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The Devastation of Baal – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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Chapter One

The Red Mist

Already the morning gongs were ringing when Uigui the water seller roused himself for another day of thankless toil.

Uigui rose fully clothed, and went to empty his bladder into the home-made purification unit in the corner. Every drop of water was precious on Baal Secundus, whatever the source.

His single-roomed home held three cots, a table, the recyc unit and precious little else. Old transit pallets heaped with threadbare blankets against the cold of desert night were their beds. On the way to the recyc unit, Uigui passed his great burden, his idiot son. The boy had gone away to the Chapter trials full of hope, and come back minus his wits.

‘Get up! Up! Up, you little fool!’ Uigui kicked at his son’s booted feet. The boy thrashed awake and threw up his hands in alarm. A frightened face peeped out between filthy fingers.

‘Get up!’ growled Uigui. ‘Dawn’s coming – can’t you hear the Angel’s gongs?’ He looked out of a window of low-grade alabaster set into the wall of unpainted adobe. Daybreak should have shone pink through the stone. Instead a red darkness lingered outside.

Most mornings were cold but beautiful, the sky flawlessly smooth and tinted a deep rose by the light of the Red Scar. Sometimes, the colours were enough to stop Uigui and make him forget how much he hated his life. ‘Not that you can tell,’ grunted Uigui. ‘Red mist. A thick one too.’

‘D-d-d-d-do we-e-e have to, Da?’ said the boy.

Uigui looked at the boy with clear hatred as he urinated into the recyc funnel. ‘Y-y-yes!’ he spat back, mocking the boy’s stutter. ‘Now, up! I need help to fill the flasks, age be cursed, or I’d turn you over to the Emperor’s mercy and be rid of you!’

Uigui adjusted his filthy clothes and stamped, bow backed and swaying, to the door of gappy wood that separated the single room of his home from the goods yard outside. He clutched at his lower back as he reached for the door handle and rubbed fruitlessly at the pain in his bones, his mood souring further.

‘Be kinder to the boy. He is my daughter’s son,’ croaked the aged voice of the room’s final occupant. The coverings on the third bed shifted, the lump beneath them growing thin arms and knotted hands as a woman even more wasted and hunched than Uigui emerged. ‘You owe him some love for her memory, if you can’t summon some for the boy himself.’

The old woman coughed hard. Phlegm rattled around her throat. Uigui looked at her in disgust. Her face was as deeply lined as the pit of a fruit, as if time had rotted away the pleasant outer flesh, leaving the bitter, craggy interior of her soul exposed for all to see.

‘Where’s your daughter now, you old witch?’ he said. ‘Dead. Dead and gone, leaving me with a fool and a crone for company.’

‘You are cruel,’ said the old woman. Clustered carcinomas blighted her face. She had only a few more months of life in her, but her eyes were bright and shrewd. Uigui hated her eyes most of all. ‘The Emperor will punish you.’

Uigui snarled. ‘We’ll all starve long before the Emperor notices if you and your precious grandson don’t rouse yourselves. We must be at the gates before they open for the day.’

The woman shrank back into her blankets. ‘The Red Mist is here. You will have no customers.’

Uigui rested his hand on the piece of scrap he had fashioned into the door handle. It was worn almost featureless. He had unearthed the metal in his youth from one of the moon’s ruined cities. An unidentifiable artefact of the system’s lost paradisal past, it could once have been a piece of art, it could have been a component from a wondrous machine. It could have been anything. Now it was old, ugly and broken, suitable only for the coarsest work. Just like Uigui.

‘Then we will starve. Get up. We go to work.’ He flipped the door open, letting it bang into the wall to show his anger.

The Red Mist was the worst he’d ever seen: a choking, thick vapour laden with sand particles. Only on a low gravity lunar body like Baal Secundus was such a phenomenon possible, though Uigui didn’t know that. His worldview was necessarily limited. What he saw was a day’s business ruined. Red Mist was iron sharp in smell and texture, a soupy brume that lacerated the nostrils. He coughed and pulled up his scarf to cover his mouth and nose. He had no clip to hold it in place, so he pressed it to the contours of his face with his left hand.

Though his home was modest, his stockyard contained a fortune. Four huge terracotta urns, taller than men and too wide for the embrace of two people to meet around, lined the wall. With such wealth to protect, the courtyard was better built than the house. The walls were of stone, not mud brick, and high, the tops studded with rusty spikes and broken glass. The gate was deliberately small, triple-barred, plated in scavenged metal, upon whose pocked surfaces the marks of the ancients were still visible, when the light was right.

There was no sun. The early day was tainted a bloody murk. The urns were looming shapes, the wall invisible. The yard was little over twenty feet side to side, but the Red Mist was so dense that day Uigui could not see across.

He paused. At the very least the fog would be full of toxins given off by Baal Secundus’ poisoned seas. If the sands in the mist had been picked up over one of the old cities, the rad levels would be high. Uigui supposed he should fetch his rad-ticker from inside. Frankly, he could not motivate himself to retrieve it. He was old. A dose of radiation from the badlands could not shorten his life by much, and if it did, what of it? He was tired of life. It was hard and unforgiving.

Sometimes he thought of ending it all, the misery, the graft, the wearing company of his son and mother-in-law. He had no illusions death would bring a happy afterlife in the Emperor’s care; all he wanted was peace. He could not bring himself to do it. The mindless will of genes forced him to continue living, which he did begrudgingly.

Blinking gritty moisture from his eyes, he headed for the lean-to where he kept his cart. A pair of tall wheels bracketed two cargo beds, one above the other. Three dozen clay flasks were on each level. He fetched the first and took it to the tap attached to the nearest urn. To fill it he had to let his scarf drop. The dust in the mist tickled his nose and he swore. Rusty water ran into the bottle, making him want to piss again. His bladder was another thing that was failing him.

‘Boy! Boy! Get out here and help me!’

The door creaked. Out came the old woman instead, her face veiled in the ridiculous manner of her desert tribe. Uigui should never have married out of town.

‘Where’s that damn boy?’ growled Uigui.

‘Let him breakfast, you old miser, he’ll be out in a moment.’

‘He’s a waste of food and water,’ said Uigui. He shut off the tap, pressed the cap closed on the bottle and fetched another flask.

‘It’s not his fault,’ said the old woman.

‘I think we all know that it’s the Angel’s fault,’ said Uigui quietly.

‘Hsst!’ she said. ‘That is heresy. Would you leave him without a father as well as his mind?’

‘He went to their trials a strong youth, and was returned to me a fool. Who else should I blame?’

‘Fate,’ she said. ‘He was not meant to join them, and he is getting better.’

‘He is not,’ said Uigui sourly. He set the full flask into his cart, and fetched a third.

The crone shuffled across the courtyard to the cart, her long skirts disturbing the moist sand of the ground. There she stopped, but she did not help, only watched him, a judgemental phantom in the fog. Uigui gave her a filthy look.

In her gnarled hands a small auto-tarot deck made its tooth-grinding clicks. She pushed the button at the side. The tiles behind its scratched viewing pane clattered into place. She studied the little pictures on them a moment, then pressed the button again. Then again. Uigui fought the urge to strike her, to knock the tarot from her hand and cast her out. The tarot was the instrument of the Emperor. Even he balked at such blasphemy.

‘Help me, then,’ he said. He squinted at the sky. ‘The sun is rising.’ The fog remained as thick as ever, but the light behind it was getting stronger. ‘We are late.’

The old woman hooked her tarot deck to her rope belt, took a flask up and went to the second urn.

‘Today is a day of great portents,’ she said.

‘You say that every day,’ said Uigui.

The woman shrugged. ‘Today it is true.’

‘Nonsense,’ he said, but he was wary of what she said. She had a knack for reading the tarot. He half believed she was a witch. In truth, he was frightened of her. He slammed the latest filled flask into the cart hard, making the others rattle. ‘Where is that boy?’

The boy pushed the cart. At least he was good for that. Uigui and the old woman walked behind. The flasks knocked and clinked in their trays, warning others they were coming. It was a good advertisement, but under the cover of the fog the noise made Uigui nervous. For all that Angel’s Fall was under the direct administration of the Blood Angels, there was always the possibility of robbery on a day of mist.

They met no misfortune as they walked the street from Waterer’s Row towards the Sanguinian Way, the small city’s main street. There were precious few people about. Those figures that appeared suddenly out of the murk were swaddled head to foot, and just as quickly disappeared.

‘Quicker, boy,’ grumbled Uigui. ‘We want a good spot. I want to get there before they are all gone.’

They turned onto the Sanguinian Way. At its far end was the Place of Choosing, where the giant statue of the Great Angel spread his arms and wings to face the eastern sky. Immense though Sanguinius’ effigy was, the fog obscured it totally. With the majestic statue hidden, the cramped, low buildings that made up Angel’s Fall seemed ruder than ever. It did not look like a holy city. The fog forced attention onto its inadequacies. Even the Sanguinian Way was meanly proportioned, and crooked. Without Sanguinius, Angel’s Fall could have been any town on any backward, arid world in the galaxy.

Gongs boomed from unseen towers, signifying the start of the Peaceday markets. Only a handful of stalls had been set up at the roadside, and foot traffic on the way was low. Uigui reckoned visitors to Angel’s Fall would be fewer than usual, though there were always some. The Red Mist discouraged travel. Not only was it toxic, but Baal’s violent wildlife hunted under its cover. He cursed his luck. Water was expensive to both the buyer and the seller. The price he’d get for his stock barely covered the cost, and he owed a lot of money to Anton the reguliser. Anton took prompt payment of debts very seriously. Uigui rubbed at the stump of his left little finger, a reminder of the last time he’d been late with a payment. Anton had been nothing but apologetic; he had said he had no choice.

Uigui thought they would have to stay out late, selling to people exiting the city to travel in the cool of the night. Assuming the mist lifts today at all, he fretted. Such a fog was rare. Baal Secundus’ principal weathers were wind and dust storms, but there was not a breath of a breeze today.

‘This weather is unnatural,’ he said.

‘A day of portents,’ said his mother-in-law in satisfaction.

‘Shut up,’ he said. ‘It’s just a day. Boy. Here.’ Uigui pointed out a patch of ground in the lee of the Temple of the Emperor. The temple occupied a whole block by itself, and another of Angel’s Fall’s major streets intersected the Sanguinian Way there.

‘This will do.’ The gongs continued to ring. ‘Why all this racket?’ Uigui said.

‘Happenings. Baalfora has much in store for us today,’ said the old woman, using the local name for Baal Secundus. She settled herself down. Her joints grumbled, and she grumbled back at them, forcing her old legs to cross. Upon skirts held taut between her knees she set her tarot deck and began repetitively clicking at the workings. Uigui bared his teeth at her. He took out his irritation on the boy.

‘Come on, boy, set out the table! Where are the cups? By the Emperor, we’d all die if you were in charge here!’

‘S-s-s-orry, father,’ said the boy.

‘Don’t call me that,’ he said. ‘My son is dead. Stolen by angels. There is no one to inherit my business once I am gone. Do not presume your place.’

The boy bowed his head to hide his tears, showing the ugly scar running across the top of his head. Uigui hated the sight of that most of all. He was sure had his boy not fallen he would be up there on Baal as a warrior of the Emperor. He stared at it as the boy set up the little table that folded out from the side of the cart and put out a set of small bronze cups. Something like grief hurt him. He responded with anger.

‘Quicker!’ he snapped.

The gongs were still booming long after they should have stopped. He squinted into the dim morning. There was another sound, a distant rumbling, under the clamour of the gongs.

‘What is that?’ he whispered.

‘V-v-void ships?’ ventured the boy.

‘Silence!’ snapped Uigui. But even as his anger flew out of his mouth, he thought the boy might be right. Angel’s Fall was no stranger to the ships of the Angels. There were offworlders too, who came to pay their respects to the place where Sanguinius, purest of the Emperor’s progeny, was discovered. But rarely did they arrive in such numbers that the sound of their descent was so constant.

Uigui heard the crunch of heavy feet on sand coming down the way. He swore at himself. Angels. They would have no use for his water.

‘Bow! Bow!’ he hissed. He dropped his head, and forced his idiot son to kneel.

A huge armoured figure emerged from the murk. Armour black, his helm cast in the shape of a skull. A Space Marine priest, death incarnate. Uigui trembled. He dropped to his knees in fright, waiting for the figure to pass by.

He did not. The footsteps stopped by the little cart. Uigui felt the Angel’s regard upon him. His bladder twinged yet again.

‘Be at peace, blessed son of Baal Secundus,’ said the warrior. His voice was inhumanly deep and thickly accented.

Uigui looked up. The grimacing skull glared down at him. Breathing hoses were clamped between its stylised teeth, and eye-lenses of glowing green set below the angry brow. The armour hissed and whined in response to microshifts in the Space Marine’s posture, making Uigui more afraid.

The warrior looked down both streets of the crossroads.

‘The great square. Where is it?’

Though made hollow and booming by its projection machinery, the warrior’s voice was kindly. Still Uigui could not see past the terrible visage glowering at him. He stared dumbly back.

‘Waterseller, I mean you no harm,’ said the Angel. ‘I come to pay my respects to my lord. Where is his statue?’

Uigui trembled and flung up his arm. He intended to say ‘That way, my lord!’ A strangled mewl came out of his mouth instead.

‘My thanks, and my blessings,’ said the Chaplain. ‘The Emperor keep you.’

He glanced up at the great temple, then strode away.

‘W-w-why does he not know?’ said the boy stupidly.

‘I do not know,’ said Uigui. Still upon his knees he gazed fearfully at the departing giant.

‘M-m-m-more!’ said the boy, and shrank back behind the cart.

Uigui followed his son’s wavering finger. More Space Marines, dozens of them. Uigui had never seen so many at one time and his body shook in terror. They walked past, armour dull in the foggy daylight. Uigui could see clearly enough to know they were not Blood Angels. Their armour was adorned in a similar manner to that of the masters of Baal. The heavy plates were beautifully formed, covered in scrollwork and delicate embellishments, and decked with bloodstone drips cased in gold, but the red of their armour was an unfamiliar hue, their helms and trim were white, and their markings were strange.

Uigui watched, amazed, as the column of warriors moved by in solemn silence, voiceless but for the growls and hum of their armour. It was not unusual to see other angels claiming descent from the Great Angel in Angel’s Fall, but only in ones or twos. When a second group in yet different colours marched by, these armoured half in black and half in bloody red, Uigui’s mouth fell open. The gongs boomed. Outside the wall, the roaring of braking jets grew louder.

‘Th-th-there’s hundreds of them!’ stuttered the boy.

For a moment, Uigui forgot his anger, and put his arm around his broken son.

‘W-w-w-why so many?’ the boy said.

‘They come to pay respect to their father. They come to pray,’ said Uigui. ‘It is a marvel.’

The old woman chuckled, a low growling sound like a felid about to bite. The tarot tiles rattled.

‘What is it?’ Uigui said.

The old woman’s smile was evident in her voice. ‘The burning tower, the bloody angel, the falling star, the foundered void ship – these are fell signs.’

Uigui looked sharply back at her. ‘What do you mean?’

The old woman regarded him through the cloth of her veil. ‘They are not coming here to worship, you foolish man,’ she said. ‘They have come here to die.’

Chapter Two

The coming shadow

Across the central deeps of the Ultima Segmentum the Red Scar spread its sanguine pall. A stellar desert tinted bloody, hard and inimical to man. The suns imprisoned within its bounds were all red in colour, whether senescent supergiants or early sequence infants. Deadly radiation bathed this benighted subsector, rendering its worlds uninhabitable by any sane measure.

The Imperium had long passed the point of sanity.

Perhaps because of their situation, the planets of the Scar were rich in exotic resources, and so generations of humanity had lived out brief lives under baleful stars, toiling at the will of the High Lords of Terra. Sustained by elixirs manufactured on Satys, the inhabitants of the Cryptus, Vitria and other systems afflicted by the Scar’s poison lived a life, of sorts, in service of the species.

Against all the odds, by human ingenuity and for human greed, there had been billions of humans in the Red Scar region. So it might have been for generations more, but nothing is permanent and mankind no longer held sway.

The tyranids had come to the Scar, scouring every world they encountered down to the bedrock to feed an ancient and powerful hunger, extirpating humanity in the process.

The invader was Hive Fleet Leviathan, by Imperial designation, though the governing intelligence of the hive mind made no such distinctions between the component parts of its body. To its incomprehensibly vast intellect, Leviathan was a limb, a foot or an arm. If the hive mind regarded Leviathan as distinct from the other fleets devouring the galaxy in some way, it was by categories too alien for men to understand.

From across the cold gulfs of intergalactic space the hive fleets had come, moving from one feeding ground to the next. The hive mind did not know and did not care what its food called itself, but noted, in its alien way, the strangeness of this prey-cluster; an environment where the realities of the mind and form were intermingled. There was risk there, but good hunting in the dangerous shoals. The galaxy teemed with life, and the hive mind glutted itself on a staggering array of biological abundance.

From the human point of view, the tyrannic wars had raged for close to a half millennium. In that time, hundreds of Imperial worlds had been devoured. Several minor races had been consumed. Thousands of unknown planets outside the Imperium’s notice had been turned from living orbs to rocky spheres that would never bear life again. Had the High Lords of Terra known how devastating the tyranids truly were, they may have acted sooner.

Like the mythical plagues of locusts of Old Earth, the tyranids stripped everything they came across bare. With each feast the hive mind became stronger, absorbing the genetic profiles of everything it devoured and adding their strengths to its own. With every new creature eaten, its repertoire of genetic tricks grew. When it encountered a threat, it adapted. Its methods became more efficient, its fleets more numerous. Its creatures proliferated and multiplied, the essences of the galaxy’s worlds converted into yet more elements of the never-ending swarms. So overwhelming was the threat it posed, the race had been declared Periculo Summa Magna, and was deemed by many departments within the Imperium’s higher echelons as the most serious challenge to mankind’s continued existence.

They were wrong about that, but only by a little. These were dangerous years, well blessed with horrors.

Nevertheless, the hive mind did not advance unopposed. There were brave men and women, heroes all, who stood against it no matter that the odds were impossible, and death was their only reward.

Imperial losses were many. Victory was rare. At many junctures the Blood Angels Space Marines had defied Hive Fleet Leviathan, stealing away its food, and in some cases destroying its splinter fleets in their entirety. The hive mind responded to them as it did to other threats in the prey-cluster, creating new beasts to beat the defences of its prey, improving those it already possessed, and devising new strategies. All to no avail. Though pushed back, the red prey warriors fought on. At Cryptus the Blood Angels performed one last supreme effort, destroying a tendril of the greater whole, in truth a trivial victory at the cost of a rich system.

Nothing could halt Leviathan’s encroachment on the Red Scar. After Cryptus there was Baal, home world of the Blood Angels, lying directly in the swarm’s path.

This was not accidental.

The sages of the Imperium thought the hive mind a non-sentient intelligence. They believed the actions of the myriad creatures in its swarms were performed instinctively, and that the sheer numbers of interactions between them gave rise to complex behaviour. At the very highest level these behaviours were remarkable, but only had the semblance of thought. Ultimately instinct drove the hive fleets, they said, not free will. Similar false intelligences had been witnessed so very many times in social animals across space, after all, from the ants of ancient Earth to the thought-trees of Demarea. The hive mind’s actions could be ascribed to sentient consideration, but the sages insisted they were nothing of the sort.

The biologans held the hive mind to be only a complicated animal, a supreme predator driven by a devastatingly powerful reactive mind, nevertheless devoid of soul. It was an automaton, they said. Unfeeling. It was as unaware of what it did as the wind is unaware of the cliff whose face it scours away, grain by grain. The hive mind was biological mechanics writ large. Mind from mindlessness.

The Imperial scholars were wrong. The hive mind knew. The hive mind thought, it felt, it hated and it desired. Its emotions were unutterably alien, cocktails of feeling not even the subtle aeldari might decipher. Its emotions were oceans to the puddles of a man’s feelings. They were inconceivable to humanity, for they were too big to perceive.

The hive mind looked out of its innumerable eyes towards the dull red star of Baal. It apprehended that this was the hive of the warriors that had hurt it so grievously, who had burned its feeding grounds and scattered its fleets. It hated the red prey, and it coveted them. Tasting their exotic genomes it had seen potential for new and terrible war beasts.

And so it drew its plans, and it set in motion its trillion trillion bodies towards the consumption of the creatures in red metal, so that their secrets might be plundered, and reemployed in the sating of the hive mind’s endless hunger. This was deliberate, considered, and done in malice.

The hive mind was aware, and it desired vengeance.

Commander Dante walked the Arx Murus, the great encircling wall of the Arx Angelicum, as the Blood Angels fortress monastery was known. The Dome of Angels was closed against the coming war. Its huge armourglass blister rose gently behind him – several square miles of triangular panes sparkling in Baal’s midday sun capped the Arx Angelicum’s ancient caldera in impenetrable diamond.

The Arx was a double spike of dark rock that stood alone in the sands of the Endless Desert. Of the primal form of the volcano it had been, little remained, for it had been carved into something more fitting for the dwelling of Angels long ago. The fires in its heart were extinguished. Where lava once flowed Space Marines held court. A trained geologian would have guessed at its natural shape. But though both peaks had been thoroughly remade by the hands of man, a hint of their origins remained; for all their adornment their base form was that of twin cones, one smaller than the other, their throats open to the sky.

In every other way, the Arx Angelicum was the work of mankind. The caldera rim had been remade into the high walls of the Arx Murus, the broad and mighty wall-walk broken by the many towers of the Blood Angels’ sub-orders. The murus plunged forty sheer yards to the uppermost of a series of tiered firing galleries that, reinforced by towering redoubts, marched belligerently down to the sand. From towers shaped as gaping angels’ faces or screaming eagles the muzzles of defence lasers and macrocannons aimed at the ever-present threat of the void.

Other, smaller outcrops around the Arx had been refashioned into towers and squat forts bearing guns big enough to down a void ship. The fury of the world’s heart that had boiled within the volcanoes might have gone, but a different rage had taken its place.

To Dante’s right the Heavenward Redoubt, the fortress monastery’s keep, swelled out of the inner wall, the skull-faced Citadel Reclusiam atop it squatting athwart the wall-walk, beyond which the cursed Tower of Amareo speared the sky. The uppermost towers of the librarius fringed the walls on the far side of the Dome of Angels, while the Sanguis Corpusculum, the bulwark domain of Corbulo and his Sanguinary priests, thrust up from the lesser peak, its flat head joined to the main wall by a broad, armoured bridge.

The interior of the volcano was as heavily transformed. The throat had been widened to the same diameter as the giant lava chamber beneath it, so that the floor of the Arx was many storeys beneath the level of the desert. The inner walls had been smoothed and carved. Buttresses fashioned as giant angels ringed the interior, and the walls between were pierced with thousands of gleaming windows. All was done with exquisite care, and gloriously embellished with stone and metal. When the star Balor shone directly overhead, the throats of the Arx blazed with a rubicund refulgence, dazzling those lucky enough to witness it.

The Arx Angelicum was truly among the most beautiful fortresses in all the galaxy.

Towards the bottom of the shaft the tiered steps of the fortress exterior were repeated, but these sprouted with greenery, not guns – the Verdis Elysia, the marvellous farmlands where the Blood Angels grew their food, and parklands that preserved the fragmentary remains of Baal Primus’ and Baal Secundus’ once vibrant ecosystems.

Baal had forever been a desert planet, but not its moons. Their toxic wastes were of man’s doing.

Baal’s cloudless sky was busy with the crossed contrails of landing craft. Shoals of blunt-nosed Space Marine attack craft crowded the planet’s anchorages. Dozens of battle-barges formed the nexus of fleets arrayed in cramped formation. The largest of the vessels were miles long, and clearly visible at the height of day as pale, dream-like shapes. Their attendant escorts were albedo phantoms, and the smallest were bright stars moving rapidly in dense clusters. Baal Secundus was rising in the west, Baal Primus setting in the east – the two rarely shared the same sky. For shame, local legend had it.

Baal’s moons were close to their mother planet, and large. The arcs of their spheres framed the activity in orbit, but like a picture overfull with detail, the gathered fleets of the Blood Angels successor Chapters spilled out from the gap between the moons and Baal’s horizon, and the blocky shapes of their ships swarmed over the moons’ surfaces also. Giant, man-made objects sailed over the mottled patchwork of desert and toxic seas of Baal Secundus, while the ugly scarring of Baalind’s Necklace on Baal Primus caught flights of support craft in the rings of its craters.

Activity in the void was mirrored on the ground. Machinery rumbled all around the extinct volcano. The peace of Baal had fled into the deeper deserts. Dunes that had lapped at the feet of the Arx Angelicum were being bulldozed away, uncovering structures abandoned after the sundering of the Chapter in the mythical past. Once, the fortress monastery had been even more expansive.

It surprised Dante to see how much had been left to the sands by his forebears. Throughout his thousand-year reign as Chapter Master, relics of ancient eras had occasionally been uncovered by powerful storms, offering glimpses into the past. Despite his deep knowledge of the Chapter records, the outer fortress was largely unknown. To see uncovered landing fields thronged with warriors and machines was as if the days of the Great Crusade lived again.

Dante had led his warriors longer than any other man in the Imperium. Indeed, there were very few humans older than he. Among all mankind’s trillions, had every person approaching Dante’s age gathered together, they would hardly fill a strike cruiser.

He had known that Leviathan was coming for some time. His efforts at Cryptus were his last chance to delay. Only at Baal, only here, could the vast tendril that had ravaged the Red Scar perhaps be destroyed, and only by titanic effort. Dante had called upon all the Chapters of the Blood, all those Space Marines that shared Sanguinius’ heritage, and their warriors had come by the thousand.

As soon as he sent out his plea for aid to the successor Chapters of the Blood Angels, Dante ordered a grand scheme of works begun, setting the Chapter’s blood thralls and its cohorts of servitors the task of preparing for the gathering host. For miles around the Arx Angelicum they had dug into the ground, pushing back the desert, in some places excavating far down to where the sand had begun its slow transformation into stone. In the process the forgotten structures had been uncovered. Bunkers, towers, and a circling wall marked on none of the ancient maps were unearthed. Most of the structures outside the Arx Angelicum were useless ruins, foundations filled with rubble and rough lumps of metal melted in forgotten battles. But the rediscovered wall itself was viable, an unexpected bulwark against the coming threat.

Dante was too wise a man to see the wall as a sign. It was coincidence, and the extra protection gave him little cheer.

Teams of mortals rebuilt the wall as he watched. Within its circuit sheltered the arriving host. Aged rockcrete landing fields freed from the sand were once again in use. Hundreds of craft lay in neat ranks radiating out from newly erected command centres, their formations on the ground making interlocking circles of red, black, white and gold. There were thousands upon thousands of Space Marines on Baal. To accommodate them the deepest halls of the Arx Angelicum had been thrown open. Built for a Legion, the fortress monastery could have housed twenty Chapters, and now it was called upon to do so again. Even so, there was not enough space for all the newcomers, and barrack houses interspersed the command centres dotting the fields.

The number of brother Chapters was impressive, a portent of victory, the rash said. The assembling battle-brothers drew strength from the presence of so many others like themselves. Among the warriors present were thousands who had never been to sacred Baal, whose only contact with the father Chapter were infrequent and resented visits from the Blood Angels High Chaplains. Their ways were strange to those of the Blood Angels, and many were markedly different in appearance and behaviour. Although none but the Blood Angels could lay claim to birth on the triple worlds of Sanguinius’ finding, and were thus not of the sacred Tribes of the Blood, ultimately their gene-seed derived from Sanguinius’. All were of his lineage, and bonds more terrible and deeper than those between any other Chapters existed. Brotherhood spread its web across Baal more tightly than at any time since the Emperor walked among men.

Yet this did not bring Dante joy, either.

A long line of transports flew down from the fleets, stacked up so far that the hindmost were motile glints. Gunships and lifters, lighters and bulk landers, conveyed an endless line of materiel to the spiritual home of Sanguinius’ sons. A score of Chapters emptied their ships’ holds of weapons, tanks, ammunition, and more. The supplies were welcome. A third wall was being erected out beyond the unearthed second. This last was of the low, prefabricated segments all Space Marine Chapters were equipped with. More were being made as Dante watched. Auto-castelators scooped up huge buckets of sand and dumped them into hopper-moulds on their trailers. With great heat and pressure the sand was crushed into shape. Fresh, steaming segments of defence line were dropped onto the desert to be dragged into place by waiting haulers.

Formations of vehicles in varied shades of red were parked around the monastery. Down aisles formed of slab-armoured tanks, hundreds of Techmarines from across the galaxy walked, sharing their ideas and experience with eager listeners.

Dante kept his progress slow around the Arx, so that he might better see the host of Angels. Balor, Baal’s large, ruby sun, made his golden armour red. Airborne sand whispered against the ceramite of his shell. The Arx Angelicum was so tall that the noise of the army marshalling in the desert and all the sounds of work as Baal fortified itself were reduced to faint suggestions of themselves. Engines were puttering disturbances. Myriad conversations were reduced to infrequent, thin shouts. The rumble of jets was as quiet as the hiss of sand on sand. Though his hearing was as sharp as any Space Marine’s, this was all Dante heard. He left his vox-beads off, and his auto-senses dormant. Having spent sleepless weeks welcoming the stream of arrivals and formulating his strategies, he sought peace on the wall, seizing it where it did not come to him voluntarily. The host gathered at his feet in rich, desert quiet.

Every half mile a pair of winged Sanguinary Guard stood in vigil. They saluted their master as he passed. The warriors wore gear nearly identical to Dante’s, but the masks of the Sanguinary Guard showed the features of their wearer. Of all men, only Dante wore Sanguinius’ face. Only he had that burden.

Baal Secundus moved up the sky, obscuring the edge of the sun and bringing a transient dusk to the desert world. This little darkness would pass in an hour as Baal Secundus continued its orbit, and day would resume. Eclipses were an everyday occurrence on all three of the Baal triple. There was nothing so simple as day and night on any of them.

As the moon covered more of Balor, the dark grew, and the temperature dropped. A sudden, warm wind blew out of the desert, stirring the flags of the Blood Angels into motion, and making Dante’s cloak snap.

Fittingly it was in that short spell of night that Mephiston came to him, emerging from one of the Arx Murus’ many armoured doors. Jerron Leeter, the Master of Astropaths, walked in his black shadow. The Blood Angels Chief of Librarians was a figure almost as legendary as Dante. Among the most potent psykers in the Adeptus Astartes, Mephiston’s power was known across the Imperium. But while Dante was celebrated and his leadership sought, Mephiston was shunned. He was secretive, and feared by all.

Mephiston did nothing to counter this opinion. His armour was cast to resemble the exposed musculature of a flayed man, incongruously framed in gold. Every fibre of a human’s exposed subdermal anatomy had been lovingly reproduced in ceramite, the horrible made no less disturbing by the artistry employed. His armour was a deeper red than the Blood Angels norm, a dark, arterial crimson lacquered to a high gloss, so that Mephiston’s gory panoply glistened as if wet. He habitually went unhelmeted. A psychic hood of unusual design framed his face. Mephiston was inhumanly beautiful in a Chapter renowned for physical perfection, and the scholiasts of the Blood Angels insisted he looked much like Sanguinius himself. If Mephiston did take after their gene-father, it was Sanguinius dead, for Mephiston’s perfection was that of a sarcophagus effigy. His troubled soul made beauty into ugliness, and the freezing, hard light in his eyes was enough to frighten the bravest man.

Leeter was another exceptional example of his type. He had survived the soul binding with his senses intact. Virtually every other astropath Dante had encountered in his long life had been blind, their eyes burned out by their communion with the Emperor, while some had no earthly senses remaining to them at all. This singular characteristic was the mark of Leeter’s power and Leeter’s will, as much as it was of the infinite grace of the Emperor. That such a prized operative as Leeter had been assigned to the Blood Angels was a token of how highly the Chapter was regarded by the Adeptus Astra Telepathica.

Leeter’s second sight was as extraordinary as his first. He could commune across space with the Librarians of the Chapter, bypassing his fellow astropaths. He could pierce the most terrible of veils, catch the most degraded teleprayer on the treacherous currents of the empyrean.

Leeter could see through all but the shadow in the warp. That remained opaque, even to him.

Seeing his Chief Librarian approach, Dante stopped and awaited his arrival. Mephiston greeted him. Leeter knelt, head bowed, until Dante told him to rise.

‘My lord, how goes the muster?’ said Mephiston. His voice was dry and whispery. During true night it was stronger. Something in the Chief Librarian loathed the day.

‘It goes well,’ said Dante. ‘Our brothers move quickly, as they must. The hive fleet will soon be here. Time has been generous to us, but it runs out.’ Dante could not stop looking up into the sky, past the fleet, the moons and the sun, to where swarms of xenos monstrosities swam the killing depths of space towards Baal.

‘Twenty-seven Chapters have already arrived, my lord,’ said Leeter. Though he had knelt out of respect, as a senior member of another adepta, Leeter had no qualms about speaking freely in front of the Chapter Master. ‘More have promised their help. There are Chapters of the Blood here that are not on any roll the Chief Librarian’s scholiasts can unearth for me. In my wildest hopes, I could not have dreamed of such a response.’ Leeter’s long, emerald robe moved violently in the eclipse wind. His remarkable eyes sparkled with fervour.

‘The sons of the Great Angel are loyal,’ said Mephiston.

‘There are over fifteen thousand sons of Sanguinius in-system already,’ said Dante. ‘Estimates suggest we may eventually be blessed with as many as twenty-five thousand. Every warrior that comes here is another stone in our defences against Leviathan.’

Dante could feel Mephiston watching him closely. Dante had changed in the last months. The weariness he strived so hard to hide from others had fallen away, and his vigour had returned. But he had also become dour, his outlook grim. Dante’s last equerry, Arafeo, had offered up his blood at the end of his service. Dante could not have refused had he wanted to. From death Dante’s new-found energy came. Death would be his reward for it.

Dante was sure Mephiston could sense all this. So it should be. Dante made no effort to hide his shame from the Librarian.

‘Is there news from Cadia?’ Dante asked.

‘Not much, my lord,’ said Mephiston. ‘And what little there is is ill-favoured. The forces of Chaos gather in crushing strength at the Diamor system. Since Astorath sent word that he and Captain Sendini were en route to Diamor, we have heard nothing. Karlaen, Aphael and Phaeton should have arrived by now.’

‘We have had no notice of their safe translation,’ said Leeter quietly.

‘Could they have fallen?’ asked Dante.

Mephiston closed his eyes a moment. His face was as still as a funeral mask. In his armour it was impossible to tell if he breathed. Not for the first time Dante wondered if he did. ‘They still live,’ Mephiston said. ‘I would know if they did not.’

‘That is something, at least.’

‘We of the Librarium will travel to Baal Secundus and add our senses to those of the astropaths at the relay there. Perhaps we will hear something soon. In the meantime, there are better tidings.’ The Lord of Death motioned to Leeter. The astropath held out a scroll case of polished hematite decorated with bloodstone drops.

‘In this case,’ said Leeter, ‘are details of astropathic communiques from six of the battlefleets you have scouring the nearmost worlds. They are disturbingly fragmentary. Already, the shadow in the warp creeps over our territory and disrupts our communication. The content is clear enough. Their work proceeds. The tyranids will find nothing to fuel their advance. Many Chapters march at your command. It is as if the Legion of old is reborn.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Dante. He was wary of Leeter’s implicit comparison of him with Sanguinius, and concerned for the future. His every effort thus far had proved insufficient to stop Leviathan. ‘I fear it will not be enough.’

‘Though it is a sight, is it not?’ said Mephiston. Tellingly he did not speak out against Dante’s fears. Neither of them had much faith in their ultimate triumph. Both of them had faced the Great Devourer several times, most recently at the pyrrhic victory at Cryptus. They had witnessed the hive mind’s power first hand. ‘I wonder if this is what our father saw when he marshalled his Legion here, those millennia ago. I feel close to him, seeing this. The dark we face is great, but it is a fine thing to come closer to the primarch.’

‘To see an echo of what he saw with our living eyes is an honour.’ Dante was forever conscious of the sacred ruby affixed to his brow. Inside the hollow vessel was the last unadulterated liquid drop of blood taken from Sanguinius’ veins, preserved for all time. ‘He is always with me, Librarian. He is always with all of us.’

‘In our blood and our souls,’ agreed Mephiston, a truth more literal than figurative; Sanguinius’ visions haunted their dreams, and hounded them to their deaths. A war deemed ancient by others was, to Blood Angels, the betrayal of yesterday. ‘By his blood were we made.’

Dante nodded. ‘By his blood he is within all of us. And we will need his strength now, more than ever.’

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