use of accomplices among the pilgrims who had been allowed onto the Phalanx to observe the trial. Castellan Leucrontas had been silent as the commanders discussed their losses and the state of the Phalanx, for it was only a matter of time before his decision to allow the pilgrims onto the ship was examined.

No Angels Sanguine had been lost, added to which Commander Gethsemar and his Sanguinary Guard seemed completely unblemished by the carnage. Howling Griffons had died. Imperial Fists, present in the greatest numbers, had lost correspondingly the most. One Silver Skull and two Doom Eagles were missing, presumed dead and cast into the void by the explosive decompression. Crewmen in void suits were already taking their first steps into the Observatory dome, to hunt for the fallen among the torrents of scorched wreckage, but hopes were not high that survivors would be found.

‘Brothers!’ came a shout from the entrance to the Crucible of Ages. Reinez, severely battered and bloodied, walked in, dragging an unarmoured Space Marine behind him. Reinez’s armour, which had been in poor repair when he had arrived on the Phalanx, was now so filthy with blood and scorch marks that the colours of the Howling Griffons were barely discernible. ‘Are you looking for answers? Perhaps a few explanations? I have done what you cannot do by bickering among yourselves, and found you some!’

Reinez shoved the Space Marine into the centre of the Crucible. The captive showed no resistance, and fell to his knees.

‘It is good that you are alive, Reinez,’ said Chapter Master Vladimir. Siege-Captain Daviks stepped forwards and lifted the bowed head of the Space Marine.

‘He’s a Soul Drinker,’ said Daviks, pointing to the chalice symbol that marked the centre of the surgical scars on the Space Marine’s chest. ‘What is your name?’

‘Apothecary Pallas,’ said the Soul Drinker.

‘One of the accused,’ said Vladimir. ‘You were to be executed. Why did you not flee with the rest of the condemned?’

‘Because we are not free,’ said Pallas. ‘I do not know why we were released, or who is responsible, but we did not seek it. I have been manipulated before, by Abraxes when our Chapter first turned from the Imperium, and I will not be used like that again. If I am to be executed here then so be it. I do not care about that any more. But I will not be a pawn in the scheme of another.’

‘Then who?’ demanded Daviks. ‘Who committed this outrage? My battle-brothers died because someone set the Soul Drinkers loose. Answer me!’

‘I don’t know!’ retorted Pallas. ‘Someone who benefits from a battle on the Phalanx. Someone who wants a last laugh from the Soul Drinkers before we are gone. Your guesses are as good as mine.’

‘They have left this one behind to sow confusion,’ said Daviks to the other Space Marines. ‘Recall the strategies of cowardice, as recounted in the Codex Astartes!’

‘There has been dissent in the ranks of the Soul Drinkers before,’ said Vladimir. ‘They turned on one another at Nevermourn. Reinez, you witnessed that, I believe. That this Apothecary chose not to follow his brothers in evading justice is not impossible.’

‘Dissenter or not,’ said Reinez, ‘we should get everything he knows out of him.’ Reinez took a tool from the closest forge – its metal prongs glowed from the heat. ‘I suggest we not delay.’

‘There will be no need for that,’ said Vladimir. ‘If he is here to misinform us then he will be prepared to spread lies under duress. If he is not, then there is no need for the infliction of suffering.’

‘Then what are we to do with him?’ sneered Reinez. ‘Give him a commission?’

‘He is an Apothecary. He can help tend to the wounded,’ replied Vladimir. ‘Apothecary Asclephin, you will oversee his work once he has answered one question.’

‘Name it,’ said Pallas.

‘Where is Sarpedon?’

Pallas looked up at Vladimir. ‘The last I knew of it, he was in the courtroom. You are in a better position to know his whereabouts than I.’

‘Space Marines died in his escape’ said Vladimir. ‘You understand that justice will fall on him sooner or later, and that your own manner of death will depend on how satisfied we are with your part in that justice.’

‘I barely care for life or death any more, Chapter Master,’ said Pallas. ‘I do not know where he is. Decide among yourselves if I speak the truth, but I know that I do.’

‘Another question, with which our Soul Drinker friend may not be able to help us,’ said Gethsemar smoothly, ‘is the location of Captain N’Kalo.’

Instinctively, the Space Marine officers looked around the Crucible. They were all there save for N’Kalo. His Iron Knights were present, but not their commander.

‘He made it out of the dome,’ said Daviks. ‘I saw him.’

‘But he did not make it here,’ answered Gethsemar.

‘Then locating him is a priority,’ said Vladimir, ‘but not one as high as locating Sarpedon and the Soul Drinkers who broke out of the cell block. If they have a plan then it most likely involves them staying together. If we are to break them with a minimum of losses, we must do so quickly, before they dig in. Lysander!’

‘Chapter Master?’ said Lysander with a salute.

‘You will lead the hunt. You have our three companies at your disposal. Officers, I ask that you cede command to Lysander in my name, and that he send your battle-brothers as he sees fit. I need no reminding of the protocols it breaks to request you place yourselves under the command of another Chapter, but this is not the time to dally over such things.’

‘I will kill Sarpedon,’ said Reinez.

‘You will not put the lives of my battle-brothers at risk,’ said Vladimir. ‘If it is expedient, another will eliminate Sarpedon, not wait for your permission.’

‘My oath of revenge is more important than life.’ Reinez shoved Pallas aside as he took a few steps closer to Vladimir. ‘Even the life of a brother.’

‘And delivering Dorn’s justice upon the Soul Drinker is more important than either,’ said Lysander, putting a hand on Reinez’s shoulder pad. Reinez shrugged it off angrily.

‘For one who despises time wasted in talking,’ said Gethsemar, ‘Brother Reinez does enjoy his little speeches.’

Reinez gave Gethsemar a look that could have killed a star, as the officers rallied their Space Marines for the hunt.

Captain N’Kalo forced off the slab of wreckage that pinned him down. His ears rang and the world was painted in blotchy blacks and reds. He was somewhere in one of the Phalanx’s tribute galleries, the deck divided into displays of art, standards and captured arms evoking the history of the Imperial Fists.

The ceiling had collapsed on him as he fled the dome. The galleries had sealed behind him before they were decompressed, but the shockwaves of the pilgrim ship’s suicide attack had caused enough damage of their own. N’Kalo saw he had been trapped beneath a spiderlike carapace, complete and preserved in a transparent layer of resin, which had been mounted on the ceiling to give the impression it was about to ambush visitors to the galleries from above. The carapace was that of a creature with ten legs and a span of four or five metres across, and still bore the charred bolter scars that had felled it. It was the relic of a battle millions of miles and probably thousands of years distant.

On one side of N’Kalo was a mural of Imperial Fists dragging the enemy dead from sucking tar pits on a primeval world of volcanoes and jungle. The enemy had the blue-grey skins and flat features of the tau, xenos who had tried to expand into Imperial space and been fought to a stalemate at the Damocles Gulf. On the other side were armour plates torn from a greenskin vehicle, a strange, brutal majesty in the savage simplicity of their skull and bullet designs and the blood that still stained the lower edges of a tank’s dozer blade.

N’Kalo tried to get his bearings. He did not know if he was alone. He looked and listened around him, trying to find crewmen or Space Marines through the displays and sculptures.

The hiss of a nerve-fibre bundle reached his ears. The clicking of one ceramite plate on another.

‘Brother?’ called N’Kalo. ‘Are you hurt? Speak to me!’

There was no reply.

N’Kalo tensed. Perhaps Sarpedon had survived the attack, and was free. Perhaps the other captive Soul Drinkers were free, too. He could not afford to think of the Phalanx as safe ground any more. For all he knew, this was enemy territory.

N’Kalo drew his bolt pistol. He wished he had his power sword with him, but he had stowed it in his squad’s cell-quarters when he had exchanged it for the executioner’s blade in the duel.

On the wall next to the vehicle armour plates hung a bladed weapon shaped like a massively oversized meat cleaver, with teeth and jagged shards soldered to its cutting edge. A greenskin weapon. N’Kalo felt distaste as he lifted it from its mountings and tested its weight. A xenos weapon, and one that no Iron Knight should ever use, but circumstances were extreme.

A shadow upon a shadow, through arches between the trophies and memorials, coalesced into the shape of a power-armoured figure. N’Kalo ducked out of sight, behind the mural of the Imperial Fists’ victory over the tau.

‘I spoke for you,’ said N’Kalo. ‘No one else would. I spoke up for your Chapter! Do what the court did not and listen to me.’

Something metal clattered to the floor. Ceramite boots sounded on the tiles.

‘Give yourself up, brother,’ continued N’Kalo. ‘If you will not, if you fight us here, your fate will only be worse.’

‘It is not my fate,’ came the reply, ‘with which you should concern yourself.’

N’Kalo did not recognise the voice. It had an edge of learning and confidence, a calmness quite at odds with its potential for violence.

‘Name yourself,’ said N’Kalo.

‘You will know my name soon enough,’ came the reply.

N’Kalo risked a glance past the mural. The muzzle of a bolt pistol met him. He ducked back as the gun fired, blasting a shower of wooden shards from the edge of the wall.

N’Kalo dived past the other side of the mural, head down, barrelling forwards. He crashed through a display of captured standards, leaping the plinth to close with his enemy.

The bolt pistol fired again. N’Kalo took the shot on his chest, feeling blades of ceramite driven into his ribs. Not too deep. Not too bad. He would make it face to face.

N’Kalo led with his shoulder and slammed into his assailant. He saw not the purple armour of a Soul Drinker, but the skull-encrusted black of a Chaplain. The chalice on one shoulder pad confirmed the Chapter, however.

Iktinos. The Chaplain of the Soul Drinkers, and the man considered the most likely moral threat among the captives until Daenyathos had been dug up. The second man slated for execution after Sarpedon. Armed and armoured, and free.

N’Kalo drove the greenskin blade up under Iktinos’ arm. Iktinos wrenched his own weapon around quickly enough to lever the blade away from him, throwing N’Kalo onto the back foot. N’Kalo realised with a lurch that Iktinos carried the crozius arcanum, the mace-like power weapon that served as a Chaplain’s badge of office.

Iktinos smacked his bolt pistol against the side of N’Kalo’s head. N’Kalo reeled, one side of his battered helmet caved in again along the cracks opened up by Reinez.

‘Kneel,’ said Iktinos, bolt pistol levelled at N’Kalo’s face. ‘Kneel and it will be quick. Is that not what the Soul Drinkers were offered? Submission for a quick death? Then that is what I offer you, Captain N’Kalo of the Iron Knights.’

N’Kalo dropped to one knee and grabbed one of the standards he had knocked onto the floor. It was an iron spear with a ragged banner hanging from it, the standard of some rebellious Imperial Guard regiment.

Another shot caught N’Kalo in the head. His helmet was torn open and one eye went black. N’Kalo thrust the standard pole forwards with everything he had, catching Iktinos in the hand and throwing the bolt pistol off into the shadows.

N’Kalo fell back onto one knee. He wrenched the ruined helmet off his head. He felt hot blood flowing down his face and his fingers brushed wet, pulpy mass where one eye had been. His head rang, and it felt like his skull was suddenly a few sizes too small.

A fractured skull, then. He had suffered that before. Not the worst. He could fight on.

Iktinos strode forwards, crozius in his good hand. He swung it down at N’Kalo, who deflected it away with the greenskin blade he snatched off the floor at the last second. The blade shattered like glass and N’Kalo was driven onto his back by the force of the blow. He reeled, his good eye unable to focus, Iktinos just a black blur over him.

‘Iktinos!’ yelled Sarpedon. For a moment Iktinos thought that Sarpedon was the man attacking him, that he was back in the Eshkeen forests with his battle-brothers. Everything since then had been a dream and he had never left that stretch of marshland.

But no. Iktinos was the enemy. Sarpedon was somewhere nearby. Iktinos dragged N’Kalo to his feet and wrapped an arm around his throat, hauled him into a corner and grabbed his bolt pistol off the floor. The muzzle of the pistol was against the side of N’Kalo’s head.

Sarpedon stood in the middle of the gallery, unarmoured as he had been in the courtroom.

‘Iktinos!’ yelled Sarpedon. He could barely believe that the first Soul Drinker he had come across since his escape was engaged in fighting the one Space Marine who had stood up for the Chapter at the trial. Still stranger was that it was Iktinos, and that he had already found his armour and weapons.

N’Kalo looked nearly dead. His face was barely recognisable as belonging to a human. One eye socket was a gory ruin. Iktinos had disarmed him, and now had him up as a human shield with a gun to his head.

‘Chaplain,’ called Sarpedon. ‘What are you doing?’

‘I am surviving,’ said Iktinos.

‘N’Kalo is my friend. Let him go.’

‘The Soul Drinkers have no friends. N’Kalo is coming with me.’

‘Hostages will do us no good, Iktinos! You know that!’

‘Then it is for the best that I have him, not you. Do not seek to follow, Sarpedon. There is only sorrow this way. Go to your brothers. They are rearming in the archives.’

‘What are you speaking of, Chaplain? Whatever fate waits for us here, are you not a part of it?’

Iktinos dragged N’Kalo towards a pair of double doors at the far end of the hall. ‘Fight, Sarpedon! Fight on! That is what fate demands of you. Stand by your brothers and die a good death!’

‘I know that someone has guided us here without my realising. Someone has used me just as surely as Abraxes did. Is it you, Iktinos?’

‘Goodbye, Sarpedon. A good death to you, my brother!’

‘Is it Daenyathos?’

Iktinos hauled N’Kalo through the doors. They boomed shut behind him. Sarpedon rushed forwards, trying to cover the ground to the doors before Iktinos could turn a corner and get out of sight.

Sarpedon heard the tiny sound of the grenade hitting the floor. He threw his arms up in front of him, supernatural reflexes giving him the warning a split second before the grenade went off in his face. The doors were ripped off their mountings and slammed into him, throwing him back across the display room, crashing through captured arms and victory monuments.

Sarpedon skidded along the floor on his back. When he came to a halt he brushed the debris from his eyes and saw the doorway was full of smoke and rubble. Sarpedon had no way of following Iktinos.

Daenyathos. Rogal Dorn. The pilgrim ship’s suicide attack. Now Iktinos, with an agenda of his own. Everything Sarpedon had believed about the galaxy was falling apart, and he did not know how it could end but with his death and the deaths of every one of his battle-brothers.

One thing that Iktinos had said made sense. Sarpedon had to fight. He had to win a good death, and help his brothers do the same. He owed himself that much. It was not much to fight for, but at that moment it was all he had.

Sarpedon snatched up a sword from a fallen display behind him, and struck out for the archives.

Sometimes a cold wind blew through the Phalanx. It was a trick of the ship’s atmospheric systems, or perhaps a random current created by the coolant pipes and superheated reactor cores of the engine sectors. It howled now through the science labs and triumphant galleries around the Observatory dome, strewn with wreckage. It picked up shards of debris and flapped the Imperial Fist banners that lined the way Chapter Master Vladimir had used to enter the now-ruined Observatory of Dornian Majesty.

It stirred the dust in the Atoning Halls, whistling between the frames of the wrecked torture racks and the bars of the empty cells. A few Space Marines lay there, Soul Drinkers who had been caught in the worst of the explosion and killed. Their battle-brothers had taken a few bodies with them but some still lay where they had fallen, their torn bodies still chained in their cells.

It turned the pages that lay on the reading tables in the archives. The reading hall was held by only a handful of Soul Drinkers, among them Librarian Scamander, the pyrokine who had not so long ago served as a Scout. He crouched in the shadows cast by the dim light and the enormous parchment rolls, waiting with the Soul Drinkers chosen to stand watch with him. When the enemy came – for they had to be called the enemy now, no matter what they had once been – they would come through here, and in force.

The enemy was now gathering in the crew mess hall, which Captain Lysander had designated as the staging post for the assault on the Soul Drinkers. The Imperial Fists and Howling Griffons made up the bulk of the force and Lysander had already had to deal with the competing demands to be the first in against the Soul Drinkers. The Phalanx was Imperial Fists ground and they had the say on who should have the moments of greatest honour in the fight to come, but Captain Borganor had demanded that his Howling Griffons be given the task of charging into the archives and letting the first Soul Drinkers blood. Lysander had agreed, for the Soul Drinkers were enemy enough and he did not need vengeful Howling Griffons facing up to him as well.

Commander Gethsemar picked up a handful of rubble dust from a collapsed wall, felled by the shockwave from the Atoning Halls explosion. He let the dust drift on the wind, as if it was a form of divination and from the eddies of the wind he could read the pattern of bloodshed unfolding into the immediate future. His war-mask was a death mask of Sanguinius, cast from the features of the divine primarch as he lay dying, felled by the Arch-Traitor Horus ten thousand years before. Sanguinius was unspeakably beautiful, and even stylised in gold and gemstones the death mask cast an aura of supernatural majesty that the Sanguinary Guard used as one of their deadliest weapons.

‘What do you see?’ asked Librarian Varnica of the Doom Eagles.

Gethsemar turned to Varnica but his eyes were hidden behind ruby panes set into the mask’s eye sockets and his expression could not be read. ‘Such fates that intertwine here, my brother, are beyond any of us,’ replied Gethsemar. ‘Long have our sages tried to unravel them. Long have they failed. They strive even now, knowing that the future will be forever hidden from them, but that to endeavour in such an impossible task is its own reward. Our immediate task here is far from impossible, but I fear a greater undertaking is revealed that will never end.’

‘Explain,’ said Varnica. ‘As you would to a layman.’

‘Think upon it, brother,’ said Gethsemar. ‘Here Space Marine fights Space Marine. There is nothing new about that. But will it be the final time?’

‘I think not,’ replied Varnica.

‘Then you begin to see our point. What is a Space Marine? He is a man, yes, but he is something far more. He is told that he is far more from the moment he is accepted into his Chapter, when he is little more than a child. His earlier memories may not even survive his training. He may conceive in his own mind of no time but one where he was superior to any human being. What might result from a mind so forged?’

‘He has no doubt and no fear,’ replied Varnica. ‘Such alteration of a man’s mind is necessary to create the warriors the Imperium needs. I see it as a sacrifice we make. We give up the men we might have become to instead serve as Adeptus Astartes. If you believe this is a mistake, commander, then I would be compelled to differ with you.’

‘Ah, but there it is! Do you see, Librarian Varnica? It is true that what we do to our minds to make us Space Marines is as necessary as teaching us to shoot. But what sin is locked in to us through such treatment?’

‘Brutality?’ said Varnica. ‘Many times Space Marines have gone too far in punishing the Emperor’s enemies, and ordinary men and woman have suffered as a result.’

‘Brutality is a necessity,’ said Gethsemar. ‘A few thousand dead here and there mean nothing compared to the millions spared through the intimidation of our foes that our potential for brutality allows. No, it is a far deeper sin of which I speak, something not so far removed from corruption.’

‘Corruption is a strong word,’ said Varnica, folding his arms and straightening up. The threat was clear. ‘Then what is it?’

‘It is pride,’ replied Gethsemar. ‘A Space Marine does not just think he is superior to the ordinary citizens of the Imperium. He thinks, whether his conscious mind accepts it or not, that he is superior to other Space Marines, too. We all have our way of doing things, do we not? Would we all resist any attempt to change us, though violence may be the only route doing so can take? So prideful we are that Space Marines will never stop killing Space Marines. For every Horus Heresy or Badab War, there are a thousand blood duels and trials of honour brought about by our inability to back down. That is the real enemy we face here. The Soul Drinkers were turned from the Imperium by pride. It is pride that motivates us in destroying them, for all we talk of justice. Pride is the enemy. Pride will kill us.’

Varnica thought about this. ‘Throne knows we all have our moments,’ he said. ‘But the mind of a Space Marine is a complicated thing. Can such a simple thing as pride really be its key? And from the way you speak, commander, I would imagine you have a solution?’

‘Oh, no,’ protested Gethsemar. ‘The Sons of Sanguinius all accept that we are doomed. A Space Marine’s destructive pride is the only thing keeping us all fighting, and we are the only thing keeping the Imperium from the brink. No, it is our way to observe our in-fighting for the death throes they are, to understand what we truly are before the end comes.’

Varnica smiled grimly. ‘For all your gilt and finery, Angel Sanguine, you are a pessimist. The Doom Eagles seek out the worst atrocities the galaxy commits because we want to put things right. It will not happen in any of our lifetimes, but it will happen, and it is the Space Marines who will do it whether we are too prideful for our own good or not. Why fight, if you believe all is lost no matter what you do?’

Gethsemar shook out his hand, and the dust drifted away on the thin wind. ‘Because it is our duty,’ he replied.

Lysander stomped past, hammer in hand. ‘Daviks and the Castellan are in position,’ he said. ‘Make ready. Two minutes.’

Gethsemar and Varnica broke away to join their own squads. The main assault force, gathered in the mess halls, consisted of the Ninth and Seventh Imperial Fist companies and the Howling Griffons’ Second. Varnica and Gethsemar’s squads were to follow the Griffons in and, if Borganor was to be believed, clean up the mangled remnants of the Soul Drinkers the Howling Griffons were sure to leave in their wake. Lysander was walking the lines, inspecting the Imperial Fists ranked up along the width of the crew mess hall. The rooms had been built for the normally proportioned crew of the Phalanx and the Space Marines could barely stand upright in it.

Whole planets had been broken by fewer than the two hundred Space Marines that the Imperial Fists fielded for this battle. The Howling Griffons were impatient, broken up by squads to be spoken to in turn by Borganor. Lord Inquisitor Kolgo was there, too, at the back of the hall with his Battle Sisters bodyguard, looking more like a battle observer than a combatant in spite of his Terminator armour.

Varnica returned to his squad. Sergeant Beyrengar, who had been elevated to squad command after Novas’s death, had gone through the pre-battle wargear rites and prayers already. There was little for Varnica left to do.

‘This is where the solution to that puzzle box lies,’ he said. ‘We have pursued the Soul Drinkers, though we did not know it, from the moment the heretic Kephilaes made the mistake of drawing our attention. What we began then, we finish here. We know what the Soul Drinkers are, and more importantly, we know what they are not. They are not our brothers. When you face one of them through a haze of gunsmoke, do not see a brother. See one more symptom of corruption, and excise him as you would any cancer of the human race.’

‘Borganor!’ came Lysander’s yell from the Imperial Fists lines. ‘The honour is yours!’

‘Gladly taken!’ cried out Borganor in reply. ‘Howling Griffons! Roboute Guilliman looks on! Let us show him a fight he will not forget!’

The deck of the Phalanx shuddered as the Howling Griffons advanced.

Scamander almost raised the alarm, but he realised that the silhouette entering the reading room was multi-legged. He stood and saluted. ‘Commander!’ he said. ‘We did not know if you were still alive.’

‘I had plenty of opportunities to die,’ replied Sarpedon. ‘I failed to grasp any of them.’ He shook Scamander’s hand. ‘How long do we have?’

‘Not long,’ said Scamander. ‘The Imperial Fists are gathering to attack us even now. They know we are here.’

‘And the plan?’

‘Hold the library stacks. Don’t die. Circumstances demand our tactics be simple.’

‘I see.’

‘We have your armour, and the Axe of Mercaeno.’

‘Then at least I will not die here unclothed! That would be too humiliating a way to go.’

Scamander smiled. For all the battles he had fought and the dangers his psychic powers posed, he was still a youth. By the standards of the Soul Drinkers, he was just a boy.

Sarpedon headed through the reading room to the archway Scamander had indicated. It led to a maze of bookcases and tables, shelves of volumes stacked high to the ceiling, a thin layer of dust covering everything disturbed by the armoured footprints of the Soul Drinkers. Sarpedon glanced at the books – histories of Imperial Fists actions, battle-philosophy, stories of individual Imperial Fists and their deeds. Sarpedon was reminded of the chansons the Soul Drinkers had once written, epic poems to glorify themselves. Sarpedon had abandoned his own chanson when he had thrown Michairas, his chronicler, out of an airlock during the First Chapter War. The thought gave him an unpleasant taste in his mouth.

Soul Drinkers saluted as he passed. He saw battle-brothers he had fought alongside for years. Some had argued against him, some had sided with him in everything, but they had all followed him into the Veiled Region. They had all accepted capture by Captain Lysander and the Imperial Fists without a fight, because he had ordered it. And they would die here, ultimately because he had ordered it.

‘Commander,’ said Sergeant Graevus as Sarpedon walked past. Sarpedon returned his salute and noted the Assault squad that Graevus had assembled from the Chapter’s survivors. He had picked veterans, bloody-minded Space Marines who could be trusted to give each centimetre of the stacks in return for buckets of blood shed by their chainblades. Sergeant Salk was instructing his squad, and paused to nod his own salute to Sarpedon. Sarpedon scuttled over makeshift barricades of upturned tables, and squeezed through the bottlenecks formed by the chaotic layout of the stacks. In the centre of the book-lined labyrinth, he found Captain Luko standing at a reading table.

Luko grabbed Sarpedon around the shoulders. ‘Good to see you, brother,’ he said. ‘I thought the festivities would begin without you.’

‘I would not miss it for the galaxy,’ replied Sarpedon. ‘How many of our brothers do we have here for the celebration?’

‘A little under sixty,’ said Luko. ‘A few were lost in the escape. Pallas stayed behind. And others have gone missing. It is to be expected, I suppose, but it is strange…’

‘Iktinos’s flock,’ said Sarpedon.

Luko took a step back. ‘How did you know?’

‘Iktinos is not with us,’ said Sarpedon. ‘His flock must have joined him.’

‘Not with us? What do you mean?’

‘Iktinos brought us here. He has been doing it for years now, manipulating us towards this place and time. Why, I do not know. Probably it is at the behest of Daenyathos. Whatever the reason, he has his goals and we have ours, and they do not coincide.’

‘The Chaplain has betrayed us.’

‘Yes,’ said Sarpedon. ‘He has.’

Luko’s customary joviality was gone. ‘I will kill him.’

‘There will be a queue,’ said Sarpedon. ‘Focus for now on your survival. You have picked a good place to make our stand, brother. I would think twice before attacking such a place.’

‘We have your armour, and your axe,’ said Luko. ‘They are stored behind that bookcase. We could not find the Soulspear among the evidence, though.’

‘Then I shall do without. The Axe of Mercaeno is weapon enough for me.’

‘You know, the Howling Griffons would want that back.’

‘Then Borganor can take it from my dead hand,’ replied Sarpedon. ‘I have no doubt he will be seeking just that chance. Many stories will end here, captain. Borganor and I is just one of them. If we can give those stories endings worthy of these histories, then we will have won our victory.’

Scamander’s voice reached them over Luko’s vox. ‘Captain! The Howling Griffons are advancing! I’m falling back towards Graevus’s position!’ The deep spatter of gunfire sounded over his words, and Sarpedon could hear the thuds of bolter impacts through the walls of the library.

‘Then it is done,’ said Sarpedon. ‘I shall arm. To the end, Captain Luko.’

‘To the end, Chapter Master,’ replied Luko. ‘Cold and fast.’

Sarpedon saluted. ‘Cold and fast, Soul Drinker.’