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Cold Vigil – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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COLD VIGIL

Jon Flindall

Will you serve your brothers without fear or doubt in your heart?

The heavy shield clanged on the stone floor as Raqib carefully set it against the altar.

The relic chapel was cold and still, the only sounds the low hum of his armour and an occasional crackle from the flickering braziers that lit the room’s corners. The braziers were shaped like chalices, echoing the flaming grail that adorned his left pauldron, the Chapter symbol of the Consecrators. This was the very heart of the ship, a shrine to everything the Chapter were and strove to be.

A yellowed servo-skull had followed him in, tails of smoke trailing from the half a dozen candles set upon its crown. It carried a small bell. Raqib met its blank gaze for a moment. When the night cycle was over, this construct would sound the completion of his vigil.

On the wall behind it hung a tattered banner, protected by the spitting aegis of a stasis field. The Consecrators had named it the Hallowed Veil. It was a standard of the old Legion, though which order had carried it to war had long been forgotten. It had been reclaimed by Ridwen, one of the greatest figures in the Chapter’s history.

Raqib knew the banner’s story well, but his reverence meant he had never truly looked at the ancient fabric. It had once been as black as his plate, but time and war had left it an uneven grey.

He had spent hours in this chapel before, meditating on the lessons imparted by its ancient treasures. He still felt the weight of their glorious legacy pressing upon him, but something was different this time. Not in the revered artefacts, but in him.

The dressed stonework of the wall to his right was inset with fragments of basanite sculpture. These pieces had once formed a great crest, believed to have adorned the bow of a I Legion battle-barge. They had been discovered during the Achilus Crusade, and Proctor Farzal, famed defender of Greyholme, was credited with their return to the Chapter.

Sulamar, Raqib’s company master, had given him a hand-copied edition of The Lay of Farzal when he joined the Third Company. He had read it fervidly, and its words sprang unbidden to his mind on seeing the fragmented crest.

Iron his arm and red his sword, that fateful day;

The gravelings could not stand against him and were cast back into their crypts.

And his path brought him to glory, for there lay a treasure most honoured.

The next step in Raqib’s own path stood before him. The tarnished storm shield was tall and cruciform. He knelt and began to work the layers of blood, soot and filth from it with vibro-scourer and sackcloth.

He was to join Sulamar’s Bladeguard – and more than that, he was to become their sergeant. In recognition of his new rank, he would be inducted into the Chapter’s hallowed First Company, though he would continue to serve under Sulamar’s command. It was a great honour, one he had hardly dared consider before this moment. He knew he should be elated.

As he scoured traces of past battles from the shield, he saw its surface shone like bone beneath the grime. The gouges that marred its golden banding would require further attention in the armoury.

As he leaned in to work dried ichor from one of the indentations, the sutured muscles of his left thigh flared with pain. The wound was barely a week old, earned on the factorum world of Borloss. The site where he had been given his promotion. His heart clenched.

The site of his failure.

Will you serve your Chapter with honour ever your shield?

The chemical sea crashed against the production tower with the pulsing regularity of a heartbeat. The white-painted walls bore cadmium streaks where corrosion had eaten through to the metal below, and the whole structure creaked and groaned like a voidship at warp.

Raqib splashed through pools of oily runoff as his squad pushed towards the tower’s interior. His helm flagged the over-recycled atmosphere as thick with the stench of human existence.

He passed the bodies of two defence troopers, their throats cut and their flak armour stripped. The corrosive fluids they lay in were already beginning to soften their flesh.

The stinking warren of tunnels was a fitting location for their degenerate foe. A xenos-worshipping cult had claimed this rime-stained tower in its entirety, murdering their overlords and seizing weapons destined for the Astra Militarum. His squad’s first objective was a purge of the lower stack-spires.

Raqib slammed open a rusted pressure hatch and stepped out onto an exposed gantry, his bolt rifle tracking ahead of him. He had entered a wide channel that cut across the tower. Noxious fluids sloshed in the bilge space below his position, their acrid reek filtered out by his armour. Across the void hung further gantries linking doors on different levels.

His auto-senses had already marked four targets aiming around doorframes or crouching behind flakboard shields. He shot the first two before return fire began whipping his way – hard rounds spanged from his armour and the ironwork gantry. He tracked another malformed cultist as it scurried from a portal two levels above him, and his shot tore the creature’s torso apart. A clawed limb fell down into the mutant tangle below.

Sawaq and Irian had just pushed through the doorway behind him when a crimson flash cut through the gantry and Raqib’s right thigh.

His display flared white for a moment as auto-dispensers flooded his system with pain suppressants. He had dropped to one knee, his armour keeping him from falling altogether. With the detached clarity of the stimms in his bloodstream, he aimed his weapon down into the channel.

A pair of hunched mutants had angled the long barrel of a lascannon up from a shadowed doorway several levels below; his thermic register flagged the heat of recent firing. Sawaq’s round entered the doorway a moment later, shredding one cultist’s legs. Shards of bone and flak armour had wounded the other, and Raqib finished it with a headshot.

Sawaq offered his arm to help Raqib to his feet. As Raqib stood up, he saw Sawaq had a small reliquary casket on a chain around his wrist.

‘Can you walk, sergeant?’ Sawaq asked.

Raqib’s wound had cauterised immediately, and his subsuit’s fibre bundles still read as functional despite the fist-sized hole bored through his thigh armour.

‘I could hardly leave all the glory for you, Sawaq.’ He gritted his teeth and took a step along the rusted gantry. The suppressants numbed his pain, allowing him to set aside the distraction of his ruined limb, but could not fully conceal it.

Raqib ordered Sawaq to take the van as they reached the door at the end of the gantry. He could lead just as well from the rear.

Beyond was darkness, a knot of encrusted pipes that followed a cramped corridor deeper into the structure. Raqib’s helm display switched to thermal, the scene before him a snarl of red-tinted veins which pulsed slightly to his hearts’ beat, a by-product of the adrenal stimulants that bolstered his reactions.

Some of the conduits carried searing chemicals, while others were linked to heat sinks filled from the churning sea around the tower. Their peristaltic motion filled his vision.

Twenty yards ahead of him, an alien dropped from the shadows onto Sawaq’s back, sickle claws tearing at his helmet. It was bigger than a human, and coiled around his shoulders. Malignant eyes gleamed in its head. Sawaq roared in pain, staggering backwards in an attempt to crush the thing against the wall. Before Raqib could bring his weapon to bear, Irian’s pinpoint shots shredded the hunched creature.

Even as he limped to his fallen brother’s body, Raqib knew it was too late. Sawaq’s activity indicator fell dark on his display.

The creature’s claws had pushed through Sawaq’s eye-lenses and into his brain.

Will you serve the primarch and venerate his legacy?

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