The Blood Angels Omnibus by James Swallow

Author:James Swallow [Swallow, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: The Black Library
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

There was laughter. Cruel and mocking, amused at his plight. Stele tried to shy away from it, but it found him wherever he hid.

“Look what you have wrought,” The words were the breath of corpses. “Do not hide from it, Inquisitor. See it. Know it and own your deeds!”

Against his will. Stele’s mind reeled back to the library once more, forced down through the years to the point where it had all begun.

Always the library, the place where he had first glimpsed the great potential for himself. It had been on Ariyo, after the burning of the Simbasa Heretics; there as the guardsmen put the torch to the storehouse of unhallowed texts, Ramius had dared to read from a volume that fell open at his feet. It had been an accident just a small thing. He had looked, just dared to look. And what he read, glimpsed even…

What he saw there planted seeds of fervent interest nurtured by the radicalism already seated in his heart. As the years passed, as he grew more disenchanted with the decrepitude of the Ecclesiarchy and the lackwits among his superiors, Ramius concealed his disgust while he sought out more forbidden knowledge and plumbed the greater depths of psyker witchery.

“Do you remember the day I spoke to you?” The voice was enthralling just as it had been the first time. “You thought I was a dream. But I was the wind of change upon your limited mind. I opened you, Ramius. You welcomed me.”

Perhaps this was an illusion, he wondered, some product of his injuries. “You know better than that!”

And then he tasted the name of the creature in his mind. Malfallax.

“Yes.” A hot pressure shoved Stele’s memories to the secret chamber beneath the old temple on Orilan. To the place where the death of the world had begun, hours ago now, days past.

“You were unready. Too eager. Look what it brought you.”

The inquisitor watched the events unfold as if he were a passive observer, merely an audience member at some gaudy theatre play; he struggled fruitlessly, as if he could somehow throw a warning back in time to himself not to begin the Rite of Binding. He had made a mistake. It was so clear to him now in retrospect; one single ritual syllable spoken incorrectly, the emphasis on the rising glottal stop instead of the failing fricative…

A small thing. But enough to uncage the Tzeentch-thing he had called to the chamber.

Stele watched it happen again, sensing his tormentor taking amusement from his squirming. He saw himself walk through the drawing of the circle and the eightfold star within. Then, the lengthy and brutal murder of the vagrant to grant the blood sacrament. At last, the coming of the funnel of swarming shadow shaping into form in the middle of the stone basement. His rapt expression of delight—and then the sudden turn to terror as it struck out, metamorphosing the rock and metal into gnashing teeth, ripping out past the feeble wards he had been sure would hold it.

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