Old Bones, New Flesh
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Let it never be said that the sons of Guilliman acted by halves. At first there were tent cities - painstakingly organized in rows with latrines, mess pavilions and motorpools carefully scattered throughout - but by the end of the month, at least a month by far-gone Macraggian reckoning, those tent cities were replaced by pressed cellulose barracks, white-washed, aligned to a massive grid. On and on they ran, in rows as straight as las, so that to step out from one and peer down a lane would be dizzying, lines of duplicated buildings going until they reached a vanishing point. Each barrack was small, fit for twelve, and so were squads organized.
Thus it was that the Imperium came to Eboracum.
He did not know any of his newfound housemates going about their business within the whitewashed walls today. None of them knew each other. Two men shared a common touchstone, both being from the Neride, on Calth, but until pressed cheek-to-jowl in a shaking Thunderhawk, they'd never crossed paths. One man was from Iax. Another from Konor. Five were from Macragge, from all across that august world. All of them were sole survivors, at least as far as they knew, of entire regiments. In his bunk he reclined, one arm thrown behind his head as a pillow, peering at ident tags as he flipped them carefully between thumb and forefinger. Rad exposure from Veridia gave them a pearlescent sheen. He closed his eyes, remembering that baleful, bloated eye above, pulsing, seething with tangible agony.
When Veridia started to die, when he'd truly grasped the depths of the plans of the Word Bearers, he'd cast aside his lasgun and his webbing and ran. Desertion? Maybe. By technicality, almost everyone was guilty of it. It was how they were here, on Eboracum, under strange stars, and not fleshless skeletons leering at a dead sky. There was no command that day, the officers were dead, the sky was falling and a man had to make hard decisions.
He joined the panicked masses of human flesh, breathed the sweat-reek of fear and stress and no, not fear, of terror. It slicked his throat, filled his nose and even now, reclining on starched linen sheets, peering up at the slatted ceiling above, he could still taste it.
Fear was a power all its own, as men and women died then, not to bolt or beam but to crush and feet. He remembered stepping on a woman's lifeless face, just visible above churned, calf-deep mud. It was impossible to tell the cause of death, but for her sake, perhaps it wasn't from suffocation.
As the star died and the sounds of war and treachery crept closer, the horizon alight with a pulsing, bruised glow, he began to fear he would not make it to the dozens of civilian lifters. Already they were clearly overfull but more were packed on, as if with shoehorns, jamming trembling, shellshocked soldiers into every hatch they could pry open. Then the lifters would belch and hurtle for the sky, pell-mell, shrieking up into the wind and lashing rain and on to…where?
Where was safety? The Word Bearers came to kill the world, to kill the XIIIth, to kill Ultramar. Where was safe? Above was the orbital grid, which was killing the star, and the warships of the XVIIth, which were kill the the XIIIth. He wondered how many lifters made it out of atmosphere. He wondered how many did, but died anyway, drifting and cold, without the legs to flee into the warp.
But then he was aboard and he was crushed into a mass of sweating flesh as the lifter banged and rattled and rumbled and any moment, any moment, he waited for the flash of heat and light and nothing - until there was sound from outside and the hatches opened and everyone spilled out, groaning and retching and they were in a bulk transport, large as any battleship.
And he lived.
Tucking dogtags back into his collar, he left his barrack behind, nodding here and there to those he'd begun to know as he strolled down the ways and avenues of a brand new, weeks old township. A township of soldiers, a township of scars. Rail lines snaked out and away, leading to local settlements and to new-sprung farmlands, even up toward the grand and growling Redoubt, looming between the snowcapped peaks to the western horizon. With his tags he was able to claim a spot aboard, no questions asked, such was the luxury of being a man of the Imperium on this heathen world. Not a few in his compartment were locals, in their strange garb and hooded suspicion. He smiled, trying to be friendly, and they goggled back at him.
They would come around, in time. Well, aside from the xenos. He could barely suppress his urge to openly gawk at the only one in the car, a beetle-like creature with compound eyes and waving antennae, which had the audacity to wear clothes like a sapient being. But the Primarch's decree was absolute, and he could see, even across the train car, the laminate card pinned to the xenos' breast.
Farmlands whipped by, already knee-high, benefitting from the generously opened vaults of the Explorator Dominus. Rapid growth grains and legumes vied for the sky and he wondered if he took an hour, if he might even be able to see them grow.
One thing was for certain, for all else might be in flux. The XIIIth was here to stay. The Redoubt, the farmlands, the local Compliance. Word was scarce and scattered, down in the ranks, but everyone knew they were far, far from Ultramar. Cast widely adrift by the currents of the Warp, but to where? Need to know.
That was fine. He had the means to find out.
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His friends were waiting for him. He gently ran fingertips over each forehead, whispering to them as they slept and he smiled fondly at each slumbering man and woman. They were pale and wan and drawn, marked by livid ligature marks at wrist and ankle and neck, all of them naked. None were restrained, not anymore. The kiss of his knife was restraint enough.
Eight and eight. A measly offering, a mean offering, one that he knew his majir would scoff at, maybe even have him added to pad out the flesh. But his majir was dead and gone, burst by mass-reactives and every other one of his kind, his blood-kin, his marked, were gone too. Maybe he wasn't the only one who knew the Truth. Maybe others had escaped Calth. Maybe others did like he did, draping themselves in the lies of Ultramar and the Imperium and making the sign of the aquila and scowling, spitting every time those damned Word Bearers were mentioned.
Didn't matter. What mattered was he lived, and he knew the Truth, and he could bring the wrath and the retribution of the Most Beloved Angels here. The Truth was the Truth, and being here instead of there didn't change it. The Truth was universal. Eternal. It would hound the bastard children of the false-god on Terra wherever they went.
Roboute Guilliman thought he'd escaped. He thought he'd found refuge and succor, but the reach of Blessed Lorgar was infinite. The Truth in the Blood, the great quartet, they were infinite. Tezen, Naugesh, Slu'an, Khamarn. Tzeentch, Nurgle, Slaanesh, Khorne. The names mattered, but all names mattered. He knew what he knew by how he was raised. He knew as his majir taught. His majir, from whose dead hands he'd claimed his knife.
This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.
'You're honored,' he whispered to his slumbering friends. 'You're blessed.' He ran the edge of his athame along a woman's neck, soft as a lover's touch and her flesh parted like lips for a lover. Blood ran. Dark, dark enough to be almost purple, rich in blood, rich in life. His athame – his majir's athame – was flint and leather and crude. It didn't whisper like the chips of night that the Most Beloved Angels carried. It didn't gabble byblow words like those blades of the elevated. But it was a knife and it was sharp and it knew death and that was enough.
He didn't know much, but that much he knew. His majir taught well.
Another throat sighed out lifeblood. He let it run, messy and loose. Runnels tracked into carven paths. He kissed the dead man's forehead and slicked his smallest finger in blood, tasting the salt-iron sacrament.
'You're honored,' he murmured. 'You're blessed. Tezen, hear me.'
Another throat. Another taste. Another blessing.
'Naugesh, hear me.'
On the eighth, he shivered. Now when he opened arteries, blood flowed sluggish. Frost rippled and melted across shivering sigils, etched into the duracrete, slick with vitae. Ozone stung his nose. He felt the glide of his knife, already as sharp as treason, move as if through silk. They were watching. They were watching. Gooseflesh prickled on his neck. Fingers ran through his hair.
'Slu'an, hear me.'
His hands were tacky and when he flexed his fist, crusts of slush dropped from his palms. His head spun. The air felt thick, chewy, dense on the palate. He'd feared eight and eight was not enough. He feared every time he lured away another, every time he courted discovery, every time he dared journey out here, to this forgotten homestead. He feared that his majir was right, that he was meat in the grinder for the Truth in the Blood, that he'd never mean anything to the Great Quartet, that he would die and his soul would be only feed.
But they were listening.
Two throats remained. Two offerings. If need be: three. Now he kissed lips and forehead of his offering and drew the blade, breathing deep, frigid air sending spikes into his temples but still he caught the iron-hot odor, the hot-iron reek, the symbol of salvation.
'Khamarn, hear me.'
His majir taught the last offering was the capstone. The ritual exclamation point. It was the shout to the angels beyond, the lamp hung at the door to draw them in. It had to be special. It had to have meaning.
Grenadier Third Class Jarnum had been his friend. They'd squeezed into the Thunderhawk together, at Calth. They'd shared minimal rations. They'd traded stories of their lives. Jarnum sponsored him, speaking on his behalf to Jarnum's Sergeant, who agreed to fold this ragged newcomer into his ragged platoon.
Jarnum was a good man, a good soul, a real Imperial's Imperial.
He cut Jarnum's throat to the bone and kept going, until the young man's head dropped free and he hefted it up, fingers tangled in hair, peering at glassy eyes.
'You're blessed,' he whispered, and kissed Jarnum's cold lips.
Then he threw the head into the center of the ritual octed.
It did not strike the duracrete floor.
Blood pinwheeled and froze in the air. Crystals of crimson, scintillant, glinting like diamonds, described arcs of the golden mean. Jarnum's skull unfolded. Flesh rolled away from bone like dough under the ministrations of a skilled baker. Teeth scattered. Hair knotted and thickened and writhed, then slapped flat to scalp and slid down to meet elongating spine, bursting from clean-cut stump like a flatworm from mud.
A thing in the shape of a man pressed out from Jarnum's sawn off neck, feet and calves and hips and then long fingers, reaching and grasping onto Jarnum's jaw and digging claws into cheeks to help haul itself free.
Weeping, eyes hot, he fell to the ground and clasped his knife to his chest. An angel. An angel.
Its feet did not brush the soiled floor. It drifted, toes pointed, hands slowly rising to spread arms out as if in benediction. It faced away from him and he trembled to imagine the hidden visage. From behind he saw it was the form of a man, a human man, rippling with lithe muscle, perfect in form, like a marble statue, like something the Phoenician might find favor in. Black cracks webbed across it and no, it was not perfect. Its arms were too long by an inch. Its legs too short. Its torso too stretched, its – its arms too short. Its legs too long.
He wanted to abase himself. He wanted to look away.
But he had never seen an angel.
Slowly it revolved in midair and as it turned the corpse-offerings eroded and decayed and blew away into crimson dust.
'Angel, I called thee from the Blood. Angel, I bind thee by the blood. Angel, I give thee gift of blood. Angel, I claim from thee two boons. Angel, by gift of blood and gift of form, I claim two boons.'
His majir bragged about calling and binding angels. Oh, his majir never did it around others, he never did it where any could see, but his majir said it was it because an angel would treat any other as yet another gift. Another offering. He pieced together the words over years, from little comments here, tidbits of lore there. His majir never knew how close one of his lowly cadre had come to the secrets.
The angel turned to face him. He saw eyes, four of each, on either hand. Black eyes, nictitating, that looked to cardinal points. In its chest between masculine pectorals burned a blackened wheel, spoked and smoking; a tattoo shaped of infamy.
It had no face. Only a mirror, silver, flawless, in which he saw the eroding corpses of Jarnum and the other sacrifices. He saw the room, painted in old, cracked yellow and newly in red. He saw his webbing, his gear, left by the door. He saw the floor, carved in the octed.
He did not see himself.
The angel finished its rotation. All bodies were gone, left as only stains on duracrete. The room was empty. The farmhouse was empty. The angel slowly cocked its polished mirror-face. For now, the hunger was sated. The betrayal was sweet. The offering accepted. The universe, howling with horror at the angel's imposition, pressed with causal fingers at the wound torn in its flesh.
The angel had finished here. It let the tide wash it away, curling back into the bloodied, decapitated head of a young man.
The head thumped to the floor, rolled once, and stopped.