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Angron: The Red Angel – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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Chapter One

It was raining over Mount Anarch. Drops of liquid ethane spotted the towering glassteel panes. In under one-fifth of standard g, the rain was not falling so much as gliding, parading towards the desolate surface of Titan as though time had already surrendered to its legions.

Graucis Telomane stared out through the cold grey eyes of his own reflection. He could not remember the last time he had looked so young, so naïve, but then it had been half a millennium since he last returned to Titan to set foot in this hall.

‘No,’ he whispered softly. ‘Not here.’

‘You are not ready, Telomane. Not for this. Grand Master Taremar is wrong to beg it of me and I refuse to permit it.’

In his memories, Justicar Aelos was a giant that he had never quite been in reality. Experience had painted the warrior’s hair grey, as it had decorated his oath plate with records of valour. In many ways, Graucis had outgrown his former mentor, but he had never seen him again after this, and so he remained the colossus of a newly initiated line brother’s remembrance.

‘I am ready,’ he said.

‘That you believe yourself to be so only proves how unready you are.’

‘The Grand Master of the Third Brotherhood believes I am.’

A shake of that head, never greyer. ‘There is a reason the Grey Knights do not temper their youngest brothers in battle. Do you know why?’

‘No,’ he said, frowning. ‘Not here.’

It was raining over Mount Anarch. Drops of liquid ethane spotted the towering glassteel panes. Graucis Telomane stood at an empty table in the midst of an empty hall. The Saturnalium was deserted, silent but for the patter of the hydrocarbon rain and the slow mechanical grinding of the great orrery that made up the cathedral-like ceiling. Dark but for the stain left by several thousand candles. Illumination was not their purpose. Candles had been lit to bridge the two sides of the veil since humanity’s first tentative dabblings with witchcraft. They were grey: the colour of wisdom, learning and defence against malefic forces.

The orrery continued to whir through its orbits.

Graucis looked up.

His fellow novitiates had called it the Deimos Clock. According to legend, it had been assembled and first set to motion by the forge moon’s Fabricator General to commemorate its removal from Mars’ orbit. Saturn rotated at its centre, a silver orb the size of a Rhino chassis held in a web of arcane suspension fields, its rings represented by concentric bands of crystal less than a nanometre thick. Titan itself was the size of a bolt-shell. Its orbit took it along a track of frictionless glass wire a hundred yards and more in radius, which it completed every three hundred and eighty-two hours. So flawlessly was the whole system rendered that, according to Justicar Aelos, a Grey Knight of sufficient acuity, patience and learning could deduce the exact time and Imperial Calendar year from the relative positions of Saturn and its eighty-two natural satellites alone.

And for eight and a half thousand years, it had been keeping perfect time.

It was 444.M41.

‘No,’ he said, becoming angry now. ‘Not here.’

It was still raining. A crimson deluge splattered and sizzled against the consecrated silver and gold of his war plate. Before him it had been worn by Eygon of the Fourth Brotherhood, and by the legendary Paladin Phox before him. Graucis still had the suit, but this was the first time he would wear it in battle. The memory was bittersweet.

Justicar Aelos had been right, of course, but of the one hundred and nine Grey Knights who had teleported down to the floodplains of the Styx River that day, which of them had done so fully prepared to face the Cruor Praetoria and the Lord of the XII Legion?

Not the ninety-six who had gone and not returned.

Not the thirteen who did.

Graucis was the least of those on the field that day. Why he had survived while the likes of Dymus, Galeo and Taremar the Golden had been allowed to fall, he did not know, except perhaps as proof the laws of the tempus materium were grounded in unreason.

‘No!’ he yelled, into the twisted red-meat mask of hatred worn by the Emperor’s son. ‘Not here!’

Drops of liquid ethane spotted the towering glassteel panes. He was in the Saturnalium, in the Citadel of Titan, but seated now where before he had been standing. He kneaded the muscle of his thigh with the heel of his palm as though it ached, although of course it did not. Not here.

‘Why do I keep on returning myself to this place?’

Nyramar, sitting across the table on the other side of a set regicide board, shrugged.

The other Grey Knight was one year Graucis’ senior, but though they had been friends, it was a gulf he had always felt in more than just time. All that Graucis had accomplished in his years on Titan, Nyramar had achieved sooner. When he had passed through the final tiers of the Chamber of Trials to be inducted into the line brotherhoods of the Grey Knights, it had been Nyramar who welcomed him there in a warrior’s armour. He looked none the worse here for his death. It would happen five weeks after this game had been played.

‘These are your memories,’ Nyramar said. ‘What do you expect to find here that you do not already know? Or that you could fully trust?’

‘To name a thing is to know it,’ Graucis countered, reciting the words from the five hundred and eighteenth canticle of the Liber Daemonica. ‘To know the daemon is to command its nature. I know the limitations of my own mind, brother, and the sanctity of my soul.’

Nyramar nodded, looking at the table between them as though planning his next move on the regicide board. ‘Then look, brother. The answer you scry for is in front of you. You only have to see.’

Graucis studied the board, as directed. In the psychic realm, even the most inconspicuous of details could convey meaning.

The board was circular and made of wood, evenly divided into black and white squares. He was playing as black. Nyramar, white. The game was already several moves old, the white peons arranged in the opening positions of the Praetorian’s Gambit. Nyramar had always been an adroit, if uninspired player. Graucis’ own peons had advanced more aggressively, as was his way, opening up the board’s left hemisphere for his ecclesiarch to go on the offensive. The stratagem had many common names but to Graucis, and those of his dwindling generation, it would always be known as the Armageddon Manoeuvre, involving as it did the wholesale sacrifice of one’s middle-ranking pieces to surround and capture the opponent’s emperor.

He almost smiled, in spite of himself. ‘I remember this move.’

‘Of course.’

‘We never finished the game.’

‘Of course.’

His finger perched over the black ivory figurine of his primarch. The piece had no particular features to identify it as any single one from the twenty. Rather, it was an idealist’s impression of a primarch as a gestalt plurality. It had the feathered wings of a Sanguinius, the laurel wreath and lorica of a Guilliman, but some effect of candlelight and suggestion made it snarl. Graucis’ primary heart gave a jolt, and he let the piece go, withdrawing his hand to his lap. ‘But this is the past. I am here to see the future.’

‘Is time so straight a line, brother? Or does it bend? Is it, in fact’ – Nyramar gestured to the board with a slight tilt of the head – ‘a circle?’

Graucis nodded to himself.

The circularity of history and the repetition of one’s forbears’ mistakes was a common enough motif in the mythologies of Old Earth and represented no special insight on his subconscious’ part.

‘Angron’s shadow lengthens across the galaxy once more. I have seen the signs, read the portents, heard his voice as he rages across the thinness of the veil. I have felt the screams of the lesser choirs that herald his coming. They all point towards a purpose that the Great Beast has not shown since Armageddon, but where is that shadow doomed to fall? If not here, where I wait for him, then where?’

‘Be careful what you wish for, brother.’

‘The oldest admonition in sorcery.’

‘And yet one the hero so rarely heeds.’

Graucis’ lip curled into a smile. ‘I am no hero.’

‘So the hero always believes.’

‘I have spent the six hundred years since Armageddon in preparation. I have gathered my allies. I have honed my skills. I am ready for whatever comes.’

‘That you believe yourself to be so only proves how unready you are.’

Graucis frowned to hear that familiar, paternal criticism in his old friend’s voice. He felt the smile on his face freeze, contorting in apparent slow motion into a grimace as pain swelled unexpectedly in the muscle of his thigh. His hands went to it. Blood soaked up through the pale grey cloth of his robe.

‘No,’ he murmured, pressing down on the never-healed wound. ‘Not here.’

It was raining over Mount Anarch. Still. Drops of liquid ethane spotted the towering glassteel panes. The striated hydrogen monster of Saturn loomed massive over the ice-blistered vista, the yellow-brown eye of a cosmic giant peering down on a dead and frozen world. As a neophyte, Graucis Telomane had stood under these windows to meditate. Justicar Aelos would often challenge any of his wards to look into the eye of that awesome world, to feel its gravity, the Newtonian precision by which it ordered its army of little worlds, and not feel the pre-eminence of physical law over a chaotic universe.

He had never been wrong. Except in this.

‘Why do I–’

He turned from the window, leaving his question unasked, drawn by the subtle twitching of the empyreal curtain much as those worlds above him were drawn to Saturn’s mass. The candles, mounted on the walls in marble sconces, and in silver candelabra on the tables, were no longer grey. They were red, burning with a brimstone odour and spitting like fat over a thermic element. Graucis felt the prickling sense of danger inching up his spine as, one by one, the candle flames bent until every last one of them was flickering at an unnatural right angle to their wicks.

They were pointing at him.

No, he realised, not at him.

He turned, slowly, lifted his gaze and looked out through the huge glassteel clerestory. The world hanging over him was no longer Saturn. Nor, as he had long suspected and fervently hoped, was it Armageddon.

Graucis had never seen it before, but he committed every detail of its visible hemisphere to his genetically perfect memory. It was small and rocky, roughly Terran-sized, but swathed entirely in sand. He bade his focus to shift, his view drifting back to see a dry, brownish orb as it turned slowly around the barycentre of two smouldering red suns. The Imperium of Man encompassed a million human worlds. If this was one of them then Graucis would find it.

Above him, the Saturnalium continued to whirl, converting angular momentum into neat parcels of linear time as it had since the inception of the Imperium.

‘Be careful what you wish for,’ said the voice behind him, and at the sound of an ivory piece scraping across a wooden board, Graucis turned. He looked towards his old table, where the white primarch, making an entirely impossible move, had just forced through its own peons and Graucis’ to stand before the black emperor.

Nyramar grinned up at him, his head hanging on a snapped neck, his face cracking over the scaffold of bone that lay beneath. Graucis told himself it was not Nyramar. None of this existed outside of his mind.

‘Check, brother,’ the dead man said. ‘Your move.’

Young Pious MMXIV emitted a concerned tone. The cyber-cherub hovered over him, reeking of formaldehyde preservatives, and of the aloe-gels it applied to his burnt skin. Epistolary Graucis Telomane stared glassily through it, his dilated pupils still focused on some other place, but there was a comforting familiarity to the hum of the cherub’s archaic anti-gravitics and the stiff-velum creak of its imitation wings. Even the touch of its foetal-stage mind and its thin but unspoiled soul helped to ground him.

He was in his meditation chamber aboard the Grey Knights strike cruiser Sword of Dione. The ship was in high orbit over Armageddon.

He blinked his eyes. It felt like polishing a piece of sandstone. He wondered how long he had spent sitting there, staring into the warp.

Young Pious MMXIV issued another tinny parp from the vedigrised flute sunk between its mummified cheeks and retreated to allow for Graucis to straighten on his own.

He gripped the silver-inlaid armrests of his chair, his armour clicking and humming as it roused itself from dormancy and directed new strength towards his grip.

He groaned stiffly as the myriad aches and niggling injuries that his mind had left behind returned like blood to a necrotised limb. Three-quarters of his skin, much of it hidden by armour, was covered in welts and burns. They were psychic burns, and tended to break out afresh whenever he probed the warp too deeply. The Apothecaries on Titan had warned him the injuries might never heal, and they never had. He had learned to ignore them. It was only pain. There were other hurts too, diffuse and variable and arising mostly from being five hundred years past what most of his brothers would consider his prime, but none came close to that of his leg.

He rubbed at his aching thigh through the thick ceramite plate.

It had been the hero, Hyperion, the one the Wolves had dubbed Bladebreaker, who had shattered Angron’s sword into a thousand unholy pieces on Armageddon, but it was Graucis who that corrupted shrapnel had struck. A single piece of tainted bronze was still in there. He was aware of it always. Sometimes it made the limb feel hot. At others, agonisingly numb. There were days when it drove him to pain-fuelled rages, or into quiet despair at the unfairness with which the cosmos distributed its tests and its glories. When he sought it out it shifted under his fingers like a lipoma, but the moment it went under a bio-scanner, or an Apothecary cut into the surrounding tissue with a knife, it became inexplicably psychosomatic.

In his darker moments, and in over six hundred years on this quest such times had been plentiful, he had considered cutting off the entire leg himself and ridding himself of Angron’s taint, but he had always pulled back at the last.

It felt too much like a concession. Or worse, a surrender.

The injury had been his trial, yes, but it was also his gift.

It was his bond to Angron.

He rolled his head stiffly to one side, staring bleary-eyed towards the windows. The cold light of Armageddon’s star, Tisra, shafted in through the hardened glass.

The Sword of Dione sailed under the heraldry of the Chapter Librarius, and of the Titan fleet, but over centuries of increasingly esoteric pursuits it had become Graucis’ personal flagship in all but name. It knew his purpose. It responded to his will. The warship had been part of a purgation operation in the Beta-Thyracuse Sector when the first tentative portents of bloodshed on a galactic scale had started to seep through the empyreal veil and into the tempus materium. Such was Graucis’ authority within the Chapter that Grand Master Cromm of the Fourth Brotherhood had not even sought an explanation as the Sword of Dione withdrew from the sector for an early return to the warp.

Graucis’ psychic powers were at their strongest here. His ability to perceive his nemesis was at its keenest.

‘No,’ he murmured, his voice a hoarser and harsher thing than that belonging to the younger man his psychic self preferred to remember. ‘Not here.’

But if Angron was not returning to conquer Armageddon, as Graucis had predicted that he would, then where was he?

He leant forwards in his chair and pinched his tired eyes. An image of the planet he had pulled from the warp flashed again across them: a desert world orbiting binary red giants. The Sword of Dione had navigational archives going back thousands of years, but Graucis did not believe this description alone would be enough to expedite any search. The Milky Way was an old and stagnant galaxy. Three-quarters of its stars were slowly fading reds, and half of those were binaries. It was also vast, too irredeemably huge even for a vessel as storied as the Sword of Dione to have visited a full one per cent of its worlds.

There was work to do.

He raised his hand, feeling the wobble of the Nemesis force staff from across the room where it lay in the moment before it took flight and snapped into his waiting grip. He rose from his chair, the staff arriving at the precise moment to take his weight. ‘Raise the Navis Imperialis station at St Jowen’s Dock on a vermilion frequency and requisition an astropathic chorus,’ he commanded Young Pious MMXIV.

Word from Titan had become infrequent, and increasingly difficult to interpret of late. He knew that the Grey Knights had stood alongside the Adeptus Custodes in the defence of the Imperial Palace, and been greatly diminished in Imperium Sanctus as a result. Their brotherhood had always been thinly spread, and never more so than now. Even with only half a galaxy left to defend.

If Angron was to be pre-empted and his plans thwarted, then it rested on Graucis to ensure that it was done.

The cyber-cherub replayed its short hymn and flapped its facsimile wings, anti-gravitics sputtering as it drifted away across the echoing chamber.

Graucis watched it go.

It was time to summon the others.

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2023.
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