Knights of Caliban by Gav Thorpe

Author:Gav Thorpe
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Published: 2019-03-25T11:12:48+00:00

The Tale of Boreas

PART TWO

It was four days after the clash with the orks, and Boreas knelt in silent meditation in the outpost chapel. He was clad only in his white robe, a mark of his position within the elite warriors of the Chapter – the Deathwing. What the others did not realise was that it was also a mark of his membership within the secretive Inner Circle of the Chapter. Lifting the robe slightly, he knelt before an altar of dark stone inlaid with gold and platinum. The altar was at one end of the chapel, which itself was situated at the top of the five-storey Dark Angels keep in Kadillus Harbour, capital of Piscina IV. The chamber was not large, for space was at a premium in the small tower, big enough only for fifty people to attend the dawn and dusk masses that Boreas held every day.

Three of the keep’s many non-Space Marine attendants were at work renewing the murals that covered the chapel’s interior, failed aspirants who had nonetheless survived their trials. Two were busy reapplying gilding to a portrait of the Dark Angels primarch, Lion El’Jonson, which towered some three metres in height above the altar.

Boreas tried to block out the occasional creak and squeak of the painters’ wooden scaffolding. The other was renovating a scene added after the Dark Angels’ last defence of Piscina, when the ork warlords Ghazghkull and Nazdreg had combined forces and fallen upon the planet like two thunderbolts of destruction. For Boreas, that particular picture brought both pride and a little consternation. It depicted the defence of the Dark Angels basilica which had once served as their outpost in the capital. It was here that Boreas himself had led the fighting against the vicious alien horde on numerous occasions, as possession of the strategically vital strongpoint had changed hands back and forth for the whole campaign. It was during the battle for the basilica that Boreas had lost his right eye to an ork powerfist, which had nearly crushed his head. Though eventually the orks had been driven out of the basilica, and the planet saved by an epic battle at Koth Ridge, so intense had been the fighting at the blood-soaked chapter house that after the orks had been defeated, the Dark Angels had been forced to abandon the fortified administration building and construct a new keep. The ruins themselves still stood a kilometre or so from where Boreas now knelt, a testament to the protection the Dark Angels had provided for countless millennia.

Reminded of the valiant battle-brothers whose dying words he had heard in those shattered rooms and corridors, and mindful of the great sacrifices that his fellow Space Marines had made, both the Dark Angels and those of the Harbingers Chapter, Boreas felt a tightness in his chest. Had the basilica really been that important, he asked himself yet again? Perhaps it had just been pride that had driven Master Belial to command Boreas to defend the

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