The winged clades took men from the air, dropping sharply and seizing armoured forms in the hooked embrace of their dark limbs. Men fought back, straggled, fired their weapons, but within seconds four or five warriors had been snatched up and borne away into the tumultuous sky, writhing and shouting.
Unit cohesion broke. The men scattered, trying to evade the things swooping out of the air. Tarvitz yelled for order, but knew it was futile. He was forced to duck as a winged shape rushed over him, making a reverberative, chopping drone. He caught a glimpse of a head crest formed into a long, dark, malevolent hook.
Another passed close by. Boltguns were pumping. Tarvitz lashed out with his sword, striking high, trying to drive the creature back. The thrumming of its wings was distressingly loud and made his diaphragm quiver. He jabbed and thrust with his blade, and the thing bobbed backwards across the soil, effortless and light. With a sharp, sudden movement, it turned away, took hold of another man, and lifted him into the sky.
Another of the winged things had seized Lucius. It had him by the back and was taking him off the ground. Lucius, twisting like a maniac, was trying to stab his swords up behind himself, to no avail.
Tarvitz sprang forwards and grabbed hold of Lucius as he left the ground. Tarvitz thrust up past him with his broadsword, but a hooked black leg struck him, and his broadsword tumbled away out of his hand. He held on to Lucius.
‘Drop! Drop!’ Lucius yelled.
Tarvitz could see that the thing held Lucius by the shield strapped to his back. Swinging, he wrenched out his combat knife, and hacked at the straps. They sheared away, and Lucius and Tarvitz fell from the thing’s clutches, plummeting ten metres onto the red dust.
The flying clades made off, taking nine of the Astartes with them. They were heading in the direction of the white blobs in the far thickets. Tarvitz didn’t need to give an order. The remaining warriors took off across the ground as fast as they could, chasing after the retreating dots.
They caught up with them at the far edge of the clearing. The white blobs had indeed been more trees, three of them, and now Lucius discovered they had a purpose after all.
The bodies of the taken Astartes were impaled upon the thorns of the trees, rammed onto the stone spikes, their armoured shapes skewered into place, allowing the winged megarachnid to feed upon them. The creatures, their wings now stilled and quiet and extended, long and slender, out behind their bodies like bars of stained glass, were crawling over the stone trees, gnawing and biting, using their hooked head crests to break open thorn-pinned armour to get at the meat within.
Tarvitz and the others came to a halt and watched in sick dismay. Blood was dripping from the white thorns and streaming down the squat, chalky trunks.
Their brothers were not alone amongst the thorns. Other cadavers hung there, rotten and rendered down to bone and dry gristle. Pieces of red armour plate hung from the reduced bodies, or littered the ground at the foot of the trees.
At last, they had found out what had happened to the Blood Angels.
THREE
During the voyage
Bad poetry
Secrets
DURING THE TWELVE-WEEK voyage between Sixty-Three Nineteen and One Forty Twenty, Loken had come to the conclusion that Sindermann was avoiding him.
He finally located him in the endless stacks of Archive Chamber Three. The iterator was sitting in a stilt-chair, examining ancient texts secured on one of the high shelves of the archive’s gloomiest back annexes. There was no bustle of activity back here, no hurrying servitors laden with requested books. Loken presumed that the material catalogued in this area was of little interest to the average scholar.
Sindermann didn’t hear him approach. He was intently studying a fragile old manuscript, the stilt-chair’s reading lamp tilted over his left shoulder to illuminate the pages.
‘Hello?’ Loken hissed.
Sindermann looked down and saw Loken. He started slightly, as if woken from a deep sleep.
‘Garviel,’ he whispered. ‘One moment.’ Sindermann put the manuscript back on the shelf, but several other books were piled up in the chair’s basket rack. As he re-shelved the manuscript, Sindermann’s hands seemed to tremble. He pulled a brass lever on the chair’s armrest and the stilt legs telescoped down with a breathy hiss until he was at ground level.
Loken reached out to steady the iterator as he stepped out of the chair.
‘Thank you, Garviel.’
‘What are you doing back here?’ Loken asked.
‘Oh, you know. Reading.’
‘Reading what?’
Sindermann cast what Loken judged to be a slightly guilty look at the books in his chair’s rack. Guilty, or embarrassed. ‘I confess,’ Sindermann said, ‘I have been seeking solace in some old and terribly unfashionable material. Pre-Unification fiction, and some poetry. Just desolate scraps, for so little remains, but I find some comfort in it.’
‘May I?’ Loken asked, gesturing to the basket.
‘Of course,’ said Sindermann.
Loken sat down in the brass chair, which creaked under his weight, and took some of the old books out of the side basket to examine them. They were frayed and foxed, even though some of them had evidently been rebound or sleeved from earlier bindings prior to archiving.
‘The Golden Age of Sumaturan Poetry,’ Loken said. ‘Folk Tales of Old Muscovy. What’s this? The Chronicles of Ursh?’
‘Boisterous fictions and bloody histories, with the occasional smattering of fine lyric verse.’
Loken took out another, heavy book. ‘Tyranny of the Panpacific,’ he read, and flipped open the cover to see the title page. ‘“An Epic Poem in Nine Cantos, Exalting the Rule of Narthan Dume”… it sounds rather dry.’
‘It’s raw-headed and robust, and quite bawdy in parts. The work of over-excited poets trying to turn the matter of their own, wretched times into myth. I’m rather fond of it. I used to read such things as a child. Fairy tales from another time.’
‘A better time?’
Sindermann baulked. ‘Oh, Terra, no! An awful time, a murderous, rancorous age when we were sliding into species doom, not knowing that the Emperor would come and apply the brakes to our cultural plummet.’
‘But they comfort you?’
‘They remind me of my boyhood. That comforts me.’
‘Do you need comforting?’ Loken asked, putting the books back in the basket and looking up at the old man. ‘I’ve barely seen you since—’
‘Since the mountains,’ Sindermann finished, with a sad smile.
‘Indeed. I’ve been to the school on several occasions to hear you brief the iterators, but always there’s someone standing in for you. How are you?’
Sindermann shrugged. ‘I confess, I’ve been better.’
‘Your injuries still—’
‘I’ve healed in body, Garviel, but…’ Sindermann tapped his temple with a gnarled finger. ‘I’m unsettled. I haven’t felt much like speaking. The fire’s not in me just now. It will return. I’ve kept my own company, and I’m on the mend.’
Loken stared at the old iterator. He seemed so frail, like a baby bird, pale and skinny necked. It had been nine weeks since the bloodshed at the Whisperheads, and most of that time they had spent in warp transit. Loken felt he had begun to come to terms with things himself, but seeing Sindermann, he realised how close to the surface the hurt lay. He could block it out. He was Astartes. But Sindermann was a mortal man, and nothing like as resilient.
‘I wish I could—’
Sindermann held up a hand. ‘Please. The Warmaster himself was kind enough to speak with me about it, privately. I understand what happened, and I am a wiser man for it.’
Loken got out of the chair and allowed Sindermann to take his place. The iterator sat down, gratefully.
‘He keeps me close,’ Loken said.
‘Who does?’
‘The Warmaster. He brought me and the Tenth with him on this undertaking, just to keep me by him.
So he could watch me.’
‘Because?’
‘Because I’ve seen what few have seen. Because I’ve seen what the warp can do if we’re not careful.’
‘Then our beloved commander is very wise, Garviel. Not only has he given you something to occupy your mind with, he’s offering you the chance to reforge your courage in battle. He still needs you.’
Sindermann got to his feet again and limped along the book stacks for a moment, tracing his thin hand across the spines. From his gait, Loken knew he hadn’t healed anything like as well as he’d claimed. He seemed occupied with the books once more.
Loken waited for a moment. ‘I should go,’ he said. ‘I have duties to attend to.’
Sindermann smiled and waved Loken on his way with eyelash blinks of his fingers.
‘I’ve enjoyed talking with you again,’ Loken said. ‘It’s been too long.’
‘It has.’
‘I’ll come back soon. A day or two. Hear you brief, perhaps?’
‘I might be up to that.’
Loken took a book out of the basket. ‘These comfort you, you say?’
‘Yes.’
‘May I borrow one?’
‘If you bring it back. What have you there?’ Sindermann shuffled over and took the volume from Loken. ‘Sumaturan poetry? I don’t think that’s you. Try this—’
He took one of the other books out of the chair’s rack. ‘The Chronicles of Ursh. Forty chapters, detailing the savage reign of Kalagann. You’ll enjoy that. Very bloody, with a high body count. Leave the poetry to me.’
Loken scanned the old book and then put it under his arm. ‘Thanks for the recommendation. If you like poetry, I have some for you.’
‘Really?’
‘One of the remembrancers—’
‘Oh yes,’ Sindermann nodded. ‘Karkasy. I was told you’d vouched for him.’
‘It was a favour, to a friend.’
‘And by friend, you mean Mersadie Oliton?’
Loken laughed. ‘You told me you’d kept your own company these last few months, yet you still know everything about everything.’
‘That’s my job. The juniors keep me up to speed. I understand you’ve indulged her a little. As your own remembrancer.’
‘Is that wrong?’
‘Not at all!’ Sindermann smiled. ‘That’s the way it’s supposed to work. Use her, Garviel. Let her use you. One day, perhaps, there will be far finer books in the Imperial archives than these poor relics.’
‘Karkasy was going to be sent away. I arranged probation, and part of that was for him to submit all his work to me. I can’t make head nor tail of it. Poetry. I don’t do poetry. Can I give it to you?’
‘Of course.’
Loken turned to leave. ‘What was the book you put back?’ he asked. ‘What?’
‘When I arrived, you had volumes in your basket there, but you were also studying one, intently, it seemed to me. You put it back on the shelves. What was it?’
‘Bad poetry,’ said Sindermann.
THE FLEET HAD embarked for Murder less than a week after the Whisperheads incident. The transmitted requests for assistance had become so insistent that any debate as to what the 63rd Expedition undertook next became academic. The Warmaster had ordered the immediate departure of ten companies under his personal command, leaving Varvarus behind with the bulk of the fleet to oversee the general withdrawal from Sixty-Three Nineteen.
Once Tenth Company had been chosen as part of the relief force, Loken had found himself too occupied with the hectic preparations for transit to let his mind dwell on the incident. It was a relief to be busy. There were squad formations to be reassigned, and replacements to be selected from the Legion’s novitiate and scout auxiliaries. He had to find men to fill the gaps in Hellebore and Brakespur, and that meant screening young candidates and making decisions that would change lives forever. Who were the best? Who should be given the chance to advance to full Astartes status?
Torgaddon and Aximand assisted Loken in this solemn task, and he was thankful for their contributions. Little Horus, in particular, seemed to have extraordinary insight regarding candidates. He saw true strengths in some that Loken would have dismissed, and flaws in others that Loken liked the look of. Loken began to appreciate that Aximand’s place in the Mournival had been earned by his astonishing analytical precision.
Loken had elected to clear out the dormitory cells of the dead men himself.
‘Vipus and I can do that,’ Torgaddon said. ‘Don’t bother yourself.’
‘I want to do it,’ Loken replied. ‘I should do it.’
‘Let him, Tarik,’ said Aximand. ‘He’s right. He should.’ Loken found himself truly warming to Little Horus for the first time. He had not imagined they would ever be close, but what had at first seemed to be quiet, reserved and stern in Little Horus Aximand was proving to be plain-spoken, empathic and wise.
When he came to clean out the modest, Spartan cells, Loken made a discovery. The warriors had little in the way of personal effects: some clothing, some select trophies, and little, tightly bound scrolls of oath papers, usually stored in canvas cargo sacks beneath their crude cots. Amongst Xavyer Jubal’s meagre effects, Loken found a small, silver medal, unmounted on any chain or cord. It was the size of a coin, a wolf’s head set against a crescent moon.
‘What is this?’ Loken asked Nero Vipus, who had come along with him.
‘I can’t say, Garvi.’
‘I think I know what it is,’ Loken said, a little annoyed at his friend’s blank response, ‘and I think you do too.’
‘I really can’t say.’
‘Then guess,’ Loken snapped. Vipus suddenly seemed very caught up in examining the way the flesh of his wrist was healing around the augmetic implant he had been fitted with.
‘Nero…’
‘It could be a lodge medal, Garvi,’ Vipus replied dismissively. ‘I can’t say for sure.’
‘That’s what I thought,’ Loken said. He turned the silver medal over in his palm. ‘Jubal was a lodge member, then, eh?’
‘So what if he was?’
‘You know my feelings on the subject,’ Loken replied.
Officially, there were no warrior lodges, or any other kind of fraternities, within the Adeptus Astartes. It was common knowledge that the Emperor frowned on such institutions, claiming they were dangerously close to cults, and only a step away from the Imperial creed, the Lectio Divinitatus, that supported the notion of the Emperor, beloved by all, as a god.
But fraternal lodges did exist within the Astartes, occult and private. According to rumours, they had been active in the XVI Legion for a long time. Some six decades earlier, the Luna Wolves, in collaboration with the XVII Legion, the Word Bearers, had undertaken the compliance of a world called Davin. A feral place, Davin had been controlled by a remarkable warrior caste, whose savage nobility had won the respect of the Astartes sent to pacify their warring feuds. The Davinite warriors had ruled their world through a complex structure of warrior lodges, quasi-religious societies that had venerated various local predators. By cultural osmosis, the lodge practices had been quietly absorbed by the Legions.
Loken had once asked his mentor, Sindermann, about them. ‘They’re harmless enough,’ the iterator had told him. ‘Warriors always seek the brotherhood of their kind. As I understand it, they seek to promote fellowship across the hierarchies of command, irrespective of rank or position. A kind of internal bond, a ribwork of loyalty that operates, as it were, perpendicular to the official chain of command.’
Loken had never been sure what something that operated perpendicular to the chain of command might look like, but it sounded wrong to him. Wrong, if nothing else, in that it was deliberately secret and thus deceitful. Wrong, in that the Emperor, beloved by all, disapproved of them.
‘Of course,’ Sindermann had added, ‘I can’t actually say if they exist.’
Real or not, Loken had made it plain that any Astartes intending to serve un
der his captaincy should have nothing to do with them.
There had never been any sign that anyone in the Tenth was involved in lodge activities. Now the medal had turned up. A lodge medal, belonging to the man who had turned into a daemon and killed his own.
Loken was greatly troubled by the discovery. He told Vipus that he wanted it made known that any man in his command who had information concerning the existence of lodges should come forwards and speak with him, privately if necessary. The next day, when Loken came to sort through the personal effects he had gathered, one last time, he found the medal had disappeared.
In the last few days before departure, Mersadie Oliton had come to him several times, pleading Karkasy’s case. Loken remembered her talking to him about it on his return from the Whisperheads, but he had been too distracted then. He cared little about the fate of a remembrancer, especially one foolish enough to anger the expedition authorities.
But it was another distraction, and he needed as many as he could get. After consulting with Maloghurst, he told her he would intervene.
Ignace Karkasy was a poet and, it appeared, an idiot. He didn’t know when to shut up. On a surface visit to Sixty-Three Nineteen, he had wandered away from the legitimate areas of visit, got drunk, and then shot his mouth off to such an extent he had received a near-fatal beating from a crew of army troopers.
‘He is going to be sent away,’ Mersadie said. ‘Back to Terra, in disgrace, his certification stripped away. It’s wrong, captain. Ignace is a good man…’
‘Really?’
‘No, all right. He’s a lousy man. Uncouth. Stubborn. Annoying. But he is a great poet, and he speaks the truth, no matter how unpalatable that is. Ignace didn’t get beaten up for lying.’
Recovered enough from his beating to have been transferred from the flagship’s infirmary to a holding cell, Ignace Karkasy was a dishevelled, unedifying prospect.
He rose as Loken walked in and the stab lights came on.
‘Captain, sir,’ he began. ‘I am gratified you take an interest in my pathetic affairs.’
‘You have persuasive friends,’ Loken said. ‘Oliton, and Keeler too.’