Mephiston: Revenant Crusade Read online

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  More Blood Angels from Black Library

  • MEPHISTON •

  by Darius Hinks

  Book 1: BLOOD OF SANGUINIUS

  Book 2: REVENANT CRUSADE

  THE DEVASTATION OF BAAL

  A novel by Guy Haley

  DANTE

  A novel by Guy Haley

  SHIELD OF BAAL

  A Space Marine Battles novel by Josh Reynolds,

  Joe Parrino and Braden Campbell

  MEPHISTON: LORD OF DEATH

  A novella by David Annandale

  SIN OF DAMNATION

  A novella by Gav Thorpe

  LEMARTES: GUARDIAN OF THE LOST

  A novel by David Annandale

  THE BLOOD ANGELS OMNIBUS

  An omnibus by James Swallow

  HEART OF RAGE

  An audio drama by James Swallow

  VIRTUES OF THE SONS / SINS OF THE FATHER

  A Horus Heresy audio drama by Andy Smillie

  More Warhammer 40,000 stories from Black Library

  The Beast Arises

  1: I AM SLAUGHTER

  2: PREDATOR, PREY

  3: THE EMPEROR EXPECTS

  4: THE LAST WALL

  5: THRONEWORLD

  6: ECHOES OF THE LONG WAR

  7: THE HUNT FOR VULKAN

  8: THE BEAST MUST DIE

  9: WATCHERS IN DEATH

  10: THE LAST SON OF DORN

  11: SHADOW OF ULLANOR

  12: THE BEHEADING

  Space Marine Battles

  WAR OF THE FANG

  THE WORLD ENGINE

  DAMNOS

  DAMOCLES

  OVERFIEND

  ARMAGEDDON

  Legends of the Dark Millennium

  ASTRA MILITARUM

  ULTRAMARINES

  FARSIGHT

  SONS OF CORAX

  SPACE WOLVES

  Visit blacklibrary.com for the full range of novels, novellas, audio dramas and Quick Reads, along with many other exclusive products

  Contents

  Cover

  Backlist

  Title Page

  Warhammer 40,000

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  An Extract from ‘The Devastation of Baal’

  A Black Library Publication

  eBook license

  It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the Master of Mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of His inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that He may never truly die.

  Yet even in His deathless state, the Emperor continues His eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in His name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Astra Militarum and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants – and worse.

  To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

  Prologue

  The Bactrus Wastes, three miles south of Hades Hive, Armageddon Secundus.

  Many years earlier.

  The angel rose from a wellspring of flame, sloughing off the past and shedding ash from his wings. Dead and reborn, ancient and new, he burned through the veils of reality with his father at his side and the universe in his hand. Even now, hours from birth, his consciousness was exploding and expanding, soaring into new shapes. The curse of his old life was gone, leaving nothing but primordial power. Fire bloomed in his footsteps. Clouds boiled in his wake. Calistarius had fallen. Mephiston had risen.

  A grunting, sweating mob blundered into his dream, staining the purity of the moment. He raised his hand and a sword appeared, torn from his gauntlet in a sheath of flame. Vitarus.

  The shadows broke through the blaze. Greenskins. Snarling and drooling as they barrelled towards him, chainswords rattling.

  Vitarus cut them down like saplings. Mephiston fought with blissful dispassion. No rage. No confusion. The bloodlust remained but it was simply fuel for his blows, just another weapon to wield.

  Ork blood filled the air, quickening the angel’s transformation, igniting his soul like a revelation.

  The old part of his mind told him to return, reach the Imperial lines, rejoin his old life. But the new part revelled in the moment, carving mounds of broken limbs, scattering heaps of splintered armour.

  When the killing was done the angel moved on. Briefly, he forgot himself and walked. Then he breathed wings from his spine and soared, gliding high above the desolation, banking through the smouldering echoes of war.

  He came to a ruined city and saw more prey picking through a rubble-strewn square. He plummeted, slicing through the dust clouds and crashing into them, tearing the orks apart with ember-shrouded blows.

  He became mired in a mob of brutish, crookbacked monsters, crushed beneath a bellowing horde that mistook him for easy prey.

  Eager to test his new form, Mephiston let the warp pour through him, unleashing every trace of power he could summon with no thought for his soul. He was free. Why contain such fury?

  Light burned through asphyxiating fumes, incinerating and eviscerating, filling the square with charred flesh. Columns of empyric lightning smashed into the flagstones. The earth split. Walls toppled. Watchtowers burned.

  As the fighting grew more frenzied, Mephiston’s mind began to slip. Every thunderstrike and sword lunge fed his power rather than drained it. He was incandescent, his thoughts too bright to grasp, too strange to follow. His hearts pounded as he plumbed the depths of the warp. In his old life he had painted his armour black as a mark of his curse, but now the paint blistered away, revealing a glorious, bloody crimson.

  Walls detonated and Mephiston levitated through the maelstrom, arms outstretched, a divine conductor orchestrating the apocalypse. Greenskins tumbled away, charred and broken as the warp reached into reality and ripped them apart. Power flooded every cell of Mephiston’s body, consuming him, transforming him, making him one with the immaterium.

  No.+

  The voice rang out in Mephiston’s mind, s
hattering his equilibrium. Who dared challenge him? He who had mastered the curse. He who had mastered death. Who dared enter the mind of an angel?

  Mephiston called down the warp storm with even more violence, splitting the sky with curses and enveloping the city in madness. The flames grew wild and strange, sprouting humanoid shapes that reached through the inferno, grasping with spindly, disjointed limbs.

  Stop,+ said the voice, still audible over the fury of Mephiston’s thoughts.

  Rage, long forgotten, boiled up through Mephiston’s chest. He dived through the flames, seeking the fool who dared to address him.

  Up ahead, rising from the shattered buildings, was a shrine. It was the same as countless shrines on countless worlds: a winged skull, crowned with a halo of spikes. Mephiston barely registered it. But standing before the shrine, silhouetted by the flames, was a robed figure. Despite the destruction Mephiston had unleashed, the man was standing firmly on the rubble, leaning into the tempest, unbowed by the storm.

  Mephiston drew back Vitarus and hurled warp fire at him.

  The figure raised a sword and parried the blast. He staggered under the impact, head bowed, but managed to stay on his feet. Ghost-runes billowed around him, whirling like fireflies as he wrenched his sword aside and sent Mephiston’s fire into a temple, shattering walls and adding more flames to the ash clouds.

  Mephiston dived again, bringing Vitarus round for another strike.

  The blades clashed with a boom of colliding warp fields.

  The sorcerer fell, knocked from his feet by the force of Mephiston’s blow. He crashed against the shrine and his sword flew from his grip.

  Mephiston strode forwards, raising Vitarus for the killing blow.

  The ash clouds banked away and he saw, not a Chaos sorcerer, but a brother of his own Librarius. A Blood Angel, clad in blue war-plate. He removed his helmet to reveal a familiar face with dark, weathered skin and a short white beard.

  ‘Rhacelus?’ said Mephiston.

  ‘Calistarius,’ said the Blood Angel, shaking his head and holding up his hand to ward off the next blow.

  Mephiston lowered Vitarus and looked around at the burning city, emerging from his fever dream with a jolt. He could barely remember how he had come to be there. ‘Calistarius is dead,’ he said, sure of that much.

  Rhacelus climbed to his feet, staring at Mephiston, taking in his warp-mangled armour and the grim pallor of his face. He grabbed his sword from the rocks. ‘Then what are you?’

  The name was burned across his soul. It had nourished and sustained him beneath the ruins of Hades Hive. It was his path from the darkness. The ember that lit the fire. ‘I am Mephiston.’

  ‘And does Mephiston murder his friends?’

  Anger flared in Mephiston, then quickly faded. He shook his head and lowered his sword.

  As Rhacelus stared at him, Mephiston imagined what he must be thinking. His armour was smouldering and blood-drenched and he had just destroyed dozens of buildings without considering who might be cowering in the ruins. When they last met, he had been lost in the madness of the Black Rage. And now he was apparently sane. Cured by a miracle he could not explain. Rhacelus would be trying to decide if his battle-brother had fallen to the Ruinous Powers. Exactly as Mephiston would have done were their places reversed.

  Warp fury drained from Mephiston’s limbs, replaced by doubt. Had he simply replaced one curse with another? ‘No,’ he said. ‘I do not kill my friends. I am…’ His words trailed off. He did not know what he was.

  Rhacelus gripped his sword, still watching him closely.

  Mephiston expected denunciation or attack, but Rhacelus sheathed the sword and shook his head.

  ‘Calistarius is not dead,’ he said. ‘I see him. He’s still in you, even if you do not realise it. Whatever you are now, you carry an echo of the man you were.’ He stepped closer and looked Mephiston directly in the eye. ‘And so you must. I do not understand what this change means. I do not know what has happened to you. And I sense that you are just as confused. But you have to remember what you were, Calistarius.’ He looked at the wasteland that surrounded them. ‘You have gone beyond the Librarius. I can see that. You are something new.’ He frowned. ‘Something liminal. I see your soul and at the same time I don’t.’ He waved at the path Mephiston had carved through the city. ‘Whatever this power is, it must be taethered, tied to something human. You must remember yourself.’

  Mephiston saw the cold, sobering truth of his friend’s words. ‘I will remember,’ he said.

  The doubt remained on Rhacelus’ face.

  Mephiston gripped his arm. ‘I swear.’

  Rhacelus stared at Mephiston for a long time, peering deep into his soul. Eventually, the doubt faded from his eyes, replaced with a glimmer of something else: hope.

  He gripped Mephiston’s arm.

  ‘I believe you.’

  Chapter One

  Frost crawled into the bunker, silvering the heads piled at its centre, clamping their jaws into obstinate silence. Most of them were beyond saving, their fat, black tongues hanging from death-grey lips, smoke drifting from their ragged eye sockets. It was a pitiful scene. Some were still twitching, brutally galvanised by banks of sparking transformers, but none of them were speaking anymore. The heads had become totems, carefully labelled symbols of the curse that had befallen Hydrus Ulterior – contorted, mindless and finally mute.

  ‘Groti-grosi, zero-one,’ said Magos Calx through a hood full of vox-pipes. ‘Hair, teeth, nails. Nails, teeth, hair. Sifter-zero. Sifter-one.’ With each clipped word he stabbed a syringe into one of the heads, trying to coax out a reply. ‘Putrescible matter. Non-copper. No adulterations. Gliacine-zero. Gliacine-one. Blood-spitting, then silence.’

  There was frustration in his voice as he glanced at a shrine in the corner of the bunker. It was rattling furiously in its alcove, spooling reels of data scrolls, as though remonstrating him. ‘Munificent lord,’ said Calx. ‘I will not be defeated by this. Whatever they have become, they will give me answers. The vescend-vibum will yield.’ He forced the needle deeper. ‘Flesh always yields.’

  The bunker shuddered in response to distant artillery, coating Calx’s crimson robes with a fresh layer of dust. He cursed and brushed it away, revealing gold needlework running down his floor-length robes – a spiral of cogs and circuitry that proclaimed long decades of study. His legs scuttled beneath him, a claw-fist of mechadendrite talons, clattering on the stone floor as he approached another head.

  ‘Spool-speak-one,’ he hissed, bending his already hunched frame over the head. The slab of flesh twitched in response and Calx nodded, pleased. The head had been transformed by madness, more beast now than man, blood-splattered and leering. Calx activated the transformers attached to its skull. Light flickered beneath the skin and the smell of ozone and cooking meat filled the bunker. ‘S33331 ineffectual,’ said Calx, attaching cables to bloody sockets. ‘IOH zero coagulated. Neuman acid no longer servative. Bio repeat. Others are inferior and subzanted. Glaciahne or Giacialine. S33336 ineffectual.’

  He opened a leather-bound hymnal and recited a litany of invigoration, droning the questions and answers until the head started to respond, rocking and snorting in time to his words, jolting so hard that black clots fell from its nose. Calx took a heavy, brass chronometer from his robes and flipped it open, peering at the spinning mechanism and comparing the measurements to lines he had drawn on the head. ‘S33332 efficacious,’ he said.

  He looked closer at his chronometer, then snapped it shut, placing it beneath his robes and peering at the rotting face. ‘Talk to me.’ He adjusted the transformers so that the head shook even more violently. ‘Who stole your mind?’

  Calx could hear the mortar rounds hitting with increasing force outside, getting ever closer. His time was almost up. He had to find the answer. How had such a primitive foe breached their thrice-blesse
d logic engines? How had they entered their minds?

  The head rocked back on its stand and spat, showering the tech-priest with red saliva.

  Calx gripped the head and forced another syringe home, placing the needle carefully between intersections he had inked on its neck. ‘Tell me,’ he whispered, ‘what am I not seeing? How were you corrupted? What is absit-absens from your head? How was it possible? Daemonolegisari? You were stearated, anointed, antitropic, metal-bodied. You were everything the Omnissiah desires. There was no trace of delirium in you. None. Steel-bound, god-bound, oil-chained in-ab-eterno. What could find purchase in your soul? I examined your hair, your teeth, your nails.’

  As though sensing Calx’s frustration, the severed head started to laugh, snorting like a drunk.

  The mass of oily cables that passed for Calx’s face recoiled, rolling like a nest of rubber snakes, their mechanical lenses blinking and refocusing. ‘Do you think you can deceive me? I will reorder your consciousness. You will tell me exactly what–’

  The head’s expression changed. The transformation was so sudden and peculiar that Calx paused in surprise. He took out the chronometer again and adjusted the settings, winding the mechanism several times and tapping the brass case. Then he looked back at the head.

  It was physically unchanged but the mania was gone. It looked around the bunker with cool disdain, then fixed its stare on the tech-priest, studying the chronometer and the symbols stitched into Calx’s robes.

  ‘So much learning,’ said the head quietly. ‘So little thinking.’

  Calx backed away. ‘What? What did you say?’ He glanced at one of the humming devices sunk into its cranium. ‘Which focimeter is that? These are not your words. Who is that? There must be no interruptions. Is this the extant sphygmograph or the piomancies of the twelfth nine? Did I confuse the screed?’ He approached one of the machines and tapped furiously at a flickering gauge. ‘Are you a pollutant? Is there a pollutant in the ore?’

  ‘The Emperor has need of you, magos,’ said the head, speaking in ornate, archaic Gothic. ‘Meet me on the crest of the dam.’

  Calx froze. Then he looked around the bunker, half expecting to see a newcomer in the room. His machines flickered impassively, showing no signs of anyone hiding. A mixture of fear and excitement gripped him. The Emperor? Could this be it? Had help finally come? Had they finally been heard?