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Lords of Blood – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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Chapter One

The Thrice-Blessed Child

452.M40

The Great Salt Waste

Baal Secundus

Baal System

A new life was beginning. Night was falling, and a boy and his father watched the skies.

The giant red orb of the sun passed behind the disc of Baal. Firstnight came to Baal Secundus with eclipse, Baal’s shadow creeping over the Great Salt Waste of its second moon. Heat radiated rapidly through the thin atmosphere. The temperature dropped fast and the night wind blew hard, chilling the man and his son. The sand roamer behind them rocked in the breeze. The rusty springs of its suspension squealed in sympathy with the pained birth-cries coming from within.

The boy glanced back at the roamer. A rough ovoid of crude plates lifted high over the ground on six wheels, it was his home and refuge from the moon-world’s killing landscapes. The open door cast a rhomboid of yellow light across the waste, softening the fractal harshness of the salt pan’s surface. As if provoked by his gaze, the door banged shut, cutting off the warm light. The metal muffled the cries only a little.

The boy’s father looked back also, then wrapped his arm tighter around his son, pulling him close.

‘She will be fine,’ said the man. ‘Your mother is strong. Your brother will be here soon.’ The boy was old enough to guess the words were intended to reassure his father, not he.

His father’s body was ravaged by residual fallout from a war, twelve thousand years lost. Deep lines marked his cheeks. His lips were scabbed with plates of skin. Amid the stubble of his cheek, a trio of ulcers glistened, blood-red flowers blooming in a poison field. A thick mane of brown hair, shot with premature grey and coarsened by salt, framed his face. There were black gaps in his yellow smile. At a little over thirty standard years the man was old and regarded himself well past his prime. His goggles, a priceless family heirloom of age-yellowed, scratched plastek, rested on his forehead, exposing an area of paler skin around his eyes less damaged than the rest. For all the cruelties of the land and the hard life it had given him, in his perfect, amber eyes there dwelt humour and a tender love for his child. Privation was all he had ever known. His humanity had not suffered for it.

‘Come away from the roamer, Luis,’ the man said softly. His chapped hands adjusted the scarf around the boy’s face, bringing it into a sharp triangle on the bridge of his nose. He smiled and touched his knuckle to his son’s forehead. Long, dark robes swathed them head to foot. Although the sun killed slowly out there in the Great Salt Waste, the nearest mortis radzone was far away. They were blessedly free of the need to wear their rad suits.

‘But da, mama–’

‘Hush,’ said the man, and he gripped his boy to him more tightly. ‘Let the life-bringer do what she does. Your mother is safe in her hands, you’ll see.’

A long, agonised moan came from the roamer to belie his words. The vehicle rocked hard, a sudden violence that subsided into ominous stillness. The wind soughed through the struts of the vehicle, setting the charms around the cab rattling. The boy’s father had made them. There were strings of scrimshawed bones and chimes of wind-scoured glass of blue and turquoise, plucked from the buried ruins of forgotten lands. But the boy’s favourites were two angels of metal scrap leaning forwards on the engine casing, frozen in the act of taking flight. From their outstretched arms, wings of blood-red ribbon snapped. In the growing dark they ceased to be familiar, becoming unnerving harbingers of terrible news – the very angels of death. The boy’s fears for his mother grew.

‘It will be fine, you’ll see,’ repeated his father. ‘Come on, let’s walk a little way.’

The boy was seven or thereabouts. Like his father, he had little idea of his true age. The seasons of a moon-world are complex and not easy to reconcile with the rhythms of Terra, a place far distant from their thoughts in any case. The home of the undying God-Emperor, Terra was to them a mythical world beyond conception. Nevertheless, their bodies remembered. Their unthinking genes had yet to throw off the stamp of their birthplace. Man was not made to survive on the Baalite trio. A genetic code forged over millions of years had had scant thousands to adapt to this hellish place, and frantically drove the creatures it made to reproduce before it was terminally compromised. Already the harsh environment had set its claws into the boy, eroding his features almost quicker than they could form. Life was short for the Baalites. They instinctively felt that it was not meant to be so and sorrowed, though they did not know why.

Their mortal shells yearned for the ease of a world that had ceased to exist millennia since. Old Earth was gone, and Terra as dry and dead as Baal Secundus. In those terrible times there were only deserts for men to inhabit. Deserts that had been made from paradises.

‘Come away a little further,’ said the man, when they had gone a way from the camp. ‘We’ll see them soon, up there, on Baal.’

‘But we are not supposed to,’ said the boy. He cast another glance backwards. His father gently but firmly pushed him on. Beyond their sand roamer were a score of similar vehicles. Some were bigger and some were smaller than their family home, but none greatly so, and they all followed the same basic pattern save the hulking salt hauler, in which no man lived. The orange light of fire scorpion lamps burned in the roamers’ portholes and through cracks in their worn sides. They were the sole, lonely signs of life. Sometimes Luis felt his clan were the only people anywhere.

‘I know you are not supposed to go too far, and you are wise to remind me,’ said the man. ‘But you are with me, and so you shall be safe.’ The man squeezed the boy’s shoulders. He took the boy further out from the camp. Plates of salt cracked under their feet. In every direction flat salt pan stretched away, a desiccated infinity as fractured as the skin of the man. During the day the sun streamed through clear skies stripped of protective ozone in the Long Ago Wars, as merciless to the land as it was to the flesh. At night the temperature plunged, and then the salt sucked greedily at the atmosphere’s meagre moisture load. Complex hydrates formed in the wastes, as precious to the salt clans as the chemicals they scraped from the ground. The latter gave them wealth, the former water. Hard as it would be for an off-worlder to believe, theirs was a rich clan.

The cries had faded with distance, and so the man stopped his son with gentle hands. ‘Here will do,’ he said. He sat down with a satisfied sigh. Rest was a luxury he rarely enjoyed. ‘Will you sit with me?’ he said. The wind gusted harder, cooler with every second. It peppered the boy and his father with salty grit.

Luis looked out over the desert. Visibility was good. The giant red crescent of Baal proper poured sanguine light over their world. ‘We can see for miles,’ he said. ‘Nothing approaches.’ He looked up and searched the sky. The painful blue of the day was ceding the bowl of heaven to night. The sky was red, the stars were red. The broad slash of the Red Scar bled its ruddy light across the cosmos. ‘No blood eagles fly. Fire scorpions are rare in the salt wastes.’ He stamped. ‘This ground is too salty to support trap-clams and too hard for catch spiders.’ He looked at his father. ‘I judge it safe. I will sit with you.’

The father blinked away grit from his eye, but did not put on his goggles. He grinned in delight at his son’s answer. ‘Soon you’ll know more than I.’

‘I already do,’ said the boy confidently. The man laughed, openly, the kind of laughter than invites participation, but the boy did not join in. His appraisal of the deadly lands around had been a momentary distraction. Worry for his mother returned. Luis sat down and nestled into his father.

White streamers of salt snaked across the ground. Their hissing could not quite drown out the cries coming from their roamer. He watched it nervously. For all the pressure the world exerted on its inhabitants to mature quickly, he was still a boy. He needed his mother.

His father laughed. ‘I will decide when you know more than I.’ Following his son’s eyes to their roamer, the man took his son’s hand and pulled his attention away, directing it out to the horizon and the planet looming over it. ‘Tonight is a good night, an auspicious night.’ He folded his arms around the boy, feeling him shiver in the dropping temperature. They leaned into each other, seeking warmth.

‘Why?’

‘Watch!’ said the man. He pointed to the brother planet, bringing his arm in line with his son’s eyes. The shadow of Baal’s own night crawled over the surface. It too was a world of deserts, red and vast, an all-encompassing landscape stretching from pole to pole. Mottled dun patches marked out mountains, blacker areas were depressions, modest spreads of frozen carbon and water capped the points of its axis, but no matter their hue all were various shades of red.

‘The first wonder of tonight,’ said the man. The dayside of Baal gave no hint that men lived there, but as night made its solemn procession across the surface, a single light blazed out from near the equator.

The boy had seen it on several occasions before, when the relative positions of Baal and Baal Secundus were favourable. His heart leapt every time.

‘The Arx Angelicum! Fortress of Angels!’ the boy said.

‘The very same,’ said his father. ‘The great castle where the angels of light and blood live, those who bring the Emperor’s judgement to all corners of the galaxy. Think, Luis, they are of Baal!’ he said proudly. ‘Why, there are even men there who might have come from our own tribe, once.’

‘Would they know us?’

‘No!’ said the man with a smile. ‘They have become mighty, risen past the concerns of mortal folk. They were chosen to become the sons of the God-Emperor, given great power and glory. They are the most wrathful of the Emperor’s servants – the noblest, the purest, the best.’ He whispered the truths of it into the boy’s ear, his words displacing the cries from the roamer and the sinister hissing of the wind-blown salt. ‘They are the lordliest of lords. The Emperor protects, the priests tell us in Selltown and Kemrender, but they,’ he pointed again emphatically, ‘they are how He protects us and billions and billions more like us, all over the galaxy. But they would not know us, not as kin. They are given great lifespans, and the concerns of our lives are beneath them now.’

The boy looked up. Blood-red stars looked back.

‘Are there really people there?’

‘There are people everywhere!’ said his father. ‘On worlds around every star, worlds of every kind.’

‘I have seen the fortress before,’ said the boy, his wonder departing as quickly as it had come. Fear for his mother constricted his young heart.

‘Have you seen this?’ said his father knowingly. He directed his son’s gaze to the farthest side of Baal, where night was deeply entrenched. Bright points moved across the world, some so close to one another they merged. Smaller lights twinkled as they ascended from the fortress on Baal.

‘Stars,’ said the boy. ‘That is all.’

‘Not so,’ said the man. ‘Stars cannot be so close to a world. Those are the great starships of the Blood Angels themselves.’

‘Are they bigger than our roamer?’ asked the boy.

The man laughed at his innocence. ‘I would think so, my son. In those great void chariots the lords of Baal ride to war. You see a very special thing. Rogus saw them gathering last night. I thought you might like to see. Now, some will say the angels fly to war on wings of shining light, but I know that is not true. They fly in machines that vent fire, roaring louder than the thunder. Who can stand against such warriors?’

‘No one,’ said the boy, entranced again. ‘There really are people out there, in the black?’

‘Yes!’ said the man.

‘I would like to go there one day.’ He turned around in his father’s arms. ‘Maybe I will one day. I could go to the brother planet and join the angels of blood. Would that not be a fine thing?’

The earnestness shining in the boy’s face unnerved the man. Encouraging such an ambition had not been his intention. His scabbed brow lowered over his perfect eyes.

‘More die in the attempt than get to join the angels,’ he said. ‘Only a very few make their way to the Place of Challenge at Angel’s Fall, fewer still survive the challenges, fewer yet are chosen.’ Reflexively, he hugged harder. Already he feared to lose his wife that night; the thought of losing his son as well terrified him. ‘Better a life of hardship you know than the almost certain chance of doom. It is best to venerate the angels from afar.’

‘Many people fail?’ said the boy, refusing to be discouraged.

‘Nearly all the people fail. Only the most exceptional survive to be chosen, and special as you are, chance will doom you before you have the opportunity to prove yourself.’

Luis was silent a moment. He craned his neck around to look at the lights over Baal. ‘Nearly all, but not all. Someone has to become an angel.’

There was no arguing with this truism, and the man inwardly cursed his son’s sharp mind. The coy edge of Baal Primus peeked around Baal, and the man seized the opportunity to change the subject.

‘See! Here comes our moon’s sister, Baalind,’ said the man, using the local name for Baal’s first moon. ‘She is always trying but ever failing to catch us. Once the sisters of Baal were always in the sky together, glorying in their company for one another. Until the Long Ago War, when their falling out drove them apart and ruined both moons for the people.’

The boy knew the story very well, but loved to hear it. ‘Why did they fight? Were they hungry?’

‘No! In those days everyone had enough to eat and drink, enough metal to work and machines you could not imagine. They fought over gold and favour, for the love of Baal himself,’ said the man. ‘Baal made a gift to his little sister Baalind of a glorious necklace. It was so beautiful that his elder sister flew into a rage and attacked her. They say on the far side of Baalind there is a series of scars where our moon Baalfora tore the necklace free,’ he said. ‘But it burned her fingers, and she dropped it into the night, and the necklace fell into the Blood Sea,’ he said, pointing at the Red Scar. ‘And so the gift was lost, and the worlds were ruined. Both sisters were beautiful once. Their jealousies made them hags. There is a lesson in that. That is why we never fight in our families. Strife within family is death to us all. If we fight with ourselves, we cannot protect ourselves from what might come from without. Not until the Great Angel came to Baal did we find ourselves again, and learn this lesson properly.’

Luis thought in the deep, intense way of small boys. ‘Maybe the stories are not true,’ he said. ‘Maybe home was always like this.’

The man hugged his son. ‘An ignorant man says ignorant things. I hope I did not raise you to be ignorant. The stories are true. This world was once a beautiful place. This Great Salt Waste was once a sea, as wide a body of water as you can imagine, and many creatures lived in its depths. You have seen their bones. There is proof there.’

‘I am sorry,’ said the boy, worried he had annoyed his father. He was a good, kind man, but his temper was sharp and easily unleashed.

‘No need to say sorry,’ said the man, his tone softening. ‘I correct you, not chastise. When you have seen all I have seen, you will understand what once happened here. The Great Angel made it better, though we still suffer for the sins of our forefathers. Even so, the Great Angel’s sons love us of all people especially. This is what I am showing you – that they are out there, watching over us for the Emperor.’

The cries from the roamer were diminishing in frequency and intensity.

‘We are fortunate tonight – a child born under the lights of the angels marshalling is destined for great things. So don’t worry for your mother. This business of making children is fraught, but it will be right, you shall see. Your brother will be thrice-blessed.’

‘Was I born on such a night?’ asked Luis.

His father’s pause was all the answer he needed. ‘You have other blessings,’ he said. ‘But you are not marked for such things.’

‘Father?’ said the boy. He turned from the lights cutting their way across the sky.

‘Yes, my son?’ said the man. His pale eyes looked earnestly into those of his offspring.

‘When I have a brother, will you still love me just as much?’

The man laughed and gave his boy a fierce squeeze. ‘Love is a bottomless well, my lad. I’ll love you both just the same. And if you ever feel yourself being jealous – and you will, for a new life needs much nurturing – then remember…’ He leaned in close and whispered in the boy’s ear. ‘You were here first, and you and I had this time together. That’ll always be yours.’ He withdrew a touch. ‘I’ll love you so much no matter what, little one, for I am your father.’

The sky burst with light again as the sun drew past the edge of Baal. Firstnight ended. The sudden input of heat set the winds roaring across the plains, and the boy and man cast their long hoods over their heads and held each other, giggling for the thrill of being out in the scouring storm.

Abruptly it dropped. Luis’ father shook out their cloaks. The sun set again as Baal Secundus – Baalfora – turned its face away from the light and the sun set a second time.

A sliver of Baal remained lit. That slice of Baal Primus inching around the mother world was bright still. For a rare moment all three worlds in the planetary subsystem lined up, and the aged sun kissed the foreheads of her sickly children one by one. The void chariots of the angels sailed through the sea of light and dark. Luis held his breath at the sight.

Then the sun was gone, and truenight draped its cloak over the Great Salt Waste. The wind dropped.

‘Arreas! Arreas!’ The shout had the father and son turn around. The life-bringer was framed in the light of the roamer’s open door, her voice wavering on the dying wind.

Something in the woman’s voice and manner had the boy’s father stumble to his feet violently, spilling his son into the salt.

‘Arreas! Come quickly!’

‘Father?’ said the boy. His eyes threatened tears. An indescribable dread had him. ‘Father!’

But the man was running as fast as he could for the roamer and did not reply. The boy watched him recede from him forever, leaving him alone on the cooling salt.

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Dante first published in 2017.
The Devastation of Baal first published in 2017.
Darkness in the Blood first published in 2019.
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