Mephiston Lord of Death Read online

  MEPHISTON

  LORD OF DEATH

  DAVID ANNANDALE

  For Margaux, for her strength.

  PROLOGUE

  THE ABYSSAL CURSE

  Darkness is running through my hands. I feel its textures. I know its shifting from smooth to granular, soothing to jagged, calm to desperate. The dark has as many moods and faces and songs as any more mundane, more adulterated reality. It is as protean as the warp, but possesses a purity that the daemon-infested empyrean will never know.

  I am in something that might be called Limbo. I think of it as the embodiment of neither. It is neither real nor illusion, neither consciousness nor sleep, neither moral nor corrupt, neither materium nor warp. I am part of the neither, and I am separate from it. But the darkness is mine. It is in my hands. At any moment that I desire, I can grasp it. And then I can bend it to my will.

  When I do, I must face a truth: the dark and the warp are not separate. The warp fuels its potential. The warp fuels me. If I slip, the warp will take me. It will become me. But that has not happened, nor will it. This is what I must believe. If I fail, then I must consider myself damned, and this is something I will not do.

  But.

  But the reason I travel the dark, the reason I parse its ways and beings, is to discover what it is that I am. I once was Calistarius. He has been dead for many years. I stand in his place, with death in my right hand, darkness in my left, and I would know who this is who bears the name Mephiston. So it is not just darkness that is running through my hands. It is knowledge. And one of the grains may be the one I seek.

  The neither is non-space, and yet it has a place. It has an entry point, and outside of the neither, in the realm of the here, the gateway has a precise location. It exists aboard the strike cruiser Crimson Exhortation. It waits, barred to all but myself, in my quarters, in the upper reaches of the tower that rises amidships. My domain in the here is spacious compared to the cells that are sufficient to the needs of my battle-brothers. My quarters are large, but not because of any indulgence. They are large because of the archives. The primary chamber is a repository of banes. Scrolls, books, parchments and more are amassed here, all of them records of knowledge that kills, wisdom that blasts, philosophy that twists. These are dangerous objects. They can kill simply by existing.

  I am more dangerous than they are. It may be that I am also more blighted (but not damned, not damned outright). I do not know. I seek my understanding in the neither, and I seek it when I comb through those vaults of black thought. I remain disappointed.

  Beyond the archive, up another level, is my meditation chamber. This is a small space. It is empty, a lightless cylinder no more than three metres high and two wide, a coldness of black stone walls. This is the gateway. Pass through it, and space ends. In the liminal zone of the chamber itself, my body waits for my exploration to end. It waits while my mind weaves through the tapestry of the dark. Yet in the dark, I have a body, too. There is no consciousness without the idea of the physical self. I stretch out my hands. I do not see them, but I perceive them in the minutest detail. I flex my fingers, and touch the dark. It pours itself into and through my grasp. I will not find answers today. I know that with a certainty as perfect as death. But I also know, with the same certainty, that I must continue my search. I must seek to understand this thing that I now am. The day that I abandon my quest will be a terrible one indeed.

  I must remain wary of the being who touches the dark.

  The currents in the darkness become more defined. The slick of the warp spreads its stain. It forms sights, words, sounds, memories. An echo reaches for me: it is the insinuating rasp of M’kar. The image of the daemon prince is also there, fragmented, distorted and multiplied by the crystals of my prison on Solon V. You are of our party without knowing it. You walk the path. Know what you are. Embrace the revel. Enter the palace of wisdom. I denied him. I destroyed him. But his words will not die with him. He has bequeathed a legacy of doubt.

  I turn from it. I deny it, though I know I will meet those words again. In its stead, I follow another current, one of more immediate import. This is a flow that gathers strength the further I follow it. It tries to sweep me into its rushing turbulence, but though it wants my surrender, it conceals its nature. I sense its power. I sense that it is hurtling toward a maelstrom of terrible force. I know that there is purpose, but whether holy or corrupt, I cannot tell. There is also a physical destination, and this I can read. All too well.

  There is a change in real space, a presence approaching. My consciousness drops from the darkness, back into my body. I turn to greet Albinus. The Sanguinary Priest says, ‘We have arrived.’

  I nod. In the back of my mind, I can feel the immense twist of the vortex. It is here. We are deep inside it. We have come to the Pallevon system in answer to the call of one of our own. Everywhere and nowhere, the empyrean is flexing, twisting. The potential is transforming into the inevitable. An event prepares to be born.

  I cannot help but wonder if we have been summoned to our doom.

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE REACH OF THE PAST

  The Crimson Exhortation has barely made the transition to the materium when the klaxons resound. Battle stations. We have arrived, and we are at war. Albinus and I reach the cathedral that is the strike cruiser’s bridge. I mount the marble steps to the apse. Here, in the strategium, Captain Castigon, commander of Fourth Company, is surrounded by a panoply of tacticarium screens. Castigon is an exemplar. His bearing is noble. His aquiline, aristocratic features reveal the genetic inheritance of our primarch, and are an expression of the heroic ideal that is the tragic hope of our Chapter. There is nothing of the Red Thirst visible in the paladin that stands before me. I have seen him in battle, though. He is a Blood Angel, and so he is riven by the Flaw. But he is also of that number whose quest for a cure is so determined, it implies a belief that such a thing exists.

  So be it. May his hope grant him a measure of peace.

  My presence gives him no pleasure. He hides this well, but he deludes himself if he thinks he can conceal anything from me. I am not offended. Mine is a resurrection that does not engender optimism. I am not the embodiment of life’s resilience. I am, at best, the vector of devastation. Coiled, cold and gnawing in the heart of many of my brothers is the thought that I may be something worse. Beyond my actions themselves, I have no answer for them. Or for myself.

  Castigon nods to me. ‘Chief Librarian,’ he says.

  ‘Is it here?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes.’ He points to a hololith. It is the image of two ships. The magnification is extreme, but the details are still quite clear. The small vessel is a Gladius-class frigate. It is at the mercy of a strike cruiser more than twice its size. I scan the other displays. ‘No exchange of fire,’ I say.

  ‘A boarding action is under way.’

  The cruiser is known to us. It is the traitor ship Destiny of Pain. ‘The Sanctified,’ I mutter. Doubly treacherous Chaos Space Marines, they betrayed first their sacred duty and the Emperor, and then broke from their own foul kin, renouncing the Word Bearers and falling in worship before Khorne. They are vile, but they are not to be dismissed. They will fight to the last warrior, and they have a dark gift: daemons answer their summons eagerly.

  The presence of the Sanctified is not welcome, but we will not shrink from their challenge. Instead, we will tear them apart.

  What I find disturbing about the displays is not the Destiny of Pain. For that ship, I feel only a pure, blessed hatred. The image that troubles me is that of the Gladius. Its name is Harrowing Faith, and it should not be here. It was lost during the Second War for Armageddon. But now the empyrean has returned our ship to us. I stare at the grainy f
lickering hololith, and I have no warmth or love to give the prodigal vessel. Unlooked-for escapees from the lost stretches of time are rarely cause for rejoicing. I know this very well, thanks to the Eclipse of Hope. My brothers should, too.

  I wonder what a boarding party will find on the Gladius. I know whom we expect to find. Will he be the same Space Marine who went to war on Armageddon? I am not.

  ‘There is no resistance from the Harrowing Faith,’ I note. I have not seen a single shot fired from its guns. The life of the Sanctified is being made very easy.

  ‘There may not be anyone left to retaliate,’ says Castigon.

  ‘In which case our mission is futile.’

  Castigon thinks for a moment, perhaps considering an immediate and direct assault on the Destiny of Pain, leaving the Gladius to whatever end will come. He shakes his head. ‘No,’ he says. ‘We received that signal. It was sent by someone aboard, and we must answer it. To do otherwise would dishonour the company.’

  ‘Are we still receiving the message?’

  ‘No. But that changes nothing.’

  He is right. More right, I suspect, than he knows. There is something waiting for us on Pallevon. We shall meet it whether or not anyone survives on the frigate. The currents I saw in the dark are too strong. Whatever contingent events arise, we shall come to the centre of the vortex.

  But Castigon is also correct about honour. What the traitors attack, we must defend. And the Harrowing Faith bears the livery of the Blood Angels. There is no choice in what we must do, but only in how we march down the fated path.

  ‘We will engage the traitor ship,’ Castigon declares. ‘Draw it off. Provide the opportunity for our own boarding party.’

  ‘I will lead the squad.’ I would see what has emerged from the warp for myself.

  The boarding torpedo cuts through the void. Inside, we are a message of judgement. Through its viewing block, I see the initiating steps of the lethal dance between the cruisers. The two ships are leviathans of destruction, ponderous in their movements, their actions unfolding like the shifting of continents: unstoppable, so inevitable as to appear preordained. The Crimson Exhortation strikes the first blow. Its lances slice through the Destiny’s shields. The hits are good. Flames billow from the port side. The traitor ship responds in kind, but it has been caught at a disadvantage, its flank exposed while the Exhortation presents a narrower profile as it storms forward. The glimpse of the battle well begun is all I am given before we are grinding our way through the hull of the Harrowing Faith.

  Our point of entry is very close to the pockmark of a Sanctified boarding torpedo. We do not know where the frigate’s survivors, if any, are. But we can follow the traitors, and dispatch them to their reward. And so within seconds of breaching the hull, we have disembarked and are moving down the corridors. We are a crimson sword seeking the belly of our prey.

  The Harrowing Faith was recognisable from the exterior. Eroded, battle-worn, but still a fighting vessel of the Blood Angels. Here, inside, is where the depredations of the warp have made themselves felt. The stonework in the passageways has lost definition. Relief-work covers the walls. Created with all the skill of the stone-carvers of Baal, the sculptures were inspiring depictions of glorious victory and heroic martyrdom. Now they seem blurred, smeared, as if their reality were uncertain. There are veins in the rock that vibrate in my peripheral vision. The entire ship feels porous. It is rotten. It would take very little for the frigate to disintegrate, to surrender to nothingness. The ship is not a ghost. I have walked the decks of such an abomination, and this is different. The Harrowing Faith is a corpse that has not been allowed to decay. It is dangerous, but also pitiable. And what, I wonder, is so bitterly preserving its existence?

  There is no sign of life. We have passed no serfs. We have seen the remains of a few servitors, and they have been dead for a long time. The disintegration of their forms is well-advanced. It is not the natural corruption of decay. They are blurring like the ship, and soon the very idea of their existence will have vanished.

  The Sanctified have time on their side, and have made good use of it. We found the punctured loading bay that was their breaching point, but the traitors were long gone. They have made rapid progress through the ship. There is no sign of battle. The Sanctified appear to have advanced unopposed.

  Albinus is marching one step behind me, ahead of Sergeant Gamigin and the rest of the squad. This is not a standard battle formation, but I will not lead from the rear, and Albinus has fought by my side since before… well… before the thing that I now am came into being. ‘Perhaps there is no one aboard, after all,’ Albinus says.

  ‘Then who sent the message?’ I ask.

  ‘A vox-servitor, perhaps, transmitting a recording.’

  A reasonable supposition. It is also wrong. ‘The Harrowing Faith exists when it should not,’ I answer. ‘There is a reason for that.’ And as we move toward the awaiting inevitable, I would do so with open eyes, and a forward charge. I cannot turn away from my own mystery, nor shall I from any others.

  Though there are no physical traces left by the passage of the Sanctified, there are other ways of tracking them. I can see their taint, a spoor of corruption that lingers in their wake. It eats a little more at the substance of the ship. I am following a trail of corroding reality.

  ‘They aren’t heading for the bridge,’ Gamigin observes.

  He is right. Nor for the enginarium. The power nodes of the frigate hold no interest for the enemy. This makes no tactical sense. It is, therefore, important. The followers of Chaos are depraved, they are perfidious, and they are malignant, cancerous souls. But most are not insane, much as we would wish it otherwise, and they are not stupid. They would not be half so dangerous if they possessed these flaws. If they care about something other than the control of the ship, then so shall I. Especially now that I realise where the trail is leading us. There is a dark logic to the traitors’ goal. ‘They want the chapel.’ Of course they do. What else would a warband of the iniquitous stripe of the Sanctified be targeting? And where else would we find the particular Blood Angel who summoned us here?

  Anger at the thought of the desecration that may already be occurring flares from the squad. I can see the anger. Its aura is a cold, shimmering blue. It is the shade of quick outrage and calculated, careful violence. It is an anger that fuels war, but not madness. It poses no risk for my battle-brothers.

  It is not just a psychic colour, though. It is also a taste. I know its every nuance. I feed on it. I am not sure what that makes me.

  Is that another twisting hook of doubt that I feel? If so, then let it be the mark of my fidelity that I note it, and use it to walk an honourable path. Let it further be transmuted into an anger of my own, one that will smite the heretic and the traitor.

  The Harrowing Faith is a minor vessel. It does not follow from this, however, that its chapel is a small, mean thing. Our sites of worship must be worthy of the Emperor. The passageway leading to the chapel’s entrance becomes wide and high, that it might accommodate the massive iron doors at the entrance to the nave. The doors are strong, designed to protect the sacred heart of the ship in the event of a successful boarding, but against a determined force, no barrier aboard a vessel can do more than delay the enemy. The doors have been broken. They lie like the lids of colossal sarcophagi. Their engravings, chronicles of the acts of Sanguinius and the Emperor, have become uncertain memories. Beyond the doorway, the dim lighting of the chapel is rent by muzzle flashes.

  This sacrilege will not stand. The blue anger slides down the spectrum to a more savage, dangerous, nourishing red. I draw my force sword. It is called Vitarus, it is ancient, and it has feasted on an ocean of traitor’s blood. Crimson energy crackles down its length. It is as hungry as we are. ‘Brothers,’ I call. I do not raise my voice. I make it heard all the same, here in the antechamber and even in the chapel, where it insinuates itself between the din of bolter fire. I know the nature of my instrument. I know the
effect of my voice. There is the echo of the tomb in it, the coldness of eternal void. Calistarius’s voice died on Armageddon, as did he. I rose in his place, and my voice is the sound of darkness. Let the Sanctified know: the Lord of Death is upon them.

  I am not alone. ‘By the blood of Sanguinius!’ Gamigin roars. The rest of the squad echoes him, and the walls shake with the Blood Angels’ battle cry.

  We race into the chapel, vengeance in our hearts, blood in our eyes. I take in the scene as I cross the threshold. There are nine of the traitor Space Marines. One of the Sanctified lies dead in the nave, his head missing. The blood pooling from the stump of his neck is more substantial than the floor it covers. The dominant red of the Sanctified’s armour is sufficiently close to our own that it is especially galling to see them in this holy place. Their presence carries an extra charge of mockery. I will ram that laughter back down their throats. At the other end of the chapel, a lone figure has taken shelter behind the altar. He is keeping the enemy at bay thanks to the precision of his shots. The altar, an unforgiving block of marble draped in crimson, is the strong point of the space. The warrior behind it will not be removed easily. He is defiant, hurling anathema upon the Sanctified. His language is ornate, savage, theologically rich. It marks him as a Chaplain. Though the distortion of his helmet’s vox-speaker grants a certain anonymity, I recognise the voice. It is the one we expected.

  The rest of the squad spreads out behind me. Bolter shells punch into the enemy. The Chaos Space Marines respond well. Two of them keep up the pressure on the altar. They run towards opposite sides of the nave, seeking to flank the defender. The others turn their attention to us, dropping low and shooting back. The wooden pews between us are pointless cover, blasted to splinters within seconds by the crossfire. There are columns on either side of the nave, but our two forces have advanced up the centre. We face each other across open ground. This will not be a battle of attrition. It will be short and savage, the explosion of war for which a Blood Angel thirsts. We are rushing forward to reclaim the space. Doomed it may be, like the rest of the ship, but I would have it redeemed before it ceases to exist.