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Lemartes – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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Chapter One

Evangelical

An ocean in storm: blood to infinite depths, rage the sum of all tempests and waves breaking into crimson foam as they crash against the obsidian sky. A presence approaching. The thing of rage and blood. Born of the storm, shaper of the ocean. A terrible rising. The bringer of the roar, endless and final, a roar of reason’s death and of fury’s dominion. The destroyer still in the shadow of the sky, concealed by the waves, but coming in wrath. Inexorable. Inevitable.

The need for clarity.

The dread of revelation.

The retaliation of my own rage.

A war of storms.

Baldwin Morrov knew when the prayers on Phlegethon stopped. He felt it: the hard snap of spiritual abandonment. The cord that had linked him from this tomb of darkness and bloodshed to the hope of rescue and light had thinned, frayed, and now was gone. He even knew who had been the last to turn away: his children. They were called Alayna and Bernd, but he had lost their names some time ago. Even their faces were darkening blurs in the shards that remained of his identity. But that anything remained was due to their prayers.

Morrov was not a psyker, yet some agency had permitted him to feel the psychic ripples of the prayers. In the first days of his entombment, the hope had sustained his rational being. The Morrov of the early days of the ordeal had believed the hand of the Emperor was behind the miracle.

But when the rescue did not come, and the prayers began to fall away, the loss of hope was worse than if it had never been present. In the dying moments of Morrov’s self, he had known the Emperor was not blessing him. And then had come the blasphemous thought that something else might be at work. That terror had marked his last coherent thought.

And now the final connection was broken. He howled. He crawled forward in the dark. His work uniform was rags, and the stones dug into his flesh. His hands, thick with scar tissue and bleeding from fresh cuts, touched something that moved. It screamed and attacked him. Hands squeezed his throat. He fought back and felt his broken nails sink into softness. He dug deeper. The other’s screams turned desperate. The hands released his throat. Morrov breathed and snarled. He pushed and tore and gouged until the screams and the struggling and the movement stopped.

But the darkness did not stop. Morrov kept growling as if to keep the suffocating silence at bay.

He did not know that he had just killed his friend Teodor Weiss. But then, Weiss had forgotten his own name some time ago. Weiss, like Morrov, had become a bundle of fearful, raging instincts, moving and fighting in darkness.

And eating.

Morrov began to feast.

There was so much gone from the ruin of Baldwin Morrov. He did not know where he was, or how he had come to be there. He did not remember being a miner. He did not know that he was in one of the largest of the thousands of small moons that orbited Phlegethon in a thick cloud. Some were a few metres in size. Others were hundreds of kilometres in diameter. Rich in ore, this particular moonlet’s interior had become the site of a gigantic mining operation. Atmosphere generators permitted work unfettered by void suits. Enough miners to populate a small city had worked the veins for over a century.

But then, the catastrophe. Morrov no longer had a memory of the time before the cataclysm, but what was left of his mind did retain an impression of the coming of night, so deep were the wounds. Even in the first days of darkness, when the trapped souls were still cooperating, still hoping, and still thinking, Morrov had not learned the cause of his entombment. He did not know that he was a victim of chance and gravity. The density of Phlegethon’s moon swarm was such that collisions were inevitable. The mining asteroid had been struck by another chunk of rock, one much smaller, but large enough that the blast had destroyed all surface installations and collapsed the access to the mines.

Power had failed. Light had died. Enough of the moon had been excavated over the decades that its volume contained sufficient breathable atmosphere for months. But there was only enough food for weeks. As the days had passed and rescue had not come, cooperation had given way to competition for the diminishing resources. And competition had given way to war.

Light was the edge. Light was the key to finding stores and spotting those who would take them. Portable lamps became more precious than the food itself. They became targets. Once the battles began in earnest, it was only a matter of days before night came to the tunnels, never to leave.

The war had taken Morrov apart. It had broken him down to the most desperate core. Existence had become nothing but the struggle in the void, and when there was not struggle, there was the silence that waited beyond death. And running through all those days of torment was the rage.

The rage against enemies. Against fate. Against the dark. Against the rescuers who would not come.

And when he had still been capable of speech, and of understanding it, Morrov had heard blasphemous rage against the Emperor Himself.

Morrov had uttered no such heresy. There had been that cord of hope. He had known there were prayers. They had sustained him, given him strength to endure. When they had begun to die away, they had given him the strength of desperation.

And now, snap. The hope that he no longer comprehended but needed beyond all measure vanished.

The rage took him. The rage that had built up inside the stone prison. The rage of thousands and thousands of humans tearing each other apart in despair. The rage of final betrayal. A concentrated essence. A summation.

The conclusion of the first step of a very great work.

Morrov shrieked in the silence. He crawled through blood and over bones. He clawed at stone. When he encountered a rising slope of fallen rock, he hurled himself against the barrier. He battered his bones and flesh against the seal of his tomb. His ragged lungs took a deep breath of foul air. He screamed the full enormity of his mindless rage and perfect hate. The god he had worshipped did not hear him.

But another did.

Stones shifted.

Phlegethon’s days of miracles began.

Lina Elsener waited in the medicae centre for the shuttle to deliver the survivor. The centre was located near the top of the apex spire of Hive Profundis and close to the tower’s landing pad.

‘Why are they bringing him here?’ Mirus Thulin asked. ‘He’s a serf.’

‘He’s a miracle,’ Elsener told him, ‘and miracles must be honoured.’ She wasn’t really joking. She understood the political calculations of the decision. The tens of thousands of miners who had died in the disaster had had enough connections that a significant portion of the hive’s population had been affected to at least some degree. When the last attempts to reach the entombed had been abandoned, and all hope finally lost, the unrest had continued. The smooth functioning of other orbital operations had been compromised. The expense involved in crushing resistance and forcing reluctant serfs back to work was considerable. A display of generosity towards the sole survivor made sound economic sense.

But the fact of the matter was that the patient Elsener was going to receive was a miracle. He should not be alive. The crew that had picked him up had voxed that he was in a vegetative state, and Elsener thought it likely that he would never recover. But he was alive. Not only that, he had somehow managed to break through the rubble to a pocket near the surface where there had been a functioning beacon. Which he had activated.

That, at least, was what had been reported. Elsener had her doubts. If he was in a coma, how had he triggered the beacon? She wasn’t even sure it was a beacon that had summoned the rescue team. She had known about the call before it had been announced. Everyone had. That was part of the miracle. The God-Emperor had directed the attention of all Phlegethon to the moon at that vital moment. That was the explanation.

Surely it was. Nothing else made sense.

But the doubts were there. She should have been ecstatic to be among the first to see this wonder, and to be the chirurgeon responsible for his care. Instead, tension was twisting her gut. When she swallowed, she tasted bile.

She glanced at Thulin. If her assistant was worried, he didn’t show it. He seemed much more offended by the impropriety of a mining serf receiving the treatment reserved for the nobility of Profundis.

‘He shouldn’t be here,’ Thulin insisted.

‘It is the governor’s will,’ Elsener said. She was about to add, ‘And the Emperor’s.’ The tension choked off her words. Instead, she walked to the entrance of the medicae centre. She looked down the hall adorned by the ruling family’s banners. Beyond the closed iron doors at the end, she heard the roar of the approaching shuttle’s retro-engines. Her charge was almost here.

She drummed her fingers against the doorway. The tension was resolving itself into a war between fear and anger. She didn’t know why.

The doors banged open. Elsener’s eyes widened. Lord Governor Uhlen entered, ahead of a cluster of his household servants bearing the stretcher on which lay the miracle. Of course, Elsener thought. The governor must be known to have greeted the survivor and escorted him to care. Of course.

She had to fight to keep her face from twisting into a snarl. In the next second, as she became aware of the struggle, her skin pricked with fear.

Elsener stepped to the side of the door, folded her arms in her chirurgeon’s robes, and bowed her head in greeting to the governor. Uhlen’s nod was curt. He walked to the nearest operating table. His servants transferred the miner from the stretcher and withdrew.

‘Well?’ Uhlen asked as Elsener approached. His thin lips were compressed. A vein was throbbing on his neck. ‘Can you do anything with him?’

‘I will need to examine him first,’ she answered, thinking she was doing very well to remain civil.

‘Do your work well, chirurgeon,’ Uhlen said. ‘If he dies, he does more harm than if he’d never emerged.’

‘I will do what is possible to be done.’ Her first sight of the miner was not encouraging. Even though he had been cleaned by the shuttle crew, he was a bloody mass of wounds and contusions. His face was so damaged it was doubtful anyone would be able to identify him. Tracking down who he was would be time-consuming. At least that was none of her concern.

She reached out to take his pulse. Her fingers touched his arm. It snapped up and he grabbed her by the wrist. When she tried to pull away, he sat up. His eyes opened. For a moment, they were an unfocused, cloudy green, staring blankly at the opposite wall.

Then a murderous scarlet spread out from his pupils, filled the irises, and then the whites. His eyes were a uniform red, but they were not blind or unfocused now. They glinted with passion and knowledge. He looked first straight ahead at the governor, and then turned his head to face Elsener. She saw the true fire in his gaze. She felt the wrath of thousands upon thousands of raging souls strike her.

In the corners of her vision, blood appeared. It was running down the walls and across the floor of the medicae centre. It poured from the ceiling. It sprang from every surface in the hall.

It ran in tears down her face, but there was no grief. Nor was there fear. She did not hold back her snarl now.

‘What is there but rage?’ asked the Prophet of Blood.

Beyond the huge sprawl of Hive Profundis were the great prairies of Phlegethon’s northern continent. Millennia of polluted atmosphere, diminished sunlight and overwork of the land were pushing what had been the most fertile region on the planet towards desertification. Millions of hectares had become mud fields. Wind storms blew topsoil into the sky, leaving dead earth behind. But many of the great farms were still active. The hive must be fed, and ways were found. The time would come when even the most desperate measures would not be enough. But that time had not come yet.

On the edges of the giant concerns were a few smaller holdings, fragments owned by the last representatives of once-great families. They had been nobles. Now they were one or two generations away from beggars. Albrecht Cawler knew enough of his family history to know that his ancestors had been wealthy. But that was so many centuries in the past, the knowledge had no emotional resonance for him. What mattered was the present, and the present was the need to raise enough grain to keep the struggle going another year.

Cawler was walking back from his field towards his sagging farmhouse when he heard thunder. He glanced up. The night sky, lit by the glow of the hive, was a uniform black and amber. There were no storm clouds.

The thunder continued. The rumble grew louder. It seemed to be coming from behind him. He turned around.

Cawler’s farm ended at a baked clay plain that ran straight to the hundred-metre-high walls of Hive Profundis. The hive rose from the plain with the sudden, vertical thrust of a monstrous horn jutting from the earth. Level upon level, spire upon spire, it was a tapering cone of agglomerated architecture that towered past the clouds. A hundred million people lived there, their competing faith, duty and need and ambitions, hatreds and desires crawling over one another in an unending battle whose goals ranged from the luxury and prestige of the highest peaks to simple survival in the underhive depths.

The thunder came from the hive. It built and built until the rumbles became hammer blows against a drum the size of the world. Cawler covered his ears. Terror pushed him to his knees. The greatest crash of all came, and it seemed to Cawler that the entire hive shook. Its lights flickered, then flared red. A million eyes glared out of the night.

The thunder faded, and gave way to a new sound. It was a roar. It began as distant waves on a rocky shore. The waves came closer, and there was no receding before the next crash. Closer. The roar was hungry. Cawler began to pray.

The wave burst from the gates of Hive Profundis. Cawler’s prayer faltered. He stared at a rushing mob of hundreds, of thousands, of hundreds of thousands, and still more. The gates were wide, the flow was unending, and the roar came from the throats of uncountable monsters. Caught in the grip of a rage that knew neither mercy, nor obstacle, nor surcease, the citizens of Profundis raced over the land.

Cawler screamed at the most terrible sight he had ever witnessed.

But then the wave reached him.

The sky above the colony was dark with smoke. The ruins were shrouded with it. Not a single building still stood. Khevrak strode over the wreckage. His neuroglottis filtered the component elements of the smoke. It sorted the burning wood from the smouldering plasteel, the promethium from the human flesh. There was a lot of flesh. The colonists of Algidus lay in huge pyres, hills of bodies many metres high, towering over the remnants of their homes. Khevrak passed between two of the mounds. He walked through a valley of death that he had called into being. The guttering flames reflected off the brass and black of his power armour. The armour was his identity. He was the darkness that came with night, and he was the unforgiving strength of metal. The brass of his helmet was the echo of fire and blood, the wrath of the Blood God forged into a skull of war. On his left shoulder plate was a different sort of skull. Horned, elongated, the badge was the symbol for the carnage that surrounded Khevrak. It was death, and it was inhuman. So was every action undertaken by Khevrak’s warband.

In this moment, as he walked, all Khevrak could see and hear and taste was devastation. This was good work. But it was not sufficient. How could it be, when there was an entire galaxy to feed to the Blood God? Already, the hunger for death, driven by unending anger, was growing again. There were moments of satisfaction, in the heat of battle, in the highest peaks of slaughter, when the world was drenched in vitae and it seemed that life itself would finally drown in its own essence. Those were the moments when Khevrak believed his worship took on its purest, most potent form. He felt on the verge of transformation, then, touching the apotheosis that would be the ultimate expression of what it meant to be one of the Blood Disciples.

But the slaughter was always finite. It always ended. The Blood Disciples were constrained in their offerings by the limits of their military capability. Transcendence remained out of reach.

Khevrak reached the centre of the colony. This was where the chapel had been. The greatest massacre had taken place here, but so many of the bodies had become ash that the mounds were lower than elsewhere. The only trace of the chapel that remained was the blackened stones of its foundations. They were the bones of slain belief. At the heart of the wreckage, the Dark Apostle knelt.

Khevrak stopped outside the perimeter of the defiled chapel and waited. He would not disturb Dhassaran at his devotions. Around the Apostle, corpses lay in jagged angles, spines and limbs shattered into runic symbols. A nimbus of energy crackled over Dhassaran. It was the colour of rust and violence. It twisted the air. It dragged claws over space. Even outside the area of the ritual, Khevrak could feel a tug. The aura was the trace of pure hunger, an abstraction seeking to reify itself. It was the sign of Dhassaran finding another step along the path towards the Blood Disciples’ destiny.

There was a flash, the shriek of reality sliced with an axe, and the nimbus vanished. Dhassaran rose. He turned and walked out of the circle of corpses towards Khevrak. The robe he wore over his armour smoked. Prayer scrolls of human flesh were curled, their edges burned. Dhassaran had begun the ceremony as the chapel burned down around him. There were new scorch marks on his face, adding to the topography of scarred and burned tissue. Deep in his skull, his eyes burned more brightly than the colony had at the height of the conflagration. His lips were pulled back in an eager, ecstatic snarl.

‘You have seen something,’ Khevrak said.

‘I have, brother-captain. And I have news. The time of our transcendence approaches.’

‘We have always believed that.’

‘Yes, but now I know where.’ Dhassaran spread his arms wide and tilted his head back, welcoming the atrocities to come. ‘The Prophet of Blood is reborn,’ he said.

Joy was a thing of blades and ragged wounds. Khevrak experienced joy now. ‘You’re sure?’ he asked.

Dhassaran nodded once. ‘I experienced his return in my vision. He has come. And so, at last, has our transcendence. And redemption.’

Redemption. It was a word that passed the lips of very few who were sworn to Chaos. ‘Redemption,’ Khevrak said, tasting the syllables, exploring their razored edges. The chance had come for the Blood Disciples to atone for the crime that had given them birth. Before the great conversion, before the end of delusion, they had been the Emperor’s Wolves. In the name of the false god, they had killed the Prophet of Blood. That act had been their last in the service of the Imperium. From that moment onward, they had been disciples to Khorne. But they had silenced the voice that spoke of the way forwards.

At last, the voice had returned.

‘Redemption,’ Dhassaran repeated. ‘He waits for us on Phlegethon.’

The storm. The ocean. The blood. The shadow moving closer. A great blow descending.

Then Corbulo stands before me. He watches me without speaking. I step out of my stasis chamber. ‘Ask me,’ I say.

‘What do you see?’

The blur. Sanguinary priest and primarch. Overlap of images, their features identical. Phantom wings. The need to fight, to save Sanguinius this time, this now. Kill the traitor Horus.

No. I know who is present. I will myself to see him. Cracks of black and flickers of red withdraw to the edges of my vision. I hold them there. I hold back the tide.

The tide that never ebbs.

‘I see you, Brother Corbulo.’ Every word a bloodied victory. A bitter irony. I am a Chaplain. Before the Rage, words were in my arsenal. Their shaping was a duty. Words to inspire. Words to condemn. Words to blast the souls of the enemy. But now every rational syllable is carved from the cliff face of rage. The rage of a madman. I am that madman. I am sane only as long as I know that I am mad. The madness will drown me if I ever think myself sane.

‘What else do you see?’

The banners of victories surrounding us, hanging in the still air. I know what every battle was, though I do not always remember them. But Corbulo asks if I know where I am. ‘The chamber,’ I tell him. ‘My crypt.’ My needed prison. Deep in Mount Seraph. Beneath the cells that hold my brothers of the Death Company. I can hear their shouts through the rock. But I do not know if those sounds are real.

My hands are closed into fists. They grip reality. It is slippery.

Corbulo says, ‘The Death Company is needed, Chaplain Lemartes.’

‘Rage to combat rage,’ I say.

He looks at me sharply. ‘Why do you say that?’

‘Am I wrong?’

‘No.’ He pauses. ‘The precise nature of the crisis is as yet unclear.’

‘Clear enough to wake me.’ I am the sleeping monster. I have no consciousness except for war and its preparation.

‘Yes,’ says Corbulo. ‘Phlegethon, in the Caïna sector, has been struck with what appears to be a plague of wrath. The Mordian Iron Guard has intervened. They have been unable to restore order or stem the spread of the infection’.

‘A plague of wrath,’ I repeat. Fury taking the form of a disease. Corbulo watches as I consider the parallels. Whatever is happening on Phlegethon is not the Black Rage. There is a link, though. I do not believe in a coincidence of symptoms.

The vision. The roaring shadow. A thing of anger and strength. Grasping.

Squeeze of fists. Willed clarity. This vision is important. There is a link between Phlegethon and my madness.

Corbulo says, ‘You don’t appear surprised.’

‘I am not.’

‘Why did you say, “Rage to combat rage”? How could you know?’

‘A vision.’

‘From the Heresy?’

‘Not of that fall. Nor of mine.’ The slippages of time, of place, the confusion of the real. Of late, I have walked again on Hadriath XI. I have Corbulo to thank for a new layer of delusion. We both know this. He regrets the added martyrdom. He will not, though, desist in his research. I would not wish him to. I give my strength to the Chapter, to Sanguinius. And my soul. And my madness.

I describe the vision to Corbulo. It slips over the real. Storm. Blood. Shadow. The vault of the chamber rises into limbo. Stone becomes insubstantial. The flagstones beneath my boots sink beneath waves. I feel the wind. It reeks of death. It cries with violence. The blood rises past my waist, to my neck.

Submerging.

No.

Push it away.

Stone beneath me. The sacred hardness of Baal around me. The Sanguinary High Priest watching and listening.

‘That is no memory,’ Corbulo says. He is holding a data-slate, taking notes. He did not have it when I began speaking. Reality moved on while I was in the storm. ‘But you have not mentioned it before.’

‘It is new.’

‘Since last we spoke?’

‘Yes.’ The implications are clear to both of us.

‘There are no dreams in stasis,’ Corbulo says.

‘I know.’

‘They do not happen,’ he insists, as if I have contradicted him.

‘This was no dream.’

He muses. ‘Perhaps, during the transition out of stasis…’

I turn from him and walk to a recess in the far corner of the chamber. This is my cell. Here are my weapons. Here is my helmet. ‘With respect, brother,’ I say, ‘you focus on an irrelevance. How the vision came to me is not the issue. What it portends is vital.’

‘What do you think it portends?’

Horror. ‘What rage and blood must always mean for the Blood Angels.’ I do not need to elaborate. There is a peril ahead aimed at our souls. For that reason, it must be confronted.

‘Commander Dante agrees with me that there might be opportunity here too,’ says Corbulo. ‘A manifestation with such parallels to the Flaw demands our special attention. Your vision makes this doubly true. So how it came to you is relevant. Any new symptom is significant. One might be a path to a cure.’

A flash of pity for Corbulo. For the sake of the Chapter, he must hold fast to that hope. He must pursue the quest. I cannot afford that hope. Its loss could doom me utterly. Though I want Corbulo to be correct. He seeks nothing less than the salvation of the Blood Angels.

But salvation is not at hand. Battle is at hand. I pick up my helmet. The void of the skull’s eyes gaze back at me. White bones on black. Death and the Rage. I am looking at a mirror. This is my true face. The flesh one is a mask. Its muscles vibrate from strain. To speak is to force my lips back from a snarl. The skin would peel itself away and give the truth free rein.

I don the helmet. I don the skull. But I am not Death. That is the truth of Mephiston. The other holy monster. He is the revenant. I am Rage. I am Doom.

Wearing my identity, I go to find my brothers in madness. Corbulo stays where he is. In this crypt, I am his object of study. Above, a communion awaits that is not for him.

Up a level. A spiral of stone steps. The hollow knell of my boots. I am darkness and crimson. I am rising from the crypt to the asylum.

A long hall before me. Cells on either side. The lighting dim, from torches in sconces before each cell. The flames kept burning by the honour guard that passes once an hour. Flames for the fire of my brothers. For the rage that consumes them, and consumes our enemies. Banners here too, reaching down from the arch keystones. The air just as still as in the crypt, as if the turmoil of sound meant nothing.

The sound means everything. The chorus of wrath. The scream of reason. The unending battle cry of the Death Company. This is the madness of our Chapter. Our tragedy. Our history. We are the Lost, yet we are found in the heart of every Blood Angel. In the grasp of the Black Rage, we do not remember history. We live it. Always. The nightmare of the past, an eternal present. The death of Sanguinius not a scar, but a wound struck again and again, heartbeat by heartbeat.

The betrayal, always. The fall, always. The anguish, always. And the rage, rage, rage for vengeance that can never be enough. The unreachable vengeance sought in every battle. The battles that only I might remember.

I walk down the hall. My tortured brothers hurl themselves against the reinforced doors of their cells. They curse Horus. They will avenge their imprisonment at the hands of Traitors. Their rage is my rage. The black tendrils creep into my vision. The crimson flickers intensify. My breath becomes ragged.

Blurring.

Such a betrayal. Language dies before it. Rend the Traitors limb from limb. Tear their flesh. There can be no restraint. Feast on their blood.

Is that smoke? Smoke from the walls of the Imperial Palace?

I will–

No.

I am in the hall. I know what is real. But I feel the fury of the past. My soul is on Terra ten thousand years ago. I am one with the heroes of the Death Company. Our rage is our strength. Our strength is our glory, and it is monstrous to behold.

I am a Chaplain. I am the Guardian. I open my mouth and give voice to thunder.

‘Brothers!’

Silence falls over the Death Company. The Lost attend to me, to madness speaking to madness.

‘We go to war!’

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2015.
This eBook edition published in 2016 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd,
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Cover illustration by Anna Steinbauer.

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