FEAT OF IRON

Nick Kyme

Contents

~ DRAMATIS PERSONAE ~

WROUGHT OF IRON

WILL OF IRON

WRATH OF IRON

~ DRAMATIS PERSONAE ~

The X Legion ‘Iron Hands’

Ferrus Manus, Primarch

Gabriel Santar, Equerry and First Captain

Vaakal Desaan, Morlock Ninth Clan Company Captain

Erasmus Ruuman, Morlock Thirteenth Clan Company Ironwrought

Shadrak Meduson, Tenth Clan Company Captain

Bion Henricos, Tenth Clan Company Seventh Sergeant

Xenos Personae

Lathsarial, Eldar Farseer

‘The Diviner’, Eldar Farseer

‘What does it matter why he fell?’

‘When the fall is all there is, it matters.’

– Farseer Lathsarial answers a student of the Path

WROUGHT OF IRON

It was not supposed to be like this. This was not his idea of how the war would play out. He had envisaged it differently.

Glorious, vindicating… vengeful.

I was not meant to fail here.

He had not expected to be last. He hated to be last. It irritated, like the itch around his neck.

No matter how he oiled the skin beneath his gorget, or the method he used to affix its clasps, the itch persisted.

Like a blade across my throat…

From his first ironclad footfall onto the desert, it had been there. A dark reminder of something as yet unfulfilled, a promise his supposed executioner had yet to make. Sand was everywhere, endless oceans of undulating grains stretched all the way to the blurred horizon, bleached white by an oppressive sun. In his dreams, the sand was black.

Such moribund thoughts brought an unworthy declaration to taut lips.

‘I am the equal of my brothers,’ he muttered to a darkness that deigned not to answer.

‘And the better of some,’ he added. Still the uncaring shadows paid no heed.

Always it came down to this singular truth, ever since he had split the darkness upon a trail of fire.

‘I should be first.’

The interior of the landship and his strategium chamber were black, much like his mood. The blunt refrain of a thousand hammers rang through the armoured flanks, as the tracks that provided motion to his leviathan pounded the desert in relentless syncopation. Beyond the constant din echoed the dull report of heavy ordnance. It reminded him of the forge and its fuliginous depths, of the Anvilarium aboard the Fist of Iron. How he longed for the solitude of its appended reclusiam at that moment. With creation and function came peace. With mental fortitude came strength and the banishment of weakness.

Weakness was a thing to be abhorred. It had no place in the new Imperium.

As the hololith flickered into life, revealing a nascent image in grainy grey resolution, he recognised it was the weakness within that he loathed the most. It wasn’t a malady, a social or psychological deviancy that he railed against; rather it was merely flesh and all its inherent limitations.

I will be as iron.

Focus turned the grainy hololith into two figures.

Ferrus Manus glowered at them both from the dimly-lit shadows. For him and his forces, the campaign of One-Five-Four Four was not going well.

His voice was hard as granite as he addressed his audience.

‘Brothers.’

Descending into the desert basin had not been easy. Hampered by the constant shifting of the dunes and the debilitating effects of the sand on their engines, much of the Army tank divisions and Mechanicum claves had foundered.

Tracks had mired near the tip of the decline, half-drowned in sinking sand. One battle tank pitched nose-first and rolled, bringing an entire column to a grinding halt. Even the bipedal walkers fared no better, and the broken skeletons of several Sentinels hit the nadir of the desert basin before any foot troops. Their burned-out wrecks were ignored by those that followed behind.

It therefore fell to stronger, more able, warriors to take up the mantle of battle.

‘Bring them iron and death!’ Gabriel Santar bellowed, a machine reverb in his voice, as he announced the attack.

A war host of Iron Hands answered, advancing in unison as a halo of crackling starbursts erupted from their weapons.

A horde of massive insect-like creatures wrapped in chitin boiled towards them and in its wake, scores of the cloaked warriors who had first sprung the ambush.

Eldar.

As muzzle flares lit, the heavy roar of cannon spoke and the hot air in the desert basin was chewed apart by brass-shelled fury.

Thick-skinned and ponderous, the first wave of chitin creatures was slow but resilient. Shell impacts rained against their heavy bodies, but did little more than indent flesh. They waded through clouds of explosive discharge from missiles and grenades without pause. Like their slighter kin they had billowed up from the desert in a welter of displaced sand and mournful nasal dirges. Humpbacked and muscular, as bulky as an Imperial battle tank, the beasts were impelled by an eldar kindred wearing what Santar could only assume were some form of mind-goad.

Such alien technology was to be abhorred, but the first captain knew these were not the true vanguard.

Infinitesimal vibrations, growing steadily in significance, registered on his helmet’s auto-senses as minute seismological anomalies in the basin’s tectonic structure.

Earth burrowers tunnelled beneath them, closing on the line of Iron Hands fast.

A series of subterranean detonations presaged the attack, and as the Legiones Astartes advanced in stoic rows of black and steel ceramite, the creatures emerged from geysers of spurting sand. Swift and serpentine, so utterly unlike the ordered ranks of the Iron Hands, it was difficult to make out the precise nature of the abominations. Crackling discharge flickering off the barbed pikes of their masked riders was visible, as the desert drained off master and beast in a fragmenting veil. It was a form of cavalry, Santar realised, only the most debased kind.

Santar scowled, and the cliffs of his cheeks hardened into craggy bulwarks. He would see them wiped from the face of the desert.

A fusillade of small-arms fire and light ordnance erupting around him, the first captain led a company of Morlocks into the onrushing creatures with his lightning claw aloft. The sun glinted from the blades and made the dark metal of his armour gleam.

At range the elite warriors were formidable; at close quarters they were unstoppable.

The aliens seemed not to realise, but would soon be educated.

‘Be as iron!’ he roared as the eldar hit them.

A beast, its long torso segmented and armoured with a tough brown carapace, snapped at the first captain in an attempt to bite off his arm. Santar shrugged off the blow and cut its face open, spilling viscous green fluid onto clacking mandibles and many-faceted eye-pits. A second slash severed its razor-edged pincers with a roar of bionic automation that drew a high-pitched mewl of pain from the thing’s puckered mouth.

Its rider, a sand-cloaked eldar in dun-coloured battle armour that was the mirror of the creature’s natural carapace, brought its electro-pike to bear, but Santar cut the wretch down before it could thrust.

Servos in his mechanised implants screaming, lending enhanced strength to an already exceptional biology, Santar cleaved the head from a second chitin-worm as the first was still collapsing. Through the gore fountaining from the neck cavity he saw Captain Vaakal Desaan, who was leading the other company, eviscerate a third.

Beast and rider crumpled. Behind them, more were coming. They were skirting ahead of the larger, beetle-like monsters, their sand wakes just breaking the desert surface in rippling mounds.

At least four dozen enemy contacts registered on his retinal display. Faint heat signatures, baffled by the sand, suggested there were another four score still fully submerged. A host of dun-cloaked foot troops with anti-gravitic weapon arrays followed them and the air chimed to the shriek of their cannons.

A heavy barrage was coming off the iron-armoured Morlocks in response, their rattling combination bolter fire taking a brutal toll. Holding the centre of the war host, they showed no sign of capitulation. Fashioned of reinforced plates, with the barrel-like shoulder guards adorned by pteruges that overlaid the thinner and more dexterous arm greaves, their Cataphractii Terminator armour was near-inviolate against the alien weapons. Intended for frontal assault, a tactic in which the Iron Hands excelled, the armour made them giants. Hulking, implacable, they passed through a hail of heavy bow-casters, fusion blasters and shuriken cannon with impunity.

Little effort was expended in vanquishing the chitin-worms, their numbers decimated for no injury in reply.

‘They have obviously not fought Terminators before,’ Desaan said over the comm-feed.

Santar’s reprimand was swift but light. ‘Just kill them, brother. As efficiently as you can.’ Cataphractii war-plate was rare amongst the Legions, but the Iron Hands boasted a great many suits, especially amongst the clan companies of the Avernii, the Morlocks. It was cumbersome, akin to wearing a battle tank bereft of tracks, but still retained all its resilience and stopping power. Santar revelled in the machine-strength it gave him. They all did.

The Iron Hands’ blows fell like metronomes: precise, methodical and without profligacy or flourish. It was a functional combat doctrine, merciless and unrelenting. The eldar withered before it.

In concert with Captain Desaan, Santar pressed the advance. The thickly-armoured Morlocks were steam-rolling across the dune. Nothing escaped their wrath, which was punitive and absolute.

Renewed tremors jagged across the first captain’s retinal display, indicating further tunnellers. Initially, he expected a secondary wave of the chitin-worms but realised his error as the vibration returns came back louder and more resonant.

‘Stand and prepare to repel the enemy,’ he barked down the comm-feed.

Both Morlock companies fell into line in perfect unison, weapons locked on the dead ground ahead of them. Their bolter storm abated, allowing the battered eldar to scurry back behind their ponderous barricade creatures.

Behind the pitiless lenses of his battle-helm, Santar’s narrowed eyes promised retribution upon those cowards later.

The Army ordnance had managed to find position at the cusp of the rise overlooking the basin. The gunners now had range and pummelled the mind-goaded chitin monsters anchoring the eldar kindreds.

The next wave, he knew, was coming.

‘Show no mercy,’ he said to his warriors.

Cracks webbed the base of the sand valley, swallowing the carcasses of dead chitin-worms and their slain riders, as a much larger strain of sand-burrower emerged.

Massive pincers married to a serpentine torso that ended in a whickering stinger gave them the aspect of the scorpiad that Santar had heard the XVIIIthlegionaries speak of prior to deployment on One-Five-Four Four. Apparently the beast was indigenous to their volcanic home world. It mattered little to the first captain; he just needed to know how to kill them.

A crackling line of bolter fire stitched across a scorpiad-creature’s midriff but the shells failed to penetrate, and exploded with little effect against its hardened exoskeleton.

One look at the barbed stinger and serrated claws attached to its ribbed torso, told Santar that these beasts could penetrate power armour. It was theoretically possibly they could wound the Cataphractii too. He decided to test it, but not before he had thinned the ranks a little.

Santar raised Erasmus Ruuman through his battle-helm’s comm-feed.

The response from the Morlock Ironwrought was immediate.

‘At your command, first captain.’

In his mind’s eye, Santar painted a blood-red crosshair over the advancing scorpiad-creatures.

And with our iron fist…

‘Heavy divisions on this position,’ he grated with machine-like cadence, relaying coordinates sub-vocally. ‘Rapiers and missile launchers.’

A glance and a clenched fist from Santar to Desaan held the Morlock captain in place and also brought both Cataphractii companies to a halt.

Seconds later, a storm of ordnance lit the desert basin in magnesium white, so bright it almost overloaded the retinal buffers in Santar’s battle-helm.

…we shall bring down such fury.

He blinked away the after-flare quickly and was already stomping into the smoke-clouded blast zone ahead. Vitrified sand crunched underfoot and fire licked at the edges of his boots as he crushed a burning eldar skull.

He waved Desaan and the Terminators on. ‘Forward, Clan Avernii.’

After the barrage from Ruuman, there were a few score remaining of the aliens’ hundreds-strong kindreds. The scorpiad-creatures were all but wiped out. A few dogged defenders were left, together with any creatures deep enough beneath the earth to have survived the blast. They waged war amidst the smouldering carcasses of their fallen, but rather than dismay them, the visceral reminder of their mortality seemed only to embolden the creatures.

Santar would crush them regardless of their resilience.

A thousand legionaries followed his lead, the Iron Hands reserves joining the Morlocks, many times more than enough to eradicate a recalcitrant xenos warband. Quickly he appraised the tactical dispositions of his forces.

The Morlocks held the centre, whilst the right flank was anchored by Shadrak Meduson and his own company of Iron Hands. The left was clenched in the unyielding fist of Ruuman and another company of heavies. Despite the inclusion of the slower moving Terminators in the war host, the Ironwrought’s section was the least mobile. Logic suggested an oblique line as the most efficient and employable tactic. Santar relayed his orders.

‘Ironwrought will forge the hinge. Tenth captain, you are our swinging fist.’

Meduson’s affirmation icon flashed once on Santar’s retinal display as he then isolated the ninth captain’s comm-channel.

‘Desaan, keep your Cataphractii at pace. Move up to assault speed, mauls and blades.’

Desaan nodded simultaneously with his own flashing icon as the Terminators maglocked their bolters and armed for close combat. Crackling hammers and burring blades were swung into readiness.

Though they were slow, the beetle-like chitin creatures possessed enough bulk and mass to crush tank armour. Santar wanted them down; they were all that was left of the eldar resistance.

Meduson struck first, the ‘swinging fist’, just as Ruuman’s last salvo abated. Seeking to envelop the isolated company, the beasts rounded on the Iron Hands who fought them to a standstill.

Less than a minute after the beasts were fully engaged, Santar, Desaan and two entire companies of Morlocks crashed into their exposed flank.

Eviscerator saws and seismic hammers cut and bludgeoned the massive creatures who died by degrees to the legionaries’ relentless attack. Slowly, one by one, they crumpled and lay still. The desert resounded to their demise, sand banks demolished in the shock waves radiating from where the beasts had fallen.

Standing at the edge of a blood-slicked impact crater, shucking his blades from an eldar’s ruptured skull, Santar surveyed the carnage he and his brothers had wrought.

‘Glory Imperator!’ he roared.

A thousand voices chorused back.

‘Glory Imperator,’ said Ruuman over the comm-feed, ‘and in the name of the Gorgon.’

Santar’s reply was rueful before he cut the link.

‘I doubt this victory will satisfy him, brother.’

The eldar were broken, smashed against the unyielding resolve of the Iron Hands. Santar was wiping the alien gore from his lightning claws when Desaan lumbered alongside him. In their Cataphractii Terminator armour they were much taller than their legionary brothers and had a commanding view of the battlefield.

Alien dead and their enslaved chitin-creatures lay in sundered heaps, putrefying in the sun. Kill squads of Iron Hands were working their way around the battle site, executing survivors. Santar had ordered no prisoners to be taken. Eldar were not vulnerable to coercion, even when violently encouraged, and they had a talent for misdirection and sowing confusion. Strength of mind and purpose, no mercy – these were the tenets of engagement the first captain had insisted upon.

One of the alien wretches was attempting to speak, its tongue lilting and offensive to Santar’s senses even through his battle-helm. He finished the eldar off with his lightning claw.

‘We should pursue and harry them, brother-captain,’ said Desaan. The visor he wore in place of his eyes blazed coldly, as if in emphasis. His ‘blinding’ had been courtesy of an eldar acid-spitter, a strain of the xenos more feral and barbed than the sand-nomads they currently engaged. Due to the intervention of the Mechanicum, the ninth captain now saw more than he ever had before.

Santar averted his gaze from the dead alien to the summit of the distant dune where the remnants of the surviving eldar were retreating. Heat haze obscured the view, throbbing and thick, but the aliens were ragged. Such disorder would not last. Santar would have preferred to chase them down and destroy them, but they were already far behind where the father desired them to be.

‘No. We’ll regroup our forces and have them ready to march again as soon as possible,’ he said, before adding, ‘It will give some of the slower elements opportunity to catch up.’

‘You mean weaker.’

Santar met Desaan’s impassive gaze through the visor.

‘I mean what I say, brother-captain.’

Desaan nodded without reaction but Santar’s upraised hand kept him from heading off. The first captain looked away, appraising the desolation of the chitin creatures in the desert basin. Most were open and raw, bleeding green lifeblood across the sand and creating a noisome stench; others were half-submerged, slain before they could escape. Any survivors had burrowed deep, away from the noise and the fire, taking their riders with them. If allowed to roam unchecked, broken or otherwise, such creatures could become a needless thorn.

Santar raised the Ironwrought on the comm-feed.

‘Ruuman, we are clearing this area in short order. I want it thoroughly sanitised, above and below the surface.’

‘Nothing lives.’ It was not a question, but Santar answered it anyway.

‘Nothing lives, brother.’

Behind the forward line, the first captain could already see the Ironwrought bringing divisions of mole mortars and unmanned Termite incendiary drones into position.

‘Dig them deep,’ he added.

‘Nothing lives,’ repeated Ruuman in grating confirmation.

Santar signalled for Captain Desaan to follow, leaving the preparations for regroup and advance to Captain Meduson.

‘You are with me, Morlock.’

They strode up the sand bank in silence, barring the hard whine of the servos in their Terminator armour as it struggled to cope with the incline. Together they passed lines of foundered Army tanks and minor Ordinatus of the Mechanicum. Most of the vehicles were weatherbeaten and in need of serious repair and maintenance. Neither warrior spared the struggling troopers a glance. Cresting the rise, they were met by Ruuman who was organising the heavy divisions for their punitive salvo. His mouth was set into a tight line, in part due to his characteristic dourness but also because the lower half of his face was augmetic. Much of his body was cybernetic and Ruuman displayed it proudly in concert with his battle-plate. Far behind the heavies, marching on weary legs, the belated Army divisions came into sight through the heat haze.

Desaan did not wear a war-helm and his head jutted above the high rim of his gorget, sitting between the barrel-shaped curves of his pauldrons like a little nub of steel. But the disdain was evident in his tone without the need to see it on his face.

‘The Army arrives at last,’ Santar said to him.

‘We are better off without them.’

Ruuman agreed, cutting in to address the first captain. ‘I have some serious concerns regarding the efficacy of both the human mechanised and foot contingents. Our progress is being slowed irrevocably.’

‘They are vulnerable to the conditions out here, brother. Sand and heat cause havoc with track-beds, engines. It’s stultifying our advance but I can see no immediate solution.’

The first captain’s reply was meant to be mollifying, even partly an invitation, but only caused further concern in the Ironwrought.

‘I will look into it,’ Santar added finally, walking on.

Ruuman nodded as mole mortar teams and batteries of missile launchers ran through their final launch preparations.

The Ironwrought’s disregard for mortal flesh came from the fact he was now more machine than man. Several close encounters with the Deuthrite in the spike-forests on Kwang had seen to the necessity of his extensive cybernetics. But he had not once complained and accepted his bionics stoically.

Desaan held his tongue until they had passed the line and were advancing into open desert.

‘And do what, Gabriel? Some theatres of war are not meant for mere men.’

Santar removed his helm with a hiss of released pressure. The face beneath was dappled with sweat. He raised an eyebrow.

Behind them the foom of expelled ordnance punctuated the first captain’s words in a staggered crescendo of multiple rocket bursts.

‘Are we not men, then, Vaakal?’

Desaan was a staunch adherent to the Creed of Iron, that which espoused Flesh is Weak. His ostensible elitism and lack of human empathy often spilled over into disdain, sometimes worse.

The other captain frowned as a rumble of deep subterranean detonations shook the sand beneath their feet and the Ironwrought’s explosive payload did its work.

‘I know you understand my meaning, brother,’ Santar pressed, undaunted. ‘We are familiar enough, are we not? Your earlier tone would suggest so.’ There was a rebuke in the first captain’s words that Desaan discerned at once.

‘If I have been disrespectful…’

‘I agree with you, captain. Flesh is weak. The Creed has been borne out in this desert, in the fatigue of our Army divisions and their failing resolve. But isn’t our purpose to shoulder this burden and promote strength through the demonstration of strength?’

Desaan opened his mouth to respond but thought better of it when he realised the first captain wasn’t finished.

‘I am still a man, flesh in part. My heart pumps blood, my lungs draw air. They are not machine, unlike this,’ said Santar, brandishing his left arm, the bionics within whirring in simpatico with the first captain. ‘And these,’ he said, tapping a claw blade against his armoured thigh. ‘Does my flesh make me weak, brother?’

Desaan was careful to be deferential. True, Gabriel Santar did not possess the phenomenal temper of his primarch but he was as harsh and unyielding as the bionics in his limbs.

‘You are much more than a mere man, my captain,’ he ventured. After a silent pause, he decided to go on. ‘We all are. We, the Emperor’s sons, are the true inheritors of the galaxy.’

Santar stared at the ninth captain, showing some of the flint for which he was so renowned.

‘Bold talk, but wrong.’ Santar turned away again and the tension ebbed. ‘We are warriors and when the war is done, we’ll need to find new vocations or be put to use as praetorian statues adorning the Palace on Terra. Perhaps we’ll form ceremonial honour guards for our defunct warlords.’ More than a little rancour coloured the first captain’s words. He had thought on it often. ‘A warrior without a war to fight is like a machine without function,’ he added in quiet introspection. ‘Do you know what this means, Vaakal? Do you know what we face?’

Desaan nodded slowly, at least as much as his high gorget would allow.

‘Becoming obsolete.’

‘Indeed.’

The implication of that hung in the air for a while before Desaan attempted to banish the awkward tension.

‘An entire galaxy to bring to heel, untold billions of weak and fragile men to reforge. I suspect it will be long before the Crusade is done.’

A shadow fell across them, echoing the sudden dip in mood; or, rather, they strayed into its massive penumbra. Santar craned his neck to regard the cyclopean landship, Eye of Medusa, engulfing the Iron Hands with its sheer oppressive majesty.

‘Perhaps…’ he muttered, taking in the hard, sweeping hull of the leviathan. The iconic sigil of a mailed fist dominated one flank. Below it an access ramp angled down from the lowest level of the landship, spanning its gargantuan tracks.

The Father was within, in concert with two of his brothers. When last they had spoken, his mood had been far from sanguine. Failure to precisely locate the node had vexed the Father greatly, to the point where his rage had grown incandescent. Swift progress was demanded. As with most things, Lord Manus did not have the time or inclination for patience.

Santar was fashioning his report as he ascended the access ramp with Desaan.

‘I am not sure Father would match your hope, brother. If we do not find the node soon, his wrath will be volatile, of that I am certain.’ There was no trepidation in Santar’s voice, no concern of reproach – it was merely a stating of the facts.

‘It is…’ Desaan chose his words carefully as they paused at the edge of the landship’s access hatch, ‘…curious that none of the Mechanicum adepts have located the node. Is it such an arduous task?’

‘The sand and heat,’ said Santar. ‘What our deep-space sensoria pict-captured, we have been unable to match to the surface. It is a different set of environmental conditions to which we must adapt.’

Desaan looked the first captain in the eye. ‘Are you so certain it is merely the adverse weather that is foiling our efforts?’

‘No, I am not, but I would like to see you suggest something more… arcane to the Father. I believe he would be less than accepting.’

‘Putting it mildly, brother,’ Desaan replied as they entered the landship.

Darkness reigned within the Eye of Medusa. A series of churning vertical-lifters and horizontal-conveyers had brought the two Morlocks to a gallery leading to the primarch’s strategium. The method of their transportation was not so dissimilar from the way the great internal ore processors funnelled rock into the immense pressure-hammers and furnaces of the Medusan mine-trains. It amused Santar to make the correlation with the vast, tracked mining stations, but he dismissed any further simile quickly as something the sons of Vulkan might find diverting. Serving no useful function, it held only passing interest for him.

Venting pneumatic pressure heralded the opening of the strategium blast door. Half a metre thick and bound with adamantium rebars, it could double up as a bunker if ever the landship was attacked. Not that its sole occupant required such a refuge.

The interior was as stark and chill as an ice cavern. Lacquered black walls absorbed the light and panes of glass crafted into the obsidian-like panels were frosted and glacial-thick. It was Medusa in all but its geographical disposition.

Entering as one, Santar and Desaan caught the end of Lord Manus’s mission briefing with the primarchs Vulkan and Mortarion.

‘…cannot afford to have our purpose divided. Be mindful, brother, but let the humans look to their own protection. That is all.’

Ferrus Manus cut the link with a curt slash of his hand. The grainy light from the hololith was still dying as he turned to his first captain. A pale glow settled about his mountainous shoulders, like a mantle of hoarfrost melting against his barely fettered anger.

He exhaled, and his displeasure lessened like a storm cloud passing across his features. His face was a rugged cliff, colonised by scars and framed by a jet-black skullcap of close-cropped hair. The primarch was, for all intents and purposes, Santar’s father but his demeanour was anything but paternal.

‘I love my brother,’ rumbled Ferrus, apropos of nothing, ‘but he drives me to distraction with his desire to nurture and coddle. It is a weak predilection and can only breed weakness in return.’ He raised an eyebrow, forming a crease across his slab-like forehead. ‘Not like the Tenth, isn’t that right, first captain?’

Ferrus Manus was a huge and imposing figure. Clad in coal-black armour, he looked hewn from granite. His unyielding skin was scraped and oiled and his eyes were like two pieces of knapped flint. Of his many names, his favourite was the Gorgon. It seemed an apt honorific for one whose glare was hard enough to petrify. Cold fury radiated from his every pore, telegraphed in the way he moved, the tone of his voice and the language he chose to express his thoughts. At that moment they fashioned a challenge, which Gabriel Santar had little choice but to accept.

‘We vanquished the eldar raiding party but are no closer to locating the node at this time, my primarch.’ He bowed his head in a gesture of fealty but Ferrus rebuked him for what he took as capitulation.

‘Raise your eyes and meet my gaze,’ he said, temper smouldering like a volcano on the verge of eruption. ‘Are you not my equerry, in whom I place my trust and respect?’

It was pointless to protest, so Santar held those two pieces of icy flint in his eye line and did not flinch. To do so would be unwise.

‘I am, primarch. As ever.’

Simmering now, the glow of the lambent lumen-lamps reflecting from the unfathomable living metal of his silver arms, Ferrus Manus began to pace. His ire was far from spent.

‘At this time, is it? All we have had is time. Answer this for me,’ said Ferrus Manus, his glare shifting to the warrior standing beside his equerry. ‘Captain Desaan, unless your tongue is too leaden, how is it that both my brothers are able to find the nodes and we cannot?’

There was a mighty hammer affixed to the primarch’s broad, armoured back. It was called Forgebreaker and it had been fashioned beneath Mount Narodnya by his brother Fulgrim, whose presence he was clearly missing. Santar wondered if Desaan was trying not to imagine his lord ripping the weapon free of its strappings and laying about the strategium and his ineffective officer cadre.

Ferrus Manus glared, impatient for an answer.

Santar had seldom seen him this enraged and wondered at the cause.

Desaan’s grizzled face, a patchwork of scars itself, was reflected in the Gorgon’s armour. His visored eyes appeared distorted. The primarch was close enough to strike him, but the captain did not flinch, though he did make an effort to keep the clearing of his throat surreptitious. Even masked behind his gorget it sounded louder than a clarion horn to his ears. He was a Morlock, one of the primarch’s elite, but it was rare to be questioned by him directly. Even for a veteran legionary, the effect was disconcerting.

‘Our human cohorts are suffering in the heat,’ he answered simply, and Santar was glad that Desaan hadn’t mentioned his earlier suspicion that he thought something other than the adverse weather was causing the delay.

The few remembrancers that had accompanied the war host had long since fallen behind, and though a small detachment of Saavan Masonites had been tasked with their protection it wasn’t to these civilians that Desaan referred. Citizens and non-combatants were expected to falter. It was part of the reason the primarch hadn’t objected to the presence of iterators and imagists in the first place; he knew they would fail and cease to be a problem. No, Desaan meant soldiers. Such men and women were expected to endure and meet the rigours placed upon them by the march.

‘And do my brothers not suffer in similar adverse conditions or are they somehow able to overcome such debilitations?’ Ferrus pressed.

‘I do not know, my lord.’

The primarch grunted and addressed Santar.

‘Do you concur with your fellow captain?’

‘I am as frustrated as you, my primarch.’

Ferrus’s eyes narrowed to silvered slits before he turned his back to regard a broad strategium table that had manifested in the wake of the hololith.

‘I doubt that,’ he muttered.

He passed a shimmering silver hand across a geographical representation of the desert continent to magnify the view projected across the glass slate. Several potential node locations were identified by flashing beacons as well as two further markings, a red and a green dotted line.

‘But it fails to answer why we are so far behind,’ said Ferrus, glaring at the red line as if doing so would will it further across the map. Unsurprisingly, it did not.

‘My lord, if I may…’ Desaan began, and Santar groaned inwardly, for he knew the mistake his fellow captain had made even before he’d made it. ‘Perhaps there is more retarding our efforts than merely sun and sand.’

‘Speak plainly, brother-captain.’

‘Sorcery, my lord. I can put it no plainer than that,’ said Desaan. ‘Our efforts are thwarted by eldar witches.’

Ferrus laughed, a hollow, cracking sound.

‘Is that your best excuse for failure?’ His silvered fists clenched the edge of the strategium table, birthing a web of cracks that would have riven the landscape with catastrophic earthquakes had they been real. Desaan felt the imagined tectonic ruptures all the way up his spine.

‘It would explain why our efforts have thus far–’

Ferrus Manus’s fist slammed against the map, arresting the floundering captain’s words. The resultant split almost broke it in two.

‘I am not interested,’ he said, and it was as if the air in the stark chamber grew colder, cold enough to burn.

The primarch folded his arms. Fathomless silver pooled across his immense biceps, shimmering and refulgent.

Desaan, who had seldom been this close to his lord and for so long, found his sight drawn to them.

‘Do you know how I came by this magnificent aberration?’ asked Ferrus, noting the captain’s interest.

Desaan hid his confusion at the line of questioning well. Like most exceptional beings, primarchs were occasionally inscrutable.

‘Have you heard of my deeds?’ Ferrus continued when an answer was not immediate. ‘Of how I bested a storm giant in a feat of strength or how I scaled Karaashi, the Ice Pinnacle, with my bare hands? Or perhaps you are familiar with the day when I swam deeper than the Horned Behemoth of the Suphuron Sea? Do you know these stories?’

Desaan’s reply was not much louder than a whisper.

‘I have heard the great sagas, sire.’

Ferrus wagged a finger, lost in monologue and nodding sagely as if he’d just come upon the answer to his own conundrum. ‘No… it was Asirnoth, he who was called Silver Wyrm and the greatest of the ancient drakes. No blade could pierce his metal skin, no spear or lance that I possessed.’

He paused, as if reminiscing. ‘I burned it, held its writhing body beneath the lava flows of Medusa until it was dead, and when I withdrew my hands they were…’ he held out both his arms, ‘like this. Or so the saga speakers would say.’

‘I… my lord?’

Santar wanted to intervene but a lesson was being imparted. The tale was simply that, a story crafted by bards and the tribal orators of the clans as related in the Canticle of Travels. It was told differently every time the first captain had heard it. No Iron Hand could claim its veracity, for none had been present during the lightless days of the primarch’s arrival on Medusa. Only Ferrus Manus himself knew the truth and he kept that inside the locked cage of his memories.

‘Do you believe such a warrior would allow himself to be undone by witchcraft? Do you believe he could be so weak?’ he asked.

Desaan was shaking his head, trying to atone for a transgression he did not fully understand.

‘No, sire.’

‘Get out.’ The words escaped Ferrus’s lips in a rasp. ‘Before I throw you out.’

Desaan saluted and turned on his heel.

Santar was about to join him when Ferrus stopped him.

‘Not you, first captain.’

Santar stood his ground and straightened his back.

‘Have I raised weak sons?’ Ferrus asked when they were alone again.

‘You know that is not the case.’

‘Then why are we confounded?’ The primarch’s choler cooled as he took to pacing his ruined strategium. ‘I have been away from the war front too long, my brothers draining my attention. You have become malleable, tractable. I perceive a weakness of purpose in our ranks, a failing of will that holds us back from our objective. Eldar sorcery is not my concern, finding and destroying the node is. We should have the mental fortitude to overcome tricks. I am leading this campaign and I will not be bested by my brothers. We are strength, an example to all. The reputation of this Legion, my reputation, will not be besmirched. No more delays. We press on at speed. Leave the Army divisions behind if you must. Nothing must prevent us achieving victory.’

Santar frowned as he saw resolve turn to melancholy on Ferrus’s face.

‘Desaan serves you unshakeably, as we all do. You have forged strong sons, my primarch.’

Ferrus relented. His hand was heavy and crushing as it fell upon the equerry’s shoulder.

‘You make me temperate, Gabriel. I suspect you are the only one who can.’

Santar bowed his head respectfully. ‘You honour me with your praise, my primarch.’

‘It is well-earned, my son.’ Ferrus released him, leaving the shoulder numb beneath the guard. ‘Desaan is a good soldier.’

‘I shall tell him you said so.’

‘No, I’ll do it. Better it come from me.’

‘As you wish, my primarch.’ There was a pregnant pause as Santar considered what he was about to say next.

Ferrus had his back to him again. ‘Voice your concerns. My eyes might be cold, but they are not blind.’

‘Very well. Is it wise to abandon our auxiliaries? We might have need of their support.’

Ferrus’s head came around to regard his first captain swiftly. The primarch’s calm demeanour scorched to ash as something molten and unpredictable burned in his gaze.

‘Are you questioning my orders, equerry?’

Unlike his less experienced captain, Santar did not falter.

‘No, primarch, but you do not seem yourself.’

Anyone but Santar would have been struck for speaking so candidly. As it was, the first captain experienced a moment of disquiet as his primarch considered his reaction. Santar’s fists were clenched, the lightning claws poised for release as his warrior instincts took over.

Ferrus’s fury ebbed as quickly as it had flared and he stared into the darkness.

‘There is something I need to tell you, Gabriel.’ Ferrus met the first captain’s gaze. ‘It is for you and only you to know, but I must confess it. I warn you, speak of this to no one…’

An implicit threat lurked at the periphery of the primarch’s trailing words and a nerve tremor in Ferrus’s jaw flickered. The first captain waited patiently.

‘I have had strange dreams of late,’ Ferrus muttered. It was utterly unlike him to do so and set Santar on edge more than any threat of violence ever could. ‘Of a desert of black sand and of eyes watching… cold, reptilian eyes.’

Santar had no response. He had never seen his primarch vulnerable before. Ever.

‘Should I summon an Apothecary, my lord?’ he eventually asked when he noticed Ferrus rubbing his neck. Under the gorget, just visible above the lip, the skin was raw.

‘An irritation, nothing more,’ he said, though his voice was far away. ‘It is this place, this desert. There is something out there…’

Now Santar felt real concern and wanted to end the campaign in short order and venture to fresh theatres of war.

‘The Legion can destroy the node unassisted,’ he asserted with confidence. ‘Flesh is weak, my primarch, but we shall not be slaves to it.’

And like a shadow moving from across the sun, Ferrus brightened and became his old self again. He clasped Santar’s shoulder in a grip that was painful for the first captain.

‘Muster the legionary captains. I will lead us to our enemies and show just how strong the sons of Medusa are,’ he vowed. ‘My course is set, equerry. Nothing will stop me. Nothing.’

With Gabriel Santar gone, Ferrus returned to introspection. Nothing, not even the promise of battle, could shake his bleak mood. Like an anvil hung around his neck, it dragged him deeper towards an abyss. Fulgrim could lighten it, he was sure, but then the Phoenician was not here. Instead, he had to make war with that obstinate bastard Mortarion and soft-hearted Vulkan.

‘Strength…’ he said as if invoking the word would provide it. With silver fingers he reached out to seize the haft of Forgebreaker.

He would crush the eldar, destroy their psychic node and win the campaign.

‘And do it swiftly,’ he added in a whisper, tearing the hammer from its strappings.

Though he would never admit it, for Ferrus, the war could not end soon enough.

Cocooned in a vestibule of white bone, the two figures could speak without fear of interlopers listening in. There was a great deal to discuss and much hung in the balance.

‘I perceive two lines,’ said one, his voice lyrical and reverberant. ‘Convergent at the moment, but they will soon diverge.’

The other speaker laced his slender fingers together as he answered. ‘I see them too, and the point at which they part. He will not heed you. You are wasting your time in this.’

Though he was adamant, the first speaker did not sound agitated. ‘He must, or think of the cost.’

‘Others might not agree.’ After a moment, the other speaker slowly shook his head. ‘You perceive a second path where one does not truly exist. Fate will close this door to us.’

‘Have you seen it?’

‘I have seen him. He must choose, all must choose, but his decision is already made, and it is not to our favour.’

Now the faintest resonance of exasperation entered the first speaker’s tone. ‘How can you be certain?’

‘Nothing is certain, however unlikely the alternative, but feet of iron do not readily alter their path without strong incentive.’

The first speaker leaned back. ‘Then I shall provide it.’

‘It will not make any difference.’

‘I must succeed.’

‘And yet you will not.’

‘But I have to try.’

Bion Henricos of the Iron Hands Tenth Company was not encouraged as he surveyed the bedraggled condition of the Army divisions. They were sweat-stained, gaunt-looking men, plastered in the crust of their own flesh-salt. They were raw and bleeding, and slow. Interminably slow.

Even the claves of Mechanicum skitarii and servitor battalions were suffering, the frailty of their flesh components a major contributing factor. Several hundred of the cybernetic creatures had been left to rust and rot in the war host’s wake; while casualties amongst the Saavan Masonites were allowed to lie where they fell in ragged Army dress and buried only at the whim of sporadic sandstorms.

A makeshift encampment had been hastily erected by the few remaining gangs of able-bodied labour serfs, and infirmaries established to deal with heat exhaustion and chronic dehydration.

Henricos counted the ranks of men within the tents, prostrate on row upon row of wire and canvas bunks. It amounted to hundreds of sick and wounded. Aside from the occasional plaintive moan, they were silent and desolate. He did not slow or linger, blind to clutches of Dogan Maulers leaning on their pike shafts and huddled beneath awnings suspended from the flanks of Chimeras; or the desperate efforts of pilots and drivers attempting to cool the engines of their vehicles; or the muttered curses of men raking clods of compacted sand from their weapons. One hoary-looking colonel tipped his cap to him, whilst sucking on a stick of tabac. He looked weathered; so did his men. But as the Iron Hand passed through the throngs of blistered, heat-scorched soldiers who could barely speak through bone-dry lips and leathern tongues, he felt an iota of compassion.

This was no place for men. It was hell made manifest and therefore the province of star-forged warriors like him. Unlike many of his brothers, Henricos did not possess a full array of bionic enhancements. His hand had been severed and replaced with a mechanised simulacrum, as was rite and ritual amongst the Legion, but the rest of the seventh sergeant was organic. He suspected that shred of empathy he had experienced came from this bias of biology.

He wondered if his more cybernetic brethren were surrendering more than just the weakness of flesh to the altar of mechanised strength and resilience. Were they giving up a part of their humanity too?

Henricos dismissed the notion, and yet it stayed at the edge of his subconscious.

Infirmary tents soon gave way to smaller pavilions that provided shade to entire battalions but were of little use to their clustered occupants in such oppressive heat. Canteens were passed around in quick succession but not even a reservoir would be enough to slake the thirst of one, let alone the many divisions of the war host. Discipline masters stood upright and unflinching as an example to their charges, but even these normally steel-backed officers were weakening. Henricos saw one collapse to his knees before he picked himself up and reasserted his post.

The old colonel was singing, but few took up the scratchy ditty, save for his veterans.

All told, it was a woeful sight, and these were just the vanguard troops; many more were still adrift from the main war host, slogging through the desert.

A command tent came into view at the end of a flattened colonnade of sand that was rapidly being overrun with drifts. A pair of ragged-looking Masonite Praetors stood to attention as the Iron Hand approached.

Henricos did not request entry, or even deign to look at the soldiers beyond acknowledging that they were present. Instead, he strode into the tent and was hit by a belt of stagnant air. Squatting in the corner of the canvas tent was a recyc-fan switched to its coldest setting. The boxy machine juddered and whined as it was pushed well beyond its limits.

Fifteen men, all in officers’ attire dishevelled to the point of half-dress, stood to attention as Henricos entered.

One, a general judging by the ostentation of his uniform and the quill-bearing thrall-hawk perched upon his shoulder, stepped forwards. He had a data-slate clutched in his gauntleted hand and opened his mouth to speak, but Henricos silenced him with an upraised palm. He used his cybernetic one deliberately.

‘Break it down,’ he stated flatly. The Iron Hand could have been speaking in binaric for all the emotion he conveyed. ‘All of it.’

A second officer, his face aghast, spoke up. This one had removed his armoured cuirass and unbuttoned his jacket. Evidently, settling in.

‘But, my lord, we have only just–’

Henricos considered the three seconds he had allowed the officer to speak as a concession he would not repeat.

‘No exceptions. The Legion advances, so do you. Gather your divisions or you are welcome to take up your objections with this.’ He tapped the bolt pistol holstered at his hip once. ‘Lord Manus commands it.’

Only the chief medicus was undeterred. ‘If we uproot now, our sick and wounded will perish.’ He dared to glower through wire framed spectacles. Fortunately for him, Henricos did not take it as a challenge to his authority.

‘Yes, they will,’ said the Iron Hand, the barest tremor of remorse surprising him.

The officers sat down, or rather slumped. Henricos took the data-slate and absorbed the information in a glance.

Then he left.

The desert stretched before them like a gilded ocean, burnished by the sun.

Upon a sickle-shaped rise, Ferrus Manus was surveying the way ahead. A cadre of his officers was close by while the rest of the legionary ranks waited in formation below.

The primarch glanced at a geographic hololith projected from a slate in Santar’s hand. He observed sweeping dunes, caverns of basalt and endless sand plains revealed in green monochrome, before returning to the desert vista.

‘Nothing on the horizon line…’ he rumbled, but then squinted as if perceiving something only one of his vaunted genetic provenance could see. ‘But there is a hazing of the air, a disturbance…’

‘Potential energy feedback, my lord,’ said Ruuman, peering down at the scorched valley through his bionic eye. The gyroscopic focusing rings whirred and clicked, the faceted apertures clacking and reclacking in different configurations as fresh spectra were overlaid upon his vision. Its telescopic extension retracted as he added, ‘Which could suggest an outpost or bastion.’

‘I see it too,’ said Desaan, analysing the scene through his visor. ‘The outpost is likely cloaked in some way.’

Santar regarded the valley through a pair of magnoculars. It was shawled with bone-white rocks, bleached by the sun. Some jutted from the ground like skeletal fingers or were clustered together, suggesting the ribcage of some vast but long-dead predator. Sigils too; he thought he saw runic patterns described in the arrangement of the rocks.

‘It must be there,’ said Ferrus, interrupting the first captain’s thoughts.

A dusty squall was slowly rolling across the valley basin. Santar thought he saw tiny star flashes in the churned dirt and unnatural shadows that could not have been formed by the sun. He blinked and they were gone, but the sand squall had thickened.

Santar shut down the hololith and gave the slate back to one of the few still-functioning servitor units in attendance. He passed the scopes back to Shadrak Meduson.

‘Even advancing at pace, it will be a slow march across the valley,’ he said, appraising all of the various tactical options. ‘But arcing around the basin will be slower still.’

Ruuman made a rapid calculation through his bionics.

‘Four-point-eight kilometres once we’ve made descent, first captain.’

Santar nodded to the Ironwrought, but addressed his primarch.

‘Higher ground offers better vantage, but will force us into column. Through the valley our divisions can spread out, but exposure would be prolonged. There is something about it I cannot see… a threat.’

Ferrus glanced over his armoured shoulder. ‘Is superstition contagious now, equerry?’ he asked, as if sharing a private joke with Santar. The primarch did it often.

‘Trusting my instincts, primarch.’

‘For which I cannot fault you.’ Ferrus’s attempt at conciliation didn’t reach his cold eyes. He watched the valley too, as if he had already seen what Santar had described but chose to dismiss it. ‘I won’t be slowed any further. We take the low ground.’

‘Shall we send scouts to reconnoitre first? We don’t know what’s out there.’

‘There are none,’ answered Meduson, the bolter slung low and easy in his veteran’s grip. His narrow face was taut as a blade, and when he scowled it seemed to sharpen.

The voice of Bion Henricos interrupted the exchange between captains. The sergeant had been brought to the impromptu conclave in order to speak for the Army divisions, since none of their officers were able to do so or quick enough to satisfy the primarch’s impatience. He was a thick-set warrior, tautly muscled but with a swordsman’s grace. The Medusan steel-edge strapped to his thigh alone was testament to that.

‘I have a suggestion, my lord,’ he said, falling to one knee but with his chin upraised and shoulders squared. He had not long been elevated to the sergeant’s rank, and this was the first time he had spoken directly to his lord and primarch.

‘Rise,’ said Ferrus, glancing askance at the deferent sergeant. ‘No son of mine must kneel before me, sergeant, not unless he is asking for forgiveness.’

‘There are scouts within the Army ranks, the Dogan Maulers,’ said Henricos as he stood.

‘We would be wasting our time,’ Desaan cut in.

Henricos turned to him. ‘The humans have a role to play here.’

Eyeing the sergeant’s singular bionic implant, Desaan was less than convivial.

‘Yes, that of ball and chain around our noble necks, dragging behind us in the dirt. They are unnecessary. Trust in iron, not flesh.’

‘Do you believe I do not?’ Henricos was careful to keep his tone neutral.

If Desaan’s visored eyes could have narrowed they would have.

‘You are over-fleshed, Bion, a weakness that clouds your thinking.’

Henricos bristled at the obvious slight. His jaw tightened. ‘I can assure you I am unclouded, brother-captain.’

Booming laughter, hard-edged and full of violent mirth, broke the tension like a hammer splitting an anvil.

‘That’s the spirit, my sons,’ snarled the primarch, ‘but save your zeal for the enemy. No sense blunting blades on one another or my equerry humbling the both of you in front of your fellow legionaries, eh?’

The rebuke was firm but without true ire.

Meduson stepped in as conciliator before any further harsh words between the officers saw the primarch’s mood shift again. The captain’s face had softened so that it might only cut rather than cleave. ‘We could consolidate here, allow the Army divisions to catch up. Presumably, the Dogans will be in the vanguard.’

Henricos nodded, indicating that was the case.

‘It will give them purpose and invigorate them,’ he said, ignoring Desaan’s disapproving expression.

‘And what of our purpose?’ asked Ferrus Manus. There was an edge to the primarch’s question. ‘It has been delayed enough. No more waiting,’ he snapped, capricious as mercury. A long, deep breath exhaled from his tight lips.

‘Muster the Legion, first captain,’ said Ferrus. ‘We’ll take the Morlocks through the valley, heavies in reserve to gain the hill and provide overwatch for the forces advancing across the basin. Captain Meduson, you’ll lead the rest in two half-battalions across the flanks of this rise and regroup with us when it levels out.’

Santar gave a firm salute to his lord and went about his duty.

The sickle-shaped banks were broad and long, but gradually tapered to a point at their terminus where they met the valley basin. Santar recalled the shadows in the dust squall and decided that the Morlocks would draw out whatever was lurking inside it.

All but one of the potential node locations pinpointed by the Mechanicum had proven false; mirages likely fashioned through the eldar witchery. The Iron Hands’ efforts, which had seen the few Army divisions able to keep pace with the Legion lag farther and farther behind, had been rewarded with further ambush.

It was probable that in tracking down this final node location the same would be true.

Ferrus’s steely gaze returned to the distant horizon and the haze he had perceived earlier. There was no time to waste.

‘We descend immediately. Army be damned.’

Seven separate outposts yielded no sign of the node. Following the coordinates of the Mechanicum, the Legion had fought several brutal skirmishes. After the last, Ferrus had been forced to report his lack of progress to his brother primarchs. Vulkan was… accommodating, even offering aid which Ferrus flatly refused. The exchange with Mortarion was less cordial. At this rate, it might be days before the legionary forces could consolidate and leave One-Five-Four Four behind. The slow pace of the Army divisions was not helping their cause. Ferrus could not deny the strength of their guns, they were useful, but bemoaned their frailty. So many had fallen behind. He doubted their return.

This desert is an eater of men, he thought bitterly.

The valley below had a strange cast to it. The others could not see it; it went beyond their ken to comprehend. Ferrus felt it, though; he felt the pull of it bringing him closer to his imagined abyss. Something was dogging his thoughts, just beyond the reach of his senses. He wanted to seize it, crush it in his fist, but how could he crush a feeling?

Out there on the sand plain, deep into the valley, it was waiting for him.

Perhaps it had always been waiting.

Trepidation, anger and resolve kaleidoscoped into a single imperative.

Face it and kill it.

That was the Gorgon’s way, how he had always lived. It would be how he would die, too, he was certain. Nothing had ever bested him. Determination definedhim.

I am coming for you, he vowed as he led the descent.

Fading light radiating from the ossified walls of their psychic sanctuary described the frown on the first speaker’s face.

‘He is singular in his will and purpose.’

‘Do you still believe he is on the wrong path?’ said the other.

‘The nexus is close…’ muttered the first speaker.

‘How will you convince him of it? Mon’keigh, particularly humans – especially one such as this – are distrustful by nature.’

As the conjurations of his plan began to connect like the chromosomes of an embryonic life form, the first speaker’s eyes narrowed.

‘It will need to be cunning. He must believe it is his decision. It is the only way to alter his path.’

‘This web you weave is flawed,’ said the other.

The first speaker met the other’s gaze and a flash of power illuminated a question in his almond-shaped eyes…

…which the other gladly answered. ‘You are trying to turn stone into water, have it flow to your design. Stone cannot bend, it can only break.’

The first speaker was defiant. ‘Then I shall break it and fashion it anew.’

As they neared the floor of the basin, the air became still and silent. Deep cliffs rose on either side of the Morlocks, and the broad valley quickly turned into a ravine into which the sun barely reached.

‘Where have we ventured?’ Santar’s voice was not much louder than a whisper.

Thick, engulfing darkness dwelled here. Rather than a desert, it had become a stark landscape of mortuary stones and crypt-like monoliths. In the shadows, the sand banks were almost black and Santar was reminded of his primarch’s earlier confession about his dreams. Even the pellucid lustre of the bone-white rocks had dimmed.

Several Morlocks were glancing around at their altered surroundings. Veterans all, they were disciplined enough not to react, but Santar sensed grips tightening on bolters.

‘Steady, the Avernii,’ he said into the feed and then isolated Desaan’s channel. ‘Keep your legionaries close and ready, brother-captain.’

The two companies marched alongside one another, spread wide and in shallow ranks. Heavy shadows and the abject stillness of the valley made the distance between them feel like a gulf.

‘Did we lose the sun?’ asked Desaan. ‘It is black as Old Night down here.’

Santar looked up. The orb still blazed in the sky, but its light was being filtered as if through murky gauze, turning grey and dilute before it hit the valley.

‘I have lost sight of Meduson and Ruuman,’ the captain added.

Santar arched his neck towards the tip of the rise but it was almost impossible to see the summit.

It was deep, much deeper than it looked. Sand squalls billowing around his feet put him in mind of iron filings skittering around an anvil. It was also farther than Ruuman had suggested, and the Ironwrought was never usually wrong about such things. But nothing about this situation was usual.

‘Like the Land of Shadow,’ the primarch rumbled.

Even without the feed, Ferrus Manus’s stentorian voice carried on the skirling breeze. He anchored the two formations. He was the hinge along with a bodyguard of his staunchest praetorians, which included Gabriel Santar.

‘I see no ghosts, primarch,’ said the first captain, attempting to break the tension.

Back on Medusa, the Land of Shadow was a bleak place supposedly infested by shades and revenants. Such talk came from superstitious men, those of weak and gullible minds. The Iron Hands knew differently. In its trackless depths were great obelisks of stone and metal, whose purpose had been lost to time. Monsters plied its darkened furrows and forgotten chasms, that much was true. And madness lurked on its endless plains for the unwary or the foolish. The association was not comforting.

‘The ghosts are here,’ said Ferrus, adding a layer of frost to the already chill air. ‘We just cannot see them yet.’ And as the squalls began to thicken into a storm, he added, ‘Close ranks. Keep it narrow and deep.’

The valley had become another realm entirely, one Santar did not recognise. Cast from skeletal rocks, shadows stretched into claws, reaching for the Iron Hands and slowly encircling them.

‘Why do I not know this place?’ he asked of himself.

Desaan’s comm-feed crackled with interference. ‘Because… is not… same.’

‘Lord Manus,’ said Santar, the sense of threat abruptly palpable.

Ferrus did not look his way. ‘Keep moving. We cannot turn back.’ The primarch’s tone suggested he knew they had stumbled into a trap. ‘The eldar have us, but will not keep us.’

The wind was rising, and so too the storm. It robbed the primarch’s voice of its potency. At the same moment, the heavy tread of many booted feet was silenced as the storm rolled over the Morlocks without warning.

It hit them like a hammer and within seconds the two companies were engulfed.

The sun died at once, lost to a shrieking darkness.

Moments later, slashing grains abraded Santar’s armour like blades. He heard the grind of the desert against the metal, but dismissed the minor damage to his battle-plate as the report of it scrolled across the retinal lens in his battle-helm. Lightning claws unsheathed, Santar tried to slice through the black morass and found it less than yielding. It was like cutting earth, only it was air.

‘Stay together,’ he said down the feed, ‘advancing as one.’

Fewer acknowledgements sounded that time. The tactical display was faulty and the bio-scan markers denoting the position of his battle-brothers were intermittent. As far as he could tell, formation was being maintained, but he did not know how long that would last. Santar sensed things would get worse before they got better. Grit clogged the rebreather grille of his helmet, raking his tongue. It tasted like ash and death. Copper-scent spiked his nostrils.

‘Together as one,’ he repeated.

A distant shrieking registered on his aural sensorium, overloading the angry static from the comm-feed. It didn’t sound like the wind, or at least not just the wind. A series of baffling returns ghosted in and out on the tactical display.

‘Weapons ready,’ he ordered, searching for an enemy. Black sand marred his view, making target acquisition impossible. A screaming refrain muddied the response from his fellow sergeants and captains. Affirmation icons sporadically blinked into being, as if the feed’s interfaces had been degraded.

Santar could barely make out the primarch’s outline, just a few metres in front of him.

‘Lord Manus,’ he called, before Ferrus was lost further to the storm.

There was no response at first but then the faint reply reached him.

‘Forward! We drive through it or we die.’

Santar wanted to consolidate; to forge a defensive cordon and wait out the tempest, but this was no ordinary phenomenon. To linger would bring lethal consequences, he was sure. He advanced.

Something flickered into existence on his retinal display. It was a heat signature, weak, but distinct enough for him to locate.

He swung his head around, the Cataphractii armour more cumbersome than he was used to, and saw… a face.

It was inhuman, the skin pulled taut across an overlong skull. Chin and cheekbones were angular, pointed at the tips, and the eyes were merely hollows.

‘In the Emperor’s name…’ he breathed as he realised the deathly visages were swarming their ranks like a shoal of flesh-eating fish, disembodied and darkly luminous in the storm.

Santar roared, ‘Enemy contact!’ He hoped the feed would convey his warning.

The Morlocks opened up with their bolters, and a chugging staccato of hard bangs resounded. Muzzle flashes were like subdued distress flares, dulled by the tempest wind.

Utterly alien, the face retreated into darkness as Santar advanced. It drew him on, step by step.

‘Engaging!’

He swung, energy crackling off the blades in tongues of jagged azure, but cleaved only air.

‘Detecting movement,’ Santar heard over the feed, but he could not identify the speaker as a conglomeration of voices vied for his attention.

‘Contact,’ cried the echo of another, also anonymous to the first captain even though he had known and fought beside these warriors for decades.

Dense bolter bursts erupted throughout the Iron Hands formation as an effort to repel the attackers was mounted in earnest.

‘Desaan, report,’ shouted Santar as something preternaturally fast and impossible to track flitted across his left flank. He turned as a second figure skittered into his limited peripheral vision on the right. It glared as it passed him and Santar was left with the vague impression of its wraith-like countenance.

Lord Manus had been right; there were ghosts waiting for them in the darkness and now their patience was at an end. Blood was in the water.

‘Unknown… enemy.’ Desaan’s reply was piecemeal but clear. ‘Cannot pin down… dispositions… engaging… multiple contacts…’

Of the primarch, there was no sign. Ahead was darkness, so too behind and in every other direction. Orientation at this point was impossible, so Santar chose to stand.

‘Maintain position,’ he said down the feed. ‘They are trying to pull us apart.’

He tried to find his lord but could discern nothing with either sight or sensor beyond the blackness.

Desaan’s broken acknowledgement was delayed and came as scant comfort to Santar. The Morlocks were divided, swallowed by the storm, and Lord Manus had been shorn from the rest of the Legion. Their strength and fortitude had been vexed in a single moment of rashness.

Santar cursed his lack of foresight. He should have insisted they skirt the valley or wait for a thorough reconnoitring of the area, but the primarch would not be swayed. It was as if he drove head-on at some fate that only he could see. Santar was closer than any of the Iron Hands to his lord but even he was not privy to the primarch’s inner thoughts.

A keening wail, high-pitched and several octaves above the scream of the storm, cut the air. It made Santar’s head throb, despite the protection afforded by his battle-helm. Vertigo fell upon him in a crashing wave and he staggered. Impenetrable static marred the feed completely, though he could not muster his voice to give an order anyway.

Santar tasted blood in his mouth and spat it against the inner surface of his helm. He gritted his crimson teeth.

Be as iron.

Shuddering vibrations cascaded along his bones with the invasive intensity of mortar impacts. He staggered again but fought from collapsing. Fall now and he was certainly dead. No warrior wearing Cataphractii war-plate would ever rise unassisted if he fell. And there were more than just ghosts prowling the blackness. Before the aural assault, he had caught the impression of edged blades, of lithe and spectral warriors. Finding inner fortitude, Santar looked for something to kill.

Dull, armoured silhouettes stumbled through the fog – his Morlocks, slow and all but mired.

Screaming scythed through his pain, a desperately mortal sound that presaged a line of bolter fire ripping along his right flank. Santar ignored it, heard the sudden air displacement to his left instead.

Found you…

Defensive instinct made Santar parry the blade blurring towards his neck, and at last he got a proper look at his attacker.

It was a mask that the eldar wore, bone-white to match its segmented armour, with a mane of tendril-like black hair cascading behind it. Judging by the form-fitting cuirass, this one was female and not a wraith or ghoul at all. The sword was long and curved, forged and sharpened by a killing mind. Hot sparks rang from the blade as it ground against Santar’s lightning claws.

She was at once a part of the storm yet at the same time apart from it, blending with the eddying wind as she chose. Leaving a trail of jagged spikes to fade in the air behind her, she disengaged.

Santar kept his guard up, ignoring what his retinal lenses were telling him and trusting to instinct. When the follow-up attack came it was delivered with power. The sword clashed against his lightning claw and he felt the jolt of it all the way up into his shoulder. She glared at Santar, incensed at his defiance, and released a hell-screech from her mask that forced the first captain’s jaw to lock. Weathering the aural barrage, he thrust with his other lightning claw and trapped the eldar’s bone blade fast.

A pistol appeared in her other hand but the shots rebounded harmlessly off Santar’s war-plate like ineffectual insect stings.

The grating laughter emitting through his mouth grille surprised him.

Abandoning the pistol, she took her sword in a two-handed grip in an effort to release it. Whilst trapped she could not withdraw and if she disengaged without her blade she would be cut apart. Even eldar were not faster than lightning.

‘You’re not so scary,’ Santar grunted through clenched teeth as she fed another hell-screech into his face. The first captain’s superior strength was telling against the alien’s pressing sword, and his bionics growled in anticipation of triumph. ‘I am scarier.’

Santar parted her weapon in two, shredding it with the scissoring action of his paired lightning claws. The sundered half of the blade, separated from the ragged edge of its broken hilt, spun into the warrior’s undefended chest and impaled her. She fell back into the storm and was immediately lost within it.

The ambush was faltering, and Santar was certain the darkness itself was receding as the storm ebbed. Several Morlocks lay prone where they’d been transfixed by blades or felled by the howling but others were rallying. Even the feed was returning to normal.

‘Are you alive, first captain?’ It was Desaan, the muffled thud-chank of his bolter chorusing behind him.

‘Alive and wrathful, brother-captain,’ Santar replied, gutting another of the wraith-warriors. He was wrenching the blades free from her back with a satisfying slurrch of flesh when his left arm seized. He tried once to free it but it wouldn’t move.

‘Something is wrong. Brother, I… gnn.’ Paralysis anchored his bionics in place as if they had simply stopped functioning. His legs, also mechanised, were locked. ‘I cannot… gnn,’ the pain of it was incredible and he gasped the last part, ‘…move.’

Searching for allies he only found two fleshless masks bearing down on him. They grinned cruelly, a witching glow to their features, and spat something vengeful in their native tongue.

‘I can kill you both… one-handed,’ Santar promised but felt a chink in his confidence as they began to weave around him.

Something was coming through the comm-feed, arresting his attention from the wraith-warriors as they closed. He recognised the plaintive cry of his fellow captain.

Between the circling forms of the eldar, he glimpsed Desaan stumbling through the darkness, firing wildly. An errant burst clipped one of the other Morlocks, dropping his guard so another wraith-warrior could plunge its sword between the armour joint linking breastplate to greave. The Iron Hand sagged before the storm cut him off from view.

‘Desaan!’ Santar’s would-be killers were near. ‘Watch your fire, brother.’ He couldn’t afford to be distracted. Desaan staggered on, bolter tracking dangerously as his firing arcs went unchecked.

‘Desaan!’

He looked as if he was…

‘Blind, first captain…’ he mumbled, stunned. ‘Hnn… I can’t… see…’ His arm was limp by his side. Others were afflicted too, the Morlocks undone by precisely what had given them strength.

Flesh is weak. The mantra came back to Santar with mocking irony.

The eldar had done something to them, crafted some malign sorcery to affect their cybernetics. To a man, the Morlocks all had extensive bionics.

Santar stared at the wraith-warriors who were brandishing their swords in the promised cuts to come.

‘Come on,’ he slurred. His heart might as well have been bared to their blades.

The wraith-warriors paused, lingering half-corporeally amidst the storm. As one they blurred. Two became many, and their harsh laughter resounded through the howling that was pounding Santar relentlessly.

‘Come on!’ he roared. ‘Fight me!’

The eyes of one – or was it all? – narrowed behind its mask and Santar followed its gaze to where his arm was paralysed. Only it was moving again, but not of the first captain’s volition. Energy cracked along the lightning claw blades, fierce enough to rend war-plate. Fascination and disbelief coalesced into horror as Santar realised they were being turned inwards… towards his neck.

He clutched his rebellious wrist, held it with his other hand whilst the alien laughter grew into a tinnitus drone. Sweat beaded his face as the muscles in his neck and shoulder bunched with the effort of trying to restrain the foreign limb that was trying to kill him.

Slain by his own hand, there was no honour in that. It was a despicable death, and the eldar looking on knew it.

‘Throne…’ he gasped. Even the squeal of the bionics sounded different, belligerent somehow.

Fight it! he urged, but the link between machine and flesh was far from symbiotic. One was almost regarded as a contagion to the detriment of the other, but now that boon had rebelled and become a curse.

The actinic smell of scorched metal filled his rebreather as the energised blade tips touched the edge of his gorget. Santar estimated it would take a single, determined thrust to pierce the armour and tear open his neck. At most he had seconds.

Santar was hoarse from his roared defiance but his struggles were lessening.

He closed his eyes and his voice shrank to a whisper in the face of the inevitable.

‘Primarch…’

Ferrus was alone; there was only him and the storm. He had since donned his war-helm but saw no evidence of his Legion on the retinal display, so did not waste his time calling out to them. The last contact he’d had was from Gabriel Santar, a desperate plea for them to stay together.

Onwards, drive onwards.

The compulsion was too strong to resist. They were deep into it now. Whatever horror this desert was harbouring, whatever cruel truth he had been summoned here to witness, he could no longer deny it.

This was no ordinary storm. Too redolent with the fabric of his dreams, it was awash with metaphors from his violent past and the figurative snares of his possible futures. He heard voices on the scything wind but no sounds of battle, no war cries.

I expected a battle.

Ferrus could not discern their meaning but sensed their words were important.

The comm-feed was down. Not even static haunted its channels. He accepted that too, and kept moving. Whatever this was, whatever destiny or sliver of fate had delivered him here, he would meet it head-on.

Eyes… slits like those of a serpent, watch me. I can hear the sibilance of its tongue like a knife on the breeze. It is the same knife I feel resting against my throat.

A memory surfaced.

After leaving the landship, he had spoken to Mortarion again, or rather his brother had spoken to him. The other primarch had left him with a barb that Ferrus could not easily forget or silence.

If you are not strong enough, he had said. If you cannot finish it alone…

‘Help me?’ he roared into the uncaring storm. The wind was mocking in reply. ‘I need no help.’ He laughed, a cruel and terrible sound. ‘I am strong. I am the Gorgon.’

Ferrus was running, though he couldn’t remember quickening his pace so drastically and without cause. But he ran as hard as his limbs would allow. The darkness of the sand plain only seemed to lengthen as earth and sky merged into one.

‘You cannot help me,’ he raged as a sensation of flying then falling overtook him.

And in a much quieter voice, lost to his subconscious, ‘…no one can.’

Two legionaries stood out on the golden sand bank, staring into a pall of darkness.

In front of them, the black cloud surrounded the Morlocks like ink on water.

Bion Henricos could scarcely believe what his eyes were telling him and wondered if his augmetically enhanced brethren were seeing the same.

‘What is that?’

Brother Tarkan widened the aperture of his bionic eye, enhancing its focus with minute movements of his facial muscles. Every adjustment produced the same result.

‘Inconclusive.’

‘Nothing natural,’ Henricos replied, rising from a crouched position.

Until he regrouped with Captain Meduson, one half of the battalion was his. Whatever the blackness was in front of them, he would have to deal with it on his own. He had tried opening the feed, but the link was foiled by whatever psy-storm was boiling in the desert basin.

‘It has claws, brother-sergeant,’ said Tarkan.

Two hundred and fifty legionaries, just a portion of the Iron Tenth, awaited Henricos’s command. Bolter-armed and full of fury, yet here they were, stopped in their iron tracks by the dark. A pity they did not have any jetbike divisions to circumvent the storm and assess it more fully. Not for the first time, Henricos considered the lack of tactical flexibility in the Legion.

‘That it does,’ he said, scanning the horizon and the pillared rocks overlooking the shadow-choked valley. He was close enough to touch it and reached out with his iron hand. A tendril of swirling sand tinked harmlessly against the metal and as Henricos lifted his gaze he found what he was searching for above the storm. It orchestrated the darkness, a tall, thin figure in dun-coloured robes. It carried a witching stave, carved with alien runes and inlaid gemstones.

‘Brother Tarkan,’ he said in a grating cadence, thick with promised retribution, ‘remove that stain.’

Tarkan was a sniper, part of one of several such squads in the Tenth, and he handled his long-barrelled rifle with a marksman’s grace. It was fashioned for his hands and carried a scope-sight that would connect to his bionic eye and forge an infallible link between firer and target.

Looking down the scope, Tarkan lined the green crosshair over the witch’s helmeted head and fired. The expulsion of the shell rocked the weapon but Tarkan had compensated for that already. Still tracking through the scope, he grinned with mirthless satisfaction as the alien’s cranium burst open and it fell from the pillar without a head or much of its upper torso.

He slung the rifle onto his back.

‘Target eliminated, brother-sergeant.’

Henricos raised his fist and the rest of the half-battalion marched onto the bank.

There was no sense in holding back at this point.

‘Forward, in the name of the Gorgon.’

Together two hundred and fifty warriors waded into the dissipating storm.

Something repelled Henricos as he entered the shadow. It was a stiffening of the mechanisms in his bionic hand, clenching it into a fist when he desired it to be loose and ready to unsheathe his blade. He forced it open as he closed on the stricken Morlocks, unclear as to its malfunction, and halted when he saw what they were doing to one another.

One legionary had his own eviscerator lodged in his armoured chest. The teeth were red and churning. With one hand he was trying to prevent the blade from sinking deeper, but the cybernetic one was pushing it farther into him. Another lay prone and unmoving, his helmet staved in by his own power-maul. Crimson fluid was leaking from the cracks and pooled around his head. Some staggered, half-blind, or were rooted by bionic legs that would not function. Bionic hands wrapped themselves around throats of flesh and choked the life from their bearers. Grisly and terrifying, the evidence of machine-carnage was everywhere.

The virtue of the Iron Hands’ creed was being turned against them.

Henricos’s momentary pause was born out of self-preservation for his half of the battalion and a desire not to make a grievous situation worse, but whatever malady was afflicting the Morlocks hadn’t seized the Iron Tenth yet.

‘Captain!’ Henricos barged into the storm with renewed vigour. Behind him, his brothers fanned out, interceding where they could, stopping the self-mutilation from escalating any further than it already had.

‘I see it!’ Meduson replied. ‘By the Emperor’s sword, I see it… Bring them down, brother. Save them from themselves if you can.’

The link went dead, the reprieve in communication only fleeting, just as Desaan blundered into Henricos’s eye line.

A jagged combat blade was gripped in the captain’s cybernetic hand as he wrestled with some unseen assailant that was trying to ram it into his face.

Henricos reached him as the monomolecular knife was about to pierce flesh.

His iron fingers clenched around Desaan’s wrist, holding it steady.

‘Hold on, brother!’ he cried, trying to bring the weapon under his control. As he struggled, Henricos saw faces inside the darkness. They were swift and incorporeal, like snatches of freezing fog given spectral form. A line of bolter fire chased one but the ghost dissipated before it could connect. A mocking, howling chorus followed that set the sergeant’s teeth on edge.

Desaan’s voice was pained. ‘Bion, is that you? I cannot see, brother.’

His visor was dark, like an iron blindfold wrapped around his eyes.

‘Fight it, brother-captain!’ Henricos urged, but Desaan’s bionic strength was incredible. Even together they were losing and the blade slipped a little closer, piercing flesh.

‘Gutted by my own combat blade,’ said Desaan with a pained grimace. ‘Not as glorious as I’d hoped.’

‘You’re not dead yet,’ promised Henricos. ‘Lean back…’

Letting go of Desaan’s arm, he wrenched out his Medusan steel-edge and fed power into the blade. It took several seconds longer to draw than it should have, his iron hand resisting him.

Soon it will take us too.

‘What are you doing?’

‘What I must.’ The shriek of hewn metal eclipsed the howling as Henricos began sawing off the captain’s forearm.

As well as he could, Desaan tried to stand his ground and be still.

‘If you slip…’ he growled, teeth clenched.

‘You’ll lose your head,’ answered Henricos and kept cutting.

Around them, the ghosts were receding, fading along with the storm. So too was the sorcerous grip on the Iron Hands’ cybernetics.

The last of the cabling and mech-servos came away in a welter of oil and sparks, leaving just the armoured vambrace housing. Beaded with nervous sweat, Henricos pulled up short and the two Iron Hands exhaled in unison.

Stuttering bolter bursts, increasingly more spread out with every passing moment, sounded on the breeze. The storm was dying and the ghosts were gone. Function returned to the stricken Morlocks but the cost revealed by the settling of the sand was dear.

Several dead Cataphractii lay on the ground, impaled on their own blades or bludgeoned by their own mauls. At least three others were slain to the wraith-warriors. Many more were injured.

Sight returning, Desaan winced at his sawn-off limb but gave nodded thanks to the sergeant.

‘Judgement of my humours is not always my strongest attribute.’

‘You spoke your mind, I spoke mine. No more needs to be said.’

They each gave a cursory salute and the matter was settled.

Desaan nodded again, and then looked around.

Of the enemy casualties, there was no sign.

‘Was a battle even fought here?’ asked Meduson as he regrouped the Iron Tenth.

‘I struck one that could not have lived,’ offered Desaan.

‘As did I. Its head left its body,’ said Tarkan as he joined them.

Desaan scowled. ‘Even their dead are craven. They are all gone.’

Further discussion was stalled as a figure emerged from the dissipating darkness. He bore a brutal wound across his gorget and left pauldron, gouges that would have taken his head had they been a centimetre closer to his sternum. The four grooves were deep, scored by an energy weapon.

‘So is the primarch,’ said Gabriel Santar. ‘Lord Manus is missing.’

WILL OF IRON

‘He could not have fallen.’

Meduson’s tone carried a trace of doubt that made Santar’s jaw clench.

‘Stabbed in the back…’ Desaan muttered. They had all been horrifically exposed in the valley, but he dismissed the notion immediately.

‘The Gorgon is unkillable,’ he declared in a louder voice. ‘No treacherous coward’s blade could even pierce his skin. It’s impossible.’

‘Then where is he?’ asked Meduson.

Though it had returned to its natural hue and geography, the desert valley was still rife with chasms, crags and scattered rocks. Even a cursory appraisal revealed over two dozen possible areas where the primarch could have fallen foul of enemy treachery.

Desaan found he could not answer.

Santar followed his gaze, and opened a comm-feed channel. Surely nothing as mundane as a pitfall could have undone the Gorgon.

‘Ironwrought?’

Ruuman was still on the ridgeline, slowly directing his heavy divisions towards the basin now that overwatch was no longer needed.

‘There was nothing to be seen, first captain. Nor could I draw a bead on your spectral enemies,’ he admitted ruefully.

‘And now?’ asked Santar, as the rest of the officer cadre clustered around him listened.

‘A vast and golden plain, but no obvious sign of our primarch. Or his passing.’

Santar cut the feed. His face was set like scoured iron.

‘Lord Manus is unkillable,’ he asserted with a glance at Desaan, ‘but I won’t abandon him. If the eldar do have him, if they have somehow ensnared him, then I pity the fools. They clasp a molten blade with bare flesh and will burn for it.’

His glare found Meduson.

‘Captain, you have command of the battalions. Take them to the final node location and confirm its presence. I will remain with fifty warriors to commence a search for our liege-lord.’

Meduson said, ‘We could still consolidate, await the Army divisions and press them into the search?’

Santar was emphatic. ‘No. If they reach us then I’ll use them accordingly. Otherwise, I want you to follow Lord Manus’s orders and find the node.’

Nodding, Meduson went to gather the Legion as Santar drew close to his fellow captain and second.

‘Get me fifty of our very best. Bring Tarkan and his snipers, Henricos too. The others go with Meduson under his orders until I return. Understood?’

‘Yes, first captain.’

Desaan lingered.

‘Is there something I have missed, brother-captain?’ asked Santar.

‘Where is he, Gabriel?’

As the rest of the legionaries were mobilising, Santar looked around at the endless desert.

‘Out there, I hope.’

‘And if he is not?’

‘Then I’ll trust that our lord can find his way out of whatever trouble has befallen him. You should do the same.’

‘It was the storm, Gabriel. That was no natural thing we fought. There are unseen enemies abroad on the sand.’

‘The world around us is changing, Vaakal. You and I have seen it.’

‘Some things should be left to the darkness. I do not look forward to their return.’

Santar’s silence suggested he agreed.

The world, the entire galaxy, was changing. They felt it, all the Legiones Astartes did. Santar wondered whether that was why the Emperor had returned to Terra. He wondered what that meant for all their futures. Even his favoured sons did not know and Gabriel saw the trauma that had caused echoed in his own father.

Waiting for Desaan who had gone to assemble the search party, he touched the self-inflicted gouges on his war-plate and had time enough to consider the Iron Hands’ reliance on bionics. Whoever these foes were, they knew the Legion’s strengths and how to undo them. Flesh and iron was a potent fusion but as with any alloy, the balance had to be right to achieve perfect forging. Their metal felt flawed at that moment. Perhaps Meduson had been right about consolidation.

It didn’t matter now. They were stretched, but would overcome. That was the Iron Hands’ way.

Fifty legionaries were standing in front of him, eager to act, and he met their gaze.

Someone or something had taken the primarch. Santar needed to know where and he needed to know why. And if he had to kill every xenos that cowered under the rocks of the entire desert he would.

‘Quadrant by quadrant,’ he growled. ‘Leave no stone, brothers. You are the primarch’s own praetorians. Act like it. Find him.’

Ferrus Manus did not feel lost, yet this place was unfamiliar to him.

It was a cavern, a vast and echoing space that went on into infinite darkness. A long, jagging scar split the vaulted ceiling above and he assumed he had fallen into an unseen chasm in the desert.

Wan sunlight permeated through the crack, but failed to leaven the gloom.

He had tried several times to raise the Morlocks, but the comm-feed was dead. Not even static. The retinal lenses offered little, coming back with a series of blank returns, so he removed his battle-helm.

‘How deep am I?’ he wondered out loud. There was no echo to the sound, despite the vastness of the cavern. The air was fresh and cool. He felt it against his skin like a caress, but there was the reek of oil and something else… perfume on the breeze. The scent was cloying, utterly anathema to what he was used to. It was decadence and hedonism; as far from solidity and the discipline of function as one could reach.

Slowly, more details of his surroundings resolved as his enhanced sight caught up to his other senses. There were columns, the faded remnants of carved frescoes and sweeping triumphal arches rendered from the rock. He saw monolithic statuary. The subjects were all human but he did not recognise either their faces or their attire. The stone strangers glared at him from on high through time-ravaged features. One, a noble warrior bereft of his head, pointed down at him with an accusing finger.

‘I didn’t cut your neck, brother,’ Ferrus told him and started to walk.

Like his voice, Ferrus’s footsteps did not echo and he assumed it was some quirk of geology. Ferrus had spent some time with his brother Vulkan who had illuminated him, oft at length, about the virtues and variances of earth and stone.

‘Show me how to craft it into something with function and purpose,’ he had replied, much to the other primarch’s chagrin. Otherwise, what’s the point?

Alike and yet so different were the Gorgon and the Drake.

Ferrus followed the breeze, hoping it would lead to some fissure he could crack open and use to rejoin his Legion. It took him from the vast cavern into a wide gallery that still had the essence of some submerged kingdom of Old Earth. Columns punctuated a long, dark processional and soared to a tall ceiling that was lost in shadow. Underfoot the earth was dark. The odour of crematoria ash and burned flesh pervaded. A mortal man might have been unsettled by it, but Ferrus was far removed from such flesh-born weakness.

Black sand…

The thought came unbidden as he looked down at his armoured feet.

Just like in the valley.

‘A tomb or mausoleum, perhaps,’ he considered aloud. But there were no crypts, not even a reliquary, yet the gallery stank of death.

Slivers of reflective obsidian, black like the earth, shimmered in the light of luminous crystals as he passed through the gallery. He caught sight of something, or rather a piece of an image, in the glassy rock. A massive conflagration burned in its fathomless darkness, and something else… It was familiar, yet alien.

Like grabbing the broken fragments of a dream, Ferrus could not hold it steady long enough to see it clearly. Whenever he stopped to get a better look, the obsidian merely reflected his face back at him, dour and displeased.

Perhaps it was another quirk of the light and geology of this place. Certainly, there was something unique about it.

Ferrus resisted the urge to unsheathe Forgebreaker and smash the stone asunder, knowing it would achieve nothing, and fended off the desire to vent.

He would not be so easily goaded, and doggedly pressed on.

He was about to leave the long gallery when something else pricked at the primarch’s senses.

Ferrus could hear… weeping.

A trick of the wind perhaps? He could feel no breeze, yet the sound carried easily enough.

It was a mourning song, something so baleful that it seeped into his marrow and made his limbs leaden. Grief was not something the primarch had ever experienced. It pained him to lose his sons in battle but that was a risk inherent in the purpose for which they had been bred. He could accept it. He had never felt true loss and yet now it crept upon him, a simulacrum of the real thing. Images filled his mind of his brothers slain or close to death, the skeletal corpse of his father.

‘What is this?’

Wrath supplanted grief as Ferrus realised he was the victim of further alien witchery. He defied it, forced strength back into his body only for the plaintive lament to metamorphose into something else, something worse. Death cries haunted the air, as if whatever revenants lingered in this grim place relived their final moments before the end.

‘Come out!’ Ferrus demanded, seeking out the witch that was haunting him with its sorcery. ‘Reveal yourself or I shall tear this chamber apart to find you.’

His challenge was met by the low grind of distant engines, the ear-splitting crescendo of mass gunfire and the feral shout of warriors. Thousands of war sounds crashed together in terrifying cacophony, bent towards murder and death. A theatre of battle evolved around the primarch, one to which he could only listen – and even then from a great distance, perhaps through time itself. Ferrus did not need to bear witness to it to know wherever or whenever this was meant to be, it was hell.

As the illusory war ground on, he discerned a voice that made his blood run as ice.

The sound that escaped the primarch’s lips was a rasp, ill befitting a lord of battle.

‘Gabriel…’

He stopped, tried to listen harder, hoping that closer interrogation would put the lie to his suspicions, but the din abated and silence filled the chamber in its place.

Breathing, low and fast. Chest heaving beneath war-plate forged by a demi-god’s own hand. The sudden stillness surrounding him brought fresh and unwelcome disquiet to Ferrus.

The smallest step, tentative and wary, brought the return of hell in his mind. Another and the cries grew louder. One more and they were near deafening.

‘Gabriel!’

Ferrus glowered at the darkness, searching every column, every shadow for a sign of his first captain. Frantic and incredulous, acting in a way he did not recognise… In his tortured mindscape, Gabriel Santar was being brutally murdered.

Others followed… Desaan, scorched to ash by atomic flame; Ruuman, stabbed to death by half a dozen spatha blades; even Cistor, the Master of Astropaths, spitting blood and locked in a convulsive death spasm… A thousand dying voices screamed as one.

Ferrus hit earth and realised he was on his knees. Assailed by the apocalyptic visions, he raised silvered hands to his forehead in an effort to push them down. ‘Impossible…’

He had seen something in his waking dreamscape, something so terrible he could barely countenance it, let alone give it voice.

A lesser being might have broken then, but he was the Gorgon and possessed of mental strength few credited him with. Guilliman knew it and had said as much when the two had occasion to speak alone. The cobalt and black were a potent mixture, an unbendable alloy.

Doggedly, he rose, one foot then the other. Only determination that could see mountains unearthed and monsters bested single-handed could unravel such potent sorcery. His back was heavy, so too his arms.

I have borne heavier weights.

Wrath provided fortitude. It became the molten wellspring from which Ferrus drew his strength with fists clenched full of rage.

He roared at the shadows.

‘Lies! You show me these falsehoods and expect me to believe them. What is it meant to achieve? Are you trying to drive me to madness?’

His last words echoed back at him, over and over.

I will endure. My will is ironclad.

Gritted teeth pulled Ferrus through the horror of seeing Gabriel’s tortured death over and over. It washed over him in a desolating wave. Every one of his loyal Morlocks, their murders folded into a massacre without end.

Ripped from its strappings, Forgebreaker hummed in the primarch’s grasp with barely restrained violence. It wanted to be unleashed but like its master was frustrated. Tangible enemies were painfully absent.

‘Afraid to face me?’

The darkness had no answer to the challenge, save for the droning of the war unending.

Fire blazed in the Gorgon’s peripheral vision; the slivers of obsidian were alive with it. The significance of the imagery was lost on him.

He had but one recourse remaining.

Broken apart by Ferrus’s fury, part of the wall disintegrated. The glassy rock shattered as it struck the ground but there was no fire, no death screams released from its destruction.

A second blow hewed a column in half and he leaned aside to avoid its crash, like a felled and crystalline tree brought down to the earth. It was not a rampage, rather a keen and precise assault. Ferrus moved with purpose, chose his blows carefully and observed their aftermath. He was searching for a breach in the glamour he could exploit. Having spent a lifetime trying to excise it from his mind and body, the Gorgon was adept at finding weakness. So he moved, and slowly left the gallery and its horrors behind.

As he neared the end of the chamber another sound joined the battle noise, lurking just beneath it in a sub-frequency that only a primarch could hear. Sibilant, it carried the low susurrus of something viperous and serpentine.

Eyes watching, cold and reptilian eyes…

Something was hunting him. He caught the flash of a tail, the impression of scales mirroring the reflected fire from the slivers of obsidian.

Fury surrendered to calm. He was not some headstrong pup to be goaded with tricks.

I am the Gorgon. I am Medusa.

The susurrus returned, louder this time. Behind him. Ferrus’s heart stilled as he strove to pinpoint the sound. It had no origin, everywhere and nowhere. In his mind’s eye, he spun around to face his nemesis and split another chunk of the gallery with Forgebreaker’s might.

Instead, he lowered the hammer head and let it drop to the ground with a dull thud of metal.

‘Do you see strings attached to my limbs?’ he asked the shadow, hefting Forgebreaker onto his back.

‘I thought not,’ said Ferrus after a short pause and walked slowly from the gallery.

The bloody images and the roar of war did not follow.

Grainy lumen light stripped back the darkness but revealed little of the chasm except for skittering native fauna.

Santar had found an aperture in the desert rock large enough to accommodate his bulk, a widening crack into the subterranean world that had seemingly swallowed his father whole. But there was no sign. His voice echoed coldly across the feed. ‘Negative.’

It was one of many dead ends.

He knew that fifty legionaries, broken into smaller search squads, were scouring the basin and the desert beyond it. Thus far, to no avail. Despite their efforts, they were no closer to finding the primarch.

Half his focus on the auto-senses data streaming across his retinal lenses, Santar stared at the sun. The burning orb had returned more fearsome than ever since the dispersal of the witch-cloud. Memories of the psychic attack on the Legion were slow to fade. He flexed his bionic arm, half expecting it to defy his neural commands. It did not.

He took off his battle-helm and let the heat hit him.

‘A changing world…’ he thought aloud. Opening up the feed, he spoke to Desaan. ‘How can someone like the Gorgon just disappear, brother?’ Santar surveyed the plain. It was vast and undulating, but littered with rocks and caverns. Even with a fleet of Stormbirds, he doubted they would find their quarry.

‘Every metre of this basin has been mapped and searched. What did we miss?’

‘Anything through your visor’s sensorium?’

There was a click in the feed as Desaan rechecked.

‘Residual energy readings, but nothing we could follow. Nothing that makes any sense.’

After a pause he asked, ‘Could he truly have fallen?’

It was only with half-hope that Santar had ordered the search. Deep in his core, he knew his lord was gone and would only be found again when he wished, or rather willed, it.

Impotence was not a feeling the first captain relished.

‘No. He has been taken and I want to know why.’

Santar was about to continue when he switched channels to receive. Meduson was requesting a report and providing a status update as to the battle group’s progress.

On the sickle-shaped ridgeline overlooking the basin, the first of the Army divisions marched into view. They were slow but stalwart, foot soldiers leading an armoured column of tanks. Mechanicum outriders ranged the flanks alongside the still-functioning Sentinels.

The hour was later than he realised.

‘Confirmed,’ he sent back to Meduson. It felt like choking on gravel. ‘We are inbound with Army divisions. Hold the line and await reinforcement.’

Santar switched channels again, and growled into the feed.

‘Regroup.’

Desaan was the first to return.

‘Meduson?’

Santar nodded. ‘They’ve found the node.’

Desaan snorted his derision. ‘Glorious day. Are we leaving?’

‘You already know the answer to that, brother-captain.’

‘Why does it feel like we are abandoning him?’

Others were joining them as the fifty legionaries came together again. Only Tarkan and three other snipers were absent.

‘Because we are.’

Desaan scowled but was wise enough to hold his tongue.

‘Brother Tarkan…’ said Santar. He was looking past the edge of the desert basin and its confluence with the greater plain where the warriors from the Iron Tenth had ranged. ‘We are leaving.’

Tarkan’s response was unexpected.

‘I’ve found something, Lord Santar.’

Another cavern lay beyond the gallery’s archway.

A vast subterranean auditorium, much larger than its predecessor, opened up before Ferrus. Its vaulted ceiling was lost to darkness, though he discerned a hairline crack at its apex.Splitting the gulf in two was a narrow bridge of rock, its natural supports shrouded in shadow. Endless black stretched below, a fatal drop.

Ferrus sneered at the ignominy of it.

He followed the path of stone with his eyes, traced its wending trajectory through the darkness until it reached a wider plateau. From there climbed a stairway, its steps narrow and steep.

Before he realised, Ferrus was standing at the foot of the stairs looking up.

Monolithic statues lined its ascent, like the ones in the first cavern only much, much larger. Each one was wearing patrician robes, their hands across their chests, fingers laced in the shape of an aquila. Only their faces differentiated them. Totemic masks hid their true natures, or perhaps revealed them. Ferrus had a sense that both could be true.

His silvered gaze was drawn to one as he took a first step. It had a scalp of thrashing serpents, like the gorgon of ancient Mykenaean myth. He reached out to it even though the statue was much too far away to touch.

Another had the skeletal aspect of Death itself, hooded and gripping a scythe that cut into its bony brow. The visage of a third was split in half, like Janus of old Romanii legend. Two masks, not one, gazed at the primarch. But it was a mistake to think of Janus as having only two faces, for he had many.

Ferrus saw an effigy of a bestial and snarling hound, and felt his anger rise as he passed it. Behind it was a stoic drake, its crest a living flame. A heraldic knight stood alongside its much darker twin, one with a shield, the other a mace.

Leathern wings unfolded from the back of one statue. Its chiropteran mask was hard to discern from its human face, suggesting a singular lack of humanity.

There were others: a horse with a wild flowing mane, a bird of prey, a noble human countenance crowned by a laurel wreath, a lion beneath a monk’s cowl.

The processional was comprised of twenty statues in all. Some were familiar to him, others less so and did not appear as he expected. They had subtle differences, even aberrations that Ferrus found disturbing. Only two were completely unknown to him, their masks scratched and near obliterated.

One, the last, stood across the stairway and glared down at him, and he looked up to regard it.

Unlike the others, this one had its arms outstretched as if in invitation to embrace him. It wore robes, but they were finer, more ostentatious in the mason’s design. His mask was beautiful, almost perfect were it not for the angular eye slits and the scalloping on the faux cheekbones.

‘Fulgrim…’

He hadn’t intended to speak his brother’s name aloud, but now that he did, Ferrus recognised the titan towering over him.

Memories of Narodyna rushed back in a nostalgic flood, but there was bitterness there, even mockery. Did the statue smile? The mask appeared to be unchanged and yet there was the slightest curl to the edges of its mouth. A desire for retribution turned his silvered hands into fists of their own volition. It seized him without cause, without reason, but prompted such wrath, such a sense of… betrayal?

Ferrus shook his head, as if to banish a lingering dream.

More witchery, he thought grimly, deciding he would inflict particular injury upon his alien persecutors, when his sibilant shadow returned.

It was not so obvious this time. It came enfolded in the breeze or the yawning of old stone as it resettled in its foundations. There was more, something only a being such as he could discern, twisted between the layers of susurration. The meaning of it was difficult to unpick from the colliding elements of non sequitur encoded into the shadow’s hissing cadence.

It was a word or phrase, but one that remained an enigma for the moment.

The hunter was behind him; Ferrus heard the scrape of its scaled body against the lowest steps. Swallowed by darkness, there was nothing to see below, but it was there. Ferrus imagined it waiting for him, the slow rise and fall of its body, its tongue tasting the air for his scent. It was a patient and mercurial hunter. It would strike when the moment was right, when its prey was unaware of its presence.

‘I can be patient too, my belligerent traveller,’ he told it quietly, and was surprised at his own calm.

Ferrus sighed ruefully. Perhaps some of Vulkan’s pragmatism was rubbing off on him.

The stairway went on farther and he had no time to linger. Nor did he wish to. Death lurked here, he felt it in the chill air and the slow ossification of his bones. If he stayed long enough it would find him.

As Ferrus hastened up the next flight of steps he tried to put the image of Fulgrim from his mind, the way the statue made him think of betrayal and the hunter following in his wake. He realised then that he had not fallen into any chasm.

This was not the desert.

It was somewhere else, somewhere other.

‘What am I looking at, Tarkan?’

Santar and Desaan were standing by the sniper and two other Iron Hands from the Tenth. Tarkan’s battle-brothers were silent, their sighted bolters low-slung.

Tarkan himself was crouched near the ground and pointed out an indentation in the sand with a gauntleted finger.

‘An impression,’ he said, tracing the indentation’s outline. ‘Here.’

‘A footprint,’ offered Desaan, running the mark through the spectra in his visor. To the untrained eye it was merely another undulation in the desert.

‘Several,’ Tarkan corrected him, gesturing to a number of marks that ran back from the first. ‘Trail ends here,’ he added, looking up at Santar. The sniper’s retinal lenses were sharp and cold, like his aim. His bionic eye clicked and whirred as it readjusted.

‘Where did it begin?’ asked Santar, trying to follow the footprints to their origin point.

‘Back in the desert basin, I’d estimate.’

‘Father’s?’

Tarkan nodded slowly.

The boot mark they’d discovered was large and deep. It was only by virtue of its size and impact that the sand hadn’t already obscured it beyond the sniper’s expert recovery.

‘Notice the deeper toe impression,’ said Tarkan, drawing his combat knife to better illuminate his audience. The glinting monomolecular tip stabbed into the end of the print.

‘He was running,’ said Desaan.

Santar frowned and looked into the sun-streaked horizon, as if an answer waited there.

‘But from what?’

‘Or to what?’ suggested Desaan.

There was no blood, no scorch marks, no evidence of any struggle. The trail simply ended.

Santar frowned again, unhappy with this turn of events.

‘Good work, Brother Tarkan,’ he said, turning.

Desaan was nonplussed. ‘Aren’t we continuing the search?’

‘There is no point,’ said Santar. ‘Wherever Lord Manus is, we cannot reach him. Meduson has need of us.’

Desaan’s riposte was quiet and just for Santar. ‘We cannot just leave him, brother.’

The first captain stopped to regard the others. Tarkan was back on his feet. ‘Choice is not a luxury we have right now, Vaakal. There is still a war to fight. At least we can do something about that.’

Reluctantly, Desaan conceded the point. Logically, he could do little else. None of them could.

Following the trail of the Army divisions, the fifty legionaries left the desert basin and their primarch to his fate.

A bird. No, not merely a bird, but an immense avian beast whose magnificence had long faded. Easily the size and span of a gunship, its previously formidable muscle was wasted and atrophied. Wings that might once have been gilded were ragged and tarnished. Its skin hung loose about its frame like a feathered robe that was overlarge, the bones protruding in a raft of ugly contusions beneath. It was a carrion-eater, whose last meal was distant in the memory.

Myth recounted many tales across many cultures of the gryphon, cockatrice and harpy. Civilisations had been eradicated by such beasts, if the bards and tale-tellers were to be believed. Even in its debilitated condition, this monster would kill them all. With ease. Ferrus slowed as he approached the creature.

You will find me a difficult morsel to swallow, he promised, nearing the summit of the stone stairway.

As he gained the last few steps, he realised it was not one bird but two, and they were no carrion-eaters. It was a pair of eagles, albeit rope-thin and emaciated. They each watched him curiously out of one eye, the other blinded by some past misfortune, as if with some knowing prescience the primarch was not privy to.

As he reached out to them a death screech escaped their beaks, harrowing and reedy in its tonality. The Gorgon went for Forgebreaker but his fingers never touched the haft when he realised the pair of eagles were not about to attack. Instead, the creatures spread their once great wings and took flight.

It would have been a pity to slay them, though perhaps it would curtail their misery and be an act of mercy. Surprised at how gladdened he was to have stayed his hand, Ferrus followed the trajectory of the first as it soared into the vaulted darkness of the cavern. Upon reaching the crack in the ceiling, it disappeared. He was envious of its wings, however decrepit and decaying they were. It had limped into the golden light regardless.

His sons were above, separated from their father by that gilded crack in the world’s underbelly. For a few moments the eagle’s shadow lingered and it was almost as if Ferrus could reach out and touch it…

The other eagle flew deeper into the caverns. In spite of his initial belief, Ferrus realised the pair were not completely identical. Where the first was wise and austere, the second prey bird had a nobler, patrician bearing in spite of its ragged appearance.

Defiant, thought the primarch, familiar, even.

It glided through an open portal cut from the stone wall of the cavern. The archway was militaristic, reminiscent of a civilised culture in its architectural tone, like the old empires of the ancient Romanii. It led into a further chamber lit by a firmament of stars.

‘Yet more cold stone,’ he thought aloud, as the crags of dark granite were revealed.

Frustrated at his sense of powerlessness, Ferrus was beginning to believe that the road he was on was an endless one, that distance held no meaning in this labyrinth.

It was pointless to fight against that over which he had no sway. Though it went against his instincts, Ferrus surrendered to fate. For now. He would reach the terminus of his journey when whatever had trapped him here deemed it appropriate.

Then he would crush that being with all the fury of Medusa.

Whatever lurked at the heart of the maze, it was no invincible monster.

I have slain frost giants, he said to himself. I have killed ice wyrms with my bare hands. You snare a gorgon at your peril…

The celestial constellations that illuminated his passage into the next room were not made of stars at all. Clusters of gemstones punctuated the walls, glittering in the ambient light. There was little remarkable about the threshold, just diamond-veined rock. He heard the languid flap of wings as a distant echo in his ear and since he could not fly, Ferrus followed the second eagle deeper into the star-lightened darkness.

Ferrus smelled dead meat and cold. Something metallic spiked his tongue.

The itch around his neck began to irritate and burn.

Serpent breath hissed on the breeze.

His belligerent travelling companion had returned.

Have you come for me at last?

Ferrus drew Forgebreaker and held it loosely in one hand. It hummed pugnaciously in his grasp.

I will crack your skull like an egg, beast.

The serpent kept its distance, lingering at the periphery of his awareness. It knew he would not merely blunder into the dark and attack it. Ferrus had to wait. Infuriating, and the creature knew it. But beyond simple goading, it had another purpose in forestalling a confrontation. It wanted him to see something first, something it had made for him.

Like a swathe of black canvas had been drawn over the latter part of the chamber, the light of false stars was extinguished. Ferrus stood at its border, about to step into a shadow realm. Even his silhouette, limned with crystalline light, seemed dwarfed by it.

And then everything changed.

The darkness parted like a veil.

One by one, the gemstones winked out. Like a cut artery washing over a lens, a visceral glow imposed itself over the scene. A gruesome abattoir was laid out, and Ferrus scowled at its ugliness.

Blood-stink laced the air, leaden with a bitter tang. It crusted darkly in the corners of the slab-stoned floor, and reached up dank walls like a fungal contagion. Marks were smeared in the porcelain-white of the room, where hands and feet had slipped in the muck. Men and women had died in this place on their knees, pleading for their lives with the torturer’s blade at their necks or bellies. Hooked chains scaled the walls, gummed with meat, ready to receive the flesh feast.

Images of rusty cleavers, jagged paring knives and flesh-ragged bonesaws resolved in Ferrus’s mind, though none of these butcher’s tools were visible.

Instead, suspended from the ceiling on strips of sinew, there were heads. A hundred decapitated heads swung languidly on the breeze, turning slowly to reveal their full horror. Their faces were frozen in expressions of anguish, some open-mouthed and voicing silent screams; others with jaws locked in teeth-clenched agony.

Ferrus worried at the rash beneath his gorget and felt anew the phantom sting of the executioner’s knife from a wound he had never received.

Or perhaps, just not yet…

The thought formed unconsciously, as if implanted. Ferrus was too shocked to rebel against it.

Revelation piled atop revelation as he finally recognised the warrior in the faces of the hanging heads before him.

Tortured, contorted with pain beyond mortal endurance, Ferrus had never before beheld such a terrible sight.

Each face was his.

WRATH OF IRON

Jutting from the desert sand like a sliver of arching bone, it looked obvious enough. As he arrived at the battle site, Gabriel Santar wondered why it had taken them so long to find the eldar node.

Take out the nodes and disrupt the enemy’s cohesion. Like trying to communicate across an interrupted circuit, the eldar’s ability to coordinate their defence would be severely inhibited. Break the nodes and break the enemy. These were the edicts of Lord Manus, both to his Legion and his brothers warmongering elsewhere on One-Five-Four Four. It rankled that the primarch would not get to see his plan borne to fruition.

For that and many other reasons, he dearly wished his lord was present.

The Morlocks, together with Tarkan’s small band of snipers, had returned at the head of a massed column of Army battle tanks. What was left of the Army divisions, mainly Dogan Maulers and some Veridan Korracts, had also made the journey, most hanging off hull rails or perched atop the cupolas of the larger vehicles. Some mechanised elements had also survived the desert, and along with a few Sentinel outriders, they carried what was left of the Saavan Masonites.

A ragged force, but reinforcement none the less.

Judging by the impasse around the node and its defenders, they couldn’t have arrived soon enough.

The node itself was immense and wreathed with a crackling energy shield the Iron Hands were struggling to crack. Santar could see no power source, no objective they could attack and neutralise to bring the defences down. It was generated by some other means unknown to them.

Heavy impacts blossomed in bright azure bursts, and the shield rippled to diffuse their explosive energy across its curved surface.

Ruuman refused to concede defeat. His Rapiers and missile batteries kept up a constant fusillade, charging the air with their noise and actinic stench. Expulsion clouds thickened into a fog that rolled off the bank where the Ironwrought had positioned his divisions and spilled down into Meduson’s advancing companies below.

Santar was met by Bion Henricos, and the sergeant snapped a quick salute when he saw the first captain.

While Meduson was overseeing the battle, he’d placed his hulking sergeant in command of the Iron Tenth. These warriors looked impatient for combat while Meduson’s vanguard, spearheaded by the Morlocks, tried to force an opening several hundred metres deeper into the field.

‘You can use the Army divisions?’ asked the first captain before Henricos could voice a greeting. There was no time to observe pleasantries. Amongst the Iron Hands officer cadre, the sergeant had the greatest empathy with the humans. Santar merely wanted that utilised, and conveyed as much in his perfunctory demeanour.

No word was spoken of the mission or the primarch. It was not the sergeant’s place to ask, though he did cast a quick glance at Desaan who was a step behind the first captain.

There must have been a short shake of the head from Desaan, because Henricos stiffened in grief and anger, but fell back to his duty in short order. That was to Henricos’s credit as he appraised the arriving column.

‘Just under fifteen thousand men and sixty-three operational vehicles,’ said Henricos. ‘Yes, my lord, I believe I can use these divisions.’

Santar nodded. ‘Good. They are ragged, brother-sergeant,’ he warned.

‘Ready for a fight,’ countered Henricos.

Smiling beneath his battle-helm, Santar said, ‘Indeed.’ He liked this Henricos, his dogged spirit. ‘Where is Captain Meduson?’

Devastatingly powerful ranks of plasma cannons and Tarantula gun platforms boomed across the battle line, filling the rear echelons with light and thunder. Henricos waited a few moments for their salvo to subside before pointing north-east to where the acting commander was stationed.

Santar saw Meduson and his retinue, but his gaze lingered on the shield after the plasma wake and heavy bolter smoke had dispersed. He expected a crack in the eldar’s armour, even a fissure. Nothing. The shield still held.

‘It has been like this for the past hour,’ said Henricos.

Santar grunted, displeased. ‘Get the Army ordnance sounding immediately. I want to hear it from the front line when I’m standing next to that energy shield.’

‘We’ll punch a hole though it for you, my lord.’

‘See that you do. Flesh is weak, but those tanks are steel,’ he reminded Henricos.

Santar didn’t linger. He headed over to Meduson.

‘Desaan, with me,’ he growled, watching the ineffectual barrage continue to rain down on the shield.

‘Their resistance is fearsome,’ said the captain of the Iron Tenth as Santar approached.

‘You sound surprised.’

Meduson carried a holo-slate in his bionic hand and was appraising the tactical dispositions of his force. Heavies gave support fire from range, while three wedges of Iron Hands from the Sixteenth, Thirty-Fourth and Twenty-Seventh clan companies provided a relentless assault on the entrenched eldar positions. Santar recognised the sigils of the Vorganan, Burkhar and Felg clans battling tirelessly at the front.

Down the centre, where the firestorm was hottest, he knew he would find the Clan Avernii, his Morlocks. Judging by the static representation of the veteran company, they too had reached an impasse. No Iron Hand had yet reached the shield wall itself.

Eldar forces in front of it, acting as a breaker, were thick but also retreating back behind it.

In reserve for the Iron Hands were Sorrgol’s clan warriors of the Iron Tenth, Meduson’s own kith and kin, as well as Kadoran, Lokopt and Ungavarr clans who brought down hellfire from the high ground. Even with all of that might at their disposal, the Iron Hands could not breach the eldar cordon.

Five hundred metres ahead of him, the flesh and iron versions of Meduson’s army were doing the actual fighting.

Rows of legionaries strode implacably into the teeth of the enemy, bolters kicking up a steady barrage. Meduson had positioned smaller divisions of conversion beamers and graviton cannons amongst the bulk of the battalions, identified by the sporadic flash from their barrels and arcing lances of power, but the enemy was resolute.

‘They are tougher than expected,’ Meduson admitted. Scorch marks blackened his battle-plate, suggesting he’d attempted to storm the eldar outpost in an earlier sortie and been repulsed.

‘You thought they would yield easily, brother-captain?’

Meduson’s head twitched slightly when he realised the primarch was not with Santar.

‘The Gorgon?’ he asked, though his tone suggested he wasn’t sure he wanted to know the answer.

‘Gone.’

‘When will he return?’ He made no suggestion of the primarch’s death, such a thing was beyond countenance, though the shadow of that possibility passed over Meduson’s features like a dark cloud.

‘He will return?’ he rasped, fists clenching of their own volition as a vengeful fury came upon him.

‘We failed to find him.’ Santar had no answer to give.

‘He’ll be angry when he does come back.’

Santar gestured to the holo-slate and the slow manoeuvres of the forces depicted on it. ‘That I would like to see.’

‘They are well corralled,’ said Meduson.

Reserve forces of Iron Hands were moving in, encircling the node and its guardians in a ring of black ceramite.

‘Laying siege to a foe isn’t really our way though, is it, Shadrak?’

Meduson gave a feral smile. ‘No, first captain. It is not.’

‘They hold tenaciously to something.’

‘Sounds like you admire them.’

Santar’s eyes never left the holo-slate, thinking and strategising. In his time as equerry, he had learned much from Ferrus Manus. Often the Gorgon stood in Guilliman’s shadow but he was just as adroit a tactician. Others claimed his only drawback was that his single-mindedness sometimes left him slightly myopic. Though he would never speak of it aloud, Santar believed Ferrus didn’t have the Battle King’s patience for endless scenario-making either.

‘Admire them? No,’ said Santar with absolute certainty. ‘I want to understand them so I can better destroy them.’ Then he added, ‘Have you breached the energy shield even once?’

‘We haven’t even reached it. I expected their capitulation when facing our obvious numerical superiority, first captain. It’s only logical.’

‘Perhaps there is no concept of inevitability in the eldar culture.’

Meduson’s silence intimated he didn’t understand that.

‘Suggestions then?’ asked Santar.

‘Hit them harder, throw more warriors against their defences until they shatter.’

‘Fortunately I have brought some with me who are keen to be reunited with their clansmen.’

The Morlocks strained at the leash behind him.

Meduson cast them a quick glance. ‘Hungry too.’

‘War is an unsubtle thing, Shadrak,’ Santar said. ‘Sometimes you just have to wield a larger hammer. Show me where you would like it to fall and we’ll make that breach for you.’

‘That is comforting to hear–’

Meduson held up a hand, pausing to listen to a series of reports across the feed as the various commanders advanced or altered position. He met Santar’s gaze when he was finished. ‘I assumed you’d take command upon your return, first captain. I’ve already sent our troops’ dispositions across the feed to your retinal lens.’

‘Not necessary,’ said Santar. ‘You have this in hand, brother. I want to dirty my claws with xenos blood.’

Meduson thumped his armoured chest, unable to stifle his pride at the first captain’s confidence in him.

‘Then let your wrath fall here, my lord.’

As the words registered in Santar’s feed, an icon lit up on his retinal display. The other troop dispositions overlaid it. The rest of the Morlocks were holding at the very brunt of the battle, attacking the eldar defenders at close quarters. Here the defences were thickest, here the aliens wore heavier armour and brought their most devastating weapons and gun platforms to bear.

Even at a distance it looked ferocious.

Ignoring the cauldron he was about to step into, Santar scrutinised the distant shield as if he could discern a weakness just by looking at it.

‘How deep do you think it goes, brother?’

Meduson followed his first captain’s eye line. He smiled when he realised what Santar was suggesting.

Santar touched a finger to his gorget to open the comm-feed. ‘Ironwrought.’

Ruuman came back between loud salvoes of heavy weapons fire.

‘I need you to do something for me…’ Santar said, and relayed his plan.

‘You are the hammer,’ said Meduson when the first captain closed the feed again.

Santar’s lightning claws slid free of their sheaths. He fed a crackle of power down the blades.

‘Then it’s time we swung and struck.’

Arrogance deliberately visible and overflowing, Santar forged through the Iron Hands ranks that parted for him and his entourage of Morlocks. He kept his helmet maglocked to his thigh plate. He was more vulnerable without it, but the warriors around him needed to see his face. Without the primarch, it was up to him to inspire.

Behind his mask of ferocity, he hid his desire to be fighting alongside his lord. He could not imagine a time when that would not be so.

He raised his iron fist to the Morlocks and roared.

‘Iron and death!’

An insistent voice inside him intruded on Santar’s belligerence and the resounding affirmation of his charges that was hard to ignore.

Father, where are you?

Ferrus scowled.

‘Petty tricks,’ he stated flatly, though none of the hanging skulls in the abattoir seemed to hear him.

Death did not unnerve the Gorgon, even the prospect of his own. Long ago, in the desolate wastes of Medusa, he had come to terms with the inevitability of his own mortality. He would live longer than most, perhaps even millennia, for who could say what the limits of the Emperor’s gene-science were? But he was a warrior and warriors would eventually meet their end at the edge of a blade. Ferrus hoped his ending would be glorious. He also hoped, one day, for peace. But without war he wondered what would then become of his purpose and function?

Scowl became sneer, and Ferrus’s lip curled derisively at the strung effigies meant to portend his doom. Swollen with righteous indignation, he had to resist the urge to destroy every one of them.

Without the lambent illumination of the gemstones, it was still light enough to see, even though the light was crimson and pulsing like a vein. The skulls were far enough apart to weave through without the need to touch them. Twisting in the breeze, one of the heads yawed around to face him.

He smiled at the cadaverous doppelganger, his eyes narrowed and cold.

‘I would make a handsomer corpse,’ he said, and smiled. It sounded like a remark Fulgrim might have made. At the thought of his brother, a sound echoed in the primarch’s ear that he recognised, the hissing discord that had dogged his steps.

The hunter had returned. Likely, it had never left. To this Ferrus paid his full attention, for its threat was real and it was close. It was in the chamber with him, slithering alongside him, matching his every step.

‘Come into the light, coward,’ he snarled. ‘I would like to see the enemy who wishes me slain a hundred times over. I will make a lie of that assumption, though you will only suffer one death.’

His belligerent companion did not respond.

Ferrus went on.

Halfway across the grim abattoir, the cluster of the skulls became so tightly packed that Ferrus would have no choice but to ease them apart in order to pass.

Using Forgebreaker like a cattle-prod, he tentatively pushed one of the heads aside.

A slow moan escaped the dead lips. A second of the heads echoed the first, then a third and fourth. Gripped by a sudden and terrifying epidemic, every one of the decaying skulls began to animate in a baleful chorus.

They were alive. Dragged back from damnation, these revenants wearing the flesh of Ferrus Manus had returned to haunt him. Revulsion, rage and disbelief warred inside the primarch and he backed away expecting an attack. A skull brushed his neck. Dry lips touched his skin like a kissed caress. Recoiling, he collided with another. A cheekbone shattered with the force. Bone fragments cascaded. A tooth bit into his armoured shoulder plate and stuck. Ferrus pulled it out, snarling as the moaning rose to a wail. The sound was low and accusing.

You did this to us…

You consigned us to this fate…

We are in limbo because of you!

Ferrus’s fists clenched, his teeth locked.

‘Shut up!’ he hissed. His fury boiled over and he whirled around, bringing Forgebreaker up in front of him.

The dead should stay dead…

Such debasement only confirmed the weakness of flesh and its eventual corruption. The fact it was his own dead visage made no difference to the Gorgon. He had held back before, allowed temperance to stay his hand. Now he would smash every one of the wretched things to bone-dust and memory.

A streak of silver flashed in the darkness, the abattoir’s light flowing over it like congealed blood…

Ferrus’s first blow never fell.

Agonising hellfire roared up his spine, and bent it almost double. Armour plate cracked with the primarch’s sudden and violent convulsions, split like hot metal cooled too fast. Pain that would kill a hundred lesser men flooded his veins and nearly crippled him. Ferrus was bowed, down on one knee and hurting. Spitting phlegm and blood, he unleashed a peal of anger and fought the poison down. Pellucid silver cooled the burning of the wound, miraculous but far from cleansing, and the primarch straightened. Ferrus’s other hand was clenched around his wrist. It throbbed beneath the fingers of living metal, told him he had been hurt. Worse, he had been weakened. Forgebreaker was lost, spilled from his numbed grasp and sent clattering to the ground.

He lifted his hand gingerly, like peering beneath battlefield dressings and expecting to be confronted by gangrene. Two puncture wounds, deep and wide like dagger thrusts, pierced his inviolable metal skin. The wounds bubbled with venom and Ferrus watched in disbelief as the living metal corroded before his eyes. As if stung, he withdrew his other hand, afraid that the taint would spread to both. Beneath the bleeding silver, burned and blistered skin was revealed and in it a memory was born…

Standing at the edge of the lava chasm, the beast above.

Breath of cold and sulphur.

Hands raw and bleeding, but taut enough to snap anvils.

The beast was waning. The battle they’d fought had taken its toll.

Molten silver upon its flanks reflected the magma glow and shimmered with heat haze.

Such a magnificent creature.

He would kill it anyway, his dominance proved beyond doubt.

I am stronger.

Fangs bared, a song of fury upon its lips.

He would prove it.

He would find a way to pierce its miraculous flesh and kill it.

The lava beckoned. His forge.

Here, weapons were made and unmade.

I will prove I am stronger.

I must, for if I do not what does that make me?

Memory faded, vague and indistinct. Myth and fact wove a single narrative that left him wondering at the truth of his own origins. Distraction was momentary. Need for survival and his warrior instincts took over. Rather than search for Forgebreaker, Ferrus ripped a spatha from his waist, a thick, meaty blade that was keen-edged and deadly. Numbed by the virulent poison, his wounded arm hung low at his side. Ferrus took the blade in his left hand, adjusting stance and grip before he scored a slit down his wrist to release the poison. Burning brine-yellow fluid seeped like acid down his red raw hand, dripping off bloodied fingers. Pain eased, so too the clamour in his skull that felt like it was being pummelled by a dozen gauntleted fists.

Like my head is being cut from my shoulders…

Ignoring the mournful cries of the heads, shutting out the death rattle of his own voice heard a hundred times over, Ferrus searched the shadows. He turned quickly at the glint of silver in his peripheral vision. It flashed with the urgency of a warning beacon.

Preternatural reflexes saved him from being maimed further. He lashed out, but the creature was swift beyond reason and slid from the primarch’s enraged clutches.

Serpentine, but like no snake Ferrus had ever encountered. Silver scaled, it was not unlike the spawn of a beast he had fought long ago. Stars were merely chips of granite in the darkling sky back then, when there was only Medusa and the endless arctic night. Swallowed by shadow, the impression of the creature was fleeting but familiar.

Perhaps we have met before…

A tail crack made the Gorgon turn and he swung again, blindly, and cut only air. He felt slower. Despite excising the poison, the sting of his wound was creeping up his shoulder and into his neck. The phantom pain he’d felt around his throat ever since coming to the desert burned like white fire.

Real or imagined, this creature could hurt him. Pulled from some black abyss of Old Night, it had manifested in this nether realm intent on his undoing. His gaolers knew his past, his primordial fears and desires, and taunted him with visions of an imagined future. They plucked strands of unrealised fate and watched the vibrations resonate through the primarch’s demeanour.

Ferrus knew he could not give in to it.

Delirium had started to affect his senses as whatever venom the serpent possessed did its work.

Endure.

The word was like his anchor. Lose that and he would be cast adrift upon an endless sea of chaos.

The hiss of living metal as it dripped from his arm and splashed onto the ground in molten gobbets brought the primarch back around. He shook his head to banish the worst of the fog threatening at the edge of his vision.

Basilisk, khimerae, hydra, such fiends had many names and forms. The creature was none of those. But it was powerful. It had to be to undo what was supposed to be incorruptible.

Is nothing incorruptible?

What were all the frost giants and ice drakes compared to that?

Ferrus pushed the unworthy thoughts aside, realising they were being fed to him. The raging core bubbling beneath his cold exterior began to vent. His grip tightened on the spatha and the leather bindings wound around the hilt cracked.

The weapon had been a gift from Vulkan, and the memory of his brother gave him strength.

‘I forged it to fit your hand, Ferrus,’ he had said. ‘It is your sword, not the equal of Forgebreaker I grant you, but a worthy weapon I hope. You honour me by carrying it.’

Ferrus had turned it over in his hand, his cold eyes running across the filigree and ornate intaglio, the inlaid gemstones and Nocturnean inscription. The fine serrated teeth were diamond-sharp and acid-edged, the metal of its forging dense and unyielding.

Ignoring the weapon’s obvious craft and beauty, Ferrus had at once seen its potential as a blade, but chose to be harsh instead of praising his brother’s craftsmanship.

‘Why does it need such ornamentation? Can I kill my enemies better because of it?’ There was a smirk upon his face that in retrospect Ferrus was not proud of.

Vulkan had taken it in his stride. ‘It’s a master weapon with a master’s pride lavished upon it,’ he admitted. ‘When I draw my blade, I want my enemies to know it is a warrior-king’s weapon they face, wielded by a warrior-king’s hand.’

‘Even though you would rather wield a hammer to create than a blade to destroy?’

Vulkan had smiled then and the gesture was warm as a lava glow.

‘Nocturneans are pragmatists, my brother. While war is necessary, I will fight, but I hope that one day I can put down my sword.’ His eyes flashed with fire. ‘Until then I’ll keep my killing edge sharp.’

Ferrus had nodded and sheathed the blade, attaching it to his weapons belt. ‘I might have need of a knife,’ he had said lightly, and touched a silver hand to his glabrous skull, ‘for when the serfs don’t scrape close enough to the skin.’

They laughed, the Gorgon raucous and ribald, the Drake booming and hearty as they shared a rare moment of levity until the Crusade forced them onto different paths. Until One-Five-Four Four.

The memory of that day vanished in the reflected metal of the blade.

Ferrus had named it Draken in honour of his brother. He needed its bite now and was glad of the spatha’s presence in his hand.

Much like in the mausoleum gallery, the walls in the abattoir were polished obsidian. Their mirrored black stretched into infinity. The heads were reflected there, but in the doppelganger world they were sheathed in flesh. Severed arteries pulsed, spewing blood. It spattered his brow, still warm, still living. The wound was fresh cut and it blazed against the neck of the real Ferrus, who fought his revulsion at the spectacle rendered in the darkling glass. They were laughing, the severed bloody heads, all of them. They were laughing at him.

Idiot!

Weakling!

Unwanted son!

This last barb stuck in his throat. Ferrus was remarkable and on Medusa he was a king of kings. None could match him. But when his father came and brought him to seventeen remarkable brothers, he realised his place. Unlike Vulkan who had accepted his position gladly and humbly, Ferrus railed. Was he not the equal of his siblings? When faced with the glory of Horus, the majesty of Sanguinius or even Rogal Dorn’s dogged solidity, it was easy to believe that some sons would wait in the wings while the chosen few enacted their father’s grand plan for the galaxy.

Ferrus wanted that light for himself, to be equal. He wasn’t vain; he merely wanted to be acknowledged. His entire existence until that point had been spent in the pursuit of strength. He could not believe that all of that had been done in an ancillary role. Ferrus could not believe his father had brought him from one shadow to merely consign him to another.

I will make you proud, father. I will prove my worth.

‘Come then!’ he bellowed, but the challenge was unmet. The creature would snap at him from the shadows and lay him low with a thousand cuts.

An inglorious death.

Ferrus would not submit to that.

But the creature was fast. He had yet to land a blow and striking at flashes would not yield victory. It wanted to goad him, make him lower his guard and open up to a mortal wound.

He caught sudden movement in the corner of his eye and followed it, holding out the spatha defensively, its blade flat and angled away from his body.

It was hard to refrain from violence; his entire existence was violence.

Fury was hammering in his ears like a pealing bell. He focused and the clamour lessened to a dull roar. The creature was close, though it betrayed no sign of its presence. It felt as though Ferrus was somehow bonded to it, possibly through the bite and the taint of its venom. He wanted to hurt it for that, to redress the balance then destroy it. A font of inner rage was lapping at the edges of his consciousness, close to spilling over from thought into action.

He remembered the forge and the solace of working metal. The only salve to his wrath, the one thing that could placate his volcanic anger. In spite of such anger, Ferrus knew patience even if it sometimes felt like he was grasping at smoke. Unlike Vulkan, patience did not come easily to him. It was an early lesson for all forge smiths. Tempering could not be rushed, metal needed time, it needed to wait until it was ready; so would he.

He saw Forgebreaker lying on the ground, but resisted the urge to take it. The creature wanted him to. It waited for him to reach for his hammer.

Vulkan’s blade would more than suffice. He trusted his brother’s craft.

He should have told him that.

Ferrus closed his eyes and listened. He heard a faint and rasping refrain, almost masked by the ambient noise. The reptilian hiss of the serpent.

Now I’ll bait the hook…

Blind, he was vulnerable.

So he lowered his sword, let his arm fall by his side.

He listened harder, allowed his heart to still.

The cacophony of the dead lessened, the serpent’s voice intensified and Ferrus perceived two words.

Angel…

It hurt just to think it, as if it carried potency beyond its literal meaning.

Exterminatus…

It was hidden within the multiple susurrations of the creature, enfolded within pitch and cadence like a secret note in a virtuoso’s perfect symphony.

It meant nothing to him, yet he felt the weight of its importance like it was a physical thing.

‘And the heavens burned with its refulgent beauty…’ The words came to Ferrus’s lips unbidden, as if belonging to another speaker without the power to articulate them.

Something dark was at work here, something evil that intruded upon the nether realm Ferrus was bound to. He wondered if his captors realised.

There was no time to consider it further, doing so would serve no purpose anyway.

Breath held in his chest, Ferrus heard the scrape of metal that presaged the creature’s attack, its whickering tongue. Trusting to instinct, he waited until the creature was almost upon him before cutting. Scaled flesh parted against his sword.

His eyes snapped open like armoured visors and Ferrus thrust again. A snarl of pain rewarded him. As he withdrew Draken from the shadows its edge was coated in gore. It was not blood but an ichorous fluid, heliotrope purple in colour, gripping viscously to the blade.

He had hurt the creature. Its susurrus grew in pitch, a collision of anger and pain. Metal scale scratching against stone faded as the monster retreated into the darkness. Ferrus did not move for several minutes, listening for signs of its return. The wound in his forearm pulsed with foetid vigour, and the silver lustre had almost burned away completely, leaving it raw and agonised. Sheathing the spatha, he reached down and his fingers curled around the haft of Forgebreaker, as if weapon and wielder had sought each other out. Never had his hammer felt so heavy and cumbersome in his grasp.

‘Flesh is weak…’ he muttered and cursed his impotence in bringing to heel the forces that conspired against him.

The memory of the phrase hidden in the serpent’s voice returned to him.

Angel Exterminatus.

As did the sense of malfeasance it carried. Some other sentience had pushed the words into his mind. It didn’t feel like a warning, as so much of this crystalline labyrinth did. It was a promise, a prophecy.

Ferrus was too weak to unravel it. A febrile sweat lathered his forehead as he staggered the last few steps through the abattoir and into whatever further horrors awaited him. With the absence of the serpent, the hanging skulls had ceased to chatter and were truly dead once more. The breeze ebbed to nothing and they stopped swinging too, making it easier to avoid touching them. Even their features seemed less like his own, their aspects less daunting. A singular thought drove Ferrus now. Like a Medusan land-shark, he had to keep moving. To stop was to die.

He managed three steps before he fell and darkness took him.

The cool aura of the bone sanctuary was charged with indignant energy.

‘It is affecting you,’ said the Diviner.

‘It should not have been able to breach the ossuary road,’ answered the other.

‘Careful, I see Khaine manifesting in your mood. Step back upon the path.’

The other was not ready to relent just yet. ‘My anger is well-founded. He was not meant to die. Not in here. Not from this.’

The Diviner peered at the other intently. His gaze was contemplative and unfathomable.

‘And yet his life is threatened. You lace the waters of fate with enough blood and sooner or later sharks will circle.’

‘It should not be here at all.’

‘The bone roads we travel are far from secure. Ever since the Fall, you know that. Are you so surprised that something malicious has come?’

About to object, the other’s humour changed from choler to melancholy.

‘What can be done?’

‘Release him and accept failure.’

‘We are too close for that.’

The Diviner leaned back against a spur of arching bone and folded his hands upon his lap.

‘Then you have to let fate run its course and hope he can defeat that which you have allowed into your cage.’

There was a pause that the Diviner did not choose to fill. He merely watched. The other was displeased, ruled by emotion and thwarted ambition. The Diviner did not need prescience to know what his companion was about to ask.

‘What do you see?’

It smacked of desperation.

‘Nothing. Everything. I see a billion, billion futures and possible outcomes, some so infinitesimally different you could spend aeons looking for the variation and still not find it.’

‘That is not an answer.’

‘I advise you to propose a narrower question then.’

‘Will he die? Am I undone?’

‘Yes and no.’

‘Your meaning is needlessly cryptic.’

‘We are fighting a war of fate. We two are merely agents in this conflict. Through hubris you allowed the Primordial Annihilator–’ the other touched the spirit stone around his neck at mention of the name ‘–a piece of its essence, at least, into your cage and now it is trapped with your intended prey. Chaos has a way of clouding the path of fate.’

The other sagged in his seat of bone. His hand trembled as he felt the protection and anonymity of their sanctuary start to fragment.

A haggard face looked up at the Diviner through hollowed eyes. ‘How long before it finds us?’

‘Soon.’

Santar knew the warriors bleeding through the shimmering energy shield.

A wake of eldar bodies, the smashed detritus of what had come before together with the remains of their weapon platforms, lay scattered behind the Iron Hands. With Santar leading them, they had driven deep in the enemy defences and were on the cusp of assaulting the shield directly. It blazed before the Morlocks like an azure sun. Santar could almost taste the electric tang on his tongue. Its heat made him want to shade his eyes but he resisted the urge. One last obstacle was left to overcome.

Still wraith-like, they did not appear as incorporeal as they had in the desert basin. Bone-armoured, clutching their curved singing swords, the eldar had sent their best warriors through the shield for them. Their hell-scream hit the Morlocks like a wrecking ball.

Santar yelled through a barricade of teeth, ‘Take it!’

His every bone vibrated. The teeth in his skull cracked with the effort of clenching them. Much more punishment and they would shatter.

‘I can shout louder,’ he promised the warrior bearing down on him.

Santar advanced and turned his forward step into an attacking lunge.

His lightning claw cut through the warrior’s blade and carried on into its sternum. Stepping over the eviscerated alien’s corpse, he found another.

It leapt his diagonal swipe, weaved inside the counter-thrust and pirouetted alongside the first captain’s unprotected flank.

Santar winced as a power-charged blade cut into his battle-plate but there it stuck, unable to penetrate further. An elbow smash, delivered without finesse, broke the eldar’s collarbone. An overhead slash would cleave the alien open, but Santar staggered when a second attacker mounted his back. He turned his ear from its hell-scream, reaching up to throw it off, when it jolted and fell.

Half its head and helm were missing, ruptured by an explosive round.

Tarkan’s icon winked once on the retinal tac-display.

The sniper’s voice issued over the feed. ‘Glory to the Gorgon.’

Santar finished the one with the broken collarbone, stamping on its prone form with his armoured boot. Then he wiped the blood leaking from his nose and gave a clipped salute he knew Tarkan would see. Unable to feint and attack as they had in the desert basin, the wraith-like warriors were finding the Morlocks a tougher prospect out in the open. There, the cohesion of the Iron Hands counted for more than agility.

To his left, Santar saw Desaan shoulder-barge an alien into the air then swing up his bolter in his remaining hand to perforate it before it landed a ragged corpse. Santar thought he detected the trace of a smile when their eyes met briefly across the field.

Desaan laughed. ‘Like shooting discus.’

‘Theatrics will avail you nothing, brother-captain… except perhaps an early grave. Kill them quickly. Give no quarter.’

‘Reparation will have to wait,’ Desaan replied. ‘It appears my enemies are all dead.’

Alien corpses littered the ground, where the casualties amongst the Iron Hands were minimal. They had bloodied the eldar, but more were coming, leaping through the energy shield with athletic and deadly grace.

‘Here is your chance,’ said Santar, before leaning towards the vocal amplifier in his gorget and grating an order that resounded across the battlefront. ‘Consolidate. Iron as one.’

Underfoot, the buried echoes of Ruuman’s payload could be felt. Seismic spikes registering on Santar’s retinal display confirmed it. A synchronised chrono flashed up in one corner of his vision at the same time.

He cried, ‘Advancing!’

Morlocks joined him at either shoulder, their Cataphractii war-plate touching, pauldron to pauldron.

The wraith-like warriors broke against the implacable black wall of ceramite confronting them. Some fought and made small gains, and Santar would remember those who died later, but united the Terminators could not be denied. They rolled over the eldar elite in an unyielding wave. Caught between an energy shield that only allowed them out and the advancing legionaries, there was nowhere for the aliens to run and they were crushed underfoot.

The eldar behind them answered with heavy, relentless fire from their gun platforms.

Cannon impacts smashed into the Morlocks. A Terminator, it might have been Kador, was put on his back. Another, Santar couldn’t tell who, was speared through the chest and fell. The rest kept moving, weathering the barrage.

‘A light shower,’ said Desaan, barely audible above the storm.

‘We have less than a minute, brother,’ Santar told him.

‘More than enough, first captain.’

Bullying their way forwards, the Morlocks reached the crackling edge of the shield.

The eldar inside fell back, but kept up their fusillade of fire. Overhead, Ruuman’s cannons and the tanks of the Army divisions pounded.

Something else lurked behind the flicker-haze too, eldar clad in robes and wielding arcane staves.

‘Tear it down!’ roared Santar, warring with the ionised throb of the energy shield. ‘Hit it with everything you’ve got.’

Thunder hammers and power-mauls, eviscerators and combi-bolters at point-blank range rattled against a field of glowing azure. Rippling violently, the shield bowed but did not break.

The chrono in the retinal displays of all the Iron Hands veterans reached zero.

Its terminus presaged a series of deep, subterranean detonations that split the surface open inside the shield as the mole mortar shells burrowing below exploded in a chain. Concussive bursts billowed upwards as the web the eldar had woven around the node was unpicked.

Flickering initially as a cluster of minute interrupts stuttered across its curvature, the shield flared once and then failed.

Santar was first across its threshold.

‘At them! Glory to the Gorgon!’

Reaping into the gun platforms, the Morlocks barely noticed the brutal ordnance from the tank divisions as it hammered the node. Even without the shield to protect it, the bone edifice was resilient, but cracks began to appear along its length.

It was a massacre, efficient not bloodthirsty, but slaughter all the same.

A warrior with a crackling falchion emerged from the melee. Santar met it with his lightning claws, but felt a tightening in the servos of his bionic arm as he applied the killing stroke. His follow-up was slower too, as if pushing against inertia or the effects of high gravity. His legs were the same.

He recalled the robed figures. A cohort of heavily armed alien warriors surrounded them.

‘Desaan, can you still see?’ Santar asked. Foes were coming at them from every angle, swinging pikes and blades, a rabble of carapace-armoured eldar soldiers and the cloaked ranger caste the Iron Hands had fought earlier. One of them thrust an energy spear at Santar, which he barely turned aside. Seizing the haft, he pulled the warrior towards him and bludgeoned open its faceplate with his fist. The body sagged and was still, but the eldar had left a score mark down the first captain’s flank.

‘Too close.’

Another aimed a shuriken lance at his torso and blasted apart a section of armour plate. Santar swept his claw around to despatch it but felt the same drag that had slowed him a few seconds before.

Recognising these sensations, he shouted, ‘Desaan, your eyes?’

‘My sight… is failing.’

Darkness was boiling around the node, coiling from its tip in a thunderhead.

Santar arched his neck to see a black cloud creeping down the side of the node and billowing towards them.

‘Throne of Earth…’

Not again…

Santar knew the carnage the storm and its curse of iron could inflict. Upon so many warriors conjoined with the machine, he dared not contemplate exactly how much.

To his mind, there was little choice.

‘Hold advance, all companies.’

Santar was caught, seized by indecision just as his bionics were frozen by the approaching darkness.

‘We must move forward,’ Captain Attar voiced down the feed. ‘First captain, what are your orders?’

Taking advantage of the respite, the robed conclave of eldar was already re-establishing parts of the shield. It grew like an organic energy web behind the Morlocks. Shells and las-bursts from the heavy divisions caromed off the rapidly regenerating veil.

Desaan gripped Santar’s shoulder guard. ‘We cannot stay here, Gabriel. Forward or back, which is it?’

If they stayed, they could destroy the node, or at least slay the witches that had refashioned the shield, but they risked annihilation at their own hands or the hands of their brothers if they did.

Tendrils of cloud, outriders of the dark veil, closed to within a few metres of the Iron Hands. They writhed like vipers.

So close…

‘You saw what it did to us in the desert basin.’ Santar had made his decision. It tasted bitter as his mouth formed the words.

‘Fall back!’

The retreat was slow and wearisome. Legionaries fought the mechanised parts of their bodies, and tried to stop outright rebellion. Some failed and had to be dragged by their battle-brothers. None at least were devoured by the storm, for to be lost to it was a death sentence.

It boiled at the edge of the shield, shrouding what was left of the eldar inside, but reached no farther.

Even from a distance Santar could feel the pull of the machine curse’s influence. Absently, his armoured fingers touched the gouges at his neck. The gorget had barely saved his life. He could still feel the prickling heat of his own lightning claw upon his skin, its electric stink in his nostrils.

‘So, what is our next recourse?’ Desaan had removed his visor and was standing beside the first captain, the two of them in close concert. Desaan’s scarred face was worse beneath the metal band he usually wore around his eyes; the skin swollen and ravaged. He reattached the visor to a pair of cranial implants in his temples and the device whirred back to life.

‘Functioning perfectly,’ he said, muttering rites of activation and purity.

‘So long as we stay out of the cloud,’ said Santar.

The tempest rippled and undulated like a dark ocean, slowly and mockingly for all its seeming innocuousness.

Santar stared at it. He was standing in a half-circle with his captains and their seconds, while the rest of the Legion waited farther back with their clan companies and looked on beleaguered.

‘The shield was breached and only partly regenerated,’ said Captain Attar.

Ruuman’s barrage had ceased and the Ironwrought joined them from the high ground where the heavies still waited.

Santar turned to him next. ‘What’s your assessment, Erasmus?’

‘The shield is constructed of kinetic energy but created psychically. Whether the xenos have some form of generator sympathetic to their abilities or another piece of fell alien technology, I can only theorise. As we’ve seen, it can be breached, but only through excessive force.’

Desaan frowned. ‘What about the cloud? How do we breach that?’

Ruuman turned his cold gaze on him. ‘Without suffering machine-death, we cannot.’

‘You think they can keep this up indefinitely?’ asked Captain Meduson.

Desaan stared into the darkness, but could find no gap or weakness. ‘If our Ironwrought is right, while the storm persists there is no way for us to advance.’

Santar’s knuckles cracked with cybernetic resonance.

‘I would very much like to summon the Fist of Iron and bombard this site from existence.’

‘Then do it, first captain,’ said Meduson. ‘We can further withdraw our forces and take the necessary cover in the deeper desert.’

Ruuman shook his head. ‘Negative. The sensoria are unable to overcome whatever psychic baffles the eldar have in place. We are more likely to exterminate ourselves than level the node.’

Desaan rubbed at his chin and frowned.

‘The shield is broken, but not down. The aliens’ defences are severely weakened. If we can get warriors behind the veil to kill whatever is creating it–’

Henricos stepped up, interrupting.

‘I can get beyond that veil.’

Desaan scowled. ‘You have a talent for intrusion, brother-sergeant.’

A nod sufficed as apology from Henricos.

Santar’s eyes narrowed. ‘I am listening. How can you enter the storm, brother? Unless you want to end up impaled on your own sword?’

‘Because a warrior of flesh has nothing to fear from it.’

Henricos revealed the stump where he had detached his bionic hand.

‘It is safe,’ he said quickly. ‘I can fight without it.’

A host of hard, reproachful glances fell upon the sergeant.

‘You dishonour the Iron Creed,’ said Santar. ‘That mechanised implant is part of rite and ritual. It is what makes us what we are.’

‘And what we are is confounding us, first captain. I am suggesting a different approach.’

‘One for which you’ll be severely reprimanded.’

‘I’ll bear whatever punishment is deemed fit.’

Santar glared, fighting the urge to mete out that punishment immediately.

‘Even if it is death?’

Henricos was stoic. ‘I can breach the veil.’

‘Alone?’ Attar sounded dubious.

‘No, not alone,’ Santar answered as he saw a unit of Army veterans approaching the conclave of Iron Hands officers. They looked on edge to be in the presence of the hulking warriors and kept together.

Santar fought down his disdain and tried to see soldiers in the children before him.

Their commanding officer was a hoary-looking colonel of the Savaan Masonites who knelt before the Iron Hands like a serf. Unlike some of his more nervous charges he did not tremble.

Desaan glared at him from the mountainous summit of his Cataphractii war-plate.

‘Speak your name.’

‘Lords,’ said the man, his voice gravelly from smoking too much tabac or simple age. ‘I am Marshal Vortt Salazarian of the Savaan 254th, the Masonites, and I have served the Emperor’s Great Crusade and your Lord Gorgon for four decades.’

Desaan touched the platinum stud embedded in his skull.

‘Do not speak to me of service, old man. What do you know of it?’

Attar folded his immense bionic arms, whilst Meduson merely glowered. They each carried platinum studs and had each fought longer campaigns than most men had lifetimes.

To his credit, Colonel Salazarian didn’t blink. Not once.

‘I meant no offence. We will accompany Sergeant Henricos into the storm,’ he said, licking his lips to moisten his dry mouth. The presence of Space Marines tended to have that effect on humans. ‘If you will allow us to, we will do that. It would be our honour.’

Desaan scowled. ‘Flesh is weak–’ he said, but Santar raised his hand for silence.

The Army veterans looked thin and feeble, even the grizzled colonel, but so too did the eldar and they had proven formidable.

Slowly shaking his head, Desaan said, ‘They will break and we will have lost one of our own into the bargain.’

‘Enough,’ stated Santar, regarding the kneeling man. He bade him stand. ‘I am not a king and you are not my subject. On your feet.’

Nodding at Desaan, Santar asked the colonel, ‘Is he right? Will you break?’

Salazarian squared his shoulders and thrust out his jaw. ‘Let us show you our worth. We will not break, my lord. We have endured this far.’

‘Few mere men can make that claim,’ said Henricos.

Santar’s eyes were chips of slate when he met his gaze. ‘I knew you had an affinity for humans, sergeant. I saw it when you gave your report concerning the Army divisions.’ He paused, eyeing first the storm and then the Army veterans.

It is better to act and ask for forgiveness later than be paralysed by indecision.

He’d heard Ferrus Manus say that before. Santar wished he could ask for his guidance right now. Since he could not, he said, ‘You vouch for this man and his warriors?’

‘It will be my death if they fail,’ said Henricos.

‘You are right about that,’ Santar told him, making the threat very clear. ‘Find the coven or whatever means the eldar are using to perpetuate that storm and remove it. We will follow in after and eliminate whatever is left standing. The path is laid, brother. All you need do is to follow it.’

Henricos saluted and went to muster the rest of the Masonites.

After he had gone, Desaan shook his head.

‘Reckless bravery kills warriors swifter than any bolter or blade.’ He pointed at the storm bank. ‘Those men will die in there. Henricos too.’

Santar watched the ominous black cloud, imagined it watching him back with a feral sentience.

When they were retreating, when its tendrils had closed with the delicate inexorability of a drifting fog, he’d felt a crushing weight in his chest, as if his limbs had been bound in metre-thick ferrocrete. They all felt it, each and every one of them that was significantly part machine.

All of their strength, the power of a Legion at his disposal, and all any of them could do was watch.

‘Then I hope they die well and make a worthy sacrifice. But I promise you this. One way or another, we are bringing that node down. The Gorgon has willed it.’

Cold stone chilled his face. A trickle of water from some underground stream wet his lips and brought him round.

Dazed and groggy from the poison, Ferrus rolled onto his back and groaned.

He had never felt so weak.

He couldn’t remember passing out. It must have happened on the way from the abattoir.

Attempting to rise unleashed a hellish crescendo crashing into his mind. Blood thundered in his ears. He held his head and, wincing, got to one knee.

Lead dragged at his limbs, made him sluggish and slow. Forgebreaker acted as a crutch. Twice now since being in the labyrinth he had used it ignobly. The fact did not sit well with the primarch, who surveyed his surroundings once standing again.

Mercifully, the serpent or whatever it was had gone. Even the sibilance of its presence was absent and a terrible silence replaced it. Ferrus doubted he would live if he faced it at that moment. He could barely lift his feet, let alone a weapon.

He patted the pommel of Draken.

‘Thank you, brother.’

The way behind him was darkness. He couldn’t even see the abattoir now and wondered how long and how far he had wandered in delirium. Ahead was darkness too, but with a tiny shard of light like a beacon to guide him through a storm. The turbulence of his thoughts pulled at him.

What had the creature said?

Angel Exterminatus.

Ferrus understood the words but not their meaning. It pained him to think about them and the vague sense of flame intruded at the edges of his consciousness when he did.

With motion, his strength began to return. His arm was still ravaged where the living silver had been melted away but it didn’t burn as badly. His neck itched like all hell, though, and he suspected the creature had dealt a secondary wound he was unaware of until that moment. But when he touched the skin beneath his gorget it was uninjured.

Biting down his irritation, Ferrus walked slowly towards the shard of light.

Likely this was yet another trick, some fresh torture with which to test him. Ferrus had yet to discern its purpose. He reasoned that if his enemies meant to kill him, they would have done so already or at least tried harder and more overtly. Xenos, particularly the eldar, were cryptic and capricious, even to one with the formidable mental acuity of a primarch. Their rationale was lost on him. The thing that hunted him was no serpent, it was something darker, something primordial and, he suspected, not something wholly fashioned by his captors. It had meant to end his life. He felt all its rage, its denial, its sadistic yearning of which Ferrus was the focus. When they had fought he could sense this, but it was inchoate as if the creature itself was only partially realised.

Ferrus was uncertain what that meant. One thing he could be sure of was that it wasn’t dead and would return for him. Whatever the eldar’s original plan, he knew he would have to kill the creature now to escape.

Entering through the shard of light that had widened into a brilliant chasm to allow him passage, Ferrus steeled himself for that battle to come.

He would not have long to wait.

A series of grand, triumphal archways led into a long processional before him. They had the appearance of great gates but with their portals laid open and shattered to potential invasion. Fire-blackened stone crept at their edges and ugly shards were chipped from every stone.

The chasm of light had closed behind him, leaving no visible way out.

As he had suspected, this was to be the final arena.

Ferrus felt like a giant touring a grand but blasted palace in miniature. As he passed along the processional, he left the sundered gates behind and walked into an appended chamber. Even scaled down in miniature, the great hall was immense. A giant would have been dwarfed by it. Gothic architectural flourishes dominated, but they were bleak and austere, suggestive of faded glories and cultural stagnation. Skulls lined the walls as if part of some vast reliquary and a sombre mood pervaded its grim design. A monument to decay and everlasting decline, here opulence had long since given in to decrepitude.

As he made his way across the diminutive flagstones underfoot, Ferrus realised it was no great hall, nor had it ever been so.

It was a tomb.

And at the end of a cracked plaza, wreathed with gossamer-thin webs and the rough patina of heavy age, there stood a massive throne, out of scale with the rest of the palace.

Slumped upon it, in emaciated repose, sat a king.

The king of stagnation, lord of a decaying empire, his robes were tattered, his body a flesh-starved and skeletal ruin. He bore no crown, only a rictus grimace, a final pained expression of a dream unfulfilled.

He towered over Ferrus, glaring down through abyssal eye sockets the colour of sackcloth.

A hissing breath, its last, escaped the undead king’s mouth and drew a nerve tremor of consternation from the primarch’s face.

Half-expecting the revenant to rise, he took a backward step.

Only when the breath continued long after it should have ended did Ferrus realise it was not the king, but something else that gave the corpse its mimicked speech.

Uncoiling from its hiding place behind the tarnished throne of the dead king was the serpent.

The head and neck stood erect whilst its vast body undulated beneath it, providing support. Mirrored silver sheathed its flanks. Its eyes were sulphur-yellow pools of corruption, cut open with black, dagger-thin pupils. Hate exuded in a heady musk that made the primarch’s senses lurch vertiginously.

He reached for Forgebreaker, but the serpent sprang at him, faster than mercury, and Ferrus was forced to seize its jaws before they snapped around his throat.

Hot, stinking spittle, acid-tanged, spattered the primarch’s face and he snarled. Fighting this beast was like clinging to liquid, but Ferrus wrestled it down and wrapped his arms around its neck before it could wriggle free. Thrashing hard, the serpent hauled him off the ground and smashed him down again. Lances of agony impaled his back and shoulder. His neck felt about ready to crack as the burning wound that was not a wound around his throat smouldered like hellfire.

‘I am the Gorgon!’ he yelled. ‘I am a primarch!’

His head hit something hard, and dark spikes intruded at the edge of his sight. A red rime layered his vision but Ferrus held on.

He held on and squeezed.

Despite the serpent’s fervent efforts, Ferrus slowly tightened his grip. He would strangle it, crush every ounce of life from the creature until it lay cold and unmoving. Then he would stave its skull to a crimson paste.

‘Back from the underworld…’ he spat. ‘You should have stayed dead, Asirnoth…’

For what else could it be but a manifestation of that dread creature?

The serpent’s head turned… turned in a way that should have broken its neck in the primarch’s iron grip. Lips that should not be lips parted. Eyes that were human and familiar regarded him. A mane of hair crept down its back as a noble and patrician countenance asserted itself across previously reptilian features.

‘I…’ it said without hint of sibilance, ‘I am not…’ the words were lyrical, musical and rich, ‘Asirnoth…’

Ferrus knew, as he knew the voice and the face before him.

It was the perfect killer, preternaturally fast and superhumanly strong. Only another primarch could have defeated it.

Only another primarch…

He relaxed his grip and a flash of transformation blended the human visage with that of the creature. A rack of saliva-wet fangs pierced its gums, drawing blood with the violent metamorphosis. Eyes that had been warm and fraternal narrowed to yellow knife-slashes. Scaled flesh colonised its lower neck and cheekbones like a contagion.

Fighting down the urge to vomit, Ferrus reasserted his grip. His eyes widened in eerie synchronicity with the creature’s as its neck was slowly crushed. It struggled. It wanted to live, to manifest, but Ferrus would kill it. He would end it with his bare hands.

‘You are not him,’ he told it through a barricade of clenched teeth.

A final tortured rasp, part reptilian, part human, slipped from the serpent’s mouth and it became still and lifeless.

Giving it one final squeeze until it felt as though his knuckles might break, Ferrus let go and the creature slid to the ground dead.

A long, trembling breath came from his throat and he rubbed his eyes as if to banish a bad dream.

Disquiet turned to anger. Ferrus pulled out Forgebreaker and did as he’d vowed. He kept going for a full minute before his arms and shoulders ached at him to stop. Little was left of the creature when he was done, just a ruddy smear. He was breathing hard and beads of sweat cascaded from his brow. He felt the chill of evaporation against his fevered skin and followed that sensation all the way to the throne.

Enraged, Ferrus stormed towards the corpse-king, hauled it one-handed from its seat of office and smashed it into pieces of bone on the ground.

‘Your reign is ended,’ he told it, before stowing the hammer and gripping an arm of the throne in each hand. Ripping it aside, tearing it bodily from its bearings, Ferrus revealed a doorway of light. Casting the wretched seat aside, he stepped through the portal and prepared to face his tormentors.

It was not as he expected.

An orrery of worlds and stars revolved before him, locked in an infinite space that had no dimension, no limit or discernible edges. The effect was disconcerting.

The primarch’s gaze was drawn to a dominant prime world, sitting amongst four others in a system of stars and desolate moons. The world was black, and Ferrus was reminded of the dark sand that had been underfoot for so much of his journey. Then, as if a giant celestial match or the contrail of a meteor had been struck against its surface, a flame was born upon the prime world. It grew into a conflagration, eclipsing all of its continents and seas, enveloping them like a baleful sun. Only once the transformation was absolute did Ferrus realise it was not a sun at all, but a burning red eye with a black pupil.

As the tableau unfolded further, he saw a slow-moving ring of black iron grow around the red world that held its fire in place until a second ring of cobalt joined it. Though it burned furiously, the eye could not escape the combined rings of metal sent to contain it. The sun faded and finally blinked out, leaving the world black and still once more.

Ferrus reached out to touch the orrery but his silver hand passed through it, revealing the illusion. It vanished like smoke in an eyeblink.

‘What is this?’ he snapped. ‘More signs, more games?’

‘Not a game,’ said a deep, faintly musical voice.

Ferrus turned to face his captor, Forgebreaker gripped in his closed fists.

‘It is the future. Your future,’ said the eldar. ‘If you wish it to be.’

The alien was robed, the colours subdued but manifold. Arcane sigils were stitched into the iridescent fabric, but also hung on gossamer-thin chains or from glittering diamond threads. It wore no helmet or mask, but showed a long face of high cheekbones and a tapered chin that jutted like a dagger. Strange tattoos marked its flesh and were shaven into the side of its scalp from which a long mane of golden hair cascaded. Fathomless wisdom and capricious intellect glittered in the almond-shaped eyes that regarded the primarch, but also fear.

‘You have reached a fork in the road, Ferrus Manus. The path you are on leads to death, but another leads to survival and the changing of a great many things in the galaxy,’ said the eldar. ‘You do not realise how important you are.’

It opened its hands in a gesture of peace and solidarity.

All Ferrus saw was an alien deceiver.

‘And you expect me to believe you, creature?’ He spoke plainly and calmly. There was none of the untempered rage of earlier.

‘I offer you hope. I offer it to the galaxy,’ it pleaded. ‘You can change everything.’

Ferrus smiled, but it was a hollow gesture. The eldar’s shoulders sagged when it saw it.

‘I know I will die,’ the primarch said, ‘just as I know my place and duty. It matters not if it is upon some blackened world I have never seen or the very crags of Medusa itself. I am a warrior-king, alien, but I am also something else. Human. And unlike you eldar, we humans do not submit to fate.’ His eyes flashed with fire. ‘We shape it.’

‘You are mistaken–’

‘No, you are the one who has made the grievous error by trapping me here,’ said Ferrus, swinging Forgebreaker around. The serpent’s gore flicked off the head, a taste of things to come. ‘An error only exceeded by you showing yourself to me now.’

‘Please, I offer life…’ said the alien.

‘You offer a cage of pre-destiny,’ snarled Ferrus. ‘It is your last desperate gambit,’ he said, before he charged.

‘Heed me,’ cried the eldar, backing away and throwing up a psychic shield to defend itself. ‘It does not have to be this way. Do not give in to wrath.’

‘Wrath is what I am,’ he roared. ‘I am a warrior-king, born from battle’s blood!’

No mind-fashioned shield could stay the destructive fury of Forgebreaker, not when wielded by its master. The defences were shattered and the psychic shards bit into the eldar as painfully as any blade. It recoiled and threw a jag of arc-lightning that Ferrus deflected with his shoulder guard. Ozone-stink filled his nostrils but he was not about to be deterred.

His bellow shook the fabric of the constructed world around him, the psychic echo of his rage unpinning it at the seams.

‘Now release me!’

Sweating, bleeding and clenched by fear, the eldar fled through a fissure in the fake reality.

Ferrus reached out, tried to slip through the same doorway as the eldar witch, but a corona of perfect light repelled him.

‘Release me!’

The words stretched out into infinity as the light engulfed him, drowning his senses until they merged. Until darkness overwhelmed them and it felt like he was falling forever.

The last coven witch slid off his sword, leaving a trail of alien blood along the blade. Even with its death and the slow banishment of the black storm, Bion Henricos knew he was dead.

Of the six thousand veterans he had led into the darkness, barely eight hundred remained. They circled the Iron Hand, an injured Colonel Salazarian fighting hard alongside him despite the blood in his lungs. The Army commander squinted through one eye – the other one had been plucked out by an eldar’s knife – and saw they were overrun.

For the first time in an hour, Salazarian stopped barking orders to his men.

Henricos recognised his sudden fatalism.

‘You gave us back our dignity and honour,’ said the colonel, ‘and I thank you for that, my lord.’

A high-pitched whine. Rapid air displacement and the splash of hot fluid against his face told Henricos the old man was dead before he saw the gaping hole in the veteran’s chest.

Salazarian fell, dead-eyed and still, into the arms of the Iron Hand who cradled him to the ground.

The storm was ebbing but the darkness of it was slow to disperse. His brothers would not reach him in time. Men were dying in droves as the eldar gave their last. They were dying too, but were not content to do so alone. They wanted the Space Marine’s head. They wanted Bion Henricos.

‘For the Gorgon!’ he cried, leaving his Medusan steel-edge impaled in the earth so he could draw his bolt pistol. Shells sprayed in an arc of muzzle flare that left a tongue of fire in the air. Alien bodies were struck and died in explosive agony. A head shot through the darkness took out a warleader whose falchion had looked as keen as its wielder.

‘For the Gor–’

Something hit Henricos in the neck, possibly a shuriken from an eldar bow-caster. He grunted, felt it burn. A las-beam pierced his thigh a half-second later. He staggered, slid the combat shield off his butchered forearm, and tried to clutch the graze across his throat with the stump of his wrist but found it wanting. A further beam lanced his torso, somewhere between chest and shoulder. Falling to one knee, Henricos fired off a desultory burst.

Warning icons flashed loudly and insistently on his retinal display. He ripped off his helm to silence them.

Closing his eyes, Henricos prepared for the end when a hand touched his shoulder and he opened them again.

‘The war’s not done with you yet, Iron Hand,’ said a voice of ice and fire.

The giant before Bion Henricos was clad in armour of coal-black. His powerful arms shimmered with lustrous silver that flowed like mercury. Eyes of knapped flint regarded him sternly, and the hammer in his hand could sunder mountains.

Ferrus Manus had returned, and the eldar were fleeing.

‘The storm has ended, brother,’ said the primarch, and held out his hand. ‘Now, stand with me to see it finished.’

Henricos heard the rest of the Legion approaching through the fire and smoke of the battle.

Santar and the Morlocks were first to the primarch’s side. Joy at the sight of the Father was hard for them to contain. Their bolters and blades sang.

The node fell quickly, though much of what followed was a blur for Henricos. He carried Salazarian back to friendly lines. Barely three hundred of the veterans returned alive with him.

They would later be honoured for their part and recognised as adopted sons of Medusa. They were the first of the Chainveil, destined to be its captains, and living proof of the concession that, from that day, not all flesh was weak.

Santar found him at the edge of the battlefield, standing vigil over Bion Henricos.

After he’d returned the body of Colonel Salazarian, the sergeant had fallen unconscious from his injuries.

‘He will live,’ said the Gorgon, ‘but he will need further augmentation.’

‘As is his right. The Iron Fathers can tend to him,’ Santar replied. ‘I had thought to punish him for turning on the Iron Creed.’

‘You still should.’

Santar considered that, but other thoughts were dominant in his mind and rose to the surface.

‘What happened?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Ferrus in a quiet voice. His mood hardened abruptly and he met the first captain’s questioning gaze. ‘It changes nothing.’

The primarch beckoned to one of his legionaries, who set up a hololithic projector in the earth. Word had reached the Iron Hands that the Salamanders had discovered a second ‘prime’ node in the jungle. With victory in the desert, Ferrus was determined to meet his brother.

‘Are we leaving?’ asked Santar as the hololith came to life in a grainy cone of grey light.

‘We are. Gather the Morlocks and tell them we’re headed to the jungle.’ A thin smile betrayed the primarch’s pleasure. ‘My brother has need of us.’

As Ferrus began his communication with Vulkan, Santar did as he was ordered, but despite his lord’s return he couldn’t shake the feeling that all was not well. Whatever had occurred during the Gorgon’s absence had left an indelible mark, one that would resonate into the future. Perhaps all their futures.

The ossified highways that led from their cocooned sanctuary were perilous, but there was little choice but to brave them. The scrap of malfeasant sentience that had found its way into Lathsarial’s pseudo-world was dead, slain by the Gorgon.

It would be millennia before it could return.

Lathsarial staggered and the Diviner helped him walk. The ignorant creature he was trying to save had wounded him. Despair and anguish bled out of him in a psychic wake that would attract other predators. They needed to find safe haven quickly.

‘I have failed,’ he moaned, utterly desolated. ‘I have allowed a war to come to pass that will decimate our race when we are already so few.’

The Diviner’s attention was on the webway around them. He kept his senses alert to any crack, any seemingly insignificant fissure. Many sub-realms had already been devoured and more would follow as the conflict Lathsarial had fought so hard to prevent came to pass.

Such things were inevitable, and so the Diviner’s mood was sanguine.

‘It was not your war to avert,’ he said, opening up a fresh channel in the bone road that was seldom trodden and therefore safer. ‘A healing place is close.’

Lathsarial did not answer. The farseer was inconsolable.

‘Humans are closed-minded,’ said the Diviner. ‘Even those that consider themselves greater, like the Gorgon. He has feet of iron, fixed to his fate and his doom.’

‘But he does not condemn himself alone, but a galaxy. One that is destined to be engulfed in flames.’

Cool light bathed them as they found the healing place at last. The Diviner set Lathsarial down upon a slab of bone and bade him rest.

As the other farseer faded from consciousness, the Diviner revisited his vision of prescience. Three times he had seen the exact same eventuality unfold. That, in itself, was remarkable.

‘There is hope,’ he muttered. ‘In the empire of the Battle-King, he who would install an heir. Even if the Gorgon falls and fails to heed our warning, there is another who will listen, one who was lost.’