Further Reading From The Horus Heresy

Book 1 – HORUS RISING

Dan Abnett

Book 2 – FALSE GODS

Graham McNeill

Book 3 – GALAXY IN FLAMES

Ben Counter

Book 4 – THE FLIGHT OF THE EISENSTEIN

James Swallow

Book 1 – THE SOLAR WAR

John French

Book 2 – THE LOST AND THE DAMNED

Guy Haley

Book 3 – THE FIRST WALL

Gav Thorpe

Book 4 – SATURNINE

Dan Abnett

Book 5 – MORTIS

John French

Book 6 – WARHAWK

Chris Wraight

SONS OF THE SELENAR (Novella)

Graham McNeill

FURY OF MAGNUS (Novella)

Graham McNeill

ANGRON: SLAVE OF NUCERIA

Ian St. Martin

KONRAD CURZE: THE NIGHT HAUNTER

Guy Haley

LION EL’JONSON: LORD OF THE FIRST

David Guymer

ALPHARIUS: HEAD OF THE HYDRA

Mike Brooks

The Horus Heresy Character Series

VALDOR: BIRTH OF THE IMPERIUM

Chris Wraight

LUTHER: FIRST OF THE FALLEN

Gav Thorpe

SIGISMUND: THE ETERNAL CRUSADER

John French

Contents

Cover

Backlist

Title Page

The Horus Heresy

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Luther: First of the Fallen’

A Black Library Publication

The Horus Heresy

It is a time of legend.

Mighty heroes battle for the right to rule the galaxy. The vast armies of the Emperor of Mankind conquer the stars in a Great Crusade – the myriad alien races are to be smashed by His elite warriors and wiped from the face of history.

The dawn of a new age of supremacy for humanity
beckons. Gleaming citadels of marble and gold celebrate the many victories of the Emperor, as system after system is brought back under His control. Triumphs are raised on a million worlds to record the epic deeds of His most powerful champions.

First and foremost amongst these are the primarchs, superhuman beings who have led the Space Marine Legions in campaign after campaign. They are unstoppable and magnificent, the pinnacle of the Emperor’s genetic experimentation, while the Space Marines themselves are the mightiest human warriors the galaxy has ever known, each capable of besting a hundred normal men or more in combat.

Many are the tales told of these legendary beings. From the halls of the Imperial Palace on Terra to the outermost reaches of Ultima Segmentum, their deeds are known to be shaping the very future of the galaxy. But can such souls remain free of doubt and corruption forever? Or will the temptation of greater power prove too much for even the most loyal sons of the Emperor?

The seeds of heresy have already been sown, and the start of the greatest war in the history of mankind is but a few years away...

‘It’s not safe, sir.’

Solomon Voss looked at the face of the soldier who had come running from the clearing edge as the cargo-lifter’s ramp dropped. The rain was falling in thick, vertical lines the colour of milk. The lifter’s engines were still turning. Its turrets pivoted, quad-cannons watching the vegetation line. Stacked globes of pale green plant matter rose in bulging towers. Red needles, the length of a human arm, projected from their sides. The air smelled like honey and medicae-spirit. Somewhere in the not too far distance, the crump of an explosive blast rolled in the air over the drum of the rain. Voss grinned to himself under the brim of his hat – one day when all this was over, he wouldn’t be surprised if he ended up missing places like this.

‘You are my liaison,’ he said to the soldier, picking up his pace to get clear of the landing zone.

‘Major Ulthara, Ramalisian Eighty-Eighth, yes, sir,’ she said, now striding by his side. Milk-white rain was streaming from her rain cowl and cloak. She was very tall, he noticed, narrow features to her face, silver campaign studs bonded to her chin and jawline. A veteran. He watched her eyes moving across the vegetation line.

Behind them, the quartermasters and loading crews had already pulled the supply containers out of the lifter and were hurrying to clear the zone themselves.

‘Where do we pick up the next hop along the line, major?’

‘Sir, it would be best if you re-embarked. The zone is not cleared for civilians.’

‘I am cleared, major,’ he replied, and pulled the data-wand from under his cloak, and held it out to her. She took it, pulled out a data-slate and snapped the wand in place without breaking stride. The screen of the slate lit, fizzed with data, and then became a cascade of cypher runes. She barely blinked, he noted – a hard one this. You did not end up in the forward group of the VII Legion’s First Crusade by being any other way, but even so, it was impressive – the personal cypher seal of Lord Rogal Dorn usually caused at least some reaction.

‘All right,’ she said, and started to stride faster, turning towards where a wall of rockcrete screens rose to enclose a cluster of smaller landing pads. ‘The next move up into the mountains lifts in six minutes, next after that not for another ten hours.’

Voss sped up to keep pace as they turned the corner of one of the screens. Four gunships sat on the metal landing plates. Black and amber yellow, scorch marks dragged down their backs from the rocket pods mounted on their spines. Pale rain drummed on their hunched wings. Ground crew were already snapping access panels shut. Tech-priests and servitors were trying to drone out a machine prayer over the sound of the rain. The first gunship’s engines lit and roared down their attempts at piety.

The major headed for the nearest gunship. Its engines started as they made for it. A figure was suddenly in front of them, towering, the red gaze of its eye-lenses looking down at them, water running from its warplate. Voss snapped his will down on the instinct to run. He had been around the Legiones Astartes countless times, had got used to them to the point that the primal dread they invoked in humans was barely a murmur in his pulse. But every now and again their presence caught him and spun him back to that first time he had looked up at one of the Emperor’s warriors, and known that he was looking at death given form.

He swallowed in a dry throat as the Space Marine held him in its gaze.

‘You are not permitted here,’ it said.

Major Ulthara held up her data-slate. The code cyphers from Voss’ data-cylinder were still flowing across the screen. The warrior took it in with a glance.

‘This is a Legion lift, major, full armament,’ it said. ‘The battle zone is active.’

The engines of another gunship lit. Rain and jet blast buffeted Voss.

‘He needs to get to the Lord Templar,’ said Ulthara, ‘and you have seen the clearance.’

‘I can read and heed the will of my lord, major. It was merely a caution.’

The warrior nodded, turned, and moved to the last gunship. Ulthara and Voss had to jog to keep up with his stride. Voss could see the open belly of the gunship, the huge figures in yellow-and-black armour locked into harnesses inside. A single warrior was moving down the central walkway between the warriors, his back to the open ramp, head bare, slapping his palm against the shoulder guards of those he passed. Voss and the major reached the ramp and climbed up. Helmed heads turned. Behind them the ramp was beginning to shut.

‘What is this?’ came a voice that growled louder than the building shriek of engine power. The bareheaded Space Marine had turned, had looked at them with dark eyes framed by beard and scar tissue. Campaign and command glyphs marked his armour beside a patchwork of dents and scars. A twin-axe device in black sat on his right pauldron, the clenched fist of the Imperial Fists Legion on the other. Ulthara gave a quick salute and began to hold up the data-slate, but the Space Marine was looking at Voss, who found himself smiling despite himself. ‘You had better have an incredibly good reason to be here, poet.’

‘I’m not a poet,’ shouted Voss over the sound of the engines. ‘There is more to wordsmithing than poetry.’

‘So you said before,’ said the Space Marine. He shrugged and grinned. ‘I am still not convinced.’

‘You wouldn’t know the difference between poetry and rhyme anyway,’ shouted Voss.

‘True enough,’ replied the Space Marine with a bark of laughter, before looking at Major Ulthara. ‘Get yourself and the poet strapped in, major. We don’t want a talent like him to take a fall and find he has choked on an overly long word.’

The gunship lurched. Ulthara tugged him to a set of mortal-size harnesses beside the ramp. Voss started to strap himself in, hands finding the fastenings and buckles without having to look. Old habits, built up from a lifetime of observing and recording war from its front lines, sliding back into use. The ramp sealed behind them with a thump. Amber light flooded the compartment.

‘You know Lord Captain Rann?’ said Ulthara, leaning close as the engine noise rose. The gunship rocked as it lifted.

‘That he does,’ said Rann.

Ulthara’s head jerked up, surprised that he had heard her over the din of the engines. Rann was still standing, one hand hooked through a bracket on the ceiling, rocking with the movement of the gunship. He was grinning at them.

‘I knew the Great Solomon Voss when I was just, what, a line warrior on Rennimar? Still a long way to go for me but he was most definitely the “Great” even back then, am I not right, poet?’

‘I would hardly say so,’ shouted Voss in reply.

‘Trust me,’ said Rann to Ulthara. ‘You don’t gain the admiration of the primarch by being less than brilliant. He is a reckless idiot, too, but we all have to have something worth forgiving.’

‘You were on Rennimar?’ asked Ulthara. The gunship was shaking now as it pushed up through the air, G-force squashing Voss back into his harness.

‘Yes,’ said Voss.

Rann’s grin spread. ‘Rennimar, Catraonparis, Nis and a few more. Seen more of war than half the Imperial Army.’ Rann’s dark eyes flicked to Voss. ‘Just had to see one more, eh?’

‘Have to witness the future being made while we still can,’ Voss shouted back with a smile.

‘You say that like you think this is going to end,’ said Rann.

Voss shrugged. ‘Don’t you?’

‘I try not to think too much,’ said Rann, ‘it’s bad for my health.’

Shadows followed Voss as he walked down the length of the cavern. A glow-globe bobbed behind him, clutched by a floating servo-unit. This deep in the mountain, he could barely feel the detonations on the surface. The gunships had come in just ahead of a bomb storm that was sweeping the range. One gunship had taken a direct hit and come into the hangar cavern with its left wing in burning tatters. Voss had noticed the bullet holes and blood marks still on the cavern walls when they disembarked; the Imperial Fists had taken this warren of caves only a day before. In five hours, they would begin an assault on the next tier of mountain peaks. Four days and it would be over, Rann had said. Voss did not doubt it; he had seen the warcraft of the sons of Dorn often enough to know that they did not let their tongues outreach their swords.

Voss paused. Ahead of him, alone in the quiet dark, Sigismund, Lord Templar and First Captain of the Imperial Fists, stood next to a stack of munition crates that formed a makeshift table. Parchment maps and active data-slates sat in neat arrangement, edges and corners aligned. The Lord Templar looked down at the information spread in front of him, his hands crossed behind his back, his posture upright. Only his eyes moved, the light caught in them flickering as they moved over the plans and data laid out in front of him. Voss felt his stride falter. There was a quality of threat to the Lord Templar’s stillness, a pressure wave of force held back.

‘You are the remembrancer,’ said Sigismund.

‘Yes, my lord,’ said Voss, his step dropping back to where it had been.

‘You do not call Captain Rann “lord”,’ Sigismund said, and turned to look at Voss. ‘But you do me?’

‘Yes, lord. I do not know you, and I do not presume.’

Sigismund looked at Voss for a long moment. His face was wide, handsome features pulled across bones and muscles bulked by gene-
craft. There were small scars too, some jagged, others razor fine. An off-white surcoat hung over unadorned yellow armour, edged with black and bearing the obsidian fist of the VII Legion. A sword hung at his back.

‘You do not know me,’ said Sigismund, ‘but we have stood in the same places before, and you have heard of me just as I have heard of you.’ It was as though all the Lord Templar’s being were directed down the line of his gaze. ‘You could have talked to me before, but you did not. You chose to come now. Why?’

Voss swallowed. His throat was dry again. No introductions, no circling or discussion of the current campaign or how Voss had come here – after the first touch of swords, a straight cut to the centre.

‘I have heard that you have said this crusade will never end,’ Voss said, and took a step forwards, pulling out his slate and data-quill.

‘I believe that,’ replied Sigismund.

‘My lord, the Emperor has withdrawn to Terra. Your own Legion goes to join Him. The Imperium’s borders now touch the galaxy’s edge. There are almost no enemies left.’ He paused. Sigismund’s face was still, the touch of any emotion invisible to Voss’ eyes. ‘My lord, the war is ending. All know it, all believe it… except you. I came here because I want to know why.’

Sigismund was quiet for a moment, and then he gestured to a crate for Voss to sit at.

‘Then let me give you an answer,’ he said.

One

FROM DUST

The storm wind breathed across the Ionus Plateau. Summer heat and dry winds had pulled the dust up into the air so that now a layer of cloud lurked on the horizon, flickering with lightning, bruise-dark smudged with ochre. The plain had once been an ocean, or so the story ran. The waters had long since drained away, leaving dust where there had been a seabed and mesas of stone that had been mountains beneath the waves. The tombs of long-dead kings stared down from those mountains at the drift camps at their feet. They were called camps even by those who had been born in them. They were home to the millions that the great war for and against Unity had pushed from the cities and hives to the north and south. Alleys tangled through walls made from scrap and fabric. Smoke rose from cooking fires, along with the cries of the dying and the songs of the living. On and on it went, rolling beyond sight to meet the edge of the world.

This was the land taken by the lost. Even for the despots who hungered for dominion, it was a shunned place. The monarchs who had bored their palaces and tombs into the mountains had left their mark on the land in the form of stories of enchanter kings and tales of ghost voices laughing from the mouths of deserted palaces. It had been an empty place for millennia, but then new armies had marched across the world: gene-wrought armies in skins of metal. Cities became pyres as warlords new and old tried to make new realms or hold on to what they had. Refugees had come to Ionus, first a few and then tens of thousands. They had made homes and had children, and done what humanity does even as the world is falling into fire – they had survived. Now the wars were supposed to be over. From many warlords there had come one who called Himself ‘Emperor’, and He had proclaimed the tattered realms He had conquered not many lands but one. One Imperium.

For the people in the drift camps of Ionus, this new Unity had been neither a blight nor a triumph. As with all the other wars in all the other years, the new peace was a distant irrelevance. Life remained as it had been, balanced on sharp edges, unsoftened in its cruelty. The stories of the old kings of the mountains had become the founding myths of murder gangs that ran the alleys at night with sharp knives and crowns of blades. Spring winds sometimes brought poison from the north. Those of autumn, the smell of the dead left on the mountain slopes for the carrion birds. In winter, ice clotted the gathered dew, and in summer Sol breathed furnace heat and summoned thirst to steal the spit from people’s mouths. There was no change, nor hope, just the certainty of struggle.

Sigismund could taste the storm on his teeth like he was biting copper. He was breathing hard as he twisted down an alley between two shacks. Behind him the cries rose, ululating up into the storm wind. They were close.

He reached the dead end of the alley and looked behind him in time to see a figure come around the corner at a run: wiry muscle and scarred skin dusted with white ash, a mask and crown of jagged metal, bones and skin hung on cords. The blade in the figure’s hand was a hooked smile of plasteel. It was a Corpse King, one of the gangs that hunted and harvested in this part of the drift.

Sigismund jumped up, grabbed on to the edge of the roof, and hauled himself up. He started running, boards shaking under his strides. Ahead of him, a metal pylon jabbed up from the roof into the darkening sky. The storm was a dark wall, curving up from the land into the heavens. Behind him, the Corpse King vaulted up the side of the alley and landed in a crouch. In the distance, the storm spoke. Thunder growled through the air. Lightning sparked in its depths. It was an angry god of a storm.

Sigismund’s eyes caught on a lightning flash, and his stride stuttered. There had been something there in the clouds, glinting in the flare of energy. Another flash, and there it was again, and not just one but several, glinting motes in the roiling murk…

‘Come down to the kingdom!’ shouted his Corpse King. ‘The dead want you!’ The ganger was closing, almost on him. Sigismund kicked his run into a sprint. A second Corpse King climbed onto the roof. She had knives in her hands and finger bones in her hair.

Sigismund reached the pylon and ducked behind it. For a second, he was out of sight of the gangers. He picked out the metal bar he had left propped against the pylon. The first Corpse King came into view at full sprint. The metal bar hit him in the throat, just under the mask. Sigismund slammed the tip of the metal bar into the youth’s chest, and then swung it up into his face. The crude mask mashed into skin and bone, and the ganger was falling, bone fetishes clattering, blood and air gasping from between broken teeth. Sigismund could hear the second Corpse King running across the roof. The one on the floor pushed up, hooked blade in hand. Sigismund slammed the metal bar down once, hard, and brought it up just in time to meet the second murder ganger as she came around the side of the pylon. A blade flashed out towards Sigismund. It was hooked, a polished sliver of scrap, the hilt wound in green-blue plastek and human hair. The cut was fast, but Sigismund was already swinging the metal bar and the Corpse King did not have time to duck back before it crashed into her upper arm. She staggered, crying out, arm dangling. The ganger’s other knife sliced out. He darted back. She was up and coming for him, cursing, stabbing and slashing.

Sigismund had heard from one of the other orphans that there was supposed to be an art to fighting, that warriors in the distant wars knew ways of using blades and guns, and hands and feet to kill and survive. He did not know if that was true, but here, in the drift camps, the only art was being the one left alive.

A blade point slashed across his left forearm. A sharp feeling and then a sudden soft lightness in his legs and gut as the shock slammed through him. Nausea followed in a flood. The knives flashed forwards again. Sigismund swung the bar into the masked face. The Corpse King crumpled, blood dribbling from behind the mask.

Sigismund could feel his hands shaking. There were more running feet pounding the roof. Cries rose. He needed to move. There were many of them, at least twenty, maybe more. Too many. They had come hunting again as though roused by the coming storm. Too many to face all at once. He had learnt that since the first time he had fought. In that first fight, he had got the best of it somehow, sent some down bloody into the dust. The rest had run, the cost suddenly higher than they wanted to pay for the skin of a few orphans. Since then the gangs had come for them repeatedly: the Queens of Hades with their manes of cadaver hair; the Blood Spectres in crude armour dipped in red paint; the Breath Stealers, gasping out strings of rattling noise from tongueless mouths. Most were youths little older than Sigismund; with every winter there seemed to be more, and they always came back. He had learnt: you did not face them together, you faced them one at a time.

He ran to the edge of the roof, jumped, hit the dust, crouched, rolled, and came up running again. Blood was dripping down his left arm, the weight of the metal bar dragging at the right. His chest felt like it was going to explode. He ducked down a half-collapsed opening between two shacks. Running footsteps shook the roof panels above and behind him.

‘Come back, little one!’

Keep going, he needed to keep going. He reached the end of the alley. The space beyond was a wide oblong open to the sky. A charge reservoir sat in the middle of the oil-stained ground. A web of cables stretched from the machinery up to a soar of electro-kites in the sky above. Sparks were already running down the cords. Sigismund ran towards a narrow gap between the charge reservoir and a shack wall. He reached it just as he heard the first of the Corpse Kings reach the opposite roof edge. He did not look around as they dropped down and ran after him. He slowed, just enough. One of the Corpse Kings was just a few strides behind him, a spiked club held in two hands. There was a niche in the wall, made by the poor join between two sheets of rusted metal.

‘You’re ours now!’ the ganger snarled.

Sigismund ducked into the niche in the shack wall, pivoted, and brought the metal bar around. It hit the Corpse King in the gut and folded him in two. Sigismund’s knee met the masked face as it came down. He was not as strong as the ganger, but the falling weight of the Corpse King’s head, and the rising knee, were enough to mash the mask into the face with a crack of bone.

Thunder roared in the ochre-and-iron sky. A tongue of lightning struck one of the electro-kites. The flash of light exploded in Sigismund’s sight. He staggered. The bar dropped from his hand. He could not see. The world was white dancing with neon ghosts. There were cries close by, the sound of someone barrelling towards him. He jumped back almost too late. A sharp point scored across the meat of his left shoulder. The pain jolted through him.

‘The gods of death are coming!’ called a voice from close to him. ‘They have come to choose! They have come to make us live forever!’

He saw something move behind the blur filling his eyes. He lashed a foot out, felt it connect, heard a grunt. He punched his open right hand in the direction of the sound, felt it hit something that felt like hair and the strap of a harness. He grabbed and yanked. The weight of a human body crashed into him. Arms flailed at him. He yanked again and heard the Corpse King slam into the metal of the charge reservoir next to them. He brought his knee up, felt it hit something soft, and then hit again and again, hearing the Corpse King gasping for air. There were shouts in the narrow space, more blurred images moving in the clearing fog. He landed one more knee, then shoved the body away from him and broke into a run. Lightning split the sky above. Thunder rolled, obliterating the sound of cries and feet behind him. He reached a shack wall, found a door and hauled it open.

The space inside was as empty as when he had scouted this route: lengths of rag folded and stacked in a corner, cooking pots made from cast-off munition casings, lumps of blast glass threaded on strings so that they caught the flashes of lightning from the open door. It was a home. Where the people had gone, he did not know; there were more ways to vanish in the drift than there were to live. He slammed the door closed and dropped the bar he had prepared across it. He turned, half stumbling, looking down at his left arm. Clotted blood and dust covered it down to the fingers. He picked up another metal bar he had left waiting and staggered across the shack as something heavy hit the door he had just shut. There was white fog at the edge of his sight. That one on the roof had caught him well, a deeper cut. He was slowing down. He could not slow down. He just needed to keep moving, keep them focused on him.

He pulled up the length of board he had loosened in the shack wall. All the details he had prepared – the route he had run, when he had turned to fight, the bar to close the door, the backup weapons he had left himself – all of it was so that he could face the murder gangers one at a time, on his terms. The gangs that had come the last few times had given up with only a few of their kind lying bloody on the dust, but not tonight. Perhaps it was the storm, perhaps the Corpse Kings had decided to do whatever it took to run him and the others down. No matter the reason, they were not stopping.

He had ducked out of the shack just as the door he had barred gave way. He started to run. The white fog was spreading from the side of his sight. Above him, the storm clouds boiled with lightning. The ground dropped into a slope. He half ran, half tumbled down it. Behind him, the cries of the Corpse Kings rose and vanished in the drumming of the rain and roll of the thunder. He twisted to look back, saw one on the rooftops, then two, then three, more, more than he had ever seen on a hunt. This was not going to go like it had before.

Bright light surrounded him suddenly, pouring from the sky. He ducked and looked up. A shape turned in the air above him. He had seen flying machines before. Sometimes they slid across the sky above, trailing white from their wings. Sometimes they flew lower, and you could hear them chewing the air as they moved. Some looked like grey darts, and others like they were made by people who had heard of birds but never seen one. They were always distant, things of another world that did not touch the dust. This one was closer than he had ever seen before. Rain poured from its block-sided body and wings. Cones of blue-white fire breathed from its flanks. The sound of it shook his flesh down to the bone. He could smell the burning-fuel reek of it over the rain. Gun mounts twitched on its wing tips and snout. Its skin was dark in the storm light. The light shining from its belly held on Sigismund for a second and then flashed up to the rooftops, where the Corpse Kings turned their heads up and howled.

Sigismund did not wait: he turned and began to run, feet sliding in the dust as it became mud. Above, the flying machine shifted across the sky, the beam of its light panning across the shack roofs. Sigismund reached an alley and ducked in as he heard the Corpse Kings’ cries change in pitch. They were coming and he needed to reach the only family he had ever known before they did.

Four blows of thunder shook the sky as he reached the rock. A thumb of old stone, it jutted up from the sea of roofs. A fissure split its side, barely wide enough for a person to crawl into. There, in the cool dark, there was just enough space for a dozen people to lie or crouch, more if they were small. Faces looked up at Sigismund as he squeezed down the gap. Some were young, others had the years, but hunger or cruelty had kept flesh from their bones.

‘Get the light out,’ he said.

‘What’s happening?’ asked Yel, rising to her feet, the blade-tipped pole in her hands.

‘The Corpse Kings are coming,’ he replied. ‘A lot of them. We have to move and move now.’

‘Slowly now,’ said Yel, calmly. Her eyes were steady. Sigismund was suddenly aware that he was shaking. Pain and exhaustion and fear were juddering through him, like power through a charge coil that was about to blow. Yel looked at him, not blinking, waiting, steady. The eyes of the smaller ones in the cave were on them, wide in the light of the flame that rose from a rag lamp. He could feel their tension, the tense instincts that had kept them alive this long in a place that ate the alone and the lost. They were all looking at him and Yel and Coroban, the eldest three, all waiting. He forced his breath to slow and stilled the instincts that were screaming at him to shout and run.

‘You’re bleeding,’ said Coroban, moving up beside them, jerking his head at Sigismund’s left arm.

‘One of them snagged me,’ he said.

‘I should have gone with you,’ said Coroban.

‘You’re not fast enough,’ said Sigismund.

‘Neither were you,’ said Coroban. Sigismund almost smiled. Coroban was bigger than him, just as tall, but thicker in limb. He had come out of one of the techno-domains to the south and still had the remains of shackle-plugs in his spine and skull. Whatever had happened to him, he had got out alone, and made it to Ionus. Not fast, but strong. He had broken the skulls of three gangs who decided they wanted the meat off his bones, but he was too slow for the running fight that Sigismund fought. They had agreed on that after they had both nearly died. So, Sigismund led the hunters in a dance and the others held the line, the best chance of survival if he failed. It had worked, too. Until now.

‘Is the route north open?’ asked Yel.

Sigismund shook his head, blinked. A hammer beat of pain and nausea was rolling inside his skull.

‘I don’t know. There are flying machines, too. They came with the storm.’

‘Flying machines?’

‘Hovering low. Tracing the ground with lights, like they are watching. They had guns.’

‘The war’s come,’ said Coroban.

‘We go west,’ said Yel.

‘That’s towards the mountains,’ said Sigismund. They all knew what he meant. The mountain tombs and ruined palaces were the haunts of the gangs. If they went towards them…

‘There will be fewer of them,’ said Yel. ‘If they are hunting then they won’t be watching their own patch. And if the war has come then I’d rather take my chances in the ghost caves than down here.’

Sigismund did not answer.

‘You know I am right,’ said Yel after a moment.

He looked around, at the eyes fixed on them.

‘Where are we going?’ asked Siv. The boy was new. They had found him walking on his own on one of the dust paths to the south. He had been clutching a piece of parchment that he refused to let go of, and neither he nor any of the others could read. No tears then, and none now, just a stillness that came from expecting nothing that was here now to be there in the next moment. Sigismund knew the look. It was his own.

‘You are going somewhere safer than here,’ he said, holding Siv’s gaze, before looking back at Yel and Coroban.

‘You will have to go now,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how close they are or how long I can distract them.’

He began to move towards the way out.

‘Come with us,’ said Coroban, and he put his hand on Sigismund’s shoulder to stop him. ‘They will kill you.’

Sigismund looked around at Coroban and then at Yel and back at the other orphans of the drift, still listening, still watching. He thought of Thera, the eldest of the orphans when he was small. In his memory, he saw her touching her forehead to the piece of metal she called a weapon and going out to face the killers in their ragged crowns. She had stood up and never come back, but he and others had lived.

‘I stay,’ he said.

Coroban shook his head, but Sigismund was already working his way back up the gap in the rock, pulling the metal bar with him in his good hand.

He found his first Corpse King barely two hundred paces from the bolthole in the rock. The ganger was moving across an open patch of ground that was becoming a swamp, his head turning. He did not see Sigismund until he was just an arm’s reach away. The Corpse King flinched back, but the metal bar crashed into his shoulder, and then his legs. He fell. Spray showered up from the boards of the shack roof. Sigismund looked down at him. The ganger was writhing, trying to move with broken bones. Sigismund stood above him, looked up. In the distance he could see the light of one of the flying machines. Then lightning whipped across the belly of the clouds, turning the world blinding silver. The rain was pouring down him. Drops exploded in the sea of mud at his feet.

‘I am here!’ he shouted as the thunder roar faded. ‘If your dead kings want me, then come and get me!’ The ganger at his feet screamed – maybe a warning, maybe a cry of pain.

Sigismund saw a masked figure come to the edge of the roof next to the open ground. Another joined it and then another, and then a crowd of them were vaulting and swinging down. They did not come at him but spread out in a ragged crescent, wary.

Sigismund watched them. The blood in his veins was beating a roll of thunder that filled his ears. He could taste metal and bile. He tried to push the sensation down even as he felt it reach through his nerves to shake his fingers on the metal bar in his grip.

The crowd of Corpse Kings watched. The rain poured down them, pulling the white dust from their skin. Masks and crowns glinted in the flash of lightning. Some of them held knives, others switched their grips on hooked blades and spiked clubs.

‘The lords of death watch us, little one,’ called a taller figure who stepped from the half-circle. Teeth glinted on cords around his neck. A mask of blue plastek and battered metal covered his face. His chest was bare and gaunt, but muscle moved under the taut skin. He held a club capped with a ball of black metal in a crude echo of the statues of the dead monarchs that filled the tombs in the mountains. This was a leader. Sigismund could tell that from the way the others pulled back and waited, listening. ‘There are angels watching from the storm. They have come to pick those who will live forever. Your blood and bone will pay my crossing into the land of ghosts.’

Sigismund did not reply but raised the metal bar, fighting to hold it steady as he touched it against his forehead. He closed his eyes for a moment. He thought of Yel, and Coroban, and Siv, and the others running towards whatever safety they could find.

‘Look at you,’ called the Corpse King. ‘You have hurt a lot of us, but we cannot die. We rule death, and you are ours now, little one.’ The leader took a slow step forwards, the club resting on his shoulder, a long blade loose at his side. ‘We will find your friends, too. We know they have run. We will find them. A few might like to take a crown from us, eh? Live as kings…’

A flash of lightning, and the Corpse King lashed forwards. The club whirled. Sigismund just managed to jump out of reach of the swing. The tall leader half stumbled on his comrade still lying in the mud where Sigismund had planted him. Sigismund brought his metal bar up above his head and swept it down. The leader ducked back and swung his blade in a hacking arc that whistled through the air. The crowd were a blur of smeared crowns and masks beyond the rain.

The Corpse King stepped back to swing. Sigismund rammed the tip of the bar forwards. It was not a strong blow, but it was fast, and it punched into the leader’s mask. Blue plastek shattered. The ganger staggered. Sigismund wrenched the bar back and hammered it down. The leader tried to get his arm up, but the bar whistled as it crashed into the side of his head. The crude crown broke, and the ganger was falling, blood scattering into the mud and falling rain.

Sigismund almost fell as the weight of the blow pulled him over. In his ears he could hear a high ringing. The crescent of Corpse Kings seemed still, frozen as the moment fell from past to future. Sigismund felt the breath sucking into his lungs. The moment pooled, gathering in the exploded second of raindrops hitting the ground.

The Corpse Kings charged. Howls tore from their lips. Sigismund swung just in time to meet a ganger with a copper mask. Then another was on him and he swung again, half blind. He hit nothing, but the figures in masks jumped back and he had an instant to swing the bar up over his head. They surged in. He whipped the bar around in a circle. The tip caught one on the side of the head and they went down, dropping like a broken doll. He whirled, using the bar’s weight in place of strength, and slammed it into another. Bones broke, and a crowned figure was falling, screaming.

He might have stood a chance. He was fast and knew how to use his weight. He had lived through fights like this before. But there were more of them than there had been then. Many more. And these false kings of cruelty would not run when they started to bleed. They believed that gods or angels of the dead were watching to claim them. They would not stop. No matter how many of them he sent down to the mud. He was going to end, hacked down, and beaten to bloody meat.

Pain exploded in his left leg, and he was falling. One of the Corpse Kings had got behind him and swung a club into his knee. He felt a scream batter at his lips as he bit them shut. The Corpse Kings howled and surged in. The one who had taken his leg out pulled his club back to swing it into his head.

Somebody came out of the rain and cannoned into the Corpse King, felling the ganger. The figure had hold of the club it had wrenched from the ganger’s hand and brought it up and down in a crushing arc. Lightning flashed and Sigismund saw Coroban whirl the club of the youth he had just killed and slam it into the centre of the next nearest mask. The Corpse Kings recoiled, shocked. Sigismund could feel pain and weakness dragging at him like dead hands pulling him down into the mud.

‘Why?’ gasped Sigismund.

‘Came to find you,’ said Coroban. ‘Could not let you do this alone.’

Sigismund rammed his bar into the ground and forced himself up beside his friend as the Corpse Kings charged. A blade scored a red line across Coroban’s shoulder. Sigismund braced himself against the bigger youth’s back and swung his weapon into the face of the nearest ganger. Coroban hit again and again, and two more went down. The masked faces were circling now. They wanted the kill, wanted the bones of these orphans who had stood against them. All they needed to do was wait and let exhaustion do its work. It was always that way with cruelty, Sigismund knew – it did not have to sacrifice, or struggle; it had only to be patient.

‘You should have…’ began Sigismund, fighting for breath. ‘You should have stayed with the others.’

‘No,’ was all Coroban said. Sigismund noticed a ripple in the circle of gangers, as muscles tensed. ‘You have stood for us alone enough times.’

A ganger with a pair of serrated knives leapt forwards.

Thunder and light filled the air.

The Corpse King came apart.

Sigismund’s eyes clamped shut as a hot blast wave slammed into him. He stumbled. His sight was shattered neon, his head ringing. He pushed up. Coroban was shouting something. The Corpse Kings were running and there was something lying in the mud, blown-open ribs and bits of meat, and now he could hear Coroban shouting, and knew that his friend was terrified. He was shouting in the half techno-tongue of his birth, calling for help, for protection, for whatever neglected gods or spirits of his birth to hear him now.

Death was walking towards them through the rain. It was the grey of storm clouds, clad in curved plates. Two eyes burned red in a face like the ram on a land train. It was huge, too huge. The rainwater exploded from its shoulders. A sword sat at its waist and a gun sat in its right hand. Its movement shook with smooth power, each step a threat. The image of it hammered into Sigismund’s eyes and mind, filling them, crushing everything that was not an almost overwhelming instinct to run. It closed with them, unhurried, inevitable, death given form.

Coroban was still shouting, body shaking as though the storm charge were flowing through him. Sigismund felt something shift inside him, something that let him move his limbs. He yanked Coroban’s arm.

‘Run!’ he shouted. Coroban’s eyes were locked on the giant in the storm. Sigismund yanked his arm again. ‘Run! Go after the others and keep running!’

Coroban’s eyes focused.

‘You–’ he began.

‘I can’t run. It wants a life. I will stand. You run, run and keep the rest alive.’

‘You can’t–’

‘Go!’ Sigismund shouted, and shoved the big youth. Coroban barely moved, but his eyes met Sigismund’s and he nodded; and then he was running, trailing his own blood into the mud.

Sigismund turned to face Death. It was almost on him. He noticed the lightning bolts set on its chest. Lightning bolts and a bird head with a hooked beak.

He tried to hold himself still. The pain in his limbs was distant now, not gone but unimportant, discarded in the mud.

Death took a last step and stopped in front of him. A buzzing purr vibrated from the giant. Sigismund could feel an ache in his teeth and eyes. Slowly, he tried to raise the crude metal bar that was his weapon. Death tilted its head, and then a growl filled the air. It took a moment for Sigismund to understand that the sound was a chuckle.

Light suddenly filled Sigismund’s world. Noise hammered him, and for an instant he thought that this spectre had called the storm down on him. Then the flying machine came in low, white light stabbing down from its nose, the rain shredding into mist in the downdraught from its engines. It hung above them, as Death looked at Sigismund.

‘We have come for you,’ it said.

‘You did not want to be a warrior of the Legions?’ asked Voss. He looked up from his data-slate at the Lord Templar.

‘No,’ said Sigismund.

‘Did you know the Legions existed?’

‘No.’

‘There were many like you recruited in the early days of the Crusade, not knowing what they would become.’

‘Taken,’ said Sigismund. ‘We were not recruited. We were taken.’

Voss blinked, nodded, and made a note, finding himself relieved to be looking back down at the green script glowing on the screen of his data-slate. He had been creating as the conversation progressed, taking rapid notes, jotting ways of framing or realising the narrative as he went. What narrative, though? If he was honest, he had expected less, maybe something blunt and direct in answer to his question. This was… It was odd, these were not points told to illustrate or justify an answer given. Nor were they random – he could tell that already. What he was getting was precise – as though the Lord Templar was laying out a lesson a link at a time. It did not feel like a justification. It felt like a journey.

‘You did not know that this was what you were going to become when you were taken. If you had known, would you have gone willingly?’

‘No,’ said Sigismund.

Two

REBORN

Later, he would only remember the dreams that came to him. They took him up into the sky. He tried to fight, but the giants in grey dragged him into the mouth of the flying machine as it hovered low over the ground. Then the white fog at the edge of his sight, which had been forming ever since he was cut on the rooftop, billowed across his vision and the world slipped from his grasp before he could hold on to it.

The dreams that came to him were cruel. Figures in white rags with jagged crowns marched into the distance. Their hands hung at their sides, red to the elbow. Chains clinked on their feet. He followed. Blood dripped from the fingertips of the figure in front of him, pattering on the white floor. He wondered why he was following and tried to turn to look behind him.

‘Why did you go?’

The voice stopped him as he made to turn. He knew the voice but was not sure how. Was it Siv? Coroban? Yel? Maybe…

The line of figures in front of him had halted.

‘You said you would stop them finding us,’ said the figure in front of him. It was still facing away. The voice was different. Thera? One of the others? The figure’s crowned head dipped, shoulders rounding and shaking. ‘Why did you go?’

He opened his mouth to speak and reached out a hand to the slumped shoulders. His hand was crimson. The weeping figure turned. It had holes for eyes and the flayed face of Coroban stretched across its metal mask.

‘They came for you, but you were gone,’ said the voice, and then the line of figures in white rags were not in front of him but all around him, red hands dripping, staring at him with faces peeled off the past: Thera, Siv, Yel and all the others. ‘They took us instead.’

He woke.

He tried to stand, tried to reach for a weapon. His limbs did not move. For an instant he struggled. Then he noticed the restraints looping over his arms, torso and legs. He went still, aware of the angled sheet of metal at his back, and the tubes attached to his arms and neck by needles. He was in a room of humming machines. Figures in gloss-grey bodysuits and bulbous helmets moved between banks of screens. The smell of chemicals filled the air, thick and alien.

A woman stood directly in front of him. Yellow tinged the whites of her eyes, and her skin had the look of something pulled and stretched over the bones beneath. Wrinkles gathered at the edges of her cheeks, and folds of skin hung from her neck. Twin lines of buttons ran down the front of a white uniform with a stiff collar. Crusted, dark red spots flecked her right sleeve. She tilted her head, eyes moving from Sigismund’s gaze to a beeping screen bolted to the frame beside his head. He noticed that the right side of her skull was a metal plate.

‘That’s it…’ she said. ‘Good… Immediate, aggressive fight response, but then a shift to situational awareness and threat assessment. Excellent instinctive bio-emotional control.’ She leaned closer. A fine machine arm of chromed metal unfolded from her shoulder and settled a thick lens over her right eye. ‘Sensory response good. Little or no damage to nervous system from chem-infusion coma. Do you remember how you came here?’

For a second, he did not realise the question was for him.

Remember… He remembered the image of Death walking out of the rain, and the flying machine pouring light down on him, and then…

He clenched his jaw shut and held his gaze steady on the woman.

Her mouth twitched.

‘Eye movement and pupil dilation indicate cognitive recall but a negative response to command. To be expected.’ She leaned in a little closer. Sigismund caught a scent on her breath, something sugary and acidic that made him think of burning plastek and refuse. ‘We repaired you a bit – basic wound treatment, sanguinary infusions. Even a little nutrient building. Give you a fighting chance. Can’t have the meat go into the grinder already broken.’ She stepped back, still smiling. The arm holding the lens to her right eye folded back onto her shoulder. ‘Move this one to assessment. Initial physiological and behaviour assessed as the seventh category. Also, tag for non-compliant behaviour.’

A figure in a domed helmet stepped up next to Sigismund. There were no features to its faceplate besides a glowing blue band at eye level. The figure slammed an open hand up under Sigismund’s jaw and pushed his head up. He strained to resist, but the hand holding his head felt like there was iron inside its gloss-black glove. The other hand brought up a device that looked like a pistol with a barrel of barbed needles. The figure held it up, steadied its tip a handspan from Sigismund’s neck and pulled the trigger. The device slammed into Sigismund’s neck. Pain exploded through the inside of his skin. He kept his mouth clamped shut. The woman was still watching him, still smiling.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘definitely seventh category.’

The helmed figure pressed a control on the frame holding Sigismund, and he fell forwards as the restraints holding him released with a pneumatic snap. The tubes and injector needles ripped out of his arms. He tried to spring up, to run, to grab a weapon and get free, but his body was dull, his movements slow, as though his limbs did not yet belong to him. His fingers found the place on his neck where the device had punched in. He felt a circular plug of metal, sitting tight to his skin.

‘Try to rip that out and you will take most of your throat with it,’ said the woman. ‘Won’t take long to bleed out after that.’ Sigismund could see that the room extended away to either side of where he had hung on the frame. The racks to the right of his were empty, but filled with bodies on his left. Some were moving, twitching or straining in their harnesses; others were still, their eyes closed. Most had tubes in their arms.

The woman began to walk away, down the line to the next rack. Its occupant was unmoving, his eyes shut. The woman keyed a set of controls attached to the rack, and the tubes running to the youth’s arms jerked as milk-white liquid pulsed through them. The youth’s eyes flickered open. The woman’s mouth pursed. The chrome arm unfolded from her shoulder to hold the lens in front of her eye as she yanked the youth’s eyelids wide. She stepped back, hissed through her teeth, and held out a hand without looking around. The figure in the domed helm placed a thick cylinder in her grasp.

‘Log failure to respond correctly to chem-infusions,’ she said, and pressed the cylinder against the youth’s head. There was a wet thump and the eyes closed. The woman stepped back, fresh flecks of bright red on her sleeve beside the darker, dry spots.

Another figure in the same domed helm reached down, gripped Sigismund’s ankle and began to drag him across the glossy floor towards a metal door he had not noticed before. As it opened and he was pulled through, he could hear the woman’s voice follow him, the words a fading drone sliding into the distance.

‘Immediate aggressive response not diminishing, log as probable twelfth type…’

He was left on the floor in a room of metal. He pulled himself up and tried to reach the door before it slammed shut. His limbs were still numb and slow, and locks clattered into place as his fist hit the scuffed metal of the door. He rested his forehead against it, gasping.

‘Light of the sun, what have they found now?’

A ripple of laughter turned his head. The metal room was a bare box. A set of heavy blast doors filled the wall opposite. Yellow and black chevrons marked the toothed crack along which the doors would open. Bright, blue-white light came from grilles in the ceiling. A dozen or more youths stood or sat. No two were alike: smaller, larger, heavily muscled, gaunt, pale skin and dark. He noticed that all looked of the same age. He felt his numb muscles tense, ready.

‘Edgy,’ observed the one who had spoken before. He was tall, smooth skin over even muscle. Silver-blue hair spilled down the right side of a narrow face. A single neat scar crossed his left cheek. His eyes were green and sharp, and the smile on his lips reminded Sigismund of a felid baring its teeth. ‘Do you understand speech, feral-boy?’

Sigismund did not reply. His eyes were moving to the rest of the youths in the room. They did not look unified, but all of them looked dangerous. The possibility for sudden violence bled off them like heat off a fire. He could feel the numbness in his muscles fading, his head clearing. There was pain, but that did not matter. He would be able to fight if he needed to.

‘Do you speak?’ sneered the youth with the scar, still smiling.

‘Stop.’ One of the youths at the edge of the room. He was big, long limbed. Bright, blue tattoos of beasts half feline, half eagle dotted his umber skin.

‘Just seeing what the latest competition is.’ The scarred youth with silver-blue hair shrugged, still looking at Sigismund. ‘This is a competition, you know. Not everyone is going to get through what happens next. Not everyone is going to survive what happens next.’

‘And you will make it?’ asked another youth with acid brands on his forearms and green-dyed stubble on his scalp. The youth with the scar shrugged again.

‘That’s not in question. The question is which of you will get through, too?’ A few of the others looked at the youth. ‘How many of you even know what this is? I wager feral-boy over here has less idea about that than he has about how not to defecate on the floor. We are here for the new Emperor’s Legions. We are being sorted, assessed, categorised and evaluated. If we pass, we are remade, reborn. Fail, and you won’t even be a smear of blood on a boot.’

‘And you want that, high-born?’ asked the youth with blue tattoos.

‘I was given to this process. I am a gift from my family to the new Imperium.’

‘Great way to take out the waste,’ said the one with the burn scars, looking up. His eyes were pale grey, his skin the ashen white of grave dust. A few others laughed. The high-born youth opened his mouth to say something but was cut off. ‘You scared, high-born? That why you talk so much? I mean, you look the part, but what is that on your face? Is it supposed to be a blade scar?’

‘You gutter discharge,’ snarled the youth with the scar, and he took a step forward. Sigismund noticed the muscles shift in the youth’s back, ready to snap him forwards. The one with the acid brands still sat on the floor, arms resting on his knees, palms down.

‘Did your family pay for you to get a cut, eh? A little mark of war to wear with a nice piece of jewellery. Did it hurt? Did you cry?’

The high-born youth surged forwards, fists and muscles bunching. The one with the acid brands came off the floor like a released spring. The sharpened splinter of metal he had been hiding in his hand punched up towards the high-born’s ribs. The youth’s eyes began to widen as he realised what had happened and that there was nothing he could do to stop it.

Sigismund rammed into the youth with the acid burns, his hands gripping the hand holding the spike. The other youth was strong, Sigismund realised, much stronger than his thin frame suggested, strong enough to rip his weapon free and cut Sigismund down and then stab whoever else he liked. For this shocked, stumbling instant, though, the youth was off balance. Sigismund twisted the arm holding the shiv and rammed the sliver of sharpened metal up into the youth’s torso. The youth gasped, suddenly still. Shock flooded his eyes. His mouth worked. Then the blood came, spilling from his mouth as he collapsed. Sigismund looked down at him, knelt and closed his eyes. When he stood it was to a room full of eyes staring at him.

The dark-skinned youth with the bright tattoos moved over and bent down, peering at the shiv still protruding from under the dead youth’s ribs. He looked at the high-born.

‘He was going to gut you,’ he said. ‘Needle you to attack, and then you would have been gasping through your own blood on the deck. I didn’t even see that he had a spike. Anyone else?’ He looked around the watching eyes. No one answered. He looked at Sigismund then. ‘Sacred water of the lost rivers, but that was fast.’ Sigismund did not say anything but turned away. ‘Looks like you owe the feral-boy your breath, high-born.’

The youth with the scarred face glanced up at Sigismund. There was fear in that glance, fear and anger.

‘Get away from me,’ he spat, and turned his back. Sigismund moved past him and sat against a wall, looking at no one but watching them all. The blood was drying on his fingers.

The chevroned doors opened. Figures in mirror visors and heavy grey armour poured in, shock batons in their hands.

‘Up! Up!’ shouted an amplified voice. ‘Through now! Run!’

He never saw the high-born youth again, nor any of the others who had been in the chamber with him. They were mixed with hundreds of others, broken into groups, and pooled and divided again, herded through passages and doors until Sigismund found himself shivering in a canyon between walls of crushed wreckage and broken rubble. Ice sheeted the floor and freezing liquid fell from the starless dark above.

‘If you find the door and go through before the cut-off, you eat,’ shouted a booming voice from a hovering mass of sensor lenses and vox-speakers. Sigismund looked up, but the floating mass was already rising up into the air. Then some of the others began to run forwards into the narrow passages. A second later, Sigismund heard the howls of beasts close by and began to run too.

He did not reach the door in time. He lived but did not eat. Then it began again. He realised those that had started running as soon as the vox voice had stopped talking were those that had made the runs before. The next time, he was one of them. He never made it to the door at the other end of the maze in time. He began to wonder if anyone did. He kept trying, even as the hunger and fatigue pulled him down and down into a place where he was not sure if he was still alive or if this was just the last seconds of life playing out in his head.

Eventually it just stopped. They fed him then – grey blocks of paste that tasted of chem. They let him rest.

Then they started to try and kill him again. They tried exhaustion, running him through the gaps between the heaped wreckage and spires of stone, running without end, chased by a cacophony of screams and howls. On and on without a goal or a promise of rest and only the shock batons of the visored figures. Others broke, collapsing, unable to go further. Some turned and began to run back the way they had come. Sigismund did not see what happened to them.

The nights and days vanished. He would wake in a cell too small for him to lie down, then in an echoing chamber filled with light so bright that he could not open his eyes without being blinded. Numbers droned at him out of speaker grilles. He would reach the end of a chase and someone would shout a string of words at him. The first two times he did not reply. Cold water and ice and hunger and more darkness and blinding light and the droning voices. The third time, something clicked in the fogged depths of his mind and he replied to the shouted words with a string of numbers. The cycles of light and dark and exhaustion ended. They hooked him up to machines again. Fluid was pumped into his blood as he hung on a metal frame. They let him sleep. He began to wonder if he was keeping going to get back to the world of the living, or to reach the land of the dead.

He woke at last to discover that Death had returned to find him. The giant had taken its face of iron off. It had green eyes, and features that looked almost like a human’s. Its armoured skin was grey splashed with white on its shoulders. A man in a cyan uniform stood beside the giant, fingers moving over a glowing data-slate.

‘Physical and cognitive assessments are in the higher margins,’ said the man, without looking up from the scrolling data. ‘A degree of resistance to psycho-infusion precursors, but within the realm of tolerance. No psychic-potentia indicators. Assessment confirmed as suitable for progression to initial implantation.’

‘Type confirmation?’

‘Most measures and assessments confirm to the initial categorisation into the seventh type,’ replied the man.

‘And the measures that don’t conform?’ asked Death, his eyes steady on Sigismund’s.

‘Psychological and physical markers of the twelfth and sixteenth categories, and a lone marker of the nineteenth type,’ said the man. ‘All within tolerance for compatibility.’

Death stepped closer. He smelled of oil and something that reminded Sigismund of spice burning on the winter fires in the drift camps. He felt his skin prickle and the instinct to try and run coil in his guts.

‘Acceptable,’ said Death after a long moment.

They gave him a new heart on Luna. It would not be until later that he realised that he had left Terra for the first time. There was just another journey, first up and out through a labyrinth of chambers and corridors to a landing platform on the side of a mountain under a star-filled night sky. A flying machine the size of the largest building he had ever seen sat on the platform. They had given him a suit of rubberised fabric stamped with helical symbols and number codes that he could not read. There were more like him, blocks of youths, moving forwards to the open doors in the side of the machine.

More of the giants stood beside it and in the open doors. Sigismund noticed that each of them wore sections of white on their armour, but that no two were alike. The grey of their armour was different, as if the colour conformed to a principle but not to an exactness. The right arm of one was red from shoulder to fingers, another was slashed with scars of darker grey and white. They watched the youths with glowing eyes.

Sigismund felt the ice-cold air hit his face and looked at the jagged rocks and snow running to the horizon. He wondered how far it was to the drift camps, to Yel and the others. He had waited and endured for a chance to break free, and here it was, freedom waiting in that black horizon.

He moved towards the edge of the platform, watching for a chance to drop down onto the snowy slope beneath. One of the giants had moved to stand between him and the edge, then. It had not looked at him directly, but Sigismund felt as though it knew what he intended, and then before there was a chance to look for another way they were moving to the machine. They had strapped themselves into harnesses as the machine began to roar and vibrate. The doors had closed. The machine lurched, and he felt the vibration of flight, but then there had been sudden quiet, and the weight had vanished from his body.

When they landed again, the doors of the machine had opened onto a cavern of smooth, dark stone with curved walls and a roof closed by a great iris of metal leaves. The first step he took sent him bounding away across the space, and when he landed he felt as though the ground might release its grip on him at any moment.

They took him to a room like the inside of an egg. The walls were mirror smooth. Circular pools of water sat in the floor. Very tall figures in liquid black bodysuits and grey robes slid forwards and sprayed him with a fine mist that smelt of chems. The mist was cool on his skin. They darted away from him, and he noticed that they moved on sprung black stilts.

Two women held back, one milk pale in a grey robe with chromed hair. The second had a face of silver, and tubes wound across the slick coating of her bodyglove. Traces of polished metal gauze hung from her, twitching even though the air was still. She was floating half a metre off the floor Sigismund realised, and when she came towards him it was as though she were sliding through deep water. The silver of her mask gleamed in the low light.

‘The gods of death are coming,’ called the voice of the Corpse King in his memory. ‘They have come to choose. They have come to make us live forever!’

He looked around but he could see no door now, not even the door he had come through. The giant in grey and white stood directly behind him. Anger and fear uncoiled in him. There was no way out, no way back. He was going to end here and there was no way back.

The giant in grey pushed him forwards. There was not much force in it, but Sigismund could feel the strength of a mountain slide behind the touch. He whirled, dived to get past the giant. A fist closed around his neck and yanked him off the floor. He kicked and clawed, thrashing even as he felt the armoured fingers dig into the meat of his neck and spine. He was looking into the giant’s eyes, red in its helm of white.

‘You will comply,’ it growled.

‘Put him down,’ said a female voice. The grip on Sigismund’s neck did not lessen. ‘True compliance is not won by threat. Put him down.’

The grip lessened then, and Sigismund tumbled to the stone floor, gasping. The woman in the silver mask floated to his side and put her hand under his arm before he could react, and pulled him to his feet.

‘You have known suffering,’ she said, and Sigismund was surprised to hear a note of sympathy in the voice. Her face was a mask, he realised, the eyelids sculpted shut as though in serene sleep. ‘I can see it. I am sorry, but there will be more pain now and more after, and then…’ The woman nodded. ‘You are not to be children of kindness, and your rebirth shall not be kind. For this, too, I am sorry.’ She reached out a hand and touched his cheek; he flinched back from the cold touch. ‘Unkind offspring for the last days of an age of ignorance. At least that is what the Master of Terra says, that is the hope that makes this pain have meaning.’ She let her hand drop and turned away, floating towards a circular stone table. ‘What is your name, son of Terra?’

He hesitated, as though speaking his name would be giving up a part of himself that he had been fighting to keep hold of, a part of him that would find a way out of this underworld of monsters and witches.

‘Sigismund,’ he said.

‘An old name… I am Heliosa.’ She indicated the other woman in the grey robe. ‘And this is my daughter, Andromeda – the sixteenth to bear the life of that name. Old names… We are all bearers of history, Sigismund, did you know that? Every life carries the past into the future. There is within all humans a principle of the universal trying to express itself. For some, it never gets a chance to surface. For others, it remakes them.’

She raised a hand and a spider of silvered metal blades glided down from the darkness above. Sigismund noticed the grooves and channels that ran across the stone table, and down its sides to the mirror pools of water in the floor.

‘We are going to do something terrible to you, Sigismund. Many, most in fact who undergo this transmutation, do not survive. You may not survive, though something tells me you won’t let that be the case if you can help it, and for my part I hope you live. I do not perform these rites on most of the aspirants that are brought here, but I will with you… If you will allow it.’

‘Matriarch Heliosa–’ growled the giant in grey, but the woman called Andromeda stepped forwards.

‘This will be as the Matriarch wishes,’ she said. ‘He shall have this choice, and unless you wish us to stop manufacture of your breed, you will be silent.’

The giant shook its head but said no more. There was anger in that silence.

Sigismund looked at Heliosa. In his mind he was half wondering if he was delirious with hunger or fever, the stories of the underworld and the guardians that stood at the gates of life and death playing out in a last dream before the end.

‘I have a choice?’ he asked.

‘There is always a choice,’ said Heliosa. ‘Even if the alternative is to die, that is a choice. To go on, to survive, to have the possibility of becoming – that is a choice, too.’

‘What will I become?’ he asked.

‘What do you think you will become?’ she said.

‘One of them,’ he said, jerking his head at the giant.

‘If you survive the process, yes, you will be one of them – one of the Legiones Astartes of the Emperor of Terra.’

‘I do not know what that means,’ he said.

‘What do you fear it means, Sigismund?’

‘A thing of the dark sent to pray on the living.’

Heliosa laughed then, briefly, coldly.

‘A worthy fear,’ she said. ‘I cannot say that you will not become that, but I can tell you that this will not make you what you fear. If you do, or if you become something greater, or become nothing, that will be as it must be.’

She held her hand out to the stone table beneath the spider of blades.

Sigismund glanced at the giant, and then climbed onto the table. The stone was cold against his back. He looked up at the blades suspended above him. Something coiled around his arms and legs, clinching tight. He heard water begin to run. Above him, the silver spider limbs clicked.

‘We will begin,’ said Heliosa. Sigismund nodded, and the blades flashed down.

He rose from the pool of memories to the sound of his second heart beating in his chest. He came to his feet fast, hand going to the staples and cauterised flesh running down the middle of his chest.

‘Alive, no doubt about that,’ came a voice.

There were eyes looking at him – two sets of eyes each in a different face, one thin and dark, the other with a knot of ugly scars winding down its cheek and temple and mouth, which shifted to a grin as Sigismund blinked at it.

‘Does he talk I wonder, or does that come later?’

The room was small and metal and reeked of human sweat and stale air. Gone was the smooth black-grey stone of Luna. Gravity pulled at him as he moved. The memories of the drift camp and the storm still felt as though they were about to flood back into his eyes.

‘Hypno-dazed,’ said the one with the thin face. ‘They had him immersed for a long time.’

‘All the way from Solar, I am guessing,’ said the one with the smile.

Sigismund did not answer but he could feel the words attaching to knowledge in his thoughts that he did not know he had. Hypno-knowledge-infusion, also called hypno-indoctrination – the process by which a subject, suitably chem-conditioned, can assimilate fundamental knowledge by a non-active process. Subject casualty rate twenty-three point four per cent.

‘Vivid memory recall and dreaming,’ said the thin face. ‘As the brain tissue realigns to accommodate added information layers. Many subjects lose the ability to dream altogether. Other subjects lose portions of prior memories. A small number–’

‘–of subjects lose all identity formed prior to hypno-infusion.’ Sigismund completed the phrase.

‘Well, that confirms that they are dosing us with the same material,’ said the aspirant with the smile and scar.

Aspirant. The term made Sigismund blink as the thought including it formed. He blinked again, looking at his hands and the muscle already thickening on his forearms. He knew that it was the result of the implants given to him on Luna, the first-phase organs of his transformation, of his rebirth into something that would not be truly human any more. He felt other layers of recalled information bubbling up inside him. They must have shipped him off after only the first stages of the process and poured hypno-knowledge into his skull as the ship carrying him crossed the stars.

‘I am Sigismund,’ he said, looking up at the other faces.

‘This is Geldoran,’ the one with the smile said, jerking his head at the other. ‘And I am called Fafnir Rann.’

The cannon-round hit the kill-servitor in its central mass. It blasted backwards, hit the metal wall, and sprang at Sigismund. He fired again, another blast boring into the servitor’s core. It slammed back, spasming, steel scorpion tail thrashing. A second servitor leapt around the corner, blade hands and feet digging into wall and ceiling. Sigismund brought his gun up, fast, but not fast enough. The kill-servitor reached with its long, dead-flesh arms. A cannon-round hit it in the head. It tumbled, blood pouring from where its metal mask had mashed into the meat and skull beneath.

He heard Geldoran’s snarl of triumph at the shot but did not look around at the other aspirant. The instinct of the lone survivor held his focus on himself alone. He slammed his foot onto the servitor’s neck, pinning it, and fired into the remains of its head, then swung his gun up and put another shot into the one that was scrabbling on the deck. He went forwards, around the corner, towards the drone howls of the rest of the oncoming servitors, stripped the magazine from the gun and snapped a fresh one into place in a fluid movement.

The servitors were already waiting, coiled against the walls. They had been built from human stock, or at least partially, but cybernetic and flesh work had cracked their spines and set their joints so that they could run on four limbs like a feline, or bound like a spring-legged ape. Metal encased their skulls and the plugs for electro-goads dotted their backs. Portions of their brain tissue had been excised and nested into their chest and lower torso. A single kill-shot to the head would slow but not kill them; for that you needed to obliterate them utterly. On top of that, they were fast, difficult to kill and acted with a vicious cunning. Sigismund had faced them already in dozens of the kill-grade training exercises, and had seen them gut three of the other aspirants. That was to be expected if you did not learn the lessons being taught. In the training mazes deep in the guts of the ship, nothing was certain, and everything was a test. Each exercise was blind, the duration, enemy and conditions different every time. In earlier cycles they had been dumped into a heat-drenched zone, with toxic air and fluctuating gravity. This time they had been armoured in grey partial carapace and armed with stub cannons that fired solid slugs the size of a human thumb. Their goal was simple – wipe out the kill-servitors in under fifty minutes.

A servitor leapt at Sigismund. He fired, shifted aim and fired twice more. Blood scattered from the ruin of its skull. Its claws raked across his left arm. He felt the stub cannon dip and yanked it back up. He pulled the trigger. It kicked. The blast cored the servitor’s torso. He kicked the corpse into another servitor that was scrambling up the wall to reach him. The impact barely slowed it down, but it was enough for him to ram the barrel of the cannon into its chest and fire again.

Numbness was spreading up his arm from the wound, but the blood was already clotting. Another servitor bounded up to the ceiling, claws gripping the grating. Sigismund took a step back and braced his shoulder against the wall. The servitor coiled and pounced. He fired. The round hit it in the face, bored down its neck and through its torso. It dropped, limbs slack. Sigismund kept his aim steady and fired again. The shot ripped through another servitor from head to gut. It swung from the ceiling, its claws still hooked into the grating plates.

‘End.’ The voice boomed through the corridors, echoing from vox-grilles and horns.

Sigismund lowered his aim, but not the gun. Behind him, Rann and Geldoran came around the corner, together, their faces and armour splattered with gore.

‘The exercise is suspended. You have failed,’ boomed the vox voice. ‘You will begin again in seventeen minutes. Return to initiation point.’

Rann and Geldoran looked at Sigismund, who turned away and started back along the corridor.

‘We are failing because of you,’ said Rann, as they snapped shells into magazines. Sigismund looked at him. Rann shrugged and pushed another slug into the clip. ‘You know why too, brother. You are fast and quick, and you can kill. But you are alone, and that’s how warriors die, and how we fail.’

Sigismund snapped the magazine into the cannon, readied and safetied it. He looked up, and met Rann’s gaze.

‘What is it that we are becoming?’ he asked.

‘You know,’ said Geldoran. ‘You have the hypno-data, you have heard it from the masters. We are becoming warriors of the Seventh Legiones Astartes. We are to be soldiers in a crusade.’

‘Crusade for what?’ asked Sigismund. ‘For who?’

‘For the Emperor,’ said Geldoran.

Sigismund shook his head.

Geldoran looked like he was going to speak again, but Rann held up his hand.

‘We are becoming monsters, Sigismund,’ said Rann. Sigismund gave a small nod. ‘We are becoming things that will crush and kill, and our existence will create as much terror as hope. Monsters, death incarnate. Of all the things that the stars have seen, they will have seen nothing like us.’

Sigismund nodded.

‘Not what you hoped when you fought to stay alive,’ said Rann. ‘Worse than you feared, yes?’

Klaxons began to sound. Lights blinked and strobed. Far off, the scissor-chime sound of claws biting metal echoed down the passages. Geldoran began to move, but Rann was unmoving, his eyes still on Sigismund.

‘I would not be a monster,’ said Sigismund.

Rann grinned. ‘Who says you are not already? But this is different.’

‘Come on!’ growled Geldoran, and now they were running down the passage towards the sound of claws. They reached a place where the tunnel flared out, and then pinched back in. Geldoran flicked a series of battle gestures. The trio folded into the walls either side of the narrowing.

‘You want to know what you are part of?’ Rann called, but did not wait for a reply. ‘We are the end of everything that has been. All of it. We are going to tear it down, and what refuses to be torn down we are going to break and burn. Ashes, that is what we are going to leave. All the kings and mad rulers, the wars and the lies, all the blood and cruelty, we are going to cut it down and leave it dead on the ground. The executioners of the past, that is what we are, and you know what comes after that? An age when we will not be needed any more, that will never need our like again.’

‘You are certain?’ said Sigismund.

‘Nothing is certain, brother. That is why we have to fight for it.’

Sigismund looked at Rann for a long moment. From down the corridor the sound of the kill-servitors scraped through the air.

‘Thank you… my brother,’ said Sigismund. Rann grinned. Geldoran met Sigismund’s eye and gave a curt nod.

The din of howl-voices was deafening as the first kill-servitor rounded the corner.

‘Now!’ shouted Sigismund, and the three surged to their feet, weapons rising. Sigismund thought he heard Rann laugh as the first shots roared from their guns.

‘You found yourself,’ said Voss. He had been smiling as he wrote, thinking of Rann. The assault captain had the greatest capacity for blunt truth and laughter that Voss had ever encountered in a son of Rogal Dorn.

‘I did not find anything. The Legion found me,’ said Sigismund. ‘I accepted that.’

‘I think I begin to see,’ said Voss. ‘This is a chain of becoming, from fear and loss to brotherhood to idealism.’

‘I am not an idealist,’ said Sigismund.

‘You are the champion and protector of oaths for a Legion that believes they are not just conquering but making something that is greater than them. You have fought for the honour of your Legion time and again. Is that not idealism?’

‘It is duty,’ said Sigismund.

‘Of course it is…’ said Voss to himself, half under his breath.

‘Does my answer displease you?’ said Sigismund, and there was enough of an edge in the words that Voss looked up. The cold killer gaze met him again, and again there was the surge of fear shouting from the back of his head. He shut it out.

‘If I am speaking frankly, yes, it does,’ he said.

‘Why?’

‘I don’t believe it.’

‘You are calling me a liar?’ The edge again, the promise in the low control of the voice of something that would send wolves and warriors scrambling back into the dark.

Voss held his emotions still. He sighed, rubbed his eyes.

‘I don’t think you are lying, and I am sure as the light of Sol shines not saying that, but I think that you are…’ He sighed again, put down his slate and picked up his water flask. The liquid inside had the same sap-like sweetness of everything else on this planet. He took a gulp, screwed the cap back on the flask and put it down again. Sigismund was still watching him as he picked up the slate and quill again. ‘I think you are torn.’

The shadow of a blink over those ice-blue eyes.

‘What?’

‘I think you want to talk, to tell me your story and the reasons for your belief, but you also don’t like the process, you are not comfortable. This doesn’t fit you. Your sword, your Legion, your duty, they fit you. Sitting with a human who thinks that his duty is to find and illuminate truth – and is frankly a bit difficult in his own way – that does not fit you. It is uncomfortable. So, my lord, you are torn between what you want and your nature. And that brings us onto the other conflict, the real one – the one that is there not just in the account you have given me, the great conflict within you that makes you answer with “duty” when I ask why you do what you do.’

A long pause. Sigismund’s expression did not change. Voss had the distinct feeling that if he had not gone too far, then he had come right up to its border.

‘You talk too much,’ said Sigismund, his voice still and low and dangerous. ‘You form opinions quickly and on scant information, and speak when the prudent course of action would be silence.’

Voss waited. He had come a long way for this conversation, to talk to this warrior’s warrior. He had a feeling he might have just brought both his journey and interview to a close. Sigismund’s eyes flickered, and slowly the last expression that Voss had thought to see formed briefly on the Lord Templar’s face.

‘I can see why Rann likes you,’ said Sigismund, and he smiled.

Then it was gone. Voss blinked.

‘This conflict that has me torn,’ said Sigismund, and Voss wondered if there was a note of mocking in the last word. ‘What forces do you see clashing in me, Solomon Voss?’

‘Control,’ replied Voss. ‘Self-control, discipline, force of will, call it what you like.’

‘And in opposition to that?’

‘Everything else.’

Sigismund raised an eyebrow.

‘Shall we see?’

Three

HOUNDS OF WAR

‘Brother Sigismund.’

He looked up and opened his eyes. Sergeant Iscus was looking down at him.

‘Brother-sergeant,’ Sigismund replied, and began to rise to salute. Iscus placed a hand on Sigismund’s pauldron to still him. The hand was oiled metal, the servo joints, micro-pistons exposed like bone and sinew on a limb flayed of skin. The augmentation ran all the way up Iscus’ arm until it vanished under the curve of his shoulder guard. His right leg was an augmetic that ended in a square-toed foot like a miniaturised version of a Battle Titan’s tread. He was bareheaded and his face and skull were a shell of chrome and black carbon. Twin augmetic eyes glowed red above the mouth and chin that were the only signs the face had once been flesh.

The word was that he had lost half of his body to a flesh-eating nano-phage in the assault on Luna, when the Great Crusade had yet to break the bounds of the Sol System. There had been barely enough of him left to reconstitute into service, and he had teetered on the boundary of being interred in a Dreadnought until he had said that he would break the techno-adepts with what was left of him before he would sleep in a walking coffin. That at least was the story, and though no one ever asked him to confirm it, his body was a testament to his service. His squad was the second of the 45th Assault Cadre of the Tenth Crusade of the VII Legion – a ‘beyond front-line’ unit as the Crusade forces often called them. Not just first to battle but the first into the enemy. When the Tenth Crusade’s Legion element threw its first blow, the 45th were the knuckles of its fist.

Iscus’ head moved and his eyes whirred as they focused on the oath parchment in Sigismund’s hand. They were in the drop-ship’s loading bay, two hundred warriors in the yellow and black of the Imperial Fists, each standing or sitting, the air aching with active power armour, weapons clinking with final checks. The smoke of burning seal-wax rose from where attendants and servitors moved through the warriors attaching oath papers to armour.

‘May I, brother?’ asked Iscus. The metal fingers of his hand opened and he nodded at Sigismund’s oath of moment. Sigismund felt himself hesitate and then held out the parchment.

Iscus looked at it, eyes refocusing to hard points of red fire.

‘That war might find us…’ said Iscus after a pause. ‘That we might find we are its equal…’ His gaze shifted to Sigismund’s. ‘Do you harbour doubt, brother?’

Sigismund was silent for a long moment.

‘I do not doubt myself, sergeant, but I know that there are always things greater than us, stronger than us. I would not find myself unequal when I meet them.’

Another long, laser-red gaze.

‘You have known war all your life, haven’t you?’ said Iscus at last, and Sigismund was surprised at its sound. It was lower, the hard command that always ran through it gone, a human voice coming from a face of metal. Sigismund found his reply fading on his tongue. ‘You go to battle for the Imperium today, for the Legion, for the future. It is the first time you do this, but war created you. You do not need to hope to be its equal, because you are its son. War is life for you and us all. That is all that matters – there is no test in this that you have not already met by living. This is an oath of moment, brother, and all you have to do to meet that moment is go forwards.’

Iscus held out the parchment to Sigismund, who took it.

‘My thanks, brother-sergeant,’ he replied, and bowed his head. Iscus gave a curt nod and moved away, his tread a rasp of gears.

The city had a name, but that had vanished as soon as the first shot was fired. To the strategists and command staff of the 786th Crusade Group it became Engagement Zone 12-75/Primary. To everyone else within the battle sphere it was simply the City of Witches. It sat on a plateau of gridded fields, hydroponic domes and irrigation canals that shone in the sun like silver inlay. People had worked those domes and ditches and fields, bringing up harvests of heavy seed, pulp-root and citerane fruit that filled the wagon cars that rode the rails back to the city. The soil was a thick layer of old volcanic ash, dry under the heat and fertile when watered. The diggers and irrigation workers would turn up shards of green, volcanic glass by the bucketload, and heaps of the stuff marked the intersections of the roads and paths that jagged between the fields. When the sun went down at certain times of the year, the green glass would glow, as though living fireflies were set inside each shard. The field workers would dance on those nights and thank the stars and the land for their fortune and plenty.

Above the plateau and fields rose the city. The mountain at its heart had once been the volcano that had covered the land at its foot with ash and glass and pumice. Long cold, its flanks now wound with towers and buildings. Roads spiralled from ten gates at its base to the lip of the crater. Towers circled that rim like the spikes on a crown. Within the crater, stairs coiled down into the cold throat of the mountain, down and down to where the light of the sun would never touch. No buildings marked that long drop, just the stairs and niches cut into the rock and ropes strung across the abyss, hung with green glass that chimed at night as though touched by a wind.

Other cities covered the planet and even dotted the moons and planetoids of the star system it sat in, but the city and its mountain were the heart of plenty. From here, protection and tradition and stability had held the people of the planet and its system together. The city’s masters held the power of the land and the air, and of sun and night. At the height of the season of sun, and again at the middle of the barren season, their proxies would come and take their due: one in a hundred of the young, chosen to serve and perhaps to become masters themselves. All was balanced, plenty and certainty given and a due taken in return, just as with the land watered and then harvested. There was no reason to resist. There was no reason to do anything other than obey and be thankful.

Then the ships had come. The balance had broken, and peace and plenty could be no more.

Sigismund felt the Land Raider’s engines cycle to maximum. A shock wave slammed through his frame. His helm lit with amber warning runes. He could feel the machine turn hard. The compartment light flicked from amber to red. Something exploded in the air close by. Impacts sang across the tank’s hull. It rocked and slammed in a different direction. The mag-
harnesses holding the Imperial Fists snapped open. Sigismund came to his feet as the Land Raider lurched again. Beside him, Rann gave a growl of laughter through his helm speaker.

‘Speak your oaths,’ came First Sergeant Iscus’ voice on the helm vox, steady and clear over the roar of engines.

‘That war might find us…’ Sigismund said, and heard its echo inside his helm. The weight of the weapons in his hands felt distant.

‘That we might find we are its equal…’ came the next words. A buzzing shriek split the red air as the tank’s sponsons fired.

‘Approaching egress, resistance high,’ came the flat voice of the machine’s commander.

‘That we might rise…’

The noise of the engine was increasing, the rattle of tracks vibrating through armour and flesh.

‘That we might cast our enemies down.’

The Land Raider spun as the right tracks went into reverse at full speed. Another shriek of las-discharge. Brakes slammed on. The pistons on the assault doors split them wide with a thump of pneumatics. The Land Raider kept skidding. Mud churned over the edge of the ramp as it bit into the ground. Sigismund, Rann and their squad brothers surged for the opening. The world beyond was a strobing smear of ochre light. Sigismund came off the ramp at a full run. His foot hit the ground and sunk halfway up his shin. A cord of amethyst lightning whipped past him and hit the warrior just in front of him. Armour exploded. Sigismund felt the blast shove him to his right. He could smell ozone, bitter on his tongue. The vox was a shriek of static in his ear. The lightning-struck warrior was on the ground, a mass of splintered yellow and red meat. There was a Singularity close by – one of the witch abominations of the city, things of raw psychic power and destruction.

‘Forward!’ Sergeant Iscus’ voice bellowed. Sigismund surged forwards, legs ripping from the liquid ground. He could see Rann to his left.

Another snap of light and a ringing scream like the sound of breaking glass stretched into a razor-cut line. More warriors falling, blown apart, chewed bloody. Hail poured from the sky. Each lump of ice was a red-black fist. Sigismund could see the trench line now, a dark boundary drawn across the ground. Red ice exploded from his shoulders. His squadmates were beside and in front of him, a loose diamond arrowing forwards as the world shrieked at them. He could see the Singularity, hovering above the ground, like a growing blind spot in the world, a black and magenta blot in reality. It was difficult to look at directly, but at the edge of his eyes it looked like a frozen explosion of neon colour and pitch-black. It hissed, flexing, the ground and clouds seeming to bow around it like a cloth mask pulled taut across a mouth by inhalation.

The target of the main Imperial assault was not an enemy line; it was an Imperial support and fallback line, dug into the plateau a full kilometre behind the frontmost trenches at the opening of hostilities. That had been the first plan of the general on the ground when it became clear that the city would not comply with the Mandate of Unity: circle the mountain, dig in, and begin the slow squeeze of a siege that would hopefully bring sense before any significant loss of life for either side. They had completed the works in three days – excellent progress for human forces. Ships and planes had circled the mountain in case the dwellers of the city had mounted a sortie to try and break or disrupt the encirclement. They had not, and if the city harboured any armed forces they did not move. The enemy had not drawn up fortifications, nor were there any signs of them moving to do so. The Imperial commanders began to shift their thinking onto the optimisation of forces and supplies necessary to hold the siege. There were other cities on the planet, and other worlds in the system that likely harboured other human enclaves. The resistance of this city, though it was large and politically significant for long-term compliance, would fall to patience, and in the meantime the greater concern was that it tied up as few resources as necessary. And while the strategists calculated, the city had been silent and still.

Three days after the encirclement was completed, the mountain poured a storm into the sky. A great dome of clouds covered the city beneath, pushing up and up, a blister of red-iron grey in the blue sky. Rain shivered from the clouds, the drops exploding to steam as they fell through the air. Lightning writhed within it, white flashes fading to cyan, ochre and crimson. Sheets of ice formed on the rising edge of blast waves and fell back to earth. Every now and again, a detonation would bruise a part of the cloud black. It hurt to look at, like a brain-bleed concussion behind the eyes. Even the orbital auspex savants could not look at it directly for more than a minute at a time.

On the ground, the dead and the screaming filled the trench lines encircling the city. The first blast wave that rolled down the mountain had turned thousands to pulped meat and bone inside bags of skin. The second wave had lifted the dead and the living up, and crashed them back down. The air reeked of ozone and burning hair. Blood boiled from the corpses into the air. In the bunkers cut into the trench walls, troopers sheltering from the concussive waves bit through their tongues as their muscles went into spasm. Bones cracked in chests. Glow-globes shattered. Stacked shells detonated.

Then the Singularities had come. They had drifted down the slopes of the mountain towards a section of trench work on the western plateau. The fug of smoke and fire parted before them. To those few still living in the Imperial lines, they looked like a loose cloud of glowing shapes, like paper lanterns cut free of their strings. Soldiers stared at them coming, buzzing filling their heads, their guns hanging forgotten in their hands; others vomited bile and then blood. The rain became hail. Breath became clouds of ice. The Singularities were half a kilometre out from the lines when the soldiers turned their guns on each other, or on themselves. Broken hands pulled pins from grenades. Explosions and ragged gunfire rippled down the lines, spreading as the drifting blots of light and blackness slid closer.

On the reserve lines, officers scrambled to bring their units to readiness. Armoured companies held in reserve pushed forwards, tracks churning the remnants of crops into the mud. The Singularities halted, hovering above the trenches. They began to glow, then to blaze. Tank drivers screamed as the light lanced through vision slits, blinding, burning. Machines slewed, skidding in the mud. A Malcador heavy tank had curved around and slammed into an Executioner. The impact sent the smaller tank rolling onto its side. The gunner in the Malcador’s top turret felt his hand clamp on the firing lever as he screamed. The shell had barely left the barrel before it hit the Executioner’s underside. The pair became a fireball.

The light of the Singularities dimmed, and then pulsed. An invisible wave ripped out, picking up debris as it accelerated. The ground heaved. The tanks still coming forwards hit the wave and spun up into the air. Turrets snapped free of hulls. Guns bent. Then the witch-force gripping them found the munitions inside their shells. War machines blew apart in mid-air. Pieces of track and armour whickered down.

From positions across the plateau, frantic signals reached up to the Crusade ships as the smoke veiled the burning lines. Amongst the tactical reports and forming strategic assessments a single word, heavy with warning and import, called for help at speed. Sorcery – the taint and curse of Old Night come again.

The dead rose from the trench in front of Sigismund. Globules of bone and flesh and armour were sucked into the air. Blood clotted and froze. Splinters of bone blended into a paste of ice crystals and meat. They were not the dead that had fallen, they were the matter of life mashed and moulded into the shape of men. Sigismund had time to recognise a torn helm bearing the mark of the Skilkanian Tenth on a figure forming in front of him before its arm lashed towards him.

He fired. A trio of bolts hit the figure in its centre and exploded. Plumes of shattered debris blasted from the impacts. The revenant did not slow or stop. A globular fist of bone fragments and spent shell casings hit Sigismund across the right shoulder. He pitched back. The figure’s limb shattered, flowing over Sigismund’s armour with a sound like needles pulling across slate. It wrapped around him, pulling itself over him. He could feel its strength as it chewed through lacquer and armour. The reek of ozone was a choking clot in his throat.

‘Pin it!’ he shouted and yanked himself backwards. The warrior to his left fired. The bolt-shells breathed past Sigismund’s left shoulder. He fired again, point blank, raking his fire up from the ground so that it soared through the thing’s mass. He saw skulls and faces, and body parts caught inside it as it tore in two. He wrenched himself back, pulled a grenade from his waist and threw it into the creature as it pulled itself back together. He was already moving as the explosion blew the thing back into shards and blood-slime.

He saw Rann then. His brother was pinned to the air, rising as worms of ghost light writhed over him. Cracks spidered across his armour. Another of their squad brothers lay on the ground beside him, limbs twisted into a heap of buckled armour. Grey lightning blinked through the air, and for a moment the falling hail became the shafts of silver arrows falling from the sky. In the flash, Sigismund saw the remains of the Imperial Fist on the ground stir and then, like a puppet pulled by strings, the dead warrior rose. Blood poured from cracks in armour. Broken limbs clattered as they dangled. The head lolled, oozing black fluid from broken eyepieces. The hands came up, reaching for Rann with fingers that twisted like worms. Sigismund heard a roar of rage and defiance rip from Rann’s helm grille.

A stream of plasma burned across Sigismund’s sight. The dead warrior reaching for Rann vanished in a ball of blue-white light. Rann dropped to the ground. Sigismund began to run towards him.

‘Close order,’ came a shout, rising against the storm’s roar and gunfire. The words slowed Sigismund’s stride. Iscus was beside him, shoulder guard to shoulder guard, then the rest of his squad, slotting together, the cogs of shared conditioning and training meshing in the space of a breath. They moved next to Rann, who was pushing himself up, pulling the ruin of his helm off.

A Singularity hovered into sight, folding out of the murk, buzzing like a failing light filament.

‘Fire to–’ Iscus began to shout, and raised his plasma pistol.

Lightning whipped from the Singularity and touched Iscus’ gun before it could fire. The world blinked white. The plasma held in the gun’s coils burst out. The machine half of Iscus, the half that had already been taken by war, vanished. The rest of him fell, fire eating his armour and flesh. Pieces of molten metal smacked into Sigismund as he reeled, picked him up and threw him down. His helm display was a flash-dimmed swirl of red runes. He was breathing hard. There was iron on his tongue now, mingling with ozone.

Everything folded to a ringing quiet. He could still feel the bolter in his hands, the inside of the armour against his skin. Everything was falling, everything coming apart, except here, inside the small world made by the sound of his own breath and the beating of his hearts. Down and down, falling into the mud, the flash of lightning still caught in his eye. So fast, so sudden, but a moment that was not ending. He was here, in the storm beneath the rain, the blood of the dead falling with him. He was here, and always would be.

‘This is an oath of moment, brother, and all you have to do to meet that moment is go forwards.’

He was already rising, gun up and firing, going forwards, towards the blot of darkness and light, and he was shouting, calling the words of the oath that he had thought he was making for himself but now was a promise to everything that was before him.

‘That we might cast our enemies down.’

There were others with him, surging forwards firing, moving as one. Bolt-shells reached for the Singularity and exploded, hammering into it, digging deeper into the air around it. Sigismund could hear a voice, high and shrill, babbling, screaming, the words rubbed together from the sound of insect wings. Light and heat bled from the Singularity. It shrank, folding itself in as the explosions cloaked it. Then it burst outwards, swallowing the bolt-shell detonations. For an eye-blink it hung, a deconstructed star, painted in retina burns. He saw the figure within.

It had been human, its flesh withered back to bones, limbs bound into its torso by ropes of lambent, green-black stones. Stitches closed its eyelids and black ash ringed their sockets and smeared its cheeks. Sigismund thought he could see the blood beating through the vessels that threaded the translucent skin. The fire and shrapnel from the bolt-shell detonations orbited the figure, flattening into glowing hoops. For a second it held still, a vision suspended in the air, cut from the fears and myths of humanity.

Then time unfolded into chaos. The orbiting hoops of fire and shrapnel sawed forwards. The circle of fire hit an Imperial Fist. There was a sound like a bandsaw biting into steel. Blood fountained up, cooking to ash. From behind Sigismund, a beam of red light hit the Singularity as its shell of light began to close. The Singularity juddered in the air, its wrapping of brilliance and night flickering. A squall of bolt-shells hit it from the side. It vibrated like an insect against an upturned glass. Lightning lashed from it, stabbing wildly at the air and ground. Sigismund saw its light blink for a moment and the figure within the Singularity was clear before him. Its mouth was moving, as though beginning to form words. The sound of his hearts was a paused drumbeat in his chest.

He fired once. The shot struck the Singularity in the upper torso, and blew its shoulders, neck and skull apart. A high note, like the sound of shattering glass stretched to the edge of hearing, stole the sound of battle. Then there was just quiet and the patter of torn flesh-stone beads hitting the mud.

Sigismund was already moving forwards, ready to fire even as the risen dead dissolved back into blood slurry. He felt the beat of his hearts complete. It felt almost like peace. He looked down. The remains of Iscus lay under the falling hail. He looked up, and then around. Warriors in yellow were around him, covered in mud and blood-slime. Before them the veil of fog thinned, as though the death of the Singularity had torn its weave.

What was left of it lay on the ground on the edge of the trench: a portion of a jaw and skull, still stuck to a portion of ribs and shoulder from which an intact arm reached to touch the mud. It did not look like it had come from something strange or terrible now. It looked like the hand of someone who had lived a short life which had starved the flesh from under its skin.

Rann came up beside him. The hail had begun to fall as foul-smelling pink slush. Somewhere higher up, chains of lightning pulsed. The thunder that followed blended with the sound of munition detonations.

‘A fine kill,’ he growled.

‘They make them like this,’ said Sigismund, motioning at the remains. He looked up towards where the thinning mist showed the foot of the mountain beyond the storm. ‘The rulers of this city, they made these… They made them from their own. These were their children once.’

Rann shifted. ‘They are monsters now,’ he said.

A rune began to pulse urgently at the edge of his helmet display. Data began to cascade across his sight and the vox squawked as static-chopped voices filled his ears. The conditioned and trained parts of his senses had already processed the re-tasking order before he had blinked. Fresh objectives and battle conditions slotted into place in his awareness. It was more like breathing than thinking, his mind inhaling information in an instant.

He started to run, Rann and the rest of their squad with him. The Land Raiders came up behind them, churning mud and blood into the air. The tanks did not slow down. Sigismund and Rann grabbed grip bars on the hull of one and swung up onto the track guards.

A sudden pressure wave slammed into Sigismund’s back and his head jerked up as a quartet of Storm Eagles in battered blue and white came in low above them. He could see the assault doors were already open. Legion warriors stood in the openings, gripping the hull, weapons in hand. On the shoulder of each warrior and the hulls of the gunships, a red hound reared rampant, teeth bared.

‘They have loosed the War Hounds,’ called Rann, his voice a shout against the cacophony of machine noise and thunder. ‘This is not a battle any more – it’s an execution.’

The Imperial strike hit the mountain city in a quickening sequence of assaults: VII and XII Legion in a narrow thrust followed by heavy infantry from the Hradlia Dragoons in blue-and-yellow carapace, close-quarter platoons of the Inferalti Hussars, and armour from the Artal Tenth.

The city met them with fire. Human soldiers burned in the streets. Invisible scythes of telekinetic force split bodies into bloody portions. Those that did advance met creatures spun from dead and living flesh. Biomantic ritual had fused limbs to skeletons, stretched spines, grown and grafted bones to bodies so that it formed armour that clicked as it moved. The people at the core of these creations – for they had been people – were citizens of the mountain city. They had walked its streets, slept in its houses, talked awhile with others, lived and passed their days. Now, they screamed as they flailed and juddered down those same places that had been their home. They punched through armour with hands which had fused into spikes of bone, bit through limbs with needle teeth. They fought with the frenzy of souls trying to cling on to the last agonised moments of life. Throughout this the warriors of two Legions advanced up the mountain, up stone-clad roads and through deserted buildings. They died as they climbed, but they kept moving, reaching for the crown of the mountain and the seat of the witches.

Sigismund felt the headache pressure build in his skull and jerked back into the lee of a building. A second later, a blast of force ripped past, tumbling chunks of rock like twigs in a gale. Shards pinged from the wall corner beside him.

‘It is getting worse,’ shouted Rann. Sigismund looked over his shoulder. Rann was grinning through a mask of clotted blood.

There were only four of them left of the twenty who had made the trench assault that morning. He did not know where the rest of the Legion forces were on the mountain. A buzzing cloud of static had enveloped the vox as the fog shrouding the mountain poured down to steal all but a few metres of vision. There was a burnt-sugar taste in the air, a shivering buzz in every surface. Beneath their feet, the paved road arced around buildings raised on tiers cut into the slope. The shadows of the towers loomed in the churning clouds above. They had cut through snares of enemy to get this high, but now they had hit a wall of resistance that held fast to the narrowing roads.

‘We must be close,’ barked Rann.

As though in answer to Rann’s words, a sound like hundreds of clapping hands filled the air. A creature rolled down the paved street, snapped to a stop. In form it was a hoop, two metres across. Its carapace was the colour of bone. Dozens of arms and hands sprouted from its edge. Scorpion tails of vertebrae uncoiled from it.

Sigismund surged forwards. Rann fired. The bolts blew gouges in its skin of bone. It bellowed, the sound vibrating through Sigismund’s thoughts like a static howl. Ice formed on the ground. The air around it was singing, popping with bubbles of colour and worms of ghost light. Sigismund could feel the agony of the thing, its fear and terror. The sensation struck him like a blow. He felt his hands freeze on his weapon, felt the will sucked out of his flesh. He could only feel pain and loss and failure, all around him, within him, a black sea to drown in beneath the surface of the world.

‘No…’ He heard the word come from his lips, felt something inside the darkness push back. And then he was firing up into the creature as its scorpion tails arched above to strike down. The boltgun clicked as the firing hammer struck an ice-clotted breech. The scorpion tails lashed down. He dropped the gun, drew a knife, and struck. The point of the blade punched into a gap between two bone plates and rammed in up to the hilt. Blood gushed out. The thing’s scorpion tails thrashed the air. Sigismund sawed the blade down and out, pulled it free, struck and cut again. The creature’s limbs began to judder. Hands raked his armour. He could feel death breathing close, but his world was the surge of muscle and the pump of blood and the wild moment that lived or died just beyond the next blade thrust. He could die here. He could die now, and that truth, that possibility of release, felt like freedom.

He struck one more blow. The creature’s limbs trembled and then it was falling into a bloody tangle, spasming, its dozens of hands grasping at each other. A cluster of bolt-rounds hit its collapsing mass and blew out pieces of meat.

Sigismund whirled, already moving, scooping his bolter off the ground. Rann and their squad brothers fell in at his side. Warriors in battered white and blue came into sight, weapons levelled – War Hounds. One of the warriors, his scalp bare and his lower face covered by a breath mask, looked from Rann to Sigismund to the heap of limbs and flesh on the ground. The War Hound glanced back at Sigismund and Rann. The rank chevrons of an assault sergeant sat on the scored and blood-lacquered paint of his plate. Shards of red-hot stone buzzed past them from further up the mountainside.

‘Give me the position,’ said the War Hound.

‘Enemy are holding the next junction up,’ said Sigismund. ‘No way around or to flank. Immediate direct assault, before they reinforce.’

‘I said position, not recommendation, son of the Seventh,’ growled the War Hound. ‘But it is at least the correct move.’ He glanced at the other War Hounds with him and unclamped a hand flamer from his waist. The pilot light flared blue in the gun’s mouth. A droplet of fuel fell from the nozzle, flaring white and yellow. A legionary in mag-bolt-studded armour locked in behind the sergeant. Soot and heat scarring covered his left arm and shoulder where he braced a short, fat-barrel flamer. Its pilot light was already burning too.

‘You are with us, sons of the Seventh,’ said the sergeant. He paused, flexed his shoulders, and looked at the Imperial Fists. ‘My name is Sai.’ Then he went around the corner.

The record of the battle for the City of Witches would feature little in the annals of the Great Crusade. The battle logs would record much of what occurred in the cold categories of unified field data. Force depletion, duration of action, casualties of compliance, severity of resistance and a few footnotes that sliced details from the burning, screaming reality and set them down in abrupt stamps of fact: Malefic tyranny expunged. Ongoing assessment of psy-active environment. Magna-grade population reconditioning required. Here, amongst the scant lines, it would be noted that the first termination of one of the witch-tyrants was effected by a small force of the XII and VII Legiones Astartes.

‘Go!’ shouted Sai, and the sergeant was up and sprinting. Sigismund followed, Rann with him, then the rest of the Imperial Fists and War Hounds. Fire jetted from the guns of the XII. Liquid flame spilled up the walls of the building ahead of them. Glass exploded in wooden window frames. Behind and beneath Sigismund, the city was a smeared painting of fire and smoke.

The building they ran towards was a fane, a shrine; even if its builders had not called it that, Sigismund recognised it. It sat on the edge of the crater lip. The city huddled back from it on the other side of a long cascade of steps. Open doors dotted its lowest level. Sharp, spiral-roofed towers rose above the openings. The remains of harvest wreaths and flowers had sat on the steps outside beside bowls of milk, oil and water. The details were different from the grubby piles of bone and scraps of bright rag left in the dead kings’ tombs above the drift camps on Terra, but the intent was the same. Sorcery, witchcraft, malefic psykana.

There were figures in the inferno, shadows of limbs crumbling to ash as they came forwards. Sigismund saw one step from the fire. There was still enough substance to its armour that Sigismund recognised it as a trooper of the Hradlia Dragoons. Psy-puppetry had taken control of the dragoon’s limbs, so that he lived and moved even as he burned. Rann put the man down. The War Hounds were meeting the burning dead head-on, hacking, blasting.

Something came out of the blaze, and swung at Sigismund with a charred talon of bone. He put a bolt-round into it and charged it as it reeled from the impact. The ammo counter in his helm display blinked red. His body weight hit the burning figure. Bones broke under the impact, and he was running forwards, shunting the enemy back into the fire. He could see a shape behind the smoke and flame light, the shape of a chair on a platform under a sculpted canopy.

He took a stride towards it.

An invisible force yanked him from the ground. He was lifted and slammed into the wall. Down became up. He fell, tumbling over and over in slow seconds. All the months in the holds of the training ships, all the days of running live firing drills through mazes of tunnels as gravity shifted, as he fought blind or choking or in a deafening roil of sound, had been to prepare him to face this type of moment. The training did not come close to reality. The years of modification and testing should have armoured him against the horrors of the universe, but it was not enough.

Red bubbled up into his sight. An endless high ringing filled his head and senses. He felt blood vessels pop in his chest. Felt the cords of his muscle tense as a will that was not his own ran through his nerves. There was a breath on the back of his neck, a cold embrace sliding into his flesh, shutting his mind into a box from which he watched himself land on the floor and rise. He could see Rann and his brothers, could see Sai and the handful of War Hounds. He felt himself take a step, willed it to stop.

+Hush…+

The voice breathed in his mind, soft, smothering. He felt the consciousness of the witch strangle his thoughts. He felt its pride: always it had been superior to others, able to shape and fold the world as it wanted. It was strong, too. It knew it would prevail even now with fire and death come to its threshold. After all, it was one of the masters of this world, a shaper of reality. Everything else was its to command. Sigismund felt his limbs move, felt his weapons rise. He tried to stop his arms moving, but he was falling and falling in an abyss of his own mind.

+Hush now. There is nothing to be done, nothing you should do, nothing you can do. Let go.+ Rann and the other warriors were looking at him, their movements treacle slow. +This is your last dream. I promise it will be sweet.+

Let go… lie down in the mud and dust. No need to go on. No need. A way out, a way out that he could take now. Stay down, and never stand, no need to live the life that fate had laid out in front of him.

He felt the lash of the witch’s command, but there was something else behind it: weakness. Not just the weakness of arrogance, but the weakness of a will and mind pushed to its edge.

In the strangled silence of his mind, Sigismund spoke.

No, he said, and as though the word were a link shattering in a chain, the hold on him broke. He turned. The fire that filled the air shredded. Blinding light and deep shadow blinked across the chamber. Time stuttered as though running out of sync with reality. Chunks of shattered stone flew through the air, glowing with telekinetic force.

Sigismund saw the enemy truly then. The witch sat on a chair of green stone at the centre of the room. He was old, one eye socket empty, the skin of his face folded and pinched, chin lolling on a shrunken chest. He looked like a corpse, but the air around him crackled as he drew breath.

Sigismund felt the witch’s presence at the back of his mind begin to tighten again. The old man’s eye was fixed on him, a black pinprick aimed like the mouth of a cannon. Sigismund felt ghost fingers dig into his mind in the instant that his hand gripped the shrunken man’s neck. Numbness jolted up his arm. The armour of his gauntlet and arm charred black to the elbow. He felt destruction reach for him, like a lightning bolt unfolding from a storm in blinked instants.

His fist closed. There was a sound of snapping bone, and then there was just silence and ash falling from the air.

The War Hound was dying. A piece of stone, accelerated past the speed of sound by telekinetic force, had ripped the right side of his body away. Blood was pouring out faster than it could clot. Still the legionary tried to stand. Sigismund began to move to him, but Sai was there first. The War Hounds sergeant put a hand on the warrior’s shoulder, and the contact and gesture stilled the dying man.

Barely a minute had passed since the sorcerer had died, but a calm had come to the burning fane. The animations of dead flesh had fallen apart. Vox-links had connected again. Around the summit of the mountain city, the forces of the Imperium were closing on the last fanes and towers of the witch-tyrants. Orders were to hold, to ensure that hostiles were expunged, and to tend to casualties.

‘Khal, here,’ called Sai. One of the War Hounds came and knelt next to the dying warrior. Sigismund had marked Khal earlier; his left arm had been pearl white from shoulder to fingers and he wore a reductor, the mark of a Legion Apothecary, on his forearm. Apothecaries fought beside the Legion brothers they tended, but most Sigismund had met as an initiate had an air of aloofness, as though they kept a part of themselves separate from the craft of war. Not Khal. Like the rest of his brothers, a layer of dark cooked blood lacquered his armour. Sigismund watched as the Apothecary knelt and raised the reductor. The chainblades on the gauntlet spun to life. Sai gripped the dying warrior’s bloody hand.

The Apothecary brought the reductor’s blade to the warrior’s chestplate. A thrust and it would begin to cut through ceramite, bone and flesh so that Khal could pull the progenoid glands from his Legion brother’s chest. The glands would go to raise more humans to War Hounds. Sigismund had seen it done to the dead before, but never to one who was yet to succumb to his wounds. He knelt, head bowed, fist clenched on his breastplate. Behind him, Rann and the survivors of their squad knelt with him.

‘Are you ready, brother?’ asked Sai.

The dying War Hound nodded.

‘You will live on in war,’ Khal said, and pushed the blades forward.

The battle was done before the light began to fade. The witch-tyrants had gone, and with them serious resistance. The people of the city had begun to emerge from where they had sheltered. All looked ragged, angry and scared. Sigismund had seen one, a girl no more than ten years old. She had frozen when she had seen him, eyes wide. Then she had made a sign with her hand and turned and run. He had watched her go and thought of the look of terror and defiance in her eyes; it had felt like a memory, a flash of lightning showing Death standing under the falling rain.

‘We have come for you…’

‘Here they are,’ said Rann. Sigismund and his brothers and Sai and the cluster of remaining War Hounds were on a stone platform in front of the fane. The storm of battle had now turned to the protocol of victory. As the first warriors to kill a witch-tyrant, they had the duty of meeting the reinforcements committed to the battle sphere. For line warriors it was an honour.

‘The Eighth…’ said Rann. ‘I did not know that there were any of them in the fleet.’

‘There weren’t,’ growled Sai. ‘This started to escalate as soon as the witches showed their hands. The whole system is a high-
grade malefic threat. Other forces have been pulled in. I would not be surprised if theatre command escalates fast. This is going to be a nasty fight, and that’s just the kind that draws the Eighth.’

Above them, the gunships glided in as the light of day faded. Their hulls were the blue-black of ink. Sigismund saw them circle three times before descending to hover before the fane. Warriors in near-black armour dropped from the open hatches. One with the crest and markings of a lieutenant climbed the steps towards Sigismund and the others. He stopped a few paces from them and waited the heartbeat it took for the War Hounds and Imperial Fists to salute, and then offered a brief salute of his own.

‘I am Valloken,’ said the lieutenant. ‘You are relieved from this warzone.’

He turned back to where the warriors of his Legion were already dispersing into the scorched ruins of the city. Sigismund felt something cold coil up his spine.

‘Brother-lieutenant,’ called Sigismund. The War Hounds and Imperial Fists around him turned to look at him. Valloken turned a fraction of a second later, head tilting in question.

‘Yes?’

‘What are your objectives?’ asked Sigismund. Valloken looked him up and down, then at the warriors around him as though deciding to take an interest for the first time.

‘I would have expected impudence from the hounds of the Twelfth, but from a warrior of the Seventh?’

‘We have fought and bled to take this city, brother-lieutenant,’ said Sigismund, his voice steady, his gaze unblinking. ‘With honour and respect, from warrior to warrior, we would know what will happen to it next.’

‘Compliance,’ said Valloken.

‘The enemy is defeated,’ said Rann.

Valloken laughed then, the sound a mirthless rasp from his speaker grille. ‘This remains a warzone, little brothers,’ he said. ‘Your part is done, but ours is beginning.’

‘Beginning?’ said Sigismund.

‘The gross matter of battle is dealt with, but two objectives remain incomplete. The first is that many responsible and complicit with this abomination will have lived and fled and faded back into the shadows. They shall be found. The darkness is ours and will not aid them.’

‘And the second objective, lieutenant?’ asked Sigismund.

The midnight-clad warrior tilted his head, red gaze steady. ‘The punishment for the crimes done here,’ he said. ‘That lesson must be delivered.’ Valloken looked around at the circle of War Hounds and Imperial Fists. ‘A pity that you killed the witch you found – the living can be more useful than the dead. No matter, there will be others.’ He turned and walked away, his guard of warriors falling in beside him. ‘You may go. This compliance is ours now.’

Sai, Rann and Sigismund watched him go.

‘They like to make sure their reputation is earned, don’t they?’ breathed Rann.

Sai unfastened his breath mask and spat. The phlegm hissed as it ate the stone of the floor. Then he turned and raised his hand. Blood was still clotting on the blue digits.

‘We killed well today, brothers,’ he said. ‘You do your Legion honour, and me by fighting at my side.’ He clasped each of the Imperial Fists’ hands in a warrior grip, then turned to Rann and Sigismund. ‘This is your first sniff of the blood of Legion war, eh? I hope the luck of war shall see us meet again. Until that day.’

Then Sai stepped back, and banged the hand holding his chainaxe on his chest in a ragged salute. The Imperial Fists echoed the salute, and then the War Hounds were gone, carrying the bodies of their fallen.

‘What did becoming a full and blooded warrior of the Legion mean to you?’

‘It was another beginning. A confirmation of need and purpose.’

‘Really? That is all? This moment where the changes and training that you had passed through were first put to action, where you first saw what your existence would now be – that must have meant something.’

‘I think you may be misunderstanding us – we are not the same as the humans we might have been.’

‘I know, my lord.’

‘You know us very well, Solomon Voss, but you are not us – you see things like this moment and think that maybe I felt fulfilment, or pride, or something momentous. I did not. I am a being of war, crafted for it. It did not have other meaning for me, but it did give me understanding.’

‘Of what?’

‘Of the reality of what we were fighting against – that greater strength and a wider universe meant only worse monsters to face, that there was a need for warriors like me to exist and a reason for us to fight.’

‘Monsters? A word loaded with as much emotion as meaning…’

‘An accurate word.’

‘Accurate how?’

‘The witch-tyrants made their people into weapons and cattle. What other word would you choose?’ Sigismund was looking back at him, eyes focused. Voss blinked, shook himself.

‘All right…’

Solomon Voss frowned at the data-slate in front of him, his data-quill poised. Many others of his fellow wordsmiths in the newly founded Order of Remembrance wrote with touch, fingertips dancing across the glassite surface of screens. Some typed on compact key-decks. A few wrote in ink – preferring the feel and perhaps the idea of such an archaic method. Voss suspected that he was to blame for setting the trend. Where practical, he had always preferred the feel of parchment and the unfolding mystery of watching words appear beneath a nib. He would have liked to bring ink to bear on his current task, but the slate was more practical in a warzone; he had learnt that the hard way. The data-quill was his one allowance to his artistic preference. It also told him things. When it flowed, so did his thoughts. When it paused or slowed, it told him that there was something unresolved or incomplete in what he was setting down. Now it was telling him that he needed to voice a nagging suspicion.

‘Your mention of the Eighth Legion, the Night Lords,’ he said. ‘If you will excuse me, their placement in this account… it is notable. Their role in events is minor. You must have met warriors of their Legion many times, but this was the first time you met them–’

‘Not the first,’ said Sigismund.

‘But this was your first combat. Your first action as a warrior. You would not have fought beside other Legions before…’ Voss’ words trailed away. He smiled, licked and then bit his lip. ‘The first time you fought alongside other Legions, but not the first time you had met warriors of the Legion. The one that took you from the drift camps. He said…’

‘We have come for you,’ said Sigismund.

‘The words of the Eighth even in the early years. Less of a war cry and more of a promise. But if a warrior of the Eighth took you to the Legions–’

‘Some recruiting grounds on Terra were used exclusively by some Legions who looked for traits that they valued, but many were simply harvested by forces from all the active Legions and the prospects divided later. The Eighth took their first and majority of Terran recruits from the gaol underworlds, but they took those from other places that fitted their… their nature. I became a son of Rogal Dorn’s Seventh Legion, but those that took me from my life were not.’

‘That being so only makes the point more distinctly,’ said Voss. ‘The Eighth Legion are included in your account here because they matter. They matter to the point you are trying to make, don’t they?’

Sigismund did not reply.

Voss tapped the data-quill against his teeth.

‘Do you wish me to continue?’ asked Sigismund.

‘I was hoping you would comment further,’ said Voss.

No reply again.

‘Do you look at the Night Lords of the Eighth Legion and think what might have been if you had fitted a different set of criteria?’

Silence.

‘Are they a fate avoided? Is that something you feared?’ Voss tapped the slate, bit his lip again. ‘It is important to know how to place and frame details, you see. Context matters. Would you comment?’

‘No,’ said Sigismund, with the slightest shake of the head. ‘You require context…’ Voss nodded. ‘But events cannot be understood when they occur. They require time to acquire meaning.’

‘But these things are already in the past,’ said Voss.

Sigismund held his gunsight gaze steady.

‘Shall we continue?’ he asked.

Four

OATHS

They knelt in silence. Twenty warriors in yellow.

All their armour was different to some degree. Some wore amalgamations of older and newer pieces: the plough-fronted helm of the ‘Iron’ Mark III plate; a segmented and studded pauldron that must have come from the proto-designs of pre-unified Terra; a chestplate bolted and layered in a way that conformed to none of the standardised patterns. Others wore suits that looked as though their lines had been the basis for the schematics in unit recognition primers, but with colours that Sigismund had never seen amongst the Legion: a pauldron of deep blue scattered with white stars, helms split between red and black, one the grey of gunmetal with a lone pauldron showing the yellow of the Legion.

All bore the clenched black fist, and all held to their vigil in silence, kneeling, heads bowed; they had not moved for three hours. Before them, the door to the Temple opened on darkness. No door or gate closed it, but to cross that threshold was death to any not summoned there.

A single warrior stood in front of the opening. A drawn sword rested point down under his hands. A black crossed tabard hung over his armour. His head was bare, and scars and augmetic plugs dotted the dark skin of his crown above pale, cold eyes. A Templar, one of the warriors chosen by the primarch Rogal Dorn to guard the Temple of Oaths and with it the spirit of the Legion he now commanded.

Every warrior of the VII Legion would, in time, come here to make their oaths to the Emperor and the primarch. The first to bear that honour were the warriors who had ascended to the Legion after the primarch had taken command. Now, whenever the Phalanx met with a contingent of the Imperial Fists, those who had never entered the Temple would come and make their oaths under the sight of the Templars. For those warriors who fell before they could come to the Temple, one of their brothers would bear their remembrance and speak the oath of the fallen so that their name could be carved on the walls and pillars beside those of the living.

In the years that had taken him from the drift camps to his first battlefield, Sigismund had seen and understood the Imperium of Mankind and the VII Legion as devices of truth. Often harsh, but clear-sighted, the Imperium had cast off old, false beliefs and replaced them with new, simple truths. The temples of gods had gone, but the Temple of Oaths held something that he imagined the faithful of the past would have called sacred. It was something in the stillness, in the quiet, in the sense that the rest of the universe could burn beyond these walls, could storm and roar and break mountains and crush the mighty, but here there would always be stillness and simple truth.

‘Rise,’ said the Templar before the door. The warriors rose. ‘Approach if you would enter.’

The first warrior stepped forwards. The Templar’s sword came up to bar the way.

‘What name do you carry within?’ asked the Templar.

‘Kidooneth,’ said the warrior. ‘I bear my name and the name of our brother Sidath, fallen in battle.’

‘Pass, Kidooneth,’ said the Templar, and Kidooneth stepped through the door.

One by one the rest approached, spoke their name and the names of the dead whose unspoken oaths they bore.

‘What name do you carry within?’

‘Cordal…’

‘Saur and Istofar, fallen in battle…’

‘Bellatus…’

‘Amarth…’

‘Fafnir Rann…’

The sword came up to greet Sigismund.

‘What name do you carry within?’

‘Sigismund,’ he said. ‘I bear my name and the name of our brother Iscus, fallen in battle.’

The Templar held his gaze and sword still, then raised it.

‘Pass, Sigismund.’

He stepped across the threshold. It was dark within. Only the light of the torches burning in the passage outside the door diluted the gloom, sketching pillars and a high roof, and marking the names that had already begun to march across the stone faces of the walls. The chamber was smaller than Sigismund had expected, only a little wider than one of the fighting cages used for arms training.

A stone plinth rose from the centre of the floor. A wide copper bowl sat on top of it. He wondered for a second at its purpose. He had been told nothing of what would happen within the Temple, only that he would make his oath in the sight of the Templars and his brothers. Everything else belonged to the unknown, a mystery that would only be revealed by experiencing it. The other oath makers had already taken their places around the circle of the chamber, and he moved to stand in the remaining spot.

‘What is war?’

The voice was low but rolled through the dark. Sigismund felt needles climb his spine. The breath in his chest stilled. There was someone there, in the dark at the edge of the circle. A sudden presence that flowed out as it moved into the dim light. Sigismund felt lightning arc down his nerves.

A figure stepped into the circle, towering, the edges of armour reflecting the impressions of talons and beaks, of feathered wings spread to catch the wind. Rogal Dorn, primarch and commander of the VII Legion and father of the Imperial Fists, walked to the centre of the room.

Much had been taken from Sigismund when he was reborn into a warrior. He could see horror and death and experience only a note of threat and warning. The fear felt by humans belonged to another life. But, in the silence of the Temple, he felt an echo of something that must have taken fear’s place. It was like the lightning charge of a storm running through him, like the ground vanishing under his feet. It was crushing, burning, uplifting, the pressure wave of a bomb blast extended into eternity. He knelt.

‘Stand,’ said Rogal Dorn. The warriors obeyed, and the primarch looked around the circle. His eyes were black pearls in a face of hard edges and shadow. Sigismund met the gaze. The end of all things was in those eyes, as cold and inevitable as the void beyond the stars. Then a flash in the depths, lightning, far off in a storm held on the edge of the world, and in that flash something that took the breath from Sigismund. There, in the glitter of Death’s eyes, was understanding.

‘War is fire,’ Dorn continued, and he turned as a Templar stepped into the space holding a burning torch. Dorn took it and brought it to the bowl on the plinth. Flames leaped up. ‘War is pain and suffering. It is loss and darkness and death. It is the bitterest of deeds.’ The fire in the bowl danced shadows across his face. ‘It is our burden, my warriors. We are makers of war. We create it, we hold it in our blood. There will be no kind end for any of us. There will be only war.’

Dorn paused, and raised his right hand. The armoured gauntlet folded back from the fist with a purr of micro-servos. He turned his gaze around the room again, and then placed his bare hand in the flames. Sigismund watched as the fire coiled around the digits. Dorn was utterly still, only his mouth and tongue moving as he spoke again.

‘Where war breaks others, we will endure. Where it brings ruin, we will build. Where it calls for sacrifice, we will answer. There is no end to this duty. We do this that others should not have to bear what only we can. It is our promise to humanity.’ The primarch’s eyes were dark mirrors to the flame surrounding his hand. ‘Come, my warriors, and speak your oaths.’

Sigismund stared at the fire and the face of Dorn beyond. The world had stopped in its turning. Existence had become the stone walls at the edge of sight, and the light of the fire, and the echo of the words in his ears. He saw them then, figures he remembered and some he had thought forgotten: Iscus standing, gun rising, the flash of death light caught briefly on the chrome of his skull; the War Hound Apothecary, Khal, kneeling beside the body of his dying brother, the blade of his reductor spinning up as he gripped his brother’s bloody fist.

‘You will live on in war,’ Khal had said.

Coroban standing behind him as the rain fell and the Corpse Kings circled…

Thera touching the iron bar to her forehead before she went out to meet the murder gangs for the last time…

Further back, half forgotten, a woman with amber eyes looking at him from beneath the fold of a blue scarf. Blood and the sound of gunfire…

‘Go,’ the woman had said, and there had been fire reflected at the edge of her eyes, and the sound of the world roaring as it came apart.

‘No!’ A small voice, defiant, wanting to hold on, to stay, to stand where he was.

‘Go! Do not stop, you understand? Go! Now!’ And then she was gone, turning away, a gun in her hand, pointing towards the edge of what was coming, and he was standing and there was just the slow passing of a second, breath in his lungs, his eyes wide, his limbs not moving. Then he turned, and ran.

He was looking into Rogal Dorn’s eyes, and stepping forwards, pulling the gauntlet from his fist, and plunging it into the fire.

The flesh on his hand began to char. Pain began to bite into his fingers, his palm, his arm. His face was still.

‘I am Sigismund,’ he said, ‘warrior of the Seventh, and with me I bear the name of Iscus, fallen in battle, to this Temple of Oaths.’

Dorn held his gaze, and Sigismund felt the skin begin to peel from his burning fingers.

‘Did you wish to be a warrior?’ asked the primarch.

‘No,’ said Sigismund.

A flicker in the flame filled the depths of the primarch’s gaze.

‘Then why do you stand here?’

‘For those who cannot.’

Dorn held his gaze and then grasped his hand in the flames.

‘Speak your oath, Sigismund,’ he said.

‘Your lord father,’ said Voss, ‘the first time you met him was when you swore your oath?’

‘Yes,’ said Sigismund.

‘“There will be only war” – the words he spoke then. The words he spoke then must have left an impression.’

‘My father’s words on the day I swore my oath are not the reason that I believe this crusade will never end.’

Voss raised an eyebrow.

‘Then the significance of that moment to this story?’

‘It was the moment when I understood that we were not just fighting for people but for ideas. It was the moment that I knew that there could be a higher purpose to defiance and the art of war.’

‘Your father has that effect,’ said Voss, as he made notes.

‘He thinks very highly of you,’ said Sigismund. Voss looked up, surprised. Sigismund nodded. ‘Your works are almost mandatory amongst command ranks in the Seventh. He has quoted you to me, and to other lord primarchs in my hearing. If the Crusade is fought by showing truth and ideas as much as by bullet and blade, then you are one of its champions.’

‘I am flattered,’ said Voss, looking down at his work again.

‘I also admire you,’ said Sigismund.

Voss’ head jerked up. Sigismund gave a smile, and Voss noticed the control in his gaze, the judgement. He was reminded not just of the physical ability of the Emperor’s legionaries but of the intelligence that drove them.

‘You have great talent, but you have worked and trained that talent, and put it to use in service of something greater than your own self.’

‘I would not say all my actions are entirely free of ego,’ said Voss.

‘Few human actions are.’

‘And the actions of Space Marines? Of primarchs?’ Sigismund did not answer, and Voss knew that he would draw no direct response to that question. ‘You know that it was Lord Dorn, your father’s idea, my “calling” I suppose we should term it. I was nothing, a minor merchant who had the foolish idea to use the last of my dwindling funds to follow the Crusade. I thought about joining the regiments, becoming a soldier of the Army, but I have never been brave.’

‘Courage is not a trait lacking in a man who goes onto hundreds of battlefields by choice, without weapon or armour, so that he can see them for what they are and give that understanding to those who will never see them.’

Voss could not keep the surprise from his face, then shook himself.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I had never written either, you know. Not when I got on that first supply ship out of the Sol System. I didn’t really have a sense of what I was doing. I had taken a folio book – blank… it was…’ He blinked, not certain why he was still talking, aware of the prickle at the edge of his eyes. ‘It was my son’s. He had… he had left it when he… when he had gone.’

Sigismund nodded. ‘Your son,’ he said, his voice low. ‘What regiment?’

‘Saccalian First,’ said Voss. ‘I… I didn’t want him to go, but he believed. Thought it was right, that the future needed fighting for and that if he could do that then he should.’ Voss found himself rolling his data-quill through his fingers, looking at the glowing words on the screen. ‘I think there is a good case for saying I went out to see what he had seen, what he had wanted to be a part of.’ He let out a breath. ‘I started to write about what I saw, ordinary things – what loading crews talked about in ports. The smell of tank wrecks when they have been pulled out of a burning city. The look on the face of someone when they see one of the truly big Crusade ships for the first time. Little things, little truths, small steps… I was not doing it with a purpose, though, not until your lord father… “There is beauty and truth in your words,” he said, and then he asked one question – “To what end do you make these remembrances, Solomon Voss?” Just one question, and my life since then is the answer. I was nothing before then, in truth, just a man wondering and making scratches that some people read. I think in a very real way I was lost.’

Voss blinked, recomposing himself, pulling back the threads of his thoughts. Sigismund nodded slowly.

‘We are all nothing until we decide what to become,’ he said.

Five

TEMPLE

Sigismund found his way barred the first night he came to the Temple. In front of the door stood the Templar. He was tall, even for a Space Marine, dark skinned without hair or mark, his eyes the green-grey of an ocean under a storm cloud. He held a great sword on his shoulder, the blade almost his equal in height. His armour was coal black and polished amber.

‘I wish to pass within,’ said Sigismund.

‘Who are you who would enter this place?’

‘I am Sigismund, warrior of the Seventh Legion.’

‘You have made your oaths. The way is closed to you.’

Sigismund knelt. He would stay like this for twelve hours, silent, unmoving, as the Phalanx slid into its night cycle. Thereafter, every cycle of night he came, and waited, and listened to the slow voice of the ship and the beat of his hearts. When the bell sounded to begin each day, he left the threshold and went back to face the sword.

‘Do you wish to fail?’ asked Appius.

Sigismund looked up from where he had fallen onto the cinders of the training floor. The tip of the weapon master’s spear was at his neck, the point resting on the skin as delicately as the touch of a fingertip. Appius was looking down at him, steady, patient, waiting.

‘I wish to become a brother of the Temple,’ said Sigismund.

Appius raised an eyebrow, then took the spear point from Sigismund’s neck and walked across the training circle to where a weapon rack hung from the chamber wall.

Sigismund stood. The grey cinders of the floor clung to his bodyglove and tunic. He shifted and resettled his grip on his staff so that he was ready to swing. He let it settle into his grasp, his thoughts find the echo of its weight. Even with only two days of Appius’ tutoring he had learnt that the smallest of details mattered. If you lifted a weapon, you had to be ready to wield it, and readiness meant not just holding it; it meant your being aligned to the weapon’s nature in muscle, thought and will.

Appius placed the spear he had used back on the rack, then looked across the row of weapons. There were swords and blades of all kinds, pole arms, maces, morning stars, hammers with beaked heads, bucklers, half-shields and devices that combined sharp edges and points in ways that Sigismund had never seen before. Appius’ hand moved between the weapons in turn, pausing to rest his finger on a blade or grip. His expression was relaxed, his eyes focused on what was in front of him, as though each weapon were all that existed in the universe. A black bodyglove covered his frame under a tabard of off-white. A faded tattoo of a raptor and lightning bolt marked his cheek, a remnant from the time when the Imperial Fists had been a Legion with only a number and the wars they fought had been under the light of Terra’s sun. His hair and beard were the grey of flint, of storm clouds, of the cinders that covered the training floor that was his kingdom.

‘Do you believe you will die in battle?’ asked Appius. His voice was mild, as though he had asked for Sigismund’s thoughts on the balance of a new blade.

‘Everyone dies in the end,’ he replied.

Appius laughed. ‘True,’ he said, and his hand paused above a double-handed mace. The flesh around the fingers was glossy with scar tissue. ‘True…’ His fingers tapped the mace. ‘But I asked if you believe you will die in battle.’

‘We are warriors,’ said Sigismund. ‘If we fear dying in battle then we have failed.’

Appius lifted the mace from the rack and turned.

‘Again, I did not ask if you feared death. I know you do not.’ He held out the mace to Sigismund. ‘Here.’

Sigismund set the staff down and took the proffered mace. Its weight pulled against his grip as soon as he took it. Appius noticed and gave a brief smile as he turned to the rack and took a broad-bladed gladius and pugio dagger for himself.

‘The head of that beast you hold is star iron wrapped around a lump of raw adamantium. Heavy. Heavy enough to make you slow if you do not submit to its nature.’

Appius lunged forwards. Sigismund judged the blow, stepped back and swung the mace up and down. Appius brought the gladius up in a fast parry that could never stop the descending mace. The blade kissed the head of the mace, and Appius turned his grip as the weapons made contact. The mace slid down the blade like a water drop rolling down a stem of grass, and now the weight of the mace was pulling it down and past Appius, who was stabbing up into Sigismund’s open side with his dagger. Sigismund wrenched the mace back as he turned, and felt the blade score across his side, biting through the bodyglove, sending blood down to the cinders.

‘What do we do here?’ asked Appius, circling.

‘We train for the trial of swords.’

‘No,’ said Appius, snapping forwards, then turning to scythe low with his gladius. Sigismund had read the first movement, but was a fraction too slow for the second, and felt his balance fall wrong. In that moment, Appius hooked the flat of his dagger behind Sigismund’s neck and slammed his knee into his gut.

Warriors of the Legions could shrug off blows that could kill mortals and not even notice, but a strike delivered by another of their kind, one made with perfect timing… that was another matter. Sigismund felt the impact shudder through him. Appius was already out of range as he straightened.

‘Point and edge, guard and riposte, you think that is what this is?’ called Appius.

Sigismund held still. The dance of Appius’ blades sliced a gleaming rhythm in his mind. He held the weight of the mace, felt its haft pull against his fingers as he shifted his grip. He had the read of the master’s rhythm. An attack would come now, a blade flick, and then the snap and then the thrust down…

Now.

Appius’ gladius flicked up.

Sigismund pivoted as Appius’ muscles snapped forwards. Fast. Lightning-flash fast. The quickness of death itself. Sigismund swung the mace as he turned. Strength and timing meshed. The mace head slammed down to break Appius’ left shoulder and send him to the ground.

Except that he was not there. He was three paces away. The hand holding the dagger flicked out, a glittering blur flashed through the air. The dagger slammed point first into the meat of Sigismund’s shoulder. His arm went numb. The head of Sigismund’s mace thudded into the cinders. The point of the gladius touched his neck.

‘I yield,’ he said.

Appius’ face was grim now, the patience gone from his eyes. He reached out and pulled the dagger from Sigismund’s shoulder. Blood followed it.

Sigismund kept his face still. Appius stepped close, gaze locked to Sigismund’s.

‘I know you,’ Appius said, and then turned away, walked towards the weapon rack and began to clean the blood from the dagger. ‘I chose you for this test. I have never seen your equal, not on this floor, not in all the places that I have seen warriors fight and die. You might be a Templar, you might be one of the greatest warriors that builds this Imperium.’ Appius paused as he inspected the dagger closely. ‘But you shall fail. One day you will draw a blade and stand against a foe, and you will look at them and in their eyes you will see death. Then you will go to meet them, and you will end.’

‘Everything ends, and all warriors die,’ said Sigismund.

‘You think so?’

‘All I seek is to serve the Imperium and the Legion,’ he said.

‘No,’ said Appius, and his voice was as cold and hard as a sword edge. ‘You seek death. You don’t just believe that you will die in battle – you want it.’ He dropped his gaze and shook his head. ‘You want it because it is a way out, a way out of all of what you have seen and see in this world, the only way that it can end. But our oaths and duty are eternal. To die in battle means that your enemy lived. Any enemy that you face in war should end at your hand. There is no exception to this. Victory, eternal victory, is about one strike, one kill, so that you can kill the next one, and the next, and the next after that.’ Appius raised his dagger. ‘One cut at a time. That’s how we create eternity – by making the next cut.’

‘What must I do?’ asked Sigismund at last.

Appius turned to the weapon rack, slotted his weapons back into place and drew a double-handed axe. ‘Find the truth and you will need nothing else.’ He made a quick set of cuts through the air, turned to Sigismund, nodded in salute, and raised the axe. ‘Again,’ he said.

The Phalanx was at harbour in the void docks of Jupiter. Swarms of Jovian shipwrights tended to its wounded skin, as ordnance masters and magi from Mars rebuilt its weaponry. Volkite close-range emitters, mass drivers and plasma bombards would nest next to the turbolasers and macro batteries. The new weapons had come from the Martian forges, crafted by the Red Priests based on Standard Template Constructs data recovered by the Imperial Fists. It was a process that would take months, and while it did, the Crusade forces carried by the Phalanx and its sisters took on supplies: weaponry, base materials, sustenance, human auxiliary forces from the Solar divisions of the Imperial Army, and fresh recruits to replace the legionaries lost in battle.

Rogal Dorn had gone to sit in conference with his brother primarchs and the rest of the War Council and welcome the newest of their number, Lion El’Jonson, to the heart of the Imperium. Half of the front-line high commanders of the Crusade had come: Fulgrim, Manus, Guilliman and bright Horus were there with Zahalume, Terragaaz and even Morn, the Matriarch of War herself. There were decisions to be made, bonds to renew and disputes to settle. Though the Crusade was already old, this moment would mark a shift from its youth and fury into an age of maturity and relentless momentum. In time, history would give the gathering a name to fit its place in the tide of events. The First Solar Conclave, they would call it.

The docks and fitting yards of Luna, Jupiter and Saturn crowded with warships. Soldiers filled muster grounds, and half of the merchant flotilla of the system hurried back and forth between planets and moons hauling the supplies for the holds of the hungry fleets. When the conclave was done, they would scatter back to the frontiers and push the boundary of the Imperium deeper into the dark. Not since the Crusade had first gone beyond the Sol System had so much strength gathered in the circle of the sun’s light.

When chroniclers of the Great Crusade looked back with the benefit of hindsight, they would note that this great occasion was also the moment that a warrior of the line in the VII Legiones Astartes submitted to the Circle of Blades to become a Templar of that Legion. They would see the alignment – the rise of a future leader and champion of the Great Crusade, and the gathering that would set the course and tone of that crusade for decades to come. In truth, like much of history, significance exists only in retrospect – the conclave important to the smaller event because it allowed time for the trial to be attempted while the needs of battle paused.

For Sigismund, all that existed during those days was his vigil before the Temple door and the cinders on the training floor. There was no sleep, not even the few hours mandated for a Legion warrior. Except the Templars who stood before the door and Appius, he saw no one. On and on this would go, until he faced his test, and failed or proved its equal.

The Templar who denied Sigismund entry each night was always different. Some he recognised, some he had never seen before. There was Chicero, one of the First – those who had ascended to the Legion as Rogal Dorn had taken command – tall and sharp-boned, his mace gilded with red gold. There was Erudae, broad, his face still bearing the scars of the Battle for Luna, with twin sabres in his hands. There were warriors with faces like carved stone and others with gazes that seemed to hold only the kindness of sharp steel.

On the night vigils rolled, and he knelt as the world turned around him. Each night, in the gloom before the door, he listened as the pulse filled his ears. The Temple was a sanctuary, buried deep in the heart of the Phalanx, separated and baffled so that even the noise of battle would not touch it. But there was not true silence. First came the sounds of his own blood and breath, filling his ears and senses; then, as though replying to the beat of his own life, he would hear the ship. Even stationary in the void, the Phalanx breathed. Billions of tonnes of metal and stone shivered in slow murmurs as forces and pressures worked their way through its bones. The accumulated clack of feet on distant decks, the shriek of a cutting saw on the outside of the hull, the fizz of vox-cables carrying commands from one portion of the ship to another – all merged and filtered into a sound that poured into Sigismund’s senses. Like the hiss of storm static. Like dust.

‘You have been wondering about the weapons,’ said Appius.

Sigismund looked around from the rack. Fresh blood was clotting on his brow and running down his right arm to the hand that held a beaked hammer. Appius was wiping a sabre clean.

‘Where do they come from?’

‘A good question,’ said Appius, inspecting the sabre blade then replacing it in a lacquered scabbard and slotting it back beside its kin. ‘These are weapons of the Temple, used by its protectors and to train those who would join them. They come from across the stars unified by the Imperial Truth. Some are sent by the great weapon forges of Sol, others are brought from wars, or given by other Legions.’

‘What is their purpose?’ asked Sigismund. ‘Their true purpose?’

‘To me, their purpose is beauty.’

‘Beauty?’

‘There are few things that I find beautiful,’ said Appius, nodding. ‘I think that some things are cut from us when we become part of the Legion, some parts of humanity that are trimmed to allow what remains to have focus. Other Legions are different, perhaps, but I find it strange that some are moved by the marks of a brush or the sound of a song. Things wrought for war, for the creation of victory, though… that is still somewhere where beauty remains to me.’ He looked along the rack, the smile in his eyes catching the light of reflected edges. He looked at Sigismund, the half-smile on his lips, grey eyebrow raised.

‘That is not an answer to the question,’ said Sigismund.

Appius nodded, conceding.

‘Another purpose is so that you understand each weapon you might face in combat by wielding them yourself. The weapon teaches you how you may defeat it. A Templar must defeat any enemy, so they must wield all weapons.’

‘That is not their ultimate purpose though, is it?’

‘They teach us who we are,’ said Appius. ‘That is why they exist. That is why we must wield them all.’

‘Until we find ourselves,’ said Sigismund.

‘Until we find our truth,’ said Appius. He turned and took a sword off the rack. Razor edges ran down both sides of the straight blade, and dark leather wound the grip beneath the cross guard. The weapon master raised the sword so that the blade was flat to his face. His eyes moved across the blade. ‘When you pick up a tool of war, you should know its history, both as it is written in records and how it is written in its substance. Like you, this blade was made on Terra. A weapon smith in the Gobinal Blade Clans of the Asiatic Sinks forged it from shards taken from battlefields while the Unity of Terra could still be doubted. Her name is lost but she was more able than any of those around her. At that time, the Blade Clans had only just submitted to Unity and laboured to make the weapons as gifts of fealty to the Emperor. The smith was of a lower caste, unable to work with the purest materials, so she sifted the rust piles and the battle middens for pieces of forged steel that others did not see or discarded because they were too small or too damaged. She gathered carbon dust from the edges of her master’s forge spaces. She worked when she should have slept. She made five swords, each one different in small ways. Look at this blade and you can see her in the ripple of the damascene, in the hammer blows and heat that brought the alloys of so many broken shards together to a single purpose. Her life is in its balance. Her truth.’

Appius reversed the sword with a smooth spin and held it out, pommel first, to Sigismund.

‘Try it,’ he said. ‘The hammer, axe and gladius are not your tools. Perhaps this will be.’

Sigismund took it. He felt the weight of the blade settle into his fingers.

‘How did it come to the Legion?’ he asked.

‘When the Blade Clans set their offering of weapons at the feet of the Emperor, He saw the smith’s swords buried beneath blades made of pure starsteel, of carbon-glass and alloys that cannot be replicated even by the high magi of Mars. All those blades were moved aside and the smith’s blades marvelled at. The simplicity of their design, the perfection of their making and the message they gave outshone all the rest. The Emperor and the Council of Unity gave honour to the masters of the Blade Clans for gifts that spoke not just of craft but of understanding. The masters accepted the praise and returned to their forges. The swords were given to officers in the newly founded Legiones Astartes and carried to war. One of them now sits in your hands.

‘And its maker?’

‘The leaders of the clans burned her in her own forge for the shame she had brought on them.’

‘They thought what she had done shameful?’

‘Shameful that she had presumed to place her gifts at the feet of the new Master of Terra, shameful that her blades had been lauded over their own works, shameful that she understood something they did not.’

‘What?’

Appius gave a smile. ‘Ask the sword,’ he said.

Sigismund watched the light pool and shimmer along the waves of shadow in the steel. ‘Is that story true?’

Appius nodded sadly. ‘Stories like that always are.’

The warrior with grey eyes waited for him before the Temple door as the bell struck night.

‘I wish to pass within,’ said Sigismund.

‘Who are you who would enter this place?’

‘I am Sigismund, warrior of the Seventh Legion.’

‘You have made your oaths. Only the protectors of oaths may enter. The way is closed to you.’

Sigismund took a step closer. ‘I would enter, brother,’ he said.

‘Why?’

‘I would stand where you stand.’

The point of the Templar’s sword checked his step.

‘The way is closed to you,’ said the Templar.

Sigismund took another step. The Templar’s sword cut towards him. His own blade met the strike. He looked through the cross of locked blades at the eyes coloured like a sea in storm. He knew who he faced now. This was not a brother of the Temple, nor even one of their champions. This warrior was Aeolus, one-time commander of the VII Legion before Rogal Dorn was reunited with the Emperor, now master of its Templars. He was death and defiance and the stone of ancient thrones.

‘I would bear your burden with you, brother,’ said Sigismund.

‘You have drawn your blade,’ said Aeolus, ‘and so you must live by its virtue…’ He stepped back, breaking the blade lock, gaze utterly still. ‘Or fall by your own failing.’

Around them, figures stepped from the dark. Each of them wore a crossed tabard over his armour and held a weapon in his hands. Sigismund recognised them from the nights he had knelt on this spot: they were the Templars who had barred his path each time he had come here. All except one. Appius stepped into sight. The master of arms held a hammer in his hands, and his expression was stone.

Aeolus looked around the circle of warriors.

‘Begin,’ he said.

The blow came from Sigismund’s left, fast, a lateral, low cut from a warrior with an axe. Sigismund stepped back. The blade passed and he went forwards, sword rising. Another blow and another, crashing into his sword, shivering into his grasp and up his arms. He saw the warrior with the axe twist, pulling the momentum of the weapon up ready to bring it down in an overhead cut. The tyrant’s cut was what the old warriors of Unity called it, a half-joke made to mock those dead kings whose heads and kingdoms had fallen to the Emperor. It was an ender of lives. Sigismund read and met the blow, turning the cut and striking in… and finding nothing. The warrior was already past him, switching grip and cutting. The axe head struck Sigismund’s side. The force buckled plate. Another blow hammered into the back of his leg. Then the warrior with the axe was stepping back, and there was a blur of steel as Erudae came at him, twin blades hissing.

Sigismund sprang back, but an edge hissed across his cheek. Blood flicked out. The next cut was already coming, and his sword was rising to meet it. Steel kissed. He could see Erudae’s lips pulled back in a snarl, chromed teeth gleaming. Sigismund spun back for space, one hand releasing from the grip on his sword, the other grabbing Erudae’s arm as–

A wide cut opened across Sigismund’s forehead. Blood poured across his sight. He had an instant before Erudae hooked his arm under Sigismund’s shoulder and twisted, and he was falling, and he knew the next cut would break him. He had faced warriors and enemies but never like these. He had nothing. He was empty, a void in the shape of a boy and then a warrior, looking for a reason to stand. He would fail, here and now, just as everyone must, just as he knew he would.

He was falling, and when he struck the floor, he knew that if he rose it would be to fall again, and again. All the strength given to him, all the skill at arms and the lessons of a decade of war, meant nothing. Even if there was a way past this moment, the cuts and blows would never end until he was broken, until this circle of swords had found the truth…

‘Find the truth and you will need nothing else.’

He struck the floor. The breath went out of his lungs. The moment slowed. For a second, he thought he could hear the sound of the ship, there underneath the grind of power armour and the ringing of steel. A slow pulse, the universe turning through its eternal arc, second by second. The sword was in his hand. The blade pulling on his grasp.

‘They teach us who we are. That is why they exist.’

The breath pulled into his lungs.

He saw Appius looking at him from the memory of the training floor, the half-smile glinting in the warrior’s eyes.

‘One cut at a time. That’s how we create eternity – by making the next cut.’

He rose. Erudae was there, the warrior’s sabre a flicker-blur at the edge of sight.

Sigismund cut.

The sword struck Erudae on the gorget. Chips of yellow lacquer showered out. He staggered for an instant, the cut of his own blade faltering, and then Sigismund was going forwards into him, cutting again and again, sending the Templar crashing down.

A flicker of movement at the edge of sight, and he was turning as another of the circle came at him, a morning star arching down. His sword was already moving, already cutting before the spiked ball would crash into his skull. He could see the glow in the warrior’s eyepieces. The head of the morning star was descending, a promise of oblivion. His sword sliced forwards.

The blade struck the front of the warrior’s helmet. The left eyepiece shattered, the faceplate crumpled, and Sigismund was striking again, hammering blows as the next warrior came, and the next, and within him he felt the sword move with him, a lethal shadow to his will. Nothing existed outside of this present, outside of the reach of his blade and the truth of its cut. There was no next moment, only a present sliced from the future one blow at a time. Faces and weapons changed; he felt himself take blows, smelled and tasted the blood in his mouth, but they were phantoms, ghosts vanishing.

Then there was just stillness. He looked around for the next opponent, but there was none.

Aeolus was in front of him, the great sword in his hand. The Master of Templars stepped back, his gaze still as he looked at Sigismund. Then he raised his sword in salute and rested it back on his shoulder.

‘You may pass within, Sigismund.’

Slowly, the sensation of the blows he had taken a dull ache on the edge of his movement, he knelt. He raised his sword. The ripples in the blade’s steel flowed with the light of the torches. In his mind he thought of the nameless smith who had worked a simple dream of unity and hope into its heart. He closed his eyes and rested his forehead against the blade. Then he stood and stepped through the door.

‘I was at the First Solar Conclave,’ said Voss. The screen of his slate fuzzed briefly. He frowned and twitched the display on and off. ‘Not in formal attendance, of course, but there – your lord father’s and a few others’ influence to thank for that. I can still remember the Lion of Caliban processing into the Investiary, the frost petals falling from the sky, the midwinter fires burning on bronze cages atop every wall and tower across the Palace. I even talked with Terragaaz the night before… well, before what happened. When you are there for such times you think that, just for a moment, the universe is turning around you. Your story makes the point that what is important is not always seen by history, or at least not seen at the time. Your trial in the Circle of Blades was a moment of small note then, but now it becomes the moment that a great hero of the Great Crusade took on part of his role in things – champion, defender, lord of swords.’

‘The truth is often unseen,’ said Sigismund, ‘that is why we have to follow it when we find it, why we have to fight for it.’ He gestured at Voss’ data-quill and slate. ‘That is why we have remembrance and witnesses to history.’

Voss gave a small chuckle. ‘I must admit that sometimes I wonder what events are happening right now that seem like nothing, or perhaps that we don’t even know are happening but to future ages will seem vast.’

‘Those moments are always there,’ said Sigismund. ‘Sometimes we are even lucky enough to see them and make a choice.’

‘Choice… something that has come up a few times, my lord, but there is not often choice in what you would become, is there? In being a champion of the Legion and your lord father I mean.’

Sigismund inclined his head, conceding the point.

‘That is true.’

Six

FIRST OF SONS

The Iron Hand looked at him with blue, machine eyes. Sigismund met the stare.

‘Thos, shield-centurion of the Felg Clan,’ said Sejanus, from beside Sigismund. ‘He is strong. Extraordinarily strong in fact, but don’t think that he is going to be slow. He can move like a snap of lightning when he wants.’

Sigismund nodded, but did not shift his gaze from the Iron Hand. There was ice forming on the deck. Atmospheric control had yet to be restored to the enemy ship, and the temperature inside was still plummeting. His breath fogged the view for a second. Eyes watched him from around the chamber: warriors from four Legions, magi of the Martian priesthood and their myrmidon bodyguards. Behind the crowd, their presence radiating through the chamber like the gravity of stars, the primarchs stood: Horus, in burnished steel and pearl white, face impassive, watching; Ferrus Manus, his silver hand clenched beneath his jaw; and next to them Rogal Dorn, his arms crossed across his chest, grim faced.

A loose circle lay at the centre of the crowd. The blast and scorch marks from the assault were still fresh. Sigismund could feel the shrill ache of his own wounds, the damage to his armour a razor vibration in his spine. The Iron Hand standing opposite him wore the marks of battle, too: a wide gash across his chestplate, deep enough to expose the machine workings beneath. The face above the high gorget was brushed steel, without any attempt to make the features seem human. Just the mouth remained, the teeth etched with chrome circuitry. His armour was the black of oil-coated steel. Pistons and cables bulked his frame. He was called Thos and he was a lord of the Iron Hands, a champion of their creed in war. He bore a two-handed mace, its head a globe of raw iron. Silver threaded the black metal and wound back into the haft. It, like its wielder, was a destroyer of enemies: not just a tool of war but one of obliteration.

‘Brother,’ said Sejanus, his voice low as he fastened the oath paper onto Sigismund’s shoulder guard. ‘You understand why this must be?’

Sigismund turned his head to look at the Luna Wolves captain. Sejanus looked back with grey eyes.

‘I understand,’ said Sigismund.

Sejanus nodded once, and then held out his hand. ‘Strength and truth, son of Dorn,’ he said.

Sigismund grasped Sejanus’ arm. Then he was stepping to the edge of the circle, and now there was just Sigismund and Thos, facing each other across scorched metal, breath forming frost in the air. Sigismund felt the weight of his sword as he raised it. The world had become small, compressed into this ragged circle and moment. He brought his sword to salute, saw Thos lower his head in answer. He felt the ice in the air as he drew breath. Then he lowered the sword and the future unfolded into a blur of steel.

Later, months later, after the war with the Astranii Machine Empire was done, Sigismund would think of the moment that the fight with the Iron Hands became inevitable. It had begun with five words spoken by Horus Lupercal after the ambush at Gallet Point. Five words.

Nothing. Just the blind darkness and the fading sound of his heart.

He closed his fingers. Tension, resistance. Something encasing his hands. Fast tensing of his muscles from feet to scalp, instinctual. Sensation as data, harvested and processed in an instant. A dead shell around him. Armour. Dead armour. Helm display scrambled to blackness. Zero power, or system failure or catastrophic neural link failure. No weight. Zero G. No external vibration. Vacuum. Void…

Memories, falling one after another, like motes of dust in darkness: a boy standing in a storm’s deluge… A ship, block-sided, grey stone and black iron… Fire… Spiders of silver hanging from the ceiling, blades for legs… Fire surrounding his fist… A sword… Cold steel against his forehead… How was he here? What had happened?

The survival response closed the questions, snapped his mind back to the stripped-down facts and needs of the moment. His hearts had dropped to a very, very slow beat. His body was shutting down and pushing blood and control to the parts of his brain and sinew that were critical to his survival.

No air. Floating in vacuum. Armour intact but non-functional. No indications of damage. Immediate priorities – armour power, then motion.

Muscle impulse to left arm. Resistance as the dead armour joints fought him. His hand moved; his arm rose. He brought it to his helm. Something hit him, low of the left side, low-power impact. He felt something then, a needle prickle across his skin. He froze. The sensation slid past. He waited. Slowly he moved his hand. The armoured digits found the visor display override under the jaw of the helm. He pushed it, felt the tiny mechanical click.

He saw.

Blood and splintered metal tumbled around him. Torn human limbs. Globules of blood and oil. Pieces of armour, shining edges sheared clean. Wires. Lumps of control console. Shards of armour crystal drifting, winking with the raw light of a red sun pouring in through blown viewports.

Motes of memories snapped into focus.

Sigismund knew where he was. He knew what had happened.

The flare of the teleport light as the Astranii emissaries appeared on the bridge. Waves of displaced air and matter blasting out, shredding crew. Him turning, blade drawn, as the captain on the command dais raised his boltgun and fired. The shell hit one of the emissaries, punched through its cloak of silver and into the mass of its thorax. Blood and oil and black carbon exploded out.

Sigismund reached the edge of the platform in time to meet an emissary as it hoisted itself up the stone balustrade. He cut directly down, the power field of his sword activating. The emissary looked up. Its face was a brass skull, its eyes rubies. Sigismund’s sword split it from crown to gut. The matter of its body blew out as the power field unmade whatever techno-mysteries nested in its guts. Sigismund whirled and struck again, armour juddering with impact.

Another emissary reached the top of the platform. Its face was an equine skull of carbon and brass. Sigismund cut. A whirl of pale light surrounded the creature. Weapons arched over its back. A gun with a crystal tip levelled at him, another with a conical muzzle. His cut struck the emissary as it fired. Overlapping bursts of light stuttering through the air. A jolt, then a dull numbness. His sight draining to grey…

Sound to a buzzing of static…

Neural scrambler. Point-blank burst. Powerful. Like a hammer to the stem of the brain. Another flare of light. His armour locking around him as fibre bundles and systems scrambled. Haywire emitter pulse. Direct hit, his armour a dead shell for his body as he fell into a fragmenting whirl.

Beyond the viewports, a shape slid over the red sun. It was a ship, but of a size that mocked the smallness of that word. A cliff-sided slab of dark stone and metal, over twenty kilometres to its longest side, it seemed as though one of the false gods of myth had torn it free from the heavens and cast it into the void to be the ruin of mortals. Trenches ran over its mass. Triangular pyramids rose from its upper side, and forests of aerials and pylons projected from bow and stern. Curtains of energy rolled around it, shifting like the cloaks of a queen caught in the wind. As Sigismund saw it, a sheet of light blazed from its hull cutting out of sight, a thousand-metre-wide scythe of orange that fogged his helm display with static. Then the buzzing migraine shriek as the neuro scrambler stole the sight and sent him down to drift in darkness.

In the ruin of the bridge, his view turned over and he saw the stars beyond the viewport, clear and bright, the great bulk of the ship he had seen gone. For a slow-turning second all was still. Then a mote of light formed in the airless space of the bridge. It hung for a second, grew, buzzing like a cage of wasps. Then it exploded into a sphere of lightning that faded to reveal warriors in the pearl white of the Luna Wolves. Their feet mag-locked to the floor. They spread out, moving with bounding, zero G slowness.

One of them reached him. Sigismund signed a battle hand message, fingers moving slowly in his unpowered gauntlets. The Luna Wolves warrior nodded, put his hand on the side of Sigismund’s helm. There was the tremble of vibration signal induction and then the warrior spoke.

‘Lieutenant Sigismund.’

‘I hear you.’

‘We are here to recover you. The lord commanders want your report.’

The three primarchs were silent when he finished. Quiet filled the command chamber, tension folding into the low buzz of holo-projectors and active power armour.

‘They must be annihilated,’ said Ferrus Manus. The X Legion primarch’s eyes focused on the holo-displays that rotated at the chamber’s centre. ‘Down to dust. Nothing to remain. What survives, my Legion will take and bury it in darkness.’

Rogal Dorn’s face hardened. Tiny fracture lines of tension spidered from the edges of his eyes.

‘Wasteful,’ he said.

Sigismund could feel the presence of the two primarchs vibrating from them. The senior Space Marines in the chamber had gone very still. Some of the human officers visibly flinched.

‘Necessary,’ said Ferrus. ‘You do not know what we are dealing with, brother.’

Rogal Dorn leant on the holo-table, eyes glittering, his face hard stone and shadow.

‘Do I not?’ he said softly.

‘No,’ said Ferrus. ‘You do not.’

The enemy were called the Astranii. At least that was what they called themselves. The Martian Mechanicum had different names for them: hereteks, unclean, blasphemers. At some moment back in the lost time before or during Old Night, followers of a machine cult had come to a star system and made it their home. Perhaps they were a tree sprouted from the same root as the tech-priests of Mars. Perhaps they had evolved in parallel – a cult sprung from mankind’s crumbling understanding of its old technology. No matter the truth; in isolation and darkness the Astranii had prospered and made a kingdom of machines. A spiral of star systems were theirs, each ringed by worlds on which cities of chrome and black carbon rose from earth and seas. Void cities swung through the gulfs between those worlds.

Its masters were called the Mechanism and war was the domain of its emissary class. They were formidable. War engines, void-
craft, macro energy weapons, augmented troops. Some weapons seemed cousins of the war-artifice of Mars, others were of a different, stranger, kind: sonic matter manipulation, harmonic neuro-disruption, machine-spirit sedition, sentient energy ghosts.

Three primarchs. That was what this campaign had summoned. It was not what it had been at the start. A single expeditionary fleet had made contact with the Astranii, but it had become clear rapidly that it was facing a task beyond its means. Scouting fleets were lost without a trace as they moved into Astranii territory. Then larger forces simply vanished.

The Imperial Fists had been part of the fleet to make first contact with the Astranii and more Legion forces had joined them as matters escalated. Large elements had come from the X Legion, the Iron Hands. Drawn perhaps by the technological sophistication of the foe or summoned by the Mechanicum elements already part of the compliance force, they had taken an approach at odds with the rest of the Imperial forces – annihilation.

Where the X met the enemy and prevailed, nothing remained. Void habitats became drifts of cooling slag. Survivors became ash. Data and captured materiel vanished. Dispute erupted in the expedition’s command echelon, the Iron Hands refusing to either change their approach or to quit the campaign. Their opponents were numerous, but the Iron Hands had the backing of the Mechanicum and that was enough to ensure deadlock.

Whether word had reached Rogal Dorn or Ferrus Manus first, Sigismund would never know, but both escalated their Legion forces committed to the campaign, and then came themselves. Before the two brothers could lock wills, a third element had arrived under the personal command of Horus Lupercal. At that point it had become clear that the greater fight was not on the battlefield, but to see whose vision would shape the campaign to its end.

In the command chamber, Ferrus Manus shifted forwards. The silver skin of his bare forearms suddenly seemed black in the low light, as though it reflected a starless void.

‘Get out of my way, brother,’ said Ferrus.

‘Our mission is compliance, not annihilation,’ replied Dorn. ‘The punishment for refusal is not execution. Behind these emissaries and their war engines are people, people who will be part of the Imperium and whose knowledge will make it stronger.’ Ferrus Manus opened his mouth to speak but Dorn struck the side of the table once. Metal buckled. The sound cut through the air. ‘We have a duty to our father’s vision, not a mandate to pursue our personal fears.’

Everything in the room was still. Ferrus Manus looked at his brother. When he spoke, his voice was low and dangerous.

‘You do not know what my duty and mandate is. There are greater and more important things than those in your simple world of stone.’

‘Duty…’ Horus said, stepping forwards and reaching into the holo-display to spin the images with his fingers, his eyes focused on the stars and icons. ‘I apologise, my brothers. These are great matters, but I am reminded of my duty as a warrior.’ He looked up at Sigismund. ‘We have ordered Lieutenant Sigismund to give us his report of the latest engagement, and the simple war dog in me would like to hear it and what he thinks it means.’ Horus looked around at his brothers. ‘Would you both indulge my impatience to hear what he has to say?’

Ferrus Manus looked at Horus, his expression hard. Horus’ expression was impassive, open, as though the Gorgon’s gaze were the welcome warmth of a sun. Ferrus nodded and stepped back. Horus bowed his head briefly in thanks, and then glanced at Rogal Dorn.

‘Brother?’ asked Horus. Dorn nodded.

‘Proceed, Lieutenant Sigismund.’

He stepped forward, under the gaze of his father and the lords of two other Legions. He was aware of the other eyes, of the warriors standing behind and with the primarchs, commanders of renown all, Mournival, Morlocks, Huscarls… He felt the stillness come, as it did in battle, as it did in the crossing of swords.

‘My lords,’ he began, and keyed the holo-displays. Then he laid out what had happened to his squadron of ships when they had translated into the Astranii territory at Gallet Point.

When he was done, it was not one of the primarchs who spoke first, but one of the assembled warriors.

‘The ship you saw,’ said the Luna Wolf, a legionary with dark skin and grey eyes, who had introduced himself as Hastur Sejanus. ‘It seems likely that it is a command vessel. Nothing of that class and strength has been identified before.’

‘They did not intend to leave witnesses,’ said Sigismund.

‘From the mouth of your own gene-son,’ Ferrus growled at Dorn. ‘Such is this enemy’s contempt for your restraint.’

Horus glanced at Ferrus and then looked directly at Sigismund.

‘What is your strategic assessment of what you saw, lieutenant?’

‘My lord, I believe that it shows the enemy has a weakness, both physically and behaviourally. The campaign forces have failed so far to find the location and nature of the ruling echelon of the Astranii – the so-called Mechanism. I believe this great ship is the answer. The Mechanism are on this vessel and others like it. They are not only its weapons but also its heart and head, and they are vulnerable.’

‘Vulnerable?’ cut in Sejanus. ‘They have been effective enough so far that this is the first time we have even seen them.’

‘Vulnerable, yes,’ said Sigismund. ‘After they destroyed our scouting force, they could have waited for more forces to arrive and then killed those, too. They did not. They ran. They fear that if engaged they will lose, and that if they lose then they lose everything. If we can draw these vessels out and then engage them quickly and with concentrated force, then I believe we can win this campaign.’

‘How?’ asked Horus, almost casually.

‘We attack,’ said Sigismund. ‘First here…’ He pointed at where a cluster of red markers winked. The display shifted as he indicated points of the sphere of stars in holo-light. ‘Then here, then here.’

‘Sequentially?’ asked Sejanus.

Sigismund nodded.

‘The first strike force moves from one strike zone to the next, targets of priority capital assets, maximum materiel application. Then the assault force jumps again and strikes.’

‘Forcing an escalation,’ said Sejanus.

Sigismund nodded. ‘We hold a reserve force in the shadow of each main force. When the enemy macro-vessels engage, the shadow force engages.’ He paused, looked up at the eyes watching him. ‘And we kill them.’

‘I like it,’ Horus said, then gave a smile. ‘With some refinement and modifications. Efficient, aggressive, removes the core of the problem and allows for the concerns of the Mechanicum and my brother to be addressed in isolation. The people, once removed of the burden of their masters, shall live and comply.’

He looked at Rogal Dorn, who gave a single nod of consent.

‘I concur,’ he said.

Horus looked at Ferrus Manus. The Gorgon glowered back.

‘This is folly,’ he said. ‘We will align, under protest, if only to ensure that this does not become a true disaster.’ He turned and stalked from the chamber. Horus and his commanders followed a moment later, then Dorn and the Huscarls, leaving Sigismund alone with the false light of drifting hololithic stars.

‘May I speak with you, brother?’

Sigismund turned at the words. He had heard footsteps and had known from their rhythm that they did not belong to one of his Legion brothers. He thought he knew who it would be, and when the visitor spoke, he had known that he was right. Hastur Sejanus looked at him from the edge of the practice floor. The Luna Wolves captain bowed his head in greeting.

‘Honoured captain,’ said Sigismund, bringing his hand to his chest respectfully. Like Sejanus, he was unarmoured, sheathed in a bodyglove and black tabard.

‘Please, call me Sejanus, my brother.’

Sigismund nodded. ‘How may I serve?’

Sejanus smiled. ‘Just as direct as they say. No dance of words, no veiling of purpose – one cut to the centre by word or sword.’ He paused. Sigismund remained silent. ‘May I cross the floor?’ asked Sejanus, gesturing at the circle of cinders.

‘Of course,’ said Sigismund. Sejanus stepped onto the fighting floor. Sigismund noticed that, like himself, the captain was barefoot. The Luna Wolf paused, flexing his toes in the ash, turning his eye up to the vaulted stone ceiling and walls, nodding in appreciation. His skin was very dark, and the short comb of hair running down the centre of his scalp was a grey to match that of his eyes. Sigismund knew him by reputation – you could not be aware of the victories and honours of the Luna Wolves and not know of Hastur Sejanus, captain of the Fourth Company, and member of the Mournival, the quartet of close advisors to Horus Lupercal. Honourable and lethal was how all who knew Sejanus spoke of him. Before the briefing that morning, Sigismund had never met him in person, but from watching him move he could tell that at least half of his reputation was true. He hoped the rest was, too.

‘I am afraid that I am here to talk to you about a rift in the brotherhood of the Legions,’ said Sejanus, ‘and about your part in it.’

‘I spoke as I saw the battle position, brother,’ said Sigismund. ‘It is that simple.’

Sejanus smiled and shook his head sadly. ‘I am afraid that in some matters it is rarely so simple, even if the outcome must be.’

‘The tactical decisions are not mine to make, and, forgive me, though you ask me to call you by your name, I am no captain of the Mournival, nor commander of the highest rank. I am a lieutenant of the Templars. I protect our oaths and I go where my lord father asks me. I spoke because Lord Horus wished it. If I misspoke or did dishonour then I will make amends.’

Sejanus smiled and bowed his head, but when he looked up his face was grave.

‘You were there because Lord Rogal Dorn wished you to be there and to say what you did. You said it on his behalf.’

‘I spoke only as I saw,’ said Sigismund. ‘My lord did not ask or instruct me.’

‘Yet you did speak for him and you said what he wanted said. You are his son, Sigismund. I could see it then and I can see it now. Some see the father of the Imperial Fists as a maker of fortresses, a master of ships, as a warrior of stone, but he is also a lord of conquest, of fire, of pushing back the enemies of the Imperium until they can threaten it no more. Whether those enemies exist on the battlefield or in people’s minds makes no difference to him – they must be faced and defeated.’ Sejanus paused, his gaze very steady. ‘You know this. You know it in your hearts and muscle and fibre. You are his son in so many ways that are not touched by title or rank. He put you in that room at that time because he knew what you would say, because it is what he would say.’

Sigismund felt the words sink and settle before he replied.

‘There is nothing that my lord could not say himself.’

‘But there is, brother. There are things he cannot say and things he cannot do.’

Sigismund was still for a second and then gave a slow nod.

‘The Tenth,’ he said.

‘The Tenth,’ echoed Sejanus sadly. ‘There are wars within the war we fight, brother. Wars for how we conquer, what we tolerate, and the shape of the peace that will come after we are done. You, like Lord Dorn, believe that action should be unrelenting but with an end that can be built on – that we are not and should not be the monsters we face. Others think differently. Lord Ferrus amongst them, in this instance.’

‘The annihilation of the Astranii…’ said Sigismund.

‘No possibility of redemption, no chance that with their claws blunted and their fangs pulled they may comply, that they may have things to teach us about truth, that they might not be a pillar of the future in days that we cannot see.’

‘Some enemies cannot be allowed to persist,’ said Sigismund.

‘Indeed, and the idea that we should start from that attitude is chief amongst those enemies that cannot be tolerated. We are the spear-tip, the bringers of death that cannot be denied or defeated. We must hold that responsibility lightly, or all we will do is create a desolation and call it peace.’

‘You speak for Lord Horus, now,’ said Sigismund.

Sejanus shrugged. ‘For him, for myself, for our Legion and the future we would make. This is what champions do, what we are there for – to say what their lords cannot, to stand where their lords cannot, to do what their lords cannot.’

‘I see,’ said Sigismund.

‘Yes, brother,’ said Sejanus. ‘I think you do.’

And Sigismund did see. He saw Ferrus Manus, his conviction as unrelenting as the turning of a great machine. He saw his lord father, and knew that Rogal Dorn would not give ground or compromise. He saw Horus Lupercal, ever the balance, as subtle in strategy as he was devastating in war, siding with Dorn but knowing that a conflict was coming, a conflict between his brothers and between the Iron Tenth and the Stone Seventh.

No good would come of such a rift. They had occurred before, and always the result was that the Crusade for illumination suffered and the Imperium was weakened. In other times, on lesser stages, perhaps it would have been settled by each party walking into a circle of swords and letting strength of arms decide. But these were primarchs, the pillars on which the Imperium rested as it grew. They could not draw blades in anger to settle matters of pride. Others had to do it for them.

‘The Tenth will challenge after the last battle is done,’ said Sigismund.

Sejanus nodded. ‘They will challenge you. You spoke in the council. Your words swayed the balance. You are your father’s chosen son in this, so they will challenge, and they will do more than try to defeat you. They will try and break you. They will want to show that while Dorn’s words won, he is weak.’

‘And Lord Horus wishes to see both the challenge and the victory of my father’s ideals.’

‘We must win the battle and then we must win the argument, and the only way to do that sometimes is with a sword.’

‘I understand,’ said Sigismund.

‘I knew you would. Something tells me you always have.’ Sejanus smiled, and brought his fist to his chest in salute. He straightened, and shook himself, a wolf scattering ash from his fur. He grinned at Sigismund. ‘Now that is done, I have one indulgence to ask of you, brother.’

‘Name it,’ said Sigismund.

‘I would like to cross blades with you myself. I have heard your Legion brothers speak of your art, but I would taste it myself. I have a feeling that I may wish one day to say that I had that honour.’

‘The honour would be mine.’

Sejanus laughed and drew a gladius. ‘Don’t judge yet, you haven’t seen my worst side. We sons of Horus can be quite vicious, you know.’

Sigismund raised his own sword.

‘Let us begin,’ said Sejanus, and the world again was a blur of ringing steel.

Thos’ mace struck Sigismund’s right shoulder. Ceramite shattered. Bones cracked. Pain shot down Sigismund’s arm. The force of the blow shunted him sidewise. He held his balance, switched his sword to just his left hand and turned into a cut that sliced down into the Iron Hands’ champion.

Thos was not there. He was already turning, spinning his great mace low to sweep Sigismund’s legs from under him. He was fast. Very fast. Sigismund jerked back, read the momentum of the mace, and slammed a foot out. The kick struck Thos’ left shoulder. Impact shuddered through Sigismund. It was like stamping on a mountain. The Iron Hand barely rocked, but the blow had halted the whirl of his swing. He came back with the haft of the mace instead, slamming the section between his hands into Sigismund’s face.

Blood sprayed. Sigismund felt the bones of his left cheek and nose break. Fragments of colour spun in his sight. The taste of iron filled his mouth and throat. Thos was a recoiling blur, like a great wave pulling from the shore before crashing back.

‘They will do more than try to defeat you…’ said Sejanus, the memory of his voice coming as Sigismund felt his sword rise to meet the falling storm. ‘They will try and break you.’

The mace struck. Pistons in Thos’ frame accelerated the swing as it unfolded. Sigismund’s sword met the blow. The mace slid down the blade and slammed into the cross guard. The power of the impact rammed the tines back into Sigismund’s hand with enough force to shatter his thumb and fingers.

Thos pulled the mace back. Pistons hissed in his shoulders. Sigismund cut, felt the sword swerve from true in his broken fingers and deflect off Thos’ pauldron.

Sigismund yanked the sword away, gripping it with broken hands. Thos’ eyes glowed above the line of his still-human mouth. He hit again, slamming with the crown of the mace to the grip of Sigismund’s sword. The lump of iron mashed Sigismund’s gauntlets into his fingers and crushed them into the sword’s grip. Shards of ceramite tore open skin. Bone and cartilage split, deformed, sheared. The pain was bright and sudden, like the flare of a phosphor grenade.

Sigismund did not let go of his sword. He shifted, instinct moving him aside from another blow aimed at his right leg. The mace hit his shin and spun him to one knee; he caught the fall in time to pull back from the mace as Thos spun the momentum of the first blow into a second that came up and into his guts.

Falling…

Broken ceramite…

Ringing in his ears…

His left hand slipped from his sword as he regained his balance. Thos was stepping back, giving himself space to swing again.

Sigismund rose, and cut. Once, twice, three times. Blinks of razor steel. The sword a hiss of a single breath. He was going forwards, and fluid was venting from Thos’ severed piston feeds, his arms locking, as the tip of Sigismund’s blade stopped dead between the Iron Hand’s teeth.

Thos went still at the blade touch.

A single impulse of nerves and muscle, and the sword would skewer Thos through the skull.

Sigismund drew breath to issue quarter.

‘Enough.’ The voice ground through the chamber. Ferrus Manus walked into the circle.

Sigismund met the primarch’s gaze. This close, Sigismund could mark the lines of similarity with his own gene-father, could feel the wash and flow of his power and presence, the thunder edge to the air, the promise of wonder and destruction. Sigismund felt it beat against his senses. He remained unmoving, the sword still poised. Thos’ breath fogged the blade-tip. Beads of blood were leaking from the cracks in Sigismund’s gauntlets.

‘Lower your sword,’ said Ferrus Manus.

Sigismund did not move.

‘Did you hear me?’ said Ferrus Manus.

Sigismund turned his gaze to Thos. Piston fluid was dripping slowly from his limbs.

‘Thos of the Tenth Legion, do you yield?’

A muscle twitched beside the mouth, but no words came.

‘Do you yield?’

‘He will not yield without my willing it,’ said Ferrus Manus. ‘Would you kill him for it, Templar?’

‘No, lord,’ said Sigismund. ‘I would not see a brother die for pride.’

Ferrus’ gaze darkened. Sigismund could feel thunder pressure in his head. He knew that he could die here, die and not even realise the blow had struck. He held himself still, his gaze steady. Ferrus Manus looked at him for a long moment more. Then he turned to Thos.

‘Yield,’ he said.

‘I yield,’ said Thos.

Sigismund lowered the blade, feeling the numbness stealing the strength and pain from his fingers. Ferrus Manus was already at the exit from the room, Horus at his side, talking closely.

‘I think I may remember that until the end of my days,’ said Sejanus, clapping his hand on Sigismund’s shoulder.

Sigismund raised the sword and rested the flat of the blade against his forehead. ‘It is done,’ he said.

‘It is,’ said Sejanus, his voice low.

Sigismund felt a prickle on his skin, and looked over the heads of the other Imperial Fists. Rogal Dorn was looking directly at him, face unreadable, but for a second Sigismund thought he saw a flash in the dark depths, a light, brief and bright and then gone, a ghost of emotion, fleeing before it could be seen. Sigismund raised his sword in salute.

There was cheering now, Luna Wolves and Imperial Fists filling the air with roars and calls of victory. Still holding his son’s gaze, Rogal Dorn nodded once and brought his fist to his chest.

‘Your lord father…’ said Voss, jotting down notes.

‘Yes?’ asked Sigismund.

‘You are very close to him.’

‘He is my commander and gene-sire,’ said Sigismund.

‘As he is to over a hundred thousand warriors of the Seventh Legion, but you are his First Captain, his champion from that moment when you defeated Thos to now. You are more than a warrior or gene-son to him. You are the personification of part of his nature – if it were not a term we had left behind, I would say of his soul. He has always trusted you to do as he would, to be victorious, to go forward. He has said as much to me.’

‘Your point?’

‘You believe that war will not end, and he believes it will. You know that. He knows that. Yet you both persist in seeing things differently. How is that possible?’

‘Because my lord father is the greatest and noblest and strongest of beings. I am just a shadow.’

Voss paused, biting his lip, wondering whether to push or retreat. Then he let out a breath and looked down to his slate again.

‘Do you want to know what I think?’ asked Voss.

‘Of course.’

‘I think an eternity of war is not an ideal to you, nor an idea that was given to you or that you arrived at in a single moment. It is an accumulation, like dust gathering in a ruined city until it swallows it.’

‘A bleak image,’ said Sigismund. ‘One that I refute.’

‘And that brings us back to control. You bleed control, you fight with total control, you control what you believe and your actions like few others I have met, and I include a great number of your Legion brothers.’

‘What you call control, is war,’ said Sigismund. ‘War with ourselves is where all other wars begin.’

‘Ah… I think I might be starting to see. And the chains? The chains I hear you use to fasten your sword to your arm in battle – is that a symbol of your war and control?’

Sigismund laughed. Voss flinched with surprise.

‘So I have been told,’ said Sigismund. ‘And there may be some truth in it.’

‘And the rest of the truth? Not that you think you are going to drop your sword, I am guessing.’

Sigismund looked at his sword hand and wrist as though there were iron links wrapped around them then. He smiled, but there was a note in the expression that Voss thought pulled it from pleasure closer to sorrow.

‘Honour,’ he said. ‘Honour and brotherhood.’

Seven

BROTHERS OF THE RED SANDS

‘I am Khârn. You are Sigismund. As equerry to the primarch and commander of this expeditionary fleet, I give you greetings.’ He turned away, moved to the cluster of other warriors in white and blue at the edge of the arena pit.

Sigismund felt Boreas stiffen beside him. The two of them stood at the edge of a circle of sand bordered by a high wall of worn and pitted metal. The warriors with Khârn were bareheaded, scalps studded with aggression implants. Several wore armour made of metal and leather. Most had their arms or shoulders bare of plate. One held a slab-faced shield, and a hound-shaped helm hid his face. Sigismund heard the growls of brief words between the warriors, punctuated by gunshots of laughter. Once, Khârn flicked a glance over his shoulder at the Templars, but other than that it was as though Sigismund and Boreas were not there.

More warriors started to enter, streaming onto the viewing platforms above the pit. Sigismund waited, watching. His eyes were following the casual swings of weapons in the World Eaters’ hands, the skill and lethal understanding in the movements – nothing casual at all in truth, just lethality. Khârn leaned in closer to the fighter with the hound helm and then jerked his head at Sigismund and Boreas. The hound head dipped in a nod, and the warrior marched over, armour clinking as he moved.

‘You must move,’ growled a voice from behind the hound’s snarl, and he jerked a hand at the filling tiers above. ‘This sand is for those who are going to bleed.’

He began to turn.

‘Your name, brother?’ called Boreas.

The hound face looked back. ‘Delavarus,’ he said.

‘I have heard of him,’ said Boreas.

‘So have I,’ said Sigismund, then turned. ‘Come, let us do as we are bid.’ He reached up, gripped the lip of the pit, and vaulted up onto the lowest tier. Boreas followed a second later. On the sand, the cluster of World Eaters were breaking into pairs. Sigismund could see the rhythm of their movements shortening, fists and jaws clenching involuntarily. Sigismund saw Khârn looping lengths of chain around his forearms. Some of the others were doing the same.

‘Curious custom,’ said Boreas.

Sigismund did not respond.

The fighters were roped together now, each warrior bound to their partner. Sigismund had heard of the rope; like the pit it was a tradition brought by Angron from the world that raised him.

He had brought other changes, too. Sigismund watched as the warrior called Delavarus and another paced to one side of the pit. On the other, Khârn waited, his limbs and body shifting as though an electro-charge were building up inside him. Twin blades hung in his hands. The warrior paired to him was pacing from side to side. The pit and the space had gone quiet, a low grinding silence of a storm reaching for thunder.

‘What has become of them?’ asked Boreas.

‘You think they have changed?’

‘The War Hounds were warriors of a great Legion. This–’

‘I do not think they have changed. I think they have become more themselves. I think that perhaps…’

Boreas looked around at the rare hesitation in his mentor’s voice.

‘I think we are all like them. They have not changed. They have become true.’

Boreas looked back at where the warriors were pacing across the sand of the pit, rolling shoulders, Delavarus on one side with his partner, Khârn on the other. Delavarus had begun to spin a sphere of metal on the end of a chain. Khârn was just staring as though seeing nothing, muscles flexing and twitching.

‘They are barely holding themselves true,’ said Boreas quietly. ‘The rumours are true… They are barely a blink away from murder.’

Sigismund did not respond, but his eyes had gone to the implants studding Khârn’s head and the metal cables trailing across his scalp: the Butcher’s Nails, aggression implants that had proliferated amongst the World Eaters in the decades since their father’s return to the Imperium. The Nails had pushed a Legion already known for its ferocity into a new sphere of brutality.

In part, they were why Sigismund had come. The exchanging of forces between Legions was a tradition as old as those Legions themselves, a mark of honour and a sign of trust between the separate brotherhoods of Space Marines. Commanders and units would go and serve with another Legion, not just as part of the same expedition or conquest fleet, but as part of that brotherhood, its warriors grafted into another warrior culture, living it, fighting under it for years before returning to their own Legion. From these exchanges came new tactics and mutual strategic and doctrinal understanding. The bonds between Legions at every level became tighter and the Imperium stronger.

That was the largest reason. The other, as pernicious as it was inevitable, was politics.

‘What more do we need to see than this?’ asked Boreas, his voice firm but low.

‘We are not here as judges,’ said Sigismund.

‘What are we here for then?’

‘To understand,’ said Sigismund.

War was barbarism. That was a truth that Sigismund had known since he had first become a warrior. In a crusade spanning the stars, facing the horrors of humanity’s past and all the monsters spawned in the dark, there was little room for kindness. The nature of conquest and of compliance meant death; it meant suffering. It was tragic, but if it was needed then it should be swift. Sigismund knew that in Lord Sanguinius’ Blood Angels, the role of destroying civilisations and enemies was seen as a terrible act, as shameful as it was occasionally necessary. The whole Blood Angels Legion bore those responsibilities when needed, donning silver masks of mourning, leaving their ranks and lives and names behind while they became angels of atrocity. Sigismund had always thought it the purest response to the truth of war he had ever met. Across so many forces, Legions, armies and warzones, the balance of necessity and cruelty wavered constantly, though the balance held true.

The XII Legion, once the War Hounds, now the World Eaters, had always had a reputation for directness and aggression, even of glorying in destruction, but as the presence of their primarch had pressed in on them, it had become something more. Tales of blind frenzy and feral bloodletting pervading the culture of what the XII had become. Death censures, massacres, casualties amongst allied forces, all of it piling up alongside a victory roll that grew and became ever bloodier.

It could not be ignored, but outright confrontation would fail. In other cases, with other Legions, harsh censures had worked. In the case of Angron’s Eaters of Worlds, it would not bite. They would shrug it off and grin an unrepentant grin through bloody and broken teeth.

So other ways were being used, the first of which was sending a force from the Imperial Fists to fight in the World Eaters: to observe, to learn and form a bond between the rock of the Legions and the currently most troubled brotherhood. It was a duty that Dorn had considered giving to others in his command structure, but Sigismund had asked that it be him. Dorn had agreed.

In the pit, the pairs of warriors moved towards each other, motion and muscle held barely in check, straining.

‘To understand what?’ asked Boreas. ‘The exact nature of their barbarity?’

‘No, to understand if it is barbarity at all.’

The doors in the pit wall closed. Khârn gave his opponents the briefest of salutes and then the warriors were a blur of motion, blades and chains. Sand kicked into the air. Sigismund saw it unfold, saw Khârn leap forwards as his partner’s mace crashed into Delavarus’ shield. The hound-helmed warrior met the blow and rammed his weight up and out. The warrior with the mace staggered. So fast, all of them, and all of it raw, no blows pulled, nothing held back.

Sigismund was aware of Boreas looking at him, and glanced at the lieutenant, eyebrow raised in question.

Boreas shrugged. ‘You were smiling,’ he said.

Down in the pit, blood sprayed from a cut and a cry of victory went up, echoed a second later by a roar from the tiers of watchers.

There was still blood on the sand, but the air was still now, the sounds of fighting replaced by the slow heartbeat of the ship as it pushed through the ether. The viewing tiers were empty, the combat that had filled the space with roars of victory and the clang of weapons reduced to the dark stains on the foot-churned sand. Sigismund stepped out, looked up, smelling the rich reek of sweat and blood still hanging in the air. Flashes of red and gold spun briefly in his eyes, as his gene-
wrought senses pulled tiny splinters of memory from the blood particles. In his mouth he tasted the acid sharpness of adrenaline.

Khârn stood on the other side of the sand. Stripped to the waist, he was slotting a blade back into a rack that had lowered on piston arms from the roof above. He did not turn, but Sigismund noticed a spasm ripple down his neck and back.

‘Why are you here, Templar?’ said Khârn, and Sigismund could hear the forced calm in the World Eater’s voice.

‘I like quiet,’ said Sigismund.

‘But not solitude,’ Khârn growled, and looked around. His hand was still on the blade he had been putting into the rack. He snorted and turned his back again. ‘I know why you are here. You are here to judge us, to see if we are as mired in savagery as the cowards say we are.’

‘I am here to fight at your side,’ said Sigismund. ‘I am here as a brother of the Legions.’

‘As a brother?’ said Khârn, turning from the weapon rack, an ugly grin now on his face. ‘You are not my brother, Sigismund. You may talk of custom and shared blood all you want, but we are different. You were made to make war the way a man sets bricks – one dull layer at a time. We were made to become it. You see this?’ He gestured at the metal walls. ‘This is not your Circle of Blades. This is the eye of the truth looking back at you. Blood, and hurt, and pain, and more blood, because that is what war is. We are not animals. We are just honest.’

Khârn was just two paces from Sigismund, head forward, muscles ticcing on face and torso like the firing of pistons. Sigismund held still.

‘I fought beside your Legion before,’ said Sigismund. ‘I stood beside a warrior called Sai on my first battlefield.’

‘Dead now, like the War Hounds we were,’ said Khârn, and he began to turn.

‘Did he die well?’ asked Sigismund. Khârn paused, looked back at Sigismund.

‘He died a centurion, standing with a weapon in his hand.’

‘None of us can ask for anything else.’

Sigismund moved around to the rack. Turning his back on Khârn, he looked at the weapons – there were axes, knives, cleavers, chain meteor hammers, broad-bladed spears.

‘They teach us who we are,’ said Appius’ voice in the back of his head. ‘That is why they exist. That is why we must wield them all.’

‘Until we find ourselves,’ he had said.

‘Until we find our truth.’

‘May I?’ said Sigismund.

Khârn shrugged.

Sigismund unhooked a sword with a heavy, fork-tipped blade. The weight pulled at him like an animal trying to break free. He swung it and listened to the heavy steel pull the edge through the air with a whistle.

‘Yes,’ said Khârn. ‘That one is a beast. Not made for fine motion.’

‘One cut, one kill,’ Sigismund said, and whipped the blade through a fast, downward cut.

Khârn nodded, and Sigismund noticed that a watchfulness had come into his eyes. He was reminded that Khârn had been a senior commander in the War Hounds, and was equerry to Angron, seen by many as the bridge of moderation, honour and control to his father and Legion. He was one of the reasons why Sigismund had requested to be part of this force. Khârn was more than a killer.

‘Do you think I haven’t heard of you, Templar?’ asked Khârn, his voice low, a threat held back. ‘I have. Who in the Legions has not? The great champion, the master of blades, always at the front, never slowing, stone within, fire without. They say you are undefeated – is it true?’

Sigismund nodded.

Khârn raised a scar-twisted eyebrow. ‘We will see.’

Sigismund felt the challenge in the words, the test. ‘You may see now, if you wish,’ he said.

Khârn’s grin pulled into a wide, broken-toothed smile. ‘Ha! This is not the duelling cages of other Legions. You wish to cross blades with me, Sigismund, Templar of the Seventh, then you need to walk out here under the eyes of all, stab your weapon in the sands.’

Sigismund turned and put the heavy blade back in the rack.

‘You are not what I expected,’ said Khârn. ‘Most others of the other Legions who have come here, they do not come anywhere near these places. No matter how bloody they are themselves, they do not understand. You though, I think you may be something else.’

‘What is that?’ Sigismund asked, and heard the surprise in his voice.

‘I do not know yet,’ said Khârn. ‘I think maybe you do not either.’

Amber lights blinked through the chamber. Beneath Sigismund’s feet, he felt the tone of the ship’s vibration change; it was preparing to come out of the warp into realspace.

Khârn looked up, still smiling. ‘It seems talk is done, Templar. War calls.’

The man walked onto the rise of rubble. He was bleeding inside and out: Sigismund could smell the metal tang on the man’s breath. The human held one of the energy carbines that had taken their toll of death from the Space Marines in the last weeks. A carbon-blade scimitar hung at his waist. The crystal scales of his armour were spattered red. Holes showed where impacts had penetrated. Synth-flesh packed the wounds, but red leaked from them as he moved.

He stopped atop the heap of rubble and looked down at the crescent of Space Marines. Sigismund could see the fear and loathing in the man’s eyes. Exhaustion and grief had stolen any mask that the human might have preferred to wear – his world was shredded, his soul open.

He did not speak or move.

After a second, Khârn looked around at Sigismund. ‘Do you wish to go and make peace, Templar?’

He turned without waiting for an answer and climbed the slope.

Iscolahar looked at Sigismund, his gaze pointed, a question written in the set of his jaw and eyes. The Ultramarines consul was commander of the expeditionary fleet that had jointly engaged with the uncompliant forces on this world. Upright, highly competent, he was every inch an Ultramarine. To say there had been tension between the two elements of the compliance force would have been an understatement. Khârn had refused to consider Iscolahar’s multi-staged campaign strategy, and it had only been through the Ultramarines’ patience and determination that the campaign succeed that they had made it work at all.

Beside them, walking with the World Eaters, Sigismund had felt the subtle appeals to him in Iscolahar’s words and body language, as though Sigismund could somehow bring Khârn’s dogs to heel. Sigismund had not responded. He was not here to impose his or anyone’s will on the XII. For now, his duty was to be part of them.

‘What madness now?’ breathed Iscolahar as Khârn stalked off ahead.

Sigismund returned the Ultramarine’s gaze without expression, then turned and followed Khârn up the rubble slope, Boreas at his side.

The human waiting for them was shivering, part from pain, part from rage. Behind him, down the slope, others were visible, a loose cluster of fifteen, some armoured like the man, others in clothes that must have been part of their lives before war came: men and women, some young, some with the weight of years hanging from their backs. Farther back there were more, aiming guns from broken buildings.

Khârn came to a halt and pulled the helm from his head. Blood spattered the white of his armour. The Nails in his skull were quietening, Sigismund could tell, still firing but more slowly, like the slowing breaths of a predator after a hard kill. In the weeks since this action began, he had learnt to read the signs of the Nails’ bite.

The man looked up at Khârn. Sigismund could see the anger surfacing on the human’s face, pushing past fear to pull lips back from teeth.

‘Butchers!’ The man spat. The phlegm hit the ground at Khârn’s feet. Sigismund saw the muscles in Khârn’s jaw twitch. His armour growled, tensing, but he did not move. ‘You…’ began the man, the word catching. ‘You come to offer terms?’

‘You will comply,’ said Iscolahar, his voice cold. ‘You will lay down your arms, and order all those within your authority to surrender. You will submit to the authority of the Imperium, swear fealty, and order those under your command to do the same.’

‘Do you not even want to know my name?’ said the man, and there was a note of bitter laughter in the words.

‘You are Vesis,’ said Sigismund. ‘You were a cohort commander of your civil guard. You are the leader of the last forces in this city complex.’

The human called Vesis blinked, the pain-blown mind behind the eyes processing the words.

‘Those who have already complied told us of you,’ said Iscolahar. ‘Your actions do you credit. There is a future for you if you wish it.’

‘But not here, not on the earth of my home. You offer me a life of what, of killing others in your name, forcing them to their knees?’ The man shook his head. ‘No.’

‘You cannot be allowed to live if you will not comply,’ said Iscolahar softly. ‘Not you nor any that stand with you. You understand. There are orbital arrays plotted and fire locked. Your shields failed an hour ago. We have moved all the non-
combatants out of the firezone. Only your force remains. Please, understand that we do not wish to do this.’

The man’s eyes were wide. Sigismund saw his fingers twitch, as though clutching at a sword hilt that was not there. There was blood on the fingers, drops forming on the tips. He looked as though he was about to say something, either that or draw his weapon.

‘No,’ said Sigismund. Iscolahar looked around, gaze sharp. Khârn turned more slowly. ‘He will not comply,’ said Sigismund. He could feel the eyes of the others on him, but he was looking at the man called Vesis. ‘Even if he agrees, he will not comply. In his heart he will remain defiant. Those that follow him now will be the same.’

‘This is the only choice left,’ said Iscolahar. The disbelief rang in his words. ‘You would deny them the chance of life?’

Sigismund shook his head. ‘There are other choices.’ He looked at the man Vesis again. ‘You wish to fight for your world even now.’

The man nodded.

‘You know you cannot win, but you wish to fight all the same. Better to die defiant than live broken.’

‘Yes,’ said the man.

‘Then we will come for you,’ said Sigismund. He nodded once to the man and turned away.

‘A ground assault?’ growled Iscolahar, anger sending cracks through his control. ‘We will be sending our warriors to die, for what? For pride and their bloodlust?’ Iscolahar jerked his head at Khârn.

Sigismund was ready for a snarl, perhaps even a blow, but the captain of the World Eaters seemed strangely still, watchful.

Iscolahar leant close to Sigismund. ‘I had heard much of you. I had thought to find better.’

Boreas had his hand on his sword before the breath of the words had left the Ultramarine’s lips.

‘We have taken all that they had,’ said Khârn.

Both Iscolahar and Sigismund looked around. Khârn swept his blade across the ruins and the smoke drawing up into the sky.

‘You will remake what remains, build different ideas in the heads of the people that are born after we are gone. A mirror of Ultramar and Imperial ideals, that is what this will be. Everything else ploughed under… And you call us barbaric.’ He shook his head. ‘It is as it must be, because we are right and too strong, and they are not right enough and not strong enough. But when you take everything from someone, you let them at least try to kill you for it. We owe them that much.’ He pointed his blade at Sigismund. ‘My command and warriors will follow the advice of the Templar of the Seventh. Ground assault in one hour. They can even have time to prepare. If you want no part of it, Ultramarine, then that is on your conscience.’

He turned and moved down the hill towards where the World Eaters tanks were growling fumes into the air.

‘We will join the assault, if only to try and stem the losses,’ said Iscolahar, his voice brittle, his face hard. He looked directly at Sigismund. ‘And when it is done, I will take issue with you.’ He put his hand on the hilt of his gladius.

‘As you wish,’ said Sigismund.

The Ultramarines commander stalked away towards his own men.

Sigismund turned back to where Vesis stood. He looked at the human for a long moment then drew his sword and raised it in salute. The man’s jaw twitched but he gave no other acknowledgment; a moment later, he turned and began to limp back to his lines. Sigismund watched him go, then turned himself and moved in the direction Khârn had gone.

Sigismund walked into the arena. The tiers above were already filling with warriors. Eyes gleamed in the low light, following him as he crossed the sand.

Khârn looked up. The captain of the Eighth was winding a chain around his wrist, the links clinking. Muscles flickered in his jaw. The plugs in his skull were buzzing like wasps. There was a burn scar from the ground assault on his shoulder. The World Eaters had come here after the fighting was done, and left the battlefield to Iscolahar’s Ultramarines.

‘Come to judge our barbarity again, black knight?’ said Khârn.

Sigismund shook his head; he drew his sword. The World Eaters’ weapons came up, teeth bared. Sigismund plunged the sword point down into the sand.

Khârn snapped back, still, like a dog held on a taut leash.

‘I come to walk on the red sands,’ said Sigismund, his hands on the pommel of the sword.

Khârn looked at the blade, then at Sigismund; his sneer might have become a grin. A rattling growl came from him that Sigismund took a moment to realise was a chuckle. The warriors in the pit and on the tiers above were jeering now.

Khârn laughed, the sound rolling around the pit like the firing of pistons, and then he was arm’s reach from Sigismund, voice no longer a roar but a rasp.

‘I am not mocked, Templar.’ His eyes were wide, his teeth bared. ‘This is our ground, you understand, our truth? The blood of our brothers has fallen on this sand. We were dogs, but we are not fools. This is our ground. I am a son of this place, we all are, and I will not be mocked.’

Sigismund pulled the sword out of the ground, reversed his grip and held it out, pommel first, to Khârn.

‘This is the sword of a defender of the oaths of my Legion. It was made by a forgotten smith who was killed by cruel masters. It is the blade that carries my word. It is my sword, Khârn. I offer it to you on this sand.’

Khârn gazed at the sword hilt, face suddenly frozen, uncertain.

‘I am not mocked,’ said Sigismund.

Khârn looked at him, then reached out and took the sword. He lifted it, eyes darting over the rippled steel.

‘You may keep it,’ he said, and spun the blade before plunging it back into the ground. ‘I prefer my own – besides, it’s better that you don’t do this with an unfamiliar blade.’

Khârn glanced over his shoulder to the closest of the World Eaters in the pit.

‘Skraloc, brother, you will have to find another to stand beside. Delavarus, you will be with this black knight of the Seventh.’ Khârn turned and sat again on the bench, and began to look to the chains half circling his wrists.

Delavarus moved towards Sigismund. The Triarii warrior’s hound helm hid any expression on his face.

‘Stay in my shadow,’ he growled. ‘I am not dragging you across the pit. I am not going to let you stain my record. Understand? Here you are not captain of anything. You are the warrior bound to me and I to you, for better or worse.’

‘I understand,’ Sigismund said, and turned to where Khârn was chaining his weapons to his arms. Sigismund held out a hand towards the chains.

Khârn looked at the hand and then him. The skin beside his right eye was ticcing.

‘A chain,’ said Sigismund, not lowering his hand. ‘I would not wish to lose my sword in our first bout.’

‘First bout?’ said Khârn. ‘Who says you will get past one?’

Sigismund shrugged.

Khârn let out a long breath. ‘You know, I am getting the most pointed feeling that I am going to regret this.’ He shook his head and unwound the chain that dangled from his right wrist. ‘Here,’ he said, holding the links out to Sigismund, who took them and began to wind them around his right forearm. Beside him, Delavarus shook out his meteor hammer, whirling the heavy iron ball on its chain so that it whickered through the air.

Khârn rose and moved to the other side of the sand with Skraloc. The doors in the pit walls shut. A buzzing quiet had filled the chamber. Sigismund finished fastening the chain to his sword. He looked at Delavarus. The hound helm nodded. Khârn turned, his twitching muscles suddenly still. Sigismund raised the sword and touched it to his forehead.

Then the roar, and the surge of muscle and blood, and the whir of chains, and the clash of steel.

‘You admire them?’ asked Voss. ‘The World Eaters, you admire them. I confess, I am confused. The weave of what you have told me and what I know of your record and your Legion’s, tells me that you are a noble soul, that you see no glory in war or death. Yet you call the warriors of a Legion that has been rebuked and censured for its methods your brothers. You do not see a contradiction in that?’

‘They have erred,’ said Sigismund.

‘Your dislike of the Night Lords of the Eighth Legion is clear even from the few asides you have made. They have also been censured for brutal acts of war. Yet you do not say that they have only erred, and something tells me you would not call them brothers.’

A shadow moved over Sigismund’s face.

‘The deed is not all that matters. The reason is what matters.’

Eight

KIN OF MIDNIGHT

There was smoke coming from the corpse of the city. Sigismund could smell it as the gunship doors opened. Promethium. Plastek. Flesh. Thick, rolling a fog up into the blue sky.

‘Teeth of hell,’ hissed Rann, from beside him.

The gunship banked. The city filled the view beyond the open door. Sigismund’s boots locked to the floor, his muscles shifting to hold him steady on the sight before him. The roar of the engines was deafening at his back, the growl of a storm.

He could see the grid and wind of the roads. Piles of rubble that had been buildings. Ragged walls. Holes that had been windows. The shadow of the surrounding mountains creeping back across the ground, a slow tide, the new day’s light an unkindness to the comfort of shadows. Fires rolling in orange and black at the base of the columns of smoke. No shell fire. No flicker of tracer. No blink of explosions or rising blasts of dust. Silence. Silence that he could feel through the gunship’s din.

His eyes found the blue-black shapes of tanks and war machines amongst the ruins, figures on the edge of the fires.

‘Lock targets,’ said Sigismund. ‘Combat deployment immediate.’

Rann gave a single nod, and then the orders were snapping across the vox, and the warriors in the gunship were rising, weapons arming. The gunship rose, engines now shrieking, and beyond the open door its kin flashed through the air, squadrons spiralling into a gyre. Flares shed from wings and burst into star brightness, and all Sigismund could feel was the coldness within, the lightning of the storm. A small voice, very small and fading, called that he could not do this, that he had to have control, that without that there was nothing.

‘Oaths for eternity!’ called Rann, and the echo of those words roared from the throats of his brothers. The gunship’s nose lifted, and for a moment the view was just of the blue sky and the stars fading in the morning sun. Then the gunship winged over and dived.

Cheraut – a war long and bitter. The warriors of five Legions, three primarchs, millions of mortal troops. Months of the most direct conflict that the Great Crusade had seen. Sieges, assaults, losses, the long creaking, bleeding pressure of forces that will not be denied beating against the will and strength of people that did not want to submit. Later, it would be remembered only for how it ended, for the cracks in brotherhood and ideology that would see Rogal Dorn bloodied at the hands of Curze, and the Night Haunter fleeing into a future of further atrocity. The gilding of glory and honour looked for by Fulgrim’s III Legion would turn to tarnish. It would become a compliance that few would want to remember and fewer to hold the banner for.

In its last stages on the northern, sub-polar continent, the final cities and fortresses fell. They fell not as the others had, prised away from those who held them over weeks and months, but in days, one after another as the Legions struck from air and land. The people of Cheraut had fought and fought and resisted, but now found that they were exhausted, broken, human, while those they faced were anything but human.

The gunship slammed level above the plaza. Sigismund leapt from the assault ramp. The ground greeted him, impact shuddering through him, and he was moving, going forwards, weapon drawn, his brothers at his side.

There were warriors in midnight blue in loose order at the centre of the plaza. The Imperial Fists did not stop. The gunships shrieked as they fired their engines and punched back into the sky. One of the midnight-clad warriors raised a bolter as Sigismund came at him.

A mistake. Sigismund sliced his blade through the weapon. The shells in the breech and magazine exploded. The warrior reeled, but Rann’s shield was already slamming into him, and the Imperial Fists were a wedge driving through to the centre of the plaza.

A figure in a skull helm turned to meet Sigismund. A crest of skeletal, red wings rose from its crown, a chainsword was gunning to life in its fist. Sigismund triggered his own blade’s power field in the instant it struck the chainsword. Chain teeth spewed into the air, and Sigismund felt his blade go through the weapon. The eyes in the skull helm were blood red. He cut the power field an instant before the sword struck the dark clad warrior’s crown. Had the field been active the blow would have parted crest and helm and skull, and sliced down through chest and guts, and blood and bowel fluid would have been gushing out, cooking as it touched the blade in the second before it swept up to meet the next enemy…

The naked sword split the crest and cracked the ceramite of skull helm, cleaved it, and there was blood flowing over the skull-
painted mask as the warrior staggered. Sigismund slammed a kick into the warrior’s chest. Shouts and cries filled the air around him, but that was somewhere else, some other space where Rann’s shield brothers were shoulder to shoulder, the Templars with them. All that Sigismund was aware of was the blood roaring through him and the thread of will that held the tip of his blade still at the throat of the Night Lord at his feet. A protesting noise was coming from the speaker grille. One push of muscle and will and Sigismund’s sword-tip would ram up under the chin of the helm, up and through the mouth and into the meat beyond.

‘Brother!’ Rann’s voice, loud and urgent. Sigismund did not move, but suddenly the world flooded back in.

‘What are you doing?’ gasped the Night Lord. Sigismund looked down at him then up at the plaza and the smoke-veiled city. Corpse smoke. Greasy with fat. Poles ringed the plaza, lengths of metal rammed into the ground. Bodies, impaled through, hung from them, one stacked on another. Some of the poles had begun to bend with the weight. There was blood in the fountain at the centre of the plaza, blood and heaps of fresh, flayed skin.

‘Get your forces out of this battle zone,’ said Sigismund through gritted teeth. ‘You are relieved. Do it now.’

‘Relieved?’ a sneering voice rose from behind him. ‘I am not certain under what authority you give that order.’

Sigismund straightened, turned. The warrior who had spoken was leaning against the scorched remains of a statue, arms folded, a barbed chain halberd resting beside him. His face was very pale, a tangle of scars running through the refined features like cracks through marble. He looked at Sigismund with black-in-black eyes.

‘According to the conventions and rules that govern these matters, I have theatre command here. So, unless you bring fresh orders from a higher authority, on behalf of the Eighth Legion I will have to decline your request.’

‘Sevatar,’ growled Rann.

‘Fafnir,’ smiled Sevatar, then nodded to the Night Lord still sprawled on the ground. ‘Krukesh, get up.’

Sigismund stepped towards Sevatar. The plaza had gone quiet, tense.

‘What have you done here?’ asked Sigismund.

‘We have done what our lord father ordered – we have done what is needed.’

‘This!’ Sigismund pointed his sword at the coiling smoke and the place that had been a city behind the poles. ‘This is not needed.’

Sevatar shrugged. ‘I am not going to argue points of philosophical difference. In truth I find they are equally as tedious as they are meaningless.’

Sigismund drew breath, but Sevatar spoke again.

‘More to the point, they are irrelevant. We have work to do. You can stay but something tells me you might find it distasteful.’

Sevatar turned away. Sigismund cut, the motion unfolding in a blink of steel. Sevatar’s glaive met the blow, and suddenly both of them were eye to eye, weapons locked.

‘A strike without warning,’ hissed Sevatar between bared teeth. ‘Isn’t that rather against the grain of honour and justice? Please don’t tell me I have misjudged you. I would hate to have to like you.’

Sigismund looked into the black-in-black eyes. He held the sword steady.

Sevatar’s grin twitched. ‘I notice that you didn’t activate the power field. Was that out of concern for my safety, or are you trying to make some kind of point? You are noble and just, and I am a cruel killer, or something along those lines, hmm?’ Sevatar’s eyes glittered above his grin. ‘Well, I can save you the effort on two fronts, brother – first, if it had been me, I wouldn’t have bothered to swing the blade if it didn’t have bite.’ Sevatar shifted the pressure locking his glaive with Sigismund’s sword and spun back, fluid, and fast. The smile faded from his lips. He looked up at where the nearest corpse hung, arms slack at its sides, uniform black with blood, the tip of the spear projecting up between its teeth. ‘Second, I simply don’t care. Third, even though I swore I would stop at two, you are deadly and righteous, but this is not your war and never was, Templar.’

Sigismund took a step forward and plunged his sword into the ground at Sevatar’s feet.

The midnight-clad warriors laughed. Sevatar looked at the sword. ‘You do want to do this, don’t you?’

‘Here and now.’

Sevatar rolled his eyes, looked around the circle of Imperial Fists and Night Lords. He blinked and shook his head. ‘All right.’

Sigismund pulled the sword from the ground and took a pace back to where Rann stood. A loose circle was forming at the centre of the Imperial Fists and Night Lords.

Rann held his hand out wordlessly to take the sword from Sigismund as he took a length of chain from a pouch and began to wind it around his wrist. He listened to the clink as the links pulled tight. He nodded to Rann as the assault captain held out his sword.

‘Thank you, my brother,’ he said.

‘For not trying to tell you that this is a foolish idea?’ said Rann. ‘If you weren’t here, I think I might have skipped the challenge and just seen how he looked with that grin scattered in the mud.’

Sigismund fastened the sword to the chain, flexed his fingers, held the blade’s weight, felt its balance shift.

‘I do not need to tell you, but he’s quick,’ said Rann softly. ‘I saw him against one of the Thirteenth – not a pretty thing to watch – and I would trust him as far as I would a scorpion.’ Sigismund glanced at Rann, who shrugged. ‘Just in case you hadn’t thought of that.’

‘This is not about who is faster, brother, or stronger,’ said Sigismund. He put a hand on Rann’s shoulder, his voice low. ‘Disperse our forces into the city, and see this barbarity stopped. Send word to the primarch. He will want words with the Night Haunter.’

‘It will be done,’ said Rann.

Sigismund bowed his head and brought his fist to his chest. Rann returned the salute, and then Sigismund was turning, and the world was slowing to the beat of his hearts. Inside his mind he could hear the growl of a storm coming, long ago and far off.

Sevatar padded forwards, his movement loose, his spear held in one hand, eyes watching, mouth smiling.

‘We fight until one yields,’ he called.

Sigismund nodded. ‘Agreed.’

The smell of the murdered city filled Sigismund’s nose as he drew a breath.

‘Only blows with weapons,’ said Rann.

Sevatar raised an eyebrow then shrugged. ‘They say you have played in the dog pits of the Twelfth, so I can understand it if you are worried that he might have picked up bad habits. Can’t have the Lord Templar in more grubby brawls than needed, can we?’

Sigismund did not acknowledge the words. He stopped. In his mind he could feel the weight of his sword. The beat of his hearts had faded to near silence. Far off in memory he could hear the rain begin to fall and the wind rattling through the shack doors.

‘Well then…’ said Sevatar, stopping in his own stride, reaching down to pull the helm from where it hung at his waist and lower it over his head. A fanged skull gazed back at Sigismund from beneath a crest of crimson wings. The eye-lenses lit. ‘Let’s get this over with.’

Sevatar moved. His chain staff flicked out and then twisted into a cut. It was fast. Shockingly fast. Sigismund was already moving forwards as he felt it clang from his blade as he parried. He turned the blow and thrust, shifting the sword to one hand, all his weight and speed behind the point of the blade. One hit, one kill, true and pure. Even without its power field the blow would breach armour and punch into flesh if it struck the right point, and Sigismund had seen the gap open above Sevatar’s gut-plate. Hit the place where the plates and cables joined and the sword would ram into the torso, through bone and into the guts within. Not a mortal blow, not for a Space Marine. But a blow to end this now, enough to wound, enough to leave a mark.

But Sevatar was not there. An eye-blink, and Sigismund felt his sword thrusting into space, pulling him forwards as the chain staff whipped around, cutting across and up and into his own midriff. He turned as the blow came at him and went in close, guard high as he read the spin of Sevatar’s weapon and the two blades rang against each other.

Blow after blow, cut after cut as the sun rose and poured its rays through the veils of smoke. There had been cries and cheers at first. They had gone, replaced by silence. Cut and riposte, the two figures a spiral moving at the centre of a circle, and for Sigismund it seemed as though time and place had gone, as though the sun arcing above were rotating around this moment, as though this were the world – truth and lies, life and pain all found in the meeting of blades.

A cut, a parry, the teeth of the glaive catching the edge of the sword enough to shear it wide, and the blur of the blow slicing into his legs, and the step that would pull him back, sword rising, thrusting into the gap that would come. The glaive coming to meet his cut, the sound of the chain motor gunning to life for a second so that the cutting teeth spun his sword as the weapons met – the sword pivoting in his grip, shrugging off the deflection to cut. On and on, his hearts a steady drum to the hours.

One cut, one kill… True and simple. The first truth he had learnt from the sword. True unless the sword would not find its mark. Unless the enemy was like Sevatar, cruel and uncaring of ideals, and deadly, and as fast as the snap of lightning between storm cloud and ground. One moment, one mistake and it would be over.

They duelled in silence. At first Sigismund had thought Sevatar would talk, would throw words with his blows, but he did not; he simply fought, not with a sneer or a flourish, but with an intensity that Sigismund had never felt, focused yet boiling, like the waves of a black ocean. Like a storm that would never pass. He would not tire, Sigismund knew that. He knew that this was an opponent who had run and retreated and murdered and fought like a coward in war, but here in the circle of time was something else, something that perhaps even he did not realise, an argument spoken by the touch of blades. This was the interplay of ages, of all civilisation and its fall, never repeating in detail, but always in pattern. Death and the warrior, the knight and his shadow, on and on, blades ringing as they sliced away the present forever. This, though, would end, and it would end with one cut.

It was almost here. He could feel it, like a light flickering in the distance becoming clearer with each step, a different truth to the one he had thought Appius had meant all those years ago.

‘One cut at a time. That’s how we create eternity – by making the next cut.’

From the moment that their blades had locked, he had known that Sevatar would not fall quickly. So, he had struck and struck, each time sharpening the edge in his mind, refining his feel for the timing of his opponent, his movement. Soon he would be able to make a single cut, a cut shaped like a key for a lock, and then this would be done. A thousand cuts to create one.

The sun was setting, red and fire orange through thinning smoke. Another cut from overhead, another turn of his blade, another strike shearing off a parry…

And there it was, opening before him, as though it were not him wielding the weapon that would strike, but just observing it coming into being. He took a blow on his sword, felt the force shudder through his grip, felt the halberd slide to the cross guard, locked and jerked the weapons for a second and then whipped the blade, turning it into an overhead cut that would smash down onto Sevatar’s face.

Sevatar knew what was happening. Sigismund felt the realisation like an electric shock of understanding passing between them, like a blast wave transmitted through water. He knew that in this moment he could not parry, could not bring his blade to strike. The eyes in Sevatar’s faceplate were red coals in the dying light, caught in an unfolding instant that only they understood, brief and eternal.

Sevatar dipped his head and rammed the crest of his helm up into Sigismund’s face as the sword cut his faceplate, shattering the skull-painted ceramite and the red of an eye-lens. Sigismund stepped back, spinning the sword into a guard. Sevatar retreated, pulling his helm from a bloody face. Sigismund could taste the iron on his own tongue. He felt the weight in his limbs now, rare for a Space Marine; saw the scoring and chips on his armour. It was night, the light of a new dawn slipping above the teeth of the surrounding mountains. The city was quiet, the fires gone and the corpse smoke fading from the air.

‘First blood to me,’ said Sevatar, grinning as his own blood ran down his face.

‘You forfeit,’ called Rann.

‘Perhaps,’ shrugged Sevatar, ‘but I didn’t lose.’ He took a step closer so that his words were a whisper between them. ‘Next time, brother, remember that even if people start out with honour, no one ends that way.’ He grinned again. ‘Take it from me.’

Sigismund felt a hollow laugh come from his lips, then he turned his back and walked away.

Sigismund had stopped, the incomplete words of his last answer hanging like a severed length of rope. The Lord Templar’s gaze was fixed on the edge of the cave, staring, unblinking, eyes focused on nothing that was there.

‘So, there was no winner,’ said Voss.

Sigismund looked around. Eyes fastening again on Voss.

‘The bout was void. No victory assigned, no loss taken.’

‘No victory…’ said Sigismund slowly. ‘You think that the truth of victory is defined by rules?’

Voss shook his head.

‘I think that you are trying to tell me that we like to believe it is.’

Nine

TRIUMPH

The sun rose over the plateau, pouring pale gold over the ground and turning the shadows from night blue to the purple of bruised skin. High above, the false stars of the ships stacked from high to low orbit winked in the lightening sky.

Sigismund watched as the light changed. From here, high on a balcony on the side of the Imperial Dais, the world beneath seemed laid bare, the landers and war engines made small by the distance, individual figures invisible unless they moved together and even then barely discernible. Here were armies that had conquered the galaxy once and had the strength and power to do it again. World Eaters, Thousand Sons, Word Bearers, Luna Wolves, Blood Angels, White Scars, Emperor’s Children, Death Guard, all in mass strengths, and with them Titan Legions, Knight dynasties, grand armies, crusade gatherings, tribute cohorts, legate formations – on and on to beyond the horizon either side of the great triumphal highway beneath the Imperial Dais, which rose as a lone mountain above the flattened arc of the world.

Ullanor, the place of victory. Here the Emperor had broken the greatest of the ork kingdoms. A triumph had been called to mark that victory, but this was a triumph like few others. Representatives of every one of the Legiones Astartes were here. Nine of the primarchs would stand at the Emperor’s side to take the salute of the armies that would walk along an avenue made from the ground and broken shards of mountains. The preparations alone had been a feat of engineering and logistics to match the greatest of campaigns, a mark made by the will of man on the universe.

Sigismund heard the buzz of active power armour and the click and whir of an augmetic step, but did not turn.

‘Quite the view,’ said a voice from beside him. Sigismund glanced to his left as a figure in yellow armour and the ice lion fur-trimmed cloak of Rogal Dorn’s Huscarls leant against the balustrade. A grey beard framed a face marked by scars and time. Three service studs of jet marched across his brow above his left eye. Sigismund nodded in greeting.

‘Master Archamus,’ he said.

‘First Captain Sigismund,’ replied Archamus.

‘Does he require me?’ asked Sigismund.

Archamus shook his head. ‘Not yet.’

Sigismund nodded. Silence fell again. They would come here again, later, as part of Rogal Dorn’s honour guard as he ascended the dais with his brother primarchs. That was part of the ordained events of the triumph, but the Emperor had summoned Dorn to attend Him the night before. So, Sigismund had come with his father to the Imperial Dais and had waited as night had slid from darkness to day. Sigismund had no idea what was happening behind the doors of the council chambers, and if Archamus did, the master of Dorn’s bodyguards gave no sign. The meeting seemed furtive to Sigismund, as though things were moving beneath the surface of ceremony and pageantry.

The wind rose in the quiet, fluttering the ropes holding the furled banners in place. He smelled dust.

‘Does something trouble you in what you see, brother?’ asked Archamus at last.

Sigismund looked around at Archamus, met the level gaze. Many in the Legion saw the Master of Huscarls as an old, weathered rock, the unyielding heart of the Legion that Dorn had taken command of all those decades ago. In truth, Archamus’ service was scant years longer than Sigismund’s, but he was one of the First who had become Imperial Fists when Rogal Dorn had taken command of the Legion. He carried that honour and his decades of duty with the weight of a veteran, of a warrior who had seen and done much, and understood more. Sigismund had known him for decades, fought with him, respected him without limit or question, but they had never been close. There was something too still, too cold about Archamus, like the stone of a mountain that would endure past all but would always be the anvil for the hammer to strike.

‘This is the perspective of history,’ said Sigismund, nodding at the view.

‘Of history?’

‘This is how the future sees us,’ said Sigismund. ‘How it sees all that we have been a part of. Nothing small exists in such a view, no individual deeds or persons. There are heroes and future heroes and people who changed the course of lives down there, hundreds of them, thousands of them, but I cannot see them to name them. The might of the Imperium, that is what they will say when this is talked of, all the names and life washed away by time and scale.’

‘You worry about legacy?’ said Archamus.

‘No,’ said Sigismund. ‘None of us will be remembered, brother, we were not meant to be. This is not about remembering – this is about change. That is why we are here. That is why our lord father alone is talking to the Emperor. This is about drawing a line through time to separate the past from the future. Before and after Ullanor, that is how it will be written.’

Archamus gave a silent nod. ‘You have a point, but I fail to see it as a reason for melancholy.’

Sigismund blinked, and in the blink, he saw the masks of dead and cruel kings, and the red eyes of death, of Sevatar grinning at him with bloody teeth.

‘What has changed that we can think of what has gone before as another age?’

Archamus looked as though he would answer, but then straightened and turned as Rogal Dorn came from the archway onto the balcony. His face was just as stone-like and unreadable as ever, but Sigismund thought he could see a flicker in his father’s eyes, as though the fires of the mind in the stone shell were struggling to consume something vast that had been cast into the blaze.

‘My sons,’ he said, coming to stand beside them, his gaze going to the sky and then the plateau below, where smoke from exhausts and campfires was rising. Vehicles and bodies of troops were moving, the forces that had slept in the dark waiting. He was silent for a long moment. Sigismund saw him clench his fist and knock his knuckles on the marble. Then he nodded, eyes still on the distance for a second before he turned.

‘Does the Emperor have a purpose for us?’ asked Sigismund. Dorn looked at him.

‘A new purpose…’ said Dorn slowly. ‘Everything has new purpose today. Everything.’ He shook his head. ‘You will know part of it soon enough, and the rest later.’

‘Is all well, my lord?’ asked Archamus.

Dorn looked at his Master of Huscarls and smiled, though there was the frost of sadness in his eyes.

‘Everything is as it must be,’ Dorn said, then seemed to shake himself. ‘We must prepare for the triumph, and when it is done, I wish to talk to the senior tier of my sons that are here – Yonnad, Camba Diaz, Efried and you both. Rann and Pollux, too.’ He looked at Sigismund. ‘I am guessing Boreas will be your second.’

Sigismund nodded, eyes narrowed. ‘That’s a command gathering. That means a fundamental alteration of our orders.’

‘You truly expect me to pre-empt what I am going to say, First Captain?’

Sigismund shrugged. ‘I thought there might be a chance of it,’ he said.

Dorn laughed, the sound a brief bark of noise in the morning air. He put his hand on Sigismund’s shoulder.

‘Thank you, my son,’ he said. ‘In truth, I do not think there will be another day like this again. It is a great day, a truly great day, you will see and understand. Thank you for being here at my side to see it.’

Sigismund bowed his head. Dorn looked out across Ullanor, then gave a single nod as though in acceptance of some answer only he had heard, and turned from the light of the new sun.

The air already shook from ground to heavens. Five kilometres from the dais, the engines of tens of thousands of tanks were breathing fumes into the sunlight. Sigismund could feel the rumble as division after division added its growl to the chorus.

He and a thousand of the Imperial Fists stood in rank order at the foot of the dais. Beside him were a hundred of his Templars, their surcoats stirring in the wind that snapped the banners above their heads. Beside them were units of Huscarls, the Terminator-armoured assault warriors of the Stonebreaker battalions, and the elite of Rann’s assault cadre, their shields resting upright in front of them. Forces from nine Legions stood beside them, one guard for each primarch present, chosen to stand before the Emperor and His sons and at the head of the parade that would follow.

Sigismund watched as high on the flank of the dais, petals of gold began to fall. A fanfare rose from the throats of silver horns, each one the size of a howitzer, the breath of huge compressors feeding the notes that rose and rang down the mountain of marble. Then, one after another the primarchs appeared on the balcony high above. Even though it was hundreds of metres above the ground, each of the Emperor’s sons shone, pulling the senses to them like lodestars that seemed to bend the heavens around their forms.

There was Lorgar, his face serene, kneeling in humility as he looked down at the assembled warriors. There was Fulgrim, at the shoulder of Sanguinius, as though a hero of ancient myth and an angel of old heavens had stepped down from story into being. The Khan, and with him Angron, ferocity and defiance echoing between them like thunder caught between cliff-faces. Magnus, a copper giant, his presence like a thunderbolt frozen in its fall. Mortarion, a shadow cut in the glare of his brothers. Then Rogal Dorn, gleaming in gold, a step in front of Horus, face set, the skin of a wolf draped over the bulk of his pearl-white armour. Both moved in harmony, as though their beings in that moment were synchronised to a single purpose, unyielding, remorseless, strong beyond reckoning, the illumination and strength of the Imperium cast in metal and carved in flesh.

Sigismund felt his breath still in his chest, his hearts rising to match the call of the silver fanfare. He felt humbled but also elevated, in that moment knowing that he was part of something greater than he was, something real and eternal. He brought his fist to his chest, and heard the echo as nine thousand more answered, as the warriors arrayed beneath the dais saluted their fathers.

Then a last figure stepped into sight. The nine primarchs turned, each moving on their own but in that moment one. The figure filled Sigismund’s sight: gold, light, fire and shadow, lightning and storm, towering, a nova to make the stars of the primarchs dim. Sound and sensation slid into the background, everything balanced on the unfolding of time that flowed from the one golden source. Sigismund was kneeling. The world was kneeling. Silence swallowed the blare of the horns. There was nothing beyond the wind rattling dust against his armour.

He thought of the moment that had happened as his warriors had been assembling, the warriors of the honour guard forming around him. A shout had gone up, and he had turned to see a warrior in pearl-white armour and black, the sigil of a black wolf holding a silver moon in its teeth on his shoulder, a brush-crested helm tucked under his arm. The Templars turned, swords drawing instinctively.

‘First Captain!’ came the shout. ‘I demand words.’ A broad smile under grey eyes.

Sigismund gestured at his warriors, shook his head. Swords slid back into sheaths.

‘Honoured Captain Sejanus,’ said Sigismund. Sejanus grinned more broadly, as they gripped hands and embraced. ‘It is good to see you, brother.’

‘You look no older, and only more lethal,’ said Sejanus, making a show of eyeing Sigismund closely. ‘I on the other hand feel both older and slower by the hour. I think I will leave it to someone else to try and knock the victory laurels off your head.’

‘Join the line,’ snarled Rann, shouldering his way to Sigismund’s side.

‘Fafnir,’ said Sejanus, as the pair embraced and clashed gauntlets.

Sigismund looked past Sejanus at the warriors that followed him. Three in black, the rest in grey-white.

‘Ezekyle,’ he said, with a nod at the First Captain of the Luna Wolves, then at the rest. ‘Tarik, Aximand.’

‘Lord Templar,’ replied Abaddon, gripping Sigismund’s hand. Sigismund saw something move in Abaddon’s gaze, a ghost of distraction in his eyes.

‘You are grave for such a day,’ said Sigismund. ‘Something vexes you?’

‘From you, that must mean that I am dragging thunder clouds with me.’ Abaddon grimaced, then shook his head. ‘No, brother… nothing for the present,’ he said. ‘Something to talk of once this day is done, perhaps.’

‘First Captain Sigismund,’ came another voice, and Sigismund saw Kalus Ekaddon coming forward, the blade-sharp smirk he often wore pulling back from his teeth.

Abaddon raised a hand without turning. ‘Captain Ekaddon, if you think I am going to let the First Company be humbled by you challenging the Lord Templar, you have misjudged my patience. I do not need you to add to his tally.’

Sigismund nodded to Ekaddon, who grinned and shrugged.

‘We should be in place soon, brother,’ said Abaddon, turning to Sejanus, who broke off from a conversation that had left Rann laughing. ‘We will talk later, brother,’ he had said to Sigismund, and gone with the rest. Sigismund found himself remembering Abaddon’s look: a question, and shadow, as though he were still turning over a new and great weight in his mind. It reminded him of the look on Rogal Dorn’s face that morning.

Kneeling before the Emperor of Mankind, he found the face of Abaddon and his father sinking down just as quick as they had risen. Then he was rising, unsheathing his sword, raising it in salute. The blades of the Templars rose beside him. Drums began to beat. Huge skins taken from dead macro-xenos and stretched across copper cylinders vibrated under the blows of ogryns. The sound rolled like a rising heartbeat.

Sigismund lowered his sword to his shoulder and turned as the honour guards of the nine primarchs pivoted and began to march. Behind them, stretching over the horizon for kilometre on kilometre, warriors and Titans and the might of the Imperium followed.

Later, Sigismund would remember the sensations of the moment clearer than its details. He and the principals of the primarchs’ honour guards had peeled from the procession and ascended the dais to wait with their lords. From the colonnade behind the Imperial balcony he had watched as the river of war passed. The Custodians were everywhere, golden presences where there would be shadows. There were others there, too, small clusters of the highest rank of warriors present. Abaddon, Sejanus and the rest of the Mournival stood at attention, their faces set, their air of familiar camaraderie replaced by hard control. Khârn held place for the World Eaters, his face hidden by his crested helm. Sigismund noticed that his fingers clenched shut occasionally, as though an electro-charge had jolted through him.

They stood and waited. Then the procession ended, and the Emperor had moved forward to speak to the forces standing in ranks that reached the horizon. Vox-ships hovered low over the ground. Transmission pylons growled static for a second.

The Emperor spoke. The words would be written down later and carried throughout the Imperium. For those that were there, many would say that they could remember each syllable as though they were still sounding in their ears. Others would say they could remember nothing of what was said, just the feeling of knowing that they were there. The Master of Mankind spoke of all that had been, of the wars that had unified Terra, of the struggle that brought illumination and truth to the lost outposts of humanity across the galaxy, of the work still to be done. He had said that they had come far but there was still further they must go. There had been cheers, great rolling waves of sound that lifted from the ground like birds rising into the sky, but then silence fell as the Emperor had paused, and into the silence He had said that He would be returning to Terra, to do the great work at the heart of the Imperium.

A murmur had shivered through some of the throng, near silent, a muffled cry of denial. Sigismund had felt it as a coldness opening within him, pulling the questions and thoughts of the last days into alignment. Then the Emperor had said the Crusade would continue and as its head they would have a master of war, a warrior who had been its champion since its earliest times, a warrior and leader they all knew, a father and a brother and comrade… Then He had spoken the only name He could have spoken at the end of such praise.

Horus.

The word still rung in Sigismund’s ears, unfolding the past into the future.

‘Warmaster…’

‘Warmaster of this Imperium…’

‘I declare Horus Warmaster of this Imperium.’

Sigismund felt as though he had been struck or as though the world had flipped over beneath his feet. He saw Horus lift the great mace into the air, and heard the Emperor’s words echo and then blend with the cheers rising from millions of voices. The war-horns of Titans shook the air. A flight of aircraft hundreds strong streaked across the heavens, the boom of their passing rolling as false thunder under the sun.

And there were the primarchs, eight beings who were beyond humanity bowing their heads, saluting, emotion radiating from them like a splintered rainbow. The Emperor was there, but in this moment Sigismund would never be able to remember how He appeared, only a feeling like the heat of the midday sun, and the pull of the blackness between the stars: humbling, infinite, blazing, without end or limit. He saw and heard and knew that nothing would be the same again.

He waited as the cheers faded, waited as Horus spoke, listened to the new Warmaster’s voice echo the hopes and conviction of the Emperor. He heard the strength in Horus, the balance, the craft and care in each word and phrase. Then the words faded, and a thousand war engines fired a salute that shook the dais.

The primarchs came from the balcony then. Some alone, some in groups, talking. He saw Sanguinius smile and the Khan bark with laughter as they walked beside Magnus. Last to come was Rogal Dorn, and at his side Horus, now carrying the mace of his office. Another walked with them. Their heads were close, nodding as they talked. Sigismund moved to fall in with his lord. Then he realised who walked with them.

He had not seen Him. How had he not seen Him? His presence and voice had filled the world, and held the ranks of countless soldiers rapt, but somehow Sigismund had not seen or realised that the Emperor walked with Horus and Dorn. Where before His presence had blazed, now it whispered, rolling out like the hush of wind coming as the sun sets. To Sigismund’s eyes He looked the same size as the primarchs but somehow both greater and more refined – a simple warrior amongst warriors, armoured in black, the sigils of eagle and lightning worked in gold on one shoulder, a laurel of green leaves on His head, a sword at His waist.

Then they were within arm’s reach, and Sigismund was kneeling, aware of Archamus and the Huscarls beside him doing the same, and the Mournival and Justaerin kneeling too.

‘Rise,’ said a voice that belonged to neither Dorn nor Horus.

Sigismund stood.

The Emperor was looking at him, dark eyes in a face that held the image of Rogal Dorn, of Horus, of all of His sons, but was none of them. A human face.

The Emperor turned His gaze across the small group of warriors.

‘I see the finest of our warriors and champions,’ He said, and smiled. The expression pulled at Sigismund’s own mouth. ‘You serve your fathers and me well. I thank you. Humanity and its future thanks you for all you have done, and all you will give.’

The Emperor went between the warriors, gripping hands, exchanging a word with each, laughter with a few, and He seemed not the master of humanity’s destiny or the father of primarchs, but a warrior among His own kind.

He turned to Sigismund at last, and the hand that reached out could have been Rann’s or Khârn’s or Sejanus’. Sigismund took it. He should have bowed his head. He should have said ‘sire’. He should have, but he knew that he did not need to, should not, that at this moment what he needed to do was look up into the face and eyes.

He felt the past slide away from the present, the need, the driving need to have purpose, to have a reason to draw the next breath, all falling away, a blink of lightning, the breath of an old storm, the touch of iron on his forehead.

Later, as the night filled the sky above the place of triumph, the commanders of the Imperial Fists met their lord father. They met in one of the chambers of the Imperial Dais, and stood in a loose circle in the light of floating glow-globes. Above them, images of eagles and heraldic beasts reared and snarled across the ceiling in gold and silver gilt.

In the quiet, Rogal Dorn had told them that alone amongst the Legions they would not follow the new Warmaster as he led the Great Crusade. The bulk of the VII Legion, its primarch, commanders, fleet and assets were to go to the Sol System. As Horus was Warmaster, so Dorn would be Praetorian of Terra, and his Legion its guardians at his side. While the Emperor was leaving the rest of the Legions to continue the Great Crusade without Him, the Imperial Fists would stay at His side, sentinels and protectors of the heart of the Imperium. It would not be immediate, but bit by bit the Legion would disengage from front-line operations and the expansion of compliance.

The commanders greeted the words with silence, faces set into the images of stone that so many outside their ranks thought was their nature. A few nodded. When Dorn asked them to speak, some asked questions: matters of logistics and practical strategy, clarification on details that would be needed for immediate action. That was the Fists’ way and always had been: they had their order and duty, all that mattered now was what they needed to execute their purpose. Everything else was irrelevant.

After Dorn had dismissed them, Sigismund had found himself not descending to find his lieutenants and the other commanders. A quiet had fallen over the marble halls and the land beyond, as though time had exhaled after a moment of pressure. He walked alone, hearing his steps on the stone, thoughts turning over in his mind, allowing himself to be guided by nothing.

The breath of wind greeted him as he stepped out onto the balcony where the Emperor and His sons had stood. The banners had gone. Cables and catches rattled against empty poles. Lights moved on the plateau and across the night sky as the armies that had marched along the avenue broke camp and scattered back to the wars still waiting for them. Six kilometres away, Titans walked up the loading ramps of cliff-sided drop-ships. Nearer, six gunships lifted into the air, rising like a crown of stolen stars returning to the heavens. He could smell promethium and dust on the cooling breeze. He rested his hands on the marble balustrade and watched the lights move and rise for a long moment.

He looked around at the sound of a step behind him.

‘It seems I am not the only one who thought to come here and think,’ said Rogal Dorn. Sigismund straightened but the primarch raised a hand. ‘Your pardon for disturbing your peace, my son. May I join you?’

Sigismund nodded.

Dorn moved to stand beside him, his own gauntlets resting on the marble. The lights of the lifting transports gleamed in his eyes.

‘And so, with hurrying foot do we step from the moment gone to the moment to come,’ said Dorn after a long moment.

‘Solomon Voss,’ said Sigismund, ‘from The Heroes of Kinder Ages.’

‘Just so,’ said Dorn with a brief smile. ‘Perhaps soon we shall all be marked in poetry and paint – you have heard of the decree?’

‘The Decree of Remembrance,’ Sigismund said, and nodded. ‘The wordsmith finally won his battle. With some help from you, no doubt.’

Another brief smile.

‘It is important that the truth is remembered. Once we are done, it will matter even more.’

‘Once we are done?’ asked Sigismund.

‘There will come a time when the wars are done, my son. When the Imperial Truth is known from one edge of the galaxy to the other. Then the work shall begin in earnest.’ Dorn tapped the knuckles of his fist against the marble of the balustrade. ‘Everything that has been done so far is merely the setting of foundations, the raising of the first structures of the future – humanity, united, enlightened. Not just free of ignorance but embracing reason, not governed but governing themselves by the light of that reason. An end to warlords and wars, to fear, and freed of fear what will that future humanity make? What will they do?’ He was looking up to the sky now, as though his own words and thoughts had pulled his eyes to the stars.

Sigismund felt his heartbeats rising, and found himself looking up, too, following his father’s gaze. He could feel the warmth of fire and the light of the sun on his skin. He drew a long breath, and every note of scent in the air seemed both a possibility and a promise.

‘Do you see it, my son?’ asked Dorn, and he looked from the stars to Sigismund.

‘Yes,’ he replied, but as the word left his mouth, he felt something else, something cold and dark, and tasting of dust and iron. The gold faded, and the sunlight clouded, and all he could see was the blood running off sharp edges in the mud.

He looked back at Rogal Dorn. His father’s eyes were filled with bright intensity. It was the light of the future he saw, that drew Rogal Dorn on and on, never retreating, never bowing to setback or defeat, always towards a final end, a vision worth all that would have to be given to make it real.

‘I see it,’ he said to his father.

Rogal Dorn smiled, straightened and looked around the balcony where he had stood with his brother primarchs.

‘That is what this was,’ said Dorn. ‘The start of the next era of the Imperium. My father’s return to Terra, our redeployment to the Sol System and heart worlds. This is the true beginning.’

‘Warmaster Horus still has a crusade to prosecute,’ said Sigismund.

‘He does, and a difficult task it is, too. In truth, I do not envy him. He will need every ounce of his ability to marshal our forces and see the Crusade complete.’

‘The other primarchs do not welcome this change of command?’

‘Some do,’ said Dorn. ‘Some see the hand of Horus as being more pliant to their influence. Others see advantage in their closeness to my bright brother. Others… do not see this favourably, or see the Emperor’s return to Terra as a matter for concern rather than joy.’ Dorn shook his head. ‘The Warmaster must now overcome all this and more, a battle to be fought within the Legions that must be won even as the war without is pressed. He will succeed. He will let nothing stand in his way, and he will have victory – he knows no other way to be.’

‘And word of your investment as Praetorian of Terra?’

‘This moment needed to be about the Warmaster. Seven of our brothers and countless warriors of the Crusade came here and saw the trust that my father, our Emperor, has in Horus. In an age where we have broken despots and tyrants, what other reason is there for such spectacle?’ Dorn gestured at the dais and the plateau where the triumphal procession had passed. ‘Our new task had to not take anything from what the Imperium needed to understand – Horus is Warmaster and he will have victory and we will have an end to war.’

‘An end?’

Dorn laughed, the sound bright, ringing off the marble of the dais, and flickering into the wind.

‘You do not believe it?’ he said, smiling. ‘I understand, my son. There is so much to do, but one day it will be complete. The deeds and sacrifices of today will not be asked of us forever, but they will create a peace that will last for eternity.’ Dorn put his hand on Sigismund’s shoulder. ‘Even if you do not believe me, you will be with me when we see it.’

Sigismund looked back at his father. He felt the certainty radiate from this being who was everything that a warrior and leader should be, everything that he believed in and served. Down in the pit of memory, he felt the storm wind and felt the weight of iron in his hand.

He bowed his head.

‘I will always be at your side, father,’ he said.

‘My lord Sigismund?’

Sigismund looked around, his eyes focusing. For a long moment he had been silent, staring into the distance.

‘My apologies,’ he said.

‘Does something trouble you?’

Sigismund shook his head.

Voss bit his lip, hesitated then looked back at his slate.

‘It was a sight, was it not?’ asked Voss. ‘Like no other I have seen. The numbers alone. The primarchs and peers of the Imperium in one place at one time.’

‘Your written remembrances do it better service than my recollections,’ Sigismund said, and shook his head.

Voss frowned. For the first time he felt Sigismund’s reluctance to go further. When he had cut lines of questions before it was because it closed down a path that ran aside from the thread he and Voss were weaving. For the first time, it felt like the Lord Templar did not want to say more than he had. Voss wondered why.

‘Did you talk to Captain Abaddon that day?’ asked Voss after a moment, picking one of the minor queries he had noted during the discussion.

‘No,’ he said. ‘The course of events did not allow for it.’

‘What do you think disturbed him? When he talked to you, you note that there was something about him that made you think he was troubled. What was it?’

‘I do not know,’ said Sigismund. ‘We have never spoken of it.’

‘But you suspect?’

‘I do not presume to know the thoughts of others, least of all my brothers in war.’ Sigismund paused. ‘I know only what I would have felt, had I been him.’

‘And that is?’

‘Loss,’ said Sigismund.

‘Loss? Not pride, not joy? His lord father was declared Warmaster, given the highest honour and authority, and by extension so was his Legion, and his sons.’

‘Warriors like Abaddon, like Sejanus, they are not simple executors of war. They do not fight for glory, they fight for purpose, and for each other. If I had heard that my father was now the master of this war, then I would know that everything was going to change, and in changing I would lose something, that all my Legion would lose something.’

‘What?’

‘Simplicity.’

Voss frowned, looked back at the notes glowing on the screen of his slate.

‘The Emperor,’ said Voss. ‘You did not mention if He said anything else to you, when you met Him on Ullanor.’

Sigismund was still for a second, then stood, looking up at the cave ceiling. Voss realised that the rumbling drumbeat of bombardment, which had accompanied their interview, had gone.

‘I have spoken for more hours than I should have, and duty must now be done,’ said Sigismund, then he looked back at Voss. ‘Do you have your answer, Solomon Voss?’

‘I think so,’ said Voss, glancing down at his slate once, but feeling a calm in his thoughts, clearness.

‘Then tell me.’

‘I think you believe war will be eternal not because we will lose the wars we fight. I think you believe it is because of us, because of humanity. Atrocity defines mercy. Cruelty nobility. You think we will always have to fight because even in the world we are building there will be the cruel and the monstrous. That we will never be free of ourselves, and we will never be free of the need to fight for the peace we have. Conflict… conflict between our ideals and our actions, conflict between what we hope for and reality, between the future and what we have to do to create it.’

Voss felt a sad smile form on his face. ‘You know, you are a master of the sword but you could have been a weaver of parables – you knew what I was thinking, how I was reacting to you, to what you were telling me. You knew where I would end up, just like you knew where Sevatar would be after hours of exchanging blows.’ Voss let out a long breath. ‘War eternal – within, without, beyond what we know… For my part, I hope you are wrong.’

Sigismund held Voss’ gaze, then bowed his head briefly and walked away. Voss watched him go until he had passed beyond the light of the glow-globes.

TRUTH OF THE SWORD

Doors and roofs rattled in the drift camps. Cords of static began to gather in the cables running from the electro-kites to their tethers. The smell of the storm was thick in Sigismund’s nose. He could hear the cries of the murder gangs, far off but coming closer, as they ran with the storm. The ground beneath him sloped down from the crag of stones that jutted up from the sprawl. The metal bar lay in the dust between his feet where he sat. He closed his eyes, for a second.

‘May I sit with you?’

Sigismund opened his eyes and looked up. A man stood next to him. His face was dark and lean. A ragged cloak of blue hung over battered and mismatched armour. His eyes were very dark. Sigismund began to rise, to open his mouth, but the man motioned him to stillness with a gesture.

‘May I sit with you?’ asked the man again.

Sigismund nodded.

‘Yes,’ he said, and he was suddenly aware that his limbs and body were clad in battleplate, his hands not bare but skinned in yellow ceramite.

The man lowered himself to the ground beside Sigismund and gazed out towards where the grey-yellow blur of the storm had stolen the horizon.

‘We are not here,’ said Sigismund. ‘This was long ago. I am with you on Ullanor, not here. This is a dream.’

‘We have always been here,’ said the man.

Sigismund felt his eyes close for a second, and a shutter-blur of years flicked across his vision.

‘You have been fighting a long time,’ said the man.

Sigismund opened his eyes. He could barely tell apart the sound of the hunting gangs and the cry of the rising wind. He noticed that the man had picked the iron bar up and was looking at it, eyes intent as he turned it over, as though it were a wonder of the ages and not a length of raw metal pitted with rust. The dark eyes glanced at Sigismund, knowing but not judging, hard yet sorrowful.

‘You wish for peace,’ said the man.

‘Yes,’ said Sigismund.

‘You will not have it,’ said the man. ‘But your life has been lived for a purpose. You have purpose.’

‘What purpose?’

‘To stand.’

‘Why?’

‘Because someone must.’

The figure in battered armour stood and handed the iron bar to Sigismund. He nodded, and Sigismund saw there was tiredness in the eyes, the weariness of one who has come far and yet has further to go.

‘We will win?’ asked Sigismund. ‘The war, we will win in the end, won’t we? It will be over?’

The man gave a sad smile and tapped the iron bar in Sigismund’s hands.

‘Ask the sword,’ he said, and then he was turning, wrapping the fold of his cloak over his head.

Drops of rain had begun to fall. Cords of lightning arced down the cables of the electro-kites. Far off, but drawing closer, thunder growled. Sigismund watched as the man walked down the slope, a ragged outline in the billowing dust and ochre smog of the first fall of rain. Then he was gone.

Sigismund was still for a long moment, and then stood. Rain struck his face, first one drop then a scattering, then more. He looked at the black iron in his hand that would become a sword, and slowly, as he had for a lifetime and would for an eternity, he bowed his head and touched the cold metal to his forehead.

About the Author

John French is the author of several Horus Heresy stories including the novels The Solar War, Mortis, Praetorian of Dorn, Tallarn and Slaves to Darkness, the novella The Crimson Fist, and the audio dramas Dark Compliance, Templar and Warmaster. For Warhammer 40,000 he has written Resurrection, Incarnation and Divination for The Horusian Wars and three tie-in audio dramas – the Scribe Award-winning Agent of the Throne: Blood and Lies, as well as Agent of the Throne: Truth and Dreams and Agent of the Throne: Ashes and Oaths. John has also written the Ahriman series and many short stories.

An extract from Luther: First of the Fallen.

He remembered the world breaking.

It was very confused; everything happened at the same time, a kaleidoscope of images, conflicting and noisy. The sky burned. No, not burned. A storm. A storm not of this reality, devouring the universe.

The gods had claimed their dues.

He had not expected anything quite so… apocalyptic.

Pain broke into his thoughts. Intense. Sharp.

A blade lanced into his side and he screamed.

He screamed at the memory of it. It was not in his side any longer. He could feel the wound, raw and bleeding. It mirrored the wound in the sky that had swallowed his army.

The hand that had driven the blade, inhumanly strong. Stronger even than he was. Stronger than the archaic technologies that had given him such endurance and long life. Stronger than the will of the gods.

Driven by hate that had burned in eyes the green of Caliban’s forests.

Caliban’s lost forests…

So long ago.

Eyes of a demigod, filled with rage.

A heartbeat. A thunderous heartbeat, drumming, drumming. His own? Why couldn’t he see? He had the memory of sight, but he was in darkness. They had fixed his eyes. He could see as well as a wildcat at night and a hawk in the day. One of the simplest procedures, but one of the most effective. How did one see the world as he did? What did the universe look like to a creature made of science and myth?

The drumming was not his heart. That slowly and surely resounded in his chest. He felt the pulse of it in the blood vessels in his neck, at his temples, throbbing through wrist and thigh. He had never been so aware of his body.

The drumming was footfalls. Quick strides thudding on rock.

Eyes made perfect by the arcane knowledge of the Dark Age finally adjusted to the gloom, picking out the slightest of light sources, sketching in broken ruins. A toppled statue lay to his left, of a knightly figure with blade held in salute, snapped at the waist. An archway had collapsed behind him.

Lights approached, a pair of lamps moving up and down in time with the foot-drums. Less than two hundred metres away, several metres lower than where he lay upon the slope of a tumbled wall.

His hearing had also been honed to preternatural accuracy and he detected another sound amidst the trickling of grit and dust, the patter of liquid from a ruptured pipe and the creak of settling masonry. The sound was a mechanical wheeze. As the lights grew brighter and brighter they brought with them a hum of electrical circuitry too.

The suit lamps dimmed, their illumination replaced by a sudden cerulean brightness that caused him to flinch. The movement sent a stab of pain crackling up through pulped ribs, searing through the coagulating wound in his flank.

The blue light flickered as a flame for several seconds before assuming the shape of an axe blade, forming a crackling field around the weapon. It was impossible to tell the colour of the armour in the harsh light. Dark, but black or green?

Smell.

Sweat. A lot of blood. His own, most likely. The residue of bolter rounds and ozone aftertaste of las and plasma discharge. Smells of battle. Smells he had learned as a child.

Lubricant, alien and strong. Not the maintenance oils used by the Order but something else. The approaching figure was not of this world. Martian smells.

One of the demigod’s warriors.

The Space Marine stopped at the bottom of the steep rubble slope, one booted foot crunching onto the shattered brick. He leaned forward, the light of the axe revealing a scarred face with trifurcated beard and a dark stubble breaking a bald scalp. The eyes widened with shock.

‘Luther.’

His name brought further clarity. Names had power and his brought him back to the present in a way that the barbs of broken stone in his spine had not. The voice was familiar, but the face was a mystery at first. The thud of other footsteps echoed behind the stranger as he slowly processed what he was looking at. Not one of the Order, one of the Dark Angels. A face he had not seen for more than five decades. He removed the scars, mentally healing the ravages of wars both old and recent, until he could place the features.

‘Farith?’ His voice was little more than a croaking whisper. ‘Wait… I need to–’

The warrior took a step.

‘Bastard traitor!’

Blue light blazed as the axe swung.

Harsh edges of metal brought him round, biting at wrists and ankles. He was in irons, chained to a chair. He had been stripped of his armour’s remnants and was clad in a stiff kilt of leather, such as one might train in when unarmed. The pain in his side was no more. Paralysis? His heart thudded at the thought, but the ache of the shackles on his legs proved the falseness of the theory.

He had been healed, then. By whom?

Opening his eyes revealed the face he last remembered before the axe had struck him. The flat of it, given that he still lived. The Paladin, Farith. One of the last to be squired to the Order by the Lion before the First Legion had arrived. He was a cold killer; Luther had disliked him but admired his ruthlessness, and he was utterly dedicated to the Lion. It was hard to reconcile the clean-cheeked youth with the haggard soldier in front of him. The years had not been kind.

Farith was also unarmoured, clad in a heavy sleeveless robe of dark green, embellished only with the Legion symbol upon the left breast – a downward-pointing sword flanked by wings, in thick white thread. They both sat in a chamber just a few metres square, furnished only with the two chairs. Something moved in the shadows beyond the door. Red eyes gleamed inside a dark hood, the height of a small child’s face, but Luther knew it was no infant. A Watcher in the Dark. It had been some time since he had laid eyes upon one of Caliban’s mysterious guardians. It was gone a heartbeat later.

‘Where is the Lion?’ asked Farith, leaning forward, thick forearms resting on his knees.

The question surprised Luther. His side spasmed as though the sword were still buried there. The room swirled in and out of focus, merging with flashes of memory and sights of what had not yet arrived. The storm that had engulfed them, that had swept up his warriors, now swirled inside his thoughts. With an effort he broke out of its nebulous grip, blinking as he focused on the legionary before him.

Luther was sure that there was something he was supposed to do, or say, but he could not recall it. Farith asked the question again, more forcefully.

‘I do not know what happened to the Lion. Aldurukh broke. We fell. He is not with you?’

Farith shook his head, eyes fixed on Luther. There was barely suppressed fury in that gaze.

‘Caliban…’ Farith looked away, jaw clenched. He was shaking, hands making fists and unclenching. The robe stretched as he took in a long breath and looked once more at his prisoner. ‘Caliban is no more. It was destroyed by the bombardment and warp storm. There is no sign of the primarch. Tell me what you remember.’

‘Little,’ confessed Luther, frowning. ‘My thoughts twist into themselves, more contorted than a forest path. Past, present, future. I wander among them. I cannot tell one from the other. Have we had this conversation before?’

‘Where did you send your followers?’

‘Send?’ Luther recalled the storm, tendrils of warp power flashing down, striking like lightning. ‘I sent them nowhere. They were taken. The storm! I remember what happened now. In shadow, at least. The storm. I had to get to the heart. The Lion and I… He stopped me before I could stop it. I needed to… I cannot recall. It was important, but the Lion… We fought, but I did not kill him. I would not.’

Farith sat back as he absorbed this, eyes narrowing in suspicion.

‘You protest innocence?’

‘I did not summon the storm, I did not kill the Lion,’ Luther assured him. Farith’s words filtered through the tumult of his mind, settling like debris on the shore of his thoughts. He looked around the cell, confused. ‘Caliban is no more?’

Farith nodded.

‘Broken by your sorcery and the guns of the fleet. Aldurukh’s energy fields sustain the tower, the rest is rock and ash scattered across the void.’

‘No, you are lying,’ said Luther. ‘I saved Caliban from destruction. I saw it. Or not. It is still moving, the fog and the storm.’

Panic set in, speeding his heart, sweating his palms as the notion took root. Farith said nothing, offering no word of defence.

‘I saved Caliban,’ Luther said again, but as he spoke his words fell quieter with doubt. ‘I saved Caliban…’

He was going to save Caliban. Was that it? Or save the Lion? Was it memory or something else?

‘You doomed Caliban.’ Farith’s sneer was more cutting than any sword edge. ‘You betrayed the Lion and destroyed our world.’

‘No, that was not how it happened,’ protested Luther. He tried to rise but the restraints bit into flesh and bone as he struggled. ‘No! He betrayed me! He abandoned us!’

Luther slumped into the chair, chains rattling, frustrated as Farith just glowered at him in silence. The storm. Everything breaking. The fall. Like the depths that had swallowed him and the Lion, his gut became a deep chasm.

Hollow, emptied out like a swine’s carcass for the roasting spit. As empty as the oaths he had taken. Oaths he had thrown away for… For what? It was hard to remember.

‘You killed the Lion and destroyed Caliban,’ said Farith, every word heavy with the weight of its accusation.

Luther raised no argument, letting the charges settle on him like a shroud. His mouth was dry, his bones ached and yet the greatest discomfort was the knowledge that Farith spoke the truth. Not about the Lion, but about Caliban’s fate. The planet of his birth was no more. He had tried to bring it back, to restore it to the way it was meant to be, but he had failed.

And he had dishonoured himself and the Order. For nothing. For lies and vainglory.

‘Are those tears, traitor?’ Farith grimaced, standing up. ‘You do not get to shed tears. You are not allowed sorrow for what you have done.’

Luther choked back his grief and nodded, acknowledging the right of Farith’s anger.

‘I… I was weak,’ he began.

I was weak when I thought I was being strong.

A moment was fast approaching when our fates would be set. Whose fates do I mean? Myself and my council, a mixture of disparate souls that had found common cause in our secession from the Imperium. Once we had been united under the auspices of the Legion, now we were bonded by something even stronger: mutual need.

My seneschal was perhaps the most unlikely of candidates, not even born of Caliban. The Terran veteran Sar Astelan, who bore a grudge against the Lion greater than any other of us. Astelan was my commander openly, and in secret he was my chief of espionage, enforcement and the other unpleasantries of rule. Our arrangement was simple but effective: he was loyal to me and I asked no questions about his business or what he did to maintain my authority and that of the Order.

My chief advisor was a companion of long acquaintance who had never been a Dark Angel direct, but by dint of her associations with command of the Order had benefited from the physical enhancements gifted to me and the other senior knights when the Emperor arrived. We were too old to become legionaries, but there were plenty of augmetics and bio-therapies that could still be applied to make us formidable, long-lived warriors. She was Saulus Maegon, the deadly mistress of the Angelicasta, who had been in command of Caliban’s greatest fortress for decades.

Then there was Sar Griffayn, the Spear-Cast, formerly the voted lieutenant of the Firewing. A traditionalist who had been returned to us on a fleet of ships sent for reinforcements and, following the death of their leader, Belath, come over to our cause along with the survivors of a brief but bloody internecine fight. His defection was perhaps the most important and heartening, for he had not been one of us isolated on Caliban and yet still saw the worth in our goals for autonomy. Inculcated in the oldest rites of the Legion, nevertheless his loyalty was to Caliban over the Dark Angels. It had boded well that we might encounter others who would lend ear to our arguments, and that those arguments came from one of such standing in the Legion gave them some weight outside of the Order.

Finally, there could be no council of the Order without the Lord Cypher. Guardian of our history and judge of our current character, the Lord Cypher was a figure steeped in the tradition of Aldurukh and Caliban and no Grand Master would have legitimacy without him. For us there was additional benefit to his inclusion, for my Lord Cypher had before been the Librarian Zahariel, a psyker, and so doubled as the master of my Mystai.

This was my council, the leaders of Caliban beneath me, the Grand Master of the Order.

Our great endeavour was now poised upon glory or ruin, our striving for independence about to face the final test of strength.

The Lion.

He was returning after many decades of fighting the battles of the Emperor. The massive war fleet of the First, the honoured Dark Angels, was but days or even hours from breaking warp at the edge of the system. Lord Cypher and our own warp auguries had confirmed as much, for so many ships do not travel unannounced through the immaterium. We had flotillas of our own: some won through guile and conquest; others raised in the shipyards of Zaramund, which we had made our colony; yet more supplied from other worlds that had been brought within the ruling sphere of Caliban.

The star system was a fortress yet to be tested, and the strength of the Lion was not certain. Yet always the advantage is with the defender, and so we were confident that if it came to martial examination we would not be found the weaker.

Not in military terms, at least.

It was Astelan that first raised concern when the council was convened. I remember it clearly. We met in the Chamber of Arthorus as we often did, lit by the early sun. Morning training had commenced and the noise of feigned combat rang through the open window from the mustering fields and shooting ranges beyond the Angelicasta.

‘They are ready,’ Maegon assured us. She and Astelan were jointly in charge of recruitment and training, combining the best rites and culture of the Order with the disciplines of the Legion we had left behind.

‘Physically,’ the Terran countered. He took fruit from the bowl on the table. A red apple, newly harvested from orchards on the western slopes. He did not take a bite but continued. ‘In their minds, in their hearts, we cannot be sure.’

‘Sure of what, Sar Astelan?’ Griffayn asked. The voted lieutenant was my void-general, the most experienced starship commander among us, and would lead the defence beyond the surface. ‘They are brave as any Space Marine can be.’

‘I do not question their courage,’ Astelan told us. He bit the apple and chewed for several seconds, brow furrowed, before speaking again. ‘I am sure they will face the blades and bolts of our foes without a moment’s hesitation. But we can’t say for sure if they will fight back.’

‘Their loyalty is to the Order,’ said Maegon. She looked at me, her tone insistent. ‘Every doctrine they know reinforces their allegiance to Aldurukh, to Caliban and to you.’

I rewarded her with a smile of confidence, for I knew of what Astelan spoke and it was no accusation against the mistress of the Angelicasta.

‘All is as I have required, Sarl Maegon,’ I assured her. ‘Their older companions have proven skilful on battlefields already and I have no doubt in their competence. But Sar Astelan’s point is correct. To be loyal is one matter. To turn blades against the Dark Angels, some of them Calibanites, is a different matter.’

Astelan’s concerns were a veiled question for me to answer. Always had our alliance been uneasy, our mutuality uncertain. His hatred for the Lion outweighed his attested loyalty to the Emperor Himself. If he was not willing to accuse me openly, I decided to answer in likewise oblique fashion.

‘There are those in the ranks that have already spilled the blood of the Dark Angels,’ I reminded him. ‘Veterans from the events in the Hall of Decemial. They are our lieutenants now, under Sar Griffayn.’

‘Two dozen, perhaps,’ added Lord Cypher. ‘Myself counted among those that executed the assassins in our midst.’

‘Two dozen among tens of thousands?’ scoffed Astelan. ‘I agree that they will give the order, but will fingers tighten on triggers, will swords leave sheaths on their word?’

‘You have picked the recruits and trained them, but you do not understand the nature of your army,’ I told Astelan, wearied by his arguments. ‘These are not legionaries of the Emperor fighting other legionaries. Save for a heart of former First like yourself, warriors who have proven their worth and loyalty already, the others are knights of the Order. They have sworn oaths only to me and to our institution.’

It was surprisingly Lord Cypher that made plainer the interrogation behind Astelan’s questions.

‘Will the order be given, Grand Master?’ he asked me directly. ‘All has been arranged with you at the centre. Without your command, our war for independence will end.’

‘Yes, Sar Luther,’ said Griffayn. ‘We stand as a weapon loaded but it is your finger upon the trigger.’

I raised eyebrows at how swiftly my lieutenants gathered about this theme against me. It was less of a shock that Astelan made more plain his unease with my command arrangements.

‘At least give us the defence activation code,’ he said. His tone was more demanding than I liked but I held my tongue. ‘All of our systems are slaved to a single phrase that only you know, Sar Luther. The delay of communication could prove costly during the battle.’

I looked at them each with slow regard, keeping my temper in check. This was no time for divisions or authoritarianism. If just one of them chose the Lion over me we would all be undone. In a way it was gratifying. There was no bickering, no distrust among them for each other. Their only concern was in their commander, which was disappointing on a personal level. I needed to choose my words with care, so as not to gloat or bludgeon, but to remind them of the pertinent facts.

There was one last question I had to ask myself: Did I trust them?

‘Caliban would still be a slave of the Emperor if not for me,’ I told them quietly. I sat back in my chair, relaxed. ‘I have been expecting this day for many years. We all have, but none for longer than me. Maegon, you and I alone remember Caliban before the Emperor, and perhaps yours was the even longer exile, condemned to remain in this fortress while the Legion departed for the Great Crusade. The rest of you are followers to the cause that I began, never forget that. We each have our reasons to be sat at this table now, but if Maegon has kept this fortress standing, it is by my will that it remains home to the Order alone. None of you could command the Order as I do, either by ability or tradition.’

I paused at that moment, giving them opportunity to gainsay my statement, for I wanted all debate to be aired then and not saved an hour longer.

Griffayn was the first to bow his head in acquiescence. Always obedient, what he had witnessed on the Great Crusade and in the fleet of Corswain had broken his faith in the Imperial cause – after I had highlighted the truth for him.

I thought Astelan would continue his argument, for he had no loyalty to the Order save for how it served his revenge against the Lion. But in this I found him the most trustworthy, of sorts, because he had no pretension to leadership or even Caliban’s independence. The Order and our world was a means to an end and as long as I promised to deliver that end he was absolutely dedicated to our success.

He stayed silent, but his annoyance remained clear.

Lord Cypher steepled his fingers before him and looked at me for some time through the lenses of his helm. It mattered nothing that I had given him his position and knew the man within, he was Lord Cypher now and carried all the respect and authority that entailed. Had I done him disservice with my doubts?

‘You are right, Sar Luther, that there is not another of us that could have created what we have here. I do not doubt your dedication to the Order. There is none that has done more in its long history to bring honour and glory to Aldurukh and no other I would entrust with its future.’

I expected some qualification or equivocation to follow, but none came. Lord Cypher clasped his hands together and nodded, satisfied with his input.

‘I will think on what you have said,’ I promised them, rising. ‘We convene again in two hours, for the last conference before battle. I will give you my answer then.’

I left them to discuss whatever matters that required such conversation and returned to my chambers. They had been enlarged in recent years, expanded to encompass the sizeable library I had assembled. The core of it remained the books of the Knights of Lupus I had taken, which had first introduced me to the truth beyond the teachings of the Order and the Imperial Truth.

Yet I had outgrown those tomes in time, having drained them of all knowledge with much reading. With the aid of Zahariel and a few select others, I had acquired more works, from across Caliban and ultimately other worlds. My Lord Cypher never spoke of it, but he had to know the manner of the books I took from him, and I knew that his Mystai were far more than the Librarians of the Space Marines.

Such works were not to be kept lightly: harsh experience had taught me that precautions had to be taken with some of the volumes of deeper lore. So it was that the inner sanctum of my quarters more closely resembled a vault or arsenal than it did personal chambers, much reinforced by beams inscribed with potent charms, the heavy lead-lined door from my study locked not only with physical bonds but also enchantments of a protective nature, taught to me by the Mystai and culled from the texts held within.

My dorm had become a place of only passing interest in the preceding years, for often I would study for days at a time, and when sleep finally crept upon me I would collapse in the cushioned chair behind my desk. I was always certain to retire from the library before too late in order that I remained of cogent enough mind to invoke the protections. The price of fatigue-induced carelessness would have been heavy indeed.

I see now that the library had gained more of a hold over me than I realised. Knowledge is powerful, but dangerous in obsession. And I had become obsessed. Not with knowledge for its own sake, but as a means to ensure the security and sanctity of Caliban against our coming foes. There were tracts that lingered in my mind long after their reading, and many are the nuggets of lore that fixed my thoughts and plagued my dreams for days or even weeks. I cannot recall any of them now, for they were ripped from my mind by the storm, even as it raged across our world.

And therein lies a lesson, I think. Knowledge only has power when earned, not freely imparted. At first I questioned the nature of what I read, what I was learning. The Knights of Lupus had protected their works for a reason and I similarly guarded against others, save the Mystai, learning what I possessed. Not honourable Griffayn, certainly not Astelan. And I would not inflict such a burden upon Maegon, oldest of my allies.

Upon returning that morning, after the council, I passed into the inner sanctum having prepared the wards for my passage and secured the outer chamber against intrusion by a subordinate, as I had done hundreds, thousands of times before. Always I was careful to be mindful of these actions, not to conduct them out of rote. Presence of mind in all things, I counsel. Be aware of thyself before all else.

The inner sanctum was a small room, sealed with layers of ferrocrete, lead and titanium, the walls behind the shelves laced with sorcerous alloys. It pains me to say it, but the artisans that created the inner sanctum perished soon after, taking the knowledge of its existence to their unmarked graves. As I said, be careful from whom one gains knowledge and be aware of the price of its acquisition.

Not only to contain were those wards raised, but to shield from view. For as long as records have been made, Aldurukh had been home to the creatures we called the Watchers in the Dark. Of late they had abandoned coming directly, seen only on the edge of vision, at the moment of sleep or waking, in the shadows of the last and first light. They remained but their scorn was palpable. Now suspicious of their intent, I sought to keep from their knowledge all that passed within my library.

Ha! But I speak wisely now, though as a fool I was. More clearly with the telling does this lesson become one I should have heard many years ago.

Within the inner sanctum the floor was cleared and upon it were carved symbols of summoning and containment, to channel and manifest the energies of the immaterium. Other accoutrements were set about a circle, which enclosed a pentagon, which in turn held within it a triangle. Just as the spiral of our martial training creates a better, more focused warrior, so the concentric wards honed the power of entreatment.

Within the triangle waited one of the nephilla. I learned many names for such creatures, but it was by the Calibanite term that I always titled them. Nephilla, spirits not of the mortal world. Even on a planet of fantastic beasts and semi-living forests the nephilla were something of a dubious subject, particularly after the coming of the Imperium’s servants and the brutal imposition of rationality and suppression of our traditional beliefs.

This particular specimen was my primary contact with the World Beyond, as I was wont to call the empyrean and all lands of the powers not of mortal origin. Its true name had been erased, but for my own benefit I called it a bastardised version in conversation: Ezqurol. Its form was impermanent as any denizen of the immaterial realm, but it favoured the aspect of a small, grumpy creature with flesh of blue flame. When I entered it was sitting with its back to me upon the charred planks of its containment, grumbling loudly in a language I could not understand. Wherever I walked in the chamber it appeared to be facing away from me.

It was almost laughable, infantile, but I knew better than to underestimate this creature. It quested always to be free of its imprisonment, either by being dismissed or by breaking its bonds. It had occasionally succeeded in the first and only been closely thwarted in the second. Today it was trying to be uncooperative, having delivered its message from the power that had conjured it into being at my request. Alas I cannot recall the identity of its creator in any detail now, even by allegory, save to recall a title: the Master of Magic. This herald had become my regular, though not sole, conduit to the powers that live beyond our realm.

‘You said that one of them would betray me,’ I said to it, coming to the lectern of black-lacquered wood that held open the volume to which I had been referring before the council. ‘You lied.’

‘Cannot lie,’ the creature said between more unintelligible complaints. ‘Bound by hex and word.’

‘But you will not tell me which one is the traitor,’ I said to it, as I traced through the lines of the conjuration on the open pages. I found what I was looking for, a few lines of text that would elicit a pained reaction from Ezqurol when spoken aloud.

I spoke them aloud.

‘Stop it!’ it snarled at me. ‘No lies!’

‘Perhaps I will keep you here instead, doing nothing at all.’ It changed form, rearranging itself without moving as such so that it was standing facing me, small flickers of fists raised in anger. I began to recite the words of punishment again and it screeched at me to stop.

‘No more! Relent! Mercy!’

‘Tell me again of the traitor,’ I said, as I stepped from the lectern, careful not to pass the outer bounds of the summoning ring. ‘Word by word, repeat what you said before.’

‘You asked if all on your council were sound,’ cackled the creature, as it showed rare mirth at my earlier moment of doubt. I had indeed consulted it to determine if it knew of any of my commanders moving against me. A precaution, fuelled by a paranoia made keen by the approaching confrontation.

It started to hum tunelessly, but soon a rhythm entered, in time with pulsing of its flames from deep blue to bright azure.

‘In Aldurukh, in shadows cold,

Where before the knights of old,

Had gathered in their pomp and glory,

Now is told a different story.’

The nephilla started to pirouette slowly, stretching out its arms as it continued, droplets of fire falling from its fingertips.

‘Conspirators, a clandestine meeting,

Veiled in darkness, silent greeting.

A lord to slay, their words unspoken,

Payment taken for oaths long broken.

‘And in their quiet confiding,

Another traitor smugly hiding,

To turn upon turncoats at the last,

And right the wrongs of distant past.

‘Truth is lost in blind ambition,

When loyalty gives way to grand suspicion,

And allies seek that which is gone,

Repent too late, the damage done.’

Its voice dropped to a gleeful whisper, eyes of bright sparks fixed upon me, a cruel smile showing teeth of silver needles.

‘All dreams must fail in passing time,

Hope is lost with bell’s last chime.

The lie to which your sons have striven,

Will forever remain the unforgiven.’

The creature of flame fell silent, glowering at me again from beneath brows of fire, fingers tapping tip to tip as it watched me, each contact like the flare of a match head.

The verse was the sort of vagueness I had come to expect from the messengers of the empyrean powers, and yet I knew from study, and the bindings I had placed upon Ezqurol, that they were neither random nor without aid. The warning was within them, but purposefully veiled.

‘Your advice is too generic!’ I complained, having listened to the words again. I had first heard them before dawn and pondered them until the meeting, hoping their meaning would be revealed by something that occurred during the council.

I had nothing more to help with deciphering the rhyme, and I wondered for some time whether it referred to a secret cabal not aligned with my council at all, though Astelan assured me that there was no resistance to our command anywhere on Caliban.

My next thought was for the Lord Cypher, and more specifically his Mystai. They had access to ancient texts that told of mysteries even older than those found in the Library of Lupus. Certainly Zahariel, as he had been, had shown himself capable of following his own agenda at times, but both my own reasoning and the probes of Astelan had found nothing to suggest that they would benefit from the failure of our endeavour.

Such is the nature of conspiracy and resistance. The needs of the one quickly become the needs of all. One cannot gain one’s own victories apart from the others, and so all goals becomes the same goal.

After that…?

Many a rebellion fails in the aftermath, when the enemy is overthrown and a new regime must reign. Was that the nature of Ezqurol’s warning? I thought. When the Lion was defeated, our common foe would be gone.

Certainly Astelan owed me nothing beyond that point. If any was the first to turn, it would be the Terran. But he lacked a power base. The few followers he had that I judged loyal to him before Caliban were imprisoned beneath the tower of the Angelicasta, and ranged against the strength of the Order they were too few to usurp power by force alone.

Over and over I cast each of my companions as the villain, trying to discern motive for their abandonment and the means by which it would transpire. I came up with nothing convincing, and not only because I offered more to them than continued service to the Lion or the Emperor. Each had a personal reason to see the task to its completion and to support the transition after.

As my frustration grew, so Ezqurol grew more animated, pacing its incorporeal prison, glaring and spitting.

If I could not trust all of my council, I could trust none of them. It was far too late in our plans to reform the inner circle.

I sensed impatience from my immaterial captive.

‘It is doubt!’ I shouted in triumph, rounding on the creature. It hissed in annoyance by way of reply. ‘Doubt, suspicion, uncertainty. They are the traitors in the dark counsels of our thoughts! Repent too late, the damage done! You think I will stay my hand, hold back the command when the time comes too.’

‘You have proven your weakness already,’ it said with a scowl. ‘You have your answer, let me be!’

‘I am not weak,’ I replied, and it was then that I committed the grave offence of listening to my ego. ‘The verse was about me? You call me traitor to my own cause?’

‘The architect knows best the flaws in his plans,’ Ezqurol replied. ‘The chain breaks at its weakest point. The ambition you harbour will devour you, mortal.’

‘I lead for Caliban,’ I declared, and in my rash mood I raised my fist, and in doing so my foot parted the outer ward of the binding hexes.

Ezqurol needed no further invite and hurled itself at me, a bolt of blue flame that surged up my leg, escaping the ring of containment.

Afire with sorcerous energy, I fell backwards, my shout held fast by the thick walls. Ezqurol formed into a semblance of its usual self, dancing upon my chest, singeing its footprints into my robe and flesh while it cackled a song of victory.

I swept out an arm but my warding limb passed through it with just a flutter of its fiery body.

‘Free!’ it screeched in my face, setting fingers of cerulean flame around my throat.

But I was not without a measure of sorcerous ability. The teachings of the Imperium would have you believe that it requires a freak of birth to make one a psyker, but my readings had revealed the lie of that. With practice and rite, one can open doors to strengthen the mind and access the powers that some can wield by mutation.

I summoned that energy now, cladding my fists in wreaths of lightning as I struck again, flinging the nephilla across the library. It exploded like a grenade against the ward-inscribed bookcase, wailing as it fell to the floor.

Quick as a cat it found its feet and this time, rather than attack me, it sought to escape. It threw itself at the walls as though to pass the material barrier, but found in a flash and bang that they were barred in the immortal plane also. In desperation it bounded to the ceiling, and scrambled above me moaning as runes burned its hands and feet with sanctuary force.

I turned and cornered it as it rebounded from the door charms, its fiery form laced through with tendrils of black and red as it flailed across the room.

I let streams of lightning rip from my fingertips, but it darted forward as quick as a las-blast, leaping for the lectern that held the spell which had bound it. I curbed my power for fear that destroying the tome might break what remained of the spell tying Ezqurol to the chamber.

The pages fluttered before it, its sparking eyes scanning the text, as I raced across the room. The fiend gave a triumphant cry just as my fingers, anointed with black fire, gripped its flaming limb and heaved it away. It rammed fingertips of fire into my face, blinding me, and in pain I cried out the words of unbinding I had committed to memory, while I hurled the creature back to the centre of the pentangle-bonds.

I heard a crack like thunder and the air smelt fresh and bright as in the aftermath of an electrical storm.

It took some time for my sight to recover, and my vision was still blurred when the occasion came for the council to next convene. While I donned my armour and hooded robe to conceal my wounds I pondered why the creature and its master had tried to undermine me. With the Lion defeated and Caliban free, did they fear I would turn from them? Or perhaps it was a final test of my resolve.

I would not be tricked. There would be no hesitation or discord.

‘Starfire,’ I announced when all were gathered again in the Hall of Arthorus. ‘Starfire is the word that will set the sky of Caliban alight.’

‘I once thought you the greatest of us,’ whispered Farith. ‘None of us could be the Lion, just as a hen will never be an eagle. But you were raised a mortal like me, a paragon that could be emulated, a measure that could be matched. Yet you were the worst of us, and forgot everything you had been in one moment of vanity.’

‘Vanity?’ Luther shook his head. ‘Is it vanity to recognise injustice? Was I vain to hope there could be a better future for my world?’

‘Vanity clouded your hearing, when the nephilla spoke truth perhaps for the only time. You were the traitor, Luther. It has never been about Caliban, it was always about you. I have seen the powers of the warp so closely these last years, but I remained strong. I rejected them. Nothing good comes of their patronage, but you accepted it all the same. You needed it because you knew you were weak and when you failed them, they took it all from you. Your army, your knowledge. Your soul…?’

Luther stared at his interrogator, eyes brimming with moisture. All of it was true, and the verse of Ezqurol returned to him, but this time the words were like sparkling diamonds of clarity. His lips moved almost silently as he spoke them again.

‘Repent too late, the damage done…’ With trembling hand, he reached out to Farith. ‘I am sorry.’

‘You have slain the only one whose forgiveness might release you,’ Farith growled. ‘“The lie to which your sons have striven will forever remain the unforgiven.” You were warned but did not listen. Deaf to both mortal and immortal, your fate was sealed.’

‘Wait!’ cried Luther as Farith turned away. ‘There is still time to learn. We are not yet doomed. Listen to me!’

The Paladin did not look back, and as the door swung shut Luther saw the glitter of red eyes in the dark.

Click here to buy Luther: First of the Fallen.

A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2022.
This eBook edition published in 2022 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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Cover illustration by Tomas Duchek.

Sigismund: The Eternal Crusader © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2020. Sigismund: The Eternal Crusader, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
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ISBN: 978-1-80026-678-0

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

For Chris Wraight.