Graham McNeill: Killing Ground

'Did you see something?' asked Pasanius, bracing the bolter between his knees and racking the slide. The noise was ugly and harsh, and both warriors felt a ripple of distaste at the sound. The weapon was from the battiefields of Medrengard and had once belonged to an Iron Warrior. Though he held it before him, Uriel saw that Pasanius was reluctant to employ a weapon of the enemy.

'No,' said Uriel. 'I felt something.'

'Like what?'

'I'm not sure, It was as if someone was standing right behind me.'

Pasanius scanned the temple's interior, but finding no targets for his weapon he lowered the bolter. Uriel could see the relief on his face and the sense that they were not alone in the temple receded.

'There's no one here but us,' said Pasanius, moving along the length of the wall towards the altar, though he kept a firm grip on the bolter. 'Maybe you're still a little jumpy after Medrengard.'

'Maybe,' said Uriel as he followed Pasanius, walking past a procession of smiling faces, votive offerings and fluttering prayer papers.

So many had died and been remembered on these walls. Pasanius was right, there were thousands of them and Uriel thought the scene unbearably sad. The opposite wall was similarly covered in sad memorials, and stacks of fallen papers clustered around the base of every column.

They reached the altar and Uriel sheathed his sword.

'We should study these papers,' said Uriel, pushing the fallen altar upright and beginning to unclip the few broken pieces of the armour encasing his upper body, not that there was much left of it. 'They might give us a clue as to where we are.'

'I suppose,' said Pasanius, placing the bolter on the ground and pushing it away with his foot.

'Are you all right, my friend?' asked Uriel, placing a shorn sliver that was all that remained of his breastplate on the altar. 'We are on our way home.'

'I know, but…'

'But?'

'What's going to happen when we get there?'

'What do you mean?'

'Think about it, Uriel,' said Pasanius. 'We've been to the Eye of Terror. No one comes back from there unchanged. How do we know we'll even be welcome back on Macragge? They'll probably kill us as soon as they see us.'

'No,' said Uriel, 'they won't. We fulfilled our Death Oath. Tigurius and Calgar sent us there and they will be proud of what we did.'

'You think?' said Pasanius, shaking his head. 'We fought alongside renegade Space Marines. We made a pact with cannibal mutants and freed a daemon creature. Don't you think Tigurius might take a dim view of things like that?'

Uriel sighed. He had considered these things, but in his heart he knew they had made every decision with the best intentions and for the right reasons.

The Masters of the Chapter had to see that. Didn't they?

It had been Uriel's wilful deviation from Roboute Guilliman's Codex Astartes that had seen them banished from Ultramar in the first place. Penned by the Ultramarines primarch ten thousand years ago, the Codex Astartes laid out the precise organisational tenets by which the Space Marine Chapters would arise from the mighty Legions of the Great Crusade.

Everything from uniform markings, parade drill and the exact means by which warriors should deploy for battle was described within its hallowed pages, and no Chapter exemplified its teachings better than the Ultramarines.

To conform to the principles of their primarch was seen as the highest ideal of the Ultramarines and so to have one of its captains go against that was unacceptable. Uriel had willingly accepted his punishment, but having Pasanius condemned with him had been a shard of guilt in his heart for as long as they had marched across the surface of Medrengard.

In his time on that hell world, Uriel had often doubted his worth as a hero, but with the casting down of Honsou's fortress and the destruction of the daemon creatures that had birthed the Unfleshed, he had come to see that they had been instruments of the Emperor's will after all. Now, with their Death Oath fulfilled, they were going home.

How could such a thing be wrong?

'We have done all that was required of us,' said Uriel, 'and more besides. Tigurius will sense that there is no taint of the Ruinous Powers within us.'

'What about this?' asked Pasanius, holding up the severed end of his arm. 'What if there's some lingering remainder of the Bringer of Darkness left in me?'

'There won't be,' said Uriel. 'Honsou took that from you.'

'How can you be sure it's all gone?'

'I can't,' said Uriel, 'but once we get back to the Fortress of Hera, the Apothecaries will know for sure.'

'Then I will be punished.'

'Perhaps,' allowed Uriel. ' You kept a xenos infection from your superior officers, but whatever the senior masters of the Chapter decide, you will be back with the Fourth Company before long.'

'I wonder how the company is doing,' said Pasanius.

'Learchus promised to look after the men of the Company in our absence,' said Uriel. 'He will have done us proud, I'm sure.'

'Aye,' agreed Pasanius. 'As straight up and down a sergeant as you could wish for, that one. Bit of a cold fish, but he'll have kept the men together.'

'What few were left after Tarsis Ultra,' said Uriel, thinking of the terrible carnage that had seen much of the Fourth Company dead as they defended the Imperial world against a Tyranid invasion.

'That was a tough one, right enough,' said Pasanius as Uriel placed the last of the broken pieces of his armour on the altar. His upper body was left clothed in a simple body sleeve of faded and dirty khaki, the toughened fabric pierced with holes where his armour's interface plugs had meshed with the internal workings of his body.

'I'm sure Learchus will have been thorough in raising promising candidates up from the Scout Auxillia,' said Pasanius. 'The Fourth will be back to full strength by now, surely.'

'I hope so,' agreed Uriel. 'The idea of the Ultramarines without the Fourth does not sit well with me.'

'Nor I, but if you're right and we get back soon, do you think it will be yours again?'

Uriel shrugged. 'That won't be up to me. Chapter Master Calgar will decide that.'

'If he knows what's good for the Chapter, he'll appoint you captain the day we get back.'

'He knows what's good for the Chapter,' promised Uriel.

'I know he does, but I can't help but feel apprehensive. I mean, who knows how long we've been gone? For all we know, hundreds or thousands of years could have passed since we left. And this place…'

'What about it?'

'The Lord of the Unfleshed… He's right, something bad happened to this city. I can feel it.'

Uriel said nothing, for he too could feel the subtle undercurrent in the air, a feeling that the imprint of terrible calamity had befallen this city, that it hadn't simply been abandoned.

'And another thing,' said Pasanius, 'just what in the name of the Primarch are you hoping to achieve with those monsters?'

'They're not monsters,' said Uriel. 'They have the blood of Astartes within them.'

'Maybe so, but they look like monsters and I can't see anyone with a gun not shooting as soon as they lay eyes on them. We should have left them on Medrengard. You know that don't you?'

'I couldn't,' said Uriel, sitting next to Pasanius. 'You saw how they lived. They may look like monsters, but they love the Emperor and all they want is his love in return. I couldn't leave them there. I have to try to… I don't know, show them that there is more to existence than pain.'

'Good luck with that,' said Pasanius sourly.

The moon had risen and pools of brilliant white light reflected a ghostly radiance around the temple's interior by the time the Unfleshed returned. Uriel was loath to use the memorials as fuel and thus they had built a fire from the kindling of the shattered pews in an iron brazier they discovered at the rear of the temple.