Book 1 – HORUS RISING

Book 2 – FALSE GODS

Book 3 – GALAXY IN FLAMES

Book 4 – THE FLIGHT OF THE EISENSTEIN

Book 5 – FULGRIM

Book 6 – DESCENT OF ANGELS

Book 7 – LEGION

Book 8 – BATTLE FOR THE ABYSS

Book 9 – MECHANICUM

Book 10 – TALES OF HERESY

Book 11 – FALLEN ANGELS

Book 12 – A THOUSAND SONS

Book 13 – NEMESIS

Book 14 – THE FIRST HERETIC

Book 15 – PROSPERO BURNS

Book 16 – AGE OF DARKNESS

Book 17 – THE OUTCAST DEAD

Book 18 – DELIVERANCE LOST

Book 19 – KNOW NO FEAR

Book 20 – THE PRIMARCHS

Book 21 – FEAR TO TREAD

Book 22 – SHADOWS OF TREACHERY

Book 23 – ANGEL EXTERMINATUS

Book 24 – BETRAYER

Book 25 – MARK OF CALTH

Book 26 – VULKAN LIVES

Book 27 – THE UNREMEMBERED EMPIRE

Book 28 – SCARS

Book 29 – VENGEFUL SPIRIT

Book 30 – THE DAMNATION OF PYTHOS

Book 31 – LEGACIES OF BETRAYAL

Book 32 – DEATHFIRE

Book 33 – WAR WITHOUT END

Book 34 – PHAROS

TALLARN: IRONCLAD

THE HONOURED

THE UNBURDENED

PROMETHEAN SUN

AURELIAN

BROTHERHOOD OF THE STORM

CORAX: SOULFORGE

SCORCHED EARTH

TALLARN: EXECUTIONER

THE CRIMSON FIST

PRINCE OF CROWS

THE PURGE

RAVENLORD

CYBERNETICA

WOLF KING

GARRO: VOW OF FAITH

Many of these titles are also available as abridged and unabridged audiobooks. Order the full range of Horus Heresy novels and audiobooks from blacklibrary.com

It is a time of legend.

The galaxy is in flames. The Emperor’s glorious vision for humanity is in ruins. His favoured son, Horus, has turned from his father’s light and embraced Chaos.

His armies, the mighty and redoubtable Space Marines, are locked in a brutal civil war. Once, these ultimate warriors fought side by side as brothers, protecting the galaxy and bringing mankind back into the Emperor’s light. Now they are divided.

Some remain loyal to the Emperor, whilst others have sided with the Warmaster. Pre-eminent amongst them, the leaders of their thousands-strong Legions are the primarchs. Magnificent, superhuman beings, they are the crowning achievement of the Emperor’s genetic science. Thrust into battle against one another, victory is uncertain for either side.

Worlds are burning. At Isstvan V, Horus dealt a vicious blow and three loyal Legions were all but destroyed. War was begun, a conflict that will engulf all mankind in fire. Treachery and betrayal have usurped honour and nobility. Assassins lurk in every shadow. Armies are gathering. All must choose a side or die.

Horus musters his armada, Terra itself the object of his wrath. Seated upon the Golden Throne, the Emperor waits for his wayward son to return. But his true enemy is Chaos, a primordial force that seeks to enslave mankind to its capricious whims.

The screams of the innocent, the pleas of the righteous resound to the cruel laughter of Dark Gods. Suffering and damnation await all should the Emperor fail and the war be lost.

The age of knowledge and enlightenment has ended.
The Age of Darkness has begun.

Yasu Nagasena stands by a window of the square tower at the north-eastern corner of his mountain villa, letting the cold cut into his face. Built on the flanks of a mountain known as Cho Oyu, the villa has been his home for fifty years, and memories surround him like restless ghosts. Mournful winds from the far corners of the world sigh through the tower, each bearing the sound of pounding hammers, a billion migrant voices and the fear of an entire planet.

The mountains crowd this continent, rowdy giants standing shoulder to shoulder as they reach to the heavens. Sunlight spills over them in a golden tide, gleaming from the exposed quartz and feldspar.

The mountains are saying goodbye, giving him a last sight of their glory.

The villa occupies a fortuitous position, looking out over the Palace at the crown of the world. Through the windows, he can see its triumphal processionals, its high towers and its fresh-wrought defences. Beyond the Palace walls, the Petitioners’ City. Once a place of pilgrimage, now an overcrowded slum of people desperately seeking protection.

Nagasena turns from the window. The wooden stretching frame still sits here, undisturbed since he last let his heart bleed out through his brushstrokes. The silk is still strung to the frame, still taut and bearing his painted image of the Palace.

It no longer looks like the Palace visible through the windows.

The Emperor is remaking the galaxy, but Rogal Dorn is remaking the Palace.

Once it was a thing of beauty, but it is ugly now, the craft of the engineer pasted over the vision of the architect.

‘It is not a harmonious union, Lord Dorn,’ says Nagasena, surprising himself by speaking aloud.

He has spoken little since the end of his hunt for the escaped warriors of the Crusader Host. What began as a hunt ended in sanctioned murder, and he does not yet know whether the truth was served by its execution.

Nagasena hears the slap of sandals on the marbled stairs, accompanied by the heaving breath of Amita. She has maintained his household for as long as he has lived here, and is as robust and solid as the mountains.

Amita reaches the top of the tower, her skin ruddy from the climb and strands of grey-streaked hair hanging loose over her face. She frowns at Nagasena’s clothes – a lacquered breastplate of black and bronze, reinforced canvas leggings tucked into leather-faced boots. But something has changed within him since his return from the Petitioners’ City and she lets his improper attire pass without comment.

‘You asked to see me?’ she asks.

He nods, looking back down over the sprawling immensity of the Palace. Far below, a towering siege Titan is lifting vast ouslite blocks from the Dhawalagiri elevation, the workmanship too precious to be destroyed or built over. He wonders if that stone will ever see the light of day again.

‘Yes, I have something to give you,’ says Nagasena.

‘Here?’ replies Amita.

‘No,’ says Nagasena. ‘In my private chambers.’

‘You couldn’t have summoned me there instead of making me climb all these stairs?’

‘My apologies, Amita,’ says Nagasena. ‘I lingered here longer than I intended.’

‘That doesn’t make my old bones feel any better.’

Nagasena smiles. In any other household, Amita’s brusqueness would see her dismissed, but her blunt honesty matches his adherence to the truth over all things.

‘Have I been a good master to serve?’ he asks.

Nagasena likes the fact that she takes the time to think about her answer instead of simply voicing a platitude.

‘You have always been courteous and grateful. The staff think you cold, but you are just sorrowful. More so now.’

Nagasena nods. It is a fair assessment.

‘Come with me,’ he says, moving past her to begin the long descent of the tower. Amita follows, and they emerge into the rose garden where he wishes he could have spent more time.

They follow the hypaethral around the garden and into the well-proportioned chambers of the villa. He cannot call it his home, not any more. Not now that Lord Dorn has charged him with this last hunt.

He opens the doors to his private chambers, and beckons Amita to enter. She reluctantly follows him within, barely registering the silk hanging scrolls depicting ancient maps of long-forgotten realms: Atlantea, Hyperborea and Dalriada.

Nagasena makes his way to shelves laden with papers and heavy textbooks. He pulls out a wax-sealed document and sits cross-legged behind his narrow desk. Writing implements are arranged neatly on its polished surface and he beckons Amita to sit as he breaks the seal.

Nagasena dips a sharpened eagle feather in a pot of ink and signs his name at the bottom of the document. He turns the paper around and holds the quill out to Amita.

‘Sign your name next to mine and you will be the owner of this villa,’ he says.

‘You’re giving me the villa?’ she asks.

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’ she asks.

‘You have more than earned it.’

Amita does not reach for the quill.

‘You are going on another hunt?’ she asks.

‘I am,’ he confirms, placing the quill on the desk.

He rises smoothly and runs his hand over the wall behind him in a series of complex gestures. It slides back, revealing a deep compartment filled with gleaming armour and racked weapons. It is an armoury worthy of a Legion quartermaster.

‘Who is it this time?’

Nagasena removes a hand-tooled long-las and a silver-chased volkite pistol, weapons capable of harming the man he is to hunt. These are not implements of pursuit and capture, but execution.

‘A Luna Wolf.’

‘A warrior of the Legions?’

‘A warrior of Horus’ Legion,’ clarifies Nagasena.

He slings the long-las over his shoulder and holsters the pistol before reverently lifting a scabbard of lacquered wood, jade and mother of pearl from a rack of rich cherrywood. The sword’s handle is wound in leather of the palest cream and its blade was crafted with love and an attention to detail that no machine will ever replicate.

Nagasena knows the weapon as Shoujiki.

‘You do not expect to return,’ she says.

‘A reasonable expectation,’ he says.

‘Who gives you this hunt?’

‘Lord Dorn.’

She nods, knowing Nagasena could not have refused a primarch’s order.

‘If I am to die on this hunt, I do not wish to leave loose ends in my wake. The villa is to be yours. This is my wish.’

Amita pushes the document away. ‘If I am told you are dead, I will sign it, but not before.’

Nagasena is humbled by her fierce devotion and belts Shoujiki around his waist. His hand settles naturally on the textured grip.

‘Sign it,’ he says softly. ‘Even if I kill this man, I do not think I will return.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because the mountains have said goodbye,’ says Nagasena.

Amita nods, accepting his cryptic answer.

‘This Luna Wolf, does he have a name?’ she asks.

‘His name is Severian,’ says Nagasena.

The wolf was in the fold, but none of the sheep had seen him or even suspected he was there. The hab-tenement in which Severian made his lair existed in a perpetual state of incremental collapse. Tremors shook the dust from its walls with every hammer blow of titanic machinery on the construction fields before the Palace.

Two thousand people crowded the building, taking what privacy they could with tarpaulins hung on a complex web of intersecting clotheslines. Severian was a ghost, unseen and unheard over the building’s moans and the crack and snap of the partitioning tarps.

Three days he had hidden between the walls and in the rotten ceiling spaces of the tenement, listening to the static hiss in his helmet and fighting the urge to keep moving. The hunters expected him to try and break the cordon around the Petitioners’ City. They hoped he would flee the slaughter at the Temple of Woe, but stillness was his cloak now, not action.

Hundreds of Black Sentinels had flooded the city, sweeping through the despairing streets in search of him.

He had seen no sign of Imperial Fists or Custodians.

What could be important enough to keep them from the hunt?

The mortal soldiers moved through the city like beaters on a game hunt, but it was simplicity itself to evade them.

These men had never hunted a Luna Wolf before, and they–

No, not a Luna Wolf, a Son of Horus…

The Warmaster was no stranger to the value of ego displays, but even he had balked at the renaming of an entire Space Marine Legion in his honour.

It seemed that his reluctance had now been overcome.

Severian still thought of himself as a Luna Wolf; the lone predator hunting in the gloaming light of the moon. A Son of Horus would fight his way through this city, but only a Luna Wolf could pass unknown through its streets.

He still wore the armour he had stripped from the Thunder Warrior’s enforcers. The plates were ill-fitting, fashioned in an age where immediacy was a greater concern than functionality. The helm-vox buzzed with static, bubbling with the ghost voices of long-dead warriors.

He could tune out the static, but it was harder to ignore the voices of the people around him.

The subject on everyone’s lips was the Warmaster’s rebellion and the massacre on Isstvan V. Trembling mouths told and retold tales of murder and atrocity. Lies and speculation masqueraded as fact.

But every taleteller agreed that Horus was a betrayer, a vile and faithless son.

Severian could not bring himself to believe his primarch had turned against the Emperor. What reason could the Warmaster have to embark upon such a calamitous course? Severian could think of nothing grand enough to warrant betrayal, his mind rejecting every possibility as too petty, too improbable or too mortal to justify a galaxy-wide rebellion.

Atharva had seemed so certain of Horus’ betrayal, but that was always the way with the Crimson King’s sons. They lived for certainty, but Atharva was dead, a primarch’s bullet in his brain. What did his certitudes count for now?

Severian heard the crunch of approaching footsteps and slowed his breathing, letting himself merge with the rotting lath and plaster of the ceiling. The footsteps stopped beneath him; three men carrying plastic drums to be filled with water from the pump. Severian’s ability to remain hidden in plain sight was superlative, an affinity with shadows that came to him as naturally as breathing.

It was a risk concealing himself in an area frequented by the people that called this block home, but the risks were outweighed by the morsels of information he could gather.

The first man, thickset and with the build of a metalworker, placed his drum beneath the pump and began working the handle. The water that came out was brackish-looking and gritty.

The other men took turns at the pump, and their talk was banal and mundane. Inevitably, their discussion turned towards the fighting in the Isstvan System.

‘It’s that bastard, Horus,’ said the metalworker. ‘He’s the one that started this. Changing the name of his Legion like that. Too big an ego that one, and no mistake.’

‘I reckon you’re right,’ agreed a skeletal man with eyes as big as saucers and whose sweat stank of an addict’s hunger.

‘What did the Emperor expect?’ asked a balding man with a hooked nose and a withered right arm. ‘I mean, you give a man that much power and it’s bound to go to his head.’

The men nodded at the sagacity of their companion.

The metalworker spoke again. ‘Yeah, you get that many guns and all you want to do is shoot ’em off, right? Look at Isstvan Three, wiped out with virus bombs. Madness.’

‘I heard Horus killed three of his brothers single-handed,’ said the addict. ‘Vulkan, Corax and Leman Russ. All dead as dust.’

‘The Wolf King weren’t on Isstvan,’ said the balding man. ‘It’s Ferrus Manus that’s dead. They say the Phoenician killed him. Cut his head right off.’

‘Nah,’ said the thin man. ‘I don’t reckon anyone could kill that tough old bastard. Got bones of iron, he has. How you gonna cut through that?’

‘Horus could do it,’ said the metalworker. ‘Got bad blood in him, ain’t he? Everyone says so. I heard he got poisoned. Some cult got him sick and twisted his mind. Shoura says she heard Horus is one of this cult now, him and all his warriors. Sacrifice women and children, I hear. Throw them into the fires and let them burn in the name of some god or other.’

The man leaned in conspiratorially. ‘Yeah, no better than savages now, she says. Cannibals they are, eating the flesh of the dead and making trophies from their bones.’

Severian ground his teeth. To hear his beloved primarch and Legion being slandered with such obvious nonsense was almost more than he could stand. His fingers tightened on the rusting rebars and pipes, and the metal squealed as it buckled beneath his strength. The metalworker looked up, and their eyes met through the sodden ceiling structure.

Severian willed the man not to see him, focusing every ounce of his determination. The man looked away with a curious expression on his face, as though suddenly bewildered. Severian exhaled softly, seeing his breath feather the air in front of him.

‘I heard that said too,’ the balding man agreed. ‘They say Horus has gone mad, that he’s been… you know… possessed.’

The others laughed.

‘Possessed?’ said the addict, his voice reedy and laced with need.

‘Y’know, by aliens or something,’ said the metalworker.

Severian could stand it no longer, and dropped to the floor with a heavy crash. The metalworker and the addict jumped back from the pump in shock, but the balding man turned tail and ran for his life. Severian’s hand shot out and a piece of brickwork, no larger than a pebble, flashed from his palm.

It struck the balding man like a bullet from a slingshot. The impact spun him around, and he collapsed with an egg-sized lump on the back of his skull. Drool and blood leaked from the corner of his mouth.

‘You killed him,’ breathed the metalworker.

‘No,’ said Severian, drawing the serrated knife belted at his hip. ‘Though he deserves death for disrespecting the Warmaster.’

‘You’re him, ain’t ya?’ said the addict, wringing his hands and worrying at the nailbeds of his fingers. ‘You’re the one they’re all looking for.’

Severian ignored him.

‘You’re like ignorant children,’ snapped Severian. ‘You know nothing of Lord Horus, the battles he won and the blood he spilled for his father. My Legion waged war across the heavens for two hundred years, conquering the galaxy in the name of humanity. And this is the thanks we get? I should kill you all. You ought to be building statues of the Warmaster and shrines to his deeds. Horus has won the galaxy for you, not the Emperor.’

The addict crumpled to his knees, weeping and pawing at Severian’s boots. The Luna Wolf kicked him away in disgust, drawing a cry of pain from the man’s lips. The metalworker swallowed hard and looked up at Severian.

‘Horus is a traitor,’ said the man. ‘The Emperor said so…’

Severian’s fist drew back, his arm quivering with tension. One tap and the man’s skull would be in a hundred fragments.

‘The Warmaster is the Emperor’s beloved son,’ said Severian through gritted teeth. ‘These things you say… They cannot be true. I would know of it.’

The metalworker fell to his knees with his hands laced before him as though in prayer. His terror sickened Severian. The emotion was too unknown to him and made Severian want to kill him even more.

‘You are what we fought for?’ laughed Severian, the sound as anguished as it was derisive.

He leaned down and placed the tip of the knife against the man’s chest.

‘Your kind doesn’t deserve to inherit the galaxy,’ he said. ‘Your life isn’t worth one drop of Legion blood.’

‘Please… don’t… kill me,’ sobbed the man.

Severian sheathed his knife and looked at the man with the eyes of a god who stared upon his failed creation.

He turned away in disgust, robbed of certainty and adrift on unknown tides.

The light was falling away to evening as Severian left the hab-tenement. He moved through narrow streets taken by decay, avoiding the thoroughfares and arteries of the Petitioners’ City. Every junction would have a complement of soldiers stationed at its corners and rooftops.

His steps were sure and swift. A lone wolf, he owned the silence and made the shadows his own. There were few people abroad in these narrow alleyways, only the occasional footpad or lost soul, and they wisely kept out of his way.

He did not kill as he went. A body was a trail, but a frightened man kept his own counsel.

The heavy-handed approach of the soldiers sweeping the streets was working in Severian’s favour. Word of the Black Sentinels’ brutal search tactics had spread quickly, and now no one was admitting to anything.

They had no clue where he was heading.

The villa of the Emperor’s Warmason was a shining bauble atop the granite scarp above the Temple of Woe. Severian’s route had taken him in a looping course away from his pursuers and back around to where he had begun, ready to climb that cliff to where the Warmason kept his orbit-capable flyer.

Vadok Singh, like many of his gene-bred bloodline, favoured elevated positions from which to observe his works and it was from here that Severian would begin his journey back to his Legion.

To prove the falsehood of the accusations levelled against his primarch or to call him to account for his crimes.

Severian paused at an irregular confluence of narrow streets of corrugated steel and looted cinderblocks. He pressed himself to the wall as he heard the tramp of booted feet from his left. Muffled voices echoed with a curious metallic quality from the walls, and Severian picked out five speakers. A combat squad, which meant there was likely another one nearby. Severian crouched like a runner awaiting the starting pistol and closed his eyes, letting his hearing take up the sensory slack.

There, behind him, moving through the building to his rear.

They moved carefully, which meant they knew he was nearby.

A crackle of vox, a hushed voice calling for backup.

Moisture dripped from above, and Severian looked up to see a young girl leaning from a scaffolded trellis. Dressed in a simple green shift with a red flower pinned to her breast, she saw him and waved. Severian watched the play of muscles around her mouth and knew she was about to call out to him.

His hand closed on a sharp-edged rock. He could put it through her skull before she spoke, angling his throw so she would fall back into her dwelling. Instead he lifted a finger to his lips and shook his head.

He saw panic in her eyes as she retreated into the building, and shook his head in disbelief.

Legion warriors were avatars of battle, but when had they become figures of fear to human beings? He remembered the cheering multitudes at the expeditionary fields as the marching hosts of Space Marines had left for a life of war. The crowds had laughed and cheered them, but those days were gone.

Now they were murderous killers, savage weapons that could turn and blood their creators as easily as their foes.

The spaces between the buildings were hung with wet sheets like the battle flags won by the Legion in its earliest days; the reclamation of the asteroid belt, the taking of the outer planets and the first push out into the wilderness of space beyond the solar system.

How many more victory banners were now hung in the Museum of Conquest aboard the Vengeful Spirit? What glories had passed Severian by as he rotted on Terra as little more than a ceremonial figurehead of wars he would never fight?

Severian let out a soft sigh, forcing down the random jumping of his thoughts when there was killing in the offing. He calculated the distance between him and the first man in the approaching squad. Severian counted down until a booted foot and the wavering barrel of a carbine appeared around the corner.

He swung out, keeping the Black Sentinel’s body between him and the rest of the squad. A pistoning jab crushed the man’s skull. He spun around the falling body, going low and swinging his leg out in a scything sweep that felled the two soldiers behind him. They dropped and Severian slammed his fists against their chests, smashing their ribs down through their lungs and stealing the air from their screams.

He sprang forwards and chopped his hands out: hard left, hard right. The two soldiers bringing up the rear of the squad toppled, their necks broken cleanly before they had even realised they were under attack.

Severian heard the bark of urgent voices in the vox-beads clipped to their helmets.

He lifted one of the tiny voice units to his mouth. ‘Five dead and counting. Who wants to be number six?’

When Nagasena reaches the bodies, ragged scavengers have already begun to gather. They look at him with hostile eyes, debating whether or not to fight him for possession of the dead.

He already knows they will make the wrong decision.

After all, desperation makes fools of men.

There are five of them, more than enough – they think – to take down one man. Two are armed with factory-stamped stubbers, the third with a custom rig that looks more dangerous to its owner than him. Two men rush him, armed only with lengths of rusted pipe and fear-born courage.

Shoujiki whispers from its sheath and the first dies with his belly sliced open. Nagasena spins on his heel and brings the lethal edge down on the neck of the second. The head flies clear and crashes through a nearby window.

Nagasena is moving before the first body hits the ground. Stubber fire blasts from perforated barrels. The low-grade ammo makes the guns’ recoil too powerful to keep the weapons on target. Two quick cuts open the first gunner from groin to sternum.

Nagasena leaps up and his sword stabs down into the hollow behind the second gunner’s collarbone. It slices effortlessly through the man’s heart and lungs. Nagasena twists the blade free and a crimson geyser arcs over the wall as the man falls to his knees.

The last scavenger backs away, his converted pistol held out in a shaking grip. It is a primitive thing – loud, dangerous and intimidatingly large. Nagasena’s pistol matches it in lethality, but his does not waver.

‘You will miss,’ he says, ‘and then I will kill you.’

He sees the man’s decision in his eyes a fraction of a second before he knows it himself.

Nagasena presses the firing stud on his volkite pistol and a searing beam flashes into existence, linking the tapered barrel and the scavenger’s head.

The man’s skull detonates as his brain cavity is superheated and the blood, oxygen and brain matter expand explosively. His headless corpse drops straight down and his finger tightens on the trigger. The report echoes through the streets of the Petitioners’ City and Nagasena feels the distortion of the air as the shell tears past him to blow a shield-sized crater in the wall behind him.

He holsters his pistol and bends to wipe the blood from Shoujiki on a dead man’s clothes. With the worst of it removed, Nagasena unfolds an oiled cloth and polishes the blade to a mirror finish once again.

He brings the blade up and touches the tip to the end of the scabbard. He pauses for a heartbeat to honour the weapon, before sliding it home in one smooth motion. He hears angry voices behind him. Men who wear the same uniform as the dead Black Sentinels killed by Severian.

A five-man combat squad, the brothers of these dead Sentinels.

A lieutenant reaches down to a fallen warrior and Nagasena opens his mouth to shout a warning, but it is too late. The dead man’s body shifts and the fragmentation grenades wedged between his breastplate and the ground roll clear. Nagasena hurls himself behind a stack of crumbling bricks as they detonate with a hard, echoing bang. Fire rolls out, and in its wake comes a storm of red-hot shrapnel.

It engulfs the street, ricocheting back and forth in a flesh-shredding hurricane. The blast wave lifts the other dead bodies into the air, and grenades hidden beneath them go off in a deafening succession of secondary explosions. Nagasena puts his hands to his ears, pressing himself into a tight ball as the concussive force of the blasts punches the air from his lungs.

Tumbling fragments of hot steel slice his cheek, his arm and his neck. One embeds in Shoujiki’s scabbard, and he plucks the smoking metal from the lacquered wood. At last the ringing echoes of the blast diminish as it travels outwards through the streets.

He sucks in a breath of fyceline-hot air. Blood runs down his face and from his ears. His body feels like it has been worked over by an Arbiter’s shock maul. Nagasena rises unsteadily to his feet, but he can see nothing of the Sentinels. He weaves a path back down the street, seeing dark, wet lumps that were once human beings scattered like butcher’s offal. The smoke obscures the worst of the carnage, but not enough to keep the horror from his face.

One man is still alive.

Incredibly, it is the lieutenant who turned over the first grenade-rigged body.

Nothing is left of him below the waist, and he stares at Nagasena with pleading, disbelieving eyes. His mouth flaps like a landed fish, trying to form words, but failing in the face of such unendurable agony. Nagasena kneels beside the lieutenant and takes his hand.

The lieutenant’s eyes ease shut, as though he is falling asleep and might soon wake.

The man’s hand slips from Nagasena’s, who gives voice to the jisei composed by Master Nagamitsu on the eve of his assassination:

‘Should this body die and die a thousand times over,

White bones turning to dust, with or without trace of a soul,

My steadfast heart is Truth, can it ever fade away?’

Nagasena looks up, feeling someone’s gaze upon him.

Leaning from the high window of an adjacent building is a young girl, strikingly pretty, with skin so dark it puts him in mind of the Salamanders legionary he saw at the Preceptory. Her eyes are wide orbs of pale white, and she wears a crimson flower pinned to her green dress. She sees him looking at her and darts her head back inside.

The instant their eyes meet, Nagasena sees a sure and certain truth.

She has seen the Luna Wolf.

Severian moved at speed through the streets, following the mental map he had compiled in the hours after his escape from the Temple of Woe. The street plan followed no logic and changed with each passing day, but he navigated the spaces between its scrapyard palaces and junk-habs with aplomb.

Like his ability to blend, his innate sense for direction had never yet let him down. He had guided the Outcast Dead through the labyrinthine complexity of the mountain gaol with ease, and they had travelled the Petitioners’ City like natives. Cities opened up to Severian, their roads rising to greet him, their highways and byways like old friends.

Frightened faces poked from openings in scavenged structures above him, some seeing him, most not. Even those who looked right at him did so with perplexed expressions, as though unsure of what exactly they were seeing.

Severian did not question this.

The shadows were lengthening and Severian kept to the walls, moving low and keeping his eyes constantly in motion. The noise of the city was familiar to him, a rustle of bodies, the clatter of pots and the sharpening of knives. Then came the dull echoes of distant grenade blasts, and he shook his head at the foolishness of his pursuers.

Cookfires and smoke scents joined those of sweat and desperation and fear.

And beneath it all, the low-level buzz of the broken earpiece in his helmet.

He’d listened to the skirl and sway of the static during the quieter moments of his solitude, picking out the odd word here and there, like impossibly distant echoes from a bygone age seeking a connection to the present. Nothing of any use, but the interleaving ghost voices made him feel marginally less isolated. He wondered if he would eventually join them, a lone voice lost among the millions of dead in the wars fought to bring unity to a world on the verge of extinction.

A static warble, like a soft wave breaking on a golden beach, washed through the helm and Severian let the vox-fragments surf the edges of his consciousness as he slipped through the evening.

He crested a rocky defile towards the scarp upon which rested Vadok Singh’s walled enclosure. He skirted the edges of what looked like a small cemetery, the three graves hacked from the rock of the mountain and marked with carved cherubs. Severian saw no names, but from the size of the holes cut into the rock, two of the dead were children.

He looked back through the jumbled silhouettes of the buildings behind him, seeing the arched roof of the Temple of Woe. Despite the wild stories of what had taken place within its walls, the people of the Petitioners’ City still brought their dead to its doors.

No one would dig a grave for Severian, and the thought hardened his heart.

He began to climb.

Nagasena looks for a way into the building, eventually finding a rope-hinged doorway of nailed timbers and sheet metal. He pauses as he enters, letting his eyes adjust to the dim light. Stairs lead to a broken landing, upon which sits an ill-fashioned ladder of metal struts and baling twine. Swiftly he ascends, knowing he does not have much time until mistrust seals the girl’s lips.

The floor above is a crumbling permacrete slab, divided into myriad living spaces by struts of trench shuttering. Huddled bodies crouch in their allocated spaces, gathered around stuttering thermal generators, sleeping or kneeling before opened boxes with carved fronts. Children look at him with open mouths before parents pull them away. They do not know him, but they know he is dangerous.

These people are pinched and wary, curious at the bloodshed beyond their home, but hoping he will pass swiftly. He is an unwelcome visitor in a place he does not belong. The sensation of being a trespasser on Terra saddens him, and he wonders if these people even think of themselves as citizens of the Imperium any more.

He sees the girl in the green dress sitting with her back to the wall, her knees drawn up before her, and he makes his way towards her slowly. She looks twenty, but is probably younger. Poverty and desperation age people.

He keeps his hands in plain sight, palms up. She watches him with eyes that tell him she saw him kill the scavengers.

‘You have nothing to fear from me,’ he says.

‘You promise?’ she asks, and her desire to believe him almost breaks his heart.

Nagasena twists the sash at his waist, holding the lacquered scabbard as though offering it to her. Her eyes widen at the workmanship, and he knows she will never see anything this beautiful again.

‘This sword is Shoujiki,’ says Nagasena. ‘In one of the dead languages, it means honesty. The man who gave it that name bound it to me with a promise to live by that principle. I am not a good man, and I have done many terrible things in my life, but I have never broken that promise.’

She searches his face for deceit, but finds none and the tension in her taut body visibly relaxes.

‘You saw him,’ he says. ‘The Legion warrior.’

Her face crumples at the memory, and Nagasena waits, knowing it would be a mistake to force the words from her. To see a Space Marine is no small thing, and to see one make war is to witness killing fury at its most violent.

‘He is not coming back,’ Nagasena promises her. ‘If that is what you’re afraid of.’

‘You don’t know that,’ she says. ‘I saw him look at me, and he had death in his eyes.’

A single tear runs down her cheek, and Nagasena hates that the treachery of Horus has made this girl afraid of the very warriors wrought to win the galaxy in her name.

‘He will never hurt you,’ he says.

‘How do you know that?’

‘Because I am going to kill him.’

She looks up, and she gives him a crooked grin at the certainty in his voice.

‘My name’s Ekata,’ she says. ‘He went north, towards the cliffs above the Temple of Woe.’

At first Nagasena thinks she must be mistaken. Why would Severian head back to where the hunt began? Then he remembers what Severian wants and it all makes sense.

‘Does that help you?’ asks Ekata.

‘More than you know,’ says Nagasena, wishing he could help her, that he could rebuild her faith in the Imperium. Coming to a decision within himself, he removes a jade cartouche from around his neck. The polished oval stone is etched in gold with the image of a serpentine dragon. He places the cartouche in Ekata’s palm and closes her fingers over it.

‘Do you know the Chitwan path on the southern approaches to the upland work camps?’

‘Yes, at the Primus Gate barracks.’

‘Take the path until you come to a fork marked with a small cairn of black and gold rocks. Walk the path on your right and follow it uphill until you reach a red-roofed villa with the same dragon symbol on the gates. Present yourself to the mistress of the house, a woman named Amita, and tell her that Master Nagamitsu’s pupil wishes you to be treated as a guest until his return. You understand?’

‘Yes,’ says Ekata, her smile making her beautiful.

‘Go now, for night is coming and the Petitioners’ City is no place to be out after dark.’

Ekata stands and unpins the crimson flower from her breast and leans forwards to attach it to Nagasena’s breastplate.

‘For luck,’ she says, embarrassed by the superstition. ‘A rosette.’

Severian had chosen a route up the eastern sides of the projecting bluffs of the cliff face to keep himself clad in shadows. The climb was difficult, the exposed face worn smooth by abrasive winds and the quarryman’s drill. Each handhold was a finger-breadth wide, each toehold a sliver of a projection. More than enough for a Luna Wolf.

The sun arced further into the west, the rich blue deepening to subtle purple and the sounds of the city rising to meet him. As the sun dipped to the horizon, the Palace was bathed in its dying light, painting it the colour of blood. Severian remembered a time before it had assumed so imperious a title and appearance, when it had been no more than a mountain citadel, a bastion for a council of war – a fastness from which the conquest of the galaxy had been planned.

It had been a time for heroes, the beginning of a new epoch. For the first time in uncounted centuries, light was eclipsing dark. The solar system was poised to fall, and the galaxy was opening up to mankind. In a mighty diaspora that echoed humanity’s first great explosion into the stars, the expeditionary fleets of the Legions knifed into the void to reclaim that lost empire.

But Severian would not be part of that noble endeavour.

As the 63rd Expedition breached the heliopause, Severian was returning to Terra with full honours to join the Crusader Host. As part of a new brotherhood, he had stood proudly with his brother legionaries in glory. They had been visible paragons of the new order carving the Imperium into the flesh of the galaxy.

That time was long gone, and Severian found it increasingly difficult to reconcile that memory with his current plight. Stranded and alone, the last survivor of a disparate group of warriors thrown together by circumstance, then chosen by Atharva’s design. He had long ago given up trying to understand why Atharva had only freed the seven of them when there were plainly others who would have been sympathetic to their cause.

What of the representatives of the Night Lords, the Word Bearers and the Iron Warriors?

Might their escape have fared better with a son of Nostramo or an Olympian at their side?

At first Severian didn’t notice the scratching voice emerging from the static, thinking it was simply his imagination. A trick of memory and isolation. But it came again, rising like a whisper in the quiet of a deserted fane. He paused in his ascent and tapped a finger to the side of the helm.

The voice came again, louder and more distinct.

This time there was no question of what it was saying.

‘Severian,’ said the voice.

Shock pinned him to the cliff. He twisted his head left and right, then up and down. He saw nothing to indicate he was being observed, but any hunter this good wouldn’t expose himself to his prey.

‘Severian,’ said the voice again.

‘Who are you?’ he asked, resuming his climb.

‘My name is Yasu Nagasena.’

Severian made the connection. ‘You are the hunter who tracked us to the temple.’

‘Yes, and now I have tracked you here.’

‘How is it you are talking to me?’

‘The helmet you wear belonged to a warrior from an earlier age,’ said Nagasena. ‘I saw how your fellow warriors were clad in the temple and requisitioned a similar communications device from the Palace reliquaries.’

‘Clever,’ admitted Severian.

‘It required no great insight on my part,’ said Nagasena modestly.

‘No one else thought of it.’

‘I am not everyone else.’

‘You won’t be triangulating me with this,’ said Severian, recalling what he knew of Unity tech-levels. ‘These work on open-wavelength broadcasts. Anyone with a receiver tuned to the right frequency could hear this.’

‘I do not need to track you this way. I know where you are going and I have you in my sights right now.’

Severian laughed, the first moment of genuine amusement he had felt in a long time.

‘Then take the shot, hunter.’

Moments later a portion of the cliff face to his left puffed with the impact of a long-las round. Severian blinked away the afterimage and the acrid heat haze of dust.

‘Are you psychic?’ he asked. ‘Has the Imperium decided that yet another class of useful psykers are worth special dispensation?’

Nagasena seemed amused at his outburst. ‘I am not psychic, just a very good tracker. The first axiom of the tracker is to understand what your target wants.’

‘And what do I want?’

‘What death denied Atharva of the Thousand Sons and your fellows. The truth.’

Severian paused in his climb. ‘What truth?’

‘The truth of how the galaxy has changed. You are adrift, Severian. You are told your primarch has betrayed you. Betrayed the Imperium. You want to look your brothers in the eye because you cannot reconcile that truth with what you remember.’

‘I know Horus Lupercal was a better man than any other I met. He would never turn on his father.’

‘You do not really believe that,’ said Nagasena.

‘Don’t tell me what I believe,’ snarled Severian.

‘You do not believe it because if Horus was ever to turn on his father, you know this is exactly how he would do it. A sudden, shocking betrayal followed by an apparently suicidal gambit that results in the massacre of the Emperor’s best chance to stop the rebellion before it gains momentum.’

Severian said nothing, knowing Nagasena was right. What little he knew of the massacre at Isstvan V was just the manner in which Horus would open a rebellion.

‘I do not lie,’ said Nagasena. ‘On the blade Shoujiki, I swear it.’

‘Then why have you not shot me from the cliff?’

‘Perhaps I will before you reach Vadok Singh’s villa.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Severian, resuming his climb.

‘Then let us say that Horus may be a traitor, but I do not yet know if you are.’

Nagasena’s voice faded from the helm, lost in a squall of interference from a test firing of the Palace’s void generators.

Severian continued climbing, drawing closer to the top. With each moment of ascent, he wondered if Nagasena would shoot him from the cliff, but quickly dismissed the possibility. If Nagasena wanted to kill him, he would be dead already.

The sun was gone now, and only the faint haze of starlight and the arc-lights from the Bhabhar work camps and the Mechanicum ship forges on the Terai-Duar flatlands illuminated the rock face.

As he approached the lip of the cliff, he pressed his cheek to the black rock and focused his gaze on the boundary between stone and sky. Sure enough, he saw a wavering bloom of disturbed air.

The faint haze of a laser tripwire covered the full length of the cliff edge.

Severian took a firm grip of the rock in one hand and let himself dangle. He turned himself around and re-established his handholds as he braced his feet flat against the cliff, knees bent, muscles tense. He took a shallow breath and gathered his concentration, visualising the planned movement in his head, rehearsing the duration of each muscle contraction and snap of limb until he was certain of its success.

Severian pushed off, powering his legs out and up, using his handhold as a hinge about which his body arced like the overpowered swing of a pendulum. Halfway through, he released his grip and twisted his body, snapping around in a gymnast’s crunch. He landed a metre beyond the edge of the cliff and dropped to his knees in a sandy courtyard, one hand pressed flat to the ground, the other balled into a fist.

He awaited the scream of an alarm, the hue and cry of a sentry or the chatter of an automated weapon system. Nothing. Only the sigh of the wind and the hiss of his own breath disturbed the silence.

‘I expected better from you, Warmason,’ muttered Severian. ‘If you are Dorn’s architect, then the Warmaster will simply walk into the Emperor’s throne room.’

The courtyard was enclosed on three sides by tiered steps that led up to a cloister. Night-blooming plants with albino leaves spread themselves to the moon, and their bitter, almond scent hinted at bespoke genecraft. A stone-flagged path led around the edges of the courtyard, at the centre of which gurgled and frothed a fountain topped by the finial of a square and compass.

The numerous branches of the path enclosed rectangles of sand in which were rendered miniature sections of construction models of blockhouses, elevations and bastions. Intersecting lines of fire and dead zones were marked in the sand, together with guild markings that made no sense to Severian.

He recognised the Dhawalagiri in one, the Eternity Gate in another and the growing fortifications spreading at the opening of the Mohan. Severian ascended to the cloister, padding softly over the polished terrazzo. The heads of the flowers followed his movements.

He followed the cloister to the villa’s central pavilion, a wide elevation with a tall tower at its heart from which the Warmason could survey his great works. The landing platform and Singh’s tiltjet shuttle were on a raised plateau to the front of the main building. Severian had only the most basic knowledge of operating such a craft. He could fly it, but not well enough to avoid the inevitable interceptors and their seeker warheads.

No, if he was to reach the orbital plates alive, he needed to give his pursuers a reason not to shoot him down.

What better a reason than the Emperor’s own Warmason?

Severian paused, sensing a subtle, undefinable change in the air. The smell of almonds had vanished, replaced by something ammoniac. Instantly his hand flashed to his blade and he pressed himself against the wall.

A panel beside him slid open, and a multi-barrelled cannon pushed out on a circular gimbal mount. A green-lensed range-finder tracked across the courtyard, and Severian saw its twin emerge from the opposite wall. Its tracker beam panned across him and green flashed to red.

A blitz of shells hammered the air and he pushed off the wall as the cannon beside him spun around. He sprang up and wrenched the barrel around, its bucking motion like wrestling a greenskin. Its servos fought him, but he kept his grip firm and walked its fire into the opposite cannon. High-velocity shells ripped through it, tearing it from the wall in a blaze of impacts.

Severian jammed his blade into the cannon’s rotator mechanism, and threw himself to the side as the shells exploded in the breech, ripping the weapon apart in a spray of wild shots. He rolled to his feet and ran for the edge of the cloister. Vaulting from one of its supporting pillars, he swung up and hauled himself onto the tiled roof as more guns unmasked below. Having seen the Warmason’s schematics in the sand, Severian knew there would be no dead ground in which to hide.

Movement was his only ally here.

He ran along the ridge of the cloister’s roof as a wailing siren blared in alarm and light flooded the mountainside. Previously concealed arc-lights swung up and bathed the villa in blazing illumination that left him no shadow. More of the night-blooming flowers were situated at regular intervals in ornate planters. Spores misted their heads and Severian gagged at the stench, now realising how he had been unmasked so swiftly. These were bio-engineered plants, presumably tailored to react to any unfamiliar genetic sample.

Severian vaulted onto the higher roof of the main structure as four figures emerged from cavities worked into the lower reaches of the tower. Automata, rendered in glossy black flex-metal and moving with a suppleness that only connections to the high magi of the Mechanicum could procure. Superficially human, their heads were mannequin-blank, concealing a lethal array of combat wetware grafted to the cauterised remains of a human cerebral cortex. Each was armed with a long, whipping blade and an implanted energy weapon. Two of them came straight for him, the third and fourth taking to the air on repulsor packs. A flurry of shots scythed towards him. Severian ducked and rolled, knowing on an instinctual level where their targeters would aim.

He ran towards the first, drawing and firing a Black Sentinel’s pistol in one motion. The weapon was ridiculously small in his grip, but the nearest automaton went down, its head broken open. The second sprang away to the side.

Right into the arcing grenade Severian had thrown at the same instant.

The detonation sent it spinning down into the courtyard in flames. A shot struck him in the back and he grunted in pain as the beam punched through his armour. His war-plate would have stopped the shot, but this was armour of an earlier age.

He rolled and came up firing. The automata had spread out. His shots punched empty air. Severian kept moving, hearing the clatter of yet more emplaced sentinels being thrown into the fray. Escalating threat response; the more he killed, the more would come at him.

Another shot struck him, and this time searing heat burned him a cauterised wound. Severian turned as he heard the buzz of an approaching enemy. The blank-faced automaton crashed down beside him, and Severian swung two pistols to bear. It struck out with its implanted blade, skewering him through his lower ribs. He slammed his fist down, snapping the blade at the root, and emptied one pistol’s magazine into the automaton. The impacts battered it down the slope of the roof, but pitch-perfect balance-gyros kept it from toppling over the edge. It took aim at him, but a grenade at its feet blew it off the roof in a cascade of broken tiles and fire.

Severian wrenched the flex-blade from his body as the fourth automaton dropped down ten metres behind him. It had seen the destruction of the first three and was in no hurry to share their fate. Severian ran towards the tower, chased by weapons fire. Shots blistered the air around him as he saw more of the blank-faced sentinels circling the structure.

Severian skidded to a halt, dropping to a crouch. His arm lifted and shot forwards. Black, nano-carbon steel flashed and the automaton went down with a bloodied flex-blade punched through its skull. It crumpled to its knees, but Severian was already on the move.

He dived into the recess from which the nearest of the automata had emerged.

Yasu Nagasena watches the battle on the rooftop with a hunter’s fascination. He is impressed that Severian has managed to penetrate this far. Vadok Singh dismissed his warning as unnecessary, yet here they stand in the Warmason’s extremis chamber, surrounded by free-floating pict-feed images generated by a holosphere.

Vadok Singh is accompanied by a migou pit-fighting creature and two of his glossy black automata. The warrior cyborgs were crafted in the forges of Magos Lukas Chrom, a Mechanicum adept now thought to be a traitor. Singh clearly valued Chrom’s work over his reputation.

The Warmason’s body is tall and willowy, engineered for height and guild-work. It looks too fragile and too breakable for Terran gravity. Nagasena has been in the presence of the gene-forged many times, but something in Singh’s form unnerves him more than any primarch, legionary or chimeric Mechanicum adept.

Singh glances over at him, stroking the wax-paper schemata Nagasena asked to see.

‘He is resourceful,’ allows Singh, his voice a mix of irritation and admiration. ‘But he is just one warrior.’

‘One warrior who has evaded capture by the Emperor’s Custodians and the Black Sentinels. Trust me, you do not know this man.’

‘Nor do you,’ snaps Singh.

‘To hunt a man is to know him,’ answers Nagasena, his presence here surely making the truth of his words self-evident.

Singh leans forwards as an explosion on the rooftop blanks the screens for a fraction of a second. The Warmason frowns, tracking the pict-feeds on the roof around in confusion.

Severian is nowhere to be seen.

‘Where is he?’ demands Singh, as though Severian’s disappearance is a personal affront.

Nagasena has no answer for him. Severian has vanished, and he can do nothing trapped in the extremis chamber. He realises it was a mistake to trust the Warmason’s assurances that there were no blind spots in his defences.

‘Open the door,’ he says. ‘Now.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ replies Singh, sifting through myriad holos with impatient haptic gestures.

‘Open it,’ repeats Nagasena. ‘I need to be out there.’

‘Very well,’ says Singh, tapping a code into a floating keypad of light. ‘But this door will not open again. Not for you or anyone else.’

‘I understand,’ says Nagasena as the metres-thick armoured blast door swings slowly open. He slips through as soon as it is wide enough.

The corridor is empty, as is the room beyond, a high-ceilinged chamber lush with alien furs, exquisitely crafted furniture of extinct woods and gilt-framed architectural plans said to have been a gift from Perturabo himself.

He hears something heavy and metallic behind him, and at first thinks it is the door-locks of the extremis chamber closing. Then he hears a scream and realises his mistake. Nagasena spins around in time to see one of Singh’s automata spill from the door, its head a pulverised ruin of sparking circuit boards and dribbling brain matter.

He knows immediately what has happened.

Severian has infiltrated the Warmason’s tower and broken through into the extremis chamber through its most unguarded flank, the roof.

Singh’s voice sounds from within, a reedy plea for mercy, and Nagasena wonders if Severian has any left in him. Strobing flashes of gunfire light the corridor and Nagasena hears grunts of pain and the sound of a furious brawl. Singh cries out and something explodes from within. The armoured door is still trying to close, but the body of the automaton is holding it open for now.

Two fist-sized objects fly through the gap, perfectly angled to bounce from the wall and land either side of Nagasena.

He throws himself back, dragging a heavy rosewood table after him as the fragmentation grenades explode. The blasts of fire and shrapnel are intensified in the confines of the room, and the table is blown to splinters by the impact. Sharp pain slices into him, and blood runs down his thigh. He tries to rise, but his leg gives out under him and he drops with a cry of pain.

Through the smoke of the explosion, Nagasena sees a vast shape moving towards him. He pulls his long-las tight into his shoulder and fires three shots in quick succession. He thinks all three hit, but he is smashed from his feet by a tremendous impact before he can be sure.

Nagasena lands badly on a sculpture of a golden lion. He spills from its back onto the soft furs. Ribs are broken and his leg is numb and useless. His long-las lies next to him, miraculously undamaged. Just as he reaches for it, a booted foot stamps down, breaking the weapon in two. Nagasena rolls onto his back and reaches for his sword, but the weapon is only half drawn before a fist too large to be mortal takes his arm and twists it.

Nagasena’s scream is one of agony and loss, for as his wrist breaks so too does Shoujiki.

The broken shards spin away across the floor, and through blurred vision, Nagasena sees Severian’s face. It is cruel and angular, sharply defined where many of his gene-brothers have a curious flattening of their features.

‘You let me live on the cliff,’ says Severian. ‘Now I return the favour.’

Nagasena sees that Severian carries the unconscious form of Vadok Singh under his arm, as easily as a man might carry a rolled up sheaf of papers.

‘You will not leave Terra,’ Nagasena promises him.

‘Watch me,’ says Severian, dropping Singh to the floor.

The legionary pushes open the wide doors that lead to the courtyard and the landing platforms. Automata descend from the roof on glowing flight packs, but they do not attack. Their targeting wetware has specific rules of engagement, and Singh’s own parameters for his safety render them impotent. Nagasena loses sight of Severian, gritting his teeth against the pain.

With his good arm, he drags himself across the floor. Every movement causes blood to pump from his wounded leg. He should lie still and bind his wounds, but Nagasena has not yet failed in a hunt and he does not intend to fail in this one. Sweat pours down his face. His features are drained of colour, but he keeps going. He leaves a line of smeared crimson in his wake.

Nagasena pulls himself through the doors into the courtyard. It is brightly lit, and the black-skinned automata stand motionless. The night-blooming flowers bend and flap in a roaring downdraught.

The building howl of engines comes from a double-rotored tiltjet sitting on a raised platform cantilevered from the villa’s outer walls. Severian sits at the flyer’s controls, with Vadok Singh slumped next to him. Nagasena shields his eyes against the hurricane-force propwash that billows dust into the air. He draws his volkite pistol.

Proximity protocols might keep the automata from engaging, but Nagasena has no such restrictions.

The rotor nacelles angle downwards and the tiltjet lifts into the night.

Holding the pistol is almost too much for Nagasena. Sweat drips in his eyes and his limbs tremble with the effort of holding it straight. He will get one shot, two if he is lucky.

His first shot stabs into an engine, a bright beam that fuses components and blows hydraulic lines. His second misses.

But one was enough.

The engine coughs smoke and something inside explodes with a fearsome bang that rips the rotor assembly from the side of the tiltjet. The nacelle drops onto the villa’s gateway and its sculpted structure is obliterated with a shriek of buckling metal and cracking stone. Broken pieces of rotor blades whip through the courtyard, beheading automata and scything others down like deserters before a firing squad. Nagasena buries his head in his hands as the nacelle explodes and the spinning tiltjet slams down next to it. The impact collapses the flyer’s structure, its spine broken and the remaining engine spitting black smoke and screaming with grinding rotors.

Nagasena crawls towards the downed flyer and uses its buckled prow to pull himself upright. Through the shattered ruin of the canopy, he sees Vadok Singh is still unconscious, but relatively unscathed.

Severian is pinned in the pilot’s seat, his legs broken by the crushed avionics panel. With a little time he could free himself, but Nagasena has the volkite pistol aimed at his head.

The Legion warrior sees the gun, but Nagasena does not shoot.

Instead, he asks: ‘You were one of the Crusader Host, yes?’

‘I was,’ answers Severian. ‘I stood on the walls of Terra as a symbol of the warriors fighting to reclaim the galaxy your ancestors let slip through their fingers. My brothers and I forswore the glories of campaigning to stand as honour guard on Terra. And what did we get for our sacrifice? Betrayal and imprisonment!’

‘How long were you on Terra?’ asks Nagasena.

‘One hundred and seventy-seven years.’

‘Then you never became a Son of Horus.’

‘We were the foremost of the Emperor’s Legions,’ says Severian. ‘None could match our tally of compliance. I am a Luna Wolf, and my loyalty is beyond question.’

‘A lot can happen in two centuries,’ said Nagasena. ‘Hearts can change.’

‘Mortal hearts, not Legion hearts,’ spits Severian, looking him right in the eye. ‘So if you’re going to kill me, get on with it.’

‘Goodbye, Severian,’ says Nagasena, pulling the trigger.

The volkite pistol is an artificer-crafted relic of a bygone age, a weapon that has never once failed. Its workings are a mystery to him, but its lethality is beyond question, as is its reliability.

But this time, the pistol does not fire.

Before either Nagasena or Severian can react to the misfire, the arc-lights of the villa are snuffed out and a shriek of jets sounds overhead. A host of aircraft descend on columns of stab-lights. Nagasena shields his eyes as a score of grey-armoured soldiers descend through billowing winds on zip lines. Nagasena does not recognise them, for the firelight illuminates no insignia or rank markings upon their uniforms.

Their equipment is high-end tech, powerful hellguns, ablative shock-armour and full-visored helms with integral combat-augmetics. They quickly surround the downed tiltjet with their guns aimed squarely at Severian’s head and heart.

None of the soldiers speak, and Nagasena slides down the buckled fuselage of the flyer as the last of his strength bleeds out of him. Movement draws his eye, and he lifts his weary head. Through the burning gateway walks a dark man, clad in a hooded robe and flanked by a dozen slender women in gold, form-fitting armour. The red and ivory of their helm-plumes twist in the thermal vortices.

They are the Sisters of Silence, and there can be only one reason they are here.

The dark man pulls back his hood, revealing a tense, patrician face, framed by long white hair pulled in a scalp-lock. His eyes are old, perhaps the oldest Nagasena has ever seen, and a pale light dances in them like snow falling through moonbeams.

‘Lord Malcador?’ asks Nagasena.

The Regent of Terra nods and says, ‘Your pistol, Yasu. Point it in the air if you please.’

Nagasena does so, and as soon as it is vertical a thin beam of incandescent energy cuts the night. The tension in Malcador’s face visibly relaxes and colour returns to his features.

‘The mechanisms of the volkite are complex and require a great deal of effort to confound,’ says Malcador. ‘Even for one such as I.’

‘You prevented my gun from firing?’

‘I did, for I have need of the Luna Wolf,’ says Malcador as a group of the grey soldiers carry Vadok Singh from the wreckage and into the villa. Another group free Severian with cutting gear and las-torches. His weight is enormous, and it takes six of them to lift him clear. His genhanced physique will be dulling the agony of his broken legs, but the pallor of his skin is testament to his pain. The Sisters of Silence surround Severian, and his face betrays a strange revulsion at the presence of the mute order.

Between them, they bear the wounded Space Marine up to the landing platform, where a black aircraft with a non-reflective hull descends from the darkness. The craft hovers just above the platform, and an assault ramp extends from its centre section. The silent sisterhood take Severian aboard, the assault ramp is retracted and the black ship rises on a near-silent repulsor field.

Nagasena groans and Malcador waves a pair of soldiers to his side. They have no markings, but bind his wounds with the expertise of battlefield medicae. One man readies a hypo of pain balm, but Nagasena shakes his head.

‘Lord Dorn wanted Severian dead,’ he says. ‘Why do you need him alive?’

Malcador turns, and the firelight from the burning flyer gives his features a harsh, calculating appearance: a regicide grandmaster whose pieces are living beings and who knows full well the cost of the decisions he takes.

‘We are at war, Yasu, a war for our very survival,’ says Malcador. ‘Lord Dorn fights his battles with guns and warriors. I wage a war of greater subtlety – a silent war, if you will, and I require men of singular talents to fight it.’

‘What talent does Severian have that brings the Sigillite looking for him?’

‘The Luna Wolf is a unique individual,’ says Malcador. ‘A latent psyker whose powers are so instinctual he does not even realise he has them.’

‘A psyker?’

Malcador nods. ‘One whose powers were only truly awakened when Magnus the Red sent his, shall we say, ill-advised message to Terra. In the years since then, Severian’s innate abilities have grown into something quite special, oh yes, quite special indeed.’

‘Years?’ asks Nagasena. ‘It was the Crimson King’s psychic attack that allowed the prisoners to escape from Khangba Marwu. That was only a few days ago.’

Malcador nods, then sees Nagasena’s confusion. ‘Ah, yes, I can see how it would appear that way from the outside, but Magnus sent his warning about Horus to Terra two years ago. It almost ripped the Palace apart, but the Emperor’s wards were able to contain it from escaping. A host of psykers from the Hollow Mountain attempted to dissipate that enormous reservoir of power before it broke the psychic levees, but the energies Magnus unleashed eventually overcame them. And the entire world felt the results of that. But mark my words, it could have been worse, a lot worse.’

Nagasena tries to process this information, but the pain from his wounds is overwhelming his thought processes. He feels a jab in his thigh and calming warmth spreads through him.

‘Lord Dorn will want to know of my hunt,’ he says. ‘What will I tell him?’

‘Leave me to worry about Rogal,’ chuckles Malcador.

‘And Singh? What will he tell of this night’s events?’

‘Vadok Singh has an impressionable psyche,’ says Malcador. ‘He will remember what I need him to remember.’

‘You would lie to Lord Dorn?’ asks Nagasena.

Malcador shakes his head and says, ‘Rogal and I have somewhat differing views on the means by which we must fight Horus. He has his knights, and I will soon have mine. Where his will blaze with fire and fury, my grey angels will move unseen through the Imperium. Severian will be part of that.’

Malcador’s eyes bore into Nagasena, and he hears the Sigillite’s next words echoing in the farthest reaches of his mind.

‘And so will you.’

Severian faces his pursuer

About the Author

Graham McNeill has written more Horus Heresy novels than any other Black Library author! His canon of work includes Vengeful Spirit and his New York Times bestsellers A Thousand Sons and the novella The Reflection Crack’d, which featured in The Primarchs anthology. Graham’s Ultramarines series, featuring Captain Uriel Ventris, is now six novels long, and has close links to his Iron Warriors stories, the novel Storm of Iron being a perennial favourite with Black Library fans. He has also written a Mars trilogy, featuring the Adeptus Mechanicus. For Warhammer, he has written the Time of Legends trilogy The Legend of Sigmar, the second volume of which won the 2010 David Gemmell

An extract from Garro: Vow of Faith.

As he waited for the dawn glow to rise higher, the man turned in a slow circle and passed the time reading the history in the landscape around him. Some of it he gathered from his own instincts, more he took from flashes of mnemon-implants fed into his brain by the hypnogoges, long before he had come to Terra.

The forest of tall, mutated fir trees filled a valley that had once been a bay bordered by city sprawls now long-dead and lost. The iron-hard trunks, grey-green like ancient jade, ranged away in all directions beyond the clearing where he had landed the cargo lighter. He could see former islands that were now stubby mesas protruding from the valley floor, even pick out the distant shapes of old buildings swallowed by the tree line. But to the east, the clearest of the decrepit monuments to the dead city were the towers of a long-vanished highway bridge. Only the twisted remains of two narrow gates remained, rust-chewed and thousands of years old. Beyond them, in the time before the Fall of Night, there had been a great ocean; now, the strange forest petered out and became the endless desert of the Mendocine Plains.

The bleakness of that thought was somehow comforting. Entropy is eternal, it said. Whatever we do today, it will matter not in centuries to come. Forests anew will rise and engulf all deeds.

He turned and walked back to the lighter. The snow on the ground hissed beneath his footfalls as he came around to the drop ramp at the rear, open like a fallen drawbridge. Inside the flyer’s otherwise empty hold, a man in a maintenance worker’s oversuit looked up at his approach and pulled listlessly at the magnetic cuff tethering him to a support frame. The two of them were similarly dressed, alike in average height and nondescript aspect, but the chained man’s face was swollen and florid.

‘Haln,’ he began, his words emerging in puffs of vapour, ‘Look, comrade, this has gone far enough! I’m freezing my balls off–’

His real name was not Haln, but it was who he was today. He stepped in and punched the worker in the face three times to stop him talking. Then, while the man was dazed and reeling, Haln released the mag-cuff and used it to lead his captive out of the lighter. He chanced a look up into the cloudy sky. Not long now.

The worker tried to speak, but all that came out was a wet, breathy noise.

Perhaps he had thought they were friends. Perhaps the fiction that was Haln had been so good that the worker bought its reality without question. People usually did. Haln was a well-trained, highly accomplished liar.

He wanted to strike the worker again, but it was important that the man not bleed, not yet. With his free hand, Haln pulled a metallic spider from one of the deep pockets of his overcoat and clamped it around the worker’s throat. His captive whimpered and then cried out in pain as the neurodendrite probes that were the spider’s legs entered his flesh, and found their way through meat and bone to nerve clusters and brain tissue.

Haln released him, but not before giving the worker another item – an Imperial soldier’s battle knife. It was old, blackened by disuse and corrosion. There were stories in it, but they would not be heard today.

The worker accepted the blade, wide-eyed and confused. Wondering why he had been handed a weapon.

Haln didn’t give him time to think too long about it. He pulled back the sleeve of his coat to reveal a control panel with hologlyph keys, secured around his wrist. Haln placed the fingers of his other hand on the panel and slid them around, feeling for the right position. In synchrony, the worker cried out and began a sudden, spastic series of motions. The spider device accepted the signals from the control and made him a puppet. He staggered back and forth as Haln got a sense of the range of motion. He began to weep, and through coughing sobs, the worker begged for his life.

Haln ignored his slurred entreaties, walking him away into the middle of the large clearing where the chem-stained snow was still virgin. When he was satisfied, Haln looked again at the oncoming dawn and nodded once.

Highlighting two glyphs made the worker bring the old knife to his throat and draw it across. Manipulating other symbols forced his legs to work, walking him around in a perfect circle as blood jetted from the widening wound. Haln watched the spurts of crimson form jagged, steaming lines in the snowfall. Each wet red axis pointed away to the horizon.

Eventually, the cut killed the worker and he dropped, sprawled across the mark of his own making. Haln felt a change in the air, a grotesquely familiar acidity that was alien and uncanny. It was good, he decided.

He saw the object before he heard it. A hole melted through the low clouds and a flickering meteoric form fell from the sky. A heartbeat later, a supersonic scream came with it – although he knew no-one else beyond the valley would hear it, walled in and smothered as it was by the magicks the spilled blood provided.

The object slammed into the earth with enough shock force to toss Haln back ten yards, and rock the cargo lighter on its landing skids. When he rose to his feet, Haln saw that a shallow pit had been dug by the impact, revealing black dirt beneath the bloodstained snow. The worker’s corpse had been directly beneath the fall, the very point upon which it was targeted – and if any of the man now remained, it was only shreds and rags.

In the pit was a capsule not unlike those used to eject the bodies of the dead into stars for solar cremation. Hot and sizzling, it creaked and shuddered as something moved inside. Haln looked up again and saw the hole in the cloud sealing up once more. He allowed himself a moment to wonder where the pod had come from – dropped by a ship from orbit, dragged from the immaterium itself, conjured out of a dream? – and then forgot his own question. It wasn’t important. Only the mission mattered.

Heat seared him, even through his heavy gloves, but Haln found the seam of the capsule and pulled on it. A wash of thick air dense with human smells assaulted him, and fingers of fire-burned flesh emerged through the widening gap. Then presently a hand, an arm, a torso. A figure stepped onto Terran soil – a tall man with unkempt hair, a hawkish face and haunted, wild eyes – and glared at him.

‘It worked,’ he growled. ‘Each time, I think it will not. I shouldn’t. Should not doubt.’ The words he spoke were rough and scratchy. The new arrival’s tone made Haln imagine a feral animal taught to walk upright and speak like a person.

Haln gestured at the pod interior. ‘You need to kill your pathfinder, before it–’

The other man’s dark eyes flashed. ‘I know. I’ve done this before.’ He hesitated. ‘Haven’t I?’ He shook off his own question and reached into the capsule. With a wet tearing noise, he ripped a bulb of gelatinous, oily flesh from where it had been nestled in among the pod’s inner workings. It writhed and squealed, trying to squirm out of his grip.

Haln was going to offer the man another of his many knives with which to finish the task, but when he looked back the new arrival had a pistol in his fist. Haln had not seen him draw it, had not even seen a holster for the gun. Even the weapon itself seemed strange – he didn’t really see it, it was more like he saw the impression of it. Something murderous and accursed made of chromed parts moving with no mechanical logic; or was it assembled out of glassy crystal and ruby-red liquid? He had no time to really understand, because it fired and his vision went purple with the afterimage.

Even the proscribed mech-enhancements of Haln’s vision didn’t stop the retina burn, and he blinked furiously. After a moment, his sight returned and there was only grey ash where the pathfinder-thing had been. The pistol had vanished.

He said nothing of it. These things, these moments of not-understanding, they were not new to Haln. He kept himself above them by remembering – once again – the mission, the mission, always the mission.

‘Were you briefed?’ said the man. His manner shifted like the winds. Now he was cold and professional.

‘A basic summary. I am to provide operational support for the duration of your assignment,’ he replied. ‘My name is Haln, for the interim.’

‘How long have you served Horus?’

Haln hesitated, glancing around. Even here in the deep wilds, far from the nearest settlement, he was reluctant to speak the Warmaster’s name aloud. ‘Longer than I have been aware,’ he said, at length. A more honest answer to that question would be lengthy and complex.

That seemed to amuse the other man. ‘Truth in that,’ he allowed, and started for the cargo lighter. ‘There are several avenues to follow but only one target. You’ll help me locate it.’

Haln nodded and reached inside his coat for a melta grenade, priming the timer and radius so it would obliterate all trace of the pod and the sacrifice. ‘As you wish,’ he told the assassin.

Half a world away, a sky of artificial night made the wastes of Albia seem like a sketch in charcoal and slate. Miles above the ground, the aertropolis of Kolob cast a massive shadow as it floated on a ring of colossal antigravs, causing microclimate veils of hard, cold rain to race across the stony hillsides.

The warrior had been walking for the better part of a day. His Stormbird had climbed away and left him on a twisted crag somewhere in the northern sinks, just as ordered. He climbed down and started on a southerly path, his pace careful and the solid clanks and hisses of his power armour a steady metronome. He walked, waiting for the great emptiness of the landscape to clear his thoughts. It had not happened yet.

This place was home to him, or it would have been if that word held any true meaning for the legionary. His past was a gossamer thing, faint and ephemeral, so delicate that he wondered if looking too closely upon it would make it fade forever. The memories of the time before he took on oath and armour in service to the Imperium of Man were strange to him. In many ways, they were a fiction he had been told more than a chain of events he had actually experienced.

Had he ever really been the ragged youth that lurked in his deep recollection? The one that was sallow of face and always cold? If he reached for it, if he dug in and tried hard, he could pull some fragments back to the surface. Sensations, mostly. Pieces so small and dislocated that they hardly deserved to be thought of as memories. Warmth in the embrace of a parent. The sight of shooting stars crossing the sky. A lake of captured sunlight, as gold as coin.

Those events were centuries old. The outlines of the faces he saw there belonged to people long since dead and turned to dust, their voices lost to him. Wiped away by the bio-programming and hardwiring of his brain that made him a superlative warrior. Like all of his kind, the forgetting was required to reforge him into what he had become.

These grains of his old self were all that remained, trapped in the cracks of his newer nature, the one carved out of the body he was born in and built anew with implants, techno-organs and powerful genetic modifications. He carried a special, quiet apprehension that one day he would look for these grains and they would be gone. The legionary knew brothers like that, who had lost whatever had made them human.

He looked up into the sky, watching the orbital plate’s slow progress, thinking of those men. Some of them were like him, holding on to the threads of their better selves in silent desperation, but more – far too many more – had willingly opened their hands and let go of any ties to Terra, to the past, to who they had once been.

Once, he would not have had the words to describe these events, but ever since the insurrection, he did. He thought of his battle-brothers as having given up their souls, if there were such a thing.

The warrior halted at the edge of a crumbling ridge, surrounding a vast pit that resembled a volcanic caldera. There had been a city here long ago, assembled atop a network of tunnels and caverns, but wars had washed over it and torn it away. Remnants of the ancient caves were visible down there, laid bare by forces that had shredded mountains. He knew this place, the spectre of it trapped in one of the memory-pieces. Perhaps he had lived in the shanty-towns that clustered down along the walls of the pit, or ventured from one of the hive towers in the far distance. He did not know. The content of the memory was gone, only its empty vessel capable of bringing him to this place.

Another hard pulse of rain lashed over him, and he glimpsed his own flickering reflection in an elongated puddle. A hulking shape in ghost-grey wargear, face hidden behind a beaked, cold-eyed battle helm. A cuirass about his shoulders with golden detail, rendered dull and lifeless by the bleak sky. A great sword in the scabbard on his back, a master-crafted bolter clamped to his hip.

He reached up and removed the helmet, mag-locking it to a thigh plate, taking a breath of damp air laced with heavy pollutants. He met his own gaze on the water’s surface.

The Knight Errant Nathaniel Garro looked back at himself, measuring the scars that were the map of his war record. He felt old and empty, a sensation that had been banished from him for a long while but now returned in full effect. The last time he had experienced such a thing, it had been as the madness unfolded over Isstvan V. As he stood aboard the frigate Eisenstein and slowly came to the shattering conclusion that his legion had betrayed him. As the Warmaster Horus’ rebellion had been birthed before him, the very personal treachery of his brethren and his primarch Lord Mortarion hollowed him out.

Perhaps, if he had been without courage and honour, Garro might have faltered in that moment, might never have recovered from what he witnessed. But instead, he found a new kind of strength. Emboldened by the singular truth laid bare before him – that of his unswerving loyalty to Terra and the Emperor of Mankind – Garro defied the traitors and set upon a flight into danger, racing back to the Solar System with word of warning.

Had he been without focus, Garro’s future and that of the refugees he brought with him might have ended with that deed. But his loyalty found reward, of a sort. The Emperor’s right hand, the great psyker and Regent of Terra Malcador the Sigillite, took the reins of Garro’s purpose. The former Battle-Captain of the Death Guard became Agentia Primus of the Sigillite’s clandestine task force. He became a Knight Errant, legionless but charged with great deeds.

Or so he had believed. After years of working to Malcador’s byzantine orders, recruiting others like himself, chasing down Horus’ spies, secretly crisscrossing the stars beneath the shroud of a tormented galaxy, Garro’s certainty of purpose became clouded. More and more, he was coming to believe that fate had spared him at Isstvan for something larger than just the Sigillite’s enigmatic designs. Already he had openly challenged Malcador’s commands, in the Somnus Citadel on Luna and in the halls of an unfinished fortress on distant Titan. How long would it be before he spoke his doubts aloud and in the fullest? Garro could not hold to silence forever. It simply was not in his character.

His craggy face twisted in a scowl, annoyance flaring. He had been foolish to come here. Some sentimental part of his spirit hoped that walking these lands would take him to a calmer place, where he could quiet his uncertainties and find a measure of peace. But that was not happening, and he knew it would never come. He resented the lack of answers, the directionless unawareness that pushed and pulled at him whenever his thoughts should have been at rest. More than anything, he wanted to come to a place of tranquillity and in it, find understanding. Garro was a legionary, a soldier born to duty, but the one before him was not right. It was not enough.

Everyone in the galaxy had been changed by Horus’ sedition, if they knew it or not. Garro knew with great clarity how he had been altered. Something had broken free inside him as his Legion’s sworn oaths had blackened and disintegrated. He was more than just a weapon of war, to be directed at a target and told to fight or perish. A heavier mantle had fallen upon him, a champion’s duty.

Have faith, Nathaniel. You are of purpose.

The words echoed in his thoughts. The woman Keeler, she had opened his mind to that truth. She understood. Perhaps for Garro to understand too, he would need to find her again and–

On the wet breeze he sensed the stale odour of animals, and froze. Garro listened and picked out the footfalls of two quadrupeds, stalking him across the shale and mud. He turned his head and picked them out against the dark stone.

Lupenate forms, the pair of them. Predators evolved from the wolves that had once stalked the woodlands of this region, in the times before the trees had died off, never to return. Their large bodies were long and sinuous, their fur slick with secreted oils that sloughed off the toxic rains and made their thermal aspects harder to see. Arrow-shaped ears twitched and stiffened as they tracked Garro’s smallest movement, while narrow eyes fixed him with a gelid, hungry gaze.

Normally, lupenates stayed away from the edges of human-habited zones, preferring to prey on the odd unwary traveller caught out alone. That a hunting pair had come so close to the shanty towns in the pit could only mean their life cycle was being disrupted as well as everyone else’s on Terra. The global day-and-night preparations for Horus’ inevitable invasion trickled down to even the most insignificant of the planet’s creatures.

Garro had drawn his sword without being aware of it. The power blade Libertas, his stalwart war companion for a hundred years and a thousand conflicts, could slice through tank armour when fully charged. His lip curled. These animals were not worth that expenditure of energy.

‘Go!’ he barked at them, planting the sword in the ground with its hilt facing the sky. Garro took a menacing step toward the predators. ‘Be gone!’

But the lupenates were starving and agitated beyond rationality. They attacked, flashing forward in a glistening arc of motion. Both leapt at him, smelling his breath, claws and teeth aiming to gain purchase on the bare flesh of his face.

The legionary’s arm blurred and he snatched the closest of the creatures from the air at the top of its arc, grabbing it by the throat. The second he batted away with the back of his gauntlet – he saw it crash into the rocks with a furious yelp.

The lupenate in his grip spat venom at him, missing his face but spattering on his chest plate. The droplets sizzled where they landed, scorching the slate-coloured armour. Garro’s lips thinned and he threw the creature in the direction of the standing sword. His aim was true enough, and the blade so sharp even in its inactive state, that the force of the throw bifurcated the creature and sent its parts tumbling over the edge of the pit. He stalked across to the second, wounded animal and stamped down on its head, crushing its skull beneath his heavy ceramite boot before it could rise.

Grim-faced, Garro returned to recover Libertas. If he had believed in omens, the appearance of the lupenates would mean ill portent.

‘A wolf,’ said a careful voice, ‘attacking out of blind hate and savagery. That reminds me of someone.’

Garro withdrew his sword and replaced it in the scabbard, noting that the rain had suddenly stopped. ‘Horus is not a savage. Unless he needs to be.’

He turned and found Malcador studying the dead animal with mild disdain. Quite how the Sigillite was able to approach him without sound or signal, the legionary did not know. Garro had learned not to ask such questions, as there were never any answers that satisfied him.

‘Was it necessary to kill them?’ said the other man, rolling back the cloak that concealed his gaunt features. Pale, silver hair fell to his shoulders. ‘The beasts have as much right to be here as you.’

‘I gave them the chance to withdraw,’ said the warrior. ‘I would grant the same to any foe.’

‘Honourable in all things.’ Malcador gave a small shrug and looked away, dismissing the moment.

Is he actually here, Garro wondered? I could be perceiving some fragment of him projected by a psyker’s might… It was very possible that in all the times Garro had stood before the Sigillite, he had in fact never stood before him, at least not in the most literal sense. The Regent of Terra’s psionic power was said to be second only to that of the Emperor himself, and the Emperor…

Divine was not a word that Garro would have used, but there were few others that could encompass the power of the Master of Mankind. If the Emperor were not a god, then he was as near to it as had ever existed. The image of a golden icon, of a two-headed aquila dancing on the end of a chain, flitted through his thoughts and he pushed it away.

The Sigillite looked toward him, as if he could smell the memory just as the wolf-things had caught Garro’s scent. ‘You have not found what you are looking for, Nathaniel,’ he said. ‘This has become troubling to me.’

‘I perform my duties to your order,’ said the legionary.

Malcador smiled. ‘There’s more to it than that. Don’t deflect. I chose you to serve because of your honesty, your… simplicity. But as time passes, the clear view I have becomes more clouded.’ The smile faded. ‘Duty turns to burden. Obedience chafes and eventually becomes defiance. It was this way with the Luna Wolf.’ He nodded toward the dead lupenate. ‘I did not see it until it was too late. And so I am watchful for the same patterns now, closer to home.’

Garro stiffened. ‘After I tallied all the things I lost in order to prove my allegiance,’ he began, ‘my legion, my brotherhood… I told myself that the next man who dared to suggest I was disloyal would bleed for it.’

‘Ah, but your promise contains a fatal flaw,’ Malcador replied, ignoring the threat. ‘You begin from the assumption that loyalty is a fixed point, immutable once established…’ The Sigillite broke off, and turned to look eastward, his eyes narrowing as if attracted by something only he could perceive. After a moment he turned away and continued, speaking as if nothing had happened. ‘But it is a flag planted in sand, Nathaniel. It can and will drift under the action of outside forces you may never see, until you are challenged. You were loyal to Mortarion, until the moment you were not. You were loyal to the Warmaster, until you were not. You are loyal to me–’

‘I am loyal to the Emperor,’ Garro corrected him, ‘and on my life, that flag will never fall.’

‘I believe you,’ said the Sigillite. ‘But my point still stands. Your missions, the whole reason why I gave you the grey and my mark to carry…’ He gestured to Garro’s armour, where the small icon of a stylized letter ‘I’ was barely visible. ‘They have been obscured of late by other issues.’

Garro looked away. ‘You speak of what I glimpsed on Saturn’s moon.’

Malcador shook his head. ‘It began long before you ventured to places that are outside your purview.’ The Sigillite wandered to the edge of the pit and looked down, taking in the gloomy settlement far below. ‘You went to the Riga orbital plate at your own bidding. You have been casting out feelers in the time between your missions, looking for something. Someone.’

Garro became very still. Of course Malcador knows, he told himself. How could I have believed he would not see the pattern?

‘Yes,’ continued the Sigillite. ‘I am aware of the Lectitio Divinitatus and the believers who have read Lorgar’s book.’

‘Lord Aurelian? The Word Bearer…?’ Garro’s brow furrowed, unsure if he had heard Malcador correctly.

The Sigillite went on. ‘I know they think of our Emperor as a living deity, despite all his words to the contrary.’ He took a step back. ‘And I know of the woman, Euphrati Keeler. The mere remembrancer who is now revered as a living saint.’

The question slipped out of Garro’s mouth before he could stop himself from uttering it. ‘Where is she?’

Malcador gave a rueful smile. ‘Not everything is clear to me, Nathaniel. Even if that is the image I like to project. Some things…’ The smile became brittle. ‘Some places, even I cannot reach. As curious as that is.’

‘But if you know of them, why do you allow the gatherings to go on unchecked?’

‘There are so many, and more with each passing month.’ The Sigillite opened his arms to the sky. ‘But perhaps you have forgotten that we are embroiled in a war that threatens to consume the galaxy? There are many things of far greater import before me. They are not like the lodges that Horus used to suborn the legions. These believers are little more than groups of worried people drawing solace from the pages of a fanatic’s scribblings.’ He paused, thinking. ‘That book proves my earlier point, when I spoke of malleable loyalty. Lorgar Aurelian was so very faithful when he wrote it. And look at him now.’

Garro nodded. ‘I saw the XVII Legion before Ullanor, and then after Isstvan. Like day and night, they were – but still a commonality of mad zeal in each incarnation.’ He paused, marshalling his words. ‘But I am not a Word Bearer. I am not even a Death Guard any more. I am only the Emperor’s sword, and that I will remain until the day I die.’

‘I believe you,’ Malcador repeated. ‘But even the best of blades can become blunted and careworn if left untended. It is clear that you cannot function fully as my Agentia Primus while you remain distracted by other concerns.’ The Sigillite’s tone hardened, and Garro found himself unconsciously taking up a combat stance.

His war-implants flexed and came alive, as they would if he were about to engage a foe. The very real possibility that Malcador was going to end him sang through Garro’s nerves.

‘You are of no use to me if you are preoccupied. I need agents who are here, in the moment. I need weapons and tools, if I am to end the war before it blackens Terra’s skies.’

‘Speak plainly, then,’ Garro demanded. If the worst were to come, he would meet it head on; this was not the first time he had been ready for such an outcome.

Malcador sighed. ‘After much consideration, I have decided to grant you a leave of absence, of a sort.’ He gestured at the sky, the floating city still blotting out the weak sun above them. ‘Go and find your answers, Nathaniel. Wherever they may lie.’

It was the last thing Garro had expected from the Sigillite. Censure and reprimand, indeed… But not permission. ‘You would allow that?’

‘I spoke the words. I have granted it.’ Malcador eyed him. ‘But there are certain conditions. You will leave behind your wargear, your power armour, your weapons. And more importantly, you will go without the authority I have conferred upon you. In this, you will be only Nathaniel Garro, late of the Death Guard Legiones Astartes. Whatever you want, you will find it on your own.’

In the distance, Garro heard the sound of powerful engines on a fast approach. A dropship was coming in. The warrior reached for his sword and removed it, scabbard and all, from his armour. ‘I will not leave Libertas in the hands of another,’ he intoned. ‘All else, I agree to.’

‘And still you challenge me, even in this…’ Malcador folded his arms. ‘Very well. Keep the sword. Perhaps you will need it.’

A Thunderhawk in unadorned grey livery crested the far ridgeline and tore over the pit, slowing to a hover on jets of flame. It pivoted in place as the pilot looked for somewhere to set down. Garro had done nothing to summon the dropship, nor seen Malcador do likewise, and yet here it was.

‘They will take you where you want to go,’ said the Sigillite, his words carrying over the howl of the engines. Garro raised a hand to shield his face as the Thunderhawk settled on the wide crag, the down-draft blasting a spray of rainwater up and about him. ‘But do not tarry. Horus is coming and we must be ready. I will array every servant of the Emperor in preparation to resist him, and you are counted in that number. Am I clear?’

Garro nodded as the Thunderhawk’s thrusters fell to an idling growl. ‘Aye,’ he replied, turning back to look at the Sigillite. ‘It is–’

He stood alone on the ridge, as the rain began to fall once again.

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* 5. You acknowledge that all copyright, trademark and other intellectual property rights in the e-book are, shall remain, the sole property of Black Library.

* 6. On termination of this license, howsoever effected, you shall immediately and permanently delete all copies of the e-book from your computers and storage media, and shall destroy all hard copies of the e-book which you have derived from the e-book.

* 7. Black Library shall be entitled to amend these terms and conditions from time to time by written notice to you.

* 8. These terms and conditions shall be governed by English law, and shall be subject only to the jurisdiction of the Courts in England and Wales.

* 9. If any part of this license is illegal, or becomes illegal as a result of any change in the law, then that part shall be deleted, and replaced with wording that is as close to the original meaning as possible without being illegal.

* 10. Any failure by Black Library to exercise its rights under this license for whatever reason shall not be in any way deemed to be a waiver of its rights, and in particular, Black Library reserves the right at all times to terminate this license in the event that you breach clause 2 or clause 3.