Table of Contents

The Horus Heresy Volume Three – Cover

The Horus Heresy Volume Three – Title Page

Fallen Angels – Cover

Fallen Angels – Title Page

The Horus Heresy

Dramatis Personae

Prologue – Loyalty and Honour

One – Alarums and Excursions

Two – The Tyranny of Neglect

Three – Hammer and Anvil

Four – Uncertain Allegiances

Five – Into the Cauldron

Six – Angels of Death

Seven – Brothers in Arms

Eight – Dark Designs

Nine – Unto the Breach

Ten – Hidden Evils

Eleven – Conversations by Starlight

Twelve – Awful Truths

Thirteen – Secrets of the Past

Fourteen – Walking the Spiral

Fifteen – Engines of War

Sixteen – Wheels Within Wheels

Seventeen – Fire from the Sky

Eighteen – A Thorn in the Mind

Nineteen – Lion Rampant

Twenty – The Conqueror Worm

Epilogue – Fallen Angels

A Thousand Sons – Cover

A Thousand Sons – Title Page

The Horus Heresy

Dramatis Personae

Book One – In the Kingdom of the Blind

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Book Two – Mutatis Mutandis

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Book Three – Prospero’s Lament

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Thirty-One

Nemesis – Cover

Nemesis – Title Page

The Horus Heresy

Dramatis Personae

Part One – Execution

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Part Two – Attrition

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Acknowledgments

The First Heretic – Cover

The First Heretic – Title Page

The Horus Heresy

Dramatis Personae

Part One – Grey

Prologue

I

One

II

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

III

Part Two – Pilgrimage

IV

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

V

Part Three – Crimson

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

VI

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Prospero Burns – Cover

Prospero Burns – Title Page

The Horus Heresy

Dramatis Personae

Part One – The Upplander

One

Two

Three

Four

Part Two – Wolf Tales

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Part Three – Account

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Thanks to

About the Authors

Legal

It is a time of legend.

Mighty heroes battle for the right to rule the galaxy.

The vast armies of the Emperor of Earth have conquered the galaxy in a Great Crusade – the myriad alien races have been smashed by the Emperor’s elite warriors and wiped from the face of history.

The dawn of a new age of supremacy for humanity beckons.

Gleaming citadels of marble and gold celebrate the many victories of the Emperor. Triumphs are raised on a million worlds to record the epic deeds of his most powerful and deadly warriors.

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

Organised into vast armies of tens of thousands called Legions, the Space Marines and their primarch leaders conquer the galaxy in the name of the Emperor.

Chief amongst the primarchs is Horus, called the Glorious, the Brightest Star, favourite of the Emperor, and like a son unto him. He is the Warmaster, the commander-in-chief of the Emperor’s military might, subjugator of a thousand thousand worlds and conqueror of the galaxy. He is a warrior without peer, a diplomat supreme.

As the flames of war spread through the Imperium, mankind’s champions will all be put to the ultimate test.

~ Dramatis Personae ~

With the Fourth Expeditionary Fleet

Lion El’Jonson, Son of the Emperor, Primarch of the First Legion

Nemiel, Brother-Redemptor, Chaplain

Kohl, Sergeant, Terran, veteran of many campaigns

Askelon, Techmarine

Marthes, Battle-brother

Vardus, Battle-brother

Ephrial, Battle-brother

Yung, Battle-brother

Cortus, Battle-brother

Titus, Dreadnought

Stenius, Captain and master of the Invincible Reason

On Caliban

Luther, In Jonson’s absence, now Master of Caliban

Lord Cypher, Reclusive scholar, and guardian of the Order’s traditions

Israfael, Chief Librarian of the Dark Angels Legion

Zahariel, Brother-Librarian in training

Astelan, Chapter Master, Terran, one of Luther’s training masters

Ramiel, Elderly and esteemed training master

Attias, Battle-brother, Veteran of Sarosh

Morten, General, Terran, Commander of the Calibanite Jaegers

Talia Bosk, Magos Administratum, Terran, Imperial bureaucrat

Sar Daviel, Former knight of the Order

Lord Thuriel, Scion of a once-powerful noble house

Lady Alera, Noble lady, mistress of her house

Lord Malchial, Son of a famous knight, now fallen on hard times

On Diamat

Taddeus Kulik, Imperial Governor of Diamat

Archoi, Mechanicum Magos, Master of the Forge at Diamat

Prologue

Loyalty and Honour

There were no trumpets to announce their arrival, no cheering crowds to welcome them home. They returned to Caliban in the dead of night, dropping down through the sullen clouds of a late autumn storm.

One by one the drop-ships broke through the heavy overcast, their white undercarriage lights knifing through the gloom as they swept down to the landing field below. For a few moments the black hulls of the Stormbirds were highlighted by the harsh yellow glow of the space port lights, picking out the winged sword insignia of the Emperor’s First Legion on the transports’ broad wings.

The assault ships flared their thrusters and settled onto the landing pad amid billowing clouds of hissing steam. Moments later came the iron clang of assault ramps striking permacrete, followed by the heavy tread of armoured feet; huge, broad-shouldered giants emerged from the roiling mists. Rain lashed at the curved plates of the Dark Angels’ black power armour and soaked the white surplices of the warrior-initiates. Here and there, orbs of blurry crimson light leaked from the oculars of battle helms, but for the most part the Astartes had bared their faces to the storm. Water beaded on heavy brows and blunt cheekbones, on gleaming data plugs and shaven pates. To a man, their expressions were as stern and impassive as stone.

The Astartes marched to the far end of the permacrete and formed into silent ranks facing the Stormbirds, their boltguns held at port arms. There were no proud banners to raise above the serried lines, nor bold champions to anchor the files with their ceremonial harness and master-crafted blades. All those honours had been left behind with their parent Chapters, still fighting with the primarch and the Fourth Expeditionary Fleet at Sarosh. Their armour was polished and unadorned; only a few bore the traces of battle scars mended during the long journey. Since leaving Caliban to join the Emperor’s Crusade they had participated in only a handful of campaigns, and some of them had seen no combat at all before receiving the order to return home.

Thrusters roared as empty Stormbirds lifted ponderously into the air, making room for still more drop-ships descending through the iron-grey cloud cover. The ranks of the returning warriors swelled, rapidly filling the northern edge of the landing field. It took more than four hours to transport the entire contingent to the planet’s surface, with the assault ships working in steady rotation; the assembled warriors waited and watched in complete silence, stolid and immovable as statues while the wind howled and the storm raged about them.

Two hours before dawn, the last of the transport flights touched down. The ranks of Astartes stirred slightly as warriors roused themselves from meditative rotes and came to full attention as the last four Stormbirds lowered their ramps and their passengers disembarked.

First came the wounded – Astartes who had suffered grievous injuries during the combat landings at Sarosh, their comatose forms borne on grav-sleds and watched over by attentive Legion Apothecaries. Next was the guard of honour, comprised of the most senior warrior-initiates in the cadre. In the lead marched Brother-Librarian Israfael, his dour face hidden within the depths of a wide samite hood. Each of the Astartes in the guard of honour wore surplices hemmed with ruby, sapphire, emerald, adamantine or gold, signifying their devotion to one of the Higher Mysteries. All, that was, except one.

Zahariel marched ten steps behind Brother Israfael, his head hooded like that of his mentor and his armoured hands tucked into the broad sleeves of his plain surplice. He felt self-conscious and out of place among the champions and senior initiates, but Israfael had been adamant.

‘You saved everyone on Sarosh,’ the Librarian had declared, back aboard the Wrath of Caliban, ‘including the primarch himself. And you spend more time at Luther’s side these days than all the rest of us combined. If you don’t deserve to stand in the honour guard, none of us do.’

The guard of honour followed at a measured pace behind their wounded brothers, who passed slowly by the waiting ranks of Dark Angels and then took their leave, headed for Aldurukh’s extensive medicae wards. Israfael halted the guard of honour before the assembled Astartes and with a murmured command ordered a sharp about-face. Twelve boots crashed down in unison on the rain-slick permacrete and every warrior stiffened to attention. Rain drummed against Zahariel’s hood, plastering it slowly to the top of his shaved head.

Across the landing field the assault ramp on the Stormbird lowered with a faint hiss of hydraulics. Ruddy light spilled down the ramp, casting a long, martial shadow onto the scorched pavement as a single, armoured figure emerged into the stormy night.

At just that moment, the driving rain slackened and the howling wind receded like an indrawn breath as Luther set foot on Caliban once more. The former knight was clad in gleaming armour of black and gold, forged in the close-fitting Calibanite fashion rather than the larger, bulkier Crusade-pattern suits favoured by the Astartes. A curved adamantine combat shield bearing the insignia of a Calibanite wyrm was strapped to the knight’s upper left arm, while his right pauldron bore the winged sword insignia of the Emperor’s First Legion on a dark green field. On Luther’s left hip rode Nightfall, the fearsome hand-and-a-half power sword gifted to him in happier days by Lion El’Jonson himself; in a holster on his right sat an old and well-worn pistol that had seen much use in the monster-haunted forests of Caliban. A winged great helm concealed the knight’s features and a heavy black cloak swirled about his feet as he strode swiftly to the assembled warriors.

Every eye was upon Luther as he came to a halt precisely twenty paces from the Astartes and surveyed their ranks with glowing, implacable eyes. Though he had been given many of the same physical augmentations as Zahariel and the rest, Luther had been too old to receive the gene-seed as they had. They towered head and shoulders over him, and yet his sheer physical presence seemed to fill the space around him, making him seem far larger than he actually was. Even Israfael, a Terran by birth, seemed slightly awed by Jonson’s second-in-command. He was the sort of man that came along once in a thousand years, a man who might have united all of Caliban but for the appearance of another, even greater figure: Lion El’Jonson himself.

Luther surveyed the Astartes for a moment longer, then reached up and drew off his helm. He had a handsome, square-jawed face, with strong cheekbones and an aquiline nose. His eyes were dark and piercing, like chips of polished obsidian. His hair was black as jet and cropped close to his skull.

Thunder rumbled off to the south and the wind began to pick up again, blowing a curtain of cold rain across the landing field. Luther turned his face to the heavens and closed his eyes, and Zahariel thought he saw the ghost of a smile play across his face as the drops struck his cheeks. The precipitation grew into a steady, pelting shower once more.

Zahariel watched as Luther took a deep breath and glanced back at the assembled troops. This time his grin was broad and comradely, but Zahariel saw that the smile didn’t reach all the way to Luther’s eyes.

‘Welcome home, brothers,’ Luther said, his powerful speaking voice carrying easily over the rain and the wind, and eliciting rueful chuckles from the Astartes in the front ranks. ‘I regret that I can’t promise you a grand feast, such as welcomed the questing knights of old. If we’re lucky and we’re bold, perhaps we can stage a quick raid on Master Luwin’s kitchen and make off with some fresh victuals before the day’s work begins.’

Many of the Dark Angels laughed at the thought, remembering Luwin, the roaring tyrant of the kitchens at old Aldurukh. Zahariel chuckled in spite of himself, thinking back to his days as an aspirant and remembering fondly the halls and courtyards of the fortress. For the first time since leaving Sarosh, he found himself looking forward to seeing Aldurukh again.

Before the laughter could entirely subside, Luther tucked his helmet under his right arm and nodded to his honour guard. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Let’s go see how much the old rock has changed in our absence.’

Without another word, Luther turned on his heel and set off for the landing field’s access road, his shoulders straight and his head held high. Immediately his honour guard fell into step behind him, and then moments later the pavement resounded with the thunder of hundreds of armoured feet as the rest of the cadre began the march to the distant fortress.

Luther marched at the head of the column like a conquering hero, returning to Caliban in glory rather than exile. It was an impressive performance, Zahariel thought, but he wondered if any of his brothers were fooled by it.

Officially, they had been ordered back to Caliban because the Great Crusade was about to enter a new operational phase, and the First Legion was in dire need of new recruits to meet the tasks the Emperor had planned for them. The Lion declared that experienced warriors were needed at home to speed up the training process, and a list of names was drawn up and circulated throughout the fleet. Little more than a week after being deployed on their first campaign, Zahariel and more than five hundred of his brothers – over half a Chapter – discovered they had been dismissed.

The news had stunned them all. Zahariel had seen it in the eyes of his battle-brothers as they’d mustered on the embarkation deck to begin the long trip back to Caliban. If the Legion needed warriors so badly, why were they being pulled from the front lines? Training recruits was a job for elders, men who were full of wisdom but past their physical prime. That was the way it had been on their home world for generations – and it had escaped no one that virtually all of the Astartes being sent home were from Caliban rather than Terra.

Ironically, it was the announcement that Luther himself would take charge of the recruitment effort that convinced them something was wrong. Luther, the man who had been Jonson’s right hand for decades, and who had risen to become the Legion’s second-in-command despite not being an Astartes himself, had no business leaving the Crusade to train young recruits at Aldurukh. He was being sent as far from the Lion as possible, and the rest of the cadre were being exiled along with him.

They followed their orders to the letter, without question or hesitation, as they had been trained to do. But Zahariel could see the doubts that had taken root inside each of his battle-brothers. What did we do? How have we failed him? But Luther gave the Astartes little opportunity to speculate; once the Wrath of Caliban entered the warp he established a rigorous regimen of equipment maintenance, combat training and readiness drills that kept idle time to an absolute minimum. To all intents and purposes, it appeared that the Legion’s second-in-command took the primarch at his word and intended to fulfil his assigned task to the best of his ability. When he wasn’t taking an active role inspecting wargear or supervising combat exercises, Luther spent the rest of his time secluded in his quarters, drafting plans for overhauling the training practices at Aldurukh.

Zahariel was kept as busy as the rest, although he quickly found himself exempted from the more mundane aspects of the shipboard inspections and readiness drills in favour of training his psychic powers under the tutelage of Brother-Librarian Israfael – and acting as Luther’s unofficial aide-de-camp.

The order had come down shortly after the voyage began. Luther required an assistant to help draft the orders for the new training scheme and organise the ongoing activities aboard ship. He had chosen Zahariel personally for the job. Most assumed that he’d chosen the young Astartes because of their shared exploits during the Saroshi assassination attempt aboard the primarch’s flagship, the Invincible Reason. They were correct in their assumption, but not for the reasons they imagined.

The Saroshi had been a highly cultured people who hid a terrible canker at the heart of their civilization. Sometime during the nightmare known as the Age of Strife they had sealed a pact with a horrific entity in exchange for their survival. When the Dark Angels had assumed the task of formalising compliance, the Saroshi leaders had attempted to assassinate their primarch by smuggling an atomic warhead onto the flagship. Had the bomb not been discovered and dealt with by Luther and Zahariel, the Legion would have been dealt a catastrophic blow – or so the story went.

Luther never brought up the incident during the length of the voyage back to Caliban, but the question hung in the air between them. Had Jonson suspected the truth? Was that why Luther had been sent away, and was Zahariel being punished by virtue of his association to the event?

There was no way to know.

The space port was one of five within a two-hundred-square-kilometre perimeter around the Legion fortress of Aldurukh. Zahariel could remember a time when the land had been covered in dense forest that teemed with deadly plant and animal life. Caliban was considered by Imperial planetologists to be a ‘death world’ – a planet that wasn’t merely dangerous but actively inimical to human life. Every day had been a struggle for survival, and life was both brutal and often very short. It was only through the courage and sacrifice of the planet’s knightly orders that humanity survived at all.

Lion El’Jonson had united all the knightly orders under his leadership and had led a successful campaign to eradicate the deadliest of Caliban’s monsters, but the final blow had come in the form of the Imperium. The Emperor’s servants had descended on the planet in the years that followed, with enormous machines that cleared dozens of kilometres of forest a day and left flat, lifeless earth in their wake. Mines, refineries and manufactorums had followed, ready to transform the planet’s abundant resources into vital war materiel for the Emperor’s Crusade. Cities were built to supply the sprawling industrial sites, growing upwards and outwards with each passing year as villages and towns were emptied and their citizens relocated to better serve the Imperium.

In the past, more than two dozen villages and settlements had supported the fortress of Aldurukh, providing everything from food to clothing, metal ore and medicines so that the knights were free to hone their skills and defend the land from the beasts. All of them were gone now; the land surrounding the fortress had been levelled and transformed into a vast military and logistical complex. Zahariel would have been hard-put to recall where any of the villages had once stood. Now, in addition to the space ports, there were training centres, barracks, arsenals, storehouses and maintenance yards stretching as far as the eye could see, all dedicated to supplying the Legion with the men and equipment it needed to fulfil its role in the Great Crusade.

Even at such a late hour, the cadre went almost unnoticed in the bustling activity surrounding the fortress. Cargo lifters and shuttles came and went between the space ports and the harbours in high orbit, ferrying supplies and personnel destined for the front lines. The Dark Angels passed long convoys of ordnance haulers and supply trucks on their way to and from the landing fields. Platoons of armoured vehicles roared past, heading for the marshalling yards south of the fortress or to the training grounds for the Legion’s auxiliary Imperial Army units. Once, a regiment of new Army recruits stopped in its tracks and shuffled quickly off the road to let the Astartes pass. The young men and women in their crisp new battle-dress stared open-mouthed at the marching giants and the golden-armoured figure who led them.

They marched through the rain and the wind for ten kilometres, passing through curtain walls made from permacrete and studded with defensive shield projectors and automated weapon emplacements. The closer they drew to Aldurukh, the denser and higher the structures grew, until finally the Astartes found themselves marching down man-made canyons lit solely by globes of artificial light.

Yet Aldurukh rose above all else, a bastion of strength and tradition surrounded by a sea of constant change. Its granite flanks had been scraped bare by Imperial construction machines; even now, titanic excavators scaled its sheer sides, carving out ledges and boring tunnels deep into the rock as the fortress continued to expand into the heart of the mountain itself. Zahariel had heard of plans to one day create a series of gates at the foot of the mountain that would provide access to the fortress’s subterranean levels as well as lifts that would carry passengers up into the centre of the fortress within seconds. For all its efficiency, the notion seemed vaguely offensive to him; the path up the Errant’s Road to the castle gates had been trod by the knights of the Order for centuries, and had taken on great spiritual significance in their legends and lore. His brothers could ride the lifts if they preferred; he intended to walk the path built by his elders for as long as he was able.

To his relief, the fortress hadn’t yet changed so much in the years he’d been away. At the base of the mountain, rising incongruously to either side of a narrow, paved lane that passed between two towering barracks facilities, stood the ancient, weathered menhirs that marked the foot of the old road. The old stones depicted the beginning and ending stages of a knight’s journey: the left menhir was carved in the likeness of a proud knight striding forth into the world, pistol and chainsword in hand; the one on the right showed a battered and weary warrior, his armour splintered and his weapons broken, kneeling wearily but with his head held high as he contemplated his return home. Zahariel smiled to see Luther brush his fingertips lightly against the right-hand menhir as he passed by, a tradition that reached back to the earliest days of their brotherhood. He repeated the gesture, feeling the smooth stone beneath his fingertips and thinking of the generations of his forebears who had done the same, stretching back for millennia.

The storm broke as they trod the narrow, winding road, though the wind still tangled their surplices and tugged at their hoods as the clouds paled with the first light of dawn. The climb, though long, passed quicker than Zahariel expected. After what seemed like only a couple of hours he found himself upon a broad, paved square that in times past had been a forested clearing, where aspirants to the Order once spent a long and harrowing night before the castle gates.

Now those gates were thrown wide open as the Dark Angels approached, and Zahariel saw with surprise that the courtyard beyond was filled with ranks of young recruits, arrayed to create a processional that led to the feet of the castle’s outer citadel. The recruits had been assembled in haste; many of them stared at the new arrivals with an equal mix of curiosity and surprise.

Luther led his warriors down the length of the processional as though he’d expected the impromptu assembly all along. At the far end of the long line of recruits waited two figures: one wasted and bent with age, the other clad in dark armour and a surplice hemmed with gold. He stopped at a respectful distance from the two, and behind him the cadre of Astartes came to a thundering halt.

As if on cue, the assembled recruits sank to one knee and bowed their heads to the golden knight. A trumpet pealed from the castle gatehouse, the traditional signal for a knight home from a long and dangerous quest. Master Ramiel, of late the Castellan of Aldurukh, knelt before Luther as well. Behind Ramiel, Lord Cypher inclined his head respectfully to the Legion’s second-in-command, though Zahariel could not help but notice a faint glitter of amusement in the warrior’s eyes.

Cypher was not a name, but a title; one that went back to the earliest days of the Order. His role was to maintain the traditions, customs and history of the brotherhood, as well as maintaining the integrity of the Higher Mysteries – the advanced tactics and teachings shared with the senior initiates. Because he was the literal personification of the Order and its beliefs, once a man took the role of Cypher he gave up his proper name from that moment forward. He was the brotherhood’s touchstone, a knight of great experience and wisdom who held little real power but wielded enormous influence within the organisation.

The current Lord Cypher was even more of an enigma than most, not least because of his youth and lack of seniority within the brotherhood. When Lion El’Jonson became Grand Master of the Order it had been expected that he would name Master Ramiel to the position; instead, he raised up a little-known knight younger than Luther or many other high-ranking peers. It was said that the new Cypher had been trained at one of the Order’s lesser fortresses, near the beast-haunted Northwilds, but even that was little more than rumour. No one could fathom Jonson’s decision, but no one had found cause to complain about it, either. By all accounts, the current Cypher was more of a reclusive, scholarly figure than previous bearers of the title, spending long hours poring through the libraries and record vaults hidden within the castle – though the paired pistols at his belt hinted that he was as capable a fighter as anyone else in the brotherhood.

Luther seemed genuinely surprised by Master Ramiel’s gesture of fealty. He stepped forward quickly, extending his hand. ‘Do your knees trouble you, Master?’ he said. ‘Please, let me help you up.’ He looked left and right, taking in the ranks of kneeling recruits. ‘Rise, all of you, in the Lion’s name,’ he said, his voice ringing from the walls of the citadel. ‘We are all brothers here, with no man set above another. Is that not so, Lord Cypher?’

Cypher inclined his head to Luther once more. ‘It is indeed,’ he replied in a quiet voice. The faintest of smiles played across Cypher’s face. ‘Something we would all do well to remember.’

Master Ramiel stared at Luther’s outstretched hand for a moment. Reluctantly, he accepted the offer and rose stiffly to his feet. He had aged a great deal in the past few years, Zahariel saw, and seemed almost diminutive between the towering figure of Cypher and Luther’s enhanced stature. Like most of the senior members of the Order, Ramiel had been accepted into the Legion, but was far too old to receive the Dark Angels gene-seed. Strangely, he had also refused even the basic physical augmentation and rejuvenation that men such as Luther had received. He remained a product of a bygone age, one fading quickly into the mists of time.

‘Aldurukh welcomes you, brother,’ Ramiel said to Luther. His voice was hoarse with age, which made his tone all the more stern and forbidding. ‘The captain aboard the Wrath of Caliban informed us of your impeding arrival, but there wasn’t enough time to arrange a proper welcome.’ He stared up at Luther, his pointed chin thrust out in a proud, almost defiant pose. ‘The recruits stand ready for inspection. I look forward to hearing your appraisal.’

For the first time Zahariel noted the faint air of tension in the courtyard; from the slight straightening of Luther’s shoulders, it was clear he sensed it as well. The young Astartes surveyed the assembly carefully, and realised that Ramiel’s impromptu welcome might be designed to send a message to the cadre as well.

Master Ramiel thinks the Lion has lost faith in him as well, Zahariel thought. Why else send Luther and half a Chapter of Astartes all the way back to Caliban to take over the training of recruits?

Never before had Zahariel questioned the orders of his primarch. The very idea that Jonson could make a mistake seemed inconceivable. But now, a cold sense of foreboding sent a shiver along his spine.

Luther, however, seemed unaffected by Ramiel’s tone. He chuckled, gripping the master’s arm warmly. ‘You have forgotten more about the training of fighting men than I will ever know, Master,’ he said, loud enough for everyone to hear. ‘We’re here to help train more recruits, not train them better.’ Luther turned to the assembled men and smiled proudly. ‘The Emperor himself has spoken, brothers! He expects great things from our Legion, and we will show him that the men of Caliban are worthy of his esteem! Glory awaits you, brothers – have you the loyalty and honour to earn it?’

‘Aye!’ the recruits answered in a ragged shout.

Luther nodded proudly. ‘I expected no less from Master Ramiel’s students,’ he said. ‘But time is short, and there’s much work still to be done. The Great Crusade waits on no man, and before long I and my brothers here will be called back to the thick of the fighting. We intend to bring as many of you with us as we can. The Lion needs you. We need you. And starting today you will be tested as you never have before.’

A stir went through the assembly – not just the recruits, but the Dark Angels surrounding Zahariel as well. Everywhere he looked, he saw expressions of determination and pride. Luther’s challenge had transformed the atmosphere of the courtyard in a single instant, and even Master Ramiel seemed moved by the conviction in Luther’s voice. The cadre felt it, too. For the first time, they saw a noble purpose in what they’d been sent to do. They hadn’t been forgotten. Rather they would soon return to their brothers out among the stars at the head of an army that they had helped create, one that would propel the First Legion into the annals of legend.

Luther spoke again, this time with an iron tone of command in his voice. ‘Brothers, you are dismissed,’ he ordered. ‘Return to your morning meditations and prepare yourselves for today’s training cycle. You can expect to encounter a host of new challenges as the day progresses, so be prepared for anything.’

Under Master Ramiel’s watchful eye, the recruits dispersed quickly and quietly from the courtyard. The Astartes of the training cadre remained in ranks, awaiting word from Luther. Zahariel watched him speak a few quiet words to Ramiel after the last of the recruits had left. Lord Cypher had vanished at some point during Luther’s short speech; Zahariel couldn’t say how or when he’d left.

After a few moments, Ramiel bowed to Luther and took his leave. Luther turned to the waiting Astartes, his expression businesslike. ‘All right, brothers, now you can see the challenge that lies before us,’ he said with a faint grin. ‘The sooner we’re done here, the sooner we can return to the fight, so I don’t plan on wasting a single minute. Report to the training grounds at once. We’re going to put these young ones through their paces.’

Luther’s honour guard bowed their heads and broke ranks, and the rest of the cadre followed in quick succession. Zahariel was turning to go when Luther caught his eye. ‘A word, brother,’ the knight said, beckoning to him.

Zahariel joined Luther as the cadre filed from the courtyard. Speaking quickly, Luther summarised the parts of his training plan that he intended to implement over the course of the day. ‘Coordinate with Master Ramiel to ensure that all of the instructors are informed of the changes,’ he said. ‘I’m going to have to leave matters of implementation entirely in your hands, brother. For the time being I’m going to have my hands full reviewing everything that’s happened here at the fortress in our absence.’

‘I’ll see to it,’ Zahariel said, both surprised and honoured that Luther would place so much trust in him. Despite the responsibility that had been placed on his shoulders, he was surprised to find that his spirits were lighter than they had been since the battle at Sarosh.

For the moment, the two were alone in the vast courtyard. Luther was gazing across the empty space, his mind turning to other matters. On impulse, Zahariel said, ‘That was well done, brother.’

Luther glanced quizzically at the young Astartes. ‘What do you mean?’

‘What you said a moment ago,’ Zahariel replied. ‘It was inspiring. To tell the truth, many of us have been in low spirits since we left the fleet. We… well, it’s good to know that we won’t be here for long. All of us are eager to get back to the Crusade.’

As Zahariel spoke, the light seemed to go out of Luther’s eyes. ‘Ah, that,’ he said, his voice strangely subdued. To Zahariel’s surprise, Luther turned away, glancing up at the cloudy sky. ‘That was all a lie, brother,’ he said with a sigh. ‘We’ve fallen from grace, and nothing we do here will change that. For us, the Great Crusade is over.’

One

Alarums and Excursions

The primarch’s summons found Brother-Redemptor Nemiel at the Seventh Chapter’s forward base in the Huldaran foothills, just twenty kilometres south of Gordia IV’s planetary capital. Dawn was only two hours away, and the Chapter’s battle-brothers were completing their final checks on their weapons and equipment. The last survivors of the Gordians’ battered heavy divisions had finally halted their long, bitter retreat and decided to make a stand amid the steep, iron-grey hills. The Dark Angels sensed that this would be the last battle in the months-long campaign to bring the stubborn world into compliance.

It had been a hectic night on the windswept plains. The Seventh Chapter had travelled two hundred kilometres on the previous day, harrying the Gordian rearguard, and there was little time to prepare for a dawn assault against fortified enemy positions. Nemiel had spent much of the time shuttling back and forth between the Chapter’s four assembly areas, speaking with each of the squads, evaluating their readiness and, when asked, receiving their battle-oaths in the name of the Lion and the Emperor. He had only just reported to Chapter Master Torannen and certified the Chapter fit for combat when the message was sent down from the fleet: Brother-Redemptor Nemiel and squad to report aboard the flagship immediately. Transport en route.

The Stormbird touched down less than fifteen minutes later, just as the Imperials’ preliminary bombardment began to fall on the enemy’s forward positions. Surprised and somewhat bemused, Nemiel could only clasp hands with Torannen and accept the Chapter Master’s battle-oath, then watch the Seventh Chapter’s armoured vehicles rumble northward without him and his men.

Within minutes, the drop-ship was climbing skyward again. After a single orbit of the war-torn planet, climbing high over its storm-tossed oceans and soaring, white-capped mountain ranges, the Stormbird’s pilot had adjusted his course and was closing on the Imperial squadrons anchored above Gordia IV – only to be shunted into a temporary holding pattern while the battle-barge completed a resupply evolution and cleared its embarkation deck. After all the haste and urgency, Nemiel was left to sit and wait, contemplating the grey-green world below and wondering how the battle was faring for Torannen and his Chapter.

A half-hour passed. Nemiel listened idly to the vox chatter over the fleet command net and turned his attention to the constellation of warships and transports that surrounded the primarch’s battle-barge. He could remember a time when the Fourth Expeditionary Fleet numbered no more than seven main line vessels. Now, decades later, the flagship was accompanied by more than seventy ships of various types, and that was barely a third of the fleet’s total complement. The remainder were organised into discrete battle groups that were in action across the length and breadth of the Shield Worlds, fighting the Gordian League and their degenerate xenos allies.

The warships anchored around the flagship constituted the fleet’s reserve squadrons, plus vessels damaged in recent actions against the League’s small but powerful navy. Tenders were pulled alongside the grand cruisers Iron Duke and Duchess Arbellatris while repairs were under way on their battle-scarred flanks. Plasma torches twinkled coldly in the dark as hundreds of servitors repaired damaged hull plating and wrecked weapons emplacements. After several minutes of idle study, Nemiel noticed frantic activity around a dozen other warships as well. Cargo lifters and supply shuttles were flying back and forth from the fleet’s huge replenishment vessels, delivering everything from reactor fuel to ration tins at breakneck speed. For the first time he felt a twinge of uneasiness, wondering if the League had managed to launch a surprise counter-offensive that had caught the Legion off-guard.

When the Stormbird was finally granted priority clearance to land, the tension Nemiel felt in the air of the cavernous embarkation deck only served to deepen his unease. Harried-looking officers and ratings were hard at work organising hundreds of tonnes of supplies and getting them stowed as rapidly as possible. Shouted orders and angry tirades from impatient petty officers were drowned out by the loud crackle of the deck’s magnetic barrier as two more Stormbirds came aboard in rapid succession and touched down directly behind Nemiel’s ship.

The drop-ship’s assault ramp quivered beneath the weight of armoured feet, and Brother-Sergeant Kohl led his squad out onto the deck. The Terran had removed his helmet and clipped it to his belt, and he surveyed the frenetic activity with a bemused scowl.

Nemiel glanced over at Kohl as the squad leader joined him at the base of the ramp. ‘What do you make of all this?’ he asked.

Kohl shook his head. The sergeant was one of the oldest surviving Astartes in the Legion, having fought in the very first battles of the Great Crusade, more than two hundred years before. His broad face was all flat planes and jutting angles, creased with old scars and weathered by centuries of hard fighting in the service of the Emperor. His black hair hung in tight braids close to his bull-like neck, and four polished service studs gleamed above his right brow. When he spoke, this voice was a gravelly basso.

‘Never seen anything like it,’ Kohl said warily. ‘Something’s happened, that’s for certain. The fleet looks like they’re getting ready for a fight.’

The embarkation deck’s containment field crackled again, admitting two more Stormbirds onto the increasingly-crowded deck. Assault ramps deployed, and more Astartes squads – veterans one and all, judging by the battle honours decorating their breastplates and pauldrons – disembarked with the same mix of bemusement and professional alacrity.

An alert tone echoed from vox speakers set in the overhead. ‘All squad leaders and command staff report to the strategium immediately.’

Nemiel frowned up at the overhead. Even the bridge announcer’s voice sounded unusually anxious. ‘Everyone seems to know something we don’t,’ he muttered.

Kohl shook his head. ‘Welcome to the Great Crusade, brother,’ he replied.

Nemiel chuckled, shaking his head in mock exasperation. He’d fought beside Kohl and his squad many times over the past few decades, and had learned to appreciate his sarcastic wit, but this time Nemiel couldn’t help but notice the faint undercurrent of tension in the veteran sergeant’s voice. ‘Come on,’ he said, setting off towards the lifts at the far side of the embarkation deck. ‘Let’s go find out what all this is about.’

Human crewmen stood to attention as Nemiel passed, and fellow Astartes bowed their heads respectfully. Years of hard campaigning had left their mark on the young Calibanite. His armour, fresh from the forges of Mars a half-century ago, was now scarred and blemished from countless battlefields. His left pauldron, replaced by the Legion armourers after the combat drop on Cyboris, had been engraved with battle scenes commemorating his Chapter’s charge against the Cyborian hunter-killers. Parchment ribbons fluttered from the edges of his right pauldron, affixed with stamps of melted gold and silver to commemorate deeds of valour against humanity’s many foes. The cloak of a senior initiate hung about his shoulders, edged with double bands of red and gold to mark his rank in the Higher Mysteries – a tradition from the old Order on Caliban that had been implemented by their primarch. He’d grown his hair long, like his Terran brothers, and wore it in tight braids bound by silver wire. But of all the awards and accolades that Nemiel had earned over the last half-century, it was the gleaming maul clutched in his right hand that he was proudest of.

The crozius aquilum marked him as one of the Legion’s select order of Chaplains, charged with maintaining the fighting spirit of their battle-brothers and preserving the ancient traditions of their brotherhood. It had been years since he’d been nominated for the position following the grim siege of Barrakan, when his Chapter had been cut off by the greenskins and trapped at Firebase Endriago for eighteen months. By the end they were fighting off the alien assaults with fists and pieces of sharpened steel scavenged from bombed-out strongpoints, but through it all Nemiel had never wavered. He’d taunted the greenskins relentlessly and exhorted his brothers to acts of ever-greater defiance in the face of insurmountable odds. When a greenskin’s crude axe had shattered his knee he’d grabbed the beast by one of its tusks and kicked it to death, just for spite. When the last line of defence was broken, he’d stood his ground in the face of a massive xenos champion and fought an epic duel that had given the Chapter time to launch a counter-attack that finally exhausted the last of the enemy’s strength. The next day, when relief forces finally managed to fight their way through to the firebase, Nemiel had stood on the ramparts and cheered with the rest of his brothers. It took several minutes before he registered the slaps on his shoulders and back and realised that the Chapter wasn’t cheering for victory – they were cheering for him. Not long after, the Chapter voted unanimously for him to take the place of Brother-Redemptor Barthiel, who had fallen during the darkest hours of the siege.

The whole thing still seemed a little unreal. Him, a paragon of the Legion’s ideals? As far as he was concerned, he’d just been too angry and stubborn to let a bunch of dirty greenskins get the better of him. In private moments, he would hold up the crozius and shake his head in bemusement, as though it belonged to someone else.

This should have been Zahariel’s, he’d often think to himself. He was the idealist, the true believer. I just wanted to be a knight.

Not a month went by that he didn’t wonder what his cousin was doing back on Caliban, and he regretted not saying farewell back on Sarosh all those years ago. The departure of Luther and the rest had been sudden, almost perfunctory, and at the time Nemiel had assumed, like everyone else, that they would be back with the fleet before long. But Jonson had never spoken of them again – he no longer even read the regular dispatches from Caliban, relegating that task to members of his staff. Luther and the rest seemed to have been entirely banished from the primarch’s mind, and as the years lengthened into decades, rumour and speculation had begun to circulate through the ranks. Some suggested a falling-out between Jonson and Luther, of old jealousies and petty enmities rising to the fore. Others speculated that Luther and the rest bore the blame for allowing the Saroshi bomb aboard the Invincible Reason, which led to sometimes-heated debates between the Terran and Calibanite factions within the Legion. Primarch Jonson made no attempt to address any of the rumours, and over time they were forgotten. No one spoke of the exiles much any more, except as a cautionary tale to new initiates: once you fell from grace with Lion El’Jonson, you were never likely to rise again.

I should send Zahariel a letter, he thought absently. He’d started several over the years, only to set them aside as the Chapter prepared to deploy to yet another conflict. Then he’d begun his tutelage as a Chaplain, which occupied every spare moment that wasn’t spent fighting or training to fight, and before he knew it, the time had just slipped by. He resolved to try again, just as soon as they’d gotten the current crisis under control.

Whatever the situation was, Nemiel thought grimly, he was certain that Jonson and the Fourth Expedition were up to the task.

The battle-barge’s strategium, which overlooked the warship’s bridge and served as the combat control centre for both the Invincible Reason and the Fourth Expedition as a whole, was already filled to capacity by the time that Nemiel arrived. The human officers on deck bowed their heads and stepped aside as he and Kohl went to join their brethren by the strategium’s primary hololith. The mood on deck was tense; unease showed on the faces of the Astartes and the human officers, no matter how much they tried to conceal it. Some tried to mask their concerns with rough banter; others withdrew, focusing their attentions on their data-slates or receiving reports from their subordinates via vox-bead, but the signs were there for a trained Redemptor to read.

Moments after Nemiel’s arrival, a stir went through the assembly. The assembly stiffened to attention as Lion El’Jonson, Primarch of the First Legion, appeared at the entrance to the strategium.

Like all of the Emperor’s sons, Jonson was the product of the most advanced genetic science known to mankind. He hadn’t been born; he had been sculpted, at the cellular level, by the hands of a genius. His hair was shining gold, falling in heavy curls to his broad shoulders, and his skin was pale and smooth as alabaster. Green eyes caught the light and seemed to glow from within, like polished emeralds. His gaze was sharp and penetrating, laser-like in its intensity.

Normally, Jonson preferred to wear a simple white surplice bound with a belt of gold chains, which only served to accentuate his towering physical presence and genetically perfect physique. This time, however, he was clad for war, cased in the intricately-crafted power armour that had been gifted to him by the Emperor himself. Ornate gold scrollwork had been worked into the curved, ceramite plates, detailing forest scenes from distant Caliban. Across the breastplate was a vivid depiction of a younger Jonson wrestling with a fearsome Calibanite Lion; the monster’s back was bowed and its paws raked furiously at the sky, its neck strained to breaking point by the primarch’s powerful arms. At his hip, Jonson carried the Lion Sword, a glorious blade forged on Terra by the Emperor’s own master armourers. A heavy cloak of emerald green swirled at the primarch’s back, and he walked with the portentous tread of an avenging angel.

Voices fell silent at Jonson’s approach. Nemiel watched the expressions of man and Astartes alike change at the sight of the primarch. Even to this day, after fighting alongside Jonson for so many decades, Nemiel still felt awed every time he stood in the Lion’s presence. He’d often said to Kohl and the rest that it was a good thing the Emperor had dedicated himself to ridding the human race of religious superstition – otherwise it would be all too easy to look upon the primarchs and worship them like gods.

For his part, Jonson seemed completely unaware of his effect on his subordinates – or else was so accustomed to it that he simply accepted it as a fundamental fact, like light or gravity. He acknowledged senior officers and long-time veterans like Kohl with sombre nods before taking his place at the strategium’s circular hololith. Jonson fitted a data crystal into the projector’s inload socket, paused scarcely a moment to marshal his thoughts, and began to speak.

‘Well met, brothers,’ Jonson began. His normally melodious voice was subdued, like someone who had just been dealt a terrible blow. ‘I regret to have called you away from your duties, but this morning we received grim tidings from the Emperor.’ He paused, meeting the eyes of the officers and Astartes closest to him. ‘The Warmaster Horus and his Legion have renounced their oaths of allegiance, along with Primarch Angron’s World Eaters, Mortarion’s Death Guard and Fulgrim’s Emperor’s Children. They have virus-bombed Isstvan III, the most heavily-populated world in the system, and have rendered it lifeless. An estimated twelve billion human lives have been lost.’

Gasps of shock and cries of dismay were uttered by many of the fleet officers. Nemiel scarcely heard them. He felt only the rushing of blood in his temples and the awful coldness that seemed to spread like a wound through his chest. The primarch’s words echoed in his mind, but they didn’t make any sense. They couldn’t make sense. His mind refused to accept them.

He turned to Kohl. The veteran sergeant’s expression was stoic, but his eyes were glassy with shock. The rest of the Astartes also bore the news in silence, but Nemiel could see the words sinking into them like a torturer’s knife. The Redemptor shook his head slowly, as though he could banish the awful knowledge from his head.

The primarch waited patiently for the assembly to regain a sense of order before continuing. He keyed a series of controls on the side of the hololith projector, and the device flickered into life. A detailed, three-dimensional map of the Eriden Sector flickered into existence before the assembly. Imperial systems were displayed in bright blue, while at their heart, the Isstvan System pulsed an angry red. Jonson pressed another set of keys, and many of the star systems surrounding Isstvan changed colour in an irregularly-expanding sphere. Nemiel and many others in the assembly were shocked to see a score of systems switch from blue to red, and scores more flicker from blue to a dull grey.

‘The reasons for the Warmaster’s rebellion are unclear, but the magnitude of his actions cannot be overstated. News of the rebellion has spread like a cancer through the sector and beyond,’ Jonson said, ‘re-igniting old tensions and territorial ambitions. Some governors have openly declared for Horus, while others see the rebellion as an opportunity to build petty empires of their own. In the short space of just a few months, Imperial authority in Segmentum Obscurus has been severely compromised, and dissent is beginning to spread into Segmentum Solar as well.’

Jonson paused, studying the pattern of unrest represented on the map as though it held secrets that only he could see. ‘It’s likely that agents loyal to the Warmaster are operating all across both segmentums, helping fuel the growing rebellion. Note how the outbreaks of lawlessness spread from system to system along the most stable warp routes leading back to Terra, the direction from which any large-scale retaliation is certain to originate.’

Nemiel took a breath, drawing on the psycho-linguistic rotes he’d learned in training to suppress his emotions and focus on the data suspended in the air above the projector. To his eyes, the instances of revolt in Segmentum Obscurus appeared haphazard, but Lion El’Jonson was famous within the Legion – if not elsewhere – for his strategic genius. He had an almost intuitive ability to understand the balance of forces in a conflict and predict its course with stunning accuracy. It made him one of the Emperor’s finest generals, second only to Horus himself – and in the opinion of many Dark Angels, perhaps even greater than that.

‘As soon as word of the Warmaster’s rebellion reached Terra, the Emperor began assembling a punitive force to confront the rebel Legions and take Horus into custody,’ Jonson continued gravely. ‘According to the despatch we received, a full seven Legions, led by Ferrus Manus and the Iron Hands, are en route to Isstvan, but it will be at least another four to six months before they arrive. In the meantime, Horus has redeployed most of his forces to Isstvan V, and is in the process of fortifying the planet in anticipation of the coming attack.’

Out of the corner of his eye, Nemiel saw Kohl fold his arms across his chest. He glanced at the Terran sergeant, and saw a bemused frown cross his weathered face.

‘The next few months are going to be crucial for Horus and the rebel Legions,’ Jonson said. ‘The Warmaster knows that the Emperor will respond with all the force he has available. I now believe that our deployment to the Shield Worlds was part of an effort to scatter the Imperium’s most loyal servants as far as possible in order to minimise the number of Legions he would have to face at any given time. Even so, a strike force of seven full Legions poses a dire threat to Horus’s survival – surviving a planetary siege from such a force, let alone defeating it, will require transforming Isstvan V into a veritable fortress world. That will require an enormous amount of supplies and equipment on very short notice – the sort of materiel that only a fully-operational forge world can provide.’

The primarch adjusted the controls on the projector, and the sector view blurred, focussing in closely on the Eriden Sector and its neighbours. One system very close to Isstvan, stubbornly blue in a sea of grey and red, was suddenly highlighted.

‘This is the Tanagra System, located at the edge of the adjoining Ulthoris sub-sector. As you can see, it is only fifty-two-point-seven light years from Isstvan, and lies along the most stable warp route to and from Terra. It also happens to be one of the most heavily industrialised systems in the entire sector, with a Class I-Ultra forge world named Diamat and more than two dozen mining outposts and refineries scattered throughout the system. Historically, Tanagra was rediscovered by Horus’s Legion and became compliant relatively early in the Great Crusade. It has been a key logistical centre for the region ever since.’ Jonson indicated the highlighted system with a thoughtful nod. ‘It is no exaggeration to say that whoever controls the Tanagra System in the coming months might well determine the fate of the entire Imperium.’

Murmurs spread through the assembly. The primarch’s voice carried easily over them all.

‘The Warmaster’s treachery caught all of us off-guard – just as he intended it to do,’ Jonson said. His voice took on a cold, angry edge. ‘At this stage, our forces are too deeply enmeshed here in the Shield Worlds to respond quickly to Horus’s treachery – the best estimates of my staff indicate that it would take us nearly eight months to conclude our offensive operations, even on an emergency basis, and re-position ourselves for a strike against Isstvan. Even if we could move more quickly, Horus’s agents would be able to alert the Warmaster in time to organise a counter-move.’

Jonson paused, once more surveying the shocked faces surrounding him, and his lips quirked in a predatory smile. ‘A small, hand-picked force, however, might accomplish what an entire Legion cannot.’ He pointed to the Tanagra System. ‘Diamat is the key. If we can keep its industrial wealth from Horus’s hands, he and his Legions will be as good as beaten.’

The murmurs among the assembly grew to an excited buzz. Suddenly, Nemiel understood the frenetic activity occupying much of the fleet, and the primarch’s summons from the planet below. He’d been chosen, along with all the other Astartes who’d come aboard. A fierce pride swelled in his breast. Looking about, he could see that many of his brethren were feeling it as well.

Jonson raised a gauntleted hand for silence. ‘As many of you already know, I’ve issued orders for many of our reserve squadrons to resupply and prepare for immediate deployment. I have also summoned two hundred veterans – the most I feel we can spare – from our Chapters on the planet below. As you’re well aware, the Shield Worlds campaign is at a critical juncture. We’ve been fighting the Gordians and their degenerate xenos allies for months, and this is our best opportunity to break the alliance once and for all.

‘My senior staff will be transferring aboard the grand cruiser Decimator within the hour, and will remain behind to conclude operations here in the Shield Worlds as quickly as possible. I will personally lead the expedition to Diamat, with a battle group of fifteen warships. We will travel light, leaving the slower tenders and supply vessels behind, and trust that we will be able to replace our stores when we reach Tanagra. Our Navigator believes that if current warp conditions persist, we should reach Diamat within two months.’

Jonson folded his arms and stared at the fleet officers. ‘One thing more. As far as the fleet – indeed, the rest of the Legion – is concerned, the Invincible Reason and the ships of the battle group are withdrawing for refit and repair at Carnassus. We’ll be taking a number of damaged vessels along with us to maintain the ruse. Secrecy is vital. Horus is certain to have agents in the region keeping watch on us, and they must not suspect where we’re really headed until it’s too late to do anything about it. Is that clear?’

The officers responded at once with nods and muttered assents. Nemiel and the Astartes said nothing. It went without saying that they would comply.

The primarch nodded curtly. ‘The battle group will weigh anchor and depart for the system jump point in ten hours and forty-five minutes. All ongoing repairs, resupply efforts and equipment checks must be complete by that time. No exceptions.’

Jonson turned his attention back to the hololith projector. ‘I expect by now that the Warmaster has despatched a raiding fleet to Diamat to begin plundering the necessary supplies,’ he said. ‘When we reach the Tanagra System, eight weeks from now, we need to arrive fully prepared to fight.’

Two

The Tyranny of Neglect

The tiny logic engines in the brass holoscriptor whirred softly as they wrote data onto the portable memory core. Zahariel paused while the buffer emptied, taking the time to review the facts and figures stored in his own memory. When the indicator light set atop the ’scriptor flashed from amber to green, he continued his report.

‘Brother Luther’s planet-wide recruiting efforts continue to show a steady twenty per cent increase each training cycle – for the third time in a row we have had to increase the size of our training Chapters to accommodate the new aspirants, and the Apothecarion reports that our new screening model has dramatically reduced incidents of organ rejection among inductees. In fact, not a single fatality has been reported for the last two training cycles, and the Apothecaries are confident that this trend can continue indefinitely.’

Zahariel straightened slightly, his hands clutched tightly behind his back and his head held high as he looked into the ’scriptor’s lens, and imagined himself speaking directly to the primarch and his senior staff. ‘I am thus proud to present you with four thousand, two hundred and twelve new Astartes, ready to join their brothers in the Legion’s front-line Chapters. This represents a certification rate of nearly ninety-eight per cent – an extraordinary achievement by the standards of any of the Emperor’s Legions.

‘I am also pleased to report that the Techmarines have certified two thousand suits of power armour, a hundred new suits of Tactical Dreadnought armour and two hundred of the new Thyrsis-pattern jump packs for shipment to the fleet from the forges. The manufactories here on Caliban are including two thousand new chainswords for the fleet armoury and twelve million rounds of boltgun shells. We are expecting a shipment of armoured vehicles from the Mechanicum within the next two months, and will expedite the shipment as soon as they have been certified. If all goes as planned, they will be accompanied from Caliban by two new divisions of Jaegers, who are performing their final training manoeuvres this month.’

Zahariel paused for half a beat, going over the figures in his head to make sure he’d left nothing out. Satisfied, he nodded to the ’scriptor. ‘This concludes my report. By the time you receive this, we will have already begun our nineteenth training cycle. Brother Luther and the training masters concur that further reduction of the cycle time would only degrade the fitness of new recruits, so we’ve reached an optimal training time of twenty-four months, incorporating accelerated surgical implantation into an ongoing regimen of conditioning and instruction. Current projections indicate that we will have another five thousand new Astartes ready for battle by the next cycle’s completion. The Mechanicum has assured us that shipments of wargear will continue on an accelerated basis until you order otherwise.’

His face sobered as he reached the final item of his report. ‘As a postscript, I regret to inform you that Master Ramiel has taken his leave of the Legion at the age of one hundred and twelve. I am proud to say that he left on horseback, riding the Errant Road with lance in hand. All of us, especially Brother Luther, regrets his loss. We shall not see his like again.

‘I trust this report finds you at the forefront of the Emperor’s Crusade, driving back the shadows of Old Night and adding to the glories of our venerable Legion. On behalf of Luther and the rest of the training cadre, we remain your loyal and dutiful brothers in arms.’

He bowed deeply to the ’scriptor. ‘Victoria ut Imperator. This is Brother-Librarian Zahariel, signing off.’

Zahariel reached forward, shutting off the ’scriptor with a flick of a switch. The logic engines whirred and clattered, transferring the rest of the message to the memory core. As he listened to the machine work, he debated continuing further. Was he tempting the primarch’s wrath? There was no way to know. On the other hand, he thought ruefully, what was the worst that could happen if he did?

The ’scriptor finished its work. He paused, composing his thoughts, then adjusted the dials on the face of the machine. As the machine clattered, setting up a new message header, Zahariel stepped back in front of the lens. When the amber light blinked twice, he said. ‘Appended message file, classification four-alpha, standard cipher. Recipient: Primarch Lion El’Jonson, First Legion.’

When the light turned green again, Zahariel took a deep breath and began his plea.

‘I beg your pardon in advance, my lord, and I hope you will not think me speaking out of turn, but I would be remiss in my duties if I didn’t make every effort to improve the fortunes of our Legion in these trying times.’ He hesitated, considering his words carefully.

‘Our training cadre has worked diligently for the last century, refining our recruiting and training procedures to meet the challenges that the Emperor has set for us. I believe that my reports – as well as the constant flow of warriors and supplies – testify to our dedication and success. We have achieved a degree of speed and efficiency unmatched by any other Legion, and we are rightly proud of our achievements.

‘At this stage, our procedures have been well-established, and we have a highly-capable infrastructure in place to continue the induction process. What the Legion needs most is for veteran warriors to return home and share the experience they’ve gained during the Crusade. By the same token, our brothers here on Caliban are acutely aware of the limited nature of their own experience, and are eager to hone their skills against the Emperor’s foes on the front line. This especially applies to Brother Luther, whom I believe would serve the Legion far better at your side than conducting recruiting drives here on Caliban.’

Zahariel kept his face calm and composed, even as his mind struggled to find the perfect argument that would sway the primarch. ‘I think it fair to say that we have done all we can here, and it would be in the best interests of the Legion if we were rotated back to our parent Chapters in the fleet. This goes particularly for Brother Luther, whose skills as a warrior and diplomat are well-known. If you were to summon just one of us back to your side, my lord, let it be him.’

His hands, clasped behind his back, tightened into fists. There was more he wanted to say, but he feared that he had pressed his luck too much already. Zahariel bowed his head before the lens. ‘I hope that after you have reviewed my reports you will see the logic of my request. We all have a duty to the Emperor, my lord – all we ask is for the chance to fulfil it as we were meant to, defeating his enemies and redeeming the lost worlds of mankind.’

Zahariel sketched another quick bow and, lest he be tempted to speak further, he reached forward swiftly and deactivated the recorder. Silence fell in the small office, broken only by the whir of the ’scriptor’s logic engines and the murmur of voices in the adjoining operations centre. Sighing faintly, the young Librarian turned away from the machine and surveyed the cramped, neatly-kept space, with its polished grey desk-cum-hololith unit and neat stacks of message cores containing status reports on everything from training schedules to munition production quotas. Beyond the desk, a tall, narrow window looked out past the Tower of Angels onto the southern sector of the Legion’s vast sprawl of armouries, barracks and training grounds. Tall spires rose out of the late-afternoon smog, navigation hazard lights blinking red and green through the haze. He looked out at the bustling activity, the energetic industry of war, and wondered what had become of old Master Ramiel.

There was a clatter of gears and the ’scriptor ejected the memory core. Zahariel plucked the small cylinder carefully from the socket and slipped it onto an ornate brass carrying tube marked with the heraldry of the Legion. Checking his armour’s internal chrono, he saw that he had just enough time to reach the detachment before they left for the embarkation field. He keyed his vox-bead and summoned a transport, then drew up the hood of his surplice and headed for the lifts on the opposite side of the operations centre. A sense of foreboding dogged his steps as he entered the lift and descended into the depths of the great mountain.

Zahariel couldn’t say why the years had started to weigh on him of late. Most of the last century had passed swiftly indeed, lost in a whirlwind of hard work and seemingly endless iterations of recruitment strategies, training schemes and industrial expansion. Luther had seen at once that it wouldn’t be enough to simply accelerate the pace of training; fulfilling the primarch’s stated objectives demanded the creation of an enormous support structure that stretched across the entire planet. It was a herculean task, and at first Zahariel told himself that it was an honour that Jonson had chosen them for it.

Luther involved himself in every aspect of planetary administration, from tithe structures to industrial and arcology construction, and Zahariel was drawn along in his wake. Luther depended on him more and more, leaving him to make decisions that affected the lives of tens of millions of people each day. At first, the sheer weight of his responsibilities horrified him. But he summoned up his courage and rose to the occasion, determined to redeem himself in the primarch’s eyes. Caliban’s forests dwindled, replaced by mines, refineries and industrial sprawls. Huge arcologies rose like man-made mountains across the landscape as the planet’s population swelled. Civilization spread across the globe, and the ranks of the Legion increased as Luther found ways to reduce the training cycle from eight years to only two. Meanwhile, reports of Jonson’s exploits made their way back to Caliban, swelling their hearts with pride as the Dark Angels marched from one victory to the next. Transport ships from hundreds of distant worlds carried battle honours and war trophies back to Aldurukh, testifying to the valour of the primarch and the Legion’s fighting Chapters. The members of the training cadre admired each and every token sent back by their brothers and made comradely boasts of how they would exceed them all when Jonson summoned them back to the fighting.

Yet the decades passed, and no summons came. Jonson had never officially returned to Caliban; two planned visits had been cancelled at the last moment, citing new orders from the Emperor or unexpected developments in the current campaign. With each passing year, Luther’s promise to the cadre in the castle courtyard sounded increasingly hollow, but not a warrior among them faulted him for it. If anything, their loyalty to Luther had increased during their exile. He shared their burdens and praised their successes, inspiring them by virtue of hard work, humility and personal charisma. Though they would deny it if asked, Zahariel believed that many of his brothers owed more loyalty to Luther than they did their distant primarch, and that worried him more and more as time went by.

It was only in more private moments, travelling across Caliban on manufactory inspections or working long hours alongside Luther in the Grand Master’s sanctum, that Zahariel saw the turmoil in the great man’s eyes.

News took a long time to reach Caliban these days, as the expeditionary fleets advanced farther and farther across the galaxy. Transports laden with plunder and trophies had grown less and less frequent of late. Then, recently, they’d received the news that the Emperor had named Horus Lupercal his Warmaster and left the crusading Legions to return to Terra. At first, Luther had hoped to keep the news quiet, but that had been folly. Before long all of their battle-brothers had been talking about what had happened, and what it meant for them.

None of them were fools. They could see that the Great Crusade was entering into its final phase, and their last chance for glory was slipping away forever.

After several long minutes the lift deposited Zahariel at the base of the mountain, amidst the Legion’s cavernous vehicle assembly areas. Plasma torches hissed and sputtered as Techmarines and servitors laboured to repair severely damaged Rhinos and Predator tanks sent back to Caliban from the front lines. No sooner had he stepped from the lift chamber than a four-wheeled personal transport rolled smoothly out of the vehicle pool and stopped beside the Librarian. He stepped into the open-topped passenger compartment, large enough to accommodate two Astartes in full armour. ‘Sector forty-seven, training Chapter five, main assembly grounds,’ he ordered the servitor in the driver’s compartment, and the transport set off at once, gathering speed as it made for one of the cavern’s transit tunnels.

Zahariel’s thoughts wandered as they sped past ranks of armoured personnel carriers, tanks and assault vehicles. He turned the memory core over and over in his hands, wondering at the unease that lingered in the recesses of his mind. Not even Israfael’s meditative techniques had managed to blunt the sense of foreboding he felt. It was like a splinter beneath the skin, reminding him painfully of its presence and defying every attempt to pluck it out.

He could not say why it was so important for Luther to return to Jonson’s side. They had all borne their exile with stoicism and dedication to duty, as any Astartes would, and Luther more than most. Of course, Zahariel knew why; the Legion’s second-in-command was seeking redemption for what he’d nearly done aboard the Invincible Reason. Luther had discovered the bomb that the Saroshi delegation had smuggled onboard the Dark Angels’ battle-barge – and had done nothing about it. For a brief time he’d let his jealousy of Lion El’Jonson’s achievements overcome his better nature, but at the last moment he’d come to his senses and tried to make things right. He and Zahariel had nearly died disposing of the Saroshi bomb, but somehow the primarch suspected Luther’s earlier lapse and had exiled him to Caliban. Now Luther worked to extirpate his guilt, but his efforts went unnoticed.

Yet what other choice did Luther have? Even if he wanted to defy Jonson’s wishes, would he simply demand a fair accounting and a return to the front lines? To do that he would have to leave Caliban and seek out the primarch, in direct violation of Jonson’s orders, and that meant outright rebellion. Luther would never countenance such a thing. After Zaramund, it was inconceivable.

But if Jonson did nothing – if he let these loyal warriors sit here while the Great Crusade came to a close, it would leave a scar within their brotherhood that would never truly heal. Such wounds tended to fester over time, until the entire body became imperilled. It had happened on Caliban all the time, back in the old days.

Zahariel reached up and rubbed his forehead as the transport exited the tunnel into the afternoon sunlight. He couldn’t imagine outright dissent within the Legion, but the thought still nagged at him.

The Librarian clenched the message tube tightly. If he earned the primarch’s wrath, so be it. This was far more important.

It took almost an hour to travel from the mountain to the Chapter training facilities in sector forty-seven, passing through successive rings of defensive walls and checkpoints before pulling up at the edge of a broad parade ground surrounded on three sides by barracks, firing ranges and combat simulator centres.

Zahariel sat bolt upright as the transport rolled to a stop, his brow creasing in a worried frown. The square was empty.

He checked his chrono again. According to the embarkation schedule, there should be a thousand Astartes in full combat gear waiting to board a transport for high orbit. ‘Wait here,’ he told the servitor, leaping from the idling vehicle and striding swiftly to the Chapter Master’s quarters. Zahariel keyed the door open and rushed into the ready room to find the Chapter Master conducting an informal briefing with his newly-trained squad leaders. The young Astartes turned at the Librarian’s approach, failing to conceal the bemused looks on their faces.

‘Chapter Master Astelan, what’s the meaning of this?’ Zahariel said, his voice calm but stern. ‘Your Astartes should be mustering for embarkation this very minute, but the square is empty.’

Astelan’s eyes narrowed on the advancing Librarian. He was one of the few Terrans serving with the Legion on Caliban, having been sent to Aldurukh some years after Luther and the rest of the training cadre. He was a veteran warrior who’d risen quickly to command of a Chapter in the years following Jonson’s ascension to primarch and his sudden reassignment was every bit as baffling to Zahariel as his own. He presumed that Luther was aware of the circumstances, but if Astelan had been exiled from the expeditionary fleets like the rest of them, the Master of Caliban hadn’t made that fact public. Instead, he’d immediately assigned the Terran to lead one of the newly-reorganised training Chapters, and treated Astelan with all the respect and esteem that he showed his other battle-brothers. Luther’s charisma and leadership quickly won him over, and now Zahariel would be hard-pressed to name another member of the Legion more loyal to the Master of Caliban.

‘The muster was cancelled two hours ago,’ Astelan said in a deep voice. He had a bluff, square-jawed face and deep-set eyes shadowed by a brooding brow. A fine white scar bisected his right eyebrow and stretched across his forehead up to the edge of his scalp. When he’d arrived on Caliban he’d worn his hair in long, tightly-knotted braids, but within the first few days he’d shaved his scalp and kept it that way.

‘By whose order?’ Zahariel demanded.

‘Luther, of course,’ Astelan replied. ‘Who else?’

The Librarian frowned. ‘I don’t understand. Your warriors were certified for deployment. I saw the report myself.’

Astelan folded his arms. ‘This has nothing to do with my Astartes, brother. Luther has cancelled all deployments offworld.’

Zahariel was suddenly conscious of the message tube clutched in his left hand. ‘That can’t be right,’ he said. ‘It’s not possible.’

Astelan’s scarred eyebrow raised slightly. ‘Luther appears to think otherwise,’ he said. One of the squad leaders chuckled, but the Chapter Master silenced him with a sidelong glance. ‘He’s in command here, is he not?’

Zahariel ignored the challenge in Astelan’s tone. ‘Why did he cancel the deployments? The fleet is depending on those reinforcements.’

The Chapter Master shrugged. ‘You will have to ask him, brother.’

Biting back a sharp reply, Zahariel spun on his heel. ‘I will, Astelan,’ he said, heading for the door. ‘You can be assured of that.’

He found Luther high in the fortress’s topmost tower, at work in the Grand Master’s chambers. Jonson and Luther had shared the huge working space in better times, shaping the future of first the Order, then the Legion. As ever, scribes and staff aides bustled through the adjoining rooms, performing the countless daily tasks of Imperial rule.

Luther’s desk was a massive bastion of polished Northwild oak, solid enough to stop a boltgun shell even before the heavy hololith projector and cogitators were installed. He used it as a bulwark to keep visiting bureaucrats out of arm’s reach, as he often joked.

Just behind the desk stood a narrow archway that led to a small, open balcony. Zahariel saw Luther out in the sunshine, glancing thoughtfully up at the cloudless sky. He rounded the desk and stepped to the edge of the balcony, reluctant to intrude even under the current circumstances.

‘May I speak to you for a moment, brother?’

Luther glanced over his shoulder and waved Zahariel forwards. ‘I take it you’ve heard about the deployments,’ he said.

‘What’s going on?’ Zahariel replied. ‘Has there been some word from the primarch?’

‘No,’ Luther said. ‘More’s the pity. There have been… developments here on Caliban.’

Zahariel frowned. ‘Developments? What does that mean?’

Luther didn’t reply at first. He leaned against the balcony’s stone railing, staring down at the industrial sprawl thousands of feet below. Zahariel could tell that he was troubled.

‘There have been reports of unrest in Stormhold and Windmir,’ he said. ‘Worker strikes. Protests. Even some cases of sabotage at the weapon manufactories.’

‘Sabotage?’ Zahariel exclaimed, unable to conceal his surprise. ‘How long has this been going on?’

‘Several months,’ Luther said darkly. ‘Perhaps as long as a year. It began with a few isolated incidents, but the problem’s worked its way through the outer territories like a reaper vine, digging deep into every chink and crevice. Now it’s bleeding us in a hundred places. Work stoppages have cut ammo production by fifteen per cent.’

Zahariel shook his head. He held up the message tube. ‘That can’t be right. I prepared the reports personally. We’re over our quota.’

Luther smiled ruefully. ‘That’s because I’ve been making up the shortfall by drawing lots of ammunition from the fortress’s emergency stockpiles. Now we’re dangerously low.’

The Librarian let out a long breath. The emergency stockpiles were held in reserve to defend Caliban from enemy attack. Jonson would be furious if he knew they’d been cleaned out. ‘What about the constabulary? Why haven’t they put a stop to this?’

‘The constabulary have been less than effective,’ Luther said, glancing meaningfully at Zahariel.

‘You mean they’re helping these… these rebels?’

‘Indirectly, yes,’ Luther said. ‘I have no proof, but I can think of no other way to explain it. There have been few detentions, and little progress on attempts to uncover who is organising the dissenters.’

Zahariel considered the implications. ‘The upper echelons of the constabulary are filled with warriors from the defunct knightly orders,’ he mused. Once again, the sense of foreboding tingled at the back of his mind. He pressed the fingertips of his right hand to his forehead.

‘I was thinking much the same thing,’ Luther said. ‘There are many former nobles and powerful knights who broke with the Order when we swore our loyalty to the Emperor. Many of them possess considerable wealth and influence in their former domains.’

‘But what do these rebels want?’

Luther turned to Zahariel. This time, his dark eyes glinted coldly. ‘I don’t know yet, brother, but I intend to find out,’ he said. ‘But I’m going to need warriors I can trust, so I’ve cancelled all deployments until further notice.’

Zahariel leaned against the balcony. The decision made sense, but he feared that Luther was striding along the edge of a precipice. ‘The primarch needs those warriors in the Shield Worlds,’ he said. ‘If we delay them, it could lead to disastrous consequences.’

‘Worse than having Caliban descend into anarchy?’ Luther countered. ‘Don’t worry, brother. I’ve given this much thought. We’ll send in the Jaegers first. If they appear to have matters well in hand, I’ll release the new Astartes for immediate deployment to the fleet.’

Zahariel nodded, still uneasy. ‘We need to root out their ringleaders,’ he said. ‘Drag them out into the open and confront them with their crimes. That will put an end to this lawlessness.’

Luther nodded. ‘It’s already begun,’ he said. ‘Lord Cypher is searching for them even as we speak.’

Three

Hammer and Anvil

‘Vox transmission from Destroyer Squadron Twelve,’ Captain Stenius reported, joining the primarch at the strategium’s primary hololith display. ‘Long-range surveyors are picking up thirty vessels anchored in high orbit above the forge world. Reactor and sensor emissions suggest a mixed group of capital ships and heavy-grade cargo transports.’

Lion El’Jonson rested his hands against the burnished metal rim of the tank. A faint smile played at the corners of his mouth. ‘Identification?’

Stenius shook his head. He was another veteran of the Legion’s earliest campaigns, and bore the scars of his service proudly. His eyes were silver-rimmed, smoke-grey lenses set deeply into sockets that were seamed with scars. Nerve damage, inflicted by razor-sharp slivers of glass from an exploding hololith display, had transformed his face into a grim, inscrutable mask.

‘None of the vessels in orbit are flashing ident codes,’ the captain replied. ‘But Commander Bracchius, aboard Rapier, claims the reactor signatures from two of the larger craft match those of the grand cruisers Forinax and Leonis.’

The primarch nodded. ‘Formidable ships, but well past their prime. I expected as much – Horus has sent a second-line fleet comprised of renegade Imperial warships and Army units to plunder Diamat, while holding back his Astartes to protect Isstvan V.’

Stenius watched gravely as the hololith image above the table updated to reflect the new data. Diamat hung in the centre of the display, rendered in mottled shades of rust, ochre and burnt iron. Tiny red icons dotted the face of the world facing the approaching Dark Angels battle group, marking the approximate size and location of the enemy ships in orbit. Two of the icons had been tentatively classified as the two rebel grand cruisers, while others were given probable classifications based on their size and reactor emissions. Currently, the plot was showing no less than twenty cruiser-sized contacts anchored at Diamat, clustered around another ten heavy transports.

Nemiel, standing to Jonson’s left on the other side of the hololith table, saw the concern in the captain’s eyes. Second-rate or not, the rebels had twice as many capital ships as they did. For the moment, the Dark Angels enjoyed the advantage of surprise, and the enemy had been caught with little room to manoeuvre, but it was anyone’s guess how long that would last.

Tension and uncertainty hung heavy in the dimly-lit chamber; Nemiel had observed it for weeks in the hunched shoulders and hushed exchanges between the fleet officers. During the two-month voyage from the Gordia System, the news of Horus’s betrayal and the nature of their clandestine mission had left indelible marks on the crew’s psyche.

They’ve lost their faith, Nemiel thought. And why not? The unimaginable had occurred. Warmaster Horus, the Emperor’s favoured son, has turned his back on the Emperor, and brother has been set against brother. He studied the faces of the men inside the strategium and saw the same fear lurking in the depths of their eyes. No one knows who to trust any more, he sensed. If someone like Horus could fall, who might be next?

The two hundred Astartes aboard the flagship dealt with their own uncertainties as they always did: honing their skills and preparing themselves mentally and physically for battle. Early in the voyage, Jonson had issued a set of directives organising his hand-picked squads into two small battle companies – First and Second – and establishing a rigorous training regimen to cement them into a cohesive fighting unit.

As the only Chaplain aboard the battle-barge, Nemiel found himself personally tasked by Jonson to monitor the Astartes’ training regimen and periodically certify their physical and psychological fitness. Since virtually all of the Legion’s senior staff members had been left behind at Gordia IV, Nemiel soon found his responsibilities expanded to include logistics and fleet operations as well. He accepted the extra duties with pride and a certain amount of uneasiness, because the more he worked alongside Lion El’Jonson, the less sense the undertaking to Diamat made. Such a relatively small force couldn’t possibly hold out for very long against the full strength of four rebel Legions, and Nemiel couldn’t imagine that the Emperor would have ordered Jonson to attempt such a thing. The more he thought about it, the more certain he became that the primarch had ordered the expedition to Diamat for reasons that were entirely his own.

Nemiel focused his attention on the tactical plot and tried to put his foreboding aside. ‘The rebels have us outnumbered, my lord,’ he pointed out.

Jonson gave Nemiel a sidelong look. ‘I can perform hyperspatial calculations in my head, brother,’ he said wryly. ‘I think I can manage to count to thirty unaided.’

Nemiel shifted uncomfortably. ‘Yes, of course, my lord,’ he said quickly. ‘I don’t mean to belabour the obvious. I was just curious as to your strategy–’

‘Easy, brother,’ Jonson chuckled, clapping Nemiel on the shoulder. ‘I know what you meant.’ He pointed to the cluster of transports above Diamat. ‘That’s going to be their weak point,’ he said. ‘The success or failure of their mission depends on the survival of those big, lumbering ships, and they’re going to hang like an anchor around the rebel admiral’s neck.’ He glanced back at Stenius. ‘Any picket ships?’

Stenius nodded. ‘Bracchius reports three squadrons of escorts in a staggered sentry formation,’ he reported. ‘They have detected our scouts and are coming about to engage. Time to contact is one hour, fifteen minutes at current course and speed.’ He straightened, hands clasped behind his back. ‘What are your orders, my lord?’ he inquired formally.

The battle group had reached the point of no return. At this point, more than one and a half astronomical units from Diamat, the battle group still had time and manoeuvring room to come about and retreat from the system. If Jonson chose to press ahead, it would commit his small force irrevocably to battle.

Jonson did not hesitate. ‘Execute attack plan Alpha,’ he said calmly, ‘and send the signal to launch all Stormbirds. Bracchius is to maintain speed and engage as soon as the pickets come within range. He’ll have the honour of striking the first blow against Horus’s rebels.’

Stenius bowed to the primarch and turned about, issuing a stream of orders to the flagship’s command staff. Jonson turned his attention back to the tactical plot. ‘Brother-Redemptor Nemiel, inform the company commanders to prepare their squads for an orbital assault,’ he said. ‘I expect we will be in position to launch in just over three hours’ time.’

‘At once, my lord,’ Nemiel replied, and began to relay the command through his vox-bead. The image above the hololith updated again, this time depicting the approximate location of the battle group’s three small scout squadrons. Ahead of them, three much larger squadrons were displayed in bright red, shifting slowly into a rough crescent formation. The arms of the crescent were oriented towards the oncoming Imperial scouts, like a pair of encircling arms. Blue and red numerical data, depicting the range, course and speed of the two formations changed with steadily-increasing speed.

Lion El’Jonson studied the glowing motes of data and folded his arms, his expression distant and thoughtful. Nemiel watched a ghostly smile play across the primarch’s face as both forces arrayed themselves for battle, and fought down another twinge of unease. At that moment he would have given a great deal to know what Jonson saw in the grim picture that he did not.

As soon as the Dark Angels’ battle group had arrived in the Tanagra star system it had effectively split into two forces. Six of the group’s sixteen ships were sleek, swift destroyers, which the primarch immediately ordered ahead of the main division with a trio of light cruisers to provide support. These scout squadrons quickly pulled ahead of the larger and slower cruisers, their long-range surveyors sweeping the void ahead of them and attempting to fix the size and disposition of the enemy fleet.

Now that the enemy was sighted, vox signals went back and forth between the two destroyer squadrons and the trio of light cruisers hanging back in their wake. As the rebel picket ships – no less than fifteen enemy destroyers, organised into three large squadrons – deployed into a standard crescent formation, Jonson’s light cruisers flared their thrusters and moved up to form a battle line with the rest of the scouts.

Thousands of kilometres behind them, the main body of Jonson’s battle group was altering formation as well. The Invincible Reason and the strike cruisers Amadis and Adzikel drew ahead of the two grand cruisers and two heavy cruisers that comprised the rest of the main force. At the same time, the armoured blast doors covering the three ships’ prow hangar bays slid ponderously open and flight after flight of Stormbirds leapt like loosed arrows into the darkness. Within minutes, seven squadrons of the heavily-armed assault craft were speeding ahead of the formation, racing to join up with the distant scouts before the rebel destroyers reached extreme firing range.

With four minutes left to contact, the rebel pickets suddenly increased speed; perhaps the flotilla commander detected the oncoming Stormbirds, or gave in to his eagerness to open the engagement, but it was too little, too late. Jonson’s Stormbirds were streaking through the scout squadron’s firing line just as the enemy destroyers opened fire.

The rebel ships opened the engagement as Jonson expected they would, opening their bow tubes and launching a salvo of deadly torpedoes at the oncoming scouts. Thirty of the huge missiles – each one powerful enough to blow a destroyer-sized ship apart – sped towards the scouts in a wide arc that left the Imperial ships with no room to escape.

Surveyor arrays aboard the Stormbirds detected the launches at once, and the pilots spread out their formations as widely as possible to intercept the oncoming torpedoes. They swept through the volley of missiles in the space of a few seconds; lascannons spat bolts of searing light, spearing through the torpedoes’ casings and detonating their huge fuel tanks. Massive explosions flickered angrily in the darkness in the Stormbirds’ wake, spreading clouds of incandescent gas and debris that faded quickly in the airless void. Almost half of the torpedoes were destroyed; the rest sped onward towards their targets, too fast for the assault ships to alter course and come around for another pass. The Astartes held their course, already picking out targets among the oncoming picket ships.

The scout squadrons opened fire on the incoming missiles as soon as they came within range. Macro cannons and rapid-cycle mega lasers filled the vacuum ahead of the small ships with a veritable wall of fire. Energy lances – massive beams of voltaic power – swept in burning arcs ahead of the light cruisers. More globes of flame bloomed along the path of the onrushing scouts, blending together into a seething field of vaporised metal and radioactive gas.

Five torpedoes slipped through the maelstrom. They crossed the remaining space to their targets in less than a second, flying into a second, smaller cloud of exploding shells as the destroyers’ flak batteries opened fire. The servitor-crewed guns succeeded in destroying two of the remaining missiles.

Three torpedoes out of thirty struck home. One of the weapons smashed into the prow of the destroyer Audacious but failed to detonate; Hotspur and Stiletto, however, were not so fortunate. The torpedoes’ plasma warheads tore the lightly-armoured destroyers apart, transforming them into expanding clouds of gas and debris in a single instant. Horus’s rebels had claimed first blood.

The surviving ships passed through the remnant gases of the intercepted torpedoes, wreathing their void shields with streamers of plasma and temporarily fouling their auspex returns. Hungry for vengeance, their surveyor crews strained at their scopes, searching for engine telltales amidst the storm of interference. Moments passed; points of heat swelled like stars in the radioactive haze. Ranges and vectors were calculated and relayed down to the torpedomen, who entered the data into their deadly charges. While the enemy pickets were still trying to reload their tubes, the scouts launched a torpedo salvo of their own.

By this time, the two formations were at extreme weapons range, and the enemy pickets were faced with a dilemma: fire at the oncoming Stormbirds, the torpedo salvo or the scout squadrons behind them. The flotilla commander was forced to make a split-second decision, ordering all gun batteries to target the scouts and leaving the rest to the flak guns.

It was a brave but costly tactic. The Stormbirds reached the pickets first, each squadron orientating on a target and thundering in at full power. Explosive shells and mega laser bolts hammered at the oncoming assault craft, but the heavily-armoured Stormbirds pressed on through the barrage. Here and there an enemy shot struck home; engines exploded or cockpits were shattered by direct hits, but the rest continued their attack. They swept in low across the destroyers’ upper decks, pummelling their hull and superstructure with cannon fire and melta rockets. Four of the pickets staggered out of formation, their bridges smashed and their decks ablaze.

Seconds later the Imperial torpedoes struck. Seven of them hit their targets, blowing the rebel destroyers apart. The four surviving ships plunged onwards, doggedly trading blow for blow with the scout squadrons. Their void shields blazed beneath a rain of explosive shells and ravening lance beams as they plunged into the Imperial formation. At such close range the gunners could scarcely miss their targets; one by one the shields of the rebel ships failed and the concentrated Imperial fire ripped them open from stem to stern.

But Horus’s ships and their veteran crews died hard. They concentrated their fire on the survivors of Destroyer Squadron Twelve, pouring fire into Rapier and Courageous. The void shields of the two destroyers collapsed beneath the onslaught; Courageous died a moment later as a shell found its way into her main reactor. Rapier fought on a few seconds more, destroying one of the picket ships with her last salvo, before an enemy shell detonated in her torpedo magazine.

Forty seconds had passed since the rebels’ first salvo. Captain Ivers, master of the light cruiser Formidable, sent a terse vox to the flagship: the way to Diamat was clear.

‘Increase speed,’ Jonson ordered, watching the telltales update on the tactical plot. They were less than a quarter of a million kilometres from Diamat now, well within range of the battle group’s surveyor arrays, and they were getting positional updates on the enemy fleet in real time.

It had been more than an hour since the initial engagement against the rebel pickets. The Stormbirds had been recovered and were being rearmed for another sortie. Nemiel had expected that the surviving escorts would be withdrawn as well, but Jonson had instead sent the depleted force on a roundabout course that threatened to swing around the far left flank of the enemy squadrons that had weighed anchor and were forming a battle line between Jonson’s force and the planet. The rebel transports were still in high orbit above Diamat, surrounded by a protective cordon of eight cruisers.

Nemiel felt the rumble of the battle-barge’s thrusters reverberate through the deck plates as the Invincible Reason went to maximum acceleration. The battle-barge and her flanking strike cruisers had adopted a wedge formation, presenting themselves as primary targets to the rebel ships. The Legion ships, designed to force their way through a hostile planet’s defence network and deploy their landing companies, were even more heavily armoured than typical ships of the line. Jonson calculated that the enemy ships would focus the majority of their fire on the battle-barge, buying his other ships precious seconds to close to effective firing range.

‘Any response to our hails?’ Jonson asked Captain Stenius. They had been trying to raise the Imperial authorities on Diamat as soon as they had come within vox range.

Stenius shook his head. ‘Nothing yet,’ he replied. ‘There’s signs of heavy ionization in the atmosphere, though, so we might not get a signal through until we reach orbit.’

‘Atomics?’ the primarch asked.

The captain nodded. ‘It looks like the rebels have launched dozens of orbital strikes, likely targeting troop concentrations and defence installations.’

‘Have the rebels succeeded in reaching the forges?’ Nemiel asked.

‘If not, they must be very close,’ Jonson said. ‘Otherwise those transports would have broken orbit as soon as we were detected.’ He nodded his head at the telltales representing the escorting cruisers. ‘They also wouldn’t have left behind such a strong reserve force to guard them unless they already contained something valuable, so we have to assume that the enemy has at least managed to breach a number of the planet’s secondary forges. If there are any defence forces still in action, they will be concentrated around the primary forge complex and Titan foundry.’

‘Titans?’ Nemiel asked. ’There is a legion based at Diamat?’

Jonson nodded. ‘Legio Gladius,’ he replied. ‘Unfortunately, their engines are embarked with the 1127th Expeditionary Fleet, far to the galactic south. On Horus’s orders, I might add.’

‘What does that leave the defenders with?’

The primarch paused, consulting his memory. ‘Eight regiments of Tanagran Dragoons, plus two armoured regiments and several battalions of heavy artillery.’

Nemiel nodded. It was an impressive array of force. He wondered how much of it still survived. ‘What forces can the forges muster?’

Jonson shrugged. ‘An unknown number of Mechanicum troops. The scions of Mars are not obliged to share the secrets of their defences.’ He paused, studying the plot for several moments before straightening and shaking his head. ‘It’s looking unlikely that the rebels will detach any units from their main body to try and intercept our escorts. They’ll trust the reserve cruisers to keep them at bay, which leaves us facing no less than twelve ships of the line.’

‘Ten minutes to contact,’ Stenius announced. ‘Orders, my lord?’

‘Are the Stormbirds ready for another sortie?’ Jonson asked.

‘We have two squadrons ready for launch, and Amadis reports that they have one squadron standing by. Adzikel has a fire in her hangar bay from a crash-landed Stormbird. They estimate another fourteen minutes before they can resume flight operations.’

‘The battle will be over in ten,’ Jonson growled. ‘Very well, signal the scout force and order them to ready torpedoes and prepare for a course change on my mark. Transmit the same signal to the main force, and add that no ship is to fire until ordered.’

Stenius bowed curtly and began barking orders across the strategium. On the tactical plot the distance between the two fleets was dwindling rapidly. They would be in extreme weapons range within moments. Nemiel thought back to the savagery of the initial engagement and prepared himself for the coming storm.

The main body of the enemy fleet was centred on four grand cruisers; at this range the officers aboard the flagship had positively identified them as the Avenger-class grand cruisers Forinax and Leonis, and the Vengeance-class ships Castigator and Vindicare. To either flank of this powerful group of ships were arrayed a squadron of four cruisers each: a mix of Crusaders, their hulls bristling with weapon batteries, and swift, lance-armed Armigers. Against such a force, the Dark Angels had their battle-barge and two strike cruisers, plus the Avenger-class grand cruisers Iron Duke and Duchess Arbellatris and the Infernus-class heavy cruisers Flamberge and Lord Dante. Though the rebels had a clear edge in numbers and firepower, they no longer had any ships capable of launching torpedoes – a slim advantage that Jonson intended to capitalise on.

The seconds ticked by. Captain Stenius watched the readouts on the tactical plot. ‘We’re at extreme torpedo range,’ he announced.

‘Not yet,’ Jonson ordered. He watched the scout force slip past the main body of the rebel fleet, still accelerating towards Diamat and the vulnerable transports.

Stenius nodded. ‘Two minutes to extreme firing range.’

‘Any signals from the planet’s surface?’ Jonson asked.

‘Negative,’ the captain replied.

‘Very well.’ Jonson turned to Nemiel. ‘If we don’t hear anything from the governor or his defence forces by the time we reach orbit, I’m going to send the landing force down around the main forge complex. Your orders will be to secure the forge and eliminate any rebel troops in the area. Clear?’

‘Clear, my lord,’ Nemiel answered at once.

The battle group sped onwards, straight into the guns of the waiting rebel ships. Two minutes later the Aegis Officer called out, ‘Incoming fire!’

‘All ships brace for impact!’ the primarch ordered.

Lance beams leapt from the prows of the rebel cruisers, raking the void with searing beams of force. They slashed across the prow of the Invincible Reason and the two strike cruisers, causing their shields to flare with incandescent fury. Violet light blazed beyond the reinforced viewports of the bridge and a powerful blow resounded through the hull of the great ship.

‘Hull breach, deck twelve, frame sixty-three!’ the Aegis Officer called out. ‘No casualties reported.’

Captain Stenius accepted the news with a curt nod. ‘Do we return fire?’ he asked the primarch.

‘Not yet,’ Jonson replied. He was studying the readout on the plot intently. ‘Signal the scout force – come about to new heading one-two-zero and commence torpedo runs on rebel grand cruisers.’

The Astartes ships ploughed through glowing clouds of plasma and vaporised deck plating as they continued to close on the rebel ships. As they closed to optimum firing range the enemy force began a slow turn to starboard so they could bring their fearsome broadsides to bear on the Imperial ships. But as they began their turn, Nemiel saw the scouts begin their course change. The nimble escorts swung around in a tight arc directly behind the enemy ships, their presence hidden by the rebels’ own reactor emissions.

The trap had been sprung. Jonson smiled coldly. ‘Signal Amadis and Adzikel – target enemy grand cruisers and launch torpedoes. Captain Stenius, you may fire at will.’

More lance shots leapt from the rebel ships, and now the enemy weapon batteries were going into action as well, hurling streams of blazing shells at the oncoming Imperials. At the same time, torpedoes leapt from the tubes of the Astartes ships and the oncoming scout vessels, bracketing the rebel grand cruisers from both fore and aft.

Heavy blows pummelled the battle-barge to port and starboard. Alarms wailed. ‘Multiple hits, decks five through twenty!’ the Aegis Officer called out. ‘Fire on deck twelve!’

‘Signal the main force,’ Jonson said calmly. ‘New course three-zero-zero. All units, target enemy cruisers to port. Fire at will.’

Wreathed in a maelstrom of fire, the Imperial ships swung ponderously to port, aiming away from the centre of the enemy formation and instead towards the four rebel cruisers on the enemy’s flank. Along the dorsal gun decks of the battle-barge, enormous turrets slowly traversed, bringing their massive bombardment cannons to bear on an Armiger-class cruiser. At the same time the battle-barge’s starboard weapons batteries went into action, hammering at the rebel ship’s void shields with a hail of macro cannon shells. The enemy cruiser’s shields flickered angrily under the relentless barrage before collapsing entirely. At the same time her lance batteries lashed at the Invincible Reason, raking her void shields from stem to stern. Beams of force pierced the defensive field and clawed through the barge’s armoured hull.

Seconds later the battle-barge replied with a rolling salvo from her bombardment cannons. They boomed through the hull like war drums, each one growing louder as the volley marched closer to the bridge. The shells glowed as they sped through the void and smashed into the flanks of the rebel ship. Nemiel watched in awe as a series of massive explosions rippled through the cruiser’s decks, until finally it blew apart in a flare of escaping plasma.

Farther away, the grand cruisers at the centre of the enemy formation were reeling beneath the blows of Imperial torpedoes that struck them both fore and aft. The Forinax staggered out of the formation, her bridge aflame, while the Castigator saw most of her starboard gun decks smashed by a trio of powerful hits. The scout force reduced speed and continued their run behind the rebels, lashing at the enemy ships with their weapon batteries and energy lances.

The Imperial ships plunged through the rebel formation, exchanging thunderous broadsides with the enemy. The smaller cruisers suffered greatly under the punishing blows of Jonson’s larger ships; a Crusader received a broadside from both the Amadis and the Iron Duke that ripped her open and left her a burning hulk, while the second Armiger blew apart in another massive fireball as her reactor core was breached. Lances and shells hammered the Imperial ships as well; the flagship and the strike cruisers bore the brunt of the enemy fire, their armoured hulls riddled with multiple impacts and the glowing tracks of lance hits. Duchess Arbellatris staggered beneath a hail of fire; her hastily-repaired hull plating gave way beneath the onslaught, wracking the proud vessel with devastating internal explosions that left her drifting out of control. Flamberge and Lord Dante suffered as well, their upper decks and superstructure smashed by a hail of enemy shells, but the battered heavy cruisers held their course and returned fire with every weapon they had left.

The exchange lasted barely fifteen seconds, though to Nemiel it seemed like an eternity. The void was rent with fire and streams of blazing debris. Ships and men died in the blink of an eye before the two forces drew away from one another on opposite courses. The scout force continued to harry the rebels as they sped away and began a slow turn to re-engage the Imperial battle group.

‘Damage report!’ Jonson ordered. The Invincible Reason shuddered like a wounded beast as she sped on towards Diamat. The air in the strategium was growing hazy with smoke as fires spread throughout the ship.

Captain Stenius was bent over the Aegis Officer’s station, his augmetic lenses glowing green in the reflected light of the flickering readouts. ‘All ships report moderate to severe damage,’ he replied. ‘Duchess Arbellatris is not responding to signals. Flamberge and Lord Dante report heavy casualties. Iron Duke and Amadis have both sustained damage to their thrusters, and Amadis also reports that her flak batteries are out of action. Repairs are under way.’

‘What about us?’ the primarch said. ‘How hard were we hit?’

Stenius grimaced. ‘Our armour stopped the worst of it, but we’ve got hull breaches all over the ship and a fire raging on three decks. The torpedo deck reports that the forward tubes are fouled, but they’re working to clear them.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s not good, but it could have been much worse.’

Jonson smiled grimly. ‘Don’t tempt fate, captain. We’re not finished yet. Signal the main force to alter course to three-three-zero and launch the Stormbirds. We’ll head straight for those transports and see if we can force them to weigh anchor. I’m betting the reserve force will opt to disengage rather than risk those ships.’

He turned to Nemiel. ‘Brother, it’s time you made your way to the drop pods. We’ll be over Diamat in another ten minutes.’

Four

Uncertain Allegiances

There was an ill wind blowing through the halls of Aldurukh, and Zahariel feared he was the only one who felt it.

The courtyard was much the same as it had been when he was a young aspirant; the white paving stones were kept spotlessly clean, the more to highlight the dark grey stone of the spiral that had been laid there many hundreds of years before. The Order had used it as a training tool, incorporating the curving lines into their sword routines and close-order drills, but Brother-Librarian Israfael claimed that its significance was far more ancient. ‘Walk the Labyrinth and meditate daily,’ he told his students. ‘Fix your eyes upon the path, and it will help to focus your mind.’

Zahariel walked the spiral with slow, deliberate steps, his head covered by a deep woollen cowl and his hands tucked into the sleeves of his surplice. His eyes followed the endlessly curving line of dark stone, no longer truly seeing what was before him. The Librarian’s mind was turned inward, buffeted by an unseen storm.

He could feel the energies of the warp whipping about him like a gusting breeze, angry and turbulent. Israfael had warned him on the trip back from Sarosh that the winds of the warp were far stronger on Caliban than any other world he’d ever visited, and the senior Librarian had spent considerable time studying the phenomenon in the years since they’d returned. From Zahariel’s own observations, it seemed that the energies surrounding the vast fortress had grown increasingly agitated over the past few months. He knew from his training that the warp was sensitive to strong emotions – particularly the darker passions of fear, sadness and hate. Given the troubling events that were occurring beyond the walls of Aldurukh, the rising wind felt like an omen of things to come.

The civil unrest spreading across Caliban baffled and troubled Zahariel, all the more so because it had evidently been building for a long time. He was dismayed to discover that the clues had been there all along. After learning of the situation from Luther, he had spent every free moment sifting through the vast message archives in the fortress’s library. The Imperium operated and maintained Caliban’s fast-growing vox and data networks, and every bit of message traffic – from personal calls to news broadcasts – were captured and archived as standard procedure. So far he’d managed to work his way back through several years’ worth of data, and his Astartes training had taught him exactly what to look for. The patterns were obvious to one educated in the myriad ways of waging war.

There was an insurrection spreading across Caliban. It was well-organised, well-equipped and growing bolder with each passing day. It hadn’t been going on for months, or even a year, as Luther claimed, but possibly as long as a decade.

Whoever was behind the unrest had been very careful, starting with small disturbances in scattered settlements and slowly expanding as their skill and experience increased. Reports of industrial accidents at weapon manufactories and other industrial sites had been written off in the past as the unfortunate consequence of a highly aggressive expansion program, but now Zahariel wondered how many of these accidents had actually been staged to cover up the theft of weapons and other military-grade equipment. Investigations by Munitorum officials and the local constabulary had been perfunctory at best, but the Imperial bureaucracy on Caliban was overworked and undermanned and there was good reason to believe that the planet’s law enforcement organisation had been compromised. There was certainly enough evidence to indicate that the constabulary had been covering up the extent of the problem for a long time, but yet…

How could Luther not have known?

The ghostly pressure of the warp vanished, like a snuffed candle. Zahariel paused, took a deep breath, and tried to regain his focus once more.

It seemed inconceivable to him that Luther had missed the signs for so long. He was justly famous for his intellect, one of the very few on Caliban who could converse with Jonson on an almost equal footing. Zahariel knew that Luther monitored the reports of the Administratum, the local militia and the constabulary as a matter of course – it was part of his duties as the Master of Caliban. If the threat was obvious to him, it should have been glaringly so to a man like Luther. The implications were disturbing, to say the least.

Zahariel wished there was someone he could talk to about his concerns. More than once he’d been tempted to bring the matter up with Brother Israfael, but the Librarian’s stern and aloof demeanour had persuaded him against it. The only other member of the Legion he felt he could talk to had been Master Ramiel, and now he was gone.

The young Librarian cast his eyes skyward and found himself wishing, once again, that Nemiel had been sent home as well. Zahariel thought his cousin could be overly cynical at times, but right now he needed a pragmatic perspective more than anything else. As much as he wanted to believe that Luther was still a noble and virtuous knight at heart, Zahariel had a sacred duty to his Legion, his primarch, and above all, the Emperor himself. If there was corruption within the ranks he was obligated to do something about it, regardless of who might be involved, but he had to be absolutely certain before he took action. Morale among the brothers was tenuous enough as it was.

Once again, Zahariel breathed deeply and tried to focus once more on his meditations. He closed his eyes, summoning up the mental rotes that Israfael had taught him, if only to drive away the worries that gnawed at his heart. He ruthlessly pushed conscious thought aside and emptied his mind.

The ghostly wind gusted once more, surprising him with its strength. Invisible and insubstantial, it nevertheless pushed roughly against him. The force of it rocked him back on his heels; without thinking, he opened his eyes and found himself staring into the face of the storm.

A pale blue glow suffused the courtyard, similar to moonlight but roiling like oil. Wild currents swirled and eddied around him, outlined in shades of black and grey; if he focused on them, they took on patterns that plucked uncomfortably at his mind. A faint, discordant moaning filled his head. The intensity of the vision startled the young Librarian for an instant. His concentration faltered – yet the sensations grew stronger.

Dark, hooded figures stirred at the edges of his sight, and then a voice, alien and yet chillingly familiar, echoed in his mind.

Remember your oath to us.

Zahariel let out a startled cry and spun on his heel, seeking the source of the voice. Memories of his quest for the Beast of Endriago, more than fifty years past, flooded back to him in an instant. He remembered wandering into a remote part of the forest more haunted and evil than he had ever known before, and the strange, hooded creatures who had confronted him there.

His hearts pounding wildly, Zahariel searched the courtyard’s shadows for the Watchers in the Dark. The blue glow and the angry wind vanished from one blink to the next, and when his vision cleared, he found himself staring across the courtyard at the pensive figure of Luther. The Master of Caliban was studying Zahariel intently.

‘Is something wrong, brother?’ Luther said quietly. His voice was full of concern, but the knight’s expression was inscrutable.

Zahariel mastered himself quickly, controlling the flow of adrenaline and lowering his heart rate with a few controlled breaths. ‘Brother-Librarian Israfael would reprimand me for letting someone catch me unawares while I was meditating,’ he said. It shocked him how quickly the lie came to his lips.

Silence fell between the two warriors. Luther studied Zahariel for a long moment, then smiled ruefully. ‘We’ve all got a lot on our minds these days, haven’t we?’

‘More so than ever before,’ Zahariel managed to say.

Luther nodded in agreement. He crossed the courtyard quickly, his manner formal but his expression still guarded. ‘I’ve been looking all over the fortress for you,’ he said.

Zahariel frowned. ‘Why didn’t you contact me on the vox?’

‘Because some conversations don’t belong on the network,’ Luther replied in a low voice. ‘I’m about to attend a very important meeting, and I want you there as well.’

The Librarian’s frown deepened. ‘Of course,’ he replied at once. Then, more hesitantly, he said, ‘The hour is very late, brother. What’s this about? Has something happened?’

Luther’s handsome face turned grim. ‘An hour ago, insurgents launched attacks on foundries, manufactories and Administratum buildings all over Caliban,’ he said. ‘Since then, riots have broken out in a number of arcologies, including the new one up in the Northwilds.’ His lip curled in an angry snarl. ‘The constabulary has been unable to deal with the crisis, so I’ve despatched ten regiments of Jaegers to restore order.’

The news stunned Zahariel. Suddenly, Luther’s decision to withhold the Legion’s reinforcements seemed almost prescient. The insurgency on Caliban had entered a dangerous new phase. His mind began to race, recalling reams of data on combat readiness, deployment times and logistics requirements for the legionaries and support units on-planet. ‘Will this be an operational meeting, or a strategic one?’ he asked. ‘I’ll need a few minutes to collect the proper data files.’

‘Neither,’ Luther replied. His expression became guarded. ‘The rebel leaders have been in contact with Lord Cypher. They want to meet with me under a flag of parley, and I’ve agreed. They’ll arrive within the hour.’

The shuttle was a standard Imperial design, anonymous and unnoticed amongst the hundreds of craft coming and going from the landing fields around Aldurukh. At precisely two hours past midnight, the transport touched down and lowered its landing ramp. Its engines subsided to an idle hum as five individuals moved quickly and purposefully down the ramp and crossed the permacrete towards the open doorway of a nearby hangar. They entered the cavernous space warily, scanning the deep shadows for potential threats. Finding none, the rebel leaders and their lone escort crossed to the centre of the building, where Luther and Zahariel stood in the glow of one of the hangar’s many floodlights.

Zahariel watched the traitors approach and tried to remain outwardly calm. His mind was in turmoil, torn between outrage and obedience. Luther’s decision to meet with the leaders of the insurrection shocked him to the core; it went against everything the Legion had taught him. Defiance of Imperial law demanded swift and ruthless action, without mercy or compromise. Negotiation of any kind was unthinkable, and threatened to undermine the Emperor’s authority. Entire worlds had been devastated for less.

But this wasn’t some strange, isolated planet like Sarosh. This was Caliban. These were his people, and Zahariel knew in his heart that they weren’t corrupt or evil. Perhaps that was what was foremost in Luther’s mind as well, he thought. It served no one, least of all the Emperor, if millions of innocent lives were lost thanks to the actions of a misguided few. And if anyone could convince these men to abandon their cause, it was Luther. So Zahariel told himself, and tried to master the doubts that gnawed at his heart.

The five figures each wore an aspirant’s hooded surplice, hiding their faces in shadow. None of them were armed, as the ancient traditions of parley demanded. As they stepped into the circle of light, Zahariel felt a rising pain in the back of his head. His vision wavered; the hooded figures seemed to double before his eyes, and the light flickered strangely. The Librarian screwed his eyes shut and used the rotes he’d learned from Israfael to try and clear his mind. When he opened them again, his vision was clear, but the pain refused to go away.

The rebel leaders drew back their hoods, one by one. Lord Cypher was in the lead, his expression flat and unreadable. The others Zahariel recognised with a mix of anger and dismay.

The first of the rebel leaders was Lord Thuriel, scion of a noble family in the southlands that still clung stubbornly to its last vestiges of wealth and power. Behind him came Lord Malchial, the son of a famous knight who had earned much renown during Jonson’s crusade against the great beasts. The fact that he and Thuriel had been bitter enemies for decades led Zahariel to wonder what could have possibly united them so.

After Malchial came another surprise: the third rebel leader was a woman. Lady Alera had inherited her title when all four of her brothers had been killed in the Northwilds, and under her leadership her household had prospered for a while. Now her fortunes were in decline, like all of Caliban’s noble families, but she remained a force to be reckoned with.

But the last of the rebels was the most surprising of all. Zahariel recognised the man’s ruined face at once: more than half a century ago, Sar Daviel had been among the knights who had stormed the fortress of the Knights of Lupus, and was one of the warriors who fought the terrible beasts that their foes had loosed upon the Order. A monster’s huge paw had crushed the right side of his face, caving in his cheekbone and bursting his eye. The creature’s talons had carved Daviel’s flesh down to the bone in five ragged arcs that stretched from his right ear all the way to his chin. By some miracle he’d survived the terrible wound, but when the Emperor had come and the Order had been absorbed into the Legion his request to join the ranks of the Astartes had been denied. The young knight had left Aldurukh soon after, and none knew what had become of him. Daviel was an old man now; his hair had grown white and his face was seamed with decades of hard living out on Caliban’s ever-shrinking frontier, but his rejuvenated body was still lean and strong for a man with more than a century behind him.

Thuriel caught sight of Zahariel, and the noble’s sharp, aristocratic features darkened with rage. He rounded on Cypher. ‘You assured us that only Luther would attend the parley,’ he snapped. Lady Alera and Lord Malchial cast suspicious looks at the Librarian’s tall, imposing form.

‘That’s not for Lord Cypher to decide,’ Luther replied in a steely tone. ‘Brother-Librarian Zahariel is my lieutenant – anything you say to me can be said to him as well.’ He folded his arms and stared forbiddingly at the rebels. ‘You requested this parley, so let’s hear what you have to say.’

The cool menace in Luther’s voice caused Lord Thuriel to pale slightly. Malchial and Alera looked uneasily at one another, but neither seemed willing to speak. Finally Sar Daviel let out an impatient growl and said, ‘We speak for the free peoples of Caliban, my lord, and we declare that the Imperial occupation must end.’

‘Occupation?’ Luther echoed, his voice faintly incredulous. ‘Caliban is an Imperial world now, governed and protected by the Emperor’s law and the might of the First Legion.’

‘Protected? More like conquered,’ Malchial interjected. ‘It was Lion El’Jonson who welcomed the Emperor – his father, if rumours be true – to Caliban and delivered the planet into his hands.’

‘For all we know, that was their plan all along,’ Lady Alera snapped. ‘It seems very convenient to me that Jonson arrives on Caliban under very mysterious circumstances, and then, just when he’s gained control of the planet’s knightly orders, the Emperor just happens to find him.’

‘That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,’ Zahariel snapped. ‘You people don’t know what you’re talking about! If you had any idea how vast the Imperium is–’

Luther cut off the Librarian with an upraised hand and a warning glance. ‘My lieutenant speaks out of turn,’ he said smoothly. ‘Nevertheless, your suspicions, Lady Alera, are groundless at best. As to you, Lord Malchial, how do you defend the assertion that my primarch delivered Caliban to the Emperor? Our own legends speak of Caliban’s ties to distant Terra. Now, thanks to the Emperor, those ties have been restored, and our planet has entered a new age of prosperity.’

‘Prosperity?’ Lord Thuriel snarled. The noble’s initial pallor had vanished beneath a swelling tide of outrage. ‘Is that what you call the wholesale plundering of our world? Perhaps if you’d stuck your head outside the walls of this spreading canker you call a fortress you’d see how Caliban suffers! Our forests are gone, our villages ploughed under, our mountains cracked open like nuts and scraped clean by huge mining machines! Noble families that fought and bled for their lands and their people for generations have been disinherited, their feudal subjects carried off and put to work in Imperial factories and mines. And the knightly orders who might have protected us from all of this have all been disbanded or–’ he glanced up at Zahariel’s giant form ‘–altered nearly beyond recognition.’

Zahariel’s fists clenched at the implied insult. Only Luther’s steady demeanour kept the Librarian’s anger in check and the rules of parley intact.

By contrast, the Master of Caliban folded his arms and chuckled softly. ‘And now we get to the heart of things,’ he said with a mirthless grin. He indicated the rebel leaders with a sweep of his hand. ‘Your grievances are personal, not collective. You’re not rebelling for the sake of your feudal subjects, as you call them, but because you’ve lost the wealth and power your families have hoarded over the centuries. Do you imagine that the majority of our people would actually want to become peasant farmers once more? The Emperor has completed the process that Jonson began here with the Order – providing safety, security and above all, equality for everyone, regardless of their class or station.’

Lady Alera looked pointedly from Luther to Zahariel and back again. ‘Clearly some people are more equal than others,’ she said.

Luther shook his head, refusing to take the bait. ‘Appearances can be deceiving,’ he replied evenly.

‘Indeed they can,’ Sar Daviel said, stepping to the front of the group. ‘Look at me, brother. I’m no pampered earl’s son. I earned these scars by your side in the Northwilds, serving Jonson’s vision. And how was I rewarded?’

Luther sighed. ‘Brother, it was nothing more than cruel fate that kept you from the ranks of the Legion. Your injuries were too severe to permit the process of transformation, just as I was too advanced in years. It was your decision to leave. You still had a place at Aldurukh.’

‘Doing what?’ Daviel shot back. ‘Polishing the armour of my betters? Scurrying through the halls like a pageboy?’ Tears shone at the corners of his remaining eye. ‘I’m a knight, Luther. That used to mean something. It meant something to you, once upon a time. You were the greatest among us, and frankly it kills me to see how Jonson has used you all these years.’

Zahariel saw Luther stiffen slightly. Daviel’s blow had struck home.

‘Have a care, brother,’ Luther said, his voice subdued. ‘You presume too much. Jonson united this world. He saved us from the threat of the beasts. I could never have done that.’

But Daviel didn’t waver. He held Luther’s gaze without flinching. ‘I think you could have,’ he replied. ‘Jonson could never have convinced the other knightly orders to support his crusade against the beasts. You did that. The plan might have been his, but you were the one who rallied an entire world behind it. The truth is that Jonson owes you everything. And look how he has repaid you. He’s cast you aside, just like me.’

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about!’ Luther snarled, his voice sharp with anger.

‘Not so,’ Daviel said, shaking his head sadly. ‘I was there, brother. I watched it happen. When I was a child, my greatest ambition was to become a knight and ride at your side. I know what a great man you are, even if no one on Caliban still remembers. Jonson knows, too. How could he not? You raised him like a son, after all. And now he’s left you behind, like the rest of us.’

Lady Alera stepped forward. ‘What has the Imperium truly given us? Yes, the forests are gone, and with them the beasts, but now our people have been herded into arcologies and put to work in manufactories or recruited to serve in the Imperial Army. Every hour of every day we see a little more of ourselves carved away and carried off into the stars, to serve a cause that doesn’t benefit us in the least.’

‘You can scorn the old ways if you wish, Luther,’ Lord Thuriel added, ‘but before the creation of the Order, the noble houses provided the knights that fought and died for the peasantry. Yes, we took our due, but we gave back as well. We served in our own way. How do Jonson and the Emperor serve us? They take the very best of what we have and give little or nothing in return. Surely you of all people can see that.’

‘I see nothing of the kind,’ Luther answered, but his expression had grown clouded. ‘What about medicines, or better education? What about art and civilization?’

Malchial snorted derisively. ‘Medicines and education that make us better labourers, you mean. And what good are art or entertainments when you’re too busy slaving in a manufactory to appreciate them?’

‘Do you imagine ours is the only world called upon to contribute to the Great Crusade?’ Luther replied. ‘Zahariel is right. If you only knew the scope of the Emperor’s undertaking.’

‘What we know is that we’re being impoverished for the sake of people we don’t know and have never seen,’ Thuriel countered.

‘We’ve had our culture and traditions taken from us,’ Daviel interjected. ‘And now our people are in greater danger than ever before.’

Luther frowned. ‘What is that supposed to mean?’ he asked, some of the anger returning to his voice.

Daviel started to answer, but Malchial cut him off. ‘It means that Caliban’s suffering will continue to worsen under Imperial rule. The question is whether or not you will stand by and allow it to happen.’

‘You’re not our enemy, Sar Luther,’ Lady Alera said. ‘We know you’re a brave and honourable man. Our fight is with the Imperium, not with you or your warriors.’

Zahariel stepped forward. ‘We are servants of the Emperor, my lady.’

‘But you’re also sons of Caliban,’ the noble countered. ‘And this is your world’s darkest hour.’

‘Join us, brother,’ Sar Daviel said to Luther. ‘You’ve denied your destiny for too long. Embrace it at last. Remember what it was like to be a knight and ride to your people’s defence.’

‘Defence?’ Zahariel said. ‘It’s you who have taken up arms against your fellow citizens. Even now your rebels are fighting constabulary officers and Jaegers all across the planet, and innocent people are suffering in the riots you’ve spawned.’ He turned angrily to Luther. ‘You can see what they’re trying to do, can’t you? If we move quickly our battle-brothers can crush this revolt in a matter of hours. Don’t let them play on your jealousies–’

Luther rounded on Zahariel. ‘That’s enough, brother,’ he said, his voice as hard as iron. The sharp tone brought the Librarian up short. The Master of Caliban glared at him a moment longer, then turned back to the rebels.

‘This parley is finished,’ he declared. ‘Lord Cypher will return you from whence you came. After that, you will have twenty-four hours to order your forces to cease all operations and turn themselves in to local authorities.’

The rebel leaders glared angrily at Luther, all except for Daviel, who shook his head sadly. ‘How can you do this?’ he said.

‘How can you think I wouldn’t?’ Luther shot back. ‘If you think I hold my honour so cheaply, then you’re no brother of mine,’ he said. ‘You have twenty-four hours. Use them wisely.’

Thuriel turned to Lady Alera and Lord Malchial. ‘You see? I told you this was pointless.’ He shot a venomous look at Lord Cypher. ‘We’re ready to leave,’ the noble said, and headed swiftly for the waiting shuttle. One by one, the rebel leaders fell in behind Thuriel and walked out into the pre-dawn darkness. Zahariel felt tension drain from the muscles in his neck as the pain in his head began to ease. He made a mental note to ask Israfael about the episodes. Whatever was causing them, they were clearly getting worse.

Luther walked along behind the departing rebels, his expression lost in thought. After a moment, Zahariel followed. Part of him wanted to insist that Luther arrest the rebel leaders on the spot – the parley was a convention of Caliban’s rules of warfare, not those of the Imperium, so the Legion wasn’t truly bound by it. But another part of his mind warned that he’d already overstepped his bounds with Luther, and Zahariel was uncertain what might happen if he pressed further.

The engines of the shuttle rose to a pulsing roar as the rebels hurried to the waiting ramp. Zahariel stopped just outside the hangar, but Luther continued on, escorting the leaders across the permacrete.

Daviel was the last to board the shuttle. At the bottom of the ramp he turned to regard Luther. Zahariel could see the old knight say something to the Master of Caliban, but his voice was lost in the shriek of the shuttle’s turbines.

When Daviel had disappeared inside the shuttle, Luther turned and made his way back to the hangar. Behind him, the transport lifted off in a cloud of dust and sped off westward, racing ahead of the dawn.

Zahariel watched Luther approach, and braced himself for a sharp rebuke. The knight’s face was deeply troubled. When he reached the Librarian’s side, he turned to watch the dwindling lights of the shuttle’s thrusters and sighed. ‘We should get back to the strategium,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a lot of work to do.’

The Librarian nodded. ‘You don’t think they’ll heed your warning?’

‘No, of course not,’ Luther replied. ‘But the words needed to be said, nonetheless.’ After a moment he added, ‘Best we kept this meeting to ourselves, brother. I would not want any misunderstandings to impact morale.’

Zahariel knew an order when he heard one. He nodded curtly and watched the shuttle disappear from sight. ‘What was it that Sar Daviel said to you, just before he left?’ he asked, keeping his voice carefully neutral.

Luther stared out into the darkness. ‘He said that Jonson betrayed us all. The forests are gone, but the monsters still remain.’

Five

Into the Cauldron

Nemiel reached the midships ordnance deck at a dead run, his helmet locked in place and counting the seconds he had left until the battle-barge entered Diamat’s atmosphere. Already he could feel the rhythmic thunder of the ship’s gun batteries rumbling through the deck plates beneath his feet, which meant that the battle group was trading fire with the enemy reserve squadron. Jonson was racing forward with his ships as quickly as he could to deploy his Astartes onto the beleaguered forge world, and Nemiel had no intention of keeping the primarch waiting.

Thick, heavy steel hatches were clanging shut in rapid succession along the length of the cavernous drop bay as the assault pods were sealed into their launch tubes like oversized torpedoes. Only one pod still sat in its loading cradle, poised above the last of the portside launch tubes. A single hatch was still open, red light spilling down the steel ramp from the cocoon-like re-entry compartment within.

A single, heavy blow rang sharply through the bulkheads; an enemy shell had penetrated the flagship’s armour and detonated on one of the decks above. There was an ordnance crew waiting for Nemiel at the foot of the open pod; they followed him up the ramp, ensured he was locked into the re-entry harness and fitted a series of data cables to interface plugs set into his armour’s helmet and power plant. They completed their tasks in just a few seconds and retreated from the pod without a single word. Nemiel barely noticed – he was already tapping into the fleet command net through the pod’s vox array.

Readouts flickered coldly across the lenses of his helmet. Icons of red and blue flared to life, silhouetted against the curve of a planet. At first he struggled to make sense of the torrent of information, but within a few seconds a coherent picture of the orbital battle took shape. The reserve squadron had formed a wall of steel between the heavy cargo carriers and Jonson’s onrushing ships. The Dark Angels Stormbirds, however, had already raced past the rebel cordon and were even now launching strafing runs on the largely defenceless transports. With the Duchess Arbellatris out of action, Jonson was left with just six ships against eight undamaged enemy cruisers, but the rebel ships were caught at anchor, with little room to manoeuvre against the fast-moving Astartes ships. A salvo of torpedoes was already speeding towards the rebel cruisers’ flanks, and the battle-barge and her strike cruisers were well within range to open fire with their devastating bombardment cannons. So long as they were committed to protecting the transports, the cruisers were practically stationary targets for the battle group’s combined firepower.

No sooner had the ramp sealed shut over Nemiel’s re-entry compartment than the whole pod gave a grinding lurch and began to descend into its launch tube. Kohl’s gruff, sardonic voice reverberated from Nemiel’s vox-bead over the squad net. ‘Good to have you join us, brother,’ he said sarcastically. ‘I was beginning to think you’d gotten lost.’

‘We can’t all spend our time lounging around in a drop pod, sergeant,’ Nemiel said with a chuckle. The pod jolted to a stop with a loud clang, then came the thud of the hatch sealing overhead. ‘Some of us have to do proper work so you can live this life of leisure.’

A chorus of deep voices laughed quietly over the vox. Nemiel smiled and glanced over the status readouts of Kohl’s Astartes. All nine of the warriors showed green on the display, which was no less than he expected. He had fought alongside them for so long that he’d come to think of them as his own squad, and much preferred their jibes over the deferential respect that most other members of the Legion afforded him.

Kohl began to growl a retort but was cut off by a priority signal over the fleet command channel. ‘Battle Force Alpha, this is command,’ Captain Stenius called over the vox. ‘We are thirty seconds from orbital insertion–’ a hollow boom echoed through the battle-barge’s hull and the signal broke up into squealing static for a second ‘–are now in contact with Imperial forces on the ground. Inloading new drop coordinates and tactical data to your onboards now. Stand by.’

Seconds later the schematic of the orbital battle disappeared, replaced by a detailed map of a battle-scarred city and the outlying districts of a massive forge complex. The city – identified in the image as Xanthus, Diamat’s capital – was built along the shore of a restless, slate-grey ocean, and stretched for dozens of kilometres north and south along the rocky coastline. Twenty kilometres east of the city outskirts, far inland along a desolate plain of black rock and drifts of red oxide, rose the conical slopes of a massive volcano that lay at the heart of the Mechanicum’s primary forge on Diamat. Many hundreds of years in the past, the scions of Mars had bored into the corpus of the dormant volcano and tapped the geothermal energies within, fuelling the vast smelters, foundries and manufactories that surrounded it. At the far edge of the great plain, the city sprawl and the forge’s warehouse complexes met. Squalid subsids and reeking shanty towns fetched up hard against a towering permacrete wall that separated the orderly world of the Mechanicum from the haphazard lives of ordinary humans.

Nemiel took it all in, absorbing every detail with his keenly-trained mind. Icons blinked into life across this grey zone between the city proper and the great forge: blue for the units of the Tanagran Dragoons, and red for Horus’s traitors. It took only a moment for the Redemptor to realise that the situation on the ground was desperate indeed.

Xanthus proper had been subjected to prolonged orbital bombardment over the course of several weeks. The city centre was a burnt-out wasteland, and the great, artificial bay of the harbour district was dotted with the hulls of hundreds of broken or capsized ships. To the south-east of the city, connected by tramways to both the city and the great forge complex, lay the planet’s primary star port. The port was firmly in rebel hands. Nemiel counted six heavy cargo haulers landed at the site, surrounded by rebel support units and at least a regiment of mechanised troops.

Rebel ground forces had been advancing up the tramway towards the forge complex with four infantry regiments and approximately a regiment of heavy armour, and had apparently managed to break through an Imperial strongpoint covering the forge’s southern entrance. There was no data on enemy troop strength or Mechanicum defence forces inside the complex itself. Nemiel suspected that the data had all come from the Imperial forces on-planet, and they had no idea what was going on behind the walls of the Mechanicum preserve.

Blue icons were driving south and east through the grey zone towards the rebels along the tramway – two under-strength regiments supported by a battalion of armour, trying to hit the rebels in the flank and drive them away from the forge. It was a valiant attempt, but the rebels had already stymied the Imperial counter-attack along a rough front some five kilometres north of the tramway.

‘Ten seconds to orbital insertion,’ Captain Stenius said over the vox. ‘Battle Force Alpha, stand by for drop.’

Glowing blue circles appeared on the tactical map, showing the landing zone for the drop. The two companies would come down in a chain of foothills that bordered the very southern edge of the plain, some two kilometres south of the rebel-held tramway. The strategy from there was obvious: the Astartes would advance north and strike the rebels from their other flank, cutting access to the tramway and trapping them against the Imperial forces further north. The elevated terrain south of the tramway provided excellent fields of fire and ample cover for the Dark Angels, allowing them to target the rebel forces at will. Once resistance along the tramway had been eliminated Nemiel reckoned that one company would remain to hold the road against reinforcements approaching from the star port, while the other company would enter the forge complex itself and hunt down any rebel forces operating there.

‘Five seconds. Four… three… two… one. Begin drop seq–’

A massive impact hammered into the Invincible Reason’s port side, hard enough to slam Nemiel against his re-entry harness, and everything went black.

Jonson had brought his battle group into Diamat at a fairly steep angle, intending to close with the rebels as rapidly as possible and deploy the landing force. Since the cruisers and the transports they guarded were in geo-synchronous orbits over Diamat’s main forge complex, this brought the two forces into point-blank range. Weapons batteries and lance turrets blazed away at the Imperial ships, which responded with a spread of torpedoes and the deadly bombardment cannons of the flagship and her strike cruisers.

The battle-barge was wreathed in a hail of explosions as she drove ever closer to the enemy battle-line. At the last moment, the Invincible Reason and her strike cruisers slewed to starboard, almost paralleling the enemy cruisers as the flagship prepared to release its drop pods.

Less than fifty kilometres to port – appallingly close range for a naval engagement – a rebel Armiger-class cruiser raked the battle-barge’s flank with its heavy lance batteries. Torpedo impacts had gouged deep craters in the Armiger’s hull, igniting fires deep in the bowels of the stricken cruiser.

The flagship’s bombardment cannons fired a rolling volley into the Armiger. At such close range, each and every shell found its mark. The giant rounds – five times the mass and explosive power of a standard macro cannon shell – punched through the cruiser’s armour and touched off a chain of catastrophic explosions inside the hull that overloaded the ship’s plasma reactor. The huge warship disintegrated in a tremendous explosion, hurling molten debris in every direction.

One piece of the destroyed cruiser – a hunk of armoured superstructure as large as a city block – smashed into the flagship’s port side just as she began her drop sequence. The Invincible Reason lurched to starboard under the tremendous impact, throwing off the precise manoeuvres directed by the ship’s ordnance officer. But it was too late to abort; the automatic sequence had activated and the pods were firing at a rate of two per second. Within ten seconds all two hundred Astartes had been launched, their pods scattering through the atmosphere over the battle zone.

The drop pod’s onboard power plant restarted a second after launch. Data displays flickered back to life and attitude thrusters fired, correcting the pod’s corkscrewing tumble through the atmosphere. It juddered and shook like a toy in a giant’s rough hands. Tortured air howled past the drop pod’s rudimentary stabilisers, but their vertiginous spiral finally ceased.

The flagship had been hit hard, Nemiel reckoned, which meant that they had likely been knocked outside their deployment envelope. He scanned the readouts quickly while the pod’s logic engines read its trajectory and projected its new landing point.

A yellow circle pulsed on the tactical map. Nemiel frowned. They were going to come down a few kilometres north of the tramway now, right into the middle of the rebel forces who were holding off the Imperial counterattack. That was going to complicate things. Nemiel checked the command frequency, but heard only static. Between the atmospheric ionization and the thick hulls of the drop pods, he wouldn’t be able to speak to Force Commander Lamnos until the Astartes had reached the ground.

The Redemptor switched over to the squad net. ‘Everyone still here?’ he called.

‘You were expecting us to go somewhere, brother?’ Kohl replied at once.

A new voice came over the vox, mellower than Kohl but just as amused. ‘I don’t know about the rest of you, but I could stand to stretch my legs,’ Askelon, their Techmarine, said with a chuckle. ‘All this lying about is bad for the circulation.’

‘Says the one who spends all his time with his head and shoulders buried in a maintenance bay,’ Kohl retorted.

‘Which makes me an authority on the subject, wouldn’t you agree?’ Askelon replied.

‘That’ll be the day,’ snorted Brother Marthes, the squad’s meltagunner. ‘The day Sergeant Kohl stops being disagreeable is the day he stops breathing.’

‘That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard,’ Kohl grumbled, and the squad laughed in reply.

The turbulence of re-entry rose to a bone-shaking crescendo and then held steady for a punishing nine-and-a-half minutes until a warning icon flashed on the display and the retro thrusters kicked in. The ordnance division aboard the flagship had programmed the pods to deploy their thrusters at the last possible moment, just in case there was a significant anti-aircraft threat over the drop zone. The jolt was akin to being kicked in the backside by a Titan, Nemiel mused.

An ear-splitting roar swelled up from beneath their feet as the thrusters flared to full power for three full seconds, right up to the point of impact. Nemiel felt another, much lesser jolt, and dimly heard a rending crash, then a series of small, sharp impacts reverberated through the pod’s hull before it finally came to rest.

Nemiel’s display blanked, flashing an urgent red. ‘Disengage and deploy!’ he shouted over the squad net, and hit the quick-release on his re-entry harness. There was a hiss and a rush of hot, reeking air as the ramp in front of him began to deploy – then stopped at roughly a sixty-degree angle. The hydraulics whined insistently, nearly shifting the pod’s bulk with the effort, before the safety interlocks kicked in and aborted the process.

At the back of his mind, Nemiel sensed that the deck beneath him was angled slightly. He growled with irritation, took a step forward and planted a foot against the ramp. He heard a crackle of masonry; the ramp rebounded slightly, then lowered another half a degree.

Acrid smoke and waves of heat were starting to penetrate the inside of the re-entry chamber. Nemiel heard muffled cursing over the vox-net as other members of the squad tried to force their own way out of the pod. He took hold of the entry frame with one hand and the ramp’s edge with the other and clambered up and out, then saw at once what had happened.

The pod had come down squarely atop a multi-storey hab unit, punching like a bullet through at least four or five floors before finally coming to rest in the building’s decrepit basement. Faint sunlight filtered down through the gaping hole of the floor above, all but occluded by clouds of increasingly thick smoke. The pod’s retro thrusters had set the building’s upper storeys ablaze.

Several of the pod’s ramps had managed to open fully, while others, like Nemiel’s, had been blocked by piles of debris. Brother-Sergeant Kohl was braced against the side of the pod and helping free Brother Vardus and his cumbersome heavy bolter.

Brother Askelon came around the side of the pod closest to Nemiel. His powerful servo arm deployed above his shoulder with a faint whine as he placed his feet carefully among the rubble. ‘Stand clear!’ he called, then opened the gripping claw of his arm and extended it against the side of the pod. Servo-motors hummed with gathering power. Askelon slid backwards a few centimetres; Nemiel stepped forward and tried to help brace him. Then, with a grating of powdered masonry and a groan of metal, the pod shifted slowly upright.

‘Well done, brother,’ Nemiel said, clapping the Techmarine on the shoulder as the pod’s ramps fully deployed. ‘Sergeant Kohl, find us a way out of here.’

‘Aye, Brother-Redemptor,’ Kohl answered, his tone all business now. He snapped orders to his squad, and the Astartes went to work. Already, Nemiel could hear the snap and crackle of lasgun fire outside, followed by the hollow bark of bolters.

Within seconds the squad was scrambling up a fallen slab of permacrete to reach the building’s ground floor. Flaming debris fell amongst the Astartes like stray meteors; small pieces clattered harmlessly off their armour. At ground level, Sergeant Kohl pulled an auspex unit from his belt and took a compass reading in the smoky haze. ‘Orders?’ he asked Nemiel.

The Redemptor made a snap decision. ‘We go north,’ he said to Kohl.

Kohl checked the glowing readout once more, nodded curtly, and headed off into the blackness. The Astartes didn’t bother fumbling about for a doorway – when he encountered an inner wall he barrelled right through the flimsy flakboard with scarcely a pause. In moments, the squad saw a large square of hazy light up ahead. Kohl led the squad through the window at a run, emerging onto the street outside in a shower of glittering glass shards and a billow of dirty grey smoke.

They were on a narrow avenue running roughly east-west through the grey zone. Piles of debris and dozens of blackened bodies dotted the road as far as Nemiel could see. Most of the buildings fronting the street were little more than hollowed-out shells, their facades blackened and cratered by small-arms fire. A smashed six-wheel military transport lay on its side a few dozen metres to the squad’s right, its tyres still burning. The air reverberated with the crackle and thump of weapons fire and the ominous whistle of mortar rounds arcing overhead.

The roar of petrochem engines echoed up a narrow cross-street just twenty metres to the squad’s left. Nemiel recognised the sound at once: Imperial military APCs, moving fast. It sounded like four vehicles – a full mechanised platoon.

‘Ambush pattern epsilon!’ He called out, waving half the squad to the opposite side of the street. Kohl followed after the warriors, his bolt pistol scanning for threats. Brother Vardus knelt behind a pile of blackened rubble to Nemiel’s immediate left, bracing his heavy bolter atop the pile. The Redemptor drew his bolt pistol and hit the activation stud on his crozius aquilum. The double-headed eagle atop the staff blazed with crackling blue energies.

The APCs reached the corner in seconds, rumbling fast up the cross-street towards the front line a few more kilometres north. They were lightly-armoured Testudo personnel carriers, armed with a turret autocannon and capable of transporting a full squad of troops. Their drivers were going all-out, kicking up thick plumes of black exhaust from their engine decks.

The Dark Angels had gone to ground with admirable speed and skill, concealing their presence behind piles of debris or in the entry niches of several ruined buildings. Just as the APCs appeared, one of the Astartes stepped out of cover and raised the muzzle of his stubby meltagun. Brother Marthes brought the anti-tank weapon to bear on the flank of the lead Testudo and touched the firing stud, unleashing a blast of high-intensity microwaves that converted the vehicle’s metal hull into superheated slag. The APC’s fuel tanks exploded in a ground-shaking whump, blowing the Testudo apart in a shower of blazing fragments.

Brother Vardus opened fire a second later, raking the rear Testudo with an extended burst of heavy bolter fire. The mass-reactive rounds exploded against the APC’s armoured hide and gouged craters in its solid tyres. Here and there the rounds found a seam in the armour plates and penetrated into the APC, wreaking bloody havoc on the men crammed within. The Testudo lurched to a stop, smoke pouring from the holes punched in its side.

The two middle APCs swerved left to try and avoid the burning wreck of the lead vehicle and escape the kill zone. Their turrets slewed to the right and spat a stream of high-calibre shells down the street, blasting more holes into the burnt-out buildings and digging up sprays of permacrete from the rubble piles. Brother Marthes switched his aim and fired at the next APC in line, but this time his shot went a little high, striking the vehicle’s small turret and ripping it open. Autocannon shells cooked off in the blast of heat, wreathing the Testudo’s upper deck in angry flashes of red, and the APC abruptly lost speed. The second Testudo, moving too fast to stop, rear-ended the damaged vehicle and spun it ninety degrees to the right, nearly flipping it over.

Vardus levelled the heavy bolter at the two immobilised APCs and hammered them with short, precise bursts. Nemiel watched the rear ramp of the second Testudo come down and raised his bolt pistol. As the panicked squad fled from the stricken vehicle, he and the rest of the squad cut them down with a volley of bolter fire. The last of the rebels had yet to hit the ground when Marthes fired another shot at the damaged APC, this time scoring a direct hit and immolating the men trapped inside.

It was a far cry from the old tales of chivalry he’d been taught on Caliban, Nemiel thought, surveying the carnage with clinical detachment. War was about butchery, plain and simple. Notions of glory came long afterward, he’d come to realise, imagined by those who had never seen the reality with their own eyes.

Nemiel’s vox-bead crackled to life. ‘All units, location and status check,’ Force Commander Lamnos said tersely.

Brother-Sergeant Kohl and two other squad members dashed down the street to check the wrecked vehicles and ensure there were no survivors. Nemiel called up a map of the landing zone on his tactical display and checked his coordinates. They’d come down just a kilometre and a half north of the tramway, close to the forge’s southern entrance. ‘This is squad Alpha Six. Status is green. Awaiting orders,’ he replied, providing their coordinates.

‘Affirmative, Alpha Six. Stand by,’ Lamnos answered at once. Less than a minute later the Force Commander came back. ‘Alpha Six, we’re getting a signal that Echo Four’s pod is down but failed to deploy. Enemy forces are closing in on Echo’s location from the south. Link up with Echo Four and ascertain its status immediately. Stand by for coordinates.’

Nemiel compared the coordinates to his tactical map. Echo Four had come down half a kilometre to the south-east, closer to the forge complex. ‘We’re on our way. Alpha Six out,’ he replied.

Kohl and his warriors returned from the killing ground. ‘There’s mechanised infantry with Testudo APCs coming up the street from the direction of the tramway,’ he reported.

‘They’ll have to wait,’ Nemiel said. ‘We’re heading east. Echo Four is in some kind of trouble – the pod probably came down inside another building, and the ramps won’t deploy. We’ve got to get there before the rebels do.’

Kohl nodded his helmeted head and addressed the squad. ‘Askelon, you wanted a nice walk in the sunshine, so don’t let me hear you crying if you can’t keep up. Brother Yung and Brother Cortus, you’re on point. Let’s move!’

Without a word the squad rose from cover and set off east down the street, their boltguns sweeping ahead and to the flanks in search of targets. Nemiel fell into step with Techmarine Askelon and Brother Marthes beside him, while Kohl and three other squad members brought up the rear. Farther east, the grey wall of the forge complex rose above the smoking ruins of the grey zone. Tall, blinking towers made a metal forest beyond that forbidding barrier, girding the flanks of the bound volcano at the heart of the Mechanicum’s domain. Plumes of orange and black smoke hung heavily about the complex, giving the place a nightmarish cast.

We came all this way to defend that? Nemiel grinned ruefully within the confines of his helmet. It hardly seemed like the kind of place worth dying for.

Six

Angels of Death

‘This is Epsilon Three-Niner Heavy, lifting from zone four! I’m taking fire!’

The panicked vox-transmission cut through the hectic buzz of conversation in the fortress strategium, tearing Zahariel’s attention from the glowing panes of after-action reports projected above his desk. Gritting his teeth, he blanked his hololith display and stepped swiftly from his office into the bustling chamber beyond.

It was mid-afternoon of the fourteenth day since the insurgents’ global campaign began and so far the violence showed no signs of abating. The strategium had been in constant operation ever since, staffed by a mix of Legion officers and aides and senior commanders of the Jaeger regiments in action across Caliban. The men and women of the Jaegers struggled to cope with the constantly shifting nature of the enemy attacks, and the pressure of maintaining civil order while simultaneously trying to come to grips with insurgent cells that avoided direct combat as much as possible. They consumed pots of bitter tea and stim capsules and tried to match the stoic calm of the Astartes that loomed in their midst, but he could feel their frustration as the cargo hauler’s distress call broadcast from the vox-unit across the room. Zahariel caught sight of Luther standing near the vox-unit, listening intently. So far as he knew, the Master of Caliban hadn’t left the strategium for days on end.

A new voice crackled over the vox as Zahariel worked his way across the chamber. He heard a Legion air defence controller say, ‘Epsilon Three-Niner Heavy, be advised, combat air patrol has been alerted and is vectoring on your position. Time to rendezvous is thirty seconds. What are you seeing?’

Epsilon’s civilian pilot came back over the vox at once. ‘My co-pilot says he’s seeing red flashes to the north, out beyond the perimeter. My starboard engine’s been hit. Temperature is spiking! I need to divert and make an emergency landing!’

‘Negative, Three-Niner Heavy,’ the controller shot back. ‘Increase speed and altitude. Do not, I repeat, do not attempt to land.’

Zahariel shook his head in irritation. The civilian pilots always tried to set their transports back down at the first sign of trouble, not realising that turning around and slowing down for landing only made them more vulnerable to ground fire. Thunder reverberated through the room as the combat air patrol roared past Aldurukh’s spires, heading north at full speed.

‘What are the rebels going after this time?’ Zahariel asked as he reached Luther’s side.

‘A Type II cargo hauler loaded with ten thousand tonnes of promethium,’ Luther replied grimly, his eyes fixed on the vox-unit’s grille. ‘They couldn’t have picked a better target.’

Zahariel’s eyes widened. Epsilon Three-Niner was, for all intents and purposes, a flying bomb. A direct hit on one of the pressurised promethium tanks in its cargo holds would turn the ship into a massive fireball, scattering wreckage and blazing fuel all over the northern landing zones. He thought of all the fuel substations and warehouses in that sector and tried to calculate the devastation such an explosion would cause.

The vox-unit crackled once more. This time, the deep voice of an Astartes sounded from the grille. ‘This is Lion Four – I’ve got a visual on Epsilon Three-Niner at this time. Stand by.’ Moments later, the pilot spoke again. ‘Contact! I’ve spotted a group of rebels operating a lascannon from the back of a civilian truck two kilometres outside the perimeter. Engaging now.’

‘Hurry up, Lion Four!’ shouted Epsilon Three-Niner. ‘We just got hit again!’

Lion Four didn’t respond. Seconds ticked by, and Zahariel realised the strategium had fallen silent. Then, moments later, the vox crackled once again.

‘This is Lion Four. Target destroyed. Repeat, target destroyed. Epsilon Three-Niner is clear.’

A relieved cheer went up from the Jaeger officers and Legion aides; any victory, however small, was worth celebrating under the circumstances. The Astartes in the chamber received the news impassively and continued with their work. Zahariel took a long breath and glanced at Luther. ‘The rebels are getting bolder,’ he observed. ‘That’s the third attempt in the last twelve hours.’

The Master of Caliban frowned thoughtfully. ‘We need to push the perimeter out another five kilometres or so, and increase our mobile patrols. Sooner or later they’ll realise that vehicle-mounted lascannons are too easy to spot and switch to shoulder-fired missile launchers, which will make our job that much harder.’

Zahariel nodded in agreement. So far they had been fortunate; two shuttles had been shot down over the past two weeks, but none of the larger transports had suffered more than minor damage. Clearly the rebels hoped to interdict all orbital traffic from Aldurukh to the waiting supply ships above Caliban, but Luther was determined to continue operations despite increasingly loud protests from the civilian pilots who were hauling the cargo. Of greater concern to Zahariel was the fact that no new supplies were coming in to replace those being launched into orbit.

‘We have four Jaeger regiments in training that are advanced enough to perform basic combat patrols,’ the Librarian suggested. ‘We could put them on perimeter patrol immediately.’

‘What about line regiments?’ Luther asked.

Zahariel shook his head. ‘All of our combat-capable units have been deployed. Right now the Jaegers are stretched thin.’ He paused. ‘We have almost an entire Scout Chapter ready for action, brother. We could send them out in pairs to patrol the countryside around Aldurukh and hunt down rebel weapon teams instead of calling up the trainees.’

Luther seemed to consider this for a moment. ‘If the tempo of rebel attacks increase, I’ll consider it,’ he said at length. ‘In the meantime, set up a patrol rotation for the training regiments.’

‘Very well,’ Zahariel replied. He tried to keep any trace of exasperation from his voice. Violence had raged across Caliban for two weeks, and the Dark Angels had yet to stir from Aldurukh. He couldn’t fathom Luther’s reluctance to commit the Legion. Zahariel chose to believe that the Master of Caliban was holding them in reserve for a swift, decisive blow against the insurgents.

The only other possibility was that Luther wasn’t certain of his own allegiances, which was simply too terrible to contemplate.

‘The situation is absolutely intolerable.’ Magos Administratum Talia Bosk’s metal-capped fingers sliced through the air in a gesture of Imperial pique. She sat perched on the edge of the tall, throne-like chair in the Grand Master’s chambers, her slight figure nearly swallowed by the bulk of her layered robes. ‘Our production quotas have slipped by sixty-three per cent at this point. Something must be done about these attacks at once, or we won’t be able to meet our commitments to the Emperor’s Crusade.’ From the dread in Bosk’s voice she might have been describing the end of life as she knew it – which, from her perspective, was probably close to the truth.

Bosk and most of her staff were from Terra, having been assigned to Caliban by the Administratum to oversee the planet’s growing bureaucracy and its breakneck industrialisation programme. Gleaming, metal-sheathed cables ran from recessed data ports at the base of her skull and wound about her bird-like neck before disappearing beneath the wide collar of her robes. Her shaven head was adorned with tattoos etched in holographic ink, drawing on her own bio-electric field to project shimmering images of the Imperial aquila a few millimetres above her skin. The haptic interfaces covering the tips of her fingers were ornamented with tiny jewels and delicate whorls, like fingerprints, etched into their platinum surface. Her augmetic eyes gleamed with a cold, blue light as she regarded Luther across the massive oaken desk.

It was late afternoon, and the slanting light was creeping across the chamber floor from the tall windows on the west side of the room. The chamber, which normally seemed spacious to Zahariel, was crowded with regimental officers, staff aides and Bosk’s fretful retinue of bureaucrats. He stood patiently by the window, his broad shoulders outlined by the setting sun, a data-slate gripped loosely in his hand. The meeting, intended to provide Luther with a status report from the planet’s senior Imperial officials, wasn’t going well.

Luther sat back in the Grand Master’s enormous chair. Built for Lion El’Jonson’s massive physique, it made the great knight seem almost childlike in comparison. He rested his elbows on the chair’s broad arms and regarded Bosk coolly.

‘Rest assured, Magos Bosk, there’s no one on this planet more conscious of our obligations to the Legion than I,’ Luther replied. Only someone who knew him well could detect the undercurrent of tension in his voice. ‘General Morten, perhaps you could enlighten us on the current security situation.’

General Morten, outfitted in the dark green uniform of the Caliban Jaegers, cleared his throat and rose slowly from his chair. Like Bosk, he was a Terran, a decorated soldier of many years’ service who had been tasked with creating the planet’s defence forces. He was a short, stout man, with sagging jowls and a nose that had been broken so many times it was little more than a misshapen bulb in the centre of his weathered face. His voice was a steely rasp, thanks to a year fighting amid the toxic ash plumes of Cambion Prime.

‘Caliban’s major arcologies remain under martial law, with mandatory curfews in effect,’ the general began. ‘The riots appear to have run their course, at least for the moment, but we’re still seeing isolated rebel attacks on checkpoints, precinct houses and infrastructure targets like water pumps and power substations.’ He sighed. ‘A heavy troop presence in the arcologies has sharply reduced the number of attacks, but it can’t eliminate them completely.’

Luther nodded. ‘What about industrial sites?’

‘We’ve had much better luck there,’ Morten continued. ‘The larger manufactories and mining outposts have been assigned a small garrison for security, with mobile reaction forces standing by to provide reinforcement in case of an attack. As a result, we’ve managed to defeat a number of major attacks over the course of the last few days.’

‘Although it appears that the rebels feel confident enough to start sniping at transports and shuttles coming and going from Aldurukh itself,’ Bosk complained. Not half an hour after Epsilon Three-Niner’s narrow escape, Bosk’s shuttle had been briefly targeted by a rebel autocannon on its approach to the fortress. ‘Who are these criminals, and how have they managed to accomplish so much in so little time?’

Luther took a deep breath, clearly choosing his words carefully. ‘There are indications that the rebels are made up mostly of disaffected nobles and former knights. We believe they’ve been laying the groundwork for this campaign for many years, stockpiling weapons and organising their forces.’

‘Their discipline is impressive,’ Morten said grudgingly. ‘And their organisation is highly decentralised. I have no proof, but I strongly suspect that one or more of their senior leaders have received Imperial military training at some point. We haven’t been able to gather any useful intelligence on their command and communications network, much less identify any of their leaders.’

Zahariel eyed Luther intently, wondering if he would identify Lord Thuriel and the other rebel leaders, but the knight said nothing.

‘What do these criminals want?’ Bosk demanded.

Luther regarded the magos inscrutably. ‘They want to be relevant once more,’ he said.

‘Then they can go to work in a munitions plant,’ Bosk snapped. ‘This planet has obligations – strict obligations – to the Emperor’s forces, and it’s my responsibility to make sure those obligations are met. What’s being done to round up these ringleaders and deal with them?’

Morten sighed. ‘That’s easier said than done, magos. My troops are already stretched to the limit maintaining order and protecting your industrial sites.’

‘Which are sitting idle because there aren’t any labourers to man the assembly lines,’ Bosk retorted. ‘They can’t leave their hab units while martial law is in effect.’ Layers of fabric rustled as the magos folded her thin arms and glared at Luther. ‘Where is the Legion in all this, Master Luther? Why haven’t they been unleashed against the rebels?’

Zahariel straightened. Bosk had cut to the heart of the matter. Now perhaps they would hear the truth.

Luther leaned forward, resting his forearms on the massive oak desk, and met the administrator’s stare unflinchingly. ‘Administrator, my battle-brothers are capable of a great many things, but hunting criminals isn’t one of them. When the time is right and the proper targets present themselves, the Dark Angels will act – but not before.’

Magos Bosk stiffened at Luther’s reply. ‘That won’t do, Master Luther,’ she said curtly. ‘This unrest must stop immediately. Caliban’s obligations must be fulfilled without delay. If you won’t act, then I’ll be forced to report the situation to Primarch Jonson and to the Council of Terra.’

The air in the chamber was suddenly charged with tension. Luther’s gaze turned hard and cold. Zahariel started to step in and try to defuse the situation when the door to the chamber opened and one of Morten’s aides hurried inside. With an apologetic bow to Luther, the aide turned to the general and whispered urgently into his ear. Morten frowned, then began asking the aide a number of increasingly urgent questions. Magos Bosk watched the exchange with growing alarm.

‘What’s happened?’ she asked, her metal-clad fingers clicking as she gripped the wooden arms of her chair. ‘General Morten? What’s going on?’

Morten waved his aide away. He looked questioningly at Luther, who gave his permission with a curt wave of his hand. The general took a deep breath, and addressed the magos.

‘There’s been… an incident at Sigma Five-One-Seven,’ he said.

‘An incident?’ Bosk said, her voice rising. ‘You mean an attack?’

‘Possibly,’ the general replied. ‘At this point we don’t know for certain.’

‘Well, what exactly do you know?’

Morten couldn’t entirely suppress a frown of irritation at the administrator’s demanding tone. He related what he knew in a clipped, perfunctory manner. ‘Approximately forty-eight minutes ago our headquarters received a garbled transmission from the garrison at Sigma Five-One-Seven. The vox operator confirmed that the signaller was using the garrison’s proper callsign and encryption code, but couldn’t make out what he was trying to say. The transmission lasted thirty-two seconds before being cut off. Nothing has been heard from the garrison since.’

‘Jamming?’ Luther inquired.

Morten shook his head. ‘No, sir. The transmission simply stopped. The signaller was cut off in mid-sentence.’

The Master of Caliban turned his attention back to Magos Bosk. ‘What exactly is Sigma Five-One-Seven?’

‘A materials processing plant in the Northwilds,’ she replied. ‘It went online last month, and has yet to become fully operational.’

‘How many labourers?’

‘Four thousand per shift under normal conditions, but as I said, the plant wasn’t operational.’ Bosk pursed her lips as she accessed her cortical data shunts. ‘There were difficulties with the plant’s thermal power core. An engineering team was on site, trying to track down the source of the problem, but that was all.’

Luther nodded. ‘And the garrison?’

‘A platoon of Jaegers and an attached heavy weapons squad,’ Morten answered. ‘Enough to defend the site against anything but a major rebel attack.’

‘Well, obviously that’s exactly what happened,’ Bosk snapped. ‘You said you had mobile troops to reinforce the garrisons in the event of attack. Why haven’t you despatched them?’

The general glowered at Bosk. ‘We did, magos. They landed at the site five minutes ago.’

‘Well, what in the Emperor’s name did they find?’ Bosk demanded.

Morten’s expression turned grim. ‘We don’t know,’ he said reluctantly. ‘We lost all contact with them moments after they touched down.’

Luther sat bolt upright in the Grand Master’s chair. Zahariel felt a wave of unease wash over him; something very strange was going on. From the dark look in Luther’s eyes, it was clear that the Master of Caliban felt much the same.

‘How large was the relief force?’ Luther asked.

‘A reinforced company,’ Morten replied. ‘Two hundred men, plus heavy weapons and ten Condor airborne assault carriers.’

Zahariel’s unease deepened. A force that size would have been more than enough to deal with any rebel attack. ‘It’s possible that the original transmission was a ruse, and the relief force was lured into an ambush.’

‘It’s possible,’ Luther said, somewhat dubiously. ‘But why no vox signals? Surely we would have heard something.’ He turned to Morten. ‘Are there any other reaction forces in the area?’

‘The closest one is more than two hours away,’ the general replied. ‘I can divert them to the site, but it would leave the Red Hills sector without any reinforcements in the event of another attack.’

Bosk rose angrily to her feet. ‘This is outrageous,’ she declared. ‘Master Luther, I mean you no disrespect, but I have to report this to Primarch Jonson and my superiors on Terra. The situation is worsening by the moment, and it’s obvious to me that you’re unwilling to commit your Astartes in battle against your own people. Perhaps forces from another Legion can be despatched to put an end to the uprising.’

Luther’s handsome face paled with anger. General Morten saw the danger and began to stammer a quick reply, but Zahariel cut him off.

‘The defence of Caliban is not a matter for the Council of Terra to concern itself with,’ he said in a stern voice. ‘And our primarch has more important matters to occupy his attentions at present. Master Luther explained to you that he was waiting for the proper time to order our battle-brothers into action, and clearly that moment has arrived.’

Luther turned to Zahariel as the Librarian spoke, and the two warriors locked eyes. The Master of Caliban glared at the Astartes for a moment, his dark eyes glittering with anger. Zahariel met the knight’s gaze steadily.

After a moment, Luther seemed to master his anger. He nodded slowly, though his expression was still deeply troubled.

‘Well said, brother. Assemble a squad of veterans and depart for Sigma Five-One-Seven at once. Eliminate any resistance and secure the site, then report back to me. Understood?’

Inwardly, Zahariel breathed a sigh of relief. He regretted having forced Luther’s hand, but he was certain that, in time, the Master of Caliban would forgive him. The Librarian bowed to Luther, then nodded respectfully to General Morten and Magos Bosk before striding purposefully from the room.

His conscience was clear. For the sake of the Emperor and the honour of the Legion, the Dark Angels on Caliban were rousing themselves for war.

Seven

Brothers in Arms

Nemiel’s squad raced down the narrow street towards the location of Echo Four’s downed pod, expecting to encounter more rebel troops at any moment. Sounds of fighting between Astartes squads and enemy forces echoed across the grey zone with increasing intensity as the rebels began to respond to the danger in their midst. Nemiel heard the bark of autocannons and, here and there, the flat boom of a tank’s battle cannon adding to the din.

‘Turn south at the next corner,’ he called out to his squad. ‘Echo Four should be another four hundred metres down the cross-street and somewhere to the left.’

‘Acknowledged,’ said Brother Yung, one of the two warriors on point. Nemiel watched the Astartes race up to the street corner and put their backs to a burnt-out storefront, their bolters held across their chests. One of the two warriors – Brother Cortus, Nemiel thought – slid to the end of the wall and peered around the corner.

Nemiel heard the battle cannon fire and watched the corner of the building Cortus was standing at disintegrate in the space of a single heartbeat. The two Astartes disappeared in a blizzard of pulverised stone and fragments of structural steel. A billowing cloud of dust and smoke enveloped the intersection and rolled down the street towards the rest of the squad.

The squad took cover on reflex, crouching behind rubble piles or pressing close to a building wall. Nemiel checked his helmet display and saw the status icon for Brother Cortus flash from green to amber. He was wounded, perhaps seriously, but still functional. The walls of the building must have shielded the Astartes from the worst of the blast.

Less than a minute later Brother Yung emerged from the smoke cloud, his black armour caked with brown dust. He was half-carrying, half-dragging Brother Cortus. Nemiel rose from cover and jogged forward as Yung set the wounded warrior down next to the shattered stoop of a hab unit.

Cortus reached up and fumbled with his helmet. One side of the ceramite helm had been partially crushed, shattering the right ocular and splitting it from crown to nape. Yung lent a hand and helped the wounded Astartes pull the helmet free.

‘Status?’ Nemiel asked.

Brother Cortus sent the smashed helmet bouncing across the street. The skin on the right side of his face had been deeply scored by the impact, peeling away the flesh down to the bone in some places. His right eye was a bloody ruin, but the wound was clotting quickly thanks to Cortus’s enhanced healing ability.

‘One battle tank and four APCs, three hundred metres south,’ he said, his voice rough with pain. ‘Approximately a platoon of infantry in hasty defensive positions, maybe more.’

‘I was talking about your head, brother.’

Cortus glanced dazedly at the Redemptor, blinking his one good eye. ‘Oh, that,’ he said dismissively. ‘It’s nothing. Did anyone see what happened to my bolter?’

‘Here,’ Yung said laconically, handing over Cortus’s dirt-caked weapon.

The wounded warrior’s face brightened. ‘Thanks for that, brother,’ he replied. ‘Kohl would have had my skin if I’d lost it.’

‘Too right,’ Sergeant Kohl growled as he crouched down beside Nemiel. ‘It sounds like the rebels have beaten us to Echo Four,’ he said to the Redemptor. ‘We might already be too late.’

‘Or perhaps we’re just in time,’ Nemiel countered. ‘Three hundred metres is too far away to have a good chance at a kill with the meltagun. We’ll have to get closer.’ He looked back down the way they’d come, searching for an alley they could use to outflank the enemy position, but there was none. ‘We’ll have to cut through the buildings,’ he decided. ‘Sergeant, you and Askelon lead the way.’

Kohl nodded and beckoned to the Techmarine. Nemiel helped Cortus to his feet, then followed the sergeant through the hab unit’s gaping doorway.

It took ten minutes for the squad to work its way through the partially-collapsed structure. Kohl and Askelon ploughed through any rubble in their path; in places the Techmarine used his servo arm to reinforce damaged structural supports so that the squad could keep moving without touching off a cave-in. They emerged from the building via a broken out window, crossed a narrow, filth-strewn alley, and entered the shell of another structure on the far side.

The second building had almost completely caved in, forcing the Astartes to scramble over enormous piles of rubble to reach the opposite side. Nemiel could hear the idling rumble of petrochem engines now, and the distant sound of shouted orders.

They reached the crest of a rubble pile close to the far corner of the building and hunkered down. Nemiel joined Kohl and Askelon, and peered over the top of the pile. By this point, his armour was so caked in dust that it was nearly invisible against the backdrop of debris.

He could see the enemy positions through the tall, broken window frames at the corner of the ruined structure. The battle tank was parked in the centre of another intersection, its flanks wreathed in exhaust fumes. The four APCs were arrayed behind it in a loose formation – their ramps were down and their troops had deployed into cover on either side of the street. At the opposite corner of the intersection stood a ruined hab unit with a huge, ragged hole high on the side of one of its upper storeys. Flames licked hungrily about the hole.

‘We’ve found Echo Four,’ Nemiel announced over the vox. ‘Vardus, set up your shot. Everyone else, get ready to move.’

Brother Marthes worked his way up the rubble pile and aimed his meltagun through the window frame at the tank. The rest of the squad climbed up the slope to either side, their weapons ready.

The meltagunner glanced at Nemiel and gave a nod.

‘Fire!’ Nemiel said.

The meltagun went off with a hissing shriek of superheated air and struck the tank in the side, right beside the engine. Molten pieces of armour plate and track segments went spinning through the air. Nemiel surged to his feet.

‘Loyalty and honour!’ the Redemptor cried. ‘Charge!’

With a shout, the Dark Angels scrambled down the rubble pile and leapt through the open window frames, their boltguns blazing. Rebel troops tumbled to the ground, their light armour no match for the bolters’ powerful rounds, but the survivors immediately returned fire. Lasgun rounds buzzed through the air, detonating against the sides of the blackened buildings with a staccato crackle.

Nemiel emerged into the street at a run, charging straight towards the parked APCs. The Testudos were already traversing their gun turrets, but the Astartes were too close for the vehicles to use their guns effectively. Lasgun bolts seared the air around him; he brought up his bolt pistol and snapped off two quick shots, hitting a trooper crouching in the doorway of a building a little further down the street.

‘Get across the intersection!’ he ordered over the vox. ‘Make for the building on the opposite side – that’s where Echo Four went down!’ Nemiel said, running past the burning tank. Askelon and Kohl dogged his heels, trading fire with the rebel troops. They ran into the midst of the parked APCs, and the sergeant tossed a fragmentation grenade into the troop compartments of the two vehicles he could reach. Marthes took aim and fired on the move, hitting one of the Testudos a bit farther down the street. The bolt struck the APC square on the front glacis and burned easily through the armour plate, touching off a huge explosion.

Nemiel reached the far side of the intersection in just a few seconds and found himself under fire from three different directions. Another squad had taken cover around the building where Echo Four had gone down, and now they fired point-blank at the onrushing Astartes. A las-bolt struck Nemiel full in the chest; another dug a glowing crater out of his left pauldron, but his ceramite armour withstood the worst of the impacts. Askelon was struck several times as well, but his ornate harness, forged by the master craftsmen on Mars itself, shrugged off the hits with ease.

To Nemiel’s right, Brother-Sergeant Kohl shot one rebel soldier point-blank with his bolt pistol, then sliced his power sword through another. Nemiel caught sight of an enemy sergeant off to the left, hastily switching power cells on his laspistol. The Redemptor shot the man twice, then rushed in among the rest of the soldiers, slaying every rebel he could reach with savage blows from his crozius. A las-bolt flashed through the building’s open doorway and struck him in the midsection; he felt a searing pain as the bolt found a weak spot in his armour, but the ceramite plating still managed to deflect most of its energy.

Roaring a challenge, Nemiel pressed forward into the building, leaving the survivors of the enemy squad to his brethren. He found himself inside another blasted, fire-scorched shell; the hab unit’s roof and three storeys had collapsed some time ago, leaving only the battered outer walls still standing. In the corner of the building, directly opposite the entrance, sat Echo Four. The drop pod had come down at nearly a forty-five degree angle and had dug itself into a mound of crushed flakboard and masonry. There wasn’t a single ramp that could properly deploy at that angle, leaving the occupant trapped inside.

Figures scattered about the shadowy interior, firing lasguns and laspistols at Nemiel. One bolt struck his right thigh, while two more punched into his chest. Amber warning telltales flashed on his armour readout, but the suit’s integrity was still well within accepted parameters. He charged towards the pod, his powerful legs driving him relentlessly over the shifting piles of rubble. His bolt pistol barked again and again; each shot struck home, killing a rebel soldier as he rose from cover or tried to switch positions to outflank him.

He had just crested the tallest debris pile, only ten short metres from the drop pod, when he saw the flicker of an energy field low and to his left. Without thinking he dodged to the right and brought his crozius down to block the blow, and just barely managed to keep his leg from being cut off at the knee. As it was, the rebel lieutenant’s power sword sliced deeply through his left calf and caused him to stumble.

The pain was so intense it took his breath away. Even with the autohypnotic rotes at his command, the wound very nearly sent him into shock. His armour sensed the damage and immediately compensated, stiffening the pseudo-musculature of his left calf and immobilising it, like a ceramite splint. The sudden change in mobility pitched Nemiel forward, sending him sliding face-first down the debris pile into the midst of the platoon’s small command squad.

The rebels closed in on Nemiel from all sides, firing their laspistols as they came. He was hit in the head, shoulders and chest – the armour stopped the blasts, but the integrity sensors began to shade from amber to red. He heard the distinctive crackle of the lieutenant’s power sword as the man chased down the slope after him.

Nemiel crashed to a stop against a tangle of steel supports at the base of the pile and twisted onto his side just as the enemy officer reached him. The power sword swept down at his chest, and he just managed to twist far enough to parry it with his crozius. Snarling, the lieutenant drew back his blade for a quick thrust, but Nemiel brought around his bolt pistol and shot the man through the heart.

Another rebel soldier rushed past the lieutenant’s falling body and tried to drive a bayonet into Nemiel’s throat. The Redemptor contemptuously blocked the thrust with his crozius and killed the soldier with a backhanded blow to his head. The remaining soldiers scattered as Brother-Sergeant Kohl reached the crest of the debris pile and opened fire with his bolt pistol. The survivors retreated from sight around another mound of fallen permacrete.

Kohl sheathed his power weapon and dashed nimbly down the slope. ‘Are you all right, brother?’ he called, extending his hand.

Nemiel waved the offer of assistance away. ‘I’m fine,’ he said, climbing quickly to his feet. He was about to ask for Brother Askelon when the Techmarine appeared at the top of the pile and quickly moved to join them. Instead of inquiring about Nemiel, however, his eyes were for the drop pod alone.

Askelon indicated an open crate a few metres away. Four disc-shaped melta charges had been carefully unpacked and sat in a neat row on a small slab of flakboard. ‘I’d say we were just in time,’ he noted, giving Kohl a meaningful look.

‘Well, you know what I say, Askelon?’ Kohl shot back. But the rest of his retort was swallowed in a thunderous explosion as the tank outside fired its battle cannon into the derelict building. The blast pulverised a ten-metre-wide section of the building’s front entrance, showering the Astartes in a hail of jagged stone and metal. When the cloud of dust and smoke cleared, Nemiel could look through the hole the cannon had made and see the enemy tank, still sitting where Marthes had hit it. The melta blast had knocked out the vehicle’s engine, but the crew was still very much alive.

‘Marthes!’ Nemiel called out over the vox.

‘I know, brother, I know!’ Marthes called back. ‘I’m at the southern end of the building with half the squad. Just give me a minute to get into position.’

‘We may not have another minute!’ Nemiel shot back. But it wasn’t himself or his squadmates he was worried about – the downed drop pod made for a much more enticing target. ‘Askelon, we’ve got to get that pod open!’ he shouted.

The Techmarine nodded his helmeted head. ‘We need to get it level fast, so the ramps can deploy!’ he said. His gaze fell to the melta charges. ‘Help me with these!’ he said, and bent to grab two of the discs.

Nemiel and Kohl each grabbed one of the charges and followed Askelon around to the far side of the pod. The Techmarine surveyed the debris pile, then activated his servo arm and began to dig deep gouges into the rubble at specific points below the canted end of the pod.

‘You’re not going to be able to dig this pile out fast enough!’ Kohl barked.

‘I’m not planning to, brother,’ Askelon said. He took one of the melta charges, set its timer, and shoved it into one of the gouges, then quickly placed the second one.

Nemiel heard the whine of servos as the tank’s turret rotated to bear on its new target. Then came a shriek of superheated air, and a melta blast struck the tank from its right. The detonation reverberated down the street, but when the smoke cleared, Nemiel saw that Marthes had shot from too far away, and the melta blast hadn’t fully penetrated the tank’s armour. The crew inside had likely been stunned by the hit, but that wouldn’t last for more than a few seconds.

Askelon grabbed the charge from Nemiel’s fingers. ‘I’d find some cover, if I were you,’ he said, setting its timer and placing it in the pile.

The three Astartes hurried away from the pod and crouched at the base of the debris pile. No sooner had they settled onto one knee than the four charges detonated in carefully-orchestrated succession.

The blasts went off so close together that the sound merged into a single, thunderous explosion. Molten stone and vaporised earth sheeted out from the pile, channelled away from the pod by the precise placement of the charges. In one stroke, Askelon removed ten cubic metres of rubble from beneath one end of the drop pod. Slowly, then with gathering speed, the elevated end of the pod began to settle, until it landed upright with a hollow metal clang. The flank of the pod slammed into the corner of the building, sending an alarming series of cracks forking across the damaged walls.

Immediately, Nemiel heard the metal thud of harness releases popping, then the buzzing whine of servos as the pod’s four large ramps finally deployed, revealing Echo Four’s lone passenger.

The huge figure in the centre of the pod was approximately humanoid in shape, with two stubby, powerful legs and a pair of mighty weapon arms attached to a giant, barrel-like torso. A sensor turret, shaped similarly to a helmet-clad head, swivelled left and right from an armoured collar set a little above the torso’s middle. The overall effect was of a hulking, hunchbacked giant, with a matt black ceramite hide. Both shoulders bore the winged sword emblem of the First Legion, and a score of noble battle honours fluttered from the Dreadnought’s frontal plates. A Mechanicum artisan had applied gilt scrollwork to the glacis, just beneath the Dreadnought’s notional head, which bore the name Titus.

Gears and servo-motors whirring, Brother Titus strode from his drop pod just as the tank fired its cannon once more. The shell flew into the pod where Titus had been standing a moment before and blew it apart.

Red-hot shrapnel pinged like raindrops off Brother Titus’s shoulders. The Dreadnought cleared the ramp in three long steps and kicked its way through the debris piles towards the rebel tank. Its turret slewed to the right, desperately tracking the oncoming war machine while the crew struggled to load another round into the cannon’s breech.

Brother Titus was armed with a standard Dreadnought weapons configuration. His right arm terminated in a large, multi-barrel assault cannon, capable of firing streams of high-velocity shells that were lethal to troops and light vehicles, but far less likely to penetrate the thick armour of a battle tank. Titus’s left arm, however, ended in a powerful, four-fingered hand that crackled with pent-up energies like an Astartes power fist. Nemiel and his brothers watched Titus charge through the ragged gap blown in the front of the building and bring that tremendous fist down on the top of the tank’s square turret. Armour plates crumpled like tin; there was a bright, violet spark and a tremendous concussion as the turret split apart beneath the blow. Flames leapt from the ruptured seams.

Nemiel shook his head in awe at the Dreadnought’s power. ‘Brother-Sergeant Kohl, re-form the squad,’ he said, and began limping quickly from the building. The pain in his leg had subsided to a dull ache, thanks to injections from his suit’s array of pain blockers and his own enhanced healing abilities. He switched to the company command net. ‘Force Commander Lamnos, this is Alpha Six,’ he said. ‘We’ve reached Echo Four and freed Brother Titus. No enemy forces in our immediate area. What are your orders?’

‘Good work Alpha Six,’ Lamnos responded. ‘Titus was the only one still unaccounted for. The rest of the landing force has engaged rebel units along the tramway, and we’ve received word that forward elements of the Tanagran Dragoons are working south to link up with us.’ There was a short pause while Lamnos consulted with his other squad leaders. ‘There are still enemy units present around the entrance to the forge complex, approximately one kilometre to your south-east. Take Titus and engage the rebels.’

‘Affirmative,’ Nemiel replied. ‘Alpha Six, out.’

The Redemptor limped over to Kohl and Askelon, who were standing in the shadow of Brother Titus. Askelon was clearly in awe of the mighty Dreadnought; Kohl was looking up at Titus’s sensor turret, his head cocked as though in conversation. They were probably speaking on a private channel, he realised. Dreadnoughts were a relatively uncommon sight in the Legion – since they required a human mind to operate, only severely-injured Astartes were offered the opportunity to continue serving the Emperor by having themselves installed into one of the war machines. Those offered the task were typically warriors who had demonstrated great heroism in battle and were mentally strong enough to endure their entombment in a Dreadnought’s sarcophagus. As a result, they were accorded tremendous respect by their brethren.

Titus’s head swivelled slightly at Nemiel’s approach. ‘My thanks to you and your squad, Brother-Redemptor,’ he said over the squad channel. Titus’s voice was deep and powerful, and entirely synthetic, devoid of human inflection. ‘Force Commander Lamnos has directed me to accompany your squad for the time being. What is our objective?’

‘The rebels have taken the southern entrance to the forge complex,’ Nemiel said, turning and heading off to the south-east. ‘We’re going to take it back.’

Eight

Dark Designs

A roiling, grey overcast hung over the towers of Sigma Five-One-Seven, swallowing the rays of the setting sun and plunging much of the processing plant into shadow as Zahariel and his warriors reached the outskirts of the site.

They made their approach straight down the plant’s primary access road with a clatter of steel treads and a billowing wake of oily black smoke from the Land Raider’s massive petrochem engine. Sitting in the assault tank’s troop compartment, Zahariel adjusted the settings of the tactical display on the bulkhead next to his station and switched from light-enhancement to thermal view. Instantly the blocky outlines of the plant’s main buildings and its sifting towers were painted in stark silhouettes against a vivid green background, their flanks studded by bright spots of white that marked the locations of hot chem-lights. Peering carefully at the display, he could make out a faint, white nimbus colouring the air at the centre of the plant – from what he knew of the site’s layout, he suspected that was likely the heat rising from the power plants of the relief force’s ten Condor transports. According to the blueprints, the site had a large, central landing zone for offloading heavy-lift cargo haulers. The reinforcements could touch down there and unload under cover without worrying about fire from rebel forces around the site perimeter.

Except that there weren’t any rebel troops, as near as Zahariel could reckon. The dark foothills, scoured down to bare rock by Imperial crawlers, were silent and still. Stranger still was the lack of any obvious signs of attack: there were no gaps in the plant’s tall perimeter fence, nor thermal scars on the buildings from small-arms or light artillery fire. More and more, he was coming to believe that the threat to the plant had been internal rather than external. He’d accessed the site’s status reports and work logs on the short flight from Aldurukh and discovered that the engineering team working on Sigma Five-One-Seven’s thermal plant consisted of twenty-five Terran engineering specialists and a hundred Calibanite labourers. Could the labour pool have been infiltrated by insurgents? Zahariel thought it entirely possible. From there, it would have been easy to smuggle weapons onto the site and hide them in the plant’s sub-levels until the time was right. Using the advantage of surprise, such a force could then easily overcome the rest of the engineers and the unsuspecting garrison, and then set an effective ambush for Imperial relief forces.

Zahariel could understand how such a thing could be done. He just couldn’t figure out why. An attack of this kind didn’t match the insurgents’ tactics to date, and it seemed like a disproportionate investment of time and manpower on a target that was far from any of the planet’s major population centres. So far, the rebels were doing a very effective job of crippling the planet’s industrial base by fomenting riots in the arcologies and staging hit-and-run raids with small, well-armed guerrilla forces. And this particular plant was sitting idle anyway; Zahariel could think of a dozen targets offhand that would have made better candidates for a takeover. There was a great deal about the situation that didn’t add up, and he wasn’t heading back to Aldurukh until he had some answers in hand.

The voice of the Land Raider’s driver crackled over Zahariel’s vox-bead. ‘Coming up on the site’s main gate now,’ he said. ‘Orders?’

‘Increase speed,’ Zahariel replied. ‘Advance up the main road towards the central landing zone.’

The assault tank’s engine roared in reply, and the Astartes in the troop compartment swayed in their seats as the Land Raider surged forward. The vehicle struck the plant’s heavy main gate and crumpled it contemptuously. Zahariel heard the faint clang of the impact and the screech of metal as the broken gate was ground beneath the heavy tank’s treads, but the barrier scarcely slowed the Land Raider down. As the tank roared along the main road, he switched to the Legion command frequency and reported in to Aldurukh. ‘Seraphim, this is Angelus Six,’ he called. ‘We have reached Objective Alpha and are proceeding to secure the area.’

The reply came back at once. Zahariel was surprised to hear Luther’s voice over the vox instead of the strategium’s duty officer. ‘We read you, Angelus Six. Any sign of the garrison or the relief force?’

‘Negative,’ Zahariel replied. ‘No obvious signs of combat, either. I expect I’ll learn more once I reach the central landing zone.’

‘Understood,’ Luther said. ‘Broadsword Flight is on station and standing by if you require support, Angelus Six. Remain in contact at all times.’

The Librarian twisted a dial on the tactical display and brought up a regional map of the Northwilds sector. A green diamond, representing the transport craft that had delivered the Land Raider from Aldurukh was shown exiting the area to the south. There was also a small, red chevron blinking above the mountains north-west of the site, flying in a circular holding pattern between Sigma Five-One-Seven and the recently established Northwilds arcology. The alphanumeric code beneath the chevron told him that Broadsword Flight consisted of three Stormbirds, each loaded with a full suite of air-to-ground ordnance. Luther had put enough firepower at his disposal to destroy an entire armoured regiment. Zahariel was more grateful for the obvious sign of Luther’s support than the Stormbirds themselves. ‘Understood, Seraphim,’ he answered. ‘We will keep you advised.’

Zahariel switched the tactical display back to the tank’s forward auspex array, then turned away from the screen and bent in his seat to pick his helmet off the Land Raider’s deck. ‘We’re coming up on the edge of the objective area,’ he said, pitching his voice to carry over the tank’s roaring engine. ‘Prepare to deploy. Brother Attias, take the pintle mount.’

Silent and purposeful, the veteran squad fitted on their helmets and checked their weapon loads. Across from Zahariel, Chapter Master Astelan readied his bolt pistol and power sword. When the order had come down to assemble a combat patrol to investigate the site, Astelan had been among the first to volunteer. After so long in garrison, every member of Luther’s training cadre was eager for action, and Zahariel was glad to have a warrior of Astelan’s ability as part of the squad.

At the far end of the troop compartment, Brother Attias rose to his feet and worked his way down the narrow aisle between his squadmates. Attias had been an aspirant of the Order at the same time as Zahariel and Nemiel, and as a youth he’d earned no small amount of grief thanks to his nervous and overly-studious nature. That had changed on Sarosh, when an alien monster had melted his helmet with a torrent of caustic slime. Attias had been lucky to survive, but the Legion Apothecaries had been powerless to heal the damage wrought by the monster’s acid. In the end, they had been forced to strip away most of the flesh and muscle and graft polished steel plates directly to Attias’s skull, transforming his face into a gleaming death mask. After more than a year recovering from his wounds, he had joined Astelan’s training cadre, where he was roundly feared by the Chapter’s novices. Zahariel had barely spoken to him in the years since returning to Caliban. Outside of training, Attias rarely spoke to anyone at all.

Zahariel watched as Attias stepped past him and took up the remote controls for the Land Raider’s pintle-mounted storm bolter. Servo-motors whined on the tank’s roof as the weapon elevated and began to cover the rooftops of the plant’s outer buildings as they made their way deeper into the site. The heavily-armoured Land Raider was impervious to all but the most powerful anti-tank weapons, but in the confines of the industrial plant a rebel team with melta bombs – or worse, a meltagun – could be a serious threat.

For several minutes there was nothing to do but wait. Zahariel reached over and unclipped his force staff from where it hung against the tank’s armoured bulkhead and gripped the cold, adamantine haft with both hands. The staff was both a weapon and a focus for the Librarian’s psychic abilities, and Zahariel took a moment to meditate upon it as Israfael had taught him to do. He began with a series of slow, steady breaths as he interfaced first with the crystalline array of the psychic hood built into his power armour. The array, built into a metal shell that rose from the back of his cuirass and partially enclosed his bare head, served as a crucial buffer that shielded his brain from the terrible energies of the warp. Without it, he risked madness – or worse – every time he unleashed his psychic powers in battle.

The interface cables connecting Zahariel to the hood grew warm against the back of his skull as he accessed the array and focused his awareness on the staff. Only then, once he was firmly grounded, did he extend that awareness further and take the measure of the psychic energies surrounding Sigma Five-One-Seven.

The shock was like an icy gale against his skin. Zahariel felt his flesh prickle; his muscles tensed, and a hungry, howling wind thundered in his mind. He felt the crystal array behind his head grow hot as the psychic torrent threatened to overwhelm the hood’s dampeners. It was like the raging storm he’d experienced at Aldurukh, only far stronger and wilder. What was worse, the Librarian could feel an otherworldly wrongness about the tempest – a taint that seemed to tug at his very soul.

Zahariel recoiled inwardly from the shock of the psychic storm. Screwing his eyes shut, he drew back his awareness as swiftly as he could, but the vileness in the aether plucked at him like grasping tendrils. For a horrifying second it felt as though there was a sentience behind the psychic force, and he was reminded of the nightmarish spectacle he’d witnessed on Sarosh.

After what seemed like an eternity, he managed to pull himself free from the taint. It withdrew and left him shaken to his core.

‘Are you well, brother?’

Zahariel looked up and saw Astelan’s concerned expression. He nodded, catching his breath. ‘Of course,’ he replied, ‘merely focusing my thoughts.’

The Chapter Master raised a dark eyebrow. ‘They must be very weighty thoughts. I can see the pulse in your temples from here.’

Zahariel wasn’t certain how to respond. Did he share what he’d just experienced? Would it make any difference to Astelan or the rest of the squad? This was a situation he’d never experienced in any training scenario. The matter was taken from his hands, however, when suddenly the driver called out over the intercom. ‘We’ve reached the central landing zone. I see ten Condor aerial transports in tactical landing formation at one hundred and fifty metres.’

The Librarian pushed his doubts and questions aside. If there was one thing he was certain of, it was that hesitation in battle was often fatal. ‘Halt and deploy!’ he called over the intercom. Leaping to his feet, he drew his bolt pistol from its holster and addressed his squad. ‘Tactical pattern delta! Treat all contacts as hostile until otherwise directed.’ He raised his staff, noticing for the first time the rime of frost coating the metal shaft. ‘Loyalty and honour!’

The Land Raider rumbled to a halt, its front assault ramp deploying with a hiss of powerful hydraulics. Astelan stood, igniting his power sword’s energy field. ‘For Luther!’ he shouted to his men.

As one, the Dark Angels answered Astelan’s cry. Zahariel had no time to wonder at the Chapter Master’s strange oath; he was already rushing towards the assault ramp, the golden double eagle at the top of his staff held before him like a talisman.

The landing field was a dark, grey plain of permacrete some five hundred metres square, bounded on three sides by huge, multi-storey mineral refinery and storage plants. Cylindrical sifting towers loomed over the idle refineries, ringed every ten metres by blinking red hazard lights. They cast long shadows across the field, bisecting the orderly rows of Condor transports crouching silently on their squat landing struts.

Zahariel swept the field with his bolt pistol, searching for targets as the squad spread out around him. The transports’ assault ramps were down and all of the craft he could see had one or more of their maintenance hatches open, but there were no signs of activity.

The Librarian felt his scalp prickle as he grew aware of the deathly stillness that hung over the plant. He glanced at one of the warriors in his squad who was busy sweeping the field with a portable auspex unit. ‘Any readings?’ he asked.

‘No movement. No life signs,’ the Astartes answered. ‘Trace heat on the engines of the transports, but that’s all.’

Zahariel’s eyes narrowed warily. That wasn’t quite all; he could sense the tension in the warrior’s voice. There was something else, something invisible that didn’t register on any of their equipment. He’d felt it once before, many, many years past, when he’d travelled deep into the forest in search of the last Calibanite Lion.

This was an evil place, Zahariel knew. The air was heavy with a sense of malice and slow, hateful corruption, and it knew he was there.

A dreadful sense of déjà vu swept over him. Zahariel raised his head and looked past the hulking buildings and silent towers, searching the horizon for clues. He studied the broken line of mountains that comprised the nearby Northwilds, and realised that he was very close to that same spot where he’d fought the lion, decades ago. The terrible, twisted trees were gone and the echoing hollows had been scraped bare, but the aura of the place somehow remained.

‘Not far from here,’ a hollow voice spoke in Zahariel’s ear. With a start, he turned to see Attias staring at him, just a couple of metres away. The lenses of Attias’s augmetic eyes were flat and depthless in his polished, skull-like face.

‘What is that, brother?’ Zahariel replied.

‘The castle,’ Attias replied. The words were flat and emotionless, resonating from the small, silver vox grille embedded in his throat. He raised his chainsword and pointed off to the north-east. ‘The fortress of the Knights of Lupus was just a few score kilometres off that way. You remember?’

Zahariel followed the whirring tip of the sword and stared off into the gathering darkness. Sure enough, he could just make out the distant flank of Wolf’s Head Mountain, the old peak from which the disgraced knights had taken their name. They had been the last of the knightly orders to defy Jonson’s plan of unification against the great beasts that terrorised Caliban’s people, and their intransigence had ultimately led to open conflict. He remembered the horrific assault on the fortress as clearly as if it had been yesterday. That had been his first real taste of the brutality of war.

The worst shock, though, had been once the knights of the Order had breached the outer walls and fought their way into the castle proper. The outer courtyard of the fortress had been full of enclosures, most of them filled with twisted monstrosities. Zahariel and his brethren had been horrified to learn that the Knights of Lupus had been collecting as many of the great beasts as they could and preserving them from the wrath of Jonson’s forces. Jonson had been so furious he’d ordered the fortress to be completely destroyed. Not one stone had been left atop another, and every trace of the Knights of Lupus had been wiped away.

Except for their library, Zahariel realised. The library of the renegade knights had been vast, larger even than the one at Aldurukh, and filled with a huge assortment of ancient and esoteric tomes. To everyone’s surprise, Jonson had ordered the library to be catalogued and transported back to the Rock. No one knew why, and Zahariel never learned what happened to the books after that.

The Northwilds had always been the oldest, wildest and most dangerous wilderness region on Caliban. Now, nearly all of the forest was gone – but had something ancient and inimical somehow remained?

Astelan’s voice shook Zahariel from his reverie. ‘Is your vox-unit working, brother?’ he said. He nodded his head back at the idling Land Raider. ‘I’ve tried to check with the crew, but no one is responding.’

Zahariel turned and stared worriedly at the massive vehicle. He keyed his vox-unit. ‘Raider Two-One, respond.’

Nothing. No interference, no static. Just dead air.

The Librarian took a step towards the assault tank just as the driver’s hatch rose on hydraulic hinges and the warrior’s helmeted head appeared. ‘We’ve been trying to call you for a full minute,’ the driver said over the rumbling engines. ‘Our vox-unit’s not working properly.’

Frowning inside his helmet, Zahariel tried to contact Luther. The orbital communications array and the Rock’s far more powerful vox-unit should have easily picked up the signal, but once again, all he heard was dead air. The unit was working fine, he knew, and there were no signs of jamming. It was as though their vox signals were simply being swallowed, though he couldn’t imagine how such a thing was possible.

‘The vox was working fine at the plant’s perimeter,’ Astelan said, clearly thinking along the same lines. ‘We could send the Land Raider back to maintain contact with Aldurukh while we secure the site.’

Zahariel shook his head. The whole point of bringing the Land Raider in the first place was to provide a base of heavy firepower for the squad and to serve as a mobile strongpoint that the Astartes could fall back to in the event of an emergency. Until he knew more, he wanted the tank close by.

‘Button up and keep a close eye on the auspex arrays,’ he ordered the driver. ‘And secure the assault ramp until we signal.’

The driver acknowledged with a curt nod and dropped back inside the tank. Within seconds the circular hatch and the heavy ramp clanged shut, sealing the vehicle tight. Zahariel then turned to Astelan. ‘Take two brothers and see what you can find at the plant’s control room,’ he said. ‘There ought to be a log of vox transmissions at the very least.’ He indicated the landing field with a sweep of his staff. ‘We’ll inspect the transports and try to find out what happened to the relief force.’

Astelan acknowledged the order with a nod. ‘Jonas and Gideon, you’re with me,’ he said, and headed off across the landing field at a ground-eating jog with two of the squad’s warriors close behind him.

Zahariel waved the rest of the squad forward. ‘Spread out,’ he ordered. ‘But remain in visual contact at all times. If you see anything strange, inform me at once.’

Weapons ready, the Dark Angels advanced across the landing field towards the closest of the Condors. Permacrete crunched underfoot; Zahariel glanced down and saw deep cracks running through the landing field’s pavement. Here and there, he saw the tops of slick, brown and black roots pushing their way up through the cracks. Caliban’s forests were not surrendering meekly to the Imperium’s ground-clearing machines. His home planet was a death world, Zahariel had come to learn, and such places were nearly impossible to tame. Still, it surprised him to see so much damage to a site that couldn’t be more than eight months old. Reinforced permacrete was built to resist the elements for centuries.

They came upon the first transport in line, approaching it from the port side. Zahariel saw at once that the Condor’s cockpit, set between the craft’s building air intakes, was empty. The Librarian circled around aft as the squad surrounded the transport. Bolt pistol ready, he peered up the open assault ramp into the red-lit troop compartment. It was empty, save for an open toolbox sitting in the centre of the bay.

‘Access panels are open, starboard side,’ Attias said, peering up at the ship’s fuselage.

Zahariel walked around the transport and studied the open hatches. ‘Auspex and vox arrays,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘I suspect the crews were running tests on their systems and trying to determine why their vox-units weren’t working.’

‘And then?’ Attias said in his sepulchral voice.

Zahariel shrugged. ‘I don’t know. There’s no sign of a struggle. No weapons damage to the transport. It looks like the crew just walked away.’

‘Like Sarosh,’ Attias declared.

‘No, not like Sarosh,’ Zahariel shot back. ‘The people of Sarosh went insane. This has to be something different.’

Attias said nothing, his augmetic eyes lifeless and unreadable in a cold steel mask.

The sound of running feet resounded across the permacrete plain. Zahariel turned to see Brother Gabriel approaching at a dead run.

‘Astelan says to come at once,’ Gabriel called out. ‘We’ve found something.’

Nine

Unto the Breach

‘I see the Dragoons built the rebels some fortifications,’ Kohl grumbled.

Nemiel and the sergeant were crouching at the corner of a burnt-out building some two hundred and fifty metres from the entrance to the forge complex, peering across a wasteland of rubble and twisted girders that had once been someone’s hab. From their vantage point they could observe approximately five hundred metres of tramway and the tall, wide gateway that led into the outer districts of the great forge. Neither of the Astartes cared for what they saw.

At some point in the recent past the Imperial garrison had heavily fortified the entrance, creating a pair of permacrete bastions to either side of the gateway. Heavy weapons emplacements had been built to create a deadly crossfire covering the approaches to the gate, and revetments had been dug to provide cover for armoured vehicles as well. Buildings had been levelled in a two hundred metre swathe around the fortifications, creating a killing ground devoid of cover or concealment. It was a formidable strongpoint by anyone’s estimations, and Nemiel would have been encouraged by its presence, except for the fact that there were rebel troops manning the fortifications now instead of the Tanagran Dragoons.

‘It looks like the Tanagrans at least put up a fight,’ Nemiel observed. Their enhanced vision allowed them to scrutinise the bastions as well as any man with a set of magnoculars. ‘Most of those gun emplacements have been knocked out, and there’s a burnt-out tank in each one of those revetments. That’s why the rebels have their vehicles parked along the tramway.’

Kohl gave a pessimistic grunt. They could see four Testudos lined up along the berm, hull-down, with only their squat autocannon turrets showing. ‘Wonder why there aren’t any tanks?’

‘They were probably called away to reinforce another part of the line,’ Nemiel suggested.

The sergeant nodded. ‘Bet those fields are probably mined,’ he said, nodding at the wide expanse of churned earth that led up to the bastions.

The Redemptor shook his head ruefully. ‘You’re a veritable beacon of hope, brother.’

‘Hope is your area of responsibility,’ Kohl declared. ‘Mine is, among other things, steering callow young officers away from minefields.’

‘And for that we are all duly grateful,’ Nemiel replied. Then he took a deep breath, focused his attention, and studied the bastions one more time. He could see plenty of signs that the fortifications had come under heavy fire, but he couldn’t extrapolate how the rebels had managed to overrun them. There were no bodies in the fields that might suggest an axis of advance, nor any burnt-out hulls of wrecked vehicles to indicate an armoured rush. If he could figure out how the enemy had managed to overcome the strongpoint, then the odds were he could make use of the same vulnerabilities as well.

‘What do you think, brother-sergeant?’ Nemiel asked. ‘How are we going to take those bastions?’

Kohl studied the fortifications for another few moments. ‘Why, I expect we run right up and ask them to let us in.’

Nemiel gave the sergeant a dark look, a gesture entirely wasted within the confines of his helmet. ‘That’s not very funny, sergeant.’

‘As it happens, I’m not joking,’ Kohl replied.

‘Not so fast,’ Nemiel yelled over the Testudo’s roaring engine. ‘The last thing we need is to spook some trigger-happy rebel gunner into firing at his own side.’

The two APCs were rolling down the tramway at a steady clip towards the forge entrance, wreathed in thick plumes of ochre dust and swirling petrochem exhaust. Askelon had used his servo arm and a plasma cutter to strip away everything he could from the interior of the vehicles, from the benches to the ammo baskets for turret autocannon, and still there was only enough room for one Astartes up front and three more in the troop compartment. Brother Marthes, who was driving the Testudo that Nemiel was riding in, would have to crawl out of the driver’s compartment on his hands and knees before exiting via the assault ramp at the rear. For the hundredth time, Nemiel found himself wondering how he’d let Brother-Sergeant Kohl talk him into this.

‘The sergeant said to make it look like we were running from something,’ Marthes shouted back. ‘If we’re going too slowly, they might try to challenge us.’

‘As opposed to going too fast and having them shoot at us?’

Marthes didn’t reply at first. ‘I admit it made more sense when Brother-Sergeant Kohl explained it,’ he replied.

Nemiel shook his head irritably. At least Kohl had the decency to be the first member of the squad to volunteer for the scheme. He was in the second APC, along with Askelon, Yung and Brother Farras. Nemiel had Brother Cortus and Brother Ephrial in the cramped troop compartment with him. They were jammed in shoulder-to-shoulder in the noisy, exhaust-filled space and completely blind. Nemiel, closest to the driver’s space, tried to crane his head around and see through one of the forward vision blocks, but he couldn’t quite manage it. ‘How far from the bastions are we?’ he asked.

‘One hundred and fifty metres,’ Marthes answered. ‘They saw us coming about a minute ago. I can see several of the Testudos aiming their cannons at us.’

Nemiel nodded to himself. No doubt the commander in charge of the garrison was trying to call them over the vox and find out what they were doing approaching his position. Askelon had taken pains to shoot the APC’s antenna off with his bolt pistol, but would the rebels be convinced? Would they even notice, or simply decide to take no chances and open fire? It’s what he would do in their position.

The Redemptor keyed his vox. ‘Brother Titus, are you and the rest of the squad in position?’ he called.

‘Affirmative,’ the Dreadnought replied in his metallic voice. ‘I have you on my surveyors now.’

‘Very well,’ Nemiel said. ‘Fire at will.’

Two hundred metres north, at exactly the same spot where Kohl and Nemiel had reconnoitred the fortifications a half-hour before, Brother Titus stepped around the corner of the burnt-out building and readied his assault cannon. The weapon’s six barrels began to spin with the ominous, rising whine of electric motors until they were little more than an iron-grey blur. The Dreadnought surveyed the enemy positions with a single sweep of his sensor turret and fired a long, roaring burst.

Diamantine-tipped, light armour-piercing rounds raked across the northern bastion and then down along the parked APCs. The shells blasted craters in the formed permacrete; enemy troops caught in the open were literally blown apart by the high-velocity projectiles. The rounds punched through the thin armour of the easternmost APC’s turret and touched off one of the shells in the ammo feed; it blew apart in a yellow fireball and filled the vehicle with a storm of deadly shrapnel.

The remaining warriors in Kohl’s veteran squad fanned out around the Dreadnought and began advancing across the no-man’s-land toward the bastions, firing as they went. Their shots added to the storm of shells and drove the stunned rebels behind the nearest cover.

The turrets of the three surviving Testudos quickly swerved to target the threat bearing down on them from the north. ‘It’s working!’ Brother Marthes shouted. ‘They’re going after Titus!’

‘Let’s not leave him hanging any longer than we have to,’ Nemiel replied. ‘Increase speed!’

The two APCs roared down the tramway at full throttle, seemingly racing for the safety of the fortifications around the gateway. As they drew close to the parked rebel vehicles, a sergeant rose to a crouch and began pointing urgently to positions alongside the berm, but both of the Testudos shot right past.

‘Uh, Brother-Redemptor Nemiel?’ Marthes said. ‘You didn’t mention anything about a barricade between the two fortifications.’

‘We couldn’t see between the fortifications during our reconnaissance,’ Nemiel answered. ‘Can we break through?’

‘We’re about to find out,’ the Astartes said grimly. ‘Brace for impact!’

A second later the Testudo struck a pair of permacrete construction barriers that had been laid across the entrance to the forge. There was a tremendous crash, and a grinding of metal on stone, and the forty-tonne APC bucked skyward like a broaching whale as its sloped bow carried it over the lip of the barricade. There it might have remained, had not the second APC crashed into it from behind.

The impact shoved the Testudo further forward, bearing over the barricade and forcing it into the gap beside the two bastions. The APC came to a stop, bow dragging across the tramway after having its front two wheels ripped completely away.

‘Lower the ramp!’ Nemiel shouted. Outside he could hear urgent shouts and the crack of lasguns.

He heard a hollow booming at the back of the troop compartment, then a grating of metal as Brother Ephrial forced the partially-jammed ramp open. The sounds of battle flooded into the compartment: angry shouts, the crackle of las-bolts, the distant snarl of the Dreadnought’s assault cannon and the hollow bark of boltguns. Las-bolts began to strike the side of the APC in a staccato hail of small explosions.

Ephrial forced his way out of the wrecked Testudo and opened fire, snapping off short, controlled bursts at the ramparts of the bastion to the north. Cortus was next in line, and made it out significantly faster thanks to having enough room to throw himself against the ramp and drive it a bit further to the ground. A las-bolt struck him a glancing blow across the back of the helmet as he emerged into the open; he shook his head like an angry bear and struggled to his feet, his bolter spitting death at the rebels.

‘Marthes! Let’s go!’ Nemiel shouted.

The Redemptor clawed his way forward, his crozius clutched in his fist. He emerged into a veritable storm of fire from both sides of the gateway, and found himself staring at the sight of Brother-Sergeant Kohl’s APC, lying on its right side atop the crushed remains of the barricade. The Dark Angels had succeeded in deploying their ramp and were now trading shots with the rebels in the southern barricade from behind the shelter of the wrecked vehicle.

Nemiel drew his bolt pistol and headed right, firing shots up at the ramparts of the northern bastion as he went. The fortification was like a three-storey stepped pyramid, with a rampart and firing positions at each level. Unfortunately for the rebels, there was only a narrow frontage that actually looked down into the space between the fortifications; the defences were designed primarily facing outward, covering the hundreds of metres of kill zone and the long, wide tramway. Rebel troops were now crowded along those narrow ramparts, pouring lasgun fire down at the Astartes, but the Dark Angels were taking a fearsome toll upon the bunched-up troops.

‘Brother-Sergeant Kohl, get your section moving!’ Nemiel called over the vox. ‘Ephrial! Cortus! With me!’

He ran stiff-legged towards the far end of the bastion, close to the actual gateway. As he expected, there was a ramp leading up into the fortification proper. ‘Grenades!’ he ordered. Ephrial and Cortus immediately pulled a pair of fragmentation grenades from their belt dispensers, set the fuses and threw them up and over the first-level rampart. Nemiel was already charging up the ramp, bolt pistol ready.

The grenades went off with a pair of muffled bangs and a chorus of agonised shouts and screams. Nemiel reached the top of the ramp; it turned sharply to the right, opening onto the first rampart. It was a standard Imperial fortification, right out of the field manual, and he knew its layout well. He rounded the corner, firing his bolt pistol and charging the stunned rebels with a fierce battle cry.

The rampart was a scene of carnage. Dead and wounded men were slumped at the base of the narrow, trench-like passage, shredded by bursts from the Dreadnought’s assault cannon or blown apart by mass-reactive bolter shells. The survivors retreated down the length of the rampart, firing wildly as they staggered over the bodies of their comrades. More las-bolts rained down from the ramparts above; they detonated against his armour’s broad pauldrons or glanced from the top of his curved helm. Nemiel kept moving forward, firing methodically and killing a soldier with each well-placed shot. Ephrial and Cortus joined him in moments, firing up at the higher ramparts to suppress the enemy fire.

The rampart ran for fifteen metres due west, then doglegged sharply to the north-east. At the corner, Nemiel paused and threw a grenade of his own, then followed right on the heels of the blast. Several metres behind him, he heard the shrieking blast of a meltagun, and knew that Marthes had joined them at last.

Around the corner the rampart ran for more than forty metres in a straight line, its weapon emplacements looking out over the killing ground that Brother Titus and the rest of the squad were currently advancing across. The parapet here had been savagely chewed by the Dreadnought’s assault cannon and Brother Vardus’s heavy bolter, and there were far more dead rebels than live ones still holding the trench. Fifteen metres down the line another ramp led up and back to the second level.

The rebels fell back a bit further in the face of Nemiel’s advance, but held their ground rather than give up the next ramp. They poured fire from their lasguns at the advancing Astartes, but the las-bolts were meant for lightly-armoured humans, not walking juggernauts like the Dark Angels. Nemiel advanced doggedly into the whirlwind of fire, pummelled by shot after shot. Warning icons flashed insistently on his helmet display, and he overrode each and every one. Gathering his strength, he charged the last ten metres until he was in close-combat range. Then the slaughter truly began.

The blazing crozius swept down in hissing arcs, smashing helmets and crushing bone. There was nowhere to run in the narrow space; nowhere to manoeuvre or try to sneak around Nemiel’s flanks. The rebels were forced to stand and face his wrath directly, and he slew them without mercy. When their courage finally broke and they turned and ran down the remaining length of the rampart, Nemiel realised he was thirty metres past the second-storey ramp, and his armour was caked in blood up to mid-thigh. He’d been treading on burnt and broken corpses for a full ten minutes.

Down on the tramway another APC exploded in a shower of molten steel. Brother Titus and the rest of Kohl’s squad were almost to the berm, and the remaining rebel troops were in full retreat, withdrawing on foot as quickly as they could down the tramway in the direction of the captured star port. Behind Nemiel, Cortus, Ephrial and Marthes were trading fire with the rebels on the second storey. The Redemptor slapped a fresh magazine into his bolt pistol and went to join them.

The rebels fought doggedly, forcing the Astartes to fight for every metre they climbed, but the Dark Angels were relentless. Nemiel took the lead once more, firing away with his bolt pistol until he could draw close enough to wield his deadly crozius. He was wounded half a dozen times. Las-bolts burned through weakened spots in his armour and seared the flesh beneath. Once a rebel soldier charged him with a bayonet-tipped lasgun and jammed the blade into the joint of his left hip. The point dug deep into his flesh and snapped off when Nemiel smashed the man to the ground with a backhanded sweep of the crozius, but the injury scarcely slowed him by that point. Victory was close at hand.

They threw the last of their grenades at the top of the third ramp, and they rushed forward to meet the rebels’ last stand. Ephrial fell during the charge, shot through the right knee. He landed on the permacrete, his crippled leg extended beside him, and continued to blaze away at the enemy with his bolter. At the top of the pyramid the Astartes were able to spread out and attack the enemy at once, and a wild melee raged for almost three full minutes before the last of the rebels fell beneath Nemiel’s crozius. He searched among the bodies for the commander of the detachment, but there were no officers to be found.

‘North bastion secure,’ Nemiel reported over the vox. ‘One casualty.’

‘South bastion secure,’ Brother-Sergeant Kohl answered a minute later. ‘No casualties to report.’

‘Gateway secure,’ Brother Titus reported. ‘Brother-Redemptor Nemiel, I am detecting movement inside the forge complex; approximately six contacts, heading this way.’

‘Very well,’ Nemiel replied. ‘I’m coming down. Brother-Sergeant Kohl, leave one member of your section behind as a lookout, then link up with me in the gateway.’

Nemiel left Brother Ephrial behind to stand watch from the northern bastion and headed down to ground level. Off to the north-west, he could hear the rumble of petrochem engines and the squeal of tank treads. New signals over the company command net indicated that the Tanagran Dragoons had broken through and were almost to the tramway.

Kohl and his warriors reached the gateway at the same time as Nemiel. Brother Titus stood squarely in the breach, his smoking assault cannon trained down a wide avenue that ran north-east into the vast complex.

‘Where are the contacts now?’ Nemiel asked the Dreadnought.

‘Two hundred metres north-east,’ Titus answered. ‘I’m getting strange returns on my surveyors. Whatever they are, they are making good use of cover and avoiding direct line of sight.’ He paused. ‘I don’t think they are rebel troops.’

‘It could be tech-guard,’ Askelon said. ‘There has to be a garrison of some kind here to defend the forge.’

‘Let’s hope so,’ Nemiel replied. ‘Although it looks like the enemy managed to penetrate at least into the outer districts before we arrived. We need to investigate the returns, no matter what.’ He turned to the Dreadnought. ‘Hold the gate, Brother Titus. This shouldn’t take long.’

Nemiel led the group through the gateway and into the precincts of the Mechanicum. The roadway beneath his feet wasn’t permacrete, but a kind of smooth, grey metal cladding. It rang softly with each step, and continued north-east in a laser-perfect line towards the distant slopes of the great volcano. Tall, dark structures rose to either side of the roadway. Warehouses, Nemiel reckoned, or manufactories idled sometime during the rebel attack.

The Redemptor moved forward, peering intently into the shadows surrounding the silent buildings. He knew basically where the six individuals ought to be, but try as he might, he could not spot them. ‘They must be around the corner of one of these structures,’ he said quietly. ‘If so, they likely don’t know we’re here.’

Techmarine Askelon shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t count on that,’ he replied. ‘If they’re tech-guard, they could have surveyors that rival those of Brother Titus.’

Nemiel didn’t like the sound of anything that could see farther and keener than he could. ‘Stay sharp,’ he told his warriors, and pressed ahead. After just fifteen metres, Brother Titus called over the vox.

‘The contacts are moving,’ Titus reported. ‘They’re thirty metres north-by-north-east and heading your way.’

The Astartes orientated on the bearing given by the Dreadnought, their weapons held low but ready. Ironically, it was Brother Cortus, the one-eyed Astartes, who spotted them first. ‘There!’ he said, indicating a narrow alley off to the left with a nod of his head.

Six figures were spilling from the alley and fanning out in a semi-circular formation, heading straight for the Astartes. As they emerged from the shadows between the buildings, Nemiel could see that they were massive individuals, each one easily as large as an Astartes, and just as powerfully built. Articulated armour plates covered their hyper-muscled bodies, and even from this distance Nemiel could clearly see that their limbs and heads were heavily augmented with bionic and chemical implants. Their arms were fully weaponised, with an assortment of fearsome-looking energy and projectile weapons and lethal close combat attachments. He could hear them speaking to one another in blurts of binaric code as they advanced. Their augmetic eyes glowed a pale green from within burnished metal frames.

Nemiel turned to Askelon. ‘What are they signalling to one another about?’ he asked.

The Techmarine shook his head. ‘I can’t tell, sir. It’s all highly encrypted. But their weapons systems and combat surveyors are fully active.’

Nemiel turned back to the oncoming figures. ‘Do you recognise them?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Askelon said. ‘They’re skitarii – more specifically, a unit of praetorians. They’re the Mechanicum’s elite guard.’

The praetorians continued to advance, snapping and squealing to one another in sinister-sounding code. Nemiel took a step forward, making a point to lower his weapons.

‘Ave, praetorians,’ he began. ‘I’m Brother-Redemptor Nemiel, of the Emperor’s First Legion. We’ve come to help defend the forge–’

The rest of Nemiel’s greeting was cut short as the praetorians raised their weapon arms and opened fire.

Ten

Hidden Evils

The ground floor of Sigma Five-One-Seven’s control centre had been claimed by the plant’s small garrison as a makeshift barracks. The squat, thick-walled building was an ideal defensive position, with access to the plant’s vox-unit and a comprehensive network of surveyors that streamed real-time data covering the entire facility – all of which made the scene of carnage inside all the harder to understand.

Zahariel stood just inside the control centre’s single entrance and tried to make sense of the wreckage strewn across the wide, low-ceilinged room. Three-quarters of the space had been set with orderly rows of desks and logic engines, intended for the plant’s supervisors and senior engineers once the site went into operation. The rest of the room had been claimed by at least one of the garrison’s Jaeger squads. He could see torn and bloody bedrolls, kicked-over piles of ration packs and scattered crates of spare energy cells. Scorch marks stained the ochre-coloured walls, and the desks were scarred and cratered by lasgun fire.

The Librarian took a deep breath, tasting smoke and the bitter tang of blood. Astelan stood in the middle of the carnage, grimly surveying the scene.

‘The attackers came in through the front door,’ the Chapter Master said quietly. He pointed at the wall to either side of Zahariel’s head. ‘Most of the scorch marks indicate that the Jaegers were firing at the doorway from over there, by their bedrolls.’

‘They didn’t try to take cover behind the desks, just a couple of metres away,’ Zahariel observed.

‘Obviously they didn’t have time,’ Astelan said. ‘The Jaegers here were off-watch and likely asleep when the attackers arrived.’ He nodded towards a doorway on the far side of the room. ‘The platoon’s second squad was camped in the next room over, and their area is undisturbed.’

Zahariel pursed his lips thoughtfully, recreating the scene in his mind. ‘Second squad is on patrol when the vox-units go out. The attackers deal with them first, then close in on the control centre and surprise the first squad.’ He glanced at Astelan with narrowed eyes. ‘None of which should have been possible, given that the attackers would have had to wipe out an entire squad of troops in full view of the plant’s surveyors, then blast their way through this building’s reinforced door.’

The Chapter Master nodded. ‘We found a great deal of blood upstairs in the control room.’

‘Show me.’

Astelan led Zahariel deeper into the building, through the deserted offices and echoing hallways of the control centre. The malevolent energies surrounding the site swirled about them as they walked. It was like feeling the eyes of a beast upon you as you were riding through a deep, shadow-haunted part of the forest, and from the set of the Chapter Master’s shoulders, Zahariel suspected that Astelan felt it as well.

They rode a lift to the building’s third floor and Zahariel stepped into the plant’s large control room. Logic engines whirred and clattered from dozens of empty workstations, and flickering green pict units displayed scrolling streams of data detailing every aspect of the plant’s idle machinery. Brother Gideon knelt beside the plant’s security station, set in a shadowed alcove just to the right of the lift. He had pushed aside the workstation’s chair, which had been built to human specifications and was altogether too frail for Gideon’s armoured bulk, and was working industriously at the controls. His right knee rested in the centre of a wide pool of mostly-dried blood.

Once again, Zahariel paused and studied the scene for clues. Most of the work stations were operating in standby mode, except for two others. He quickly scanned the readouts on their screens; both were dedicated to monitoring the operation of the site’s thermal power plant. The Librarian glanced back at the pool of blood. ‘Someone got close enough to slit the watch officer’s throat,’ he mused.

‘It was mid-afternoon, so that was probably the platoon commander or the senior sergeant,’ Astelan said.

Zahariel nodded thoughtfully. ‘He would have been the first to die. Then the perimeter patrols would have been eliminated.’

Astelan pointed to the security display. ‘The killer likely monitored the ambushes from here – perhaps even coordinated them with teams on the outside. Then, when the time was right, he went downstairs and opened the door to let them finish the job.’

The Librarian clenched his armoured fists. It had been a well-organised and ruthlessly-executed assault. But to what purpose?

‘What about the vox logs?’ he asked.

Astelan motioned Zahariel to follow him to another alcove, this one situated at the rear of the chamber. Inside, the plant’s vox-unit was still operating. Zahariel could hear the faint hum of power coursing through its frame, but the speaker was ominously silent.

The Chapter Master turned to a display panel and keyed a series of switches. At once, a long string of readouts cascaded down the display. ‘There was only one transmission today,’ he said. ‘The time stamp corresponds to the signal we received at Aldurukh.’ Astelan folded his arms. ‘Based on the condition of the bloodstain in the security alcove, I would estimate that the signal was sent approximately thirty minutes to an hour after the watch officer was killed.’

‘They could have gotten the codes from the vox operator’s kit. All they had to do was distort the caller’s voice and wait for us to follow procedure.’ The last pieces of the puzzle were falling into place, and Zahariel did not like the picture it revealed. ‘Luther was right. The reaction force was lured into an ambush.’

Astelan nodded. ‘It appears that the rebels managed to infiltrate the labour force,’ he said.

‘But to what purpose?’ Zahariel countered. ‘They didn’t intend to destroy the plant, obviously.’

The Chapter Master cocked a thin eyebrow at the Librarian. ‘They managed to wipe out an entire Jaeger company. Isn’t that enough?’

‘How do we know the Jaegers are dead?’ he asked. ‘Have you found any bodies?’

Astelan glanced away. For the first time, the Astartes looked faintly uncomfortable. ‘No,’ he said. The thought sent a chill down Zahariel’s spine. ‘We’ve found plenty of blood, but that’s all.’

‘And whoever sent that signal also had some way of controlling whatever force is interrupting our vox transmissions,’ Zahariel continued. ‘Whatever this is, it’s not something the rebels have ever used before.’

He turned away from the vox-unit and paced across the room, pausing to study the two functioning work stations. ‘What do we know about the labourers?’ he asked.

Astelan shrugged. ‘According to the maintenance logs, they arrived about a week ago as part of the quarterly rotation. The Administratum flies them in by shuttle from the Northwilds arcology and houses them in a pair of dormitories on the north end of the site.’

‘No sign of them, either?’ Zahariel asked.

‘We haven’t searched the dormitories yet, but I don’t expect we’ll find anything.’

Zahariel shook his head. ‘They have to be here somewhere, brother,’ he said grimly. ‘Three hundred bodies don’t simply vanish into thin air.’

‘Chapter Master Astelan!’ Gideon cried. ‘I’ve found something!’

Zahariel and Astelan strode swiftly to the security station. The pict displays at the work station were all dark. ‘What’s this?’ the Librarian said.

‘I’ve been checking all of the surveyors and pict arrays covering the site,’ Gideon said. ‘All of the units have checked out fine up to this point, but the units on level B6 all appear to be dead.’

Zahariel gave Astelan a sidelong glance. They’d all memorised the layout of Sigma Five-One-Seven, down to the smallest detail.

‘That’s where the thermal vent is located,’ the Chapter Master said.

Zahariel could see the memories of Sarosh lurking deep in Astelan’s eyes. They all remembered the vast cavern beneath the earth, filled with millions upon millions of corpses offered up to the Saroshi’s obscene god.

Not here, he wanted to say. This is Caliban. Such things do not happen here.

Instead, Zahariel gripped his force staff tightly in his hand and addressed the Chapter Master. ‘Assemble the squad,’ he said, his voice betraying nothing of the despair he felt.

Astelan nodded curtly. ‘What are your orders?’

Zahariel glanced once more at the dark pict screens. ‘We’re going to go down there and find out who is responsible for this,’ the Librarian replied. ‘Then, by the primarch, they’re going to pay for what they’ve done.’

They formed up by the Land Raider as the sun was setting behind the mountains to the west. A thick bank of grey clouds was rolling ponderously towards the site from the south, carrying with it the threat of a storm. The weather had grown increasingly wild and unpredictable over the years as the Imperium transformed the surface of the planet and filled the skies with plumes of smoke from their manufactories. Magos Bosk and the rest of the Administratum insisted that the changes were nothing to be concerned about. Zahariel eyed the looming clouds warily and wondered if Magos Bosk had ever conducted a squad-level skirmish in a raging gale. He confessed to himself that the odds seemed unlikely in the extreme.

They boarded the assault tank and crossed the wide landing field, heading into the deep shadows filling up the alleys and access ways to the east of the site. The plant’s massive thermal exchange unit was a black tower – wider at the base, then narrowing at the middle before flaring open once more as it soared high into the sky over Sigma Five-One-Seven. Red and blue hazard lights flashed insistently along its length, warning low-flying aircraft to keep away; when the plant went into full operation the tower would be wreathed in hissing ribbons of waste steam, tinted a sickly orange by chemical flood lamps.

The Land Raider’s driver circled around the base of the huge tower until he came upon a wide, low-ceiling entrance at the south-east side. At Zahariel’s command, the tank rumbled to a halt a few dozen metres from the opening, then the squad dismounted into the gathering darkness. Immediately, Astelan pointed to three sets of cargo crates, each arrayed in a crescent shape with the closed ends pointed towards the tower entrance. Zahariel recognised them even before he saw the familiar shapes of heavy stubbers aimed at the thermal unit’s entrance.

The Astartes approached the makeshift weapons cautiously, sweeping the shadows with their bolt pistols. Dried blood stained the permacrete around each of the positions; Zahariel’s keen eyes detected scores of small craters where lasgun bolts had eaten into the pavement around the emplacements. A bloodstained portable vox-unit lay near the centre weapons station, its control panel smashed to pieces.

Zahariel eyed the heavy stubbers. None of them showed signs of having been fired. ‘It looks like the reaction force tried to set up a security cordon around the thermal plant’s entrance,’ he declared, ‘the gunners must have been ambushed later, once the others were gone.’

Astelan nodded in agreement. ‘You think they realised what was going on?’

The Librarian shook his head. ‘They knew only what the enemy told them,’ Zahariel said. ‘I expect the company commander got off his Condor and found a frantic man or woman in labourer’s coveralls who told him that the rebels had taken over the thermal unit and were planning to blow it up. So the captain rushed in there with everything he had, hoping to stop the enemy before it was too late.’

Astelan glanced back at the Librarian. ‘And now we’re going in there as well?’

Zahariel nodded grimly, raising his force staff. ‘Whatever the enemy might expect, they aren’t ready for the likes of us.’

The members of the squad readied their weapons in mute agreement. Attias moved up alongside Zahariel, his silver death’s-head mask seeming to float eerily out of the darkness. ‘Loyalty and honour,’ he rasped.

‘Loyalty and honour, brothers,’ Zahariel answered back, and led his squad inside.

The air inside the thermal exchange unit was hot and humid, gusting like the breath of a huge, hungry beast. Red emergency lighting bathed the interior crimson, outlining billowing clouds of steam and glistening on drops of condensate flowing from overhead pipes and ductwork. Zahariel smelled the bitter reek of corroded metal and freshly spilled blood.

‘I thought the thermal exchanger wasn’t online yet,’ he said aloud.

‘It’s not,’ Gideon replied. ‘I checked the readouts myself.’ He pulled his auspex unit from his belt and tested it. The screen flickered and then filled with a cascade of data. The Astartes tried several different detection modes, then shook his head in disgust and put the unit away. ‘No readings,’ he reported, ‘or at least, none that make any sense. I’m picking up a lot of interference from somewhere close by.’

‘Somewhere,’ Attias echoed, ‘or something.’

‘Tactical pattern Epsilon,’ Zahariel interjected curtly, unwilling to let that train of speculation proceed any further. ‘Stay sharp, and watch for likely ambush points.’

Within moments the squad was arrayed in a rough octagonal formation, with a warrior at each corner of the octagon and Zahariel and Gideon, the auspex bearer, in the centre. It was a solid formation that drew on the ancient teachings of the Order, and was suited to dealing with close assaults from any direction. Abruptly he found himself wishing that he’d thought to equip the squad with a flamer or two before leaving Aldurukh, but that couldn’t be helped now. Once he was satisfied that all of his warriors were in position, Zahariel waved the squad forward.

Drawing on the maps he’d memorised, Zahariel guided the squad through the twisting corridors surrounding the base of the thermal tower. Visibility was limited; even with the Astartes’ enhanced senses the plumes of mist and the dim red lighting created illusory patterns of movement and obscured vision beyond more than two metres. Zahariel could not help but admire the courage of the Jaegers who had preceded them; the human troops would have been all but blind as they tried to reach the lower levels of the tower. He doubted that they’d made it very far.

The terrible heat and the reek of corruption increased as they pressed further inside, and the sense of malevolence grew stronger and more focused on Zahariel and the squad. He could feel its weight pressing against him like a smothering cloud, probing his armour in search of a way inside. The cables connecting his mind to the psychic hood grew deathly cold, and a film of black frost condensed on the shaft of his force staff despite the cloying heat. He was tempted – strongly tempted – to reach out with his own psychic power and get a sense of the enemy that lay somewhere ahead, but years of training with Brother-Librarian Israfael cautioned against it. Don’t waste your energies swinging blind, Israfael had told him many times. Or worse, leave yourself open to a surprise attack. Conserve your strength, maintain your defences, and wait for the enemy to reveal themselves. And so he did, resolutely pushing the squad forward and waiting for the first blows to fall.

There were four industrial-grade lifts that provided access to the tower’s lower levels, but they were deathtraps as far as Zahariel was concerned. If the enemy had access to a meltagun – and the Jaeger reaction force had carried two – then a single blast into such a tight space could wipe out half his squad. He had Brother Gideon disable their controls so the enemy couldn’t use them either, then they began their descent via one of the tower’s four long stairways.

The stairs didn’t switch back upon themselves, like in most structures; instead they descended in a long, arcing spiral that wound ever deeper into the earth. The foul presence permeating the air grew stronger with each and every step. Zahariel concentrated on putting one foot in front of the next, recalling the labyrinthine steps that wound through the ancient stone beneath Aldurukh itself. Memories flitted through his mind as he walked – of his initiation into the Order and his long walk through darkness at Jonson’s side. Fragmentary images came and went: stone steps and torchlight, the rustle of fabric, Nemiel’s presence at his side as they descended a flight of stairs to… where? He couldn’t quite recall. The memories were vague and only half-formed, like scenes from a dream. A dull pain swelled in the back of his head as he tried to concentrate on the images, until finally he was forced to push the thoughts away.

More alarming were the cracks that began to appear in the outer walls of the stairwell as they descended deeper beneath the ground. Black roots had forced their way through freshly-laid permacrete more than a metre thick, spreading across the inner surface of the curved walls and spilling black, foul-smelling dirt onto the stairs. Red light glistened on the segmented bodies of insects that wormed and writhed their way among the roots. Ghostly white cave spiders, each as big as Zahariel’s hand, rose up from their nests and brandished their long legs in challenge as the Astartes went past.

By the time they reached the lowest levels the stairway was little more than a tunnel of raw earth and dripping plant matter, thick with crawling, chittering life. Strange, misshapen insects, bloated and foul, squirmed amid dense networks of rotting root matter. A long, segmented millipede, nearly as long as Zahariel’s forearm, uncoiled like a spring from the curve of a root ball and leapt onto his shoulder, stabbing wildly at the armour plate with its needle-like stinger. He brushed the foul thing away with the haft of his force staff and crushed it beneath his boot.

Still, the squad forged ahead, pressing through the ever-constricting tunnel until Zahariel began to think they would be forced to cut a path with their chainswords. Finally, Astelan and the warrior beside him at the front of the formation came to a halt. The air was stifling, thick with heat and the smell of rot, and the red emergency lights had long since given out. Dimly, Zahariel could sense a vague, greenish glow down and to the right, past Astelan’s shoulder.

‘We’ve reached the bottom of the stairs,’ Astelan said quietly, casting a wary eye up at the swarms of insect life rustling ceaselessly overhead. ‘What are your orders?’

There was no telling what they might find beyond the opening to level B6. Zahariel was surprised the enemy had let them penetrate so far – he’d operated on the assumption that they would encounter resistance almost immediately, which would have at least given him some idea of what they were up against. The time might come very soon when he would have to draw upon his psychic abilities, whether he wanted to or not. He needed information more than anything else at this point.

‘Press forward,’ he said. ‘Drive for the thermal core. It’s the largest chamber on this level.’

The Chapter Master nodded and stepped into the green-lit blackness without hesitation. Zahariel followed with the rest of his squad, bolt pistol at the ready. His feet came down on thick roots and cable-like vines stretching across the floor beyond the stairwell. Draughts of stinking air gusted past his helmet, and the insect noise surrounding the warriors swelled to frantic life.

They pressed on down a low-ceilinged passage for more than a hundred metres, passing numerous cross-corridors as they went. The clinging plant life continued unabated down the passageway, and Zahariel realised the pale green glow came from colonies of bloated grubs that clung tenaciously to the twisted roots. Sounds of restless movement echoed all around them, seeming to grow louder with each passing moment. At one point Zahariel heard the clatter of talons behind a cluster of pipes half-hidden among a network of vines running along one of the walls, but he couldn’t catch sight of the creature that made the noise.

‘How much farther?’ Gideon asked quietly. The warrior’s voice was tense. The continual screeching and rustling had the entire squad on edge.

‘Fifty more–’ Zahariel started to say, just as the air filled with a hideous screeching and dark, armoured shapes burst from the plant life all around them.

He was glancing over at Gideon just as a segmented creature struck downwards at the Astartes from the network of thick pipes running overhead. It was swift as a tree viper but as thick as Zahariel’s upper arm, with hundreds of chitin-sheathed legs and a broad head set with a half-dozen compound eyes. In a flash it had wrapped around Gideon’s torso and lifted the huge warrior off the ground, lunging and snapping at the back of his helmet with its curved mandibles.

Bolt pistols barked and chainswords howled in the confined space as the squad was set upon from all sides. Gideon twisted in the monster’s grip, slashing at its body with his whirring blade. Zahariel blew the creature’s head apart with a single shot from his bolt pistol just as a powerful impact struck the back of his helmet and pitched him off his feet.

Zahariel tried to twist his body as he fell, but the creature had his helmet gripped in its mandibles and it was stronger even than he. It drove him face-first onto the floor, wrenching his head left and right as it tried to crack the helmet he wore. Something sharp jabbed at the back plate of the helmet like a dagger, trying again and again to punch through the ceramite. Warning icons flashed before his eyes, informing him of his suit’s failing integrity.

With his elbows and knees on firm ground the Librarian flexed his augmented muscles and managed to twist onto his right side. His force staff was pinned beneath him, but he was able to aim behind him at the creature’s thrashing body. It took three bolt pistol shots in rapid succession to blow the thing apart, showering him with fragments of chitin and reeking ichor. In the muzzle flashes of his pistol Zahariel could see three more of the monsters rearing up from the walls like snakes, their mandibles clashing as they prepared to strike. Without hesitation, he summoned up the full force of his will and unleashed the psychic fury of the warp.

He had practised the attack countless times under Israfael’s tutelage, but the sheer intensity of the energy coursing through him took Zahariel by surprise. It roared through him like a torrent, far stronger and easier to grasp than he’d ever experienced before. A nimbus of crackling energy surrounded the Librarian; he felt each and every vein in his body turn to ice, radiating from the cables of the psychic hood at the back of his skull, and the three creatures were engulfed in a torrent of raging fire that coalesced from the very air itself. They burst apart in the intense heat, their carapaces exploding from within.

Zahariel gave a shout of triumph and surged to his feet. Skeins of crackling lightning played over the surface of his staff, and icy power raged along his limbs. For a dizzying instant his awareness sharpened to a supernatural degree, reaching into dimensions beyond the understanding of ordinary humans. The permacrete and metal of the corridor faded into near-invisibility, while living matter was etched with vibrant clarity. He could see the layers of root and vine blanketing the walls and ceiling, and every one of the thousands of insects living in their midst. He could also see the score of worms surrounding his squad, wrapping about the warriors and biting at their armoured forms.

Worse, he could see the awful, unnatural taint that pulsed through it all. It stained every living thing in the corridor around the Astartes, corrupting them like a cancer. A cancer that seethed with awful, otherworldly sentience.

The sight of it stunned Zahariel. It etched itself indelibly into his brain. This was worse by far than the horrors he’d witnessed on Sarosh. There, too, he had been deep beneath the ground, surrounded by death and corruption, but on Sarosh, the vile, jelly-like creature they’d faced had been clearly born of the shifting madness of the warp. This taint, this evil that suffused every root and vine, was inextricably part of Caliban itself.

Eleven

Conversations by Starlight

The attack was so fast that it momentarily took Nemiel off-guard. In the space of a single heartbeat the praetorians erupted into a blur of deadly motion, bringing their weapons to bear and charging across the last few metres between themselves and the Astartes. Multi-barrel slug throwers pounded at the Dark Angels, the explosive shells bursting in a series of sharp flashes across the ceramite surfaces of their armour. The warriors staggered under the hail of shells, blood spraying from wounds to their arms, torsos and legs. Urgent red telltales flashed on Nemiel’s helmet display; pain flared across his chest, and his arms suddenly felt twice as heavy. A praetorian shell had likely cut a bundle of synthetic muscle fibres beneath his breastplate.

Brother-Sergeant Kohl was the first to respond. There was no time for questions or recriminations – the praetorians were descending on them with the speed of a thunderbolt, brandishing power claws and blazing shock mauls that would make a mockery of their power armour. The Terran staggered backward under a punishing barrage of explosive shells, roaring a curse in some forgotten tongue and returning fire with his bolt pistol. The shells struck one of the charging praetorians in the chest and head, flattening against the augmented warrior’s armour plates without inflicting serious damage, but the gesture of resistance was enough to shock the rest of the squad back into action.

Bolters hammered at the charging praetorians, slowing their advance by sheer weight of fire. Blood and other fluids spurted from minor wounds; spatters of liquid hissed into steam where it struck their super-charged bionics. Nemiel smelled the acrid reek of adrenal compounds and hormone agitators.

Off to Nemiel’s right there was a shriek of superheated air as Brother Marthes shot one of the oncoming warriors point-blank with his meltagun. The anti-tank weapon blew the praetorian apart in a shower of sparks and charred bits of flesh.

The praetorian rushing at Nemiel was a massive brute that seemed more machine than man; a composition of bionic joints, synthetic musculature, adrenal shunts and pitted armour plating. His head was encased in a faceless metal shell, studded with multi-spectrum auspex nodes in place of ears, nose and mouth. His breastplate was decorated – if that was the word – with bar-code emblems and small plaques of glittering, iridescent metal. Perhaps he was a champion of sorts, or the leader of the detachment; Nemiel couldn’t be sure. The praetorian’s left hand had been replaced by a huge, three-fingered power claw, its curved edges plated with adamantium and sharpened to a mirror-sheen. The warrior lunged at Nemiel with stunning speed, swiping the claw at his face.

He knew better than to try and parry something so large, the power claw could easily knock his crozius aside – or worse, snap it cleanly in two. Instead, he ducked, allowing the praetorian’s swing to pass harmlessly over his head, and smashed his staff into the warrior’s elbow. The power field of the crozius struck the bionic joint and fused it with a flash of actinic light, but the praetorian scarcely seemed to notice. The huge warrior spun on his left heel and brought his right elbow back to smash into Nemiel’s forehead.

Ceramite cracked loudly in Nemiel’s ears, and the impact hurled him off his feet. He landed squarely on his back, his helmet readouts crackling with washes of static. Without thinking, he fired a quick burst in the praetorian’s direction, and was rewarded with the sound of shells striking the warrior’s armour plate. The thing was just a blurry shape on the helmet’s damaged optical systems, fading in and out of existence like a monstrous ghost. The praetorian moved closer, his claw arm reaching for Nemiel’s right leg.

A flash of light and another howl of tortured air swept over Nemiel. Marthes’s shot vaporised the praetorian’s claw arm at the elbow and blistered the warrior’s armoured shoulders and chest. The warrior reeled backwards, his auto-senses momentarily overloaded.

Nemiel dropped his pistol and clawed at his helmet release. He popped the catches with nimble fingers and tore the damaged helm from his head, blinking in the dim, red light of Diamat’s distant sun. A wild melee was raging all around him as his battle-brothers fought against the heavily-armed praetorians. Brother Yung was down, his breastplate torn like paper and stained with blood. Techmarine Askelon had another of the praetorians by the throat, lifting the brute off the ground with his servo arm and crushing the warrior’s metal-sheathed spine.

He quickly turned his focus back to the one-armed praetorian just a few metres away. The augmented warrior was in a crouch, the air shimmering around his scorched armour, his body eerily still as he reset his auspex nodes. Nemiel snatched up his bolt pistol and took careful aim, preparing to put a round through the praetorian’s throat.

Suddenly a strange, trumpeting blurt of binaric code cut like a knife through the sounds of battle, and the praetorians practically recoiled from the Dark Angels. They retreated a dozen steps and lowered their weapon arms, their chests heaving from exertion and the combat drugs that were boiling in their veins. The Astartes paused, their weapons trained on their adversaries. Kohl looked to Nemiel for instructions.

But the Redemptor’s attention was focused on a large force of armoured skitarii rushing down the roadway from the north-east. They were led by a tall, hooded figure clad in the crimson robes of the Mechanicum, riding atop a humming suspensor disc.

Nemiel rose swiftly to his feet as the figure glided closer. ‘What is the meaning of this, magos?’ he snarled, his choler nearly overwhelming him.

‘Error. Improper threat parameters. Misidentification,’ the magos blurted in High Gothic. The voice was harsh and atonal, the words strangely inflected but recognizable. The magos paused, raising a hand that glittered in the rust-coloured sunlight. ‘Apologies,’ he continued, his synthetic voice more carefully modulated now. ‘Grave apologies to you and your squad, noble Astartes. The praetorians were in seek-and-destroy mode, searching for enemy troops that had penetrated the complex. Your appearance on Diamat is… unexpected. I was unable to override the engagement protocols until it was too late.’

‘I see,’ Nemiel said curtly. So it’s our fault for rushing here to protect you, he thought. He glanced over at Brother-Sergeant Kohl and guessed from the Terran’s belligerent pose that he was thinking much the same thing. ‘How is Brother Yung?’

‘Comatose,’ Kohl growled. ‘His injuries are grave.’

‘Let us conduct him to the forge’s apothecarion,’ the magos said at once. ‘We will repair his body and mend his damaged armour.’

For some reason, the magos’s offer took Nemiel aback. ‘That won’t be required,’ he said quickly. ‘We will conduct him back to our ship when the battle is done, and let our brothers tend to him.’ He studied the hooded figure warily. ‘I am Brother-Redemptor Nemiel, of the Emperor’s First Legion. Who are you?’

The magos laid one metal hand atop the other and bowed from the waist. ‘I am Archoi, magos of the forge and former servant of the Arch-Magos Vertullus,’ he said.

‘Former?’ Nemiel inquired.

Archoi nodded gravely. ‘I regret that the esteemed Arch-Magos was slain, twelve-point-eight hours ago, while coordinating the defence of the forge,’ he said. ‘As the senior surviving member of Vertullus’s staff, I am now the acting Arch-Magos of Diamat.’

Off to the south, a deep, brassy rumble shook the air. It swelled in volume, the source climbing slowly into the sky. Nemiel turned and saw a pair of ships boosting ponderously into orbit on pillars of cyan light.

‘The rebels have had enough,’ Kohl declared. There was a grim note of triumph in his voice. ‘They’re pulling out.’

‘Indeed,’ Archoi replied. ‘Your primarch contacted us six-point-three-seven minutes previously, declaring that rebel forces in orbit are in full retreat.’ The magos raised his arms, as if in benediction. ‘Victory is yours, noble Astartes. Diamat is saved.’

Archoi’s synthesised voice fell silent, giving way to the fading thunder of the fleeing transports and distant rumble of Imperial vehicles. A rattle of small-arms fire echoed in the distance. The praetorians stared mutely at Nemiel and the Dark Angels, their augmented bodies as still as statues. Blood and lubricants leaked slowly from their wounds.

Nemiel couldn’t help but think that Archoi was being a bit premature.

‘Naturally, we’re very grateful that you came when you did,’ Taddeus Kulik said, though the look in the governor’s hooded eyes suggested just the opposite.

The primarch’s sanctum aboard the Invincible Reason was a single, large chamber that stretched from one side of the warship’s superstructure to the other and subdivided into smaller, more intimate spaces by fluted columns of structural steel. Tall, arched viewports to port and starboard threw long, sharp-edged shadows across the mosaics inlaid onto the deck, and hinted at the angular shapes of furnishings in the surrounding spaces. Fragments of hull plating had gouged the portside viewports in chaotic patterns, refracting the red light of Diamat’s sun like a scattering of polished rubies.

Jonson typically kept the lighting dim in the sanctum, preferring to work solely by starlight when possible, but out of consideration for his guests he’d lit the lumen-sconces on the pillars surrounding the large, hexagonally-shaped meeting space in the centre of the great chamber. A carved wooden campaign chair had been provided for the governor, who had been hit in the leg by a lasgun bolt during the Dragoons’ counter-attack. A chirurgeon from the Imperial palace and a medicae servitor stood a discreet distance away, ready with painkillers should Kulik require them.

The governor, a man in his middle years, still wore the battle-scarred carapace armour he’d fought in just a few hours before. A stained compression bandage was wrapped around his right thigh, and an old power sword hung from a scabbard at his hip. His pale grey eyes were bright with pain and fatigue, and though he made a point to relax into the back of his chair, the set of his shoulders was tense.

Magos Archoi stood a few paces to the governor’s right, his metal hands folded at his waist. He had changed out of his simple Mechanicum robe for his audience with the primarch, garbing himself in the formal attire of his late predecessor. The heavy robes of office were woven with gold and platinum thread, worked into complicated patterns that resembled nothing so much as integrated circuit paths; the sleeves were wide and terminated just below the elbow, revealing the intricate craftsmanship of Archoi’s bionic arms. The magos had drawn back his hood, exposing the polished metal of his lower skull and neck. Data cables and coolant tubes ran in bundles along either side of his steel throat; auspex nodes and receptor pits were arranged around the vox grille set in the space where his mouth used to be. The magos had augmetic eyes set into the flesh of his upper face, glowing with faint pinpoints of blue light. His bald scalp was pale and dotted with faint scars. Nemiel couldn’t read the magos at all; Archoi’s body betrayed nothing but machine-like inscrutability. A pair of hooded acolytes stood a precise six paces behind him, heads bowed and muttering to one another in muted blurts of binaric cant.

Lion El’Jonson studied the two officials over the tips of his steepled fingers. He sat in a high-backed, throne-like chair carved from Calibanite oak that only served to magnify his towering physical presence, his demeanour confident and utterly composed. Looking at him, one would never know that he’d been fighting for his life in a space battle just a short while before.

‘Diamat’s troubles are far from over, Governor Kulik,’ Jonson replied gravely. ‘There are resources here that Horus must have in order to prevail in the coming conflict with the Emperor. As soon as the survivors of his raiding fleet return to Isstvan, he’ll immediately start putting together a new force – and this time it won’t be comprised of renegade warships and former Imperial Army troops.’ His gaze drifted to the red-stained viewports to port, his expression thoughtful. ‘I expect we have no more than two and a half weeks, three at most, before they return. We need to make the most of it.’

Kulik eyed Jonson warily. ‘And what exactly would you have us do, Primarch Jonson?’ he asked.

The cynical tone in the governor’s voice shocked Nemiel. He was standing to the right of Jonson’s chair, turned so that he could address the primarch or the two officials if required. Upon returning to the flagship he’d seen to the needs of his squad and then spent more than an hour in the apothecarion having bits of steel removed from his body. His battered wargear had been handed off to the ship’s armourers for repairs, and he’d clad himself in a simple, hooded surplice before reporting to the primarch. His hands clenched reflexively at the near-insolent tone in the governor’s voice.

Kulik acted as though Jonson was as much of a danger as Horus – and why not, Nemiel thought? Four Legions had already cast off their ties to the Emperor, and the entire segmentum was coming apart at the seams. Everyone’s motives were suspect. The realisation left him cold.

Jonson didn’t miss the tone in Kulik’s voice either. He turned back to the governor, his expression an icy mask. ‘I would have you continue to do your duty, sir,’ he said coldly. ‘We must defend this planet at all costs. The future of the Imperium might well depend upon it.’

Governor Kulik grimaced, shifting uncomfortably in his seat. He rubbed the bandage on his leg, but Nemiel wondered if that was what truly pained him. ‘My people don’t have much left to give,’ he said gravely. ‘The rebels smashed every city and town from orbit. We don’t even know for sure how many people are still alive. There’s been no time to count all the bodies, much less bury them.’

‘What of the Dragoons?’ the primarch asked.

Kulik sighed. ‘We threw everything we had left into the counterattack once we learned that the company covering the forge’s south entrance had been overrun.’ The governor had been a military man in his youth. When the commander of the Dragoons had been killed in an atomic strike early in the rebel attack, and the Imperial palace had been bombed to rubble, he put on a Dragoon’s carapace armour and took charge of the planet’s defence. Kulik was a man who took his duties to the Imperium seriously.

‘I’ve got perhaps one full regiment’s worth of troops, cobbled together from half a dozen units, and most of an armoured battalion left,’ he said, then shot a venomous look at Magos Archoi. ‘On the other hand, the Mechanicum’s troops saw little or no action during the attack, so they’re likely to be at full strength.’

Jonson turned to the magos and raised an inquisitive eyebrow. ‘Is that so?’ he asked. His tone was mild, but Nemiel saw a gleam of anger in the primarch’s eye.

Magos Archoi bowed his head in regret. ‘It was Arch-Magos Vertullus’s directive that the tech-guard be employed only for the purposes of defending our forge complexes across the planet,’ he said. ‘Many of us tried to convince him otherwise, but he said his orders came from Mars itself.’

‘Not that it made any difference,’ Kulik spat. ‘The rebels sacked every one of the smaller forges and manufactories.’

‘But they failed to seize more than twelve per cent of our primary complex outside Xanthus,’ Magos Archoi pointed out.

The governor glared at him. ‘And had we not bled to keep them out, I wager that percentage would have been a great deal higher,’ he retorted, his anger rising.

‘Now is not the time for recriminations, my friends,’ Jonson declared, holding up a hand to forestall further comment. ‘We have fought hard and won a temporary reprieve, but that is all. Now tell us, Magos Archoi, how many troops can the Mechanicum muster for Diamat’s defence?’

The magos paused. One of his acolytes raised his hooded head slightly and let out an atonal squawk of code. Archoi burbled a reply in binaric, then said, ‘As Governor Kulik pointed out, all of our lesser forges were seized by the enemy, and their defenders were slain. Fighting around the southern entrance to the primary forge was also very heavy, and our garrison suffered serious losses. At this point we can muster only one thousand, two hundred and twelve skitarii.’

Nemiel saw Kulik grind his teeth at the offhand assessment, but the governor wisely chose to hold his choler in check.

‘Thank you, magos,’ Jonson said, taking control of the conversation again. ‘For my part, I can muster one hundred and eighty-seven veteran Astartes for the planet’s defence. I’m still waiting on damage assessments from my battle group commanders, but it’s clear that all of my surviving vessels have sustained moderate to severe levels of damage, and all of them are low on stocks of fuel, ordnance and ammunition.’

Magos Archoi bowed to the primarch. ‘The full resources of our forge are at your service, Primarch Jonson,’ he said. ‘We can begin resupplying your ships and effecting repairs immediately.’

‘Providing you’re resupplied and the proper repairs are made, can your ships repel the next attack?’ Kulik asked.

Jonson considered his reply. ‘It’s unlikely,’ he admitted. ‘We’ll hold them off as long as we can, but my ships are in no condition for a protracted battle. Keep in mind, however, that time is not on Horus’s side. He knows that a huge force of Astartes is on the way to attack Isstvan, and could arrive here at any time in the next few weeks. Every day we can hold him off brings us that much closer to victory.’

‘If all we have to do is dig in our heels and make the bastards pay for every kilometre, that’s something we’ve had a lot of experience with,’ Kulik said grimly.

‘And we’ll be right beside you every step of the way,’ Jonson said with a nod. He turned to Magos Archoi. ‘There is a great deal of planning to discuss,’ he began. ‘May I make a small request, magos?’

‘Naturally you may, primarch,’ Archoi replied.

Jonson smiled. ‘What I require most right now is information,’ he began. ‘Specifically, I need an accounting of the materiel that the rebels succeeded in removing from your forges, as well as an inventory of what remains, and where it is stored.’

Archoi didn’t reply for several moments. Kulik turned to regard the magos, his expression intent.

‘Your request is problematic,’ the magos said at last. ‘The lesser forges were almost completely destroyed, and a great deal of data storage was lost.’

Jonson raised a placating hand. ‘Of course, magos. I see your point,’ he said. ‘If you could just provide an inventory of the materiel still stored at the primary forge site, that would be sufficient.’

The magos bowed. ‘Thank you for your understanding, primarch,’ he replied. ‘I will instruct my acolytes to begin compiling the data at once.’

The primarch smiled, but his eyes were calculating. ‘My thanks, Magos Archoi,’ he said. ‘Now, if you will excuse me, I must see to the needs of my brethren. We will meet again tomorrow to begin discussing an integrated defence plan.’

Magos Archoi bowed deeply to the primarch and withdrew quickly, exchanging a flurry of code with his acolytes as he disappeared into the deep shadows beyond the audience space. Governor Kulik levered himself awkwardly to his feet, waving away the hands of the hovering chirurgeon. He inclined his head respectfully to Jonson, who nodded at the wounded man in return and watched him limp off into the gloom. After the governor had left, the primarch turned to Nemiel.

‘What do you make of them?’ he asked.

The question surprised Nemiel. He paused for a moment, collecting his thoughts. ‘Governor Kulik seems like a brave and honourable man,’ he replied. ‘How many planetary rulers have we met who cower in their palaces and send better men to die on their behalf?’

‘Well, his palace was blown to bits,’ Jonson observed.

Nemiel chuckled. ‘He could have fled to the hills with his people, but he didn’t. He honoured his oaths, and that counts for something.’

Jonson nodded. ‘Do you think we can trust him?’

The Redemptor frowned. He studied the primarch’s impassive face. Was Jonson making another joke? ‘I… believe so,’ he said after a moment. ‘How could it possibly profit him to betray us now?

The primarch gave him a faintly exasperated look. ‘Nemiel, the governor did well enough against Horus’s cannon fodder, I’ll grant you that,’ he said. ‘But the Warmaster won’t just send auxiliaries next time. We’ll almost certainly be facing other Astartes as well. How do you imagine he’ll react then?’

Nemiel frowned. It was still difficult to imagine the idea of fighting a brother Astartes. The very thought of it filled him with dread. ‘Governor Kulik is no coward,’ he said confidently. ‘He’ll fight, regardless of the odds. It’s in his nature.’

Jonson nodded to himself, and Nemiel saw that he seemed actually relieved by the observation. Could the primarch actually have a difficult time reading someone as forthright as Kulik? Was this the same individual who united all of Caliban in a crusade against the great beasts?

But then it hit Nemiel; Jonson hadn’t united Caliban. The plan was his but the person who convinced the knightly orders and the noble families to put aside their ancient traditions and unite under Jonson’s banner was Luther. It had been his oratorial skills, his personal charisma and sense of diplomacy, and above all his keen insight into human nature that had allowed him to forge the grand alliance that had changed the face of Caliban. Jonson, by contrast, had spent his early years alone, living like an animal in the depths of the Northwilds, one of the most forbidding and inaccessible wildernesses on the planet. He didn’t say a word for the first few months at Aldurukh, and was always considered cold and aloof even in later years. He was thought of as an intellectual and a scholar, and Nemiel knew that to be true, but now he also wondered if Lion El’Jonson, the superhuman son of the Emperor himself, could not relate to the people around him. He could predict how they would behave on the battlefield to an uncanny degree, but he couldn’t tell an honourable man from a craven one. Are we all ciphers to him, the Redemptor wondered? If Jonson had so little in common with humanity, what did that make him?

Nemiel realised abruptly that Jonson was staring at him. He shifted uncomfortably. ‘My apologies, lord,’ he said. ‘Did you say something?’

‘I asked you for your impression of Magos Archoi,’ he said.

‘Ah,’ Nemiel replied. ‘Honestly, I don’t know what to make of him. How can a man willingly part with his own flesh and replace it with cold, unfeeling metal and plastek? It seems unnatural to me.’

‘You mean like Captain Stenius? I think he rather appreciates having a pair of working eyes,’ Jonson said wryly.

‘That’s different, my lord. Stenius lost his sight in battle. They were taken from him, not willingly thrown away.’

Jonson nodded. ‘So you think we can’t trust him?’

‘I don’t know what to think about him, lord. That’s what I’m saying.’ He sighed. ‘I confess I might be a little biased as well, after our first encounter.’

Jonson nodded. ‘Understandable,’ he said. ‘How is Brother Yung?’

‘The Apothecaries are tending him now,’ Nemiel replied. ‘He suffered severe internal injuries, and his body went into stasis almost immediately.’ As part of their extensive physical and genetic modifications, all Astartes possessed the ability to survive even the worst physical injuries by entering a kind of voluntary coma that focused the body’s energies on basic survival. ‘The chirurgeon says that he will heal, but there’s no chance he’ll be returning to action in the next few months.’

‘And the rest of the squad?’

Nemiel shrugged. ‘Numerous minor injuries, but that’s to be expected. Brother Ephrial is having his knee mended now, and will be fit for duty again within twelve hours.’ He grinned. ‘Just don’t send us into battle any time in the next week or so, or half of us will be fighting in our surplices.’

Jonson returned the grin. ‘I think I can manage that,’ he said, then rose from the chair. ‘Go and get some rest. Give your body some time to recover. We’ll begin planning in earnest on the morrow.’

Nemiel bowed to the primarch and made to withdraw, but something he recalled from the previous conversation made him pause. ‘My lord?’

Jonson had already padded silently into the shadows. Nemiel saw him turn, silhouetted against the crimson light streaming through the portside viewports. ‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘Why did you request that inventory from Magos Archoi?’ he said without preamble.

The primarch stiffened slightly. ‘I should think it obvious,’ he replied. ‘If we’re to devise an effective battle plan against the rebels we will need a full accounting of our supplies and all available assets.’

Nemiel nodded. ‘Yes, of course, my lord. It’s entirely understandable. Only…’ he paused. ‘The request troubled the magos considerably. In these difficult times, with the Warmaster in open revolt and armies on the march, it’s easy to misunderstand the intent behind such a request.’

Jonson did not reply at first. He stared at Nemiel from the shadows, his powerful body completely still. ‘I’m not a brigand, Nemiel,’ he said, his voice quiet and cold.

The Redemptor bowed his head. ‘Of course not, my lord,’ he said, feeling foolish now for bringing the matter up in the first place. ‘I didn’t mean that at all. But Archoi and Governor Kulik have already suffered a great deal at the hands of Horus’s men. No one knows whom to trust anymore.’

Jonson’s gaze bored into Nemiel. ‘Do you trust me, Nemiel?’ the primarch asked.

‘Of course,’ Nemiel replied.

‘Then rest,’ Jonson said. ‘And leave Archoi and Kulik to me.’

The primarch turned away, gliding like a forest cat into the darkness. Nemiel watched him go, a feeling of unease sinking into his stomach.

Twelve

Awful Truths

Horror and revulsion threatened to overwhelm Zahariel. He cried out in rage at the vision of evil before him – and then his senses shifted yet again.

Pale light bathed the corridor, swelling from the bodies of his brother Astartes and the twisted monstrosities that they fought. Between one eye-blink and the next, the world had slowed near to a standstill, transforming the desperate battle into a kind of grim tableaux. Zahariel could see through the bodies of friend and foe alike; he saw hearts beating and veins coursing sluggishly with hot blood. He could see the black ichor suffusing the bodies of the terrible worms, and the foul corruption that spread within them. One of the monsters had seized brother Attias, wrapping around his torso and clamping its mandibles about his steel-encased skull. Within the creature’s mouth was a long, needle-pointed spike of bone, sheathed in a powerful bundle of muscle that propelled it forward with the force of a bullet aimed at the back of Attias’s head. A hollow channel within the bony needle pulsed with foul venom.

Zahariel’s horror was transformed into pure, righteous rage. He summoned the fury of the warp and swept his staff in a wide arc, hurling tendrils of searing white fire towards every creature he could see. Like thunderbolts, they sank through the monsters’ flesh and boiled the liquid within. The Librarian felt his veins freeze and his hearts clench in agony, and the world snapped back into motion once more.

A dozen of the creatures exploded, showering the squad with shattered chitin and a mist of stinking ichor. Zahariel reeled backwards, stunned by the intensity of his vision. Terrorsight, Israfael called it. He’d only experienced it once before, when he’d fought the Calibanite lion. For that one instant, he had extended his consciousness partly into the warp. The coils of his psychic hood were so cold they seared his skin. He shuddered to think what might have happened had he exposed himself to the tainted energies inside the passageway without the hood’s protection.

The darkness within the corridor was lit with muzzle flashes as the squad rallied against the armoured worms’ sudden assault. Chapter Master Astelan was still on his feet, blasting two of the monsters to pieces with well-aimed shots from his pistol and slicing another in half with a swipe of his chainsword. Brother Gideon leapt up, shrugging off the body of the worm he’d killed and chopping apart another that had latched onto a fellow warrior’s back. Attias charged forward to help free another fallen comrade, his fearsome skull-face lit by the hellish flames of pistol fire.

With a fierce cry, Zahariel hurled himself into the fight. He focused his rage on the force staff in his hands, wreathing it in a crackling aura of psychic power. Every worm he struck was incinerated in a flash of blue fire and a sizzling clap of thunder that hurled their shattered husks into the air. He destroyed a half-dozen of the worms in as many seconds, and then as suddenly as it had begun, the battle was over. The Astartes stood in a rough circle, facing outwards, their armour scarred and dented and their pistols smoking. The blue haze of bolt propellant hung in the thick air around them, and the smashed bodies of more than a score of worms lay about their feet. Several of the Astartes bore minor wounds, but none of them had fallen prey to the worms’ fearsome stingers.

‘What are these creatures?’ Zahariel asked, probing one of the corpses with the butt of his staff.

‘Reaver worms,’ Attias said, nudging one of the dead creatures with his boot. ‘We used to hunt them when I was a child, but where I come from they never grow much longer than half a metre.’

Zahariel had heard of reaver worms, like most Calibanite children, but had never seen one. They were a menace to human settlements all over Caliban, transforming small animals and livestock into living incubators for their eggs. The worms would wrap themselves around their victim’s neck, driving their stinger into the prey’s spine and injecting it with a tremendous amount of neurotoxin. The venom destroyed higher brain functions, leaving the autonomic functions intact and making the victim’s nervous system hyper-conductive. Still attached to the victim, the worm then secreted enzymes into the prey’s spinal cord that gave it rudimentary control of its motor functions. The worm would then literally drive the prey back to its communal nest, where the still-living victim would be injected with eggs by the nest’s queen. Occasionally the worms would find their way into fresh human graves and try to make off with the corpse, much to the horror of the deceased’s relatives. His skin crawled at the thought of the worm that had clamped onto his helmet, and the dagger-like stinger that had tried to punch its way into the back of his skull.

‘I think we know what happened to the Jaegers,’ he said grimly. ‘And probably most of the labourers besides.’

‘Most of them?’ Astelan said.

‘A worm didn’t send the radio transmission to Aldurukh,’ Zahariel said.

‘Emperor protect us,’ the Chapter Master hissed in disgust.

‘It’s been done before,’ Attias said. ‘The Knights of Lupus turned their beasts on us, remember?’

‘But the Knights of Lupus are no more,’ Astelan said sharply. ‘And the great beasts driven to extinction. So where did these vile things come from?’

‘That’s not important right now,’ Zahariel said, eager to change the subject. ‘If the worms carried off the bodies of the Jaegers, it means they’ve got a nest and an egg-laying queen down here.’

Astelan nodded in agreement. ‘The queens are much larger than the drones,’ he warned.

‘Then she must be up ahead, near the thermal core,’ Zahariel declared. He checked the load in his bolt pistol, then holstered it and pulled a frag grenade from his belt. ‘Grenades first, then we charge. I’ll take the lead. Any questions?’

There were none, of course. The warriors of the squad had their orders. The Astartes returned to their formation and readied their weapons without hesitation. Zahariel took Astelan’s place at the head of the group and set off down the corridor at a swift pace. As he did, he summoned his power once more and sent it questing down the passageway ahead. He sensed more worms waiting in ambush at the far end of the corridor and lashed the monsters with a wave of psychic energy. A hideous screeching filled the air, and powerful, armoured bodies burst from the concealing roots, thrashing in their death agonies. Zahariel struck them again, channelling every ounce of his rage into the blast, and the worms became shrieking pyres of purple and indigo flame.

Zahariel primed the grenade in his hand. ‘For the Emperor!’ he cried, and hurled it down the corridor. Nine more grenades followed an instant later, flashing past his head in flat, precise arcs to detonate just beyond the entrance to the core chamber. More shrieking rent the air as shrapnel scythed through the creatures hiding around the entranceway. Zahariel answered them with a furious shout of his own and broke into a run, his force staff blazing like a firebrand.

A swarm of reaver worms awaited their charge, ready to defend their nest. The Librarian hurled a torrent of psychic flame into their midst, immolating a score of the creatures and stunning the rest. He and his brothers crashed a moment later, and the battle was joined in earnest.

Zahariel swept his force staff in a crackling arc and killed two worms lunging at him from the right. Another monster struck from the left, fixing its mandibles about his ceramite pauldron; in one swift motion he drew his bolt pistol and decapitated the creature with a single, well-aimed shot. Around him, chainswords howled and bolt pistols hammered as the Angels of Death slaughtered their foes.

The chamber was a huge, man-made cavern that rose to a curved, dome-like ceiling thirty metres above their heads. The huge cylinder of the thermal core itself dominated the centre of the chamber, rising from a bore that had been drilled more than five hundred metres into the bedrock of the planet and disappearing through an opening at the apex of the dome, where it carried geothermal heat to power exchange units that supplied the rest of the plant.

The air inside the cavernous space was gelid with heat and the stench of rot. The air around the thermal core shimmered like a mirage, and a powerful sense of dislocation threatened to overwhelm Zahariel. The cables of his psychic hood burned into his skull, and a spike of dull agony bore into his brain despite the effects of the dampener. The barrier between the warp and the physical world had been weakened, and the sense of madness and corruption was almost palpable, like a layer of oil coating his skin. Sorceries had been worked here, his training told him, and the heart of it lay only a few dozen metres away.

At the centre of the chamber, right at the feet of the columnar thermal core, lay a massive pile of corpses. The top layer, Zahariel could see, wore bloodstained uniforms of forest green – the Jaeger relief force that had been drawn to the site. But there were hundreds more, the Librarian estimated – likely the entire labour force of the plant as well.

Hissing and screeching, the defenders of the reaver worm nest assaulted the Dark Angels from all sides. Zahariel blew one out of the air with a pair of shots from his bolt pistol and blasted two more into burning husks with a sweep of his staff. The Astartes kept their octagonal formation, facing outwards and slashing away with their chainswords at any monster that came within reach. The training of the Legion – and the rites of the Order before it – served the warriors of Caliban in good stead, and the bodies of their foes began to pile about their feet. But every time they slew one of the monsters, Zahariel felt the invisible energies swirling in the room grow more turbulent. Whatever dark designs had been set into motion here, their actions only served to energise it further.

‘Press forward, brothers!’ Zahariel cried, and the squad responded instantly, shifting their formation towards the thermal core one measured step at a time. The surviving worms redoubled their attack, leaping for perceived openings in the warriors’ formation, but each attempt was met with a scything blade or the muzzle flash of a bolt pistol. The Dark Angels advanced relentlessly across the chamber, leaving a trail of broken, bleeding monsters in their wake. With each step, however, the air seemed to grow more and more charged. Strange coruscations crackled along the length of the core, and unearthly groans reverberated around the Astartes. As they drew nearer to the pile of corpses, Zahariel could see that they had been laid inside a vast spiral. The curving line was formed of a procession of carefully-shaped runes, each one carved into the floor by a plasma torch and filled with congealed blood. The symbols smote his eyes and sent jagged needles into his brain when he tried to focus on them, and the effect grew worse the farther along the spiral he stared.

The surviving worms had abandoned their frenzied attack, and were retreating away from the Astartes in a ragged circle, their swift, sinuous forms slithering across the damp ground as they lurked beyond chainsword range. The members of Zahariel’s squad continued their bloody work, picking off the monsters with careful shots from their bolt pistols. The death energies added to the growing maelstrom, stoking the invisible fires further. Zahariel gritted his teeth at the mounting pain in the back of his skull and drove his squad forward one stubborn step at a time. They were ten metres from the corpse pile now; he could see that each body had been daubed with runes of its own and coated in a translucent slime that shimmered faintly in the strange energies flickering overhead. As the ball lightning flashed, Zahariel glimpsed a sigil of some kind that had been painted against the side of the thermal core, about a dozen metres above the mound of bodies. But before he could focus on what it was, the worms suddenly turned about and rushed at his squad.

A terrible sense of foreboding gripped Zahariel. Before he could shout a warning, however, nine bolt pistols hammered, and every remaining worm was blown apart in a single, simultaneous volley. Their death energies smote the ether like a hammer blow, and the pent-up forces in the chamber erupted.

Zahariel felt the sense of dislocation sharpen dramatically as the barrier between the realms began to unravel. He staggered as his psychic dampener threatened to overload, sending shooting spikes of agony into his brain.

Before him, the pile of corpses began to stir.

For a fleeting instant, Zahariel thought his overtaxed nerves were misfiring, playing tricks on him. But then one of the dead Jaegers drew back his arms and pushed himself clumsily upright, revealing the ghastly wounds that covered his torso and neck. The dead soldier’s face was slack, his mouth agape and his eyes glowing an unearthly green.

Another corpse stirred, and another, until the entire mound was lurching into motion. Beneath the Jaegers were the bloated, rotting corpses of men and women in grey workers’ coveralls, their slime-covered faces contorted in expressions of agony or horror. They were covered in patches of mould and colonies of squirming maggots; many were missing patches of skin or bore stumps of splintered bone in place of limbs. Yet what these horrors had concealed beneath their rotting bulk was more terrible by far.

As the hundreds of corpses began to shamble, stagger and crawl towards the stunned Astartes, they exposed a score of bloated, squirming larvae that once had been people. Their bones had softened and their muscles stretched until their shapes bore little resemblance to human beings; only their feebly contorting limbs and their distorted, agonised faces revealed what they once had been. Zahariel could clearly see the coiled, black shapes of reaver worms curled within the jelly-like torsos of the larvae, slowly feeding on the still-living bodies of their hosts as they grew to maturity.

The larvae recoiled from the open air, vainly trying to squirm beneath the armoured coils of the enormous worm that had lain at the centre of the chamber’s sorcerous spiral. Daubed with blasphemous runes and glistening with slime, the worm queen raised her massive skull and screeched her fury at the grubs that had invaded its domain.

It was a sight that would have broken the courage of lesser men, but hard discipline and the bonds of brotherhood held the Astartes in place. Chapter Master Astelan took a couple of steps forward and stood by Zahariel’s side. ‘What are your orders?’ he asked in a steely voice, as the horde of living dead approached.

Zahariel called upon the rotes Israfael had taught him and mastered the pounding agony in his skull before it could overwhelm him.

‘Form a firing line!’ he ordered.

The closest of the corpses was only five metres away. As the eight remaining Astartes rushed forward to stand shoulder-to-shoulder beside Zahariel and Astelan, the Librarian called out, ‘Change magazines!’

As one, nine pairs of hands went to work, releasing nearly-empty clips from their bolt pistols and slapping fresh ones home. Charging handles racked home with a well-oiled clatter.

The shambling mob was two metres away, almost close enough to touch. ‘Squad!’ Zahariel yelled. ‘One step back! Five rounds rapid. Fire!’

In lockstep, ten pairs of boots crashed upon the permacrete. Bolt pistols barked in a rolling volley. Green clad bodies jerked and blew apart in the storm of mass-reactive rounds. The first rank of corpses disintegrated under the fusillade.

‘One step back. Five rounds rapid. Fire!’

The bolt pistols thundered again. Each round found its mark, and fifty more bodies were reduced to bloody fragments. The rest of the mob staggered on, their outstretched hands little more than a metre away.

At Zahariel’s command, the squad took one last step back and fired five more rounds into the press. Firing bolts locked back on empty magazines as fifty more bodies erupted into gory mist. The mob had been cut in half in the span of twenty seconds, but the remainder pressed their advance.

Wreathed in propellant smoke, Zahariel raised his crackling staff. ‘Loyalty and honour!’ he roared. ‘Charge!’

With a furious shout, the Dark Angels leapt into the midst of the monstrosities, their chain-blades howling. Swung with superhuman strength, the swords split torsos and severed limbs with each blurring stroke. Corpses toppled at the touch of Zahariel’s force staff, their rotting flesh sizzling under the lash of the Librarian’s psychic power.

The undead surrounded the grimly fighting Astartes, clawing and grabbing at their armoured forms. What they lacked in strength and skill they sought to make up for in numbers, but the Dark Angels were masters at the craft of slaughter, and their ranks melted away like ice on a hot iron. Within moments the tide turned inexorably in the Astartes’ favour – and then the worm queen struck.

A timely flash of lightning provided the only warning. The fickle light sizzled about the thermal core, and Zahariel saw the bulk of the great worm rearing up, like a snake about to strike. The Librarian hurled himself to the side just as the creature lunged into the squad’s midst with the force of a runaway train.

With a shout, Zahariel spun to face the beast as the queen gathered herself together like a coiling spring and lashed out again, this time catching Gideon and two of the corpses in her wide mandibles. The curved pincers snapped shut like giant scissors. The two corpses were bisected at once; Gideon’s armour resisted a half-second longer before giving way as well.

Astelan and Jonas whirled on their heels and slashed furiously at the queen, but their chainswords left little more than shallow scars on the worm’s thick armoured plates. Screeching in rage, the queen tossed her bony head and smashed Jonas aside, then lunged at Astelan with her bloody mandibles. The Chapter Master leapt aside at the last moment, hacking a divot out of one of the huge pincers before rolling nimbly away. The worm crushed another half-dozen corpses beneath its bulk as it drew its coils together for another leap. Three Astartes charged the monster from different directions, hacking at it with powerful blows that left only scratches on the worm’s thick, black armour. One of the Dark Angels lingered within reach a moment too long and was struck from behind by the queen’s lashing tail. The huge warrior was flipped head-over-heels by the powerful blow and landed heavily on his face. A bolt pistol barked; Gideon, lying in a pool of his own blood, had reloaded his weapon and was snapping careful shots at the worm’s eyes. Two burst apart in a shower of ichor, causing the queen to thrash and shriek in pain, but the wounds didn’t seem to slow the creature in the slightest.

Zahariel dropped his empty pistol and took a two-handed grip on his force staff. He had to end the fight quickly, before the monster killed or crippled any more of his squad. The Librarian channelled his will into the psycho-reactive matrices embedded in the force weapon’s staff. Crackling arcs of violet light wound around the metal haft and created a blazing halo about the double-headed eagle at the staff’s head. Raising the weapon above his head, Zahariel shouted a wild oath and charged straight at the creature.

The movement and the flickering light of the staff had the desired effect. The worm queen swung her bleeding head around and lunged at Zahariel, smashing into the Librarian in mid-charge.

The impact was tremendous, overwhelming Zahariel’s senses. One moment he was racing towards the creature and the next he was flat on his back with the worm’s mandibles locked about his waist. A score of flashing crimson runes blinked at the corners of his vision, warning of extensive servo-motor damage and armour breaches. His vision came and went in bursts of distortion as the creature’s scissor-like pincers cut into the feeds running from the power unit on his back. He heard the groan and pop of ceramite plates giving way beneath the terrible force of the worm’s mandibles. He saw his battered armour reflected in the myriad facets of its black, soulless eyes, each as large as a dinner plate and close enough to touch.

Zahariel brought down the butt of his crackling staff on the queen’s skull, right between its monstrous eyes.

The force staff punched through the thick bone with a flash of blue-white light and an angry clap of thunder as the Librarian channelled every erg of psychic force he could command into the creature’s body. Nerves fried and brain matter boiled; the worm’s remaining eyes burst and its armour plates cracked as steam erupted from its core. Zahariel snuffed out the monster’s life force in a split second with the raging winds of the warp itself. It let out a rending shriek and tossed its head in a death spasm, smashing Zahariel to the ground hard enough to knock him unconscious.

When he came to, he found himself lying on his back a few metres away from the worm’s smoking corpse. Astelan was kneeling beside him, twisting his legs back into their proper position. Dimly, he could feel the tingle of pain blockers blurring the edges of his mind.

‘Hold still for a few moments more, until the bones knit,’ the Chapter Master said as he orientated Zahariel’s right calf and began inspecting the servo-motors around the knee-cap. ‘Most of your actuators are shot, but you should still be able to move about.’

Zahariel nodded, focusing his thoughts on accelerating his healing faculties and taking stock of his armour. ‘The queen?’ he grunted.

‘Dead,’ Astelan confirmed. ‘And the corpses went inert at the same moment. That was well done, brother. Luther would be proud.’

‘What of Brother Gideon?’ Zahariel asked.

‘Comatose. His armour is keeping his vital signs stable enough that we should be able to get him back to Aldurukh.’

Satisfied, the Librarian lay his head back against the floor and spent the next few seconds testing the strength of his muscles and bones. Armour plates grated and crimson runes flashed insistently in the corners of his eyes as he carefully flexed first the left leg, then the right. He would be weak for a few minutes more as his body worked to repair the damage, but he was functional. Astelan offered his hand and he took it gladly as he rose carefully to his feet.

The worm queen’s corpse was wreathed in tendrils of black smoke. Zahariel walked slowly over to the body of the monster and pulled his staff from the creature’s forehead. The corpses it had controlled were sprawled about like puppets whose strings had been severed.

Feeble motion across the chamber caught Zahariel’s eye. The queen’s larval hosts were squirming and writhing away from the carnage, drawn by some primal instinct towards the illusory safety of the thermal core. Zahariel limped slowly after them, drawing once more on the psychic power of the warp. The energy came reluctantly, flowing through the dampener and coursing along the staff. It was nothing like the wild torrent of power he’d felt before, and he was relieved to note that the sense of dislocation was receding. The oily feeling of corruption still lingered, however, staining the very stone of the chamber and pooling in the blood-soaked runes carved into the floor.

Zahariel slew the larvae one by one, using the power of the staff to slay the host and snuff out the life of the monster within. The last of the abominations had reached the very base of the thermal core, its distorted face and thin arms stretching upwards as though pleading for aid from some nameless, atavistic power.

The Librarian glanced upwards at the core as the last of the larvae burned. He was close enough now to see the symbol that had been painted on the side of the thermal unit. The image was comprised of hundreds of tiny runes that stung his eyes when he tried to focus on them, but the picture they formed was easy enough to identify: an enormous serpent eating its own tail. An ouroboros, Zahariel thought.

Suddenly a voice crackled over his vox-unit, stirring him from his reverie. ‘Angelus Six, this is Raider Two-One. Angelus Six, come in.’

‘This is Angelus Six,’ Zahariel replied.

‘It’s good to hear your voice, brother,’ the driver of the Land Raider said. ‘We’re picking up signals from beyond the perimeter again. Seraphim is calling urgently for a status update.’

Zahariel took one last look at the symbol on the thermal core, then turned back to his squad. What he had to say to Luther couldn’t be shared over the vox net. ‘Inform Seraphim that we’ve secured Objective Alpha and we’re returning to base. I’ll deliver my report to him personally. We’ll be back on the surface in ten minutes.’

‘Raider Two-One copies, Angelus. Standing by.’

Astelan stood at what had been the centre of the sorcerous spiral, well apart from the rest of his brothers. He had removed his helmet and was studying the runes cut into the stone. The Chapter Master looked up at Zahariel as the Librarian approached. His expression was haunted.

‘What are we going to do about this?’ he asked quietly.

Zahariel knew what Astelan meant. He reached up and pulled off his own helmet, grimacing at the strange mix of ozone and decay that permeated the air. ‘I’ll see to it,’ he said. ‘Gather the squad. We’ve got to get back and report to Luther at once.’

The Chapter Master nodded and turned away. Zahariel followed, keying his vox-unit.

‘Broadsword Flight, this is Angelus Six.’

This time the reply came in loud and clear; the unnatural interference had subsided completely. ‘Broadsword Flight copies,’ said the leader of the Stormbird flight.

‘Objective Alpha is compromised – repeat, Objective Alpha is compromised,’ Zahariel replied. ‘We are withdrawing in fifteen minutes. Execute Plan Damocles at that time.’

The Stormbird Leader answered without hesitation. ‘Affirmative, Angelus Six. Plan Damocles in one-five minutes.’

Zahariel quickened his pace, passing Astelan and the rest of his squad. The Astartes fell in behind him, carrying both halves of Brother Gideon’s limp form between them.

They had little time to spare. In fifteen minutes the Stormbirds from Broadsword Flight would level Sigma Five-One-Seven, destroying any evidence of what had transpired at the site.

The Dark Angels alone would know the truth. Otherwise, Caliban would surely die.

Thirteen

Secrets of the Past

For the next two and a half weeks, the Dark Angels and the people of Diamat worked day and night to prepare for the coming storm. Governor Kulik sent troops into the countryside to locate camps of refugees, conscripting all the healthy men and women he could find and putting them to work constructing new fortifications under the experienced eye of Jonson’s veteran warriors. High above the forge, Jonson’s warships lay at anchor – even the near-derelict Duchess Arbellatris, which had been towed back to Diamat by the light cruisers of the scout force – and were being worked over night and day by Magos Archoi’s best tech-adepts. Flocks of cargo shuttles came and went daily, re-stocking the battle group’s depleted stores of ammunition and heavy ordnance. Other craft ferried Governor Kulik and Magos Archoi to and from the Invincible Reason on a regular basis to confer with Primarch Jonson and refine their battle plan.

Nemiel was busier than he’d ever been. When he wasn’t managing repair and resupply schedules or fielding requests from the captains of the battle group, he was shuttling down to the planet’s surface to help supervise the construction of defensive positions throughout the grey zone and implementing Jonson’s organisational changes to the planetary defence force. He ate little and slept even less, devoting his full energy and attention to every task that was put in front of him. The officers of the fleet and members of Kulik’s staff commented on his dedication and zeal, and held him up as an inspiration to the men under their command. Nemiel would wave away their praise. He was merely setting a proper example, he would say, as any Chaplain ought.

In truth, he consumed himself with work because it kept his growing doubts at bay. He couldn’t help but think about his conversation with Jonson, and his evasive replies. The primarch wasn’t a brigand, Nemiel knew; he hadn’t come all the way to Diamat to sack its forges, as Horus’s men had done. Yet he couldn’t shake the notion that Jonson wasn’t telling him the entire truth, and that went against everything Nemiel thought that the Legion stood for.

More than once, he found himself wishing that Luther and Zahariel were still with them. He found himself sorely missing his cousin’s unwavering idealism.

It was late in the day when the primarch summoned Nemiel to his sanctum. He found Jonson seated at his favourite spot, beneath the towering viewports along the port side of the chamber. Red light shone along the side of Jonson’s face as he bent over a series of aerial images spread atop a low, wooden table. He glanced up at the Redemptor’s approach.

‘There you are, Nemiel,’ he said tersely, gathering the images together into a small stack. ‘You’ve been keeping yourself scarce of late.’

‘Not by design, my lord,’ Nemiel replied guardedly. ‘There’s a great deal to be done before the rebels return.’

Jonson grunted in agreement. ‘True enough.’ He looked up at Nemiel again and smiled. ‘Wipe that guilty look off your face, Nemiel. I wasn’t accusing you of anything.’ He leaned back in his chair. ‘What’s the current status of the battle group?’

Nemiel relaxed a bit, glad to be back on familiar terrain. ‘Our scout force has nearly completed resupply and will be ready for operations within five hours,’ he reported from memory. ‘The strike cruisers Amadis and Adzikel have finished their most critical repairs and have begun re-loading their stores of ammunition and ordnance. Replacement Stormbirds have arrived from the surface to replace those lost in combat. The heavy cruisers Flamberge and Lord Dante report all repairs complete, and they expect to finish resupply within the hour.’ He paused. ‘Iron Duke reports that all of her weapon batteries are back in action, but damage to her hull is so extensive she’ll need to be dry-docked to effect any meaningful repairs. The crew of Duchess Arbellatris has been working day and night, and Captain Rashid insists that she can be returned to action within a few weeks, but the tech-adepts assigned to her believe that the ship is a lost cause.’

‘Inform Captain Rashid that he has forty-eight hours to do what he can. If the ship isn’t capable of standing in the battle line by then, she will have to be abandoned and her crew reassigned to the other ships in the group.’ Jonson said. ‘That’s all the time we can afford.’

‘Have there been any new developments?’ Nemiel said, suddenly alert.

The primarch shook his head. ‘Not yet. But based on the distance between systems and the minimum amount of time I estimate Horus would need to assemble another fleet and send it on its way, the rebels could arrive in the system imminently. The Warmaster must attack again as soon as possible, or he won’t have enough time to strip the forge of its resources and put them to use back on Isstvan.’

Jonson held up the small stack of images. ‘Which brings us to this.’

He held the images out to Nemiel. The Redemptor took them and began looking them over. ‘These look like aerial images of the forge complex,’ he said with a scowl.

‘Specifically the warehouse and depot facilities along the southern edge of the forge, closest to the gateway,’ Jonson confirmed. ‘You’ll note that a number of the buildings have been highlighted for ease of reference.’

Nemiel’s scowl deepened. ‘I’m not sure I understand, my lord,’ he said, feeling suddenly uneasy.

Jonson studied Nemiel in silence for a moment. ‘Magos Archoi hasn’t complied with my request for a full inventory of his stores,’ he said carefully. ‘Time is running out. Since he won’t give me the information I need, I’ll have to gather it another way.’

‘But… that’s not correct,’ Nemiel protested. ‘Archoi has provided detailed reports of the materiel he has on hand. I’ve seen them myself.’

The primarch’s eyes narrowed slightly. ‘I have reason to believe that those reports are incomplete.’

‘Why is that?’ Nemiel pressed. His unease swelled until it threatened to become something akin to despair. ‘Why are we here, my lord? You claim that we’re here to stop Horus, but the logic of the situation and your own actions belie this. What else is there that has drawn you here?’

Jonson straightened fractionally in his chair. His face was calm, but there was a steely edge in his green eyes. ‘Are you calling me a liar, Brother-Redemptor Nemiel?’ he asked.

Nemiel’s breath caught in his throat. Suddenly he sensed the deadly precipice that now figuratively yawned at his feet. Yet he would be damned if he allowed himself to be intimidated into silence and compromise his sacred oaths – not even by the primarch himself. ‘Do you deny that you have a hidden motive for bringing us here?’ he said.

The Redemptor boldly met the primarch’s imposing stare, ready to accept the consequences. Jonson glared at Nemiel a moment more, his expression calculating, before slowly nodding his head.

‘That was well done,’ Jonson allowed. ‘You have the makings of a good interrogator, I think.’ He spread his hands. ‘Diamat is important to the Warmaster for reasons other than ammunition and building materials,’ he said. ‘I judged that it was best to keep those reasons a secret, for purposes of operational security. Restriction of information isn’t the same thing as deception, Nemiel.’

‘I never said you’d lied to us, my lord,’ Nemiel pointed out. ‘But what possible good does it do to withhold vital information from your own warriors and allies?’

Jonson frowned. ‘As a knight of the Order, I should think that would be obvious,’ he said. ‘Every facet of your training on Caliban was governed by custom, order and ritual. An aspirant could not become a novice until he’d passed certain tests to prove his knowledge, character and worthiness. Likewise, a novice could not rise to the ranks of knighthood without progressing through many ranks of knowledge and skill. Even upon reaching the coveted rank of knight, there were still degrees of initiation and rank that opened each warrior to new levels of knowledge and expertise, all the way to the lofty rank of Grand Master itself. Why was that so? Why didn’t the masters begin inducting the novices straightaway into the Higher Mysteries?’

‘Because a novice wouldn’t know what to do with the training,’ Nemiel answered at once. ‘Not before mastering a great many basic skills first. Trying to employ those advanced tactics without the proper foundation would just get them killed.’

The primarch smiled. ‘Precisely. Knowledge is power, Nemiel. Never forget that. And power, in the wrong hands, can inflict terrible harm.’

Nemiel considered this. ‘I understand, my lord,’ he said at length. ‘Is there anything in particular I should be looking for?’

Jonson studied him a moment longer, then nodded to himself. ‘Vehicles,’ he said. ‘Approximately six to eight of them – the references I saw were unclear on the exact number. They were reportedly built over a hundred and fifty years ago, and would likely have been placed into storage somewhere in the complex.’

‘What kind of vehicles?’ Nemiel asked.

‘War machines,’ Jonson replied. ‘Like nothing either of us have ever seen before.’

Nemiel frowned. ‘But if the Mechanicum has these machines at their disposal, why aren’t they using them?’

Jonson shrugged. ‘It’s possible that Archoi doesn’t know they’re here. Or the Mechanicum has decided to withhold them for their own use, much as they did with their skitarii.’ He raised a warning finger. ‘What’s important is that the Warmaster needs them, and we have to keep them out of his hands.’

‘How does the Horus know about these war machines?’ Nemiel asked.

‘How else?’ the primarch said. ‘He’s the one who commissioned them in the first place.’

It was a long and circuitous drive from the Xanthus star port to the southern entrance of the forge complex. Nemiel’s Rhino – fresh from the assembly lines at Diamat and still showing its black coat of manufactory primer – had to first head north, past a series of fortified checkpoints, then eastward through a literal maze of narrow streets. The tramway was no longer passable; over the last two weeks the entire length of the road had been sowed with mines, cut by permacrete tank barriers and festooned with kilometres of molly-wire. Heavy vehicles trying to force their way north-eastward towards the forge would have to fight their way through one obstacle after another, all the while coming under fire from concealed bunkers on both the north and south sides of the tramway. The ash wastes to the south of the tramway were passable by infantry but not vehicles, and were covered by the Dragoons’ remaining artillery batteries. The only alternative was to press north and east, just as Nemiel’s Rhino had done, but the rebels would be forced to break through each set of checkpoints and then find a safe path through streets that had been riddled with mines, tank traps and more ambush points. Neither route was completely impassable, as the defenders knew, but breaching them would take a great deal of time – something the enemy had in short supply.

The southern gateway had also seen heavy reinforcement since Nemiel had last been there. Work parties had expanded the walls on both sides of the tramway and refitted the destroyed weapon emplacements with new heavy guns taken from the forge. Archoi’s adepts had also installed remote sentry guns at strategic points along the walls, and a cadre of hulking skitarii stood watch over the battlements alongside Kulik’s Dragoons. Magos Archoi had proposed embedding skitarii units with the governor’s men and the Dark Angels alike to enhance their combat power, and the primarch saw the wisdom of the idea. Most of the skitarii were assigned to the under-strength Dragoons, who were given the responsibility of defending the tramway and the grey zone. The Dark Angels were to be held back in a mobile reserve, to reinforce key areas or deal with unexpected enemy attacks. The Dragoons spent their days labouring over their fortifications and then sleeping in them, while the Astartes had been assigned temporary quarters in a number of empty warehouses inside the forge complex, close to the gateway. A trio of praetorians had been assigned to each squad for added reinforcement.

Nemiel’s Rhino drew up to the gateway and ground to a halt in a billowing cloud of dust. Civilian workers wiped sweat from their eyes and peered through the haze as the Redemptor disembarked and worked his way through the reinforced permacrete barriers that had been laid in an alternating pattern between the towering bastions. Dragoons and skitarii alike watched Nemiel from the battlements; his gaze searched among them, looking for the helmeted heads of his squad.

‘Over here, brother!’ Kohl shouted, waving his arm from the top of the southern bastion. Nemiel waved in reply and headed up to join him.

He found Kohl and Techmarine Askelon at the topmost level, supervising the installation of advanced ballistic calculators that would help the Dragoons call down effective artillery fire on the attacking rebels. A fearsome-looking skitarii stood nearby, observing the proceedings with almost mechanical detachment.

‘Come to check up on us, brother?’ Kohl growled good-naturedly.

Nemiel looked over the crew of Dragoons and fretful tech-adepts installing the sensitive machinery and managed a grin. ‘It’s been too quiet lately. The primarch believes you’re up to something.’

Kohl grunted. ‘Always,’ he said, completely deadpan. ‘Tell him I’m touched by his concern.’

The Redemptor glanced over at the skitarii. ‘How are the new squadmates?’ he asked.

Kohl grimaced. ‘Not much for conversation, other than that strange hash that Askelon insists is speech,’ he said. ‘Mostly they just stand around and stare at everything.’

‘Has Magos Archoi got them billeted with you?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Kohl replied. His tone was mild, but the look in his eyes spoke volumes of his unhappiness about the situation. ‘Second Company is spread out among three adjoining warehouses, about half a kilometre from here.’

Nemiel nodded thoughtfully. That was going to complicate things a little. ‘Where’s the rest of the squad right now?’

‘Over at the north bastion,’ Kohl replied, ‘helping teach some new recruits how to work the heavy weapons. Why?’

‘I’ll be taking five of you back up into orbit with me in a few hours,’ Nemiel replied, and raised a forestalling hand. ‘Don’t ask me why, because I don’t know. The primarch has a job for us.’

‘Well, that can’t be good,’ Kohl said with typical fatalism. He glanced over at the work party. ‘We’ll be done here a bit after nightfall. Is that soon enough?’

Nemiel glanced west, where the sun was already low over the distant ruins of Xanthus. ‘Nightfall sounds just about right,’ he said with a nod.

Three hours later, the Astartes climbed up the rear ramp of Nemiel’s idling Rhino and found their seats along the narrow benches that lined both sides of the troop compartment. As the ramp clanged shut the armoured personnel carrier revved its petrochem engines and lurched into motion.

Brother-Sergeant Kohl had Techmarine Askelon, plus Marthes, Vardus and Ephrial. No sooner had the APC started moving than the squad leader turned to Nemiel and said, ‘Now what’s this nonsense about the primarch sending for us personally?’

Nemiel grimaced. ‘I had to think of something halfway plausible to pull you out of there without the skitarii making anything of it,’ he said. ‘The primarch wants us to perform a reconnaissance mission inside the forge complex itself.’

As the Rhino worked its way slowly back down the access road towards the gateway, Nemiel produced the images that Jonson had given him and laid out the details of the mission. At the mention of the secret war machines, the attitude of the squad turned very serious indeed.

‘We’ve got a lot of ground to cover in just a few hours,’ Nemiel said at the conclusion of the briefing. ‘Brother Askelon, what sort of threats are we likely to encounter?’

‘There will be an array of electronic sensors covering each of the storage sites,’ he replied, ‘plus skitarii patrols with a full-spectrum auspex arrays. If these war machines are as valuable as the primarch believes them to be, they may be covered by additional security as well.’

Nemiel nodded. ‘We can avoid the patrols,’ he said confidently. ‘Can you get us past the sensors?’

Brother Askelon considered the problem for several seconds before nodding. ‘I can at least get us close enough to determine the contents of each building,’ he said.

‘All right,’ Nemiel said with a nod. ‘As soon as we’re out of the Rhino, we go vox-silent – only verbal signals or hand signs. We can’t risk having our transmissions detected. Questions?’

There were none. Nemiel rose from his bench with a curt nod and opened the Rhino’s portside door. With a quick check up and down the dark access road, he jumped lightly from the vehicle. The five other Astartes followed suit, reflexively fanning out into a standard tactical formation as they moved quickly into the deeper shadows between two large warehouses.

Nemiel drew his bolt pistol, leaving his crozius aquilum attached to his belt. ‘Let’s try not to get into another fight with our allies.’ he said quietly. Quiet chuckles rose from the darkness. ‘Askelon, you’ve got point – I know it’s not your usual position, but you’ll spot the forge’s security systems well before the rest of us. Brother Vardus, you’re covering our back-trail. Everyone clear? Then let’s get to work.’

They worked their way through the vast forge complex for hours, as Diamat’s moon rose in a thin crescent and passed through a hazy, ochre sky. Now and again they would come upon a patrol of tech-guard. These weren’t the massive, bionically enhanced killing machines of the praetorians, but were simple soldiers akin to the Tanagran Dragoons, albeit in fine carapace armour and wielding high-power lasguns. Compact auspex units were mounted to the front of their helmets and flipped down over their faces like strange, insectoid masks. They moved with speed and skill, constantly alert and watchful, but the Astartes’ enhanced senses allowed them to detect the patrols and find cover long before they were seen. Aside from the occasional patrols, the Astartes encountered no other signs of life.

There were hundreds of warehouses and storage depots located in the southern sector of the forge complex. Most were single-storey structures, but others were tall, cavernous buildings with massive, rolling doors that could hold entire companies of heavy battle tanks. Without the locations provided by Jonson there would have been no way that they could have completed their search in a single night; as it was, Nemiel had begun to fear that they would be working right up until dawn.

At each of the structures highlighted on Nemiel’s images, the squad would take up a defensive position and let Brother Askelon go ahead to inspect the building’s contents. Each time the Techmarine would emerge, shaking his head, and the squad would move on to the next building down the line.

By midnight they were halfway through their search pattern and were doubling back eastward, heading for the warehouse districts on the other side of the access road. They were well north of the billets set aside for the Astartes ground force, and could see the towering, fortress-like manufactories off to the north, spreading out in a rough circle from the foot of the slumbering volcano. Tall, narrow smokestacks and squat cooling towers rose into the sky like the bones of dead gods, blackened and pitted by age. Cold, white lights shone like stars from the slopes of the conical mountain, while off to the north-east, the towering, monolithic structures of the Titan foundry shone with sparkling pinpoints of sapphire, crimson and emerald.

‘I’ve moved through dead cities that weren’t as eerie as this,’ Brother-Sergeant Kohl murmured beside Nemiel. ‘I thought forges were like mechanical beehives. Where is everyone?’

Nemiel shrugged, his eyes searching the darkness off to the south for signs of danger just as Kohl kept his attention focused on the north. ‘Magos Archoi mentioned at one of the strategy meetings that he’d ordered all surviving tech-adepts and acolytes into a series of deep shelters near the heart of the complex. Only a few hundred volunteers are still above ground or in orbit, working with the battle group and helping supply our forces on the ground. Archoi said they’d suffered enough losses during the last raid, and he wasn’t going to permit any more if he could help it.’

Kohl grunted dubiously. ‘It’s an awfully clean battlefield, don’t you think?’

Nemiel glanced sidelong at the sergeant. ‘What are you talking about?’

Brother-Sergeant Kohl shrugged, eyeing the walls of the dark buildings to his right. ‘Where are the shell holes? The scorch marks? Where are the burnt-out buildings? If the fighting was so heavy in this sector, why haven’t we seen any sign of it yet?’

The observation nearly stopped Nemiel in his tracks. Something tugged at the back of his mind; something else strange and out of place, but he couldn’t quite put a finger on it.

‘Maybe the battle sites are still up ahead,’ he replied, frowning to himself. ‘Archoi and his warriors came at us from the north-east. Let’s see what lies up ahead.’

But for the next three hours Nemiel and Kohl saw only more of the same: building after building, arrayed in laser-perfect lines, their permacrete walls unblemished save for decades of stains and pitting etched by acid rain. Nemiel’s disquiet grew stronger. Something was very wrong.

Barely two hours before dawn, Askelon found something. They had reached an enormous depot building, two storeys high and wide enough for a pair of super-heavy tanks to pass through its entryway side by side. The Techmarine moved stealthily inside while the rest of the squad watched for Mechanicum patrols.

He was back in less than five minutes. ‘You need to see this,’ he said to Nemiel.

The Redemptor rose to his feet and signalled for the squad to follow him. Askelon led the warriors along a convoluted route that brought them past the cordon of sensors surrounding the perimeter of the structure. Soon, Nemiel found himself standing in a vast, cavernous structure, supported by soaring metal arches curving high overhead.

‘It’s empty,’ he said to Askelon. His voice echoed faintly in the deserted building.

‘No. Not quite,’ the Techmarine said, turning about and pointing to the inner surface of the depot’s towering metal doors.

Nemiel turned about and saw that the metal slabs were splashed and streaked with dried gore.

He stepped forwards, his enhanced vision easily picking out details even in the near-absence of light. ‘Lots of carbon scoring,’ he observed. ‘Looks like high-power lasgun fire.’

Kohl nodded, stepping up beside Nemiel. A gauntleted finger moved through the air, roughly tracing the outline of the stains. ‘I’d guess ten to fifteen individuals, shot at close range,’ he reckoned. ‘Judging by the intensity of the lasgun fire, they must have been nearly blown apart. This wasn’t a battle. It was an execution.’

‘I thought much the same thing,’ Askelon said. He stepped up to the doors and laid a fingertip against one of the dried stains. ‘Not all of this is blood. Some of it is bionic lubricant or coolant.’

Brother-Sergeant Kohl scowled. ‘Didn’t Magos Archoi say that Arch-Magos Vertullus was killed during the fighting?’

Nemiel felt his skin grow cold. ‘The magos never said who it was that killed Vertullus.’

Kohl stared at Nemiel. ‘You think there’s been some kind of coup?’ The veteran sergeant sounded incredulous.

‘Archoi was in the area with a large force of praetorians,’ Nemiel mused. ‘The attack would have given him an excellent opportunity. He could kill Vertullus and the other senior magi, dispose of the bodies, and no one the wiser.’ Suddenly Nemiel’s eyes widened. ‘Bodies. By the Emperor, that’s what was missing. The bodies!’

Kohl shook his head in consternation. ‘What are you talking about now?’

‘Governor Kulik said there was an entire company of Dragoons covering the entrance to the southern gateway,’ Nemiel explained. ‘The rebels supposedly overran them. But there were no dead Imperial troops anywhere. What happened to the bodies?’

The sergeant frowned. ‘I don’t know. I doubt they just got up and walked away.’

‘But perhaps they did,’ Nemiel said. ‘What if the Dragoon company guarding the gateway was betrayed by the very people they were there to defend?’

Kohl’s face turned grim. ‘That would mean Magos Archoi is in league with Horus,’ he said. ‘We need to inform the primarch at once!’

Nemiel held up a hand. ‘Not yet. Not without more proof than this,’ he said, indicating the blood-splashed wall. He paused, contemplating the tall doors, then glanced back at the empty, echoing space. ‘What was Vertullus doing here in the first place?’ he wondered. ‘Maybe the war machines we’re looking for were stored here, and he’d come to check on them?’

‘The building’s certainly big enough to hold six to eight large vehicles,’ Askelon confirmed. ‘There’s dust and debris in the corners that suggest this place hadn’t seen much activity in a very long time. The question is – where are the war machines now?’

Nemiel’s mind raced as he tried to think through the mystery. ‘If Archoi is with the rebels, he was in the process of trying to hand over the war machines to them when we arrived,’ he said. ‘If the vehicles had sat in a depot for a century and a half, they would have been in need of some refurbishment. He would have taken them somewhere he and his minions could work on them without being disturbed – possibly even as early as several weeks before Horus’s raid.’

Askelon shook his head. ‘The manufactories would have been working at full output at that point. They couldn’t possibly have used them.’

‘Well, where else would they have the facilities they would need?’ Nemiel asked.

The Techmarine spread his hands. ‘Other than the Titan foundry, I can’t think of any,’ he said. ‘And I guarantee you, the Legio adepts would take a dim view of someone else using their facilities.’

Nemiel looked to Kohl. ‘Except that Legio Gladius isn’t here. Someone else is running the lights over at the foundry.’

Fourteen

Walking the Spiral

‘How can this be?’ Luther demanded, his voice crackling with tension in the confines of the Grand Master’s sanctum. He had abandoned the massive oaken chair behind the sanctum’s wide desk and had begun to pace across the room. ‘How is it possible that no one noticed this before?’

Damaged servo-motors whined as Zahariel folded his arms. He and Astelan stood side by side before the Grand Master’s desk, fresh from the transport that had carried them from Sigma Five-One-Seven. The sanctum was crowded with portable logic engines, stacks of papers and map tables, and half-empty cups of caffeine steamed in little clusters on the stone floor. They had interrupted a high-level operations meeting to deliver their report; the antechamber outside the sanctum was crowded with regimental officers and staff members who were doubtless wondering what all the secrecy was about. Only Lord Cypher had been allowed to remain in the room to hear the warriors’ report. He stood by one of the chamber’s windows, silent and half-hidden by shadow. Brother-Librarian Israfael was also present; the Master of Caliban had summoned him as soon as he’d heard the gist of Zahariel and Astelan’s report.

‘The clues were there all along,’ Zahariel replied. ‘What else could have created the great beasts? What else could have shaped a wilderness so relentlessly malevolent and deadly to human life?’

‘Caliban is a death world, brother,’ Israfael pointed out. ‘Like Catachan or Piscina Five. That doesn’t mean it’s inherently tainted.’

‘Perhaps not,’ Zahariel admitted. ‘Perhaps the two traits are unrelated, but the fact remains that Caliban is tainted somehow. I saw it with my own eyes.’

Luther paused in his restless pacing and fixed Astelan with a penetrating stare. ‘What about you, Chapter Master? Did you see evidence of this as well?’

Astelan had stood at a rigid parade-rest, shoulders squared and hands clasped behind his back as he and Zahariel had delivered their report. He met Luther’s flinty gaze unflinchingly. ‘There was nothing natural about the creatures we fought, my lord,’ he said. ‘I confess that I did not see the traces of corruption that Brother Zahariel reports, but I’m no psyker. If he says that’s what he saw, then I believe him.’ He shrugged. ‘The Northwilds were always thought of as haunted, my lord, as you yourself must know.’

The answer did little to please Luther. ‘Damnation,’ he hissed. The Master of Caliban turned to Israfael. ‘How could the Imperium have missed this?’

The Librarian shrugged. ‘Because no one asked us to look,’ he said.

‘Have a care, brother,’ Luther growled. ‘I’m in no mood for jests.’

‘I’m not trying to be impertinent,’ Israfael answered. ‘There were no obvious signs of corruption when the fleet arrived here. If anything, we were surprised at how few psykers we found among the planet’s populace.’

‘That’s because witches and mutants were slain out of hand for hundreds of years,’ Astelan grunted.

Israfael acknowledged this with a wave of his hand. ‘Another characteristic common to worlds that survived the Age of Strife and the fall of Old Night,’ he said. ‘Had any of these great beasts still survived by the time we found your world, we might have seen the need to investigate more closely, but as it was, there was nothing obvious to arouse our concern. This warp-taint, whatever it is, must be buried very deep indeed.’

‘I agree,’ Zahariel said. ‘And I believe that it only became readily accessible recently, when the insurrection began. We know that warp-taint feeds on human strife and bloodshed. The arcology riots could have been the catalyst that set the events at Sigma Five-One-Seven into motion.’

Luther’s eyes narrowed. ‘So you’re saying the rebels are behind this?’

‘Not at all,’ Zahariel replied. ‘There was no evidence of rebel activity at the site whatsoever. I think that the attacks and the riots created an environment that others have succumbed to.’

‘Like who?’ Luther demanded.

Zahariel considered his reply carefully. ‘We accounted for the bodies of the Jaeger garrison, the reaction force, and the labourers that had been sent to work on the thermal plant. The Terran engineers assigned to the plant were nowhere to be found.’

‘They may have been elsewhere at the site,’ Israfael countered. ‘You reported that your squad didn’t search the labourer’s dormitories, for example. They might well have been murdered in their sleep.’

‘I’d considered that,’ Zahariel said, ‘but it was clear to Astelan and myself that the site’s garrison was betrayed from within. All of the Calibanite labourers had been murdered, along with the Jaegers. That leaves only the Terrans.’

Before Israfael could offer a counter-argument, Luther interjected. ‘All right, let’s assume for the moment that the Terrans were responsible. What was the point of the ritual?’

‘That’s difficult to say,’ Zahariel answered. ‘Clearly the reaver worms were an integral part of it. Why else would the Terrans go to so much trouble to provide hundreds of corpses for the worm queen?’ He thought the situation over for a moment. ‘The sorcerers were gone long before we arrived, so we have to assume the ritual was completed successfully, and they got what they came for. The ritual itself was complicated and obviously required a great deal of planning to execute. Given that the Terrans had only been at the site for approximately six days, I think it’s also clear that the whole operation was conceived elsewhere and put into action at the site.’

‘Where had these Terrans come from?’ Luther asked.

‘Northwilds arcology,’ the Librarian answered. Suddenly he straightened, remembering something he’d dismissed in the early stages of the mission. ‘And that’s where they must have returned to as well. Just before we entered the perimeter I picked up a civilian shuttle on our surveyors off to the west, headed in that direction. They fled the site minutes before we arrived.’ The pieces started to fall into place. Zahariel nodded thoughtfully. ‘I think this ritual was just one element of a much larger scheme, brothers. They performed the ritual at Sigma Five-One-Seven, gathered the fruits of their sorcery and returned to the arcology for the next phase of the operation.’

Luther started to pace again, his hands clenched tightly behind his back. ‘There are more than a thousand Terran engineers operating out of that arcology,’ he growled. ‘We’ll have to investigate every industrial site they’ve worked on in the last month, just to be sure there haven’t been any other rituals we don’t know about.’

Israfael bristled. ‘You act like every Terran in the arcology has been corrupted!’

‘Show me a Calibanite that’s been corrupted and I’ll revise my assumptions,’ Luther answered coldly. ‘In the meantime we need to track down every one of those engineers as quickly and quietly as possible.’

‘That will be difficult, my lord,’ Astelan said. ‘Those engineers built Northwilds arcology. There are miles upon miles of tunnels and maintenance spaces they could be hiding in at this point – to say nothing of the rebel activity already tying down our troops in that sector.’

‘The rebels be damned!’ Luther snapped. ‘They can burn the arcology to the ground, so long as we catch these Terran devils and no one is the wiser!’

Israfael’s eyes widened in alarm. ‘Surely you don’t mean to say that we can keep this a secret. We have to report this to the primarch and the Council of Terra at once!’

‘If word of this reaches Terra, Caliban will die.’ Luther declared. ‘Worlds have burned for far less.’

The Terran started to protest, but found he could not. ‘It’s true,’ he said heavily. ‘I cannot deny it.’

‘Then you understand why I cannot allow that to happen,’ Luther said. ‘Not here. Not on my watch. The people of Caliban are innocent and undeserving of such a fate, and I won’t allow such a thing to happen.’

Israfael rose slowly to his feet and faced Luther. ‘What you’re contemplating is against Imperial law,’ he said gravely. ‘Indeed, it smacks of treason.’

‘That’s easy for you to say,’ Luther snarled. ‘This isn’t your home. These aren’t people you’ve sworn a solemn oath to defend.’

‘Of course I have!’ Israfael shot back, his voice rising. ‘Am I not an Astartes? The Imperium–’

‘The Imperium brought us to this!’ Luther roared. He rounded on Israfael, his face anguished and his hands clenched into fists. ‘There were no rebellions before you arrived, no obscene rituals or human sacrifices! There was order, and law, and virtuous men who stood between the innocent and the terrors of the forest. It was your people who did this, who dug too deeply and grasped for too much, and now I and mine will pay the price!’

Israfael tensed, and the air around him literally crackled with furious power. Astelan turned slightly to face the senior Librarian, his hands drifting slowly to his weapons. Zahariel recalled the Chapter Master’s oath at Sigma Five-One-Seven and understood how perilous the situation had become. He rushed forward, placing himself between Luther and Israfael.

‘We are all brothers here,’ he said firmly. ‘Neither Calibanite nor Terran, but Dark Angels, first and always. If we forget that, even for a moment, we are lost. Then who will protect our people, Master Luther?’

Luther’s gaze fell on Zahariel. For a long moment he was silent, until his expression grew bleak and his fists slowly unclenched. The Master of Caliban turned away, resting his hands upon the heavy desk.

‘Zahariel is right, of course,’ he said at last. ‘I hope you will forgive my intemperate tone, Brother Israfael.’

‘Of course,’ Israfael said stiffly.

Luther worked his way around the desk and settled slowly onto the throne-like chair. His expression was distant, his eyes haunted.

‘I must meditate on this,’ he said in a hollow voice. ‘Too many lives are at stake to act precipitously. For now, we must make sure this rot has spread no further. Zahariel, send the scouts into the Northwilds. Have them reconnoitre every industrial site in the sector and search for signs of further corruption. Check the Administratum’s records and find out which engineers were assigned to Sigma Five-One-Seven, then pass their identities on to the Jaeger regiments at the Northwilds arcology. They are to be captured and delivered to Aldurukh immediately.’ He sighed. ‘Brothers, I realise this is well outside the scope of our temperament and training, but this matter must be handled with the utmost secrecy. There is no one else we can trust with this.’

Zahariel bowed his head respectfully. ‘I’ll see to it at once.’

Luther turned to Astelan. ‘Chapter Master, as of this moment I’m putting you in command of Caliban’s defence forces. Place our brothers on a war footing. I want strike teams ready to deploy in case any more ritual activity is detected, but no one is to act without my express authorisation. Understood?’

‘Understood,’ Astelan replied gravely. ‘We will stand ready, my lord.’

‘Let’s at least send some scout teams into the arcology as well,’ Zahariel said. ‘The sorcerers are most likely practicing their rituals close to the thermal core. If we could locate them quickly, we could–’

Luther held up a restraining hand. ‘Not yet. If we start suddenly committing our warriors now, during a relative lull in civil unrest, it will almost certainly lead to renewed scrutiny from the Administratum. That’s something we can ill afford at this point.’

‘Magos Bosk will have to be informed of the destruction of Sigma Five-One-Seven,’ Israfael pointed out.

‘If there are any reports to be made, I will make them,’ Luther said sternly. ‘None of you are to speak of what happened at the site, as a matter of operational security. Understood?’

The four Astartes nodded.

‘Then you are dismissed,’ Luther said. ‘Except for you, Lord Cypher. I have some questions to ask you.’

Israfael turned on his heel and left the room without a word. Astelan was close behind, his expression eager. Zahariel hesitated for a moment, torn by feelings of doubt. Only he saw Lord Cypher glide quietly from the shadows to stand beside the Grand Master’s throne-like chair.

He wasn’t certain what disturbed him more: the sight of Luther staring down at his own hands, his expression anguished – or the enigmatic smile that passed like a shadow across Lord Cypher’s face.

Lightning flashed angrily overhead, banishing the darkness for the space of a heartbeat and dazzling Zahariel’s sensitive eyes. Thunder crashed, vibrating along his bones, and raindrops spattered heavily against his cheeks. He paused, struggling to calm his thoughts and banish the spots of colour from his vision. When his vision cleared, he set his feet upon the spiral path once more.

It had been more than a week since the encounter at Sigma Five-One-Seven. Orders had gone out immediately from the Rock; the Scout Chapter on Caliban had gone into action within hours, commencing a building-by-building search of every industrial site within the Northwilds sector. At the same time, a records search provided the identities of the Terran engineering team that had been assigned to Sigma Five-One-Seven. The information had been passed on to the Jaeger regiments deployed to the Northwilds arcology, but it was learned that the arcology’s so-called ‘Terran Quarter’ had been looted and burned during the first cycle of riots, and the inhabitants had been relocated for their own safety. The problem was that details of the relocation had been lost amid the chaos, and now no one knew for sure where many of the Terrans had wound up. The Jaegers were trying to locate them, but the local regiments had few troops to spare because of the continued threat of rebel attack. Though Luther seemed willing to let the arcology burn in order to track down the sorcerers, there was no practical way to issue such an order without raising a chorus of questions all along the chain of command. Zahariel had heard, indirectly, of the confrontation between Luther and Magos Bosk over the destruction of Sigma Five-One-Seven, and by all accounts it had been epic. Bosk had been livid over the loss of so much industrial capacity, and it had taken every bit of Luther’s charisma and authority to prevent her once more from breaching protocol and reporting the situation to Terra.

They were running out of time. Every passing hour was a boon to the fugitive sorcerers, who were no doubt working to further their plan somewhere in the labyrinthine depths of the arcology. Though the Jaegers were making a concerted effort to locate them, the fact was that there were large parts of the arcology that they couldn’t penetrate due to the possibility of rebel attack. These no-go zones provided countless safe havens for the sorcerers to continue their work without fear of interruption.

The only answer was to send in the Legion, Zahariel knew. A level-by-level sweep, conducted by their Scout Chapter and supported by one or more assault Chapters could brush aside any rebel resistance and isolate the real threat within hours. Such an operation, if conducted with proper ruthlessness, might even convince the rebel leaders that further resistance was pointless, and put an end to both threats at the same time.

The problem was that only Luther had the authority to put such a plan into action, and he had gone into seclusion within hours of receiving the report on Sigma Five-One-Seven. No one could even say for certain where the Master of Caliban had gone, save for the enigmatic Lord Cypher, and he was sworn to silence. Zahariel had prevailed upon Cypher to carry close to a dozen messages to Luther urgently requesting permission to send the Legion into the arcology, but not a single one had been answered.

The fact was, he was sorely tempted to defy Luther and order the Astartes into action. Technically, it was within his authority as Luther’s second-in-command; with the Master of Caliban in seclusion, the decision was his to make, but doing so would betray his oaths of obedience to the Emperor and to the Legion. And yet, what if Luther was right, and the real danger to Caliban was from the Imperium itself? If that were true, then his oath to the Emperor was based on a lie, and counted for nothing. He didn’t know what to believe at this point. The things he’d witnessed at Sigma Five-One-Seven had shaken his faith to the core.

In all his life, Zahariel had never lacked for certainty. His faith in himself and his cause had been unwavering. Now it seemed like the very foundations of the world were quaking beneath his feet. If he wasn’t careful, his next step could well be his last.

Overhead the storm raged, mirroring the turmoil in Zahariel’s mind. He drew in a deep breath and channelled his frustrations into a mental summons.

‘Show yourselves, you Watchers in the Dark!’ he shouted into the raging wind. ‘Long ago, I pledged my sword to you, to stand against the same evils that you did. Now I see the truth – this whole world is corrupted, and now my people are in dire peril.’

Another searing flash of lightning answered his mental summons, banishing all but the deepest shadows and etching the courtyard in sharp relief. But this time the brilliant light did not fade; it deepened slightly in colour, from a harsh blue-white to a more silvery hue, like moonlight. Zahariel no longer felt the touch of rain on his cheeks, and the howling wind seemed strangely muted, almost plaintive in its howls. Then he saw the three hooded figures standing at the centre of the spiral. They were garbed like supplicants, wearing a surplice whose colour seemed to constantly shift from black to brown to grey and back again. Their heads were covered by voluminous hoods, their faces hidden by darkness. Their hands were tucked inside the sleeves of their surplice, so that not one centimetre of flesh could be seen.

The Watchers in the Dark weren’t human. Of that, Zahariel was certain. This was the form they chose to show him, because he was quite certain that the sight of their true nature would very likely drive him mad.

One of the three spoke, though Zahariel could not be certain which one. Their voices were like a complex skein of whispered sounds, woven together into the semblance of human words.

You know nothing of truth, Zahariel, the watcher said. If truth and falsehood were so simple, our ancient enemy could never find its way into a human soul.

‘I know what is right and what is wrong!’ Zahariel shot back. ‘I know the difference between honour and dishonour, loyalty and treason! What more does a man – or an Astartes – need to know?’

He is blind, said one of the watchers. He has always been thus. Kill him, before he does more harm than he knows.

Though the watchers were diminutive creatures by Astartes standards – each one barely more than a metre in height – Zahariel could sense the mantle of psychic energy that surrounded each of them, and knew that they could snuff out his life as easily as a candle flame. But he was in no mood to be cowed by these beings, not when the future of Caliban was at stake.

‘Perhaps that was true once, but I have learned a great deal since the first time we met,’ Zahariel countered. ‘You’re not ghosts or malevolent spirits, as the forest folk once believed. You’re a xenos species that has been guarding something here on Caliban for a very long time. What is it?’

Something mankind was not meant to trifle with, one of the watchers hissed. It has ever been thus. Your kind is too curious, too grasping and ignorant. It will be your undoing.

‘If we are ignorant, it’s because beings like you withhold the truth from us,’ Zahariel shouted. ‘Knowledge is power.’

And mankind misuses its power at every turn. One day humanity will kindle a fire they cannot control, and the entire universe will burn.

‘Then teach us!’ Zahariel said. ‘Show us a better way, instead of sitting back and waiting for disaster to fall. If you don’t, then you’re just as much to blame for what happens as we are.’

The three beings stirred, and a wave of psychic power rolled away from them like a cold wave, engulfing Zahariel and freezing him to the core. The shock of it would have stopped an ordinary man’s heart; as it was, the Librarian’s circulatory and nervous systems struggled to keep him conscious. Yet he refused to be cowed by their expression of pique.

‘You said to me, long ago, that this evil could be fought,’ he said. ‘Here I stand, ready to fight it. Just tell me what I must do.’

The watchers did not answer at first. They stirred again, and the ether was charged with pulses and ripples of invisible power. He sensed that they were conversing somehow, on a level too rarefied for him to perceive.

After what felt like an eternity, the ether stilled once more, and one of the watchers spoke. Ask your questions, human. We will answer what we can.

The admission surprised Zahariel, until he remembered that the watchers had once admitted that they were a part of a larger cabal, dedicated to battling the most ancient of evils. For the first time, he perceived that there were limits to what these potent beings were capable of doing.

‘All right,’ Zahariel began. ‘How long has Caliban been tainted by this evil?’

Always, was the watcher’s wintry reply.

‘Then why have no Calibanites succumbed to its touch before now?’

Because of our efforts, you foolish human, another watcher said. Zahariel was coming to recognise tonal differences between the beings now, though he still had no clear idea which voice belonged to which body.

And, ironically, by the great beasts themselves, another watcher said. They were born of the taint, and lingered near the places where its corruption rose close to the surface. They killed nearly all of the humans who strayed too close, and those few who did survive were ultimately slain as warlocks by your own people before they could grow too strong.

A sudden chill raised gooseflesh on Zahariel’s skin as a memory returned to him from long ago. He remembered standing in the great library of the Knights of Lupus, listening to the bleak words of their doomed master, Lord Sartana... The worst… of all this, is the Lion’s quest to kill off the great beasts. That’s the real danger. That’s the part we’ll all end up regretting.

And now the Terrans had come, cutting away the forests and forcing their way into the most inhospitable parts of Caliban in search of resources to feed the Imperial war machine. ‘The thermal cores,’ he mused. ‘They sank the thermal cores deep into the earth and released the taint in the Northwilds.’

And now others feed it with fire and slaughter, a watcher added.

Zahariel nodded, thinking of the pile of corpses at Sigma Five-One-Seven. Many of them had doubtless been provided for the worm queen to lay her eggs, but others – likely the entirety of the Calibanite labour force – had been offered up as a sacrifice, to add power to the ritual and focus the energies that the sorcerers unleashed. If they managed to tap into the horror and bloodshed being unleashed by the rebels, what terrible things might they accomplish?

In their own way, the rebels were more dangerous than the sorcerers themselves, Zahariel realised bleakly. And tragically, their cause wasn’t entirely unjust. The Imperium did, in fact, pose a grave danger to Caliban – just not in the way that many of them suspected.

Except for the old knight, Sar Daviel. He knew. Zahariel remembered his last words to Luther.

The forests are gone, but the monsters still remain.

Zahariel suddenly understood what had to be done. He turned to the watchers and bowed his head respectfully. ‘Thank you for your counsel,’ he said gravely. ‘You have my word that the wisdom you’ve shared will be put to good use. I will save Caliban from destruction. This I swear.’

The watchers studied him for a long moment, while the ghostly winds of the immaterium howled above their heads. Then, slowly, the watcher in the centre shook his cowled head.

In that you are wrong, Zahariel of the Dark Angels, the watcher replied. Its unearthly voice was low, and almost sad. Caliban is doomed, and nothing you do can prevent it.

Zahariel blinked in surprise, stunned by the watcher’s words. When he opened his eyelids again, the afterimage of the lightning bolt was fading from his vision. Rain smote his face, and the Watchers in the Dark were gone.

Zahariel burst into the Grand Master’s sanctum unannounced, the thick, oaken door rebounding with a boom from the old stone walls. Lord Cypher looked up from behind the Grand Master’s desk, his hooded form bent over neatly-stacked data slates and copies of readiness reports.

The enigmatic warrior’s square-jawed face betrayed no emotion at the Librarian’s sudden arrival. ‘Master Luther remains in seclusion, meditating on the crisis,’ he said coolly. ‘Have you another message for me to deliver?’

‘I’m not looking for Master Luther,’ Zahariel said, stalking purposefully across the room. ‘You’re the one I wish to speak to, my lord.’

‘Indeed?’ Cypher straightened, hooking his thumbs casually in his tooled leather gun belt. ‘And how may I be of service, Brother-Librarian Zahariel?’

‘I want another parley with the rebel leaders,’ Zahariel said. ‘Specifically Sar Daviel. And it needs to be within the next twenty-four hours.’

The request seemed to genuinely amuse Cypher. ‘Shall I pull the moon out of the sky while I’m at it?’ he asked with a faint grin.

‘You got word to them once before,’ Zahariel continued stubbornly. ‘I have no doubt those channels are still open to you, if you choose to employ them.’

The traditions of parley went back for hundreds of years on Caliban, when open warfare between knightly orders was more common. Even the bitterest foes maintained channels of communication to facilitate negotiations or declarations of surrender. It was a means of avoiding unnecessary casualties and bringing a swift end to open combat before both sides were too badly mauled to perform their sworn duty to the people of Caliban.

The grin faded from Lord Cypher’s face. His lips pressed into a narrow line. ‘Only the Grand Master can initiate a parley,’ he said.

‘Not so,’ Zahariel countered. ‘Astelan and I are his designated representatives, and so long as he remains incommunicado, we have the authority to prosecute the war as we see fit. And I wish to parley with the rebels at once.’

Lord Cypher hesitated for a moment, but then ultimately gave a nod of assent. ‘The rebels won’t agree to a meeting at Aldurukh this time,’ he warned.

‘I’ve no interest in speaking to them here,’ Zahariel said. ‘Tell Sar Daviel that I will meet them at a place of their choosing,’ he said, ‘inside the Northwilds arcology. No other location is acceptable.’

Cypher studied Zahariel closely. ‘An unusual request,’ he said. ‘They will want to know why.’

‘Because the fate of our world is going to be decided there,’ Zahariel replied. ‘Whether any of us like it or not.’

Fifteen

Engines of War

The forge’s massive Titan foundry was actually a collection of cyclopean structures that filled an area of five square kilometres, not far from the complex’s southern gate. It was a self-contained manufactory, with facilities for creating everything from adamantine skeletal segments to tempered plasteel armour plate, and everything in between. Broad trackways, made to accommodate heavy load-haulers, connected to the towering structure at the centre of the foundry – the giant assembly building, where up to four of the gargantuan war machines could be built at the same time. When a Titan was completed it would then be handed over to the adepts of the Legio Gladius with solemn ceremony, and the engine would take its first steps to join its brethren at the legion’s fortress, some ten kilometres to the north.

Nemiel and his squad encountered the first of the skitarii patrols at the edge of the foundry sector; these were well-equipped troops in static positions, manning lascannons or heavy stubbers and sweeping the perimeter every few seconds with advanced auspex arrays.

He halted the squad in the shadow of an idle manufactory and waved Brother Askelon over. ‘It looks like the assembly building is the only part of the foundry in operation,’ he said, nodding towards the towering, well-lit structure. ‘Magos Archoi isn’t taking any chances. He’s extended his security perimeter to the very edge of the sector. Can you think of a way we can get past those auspex units? It’s imperative we find out what Archoi is doing.’

The Techmarine considered the problem for a moment, and nodded. ‘All of the facilities here are powered by the thermal reactors inside the volcano,’ he said. ‘The power feeds are run through utility tunnels that connect all the buildings. They’ll likely be covered by automated security systems, but I believe I can bypass them.’

Nemiel nodded. ‘Let’s go. We don’t have much time until dawn.’

Askelon led the squad back the way they’d come, to an access door at the far side of the manufactory. While Nemiel and the rest of the Dark Angels stood watch for more Mechanicum patrols, the Techmarine bypassed the door’s security system and slipped inside. Fifteen seconds later he returned, beckoning for Nemiel. ‘There are several small, cybernetic sentries prowling the building,’ Askelon whispered. ‘They follow predictable routes and use their surveyors to scan for signs of heat or motion, but they’re very short-ranged. Stay close, and move only when I say.’

The Techmarine led the squad across the dark floor of the manufactory, slipping between massive stamping machines and automated spot-welding arrays. Askelon traced a winding, deliberate route through the plant, pausing at times and listening for the telltale ultrasonic whine of an auspex transmitter. After several long minutes they reached a short, squat permacrete structure at the centre of the manufactory floor. Askelon located a plasteel door in the side of the structure and quickly disarmed its sensors, then led the squad inside. Within, a cluster of giant, metal-clad conduits rose like fat, silver worms from a circular hole in the middle of the bare permacrete floor and connected to large junction boxes on three of the four walls. Control panels along the wall beside the door monitored the power feed to the manufactory’s systems.

Askelon stepped to the edge of the hole and located a set of metal rungs that descended into the access tunnel below. Hot, dry air, smelling of ozone and sulphur, wafted up from the depths. ‘We’ll follow the tunnel to the access point underneath the assembly building,’ he said to the squad. ‘Keep your eyes open, brothers. There may be cybernetic sentries in the tunnel as well.’

‘What do we do if we see one?’ Kohl asked.

‘Shoot it,’ the Techmarine replied with a shrug, ‘and hope that it can’t get a signal off before it’s destroyed.’

Kohl and Nemiel exchanged grim looks and followed Askelon down into the tunnel.

The utility tunnel was tall and wide, its circular walls lined with thick, metal conduits stamped with strings of binaric code. The Techmarine headed off down the tunnel in the general direction of the foundry, pausing from time to time to read the stamps on several of the conduits to his left.

They travelled for more than two kilometres, following the trunk labels through one intersection after another. Finally, Askelon battle-signed for the squad to halt and sank slowly into a crouch.

Nemiel moved silently forward and knelt down beside the Techmarine. ‘What’s wrong?’ he whispered.

Askelon raised his chin slightly, like a hound tasting a scent. ‘Faint surveyor pulse, emanating from farther down the tunnel,’ he said. ‘We’re outside its extreme range.’

The Redemptor raised his bolt pistol. ‘A sentry?’

‘Yes,’ Askelon replied. ‘It’s a sigma-sequence pulse, so it’s not one of the small patrol units. Most likely it’s a stationary unit, like a sentry gun.’

‘Then it’s probably sitting right at the feet of the ladder leading up to the foundry.’ Nemiel said. ‘Any way to outflank it?’

Askelon shook his head. ‘Unlikely. But there might be a way to temporarily incapacitate it.’

‘Tell me.’

The Techmarine pointed at the conduits lining the walls around them. ‘This is category nine conduit – it’s the most heavily-shielded insulator available,’ he explained. ‘But there’s so much power going through these lines that there’s still significant electromagnetic radiation leaking into the tunnel.’

‘And how does that help us, exactly?’

‘If I cut into the conduits I can use my armour’s power plant to send a feedback surge down the line towards the sentry unit,’ Askelon said. ‘A powerful enough spike in electromagnetic radiation will overload its auspex receptors and force a reset. That will render it blind and unable to communicate for approximately thirty seconds.’

‘Approximately?’ Nemiel said.

‘If I could see the type of sentry unit I could tell you down to the millisecond,’ Askelon said. ‘As it is, it could be one of a half-dozen models. Thirty seconds is my worst-case estimate.’

Nemiel nodded. ‘Get to work.’

The Redemptor went back to the squad and told them what was happening while Askelon quickly marked out which conduits to tap and went to work. With deft movements he drew out a small, powerful plasma torch and cut open a half-dozen of the steel tubes, then he opened an access panel on the side of his backpack power unit and began attaching a number of heavy-gauge cables to the contacts inside.

Several minutes later, the Techmarine was ready. He glanced back at Nemiel, who gave him the nod to proceed. Askelon quickly attached the cables to the power lines inside the conduits. His armour stiffened abruptly. Immediately, Nemiel saw the Techmarine’s status indicators begin flashing urgently on his helmet display. The core temp of his power unit spiked beyond allowable tolerances and continued to climb. Askelon’s physio-monitors began to fluctuate as well, as feedback coursed through the suit’s neuro-interfaces and into his body.

‘There’s smoke rising from his power plant,’ Kohl whispered urgently.

‘Let him finish!’ Nemiel hissed. ‘It’s the only way.’

Seconds passed. Nemiel watched Askelon’s indicators pulse from green to amber, and then amber to red. Without warning, a fountain of sparks shot from the servo-arm housing between the Techmarine’s shoulders. Askelon spasmed, throwing out his hands and shoving himself away from the power conduits. The Techmarine fell backwards, stiff-legged, and crashed into the far side of the tunnel.

Nemiel and the rest of the squad rushed to the downed Astartes. The air around Askelon shimmered with heat, radiating from his overloaded power unit. The Techmarine turned his head; squawks of sound crackled from his helmet’s speaker. Nemiel didn’t have to hear the words to know what Askelon was trying to say.

‘He’s sent the pulse,’ Nemiel told the squad. ‘Brother Marthes, take point. Sergeant Kohl, help me with Brother Askelon. Let’s move!’

The Astartes sprang into action, charging down the tunnel behind Marthes, who advanced with his meltagun held ready. Kohl and Nemiel brought up the rear, dragging the limp form of Askelon between them.

Three hundred metres down the tunnel, the passageway fed into a large, square structure that echoed the permacrete blockhouse they’d entered at the manufactory. The plasteel rungs of another ladder climbed upward, presumably into the foundry’s assembly building. Sitting at its feet, just as Nemiel suspected, crouched a matte-black sentry gun. Armed with a turret-mounted twin-linked lascannon, the automated unit crouched on four stubby legs like a hungry spider waiting for prey. Nemiel could hear the hum of its power unit as they approached. Its twin guns were aimed straight down the tunnel at the approaching Astartes. A single shot would cut through their armour like tissue.

‘Up the ladder!’ he ordered the squad. ‘Get up and get out of sight!’

Marthes stepped around the sentry gun and began climbing at once. Vardus paused at the bottom rungs, his heavy bolter slung at his side. ‘What about Askelon?’ he said.

‘We’ll manage,’ the Redemptor shot back. ‘Now hurry, brother!’

Vardus started his climb, with Ephrial hot on his heels. Nemiel consulted his internal chrono: they had just twelve seconds left. He looked to Kohl as they reached the bottom of the ladder. ‘We need to find a way to shut off the sentry gun,’ he said. ‘There must be an access panel–’

Askelon shook his head sharply; the ceramite edges of his helmet scraped against his gorget, suggesting he’d sustained damage to his armour’s muscle fibres. ‘No,’ he said, his voice coming through his helmet’s damaged speaker as a tortured croak. ‘Can’t risk it. I… I can climb.’

‘All right,’ Nemiel growled. ‘You go first. Kohl, you’re next. Help him as much as you can.’ He would stay until the last moment; if they ran out of time, he would tear open one of the sentry gun’s access panels and try to shut it down.

Askelon grabbed hold of the metal rungs and started climbing, seeming to gather strength with each lunge of his legs. Kohl was right behind him, ready to provide a judicious shove if the Techmarine faltered. Nemiel counted the seconds and checked the sentry gun for likely access points.

Vardus and Ephrial leaned over the hole, grabbed Askelon’s folded servo-arm and hauled him bodily up into the chamber above. Kohl raced up behind him. ‘Clear!’ he hissed to Nemiel.

The Redemptor leapt for the rungs and scrambled upwards as quickly as he could. The timer on his display hit zero when he was halfway up. There was a series of rapid clicks and whirring sounds directly beneath him as the sentry gun sprang back to life.

Hands reached down and grabbed the edges of his pauldrons. Nemiel felt himself yanked upwards like a sack of grain and deposited roughly on the permacrete of the upper floor.

The Astartes froze, listening intently. Below them, the sentry gun clattered and whirred a moment more, then resumed its quiet vigil.

Nemiel looked over at Askelon’s prone form. ‘Any sign of alarm?’

The Techmarine reached slowly for his helmet and undid its clasps. Askelon pulled the helm away, revealing a sweat-streaked face stippled with broken blood vessels. A trickle of blood seeped from his nose and the corners of his eyes. ‘No change,’ he said in a husky voice. Blood slicked the Techmarine’s teeth.

Nemiel rolled over and rose to his knees beside Askelon. ‘How badly are you hurt?’ he asked quietly.

Askelon chuckled faintly. ‘I’m no Apothecary, brother,’ he replied. ‘The machinery of a living body is too complex even for me.’ He levered himself to a sitting position with a grunt. ‘Armour integrity is at sixty-five per cent. Power levels at forty per cent. Muscle fibre reflex is compromised, and I think I melted the motors on my servo-arm.’

Nemiel frowned. ‘You didn’t mention that tapping those conduits would likely kill you,’ he growled.

The Techmarine managed a grin. ‘It didn’t seem relevant at the time.’ He extended his hand. ‘Help me up, please.’

Kohl and Nemiel hauled Askelon upright. The Redemptor glanced warily at the edge of the hole. ‘Can the gun sense us up here?’

‘To a limited extent, yes,’ the Techmarine said. ‘But activity overhead won’t trigger a combat response. It’s down there to guard the approaches to the building, and that’s all.’

‘All right. Where do we go from here?’

Askelon looked about the chamber. It was identical to the conduit room at the manufactory, only substantially larger. He nodded to the metal door across the chamber. ‘That leads out into a sub-level beneath the main assembly floor. From there we’ll be able to access almost every part of the building.’

Nemiel checked his chrono again. It was little more than an hour until dawn. ‘A building like this is bound to have catwalks along the upper storeys, correct?’

Askelon nodded. ‘Three levels of them, in this case. You can look out over the entire assembly area from some of them.’

‘Then that’s where we need to be,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

Kohl took point after that, leading the squad through the confines of the sub-level according to whispered directions from Brother Askelon, until they reached a narrow stairwell that climbed upwards into the assembly building proper. Weapons ready, they made their way carefully up the permacrete stairs, listening for the slightest sound of movement. Nemiel could hear the sharp crackle of arc torches and the snarl of power tools reverberating through the walls, the steel-on-steel noise like the sounds of a distant battlefield.

They climbed up several storeys, past one dimly-lit landing after another, until Nemiel signalled for a halt. ‘This is far enough,’ he said. ‘We don’t need to get all the way to the top – I just want a good view of what’s going on,’ he told them. He turned to Askelon. ‘Is there any risk of sensors at this point?’

‘No,’ the Techmarine replied. ‘We’re past their detection perimeter.’

‘All right. Marthes, you and Vardus stay here and cover the stairwell. Kohl, Askelon and Ephrial, you’re with me.’

Nemiel crouched at the plasteel door and cracked it slowly open. Beyond, the gantry-way was lit with red light from below. His autosenses picked up the reek of melted plastek, petrochemicals and heated metal. Distantly, he could make out the sharp blurts and squeals of binaric cant, as well as a number of voices speaking in Gothic. The Redemptor concentrated, but he could not make out what they were saying over the squalling of the machinery.

He surveyed the gantry-way carefully for as far as he could see, checking for any signs of movement, then went back and checked again. Satisfied there was no one within the immediate area, he opened the door the rest of the way and crept quietly onto the plasteel catwalk.

The assembly building was rectangular in shape, with an open floor plan surrounded by six huge niches that stretched from floor to ceiling. Giant servo arms were set into either side of these niches, able to climb to different heights along trackways set into the permacrete, and huge cranes hung from similar tracks high overhead. The Titans were assembled inside each niche, starting with the skeletal structure of the feet and working upwards to the head.

Nemiel found himself crouched on a section of third-storey gantry-way at one end of the building. The storeys above him were plunged into darkness, without so much as an emergency lamp burning. Below, red light rose up from the assembly floor like the glow of an actual forge. Gusts of hot air, stirred by industrial grade arc torches blew against his faceplate. A rustle of iron links, musical and cold, chimed from the deep shadows high above the floor.

Hundreds of chains had been suspended from the assembly building’s ceiling, twisting and clinking together in the restless air. Each chain, more than fifty metres in length, had been strung with dozens of hooks, and on each hook hung a fresh corpse. Nemiel saw the bodies of Tanagran Dragoons, skitarii – even the mangled bodies of dead praetorians – along with the smaller figures of tech-adepts and half-mechanical magi. Their corpses had been riddled by bullets or torn apart by energy bolts, sliced open by power claws or crushed by mechanical fists, and their fluids leaked from them in a steady, dripping rain onto the hulls of the enormous vehicles below.

There were six of them, Nemiel saw. Their chassis were so wide that they could only be arrayed in a single file that stretched from one end of the assembly building to the other. Their armoured hulls were supported by dual sets of treads on each of the vehicles’ flanks, with a sloped front that rose like a sheer-sided hillock more than two storeys high. Void shield generators studded the vehicle’s sides, along with automated quad-laser and mega-bolter emplacements, but Nemiel scarcely noticed them. His gaze was drawn to the enormous cannon built into the centreline of the vehicle’s hull. A complicated series of hoists and giant braces surrounding the cannon’s barrel indicated that it was meant to be elevated and fired like a conventional artillery piece. The aft section of each vehicle was segmented like the body of a giant insect, and appeared to be even more heavily armoured than the rest of the hull.

‘What in the Emperor’s name are those things?’ Kohl hissed. It was the first time Nemiel had ever heard the sergeant taken aback.

Techmarine Askelon carefully eased into a crouch beside them. His eyes widened as he saw the machines on the assembly floor. ‘Siege guns,’ he said, his voice tinged with awe, ‘but far larger than any I’ve ever seen before. Those look like macro cannons, fitted to a custom hull.’ He pointed to the nearest vehicle. ‘See those dual treads? Those aren’t part of a contiguous drive train. They are distinct drive units, similar in size and power to the ones used on Baneblade super-heavy tanks. There are three to a side, and that’s just to form the foundation for each vehicle.’

Tech-adepts were crawling like ants over each of the war machines, working feverishly along the armoured hull beneath the rain of gore. Symbols had been scrawled in blood at regular intervals along each machine’s flank, but Nemiel couldn’t make them out at such a distance. The Redemptor noticed that the vehicle closest to them had a large, open hatch on the top deck, to the right of the huge gun. ‘What do you make of that?’ he said, pointing to the two tech-adepts working in the well beneath the hatchway.

Askelon leaned slightly forward, peering intently at the opening. His eyes widened. ‘It’s an MIU interface chamber,’ he said, ‘A neural interface link, much like we employ on our Titans. It looks like they’re refurbishing the control leads and making it ready for use.’

‘So a single operator could control one of these behemoths?’ Nemiel said.

The Techmarine nodded. ‘Of course. They’re big, but far less demanding than a bipedal Titan,’ he replied. ’And the MIU makes it nearly impossible for them to be used if captured.’

Nemiel nodded grimly, his gaze rising to the collection of corpses dangling in the air before them. ‘Now we know what happened to the Dragoons covering the southern approach,’ he said, his voice thick with revulsion. ‘Not to mention a good many of the forge’s own personnel. Magos Archoi is a madman. This whole thing smacks of some obscene, superstitious ritual. How could someone like Horus Lupercal be connected to such debased behaviour?’ Memories of the foul things he’d witnessed at Sarosh rose unbidden in Nemiel’s mind. He forced them aside with an effort of will and a savage shake of his head.

Kohl tore his gaze away from the repellent sight and caught a glimpse of movement on the assembly floor. ‘Here comes the high priest himself,’ he growled, pointing to the narrow lane at the right of the parked war machines.

Nemiel straightened, craning his head around to see Magos Archoi walking down the line of vehicles. A pair of tech-adepts followed a discreet distance behind the magos, their hands tucked into their sleeves, while a knot of four uniformed men dogged Archoi’s heels and studied the siege guns critically. One of the men was conferring with the magos, speaking to him in urgent tones. It took a moment for Nemiel to recognise the uniform he wore.

‘Fifteenth Hesperan Lancers,’ he murmured. ‘Assigned to Horus’s Sixty-third Expeditionary Fleet. It looks like some of the rebels stayed behind when their ground forces left the planet. They must have been meeting with that traitor Archoi and arranging delivery of the machines when we arrived.’

‘And they’ve been biding their time ever since, waiting for the right opportunity,’ Kohl snarled. ‘That damned magos has embedded his warriors into every one of our combat units. We’ve got to warn the primarch or we may well have a massacre on our hands!’

At just that moment, Brother Vardus leaned out from the stairwell entrance. ‘Movement on the stairs!’ he hissed, ‘coming from above and below.’

Kohl stared back at Vardus. ‘Above and below simultaneously?’

Vardus nodded. ‘They’re moving quietly. Might be a pair of patrols.’

Suddenly, Askelon pointed across the cavernous space. ‘I can see movement on the opposite gantry-way!’ he said quietly. ‘They’re carrying something.’

Nemiel felt the hairs on the back of his neck go up. He looked down at the assembly room floor. Magos Archoi was standing there, surrounded by a circle of bemused rebels. The traitor’s hooded head was tilted upwards, looking directly at him.

‘They know we’re here!’ he cried, drawing his crozius from his belt. ‘It’s a trap!’

Lasgun fire erupted from the gantry-way on the opposite side of the building; red bolts hissed through the air, gouging craters from the permacrete wall in a string of sharp thunderclaps. A heavy bolter began to hammer away, spitting tracers across the intervening space in a series of measured bursts. Rounds struck many of the hanging chains, splitting their links and dumping their grisly cargo to the ground.

Nemiel fired a burst in the direction of the heavy bolter and activated his vox-bead. ‘Invincible Reason, this is Brother Nemiel!’ he cried. ‘Can you read me?’ He was answered with a rising screech of static. The Redemptor went through a score of frequencies and got the same result. Archoi’s traitors were jamming the vox-channels.

Fire erupted from the stairwell behind Nemiel. Autoguns clattered and lasguns spat bursts of light at Marthes and Vardus, who responded with a brace of fragmentation grenades. Marthes levelled his meltagun down the stairs and fired a howling blast, then ducked out onto the gangway. ‘There’s a platoon of skitarii coming up the stairs!’ he shouted.

Dark figures were rushing at them along the gangway from the far side of the building, firing bursts of lasgun fire as they advanced. Kohl and Ephrial exchanged fire with them, dropping several with well-aimed shots. A burst of heavy bolter fire answered them, stitching the two Astartes with a stream of shells. Both warriors staggered beneath the hits, but their armour turned aside the blows.

‘Marthes! Put a shot on that gangway!’ Nemiel yelled as he leaned over the thin metal rail and levelled his pistol at Magos Archoi. The traitor didn’t even flinch as the Redemptor laid his aiming point at the centre of the darkness beneath his hood and let off a burst. The shells flew straight and true – and detonated harmlessly against a force field just a few scant centimetres from their target. The officers with the magos drew laspistols and returned fire, striking Nemiel once in the leg and abdomen.

Marthes shouldered his way onto the catwalk and fired his meltagun at the distant heavy bolter. The microwave burst struck the weapon and the gangway beneath it and superheated the metal in a split second, vaporising them in a fierce concussion and hurling burning skitarii to the assembly floor below.

‘We’re cut off!’ Kohl shouted as he picked off another of the charging warriors. ‘Where do we go from here?’

Nemiel glared down at Archoi. Several metres away, one of the burning skitarii had become entangled in one of the chains on the way down, and now he thrashed and twisted in the air as the flames consumed him. On impulse, he holstered his pistol. ‘Follow me!’ he said, then put a foot onto the rail and leapt into space.

The thin metal of the railing bent beneath his full weight, throwing him off balance, but his leap carried him far enough to reach one of the grisly, corpse-strewn chains. He grabbed hold with one hand and slid partway down its length before the slippery metal snaked out of his hands. Nemiel fell the remaining few metres and landed atop the lead siege gun. A tech-adept rose up beside him, raising a crackling arc-torch, but he may as well have been moving in slow motion. The Astartes smashed the traitor aside with a sweep of his crozius and began to run along the downward-sloping hull towards Archoi and the rebel officers.

‘For the Lion!’ he roared, raising the crozius aquilum high as he launched himself at the traitors.

Sixteen

Wheels Within Wheels

General Morten shifted uncomfortably in the shuttle’s oversized jump seat and tried to conceal the scowl on his face by pretending to study the view beyond the small window at his left. ‘If I could perhaps get some idea of what it is you’re looking for, I could arrange for a presentation from the garrison’s senior officers.’

‘That would defeat the purpose of the inspection,’ Zahariel replied from his seat across the shuttle’s passenger cabin. ‘In fact, it would be best if the troops never knew I was there.’

‘Very well,’ Morten rasped, though Zahariel could see that his weathered face was still troubled. The Terran officer stared out the window for a moment more, debating what to say next. After a moment, he drew a deep breath and said, ‘You asked me to inspect the troops at Northwilds to provide a cover for your own activities.’

‘That’s right,’ Zahariel admitted. He didn’t want to lie to the man any more than he had to. ‘We’ll part ways once the shuttle lands, and it’s likely I won’t be returning with you back to Aldurukh.’ He spread his hands. ‘I regret that I can’t be any more candid, but this is Legion business. I’m sure you understand.’

‘Yes, of course,’ Morten said readily, but there was no mistaking the wary look in the old general’s eye. For a brief moment, Zahariel wondered if there was something that the general was hiding, but he quickly dismissed the thought with a flash of irritation. He had no reason to distrust Morten, Zahariel reminded himself forcibly. The man was, by all accounts, an honourable and dedicated soldier, and had every reason to wonder at Zahariel’s request for an unannounced inspection of the garrison at the Northwilds arcology. The fact was, Zahariel couldn’t afford to make his presence known to the local troops or the Administratum officials struggling to maintain order across the arcology’s war-torn sectors; it would lead to pointed questions that he could ill afford to answer.

The last thing he wanted was for General Morten – or worse, Magos Bosk – to learn that a member of the Legion was meeting secretly with rebel leaders in the midst of the most hotly-contested population centre on the planet. It was unlikely that either of the Terrans would take the news well. As much as he hated the idea of concealing his actions, Zahariel was forced to admit that, when it came down to it, Morten and Bosk acted in the best interests of the Imperium, not Caliban itself.

Shafts of late afternoon sunlight slanted through the window to Zahariel’s right as the military shuttle began a wide, diving turn towards their destination. The Librarian craned his neck to peer out the window to the north-east, where the arcology rose sharp-edged against the backdrop of the weathered mountain range further north.

The Northwilds arcology had been built according to the standard Imperial template; it was an irregularly-stepped pyramid that, even still in its initial stages, was five kilometres wide at its base and rose more than three kilometres into the cloudy sky. Narrow streets radiated away from the arcology across the plain, surrounded by hundreds of smaller buildings that had yet to be subsumed by the structure’s ever-expanding footprint.

Each arcology was constructed in a similar fashion on newly-compliant Imperial worlds: first would come the labourers and their families, relocated by the tens of thousands from towns and villages all over the hemisphere. They would be resettled in a town at the site of the new arcology, which would spread outwards in all directions as its population swelled. Then, once there was a large enough labour pool that had been sufficiently trained to begin work, the digging of the arcology’s foundation would begin. The structure would grow in stages, expanding outwards, upwards and downwards at the same time. Little by little, the arcology would swallow up the town, its residents progressively reassigned to districts inside the structure itself. The population would continue to grow as well, along with the civil services and bureaucracy that went along with it. In theory, the population and organisational growth would match the growth of the structure so closely that by the time the structure was complete, the arcology would be fully populated and self-sufficient. Of course, such things rarely ever went precisely according to plan.

‘How many people are at Northwilds these days?’ Zahariel asked.

‘You mean civilians? About five million, all told,’ Morten replied. ‘About a quarter of that are Imperial citizens from offworld – Administratum officials, engineers, industrial planners and the like.’

Zahariel consulted facts and figures committed to memory before leaving Aldurukh. ‘A stage one arcology is built to support twice that number,’ he observed. ‘So half of the structure is still unoccupied?’

Morten shrugged. ‘The Imperium’s industrialisation plan calls for twenty stage-one arcologies across Caliban, but the planet’s population won’t be able to support that for some time yet.’

The Librarian frowned thoughtfully. ‘That seems like a great deal of extra work. One would think that they would build new structures as needed, rather than all at once?’

Morten spread his gnarled hands. ‘Who can say? The Administratum has its reasons, I don’t doubt.’

‘How is the population distributed throughout the arcology?’ Zahariel inquired.

‘We’re keeping the natives penned into the lower levels,’ the general rasped. ‘The garrison, the Administratum infrastructure and the off-world residents are housed on the upper levels, where we can keep them secure.’

Zahariel gave the general a flat stare. ‘Natives?’ he said.

Morten’s scowl vanished. ‘My apologies, sir,’ he said, straightening in his seat. An embarrassed flush began to spread up his thick neck. ‘Just a figure of speech. I meant no offence.’

‘No, of course not,’ the Librarian replied coolly. ‘How are you managing to provide basic services to the population?’

Morten drew in a quick breath. ‘Well, I won’t deny it’s difficult. The lower levels bore the brunt of the riots, so a lot of the infrastructure was damaged. We’re sending in work teams every day with armed escorts to perform repairs, and we’ve set up medicae facilities at strategic points to care for the injured.’

‘So how much of the lower levels are without light or running water at this point?’ Zahariel asked.

‘Only about twenty per cent,’ Morten said. ‘If we can keep any more full-scale riots from breaking out, we can knock that number down even further in the next couple of weeks.’

Zahariel nodded, keeping his face impassive. Twenty per cent without power or water meant roughly a million people trapped in the dark, shivering in the cold and living off military ration packs for the better part of a month. ‘Is there no way to relocate the affected residents to another level?’

Morten’s craggy brows went up. ‘Sir, you must be aware that an unknown number of the natives – excuse me, citizens – are also likely members of the rebellion. It’s much more sensible from a military standpoint to keep them isolated and restore service to them, than turn them loose in another part of the arcology where they can cause more mischief.’

Zahariel turned back to the window and breathed deeply, biting back the outrage he felt. ‘Is this sort of tactic normal when dealing with civil unrest?’ he asked.

‘Of course,’ Morten replied. ‘You’ve got to get it through their heads that when they destroy Imperial property they’re only going to make their lives harder and more miserable. Sooner or later the lesson sinks in.’

And how many rebels do you create in the process, Zahariel thought?

The shuttle had descended to about two thousand metres by this point, and its turn sharpened as it came in for its final approach. Zahariel saw plumes of smoke rising from the arcology’s flanks near ground level, suggesting that the populace was far from learning General Morten’s brutal lesson. He was shocked to feel a perverse sense of pride at the thought.

They continued their descent, passing below fifteen hundred metres before the shuttle pilot pulled up the nose of his craft and flared his thrusters for a vertical landing. The transport touched down on a broad landing pad, one of dozens that jutted from the arcology’s northern face, with scarcely a jolt. Morten grunted in satisfaction as he unbuckled his safety harness and climbed wearily to his feet.

‘My inspection will likely take the better part of three hours,’ he said to Zahariel. ‘Do I need to stretch it out further?’

‘No need,’ Zahariel replied. He had yet to climb from his seat. ‘Return to Aldurukh without me. I will arrange for my own transport.’

Morten paused, as though he wanted to inquire further, but after a moment he mastered his curiosity and gave the Librarian a curt nod. ‘I’ll bid you good luck then,’ he said, then turned on his heel and headed for the exit ramp.

Zahariel listened to the clang of the general’s boots as he descended the ramp. One of the shuttle pilots passed through the passenger compartment, headed aft to check on the shuttle’s engines. He waited a full minute more, then rose to his feet and pulled off his plain, white surplice to reveal a black body glove beneath. The rebel leaders had agreed to the meeting only on the condition that he come unarmed and unarmoured. The stipulation surprised and irritated him; did they imagine he would call for a parley with treachery in mind? He’d swallowed his aggravation and agreed nonetheless. There was too much at stake to haggle over such trivial details.

The Librarian reached into an overhead locker and drew out a neatly-folded bundle of cloth. Zahariel unfurled the heavy cloak with a snap of his wrists and drew it about his shoulders. When he closed the clasp, the cloak’s cameleoline outer layer activated, matching the grey hues of the compartment in less than a second. He drew the cloak’s deep hood over his head and headed quickly to the ramp.

Outside the shuttle the air was cold and brisk, with a strong wind blowing down from the mountains. Tattered streamers of smoke curled around the lip of the landing pad; he grimaced as he caught the mingled smell of ash and melted plastek. Across the pad, a deep alcove led to a pair of blast doors that gave access to the arcology itself. A shuttle technician stood near the alcove, his back to Zahariel as he tried to wrestle a heavy refuelling hose from a recessed bay set into the pad itself.

The Astartes moved swiftly across the pad, the faint sound of his footfalls lost in the idling whine of the shuttle’s engines. He passed the technician close enough to touch him if he’d wished; the man glanced up irritably as he felt the wind of Zahariel’s passage on his neck, but his gaze swept right past the Librarian without registering his presence.

Clutching the cloak about his broad frame, Zahariel entered the broad, shadowed alcove and paused beside the blast doors. As near as he could reckon, he had six hours before the rendezvous on sub-level four.

He turned to a maintenance access hatch, situated at the side of the alcove to the left of the blast doors. The hatch swung open noiselessly, revealing a cramped space lit with dim, red utility lighting and crowded with high-voltage conduits and data trunks. A narrow set of metal rungs led upwards and downwards into darkness. Before he’d left Aldurukh, Zahariel had memorised a circuitous route through the arcology’s maze of accessways that would give him the best chance of reaching the rendezvous point unobserved. He’d need every bit of those six hours to make it to the meeting on time.

The Librarian stooped his shoulders and squeezed his way into the human-sized space, then pulled the hatch shut behind him. Darkness closed in on all sides, heavy with the scent of lubricants, ozone and recycled air. The hum of distant machinery reverberated through his bones.

With a deep breath, Zahariel began his descent into the depths.

Six hours and ten minutes later, Zahariel was crouched in the shadows at the mouth of a maintenance access corridor. Just a few steps away, a metal catwalk ran along the high wall of one of the arcology’s many generator substations. From where he crouched he had a good view of the rendezvous point on the generator floor, six metres below.

Something was wrong.

The time for the rendezvous had come and gone, and the rebel leaders were nowhere in sight. Instead, Zahariel saw a pair of men in utility coveralls waiting at the designated spot. One man puffed worriedly at a clay pipe, while the other tried to calm himself by cleaning his grimy nails with the point of a small knife. They looked like just another pair of generator techs stealing a few minutes’ break away from the watchful eyes of their boss – except for the cut-down las-carbines hanging from their shoulders.

What had happened to Sar Daviel and the rest? Why had these two men been sent in their stead? Now, after ten minutes, the men were growing restless. No doubt they were coming to the conclusion that he wasn’t going to appear either.

Zahariel gritted his teeth in irritation. He could let the men leave and try to follow them back to their superiors, but there was a significant risk that he could lose them in the arcology’s labyrinthine passageways. That left him with only one viable option. The Librarian took a few deep breaths, calling on his training to calm his mind and focus his thoughts, then he rose from concealment, took three quick steps and vaulted over the side of the catwalk.

He landed with scarcely a sound, not three metres away from the two rebels. The man with the knife let out a startled squawk and recoiled from the Astartes, his eyes widening in fear. The pipe-smoker whirled, following the other man’s startled gaze. To his credit, he kept his composure much better than his companion.

‘You’re late,’ the rebel said around the stem of his pipe.

‘I didn’t come here to meet with you,’ Zahariel said coldly. ‘Where is Sar Daviel?’

The two rebels exchanged nervous glances. ‘We’re supposed to take you to him,’ the pipe-smoker said.

‘That wasn’t what we agreed upon,’ Zahariel said, a shade of menace creeping into his voice. The knife-wielder blanched, his grip tightening on the handle of his tiny penknife. If the situation hadn’t been so serious, the Librarian might have been tempted to laugh.

The other rebel plucked the pipe from his lips and gave a disinterested shrug. ‘Just doing what we’re told,’ he said. ‘If you mean to parley, then follow us. If not, well, I expect you know the way out.’

‘Very well,’ the Astartes said coldly. ‘Let’s go.’

‘First things first,’ the pipe-smoker said. He reached into a pocket of his coveralls and drew out a small auspex unit. Placing the pipe back in his mouth, he activated the unit and adjusted its settings, then swept it over Zahariel from head to toe.

Zahariel felt his choler rise as the rebel performed his scan. ‘The agreement was that I not come armed or armoured,’ he said, biting off each word.

The rebel was unperturbed. ‘That’s as may be. I still have my orders.’ Finished with the scan, he checked the unit’s readout, then nodded to his companion. ‘He’s clear.’

The second rebel nodded, then put away his penknife and started off towards the mouth of a dimly-lit corridor on the far side of the generator room.

‘Follow him,’ the pipe-smoker said. ‘I’ll be right behind you.’

Biting back his anger, Zahariel fell into step behind the lead rebel.

They walked for more than an hour, following a long, torturous route through the maintenance spaces that would have completely disorientated a normal man. As it was, Zahariel had only a vague notion of where in the arcology they were. He was certain that they had descended through another two sub-levels, making them at least a hundred metres below ground.

At the end of the trek Zahariel found himself walking down a long, dark corridor that seemed to go on for at least a kilometre. After several minutes he began to see a faint, grey luminescence up ahead. He smelled brackish water and wet stone, and a low, hissing sound filled his ears. Soon the grey light resolved itself into a doorway that opened onto a clattering metal catwalk suspended over a man-made waterfall. To the right of the catwalk, close enough to touch, was a wall of plunging water that churned into foam just two metres below Zahariel’s feet before passing under the catwalk and through a metal grate off to his left. They had reached one of the arcology’s many waste water purification plants, Zahariel realised. At the far end of the catwalk, about fifty metres away, a small, permacrete blockhouse jutted from the chamber wall. Two armed rebels stood outside the blockhouse door, their hands nervously gripping their stolen lasguns.

The guards halted them at the end of the catwalk and conferred with Zahariel’s guides in low, urgent tones; he tried to listen in on what was being said, but the white noise of the waterfall made it impossible. After a brief exchange, the guards nodded and stepped to one side. The pipe-smoking rebel turned back to Zahariel and gestured to the door with a nod of his head. ‘They’re waiting for you inside,’ he said.

At once, Zahariel’s anger began to rise. Without a word, he rushed past the four men, pushing open the door with the flat of his hand and storming inside. He found himself in a small room, perhaps five metres to a side, which was lined with banks of controls and flickering data-plates. Four rebel soldiers stood in a tight knot on the opposite side of the room, close to a featureless metal door. To his left, Zahariel saw Lord Thuriel and Lord Malchial sitting in a pair of the control room’s utilitarian chairs. Malchial was clearly agitated, leaning forward in the chair with his hands clenched so tightly his knuckles were white as chalk. Thuriel, on the other hand, was at ease, peering at the Librarian over steepled fingers. His dark eyes held nothing but contempt.

‘So you chose to come after all,’ Thuriel sneered. ‘I’d half given up on you.’

‘Had you been at the agreed-upon place you wouldn’t have had to wait,’ Zahariel shot back. ‘We haven’t the time for games, Lord Thuriel. Where are Lady Alera and Sar Daviel?’

‘That’s none of your concern,’ Thuriel said. He turned slightly and nodded to the men at the door. As one, the four rebels turned to face Zahariel, raising their weapons. Two of the men were armed with heavy, blunt-nosed plasma guns. For a moment Zahariel could only stare at the rebels. The idea of violating the time-honoured tradition of parley shocked him more profoundly than any warp-spawned horror could.

‘Upon further consideration, we’ve decided to make you our guest,’ Thuriel said with a cruel smile. ‘I think a high-value hostage will persuade Luther to take our demands seriously.’

Zahariel, however, wasn’t the least bit cowed. He folded his arms and glared at the rebels. ‘I’m going to give you just one chance to put those guns away,’ he said in a quiet voice.

Thuriel chuckled. ‘Or what?’ he shot back. ‘I’ve heard stories about the legendary toughness of the Astartes, but I rather doubt even you would survive a point-blank shot from a plasma gun.’

‘None of us would survive, you idiot,’ Zahariel said scornfully. ‘In a small room like this the thermal effects would incinerate us all. Now, I’m going to say this one last time. Put your weapons away, or this parley is finished.’

‘Parley?’ Thuriel said incredulously. ‘Have you not heard anything I’ve said? Unless you’re here to accede to our terms, we have nothing to discuss.’

Before Zahariel could reply, the door behind the rebel soldiers banged open. Sar Daviel appeared, shoving his way roughly past the startled gunmen. Behind him came Lady Alera, her face pale and her expression fierce. She, in turn, was followed by a third figure, stoop-shouldered and lean and clad in a plain white surplice identical to Zahariel’s own. The Librarian looked into the figure’s seamed face and felt a shock like a thunderbolt course up his spine.

It was Master Ramiel.

‘Thuriel, you damned fool,’ snarled Sar Daviel. ‘You’ve got no idea what you’re playing at here. Tell your men to put away their guns right now, or I’ll do it for them.’ The old knight’s scarred hands clenched into fists. He looked entirely ready to make good his threat.

Daviel’s scornful tone brought Lord Thuriel out of his chair. ‘Mind your tongue when you’re speaking to your betters, you old dog,’ he warned. ‘Or you’ll wind up sharing the same cell as this hyper-muscled monstrosity here.’

‘Listen to me,’ Sar Daviel said, his voice low and insistent. ‘Zahariel is here under the terms of parley. Do you understand what that means?’

‘Parley?’ Thuriel said with a harsh laugh. ‘I’ve had quite enough of your romantic notions of warfare, Daviel. Do you imagine that Luther has suddenly had a change of heart, and wants to negotiate with us? Use your head, man!’ He pointed an accusing finger at Zahariel. ‘For all we know, he called this parley to draw us into the open so he could kill us!’

‘Shut up, Thuriel,’ Ramiel snapped. The old master’s voice was roughened with age, but still bore the same lash of authority he’d wielded at Aldurukh. ‘Have your men put away their weapons before Zahariel decides that the parley is void and turns your paranoid suspicions into reality.’

The noble recoiled from the command as though he’d been slapped. The rebel gunmen wavered, casting uncertain glances between the rebel leaders as if unsure who to follow. When Thuriel didn’t respond at once, Lady Alera wormed her way between the gunmen and pushed the muzzles of the plasma guns downward.

‘Enough of this madness,’ she declared. Then, to Zahariel, she said, ‘I regret this misunderstanding has occurred. Lord Thuriel and Lord Malchial acted rashly, and without the sanction of the rest of our leadership. In fact,’ she continued, shooting an angry glance at the two noblemen, ‘they conspired to delay the rest of us so that we couldn’t interfere with their treachery.’

‘Now, look here,’ Malchial said, rising nervously from his chair. ‘I never wanted any part of this. Lord Thuriel said–’

‘We’ve heard more than enough of what Lord Thuriel has to say,’ Ramiel snapped. ‘I advise the both of you to hold your tongue from this point forward. At the moment I’m of the opinion you’re a bigger threat to our cause than Luther and his minions, and nothing in the terms of parley prevents me from having the both of you shot.’

Ramiel’s threat ended the confrontation at a stroke. The gunmen withdrew to stand by the doorway behind the rebel leaders, their weapons held at port arms. Malchial went pale and his mouth snapped shut at once. Thuriel held his tongue as well, though his body trembled with barely-contained rage.

Zahariel observed the entire exchange with outward calm, though inwardly his mind reeled at the implications of the scene playing out before him. It had been obvious from the start that the insurgents were very well-informed about Imperial strategy and tactics, but Luther and General Morten had assumed that deserters from the Jaeger regiments were the cause. The truth, Zahariel now realised, was far worse – and called into question many of their assumptions about the rebels and their motives.

‘It was you all along,’ Zahariel said, his heart sinking with the realisation. ‘How many years did you pretend to be our brother while you were laying the groundwork for this reb-ellion? When did you forsake your oaths to the primarch, master? Did it happen the day that Luther returned from the Crusade – or when Jonson passed you over and chose another to become Lord Cypher?’

‘It was Jonson’s treachery that brought us all to this,’ Ramiel said. The old master’s voice was sharp as drawn steel. ‘An oath born from deceit is no oath at all! His lies–’

‘Save your breath, my lord,’ Sar Daviel said, resting a hand on Ramiel’s arm. ‘It won’t do you any good.’ The maimed knight let go of the old master and took a step towards Zahariel, his expression stern and unforgiving. ‘You called for a parley, and in honour of the old ways we obliged you. What is it you want?’

With an effort, Zahariel tore his gaze away from Ramiel and collected his thoughts. He’d rehearsed this conversation in his head a hundred times on the way to the arcology.

‘I’m here because of what you said to Luther, just before you got on the shuttle back at Aldurukh.’

Sar Daviel’s one good eye narrowed thoughtfully. He gave Zahariel a searching look, and then sudden comprehension dawned across his scarred face. ‘You’ve seen something, haven’t you?’

‘What’s happened?’ Ramiel said, a note of concern creeping into his voice.

Zahariel hesitated, knowing that he had reached the point of no return. Luther had forbidden him to discuss the matter with anyone, but if he didn’t, Caliban was doomed. Slowly at first, then with gathering speed and determination, he told the rebel leaders what he’d found at Sigma Five-One-Seven.

When he was done, Zahariel studied the faces of each rebel leader in turn. Daviel and Master Ramiel cast sidelong glances at one another, their expressions grim. Lady Alera and Lord Malchial were pale with shock, while Lord Thuriel’s jaw tightened with building outrage.

‘What is he talking about?’ Thuriel demanded. ‘What’s this… this taint he keeps referring to?’ He took a step towards the two older knights, his hands clenching into fists. ‘How long have you been keeping this from us?’

Daviel glared forbiddingly at the angry noble. ‘It’s none of your concern, Thuriel,’ he growled. ‘Believe me. The less you know about this, the better.’

‘And now you presume to tell me what I have a right to know? You’re no better than the damned Imperials!’ Thuriel turned to Lady Alera. ‘I told you we couldn’t trust them!’ he snarled, pointing an accusing finger at the old knights. ‘Who knows what other secrets they’re hiding? For all we know, they might have been working with Luther all along!’

‘Thuriel, will you please just shut up,’ Lady Alera said, her voice trembling faintly. She pressed a hand to her forehead, and Zahariel could see that she was struggling to come to grips with what she’d been told. ‘Can’t you see what’s at stake here?’

‘Of course I can,’ Thuriel snarled. ‘In fact, I see things a great deal more clearly than you, Alera. I see that the Terrans aren’t content with raping our world – now they’re feeding our people to monsters. And these two old fools knew it, but kept it to themselves.’

‘We knew nothing of the kind, you arrogant, self-centred dolt,’ Daviel shot back. ‘Master Ramiel and I were protecting our people from monsters long before you were born, and don’t you forget it.’ He jabbed a gnarled finger at the ruined side of his face. ‘You want to talk about monsters, boy, you show me the scars you earned fighting them. Otherwise, shut your damned mouth!’

‘So that’s it, eh? Just shut up and trust you? Like we trusted Luther, and Jonson, and all those vultures from the Administratum?’ Thuriel shouted back. His right hand fell to the pistol holstered at his hip. ‘Never again, Daviel! You hear me? Never again!’

The nobleman glared at Daviel for a long moment. The knight regarded Thuriel coldly, pointedly folding his arms in the face of the other man’s threat. The rebel gunmen at the back of the room fingered their weapons nervously. Before the situation could escalate further, however, Lord Malchial leapt from his chair and gripped Thuriel’s left arm.

‘Leave it, cousin,’ Malchial hissed fearfully. ‘Nothing good can come of this.’

Thuriel gritted his teeth in consternation, weighing his options. Finally, he drew his hand away from his weapon.

‘For once, Malchial, you may be right,’ the nobleman said. Thuriel swept a haughty gaze over the knights, Lady Alera and Zahariel. ‘We’re finished, do you hear? You’ll not get another coin from me to finance your little games of deception. I’ll find another way to set our people free from the likes of Jonson and his ilk. See if I won’t.’ He turned and stormed from the room, with a nervous Malchial close behind.

‘Damn that Malchial,’ Sar Daviel said as the door slammed shut behind them. ‘Another moment more and Thuriel would have done something foolish. Then we could have been rid of the both of them.’

Zahariel frowned. ‘Was it wise to let them go?’ he asked.

‘You’d rather he were here, using up good air?’ Alera said disgustedly. She waved her hand in dismissal. ‘Thuriel provides us with money and outrage, and not much else. He doesn’t have any real support inside the movement. Let him go. We’ve got much more important things to worry about.’

Sar Daviel looked to Ramiel. ‘Things are far worse than we feared,’ he said gravely.

Ramiel nodded, but he continued to stare searchingly at Zahariel. ‘Why have you told us this?’ he asked his old pupil.

‘Because we’re running out of time,’ Zahariel replied. ‘We’ve got to stop the Terrans before they unleash their master ritual, but if we send in a major force of Astartes to search for them we risk drawing the attention of the Administratum.’

‘Who wouldn’t hesitate to condemn the planet – and its people – if they learned the truth,’ Ramiel concluded.

‘Condemn?’ Alera said. ‘What does that mean?’

‘The Imperium views warp-taint as… a cancer, if you will. A tumour on the human soul,’ Ramiel said. ‘Not without reason, of course. No sane person wants to see a return of Old Night. But the problem here is that Caliban’s taint runs deeper than just a handful of debased individuals; it permeates the very bedrock of the world.’

‘Then how does one go about curing it?’ she said, her voice rising with exasperation.

The old master sighed. ‘With fire. What else?’ He eyed Zahariel coldly. ‘The Imperium would relocate the Legion and as many of its loyal servants as it could. Perhaps a few hundred thousand could be saved. The rest…’

‘That’s why this must be kept secret,’ Zahariel said calmly. His eyes never left Ramiel’s.

The old master’s eyebrows rose. ‘That sounds like something very close to rebellion, young Zahariel.’

The Librarian shook his head. ‘Luther and I swore an oath to protect the people of Caliban, long before the coming of the Emperor,’ he replied. ‘As did you.’

Sar Daviel nodded slowly. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘What do you want from us?’

‘A truce,’ Zahariel said simply. ‘Help us find the Terrans quickly and quietly, and we’ll send in a kill-team to eliminate them.’

Alera shook her head. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘Leave these sorcerers to us. We can take care of them.’

‘Would that were so, Lady Alera,’ Ramiel said heavily. ‘But Zahariel is right. Our people are no match for these creatures. This is a task for the Astartes.’

‘But we don’t even know for certain that these sorcerers are here,’ Alera protested. ‘A truce at this point benefits the Imperials, not us! Their control of the arcology is balanced on a knife edge – if we give them time to catch their breath, bring in more reinforcements…’ The noblewoman’s voice trailed away as she watched a wordless exchange pass between Ramiel and Sar Daviel. ‘There’s something else, isn’t there?’ she asked.

Daviel nodded. ‘We didn’t tell you before, for reasons of security,’ he said gravely. ‘But we’ve lost contact with a number of our sub-level cells over the last two weeks.’

‘How many cells?’ Alera demanded.

‘Fourteen,’ Ramiel answered. ‘Possibly as many as sixteen. Two others missed their last scheduled report this morning, but that could be the result of equipment failure.’

The news sent a jolt down Zahariel’s spine. ‘How many cells do you have in the sub-levels?’

Daviel shifted uncomfortably. ‘A significant number,’ he said. ‘The Jaegers don’t have the manpower to penetrate much beyond sub-level two, so we keep our combat teams on the lowest sub-levels between raids.’

‘How many men have you lost so far?’ Zahariel pressed. ‘Tell me!’

‘One hundred and thirty-two,’ the maimed knight answered. ‘All of them well-trained and well-equipped, and all of them lost without so much as a single vox transmission. Frankly, we were starting to suspect that you’d sent Astartes teams into the sub-levels to root us out.’

Zahariel shook his head. ‘It’s begun,’ he said. ‘They’re gathering bodies, just like they did at Sigma Five-One-Seven.’

Alera’s face twisted in a bitter grimace. ‘As though the Terrans would have a hard time finding corpses in that charnel house.’

‘Charnel house?’ Zahariel echoed. ‘What do you mean?’

Lady Alera stared open-mouthed at the Astartes. ‘Don’t pretend you don’t know,’ she said, her eyes blazing angrily.

Zahariel held up a hand. ‘On my honour, lady, I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

‘Then who is responsible for the atrocities committed in your name?’ she said coldly. ‘Five million people, crammed into three levels built to hold a quarter of that number. No power, intermittent supplies of food and water, no functioning sanitation… What did you think was going to happen? People are dying by the hundreds every day. The bodies are tossed down maintenance shafts or piled in lifts and sent to the lower levels, so the survivors don’t have to live among the corpses.’

The news stunned Zahariel. ‘This wasn’t reported back to us at Aldurukh,’ he said, his voice choked with outrage. ‘Is there any way to know how many have died?’

Ramiel shook his head. ‘Tens of thousands, son. Perhaps more.’

Zahariel nodded thoughtfully. ‘The Terrans knew. That’s why they returned to the arcology.’ He looked to Ramiel. ‘The incident at Sigma Five-One-Seven was a field test,’ he said, like a pupil solving a problem for his tutor. ‘They needed to refine the ritual, test its effects on a smaller scale before unleashing it here.’ An image came to him, of an army of animated bodies shambling and crawling up out of the depths to slaughter the millions penned like sheep in the sub-levels above.

‘There’s no time to waste,’ he said. ‘If there’s another outbreak of violence here, the Terrans will have all the psychic energy they need to begin a large-scale ritual. We’ve got to find them before it’s too late.’ Zahariel stepped forward, holding out his empty hand to the rebels. ‘Will you agree to the truce?’

Alera and Sar Daviel looked to Ramiel. The old master stared at Zahariel’s open hand for a long moment, a tormented look on his face. Finally, he straightened and looked his former student in the eye.

‘For the pact to be binding, it must be sworn by both leaders,’ he said sternly. ‘If Luther gives me his hand, then I shall take it. Until then, we can have no truce between us.’

‘Then come back with me to Aldurukh,’ Zahariel said, his voice taut. ‘We can travel back together.’

Ramiel’s eyes narrowed. ‘Are you so certain he will agree to this?’

‘Of course,’ Zahariel replied, putting more sincerity into his voice than he actually felt. ‘Do you imagine Caliban’s greatest living knight would hold his honour so cheaply?’

If Ramiel sensed the doubt in Zahariel’s heart he did not let it show. ‘Very well,’ he said with a curt nod. ‘Sar Daviel will join us to help coordinate our forces.’ He turned to Lady Alera. ‘Alert our remaining cells and organise a search of the sub-levels at once. If you locate the Terrans, do not attempt to engage them. Do you understand?’

Alera nodded. On impulse, she reached out and laid her hands on Ramiel’s own. ‘Are you sure of this?’ she asked. ‘You swore you’d never return to the fortress. You said they’d betrayed everything you believed in. How can you trust them now?’

Ramiel sighed. ‘This isn’t about trust,’ he said to her. ‘It’s about honour, and a last chance at redemption. I owe it to them, Alera. I owe it to myself.’ He gently pushed her hands away.

‘Now go. Zahariel is right. We haven’t much time.’ He smiled. ‘I will return with the knights of Caliban at my back, or I will not return at all.’

Seventeen

Fire from the Sky

Las-bolts hissed past Nemiel as he plunged down onto Magos Archoi and the rebel soldiers. His bolt pistol thundered, and two of the officers collapsed with gaping wounds blown in their chests. Archoi fell back from the Redemptor’s attack, screeching in binaric, and his acolytes rushed forward, drawing high-powered laspistols from their belts.

Nemiel struck down another of the rebels with a crackling swipe of his crozius. A las-bolt struck the side of his helmet like a hammerblow, causing his visual displays to waver, and a warning icon told him that the helm’s integrity had been compromised. He shot the officer point-blank, blowing him off his feet – and then felt a hail of blows as the acolytes unleashed a volley of pistol shots into his chest.

The acolytes were blurs of motion, their muscles undoubtedly stoked by combat drugs and adrenal boosters. Nemiel felt a half-dozen bolts pummel his breastplate, then a flash of searing pain over his primary heart. For a moment his vision threatened to grey out as his body fought to stave off the effects of shock, then abruptly the pain vanished and his mind cleared with a cold rush as his suit dumped pain blockers and stimulants into his bloodstream.

A boltgun let off a rapid burst over Nemiel’s shoulder and one of the acolytes fell in a spray of blood and fluids. The Redemptor shot the remaining acolyte twice, and finished him off with a backhanded blow of his crozius. He was leaping forwards before the traitor’s body had hit the floor, racing down the narrow aisle after the fleeing form of Magos Archoi.

Brother-Sergeant Kohl ran alongside Nemiel from high atop the siege gun’s hull, firing shots from his bolt pistol at every tech-adept who got in his path. Behind Nemiel, Marthes crouched atop the vehicle and fired another blast up at the skitarii who were firing down from the gantry-way they had just vacated. The catwalk blew apart in a storm of molten fragments, plunging the survivors to the permacrete floor two storeys below. Techmarine Askelon landed heavily, pushing onwards, despite his suit’s heavily damaged systems. Vardus and Ephrial brought up the rear, cutting down any soldier or tech-adept who tried to circle behind the squad.

Nemiel bore down on the magos like a Calibanite lion, his lips pulling back in a feral snarl. If it was the last thing he did, he was going to make sure the traitor felt the Emperor’s justice. Behind and above him, he heard Kohl shout a warning just as the praetorians charged at him from the gap between two of the parked siege guns.

The shout saved his life. Nemiel turned towards the sound and ducked low, barely avoiding a swinging power claw that would have torn his head off. A second praetorian lunged at him, scoring a deep gouge across his hip with a glowing power knife. Nemiel brought his crozius down on the warrior’s knife hand, smashing the weapon from the warrior’s grip, and pumped three rounds into the praetorian’s chest. The warrior staggered as the rounds punched through his armour, but his chemically-charged nervous system kept him upright.

There were four of the hulking, gene-modded warriors: the one with the power claw reached for Nemiel’s gun arm, while the second praetorian brought his weapon systems to bear as he tried to circle around the Redemptor’s flank. The remaining pair were stymied by Brother-Sergeant Kohl, who leapt down onto the praetorians with a furious shout. His power sword slashed down in a glowing arc, slicing through one warrior’s weapon arm with a shower of sparks and spurting fluids.

The praetorian circling to Nemiel’s right went down in a blaze of bolt pistol fire from Techmarine Askelon; seeing his opportunity, the Redemptor pivoted on his left heel and smashed his crozius into the other praetorian’s head. The warrior died just as his claw snapped shut on Nemiel’s forearm, leaving three deep, bubbling gouges on the black vambrace before collapsing to the ground.

Kohl despatched the wounded praetorian in front of him with a brutal cut that sliced open his armoured torso. The last of them raised his weapon-arm and took aim at the sergeant, only to die as Nemiel put three bolt pistol rounds into his back at point-blank range.

Nemiel whirled, looking for the traitor magos, but Archoi was nowhere to be found. The praetorians had accomplished their goal, buying time for the traitor to escape with their lives. The surviving tech-adepts had fled as well, scattering like vermin down the narrow lanes on the floor of the assembly building. The Redemptor started to pursue them, but Brother-Sergeant Kohl called for him to stop.

‘We don’t have time to chase rabbits,’ Kohl said as las-bolts spat down at them from the gangway. ‘We’ve got to get a warning back to our brothers and to the Dragoons.’

Vardus, Ephrial and Askelon unleashed a blistering volley up at the skitarii, killing several and forcing the rest to withdraw. Nemiel wavered, drawn by the siren song of vengeance, but reason and training ultimately won out over emotion. ‘You’re right, brother,’ he said to the sergeant. ‘We’ve just forced Archoi’s hand – he’ll have to order his forces into action at once. Askelon!’ he called, turning to the Techmarine. ‘What’s the quickest way out of here? We haven’t got a moment to lose!’

In fact, they were already ten minutes too late.

Archoi’s plan had been a hasty one, devised on the spur of the moment as he stood over the bullet-riddled body of his former master Vertullus and received word that, at the absolute last moment, an unknown force of Astartes had arrived in orbit to save the beleaguered forge world. His takeover was already well under-way, with loyal units of tech-adepts and skitarii murdering Vertullus’s loyal supporters and herding the rest into the old shelters situated deep beneath the manufactories at the base of the great volcano. When the admiral in charge of the Warmaster’s fleet informed him that they would have to withdraw, Archoi promised him that when they returned to Diamat, he and his people would be ready. It was that, or face certain execution once that bastard Kulik caught wind of his crimes. As the last of the rebel ships were pulling out of vox range, the magos fired off a compressed burst of binaric that outlined his scheme. The crucial element that the whole plan hinged on was a certain date and an approximate time, two and a half weeks away. Now that time had arrived, and Archoi had to trust that the Warmaster would not be late.

Across the southern sector of the forge complex, down to the southern gateway and across the fortified grey zone, each of the skitarii embedded with the defence forces received a coded burst transmission. Sleeping soldiers awoke and quietly gathered up their weapons, while those on sentry duty drew knives or silenced weapons and turned them on their watchmates. Within minutes, gunfire crackled in the darkness as the tech-guard ambushed their erstwhile comrades.

At the warehouse barracks of the Astartes ground force, most of the Dark Angels were still tending their weapons and engaging in close-combat drills in preparation for the battles ahead. The praetorians in their midst stiffened as the signal touched off implanted combat protocols and flooded their bloodstreams with a lethal brew of combat drugs. From one heartbeat to the next, they were transformed into berserk killing machines; the virulence of the drugs were so great that within fifteen minutes it would begin to erode their muscle tissue – literally eating them alive. Until that point, however, they were immune to all but the most catastrophic injuries. Readying their weapon implants and close-combat attachments, the praetorians hurled themselves at the unsuspecting Astartes, and the blood began to flow.

The first indication of danger in orbit was the sudden storm of vox jamming that effectively isolated each of Jonson’s ships. The resupply operations had ceased for the day, but there were still several hundred tech-adepts and servitors from the forge hard at work on the Iron Duke, the strike cruiser Amadis and the Invincible Reason. Several of the warships, notably the heavy cruisers Flamberge and Duke Infernus, as well as the escort ships of the scout group, all went to battle stations, while the others initially believed that the vox failure was an accident caused by the current repairs.

As the captains of the battle group tried to sort out the sudden loss of communications and attempted to regain contact with the flagship, they were distracted from the threat that was gliding towards them out of the darkness. A small but powerful fleet, assembled in haste with whatever forces were at hand and quickly despatched to Diamat, was now stalking towards the planet with their engines idling and their surveyors silent.

The ships of the scout force detected the oncoming enemy ships first. Signalling to one another in basic code using their running lights, the light cruisers and their attendant destroyers flared their thrusters and broke orbit, their surveyors sweeping the void in case the jamming was the precursor to an enemy attack. They detected the eight ships of the enemy force just a few minutes later.

Signal lights flashed between the Imperial ships: form line and prepare to launch torpedoes. With remarkable skill and precision the small ships raced forwards, increasing to attack speed. Below decks, servitors and torpedomen struggled to load the tubes, while on the bridge the Ordnance Officer input course and speed into the target solutions for the ship’s weapons.

Within five minutes the vessels signalled that they were ready to launch. As the scout force entered optimal torpedo range the signal was given: for the Emperor – launch all torpedoes.

Orders were passed to the torpedo deck. The senior torpedomen checked their firing data and turned their launch keys.

Less than half a second later, they were dead.

As each torpedo received the electronic signal to launch, its plasma reactor overloaded, detonating its warhead inside the tube. The rakish bows of the sleek destroyers vaporised in expanding balls of plasma, transforming them into burning, broken hulks. The light cruisers fared only slightly better, their torpedo decks destroyed and fires burning out of control on their lower decks, the small squadron had no choice but to break off and try to save their ships.

The explosions signalled to the rebels that their stealthy approach was at an end. Thrusters ignited, surging to full power; void shields crackled into existence, forming shimmering spheres around their vessels like ephemeral soap bubbles before firming up and fading from view. Surveyors blazed to life, painting the surprised Imperial ships with invisible energies and feeding targeting data back to the rebel gunnery officers.

Eight ships: three cruisers, two heavy cruisers and three grand cruisers – bore down on the battered Imperial ships. Cut off from one another, uncertain if their own ammunition had been rigged to explode by the treacherous forge, the Imperials braced themselves for the rebel onslaught.

Dawn was breaking as Nemiel emerged from the Titan assembly building. He heard the distant rattle of gunfire to the south and knew that they had run out of time. All he and his squad could do now was rush to the aid of their fellow Astartes and kill as many of the enemy as they could. ‘Forward!’ he shouted to his squad. ‘Let no one stand in our way!’

The Astartes raced down the access road towards the southern edge of the foundry sector, their weapons held ready as they searched for threats. The rumble of petrochem engines echoed amongst the buildings to the south-east, but there was no way to tell for certain where the sounds were coming from. It was most likely a mechanised patrol of skitarii, Nemiel thought, and kept part of his attention focused that way in the event they showed themselves.

High-intensity lasguns barked behind them. Brother Vardus was struck in the back by a powerful las-bolt that caused him to fall onto one knee. Marthes held his meltagun in his left hand and bent down, grabbing Vardus’s upper arm and pulling him to his feet. Brother Ephrial turned and fired a long burst back the way they’d come, eliciting a scream of pain from one of their pursuers.

Up ahead, the engine sounds roared into angry life. ‘Marthes!’ Nemiel said, beckoning to the meltagunner.

Just then, a Testudo APC rumbled into the access road from a side lane and lurched to a halt. Its turret autocannon slewed about and spat a stream of high-velocity shells at the running Astartes. The gunner’s aim was poor and he overshot the mark, sending the shells screaming over their heads, but Nemiel could see the barrel dropping as the man adjusted his aim. Skitarii in carapace armour came around the corner as well, dropping to their bellies and opening fire on the Dark Angels.

Brother Marthes ran ahead of the rest of the squad and took aim with his meltagun. A high-power las-bolt struck him in the left pauldon and left a burn across the thick ceramite. Another shot clipped him in the leg, causing sparks to flare from his knee joint. The APC gunner, apparently realising the danger, adjusted his aim again and fired a burst of shells at Marthes just as he hit the meltagun’s trigger. The blast cut into the vehicle’s side like a power knife and detonated its fuel cells, hurling a ball of fire high into the overcast sky.

Nemiel saw Marthes stagger as two of the autocannon’s heavy shells struck him in the chest. There was a double flash, coming so close together that the sound of the impacts merged into a single loud thunderclap. The Astartes staggered forward a few steps more, then fell forward onto his face. His status indicator in Nemiel’s helmet display went abruptly black.

The skitarii scrambled to their feet, their armour smouldering from the heat of the vehicle’s flames. Nemiel and the others raked them with bolter fire, killing several and forcing the others to retreat. As Kohl reached Marthes, he knelt and took the meltagun from the warrior’s hands and tossed it to Ephrial, then laid a parting hand on the dead warrior’s shoulder before rising to his feet and sprinting after the squad.

They put the burning hulk of the APC between themselves and their pursuers, then cut to the left down a side lane to hopefully throw them off a bit further. As they came around the corner and turned south again, Askelon pointed to the sky. ‘Look!’ he said breathlessly.

Nemiel looked skyward to see a shower of blazing meteors plunging through the clouds in the direction of the coast. Many burned out as they fell, carving bright trails of green and orange across the sky, while several larger pieces continued to fall until they disappeared over the horizon. It was an awe-inspiring sight, but one that filled Nemiel with dread. He’d seen such things many times before, at war-torn worlds like Barrakan and Leantris. Those meteors had been pieces of a starship that had been blown up in high orbit. The attack on Diamat had begun.

Las-bolts snapped and howled through the air from the end of the access road. One hit Kohl in the chest, dispersing harmlessly against his breastplate. The squad returned fire, and a pair of skitarii broke cover and retreated back around the corner of a low-slung building.

‘That was an observation team!’ Nemiel warned his squadmates. ‘We’ll be coming up on their outer perimeter in another minute. Ephrial, get ready with that meltagun!’

As they approached the end of the access road, Nemiel summoned up the layout of the perimeter fortifications in his memory. Just ahead and to the right was a lascannon post, with a heavy stubber post further west. Just ahead and to the left was another heavy stubber. He waved Ephrial to the corner of the furthest building to the right, while he angled off to the left.

Nemiel put his back to the wall of the manufactory and glanced across the road at Ephrial. He battle-signed for the Astartes to hit the target to his right. Ephrial nodded, and without hesitation he whirled around the corner and fired a shot with the meltagun. There was an immediate, crackling boom as the lascannon’s power supply detonated, followed by the screams of its maimed and dying crew.

Immediately the heavy stubber to Nemiel’s left opened fire, spitting a long burst of tracer rounds at Ephrial’s back. He spun around the corner and levelled his bolt pistol at the four men in the sandbagged emplacement just five metres away. The Redemptor fired four quick shots, and the skitarii slumped to the ground.

Nemiel turned back to the squad and waved them forward. They left the foundry sector and headed quickly for the sheltering warehouses further south, taking fire from two more heavy stubber emplacements as they went. Vardus was limping from an unlucky hit in his leg. Askelon was driving himself onward with ruthless determination, but Nemiel could tell that he was fighting the weight of his own armour, and was nearing the point of exhaustion. The Redemptor ran on, dropping the empty magazine from his bolt pistol and slamming in a fresh one.

He reckoned they were four and a half kilometres from the warehouse barracks of the ground force. Nemiel could still hear the sounds of bolter fire up ahead, so he knew at least some of his brothers were still fighting. Several times he tried to call out over the vox, but the jamming was still under way. Pillars of black smoke were rising from more than a dozen points out beyond the forge’s curtain wall, and he feared the worst for Kulik’s brave Dragoons.

As they drew closer to the barracks, Nemiel suddenly heard a flurry of lasgun and stubber fire, answered by the snarl of an assault cannon. It was Brother Titus, he realised; the Dreadnought had been standing watch outside the barracks when they’d left on their reconnaissance mission earlier that night. On impulse, he led the squad in that direction, listening as the sounds of battle increased.

By the time they drew within sight of the warehouse, a pitched battle was raging on the street outside. They found Brother Titus guarding the warehouse’s side entrance from what amounted to a platoon of skitarii. Dozens of broken bodies lay around the Dreadnought’s wide feet, denoting a failed assault by the enemy. Scores more tech-guard were sprawled on the permacrete, torn apart by the Dreadnought’s fearsome cannon. Still more were arriving from the direction of the southern gateway, however, taking up firing positions and unleashing a storm of fire against Titus’s front armour.

Nemiel brought the squad to a halt. ‘It’s only a matter of time before those tech-guard bring up a missile launcher or a lascannon and destroy Titus,’ he said. ‘We’re going to swing around and hit them from the rear. Askelon, can you still keep up?’

The Techmarine’s armoured shoulders were heaving after the terrible exertions of the run. His bloodied face was pale, but he looked up at Nemiel and smiled. ‘Brother-Sergeant Kohl’s been saying I need to get more exercise,’ he said breathlessly. ‘Don’t worry about me.’

‘He’s just worried about having to carry your dead weight around,’ Kohl growled. ‘Now let’s get moving.’

The squad set off to the north-west, moving past a pair of warehouse buildings before cutting south again. They listened to the sounds of battle raging off to their left, gauging their position relative to the enemy and moving five hundred metres behind them. Then they cut back east, gathering speed as they prepared to swing around and strike the enemy from behind.

They’d run for only a few hundred metres when just ahead they saw a platoon of skitarii jog into view, dragging four lascannons mounted on wheeled gun carriages. They saw the Astartes at almost the same instant; with three hundred metres between them, the enemy troops hurriedly dropped the trails on the four guns and began to frantically wheel them around to bear on the squad.

‘Charge!’ Nemiel cried, but the rest of the squad hardly needed prompting. They broke into a full run, firing their bolters as they went.

Nemiel watched the mass-reactive shells strike the armoured splinter plates of the gun carriages and ricochet harmlessly away. The crews worked quickly and with remarkable precision, connecting the weapons to their power units and energising the guns in the space of seconds. If they had been preparing to fire on human troops, it might have been enough, but the Astartes reached the enemy with seconds to spare.

They leapt up and over the lascannons’ splinter shields and came down among the shocked gun crews. Nemiel shot two of them point-blank, then slew two more with his crozius. Brother-Sergeant Kohl and Brother Ephrial killed almost a dozen more before the rest of the platoon broke and fled back the way they’d come.

Nemiel paused amid the carnage, his auto-senses detecting more sounds of activity to the south as still more enemy troops headed their way. He was about to order Askelon to disable the abandoned lascannons when the heavens split and trails of fire descended to the forge from on high.

These were no simple meteors, falling in thin streaks of light before vanishing into oblivion. Nemiel counted eight separate streaks of smoke and flame, plunging down in a steep arc and converging on a common point: the heart of the forge complex, some thirty kilometres away. When they struck, the entire northern horizon blazed with terrible, white light.

Nemiel had witnessed more than one orbital bombardment in his time, but those had been blazing trails of lance fire that carved across the ground like a burning blade, or salvoes of poorly-aimed macro cannon fire that saturated a target area with huge shells. He’d never been close enough to experience the fury of a barrage of bombardment cannons, and wasn’t prepared for what followed.

The eight shells struck the target area more or less simultaneously, their magma warheads detonating with the heat and force of a fusion bomb. His onboard systems registered the overpressure from the blast and had just enough time to yell, ‘Get down!’ before the blast wave hit.

He dropped to the ground and pressed his helmet to the permacrete as a roaring wall of superheated air howled over him. His temperature sensors spiked, pushing into the red zone, and the force of the wind lifted him off the ground and tossed him like a toy down the narrow lane. The thunder of the blast was something he felt through his armour, reverberating down into his bones. His auto-senses overloaded and shut down at once to prevent permanent damage.

It was over in a matter of moments. One second the entire world felt as though it were coming apart at the seams, and the next, everything was almost eerily silent. Nemiel lay on his back, trying to regain his bearings. Icons blinked on his helmet display, informing him that his armour]s systems were resetting. As his vision cleared, he saw tendrils of smoke rising from his scorched war-plate.

Slowly and carefully, he sat upright. There was smoke everywhere, rising from warehouses that had been set aflame by the blast wave. The four abandoned lascannons were gone; he looked about and found one smashed to pieces against the side of a building, but the rest had simply disappeared.

A squeal of static in his ears made him start as his vox-link came back online. He was about to silence it again when he heard words coalesce out of the interference.

‘Battle Force Alpha, this is Leonis!’ spoke a familiar voice, hazy and hashed out by atmospheric ionization. ‘Activate your teleport beacons and stand by!’

Nemiel scrambled to his feet. Leonis was the primarch’s personal callsign. He looked about the smoke-stained road and saw Brother-Sergeant Kohl climbing to his feet, along with Vardus and Ephrial. ‘Where is Brother Askelon?’ he called. ‘We’ve got to get back to the warehouses immediately!’

‘Over here,’ a voice answered weakly from down the side lane where they’d originally come. Nemiel and Kohl rushed to the corner to see Askelon slowly pushing himself upright. His unprotected head had been badly burned by the blast, but somehow the Techmarine was still able to move.

They helped Askelon to his feet. He looked over at Kohl and tried to grin, his lips cracking. ‘Looks like you’ll have to carry me after all,’ he gasped.

Kohl grabbed the Techmarine’s arm and draped it over his shoulder, then took hold of Askelon’s waist with his left hand. ‘I could carry two of you without breaking a sweat,’ the sergeant growled. ‘You just keep an eye out for more of those damned skitarii, and let me do the rest.’

Nemiel grabbed Askelon’s other arm and together they helped the Techmarine along. He could hear signals going back and forth across the battle force command channel, so he knew that at least some of the Dark Angels had survived Archoi’s deadly ambush. He hoped there was an Apothecary still alive, for Askelon’s sake.

They linked up with the rest of the squad and headed back towards the barracks buildings as quickly as they could. It was only then that Nemiel fully saw the devastation that the bombardment had wrought.

An enormous column of ash and smoke rose into the sky off to the north, where the volcano and the forge’s centre used to be. The rising sun tinged the climbing column of debris in shades of blood-red and fiery crimson, whilst closer to the ground Nemiel could see thin veins of pulsing orange, tracks of real magma flowing from the volcano’s shattered flanks. Fires blazed out of control from horizon to horizon, consuming the shattered husks of wrecked buildings in a vast swathe surrounding the epicentre of the blast. For all intents and purposes, the forge complex had been destroyed.

It took more than half an hour to cover the five hundred metres back to the warehouses. They saw the towering form of Brother Titus first. His armour had been scorched – in some places the paint had been stripped away down to the bare metal – but he seemed otherwise undamaged. The warehouses themselves were ablaze, and the road was full of Astartes. A disturbingly long line of dead battle-brothers were stretched out along the roadway to their left; the bodies were being tended to by one of the ground force’s two Apothecaries, collecting the gene-seed for the future of the Legion. The second Apothecary was tending to an even larger number of wounded Dark Angels who were formed into small groups according to their parent squads on the right side of the roadway.

In the centre of the crowd stood the company commanders and senior squad leaders, gathered beneath the shadow of the great Dreadnought. In their midst stood a towering figure in gleaming armour, his head bare and his expression one of cold, righteous rage. Nemiel left Askelon in Brother-Sergeant Kohl’s care and hurried over to join the primarch.

Lion El’Jonson was receiving the reports of the company commanders when Nemiel arrived. Jonson caught the Redemptor’s eye and but said nothing until the two captains had finished tallying their dead and wounded. As near as Nemiel could determine, some thirty of the Astartes had been killed in the ambush and twice as many others seriously wounded before the last of the frenzied praetorians had been killed. The sight of so many dead brothers filled him with grief and a cold, fathomless rage.

The primarch listened gravely to the captains’ reports and then turned to Nemiel. ‘We’ve a grim start to the day, Brother-Redemptor,’ Jonson said. ‘I hope you bring us better news.’

Without preamble, Nemiel delivered his report. He told Jonson everything they’d found during the night, from the site of Vertullus’s likely murder to the discovery of the great siege guns at the Titan foundry and Archoi’s foul treachery.

‘I surmised as much when most of our scouts were destroyed by their own brand-new torpedoes,’ Jonson said. He turned and glanced back at the towering plume of ash and smoke to the north. ‘When we traced the source of the vox jamming, it made Archoi’s duplicity all too clear.’

‘The Lords of Mars will be furious at the loss of such a venerable forge,’ Nemiel said forebodingly.

Jonson turned back to the Redemptor, his green eyes blazing. ‘Such is the fate of all traitors!’ he snapped. The force of his anger was like a physical blow, as though he’d reached over and slapped Nemiel across the face. ‘So Horus and the rest of his ilk will learn in due time.’

‘We saw the debris of a ship falling to earth,’ Nemiel ventured more carefully. ‘I take it the rebels have returned.’

The primarch drew in a deep breath and sought to master his humours. He nodded. ‘A much smaller force, this time, but sufficient to their needs,’ he said tersely. ‘Horus moved much more quickly than I expected and sent out an ad hoc force not too dissimilar from ours. We would have been hard pressed to defeat them as it was, but Archoi’s treachery proved to be our undoing. All of our destroyers were lost, along with both grand cruisers and the strike cruiser Adzikel. After bombarding the forge and eliminating the source of the jamming, I ordered the rest of the battle group to withdraw to the edges of the system and then teleported myself down to join you.’

The news of the battle group’s defeat sent a stir through the stoic Astartes. Nemiel gripped his crozius and straightened, remembering his duties to the Legion. ‘While we live, we fight, my lord,’ he said, his voice defiant. ‘Though the storm rages and the foe gathers about us, we are unmoved. Let them come – we are the warriors of the First Legion, and we have never known defeat!’

Shouts of agreement rose from the assembled Dark Angels. Jonson smiled. ‘Well said, Brother-Redemptor,’ he replied. ‘You are right. We’ve suffered some terrible blows, but the battle isn’t over yet.’

‘What would you have of us, my lord?’ Nemiel asked.

Jonson cast his eyes to the north, towards the distant bulk of the assembly building. ‘We fall back to the foundry,’ he said. ‘So long as we possess Horus’s siege guns, the rebels won’t risk an orbital bombardment.’ When he turned back to the Astartes, his face was grim.

‘Once we’re in position, we need to fortify the sector as best we can, and prepare for the fight of our lives. Unless I’m very much mistaken, the Sons of Horus will be here soon.’

Eighteen

A Thorn in the Mind

The timbre of the shuttle’s thrusters deepened as they made a near-ballistic descent towards Aldurukh, swelling from an angry whine to a thunderous roar as they plummeted from the stratosphere into the denser air at sea level. The shuttle’s airframe trembled as the pilot pushed the craft to its limits; Zahariel had told him to fly to the fortress as though his life depended on it, and he was taking the Astartes at his word. The Librarian felt the shuddering of the craft in his bones and had to raise his powerful voice to be heard over the noise.

‘General Morten, this is a direct order,’ he yelled into his vox-bead. ‘Unseal the hab levels at the Northwilds arcology and redistribute the populace through the upper levels.’

The Terran general’s reply was faint and washed with static, but there was no mistaking the exasperation in his voice. ‘Sir, I believe I explained this before. The security situation–’

‘I’m well aware of the security situation,’ Zahariel snapped. He glanced across the passenger compartment at Master Ramiel and Sar Daviel, who were both pretending not to listen to the tense exchange. ‘The cordon is only making things worse. You’ve got to get those people out of there before you have a catastrophe on your hands.’

‘But sir, the logistics of relocating five million people–’

‘Will require a great deal of effort and coordination on our part,’ Zahariel cut in. ‘So I expect you and your staff to give the matter your complete and immediate attention. Make it happen, general. I don’t care what it takes.’ Zahariel broke the connection without giving Morten a chance to reply. He wasn’t interested in arguing the matter, and he had no intention of explaining his reasons over vox.

Daviel turned away from the viewport at his left and stared questioningly at Zahariel. ‘Do you think he’ll do it?’ the maimed knight asked.

The Librarian sighed. ‘Not all Terrans are corrupt devils, Sar Daviel. Morten is a good soldier. He’ll follow orders.’

Daviel’s scarred face twisted into a scowl, but he offered no reply. Zahariel studied the scarred knight for a moment.

‘How long have you known?’ he asked.

Sar Daviel narrowed his one good eye. ‘Known what?’

‘About Caliban. About the taint.’

Daviel’s fierce expression grew haunted. ‘Ah. That.’ He rubbed his chin with one scarred hand. ‘A long time. Too long, perhaps.’ The knight shook his head. ‘At first, I thought I must be going mad. After all, you’d seen the same things I had, and never seemed to think anything of it.’

Zahariel straightened in his chair. ‘What things?’ he asked, feeling the skin prickle on the back of his neck. ‘What are you talking about?’

Daviel frowned in consternation. ‘Why, the library, of course.’ He replied. ‘At the fortress of the Knights of Lupus. Surely you remember.’ His one eye grew unfocused, as though he were recalling the details of a nightmare. ‘All those books. Those terrible, terrible books…’

The Librarian felt his skin grow cold. ‘How could you have seen the library, Daviel?’ he asked him. ‘I saw you wounded in the castle courtyard.’

Daviel’s gaze fell. ‘So I was,’ he said quietly. ‘I was raving with fever for days afterward. The chirurgeons feared to move me in the state I was in, so I and a few other wounded men were left behind when the army returned to Aldurukh.’

The old knight fell silent for a moment as the memories welled up inside him. He stared at his hands, curled like claws in his lap. ‘Later, when we could get up and hobble about for a few hours at a time, they tried to find jobs for us to do, to keep our spirits up. So they put some of us to work in that library, crating everything up to be carried back home.’

Daviel sighed. ‘They rotated us in shifts, so we were only up there a few hours at a time, and we had strict orders not to open any of the books.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘The chirurgeons said they didn’t want us to exert our minds unduly in our weakened state.’

‘But you didn’t listen.’

‘No, I didn’t,’ Daviel said heavily. ‘I and another knight succumbed to our curiosity. We pored through some of the oldest books as we readied them for packing. Towards the end, we spent more time reading than working, to tell the truth.’

‘What was in the books?’ Zahariel pressed.

‘History. Literature. Art and philosophy. There were books on science, and medicine, and… forbidden things. Ancient, occult tomes, many of them written by hand.’ He shook his head. ‘I couldn’t understand most of it, but it was clear that the Knights of Lupus had been studying the great beasts – and the Northwilds itself – for centuries. They knew about the taint, though they didn’t fully understand it. They seemed to believe it was a force that could be summoned and controlled. I saw grimoires that purported to contain rituals for that very purpose.’

His voice trailed away, and his face paled at the recollections. Zahariel watched him raise a hand to his ruined cheek, as though the old wound pained him once more. After a moment, the knight gave a shudder and shook his head roughly, as though waking from a vivid dream. He blinked his eyes a few times and focused on the Astartes once more.

‘Afterwards, once the books were crated away and we were allowed to make the journey home, we tried to forget the things we’d seen.’ He smiled faintly. ‘Strange, of all the horrors we witnessed at that place, it was the memories of those books that haunted us most of all. We would talk about them sometimes, late into the night, trying to understand what it all meant. I believed that they heralded the next stage of our crusade – that once the great beasts had been destroyed, Jonson would dedicate our Order to driving the taint from Caliban once and for all.’

Daviel’s face turned solemn. ‘Then the Emperor came, and everything changed. We traded one crusade for another, and I couldn’t understand why. If what was in those books was true, then Caliban was still in terrible danger. That, more than anything else, was why I left.’

‘Why?’ Zahariel asked.

Daviel paused, struggling to find a way to put his thoughts into words. His hand reached up to absently rub his scarred temple.

‘I had to know the truth,’ he said at last. ‘The books had vanished, but the memories of what I saw stuck with me, like… like a thorn in the mind. I tried to tell myself that they were just fables – peasant myths, like the Watchers in the Woods – but guilt ate at me day and night. Because if the taint was real, the great beasts would just rise again, and everything we’d suffered would be in vain.’ The old knight sighed. ‘So I left the Order and embarked on one last quest – to find the surviving members of the Knights of Lupus.’

Zahariel blinked in surprise. ‘But there were no survivors,’ he said. ‘Lord Sartana had summoned the entire order back to their fortress in the Northwilds. They died to a man in the final assault.’

‘So we were led to believe,’ Daviel replied. ‘Lord Sartana sent out the call, to be sure, but the Knights of Lupus were famous for sending their knights out to the farthest-flung parts of the world on strange and secretive quests. Not all of them could have made it back in time for the siege, or so I believed.’

The Librarian frowned, trying to think back to the days immediately after the siege. Hadn’t Jonson made a statement of some kind about hunting for outlaw members of the Knights of Lupus? He couldn’t recall. A faint sense of unease stirred in his gut.

‘For the first few years I waited near the ruins of their fortress, waiting for the errant wolves to come home,’ Daviel continued. ‘I expected the survivors would try to return and see what they could salvage of their order. When none appeared, I began to search the frontiers for signs of their passage.’

‘Were you successful?’ Zahariel asked.

Daviel nodded grimly.

‘As best I could tell, there were five Knights of Lupus who weren’t present at the siege,’ he replied. ‘I found the bones of three of them in the deep wilderness, where they’d tried to live for months after the destruction of their fortress. The fourth one I tracked to a half-ruined tower near Stone Point, on the other side of the world from the Northwilds. He fought me like a cornered animal, and when he realised that he couldn’t best me he leapt from the top of the tower into the raging sea rather than give up his secrets.’

‘And the fifth?’

Daviel paused, casting a questioning glance at Ramiel. The old master gestured for the knight to continue with a wave of his hand.

The old knight sighed. ‘The last one was the hardest to track of all,’ he said. ‘He never stayed in one place for too long, passing like a ghost from one village to another. No one could remember for certain what he looked like, and he wore a great many names over the years. For a long time I couldn’t be sure if he was even real – until I turned up his horse and tack, still marked with sigils of his order, in a trade town at Hills End.’

‘What had become of him?’

Daviel’s good eye narrowed. ‘According to the horse’s new owner, the man took his coin, bought some new clothes from a merchant, and then presented himself to a brother knight of the Order who was passing through the village in search of new aspirants.’

The news stunned Zahariel. He looked to Master Ramiel. ‘Surely someone would have realised–’

Ramiel arched an eyebrow at his former pupil. ‘How so? If he were a young knight, with no reputation and no sense of honour, he could claim to be a woodsman’s son and no one would be any wiser.’ His eyes bored into Zahariel. ‘With his skills and experience he could rise through the Order’s ranks quite rapidly, in fact.’

Zahariel frowned. ‘What are you getting at?’ he demanded. Ramiel’s expression turned bitter – and then the Librarian understood.

Ramiel saw the realization on Zahariel’s face and nodded. ‘Now you begin to see.’

‘No,’ Zahariel protested. ‘It’s impossible. Jonson would never have allowed–’

‘But he did,’ Ramiel snarled, his voice sharpening with long-suppressed anger. ‘Did you never wonder why Jonson named an unknown young knight as the new Lord Cypher, entrusting him with all of our traditions and secrets?’

Zahariel shook his head. ‘But why… what possible reason could he have for such a thing?’

‘Think, son,’ Ramiel said, once more an impatient tutor instructing an obstinate pupil. ‘Put aside your damned idealism for a moment and think in terms of tactics. What would such a choice give Jonson?’

Zahariel swallowed his shock and irritation and considered the matter in cold terms. ‘He chose someone with no ties to the Order’s senior knights or masters, whose loyalty was to him alone,’ he said, thinking aloud. ‘Someone who could be counted on to act in Jonson’s best interests above everything else.’

‘And would keep his secrets, regardless of the consequences to everyone else,’ Ramiel said.

The Astartes considered the implications and felt a cold surge of horror. ‘I can’t believe this,’ he said, his voice hollow.

‘Can’t… or won’t?’ the old master said. ‘Do you imagine this was any easier for me to accept? I helped raise Lion El’Jonson when Luther brought him back from the wilderness. He was like a son to me.’

‘But why?’ Zahariel protested. ‘Why all the secrets and deceptions? We were sworn to him, Ramiel. He already had our oaths. We would have followed him back into Old Night itself if he asked.’

Ramiel didn’t answer at first. Zahariel watched the old master’s anger fade, like heat from a dying ember, giving way to anguish, and then finally, to an empty, barren sadness.

‘It’s not that any of us lost faith in Jonson,’ he said softly. Tears glimmered at the corners of his eyes. ‘Somewhere along the line, he lost faith in us. Wherever he and the Emperor are headed, we aren’t meant to follow. All we can do now is reclaim what was once ours.’

The thought stung Zahariel, like a knife pricking at his heart. He tried to gainsay Ramiel, to find some fault in the old master’s bleak logic.

They spent the last few minutes of the flight in silence.

When they reached Aldurukh, Zahariel cased himself in his armour and took up bolt pistol and staff before leading Ramiel and Daviel to the Grand Master’s chambers. He found Lord Cypher there, as he expected he would.

Cypher glanced up sharply from the reports piled atop the desk. His eyes widened as he saw the rebel leaders. It was the first time Zahariel had ever seen the Astartes taken by surprise.

‘What’s the meaning of this?’ Cypher demanded coldly.

‘Take us to Luther,’ Zahariel demanded. ‘Now.’

‘I can’t do that,’ Cypher replied, regaining some of his inscrutable poise. ‘As I’ve told you many times, brother, Luther is in meditation and does not want to be disturbed–’

‘He will when he hears what we have to say,’ Zahariel shot back. ‘Caliban’s survival is at stake.’ His hand tightened on his staff. ‘If you won’t take us to him, then tell us where he can be found.’

‘I can’t do that,’ Cypher replied coolly. ‘My orders are from the Master of Caliban. You haven’t the authority to countermand them.’

‘Surely Luther expects to be informed in the event of an emergency,’ Zahariel persisted.

Cypher smiled thinly. ‘Why, of course. Give me the message and I’ll relay it to him immediately.’

Zahariel felt a surge of anger. Before he could reply, however, he heard heavy footfalls behind him. He turned to see Brother-Librarian Israfael and Chapter Master Astelan standing just inside the doorway. Israfael eyed Daviel and Master Ramiel with wary surprise, while Astelan’s eyes flashed with irritation when he caught sight of Zahariel.

‘Where have you been?’ Astelan said. ‘I’ve been searching for you all over Aldurukh!’

‘What’s happened?’ Zahariel asked, already fearing what he might hear. If Astelan hadn’t used the vox to contact him it could only mean one thing.

‘Half an hour ago we began hearing of wide-scale rioting at the Northwilds arcology,’ Astelan said grimly. ‘Mobs of panicked civilians have rushed the barricades around the hab levels. Many of them are claiming that the Imperials are secretly in league with sorcerers who mean to sacrifice them to the warp.’

Daviel let out an angry groan. ‘Thuriel’s behind this,’ he said. ‘That short-sighted idiot has damned us all.’

Zahariel felt a chill race up his spine. ‘What about the Jaegers?’ he asked. ‘I ordered General Morten to open the cordon and begin relocating the civilians.’

Astelan shook his head in exasperation. ‘We’re getting wildly conflicting reports,’ he said. ‘We’ve heard that some units have opened fire on the rioters, while others have thrown down their arms or even switched sides. The Administratum officials at the arcology have contacted Magos Bosk, and she is demanding to know what we’re doing about the situation.’

‘I told you that we couldn’t keep this a secret from her,’ Israfael interjected angrily. ‘She’s probably drafting an urgent report to the primarch right now, accusing us all of negligence. And she would be right to do so!’

‘That’s not the worst of it,’ the Chapter Master said, cutting Israfael off with an angry glare. He turned back to Zahariel. ‘There’ve been fragmentary transmissions from Jaeger patrols on the lower hab levels, reporting that they’re under attack.’

‘Under attack?’ Zahariel echoed. He eyed the rebel leaders. ‘By whom?’

‘By the dead,’ Astelan replied.

The words hung heavy in the chamber.

‘It’s over,’ Ramiel said, putting a voice to their thoughts. ‘We’re too late.’

Zahariel shook his head stubbornly. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not yet.’ He turned back to Cypher, his face pale with anger. The hooded Astartes started to say something, then recoiled with a gasp of pain as Zahariel sent a probe of psychic energy into Cypher’s mind.

‘The time for dissembling is past,’ Zahariel said, his tone as cold and sharp as ice. ‘Take us to Luther. Now.’

Cypher gritted his teeth under the psychic onslaught. ‘I won’t...’

‘Then I’ll dig his location out of your brain,’ Zahariel said, ‘along with any other secrets you’ve been keeping. I can’t say there will be much left of you afterwards, though.’

Zahariel drove his probe deeper into Cypher’s mind. The Astartes went rigid. A thin trickle of blood seeped from one nostril.

‘Stop!’ Cypher said in a choked whisper. ‘I’ll do it! I’ll take you to him! Just–’

He slumped with a groan as Zahariel released him. Cypher’s head drooped for a moment, his shoulders heaving. When he looked up at the Librarian, his expression was savage.

‘You don’t know what you’re trifling with, you fool,’ Cypher snarled. ‘The primarch–’

‘The primarch isn’t here,’ Zahariel said coldly. ‘So I’ll trifle with whatever I must. Now get up. We haven’t any more time to waste.’

Cypher got up from behind the desk without another word. They followed him from the room, hovering at his shoulder like ravens.

Cypher led them into darkness, deep within the bowels of the Rock.

From the Circle Chamber, they descended through a secret stairway at the top of the Grand Master’s dais that Zahariel never knew existed, yet at the same time seemed tantalisingly familiar. Try as he might, he couldn’t reconcile the two notions; the more he concentrated, the more his head began to ache. Finally, he decided to let the matter go rather than compromise his already frayed concentration. The pain in his skull subsided, but didn’t entirely vanish.

The stairwell ended at a low-ceilinged room that might once have been a meeting space in times past – now the ancient brickwork was pierced by modern archways of fused permacrete that continued even further into the depths. Cypher led them through the dimly-lit passageways without hesitation, threading his way through a labyrinth of tunnels that began to tax even Zahariel’s genetically-enhanced memory. Deeper and deeper they went, down into the very heart of the mountain, until it felt as though they had been walking for hours. Zahariel reckoned they were more than a thousand metres down when Cypher turned down a narrow, vaulted corridor that abruptly ended at a tall, arched doorway. The doors themselves, Zahariel noted with surprise, were plated with adamantium, and set in a reinforced frame. Anything powerful enough to breach that portal would also incinerate anything on the other side.

Standing before the doors, Cypher dug a sophisticated electronic key from within his robes. With a last, furious glance at Zahariel, he held the key up to the portal and touched the actuator. Bolts drew back into the frame with an oiled clatter, and the tall doors swung silently inward.

The library within was built vertically, its packed shelves rising on eight sides to a vaulted ceiling fifty metres overhead. Long, thin lumen strips set into the stone at the corners of the eight walls filled the space with pellucid light. The air smelled faintly of ozone and machine oil. High up along the walls Zahariel could see four small logo-servitors waiting unobtrusively in the shadows, clinging to the walls with their spindly limbs and watching the Astartes with small, red eyes.

Zahariel reckoned the floor of the library was perhaps thirty paces across, covered with thick rugs to combat the subterranean chill. Reading desks and heavy wooden tables were arrayed haphazardly about the room, piled with open books and ancient, musty scrolls. More books were scattered in drifts across the floor, between and beneath the tables. There were so many that the Astartes were forced to pause just beyond the threshold, afraid of treading upon the fragile tomes.

The air in the library was utterly still, heavy with the dust of ages. The only sound Zahariel could hear was the soft whirring of servo-motors overhead. A current of invisible energy, faint but palpable, sent tendrils of ice spreading through his skull.

He drew a breath and spoke into the cathedral silence. ‘Luther? My lord, are you here?’

A figure stirred in the shadowy depths of a high-backed chair near the centre of the room. Zahariel could just make out the head and shoulders of a man, limned in the faint, bluish-silver light.

‘Zahariel,’ Luther replied. His voice was rough, as if from long hours of exertion. ‘You shouldn’t be here.’

Lord Cypher took a cautious step forward, distancing himself from the rest of the Astartes. ‘I beg your forgiveness, my lord,’ he said with bowed head. ‘They would not honour your wishes.’

Zahariel glared at Cypher’s back. ‘This has nothing to do with anyone’s wishes,’ he snapped. ‘This is a time of crisis. Caliban stands upon the brink of disaster, my lord. The Legion must act now, or all is lost.’

Luther rose slowly from the chair and stepped forward into the light. His eyes were sunken and his cheeks hollowed, as though from the ravages of a terrible illness, and there were dark ink marks on his hands, wrists and throat. The Master of Caliban paused, his cracked lips working as he peered at the figures standing at Zahariel’s shoulder.

‘Master Ramiel?’ he said. ‘Is this a dream? I thought you long dead.’

‘I continue to confound my enemies, my lord,’ Ramiel answered with a faint smile.

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ Luther said. His expression turned sombre. ‘But I see you travel in the company of rebels these days,’ he said, pointing to Sar Daviel. ‘Is it me you seek to confound now, master?’

Ramiel didn’t flinch from the accusation. ‘No loyal son of Caliban is an enemy of mine,’ he answered coolly.

Zahariel studied Luther with concern. ‘My lord, when did you last eat or drink?’ he asked. Though an Astartes could go for many weeks with minimal nourishment, he knew that Luther’s body hadn’t received the full suite of metabolic enhancements. By the look of things, Zahariel feared that he’d been fasting for weeks.

The Master of Caliban ignored the question. ‘What is going on here, brothers?’ he asked, his voice regaining some of its strength and authority.

‘The truth has become known,’ Israfael said grimly. ‘Rumours have spread through the Northwilds that the Imperium is in league with sorcerers,’ he spat angrily. ‘Riots have broken out, and the Administratum is up in arms.’

Luther’s eyes widened in anger. ‘How did these rumours start?’ he demanded. ‘I ordered this knowledge kept secret! Who is responsible?’

Zahariel took a deep breath and stepped forward. ‘I am,’ he said gravely. ‘The fault is mine.’

The admission took Luther aback. ‘You?’ he said disbelievingly. ‘But why?’

All eyes turned to Zahariel. Head high, the Librarian reported everything he’d seen and done at the arcology. Luther listened, his expression growing harder by the moment. He gave no reaction to the proposed truce with the rebels, though both Astelan and Israfael glowered angrily at the news.

Zahariel concluded by relating what they’d recently heard from the Northwilds. ‘Things are balanced on a knife’s edge, my lord,’ he said. ‘If we strike quickly, we might still be able to contain the situation.’

‘No, we can’t,’ Luther said flatly. He shook his head, his expression bleak. ‘It’s far too late for that. I don’t fault you for what you did brother, but there’s no going back now. Caliban’s fate is sealed.’

Luther turned in the stunned silence that followed and walked to one of the heavy reading tables. He bent over a massive, leather-bound tome, brushing the tips of his fingers across one of the thick, vellum pages. Zahariel caught a better glimpse of Luther’s hands, and saw that the ink marks there were actually symbols of some kind, laid out in a geometric pattern. A chill raced up the back of his neck.

‘They wanted me to kill him, you know,’ he said quietly. ‘I can still hear their voices as though it were yesterday.’

Zahariel gave Luther a bemused frown. ‘Kill who, my lord?’

The Master of Caliban glanced up from the book. ‘Why, Jonson, of course,’ he replied. ‘There we were, in the worst part of the Northwilds, so deep in the forest that we hadn’t seen the sun for a week. We’d already killed two beasts by then, and lost Sar Lutiel in the process. Most of us were wounded and feverish, but we pressed on nonetheless.’ He smiled faintly. ‘No one had ever gone so far into that part of the wilderness, and we were all hungry for glory.’

Luther’s eyes grew unfocused as the memories took hold. ‘We’d come upon a stream at midday,’ he continued. ‘A prime spot for predators, but our water bottles were empty, so we decided to take the risk. I was standing watch, sitting in the saddle with my pistol ready. And the next thing any of us knew, there was this little boy standing with us. He’d walked right out of the woods into our midst, as silent as you please.’

The Master of Caliban chuckled ruefully. ‘We just gaped at him for a moment. I think everyone believed he was a fever dream at first. Naked as a babe, his golden hair matted with twigs and leaves, and his eyes…’ Luther shook his head. ‘His eyes were cold and knowing, like a wolf’s, and utterly unafraid.

‘Sar Adriel looked into those eyes and turned white as a sheet. He and Sar Javiel’s hands were laden with water bottles, and couldn’t protect themselves. “Kill him!” Adriel said to me. I’d never heard him sound so frightened in his life.

‘And I nearly did,’ Luther confessed. ‘You don’t know how close I came, brothers. I knew what Adriel was thinking – we were more than a hundred leagues from the nearest village, in the deadliest forest on Caliban, and here was a child, barely tall enough to touch my saddle, without a single mark on his body. He couldn’t have survived in a wilderness like that alone. It wasn’t possible.

‘I remember thinking he was a monster,’ Luther said. Tears welled in his eyes. ‘What else could he be? So I raised my pistol and took careful aim. One shot to the head was all it would take.

‘My finger was tightening on the trigger when he turned and looked at me. He didn’t flinch at the sight of the pistol, and why would he? He didn’t have the faintest idea what it was.’ Luther drew in a great, wracking breath. ‘That’s when I realised what I was about to do, and I was ashamed. So I tossed the pistol to the ground.’

Tears were flowing freely down Luther’s cheeks. Zahariel glanced back at Israfael and Astelan; the Astartes were just as unnerved by Luther’s strange demeanour as he was. He struggled to come up with a reply, but it was Ramiel who spoke first. ‘There is no shame in sparing the innocent,’ the old master said softly.

‘But he wasn’t innocent!’ Luther cried bitterly. ‘He knew. Jonson knew about the taint all along, and he’s spilled an ocean of blood to keep the truth from us.’

Zahariel reeled in surprise at the vehemence in Luther’s voice. ‘You can’t possibly mean that, my lord,’ he protested numbly.

‘Why else would he have goaded the Knights of Lupus into war, then annihilated them? Why else take their books–’ Luthor picked up the arcane tome and brandished it at Zahariel, ‘–and hide them from our eyes? Because of what they could tell us about the planet’s taint. Lion El’Jonson went to great lengths to silence those who knew too much, and it only got worse once the Emperor arrived.’

‘That is enough!’ Brother-Librarian Israfael shouted. ‘I will not have you defame our primarch in this fashion, much less the Emperor!’

Pain blossomed in the back of Zahariel’s head, so sudden and intense it nearly overwhelmed him. He groaned, pressing a hand to his temple and trying to push the agony aside, then turned to see Israfael standing well apart from the others, his fists clenched. Chapter Master Astelan stood to one side, his gaze shifting from Israfael to Luther as though unsure whom to believe. The room seemed to shift beneath Zahariel’s feet. Things were spinning out of control, he knew. He’d never meant for things to come to this.

‘Not everyone was silenced,’ he protested. ‘What about Nemiel? What about me? We were the last people to speak to Lord Sartana, and nothing befell us.’

‘Brother Nemiel may lie dead on some distant world for all we know,’ Luther said grimly. ‘And you are here, exiled to a world that will soon be consigned to the flames.’ His voice rose, teetering on the edge of madness. ‘Don’t you see? Jonson knew that the Imperium would one day destroy Caliban. That’s why we’re here. He didn’t just forsake us, brother. He sent us here to die.’

‘Not another word!’ Israfael roared. Arcs of psychic power danced around his head, crackling like miniature thunderbolts. ‘My lord, you are unwell, and no longer fit for command!’ He turned to Zahariel. ‘In the name of the primarch, and for the honour of the Legion, you must assume control and order Luther to submit himself to the Apothecarion at once.’

‘It’s too late for such treacheries, Terran!’ Luther snarled. He tossed the book aside and came around the edge of the table, his dark eyes blazing. ‘He knows the truth now. Don’t you, Zahariel?’

An invisible storm of psychic power swelled within the room. Zahariel’s mind reeled. He saw Master Ramiel and Sar Daviel just a few metres away, caught in between the two furious warriors. A thought came to him through the growing haze of pain. ‘This is a mistake, my lord!’ he said to Luther. ‘Sar Daviel!’ he cried. ‘Your friend, the knight who read these same books. Who was he? Where is he now?’

Daviel turned to the Librarian with a haunted look in his eyes. ‘His name was Ulient,’ the old knight said. ‘He disappeared on the day the Emperor came to Caliban, and was never seen again.’

A spear of pure, burning pain lanced through Zahariel’s mind. He cried out, pressing his hands to his temples. It felt as though a dam had burst in his brain, unleashing a torrent of pent-up memories.

…Darkness. Armoured hands gripping him, holding him upright…

…Israfael’s voice, echoing from the blackness. ‘…The plot failed and the conspirator is being interrogated. We will soon uncover those who sought to do us harm and deal with them…’

…Another voice. Brother Midris. ‘…Tell us everything and leave nothing out, or it will go badly for you. Start with how you knew what Brother Ulient was planning…’

…‘Brother Ulient?’ he said. ‘Is that his name? I didn’t know him…’

…Except that he did. He’d seen him in the secret room beneath the Circle chamber. Nemiel had taken him there to meet with the members of the conspiracy. He remembered the hooded men in white surplices, talking of killing the Emperor of Mankind…

‘…The Imperium is not to be trusted. We know they are plotting to enslave us and take this world for themselves…’

…He remembered the shining figure that had appeared at the door of the interrogation chamber, his face too glorious to behold. The voice of the Emperor of Mankind rolling over him like an ocean wave...

‘…be sure he remembers nothing of this. No suspicion of any dissent must exist within the Legion. We must be united or we are lost…’

Zahariel fell to his knees, his body trembling as the last vestiges of the psychic block unravelled. Israfael and Luther had fallen silent, and every eye was upon him.

The sense of violation, of betrayal, was almost too terrible to bear. He turned to Israfael. ‘You tampered with my mind, brother,’ he said, his voice barely above a whisper.

‘Of course,’ Israfael said, his tone unapologetic. ‘The Emperor himself commanded it. I would expect you to do the same.’

‘Couldn’t he have simply trusted me?’ Zahariel cried. ‘Wouldn’t my oath have been enough? Has he no honour?’

‘Honour has nothing to do with it!’ Israfael snarled. ‘We are his Astartes, Zahariel. It’s not for us to question his will!’

‘That is where you are wrong, Terran,’ Master Ramiel said. ‘You and your kind may be content to live as slaves, but we never will!’

Zahariel felt the surge of psychic power a heartbeat before Israfael struck. Time slowed, and everything seemed to happen at once.

Bellowing in rage, Israfael rounded on Master Ramiel and flung out a gauntleted hand. Skeins of searing white fire leapt from the Librarian’s fingertips, but Sar Daviel was already moving, putting his body between Israfael and Ramiel. The psychic blast tore into his chest, searing his flesh and setting his robes on fire.

Luther shouted a command, and Zahariel felt his body respond even before his mind registered what he’d heard. He leapt to his feet and focused his will into his armour’s psychic hood. The hood’s dampener was not only for self-protection; it could also be used to combat the power of other psykers within a certain distance from the device. Zahariel turned its power on Brother Israfael, and the Librarian’s energies faltered. At the same time, Chapter Master Astelan rushed at Israfael from the side, his pistol raised.

But the senior Librarian would not be overcome so easily. Israfael ducked as Astelan tried to strike him with the butt of his bolt pistol and lashed out with his hand. His fingertips seemed to brush lightly against Astelan’s breastplate, but Zahariel felt the psychic discharge that flung the Chapter Master through the air at him. Zahariel ducked barely in time, but his concentration on the dampener faltered for a fleeting instant.

That was all the opening that Israfael needed. With a savage cry, he raised his hands and unleashed a torrent of crackling energy upon Luther.

Zahariel felt the heat of the blast as it burned through the air past his head and struck Luther full in the chest. But the knight did not burn – instead, the wards painted upon his skin flared with an icy luminescence, deflecting the energy in a boiling wave away from his body.

He saw Luther bare his teeth in a wolfish grin, then he opened his mouth and uttered a single word. The sound smote Zahariel like a hammer; he felt a searing pain in his ears and at the corners of his eyes, and he reeled under the blow.

Israfael did as well. Bleeding from the eyes and ears, he staggered backwards before a searing bolt of plasma struck him full in the chest.

The Librarian’s eyes went wide. There was a crater in his breastplate as large as a man’s palm, its edges still molten. He swayed on his feet, his lips working as though trying to speak, then sank slowly to his knees and toppled onto his side.

Zahariel glanced back the way the shot had come. Lord Cypher slowly lowered his plasma pistol and cast a wary glance towards Luther. ‘Are you well, my lord?’ He asked.

Luther didn’t answer. Smoke curled in thin tendrils from each of the hexagrammatic wards covering his body.

‘How is Sar Daviel?’ he asked.

Master Ramiel was kneeling beside the charred body of the old knight. ‘Gone to the halls of honour,’ he said quietly.

Zahariel tore his gaze away from Cypher and staggered over to Israfael. The wound in his chest was grave, but he checked the Librarian’s life support systems nevertheless and was surprised to find a faint reading. ‘Israfael still lives, my lord,’ he said. ‘What shall we do with him?’

Lord Cypher took a step towards the fallen Librarian, his pistol still in hand. Luther stopped him with a hard glance.

‘Summon a pair of servitors to take him to the Apothecaries,’ Luther commanded. ‘When he’s recovered enough we’ll transfer him to a cell in the Tower of Angels and see if we can convince him of the error of his ways.’ Then he turned to Astelan.

‘Are the strike teams ready, brother?’

The Chapter Master nodded. ‘All is in readiness, my lord,’ he said.

‘Then your first orders are to arrest General Morten and his staff, as well as Magos Bosk and the senior officials of the Administratum,’ the Master of Caliban said. ‘Spare their lives if at all possible, but do what you must to secure them. From this moment forward, Caliban is a free world once more.’

Astelan hesitated. Zahariel could see the struggle in the warrior’s eyes, but in the end, his loyalty to Luther won out over years of unthinking obedience. ‘It shall be done,’ he said.

Master Ramiel rose wearily to his feet. Tears streamed down his face as he walked up to Luther. ‘The knight of old has returned,’ he said, his voice cracking with emotion. He reached out and gripped Luther’s arms.

‘Behold the saviour of Caliban!’

Nineteen

Lion Rampant

They discovered the foundry sector entirely deserted upon their return. The Dark Angels found many of the perimeter outposts still intact, shielded from the blast wave of the bombardment by virtue of being sheltered in the lee of thick-walled manufactories, but the soldiers who manned them were gone. Jonson sent First Company and Brother Titus ahead with orders to secure the assembly building, while Second Company moved along at a slower pace. They’d recovered three Rhinos from outside the warehouses and loaded them with the most seriously injured battle-brothers, while the rest of the company followed along behind the vehicles with the bodies of the fallen. Nemiel and Kohl, reunited with the rest of their squad, found the body of Brother Marthes on the way back and made him a part of the sombre procession as well. As they made their way into the foundry precincts they began to hear the faint rumble of thrusters off to the south. Now and again Nemiel and the others would look back in the direction of the far-off star port, and search for telltale streaks of light that would signify the descent of an orbital transport. The Dark Angels knew that with every passing minute the wolves were gathering at their backs. It would only be a matter of time before they began to close in.

Force Commander Lamnos, who was also the commanding officer of First Company, was waiting outside the assembly building when Primarch Jonson and Second Company arrived. ‘The building has been secured, my lord,’ he reported. ‘We encountered several squads of stragglers inside, but they weren’t in much shape to put up a fight.’

‘What about the siege guns?’ the primarch asked.

‘All present and accounted for. The building weathered the blast very well, and the vehicles sustained no damage.’

Jonson nodded. ‘Well done, commander. Let’s get the wounded inside, then begin developing a defence strategy.’ He cast a wary eye to the south. ‘I believe we’ve only got two or three hours at most before the Sons of Horus begin their attack.’

The Astartes went to work immediately, scouting out the terrain and scavenging working heavy weapons from the abandoned enemy emplacements. Jonson and the company commanders assembled outside the assembly building, along with Nemiel and Brother-Sergeant Kohl, to review the terrain and develop a proper defensive perimeter. The primarch favoured a layered defence, with an outer defensive ring encompassing the entire sector, and an inner ring centred solely on the assembly building. The First Company was put to work on the outer ring, while the Second Company was assigned to the inner ring.

‘At this point, we only have enough strength to successfully defend about half of the outer ring,’ Jonson said. In the absence of a hololith table, one of the Astartes had scratched a crude map of the foundry sector into the permacrete with the point of his combat blade, and the Dark Angels had gathered in a circle around it.

‘Naturally, we’ll orientate our defence to the south, because the rebels will use the most direct approach – at least initially,’ the primarch continued. ‘We’ll site our captured lascannons and heavy stubbers on rooftops here, here and here.’ He indicated a series of buildings on the outer edge of the sector that provided commanding fields of fire down the main avenues of approach. ‘The lascannon gunners’ priority is to knock out as many vehicles as possible and strip the attackers of their support. Most of First and Second Companies will be arrayed in a wide arc covering all the southern routes into the sector. Three squads will be kept in reserve and mounted in our Rhinos to provide swift reinforcement to weak parts of the line.’ He paused, studying the map thoughtfully. ‘As the battle wears on, we can expect that they will probe around our flanks, looking for less well-defended areas. We’ll have to stay flexible and be ready to re-orientate our squads at a moment’s notice, falling back to the inner line if necessary.’

‘What about Magos Archoi and the remaining skitarii?’ Force Commander Lamnos asked. Since taking the assembly building there had been a few brief skirmishes with skitarii units from the north.

Jonson shrugged. ‘Archoi himself is most likely dead,’ he replied. ‘I expect he fled right back to his stronghold and was caught in the bombardment. Just in case, however, I want to post a squad of wounded battle-brothers onto the roof of the assembly building to act as observers. If they detect a serious threat from the north, we’ll despatch our mobile reserve to deal with it.’

Lamnos and Captain Hsien of Second Company nodded in agreement. Neither warrior looked particularly pleased with the tactical situation, but Jonson had devised a plan that made the best use of the assets they had available. Still, Nemiel couldn’t help but note a grim undercurrent in the manner of the two leaders. They carried themselves like warriors who were about to make a final stand, and had already resigned themselves to their deaths.

‘We’ve got almost a hundred and fifty battle-brothers able to fight, plus a Dreadnought,’ Nemiel pointed out. ‘We should be able to hold the foundry almost indefinitely with so large a force. The Emperor knows we managed to hold off a horde of orks with far less than that back on Barrakan.’

‘If we were only facing skitarii and conventional troops, I would agree with you,’ Lamnos said readily. ‘But this time we’re dealing with the Sons of Horus. This may well prove to be the toughest battle that any of us have ever fought.’

‘There’s also the matter of supplies,’ Hsien pointed out. ‘Our warriors were fully resupplied before the attack began, but we’ll go through our basic stocks of ammunition within a few days of heavy fighting,’ he said.

Jonson raised a hand. ‘All of these things are true,’ he said, ‘but we also have a number of advantages here. First, we have something that the enemy desperately wants, so they cannot bring their heaviest weapons to bear on us without risking a direct hit on the siege guns. They can’t just sit back and blast us with artillery – instead, they’ve got to come in and dig us out, which makes their job much more difficult. Secondly, their fleet is much smaller this time than it was during their first attack. Horus put together a raiding group with whatever he had immediately to hand, so I expect they have supply issues of their own. If we can defeat their ground units and drive them off the planet, the fleet will have little choice but to withdraw, and I doubt that the Warmaster will risk a third attempt with the Emperor’s punitive force drawing nearer.’ He gave the two company commanders a steadfast look. ‘This won’t be a protracted siege. Far from it. The enemy will have enough resources to sustain only a few days of intense combat before they will have to retreat. That was another factor in my decision to bombard the forge. Within a week they’ll be more desperate for resources than we will.’

The primarch’s assertions effectively ended the discussion. Everyone knew of Jonson’s strategic brilliance, and the mood of the company commanders was buoyed by his self-assurance. But Nemiel, ever the cynic, couldn’t help but note the things that the primarch left unsaid. The attacking force was small, but fresh, and though their resources were finite, they were undoubtedly well-equipped. And it didn’t matter if the Dark Angels could hold out a month or more if the Sons of Horus managed to overrun them in the very first battle.

The company commanders left to join their respective commands and complete preparations for the coming fight. Nemiel and his squad went to join the mobile reserve. Jonson had specifically ordered the Redemptor to do so. ‘You’ll be most needed where the fighting is hardest,’ he’d told Nemiel. ‘I can’t have you getting bogged down guarding some access road while the enemy is breaking through on the other side of the perimeter.’

Nemiel accepted the order with a brusque nod. ‘Where will you be, my lord?’ he asked.

A faint grin crossed Jonson’s handsome face. ‘Why, I’ll try to be everywhere at once,’ the primarch replied.

Hours passed, and the tension began to mount. The sounds of orbital transports descending through the overcast grew more frequent as the day progressed. At mid-morning they heard a faint crackle of small-arms fire off in the far distance, somewhere out in the grey zone, and the Astartes wondered if some of the Dragoons had somehow managed to survive. The sounds of combat tapered off within a few minutes, however, and an uneasy quiet descended once more.

Four hours past dawn they heard the rumble of engines off to the north, and the observers on the top of the assembly building reported a small force of APCs were heading for the northern perimeter at high speed. Nemiel and the reserve forces, accompanied by Jonson himself, hurriedly climbed aboard their Rhinos and raced down the access roads to meet the oncoming threat. No sooner had the Astartes deployed into cover around the perimeter’s ruined buildings than four Testudo personnel carriers burst into view. Battered-looking Dragoons clung to the top decks of the APCs, and all of the vehicles showed signs of recent battle damage. Jonson and Nemiel stepped from cover and waved at the vehicles, which quickly changed course and slid to a halt some ten metres from the two warriors. The Dragoons on the tops of the vehicles regarded them with glassy-eyed expressions.

The Testudos lowered their assault ramps and more troops spilled out into the daylight. Among them was Governor Kulik, still wearing his carapace armour and limping along with the help of a cane.

Jonson stepped forward, raising his hand in salute. ‘It’s good to see you, governor,’ he said. ‘After Magos Archoi’s betrayal we’d feared the worst.’

‘For the first few hours, so did I,’ Kulik answered. ‘Archoi took us completely by surprise, damn him.’ He turned and indicated his battered force with a sweep of his cane. ‘This is all I have left. Barely half a company, out of a starting strength of twenty thousand men.’ He turned back to the primarch, and Nemiel could see the pain etched across Kulik’s face. ‘We knew that if anyone could survive Magos Archoi’s treachery, it would be you. So we loaded up the only vehicles we had left and managed to slip through the northern gate in the hopes of finding you.’

‘What’s the situation beyond the curtain wall?’ Jonson asked.

Kulik’s face fell. ‘The skitarii control the fortifications in the grey zone, and probably the southern gateway as well – we couldn’t get close enough to find out,’ he said. ‘A small convoy of tech-guard headed out to the star port at first light. Since dawn, we estimate that eight to ten heavy troop transports and a number of drop-ships have landed there.’ He nodded his head to the south. ‘The last we saw, their vanguard units were on the move, heading north. The damned traitors are going to lead them through the grey zone and probably past the southern gateway as well. They’ll be here within the hour, I expect.’

Jonson stepped forward and laid a hand on Kulik’s shoulder. ‘You and your men have fought courageously, governor,’ he said. ‘They’ve given everything they have in defence of their world. Let us take up the banner from here. You can withdraw back to the north and slip into the countryside, while we hold off the rebels.’

Kulik stiffened, and for a moment Nemiel feared that he would take insult at Jonson’s heartfelt offer.

‘My men and I are honoured by your offer,’ Kulik said after a moment, ‘but we’re going to see this through to the end, if it’s all the same to you.’

Jonson nodded sombrely. ‘Welcome, then,’ he replied. ‘Have your men take positions here, covering our northern approach. We’ve had some skirmishes with skitarii patrols, and we’re worried that Archoi may be planning an attack.’

‘I damn well hope he tries!’ the governor said, a fierce look crossing his face. ‘If he does, we’ll deal with him, Primarch Jonson. You mark my words.’ With that, he turned on his heel and began snapping orders to his men, and the Dragoons went to work with surprising speed.

The reserve force returned to their start position and the wait began once more. Nemiel stepped outside the Rhino and sat down against its armoured flank, trying to balance his humours and rest his body with meditation. Ten minutes later, the observers called across the command net and said that a large force of armoured vehicles was approaching from the south. Orders were passed along the company command nets, and the Dark Angels readied their weapons.

Twenty minutes later they felt the rumble of the armoured columns reverberating through the earth, drawing closer with every passing moment. Plumes of black petrochem exhaust rose from the midst of the warehouses to the south. Then, the gunners atop the buildings facing the enemy advance began to call out sightings: three columns of heavy tanks and APCs, approaching fast. To Nemiel it sounded like an entire mechanised battalion, heading straight down their throats.

Jonson received the news calmly. ‘Lascannon emplacements, target the main battle tanks and open fire at four hundred and fifty metres,’ he said.

The range was already so close that the anti-tank lasers opened fire almost at once. Bright red beams shot down the narrow roadways and struck the lead tanks head-on. One of the vehicles exploded with the first hit; another lost one of its treads and ground to a halt. The third tank pressed forward with a gouge scored along the side of its turret. Its battle cannon elevated and fired a high-explosive shell with a hollow boom. The round overshot, flying past the weapons emplacement and crashing into a manufactorum on the north side of the sector. The Astartes kept firing, sending beam after beam at the tanks, until finally all three were knocked out. Behind the wrecks, the remaining tanks and APCs were forced to retreat and spread out further along the side lanes before resuming their advance.

The rebel forces came on in a much broader formation this time, their vehicles arrayed in a wide crescent that nearly encompassed the entire southern perimeter. This time the heavy stubbers joined in the battle, raking the enemy APCs with bursts of armour-piercing shells. The enemy responded with battle cannon shells and autocannon bursts, and the air was filled with explosions and blossoms of fire. The Astartes placed their shots with brutal efficiency, aiming for the known vulnerabilities in the armour plating of the battle tanks and destroying half a dozen in the space of just a few minutes. The APCs fared no better under the hail of shells from the heavy stubbers as the armour-piercing rounds found weak spots in their hulls and punched their way inside, wreaking bloody havoc on the troops embarked within. Several shuddered to a halt and exploded as tracer rounds touched off their fuel cells, until finally the battalion commander ordered the rest of the infantry to dismount and continue the attack on foot. The infantry squads exited their transports and charged across the fifteen-metre open space, only to be cut down by heavy stubbers and disciplined bursts of boltgun fire from concealed Astartes squads.

Twenty minutes after the attack began, the rebel advance faltered and began to withdraw. They left behind twenty knocked-out vehicles and more than two hundred dead soldiers. Three of the Dark Angels’ weapons emplacements had been destroyed by battle cannon fire, and three Astartes had been slain. The First Legion could claim victory in the opening engagement, but the battle was only beginning. The Sons of Horus had yet to make an appearance.

Over the course of the next three hours the Dark Angels repulsed five more attacks. Each time the rebels refined their tactics and probed more aggressively around the Astartes’ flanks. Each time they drove back the rebels with significant losses, but casualties among the defenders mounted, and with each attack they lost one or more of their few remaining lascannons or heavy stubbers. To Nemiel it felt as though a noose was slowly being tightened around them.

The rebels dropped mortar rounds onto the outskirts of the sector during the third attack, targeting buildings where they knew a heavy weapons emplacement was located. By the sixth attack the enemy APCs were growing bolder, advancing within ten metres of the sector perimeter before being turned back.

An hour passed before the commencement of the seventh attack, allowing the Astartes time to re-distribute ammunition and tend their wounded. The Dark Angels’ spirits had been restored by the time the first mortar rounds began to fall, and when the rebel tanks and APCs began their advance they opened fire with their few remaining heavy weapons and prepared for close-quarters combat.

This time the rebel tanks and APCs closed in on the perimeter from three sides, and the weight of fire from the defenders wasn’t strong enough to stem the tide. The enemy vehicles hit the first defensive line in a score of places; they poured cannon and heavy stubber fire into the manufactories as they pressed deeper, forcing the Astartes to break cover and assault the lumbering vehicles. Within minutes both companies were involved in dozens of squad-level melees, as the Dark Angels came to grips with platoons of heavily-armed infantry.

And then, judging that the decisive moment had come, the Sons of Horus launched their attack.

‘Rhinos approaching from the north!’

Nemiel heard the call over the vox and saw the enemy strategy at once. While the rebel infantry had been probing the extent of the Imperial defences, the Sons of Horus had been moving under cover of the attacks in a sweeping movement to the north that would bring them around behind the Dark Angels’ positions. It was the kind of swift, decisive strategy that made the Sons of Horus such deadly opponents on the field of battle, and reflected the tactical prowess of their illustrious primarch. Now, Nemiel and the mobile reserve was all that stood in their way.

‘Move out!’ he ordered as he leapt inside the lead Rhino and slammed the troop door shut. The three transports roared into motion, circling around the assembly building and racing down the accessways to the northern perimeter. He switched to the command net and called the rooftop lookouts. ‘How many Rhinos are we facing?’ he asked.

‘I count four,’ one of the lookouts replied. ‘The Dragoons are engaging them now.’

The Tanagran troops stood their ground in the face of the enemy charge, and the autocannons of their four Testudos began to spit bursts of armour-piercing rounds at the oncoming transports. Two of the lightly-armoured APCs were hit and ground to a halt, smoke pouring from their wrecked power plants. A third caught fire and exploded, scattering burning debris in a wide arc.

Had the vehicles been crewed by human troops, the attack would have been stopped cold, but the hatches on all three of the destroyed vehicles slammed open and squads of pale-armoured warriors fought their way free of the wreckage and resumed their attack. They were fearsome apparitions of war, their battle-scarred armour clad with two centuries’ worth of campaign honours and prized trophies looted from worlds stretching the length and breadth of the Imperium. Once they had been called the Luna Wolves, and had been the first of the Astartes Legions to be reunited with their primarch. Their name had been synonymous with the Emperor’s Great Crusade for nearly two hundred years. Now they were called the Sons of Horus, and they had drowned Isstvan III in the blood of billions of innocent souls.

Boltguns blazed, wreaking carnage among the Dragoons; plasma guns spat bolts of charged particles that bored into the front armour of the Testudos and blew two of them apart. The lone surviving Rhino continued forwards, firing bursts from its remote-controlled twin bolters until it crashed into the enemy positions and dropped its rear assault ramp. Another squad of rebel Astartes charged out of the vehicle and attacked the surviving Dragoons in close combat, carving through the exhausted soldiers with snarling chainswords and glowing power weapons.

The Tanagran troops were on the verge of collapse when Nemiel and the reserves arrived. He ordered the APCs to halt fifteen metres back from the melee so that the three squads could deploy in good order. The Redemptor looked across the battlefield at the fearsome, pale-armoured warriors. There were four full squads against his three under-strength ones; he and his men were in for a rough fight.

Igniting his crozius, Nemiel led the charge. ‘Loyalty and honour!’ he cried. ‘For the Lion and the Emperor!’

Brother-Sergant Kohl took up the war cry, and in moments all twenty-three of the Dark Angels were shouting, too, as they crashed into the ranks of their foes.

Nemiel saw a rebel legionary cut down two screaming Dragoons and then turn upon him. He rushed at the Son of Horus, channelling all of his rage into a sweeping blow from his crozius. But the veteran warrior sidestepped the blow with fearsome speed and slashed the Redemptor across the wrist. Had it been a power blade, the sword would have sliced off Nemiel’s hand; as it was, the teeth of the chainsword raked across his armoured gauntlet, scoring deep gouges in the ceramite plates.

The Redemptor lashed at the rebel with a backhanded stroke, feinting for the warrior’s head and then striking downwards at his knee. Again, the Astartes nimbly dodged the blow and then brought up his bolt pistol and shot Nemiel in the head.

The blow to his helmet blinded Nemiel and knocked him off his feet. He registered the impact across his shoulders as he struck the ground and felt blood trickling down the bridge of his nose. The bolt pistol round had failed to penetrate his helmet, but the impact had split it and damaged the delicate circuitry beneath the ceramite plates. His vision came back in flashes of red-tinged static just as the edge of his enemy’s chainblade pressed against his breastplate. He felt the whirring teeth skip and screech across the curved plate, scrabbling for purchase. In another few seconds he knew that it would mar the surface enough to bite deep, and then he was as good as dead.

With a shout, Nemiel brought up his pistol and fired a shot into the side of his opponent’s knee. The bolt-round punched through the relatively weak joint armour and blew the warrior’s lower leg off. The Astartes collapsed with a roar of pain and rage, and Nemiel threw himself atop his foe, batting aside his chainblade with the barrel of his pistol and slamming his crozius down on the warrior’s helmet. The helm imploded with a bright blue flash, and the Son of Horus went limp.

Gasping, Nemiel tore at his damaged helm one-handed until he finally pulled it free. A pitched battle was raging all around him; the Dragoons were nowhere to be seen, leaving his warriors to fight the numerically-superior Sons of Horus alone. Pistols flashed and thundered, and blades drew sparks as they slashed across the curved surfaces of power armour. He saw a Dark Angel take a shot from a plasma pistol at close range and fall to the ground, then another lose his arm to a deadly lightning claw. A rebel Astartes toppled, run through by Brother-Sergeant Kohl’s power sword. Brother Ephrial smashed a rebel to the ground with the butt of his meltagun and blew the prone warrior apart with a searing blast of microwaves. The heat generated by the shot staggered everyone around him – all except the pale-armoured warrior who had slipped behind Ephrial. Brandishing a huge power fist, the Son of Horus punched Ephrial in the back of his head, killing him instantly.

Nemiel leapt to his feet and charged at the warrior who’d killed Ephrial. A plasma bolt shot past his head, close enough to sear the skin on the side of his face, but he scarcely felt the pain. He raised his crozius, and the rebel seemed to sense the blow at the last moment. The warrior spun about, bringing his power fist up in a ponderous arc that nevertheless managed to deflect Nemiel’s attack. The rebel spun on his heel and, quick as a viper, brought up a plasma pistol and loosed a bolt at Nemiel, but the Redemptor anticipated the move just in time and dodged to the side. The shot missed his shoulder by centimetres, flashing past and striking someone behind him. He heard an agonised scream, but had no time to see whether friend or foe had been hit.

He lunged forward before the traitor could fire another shot, and smashed the pistol’s barrel with a jab from his crozius. The Astartes hurled the ruined weapon at Nemiel’s face, following behind the feint with a sweeping blow aimed at the Redemptor’s abdomen. Nemiel dodged to the right, narrowly avoiding both attacks, and brought his crozius down on his enemy’s left shoulder. The warrior’s pauldron shattered beneath the impact and broke the traitor’s shoulder along with it. The Son of Horus was driven to his knees. Before he could rise again the Redemptor crushed his skull with another blow from his power weapon.

Nemiel whirled about, taking stock of the battle even as his last foe toppled to the ground. Everywhere he turned he saw pale-armoured figures pressing in upon his warriors from all sides. Bodies of friend and foe alike littered the ground, but he could see at once that his warriors had suffered the worst in the exchange. There were less than a dozen left, including Brother-Sergeant Kohl and Brother Cortus. The Dark Angels were instinctively drawing together into a tight knot, standing back-to-back in a classic defensive formation that had its roots on Caliban. They were outnumbered more than two to one, but they refused to yield a centimetre to their foes.

For the first time in his life, Nemiel truly felt that he was about to die. A strange peace settled over him at the thought, and as he joined his brothers he prepared to give his life for the Emperor.

Then, suddenly, a shout went up from the Sons of Horus, and the entire mass of enemy warriors recoiled away from the Dark Angels. Stunned, Nemiel whirled about, searching for the source of the enemy’s retreat.

Lion El’Jonson fell upon the rebels with a fierce cry, the Lion Sword blazing as he carved through the enemy ranks. The rebels fell like wheat before a scythe, cut down before they scarcely had a chance to move, much less strike at their foe. Jonson was a vengeful god, a whirlwind of death and destruction, and the Sons of Horus retreated before his wrath.

The enemy fell back to their Rhinos, firing their pistols to cover their withdrawal. The Dark Angels traded shots with them until the enemy had disappeared inside their transports and the Rhinos turned and sped out of range. Only then did Nemiel turn and take stock of their losses. With dawning horror, he saw that only eight warriors besides him were still standing. Fifteen of his brothers lay dead upon the permacrete, surrounded by the bodies of a dozen of their foes. They had turned aside the enemy attack, but the reserve force had been decimated.

If the Sons of Horus launched another attack, there would be little left to stop them.

The Dark Angels had taken a terrible toll on the enemy, but they had paid an equally terrible price in return. The Sons of Horus had slain many of their battle-brothers, but even worse was the horror of spilling the blood of fellow Astartes, something utterly unthinkable just a few scant months before. Out beyond the perimeter they could hear the rumble of engines, and sensed that the enemy was re-forming for yet another attack. Jonson took stock of his remaining forces and reluctantly ordered his warriors back to the inner defensive line.

Nemiel was summoned by the primarch as he and his squad were helping carry the most gravely-wounded brothers into the assembly building. There were only sixty warriors still standing; Force Commander Lamnos lay in a coma, his primary heart and his oolitic kidney ruptured by an autocannon blast, and Captain Hsien had been killed when his position had been struck by a battle cannon shell. The Tanagran Dragoons had died to a man fighting the Sons of Horus; Nemiel had found the body of Governor Kulik surrounded by his troops, his sword gripped in his hand.

‘I have a task for you, Brother-Redemptor Nemiel,’ the primarch said. Beside him, Brother Titus stood sentinel beside the assembly building’s open doors. A plasma bolt had fused the barrels of his assault cannon, but his deadly power fist still functioned.

‘What are your orders, my lord?’ Nemiel replied calmly.

‘It’s absolutely vital that the siege guns do not fall into Horus’s hands,’ Jonson replied. ‘Do you agree?’

Nemiel nodded. ‘Of course, my lord.’

‘Then we must take steps to ensure that they are destroyed in the event that the Sons of Horus break through,’ the primarch said. ‘I want you to find Techmarine Askelon and instruct him to prepare a demolition device that will destroy the assembly building and everything within it. According to him, the siege guns’ ammunition sections are fully-loaded. If he can rig the shells to detonate it should devastate everything within a five kilometre radius.’

The Redemptor nodded sombrely. The order wasn’t unexpected. Once he’d heard a full tally of their losses he knew that their odds of victory were growing slimmer by the moment.

‘I’ll see to it at once,’ he said.

He left the primarch and hurried into the assembly building. On the way he caught sight of Brother-Sergeant Kohl and the rest of the squad taking their place with the rest of their brothers at the inner line. For a moment he and the sergeant locked eyes, and Kohl seemed to understand what the grim look on the Redemptor’s face signified. Nemiel gave the veteran a knowing nod, and the sergeant saluted him in return.

There were close to a hundred seriously wounded Astartes laid up inside the assembly building, their conditions monitored by the ground force’s Apothecaries. Nemiel searched among the unconscious or comatose figures, looking for Askelon and frowning worriedly when he could not find him.

‘Up here,’ echoed a familiar voice. Nemiel looked up to find the Techmarine standing atop the dorsal hull of the lead siege gun. Askelon pointed to the rear of the huge vehicle. ‘There are ladder rungs back at the ammo section.’

Nemiel hurried back to the rear of the war machine and scrambled up onto the dorsal hull. The armoured deck stretched for a hundred metres from one end to the other, nearly as long as an Imperator Titan was tall. He jogged down the length of the huge machine, joining Askelon by the open hatch where they’d watched Archoi’s technicians work just a few hours before.

‘What in Terra’s name are you doing up here?’ Nemiel asked. ‘Brother-Apothecary Gideon said you should be resting. Your internal organs and nervous system were badly damaged when you tapped those power conduits.’

Askelon waved such concerns away. ‘I’m not doing any good sitting down there on the permacrete,’ he said hoarsely. Burn sealant had been spread across his burned face, giving the charred skin a synthetic sheen. ‘So I thought I’d climb up here and see if I can get this monster running.’

Nemiel’s eyes widened. ‘Is that possible?’

Askelon sighed. ‘Well, in theory, yes. The engine is functional, the weapons fully loaded, and the void shields – all four of them – check out as ready for activation. The problem is that there aren’t any manual controls!’

The Redemptor frowned. ‘That doesn’t make any sense. Even a Titan has a crew to assist its princeps.’

Askelon nodded. ‘And these vehicles were built with supplementary crew stations – but Archoi’s tech-adepts took out all the controls and welded the hatches shut!’ The Techmarine shook his head. ‘It doesn’t make any sense. I can’t imagine what Horus thought he could use to operate these machines – the systems aren’t quite as complex as a Titan, but they’re close.’ He spread his arms and gave a frustrated sigh. ‘So here we are with the firepower of an army in our hands, and no way to use it.’

The Redemptor scowled down at the open cockpit. A thought niggled at him. ‘Is there any way to rig a basic set of controls to the machine – even just to operate one of its void shields?’

Askelon shook his head. ‘Actually, operating the void shield is one of the most complex operations to manage – just ask any Titan moderati. Rigging an effective set of controls would take hours, possibly days.’ He shook his head. ‘Unless you have a spare MIU sitting around, there’s nothing we can do.’

Nemiel glanced up at the Techmarine, his eyes widening. Askelon frowned. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.

‘We do have an MIU,’ Nemiel said. ‘It’s been right under our noses all along.’

The enemy launched their eighth and final attack an hour and a half later.

Lion El’Jonson listened to the approaching sound of engines and readied his sword. ‘Here they come,’ he said to Nemiel. Around them, the surviving Astartes checked their weapons. At the Redemptor’s urging, they had extended the perimeter of the inner line outwards another two hundred and fifty metres, stretching their coverage almost to breaking point.

‘Askelon is working as quickly as he can, my lord,’ he said to the primarch. ‘We have to buy as much time for him as we can.’

‘This is a terrible risk we’re taking,’ Jonson replied. Amid the mounting tension, the primarch managed a faint smile. ‘If we fail to hold them back and somehow we aren’t both shot to pieces in the process, I’m going to hold you personally responsible for this.’

Nemiel nodded. ‘Duly noted, my lord,’ he said in a deadpan voice that would have made Brother-Sergeant Kohl proud.

The enemy vehicles advanced from three sides, nosing their way through the maze of close-set buildings and closing in on the assembly building. By careful planning or sheer, diabolical luck, most of the enemy vehicles emerged from cover at the same time. Nemiel counted ten Rhino APCs – and, directly ahead, a patched-up battle tank. A square metal plate had been bolted over the crater blasted in its glacis by a lascannon bolt, and the rebels’ technicians had jury-rigged enough of its wrecked controls to get it back into action. The tank shuddered to a halt as the rest of the APCs surged forward. Its turret tracked fractionally to the left and the battle cannon fired.

The heavy shell howled through the air towards the Dark Angels and struck Brother Titus’s armoured torso. The Dreadnought vanished in a thunderous blast, hurling bits of its arms and chest high into the air. Shrapnel rained down on the defenders, the metal fragments pinging off their armour.

Jonson straightened in the wake of the blast, his expression tense. Twenty metres away, the Rhinos came to an abrupt halt. Assault ramps dropped to the ground as ten squads of pale-armoured Astartes disembarked and took shelter behind the cover of their vehicles. Farther back, the tank traversed its turret to the left, taking aim on a Dark Angels squad.

‘This won’t work,’ the primarch snarled. ‘That tank will sit back there and shoot us to pieces, and then the Sons of Horus will sweep in and mop up the survivors.’ He drew the Lion Sword and held it aloft. Sunlight shone on its razor edge. ‘Forward, brothers!’ he cried. ‘For honour and glory! For Terra! For the Emperor! Forward!’

All sixty Dark Angels rose to their feet in a single, fluid motion and advanced towards the Sons of Horus, a thin line of black against a waiting phalanx of grey-green. The battle cannon boomed again, but the gunner failed to adjust for the sudden enemy advance, and the shell blasted a gout of dirt and permacrete into the air behind the Astartes. The rebel warriors rose from cover and opened fire as well. Plasma bolts and shells stabbed out at the advancing Imperials, and the Dark Angels returned fire. The two formations drew inexorably together. Nemiel clutched his crozius tightly and prepared for one final battle.

A tremor rippled through the ground beneath their feet – very faint at first, but growing in strength with each passing moment. Nemiel felt it through the soles of his boots and turned to Jonson, who had felt it, too. A throaty roar filled the air behind them, swelling outwards in a solid wall of sound as one of Horus’s mighty siege machines rumbled slowly onto the battlefield.

The war engine rose like a plasteel and ceramite mountain over the Astartes, the flak batteries and mega-bolter turrets along its flanks traversing to bear on the enemy ranks. The multi-barrelled laser batteries opened fire, unleashing a torrent of bolts at the stationary battle tank. The tank all but vanished in the glare of hundreds of detonations as the laser bolts pounded the armoured hull. Individually, each shot lacked the power to penetrate the mighty tank’s reinforced ceramite plates, but one among the hundreds of impacts landed a direct hit on the plate steel bolted hastily over its former wound and burned straight through. Smoke billowed from the tank’s open ports as the thermal effects of the bolt incinerated the crew in a split second.

A pair of mega-bolters roared to life next, sending a stream of heavy calibre shells over the heads of the Dark Angels and into the enemy’s ranks. Rhinos shuddered beneath dozens of hits and were torn apart in seconds – the Astartes standing alongside them fared little better. The Sons of Horus recoiled under the storm of shells – dozens of the warriors fell, their armour riddled with holes. The rest wavered for a moment more and then broke, retreating swiftly back into cover among the surrounding buildings. Mega-bolter shells pursued them the entire way, slaying a dozen more before the rest could escape.

The Dark Angels stood in the shadow of the immense war machine, wreathed by wisps of fyceline propellant from the barrels of the mega-bolters and numbed by the awesome roar of the guns. Alone among them, Lion El’Jonson turned to the enormous engine and raised his sword in salute.

‘Well done, Brother Titus!’ he called over the vox. ‘You could not have arrived at a more opportune time.’

‘Techmarine Askelon deserves your accolades, my lord, not I,’ replied Titus’s synthetic voice. ‘It was no small feat merging my MIU with the war engine’s interface without access to the original STC blueprints – only the specialised tools and equipment in the assembly building allowed him to modify the vehicle’s interface with my neural connectors. I regret that I am still unable to access the vehicle’s shield array, and my locomotion is still very slow and clumsy, but all weapons systems are fully functional.’

Jonson stared up at the mountain of metal. ‘Brother Titus, can your surveyors detect the star port to the south?’

‘The unit is in need of calibration, but yes, I am registering it on my array,’ Titus replied. ‘I am detecting twelve heavy transports and numerous small vehicles.’

The primarch nodded. ‘Load a shell into your siege gun and destroy the site.’

Titus hesitated for only an instant. ‘At once, my lord,’ he replied. With a ponderous moan of heavy-duty motors, the giant cannon barrel began to elevate. ‘Loading will complete in five seconds,’ Titus said. ‘I advise that you take cover behind me. I cannot adequately gauge the effect the gun’s concussion will have when it is fired.’

As primarch and war machine spoke, Nemiel cast his gaze upon the devastation that Titus had wrought. Scores of Astartes lay dead, surrounding misshapen metal hulks that were functioning APCs just a few minutes before. Behind him, heavy plasteel machinery rattled and groaned as the siege gun’s auto-loading mechanism fed a magma shell into the cannon’s breech. Recalling what such shells had done to the forge, he felt a deep sense of dread. What horrors could a warlord wreak with six such weapons at his command?

The Astartes withdrew a hundred metres behind the huge machine, nearly to the entrance of the assembly building itself. Nemiel glanced over at Jonson, and saw the primarch staring off to the south-west, towards the unsuspecting star port.

The air blazed with a flare of orange and yellow light as the cannon fired, rocking the massive war machine back against its drive units. Nemiel felt the concussion of the blast like the fist of a god striking his chest; several of the Astartes staggered beneath the blow, while downrange the pressure wave hurled the wrecked Rhinos about like broken toys. The magma shell roared skyward, flaring like a shooting star until it was lost from sight behind the planet’s thick overcast.

They waited in silence, counting the seconds as the shell reached its apogee and began to fall to earth once more. Two minutes after the shot there was a flash of searing white light on the southern horizon, followed by a furious rumble that shook the earth where the Astartes stood, more than thirty kilometres away. A hot breeze wafted against their faces, smelling of molten steel and ash, and a slowly-rising pillar of dirt and debris climbed portentously into the sky. With a single stroke, the enemy ground force had been utterly destroyed.

‘Such is the fate of all traitors,’ Lion El’Jonson said. The implacable look in the primarch’s eye made Nemiel’s blood run cold.

Twenty

The Conqueror Worm

For the third time in twenty-four hours, Zahariel found himself locked into the jump seat of a Stormbird, his ears full of thunder and his eyes brimming with dark thoughts.

The angels of Caliban’s deliverance descended on the Northwilds arcology clad in fire, smoke and burnished iron. Luther had ordered a ballistic approach for the assault forces, so the drop-ships literally fell from the sky upon the beleaguered city. To the panicked Jaegers securing the landing platforms on the arcology’s upper levels it was like a scene from a mythical Armageddon.

The command squad went in with the first wave. Zahariel’s stomach leapt as the transport pulled out of its dive less than a thousand metres over the arcology and the Stormbird’s pilot gave full power to the thrusters scant seconds before touchdown. His gauntleted hands tightened on the haft of the force staff resting between his knees as he counted down the seconds until landing. Around him, the other members of the squad made final checks to their wargear with swift, practiced movements. The atmosphere in the troop compartment was electric. Even Brother Attias seemed unusually animated, his steel-plated head turning left and right as he spoke words of encouragement to the Astartes at his side. The words of Luther’s speech on the embarkation field still rang in their ears, calling them all to glory.

The moment has come, brothers. Jonson has cast us aside – the Emperor, who once demanded our fealty, has forgotten us. Now we must decide whether to accept their judgment and give in to the darkness, or to defy them for the sake of our home and our people.

He glanced across the compartment to the jump seats nearest the ramp. There, the Saviour of Caliban sat, clad in his gleaming armour like a hero of old. Luther’s gaunt features were composed as he studied page after page of arcane text from the ancient grimoire propped across his knees. Lord Cypher sat closest to him, arms folded across his chest. He stared back at Zahariel from the depths of his hood, his expression unreadable.

Zahariel focused on his breathing. Images came and went in his mind: Sar Daviel, wreathed in tongues of blue fire; Luther, marked with glowing runes and haloed by the same terrible flame; Brother-Librarian Israfael, smoke rising from the wound in his chest, his features distorted with anguish as he sank slowly to his knees.

Shall we side with those who scorn us, or choose our own path, to protect the innocent from those who would exploit and corrupt them?

The noise of the thrusters rose to a screaming crescendo, and then the Stormbird touched down with a tremendous, spine-rattling jolt. Jump restraints released with a metallic clatter and servo-motors whined as the assault ramp deployed, letting in the cold, smoke-tinged air of the Northwilds. Boots thundered as the Astartes leapt to their feet; bolt pistols cleared their holsters and chainswords roared to angry life. Zahariel felt his body respond without conscious thought, caught up with all the rest in the intricate dance of death.

Luther passed the book to Lord Cypher and led the way, his black cloak flapping wildly in the howling gale kicked up by the Stormbird’s thrusters. Zahariel followed six paces behind Lord Cypher, flanked by Brother Attias to his right. Six other Astartes, all veterans of the fighting on Sarosh, fanned out around them, their weapons ready. Three other assault squads were deploying from their own transports on the landing platform as well, spreading out in a wide arc to cover the command squad’s flanks and rear.

The heavy blast doors leading to the arcology’s upper levels had already slid open by the time Luther and his warriors had disembarked, and a large group of green-uniformed Jaeger officers were struggling to reach them through the gale spawned by the drop-ships’ thrusters. Leading the Jaeger troops was a wiry, sharp-featured officer in smoke-stained flak armour and fatigues.

‘Colonel Hadziel,’ Luther said in greeting, his powerful voice carrying easily over the roaring wind.

‘An honour, my lord,’ Hadziel shouted back. One hand was pressed to the top of his helmet to keep it in place, and he squinted into the grit kicked up by the Stormbirds. ‘I apologise for not being able to keep you apprised of the situation during the trip, but the rebels have found some way to jam all of our vox transmissions. I can’t coordinate with my squads inside the arcology, much less send or receive signals outside.’

‘No need for apologies, Colonel. Frankly, we expected something like this.’ Luther paused for a moment as the four transports took off with a bone-jarring roar, then spoke into the ringing silence that followed. ‘One thing we need to be clear on from the outset, however, is that the rebels are not responsible for this. In fact, as of three hours ago, I concluded a truce with the rebel leaders, and they have agreed to assist us against our common enemy.’

Hadziel and his staff exchanged bemused looks. ‘Common enemy, my lord?’ he asked carefully.

‘Now is not the time for a detailed briefing, Colonel,’ Luther said sternly. ‘I assure you, all will be made clear once we’ve gotten this situation under control. Suffice to say that a cabal of off-worlders housed here at the arcology have hidden themselves somewhere in the lowest sub-levels and are exposing this entire area to the malign effects of the warp.’

To his credit, Colonel Hadziel accepted the bizarre turn of events with surprising poise. He blinked once, and nodded curtly. ‘How can I and my Jaegers be of service, my lord?’

‘Good man,’ Luther said proudly. To a man, Hadziel’s staff grinned, their confidence restored. The Master of Caliban beckoned them to fall in around him. ‘First,’ he said, ‘what’s the current situation and the disposition of the civilians?’

Colonel Hadziel gestured to a pair of staff officers, who presented a portable hololith table and set it up at Luther’s feet.

‘For the last few hours, it’s been complete chaos,’ Hadziel said grimly. He keyed in a number of commands, and a cross-section of the arcology filled the air above the table. ‘As luck would have it, the evacuation order from Aldurukh had just gotten underway when the unrest began. As a result, we already had a movement order in place and there were combat squads in the hab levels. Those squads bought us precious time to organise and took a lot of pressure off our checkpoints in the early stages of the riots. Otherwise, our cordon would have probably been completely overrun.’

‘How many civilians were you able to evacuate?’ Zahariel interjected.

The colonel shrugged. ‘Thousands, certainly,’ he said, ‘but I’ve no way of determining an exact number of evacuees. We’re still trying to let people through, but it’s extremely difficult at this point.’

‘Why?’ Luther asked.

Colonel Hadziel took a breath, considering his reply carefully. ‘These riots are much worse than anything we’ve seen before,’ he said. ‘We’d thought maybe some kind of disease had taken hold in the hab levels – something savage, like crimson fever or rabies. The last reports we got from our squads in the lower levels reported mobs of bestial civilians attacking every living thing in sight. Gunfire didn’t seem to slow them in the least, short of a las-bolt to the head. The uninfected civilians are panicking and trying to mob our checkpoints in an effort to escape.’ The colonel’s jaw tightened. ‘There have been several incidents of troops turning their guns on the civilians in order to keep the crowds at bay.’

He hit another set of keys and gestured to the holo-image. ‘As it is, I’ve been forced to give up my initial positions and fall back to level fifteen, where there are fewer access points to cover and I can pass orders using runners.’ Almost half of the lower levels of the arcology began to blink red. ‘Everything below that level, including all the sub-levels, has been lost, which includes the arcology’s thermal power plants, water and air circulation and waste recycling facilities. In purely military terms, we’re no longer in control of the arcology.’ Hadziel spread his hands. ‘We’re still trying to save as many civilians as we can, but we’ve got to check every group and make sure they’re clean before we can let them through.’

Luther turned to Zahariel. ‘Are there any measures we can take to quickly discern living humans from these walking corpses?’

Hadziel’s eyes widened. ‘Corpses, my lord? Those were reports from panicked troops. Surely you don’t believe–’

‘Make sure the checkpoints are issued thermal auspex units,’ Zahariel cut in. ‘Even a thermal lasgun sight will do. The corpses will have a much lower heat signature than the civilians around them.’

‘Well, I…’ Hadziel began, then took one look at the Astartes and thought better of his protest. ‘I mean, I’ll send the word out immediately.’

Luther nodded curtly. ‘Very good, colonel.’ He paused for a moment, studying the display carefully. ‘At this point, I want you to focus your efforts on holding the checkpoints at level fifteen and to continue evacuating civilians out of the hab levels as quickly and efficiently as possible. My warriors will form into strike forces and will pass through these checkpoints–’ He indicated seven strategic locations across level fifteen ‘–and will advance into the contested areas towards the arcology’s power plants and life support centres.’

Hadziel frowned. ‘My lord, we have no clear estimates on the number of infected individuals on the lower levels, but it certainly reaches into the hundreds, possibly thousands. They will be drawn to your warriors like blood moths to a wounded deer.’

Luther nodded in agreement. ‘That’s the idea, colonel. My brothers will deal with the corpses and take the pressure off your troops. Once you’ve completed relocating the civilian population you’ll be able to commit your forces to securing the arcology’s lower levels. I want you to assign a liaison officer to each of my teams and ensure that their path through the checkpoints is cleared. That’s all for now, gentlemen. We’ll speak again once order is restored.’

Hadziel nodded and began issuing instructions to his staff officers, who immediately began to draft the necessary orders. Luther turned away from the Jaegers and motioned for Zahariel, Attias and Lord Cypher to join him several paces away.

‘Any word from the rebels still inside the arcology?’ he quietly asked Zahariel.

The Librarian shook his head. ‘They’re having no better luck with their vox-units than we are,’ he replied. ‘There’s no way to know if they’ve found the sorcerers or not.’

Luther nodded. ‘Do you believe Colonel Hadziel’s estimate of the number of corpses in the lower levels?’

Zahariel shook his head grimly. ‘Not in the least. They must number in the thousands, possibly the tens of thousands.’

‘An army of the dead,’ Brother Attias said in his hollow, synthetic voice. ‘But to what purpose?’

‘Fuel for the fire,’ Luther said, half to himself. ‘The sorcerers are using the violence and bloodshed to weaken the barrier between the physical world and the warp, to facilitate their master ritual.’ He cast a meaningful glance at Lord Cypher, who nodded.

Zahariel scowled at the secret exchange, wondering what secrets Luther had uncovered from the forbidden library. ‘Then we have to find a way to strike directly at the sorcerers,’ he declared.

‘If we can locate them in time,’ Luther said grimly. ‘The ritual must be close to completion at this point.’

‘Zahariel can lead us there,’ Cypher said. His hooded head swivelled to regard the Librarian. ‘You can sense the turbulence in the warp generated by the ritual, can you not?’

‘I…’ Zahariel paused, glancing from Lord Cypher to Luther. The Master of Caliban was staring at him expectantly. Was he being manoeuvred into something? Israfael’s stricken face hovered before his mind’s eye like a ghost. He shook his head, as though to clear it. ‘That is, yes, I can, but that kind of prolonged exposure to warp energy is not without risk.’

Luther grinned wryly. ‘Brother, believe me when I tell you that if we don’t stop this ritual we’re all going to be exposed to more warp energy than is really healthy.’

A strange, wheezing note blurted from Attias’s vox grille. Zahariel turned to stare at the skull-faced Astartes. The sound continued, and it took the Librarian a few moments to realise that Attias was laughing. Cypher started to chuckle, and then Zahariel couldn’t help but join in as well, dispelling the tension of the moment.

‘Well, brother?’ Luther prompted.

Zahariel bowed his head. ‘Give me a moment to centre myself,’ he said, clenching the force staff tightly and focusing his awareness through his armour’s psychic hood.

At once he felt the churning maelstrom of the warp whirling about him. Its energy licked at him like tongues of flame, trying to find purchase in his soul. Jagged slivers of ice dug painfully into the back of his skull as the hood tried to shield him from the storm.

The whirlwind spun about him, drawing him downward towards its locus like a gaping maw. Something lay at its centre, he sensed; a seed of darkness, hungry and impatient for release.

Zahariel staggered slightly at the vertiginous pull of the ritual, holding himself apart from it by sheer effort of will. ‘I can feel it,’ he gasped. ‘The sorcerers are trying to open a path for something to come through. Like Sarosh, only… worse, somehow.’

‘Can you lead us to them?’ Luther said.

Zahariel concentrated on the vortex, following its currents with his mind. The biting cold in his head increased. Frost spread along the force staff’s metal shaft. ‘The locus is deep within the earth,’ he said with a grimace. ‘I’ll be able to refine its position more precisely as we go.’

‘Excellent,’ Luther said. ‘We’ll have Hadziel unlock a bank of maintenance lifts that will take us directly to the lowest sub-level, then fight our way to the locus from there.’

The Master of Caliban spun on his heel, snapping orders to Colonel Hadziel and to the other three squad leaders waiting at the landing pad. With an effort, Zahariel tried to re-orient himself in the physical world once more. The transition was much more difficult than he expected; even with the buffer provided by the psychic hood, the energies of the maelstrom still plucked at him, as though it had sunk barbs deep into his soul. He felt strangely numbed, unmoored within his own skin, and he knew that the grip of the storm would only grow stronger the closer he came to the centre of the ritual.

He blinked, trying to clear his eyes, and found Lord Cypher studying him speculatively. Before Zahariel could ask what he was staring at, the enigmatic Astartes abruptly turned away.

They descended into darkness, lit only by feeble red emergency lighting inside the maintenance lift’s metal cage. Hadziel had authorised the activation of a bank of four lifts that would allow Luther’s four assault squads to deploy together, concentrating their strength against whatever foes awaited them. Based on their experience at Sigma Five-One-Seven, Zahariel had advised choosing the set of lifts in the closest proximity to the arcology’s main thermal core.

The strength of the maelstrom increased steadily the deeper they went, until Zahariel scarcely had to focus his awareness in order to sense it. The unnatural energies sank effortlessly through his armour and pulsed sickeningly against his skin. Frost coated the housing of his psychic hood and sent needles of icy feedback into his brain. The storm winds tugged ruthlessly at him, tearing at his mind and soul with increasing vigour.

Finally the lift jerked roughly to a halt, two hundred metres below the earth. They’d reached the lowest sub-level of the arcology. Luther gave a nod to the Astartes manning the controls, and the lift doors clattered open, revealing a broad, low-ceilinged chamber formed of fused permacrete. The air was stiflingly humid and thick with the stench of corruption.

Here, as with the lower levels at Sigma Five-One-Seven, the earth had already begun to reclaim the space. Glossy greenish-black vines sprouted from cracks in the walls and along the floor, and a dripping, greenish mould covered much of the ceiling. Insects chittered and squirmed through the tainted growth, or droned through the thick air on blurring wings. Sickly blue luminescence radiated from colonies of fungus that sprouted in haphazard clusters overhead, providing ample light to the Astartes’ enhanced night vision.

The Dark Angels deployed swiftly from the adjoining lifts. Three assault squads took the lead, forming a protective arc in front of Luther and the command squad, and orienting their weapons on the three entryways on the opposite side of the chamber. Two men in each of the assault squads carried a hand flamer, while two of the veterans in Luther’s command squad were armed with powerful, short range meltaguns. The rest carried roaring chainswords and blunt-nosed bolt pistols, ideal for the kind of close-quarters fighting they expected to encounter. They were forty strong, a fearsome display of force. Entire worlds had been brought into compliance with less.

Luther led the command squad into the chamber. His huge sword Nightfall burned a fierce blue in his right hand, and his ornate bolt pistol gleamed dully in his left. Zahariel stood next to him, clutching his force staff with both hands, while Brother Attias and Lord Cypher brought up the rear. Cypher held his plasma pistol ready in his right hand. The leather-bound grimoire was clutched tightly against his chest.

The Master of Caliban leaned close to Zahariel. ‘Can you sense the ritual in process?’ he asked quietly.

Gritting his teeth, Zahariel focused his awareness through the psychic hood. The dampener was already straining at the limit of its abilities; he could smell the strange mix of overheated circuitry and frozen metal. This close, he could sense rhythms pulsing through the howling psychic wind, like discordant notes struck by a madman’s hand. The vibrations represented the symbolic chants that coaxed the energies of the warp into the physical realm.

‘The ritual is well advanced,’ the Librarian said, suppressing a groan of disgust. ‘It could reach its climax at any time. We have to hurry!’

Luther nodded. His dark eyes shone with fevered intensity. ‘Listen, Zahariel. When we reach the ritual site, I want you to keep close to me. We have to confront this entity, together. I have the knowledge, but I lack the ability to manipulate the forces of the warp.’

Zahariel shook his head. ‘Confront it? You mean drive it back.’

‘No,’ Luther said. ‘At least, not yet.’ He turned and nodded at the grimoire that Cypher carried. ‘That book contains the means to subjugate the spirit, bend it to our will. If we can reach it at the right moment, while it’s still weak.’

‘You can’t be serious!’ Zahariel cried. ‘What you’re talking about is madness! The Emperor–’

Luther stepped close, until he was nearly whispering in Zahariel’s ear. ‘Yes. The Emperor has forbidden this. Why? Because he fears the beings of the warp. That’s something we must learn to exploit, if Caliban is to remain free.’ He looked deeply into Zahariel’s eyes. ‘Do you trust me, brother?’

Zahariel found himself nodding, despite the misgivings in his heart. ‘Yes. Of course.’

‘Then help me. It’s the only way.’

Without waiting to hear Zahariel’s reply, Luther turned and waved the assault squads towards the rightmost of the three large openings on the other side of the landing. So far, the path to the ritual site seemed to lead to the arcology’s primary thermal core, just as it had at Sigma Five-One-Seven. With a pair of flamer-wielding Astartes in the lead, the first assault squad advanced into the broad, vine-choked passageway. Luther’s command squad was third in line, with the last assault squad covering the rear.

The corpses came at them from three sides. A few hundred metres down the passageway, it was bisected by another pair of wide corridors. The enemy, showing a rudimentary grasp of tactics, allowed the first and second squads to pass this junction before triggering their ambush. With scarcely a sound, hundreds of rotting corpses shambled out of the darkness, attacking the head of the advancing strike force and trying to drive into its midst from either side.

Flamers hissed, filling the passageways with streams of searing promethium. Bolt pistols barked on every side, felling the advancing creatures with well-placed shots to the head. The Astartes continued to fire even as the corpses surrounded them, drawing into arm’s reach and trying to drag down the armoured warriors by sheer weight of numbers. Chainswords roared and slashed, severing limbs and splitting torsos.

The Dark Angels stood shoulder to shoulder in the confined space, never yielding a centimetre to the unearthly horde. At the centre of the formation, standing at the junction of the passageways, Luther roared encouragement to his warriors and put down one corpse after another with his pistol. Zahariel and Attias joined in with their own pistols, adding to the whirlwind of steel that took a fearful toll on the enemy.

For several long minutes the battle raged against the walking dead. The corpses pressed harder and harder against the Astartes – and then, inevitably, the pressure began to wane. The strike force, sensing that they had absorbed the brunt of the attack, began to press further down the passageway. Flamers continued to hiss and spit, until the walls of the passage shimmered with heat and the air grew thick with smoke and the stench of burnt meat.

Zahariel followed Luther through a waking nightmare. They advanced in the wake of the lead assault squads, moving down a tunnel of burning vines and shredded bodies. The slaughter was incredible; within only a hundred metres the Librarian found himself walking on a literal carpet of broken bodies. In places his boots sank into piles of blood and bone that rose nearly to his knees.

The Astartes drove inexorably forward, grinding the enemy beneath their heel. Then, without warning, the passageway widened into a huge chamber that crackled with unnatural energies. They had reached the thermal core.

Blasting their way through a faltering rear guard of corpses, the first and second assault squads broke through into the chamber far enough to make room for Luther’s command squad. Then they halted, weapons ready, waiting for word from their commander.

Luther and Zahariel emerged into the cavernous room with the rest of the command squad close behind. Ahead, arcs of violet lightning leapt from the monolithic bulk of the thermal core and etched looping scars across the permacrete floor. The air stank of ozone and the sickly-sweet reek of decaying flesh; it rippled invisibly against the skin, churned by unnatural energies that radiated from the vast ritual circle at the centre of the space.

A half-dozen queen worms were curled about the outside of the circle, their segmented bodies writhing frenetically in response to the building intensity of the ritual. Their mandibles clashed and their multiple eyes glowed with a power of their own as they drove thousands of corpses against the arcology’s hard-pressed defenders.

Just beyond the worms, standing at precisely-determined points along the perimeter of the ritual circle, stood the sorcerers. The Terrans were clad in torn and stained robes that had been painted in arcane sigils that shone with a strange, pellucid light. Zahariel saw that their skin was waxy and mottled in shades of black and grey, as though they were little more than corpses themselves. Their heads turned fearfully at the arrival of the Astartes, but their leader, a towering figure with his back to the Dark Angels, rallied them with clenched fists and shrieked curses until they resumed their efforts.

At the centre of the circle, Zahariel could just make out massive coils of scaly hide, larger by far than the queen worm that had nearly slain him and his squad at Sigma Five-One-Seven.

Zahariel felt a surge of power in the great chamber that seemed to rise up from deep within the earth. Black vapours, reeking of sulphur and rot, rose in a flood from the deep pit where the thermal core was set. The ritual was reaching its culmination.

‘We’re nearly out of time!’ he cried out.

Luther heard and nodded grimly. He raised his glowing sword. ‘For Caliban, brothers!’ he cried, his voice echoing like a trumpet call over the cacophony of the ritual chamber.

‘For Caliban!’ the Astartes answered. ‘For Luther!’ As one, they charged forward.

The queen worms outside the circle reacted at once, whipping about and screeching their fury, but they were caught in a veritable storm of bolt pistol fire, searing flame, and the fearsome blasts of meltaguns. Mass-reactive rounds punched through thick layers of scale and detonated in the soft flesh beneath, blasting gory craters in the worms’ flanks. Two of the creatures thrashed and hissed, bathed in streams of fiery promethium. A third blew apart as a pair of meltagun shots struck in at the head and midsection, showering the rest with splashes of steaming ichor.

Yet despite their terrible wounds, the surviving worm queens fought on. Two of the creatures focused on Luther, their mandibles clashing as they lunged at the knight from the left and right. Zahariel saw it unfold, and thought of Brother Gideon, his body shorn in half by a worm’s scissor-like bite.

But Luther was a born warrior, a man who had been fighting the monsters of Caliban all his life. As they lunged, he ducked low and to the left, bringing up his power sword as the worm’s leap carried it just past his right shoulder. Nightfall pierced the side of the worm’s head, just behind the mandible, and like a claw it tore a burning gash more than halfway along the worm queen’s length. The second worm found its attack blocked by the first creature’s lunge, causing it to check its thrust and slide, snapping, over the mortally-wounded queen’s back. Luther saw it coming and put out one of its eyes with an explosive bolt from his pistol. A plasma shot from Lord Cypher struck the opposite side of the queen’s skull a moment later, leaving a glowing crater gouged into the bone and boiling its brains in the blink of an eye.

Brother Attias fell upon the mortally-wounded queen and began to saw its head off with his roaring chainsword. To Zahariel’s left, a burning worm leapt into the midst of one of the attack squads, flattening them beneath its bulk and madly snapping at armoured limbs and torsos. Another worm, streaming ichor from scores of bolt-pistol wounds, snatched up a Dark Angel in its mandibles and lifted him high, crushing his armour plates like paper. The Librarian watched the warrior slap a krak grenade right between the monster’s eyes, and both he and the worm’s head disappeared in an angry yellow flash.

Zahariel ignored the surviving worms, heading instead for the ritual circle and the madly chanting Terrans. The power of the ritual trembled in the air; he could feel it against his skin like a searing brand. A bridge was being formed, linking the physical world with the seething madness of the warp. He knew all too well what would happen next.

He struck the sorcerer’s ward a moment later, just outside the first lines of the summoning circle. It felt as though he’d run right into a solid wall of lightning. Agony tore along his nerves; warning telltales flashed in his vision as the neural feedback began to overload his synaptic receptors. Had it not been for the dampening power of his psychic hood, the shock would likely have killed him outright.

The cries of the sorcerers grew exultant. In the centre of the circle, the giant worm began to slowly rise into the air, its scales throwing back the lurid glow of muzzle-flashes and liquid fire. Pain threatened to overwhelm Zahariel. It took all his concentration, all his courage and dedication, to raise his force staff and strike at the energies of the ward with all his might.

Warp energies collided with incandescent fury. Zahariel focused his anger through the staff, pouring all the psychic energy he could through the focus and into the ward. Its energies surged for a moment, resisting, then like a pierced bubble it burst with a ringing peal of thunder.

Zahariel fell, his strength spent, but a strong hand at his side gripped his arm, bearing him up. Luther, his blade gleaming like an avenging angel, stepped past him and reached the Terran leader. His shadow fell across the sorcerer, who realised, too late, that his powers had failed him. The sorcerer spun, hands curled into claws before his face, and Luther smote him with his burning sword. Nightfall sliced through both of the Terran’s legs, just below the hip joint, and the Terran fell screaming to the stone floor.

A sorcerer to Zahariel’s right jerked and twitched under a fusillade of bolt pistol rounds. Another melted like wax in a gout of burning promethium. He could sense the energies of the ritual grow unstable as the sorcerers were slain, but the rite itself continued to unfold. A tipping point had been reached; the rite had accumulated enough energy that nothing would stop its culmination.

Luther spun and held out his hand. ‘Cypher! The book, quickly!’ he cried. His gaze fell to Zahariel. ‘Join me, brother! We have to get control of this, or we’re finished!’

A sense of horror welled up inside Zahariel as he realised what he had to do, but Luther was right. At this point, there was no other choice that he could see. Gritting his teeth, he staggered forwards, moving under the weight of his damaged armour by sheer muscle power alone.

He dimly sensed Cypher pressing the grimoire into Luther’s hands. The Master of Caliban opened it and went quickly to a particular page. ‘Can you sense the energies, Zahariel?’

Zahariel nodded. It was nearly impossible not to feel the unnatural forces impinging on his mind. He shook his head grimly. ‘If I do this, I’ll have to deactivate my dampener,’ he warned. ‘There’s no other way.’

‘Don’t be afraid, brother!’ Luther cried. ‘You can master it!’ He lifted the book close enough to read the pages in the shifting light. ‘Now, repeat the words exactly as I read them!’

Zahariel felt a wave of icy dread. There was no time left for arguments. It was act, or perish. He reached to a set of controls at his belt and deactivated the psychic hood.

The storm forced its way into his skull. Unnatural energies crawled along the pathways of his mind. He cried out at its blasphemous touch – and felt the stirrings of a terrible intelligence behind it.

Beside him, Luther began to read aloud. Desperate, Zahariel focused on the words to the exclusion of all else, and began to repeat them in the same cadence and intonation. He poured the last vestiges of his willpower into the sorcerous invocation, and its threads mingled with the torrent of energy raised by the previous ritual. With each passing moment, the composition of the rite began to change.

Within the centre of the circle, the great worm unfolded to its full height. It towered over the assembled Astartes, its flanks wreathed in a nimbus of hellish light. Shadows shifted along its length. Scaled flesh rippled, and a pair of human-looking arms reached out to encompass the chamber. The worm’s multiple eyes shone with pale green light, but in their reflected glow Zahariel saw that they now gleamed from a vaguely human-like skull.

The energies of Zahariel’s incantation drew about the blasphemous creature, enfolding it like a net, but to the Librarian it was like trying to bind a dragon with a ball of thread. Its awareness pressed against the bindings, testing them, and reaching tendrils directly into Zahariel’s soul.

It was vast. Ancient. A leviathan of the boundless deeps, from an age before men walked the surface of distant Terra. And as Zahariel completed the words of the binding ritual it turned its gaze upon him.

Luther stepped between Zahariel and the being, raising his fist to its inhuman face. ‘By my honour and by my oaths, I bind you!’ he cried. ‘By the blood of my brothers, I bind you! By the power of these words I bind you!’

The being shifted against its bonds, and Zahariel found himself grappling with it. Power flooded through him, bright and clear, flowing from a thousand different sources at once: the souls of his brothers on Caliban, who had sworn themselves to Luther’s service. He stifled a groan and redoubled his efforts to hold the leviathan in check.

‘Release me,’ the being thundered, its words reverberating in the Dark Angels’ minds. It strained at the bridge between the worlds. ‘Too long have I been bound by chains. Release me, and your rewards will be great.’

But Luther would not relent. ‘You are bound to me, denizen of the warp! By the Twelfth Rite of Azh’uthur, I command you! Reveal to me your name!’

Now the leviathan stirred sharply; Zahariel could feel its awareness pulling at his bones. ‘Ouroboros,’ it spat. He felt it like a slap against his face. Blood leaked from his nostrils and the corners of his eyes.

Luther shook his fist. ‘Not the name that men have given you,’ he demanded. ‘Reveal your true name!’

‘Release me,’ it thundered again. ‘And all will be revealed.’

The leviathan was pulling at the bonds of the rite with increasing strength now. Zahariel realised why; the original summoning was starting to dissipate, and the being had not been fully able to manifest itself yet. In another few moments it would be forced to return from whence it came.

It reached into him. Zahariel’s mouth went agape as the being swelled within his skin. His veins froze and his skin blackened. Icy vapour boiled up from his throat. Yet with every last ounce of life left in him he resisted the being’s efforts, holding it just barely at bay.

‘Tell me your name!’ Luther shouted, and the being let out a furious roar.

There was a sudden inrushing of energy as the summoning ritual failed at last. Howling blasphemies that split stone and corroded steel, the leviathan returned to that dark place from which it had been summoned. The bridge unravelled, and the storm of psychic energies began to subside.

A deafening silence fell upon the battleground. Luther turned to Zahariel, his expression full of anguish. The Librarian sank to his knees, steam rising from the joints of his armour. His staff clattered to the floor beside him.

Zahariel looked up at Luther through a film of blood. His cracked lips pulled back in a smile.

‘The quest is done, my lord,’ he said, his voice barely a whisper. ‘Caliban is saved.’

And then he fell forward, into Luther’s reaching arms, and died.

Epilogue

Fallen Angels

Zahariel awoke to find the face of death staring down at him.

‘Do not move,’ Brother Attias said in his hollow voice. ‘You sustained severe injuries to much of your body during the battle. By rights you shouldn’t be alive at all.’

The Librarian forced himself to relax and heed Attias’s warning. His mind swam with images and sensations, as though all of his sensory organs had been shattered and crudely reassembled later. It took him several long moments to recognise the feel of cold sunlight against his face and the weight of cotton sheets against his chest and legs.

He looked around, moving only his eyes, and tried to make sense of where he was. Stone walls, and an arched glassaic window by his bed. Spartan furnishings: a desk and chair, and a chest for storing clothing. He saw a staff resting atop the chest, and belatedly realised that it was his. Was the room his as well?

‘Where…’ he croaked. The sound of his voice surprised him. It sounded strange, somehow, but he persisted. ‘Where… am …I?’

‘Aldurukh, in the Tower of Angels,’ Attias replied. ‘Luther had you moved up here once the Apothecaries said your vital signs had stabilised. You were dead for a full five minutes before Luther was able to get one of your hearts beating again. No one knows exactly how he did it. It was something he read out of the book he took down into the core with him – that much I saw with my own eyes. Even still, you’ve been lying here for a long time in a deep coma, healing the damage you suffered.’

‘How… long?’ Zahariel asked.

‘Eight months,’ the Astartes said. ‘I think everyone else but me has forgotten you’re up here.’

Eight months, Zahariel thought. The number seemed significant, but he couldn’t quite remember why. Fragmentary images tumbled through his mind; he tried to grasp at them, but the more he tried to hold them, the quicker they faded away. ‘I was… dreaming,’ he said.

Attias nodded. ‘I expect so.’ He stepped around the end of the bed, heading for the room’s narrow door. ‘I’ll go and tell the Medicae Primus you’re awake, and bring you some food from the kitchen. No doubt you’re ravenous after being so long asleep.’

The skull-faced Astartes slipped quietly from the room. Zahariel stared up at the ceiling. ‘Ravenous,’ he echoed.

Yes. He certainly was.

Faces came and went. Attias brought him food, which he ate when the need arose. He rested, moving as little as possible, and sorted through the broken images in his mind. The Apothecaries visited often, asking many questions for which he had few answers. At night he dreamed. Sometimes he would awake in the darkness and find a hooded figure staring at him from beside the open doorway. Unlike the others, the figure had nothing to say.

Slowly but surely, he began to fit the pieces of his mind back into place. His speech returned, then his muscle control. When Luther finally came to visit him he was sitting upright, staring out the narrow window at the sky.

The Master of Caliban studied him silently for a time.

‘How are you feeling, brother?’ he asked.

Zahariel considered the question. ‘Mended,’ he said at last.

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ Luther said. ‘It’s been many months, and there’s a great deal of work left undone.’

‘What’s happened?’ Zahariel asked. He shifted about, turning to face Luther.

Luther folded his arms across his chest and pursed his lips thoughtfully. ‘Order has been restored,’ he said. ‘Once we banished the warp entity, its undead servants fell inert, just as they had at Sigma Five-One-Seven. After that, we were able to finish the evacuation and resettle the citizens across the upper levels of the arcology. The Northwilds have been quiet ever since, though maintenance crews are still stumbling across skeletal remains down in the sub-levels.’

‘And the rebellion?’

Luther shrugged. ‘There is no rebellion. It effectively ended in the library, when the Emperor’s lies were finally brought to light. By the end of the riots at the Northwilds, it became apparent that Master Ramiel was the only member of the rebel leadership still alive. Lord Thuriel and Lord Malchial were slain sometime during the day – not by the undead, but apparently by some of Lady Alera’s people. Alas, we’ll likely never know for certain, because Alera died leading a search party into the sub-levels to try and locate the Terran sorcerers.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Zahariel replied. ‘What about the Terrans?’

‘We’ve rounded up nearly all of them,’ Luther said. ‘Most submitted quietly, but General Morten and a number of his men managed to evade arrest and are running loose in the countryside. We’ll track them down sooner or later, I’m sure. Honestly, we’ve got more important things to attend to at this point.’

‘Such as?’

Luther smiled coldly. ‘Such as securing Caliban’s freedom from the Imperium.’

Zahariel shook his head. ‘That’s not possible,’ he said tiredly. ‘Surely you realise that. No matter what we do, at the end of the day we’re just one world. Sooner or later Terra will learn of what we’ve done, and then there will be a reckoning.’

‘Perhaps, and perhaps not,’ Luther said. ‘We’ve received news from out beyond Segmentum Obscurus. Dozens of star systems are rebelling against the Emperor and throwing off the yoke of Terran rule, and that, I believe, is just the beginning. The Emperor has much more to worry about than Caliban at this point. Now it falls to us to make the most of the time we’ve been given.’

Zahariel’s eyes narrowed. ‘In what way?’ he asked, even though he already knew the answer.

‘Why, to master the secrets that the Emperor has tried to conceal from us,’ Luther said. ‘The library here at the Rock is only the beginning, brother. We’ve only scratched the surface of what’s out there.’

He stepped forward, kneeling at the side of the bed, and stared searchingly into Zahariel’s eyes. ‘What do you remember of the ritual, back at the arcology?’

‘Why, all of it,’ Zahariel answered. He remembered the pillar of flame, the bridge between the physical realm and the warp. He remembered the entity, and how it had sunk talons of ice into his soul.

Luther leaned forward, as though he could plumb the depths of Zahariel’s eyes. ‘Do you remember learning the entity’s name? Its true name?’

Zahariel never flinched from Luther’s gaze. Slowly, he shook his head. ‘No,’ he replied. ‘I’m sorry. I tried, but it was far too powerful for me to command.’

Luther sighed, and slowly rose to his feet. ‘Well, it was worth a try,’ he said, disappointment evident in his voice. He smiled. ‘Perhaps next time.’

‘Next time?’

‘When you’re stronger, of course,’ Luther added quickly. ‘I admit, I underestimated the entity’s power as well. Next time, we’ll be better prepared. You have my oath on it.’

He reached forward and patted Zahariel’s shoulder. ‘I’ve troubled you enough for one day,’ he said. ‘Get some rest, regain your strength. When you’re ready we’ll return to the library and start our research.’ The Master of Caliban took his leave, striding for the doorway. At the threshold he turned and gave Zahariel a proud smile. ‘Caliban is on the verge of a golden age unlike any our ancestors dreamed of, brother. You and I are going to make it possible.’

Zahariel listened to Luther’s footsteps recede down the stairs. Silence returned to the tower room once more. He rose carefully from the bed and stepped to the centre of the room. He raised his arms over his head, staring up at the ceiling, and began to slowly, deliberately stretch his long-unused muscles. When he’d finished his stretches he began a careful series of calisthenics.

The foul touch of the entity lay on his soul like a rime of black frost. It had never left him, because in truth the entity had never left, either. It was still there, deep beneath the earth, where it had lain for millions upon millions of years. The psychic bridge he’d witnessed beneath the Northwilds arcology hadn’t been to draw the being through into the physical realm from the warp, like at Sarosh, but to send it back.

Zahariel knew the source of Caliban’s taint.

And he knew its name.

The sky above Diamat was full of ships.

The Emperor’s Legions had arrived in the Tanagra System just five days after the destruction of Horus’s landing force at the Xanthus star port. With no way to secure the siege machines from Jonson’s Astartes, the admiral of the raiding fleet had little choice but to withdraw back to Isstvan. The Warmaster’s final gambit had failed.

Lion El’Jonson stared admiringly at the gleaming array of military power drifting gracefully beyond the reinforced viewport of his sanctum. Drops of emerald still shone on the thick glass pane. With the destruction of the forge there would be no way to replace the damage done to the viewport for some time to come. He considered it a small price to pay given all that he had accomplished here.

‘When will you move on Isstvan?’ he asked his guest.

The other primarch stepped closer to the viewport, his armoured hands clasped behind his back. ‘With all due haste,’ he said in a deep, rumbling voice. ‘Ferrus Manus has hastened ahead of us, hungry to claim the Emperor’s vengeance against Horus.’ He glanced at Jonson and frowned. ‘We had hoped to provision our ships here before continuing to the combat zone.’

Jonson sighed. ‘I’m sorry for that, but Magos Archoi left me no choice. The jamming had to be stopped without delay.’ His expression darkened. ‘Also, he lied to me. Better he had come at me with a knife, face to face, than play me false.’

The primarch nodded, turning back to the viewport and looking down upon Diamat. A vast, reddish-brown stain, like old blood, hung in the planet’s ochre sky. The dust and ash blown into the atmosphere by the destruction of the forge – and to a lesser extent, the devastation of the star port, hours later – would have far-reaching effects upon the planet. The few thousand inhabitants who remained would face lean and difficult times for generations to come.

‘May I ask you a question?’ the primarch asked.

Jonson shrugged. ‘Of course.’

‘When did you learn about the existence of the siege engines?’

‘Oh. That.’ Jonson smiled. ‘Fifty years ago. I was studying the history of the Great Crusade and saw a reference to them in a despatch that Horus sent to the Emperor. He’d commissioned them during the long siege of the xenos fortress-states on Tethonus. Horus tasked the masters of Diamat to create continental siege machines – vast artillery pieces that could devastate the most powerful fortifications.’ He spread his hands. ‘The war machines took much longer for the forge masters to complete than planned. By the time they were finished, the campaign on Tethonus had been over for a year and a half, and Horus had moved on to other conquests. So the weapons were put into a depot here against the day when he would come to claim them. Then came Isstvan.’

The primarch grunted in understanding. ‘Then came Isstvan,’ he agreed.

‘When I heard about his rebellion, it was obvious to me that Horus’s path must ultimately lead to Terra,’ Jonson said. ‘Even if he were to somehow prevail against you and the other Legions, the Warmaster couldn’t claim total victory so long as the Emperor was safe in his palace. No, for Horus to triumph, our father would have to die. And that meant a long and costly siege of Terra.’

The primarch glanced at Jonson again and bowed his head in admiration. ‘You have performed a master stroke, brother. Truly. Rather than confront Horus directly, you’ve defeated him with only a handful of troops.’ He smiled slyly. ‘I begin to think that the title of Warmaster was placed upon the wrong brow.’

Jonson smiled at the compliment. ‘From you, brother, that means something. Thank you.’

‘What now?’ the primarch asked. ‘Will you accompany us to Isstvan?’

‘No,’ Jonson said. ‘I must return with all haste to the Shield Worlds and prepare the Legion. In fact, I think it best if no one outside you, I and the other primarchs ever knew I was here. I wouldn’t want the Emperor to believe I did any of this with an ulterior motive in mind.’

The primarch considered this at length, and nodded. ‘A prudent choice, and a very humble one.’

Jonson leaned forward in his chair. ‘Well, naturally,’ he said. His expression grew serious. ‘I don’t do this for the accolades, brother, nor for the power. Not really. I do this for the good of the Imperium. Horus became our father’s favourite son for no other reason than fate. Had I been the first one he’d found, I would be Warmaster today. No offence.’

The primarch smiled. ‘None taken.’

‘So I can count upon your support when the time comes? I feel that the Emperor will need to choose a new Warmaster very quickly if the Great Crusade is to continue.’

‘That goes without saying,’ the primarch agreed.

‘Then we’ve reached an understanding?’

The primarch bowed his head solemnly. ‘The arrangement stands to benefit us both.’

‘Excellent,’ Jonson said. ‘In that case, you’re welcome to take possession of the siege guns at your convenience. On one condition, of course.’

The primarch raised a thin eyebrow. ‘Oh?’

Jonson gave his guest a sly grin. ‘You must promise me they will be put to good use.’

Perturabo, Primarch of the Iron Warriors smiled, his eyes gleaming like polished iron.

‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘Of that you may be assured.’

It is a time of legend.

Mighty heroes battle for the right to rule the galaxy.

The vast armies of the Emperor of Earth have conquered the galaxy in a Great Crusade – the myriad alien races have been smashed by the Emperor’s elite warriors and wiped from the face of history.

The dawn of a new age of supremacy for humanity beckons.

Gleaming citadels of marble and gold celebrate the many victories of the Emperor. Triumphs are raised on a million worlds to record the epic deeds of his most powerful and deadly warriors.

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

Organised into vast armies of tens of thousands called Legions, the Space Marines and their primarch leaders conquer the galaxy in the name of the Emperor.

Chief amongst the primarchs is Horus, called the Glorious, the Brightest Star, favourite of the Emperor, and like a son unto him. He is the Warmaster, the commander-in-chief of the Emperor’s military might, subjugator of a thousand thousand worlds and conqueror of the galaxy. He is a warrior without peer, a diplomat supreme.

As the flames of war spread through the Imperium, mankind’s champions will all be put to the ultimate test.

~ Dramatis Personae ~

The XV Legion ‘Thousand Sons’

Magnus the Red, Primarch known as ‘the Crimson King’

The Corvidae

Ahzek Ahriman, Chief Librarian of the Thousand Sons

Ankhu Anen, Guardian of the Great Library

Amon, Captain of the Ninth Fellowship, equerry to the primarch

The Pyrae

Khalophis, Captain of the Sixth Fellowship

Auramagma, Captain of the Eighth Fellowship

The Pavoni

Hathor Maat, Captain of the Third Fellowship

The Athanaeans

Baleq Uthizzar, Captain of the Fifth Fellowship

The Raptora

Phosis T’kar, Captain of the Second Fellowship

Phael Toron, Captain of the Seventh Fellowship

The Primarchs

Leman Russ, Primarch of the Space Wolves

Lorgar, Primarch of the Word Bearers

Mortarion, Primarch of the Death Guard

Sanguinius, Primarch of the Blood Angels

Fulgrim, Primarch of the Emperor’s Children

The VI Legion ‘Space Wolves’

Amlodhi Skarssen Skarssensson , Lord of the Fifth Company

Ohthere Wyrdmake, Rune Priest of the Fifth Company

The Legio Custodes

Constantin Valdor, Chief Custodian

Amon Tauromachian, Custodian Guard

Imperial Personae

Malcador the Sigillite, Regent of Terra

Kallista Eris, Historiographer

Mahavastu Kallimakus, Scrivener Extraordinary to Magnus the Red

Camille Shivani, Architectural archeohistorian

Lemuel Gaumon, Societal behaviourist

Yatiri, Leader of the Aghoru

‘The ancient knights’ quest for the grail, the alchemist’s search for the Stone of the Philosophers, all were part of the Great Work and are therefore endless. Success only opens up new avenues of brilliant possibility. Such a task is eternal and its joys without bounds; for the whole universe, and all its wonders… what is it but the infinite playground of the Crowned and Conquering Child, of the insatiable, the innocent, the ever-rejoicing heirs of the galaxy and eternity, whose name is Mankind?’

– The Book of Magnus

‘The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance.’

– Ahzek Ahriman

‘The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself: ye, all which it inherits shall dissolve, and like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind.’

– The Prophecy of Amon

All is dust…

How prophetic those words seem now.

A wise man from ancient Terra said them, or words just like them. I wonder if he was gifted as I am. I say gifted, but with every passing day, I come to regard my powers as a curse.

I look out from the top of my tower, over a landscape of madness and storms of impossible energies, and I remember reading those words in a crumbling book on Terra. Over the centuries, I read every one of the texts from the forgotten ages that filled the great libraries of Prospero, but I do not think I really understood them until today.

I can feel him drawing near with every breath, every heartbeat.

That I still have either is a miracle, especially now.

He is coming to kill me, of course. I can feel his anger, his hurt pride and his great regret. The power he now has was unlooked for, unwanted and unnatural. Power is fleeting, some say, but not this power.

Once acquired it can never be given back.

His abilities are like nothing else wielded by man. He could kill me from the other side of the galaxy, but he will not. He needs to look me in the eye as he destroys me. It is his flaw, one of them at least, that he is honourable.

He behaves to others as he expects to be treated.

That was his undoing.

I know what he thinks I have done. He thinks I have betrayed him, but I have not. Truly, I have not. None of our cabal betrayed him; we did everything we could to save our brothers.

It has come to this, a father set to kill his favoured son.

That is the greatest tragedy of the Thousand Sons. They will call us traitors, but such an irony will go unrecorded, even in the lost books of Kallimakus. We remain loyal, as we have always been.

No one will believe that, not the Emperor, not our brothers, and especially not the wolves that are not wolves.

History will say they unleashed the Wolves of Russ on us, but history will be wrong. They unleashed something far worse.

I can hear him climbing the steps of my tower.

He will think I have done this because of Ohrmuzd, and in a way he is right. But it is so much more than that.

I have destroyed my Legion: The Legion I loved, the Legion that saved me. I have destroyed the Legion he tried to save, and when he kills me he will be right to do so.

I deserve no less, and perhaps much more.

Ah, but before he destroys me, I must tell you of our doom.

Yet where to begin?

There are no beginnings and no endings, especially upon worlds of the Great Ocean. Past, present and future are one, and time is a meaningless.

So it must be arbitrary, this place where I begin.

I will start with a mountain.

The Mountain that Eats Men.

One

The Mountain that Eats Men
Captains
Observers

The Mountain had existed for tens of thousands of years, a rearing landmass of rock that had been willed into existence by forces greater than any living inhabitant of Aghoru could imagine. Though its people had no knowledge of geology, the titanic forces of orogenic movement, compressional energies and isostatic uplift, they knew enough to know that the Mountain was too vast, too monumental, to be a natural formation.

Set in the heart of an undulating salt plain the ancients of the Aghoru claimed had once been at the bottom of an ocean, the Mountain rose to a height of nearly thirty kilometres, taller even than Olympus Mons, the great Fabricator’s forge on Mars.

It dominated the blazing, umber sky, a graceful, soaring peak shaped like an incredible tomb, crafted for some ancient king, of magnificent, cyclopean scale. No regular lines formed the Mountain, and no artifice of mankind had shaped its rugged flanks, but one look at the Mountain was enough to convince even the most diehard sceptic that it had been crafted by unnatural means.

Nothing grew on its rocky sides, no plants, gorse or even the thinnest of prairie grasses. The earth surrounding the Mountain shimmered in the baking heat of the planet’s sun, which hung low on the horizon like an overripe fruit.

Despite the heat, the rocks of the Mountain were cold to the touch, smooth and slick as though freshly raised from the depths of a black ocean. Sunlight abhorred its sides, its shadowed valleys, sunken grabens and sheared clefts dark and cold, as though it had been built atop some frozen geyser that seeped its icy chill into the rock by some strange, geological osmosis.

Surrounding the rumpled skirts of the Mountain, scattered collections of raised stones, each taller than three men, were gathered in loose circles. Such monuments should have been towering achievements, incredible feats of engineering by a culture without access to mechanical lifting equipment, mass-reducing suspensor gear or the titanic engines of the Mechanicum. But in the face of the Mountain’s artificial origins they were primitive afterthoughts, specks against the stark, brooding immensity of its impossibility. On a world such as this, what force could raise a mountain?

None of the many people gathered on Aghoru could answer that question, though some of the greatest, most inquisitive and brilliant minds bent their every faculty to answer it.

To the Aghoru, the Mountain was the Axis Mundi of their world, a place of pilgrimage.

To the warrior-scholars of the Thousand Sons, the Mountain and its people were a curiosity, a puzzle to be solved and, potentially, the solution to a riddle their glorious leader had sought to unlock for nearly two centuries.

On one thing, both cultures agreed wholeheartedly.

The Mountain was a place of the dead.

‘Can you see him?’ asked the voice, distant and dreamlike.

‘No.’

‘He should be back by now,’ pressed the voice, stronger now. ‘Why isn’t he back?’

Ahriman descended through the Enumerations, feeling the psychic presence of the three Astartes gathered beneath the scarlet canopy of his pavilion with senses beyond the rudimentary ones nature had seen fit to gift him. Their potent psyches hummed through their flesh like chained thunder, that of Phosis T’kar tense and choleric, Hathor Maat’s lugubrious and rigidly controlled.

Sobek’s aetheric field was a tiny candle next to the blazing suns they carried within them.

Ahriman felt his subtle body mesh with his physical form, and opened his eyes. He broke the link with his Tutelary and looked up at Phosis T’kar. The sun was low, yet still powerfully bright, and he squinted against it, shielding his eyes from the reflected glare of sunlight from the salt flats.

‘Well?’ demanded Phosis T’kar.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Aaetpio can see no farther than the deadstones.’

‘Nor can Utipa,’ said Phosis T’kar, squatting on his haunches and flicking up puffs of salt dust with irritated thoughts. Ahriman felt each one like an electric spark in his mind. ‘Why can’t the Tutelaries see beyond them?’

‘Who knows?’ asked Ahriman, more troubled than he cared to admit.

‘I thought you’d be able to see further. You’re Corvidae after all.’

‘That wouldn’t help here,’ said Ahriman, rising smoothly from a cross-legged position, and dusting glittering salt crystals from the inscribed crimson plates of his armour. His body felt stiff, and it took a moment for muscle memory to reassert control of his limbs after a flight in the aether.

‘In any case,’ he said, ‘I don’t think it would be wise to try on this world. The walls between us and the Great Ocean are thin, and there’s a lot of unchannelled energy here.’

‘You’re probably right,’ agreed Phosis T’kar, sweat dripping down his shaven scalp along the line of an elliptical scar that ran from his crown to the nape of his neck. ‘You think that’s why we linger on this planet?’

‘Entirely likely,’ said Ahriman. ‘There is power here, but the Aghoru have lived in balance for centuries without suffering any ill-effects or mutations. That has to be worth investigating.’

‘Indeed it is,’ said Hathor Maat, apparently unaffected by the furnace heat. ‘There’s precious little else of interest on this parched rock. And I don’t trust the Aghoru. I think they’re hiding something. How does anyone live in a place like this for so long without any signs of mutation?’

Ahriman noted the venom with which his fellow captain spat the last word. Unlike Ahriman or Phosis T’kar, Hathor Maat’s skin was pale, like the smoothest marble, his golden hair like that painted on the heroic mosaics of the Athenaeum. Not a bead of sweat befouled Maat’s sculpted features.

‘I don’t care how they’ve done it,’ said Phosis T’kar. ‘This place bores me. It’s been six months, and we should be making war in the Ark Reach Cluster. Lorgar’s 47th are expecting us, Russ too. And trust me, you don’t want to keep the Wolves waiting any longer than you must.’

‘The primarch says we stay, so we stay,’ said Ahriman.

Sobek, his dutiful Practicus, stepped forward and offered him a goblet of water. Ahriman drained the cool liquid in a single swallow. He shook his head when Sobek held a bronze hes out to refill it.

‘No, take it to remembrancer Eris,’ he commanded. ‘She is at the deadstones and has more need of it than I.’

Sobek nodded and left the shade of the canopy without another word. Ahriman’s battle-plate cooled him, recycling the moisture of his body and turning aside the worst of the searing heat. The remembrancers that had come to the planet’s surface were not so fortunately equipped, and dozens had already been returned to the Photep’s medicae decks suffering from heatstroke and dehydration.

‘You indulge the woman, Ahzek,’ said Hathor Maat. ‘It’s not that hot.’

‘Easy for you to say,’ replied Phosis T’kar, wiping sweat from his skull with a cleaning rag. ‘We can’t all be Pavoni. Some of us have to deal with this heat on our own.’

‘With further study, meditation and mental discipline you might one day achieve a mastery equal to mine,’ replied Maat, and though his tone was jovial, Ahriman knew he wasn’t joking. ‘You Raptora are belligerent sorts, but eventually you might be able to master the necessary Enumerations.’

Phosis T’kar scowled, and a dense cluster of salt crystals flew from the ground beside him, aimed at Hathor Maat’s head. Before it reached its target, the warrior’s hand flashed, quick as lightning, and caught it.

Maat crushed the mass of crystals, letting it spill from his hand like dust.

‘Surely you can muster something better than that?’

‘Enough,’ said Ahriman. ‘Hold your powers in check, both of you. They are not for vulgar displays, especially when there are mortals nearby.’

‘Then why keep them around?’ asked Maat. ‘Simply send her on her way with the others.’

‘That’s what I keep telling him,’ said Phosis T’kar. ‘If she’s so damn keen to learn of the Crusade, send her to a Legion that cares about being immortalised, the Ultramarines or Word Bearers; she doesn’t belong with us.’

It was a familiar sentiment, and Ahriman had heard it a hundred times from all his fellow captains. T’kar was not the most vocal; that honour belonged to Khalophis of the Sixth Fellowship. Whichever viewpoint T’kar took, Khalophis would emulate more vociferously.

‘Should we not be remembered?’ countered Ahriman. ‘The writings of Kallista Eris are among the most insightful I have read from the Remembrancer Order. Why should we be left out of the annals of the Great Crusade?’

‘You know why,’ said Phosis T’kar angrily. ‘Half the Imperium wished us dead not so long ago. They fear us.’

‘They fear what they do not understand,’ said Ahriman. ‘The primarch tells us their fear comes from ignorance. Knowledge will be our illumination to banish that fear.’

Phosis T’kar grunted and carved spirals in the salt with his thoughts.

‘The more they know, the more they’ll fear us. You mark my words,’ he said.

Ahriman ignored Phosis T’kar and stepped out from the shelter of the canopy. The sensations of travelling in his subtle body were all but gone, and the mundane nature of the material world returned to him: the searing heat that had turned his skin the colour of mahogany within an hour of the Stormbird touching down, the oily sweat coating his iron-hard flesh and the crisp scent of the air, a mixture of burned salt and rich spices.

And the swirling aetheric winds that swept the surface of this world.

Ahriman felt power coursing through his body; glittering comet trails of psychic potential aching to be moulded into something tangible. Over a century of training kept that power fluid, washing through his flesh like a gentle tide, preventing dangerous levels of aetheric energy from building. It would be too easy to give in and allow it free rein, but Ahriman knew only too well the danger that represented. He reached up and touched the silver oakleaf worked into his right shoulder guard, and calmed his aetheric field with a deep breath and a whispered recitation of the Enumerations.

Ahriman looked up at the towering mountain, wondering at the vast power of its makers and what the primarch was doing inside it. Until the power to far-see was taken away, he had not realised how blind he was.

‘Where is he?’ hissed Phosis T’kar, echoing his thoughts.

It had been four hours since Magnus the Red had followed Yatiri and his tribe into the Mountain, and the tension had been gnawing at their nerves ever since.

‘You’re worried about him, aren’t you?’ asked Hathor Maat.

‘Since when could you master the powers of the Athanaean?’ asked Ahriman.

‘I don’t need to. I can see you’re both worried,’ countered Maat. ‘It’s obvious.’

‘Aren’t you?’ asked Phosis T’kar.

‘Magnus can look out for himself,’ said Hathor Maat. ‘He told us to wait for him.’

The primarch of the Thousand Sons had indeed told them to await his return, but Ahriman had a sick feeling that something was terribly wrong.

‘Did you see something?’ asked Phosis T’kar, noting Ahriman’s expression. ‘When you travelled the Great Ocean, you saw something, didn’t you? Tell me.’

‘I saw nothing,’ said Ahriman bitterly. He turned and marched back into his pavilion, retrieving his weapons from a long footlocker of acacia and jade. He holstered a pistol that was as fine an example of the armourer’s art as any crafted by the artificers of Vulkan’s Salamanders, its flanks plated with golden backswept hawk wings and its grip textured with stippled hide.

As well as his pistol, he also bore a long heqa staff of ivory with a hooked blade at its end, its length gold-plated and reinforced with blue copper bands.

‘What are you doing?’ asked Hathor Maat when he emerged, accoutred for war.

‘I’m taking the Sekhmet into that mountain,’ said Ahriman. ‘Are you coming?’

Lemuel Gaumon reclined against one of the deadstones in the foothills of the enormous mountain, trying to keep within its shadow and wishing his frame was rather less fulsome. Growing up in the mid-continental drift-hives of the Nordafrik enclaves, he was used to heat, but this world was something else entirely.

He wore a long banyan of lightweight linen, colourfully embroidered with interlocking motifs of lightning bolts, bulls, spirals and numerous other less easily identifiable symbols. It had been woven by a blind tailor in the Sangha commercia-subsid to his design, the imagery taken from the scrolls collected in the secret library of his villa in Mobayi. Dark-skinned and shaven-headed, his deep-set eyes carefully watched the encampment of the Thousand Sons, while he occasionally made notes in a pad balanced on his thigh.

Perhaps a hundred scarlet pavilions dotted the salt plains, their sides tied up, each home to a band of Thousand Sons warriors. He’d noted which Fellowships were represented: Ahriman’s Scarab Occult, Ankhu Anen’s Fourth, Khalophis’s Sixth, Hathor Maat’s Third and Phosis T’kar’s Second.

A sizeable war-host of Astartes warriors was encamped before the Mountain, the atmosphere strangely tense, though Lemuel could see no cause for it. It was clear they weren’t expecting trouble, but it was equally clear something was troubling them.

Lemuel closed his eyes and let his consciousness drift on the invisible currents of power that rippled in the air like a heat haze. Though his eyes were shut, he could feel the energy of this world like a vivid canvas of colour, brighter than the greatest works of Serena d’Angelus or Kelan Roget. Beyond the deadstones, the Mountain was a black wall of nothingness, a cliff of utter darkness as solid and as impenetrable as adamantium.

But further out into the salt flats, the world was alive with colour.

The Thousand Sons encampment was a blazing inferno of shifting colours and light, like an atomic explosion frozen at the instant of detonation. Even amid that blazing illumination, some lights shone brighter than others, and three such minds were gathered beneath where Lemuel knew Captain Ahriman’s pavilion was pitched. Something preyed upon these minds, and he dearly wished he was strong enough to venture closer. A bright mind, a supernova amongst guttering candles, normally burned at the heart of the encampment, but not today.

Perhaps that was the source of the Thousand Sons’ tension.

Their great leader was in absentia.

Frustrated, Lemuel’s mind drifted away from the Thousand Sons, and he let it approach the sunken dwellings of the Aghoru. Cut into the dry earth, they were as dark and lifeless as the Thousand Sons were bright and vital. The Aghoru people were as barren as the salt plain, without the slightest spark of a presence within them.

He opened his eyes, exhaling and reciting the Mantra of the Sangoma to calm his racing heartbeat. Lemuel took a drink from his canvas-wrapped canteen, the water warm and gritty but deliciously welcome. Three more canteens lay in the pack next to him, but they would only last the rest of the afternoon. By nightfall, he would need to refill them, for the remorseless heat let up only marginally during the hours of darkness.

‘How can anyone live in this heat?’ he wondered aloud for the hundredth time.

‘They don’t,’ said a woman’s voice behind him, and he smiled at the sound. ‘They mostly live in the fertile river deltas further north or on the western coast.’

‘So you said, my dear Camille,’ he said, ‘but to willingly trek from there to this desolate place seems to defy all logic.’

The speaker moved into view, and he squinted through the sun’s glare at a young woman dressed in a tight-fitting vest, lightweight cut-off fatigues and dusty sandals. She carried a combination vox-recorder and picter in a sling around her neck, and a canvas shoulder bag stuffed with notebooks and sketchpads.

Camille Shivani cut an impressive figure with her sun-browned skin, long dark hair bound up beneath a loose turban of wrapped silk and dark glare-shields. Her skin was ruddy brown, her manner forthright, and Lemuel liked her immensely. She smiled down at him, and he gave her his best, most winning smile in return. It was a wasted effort; Camille’s appetites did not include the likes of him, but it never hurt to be courteous.

‘Lemuel, when it comes to humanity, even lost strands of it, you should know that logic has precious little to do with how people behave,’ said Camille Shivani, brushing her hands together to clear dust from the thin gloves she always wore.

‘So very true. Why else would we linger here when there’s nothing worth remembering?’

‘Nothing worth remembering? Nonsense, there’s lots to learn here,’ she said.

‘For an archeohistorian, maybe,’ he said.

‘I spent a week living with the Aghoru, exploring the ruins their villages are built upon. It’s fascinating; you should come with me next time I make a trip.’

‘Me? What would I learn there?’ he asked. ‘I study how societies form after compliance, not the ruins of dead ones.’

‘Yes, but what was there before has an impact on what’ll follow. You know as well as I do that you can’t just stamp one civilisation on top of another without taking into account the previous culture’s history.’

‘True, but the Aghoru don’t seem to have much history to supplant,’ he said sadly. ‘I don’t think what they have will long survive the coming of the Imperium.’

‘You might be right, but that just makes studying them while we can even more important.’

Lemuel clambered to his feet, the effort causing him to break out in torrents of sweat.

‘Not a good climate for a fat man,’ he said.

‘You’re not fat,’ said Camille. ‘You’re generously portioned.’

‘And you are very kind, but I know what I am,’ said Lemuel, brushing his banyan free of salt crystals. He looked around the circle of towering stones. ‘Where are your companions?’

‘Ankhu Anen returned to the Photep an hour ago to consult his Rosetta scrolls.’

‘And Mistress Eris?’ he asked.

Camille grinned. ‘Kalli’s returning from taking rubbings from the deadstones on the eastern slope of the Mountain. She should be back soon.’

Kallista Eris, Camille and Ankhu Anen had spent hundreds of fruitless hours attempting to translate the graceful, flowing runes that wove around the deadstones. So far, they had met with limited success, but if anyone could decipher their meaning it would be this triumvirate.

‘Are you any closer to translating the script on the stones?’ asked Lemuel, waving a hand at the ancient menhirs.

‘We’re getting there,’ said Camille, dropping her bag beside his and lifting the picter from around her neck. ‘Kalli thinks it’s a form of proto-eldar, rendered in a dialect that’s ancient even to them, which will make it next to impossible to pin down an exact meaning, but Ankhu Anen knows of some works on Prospero that might shed some light on the runes.’

‘On Prospero?’ asked Lemuel, suddenly interested.

‘Yes, in the Athenaeum, some big library the Thousand Sons have on their home world.’

‘Did he say anything about the library?’ asked Lemuel.

Camille shrugged, taking off her glare shields and rubbing her gritty eyes. ‘No, I don’t think so. Why?’

‘No reason,’ he said, smiling as he saw Kallista Eris approaching the circle of deadstones, and grateful for the distraction.

Wrapped in a flowing white jellabiya, Kallista was a beautiful, olive-skinned young woman who, did she but desire it, had the pick of the male remembrancers attached to the 28th Expedition Fleet. Not that there were many remembrancers attached; the Thousand Sons were ruthlessly selective in choosing those allowed to accompany their campaigns and record their exploits.

In any case, Kallista declined every offer of companionship, spending most of her time with Lemuel and Camille. He had no interest in a liaison with either woman, content simply to spend time with two fellow students of the unknown.

‘Welcome back, my dear,’ he said, moving past Camille to take Kallista’s hand. Her skin was hot, the fingers charcoal stained. She carried a drawstring bag over one shoulder, rolled up sheets of rubbing paper protruding from its neck.

Kallista Eris was a student of history, one whose field of expertise was the manner in which knowledge of the past was obtained and transmitted. Once, in the library aboard the Photep, she had shown Lemuel holo-picts of a crumbling text known as the Shiji, a record of the ancient emperors of a vanished culture of Terra. Kallista explained how its factual accuracy had to be questioned, given that its author’s intent appeared to be the vilification of the emperor previous to the one he now served. The veracity of any historical text, she explained, could only be interpreted by understanding the writer’s intent, style and bias.

‘Lemuel, Camille,’ said Kallista. ‘Do you have any water? I forgot to take extra.’

Lemuel chuckled. ‘Only you would forget to take enough water on a world like this.’

Kallista nodded, running a hand through her auburn hair, her skin reddening even beneath her sunburn. Her green eyes sparkled with amused embarrassment, and Lemuel saw why so many desired her. She had a vulnerability that made men alternately want to protect or deflower her. Strangely, she seemed oblivious to this fact.

Lemuel knelt beside his pack to retrieve a canteen, but Camille tapped him on the shoulder and said, ‘Save it, looks like we’re getting some brought to us.’

He turned and lifted a hand to shade his eyes, seeing one of the Astartes walking towards them with a bronze, oval-shaped vase held out before him. The warrior’s head was bare, apart from a trailing topknot of black hair, and his golden-skinned features were curiously flat, his eyes dark and hooded like a cobra’s. Despite the heat, Lemuel shivered, catching a flicker of cold power hazing the warrior’s outline.

‘Sobek,’ said Lemuel.

‘You know him?’ asked Camille.

‘Of him. He’s one of the Scarab Occult, the Legion veterans. He’s also Captain Ahriman’s Practicus,’ he said. Seeing Kallista’s look of incomprehension, he added. ‘I think it’s a rank of proficiency of some sort, like a gifted apprentice or something.’

‘Ah.’

The Astartes warrior halted, towering over them like a solid slab of ceramite. His battle armour was gloriously intricate, the crimson plates engraved with geometric forms and sigils that Lemuel recognised as similar to those woven into his banyan. Sobek’s right shoulder guard was stamped with a golden scarab, while the left bore the serpentine star icon of the Thousand Sons.

In the centre of the star was a black raven’s head, smaller than the scarab, yet subtly given more relevance thanks to its positioning within the Legion’s symbol. This was the symbol of the Corvidae, one of the cults of the Thousand Sons, though he had been able to glean precious little of is tenets during his time with the 28th Expedition.

‘Lord Ahriman sends this hes of water,’ said Sobek. His voice was sonorous and fulsome, as though produced in a deep well within his chest. Lemuel supposed the peculiar Astartes tone was due to the sheer volume of biological hardware within his body.

‘That’s very gracious of him,’ said Camille, holding her hands out to receive the hes.

‘Lord Ahriman instructed me go give the water to Remembrancer Eris,’ said Sobek.

Camille frowned and said, ‘Oh, right. Well, here she is.’

Kallista took the proffered hes with a grateful smile.

‘Please send Lord Ahriman my thanks,’ she said, placing the heavy vase on the ground. ‘It’s most considerate of him to think of me.’

‘I shall pass your message to him when he returns,’ said Sobek.

‘Returns?’ asked Lemuel. ‘Where’s he gone?’

Sobek glared down at him, and then marched back towards his encampment. The Astartes had not answered his question, but Lemuel caught an upward flicker of Sobek’s eyes towards the Mountain.

‘Friendly sort, isn’t he?’ remarked Camille. ‘Makes you wonder why we bother, eh?’

‘I know what you mean; none of them are exactly welcoming, are they?’ said Lemuel.

‘Some are,’ pointed out Kallista, emptying water into her canteen, and managing to spill more than she transferred. ‘Ankhu Anen has helped us, hasn’t he? And Captain Ahriman is quite forthcoming in his remembrances. I’ve learned a lot from him about the Great Crusade.’

‘Here, let me help you,’ said Lemuel, kneeling beside her and holding the vase steady. Like most things designed for or by Astartes, it was oversized and heavy in mortal hands, more so now that it was filled with water.

‘I’d be fascinated to read what you’ve accumulated so far,’ he said.

‘Of course, Lemuel,’ said Kallista. She smiled at him, and he felt his soul shine.

‘So where do you think Ahriman’s gone?’ asked Camille.

‘I think I know,’ said Lemuel with a conspiratorial grin. ‘Want to go look?’

The Sekhmet, The Scarab Occult, Magnus’s Veterans, whichever name they bore, it was one of fierce pride and devotion. None of lower grade than a Philosophus, the last cult rank a warrior could hold before facing the Dominus Liminus, these veterans were the best and brightest of the Legion. Having transcended their likes and dislikes, defied their mortality and broken down their idea of self, these warriors fought from a place of perfect calm.

The Khan had called them automatons, Russ decried their fighting spirit and Ferrus Manus had likened them to robots. Having heard his primarch’s tales of the master of the Iron Hands, Ahriman suspected the latter comment was intended as a compliment.

Clad in hulking suits of burnished crimson Terminator armour, the Sekhmet crunched out over the salt plains and onto the lower slopes of the Mountain. Ahriman felt the presence of his Tutelary above him, sensing its unease as the psychic void beyond the deadstones loomed ever closer.

Phosis T’kar and Hathor Maat marched alongside him, their strides sure and eager. The shimmering forms of Tutelaries darted thorough the air like wary shoals of fish in the presence of pack predators. Like Aaetpio, the Tutelaries of his fellow warriors and captains were fearful in the face of the Mountain’s emptiness.

To those without aether-sight, Tutelaries were invisible, but to the Thousand Sons with power they were bright visions of exquisite beauty. Aaetpio had served Ahriman faithfully for nearly a century, its form inconstant and beautiful, a vision of eyes and ever turning wheels of light. Utipa was a bullish entity of formless energy, as bellicose as Phosis T’kar, where Paeoc resembled an eagle fashioned from a million golden suns, as vain and proud as Hathor Maat.

Ahriman had thought them angels at first, but that was an old word, a word cast aside by those who studied the mysteries of the aether as too emotive, too loaded with connotations of the divine. Tutelaries were simply fragments of the Primordial Creator given form and function by those with the power to bend them to their will.

He linked his thoughts briefly with Aaetpio’s. If Magnus was in trouble, then they would need to find out without the sight or aid of their Tutelaries.

Though he had seen nothing tangible in any of his divinations, Ahriman’s intuition told him something was amiss. As Magister Templi of all Prospero’s cults, Magnus taught that intuition was just as important a tool for sifting meaning from the currents of the Great Ocean as direct vision.

Ahriman suspected trouble, but Phosis T’kar and Hathor Maat longed for it.

The 28th Expedition had come to Aghoru three months ago. Its official designation in the War Council Records was Twenty-Eight Sixteen, though no one in the XV Legion ever called it that. Following the successful compliance of Twenty-Eight Fifteen, the sixty-three ships of the 28th Expedition translated from the Great Ocean to find a system of dead worlds, empty of life and desolate.

Indications were that life had once existed here, but now did not. What had caused such a system-wide cataclysm was unknown, but as the fleet made its way towards the sun, it became clear that life on the fifth planet had somehow survived the disaster.

How Magnus had known this insignificant shoal of the galaxy had included a planet inhabited by a severed offshoot of humanity was a mystery, for there were no residual electomagnetics or long-dead emissions to suggest anything lived here.

The Rehahti urged Magnus to order the fleet onwards, for the Crusade was at its height and the Thousand Sons had their share of plaudits yet to earn. Nearly two centuries had passed since the Crusade was launched in glory and fanfare, two centuries of exploration and war that had seen world after world folded into the body of the resurgent Imperium of Man.

Of those two centuries, the Thousand Sons had fought for less than a hundred years.

In the early years of the Crusade, prior to the coming of Magnus, the Astartes of the Thousand Sons had proven especially susceptible to unstable genes, resulting in spontaneous tissue rejection, vastly increased psychic potential and numerous other variations from the norm. Labels like ‘mutants’ and ‘freaks’ were hung upon the Thousand Sons, and for a time it seemed as though they would suffer an ignoble ending as a footnote in the history of the Great Crusade.

Then the Emperor’s fleet had discovered Magnus the Red in a forgotten backwater of the galaxy, on the remote world of Prospero, and everything changed.

‘As I am your son, they shall become mine,’ were Magnus’s words to the Emperor, words that had changed the destiny of the Thousand Sons forever.

United with the Legion that carried his genetic legacy, Magnus bent every shred of his towering intellect to undoing the damage their aberrant genes had done.

And he had succeeded.

Magnus saved his Legion, but the Crusade had progressed in the time it had taken him to do it, and his warriors were eager to share in the glory their brothers were earning with every passing day.

The Expedition Fleets of the Legions pushed ever outwards from the cradle of humanity to reunify the Emperor’s realm. Like squabbling brothers, each of the primarchs vied for a place at their father’s side, but only one was ever good enough to fight alongside the saviour of humanity: Horus Lupercal, Primarch of the Luna Wolves and beloved son of the Emperor.

The Emperor stood at the head of the Luna Wolves and Guilliman’s Ultramarines, ready to unleash his terrible thunder against the greenskin of Ullanor, a war that promised to be gruelling and punishing. Who better than the favoured son of the Emperor to stand at his side as they throttled the life from this barbarian foe?

Ullanor would be a war to end all wars, but there was fighting closer to hand that demanded the attention of the Thousand Sons. Lorgar’s Word Bearers and the Space Wolves of Leman Russ fought in the Ark Reach Cluster, a group of binary stars occupied by a number of belligerent planetary empires that rejected the Imperium’s offer to become part of something greater.

The Wolf King had sent repeated calls for the XV Legion to join the fighting, but Magnus ignored them all.

He had found something of greater interest on Aghoru.

He had found the Mountain.

Two

Drums of the Mountain
Temple of the Syrbotae
A place of the dead

They had only been climbing for twenty minutes, but already Lemuel was beginning to regret his hasty idea to spy upon the Thousand Sons. He’d discovered the steps hidden in the rocks on one of his frequent solitary walks in the lower reaches of the titanic mountain. Set in a cunningly concealed cleft a hundred metres from the deadstones, the steps wound through the rock of the Mountain, climbing a steep, but far more direct path than the Astartes would be following.

It might be more direct, but it certainly wasn’t easier. His banyan was stained with sweat, and he imagined he didn’t smell too pleasant. The sound of his heart was like the pounding kettledrums of a triumphal band welcoming the Emperor himself.

‘How much further is it?’ asked Camille. She was relishing this chance to venture deeper into the Mountain, though Kallista appeared rather less enthusiastic. The Astartes awed and scared her, but the idea of spying on them had sent a delicious thrill through her when he had suggested it. He couldn’t read her aura, but her expression said she was regretting her decision to come along.

Lemuel paused, looking up at the metal yellow of the sky to catch his breath and slow his racing heartbeat.

‘Another ten minutes, maybe,’ he said.

‘You sure you’ll last that long?’ asked Camille, only half-joking.

‘I’ll be fine,’ he assured her, taking a swig of water from his canteen. ‘I’ve climbed this way before. It’s not much higher. I think.’

‘Just don’t collapse on me,’ said Camille. ‘I don’t want to have to carry you back down.’

‘You can always roll me back down,’ replied Lemuel, attempting some levity.

‘Seriously,’ said Camille, ‘are you sure you’re up to this climb?’

‘I’m fine,’ he insisted, with more conviction than he felt. ‘Trust me, it’s worth the effort.’

Back at the deadstones it had seemed like a grand adventure for the three of them to undertake, but the numbness of the senses he felt was like having his ears stoppered and his eyes sewn shut. From below, the Mountain had been a black wall of nothingness, but climbing deeper into the rocks, Lemuel felt as if that nothingness was swallowing him whole.

He passed the canteen around, grateful that Kallista and Camille indulged his desire to stop for a rest. It was early evening, but the day’s heat hadn’t let up. Still, at least there was some shade here. They could afford a brief stop, for the only other route he knew would take at least an hour to traverse, even for Astartes.

Lemuel took the bandanna from around his neck and mopped his face. The cloth was soaked by the time he was done, and he wrung it out with a grimace. Camille looked up the steps, craning her neck to try to see the top.

‘So where does this lead exactly?’ she asked.

‘There’s a plateau a bit higher up,’ he said. ‘It’s like a viewing platform of some sort.’

‘A viewing platform?’ asked Kallista. ‘For what?’

‘It looks out over a wide valley I call the Temple of the Syrbotae.’

‘Syrbotae?’ asked Camille. ‘What’s that?’

‘A very old legend of my homeland,’ replied Lemuel. ‘The Syrbotae were a race of giants from the Aethiopian kingdom of Meroe.’

‘Why do you call it that, a temple I mean?’ asked Kallista, horrified at the word.

‘You’ll understand when we get there.’

‘You have a way of choosing words that could get you into trouble,’ said Camille.

‘Not at all, my dear,’ said Lemuel. ‘The Thousand Sons are nothing if not rebels. I think they would appreciate the irony.’

‘Rebels? What are you talking about?’ asked Kallista angrily.

‘Nothing,’ said Lemuel, realising he had said too much. Stripped of his ability to read auras, he was being careless. ‘Just a bad joke.’

He smiled to reassure Kallista he had been joking, and she smiled back.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We should get going. I want to show you something spectacular.’

It took them another thirty minutes to reach the plateau, by which time Lemuel swore never to climb the Mountain again, no matter how spectacular the views or what the enticement. The sound of his drumming heartbeat seemed louder than ever, and Lemuel vowed to shed some weight before it killed him.

The sky was a darker shade of yellow brown. The light would never really fade, so he wasn’t worried about negotiating the descent.

‘This is amazing,’ said Kallista, looking back the way they had climbed. ‘You were so right, Lemuel.’

‘Yeah,’ agreed Camille, taking out her picter. ‘Not bad at all.’

Lemuel shook his head.

‘No, not the salt flats. Over there,’ he said, waving towards a row of spiked rocks that looked like slender stalagmites at the edge of the plateau. If the artificiality of the Mountain had ever been in doubt, the sight of the stalagmites, which were clearly the remains of fluted balustrades, would have dispelled it.

‘Over there,’ he said between gulps of air. ‘Look over there.’

Camille and Kallista walked over to the stalagmites, and he saw the amazement in their body language. He smiled, pleased that he hadn’t let them down with his talk of a spectacular view. He stood up and stretched his back. His breath was returning to normal, but the drumming in his ears hadn’t let up one bit.

‘You weren’t wrong to call it a temple,’ said Camille, looking down into the valley.

‘Yes, it’s quite a view, isn’t it?’ said Lemuel, regaining some of his composure.

‘It is, but that’s not what I mean.’

‘It’s not?’ he asked, finally realising that the drumming he was hearing wasn’t in his head. It was coming from the valley, a haunting, relentless beat that was hypnotic and threatening at the same time. The percussive booms of scores of drums interleaved with brutal disharmony, plucking at Lemuel’s nerves and sending tremors of unease down his spine.

Intrigued, he walked stiffly on tired legs to join the two women at the edge of the plateau.

He put a hand on Camille’s shoulder and looked down into the valley.

His eyes widened and his jaw hung open in surprise.

‘Throne of Terra!’ he said.

Ahriman heard the drums, recognising the dissonant notes echoing from the Mountain as those once declared forbidden in an ancient age. Nothing good could come of such a sound, and Ahriman felt certain that something unnatural was being orchestrated within the valley. The Sekhmet matched his pace, their heavy suits driven on by uncompromising will and strength.

‘This bodes ill,’ said Phosis T’kar, as the drums grew louder. ‘Damn, but I do not like this place. I am blind here.’

‘We all are,’ replied Hathor Maat, looking towards the upper reaches of the valley.

Ahriman shared Phosis T’kar’s hatred of the blindness. As one of the Legion’s Adept Exemptus, he had attained supreme summits of mastery, aetheric flight, connection with a Tutelary, and the rites of evocation and invocation. The Sekhmet were powerful warrior-mages, and could call forth powers mortal men could never dream of wielding. On his own, each warrior was capable of subduing worlds, but in this place, with their powers denied them, they were simply Astartes.

Simply Astartes, thought Ahriman with a smile. How arrogant that sounds.

Even as he scanned the valley ahead, Ahriman began forming the basis of a treatise for his grimoire, a discourse on the perils of dependence and overweening pride.

‘There is a lesson here,’ he said. ‘It will do us good to face this without our powers. We have become lax in making war as it was once made.’

‘Always the teacher, eh?’ said Phosis T’kar.

‘Always,’ agreed Ahriman, ‘and always the student. Every experience is an opportunity to learn.’

‘So what lesson can I possibly learn here?’ demanded Hathor Maat. Of them all, Maat had the greatest dread of powerlessness, and the walk into the Mountain had tested his courage in ways beyond what they had faced before.

‘We depend on our abilities to define us,’ said Ahriman, feeling the bass vibration of the drums through the soles of his armoured boots. ‘We must learn to fight as Astartes again.’

‘Why?’ demanded Hathor Maat. ‘We have been gifted with power. The power of the Primordial Creator is in all of us, so why should we not use it?’

Ahriman shook his head. Like him, Hathor Maat had faced the Dominus Liminus, but his mastery of the Enumerations was that of Adept Major. He had achieved self-reliance, but he had yet to achieve the oneness of self and ego-extinction that would allow him to reach the higher Enumerations. Few Pavoni could, and Ahriman suspected Hathor Maat was no exception.

‘You might as well send us in unarmed and say we should fight with our bare hands,’ continued Hathor Maat.

‘Someday you may have to do just that,’ said Ahriman.

The ground, which had been steadily rising for the last hour, began to climb ever more steeply, and the sound of drums grew louder, as though amplified by the soaring walls of the valley. As it always was, Ahriman’s gaze was drawn up the incredible height of the Mountain. The summit was hidden from view by its sheer mass, an endless slope rearing into a cloudless, yellow sky that was darkening to burnt orange.

It seemed inconceivable that this towering peak had been raised by natural means. Its proportions were too perfect, its form too pleasing to the eye, and its curves and lines flowed with a grace that was wholly unnatural. Ahriman had seen such perfect artifice before.

On Prospero.

The Vitruvian pyramids and cult temples of Tizca were constructed using golden means and the numerical series of the Liber Abaci. Their work had been distilled and refined by Magnus the Red to fashion the City of Light with such beauty that all who beheld it were rendered speechless with delight.

Everywhere Ahriman looked he saw evidence of geometric perfection, as though the Mountain’s creator had studied the divine proportions of the ancients and crafted the landmass to their design. Spiral patterns on the ground described perfect curves, pillars of rock were equally spaced, and each angle of cliff and cleft was artfully arranged with mathematical exactitude. Ahriman wondered what cause could be so great as to require such magnificent feats of geomorphic sculpting.

The mouth of the valley funnelled the sound of drums towards them, the beats rising and falling in what, at first, seemed a random pattern, but which Ahriman’s enhanced cognitive processes quickly discerned was not random at all.

‘Prime armaments,’ he ordered, and fifty weapons snapped up in unison, a mix of storm bolters, flamers and newly issued rotary cannons capable of unleashing thousands of shells per minute. Their official designation was assault cannon, but such a graceless name had none of the power of its former incarnation, and numerological study had led the Thousand Sons to keep its previous title: the reaper cannon.

The Mechanicum had not the wit or understanding to recognise the power of names or the mastery and fear a well chosen one could instil. With six letters, three vowels and three consonants, the reaper’s number was nine. Given the organisation of the Thousand Sons into a Pesedjet of nine Fellowships, it was a natural fit and the name had remained.

Ahriman recited the mantras that lifted his mind into the lower Enumerations and calmed his supra-enhanced physiology, allowing him to better process information and react without fear in a hostile environment. Normally this process would enhance his awareness of his surroundings, the essential nature of the world around him laid bare to his senses, but on this mountain the landscape was dead and lifeless to him.

Ahriman saw the diffuse glow of torches and fires ahead. The vibration of the ground was like the heartbeat of the mountain. Was he an ant crawling on the body of some larger organism, insignificant and easily swatted aside?

‘Zagaya,’ said Ahriman, and the Sekhmet formed a staggered arrowhead, with him at its point. Other Legions knew this formation as the speartip, and though Ahriman appreciated the robust, forceful nature of the term, he preferred the ancient name taught to him by the Emperor on Terra at the island fortress of Diemenslandt.

Phosis T’kar moved alongside him, and Ahriman recognised the urge for violence that filled his fellow captain. In his detached state, Ahriman wondered why he always called Phosis T’kar his ‘fellow’ and never his ‘friend’.

‘What are our orders?’ asked Hathor Maat, tense and on edge.

‘No violence unless I order it,’ said Ahriman, opening the vox to the Sekhmet. ‘This is a march of investigation, not of war.’

‘But be ready for it to become a war,’ added Phosis T’kar with relish.

‘Sekhmet, align your humours,’ ordered Ahriman, using his mastery of the Enumerations to alter his body’s internal alchemy. ‘Temper the choleric with the phlegmatic, and bring the sanguine to the fore.’

Ahriman heard Hathor Maat muttering under his breath. Normally a Pavoni could balance his humours with a thought, but without access to the aether, Hathor Maat had to do it like the rest of them: with discipline, concentration and self-will.

The valley widened, and Ahriman saw a host of figures standing at the crest of the slope, like the legendary warriors of Leonidas who fought and died at Thermopylae. Ahriman felt nothing for them, no hatred and no fear. In the lower Enumerations he was beyond such considerations.

With their sunset-coloured robes, baked leather breastplates and long falarica, the Aghoru warriors were the very image of the barbarian tribes of ancient Terra. The warriors were not facing down the valley to repel invaders, but were instead focussed on something deeper in the valley and beyond his sight.

Ahriman’s fingers flexed on the hide grip of his bolter. The warriors above turned at the sound of the Sekhmet’s advance, and Ahriman saw they were all wearing masks of polished glass. Expressionless and without life, they resembled the gold leaf corpse masks placed upon the faces of ancient Mycenaean kings to conceal the decay of their features.

At the most recent conclave of the Rehahti, Magnus had invited Yatiri, the leader of the Aghoru tribes gathered at the Mountain, to speak with them. The proud chieftain stood in the centre of Magnus’s austere pavilion, clad in saffron robes and wearing the ceremonial mirrormask of his people. Yatiri carried a black-bladed falarica and a heqa staff, not unlike those carried by the captains of the Thousand Sons. Though centuries of isolation had separated his people from the Imperium, the regal Yatiri spoke with clarity and fluency as he requested they refrain from entering the valley, explaining that it was a holy place to his people.

Holy. That was the word he had used.

Such a provocative word would have raised the hackles of many Astartes Legions, but the Thousand Sons understood the original meaning of the term – uninjured, sound, healthy – and rose above its connotations of divinity to recognise it for what it truly meant: a place free of imperfection. Yatiri’s request had roused some suspicion among the Legion, but Magnus had given his oath that the Thousand Sons would respect his wishes.

That request had been honoured until this moment.

The Aghoru parted as the Sekhmet approached the crest of the valley, the sharpened blades of their falarica glittering in firelight. Ahriman had no fear of such weapons, but he had no wish to start a fight he didn’t need to.

Ahriman marched towards the Aghoru, keeping his pace steady, and his gaze was lifted upwards in awed amazement as the titanic guardians of the valley were revealed to his sight.

On Prospero, the cult temple of the Pyrae was a vast pyramid of silvered glass with an eternally burning finial at its peak. Where the other cult temples of Tizca raised golden idols of their cult symbols before their gates, the Pyrae boasted a battle-engine of the Titan Legions.

Supplicants to the pyromancers approached along a brazier-lit processional of red marble towards a mighty Warlord Titan. Bearing the proud name Canis Vertex, the engine had once walked beneath the banners of Legio Astorum, its carapace emblazoned with a faded black disc haloed by a flaming blue corona.

Its princeps was killed and its moderati crushed when the engine fell during the bloody campaigns of extermination waged in the middle years of the Great Crusade against the barbaric greenskin of the Kamenka Troika. The Emperor had issued the writs of war, commanding the Thousand Sons, Legio Astorum and a Lifehost of PanPac Eugenians to drive that savage race of xenos from the three satellite planets of Kamenka Ulizarna, a world claimed by the Mechanicum of Mars.

Ahriman remembered well the savagery of that war, the slaughter and relentless, grinding attrition that left tens of thousands dead in its wake. Imperial forces had been victorious after two years of fighting and earned a score of honours for the war banners.

Victory had been won, but the cost had been high. Eight hundred and seventy-three warriors of the Thousand Sons had died, forcing Magnus to reduce his Legion from ten fellowships to the Pesedjet, the nine fellowships of antiquity.

Of greater sorrow to Ahriman was the death of Apophis, Captain of the Fifth Fellowship and his oldest friend. Only now that Apophis was dead, was Ahriman able to use that word.

Canis Vertex had been brought down on the killing fields of Coriovallum in the last days of the war by a gargantuan war machine of the greenskin, crudely built in the image of their warlike gods. Defeat seemed inevitable until Magnus stood before the enemy colossus, wielding the power of the aether like an ancient god of war.

Two giants, one mechanical, one a flesh and blood progeny of the Emperor, they had faced each other across the burning ruins, and it seemed the battle’s conclusion could not have been more foregone.

But Magnus raised his arms, his feathered cloak billowed by unseen storms, and the full fury of the aether unmade the enemy war-engine in a hurricane of immaterial fire that tore the flesh of reality asunder and shook the world to its very foundations.

All those who saw the giant primarch that day would take the sight of his battle with that bloated, hateful, war machine to their graves, his power and majesty indelibly etched on their memories like a scar. Ten thousand warriors bowed their heads to their saviour as he returned to them across a field of the dead.

The Legio Astorum contingent had been destroyed, and Khalophis of the Sixth Fellowship had ‘honoured’ their sacrifice by transporting Canis Vertex back to Prospero and setting it as a silent guardian to the temple of the Pyrae. The raising of such a colossal sentinel was typical Pyrae showmanship, but there was no doubting the impact made by the sight of the dead engine sheened in the orange firelight of the temple.

Ahriman was no stranger to the impossible scale of the Mechanicum war engines, but he had never seen anything to compare with the guardians of the valley.

Taller than Canis Vertex, the identical colossi that stood at the end of the valley were, like the mountain they inhabited, enormous beyond imagining. Soaring, graceful and threatening, they were mighty bipedal constructions that resembled an impossibly slender humanoid form. Crafted from something that resembled porcelain or ceramic the colour of bone, they were manufactured as though moulded from one enormous block.

Their heads were like sinuous helmets studded with glittering gems, and graceful spines flared from their shoulders like angelic wings. These guardians were prepared for war. One arm ended in a mighty fist, the other in an elongated, lance-like weapon, its slim barrel gracefully fluted and hung with faded banners.

‘Sweet Mother of the Abyss,’ said Phosis T’kar at the sight of them.

Ahriman felt the calm he had established within him crumble when confronted by such powerful icons of war. Like gods of battle, the towering creations rendered everything in the valley inconsequential. He saw the same grace and aesthetic in these guardians as he had seen in the valley’s formation. Whoever had willed this mountain into existence had also crafted these guardians to watch over it.

‘What are they?’ asked Hathor Maat.

‘I don’t know,’ said Ahriman. ‘Xenos Titans?’

‘They have the look of eldar about them,’ said Phosis T’kar.

Ahriman agreed. Two decades ago, the Thousand Sons had detected a fleet of eldar vessels on the edge of the Perdus Anomaly. The encounter had been cordial, both forces passing on their way without violence, but Ahriman had never forgotten the elegance of the eldar ships and the ease with which they navigated the stars.

‘They must be war engines,’ said Hathor Maat. ‘Khalophis would kill to see this.’

That was certainly true. Khalophis was Pyrae, and a warmongering student of conflict in all its most brutal forms. If an enemy was to be wiped from the battlefield with overwhelming firepower, it was to Khalophis the Thousand Sons turned.

‘I’m sure he would,’ said Ahriman, dragging his eyes from the titanic war machines. The valley was filled with Aghoru tribesmen, all bearing burning brands or battering their palms bloody on tribal drums.

Phosis T’kar held his bolt pistol at his side, but Ahriman could see his urge to use it was strong. Hathor Maat held his heqa staff at the ready. Warriors who had faced the Dominus Liminus and achieved the rank of adept could release devastating bursts of aetheric energy through their staffs, but here it was no more than a symbol of rank.

‘Hold to the Enumerations,’ he whispered. ‘There is to be no killing unless I give the word.’

Perhaps a thousand men and women in hooded robes and reflective masks filled the valley, surrounding a great altar of basalt that stood before a yawning cave mouth set in the cliff between the towering guardians.

Ahriman immediately saw that this cave was no deliberately crafted entrance to the mountain. An earthquake had ripped it open and the blackness of it seemed darker than the depths of space.

‘What’s going on here?’ demanded Phosis T’kar.

‘I do not know,’ said Ahriman, advancing cautiously through the Aghoru, seeing the crimson plates of the Sekhmet’s armour reflected in their masks. The chanting ceased and the drumming diminished until the valley was utterly silent.

‘Why are they watching?’ hissed Hathor Maat. ‘Why don’t they move?’

‘They’re waiting to see what we do,’ replied Ahriman.

It was impossible to read the Aghoru behind their masks, but he didn’t think there was any hostile intent. The mirror-masked tribesmen simply watched as Ahriman led the Sekhmet through the crowds towards the basalt altar. Its smooth black surface gleamed in the last of the day’s light, like the still waters of a motionless black pool.

Tokens lay strewn across the altar’s surface, bracelets, earrings, dolls of woven reeds and bead necklaces; the personal effects of scores of people. Ahriman saw footprints in the dust leading from the altar to the black tear in the mountainside. Whoever had made them had gone back and forth many times.

He knelt beside the tracks as Phosis T’kar and Hathor Maat approached the altar.

‘What are these?’ wondered Phosis T’kar.

‘Offerings?’ ventured Hathor Maat, lifting a neck torque of copper and onyx, and examining the workmanship with disdain.

‘To what?’ asked Phosis T’kar ‘I didn’t read of any practices of the Aghoru like this.’

‘Nor I, but how else do you explain it?’

‘Yatiri told us the Mountain is a place of the dead,’ said Ahriman, tracing the outline of a print clearly made by someone of far greater stature than any mortal or Astartes.

‘Perhaps this is a rite of memorial,’ said Phosis T’kar.

‘You could be right,’ conceded Hathor Maat, ‘but then where are the dead?’

‘They’re in the Mountain,’ said Ahriman, backing away from the cave as the drums began once again. He rejoined his warriors, planting his staff in the dusty ground.

As one, the Aghoru turned their mirrored masks towards the end of the valley, chanting in unison and moving forwards with short, shuffling steps, the butts of their falarica thumping on the ground in time with every beat of the drums.

‘Mandala,’ ordered Ahriman, and the Sekhmet formed a circle around the altar. Auto-loaders clattered and power fists crackled as energy fields engaged.

‘Permission to open fire?’ requested Hathor Maat, aiming his bolt pistol at the mask of the nearest Aghoru tribesman.

‘No,’ said Ahriman, turning to face the darkness of the cave mouth as wind-blown ash gusted from the depths of the Mountain. ‘This isn’t for us.’

Bleak despair tainted the wind, the dust and memory of a billion corpses decayed to powder and forgotten in the lightless depths of the world.

A shape emerged from the cave, wreathed in swirling ash: hulking, crimson and gold and monstrous.

Three

Magnus
The Sanctum
You must teach him

He couldn’t focus on it. Impressions were all Lemuel could make out: skin that shone as though fire flowed in its veins, mighty wings of feathers and golden plates. A mane of copper hair, ash-stained and wild, billowed around the being’s head, its face appearing as an inconstant swirl of liquid light and flesh, as though no bone formed the basis for its foundations, but something altogether more dynamic and vital.

Lemuel felt sick to his stomach at the sight, yet was unable to tear his gaze from this towering being.

Wait… Was it towering?

With each second, it seemed as though the apparition’s shape changed without him even being aware of it. Without seeming to vary from one second to the next, the being was alternately a giant, a man, a god, or a being of radiant light and a million eyes.

‘What is it?’ asked Lemuel, the words little more than a whisper. ‘What have they done?’

He couldn’t look away, knowing on some primal level that the fire that burned in this being’s heart was dangerous, perhaps the most dangerous thing in the world. Lemuel wanted to touch it, though he knew he would be burned to ashes were he to get too close.

Kallista screamed, and the spell was broken.

Lemuel dropped to his knees and vomited, the contents of his stomach spilling down the rock face. His heaving breath flowed like milky smoke from his mouth, and he stared in amazement at his stomach’s contents, the spattered mass glittering as though the potential of what it had once been longed to reconstitute itself. The air seethed with ambition, as though a power that not even the deadstones could contain flexed its muscles.

The moment passed and Lemuel’s vomit was just vomit, his breath invisible and without form. He could not take his eyes from the inchoate being below, his previously overwhelmed senses now firmly rooted in the mundane reality of the world. Tears spilled down his cheeks, and he wiped his face with his sleeve.

Kallista sobbed uncontrollably, shaking as though in the midst of a seizure. Her hands clawed the ground, scratching her nails bloody as though she were desperately writing something in the dust.

‘Must come out,’ she wept. ‘Can’t stay inside. Fire must come out or it’ll burn me up.’

She looked up at Lemuel, silently imploring him to help. Before he could move, her eyes rolled back in their sockets and she slumped forward. Lemuel wanted to go to her aid, but his limbs were useless. Beside Kallista, Camille remained upright, her face blanched beneath her tan. Her entire body shook, and her jaw hung open in awed wonder.

‘He’s beautiful… So very beautiful,’ she said, hesitantly lifting her picter and clicking off shots of the monstrous being.

Lemuel spat a mouthful of acrid bile and shook his head.

‘No,’ he said. ‘He’s a monster.’

She turned, and Lemuel was shocked at her anger. ‘How can you say that? Look at him.’

Lemuel screwed his eyes shut, only gradually opening them once again to look upon this incredible figure. He still saw the light shining in its heart, but where before it had been beguilingly dangerous, it was now soothing and hypnotic.

Like a badly tuned picter suddenly brought into focus, the being’s true form was revealed: a broad-shouldered giant in exquisite battle-plate of gold, bronze and leather. Sheathed at his side were his weapons, a curved sword with an obsidian haft and golden blade, and a heavy pistol of terrifying proportions.

Though the warrior was hundreds of metres below him, Lemuel saw him as clearly as a vivid memory or the brightest image conjured by his imagination.

He smiled, now seeing the beauty Camille saw.

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how I didn’t see it before.’

A billowing mantle of golden feathers floated at the being’s shoulders, hung with thuribles and trailing parchments fixed with wax seals. Great ebony horns curled up from his breastplate, matching the two that sprang from his shoulders. A pale tabard decorated with a blazing sun motif hung at his belt, and a heavy book, bound in thick red hide, was strung about his armour on golden chains.

Lemuel’s eyes were drawn to the book, its unknown contents rich with the promise of knowledge and the secret workings of the universe. A golden hasp was secured with a lock fashioned from lead. Lemuel would have traded his entire wealth and even his very soul to open that book and peer into its depths.

He felt a hand on his arm and allowed himself to be pulled to his feet. Camille hugged him, overcome with wonder and love, and Lemuel took pleasure in the embrace.

‘I never thought to see him this close,’ said Camille.

Lemuel didn’t answer, watching as two figures followed the being from the cave. One was an Aghoru tribesman in a glittering mask and orange robe, the other a thin man wearing an ash-stained robe of a remembrancer. They were irrelevant. The majestic being of light was all that mattered.

As though hearing his thoughts, the warrior looked up at him.

He wore a golden helmet, plumed with a mane of scarlet hair, his face wise beyond understanding, like a tribal elder or venerable sage.

Camille was right. He was beautiful, perfect and beautiful.

Still embracing, Lemuel and Camille sank to their knees.

Lemuel stared back at the magnificent being, only now seeing that a single flaw marred his perfection. A golden eye, flecked with iridescent colours without name, blinked and Lemuel saw that the warrior looked out at the world through this eye alone. Where his other eye should have been was smooth and unblemished, as if no eye had ever sat there.

‘Magnus the Red,’ said Lemuel. ‘The Crimson King.’

Aghoru’s sun had finally set, though the sky still glowed faintly with its light. Night did not last long here, but it provided a merciful respite from the intense heat of the day. Ahriman carried his golden deshret helmet in the crook of his arm as he made his way towards his primarch’s pavilion. His connection to the secret powers of the universe had established itself the moment he had led the Sekhmet past the deadstones. Aaetpio’s light had welcomed him, and the presence of the Tutelary was as refreshing as a cool glass of water in the desert.

Ahriman’s relief at the sight of Magnus emerging from the cave was matched only by the recognition of the disappointment in his eyes. The magnificent primarch glared down at the circle of warriors gathered around the altar, and then shook his head. Even denied the use of his enhanced acuity in the Mountain, Ahriman had felt his master’s enormous presence, a power that transcended whatever wards were woven into the stones of the Mountain.

Magnus marched past them, not even bothering to further acknowledge their presence. The masked tribesman, who Ahriman knew must be Yatiri, walked alongside the primarch, and Mahavastu Kallimakus, Magnus’s personal scribe, trotted after them, whispering words into a slender wand that were then transcribed by a clattering quill unit attached to his belt.

‘This was a mistake,’ said Hathor Maat. ‘We shouldn’t have come here.’

Ahriman rounded angrily on him, saying, ‘You were only too keen to march when I suggested it.’

‘It was better than sitting about doing nothing, but I did say that the primarch told us to wait,’ Maat said with a shrug.

Ahriman had wanted to lash out at Hathor Maat, feeling his self-control faltering in the face of the Pavoni’s smug arrogance. That he was right only made it worse.

He knew he should have trusted Magnus’s judgement, but he had doubted. At best it would probably mean a public apology to Yatiri, at worst potential exclusion from the Rehahti, the inner coven of the Thousand Sons chosen by Magnus to address whatever issues were currently concerning the Legion.

Its members were ever-changing, and inclusion within the Rehahti was dependent on many things, not least an Astartes’s standing within the Legion. The cults of the Thousand Sons vied for prominence and a place in the primarch’s inner circle, knowing that to bask in his radiance would only enhance their powers.

As the power of the aether waxed and waned, so too did the mystical abilities of the cults. Invisible currents inimical to one discipline would boost the powers of another, and portents of the Great Ocean’s ever-changing tides were read and interpreted by the Legion’s geomancers with obsessive detail. At present the Pyrae was in the ascendance, while Ahriman’s cult, the Corvidae, was at its lowest ebb for nearly fifty years. For centuries, the Corvidae had been pre-eminent within the ranks of the Thousand Sons, but over the last few decades, their power to read the twisting paths of the future had diminished until their seers could barely penetrate the shallows of things to come.

The currents of the Great Ocean were swelling and boisterous, the geomancers warning of a great storm building within its depths, though they could see nothing of its source. The subtle currents were obscured by the raging tides that empowered the more bellicose disciplines, ringing in the blood of those whose mastery only stretched to the lower echelons.

It was galling that reckless firebrands like Khalophis and Auramagma strutted like lords while the hidden seers and sorcerers who had guided the Thousand Sons since their inception were forced to the sidelines. Yet there was nothing Ahriman could do, save try every day to re-establish his connection to the distant shores of the future.

He put such thoughts aside, rising through the Enumerations to calm himself and enter a contemplative state. The pavilion of Magnus loomed ahead of him, a grand, three-cornered pyramid of polarised glass and gold that shimmered in the evening’s glow like a half-buried diamond. Opaque from the outside, transparent on the inside, it was the perfect embodiment of the leader of the Thousand Sons.

Three Terminators of the Scarab Occult stood at each corner. Each carried a bladed sekhem staff, and their storm bolters were held tightly across the jade and amber scarab design on their breastplates.

Brother Amsu stood at the entrance to the pavilion, holding a rippling banner of scarlet and ivory. Ahriman’s pride at the sight of the banner was tempered by the fact that he had incurred his primarch’s displeasure by taking the Sekhmet into the Mountain.

Ahriman stopped before Amsu and allowed him to read his aetheric aura, confirming his identity more completely than any gene-scanner or molecular-reader ever could.

‘Brother Ahriman,’ said Amsu, ‘welcome to the Rehahti. Lord Magnus is expecting you.’

The inside of the pavilion would have surprised most people with its austerity. Given the suspicions that had surrounded the Thousand Sons since their earliest days, those mortals lucky enough to be granted an audience with Magnus the Red always expected his chambers to be hung with esoteric symbols, arcane apparatus and paraphernalia of the occult.

Instead, the walls were rippling glass, the floor pale marble quarried from the ventral mountains of Prospero. Carefully positioned black tiles veined with gold formed a repeating geometric spiral that coiled out from the centre.

The Captains of Fellowship stood upon the spiral, their distance from the centre but one indication of their standing within the Rehahti. Ahriman walked calmly along the dark portions, past the assembled warriors, to his place upon it. Beneath the crystal apex of the pyramid a golden disc in the shape of a radiating sun met the terminations of both black and white tiles, the heart of the gathering.

Magnus the Red stood upon the golden sun.

The Primarch of the Thousand Sons was a magnificent warrior and scholar beyond compare, yet his outward mien was that of a man faintly embarrassed by his pre-eminence amongst equals. Ahriman knew it was a façade, albeit a necessary one, for who could stand face to face with a being whose intellect and treasury of knowledge rendered all other accomplishments meaningless?

His skin was the colour of molten copper, the plates of his armour beaten gold and hard-baked leather, his mail a fine mesh of blackened adamant. The magisterial scarlet plume of his helmet spilled around the curling horns of his armour, and his mighty cloak of feathers was like a waterfall of bright plumage belonging to some vainglorious bird of prey. Partially hidden within that cloak was a thick tome, bound in the same, stipple-textured hide as that on Ahriman’s pistol grip. It came from the body of a psychneuein, a vicious psychic predator of Prospero that had all but wiped out the planet’s previous civilisation in ages past.

The primarch’s expression was impossible to read, but Ahriman took solace in the fact that his position had not yet fallen to the outer reaches of the spiral. Magnus’s eye glittered with colour, its hue never fixed and always changing, though for this gathering it had assumed an emerald aspect with flecks of violet in its iris.

Phosis T’kar stood near Ahriman to his right, with Khalophis on the spiral across from him. Hathor Maat was behind him and to his left, while Uthizzar was to his right and at the furthest extent of the spiral. A warrior’s standing was not simply measured by his proximity to the centre of the spiral, but by myriad other indicators: the position of the warrior next to him, behind him and across from him. Who was obscured, who was visible, the arc of distance between his position and the sun disc, all played their part in the dance of supremacy. Each member’s position interacted subtly with the other, creating a web of hierarchy that only Magnus could fathom.

Ahriman could not read the aetheric auras of his fellow captains, and he felt Aaetpio’s absence keenly. He had not summoned Aaetpio to the meeting, for it would be overwhelmed in the face of the primarch’s power. Magnus himself had no Tutelary, for what could a fragment of the Primordial Creator teach one who had stared into its depths and mastered its every nuance?

Magnus nodded as Ahriman took his place on the spiral and Brother Amon stepped from the shadows of the pyramid to pull the golden doors shut. Ahriman had not seen or sensed Amon’s presence, but few ever did. Equerry to Magnus and Captain of the Ninth Fellowship, Amon trained the ‘Hidden Ones’, the Scout Auxilia of the Thousand Sons.

‘The Sanctum awaits the Symbol of Thothmes,’ announced Amon, the crimson of his armour seeming to blend with the shadows that gathered around the edges of the pyramid.

Magnus nodded and lifted his golden khopesh from his belt. A flick of his thumb, and the haft extended with a smooth hiss, transforming the sickle-sword into a long-bladed polearm. Magnus rapped the staff on the sun disc, tracing an intricate, twisting shape on the ground.

Ahriman pursed his lips together as the world went dim and the interior of the pyramid was shielded from outside eyes. To be cut off from the aether was unpleasant, but now no one could eavesdrop within the pyramid by any means, be they technological or psychic.

Magnus had once boasted that not even the Emperor himself could penetrate the invisible veil cast around the Rehahti by the Symbol of Thothmes.

‘Are we all assembled?’ demanded Ahriman, speaking as the Legion’s Chief Librarian. On Prospero, gatherings of the Rehahti would be conducted in aetheric speech, but here the Thousand Sons were forced to rely on the crudity of language.

‘I am Ahzek Ahriman of the Corvidae,’ he said. ‘If you would be heard, then speak your true name. Who comes to this Rehahti?’

‘I come, Phosis T’kar, Magister Templi of the Raptora.’

‘I come, Khalophis, Magister Templi of the Pyrae.’

‘I come, Hathor Maat, Magister Templi of the Pavoni.’

‘I come, Uthizzar, Magister Templi of the Athanaeans.’

Ahriman nodded as the Captains of the Thousand Sons recited their names. Only Uthizzar hesitated. The young Adept Minor had only recently ascended to the role of Magister Templi, and Ahriman could not look at him without feeling the sorrow of Apophis’s death.

‘We are all assembled,’ he said.

‘We are alone,’ confirmed Amon.

Magnus nodded and looked each of his captains in the eye before speaking.

‘I am disappointed in you, my sons,’ he said, his voice a rich baritone laden with subtle layers of meaning. These were the first words Ahriman had heard from his primarch since leaving the Mountain, and though they were of censure, they were still welcome.

‘This world has much to teach us, and you jeopardise that by venturing onto a holy site of the Aghoru. I told you to await my return. Why did you disobey me?’

Ahriman felt the eyes of the captains on him and held himself straighter.

‘I ordered it, my lord,’ he said. ‘The decision to march into the valley was mine.’

‘I know,’ said Magnus, with the barest hint of a smile. ‘If anyone was going to defy me, it would be you, eh, Ahzek?’

Ahriman nodded, unsure whether he was to be reprimanded or lauded.

‘Well, you set foot on the Mountain,’ said Magnus. ‘What did you make of it?’

‘My lord?’

‘What did you feel?’

‘Nothing, my lord,’ said Ahriman. ‘I felt nothing.’

‘Exactly,’ said Magnus, stepping from the sun disc and following the white spiral out from the centre of the pyramid. ‘You felt nothing. Now you know how mortals feel, trapped in their silent, dull world, disconnected from their birthright as an evolving race.’

‘Birthright?’ asked Hathor Maat. ‘What birthright?’

Magnus rounded on him, his eye transformed into a flickering blue orb, alive with motion.

‘The right to explore this brilliant, dazzling galaxy and all its wonders with their eyes open to its glory,’ said Magnus. ‘What is a life lived in the shadows, a life where all the shining wonders of the world are half-glimpsed phantasms?’

Magnus stopped next to Ahriman and placed a hand on his shoulder. The hand was that of a giant, yet he looked up at a face that was only slightly larger than his own, the features sculpted as if from molten metal, the single eye green once more. Ahriman felt the immense, unknowable power of his primarch, understanding that he stood before a living sun, the power of creation and destruction bound within its beauteous form.

Magnus’s body was not so much flesh and blood, but energy and will bound together by the ancient science of the Emperor. Ahriman had studied the substance of the Great Ocean with the aid of some of the Legion’s foremost seers, yet the power that filled his primarch was as alien to him as a starship was to a primitive savage.

‘The Aghoru live on a world swept by aetheric winds, yet they remain untouched by its presence,’ said Magnus, walking back towards the sun disc at the centre of the pyramid. His khopesh staff spun in his grip, tracing patterns Ahriman recognised as sigils of evocation that would summon a host of Tutelaries if made beyond the inert air of the Sanctum.

‘They come to this mountain every year, this place of pilgrimage, to bring the bodies of their dead to their final rest. They carry them into the holy valley and place them in the mouth of the Mountain, and each time they return, the bodies of the previous year are gone, “eaten” by the Mountain. We all feel that the walls that separate this world from the aether are thin here. The essence of the Great Ocean presses in, yet the Aghoru remain unaffected by its presence. Why should that be? I do not know, but when I solve that mystery we will be one step closer to helping our brothers draw closer to the light at the heart of the universe. There is power in that mountain, great power, yet it is somehow contained, and the Aghoru are oblivious to it except as energy that devours the dead. I only hope that Yatiri forgives your trespass into their holy place, for without his peoples’ help we may never unlock the secrets of this world.’

The primarch’s enthusiasm for the task was infectious, and the shame Ahriman felt at jeopardising Magnus’s great work was like a crushing weight upon his shoulders.

‘I will make whatever reparations need to be made, my lord,’ said Ahriman. ‘The Sekhmet marched at my order and I will explain that to Yatiri.’

‘That will not be necessary,’ said Magnus, once again taking his place at the centre of the pyramid. ‘I have another task for you all.’

‘Anything, my lord,’ said Phosis T’kar, and the rest joined his affirmation.

Magnus smiled and said, ‘As always, my sons, you are a delight to me. The Aghoru are not the only ones who can feel that this world is special. The remembrancers we selected to join our Expedition, they know it too, even if they do not consciously realise it. You are to make them welcome, befriend them and study them. We have kept them at a distance long enough; it is time for them to see that we have mellowed to their presence. In any case, I believe the Emperor will soon make their presence mandatory and send thousands more out to join the fleets. Before such an edict becomes law, don the mask of friend, of grudging admirer, whatever it takes to gain their confidence. Study the effects of this world on them and record your findings in your grimoires. As we study this world, we must also study its effect on mortals and ourselves. Do you understand this task?’

‘Yes, my lord,’ said Hathor Maat, the words echoed by the rest of the captains until only Ahriman was left to speak.

He felt the primarch’s eyes upon him, and offered a curt bow, saying, ‘I understand, my lord.’

‘Then this Rehahti is over,’ said Magnus, rapping his staff on the sun disc. Light streamed out from the centre, bathing the assembled captains in radiance. The Symbol of Thothmes was undone, and Ahriman felt the wellspring of the aether wash through his flesh.

Amon opened the pyramid’s doors, and Ahriman bowed to the primarch. As the captains made their way outside, Magnus said, ‘Ahzek, a moment if you please.’

Ahriman paused, and then walked to the centre of the pyramid, ready to face his punishment. The primarch sheathed his khopesh, the haft now returned to its original proportions. Magnus looked down at him, and his glittering green eye narrowed as he appraised his Chief Librarian.

‘Something troubles you, my friend. What is it?’

‘The story of the men in the cave,’ said Ahriman. ‘The one you told me when I was your Neophyte.’

‘I know the one,’ said Magnus. ‘What of it?’

‘If I remember correctly, that story shows that it is futile to share the truth of what we know with those who have too narrow a view of the horizon. How are we to illuminate our fellows when their vision is so limited?’

‘We do not,’ said Magnus, turning Ahriman and walking him across the spiral towards the pyramid’s open doors. ‘At least not at first.’

‘I do not understand.’

‘We do not bring the light to humanity; we bring them to the light,’ said Magnus. ‘We learn how to lift mankind’s consciousness to a higher state of being so that he can recognise the light for himself.’

Ahriman felt the force of the primarch’s passion, and wished he felt it too. ‘Trying to explain the truth of the aether to mortals is like trying to describe the meaning of the colour yellow to a blind man. They do not want to see it. They fear it.’

‘Small steps, Ahzek, small steps,’ said Magnus patiently. ‘Mankind is already crawling towards psychic awareness, but he must walk before he can run. We will help him.’

‘You have great faith in humanity,’ said Ahriman as they reached the doors. ‘They wanted to destroy us once. They may again.’

Magnus shook his head. ‘Trust them a little more, my son. Trust me.’

‘I trust you, my lord,’ promised Ahriman. ‘My life is yours.’

‘And I value that, my son, believe me,’ said Magnus, ‘but I am set on this course, and I need you with me, Ahzek. The others look up to you, and where you lead, others will follow.’

‘As you wish, my lord,’ said Ahriman with a respectful bow.

‘Now, as far as studying the remembrancers goes, I want you to pay close attention to Lemuel Gaumon, he interests me.’

‘Gaumon? The aetheric reader?’

‘Yes, that’s the one. He has some power, learned from the writings of the Nordafrik Sangoma by the feel of it,’ said Magnus. ‘He believes he hides this power from us, and has taken his first, faltering steps towards its proper use. I wish you to mentor him. Draw out his abilities and determine how best he may use them without danger to himself or others. If we can do it for him, we can do it for others.’

‘That will not be easy; he does not have the mastery of the Enumerations.’

‘That is why you must teach him,’ said Magnus.

Four

The sound of judgement
Shadow dancers
Summoned

Fires seared the horizon as the planet burned. The skies bucked and heaved with pressure, kaleidoscopic lighting blazing across the heavens with unnatural fire. Screaming shards of glass fell in glittering torrents, the streets ran with molten gold, and once proud avenues of glorious statuary were brought to ruin by the thunder of explosions and the howls of killers.

Predators stalked the ruins of the beautiful city, a glorious representation of paradise rendered on earthly soil. Towering wonders of glass and silver and gold burned around her, the air filled with a billion fluttering scraps of scorched papers like grotesque confetti. The taste of blood filled her senses, and though she had never seen this place before she mourned its destruction.

Such perfect geometry, such pleasing aesthetics… who could ever wish harm to so perfect a refuge? Soaring silver towers sagged in the heat of the fires, broken glass falling from their high windows and pyramidion-capped summits like shimmering tears. Firelight danced in the glass, each reflecting a great, golden eye that wept tears of red.

She wanted to stop the madness, to halt the bloodletting before it was too late to save the city from complete destruction. It was already too late. Its fate had been sealed long before the first bomb had landed or the first invader set foot within its gilded palaces, marble-flagged processionals or glorious parks.

The city was doomed, and nothing could change its fate.

Yet even as the thought formed, she knew that wasn’t true.

The city could be saved.

With that thought, the clouds dispersed and the wondrous blue of the sky was revealed. Glorious sunbeams painted the mountains in gold, and the scent of wildflowers replaced the stink of ash and scorched meat and metal. Once again, the silver towers reached up to the heavens, and shimmering, monumental pyramids of glass loomed over her, glittering with the promise of a bright and incredible future.

She walked the streets of the city, alone and without form, relishing the chance to savour its beauty without interruption. Hot spices, rich fragrances and exotic scents were carried on a soft breeze, suggestive of human life, but no matter how hard she looked, there was no sign of the city’s inhabitants.

Undaunted, she continued her exploration, finding new wonders and raptures at every turn. Golden statues of hawk-headed figures lined one boulevard of marble libraries and museums, a thousand scented date palms another. Silver lions, hundreds of metres tall, reared at the entrance to a pyramid so huge it was more mountain than architecture.

Mighty carved columns topped with capitals shaped like curling scrolls formed enormous processional avenues down which entire armies could walk abreast. She wandered parks of incredible beauty nestled alongside the artifice of human hands, the two blending so seamlessly that it was impossible to discern where one began and the other ended.

Everywhere she looked, she saw perfection of line and shape, a harmony that could only have come about by the seamless fusion of knowledge and talent. This was perfection; this was everything humanity aspired to achieve.

This was bliss, though she knew it was not real, for nothing created by Man was perfect.

Everything had a flaw, no matter how small.

As with any paradise, this could not last.

She heard a mournful cry in the far distance, a sound so faint as to be almost inaudible.

Carried from the frozen bleakness of an ice-locked future, the cry was joined by another, the sounds echoing from the sides of the pyramids and lingering like a curse in the deserted streets. It resonated within a withered, atrophied part of her mind – a forgotten, primal remnant from a time when man was prey, simply an upstart hominid with ambitions beyond those of other mammals.

It was the sound of fangs like swords, claws and hunters older than Man.

It was the sound of judgement.

Her heart thudding in her chest, Kallista Eris jackknifed upright in her cot bed, drenched in sweat, the haunting cries fading from her mind. The dream of the unknown city faded like mist from her thoughts, fleeting glimpses of shimmering towers, silver-skinned pyramids and majestic parklands all that remained of her magnificent vision.

She groaned and lifted a hand to her head, a pounding headache pressing against the inner surfaces of her skull. She swung her legs from the bed, pressing a palm to her temple as she felt its intensity grow.

‘No,’ she moaned. ‘Not again. Not now.’

She rose from the bed, moving to the footlocker at its base on unsteady legs. If she could reach the bottle of sakau before the fire in her brain erupted, she could spare herself a night of pain and horror.

A sharp spike of agony lanced into her brain, and she dropped to her knees, falling against the bed with a muted cry. Kallista screwed her eyes shut against the pain, white lights bursting like explosions behind her lids. Her stomach lurched and she fought to hold onto its contents as the interior of her tent spun around her. She felt the fire pouring into her, a tide of burning nightmares and blood.

The breath heaved in her lungs as she fought against this latest attack, and her hands clawed knots in her thin sheet. She clenched her teeth, hauling herself along the bed towards the footlocker. The pain felt like a bomb had detonated within her brain, a blooming fire that raced out along her dendrites and synapses to sear through the bone of her skull.

Kallista hauled open the lid of her footlocker, throwing aside items of clothing and personal effects in her desperation. Her bottle of sakau was hidden in a hollowed out copy of Fanfare to Unity, a dreadful piece of fawning sycophancy that no one would ask to borrow.

‘Please,’ she moaned, lifting the dog-eared copy of the book. She opened it and lifted out a green glass bottle, mostly full of a cloudy emulsion.

She pulled herself upright, her vision blurring at the edges with flickering lights, the telltale signs of the fire. Every muscle was trembling as she lurched across the tent to her writing table where the hes vase sat alongside her papers and writing implements.

Her hands spasmed with a spastic jerk, and the bottle fell from her hands.

‘Throne, no!’ cried Kallista as it bounced on the dirt floor, but, mercifully, didn’t break.

She bent down, but a wave of nausea and pain washed over her, and she knew it was too late for the sakau. There was only one way to let the fire out.

Kallista collapsed to the folding chair at the table, and her trembling hand snatched up a knife-sharpened pencil before dragging a sheet of scrap paper towards her. Scrawled notes regarding yesterday’s incredible expedition into the Mountain filled the top of the page.

She turned it over angrily as the fire in her brain blinded her, her eyes rolling back as its white heat seared through her body, its luminous light filling her every molecule with its power. Her mouth opened in a silent scream, jaw locked as her hand scratched across the page in manic, desperate sweeps.

The words poured out of Kallista Eris, but she neither saw nor knew them.

It was the heat that woke her.

Kallista opened her eyes slowly, the searing brightness of Aghoru’s sun filling her tent with yellow light and oppressive heat. She licked her dry lips, her mouth parched as though she hadn’t drunk in days.

She was asleep at her desk, a broken pencil still clutched in her hand, a sheaf of papers fanned around her head. Kallista groaned as she lifted her head from the table, dizzy and disoriented by the brightness of the sun and the dislocation of waking.

Gradually, her memory reordered itself, and she dimly recalled the half-remembered city of her dreams and its dreadful ending. The pain in her head was a dull ache, a mental bruise that left her dull and numb.

Kallista reached out and poured some water from the hes vase. It was gritty with wind-blown salt, but served to dispel the gumminess that had collected around her mouth.

Spots of water landed on the pages strewn across the desk, and she saw that they were completely covered in frantic writing. She rose awkwardly to her feet, her limbs still unsteady after their abuse during the night, and backed away from the desk.

Kallista sat on her bed, staring at the desk as though the papers and pencils were dangerous animals instead of the tools of her trade. She rubbed her eyes and ran a hand through her hair, sweeping it over her ears as she pondered what to do next.

Scores of sheets were filled with writing, and she swallowed, unsure whether she even wanted to look and see what this latest fugue state had produced. Most of the time it was illegible nonsense, meaningless doggerel. Kallista never knew what any of them meant, and if she was too late to extinguish the fire before it began with a soporific infusion of sakau, she ripped the papers to pieces.

Not so this time.

Kallista looked at the angular writing that was not hers, and the morning’s heat was replaced with a sudden chill.

One phrase was written on the crumpled papers, over and over and over, repeated on every sheet a thousand times.

Camille cleared the dust of ages from the smooth object buried in the earth with delicate sweeps of a fine brush. It was curved and polished, and showed no sign it had been hidden for thousands of years. She slowly chipped around the object, marvelling at its condition as more of it was revealed. It was pale cream and had survived without any corrosion or so much as a blemish.

It could have been buried yesterday.

More careful brushes revealed a bulbous protrusion further along its length, something that looked like a vox-unit. She had never seen such a design, for it appeared it had been moulded as one piece. She chipped away more of the earth, pleased to have found an artefact that was clearly of non-human origin.

She paused, thinking back to the titanic statues, recognising a similarity between the material of this object and the giants. For all she knew, this could be part of something just as vast. A ghost of apprehension made her shiver, though she was still wearing her gloves, and had been careful not to touch the find with her bare hands.

Camille stretched the muscles in her back and wiped her arm across her forehead. Even shaded from the direct rays of the sun, the heat was oppressive.

With more of the object revealed, she lifted her picter unit, clicking off a number of shots from differing angles and ranges. The camera had been a gift from her grandfather, an old Model K Seraph 9 he’d sourced from an Optik in the Byzant markets, who’d looted it from a prospector he’d killed in the Taurus Mountains around the Anatolian plateau, who in turn had purchased it in pre-Unity days from a shift overseer in a manufactory of the Urals, where it had been built by an assembly servitor who had once been a man called Hekton Afaez.

Camille looked around, holding her breath as she listened for sounds of anyone nearby. She could hear the repetitive bite of picks and shovels from her digging team of servitors, the gentle murmur of daily life from the nearby Aghoru settlement, and the ever-present hiss of salt crystals blown by the wind.

Satisfied she was alone, she pulled off one of her gloves, her ivory white hand in stark contrast to the dark tan of her arm. The skin was delicate and smooth, not the hand one might expect to see on someone who spent time digging in the earth.

Camille slowly lowered her hand to the half-buried object, gently laying it on top with a soft sigh of pleasure. A comfortable numbness soon reached her shoulder and chest. The feeling was not unpleasant, and she closed her eyes, surrendering to the new emotions that came to her.

She felt the thread of history that connected all things and the residue left by those who had touched them. The world around her was dark, but the object before her was illuminated as though by some internal light source.

It was a battle helmet, an exquisite artefact of fluid, graceful design, and it was unmistakably alien in the subtle wrongness of its proportions. It was old, very old; so old, in fact, that she had difficulty in grasping so distant an age of time.

A shape resolved in the darkness, her touch breathing life into the memory of the helmet’s long dead owner. Behind her fluttering eyelids, Camille saw the shadow of a woman, a dancer by the fluidity of her movements. She spun through the void like liquid, her body in constant motion between graceful leaps, her arms and fists sweeping out in what Camille realised were killing blows. This woman was not just a dancer, she was a warrior.

A word came to her, a name perhaps: Elenaria.

Camille watched, entranced by the subtle weave of the dancer’s body as it twisted like smoke on a windy day. The shadow woman left blurred after-images in the darkness, as though a phantom sisterhood followed in her wake. The more Camille watched, the more it seemed as though she watched thousands of women, all moving in the same dance, yet separated by fleeting moments in time.

The dancers slid through the air, and Camille was filled with aching sadness. Their every pirouette and graceful somersault gave voice to the sorrow and regret carried in their hearts like poison. She gasped as a potent mix of heightened emotions surged into her from the buried object, supreme pinnacles of ecstasy that were matched only by depths of utter misery.

A pair of glittering swords appeared in the dancer’s hands, ghostly blades that Camille had no doubt were as deadly as they were beautiful. The shadow woman spun through the air with a shriek of unimaginable fury, her swords incandescent as she somersaulted towards Camille.

With a gasp of disconnection, Camille snatched her hand from the object, her flesh pale and cold, trembling with the after-effects of powerful emotions. Her breath came in short hikes, and she looked down at the buried object with a mixture of fear and amazement.

Her flesh crawled with chills, and a feathered breath turned to vapour before her. The incongruous sight of breath on such a hot day made her laugh, the sound nervous and unconvincing.

‘So what is it?’ asked a man’s voice, startling her. She jumped in surprise.

‘Throne, Lemuel! Don’t sneak up on people like that!’

‘Sneak up?’ he asked, looking down into the trench. ‘Trust me, my dear, a man my size doesn’t sneak.’

She forced her face to smile, though the memory of the dancer’s sadness and fury was still etched in her features.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘You startled me.’

‘Sorry.’

‘It’s okay,’ said Camille, feeling her heart rate returning to normal. ‘I could use a break anyway. Here, help me out.’

Lemuel reached down into the trench with his arm extended, and she took hold of his meaty forearm as he took hold of her slender one.

‘Ready?’

‘Ready,’ she said.

Lemuel hauled her upwards, and she scrambled up the sides of the trench, hooking her knee over the edge and hauling herself the rest of the way.

‘Dignified, huh?’ said Camille, scooting onto her belly before pushing herself to her feet.

‘Like a dancer,’ said Lemuel, and Camille flinched.

‘So, what is it?’ asked Lemuel again, pointing at the buried object.

Camille looked down at the battle helmet, the violence of the woman’s shriek still echoing within her skull.

She shook her head.

‘I have no idea,’ she said.

The pit her servitors had dug on the outskirts of the Aghoru settlement was a hundred metres by sixty-five. Initial excavations had revealed a promising number of artefacts that were not of Aghoru or Imperial origin. Half of those servitors now stood in immobile ranks beneath a wide awning set up at the edge of the pit.

The idea of servitors needing to take breaks had amused Camille no end until Adept Spuler of the Mechanicum told her that he had been forced to decommission six of them due to heat exhaustion. Servitors didn’t feel fatigue or hunger or thirst, and so continued to work beyond the limits of endurance.

Still, they had achieved more in one day than Camille could have hoped for.

Her dig site lay to the east of an Aghoru settlement named Acaltepec, three hundred kilometres north of the Mountain, and this landscape was as lush as the salt flats were barren. The settlement’s name meant ‘water house’ in the local tongue, and Camille had come to understand that the term referred to the oval-shaped canoes used to fish the lake alongside which the sunken village was built.

The dwellings of the Aghoru were dug down into the earth, and provided shade from the sun and a near-constant temperature, making them surprisingly comfortable places to live in. Camille had been welcomed into Acaltepec’s homes, finding its people quiet and polite, the barrier of language easily crossed by small gestures of kindness and courtesy.

Camille’s servitors had dug into a series of structures that had long been abandoned. The best the lexicographers could approximate for the Aghoru’s explanation of why they had been abandoned was ‘bad dreams’. Adept Spuler had dismissed such claims as primitive superstition or a meaning lost in translation, but having touched the alien battle helm, Camille wasn’t so sure.

She had enjoyed her time on this world, relishing the relaxed, unhurried pace of life and the lack of history pressing in from every individual. She had no doubt that life was hard for the people of Aghoru, but for her it was a welcome break from the hectic life of a remembrancer of the 28th Expedition.

Masked tribesmen swatted droning insects in the shade of tall trees hung with bright purple fruit, while the women worked on the shoreline, fashioning long fishing spears. Even the children were masked, a sight that had unsettled Camille at first, but like most things, it became part of the scenery after a while.

Wild plants and fields of sun-ripened crops waved in the breeze, and Camille felt a peace she hadn’t known in a long time. There was history to this world, but it was buried deep, far deeper than any world she had set foot on before. She relished the sensation of enjoying a world simply for what she could see of it instead of feeling its history intruding on her every waking moment.

Lemuel knelt beside a long tarpaulin where the day’s finds had been laid out, and lifted a broken piece of something that resembled a glazed ceramic disc.

‘A regular treasure trove,’ said Lemuel dryly. ‘I can see why I came now.’

Camille smiled. ‘It is a treasure trove actually. The artefacts here aren’t human, I’m sure of that.’

‘Not human?’ asked Lemuel, rapping his knuckles against the flat edge of the disc. ‘Well, well, how interesting. So what are they then?’

‘I don’t know, but whoever they were, they died out tens of thousands of years ago.’

‘Really? This looks like it was made yesterday.’

‘Yeah, whatever it’s made of, it doesn’t seem to age.’

‘Then how do you know how old it is?’ asked Lemuel, staring right at her.

Did he know? No, how could he?

Camille hesitated. ‘The depth of the find and earned instinct I guess. I’ve spent long enough digging around the ruins of Terra to get a good instinct for how old things are.’

‘I suppose,’ he said, turning the disc over in his hands and looking at the edge where it was broken. ‘So what do you think this is made of? It’s smooth like porcelain, but it looks like an organic internal structure, like crystal or something.’

‘Let me see,’ she said, and Lemuel handed her the disc. His fingers brushed the skin above her glove and she felt a flicker of something pass between them, seeing a white-walled villa surrounded by sprawling orchards at the foot of a mountain with a wide, flat summit. An ebony-skinned woman with a sorrowful expression waved from a roof veranda.

‘Are you all right?’ asked Lemuel, and the moment passed.

Camille shook off the sadness of her vision.

‘I’m fine; it’s just the heat,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t look manufactured, does it?’

‘No,’ agreed Lemuel, standing up straight and brushing dust from his banyan. ‘Look at the lines running through it. They’re lines of growth. This wasn’t pressed in a mould or stamped by a machine. This material, whatever it is, grew and was shaped into this form. It reminds me of the work of a man I knew in Sangha back on Terra, Babechi his name was. He was a quiet man, but he could work wonders with things that grew, and where I came from, that was a rare gift. He called himself an arbosculptor, and he could grow trees and plants into shapes that were simply beautiful.’

Lemuel smiled, lost in reminiscence. ‘With just some pruning shears, timber boards, wire and tape, Babechi could take a sapling and turn it into a chair, a sculpture or an archway. Anything you wanted really. I had an entire orchard of cherry plum, crepe myrtle and poplar grown and shaped to resemble the grand dining chamber of Narthan Dume’s Palace of Phan Kaos for a charity dinner.’

Camille eyed Lemuel to see if he was joking, but he seemed completely serious.

‘Sounds extravagant,’ she said.

‘Oh, it was, ridiculously so,’ laughed Lemuel. ‘My wife pitched a fit when she found out how much it cost. She called me a hypocrite, but it was so very beautiful while it lasted.’

Camille saw a shadow flicker on Lemuel’s face at the mention of his wife, and wondered if she had been the woman in her vision. Intuition that had nothing to do with her gift kept her from asking.

‘I think it might be made of the same substance those giants are made of,’ she said. ‘What was it you called them, Syrbotae?’

‘Yes, Syrbotae,’ he said, ‘giants amongst men, like our grand host.’

Camille smiled, remembering that first sight of Magnus the Red as he emerged from the cave on the Mountain. What magnificent visions would fill her head were she to touch the Crimson King? The thought terrified and exhilarated her.

‘He was magnificent, wasn’t he?’

‘Impressive, yes,’ agreed Lemuel. ‘I think you might be right about that disc. It certainly looks like the same material, but I’d have a hard time believing anything that big could be grown.’

‘I suppose,’ she said. ‘Do you think the Aghoru would allow us to study the giants?’

‘I don’t know, maybe. You can ask.’

‘I think I will,’ said Camille. ‘I have a feeling there’s more to them than meets the eye.’

Camille looked back towards the Aghoru village as a personal speeder in the red and ivory of the Thousand Sons skimmed towards the dig site from the village. Wide and disc-shaped, the speeder floated low to the ground, leaving a puffed trail of ionised dust in its wake. Riding the speeder like a floating chariot of antiquity was a single Astartes warrior.

‘A friend of yours?’ asked Lemuel.

‘Yes, actually,’ replied Camille, as the skimmer drifted to a halt beside her and Lemuel.

The warrior removed his golden helmet, a gesture few others of the Legion bothered with, forgetting that mortals could not so easily tell them apart while they were clad in battle-plate.

His hair was a salt and pepper mix of grey and auburn, worn in long braids, and his face was deeply lined, as if his scholarly mien had somehow aged his ageless physiology. His skin had been pale when Camille had first met him, but like the rest of his battle-brothers, he was now the colour of burnt umber.

His armour was dusty from travel in the open, the small raven symbol faded and almost unnoticed in the centre of the serpentine star symbol of the Thousand Sons.

‘Good day, Mistress Shivani,’ said the Astartes, his voice hoary and brusque. ‘How go your excavations?’

‘Very well indeed, my Lord Anen,’ said Camille. ‘There are lots of new artefacts and almost as many wild theories to explain them. I’ve also found some more writings that might help us with the inscriptions on the deadstones.’

‘I look forward to studying them,’ said the warrior, and his sincerity was genuine.

The limited number of remembrancers attached to the 28th Expedition had met with resistance amongst the Legion of Magnus, but Ankhu Anen had been a rare exception. He had willingly travelled with Camille to various sites around the Mountain, both near and far, sharing her passion for the past and what could be learned from it.

His eyes moved to Lemuel, and Camille said, ‘This is my friend, Lemuel Gaumon, he’s helping me out with my wild theorising. Lemuel, this is Ankhu Anen.’

‘The Guardian of the Great Library,’ said Lemuel, extending his hand. ‘It is an honour to meet you at last. I’ve heard a lot about you.’

The Astartes slowly extended his hand and took Lemuel’s. Ankhu Anen’s gauntlet easily swallowed Lemuel’s hand, and Camille felt a flush of unease prickle her skin. A crackling tension fizzled between Lemuel and Ankhu Anen, as though the air between them had suddenly become charged with electricity.

‘Have you indeed?’ said Ankhu Anen. ‘I have, likewise, heard a great deal of you.’

‘You have?’ asked Lemuel, and Camille could tell he was surprised. ‘I didn’t think the Thousand Sons paid us poor remembrancers much mind.’

‘Just the ones that interest us,’ replied Anen.

‘I’m flattered,’ replied Lemuel, ‘Then might I ask if you have read any of my papers?’

‘No,’ said Ankhu Anen, as though to have done so would be a waste of time. ‘I have not.’

‘Oh,’ said Lemuel, crestfallen, ‘well, perhaps I might offer you a selection of my works to read sometime. Though I claim no great insight, you might find some sections of interest, particularly the passages detailing the growth of society after the compliance of Twenty-Eight Fifteen.’

‘Perhaps,’ said the Astartes, ‘but I am not here to gather reading material, I am here to bring you a summons.’

‘A summons? From whom?’ asked Lemuel.

Ankhu Anen smiled.

‘From Lord Ahriman,’ he said.

Five

The Probationer
Creation myths
Memories of Terra

The interior of Ahriman’s pavilion was his place of calm. Spacious and well-aired, it was a refuge from the heat of Aghoru. A walnut bookcase sat beside his bedroll, the books on its shelves like old friends, well-thumbed and read countless times, as much for their familiarity as their words.

A battered copy of Akkadian Literary Forms sat alongside a translated copy of the Voynich Manuscript and the Codex Seraphinianus. The Turba Philosophorum jostled for space with five of the seven cryptical Books of Hzan and the Clavis Solomoni, together with assorted other texts that would not attract unwelcome attention. But had anyone unlocked the hidden compartments secreted within the body of the bookcase, they would have found far more provocative tomes.

Thuribles hung from sandalwood rafters, and a brazier of green flame burned at the heart of the pavilion. Ahriman breathed in the heady mix of aromas, letting their calming influence ease his passage into the lower Enumerations. He stared into the flames and directed his will along the currents of the aether.

The future was mist and shadow, a blurred fog through which no meaning could penetrate. In decades past, fractured timelines had shone through the veil of the empyrean, and Ahriman had seen the echoes of futures yet to come as easily as a mortal man could guess what might happen were he to step off a cliff.

The tides of the Great Ocean were a mystery to him, as unknowable as the far side of the world was to mariners of old. Ahriman felt his concentration slipping, his frustration at his inability to divine the future threatening to overcome his control. Concentration was the key that unlocked all doors, lying at the heart of every practice of the Thousand Sons, and the means by which the greater mysteries could be unravelled.

Angry with himself, Ahriman shook his head and opened his eyes, uncrossing his legs and rising in one smooth motion. Dressed in crimson robes and a wide leather belt, from which hung a set of bronze keys, he had foregone his armour for this meeting.

Sobek stood by the entrance to his pavilion, clad in his ruby plates of armour, and Ahriman felt his disapproval.

‘Speak,’ commanded Ahriman. ‘Your aura wears at me. Speak and be done with it.’

‘May I speak freely, my lord?’

‘I just said you could,’ snapped Ahriman, forcing himself to calm. ‘You are my Practicus, and if there is no candour between us you will never achieve the rank of Philosophus.’

‘It galls me to see you punished thus,’ said Sobek. ‘To be forced to train a mortal in the mysteries is no task for one such as you.’

‘Punished?’ asked Ahriman. ‘Is that what you think this is, punishment?’

‘What else could it be?’

‘The primarch has entrusted me with a great task, and this is but the first stage of it,’ said Ahriman. ‘Lemuel Gaumon is mortal and he has a little knowledge and a little power.’

Sobek snorted in derision and said, ‘That’s nothing unusual in the 28th Expedition.’

Ahriman smiled.

‘True,’ he said, ‘but he is a child taking his first steps, unaware that he walks blindfold along the edge of an abyss. I am to help him to remove that blindfold.’

‘But why?’

‘Because knowledge is a deadly friend, if no one sets the rules. It is our master’s wish that I illuminate this mortal,’ said Ahriman. ‘Or do you doubt the word of the Crimson King?’

Many of the Emperor’s sons had earned honourable names over the decades of war, not least of whom was Horus Lupercal, primarch of the Luna Wolves, beloved son of the Emperor. Fulgrim’s warriors knew their leader as the Phoenician, and the First Legion was led by the Lion. Magnus alone of his brothers had earned a series of less than flattering names over the decades of war: Sorcerer… Warlock…

So when Ahriman had heard his primarch was known among the 28th Expedition’s remembrancers as the Crimson King, he had allowed the name to stand.

Sobek bowed and said, ‘Never, my lord. Lord Magnus is the fountainhead of our Legion, and I will never doubt his course, no matter what.’

Ahriman nodded, sensing the presence of Lemuel Gaumon beyond the canopy of his pavilion. He felt the man’s aura, its light dull and unfocussed among the glittering flares of his fellow legionaries. Where they shone with purity and focus, Gaumon’s was blurred and raw, like an unshielded lumen globe, bright in its own way, but unpleasant to look upon for more than a moment.

‘Gaumon is without, Sobek,’ said Ahriman. ‘Send him in.’

Sobek nodded and left the pavilion, returning a moment later with a heavyset man dressed in a long crimson robe with loose sleeves and a crest of one of the Nordafrik conclaves stitched on his left breast, Sangha, if Ahriman remembered correctly. Lemuel’s skin was dark, though not the dark of those who had been tanned by the Aghoru sun. Ahriman smelled the man’s body odour even over the megaleion oil coating his skin.

‘Welcome,’ said Ahriman, modulating his accent to a more natural, fluid tone and indicating the rug beside the brazier. ‘Please, sit.’

Lemuel lowered himself to the rug, clutching a battered notebook to his chest as Sobek withdrew, leaving them alone.

Ahriman sat before Lemuel and said, ‘I am Ahzek Ahriman, Chief Librarian of the Thousand Sons.’

Lemuel nodded vigorously.

‘I know who you are, my lord,’ he said. ‘I’m honoured you sent for me.’

‘Do you know why I sent for you?’

‘I confess I do not.’

‘It is because you have power, Lemuel Gaumon,’ said Ahriman. ‘You can see the currents of the aether that flow through the world from the Great Ocean. You may not know the names, but you know of what I speak.’

Lemuel shook his head, flustered and caught off guard.

‘I think you must be mistaken, my lord,’ said Lemuel, and Ahriman laughed at the sudden panic in his aura.

Lemuel held up his notebook and said, ‘Please, my lord, I am just a humble remembrancer.’

‘No,’ said Ahriman, leaning forward and projecting a measure of fire into his aura. ‘You are far more than that – you are a wielder of sorcery, a witch!’

It was a simple trick, an invisible domination to cow weaker minds. The effect was immediate. Waves of fear and guilt washed from Lemuel in a tide. Ahriman rose through the Enumerations to shield himself from the man’s raw terror.

‘Please… I do no harm to anyone,’ pleaded Lemuel. ‘I’m not a witch, I swear, I just read old books. I don’t know any spells or anything, please!’

‘Be at peace, Lemuel,’ chuckled Ahriman, holding up an outstretched hand. ‘I am teasing you. I am no fool of a witch hunter, and did not summon you to condemn you. I am going to liberate you.’

‘Liberate me?’ asked Lemuel, his breathing returning to normal. ‘From what?’

‘From your blindness and limitations,’ said Ahriman. ‘You have power, but you do not know how to wield it with any skill. I can show you how you can use what power you have, and I can show you how to use it to see things you cannot imagine.’

Ahriman read the suspicion in Lemuel’s aura, and eased it with a nudge of his own powers, as an animal is calmed by soft words and a gentle touch. The man had no barriers whatsoever in his mind, his psyche undefended and open to the tides of the Great Ocean. In that instant of contact, Ahriman knew the man’s every secret. He saw the barb of sorrow in the man’s heart and mellowed, understanding that the grief driving him echoed his own.

Power was no salve to that grief, and Lemuel Gaumon would realise that in time. That crushing realisation could wait though; there was no need to dash his hopes just yet.

‘You are so vulnerable, and you don’t even realise it,’ said Ahriman softly.

‘My lord?’

‘Tell me what you know of the Great Ocean.’

‘I don’t know that term.’

‘The warp,’ said Ahriman. ‘The empyrean.’

‘Oh. Not much really,’ admitted Lemuel. He took a deep breath before continuing, like a student afraid of giving the wrong answer. ‘It’s a kind of higher dimension, a psychic realm where starships can travel far faster than normal. It allows astrotelepaths to communicate and, well, that’s about it.’

‘That is broadly true, but the Great Ocean is so much more than that, Lemuel. It is the home of the Primordial Creator, the energy that drives all things. It is a reflection of our universe and we are a reflection of it. What occurs in one affects the other, and like a planetary ocean, it is not without its predators. Your mind, dull though it is, shines like a beacon in the ocean for the creatures that lurk in its depths. Were I to allow you to use your powers unchecked, you would soon be dead.’

Lemuel swallowed and placed the notebook beside him.

‘I had no idea,’ he said. ‘I just thought… I mean, I don’t know what I thought. I figured I was able to tap into parts of my mind others weren’t able to. I could see lights around people, their auras, and I learned to read them, to understand what they were feeling. Does that make sense?’

‘It makes perfect sense. Those lights, as you call them, are aetheric echoes of a person’s emotion, health and power. A shadow self of that person exists in the Great Ocean, a reflection of their psyche that imprints itself in its currents.’

Lemuel shook his head with a wry smile and said, ‘This is a lot to take in, my lord.’

‘I understand that,’ said Ahriman. ‘I do not expect you to absorb it all just now. You will become my Probationer, and begin your studies on the morrow.’

‘Do I have a choice in this?’

‘Not if you want to live.’

‘Tomorrow,’ said Lemuel. ‘Lucky I happened to be selected for the 28th Expedition, eh?’

‘If there is one thing I have come to know in my long years of study, it is that there is no such thing as luck when it comes to the positioning of the universe’s chess pieces. Your coming here was no accident. I was meant to train you. I have seen it,’ said Ahriman.

‘You saw the future?’ asked Lemuel. ‘You knew I was going to be here and that this was all going to happen?’

‘Many years ago, I saw you standing on the streets of Prospero in the robes of a Neophyte.’

‘On Prospero!’ said Lemuel, his aura shimmering with his excitement. ‘And a Neophyte, that’s one of your ranks, isn’t it?’

‘It is,’ confirmed Ahriman, ‘a very low one.’

‘And you saw this? It’s the future? That’s amazing!’

Ahriman smiled at how easily mortals were impressed by such powers. How impressed and, more often, how frightened.

‘In years past, I could travel the Great Ocean and open my eyes to a world of potential futures,’ explained Ahriman. ‘To do that is no great trick, even mortals can do it. But to read those currents and sort meaning and truth from the chaos is a skill beyond all but the most gifted of seers.’

‘Will I be able read it?’

‘No,’ said Ahriman, ‘not without decades of training by the Corvidae. To read the multi-dimensional patterns of the Great Ocean and lift meaning from the meaningless requires two modalities of thought. Firstly, the rapid, accurate and efficient movement of thought from concept to concept, whereby all ideas become one; and secondly, the halting of thought altogether, were one idea is reduced to nothing. I have an eidetic memory, a mind crafted by the greatest technologists of the forgotten ages that allows me to do this. You do not.’

‘Then what can I do?’

‘First you must learn how to shield your consciousness from danger,’ said Ahriman, rising to his feet. ‘When you have accomplished that, then we will see what you can do.’

The alien Titans towered above him, majestic and powerful, but Khalophis wasn’t impressed. True, they were bigger than Canis Vertex, but they had none of the robust brutality of the Warlord guarding the gates of the Pyrae cult’s temple. He stepped back, craning his neck to see the elongated curves of their mighty head sections.

Phosis T’kar had told Khalophis of the giant statues, and he’d wanted to see them for himself, to measure himself against them.

He turned from the towering constructs to face his warriors. A dozen Astartes from the Sixth Fellowship stood behind the black altar, an object that reeked of dark rites of sacrifice. He’d listened at the Rehahti as his primarch had explained that the Mountain was a place of remembrance for the dead and was to be treated with respect. That didn’t change the fact that Khalophis simply didn’t trust the Aghoru.

Their masked leader stood with ten other tribesmen, all with their faces obscured by mirrored masks. Their presence had been a condition of allowing Khalophis and his warriors to come to the valley. That spoke of subterfuge. Why would the Aghoru not want the Legion to come to their valley?

‘What do you have to hide?’ he whispered, unheard by any save himself.

The masked leader of the Aghoru was looking at him, and Khalophis gestured towards the giant constructs.

‘Do you know what these are?’ he asked.

‘They are the guardians of the Mountain,’ said the tribesman.

‘Maybe they were once, but now they are just expensive statues.’

‘They are the guardians,’ repeated the masked tribesman.

‘They are Titans,’ said Khalophis, slowly, ‘giant war machines. In ages past they could level cities and lay waste to entire armies, but now they are dead.’

‘Our legends say they will walk again, when the Daiesthai break the bonds of their eternal prison.’

‘I don’t know what that means, but they won’t walk again,’ said Khalophis. ‘They are just machines, dead machines.’

He pointed up towards the giant head of the construct. ‘The princeps would sit up there if this was an Imperial Titan, but since it’s alien, who knows what’s really in there? A giant brain in a jar, a wired-in collective of self-aware robots, it could be anything.’

The Aghoru tribesman said, ‘What is a princeps? Is that a god?’

Khalophis laughed uproariously. ‘He might as well be. It’s not a term in favour, but what else really gets the sense of it across? An Astartes is a god to mortals, a Titan… Well, that’s the god of the battlefield. Even the Legions take note when the engines of the Mechanicum walk.’

‘These have never walked,’ said the tribesman, ‘not as long as we have known them. We hope they never do.’

‘It’s Yatiri, isn’t it?’ asked Khalophis, bending down.

‘Yes, Brother Khalophis, that is my name.’

‘I am not your brother,’ he hissed. Even cut off from his powers and unable to communicate with his Tutelary, Khalophis felt energised, not with the surging tides of aether that normally empowered him, but by the act of domination.

‘We are all brothers,’ said Yatiri, calm in the face of his hostility. ‘Is that not what your great leader teaches? He tells us that we are all one race, divided by a great catastrophe, but drawing together once more under the watchful eye of the great Sky Emperor.’

‘That’s true enough,’ conceded Khalophis. ‘But not all who were divided wish to be drawn together again. Some of them fight us.’

‘We are not fighting you,’ said Yatiri. ‘We welcome your coming.’

‘That’s your story,’ said Khalophis, leaning on the altar and regarding the mortal through the green-hued lenses of his battle helm. Though this was designated a compliant world, Khalophis had his combat senses to the fore. The Aghoru falarica were picked out in white, the tribesmen themselves in red, though the threat indicators were negligible.

‘We are the story,’ said Yatiri. ‘From the moment your leader set foot on our lands, we became part of it.’

‘That’s remembrancer talk,’ spat Khalophis. ‘And I don’t trust people who wear masks, especially masks like mirrors. I ask myself what they’re hiding behind them.’

‘You wear a mask,’ pointed out Yatiri, walking past Khalophis towards the cave mouth.

‘This is a helmet.’

‘It achieves the same thing, it conceals your features.’

‘Why do you wear them?’ asked Khalophis, following the tribesman towards the towering guardians of the Mountain.

‘Why do you?’ countered Yatiri without turning.

‘For protection. My helmet is armoured and it has saved my life on more than one occasion.’

‘I wear this mask for protection also,’ said Yatiri, reaching the foot of the leftmost giant.

‘From what? Your tribes do not make war on one another and there are no predators of any great size on this world. Where is the need?’ asked Khalophis.

Yatiri turned and rested his hand on the smooth surface of the enormous foot. This close to the giants, the scale of them was truly breathtaking. Khalophis thought back to the fire-blackened ruins of Kamenka Ulizarna and the sight of Magnus the Red standing before the might of the greenskin colossus. That had been a battle to remember, and standing this close to an alien war engine made him fully appreciate the power of his beloved leader.

‘Our legends speak of a time when this world belonged to a race of elder beings known as Elohim,’ said Yatiri, squatting beside the enormous foot, ‘a race so beautiful that they fell in love with the wonder of their own form.’

Yatiri turned his gaze towards the cave mouth and said, ‘The Elohim found a source of great power and used it to walk amongst the stars like gods, shaping worlds in their own image and crafting an empire amongst the heavens to rival the gods. They indulged their every whim, denied themselves nothing and lived an immortal life of desire.’

‘Sounds like a good life,’ said Khalophis, casting a suspicious glance into the darkness.

‘For a time it was,’ agreed Yatiri, ‘but such hubris cannot long go unpunished. The Elohim abused the source of their power, corrupting it with their wanton decadence, and it turned on them. Their entire race was virtually destroyed in a single night of blood. Their worlds fell and the oceans drank the land. But that was not the worst of it.’

‘Really? That sounds bad enough,’ said Khalophis, bored by Yatiri’s tale. Creation and destruction myths were a common feature in most cultures, morality tales used to control emerging generations. This one was little different from a hundred others he had read in the libraries of Prospero.

‘The Elohim were all but extinct, but among the pitiful survivors, some were twisted by the power that had once served them. They became the Daiesthai, a race as cruel as they had once been beautiful. The Elohim fought the Daiesthai, eventually driving them back to the shadows beneath the world. Their power was broken and they had not the means to destroy the Daiesthai, so with the last of their power, they raised the Mountain to seal their prison and set these giants to guard against their return. The Daiesthai remain imprisoned beneath the world, but their hunger for death can never be sated, and so we bring them the dead of our tribes at every turning of the world to ensure their eternal slumber continues.’

‘That’s a pretty tale,’ said Khalophis, ‘but it doesn’t explain why you wear those masks.’

‘We are the inheritors of the Elohim’s world, and their destruction serves as a warning against the temptations of vanity and self-obsession. Our masks are a way of ensuring we do not fall as they fell.’

Khalophis considered that for a moment.

‘Do you ever take them off?’ he asked.

‘For bathing, yes.’

‘What about mating?’

Yatiri shook his head and said, ‘It is unseemly for you to ask, but you are not Aghoru, so I will answer. No, we do not take them off, even then, as pleasures of the flesh were among the greatest vices of the Elohim.’

‘That explains why there’re so few of you on this world,’ said Khalophis, wanting nothing more than to return to the encampment and re-establish his connection to Sioda. With the power of the Pyrae in ascendance, his Tutelary was a winged essence of shimmering fire. His connection with Sioda allowed Khalophis and the Sixth Fellowship to burn entire armies to ashes without firing a single shot from their many guns.

The thought empowered him and he snarled, feeling his anger rise to the fore. It was good to feel controlled aggression after so long keeping it in check. This world was nothing to the Thousand Sons, and he railed against their enforced presence here when there were wars to be fought elsewhere. The Wolf King had demanded their presence in battle, and yet they wasted time on a forgotten world that offered nothing of value.

Khalophis reached out and ran his hand across the Titan’s foot, feeling the smoothness of its surface. Such a material must surely be brittle, and he longed to destroy it. He clenched his fists and dropped into a boxer’s stance.

‘What are you doing?’ cried Yatiri, leaping to his feet.

Khalophis didn’t answer. The strength in his arms built, the strength to shatter steel and buckle the hull of an armoured vehicle. He pictured exactly where his fists would strike.

‘Please, Brother Khalophis!’ begged Yatiri, putting himself between Khalophis and the enormous, splay-clawed foot. ‘Stop this, please!’

Khalophis distilled his focus into his clenched fists, but the blows did not land. His consciousness rooted itself in the eighth sphere of the Enumerations, but he forced his thoughts into the seventh, calming his aggression and shackling it to that more contemplative state of being.

‘Your strength would be wasted,’ cried Yatiri. ‘The guardians are impervious to harm!’

Khalophis lowered his arms and stepped back from the target of his violence.

‘Is that what you think?’ he asked. ‘Then what’s that?’

Rising from the ground and spreading into the foot of the towering construct like cracks in stonework, thin black lines oozed upwards like malevolent, poisoned veins.

‘Daiesthai!’ hissed Yatiri.

Kneeling on the sun disc of his glittering pyramid, Magnus closed his first eye and unshackled his body of light from his flesh. His captains and warriors required the Enumerations to achieve the separation from flesh, but Magnus had mastered spirit travel in the aether without being aware that such a thing might be considered difficult.

The Enumerations were philosophical and conceptual tools to allow a practitioner of the mysteries to sift through the myriad complexities involved in bending the universe to his will. Such was his gift, the ability to achieve the impossible without knowing it was beyond comprehension.

On a world such as Aghoru, that process was eased by the aetheric winds that blew invisibly across the planet’s surface. The Great Ocean pressed in, as though around a precious and delicate bubble. Magnus plucked a thought from the third Enumeration to express the concept; this world was a perfect sphere, structurally impossible to improve upon, yet the Mountain was a flaw, a means by which that perfect balance might be upset. When he had entered the cave with Yatiri, he had observed all the formalities of the Aghoru ritual of the dead, but the pointless chanting and somatic posturing had amused him with its naivety.

The Aghoru truly believed they placated some dormant race of devils imprisoned beneath the earth, but the time was not yet right to disabuse them of that notion. Standing in the dark of the cave, he could feel the vast pressure of the Great Ocean far beneath his feet, leeching up through wards worn thin by uncounted aeons.

There were no devils beneath the Mountain, only the promise of something so incredible that it took Magnus’s breath away. It was too early to be certain, but if he was right, the benefit to the human race would be beyond imaging.

What lay beneath the Mountain was a gateway, an entrance to an indescribably vast and complex network of pathways through the Great Ocean, as though an unseen network of veins threaded the flesh of the universe. To gain control of that network would allow humanity free rein over the stars, the chance to step from one side of the galaxy to the other in the blink of an eye.

There was danger, of course there was. He could not simply open this gate without the Great Ocean spilling out with disastrous consequences. The secret to unlocking this world’s great potential would be in careful study, meticulous research and gradual experimentation. As Yatiri intoned the meaningless rituals for the dead, Magnus had drawn a filament of that power upwards, and had tasted the vast potential of it. It was raw, this power, raw and vital. His flesh ached for its touch again.

The things he could do with such power.

Magnus rose up, leaving his corporeal body kneeling upon the sun disc. Freed from the limitations of flesh, his body truly came alive, a lattice of senses beyond the paltry few understood by those whose only life was that lived on the mundane realms of existence.

‘I will free you all from the cave,’ said Magnus, his voice unheard beyond the walls of the pyramid. His body of light shot through the pyramid’s peak, rising into the night sky of Aghoru, and Magnus relished this chance to soar without company or protection.

The Mountain reared over him, its immense presence towering in its majesty.

He rose up thousands of metres, and still it dwarfed his presence.

Magnus shot higher into the sky, a brilliant missile that twisted, spun and wove glittering traceries of light in the sky. His dizzying flight was invisible to all, for Magnus desired to remain alone, and masked his presence from even his captains.

He flew as close to the Mountain as he could, feeling the black wall of null energy radiating from artfully fashioned rocks and peaks designed with but a single purpose: to contain the roiling, unpredictable energies trapped beneath it.

Magnus spun around the Mountain, relishing the aetheric winds whipping around his body of light. Ancient mystics had known the body of light as the linga sarira, a double of the physical body they believed could be conjured into existence with time, effort and will, essentially creating a means to live forever. Though untrue, it was a noble belief.

Onwards and upwards he flew. The atmosphere grew thin, yet the subtle body needed no oxygen or heat or light to sustain it. Will and energy were its currency, and Magnus had a limitless supply of both.

The sun was a fading disc of light above him, and he flew ever upwards, spreading his arms like wings as he bathed in the warmth of the invisible currents of energy that permeated every corner of this world. The world below was a distant memory, the encampment of the Thousand Sons a pinprick of light in the darkness.

He saw the vast swathe of the galaxy, the misty whiteness of the Milky Way, the gleam of distant stars and the impossible gulfs that separated them. Throughout history, men and women had looked up at these stars and dreamed of one day travelling between them. They had balked at distances so vast the human mind was incapable of conceiving them, and then bent their minds to overcoming the difficulties in doing so.

Now the chance to take those stars, to master the galaxy once and for all, was in their grasp. Magnus would be the architect of that mastery. The ships of the Thousand Sons hung motionless in the void above him, the Photep, the Scion of Prospero and the Ankhtowë. Together with Mechanicum forge vessels, Administratum craft and a host of bulk cruisers bearing army soldiers of the Prospero Spireguard, they made up this portion of the 28th Expedition.

Up here, bathed in light and energy, Magnus was free of his earthly limitations, self-imposed though many of them were. Here, he saw with perfect clarity, his form unbound by the laws and bargains made by both him and his creator. Unlike his brothers, Magnus remembered his conception and growth, recalling with perfect clarity the bond that existed between him and his father.

Even as he was forged in the white heat of genius, he spoke with his father, listening to his grand dreams, the colossal scale of his vision and his own place within it. As a mother might talk to the unborn babe in her womb, so did the Emperor speak with Magnus.

But where a growing child knows nothing of the world outside, Magnus knew everything.

He remembered, decades later, returning to the world of his birth to travel its forgotten highways and explore its lost mysteries with his father. The Emperor had taught him more of the secret powers of the universe, imparting his wisdom while little realising that the student was on the verge of outstripping the teacher. They had walked the searing red deserts of Meganesia, travelling the invisible pathways once known as songlines by the first people to walk that land.

Other cultures knew them as ley lines or lung-mei, believing them to be the blood of the gods, the magnetic flow of mystical energy that circulated in the planet’s veins. His father told him how the ancient shamans of Old Earth could tap into these currents and wield power beyond that of other mortals. Many had sought to become gods, raising empires and enslaving all men before them.

The Emperor spoke of how these men had brought ruin upon themselves and their people by trafficking with powers beyond their comprehension. Seeing Magnus’s interest, his father warned him against flying too long and too high in the aether for selfish gain.

Magnus listened attentively, but in his secret heart he had dreamed of controlling the powers these mortals could not. He was a being of light so far removed from humanity that he barely considered himself related to his primordial ancestors. He was far above them, yes, but he did not allow himself to forget the legacy of evolution and sacrifice that had elevated him. It was his duty and his honour to speed the ascension of those who would come after him, to show them the light as his father had shown him.

In those early days, Terra was a changing world, a planet reborn in the image of its new master as shining cities and grand wonders were raised to mark this turn in humanity’s fortunes. The crowning glory of this new age was his father’s palace, a continent-sized monument to the unimaginable achievement of Unity. It took shape on the highest reaches of the world, a landmass of architecture to serve as an undeniable symbol of Terra’s new role as a lodestar for humanity. It would be a shining beacon in a galaxy starved of illumination during the lightless ages.

Magnus had studied the ancient texts his father had assembled within the Librarius Terra, devouring them all with a hunger that bordered on obsession. He stared into the heavens from the Great Observatory, toppled mountaintops with his brothers upon the Martial Spires and, greatest of all, soared upon the aether with his father.

He had watched in amusement as Fulgrim and Ferrus Manus vied for supremacy in the Terrawatt forges beneath Mount Narodnya, debated the nature of the universe with Lorgar in the Hall of Leng, and met ever more of his brothers as they travelled to the world that had birthed them.

He had felt a kinship with some, a brotherhood he had not known he craved until it was right in front of him. With others, he felt nothing; hostility even, but he had not returned that hostility. The future would vindicate him.

When the time had come to make his way in the stars, it was bittersweet. It had seen him parted from his beloved father, but could not have come soon enough for his warriors, as the gene-defects that plagued them were growing ever more severe.

Magnus had led his Legion to Prospero, and there he had…

There he had done what needed to be done to save his sons.

Thinking of his Legion, he turned his gaze from the stars and remembered his father’s warning of flying too high and too far on the aether. He turned his flight back to earth, dropping like a comet towards the surface of Aghoru. The dark ground raced up to meet him, the encampment of the Thousand Sons like a lone campfire on an empty prairie. The minds of his warriors were the flames, some gently wavering, others blazing with ambition.

Magnus slowed his descent, feeling the heat of one flame in particular.

Ahriman. Always it was Ahriman who burned brighter than the others.

His Chief Librarian stood before his pavilion with Sobek at his side. He was speaking with three mortals whose minds were little more than faded embers.

Magnus read them in an instant and knew them better than they knew themselves.

One was Lemuel Gaumon, Ahriman’s new Probationer. The taller of the two women was Camille Shivani, a psychometric, while the slighter one was Kallista Eris, an asemic writer.

She carried a handful of papers, though her aura told Magnus she was unhappy to be holding them. Shivani stood behind Gaumon, who spoke with some force to Ahriman.

Ahriman stared at the page he had been handed.

Magnus floated closer to Ahriman, reading what was written.

Over and over and over again, the same phrase.

The Wolves are coming.

Six

Skarssen
The demands of war
Wyrdmake

It was a day like any other. The sun beat down on the salt plains of Aghoru, the shimmer haze and dryness of the air as punishing as it always had been. A hot wind blew from the Mountain, snapping at the scores of scarab and hawk banners of the Thousand Sons as they formed up into two lines on either side of a processional a kilometre long.

Five Fellowships of the Legion, nearly six thousand Astartes, stood resplendent in crimson and ivory battle armour, jade scarabs gleaming on breastplates, golden crests rearing from the atef helmets of the Scarab Occult. The deshrets of the rest of the Legion were polished and plumed with gold and amethyst.

It was a day like any other, but for one thing.

The Wolves were coming.

Word had come down from the Photep that a small fleet of Astartes vessels had translated from the Great Ocean and was closing with Aghoru with frightening speed. Like a blade through water, the fleet had sliced through the outer reaches of the system on the swiftest route towards the 28th Expedition’s anchorage. Auspex interrogation protocols revealed them to be ships of the Space Wolves, but the Thousand Sons already knew who they were.

Magnus had shown no surprise when Ahriman had presented Kallista Eris’s words, merely ordering his captains to have the Legion ready to parade at dawn. To sense the arrival of a fleet of ships through the warp should have been no great feat for the Thousand Sons, but, save for Magnus, none of its warriors had any inkling of the imminent arrival of the Space Wolves. Ahriman had broached this with Magnus, but the primarch had dismissed his concerns, saying that while their understanding of the currents of the fluid medium in which starships travelled was second to none, it was not infallible.

That hadn’t reassured Ahriman.

Thousands of Legion serfs gathered to witness this reunion of brothers, though they watched proceedings from afar. The remembrancers too were kept at a distance, including Magnus’s personal scribe, Mahavastu Kallimakus. Ahriman sensed Lemuel, Camille and Kallista among them, sharing their sense of foreboding. He feared there was more to Kallista Eris’s message than he understood, yet a night spent in contemplation trying to divine the echoes of the future from the Great Ocean had once again met with failure.

The frustration of the remembrancers at being excluded from today’s proceedings was palpable, but this was a meeting of Astartes, a private thing. As auspicious as this day was, there was no mistaking the martial atmosphere, or the tension in the too rigid, too precise postures of the Thousand Sons.

This was not simply an honour guard to welcome a brother Legion: this was a show of force, a warning, and a declaration of purpose all in one.

The primarch stood beneath a glorious canopy of white silk held aloft by sixty bronze-skinned Legion eunuchs and attended by eighty-one Terminators of the Scarab Occult. Dressed in his full battle-plate, Magnus had eschewed many of the more intricate accoutrements of his armour in favour of a simpler aesthetic, one more suited to the directness of the Wolves. A cloak of dark mail hung from the golden pauldrons of his armour and his plumed helmet rose like a glorious cockade. His great book was absent, secreted within his pavilion behind locks that none save him could open.

Ahriman glanced at the sky, a searing white plate of metal ready to press its great weight down upon them. He would not see the iron-grey drop-ships until they were almost upon them, but kept looking anyway. The inconstant forms of the Tutelaries shimmered above their heads, barely visible against the glare of the sunlight on armour plates. Aaetpio flickered in and out of sight, its nervousness matching his wariness. Utipa and Paeoc held close to their masters, while Sioda pulsed in time with Khalophis’s heartbeat, red as blood.

Uthizzar’s Tutelary, Ephra, was almost invisible, a hidden skein of timid luminosity that shrank from proximity to the others of its kind.

‘They spend all this time racing to get here, and then can’t hurry up now that we’re ready for them,’ complained Phosis T’kar.

‘Vintage Space Wolves,’ said Hathor Maat, and Ahriman saw that his brother had shaped his flesh into a less sculpted cast, no longer the porcelain features of ancient statue, more the rugged warrior. ‘Isn’t that right, Uthizzar?’

Uthizzar nodded without looking at Maat.

‘The warriors of Russ are unpredictable. Except in matters of war,’ he said.

‘You should know,’ said Phosis T’kar. ‘You served with them for a time.’

‘For a short time only,’ said Uthizzar softly. ‘They are… not fond of outsiders.’

‘Ha!’ barked Phosis T’kar. ‘They sound just like us. I almost like them already.’

‘The Wolves? They’re barbarians,’ said Khalophis, surprising them all. He bristled like the alpha male of a hunting pack. The Captain of the Sixth Fellowship was a brutal man, but Ahriman understood his sentiment. As much as he relished destruction, Khalophis was never imprecise or needless with his violence.

‘Kindred spirits for you, Khalophis,’ said Hathor Maat. ‘You should get on famously.’

‘Say what you will, Pavoni, but don’t think I can’t see your newly-fleshed features.’

‘Merely adapting to the circumstances,’ replied Hathor Maat archly, his Tutelary flickering with irritation.

‘Why do you call them barbarians?’ asked Phosis T’kar. ‘No disrespect, but you are not a subtle man.’

‘I know what you’re thinking, but I have studied their campaigns and they are a blunt instrument of war. There is no subtlety or precision to their fights, simply swathes of destruction without control. When the Emperor unleashes them, be sure not to get in their way, for when the Wolves slip their leash, nothing will stop them until only ashes remain. Perturabo’s warriors, now that’s controlled aggression. We could all learn a lot from them. Precise force delivered exactly where it is needed.’

‘For once I feel myself in agreement with Khalophis,’ said Ahriman. ‘I must be ill.’

They laughed, though Ahriman saw Uthizzar’s grimace.

As part of their training, all Captains of Fellowship undertook a secondment to another Legion to learn its ways and further the Thousand Sons’ understanding of the galaxy. Khalophis had served with the Iron Warriors, a Legion he admired and ranked second only to the Thousand Sons. Phosis T’kar fought alongside the Luna Wolves, and never tired of regaling his brothers with tales of meeting Horus Lupercal, or boasting of his close friendship with Hastur Sejanus and Ezekyle Abaddon, the First Primarch’s closest lieutenants.

Hathor Maat’s secondment had seen him serving with the Emperor’s Children in their earliest days as they fought alongside the Luna Wolves. As Hathor Maat told it, he had caught the Phoenician’s eye with his perfectly moulded features, and had fought within his sight on many an occasion. Maat’s proudest possession was an Oath of Moment carved by Fulgrim, and fixed to his breastplate as he took his leave to return to Prospero.

Uthizzar’s secondment had been amongst the shortest ever served, lasting a little less than a Terran year. Ahriman was never sure whether the Wolves or Uthizzar had ended the exchange. Athanaeans shunned large gatherings or those whose thoughts were too loud, too brutal, too jagged and too raucous.

Ahriman had spent five years with the Word Bearers, learning much of their Legion and methods of war. It had been an unhappy time for Ahriman, for the scions of Lorgar were a zealous Legion, their devotion to the Master of Mankind bordering on the fanatical. All the Legions were devoted to their lord and his cause, but the Word Bearers lived and fought with the passion of those who claimed to carry the fire of the divine before them.

Their auras had been blazing pillars of certainty; certainty Ahriman felt was unwarranted, for it was unsupported by foundations of knowledge. Some called it faith, Ahriman called it hopeful ignorance. Save for a warrior named Erebus, he had made few friends in the XVII Legion, for their fervour left no room for those who did not share its passion.

Lorgar’s Legion bore an inauspicious number, for in the traditions of ancient Tali, the number seventeen was one of ill-fortune. XVII was considered as the anagram and numerical value for the ancient Gothic expression VIXI, which meant, ‘I lived’, and whose logical extension was, therefore, ‘I am dead’.

Ahriman’s thoughts were dragged back to the present by a wordless expression of unease from Aaetpio. He looked up to see a pair of angular grey aircraft plunging down through the hard yellow sky, dropping as though their engines had failed. They screamed down, flaming contrails blazing from the leading edges of their wings.

‘They’re in a hurry,’ said Phosis T’kar.

‘Is that a good thing?’ asked Ahriman.

‘No,’ said Uthizzar, his face pale beneath the darkness of his browned skin. ‘It is never good when the Wolves race towards you.’

‘You can read them?’ asked Hathor Maat. ‘Even from here?’

‘I could read their thoughts from orbit,’ said Uthizzar, fighting to keep his tone even.

Ahriman watched as the drop-ships fell, plotting their approach vectors and realising they would miss the landing fields.

‘Something’s wrong,’ he said. ‘They are off target. Way off.’

The drop-ships fell like meteors that would impact on the salt flats and leave nothing behind save devastation and a giant crater. The image fixed in Ahriman’s mind for a moment, and he wondered if it was imagination or a fragmentary glimpse of the future.

The drop-ships fired their engines just as Ahriman was sure it was too late to arrest their descent, the roar of retros like the howls of a thousand wolves as they slammed down, off to the side of Magnus’s silk canopy. Gritty clouds of exhaust roared out from the landing site, a hurricane of hot air and burned salt crystals. The gene-bulked eunuchs fought to hold the wind-blown canopy down in the face of the drop-ships’ jetwash.

Even before the obscuring clouds had begun to dissipate, the assault ramps of the drop-ships slammed down. Grey-armoured figures emerged from the swirling, stinging smoke; their lithe power wolf-clad, sure and honed to a lethal edge, a pack of voracious predators who relish the fight at bay. Leading them was a figure in grey, a leather-masked warrior of pure, streamlined aggression.

Amlodhi Skarssen Skarssensson, Lord of the Fifth Company of the Space Wolves.

Ahriman hadn’t known what to expect from the Space Wolves. Uthizzar had not exactly been forthcoming after his secondment had ended. They were not friends enough for him to press for details, but he had assumed the grand tales and hyperbolic praise heaped upon the sons of Russ was the exaggeration of storytellers.

Now he knew that was not so.

A pack of slavering wolves, dappled grey and white, with powerful, muscular shoulders, ranged ahead of the Astartes. Their eyes, slitted yellow, were locked on Magnus, and their jaws drew back to expose masses of long, overdeveloped fangs like ivory daggers.

The wolves snapped and snarled, and their monstrous, shaggy heads swung from side to side, as though deciding what to attack first.

Behind the wolves came hulking warriors in steeldust Terminator armour, with Amlodhi Skarssen Skarssensson at their head. He marched through the smoke and dust towards the ruin of Magnus’s pavilion, shoulders down as though he were advancing into the teeth of a blizzard. His armour was the battered grey of a thundercloud, and a blackened wolf pelt was secured around his neck on a bone clasp, the slain beast’s enormous skull and teeth forming his right shoulder guard.

Instead of a helmet, Skarssen wore a tight-fitting leather mask fashioned in the form of some hideous amalgam of wolf and daemon, lacquered and pierced with fragments of stone. His eyes shone through the mask, cold flint to match the grey of his armour, and a black-bladed axe with an edge like napped obsidian was sheathed across his back.

His warriors were no less feral, their weapons and armour festooned with talismans and fetishes torn from the corpses of wolves. They followed in their leader’s wake, carried along in the slipstream of his march, juggernauts of ceramite that Ahriman wasn’t sure were going to stop.

He rose through the Enumerations, outraged at this blatantly challenging behaviour. Aaetpio squalled in fear, and Ahriman’s concentration slipped as his Tutelary fled to the sanctuary of the Great Ocean. He looked back at the snarling wolves, their form blurring for a moment as they stared at him with intelligent eyes that were chilling in their perception.

It took him a moment to realise that all the Tutelaries had fled. Anger turned to momentary confusion, and all eyes turned to Magnus.

Ahriman felt his primarch’s soothing presence in his mind, the words unspoken, but heard by all the Captains of Fellowship.

Hold, my sons, this is posturing, nothing more.

The giant wolves halted, forming a rough semicircle around them and the terrified eunuchs. The wolves lowered their heads, teeth bared. The urge to send a pulse of destructive energy along the length of his heqa staff was almost overwhelming.

‘Magnus the Red,’ said Skarssen, as though there might be some doubt. His voice was booming and harsh, the voice of a killer. ‘I am called Amlodhi Skarssen Skarssensson, Lord of the Fifth Company of the Space Wolves, and I bring a call to arms from Leman Russ, Great Wolf of the Legions of Fenris. You are to muster your forces and make all haste to the Ark Reach Cluster. This the Wolf King commands.’

To stand before a being so mighty as a primarch and deliver such a baldly aggressive demand beggared belief. Without being aware of it moving, he realised his hand was on the butt of his gun, and seething waves of outrage shone in the auras of his fellow captains.

His limbs trembled with aetheric energies, the gently lapping tide within roiling into a series of roaring breakers that demanded release. The influence of the Corvidae was at its lowest ebb, but Ahriman could still draw on the power of the Great Ocean to unleash phenomenal powers of destruction.

The aether swelled around him as he built energy in his flesh. This was what it meant to be alive, to tap into the wellspring of the Primordial Creator and wield that power as deftly as a swordsman wields a blade.

That energy swirled around Skarssen and his warriors, yet where it easily passed through the Astartes of the Thousand Sons, the Space Wolves were anathema to it. Skarssen’s aura was little more than a dulled haze, like winter sunrise through thick fog.

Was Skarssen veiled?

That seemed unlikely, though perhaps the many fetishes hanging from his armour were shielding him. The protection offered by such talismans was largely illusory, but belief in such things could be a potent force. Even as he formed the thought, Ahriman caught a flash of a bearded warrior in a leather skullcap in the midst of the Terminators, like a shadow amongst the deeper darkness or a whisper in a thunderstorm.

He sensed kindred power, but in the instant of its recognition, it vanished.

‘Show some damned respect!’ snarled Phosis T’kar, and the moment passed.

The captain of the Second Fellowship stepped forward with his heqa staff planted in the ground before him and said, ‘Speak thusly again and I swear by the Great Ocean I will end you.’

To his credit, Skarssen didn’t flinch, which was impressive considering the bludgeoning force of Phosis T’kar’s choler hammering his aura.

Skarssen kept his attention fixed solely on Magnus.

‘Do you understand my message as I have spoken it to you?’ he asked.

‘I understand it,’ said Magnus, coolly. ‘Take off your mask.’

The Space Wolf flinched as though slapped, and Ahriman sensed a ferocious build up of power. He gasped as the energy filling him was drained in an instant, siphoned off by a mind infinitely greater than his.

With painful deliberation, his limbs shaking with the effort of resistance, Skarssen reached up and unfastened the buckles securing his mask. He pulled it from his face to reveal features that were craggy and worn like a storm-carved cliff. Clean-shaven, with high cheekbones and a brow pierced with jutting canine fangs like a crown, his lower jaw was tattooed to mimic the toothed jawbone of a wolf.

Throbbing veins pulsed at Skarssen’s temple.

‘That’s better,’ said Magnus. ‘I never like to kill a man without first seeing his face.’

Magnus seemed to swell, growing in stature, while simultaneously remaining as he had always appeared. The wolves yelped, lowering their heads and backing away from the mighty primarch, and Ahriman saw the beginnings of… not fear exactly, but the wariness of prey.

Skarssen had come with one purpose, to bring the Thousand Sons to the Ark Reach Cluster. He had delivered his message in the most unequivocal way possible, but Magnus could not be so easily dominated by the brute force of the Space Wolves.

‘Kill me and you will suffer the wrath of the Great Wolf,’ hissed Skarssen.

‘Be silent!’ thundered Magnus, and the world stilled. All sound died as the wind ceased its moaning and salt crystals hung motionless on the hardpan. ‘You are nothing to me, Amlodhi Skarssen Skarssensson. I can kill you where you stand, before you or any of your savage brethren could lift a hand to stop me. I can smash your ships to debris with a thought. Know this and choose your next words carefully.’

Ahriman saw that Skarssen was not a warrior without courage, his aura instinctively rebelling at the challenge in Magnus’s words, but nor was he without the wit to understand that he was a mote in the face of the primarch’s power. He looked to his left and right, seeing the world frozen around him, every banner hanging motionless and every observer save the Thousand Sons like statues lining a triumphal roadway.

Skarssen lifted his head to expose the corded muscles of his thick neck, and Ahriman recognised the symbolism of the gesture.

Magnus nodded and the world snapped back into its natural rhythms. The wind blew once more and the silk banners flapped in the haze of dancing salt crystals.

‘Wolf Lord Skarssen,’ said Magnus, ‘I understand your message, but there is much to do on Aghoru before we can fight alongside your father’s Legion.’

‘This world is compliant, is it not?’ asked Skarssen, and Ahriman sensed the confusion amongst the Space Wolves at his newly subservient tone.

‘It is,’ agreed Magnus.

‘Then what is left to do?’ he asked. ‘There are worlds yet to be brought to heel, and your Legion’s strength is required. Your brothers-in-arms call for you, and it is a warrior’s duty to fight when called.’

‘On your world perhaps,’ said Magnus, ‘but this is not Fenris. Where and when the Thousand Sons fight is for me to decide, not the Wolf King, and certainly not you. Do I make myself clear?’

‘You do, Lord Magnus, but I swore a blood oath not to return without your warriors.’

‘That is none of my concern, and this is not a matter for discussion,’ said Magnus, an unmistakeable edge of impatience in his tone.

‘Then we are at an impasse.’

‘I fear that we are,’ said Magnus.

Ahriman concentrated on the words before him, his quill scratching at the heavy paper as he committed the morning’s events to his grimoire. There would be other records, of course, but none that told of events with a true understanding of what had really happened. His words flowed from him without conscious thought as he rose through the Enumerations and let the natural rhythm of memory and intuition guide him.

He closed his eyes, freeing his body of light and letting it rise up from his flesh. The currents of the Great Ocean bore him into the darkness, and Ahriman hoped to catch a glimpse of things to come. He quashed the thought. To focus on the desires of the ego in this place of emotion would only diminish the probability of success.

His connection with the material world faded, and the Great Ocean swelled around him, a maelstrom of non-existent colours, nameless emotions and meaningless dimensions.

Occasional ripples ushered him onwards, powerful minds, intense emotions and primal urges. The anger of the Space Wolves was a red reef of raw directness, the gasping lust of two remembrancers as they coupled a purple swirl of conflicting desire. The fear of a Legion serf as he rubbed a salve into an infected rash was a splash of vivid green, the scheming of yet another as she plotted how to further her career, a dull ochre yellow.

They rose around him like temple smoke, though concepts such as up and down had no meaning here. A swirling fog surrounded him, an impenetrable mist of emotion, feeling and possibility. His mere proximity wrought potential existences within the fog, his presence an imprint in the warp and weft of the Great Ocean, shaping and shaped by the immaterial unmatter that made up this alternate dimension.

This was the very essence of the Primordial Creator, the wellspring from which all things came. Nothing was impossible here, for this was the foundry of creation, the origin of all things, past, present and future.

Ahriman flew onwards, revelling in the aetheric energies, bathing in them and refreshed by them. When he returned to his body, he would be energised as a mortal would be by a good night’s rest.

The kaleidoscopic world around him stretched out to infinite realms of possibility. Ahriman let his consciousness be borne along by the currents, hoping to chance upon a rich seam of things yet to pass. He focussed his mind on the teachings of the Corvidae even as he opened his mind to the vast emptiness of thought. Such apparently contradictory states of mind were essential to the reading of the future, difficult for one such as him, near impossible for anyone less gifted.

He felt the first nibblings of other presences in the Great Ocean, formless creatures of insensate appetite, little more than mewling scraps of energy drawn to his mind as students flock to a great master. They thought to feed on him, but Ahriman dismissed them with a flicker of thought.

Such whelp creatures were no threat to an Adept Exemptus of his skill, but older, hungrier things swam the depths, malevolent predators that fed on the hot, life-rich energies of mortal travellers. Ahriman was protected, but he was not invulnerable.

It began softly, a faint hiss, like rain on glass.

He felt its feather-light pull, and he drifted towards it without apparent interest. Too quick, and he would disturb the fabric of the Great Ocean, overwhelming the skittish trickle of future events with the swells of his eagerness.

Ahriman controlled his excitement, letting his course and that of the thin stream come together, opening his mind’s eye to the bracing cold of unwritten events.

He saw a mountain of glass, tall and hollowed out, yet a stripling compared to the Mountain of Aghoru. A great space within was filled with yellow light, a spiking cauldron of conflicting emotions and hurt, a gathering thundercloud, shot through with golden lightning, filled the sky.

Ahriman knew this was important; visions in the aether were shaped as much by the viewer as they were by the Great Ocean. This mountain and thunderstorm could be a true vision, or could be allegory, each aspect symbolic of something greater. It was the skill of the adept to sort one from the other.

Hot excitement ghosted through his immaterial form. It had been years since any Corvidae had been able to peel back the skin of the aeather to reveal the future. Might this mean the eternal waxing and waning of the tides of power were shifting once more in his cult’s favour?

The intensity of the thought rippled outwards, disturbing the liquid nothingness enfolding him. The vision fractured, like the surface of a lake in a rainstorm. Ahriman fought for calm, but his tenuous grasp on the stream was slipping. The glass mountain vanished, breaking into millions of pieces and falling like tears. A weeping eye was reflected in every shard, red and raw with pain.

He fought to hold on to the jagged, painful images, but the aether surged, and it was gone, swept away in the angry swells of his own desire. Like the onset of a sudden storm, the substance of the Great Ocean turned violent. His own frustration was turning against him. Red waves broke against him as his mind was wrenched from thoughts of the future.

His perception of the immediate returned to him, and he sensed the vibrant hunger of nearby void hunters, rapacious conceptual predators that followed the spoor of travellers’ emotions to devour their bodies of light. Dozens of them circled him like sharks with the scent of blood. He had remained longer than was safe, far longer.

The first emerged from the blood-red mist, all appetite and instinct. It came at him directly, its glittering teeth forming in the instant it took to think of them.

Ahriman flew out of its path, its crimson form twisting around to follow him as another predator emerged from the mists. His mental analogy of sharks had given them form, and its body was sleek and evolved to be the consummate killer. He forced his mind to empty, discarding all metaphor and vocabulary, for they were the weapons his enemies would use against him.

He flew from them, but they had his scent now. Half a dozen more followed, their forms blurred and protean, borrowed from those whose bodies of light had been given shape by his careless simile. A void hunter surged towards him, massive and powerful, its jaws opened wide to swallow him whole.

Ahriman gathered the energy of the aether to him, feeding on the red mists and unleashing a torrent of will at the hunter. Its body exploded into shards of fire, each one snapped up and devoured by one of the other predators. Twin heqa staffs appeared in Ahriman’s hands, blazing with aetheric fire. Such weapons were necessary and dangerous at the same time. To burn so brightly would attract other beasts, yet without them he would surely perish here, leaving his mortal body a dead, soulless husk on the floor of his pavilion.

They circled him, darting in to bite and snap, each time deterred by a sweep of his fiery staffs. Ahriman rose into the eighth Enumeration. He would need the focus of its aggression to stay alive, but it would only inflame the hunger of the beasts. The creatures came at him in a rush. Ahriman had seen their gathering fury, and lashed out with his blazing weapons.

The closest beast billowed out of existence at his blow, the second with a violent burst of thought that overwhelmed its hunger and dispersed its essence. Another snapped at him. He swayed aside, its immaterial teeth snapping shut an instant from tearing his insubstantial existence apart. He thrust his heqa staff into his head, feeling its primal hunger and rage as its essence was obliterated.

The pack broke off its attack, wary of him, but unable to halt their pursuit. The instincts of the void hunter were murderously sharp, but they demanded satisfaction. They would attack again, soon.

They came at him three more times. Each time they retreated to a pack that grew larger with every passing moment, while he grew weaker and bled irresistible morsels of energy into the void.

He could not long keep up this pace of battle. Combat in the aetheric realms was more draining than battling in the physical. In the material realm, an Astartes could fight for weeks on end without rest, but here such endurance was measured in minutes. A high-ranking warrior of the Thousand Sons could travel the Great Ocean far longer than most, but the strain of this fight was pushing Ahriman to the limits of his endurance.

A great maw raced up at him from below, a thought-shaped need of monstrous proportions. Its teeth closed on his leg, tearing into his light, and his pain bled out like glittering diamonds, brilliant white and impossible to resist. His staff carved into the beast, and it vanished in its moment of triumph.

He could not fight them much longer, and it seemed they knew his resistance was almost at an end. Their eagerness for him had them jostling one another, each beast desperate to make the kill and secure the choicest cuts.

His energy was fading and one of the fiery heqa staffs winked out of existence.

How galling to die after such a tantalising glimpse of the future.

Then came a howling cry that split the Great Ocean, a furious sound that scattered the hunters as a wild darkness rose out of the swelling tides and currents. Fangs like swords of ice snapped and bit through the void hunters. This was form and will honed to a knife-edge, a force streamlined for destruction and utterly without mercy. Yellow eyes, a shaggy pelt of black fur and slavering jaws roiled amid the frenzy.

Even before Ahriman’s mind formed the image, he saw the phantasmal outline of the wolf, a beast larger and more powerful than any living animal could ever be. It tore through the void predators, howling as it destroyed them with brutal swipes of thunderous claws and bites that swallowed each enemy whole.

Within the dark of the wolf’s body, Ahriman caught fleeting glimpses of the furious will that drove it: a distant shadow in dark armour, not black but deep, metallic grey. The wolf howled, and waves of untrammelled fury spread into the Great Ocean with the force of a boulder dropped into a millpond. The predators scattered, cowed by this apex predator.

And, like fading inkspots on a blotter, they melted into the darkness.

The wolf turned towards Ahriman, its form turning in on itself and folding like the pieces of an origami puzzle until all that was left was the shadow at its heart, the subtle body of an Astartes in the hard grey of the Space Wolves.

He drifted towards Ahriman, and it took no special skills to feel the primal, bruising energy that suffused this traveller’s flesh. His sheer vitality was incredible. Ahriman was a controlled reactor, but this warrior was a violent supernova. Both were deadly, both burned as bright, but where Ahriman could pluck a single soul out of a horde of millions, this warrior would destroy a million to kill the one.

The wolf was gone, but Ahriman saw it tightly leashed within the warrior’s heart.

‘We should go, brother,’ said the wolf warrior, with a voice like colliding glaciers. ‘The longer we tarry, the more our presence will draw fouler beasts.’

‘I saw you,’ said Ahriman. ‘You came with Skarssen.’

‘Lord Skarssen,’ corrected the warrior. ‘But, aye, you speak true, brother. My name is Ohthere Wyrdmake, Rune Priest to Amlodhi Skarssen Skarssensson of the Fifth Company of Space Wolves.’

‘Ahzek Ahriman, Chief Librarian of the Thousand Sons.’

‘I know well your name, Ahzek Ahriman,’ said Wyrdmake, with a feral grin, ‘for I have long desired to meet you.’

Seven

The Wolves of Fenris
A meeting of minds
The dam breaks

There are no wolves on Fenris.

Ahriman had heard that before, a nugget of scandalous rumour passed down from nameless source to nameless source. Such contention was, of course, ridiculous; the evidence padded alongside the Thousand Sons as they marched into the Mountain once again. A score of iron-furred wolves roamed at will along the length of the column of warriors, like herding dogs watching over a flock.

Six hundred Astartes marched into the Mountain, the Thousand Sons and Space Wolves together. At the head of the column, Magnus the Red led the way, surrounded by Terminators of the Scarab Occult and flanked by his captains. Lord Skarssen and his retinue of Wolf Guard marched alongside the towering primarch. Ohthere Wyrdmake walked at his master’s side, and the Rune Priest inclined his head as he caught Ahriman’s eye.

They had spoken last night, yet Ahriman still did not know quite what to make of him.

Land Raiders crunched their way uphill alongside the Astartes, the war footing at the behest of Yatiri.

The tribal elder had come down from the Mountain with Khalophis prior to the arrival of Lord Skarssen and begged to see the Crimson King. The Space Wolves were en route, and he had been forced to wait until after their arrival. As important as the Aghoru were to the Thousand Sons, mortal business took second place to Astartes business.

Ahriman had watched as Yatiri was shown into the glittering pyramid of Magnus, seeing the fear in his body language. Like all the masked tribesfolk of the Aghoru, Yatiri cast no shadow in the aether, his life-energies somehow hidden from the sight of the Thousand Sons. He came with his fellow elders, and Ahriman saw their anger, no matter that they were masked and unreadable.

Whatever passed between Yatiri and Magnus had been serious enough for the primarch to order Ahriman to gather warriors from every Fellowship and assemble a battle march.

Seeing the Thousand Sons preparations, a warrior calling himself Varangr Ragnulf Ragnulfssen, herald of Lord Skarssen, had come to Magnus to request an audience.

And so the Space Wolves marched with the Thousand Sons.

They had marched past the deadstones, the rocks streaked with oily black tendrils like rotten veins. Upon seeing the condition of the deadstones, the Aghoru dropped to their knees and wept in fear. Ahriman paused to examine the stones, knowing only one thing that could have had so dramatic an effect on such impervious stone.

‘What do you think?’ asked Phosis T’kar.

‘The same as you,’ he had replied, and walked on.

Ahriman watched the warriors of Lord Skarssen as the march continued. They set a brutal pace, and the Thousand Sons matched it. What was a fast walk for the Astartes was a punishing run for the Aghoru. Despite that, the tribesmen kept pace with the armoured warriors, fear lending their limbs strength to endure the exhausting temperature of the day.

‘They don’t feel the heat,’ said Phosis T’kar as the march continued.

‘Who?’

‘The beasts Skarssen brought with him,’ clarified T’kar. ‘They come from a world of ice and snow, yet they seem untroubled by this heat.’

Ahriman watched as a wolf that reached to his waist padded by. Its fur was a patchwork of grey and white, thick and shaggy around its forequarters, sleek and smooth at its rear. As though sensing his scrutiny, it swung towards him, baring its fangs and narrowing its yellow eyes in a blatant challenge.

‘I do not know for sure,’ said Ahriman, ‘but all that lives on the surface of Fenris does so because it can adapt to changing circumstances. These wolves are no exception.’

‘Then I wish I could adapt like them. I am sick of this damned heat,’ said Phosis T’kar angrily. ‘My body is gene-wrought to withstand all extremes, but the fire of this sun saps us all of life. Even Hathor Maat struggles with it.’

‘Speak for yourself, T’kar,’ retorted Hathor Maat. ‘I am quite comfortable.’

Despite his bluster, Maat suffered as the rest of them did. Without the powers of the Pavoni to call on, he was unable to regulate his body as efficiently as would normally be the case. Yet the wolves of Fenris marched as though through a balmy summer’s day, the heat as untroubling to them as the frozen tundra of their home world.

‘It is thanks to their engineering,’ said Magnus, joining their conversation. The primarch had said nothing since the march had begun, content to let his captains do the talking.

‘They were engineered?’ asked Ahriman. ‘By whom?’

‘By the first colonists of Fenris,’ said Magnus with a smile. ‘Can’t you see the dance of helices within them? The ballet of genes and the remarkable feats of splicing the earliest scientists achieved?’

Ahriman shared a glance with his fellow captains, and Magnus laughed.

‘No, of course you do not,’ said Magnus, shaking his head. ‘Uthizzar, you have travelled to Fenris, have you not?’

It was a rhetorical question, for Magnus knew everything about their secondments and legacies of honour.

Uthizzar nodded.

‘Briefly, my lord,’ he said. ‘It was not a pleasant experience.’

‘I imagine it was not. Fenris does not welcome visitors, nor is it a gracious host,’ said Magnus with a hidden smile. ‘It is a world like no other, unforgiving and pernicious. The ice waits to kill those who travel its frozen seas and snow-locked cliffs at the first signs of complacency. A mortal man, even a well-prepared one, would freeze to death on Fenris within minutes of setting foot on its surface.’

‘Yet the tribes survive there well enough,’ said Ahriman. ‘Apparently, they are little more than feral savages, endlessly waging war for the few scraps of land that survive the upheaval of the Great Year.’

‘That they are,’ said Magnus. ‘But also so much more.’

‘What makes them so special?’ asked Hathor Maat, unwilling to believe that such barbarous mortals could earn the primarchs’s approbation.

‘Were you not listening? Fenris is a death world, a planet so hostile it would test even your powers of bio-manipulation. Yet these mortals carve themselves land, home and families on a world most right-thinking men would avoid.’

‘So how do they do it?’

Magnus smiled, and Ahriman saw he was enjoying the role of teacher once more.

‘First, tell me what you know of the Canis Helix?’

‘It’s a genetic primer,’ said Hathor Maat, ‘a precursor gene that allows the remainder of the Space Wolf gene-seed to take root in an aspirant’s body.’

Magnus shook his head. His great eye glittered with green and gold as he regarded his captains.

‘That is part of its function, yes, but it was never intended to be used so… obviously,’ he said.

‘Then how was it supposed to be used?’ asked Ahriman. He looked over at Skarssen, the warrior once more wearing his leather mask, and wondered if the Apothecaries of the Fang knew as much as Magnus. The Wolf Lord walked warily around Magnus, having tasted a measure of his power. Ahriman suspected his primarch’s boast that he could destroy the Space Wolf ships in orbit was a calculated bluff. Clearly Skarssen wasn’t so sure.

‘Imagine the time when mankind first discovered Fenris,’ continued Magnus, ‘a world so utterly inimical to life that humans simply could not survive. Everything about Fenris was death, from the blood-freezing cold to the sinking lands to the howling winds that suck the life from your lungs. Back then, of course, geneticists saw impossibility as a challenge, and daily wrought new codes within the chromosomes of human and animal genomes as easily as the Mechanicum punch data-wafers for servitors.’

‘So you’re saying that these colonists brought gene-bred wolves with them to Fenris?’ said Phosis T’kar.

‘Perhaps they did,’ allowed Magnus, ‘but more likely they adapted, imperfectly at times and without thought to the consequences. Or perhaps there were other, older races living on Fenris.’

Ahriman watched Magnus as he spoke, feeling that there was more to the origins of Fenris than he was telling. Magnus was a traveller who had ventured deeper into the hidden reaches of the Great Ocean than any living soul. Perhaps he had actually witnessed the earliest days of the Wolf King’s world.

Magnus gave a studied shrug and said, ‘You look at those beasts and you see wolves, but is that only because it is what you expect to see?’

‘What else would we see?’ asked Hathor Maat. ‘They are wolves.’

‘When you have travelled as far as I have, and seen as I have seen, you will learn that it is possible to look beyond the expected and into the true heart of a thing.’

Magnus gestured towards a wolf loping alongside the column, its powerful muscles driving it uphill through the heat without pause.

‘I can look past the flesh and muscle of that beast, paring back the bone into the heart of its marrow to read every scar and twist in its genetic code. I can unravel the millennia of change back to the logos of its origins,’ said Magnus. Ahriman was surprised to hear sadness in his voice, as though he had seen things he would rather not have seen. ‘The thing it is, what it wished to be, and all the stages of that long evolutionary road.’

The wolf stopped beside Magnus and he nodded towards it. An unspoken discourse seemed to pass between them. Ahriman caught a knowing glance from Ohthere Wyrdmake. Despite his reservations, he felt the urge to nurture the nascent kinship between them.

‘Away with you!’ shouted Phosis T’kar, shooing it. ‘Damned wolves.’

Magnus smiled. ‘I told you, there are no wolves on Fenris.’

They had met the previous evening, after Ahriman returned to his corporeal body. Opening his eyes, he groaned as his flesh ached with the stress of his body of light’s reintegration. His leg flared painfully, his entire body a mass of discomfort.

With careful slowness, Ahriman uncrossed his legs and used his heqa staff to push himself to his feet. His right thigh felt numb, like it belonged to someone else, and cold pain burned the muscles and sinews the length of his leg. He opened his robe gingerly, pressing his fingertips to the bulked musculature of his smooth torso and grimacing in pain.

Repercussions covered his flesh where the void hunters had wounded him, blackened patches of skin drained of their vitality. More completely than any wound dealt with blade or bullet, injuries to the subtle body damaged the very essence of a traveller’s flesh.

An Astartes could rise above pain, his body designed to allow him to function without loss of effectiveness, but nothing save rest and meditation could undo the damage of repercussions.

He saw his grimoire lying open on the ground of his pavilion and knelt to retrieve it, wincing as the dead areas of his body pulled tight. He felt like he had fought for a month without rest, his body pushed nearly to the limits of its endurance.

Ahriman secreted his grimoire and changed from his robe into a hooded tunic of crimson, edged with ivory and sable. Though his body ached for sleep, he had one last meeting to attend, one he had not anticipated until his near-fatal flight into the Great Ocean.

The flap at his pavilion’s entrance pushed open and Sobek entered, his face a mask of concern. Cooler night air gusted in with him.

‘My lord, is everything all right?’

‘Everything is fine, Sobek,’ said Ahriman.

‘I heard you calling out.’

‘An interesting flight in the aether, Sobek, that is all,’ said Ahriman, lifting the hood over his head. ‘Some predatory creatures thought to make me a morsel.’

‘And yet you are venturing out?’ asked Sobek. ‘You should be resting, my lord.’

Ahriman shook his head.

‘No,’ he said, ‘there is someone I need to see.’

The lair of the Wolves was on the edge of the mountain, in the shadow of the deadstones. Skarssen had set his warriors’ shelters in concentric rings, with his at its heart. Ahriman saw a great wolf-skull totem planted in the crystalline hardpan, hung with wolf tails as long as a mortal man’s leg and teeth like blades.

As he drew near, shadows bled from the twilight, sleek killers that put Ahriman in mind of the predators that had almost ended him earlier. Six of them padded towards him, their forms indistinct against the darkness, their hackles raised.

They halted and he saw the gleam of stars on their fangs. Their muscles were tensed and ready, like pistons ready to fire on the launch rails of an embarkation deck.

‘I have come to see Ohthere Wyrdmake,’ said Ahriman, feeling foolish at addressing beasts. The largest of the wolves threw back its head and loosed an almighty howl that split the faded evening.

Ahriman waited for the wolves to back away, but they remained where they were, barring him entry to their master’s domain. He stepped forward, and the wolf that had announced his presence bared its iron fangs with a threatening growl.

Another shadow moved behind the wolves, a tall warrior in granite grey armour who walked with a tall staff topped with an eagle of gold and silver. His beard was waxed, and he wore a plain leather skullcap over his shaven scalp. Ahriman recognised him immediately.

‘Ohthere Wyrdmake,’ he said.

‘Aye,’ replied the Space Wolf, tilting his head and regarding him carefully. ‘You are hurt, mistflesh hurt.’

‘I was careless,’ he said, not knowing the word, but understanding the meaning.

Wyrdmake nodded and said, ‘That you were. I watched you chase the wyrd, blind to the hunting packs gathering for the murder-make. How came you to miss them?’

‘As I said, I was careless,’ repeated Ahriman. ‘How did you find me?’

Wyrdmake laughed, the sound rich with genuine humour.

‘That took no great skill,’ he said. ‘I am a Son of the Storm and I know the ocean of souls like the seas around Asaheim. When the Wolf’s Eye swells in the sky, the world forge turns and the dowsers seek the silent places, those places that are still amid the turmoil. I looked for stillness, and I found you.’

Much of what Wyrdmake said made no sense to Ahriman, the terms too archaic, the vocabulary expressing parochial understandings beyond one not of Fenris.

‘That begs the question, why were you looking for me?’

‘Come,’ said Wyrdmake. ‘Walk with me.’

The Rune Priest set off towards the deadstones without waiting to see if Ahriman obeyed. The wolves parted to allow him through their ranks. Keeping a wary eye on the beasts, Ahriman followed Wyrdmake towards the deadstones, the menhirs like black teeth growing up from the ground.

The warrior walked the circumference of the stones, careful not to touch them as he passed. He turned as Ahriman approached.

‘Anchors in the world,’ said Wyrdmake. ‘Places of stillness. The Storm rages across this world, but all is still here. Like Asaheim, immovable and unchanging.’

‘The Aghoru call them deadstones,’ said Ahriman, as the wolves padded softly around the edge of the circle, each one with its eyes locked on him.

‘A fitting name.’

‘So, are you going to tell me why you were looking for me?’

‘To know you,’ said Wyrdmake. ‘Amlodhi came with a summons for your master, but I came for you. Your name is known to the Rune Priests of the Space Wolves, Ahzek Ahriman. You are star-cunning. Like me, you are a Son of the Storm, and I know of your affinity with the wyrd.’

‘The wyrd? I don’t know that term,’ said Ahriman.

‘You are not of Fenris,’ said Wyrdmake, as though that explained everything.

‘Then enlighten me,’ said Ahriman, losing patience.

‘You would have me share the secrets of my calling?’

‘We will have precious little else to talk about if you do not.’

Wyrdmake smiled, exposing teeth honed to sharp points. ‘You cut to the heart of the meat, friend. Very well. At its simplest, wyrd is fate, destiny.’

‘The future,’ said Ahriman.

‘At times,’ agreed Wyrdmake. ‘On Fenris we ken it as the turning of the world forge that continually reshapes the face of the land. As one land rises, another sinks to its doom. Wyrd shows us how past and present shape the future, but also how the future affects the past. The storms of time flow, weave together and burst apart, forever entwined within the great saga of the universe.’

Ahriman began to understand the words of the Rune Priest, hearing in them a debased echo of the teachings of the Corvidae.

‘Fate goes ever as she shall,’ quoted Ahriman, and Wyrdmake laughed.

‘Aye, she does indeed. The Geatlander knew his business when he said that line.’

Ahriman looked up at the Mountain, feeling his hostility to Wyrdmake easing in the face of their shared understanding of the mysteries. As different as his teachings were, the Space Wolf had an insight Ahriman found refreshing. That didn’t mean he trusted him, not by a long way, but it was a start.

‘So you have found me,’ he said. ‘What do you intend now?’

‘You and I are brothers of the Storm,’ said Wyrdmake, echoing Ahriman’s earlier thought. ‘Brothers should not be strangers. I know the saga of your Legion’s past, and I know that nothing gets men’s murder-urge pumping like fear of what they do not understand.’

Ahriman hesitated before asking, ‘What is it you think you know?’

Wyrdmake stepped towards him, saying, ‘I know that a flaw in your heritage almost destroyed your Legion, and that you have a terror of its return. I know, for my Legion is the same. The curse of the Wulfen haunts us, and we keep watch over our brothers for wolf-sign.’

Wyrdmake reached up to touch the silver oakleaf worked into Ahriman’s shoulder guard.

‘Just as you watch your fellow legionaries for the flesh change.’

Ahriman flinched as though struck, backing away from Wyrdmake.

‘Never touch that again,’ he said, fighting to keep his voice even.

‘Ohrmuzd?’ asked Wyrdmake. ‘That was his name, was it not?’

Ahriman wanted to be angry, wanted to lash out at this unwarranted picking of an old wound. He forced his mind into the lower Enumerations, casting off the shed skin of grief and regret.

‘Yes,’ he said at last. ‘That was his name. That was my twin brother’s name.’

Ahriman felt the sickness from the valley long before they crossed the ridge where he had first seen its titanic guardians. Only when he felt the bitter, metallic taste in the back of his throat did he realise that he could feel the ripple of aetheric energies along his limbs. It was faint, barely more than a whisper, but it was there.

How was that possible when it had been so conspicuously absent before?

As the ridge of the valley came into sight he felt that sickness more strongly, like the taste of wind blowing over a mass grave. Something foul had taken root in the valley.

Ahriman looked over at Magnus, seeing his enormous form as a haze of indistinct images, like a thousand pict negatives placed on top of one another: Magnus the giant, Magnus the man, Magnus the monster, a thousand permutations on the theme of Magnus.

He blinked away the after-images, feeling sick at the sight of them. The sensation was unknown to him and he shook off his momentary dizziness.

‘You feel it too, don’t you?’ asked Phosis T’kar.

‘I do,’ he said. ‘What is happening?’

‘The sleepers are waking,’ hissed Uthizzar, one hand pressed to his temple.

‘Sleepers?’ asked Hathor Maat. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘The sleeping souls, bound to crystal immortality, left behind to watch,’ gasped Uthizzar, ‘trapped and corrupted, dragged to a slow doom that is worse than death.’

‘What in the Emperor’s name is he talking about?’ demanded Khalophis.

‘The Aghoru call them Daiesthai,’ said Magnus, ‘void beasts given form by the nightmares of mortals since the dawn of time. Men, in their ignorance, call them daemons.’

Ahriman almost smiled. Daemons, indeed…

‘You will feel the call of the Great Ocean, my sons,’ said Magnus, his eye red and angry. ‘It will be strong, but rise to the ninth Enumeration. Enter the sphere of inner determination and close your minds off from its power, for it will call to you like nothing you have ever known.’

‘My lord?’ asked Ahriman. ‘What is going on?’

‘Do it, Ahzek!’ snapped Magnus. ‘This is not power as you know it. It is stagnant and dead. It will try to force its way into your mind, but you must not let it, not for a moment.’

It felt alien to Ahriman to close himself off from the power of the aether, but he did as his primarch ordered, focusing his will and lifting his consciousness to the essence of his higher self, where he became an observer in his own flesh.

Magnus set off towards the mouth of the valley without another word, almost outpacing them all. The tempo of the march picked up, and Ahriman saw confusion in the Space Wolves at this sudden urgency. But the wolves… they understood. Ohthere Wyrdmake spoke to Amlodhi Skarssen, and the masked warrior cast a furious glare towards Magnus the Red.

In his objective state of being, he saw the familiar fear of the unknown, the hatred engendered by the strange and unfamiliar. The Space Wolves did not trust his Legion, but perhaps the tentatively established cooperation of Ohthere Wyrdmake might change that.

The valley climbed towards the ridge, and Ahriman noticed a change in the very character of the landscape. The perfection he had seen in its flawless geometries had subtly altered, as though the world had been shifted a fraction of a degree. Angles that once complemented one another were now horribly dissonant, like a musical instrument a hair’s-breadth out of tune.

Golden ratios were upset and the graceful dance of intersecting lines became a tangle of discordant shapes that violated the perfect order that had existed before. The valley was a place of threat, its every angle hostile. The throaty rumbles of the Land Raiders’ engines echoed strangely from the valley sides, thrown back as if from a hundred different sources.

At last they came to the mouth of the valley, and Ahriman stared in detached horror at what had become of its mighty guardians.

‘I can hear them screaming,’ hissed Uthizzar, and Ahriman saw why that should be so.

The titanic constructs stood as they always had, towering and immense, but the smooth, clean lines of their limbs were no longer graceful and pristine. Once they had been the colour of sun-bleached bone, but a loathsome network of poisonous, greenish-black veins threaded their limbs, a necrotic plague that poured from the cave in thick, oily ropes and filled the colossal statues with sickness.

Their splay-clawed feet were rank with the stuff, like rotted vegetable matter that heaved and writhed with foul growth. Blackened legs supported torsos webbed with thin lines of dark matter that absorbed any light that fell upon it. Their slender arms were slick with black veins, polluted conduits carrying the foulness of some nameless corruption. The graceful curve of their enormous heads remained pale and untouched, but even as Ahriman watched, the questing black tendrils oozed around the huge gems set in the surfaces.

Ahriman felt the insistent pressure of their Great Ocean breaking against his barriers of self-control. There was power here, rising up from somewhere far below. Yet what he felt was a fraction of what lay beneath, the trickle that becomes the stream that becomes the torrent. A dam had cracked, and inexorable pressure would soon break it wide open.

He ached to taste that power, to feel it flowing through his body, but he kept it shut out as Magnus had ordered, forcing his gaze away from the great statues.

‘What’s happening to them?’ he asked.

Magnus looked down at him.

‘Something evil, Ahzek,’ he said, ‘something I fear my presence on this world may have hastened. A balance has been upset, and I must restore it.’

Yatiri and his tribal elders, men who had managed to keep pace with the Astartes despite their advanced years, finally reached the edge of the valley.

‘Daiesthai!’ he cried, holding his falarica in a tight, white-knuckled, grip. ‘They return!’

‘What in the name of the Wolf’s Eye is he talking about?’ demanded Skarssen, marching over with Ohthere Wyrdmake. ‘What are these things?’

Magnus glared at the Wolf Lord, and Ahriman saw his primarch’s frustration at having a brother Legion’s warriors present. What needed to be done here was best done hidden from inquisitive eyes.

Yatiri turned to Magnus and said, ‘They crave the dead. We must give them what they desire.’

‘No,’ said Magnus. ‘That is the last thing you should do.’

Yatiri shook his head, and Ahriman saw his anger.

‘This is our world,’ he said, ‘and we will save it from the Daiesthai, not you.’

The mirror-masked elder turned from the primarch and led his tribesmen into the valley, making his way towards the altar before the cave mouth.

‘Lord Magnus,’ pressed Skarssen, ‘what does he mean?’

‘Superstition, Lord Skarssen,’ said Magnus, ‘nothing more.’

‘That looks like a damn sight more than superstition,’ said Skarssen, gripping his bolter tight to his chest. ‘Speak true now, Magnus of the Thousand Sons, what is going on here?’

‘Hel,’ said Ohthere Wyrdmake, staring at the titanic constructs with a mixture of horror and fascination, ‘the Father Kraken of the deep, the keeper of the dead!’

‘This is what keeps you from the Wolf King’s side?’ cried Skarssen. ‘Consorting with sorcerers!’

Magnus rounded on the Space Wolf.

‘Did you not learn your lesson before, whelp?’ he said.

Skarssen recoiled at Magnus’s anger, and Ahriman felt the wash of his fury as it spread like the shock waves of an explosion. Deeper in the valley, Yatiri and his tribesmen surrounded the altar, chanting a mantra of supplication to non-existent gods. They stood in pairs, facing one another. Ahriman watched Yatiri lift his falarica, and knew what would happen the instant before it was too late to prevent it.

‘No!’ cried Magnus, seeing what Ahriman saw. ‘Stop!’

Yatiri turned to the tribesman next to him and rammed his falarica through his chest. His fellow elders stepped together; one man the victim, the other his killer. Spears flashed, blades bit flesh and bone. Blood was spilled.

Ahriman would never know for sure whether it was the death of the tribesmen, the blood splashing the altar or some unknown catalyst, but no sooner had the dead men fallen than the power building in the valley surged like a tidal flood.

The dam holding it back had no chance of stopping it.

With a titanic rumble of cracking stone, the guardians of the valley began to move.

Eight

Slayer of Giants

The giants were moving. The fact was as undeniable as it was inconceivable. The ground shook with the force of it. The cliff face cracked and broke, vast boulders falling like dust from the side of the Mountain. Straining with the effort of breaking the shackles of their ancient bindings, the behemoths tore free of the rock.

Ahriman felt the howling shriek of something primal roar from the mouth of the cave with insensate hunger, a force of mindless destruction given free rein after uncounted aeons trapped in the darkness. Rank winds roared from the depths of the Mountain.

He dropped to his knees, hands pressed to his helmet as the Great Ocean tried to force its way inside his skull. He remembered his primarch’s warning and fought to keep it out.

Even in the desolation of Prospero, amid the ruined cities depopulated by the psychneuein, there was not this ferocity of psychic assault. Through tear-blurred eyes, he saw Astartes scatter, those without a connection to the aether spared the worst of the keening knife blade that gouged at his mind.

The ground shook as the first of the great machines took a ponderous step, its foot slamming down with seismic force. Lord Skarssen shouted at his warriors, but the words were lost to Ahriman. Ohthere Wyrdmake sagged against his staff, its haft swirling with coruscating arcs of black lightning. Beside him, Phosis T’kar and Hathor Maat fought against the corrupt power Magnus had warned them against. He couldn’t see Uthizzar or Khalophis.

Another shock wave shook the valley as the second giant tore free, the thunderous crashing of hundreds of tonnes of rock slamming down a forceful reminder of the physical world. Slabs of roaring red metal ground past Ahriman, churning the dusty ground with their passage; Land Raiders, their hull-mounted guns crackling with furious energies as they swept towards the Titans.

Ahriman felt a presence beside him and looked up to see Khalophis bellowing at his warriors. Astartes bearing the symbol of the scarlet phoenix moved to obey his orders, rushing to optimum firing positions and bringing their weapons to bear.

Ahriman wanted to laugh. What use would their weapons be against such war machines?

He tried to stand, but the pressure battering down his mind’s defences held him like a moth pinned to a slide. His resistance was locking his limbs together, fusing his joints with a stubborn refusal of the power that could be his were he only to let it in.

Ahriman recognised these temptation as the insidious whisperings that lured void travellers to their doom, as corpse lights had once ensnared those lost in ancient marshes.

That recognition alone was not enough to keep him from wanting to heed their siren song.

All he had to do was let it in and his powers would be restored: the power to smite these war machines, the power to read the currents of the future. The last of his will began to erode.

No, brother… Hold to my voice.

The words were an anchor in the madness, a lodestar back to self-control. He latched onto them as a drowning man holds fast to a rescuer’s hand.

Ahriman felt someone touch his shoulder guard, and saw Uthizzar standing above him like a priest offering benediction. The Athanaean pulled him around so that they were face to face. They gripped each other’s arms tightly, as though locked in a test of strength.

Rebuild your barriers, brother. I can protect you for a time, but only for a time.

Ahriman heard Uthizzar’s voice in his mind, the telepath’s measured tones stark against the raging torrents that threatened to overwhelm him. He felt a blessed quiet in his psyche as Uthizzar shouldered his burden.

Rise through the ranks, brother. Remember your first principles!

One by one, Ahriman repeated the mantras that allowed a Neophyte to control the powers of his being, easing into the energy-building meditations of the Zealator. Then came the control of the mind of the Practicus, the achievement of the perfectly equanimous perspective of the Philosophus. With every advance, the barriers protecting his mind were restored, and the furious howling of the aether abated.

Hurry, brother. I cannot shield you much longer.

‘No need,’ said Ahriman, as the world snapped back into focus. ‘I have control.’

Uthizzar sagged and released his hold on him.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘I could not have kept that up.’

Ahriman pushed himself upright, the world around him chaotic as the Astartes aligned themselves to face the gigantic war machines. Both were free of the cliff, the black tendrils enveloping them pulsating like newly filled arteries pumping strength around their bodies.

His situational awareness was complete. The Space Wolves had found cover in the huge piles of debris at the side of the valley. Ahriman was impressed. The sons of Russ had a reputation for wild recklessness, but that didn’t make them stupid. To charge headlong into this battle would see them all dead, and Skarssen knew it.

The Thousand Sons had assumed the formation of the Nine Bows, an aggressive configuration of three warrior groupings named for the ancient Gyptus kings’ representation of all their enemies.

‘He has gathered them all into his fist, and his mace has crashed upon their heads,’ said Ahriman in recognition. Khalophis stood at the centre of the first block, Phosis T’kar commanded the second, Hathor Maat the third.

Geysers of fire spiralled around Khalophis, pillars of white flame enveloping him with searing light. Ahriman felt the enormous power surrounding the captain of the Sixth Fellowship, its incredible potential bleeding into the warriors who followed him.

‘Trust Khalophis not to take heed,’ said Uthizzar, his voice scornful.

‘He was not the only one,’ said Ahriman, seeing blooms of aetheric energy centred on Phosis T’kar and Hathor Maat.

‘Fools,’ snapped Uthizzar, his stoic manner faltering in the face of such power. ‘They were warned!’

In the midst of the chaos, Ahriman saw Yatiri standing on the basalt altar, its gleaming surface splashed with the blood of his fellow elders. He held his falarica above his head and he was screaming. The winds from the cave mouth howled around him in a hurricane of corrupt matter, a blizzard of unnatural energy revelling in its freedom.

At the centre of the hurricane stood Magnus the Red.

Magnificent and proud, the primarch of the Thousand Sons was the eye of the storm, a quantum moment of utter stillness. Though a giant amongst men, the soaring Titans dwarfed him, their towering forms still trailing thick tarry ropes of glistening black.

The first Titan inclined its enormous head towards Magnus, its alien mind picking out the primarch like a golden treasure in a junkyard. Its body shook with what might have been disgust, regarding him as a man might view a loathsome insect. It took a step towards Magnus, its stride unsteady and hesitant, as though it were unused to controlling its limbs after so long inert. The Mountain shook with the reverberative weight of its tread, yet still Magnus did not move. His cloak of feathers billowed about his body, the violence of the Titans’ awakening seeming not to concern him at all.

The machine’s enormous fist flexed and its arm swung down, the movement so unlike the monstrous, clanking machine noise of Imperial engines. A haze of electromagnetic fire vented along the length of its smooth gauntlet.

Then it fired.

A blizzard of slicing projectiles shredded the space between its fist and Magnus, a thunderous storm of razor-edged death. Magnus didn’t move, but the storm broke above him, shunted aside by an invisible barrier to shred the ground and fill the air with whistling, spinning fragments of rock and metal.

The enormous, lance-like weapon in its other arm swung around, and Ahriman was again struck by the fluid, living grace of the Titan. It moved as if its every molecule was part of its essence, a living whole as opposed to a distant mind imperfectly meshed to a mechanical body with invasive mind impulse units and haptic receptors.

Before it could unleash the destructive fire of the weapon, a storm of energy blistered its limbs. The Thousand Sons Land Raiders stabbed it with bright spears of las-fire, like ancient hunters surrounding a towering prey-beast.

The Astartes of the Sixth Fellowship let fly with explosive warheads and storms of gunfire. Ceramic plates cracked and spalled. Fires rippled across the surface of the Titan’s armour. Imperial engines marched to war protected by shimmer-shields of ablative energy – not so this behemoth. Whatever protection it had relied on in life was denied it in this incarnation.

Magnus stood firm before the Titan, a child before a towering monster. He lifted his arm, palm upward, as though to offer the giant some morsel to sate its appetite. Ahriman saw a thin smile play around his primarch’s face as he drew his fingers back to make a fist.

The enormous gauntlet that had spat such venom upon Magnus was crushed utterly as an invisible force compressed it. Fire bloomed from the shattered hand, black tendrils like dead veins hanging from the ruin of its shoulder as Magnus coolly crushed the entire length of its arm. The giant war machine shook, the movement unnatural and hideous in its imitation of pain. Land Raiders swept in to press the advantage, furious, rippling bolts of laser energy smacking the Titan’s legs and torso.

The second machine rotated its lance, and the air grew thin, as though the Mountain had sucked in a great breath. An impossibly bright pinpoint of light grew at the end of the weapon before a pulsing storm erupted in a blaze of streaming fire.

Three Land Raiders exploded, instantly vaporised in the blast, and a fireball of burnt metal mushroomed skyward. The surging beam of liquid light swept on, carving a glassy trench across the valley and immolating everything in its path. A group of Hathor Maat’s warriors on the periphery of the seething fire burst into flames, their armour running like melted rubber. Ahriman could hear their screams. The heat wash of their death was a rancid flesh stink that threatened to break his concentration.

‘Ahzek!’ cried a voice, almost lost amid the shriek of the Titans’ weapons fire. His anger fled, the rigid mental discipline of the Enumerations reasserting itself. He turned to the source of the cry, seeing Ohthere Wyrdmake frantically beckoning him from behind the cover of a spit of red rock. Gunfire streamed from the Space Wolves position.

Logic took hold, the measured calm of mental acuity honed over a century of study.

‘Uthizzar,’ he said, ‘let’s go.’

Uthizzar nodded and together they ran through the deafening, blazing crescendo of weapons fire that filled the valley. Firepower to end entire regiments surged back and forth: heatwash, ricochets and shrieking intakes of breath from guns capable of mass murder. The shape of the battle was fluid and its tempo was increasing.

The Astartes were fighting back, filling the valley with disciplined volleys, but save for the augmented fire of Khalophis’s warriors, it was having little effect. There were too many targets for the Titans to effectively engage them all, but that wouldn’t last long. Fifty more Astartes died as the second Titan’s fist spat a shrieking hail of death, the impacts sounding like a thousand mirrors shattering at once.

Ahriman ducked into cover with Uthizzar, feeling strange at taking refuge with warriors in midnight-grey armour instead of crimson and ivory. A shaggy wolf snapped its jaws at him, thick saliva drooling between its fangs.

‘What were you doing out there?’ shouted Wyrdmake over the din of gunfire.

‘Nothing,’ replied Ahriman, unwilling to speak of the mental ordeal he and Uthizzar had endured, ‘just picking our moment to run for cover.’

‘What I would not give for a Mechanicum engine right now,’ hissed Wyrdmake as a rolling wall of boiling air washed over their position. The Rune Priest’s staff crackled with miniature lightning bolts. The power filling the valley had almost overwhelmed Ahriman with the urge to wield it, but Wyrdmake appeared oblivious to its temptations.

Space Wolves shouldered missile launchers, sighting on the undamaged Titan. Skarssen shouted an order, lost in the din, pointing towards the Titan’s head. Spiralling contrails zoomed upwards, detonating against the surface of the giant’s head, rocking it back, but doing little obvious damage.

‘Again!’ shouted Skarssen.

‘That won’t bring it down!’ cried Ahriman over the booming cough of missile fire.

‘Never hunted a Fenrisian Kraken, have you?’ cried Skarssen.

‘How perceptive,’ snapped Ahriman, ducking down as the rocks around him exploded in pinging fragments. A Space Wolf went down, but picked himself back up again. ‘What has that got do with anything?’

‘A single wolfship will be smashed to kindling and its crew devoured,’ said the Wolf Lord, as though enjoying this fight immensely, ‘but put a dozen in the water and then it becomes a hunt worth undertaking. Shield scales buckle, flesh tears and blood flows, the beast weakens and then it dies. Every harpoon matters, from the first to the last.’

Then all thought was obliterated as a world-shaking scream of ancient loss and pain ripped through the mind of every warrior.

It was the sound of worlds ending. It was the birth shout of a vile and terrible god, and the death scream of glory that died when the race of Man was young. Ahriman collapsed as pain like nothing he had ever known wracked his body with a torturer’s skill, finding the secret parts of him and driving itself home without mercy. His fragile control crumbled in the face of it, his mind ablaze with images of a civilisation overturned, worlds consumed and an empire that had spanned the stars brought low by its own weakness.

No one was spared the scream’s violence, not the Space Wolves and certainly not the Thousand Sons, who suffered worst of all. The pain drove Ahriman to the edge of sanity in the blink of an eye.

Then it was over. The echoes of the scream retreated, its power like a breaker upon a seawall, forceful and spectacular, but quick to fade. Ahriman blinked away tears of pain, surprised to find he was lying flat on his back.

‘What in the name of the Great Wolf was that?’ demanded Skarssen, towering over him as though nothing had happened. Once again, Ahriman was impressed by the Space Wolves.

‘I’m not sure,’ he gasped, blinding spots of light sparkling behind his eyes from burst blood vessels, ‘a psychic scream of some sort.’

‘Can you block it?’ asked Skarssen, holding his hand out to Ahriman.

‘No, it’s too powerful.’

‘We will not need to,’ said Uthizzar.

Ahriman took Skarssen’s hand and hauled himself upright, his head still aching from the pressure of the unexpected war shout. Uthizzar nodded at him and pointed out into the valley.

He glanced over the white-hot rocks he and the Space Wolves sheltered behind. The searing fire of the Titan’s weapons had vitrified them, the solid stone now smooth and translucent. Razor-edged discs the width of a man were embedded in the glass, caught by the molten rock before it hardened and singing with the vibration of their impacts.

Blinking away bright after-images, Ahriman looked down the valley. The elongated head sections of the war machines were burned black, their previously impervious armour cracked and their bejewelled heads split open. Ahriman smelled the burnt metal taste of an incredibly powerful aetheric discharge. Whips of wild lightning lashed from the broken armour, and he watched with fierce pride as Magnus the Red stalked through the storm of fire and death towards the towering machines with twin fists of fire.

Ghostly light rippled across the Titans. Explosions bit chunks out of their ceramic skin, and viscous black liquid, like boiling oil, slithered from the wounds.

‘You see!’ roared Skarssen. ‘They bleed!’

‘It won’t be nearly enough,’ returned Ahriman, ‘no matter how many harpoons you bring to bear!’

‘Just watch,’ promised Skarssen, throwing himself flat as a shrieking wall of light broke against their cover. Superheated air hissed and greedily sucked oxygen from the air with a thunderclap.

‘The Storm breaks!’ roared Wyrdmake. ‘The Tempest gives its sign!’

Magnus faced the giant machines alone, his feathered cloak spread behind him like an eagle’s wings. His flesh swelled with power, and for a brief moment it seemed that he matched the Titan in stature. His unbound hair was a stiffened mane of red, and his limbs ran with electric light. The primarch of the Thousand Sons drew back his arm and loosed a stream of blue fire that struck the nearest Titan square in the chest.

The alien engine was an artfully designed war machine from an age long-forgotten, the ancient craft of its makers wondrous to behold, but it could not resist such incredible, awe-inspiring power. Its torso exploded, vast ribs of unknown manufacture shattering like brittle china and falling in fire-blackened splinters. The pendulous head toppled from its neck and crashed to the rocks far below.

The war machine fell with infinite majesty, slamming down in pieces upon the rocky ground over which it had stood sentinel for longer than humans could comprehend. Blinding clouds of dust swept out from its fall, obscuring the fate of the second Titan.

A strange silence fell over the battlefield, as though no one could really believe they had seen the incredible war machine die. The silence was uncanny, but it did not last long.

A triumphant howl erupted from the throats of the Wolves, an ululating victory roar, but Ahriman took no pleasure at such destruction.

‘A terrible thing to see something so magnificent brought low,’ said Ahriman.

‘You pity it?’ asked Wyrdmake. ‘Does not the hunter feel the joy at the moment of the kill?’

‘I feel nothing but sorrow,’ said Ahriman.

Wyrdmake looked at him with genuine confusion, affronted that Ahriman sought to sour this moment of great victory. ‘The beast killed entire packs of your warriors. Vengeance demanded its death. It is right to honour your foe, but to mourn its death is pointless.’

‘Maybe so, but what secrets and knowledge have been lost in its destruction?’

‘What secrets worth knowing does such a beast keep?’ said Skarssen. ‘Better it dies and its secrets are lost than to ken such alien witchery.’

The smoke of the mighty construct’s death parted, and a keening roar built from within the depths of the ashen clouds, a wail of sorrow and anger entwined. A mighty shadow moved in the depths of the billowing dust, and the surviving Titan emerged. It was wounded and bled black rivers of glistening liquid, but like a cornered animal it was still horribly dangerous.

Its lance arm slid around, the barrel aimed squarely at Magnus, and Ahriman saw that the enormous power the primarch had wielded had cost him dearly. Magnus’s skin was pale, the fiery copper lustre dimmed to a faded brass. He was down on one knee, as though offering servitude to a bellicose god of war.

The ground shook as the giant moved forward. It lowered its head to study the insignificant creature ranged against it. The remnants of its ruined arm spat flames and smoke. Its sweeping shoulder wings were aflame, sagging and useless at its shoulders, like a broken angel of destruction come to rid Aghoru of all life.

Killing light built along the length of its weapon, and a shriek of violated air built as it drew breath.

And a blazing lance of sunfire stabbed out, searing Magnus from the face of the world.

The Thousand Sons screamed.

The heat of a million stars wreathed their primarch, and no matter that he was one of twenty towering pinnacles of gene-wrought superhuman warriors, even he could not survive such an attack. A surge tide of liquid fire swept out, turning the rock of the Mountain to glass.

Ahriman’s grip on the Enumerations collapsed in the face of such visceral horror; grief, anger and hatred jammed a twisting knife in his guts. The Titan poured its deadly fire upon Magnus, and Ahriman knew he would never live to see so hideous a sight.

Beside him, Uthizzar clutched his head in agony. Even in the midst of his grief, Ahriman pitied Uthizzar. How terrible must it be for a telepath to feel the death of his father?

Moments passed in utter silence, as though the world itself could not quite believe what had happened. One of the Emperor’s favoured sons had been struck down. It was inconceivable. What force could end the life of a primarch? The stubborn reality of it could not yet penetrate their legends, could not break the unassailable fact of their immortality.

That fact was fiction, and Ahriman felt his world crumble.

The Thousand Sons screamed.

The Space Wolves howled.

The vox exploded with it, an atavistic declaration of fury.

‘With me!’ shouted Skarssen.

And the Wolves were unleashed.

They poured from the rocks, bolters spitting fire and missiles launched on the run as they swept towards the Titan. The Terminators led the charge, a wall of armoured fury that would eviscerate any normal foe, but which would be next to useless against this enemy. Ahriman and Uthizzar went with them, knowing it was madness for infantry to move in the presence of so powerful and terrible a war machine. The Titan was king of the battlefield, a towering killing machine that crushed foot-soldiers without even registering their presence.

Yet there was an undeniable thrill in risking everything like this, a noble heroism and vitality he normally never felt in combat. The Enumerations gave a warrior focus, prevented his emotions from overwhelming him, and kept his mind free of distractions that could get him killed. The business of war was more deadly than it had ever been in any of the violent ages of Man, the surety of death or injury a warrior’s constant companion. The Enumerations helped the Thousand Sons face such thoughts objectively, and allowed them to fight on regardless.

To do otherwise was inconceivable, and Ahriman was always amazed that mortals ever dared to step onto a battlefield. Yet here he was, raw grief and the vicarious energy of the Space Wolves carrying him forward without the protection of emotional detachment.

As the Space Wolves came, so too did the Thousand Sons.

The last surviving Land Raiders, both black and belching smoke, darted like pack predators as they fired on the Titan. Desperate to avenge their primarch, the red-armoured warriors of Magnus charged with the same boundless energy as the Space Wolves, their cool detachment cast aside in this one, headlong charge.

It was reckless and futile, but also brave and heroic.

The seething fire began to fade, and Ahriman’s charge faltered at the sight before him. A vitrified bowl of a crater spread out at the mighty war engine’s clawed feet, yet at its centre was a sight that lifted his heart and filled him with awe.

A shimmering dome of golden-hued energy rippled in the heat haze, and within it, two armoured figures. Atop a crooked pillar of rock at the heart of the crater, all that had survived the Titan’s fire, were Phosis T’kar and Magnus the Red. The captain of the Second Fellowship was bent almost double, his arms raised to his shoulders like Atlas Telamon of Old Earth, the rebellious titan doomed to bear the celestial sphere upon his shoulders for all eternity.

‘A kine shield,’ breathed Uthizzar. ‘Who knew T’kar was so strong?’

Ahriman laughed in desperate relief. Magnus was alive! He was on his knees, weakened and all but exhausted by his destruction of the first Titan, but he was alive, and that simple fact pulsed through every warrior of the Thousand Sons in a connected instant of joy and wonder.

In that moment of relief, the Astartes of both Legions let fly their anger and hurt pride.

The Space Wolves unleashed the fangs of their every weapon, bolts, missiles and armour-cracking shells seeking out the Titan’s wounds and tearing them wider. In the midst of the Sons of Russ, Ahriman and Uthizzar did likewise, unloading magazine after magazine of explosive rounds at the object of their hatred. Skarssen exhorted his warriors with bellowed howls without meaning, but with a power all their own. Ohthere Wyrdmake prowled the length of the Space Wolf advance, surrounded by pack wolves as a frozen wind and the echo of a distant winter storm swirled around him.

The Wolves of Fenris attacked with all their weapons, and so too did the scions of Prospero fight with all of theirs.

Hundreds of waving streams of fire licked up at the Titan, but this was no ordinary barrage. Warriors bearing the phoenix symbol of the Pyrae were firing on the move, hurling aetheric flames from their gauntlets. In the midst of the Sixth Fellowship, Khalophis threw his fists like a pugilist, each jab sending a stream of coruscating fire against the enormous Titan. Where it struck, it burned away the Titan’s armour, exposing its crystalline structure and unmaking the bone-like material of its construction.

‘Merciful fates!’ cried Uthizzar at the sight of Khalophis. ‘What is he doing?’

‘Rescuing our primarch!’ yelled Ahriman. ‘As we should!’

The strength of the Pyrae was ascendant, but this was incredible. Within the cult temples of Prospero, such art could be wielded without fear, but to do so with outsiders present was reckless beyond imagining.

Nor were Khalophis and Phosis T’kar alone in their brazen displays.

Hathor Maat whipped his hands back and forth, each time casting traceries of purple lightning towards the towering machine. Explosions and dancing balls of fire crackled like electric chains around its body, burning its armour open. Arcs of lightning flashed between the warriors of the Pavoni as their captain drank deep of their energies and channelled it through his flesh.

Uthizzar grabbed his arm, and Ahriman read the fear in his aura.

‘They have to stop!’ hissed Uthizzar. ‘All of them! To tap into the Great Ocean is intoxicating, you know that all too well, but only the most disciplined and powerful dare wield power such as this!’

‘Our brother-captains are powerful and disciplined practitioners of the hidden arts,’ said Ahriman, shrugging off Uthizzar’s hold.

‘But are they disciplined enough? That is the real question.’

Ahriman had no answer for him and returned his attention to killing the Titan.

The Titan was dying, but it didn’t die easily. Its limbs thrashed in its death throes, spitting incandescent pulses of energy that tore down the valley walls and obliterated dozens of Astartes with every fiery sweep.

Its defiance was finally ended when Khalophis and Hathor Maat combined a hurricane of fire and a spear of lightning that struck the war machine’s head with a killing blow. The curved skull exploded and the towering machine collapsed, plummeting straight down like dead wood hewn by a woodsman’s axe.

The noise was deafening: breaking plates, shattering glass and snapping bone all in one. It fell hard, breaking into a billion pieces, none larger than the size of a man’s fist, and a glittering rain of splintered ceramic fell upon the victorious Astartes like musical notes. The Astartes lowered their weapons, and took a collective breath as the dust and smoke of battle began to settle.

The golden dome shielding Phosis T’kar and the primarch collapsed with a squalling shriek. Phosis T’kar fell, utterly drained by the act of protecting his primarch, as Magnus the Red rose to his feet once more. Though the toll taken upon him was great, he remained as magnificent as ever. Magnus lifted the stricken body of Phosis T’kar, and stepped from the pillar of rock.

He did not fall. Instead, Magnus floated across the crater like a battle-weary angel, borne aloft by his incredible power through a billowing mist of shimmering crystal.

The Thousand Sons were there to greet him, ecstatic beyond words that their primarch had survived. Ahriman and Uthizzar pushed through the scrum of Astartes, their warriors only reluctantly parting to allow them through. Ahriman reached the edge of the crater as Magnus set foot on the glassy floor of the valley and gently laid Phosis T’kar before him.

‘Hathor Maat,’ said Magnus, his voice weary and thin. ‘See to him. Bend all the power of the Pavoni to his survival. You will not allow him to die.’

The captain of the Third Fellowship nodded. He knelt beside Phosis T’kar and swiftly removed his helmet. T’kar’s face was deathly pale. Hathor Maat placed his hands on either side of his neck, and almost instantaneously colour returned to his face.

‘My lord,’ said Ahriman, his voice almost too choked with emotion to speak. ‘We thought… We thought you lost to us.’

Magnus smiled weakly, dabbing at a trickle of blood that ran from the corner of his mouth. His eye shone a bruised violet and red. Never had Ahriman seen his beloved leader so battered.

‘I will live,’ said Magnus. ‘But this is not over yet. These guardians were perverted by the corruption imprisoned beneath this peak. It has lain dormant for an age, but it has awoken. Unless we stop it, everything we have learned here will be lost.’

‘What would you have us do, lord?’ demanded Khalophis.

Magnus turned to the cave mouth. It was thick with growths, like blackened roots from some parasitic weed burrowed into the meat of the Mountain.

‘Walk with me into the depths, my sons,’ said Magnus. ‘We will finish this together.’

Nine

Abilities
Beneath the Mountain
The language of angels

The sun was at its zenith, and the idea of moving from beneath the canopy of his tent didn’t appeal to Lemuel one bit. Camille wanted to travel the secret path through the Mountain again, eager to know what had drawn the Thousand Sons and Space Wolves into its high valley with such speed. The climb had almost ended Lemuel in the cool of sunset. He didn’t want to think what it would do to him at noon.

‘Aren’t you in the least bit curious?’ asked Camille, reclining on a canvas chair and drinking water from a battered leather canteen. ‘I mean, what’s got them all riled up that they needed to take battle tanks? Land Raiders no less. Did you see?’

‘I saw,’ said Lemuel, dabbing his brow with his bandanna. ‘They were impressive.’

‘Impressive?’ said Camille, incredulously. ‘They were more than impressive, they were amazing.’

‘Okay, they were amazing, but no, I’m not that curious as to what’s happening in the Mountain. I’m sure whatever is going on, we’ll find out in due course.’

‘Easy for you to say,’ noted Camille. ‘You have a direct line to the Thousand Sons now.’

‘It’s not like that,’ said Lemuel.

‘Then what is it like?’ asked Kallista.

The three of them had taken to meeting each night since the arrival of the Space Wolves, their shared discussions of what Kallista had written bonding them like conspirators with a dark secret. The more time Lemuel spent with Kallista and Camille, the more he began to realise they shared more than one.

‘Lord Ahriman sees potential in me,’ he said, knowing his words were wholly insufficient to explain why the Chief Librarian of the Thousand Sons had sent for him.

‘What sort of potential?’ asked Kallista.

Lemuel shrugged and said, ‘I’m not really sure yet.’

‘Come on, that’s no answer,’ pressed Camille.

Lemuel’s fear when Ahriman had told him he knew of his ability, had quickly faded, replaced with a simmering pride in his powers. He had long suspected that his ability to read people marked him out as special, and now he knew that was true. After spending time with Camille and Kallista, he realised he wasn’t the only one. He hesitated before answering, knowing he could be wrong, but wanting to be sure.

‘After the other night, we know Kallista has a talent for, what would the word be? Channeling, I suppose. Channeling a power that allows her to write things that haven’t happened yet.’

‘Talent’s hardly the word I’d use,’ said Kallista bitterly.

‘No, I suppose you wouldn’t,’ agreed Lemuel, ‘not if it’s as painful as you say, but the physical manifestation of your ability aside, you can do things most people cannot, yes?’

‘Yes,’ said Kallista, nodding, and he could read how uncomfortable talk of her power made her.

‘Well, I also have an ability,’ he said.

‘What kind of ability?’ asked Camille.

‘An ability to see things that other people cannot.’

Kallista leaned forward, her aura revealing her interest.

‘What sort of things?’ she asked.

‘Auras, I suppose you’d call them. It’s like a glowing haze surrounding a person. I can see when someone’s lying, read their feelings and moods. That sort of thing.’

‘So what am I feeling right now?’ asked Camille.

Lemuel smiled.

‘You are overcome with feelings of unbridled lust for me, my dear,’ he said. ‘You want to leap on me and ravish me to within an inch of my life. Were it not for the presence of Mistress Eris, you would be astride me right now.’

Camille laughed.

‘Okay, I’m convinced,’ she said.

‘Seriously?’ asked Kallista.

‘No!’ squealed Camille. ‘I’m fond of Lemuel, but I prefer partners of a different flavour.’

‘Oh,’ said Kallista, looking away with a guilty flush. She looked at Lemuel. ‘Can you really do that?’

‘Yes, I can,’ he said. ‘Right now you’re embarrassed and wishing Camille wouldn’t refer to her sexuality in front of you. You believe me, and you’re relieved that you’re not the only one with a secret.’

‘You don’t need special powers to see that, Lemuel,’ said Camille. ‘Even I can see that.’

‘Yes, but you believe me as well, and you have a power too, don’t you?’

Camille’s smile froze.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said.

‘Now that’s a lie,’ said Lemuel, rising from his chair and fetching himself a drink. ‘You touch things and you know where they’ve come from, who owned them and everything about their history going all the way back to when they were made. That’s why you always wear those gloves and why you never borrow anything from other people. I don’t blame you. It must be hard learning all of a person’s secrets like that.’

Camille looked away, her eyes downcast, and Lemuel smiled, trying to put her at ease.

‘I watched you touch that object buried in the ruins of the Aghoru house the other day,’ he said. ‘You knew what it was the moment you laid your hand on it, didn’t you?’

Camille kept her eyes on the floor and said, ‘I did, yes. I haven’t always been able to do it. I was about thirteen when it started.’

‘Don’t worry, my dear,’ said Lemuel gently. ‘We all have something special about us. And I don’t think it’s an accident we’re here.’

‘I don’t follow.’

‘Think about it. What are the chances that the three of us, people with talents beyond the understanding of most ordinary people, would find ourselves together like this? I’m no mathematician, but I suspect the odds are pretty much against it.’

‘So what are you saying, that we’re here deliberately? Why?’

Lemuel sat down again, sweating and breathless thanks to the heat.

‘I think our hosts may have something to do with it,’ he said. ‘Look around. How few remembrancers are there with the XV Legion? Forty-two spread throughout the Fellowships. A number like that makes me think there was a great deal more to our selection than our talents as remembrancers.’

‘So you’re saying we were all selected by the Thousand Sons because we have these abilities?’

‘Almost certainly,’ said Lemuel.

‘Why?’ asked Kallista.

‘That, I don’t know,’ confessed Lemuel, ‘but if there’s one thing I’ve come to know about the Thousand Sons, it’s that they don’t do anything without good reason.’

The inside of the Mountain was alive with sound and colour. Not any sound the Space Wolves could hear, despite their legendarily heightened senses, nor any colour they could name, for these were hues of the aether, rippling like smoke and radiating from the smooth walls of the cave like bioluminescence.

The armour worn by the Astartes was equipped with sensors that could penetrate darkness, but to those without aether-sight, the view would be a sea-green monochrome, a poor rendition of the true light saturating the rock.

A hundred warriors delved the innards of the Mountain, all that could be spared from the business of harvesting the gene-seed of the fallen.

Magnus led the way down, following a twisting path only he could see. Lord Skarssen and Ohthere Wyrdmake marched with him, and Ahriman took a moment to study the Wolf Lord. Skarssen’s aura was a keen blade, a focussed edge of single-minded determination. Here was a warrior who never let up, never stopped to question, and would never, ever, falter in his duty.

Such surety of purpose reminded Ahriman of the golem legends written in the ancient Qabalah. The golem was a creature shaped from clay, raised by an ancient priest to defend his people from persecution. It was a powerful, unstoppable force, a creature that obeyed its master’s instructions absolutely literally, never deviating from its task, no matter what.

It was a perfect representation for the Space Wolves, for Ahriman had read accounts of the war they made. The sons of Russ were weapons, a consummate force for destruction that absolutely would not stop until the job was done.

Of course, the legends of the golem were also cautionary tales of hubris, with later tales depicting golems that had to be undone through trickery, whereupon they more often than not turned on their creators. The Golem of Ingolstadt was one such beast, a monster that wreaked havoc on its creator and all he loved before destroying itself upon a polar funeral pyre.

The comparison made Ahriman uneasy, and he put the thought from his mind as the tunnel sloped ever downwards. Normally he could retrace any route, no matter how complex, but within moments of entering the Mountain he was utterly lost. Only the primarch seemed to know where he was going, but how he knew which passage to take and which junction to follow was a mystery to Ahriman.

Of the captains of Fellowship, only Uthizzar had come into the Mountain. Phosis T’kar was too weak, and Hathor Maat was restoring him with the healing arts of the Pavoni. Khalophis too had remained on the surface to secure the battlefield. The alien Titans were no more, but who knew what other horrors might yet lurk in hidden valleys and caves?

As a result, the Thousand Sons beneath the Mountain were a mix of Astartes from different Fellowships, and Ahriman saw ghostly flickers of power rising from each of them, subtly different, revealing their cult affiliations by the tempers of their auras.

He noted that most of them were Pyrae.

‘I know,’ said Uthizzar. ‘Together with the Space Wolves, there will be no room for subtlety here.’

Ahriman was about to nod, when he realised he hadn’t spoken the thought aloud.

‘Did you just read me?’ he asked.

‘It is hard not to at the moment,’ replied Uthizzar. ‘Everyone’s thoughts are so heightened, with the level of aetheric energy here. It is as if you are all shouting. I find it quite uncomfortable.’

Ahriman bristled at the idea of his thoughts being read.

‘Be careful,’ he warned. ‘That could get you into trouble some day. People do not like their innermost secrets revealed.’

‘My power is no different from yours,’ said Uthizzar.

‘How do you reach that conclusion?’ said Ahriman. ‘The powers of the Corvidae and the Athanaeans are nothing alike.’

‘I read what people are thinking now. You read what they are going to be doing in the future. All that is different is the timing.’

‘I hadn’t thought of it in that way,’ conceded Ahriman. ‘Perhaps this can form a debate for another day? This is probably not the best time.’

‘No,’ said Uthizzar with an amused chuckle.

They marched in silence for a while longer, following the crooked path deeper and deeper into the darkness. To feel the touch of the aether in the Mountain, after its chronic absence, was both exhilarating and worrying. Nothing happed without reason, and only something of great magnitude could force the state of a thing to change with such extreme polarity.

What lurked in the depths of the Mountain that could effect such change?

The group lapsed into silence, each person pondering the implications of their shared abilities. Kallista and Camille were relieved to share their burdens with others, yet wary of discarding a lifetime of secrecy in so short a time.

It had bonded them. Whatever else might happen, whatever other journeys they might take, this shared secret had forged a link between them. For now it was a fragile thing, but with careful nurturing, it might prove to be enduring.

‘So what do we do with this then?’ asked Camille at last.

‘What do you mean?’ asked Lemuel.

‘I mean, what do we do?’ said Camille, throwing her hands up as though he were being obtuse. ‘If you’re saying that we’re part of the 28th Expedition because of our abilities, are we supposed to know that’s why we were selected? Can we use our abilities openly?’

Lemuel considered the question before saying, ‘I would caution against that, my dear. Powers like ours are still considered witchery in some circles.’

‘Do you think we are in danger?’ asked Kallista, picking at a fold in her jellabiya. ‘Is that why they’ve gathered us together? To get rid of us?’

‘No, I don’t believe so,’ said Lemuel hurriedly. He stood and went over to her chair, taking her hand and looking her straight in the eye. ‘I don’t believe the Thousand Sons would go to such lengths just to have us burned at the stake.’

‘Then why do they want us?’

‘I confess I do not know for sure,’ he said. ‘Lord Ahriman says he wants to teach me how best to use my powers. I think we are here to learn.’

‘Why would the Thousand Sons care about teaching us anything?’ asked Camille.

‘Lord Ahriman said that by using our powers we make ourselves vulnerable,’ said Lemuel, grasping for concepts he didn’t know how to articulate. ‘I don’t understand it really, but I got the impression that we’re all part of something larger, and that we’re on the cusp of something wonderful. We could be the first of a new breed of people, people who can use their abilities safely and teach other to do the same.’

Kallista snatched her hand back, and Lemuel was shocked at the fear he saw in her face. Her aura shifted hue, turning from a soft yellow to an angry red.

‘I don’t want to be a new breed of anything,’ she said, pushing her chair back and rising to her feet. ‘I don’t want this ability. If I could get rid of it I would!’

Lemuel stood and raised his hands in a placating gesture.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to push you.’

‘It hurts so much,’ she said, haltingly, pressing her hands to her temples and holding back tears with an effort of will. ‘Every time the fire comes, it burns part of me away with it. Unless I stop it, I’m afraid it’s going to burn me away entirely one day.’

Camille pushed herself from her chair and took Kallista in her arms.

‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘We’ll look out for you, won’t we, Lemuel?’

‘Of course,’ he said, ‘without question. People like us need to stick together.’

‘People like what?’ said a voice behind them.

Lemuel jumped as though struck, and turned to see a frail old man in the beige robe of a remembrancer with a long mane of frizzy white hair, only reluctantly contained in a wiry ponytail. Thin and stooped, he carried a slim, leatherbound book under his arm, and his walnut coloured skin was ancient and deeply creased with great age.

‘I’m not interrupting anything, am I?’ asked Mahavastu Kallimakus, Scrivener Extraordinary to Magnus the Red.

Lemuel was first to recover. ‘Mahavastu! No, no, you’re always welcome. Come in, won’t you? I rarely see you these days. Magnus got you so busy writing his memoirs you don’t have time for your old friend?’

Kallimakus looked uncomfortable, and Lemuel read the unease permeating his aura.

‘Is something the matter, my friend?’ asked Lemuel, steering Kallimakus into the tent.

‘I rather fear it might be,’ said Mahavastu.

‘What is it?’ asked Camille, getting up and allowing the old man to take her seat.

‘It is the primarch,’ said Mahavastu, placing the leatherbound book in his lap with a guilty shudder. ‘I fear he and his warriors are in great danger.’

‘What kind of danger?’ asked Kallista.

The gravest danger,’ said Mahavastu. ‘The gravest danger imaginable.’

They came at last to a great chasm in the heart of the Mountain, a perfectly circular sinkhole, hundreds of metres in diameter. The roof above the enormous pit was a crystalline temple dome, formed from the same substance as the Titans. The dome was pale cream, threaded with veins of crimson like the finest marble. And, like the Titans, its substance had been invaded with the black ropes of corruption.

Thousands of glistening, pulsing black pillars rose from the pit like the roots of some unnatural weed. They pulsed with liquid motion, obscene mockeries of life-giving veins that fed on life instead of sustaining it.

‘Great bones of Fenris,’ hissed Skarssen. ‘What manner of beast is this?’

No one had an answer for him, their horror at the sight too visceral to put into words.

Ahriman moved through the stunned Astartes to the edge of the pit. A ledge ran around the circumference of the chasm, easily wide enough to drive a pair of Land Raiders abreast. Gold and silver symbols were worked into the bones of the rock, as the though they had always existed and the Mountain had simply grown up around them.

Magnus stood at the edge of the chasm, looking in wonder at the impenetrable forest of oozing black tentacles rising from the pit. The lustre had returned to his skin, as though he were refreshed by the journey closer to the source of the power beneath the Mountain. Ohthere Wyrdmake and Lord Skarssen followed Ahriman, joining the primarch at the edge.

‘What are they?’ asked Skarssen, kneeling beside the nearest symbol, a gold serpent entwined with a silver eye.

‘Warding symbols?’ suggested Wyrdmake, ‘Like the wolf talismans we bear.’

Skarssen touched the wolf pelt at his shoulder, and Ahriman watched as all the Space Wolves superstitiously reached for various fetishes hanging from their armour. Those closest to Wyrdmake touched the eagle-topped staff he carried, and Ahriman smiled.

‘Superstition?’ he said. ‘The Emperor would not approve.’

‘An Astartes of the Thousand Sons telling us what the Emperor would not approve of?’ laughed Wyrdmake. ‘Ironic, wouldn’t you say?’

‘No, I just find the gestures quaint,’ smiled Ahriman, ‘almost primitive. I mean no offence of course.’

‘None taken,’ replied Wyrdmake. ‘But you too reached for a talismanic device.’

The smile froze on Ahriman’s lips as he realised the Rune Priest was right. Without even being aware of it, he had pressed his fingers to the silver oakleaf cluster on his shoulder guard, the icon that had once belonged to Ohrmuzd.

‘Perhaps we are not so different after all,’ said Wyrdmake.

‘Perhaps not,’ allowed Ahriman, turning his attention back to the thick ropes of black matter rising from the pit.

Magnus stood immobile, as though in silent communion, and Ahriman stood next to him.

‘My lord?’ he asked. ‘What is it?’

‘It’s incredible, Ahzek,’ said Magnus. ‘It’s raw matter, the very stuff of the Primordial Creator given form.’

‘It’s rank is what it is,’ hissed Skarssen. ‘Any fool can see that.’

‘It’s alive,’ hissed Uthizzar, walking to the edge of the pit with sleepwalker’s strides.

‘Oh, it is alive, all right,’ nodded Magnus. ‘I have never felt anything quite so alive, not for a long time. Not for a very long time indeed.’

Ahriman felt a thrill of warning along the length of his spine. Previously, the primarch had labelled this power stagnant and dead.

‘It’s calling us,’ said Uthizzar, and Ahriman heard the dream-like quality of his voice. ‘I need to go to it.’

‘What’s calling to you?’ said Ahriman, but no sooner had he spoken than he heard it, a soft whisper, like a distant friend calling from afar. It was not an unwelcome sound. It was gentle, a beguiling whisper redolent with the promise of raptures beyond measure.

Magnus turned to his captains and shook his head. Ahriman saw that Magnus’s eye was deep black, the pupil massively enlarged and swollen, as though filled with the same dark substance as the glistening pillars.

‘My sons,’ said Magnus, and Ahriman felt the barely constrained power laden in every syllable. ‘Concentrate. Rise to the tenth Enumeration and shut out the voices. You are not strong enough to resist them. I have dealt with power like this before. I mastered it then, and I will master it now.’

Uthizzar nodded, and Ahriman felt his consciousness rise into the uppermost Enumeration, a place of inner solitude where a warrior could find peace, untroubled by the concerns of the world around them. It was an effort to reach such a state of mind, especially here, but Uthizzar was master of his own psyche. Ahriman rose alongside him, and the voices ceased, shut off as surely as a vox-caster with the power cell removed.

With the clarity imparted by the tenth sphere, Ahriman saw movement within the heart of the mass of tentacles, a flash of saffron and a glitter of something reflective.

‘No,’ he whispered, his grip on the tenth sphere slipping as a flash of recognition surfaced. ‘Please don’t let it be so.’

As though in response to his words, the tentacles shivered, and a repulsive slithering sound, as of a thousand greasy limbs moving together, filled the chamber. The Space Wolves were instantly alert, their guns snapping upright, though there were no obvious targets for their wrath beyond the black tentacles.

‘What is going on?’ demanded Skarssen.

Wyrdmake’s staff crackled with power, but the Rune Priest regarded it with horror, as though it had transformed into a poisonous snake.

‘Spread out,’ ordered Magnus, ‘and stay away from the edge.’

The gelatinous mass of plant-like growths rippled, and a number of thick stems detached themselves from the domed roof of the chamber. Like disease-ridden fronds in a polluted pool, the nearest tentacles sagged and spread as something moved through them, on a course angled towards the Thousand Sons.

A black veil parted, and Ahriman’s control of the spheres collapsed completely as he saw a wretched figure drift through the tar-black tentacles.

Scraps of orange fabric clung to its naked body, which hung limp with its head down like a puppet bereft of a puppeteer. The figure was borne aloft by a host of slender tentacles, one a gleaming noose around his neck, another around his temple like a crown of obsidian.

These tentacles were not like the others. Their vile substance was alive with gaping mouths and seething eyes that bubbled into existence before dissolving into nothingness.

The figure drew nearer, and he lifted his head. His eyes were oil-dark and reflective, and fine black lines threaded his skin as though the black tentacles had filled him with their corrupt substance. A cracked mirrormask hung at his throat.

The man’s mouth was moving, as though he were screaming in unimaginable torment, but no sounds emerged, only a sopping gurgle of fluid-filled lungs.

‘Is that…?’ asked Uthizzar.

‘It is,’ said Magnus sadly. ‘Yatiri.’

Mahavastu Kallimakus hailed from the subcontinent of Indoi, and was a meticulous recorder of data and a fastidious observer of details. He had scribed much of the earliest days of the Great Crusade and had been one of the first remembrancers to be chosen by the Thousand Sons. His reputation had preceded him, and he was immediately assigned to Magnus the Red.

He had been at Magnus’s side since the restored Legion had departed Prospero in a fanfare of triumph, cheering crowds and billowing clouds of rose petals. He had recorded the primarch’s every thought and deed in a great tome that many called the Book of Magnus.

Those remembrancers who found it difficult to collect any first-hand accounts of the Great Crusade from the Thousand Sons looked upon Mahavastu Kallimakus with no small amount of jealousy. Lemuel had met Mahavastu Kallimakus on the Photep during a symposium on the best form of data collation, and their friendship had been borne of a mutual love of detail.

‘God is in the details,’ Mahavastu would say as they pored over one of the many manuscripts in the vessel’s fascinating library.

‘You mean the devil is in the details,’ Lemuel would reply.

‘That, my dear Lemuel, depends entirely on the detail in question.’

Kallimakus was energetic, with the vigour of a man half his chronological age, which was somewhere in the region of a hundred and thirty standard.

Right now, Mahavastu Kallimakus looked every one of those years.

The aged remembrancer opened his book, and Lemuel looked over his shoulder.

‘An artist’s notebook,’ he said, seeing the charcoal and pencil marks of an artist’s preliminary outlines. ‘I never had you pegged as a sketcher. All seems a bit woolly for a man like you, none of the precision of language.’

Kallimakus shook his head.

‘And you would be right, Lemuel,’ he said. ‘I am not an artist. In truth, I am no longer sure what I am.’

‘I’m sorry, Mahavastu, I don’t follow.’

‘I do not remember drawing them,’ said Mahavastu in exasperation. ‘I do not remember anything in this book, neither pictures nor words. I look back over every entry I have made and they are a mystery to me.’

Tears glistened in the old man’s eyes, and Lemuel saw the anxiety in his aura replaced with aching sorrow.

‘Everything I have written… I remember none of it.’

‘Have you had someone from the medicae corps check you out?’ asked Camille. ‘I had an uncle who got old and his mind turned on him. He couldn’t remember anything, even things you just told him. Soon he forgot who he was and couldn’t remember his wife or children. It was sad, watching him die by degrees in front of us.’

Mahavastu shook his head.

‘I am familiar with such progressive patterns of cognitive and functional impairment, Mistress Shivani, so I had a medicae scan my brain this morning,’ he said. ‘The neuron and synapse counts in my cerebral and subcortical regions are quite normal, and he found no atrophy or degeneration in my temporal and parietal lobes. The only anomaly was a minor shadow in the cingulate gyrus, but there was nothing that might explain all this.’

Lemuel looked more closely at the drawings, trying to sort out some meaning from the ragged sketches and scrawled notations.

‘Are you sure you did all this?’ he asked, studying the strange symbols that filled every page. He could not read the words, but he recognised the language, and knew that this was no ordinary book of remembrance.

This was a grimoire.

‘I am sure,’ said Mahavastu. ‘It is my handwriting.’

‘How do you know?’ asked Kallista. ‘You use a scrivener harness.’

‘Yes, my dear, but in order to calibrate such a device for use, one must first attune it to one’s own penmanship. There is not a graphologist alive who could tell the machine’s work from mine.’

‘What is it? I can’t read it,’ said Camille.

‘I do not know. It is in a language I have never seen.’

‘It’s Enochian,’ said Lemuel, ‘the so-called language of angels.’

‘Angels?’ asked Camille. ‘How do you know that?’

‘I have an incomplete copy of the Liber Loagaeth in my library back on Terra,’ explained Lemuel. Seeing their confusion, Lemuel said, ‘It’s supposed to be a list of prayers from heaven channelled through an ancient magician of Old Earth. It’s written in this language, though I’ve only ever been able to translate tiny fragments of it. Apparently there was once a twin book, the Claves Angelicae, which had the letter tables, but I never found a copy.’

‘Enochian,’ mused Mahavastu. ‘Interesting, you must tell me more of it.’

‘In case anyone’s forgotten, didn’t you say that Magnus the Red was in grave danger?’ asked Kallista. ‘Shouldn’t we focus on that?’

‘Oh, of course, yes!’ exclaimed Mahavastu, flicking through the book to the last page, which bore a charcoal sketch rendered with quick, passionate strokes. The image seemed to depict a naked figure emerging from a giant forest, though as Lemuel looked closer he saw that it wasn’t a forest at all.

It was a nest of sinuous, snake-like tentacles emerging from a giant chasm, and before it was the unmistakable form of Magnus the Red, ensnared by half a dozen of them. His warriors were also under attack, fighting for their lives in a giant cave.

Within a mountain…

‘What is it?’ asked Camille. ‘I can’t make head nor tail of it.’

‘I have no idea,’ said Mahavastu. ‘Lemuel?’

‘I can’t say for sure, but I agree it looks bad.’

‘What’s that word below the picture?’ asked Kallista.

Scrawled beneath the image was a single word, and Lemuel’s blood froze in his veins as he realised it was one of the few Enochian words he understood.

‘Panphage,’ he translated, and Mahavastu flinched.

‘What?’ asked Kallista. ‘What does that mean?’

‘It means “the thing that devours all”,’ said Lemuel.

Ten

The hydra
Belly of the beast
Time will tell

The thing that had once been Yatiri drifted towards the Thousand Sons, borne aloft by the supporting black tentacles. The darkness of his eyes was absolute, as though they were gateways into a realm where endless night held sway. Magnus drew his curved sword, and Ahriman felt his master’s enormous power swell to the fore.

The vox spat with Fenrisian oaths and muttered catechisms of the Enumerations, but Ahriman heard only the sibilant whispers drifting from the black mass that rose from the pit.

Magnussss… Magnusss…

It seemed to be repeating his primarch’s name, but it was impossible to be certain.

Magnus the Red stepped towards Yatiri, and the tentacle around the Aghoru’s neck tightened. Veins bulged on Yatiri’s face, his skin pale and discoloured, calloused where his enforced wearing of the mask had hardened the skin.

Yatiri’s features were blunt and wide-spaced across the skull, a heavy brow and high forehead suggestive of thick bone protecting the brain. Ahriman realised that he had never seen the Aghoru without their masks, not even the children.

Questing tentacles that had detached from the domed roof descended towards the Astartes, and Ahriman drew his pistol, fingers tightening on his heqa staff.

‘If those tentacles get too close, destroy them,’ he ordered.

The cavern echoed with the sound of the saw-toothed edges of chainblades revving up.

Yatiri’s body drifted towards Magnus, and Ahriman felt his finger twitch on the trigger. Great power filled the tribesman’s body, a dark tide that Ahriman sensed was but the merest fraction of the power leaking up from beneath the world.

‘My lord?’ he said.

‘I know,’ said Magnus. ‘I can contain it. This is no mystery to me.’

Uthizzar moved alongside Ahriman, his heqa staff alive with internal lines of power. Though he could not see Uthizzar’s face, he saw the strain he was under in every forced movement.

Ahriman kept one eye on Magnus and the other on the waving pseudopods approaching from above. They were smooth and oily, quite unnatural, and Ahriman sensed a monstrous intelligence in their sinuous movements, like snakes poised to strike at helpless prey.

‘My lord,’ said Ahriman once more. ‘What are your orders?’

Magnus did not reply, meeting Yatiri’s gaze. Ahriman felt the power flowing between them, sensing immense energies struggling for supremacy. A silent battle of the soul was being fought, and Ahriman could do nothing to help his primarch.

Then two things happened at once.

Yatiri’s body suddenly rushed forward, and his arms closed around Magnus in a hideous parody of a brotherly embrace, his black eyes ablaze with inner fire.

And the black serpent-like tentacles poised above the Astartes attacked.

No sooner had they moved than Ahriman opened fire.

The deafening crack of bolters filled the cavern with echoing bursts and strobing muzzle flashes. Black ichor splashed armour as the tentacles exploded with each impact. Yet there were scores of them, and for each one obliterated, a dozen more remained.

Ahriman emptied his magazine in four controlled bursts.

He felt Uthizzar next to him, the telepath forced to fight with combat moves drawn from muscle memory rather than skill. The crushing pressure of dreadful power seeking entry to his mind was almost unbearable, and he could only imagine what it must feel like to a telepath.

‘They keep coming!’ yelled Uthizzar.

‘Like the hydra of Lerna,’ said Ahriman between swings of his staff.

Each time a bolt found a target, a tentacle exploded in a mass of tarry black blood, hissing fiercely as it evaporated. They were insubstantial, but their threat was in quantity, not quality. Ropes of matter enfolded Ahriman, wrapping around him like constrictor lizards.

He released controlled bursts of energy, and they melted from his body. More reached for him, but his heqa staff swept out, its copper and gold bands rippling with fire. Uthizzar stepped back, and Ahriman braced his mind’s defences, knowing what would come next.

A blistering surge of invisible aether erupted from Uthizzar in a deafening shriek, burning through the air like the shock wave of a magma bomb. It went unheard by the Space Wolves, but the tentacles around them dissolved into black fog at its touch, and others drew back, recognising his power and wary of him. Uthizzar dropped to his knees, head bowed, and bleeding aetheric light from every joint in his armour.

In the few moments’ space Uthizzar had created, Ahriman pushed towards where he had last seen Magnus. The primarch’s body was still held in Yatiri’s loathsome embrace, but his flesh was all but obscured by a mass of writhing tentacles. More were slithering around his body with every second that passed.

‘Go!’ cried Uthizzar, and Ahriman saw how much the unleashed storm had drained him. To loose such power while under so fierce an attack was nothing short of a miracle.

Ahriman nodded to Uthizzar and pushed onwards as fresh enemies flailed from the pit, blocking him from reaching the primarch. It was a living wall of snaking darkness, but his staff cleaved through them like a threshing scythe.

An unstoppable mass of tentacles boiled from the chasm, thousands of blind monsters empowered by some hideous perversion of the Great Ocean’s energy. His power was anathema to these creatures, the pure fire of the aether a nemesis touch to such corruption.

The Space Wolves fought with immovable fury, blades hacking with relentless force and implacable resolve. Their guns fired in a non-stop crescendo, yet they were hideously outnumbered by their foes and had not the power of the aether to aid them.

Ahriman saw one of the Space Wolves lifted from his feet by a host of tentacles, his armour buckling under the awful pressure. He kept firing and howling until his armour finally gave way with a horrid crack of ceramite and bone. Blood fountained from the shorn halves of his body, but he continued shooting, even as his remains were drawn into the pit. Nor was he alone in his fate. Everywhere Ahriman looked, warriors were being torn apart. Dozens were dying with every passing minute, yet still they fought on.

Lord Skarssen laid about himself with a sword that glittered with cold light, a blade that legend would say was fashioned from ice hewn from the heart of a glacier and tempered in the breath of the mightiest kraken. Like Ahriman’s staff, the blade was the bane of the darkness, destroying it with the merest touch.

Ohthere Wyrdmake fought at his side, his eagle-topped staff spinning around his body in a glowing arc, leaving glittering traceries on the retina with its impossible brightness. Like Ahriman, Wyrdmake had power, and the darkness was wary of him.

The Rune Priest saw him, and Ahriman forged a path towards him.

Lord Skarssen looked up at his approach, and the cold flint of his eyes was even colder. There was no hatred, no battle fury, simply the implacable will to destroy his foe. The methodical, clinical nature of Skarssen’s battle surprised Ahriman, but he had no time to dwell upon it.

‘We need to reach my primarch,’ he yelled over the barking gunfire and ripping sound of chainblades. ‘And then we need to get out of here.’

‘Never!’ shouted Skarssen. ‘The foe is yet to die. We leave when it is dead, and not before.’

Ahriman could see there was no use in arguing with the Wolf Lord; his course was set and nothing he could say would sway him. He nodded and turned back towards the battle, a writhing, heaving mass of dark tentacles and struggling warriors.

The Thousand Sons enjoyed the best of the fight, their heqa staffs and innate powers having a greater effect on the enemy than the Space Wolves’ guns and blades. The Astartes were holding, but against an unstoppable, numberless enemy, it would take more than simple determination to win.

‘Very well,’ he said. ‘You will fight at my side?’

‘Wyrdmake will,’ snarled Skarssen. ‘I fight with the warriors of my blood.’

Ahriman nodded. He had expected no more. Without another word, he set off towards the edge of the chasm, forging a path with blazing swipes of his staff and bursts of aether-fire from his gauntlets. Wyrdmake matched him step for step, two warriors of enormous strength fighting side by side with powers beyond the ken of mortal men.

A black snake lashed at Wyrdmake’s helmet, and Ahriman severed it. Another wrapped around Ahriman’s waist, and Wyrdmake burned it to ash with a gesture. Their thoughts were weapons as much as their staffs, but they were forced to fight for every step, destroying the tentacles with killing blows and violent impulses. Bred of different gene-fathers, they nevertheless fought as one, each warrior’s fighting style complementing the other. Where Ahriman fought with rigidly controlled discipline, each blow precisely measured and weighted, Ohthere fought with intuitive fluidity, invented on the move and owing more to innate ability than to any imposed training.

It was a combination that was lethally effective, with both warriors fighting as though they had trained with one another since birth. They fought through a dense thicket of black limbs to reach the edge of the chasm, the sinuous matter parting before their every blow. Only when Ahriman felt the faded symbols underfoot did he realise they had reached the edge.

The bodies of Thousand Sons and Space Wolves were being dragged into the pit, their limbs wrapped in glistening black ropes. Ahriman reached out with his aetheric senses, and turned as he felt the spiking, awesome presence of Magnus.

‘The primarch!’ cried Ahriman, looking deep into the heaving mass.

Magnus and Yatiri, locked together like lovers, were carried away by the tentacles, and drawn deeper into the beating heart of the mass.

The darkness closed around Magnus.

And he was gone.

It was not unpleasant, not in the slightest.

Magnus felt the impotent rage of the seething enemy as it sought to twist him and overpower him the way it had overpowered Yatiri. The elder was gone, his mind a broken thing shattered by such exposure, his body degenerating with every passing second. Magnus had a mind crafted and honed by the greatest cognitive architect in the galaxy, and remained aloof from such brute displays.

He felt its manifestations writhing around his corporeal body, but shut himself off from physical sensations, turning his perceptions inwards as it bore him down into its depths. It amused him to see how its substance had been shaped, its form a reflection of the nightmares and legends of the Aghoru.

So simple and yet so dreadful.

What culture did not have a dread of slimy, wriggling things that lived in the dark? These creatures were shaped by the tortured mind of Yatiri, filtered through the lens of his darkest terrors and ancient legends. Magnus was fortunate indeed that the people of Aghoru had so limited a palette from which to paint its existence.

The inchoate energy pouring into the world had its source far below him, and he shrugged off Yatiri’s embrace with a thought. His flesh burned as hot as a forge, and he blasted the elder’s body to ash as he plunged into the chasm with the first words of the Enumerations on his lips.

His warriors used the Enumerations to rise to states of mind where they could function with optimum mental efficiency, but they were like stepping-stones across a tiny stream to a being such as Magnus. He had mastered them before he had left Terra for the first time, his father’s words of warning still ringing in his mind.

He had heeded the warning, enduring Amon’s tutorials and sermons regarding the power of the Great Ocean on Prospero, while knowing that greater power lay within his reach. Amon had been kind to him, and had accepted the knowledge of his growing obsolescence with good grace, for Magnus outstripped him in learning and power at an early age. Yet he too had warned of peering too deeply into the Ocean’s depths.

The desolation of Prospero was warning enough of the consequences of reaching too far and too heedlessly.

Only when the Emperor had brought the survivors of his Legion to Prospero had Magnus known he would have to disregard the warnings and delve further into the mysteries. His gene-sons were dying, their bodies mutating and turning against them as uncontrolled tides wrought ever more hideous changes in their flesh. Nor were such horrific transformations limited to their bodies. Their minds were like pulsing flares in the Great Ocean, drawing predators, hunters and malign creatures that sought to cross into the material universe.

Unchecked, his Legion would be dead within a generation.

The power to save them was there, just waiting to be used, and he had given long thought and contemplation to breaking his father’s first command. He had not done so heedlessly, but only after much introspection and an honest appraisal of his abilities. Magnus knew he was a superlative manipulator of the aether, but was he strong enough?

He knew the answer to that now, for he had saved his warriors. He had seized control of their destinies from the talons of a malevolent shadow in the Great Ocean that held their fates in its grasp. The Emperor knew of such creatures, and had bargained with them in ages past, but he had never dared face one. Magnus’s victory was not won without cost, and he reached up to touch the smooth skin where his right eye had once been, feeling the pain and vindication of that sacrifice once more.

This power was a pale echo of that, a degenerate pool of trapped energy that had stagnated in this backwater region of space. He could sense the billionfold pathways that spread out from this place, the infinite possibilities of space linked together by a web-like network of conceptual conduits burrowed through the angles between worlds. This region was corrupt, but there were regions of glittering gold in the ocean that threaded the galaxy, binding it as roads of stone had once bound the empires of the Romanii emperors together.

To memorise the entire labyrinthine network was beyond even one as gifted as him, but in a moment of connection beyond the darkness, he imprinted a million paths, conduits and access points in his mind. He might not know the entire network, but he would remember enough to find other ways in and other paths. His father would be pleased to learn of this network, pleased enough to overlook Magnus’s transgression at least.

It still amazed him that he had not known of these pathways, for he and his father had flown the farthest reaches of the Great Ocean and seen sights that would have reduced any other minds to gibbering madness. They had explored the forsaken reefs of entropy, and flown across the depthless chasms of fire that burned with light of every colour. They had fought the nameless, formless predators of the deep, and felt the gelid shadows of entities so vast as to be beyond comprehension.

He realised he had not seen these paths because they were not there to be seen. Only this break in the network on Aghoru had allowed him to see it.

Concerns of the material world intruded on his introspective plunge, and Magnus looked out on a world of shadows and deceit. He had passed from the realm of flesh to the realm of spirit without even thinking of it, and floated in a place without form and dimensions save any he desired to impose upon it. This was the entrance to the network, the nexus point that led into the labyrinth. This was what he had come to Aghoru to find.

He stood upon a broken landscape of upthrust crags and tormented geometry, a world of madness and desolation. Multi-coloured storms lashed the ground with black rain, and blistering lightning scored the heavens with burning zigzag lines. A golden line filled the horizon, a flame that encircled him and seethed with wounded power.

Jagged mountains reared up in the distance, only to be overturned within moments of their creation. Oceans surged with new tides, drying up in a heartbeat to become ashen deserts of dust and memory. Everywhere, the land was in flux, an inconstant whirl of creation and destruction without end and without beginning. Ash and despair billowed from cracks in the rock, and it was as perfect a vision of hell, as Magnus had seen.

‘Is this the best you can do?’ he said, the words dripping with scorn. ‘The mindless void predators can conjure this much.’

The darkness before Magnus coalesced, wrapping itself in black spirals until a glistening snake with scales of obsidian coiled before him, weightless and disembodied from any notions of gravity. Its eyes were whirlpools of pink and blue, and a pair of brightly coloured wings ripped from its back. Its jaw peeled back, revealing fangs that dripped with venom.

Its forked tongue glittered, and its maw was an abyss of infinite possibility.

‘This?’ said the serpent, its voice dry as the desert. ‘This is not of my making. You brought this with you. This is Mekhenty-er-irty’s doing.’

Magnus laughed at such a blatant lie, though the name was unknown to him. The sound was a glittering rain. The very air was saturated with potential. With a thought, Magnus conjured a cage of fire for the serpent.

‘This ends now,’ said Magnus. ‘Your falsehoods are wasted on me.’

‘I know,’ hissed the serpent. ‘That is why I do not need any. I told you this was no invention of mine. It is simply a re-creation of a future that waits on you like a patient hunter.’

The cage of fire vanished, and the serpent slithered through the air towards Magnus, its wings shimmering through a spectrum of a million colours in the time it took to notice.

‘I am here to end this,’ said Magnus. ‘This portal was sealed once and I will seal it again.’

‘Craft older than your master’s tried and failed. What makes you think you will do better?’

‘No one has a craft better than mine,’ laughed Magnus. ‘I have looked into the abyss and wrestled with its darkest powers. I overcame them, and I know the secrets of this world better than you.’

‘Such arrogant certainty,’ said the serpent with relish. ‘How pleasing that is to me. All the very worst sins are accomplished with such certainty: gluttony, wrath, lust… pride. No force in existence can compete with mortals in the grip of certainty.’

‘What are you? Do you have a name?’ asked Magnus.

‘If I did, what makes you think I would be foolish enough to tell it to you?’

‘Pride,’ said Magnus. ‘If I am guilty of sin, then I am not the only one. You want me to know who you are. Why else manifest like this?’

‘If you will forgive the cliché, I have many names,’ said the serpent, with a dry laugh. ‘To you, I shall be Choronzon, Dweller in the Abyss and the Daemon of Dispersion.’

‘Daemon is a meaningless word, a name to give power to fear.’

‘I know, isn’t it wonderful?’ smiled the serpent, coiling around Magnus’s legs and slithering up his body. Magnus did not fear the serpent. He could destroy it without effort.

The serpent lifted its head until they were face to face, the length of its glossy body still coiled around his torso. Magnus felt the pressure as it tightened, but simply expanded his own form to match it. As its form enlarged, so too did his until they were two titans towering over the landscape of discord.

‘You cannot intimidate me,’ he told the serpent. ‘In this place I am more powerful than you. You exist only because I have not yet destroyed you.’

‘And why is that? Your warriors are dying above. Do you not care for the lives of mortals, you who are so removed from mortality?’

‘Time has no meaning here, and when I return it will be as if I was gone for mere moments,’ said Magnus. ‘Besides, much can be learned from a talkative foe.’

‘Indeed.’

‘I grow weary of these games,’ said Magnus, returning to his mortal size once more. The rearing mountains took on a glassy, silvery hue, and he was struck by a momentary flash of sickening recognition. ‘This ends now.’

‘Truly?’ asked the snake, its vast bulk shrinking until it was only a little longer than Magnus’s arm. ‘I have not even tempted you yet. Don’t you want to hear what I can offer you?’

‘You have nothing I want,’ Magnus promised the snake.

‘Are you so sure? I can give you great power, greater than you wield already.’

‘I have power,’ said Magnus. ‘I do not need yours.’

The snake hissed in amusement, and its fanged maw parted with a serpentine approximation of a smile.

‘You have already supped from a poisoned chalice, Magnus of Terra,’ it said. ‘Yours is a borrowed power, nothing more. You are a puppet given life and animation by an unseen master. Even now you dance a merry jig to another’s tune.’

‘And I should believe you?’

‘I have no reason to lie,’ said the snake.

‘You have every reason to lie.’

‘True, but not here, not now,’ said the snake, slithering free of Magnus and turning lazy circles in the air. ‘There is no need. No lie can match the horror of the truth that awaits you. You have bargained with powers far greater and more terrible than you can possibly imagine. You are their pawn now, a plaything to be used and discarded.’

Magnus shook his head.

‘Spare me your theatrics. I bested powers greater than you, with your tawdry vision of hell,’ said Magnus with contempt. ‘I travelled the farthest reaches of the Great Ocean to save my Legion, unwound the strands of fate that bound them to their destruction and wove them anew. What makes you think your paltry blandishments will appeal to one such as I?’

‘Arrogance too,’ hissed the snake, ‘matched with your towering conceit and certainty… Such a sweet prize you will make.’

Magnus had heard enough, content that the alien intelligence behind this vision was no more than a petty dynast of the Great Ocean, a malevolent entity with nothing to offer him but empty boasts and false promises. With a gesture, he drew the snake to him and took its struggling, whipping form in an unbreakable grip.

It squirmed, but he held it fast with no more effort than he might hold a lifeless rope. Magnus squeezed and the scales peeled from its body, the coloured feathers of its wings becoming lustreless and dull. Its eyes dimmed and its fangs melted from its jaws. The landscape began to break apart, its cohesion faltering in the face of the serpent’s unmaking.

‘You bested nothing,’ said the snake as Magnus broke its neck.

Ahriman swept his heqa staff in a wide arc, clearing a space in which he and Wyrdmake could fight. It was a hopeless task. No sooner was one mass of writhing tentacles severed, than hundreds more would slither from the pit to take their places. His control of the Enumerations was lost, his concentration broken in the face of the primarch’s disappearance into the pit. Ahriman would normally fight divorced from the concerns of emotion that compromised his clarity of combat, but his mind was swamped with the competing fires of anger and hate.

With control stripped from his mind, Ahriman knew fear once more.

Only when he had watched Ohrmuzd die had he felt such a void in his soul.

He had vowed never to feel that way again, but this was even worse.

Ahriman fought to reconnect with his higher states, but his primarch’s fate was too near to be salved with the Enumerations. Instead, he focussed on the fight for survival, letting his consciousness stretch no further than the next enemy to be slain. Such a state of being was unfamiliar, but cathartic.

The air was thick with foes, making it impossible to tell in which direction the exit lay. The dark power that energised the tentacles bloated the chamber, a seething corruption that pressed on the surface of his mind like a lead weight.

He could no longer see Uthizzar, and did not know whether the warrior still lived. The Thousand Sons and Space Wolves fought in isolation, small groups cut off from one another in the midst of the black morass. Diametric opposites, they were united as one force as they battled not for victory, but for survival.

Ahriman’s pistol had long since run dry, and he swung his staff in a two-handed grip, laying about himself with crushing strokes. His every movement was leaden, his thoughts dull and slow. The Great Ocean was a potent force in combat, but the toll it took upon a warrior was equally potent.

Ahriman’s mastery of his battle powers was second to none, but even he had nothing left to give, his spirit exhausted and his body pushed to the very limits of endurance. He fought as a mortal must fight, with courage, heart and brute strength, but he already knew that alone would not be enough. He needed power, but all he could feel was the energy boiling from the chasm that had taken the primarch. Even in despair, he knew that would be the first step on a road that had but one destination.

He would face what was left of this fight without the aether.

That made it an alien fight to make, and he was reminded of his words to Hathor Maat when he had glibly told him he might one day need to go to war without his powers. How prophetic those words now seemed, though he had said them without any expectation of facing such a situation himself.

Ahriman’s concentration slipped, and a whipping mass of tentacles enfolded his arm, dragging his heqa staff aside. He struggled against its strength, but it was too late, and his other arm was entangled. His legs and torso were enveloped, and he was lifted from the ground, the joints of his armour creaking at the abominable pressure.

Wyrdmake tried to pull him down, but even the Rune Priest’s strength could not equal the alien power matched against him. Over the hideous slithering of the deathly tentacles, he could hear the sounds of warriors dying, the shouted oaths of the Space Wolves, and the bitter curses of the Thousand Sons.

Then the pressure eased and the tentacles around his body began crumbling and flaking to nothingness. Even in his exhausted state, he felt the rampant energies of the pit suddenly vanish, as surely as if a spigot had been shut off.

The sound of gunfire and chopping blades was replaced by heaving breaths and sudden silence. Ahriman tore himself free of the desiccating tentacles that bound him, bracing himself as he fell back to the ground. He landed lightly, and looked up into the towering mass of writhing blackness as its substance unravelled before his eyes. What had been dark and glossy was now ashen and bleached of colour. The liquid solidity of the tentacles was now as insubstantial as mist, and they fell in a powdered rain.

Floating in the haze of their ending was a blood-red figure, a blazing giant in dusty armour, who descended with his arms outstretched, his single eye shimmering with a golden light. His hair was matted and wild, like an ancient war god come to earth to scour the unbelievers with his divine fire.

‘My lord!’ cried Ahriman, dropping to one knee.

The Thousand Sons followed his example, as did many of the Space Wolves. Fewer than twenty had survived the battle, but the bodies of the fallen were nowhere to be seen.

Magnus set foot on the ground, and the gold and silver symbols worked into the rock at the edge of the chasm shone with renewed vigour, as though freshly energised. Ahriman felt the deadening effect immediately, a force like that which had once filled the deadstones, but cleaner, fresher and stronger.

‘My sons,’ said Magnus, his flesh invigorated and vital. ‘The danger is passed. I have destroyed the evil at the heart of this world.’

Ahriman drew in a cleansing breath, closing his eyes and rising into the first of the Enumerations. His thoughts cleared and his emotional peaks were planed smooth. He heard footsteps behind him and opened his eyes. Lord Skarssen of the Space Wolves’ Fifth Company and Ohthere Wyrdmake stood beside him. The Rune Priest gave him a weary nod of respect.

‘The battle is won?’ asked Skarssen.

‘It is,’ confirmed Magnus, and Ahriman heard fierce pride in his voice. ‘The wound in the world is no more. I have sealed it for all time. Not even its makers could undo my wards.’

‘Then you are done with this world,’ said Skarssen, and Ahriman could not tell whether it was a question or a statement.

‘Yes,’ said Magnus. ‘There is nothing more to learn here.’

‘You owe the Wolf King your presence.’

‘Indeed I do,’ said Magnus, and Ahriman caught a wry grin at the very corner of his primarch’s mouth, as though he were privy to a jest that eluded the rest of them.

‘I will inform Lord Russ of our departure,’ said Skarssen. The Wolf Lord turned away, gathering his warriors in readiness for the march to the surface.

‘Direct, without fuss or unnecessary formality,’ said Uthizzar, appearing at Ahriman’s side, ‘that is the Space Wolf way. Maddening at times.’

‘Agreed, though there is much to admire in its simplicity,’ said Ahriman, pleased that Uthizzar had survived the battle. The telepath was on the verge of collapse. Ahriman was impressed by his fortitude.

‘It is not simplicity, Ahzek,’ said Magnus as the surviving Thousand Sons gathered around him. ‘It is clarity of purpose.’

‘Is there a difference?’

‘Time will tell,’ said Magnus.

‘Then we are truly finished here?’ asked Uthizzar.

‘We are,’ confirmed Magnus. ‘What drew us here is no more, but I have uncovered the existence of a prize beyond measure.’

‘What manner of prize?’ asked Ahriman.

‘All in good time, Ahzek,’ said Magnus with a knowing smile. ‘All in good time.’

Eleven

Shrike
A good war
The Wolf King

Dawn was only a few hours old and the battle for Raven’s Aerie 93 was won. The slender, feather-cloaked bodies of its defenders lay strewn around its craggy ramparts. Thanks to the foresight of the Corvidae, the battle to take the hidden crag had been a massacre.

Six months of flying the Great Ocean on the hunt for strands of the future and constant war had drained those warriors of the Thousand Sons Magnus had led to answer Russ’s summons. They had been bled white matching the war pace of the Space Wolves.

The air in the southern polar mountains was thin and lung-bitingly cold, but it was a welcome change from the heat of Aghoru. Ahriman did not feel the cold, but the soldiers of the Prospero Spireguard were not so fortunate. To survive the sub-zero temperatures, they wore thick crimson greatcoats, heavy boots and silver shakoes, lined with fur cut from the wings of the snow-shrikes used by the Avenians as brutally effective line-breakers.

Ahriman, Hathor Maat and Phosis T’kar sat with three hundred Astartes attending to their wargear in the ruins of the mountain fortress. They cleaned their bolters and repaired chips in their armour while Apothecaries tended to the few wounded.

Dead Avenians littered the toppled battlements and shattered redoubts, a drop in the ocean compared to how many had died since the invasion of Heliosa had begun. Ahriman estimated they had killed close to three million of their warriors.

‘Five thousand,’ said Sobek, returning from tallying the dead.

‘Five thousand,’ repeated Phosis T’kar. ‘Hardly any. I told you there wasn’t as much of a fight in this one as the last.’

Phosis T’kar’s bolter floated in the air in front of him, the weapon disassembled and looking like a three-dimensional diagram in an armourer’s manual. A cleaning cloth and a vial of lubricating oil moved of their own accord through its parts, guided by Phosis T’kar’s Tutelary. The faint glow of Utipa formed a haze around the components, as if a ghostly Techmarine attended the gun.

Hathor Maat’s weapon sat next to him, gleaming as though lifted fresh from the sterile wrapping of a packing crate. He had no need to even strip down his weapon, and simply disassembled the molecular structure of the grease, dirt and foreign particles from the weapon’s moving parts with the power of his mind.

Ahriman worked a wide-bore brush down the barrel of his bolter, enjoying the tactile, hands-on approach to weapon maintenance. Aaetpio hovered at his shoulder, but he had no wish to employ his Tutelary for so menial a task as cleaning his bolt gun. It was too easy to forget that while ensconced in one of the Expedition Fleet’s many libraries or meditating alone in an invocation chamber.

In the six-week journey to the Ark Reach Cluster, Ahriman had spent much of his time with Ohthere Wyrdmake, the Rune Priest proving to be an entertaining companion. Though the terms they used for their abilities were very different, they found they had more in common than either of them had imagined.

Wyrdmake taught Ahriman the casting of the runes, and how to use them to answer vexing questions and gain insight into matters of inner turmoil. As a means of reading the future, they were a less precise method than those taught by the Corvidae, for their meanings required much in the way of interpretation. Wyrdmake also taught him the secret of bind-runes, whereby the properties of several different runes could be combined to draw similarly-attuned aetheric energies towards an object or person.

Wyrdmake’s chest and arms were tattooed with numerous bind-runes: runes for strength, runes for health and runes for steadfastness. None, Ahriman noticed, were for power. When he asked Wyrdmake about this, the Rune Priest had given him a strange look and said, ‘To speak of possessing power is as foolish as saying you own the air in your lungs.’

In return, Ahriman taught the Space Wolf more subtle means of manipulating the energies of the Great Ocean. Wyrdmake was skilled, but his Legion’s teachings were tribal and violent in the drama of their effect. The calling of the tempest, the sundering of the earth and the rising of the seas were the currency of the Rune Priests. Ahriman honed Wyrdmake’s abilities, inducting him into the outer mysteries of the Corvidae and the rites of Prospero.

The first part of this was introducing him to the concept of Tutelaries.

At first, Wyrdmake had been shocked that the Thousand Sons employed such creatures, but Ahriman believed he had come to accept that they were little different from the wolves that accompanied the Space Wolves. Wyrdmake’s companion, a silver-furred beast named Ymir, had been less accepting, and whenever Ahriman summoned Aaetpio, the wolf howled furiously and bared its fangs in expectation of a fight.

Such secrets had never before been taught to an outsider, but Magnus himself had sanctioned Ahriman’s work with Wyrdmake, reasoning that if a Legion such as the Space Wolves could be turned into allies through understanding and careful education, then other Legions would surely present few problems.

Though Ohthere Wyrdmake was a frequent visitor to the Photep, Lord Skarssen preferred to keep to his own vessel, a lean, predatory blade named the Spear of Fenris.

‘Do you want me to help you with that?’ grinned Hathor Maat, displaying a perfect smile of brilliantly white teeth. His hair was dark today, his eyes a deep brown. Though his features were still recognisably his own, they had taken on a rugged look, as if mirroring the terrain they had so recently fought over.

‘No,’ said Ahriman. ‘I do not use my powers to accomplish things I can do without them. You should not either. When was the last time either of you used your hands to clean a bolter?’

Phosis T’kar looked up and shrugged.

‘A long time ago,’ he said. ‘Why?’

‘Do you even remember how to do it?’

‘Of course,’ said Phosis T’kar, ‘How do you think I do this?’

‘Spare us yet another “we shouldn’t rely too much on our powers” lecture,’ groaned Hathor Maat. ‘Look at what would have happened to us on Aghoru if we had followed your teachings. The primarch might have died without Phosis T’kar’s kine shield. And without my mastery of biomancy, T’kar certainly would be dead.’

‘As you’ve never let me forget,’ grumbled Phosis T’kar.

‘Astartes first, psykers second,’ said Ahriman. ‘We forget that at our peril.’

‘Fine,’ said Phosis T’kar, dismissing Utipa and bringing the components of his weapon to his hands. He slotted the gun back together with a pleasing series of metallic clicks and snaps. ‘Happy now?’

‘Much happier,’ said Ahriman, reassembling his own bolter.

‘What’s the matter?’ asked Hathor Maat. ‘Are you afraid your new friend will disapprove?’

Phosis T’kar spat over the edge of the rampart, his spit falling thousands of feet.

‘That damned Wyrdmake shadows us like a psychneuein with the taste of an unguarded psyker in its mandibles,’ he hissed, his anger fierce and sudden. ‘We could have won this war months ago but for the shackles you put on us.’

Phosis T’kar jabbed an accusing fist at the smoking remnants of the tallest peak of the mountain aerie.

‘The primarch shows no such restraint, Ahzek, why should we?’ he asked. ‘Are you so afraid of what we can do?’

‘Maybe I am,’ said Ahriman. ‘Maybe we all should be. Not so long ago, we hid our powers from the world. Now you use them like mere cantrips to save you getting your hands dirty. Sometimes it is necessary to climb down into the mud.’

‘Climb down into the mud, and all you will get is muddy,’ said Hathor Maat.

‘Not much in the way of mud on this world,’ said Phosis T’kar. ‘These aeries put up little fight. How this planet has held out for so long is a mystery to me.’

‘The bird-warriors are stretched thinly now,’ Hathor Maat pointed out. ‘The Wolves have seen to that. And what Russ and his warriors haven’t savaged, the Word Bearers have put to the flame. An entire mountain range was burned out with a saturation promethium bombing three days ago to cleanse the aeries that Ahzek and Ankhu Anen found.’

‘Cleanse?’

‘Kor Phaeron’s word,’ said Hathor Maat with a shrug. ‘It seemed appropriate.’

Kor Phaeron was one of Lorgar’s chief lieutenants, and epitomised all that Ahriman disliked about the Word Bearers. The man’s mind was filled with zealous certainties that could not be shaken by logic, reason or debate.

‘A waste of lives,’ said Ahriman, looking at the bodies the Spireguard were carrying from the broken fortress and arranging in neat lines for incineration.

‘An unavoidable one,’ responded Hathor Maat.

‘Was it?’ said Ahriman. ‘I am not so sure.’

‘Lorgar led negotiations with the Phoenix Court,’ said Phosis T’kar. ‘A primarch no less, yet every attempt was rejected. What more proof do you need that these cultures are degenerate?’

Ahriman did not answer, having renewed his aquaintance with the Word Bearers’ gold-skinned primarch at the greeting ceremony held to honour the arrival of the Thousand Sons. It had been a glittering day of overblown ritual and proselytising, as pointless as it was time-consuming.

Leman Russ had not attended the ceremony, nor even bothered to send representatives. He and his huscarls were at war in the soaring peaks of the east, and did not waste time with ceremony when there was fighting to be done.

For once, Ahriman found himself in complete accord with the Wolf King.

He put thoughts of the XVII Legion from his mind and turned his gaze upwards. A too-wide, too-blue sky yawned above him, and omnipresent clouds of birds filled the air: wheeling, black-winged corvus, long-legged migratory birds and circling carrion eaters.

Ahriman had seen altogether too many of the latter in the past six months.

The Thousand Sons had proven to be instrumental in breaking open the defences of the Ark Reach Cluster, their additional weight of force tipping the balance of war in favour of the Imperium.

First contact with the disparate cultures of the binary cluster had been made two years previously, when scout ships of the Word Bearers’ 47th Expeditionary Fleet discovered six systems linked together by trade and mutually supporting defence networks.

Four of those systems had fallen to the combined forces of the Word Bearers and the Space Wolves, the fifth soon after the arrival of the Thousand Sons. Only the Avenians remained to be conquered.

The defeated empires all stemmed from an incredibly diverse genetic baseline, far removed from the archetypal human genome by millennia of separation from the world of their birth. Mechanicum geneticists confirmed such variances were within tolerable parameters, and thus Magnus had arrived in expectation of acquiring treasure troves of accumulated knowledge in the wake of compliance.

He was to be sorely disappointed.

Ahriman had seen a taste of the war the Space Wolves made on Aghoru, but the scale of what Russ’s Legion left in their wake was nothing short of genocide. Their single-minded savagery left no room for anything other than the foe’s complete and utter destruction.

Nor were the Word Bearers any more forgiving. In the wake of their triumphs, great monuments were carved in the flanks of the mountains, ten-thousand metre high representations of the Emperor and his conquests. Such a blatant challenge to the Emperor’s edict on such things set a dangerous precedent, and Ahriman was uncomfortable with such behaviour.

Kor Phaeron had declared vast swathes of the indigenous culture unwholesome, resulting in virtually every repository of knowledge, art, literature and history being burned to ashes.

From Ahriman’s perusal of the encounter logs, it appeared that Lorgar and Kor Phaeron had met with the Phoenix Court, a polyarchal leadership of the various worlds’ kings and system lords, offering numerous overtures to entice them into the fold of the Imperium. Despite his best efforts, Ahriman could find no record of what these overtures had comprised.

In any event, all had been rejected, and thus the war of compliance had been unavoidable.

The histories of the Great Crusade would record it as a just war, a good war.

The subjugation of the Avenians had begun well, with the outer worlds falling quickly to the combined Imperial forces, but Heliosa, the cardinal world of their empire, had proven a tougher nut to crack.

Violent tectonic forces in ages past had shaped its landscape into three enormous continents almost entirely composed of jagged, mountainous terrain separated by wide expanses of azure seas. Its people lived in silver towers that clung to the flanks of the tallest peaks, with glittering, feather-light bridges spanning the chasms between them, while their people soared on billowing thermals on the backs of graceful aerial beasts.

As well as this lost strand of humanity, Heliosa was a world that belonged to the creatures of the air. The skies were alive with flocks of every description, from tiny, insect-sized creatures that fed on guano to rabid pterosaurs that hunted from lairs in hollowed-out peaks. More than one Imperial craft had been lost to bird strikes before weapon systems were modified to provide continuous clearance fire.

Its air was clean and its skies boundless. It reminded Ahriman of Prospero.

Ark Reach Secundus was the Imperial Cartographe designation for this world, a convenient label that began the process of assimilation before envoys were even despatched or shots fired in anger. Its people called it Heliosa, but the Imperial Army had another name for it, a name synonymous with the razor-beaked killers that were the bane of soldiers forced to assault the aerie fortresses.

They called it Shrike.

Since Aghoru, the power of Ahriman’s cult had risen, buoyed by unexpected swells in the Great Ocean, and the Corvidae were saving Imperial lives. They had seen echoes of future events, returning to their bodies with the locations of their enemies’ hidden aeries and foreknowledge of their ambush tactics.

Armed with such vital intelligence, the Thousand Sons and the Prospero Spireguard had launched a campaign of coordinated assaults on the aeries housing the fighter aircraft protecting the principal strongpoints of the Avenian defence network.

Magnus himself led many of the assaults, wielding the power of the Great Ocean like weapons that could be drawn or sheathed at any time. No force could stand against him, his mastery of time and space, force and matter beyond the reach of even his most gifted followers.

While the Word Bearers quelled the civilian population of outlying mountain cities, the Thousand Sons cleared a path for the Space Wolves to deliver the deathblow to the heart of the Avenian Empire. With the fall of Raven’s Aerie 93, that battle was days away at most.

Ahriman walked the line of dead bodies, stopping to examine one of the Avenian warriors whose body had not been too brutally destroyed in the fighting. Aaetpio flickered at his shoulder, flitting down to the dead body to enhance the fading patterns of the soldier’s aura.

Fear, anger and confusion were all that remained of the man’s imprint on the world: fear that he was going to die here, anger at these inhuman invaders for defiling their homeland, and confusion… confusion born of not knowing why. Ahriman was surprised at this last emotion. How could he not know why the Imperium’s forces were making war against his world?

The dead man wore thin black armour, form-fitting and gracefully proportioned to match his tall, overly slender form. A two-headed shrike with outstretched wings was moulded into the chest piece, an icon so similar to the Imperial bird of union that it was almost inconceivable that these warriors were enemies.

The Avenians were graceful and fine-boned, their facial features sharp and angular, like the mountains in which they lived. Their bodies appeared weak and fragile, but that was a lie. Autopsies had discovered bones that were flexible and strong, and their armour was augmented with fibre-bundle muscles not dissimilar to those within Astartes battle armour.

Ahriman smelled hot animal sweat, recognising the sharp, bitter tang of ice and claw that were the hallmarks of a Fenrisian wolf. The wolf barked, and Aaetpio fled to the aether. Ahriman turned to find himself face to face with a fang-filled maw and amber eyes that wanted nothing more than to devour him. Behind the wolf stood Ohthere Wyrdmake, wrapped in a wolf-pelt cloak. He looked past Ahriman to the dead bodies.

‘A strange form to take on a world of mountains,’ said Wyrdmake.

‘Proof that life can sometimes buck the odds,’ agreed Ahriman.

‘Aye, you have the truth of it. Just look at Fenris. What sane form of life would choose to evolve on a world so hostile? Yet it teems with life: drakes, kraken and wolves.’

‘There are no wolves on Fenris,’ said Ahriman absently, remembering Magnus’s words on the subject.

‘What did you say?’

‘Nothing,’ said Ahriman, hearing the warning tone in the Rune Priest’s voice. ‘Just a scurrilous rumour I heard.’

‘I know the one. I have heard it myself, but the proof is here to see,’ said Wyrdmake, running a gloved hand down the wire-stiff fur of the wolf’s back. ‘Ymir is a wolf of Fenris, born and raised.’

‘Indeed,’ said Ahriman. ‘As you say, it is there to see.’

‘Why do you attend upon the enemy?’ asked Wyrdmake, rapping the base of his staff against the corpse. ‘They can offer you nothing, or do you now talk to the dead?’

‘I am no necromancer,’ said Ahriman, seeing the mischief in Wyrdmake’s eyes. ‘The dead keep their secrets. It is the living who will expand our understanding of these worlds.’

‘What is there to understand? If they fight, we kill them. If they bend to our will, we spare them. There is no more to be said. You overcomplicate things, my friend.’

Ahriman smiled and rose to his full height. He was a shade taller than Wyrdmake, though the Rune Priest was broader and more powerful in the shoulders.

‘Or perhaps you see things too starkly.’

The Rune Priest’s face hardened.

‘You are melancholic,’ said Wyrdmake coldly.

‘Perhaps,’ agreed Ahriman. He looked out over the mountains, his gaze flying to the horizon and the silver cities that lay beyond it. ‘It galls me to imagine what is being lost here, the chance to learn of these people. What will we leave behind us but ashes and hate?’

‘What happens here after we leave is not our concern.’

Ahriman shook his head.

‘But it should be,’ he said. ‘Guilliman has the way of it. The worlds his Legion wins venerate his name and are said to be utopias. Their inhabitants work tirelessly for the good of the Imperium as its most loyal subjects. The people of these worlds will be reluctant citizens of the Imperium at best, rebels-in-waiting at worst.’

‘Then we will return and show them what happens to oathbreakers,’ snarled Wyrdmake.

‘Sometimes I think we are alike,’ said Ahriman, irritated by Ohthere’s black and white morality, ‘And other times I remember that we are very different.’

‘Aye, we are different, brother,’ agreed Wyrdmake, his tone softening, ‘but we are united in war. Only Phoenix Crag remains, and when it falls our enemies must surrender or face extermination. Shrike will be ours within the week, and you and I will mingle our blood in the victory cup.’

‘Heliosa,’ corrected Ahriman. ‘Its people call this world Heliosa.’

‘Not for long they won’t,’ said Wyrdmake, looking up as a thunderous howl of engines exploded over the highest peak. ‘The Wolf King is here.’

Leman Russ: the Wolf King, the Great Wolf, Wolf Lord of Fenris, the Feral One, the Foebane, Slayer of Greenskins.

Ahriman had heard all those titles and more for the master of the Space Wolves, but none of them came close to capturing the sheer dynamism of the towering wolf in human form that set foot on the cracked stones of Raven’s Aerie 93. The jetwash of his Stormcrow had scorched the pale mountain stone and smelled of burnt rock.

A pack of wolf-clad Terminators armed with glittering harpoon spears followed the primarch of the Space Wolves, a towering warrior forged from the ice of Fenris and tempered in its freezing oceans. Magnificent and savage, Leman Russ was the power and violence of the Space Wolves distilled and sharpened to the keenest edge. A black-furred wolf pelt encircled his broad shoulders, and clawed fetishes adorned a wolf-stamped breastplate and hung about his neck. His battle-plate was the grey of a thunderstorm’s heart, its every surface scratched and gouged as though he had recently wrestled the two mighty, blade-shouldered wolves that prowled at his side, one silver and one dark as night.

Ahriman’s skin shivered at the presence of Leman Russ, as though an icy wind whistled through his armour. The primarch’s hair was a resin-stiffened mane of molten copper, his piercing grey eyes cold and unforgiving, forever moving and on the hunt. A mighty blade, fully a metre and a half long, was sheathed at his side, and Ahriman saw its hilt had been rune-bound with symbols to draw the frozen ice of winter to its edge.

It seemed impossible that any foe could stand against this warrior. Ahriman saw wild, unchecked power in Russ, a recklessness of spirit that jarred with his own strict discipline and dedication to duty. Leman Russ blazed with incandescent white fire, his aura filled with unnameable colours. So forceful was it that Ahriman shut himself off from the aether, the primarch’s searing presence in the Great Ocean like the first instant of a supernova. He blinked away the glittering after-images, feeling a nauseous surge of dislocation before his mortal senses adjusted to the sudden absence of extrasensory information.

Ohthere Wyrdmake dropped to one knee, and his lupine companion prostrated itself before the wolves of Russ.

Ahriman felt his body move of its own accord, and the mighty primarch seemed to stretch towards the sky as he knelt before his primal glory. The cold of the mountain air intensified as Russ approached, striding with the easy confidence of a warrior who knows he has no equal. Russ’s swagger was arrogant, but it was well-earned.

Ahriman was used to being in the presence of his primarch; they shared a bond of brotherhood attained through their scholarly mien, but this was something else entirely. Where Magnus valued understanding, perception and knowledge acquired for its own sake, Russ cared only for knowledge that helped him better annihilate his foes.

Ahriman was not intimidated, but being so close to Russ immediately made him feel acutely vulnerable, as though an unknown nemesis had revealed its true face.

‘You are the star-cunning one?’ asked Russ, his voice coarse and heavily accented. The guttural bark of his voice was like Wyrdmake’s, yet Ahriman’s keen ear detected a studied edge to it. It was almost as though he was trying to sound like a feral savage from one of the regressed worlds whose people had forgotten their technological heritage and reverted to barbarism.

Ahriman hid his surprise. Was the impression a true one? An ancient strategos of Old Earth had once claimed that all war was deception. Was the Wolf King’s noble savage a mask to hide his true cunning from those he considered outsiders?

Russ met his gaze, his eyes brimming with barely controlled aggression. The urge to do harm was wrought in every line on Russ’s face, a constant presence that could be loosed in a moment.

‘Ahzek Ahriman, my lord,’ he said finally. ‘You honour us with your presence.’

Russ brushed off the compliment, turning his attention to the fire-blackened ruin of the Avenian’s mountain fortress and the smouldering wreckage of those few aircraft that had reached the launch pads.

‘Ohthere Wyrdmake,’ said Russ, reaching out to tousle the dappled fur of the Rune Priest’s wolf. ‘Once again I find you in the company of a fellow wyrd.’

‘That you do, my king,’ laughed Wyrdmake, rising from bended knee and taking his primarch’s outstretched hand. ‘He’s no Son of the Storm, but I’ll make a decent rune-caster out of him yet.’

The words were spoken lightly, yet Ahriman again sensed a hollow ring to them, as though this were a pantomime for his benefit.

‘Aye, well see you keep some of our secrets, Wyrdmake,’ growled Russ. ‘Some things of Fenris are for its sons and no others.’

‘Of course, my king,’ agreed Wyrdmake.

Russ returned his attention to Ahriman. The Wolf King was not looking at him as an individual, but as a target for his aggression. The primarch’s eyes darted over Ahriman’s armour, identifying weakened joints, areas of damage and points of entry for a blade. In an instant, Russ knew his physique better than he knew it himself, where his bones could most easily be broken, where a sword might best penetrate or where a fist would break open a protective plate and sunder internal organs

‘Where is your liege lord?’ demanded Russ. ‘He should be here.’

‘I am here,’ said the deeply resonant voice of Magnus, and the force of Russ’s presence diminished, like a storm kept at bay by one of Phosis T’kar’s kine shields.

The Wolf King’s natural state of aggression slackened, the hostility he’d displayed towards Ahriman mitigated. Such was only to be expected, for Magnus was Russ’s brother, a genetic kinsman who shared a connection to the Emperor few other beings could claim.

Decades ago, Magnus had attempted to tell the tale of his creation to a gathering of the Rehahti. ‘Creation’, deliberately chosen instead of ‘birth’. Magnus had not been born as mortals were born, but had been willed into life by the designs of the Emperor. As philosophically advanced as his captains were, the concepts were too alien, too beyond mortal comprehension for any of them to understand.

To be conscious of your body growing around you, to have awareness of your brain taking shape as architecture instead of organism, and to have discourse with your creator even as your existence moved from conceptual possibility to tangible reality had proved too complex to explain to those who had not experienced such a uniquely hastened evolution.

And these were the simplest of concepts to absorb. To know these things and to not be driven insane required a singular mind, a mind advanced enough to grasp the ungraspable, to conceive the inconceivable: a primarch’s mind.

To have shared that moment of creation with another being, to know that amongst all the galaxy’s aeons of creation there had never existed beings like you and your brothers, had bonded the primarchs in ways unattainable by mortals.

Yet despite that shared heritage, there was no love lost between Magnus and Russ. The legendary brotherhood of primarchs, so beloved of the iterators orations was utterly absent.

‘Brother Russ,’ said Magnus the Red, moving past Ahriman to stand before the Wolf King. Magnus wore his horned armour of gold and leather, his feathered cloak snatched and fluttered by the winds. The two primarchs had served in the same war for just over six months and this was the first time they had met in thirty years.

Ahriman wasn’t sure what he had expected of two primarchs meeting after decades apart, but it certainly wasn’t this stilted display of forced friendship. Russ’s wolves snarled and bared their fangs. Magnus shook his head slowly, and they stepped back, pressing close to their master’s legs with their ears pressed flat to their skulls.

‘Magnus,’ said Leman Russ, the fraternal shake perfunctory and lacking any warmth. Russ looked Magnus up and down. ‘That cloak makes you look like the enemy. It’s the feathers.’

‘Or perhaps, their cloaks make them look like me?’

‘Either way, I don’t like it. You should get rid of it. A cloak is a liability in battle.’

‘I could say the same of that mangy wolf pelt.’

‘You could, but then I’d have to kill you,’ replied Russ.

‘You could try,’ said Magnus, ‘but you wouldn’t succeed.’

‘Is that what you think?’

‘It’s what I know.’

Ahriman was horrified by this exchange. Then he saw the faintest smirk on Russ’s lips, and a glint of mischief in his primarch’s glittering amber eye.

He let out a tense breath, sensing a familiar pattern to their argumentative banter. Ahriman had often observed that soldiers who exchanged the most vulgar comments were often steadfast brothers-in-arms, where the level of friendship could be judged by how foul their greetings were to one another. Might this be something similar?

Despite his realisation, there was an edge to this exchange, as though cruel barbs neither primarch was aware of were concealed in the jests.

Or perhaps they were aware of them. It was impossible to tell.

‘What brings you to Raven’s Aerie 93, brother? I had not thought to see you until the assault on Phoenix Crag.’

‘That time is upon us,’ said Leman Russ, all levity absent from his icy tone. ‘My forces are poised to unleash the murder-make at our foe’s kings.’

‘And the Urizen?’ asked Magnus, using the Word Bearers devotional name for their primarch. ‘Is he also ready to strike?’

‘Do not call him that,’ said Leman Russ. ‘His name is Lorgar.’

‘Why do you dislike that name so much?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Russ. ‘Do I need a reason?’

‘No, I was simply curious.’

‘Not everything needs an explanation, Magnus,’ said Russ. ‘Some things just are. Now gather your warriors, it is time to finish this.’

Twelve

Phoenix Crag

Explosions painted the sky, burning wrecks spiralled down to destruction, and streaking blasts of anti-aircraft fire stitched bright traceries across the heavens. Ahriman felt them all moments before they happened, flinching in anticipation of shells that hadn’t burst or zipping lines of flak that hadn’t been fired.

He reclined in a converted gravity harness built into the crew compartment of a heavily modified Stormhawk transporter designated Scarab Prime. Flying behind the main body of the aerial assault, the tempo of Ahriman’s pulse increased as the jerking images of the future blazed like miniature suns in his mind.

A dozen warriors of the Scarab Occult stood behind him in vertical restraints, bolters clamped to their chests, looking like reliquary statues at the entrance to an ancient king’s tomb. Lemuel Gaumon was dwarfed by their bulk, his ebony features pale and sweat-streaked as he kept his eyes screwed tightly shut.

To bring mortals on combat missions was a new development for the Thousand Sons, but in response to their repeated requests, Magnus had decreed that any remembrancers that desired to witness the full fury of an Astartes assault would be permitted to do so.

Surprisingly, only a few had accepted. Ahriman knew Lemuel was beginning to regret his hasty decision, but as a Neophyte it was only right that he be here. Camille Shivani travelled on a Thunderhawk of the Sixth Fellowship, her mind relishing the chance to get close to the front lines of war. Her normal line of research dealt with civilisations long gone.

Now she might see one vanish before her very eyes.

Kallista Eris had chosen not to fly into harm’s way. Another attack of what she called the fire had left her drained and exhausted. Mahavastu Kallimakus travelled with Magnus, though compared to the panicked and exhilarated thoughts of his fellow remembrancers, his mind was dull, like a fire all but smothered by suffocating foam.

Within Ahriman’s Stormhawk, internal spaces normally reserved for troops and heavy equipment were filled with banks of surveyor gear and crystalline receptors. Heavy cables snaked across the armoured floor of the compartment, plugging into the elevated harness upon which he sat.

Ahriman’s head was encased in a gleaming hood of shimmering light, a gossamer-thin matrix of precisely cut crystals hewn from the Reflecting Caves beneath Tizca. His mind floated in a meditative state, unbound from his mortal flesh and occupying a detached state in the higher Enumerations.

Fine copper wires trailed from this crystal hood, their nickel-jacketed ends immersed in psi-reactive gels that amplified Ahriman’s thoughts and allowed others to receive them. His mind skimmed the surface of the Great Ocean, allowing Aaetpio to guide the currents of potential futures his way. This close to the present, such echoes were easy to find, and it was a simple matter for a Tutelary of a Master of the Corvidae to pluck them from the aether.

His heightened sensitivity to the immediate future gave him an unmatched situational awareness. He could read the flow of thermoclines across the mountains, see every aircraft, and feel the fears of their crews as they surged towards Phoenix Crag. His awareness floated above the unfolding assault, reading its ebbs and flows as surely as if it were a slow-moving battle simulation.

The flame-crowned city of the Avenian kings lay ten kilometres east of the tightening noose of aircraft. It was a silver-sheathed mountain with an eternally burning plume of blue fire at its highest tower, a majestic creation of glass spires and soaring bridges that appeared as fragile as spun silk. Graceful minarets and pyramids of glass capped the mountain peaks, and sprawling habitation towers glittered like pillars of ice in the bright sunlight. Columned processionals marched their way into the mountains from the shadowed valleys below, their lengths wreathed in explosions and smoke as artillery brigades and the heavy armour of the Prospero Spireguard, Lacunan Lifewatch and Ouranti Draks laid siege to its lower levels.

As Phoenix Crag was battered from below, so too was it assaulted from the air.

‘As above, so below,’ whispered Ahriman.

Three thousand aircraft streaked towards the last bastion of the Avenians, roaring through a storm of defensive gunfire and the last squadrons of enemy fighters. Impulsive Space Wolf Thunderhawks raced for the crown of the mountain, while heavier Word Bearer Stormbirds and Imperial Army bulk landers dived towards its sprawling base. Thousand Sons aircraft speared towards its guts, a mixture of darting Lotus fighters, Apis bombers and Stormhawk transports.

Ahriman likened the Thousand Sons assault to a living organism, with the awesome force of Magnus the Red as its unimaginably powerful mind. Magnus directed the assault, but the Athanaens were his thoughts, the Raptora his shield, and the Pyrae and Pavoni his fists.

The Corvidae were his eyes and ears.

Ahriman saw a flickering image of an armour-piercing shell punch through the belly of Eagle’s Talon, a roaring Stormbird of the Sixth Fellowship, and sent a pulse of warning into the matrix. He felt the brief moment of connection with the impossibly complex lattice of Magnus’s mind, the brightest sun at the heart of a golden web that eclipsed all others with its brilliance.

No sooner had his warning been sent than Eagle’s Talon banked sharply. Seconds later, a stream of shells tore empty air and exploded harmlessly above it. This was one of a score of warnings pulsing from Ahriman’s enhanced awareness, the vessels of the Thousand Sons dancing to his directions to evade harm. Each permutation altered the schemata of the future, each consequence rippling outwards, interacting with others in fiendishly complex patterns that only the enhanced mental structure of a specially trained Astartes could process.

On another modified Stormhawk, Ankhu Anen, a fellow disciple of the Corvidae, undertook similar duties. It was not an exact science, and they could not see every danger. Some aircraft were going to be hit, no matter how much the Corvidae sought to prevent it.

To mitigate against such immovable futures, every assault craft carried a mix of covens from each cult. High ranking cultists of the Pavoni and Pyrae filled the air around the aircraft with crackling arcs of lightning and fire to detonate incoming shells before impact, while the Raptora maintained kine shields to deflect those shells that penetrated the fire screen. Athanaeans scanned the thoughts of enemy fighter pilots, skimming the manoeuvres and intercepts they planned from the surfaces of their minds.

It was a dance of potential futures, a whirlwind of the possible and the real, each one moving in and out of existence with every passing moment.

It was as close as Ahriman ever felt to perfection.

A nearby explosion rocked the Stormhawk, the shell that had been destined to blow it from the sky detonating harmlessly off its starboard wing.

‘Two minutes to skids down,’ shouted the pilot.

Ahriman smiled.

The dance continued.

Camille felt sick to her stomach, but relished the feeling as the aircraft hurled itself to the side and an explosion thumped their underside with a deafening clang of metal. The helmet she wore was dented and uncomfortable, but had saved her skull from being smashed open on the fuselage several times already.

‘Not like you read about, is it?’ shouted Khalophis from the far end of the compartment.

‘No!’ shouted Camille with a forced laugh. ‘It’s better.’

She wasn’t lying. Though her skin prickled with fear and her heart was thudding against her chest, she had never felt more alive. The prospect of seeing up close what the Expeditionary Fleets were doing in humanity’s name was a unique opportunity.

Phoenix Crag was a combat zone, and nothing was certain in a place like that. A chance ricochet, a stray artillery round, anything could snuff out her life in a moment, but what was the point of being alive if you weren’t willing to come out of your comfort zone and see what was being done on the bloody knife-edge of history?

‘How long until we land?’ she called.

‘One minute,’ said Khalophis, walking down the centre-line of the aircraft’s ready line with his Practicus, a warrior called Yaotl, ensuring the Thunderhawk’s cargo was ready for deployment. ‘Are you sure you want to see this? Astartes war is not pretty for those unused to such sights. Mine is certainly not.’

‘I’m ready,’ Camille assured him. ‘And I want to see it. I’m a remembrancer, I need to see things first-hand if my accounts are to be worth anything.’

‘Fair enough,’ said Khalophis. ‘Just keep behind the maniples. Stay out of my way, for it’s not my duty to protect you if you get into trouble. Keep close to Yaotl, he will shield you with a fire cloak, so be careful not to touch anything of value you might find – it will burn like promethium-soaked paper.’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Camille holding up her gloved hands. ‘I won’t.’

Khalophis nodded and turned to the muttering Techmarine following him. The Techmarine consulted a data-slate and made last minute adjustments to the weapon systems of the Thunderhawk’s silent passengers.

Ranked up in three lines were nine automatons, bulky machines in the shapes of humanoids, but twice as tall as an Astartes. Khalophis had called them Cataphracts, battle robots that reeked of grease and a hybrid electric fuel smell. Their bodies were exaggerated and armoured on the torsos and thighs, heavy plates of armaplas bolted to piston legs and cog-driven arms.

Coloured a vivid blue and gold, their heads were hunched down in the centres of their chests like peaked crowns, their carved faces like expressionless masks of long-dead emperors. Each was armed with a long cannon on one arm and a grossly oversized fist on the other. A huge, belt-fed weapon was slung behind each robot, and from the greased rails on their backs, Camille guessed they would slide up onto the shoulders when the time came for them to fire.

What would she feel from such an inanimate hunk of metal, what purely objective recall might its frame of steel and ceramite yield? She pulled off a glove and tentatively reached out to touch its cold arm.

She closed her eyes as the sensations came: the lightless times between battles, the dark, oil-dripping voids between activation and oblivion. She saw through its unfeeling eyes, a host of foes falling beneath its weapons, an eternity of war waged without thought for the consequences or reasons behind its actions.

Camille followed the coursing energy filling the robot as its power came online and new life flowed through its cabled veins. She followed the trail of power from its source, feeling the swelling sense of purpose as the robot’s battle program came alive, its synthetic cortex processing the instructions that would send it to war.

That journey stopped as she sensed a higher consciousness within the machine, a spark of something she hadn’t expected to find within its circuits and valves. She sensed a dreadful, aching need to destroy occupying the higher functions of its part-machine, part-organic mind.

Camille saw a shard of mirror-smooth crystal embedded in the robot’s cortex, and knew immediately that it had been cut from a place called the Reflecting Cave on Prospero, just as she knew it had been carefully nurtured by an apprentice crystal grower named Estoca, a man who had that day learned he had an inoperable form of lung blight, but who wasn’t worried because a Pavoni healer had been scheduled to come to his home that evening.

Seated in the back of the crystal was a dancing flame, an animating will that overrode the robot’s childishly simple doctrina wafer, a consciousness that linked all nine robots together under one supreme authority.

The fire burned brightly, swelling to fill the crystal with potency and the urge to fight. The robots raised their cannons in unison, their shoulder-mounted weapons locking into the upright position with a clatter of gears and a wheeze of hydraulics.

Then the Thunderhawk slammed down with a jarring thud, and the connection was broken as her hand fell from the robot’s arm.

The robots turned their faces to her, and a lifeless voice rumbled from the depths of every one of them. The electronically rendered voice of Khalophis rasped from the mouthpiece of all nine robots, saying, ‘Stay out of our way, Mistress Shivani.’

The assault ramp blew open, and a howling wind of grit and acrid propellant smoke was sucked inside. The deafening roar of gunfire and explosions filled the compartment.

The maniples of robots marched from the Thunderhawk in ordered ranks and into battle.

The distinctive snap of wings folding tight into a white furred body was the first warning of the attack. Magnus looked up past the ruin of a smoking tower to see a host of snow-shrikes plummeting on an attack run, thirty at least.

‘Spread out!’ he cried, and the warriors of the Scarab Occult threw themselves into the plentiful cover. With a thought, he sent Mahavastu Kallimakus into the shadow of a toppled lion statue, the venerable scribe glassy eyed and compliant. His scrivener harness recorded Magnus’s thoughts, the quill-tipped mechadendrites filling page after page for his grimoire. Shards of glass and twisted metal filled the street, as well as the blazing wrecks of Avenian fighters brought down by the Space Wolves.

The shrikes let loose ululating screams as they dived down through the hail of gunfire. Bolts filled the air, but even Astartes found it hard to hit such fast-moving targets. Mass-reactive shells sparked from toppled spires, but only a few of the diving creatures were hit, tumbling to the street in explosions of bloody fur.

They were agile flyers, their white-furred bodies like feathered serpents. Their wings were long and flexible, capable of incredible feats of manoeuvrability. Raking dewclaws snapped from the leading edges of their wings, turning them into serrated blades, but their long, razor-sharp beaks were their preferred killing tools. Two riders, strapped into flight harnesses, controlled the beasts, one a pilot of sorts, the other a marksman equipped with a lethally accurate longrifle.

Magnus watched in fascination as the Avenian line-breakers swooped low through the maze of debris, their riders controlling them with an ease that spoke of a bond formed over decades of shared experience.

One of the Scarab Occult stepped from cover to take a snap shot, but he had misjudged the speed of the creatures. A shrike flashed down like a glorious chevalier of old Franc, its razored beak like a glittering lance as it skewered the warrior. The blade punched through his chest, and the shrike’s gunner fired a repeating pistol into his face. One direct hit punched through the warrior’s visor and blew out the back of his helmet.

Magnus blinked and the creature erupted in flames, its piercing shrieks a paltry revenge for the death it had caused. Its riders tried to hurl themselves from their blazing mount, but Magnus pinned them to its back with a thought, and let them burn.

The other shrike-riders swept through their position, but the Scarab Occult were too canny to be caught in the open when they had other weapons to wield.

‘Channelling,’ ordered Magnus, and glittering shapes unfolded from each warrior, Tutelaries in the forms of birds, eyes, lizards and a myriad other unnameable guises. They darted out into the open, and streams of fire and lightning erupted from their shimmering forms as their masters channelled aetheric powers through their insubstantial bodies. A score of shrikes erupted into blazing torches of screaming flesh and fur. The survivors fled skyward, and Magnus waited until they had reached suitably lethal altitude before crushing their bones to powder.

He heard the beasts’ shrill cries of agony, but didn’t bother to watch the riders plummet to their deaths. Sporadic gunfire barked towards the Thousand Sons as running Avenian infantry came into view at the end of the street.

‘Foolish,’ said Magnus. ‘Very foolish.’

He clenched his fist, and the guns exploded in the Avenians’ hands, felling the entire line at a stroke. Screams of pain quickly followed, but Magnus paid the awful sound no heed, and strode towards the fallen soldiers. Most still blazed with fear and life, but the stamping boots of the Scarab Occult soon doused them.

Mahavastu Kallimakus trotted obediently after him, the continual stream of Magnus’s thoughts transcribed faithfully into his journal. When this battle was won, Magnus would cull those thoughts into a more artful text for his great work.

He reached the end of the street, looking into the sky along a glorious, flying buttress-like causeway that arced out into thin air towards the raised entrance of the Phoenix Crag’s Great Library.

Corvidae divinations had pinpointed the location of the city’s largest repository of knowledge and history, a vast museum housed in a pyramid of silver, six hundred metres high and two kilometres wide that rose from the main body of the mountain. The similarity to the Great Library on Prospero was not lost on Magnus. Dozens of slender bridges led to a plaza before the eagle-wreathed gateway, some shattered in the assault, others on fire and yet more the scenes of furious running battles.

Leman Russ and his Space Wolves were mauling the upper echelons of the city, tearing through its leaders and politicians like ocean predators in a feeding frenzy. Vox reports indicated that the Word Bearers and Imperial Army units had swiftly overcome the defenders of the valley gates, and were pushing up through the lower levels of the city, leaving little but ashes and devastation in their wake.

Nothing would be left of the city if it were not for Magnus’s restraining hand.

The primarchs had met the previous evening to discuss how best to assault Phoenix Crag, Leman Russ and Lorgar both eager to utterly eradicate the city, though for very different reasons. Russ simply because it stood against him, Lorgar because its ignorance of the Emperor offended him.

It would be hard to imagine three more different brothers: Russ with the bestial mask he thought fooled everyone with its bellicose savagery, and Lorgar with his altogether subtler mask that hid a face even Magnus could not fully discern. They had spoken long into the night, each of his brothers vying for the upper hand.

Phoenix Crag would not be like the other mountain cities of Heliosa, its records destroyed, its artefacts smashed and its importance forgotten. Magnus would save the history of this isolated outpost of humanity, and reclaim its place in the grand pageant of human endeavour.

This world had survived the nightmare of Old Night, and deserved no less.

‘Onwards, my brothers,’ said Magnus. ‘We have a world’s legacy to save.’

The city’s buildings were graceful structures built into the fabric of the rock, a maze of dwellings, workplaces, recreational spaces and interconnecting streets, boulevards and subterranean passages. To any normal force, this kind of uphill fight would be a brutal, building-to-building brawl, time-consuming and wasteful of lives, but the Thousand Sons were no normal force.

Ahriman maintained his connection to Aaetpio, using his Tutelary’s link to the aether to shift his perceptions into the near future. He saw traps before they were sprung, and read the presence of minds alive with anticipation of ambush.

Instead of breaking open each building, the Scarab Occult simply willed their Tutelaries into their enemies’ hiding places, and burned them out with invisible fires or crushed them with psychic hammer blows. Methodical and swift, Ahriman’s First Fellowship pushed upwards towards Magnus, the primarch calling his warriors to him to defend the city’s intellectual heart from destruction. The Thousand Sons fought their way up into the mountain city along marble-flagged boulevards, each Fellowship fighting in the manner of its captain’s nature.

Phosis T’kar’s Second Fellowship bludgeoned their way straight through the middle of the enemy brigades they encountered, smashing their strongholds with barrages of aetheric force while advancing under the protection of invisible mantlets of pure thought. Hathor Maat’s Third Fellowship burned their enemies alive, boiled the blood in their veins or sucked the air from their lungs, turning their bodies against them in spitefully painful ways.

Khalophis alone was not summoned by the primarch’s call, instead tasked with securing the Thousand Sons’ rear echelons with his Chapters of Devastators and battalions of robot maniples. Psychically resonant crystals allowed the captain of the Sixth Fellowship to direct his mindless charges with complete precision, instead of relying on the doctrina wafers provided by the Legio Cybernetica.

Flocks of shrikes looped in to attack the Thousand Sons at every opportunity. These attacks were so swift and bloody that not even Ahriman’s heightened precognitive senses could anticipate them all. The First Fellowship had suffered nearly a hundred casualties so far, and he knew there would be more before the battle was concluded.

Ahriman made his way towards a fallen pillar, behind which Lemuel Gaumon was sheltering. He noticed its fluted length was classically proportioned and the capital was shaped like the leaf-topped columns of the Great Library on Prospero. Ahriman smiled at the incongruous nature of the observation.

Lemuel’s hands were pressed to his ears to block out the barking shrieks of the alien birds and the thunderous bangs of Astartes bolt fire. The man’s terror flared from his body in streams of greenish yellow energy. Beside him, Sobek returned fire, the percussive reports of his weapon sending up puffs of dust from the top of the column.

‘Is it all you hoped for?’ asked Ahriman, slamming a fresh magazine into his pistol.

Lemuel looked up, his eyes brimming with tears. He shook his head.

‘It’s terrible,’ he said. ‘How can you stand it?’

‘It is what I am trained for,’ said Ahriman, as a booming volley of bolter fire echoed from the walls. Shrieking wails echoed, and stuttering return fire spanked from the top of the pillar. Lemuel flinched as energy projectiles whined past, curling himself into a tight ball. Sobek kept up his methodical volleys, unfazed by the nearness of the enemy fire-bullets.

A sudden, violent pulse of warning from Aaetpio sent Ahriman to his knees.

The shrike’s beak slashed over his head, and he spun his heqa staff up to block a slashing wing. He shot the creature in the face, leaving only a spraying stump as the bolt detonated within its skull. It collapsed, as another flight of shrikes dived in to attack.

A flying killer’s claws tore into the column next to him. The stone split apart as the beast slashed its wings at him, dewclaws snapping from leathery chitin-sheaths. Lemuel screamed in terror, and the monster turned its long, stabbing beak towards the remembrancer. Ahriman reached out with an open palm and crushed his hand into a fist.

The shrike standing over Lemuel gave a strangled squawk as its nervous system overloaded with pain impulses. It collapsed into a shivering heap until Ahriman stamped down on its neck, spinning around as his precognitive sense screamed a warning at him. He blocked another bladed beak with a sweep of his staff, sending a pulse of fire along its length.

The creature shrieked as its body caught light, the flames spreading over its furred body with unnatural rapidity. The flames fed on a victim’s life-force, and would only extinguish when the creature was dead.

Sobek battled two of the beasts, his left arm held in the beak of a white-furred shrike as it attempted to saw through his shoulder. The second beast’s wings boomed as it hovered above his Practicus in a dust-filled whirlwind, raking Sobek’s armour with tearing claws.

Astartes and predatory killers fought in a confused mass of thrashing limbs, blades and claws. Ahriman swung his pistol around and drew on Aaetpio’s connection to the Great Ocean, tracing the myriad potential pathways of the future to follow the path his bolt would take in a fraction of a second. He squeezed the trigger twice in quick succession.

The first bolt punched through the skull of the shrike holding Sobek down, the second exploded the heart of the hovering beast, both impact points less than ten centimetres from Sobek’s body. Both beasts collapsed, slain instantly by Ahriman’s precision kill-shots.

‘Thank you, my lord,’ said Sobek, freeing his gouged limb from the beak of the shrike. The armour was sliced through, and the meat of Sobek’s arm was bloody and torn.

‘Are you able to fight?’

‘Yes, my lord,’ Sobek assured him. ‘The wound is already healing.’

Ahriman nodded and knelt beside Lemuel.

‘And you, my Neophyte?’ he asked.

Lemuel took a deep breath. His skin was ashen, and streaked tears cut through the dust caking his cheeks. Gunfire still rattled further down the boulevard, but none of it was aimed in their direction.

‘Are they dead?’ asked Lemuel.

‘They are,’ confirmed Ahriman. ‘You were in no danger. Sobek maintained a chameleon field around you, so the birds were probably not even aware of you until you screamed, and Sergeant Xeatan protects you from a chance kill with a kine shield.’

‘I thought you were Corvidae?’ said Lemuel. ‘Divinators? Aren’t Raptora the telekines?’

‘Most of my warriors are Corvidae,’ nodded Ahriman, pleased to have this opportunity to teach, even in the midst of a firefight. ‘Like all Fellowships of the Thousand Sons, each Chapter and every squad is made up of warriors belonging to a variety of cults. Sobek and I are Corvidae, but Xeatan is Raptora.’

Ahriman pointed to a warrior sheltering in a recessed doorway from the sustained fire of a dozen Avenian soldiers. His shoulder guard was emblazoned with the serpentine star of the Thousand Sons with the image of a long, colourful feather at its centre.

‘And Hastar over there is Pavoni. Watch.’

Despite his obvious terror, Lemuel peeked over the edge of the column in time to see Hastar leap out into the street as the Avenian soldiers broke from cover. His bolter was clamped to his thigh, and he braced himself with his back foot at right angles to his out-thrust left leg. The Avenians saw him, and raised their weapons. Before they could fire, sheet lightning leapt from Hastar’s outstretched hands, and a deafening thunderclap shattered every pane of glass for five hundred metres in all directions.

Ahriman’s autosenses compensated for the sudden brightness, but Lemuel blinked away dazzling after-images. By the time his vision had cleared, it was all over. The Avenian soldiers were charred columns of blackened flesh, burned statues kept upright by heat-fused bones. Flesh ran from their corpses like melting butter. Lemuel bent over and vomited the contents of his stomach.

Lemuel looked up in horror.

‘Sweet Inkosazana, Lady of Heaven save me,’ he said.

Ahriman forgave the heathen imprecation as Lemuel took several deep breaths and wiped his mouth clean. He spat and said, ‘That’s… horrible, I mean to say, incredible… How… how did he know those soldiers were going to move at that moment?’

‘Because across the street is an Athanaean captain named Uthizzar,’ said Ahriman, indicating a warrior crouched in the cover of another fallen column. ‘He read the thoughts of their commander and told Hastar when they were going to move.’

‘Incredible,’ repeated Lemuel. ‘Simply incredible.’

Ahriman smiled, pleased that his Neophyte had so quickly accepted the fundamental powers of the Thousand Sons. The new Imperium’s unseemly rush to embrace secularism and reason had encouraged many of its subjects to abandon their sense of wonder. The new creed denied knowledge of the esoteric, condemning those who pursued such science as unclean sorcerers instead of embracing their work as simply a new form of understanding.

‘You are a fast study, Lemuel,’ said Ahriman, standing and rallying his warriors with a raised fist. ‘Now read the auras and tell me what you feel.’

Three hundred warriors, primarily Ahriman’s Sekhmet Terminators and veterans of the Scarab Occult, formed up alongside Uthizzar’s plate-armoured warriors.

‘Pride,’ said Lemuel, closing his eyes, ‘fierce pride in their abilities.’

‘You can do better than that,’ said Ahriman. ‘A child could tell me that of warriors. Reach out further.’

Lemuel’s breathing deepened, and Ahriman read the change in his aura as he forced himself into the lowest of the Enumerations. It was clumsily done and awkward, but it was more than most mortals could do.

How easy it was to forget that Ahriman had once not known how to rise through his states of consciousness. Teaching someone a task he found as natural as breathing made it easy to forget where the difficulties lay.

‘Let it come naturally,’ said Ahriman. ‘Be borne upon its waves and it will guide you to what you seek.’

Lemuel’s face eased as he caught the city’s emotional pulse, the fearful black of its populace, the angry crimson of its soldiers and the underlying golden pride that beat in every heart.

Ahriman sensed the violent spike of psychic energy a second before it hit.

It swept over them, a sudden, shocking blast of psychic noise that overwhelmed the senses with its sheer violence. Uthizzar cried out and dropped his weapon. Lemuel doubled over in pain, convulsing in spastic fits.

‘What in the name of the Great Ocean was that?’ cried Sobek. ‘A weapon?’

‘A psychic shock wave,’ gasped Uthizzar. ‘One of immense proportions.’

Ahriman forced the pain away and knelt beside Lemuel. The remembrancer’s face was a mask of blood. It wept from his eyes and poured in a steady stream from his nose.

‘So strong?’ asked Ahriman, still blinking away hazy after-images. ‘Are you sure?’

Uthizzar nodded.

‘I am,’ he said. ‘It is a howl of pure rage, cold, jagged and merciless.’

Ahriman trusted Uthizzar’s judgement, tasting icy metal and feeling the rage of a hunter’s fury denied.

‘Such a force of psychic might is too powerful for any normal mind,’ said Uthizzar, reliving a painful memory. ‘I have felt this before.’

Ahriman read Uthizzar’s aura and knew.

‘Leman Russ,’ he said.

Thirteen

The library
Flesh change
The peacemaker

They pushed higher into the Phoenix Crag. Ahriman’s First Fellowship linked with Hathor Maat’s Third in a gorge of artisans’s workshops, and scout elements of the Prospero Spireguard joined them in a region of hollowed out silo peaks. Drop-troops of the Ouranti Draks, with their scale cloaks and reptilian helmets, had seized the districts above Ahriman’s position, and parted to allow the purposeful Astartes past.

Reports of the fighting came in a haphazard jumble: a close range firefight in the south-western subsids, a swirling melee involving six thousand soldiers across the lower slopes of a manufacturing region in the mountain’s rumpled skirts, artillery duels on the northern residential flanks, dizzying aerial jousts fought between the disc-skimmers of the Thousand Sons and the last of the shrike-riders.

The reports intersected and cut across each other in blurted outbursts. Ahriman was barely able to sift meaning from the chaos. Through all the reports of impending victory and the destruction of enemy forces, two facts were abundantly clear.

The Word Bearers were advancing slowly, much slower than he would have expected.

The same could not be said of the Space Wolves.

Leman Russ and his First Great Company had dropped directly onto the silver mountain’s highest peak, extinguishing its eternal flame and toppling the symbols of rulership. The hearthguard of the Phoenix Court valiantly opposed the surging, unstoppable force of the Space Wolves, but they had been torn to scraps and hurled from the mountaintop.

The defeated kings offered terms of surrender, but Leman Russ was deaf to such pleas. He had sworn words of doom upon the Grand Annulus, and the Wolf King would never break an oath for something as trivial as mercy. The Space Wolves tore down through the mountain, an unstoppable force of nature, their blades and bolts gutting the defenders’ ranks like a butcher with a fresh carcass.

Nothing was left in their wake, the mountain city a work of art vandalised by thoughtless brutality and wanton savagery. Behind the warriors of Russ was only death, and before them was their next target for destruction: the Great Library of the Phoenix Crag, where Magnus the Red and Phosis T’kar’s Second Fellowship stood in ordered ranks.

Finally, the Space Wolves rampage was halted.

Ahriman led his warriors across a yawning chasm on a slender causeway that arched up towards a wide plaza before an enormous glittering pyramid of glass and silver. Many of its gilded panes had been shattered in the battle, but it was still a magnificent structure, like the pyramid temples of Prospero, albeit on a much smaller scale.

‘Russ’s warriors made a holy mess of this place,’ said Hathor Maat, surveying the damage done to Phoenix Crag. ‘I’m inclined to agree with you, Ahzek.’

‘About what?’

‘That maybe all this was a waste of lives,’ said Hathor Maat, surprising Ahriman with the sincerity he heard.

This far up the mountain, Ahriman could see its summit, a sagging silver peak that belched smoke instead of symbolic fire. Fires burned across the mountain’s heights, and from his vantage point on the causeway, he saw that the lower reaches fared no better.

Ahead of him, kneeling Astartes in the livery of the Second Fellowship defended the end of the causeway. The Astartes had their bolters levelled, and he saw the shimmer of kine shields distorting the air before them.

Lemuel Gaumon caught up with Ahriman. The man’s complexion was ruddy, and smears of blood coated his cheeks.

‘What’s going on?’ asked Lemuel, between greedy heaves of thin air. ‘Can you see the Wolf King? Are his warriors in trouble?’

‘Something like that,’ agreed Ahriman. ‘They are in trouble. I just do not yet know of whose making.’

Ahriman shared a glance with Uthizzar, but his fellow captain shrugged in bewilderment. That wasn’t good. If a telepath couldn’t fathom what was going on, then he had little chance.

‘Come on,’ he said, ‘let’s find out what’s at the heart of this.’

The warriors at the end of the causeway lowered their bolters at his approach, and Ahriman saw wide gouges torn in their shoulder guards. These were not the neat slices of shrike claws, they were the maim-wounds of chainswords.

The grandeur of the Great Library reared above him in a shimmering vitreous slope of polarised glass. A vast golden gateway led inside, and Ahriman took a moment to relish the thought of exploring its farthest depths to unlock this world’s secrets.

Bands of Thousand Sons warriors defended the ends of a number of other causeways, each one leading back to the bulk of the mountain. Magnus the Red stood at the edge of the plaza, his armour a blaze of gold and crimson. His curved sword was bared and his entire body crackled with aetheric fire. Behind Magnus stood his ancient scribe, and Ahriman was amazed that the old man had survived the fury of this fight.

Phosis T’kar ran over to Ahriman, his heqa staff alive with hissing lines of energy.

‘Ahzek, Hathor, you took your time,’ said Phosis T’kar.

‘We got here as soon as we could,’ snapped Hathor Maat.

‘You’re both here now, that’s what matters I suppose. Any sign of Khalophis?’

‘No,’ said Ahriman. ‘He is crystal-joined with his robots. It is hard to pinpoint his location when his consciousness is so dispersed.’

Phosis T’kar shrugged.

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘We’ll need to deal with this situation without him.’

‘T’kar,’ said Ahriman. ‘Tell me what is happening! We heard a psychic shout more powerful than anything I’ve ever known.’

‘It was Leman Russ,’ said Uthizzar. ‘Wasn’t it?’

Phosis T’kar nodded, turning and indicating that they should follow him.

‘Most probably,’ he spat. ‘Killed almost every Athanaean in my Fellowship, and most of the ones that aren’t dead are reduced to drooling lackwits.’

‘Dead?’ cried Uthizzar. These warriors were not of his Fellowship, but as Magister Templi of the Athanaeans, they were as much Uthizzar’s as they were Phosis T’kar’s.

‘Dead,’ snapped Phosis T’kar. ‘That’s what I said. Now stop wasting time. The primarch calls you to his side.’

Ahriman put aside his anger at Phosis T’kar’s brusqueness and followed him to where Magnus stood at the end of the widest causeway.

‘Where is the Wolf King?’ asked Lemuel.

Phosis T’kar looked down at the man with disdain.

‘Answer him,’ said Ahriman.

‘We don’t know for sure,’ said Phosis T’kar, ‘but he is on his way, that we do know.’

Magnus turned at their approach, and Ahriman felt the force of the primarch’s anger. His flesh seethed with life, pulsing red just beneath the skin, and his eye was a similarly belligerent hue. Magnus’s stature had always been one of variable proportions, but his rage had made him huge.

Ahriman felt Lemuel’s fear, but was surprised not to feel any from Mahavastu Kallimakus before realising that the man’s will was suppressed by a mental connection to the primarch.

‘Who would have thought it would come to this?’ said Magnus, and Ahriman put thoughts of the primarch’s scribe from his mind.

‘Come to what?’ asked Ahriman. ‘What is going on?’

‘That,’ said Phosis T’kar, pointing down the length of the causeway.

A wedge of Space Wolves massed at the end of the causeway, led by a warrior in a leather mask whose eyes were chips of cold, merciless flint. Their blades were bared, and a pack of slavering wolves hauled on thick chains, desperate to rend and tear.

‘Amlodhi Skarssen?’ said Ahriman. ‘I don’t understand. Are they attacking us? Why?’

‘No time to explain,’ said Phosis T’kar. ‘Here they come!’

The charge of the Space Wolves was a thing of great and terrible beauty.

They advanced in a great wave of clashing armoured plates, beating shields and waxed beards. They did not run, but came on in a loping jog, their feral grins, exposed fangs and lack of haste speaking of brutal confidence in their abilities.

These warriors didn’t need speed to break through their enemies.

Their skill at arms would be enough.

Ahriman’s horror mounted with every stride the Space Wolves took towards the Thousand Sons. How had these warriors, so recently their allies, become their enemies? The chains holding the snarling wolves were let slip and the monstrous beasts sprinted along the causeway.

Phosis T’kar took up position in the centre of the Thousand Sons line. His fellow warriors of the Raptora cult knelt to either side of him.

‘Kine shields,’ ordered Phosis T’kar, extending his hands before him. The air before them hazed as the force shields rippled to life.

‘Give those wolves something to think about,’ said Hathor Maat, as his Pavoni conjured writhing electrical storms in the path of the bounding wolves. Hastar took up position beside Hathor Maat, his gauntlets crackling with potent lightning.

‘There is to be no killing, my sons,’ said Magnus. ‘We will have no blood on our hands from a fight that is not of our making.’

The crackling webs of lightning paled as Hathor Maat diminished their power, though Ahriman felt his reluctance.

‘My lord?’ begged Ahriman. ‘Why is this happening?’

‘I secured the Great Library with the Scarab Occult,’ said Magnus, ‘but Skarssen’s Great Company arrived right on our heels. They sought to destroy the library. I stopped them.’

Ahriman had the sickening feeling of events spiralling beyond control. Pride, ego and the primal urge for war had collided, and such blinding drives almost always had to run their devastating course before they could be halted.

The charge of the Space Wolves was an unstoppable, elemental power.

The Thousand Sons were an implacable and immovable bulwark.

What force in the galaxy could yoke these unleashed forces?

The bounding wolves were the first to feel the fury of the Thousand Sons. They bounded into the flickering web of lightning and their fur instantly caught alight. Howls of agony echoed from the mountainside as fur was seared from their backs. The wolves snapped and rolled in their frenzy to douse the flames. Two fell from the causeway, fiery comets streaking to their deaths far below. Others fled, while a hardy few pushed onwards.

None survived to reach the Thousand Sons.

The Space Wolves jogged through the wall of aetheric fire, their armour hissing and blackening, but keeping them safe from harm. Wolf-painted shields locked together, and swords the colour of ice slid between them. The cries of the beasts had died, replaced with a furious, ululating howl torn from the throats of Amlodhi Skarssen’s warriors.

Ten metres separated the two forces.

‘Push them back!’ ordered Magnus.

Phosis T’kar nodded, and the warriors of the Second Fellowship marched onto the causeway, kine shields matched against physical ones.

‘We have to stop this!’ cried Ahriman. ‘This is madness.’

Magnus turned his gaze upon him, and his primarch’s towering fury coalesced around him, a crushing rage as primal as anything felt by a Space Wolf.

‘We did not start this fight, Ahzek,’ said Magnus, ‘but if need be we will finish it.’

‘Please, my lord!’ begged Ahriman. ‘If we take arms against the Wolf King’s warriors, he will never forgive us.’

‘I do not need his forgiveness,’ snapped Magnus, ‘but I will have his damned respect!’

‘This is not the way to get it, my lord. We both know it. The Wolf King never forgets and never forgives. Kill even one of his warriors and he will forever hold you accountable.’

‘It is too late, Ahzek,’ said Magnus, his voice haunted by some nameless fear. ‘It has already begun.’

The shields of the Thousand Sons clashed with those of Amlodhi Skarssen’s Space Wolves with a discordant squealing, scraping sound of invisible force meeting ice-forged steel. Space Wolves and Thousand Sons bent their backs to push one another back, a battle of strength against will.

No guns were drawn, as though both forces realised that this struggle needed to be settled with each warrior looking his foe squarely in the eye. They locked together, unmoving and as rigid as carved Astartes in a triumphal battle fresco, but it was a deadlock that couldn’t last.

Slowly, metre by metre, the Thousand Sons were being forced back.

‘Hathor Maat!’ ordered Magnus. ‘Take them down!’

The captain of the Third Fellowship hammered a fist into his chest and directed his ferocious will to aiding his battle-brothers. Hastar stood next to him as his fellow warriors of the Pavoni unleashed the full force of their bio-manipulation.

Unseen currents of aetheric energy sliced into the Space Wolves, blocking neural transmitters, redirecting electrical impulses in the brain and rapidly deoxygenating the blood flowing from their lungs. The effect was instantaneous.

The Space Wolves’ push faltered as their bodies rebelled. Limbs spasmed, heart muscles fibrillated and warriors lost all physical autonomy, jerking like the maddened dolls of a demented puppeteer. Ahriman watched as Amlodhi Skarssen dropped to one knee, his shield falling from nerveless fingers as his body refused to answer his demands.

The Wolf Lord’s teeth gnashed together, bloody foam spilling from the mouthpiece of his mask. Space Wolves thrashed in bone-cracking agony as their nervous systems were flooded with conflicting neural impulses. Ahriman despaired of the relish Hathor Maat took in this wanton display of power. The Pavoni had a reputation for venality and spite, but this was sickening.

‘Stop this!’ cried Ahriman, unable to contain his wrath. He ran forward and gripped Hathor Maat’s arm, twisting him around to face him. ‘Enough! You are killing them!’

Ahriman sent a blast of white noise into Hathor Maat’s aura, and the captain of the Third Fellowship flinched.

‘What are you doing?’ demanded Hathor Maat.

‘Stopping this,’ said Ahriman. ‘Release them.’

Hathor Maat stared at him, and then glanced at Magnus. Ahriman leaned in and gripped him by the edge of his pauldrons.

‘Do it!’ shouted Ahriman. ‘Stop it now!’

‘It’s done,’ snapped Hathor Maat, pushing Ahriman away.

Ahriman turned back to the Space Wolves, letting out a shuddering breath as the energies of the Pavoni diminished. The grey-armoured warriors lay on the causeway, their charge broken, their impetus lost. Amlodhi Skarssen struggled to his feet, battling against rogue impulses tearing through his body. Skarssen’s eyes were filled with blood, and his entire body shook with the effort of standing before his enemies.

‘I... Know... You,’ hissed Skarssen, fighting for every word. ‘All... Of... You.’

‘I told you to stop this!’ cried Ahriman, rounding on Hathor Maat.

‘And so I did,’ protested Hathor Maat. ‘I swear.’

Ahriman felt a ferocious surge of power beside him and saw Hastar shaking as hard as Amlodhi Skarssen. Ahriman reached into his aura and felt a hot pulse of terror mixed with aberrant energies.

With a sickening sense of horrified recognition, he understood what was happening.

Hathor Maat saw it at the same time, and they barrelled into Hastar, knocking him to the ground as he began thrashing in the grip of a violent seizure.

‘Hold him down!’ shouted Ahriman, tearing at the pressure seals of Hastar’s gorget.

‘Please, no,’ begged Hathor Maat. ‘Hold on, Hastar! Fight it!’

Ahriman tore off the warrior’s helmet and threw it aside, looking down at something he had hoped and thought never to see again.

Hastar’s flesh seethed with ambition, writhing and twisting in unnatural ways, the meat and bone of his skull bulging with fluid growth. The warrior’s eyes were terrified, uncomprehending orbs filled with red light, like coals from a smouldering forge.

‘Help me,’ gasped Hastar.

‘Flesh change!’ shouted Ahriman.

He fought to hold Hastar’s body down, but the changes wracking his body were as apocalyptic as they were catastrophic. His armour buckled as the body beneath it expanded so furiously and violently that the breastplate cracked down its centre-line, the flesh beneath alive with change. Energised veins of electricity threaded his pallid flesh, sheened with glittering hoar-light sweating from the agonised warrior’s suddenly malleable flesh.

Hastar screamed, and Ahriman’s grip slackened as the horror of Ohrmuzd’s death surged from the locked room of his memory. Hastar threw them off, his expanding body swollen with grotesquely misshapen musculature, encrusted growths, mutant appendages and slithering ropes of wet matter.

With the gurgle of wet meat and the crack of malformed bones, Hastar’s body was suddenly upright, though any semblance of limbs was impossible to pick out in his erupting flesh. Swelling bulk and crackling energy patterns writhed across his flesh, and his screams turned to bubbling gibbers of maniacal laughter.

‘Kill it!’ shouted a voice, but Ahriman couldn’t tell whose.

‘No!’ he shouted, though he knew it was futile. ‘It’s still Hastar. He’s one of us!’

The Thousand Sons scattered from Hastar’s terrible new form, horrified and terrified in equal measure. This was their greatest fear returned to haunt them, a horror from their past long thought buried.

Unchained energies whipped from Hastar’s appendages, his torso and legs fused in a rippling trunk of glowing, protean flesh. Frills of half-formed membranes flapped in unseen winds, and a hateful laughter bubbled up from vestigial mouths that erupted all across his flesh. Hundreds of distended eyes, compound like an insect’s, slitted like a reptile’s or milky with multiple pupils boiled to life and popped with wet slurps every second. No part of the creature’s anatomy was fixed for more than a moment.

A dreadful, wracking sickness seized Ahriman, as though his innards were rebelling against their fixed shapes, his entire body trembling with desire for a new form.

‘No!’ cried Ahriman through gritted teeth. ‘Not again… I will not… succumb! I am Astartes, a loyal servant of the Supreme Master of Mankind. I will not fall.’

All around him, the Thousand Sons were on their knees or backs, fighting the virulent power of transformation as it spread from Hastar with the speed of the life-eater virus. Unless this power was dispelled, they would all fall prey to the spontaneous mutations that had once nearly ended their Legion.

‘I survived before,’ snarled Ahriman, clenching his fists. ‘I will survive again.’

Determination gave him strength, and he flexed his mind into the Enumerations, distancing himself from the pain and his trembling flesh. With every sphere he attained, his mastery of his corporeal form increased until he could open his eyes once more.

His every muscle ached, but he was still Ahzek Ahriman, of sound mind and body. He glanced over his shoulder, seeing the Space Wolves coming to their senses on the causeway. Either they were beyond the reach of these transformative energies or they were immune to its effects. The damage the Pavoni had wreaked upon their nervous systems was coming undone, and Amlodhi Skarssen took faltering steps towards the Thousand Sons, his axe unsheathed.

A surging wave of power erupted behind Ahriman and he rolled onto his side in time to see Magnus the Red step towards the hideously transformed Hastar. Unchecked energy had destroyed the warrior of the Pavoni, but it empowered Magnus. The creature Hastar had become reached out to Magnus, as though to embrace him, and the primarch opened his arms to receive him with forgiveness and mercy.

A thunderous bang sounded and Hastar’s body exploded as a single, explosive round detonated within his chest. Silence descended, and Ahriman distinctly heard the heavy tink of a monstrous brass casing striking the ground.

Ahriman followed the trajectory the shell had taken, tracing a smoking line back to a giant pistol gripped in the fist of a towering giant clad in grey ceramite and thick wolf pelts.

The Wolf King had come.

A faded poem, last read in a dusty archive in the Merican dustbowl, leapt unbidden to Ahriman’s mind. Supposedly transcribed from a commemorative monument, it marked the beginning of an ancient and awesomely destructive war:

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled;
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard ’round the world.

Surrounded by a pack of fur- and armour-clad warriors, bearing great axes and bloodied harpoon-like spears, Leman Russ approached the Great Library of Phoenix Crag. Though Ahriman had seen the Wolf King before, Leman Russ at war was an entirely different proposition to Leman Russ at peace. One was brutally fearsome and intimidating, and the other utterly terrifying, an avatar of destruction as monstrous as the bloodiest culture’s renditions of their gods of murder, war and death combined.

A living engine of destruction, Ahriman saw Russ clearly for what he was: pure force and will alloyed into a living weapon that could be aimed and loosed, but never called back.

The Wolf King reached the end of the causeway, and Ahriman saw Ohthere Wyrdmake at his side, the Rune Priest’s expression impossible to read. Together with his enormous wolves, Leman Russ marched towards the Thousand Sons. Ahriman expected the Wolf King to charge wildly towards them, to confirm every negative caricature his detractors painted, but he came slowly, with infinite patience and infinite fury.

His pack-warriors awaited his return, aching to do harm.

All Ahriman could hear was the footsteps of Russ as he marched across the causeway. His stride was sure and measured, his expression set in stone. His frost-shimmer blade leapt to his hand, a weapon to cleave mountains. Magnus went to meet him, his curved golden sword bound with the power of the sun: two war gods marching to battle, the souls of their Legions carried with them.

Ahriman wanted to say something, to halt this inexorable confrontation, but the sight of the two primarchs drawing together with murder in their hearts robbed him of speech.

Before either one could speak, a blistering sheet of light flashed into existence between them, a coruscating fire that shimmered with the light of the brightest star. Impossible images were thrown out by the light, faraway places and the bitter tang of incense, burned plastic and reeking generators that thrummed with power.

A hard bang of displaced air boomed from the mountainside, and the light was gone.

A broad-shouldered giant in battle armour of granite grey with skin of gleaming gold stood in its place.

‘The Urizen,’ whispered Ahriman.

‘This ends now,’ said the golden-skinned warrior.

He stood between Magnus and Russ like the arbiter of a fistfight. Ahriman’s previous impression of Lorgar was utterly dispelled as he looked upon the soulful features of the Word Bearers’ primarch. His eyes were kohl-rimmed and filled with infinite sadness, as though he bore the burden of a sorrowful secret that he could never, ever, share.

Lorgar’s armour was dark, the colour of stone that has lain beneath the ocean for aeons, its every perfectly-nuanced plate worked with cuneiform inscriptions taken from the ancient books of Colchis. One shoulder guard bore a heavy tome, its pages yellowed with age, fluttering in the disturbed air of his teleportation.

A cloak of deepest burgundy hung from his shoulders, and though he appeared unarmed, a primarch was never really without weapons.

Ahriman heard every word that passed between the three primarchs, each indelibly carved on his mind for all time. Their import would haunt him for the rest of his span.

‘Get out of the way, Lorgar,’ snarled Leman Russ, his veneer of apparent calm slipping for a moment. ‘This does not concern you.’

‘Two of my brothers about to draw each other’s blood?’ said Lorgar. ‘That concerns me.’

‘Get out of my way,’ repeated Russ, his fingers flexing on the hide-wound grip of his sword. ‘Or so help me–’

‘What? You will cut me down too?’

Russ hesitated, and Lorgar stepped towards him.

‘Please, brother, think of what you are doing,’ he said. ‘Think of all the bonds of love and friendship that will be lost if you continue down this path to bloodshed.’

‘The Cyclops has gone too far, Lorgar. He has spilled our blood and must pay.’

‘Blood spilled through misunderstanding,’ said Lorgar. ‘You must calm your fury, brother. Anger is no one’s friend when hard choices must be made. Let it cloud your mind and all you will have when it is gone are regrets. Remember Dulan?’

‘Aye,’ said Russ, and his thunderous expression mellowed. ‘The war with the Lion.’

‘You brawled with Jonson in the throne room of the fallen Tyrant, and yet now you are oath-sworn brothers-in-arms. This is no different.’

Magnus was saying nothing, and Ahriman held his breath. Two such mighty beings facing one another with their aggression simmering so close to the surface was the most dangerous thing he had ever seen.

‘Should we do something?’ hissed Phosis T’kar, looking to Ahriman for guidance.

‘Not if you want to live,’ said Ahriman.

Titanic energies were bound within the immortal flesh of these warriors, and the tension crackling between them was razor-taut. Ahriman could feel their awesome psychic presences pressing against the lid of his skull, but dared not open his senses.

‘You would stand with the Cyclops, Lorgar?’ said Russ. ‘A wielder of unclean magicks? Look at the corpse of that… thing over there, the one with my bullet in its heart. Look at that and tell me I’m wrong.’

‘An instability of gene-seed is no reason for two brothers to go to war,’ cautioned Lorgar.

‘That is more than just unstable gene-seed, it is sorcery. You know it as well as I. We all knew Magnus was mired in the black arts, but we turned a blind eye to it because he was our brother. Well, no more, Lorgar, no more. Every warrior of that Legion is tainted, wielders of spellcraft and necromancy.’

‘Necromancy?’ scoffed Magnus. ‘You know nothing.’

‘I know enough,’ spat Russ. ‘You have gone too far, Magnus. This is where it ends.’

Lorgar placed a golden hand upon his breastplate and said, ‘All the Legions wield such power, brother. Are your Rune Priests so different?’

Russ threw back his head and laughed, a booming roar of great mirth and riotous amusement.

‘You would compare the Sons of the Storm with these warlocks?’ he asked. ‘Our power is born in the thunder of Fenris and tempered in the heart of the world forge. It comes from the strength of the natural world and is shaped by the courage of our warrior souls. It is untainted by the corruption that befouls the Thousand Sons.’

Now it was Magnus’s turn to laugh.

‘If you believe that, then you are fool!’ he said.

‘Magnus! Enough!’ barked Lorgar. ‘This is not the time for such debate. Two of my dearest brothers are at each other’s throats, and it grieves me to know how this shall disappoint our father. Is this what he created us for? Is this why he scoured the heavens looking for us? So we could descend into petty bickering like mortals? We have greater destinies before us, and must be above such lesser concerns. We are our father’s avatars of conquest, fiery comets of righteousness set loose to illuminate the cosmos with his glory. We are his emissaries sent out into the galaxy to bear word of his coming. We must be bright, shining examples of all that is good and pure in the Imperium.’

Lorgar’s words reached out to all who heard them, the fundamental truth they contained like a soothing balm. Ahriman was ashamed they had allowed things to spin so violently out of control, seeing the true horror of this situation.

Brother against brother. Could there be anything worse?

The golden primarch seemed to shine with inner light, his skin radiant and beatific as he spoke. Hearts once raging were now calmed. The Space Wolves lowered their blades a fraction, and the Thousand Sons’ defensive posture relaxed in response.

‘I will not stand by and let him destroy this world,’ said Magnus, lowering his khopesh.

‘It is not yours to save,’ snapped Russ. ‘My Legion discovered this world. It is mine to do with as I see fit. Its people had a choice: join us and live, fight us and die. They chose to die.’

‘Not everything is so black and white, Russ,’ retorted Magnus. ‘If we destroy everything we encounter, what is the point of this crusade?’

‘The point is to win it. Once it is over, we will deal with what is left.’

Magnus shook his head, saying, ‘What is left will be in ruins.’

Leman Russ lowered the ice-limned blade of his sword, his killing fury stilled for now.

‘I can live with that,’ he said, and without another word, marched from the causeway.

When he reached its end, he turned to face Magnus once more.

‘This is not over,’ he promised. ‘Blood of Fenris is on your hands, and there will be a reckoning between us, Magnus. This I swear upon the blade of Mjalnar.’

The Wolf King slashed the blade across his palm, letting brilliant scarlet droplets of blood spill out onto the cracked ground. He threw back his head and howled, and his warriors added their voices to their master’s cry until it seemed the whole mountain was howling.

The mournful cry rose to its tallest spires and echoed in its deepest valleys, a lament for the dead and a grim warning of things to come.

Fourteen

Compliance

With the fall of Phoenix Crag, the war on Shrike was as good as over, though, as with any conquest of such scale, isolated pockets of fighters remained. The mountains were rife with hidden aeries that not even the divinations of the Corvidae could uncover, and it was certain more blood would be spilled before compliance became complete.

While the Ouranti Draks garrisoned the city, Khalophis led the Prospero Spireguard and Lacunan Lifewatch in the task of hunting down the rogue aeries. The maniples of crystal-joined robots of the Sixth proved invaluable in the work, climbing into the highest crags without fear, exhaustion or complaint. The warriors of the Sixth Fellowship employed their Tutelaries to channel the fire of the Pyrae into the heart of the mountains, burning out their enemies and setting the peaks ablaze.

Less than ten hours after the Victory Confirmation, Leman Russ led his warriors from Shrike. Russ’s flagship, the Hrafnkel, led the Space Wolf Expeditionary Fleet from the Ark Reach Cluster without fanfare or promises of brotherly camaraderie. Nothing more had been said of the confrontation before the Great Library, but the matter was far from settled. Magnus dismissed it as irrelevant, but those closest to him saw that the encounter had shaken him, as though it had confirmed some long-held fear.

Civilians were afforded the opportunity to descend to the surface, and an army of iterators from the 47th Expedition began the long process of inculcating the populace with the enlightened philosophies of the Imperium. The Word Bearers participated in this process with the zeal of missionaries, shipping whole swathes of the populace to vast re-education camps constructed in the long valleys by follow-on teams of Mechanicum Pioneers.

Over the course of the three months since the death of the Phoenix Court, the entire repository of the Great Library was copied via pict scanners or transcribed by thousands of quill-servitors under the supervision of Ankhu Anen. The primarch of the Thousand Sons devoured each text, digesting every morsel in the library faster than even the most advanced data-savant could process it.

Camille Shivani spent almost every waking minute in the library, poring over the histories of Heliosa and the earliest legends regarding the mythical birth rock of Terra. Immersed in the wealth of information, she studied the texts as any scholar might, but also freely indulged her talent for reading the imprints of past owners. Many of the histories were written by men with no connection to the events they described or by those who had won the wars they wrote about, and were thus of little value beyond subjective descriptions.

Tucked away in a neglected chamber near the top of the pyramid structure, however, Camille found a flaking, ochre-stained book that changed everything. Many of its pages were illegible thanks to moisture damage, but no sooner had she touched it than she knew she wouldn’t need to read the words to unlock its secrets.

This was history written by someone who had lived through it, an authentic account of an alien world as it passed through a turbulent period of change. In an instant, she knew the writer, a young man from the south by the name of Kaleb. She felt his hopes and dreams, his passions and his vices. Through his eyes, Camille lived a lifetime of joys and regrets, learning of his time, nearly two thousand years ago, when the tribal city-states of Heliosa had united under the belief in an ancient thunder god from their earliest days to defeat a marauding race from the stars.

Ankhu Anen was thrilled by Camille’s accounts of Kaleb’s time, and immediately assigned her an Astartes Zealator from the Athanaean cult to skim the thoughts from her mind and transcribe them via a scrivener harness. From that moment on, any book of unknown provenance was brought to Camille for authentication.

In contrast, Lemuel Gaumon was a stranger in the Great Library. His time belonged to Ahriman, who continued his intensive training in the proper use of his abilities and how to shield his presence from the void predators that swam the shallows of the Great Ocean.

Only once did Lemuel attempt to broach the subject of what had happened to Hastar upon the causeway before the Great Library. The dreadfully transformed body had been returned to the Photep and placed in stasis, but the shadow of his horrific death hung over the Thousand Sons like a guilty secret.

No sooner had he asked than he knew he had touched an exposed nerve.

‘He could not control his power,’ said Ahriman, with a haunted, reflexive glance towards the silver oakleaf cluster on his shoulder guard. Lemuel made a mental note to ask about that symbol in quieter times, for it was clear there was a link.

‘Could that, what did you call it, flesh change… happen to you?’ asked Lemuel, all too aware that he was treading on dangerous ground.

‘He promised it would never happen again, to any of us,’ said Ahriman, and Lemuel read the hurt betrayal in his aura, its nearness too raw and naked to conceal. Ahriman’s words spoke of the cold dread of prey that can sense the nearness of a stalking predator. To know that Astartes could feel such emotion shocked Lemuel.

Ahriman would be drawn no further, and nothing more was said on the matter as Lemuel’s teachings continued. He was taught how to free his body of light from his body of flesh, and fly the invisible currents and thermals of the aether. Such voyages were short, for his skill had not yet developed enough to allow him any great time apart from his flesh.

Between such instructional times, Lemuel was in his element, travelling from city to city in the company of a squad of Astartes from Ahriman’s First Fellowship to document the reconstruction of a world, first-hand. These warriors were all Philosophus, a rank so far above Lemuel’s provisional one of Neophyte that it made him dizzy to think a man could master the mysteries so completely.

Mechanicum forge-vessels, city-sized monoliths bringing vast builder-machines and billions of tonnes of raw materials, dropped into the lower atmosphere like continents set adrift in the sky. The descent of such enormous cities of metal through the atmosphere set off a butterfly effect of clashing tempests that howled and raged across the world before settling into a continuous downpour that lasted two months.

Campfire scuttlebutt had it that the planet’s inhabitants believed their world was weeping for its conquered people, but no sooner were the iterators made aware of this morsel than it was spun afresh that the rains were the planet washing away the stains of the old days. In conjunction with this, anonymously sourced tales painting the kings of the Phoenix Court as corrupt despots, who exploited the people for their own selfish ends, were subtly fed into the rumour mill.

As the iterators did their work in the deep-valley re-education camps, public debates and potent examples of the Imperium’s majesty were unveiled to the people of Heliosa. Lemuel studied the techniques used by the Imperial speakers, noting the armsmen discreetly placed to drag off hecklers, the native turncoat planted within an audience to reinforce the speaker’s message with loud agreement, and the unseen vox-bee that flitted through the crowds to broadcast Imperial-friendly questions to which the answers were already prepared.

Each iterator had a team of investigators, whose task it was to unearth local beliefs and traditions, which were then embellished and finally supplanted with subtly altered versions that reinforced loyalty to the Imperium. The work of the Thousand Sons in the Great Library proved to be an enormous help with this.

Magnus’s Legion hardly strayed from the library, but the Word Bearers worked closely with the iterators, providing security for the camps and reinforcing the teachings with their own brand of loyalty. Lemuel found this element of compliance the most distasteful, seeing the indigenous culture of a world gradually overwhelmed by the Imperium’s doctrines like a cuckoo invading a nest. The Word Bearers version of the Imperial Truth was particularly hardline, and Lemuel soon grew weary of the hectoring rhetoric that smelled more of indoctrination than it did of education. It was rumoured that the Emperor had chastised Lorgar’s Legion in the past for such zeal, but even if that were true, it seemed the lesson hadn’t stuck.

The Imperium was benign. It did bring hope in the form of Unity, but the Word Bearers’ argument seemed absurdly petulant, posited along the lines of a schoolyard bully’s argument.

‘We are right because we say we are right,’ it said. ‘Agree with us and we will be friends. Disagree with us and we will be enemies.’

That was no way to win the hearts and minds of a conquered people, but what other choice was there? It rankled that this new beginning had to be won with linguistic subterfuge and outright intimidation, but Lemuel was not naïve enough to believe that a populace who had fought so hard to resist the Imperium would be brought to compliance without such stratagems. It would shorten the process massively if the populace could be made to believe they were better off now than they were before.

What saddened Lemuel most was that it seemed to be working.

Lemuel was reminded of the ancient text Camille had shown him, the Shiji, a meticulous record of a grand historian that glorified the ruling emperor while vilifying the previous dynasty.

In his quieter, darker moments, Lemuel would often wonder if the Imperium was really as enlightened as it claimed.

Like Aghoru, an Imperial Commander was appointed to oversee the Ark Reach Cluster and the long years of reconstruction and integration that lay ahead. Where Aghoru received a civilian administrator, Heliosa required a firmer hand. Major General Hestor Navarre was a senior officer of the Ouranti Draks, a regiment of swarthy-skinned fighters exclusively recruited from the desiccated jungle regions of Sud Merica. A career soldier of Hy Brasil, Navarre had fought his way across a hundred battlefields alongside the Word Bearers, and his appointment was greeted with sage approval.

Unlike Aghoru, scores of regiments were dispersed throughout the conquered Ark Reach Cluster. Imperial administration burrowed its way into every level of society, replacing defunct planetary rulers with Imperial delegates and the infrastructure to allow them to function. Munitorum officials calculated each planet’s worth to the Imperium, while storytellers and mythmakers travelled system-wide extolling the glorious history of mankind.

Four months after the collapse of resistance, word came that the last text of the Phoenix Crag library had been copied into the archive stacks of the Photep. A day later, the 28th Expeditionary Fleet broke orbit, and Magnus the Red gave the order to make best speed for an isolated shoal of spatial debris in the galactic east of the Ark Reach.

The various shipmasters of the 28th Expedition queried the coordinates, as they were far from the calculated system jump point, but Magnus’s order was confirmed. This region of space would allow their vessels a calmer entry to the Great Ocean, and only when the fleet had reached this newly declared jump point did Magnus reveal their ultimate destination.

The 28th Expedition had been summoned to the Ullanor system, and excitement spread through the fleet at the prospect of joining the war against the greenskin. More thrilling was the prospect of joining forces with the Emperor himself, who fought in the forefront of the campaign, smiting the savage foe alongside Horus Lupercal.

Hopes of glory to be earned and battles to be fought were dashed, only to be replaced by awe, as it became known that the campaign was already over. The war against the greenskins of Ullanor had been projected to last years, decades even.

The Emperor’s summons was not in the name of war, but of victory.

The Thousand Sons were to stand with many of their brother Legions in a Great Triumph honouring the Emperor’s victory, a spectacle the likes of which the galaxy would never see again. Under Magnus’s expert direction, the fleet Navigators plotted a razor’s course for the Ullanor system.

The Expedition Fleet of the Word Bearers was deeply enmeshed in the integration of the worlds of the Ark Reach into the Imperium, and Lorgar would pull his warriors out and make for Ullanor when they were able.

Magnus and Lorgar said their goodbyes briefly, the mighty primarchs speaking words that only they could hear. But as Ahriman watched them part, he caught a flicker of Magnus’s aura, the faintest whisper of something indefinable, yet disquieting.

The last time he had seen it had been when Magnus and Russ had almost come to blows.

Fifteen

Triumph
The Death Lord
Old friends

Ullanor was a world transformed. In the hands of the greenskin it had been reduced to a rough world of reeking lairs and filth-choked encampments. Astartes war had cleansed its surface with scarifying fury that swept all before it. Yet for all its ferocity, it could not compare with the industry of the Mechanicum.

Four Labour Fleets of geoformers went to work on the rugged hinterlands that had housed the feral warlord of the savages, levelling the world’s largest continent as a stage befitting the Master of Mankind. Millions of servitors, automatons and penal battalions went to work on its construction, reducing mountains to rubble and using the debris of their grinding down to fill the lightless valleys and even out the undulant wastelands where the greenskin had lit his revel fires and thrown up his ugly fortresses of mud and clay.

What should have taken centuries took months, and as squadron after squadron of Thunderhawks of the Thousand Sons broke through the acrid clouds of smog and dust hanging over Ullanor, it was a sight calculated to take a viewer’s breath away.

The ground below was a polished granite mirror, a terrazzo landmass that shone like the angelglass of the ancient court astronomer. Vitrified craters had been melted into the landscape and filled with promethium. Searing flames turned the sky orange and sent towering pillars of smoke into the heavens. A laser-straight road, half a kilometre wide and five hundred long cut through the heart of the craters, its extremities marked by trophy posts bearing the bleached, fleshless skulls of greenskin brutes.

Almost obscured by the smoke, hundreds of enormous vessels hung in low orbit, their engines straining against the pitiless attraction of gravity. The atmosphere clashed with chain lightning from the blistering electromagnetic fields each vessel generated. Flocks of strike cruisers, fighter aircraft and bombers flew formation overhead, the roar of their engines a wordless vocalisation of primal glory.

The vermilion starships of the Blood Angels jostled for position with the fabulously ornamented vessels of the Emperor’s Children. Phalanx, the mighty golden fortress of the Imperial Fists, dominated its segment of the sky, defying the laws of nature by hanging immobile above the earth.

The battle-scarred flagships of the Khan, Angron, Lorgar and Mortarion flew above the mirrored ground alongside their brother primarch’s ships, yet supreme amongst them was a gilded warship that held anchor above the one element of the continent not planed flat by the industrial meltas of the Mechanicum.

This was the Vengeful Spirit, command ship of Horus Lupercal, second only to Phalanx in its savage power of destruction. Entire worlds had died by its lethal arsenal, and Horus Lupercal had shown no restraint in unleashing its full fury. Fourteen Legions had answered the Emperor’s summons, a hundred thousand of the greatest warriors in all human history, and nine of the primarchs were in attendance, the rest too scattered by the demands of the Crusade to reach Ullanor in time.

Eight million soldiers of the Imperial Army had come, and a dizzying plethora of banners, battle flags, trophy standards and icon poles were rammed into the ground in the Centre of each armed camp. They stood proud alongside thousands of armoured vehicles and hundreds of Titans of the Legio Titanicus. Towering above the mortal soldiers, the treads of the mighty battle engines were like a city of steel on the march.

The Thousand Sons were amongst the last Legion forces to make planetfall. The entire continent sweltered like a blacksmith’s forge, the hammer of history ready to beat the soft metal of existence into its new form.

Only an event of galaxy-changing magnitude could warrant such a spectacle.

Only the greatest being in the galaxy could inspire such devotion.

This was to be a gathering like no other.

Ahriman fixed the primarch’s cloak to the pauldrons of his armour, hooking the bone catches on a clasp in the form of an upthrust talon. He settled it around Magnus’s shoulders, letting the flowing lines of iridescent feathers mould to his frame.

Magnus stood at the centre of the spiral within his Sanctum, the glass pyramid brought in pieces from the Photep and rebuilt upon the perfectly flat surface of Ullanor. The crystalline panels shimmered orange in the light of the giant fires outside, but Magnus’s mastery of the arts of the Pavoni kept the temperature within perfectly cool.

Under normal circumstances, Amon would attend upon the primarch, but on this momentous day, Magnus had requested Ahriman prepare him, fastening the plates of his armour to his muscled frame and ensuring he was not outshone by his brothers.

‘How do I look?’ asked Magnus.

‘You will certainly attract attention,’ said Ahriman, stepping back from his primarch.

‘And why should I not attract attention?’ countered Magnus, throwing out his arms in an operatic gesture. ‘Am I not worthy of it? Fulgrim and his warriors may quest for perfection, but I embody it.’

The primarch was clad in all his finery, the gold of his armour shimmering bright in the flickering torchlight. His horned breastplate was thrusting and magnificent, his helmet barely able to contain his slicked crimson hair, which was bound in three long scalp-locks. He bore twin blades sheathed across his back and carried a heqa staff of gold and emerald, his chained grimoire partially concealed in a long kilt of leather and mail.

‘It’s not the sort of attention I think you want,’ said Ahriman. ‘I have seen the way the other Legions look at us.’

He hesitated before speaking again, giving voice to the fear that had plagued him in the two months since departing the Ark Reach Cluster, ‘Like they did when the flesh change was still rife.’

Magnus turned his gaze upon him, the emerald green of his eye matching the gemstones on his heqa staff.

‘The Symbol of Thothmes holds within my Sanctum, so none may hear your words, but make no mention of the flesh change beyond these walls,’ warned Magnus. ‘That curse is behind us. When the Emperor brought you all to Prospero I ended the degradation of the gene-seed and restored biological harmony to the Thousand Sons.’

Magnus reached down and placed a hand on Ahriman’s shoulder. ‘Too late for your brother, I know, but soon enough to save the Legion.’

‘I know, but after seeing what happened to Hastar...’

‘An aberrant mutation, a one in a billion fluke,’ promised Magnus. ‘Trust me, my son, that can never happen again.’

Ahriman looked up into Magnus’s eye, seeing the power that lay in his heart.

‘I do trust you, my lord,’ he said at last.

‘Good. Then we will speak no more of this,’ said Magnus with finality.

With Magnus at their centre, the Sekhmet marched across the mirror-smooth surface of the continent towards the one feature that stood proud of the landscape. The mountain had once served as the greenskin warlord’s lair, but it had been erased from the world, its flattened base a steel-skinned dais for the Emperor and his honoured sons.

Magnus would take his place alongside his gene-sire with his brothers: Dorn, the Khan, Angron, Sanguinius, Horus, Fulgrim, Mortarion and Lorgar. The warriors of the Thousand Sons had spent the entire voyage from the Ark Reach Cluster preparing for this moment, for none wished to be found wanting in the eyes of his brothers.

Ahriman had picked only the best and most learned of his Fellowship to accompany Magnus to the dais, and each had been honoured with a cartouche secured to his armour by a wax scarab. Auramagma had joked that they should all put out an eye to mark themselves as the chosen of Magnus. No one laughed, but that was Auramagma’s way, to carry the joke too far into tastelessness.

At the head of the thirty-six warriors of the Sekhmet were the Captains of Fellowship, the senior warriors of the Pesedjet who bore the title of Magister Templi. Only Phael Toron of the Seventh was absent. His Fellowship remained on Prospero to protect its people and train the students who hoped, one day, to be counted amongst the Thousand Sons.

The flickering embers of the Tutelaries frolicked in the air above them, basking in the presence of so much raw aetheric energy. Some of that was the invisible aftertaste of the xenos species that had once called this rock home. It was as crude and powerful as a flamethrower, but its potency was equally short-lived. Aaetpio followed in Magnus’s aetheric slipstream, while Utipa prowled the edge of their group with Paeoc and Ephra, each one a shifting, formless mass of light and wings and eyes.

The air of Ullanor still bore traces of the greenskin, despite the seared reek of the promethium basins and the lingering aroma of gun oil and Astartes bio-chemicals. Exhaust fumes hung in low-lying smog banks, and the burnt metal taste of Mechanicum machines was a sour reek of exotic oils and unguents.

Thousands of Astartes filled the plain as far as the eye could see, preparing for their triumphal march. Though this was perhaps the most heavily-armed planet in the Imperium, there was tension in the air, a volatile mixture of martial pride and superiority, common among gatherings of fighting men of different origins. Each group of warriors measured the others, deciding which was the strongest, the proudest and the most courageous.

Ahriman marched alongside Magnus, feeling the wariness of his brother warriors as they stared at his magnificent primarch.

‘I never thought to see so many Astartes gathered together,’ Ahriman said to Magnus.

‘Yes, it is impressive,’ agreed Magnus. ‘My father always knew the value of the symbolic gesture. They won’t forget this. They’ll carry tales of it to the far corners of the galaxy.’

‘But why now?’ asked Ahriman. ‘When the Crusade is in its final stages.’

A shadow crossed Magnus’s face, as though Ahriman’s question had strayed into a region he disliked.

‘Because this in an epochal moment for humanity,’ he said, ‘a time when great change is upon us. Such times require to be marked in the race memory of the species. Who among us will ever experience a moment like this again?’

Ahriman was forced to agree with that sentiment, but as they drew near to the first checkpoint in the perimeter around the Emperor’s dais, he realised that Magnus had neatly diverted his question.

A pair of Warlord Titans stood sentinel on the approaches to the sheared root of the mountain. Clad in gold and bearing the thunderbolt and lightning motif of the Emperor, the Titans had come from Terra to protect their lord and master. His mightiest praetorians, these titanic custodians were the perfect blend of technology and martial spirit.

‘Bigger than the one you have propped up outside the Pyrae temple,’ said Hathor Maat to Khalophis as they marched between the engines.

‘That they are,’ agreed Khalophis, missing or ignoring Maat’s mocking tone, ‘but war isn’t always won by the warrior with the biggest gun. Canis Vertex is a predator, and would take both these fine fellows with it before it went down. Size is all very well, but experience, that’s what counts, and Canis Vertex earned its fair share on Coriovallum.’

‘We all did,’ agreed Phosis T’kar sagely. ‘But when you talk about Canis Vertex, don’t you mean it was a predator.’

‘We’ll see,’ said Khalophis with a grin.

‘A Titan wouldn’t worry me,’ said Hathor Maat. ‘It’s just a machine, a big one, I’ll grant you, but without a princeps to command it, a Titan is simply a giant statue. For all their skill, the Mechanicum haven’t yet invented a machine that doesn’t need a human being to control it. I could agitate the water molecules in the princeps’s skull until his head exploded, boil the blood in his veins or send millions of volts through its carapace to electrocute the crew.’

‘I could bring it down easily enough,’ said Phosis T’kar playfully. ‘I did it once before, remember?’

‘Yes,’ said Uthizzar. ‘We all remember. You never tire of telling us how you saved the primarch from a Titan on Aghoru.’

‘Exactly’ said Phosis T’kar. ‘After all, the bigger they are–’

‘The bigger mess they make of you when they tread on you,’ finished Ahriman. ‘We are here to escort the primarch, not indulge your fantasies of how powerful you are.’

Beyond the Titans, hulking golden warriors in the armour of the Custodes protected every approach to the hub of the continent, giant warriors of equal aspect to the Astartes, with plates of brazen gold, inscribed with curling script, bedecked with fluttering oath papers secured with wax seals. Six of them manned the checkpoint, with a trio of Land Raiders growling behind them and a pair of Dreadnoughts to further augment their strength.

‘First Titans, now this. You think they expect trouble?’ asked Hathor Maat with a smile.

‘Always,’ said Ahriman.

‘Surely these security measures are ridiculously overblown and unnecessary? After all, who would dare attempt something hostile on a world crowded with Astartes and the best war machines the Imperium has at its disposal?’

‘Have you ever met a Custodes?’ asked Phosis T’kar.

‘No, what has that got to do with anything?’

‘If you had, you would know how stupid that question is.’

‘I met one on Terra before setting out for Prospero,’ said Ahriman, ‘a young, ramrod-straight warrior named Valdor. I believe the primarch knows him.’

Magnus grunted, telling them everything they needed to know about that acquaintance.

‘What was he like?’ asked Uthizzar.

‘Can’t you tell?’ asked Hathor Maat. ‘What’s the matter, don’t you read minds anymore?’

Uthizzar ignored the Captain of the Third Fellowship, and Ahriman smiled as Magnus turned to face his officers with a mock-serious expression.

‘Enough,’ said Magnus. ‘Captains or not, you will not be permitted to pass onwards if the Custodes decide you are not of a serious enough mindset. Their word is absolute, and not even a primarch can go against it in matters of the Emperor’s safety.’

‘Come on, Ahzek,’ pressed Hathor Maat. ‘What was this Valdor like?’

Magnus nodded indulgently, and Ahriman said, ‘He was a grimly efficient praetorian, if rather humourless. I suppose when you are part of the cadre responsible for the safety of the greatest being in the galaxy, there is little room for levity.’

‘Little?’ said a voice appearing at Ahriman’s side. ‘There is no room whatsoever.’

How the Custodes had come upon Magnus and the Sekhmet, Ahriman could not fathom.

He had not sensed their nearness or caught the faintest tremor in the aether of their presence. One minute they had been approaching the checkpoint, the next, their Tutelaries had vanished in the blink of an eye and two Custodes warriors were alongside them.

They were tall, as tall as the Astartes, though their armour was nowhere near as bulky. It had a ceremonial look to it, but Ahriman knew that was a misleading interpretation, one calculated to give the warriors encased within the advantage. So like Astartes and yet so different, like distantly-related kin gone their separate ways and evolved into new forms.

They held long Guardian Spears, lethal polearms that could cut through sheet steel with ease and could sever the ogre-like body of an armoured greenskin in two with a single blow. Red horsehair plumes spilled from their tapered helmets like waterfalls of blood, and the green glow of their helmet lenses was eerily similar to that of the Thousand Sons. Gilded carvings snaked from the seals of their neck plates, curling around their shoulders and down the inner facings of their breastplates.

‘Halt and be recognised,’ said the warrior who had spoken before, and Ahriman focussed all his attention on him. He could sense nothing, not even an echo of his presence in the world, as though he were as insubstantial as a hologram. Ahriman’s throat felt dry, and an unpleasantly bitter aftertaste flooded his mouth.

Untouchables, said a voice in his mind with a familiar flavour, powerful, but not powerful enough.

Ahriman could not see them, but with the knowledge that there were psychic nulls nearby, he found he could identify them by their very lack of presence.

‘Six of them,’ he said over his armour’s suit-vox.

‘Seven,’ corrected Magnus. ‘One is more subtle than her compatriots in veiling her presence.’

The Custodes crossed their spears, barring their path to the Emperor’s dais, and Ahriman’s anger flared at the insult implied by the presence of the untouchables. Magnus stood before the Custodes, his physique imposing and threatening, his crested helmet a larger version of those belonging to the warriors before him. For an instant, it looked as though Magnus was one of them, a towering golden-armoured warrior lord.

Magnus leaned down, his eye tracing a path over the inscriptions that flowed across the burnished golden plates of the leftmost warrior.

‘Amon Tauromachian Xiagaze Lepron Cairn Hedrossa,’ said Magnus. ‘I would go on, but the rest of your name is hidden within the curve of your armour. And Haedo Venator Urdesh Zhujiajiao Fane Marovia Trajen. Fine names indeed, displaying grand heritage and exceptional lineage, but then I would expect nothing less of Constantin’s warriors. How is the old man these days?’

‘Lord Valdor abides,’ said the warrior that Magnus had identified as Amon.

‘I expect he does,’ said Magnus, reaching out to touch the beginning of the spiralling script on Amon’s shoulder. ‘You have an old name, Amon, a proud name. It is a name borne by my equerry, a student of poetry and the hidden nature of things. If the name maketh the man, does that mean you are a similar student of the unknown?’

‘Defending the Emperor requires a talent for discerning hidden truths,’ replied Amon carefully. ‘I pride myself on having a certain skill in that regard.’

‘Yes, I see you do. You are an exceptional man, Amon, and I believe you will go far within your order. I see great things ahead for you,’ said Magnus, before adding, ‘and for you also, Haedo.’

Amon inclined his head at the primarch’s comment, and the two Guardian Spears were lifted aside, allowing Magnus and the Sekhmet to pass.

‘That’s it?’ asked Ahriman as the Custodes lowered their weapons.

‘The Unified Biometric Verification System has identified and logged your genetic markers within its network,’ said Haedo. ‘You are who you claim to be.’

Magnus laughed, and asked, ‘Is anyone ever who they claim to be?’

The Custodes did not answer, but stood aside to allow them past.

The podium was in sight, but one last intercession was to come before Magnus could take his place at the Emperor’s side. Even once through all the checkpoints, Ahriman could feel the shadowing presence of the untouchables on the periphery of vision and sense.

From the primarch’s comment, he surmised that the watchmen were in fact the Sisters of Silence, the mute sisterhood of untouchables and the guardians of the Black Ships. How typical to see them and the Custodes working hand in hand.

This was the inner circle, metaphorically and literally, for here were gathered the mightiest beings in the cosmos, the brightest sons of the most incandescent sire. Here was where the primarchs gathered before ascending the platform to stand at their father’s side.

Ahriman could see the winged, angelic form of Sanguinius, the lusty red of his armour contrasting with pale feathers of his wings. Hung with loops of silver and pearl like glistening tears, the beatific primarch stood with the Khan, a swarthy warrior shawled in furs and lacquered leather plate, with a winged back-banner that echoed those of the Lord of Angels.

The golden-skinned Urizen held intense discourse with Dorn of the Fists and Angron, while the Phoenician and his cadre of lord commanders preened alongside Horus Lupercal and his lieutenants. Fulgrim’s white hair shone like a beacon, his perfect features gloriously sculpted. Little wonder the members of his Legion prided themselves on their aesthetic with such an example to follow.

Magnus swept forward to join his brothers, but before he reached them, a warrior in dusty white armour edged in pale green stepped to meet him. His shoulder guard bore the image of a skull in the centre of a spiked halo, marking him as Death Guard. His posture was bellicose, and Ahriman read his hostility in an instant.

‘I am Ignatius Grulgor, Second Company Captain of the Death Guard,’ said the warrior, and Ahriman heard the judgemental tone and the arrogant sneer that spoke of a man without humility.

‘I do not care who you are, warrior,’ said Magnus calmly, though the undercurrent of threat was unmistakable. ‘You are in my way.’

Like a living statue, the Astartes stood his ground before Magnus. Two mighty warriors in brass, gold and ash-coloured Terminator armour appeared on either side of Grulgor, long, ebony-hafted scythes held in spiked cestus gauntlets. The harvest blades were dark and heavy with the weight of slaughter they had accumulated. A name leapt to Ahriman’s mind:

Manreapers.

‘Ah, the nameless Deathshroud,’ said Magnus, looking around him. ‘Tell your master to show himself. I know he is here, within forty-nine paces, if memory serves.’

Ahriman blinked as a dark outline seemed to flow from a patch of shadow at the foot of one of the Custodes Titans, a tall, gaunt figure in armour of pallid white, bare iron and brass, shrouded in a mantle of stormcloud grey. A bronze rebreather collar obscured the lower part of his hairless skull, and feathers of rancid air gusted from it at regular intervals. The giant figure breathed deeply of these vapours.

‘Mortarion,’ hissed Hathor Maat.

His sunken cheeks were those of a consumptive, and the deep-set amber eyes those of a man who has seen horrors without number. Glass vials and philtres strung together on Mortarion’s breastplate clinked musically as he walked, his strides sepulchral, punctuated by the rap of his enormous scythe’s iron base on the polished ground. A long, drum-barrelled pistol hung at his side, and Ahriman recognised the merciless form of the Lantern, the Shenlongi-designed pistol that was said to unleash the fire of a star in every blast.

‘Magnus,’ said the primarch of the Death Guard by way of a greeting. ‘I wondered if you would show your face.’

Mortarion’s words were brazen. These were brothers, warrior gods crafted by the Emperor to conquer the galaxy in his name. Like all brothers, they squabbled and vied to attract the attention of their father, but this… this was distilled anger.

‘Brother,’ said Magnus, ignoring Mortarion’s words. ‘A great day is it not? Nine sons of the Emperor gathered together on one world, such a thing has not happened since…’

‘I know well when it was, Magnus,’ said Mortarion, his voice robust and resolute in contrast to his pallid features. ‘And the Emperor forbade us to speak of it again. Do you disobey that command?’

‘I disobey nothing, brother,’ said Magnus, keeping his tone light, ‘but even you must recognise the symbolism of our number. Three times three, the pesedjet of ancient gods, the Occidental orders of angels and the nine cosmic spheres of the forgotten ages.’

‘There you go again with talk of angels and gods,’ sneered Mortarion.

Magnus grinned and moved to take Mortarion’s hand, but the Lord of the Death Guard pulled away from him.

‘Come on, Mortarion,’ said Magnus, ‘you are not immune from the music of the spheres. Even you know that numbers are not cast blindly into the world, they come together in orderly balanced systems, like the formation of crystals or musical chords, in accordance with the laws of harmony. Why else would you insist on keeping these bodyguards within seven times seven paces of you?’

Mortarion shook his head and said, ‘Truly you are as lost in your mysteries as the Wolf King says.’

‘You have spoken with Russ?’

‘Many times,’ promised Mortarion. ‘He has been quite vocal since departing the Ark Reach Cluster. We know all about what you and your warriors have been doing.’

‘What is it you think you know?’

‘You have crossed a line, Magnus,’ hissed Mortarion. ‘You hold a snake by the tail and bargain with powers beyond your understanding.’

‘No power is beyond my understanding,’ countered Magnus. ‘You would do well to remember that.’

Mortarion laughed, the sound like mountains collapsing.

‘I knew a being like you once before,’ he said, ‘so sure in his powers, so convinced of his superiority that he could not see his doom until it was upon him. Like you, he wielded dark powers. Our father made him pay with his life for such evil. Have a care you do not suffer the same fate.’

‘Dark powers?’ said Magnus with a shake of the head. ‘Power is simply power, it is neither good nor evil. It simply is.’

He pointed to the pistol at Mortarion’s side.

‘Is that weapon evil?’ he asked. ‘Is that great reaper of yours? They are weapons, nothing more and nothing less. It is the use men put such things to that makes them evil. In your hands, the Lantern is a force for good. In an evil man’s hands it is something else entirely.’

‘Give a man a gun and he will want to fire it,’ said Mortarion.

‘So now you are going to give me a lesson in causality and predestination?’ snapped Magnus. ‘I am sure Ahriman and the Corvidae would welcome your input on the subject. Come to Prospero and you can instruct my warriors.’

Mortarion shook his head.

‘No wonder Russ petitioned the Emperor to have you censured,’ he said.

‘Russ is a superstitious savage,’ said Magnus dismissively, but not before Ahriman saw the shock at the Wolf King’s action. ‘He speaks out of turn about things he does not understand. The Emperor knows I am his most loyal son.’

‘We shall see,’ promised Mortarion.

The Death Lord turned away and marched towards the Emperor’s dais as a thunderous braying erupted from the war-horns of every Titan on Ullanor.

‘Now what do you suppose he meant by that?’ asked Phosis T’kar.

The Sekhmet fulfilled their duty of seeing their primarch to the Emperor’s sheared mountain podium, marching in procession alongside the honour guards of the nine primarchs who had come to Ullanor. To move in such elevated circles was a notion Ahriman found himself hard-pressed to comprehend.

The primarchs took their place upon the steel-sheathed dais and their honour guards were dismissed. The chance to parade before the Emperor was a once in a lifetime opportunity for most of the warriors.

To know a primarch was an honour, but to parade before nine of them in the presence of the Emperor was the stuff of dreams. Ahriman would march with his head held high before demi-gods made flesh, the apotheosis of humanity and genetic engineering, wrought from the bones of ancient science.

That twenty such beings could have been created was nothing short of miraculous, and as he surveyed the noble countenances around him, Ahriman suddenly felt very small, the tiniest cog in an ever-expanding machine. The notion of the titanic forces at work struck a powerful chord within him, and he felt the power of the Great Ocean swell in his breast. He saw his metaphor take shape in his mind’s eye, a magnificent, planet-sized machine of wondrous artifice working seamlessly in balance with its every cog, gear and piston. Those mighty pistons thundered, powering the greatest industry and causing the worlds around it to swell with new life and new beginnings.

In the midst of the machine he saw a piston stamped with a snarling wolf’s head, its amber eyes glinting like gems. It fired up and down in a bank of similarly embossed piston heads, each with an emblematic design stamped upon it, a golden eye, a white eagle, a set of fanged jaws, a crowned skull.

Even as the image formed in his mind, he saw that the wolf’s head piston was fractionally out of sync with the other pistons in the machine, working to a different beat, and gradually shifting its direction until it was completely in opposition to its fellows. The machine vibrated in protest, its harmonic balance upset by the rogue piston, and the squeal of metal grinding metal grew in volume.

Ahriman stumbled and let out a gasp of horror as he saw that the machine would soon tear itself apart. To see such an industrious machine destroyed and reduced to little more than wreckage by a previously unseen defect in its design was truly tragic.

He felt a hand on his arm and looked into the face of a startlingly handsome warrior in the pearl-coloured plate of a Luna Wolf. The vision of the machine vanished from his mind, but the lingering sorrow of its imminent destruction creased Ahriman’s features with anguish.

‘Are you well, brother?’ asked the warrior with genuine concern.

‘I am,’ replied Ahriman, though he felt sick to his stomach.

‘He says he’s fine,’ said a massively shouldered brute behind the warrior. Taller than Ahriman, with a gleaming topknot crowning his skull, he radiated choler and the urge to continually prove himself. ‘Leave him be and let’s rejoin our companies. The march will begin soon.’

The warrior extended his hand, and Ahriman accepted the proffered grip.

‘You will have to excuse Ezekyle,’ said the warrior. ‘He forgets his manners sometimes, most of the time in fact. I am Hastur Sejanus, pleased to know you.’

‘Ahzek Ahriman,’ he said. ‘Sejanus? Ezekyle? You are Mournival.’

‘Guilty as charged,’ said Sejanus with a winning smile.

‘I said those Custodes didn’t know security worth a damn,’ said Phosis T’kar, pushing past Ahriman to pull Sejanus into a crushing embrace. ‘Damn, but it’s good to see you again, Hastur.’

Laughing, Sejanus pulled himself free of Phosis T’kar’s embrace and punched him on the shoulder as two more warriors in the livery of the Luna Wolves appeared at his side. ‘Good to see you too, brother. Nobody’s managed to kill you then?’

‘Not for lack of trying,’ said Phosis T’kar, standing back to regard the warriors before him. ‘Ezekyle Abaddon and Tarik Torgaddon, as I live and breathe, and Little Horus Aximand too. I still tell my brothers of the foes we faced together. Do you remember the battles in the Slaughterhouses of the Keylekid? Those damn dragons gave us a hard fight, and no mistake. There was one, remember Tarik? The one with the vivid blue hide that almost–’

Little Horus held up a hand to stall Phosis T’kar’s reminiscence.

‘Perhaps we can gather after the Triumphal March?’ he said, adding, ‘All of us. I would greatly like to meet your fellows and swap more outrageous tales of battle.’

Sejanus nodded.

‘Absolutely,’ he said, ‘for I have it on good authority that the Emperor has a great announcement to make. I, for one, do not want to miss it.’

‘Announcement?’ asked Ahriman as a shiver of premonition passed along his spine. ‘What sort of announcement?’

‘The kind we’ll hear when we hear it,’ growled Abaddon.

‘No one knows,’ said Sejanus with a diplomatic chuckle. ‘Horus Lupercal has not yet deigned to tell even his most trusted lieutenants.’

Sejanus looked back towards the podium with a grin.

‘But whatever it is,’ he said, ‘I suspect it will be of great import to us all.’

Sixteen

New order
Tuition
Fresh summons

Stars swam in the glass of the crystal pyramid, faint shimmers of light that winked from the past, the light already thousands or even millions of years old. To be able to look into the past so clearly had always fascinated Ahriman, the notion that what you were seeing in the present was an echo of the past.

The air within the Photep’s Sanctum was cool, a precisely modulated climate that owed nothing to machine control. The floor was a spiral of black and white crystal, each piece hand-picked from the Reflecting Caves beneath Tizca and shaped by Magnus’s own hand.

Starlight glinted on the reflective chips, and gleamed from the silver threads and blood-drop pendants hanging from Magnus’s feathered cloak. The primarch stood immobile as a statue beneath the apex of the pyramid, his arms folded across his chest and his head tilted back to allow him to look out into the immensity of space.

When Magnus descended to the surface of a world, his pavilion was a re-creation of this inner sanctum, but it could never hope to capture the rarefied atmosphere that filled this place.

‘Welcome, Ahriman,’ said Magnus without averting his gaze from the stars. ‘You are just in time to watch Mechanicum Borealis with me. Come, join me in the centre.’

Ahriman walked the spiral, following the black chips towards the centre, letting the walk cleanse him of his negative thoughts in readiness for his walk out along the white spiral. He studied Magnus as he walked.

Ever since the conclusion of the Great Triumph, the primarch had been withdrawn and sullen. Hastur Sejanus had been right about the nature of the Emperor’s announcement; it had radically changed the universe in which they operated. For close to two hundred years, the Emperor, beloved by all, had led the Great Crusade from the front, fighting in the vanguard of humanity’s second expansion to the edges of the galaxy.

Those days were over, for the Emperor had announced his withdrawal from the fighting, telling his faithful warriors that the time had come for him to relinquish control of the Crusade to another. The Astartes had wept to hear that their beloved master was leaving them, but as epochal as this separation was, it was more than matched by the Emperor’s next pronouncement.

Before the gathered warriors, the Emperor removed the golden laurels that had been his most iconic accoutrement and bestowed them upon his brightest son. No longer would the Emperor command the armies of the Imperium. That honour, now fell to Horus Lupercal: The Warmaster.

It was an old title, revived from dusty antiquity, yet it was a natural fit and perfectly encapsulated the unique qualities of the Luna Wolves primarch. From the millions of warriors gathered before the steel-sheened dais, adulation had mixed with sorrow, but Ahriman had felt the conflicting waves of powerful emotions as the other primarchs reacted to Horus’s ascension. Perhaps they felt it should have been them, or perhaps they raged at having to take orders from one of their own.

Either way, it made little difference. The decision had been made, and the Emperor was unequivocal in its necessity. Many warriors had expected to renew old acquaintances or swear new bonds of brotherhood on Ullanor, but with the Emperor’s pronouncements made, the gathering of Astartes broke up with almost unseemly haste.

The 28th Expedition had left Ullanor and made the two-month journey to Hexium Minora, a Mechanicum outpost world, to resupply. The bulk of the Thousand Sons had borne witness to the beginnings of the galactic new order, while some had been on detached duties elsewhere in the sector. With each passing day, more of Magnus’s sons joined their parent Legion to await tasking orders from the Crusade’s new master.

Sotekis led a mentor company back from supporting the World Eaters in the Golgothan Deeps, and word came through that the last battle formation to arrive, Kenaphia’s Thunder Bringers, had returned after fighting alongside the IV Legion of Perturabo. There were still elements of the Legion scattered throughout the galaxy, but the majority had found its way to Hexium Minora.

For six months, the Thousand Sons fleet suckled at the planet’s forges and materiel silos like newborns eager for the teat. Billions of rounds of ammunition, thousands of tonnes of food and water, uniforms, dried goods, pioneer supplies, armoured vehicles, power cells, fuel bladders and the myriad items an Expeditionary Fleet required in order to function were shipped from the surface in bulk lifters or via impossibly slender Tsiolkovsky towers.

With resupply almost complete, the Legion and its millions of supporting soldiers lay at anchor awaiting orders. The months had not been wasted; Army units conducted battle drills alongside the Astartes, both forces learning much of the other’s abilities and limitations.

Each Captain of Fellowship divided his time between battle training and exercises of mental discipline to refresh his powers and his connection to the aether, but the Legion was eager to be in the thick of things again. Nor were the remembrancers idle. Most spent their time honing prose for post-Crusade publication, all the while hoping to learn more of the glorious Triumph on Ullanor.

Others rendered sketches taken over the course of the conquest of Heliosa or during its transitional period en route to compliance, while the lucky few chosen as Neophytes by the Thousand Sons continued their training.

‘It’s beautiful, is it not?’ asked Magnus as Ahriman joined him.

‘It is, my lord,’ agreed Ahriman.

‘I can see so much when I look out from this sanctum, Ahzek, but there is so much more that can be learned. I know much, it is true, but I will know everything one day.’

Magnus smiled and shook his head, as though amused at his own conceit.

‘No need to hide your frown, my friend,’ he said. ‘I am not so arrogant as to have forgotten my studies of the plays of Aristophanes and the dialogues of Plato. “To know, is to know that you know nothing. That is the meaning of true knowledge”.’

‘I do not look so deeply into the heavens, my lord,’ said Ahriman, ‘But looking at the stars always gives me a sense of peace, knowing that there is an order to the galaxy. It gives me stability in times of change.’

‘You say that as though change is to be feared,’ said Magnus, at last looking down at him.

‘Change is sometimes necessary,’ said Ahriman with a disarming smile, ‘but I prefer order. It is more… predictable.’

Magnus chuckled. ‘Yes, I can see how that would be pleasant, Ahzek, but the perfect, ordered world is dead and stagnant. The real world is alive because it is full of change, disorder and decay. The old order must pass away so the new one may arise.’

‘Is that what happened on Ullanor?’ ventured Ahriman.

‘In a manner of speaking. No order, not even a god-given one, will last forever. After all, the grand principle of creation is that nothing and possibility come in and out of bond infinite times in a finite moment.’

Ahriman kept silent, unsure as to the primarch’s exact meaning.

Magnus folded his arms and sighed and said, ‘We are alone in the stars, Ahzek.’

‘My lord?’

‘The Emperor leaving the Crusade,’ said Magnus. ‘I heard him speak to Horus upon the reviewing stand. My brother desired to know why our father was leaving us, and do you know what he said?’

‘No, my lord,’ said Ahriman, though he understood the question was rhetorical.

‘He said that it was not because he wearied of the fighting, but because a greater destiny called him, one he claimed would ensure the legacy of our conquests will live on until the ending of the stars. Of course Horus wanted to know what that was, but our father did not tell him, which I saw cut him deeply. You see, Horus was the first of us to be reunited with our father after our… scattering. He fought at his side for nearly thirty years, father and only son. Such a bond is unique and not easily relinquished. Truth be told, it is a bond many of my brothers look upon with no small amount of jealousy.’

‘But not you?’

‘Me? No, I never lost contact with my father. We spoke many times before he ever set foot on Prospero. That is a bond that none of my brothers can claim. As our Legion departed Ullanor, I communed with my father and told him what I found on Aghoru, a hidden labyrinth of tunnels that pierce the immaterium and link all places and all times.’

Magnus returned his eye to the stars, and Ahriman kept silent, sensing that to intrude on Magnus’s introspection would be unwise, though the ramifications of his discoveries on Aghoru were staggering.

‘Do you know what he said, Ahzek? Do you know how he greeted this momentous discovery, this key to every corner of the galaxy?’

‘No, my lord.’

‘He knew,’ said Magnus simply. ‘He already knew of it. I should not have been surprised, I suppose. If any being in the galaxy could know such a thing, it would be my father. Now that he knew I had also discovered this lattice, he told me he had discovered it decades ago and had resolved to become its master. This is why he returns to Terra.’

‘That is great news, surely?’

‘Absolutely,’ said Magnus without enthusiasm. ‘I immediately volunteered my services, of course, but my offer of assistance was declined.’

‘Declined? Why?’

Magnus’s shoulders dropped a fraction as he said, ‘Apparently my father’s researches are at too delicate a stage to allow another soul to look upon them.’

‘That surprises me,’ said Ahriman. ‘After all, there is no greater student of the esoteric than Magnus the Red. Did the Emperor say why he declined your help?’

‘He not only declines my assistance, he warns me to delve no further into my studies. He assures me that he has a vital role for me in the final realisation of his grand designs, but he would tell me no more.’

‘Did you ask what Leman Russ had told him?’

Magnus shook his head.

‘No,’ he said. ‘My father knows my lupine brother’s ways well enough; he does not to need me to point out how ridiculous and hypocritical they are.’

‘Still,’ said Ahriman, ‘it is a shame to have lost the opportunity to learn more of the Wolves. Ohthere Wyrdmake and I formed a close bond. With Uthizzar’s help, I would have learned much of the inner workings of the Wolf King’s Legion.’

Magnus nodded and smiled.

‘Have no fear, Ahzek,’ he said, ‘Wyrdmake was not our only source within the Wolves. I have other assets in place, none of whom know they dance to my tune.’

Ahriman waited for Magnus to continue, but the primarch kept his own counsel.

Before he could ask any more, the stars shimmered, as though a layer of gauze had been drawn over the crystal pyramid.

‘Look,’ said Magnus, ‘The Mechanicum Borealis, it begins.’

Like a painting left out in the rain, the image of the stars smeared in the blackness. A fusion of chemical overspill and atmospheric vapour fires on Hexium Minora caught the arcing light of the system’s distant star, refracting a shimmering halo around the world as though it were ablaze from pole to pole with rainbow fires.

The effect was wondrous, despite being born of chronic pollution and rampant industry pursued without heed of the cost to the planet’s ecology. To Ahriman, it was proof that something wonderful could come from the most ugly of sources. A side effect of the Mechanicum Borealis was the thinning of the veil between the material world and the immaterium, and a melange of unnameable colours and aetheric tempests swirled around the planet’s corona, a distant seascape viewed through a glass darkly.

‘The Great Ocean,’ said Magnus, his voice full of longing. ‘How beautiful it is.’

Ahriman kept the lights in his private library low, claiming that any aid to concentration was of paramount importance. Lemuel had been surprised how small his mentor’s sanctum was, a chamber no larger than that of a Terran bureaucrat. For a room described as a library, there were precious few books to be found, merely a single bookcase filled with leather scroll tubes and loosely bound sheaves of paper.

A large wooden desk of a pale, polished and darkly-veined wood with an inset blotter of green leather stood against one wall, and a number of thick books with spines a half-metre or more in length lay opened across its length.

An armour-stand bore Ahriman’s battle-plate, like a silent observer of his failures. It reminded Lemuel of Khalophis’s robots, and the thought of those soulless, mechanised warriors sent a shiver down Lemuel’s spine.

‘Can you see it yet?’ asked Ahriman.

‘No.’

‘Look again. Drift with the currents. Remember all I have taught you since Shrike.’

‘I’m trying, but there are so many. How can I tell what’s the actual future and what’s a potential future?’

‘That,’ said Ahriman, ‘is where the skill of the individual diviner comes into play. Some prognosticators have an innate connection to the aetheric paths that guide them with unerring accuracy to the truth, while others must sift though a thousand images of meaningless symbolism to reach it.’

‘Which are you?’ asked Lemuel without opening his eyes and trying to visualise the myriad paths of the falling cards.

‘Think less about me, more about the cards,’ warned Ahriman. ‘Ready?’

‘Ready.’

A precisely stacked house of cards sat on the lip of the desk, arranged in a delicately balanced pyramid. Ahriman had produced them from a battered, cloth-wrapped tin, seventy-eight cards of what he called a Visconti-Sforza trionfi deck. Each card was exquisitely detailed and lovingly rendered with vivid colours and expressively wrought images of regal men and women.

‘Catch the Seven of Denari,’ said Ahriman, and slammed an open palm down on the desk.

The pyramid of cards collapsed, each one fluttering to the floor in a crazed whirlwind of spinning horsemen, kings and princesses. Lemuel snatched his hand out, seizing a card and holding it up before him.

‘Show me,’ said Ahriman.

Lemuel flipped the card, which showed a female figure reaching up to touch an eight-rayed star.

‘The Star,’ said Ahriman. ‘Try again.’

‘It’s impossible,’ said Lemuel in resignation. He had been trying to catch whichever card Ahriman named from the falling stack for the last three hours without success. ‘I can’t do it.’

‘You can. Lift your mind into the lower Enumerations to clear it of the clutter of material concerns. Let your mind float free of hunger, want and desire. Only then can you follow the correct path to the future echoes.’

‘Free my mind from desire? That’s hard for me to do,’ pointed out Lemuel.

‘I never promised this would be easy. Quite the contrary in fact.’

‘I know, but it’s not easy for a man of my appetites to suppress them,’ said Lemuel, patting his ample, but shrinking, gut. Shipboard cuisine was a bland mixture of reconstituted pastes and flash frozen organics grown in ventral hydroponic bays. It nourished the body, but did little else.

‘Then the Enumerations will help you,’ said Ahriman. ‘Rise into the low spheres and visualise the paths each card will take, the interactions as they strike one another, the ripples they cause in the system. Learn to read the geometric progression of potentiality as each permutation gives birth to a thousand more outcomes regardless of how similar the beginning parameters were. In the forgotten ages, some people knew this as chaos theory, others as fractal geometry.’

‘I can’t do it,’ protested Lemuel. ‘Your brain was crafted for that sort of thing, but mine wasn’t.’

‘It is not my enhanced cognition that allows me to see the cards fall. I am not a mathematical savant.’

‘Then you do it,’ challenged Lemuel.

‘Very well,’ said Ahriman, rebuilding the house of cards with calm dexterity. When the pyramid was complete, he turned to Lemuel. ‘Name a card.’

Lemuel thought for a moment.

‘The Chariot,’ he said at last.

Ahriman nodded and closed his eyes, standing before the desk with his hands at his sides.

‘Ready?’ asked Lemuel.

‘Yes.’

Lemuel banged the table and the cards fell to the floor. Ahriman’s hand darted out like a striking snake and snatched a single gilt-edged card from the air. He turned it over to reveal a golden chariot drawn by two winged white horses. He placed the card face up on the desk.

‘You see? It can be done.’

‘Astartes reflexes,’ said Lemuel.

Ahriman smiled and said, ‘Is that what you think? Very well. Shall we try once more?’

Once again, Ahriman built the house of cards and asked Lemuel to name a card. Lemuel did so and Ahriman closed his eyes, standing before the precariously balanced cards. Instead of keeping his arms at his sides, he extended a hand with his thumb and forefinger outstretched, holding his fingertips close together, as though gripping an invisible card. His breathing deepened, and his eyes darted back and forth behind their lids.

‘Do it,’ said Ahriman.

Lemuel thumped the desk and the cards collapsed in a rain of images. Ahriman didn’t move, and a single card fluttered through the air to slide precisely between his fingertips. Lemuel was not the least bit surprised when the Chief Librarian flipped it over to reveal a divine figure bearing a fiery sword in his right hand and an eagle-topped globe in his left hand. Angels flew above the figure, blowing golden trumpets from which hung silk banners.

‘Just as you wanted,’ said Ahriman. ‘Judgement.’

Four days later, Lemuel was once again ensconced within Ahriman’s library, though this time he had been promised remembrances instead of instruction. Almost a year after being denied the opportunity to descend to the surface of Ullanor, Lemuel had hoped for a first-hand account of Horus Lupercal’s ascension to Warmaster. In this, he was to be disappointed.

When Lemuel asked about the Great Triumph, Ahriman had shrugged, as though it had been a trivial encounter, something not worthy of remembrance.

‘It was a private affair,’ said Ahriman.

Lemuel almost laughed before seeing that Ahriman was deadly serious.

‘Why would you want to know of it anyway?’

‘Seriously?’

‘Yes.’

‘Maybe because the Emperor himself was there,’ said Lemuel, struggling to understand why Ahriman would think it strange he would want to know of such a singular event. ‘Or perhaps because the Emperor has returned to Terra and the Great Crusade has a new commander. Horus Lupercal is the Warmaster. Such an event is a turning point in the affairs of mankind, surely you must see that?’

‘I do,’ nodded Ahriman, ‘though I fear I would make a poor teller of the tale. I am sure others will recount it better than I in times to come.’

Ahriman sat behind his desk, sipping crisp, corn-coloured wine from an oversized pewter goblet. Lemuel sensed there was more to his reluctance to speak of Ullanor than any doubt as to his ability to give a good enough rendition.

There would be little in the way of remembrance; something was preying on Ahriman’s mind, something that had happened upon the surface of Ullanor, but whatever it was, Lemuel would not hear it today.

To see an Astartes troubled by concerns beyond the battlefield was surprising, and he regarded Ahriman with new eyes. Even stripped out of his armour and clad in a crimson tunic and khaki combat fatigues, Ahriman was enormous. Encased in his battle-plate, his limbs were smooth and clean, machine-like, but now Lemuel could see the bulging musculature of his biceps and the undulant ridges of his pectorals. If anything, an Astartes without his armour was more frightening. His proportions were human, but also alien and gigantic.

Lemuel had come to know Ahriman well since leaving Ullanor; not well enough to yet count them as friends, but well enough to read his moods. Of his remembrancer friends, he had seen little, for Camille and Kallista spent the bulk of their time in the company of Ankhu Anen in the Photep’s library, learning to develop their nascent abilities. As little as he had seen of his female friends, Lemuel had seen nothing at all of Mahavastu Kallimakus.

‘Lemuel?’ said Ahriman, snapping his thoughts back to the present.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Lemuel. ‘I was thinking about a friend and hoping he was well.’

‘Who?’

‘Mahavastu Kallimakus, scribe to the primarch.’

‘Why would he not be doing well?’

Lemuel shrugged, unsure how much he should say.

‘He seemed out of sorts the last time I saw him,’ he said, ‘but then he’s a very old man, prone to the aches and pains of age. You understand?’

‘Not really,’ admitted Ahriman. ‘I am as fit now as I was two centuries ago.’

Lemuel chuckled and said, ‘That should amaze me, but it’s astonishing how quickly you become accustomed to the extraordinary, especially with the Thousand Sons.’

He lifted a modest, cut-crystal glass to his lips and drank, enjoying the rarity of a wine that didn’t taste like it had been strained through a starship’s urinary filtration system.

‘How are you liking the wine?’ asked Ahriman.

‘It is a more refined taste than I am used to,’ said Lemuel, ‘flavoursome and forceful, yet with enough subtlety to surprise.’

‘The grapes were grown in underground vineyards on Prospero,’ explained Ahriman. ‘It is a vintage of my own concoction, based on a gene-sample I took in Heretaunga bay on what was once the island of Diemenslandt.’

‘I never took the Astartes for students of viniculture.’

‘No? Why not?’

Lemuel cocked his head to one side, wondering if Ahriman was joking. Certainly the Chief Librarian of the Thousand Sons was a man of serious mien, but all too often he would puncture that with deadpan humour. From the hue of his aura, it seemed his question was honestly asked, and Lemuel floundered for an answer.

‘Well, it’s just that you are bred for war. I didn’t think that left much room for less martial pursuits.’

‘In other words you think we are only good for battle? Is that it? The Astartes are simply weapons, killing tools who cannot have interests beyond war?’

Lemuel saw a glint in Ahriman’s eye and played along.

‘You are very good at killing,’ he said. ‘Phoenix Crag taught me that.’

‘You are right; we are very good at killing. I think that is why my Legion encourages its warriors to develop skills beyond the battlefield. After all, this Crusade cannot last forever, and we will need to have a purpose beyond that when it is over. What will become of the warriors when there are no more wars?’

‘They’ll settle down and grow fine wine,’ said Lemuel, finishing his glass and accepting another as Ahriman leaned over to pour. A shiver passed along his spine at the sheer absurdity of this moment. He chuckled and shook his head.

‘What is funny?’ asked Ahriman.

‘Nothing really,’ he said. ‘I was just wondering how Lemuel Gaumon, a sometime academic, sometime dilettante of the esoteric came to share a glass of wine with a genetically engineered post-human? Two years ago, if someone had told me I’d be sitting here with you like this, I’d have thought they were mad.’

‘The feeling is mutual,’ Ahriman assured him.

‘Then let us drink to new experiences,’ said Lemuel, raising his glass.

They did, and they enjoyed the strangeness of the moment. When he judged sufficient time had passed, Lemuel said, ‘You never answered my question.’

‘Which question?’

‘When you were training me with the trionfi cards,’ said Lemuel. ‘When I asked what kind of diviner you were, one with an innate connection to the aether or one who has to struggle for every morsel of truth? I get the feeling it’s the former.’

‘Once I was, yes,’ said Ahriman, and Lemuel read pride in his aura, but also regret. ‘I could pluck the future from the aether without effort, guiding my Fellowship along the most productive paths in war and study, but now I have to work hard for even a momentary glimpse into the patterns of the future.’

‘What changed?’

Ahriman stood and circled the table, picking up the deck of cards and shuffling them expertly. He could have been a croupier or a card-sharp, thought Lemuel. The ease and dexterity with which Ahriman flicked the cards around his fingers was incredible, and he didn’t seem to notice he was doing it.

‘The tides of the Great Ocean are ever-changing, and its influence rises and fall. What was once a raging torrent can dwindle to a trickling brook in a fraction of a second. What was a gentle wave can rise to an all-consuming typhoon. Each practitioner’s powers rise and fall with its moods, for it is a fickle mistress whose interest flits like a firefly in the dark.’

‘You speak of it as though it were a living thing,’ said Lemuel, seeing the wistful, faraway look in Ahriman’s eyes. Ahriman smiled and replaced the cards on the desk.

‘Perhaps I do,’ he said. ‘The ancient sailors of Terra often claimed they had two wives, their earthly mates and the ocean. Each was jealous of the other and it was said that one or the other would claim a seafarer’s life. To live so close to the aether is to live with feet in two worlds. Both are dangerous, but a man can learn to read how they shift and dance in and out of sync with one another. The trick is to read those moments and crest the wave of power while it lasts.’

Lemuel leaned forward and tapped a finger on the gold-backed cards.

‘I don’t think that’s a trick I’ve mastered,’ he said.

‘No, divination is not your forte,’ agreed Ahriman, ‘though you show some skill with aetheric reading. Perhaps I will schedule some time with Uthizzar of the Athanaens for you. He can develop this area of your psyche.’

‘I keep hearing of these cults, but why such specialisation?’ asked Lemuel. ‘The sangomas I learned from were men and women who served the people of their townships in many different ways. They didn’t confine themselves to one area of expertise. Why does your Legion break up its teachings into different cults?’

‘The sangoma you speak of skimmed the tiniest fraction of learning from the Great Ocean, Lemuel. The lowliest Probationer of any Thousand Sons cult understands and practices more of the mysteries than even the most gifted sangoma.’

‘I don’t doubt that,’ said Lemuel, taking another sip of wine. ‘But, still, why so many?’

Ahriman smiled and said, ‘Finish your drink, and I will tell you of Magnus’s first journey into the desolation of Prospero.’

‘Prospero is a paradise,’ began Ahriman, ‘a wondrous planet of light and beauty. Its mountains are soaring fangs of brilliant white, its forests verdant beyond imagining and its oceans teem with life. It is a world returned to glory, but it was not always so. Long before the coming of Magnus, Prospero was all but abandoned.’

Ahriman lifted a box of cold iron from the top shelf of his bookcase and placed it on the desk before Lemuel. He opened the lid to reveal a grotesque skull of alien origin, its surface dark and glossy as though coated in lacquer. Elongated, with extended mandibles and two enormous eye sockets behind them, it was insectoid and utterly repellent.

‘What’s that?’ asked Lemuel, curling his lip in revulsion.

‘This is a preserved exo-skull of a psychneuein, an alien predator native to Prospero.’

‘And why are you showing it to me?’

‘Because without these creatures, the cults of the Thousand Sons would not exist.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I’ll show you,’ said Ahriman, lifting the skull from the box. He held it out to Lemuel and said, ‘Don’t worry, it is long dead and its residual aura has long since dissipated into the Great Ocean.’

‘Still, no thanks. Those mandibles look like they could tear a man’s head off.’

‘They could, but that was not what made the psychneuein so dangerous. It was its reproductive cycle that was its most potent weapon. The female psychneuein is drawn to psychic emanations and has a rudimentary fusion of telepathic and telekinetic powers. When fertile, the female psychically projects a clutch of its eggs into the brain of a host being with an unprotected mind, vulnerable to the power of the aether.’

‘That’s disgusting,’ said Lemuel, genuinely horrified.

‘That is not the worst of it.’

‘It’s not?’

‘Not by a long way,’ said Ahriman, with amused relish. ‘The eggs are small, no larger than a grain of sand, but by morning the following day, they will hatch and begin to feed on the host’s brain. At first the victim feels nothing more than a mild headache, but by afternoon he will be in agony, raving and insane, as his brain is devoured from the inside out. By nightfall, he will be dead, his skull a writhing mass of plump maggots. In the space of a few hours, the grubs have picked the carcass clean and will seek a dark place to hide in which to pupate. By the following day, they will emerge as adults, ready to hunt and reproduce.’

Lemuel felt his guts roil, trying not to imagine the agony of being eaten alive by a host of parasites in his brain.

‘What a horrible way to die,’ he said, ‘but I still don’t understand how such vile creatures shaped Prospero and the Thousand Sons?’

‘Patience, Lemuel,’ cautioned Ahriman, sitting on the edge of the desk. ‘I am getting to that. You know of Tizca, the City of Light, yes?’

‘It is a place I am greatly looking forward to seeing,’ said Lemuel.

‘You will see it soon enough,’ smiled Ahriman. ‘Tizca is the last outpost of a civilisation wiped out thousands of years ago, a city where the survivors of a planet-wide cataclysm found refuge from the psychneuein. We suspect some freak upsurge in the Great Ocean triggered an explosion of uncontrolled psychic potential within the population, driving the psychneuein into a reproductive feeding frenzy. The civilisation of Prospero collapsed and the survivors fled to a city in the mountains.’

‘Tizca,’ said Lemuel, thrilled to be learning the lost history of Prospero.

‘Yes,’ confirmed Ahriman. ‘For thousands of years, the people of Tizca endured, while all they had built in the millennia since leaving Terra fell to dust. The surface of Prospero is dotted with the remains of their dead culture. Empty cities are now overgrown with forests and vines, the palaces of their kings overrun with wild beasts.’

‘How did they survive?’

‘They salvaged enough knowledge and equipment from the destruction to construct techno-psychic arrays and sustainable energy sources, which then allowed them to build giant hydroponic gardens deep in the caverns of the ventral mountain ranges.’

‘Where you grow the fruit for delightful wines,’ said Lemuel, raising his glass in a toast, ‘but that’s not what I meant. How did they survive the psychneuein?

Ahriman tapped his head and said, ‘By developing the very powers that made them so vulnerable. The psychneuein were drawn to Tizca in their thousands, but the survivors were able to train their most gifted psykers to use their minds to erect invisible barriers of pure thought. They were primitive, bombastic powers compared to the subtle arts we employ today, but they kept the creatures at bay. And so, the practitioners of the mysteries remained locked in their limited understanding of the Great Ocean’s power until the coming of Magnus.’

Lemuel leaned in and placed his wine glass on the edge of the desk. The origin myths of the primarchs were often shrouded in allegory and hyperbole, embroidered over time with all manner of fanciful details involving tests of strength, contests of arms or similarly outlandish feats.

To hear of a primarch’s deeds on his home world from a warrior of his Legion would surely be the greatest achievement of any remembrancer, an authentic account as opposed to one embellished by people like the iterators. Lemuel’s pulse rate rose in expectation, and he felt a chill gust at his shoulder, like the breath of an invisible passer-by. He frowned as he saw a shimmer of red in the cut crystal of his wine glass, the hint of a golden eye looking back at him from the liquid.

Lemuel glanced over his shoulder, but there was no one there.

Looking back at his glass, it was simply wine. He shook off the unease the image had conjured. Ahriman was looking at him with an amused expression on his face, as though expecting him to say something.

‘You were saying,’ said Lemuel, when Ahriman didn’t continue, ‘about Magnus?’

‘I was,’ said Ahriman, ‘but it is not my story to tell.’

Confused, Lemuel sat back in his seat and asked, ‘Then whose story is it to tell?’

‘Mine,’ said Magnus, appearing at Lemuel’s shoulder, as if from thin air. ‘I shall tell it.’

Seventeen

The desolation of Prospero
The fallen statue
Fresh summons

It seemed like the grossest insult to be seated in the presence of so mighty a being, but no matter how Lemuel tried to rise, the muscles in his legs wouldn’t obey him.

‘My lord,’ he finally managed.

The primarch wore a long, flowing robe of crimson edged with sable, secured at the waist by a wide leather belt with a jade scarab design at its centre. His curved blade was sheathed across his back, and his bright hair was pulled into a series of elaborate braids entwined like the roots of a giant tree.

Magnus filled the library with his presence, though he appeared to be no bigger than Ahriman. Lemuel blinked away a hazed outline of the primarch and stared into his single eye, its amber iris pinpricked with white magnesium. Where his other should have been was blank flesh, smooth as though it had never known an eye.

‘Lemuel Gaumon,’ said Magnus, and the syllables of his name flowed like honey from the primarch’s mouth, like a word of power or some hidden language of the ancients.

‘That’s… that’s me,’ he stammered, knowing he sounded like a simpering idiot, but not caring. ‘I mean, yes. Yes, my lord. It’s an honour to meet you, I never expected to, I mean…’

His words trailed off as Magnus raised a hand.

‘Ahriman was telling you of how I founded the cults of Prospero?’

Lemuel found his voice and said, ‘He was. I would be honoured if you would take up where he left off.’

The request was audacious, but a new-found confidence filled him with sudden brio. He had the distinct impression that Magnus had not arrived here by accident, that this encounter was as stage-managed as any of Coraline Aseneca’s supposedly improvised theatre performances.

‘I shall tell you, for you are a rare man, Lemuel. You have vision to see what a great many people would run from in fear. You have promise, and I intend to see it fulfilled.’

‘Thank you, my lord,’ said Lemuel, though a tiny warning voice in his head wondered exactly what the primarch meant by that.

Magnus brushed past, touching Lemuel’s shoulder, and the sheer joy of the contact swept any concerns away. Magnus rounded Ahriman’s desk and lifted the gold-backed cards.

‘A Visconti-Sforza deck,’ said Magnus. ‘The Visconti di Modrone set if I am not mistaken.’

‘You have a good eye, my lord,’ said Ahriman, and Lemuel suppressed a snigger, wondering if this was what passed for humour among the Thousand Sons.

Ahriman’s words seemed sincere, and Magnus shuffled through the pack with even greater dexterity than had his Chief Librarian.

‘This is the oldest set in existence,’ said Magnus, spreading the cards on the desk.

‘How can you tell?’ asked Lemuel.

Magnus slipped a card from the deck and held up the six of denari. Each of the pips was a golden disc bearing either a fleur-de-lys or a robed figure carrying a long staff.

‘The denari suit, which corresponds to what is now known as diamonds, bears the obverse and reverse of the golden florin struck by Magister Visconti sometime in the middle of the second millennium, though the coins he designed were only in circulation for a decade or so.’

Magnus put the card back in the deck and moved over to Ahriman’s bookcase, scanning the contents briefly before turning back to face Lemuel. He smiled, his manner genial and comradely, as though he were sharing a joke instead of a priceless morsel of remembrance.

‘When I came to Prospero they said it was as though a comet had borne me to the ground, for the impact I had on them was as great,’ said Magnus with an amused smile. ‘The Tizcan commune, which was the name the survivors of the psychneuein gave to their little enclave, was a place rooted in tradition, but they had some skill in wielding the power of the aether. Of course, they didn’t know it by that name, and the powers they had, while enough to keep the psy-predators at bay, were little more than the enchantments of idiot children.’

‘But you taught them how better to use their powers?’

‘Not at first,’ said Magnus, lifting a golden disk inscribed with cuneiform symbols from Ahriman’s bookshelf. He looked at it for a moment before replacing it with an almost imperceptible shake of his head. As he turned away, Lemuel saw that it was a zodiacal timepiece.

‘I was… young back then, and knew little of my true potential, though I had been taught by the greatest tutor of the age.’

‘The Emperor?’

Magnus smiled.

‘None other,’ he said. ‘I was schooled in the ways of the commune, and I quickly learned everything they had to teach me. In truth, I had outstripped the learning of their greatest scholars within a year of my arrival. Their teachings were too dogmatic, too linear and too limiting for my mind’s potential. My intellect was superior in every way to those that taught me. With my teachings, I knew they could be so much more.’

Lemuel heard arrogance in Magnus’s voice. The primarch’s power was immense and beyond mortal understanding, but there was none of the humility he often heard when talking with Ahriman. Where Ahriman recognised his limits, Magnus clearly felt he had none.

‘So how did you teach them?’ asked Lemuel.

‘I took a walk into the desolation of Prospero. True power comes only to those who have fully tested themselves against their greatest fears. Within the commune, I knew no fear, no hunger or want and had no drive to push my abilities to their full potential. I needed to be tested to the very limits of my powers to see if I even had limits. Out in the wilds, I knew I would either find the key to fully unlock my powers or die in the attempt.’

‘A somewhat drastic solution, my lord.’

‘Was it, Lemuel? Really? Is it not better to reach for the stars and fail than never to try?’

‘Stars are giant flaming balls of gas,’ said Lemuel with a smile. ‘They tend to burn people who get too near.’

Ahriman chuckled. ‘The remembrancer knows his Pseudo-Apollodorus.’

‘That he does,’ agreed Magnus with a satisfied smile. ‘But I digress. A year after my coming to Prospero, I walked from the gates of Tizca and marched into the wilderness for nearly forty days. To this day, it is known as the desolation of Prospero, but such a title is a misnomer. You will find the landscape quite beautiful, Lemuel.’

Lemuel’s heart-rate spiked, remembering how Ahriman had told him he had seen a vision in which he had been standing on Prospero.

‘I am sure I will, my lord,’ he said.

Magnus poured a glass of wine and began his tale.

‘I walked for hundreds of miles, travelling roads that passed through broken cities of iron skeletons of tall towers, empty palaces and grand amphitheatres. It was a civilisation of great worth, but it had fallen in a single day, not an uncommon fate among worlds during the madness of Old Night. I came at last to a city, a sprawling ruin at the foot of a cliff that seemed familiar, though I had never before set foot beyond the walls of Tizca. I spent a day and a night wandering its forsaken streets, the shadow-haunted buildings and empty homes that echoed with the last breaths of those who had dwelled within them. It touched me in a way I had not thought possible. These people had lived sure in the knowledge that they had nothing to fear, that they were masters of their destinies. The coming of Old Night changed all that. It had shown them how horribly vulnerable they were. In that moment, I vowed I would master the powers I had at my command, so that I would never fall prey, as they had fallen, to the vagaries of an ever-changing universe. I would face such threats and overcome them.’

Again, Lemuel felt the full force of the primarch’s confidence, as if it was suffusing his skin and invigorating his entire body.

‘I climbed a slender pathway up the cliff and came to a bend in the road, where a long-dead sculptor had erected a tall statue of a great bird carved from multi-coloured stone. It was a splendid creature with outstretched wings and the graceful neck of a swan. It perched precariously on the edge of the cliff. This statue had endured for thousands of years, rocking and swaying, but always keeping its balance perfectly. But no sooner had I beheld its grandeur than it toppled from its plinth and was dashed to pieces at the bottom of the cliff, far, far below. The sight of that falling statue filled me with an almost inconsolable sense of loss I could not explain. I abandoned my trek into the mountains and returned to the base of the cliff, where, needless to say, the statue lay smashed into many pieces.

‘Where it had hit, the ground was covered with a carpet of shards, some small and some large, but shards and shards and more shards for as far as a man could walk in an hour. I spent the whole day just looking at the shards, measuring them and feeling the weight of them, and just pondering why the statue had chosen that moment to fall.’

Magnus paused, his eye misty and distant as he relived the memory.

‘You say “chosen” as though the statue had been waiting for you,’ said Lemuel. ‘Isn’t it possible that it was a coincidence?’

‘Surely Ahriman has taught you that there are no such things as coincidences.’

‘I mentioned it once or twice, yes,’ said Ahriman dryly.

‘I spent the night there and awoke the next morning full of enthusiasm. I spent many days on this carpet of broken stone shards, and eventually I noticed a very strange thing. There were three large stones on the ground, forming a triangle that was precisely equilateral. I was amazed. Looking further, I found four white stones arranged in a perfect square. Then I saw that by disregarding two of the white stones and thinking of a pair of grey stones a metre over, it was an exact rhombus! And, if I chose this stone, and that stone, and that one, and that one and that one I had a pentagon as large as the triangle. Here a small hexagon, and there a square partially inside the hexagon, a decagon, two triangles interlocked. And then a circle, and a smaller circle within the circle, and a triangle within that which had a red stone, a grey stone and a white stone.

‘I spent many hours finding even more designs that became infinitely more complex as my powers of observation grew with practice. Then I began to log them in my grimoire; and as I counted designs and described them, the pages began to fill as the sun made countless passages across the sky. Days passed, but my passion for the designs I was seeing was all-consuming.’

‘And that’s how Amon found him,’ said Ahriman, ‘squatting in a pile of broken stones.’

‘Amon?’ asked Lemuel. ‘The captain of the Ninth Fellowship?’

‘Yes, and my tutor on Prospero,’ said Magnus.

Lemuel frowned at this apparent contradiction, but said nothing as Magnus continued.

‘I had begun my second grimoire when Amon found me. Now, Amon is a quiet, private fellow, not easily given to company. Like many such solitary men, he is a poet and deeply interested in the hidden nature of things. When I saw him, I cried, “Amon, come quickly! I have discovered the most wondrous thing in the universe”. He hurried over to me, anxious to see what it was.

‘I showed him the carpet of stones, but Amon only laughed and said, “It is nothing but scattered shards of stone!” I took his hand and proceeded to show my old tutor the harvest of my many days study. When Amon saw the designs he turned to my grimoires and by the time he was finished with them, he too was overwhelmed.’

As much as Lemuel was having trouble following Magnus’s logic, it was impossible not to be swept up by his enthusiasm. He saw that Ahriman was similarly carried along by the irresistible tide of the primarch’s passion for his tale.

‘Now Amon was much moved,’ said Magnus, ‘and he began to write poetry about each of the incredible designs. As he wrote and contemplated, I became sure that the designs must mean something. Such order and beauty was too monumental to be senseless. The designs were there, the workings of the universe laid bare.

‘Together, Amon and I returned home, where he read his poetry, and I showed the masters of Tizca the workings in my grimoires. These were great men, and their love of beauty and nature was marvellous to behold. So amazed were they that they joined me on a pilgrimage back to the cliff where the statue had fallen. The shards were just as I had described them, and the masters of Tizca were overcome with emotion, filling their own grimoires with fantastical writing. Some wrote about triangles, others described the circles, while yet others concentrated all their attention on the glittering spectrum of coloured stones.’

Magnus directed all his attention on Lemuel, his amber eye flickering with internal fires.

‘Do you know what they said to me?’ asked Magnus.

‘No,’ breathed Lemuel, hardly daring to add his voice to the telling.

Magnus leaned down.

‘They said, “How blind we have been”. All who could see the designs knew that they had to have been put there by a Primordial Creator, for nothing but such a great force could create this immense beauty!’

Lemuel could picture the scene, the sheer immensity of the cliff, the broken carpet of multi-coloured shards and the awed gathering of students of the esoteric and the outlandish. He sensed their awe and felt the tide of history rising up to sweep away the old beliefs and leave a new way in its wake. Lemuel felt as though he were there, as though he inhabited the body of one of the venerable philosophers of Tizca, and found his mind opening to a host of new possibilities, like a blind man suddenly shown the sun.

‘It was amazing,’ he whispered.

‘That it was, Lemuel. That it was,’ said Magnus, pleased he truly appreciated the significance of what he was being told. ‘It was a great moment in the history of Prospero, but as is the way of history, nothing of import is ever achieved without bloodshed.’

Lemuel felt his chest constrict with panic, feeling the horrible sensation of impending danger, as though he stood on the cusp of an abyss, waiting for a shove in the back.

‘We had been lax in our mental discipline,’ said Magnus, and a trace of sadness entered his voice. ‘Such was our excitement at what I had found that we allowed our guard to drop.’

‘What happened?’ asked Lemuel, almost afraid of the answer.

‘The psychneuein,’ said Magnus. ‘They were drawn to us in their thousands, blackening the sky with their numbers as they descended like a plague from ancient times.’

Lemuel drew in a breath, picturing the dark swathes of psy-predators as they swarmed from their darkened caves, organically shifting clouds of deadly clades, the relentless buzzing of thousands of crystalline wings the sound of inevitable doom.

‘The males swarmed in, a hurricane of snapping mandibles and tearing claws, and fifty men died in the time it takes to draw breath. Behind the males came the females, engorged with clutch upon clutch of immaterial eggs. Their furious reproductive hunger was insatiable, and dozens of my friends fell to their knees in horror as they felt the psychneuein eggs take root in their brains. Their screams will stay with me forever, Lemuel. It is the sound of brilliant men who know that soon they will be raving madmen, their brains pulped masses of digestible tissue.’

A hushed silence filled the library, as the visceral terror of that notion took hold.

Magnus poured wine for them all before continuing.

‘The beasts swirled around us, battering us with psychic thrusts, scrabbling at our mental barriers to seed our minds with their eggs, and only the strongest of us remained. Amon and eight of the masters of Tizca stood with me, and as the psychneuein attacked again, I knew this was what I had been seeking all along, a true test of my abilities. I would finally discover whether I had limits. I would see if I was the master of my powers or was to be found wanting.’

To look at Magnus as he told his story, Lemuel couldn’t believe that such a warrior could ever be found wanting. Even telling the story gave his skin a faint luminosity, a heat that flowed through his veins. Magnus’s amber eye had darkened to a fiery orange, the glittering sparks in its depths now swimming in his pupil.

‘Then, as the psychneuein came at us again, something magnificent happened. I felt something move within me, I felt changed, as though an immense power that had lain within me, dormant and untapped, surged to life. As I contemplated the moment of my death, raging fires erupted from my hands. I hurled torrents of flame into the sky, as though I had always known I had such powers, and smote hundreds of psychneuein to ruin with every gesture.

‘Memphia and Cythega, masters who had seen the patterns in the red stones, stood at my side, and walls of flame sprang up at their command. Ahtep and Luxanhtep plucked beasts from the air and dashed them on the rocks with the power of their minds, for they had found the spiral patterns of white stones. Hastar and Imhoden had seen the eight-angled crown of shards and willed the vital fluids within the psychneuein to boil within their exo-skeletons. Amon had been first among the hidden masters to see the patterns in the shards, and his mastery of them was second only to mine. Images of the future and imminent danger seared though his mind, and he cried words of warning to his fellows, telling them of dangers to come and of how they might avoid them.

‘Phanek and Thothmes had seen the dance of squares, circles and triangles, the interaction of line and curve speaking to them of the hidden thoughts of all. They sensed the lust within the psychneuein to plant their psychic seed within our minds, the relentless animal hunger that drove them to feed and propagate. They reached into the minds of the beasts and twisted their perceptions so that they became blind to us.’

‘The cults of the Thousand Sons,’ said Lemuel. ‘That’s where they came from.’

‘Just so,’ said Magnus. ‘The subtle nuances of the Great Ocean were revealed to me that day, and when we returned to Tizca the members of my fellowship returned to their pyramid libraries to contemplate what they had learned. I watched over their deliberations and guided their studies, for I had seen the patterns of the broken statue first and knew better than any man how to wield the power of the aether. The nine masters devoted their every waking moment to what they had learned in the desolate wastelands, honing their unique abilities to become the first Magister Templi of the Prosperine cults.

‘As word of their power spread throughout the adepts of Tizca, devotees flocked to study at their feet, hungry to learn the new ways to harness the power of the Great Ocean.’

‘And what of you?’ asked Lemuel. ‘Why did you not become a cult leader?’

‘Because I became the Magus,’ said the primarch, ‘Master of all the cults.’

‘Magus? That’s the highest rank isn’t it?’ asked Lemuel.

‘No,’ said Magnus, ‘there is one rank above it, that of Ipsissimus, a being free from limitations, who lives in balance with the corporeal and incorporeal universe; for all intents and purposes, a perfect being.’

Lemuel heard Magnus’s pride and knew there could be only one man in creation that could match such a description, one man who Magnus looked up to above all others.

‘The Emperor, beloved by all,’ said Lemuel.

Magnus smiled and nodded, folding his arms across his wide chest.

‘Indeed, Lemuel,’ he said, ‘the Emperor. And it is with news of my father I come to the Library of Ahriman.’

Lemuel was instantly alert. Any scrap of information about the Emperor, the architect of humanity’s fate, and the powerhouse behind the monumental undertaking of the Great Crusade, was eagerly seized upon by the remembrancers. To hear such news first-hand from one of the primarchs would be an honour indeed.

‘Now that the last elements of the Legion have rendezvoused, we are summoned to my father’s side once more.’

‘Are we returning to Terra?’ asked Ahriman. ‘Is it time?’

Magnus hesitated, deliberately teasing the moment out.

‘It is not for Terra that we set our course, but the Emperor promises the most serious of conclaves, the most momentous of gatherings, where the greatest questions of the age are to be debated.’

Lemuel gasped. Such news was grand indeed, but there was more to this singular piece of information than Magnus was letting on.

He smiled, buoyed up with sudden confidence.

‘There’s more isn’t there, my lord?’ he asked.

‘He is perceptive, this one,’ said Magnus with a nod to Ahriman. ‘I think you are right, my friend; a stint with Uthizzar will hone his abilities nicely.’

Magnus turned to Lemuel once more and said, ‘This conclave will be the crux of our Legion’s existence, my friend. This will be our defining moment, where the Emperor at last acknowledges our worth.’

‘You have seen this, my lord?’ asked Ahriman.

‘I have seen many things,’ said Magnus. ‘Great events are in motion, the wheel of history is on the turn and the Thousand Sons will be at the forefront of the new universal order.’

‘Where will this gathering take place?’ asked Ahriman.

‘Far from here,’ said Magnus, ‘on a world named Nikaea.’

Eighteen

Nikaea
Thrown to the Wolves
The Emperor’s right hand

Cataract clouds obscured the surface, a striated covering shot through with pyroclastic sparks and umber lightning. Nikaea was a new world, its geology unfinished and its final form not yet set. Tectonic movement and kilometres-deep pressure waves rippled below the crust, sending shock waves through the mantle, and ripping some continents apart while slamming others together.

Two Stormbirds and a Stormhawk knifed through the clouds like swooping birds of prey, their crimson hulls painted with corrosive rain as they descended through the volatile atmosphere. Nikaea was a world in flux, its character in the throes of violent birth.

Space around the planet was a choppy soup of electromagnetic static, the approaches lousy with spatial debris caught in the whirling, inconstant gravity waves that rendered geomagnetic guidance systems inoperative.

Only by following a constant beacon of incandescent light that speared into the heavens from the world below could any craft hope to navigate the Nikaea system. To attempt to find Nikaea, let alone a fixed point on its surface, without the aid of this signal would have been impossible for any but the luckiest pilots in the galaxy. It had taken an entire year for the 28th Expedition to travel from Hexium Minora to this remote corner of the galaxy.

Ahriman sat up front in Scarab Prime, the consoles before the pilots alive with flickering lights, vector diagrams and tri-dimensional contour maps of the jagged terrain. Pulsing cables connected the pilots to the avionics package, allowing them to fly purely on instruments, which was just as well, as the juddering canopy of the cockpit was smeared with ash and smoke.

Though the thought was faintly blasphemous, Ahriman hoped the Machine-God was watching over them. To lose control above such a hostile world was as sure a death sentence as could be envisaged.

Not that the pilots were actually guiding the Stormbird; that duty fell to Jeter Innovence, the Navigator strapped to the converted gravity harness where Ahriman normally performed his close-protection duties when flying into harm’s way. Innovence had protested at being forced to leave his hermetic dome aboard the Photep, but had recanted his objections when told who he would be guiding and whose light he would be following.

Magnus the Red sat behind the Navigator, resplendent in a gloriously embroidered tunic of red and gold, shawled with a weave of golden mail hung with feathers and precious stones. In honour of the occasion, each of Magnus’s forearms was sheathed in an eagle-stamped vambrace, and he wore an entwined lightning bolt girdle around his torso.

His hair was loose, glossy and mirror sheened, the colour of arterial blood.

No finer warrior scholar existed in the galaxy.

The slight form of Mahavastu Kallimakus sat beside Magnus, the heavy robes he wore unable to mask his gaunt frame. Kallimakus was venerable, as Lemuel had described, but Ahriman had not realised how much the primarch’s control over him was costing the remembrancer. A heavy satchel of blank books rested against the fuselage, fresh pages for the scrivener to fill with Magnus’s words and deeds.

Ahriman caught the primarch’s eye, today an excited eclipse of pale blue and hazel flecks.

‘We are close, Ahzek,’ said Magnus, ‘in every sense.’

‘Yes, my lord. We land in less than ten minutes.’

‘So long? I could have guided us in half the time!’ cried Magnus, glaring at the recumbent form of the Navigator. His anger was false, and he laughed.

Magnus slapped a luminescent hand upon the Navigator’s shoulder, causing him to flinch.

‘Ah, don’t mind me, Innovence,’ said Magnus. ‘I’m simply impatient to see my father once more. You are doing a grand job, my friend!’

Ahriman smiled. The melancholy that wreathed Magnus’s soul after Ullanor had dispelled when word came of the conclave on Nikaea. The year spent traversing the immaterium from Hexium Minora had seen a frenzy of research and study aboard the Photep as Magnus handed out theoretical proofs, philosophical arguments and convoluted logic conundrums for his sons to solve in order to sharpen their minds. Nikaea promised to be the vindication of the Thousand Sons, and neither Magnus nor his Legion would be found wanting.

Ahriman turned back to the cockpit. According to the unwinding telemetry, they were practically on top of their destination, but the cloud cover was still impenetrable.

‘Taking us down,’ intoned the pilot. ‘Beginning approach. Ground landing protocols exchanged and verified. Tether signal accepted and control relinquished.’

The pilots sat back as control of the aircraft was surrendered to Custodes ground controllers. The aircraft dipped its nose and went into a steep, looping descent. Ahriman had a brief, sinking sensation in his gut before his enhanced physiology compensated. The clouds streaked past the canopy. The glass slithered with moisture and streaks of grey, muddy ash.

Then they were below it, and the landscape of Nikaea was laid out before them.

It was black and geometric, a profusion of angular debris strewn upon the ground like the primordial shapes that lay at the heart of everything, and which had yet to be cloaked with the lie of individuality. Perfect spheres rose from the basalt ground, rippled with the liquid lines of their formation. Vast cubes sat side by side upon stepped volcanic plains, arranged in convoluted patterns that seemed a little too random to be random at all.

Magnus appeared at his side, like an excited Probationer about to take the Liber Throa and become a Neophyte. The primarch peered through the canopy and took in the geometric precision of the landscape.

‘Incredible,’ he whispered. ‘The genesis of a world. The order of the universe described in mathematics, perfect shapes and geometry. How like my father to choose this place. He knew it would speak to me. It is the shards of my youth on a planetary scale.’

The Stormhawk dipped lower, banking its wings on its final approach, and a vast, conical landmass slid into view. It was a gigantic stratovolcano, steep-sided and rugged with hardened lava, tephra and blackened ash.

It pierced the clouds, and Ahriman knew with utter certainty that a great amphitheatre was carved within its heart. A column of purest light soared from the summit crater, invisible to mortal eyes, but a blazing spear piercing the heavens to those with aether-sight. A gathering thundercloud, shot through with golden lightning, filled the sky above the volcano.

Ahriman had felt the light’s presence as soon as the ships of the 28th Expedition had translated into the Nikaea system, but to actually see it ahead of him was like waking from a coma into a brightly lit room.

‘Throne, it’s glorious,’ said Magnus. ‘That is true power, a mind that can reach across the galaxy and bind an empire together in the dream of Unity. It humbles me to know we serve so magnificent a master.’

Ahriman didn’t answer. His mouth was dry and his heart thundered in his chest.

The light was magnificent. It was glorious and incredible in its potency and purity.

Yet all he felt was a mounting sense of dismay.

‘I have seen this before,’ he said.

‘When?’

‘On Aghoru,’ breathed Ahriman, ‘when I swam the Great Ocean hunting the threads of the future. When I met Ohthere Wyrdmake, I saw this: the volcano, the golden light.’

‘And yet you said nothing? Why did you keep it to yourself?’ asked Magnus.

‘It made no sense,’ said Ahriman, unable to keep the dread from his voice. ‘The visions were fragmentary, disjointed. It was impossible to tell what it meant.’

‘No matter,’ said Magnus.

‘No,’ said Ahriman, ‘I believe it matters. I believe it matters very much.’

Landing lights winked in an ever-decreasing cruciform pattern as the Custodes’ remote pilots reeled the Stormhawk in. The other two craft remained in their holding pattern, and would not descend until the first bird was clear. The Stormhawk slammed down in a hammer blow of burnt metal and gritty sulphurous backwash. As soon as it landed, a strip of white light extended onto the platform as a blast-shielded door lifted open.

Elongated shadows stretched from the detachment of warriors in armour of blood red and amethyst that marched from the side of the mountain. Massively wrought and precise, the honour guards of Astartes took up their position before the Stormhawk’s assault ramp. Some carried gold-bladed rhomphaia while others drew enormous silver-bladed swords, which they reversed and set on the platform with their gauntlets resting on the pommels.

The Stormhawk’s ramp lowered with a whine of pneumatics, and Magnus the Red descended to the surface. Followed by Ahriman and the shuffling form of Kallimakus, the primarch stepped from the ramp and took a deep breath of the hot, burnt air of Nikaea.

Kallimakus let out a soft gasp, and sweat gathered on Ahriman’s forehead, though he said nothing. A detachment of nine Sekhmet warriors formed up behind Magnus, subtly matching themselves before the warriors on the platform.

These were no ordinary Astartes; these were the elite of two Legions. The sword-armed warriors were no less a force than the Sanguinary Host, the elite protectorate of the Lord of the Blood Angels. The Phoenix Guard of Lord Fulgrim stood with them, their long-bladed rhomphaia held ramrod-straight at their sides, perfectly poised and immaculately presented.

Their presence could mean only one thing.

Two giant figures emerged from the volcano, walking side by side like old friends. Ahriman’s heartbeat spiked at the sight of them, the first a gloriously caparisoned warrior in armour of gold and purple, with flaring shoulder guards and a billowing cape of scarlet and gold. His hair was brilliant white, bound at his temples by a band of silver, and his face was one of perfect symmetry, like divinely-proportioned Euclidian geometry.

The second figure wore armour of deepest crimson, the colour vital and urgent. Wings of dappled black and white rustled at his back, the feathers hung with fine loops of silver wire and mother of pearl. Hair of deepest black framed a face that was pale and classically shaped, like one of the thousands of marble likenesses that garrisoned the Imperial Palace of Terra. Yet this was no lifeless rendering of a long-dead luminary; this was a living, breathing angel made flesh, whose countenance was the most beauteous in existence.

‘Lord Sanguinius,’ said Ahriman in wonder.

‘And Brother Fulgrim,’ completed Magnus. ‘Firmitas, utilitas, venustas.’

It seemed they heard him, for they smiled in genuine pleasure, though the words must surely have been lost in the feral growl of the Stormhawk’s cooling engines.

The primarchs were illuminated in the reflected glow of the volcano, their smooth features open and welcoming. They wore the faces of eager siblings pleased to see their brother, though they had seen one another only recently at Ullanor.

Magnus stepped towards Fulgrim, and the master of the Emperor’s Children opened his arms to receive his brother’s embrace. They spoke words of greeting, but they were private, and Ahriman allowed himself to look away from the majesty of the Phoenician’s countenance. Next, Magnus turned to Sanguinius, and the primarch of the Blood Angels kissed his brother’s cheeks, his greeting heartfelt but reserved. Only now did Ahriman notice the warriors accompanying each primarch. Sanguinius had two attendants, one a slender ascetic with a killer’s eyes and another with such pale skin that the veins of his face were clearly visible beneath.

Ahriman took his place beside Magnus as he and Sanguinius parted. Magnus turned to him and said, ‘Brother Sanguinius, allow me to introduce my Chief Librarian, Ahzek Ahriman.’

The Lord of the Angels turned his attention upon him, and Ahriman felt the full force of his appraisal. Like Russ before him, Sanguinius evaluated Ahriman swiftly, but where Russ sought out weakness to exploit, Sanguinius looked for strength to harness.

‘I have heard much of you, Ahzek Ahriman,’ said Sanguinius, his voice surprisingly gentle. For all its apparent softness, there was violent strength concealed within it, like a riptide beneath a placid seascape. ‘You are thought highly of by many beyond your Legion.’

Ahriman smiled, pleased to hear such praise from the lips of a primarch.

‘My lord,’ he said. ‘I serve the Emperor and my Legion to the best of my ability.’

‘And what abilities they are,’ said Sanguinius with a knowing smile. The primarch turned to introduce the warriors at his side. ‘Magnus, this is Raldoron, Chapter Master of my protectors,’ said Sanguinius, placing an elegantly sculpted hand on the shoulder of the warrior with the lethal eyes. Next he turned his attention to the warrior with the pale skin. ‘And this is Captain Thoros, one of our most vaunted captains of battle.’

Both warriors gave deep bows, and Ahriman had a sudden flash within his mind, like a single, incongruous pict frame slipped within the passage of one moment to the next: a screaming, multi-limbed arachnid beast, all fangs and blade-limbs. So swift was it, Ahriman wasn’t even sure he’d seen it, but it lingered like a harbinger when he looked at Thoros.

He shook off the image as Fulgrim turned to his warriors. Both were proud and haughty with an air of casual superiority that immediately made Ahriman wary. As flawlessly presented as their primarch, they were perfect in every way, but had none of the humility of Sanguinius’s praetorians.

‘Magnus, allow me to present my Lord Commanders, Eidolon and Vespasian.’

‘A very real pleasure to meet you all,’ said Magnus, bowing to his brother primarchs’ warriors, honouring them as he honoured their masters.

‘Well,’ said Fulgrim, ‘this promises to be a momentous day, brother, so shall we get on?’

‘Of course,’ said Magnus. ‘I am eager to begin.’

‘As are we all,’ promised the Phoenician.

Sanguinius and Fulgrim led them into the heart of the volcano, the tunnels within glassy and smooth, indicating they had been formed with industrial-scale meltas. They cut through the heart of the volcano, wide enough for the three primarchs to walk abreast, spiralling upwards through the solidified lava. The tunnels were lit with fiery luminescence, as though the molten heat of the magma at the volcano’s heart was seeping up from below.

Ahriman removed his helmet to better appreciate the startling geology of the volcano, seeing shifting bands of crystalline layers through the translucent rock, like the sedimentary bands of an exposed rock face.

‘This world may be young, but this volcano is old,’ noted Ahriman, seeing the glances passing between Fulgrim’s lord commanders as he spoke. He couldn’t read their auras, and nor could he establish a link to his Tutelary. The glare of the Emperor’s light was too powerful, overshadowing everything with its intensity.

Ahriman wondered if Magnus was similarly blinded by it.

He watched Magnus and his brothers as they spoke in low tones, relishing the sight of his primarch in the company of peers who harboured no ill-will towards him. Yet despite the bonhomie, their discourse was superficial. The more Ahriman studied the ebb and flow of their conversation and body language, the more he saw the supple flex of linguistic sparring.

The primarchs spoke of past campaigns, old glories and shared experiences, treading only on the comfortable ground of memory. Any hint that the subject of their meandering words might turn to matters of the future or the nature of the conclave were subtly deflected by Fulgrim, turned around and steered to safer ground.

He’s hiding something, thought Ahriman, something he doesn’t want us to know about this gathering.

Magnus must also be aware of it, but his primarch gave no sign that he was anything other than a willing actor in this unfolding drama. Ahriman looked at the Emperor’s Children behind and before them, now seeing them as a prisoner escort instead of an honour guard

He wanted to warn Magnus, but nothing he might say could change their course. Whatever awaited them in the great amphitheatre he knew lay at the heart of this volcano, they had no choice but to face it. This was one destiny where the future was immutable and changeless.

The coiling passage wound ever upwards, and Ahriman knew they were close the summit.

The glow of the walls grew brighter, and Ahriman saw the extra light was coming from a vaulted antechamber of mirror-smooth basalt and glass. Servitors awaited their arrival with refreshments, and padded couches lined the walls.

‘These will be your private chambers during recesses in the conclave,’ said Sanguinius.

‘They are quite sufficient,’ replied Magnus.

Ahriman wanted to scream at the stilted formality of it all. Couldn’t Magnus see that something was terribly wrong here? Sweat beaded on Ahriman’s face and neck. He had the overwhelming urge to retreat to the waiting Stormhawk, fire up its engines and fly back to the Photep, never to return to Nikaea.

A pair of bronze doors led into the heart of the mountain, and the future pressed in from the other side.

‘Is there anything else you require, friend Ahzek?’ asked Lord Commander Eidolon.

Ahriman shook his head, the effort of keeping his expression neutral almost beyond him.

‘No,’ he managed, ‘though I thank you for your concern.’

‘Of course, brother,’ said Eidolon, and Ahriman caught the inflexion on the last word.

Sanguinius turned and nodded to Raldoron and Thoros, who took up position on either side of their master and threw the bronze doors open.

It was all Ahriman could do not to scream a warning at Magnus. The primarch of the Blood Angels marched through the great portal into the golden light with Fulgrim at his side. They beckoned Magnus to follow them.

Magnus turned to face Ahriman, and he saw the hurt of impending betrayal in his eye.

‘I know, Ahzek. I know,’ said Magnus wearily. ‘I see now why we are here.’

Magnus turned and followed his brothers into the light.

Ahriman followed Magnus through the doors, entering a grand amphitheatre hewn from the sharp-sided inner slopes of the volcano’s crater. Thousands of figures filled its carved black benches, looking down into the amphitheatre. Most were robed adepts of high rank, though Ahriman saw groupings of Astartes scattered throughout the tiers. The stone floor of the amphitheatre was polished black marble, inlaid with a vast eagle of gold.

Sanguinius and Fulgrim led them to the centre of the arena, and Ahriman was struck by the appropriateness of the term, reminded of old Romanii legends that described how captured members of an underground sect had been thrown to the wolves and eaten alive for the perverse enjoyment of the crowd.

Though the world around them was raging in its birthing pangs, the air within the volcano was utterly still, the tempests beyond its tapered peak kept at bay by the hidden workings of the Mechanicum.

Ahriman’s stride faltered as he saw the pyramid-stepped dais at the opposite side of the amphitheatre and the being that awaited them. This was the epicentre of the light and the beacon that had guided them through the maelstrom of spatial interference around Nikaea. So bright that he was almost obscured by his own brilliance, the Emperor of Mankind sat upon a carved throne of soaring eagle’s wings and grasping claws coloured with blood-red rubies. A golden sword lay across his lap, and he bore an eagle-topped orb in his left hand.

Flags of black silk and gold embroidery rippled above the Emperor, borne aloft by silver cherubs with glittering clarions that filled the air with a tuneless fanfare. At once, Ahriman was reminded of the Visconti-Sforza card that Lemuel had asked him catch.

‘Judgement,’ he whispered, wondering how he could have missed so obvious a portent.

Custodes warriors flanked their master and formed an armoured wall before the dais. Ahriman’s doubts fled in the face of so wondrous an individual, for what could trouble a mind so blessed with this vision of perfection before it? He could not see the Emperor’s face, merely impressions. A thunderous brow and stern, patrician features cast in a mould of dashed hope.

‘Clarity, Ahzek,’ said Magnus. ‘Stand with me, and rise into the Enumerations. Retain your keenness of thought.’

Ahriman tore his gaze from the Emperor with effort and stepped alongside Magnus. He whispered the names of the first masters of Tizca over and over until he achieved the peace of the lowest sphere. Reaching that made advancing to the higher spheres easier, and Ahriman’s thoughts returned to something approaching equilibrium with every step he took.

Freed from the clutter of emotion, he turned his attention to studying their surroundings as thoroughly as he might peruse any grimoire. He saw that the Emperor was not alone on the dais. The praetorian beside the Emperor was a warrior Ahriman had met once before on Terra, Constantin Valdor.

From the look of the curling script that snaked all around his armour, Valdor had prospered in the ranks of the Custodes, his proximity to the Emperor surely marking him as its most senior member.

A man in the plain dark robes of an administrator stood next to Valdor, an unassuming man rendered fragile and insignificant next to the giant Custodes warrior. This man too, Ahriman recognised, his long mane of white hair and all too human frailties marking him out as Malcador the Sigillite, the Emperor’s trusted right hand and most valued counsellor.

To have earned a place in such rarefied company marked Malcador out as exceptional, even among a gathering of the most brilliant minds in the galaxy. He had not risen to such prominence by any virtue of eugenics, but by the simple brilliance of his mortal wisdom.

A red-robed fusion of machine parts and organics was surely Kelbor-Hal, the Fabricator General of Mars, but the others on the dais were unknown to him except by reputation: the green-robed Choirmaster of Astropaths, the Master of Navigators and the Lord Militant of the Imperial Army.

The lowest tier of the amphitheatre was punctuated by cantilevered boxes, like those in a playhouse reserved for kings. A short flight of steps led from each box to the floor of the amphitheatre. Figures were sitting in the boxes, but Ahriman couldn’t focus on them or discern any traits of height, bulk or appearance. Instead of defining forms, he saw shadows and reflections, each box filled with bent creases of light. Though there were unmistakably people within each box, technological artifice concealed them from sight.

Falsehoods.

Whoever occupied the boxes retained their anonymity by virtue of chameleonic cloaks that shielded them from the casual sight of observers. But Ahriman was no casual observer, and not even the overwhelming light of the Emperor could completely obscure the titanic forces lurking beneath the falsehoods.

Ahriman turned his attention from the hidden viewers as Sanguinius and Fulgrim reached a raised plinth before the dais. Its only furniture was a simple wooden lectern such as a conductor of an orchestra might use to rest his sheet music upon. Magnus and Ahriman halted before the plinth, and the nine warriors of the Sekhmet stood sentinel with their masters

The Blood Angels and Emperor’s Children dropped to their knees before the Emperor, and the Thousand Sons followed suit. Ahriman saw the dread of this moment in his dark eyes reflected in the polished black floor.

‘All hail the supreme Master of Mankind,’ said Sanguinius, his soft voice filling the amphitheatre with its quiet strength. ‘I present before you, Magnus the Red, Primarch of the Thousand Sons and Lord of Prospero.’

‘Rise, my sons,’ said a voice that could only be the Emperor’s. Ahriman had not seen him speak, but a reverent silence filled the amphitheatre, an utter absence of sound that seemed impossible with so many thousands gathered here.

Ahriman rose to his feet as Malcador the Sigillite descended the steps of the dais, bearing an eagle-topped sceptre that Ahriman recognised as belonging to the Emperor. It dwarfed the man, but Malcador appeared not to notice its bulk. Instead, he carried it as lightly as a walking cane. A pair of acolytes followed the Sigillite, one bearing rolled parchments, the other a smoking brazier in blackened iron tongs.

Malcador crossed the gleaming floor of the amphitheatre and stood before the three primarchs. The Sigillite’s white hair pooled around his shoulders like snowfall and his skin was the texture of old parchment. He was just a man, yet had lived out the spans of many men. Some put this down to the finest and most subtle augmetics or a rigorous regime of juvenat treatment, but Ahriman knew of no means that could sustain a mortal life for so long.

Malcador had the wisdom of aeons in his dark, deep-set eyes, wisdom won over the passage of centuries spent at the side of the greatest practitioner of the arts in the galaxy. That was how Malcador endured, not through cheap tricks or the artifice of technological trinkets, but by the Emperor’s design.

He held the staff up before Magnus, Fulgrim and Sanguinius, and Ahriman saw that his hands were thin, bony and frail. How easy it would be to break them.

‘Fulgrim, Magnus, Sanguinius,’ said Malcador with what Ahriman felt was woefully misplaced familiarity. ‘I’d like you all to place your right hand upon the staff, if you please.’

All three primarchs did so, sinking to their knees so their heads were level with Malcador’s. The venerable sage smiled before continuing.

‘Do you all swear that you shall do honour to your father? In sight of those assembled here on Nikaea, will you solemnly swear that you will speak the truth as it is known to you? Will you do glory to your Legions and to your brothers by accepting the judgement this august body shall reach? Do you swear this upon the staff of the father who sired you, schooled you and watches over you in this hour of upheaval and change?’

Ahriman listened to the core of the Sigillite’s words, seeing past the fine homilies and noble ideals to the truth beneath. This was no simple Oath of the Moment; this was an oath sworn by a defendant on trial for his life.

‘Upon this staff I swear it,’ intoned Fulgrim.

‘By the blood in my veins I swear it,’ said Sanguinius.

‘I swear to uphold all that has been said upon this staff,’ said Magnus.

‘Let it be so recorded,’ replied Malcador with a stiff formality that went against his normally affable demeanour. His acolytes stepped in towards the kneeling primarchs, the first unrolling a slender parchment with the words Malcador had said written upon them. He held it pressed flat to Magnus’s vambrace while the second ladled a blob of hot wax from his brazier and poured it onto the parchment. This was then embossed with an iron stamp bearing the eagle and crossed lightning bolts seal of the Emperor. The servitors repeated this with Fulgrim and Sanguinius, and when they were done they retreated behind Malcador.

‘There,’ said the Sigillite. ‘Now we can begin.’

Hooded adepts led the Thousand Sons to the box on the lower tiers of the amphitheatre above where they had entered. Magnus and his warriors took their places within the box as Fulgrim and Sanguinius were led to their seats. Excited conversation began once more.

Ahriman found himself drawn inexorably to the Emperor. High in the Enumerations, he was freed from the impact of emotion, and found he could see the Master of Mankind clearly, reading the reluctance etched into his regal features.

‘He doesn’t want this,’ said Ahriman.

‘No,’ agreed Magnus. ‘Others have clamoured for this, and the Emperor has no choice but to appease his supporters.’

‘Clamoured for what?’ asked Ahriman. ‘Do you know what is going on?’

‘Not entirely,’ hedged Magnus. ‘As soon as I heard Fulgrim’s voice, I knew something was amiss, but the heart of it eludes me.’

As he spoke, Magnus tapped his thigh, making a series of apparently innocuous movements with his fingers, as though he were loosening stiff joints. Ahriman recognised them as the somatic gestures of the Symbol of Thothmes, the means by which a sanctum could be made secure from observation. It was also a symbol for silence in the presence of the enemy.

Beside the primarch, Mahavastu Kallimakus faithfully recorded their words, his eyes fixed ahead without really seeing what was going on. Only a man completely under the sway of another could be so unaffected by the grand company assembled beneath the stars.

‘In any case,’ said Magnus, ‘I believe we are about to learn the nature of this gathering.’

Ahriman looked back to the floor of the amphitheatre, seeing Malcador standing at the plinth with a sheaf of notes spread on the lectern before him. He cleared his throat, the acoustics of the volcano’s crater amplifying the sound until even those ensconced at the back of the amphitheatre could hear him clearly.

‘My friends, we gather here on the birthing rock of Nikaea to speak on a subject that has vexed the Imperium since its inception. Many of you here today have come not knowing the substance of this conclave or the nature of this debate. Others know it all too well. For that I apologise.’

Malcador consulted his notes once more, squinting as though having trouble reading his own handwriting.

‘And now to the heart of the matter,’ said Malcador. ‘This gathering will address the question of sorcery in the Imperium. Yes, gentlemen, we are here to resolve the Librarian Crisis.’

A gasp of astonishment rippled from the tiers of the amphitheatre, though Ahriman had guessed what the substance of Malcador’s words would be as soon as he mounted the plinth.

‘This is an issue that has divided us for many years, but here we will end that division. Some will maintain that sorcery is the greatest threat facing our dominion of the galaxy, while others will rail against what is said here, believing that fear and ignorance drives their accusers’ hands.

‘Let me assure you all that there is no greater crisis facing the Imperium, and the heroic undertaking upon which we are all embarked is too vital to risk with discord.’

Malcador drew himself up to his full height and said. ‘That being said, who among you shall speak first?’

A gruff voice cut through the chatter from the tiers.

‘I shall speak,’ it said.

Undulant light in the box opposite the Thousand Sons rippled as a powerful figure threw off his falsehood. The warrior’s beard was waxed, and he wore a snarling wolf’s head across his shaved scalp. The skin of its forelegs was draped over his barrel chest and its pelt formed a ragged cloak.

Armoured in stormcloud grey and bearing his eagle-headed staff across one shoulder, Ohthere Wyrdmake, Rune Priest of the Space Wolves, stepped down into the amphitheatre.

Nineteen

Witch hunters
The heart of a primarch
Magnus speaks

The Librarian Crisis: like a guilty secret, it lurked behind the veneer of Unity, a dull ache that the body of the Imperium had tried to forget, like a frightened man ignoring a pain in his belly for fear of what might come to light under the glare of examination. Librarians had first been introduced to the Legions when Magnus, Sanguinius and Jaghatai Khan had proposed a regime of psychic training and development that went hand in hand with the already rigorous creation process of an Astartes warrior.

The Emperor had sanctioned these first experiments as a means of directing and controlling the power of emerging psykers within the Astartes, and Librarius departments were formed within the Thousand Sons, Blood Angels and White Scars to train them. The Librarians they had crafted had proven to be loyal warriors and potent weapons in the Legion’s arsenal. Such was the success of these early experiments that Magnus pushed for his programme to be expanded, allowing other Legions to benefit from his research.

With the success of the early experiments, many primarchs came to see the usefulness of Librarians, and allowed warrior-scholars from the Thousand Sons to form Librarius departments within their ranks. Not all the primarchs saw this as a good thing, and from the earliest days of its inception, the Librarian programme was beset by controversy.

Psychic powers came with dark heritage, for the Great Crusade was rebuilding the lost empire of humanity from the wreckage left after Old Night, a cataclysm brought about, it was claimed, by the uncontrolled emergence of psykers all across the galaxy. As much as Magnus and his compatriots vouchsafed the integrity of the Librarians, they would always bear the stigma of those who had brought humanity to the edge of extinction.

Though there had been squabbles and division over the employment of Librarians, those divisions had been manageable and without real weight. The Thousand Sons heard the accusations levelled at them and stoically ignored them, content that they acted with the Emperor’s blessing.

Like an untreated wound, those divisions had festered and spread, threatening to become a rift that would never be sealed. And so, with Horus Lupercal anointed the Warmaster and his retreat to Terra imminent, the Emperor chose this moment to heal that rift and bring his sons together as one.

History would recall this assembly as the Council of Nikaea.

Others would know it as the trial of Magnus the Red.

Ohthere Wyrdmake crossed the amphitheatre and stepped onto the plinth before the Emperor’s dais. Ahriman willed Wyrdmake to see him, to feel the full weight of his treachery.

‘I trusted him,’ said Ahriman, bunching his fists. ‘He was just using me to betray us. All along, it was a lie.’

His anger fled as another thought intruded.

‘Oh Throne!’ he exclaimed. ‘The things I told him. Our ways and our powers. This is all my fault.’

‘Calm yourself, Ahzek,’ cautioned Magnus. ‘Do nothing to prove him right. In any case, it was I who urged you to place your trust in Wyrdmake. If this travesty of a conclave is anyone’s fault it is mine for not giving credence to the strength of my doubters.’

Ahriman forced himself back into the higher spheres, focusing on those that enhanced clarity and speed of thought. He kept away from those of empathy and strength.

Wyrdmake lifted his wolf-helmed head to face the glares of the Thousand Sons, his lined face pulled into a scowl of primal loathing. Such was its venom, Ahriman wondered how he could not have seen so brutal and violent a core to the Rune Priest. He had always known the Space Wolves were a butcher’s blade of a Legion, powerful and unsubtle, but to see that so clearly defined on one man’s face was still a shock.

‘I will not waste time with fancy words,’ said Wyrdmake. ‘I am called Ohthere Wyrdmake of the Space Wolves, and I fought in the murder-make with the Thousand Sons on Shrike. I stood alongside its warriors on the baked salt flats of Aghoru, and I name them a coven of warlocks, every one of them a star-cunning sorcerer and conjurer of unclean magic. That is all I have to say, and I swear its truth upon my oath as a warrior of Leman Russ.’

Ahriman was astonished at the archaic wording of the accusation. Was this the forgotten ages, when men were ruled by superstition and fear of the dark? He cast around the amphitheatre, horrified at the sagely nodding heads and expressions of outrage directed their way.

Malcador stood at the edge of the dais and rapped his staff on its marble floor. All eyes turned upon him.

‘You level a terrible accusation upon your brother Legion, Ohthere Wyrdmake,’ said Malcador. ‘Are there any who substantiate your claims?’

‘Aye, Sigillite, there are,’ replied Wyrdmake.

‘Who stands with this accusation?’ called Malcador.

‘I do,’ said Mortarion, emerging from beneath a falsehood and revealing his identity to the onlookers. As Ohthere Wyrdmake returned to his seat, Mortarion walked to the centre of the amphitheatre. Whether by coincidence or design, the Death Lord took exactly twenty-eight paces from the podium, and Ahriman again saw the recurrence of the number seven. Mortarion was clad exactly as he had been on Ullanor, as though he had been waiting for this moment since then.

Before Mortarion could speak, Magnus rose to his feet and slammed his hand down on the obsidian coping before him.

‘Is this what passes for due process?’ demanded Magnus. ‘Am I to be tried by faceless observers who hide behind their falsehoods. If any man dares accuse me, let him speak to my face.’

Malcador rapped his staff once more and said, ‘The Emperor has commanded it, Magnus. No man’s testimony is to be corrupted by fear of whose eyes are upon him.’

‘It is all too easy to hide behind cloaks of anonymity and cast your venom. Far harder to look the object of your wrath in the eye while you do it.’

‘You will have your chance to speak, Magnus. No decision will be made until all those who wish to speak have done so. I promise you,’ said Malcador, adding. ‘Your father promises you.’

Magnus shook his head as he returned to his seat, his anger still simmering.

Mortarion had not moved during Magnus’s outburst, as though his brother primarch’s outrage was an inconsequential thing, something to be endured for the brief annoyance it caused. Ahriman dearly wished he could summon Aaetpio, but sensed the ensuing conflagration would be akin to letting a Pyrae Zealator loose in a promethium-soaked warehouse.

Mortarion bowed curtly to the Emperor and began his oration.

‘Brother Malcador claims that his issue has vexed the Imperium,’ said Mortarion, his rustle-soft tones like the dry hiss of wind over aeons-old sand dunes, ‘but he is wrong to believe there is anything complex about the issue. I have seen the devastation that unchecked sorcery leaves in its wake, worlds burned to cinders, populations enslaved and monsters unleashed. Sorcery brought these worlds to ruin, sorcery wielded by men who peered too deeply into dark places they should have known to leave well alone.

‘We all know of the horror of Old Night, but I ask you this simple question: what brought about that galactic holocaust? Psykers. Uncontrolled psykers. The threat of these people is horribly real, and you all know the danger they represent. Some of you may even have seen it first-hand. The psy-engines and occullum of Terra search out the latent witch-genes among humanity and the Black Ships of the Silent Sisterhood trawl the stars for these dangerous individuals. Did the Emperor, beloved by all, build these machines for no reason? No, they were built to protect us from these dangerous mutants, using their powers in service of their selfish ends.

‘That is the difference. Where an astrotelepath or Navigator uses his powers for the good of others, allowing distant worlds to communicate or guiding the Expeditionary Fleets of the Imperium across the stars, the sorcerer uses his power for personal gain, for earthly power and dominance.

‘Yes, the Imperium needs certain empowered individuals, but only those sanctioned and rigidly controlled. We know where power unchecked inevitably leads. You have all heard the stories of Old Night, but who among you has really seen what that means?’

Mortarion swung his manreaper, the deathly haft finally coming to rest upon his shoulder.

‘The Death Guard have seen,’ said Mortarion, and Ahriman wanted to laugh at his absurd theatrics. Though Mortarion played the role of the outraged righteous man, he was relishing his part in what he saw as the downfall of the Thousand Sons.

‘On Kajor my Legion encountered a warrior race of humans that had fallen to barbarism. Extensive orbital surveys detected no trace of advanced technology, yet it took my Legion nearly six months to bring Kajor to submission. Why? They were savages, armed with little more than blades and crude flintlock carbines. How could such a feral race of savages hold the Death Guard at bay for so long?’

Mortarion paced as he spoke, the haft of the manreaper marking time to his steps with a solid tunk every step he took. ‘They held us at bay because they had fell powers and unseen allies. Every night, creatures of witchery hunted in the shadows and killed for the joy of killing. Blood-red hounds stalked the darkness of the forests with savage instinct, and juggernauts of thunder broke our lines with every charge.’

The Death Lord paused a moment to let that last fact sink in. That anything could sunder a Death Guard formation was nothing short of a miracle. Though his desert wheeze was faint, no word of his narration escaped the attention of those gathered in the amphitheatre.

‘My warriors have fought xenos species of every stripe and defeated them, but these were not creatures of flesh and blood. These were summoned into life by Kajori warlocks. These magi conjured lightning from their flesh, set fires with their thoughts and cracked the very earth with their shouted oaths! No power comes without a price, and with every victory we won, we discovered what that truly meant. At the heart of every city we captured, my warriors found vast structures we came to know as Blood Fanes. Each one was a charnel house of bones and death. We destroyed every one, and with each one lost, the strength of our foes waned. In the end, we ground down every ragamuffin force they sent against us. Surrender was not in their blood and they died to a man, destroyed by a ruling caste of warlocks who could not bear to relinquish their power. I still think of Kajor and shudder.’

Mortarion finished his tale in front of the Thousand Sons, the last syllable leaving his lips as he looked up at Magnus.

‘Now I do not accuse my brother of such barbarism, but no evil begins with such monstrous acts. If it did, no sane man would ever consider it. No, it begins slowly, a small step here, a small step there. By such acts is a man’s heart turned black and rotten. A man may begin with noble intentions, believing that such small trespasses are minor things compared to the good he will do at the end of his course, but every act matters, from the smallest to the greatest.

‘Tales of the Thousand Sons’ victories are legion, but so too are the whispers of their sorceries. In the past I have led my warriors into battle alongside those of Magnus and am well aware of what his Legion can do, so I can vouch for the truth of what Ohthere Wyrdmake says. It is sorcery. I have seen it with my own eyes. Like the magi of Kajor, the cult warriors of Magnus conjure lightning and fire to smite their foes, while their brethren crush their enemies with invisible force. I do not lie when I say that I knew fear that day, the fear that I had broken one army of warlocks only to find myself with another at my side.

‘You all know I distrust the institution of Librarians within the ranks of the Astartes, fearing for what the Thousand Sons are trying to seed within our Legions. No Librarians sully the ranks of the Death Guard, and nor will they while I draw breath. I have held my tongue until now, confident that others wiser than I knew best, but I can keep silent no longer. When Brother Russ and Brother Lorgar spoke of the battles fought to subdue the Ark Reach Cluster, I found myself compelled to break my bonds of silence, though it tears my heart to name my own brother a warlock. I cannot stand by and watch his obsessions drive him and his Legion into the abyss of damnation. Know that I speak not out of hatred, but out of the love I have for Magnus. This is all I have to say.’

Mortarion turned and bowed once more to the Emperor before returning to the box he shared with other warriors of his Legion.

Ahriman turned to Magnus, as he heard the high, sharp crack of glass. The heat of Magnus’s anger was radiating from his body. The primarch’s fists were balled on the obsidian coping, and Ahriman saw the volcanic stone had softened and run like the wax of an invocation candle. Blobs of what had once been glassy rock dropped to the floor where they shattered as their customary atomic structure reasserted its reality.

‘My lord?’ hissed Ahriman, all thought of Enumerations forgotten as a hot rush of imparted fury passed between them with a flash of psychic osmosis. He reached out to Magnus, his fingertips lightly brushing his primarch’s arm.

Magnus felt his touch and turned his gaze upon him. Ahriman recoiled from the depthless pit of his eye, the entire structure of it a wheeling lattice of unknown colours, as though every facet of emotion fought for dominance. Ahriman’s heart lurched at the anger and need for vindication he saw there, a furious battle between raging instinct and higher intellect. He saw Magnus’s desire to lash out at his attackers, the animal heart that cursed his brother for his limited understanding. Holding that back was the towering intellect that held court over his base emotions, a mind that had looked deep into the warp and seen it looking back at him.

In that moment of connection, Ahriman looked into the core of his primarch’s incandescent form, the incredible fusion of genius and chained aether bound in the creation of his incredible mind and body. To see the white-hot furnace of so mighty a being’s innermost construction was to stare into the heart of a newly-birthed star.

Ahriman cried out as he saw Magnus’s life unfold in the space of what could have been an instant or could have been a span of aeons. He saw discourses between luminous minds in a cavern far beneath the earth, and a wondrous figure descending to Prospero atop a golden mountain range. All this and more poured into Ahriman without heed that his mind was vastly incapable of absorbing such enormous quantities of memory and knowledge.

He comprehended only a fraction of what he saw, but it was enough to press him back into his seat. Breath laboured in his chest and the awful rush of information pouring into him threatened to unseat his reason.

‘Stop,’ begged Ahriman as more knowledge than had been won by entire civilisations thundered into his mind, squeezing his genhanced faculties to the limits of their endurance. His vision greyed, and blood vessels haemorrhaged in his eyes. His hands trembled, and he felt the onset of a violent grand mal seizure, one that would almost certainly kill him.

Magnus closed his eye, and the raging torrent ceased.

Ahriman gasped as the flood abated, and a drawn out moan escaped his lips. Dread knowledge and buried secrets surged within him, each one a lethally volatile revelation.

He fell from the bench as his overloaded consciousness shut down in an attempt to rebuild the shattered architecture of his mind.

When he opened his eyes, he was lying on one of the padded couches in the vaulted antechamber beneath the amphitheatre. The pain had diminished, but his head felt as though it was encased in an ever-shrinking helmet of invisible steel. Light made his head hurt, and he raised a hand to shield his face. His mouth was dry and a bewildering series of images danced on the periphery of his vision, like a million memories crowding for attention.

‘Enter the sixth Enumeration,’ said a mellifluous voice that calmed and soothed him. ‘It will help you restore your thoughts.’

‘What happened?’ he managed, trying to focus on the owner of the voice. He knew he recognised the speaker, but so many names and faces crowded his mind that he could not sort through them. ‘I don’t remember.’

‘It’s my fault, my son,’ said the voice, and Ahriman was finally able to perceive the figure kneeling beside him. ‘And I am truly sorry.’

‘My lord Magnus?’ he asked.

‘In the flesh, my son,’ said Magnus, helping him sit up.

Bright lights pounded behind his eyes and he groaned, feeling like his brain was trying to press its way out of his skull. The Sekhmet were assembled in the chamber, some drinking from silver goblets, others guarding the doors.

‘You had quite a shock to the system,’ said Magnus. ‘I allowed my anger to get the better of me and let the walls enclosing my essence fall. No one mortal, not even an Astartes, should drink from that well. You’ll have a monstrously sore head, but you will live.’

‘I do not understand,’ said Ahriman, pressing his palms to his temples.

‘Knowledge is like strong liquor, my son,’ said Magnus with a smile. ‘To imbibe too much, too fast, will get you drunk.’

‘I have never been drunk. I don’t think it’s possible for me.’

‘It’s not, not really,’ said Magnus, handing him a goblet of cool water, ‘at least not on alcohol. How much do you remember about what happened?’

‘Not much,’ admitted Ahriman, draining the goblet in a single swallow.

‘That’s probably for the best,’ said Magnus, and Ahriman was not so far removed from his senses that he didn’t catch the relief in his primarch’s voice.

‘I remember the Death Lord,’ said Ahriman, ‘chastising us and twisting facts to suit his accusations, but after that, nothing.’

A sudden thought occurred, and he asked, ‘How long have I been unconscious?’

‘Just over three hours, which was probably a blessing.’

‘How so?’

‘You were spared the tedious parade of close-minded bigots, superstitious fools and throwbacks naming us heretics, sorcerers, blood-mages and sacrificers of virgins. Wyrdmake and Mortarion have assembled quite a coven of witch hunters to condemn us.’

Ahriman rose to his feet, his legs unsteady beneath him as the room spun around him. His enhanced physiology fought to compensate, but it was a losing battle. He would have fallen but for Magnus’s steadying hand. He forced the dizziness down and took a cleansing breath.

Ahriman shook his head. ‘I feel like I have been stepped on by Canis Vertex.’

‘You would,’ said Magnus, ‘but you’ll want to recover your wits quickly, my son.’

‘Why, what is happening?’

‘Our accusers have said their piece,’ said Magnus with relish, ‘and now it’s my turn.’

Expectant silence filled the amphitheatre as Magnus strode towards the plinth. He walked with his head held high and his feathered cloak trailing behind him, looking straight at the Emperor’s dais. This was no walk of the accused, but the stride of the righteous man fighting against unjust accusers.

Ahriman had never been prouder to be one of his Thousand Sons.

Magnus bowed to the Emperor and Malcador then turned to give Fulgrim and Sanguinius bows of comradeship. In a move that spoke of grace in the face of adversity, he also gave Mortarion and Ohthere Wyrdmake courteous acknowledgements. Magnus was every inch the gentleman polymath who never forgot himself, even as his enemies united against him. He mounted the plinth and rested his hands on the wooden lectern.

He paused, sweeping his gaze around the assembled men and women, favouring them all with his attention.

‘The fearful and unbelieving, the abominable and the murderers, the whoremongers and sorcerers, idolaters and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone,’ said Magnus, as though reading from a text. ‘Those words are from a book written thousands of years ago in the forgotten ages, ironically from a passage named Revelations. This is what people thought in those barbaric times. It shows what savagery we came from, and how easy it is for our species to turn upon one another. These words of fear sent thousands to their death over the millennia, and for what? To salve the fears of ignorant men who had not the wit to embrace the power of new ideas.’

Magnus stepped from the plinth, circling the amphitheatre like a lecturing iterator. Where Mortarion had hectored the assembly with venom, Magnus spoke as though every member of the assembly, from the lowliest adept to the Emperor himself, were old friends gathered for a good-natured debate.

‘If one of us were to walk among the people of those times, they would kill us for the technology we possess, thinking it witchcraft or unclean devilment. For example, before the writings of Aristarchus of Samos, men believed that Old Earth was flat, an unbroken plain where the oceans simply fell from the edges. Can you imagine anything more ridiculous? Now we take the sphericity of planets for granted. Much later, priestly scholars taught that Terra was the centre of the cosmos, and that the sun and planets revolved around it. The man who challenged this geocentric foolishness was tried for heresy, and forced to recant his beliefs. Now we know our place in the galaxy.’

Magnus paused before Mortarion, meeting the hostile glare of the Death Lord with one of quiet amusement.

‘From the deepest desire often comes the deadliest hatred,’ he said, ‘and false words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the hearts of all who hear them with evil. Imagine what we will know in a thousand years and think, really think, what we are doing here.’

Magnus turned from Mortarion and walked to the centre of the amphitheatre, lifting his hands out to his sides and slowly turning on the spot as he spoke.

‘Imagine the Imperium of the future, a golden utopia of enlightenment and progress, where the scientist and the philosopher are equal partners with the warrior in crafting a bounteous future. Now imagine the people of that glorious age looking back through the mists of time to this moment. Think what they will know and what they would make of this travesty. They would weep to know how close the flame of enlightenment had come to being snuffed out. The art and science of questioning everything is the source of all knowledge, and to abandon that will doom us to slow decay, an Imperium of darkness and ignorance, where those who dare to pursue knowledge, whatever the cost to themselves, are regarded with suspicion. That is not the Imperium I believe in. That is not the Imperium I wish to be part of.

‘Knowledge is the food of the soul, and no knowledge can be thought of as wrong, so long as each seeker after truth is master of what he learns. Nothing worth knowing can be taught, it must be learned with the blood and sweat of experience, and there are no greater scholars of that ilk than the Thousand Sons. Even as we fight in the forefront of the Emperor’s Crusade we study the things others ignore, questing for knowledge in the places others fear to tread. There are no truths unknown, no secrets too hidden and no paths too labyrinthine for us to follow, for they lead us upwards to enlightenment.

‘Hard-won knowledge is of no value unless it is put into practice. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do!’

Magnus smiled, and Ahriman saw he had won over great swathes watching him.

‘With that in mind, I beg your indulgence a little longer,’ said Magnus, ‘and a tale I will thee tell.’

‘There is an ancient legend of Old Earth that speaks of three men of Aegina, who lived in a cave deep in the mountains,’ said Magnus, with the warmth of a natural storyteller. Though he had heard this story before, Ahriman found himself captivated by Magnus’s voice, the natural charisma that loaded every commanding word.

‘These men lived shut off from the light of the world and they would have lived in permanent darkness but for a small fire that burned in a circle of stones at the heart of the cave. They ate lichen that grew on the walls and drank cold water from an underground stream. They lived, but what they had was not living.

‘Day after day, they sat around the fire, staring into the flickering embers and dancing flames, believing that its light was all the light in the world. The shadows made shapes and patterns on the walls, and this delighted them greatly. In their own way they were happy, moving from day to day without ever wondering what lay beyond their flickering circle of light.’

Magnus paused in his recital, allowing the audience to imagine the scene and picture the dancing shadows on the cave walls.

‘But one day a mighty storm blew over the mountains, but so deep were the men that only the merest breath of it reached their cave. The fire danced in the wind and the men laughed to see new patterns on the wall. The wind died and they went back to contemplating the fire, much as they had always done.

‘But one of the men got up and walked away from the fire, which surprised the other men greatly, and they bade him return to sit with them. This lone man shook his head, for he alone had a thirst to learn more of the wind. He followed it as it retreated from the cave, climbing steep cliffs, crossing chasms and negotiating many perils before he finally saw a faint haze of light ahead of him.

‘He climbed out of the cave, emerging onto the side of the mountain, and looked up at the blazing sun. Its light blinded him and he fell to his knees, overcome by its beauty and warmth. He feared he had burnt out his eyes, but in a little while his vision returned, and he hesitantly looked around him. He had come out of the cave high on the mountain’s flank, and the world was spread out before him in all its glory: glittering green seas and endless fields of golden corn. He wept to see such things, distraught that he had wasted so many years in darkness, oblivious to the glory of the world around him, a world that had been there all along, but which his limited vision had denied him.’

The primarch stopped, looking up to the stars, and his rapt audience followed his gaze, as though picturing the blazing sun of his story.

‘Can you imagine what it felt like?’ asked Magnus, his voice wracked with emotion. ‘To have spent your entire life staring at a small fire and thinking it was the only light in the world, only to be then confronted by the sun? The man knew he had to tell his friends of this miraculous discovery and he made the journey back to the cave where the other men sat, still staring into the fire and smiling vacuously at the shadows on the wall. The man who had seen the sun looked at the place he had called home and saw it for the prison it truly was. He told the others what he had seen, but they were not interested in far-fetched tales of a burning eye in the sky – all they wanted to do was live their lives as they had always lived them. They called him mad and laughed at him, continuing to stare at the fire, as it was the only reality they knew.’

Ahriman had first heard this story as a Philosophus in the Corvidae Temple when Magnus had mentored him prior to facing the Dominus Liminus. He heard the same note of bitterness in the primarch’s voice that he had heard then, a precisely modulated pitch that conveyed the proper measure of anguish and frustration at the blindness of the men in the cave. How, Magnus’s tone said, could anyone turn away from such light once they knew of its existence?

‘The man could not understand his friends’ reluctance to travel to the world above,’ continued Magnus, ‘but he resolved that he would not take their refusal to come with him as an end to the matter. He would show them the light, no matter what, and if they would not come to the light, then he would bring it to them.

‘So the man climbed back to the world of light and began to dig. He dug until he had widened the cave mouth. He dug for a hundred years, and then a hundred more, until he had dug away the top of the mountain. Then he dug downwards, a great pit in the heart of the mountain, until he broke through into the cave where his fellows sat around the fire.’

Magnus fell silent, his words trailing off, though Ahriman knew it was a theatrical pause rather than any real moment of introspection. Knowing how the story ended, Ahriman was not surprised Magnus had stopped here. In the original version of the tale, the man’s friends were so terrified by what they were shown that they killed the man and retreated deeper into the cave with their fire to live their lives in perpetual twilight.

The tale was an allegorical parable on the futility of sharing fundamental truths with those with too narrow perceptions of reality. By telling it selectively, Magnus had broken his covenant with the audience, but none of them would ever know. Instead, he continued his tale with fresh words woven from his imagination.

‘The men were amazed at what he showed them, the light they had been missing for all their lives and the golden joy that could be theirs were they just brave enough to take his hand and follow him. One by one, they climbed from their dark cave and saw the truth of the world around them, all its wonders and all its beauty. They looked back at the dank, lightless cave they had called home and were horrified by how limited their understanding of the world had been. They heaped praise upon the man who had shown them the way to the light, and honoured him greatly, for the world and all its bounty was theirs to explore for evermore.’

Magnus let his new ending wash over the amphitheatre, and no member of the Theatrica Imperialis had given so commanding a performance. A rolling wave of applause erupted from the tiers, and Magnus smiled, the perfect blend of modestly and gratitude. Sanguinius and Fulgrim were on their feet, though Mortarion and the Death Guard remained as stoic as ever.

As pitch-perfect as Magnus’s delivery had been, Ahriman saw that not all of the audience were won over, though it was clear the case against Magnus and the Thousand Sons was no longer as cut and dried as his accusers had hoped.

Magnus raised his hands to quell the applause, as though abashed to be so acclaimed.

‘The man knew he had to show his friends the truth of the world around them,’ he said, ‘and just as it was his duty to save his friends from their dull, sightless existence, it is our duty to do the same for humanity. The Thousand Sons alone of all the Legions have seen the light beyond the gates of the empyrean. That light will free us from the shackles of our mundane perceptions of reality and allow the human race to stand as masters of the galaxy. Just as the men around the fire needed to be shown the glorious future that lay within their grasp, so too does humanity. The knowledge the Thousand Sons are gathering will allow everyone to know what we know, to see as we see. Humanity needs to be led upwards with small steps, with their eyes gradually opened lest the light blind them. That is the ultimate goal of the Thousand Sons. Our future as a race is at stake. My friends, I urge you not to throw away this chance for enlightenment, for we are at a tipping point in the history of the Imperium. Think of the future and how this moment will be judged in the millennia to come.’

Magnus bowed to the cardinal points of the amphitheatre.

‘Thank you for your attention,’ he said. ‘That is all I have to say.’

Twenty

Heresy
The Librarians
Judgement

Magnus poured himself some water, smiling as he paced the reception room beneath the amphitheatre. The Sekhmet stood to attention, each one sensing that this trial would soon be over. Ahriman’s head still ached and the pressure on his thoughts was making him uneasy, as though it would prove too much for his skull to contain.

With the end of Magnus’s performance, Malcador had called a recess to the proceedings. What had begun in betrayal and infamy had come to triumph, for few could fail to be moved by Magnus’s great oration.

‘I will admit to some trepidation when the day’s events became clear to me,’ said Magnus, handing a goblet of water to Ahriman. ‘But I feel confident I have swayed the doubters to our side. Mortarion is too fixed in stone ever to change, but Sanguinius and Fulgrim stand with us. That will count for a great deal.’

‘It will, but many others are concealed behind their falsehoods. The masses are behind us, but the judgement could still go against us. I do not understand why we are even here, it is insulting!’ spat Ahriman, throwing down his goblet.

‘You need to calm yourself, Ahzek,’ said Magnus. ‘There was no choice but to call this conclave. The fearful need reassurance that their voices are being heard. You saw that the Emperor did not want this. Believe me, I feel your anger, but you must keep it in check. It will not serve us here.’

‘I know, but it galls me that our fate rests in the hands of such blinkered fools!’

‘Be careful,’ warned Magnus, moving to stand before him. ‘You will mind your words. You are as dear to me as any son, but I will not stand to hear insults upon my father’s wisdom. Give in to such impulses and you will only confirm everything they say about us.’

‘I apologise, my lord,’ said Ahriman, trying to will himself into the lower Enumerations, but the calm of the spheres eluded him. ‘I mean no disrespect, but it is hard to imagine that others cannot see what we see, and almost impossible to remember what it was like not to know the things we know.’

‘The curse of assumed knowledge is a challenge all enlightened individuals face,’ said Magnus, softening his tone. ‘We must remember that we once walked in their shoes and were blind to the truths of the universe. Even I knew nothing of the Great Ocean until my father revealed its glory to me.’

‘No,’ whispered Ahriman with sudden, instinctive clarity. ‘You already knew of it. When the Emperor showed you its wonders and dangers you feigned not to know, but you had already peered into its depths and seen them.’

Magnus was at his side in an instant, towering over him with his flesh and eye a seething crimson. Ahriman felt the searing heat of Magnus’s presence, realising that he had crossed a line without knowing it even existed. In that moment, he knew he understood very little about his primarch, and wished that every scrap of knowledge that had passed between them earlier could be washed away.

‘Never say that again, ever,’ said Magnus, his eye boring into him like a diamond drill.

Ahriman nodded, but behind Magnus’s anger was something else, a wordless fear of buried secrets returning to the light. Ahriman couldn’t see it, but he saw an image of the silver oakleaf cluster he wore on his shoulder guard.

‘Ohrmuzd? Throne, what did you do?’ asked Ahriman, as a memory that did not belong to him threatened to surface in his mind. He saw a dreadful bargain, a pact sealed with something older and more monstrous than anything Ahriman could ever imagine.

‘I did what I had to,’ snapped Magnus, forestalling any further words. ‘That is all you need to know. Trust me, Ahzek, what was done was done for the right reasons.’

Ahriman wanted to believe that, he needed to believe it, but there was no disguising the vanity and obsession that lay behind the secret bargain. He sought to pierce the shrouds and veils of self-justification and perceive the dark secret that lay beyond, but Magnus plucked the stolen memory from his mind.

‘What was it?’ demanded Ahriman. ‘Tell me. What are you hiding from us?’

‘Nothing you need know about,’ said Magnus, flushed and on the verge of… On the verge of what? Anger? Guilt?

‘You have no idea,’ he continued. ‘You can’t know what it was like. The degradation of the gene-seed was too extreme and the corruption in the damaged helices was too complex and mutating too quickly to stabilise. It was… It was…’

‘It was what?’ asked Ahriman when Magnus didn’t continue.

‘The future,’ whispered Magnus, his complexion ashen. ‘I see it. It’s here. It’s…’

Magnus never finished his sentence.

Like the mightiest tree in the forest felled by a single blow, the primarch of the Thousand Sons dropped to his knees.

As Magnus fell, Ahriman saw a storm of amber fire raging in his eye.

Light filled his vision, fireflies that burst briefly to life and then vanished.

Magnus opened his eyes to see sparks flying as stone chipped stone, and primitive smithing tools shaped a blade of napped flint. He saw the sword take shape, the workmanship little better than that of the pre-Neanderthal civilisations of Old Earth. Yet this was no human artifice, and this craftsmanship was sophisticated and undoubtedly alien. The proportions of the blade and grip were subtly wrong, the hands that fashioned them blue black and downy with a fine comb of russet hair.

Nor was this a normal blade, it was sentient. The word didn’t fit, but it was the most appropriate one Magnus could find. It was forged by alien metallurgists in ways too inhuman to be understood, imbued with the power of the fates.

It was a nemesis weapon, crafted to slay without mercy.

Magnus recoiled from the blade, horrified that an intelligent race would dare craft such a dreadful tool of destruction. What reason could there be to bring such a vile thing into being?

Was this the future or the past? It was impossible to tell with any certainty. Here in the Great Ocean (for where else could he be?) time was a meaningless framework that gave mortal lives a veneer of meaning. This was a realm of immortals, for nothing could ever really live or die here. Energy was eternal, and as one form ended, another rose in a never-ending cycle of change.

No sooner had he considered the question of past and future than the image splintered into a million shards, spinning in the darkness like a microscopically magnified view of an exploding diamond.

Magnus had ventured deeper into the Great Ocean than anyone other than the Emperor, and he had no fear of his surroundings, only an insatiable desire to know the truth of what he was seeing. Spiteful laughter, like that of a hidden observer, wove around him with the ethereal echoes of a long-departed jester. From its resonances, a chamber resolved out of the darkness, a fire-blackened place of reeking evil and blood.

Arterial spray looped over the walls, and patterns of acrid quicklime on the floor stung his nostrils. Figures moved in the darkness, ghostly and too faint to make out. Magnus reached out to a figure garbed in armour the colour of quarried stone, but the vision faded before he could see more than the tattoos covering the warrior’s scalp.

His odyssey continued, and Magnus allowed himself to be borne upon the rolling tides of the Great Ocean. Briefly, he wondered what had become of his corporeal body, for he knew he had not deliberately loosed his body of light from his flesh. That this had come upon him without warning was unusual, but fear would only make any phantom hazards more tangible.

He saw worlds on fire, worlds wracked with endless battles and entire systems ablaze with the plague of war. This was a vision of things that could never be, for these worlds were battlegrounds of Astartes, slaughterhouses where brother warriors who had marched from Terra to the edges of known space tore at each other with blades and fists. As distasteful as such visions were, Magnus did not let them affect him. The Great Ocean was a place where anything was possible and its capricious tides ever sought to unseat a traveller’s equilibrium.

The abominable stench of the charnel house rose in an overpowering wave, a potent cocktail of rotting organic matter and escaping corpse gases. Magnus felt his gaze drawn to a forsaken world, a world once verdant and fecund, but which had fallen to disease and corruption. He saw it had not gone without a fight, its landscape bearing the scars of the war waged to subdue it. The battle had been fought on the microscopic level, the armies of bacteria and virus numbering in their trillions.

Every living thing on this world was now a factory for disease, where aggressive microbes bent their mindless wills towards reproduction and spreading their infection further.

The planet’s ending had never been in doubt, but it could no more surrender to its fate than the corruption could stop its destructive assault. It had become a world of stagnation, its marshes and forests turgid oceans of filth and oozing pestilence.

Magnus saw a rearing mass of metal in the heart of a swamp, the rusted hulk of a starship that rose like an iron cliff or an ocean-going vessel sinking to its doom. Putrescent things made their homes in its rusted superstructure, and something monstrous made its lair in its dead heart. Magnus had no clue what that might be, but saw the glitter sheen of metal and knew that the nemesis blade of the alien craftsman had found its way here.

The thought filled Magnus with panic as he heard the roar of gunfire and saw a host of marching warriors in the livery of the Luna Wolves fighting towards the crashed starship. He shouted and screamed at them, seeing his brother at the forefront of his warriors. Horus Lupercal was oblivious to him, for this was not reality, merely a fleeting glimpse of a future that might never come to pass.

The chronology of events fractured, like individual frames of a picter stitched together at random: a friend cast aside and now a bitter foe; a throne room or a command bridge; a beloved son cut down by a traitor’s sword, and the steeldust shimmer of a blade that would strike the blow to change the universe; a beloved father cut down by a rebellious son.

He saw a towering temple, a giant octagonal building with eight fire-topped towers surrounding the dome at its centre. Multitudes gathered before this house of false gods, and warriors in the ceramite plates of Astartes gathered before a mighty bronze gateway. A wide pool glistened like oil and two warriors argued at its side as the crescent reflection of the new moon wavered in the water.

Booming laughter broke the scene apart, and Magnus saw Horus Lupercal once more, a titanic figure of awesome potency. Yet this was not his brother, this was a monster, a primal force of destruction that sought to put the great works of his father to the flame. With every sweep of Horus’s clawed hand worlds died, consumed in the flames of war that spread across the face of the galaxy like a rapacious infection. An insane conductor weaving a symphony of destruction, Horus systematically reduced the Imperium to cinders, turning brother upon brother as they bled in the carnage.

Magnus peered into the thing that wore Horus’s face, but saw nothing of his brother’s nobility or regal bearing, only hatred, spite and regret. The thing’s gaze met the twin orbs of Magnus with malicious glee, and Magnus saw that Horus’s eyes were amber pits of fire.

‘How does it feel, brother?’ asked Horus. ‘To look upon the world as you once did?’

‘As it always does, Horus,’ replied Magnus. ‘Here I am as I will myself to be.’

‘Ah, vanity,’ said Horus, ‘the simplest temptation to set.’

‘What are you?’ demanded Magnus. ‘You are not my brother.’

‘Not yet, but soon,’ answered the monster with a maddening grin. ‘The new moon waits on Khenty-irty to begin his transformation into Mekhenty-er-irty.’

‘More riddles?’ said Magnus. ‘You are nothing more than a void predator, a collection of base impulses and desire given form. And I have heard that name before.’

‘But you don’t know what it means.’

‘I will,’ said Magnus. ‘No knowledge is hidden from me.’

‘Is that what you think?’

‘Yes. My brother would never unleash this madness.’

‘Then you don’t know him, for it is happening right now. The pawns of the Primordial Annihilator are already in motion, setting the traps of pride, vanity and anger to ensnare the egos of the knights required to topple the king.’

‘You lie.’

‘Do I?’ laughed Horus. ‘Why would I attempt to deceive you, brother? You are Magnus of the Thousand Sons. There are no truths unknown to you, no knowledge hidden from you. Isn’t that what you said? You can see the truth of this, I know you can. Horus Lupercal will betray you all. He will set the Imperium ablaze in his quest for power. Nothing will survive; all will become a nuclear cauldron of Chaos, from the supermassive heart of the galaxy to the guttering stars in its halo.’

‘Where will this miraculous transformation take place?’ asked Magnus, fighting to keep the growing horror from his voice.

‘On a little moon,’ giggled the monster, ‘in the Davin system.’

‘Even if I believe you, why tell me?’

‘Because it has already begun, because I enjoy your torment, and because it is too late to stop this,’ said Horus.

‘We’ll see about that,’ promised Magnus.

He opened his eye, and the Horus monster was gone.

Ahriman and the Sekhmet surrounded him, their faces filled with dread.

‘My lord?’ cried Ahriman. ‘What happened?’

His hand flashed to his face, where the sacrifice he had made so long ago had once sat. The skin was smooth and unblemished with no lingering trace of the completeness his body of light enjoyed in the Great Ocean.

Magnus shrugged off the Sekhmets’ help and climbed to his feet. He could already feel the sands of time moving across the face of the galaxy, and had a brief flash of a chiming bronze timepiece with a cracked glass face and mother of pearl hands.

‘We need to go,’ he said, reacquainting himself with his surroundings by focusing on the trails of spilled water.

‘Go?’ asked Ahriman. ‘Go where?’

‘We must return to Prospero. There is much to do and precious little time.’

‘My lord, we cannot,’ said Ahriman.

‘Cannot?’ thundered Magnus. ‘Not a word you should use in reference to me, Ahzek. I am Magnus the Red. Nothing is beyond my powers.’

Ahriman shook his head and said, ‘That is not what I mean, my lord. We are summoned back to the amphitheatre. We are called to judgement.’

The stars had moved on, though sulphurous clouds obscured many of them. Ahriman had the powerful sense of their shame, as though they wished to turn their faces from events below. Ever since Magnus had fallen, Ahriman had sought to recover the memory that lurked just on the edge of his consciousness.

Try as he might, it would not come, and though he knew trying to force it would only cause it to recede, his need to know was greater than his capacity for reasoned thought. Whatever Magnus had done involved his twin brother, but the truth was locked in the deepest well of buried memory.

A sombre mood had fallen upon the thousands gathered within the crater of the volcano, in stark contrast to the ebullience that had filled it as Magnus had spoken.

‘Why do I feel like I have already been condemned?’ asked Magnus, looking over at the dais at the opposite end of the amphitheatre, where Malcador conversed with the Emperor.

‘Maybe we have,’ answered Ahriman, seeing Mortarion’s look of triumphant vindication. Sanguinius had ashen tears painted on his cheeks, and Fulgrim could not look at them, his sculpted features tormented with guilt.

‘I care not anymore,’ hissed Magnus. ‘Let us be done with this and begone.’

The atmosphere hung on a knife edge, like a bubble stretched to the point where its surface tension could no longer maintain its integrity. Not a single voice could be heard, only the rustle of hessian robes and bated breath.

That silence was broken when Malcador stood and moved to the front of the Emperor’s dais, rapping his staff three times upon the marble.

‘Friends, this council is almost at an end,’ he began. ‘We have heard learned discourse from both sides of the divide, but the time has come to pronounce judgement and restore our harmony. With great solemnity has this matter been weighed, for it is an issue that could tear us asunder if we are not united. I ask now, would any here gathered add their voices to what we have already heard? Speak now or forever keep your counsel.’

Ahriman scanned the crowd, hoping either Sanguinius or Fulgrim or some as yet unrevealed ally might emerge from beneath a falsehood to stand with them. No one moved, and he had all but given up hope of salvation when he saw a power-armoured individual bearing a long, skull-topped staff rise from his seat in the high tiers.

‘I, Targutai Yesugei, of the Borjigin Qongqotan clan would speak,’ said the warrior, his voice gruff and heavily accented with the distinctive final obstruent devoicing and vowel shortening of a native Chogorian.

Targutai Yesugei’s armour was winter white and trimmed with crimson, the shoulder guard bearing the golden lightning bolt of the White Scars. His staff marked him out as a one of the Khan’s Librarians. His scalp was shaven, save for a long scalp lock worn like a topknot, and a crystalline hood rose from the shoulders of his armour, framing a tanned, weather-beaten face criss-crossed with ritual scars.

At a nod from Malcador, Yesugei made his way to the floor of the amphitheatre, walking with the calm dignity of the noble savage.

Nor was he alone.

From scattered positions all around the amphitheatre, robed Astartes Librarians made their way to join the White Scar warrior, and Ahriman’s heart leapt as he saw the heraldry of the Dark Angels, the Night Lords, Ultramarines and Salamanders.

The twelve Librarians congregated before the Emperor’s dais, and Ahriman instantly knew that none of these warriors had ever met, just as he knew that their choosing to speak at this moment had not been planned.

‘Twelve of them standing before their king,’ said Magnus with a soft smile. ‘How apt. As all the ancient gods were attended by twelve knights, so too are we.’

The Librarians knelt before the Emperor, their heads bowed, and Ahriman studied the symbols stitched on their surplices.

‘Elikas, Zharost, Promus, Umojen,’ said Ahriman, ‘these men are the Chief Librarians of their Legions.’

‘And they side with us,’ said Magnus in wonder.

Targutai Yesugei rose to his feet, and the Emperor gave a brief nod that spoke volumes.

The warrior of the White Scars mounted the plinth, and Ahriman was impressed by the solemnity he saw in Yesugei’s eyes, a profound wisdom won through centuries of study and hard-fought battles.

‘I am White Scar, Stormseer of Jaghatai Khan,’ he said, ‘and I speak with truth as my guide. This I swear on honour of my clan, may my brothers cut out my heart if I lie. I listen to words said by honourable men, but I not see as they see. They look with eyes blind to world around them. They understand with minds not willing to see truth of this galaxy.

‘The warrior chosen by Stormseers is not evil, and nor is power he wields. He is weapon, like Land Raider and bolt gun. What fool casts aside weapon before battle? Like all weapons, it is dangerous without much training, and all here know danger of rogue psyker; Lord Mortarion tell us of it. But what is more danger, a trained warrior who understand his powers or a warrior with power who knows nothing of its use? Like all things, power must be yoked to its true purpose before it can be unleashed. The psyker must be moulded by men of great skill as a sword is crafted by forger of steel. He must be taught way of the Stormseer and must prove his worth many times before he may bear the skull staff of the warrior-seer.’

Yesugei lifted his staff and aimed it towards the green-robed Choirmaster of Astropaths and black-suited Master of Navigators, sweeping it across the width of the dais. The gesture was subtle, for it also included the Emperor.

‘To damn psykers as one evil is to forget how Imperium depend on them. Without mind-singers each world is adrift and alone, without star-seekers there is no travel between them. Men who speak against Primarch Magnus speak with the blurred vision of ancients. They do not see consequences of what they seek. What they ask for will doom us all. My truth, I pledge on this oath-sworn staff. If any doubt me, I stand ready to cross blades with them.’

Targutai Yesugei bowed once more and stepped from the podium, returning to the ranks of his brother Librarians. Ahriman looked over at Magnus. Like him, his primarch was moved by Yesugei’s words, captivated by their simple honesty and by the recognition of the hypocrisy inherent in the accusations levelled against the Thousand Sons.

‘Surely the council cannot find against us now,’ said Ahriman.

‘We will see,’ replied Magnus as the Emperor rose from his throne.

Thus far, the Emperor of Mankind had viewed the conclave’s proceedings from afar, an observer who hears all and deliberates without giving any clue to his thoughts. Now he moved to the edge of the dais, his armour shimmering in the light as the stars shone brightly once again. Ahriman tried to shift his consciousness into the Enumerations to keep his perceptions clear, but the power of the Emperor was too great and too magnificent to ever truly allow clarity of thought.

Every soul in the amphitheatre stared in wonder at this paragon of all that was good in humanity, the apotheosis of mankind’s dreams and hopes. His every word was seized upon and written in a thousand places, like the words once transcribed as the faithful recitation of a god from the forgotten ages. The scrivener harness of Mahavastu Kallimakus clattered to life in anticipation.

Thoughts of Kallimakus were forgotten as a warm sensation of approbation washed over him. Ahriman recognised this feeling for what it was, the influencing of another person by instilling a measure of your psyche into their aura. Ahriman could perform a similar feat, though on a handful of people at most. To reach out to so many thousands at once spoke of power beyond measure.

The Emperor’s sword was drawn, and his gaze locked with that of Magnus, as though they engaged in silent communion unheard by any others. Ahriman tore his gaze from the Emperor and saw that Magnus was pinned to his seat, his body rigid and his skin pale. His eye was tightly closed, and Ahriman saw an almost imperceptible tremor in his flesh, as though powerful currents of electricity were tearing through him.

‘If I am guilty of anything, it is the pursuit of knowledge,’ hissed Magnus through clenched teeth. ‘I am its master, I swear it.’

Ahriman could hear no more, for Magnus suddenly drew a gasping breath, like a drowning man upon finding the surface of an ocean.

‘Hear now the words of my ruling,’ said the Emperor, and the amphitheatre filled with the sound of scratching quills. ‘I am not blind to the needs of the Imperium, but nor am I blind to the realities of the hearts of men. I hear men speak of knowledge and power as though they are abstract concepts to be employed as simply as a sword or gun. They are not. Power is a living force, and the danger with power is obsession. A man who attains a measure of power will find it comes to dominate his life until all he can think of is the acquisition of more. Nearly all men can stand adversity, but few can stand the ultimate test of character, that of wielding power without succumbing to its darker temptations.’

As much as the Emperor was addressing the entire amphitheatre, Ahriman had the powerful sense that his words were intended solely for Magnus.

‘Peering into the darkness to gain knowledge of the warp is fraught with peril, for it is an inconstant place of shifting reality, capricious lies and untruths. The seeker after truth must have a care he is not deceived, for false knowledge is far more dangerous than ignorance. All men wish to possess knowledge, but few are willing to pay the price. Always men will seek to take the short cut, the quick route to power, and it is a man’s own mind, not his enemy or foe, that will lure him to evil ways. True knowledge is gained only after the acquisition of wisdom. Without wisdom, a powerful person does not become more powerful, he becomes reckless. His power will turn on him and eventually destroy all he has built.

‘I have walked paths no man can know and faced the unnameable creatures of the warp. I understand all too well the secrets and dangers that lurk in its hidden darkness. Such things are not for lesser minds to know; no matter how powerful or knowledgeable they believe themselves to be. The secrets I have shared serve as warnings, not enticements to explore further. Only death and damnation await those who pry too deeply into secrets not meant for mortals.’

Ahriman blanched at the Emperor’s words, feeling their awful finality. The promise of extinction was woven into every word.

‘I see now I have allowed my sons to delve too profoundly into matters I should never have permitted them to know even existed. Let it be known that no one shall suffer censure, for this conclave is to serve Unity, not discord. But no more shall the threat of sorcery be allowed to taint the warriors of the Astartes. Henceforth, it is my will that no Legion will maintain a Librarius department. All its warriors and instructors must be returned to the battle companies and never again employ any psychic powers.’

Gasps of astonishment spread through the amphitheatre, and Ahriman felt his skin chill at the absolute nature of the Emperor’s pronouncement. After everything that had been said, he couldn’t believe the judgement had gone against them.

The Emperor wasn’t finished, and thunder rolled in his voice.

‘Woe betide he who ignores my warning or breaks faith with me. He shall be my enemy, and I will visit such destruction upon him and all his followers that, until the end of all things, he shall rue the day he turned from my light.’

Twenty-One

Something of my own
Paradise
Treachery revealed

Lemuel found Mahavastu Kallimakus on the edge of the great walls of Tizca. The old man was asleep in a padded chair with a sketchpad open across his lap. Lemuel kept his footsteps light, not wishing to wake his friend if he didn’t need to. The five months on Prospero had been good for Mahavastu, the fresh sea air and temperate climate restoring his ravaged physique and putting fresh meat on his bones.

Prospero had been good for them all. Lemuel had shed much of his extra weight and now carried himself with a confidence born of knowing that he was looking better than he had in decades. Whether that was down to the agreeable lifestyle on Prospero or his growing skills in aetheric manipulation, he couldn’t say.

Lemuel cast his eyes out over the view, alternating with glances down at the charcoal lines on Mahavastu’s sketchpad. The view was one of rugged splendour, high mountains, sweeping forests and a deep blue sky of incredible width. In the far distance, a jagged series of spires indicated the ruins of one of Prospero’s lost cities of the ancients. Mahavastu’s rendition of the view was less than impressive.

‘I told you I was no artist,’ said Mahavastu, without opening his eyes.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Lemuel. ‘It has some rustic charm to it.’

‘Would you hang it on your wall?’ ‘A Kallimakus original?’ asked Lemuel, taking a seat. ‘Of course. I’d be mad not to.’

Mahavastu chuckled dryly.

‘You always were a terrible liar, Lemuel,’ he said.

‘It’s what makes me such a good friend. I’ll always tell the truth, because you’ll always know if I don’t.’

‘A good friend and a great remembrancer,’ said Mahavastu, taking Lemuel’s hand. The old man’s fingers were like twigs and without strength. ‘Stay awhile if you have the time.’

‘I’m meeting Kallista and Camille for lunch later, but I always have time for you, old friend. So, leaving aside your obvious talent, what’s brought the artistic urge out in you?’

Mahavastu looked down at the sketchpad and smiled ruefully. He flipped it closed, and Lemuel saw a look of aching sadness on the old man’s face.

‘I wanted something for myself,’ he said, with a furtive glance over his shoulder. ‘Something I knew I had done. Do you understand?’

‘I think so,’ said Lemuel guardedly, remembering the panicked words they had exchanged on Aghoru before the Thousand Sons’ dreadful battle with the Syrbotae giants in the Mountain.

‘I remember leaving Prospero with the restored Legion so long ago,’ said Mahavastu. ‘It was a glorious day, Lemuel. You would have wept to see it. Thousands upon thousands of warriors marching through the marbled processionals with rose petals falling from an empty sky and the cheers of the populace ringing in our ears. Magnus honoured me with a place in the triumphal march, and I have never felt such pride as I did that day. I could not believe that I, Mahavastu Kallimakus, was to chronicle the annals of Magnus the Red. There could be no greater honour.’

‘I wish I could have seen it, but I doubt I was even born then.’

‘Most likely not,’ agreed Mahavastu, with tears in his eyes. ‘A Legion on the verge of destruction had been reunited with its lost primarch. He had saved them from the abyss. I treasure that memory, but the time since then feels like another has lived my life. I remember fragments, but none of it feels real. I have filled a library’s worth of books, but they are not my words. I cannot even read them.’

‘That’s what I came to tell you, my friend,’ said Lemuel. ‘I think I may be able to help you with that. Remember I said I had a partial copy of the Liber Loagaeth in my library back on Terra, but how I’d never been able to source the Claves Angelicae, its twin book with the letter tables?’

‘Yes, I remember.’

‘I have found a copy.’

‘You have? Where?’

‘In the library of the Corvidae,’ said Lemuel. ‘Ever since we returned to Prospero, Ahriman has stepped up my training. He’s had me practically chained to a desk under the tutelage of Ankhu Anen, who is a scholar quite beyond anything I’ve ever experienced. I have to admit, I didn’t care for him when I first met him, but he’s been of immense help in my studies. I asked him about the book and he had a library servitor fetch it as though it was nothing at all.’

‘Then you intend to translate what I have been writing?’

‘In time, yes,’ said Lemuel. ‘It’s a difficult language to crack, even with the letter keys. There are whole word groups that don’t look like real language at all. I’m going to see if Camille can use her psychometry to help me with it.’

Mahavastu sighed and said, ‘I wish you wouldn’t.’

Lemuel was taken aback.

‘You don’t want to know what you’ve been writing all this time?’ he asked.

‘I think I am afraid to know.’

‘Afraid of what?’

‘I am a scribe, Lemuel. I am an exceptional scribe, and I do not make mistakes. You of all people know that. So why appoint me as a scribe only to prevent me from knowing what it is I write. I believe the words I have written are not meant for mortal eyes to see.’

Lemuel took a deep breath, shocked at the fear he heard in Mahavastu’s voice.

‘I am an old man, Lemuel, and I am tired of living like this. I want to leave the Crusade and return to my homeland. I want to see Uttarpatha before I die.’

‘The records of the Crusade will be poorer for your absence, my friend.’

‘Come with me, Lemuel,’ urged Mahavastu, keeping his voice low. ‘There is a curse upon this world, you must know that.’

‘A curse? What are you talking about?’

‘This world was destroyed once before through the arrogance of its people, and all human history tells us that men do not learn from their mistakes, even those as advanced as the Thousand Sons.’

‘The people back then didn’t understand their abilities,’ said Lemuel. ‘The Thousand Sons have mastered their powers.’

‘Do not be so sure, Lemuel,’ warned Mahavastu. ‘If they had truly mastered their powers, why would the Emperor forbid them to wield them? Why would he have ordered them back to Prospero except to more fully dismantle their Librarius?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Lemuel, ‘but how galling must it be to be told that all the great things they’ve done and all the knowledge they’ve accumulated is worthless and forbidden?’

‘That is exactly what I mean,’ said Mahavastu. ‘They have been forbidden to pursue their esoteric leanings, yet they do so regardless. Your continued instruction is in defiance of the Emperor’s edicts! Had you thought of that?’

A hot flush settled in Lemuel’s belly at the thought of defying the word of the Emperor. He hadn’t thought of it like that at all, for he saw no harm in the skills he was acquiring. The long journey back to the Thousand Sons home world had been a time of rest for the remembrancers, but upon arrival on Prospero their training had been, if anything, more intensive than ever.

‘This Legion is doomed,’ said Mahavastu, taking Lemuel’s hand once more and surprising him with its strength. ‘If they continue down this path, it will not be long until their defiance comes to light, and when that day comes…’

‘What?’

‘Be anywhere in the galaxy, but do not be on Prospero,’ said Mahavastu.

The meeting with Mahavastu had unsettled Lemuel, and his thoughts were troubled as he made his way through the city towards his rendezvous with Camille and Kallista. Tall buildings of white and gold lined wide boulevards of pollarded trees. Luscious green fronds hung low over the streetscape, heavy with fruits of yellow and red.

As usual, the sun was warm, and balmy ocean-scented winds sighed through streets busy with people. The inhabitants of Tizca were tall and uniformly attractive. They had welcomed the return of the Thousand Sons elements of the 28th Expedition, and the remembrancers that came with them. Lemuel had found much to like on Prospero, not least its people.

Tizca was a wondrous city of glorious architecture, open spaces, lively theatres and beautiful parklands. The White Mountains and Acropolis Magna provided a stunning backdrop to the city, and the great pyramids and silver towers of the Thousand Sons cults towered over everything. In any other city, such dominating architecture would have been oppressive, but such was the harmony with which the pyramids were constructed that they seemed as natural a part of the landscape as the mountains themselves.. Even the pyramid of the Pyrae, with its titanic guardian and burning finial blended with the city’s aesthetic.

The months he had spent on Prospero had given Lemuel a good grounding in the city’s geography, and such was the intuitive design of its layout that it was possible to navigate its many streets after only a short time.

Currently, he was heading east towards the Street of A Thousand Lions and Voisanne’s. Tucked away in one of Occullum Square’s radial streets, Lemuel had discovered Voisanne’s on one of his morning walks, a modest bakery-cum-restaurant that did the most incredible confectionaries. Though he had kept off most of the weight he had lost since Aghoru, he still liked to treat himself to something sweet when he felt in need of comfort.

Today was one of those days.

Mahavastu had picked a scab Lemuel hadn’t even realised was there. Like everyone within the Imperium, he had learned of the Edicts of Nikaea and the ramifications they would have. Though these edicts had come directly from the Emperor, dissenting voices already wondered how many of the Astartes Legions would actually obey the ruling.

That was a problem for someone else to deal with, and Lemuel hadn’t been surprised when Ahriman continued his training on the voyage back to Prospero.

Lemuel had simply taken the fact that the Thousand Sons were continuing their education of the remembrancers to mean that they were utterly certain of their abilities. Now he wondered if that were true. Were they meddling with powers that ought to be abhorred?

Lemuel had heard the story of Prospero’s fall, but he hadn’t really given any thought as to why it had fallen. Ahriman spoke of Old Night as an unavoidable catastrophe, but was that really true? Might those millennia of horror been avoided had humanity left well alone the powers that he used with such familiar ease?

He looked towards the water-locked Pyramid of Photep, the glittering spire immense and shimmering with heat haze reflecting from its mirrored skin. Primarch Magnus dwelt within this mighty structure, its gold and silver embellishments shining as though afire in the noonday sun.

Lemuel entered a street lined with statues of rearing silver lions. Each was subtly different in pose and size from the others, as though a vast pack had been gilded then brought to Tizca and placed upon tall plinths of polished marble. He touched the leftmost lion for good luck, smiling at the notion that one particular lion could be luckier than another.

Two particularly regal beasts framed the entrance to a small area of parkland, and Lemuel paused to watch a group of Tizcan citizens practicing tàijíquán under the watchful eye of a warrior of the Thousand Sons. He found calm in the slow, precise movements, letting the soothing repetitions and graceful unity ease his troubled mind.

Lemuel took in deep breaths as the class breathed, finding his hands moving in unconscious imitation. He smiled and his grim mood vanished. Lemuel moved on down the street and emerged into a vast square, though such a term was misleading for the open space was perfectly circular.

Numerous streets, eighty-one to be precise, radiated from Occullum Square, and the centre was taken up by a tall column in the Doric fashion with a flaming urn at its summit. A great relief carved on its square plinth depicted a personification of Prospero grieving for her lost civilisation, while an armoured figure with one eye lifted her up. Some said the tower was all that remained of a device once used by the ancients of Prospero to communicate with Terra in the days before Old Night, but no one had been able to make it work again.

It was market day, and the square was packed with stalls, traders and good-natured bartering as the people of Tizca haggled for silks, produce and handmade ornaments. It reminded Lemuel of home, and he had a sudden pang of nostalgia for the heaving, bustling, sweating markets of the Sangha commercia-subsid.

He threaded the crowds, politely declining offers of food and drink while stopping to purchase two crystal vials of scented oil. Lemuel headed south, taking Gordian Avenue until it cut east into a narrow street overhung with trellis and hanging fruit.

Voisanne’s was at the end of the street, and he saw Camille and Kallista waiting for him. He smiled and waved at them. They waved back, and he bent to plant chaste kisses on both womens’ cheeks.

‘You’re late,’ said Camille.

‘My apologies, ladies,’ said Lemuel. ‘I was purchasing gifts for you from the market, and it took longer than usual to haggle the merchant down from his ruinous prices.’

‘Gifts?’ asked Kallista, brightly. ‘Then you’re forgiven. What do you have for us?’

Lemuel placed a crystal vial before each woman and said, ‘Fragrant Boronia oil. I have no doubt your quarters are equipped with oil burners, so two droplets in water will fill your rooms with sweet floral undertones and a light, fruity scent that will refresh you and revitalise your creative energy. At least that’s what the merchant assured me would happen.’

‘Thank you, Lemuel,’ said Camille, unstoppering the vial and sniffing its contents. ‘Chaiya will love it. She loves our rooms to smell pretty.’

‘Very nice,’ added Kallista.

‘It’s nothing, ladies,’ said Lemuel, ‘just a trifle to apologise for my lateness.’

‘I thought you were late because you bought us these?’ said Camille.

‘Actually it was Mahavastu that made me late,’ said Lemuel with enforced levity. ‘You know how the old man likes to tell an endless, rambling story.’

Camille looked askance, but Kallista nodded, and Lemuel was about to turn and ask for a menu when a waitress arrived bearing a tray of food. She placed a bowl of fruit before Kallista, a crème-filled pastry in front of Camille and frosted confections of spun sugar, sweet pastry and fruit for Lemuel.

The waitress went back inside, and Camille took a bite of her pastry.

She sighed with pleasure.

‘Wonderful,’ she said, ‘but I don’t think I’ll ever get used to them knowing what I’m going to order before I even ask for it.’

‘I know,’ said Lemuel. ‘I’d be worried if it wasn’t for the fact they bring what I absolutely want every time.’

‘True,’ agreed Camille. ‘I’ll let them off then. So, how was he?’

‘Who?’

‘Mahavastu, you said you saw him earlier.’

‘Oh, he’s, well, he’s fine, if a little homesick, I think. He was talking about wanting to go home, to Terra, I mean.’

‘Why?’ asked Kallista. ‘Why would anyone want to leave Prospero? It’s paradise.’

‘He’s getting old, I suppose. He wants to go home before it’s too late.’

‘I’ll miss the old man,’ said Camille. ‘He has interesting tales.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Lemuel, uncomfortable with keeping the conversation on Kallimakus, as though it revived an old itch. ‘Still, how are you two fine ladies getting on?’

‘Good,’ said Camille, taking another bite of her pastry. ‘I’ve catalogued most of the ruins around Tizca, and Khalophis is taking me further out into the Desolation soon. He’s taking me to one of the older cities. One of the first to be lost when Prospero fell, so he says.’

‘Should be fascinating, my dear,’ said Lemuel, ‘but please be careful.’

‘Yes, father,’ smiled Camille.

‘I’m serious,’ said Lemuel. ‘You don’t know what might be out there.’

‘Okay, okay, I will.’

‘Good. And you, my dear Kallista? What progress have you made recently? Is Ankhu Anen still working you hard in the Athenaeum?’

Kallista nodded enthusiastically. She had blossomed since coming to Tizca, and even in a city of handsome people, Kallista Eris still stood out. Rumour had it she was being courted by a rakishly handsome captain of the Prospero Spireguard. Not that Lemuel was short of offers of companionship, but he had his own reasons for maintaining his solitary lifestyle.

Since Nikaea, the frequency of Kallista’s nocturnal seizures had steadily lessened to the point they dared hope they had ceased altogether. She still carried her bottle of sakau, but had not needed it for months.

‘Yes, Lemuel, he is. The Athenaeum is filled with texts said to pre-date Old Night, but they’re written in ancient Prosperine, which no one speaks anymore. I can help with the translation by linking back to the minds of the writers. It’s slow work, but it’s shedding a lot of light on what society was like before it collapsed. You should pay us a visit, I’m sure you’d find it fascinating to see how the planet’s developed since then.’

‘I’ll do that, my dear,’ promised Lemuel. ‘Ahriman has me very busy, but I’m sure he wouldn’t mind me calling on you.’

‘I’d like that,’ said Kallista, finishing her fruit and taking a sip of water.

They chatted of inconsequential things for the rest of the afternoon, enjoying the warm sunshine and conversing as friends do. Some wine was brought, a crystal-white blend that Lemuel laughed to see was the vintage developed by Ahriman. As Lemuel poured the last of their second bottle, Camille brought the subject around to their hosts.

‘So, how much longer do you think we have before the Thousand Sons redeploy?’ she asked.

It was a question lightly asked, but Lemuel saw the undercurrent of anxiety behind it. Normally, he did not use his ability to read auras around his friends, understanding their need for privacy, but there was no mistaking Camille’s desire to stay on Prospero.

‘I don’t know,’ said Lemuel honestly. ‘Ahriman hasn’t said anything, but with the other Legions earning glory in battle, I know they’re eager for a tasking order. The Emperor’s Children on Laeran, the Luna Wolves on One Forty Twenty, the Ultramarines at Mescalor; it’s been over two years since Ark Reach and yet the Thousand Sons are idle while their brothers make war.’

‘Do you think it has anything to do with Nikaea?’ asked Kallista.

‘I think it must,’ said Lemuel. ‘From what I hear, the Crimson King couldn’t leave Nikaea fast enough. According to Ahriman, the primarch has had all his warriors buried in their cult’s libraries since they got back.’

‘I heard that too,’ said Kallista with a conspiratorial smile. ‘I even overheard Ankhu Anen talking to Amon about it.’

‘Did you hear what they were looking for?’

‘I think so, but I didn’t really understand what they said. It sounded like they were looking for ways to project a body of light farther than ever, whatever that means.’

‘What do you suppose that’s in aid of?’ asked Camille.

‘I have no idea,’ said Lemuel.

Horror. Shock. Disbelief. Anger.

All these emotions surged through Ahriman’s body as he listened to his primarch’s words. Together with the other eight captains of the Pesedjet, he stood upon the labyrinth spiral of Magnus’s inner sanctum within the Pyramid of Photep. Slatted shafts of late afternoon sunlight cut the gloom, yet he could feel only oppressive darkness pressing in on him. He couldn’t bring himself to believe what he had just heard. Had anyone other than Magnus said these treacherous words, he would have killed them.

From his position on the spiral, he could see each of his fellow captains. Phosis T’kar’s brow was knotted in fury, his fists bunched in rage. Beside him, Phael Toron ground his teeth, and black mosaic chips wobbled in their mortar beds as their anger manifested around them.

Hathor Maat affected an air of calm, but his anguish was clear to see in the radiant aether light pulsing behind his features. Khalophis and Auramagma glowed with the power of their shock, sparks of flame bursting to life at their fingertips.

Uthizzar looked dreadful, his ashen face crumpled by the weight of unimaginable treachery yet to come as he felt the primarch’s sense of betrayed grief as his own,

Ahriman had known something unthinkable was coming. He had felt it for months, knowing that Magnus was keeping a monstrous secret from his captains while he worked feverishly and alone in his private library and the vaults beneath Tizca. Amon and Ankhu Anen had shared Ahriman’s knowledge that something was wrong, but even their combined power was unable to pierce the veils of the future to see what so concerned their primarch.

‘This cannot be,’ said Hathor Maat, for once articulating the feelings of his brothers with perfect understanding. ‘You must be wrong.’

No captain of the Thousand Sons would normally dream of uttering such a thing to Magnus, yet this was a matter of such outrageous impossibility that the words had been on the verge of spilling from Ahriman’s lips.

‘He is not,’ said Uthizzar, unashamed tears spilling down his face. ‘It will come to pass.’

‘But Horus,’ said Phosis T’kar. ‘He couldn’t… He won’t. How could he?’

Phosis T’kar could barely say the words. To voice them would give them solidity and make them real.

‘How can you be sure?’ asked Khalophis.

‘I saw it,’ said Magnus, ‘beneath the amphitheatre of Nikaea. I saw the face of the monster, and though I wish it were not so, I saw the truth of its words. Since our return from Nikaea, I have travelled the Great Ocean and followed the paths of the future and the past. A billion threads of destiny from long ago have woven this one crucial filament upon which the fate of the galaxy hangs. Either we save Horus or we will be dragged into a war more terrible than any of us can imagine. I travelled the distant lands of the past, pushing the limits of my power to unlock the truth, and this has been coming for a very long time.’

Magnus opened his great grimoire and traced his finger down the latest pages filled with his writings.

‘An ancient prophecy of the Aegyptos speaks of a time in the far future when all is war and the god of the sky, Heru, is initially set to protect his people from chaos,’ he read. ‘Much of that prophecy has been lost, but Heru turns on another god named Sutekh, a dazzling golden god, for dominion over all. In this form Heru was known as Kemwer, which means the Great Black One in the old tongue.’

‘What do ancient legends have to do with Horus Lupercal?’ demanded Phosis T’kar.

‘Heru is but one of the names of an even older god, whose name can be translated as Horus,’ said Magnus. ‘The clues have been there all along, if only we had the wit to see them. Alas for so much has been lost. Even as we expand our knowledge, we forget so much.’

‘Does the prophecy say any more?’ asked Uthizzar.

Magnus nodded.

‘It tells that neither side will be victorious, but says that many of Horus’s brother gods sided with him in the struggle,’ he said. ‘If Horus wins, he will become known as Heru-Ur, which means Horus the Great. Should Sutekh lose, his land will become barren and desolate for all time.

‘The early tales of the god Horus say that during a new moon, he would be blinded and was named Mekhenty-er-irty, which translates as He who has no Eyes. This was a very dangerous time, for until the moon rose again, Horus was a tremendously dangerous figure, oft-times attacking those who loved him after mistaking them for hated foes.’

‘Why would Horus Lupercal do such a thing?’ asked Amon. ‘What possible reason could there be?’

‘An insult to his pride?’ suggested Auramagma. ‘Ambition? Jealousy?’

‘No,’ said Ahriman, recognising emotions that would cause Auramagma to strike a brother. ‘Such things drive mortals to war, not primarchs. Something else is at the root of this.’

‘Then what?’ demanded Hathor Maat. ‘What madness could possibly make Horus Lupercal turn traitor?’

There. It had been said out loud, and only now did Ahriman dare look at Magnus. The primarch was dressed like a mortuary priest, and his shoulders were slumped in the manner of a man awaiting the executioner’s axe. Clad in a simple robe of crimson, and cloaked in a white shroud, Magnus waited for his sons to work through their emotions to a place of rationality.

Ahriman wished Magnus had not told them of his vision, for there was solace in ignorance. For the first time in his life, Ahriman wished to un-know something.

Horus Lupercal was going to betray them all.

Even thinking the words seemed like a betrayal of the Warmaster’s honour and nobility.

‘Well?’ demanded Hathor Maat. ‘What could it be?’

‘Something will take root in his soul,’ said Ahriman, feeling the words come without conscious thought, as though he knew the answers, but didn’t have the right words to articulate them. ‘Something primordial and yet corrupt.’

‘What does that even mean?’ snapped Phosis T’kar. ‘You think a simple void predator can violate the flesh of a primarch? Ludicrous!’

‘Not violate, but I… I don’t know,’ said Ahriman, looking directly at Magnus. ‘I don’t know, but on some level it is true. I am right, am I not?’

‘You are, my son,’ agreed Magnus sadly. ‘There is much I do not yet understand of what is happening to my brother, but time is running out to stop it. The Luna Wolves will soon be making war on a moon of Davin, and the fates are conspiring to fell Horus with a weapon of dreadful sentience. In his weakened and blinded state, the enemies of all life will make their move to ensnare his warrior heart. Without our intervention, they will succeed and split the galaxy asunder.’

‘We have to warn the Emperor,’ said Hathor Maat. ‘He has to know of this!’

‘What would you have me tell him?’ roared Magnus. ‘That his best and brightest son will betray him? Without proof, he would never believe it. He would send his war dogs to bring us to heel for employing the very means that have allowed us to know of this betrayal! No, there is only one option open to us. We must save Horus ourselves. Only if we fail do we take word to the Emperor.’

‘What can we do to stop this?’ asked Uthizzar. ‘Ask and we obey.’

‘The works I have had you researching since Nikaea hold the key to Horus Lupercal’s salvation,’ said Magnus. ‘With your help, I will project myself across the warp and shield my brother from his enemies.’

‘My lord,’ protested Amon. ‘That evocation will require power of undreamed magnitude. I am not even certain such a thing can be done. Nothing we have found is conclusive in how effective such a ritual could be.’

‘It must be done, Amon. Begin assembling the thralls,’ ordered Magnus. ‘Bind their power to mine and they will fuel my ascent.’

‘Many will not survive such a ritual,’ said Ahriman, horrified at the casual disregard in which Magnus held their lives. ‘To burn out so many thralls will cost us greatly.’

‘How much greater the cost if we do nothing, Ahzek?’ said Magnus. ‘I have made my decision. Assemble the coven in the Reflecting Caves in three days.’

The bill arrived without them asking for it, and Lemuel signed the credit slip. He had a pleasant buzz from the wine and saw that Kallista and Camille were just as mellow. The food had been exquisite and the service attentive. Once again Voisanne’s had lived up to its reputation, and the afternoon had passed in a wonderfully convivial manner.

‘Thank you, Lemuel,’ said Kallista. ‘Very kind of you.’

‘Not at all. Two such lovely ladies should never have to pay a bill.’

‘Sounds good to me,’ said Camille with a nod.

They pushed their chairs back and stood as the staff cleared their plates and glasses.

‘So where are you off to now?’ asked Camille.

‘I think a stroll around the market before I head back to my quarters,’ said Lemuel. ‘I have some passages of Rosenkreutz’s Fama Fraternitatis to read before my instructions with Ahriman tomorrow, and after two bottles of wine, it may take a few readings to sink in.’

‘What kind of book is it?’ asked Kallista.

‘Its about a monk who told of supernatural beings that move unknown among us, and have done since the earliest days of civilisation, healing the sick and studying the laws of nature for the betterment of mankind.’

‘Riveting stuff,’ said Camille, gathering her belongings.

‘It is actually,’ said Lemuel, warming to the subject. ‘It appeals to the very best in human nature. After all, what could be nobler than the idea of helping one’s fellow man without thought for reward or material gain? Wouldn’t you agree, Kallista? Kallista?’

Kallista Eris stood beside the table, her fingers clutching the back of her chair, her knuckles white with the effort. Her skin was flushed and tendons pulled taut in her neck. Her eyes rolled back and a trickle of bloody saliva ran from the corner of her mouth.

‘No,’ she hissed.

‘Oh, Throne, Kalli!’ cried Camille, reaching for her. ‘Lemuel, catch her!’

Lemuel reacted too slowly to catch Kallista as her legs gave way. She loosed a screeching wail of agony and spun around, crashing down onto their table, sending empty glasses and bottles flying. The table overturned and she landed in the debris, thrashing like a lunatic. The crystal bottle of oil shattered along with the glasses, and the sharp scent of berries and melon filled the air.

Camille was by her side in an instant.

‘Lemuel! Get her sakau, it’s in her bag!’ she cried.

Lemuel dropped to his knees, all traces of intoxication purged from his system as adrenaline pumped into his body. Kallista’s bag lay beneath the overturned table, and he scrambled over to it, emptying its contents onto the cobbled ground.

A notebook, pencils, a portable vox-recorder and assorted items a gentleman wasn’t supposed to see fell out.

‘Hurry!’

‘Where is it?’ he cried. ‘I don’t see it!’

‘It’s a green glass bottle. Cloudy, like spoiled milk.’

‘It’s not here!’

‘It must be. Look harder.’

A crowd of concerned onlookers had gathered, but thankfully kept their distance. Kallista howled, the sound shot through with such agony that it seemed unthinkable a human throat could produce it. Amid the detritus of her bag and the broken glass from their table, Lemuel saw the bottle Camille had described and lunged for it. He scrambled over to Camille, who was desperately trying to hold Kallista down. The pretty remembrancer was stronger than she looked, and even with the help of a man in the red-trimmed robes of a physician she was able to throw them off.

‘Here, I’ve got it!’ he shouted, holding the bottle out.

Kallista sat bolt upright and stared directly at Lemuel. Petechial haemorrhaging filled her eyes with blood, and thick streamers of it poured from her nose and mouth. It wasn’t Camille looking at him; it was a monster with snarling fangs and predator’s eyes. It was older than time, stalking the angles between worlds with immeasurable patience and cunning.

‘Too late for that,’ she said, slapping the bottle from Lemuel’s hand. It broke on the cobbles, the viscous liquid mingling with the spilled dregs of wine.

‘The wolves will betray you and his war dogs will gnaw the flesh from your bones!’ cried Kallista, and Lemuel lurched back as she lunged towards him, clawing at his eyes. She landed on him, her legs clamped around his waist and her hands locked around his throat.

He couldn’t breathe, but before she could crush his windpipe, she screeched and her back arched with a terrible crack. The killing light went out of her, and she flopped back, her hands scrabbling for her notebook.

Lemuel saw the awful pleading in her eyes.

‘Get her some paper!’ yelled Camille.

Twenty-Two

The Thousand Sons
Into the desolation

Three days after Kallista’s attack, Ahriman finally spoke of the origins of the Thousand Sons. Lemuel wasn’t in the mood for remembrances, having spent a couple of sleepless nights with Camille at Kallista’s bedside. She lay in a medicae unit in the Pyramid of Apothecaries, hooked up to a plethora of machines, the purpose of which Lemuel didn’t know. Some appeared to be specialised devices of the Corvidae, but Ankhu Anen refused to say what they were doing for her.

The attack had leeched the strength and vitality from her, as though she shrank within herself before their eyes. Every time Lemuel tried to rest, he saw her blood-red eyes, and sleep eluded him. Seeing Kallista like that had terrified him more than he liked to admit.

Malika had suffered seizures like Kallista’s in the months before she…

No, don’t think like that.

No sooner had Lemuel thrust the pen and notebook into Kallista’s hands than she had filled page after page with nonsensical doggerel.

Ankhu Anen was examining it even now, hoping to divine some truth from it, and Lemuel hoped he would find something. At least it would make Kallista’s pain meaningful.

‘Do you wish to hear this?’ asked Ahriman, and Lemuel focussed on his words.

They sat in one of the high terraced balconies of the Corvidae temple, an arboretum with an angled glass roof overlooking the city far below, though the temperature was precisely modulated to mimic the sensation of being outdoors. The terrace was positioned at the southern corner, allowing Lemuel to see the pyramid of the Pyrae cult and the Titan battle-engine guarding its entrance. He’d heard it was a prize of battle, taken by Khalophis on the field of Coriovallum, and that it had once belonged to the Legio Astorum. It seemed in somewhat bad taste to have an Imperial war machine taken as a trophy, but from what he knew of Khalophis, that seemed about right.

‘Sorry, I was just thinking of Kallista,’ said Lemuel.

‘I know, but she is in good hands,’ promised Ahriman. ‘If anyone can decipher Mistress Eris’s writings, it will be Ankhu Anen. And our medicae facilities are second to none, for we practise ancient as well as modern branches of medicine.’

‘I know, but I can’t help but worry, you understand?’

‘I do,’ replied Ahriman. ‘More than you might think.’

‘Of course,’ nodded Lemuel. ‘It must be hard to lose comrades in battle.’

‘It is, but that is not what I meant. I was referring to those who die not in battle.’

‘Oh? I was led to believe the Astartes were more or less immortal?’

‘Barring battlefield injury, we may well be. It is too soon to tell.’

‘Then how could you possibly know how I feel?’

‘Because I too have lost someone I loved,’ said Ahriman.

The surprise of such words coming from an Astartes shook Lemuel from his bitter reverie, and he narrowed his eyes. Ahriman was once again unconsciously touching the silver oakleaf cluster on his shoulder guard.

‘What is that?’ asked Lemuel.

‘It was a talisman,’ said Ahriman with a rueful smile. ‘A charm, if you will. My mother gave one each to my twin brother and I when we were selected as student aspirants to the Thousand Sons.’

‘You have a twin?’

‘I had a twin,’ corrected Ahriman.

‘What happened to him?’

‘He died, a long time ago.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ said Lemuel, finding the notion that Astartes warriors had lives before their transformation into super-engineered post-humans something he hadn’t considered. Such were the enormous divergences from the human norm that it was easier to assume the Astartes sprang full-grown from some secret laboratory. It put a human face on an inhuman creation to know that Ahriman had once had a brother, a relationship that most mortals took for granted.

‘What was his name?’

‘He was called Ohrmuzd, which means “sacrifice” in the ancient tongue of the Avesta.’

‘Why are you telling me this?’

‘Because it will be useful,’ said Ahriman. ‘For both of us, I think. The doom of Ohrmuzd is also the story of how the Thousand Sons came to be. Do you wish to hear of it?’

‘I do,’ said Lemuel.

‘From the very beginning, we were a troubled Legion,’ said Ahriman. ‘The primarch tells me our gene-stock was harvested at an inauspicious time, a time of great cosmic upheaval. The warp storms that had all but isolated Terra in the lightless age of strife were resurgent once more and the effects were felt all across the world: madness, suicide and senseless violence. The last of the pan-continental despots had been toppled and the world was only just lifting its head from the ashes of that global conflict. It seemed like these were the last, dying paroxysms of the wars, which was true to an extent, but there was more to it than that.’

‘You were there?’ asked Lemuel. ‘To see all that?’

‘No, but I was a quick learner. I was one of the lucky ones, conceived and born among the wealthy tribes of the Achaemenid Empire. Our kings had allied with Earth’s new master more than a century before, and we were spared the horrors of atomic war or the invasion of the Thunder-armoured warriors.’

‘The proto-Astartes.’

Ahriman nodded, saying, ‘Brutal and unsubtle creations, but sufficient for the job of conquest. They were ordinary men, the fiercest warriors of the Emperor, within whose bodies he had implanted full-grown biological hardware and mechanical augmentations to boost their strength, endurance and speed. They were monstrous things, and most were eventually driven insane by the demands their enhanced physiques made upon them.’

Lemuel noticed the inflexion Ahriman put on the word enhanced, reading his thinly-veiled criticism of the Emperor’s first creations.

‘With the end of the wars, the Emperor tightened his grip on Terra and turned his gaze to the heavens, knowing that he had achieved only the first step on the road to Unity. He knew the Thunder Warriors would never be able to join him on his quest to unite the disparate threads of humanity and bind them together once again. He would need another army, an army as superior to the Thunder Warriors as they were superior to mortal men. But first he would need generals, mighty soldiers who could lead them in battle.’

‘You’re talking about the primarchs, aren’t you?’

‘I am, yes. The Emperor created the primarchs using lost science and technology he had uncovered in his long wars. With the aid of rogue geneticists from the Martian Hegemony, he crafted beings of such luminosity that their like could never be conjured again. They were the pinnacles of genetic evolution, but they were lost to the Emperor before they could reach maturity. You have heard the legends, surely?’

‘I have, but I assumed they were just that, legends.’

‘No,’ said Ahriman, shaking his head. ‘They are truths enhanced by myths to allow men to better immortalise their deeds. It is far easier to march into the fires of war following a warrior whose origins are legendary than one who has no such glorious pedigree.’

‘I suppose so,’ agreed Lemuel. ‘I hadn’t thought of it like that.’

‘Few do,’ said Ahriman with a smile. ‘But I was talking about me.’

‘Sorry, go on.’

‘My people’s biological heritage was uncontaminated by many of the inherited flaws and viral defects so common to the other tribes of Earth, so the Emperor walked among us with his army of scientists, testing each and every family grouping for the requisite genetic markers. In my brother and I, he found what he was looking for and, with my parent’s blessing, took Ohrmuzd and I to a secret place deep within the high mountains at the crown of the world. Before we left, our mother gave each of us one of these talismans, said to represent the strength of Dhul-Qarnayn, the greatest ruler of the Achaemenid. She bade us keep them close, telling us that the power of the ancient king would keep us safe.’

Ahriman pulled a leather cord from around his neck, revealing a silver pendant the size of a coin upon which was embossed the image of an oak leaf. It was the twin of the one set in Ahriman’s shoulder guard.

‘Foolish superstition of course. How could a king who has been dust for tens of thousands of years protect the living? Though it went against the new creed of reason, we kept our talismans close throughout our training.’

‘What sort of training?’

‘Tests of strength, speed and mental agility. From an early age, the people of my culture were taught to value truth over all things, and Ohrmuzd and I were the sons of royalty, so we had long since learned to hunt and kill and debate. We excelled in all aspects of our training, and our biological advancement was a source of great pleasure to the scientists who attended us and monitored our progress. There were many of us training beneath the mountains, but gradually we were channelled into different groups, and Ohrmuzd and I were overjoyed at being kept together while many other siblings were split up.

‘We grew rapidly and trained harder than any have trained before or since. Our prowess was unmatched and we marched into battle to quell the last pockets of resistance and rebellion on Terra to test our battle skills. Armoured in the latest battle-plate and equipped with the most destructive weapons, none could match us, and we were named the Thousand Sons.

‘When the time came to leave Terra, it was a great moment. Not even the triumph at Ullanor can compare with the moment of grief as an entire world wept to see the architect of Unification depart. The alliance of Terra and Mars was complete, and the Mechanicum had outdone itself, building fleets of ships to allow the Emperor to take to the stars and complete his Great Crusade of Unity. The skies over Terra were thick with starships, hundreds of thousands of them organised into more than seven thousand fleets, reserve groups and secondary, follow-on forces. It was an armada designed to conquer the galaxy and that was exactly what we set out to do.’

Ahriman paused in his tale to look out over Tizca far below, his eyes lifting to the black mirror of the ocean. Lemuel saw a faraway look in his eyes, and had the powerful sense that Ahriman was telling this tale as much for his own benefit as for Lemuel’s.

‘The early years of the Crusade were a joy to us, a time of war and conquest as we swept through the solar system and reclaimed it once more. Beyond the boundaries of Terra, hostile xenos species had taken root, and we culled them without mercy, blackening their worlds and leaving nothing in our wake but ashes.’

‘That doesn’t sound like the Great Crusade,’ pointed out Lemuel. ‘I thought it was all about enlightenment and the advance of reason. That sounds like conquest for the sake of it.’

‘You have to understand that we were fighting for the survival of the species then. Terra was surrounded on all sides by predatory races, and to survive we fought fire with fire. It was a glorious time, where the Astartes learned of the sheer, unstoppable fury we could bring to bear. War forges a man’s character, and that is no less true of a Legion. Whether it was the echoes of our gene-sires in our blood, I do not know, but each of the Legions began to take shape beyond simply a name. The Ultramarines gained a reputation for order and discipline, fighters who learned from each engagement and applied that knowledge to the next. The World Eaters, well, you can imagine how they learned to fight.’

‘And the Thousand Sons?’

‘Ah… There we come to the first cracks in our great adventure,’ said Ahriman.

‘Cracks?’

‘Our character manifested itself five years into the Crusade. Our warriors began to display abilities far beyond anything we had expected. I could see things before they happened, and Ohrmuzd could craft lightning from the air. Others amongst our Legion could perform similar feats. At first we were jubilant, thinking this to be latent power encoded into our genes by the Emperor, but soon our joy turned to horror as first one warrior, then more began to change.’

‘Like Hastar on Shrike,’ said Lemuel.

‘The flesh change, yes,’ said Ahriman, rising and moving to the edge of the arboretum. Ahriman gripped the railing, staring off into the far distance. Lemuel joined him, fighting off mild vertigo as he looked down.

‘The first warrior died on Bezant, his flesh turned inside out and his powers beyond his control. Something took his flesh, ripped him apart and made him a vessel for a xenos beast from the Great Ocean. We thought this was just a fluke occurrence, but it was not; it was an epidemic.’

‘It was really that bad?’

‘It was worse than you can imagine,’ said Ahriman, and Lemuel believed him. ‘It was not long before others noticed it. Many of the Legions had been reunited with their sires, and some of them found the notion of our powers to be hateful. Mortarion may now be the worst, but the others were never much better. They feared what we could do, and spread their lies to anyone who would listen that we were witches practising unclean sorcery. Little did any of them realise they were condemning the very powers that allowed them to travel between the stars or spread their malicious rumour-mongering.’

Lemuel saw the anger in Ahriman’s face, the bitterness of memory causing the plants nearby to wither and blacken. He felt a nauseous twist in his gut and swallowed a mouthful of bile as Ahriman continued.

‘With every passing year, more and more of our warriors would succumb to the flesh change, though we grew ever more adept at spotting the signs and taking steps to contain them. Perversely, the more warriors suffered the change, the stronger our powers became. We learned how to keep the worst of the flesh change at bay, but more and more of us were falling prey to it and the voices of our persecutors were growing ever more strident. There was even talk of disbanding us and expunging us from Imperial history.’

Lemuel shook his head.

‘That’s the thing about history, he said. ‘It has a habit of remembering the things you’d like to forget. No one can erase that much, there will always be some record.’

‘Don’t be so sure, Lemuel,’ said Ahriman. ‘The Emperor’s wrath is a terrible thing.’

Lemuel heard the sorrow in Ahriman’s voice and wanted to ask more, but the tale was not yet done.

‘Ohrmuzd and I were at the forefront of the Thousand Sons, its greatest warriors and most powerful practitioners of the arts. We thought we were immune to the flesh change, that our power was too great for it to touch us. How arrogant we were! Ohrmuzd fell prey to its effects first, and I was forced to secure him as he fought against his rebelling flesh.’

Ahriman turned to Lemuel, and Lemuel quailed before the intensity of his gaze.

‘Imagine your body turning on you, every molecule refusing to hold to its genetically-encoded purpose, with only your strength of will preventing your flesh from uncontrollably mutating, all the while knowing that eventually you must weaken and it will take you.’

‘I can’t,’ said Lemuel. ‘It’s beyond me.’

‘I did what I could for Ohrmuzd, but soon after his succumbing, I too was afflicted. I did not go into stasis with the rest of our fallen brothers, doomed to wait out the entirety of the Great Crusade until a cure could be found, for I was able to stave off the change, though it was a battle I knew I was destined to lose.’

Ahriman smiled, and the twisting pain in Lemuel’s guts subsided.

‘Then, a miracle happened,’ he said. ‘We reached Prospero and the Emperor found Magnus.’

‘What was it like?’ asked Lemuel. ‘To be reunited with your lost sire?’

‘Magnus was our salvation,’ said Ahriman, with no small amount of pride. ‘We descended to the planet’s surface at the Emperor’s side, though I remember little of the first meeting of father and son, for my body was wracked with pain as I fought to hold myself together. It was a dark time for our Legion, and yet a joyous one. It was clear to us that we could not go on as we were, for the flesh change was taking too many of us, and there was nothing we could do to stop it. Even as we despaired, we rejoiced, for we were finally reunited with the genetic father of our Legion.’

Lemuel smiled to hear the fond recollection in Ahriman’s voice. The Captain of the First Fellowship looked over to the Pyramid of Photep, and an unreadable expression crossed his face, like a man afraid to face a guilty memory he has buried deep.

‘Within a day of the Emperor leaving Prospero, more and more of the Legion fell prey to the change. Though I had resisted it longer than any other had before, I too succumbed and my body began to rebel. My powers raged uncontrolled, but all I remember of that day is the horror of knowing that soon I would be little better than some of the monstrous things we had slain in our expansion from Terra. Soon, I would need to be put down like a beast.

‘Then I remember a soothing voice in my head, soft and silky, like I imagined a father’s would be when comforting a sick child. Darkness stole over me, and when I awoke, my physique was unblemished and without a mark. The flesh change had almost destroyed us, yet we were whole and in control of our bodies once more. The Legion had been saved, but I felt no joy that day, for a piece of me had died.’

‘Your twin brother,’ said Lemuel.

‘Yes. I was whole, but Ohrmuzd had died. His body was too ravaged by the flesh change, and nothing could be done to save him,’ said Ahriman. ‘I took his silver oakleaf and incorporated it into my armour. His memory deserved no less.’

‘Again, you have my condolences,’ said Lemuel.

‘None of us could recall anything of how this miracle came to pass, but we were alive, though barely a thousand of us were left.’

‘The Legion name,’ said Lemuel.

‘Literally,’ agreed Ahriman. ‘Now we truly were the Thousand Sons.’

Lemuel frowned and said, ‘Wait, that doesn’t make sense. You were known as the Thousand Sons before you reached Prospero, yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘Why what?’

‘Why that name in particular? The Legion’s name only makes sense after Magnus saved you on Prospero,’ said Lemuel. ‘Yet you were known as the Thousand Sons before then. So is it just a stupendous coincidence that there happened only to be a thousand survivors?’

‘Now you are thinking like a Practicus,’ said Ahriman with a smile. ‘I keep telling you that there is no such thing as coincidence.’

‘So what are you telling me? That the Emperor saw what was happening to you and knew that Magnus would save a thousand of you?’

‘Perhaps. The Emperor has seen a great many things,’ said Ahriman, though Lemuel sensed evasion in his words. ‘Yes, Magnus saved us, but he never said how he did it.’

‘Does it matter?’ asked Lemuel. ‘He saved you. Isn’t that enough?’

Ahriman turned his gaze to the heavens. ‘That remains to be seen, but I think it will matter. I think it will matter a great deal.’

As much as she was worried about Kallista, Camille was relishing her day of exploration too much to worry about her stricken friend. She had rolled out of bed, kissed Chaiya goodbye, and made her way to the rendezvous with Khalophis without so much as a second thought for Kallista Eris. She felt guilty about that, but not so guilty she was going to miss out on the chance of exploring the desolation of Prospero.

Khalophis’s disc-speeder brought them to the ruined city in less than an hour, which had disappointed Camille until he told her how far and fast they had travelled. Tizca was far behind them, and she wondered why everyone still called the lands beyond Tizca the ‘Desolation’, as nothing could be further from the truth. The landscape was as lush as anything she could ever imagine. Vast forests and wide open plains spread to the horizons, and crystal clear rivers spilled in foaming waterfalls from the mountains.

Khalophis had steered the speeder with delicate skill, which she found surprising. She expected him to fly brusquely and without finesse. The sense of speed as they flew through this bountiful land had been exhilarating, and the thrill of being allowed to explore the far cities of Prospero was as close to perfect as she could imagine.

Camille looked up at the high stacks of blackened iron and stone towering above her. Their structures were wrapped in greenery and swayed gently in the chill winds funnelled down from the end of the valley. Hundreds of skeletal frames arranged in what looked like grid patterns dotted the valley mouth, and the ground underfoot was like faded rockcrete, cracked and split by patient weeds.

Broken piles of stone clustered the bases of the structures, like cladding or flooring pushed from the structures they had once enclosed by the relentless forces of nature. Over the course of the morning and early afternoon, they had discovered some that still had elements of their internal structure intact, but these were few and far between.

Khalophis followed her, his boltgun slung casually over his shoulder as he watched her capturing pict images of the structures. She already had a library’s worth of images, but the things she had touched so far had yielded little of interest.

‘Have you found anything yet?’ asked Khalopis. ‘These ruins bore me.’

‘Nothing yet,’ said Camille.

‘We should go. This valley has seen some psychneuein activity of late.’

Lemuel had mentioned psychneuein once. They sounded vile, but with a warrior like Khalophis to protect her, she wasn’t unduly worried.

‘We can’t go yet,’ she said, ducking into the shadows of a largely intact structure that echoed with shadows and decay. ‘So far, everything I’ve touched has been machine-formed and without memory. They’re no use to me. This one’s in pretty good condition, so it might house something of value.’

The interior of the building stank of neglect and damp, its shadows refuges for the wild animals that called the desolation of Prospero home. Light broke in through holes in the walls and speared down from above. Dust hung in the air, drifting motes of light in the splintered breeze.

Camille drew in a deep breath, tasting the age of the structure in the musty fragrances. There was history here, stories she could unlock if she could only find something that had once belonged to a living, breathing person.

‘This way,’ she said, heading towards a sagging steel stairway that led to the next level.

‘That doesn’t look safe,’ said Khalophis, eyeing the rusted handrails.

‘I’m touched by your concern,’ said Camille, ‘but it’s lasted a thousand years like this. I expect it’ll last another afternoon, don’t you?’

‘I don’t know, I’m not an engineer.’

She tried to figure out if he was joking, but gave up when his expression didn’t change.

‘Okay then,’ she said, turning away. ‘I’ve climbed my share of rickety stairs, and this one looks fine.’

She turned and made her way upstairs, hoping that the forces of comedic timing weren’t about to deposit her in a heap of broken stairs and embarrassment. Fortunately, they held, though they creaked and groaned alarmingly as Khalophis put his weight on them.

The upper level was as desolate as the lower, the grey floor covered in dust, droppings and debris from the levels above. Most of the higher floors had collapsed, leaving the building as little more than a hollow chimney, with occasional nubs of floor slabs and structural spars jutting into thin air. Birds fluttered above, and she caught the faint rustle of wings from high up nests.

‘What do you hope to find here?’ asked Khalophis. ‘Everything’s decayed. If there was something to be learned here, don’t you think we would have found it by now?’

Camille flashed him a confident smile.

‘You can’t look the way I can,’ she said.

Khalophis grunted, ‘None of you remembrancers have done anything worth a damn since you joined us. It was a waste of time bringing you here. I haven’t seen anything special yet.’

She ignored him and moved through the remains of the building, stopping every now and then to examine the debris for anything that might prove useful. Assorted pieces of what might once have been personal effects lay in some of the piles, but they were as lifeless as the ruins themselves.

Something moved above her, a creak of stone and a soft, animal growl. Camille looked up, seeing a flitting shadow, a startled bird whose nest she’d unwittingly approached too closely. She peered into the corner of the building, seeing a collection of wooden spars and what looked like sheet metal arranged too neatly to be random.

‘Do you have any lights in that armour of yours?’ asked Camille. ‘Or a torch?’

‘I can do better than that,’ said Khalophis with relish.

He extended his hand, and a flaring ball of light appeared in the air before him. It burned brighter than a welder’s torch, and shone stark light throughout the derelict structure.

‘Very impressive,’ said Camille, squinting against the brightness.

‘This is nothing. It’s almost insulting to use my powers for something so trifling.’

‘Fair enough, but it’s a little bright. Can you dim it down a little?’

Khalophis nodded and the light’s intensity dimmed to a level where Camille could see. High-contrast lighting threw deep black shadows and revealed the decay of the structure in all its glory. For all that the ruined building had little in the way of memory, Camille felt a momentary pang of sadness for the civilisation that had passed away thousands of years before her birth.

People had lived and died here, spending the span of their years dreaming of better days, and working to provide for themselves and their families. They were now dust, and to be so forgotten struck a real chord in Camille. She moved around the barricades – there could be no other purpose for such an assembly of items – and saw a host of cobwebbed skeletons, the bones held together by what looked like some kind of hardened resin.

‘They didn’t realise how easily it could all be taken away,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘The people who lived here,’ said Camille, kneeling beside the nearest body. Though she was no expert in the study of bones, its size suggested it was a man’s. ‘I’ll bet none of them woke up and thought, “this is the day our world ends, so I’d better make it count”.’

She looked up at Khalophis and said, ‘Nothing is permanent, no matter how much we might think it is. I suppose that’s what I’m learning here.’

‘Some things will endure,’ said Khalophis with the certainty of a zealot. ‘The Imperium.’

‘I expect you’re right,’ said Camille, not wishing to get into a discussion on the Imperium’s future with him.

She peeled off one of her gloves and gingerly touched the skeleton, half-expecting it to crumble to dust at her touch. It was a miracle none had succumbed to the ravages of time already, but the hardened resin appeared to be the cause of their preservation.

She heard a rustle of frightened birds from high above, but shut out the noise as she ran her hand over the hardened clavicles to the dead man’s skull, noticing that the cranial lid was detached. It hung from one side of the skull, like a hinged door that had been pushed open from the inside.

She closed her eyes, letting the familiar warmth flow from her hand and into the relic of past times. The power moved within her, and she felt the urgency of the man whose skull she touched pulling her down into his life, sensing the swell of his emotions as they reached out to her.

Too late, Camille saw they were of pain and madness. She tried to withdraw her hand, but the red rush of agony was too swift for her, and searing pain stabbed into her brain like a hot lance. Blood streamed from her mouth as she bit her tongue. Camille screamed as the man’s last, anguished moment ripped through her. Horrible images of feasting white maggots, ruptured flesh and dying loved ones burned their way into her consciousness.

She shook as though seized by a high-energy current, her teeth grinding and her sinews cracking as her mouth tore open in a soundless scream.

Then it was over. She felt rough hands pull her away, and the moment of connection with the dead man was broken. Bruised afterimages remained imprinted on her vision, and she gasped with the horror of his last moments. She had touched the dead before, and had always been able to insulate herself from their endings, but this had been too dreadful and too intense to ignore. She tasted metal and spat a mouthful of blood.

‘I told you we should not have lingered,’ snarled Khalophis.

‘What?’ was all she could manage, seeing Khalophis towering over her. One heavy gauntlet gripped her shoulder. The other was wreathed in flickering orange flame.

‘Psychneuein,’ hissed Khalophis, dragging her towards the stairs.

Then she heard it, a droning buzz like a hive of vespidae, and the excited flutter of what sounded like an explosion of wings as a flock of predatory birds took flight.

Twenty-Three

Pyrae unleashed
If you’re dead
The Reflecting Cave

‘Run!’ shouted Khalophis, as the frantic buzzing noise grew louder. Camille looked up to see an organically shifting swarm of winged clades launching themselves from hidden lairs in the darkness of the ruined structure.

Terror flooded her limbs with paralysing stillness.

The chittering clatter of insect limbs rattled from the steel structure as scores of psychneuein boiled down the length of the building, frantic with alien hunger. Camille saw hundreds of them, vile insect-like monsters with grasping limbs and feeding proboscis. The droning buzz of hundreds of wings and the chitinous clacking of snapping mandibles grew steadily in volume.

Something moved behind her, and she turned to see one of the hideous, beetle-like creatures. It had a glossy, segmented body and six spindly limbs that oozed a repellent resin. Its wings moved too fast to see, like oil spilled on water, and it stank of spoiled meat.

Razored mandibles jutted from its swollen head, its surface grotesquely textured like a human brain studded with multi-faceted eyes that threw back her horrified reflection.

The creature launched itself forward, but erupted in flames before it reached her. The charred corpse struck her in the chest and disintegrated into hot ashes. She screamed, and frantically brushed the smoking remains from her lap as Khalophis swept her up into the crook of his arm as easily as a man might pick up a small child.

‘I told you to run,’ he snapped. ‘You mortals never listen.’

Khalophis set off towards the stairs, but a host of psychneuein crawled up from below.

‘Damn things,’ said the Astartes, flicking his free hand towards them. A wall of red flame erupted from the ground, consuming the creatures in seconds. No sooner had he despatched the psychneuein than more landed on the overhanging girders and piles of rubble. Camille counted at least a dozen.

As though a single intelligence controlled the beasts, they took flight at the same instant. They swooped towards them, the screech of their wings like a war cry.

‘You think it’s that easy?’ roared Khalophis, filling the air around them with balls of phosphorent flame, spinning them around like whipping poi. The psychneuein hovered at bay, hissing and spitting as the fiery spheres wove a flaming lattice around their prey. More of the creatures appeared with every passing second.

Khalophis set her down and said, ‘Stay behind me. Do what I say when I say it and you will live. Understood?’

Camille nodded, too terrified to speak.

The Astartes warrior hurled a torrent of fire from his hands towards the largest group of psychneuein, and they screeched in rage as they erupted in flames. A chop of his left hand sent a spear of fire into a psychneuein that dared swoop down at him from above. His right hand shot out, and an invisible blaze of heat rippled outwards. A dozen beasts spontaneously exploded as the molecules of their bodies were superheated to explosive temperatures.

The air was blisteringly hot, and Camille felt her skin burning in the fire shield around them. Secondary fires were filling the air with sooty, carbonised smoke. Her eyes stung with the heat, each breath laboured and painful.

‘I can’t breathe!’ she gasped.

Khalophis glanced down at her. ‘Deal with it.’

More of the psychneuein came at Khalophis, but none could breach his protective barriers of heat. Camille pulled her body into a tight ball on the floor, covering her mouth with her hand. She tried to keep her breaths shallow, but terror was working against her and she felt her vision greying.

‘Please,’ she gasped with the last of the oxygen in her lungs.

Khalophis bent down and hauled her to her feet.

‘Stand here,’ he said. ‘Stay within the heat haze and you will be able to breathe.’

Camille could barely hold herself upright, but she felt the heat vanish, as though the door to a meat locker had just opened in front of her. She sucked in greedy mouthfuls of cold air, seeing a ripple in the filmy atmosphere surrounding her. Beyond the haze, fires and smoke raged unchecked as Khalophis’s power consumed anything flammable within reach. None of it touched her, as though she were enclosed in a hermetically-sealed bubble.

Khalophis fought with the fury of a gladiator as the psychneuein assailed him from every side. There seemed to be no end to their numbers as they hurled themselves at the warrior with furious abandon.

‘Burn, you freaks!’ shouted Khalophis, killing with jets of flame, daggers of fire and waves of superheated air. Even in her terror, Camille heard the strain in his voice. The power of the Pyrae was phenomenal, but so too was the cost.

With every display of psychic mastery, the fury of the attacking monsters doubled.

She tried to recall what Lemuel had told her of the psychneuein, but could remember little other than the fact that they reproduced by stinging you and laying their eggs in your body. One fact leapt to the front of her consciousness, and despite the heat, a sudden chill travelled the length of her spine.

‘It’s your powers!’ she yelled. ‘They’re being drawn to us because of your powers! It’s driving them wild. You have to stop using them!’

Khalophis sliced half a dozen psychneuein from the air with a shimmering fire sword that sprang from his fist. In that brief lull, he turned to her, his face dripping in sweat, his eyes sunken and exhausted.

‘The fire is all that’s keeping us alive!’ he cried, sweeping the blade around as three more came at him.

‘It’s what will get us killed if you don’t stop using it!’

A hissing psychneuein landed on the broken remains of a fallen wall, its thorax bulging and dripping. A long stinger whipped at its rear and she screamed as it leapt at Khalophis.

‘Behind you!’ she yelled.

Khalophis dropped to one knee and immolated the monster with a glance. A clutch of monsters took its place, their stingers erect and wickedly barbed. Never mind the eggs, being stung would kill her before they could use her body as an incubator.

Khalophis snarled and the fire sword vanished. He swung his bolter around, racking the slide and firing a three round burst into the group of psychneuein.

‘Back towards the stairs!’ shouted Khalophis, firing as he went. ‘If we can reach the speeder, we’ll be safe.’

Camille nodded, trying to keep behind the warrior as her insulating cocoon vanished.

The entire floor was ablaze, pools of molten steel and dissolving carcasses littering the ground. Again the smoke tarred her lungs, and she coughed as her body fought for oxygen. A psychneuein slammed into Khalophis, its body ablaze from the fires, and the giant warrior stumbled. He batted it away, but the momentary lapse of concentration caused his barrage of bolter fire to falter.

Three psychneuein darted in, their stingers plunging into Khalophis’s armour. Two stingers broke on impact, but the third stabbed into his waist through the coiled cabling beneath his breastplate. He grunted and crushed the beast with his fist. His bolter roared and psychneuein burst like target dummies.

Khalophis expertly switched magazines on his bolter and loosed another burst of shots as more of the beasts flew in. The fire had taken hold of the entire building, and Camille felt the floor shift underfoot as beams melted in the intolerable heat. The buzz of wings was almost obscured by the crackle of flames and creaking structural elements.

‘The stairs!’ she cried.

The way down was ablaze, the sagging ironwork red hot and melting. No way down there.

Khalophis saw it at the same time and shook his head, as though disgusted at her fragility.

‘Hold on,’ he said as he slung his bolter and tossed her over his shoulder.

The psychneuein boiled towards them, but Khalophis was already on the move. He ran through the flames, head down like a living battering ram. Psychneuein smashed against him, some breaking open on his armour, others stabbing him with their long stingers. Camille cried out in pain as a barb protruding from his shoulder-guard tore into her side. She looked up in time to see that Khalophis was running towards a sheet of dancing flame. She cried out as he leapt into it.

Searing heat surrounded her, but the blazing wall parted like a stage curtain as Khalophis loosed one last burst of his powers.

Then they were falling. Camille closed her eyes as the ground rushed up towards her. Khalophis braced his legs as he dropped, slamming down on the move and carrying on as though his leap through the flames was nothing at all. Camille felt a rib break with the impact of slamming against his armour, but gritted her teeth against the pain. Khalophis kept running, smashing through the low doorway that led back to the outside world in an explosion of stone and plaster dust. He fired his bolter one-handed over his shoulder. Alien screeches told Camille that every one of them was a killing shot. Whatever else she thought of Khalophis, he was a superlative warrior.

Camille drew gloriously fresh air into her lungs and, almost immediately, her vision cleared and her breathing eased.

The psychneuein swarmed from the ruined building. Smoke poured from its shattered windows and leaping flames licked up its length. Its structure bowed and shuddered as load-bearing elements melted. Spalling brickwork and stone tumbled from its upper levels.

Khalophis unceremoniously dumped her from his shoulder, and she bit back a scream as the splintered ends of her broken rib ground together.

‘Get in,’ ordered Khalophis, and she looked behind her to see the welcome form of the disc-speeder. He threw his bolter into the vehicle and climbed into the pilot’s seat.

Camille dragged herself upright using the speeder’s exhausts and painfully opened the crew compartment hatch as its engines spooled up with a rising whine.

The swarming psychneuein were almost on top of them, the buzz of their frantic wings deafening. Less than twenty metres separated them from the vanguard of the monsters.

‘Hurry, for Throne’s sake, hurry!’ she shouted, pulling herself inside.

‘Are you in?’ Khalophis demanded.

‘I’m in,’ she said, pressing herself into one of the bucket seats and hauling the restraint harness around her body. The whine of the engines changed pitch, and the speeder leapt forward, the phenomenal acceleration slamming her head against the fuselage. She kept her eyes shut for long seconds, hardly daring to breathe as the long seconds ticked by.

The engine noise deepened, and Khalophis’s voice crackled over the intercom.

‘We’re clear,’ he said. ‘Are you all right back there?’

She wanted to snap at him, but that was the pain talking.

Instead she spat a mouthful of blood and nodded.

‘Yeah, I guess,’ she said. ‘I think I broke a rib, my lungs feel like I’ve swallowed a gallon of burning tar and thanks to your lead foot I’ve got a splitting headache, but I’ll live.’

‘Good enough,’ said Khalophis. ‘Alive is all I need.’

‘I’m touched by your concern,’ she said, before adding, ‘but thanks for saving my life.’

Khalophis didn’t acknowledge her, and they spent the journey back to Tizca in pained silence.

A soft humming filled the medicae bay. Kallista reclined in bed, eyes closed, her chest rising and falling with rhythmic breaths. Her skin was grey, its surface dull and lustreless. Her hair had been shaved, and Lemuel wished he could do more for her than simply sit by her bedside and hold her hand.

He and Camille had taken alternating shifts to sit by her bedside, but Lemuel had been here for nearly forty-eight hours and was beginning to feel like lead weights were attached to his eyelids. A bank of walnut-panelled machines with numerous gold-rimmed dials and pict-slate readouts chirruped beside Kallista’s bed. Lengths of copper wiring coiled from jack plugs in their sides to points across her skull, and crackling globes buzzed softly along their top edges.

Kallista’s eyes fluttered open and she smiled weakly at the sight of him.

‘Hello, Lemuel,’ she said, her voice like footsteps on dead leaves.

‘Hello, my dear,’ he replied. ‘You’re looking well.’

Kallista tried to laugh, but she winced in pain.

‘Sorry,’ said Lemuel. ‘I shouldn’t make you laugh, your muscles are all strained.’

‘Where am I?’

‘In the neuro-wing of the Pyramid of Apothecaries,’ said Lemuel. ‘After what happened to you, it seemed the most sensible place to bring you.’

‘What did happen to me? Did I have another attack?’

‘I’m afraid so. We tried to get your sakau, but you were too far gone,’ said Lemuel, deciding to keep silent about what Kallista had said to him in her delirium.

Kallista lifted her arm to her forehead, trailing a collection of clear tubes and monitoring cables from a cannula piercing the back of her hand. She touched her head and frowned, gently feeling the stubble and brass contacts on her scalp.

‘Yes, sorry about your hair,’ said Lemuel. ‘They had to shave it to attach those contacts.’

‘Why? What are they for?’

‘Ankhu Anen brought the devices from the Corvidae temple. He was a bit cagey when I asked what they were, but eventually he said that they monitor aetheric activity in your brain and quell any intrusions. So far, they seem to be working.’

Kallista nodded and surveyed her surroundings.

‘How long have I been here?’

Lemuel rubbed his hands over his chin. ‘My beard says three days.’

She smiled and pushed herself further up the bed. Lemuel poured some water, and she gratefully drank the entire glass.

‘Thank you, Lemuel. You are a good friend.’

‘I do my best, dearheart,’ he said, before adding. ‘Do you remember anything about what you saw? I only ask because Ankhu Anen seemed to think it might be important.’

Kallista bit her bottom lip, and he saw an echo of the fearful look he’d seen at Voisanne’s.

‘Some of it,’ she said. ‘I saw Tizca, but not like we know it. There was no sunshine and the only light was from the fires.’

‘Fires?’

‘Yes, the city was burning,’ said Kallista. ‘It was being destroyed.’

‘By whom?’

‘I don’t know, but I saw the shadow of a stalking beast in the thunderclouds, and I could hear howling from somewhere far away,’ said Kallista, tears gathering in her eyes and spilling down her cheeks. ‘Everything was burning and glass was falling like rain. All the shards were like broken mirrors and every one of them had the image of a single staring eye looking back at me.’

‘That’s quite a vision,’ said Lemuel, taking her hand and stroking her upper arm.

‘It was horrible, and it’s not the first time I’ve had one like it. I didn’t recognise Tizca the first time I saw it but, now that I’m here, I’m sure it was the same one.’

A sudden thought occurred and she said, ‘Lemuel, did I write anything this time?’

He nodded.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but it didn’t make any sense. Ankhu Anen is trying to decipher it now.’

Kallista closed her eyes and wiped away her tears. She took a shuddering breath, and then smiled as someone opened the door behind him. Lemuel turned and saw a tall, broad-shouldered man in the uniform of a captain in the Prospero Spireguard. He was ludicrously handsome, with dark features and as chiselled a jaw as any heroic image of Hektor or Akilles.

Lemuel disliked him almost immediately on principle.

The man’s crimson uniform jacket was immaculately pressed, decorated with brass buttons, gold frogging and numerous polished medals. He carried a silver helmet in the crook of his arm, and a long curved sabre was belted at his hip next to a gleaming laspistol.

‘Sokhem,’ said Kallista with a grateful smile.

The soldier gave Lemuel a quick nod of acknowledgement. He held out his hand and said, ‘Captain Sokhem Vithara, sir. 15th Prosperine Assault Infantry.’

Lemuel took the proffered hand and winced at the strength of Vithara’s grip.

‘Lemuel Gaumon, remembrancer, 28th Expedition.’

‘A pleasure,’ said Vithara. ‘Kalli’s told me of your friendship, and I thank you for that, sir.’

Lemuel felt his dislike melt away in the face of Vithara’s winning smile and natural charm. He forced himself to smile, knowing he was no longer needed.

‘Nice to meet you too, Captain Vithara,’ he said, rising and scooping up his coat. ‘I’ll leave you two alone now.’

He gently lifted Kallista’s hand and planted a kiss and said, ‘I’ll come and see you later, my dear.’

She gripped his shoulder and pulled him close, whispering urgently in his ear.

‘I want to leave Prospero,’ she said. ‘I can’t stay here. None of us can.’

‘What? No, my dear, you’re in no state to go anywhere.’

‘You don’t understand, Lemuel. This world is doomed, I’ve seen its death throes.’

‘You don’t know for sure what you saw,’ said Lemuel, pulling himself upright.

‘Yes I do,’ she said. ‘I know all too well what it was.’

‘I can’t leave,’ said Lemuel. ‘There’s so much I’ve yet to learn from the Thousand Sons.’

‘You can’t learn if you’re dead,’ said Kallista.

Lemuel left Kallista and Captain Vithara together and made his way from the neuro-wing. Though he had no desire for Kallista beyond friendship, he had to admit to a pang of jealousy at the sight of her handsome suitor.

He smiled at the thought, recognising how foolish it was.

‘You are a hopeless romantic, Lemuel Gaumon,’ he said. ‘It will be the death of you.’

As he made his way to the exit, a door slid open ahead of him, and his good mood evaporated in an instant as he saw an Astartes warrior who looked like he’d just returned from a war zone. His armour was scorched black in places, and numerous barbs jutted from his shoulder guards and thighs. He recognised Khalophis, but it wasn’t his appearance that halted Lemuel in his tracks.

He carried Camille in his arms, and she looked dreadful.

Blood matted her hair and clothes. Her skin was a painful red, and she held a hand pressed to the side of her chest, stifling pained gasps with every step Khalophis took.

‘Camille!’ cried Lemuel, running over to her. ‘What in the world happened?’

‘Lem,’ she wept. ‘We were attacked.’

‘What?’ asked Lemuel, looking up at the hulking form of Khalophis. ‘By whom?’

‘Get out of my way, mortal,’ said Khalophis, moving past Lemuel.

He turned and jogged to match the warrior’s pace.

‘Tell me what happened,’ he said.

‘She was exploring the ancient ruins, even after I told her it was dangerous, and we disturbed a nest of psychneuein.’

Lemuel’s blood chilled at the mention of Prospero’s indigenous psy-predators.

‘Throne, no!’ he said, standing directly in front of Khalophis. The Astartes glared down at him, and Lemuel thought he was going to walk straight through him.

‘Camille, listen to me,’ said Lemuel, lifting her eyelids. Her pupils were dilated and almost entirely black. He didn’t know if that was good or bad. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘Like I’ve been run over by a Land Raider,’ she snapped. ‘Any more stupid questions?’

‘How is your head?’ he asked, speaking slowly and clearly. ‘Do you have a headache?’

‘Of course I do. Thanks to Khalophis, I think I breathed in a lifetime’s worth of smoke.’

‘No, I mean… Do you feel any different?’ asked Lemuel, struggling for the right words. ‘Is your head painful in a way that feels, I don’t know, strange?’

‘I’m not sure,’ she said, catching the edge of his panic. ‘Why? What’s wrong with me?’

Lemuel ignored her question and spoke directly to Khalophis, ‘Get Camille to a bay right now, and send for Lord Ahriman. Hurry! We don’t have much time!’

The Reflecting Cave was filled with light, myriad pinpricks of soul-light that flickered form precisely shaped crystals held by the thousand Thralls standing at the intersection points of the cavern’s energy lines. Located almost a full mile beneath the city of Tizca, the crystal cave was enormous, fully three kilometres across at its widest point, and its stalactite-hung roof chimed with the sound of soft bells.

Fireflies danced within the walls, throwing back the lights carried by the Thralls and illuminating the figures and apparatus at the centre of the enormous cave.

An elongated bronze device, like a gigantic telescope, descended from the central point of the roof. Its surface was graven with unknown symbols and studded with vanes of silver, while a polished green crystal fully three metres across terminated the base of the bronze mechanism.

Magnus the Red stood directly below the device, looking up through the crystal into the night sky directly above the centre of Occullum Square. He was naked but for a loincloth, his flesh bare to the elements and gleaming with oil.

Ahriman watched as Amon massaged a mixture of sandalwood, jasmine and benzoin oil into Magnus’s flesh. Uthizzar scraped the excess oil from the primarch’s body with a bone-bladed knife as Auramagma held a smoking censer that filled the air with the fragrance of cinquefoil. Phael Toron stood next to Ahriman, his body language stiff and awkward.

Phael Toron’s Seventh Fellowship had spent the majority of the Great Crusade on Prospero, missing much of the great learning undertaken by the Legion since Magnus had led them from their adoptive home world. His warriors had quickly accepted the new teachings, but it was going to take time for them to fully adjust.

‘Is this all necessary?’ asked Toron, indicating the strange paraphernalia arranged beneath the bronze mechanism. A rectangular white slab like an altar was hung with a heavy chain of magnetised iron. At each of the cardinal points around the slab were four concave mirrors that focussed the light from the crystals carried by the Thralls. Five concentric circles enclosed the altar, and within the circuits of the four outermost circles were unknown words that left a bad taste in Ahriman’s mouth when he had tried to read them.

‘The primarch tells us so,’ said Ahriman. ‘He has looked long and hard into the necessary rituals to hurl his body of light halfway across the galaxy.’

‘This smacks of unclean spirit worship to me,’ said Toron.

‘It is not,’ Ahriman reassured him. ‘We have learned much since leaving Prospero, Toron, but there are things you have yet to fully understand. This is absolutely necessary if we are to save Horus.’

‘But why here, hidden from sight in a cave?’

‘Look to your history,’ said Ahriman. ‘The first mystical rites were conducted in caves. We are the initiates of Magnus, and when we are finished, we will emerge into the light of the stars, reborn and renewed in our purpose. Do you understand?’

Toron gave a curt bow, cowed by the aetheric flare in Ahriman’s aura. ‘Of course, Lord Ahriman. This is all very new to me.’

‘Of course, forgive my choler,’ said Ahriman. ‘Come, it is time.’

They stepped forward, and their Thrall attendants moved in to drape white chasubles over their armour, tying them at the waist with narrow gold chains. Ahriman received a crown of vervain leaves threaded with a silver cord, and Toron was handed a glittering athame with a silver blade and obsidian handle.

Together, they walked to Magnus as Uthizzar stepped away and retrieved an iron lantern from his Thrall. Amon cleaned his hands of oil with a silk cloth, and robed Magnus in white before lifting a charcoal brazier that smoked with the aroma of alder and laurel wood.

‘Your flesh is anointed, my lord,’ said Amon. ‘You are untainted.’

Magnus nodded and turned to Ahriman.

‘The Crimson King requests his crown,’ he said.

Ahriman approached Magnus, feeling the heat of his master’s skin and the meditative power churning within him. Magnus lowered his head, and Ahriman placed the crown of vervain leaves upon his brow, letting the silver cord settle around his ears.

‘Thank you, my son,’ said Magnus, his eye glittering with violet fire and hazel flecks.

‘My lord,’ said Ahriman with a bow. He retreated from Magnus, and turned to receive a heavy book bound in faded leather and stitched with gold. An iron pendant, worked in the form of a snarling wolf’s head against a crescent moon, lay along the valley at the meeting point of its pages.

This was the Book of Magnus, its contents the distilled wisdom of all that Mahavastu Kallimakus had written in his long years of unthinking service to the Thousand Sons. To look upon it was an honour, but to hold it and be expected to read from its pages was the culmination of a lifelong dream for Ahriman.

Yet, for all that he had rebuked Phael Toron, Ahriman couldn’t help but wonder if the man’s unease was justified. The ritual Magnus had them performing was uncannily similar to many they had destroyed during the glory days of the Great Crusade.

‘Are we of one mind?’ asked Magnus. ‘We can go no further without complete accord. The harmony of our assembly is all, for it bears that most precious cargo: the human soul.’

‘We are in accord,’ said the captains with one voice.

‘Our work starts in the darkness, but comes into the light,’ continued Magnus. ‘My form must be reduced to the chaos of its component parts, and the whole will be greater than the sum of its parts. This great work we are upon is our most determined effort to lay claim to mastery of our fate. By such works we show that we are not content to simply be pawns in the Great Game, but will play upon our own account. Man the dabbler becomes man the decider. Too few have the courage to take arms against an uncaring galaxy, but we are the Thousand Sons; there is nothing we dare not do!’

Magnus nodded to Auramagma, who turned to the white slab as the thousand Thralls began chanting in monotonous, meaningless syllables. The light from the Thralls’ crystals pulsed, as though with the heartbeat of the cave itself.

Auramagma turned right as he reached the slab, circling around it with the brazier forming a ring of aromatic smoke. Ahriman followed him, reciting angelic words from the Book of Magnus, the power of them a fulsome texture on his lips.

Phael Toron came after him, bearing the athame upon his outstretched palms, and following him came Uthizzar with the unlit lantern. Lastly came Amon, who bore the heated brazier in his armoured gauntlets. The five sons of Magnus processed around the white slab nine times before halting as Magnus took his place in the centre.

The primarch of the Thousand Sons lay down upon the altar, his white robes spilling over its edges. Ahriman kept reading from the Book of Magnus as Uthizzar lit the lantern with a taper from Amon’s brazier. Auramagma held the censer aloft as Phael Toron stepped towards the recumbent form of Magnus.

Ahriman saw a ripple of light converging from all around them as streamers of aether drifted down from the crystals carried by the thousand Thralls. Within moments, the entire floor of the cave was awash with smoky light, the combined essence of the Thralls seeking an outlet for their energy. The light gathered in the mirrors, focusing its magnified illumination upon Magnus’s body, imparting a ghostly aura to his still form.

‘It is time,’ said Magnus, ‘Ahzek, give me the Moon Wolf.’

Ahriman nodded and lifted the iron pendant from the book. The moon glittered silver in the cavern’s light, and the fangs of the wolf shone like icicles. He lowered the pendant into Magnus’s flattened palm, looping the chain over his outstretched fingers.

‘This was given to me by Horus Lupercal on Bakheng,’ said Magnus. ‘It was part of his armour, but a lucky shot broke it from his pauldron. He gave it to me as a keepsake of that war, and joked that it would guide me in times of darkness. He was egotistical even then.’

‘Now we’ll see if he was right,’ said Ahriman.

‘Yes we will,’ said Magnus, closing his eye and making a fist around the pendant. His breathing slowed, becoming shallower as he concentrated on the love he bore for his brother. Within moments, a swelling bloodstain appeared on Magnus’s shoulder and he groaned in pain.

‘What in the name of the Great Ocean is that?’ cried Phael Toron.

‘A sympathetic wound,’ said Amon. ‘A repercussion, a stigmata, call it what you will. We have little time; the Warmaster has already been wounded.’

‘Toron,’ hissed Ahriman, ‘you know your role. Fulfil your duty to your primarch.’

The athame twitched on Phael Toron’s palms, lifting up and twisting in the air until it hung directly over the primarch’s heart. The silver cord within the vervain crown unwound of its own accord and slithered over the edge of the altar to bind itself to the magnetised chain.

‘I will travel the Great Ocean for nine days,’ said Magnus through gritted teeth, and Ahriman was astonished. To travel for so long was unheard of. ‘No matter what occurs, do not break my connection to the aether.’

The five warriors surrounding Magnus shared a look of concern, but said nothing.

‘You must not falter,’ said Magnus. ‘Continue, or all this will be for nothing.’

Ahriman lowered his gaze and continued to read, not understanding the words or how he knew their pronunciation, but speaking them aloud just the same. His voice grew in volume, moving in counterpoint to the chanting of the Thralls.

‘Now, Toron!’ cried Magnus, and the athame plunged down, stabbing into the primarch’s chest. A red bloom of glittering, iridescent blood spilled from the wound. Instantaneously, the swirling light found its outlet, and searing white beams erupted from the mirrors and surged into the hilt of the athame.

Magnus arched his back with a terrible roar. His eye snapped open, its substance without pupil or iris, but awash with all manner of incredible colours.

‘Horus, my brother!’ cried Magnus, his voice laden with the echoes of the thousand souls fuelling his ascent. ‘I am coming to you!’

And a terrifying, angelic form shot up from Magnus’s body in a blazing column of light.

Twenty-Four

She was my world
Whatever the cost
The price

Lemuel was frantic with worry. He couldn’t find Ahriman, and Camille was running out of time. A week that had started out so well had turned to one of the worst in the space of a couple of days. Two of his dearest friends were gravely ill, and a third was suffering at the hands of a master who used him without care for his wellbeing.

Events were spiralling out of control, all his grand ideas for what he had hoped to learn from the Thousand Sons as insubstantial as mist. He had learned a great deal, but what use was power when those you loved could slip away from you without warning?

He had shed too many tears for lost loved ones. He wasn’t going to shed any more.

Camille lay in a bed not dissimilar to Kallista’s, though without the variety of equipment hooked up to her cranium. Cuts and grazes had been dressed, and her lungs had been flushed of carbon, ash and trace elements of metal oxides. The wound in her side had been treated and dressed, and she had been declared physically fit and prescribed strong pain balms and three days of bed rest.

After what Ahriman had told him, Lemuel worried that Camille didn’t have three days.

He had begged Khalophis to find Ahriman, only to be told that Ahriman was ‘with the primarch’ and could not be disturbed. Though Lemuel’s body clock was turned upside down, he guessed it was early morning. Looking at a chrono above the nurse’s station he saw that ten hours had passed since Khalophis had brought Camille in.

Still, Ahriman had not come or even acknowledged Lemuel’s calls for aid.

When he returned to Camille’s room, Lemuel found an attractive ebony-skinned woman sitting by her bed, holding her hand and mopping her brow with a cloth. The elegant sweep of the woman’s bone structure told Lemuel she was a native of Prospero.

‘Chaiya?’ he asked.

The woman nodded and favoured him with a nervous smile. ‘You must be Lemuel.’

‘I am,’ he said, rounding the bed and taking Chaiya’s hand. ‘Can we talk outside?’

Chaiya glanced over at Camille. ‘If there is something you wish to say concerning Camille’s health, I think you should tell her first, don’t you?’

‘Under normal circumstances, I’d agree with you,’ said Lemuel, ‘but two of my best friends have been admitted to this facility, and my usual good manners are in short supply. So please indulge me.’

‘It’s all right, Lemuel,’ said Camille. ‘You know me, if there’s news to be told, I’d rather hear it first-hand. Say what you have to say.’

Lemuel swallowed. Having to voice his suspicions to Camille’s lover was bad enough; admitting them to her face was almost too much to bear.

‘The psychneuein I told you about, it turns out they lay their eggs in a rather unorthodox manner.’

Camille smiled, the muscles on her face relaxing.

‘It’s okay,’ she said, ‘none of them stung me. Khalophis kept me safe. If anything, you should be checking him out to see if he’s going to become a mother.’

Lemuel sat on the edge of the bed and shook his head. ‘That’s not how they reproduce, Camille. As I said, it’s rather unorthodox…’

He explained what Ahriman had told him of the reproductive cycle of the psychneuein, trying to emphasise that it wasn’t even certain that she was in any danger. Chaiya’s expression told him he wasn’t doing a very good job.

‘You think that’s what this headache is?’ she asked.

‘It might be,’ he said. ‘I don’t know. I hope not.’

‘You hope not? What kind of lame answer is that?’ snapped Camille. ‘Get me a damn brain scan or something! If I’ve got some alien’s eggs in my head, I bloody well want to know about it.’

Lemuel nodded and said, ‘Of course. I’ll see what I can do.’

‘No,’ said Chaiya. ‘I’ll do it. I have friends in the Thousand Sons. It will be better if I ask.’

‘Yes, yes,’ nodded Lemuel. ‘That sounds wise. Very well, I’ll… I’ll wait here shall I?’

Chaiya leaned over and gave Camille a kiss.

‘I’ll be back as soon as I can,’ she said before heading out of the room. Left alone with Camille, Lemuel took a seat and smiled weakly, crossing his hands in his lap.

‘I’ll never make a physician, will I?’

‘With that bedside manner? Not anytime soon, no.’

‘How’s your head anyway?’

‘Still sore.’

‘Oh.’

‘I did get a bumpy ride in Khalophis’s speeder. I banged my head pretty good on the seat.’

‘I’m sure that’s it then,’ said Lemuel.

‘Liar.’

‘All right,’ he snapped. ‘So what do you want me to say? That I think alien eggs are going to hatch in your head and eat your brain while you’re still alive? I’m sorry, I can’t say that.’

She watched him silently.

‘Yeah, definitely need to work on that bedside manner,’ she said.

Her forced humour broke the dam within him, and he buried his head in his hands and wept. Tears flowed freely and his chest heaved with sobs.

Camille sat up.

‘Hey, I’m sorry, Lemuel, but I’m the one in bed here,’ she said gently.

‘I’m sorry,’ he managed eventually. ‘You and Kallista, it’s too much. I can’t lose you both, I just can’t.’

‘And you’re not damn well going to,’ said Camille. ‘We’ll figure this out. If there’s going to be any tinkering done with my head, there’s probably no better planet to be on, is there?’

Lemuel wiped his wet eyes with a sleeve and smiled.

‘I suppose not. You’re being very brave, you know that?’

‘I am on some pretty strong meds, so I wouldn’t give me too much of the credit.’

‘You’re braver than you think,’ said Lemuel. ‘That counts for a lot. Believe me, I know.’

‘Yeah, me and Kalli are going to be fine, you wait and see,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ said Lemuel bitterly. ‘That’s all I ever do.’

Camille reached out and took his hand, letting her eyes drift closed.

‘No,’ she said. ‘That’s not true is it? You did all you could to save her.’

Lemuel pulled his hand free.

‘Don’t. Please.’

‘It’s all right,’ said Camille. ‘Tell me about Malika.’

He began hesitantly, for it had been many years since he had spoken of Malika. The words were too tangled in grief to come easily, but he haltingly told Camille of the brightest, most beautiful woman in the world.

Her name was Malika, and they had met at a fund-raising dinner held by the Lord of the Sangha district to procure monies that would allow him to purchase a quarry’s worth of Proconnesus marble from the Anatolian peninsula to donate to the Imperial Masonic Guild. The current Guildmaster, Vadok Singh, had promised a prominent location for the statues that would be crafted from the blocks, perhaps even the Emperor’s Investiary, and rumour had it the commission had been awarded to no less a sculptor than Ostian Delafour.

Such things took money, and the wealthiest citizens of the district had been summoned to show their devotion financially. Lemuel was a rich man, and had built a sizeable estate, thanks to a combination of business acumen and the ability to read people’s auras to know when he was being played false. He owned property throughout Mobayi, and was well-liked, having turned much of his wealth to philanthropic works.

Malika was the daughter of the Lord of the Sangha district, and they had fallen in love that night beneath the stars and over a bottle of palm wine. They were married the following year, in a ceremony that cost more than many of the families living on Lemuel’s lands made in a year. Lemuel had never been happier, and as he spoke of the first seven years of marriage, his face lit up with golden memories.

The first signs of Malika’s diminishing health came with severe migraines, unexplainable blackouts and short-term memory loss. Physicians proscribed pain balms and rest, but nothing helped alleviate her symptoms. The diagnoses of the finest medical practitioners from all across the Nordafrik districts were sought, and eventually it came to light that Malika had developed a highly aggressive astrocytoma, a malignant brain tumour that he was told was incredibly difficult to treat.

Surgery alone could not control the tumour, as its cells had extended their cancer throughout her brain. Radiation therapy followed numerous surgical procedures alongside aggressive chemotherapy in an attempt to control any further tumour growth, but the physicians told Lemuel that the heterogeneous nature of her ailment was making it difficult to treat. As one cell type was destroyed, they said, others lurked in the wings to take over the job of destroying Malika’s brain.

Lemuel watched his wife fade away and there was nothing he could do about it. Such helplessness was anathema to him, and he turned to ever more esoteric methods in his attempts to save her, despite the futility of their likely effect. No treatment was too ridiculous, for Lemuel was willing to try anything to save his beloved wife.

Any chance was better than none.

Lemuel employed homeopathic and naturopathic experts to administer holistic courses of herbal treatments, while Ayurvedic practitioners placed equal emphasis on the wellbeing of her mind and spirit. Qi gong, acupuncture, controlled breathing, hypnosis and orthomolecular therapies were all tried, but none of them had any effect whatsoever.

Lemuel refused to give up. His researches had led him to the farthest corners of knowledge, and he uncovered many texts that spoke of forces beyond human understanding. In these books he recognised his own abilities and read of others that could heal the sick, raise the dead and call forth powers that were unearthly and abhorred.

That didn’t matter. He would do whatever it took to save his wife.

She begged him to stop, but he would not listen. She had made peace with her mortality, but Lemuel could not. He wept as he told Camille of how she had watched from their roof veranda as he left on an expedition to the mountains of the Himalazia in search of hidden masters said to have achieved mastery over body and mind.

If anyone could help, it would be them.

Laden with all his wealth, he and his followers travelled far into the mountains and almost died in the frozen winds that scoured these highest peaks. It proved to be a wasted journey; the builders of the Emperor’s palace had long since displaced any hidden masters that might once have lived in these mountains.

By the time he returned to Mobayi, Malika was dead.

‘She was the world to me,’ said Lemuel as he finished his tale.

‘I’m so sorry,’ said Camille. ‘I never knew. I mean, I saw something of her when I touched you on Aghoru, but I didn’t know. Why did you never tell us about Malika?’

Lemuel shrugged.

‘I don’t like telling people that she died,’ he said. ‘The more people I tell, the more it sinks in that she’s really gone. It makes it more real and more unchangeable, somehow.’

‘You think you can change that she died?’

‘For a while I thought I could,’ said Lemuel. ‘Some of the books I read spoke of bringing the dead back to life, but they were maddeningly vague. Nothing worked, but when the opportunity came to be selected for the Remembrancer Order, I jumped at the chance to petition the Thousand Sons.’

‘Why the Thousand Sons?’

‘I’d heard the rumours,’ said Lemuel. ‘Hadn’t you?’

‘I don’t listen to rumours,’ said Camille, smiling. ‘I just start them.’

Lemuel chuckled.

‘Touché, my dear,’ he said. ‘I spent a long time listening to rumours in my search for a cure for Malika, and I’d heard a great deal spoken about the sorcery of the Thousand Sons. I heard whispers of how a great many of them had been horribly afflicted with dreadful mutations, and of how Magnus had saved his Legion. I thought that if I could learn from them, I might learn how to bring Malika back.’

‘Oh, Lemuel,’ said Camille, taking his hand and kissing it. ‘Trust me, there’s no bringing anyone back. I know; I’ve touched the dead and I’ve listened to their lives. I’ve felt their love and their pain. But, through all of that, I’ve felt the joy they took in life when they were alive, the people they knew and loved. In the end, that’s the best anyone can hope for, isn’t it?’

‘I suppose so,’ agreed Lemuel, ‘but I tried so hard.’

‘She knew that. Through everything, she knew you loved her and were trying to save her.’

‘Could I give you something of hers?’ asked Lemuel. ‘Maybe you could read it?’

‘Of course, whatever I can do, Chaiya. You know that,’ said Camille, her voice drowsy.

Lemuel frowned. ‘Did you just call me Chaiya?’

‘Sure… why? That’s your… name…’ said Camille. ‘Isn’t it… my love?’

Lemuel’s stomach lurched as Camille’s hand fell from his and her eyes widened. She gasped for air, and the entire left side of her face seemed to slip, as though invisible hands were moulding her flesh into a lopsided grimace.

‘Oh, no! Camille! Camille!’

Her hands bunched into fists as they wrung the sheets on the bed, and her body stiffened with the force of the seizure. Her eyes stared with manic fury, and blood-flecked saliva drooled from the corner of her mouth. Camille’s face was a mask of wordless pleading, her entire body wracked with pain.

Lemuel turned towards the door.

‘Help! Throne of Terra, help me please!’ he yelled.

‘Can you see them?’ asked Phosis T’kar.

‘Yes,’ replied Hathor Maat. ‘Seeing them isn’t the problem. It’s doing something about it that’s the problem.’

‘Please,’ begged Lemuel. ‘Whatever you can do.’

Camille’s room had become a hive of activity since he’d called for help. Chaiya had returned, not with medical staff or any form of imaging equipment, but with two captains of the Thousand Sons. She had introduced them as Phosis T’kar of the Second Fellowship and Hathor Maat of the Third.

Evidently she did have friends in high places.

While Phosis T’kar held Camille motionless with the power of his mind, the absurdly pretty Hathor Maat placed his hands on either side of her skull. His eyes were closed, but from the motion of his pupils, it was clear he visualised with other senses.

‘There are six of them, buried deep and growing fast,’ he said. ‘Ugly white things. They’re not yet larval, but it won’t be long before they pupate.’

‘Can you save her?’ asked Chaiya, her voice as brittle as cracked crystal.

‘What do you think we’re trying to do?’ snapped Phosis T’kar.

‘They’re cunning little bastards,’ hissed Hathor Maat, twisting his head and moving his hands around Camille’s skull. ‘Organic tendrils, like anchors, are burrowing into the meat of the brain, tethering themselves to the nerve fibres. I need to burn them out slowly.’

‘Burn them out?’ asked Lemuel, horrified at the idea.

‘Of course,’ said Maat. ‘How else did you think I was going to do it? Now be quiet.’

Lemuel held onto Chaiya’s hand, and she to his. Though they had not met before today, they were united in their love for Camille. From the straining muscles in her neck and arms, Lemuel could tell that Camille’s body was trying to thrash out its agony on the bed, but Phosis T’kar kept her immobile without apparent effort.

‘I see you,’ said Hathor Maat, curling his finger as though hooking a fish. Lemuel smelled a sickly aroma of something burning.

‘You’re hurting her!’ he cried.

‘I told you to be quiet,’ barked Hathor Maat. ‘The tiniest fraction of a misstep and I may end up burning out the mechanism that allows her to breathe or pumps blood from her heart. I have its body and am slowly boiling it alive.’

He laughed with relish.

‘Oh, you don’t like that do you?’ he said. ‘Trying to dig your hooks in deeper, eh? Well, let’s see about that.’

Hathor Maat dug his fingers downwards, spreading the tips wide and smiling as the smell of burning meat grew stronger. He worked within Camille’s skull for over an hour before nodding to himself. .

‘One. Two. Three. And four… Got them,’ he said.

‘You got them all?’ asked Lemuel.

‘Don’t be foolish, that was just the tendrils of the first egg. They’re tenacious and aren’t going without a fight. It’s loose now, but we need to get it out fast before it reattaches. Phosis T’kar?’

‘Got it,’ said the captain of the Second Fellowship.

Phosis T’kar placed his hand beside Camille’s ear and twisted his extended fingers as though attempting to pick the most complex of locks. His fingers were incredibly dextrous, and Lemuel held his breath as Phosis T’kar gradually drew his fingers back towards his palm.

‘Inkosazana preserve us!’ cried Lemuel as something wet and wriggling emerged from Camille’s ear. It looked like a spined slug, and its slimy body writhed as it was drawn forth by Phosis T’kar’s incredibly precise power.

The slug-like creature plopped down into a gleaming kidney bowl, leaving a sticky trail of blood and slime behind it. Just looking at it made Lemuel feel sick.

‘Would you like to do the honours?’ asked Phosis T’kar handing Lemuel the kidney bowl with a grin.

‘Oh, absolutely,’ replied Lemuel. He tipped the bowl and dropped the pre-larval psychneuein to the tiled floor of the medicae bay.

He stamped on it and ground it to a gooey paste with his heel.

‘One down, five to go,’ said Hathor Maat, his skin streaked in sweat. ‘Just as well I love a challenge.’

Beyond the Pyramid of Apothecaries, a light rain fell over Tizca. Rain was uncommon over the city and its inhabitants came out onto the streets to feel it on their skin. Children played in the rain, and the streets echoed with squeals of delight as they splashed in puddles and stood beneath spouting gutters.

It continued for days, drowning the city every morning.

No one knew where it came from, for the techno-psychic arrays built into the mountains were normally an entirely reliable means of predicting and controlling the planet’s climate.

Some rain was, of course, necessary to keep the ecosystem in balance, but this was beyond anything the inhabitants of Tizca had ever experienced. The buildings glistened with rainwater and the streets flowed with gurgling rivers.

Questions were asked of the Thousand Sons, but no answer was forthcoming as to the cause of the unseasonable rains. Fully half the Legion’s captains were in absentia, and those who remained had no answer.

On the sixth day, an impromptu parade was held through Occullum Square where the crowd threw off its clothes and cavorted naked in the rain. Tizca had no standing force of enforcers, so elements of the Prospero Spireguard were deployed to return the deliriously naked dancers to their abodes. The seventh day saw several members of the parade fall ill with a deadly form of viral pneumonia, and the following morning riots broke out in front of the Pyramid of Apothecaries as frightened people demanded a vaccine. Sixty-three people died before the Spireguard restored order, and a sullen mood fell upon the city.

On the ninth day, the rains finally ceased, and the sun broke through the dark clouds that hung like disapproving judges over the heart of the city. A luminous beam of light shone down on Tizca, bathing it in golden radiance and striking the flaming urn atop the great column at the centre of Occullum Square.

Mahavastu Kallimakus wrote that it was like the light of heaven returning to Prospero.

Deep within the Reflecting Caves, that light retuned to its source.

Magnus opened his eye, and the athame withdrew from his flesh, its blade crumbling to dust as soon as it came into contact with the air. Ahriman let out a relieved sigh as Magnus sat up, swinging his legs over the side of the white slab and blinking furiously in the darkness.

Only the dim glow that swam in the walls illuminated the chamber. Of the thousand Thralls, only eighteen remained alive, though their bodies were gaunt and drained, the glow from their crystals faint and almost extinguished.

‘My lord,’ said Amon, coming forward with a goblet of water. ‘It is good to see you.’

Magnus nodded, and Ahriman saw how pale his skin had become. His long red hair was matted with sweat, and Ahriman thought he could see the writhing veins and pulsing organs beneath the primarch’s skin. That was a lie, for Ahriman had seen into the heart of Magnus, and there was nothing so mundane as liver, lungs or kidney within that immortal frame.

Phael Toron, Uthizzar and Auramagma crowded in, their joy at seeing Magnus returned beyond measure. Only Ahriman held back, his emotions mixed at what they had done. For nine long days they had stood vigil over their beloved primarch, neither eating nor sleeping nor partaking of food or water. No words had passed between them, and no communication had been attempted with their brothers on the surface.

‘Was it worth it?’ asked Ahriman. ‘Did you succeed?

Magnus fixed him with his single eye, a dull orb of watery blue, and shook his head slowly.

‘No, Ahzek, I think that I did not,’ said Magnus. ‘Just as I attempted to save my brother from the abyss, others were ready to push him in.’

‘Others?’ snarled Auramagma. ‘Who?’

‘A wretch named Erebus who serves my erstwhile brother, Lorgar. It seems the powers that seek to ensnare Horus Lupercal have already claimed some pieces on this board. The Word Bearers are already in thrall to Chaos.’

‘Lorgar’s Legion have betrayed us also?’ asked Phael Toron. ‘This treachery runs deeper than we could ever have imagined.’

‘Chaos?’ said Ahriman. ‘You use the term as if it were a name.’

‘It is, my son,’ said Magnus. ‘It is the Primordial Annihilator that has hidden in the blackest depths of the Great Ocean since the dawn of time, but which now moves with infinite patience to the surface. It is the enemy against which all must unite or the human race will be destroyed. The coming war is its means of achieving the end of all things.’

‘Primordial Annihilator? I have never heard of such a thing,’ said Ahriman.

‘Nor had I until I faced Horus and Erebus,’ said Magnus, and Ahriman was shocked to see the barest flicker in his primarch’s aura.

Magnus was lying to them. He had known of this Primordial Annihilator.

‘So what do we do now?’ asked Uthizzar. ‘Surely now we must warn the Emperor?’

Magnus hesitated before nodding slowly.

‘Yes, we must,’ he said. ‘If my father is forewarned, he can take arms against Horus before it is too late.’

‘Why will he believe us?’ asked Ahriman. ‘We have no proof.’

‘I have the proof now,’ sighed Magnus wearily. ‘Now return to your cult temples and await my summons. Amon, attend upon me; the rest of you may leave.’

The Captains of Fellowship turned and made their way towards the crystal steps that led out of the cave.

‘Ahriman,’ said Magnus, ‘bend all the power of the Corvidae to unravelling the strands of the future. We must know more of what is to come. Do you understand me?’

‘I do, my lord,’ replied Ahriman.

‘Do whatever it takes,’ said Magnus. ‘Whatever the cost may be.’

Lemuel awoke to find Ahriman standing over him. His mentor had a stern look in his eye, and Lemuel immediately felt the tension in the room. He stifled a yawn, realising he’d fallen asleep next to Kallista’s bed once again. Her eyes were closed, though it was hard to tell whether it was in sleep or unconsciousness. Camille sat across from him, her breathing still that of a sleeper.

Camille had recovered well from her ordeal with the psychneuein eggs, quickly returning to her normal, vivacious self.

‘My lord?’ he said. ‘What is it?’

Amon and Ankhu Anen stood behind Ahriman, making the room feel suddenly small.

‘You should leave, both of you,’ Ahriman told him.

‘Leave? Why?’

‘Because you will find what has to happen here unpleasant.’

‘I don’t understand,’ he said, rising from his chair and moving protectively towards Kallista. Camille woke and looked up, startled, as she saw Astartes filling the room.

‘Lem?’ she asked, immediately picking up on the tension. ‘What’s going on?’

‘I don’t know yet,’ he said.

‘I do not expect you to understand,’ said Ahriman with real regret in his voice. ‘But events are in motion that require us to know of the future. Our normal methods of gathering such information are denied to us, so we must seek other avenues.’

‘What are you going to do? I won’t let you hurt her.’

‘I am sorry, Lemuel,’ said Ahriman. ‘We have no choice. This has to happen. Believe me, I wish it did not.’

Amon moved towards the bank of walnut-panelled machines and turned all the dials to their middle positions. The light began to fade from the crackling, buzzing globes and the needles on the brass readouts nosed their way down.

‘What is he doing?’ Camille wanted to know. ‘Lord Ahriman, please?’

Ahriman said nothing, his face betraying his unease.

‘You wanted to know what this machine was for?’ said Ankhu Anen, taking Lemuel’s arm. The giant Astartes easily pulled him away from Kallista’s side and handed him off to Ahriman. ‘It is an aetheric blocker. It isolates the subject’s mind from the Great Ocean. We used such devices to subdue our brothers when the flesh change came upon them. It was the only way to stop it. Your friend’s mind is locked open to its roaring tides, and, but for these devices, aetheric energy would be pouring into her.’

‘Can you… shut her mind to it?’ asked Camille, standing protectively beside her friend.

The Astartes said nothing, and Lemuel read the truth in their auras.

‘They can,’ he said, ‘but they won’t.’

‘She should be dead already,’ hissed Ankhu Anen, dragging Camille out of the way. ‘She has a unique link to future currents, and we must make use of all the tools available to us.’

‘Tools? Is that all we’ve been to you?’ asked Lemuel, struggling uselessly in Ahriman’s grip. ‘All this time, were you just using us?’

‘It was not like that,’ said Ahriman, casting a poisonous glance at Ankhu Anen.

‘Yes it was,’ said Lemuel. ‘I see that now. You think you’re so clever, but you’re blinded by your belief in the superiority of your knowledge. You can’t even contemplate that someone else might know better than you.’

‘Because no one else does,’ snapped Ahriman. ‘We do know better than anyone else.’

‘Maybe you do, but maybe you don’t. What if there’s something you’re missing? What if there’s some little piece of the puzzle you don’t know about?’

‘Be silent,’ ordered Ankhu Anen. ‘We are the architects of fate, not you.’

‘So what happens when you turn those machines off?’ asked Camille, taking Lemuel’s hand as they realised the futility of resisting the Astartes physically.

‘We will listen to what she has to say and we will learn of the future.’

‘No, I won’t let you,’ said Lemuel.

‘No?’ sneered Ankhu Anen. ‘Who are you to bark orders at us, little man? You think because Ahriman has taught you a few parlour tricks that you are one of us? You are mortals, your abilities and intellect are beneath our notice.’

‘Ahriman, please!’ begged Lemuel. ‘Don’t do this!’

‘I’m sorry, Lemuel, but they are right. Kallista is dying anyway. At least this way her death will mean something.’

‘That’s a lie!’ shouted Lemuel. ‘If you do this, you’ll be killing her. You might as well put a bullet in her brain and be honest about it.’

Amon removed some of the contact points on Kallista’s skull and consulted the read-outs on the aetheric blocker. He nodded to Ankhu Anen and said, ‘It is done. I have kept some of the blocks in place, but her mind is open to the aether now. Just a fraction, but it should be enough to generate divinatory activity.’

Kallista’s eyes fluttered open and she drew in a panicked breath as awareness was forced back to the surface of her consciousness. Her lips moved and breaths of hoarse air gusted from somewhere deep inside her. The temperature in the room fell sharply.

‘A million shards of glass, a million times a million. All broken, all shattered glass. The eye in the glass. It sees and it knows, but it does nothing…’

Her eyes drifted shut and her breathing deepened. No more words were forthcoming, and Ankhu Anen leaned over her, prising the lids of her eyes open.

‘Increase the flow of aetheric energy,’ he ordered. ‘We can get more out of her.’

‘Please,’ begged Camille. ‘Don’t do this.’

‘Ahriman, she’s an innocent, she doesn’t deserve this,’ cried Lemuel.

The Thousand Sons ignored them, and Amon again adjusted the dials on the machine. The needles dipped even farther, and Kallista’s body jerked on the bed, her legs kicking the covers from her feet. Lemuel didn’t want to watch, but couldn’t tear his eyes from the dreadful sight.

She screamed, and the words poured from her in a flood as the temperature continued to plummet.

‘It’s too late… the Wolf is at the door and it hungers for blood. Oh, Throne… no, the blood! The Ravens, I see them too. The lost sons and a Raven of blood. They cry out for salvation and knowledge, but it is denied! A brother betrayed, a brother murdered. The worst mistake for the noblest reason! It cannot happen, but it must!’

Sweat poured from Kallista’s face. Her eyes bulged in their sockets and every muscle and sinew of her body stretched to breaking point. The effort of speaking was too much, and she fell back, her frame wracked with agonising convulsions.

Lemuel felt Ahriman’s grip slacken, and he looked up to see regret written across his face. He extended his aura, projecting his disgust and sadness at Kallista’s treatment by the Thousand Sons into Ahriman’s. The effect was subtle, but Ahriman looked down at him with an expression that was part admiration and part remorse.

‘That will not work on me,’ said Ahriman. ‘You have learned much, but you don’t have the strength to influence me with the little power you have.’

‘Then you’re just going to let this happen?’

‘I have no choice,’ said Ahriman. ‘The primarch has demanded it be so.’

‘Lem, they’re going to kill her,’ pleaded Camille.

Ahriman turned to face her saying, ‘She is already dead, Mistress Shivani.’

He nodded to Amon. ‘Allow the aether free rein within her. We must know everything.’

Magnus’s equerry turned back to the machine and turned all the dials to zero. The needles fell slack and the lights winking on its surface extinguished. The glass readouts on the machine cracked with frost and the globes misted over. Lemuel felt cold like the chill at the end of the world.

The effect on Kallista was instantaneous. Her back arched and her eyes snapped open. Blazing light streamed out, like the furnace breath of an incinerator. It illuminated the room with a sickly blue-green light, throwing shadows of things that didn’t exist across every wall. The ghostly howls of a million monsters ripped from her throat, and Lemuel smelled the awful stench of roasted human flesh.

Smoke poured from Kallista’s body, and even the Astartes were horrified at what was happening to her. The flesh bubbled and smoked on her bones, peeling away in blackened flakes as though the target of an invisible flamethrower. Her body hissed and spat as it was reduced to jellied runnels of boiling fat and meat.

Yet through it all, she still screamed.

Long after her heart and lungs and brain were blackened husks, she kept screaming. The sound cut through Lemuel like a hot knife, twisting in his guts with treacherous force. He dropped to his knees as a screeching whine, like a host of fingernails dragged down a slateboard, bit into his head. Camille was screaming, her grip on his hand as powerful as a clamping vice.

Then, with a terrible ripping, tearing sound, it was over.

Lemuel blinked away bright sunbursts, feeling his stomach lurch at the stench of burned meat that hung like a miasma in the air. He pulled himself to his feet, dreading what he would see as much as he needed to see what had become of Kallista Eris.

Nothing remained of the beautiful remembrancer save a blackened outline seared onto the sheets, and smoking pools of rendered flesh that drooled from the bed in long, rubbery ropes.

‘What did you do?’ he whispered, tears streaming down his face. ‘Oh, Kallista, you poor, poor girl.’

‘We did what we needed to,’ hissed Ankhu Anen. ‘I make no apologies.’

‘No,’ said Lemuel, turning to help Camille to her feet. ‘You didn’t need to do this. This was murder, plain and simple.’

Camille wept with him, burying her head in his shoulder and clawing at his back with heaving sobs of grief.

Ahriman reached out to him.

‘I am truly sorry, my friend,’ he said.

Lemuel shrugged off his hand, moving past Ahriman towards the door with his arms wrapped tightly around Camille.

‘Don’t touch me,’ he said. ‘We are no longer friends. I don’t know if we ever were.’

Twenty-Five

The warning
You were right
Too close to the sun

Magnus sat in the centre of the Reflecting Cave, allowing the resonant harmonies of the silent crystals to fill him with calm. His meditations had lasted two nights and he had finally achieved the calm he needed to make his journey. He was not alone, for nine hundred Thralls stood in their appointed positions around the chamber, each holding a glimmering crystal into which they had bound their life-force.

No more Thralls could be spared, for all those that had taken part in the last ritual had since perished. Nine hundred was fewer than Magnus would have liked, but nine hundred would have to do. What other choice was there?

The spell he had crafted required sacrifice. Its power was beyond anything he had ever conjured, even within the secrecy of his Sanctum or in the days when he had struggled to cure his Legion of their terrible mutations.

The Thralls’ lives were forfeit, but it was a sacrifice each made willingly. Their brothers had died in vain as Magnus had tried to save Horus. They would die to allow Magnus to take warning of that treachery to the Emperor, and none begrudged their lord and master the light of their lives.

Magnus opened his eye as Ahriman approached.

‘Is everything prepared?’ he asked.

Ahriman was robed in white, and he bore the Book of Magnus before him like an offering. Magnus read his favoured son’s concern, but he alone of all his warriors could be entrusted with this spell, for only Ahriman had the clarity of thinking and detached command of the Enumerations necessary to intone the incantation with the required precision.

‘It is, my lord,’ said Ahriman, ‘but again I ask you, is this the only way?’

‘Why do you doubt me, my son?’ asked Magnus.

‘It is not that I doubt you,’ said Ahriman hurriedly, ‘but I have studied this evocation and its power is unlike anything we have ever attempted. The consequences–’

‘The consequences will be mine alone to bear,’ interrupted Magnus. ‘Now do as I ask.’

‘My lord, I will always obey, but the spell to break into the alien lattice-way calls for bargains to be struck with the most terrible creatures of the Great Ocean, beings whose names translate as… daemons.’

‘There is little beyond your knowledge, Ahriman, but there are yet things you cannot know. You of all men should know that “daemon” is a meaningless word conjured by fools who knew not what they beheld. Long ago, I encountered powers in the Great Ocean I thought to be sunken, conceptual landmasses, but over time I came to know them as vast intelligences, beings of such enormous power that they dwarf even the brightest stars of our own world. Such beings can be bargained with.’

‘What could such powerful beings possibly want?’ asked Ahriman. ‘And can you ever really be sure that you have the best of such a bargain?’

‘I can,’ Magnus assured him. ‘I have bargained with them before. This will be no different. If we could have saved the gateway into the lattice on Aghoru, this spell would be unnecessary. I could simply have stepped into it and emerged on Terra.’

‘Assuming a gateway exists on Terra,’ cautioned Ahriman.

‘Of course a gateway exists on Terra. Why else would my father have retreated there to pursue his researches?’

Ahriman nodded, though Magnus saw he was far from convinced.

‘There can be no other way, my son,’ said Magnus. ‘We talked about this before.’

‘I remember, but it frightens me that we must wield powers forbidden to us to warn the Emperor. Why should he trust any warning sent by such means?’

‘You would have me trust the vagaries of astrotelepathy? You know how fickle such interpretations can be. I dare not trust a matter of such dreadful importance to mere mortals. Only I have the power to project my being into this alien labyrinth and navigate my way to Terra with news of Horus’s treachery. For my father to believe me I must speak to him directly. He must bear witness to the acuity of my visions, and he must know what I know with the totality of my truth. Heard third-, fourth- or fifth-hand through a succession of intermediaries will only dilute any warning until it is too late to do anything. That is why it must be this way.’

‘Then it must be done,’ said Ahriman.

‘Yes, it must,’ agreed Magnus, rising from the floor of the chamber and walking with Ahriman to the point beneath the bronze mechanism that lay below Occullum Square. Magnus looked up through the green gem at its base, as though looking to Terra itself.

‘It will be dangerous,’ admitted Magnus, ‘but if there is anyone who can do it…’

‘It is you,’ finished Ahriman.

Magnus smiled and said, ‘Watch over me, my son?’

‘Always,’ said Ahriman.

Magnus felt the world fall away from him, shedding his corporeal body as a serpent sheds its skin and rises renewed. Ancients watching such creatures believed they knew the secrets of immortality and named their houses of healing in their honour. To this day, the symbol of the Apothecary, the caduceus, bore serpents entwined in a double helix.

Chains of flesh were shrugged off, and Magnus distilled his molten core into a seething arrow aimed from Prospero to distant Terra. With a thought, he shot up through the Occullum and into the heavens. His body of light was a beautiful thing, existence as it was meant to be experienced, not the mundane solidity endured by mortals.

Magnus shook off his revelries, for the energy of the spell was propelling him ever onwards. He felt Ahriman’s words, the words of ancient sorcerers of Terra, wrapping his incandescent body in purpose, the life energies of the Thralls empowering him with their vitality.

This was a dangerous spell, and no other being would dare wield it.

The blackness of space dissolved, and the raging torrents of the Great Ocean surrounded him. Magnus laughed with the pleasure of it, rejoicing in the familiar energies and currents that welcomed him like a long lost friend.

He was a bright star amid a constellation of supernovas, each a flickering ember next to his beatific glory. Here in the Great Ocean, he could be whatever he wanted to be; nothing was forbidden and anything was possible.

Worlds flashed past him as he hurtled through the swelling tides of colour, light and dimensions without name. The roiling chaos of the aether was a playground for titanic forces, where entire universes could be created and destroyed with a random thought. How many trillions of potential lives were birthed and snuffed out just by thinking such things?

Predators avoided him as he sped towards his destination like the most incredible comet ever set loose in the stars. They recognised him and were fearful of his brilliance in a realm where the light of creation blazed in every breath. Stagnation was anathema to Magnus. All life needed to progress through a series of evolved stages to prosper, and change was part of the natural cycle of all living things, from the smallest single-celled organism to the radiant creature encased within the crude matter of humanity.

The nobility of his cause threw off sparks of potency that created phantom worlds and concepts in his wake. Entire philosophies and bodies of thought would be born in the minds of those lucky enough to have his leavings descend upon their dreaming minds.

His course altered, a roving thought steering him around a monstrously dark shadow, the heaving bulk of something enormous shifting in the depths of the Great Ocean. Magnus felt a glimmer of familiarity in the stirred-up memories, but suppressed it with a shudder that sent a torrent of nightmares into the dreams of the tribal warriors of a feral world soon to encounter the 392nd Expeditionary Fleet.

There were no landmarks in the Great Ocean, its topography ever-mutable, yet this landscape of streaming colour and light was familiar by its very changeability. He had flown this shoal before, and he recoiled from it, concentrating on keeping his course true.

A shudder passed along his bright essence, and Magnus felt the first clutch of his Thralls die. Their soul lights winked out and a measure of his incredible, ferocious speed bled away.

‘Hold on, my sons,’ he whispered, ‘just a little longer.’

What he sought was close, he could feel it: the same subtle vibration in the fabric of the Great Ocean that had drawn him to Aghoru. It was faint, like a distant heartbeat hidden within a rousing drum chorus.

Its creators had selfishly sought to keep it for themselves, little realising their time as masters of the galaxy was over. Even with their empire in decline, they kept their secret jealously close to their hearts.

Magnus sensed one of their hidden pathways nearby and opened his inner eye, seeing the glittering fabric of the Great Ocean in all its revealed glory. The hidden capillaries of the alien network were visible as radiant lines of molten gold, and Magnus angled his course towards the nearest.

Distance was a similarly meaningless concept here, and with a thought he spiralled around the golden passageway. He focussed his energy and unleashed it at the lattice in a blaze of silver lightning. Scores of his Thralls died in an instant, but the shimmer-sheen of the golden passage remained unbroken. Magnus hurled his fists against the impervious walls, snuffing out his Thralls by the dozen with every blow, but it was useless.

It had all been for nothing. He couldn’t get in.

Magnus felt his glorious ascent slowing, and howled his frustration to the furthest corners of the Great Ocean.

Then he felt it, the familiar sense of something titanic moving in the swells around him, a continent adrift in the ocean with ancient sentience buried in its aetheric heart. Infinite spectra of light danced before him, more magnificent than the most radiant Mechanicum Borealis. Even to one as mighty as Magnus, the flaring eruption of light and power was incredible.

Its communication was sibilant, like sand pouring through the neck of an hourglass. It had breadth and depth, yet no beginning and no end, as though it had always existed around him and always would.

It spoke, not with words, but with power. It surrounded him, offering itself freely and without ulterior motive. The Great Ocean was truly a place of contradictions, its roiling, infinite nature allowing for the presence of all things, good and bad. Just as some entities within its depths were malicious and predatory, others were benevolent and altruistic.

Contrary to what most people believed, there was uncorrupted power here that could be wielded by those with the knowledge and skill to do so. Such gifted individuals were few and far between, but through the work of adepts like Magnus, it might yet be possible to lift humanity to a golden age of exploration and the acquisition of knowledge.

Magnus drank deep of the offered power and tore his way into the golden lattice. He felt its shrieking wail of unmaking as a scream of pain. Without a second thought, he flew into the shimmering passageway, following a route he knew would lead to Terra.

Far beneath the birthrock of the race that currently bestrode the galaxy as its would-be masters, a pulsing chamber throbbed with activity. Hundreds of metres high and many hundreds more wide, it hummed with machinery and reeked of blistering ozone. Once it had served as the Imperial Dungeon, but that purpose had long been subverted to another.

Great machines of incredible potency and complexity were spread throughout the chamber, vast stockpiles and uniquely fabricated items that would defy the understanding of even the most gifted adept of the Mechanicum.

It had the feel of a laboratory belonging to the most brilliant scientist the world had ever seen. It had the look of great things, of potential yet untapped, and of dreams on the verge of being dragged into reality. Mighty golden doors, like the entrance to the most magnificent fortress, filled one end of the chamber. Great carvings were worked into the mechanised doors: entwined siblings, dreadful sagittary, a rearing lion, the scales of justice and many more.

Thousands of tech-adepts, servitors and logi moved through the chamber’s myriad passageways, like blood cells through a living organism in service to its heart, where a great golden throne reared ten metres above the floor. Bulky and machine-like, a forest of snaking cables bound it to the vast portal sealed shut at the opposite end of the chamber.

Only one being knew what lay beyond those doors, a being of towering intellect whose powers of imagination and invention were second to none. He sat upon the mighty throne, encased in golden armour, bringing all his intellect to bear in overseeing the next stage of his wondrous creation.

He was the Emperor, and though many in this chamber had known him for the spans of many lives, none knew him as anything else. No other title, no possible name, could ever do justice to such a luminous individual. Surrounded by his most senior praetorians and attended by his most trusted cabal, the Emperor sat and waited.

When the trouble began, it began swiftly.

The golden portal shone with its own inner light, as though some incredible heat from the other side was burning through the metal. Vast gunboxes fixed around the perimeter of the cave swung up, their barrels spooling up to fire. Lightning flashed from machine to machine as delicate, irreplaceable circuits overloaded and exploded. Adepts ran from the site of the breach, knowing little of what lay beyond, yet knowing enough to flee.

Crackling bolts of energy poured from the molten gates, flensing those too close to the marrow. Intricate symbols carved into the rock of the cavern exploded with shrieking detonations. Every source of illumination in the chamber blew out in a shower of sparks, and centuries of the most incredible work imaginable was undone in an instant.

No sooner had the first alarm sounded than the Emperor’s Custodes were at arms, but nothing in their training could have prepared them for what came next.

A form pressed its way through the portal: massive, red and aflame with the burning force of its journey. It emerged into the chamber, wreathed in eldritch fire that bled away to reveal a robed being composed of many-angled light and the substance of stars. Its radiance was blinding and none could look upon its many eyes without feeling the insignificance of their own mortality.

None had ever seen such a dreadful apparition, the true heart of a being so mighty that it could only beat while encased in super-engineered flesh.

The Emperor alone recognised this rapturous angel, and his heart broke to see it.

‘Magnus,’ he said.

‘Father,’ replied Magnus.

Their minds met, and in that moment of frozen connection the galaxy changed forever.

Occullum Square was busy, though Lemuel saw an undercurrent of nameless fear in the auras of the traders and buyers. They haggled with more than usual bitterness, and the sparring back and forth was done with tired eyes and heavy hearts. Perhaps it was a mass hangover from the riots two weeks ago. No one had adequately explained why such violence had broken out on the streets of a city that had not known unrest in hundreds of years.

He sat with Camille on a wrought-iron bench between Gordian Avenue and Daedalus Street, watching the crowds go about their business, pretending nothing was out of place, as though they were not living on a world ruled by warriors who regarded them as nothing more than playthings.

In the fortnight since Kallista’s death, he and Camille had spent a great deal of time together, mourning their lost friend and coming to terms with their current situation. It had involved many stories, many tears and a great deal of soul-searching, but they had eventually reached the same conclusion.

‘She thought this world was a paradise,’ said Camille, watching the forced laughter of a couple strolling arm in arm beneath the shadow of the Occullum.

‘We all did,’ said Lemuel. ‘I didn’t want a tasking order to come for the Thousand Sons. I wanted to stay and learn from Ahriman. Look where that got us.’

‘Kalli’s death wasn’t your fault,’ said Camille, taking his hand. ‘Don’t ever think that.’

‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘I blame Ahriman. He may not have pulled the switches or pressed the buttons, but he knew what they were doing was wrong and he let it happen anyway.’

They watched the crowds for a moment longer, before Camille asked, ‘Do you think he’ll come?’

Lemuel nodded.

‘He’ll come. He wants this as much as we do.’

Camille looked away and Lemuel read the hesitation in her aura.

‘We do both want this, don’t we?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ said Camille, a little too quickly.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We have to be honest with one another now.’

‘I know, and you’re right, it’s time, but I–’

‘You don’t want to leave without Chaiya,’ finished Lemuel.

‘No, I don’t. Does that sound stupid?’

‘Not at all. I understand completely, but is what you have worth dying for?’

‘I don’t know yet,’ said Camille, wiping the heels of her palms against her eyes. ‘I think it might have been, but this is her home and she won’t want to leave.’

‘I won’t force you to come, but you saw what I saw.’

‘I know,’ she said, through moist eyes. ‘It’ll break my heart, but I’ve made my mind up.’

‘Good girl,’ said Lemuel, hating that it had taken him this long to understand the truth.

Camille nodded towards Daedalus Street and said, ‘Looks like your friend’s here,’ as a servitor-borne palanquin emerged and turned towards them. The servitors were bulk-muscled things, broad shouldered and wearing silver helmets and crimson tabards. The crowds parted for the palanquin, and it stopped before Lemuel and Camille.

The velvet curtain parted and Mahavastu Kallimakus emerged. A set of bronze steps extended from the base of the palanquin and he climbed down to join them.

‘A grand conveyance,’ said Lemuel, impressed despite himself.

‘A waste of time that only serves to draw attention to my irrelevance,’ snapped Mahavastu, sitting next to Camille on the bench. ‘Sobek insisted I travel in it to save my old bones.’

The venerable scribe patted Camille’s hand, his skin gnarled like old oak.

‘I was sorry to hear of Mistress Eris’s death,’ he said. ‘She was a quite lovely girl. A real tragedy.’

‘No it’s not,’ said Lemuel. ‘It would have been a tragedy if she died thanks to a weakness of her own making, but she was murdered, plain and simple.’

‘I see,’ said Mahavastu. ‘What do I not know?’

‘The Thousand Sons burned her out,’ said Camille. ‘They used her, and she died so that they could glimpse echoes of the future. Fat lot of good it did them. All she did was talk in riddles before it killed her.’

‘Ah, I was told she had another of her unfortunate attacks at Voisanne’s?’

‘She did, but that was only the beginning,’ said Lemuel, standing and pacing back and forth before the bench. ‘They killed her, Mahavastu. It’s that simple. Look, what do you want me to say? You were right, there is a curse upon the Thousand Sons. If what Kallista said means half of what we think it means, this world is doomed and it’s time we were gone.’

‘You wish to leave Prospero?’ asked Mahavastu.

‘Damn right I do.’

Mahavastu nodded. ‘And you feel the same, Mistress Shivani?’

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘When Ankhu Anen moved me away from Kallista, I felt something of his memories, a fragment of something that passed between him and the other captains. I didn’t get more than a flash, but whatever they know has them terrified. Something very bad is happening, and it’s time we put some distance between us and the Thousand Sons.’

‘Have you given any thought as to how we might do this, Lemuel?’ asked Mahavastu.

‘I have,’ he said. ‘There’s a mass-conveyer in orbit right now, the Cypria Selene. It’s completing an engine refit and is resupplying in preparation for despatch to Thranx. She’s scheduled to depart in a week, and we need to be on that ship.’

‘And how do you propose we manage that?’ asked Mahavastu. ‘Its crew will be monitored, and we have no legitimate reason to be on the Cypria Selene.’

Lemuel smiled for the first time in weeks.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘I’ve learned a thing or two that should help with that.’

The books were scattered like autumn leaves across the floor of his chambers, their pages torn and crumpled. The orreries were shattered and the astrological charts torn from the walls. The globe of Prospero was broken, its ochre continents lying in broken shards amid the cracked cerulean fragments of its oceans.

A torrent of destruction had swept through Magnus’s chambers, but no thoughtless vandal or natural disaster had wreaked such havoc. The architect of this destruction squatted amid the ruin of his possessions with his head buried in his hands.

Magnus’s white robe was stained and unkempt, his flesh worn with weeks of neglect, his body wracked by inconsolable grief. The shelves behind him were shattered, the timber splintered and broken to matchwood. Almost nothing remained in once piece. The mirrors were cracked and reduced to shattered diamonds of reflective glass.

Magnus lifted his head, out of breath from his rampage.

The exertion was nothing; it was the scope of what he had destroyed that took away his breath, the sheer, mind-numbing horror of what had been lost and could never be retrieved.

Only one thing had escaped his destructive rampage, a heavy lectern of cold iron upon which was chained the Book of Magnus, the grimoire of all his achievements, culled from the unexpurgated texts penned by Mahavastu Kallimakus.

Achievements.

The word stuck in his throat. All his achievements were lies in the dust.

It had all been for nothing. Everything was unravelling around him faster than he could weave it back together.

Magnus rose to his full height, his body diminished from its former glory, as though a fundamental part of him had been left on Terra after his confrontation with his father. The moment of connection they had shared had been sublime and horrendous. He had seen himself as others saw him, a monstrous, fiery angel of blood bringing doom down upon those mortals unlucky enough to fall beneath his gaze.

Only his father had recognised him, for he had wrought the life into him and knew his own handiwork. Magnus had experienced that awful self-knowledge in an instant, feeling it sear his heart and crush his soul in one dreadful moment of union.

He had tried to deliver his warning, showing his father what he had seen and what he knew. It hadn’t mattered. Nothing he could have said would have outweighed or undone the colossal mistake he had made in coming to Terra. The treachery of Horus was swept away, an afterthought in the wake of the destruction Magnus had unwittingly unleashed. Wards that had kept the palace safe for a hundred years were obliterated in an instant, and the psychic shock-wave killed thousands and drove hundreds more to madness and suicide.

But that wasn’t the worst of it, not by a long way.

It was the knowledge that he had been wrong.

Everything he had been so sure of knowing better than anyone else was a lie.

He thought he had known better than his father how to wield the power of the Great Ocean. He believed he was its master, but in the ruins of his father’s great work, he had seen the truth. The Golden Throne was the key. Unearthed from forgotten ruins sunken deep beneath the driest desert, it was the lodestone that would have unlocked the secrets of the alien lattice. Now it was in ruins, its impossibly complex dimensional inhibitors and warp buffers fused beyond salvage.

The control it maintained on the shimmering gateway at his back was ended, and the artfully designed mechanism keeping the two worlds apart was fatally fractured. In the instant of connection, Magnus saw the folly of his actions and wept to see so perfect a concept undone.

Unspoken understanding flowed between Magnus and the Emperor. Everything Magnus had done was laid bare, and everything the Emperor planned flowed into him. He saw himself atop the Golden Throne, using his fearsome powers to guide humanity to its destiny as rulers of the galaxy. He was to be his father’s chosen instrument of ultimate victory. It broke him to know that his unthinking hubris had shattered that dream.

Without will, the spell that had sent him to Terra was nothing, and Magnus had felt the pull of flesh dragging his spirit back through the gateway. He did not fight it, but let his essence fly through the golden lattice to the tear he had so carelessly torn in its fabric. Vast shoals of void predators were already massing, swirling armies of formless monsters, fanged beasts and awesomely powerful entities that lived only for destruction.

Would the Emperor be able to hold them back?

Magnus didn’t know, and the thought of so much blood on his hands shamed him.

He’d flown back through the timeless depths of the Great Ocean and awoken within the Reflecting Caves in the midst of a vast hall of the dead. The Thralls were no more, each and every one reduced to a withered, lifeless husk by the power of his spell.

Only Ahriman remained, and even he looked drained.

With tears in his eyes, Magnus retreated from the scene of his crime and all but fled to the Pyramid of Photep, ignoring Ahriman’s shouted questions. Alone, amid the lies of his centuries of study, the red mist had fallen over his sight. He’d mocked Angron for his rages, but at the thoroughness of his destruction, he understood a measure of the satisfaction such violence could bring.

Magnus stood and walked from the ruin of his study, ashamed at his loss of control and needing to clear his head. The glass doors that led to his balcony were smashed, the glass lying in accusing shards that crunched as he stepped through the wreckage.

He leaned on the balcony railing, supporting his weight on his elbows and letting the cool wind ruffle his hair and caress his skin. Far below him, Tizca carried on as though nothing had happened, its people oblivious to the doom he had unleashed upon them all. They didn’t know it yet, but a terrible retribution would soon fall upon them.

What form that retribution would take he did not know, but he recalled the Emperor’s words at Nikaea, and feared the worst. People moved through Occullum Square and along the Street of a Thousand Lions, congregating in the many parks and Fountain Houses that dotted the western areas of the city where the bulk of its citizens dwelt.

The port was to the north, a walled area of the city built on the gentle slopes that led down to the curved bay. Golden beaches spread further along the coast before sweeping beyond sight into the Desolation. Hard against the flanks of the eastern mountains stood the Acropolis Magna, a raised spur of rock that had once been a fortress, but had long since fallen into ruin. A great statue of Magnus stood upon its highest point to mark the place where he had first set foot on the surface of Prospero.

How he wished he could take back those first steps!

Dozens of theatres clustered around the base of the Acropolis Magna, their tiers cut into the lower slopes of the rock, home to actors who strutted like martinets on each marbled proscenium. Five perfectly circular Tholus stood in areas of rolling parkland, open-air structures built according the principles of the Golden Mean. In the forgotten ages they had once housed temples, but were now used as sports arenas and training grounds.

Numerous barracks of the Spireguard dotted the city’s plan, and Magnus felt a twinge of regret for these men and women most of all. They were all going to die for the crime of being born on Prospero.

The cult’s pyramids dominated the skyline, looming from the gilded city like cut glass arrowheads. Sunlight reflected on them, dancing like fire in the polarised crystal. He’d seen the vision once before and had thought it allegorical. Now he knew better.

‘All this will be ashes,’ he said sadly.

‘It does not have to be,’ said a voice behind him.

Magnus turned, and harsh words died on his lips as he saw it was not an intruder that had spoken.

He had.

Or at least a version of him had.

The mirror hanging beside the doorway was broken, yet dozens of splinters still clung to the copper frame. In each of them, Magnus saw a shimmering reflection of his eye, one mocking, one angry, one capricious, another aloof. The eyes stared with sly amusement, each a different colour and each now regarding him with the same quizzical look.

‘A mirror? Even now you appeal to my vanity,’ said Magnus, dreading what this signified.

‘I told you it was the easiest trap to set,’ said the reflections, their voices slippery and entwined. ‘Now you know the truth of it.’

‘Was this always what you wanted?’ asked Magnus. ‘To see me destroyed?’

‘Destroyed? Never!’ cried the reflections, as though outraged by the suggestion. ‘You were always to be our first choice, Magnus. Did you know that?’

‘First choice for what?’

‘To bring about the eternal chaos of destruction and rebirth, the endless succession of making and unmaking that has cycled throughout time and will continue for all eternity. Yes, you were always first, and Horus is a poor second. The Eternal Powers saw great potential in you, but even as we coveted your soul, you grew too strong and caused us to look elsewhere.’

The reflections smiled with paternal affection, ‘But I always knew you would be ours one day. While suspicious eyes were turned upon you and your Legion, we wove our corruptions elsewhere. For that you have my thanks, as the Blinded One has lit the first fire of the conflagration, though none yet see it for what it is.’

‘What are you?’ asked Magnus, stepping through the doorway to re-enter the wreckage of his chambers. Hoarfrost gathered on the splintered glass and his breath misted before him.

‘You know what I am,’ said his reflections. ‘Or at least you should.’

One splintered eye shifted, swirling until it became a fiery snake with multi-coloured eyes and wings of bright feathers: the beast he had killed beneath the Mountain of Aghoru. It changed again, morphing through a succession of shimmering forms, until Magnus saw the shifting, impossibly massive form of the shadow in the Great Ocean.

‘I once named myself Choronzon to you, the Dweller in the Abyss and the Daemon of Dispersion, but those are meaningless labels that mortals hang upon me, obsolete the moment they are uttered. I have existed since the beginning of time and will exist beyond the span of this universe. Names are irrelevant to me, for I am every name and none. In the inadequate language of your youngling species, you should call me a god.’

‘You were the one that helped me save my Legion,’ said Magnus with a sinking heart.

‘Save? No. I only postponed their doom,’ said the shadow. ‘That boon is now ended.’

‘No!’ cried Magnus. ‘Please, never that!’

‘There is a price to pay for the time I gave your sons. You knew this when you accepted the gift of my power. Now it is time to make good on your bargain.’

‘I made no bargain,’ said Magnus, ‘not with the likes of you.’

‘Oh, but you did,’ laughed the eyes. ‘When, in your despair, you cried out for succour in the depths of the warp, when you begged for the means to save your sons – you flew too close to the sun, Magnus. You offered up your soul to save theirs, and that debt is now due.’

‘Then take me,’ declared Magnus. ‘Leave my Legion and allow them to serve the Emperor. They are blameless.’

‘They have drunk from the same chalice as you,’ said the eyes. ‘And why would you wish them to serve a man who betrayed you? A man who showed you unlimited power and then told you not to use it? What manner of father opens the door to a world of wonder and then orders you not to step through? This man who planned to use your flesh to save his own from destruction?’

The images in the glass changed once more, and Magnus saw the Golden Throne, its mechanisms wreathed in crackling arcs of lighting. A howling, withered cadaver sat upon the throne, its once-mighty flesh blackened and metastasised.

‘This is to be your destiny,’ said the mirror, ‘bound forever to the Emperor’s soul-engine, suffering unendurable agony to serve his selfish desires. Look upon this and know the truth.’

Magnus tried to look away, but the horror of the vision was impossible to ignore.

‘Why should I believe anything you say?’ he cried.

‘You already know the truth of your doom; I have no need to embellish. Look into the warp and hunt for your nemesis. He and his savage dogs of war are already on their way. Trust yourself if you do not trust me.’

Magnus closed his eye and cast his senses into the seething currents of the Great Ocean. Its substance was agitated, and roaring tides billowed with tempestuous force. All was chaos, but for a slender corridor of stillness, through which Magnus felt the passage of many souls.

He closed upon their life-force and saw the form his doom would take.

Magnus’s eye snapped open and anger boiled over. His hand erupted in searing white fire, the most prosaic and primal of the arts, and his chambers were filled with billowing flames, burning everything within to cinders. Wood and paper vaporised in the white heat of Magnus’s rage, and what little his despair had not destroyed, his rage consumed.

A column of blazing fire erupted from the summit of his pyramid, and a rain of molten glass shards fell from the summit. All eyes in Tizca turned towards the Pyramid of Photep, the plume of fire dwarfing that of the Pyrae.

Only the Book of Magnus remained inviolate, its pages impervious to the killing fire.

Nothing was left of the mirror, its fused shards bubbling in a molten pool at his feet.

‘You can destroy them,’ said the fading reflections in the liquid glass. ‘Say the word and I will tear their vessels asunder, scattering them beyond all knowledge and hope of salvation.’

‘No,’ said Magnus, dropping to his knees with his head in his hands. ‘Never.’

Magnus had no knowledge of how much time had passed when he heard the crash of his door breaking open. He looked up to see Uthizzar enter his chambers, his youthful features shocked at the devastation he saw within. A squad of Scarab Occult came with him, their visors marred by a single vertical slash that obscured the right eye lenses of their helmets.

Magnus had heard that the tradition had become commonplace after the Council of Nikaea, but to see such a visible sign of his sons’ devotion was a poisoned barb in his heart.

‘Uthizzar,’ said Magnus through his tears, ‘get out of here!’

‘My lord?’ cried Uthizzar, moving towards Magnus.

Magnus raised a warding hand, his grief threatening to overwhelm him as he thought of all he had seen and all that the monstrous god of the warp had shown him.

Uthizzar staggered as the full force of Magnus’s thoughts struck him like a blow. Magnus veiled his mind from the young telepath, but it was too late. Uthizzar knew it all.

‘No!’ cried Uthizzar, crushed by the gut-wrenching hurt of betrayal. ‘It cannot be! You… Is it true? Tell me it is not true. What you did… What is coming…’

Magnus felt his heart harden, and cursed himself for such an unforgivable lapse of will.

‘It is true, my son. All of it.’

He could see Uthizzar’s eyes begging him to say he was joking, or that this was some hideous test. As much as Magnus wanted to save his sons from the sins of their father, he knew he couldn’t. He had lied to himself and his warriors for too long, and this last chance for truth and redemption could not be squandered.

No matter what it entailed.

‘We have to warn the Legion,’ hissed Uthizzar, spinning on his heel and barking orders to the Scarab Occult. ‘Mobilise the Spireguard and stand the fleet to battle orders. Disperse the Arming Proclamation to the civilian militias and issue a general evacuation order for non-combatants to the Reflecting Caves!’

Magnus shook his head, and a wall of unbreakable force sprang up before Uthizzar and his warriors, trapping them within his scorched and smoking chambers.

‘I am sorry, Uthizzar, I really am,’ said Magnus, ‘but I can’t let you do that.’

Uthizzar started to turn towards him, but before his son could look him in the eye, Magnus ended his life.

Twenty-Six

A good student
My fate is my own
Dispersal

The tang of salty air was strong. A stiff breeze blew in from the sea, and Lemuel felt a pang of nostalgia as he thought back to the sweeping coastlines of Nordafrik. The waters around his home had long since retreated, but the exposed seabeds shared the memory of their days at the bottom of the ocean with the air.

He shook off the memory. He needed all his powers of concentration.

The port area of Tizca was heaving with bodies: sweating stevedores, teamsters, servitors and load-lifters. The Cypria Selene was scheduled to break orbit in four hours, and the last-minute preparations for her departure were in full swing. Trucks, supply tankers, baggage lifters and water bladders carefully negotiated the busy port, and the noise of horns and shouting drivers rivalled the roar of engines.

The hot reek of burning metal saturated the day as shuttles and lifters screamed into the sky to deliver the last crewmembers and passengers to their berths. Few remained on Prospero, and a palpable sense of excitement suffused the port.

Lemuel’s nerves were stretched bow-taut. Red-jacketed soldiers of the Prospero Spireguard circulated throughout the port, and officious docket-supervisors checked and rechecked passes and permits.

Beside him, Camille walked with her hands clasped demurely before her. She wore a long dress of emerald green, cut low and embroidered with black lace around the hems, sleeves and collar. She had balked at wearing the noblewoman’s dress before Lemuel had pointed out that a patrician gentleman’s consort would need to be seen in such a garment.

At this moment, that patrician gentleman was reclining in his palanquin, its ostentatious appearance enhanced by silk brocade and velvet cushions stolen from their living quarters. Bedecked in an exquisitely tailored suit, Mahavastu Kallimakus was failing miserably to look like an arrogant nobleman of Terra by looking down his nose as he tapped an ebony cane on the pillars of his conveyance.

Only Lemuel was spared the indignity of disguise, wearing his beige remembrancer’s robes to masquerade as Mahavastu’s personal scribe and eunuch escort to Camille. That last element of his disguise had raised a smile as they planned how best to reach a shuttle bound for the Cypria Selene. At least it had raised a smile with everyone except Lemuel.

Behind them came a team of bearers, nine servitors carrying a collection of steamer trunks filled with the mass of papers, sketchbooks and grimoires written by Mahavastu in the years he had spent as Magnus’s puppet. Lemuel had urged Mahavastu to leave them, but the old man was adamant. The past needed to be preserved. History was history and it was not for them to judge what should be remembered and what should be forgotten.

‘I won’t be a burner of books,’ said Mahavastu, and the discussion was ended.

They had entered the port area without incident, for centuries of peace and an increasingly compliant galaxy had made the people of Prospero complacent.

‘So how are we going to do this?’ asked Camille. It was the first thing she had said this morning, for there had been a furious row the previous night as she had told Chaiya of her decision to leave.

‘Trust me,’ said Lemuel. ‘I know what I’m doing.’

‘You keep saying that, but you never say what you’re going to do.’

‘I won’t know until the time comes.’

‘Well that’s reassuring.’

Lemuel didn’t reply, understanding the root of Camille’s harsh words. They moved through the crowds, avoiding the main thoroughfares of wide-wheeled trucks as they ferried soldiers and crew to the loading berths. Tall-sided hangars, storage silos and fuel towers made up the bulk of the port facilities, and they threaded a path between them as they wound towards the silver platforms built on the edge of the shoreline.

A dozen craft growled in their berths, the last to join the orbiting mass-conveyer. This would be their last chance to get off Prospero.

Lemuel led them towards the launch bays as two more craft climbed into the sky on shrieking columns of jetfire. Camille walked alongside Mahavastu’s palanquin, trying and failing to look decorous as the bulked-out servitors bore him without complaint. They made for an unusual spectacle, but one Lemuel hoped looked about right for passengers who had every right to be taking flight on the newly refitted Cypria Selene.

‘This isn’t going to work,’ said Camille.

‘It’s going to work,’ insisted Lemuel. ‘It has to work.’

‘No it won’t. We’ll be stopped and we’ll be stuck on Prospero.’

‘With that attitude we definitely will be,’ snapped Lemuel, his patience wearing thin.

‘Lemuel. Camille,’ said Mahavastu from the palanquin. ‘I understand we are all under a lot of pressure here, but if it wouldn’t be too much trouble, would both of you please shut the shitting hell up!’

Both Lemuel and Camille were brought up short, shocked at the old man’s language.

Lemuel looked up at Mahavastu, who seemed, if anything, more offended than them.

‘I apologise for my profanity,’ said Mahavastu, ‘but it seemed like the only way to restore calm. Sniping at each other is only going to end things badly for us all.’

Lemuel took a deep breath.

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘I apologise, my dear.’

‘I’m sorry, Lemuel,’ said Camille.

Lemuel nodded and led the way downhill again. At last they reached the entrance to the shuttlecraft launch platforms. This time there was a security checkpoint, as not even the citizens of Prospero left such dangerous places unsecured. Spireguard manned the entrance to the shuttle areas, and blue-robed officials checked the identity of everyone going through to the launch platforms.

‘Now we get to see if all that training was worth it,’ said Camille.

Lemuel nodded. ‘Let’s hope I was a good student.’

They approached the checkpoint, and Lemuel handed over a sheaf of papers taken from one of Kallista’s notebooks to a bored-looking clerk. The words written there made no sense, but it would be easier if the mark couldn’t understand them.

The clerk frowned, and Lemuel took that as his cue.

‘Lord Asoka Bindusara and Lady Kumaradevi Chandra to take ship to the Cypria Selene,’ said Lemuel, projecting a confidence he didn’t feel into the man’s aura. ‘I am their humble servant and scrivener. Be so good as to indicate which of the waiting shuttles is the most regally appointed.’

Lemuel leaned in and whispered conspiratorially, ‘My master has grown accustomed to the luxuries of Prospero. It wouldn’t be pleasant for anyone were we to be assigned a craft that wasn’t a damn palace, if you take my meaning.’

The clerk was still frowning at the words on the page. It wouldn’t take long for him to see past Lemuel’s bluff and understand he was looking at gibberish. Lemuel felt the man’s bureaucratic mind processing the letters before him and increased his manipulation of his aura. Siphoning off the sanguine and the bile, he crafted the impression that the documents were travel passes and berthing dockets for three passengers and their luggage.

The clerk gave up with Lemuel’s papers and consulted a data-slate of his own instead.

‘I don’t see your names,’ he said with officious satisfaction.

‘Please, check again,’ said Lemuel, edging closer as a trio of shuttles blasted off from the shoreline. He sensed Camille and Mahavastu’s panic behind him and increased his mental barrage. Even as he did so, he could feel that it wasn’t working.

Lemuel heard a gasp of surprise from behind him, and a soothing blanket of acceptance settled over him. From the glassy look that came into the clerk’s eyes, Lemuel saw it was affecting him too. Someone moved beside him and a woman’s voice said, ‘There has been a last minute addition to the passenger manifest, these are my guests aboard ship.’

Lemuel smiled as Chaiya rested her hand on the clerk’s arm, feeling her influence spreading through him. It seemed every native of Prospero enjoyed a measure of psychic power, and he wondered how he hadn’t noticed it before.

‘Yes,’ said the clerk, sounding unsure, but unable to say why. ‘I see that now.’

He nodded as Chaiya’s certainty increased, and he waved to the soldiers on either side of the gateway. The clerk stamped a lading billet for their steamer trunks and handed Lemuel four berthing disks, each with a stamped eye at its centre. Lemuel tried not to look as relieved as he felt.

‘My lord thanks you,’ he said as they swept through the gate.

No sooner were they hidden from sight of the clerk and his soldiers, than Camille threw herself into Chaiya’s arms and kissed her. They embraced until Mahavastu coughed discreetly.

‘You came!’ said Camille, tears smudging the make-up around her eyes.

‘Of course I came,’ said Chaiya. ‘You think I’d let you leave without me?’

‘But last night–’

Chaiya shook her head. ‘Last night you blindsided me with all your doomsaying talk. And the idea that you were leaving scared me. I don’t want to leave Prospero, but if you think there’s something bad coming, that’s good enough for me. You’ve never been wrong before now. About anything. I love you and won’t be parted from you.’

Camille wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her dress, ruining the fabric, but not caring.

‘There is something bad coming, I know it,’ she said.

‘I believe you,’ said Chaiya with a nervous laugh. ‘If you’re wrong we can always come back.’

Lemuel nodded towards the shuttle the clerk had assigned them.

‘We’d better get moving,’ he said. ‘Ours is one of the last to leave.’

Their ragtag group followed the directions of blue-coated ground crew towards the berth of a sleek lighter of gleaming silver. Its wide wings enfolded them in shadow as they passed beneath them, and its flat-bottomed cargo bay was slung beneath the berthing frame they had to climb to reach the crew ramp.

Lemuel allowed himself a small smile of success.

Camille and Chaiya laughed and giggled as they walked hand in hand towards the lighter.

Even Mahavastu wore a smile.

The smiles fell from all their faces as an urgent voice called out, ‘Stop. On the crew ramp, stay where you are.’

Lemuel’s heart turned to a lump of ice as he turned to see who had hailed them.

A captain in the Prospero Spireguard was leading a detachment of soldiers towards them.

‘This looks bad,’ he said.

‘You have nothing to fear from me, Amon,’ said Magnus. ‘You have been my most faithful servant since I first came to Prospero. I could never harm you.’

‘With respect, my lord, I am sure young Uthizzar thought the same,’ said Amon, picking his way gingerly through the wreckage of Magnus’s chambers. His grey hair was kept cropped close to his skull and his skin had the texture of aged vellum. He knelt beside Uthizzar’s body and placed his hand upon the cracked and seared breastplate.

The bodies of the Scarab Occult lay around Uthizzar, their bodies twisted in unnatural ways and their flesh blackened as though consumed in the same fire that had destroyed Magnus’s library.

‘Tell me what happened,’ said Amon.

Magnus lowered his head, unwilling to meet his oldest friend’s gaze. The Captain of the Ninth made no accusations – he didn’t need to. No accusation could carry greater guilt than Magnus placed upon himself. Almost a week had passed since he had killed Uthizzar, a week in which he had almost given in to his self-destructive urges and turned his powers upon himself.

Fearing the worst, others had tried to enter his chambers, but Magnus had kept them all at bay until now. Magnus looked down at the grotesquely crumpled body of Baleq Uthizzar and sighed with regret and loss.

‘It was an unforgivable lapse and should never have happened,’ he said, ‘but he knew too much and I could not let him leave.’

‘Knew too much about what?’

‘Come here,’ said Magnus. ‘Let me show you.’

Amon rose and followed Magnus onto the balcony overlooking the white city of Tizca. Magnus read the wariness in Amon’s aura, and didn’t blame him. He would be a fool not be wary. In all the long years since they had first spoken, as tutor and pupil, Magnus had never thought of Amon as a fool.

Magnus looked towards the noonday sky.

‘Fly the Great Ocean with me,’ he said.

Amon nodded and closed his eyes, and Magnus let his body of light float free of his flesh. The concerns of the mortal world lessened, but could not be wholly ignored. Tizca transformed from a place of cool marble to a glittering jewel of light, the tens of thousands of shimmering soul-lights who called the city home like tiny lanterns.

‘How fragile they are,’ said Magnus, though there was no one yet to hear him.

The warm glow of Amon’s subtle body appeared next to him, and they flew into a sky of brilliant blue. The world around them deepened from blue to black, the stars pinwheeling around them like darts of phosphor.

The blackness of space transformed into the swirling, multi-coloured chaos of the Great Ocean, and both travellers felt the welcome rush of pleasure as its currents flowed around their ethereal forms.

Magnus led the way, streaking through the swirling abyss towards a destination only he was capable of finding. Amon followed him, his dutiful friend and beloved son. At length, they came to the region of stillness he had seen a week ago.

He felt Amon’s horror as he beheld the vast fleet of ships, the slab-sided warships, the sleek strike cruisers and the monstrous monuments to destruction that were the battle-barges. Hundreds of vessels drew ever closer to Prospero, ships of many flags and many allegiances, united with one shared purpose: annihilation.

Leading them was a feral blade of a ship, unsheathed to deliver the deathblow to its hated foe. Grey and fanged, it prowled the stars with carved eyes at its bladed prow piercing the depths of the Great Ocean with uncanny precision.

‘Is that what I think it is?’ asked Amon.

‘It is,’ confirmed Magnus.

They flew closer to the brutal vessel, the protective shields that kept void predators at bay no match for travellers of such power. They passed through its layered voids, diving down through metre upon metre of adamantium hull plates, integrity fields and honeycombed bulkheads until they reached the heart of the ship.

The masters of this fleet gathered to plan the destruction of all that Magnus held dear, and the two sons of Prospero listened to their deliberations. Magnus was prepared for what he would hear, but Amon was not, and the flaring wash of his aetheric field sent a pulse of choleric energy through the ship’s crew.

‘Why?’ begged Amon.

‘Because I was wrong.’

‘About what?’

‘Everything,’ said Magnus. ‘All the things you taught me, I arrogantly assumed I already knew. You warned me of the gods of the warp and I laughed at you, calling you a superstitious old fool. Well I know better now, for I beheld such a being and thought I had the better of it, but I was wrong. I have done terrible things, Amon, but you must believe that I did them for the right reasons.’

Amon drifted down towards the master of this vessel and the steely-eyed killer in golden armour who stood next to him on a raised command dais. A group of identically armoured warriors stood at the base of the dais occupied by their leaders.

‘The Council of Nikaea?’ demanded Amon. ‘Were they right to name us warlocks?’

‘I fear they may have been, though only now do I understand that.’

‘And for that we are to suffer?’

Magnus nodded and flew up through the ironwork of the starship, exploding outwards into the seething cauldron of the Great Ocean. Amon flew at his side, and they hurtled back to Prospero, exhaling pent-up breaths as they opened their eyes and looked down on the reassuringly familiar vista of Tizca.

‘And the Legion knows nothing of this?’ asked Amon.

‘Nothing,’ said Magnus. ‘I have drawn a veil around Prospero. None see out, not even the Corvidae. Now the Thousand Sons must learn what it means to be blind.’

‘So our punishment draws ever closer,’ said Amon. ‘What happens when it gets here?’

‘You are kind, old friend,’ said Magnus. ‘It is my punishment.’

‘Their axes will fall on the rest of us as well,’ pointed out Amon. ‘I ask again; what will we do when they get here?’

‘Nothing,’ said Magnus. ‘There is nothing to do.’

‘There is always something to do. We can destroy them before they even reach us,’ hissed Amon, gripping Magnus’s arm.

Magnus shook his head saying, ‘This is not about whether we can defend ourselves against this threat. Of course we can. It is about whether we should.’

‘Why should we not?’ countered Amon. ‘We are the Thousand Sons and nothing is beyond us. No path is unknown to us and no destiny is hidden from us. Instruct the Corvidae to pierce the veils of the future. The Pavoni and Raptora can enhance our warriors’ prowess while the Pyrae burn our enemies and the Athanaeans read the minds of their commanders. When they come they will find us ready to fight.’

Magnus despaired, hearing only the urge to strike the first blow in Amon’s voice.

‘Have you not heard what I have said?’ he pleaded. ‘I do not strike because it is what the powers that have manipulated me since I came here want me to do. They want me to take arms against our doom, knowing that if I do it will only confirm everything those who hate and fear us have always believed.’

Amon looked out over the city, and his eyes took on a faraway look, tears of loss streaming down his cheeks.

‘Before you came to Prospero, I had a recurring nightmare,’ he said. ‘I dreamt that everything I held dear was swept away and destroyed. It plagued me for years, but on the day you arrived from the heavens like a comet, the dream stopped. I never had it again. I convinced myself it was nothing more than an ancestral memory of Old Night, but it wasn’t, I know that now. I foresaw this. The destruction of everything I hold dear is coming to pass’

Amon closed his eyes and he gripped the balcony with white-knuckled fury.

‘I may not be able to stop it,’ he said, ‘but I am going to fight to protect my home, and if you ever held my friendship in any esteem, you would do the same.’

Magnus rounded on Amon.

‘Despite everything I have done, my fate is my own,’ Magnus said. ‘I am a loyal son of the Emperor, and I would never betray him, for I have already broken his heart and his greatest creation. I will accept my fate and though history may judge us traitors, we will know the truth. We will know we were loyal unto the end because we accepted our fate.’

The captain of the Spireguard stopped before him, and Lemuel reached out to soothe his aura. His terror made it difficult, but before he could reach out with any calming influence, he saw that the officer’s aura was not expecting trouble, but wracked with grief.

Lemuel looked more closely, recognising the breadth of the man’s shoulders, the immaculate pressing of the uniform and the gold frogging looped around his shoulders.

The captain removed his helmet, and Lemuel dared hope this enterprise wasn’t doomed.

‘Captain Vithara?’ he said.

‘Indeed, Master Gaumon,’ said Captain Sokhem Vithara of the 15th Prosperine Assault Infantry. ‘I hoped I would see you before you left.’

‘Before we left?’ asked Lemuel, confused as to why they weren’t being frogmarched in manacles away from the lighter. The cargo bay doors were closing and they would be airborne in a matter of moments.

‘Yes, I almost missed you because your names weren’t on any of the manifests.’

‘No,’ agreed Lemuel with a guilty smile, ‘they wouldn’t be.’

‘Still, I’m glad I caught you.’

‘You are?’ asked Camille. ‘Why? What do you want?’

The young man struggled to find the right words, and in the end he gave up and just spoke in a confused torrent.

‘I don’t know for sure what happened to Kallista, but I know she does not want to remain here,’ he said, and Lemuel struggled to hold his composure in the face of the young man’s obvious grief. ‘She wants you to take her away from here.’

Lemuel exchanged a worried look with Camille.

‘That could be difficult,’ he said.

‘I know, I’m not making any sense,’ said Vithara, ‘but she said that she wanted to leave Prospero with her friends.’

‘And she told you this?’ asked Camille, enunciating each word carefully so there could be no misunderstanding. ‘After she died?’

Vithara’s face was a mask of indecision and incomprehension.

‘I believe so,’ he said. ‘I dreamed of Kallista last night, you see. She was sitting beside me in Fiorento Park and we watched the sunshine on the lake. We didn’t say anything, we just held each other. When the reveille bell woke me this morning, I found a note beside my bed telling me to be at the landing platforms at this exact time. I don’t remember writing the note, even though it was in my handwriting, but it was obviously Kallista’s words. She wanted me to be here, and she wanted me to give you this.’

Vithara accepted a pale blue ceramic jar from one of his soldiers and held it out to Lemuel. Simply crafted, it was an urn in which one might keep a beloved family member’s ashes.

Lemuel took the jar and smiled and said, ‘You know, I believe you are absolutely right. Kallista did come to you last night, and since I am her friend, I will honour her wishes.’

‘Then you think she really came to me last night?’

‘I do,’ said Lemuel, his own grief eased by the notion. ‘I really do.’

Vithara saluted Lemuel and said, ‘Thank you, Master Gaumon. I’ll miss Kalli, but if this is what she wants then who am I to deny her?’

‘You are a very noble man,’ said Camille, stepping forward and planting a soft kiss on his cheek. ‘I see why Kalli liked you.’

He smiled and nodded towards the crew compartment of the lighter, where an exasperated deck hand waited to close the hatch.

‘You’d better go,’ said Vithara. ‘You don’t want to miss the Cypria Selene’s launch. After all, time and tide wait for no man.’

‘Indeed they do not,’ said Lemuel, shaking Vithara’s hand. The servitors loaded the steamer trunks into the lighter as Mahavastu climbed down from his palanquin. Camille guided the venerable scribe onto the lighter as Vithara led his men from the landing platform.

Lemuel followed his friends onboard. As the hatch slid shut behind him, he had what he knew would be his last sight of Prospero.

He was wrong about that.

The Cypria Selene weighed anchor on schedule and eased clear of her berth with smooth grace. Silver jibs jutted into space from the central hub of the orbital docks, the space around it thick with manoeuvring warships. Thousand Sons battle-barges slipped their moorings and set sail for the outer reaches of the star system, and squadrons of strike cruisers flocked around them as they departed Prospero.

To coordinate so large a ballet of ships was no small feat. The Photep led an armada of ships with the power to level planets to the furthest edges of the star system, while the Ankhtowë, Scion of Prospero and the Kymmeru assumed equally-angled vectors, leading fleets to the corners of the Thousand Sons’ domain.

The order to disperse the fleet had come with the highest alert prefixes, and the four battle groups made best speed for their destinations. None of the captains knew the nature of the alert, but all had been given strict instructions not to unlock their orders until reaching their assigned coordinates.

That such orders left Prospero dangerously undefended was clear to every shipmaster, but none dared disobey a direct command from the primarch himself. Whatever the purpose of this dispersal was not for them to question. Their only duty was to obey.

Military traffic took precedence over civilian vessels, and it took six hours for the Cypria Selene to work its way up the queue of ships awaiting a transit corridor. Eventually, the vessel’s Master Steersman was able to pilot his way towards clear space and open up the plasma drives to take his vessel towards the coreward jump point.

From there, warp-willing, it would be a three-week journey to the Thranx system.

The angle of launch had been good, and instead of taking four days to reach the coreward jump point, Cypria Selene achieved the necessary safe distance from the Prosperine star to safely activate its warp drives in three. The vessel’s Navigator confirmed the warp-currents in the realm beyond were as calm as he had known them, and the Master of Cartography ran a final positional check before passing his jump calculations to the Navigator’s module.

In the ship’s observation dome, Lemuel and Mahavastu chatted about where they next planned to visit, while Camille and Chaiya held hands as they listened to the toneless jump countdown through speakers set into the wood-panelled walls.

Set high on the rear quarter of the Cypria Selene, the dome provided a commanding view over the vast superstructure of the mass-conveyer. Its hull stretched away from them for sixty kilometres, ending in a blunt wedge of a snout. For a vessel intended to carry vast quantities of war materiel, troops and bulk items of warfare and compliance, it was handsomely appointed.

The four of them had settled into ship-board life with ease, and the cabins they had been assigned by the misdirected clerk were clearly intended for highborn passengers.

‘Give or take, you should be on Terra inside two months,’ Lemuel told Mahavastu. ‘You’ll be back in Uttarpatha, cataloguing old records recovered from beneath the ruins. I hear they’ve finished collating the datacores of NeoAleksandrya, but there’s bound to be more. They’d be mad not to want your help.’

‘Perhaps,’ agreed Mahavastu, leaning heavily on an ebony cane with a golden pommel inset with a jade eye. ‘Though I fear I may be too old for such excitement.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Lemuel. ‘There’s life in you yet.’

‘You are kind, Lemuel,’ said Mahavastu, ‘but I think perhaps I will instead concentrate on my memoirs. What I can recall of them.’

‘I would be happy to read them.’

‘Happier than I shall be to write them, I feel.’

Lemuel didn’t reply, but simply smiled as Camille and Chaiya joined them at the edge of the observation dome. Perhaps sixty people had come to watch the ship translate into the warp, either curious to see how so enormous a vessel could travel between the stars or eagerly fearful to look into the mysterious realm of the warp.

If only they knew, thought Lemuel. They would put out their eyes rather than look into a place of such dreadful power.

‘Almost away,’ said Camille.

‘Yes,’ said Lemuel, nodding towards the glass dome as the countdown reached one minute. ‘Part of me is almost sad.’

Aerial-like vanes extended along the entire length of the vast ship, causing the view to shimmer as void barriers powered up in preparation for the jump.

‘Won’t be long now,’ said Camille, taking Lemuel’s hand.

‘And then this will all be over,’ said Lemuel.

The count had reached thirty-three seconds when the alarms sounded.

The automated voice was cut off by a burst of shrieking static. A series of emergency lights flooded the interior of the dome with a red glow.

‘What’s happening?’ cried Mahavastu.

Lemuel had no answer for him, but was spared from admitting his ignorance by an explosion of shimmering, ghostly light off the Cypria Selene’s starboard bow. As though a yellowed fang had torn a terrible wound in the fabric of reality, a blooming froth of light spilled out and illuminated space around the mass-conveyer. It tore wider and wider, blistering streamers of unlight weeping from the wound like blood on a shroud.

Vast forms moved in the swirling vortex, shaped like gutting knives.

The first was a lean, feral-looking warship; its flanks slate-grey and brutally punctured with gun batteries and torpedo launchers. Its prow was shaped like a ploughshare, but this was no peaceable vessel, it was a ship of war.

Its angles were harsh, its lines sleek. It was a hunter of the stars and a killer of ships.

As it cleared the flaring tear in reality, scores of other fighting vessels jostled for position behind it, golden craft, black craft and a host of predatory vessels in identical livery to the fleet’s leader.

Lemuel had seen this ship before, in the heavens above Shrike in the Ark Reach Cluster.

‘Is that…?’ gasped Lemuel.

‘Unfortunately, yes,’ said Mahavastu. ‘I rather think it is.’

‘You know that ship?’ asked Camille. ‘What is it?’

‘It is the Hrafnkel,’ said Mahavastu, ‘the flagship of Leman Russ.’

Twenty-Seven

Thunder from Fenris
So much will be lost
Canis Vertex

The first bombs from the Space Wolf fleet struck Prospero just before dawn. The orbital defence platforms had been caught completely unawares. One minute their augurs had been silent, the next a vast fleet of ships had appeared, a buckshot spread of torpedoes already arcing towards the orbital batteries and missile defences. Most were knocked out before they were able to launch a single weapon or power up a single gun. The lucky few that managed a snap shot were bracketed and obliterated moments later.

With no response from the ground, the armada moved into high anchor above Prospero and assumed a geostationary assault pattern. Thousands of weapons were trained on the planet below: energy weapons, mass-drivers and bombardment cannons. The ships drifted sedately, like grand liners in a regatta among the stars. The Hrafnkel opened the assault, its massive weapon systems blinking as etched lines of icy light stabbed down.

Moments later, the rest of the fleet opened fire.

Though Magnus had kept his Legion blind to the approach of the Emperor’s vengeance, the Raptora cult maintained a constant kine-barrier over the city of Tizca. Not even Magnus the Red could undo that protection without someone noticing.

The first warning anyone had of the imminent attack was a hot wind that seemed to come straight from the sky, pressing down on the city like the pressure before a storm. It tasted of metal and burnt oil. Static leapt from the pyramids’ tops, sparking from silver tower to silver tower as if between the equipment in the laboratory of an insane magos.

The sour grey of pre-dawn erupted in light as the lowered clouds were lit with inner radiance. This was swiftly followed by the tremendous crash of atmospheric discharge, like thunder without the lightning. Multiple sonic booms from hypersonic projectiles shattered the graveyard silence, and those citizens of Tizca who still slept were shaken from their beds by the echoes as percussive blasts rolled through the city.

Like a stabbing finger of raw light, the first energy lance struck Prospero a kilometre north-east of Tizca. It impacted in the wide ocean bay of the port and flashed a five-hundred metre column of seawater to superheated steam. A series of follow-on blasts seared into existence within seconds, marching vertical striations of incandescent brightness that sent up towering geysers of salt water.

Banks of scalding fog rolled in from the ocean, boiling the flesh from the bones of early-morning dockworkers. Projectiles streaked through the lower atmosphere on trails of fire as shock wave fists pummelled the sea and sent foaming breakers crashing to shore.

Whole swathes of mountains simply vanished in towering mushroom clouds, magma bombs levelling entire peaks and filling the valleys with rubble. The earth shook with man-made thunder, the relentless pounding of the planet’s surface like pile-driving hammers repeatedly slamming down. In orbit, more and more warships added the weight of their fire to the bombardment, hurling building-sized ordnance towards the planet below. The total saturation of the target area ensured that the city was completely engulfed, enough to level a continent’s worth of metropolises.

Yet Tizca endured. The kine-shields of the Raptora were the strongest defences any city in the Imperium could boast. Harder than the thickest adamantium and more unyielding than layer upon layer of voids, the invisible umbrella of protection soaked up the violence of the bombardment, though at fearsome cost to the warriors who maintained it.

The entire populace of Tizca was awake now, moving onto the streets of their beloved city and looking up in confusion and wonder. There was little fear, for the destruction had not yet breached their protected environment. They watched, open-mouthed, as blinding energy weapons burned searing traceries in the sky above, while smudges of black smoke and fire painted the clouds as steel-jacketed shells flattened on the shield. Hastily-mustered Spireguard regiments poured onto the city streets and tried to usher people indoors, but the incredible spectacle was too entrancing to be ignored.

Magnus the Red watched as the lightstorm blistered and burst over his city. The sky was stained a bloody orange as airbursting incendiary rounds burned the clouds away, and a tear fell from his eye as he watched the land around Tizca die. The forests were burning to ash and the wild grasslands blazed with secondary fires, reducing the unspoilt countryside to a wasteland in a matter of minutes.

The desolation of Prospero was complete.

‘Now I know how you felt, father,’ he whispered, sensing aetheric energy build in his fists, aching to be released. Magnus fought for calm, reciting the secret names of the Enumerations known only to him. This was his fate; this was what he had accepted as his punishment. He could not cast off his noble intent to pay for his mistakes.

No matter how much he ached to.

He watched the thunder batter itself uselessly against the shields of the Raptora.

‘I am here,’ he whispered to the heavens. ‘Do what you will.’

The Apex Chamber at the summit of the Corvidae pyramid was wreathed in smoke, aromatic fumes oozing from the stone, sweet and tinged with camphire and cedar. Veils hanging from the angled walls twisted in the warm winds billowing from outside, and Ahriman fought to hold onto the high Enumerations as the constant thunder tried to unseat him.

He sat before the Icon of the Corvidae, a wide crystal boulder shaped like a flat oval with a chunk of black spinel at its centre like the dilated pupil of an eye. The boulder had been hewn from the Reflecting Caves by the First Magister Templi of the Corvidae, and had been used as a focus for prognostication by the cult’s devotees since its earliest days. It floated above a reflecting pool, its waters shimmer-dark and still despite the pounding of the earth.

Ahriman blinked as he caught a phantom image of a new moon in its depths.

Always capricious in its revelations, the Icon had been silent for weeks, with not even the most gifted of the Corvidae able to divine so much as a hint of the future. Ankhu Anen and Ahriman had both attempted to see beyond Prospero, but their visions had revealed nothing. Their subtle bodies had been unable to enter the Great Ocean at all, as though something was actively preventing them from venturing beyond Prospero’s horizons.

Then the bombardment had fallen in a rain of thunder and steel.

Within moments of the first bombs landing, the warriors of the Corvidae mustered for war in the lower reaches of the Pyramid. Prospero was dying around them, though Tizca remained untouched. That wouldn’t last long. The unseen attackers would soon realise they would need to come down and dig the Thousand Sons out the hard way.

Who were these mysterious enemies? Who would be insane enough to attack an Astartes Legion on its home planet? More importantly, how had they been able to bring such enormous firepower to bear without anyone being aware of it?

Ahriman needed answers before he issued a deployment order, and thus he attuned his mind to the crystal and went straight to the source of all knowledge on Prospero: Magnus the Red.

No one had seen the primarch for weeks, but the great column of fire from his pyramid had been visible all across the city. The mood of its people was fearful. Now Ahriman knew why.

‘My lord, your sons require your guidance,’ he said, drawing energy from Aaetpio to focus all his energy on the crystal eye. In the past few weeks, Aaetpio had been his constant companion, his Tutelary no longer needing his summons to attend upon him. Fluttering overhead with shimmering wings, Ahriman used his enhanced power to reach out with his mind towards the crystal within the Pyramid of Photep.

He felt the resonance of the crystals in the Apex Chambers of the other cult temples, the urgent cries for information from all the captains save Uthizzar. A faint glow shimmered in the depths of the crystal and the gemstone at its heart swam with motion, as though it were no longer solid, but liquid.

‘My sons,’ said Magnus, his voice echoing in Ahriman’s mind. Its quality was sharp and edged as it sang from the crystal. ‘This is our Legion’s darkest hour, but also our moment of triumph.’

Ahriman felt the sudden joy of his brothers. Until this moment, he hadn’t realised how much he had missed hearing his father’s voice. He forced himself to concentrate on the matter at hand.

‘My lord, what is happening?’ he asked. ‘Who is attacking us?’

‘Leman Russ and his Wolves,’ said Magnus matter-of-factly, as though such an occurrence was wholly expected, ‘together with elements of the Custodes and the Silent Sisterhood.’

Ahriman was astonished, and his grip on the Enumerations would have slipped but for Aaetpio. Even so, it took a supreme effort of will to hold onto his clinical detachment.

‘Why? What have we done to earn such violence?’

‘Not you,’ said Magnus. ‘I have brought this upon us. This is my doom.’

‘We need to deploy before they launch assault boats,’ stated Phosis T’kar. ‘The kine shield cannot be maintained any longer. I have lost too many warriors holding it this long.’

‘Then lower it, my son,’ said Magnus, ‘for the Wolves are already on their way.’

‘Then those treacherous bastards will learn what it means to attack the Thousand Sons,’ snarled Khalophis. ‘I will show them how the Pyrae make war.’

‘Give us an order, my lord,’ begged Hathor Maat. ‘Please!’

The eye in the heart of the crystal dimmed, as though retreating into its depths. Ahriman saw the hesitation, and a memory threatened to swim to the surface of his mind, a fragment of his moment of connection to the primarch on Nikaea.

Khalophis had called the Space Wolves treacherous, but Ahriman knew the master of the Pyrae had it wrong. In this war, it wasn’t the Space Wolves who would be thought of as traitors, it was the Thousand Sons.

‘Leman Russ hates us, but even he would never dare attack us without orders,’ said Ahriman, thinking aloud. ‘This order must come from a higher source. It comes from the Emperor – it is the only explanation. My lord, what are you not telling us?’

‘Always you were the perceptive one, Ahzek,’ said Magnus, and the eye swam into sharp focus once more, its hue filled with resignation. ‘I hid the truth from everyone, even myself, for so long that I was almost convinced it was simply a bad dream of another’s life.’

Ahriman sensed the confusion of his brother Astartes, each of whom urgently wanted to take the field of battle. If the Space Wolves were coming, every second was precious. He wanted nothing more than to march out with his warriors, but what Magnus was telling him was too vital to be ignored.

‘What did you do?’ he demanded, all deference gone from his tone. ‘When you saved us, what did you do? The pact you made with the powers of the Great Ocean, this is the price of it, is it not?’

‘Yes, Ahzek,’ said Magnus. ‘To save my sons, I made a devil’s bargain, and like the great doctor before me, I thought I had the best of it. All this time, I have been a blind fool, a puppet jerked on the strings of an intelligence greater than mine.’

A psychic shock wave sent a sharp fracture knifing through the crystal, and a jagged red line appeared in the centre of the eye.

‘I was desperate. I had exhausted every other alternative to save you all,’ hissed Magnus, his voice sending brittle cracks throughout the crystal. ‘From the moment I turned my other eye inwards, I knew they were there: the Eternal Powers of the Great Ocean, beings older than time with power beyond imagining. Only they had the means to save you all from hideous mutation and death, so yes, I supped from their poisoned chalice. You were restored to me and I was content. What father would not do everything in his power to save his sons?’

‘And for that we must suffer?’ asked Hathor Maat. ‘For that we are to be destroyed?’

‘They think we are traitors,’ said Ahriman, with the dawning horror of comprehension. ‘All those who spoke against us at Nikaea will be vindicated if we fight back. Our inability to see the future… We thought it was because the Great Ocean’s currents had turned from us, but it was you, wasn’t it? You kept us from seeing the future. You dispersed the fleet. You want this. Is this why Uthizzar is absent? Did he learn what you planned for us?’

‘Watch your tongue, Ahzek!’ bellowed Khalophis. ‘The primarch would never allow that.’

‘He is right, Khalophis,’ said Magnus, and the simple truth of his words broke their hearts. ‘Uthizzar came to me, and in my weakness he read the truth of it. I could not allow him to warn you or our sacrifice would be for nothing. For the good of all, we must be destroyed.’

The scale of such a gross betrayal shocked them all to silence until Phosis T’kar responded in the only way he knew how.

‘No one is being destroyed,’ roared Phosis T’kar. ‘If Russ’s dogs want a fight, we’ll give them one.’

‘No! You must not,’ said Magnus. ‘The gathering darkness needs us to turn on our brothers. It wants two loyal Legions torn apart and broken on the anvil of blind hate before the coming war. We cannot allow that to happen, for the Emperor will have need of his loyal Wolves before the end. We must accept our fate and let our devastation run its course.’

Ahriman’s anger cut through his state of detachment in the spheres and his fists clenched.

‘All this time, you knew there would be a reckoning,’ he said. ‘We are the Red Sorcerers of Prospero, damned in the eyes of our fellows, and this is to be how our story ends, in betrayal and bloodshed.’

‘It is the only way, Ahzek,’ said Magnus. ‘I am sorry.’

‘No,’ said Ahriman. ‘It is not the only way. You may find it nobler to suffer your fate, but I will take arms against it.’

Ahriman focussed his will upon the crystals of his fellow Magister Templi.

‘The Corvidae will fight the invaders,’ he promised. ‘My brothers, are you with me?’

‘The Raptora are with you,’ said Phosis T’kar.

‘The Pavoni will fight,’ said Hathor Maat.

‘As will the Pyrae,’ hissed Khalophis. ‘Oh, the Pyrae will most definitely fight.’

The land around Tizca was in flames, a ruined wasteland from which nothing would ever rise again. The city’s high marble walls, glorious museums, libraries, silver towers and great pyramids remained intact, the protection of the Raptora holding firm in the face of one of the most sustained and powerful bombardments ever unleashed in the history of the Imperium.

The mountains burned, the skyline forever changed by the world-shattering detonations.

Hot on the heels of the bombardment, the invaders came in their thousands. At first, the people of Tizca thought them to be particles of ash-blown grit, so numerous and so small were they. But as they closed, it became apparent that wave after wave of drop-ships, assault boats and gunships were inbound. Behind them came bulkier cargo transports bearing armoured vehicles and artillery pieces.

The kine-shields of the Raptora could not protect Tizca from the attack, but their cover was no longer needed. The bombardment from orbit had ceased, and packs of roaring Stormbirds led the charge, skimming low over the water towards the Tizca’s port. Hundreds of craft flew over the churning seas, leaving foaming breakers in their wake. The idea that any enemy could reach the surface of Prospero to launch an assault had been discounted, and as a consequence, there were no anti-aircraft batteries to meet the oncoming craft.

The route into Tizca was wide open.

The first craft, an enormous, blade-like Stormbird with steel-grey sides and the image of twin wolves painted on its blunt, pugnacious prow smashed into the port. It blasted its way into the berths with a salvo of missiles and a sawing blast of cannon fire. Landing skids deployed at the last second, and the craft came down hard in the wreckage.

No sooner had it set down than the assault ramps dropped and a savage giant leapt down. His armour was hung with wolf pelts and his helmet bore two enormous fangs jutting from the lower portion of the faceplate.

Leman Russ set foot on Prospero, the first invader ever to do so. He roared to the skies, and the devastation wrought by his fleet above was pleasing to him. Two enormous wolves howled at his sides, and a score of his most powerful warriors fought their way into the port.

Dozens more craft smashed into the docking berths and explosions mushroomed skyward from damaged silos and ruptured fuel lines. Hundreds of warriors took the field of battle, a howling tide of warriors surging through the burning port towards the city proper.

Hundreds of smaller Thunderhawks roared in from the sea towards the undulating length of coastline between the port and the rearing escarpment of the Acropolis Magna in the east. Atop this glistening cliff of blond sandstone, the bronze statue of Magnus watched over his city with a stern, paternal gaze.

The eastern quarter of Tizca had been the original extent of the city before Magnus had designed the rest of its layout. Its street plan was chaotic and winding, and was a popular promenade for Tizca’s more bohemian citizens. Old Tizca, as it was known, was built on a gentle slope that meandered down to the sea, its narrow, winding streets awash with Fountain Houses, intimate markets, chic eateries and theatres.

Dozens of Thunderhawks touched down on its wide, seafront esplanade, smashing through the marble seawall and unleashing hundreds of howling warriors with bright axes and wolf-skulled battle helms. Coordinated gunfire took down a number of invaders, the citizen militias of Tizca mobilising with military swiftness, but their weapons were nowhere near powerful enough to fell enough of their enemies.

As Russ’s warriors loped through the burning wreckage of the coastal districts, heavy landers crushed seafront structures and disgorged thundering tanks in the grey livery of the Space Wolves. Enormous Predators, Land Raiders and Vindicators rumbled through the lower town, levelling buildings with their enormous cannons and mowing down anyone foolish enough to expose themselves.

Squadrons of Whirlwind rocket tanks rumbled from their transports and hunkered down in the ruins, turning their boxy missile pods towards the Acropolis Magna. The pods vanished in fire and smoke, as rocket after rocket streaked skywards in rapid succession. A dozen or more impacted on the tip of the rock, obliterating the statue of Magnus in a storm of molten detonations. This symbolic act complete, the missile pods swivelled and yet more salvoes arced upwards to land with devastating results in the centre of Tizca. Raging thermals spread the fire from building to building, and the City of Light burned.

As the troop carriers and heavy landers touched down, sleek speeders screamed overhead, unleashing endless torrents of missiles into the city. Their fire was indiscriminate, the gunners instructed to fire at will. Hundreds of civilians died in the opening minutes of the aerial assault, and scores more were gunned down as hunting speeders strafed the streets with cannon fire.

The Skyguard Air Command launched every squadron of their two-man skimmers from their hangars to the south. These disc-like aircraft were armed with heat lances and missile pods, and the sky above the city became a frantic mess of gunfire, streaking missiles, explosions and dogfights as the two forces duelled for supremacy.

As the Space Wolves drew first blood, Prospero’s military responded.

The citizen militias of Tizca rose in defence of their city, gathering what arms they could and taking up firing positions on rooftops and at windows. No one was fool enough to think they would be anything more than irritants to the Space Wolves, but to let the invaders simply walk into Tizca without a fight was as abhorrent as it was unthinkable.

The Spireguard, already on high alert after the commencement of the bombardment, moved out en masse under the guidance of the Corvidae. Magnus had blinded his Legion to the approach of the Space Wolves, but the immediate paths of the future were clear to those with eyes to see them.

Elements of the 15th Prosperine Assault Infantry, under Captain Sokhem Vithara, occupied the upper slopes of Old Tizca, anchoring their defence between the fire-wreathed pyramid of the Pyrae cult, the Skelmis Tholus a kilometre west and the Corvidae pyramid. Vithara set up his command post in the vestibule of the Kretis gallery, the oldest repository of artwork and sculpture on Prospero.

In the south-west of the city, the Prospero Assault Pioneers rallied what little was left of their soldiers after avalanches caused by the orbital shelling swallowed three of their barracks. The northern Palatine Guard deployed on the edges of the burning port, occupying the high parapets of overlooking libraries and galleries of the Nephra-te district. Their commander, Katon Aphea, was the heir apparent to one of Prospero’s oldest families, a young and gifted officer with great potential. He anchored his defence on the Caphiera Tholus and positioned his troops with a tactical acumen that would have been lauded at any Imperial Army scholam.

Leman Russ and his Wolves overran Aphea’s position in less than two minutes.

Tizca burned as dawn’s light crept over the horizon, but for all that the Space Wolves had struck an overwhelmingly bloody blow, they had yet to face the city’s true defenders.

The Thousand Sons deployed, and suddenly the fight took on a very different character.

Ahriman ran through the streets on the edge of Old Tizca, his armour’s autosenses easily penetrating the thick clouds of smoke pouring from the blazing buildings. The Scarab Occult marched with him, their hearts hungry for vengeance. Ahead, the Aquarion Fountain House burned, its graceful, columned structure and artfully carved fountains crumbling in the awful heat.

Heavy fighting engulfed the streets beyond the nearby Skelmis Tholus, with the 15th Prosperine Assault Infantry in contact with the invaders. The narrow streets formed natural choke points, and the Spireguard commander was using the terrain to his advantage.

Flames billowed further downslope, devouring structures set alight by the Space Wolves and threatening to spread further uphill. Warriors of the Pyrae were containing the blazes, hurling the fires back down the hill to block entire avenues and streets with seething walls of flame. The sky overhead was smeared with missile contrails and explosions, and a building behind Ahriman collapsed as an aircraft slammed into its roof, sending up plumes of smoke and fire. Blazing rafters and roof tiles spilled onto the street.

The air was hot and acrid, the smell of a city in its death throes.

Explosions and the constant bark of gunfire echoed from walls that had known only laughter and song. Drifting clouds of ash and burning parchment fluttered past, and Ahriman plucked a scrap of paper from the air.

‘What is it?’ asked Sobek.

‘Evidence of the Unseen,’ said Ahriman, reading the words on the smouldering parchment. ‘“The sea rises and the light falters. The moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out. On that day, the sun will go down for the last time”.’

Ahriman dropped the paper, watching it float off in the billowing thermals. The words were too apt to be coincidence, and he feared for what they represented. He watched the confetti of ashen books, scrolls and treatises dance like burning snowflakes above him.

‘So much will be lost, but I will restore it,’ he vowed. ‘All of it, no matter how long it takes.’

Ahriman took a deep breath, the scale of such an undertaking not lost on him. His senses were stretched to the limits of perception, his mind alive with the flickering light of possible futures. He drew deeply on Aaetpio’s well of power to enhance his awareness. His skin felt as though his Tutelary’s fire was burning him. He had felt something like this once before, but forced that memory from his mind as he sensed the presence of inimical souls nearby.

‘Scarab Occult!’ shouted Ahriman, aiming his heqa staff towards one of the narrow streets leading down into the Old Town. ‘Stand to.’

Flames and smoke belched from the street as a host of shadowy warriors smashed through the burning rubble and into the wider thoroughfare. Dust coated their armour and black, carbonised streaks marred the gleaming plate, but there was no mistaking the winter’s grey of the Space Wolves.

The enemy Astartes had seen them, unsheathing bolters and viciously-toothed swords hung with wolf-tails.

The moment stretched for Ahriman. His perceptions raced down the length of his bolter, following the path his shot would take. In his fleeting vision he saw it smash through the visor of one of the Space Wolves, blowing out the back of his helm in an explosion of blood and brain matter. The precognitive flash froze him for the briefest second with the enormity of what it represented.

Astartes were at war with one another, and the sheer horror of that fact cost Ahriman a fraction of a second.

It was all the Space Wolves needed.

Though the Thousand Sons had been forewarned, still the Space Wolves fired first.

A hail of bolter fire slammed into Ahriman and the Scarab Occult. One warrior went down, his chestplate broken open and his vital organs pulped by a mass-reactive shell. Two others dropped, but returned fire. The spell on Ahriman was broken, and his choler came to the fore as his bolter bucked in his hand and a Space Wolf was pitched backwards, his helmet a smoking ruin.

Another was lifted from his feet by Sobek, his Practicus using his kine powers to pound the wolf-cloaked warrior to destruction against the marble walls of the Fountain House. Three other Space Wolves jerked and spasmed as the Pavoni amongst his warriors vaporised the super-oxygenated blood in their veins. Flames licked from their eye-lenses, and they fell to the ground as their armour fused around them. The Tutelaries of the Scarab Occult spun around the Space Wolves, amplifying their masters’ powers with gleeful spite.

The last three Space Wolves were blazing columns of fire, the plates of their armour black and molten, like onyx statues frozen in a moment of unimaginable agony.

Ahriman took a moment to contemplate what they had done. Aaetpio flickered above his head and he felt its urge to flow into him. Crackling arcs of crimson lightning flickered at his fingers and he suppressed them with a burst of impatience.

‘Restrain yourself!’ he snapped, not liking his Tutelary’s eagerness one bit.

Sobek approached him, wringing his hands, asking, ‘What did you say?’

‘Nothing,’ said Ahriman. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘They caught us unawares, but we’ll hurl them back to Terra,’ said Sobek, and Ahriman saw the light of his Practicus’s Tutelary echoed in the fiery gleam pulsing behind his visor.

‘We have killed warriors of a brother Legion,’ said Ahriman, wanting Sobek to appreciate the gravity of the moment. ‘There is no going back from this.’

‘Why should there be? We did not start this war.’

‘That doesn’t matter. We are at war and once you are at war, you fight until the bitter end. Either we defeat the Space Wolves or Prospero will be the Thousand Sons’ tomb. Either way we lose.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘If we survive this attack, what then? We cannot remain on Prospero. Others will come and finish what Russ has begun. If we lose, well, that speaks for itself.’

Sobek hefted his heqa staff, its length rippling with fire.

‘Then we had best not lose,’ he said.

Khalophis reclined upon the crystal throne at the heart of the Pyrae temple. His armour reflected the flames billowing at the edge of the chamber. To anyone other than a cultist of the Pyrae, the chamber would have been unbearable, the air too hot to breathe, the fire too hot to endure.

Fire sprites and elemental aspects of the aether spun and danced in the air, leaving incandescent wakes behind their insubstantial bodies. Sioda hung over him like a fiery guardian angel, the Tutelary’s form having swollen to enormous proportions since the treacherous bombardment had begun.

Armoured Neophytes surrounded him, arranged in the sacred six-pointed hexalpha pattern representing the volatile union of fire and water. They carried soul-crystals hewn from the Reflecting Caves, and flickering embers of life-force burned within them.

‘Are you sure of this, my lord?’ asked Pharis, his Zelator’s voice betraying his unease.

Khalophis grinned and flexed his fingers upon the carved armrests of the throne. Darting fire swam in its depths, and he felt the enormous rage of the wounded consciousness beyond the temple walls awaiting the chance to strike back at his enemies.

‘I have never been more sure of anything, Pharis,’ said Khalophis. ‘Begin.’

Pharis backed away from his master, and nodded to the Neophytes. They bowed their heads and Khalophis gasped as their energies surged into him. The throne blazed with light, and he fought to direct the raging power that threatened to consume him.

‘I am the Magister Templi of the Pyrae,’ he hissed between clenched teeth. ‘The Inferno is my servant, for I am the Lord of Hellfire and I will teach you to burn.’

Sioda swept down and enveloped his body. Khalophis felt his consciousness torn from his flesh to fill another body, one of iron and steel, of crystal and rage. No longer were his muscles fashioned from meat and tendons, but from enormous pistons and fibre-bundle hydraulics newly lined with psychically resonant crystals. The bolter was no longer his weapon, but vast guns capable of obliterating entire armies and fists that could tear down buildings.

Khalophis surveyed the battlefield with the eyes of a god, a towering avatar of battle roused to fight once more. His limbs felt stiff and new, his senses taking a moment to adjust to their enormous dimensions and ponderous weight. He flexed his new body. The metallic grinding of long dormant gears and the shriek of rekindled pneumatics cut through the clamour of battle.

Sioda’s fire flowed along the incredibly complex mechanisms of his body, filling them with new life. He took a thunderous step forward and let loose an atavistic roar, his voice that of a braying war horn.

Like a mighty dragon woken from centuries of slumber, Canis Vertex marched into battle one more.

Twenty-Eight

The line is holding
They will turn on you too
Understand the foe

The jetbikes were golden, with curved prows shaped in the form of eagles’ beaks, their flanks carved to resemble swept-back wings. Phosis T’kar counted seven of them, swooping in low on an attack run towards his position at the end of the Raptora plaza. The warriors riding them were also golden, their red helmet plumes streaming behind them like pennants. Rapid-firing cannons blazed from underslung gun pods, ripping up the flagstone road leading from the Mylas agora.

Geysers of rock burst from every impact, but Phosis T’kar wasn’t worried. He braced his weight on his right leg and snatched his hands through the air, as though sweeping a curtain open. Four of the jetbikes were plucked from the air as if they had reached the end of an unbreakable tether. Phosis T’kar slammed them against the high walls of the Timoran Library, shattering the statues of its first custodians.

The last three exploded as Hathor Maat sent a cataclysmic electrical surge through their engines. The burning wrecks smashed into the ground and tumbled end over end towards the Thousand Sons position, skidding to a halt less than a metre from Phosis T’kar.

‘Custodes,’ he grunted. ‘They’re not so tough.’

The northern reaches of Tizca were aflame. The port was a mass of reeking pillars of smoke, the stink of promethium mingling with the acrid reek of burning tar, rubber and metal. Thick clouds hung low over the city and ash fell like black rain. Men and women in their hundreds streamed past his position, heading towards the Pyramid of Photep laden with books and arms full of scrolls. The streets were littered with fallen tomes and fragments of statuary. Carved heroes of the Raptora had once looked down on the plaza, but shelling from enemy artillery had toppled all save a handful. Expressionless faces and outstretched hands lay strewn across the flagstones.

Mixed among the civilians were bloodied remnants of the Palatine Guard, shell-shocked men drenched in blood who staggered from the port in shock. These terrified survivors were all that remained of the soldiers tasked with containing the initial enemy landings.

‘I’ve had word from the Athanaeans,’ said Hathor Maat, jogging over from his position to Phosis T’kar’s left.

‘What is it?’

‘The Wolf King is coming,’ said Hathor Maat gleefully. ‘They say he was first to land at the port and is fighting his way towards us.’

‘Fighting?’ said Phosis T’kar. ‘I don’t think there’s much fighting going on. The Wolves are cutting through the Spireguard with ease.’

‘You didn’t really expect them to hold, did you?’ said Hathor Maat. ‘They’re only mortals, and this is an Astartes fight.’

‘Not just Astartes,’ said Phosis T’kar, gesturing towards the wrecked jetbikes. ‘Custodes want our heads on spikes too.’

‘They all die just the same,’ said Hathor Maat.

‘Any word other than the location of the Wolf King?’

‘Ahriman’s got the northern perimeter sealed. He’s holding the upper slopes of Old Tizca from the Acropolis to the eastern flank of Corvidae pyramid.’

‘Leaving us with the western front from the Pavoni pyramid to the port.’

‘Looks that way,’ agreed Hathor Maat. ‘The Athanaeans are taking up position in Occullum Square, they’re going to feed us intel on the enemy plans as they get it. What’s left of the Spireguard is taking up position with the Legion, but we can’t count on them.’

‘What about Khalophis?’

‘No word yet.’

Explosions burst nearby as streaking missiles corkscrewed out of the sky and detonated overhead. Razored shrapnel scythed downwards, tearing a dozen civilians to bloody rags.

‘Here they come!’ shouted Hathor Maat, running back to his position.

A trio of boxy shapes moved through the smoke, the roar of their engines like the cry of living beasts. Trailing clouds of plaster-dust and fire, three enormous Land Raiders in the livery of the Space Wolves burst into the plaza. Behind them came the warriors of Leman Russ, hundreds of armoured fighters advancing in a howling tide of blades and bolts.

Among the warriors of Fenris were warriors in gold and red. They carried long spears with ebony hafts and shimmering blades. Phosis T’kar grinned at the thought of matching his strength against such warriors.

Packs of slavering wolves bounded across the plaza, their bared fangs flecked with scraps of uniform and flesh. The Thousand Sons opened fire, and the plaza erupted in a storm of gunfire. The din of shooting was eclipsed by the howls of the wolves. Phosis T’kar snapped his fingers and broke the alpha male of the pack in two. Bolter fire smacked armour plates and spun Space Wolves around, but the warriors of Russ were masters of charging from cover to cover and few were falling.

Heavy las-bolts flickered overhead, fizzing spears of impossibly bright energy. Explosions burst all along the Thousand Sons’ lines as thudding bangs of bolter fire pummelled their positions. Pounding concussions ripped across the plaza, but the kine shields of the Raptora were proof against such attacks.

He concentrated on the lead Land Raider, reaching out and closing his fist. He wrenched his hand back, and the left sponson tore free of the vehicle in a blazing plume of white light. The heavy tank skidded around and slammed into the vehicle next to it, crushing the warriors advancing between them.

Phosis T’kar grinned.

‘You didn’t realise what you were getting into here, did you?’ he said.

Another angry retort died in his mouth as sudden, cramping pain knotted in his belly, like someone had taken a fistful of his intestines and wrenched them upwards. He tasted bile and felt a sickly lather of sweat prickle on his skin.

Another vehicle exploded, its hull a writhing spiderweb of coruscating lightning. The last vehicle erupted in flames as Auramagma’s warriors hurled fireballs at its frontal glacis. It kept coming, shooting as it crushed priceless tomes and beautiful sculpture to shards beneath its treads. Auramagma himself stood atop a fallen master of the Raptora and wove sheets of white fire like a conductor before his orchestra.

‘Too arrogant, that one,’ said Phosis T’kar, recognising Auramagma’s flaw while ignoring his own. A missile streaked out and slammed into the Land Raider’s topside, skidding off its armour and exploding further behind it.

Phosis T’kar battered a handful of Space Wolves back with a flick of his wrist, hurling them beneath the tracks of the blazing Land Raider. Their armour broke open with satisfyingly wet cracks. No sooner had the vehicle crushed his victims than fire spewed from its insides. Its escape hatches slammed open as the blazing crew fought to escape the furnace of their vehicle. Auramagma let them burn.

Lightning danced through the Space Wolves, exploding their bodies within the armoured casing of their battle-plate. Hissing sheets of fire turned the ground molten, while the kine shields soaked up the weight of return fire. Phosis T’kar laughed to see his Legion unleashed, with no constraints to its full potential and no faint-hearts complaining because they could kill the enemies of the Imperium better than anyone else.

A sudden cold shiver made him start, the whisper of a ghostly touch at the back of his mind. He had felt it once before, but before he could recall where, a wolf leapt at him through the flames. Its fur was ablaze, and he reached up to flick it away with a gesture.

Nothing happened.

The wolf slammed into him and barrelled him to the ground. Its jaws snapped down, the fangs gouging deep furrows in his visor. Yellowed talons tore into his side, and he grunted as he felt them pierce his flesh. The wolf bit him in a frenzy, and Phosis T’kar fought to keep it from his throat.

His eyes met those of the beast, and he saw into its heart, the alien core of the being beneath the mask of the wolf. His eyes widened in recognition, but it was too late to do anything except fight.

The beast’s jaw fastened on his neck, but before it could bite down Phosis T’kar slammed his fist into the wolf’s belly. He pistoned his arm through its ribcage, crushing through ribs and vital organs to shatter its spine. The light went out of its eyes, and Phosis T’kar threw its body away in disgust. He climbed to his feet, looking at his hands in horror. He willed power to flow through them, but he felt nothing, no connection to the Great Ocean nor any hint of its fire.

A slender shape in form-fitting golden armour danced into view, a long-bladed sword lancing for his belly. He batted the blade away with his heqa staff and took stock of his attacker. It was a woman, but no ordinary woman. The lower portion of her face was obscured by a silver muzzle-mask and her dark eyes were tattooed with tears.

Now Phosis T’kar knew why his powers had failed. He heard screams of pain as the kine shields failed and more of the Silent Sisterhood made their presence felt. She came at him with a lancing thrust of her sword. He blocked it with his staff once more, sliding the hook down to the hilt of her blade and twisting.

She read the move and drew her blade back, spinning around and going low with a slender dagger aimed at his groin. Phosis T’kar stepped in to meet her and her dagger shattered on the plates of his thigh. He brought his knee up into her face and crushed the mask hiding her jaw. Blood and teeth flew from the impact, but the woman rolled out of reach.

All along the edge of the plaza, hundreds of armoured warriors came together in a battering clash of plate. No longer was this a battle to be fought with one side having the advantage; this was now a brutal, sweating, throat-tearing fight at close quarters.

Phosis T’kar unsheathed his combat blade and dropped into a fighting crouch before the armoured woman. He held his staff out before him with his knife high at his shoulder.

‘Very well, null-maiden,’ he snarled. ‘I’ll just kill you the old-fashioned way!’

Though his body lay recumbent on a crystal throne of golden fire, Khalophis marched through the ruins of Tizca with the strides of a mighty giant. Structures were children’s building blocks, the fires flickering embers. People were specks to be crushed beneath his thunderous steps.

He marched past the Kretis gallery towards the Skelmis Tholus with the wide expanse of ocean at his right shoulder. The streets of Old Tizca were too narrow for a titanic battle engine such as Canis Vertex, and ancient buildings exploded as he smashed through them like some destructive colossus from ancient legends.

Gunfire lashed up, but none of it could harm him. He felt the heat of Sioda gather in his right arm, and unleashed a torrent of fire that bathed six streets in billowing clouds of sticky flames. He couldn’t hear the screams, but he saw his howling victims falling to their knees and begging for salvation.

The guns of Canis Vertex were functional, but with his Tutelary’s connection to the Great Ocean, his pyrokinetic abilities were boosted a hundredfold and he had no need of them. The mighty fists of the Titan were wreathed in flames, and with every gesture, tank-sized fireballs slammed into the enemy. Khalophis laughed as he spat tongues of flame from both arms, burning the invaders back to their ships.

The attacking forces had cut a deep wound into Tizca, but Khalophis saw how far the invaders had extended themselves in their urgent need to break the defenders in two. Canis Vertex could cut them off from their reserves, and the Thousand Sons’ lines would drive them back to the ocean.

The Athanaeans dispersed word of the enemy movements, and the Corvidae met and countered any surprise attacks planned on a whim. The battle was by no means won by either force, but from his god’s-eye view Khalophis could see the battle was turning in favour of the Thousand Sons.

‘You bit off more than even you could chew,’ roared Khalophis, the words coming out in the real world as a deafening blurt of eardrum-busting static from the engine’s war horn.

Gunships and speeders slashed forwards, guns blazing and missiles arcing towards his armoured hide. Without voids, he would have been vulnerable, but a shield of flame turned shells to molten droplets of lead and detonated missiles before they could impact. He felt his Tutelary’s savage joy, its power jostling for control, and he clamped down his authority.

It shrieked in jealous spite and Khalophis spasmed with a soul-deep sensation of nausea.

Canis Vertex halted its rampage and explosions erupted across its armoured chest as its aetheric armour vanished. Scenting blood, the jetbikes, speeders and gunships closed in to deliver the deathblow.

‘Get back,’ he hissed. ‘This is mine!’

Sioda screeched and angrily returned to the body of Canis Vertex.

A billowing flare of heat erupted from the Titan, and a dozen aircraft were swatted from the sky by the intense burst, their engines fused and pilots seared to charred bones.

Khalophis spat onto the floor of the Pyrae temple, the blood hissing as it boiled in the intense heat. His armour was smoking, and dark light built behind his eyes as he wept tears of fire that cut blackened scars down his cheeks.

The library of the Corvidae, normally a place of quiet sanctuary and solitude was now a site of frantic activity. Ankhu Anen directed the labours of hundreds of scribes and servitors as they emptied the shelves and datacores of the library. The vast chamber contained hundreds of thousands of texts, too many ever to be evacuated in so short a time, but Ahriman’s orders had been explicit.

Everything that could be saved was to be transferred to the Pyramid of Photep.

The light of fires filtered through the crystal walls, and danced over the steel and glass shelves of the library. Massively overladen bulk servitors carried panniers of books, and terrified scribes swept even more onto protesting load lifters.

He had tried to impose some kind of order on the evacuation of the library, but soon found that impossible. The panic of being so close to the fighting was a plague spreading through his minions, and his carefully ordered plans had fallen apart within moments.

‘Ensure the Pnakotic manuscripts are kept separate from the Prophecies!’ he shouted, seeing a tearful scribe bundling books from different eras together in a servitor’s overflowing pannier. Scrolls and torn pages fluttered to the terrazzo floor. Dust fell from the high ceilings as something exploded nearby, and the library echoed with terrified screams.

Bodies flowed past him, their arms filled with heavy books and rolled-up maps and parchments. The Corvidae had collected so much in their researches into the future, so much that had yet to be studied and properly interpreted. How much knowledge of things to come would be lost in this senseless attack?

A wave of dizziness swamped him and he reached out to steady himself. His hand closed on the cold steel of a shelf and he glanced over at the book nearest his fingers. It was a tattered, worn, leather copy of Liber Draconi, incongruously sitting next to the Book of Atum and twine-bound pages of the Völuspá.

He snatched his hand away as though burned.

‘The dragon of fate,’ he whispered.

Since his earliest days in the ranks of the Thousand Sons, Ankhu Anen had been haunted by dreams of a hissing dragon born of ice and fire. Its breath was the death of stars and its eyes the light of creation. Long had he sought the meaning of his dream, but the symbolism of dragons was manifold.

To some, the dragon represented intellectually superior man overcoming the untamed natural world, or creatures of primal chaos that could only be destroyed through disciplined marshalling of mental and physical prowess. To others, it was a symbol of wisdom, adopted by primitive emperors to enhance their perceived power. To Ankhu Anen it was a symbol of impending doom.

He backed away from the bookshelf, and looked up as a sudden premonition of danger flashed into his mind. A flaming mass was hurtling towards the temple, its form blurred and indistinct through the crystal panes.

Ankhu Anen turned and ran back towards the entrance of the library as a tremendous blast rocked the temple. Glass panes and adamantium columns shattered as a blazing, golden-skinned Thunderhawk gunship smashed into the temple. The wreck spun as its remaining wing caught one of the enormous structural members and it slammed into the ceiling before dropping to the floor of the library with a thunderous explosion.

Razor-sharp fragments and blazing sheets of jet fuel sprayed out from the wreckage, and the dry pages contained within the library eagerly caught light. Ankhu Anen was hurled through the air by the force of the blast, slamming into a high shelf and crashing through it to land on an overturned load lifter and its spilled cargo of books. The shelf buckled and crashed down on top of him in a rain of twisted metal and glass.

Ankhu Anen tried to extricate himself from the remains of the shelving unit, but fell back as searing pain flared in his leg and chest. Taking a deep breath, he took stock of his wounds. His leg was pinned beneath a fallen column, and a jutting spar of steel protruded from his chest. The fall had torn the wound gapingly wide, and blood pumped from his ruptured heart. Not even his secondary organ would be able to keep up with so rapid a loss.

Flaming liquid spread through the library, clawing at groaning shelves and seeking out fresh paper to sate its rapacious appetite. Dead and dying scribes surrounded Ankhu Anen, their bodies shredded by flying debris or burned beyond recognition. He looked up to see a shimmering rain of glass falling from the enormous, smoking hole the crashed gunship had torn. It was like a waterfall of crystal, and as he stared at the mesmerising sight, he saw a golden eye reflected in the shards as they fell in slow motion. The eyes watched him sadly, and Ankhu Anen had the powerful sense that they could easily save his life, yet chose not to.

‘Why?’ he begged, but the eyes had no answer for him.

A faint scratching of metal sounded at his ear, and he twisted to call for help, but his words trailed off as he saw a black raven watching him with its head cocked to one side. Its wings were glossy and black, though he could see psyber-implants worked with great subtlety into its skull. The bird regarded him quizzically, and he smiled at the sight of his cult’s symbol.

‘What are you?’ he asked. ‘A vision of the future? A symbol of salvation?’

‘Neither, I think,’ said a coarse voice at his shoulder, and Ankhu Anen twisted to see a warrior in armour the colour of a winter’s morn. It shimmered as though sheened with a layer of frost, and Ankhu Anen saw nothing but hatred in the Space Wolf’s body language. The raven took flight with a sharp caw and landed upon the warrior’s shoulder guard.

The warrior carried a long staff topped with a golden eagle, and a host of warriors flooded into the Corvidae library behind him. They were golden and grey, and they carried long-necked weapons with blue flames at their hissing nozzles.

‘Who are you?’ cried Ankhu Anen, trying to summon the aether to strike down this impertinent invader. No power was coming, and he felt the ache of powerlessness as a jagged pain in his heart.

‘I am called Ohthere Wyrdmake, Rune Priest to Amlodhi Skarssen Skarssensson of the Fifth Company of Space Wolves,’ said the warrior, removing his helmet to reveal a bearded warrior of great age with pale eyes and a braided beard. A leather skullcap covered the top of his head, and Ankhu Anen saw a willowy female in skin-tight armour of bronze and gold behind him. Her eyes were dead and unforgiving, and he recoiled from the emptiness he saw within them.

‘Wyrdmake? The dragon of fate,’ hissed Ankhu Anen, his eyes widening in understanding. ‘It’s you… It’s always been you.’

The Rune Priest smiled, though there was no amusement, only triumphant vindication.

‘Dragon of fate? I suppose I am,’ he said.

Ankhu Anen tried to reach his heqa staff, but it was lost in the devastation of the crash. He tried to pull his leg free.

‘Do not struggle,’ said Wyrdmake. ‘It will make your death easier.’

‘Why are you doing this?’ begged Ankhu Anen. ‘This is a dreadful mistake, you must see that! Think of all that will be lost if you do this terrible thing.’

‘We are obeying the Emperor’s will,’ said Wyrdmake, ‘as you should have done.’

‘The Thousand Sons are loyal,’ gasped Ankhu Anen, and a froth of bubbling blood spilled from his mouth. ‘We always were.’

Wyrdmake knelt beside Ankhu Anen and pressed an icy gauntlet to his face.

‘Do you have a valediction? Any last words before you die?’

Ankhu Anen nodded, as the future opened up before him. Through gurgling, bloody coughs he hissed his final prophecy.

‘I can see the aether inside you, Rune Priest,’ he hissed with the last of his strength. ‘You are just like me, and one day those you serve will turn on you too.’

‘I almost pity your delusion,’ said Wyrdmake, shaking his head, ‘almost.’

Wyrdmake stood to his full height and waved more of the warriors with flame-weapons forward. Ankhu Anen heard the whoosh of streaming jets of fire destroying a hundred lifetimes worth of knowledge, and tears gathered in the corners of his eyes.

‘You will tell me one thing before you die,’ said Wyrdmake. ‘You will tell me where I can find the star-cunning one called Ahzek Ahriman.’

Phosis T’kar had the advantage of weight and strength, but the null-maiden was lightning quick and her blade whipped like a silver snake. They duelled in the ruins of the plaza amid of a sprawling mêlée of armoured bodies. Blackened hulks of wrecked tanks littered the plaza, and glass fell in a glittering crystal rain from smoking holes punched in the Raptora pyramid.

Statues fell from its golden ledges to shatter on the stone below, and the constant thud of artillery impacts further east set a rhythmic tone for the battle. Fire bathed the combatants in a ruddy orange light, and Phosis T’kar felt a liberating sense of his own strength even as his aetheric powers were denied him.

He spun his staff in lazy circles as the Sister of Silence stared at him with her dead eyes.

‘There is nothing to you, is there?’ he said. ‘I pity most mortals who cannot see what I see, but you? You live in dead space with silence as your only companion. It will be a mercy to end your life.’

The woman did not reply and launched a rapier-quick thrust to his throat. Phosis T’kar swayed aside and swept his arm out as she came in for a reverse stroke. Her blade whipped around his forearm, cutting a grove around his gauntlet, and he lunged towards her with his staff outstretched.

She bent back beneath his strike, sweeping her legs out and hammering her heel into his knee. His armour cracked and pain shot up his thigh. Phosis T’kar stepped back, favouring his good leg, and grinned.

‘You’re quick, I’ll give you that,’ he said.

She didn’t answer and dodged his next attack with similar grace. A flurry of shots sent up geysers of rock-dust beside them and he flinched back from the heavy impacts.

‘Time to end this,’ he said.

The woman came at him again, and this time he made no move to stop her. Her sword plunged into his chestplate, slicing through the compound ceramite and armaplas, but before it could penetrate the ossified bone-shield over his ribs, he stamped forward and rammed his combat knife up into the woman’s arm.

The blade sliced between her radius and ulna, and she screamed in agony.

‘Not so silent now, eh?’ he snarled, dragging her towards him. She fought against his strength, but her struggles only intensified her pain. Phosis T’kar slammed his helm into her face, and the Sister of Silence’s head caved in.

He wrenched his combat knife clear as he felt his power surge back into his limbs with a frisson of painful pleasure. Utipa flared into existence above him, and he welcomed his Tutelary’s presence, feeling its return boost his power. Phosis T’kar sheathed his bloody blade and unslung his bolter, ramming a fresh magazine home and racking the slide. He snapped the silver blade protruding from his chest, and turned from the body before him, jogging back to the fighting and firing his bolter at targets of opportunity as he went.

The raging combat swirled like a seething tide, with neither force quite able to gain the upper hand. The Space Wolves fought with furious abandon, utterly directed and focussed, but without the clarity of vision to appreciate the whole picture. The Thousand Sons fought with clinical detachment, every warrior having achieved the lower Enumerations to better focus their skills. As Astartes, they were trained to excel in the brutality of close combat, but Magnus had taught them there was always another, cleverer way to win.

‘Understand the foe,’ Magnus had said, ‘and you will know how to beat him.’

It was a lesson the Space Wolves and Custodes had taken to heart, for how else would they have thought to bring the null-maidens of the Silent Sisterhood with them? Knowing that gave Phosis T’kar all he needed to turn this battle around.

He ran through the thick of the fighting, casting his mind out into the swirling mass of heaving emotions. The red mist of anger and hatred hung over the struggling fighters, but three patches of deadness were like islands of silence amid the oceans of carnage.

‘Got you,’ he hissed.

He saw Hathor Maat fighting back to back with Auramagma, and shot his way through the crush of bodies to reach his fellow captains. A warrior in grey armour slashed at him with a saw-bladed axe, but Phosis T’kar wrenched it from his grip with a thought, and drove the screaming teeth into the warrior’s face without breaking stride.

His pace slowed as he came within range of another null-maiden. He stopped and climbed onto an empty plinth that had once supported the statue of Magister Ahkenatos, pulling his bolter tight into his shoulder, and scanning for the dead zones within the battle through Utipa’s eyes.

His Tutelary swooped over the battlefield, and Phosis T’kar felt a sudden burst of pain in his chest. He looked down. The wound was still bleeding, which was odd. Then he saw the iridescent shimmer to his blood and sensed its ambition. He knew what it meant, but angrily clamped down on the sudden fear that accompanied such recognition.

Taking a deep breath, he focussed on what he was seeing through Utipa’s eyes.

He saw the first of the null-maidens, and shifted his aim towards her. She fought in the midst of a knot of Space Wolves and Custodes against Hathor Maat’s warriors. The bolter slammed back against his shoulder, and the woman collapsed, the back of her neck and shoulder torn off by the blast of the shell.

Following Utipa’s guidance, he found the second null-maiden and put a bolt-round through her chest. The third he killed with a snap-shot as she fled to the cover of one of the wrecked Land Raiders.

Immediately, the Thousand Sons went on the offensive. Lightning flashed from Hathor Maat’s hands, and Auramagma threw out blazing streams of liquid fire. Kine shields flared to life and the Space Wolves were hurled back from the edges of the pyramid.

Phosis T’kar roared and leapt from the plinth.

Bolts of pure force slammed into his enemies, scattering them before him like a charging cavalryman. As much as he had felt a strange sense of freedom when stripped of his power, it was a moment of fleeting enjoyment compared to this.

Hathor Maat and Auramagma appeared at his side, and he read their joy at this sudden turn in their fortunes. Auramagma was as feral as the Space Wolves, while Hathor Maat was pathetically relieved to have his powers back.

The Thousand Sons formed on their captains, a fighting wedge of lightning-wreathed killers, plunging into the body of the Space Wolf army like a lance. The Space Wolves and Custodes fell back before them, helpless without any means of combating the lethal powers of the Thousand Sons.

A terrible howl of fury echoed around the plaza, and every pane of glass within the Raptora pyramid exploded into diamond fragments. They fell in a crystal rain that reflected the fire and smoke of battle in every shard.

Phosis T’kar dropped to one knee, his autosenses screaming with the overload of sound.

‘What in the name of the Great Ocean…?’ he managed before he remembered where he had heard that howl before.

‘Shrike,’ said Hathor Maat, recalling the same thing.

The Space Wolves parted, and Phosis T’kar saw the enormous majesty of the Wolf King and a coterie of gold-armoured giants striding through the battle lines towards them.

Twenty-Nine

I must not
Power without control
Syrbotae down

Old Tizca was no more. The peaceful warren of antiquated streets he had so enjoyed exploring as a youth on Prospero was now ashes and burning rubble. Warriors picked careful paths through the smouldering ruins, firing from the hip or fighting with axes and swords. The coastline was invisible, obscured by fog banks of artillery fire. Spurts of yellow fire followed by dull metallic coughs snatched at the clouds, and another portion of his beloved city would vanish in a rippling series of fiery detonations.

Magnus watched the death of Tizca from the highest balcony of his pyramid, the one structure that had so far escaped the destruction. Nothing reflective remained in his chambers, nowhere for the insidious voice of his temptation to wheedle and cajole him into making yet another error of judgement.

He gripped the edge of the balcony and wept bitter tears for his lost world and his dying sons. What had once been a wondrous beacon of illumination for all who cared to look upon it was now a maelstrom of battle.

The northern spur of the city was a raging inferno, its palaces ablaze and its parklands ashen wastelands. Further south, the port was a giant black stain on the horizon, its structures demolished in the wake of his brother’s attack.

He sensed Leman Russ in the western reaches of the city, fighting at the Raptora pyramid. Constantin Valdor was at his side and the warrior named Amon. With his inner eye, Magnus felt the courage and elation of the Thousand Sons who fought alongside Phosis T’kar, Hathor Maat and Auramagma. It grieved him to know that most of these men would soon be dead, for the Wolf King left only desolation in his wake.

In the east, Ahriman and his warriors were holding the invaders at bay. Not even the savagery of the Wolves or the power of the Custodes could break through Ahriman’s defences, his warriors using their predictive powers to counter every assault.

Few Sisters of Silence fought in the east, for the majority were at the side of Leman Russ and Valdor. The attackers had not brought enough of the null-maidens to take Tizca, assuming the assault would be little more than a mopping up operation. They thought the bombardment from orbit would be enough, and that alone angered him.

Though the majority of the Spireguard had been swept away in the opening moments of the battle, the Thousand Sons had rallied magnificently and prevented the battle becoming a rout. A thin line of warriors in crimson armour linked the six pyramids of Tizca, forming a circular perimeter with Occullum Square at its centre. The Pyramid of Photep was the southernmost of the pyramids, the glittering water surrounding it awash with sodden pages of ancient wisdom lost forever in the name of fear.

Crackling currents of aether surged through his body, begging to be released and let loose among the foe. Magnus fought to hold it in check. The fire of the Great Ocean battered him, like the most desirable addiction calling to him across the veil between worlds.

Magnus wanted nothing more than to descend to the streets of Tizca and turn back the invaders, to show them the true extent of his powers. His fingers sparked at the thought. He clenched his fists and turned his thoughts inwards.

He heard the voices of his sons crying out to him, begging him to take the field of battle, but he ignored them, forcing their voices from his head.

It was the hardest thing he had ever done.

One plea threatened to cut through his resolve, the voice of his dearest son.

Help us, it said.

‘I cannot, Ahzek,’ he said between clenched teeth. ‘I must not.’

Smoke filled the streets around the outer precincts of the port, choking the light and oxygen from the day. Booming explosions marched through the city like the tread of drunken gods, and the bark of gunfire mingled with screams in a pitch perfect rendition of a hellish choir. Phael Toron ducked back behind a fallen statue to reload his bolter as a stuttering blast of fire tore through the walls of the Fountain House. A hundred warriors of his Fellowship held this portion of the perimeter, with a further two hundred on either side of him. Three times the enemy forces had tried to break through from the port, and three times the guns and blades of the Seventh had hurled them back.

Phael Toron’s warriors knew this part of Tizca like no other, and the divinatory commands from the Corvidae allowed them to coordinate their defences with perfect cohesion. Coupled with the information gathered by the Athanaeans, the defences were always perfectly aligned to meet every attack.

Corpses littered the streets; both enemy and friend, for the defences had not been held without cost. Blood splashed the pristine marble of the walls and rivers of vital fluid flowed in the cracks in the streets. Phael Toron had exhausted twelve magazines, and only a regular supply of ammunition from Spireguard squads had kept their guns firing.

A cramping pain clenched in his gut and he grunted as an unidentifiable sickness sent spasms through his limbs. He shook off the sensation, forcing down the bilious phlegm building in his throat and shaking out the sudden blurring of his vision. He blinked away bright spots before his eyes as a series of fiery blasts ripped through their lines.

‘Watch the right!’ he shouted, seeing three of his warriors torn apart in a blitzing stream of cannon-fire. The distinctive thumping noise told Phael Toron it was too heavy for an infantry gun. Crimson-armoured warriors dashed through the rubble towards the gap, bearing heavy weapons. He risked a glance over the fallen statue of a golden lion.

The district between the port and the Timoran Library was unrecognisable, its colonnaded processionals and arched follies now a tumbledown wasteland of blazing ruins and jumbled stone. The salty tang of sea air was laden with chemical pollutants from the blazing port, the enormous volume of gunfire and the pyres of burning books.

Space Wolves and golden warriors moved cautiously through the smouldering remains of what had once been a gallery of pre-Old Night sculpture, their forms unknown and of obviously alien manufacture. They were now crushed fragments beneath the invaders’ boots, and Phael Toron felt the aether simmering beneath his skin as Dtoaa amplified his choler. He took a deep breath, reining in his emotions. The Enumerations weren’t helping, and he could feel his Tutelary’s raging desire to hurt the attackers threatening to overwhelm his tactical sense.

‘That would make me little better than them,’ he hissed, forcing its red rage down.

Another spray of bullets tore a line through the golden lion, chewing up the soft metal as though it were as porous as sandstone. Phael Toron rolled away from the disintegrating lion and scrambled over to the cover of a fallen arch of stonework. He recognised it as part of the gallery’s domed roof, and looked over his shoulder to see a plume of grey smoke coiling from the building’s interior. Streaking contrails of speeders flashed overhead amid a series of stuttering, strobing detonations.

Portions of the gallery crashed down to the east, burying at least thirty of his warriors beneath tonnes of rubble and sending up a billowing cloud of dust. No sooner had the walls of the gallery fallen than an ululating howl erupted from the invaders.

‘Push them back!’ he shouted, swinging around the fallen portion of the dome and opening fire, pumping shot after shot into the mass of charging Space Wolves. His warriors followed suit, filling their designated fire sectors with lethally accurate bolter fire. Some of the enemy warriors went down, but not enough. Phael Toron estimated at least six hundred Space Wolves were pushing hard from the port.

They were feral barbarians, with none of the grace and poise an Astartes should possess. Their armour was hung with fetishes, skulls and furs, like some primitive tribe of savages that deserved no less a fate than extinction.

Many charged into battle without helms, either casting them aside in their bloodlust or too stupid to care about protecting their most vital organ. Phael Toron made them pay for that by picking his targets, blasting skulls from shoulders with every shot.

Gunfire streaked back and forth, fizzing lines of fire that filled the air with explosive shells. He ducked back behind the ruins of the dome, hearing the hard thud of bolt-rounds against its copper-sheathed surface.

A warrior in red scrambled into cover with him, and he nodded curtly at his Philosophus, Tulekh. The man was a fine adept and had mastered his powers more quickly than any of the Seventh Fellowship. Even Phael Toron had struggled to master the breadth and power of abilities brought back to Prospero by Magnus and the Legion. Where the other Fellowships employed their mystical abilities, the Seventh fought this battle with conventional means.

‘We can’t hold them like this,’ said Tulekh. ‘We need to use our powers!’

‘Not yet,’ said Phael Toron. ‘They are weapons of last resort.’

‘This is the last resort!’ urged Tulekh. ‘What else is there?’

Phael Toron knew the man was right, but still he hesitated. His men were nowhere near as experienced at wielding the Great Ocean’s powers as the other Fellowships, and he feared to unleash them in so violent a cauldron. But as Tulekh said… what else was there?

‘Very well,’ he said at last. ‘Pass the word that everyone is to use whatever means they need to push these bastards back into the sea.’

Tulekh nodded and Phael Toron read his ferocious anticipation as the order was given.

He looked around the fallen dome and drew in a breath as he saw a monstrous shape thumping through the rubble behind the Space Wolves, a grey giant of thick ceramite plates and whirring, clanking mechanics. The Dreadnought was dust-covered and fire-blackened, its hull dented with impacts and its back banner in flames.

One arm was a bloodied, electrically-sheathed fist, the other a whirring, rotating launcher that spun up to replenish its ammo from a giant missile hopper at its shoulder.

‘Move!’ shouted Phael Toron as a series of warheads spat from the launcher and streaked towards them.

The missiles slammed into the ruins of the dome, and a tremendous explosion hurled him through the air. The blast tore his bolter from his grip and he slammed down into a crater sloshing with blood. He rolled and reached for a weapon, but there was nothing within reach.

Shredded corpses of Thousand Sons were strewn around the crater, their bodies catastrophically mangled by gunfire and explosions. Once again, the nauseous cramps seized him, and he bent double as he felt Dtoaa’s power flow into him, unbidden and unstoppable.

All around Phael Toron, the rubble rose up into the air and the blood boiled at his feet. The power of the Great Ocean flowed through him, but deep in the cellular core of him, a dreadful flaw was already unmaking him.

The Thousand Sons were dying. Scores died in the opening minutes of the Wolf King’s attack, his fury unstoppable and his power immeasurable. Clad in the finest battle-plate and armed with a frostblade that clove warriors in two with single strokes, his fury was that of a pack hunter who knows his brothers are with him. His huscarls were grimly efficient butchers of men, their Terminator armour proof against all but the luckiest shots and blades.

Though Phosis T’kar could see no more of the hateful Sisters of Silence, he knew they were there, for his powers were weakening, bleeding from his hands like ink from a splintered quill. The Custodes slew with powerful strokes of their Guardian Spears, hewing armour and flesh with efficient strokes that hit with precisely the force required to do the job of killing.

Phosis T’kar felt his Tutelary’s impotent rage as its power was leeched away. He drew ever more deeply on his own reserves of power, feeding them with the very essence of his soul, turning his emotions outwards as he and his men fought for their very survival.

Enemy warriors surrounded them, warriors who moments before had been on the brink of defeat. The lance of the Thousand Sons had plunged into the body of the Wolves and cut deep towards the heart, but Russ had deflected the fatal stroke. Worse, it had been turned back against them. The Space Wolves clawed at them, the Custodes cut them down and the slavering wolves bit and snapped at the edges of the battle.

‘We have to pull back!’ shouted Hathor Maat over the thunderous din of gunfire and clashing blades. ‘We are over-extended.’

Phosis T’kar knew he was right, but could focus on nothing save the monstrously powerful form of Leman Russ as he slaughtered the Thousand Sons without a care for the priceless repositories of knowledge and experience that he was snuffing out with every blow.

‘Do it,’ he snarled. ‘Re-form the perimeter.’

Hathor Maat read the fury in his voice and asked, ‘What are you going to do?’

‘I can end this,’ he said. ‘Now do it!’

Hathor Maat needed no second telling, and the order was passed through the ranks of the Thousand Sons. In disciplined groups, the warriors of the Second, Third and Eighth Fellowships collapsed their lines and fell back. Sensing they had regained the initiative, the Space Wolves surged forwards as they scented victory.

‘You think we’d make it that easy for you?’ hissed Phosis T’kar. He whipped his heqa staff around and surged into the heaving mêlée with a roar of hatred to equal any lupine howl. A blast of blue fire hissed from his staff, spearing into the chest of the warrior before him and setting him alight. He gave an animal bray of pain, and fell back as Phosis T’kar and his coven pushed into the mass of enemy warriors.

A fiery bloom of light erupted beside him, and he saw that Auramagma and his warriors were with him. Phosis T’kar knew he should be angry with the captain of the Eighth for disobeying his order, but instead felt only hateful vindication. Jets of white-hot fire streamed from Auramagma’s hands, melting ceramite plates as though they were softened wax. Burning wolves howled their agony to the sky, and dying warriors had the air sucked from their lungs by the superheated blasts that consumed them.

Phosis T’kar’s bolt pistol boomed and blew off the head of a Custodes warrior who’d lost his helmet. His staff swept fiery arcs as it split armour like eggshells. He killed with brutal skill, feeling a blazing heat surge within his body. His eyes filled with light and his limbs burned with fire.

Ahead, he could see the Wolf King and his golden allies. His vision narrowed until all he could see was the path his staff would take as it shattered armour and burned his foes with fire. He killed warriors by the dozen, feeling the sensation in every cell of his flesh.

His arm swept up and down like a piston, smashing though armour and shattering bone with a strength he had never known. His body seethed with power, but his every iota of attention was fixed on his prey. The enemy fell back from him in horror, unable to match his power. He hurled warriors aside like straw, battering them into the ground with waves of thought until they were little more than smears of gore on the marble. The power flowing through him was incredible.

Phosis T’kar looked over as Auramagma faced the Wolf King with fire wreathing his limbs in searing light. His fellow captain loosed a flood of aether at the primarch. Phosis T’kar roared in triumph as the flames engulfed Leman Russ, and Auramagma’s fire met the chill armour of Leman Russ in an explosion of light like the birth of a star. Russ barely blinked, but the effect on Auramagma was as incredible as it as horrific.

The enormous power of Auramagma turned from the Wolf King’s armour as light is reflected from a mirror, and his screams were hideous to behold as the aether’s spite burned its creator. Auramagma howled in such agony that all who heard his screams were moved to pity as the aether devoured his very essence. A blazing pyre of agony, Auramagma fled through the crush of bodies, and the Space Wolves parted before him, none willing to go near so damned a soul.

At last Phosis T’kar hammered his way through to the golden warriors surrounding Russ and laughed as he saw their terror of him. Their leader turned to face him, and Phosis T’kar relished the look of disgusted hatred he saw. Dark hair spilled from beneath his red-plumed helm, and Phosis T’kar saw he had the eyes of a killer.

‘Valdor,’ hissed Phosis T’kar, the word slithering and wet.

Constantin Valdor held his long-bladed polearm extended before him. ‘What are you?’ he bellowed, and Phosis T’kar laughed at the foolishness of such a question.

‘I am your death!’ he boomed, but the words were mangled and distorted by the twisted shape of his mouth. Phosis T’kar loomed over the chief Custodes, and only now did he feel the changes wrought upon his body.

His flesh was a riot of form and function, its every organ and limb reshaped by a madness of transformation. Flesh and armour ran together in a hideous meld of organic and inorganic material, and the bubbling meat of his body seethed with unbridled ambition. How could he not have noticed so profound a change? The answer came to him as soon as the question formed in his mind.

His flesh was no longer his to call his own. Utipa’s presence filled him, its hateful relish and patient malice unlocking the rampant potential locked in his genetic make-up. A wild and untamed transformative power that had lain dormant and contained within him was now given a free rein, unleashing nearly two centuries of change in as many minutes.

In Valdor’s eyes, Phosis T’kar saw what he and the Legion had become, and knew then that this fate had always been theirs. Valdor came at him with his Guardian Spear aimed at his heart, and Phosis T’kar finally understood why his primarch had chosen not to fight.

‘Monster!’ cried Valdor, driving the spear into his mutant flesh.

‘I know,’ said Phosis T’kar sadly, dropping his weapons and closing his eyes.

The golden blade clove his heart, and death was a welcome release.

Phael Toron rose out of the crater in a blaze of lightning. Hissing blood streamed from his armour and whipping arcs of power blazed at his fingertips. His armour shone with inner luminescence as though it contained the fiery heart of a plasma reactor. With eyes saturated with aetheric energy, Phael Toron saw the hellish battlescape before him in all its visceral horror.

The host of Leman Russ and the Custodes had all but won the field of battle. Like a sword thrust at the unprotected vitals of a reeling foe, the Space Wolves had cut deep into Tizca. The perimeter of the Thousand Sons was holding, but that it would soon break was beyond question. No force in the galaxy could resist so furious an attack, so lethal a drive and a foe so utterly without mercy: no force but the Thousand Sons with the power of the Great Ocean at their command.

Phael Toron saw the ruin of his Fellowship, the broken bodies and the shattered skulls taken as trophies by howling Space Wolves. He took in the vista with a glance and his rage spilled out in a torrent of force. Those enemy warriors closest to him were hurled back, the armour peeled from their bodies and their flesh torn from their bones. The furred abominations that ran with Russ’s warriors exploded in bright smears, their inner light snuffed out in an instant with alien cries of rage.

Phael Toron floated over the battlefield, his arms extended from his side as he swatted enemy warriors from his path with his thoughts. He laughed at the ease with which he commanded such powers, delirious with the sensations flooding him. How he had feared these powers and dreaded the difficulty in commanding them, but this was no more difficult than breathing!

His warriors followed behind him, the fire that flowed from his hands pouring into them and filling them with light. The power was wild, but Phael Toron didn’t care, letting the chaotic energies flow from the Great Ocean with him as its willing conduit.

A blizzard of explosive shells streamed from the cannons of three Dreadnoughts, wolf-clad machines adorned like totemistic idols. Phael Toron unmade the first, disassembling it into its component parts with a gesture. He felt the anguish of the desolate scrap of flesh at its heart as it died, and took pleasure in its terror. In a fit of dark amusement, he turned the remaining two upon one another, letting their guns rip each other apart until nothing remained save torn fragments of smoking metal.

All around him, the warriors of the Seventh Fellowship burned with the same fire that poured into him. As he grew in power and confidence, so too did his warriors, their transformation an echo of his own.

A pair of Predator battle tanks opened fire on him. He lifted the vehicles from the ground and hurled them out to sea, laughing at the horrified faces of the Space Wolves. They fell back, gathering in frightened packs as they cowered in ruins of their own making.

Phael Toron’s body shook with the force of the power passing through him, and he fought to control it, remembering the catechisms and higher Enumerations that Magnus and Ahriman had taught him. Power was only useful when it was controlled, they had told him, and Phael Toron understood the truth of that as he felt his grip on its leash slipping. Dtoaa, once his Tutelary, now his devourer, swooped down and filled him with more power than even the greatest master of the aether could contain.

‘No!’ he cried, feeling the savage glee of Dtoaa as their roles were suddenly reversed.

Agonising pain tore through him, and Phael Toron screamed as his limbs ruptured with the force of the energies pouring into him. His body could not contain such titanic forces and no mental discipline could prevent what has happening to his flesh from taking place.

Phael Toron threw back his head and gave one last scream of horrified understanding before his body exploded with the violence of a newborn star.

A kilometre to the east, Khalophis marched Canis Vertex towards the smoking, fire-blackened ruin of the Corvidae pyramid. Thick columns of smoke poured from the giant building as its priceless and irreplaceable tomes burned.

Tiny figures in gold and grey fled from his titanic strides. Missiles and hard rounds melted on his fire shield. He was invulnerable and invincible. How could he go back to making war like everyone else after such an experience? To control maniples of robots through the psychically-resonant crystals was sublime, but to command a god of the battlefield was the greatest joy of all.

What his weapons did not burn, his enormous, splay-clawed feet crushed, and he left a trail of devastation more thorough than any the Space Wolves might have made. Khalophis did not care. Buildings could be rebuilt, cities renewed, but the chance to bestride the world as a colossus of metal might never come again.

From his throne in the Pyrae pyramid, he felt the aetheric fire burning his skin, but knew he had to maintain his control over the Titan. Lives and the future of Prospero depended upon it. Utipa’s fire ran like molten gold through the limbs of Canis Vertex, though he felt its desperate urge to command, to wreak harm like he could only dream. Khalophis jealously held onto his control, even as he felt Utipa’s power increase with every life taken and structure obliterated.

He forced himself to concentrate on the battle, sweeping his gaze over the city to see where his immense firepower and strength would be best employed.

The port was the key. Heavy transports bearing yet more soldiers from orbit swooped low over the sea to debark warriors by the hundred with every passing minute. Further out, Tizca’s northern perimeter was still holding. Ahriman and the Corvidae stood shoulder to shoulder with the Athanaeans and Spireguard, fighting with rare courage to hold the seaborne invaders at bay.

Ahriman could do without his help for the time being.

To destroy the port would deny the invaders the beachhead they needed to complete the destruction of the Thousand Sons. Khalophis steered his mighty charge towards the port, fists spitting flame and death with every stride.

Khalophis did not perceive the environment around Canis Vertex as its long-dead Princeps once had. He felt the ebb and flow of battle more keenly than any Moderati. Aetheric energy washed from the battle at the Raptora pyramid and he smiled to know such power.

No sooner had he attuned his senses to the battles raging below him than he felt the sudden surge of energy on the far side of the Corvidae Pyramid. He felt Phael Toron’s presence, but his eyes snapped open as he felt the incredible power building in the captain of the Seventh.

Too late, he halted Canis Vertex’s forward momentum.

‘Throne, no,’ he hissed as a howling column of searing white fire, fully a thousand metres in diameter, erupted skyward in a blaze of hellish light. The clouds vanished in an instant as a second sun shone throughout Tizca.

Canis Vertex reeled from the blast, and Khalophis felt the enormous, surging swell of aetheric energy pour through the gaping rent torn in the fabric of the world. It blew out his flame shield in an instant, stripping the Titan back to its bare metal and beyond. The crystals bonded with its complex locomotive mechanisms shattered, and Utipa screamed in triumph as it wrested control from him.

Its triumph was short lived as the Titan’s molten skeleton buckled in the intolerable heat.

Its limbs folded beneath its enormous bulk, and the battle engine crashed down on the Corvidae pyramid, completing the destruction Ohthere Wyrdmake had begun.

Khalophis fought to sever his connection to the doomed war engine, but Utipa would not release its grip, and aetheric feedback lashed back upon him. He drew on all his power as Magister Templi of the Pyrae to hold back the fire, but no power in the galaxy could withstand so monstrous a force.

Khalophis had a moment to savour the irony of his death before the fire consumed him utterly, and the entire pyramid of the Pyrae exploded in a searing fireball of glass and steel.

Thirty

The last retreat
The truth is my weapon
Wolf-sign

Ahriman shook his head, wondering why he was lying flat on his back amid a growing cloud of dust and rubble. He didn’t remember falling or being struck, but rolled onto his side as a surging pain and cramp seized his limbs. He grunted in pain, knowing all too well what that pain signified.

He rolled to his feet and looked to the west in time to see a seething column of bitter fire piercing the heavens. A surge tide flowed from the Great Ocean into the world, and the cramping pain in his muscles told him how powerful he could be if he would only unleash those powers. Shimmering light built behind his eyes and raw aether dripped from his fingertips, liquefying the ground where it touched into a soup of impossible form.

Every single warrior, friend and foe, had been struck down by that terrible explosion, the shock waves spreading through the city like an earthquake. What buildings were left standing after the punishing barrages were brought down and cast to ruin by its force.

The light diminished as whatever vessel had torn the veil between worlds open was destroyed. Ahriman saw a blazing humanoid form lurching drunkenly on the horizon, like a burning wicker man set alight by highland savages to please their heathen gods of the harvest.

A flickering image appeared in his mind, a taunting vision of a future he could not change, and he closed his eyes as the towering battle engine that had fallen on Coriovallum died for a second time. Ahriman had seen where it would fall, but had no desire to watch the destruction of the Corvidae pyramid.

He heard the earth-shattering sound of screaming steel and breaking glass, the sound of all that might yet be known reduced to ashes and lost hope. The monstrous battle engine crashed to earth, sending another powerful tremor through the city as the Pyrae temple exploded in a simultaneous fireball.

Ahriman stared in open-mouthed horror at this trifecta of destruction. This was the death knell for his Legion. The perimeter was no more. The entire north-west sector was gone, and the enemy would pour through in unstoppable numbers as soon as they realised the boon they had just been handed.

The lull created by the destruction balanced on a knife edge, and the Thousand Sons were the first to recover their wits. As the Space Wolves picked themselves up, the Scarab Occult struck with a dreadful torrent of lethal powers. Blazing cones of lightning seared the enemy, gleeful arcs of crackling power leaping from warrior to warrior. Hissing fire swept through the streets, devouring all it touched, melting stone and ceramite and flesh in the inferno of its incredible heat.

At first, Ahriman dared to hope that the surging aetheric energy might yet be their salvation, but his hopes were dashed seconds later. A warrior ten metres to his left screamed in abject horror as his body erupted in a mass of hideous growths. His armour buckled and cracked as his mutant flesh spilled out with horrid fecundity. Another warrior followed, seconds later, his body borne aloft on a seething geyser of blue flame that consumed him in the time it took to draw breath.

Yet more hideous changes were being wrought upon the Thousand Sons, vile appendages erupting from splitting armour plates, squamous limbs and rugose growths pushing like jelly from gorgets and through bullet wounds with grotesquely wet sounds.

Warriors screamed and fell to their knees as decades of suppressed flesh change ripped its way to the surface. Dozens were falling prey to its malign influence with every second, and the cries of horror were not confined to the Space Wolves. The Spireguard fell back from their erstwhile allies, as the degenerate things the Thousand Sons were becoming turned on them with mindless hunger to feed their rampant growth.

‘Everyone back!’ shouted Ahriman, knowing that this position was lost.

Those Thousand Sons who resisted the flesh change took up the cry, and even a cursory glance told Ahriman they were the oldest and most experienced warriors of the Legion. He was glad to see that Sobek was amongst them. With the remnants of the Spireguard, he and his Practicus led the survivors back through the ruined edges of Old Tizca, moving swiftly along shell-cratered streets and avenues filled with fire and rubble.

Ahriman checked his weapon loadout, seeing he had a mere five magazines remaining to him. His heqa staff was still a potent weapon, its length crackling with invisible lines of force. He willed it to powerlessness, for he dared not wield it with so much wild energy filling the air. He would have need of his staff before the end of the fight, but he forced all thought of its use from his mind until he needed it most.

No sooner had he quelled his powers than he sensed a ghostly presence probing the aether around him, a questing tendril that spoke of another mind seeking his. Ahriman felt the primitive cunning of a hunter, the patience and animal circling that spoke of long years spent on the frozen tundra with nothing to warm the flesh but fur torn from the still warm corpse of native prey-beasts.

It took no great skill to recognise the presence, for he had swum the Great Ocean with this seeker. Ohthere Wyrdmake was hunting him, and Ahriman allowed his aetheric presence to bleed into the air, psychic spoor to draw the Rune Priest to him.

‘Come find me, Wyrdmake,’ he whispered. ‘I welcome it.’

Ahriman led his tattered remnants through the ruins of his beloved city, picking up scattered warbands of shell-shocked Thousand Sons warriors from the west and east as they converged on Occullum Square. He counted several hundred close by, and only hoped there were others deeper in the city, for they would need more if they were to hold the Space Wolves and Custodes at bay.

Occullum Square was just ahead, and as Ahriman saw the toppled, bullet-ridden statues of a number of lions, he suddenly recognised where his line of retreat had led: the Street of a Thousand Lions. He almost laughed as he saw that the leftmost lion in the street had escaped destruction, its golden hide as polished and pristine as if it had only recently left the sculptor’s workshop. He paused in his flight from Old Tizca and reached up to touch the rearing beast.

‘Maybe you really are lucky,’ he said, feeling foolish but not caring. ‘I could use some of it if you have any to spare.’

‘Superstition doesn’t suit you,’ said a voice behind him, and Ahriman smiled with genuine relief as he saw the limping form of Hathor Maat in the midst of the retreating warriors. Ahriman ran over to meet him, and they embraced like devoted brothers.

‘What happened?’ asked Ahriman, turning from the rearing lion.

‘The Wolf King,’ replied Hathor Maat, and Ahriman needed no further clarification.

‘Phosis T’kar?’ he asked as they set off south once more.

Hathor Maat looked away, and Ahriman saw the dreadful waxiness to his skin, an unhealthy pallor that was as alien and abhorrent to a biomancer as any gross mutation. To see the normally absurdly handsome Hathor Maat so broken was almost as unsettling as anything Ahriman had seen in the course of this nightmarish battle.

‘The flesh change took him,’ said Hathor Maat, the terror of what he had seen haunting his eyes. ‘Valdor of the Custodes killed him, but I think Phosis T’kar let him. Better death than to live as a monster. Auramagma is gone too.’

Ahriman had no special regard for Auramagma beyond his status as a fellow captain, but he grieved the loss of Phosis T’kar. If he lived through this horror, he would grieve his friend in the proper manner, and once again he realised that only death allowed him to recognise a fellow warrior as a true friend.

He forced his grief for Phosis T’kar down, keeping to the lower Enumerations to close himself off from the loss. He wondered how the loss had affected Hathor Maat. Coagulated blood coated the left side of Maat’s skull, but that was the least of his concerns. His skin shimmered with an internal light that rippled with the urge to change, and Ahriman hoped the vain warrior would resist the temptation to use his powers to stop it.

‘Where are we going?’ gasped Hathor Maat as they ran.

‘The second line of defence,’ said Ahriman.

‘What second line of defence?’

‘An east to west line between the pyramids of the Athanaeans and the Pavoni, with the Great Library at its centre and the Pyramid of Photep at its back.’

‘That’s a long line,’ pointed out Hathor Maat.

‘I know, but it is shorter than the last one. If we can hold it long enough to allow the bulk of Tizca’s citizens to reach whatever safety the Pyramid of Photep can provide, then we’ll have achieved something worthwhile.’

‘It’s not much.’

‘It is all we can do,’ said Ahriman, running south while casting hurried glances over his shoulder as he heard the first signs of pursuit. The horrific spawn many of his warriors had become would delay the Space Wolves, but Russ’s butchers would carve their way through them soon enough. Ahriman swallowed his anger, knowing it would do no good, for it had too many targets. He had anger enough to last a thousand lifetimes.

Anger at the unthinking violence Russ and the Custodes had unleashed against them.

Anger at the death of so many brave warriors who deserved better.

Anger at how easily he had allowed himself to turn away from asking questions that needed to be asked.

But most of all, anger at Magnus for leaving them to face their doom alone.

Ahriman led his warriors across Occullum Square, past the great urn-topped column at its centre, which, like the lion, had miraculously avoided destruction in the shelling. The square was a mass of people fleeing the wrath of the Space Wolves and Custodes, for the blades and bullets of the enemy were uncaring which of the city’s inhabitants they cut down. Panicked people poured into the square from all its radiant streets, heading towards its southernmost exit, a wide avenue incongruously named the Palace of Wisdom.

A shattered arch lay in ruins around its entrance, and toppled columns lay strewn next to shattered statues of long-dead scholars of the Athanaeum. The gold-skinned form of Prospero’s Great Library was barely visible through the smoke pouring from its shattered sides, and beyond it, the gleaming crystal form of Magnus’s great pyramid reared over all.

More survivors of the aetheric burst and the Titan’s fall poured into Occullum Square, and Ahriman estimated at least three thousand warriors of his Legion. Compared to the strength that had been fighting at the start of the battle it was pitifully few, but it was more than he had expected. How many, he wondered, had fallen to the enemy, and how many to the flesh change running rampant through their ranks?

He pushed the question aside. It was irrelevant, and he had more important matters to deal with. He ran towards the Palace of Wisdom, leaping a marble representation of the mad Scholar Alhazred with Sobek and Hathor Maat to either side of him. The Palace of Wisdom was paved with black marble slabs, each one engraved with an uplifting, cautionary or instructional quote from some of the Great Library’s most prominent contributors. Dust, rubble and panicked citizens of Tizca obscured many of the slabs, but sensing a cosmic order to those that remained, Ahriman kept his eyes fixed on the ground as he ran.

The first slab bore the words: without wisdom, power will destroy the one who wields it.

Knowing there was no such thing as coincidence, Ahriman focussed his attention on each slab as he ran across it.

Seekers desire power but not wisdom. Power without wisdom is dangerous. Better to have wisdom first.

Those who have knowledge do not predict. Those who predict do not have knowledge.

If you abuse power, you will be burned and then you will learn. If you live.

And lastly, Ahriman smiled with grim amusement as he saw a slab that read, Only the fool wishes to go into battle to beat someone for the satisfaction of beating someone.

The significance of these words was not lost on him and he wondered why he had been chosen to see them. There was little he could do to affect the destiny of the Thousand Sons.

Only one being on Prospero could do that.

The Thousand Sons formed up on the edges of the once-verdant park of the Great Library. Hathor Maat and Sobek formed the Scarab Occult and ragged warbands in a line of armoured bodies across the park, their guns pointed to the north. A mist of burnt sap and greenery clogged the air, and the smoke from the ashen forest hung low to the ground, like a noxious fog swirling around their ankles. The Great Library was in ruins behind them, its structure now barely recognisable as a pyramid. Its glassy sides were bathed in golden light from the fires raging throughout its many galleries. Its tip had caved in, and smoke poured from its collapsed summit like billowing spurts of lava from a steep-sided volcano.

Ahriman started as a memory overlaid his vision of the Great Library.

‘What?’ asked Hathor Maat, seeing his look of consternation.

‘It wasn’t Nikaea at all,’ said Ahriman. ‘I did not see the volcano at all. It was this… I saw this.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘On Aghoru,’ said Ahriman with mounting horror, ‘I foresaw this, but I did not recognise it. I could have warned Magnus. I could have stopped this.’

Hathor Maat dragged him around.

‘If you saw this, it was going to happen no matter what. There’s nothing you could have done,’ he said

‘No,’ said Ahriman, shaking his head. ‘It doesn’t work that way. The currents of the future are all echoes of possible futures. I could have–’

‘Could have is irrelevant,’ snapped Hathor Maat. ‘You didn’t see this. Neither did Amon, Ankhu Anen or Magnus or anyone else in the Corvidae. So stop worrying about what you didn’t see, and pay more attention to what’s right in front of you!’

The sheer incongruity of Hathor Maat giving him advice broke the spell of immobility that held him. Ahriman nodded and turned from the Great Library, concentrating his attention on their defensive line. It was easier to defend than the last one, but still too long for the number of warriors they had left.

The parkland was filled with ruined pavilions, low walls and decorative follies. On any normal day, its paths and arbours would be filled with citizens and scholars reading words of wisdom beneath the balmy sun. Ahriman had spent many a day beneath its green and pleasant boughs, ensconced in many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore. Now he looked on its walls, fallen trees, broken plinths and shaded hollows as defensive positions.

‘We’ll hold one attack, maybe two,’ he said, reading the contours and angles of the devastated park. ‘Then we must fall back to the Pyramid of Photep.’

‘I think that might be optimistic,’ said Hathor Maat, as Leman Russ led six thousand Astartes and Custodes towards their position like the closing jaws of a hungry wolf. It was a sight calculated to break the defenders’ will, but Ahriman recalled a quote from a leader of Old Earth and lifted his voice so every Thousand Sons warrior could hear him.

‘The patriot volunteer, fighting for his country and his rights, makes the most reliable soldier on Earth,’ he cried, pulling his bolter in tight to his shoulder. He aimed along the top of the gun and smiled without humour as he saw Ohthere Wyrdmake slotted neatly between the open sights of his bolter. The Rune Priest was way out of range to take the shot, but Ahriman had no intention of ending their enmity with something so banal as a bolter shell.

He handed his weapon to Sobek and turned to Hathor Maat.

‘Remember on Aghoru when I told you we allowed our powers to define us, and that we needed to learn to fight as Astartes again?’

‘Of course,’ said Hathor Maat, confused as to Ahriman’s meaning. ‘What of it?’

‘This is that moment,’ said Ahriman, removing his helmet and dropping it to the blackened grass. ‘Fight these dogs and show them that of all the mistakes they have ever made, underestimating us will be their most heinous. Fight them hard, but no one must use their powers or it will be their undoing.’

‘What are you talking about? What are you going to do?’

Ahriman sat cross-legged on the blackened grass and gripped his heqa staff, its gold plated length and blue copper bands crackling with awakened power.

‘Ignoring my own orders,’ he said, and closed his eyes.

Ahriman lifted his body of light from his corporeal form with a breath. The raging currents of the Great Ocean lapped close to the surface of the world, making the transition as easy as it had ever been. The force of the tides battering his subtle flesh was enormous, driven to fury by the heightened emotions at work within the cauldron of combat in the material universe.

The flesh change sought to claim him, but he forced it down, knowing this was probably the last time he would fly the Great Ocean. He rose higher, seeing the blazing, serpentine curve of Tizca’s outline and the red haze that lay over its once-proud architecture.

‘Such hatred,’ he whispered. ‘Did we ever deserve so much?’

He flew from the park of the Great Library, fighting to hold his course in the face of battering currents and dangerous breakers. He felt the raw wound where the aether had broken through in the north-west, hearing the echo of a soul in torment as it was torn apart by the rapacious void predators who gathered around the pulsing wound in the hope that it would open once more.

The line of enemy warriors shone with brilliant vividness: golden and red, vibrant and so sure of their purpose. They could not see how they might be wrong. Ahriman saw a mysterious cloud of deception lying over them and pitied them their ignorance.

‘If you knew how you had been betrayed, you would join forces with us and end this.’

Darkened shrouds hung over the advancing warriors and tanks, areas of dead space where Sisters of Silence guarded the host’s captains. Ahriman avoided them, knowing he would be hurled back to his body should he venture within such a hateful darkness. His foeman would never set foot within such darkness, for he was as hypocritical as the rest of them.

Ahriman smiled as he saw Ohthere Wyrdmake, so proud, so arrogant and so filled with anger that it was a wonder he could function as a human being. As much as he told himself he did this for his Legion’s survival, Ahriman was forced to admit he was going to enjoy this mission of revelation.

He reached down with ghostly hands and wrenched Wyrdmake’s body of light from his flesh, tearing up with such violent suddenness that the Rune Priest’s armoured limbs went as rigid as a fresh-carved statue. His comrades and acolytes rushed to his aid, but Wyrdmake was beyond their help now.

Ahriman released his nemesis as his shimmering form took shape, coalescing into a bright replica of the man below. His aura blazed with shock and anger, but that quickly turned to sly hatred as he saw who floated before him.

‘Warlock,’ spat Wyrdmake.

‘Is that all you have for me, old friend?’ asked Ahriman, folding his arms. ‘Insults?’

‘I have sought you this day,’ said Wyrdmake.

‘I know, I felt your clumsy pursuit. A Neophyte of Prospero could have sensed you. How did you acquire my psychic trace?’

‘Your brother in the library gave you up,’ said Wyrdmake triumphantly.

Ahriman laughed.

‘Is that what you think happened?’ he asked. ‘If Ankhu Anen did so, it was because he wanted you to find me. He knew I would kill you if you did.’

‘I think not,’ said Wyrdmake, a golden staff appearing in his hands.

Ahriman shook his head and the staff exploded into shards of fading light.

‘In this place, in this realm, do you really think we will fight like that?’

Wyrdmake hurled himself towards Ahriman, his hands outstretched like claws and his face transforming into that of a snarling wolf with its jaws poised to tear out his throat. Ahriman surged to meet him and they came together in a blazing explosion of power.

Wyrdmake clawed at him, but Ahriman moved like quicksilver, evading every strike and rising higher and higher into the Great Ocean. Spinning like intertwined spirals of genetic code, they streaked through the aether, Wyrdmake attacking in a frenzy of claws and snapping bites, Ahriman deflecting every strike with graceful precision.

‘You are the same as me,’ he said, evading yet another raging attack.

Wyrdmake broke away from Ahriman’s blazing form and shook his head, the wolf-form retreating within his shimmering flesh.

‘I am nothing like you,’ he snarled. ‘My power comes from the natural cycle of birth and death of Fenris. I am a Son of the Storm. I am nothing like you.’

‘And yet you are not on Fenris,’ said Ahriman. ‘We call it by different names, but the power you use to call the storm and split the earth is the same power I use to scry the future and shape the destiny of my Legion.’

‘Is this all you have for me?’ snapped Wyrdmake. ‘Lies? I can believe nothing you say.’

‘Lies?’ said Ahriman. ‘Look at what you are doing to my world. I have no need of lies. The truth is my weapon.’

No sooner had the words left him than he shot forwards, his essence enveloping Wyrdmake’s. He stabbed a spear of brightness into the Rune Priest, but this was no assault on Wyrdmake’s body of light. It was a spear of truth.

‘You cannot understand the truth without understanding the omnipresent character of the untruth you are bound to. Enlightenment is fruitless until you free yourself from the lie. The power of truth will merge with you when you become free from all forms of deception. This is my gift to you, Ohthere Wyrdmake!’

Ahriman poured everything into the Rune Priest: the corruption of Horus and the betrayal of everything the Emperor had sought to create, the monstrous scale of the imminent war and the horror that lay at the end of it. Win or lose, a time of ultimate darkness was coming, and as Ahriman opened Wyrdmake to all that he had seen, he too learned all that had driven the Space Wolves and the Custodes to make such furious war upon the Thousand Sons.

He saw the honeyed words of Horus and the sinister urgings of Constantin Valdor, each spoken with very different purposes, but designed to sway Leman Russ towards a destination of total destruction.

The scale of this betrayal shocked him to the root of all that he was. Ahriman had come to terms with Horus Lupercal’s betrayal, for it had its origins in the snares and delusions woven by beings to whom the passage of vigintillions of aeons were but the blink of an eye. This? This was all too human treachery. These were lies, told for noble reasons, but which had brought about the unintended consequences of Prospero’s destruction.

Anger overtook Ahriman, and he hurled himself at Wyrdmake once more, tearing into his subtle body with unthinking anger. Wyrdmake fought back, but his struggles were feeble, his mind aflame with the horrors Ahriman had shown him.

They fell through the Great Ocean, the weight of their emotions dragging them back to their bodies. Shoals of void predators came with them, terrible abominations of nightmares undreamed, abortions of monstrous appetite and fiends of insatiable hunger. Ahriman felt their presence, and shaped them further with the most hideous imaginings he could conjure, phage beasts of fang and claw, nameless forms and vampiric bloodlust.

At last they returned to the hate-bathed city of Tizca, its ghostly image like looking through a thick fog or a grimy window. Ahriman saw the fighting raging through the blasted park, the clash of Space Wolves and Thousand Sons as both forces tore at one another for all the wrong reasons. Sobek, Hathor Maat and the Scarab Occult stood sentinel over his body as the fighting pushed the Thousand Sons’ line inexorably back.

Leman Russ was a blazing column of light as he killed warriors by the score, and Ahriman knew that nothing could stop this feral god from tearing the Thousand Sons apart. His two wolves, representations of light and dark, smashed warriors from their feet and ripped them to pieces, their savagery the equal of their master. Ahriman dragged his gaze from the Wolf King and his bestial companions, and held the slumped Wyrdmake before him.

The Rune Priest was a broken shadow of his former haughty self. His subtle body haemorrhaged life energy and his aura flickered with the damage Ahriman’s truth had wrought upon his mind.

All his certainty was undone and his soul was bare, raw and undefended.

‘This is for Ankhu Anen,’ said Ahriman, and he threw Wyrdmake to the void predators. They closed on his helpless form with hungry savagery, snapping and tearing with warp-sharpened claws and vorpal fangs. It was over in seconds, the glowing morsels of the Rune Priest’s soul devoured and lost forever.

Ahriman watched with no small amount of satisfaction as Ohthere Wyrdmake’s armoured form collapsed, the body of flesh unable to survive the death of the soul. Part of him recoiled from so dark a deed, but the heart of him rejoiced to see his enemy so wholly destroyed.

Ahriman opened his eyes and took a deep breath, feeling the many repercussions that coloured his flesh like angry bruises. The sounds of battle were deafening, and the howling of wolves echoed throughout what was left of Tizca. In an instant, he saw that the battle for Tizca was as good as over. Prospero was lost.

His grip on his heqa staff was rigid, and he saw its gold and blue banding fade until its entire length was utterly black. The symbolism was unmistakable.

‘So be it,’ he said.

Ahriman fought back to back with Hathor Maat, holding their line together in the face of the savagery of the Space Wolves and the Emperor’s praetorians. Chainblades rose and fell, their jagged, icy teeth red with Astartes blood, and bolters fired hard rounds that impacted and penetrated their targets without time to arm.

Their line had not held against the unbridled savagery of Leman Russ, and this final stand was being made in the shadow of the Pyramid of Photep. Shards of crystalline glass floated on the oil-scummed waters surrounding Magnus the Red’s lair. The surviving populace of Tizca, who had escaped the initial wrath of the invaders, sheltered within, the last of a great lineage of scholars who had not only endured Old Night, but thrived in its wake.

Armoured vehicles crushed statues and fallen tree trunks, their guns trained on the vast pyramid behind the battle. The struggling warriors were too enmeshed for any of the gunners to draw a clear shot, and so they contented themselves with demolishing the sanctum of their enemies’ primarch. The Pyramid of Photep shimmered in the fading light, its gleaming surface and silver towers bathed in the hellish light of its own destruction. Explosions bloomed upon the mighty crux ansata engraved on its front, and glass rained from its ruptured flanks.

Ahriman knew the end was upon them, for fewer than fifteen hundred of the Legion remained alive. Such a force could conquer planets and quell entire rebellions with ease, but against more than three times their number and facing no less a warrior than a primarch, this was a battle that could only end one way.

To fight was to doom both Legions in the coming war, but Ahriman could no more let these barbarians despoil his world without a struggle than he could undo the past. The Wolf King had built pyres of irreplaceable knowledge and smashed priceless artefacts unique in all the galaxy with the careless stoke of his frostblade.

Such ignorance and thoughtless destruction could not go unanswered.

‘I said you were being optimistic,’ said Hathor Maat, punching his heqa staff through the neck of a helmetless Space Wolf. Blood squirted from the ruptured jugular, and Hathor Maat completed the kill with a bolt-round through the warrior’s skull.

‘I stand corrected,’ said Ahriman, his thoughts drifting now that he had accepted the notion of his death. In what he knew would be his last moments, he wondered what had happened to Lemuel and his fellow remembrancers. Ahriman had not seen them since Kallista Eris’s death, and he hoped they had somehow survived this horror, though he knew they were probably dead. The thought saddened him, but if this battle had taught him anything, it was that regret was pointless. Only the future mattered and only through the acquisition of knowledge could it be preserved. He lamented that he would never get the chance to replace all that had been lost on Prospero.

A screaming wolf leapt at him and Ahriman put a bolt through its skull. It landed in front of him and he recoiled in horror as he saw this was no wolf, but a monstrous beast clad in fragments of armour, as though a warrior’s body had transformed into some hell-beast.

‘What in the name of the Great Ocean!’ cried Hathor Maat, as yet more of the hideous melds of man and wolf came at them.

Something Ohthere Wyrdmake had once said to Ahriman returned to him, and he watched as yet more of the howling man-wolf creatures leapt to the attack.

‘Wulfen!’ he shouted, unleashing torrents of bolter shells into the mass of charging beasts.

‘And they say we are the monsters!’ shouted Hathor Maat.

The Wulfen were once Astartes, but Astartes afflicted by a terrible curse. Their faces were bestial, but with the last glimmerings of intelligence in the yellowed depths of their sunken eyes. Matted fur covered their faces and hands, yet their jaws were not distended like a wolf’s. Razor-sharp fangs and talons were their weapons, for the knowledge of technology was lost to these savage killers.

Only the most accurate shots would put them down, and they shrugged off wounds that would have killed even an Astartes. Their claws could tear through battle-plate with ease, and their teeth were as vicious as any energised blade. The single-minded savagery was unlike anything the Thousand Sons had fought before, and they fell back from these newly unleashed terrors, horrified that the Space Wolves would dare employ such degenerate abominations.

The Wulfen punched a bloody hole in the Thousand Sons’ line, tearing it wider with every second, and dozens of warriors fell beneath the tearing blades of their claws. Howls of triumph filled the air as the gap the Wulfen had opened was filled with Custodes and Space Wolf warriors. Bands of Thousand Sons were surrounded and hacked down by frost-bladed axes and glittering Guardian Spears.

Ahriman backed along the great basalt causeway over the water towards the Pyramid of Photep, their last refuge on Tizca. The best and bravest of the Legion, all that survived to sell their lives in sight of their primarch, went with him towards the bronze gates that led inside.

The howling of the Wulfen built to a deafening crescendo.

And high above, those howls were finally answered.

Thirty-One

Prospero’s lament

Purple lightning split the sky and the heavens darkened with the sudden fall of night. A deluge of black rain fell, soaking everything in an instant and saturating the air with the bitter taste of sodden ashes. Ahriman looked up in shock to see a flaming giant descending from the highest reaches of the Pyramid of Photep. The crux ansata rippled with pellucid green fire, and kaleidoscopic bolts of lightning slammed into the ground, immolating dozens of the cursed Wulfen with every blazing strike.

Cracks split the ground and the waters surrounding the pyramid seethed and boiled with anger. Black waves crashed upon the shores, and the glass shards falling from the pyramid were caught in a surging, sentient whirlwind that hurled them like spears to impale enemy warriors and skewer them to the ground.

Ahriman felt an enormous build up of energy, and summoned all his strength to control his body, knowing the mutations within his flesh would seek to throw off the shackles of his form and unleash new and terrifying ones within him. Yet the painful surge of mutant growth never came, and he looked up at the radiant being of fire and light that drew ever closer.

Magnus the Red was a glorious sight, his golden armour and wild red hair ablaze with aetheric energy. His bladed staff threw off blinding arcs of lightning that destroyed armoured vehicles in thunderous explosions. Magnus swept his eye across the horrified Space Wolves, and all who met his gaze died in an instant as they were driven to madness by the stygian depths of infinite chaos they saw there.

Above Tizca, madness raged as the power of the Great Ocean pressed in and the sky became a transparent window into the realm beyond. Gibbous eyes the size of mountains, and amorphous monsters the likes of which only madmen could dream, leered down on the doomed world below. Hundreds died instantly at the sight of such blasphemous horrors.

No sane man could witness such vileness without recoiling, and the invading army paused in its slaughter, shocked by the sight of such dreadful things glaring hungrily at the world below. Even the Wulfen cowered before the sight of these abominable creatures, suddenly feeling the overwhelming insignificance of their existence.

Only Leman Russ and his wolf companions stood unfazed by this vision of Magnus, and Ahriman saw a gleam of anticipation in the Wolf King’s eyes, as though he relished the idea of the coming conflict.

Magnus set foot on the causeway, and the normal tempo of time’s passage slowed, each raindrop falling as though in slow motion, the zigzagging traceries of lightning moving with infinite slowness. The volcanic stone of the causeway rippled with transformative energies beneath Magnus’s feet, and Ahriman dropped to his knees before his primarch, centuries of ingrained obedience making the motion unconscious.

The primarch of the Thousand Sons was a divine, rapturous figure of light amid the darkness. The gold of his armour had never been brighter, the red of his vast mane never more vivid. His flesh burned with the touch of immense power, greater than anything it had ever contained before. His eye locked onto Ahriman, and the depths of despair he saw in that haunted, glowing orb froze the blood in his veins. In that moment, Ahriman felt the horror Magnus had felt as his sons mutated into monsters and the anguish, centuries later, as he watched them butchered to serve a brother’s lunatic ambition.

He understood the noble ideal that had stayed the primarch’s hand throughout the battle, recognising it for what it was, not for what he had thought it to be. He felt his father’s forgiveness for doubting him, and heard his voice in his head.

‘This doom was always meant for me, not you,’ said Magnus, and Ahriman knew that every warrior of the Thousand Sons was hearing the same thing. ‘You are my sons, and I have failed you.’

Ahriman wanted to weep at his primarch’s words, feeling the sorrow of a being who had beheld all of creation, but had fallen short in his reach to grasp it. When Magnus spoke again, he alone heard the primarch’s voice.

‘Ahzek, lead my sons within the pyramid.’

‘No!’ he cried, tears of grief mingling with the rain falling in endless torrents.

‘You must,’ insisted Magnus, lifting his red arm and pointing towards the bronze gates of the pyramid, which now swung open. White light shone enticingly from within. ‘Amon awaits you, and he bears a priceless gift you must bear away from this place. You must do this, or all we have done here will have meant nothing.’

‘What of you, my lord?’ asked Ahriman. ‘What will you do?’

‘What I must,’ said Magnus, looking over at the raging form of Leman Russ as he charged with a glacial lack of speed onto the causeway. The primarch reached down and touched the jade scarab in the centre of Ahriman’s breastplate. The crystal shone with a pale light, and Ahriman felt the immense power resting within it.

‘This was cut from the Reflecting Caves,’ said Magnus. ‘Every warrior of my Legion bears one set in his armour. When the moment comes, and you will know it when it does, concentrate all your energies on the this crystal and those of your battle-brothers.’

‘I don’t understand,’ pleaded Ahriman. ‘What must I do?’

‘What you have been destined to do since before you were born,’ said Magnus. ‘Now go!’

‘I will stand with you,’ vowed Ahriman.

‘No,’ said Magnus with an endless abyss of regret. ‘You will not. Our fates are unravelling even now, and what happens here has to happen. Do this last thing for me, Ahzek.’

Though it broke his heart, Ahriman nodded, and the world swelled around him as the flow of time restored its integrity from the distortion Magnus’s arrival had caused. The bellows of burning pyres and immaterial thunder rolled across the face of the world once more, and the deafening fire of weapons roared even louder than before.

The howl of the Wolf King blotted them all out.

Ahriman and the Thousand Sons turned and ran towards the Pyramid of Photep.

Masses of people filled the pyramid, terrified civilians and exhausted Spireguard. The Thousand Sons poured inside, their armour black and dripping from the nightmarish deluge drowning the world beyond. At a conservative estimate, Ahriman guessed that just over a thousand warriors had escaped the attack of the Wulfen.

‘A tenth of the Legion,’ he said.

The horrifying scale of the loss staggered him.

Hathor Maat and Sobek came alongside him as he struggled to come to terms with what had become of their beloved Legion. Still numb from the sight of so few survivors, Ahriman sought out Amon, who stood in the centre of the vast chamber.

Amon was clad in his armour, but the plates were clean and unblemished. His weapons were sheathed and he carried a reinforced chest, sealed with a padlock of cold iron.

‘He said you would live,’ said Amon.

‘The primarch?’

‘Yes. Years ago as you lay dying in the midst of the flesh change he knew you would live to see this moment.’

‘Spare me your tales,’ stormed Ahriman. ‘The primarch said you have something for me?’

‘I do,’ confirmed Amon, holding the chest up for Ahriman to open.

‘It is locked.’

‘To all others perhaps, but not to you.’

‘We don’t have time for this,’ hissed Ahriman, looking over his shoulder as two gods of war clashed with the sound of worlds colliding. Blazing light filled the pyramid, and the howl of Leman Russ vied with the thunderous lightning of Magnus.

‘You must make time,’ snapped Amon, ‘or all this will be for nothing.’

Ahriman reached up and took hold of the lock, which snapped open with a metallic click at his touch. He opened the lid and drew in a breath as he saw the book within, its cover red and cracked with age, as though it were an archaeological find instead of a working grimoire.

‘The Book of Magnus,’ breathed Hathor Maat.

‘Why me?’ demanded Ahriman.

‘Because you are its new bearer,’ said Amon. ‘You are to keep it safe and ensure the knowledge contained within its pages never falls into the wrong hands.’

Ahriman lifted the book from the iron chest, feeling the weight of power and expectation contained within its hallowed pages. The potency of the incantations and formulae called to him, alluring and redolent with promises of the great things he might achieve with the secrets inscribed upon its pages.

He wanted to refuse, to place the book back in its chest and secure the lock so that no one would ever gaze upon its pages and crave the power it could grant. He wanted Magnus to return and retrieve his grimoire, but understood with sudden clarity that was never going to happen.

Magnus had no expectation of surviving his duel with Leman Russ.

Ahriman took the book and ran back to the bronze gates of the pyramid, desperation lending his strides greater speed. Brilliant flashes of light and thunderous impacts came from the other side of the gate, as colossal forces beyond mortal comprehension were unleashed.

Ahriman reached the mighty portal, and saw a battle between two brothers that was unparalleled in its savagery, power and folly. Magnus and the Wolf King struggled with the fate of a world balanced on the outcome. Forking traceries of lightning shot upwards from the ground, isolating them from the host of Wolves and Custodes.

Russ rained blow after blow on Magnus, shattering the horned breastplate, and in return Magnus struck his brother with a searing blast of cold fire that cracked his armour and set light to his braided hair.

It seemed as though the combatants had swollen to enormous proportions, like the giants they were in the myths and legends. The Wolf King’s frostblade struck at Magnus, but his golden axe turned the blow aside as they spun and twisted in an epic battle beneath the madness of a blazing storm of sheet lightning and pounding thunder. This was a battle fought on every level: physical, mental and spiritual, with each primarch bending every ounce of their almost limitless power to the other’s destruction.

The waters around the pyramid broke upon the shores, black as oil, and churning as though an unseen tempest boiled beneath the surface. Space Wolves and Custodes ploughed through the water, wading through the crashing spray to reach the pyramid in lieu of aiding Leman Russ in his battle. Magnus swept his hands to the side, and the warriors on the water cried out in agony as it transformed into corrosive acid, burning through ceramite plates and rendering flesh and bone to jelly.

Thick rain fell, fit to drown the world, and the ground underfoot transformed into a stinking quagmire from which writhing shapes like grasping hands emerged. Wounded warriors were dragged down into the mud, struggling against their unseen attackers, but unable to resist being pulled under to their doom.

Prospero was breaking apart, the veil between worlds cracking, and the maddening gibbers and screams of the Great Ocean’s denizens drove men to their knees in terror. The assault on the senses was total, and Ahriman could barely keep his feet as hurricane-force winds battered the pyramid, tearing glass panes from its structure and breaking the silver and gold towers from its corners. Thunder banged in the midnight sky, and heaving earthquakes ripped ever-widening cracks in the ground, toppling what few structures of Tizca remained standing.

The epicentre of this destruction was Magnus and Russ, and Ahriman watched the two titans wrestle with the bitter enmity reserved only for those who had once called each other friend. Such a contest of arms was the most desperate thing Ahriman had ever seen. He wanted to rush forward and remind them of their former kinship, but to intervene in such a planet-shaking conflict would be suicide.

Ahriman had cautioned his warriors not to wield their powers for fear of the flesh change, but Magnus showed no such restraint and battered Leman Russ with fists wreathed in fire and lightning. Russ was a primarch and such powers as could shatter armies had little effect on him save to drive him to higher fits of rage.

Magnus drove his fist into Russ’s chest, the icy breastplate cracking open with a sound like planets colliding, and shards of ceramite stabbed the Wolf King’s heart. In return, Russ snapped Magnus’s arm back, and Ahriman heard it shatter into a thousand pieces. A blade of pure thought unsheathed from Magnus’s other arm, and he drove it deep into Russ’s chest through his shattered armour.

The blade burst from Russ’s back and the Wolf King loosed a deafening bellow of pain. A chorus of the wolves that were not wolves added their howls to that of their master. The two enormous lupine monsters that accompanied Russ leapt upon Magnus, fastening their jaws upon his legs. Magnus slammed his fist into the black wolf’s head, driving it to the ground with a strangled yelp, its skull surely shattered. With a bellow of anger, Magnus tore the white wolf from his leg with a thought and hurled it away over the heads of the milling army at Russ’s back.

Ahriman felt hands dragging him away as the howling winds and driving rain tore through the gates. He tried to shake them off as someone shouted his name. Hathor Maat and Amon pulled him away from the entrance as the vast mechanisms slowly began hauling the enormous gates closed.

‘No!’ he shouted, his words snatched away by the screaming winds. ‘We can’t!’

‘We must!’ shouted Hathor Maat, pointing towards the crashing waters separating the Space Wolves from the pyramid. Using the stocks of their bolters as paddles, the enemy had jury-rigged concave shards of roof debris to use as makeshift boats, and were surging over the waves towards the gateway. The water had returned to its natural state, frothed patches of liquefied flesh and bone scumming its surface the only reminder of the men who had died there. Hordes of Wulfen plunged into the water, entire packs pushing towards the pyramid with hundreds more right behind them.

Ahriman looked past the approaching monsters to see Magnus and Russ locked in battle high above the causeway, the furious horror of their struggle obscured by ethereal fire and bursts of lightning. A flare of black light erupted and Russ cried out in agony. His blade lashed out blindly and struck a fateful blow against his foe’s most dreaded weapon: his eye.

In an instant, the pyrotechnic cascade of light and fire was extinguished and a stunning silence swept outwards. All motion ceased, and the titans battling on the causeway were no more, each primarch now restored to his customary stature.

Ahriman cried out as he saw Magnus reel back from the Wolf King, one hand clutched to his eye as his shattered arm crackled with regenerative energies. As broken and bloodied as Leman Russ was, he was brawler enough to seize his opportunity. He barrelled into Magnus and gripped him around the waist like a wrestler, roaring as he lifted his brother’s body high above his head.

All eyes turned to Russ as he brought Magnus down across his knee, and the sound of the Crimson King’s back breaking tore through every warrior of the Thousand Sons’ heart.

Ahriman fell to his knees, dropping the Book of Magnus as sympathetic pain, like a white-hot spear, stabbed through him. No pain in the world was worse, for this blow could unmake a primarch, and such wounds were a death-strike a hundred times over to any mortal warrior. He knelt against the closing gateway as the Wulfen packs reached the shoreline alongside warriors led by a bloody-fanged captain with burned hair and an ice-bladed axe.

The Wolf King howled his triumph to the blackened heavens, and a rain of blood replaced the oil-black downpour as Prospero wept for her fallen son. Ahriman’s tears were bloody as Leman Russ dropped Magnus to the mud and brought the frostblade Mjalnar around to take the head of his defeated foe.

With the last of his strength, Magnus turned his head, and his ravaged eye found Ahriman.

This is my last gift to you.

Leman Russ’s blade swept down, but before its lethal edge struck, Magnus whispered unnatural syllables unknown to Man since he had first raised his guttural chants to the nameless gods of the sky. Magnus’s body underwent an instantaneous dissolution, its entire structure unmade with a word, and Ahriman gasped as vast and depthless power surged into his body.

It was too much for any mortal man to contain, but as it swept through him, he knew what he had to do.

Ahriman clasped his hands upon the jade scarab set in his breastplate, filling his mind with its every curve and nuance, its imperfections, the intricacies of its golden mounting and the exact dimensions of the black scarab worked into its substance.

He knew everything about that gem, and pictured the identical artefact on the chest of each warrior of the Thousand Sons. Even as he visualised them, the power in him spread to the entire Legion as Magnus gave the last of his strength to save his sons.

A terrific groaning shattered the stillness, like the spine of the world shearing out of true. The sound of madness tore through the mundane substance of reality as the dying breath of a god unleashed power of impossible magnitude.

The surface of Prospero twisted, and Ahriman felt a dreadful lurch of sickening vertigo. It felt like the bottom was falling out of the world, or like he was plunging down an endless shaft. The world vanished, replaced with the utter blackness at the end of the universe when all living things have been dust for billions of years.

It was not silent, this blackness, but filled with myriad howls, as though hunting packs of wolves stalked the unseen corners between worlds with them. Was there to be no escape from the Emperor’s war dogs?

With savage suddenness the impenetrable, lightless void was replaced with a swirling maelstrom of light and colour, blistering visions of hellish despair and unbridled ecstasy. Everything and nothing came in and out of the bond in moments, stretching out to infinity as the nightmare continued.

Ahriman felt his grip on sanity slipping, the fragile notions of reality that mortals cling to snapping one by one as his mind was bombarded with a billion images at once.

Mercifully, his mind hurled itself into unconsciousness lest it be blasted to psychosis by this unceasing barrage of sensation.

Ahriman floated into the darkness, lost in space and time.

This is the end.

But it was not the end.

Ahriman opened his eyes and found himself face down on a slab of jagged black rock. Every portion of his body was in pain, from his bruised and battered body to the very sinews of his mind. Flickering embers of light reflected on the gleaming obsidian ground and he groaned as he tried to piece together the last remnants of his memory.

Thunder boomed overhead and crackling lightning threw strobing shadows out before him. Though his body protested with searing pain, Ahriman pushed himself into a kneeling position and looked around to see what had become of Prospero.

His first thought was that the last work of Magnus had wrought a dreadful change upon their home world, but it soon penetrated his fractured mind that the sky was not that of Prospero. It boiled with storms of a million colours, jagged forks of light and fire dancing in crackling columns that reached from the ground to the clouds.

He knelt upon the lower slope of an outcrop of black rock overlooking a broken volcanic plain ruptured with smoking fissures and threaded with glowing streams of lava. Gnarled fists of rock thrust up from the plain, their peaks topped with crooked silver towers that stood in mocking imitation of the graceful spires of Tizca. The leather-bound Book of Magnus lay beside him, and he tucked it protectively under his arm.

Jagged mountain peaks soared into the shimmering sky that bellowed with peals of thunder. The sky hazed and shimmered like the most magnificent Mechanicum Borealis, but this was no side effect of centuries of pollution and industry. This was raw aether saturating the air and raging with oceanic tides of power.

Warriors of the Thousand Sons wandered aimlessly across the broken rockscape in their hundreds, stunned at the desolation they found themselves in. Quaking discharges rumbled beneath the ground, as though an endless series of underground tremors constantly reshaped the planet’s core.

Ahriman rose to his feet, surveying the nightmarish landscape of everlasting turmoil. A hunched figure shambled towards him, head down, and he recognised the battered form of Khaphed, one of the Lore-Keepers within the Corvidae library. In this hellish place, it was a blessed relief to see a familiar face.

‘Khaphed? Is that you?’ asked Ahriman, feeling his speech fill the air with potential for wonders and raptures, as though every breath was charged with power.

The warrior didn’t answer and Ahriman felt a dreadful force within Khaphed’s body. The Lore-Keeper’s head came up and Ahriman took a backward step as he saw the mutant growths that transformed Khaphed. Distended eyes pushed their way from every surface on the warrior’s face, such that there was no longer a mouth, nose or any other sense organ other than eyes.

Khaphed reached for him, his myriad eyes silently imploring him for help.

Ahriman thrust his hand towards Khaphed and unleashed a barrage of fire and lightning into the Lore-Keeper’s body. Such powers were the provenance of the Raptora and Pavoni, but they leapt from Ahriman’s fingers as naturally as though he had been trained by those cults since birth.

Khaphed’s charred body collapsed and shattered into ashen fragments as it hit the ground.

Horrified, Ahriman ran down the slopes to rejoin the rest of his warriors.

He found Hathor Maat, Amon and Sobek quickly enough, but it soon became clear that the Lore-Keeper of the Corvidae was not the only member of the Legion to have succumbed to the flesh change. Dozens more required to be put down, until at last all that remained appeared to be free of mutation.

All told, twelve hundred and forty-two warriors had survived the razing of Prospero.

‘Where are we?’ asked Sobek, raising the most obvious question.

No one had an answer, and for long days and nights, though it was impossible to gauge the passage of time since everyone’s armour chrono had failed, the Thousand Sons explored the hideous desolation that was their new home.

The silver towers were discovered not to be parodies of those that had been raised on Tizca, but those selfsame towers, broken and twisted by the strange alchemy that had brought them to this place. Beyond these relics of their lost home world, there was nothing to shed any light on the nature of the place.

No power of the Corvidae or any other cult could fathom its location or any hint of how they had come to be deposited upon its blasted surface.

All that changed on the day the Obsidian Tower rose from the depths.

It began with yet another earthquake, a common enough occurrence that no one paid any mind at first. A sullen mood had fallen upon the Thousand Sons, which was wholly expected, for what manner of man would not keenly feel the loss of his home, father and brothers?

But this earthquake did not simply fade away after splitting yet another fissure in the endless volcanic plain while sealing another shut. Cracks spread from the centre of the plain in a radial pattern and a black diamond, like a thrusting basalt speartip, exploded upwards.

It rose into the sky, pushing higher and higher and growing wider and wider with every passing moment until a new mountain had been birthed. Towering and steep-sided, it rose higher than Olympus Mons and the Mountain of Aghoru combined. Broken rocks tumbled from its impossible height, falling from its angular sides to craft a fringe comprising shattered cyclopean stone and titanic blocks of strange angles and impossible perspectives.

When the rain of dust and debris had ended, the Thousand Sons gathered at the base of this stupendous creation, knowing that nothing natural could have created so magnificent an edifice. Glowing fire arced from the distant mountain’s peak and a shimmering blue light suffused its entirety, as though lightning filled its tunnels like blood in a circulatory system.

A bright shape descended from the mountaintop, a wavering and indistinct form wreathed in the light of stars and the power of infinite possibility. Brilliant wings of shimmering aetheric fire unfolded from the figure’s back, and the Thousand Sons fell to their knees as their father’s light spread over them.

Magnus landed softly before his sons and they stared in amazement as his light illuminated the bleak darkness of the world. This was no corporeal shell of a subtle body as worn by the primarch when he had walked among them. This was a body of light that could exist beyond the confines of the Great Ocean. Magnus had sacrificed the flesh that had contained his essence, and in so doing had ascended to a more evolved form, one free from the constraints of mortality and the limits of reality.

‘My sons,’ said Magnus with weary resignation, ‘welcome to the Planet of the Sorcerers.’

Time has passed.

Centuries or days, who can know?

It may be both and neither at the same time.

I cannot say how long has passed since we first came here, for I have come to appreciate that such concepts are an irrelevance here. All I know is that things have become immeasurably worse since the Obsidian Tower first reared its ugly immensity from the earth. Some say we could not have guessed that this world would have worked its evil upon us. I say: How could we not have known?

Hathor Maat fears it the worst, but I confess I too suffer the nightmarish dread that one day I will become less than nothing, a devolved creature with nothing left of the man I once was. Some even embrace their new forms, believing them to be marks of favour.

Fools.

It has become ever more rife amongst our number, and seventy-two warriors have succumbed to the flesh change since Magnus first spirited us away from Prospero.

Spirited… An old word, but an apt one perhaps, for we did not arrive on this desolate world by accident. This planet was waiting for us, prepared aeons ago by an intelligence greater than anyone, primarch or mortal, can possibly comprehend.

Magnus broods in his black tower, peering into the depths of the Great Ocean for validation, a sign that he was right to act as he did.

He will find nothing, for there is nothing to find.

His actions were never his own, for he forgot the first rule of the mysteries.

He let his ambition and hubris blind him to his flaws and the knowledge that there is always someone stronger and more powerful out there.

I will not make that mistake.

But we are still creatures of flesh and inclined to repeat our past mistakes, so I have been careful to surround myself with naysmiths to rein in my arrogance.

The bloodline of the Thousand Sons was born from the power that thrives all around us. We were given the chance to gather and pass on the knowledge of a hidden world, but we failed in that most golden of opportunities.

There are those among the remains of the Legion who do not believe the power of the Great Ocean can ever be mastered, that our accursed fate is clear evidence of that stark fact.

They are wrong.

This world is full of potential, but it is dangerous. Once I set foot on the path I believe will free us from our slow slide into degeneration there will be no leaving it. The Great Work I have begun will be the first step in proving how right we were, how loyal we were and how loyal we might yet be.

I promised to restore all that was lost when Prospero fell, and I intend to make good on that vow. This cabal will be the opening move in restoring the Thousand Sons to glory in the eyes of the Emperor.

I can feel them drawing near, the captains I must convince if I am to succeed.

Hathor Maat, I already know will join me, for he fears the ruin of his flesh more keenly than any. Sobek will follow my lead, as he has always done, but Amon?

Amon will resist, for he has served Magnus for longer than any of us can know.

He will be the key.

Win him over and this will work.

The Book of Magnus lies open before me, its pages filled with forbidden lore and knowledge from ancient, forgotten days. It holds the key to our salvation. In the labyrinthine collections of formulae, incantations and rites, I have found what I believe will be the beginnings of a mighty spell to undo all that has befallen us.

I call it the Rubric.

It is a time of legend.

Mighty heroes battle for the right to rule the galaxy.

The vast armies of the Emperor of Earth have conquered the galaxy in a Great Crusade – the myriad alien races have been smashed by the Emperor’s elite warriors and wiped from the face of history.

The dawn of a new age of supremacy for humanity beckons.

Gleaming citadels of marble and gold celebrate the many victories of the Emperor. Triumphs are raised on a million worlds to record the epic deeds of his most powerful and deadly warriors.

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

Organised into vast armies of tens of thousands called Legions, the Space Marines and their primarch leaders conquer the galaxy in the name of the Emperor.

Chief amongst the primarchs is Horus, called the Glorious, the Brightest Star, favourite of the Emperor, and like a son unto him. He is the Warmaster, the commander-in-chief of the Emperor’s military might, subjugator of a thousand thousand worlds and conqueror of the galaxy. He is a warrior without peer, a diplomat supreme.

As the flames of war spread through the Imperium, mankind’s champions will all be put to the ultimate test.

~ Dramatis Personae ~

Execution Force

Eristede Kell, Assassin-at-Marque, Clade Vindicare

Jenniker Soalm, Secluse, Clade Venenum

‘The Garantine’, Nihilator, Clade Eversor

Fon Tariel, Infocyte, Clade Vanus

Koyne, Shade, Clade Callidus

Iota, Protiphage, Clade Culexus

Officio Assassinorum

Master of Assassins, A High Lord of Terra

Sire Vindicare, Master and Director Primus, Clade Vindicare

Siress Venenum, Mistress and Director Primus, Clade Venenum

Sire Eversor, Master and Director Primus, Clade Eversor

Sire Vanus, Master and Director Primus, Clade Vanus

Siress Callidus, Mistress and Director Primus, Clade Callidus

Sire Culexus, Master and Director Primus, Clade Culexus

Legio Custodes

Constantin Valdor, Captain-General and Chief Custodian

The Imperial Fists Legion

Rogal Dorn, Primarch of the Imperial Fists

Efried, Third Captain

The Sons of Horus

Horus Lupercal, Primarch of the Sons of Horus

Maloghurst, Equerry to the Primarch

Luc Sedirae, Captain of the 13th Company

Devram Korda, Veteran Sergeant, 13th Company

The Word Bearers Legion

Erebus, First Chaplain of the Word Bearers

Imperial Personae

Malcador The Siglilitte, Regent of Terra

Yosef Sabrat, Reeve of Iesta Veracrux

Daig Segan, Reeve of Iesta Veracrux

Berts Laimner, Reeve Warden of Iesta Veracrux

Kata Telemach, High-Reeve of Iesta Veracrux

Erno Sigg, Citizen of the Imperium

Merriksun Eurotas, The Void Baron of Narvaji, Agentia Nuntius (Taebian Sector)

Hyssos, Security Operative, Eurotas Trade Consortium

Perrig, Indentured Psyker, Eurotas Trade Consortium

Capra, Citizen of Dagonet

Terrik Grohl, Citizen of Dagonet

Liya Beye, Citizen of Dagonet

Lady Astrid Sinope, Citizen of Dagonet

‘For those that defy the Imperium, only the Emperor can judge your crimes.

Only in death can you receive the Emperor’s Judgement.’

– maxim of the Officio Assassinorum

‘The monster boasted of what he would do once he conquered the home of the god-king, little knowing that Nemesis heard his words and took note of them.’

– excerpted from texts of the ancient Terran poet Nonnus

‘We live in peace and pretend at it. But in truth there are always wars, thundering unseen around us, just beyond the curve of our sight. The greatest foolishness is that no man wishes to know the truth. He is happy to live his life as silent guns cut the sky above his head.’

– attributed to the remembrancer Ignace Karkasy

One

Object Lesson
Tactics of Deceit
The Star

Gyges Prime was a murdered world, dead now, all but an ashen ember. Around the encampment, porous black rock ranged away under a cowl of low mist, the haze itself the remains of cities pounded into radio-active dust by countless bombardments from orbit. Arsenals of nuclear munitions had been emptied to bring the planet to the executioner’s block, and now the cooling corpse of the world lay swaddled in its own death-shroud, a virulent and silent pall of radiation that smothered everything.

Here, in the canyon where the invaders had made their planetfall, high walls of shield rock did their best to cut the fiery winds from the shattered landscape. Men, such as the soldiers that had crisped and burned like paper in the onslaught, would have died for the sake of living an hour outside in this nightmare, had any of them survived this long. The invaders had no such weaknesses, however.

The lethality they laid over Gyges Prime was to them a minor irritant. Once they were done in this place, they would return to their warcraft high above and clean the stink of the dead planet from their robes and armour as one might wash dried mud from a soiled boot. They would do this and think nothing of it. They would not stop to consider that the air now passing into their lungs was laced with the particulate remains of every man, woman and child that had called Gyges Prime home.

The planet was dead, and it had served a purpose in dying. The dozen other colony worlds of the Gyges system, each of them more valuable, more populous than this one, they would look through their mnemoniscopes and watch this ember cool and fade. Why choose to attack that world and no other? The question they first asked as the warships passed them by had now been answered: for the lesson of it.

Tobeld did not dwell on this, as he moved around the lee of the temporary pergolas set up beneath the wings of the tethered Stormbirds, hearing the mutter of conversation among the warriors around him amid the snap of guyropes and wind-pulled fabric. Messages were already coming in from the ships in orbit. The other worlds, the orbital platforms, the system defence fleet, all were surrendering. Twelve planets teeming with people, giving up their freedom without a single word of defiance. Lesson learned.

The taking of the Gyges system had been a swift and almost cursory thing. Doubtless, in decades to come, it would be less than a postscript in the annals of the war. No casualties of note had been taken by the warfleet, none that mattered to the architect of the conflict that this small venture was but a fragment of. Gyges was merely a stone in the path, a path that began in the Isstvan system and wound its way across the galaxy towards Terra. Gyges was a passing footstep, beneath which the blood of millions left no mark. By conventional battle logic, there was no reason for any of the invaders to even step on to the surface; yet still they had come, in this small party, for reasons that could only be guessed at.

Tobeld stifled a cough with his hand, pushing the thick robe of his hood to his face to muffle the sound. It came away wet and he tasted copper in his mouth. The radiation had killed him the moment he stepped out from the shuttle, him and the other serfs brought down from the flagship in order to serve the invaders. The serfs would all be dead before sunset. He knew he would share that fate, but it was a price worth paying. In the dimness of his dormitory capsule back on the warship, Tobeld had used a quarter of the elements of his weapons kit to fabricate a strong dosage of counter-radiation drugs; the rest he had turned to the building of the compound that nestled inside the finger-long glass vial strapped to the inside of his wrist. He had done his best to dispose of the remnants of the kit, but he was afraid some trace might still be discovered; and the counter-rads were working poorly. He had little time.

He passed behind the engine bells of a drop-ship and through the black haze he spied the largest of the tents, a low pavilion made of non-reflective cloth. For a second, the wind snapped at the entrance flap and showed him a glimpse of things inside. He saw what might have been firelight jumping and moving off slabs of polished ceramite armour, and wet shapes like animated falls of blood. Then the breeze passed on and the sight was lost to him. Still, the confusion of impressions made him shiver.

Tobeld hesitated. He would need to cross open ground to get from the Stormbird to the pavilion, and he could not afford to be challenged. He was entering the terminal stage of his mission now, after so long. There could be no mistakes. No one had come this close before. He could not risk failure.

Tobeld took a shaky, tainted breath. He had sacrificed a solar year of his life to this mission, breaking out from under a cover he had spent half a decade building as a minor Nobilite clan cook-functionary. He had willingly discarded that carefully-crafted disguise to embrace a new one, such was the gravity of his new mission; and through cautious steps, with doses of poisons both subtle and coarse to smooth his path, Tobeld had made his way into service aboard the battle cruiser Vengeful Spirit, the flagship of Horus Lupercal.

Two years had passed since the betrayal at Isstvan, the bloody backstabbing that opened the way to Horus’s insurrection against the Imperium and his father, the Emperor of Mankind. In that time, his steady progression across the galaxy had gathered momentum. As this day showed, every system that passed beneath the keel of Horus’s warships either swore fealty to him, or else they burned. Worlds and worlds, united in the aftermath of the Great Crusade, were now torn between loyalty to a distant Earth and an absent Emperor, or to a victorious Horus and his army of warlords. The glimpses Tobeld got from his lower-decks vantage point showed an armada of turncoat-kindred consolidating power degree by punishing degree. Horus closed his steel grip on sector after sector. One did not need to be a tactician to know that the Warmaster was marshalling his energies for the advance that had to come – an eventual thrust towards Terra herself, and to the gates of the Imperial Palace.

Horus could not be allowed to take that step.

At first it had seemed an unassailable objective. The Warmaster himself, a primarch, a demigod warrior, and Tobeld just a man. A killer of superlative skill and subtlety, indeed, but still a man. To strike directly at Horus aboard the Spirit would have been madness, an impossibility. Tobeld toiled aboard the flagship for almost five months before he even laid eyes upon the Warmaster – and the being he saw that day was one of such magnitude that it set him reeling, the question hard in his thoughts. How do I kill this one?

Conventional poisons were worthless ranged against the physiology of an Astartes; they could ingest the harshest of venoms as Tobeld might sip wine. But Tobeld was here precisely because poison was his weapon of choice. It could be swift; it could be patient, escaping detection, lying dormant. He was one of Clade Venenum’s finest tox-artisans; in his apprenticeship he had manufactured killing philtres from the most base of components, he had terminated dozens of targets and left no trace. And he slowly came to believe that he was capable of this, if fate would only grace him with a single opportunity.

The weapon lay in the vial. Tobeld had created a binary agent, a mixture of molecular accelerant gels suspending a live sample of gene-altered Baalite thirstwater – a virulent fluidic life form that could consume all moisture within living tissues in a matter of seconds. When Horus had announced he would be leading a landing party to the surface of Gyges Prime, Tobeld heard the tolling of fate in the words. His chance. His single chance.

There was rumour and supposition aboard the Vengeful Spirit, down on the lower decks where the human serfs and servitors toiled. Men spoke of strange things afoot on the levels where the Astartes walked, of changes, of apparitions and peculiarities in parts of the vessel. Tobeld heard whispers of the so-called lodges where these changes took place. He listened to stories of rites made on the surfaces of conquered worlds, things that sickened him as much with their nauseating similarity to crude idolatry as with their hints of inhumanity and horror. The men who spoke of these things often vanished soon after, leaving nothing but fear in their wakes.

He concentrated on the weapon, listening for the wind to drop. Horus was there, no more than a dozen steps away, inside the pavilion with his inner circle – Maloghurst, Abaddon and the rest of them – engaging in whatever ritual had brought them to this place. Close now, closer than ever before. Tobeld prepared himself, forcing away the pain in his throat, his joints. Entering the command tent, he would introduce the weapon to the jug of wine at Horus’s side, fill the cups of the Warmaster and his senior battle-brothers. One sip would be enough to infect them… and he hoped it would be enough to kill, although Tobeld held no doubt he would not live to see his mission succeed. His faith in his art would have to be enough.

Time, then. He stepped out from underneath the Stormbird’s wing; and a voice said ‘Is that it?’

A reply, firm and cold, returned from somewhere close at hand in the smoke-haze. ‘Aye.’

Tobeld tried to turn on his heel, but he was already leaving the ground, taken off his feet by a shadow that dwarfed him, a towering man-form in steel-grey armour holding a fistful of his robes. Leering out of the gloom came a hard face that was all angles and barely restrained menace. A patchwork of scarification was the setting for eyes that were wide with black mirth, eyes that bored into him. ‘Where are you going, little man?’ He marvelled at the thought that someone so large had been able to approach him in utter silence.

‘Lord, I…’ It was hard to talk. Tobeld’s throat was as dry as the winds, and the grip the Astartes had on him pulled the material of the robes tight about his neck. He struggled for breath – but he did not struggle too much, for fear the turncoat might think he was making some futile attempt to defend himself and respond in kind.

‘Hush, hush’, said the other voice. A second figure, if anything larger and more lethal in aspect than the first, stepped from the smoke. Tobeld’s eyes instantly fell to the intricate etching and jewelled medallions adorning the other Astartes’s chest, symbols of high rank and seals of loyalty among the Sons of Horus Legion. He knew this warrior immediately, the laughing face and the shock-blond hair, without need to survey the rank sigils upon him, though. Luc Sedirae, Captain of the 13th Company.

‘Let’s not make a song and dance of this,’ Sedirae went on. His right hand flexed absently; he wore no gauntlet upon it, showing to the world where the limb had been lost and replaced by an augmetic in polished brass and anodised black steel. The hand had been taken from him in battle with the Raven Guard at Isstvan, so it was said, and the captain wore the wound proudly, as if it were a badge of honour.

Tobeld’s gaze flicked back to the warrior holding him, finding the symbols of the 13th Company on the other Astartes. Belatedly, he recognised him as Devram Korda, one of Sedirae’s seconds; not that such knowledge would do him any good. He tried again to speak. ‘Lords, I am only doing my duty as–’

But the words seemed to curdle in his throat and Tobeld choked on them, emitting a wet gasp instead.

From behind Korda, following the path that Tobeld had taken around the parked craft, a third Astartes emerged from beneath the shadows cast by the drop-ship. The assassin knew this one, too. Armour the colour of old, dried blood, an aspect like a storm captured in the confines of a man’s face, eyes he could not bring himself to meet. Erebus.

‘His duty,’ said the First Chaplain of the Word Bearers, musing on the thought. ‘That is not a lie.’ Erebus’s voice was soft and almost gentle, raised only slightly above the low keen of the Gyges winds.

Tobeld blinked and felt a tide of terror growing to fill him. He rose on it, caught by the icy certainty of the moment. Erebus knew what he was. Somehow, Erebus had always known. All his careful subterfuges, every piece of flawless tradecraft he had employed – the Word Bearer walked towards him now with a swagger that told the assassin it had counted for nothing.

‘My duty is to serve the Warmaster!’ he blurted, desperate to stall for time, for a moment more of life.

‘Quietly,’ warned Erebus, silencing him before he could say more. The Word Bearer threw a glance towards the command tent. ‘Nothing will be gained by disturbing Great Horus. He will be… displeased.’

Korda turned Tobeld in his grip, like a fisherman evaluating a disappointing catch before tossing it back into the ocean. ‘So weak,’ he offered. ‘He’s dying even as I watch. The boneseekers in the air are eating him inside.’

Sedirae folded his arms. ‘Well?’ he demanded of Erebus. ‘Is this some game of yours, Word Bearer, or is there real cause for us to torment this helot?’ His lips thinned. ‘I grow bored.’

‘This is a killer,’ Erebus explained. ‘A weapon, after a fashion.’

Tobeld belatedly understood that they had been waiting for him. ‘I… am only a servant…’ he gasped. He was losing sensation in his limbs and his vision was starting to fog from the tightness of Korda’s hold.

‘Lie,’ said the Word Bearer, the accusation clicking off his tongue.

Panic broke through what barriers of resolve still remained in Tobeld’s mind, and he felt them crumble. He felt himself lose all sense of rationality and give in to the terror with animal reaction. His training, the control that had been bred into him from his childhood in the schola, disintegrated under no more than a look from Erebus’s cold, cold gaze.

Tobeld flexed his wrist and the vial came into his hand. He twisted wildly in Korda’s grasp, catching the Astartes fractionally off-guard, stabbing downwards with the glassy cylinder. Motion-sensing switches in the crystalline matrix of the vial obeyed and opened a tiny mouth at the blunt end, allowing a ring of monomol needles to emerge. Little thicker than human hairs, the fine rods could penetrate even the hardy epidermis of an Adeptus Astartes. Tobeld tried to kill Devram Korda, swinging at the bare skin of his scarred face, missing, swinging again. He did this mindlessly, in the manner of a mechanism running too fast, unguided.

Korda used the flat of his free hand to swat the assassin, doing it with such force that he broke Tobeld’s jaw and caved in much of the side of his skull. Tobeld’s right eye was immediately crushed, and the shock resonated through him. After a moment he realised he was on the ground, blood flowing freely from his shattered mouth and nose into a growing puddle.

‘Erebus was right, sir,’ Korda said, the voice woolly and distant.

Tobeld’s hand reached out in a claw, scraping at the black sand and smooth rock. Through the eye that still worked, he could see the vial, the contents unspent, lying where it had fallen from his fingers. He reached for it, inching closer.

‘He was.’ Tobeld heard Sedirae echo his battle-brother with a sigh. ‘Seems to be making a habit of it.’

The assassin looked up, the pain caused by the simple action almost insurmountable, and saw shapes swimming in mist and blood. Cold eyes upon him, judging him unworthy.

‘Put an end to this,’ said Erebus.

Korda hesitated. ‘Lord?’

‘As our cousin says, brother-sergeant,’ Sedirae replied. ‘It’s becoming tiresome.’

One of the shapes grew larger, coming closer, and Tobeld saw a steel-plated hand reach for the vial, gather it up. ‘What does this do, I wonder?’

Then the vial glittered in the light as the Astartes brought the assassin’s weapon down and injected the contents of the tube into the bruised bare flesh of Tobeld’s arm.

Sedirae watched the helot perish with the slow, indolent air of one who had seen many manners of death. He watched out of interest to see if this ending would show him something different from all the other kills he had witnessed – and it did, to some small degree.

Korda placed a hand over the man’s mouth to muffle his screams as the helot’s body twitched and drew into itself. On the Caslon Moon during the Great Crusade, the captain of the 13th had drowned a mutant in a freezing lake, holding the freak-thing down beneath the surface of the murky waters until it had perished. He was reminded of that kill now, watching the helot go to his end from the poison. The hooded servile was drowning dry, if such a thing were possible. Where he could see bare skin, Sedirae saw the pallid and rad-burned meat of the man first turn corpse-grey, then lose all definition and become papery, pulling tight over bones and muscle bunches that atrophied as the moments passed. Even the blood that had spilled onto the dark earth became cloudy and then evaporated, leaving cracked deposits bereft of any moisture. Korda eventually took his hand away and shook it, sending a rain of powder from his fingertips off on the winds.

‘A painful death,’ remarked the sergeant, examining his fingers. ‘See here?’ He showed off a tiny scratch on the ceramite of the knuckle joint. ‘He bit me in his last agonies, not that it mattered.’

Sedirae threw a look at the command tent. No one had emerged to see what was going on outside. He doubted Horus and the rest of his Mournival were even aware of the killing taking place. They had so much to occupy them, after all. So many plans and great schemes to helm…

‘I’ll inform the Warmaster,’ he heard himself say.

Erebus took a step closer. ‘Do you think that is necessary?’

Sedirae glanced at the Chaplain. The Word Bearer had a way of drawing attention directly when he wished it, almost as if he could drag a gaze towards him like a black sun would pull in light and matter in order to consume it; and by turns he could do the opposite, making himself a ghost in a room full of people, allowing sight to slide off him as if he were not there. In his more honest moments, Luc Sedirae would admit that the presence of Erebus left him unsettled. The captain of the 13th could not quite shake the disquiet that clouded his thoughts every time the Word Bearer chose to speak. Not for the first time, despite all the fealty he had sworn to the Luna Wolves – now the Sons of Horus in name and banner – Sedirae asked himself why the Warmaster needed Erebus so close in order to prosecute his just and right insurrection against the Emperor. It was one of many doubts that he carried, these days. The burden of them seemed to grow ever greater with each passing month that the Warmaster’s forces dallied out here in the deeps, while the prize of Terra herself remained out of reach.

He gave a low snort and gestured at the corpse. ‘Someone just tried to kill him. Yes, cousin, I think Horus Lupercal might consider that of interest.’

‘Tell me you are not so naïve as to imagine that this pitiful attempt was the first such act against the Warmaster?’

Sedirae narrowed his eyes at Erebus’s light, almost dismissive tone. ‘The first to come so close, I would warrant.’

‘A few steps more and he would have been inside the tent,’ muttered Korda.

‘Distance is relative,’ Erebus replied. ‘Lethality is the key factor.’

Korda stood up. ‘I wonder who sent him.’

‘The Warmaster’s father,’ said Erebus immediately. ‘Or, if not by the Emperor’s direct decree, then by that of his lackeys.’

‘You seem very certain,’ Sedirae noted. ‘But Horus has made many enemies.’

The Word Bearer gave a slight smile and shook his head. ‘None of concern on this day.’ He took a breath. ‘We three ended this threat before it became an issue. It need not become one after the fact.’ Erebus nodded towards the tent. ‘The Warmaster has a galaxy to conquer. He has more than enough to absorb his attention as it is. Would you wish to distract your primarch with this triviality, Sedirae?’ He prodded the corpse with the tip of his boot.

‘I believe the Warmaster should make that choice for himself.’ Irritation flared in Sedirae’s manner and his lip curled. ‘Perhaps–’ He caught himself and fell silent, arresting the train of thought even as it formed.

‘Perhaps?’ echoed Erebus, immediately seizing on the word as if he knew what would have followed it. ‘Speak your mind, captain. We are all kinsmen here. All brothers of the lodge.’

He deliberated for a long moment on the words pushing at his lips, and then finally gave them leave. ‘Perhaps, Word Bearer, if matters such as these were not kept from Horus, then he might wish to move along a swifter path. Perhaps, if he were not kept ignorant of the threats to our campaign, he might–’

‘Push on to the Segmentum Solar, and to Earth?’ Erebus seemed to close the distance between them without actually moving. ‘That is the root of it, am I right? You feel that the measured pace of our advance is too slow. You wish to lay siege to the Imperial Palace tomorrow.’

‘My captain is not alone in that regard,’ said Korda, with feeling.

‘A month would be enough,’ retorted Sedirae, showing teeth. ‘It could be done. We all know it.’

Erebus’s smile lengthened. ‘I am sure that from where the warriors of the 13th Company stand, it doubtless seems that simple. But let me assure you, it is not. There’s still so much to be done, Luc Sedirae. So many pieces to be placed, so many factors not yet ready.’

The captain gave an angry snort. ‘What are you saying? That we must wait for the stars to be right?’

The smile faded and the Word Bearer became grim. ‘Exactly that, cousin. Exactly that.’

The sudden coldness in Erebus’s words gave Sedirae a moment’s pause. ‘Clearly I lack your insight, then,’ he grated. ‘As I fail to see the merit in this leisurely strategy.’

‘As long as we follow the Warmaster, all will be as it should,’ Erebus told him. ‘Victory will come soon enough.’ He paused over the corpse, which had begun to disintegrate into dust, pulled away by the winds. ‘Perhaps even sooner than any of us might expect.’

‘What do you mean?’ said Korda.

‘A truism of warfare.’ Erebus did not look up from his examination of the dead assassin. ‘If a tactic can be used against us, then it can be used by us.’

Dawn brought with it the clouds, and under the mellow amber glow of the rising sun, the bright jewels of the Taebian Stars began to fade away as pure blue washed in to lighten the darkness of lost night. Pressed to one window of the coleopter’s cramped cabin, Yosef Sabrat took a moment to pull the collar of his greatcoat a little tighter around his neck. The long summer season of Iesta Veracrux was well and truly over, and the new autuwinter was on the horizon, coming in slow and careful. Up here, in the cold morning sky, he could feel it. In a matter of weeks, the rains would come in earnest; and not before time, either. This year’s crop would be one for the record books, so they were saying.

The flyer bumped through a pocket of turbulent air and Yosef bounced in his seat; like most of the craft in service with the Sentine, it was an old thing but well cared for, one of many machines that could date back their lineage to the Second Establishment and the great colonial influx. The ducted rotor vanes behind the passenger compartment thrummed, the engine note changing as the pilot put it into a shallow portside turn. Yosef let gravity turn his head and he looked past the two jagers who were the only other passengers, and out through the seamless bowl of glassaic at the empty observer’s station.

Sparse pennants of thin white cloud drifted away to give him a better view. They were passing over the Breghoot Canyon, where the sheer rock face of red stone fell away into deeps that saw little daylight, even at high sun. The terraces of the vineyards there were just opening up for the day, fans of solar arrays on the tiled roofs turning and unfolding like black sails on some ocean schooner. Beyond, clinging to the vast kilometre-long trellises that extended out off the edges of the cliffs, waves of greenery resembled strange cataracts of emerald frozen in mid-fall. Had they been closer, Yosef imagined he would be able to see the shapes of harvestmen and their ceramic-clad gatherer automatons moving in among the frames, taking the bounty from the web of vines.

The coleopter rumbled again as it forded an updraught and righted itself, giving a wide berth to the hab-towers reaching high from the cliff top and into the lightening sky. Acres of white stucco coated the flanks of the tall, skinny minarets, and across most of them the shutters were still closed over their windows, the new day yet to be greeted. Most of the capital’s populace were still slumbering at this dawn hour, and Yosef did in all honesty envy them to great degree. The hasty mug of recaf that had been his breakfast sat poorly in his stomach. He’d slept fitfully last night – something that seemed to be happening more often these days – and so when the vox had pulled him the rest of the way from his dreamless half-slumber, it had almost been a kindness. Almost.

The engine note grew shrill as the flyer picked up speed, coming in swift and low now over the tops of the woodlands that bracketed the capital’s airdocks. Yosef watched the carpet of green and brown flash past beneath him, trying not to get lost in it.

A word from the low, muttered conversation drifting between the jagers came to him without warning. He frowned and dismissed it, willing himself not to listen, concentrating on the engine sound instead; but he could not. The word, the name, whispered furtively for fear of invocation.

Horus.

Each time he heard it, it was as if it were some sort of curse. Those who uttered it would do so in fear, gripped by some strange belief that to speak the name would incur an instant punishment by unseen authority. Or perhaps it was not that; perhaps it was a sickening that the word brought with it, the sense that this combination of sounds would turn the stomach if said too loudly. The name troubled him. For too long it had been a watchword for nobility and heroism; but now the meaning was in flux, and it defied any attempt at categorisation in Yosef’s analytical, careful thoughts.

He considered admonishing the men for a brief moment, then thought better of it. For all the bright sunshine that might fall upon Iesta Veracrux’s thriving society, there were shadows cast here and some of them ran far deeper than many would wish to know. Recently, those shadows ran longer and blacker than ever before, and men would know fear and doubt for that. It was to be expected.

The coleopter rose up to clear the last barrier of high Ophelian pines and spun in towards the network of towers, landing pads and blockhouses that were the capital’s primary port.

The Sentine had dispensation and so were not required to land at a prescribed platform like civilian traffic. Instead, the pilot moved smartly between a massive pair of half-inflated cargo ballutes to touch down on a patch of ferrocrete scarcely the width of the flyer. Yosef and the pair of jagers were barely off the drop-ramp before the downwash from the rotor became a brief hurricane and the coleopter spun away, back up into the blue. Yosef shielded his eyes from the dust and scattered leaves the departure kicked up, watching it go.

He reached inside his coat for his warrant rod on its chain, and drew out the slim silver shaft to hang free and visible around his neck. He ran his thumb absently down the length of it, over the etching and the gold contact inlays that indicated his rank of reeve, and surveyed the area. Unlike the jagers, who only wore a brass badge on street duty or patrol, the reeve’s rod showed his status as an investigating officer.

The men from the flyer had joined a group of other uniforms who were carefully plotting out a search pattern for the surrounding area. Behind them, Yosef saw an automated barrier mechanical ponderously drawing a thick cable lined with warning flags around the edge of the nearest staging area.

A familiar face caught his eye. ‘Sir!’ Skelta was tall and thin of aspect, with a bearing to him that some of the other members of the Sentine unkindly equated to a rodent. The jager came quickly over to his side, ducking slightly even though the coleopter was long gone. Skelta blinked, looking serious and pale. ‘Sir,’ he repeated. The young man had ideas about being promoted beyond street duty to the Sentine’s next tier of investigatory operations, and so he was always attempting to present a sober and thoughtful aspect whenever he was in his superior’s company; but Yosef didn’t have the heart to tell the man he was just a little too dull-witted to make the grade. He wasn’t a bad sort, but sometimes he exhibited the kind of ignorance that made Sabrat’s palms itch.

‘Jager,’ he said with a nod. ‘What do you have for me?’

A shadow passed over Skelta’s face, something that went beyond his usual reticent manner, and Yosef caught it. The reeve had come here expecting to find a crime of usual note, but Skelta’s fractional expression gave him pause; and for the first time that morning, he wondered what he had walked into.

‘It’s, uh…’ The jager trailed off and swallowed hard, his gaze losing focus for a moment as he thought about something else. ‘You should probably see for yourself, sir.’

‘All right. Show me.’

Skelta led him through the ordered ranks of wooden cargo capsules, each one an octagonal block the size of a small groundcar. The smell of matured estufagemi wine was everywhere here, soaked into the massive crates, even bled into the stone flags of the flight apron. The warm, comforting scent seemed cloying and overly strong today, however, almost as if it were struggling to mask the perfume of something far less pleasant.

Close by, he heard the quick barks of dogs, and then a man’s angry shout followed by snarls and yelps. ‘Dockside strays,’ offered the jager. ‘Attracted by the stink, sir. Been kicking them away since before sun-up.’ The thought seemed to disagree with the young man and he changed the subject. ‘We think we have an identity for the victim. Documents found near the scene, papers and the like. Name was Jaared Norte. A lighter drivesman.’

‘You think,’ echoed Yosef. ‘You’re not sure?’

Skelta held up the barrier line for the reeve to step under, and they walked on, into the crime scene proper. ‘Haven’t been able to make a positive match yet, sir,’ he went on. ‘Clinicians are on the way to check for dentition and blood-trace.’ The jager coughed, self-consciously. ‘He… doesn’t have a face, sir. And we found some loose teeth… But we’re not sure they were, uh, his.’

Yosef took that in without comment. ‘Go on.’

‘Norte’s foreman has been interviewed. Apparently, Norte clocked off at the usual time last night, heading home to his wife and son. He never arrived.’

‘The wife report it, did she?’

Skelta shook his head. ‘No, sir. They had some trouble, apparently. Their marriage contract was a few months from expiration, and it was causing friction. She probably thought he was out drinking up his pay.’

‘This from the foreman?’

The jager nodded. ‘Sent a mobile to their house to confirm his take on things. Waiting on a word.’

‘Was Norte drunk when he was killed?’

This time, Skelta couldn’t stop himself from shuddering. ‘For his sake, I hope so. Would have been a blessing for the poor bastard.’

Yosef sensed the fear in the other man’s words. Murder was not an uncommon crime on Iesta Veracrux; they were a relatively prosperous world that was built on the industry of wine, after all, and men who drank – or who coveted money – were often given to mistakes that led to bloodletting. The reeve had seen many deaths, some brutal, many of them sordid, each in their own way tragic; but all of them he had understood. Yosef knew crime for what it was – a weakness of self – and he knew the triggers that would bring that flaw to light. Jealousy, madness, sorrow… But fear was the worst.

And there was much fear on Iesta Veracrux these days. Here out in the ranges of the Ultima Segmentum, across the span of the galaxy from the Throne of Terra, the planet and its people felt distant and unprotected while wars were being fought, lines of battle drawn over maps their home world was too insignificant to grace. The Emperor and his council seemed so far away, and the oncoming storm of the insurrection churning sightless and unseen in the nearby stars laid a pall of creeping apprehension over everything. In every shadowed corner, people saw the ghosts of the unknown.

They were afraid; and people who were afraid easily became people who were angry, directing their terror outwards against any slight, real or imagined. Today’s killing was only the newest of many that had rolled across Iesta Veracrux in recent months; murders spawned from trivialities, suicides, panicked attacks on illusory threats. While life went on as it ever did, beneath the surface there lay a black mood infecting the whole populace, even as they pretended it did not exist. Had Jaared Norte become a victim of this as well? Yosef thought it likely.

They moved around a tall corner of containers and into a small courtyard formed by lines of crates. Overhead, another cargo ballute drifted slowly past, for a moment casting a broad oval shadow across the proceedings. A handful of other jagers were at work conducting fingertip sweeps of the location, a couple from the documentary office working complex forensic picters and sense-nets, another talking into a bulky wireless with a tall whip antenna. Skelta exchanged looks with one of the docos, and she gave him a rueful nod in return. Behind them all, there was a narrow but high storage shed with its doors splayed wide open. The reeve immediately spotted the patches of brown staining the metal doors.

He frowned, looking around at the identical rust-coloured greatcoats and peaked caps of the Sentine officers. ‘The Arbites are inside?’ Yosef nodded towards the shed.

Skelta gave a derisive sniff. ‘The Arbites are not here, sir. Called it in, as per the regulations. Lord Marshal’s office was unavailable. Asked to be kept informed, though.’

‘I’ll bet they did.’ Yosef grimaced. For all the grand words and high ideals spouted by the Adeptus Arbites, at least on Iesta Veracrux that particular branch of the Adeptus Terra was less interested in the policing of the planet than they were in being seen to be interested in it. The officers of the Sentine had been the lawmen and wardens of the Iestan system since the days of the colony’s founding in the First Establishment, and the installation of an office of the Arbites here during the Great Crusade had done little to change that state of affairs. The Lord Marshal and his staff seemed more than happy to remain in their imposing tower and allow the Sentine to function as they always had, handling all the ‘local’ matters. Quite what the Arbites considered to be other than local had never, in twenty years of service, been made clear to Yosef Sabrat. The politics of the whole thing seemed to orbit at a level far beyond the reeve’s understanding.

He glanced at Skelta. ‘Do you have a read on the murder weapon?’

Skelta glanced at the doco officer again, as if asking permission. ‘Not exactly. Bladed weapon, probably. For starters. There might have been, uh, other tools used.’ What little colour there was on the jager’s face seemed to ebb away and he swallowed hard.

Yosef stopped on the threshold of the shed. A slaughterhouse stink of blood and faeces hit him hard and his nostrils twitched. ‘Witnesses?’ he added.

Skelta pointed upwards, towards a spotlight tower. ‘There are security imagers on the lighting stands, but they didn’t get anything. Angle was too shallow for the optics to pick up a likeness.’

The reeve filed that information away; whoever had made the kill knew the layout of the airdocks, then. ‘Canvass every other imager in a half-kilometre radius, pull the memory coils and have some of the recruits sift them. We might get lucky.’ He took a long inhalation, careful to breathe through his mouth. ‘Let’s see this, then.’

He went in, and Skelta hesitantly followed a few steps behind. Inside, the shed was gloomy, lit only by patches of watery sunshine coming in by degrees through low windows and the hard-edged glares of humming portable arc lamps. On splayed tripod legs, a quad of gangly field emitters stood at the corners of an ill-defined square, a faint yellow glow connecting each to its neighbours. The permeable energy membrane allowed objects above a certain mass or kinetic energy to pass through unhindered, but kept particulates and other micro-scale matter in situ to aid with on-site forensics.

Yosef’s brow creased in a frown as he approached the field; the area of open, shadowed floor between the emitters seemed at first glance to be empty. He stepped through the barrier and the stench in the air intensified. Glancing over his shoulder he saw that Skelta had not followed him through, instead remaining outside the line at stiff attention, his gaze directed anywhere but at the scene of the crime.

The stone floor was awash in dark arterial blood, and there were fleshy shapes scattered randomly in the shallow little sea of rippling crimson. Ropes of what had to be intestine, shiny lumps of organ meat that caught the light, and other things pasty-white and streaked with fluid. An array of butcher slab remnants, discarded not in haste but with disinterest.

The reeve felt disgust and confusion in equal measure, but he reined them in and let his sharp eye take the lead. He looked for patterns and impressions. It had been done with care and precision, this. No crime of passion, no murder of opportunity. Cool, calm and without fear of discovery. Yosef peered into the shadows, the first questions forming in his mind.

How had this been done and kept silent enough that no one had heard it? With so much blood shed, had the killer been tainted, left a trace? And where…? Where was…?

Yosef stopped short and blinked. The pool of blood was in gentle motion, small swells crossing it back and forth. He heard tiny hollow splashes here and there. ‘The remains…’ he began, glancing back at Skelta. ‘There’s not enough for a corpse. Where’s Norte’s body?’

The jager had one hand to his mouth, and with the other he gingerly pointed upwards. Yosef raised his eyes to the roof and there he found the rest of Jaared Norte.

The drivesman’s body had been opened in a manner that the reeve had only seen in use by morticians – or rather, in a manner that was an extreme variation on the cuts used for a post-mortem examination. Iron impact rods, the kind of heavy bolts used by building labourers to secure construction work to sheer cliff sides, had been used to nail Norte to the ceiling of the shed. One through each ankle, another through the meat of the forearms, the limbs splayed out in an X-shaped stance. Then, slices across the torso at oblique angles had enabled the killer to peel back the epidermis of the torso, the neck and face. These cuts created pennants of skin that each came to a point; one to the right and to the left, another down across the groin and the last torn up over the bloody grinning mess of the skull to rise over the dead man’s head. Four more impact rods secured the tips of these wet rags of meat in place. From the opened confines of the man’s body, loops of dislodged muscle and broken spars of bone pointed down towards the blood pool, weeping fluid.

‘Have you ever seen anything like that?’ managed Skelta, his voice thick with revulsion. ‘It’s horrific.’

Yosef’s first thought was of a sculpture, of an artwork. Against the dark metal plates of the shed’s roof, the drivesman had been made into a star with eight points.

‘I don’t know,’ whispered the reeve.

Two

The Shrouds
Masked
A Common Blade

The Imperial Palace was more city than stronghold, vast and ornate in the majesty of its sprawling scope, towers, pinnacles and great monoliths of stone and gold that swept from horizon to jagged horizon. Landscapes that in millennia past had been a patchwork of nation-states and sovereignties were now buried beneath the grand unity of the Empire of Humanity, and its greatest monument. The dominions of the palace encompassed whole settlements and satellite townships, from the confines of the Petitioner’s City to the ranges of the Elysium Domes, across the largest star-port in the Sol system and down to the awesome spectacle of the Eternity Gate. Millions toiled within its outer walls in service to the Imperium, many living their lives without ever leaving the silver arcology ziggurats where they were born, served, and died.

This was the shining, beating heart of all human endeavour, the throne and the birthplace of a species that stood astride the galaxy, its splendour and dignity vast enough that no one voice could ever hope to encompass them with mere words. Terra and her greatness were the jewel in the Imperial crown, bright and endless.

And yet; within a metropolis that masqueraded as a continent, there were a myriad of ghost rooms and secret places. There were corners where the light did not fall – some of them created for just that purpose.

There was a chamber known as the Shrouds. Inside the confines of the Inner Palace, if one could have gazed upon the schematics of those bold artisans who laid the first stones of the gargantuan city-state, no trace of the room or its entrances would have been apparent. To all intents and purposes, this place did not exist, and even those who had need to know of its reality could not have pinpointed it on a map. If one could not find the Shrouds, then one was not meant to.

There were many ways to the chamber, and those who met there might know of one or two – hidden passageways concealed in the tromp l’oeil artworks of the Arc Galleries; a shaft behind the captured waterfall at the Annapurna Gate; the blind corridor near the Great Orrery; the Solomon Folly and the ghost switch in the sapphire elevator at the Western Vantage; these and others, some unused for centuries. Those summoned to the Shrouds would emerge into a labyrinth of ever-shifting corridors that defied all attempts to map them, guided by a mech-intellect that would navigate them to the room and never twice by the same route. All that could be certain was that the chamber was atop a tower, one of thousands ranged in sentry rows across the inner bulwarks of the Palace, and even that was a supposition, based on the weak patina of daylight allowed to penetrate the sailcloth-thick blinds that forever curtained the great oval windows about the room. Some suspected that the light might be a deception, a falsehood filtered through trick glass or even totally simulated. Perhaps the chamber was deep underground, or perhaps there were more than one of them, a suite of dozens of identical rooms so exacting in similarity that to tell them apart would be impossible.

And once within, there was no place on Earth more secure, save for the Emperor’s Throne Room itself. None could listen in upon words spoken in a place that did not exist, that could not be found. The walls of the chamber, dark mahogany panels adorned with minimalist artworks and a few lume-globes, concealed layers of instrumentality that rendered the room and everything in it completely dead to the eyes and ears of any possible surveillance. There were counter-measures that fogged radiation detection frequencies, devices that swallowed sound and heat and light, working alongside slivers of living neural matter broadcasting the telepathic equivalent of white noise across all psychic spectra. There was even a rumour that the chamber was cloaked by a field of disruption that actually dislocated local space-time by several fractions of a second, allowing the room to exist a heartbeat into the future and out of reach of the rest of the universe.

In the Shrouds there was a table, a long octagon of polished rosewood, and upon it a simple hololithic projector casting a cool glow over the assembled men and women gathered there. In deep, comfortable seats, six of them clustered around one end of the table, while a seventh sat alone at the head. The eighth did not sit, but instead stood just beyond the range of the light, content to be little more than a tall shape made up of shadows and angles.

The seven at the table had faces of porcelain and precious metals. Masks covered their countenances from brow-line to neck, and like the room they were in, these outer concealments were far more than they appeared. Each mask was loaded with advanced technologies, data-libraries, sensoria, even microweapons, and each had a different aspect that was the mirror of its wearer; only the man at the head of the table wore a face with no affectation. His mask was simple and silver, as if it had been carved from polished steel, with only the vaguest impression of a brow, eyes, a nose and mouth. Reflected in its sheen, the panes of information shown by the hololith turned slowly, allowing everyone in the room to read them.

What was written there was damning and disappointing in equal measure.

‘Then he is dead,’ said a woman’s voice, the tone filtered through a fractal baffle that rendered her vocal pattern untraceable. Her mask was black and it fit skin-close, almost like a hood made of silk; only the large oval rubies that were her eyes broke the illusion. ‘The report here makes that clear.’

‘Quick to judge, as ever,’ came a throaty whisper, similarly filtered, from a motionless mask that resembled a distended, hydrocephalic skull. ‘We should hold for certainty, Siress Callidus.’

The ruby eyes glared across the table. ‘My esteemed Sire Culexus,’ came the terse reply. ‘How long would you have us wait? Until the revolt reaches our door?’ She turned her jewelled gaze on the only other woman seated at the table, a figure whose face was hidden behind an elegant velvet visor of green and gold, vaned with lines of droplet pearls and dark emeralds. ‘Our sister’s agent has failed. As I said he would.’

The woman in the green mask stiffened, and leaned back in her chair, distancing herself from the ire of Callidus. Her reply was frosty and brittle. ‘I would note that none of you have yet been able to place an operative so close to the Warmaster as Clade Venenum did. Tobeld was one of my finest students, equal to the task he was set upon–’

That drew a derisive grunt from a hulking male behind a grinning, fang-toothed rictus made of bone and gunmetal. ‘If he was equal to it, then why isn’t the turncoat dead? All that time wasted and for what? To give the traitors a fresh corpse at Horus’s doorstep?’ He made a spitting sound.

Siress Venenum’s eyes narrowed behind their disguise. ‘However little you think of my clade, dear Eversor, your record to date gives you no cause to preen.’ She drew herself up. ‘What have you contributed to this mission other than a few messy and explosive deaths?’

The fanged mask regarded her, anger radiating out from the man behind it. ‘My agents have brought fear!’ he spat. ‘Each kill has severed the head of a key insurrectionist element!’

‘Not to mention countless collaterals,’ offered a dry, dour voice. The comment emerged from behind a standard-issue spy mask, no different from the kind issued to every one of the sniper operatives of Clade Vindicare. ‘We need a surgeon’s touch to excise the Archtraitor. A scalpel, not a firebomb.’

Sire Eversor let out a low growl. ‘When the day comes that someone invents a rifle you can fire from the safety of your chair and still hit Horus half a galaxy away, you can save us all. But until then, hide behind your gun sight and stay silent!’

The sixth figure at the far end of the table cleared his throat, cocking his head. His mask, a thing made of glassy layers that reflected granulated, randomised images, flickered in the dimness. ‘If I might address Sire Culexus and Siress Callidus?’ said Sire Vanus. ‘My clade’s predictive engines and our most diligent infocytes have concluded, based on all available data and prognostic simulations, that the probability of Tobeld’s survival to complete his mission was zero point two percent. Margin of error negligible. However, it did represent an improvement in proximity-to-target over all Officio Assassinorum operations to date.’

‘A mile or an inch,’ hissed Culexus, ‘it doesn’t matter if the kill was lost.’

Siress Callidus looked up the table towards the man in the silver mask. ‘I want to activate a new operative,’ she began. ‘Her name is M’Shen, she is one of the best of my clade and I–’

‘Tobeld was the best of the Venenum!’ snapped Sire Vindicare, with sudden annoyance. ‘Just as Hoswalt was the best of mine, just as Eversor sent his best and so on and so on! But we’re throwing our most gifted students into a meat-grinder, sending them in blind and half-prepared! Every strike against Horus breaks, and he shrugs it off without notice!’ He shook his head grimly. ‘Is this what we have been reduced to? Every time we meet, listening to a catalogue of each other’s failures?’ The masked man spread his arms, taking in his five cohorts. ‘We all remember that day on Mount Vengeance. The pact we made in the shadow of the Great Crusade, the oath that breathed life into the Officio Assassinorum. For decades we have hunted down the enemies of our Emperor through stealth and subterfuge. We have shown them there is no safe place to hide.’ Sire Vindicare shot a look at Sire Vanus. ‘What did he say that day?’

Vanus answered immediately, his mask shimmering. ‘No world shall be beyond my rule. No enemy shall be beyond my wrath.’

Sire Culexus nodded solemnly. ‘No enemy…’ he repeated. ‘No enemy but Horus, so it seems.’

‘No!’ snarled Callidus. ‘I can kill him.’ The man in the silver mask remained silent and she went on, imploring. ‘I will kill him, if only you will give me leave to do so!’

‘You will fail as well!’ snarled Eversor. ‘My clade is the only one capable of the deed! The only one ruthless enough to end the Warmaster’s life!’

At once, it seemed as if every one of the masters and mistresses were about to launch into the same tirade, but before they could begin, the silver mask resonated with a single word of command. ‘Silence.’

The chamber became quiet, and the Master of Assassins took a breath before speaking again. ‘This rivalry and bickering serves no purpose,’ he began, his voice level and firm. ‘In all the history of this group, there has never been a target whose retirement required more than one mission to prosecute. To date, the Horus problem has claimed eight Officio operatives across all six of the primary clades. Each of you are the first of your clade, the founders… And yet you sit here and jostle for supremacy over one another instead of giving me the kill we so desperately want! I demand a solution to rid us of the Emperor’s turbulent and wayward son.’

Sire Eversor spoke. ‘I will commit every active agent in my clade. All of them, all at once. If I must spend the lives of every last Eversor to kill Horus, then so be it.’

For the first time since the group had assembled, the silent figure in the hooded robes made a sound; a soft grunt of disagreement.

‘Our visitor has something to add,’ said Sire Vanus.

The Master of Assassins inclined his head towards the shadows. ‘Is that so?’

The hooded man moved slightly, enough that he became better defined by the glow-light, but not so much that his face could be discerned inside the depths of the robe. ‘None of you are soldiers,’ he rumbled, his deep tones carrying across the room. ‘You are so used to working alone, as your occupation demands, that you forget a rule of all conflict. Force doubled is force squared.’

‘Did I not just say such a thing?’ snapped Sire Eversor.

The hooded man ignored the interruption. ‘I have heard you all speak. I have seen your mission plans. They were not flawed. They were simply not enough.’ He nodded to himself. ‘No single assassin, no matter how well-trained, no matter which clade they come from, could ever hope to terminate the Archtraitor alone. But a collective of your killers…’ He nodded again. ‘That might be enough.’

‘A strike team…’ mused Sire Vindicare.

‘An Execution Force,’ corrected the Master. ‘An elite unit hand-picked for the task.’

Sire Vanus frowned behind his mask. ‘Such a suggestion… There is no precedent for something like this. The Emperor will not approve of it.’

‘Oh?’ said Callidus. ‘What makes you so certain?’

The master of Clade Vanus leaned forward, the perturbations of his image-mask growing more agitated. ‘The veils of secrecy preserve all that we are,’ he insisted. ‘For decades we have worked in the shadows of the Imperium, at the margins of the Emperor’s knowledge, and for good reason. We serve him in deeds that he must never know of, in order to maintain his noble purity, and to do so there are conventions we have always followed.’ He shot a look at the hooded man. ‘A code of ethics. Rules of conflict.’

‘Agreed,’ ventured Siress Venenum. ‘The deployment of an assassin is a delicate matter and never one taken lightly. We have in the past fielded two or three on a single mission when the circumstances were most extreme, but then always from the same clade, and always after much deliberation.’

Vanus was nodding. ‘Six at once, from every prime clade? You cannot expect the Emperor to sanction such a thing. It is simply… not done.’

The Master of Assassins was silent for a long moment; then he steepled his fingers in front of him, pressing the apex of them to the lips of his silver face. ‘What I expect is that each clade’s Director Primus will obey my orders without question. These “rules” of which you speak, Vanus… Tell me, does Horus Lupercal adhere to them as strongly as you do?’ He didn’t raise his voice, but his tone brooked no disagreement. ‘Do you believe that the Archtraitor will baulk at a tactic because it offends the manners of those at court? Because it is not done?’

‘He bombed his sworn brethren, his own men even, into obliteration,’ said Sire Vindicare. ‘I doubt anything is beyond him.’

The Master nodded. ‘And if we are to kill this foe, we cannot limit ourselves to the moral abstracts that have guided us in the past. We must dare to exceed them.’ He paused. ‘This will be done.’

‘My lord–’ began Vanus, reaching out a hand.

‘It is so ordered,’ said the man in the silver mask, with finality. ‘This discussion is at an end.’

When the others had taken their leave through the doorways of the Shrouds, and after the psyber eagles nesting hidden in the apex of the ceiling had circled the room to ensure there were no new listening devices in place, the Master of Assassins allowed himself a moment to give a deep sigh. And then, with care, he reached up and removed the silver mask, the dermal pads releasing their contact from the flesh of his face. He shook his head, allowing a grey cascade of hair to emerge and pool upon his shoulders, over the pattern of the nondescript robes he wore. ‘I think I need a drink,’ he muttered. His voice sounded nothing like the one that had issued from the lips of the mask; but then that was to be expected. The Master of Assassins was a ghost among ghosts, known only to the leaders of the clades as one of the High Lords of Terra; but as to which of the Emperor’s council he was, that was left for them to suspect. There were five living beings who knew the true identity of the Officio’s leader, and two of them were in this room.

A machine-slave ambled over and offered up a gold-etched glass of brandy-laced black tea. ‘Will you join me, my friend?’ he asked.

‘If it pleases the Sigillite, I will abstain,’ said the hooded man.

‘As you wish.’ For a brief moment, the man who stood at the Emperor’s right hand, the man who wore the rank of Regent of Terra, studied his careworn face in the curvature of the glass. Malcador was himself once more, the cloak of the Master of Assassins gone and faded, the identity shuttered away until the next time it was needed.

He took a deep draught of the tea, and savoured it. He sighed. The effects of the counter-psionics in the room were not enough to cause him any serious ill-effect, but their presence was like the humming of an invisible insect, irritating the edges of his witch-sight. As he sometimes did in these moments, Malcador allowed himself to wonder which of the clade leaders had an idea of who he might really be. The Sigillite knew that if he put his will to it, he could uncover the true faces of every one of the Directors Primus. But he had never pursued this matter; there had never been the need. The fragile state of grace in which the leaders of the Officio Assassinorum existed had served to keep them all honest; no single Sire or Siress could ever know if their colleagues, their subordinates, even their lovers were not behind the masks they saw about the table. The group had been born in darkness and secrecy, and now it could only live there as long as the rules of its existence were adhered to.

Rules that Malcador had just broken.

His companion finally gave himself up to the light and stepped into full visibility, walking around the table with slow, steady steps. The hooded man was large, towering over the Sigillite where he sat in his chair. As big as a warrior of the Adeptus Astartes, out of the darkness the man who had observed the meeting was a threat made flesh, and he moved with a grace that caused his rust-coloured robes to flow like water. A hand, tawny of skin and scarred, reached up and pulled back the voluminous hood over a shorn skull and queue of dark hair, to reveal a face that was grim and narrow of eye. At his throat, gold-flecked brands in the shapes of lightning bolts were just visible past the open collar.

‘Speak your mind, Captain-General,’ said Malcador, reading his aura. ‘I can see the disquiet coming off you like smoke from a fire pit.’

Constantin Valdor, Chief Custodian of the Legio Custodes, spared him a glance that other men would have withered under. ‘I have said all I need to say,’ Valdor replied. ‘For better or for worse.’ The warrior’s hand dropped to the table top and he absently traced a finger over the wood. He looked around; Malcador had no doubts that the Custodian Guardsman had spent his time in this chamber working out where the room might actually be located.

The Sigillite drowned the beginnings of a waxen smile in another sip of the bittersweet tea. ‘I confess, I had not expected you to do anything other than observe,’ he began. ‘But instead you broke open the pattern of the usual parry and riposte that typically comprises these meetings.’

Valdor paused, looking away from him. ‘Why did you ask me here, my lord?’

‘To watch,’ Malcador replied. ‘I wanted to ask your counsel after the fact–’

The Custodian turned, cutting him off. ‘Don’t lie to me. You didn’t ask me to join you in this place just for my silence.’ Valdor studied him. ‘You knew exactly what I would say.’

Malcador let the smile out, at last. ‘I… had an inkling.’

Valdor’s lips thinned. ‘I hope you are pleased with the outcome, then.’

The Sigillite sensed the warrior was about to leave, and he spoke again quickly to waylay him. ‘I am surprised in some measure, it must be said. After all, you are the expression of Imperial strength and nobility. You are the personal guard of the Lord of Earth, as pure a warrior-kindred as many might aspire to become. And in that, I would have thought you of all men would consider the tactics of the Assassinorum to be…’ He paused, feeling for the right word. ‘Underhanded. Dishonourable, even?’

Valdor’s face shifted, but not towards annoyance as Malcador had expected. Instead he smiled without humour. ‘If that was a feint to test me, Sigillite, it was a poor one. I expected better of you.’

‘It’s been a long day,’ Malcador offered.

‘The Legio Custodes have done many things your assassins would think beyond us. The sires and siresses are not the only ones who have marque to operate under… special conditions.’

‘Your charter is quite specific on the Legio’s zone of responsibility.’ Malcador felt a frown forming. This conversation was not going where he had expected it to.

‘If you wish,’ Valdor said, with deceptive lightness. ‘My duty is to preserve the life of the Emperor of Mankind above all else. That is accomplished through many different endeavours. The termination of the traitor-son Horus Lupercal and the clear and present danger he represents, no matter how it is brought to pass, serves my duty.’

‘So, you really believe that a task force of killers could do this?’

Valdor gave a slight shrug of his huge shoulders. ‘I believe they have a chance, if the pointless tensions between the clades can be arrested.’

Malcador smiled. ‘You see, Captain-General? I did not lie. I wanted your insight. You have given it to me.’

‘I haven’t finished,’ said the warrior. ‘Vanus was right. This mission will not please the Emperor when he learns of it, and he will learn of it when I tell him every word that was spoken in this room today.’

The Sigillite’s smile vanished. ‘That would be an error, Custodian. A grave misjudgement on your part.’

‘You cannot have such hubris as to believe that you know better than he?’ Valdor said, his tone hardening.

‘Of course not!’ Malcador snapped in return, his temper flaring. ‘But you know as well as I do that in order to protect the sanctity of Terra and our liege-lord, some things must be kept in the dark. The Imperium is at a delicate point, and we both know it. All the effort we have spent on the Great Crusade, and the Emperor’s works, all of that has been placed in most dire jeopardy by Horus’s insurrection. The conflicts being fought at this very moment are not just on the battlefields of distant worlds and in the void of space! They are in hearts and minds, and other realms less tangible. But now, here is the opportunity to fight in the shadows, unseen and unremarked. To have this bloody deed done without setting the galaxy ablaze in its wake! A swift ending. The head of the snake severed with a single blow.’ He took a long breath. ‘But many may see it as ignoble. Use it against us. And for a father to sanction the execution of his son… Perhaps it may be beyond the pale. And that is why some things cannot be spoken of outside this chamber.’

Valdor folded his muscular arms over his chest and stared down at Malcador. ‘That statement has all the colour of an order,’ he said. ‘But who gives it, I wonder? The Master of Assassins, or the Regent of Terra?’

The Sigillite’s eyes glittered in the gloom. ‘Decide for yourself,’ he said.

Before the Emperor’s enlightenment, the Sentine’s precinct house had been a place of idolatry and ancestor worship. Once, the bodies of the rich and those judged worthy had been buried in crypts beneath the main hall, and great garish statuary and other extravagant gewgaws had filled every corner of the building, with cloisters and naves leading here and there to chapels for every deity the First Establishment had brought with them from Old Earth. Now the crypts were cells and memory stacks, armouries and storage lockers. The chapels had different tenants now, icons called security and vigilance, and all the artworks and idols were crushed and gone, a few saved in museums as indicators of a less sophisticated past. All this had taken place a long time before Yosef Sabrat had been born, however. There were barely a handful of living citizens on Iesta Veracrux who could recall any vestiges of a past with religion in it.

The cathedral’s second life as a place of justice served the building well. It was just as impressive a home for the Sentine as it had been for the long-departed priests. Sabrat crossed the long axis of the main hall, past the open waiting quad where citizens queued and argued with the luckless jagers on desk duty, and through the checkpoint where an impassive, watchful gun-servitor licked his face with a fan of green laser light before letting him by. He threw a cursory nod to a group of other reeves from the West Catchment, all of them gathered around a nynemen board with tapers of scrip, waving off an invite to join them in a game; instead he took the spiral stairs up to the second level. The upper floors were almost a building inside a building, a multi-storey blockhouse that had been constructed inside the hangar-like confines of the main hall, and retrofitted into the structure. The room was in the same state of shabby, half-controlled clutter as it ever was, with bales of rough vinepaper and starkly shot picts arranged in loose piles that represented some sort of untidy order, if only one knew how to interpret it. In the centre of the room, a pillar studded with brass communication sockets sprouted thick rubber-sheathed cables that snaked to headsets or to hololiths. One of them ended in a listening rig around the head of Yosef’s cohort, who sat bent over in a chair, listening with his eyes closed, fingers absently toying with a gold aquila on a chain about his wrist.

‘Daig.’ Yosef stopped in front of the man and called his name. When he didn’t respond, the reeve snapped his fingers loudly. ‘Wake up!’

Reeve Daig Segan opened his eyes and let out a sigh. ‘This isn’t sleep, Yosef. This is deep thought. Have you ever had one of those?’ He took off the headset and looked up at him. Yosef heard the tinny twitter of a synthetic voice from the speakers, reading out the text of an incident report in a clicking monotone.

Daig was a study in contrasts to his cohort. Where Sabrat was of slightly above average height, narrow-shouldered, clean-shaven and sandy-haired, Segan was stocky and not without jowls, his hair curly and unkempt around a perpetually dejected expression. He managed another heavy sigh, as if the weight of the world were pressing down upon him. ‘There’s no point in me listening to this a second time,’ he went on, tugging the rig’s jack plug from its socket on the pillar with a snap of his wrist. ‘Skelta’s reports are just as dull with the machine reading them to me as him doing it.’

Yosef frowned. ‘What I saw out there wasn’t any stripe of dull.’ He glanced down and saw a spread of picts from the storage shed crime scene. Even rendered in light-drenched black and white, the horror of it did not lessen. Mirrors of liquid were in every image, and the sight of them brought sense memory abruptly back into the reeve’s forebrain. He blinked the sensation away.

Daig saw him do it. ‘You all right?’ he asked, concern furrowing his brow. ‘Need a moment?’

‘No,’ Yosef said firmly. ‘You said you had something new?’

Daig’s head bobbed. ‘Not so new. More like a confirmation of something we already suspected.’ He searched for a moment through the papers and data-slates before he found a sheaf of inky printout. ‘Analysis of the cutting gave up a pattern that matches a type of industrial blade.’

‘Medical?’ Yosef recalled his impression of the almost clinical lines of the mutilation; but Daig shook his head.

‘Viticultural, actually.’ The other reeve pawed through a box at his feet and produced a plastic case, opening it to reveal a wickedly curved knife with a knurled handle. ‘I brought one up from evidentiary so we’d have an example to look at.’

Yosef recognised it instantly, and his hand twitched as he resisted the urge to reach for it. A harvestman’s blade, one of the most familiar tools on the planet, made by the millions for Iesta Veracrux’s huge army of agricultural workers. Blades exactly like this one were used in every vineyard, and they were as commonplace as the grapes they were used to cut. Being so widespread, of course, they were also the most common tool of murder on Iesta – but Yosef had never seen such a blade used for so ornate a killing as the one at the airdocks. To use the crude tool for so fine a cutting would have required both great skill and no little time to accomplish it. ‘What in Terra’s name are we dealing with?’ he muttered.

‘It’s a ritual,’ said Daig, with a certainty that seemed to come from nowhere. ‘It can’t be anything else.’ He put the blade aside and gestured at the scattered files. As well as the tide of paperwork from the airdock murder, packets of fiche and other picts had arrived from a couple of the sub-precincts in the nearby arroyo territories, automatically flagged by the reports of the incident sent out on the planetwide watch-wire. There had been other deaths, and while the nature of them had not been exactly the same as Jaared Norte’s, elements of similar methodology were expressed in each. Daig had suggested that their killer was ‘maturing’ with each assault, growing more confident in what they wished to convey with their deeds.

This was not Iesta Veracrux’s first serial murder spree. But it seemed different from all the others that had gone before it, in a manner that Yosef could not yet fully articulate.

‘What I don’t fathom,’ began a voice from behind them, ‘is how in Stars the bugger got the poor fool up on the ceiling.’ Yosef and Daig turned to where Reeve Warden Berts Laimner stood, a fan of picts in his meaty paw. Laimner was a big man, dark-skinned and always smiling, even now in a small way at the sight of Norte’s grotesque death; but the warm expression was always a falsehood, masking a character that was self-serving and oily. ‘What do you think, Sabrat?’

Yosef framed a noncommittal answer. ‘We’re looking into that, Warden.’

Laimner gave a chuckle that set Yosef’s teeth on edge and discarded the images. ‘Well, I hope you’ve got a better reply than that up your sleeve.’ He pointed across the room to an entranceway. ‘The High-Reeve is just outside that door. She wants to weigh in on this.’

Daig actually let out a little groan, and Yosef felt himself sag inside. If the precinct commander was putting her hand on this case, then the investigators could be certain that their job was about to become twice as hard.

As if Laimner’s words had been a magical summons, the door opened and High-Reeve Kata Telemach entered the office with an assistant trailing her. Telemach’s appearance was like a shock going through the room, and every reeve and jager scrambled to look as if they were working hard and being diligent. She didn’t appear to notice, instead making a direct line for Yosef and Daig. The woman was wearing a well-pressed dress uniform, and around her neck was a gold rod with one single silver band around it.

‘I was just telling Reeves Sabrat and Segan of your interest, ma’am,’ said Laimner.

The commander seemed distracted. ‘Progress?’ she asked. The woman had a sharp face and hard eyes.

‘We’re building a solid foundation,’ offered Daig, equally as good at giving non-answers as his cohort was. He swallowed. ‘There are some matters of cross-jurisdictional circumstance that might become an issue later, however.’ He was about to say more, but Telemach shot Laimner a look as if to say Haven’t you dealt with this already?

‘That will not be a concern, Reeve. I have just returned from an audience with the Lord Marshal of the Adeptus Arbites.’

‘Oh?’ Yosef tried to keep any sarcasm out of his voice.

Telemach went on. ‘The Arbites have a lot of wine in their glass at the moment. They’re engaged in a few operations across the planet. This… case doesn’t need to be added to that workload.’

Operations. That seemed to be the current word of choice to describe the actions of the Arbites on Iesta Veracrux. A colourless, open term that belied the reality of what they were actually doing – which was quietly dredging the lower cities and the upper echelons alike for the slightest evidence of any anti-Imperial sedition and pro-Horus thinking, ruthlessly stamping out anything that might blossom into actual treason.

‘It’s only bodies,’ noted Laimner, in an off-hand manner.

‘Exactly,’ said the High-Reeve. ‘And quite frankly, the Sentine are better suited for this sort of police work. The Arbites are not native to this world, and we are. We know it better than they ever will.’

‘Just so,’ offered Yosef.

Telemach graced them with a tight smile. ‘I want to deal with this in a swift and firm manner. I think the Lord Marshal and his masters back on Terra could do with a reminder that we Iestans can deal with our own problems.’

Yosef nodded here, partly because he knew he was supposed to, and partly because Telemach had just confirmed for him her real reason for wanting the case closed quickly. It was no secret that the High-Reeve had designs on the rank of Landgrave, head of all Sentine forces across the planet; and for her to get that, the current incumbent – and so the rumours went, her lover – would need to rise to the only role open to him, the Imperial Governorship of the planet. The Landgrave’s only real competition for that posting was the Lord Marshal of the Arbites. Showing a decisive posture towards a crime like this one would count for a lot when the time for new installations was nigh.

‘We’re investigating all avenues of interest,’ said Laimner.

The High-Reeve tapped a finger on her lips. ‘I want you to pay special attention to any connection with those religious fanatics that are showing up in the Falls and out at Breghoot.’

‘The Theoge,’ Laimner offered helpfully, with a sniff. ‘Odd bunch.’

‘With respect,’ said Daig, ‘they’re hardly fanatics. They’re just–’

Telemach didn’t let him finish. ‘Odium spreads wherever it takes root, Reeve. The Emperor did not guide the Great Crusade to us for nothing. I won’t have superstition find purchase in this city or any other on my watch, is that clear?’ She eyed Yosef. ‘The Theoge is an underground cult, forbidden by Imperial law. Find the connection between them and this crime, gentlemen.’

If it exists or not, Yosef added silently.

‘You have an understanding of my interest, then?’ she concluded.

He nodded once more. ‘Indeed I do, ma’am. We’ll do our best.’

Telemach sniffed. ‘Do better than that, Sabrat.’

She walked on, and Laimner fell in step with her, shooting him a weak grin as they moved off.

‘It’s only bodies,’ parroted Yosef, in a pinched imitation of the Warden’s voice as he watched them go. ‘What he means, it’s only little people dead so far. No one he has any interest in.’ He blew out a breath.

Daig’s expression had become more pessimistic than normal. ‘Where does that effluent about the Theoge come from?’ he muttered. ‘What could they possibly have to do with serial murders? Everything Telemach knows about those people comes from rumours, trash based on nothing but hearsay and bigotry.’

Yosef raised an eyebrow. ‘You know better, do you?’

He shrugged. ‘Clearly not,’ said the other man, after a moment.

After he had put Ivak to bed, Yosef returned to the living room and took a seat by the radiator. He smiled to see that his wife had poured a glass of the good mistwater for him, and he sipped it as she set the autolaunder to work in the back room.

Yosef lost himself in the honeyed swirl of the drink and let his mind drift. In the fluids he saw strange oceans, vast and unknown. Somehow, the sight of them rested him, the perturbations soothing his thoughts.

When Renia coughed, he looked up with a start, spilling a drop down the side of the glass. His wife had entered the room and he had been so captured by reverie that he had not even been aware of her.

She gave him a worried look. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes.’

Renia was not convinced. Fifteen years of loving someone gave you that kind of insight as a matter of course. And because of that, she didn’t press him. His wife knew his job, and she knew that he did his best to leave it at the precinct every time he came home. Instead she asked him, just once. ‘Do you need to talk?’

He took a sip of the wine and didn’t look at her. ‘Not yet.’

She changed the subject, but not enough for Yosef’s comfort. ‘There was an incident at Ivak’s schola today. A boy taken out of classes.’

‘Why?’

‘Ivak said it was because of a game some of the older children were playing. The Warmaster and the Emperor, they called it.’ Yosef put down the glass as she went on. Somehow, he already knew what Renia was going to say. ‘This boy, he went on about the Warmaster. Ivak’s teachers heard him and they reported it.’

‘To the Arbites?’

She nodded. ‘Now people are talking. Or else they are not talking at all.’

Yosef’s lips thinned. ‘Everyone is uncertain,’ he said, at length. ‘Everyone is afraid of what’s behind the horizon… But this sort of thing… It’s foolishness.’

‘I’ve heard rumours,’ she began. ‘Stories from people who know people on other worlds, in other systems.’

He had heard the same thing, hushed whispers in the corners of the precinct from men who couldn’t moderate the sound of their voices. Rumour and counter-rumour. Reports of terrible things, of black deeds – sometimes the same deeds – attributed to those in service of the Warmaster and the Emperor of Mankind.

‘People who used to talk freely are going silent to me,’ she added.

‘Because I’m your husband?’ Off her nod he frowned. ‘I’m not an Arbites!’

‘I think the Lord Marshal’s men are making it worse,’ she said. ‘Before, there was nothing that could not be said, no debate that could not be aired without prejudice. But now… After the insurrection…’ Her words lost momentum and faded.

Renia needed something from him, some assurance that would ease what troubled her, but as Yosef searched himself for it, he found nothing to give. He opened his mouth to speak, not sure of what he would tell her, and somewhere outside the house glass shattered against bricks.

He was immediately on his feet, at the window, peering through the slats. Raised voices met him. Down below, where the road snaked past the stairs to his front door, he saw a group of four youths surrounding a fifth. They were brandishing bottles like clubs. As he watched, the fifth stumbled backwards over the broken glass and fell to his haunches.

Renia was already opening the wooden case on the wall where the watch-wire terminal sat. She gave him a questioning look and he nodded. ‘Call it in.’

He snatched his greatcoat from the hook in the hall as she shouted after him. ‘Be careful!’

Yosef heard feet on the stairs behind him and turned, one hand on the latch, to see Ivak silhouetted in the gloom. ‘Father?’

‘Go back to bed,’ he told the boy. ‘I’ll just be a moment.’

He put his warrant rod around his neck and went out.

By the time he got to the road, they had started throwing punches at the youth on the ground. He heard yelling and once again, the name rose up at him, shouted like a blood-curse. Horus.

The fifth youth was bleeding and trying to protect himself by holding his arms up around his head. Yosef saw a particularly hard and fast haymaker blow come slamming in from the right, knocking the boy down.

The reeve flicked his wrist and the baton he carried in his sleeve pocket dropped into his palm. With a whickering hiss, the memory-metal tube extended to four times its length. Anger flared inside him and he shouted out ‘Sentine!’ even as he aimed a low sweeping blow at the knees of the nearest attacker.

The hit connected and the youth went down hard. The others reacted, falling back. One of them had a half-brick in his hand, weighing it like he was considering a throw. Yosef scanned their faces. They had scarves around their mouths and noses, but he knew railgangers when he saw them. These were young men from the loading terminals, who by day worked the cargo monorails that connected the airdocks to the vineyards, and by night made trouble and engaged in minor crime. But they were out of their normal patch in this residential district, apparently drawn here by their victim.

‘Bind him!’ shouted one of them, stabbing a finger at the injured youth. ‘He’s a traitor, that’s what he is! Whoreson traitor!’

‘No…’ managed the youth. ‘Am not…’

‘Sentine are no better!’ snarled the one with the half-brick. ‘All in it together!’ With a snarl he threw his missile, and Yosef batted it away, taking a glancing hit on his temple that made him stagger. The railgangers took this as a signal and broke into a run, scattering away down the curve of the street.

For a split second, Yosef was possessed by a fury so high that all he wanted to do was race after the thugs and beat them bloody into the cobbles; but then he forced that urge away and bent down to help the injured youth to his feet. The young man’s hand was wet where he had cut himself on the broken glass. ‘You all right?’ said the reeve.

The youth took a woozy step away from him. ‘Don’t… Don’t hurt me.’

‘I won’t,’ he told him. ‘I’m a lawman.’ Yosef’s skull was still ringing with the near-hit of the brick, but in a moment of odd perceptivity, he saw the lad had rolls of red-printed leaflets stuffed in his pocket. He grabbed the youth’s hand and snatched one from the bunch. It was a Theoge pamphlet, a page of dense text full of florid language and terms that meant nothing to him. ‘Where did you get these?’ he demanded.

In the glare of the streetlights, Yosef saw the youth’s pale face full on; the fear written large there was worse than that he had shown to the thugs with the bottles and bricks. ‘Leave me alone!’ he shouted, shoving the reeve back with both hands.

Yosef lost his balance – the pain in his head helping that along the way – and stumbled, fell. Shaking off the spreading ache, he saw the youth sprinting away, disappearing into the night. He cursed and tried to get to his feet.

The reeve’s hand touched something on the cobbles, a sharp, curved edge. At first he thought it was part of the scattering of broken glass, but the light fell on it a different way. Peering at the object, Yosef saw what it actually was. Discarded in the melee, dropped from the pocket of… who, he wondered?

It was a harvesting knife, worn with use and age.

Three

What Must Be Done
The Spear
Intervention

Stripped to the waist, Valdor strode into the sparring hall with his guardian spear raised high at the crook of his shoulder, the metal of the ornate halberd cool against his bare flesh; but what awaited him in the chamber was not the six combat robots he had programmed for his morning regimen, only a single figure in duty robes. He was tall and broad, big enough to look down at the Chief Custodian, even out of battle armour.

The figure turned, almost casually, from a rack holding weapons similar to the one Valdor carried. He was tracing the edge of the blade that hung beneath the heavy bolter mechanism at the tip of the metal staff, considering its merit in the way that a shrewd merchant might evaluate a bolt of fine silk before a purchase.

For a moment, the Custodian was unsure what protocol he was to observe; by rights, the sparring hall belonged to the Legio Custodes and so it could be considered their territory. For someone, a non-Custodian, to appear there unannounced was… impolitic. But the nature of the visitor – Valdor was loath to consider him an intruder – called such a thing into question. In the end, he chose to halt at the edge of the fighting quad and gave a shallow bow, erring on the side of respect. ‘My lord.’

‘Interesting weapon,’ came the reply. The voice was resonant and metered. ‘It appears overly ornate, archaic even. One quick to judge might even think it ineffective.’

‘Every weapon can be effective, if it is in the right hands.’

‘In the right hands.’ The figure at last gave Valdor his full attention. In the cold, sharp light tracing through the windows, the face of Rogal Dorn, Primarch of the Imperial Fists, was like chiselled granite.

For a moment, Valdor was tempted to offer Dorn the chance to try the use of the Custodes halberd-gun, but prudence warned him to hold his tongue. One did not simply challenge the master of an entire Astartes Legion to a sparring match, no matter how casually. Not unless one was prepared to take that challenge as far as it would go.

‘Why am I here?’ said Dorn, asking Valdor’s question for him. ‘Why am I here and not attendant to my duties out on the Palace walls?’

‘You wish to speak to me?’

Dorn continued, as if he had not heard his answer. The primarch glanced up at the ornate ceiling above them, which showed a frieze of jetbike-borne Custodians racing across the skyline of the Petitioner’s City. ‘I have blighted this place, Valdor. In the name of security, I have made this palace into a fortress. Replaced art with cannonades, gardens with kill zones, beauty with lethality. You understand why?’

Something in Dorn’s tone made the Custodian’s hand tighten on his weapon. ‘Because of the war. To protect your father.’

‘I take little pride in my defacement,’ Dorn replied. ‘But it must be done. For when Horus comes here, as he will, he must be met by our strength.’ He advanced a step. ‘Our honest strength, Valdor. Nothing less will suffice.’

Valdor remained silent, and Dorn gave him a level, demanding stare. In the quiet moment, the two of them measured one another as each would have gauged the lay of a battlefield before committing to combat.

The Imperial Fist broke the lengthening silence. ‘This palace and I… We know each other very well now. And I am not ignorant of what goes on in its halls, both those seen and those unseen.’ His heavy brow furrowed, as if a choice had been made in his thoughts. ‘We shall speak plainly, you and I.’

‘As you wish,’ said the Custodian.

Dorn eyed him. ‘I know the assassin clades and their shadow-killers are mounting an operation of large scope. I know this,’ he insisted. ‘I know you are involved.’

‘I am not a part of the Officio Assassinorum,’ Valdor told him. ‘I have no insight into their workings.’ It was a half-truth at best, and Dorn knew it.

‘I have always considered you a man of honour, Captain-General,’ said the Primarch. ‘But as I have learned to my cost, it sometimes becomes necessary to revise one’s opinion of a man’s character.’

‘If what you say was true, then you know it would be a matter of utmost secrecy.’

Dorn’s eyes flashed. ‘Meaning, if I am not informed of such a thing, then I should not know of it?’ He advanced again and Valdor stood his ground. The stoic, unchanging expression on the face of the Imperial Fist was, if anything, more disquieting than any snarl of annoyance. ‘I question the purpose of anything so clandestine. I am Adeptus Astartes, warrior by blood and by birth. I do not support the tactics of cowardice.’

Valdor let the guardian spear’s tip drop to the floor. ‘What some consider cowardly others might call expedient.’

Dorn’s expression shifted for a second, with a curling of his lip. ‘I have crossed paths with the agents of the Officio Assassinorum on the battlefield. Those encounters have never ended well. Their focus is always… too narrow. They are tools best suited for courtly intrigue and the games of empire. Not for war.’ He folded his arms. ‘Speak, Custodian. What do you know of this?’

Valdor stiffened. ‘I… can’t say.’

For a moment, the tension on the primarch’s face resonated through the room and Valdor’s knuckles whitened around the haft of his spear; then Dorn turned away. ‘That is unfortunate.’

The Custodian bristled at the warrior-lord’s demeaning tone. ‘We all want the same thing,’ he insisted. ‘To preserve the Emperor.’

‘No,’ Dorn looked up at the windows, and he allowed himself a sigh. ‘Your first remit is to safeguard the life of the Emperor of Mankind above all else. Mine, and that of my brothers, is to safeguard the Imperium.’

‘The two are the same,’ said Valdor. There was a flicker of uncertainty in his words that he did not expect.

‘Not so,’ Dorn said, as he left. ‘A narrow view, Custodian.’ The primarch paused on the threshold and spoke one last time, without looking back. ‘This conversation is not ended, Valdor.’

Cirsun Latigue liked to pretend that the aeronef belonged to him. When he left the Iestan capital of a night and took the languid flight back to his home in the Falls, he liked to place himself by the window of the little gondola slung beneath the cigar-shaped ballute and watch the hab-towers flash past, imagining the workadays from the service industries and the vineyards seeing him cruise along by, their faces lit with envy at someone of such importance. The gondola was no bigger than a monorail carriage, but it was opulently appointed with chaises and recessed automata for beverages and other services. For the most part, it served important clients or the urgent travel needs of upper tier management, but for a lot of the time the craft sat at dock, unused.

The aeronef was not his property, however much he wished it so. It belonged, as his wife often told him he did, to the Eurotas Trade Consortium, and while his rank with the company was such that use of the aircraft could be a regular perk of the job, on some level he knew that he would never rise far enough to truly own something of such status.

That wasn’t something he liked to think about, though. Rather like his wife, more often than not. All his not-inconsiderable earnings as a senior datum-clerk, their appealing townhouse in the fashionable end of the suburbs, the private schola for the children… She appreciated none of it. Latigue’s love of the company flyer was a reaction against that. When he was in the aeronef, he felt free, just for a little while. And thanks to the correct application of some bribery and favours in the shape of a few deliberately mislabelled shipping forms, he had learned from one of the Consortium’s technologians how simple it was to adjust the aircraft’s docile, unsophisticated machine-brain in order to take the flyer to other destinations that didn’t show up on the logs. Places like the White Crescent Quarter, where the company was always agreeable, and for a man of Latigue’s means, quite affordable.

He smiled at that, listening to the soft chopping hum of the propeller as the aeronef crossed over Spindle Canyon, and he thought about ordering a change of course. The wife was at some interminable gaming event at one of her ridiculous social clubs, so there would be no judgemental hissing and narrowing of eyes when he came home. Why not stay out a little longer, he wondered? Why not take a cruise towards the White Crescent? The daring of the thought made him smile, and he began to warm to the idea. Latigue leaned forward, reaching for the command panel and licking his lips.

It was then he noticed the object for the first time. On the seat across from him, a peculiar little ball that resembled a seed pod. Gingerly, he reached for it, prodded it with a finger – and blanched. The thing was warm to the touch, and it felt like it was made of flesh.

Latigue’s gorge rose in his throat and he tasted the sour tang of the half-digested meat dish he had eaten at mid-meal; but still he could not stop himself from reaching out once more, this time carefully gathering up the object from where it lay.

In the light cast through the cabin windows, he saw that the ball was lined and strangely textured. He let it roll in his hand, this way and that, finally bringing it closer to his nose to get a better look.

When it opened he let out a yelp. Splitting along its length, the sphere revealed an eye, horribly human in aspect, hidden behind the fleshy covering. It rotated of its own accord and Latigue became aware that it was looking directly at him, and with something that might have been recognition.

Suddenly overcome with disgust, he threw the orb away, and it vanished under a low couch. Confused and sickened, suddenly all he wanted was to be down on the ground. The interior of the gondola was hot and stifling, and Latigue felt sweat gathering around the high collar of his brocade jacket.

He was still trying to process what had just happened when one of the cabin walls began to move. The velvet patterning, the rich claret-red and spun gold of the adornment, flowed and shifted as oil moved on water. Something was extruding itself out of the side of the cabin, making its shape more definite and firm with each passing instant.

Latigue saw a head and a torso emerging, saw hands ending in long-fingered digits. In the places where the shape-thing grew out of the walls, there was a strange boiling effect, and the light caught what appeared to be something like lizard-skin, rippling and throbbing.

Latigue’s reason fled from him. Rather than seek escape, he forced himself into the corner formed by the couch and the far side of the aeronef’s cabin, the window at his back. The head turned to him, drawn by the motion. The skin-camouflage of the velvet walls faded into a tanned, rich crimson that looked like stained leather or perhaps flayed flesh: as the figure pulled itself free of the wall with spindly legs, its head came up to show a patterned skull pointed into a snout, with a peculiar, plough-shaped lower jaw. Teeth made of silver angled back in long, layered rows. There were no eyes in the sockets above, only dark pits.

Latigue coughed as a smell like blood and sulphur enveloped him, emanating from the apparition. He vomited explosively and began to cry like a child. ‘What do you want?’ he begged, abruptly finding his voice. ‘Who are you?’

The reply was husky, distant, and strangely toned, as if it had been dragged up from a great depth. ‘I… am Spear.’ It seemed more like a question than an answer.

The creature took a first step towards him, and in one hand it had a curved blade.

The transport rumbled through the thermals rising from the surface of the Atalantic Plain, and inside the aircraft’s cargo bay, the bare ribs of the walls creaked and flexed under the heavy power of the thruster pods. Beneath the transport’s belly, a blur of featureless desert raced past, torrents of windborne rust-sand reaching up from the dusty ground to snatch at it. In the distant past, thousands of years gone, this region would have been deep beneath the surface of a vast ocean, one of many that stretched across the surface of Terra; all that was left now were a few minor inland seas that barely deserved the name, little more than shrinking lakes of mud ringed by caravan townships. Much of the vast plainslands had been absorbed by the masses of the Throneworld’s city-sprawls, but there were still great swathes of it that were unclaimed and lawless, broken with foothills sculpted by the long-forgotten seas and canyons choked with the wrecks of ancient ships. There were precious few places on Terra that could still truly be considered a wilderness, but this was one of them.

The flyer’s pilot was deft; isolated in the cockpit pod at the prow, she lay wired into a flight couch that translated her nerve impulses into the minute flexions of the transport’s winglets and the outputs of the engine bells. The aircraft’s course was swift and true, crossing the barren zone on a heading towards the distant city-cluster crowded around the peaks of the Ayzor Ridge; she was following a well-traced course familiar to many of the more daring pilots. Those who played it safe flew at much higher altitudes, in the officially-sanctioned sky corridors governed by the agents of the Ministorum and the Adeptus Terra – but that cost fuel and time, and for fringer pilots working on tight margins, sometimes the riskier choice was the better one. The hazards came from the rust storms and the winds – but also from more human sources as well. The vast erg of the Atalantic was also home to bandit packs and savage clans of junkhunters.

At first glance, the cargo being carried by the flyer was nothing remarkable – but one who looked closer would have understood it was only a make-weight, there to bulk out the transport’s flimsy flight plan. The real load aboard the craft was the two passengers, and they were men so unlike to one another, it could hardly be believed they had both been dispatched by the same agency.

Constantin Valdor sat in a gap between two cube-containers of purified water, cross-legged on the deck of the cargo bay. His bulk was hidden beneath the ill-defined layers of a sandcloak which concealed an articulated suit of ablative armour. It was by no means a relative to the elaborate and majestic Custodian wargear that was his normal garb; the armour was unsophisticated, scarred and heavily pitted with use. Over Valdor’s dense form it strained to maintain its shape, almost as if it were trying to hold him in. At his side was a careworn long-las inscribed with Technomad tribal runes and an explorer’s pack containing survival gear and supplies, the latter for show. With his enhanced physiology, Valdor would have been able to live for weeks on the plains on drops of moisture he sucked from the dirt or the sparse meat of insects. The rifle he could use, though. Everything about Valdor’s disguise was there to tell a vague fiction, not enough to hide from a deep analysis but enough to allow him to go on his way without arousing too much suspicion. The Custodian had done this many times before, in blood games and on missions of other import. This was no different, he reflected.

Across the cargo bay, sitting uncomfortably upon a canvas seat that vibrated each time the transport forded a pocket of turbulence, Valdor’s companion on this journey was bent forwards over his right arm. Wearing a sandcloak similar to the Custodian’s, the smaller man was busy with a pane of hololithic text projected from a cybernetic gauntlet clasped around his wrist. With his other hand he manipulated shapes in the hologrammatic matrix, his attention on it total and complete. His name was Fon Tariel; the light of the text threw colour over his pale olive skin and the dark ovals of his eyes. A tight nest of dreadlocks drawing over Tariel’s head did their best to hide discreet bronze vents in the back of his skull, where interface sockets gleamed alongside memory implants and dataphilia. Unlike the cohorts of the Mechanicum, who willingly gave themselves fully to the marriage of flesh and machine, Tariel’s augmentations were discreet and nuanced.

Valdor studied him through lidded eyes, careful to be circumspect about it. The Sigillite had presented Tariel to him in a manner that made it clear no questioning of his choice would be allowed. The little man was Sire Vanus’s contribution to the Execution Force, one of the clade’s newest operatives, with a skull crammed full of data and a willingness to serve. They called Tariel’s kind ‘infocytes’; essentially they were human computing engines, but at the very far opposite of the spectrum from the mindless meat-automata of servitors. In matters of strategy and tactics, the insight of an infocyte was unparalleled; their existence cemented Clade Vanus as the intelligence-gathering faction of the Officio Assassinorum. It was said they had never been known to make an error of judgement. Valdor considered that as little more than disinformation, however; the creation and dissemination of propaganda was also a core strength of the Vanus.

From the corner of his eye, the Custodian saw the movement of a monitor camera high up on the roof of the cargo bay. He had noted earlier that it appeared to be dwelling on him more than it should have, and now the device’s attention seemed solely fixed on him. Without turning his head, Valdor saw that Tariel had moved slightly so that his holoscreen was now concealed by the bulk of his body.

The Custodian’s lip curled, and with a quick motion he was on his feet, crossing the short distance between the two of them. Tariel reacted with a flash of panic, but Valdor was on him, grabbing his arm. The hololith showed the monitor’s point of view, locked onto the Custodian. Data streams haloed his image, feeding out bio-patterns and body kinestics; Tariel had somehow invaded and co-opted the flyer’s internal security systems to satisfy his own curiosity.

‘Don’t spy on me,’ Valdor told the infocyte. ‘I value my privacy.’

‘You can’t blame me,’ Tariel blurted. ‘I wondered who you were.’

Valdor considered this for a moment, still holding him in an immobile grip. They had both boarded the transport in silence, neither speaking until this moment; he was not surprised that the other man had let his inquisitiveness outstrip his caution. Tariel and his kind had the same relationship with raw information that an addict did with their chosen vice; they were enrapt by the idea of new data, and would do whatever they could to gather it in, and know it. Quite how that balanced with the Assassinorum’s obsessive need for near-total secrecy he could not imagine; perhaps it went some way towards explaining the peculiar character of the Vanus clade and its agents. ‘Then who am I?’ he demanded. ‘If I caught you staring at me through that camera, then surely you have been doing that and more since we first left the Imperial City.’

‘Let go of my hand, please,’ said Tariel. ‘You’re hurting me.’

‘Not really,’ Valdor told him, but he released his grip anyway.

After a moment, the infocyte nodded. ‘You are Constantin Valdor, Captain-General of the Custodian Guard, margin of error less than fourteen percent. I parsed this from physiological data and existing records, along with sampling of various other information streams.’ Tariel showed him; inputs from sources as diverse as traffic routings, listings of foodstuffs purchased by the Palace consumery, the routes of cleaning automata, renovation files from the forges that repaired the robots Valdor had smashed during his morning exercises… To the warrior it seemed like a wall of white noise, but the infocyte manipulated it effortlessly.

‘That is… impressive,’ he offered. ‘But not the work of an assassin, I would think.’

Tariel’s expression stiffened at that. ‘Clade Vanus has removed many of the Imperium’s enemies. We do our part, as you do, Captain-General.’

Valdor leaned in, looming over the man. ‘And how many enemies of Terra have you killed, Fon Tariel?’

The infocyte paused, blinking. ‘In the way that you would consider it a termination? None. But I have been instrumental in the excision of a number of targets.’

‘Such as?’

For a moment, he thought Tariel would refuse to answer, but then the infocyte began to speak, quickly and curtly, as if he were giving a data download. ‘I will provide you with an example. Lord-Elective Corliss Braganza of the Triton-B colony.’

‘I know the name. A delinquent and a criminal.’

‘In effect. I discovered through program artefacts uncovered during routine information-trawling that he was in the process of embezzling Imperial funds as part of a plan to finance a move against several senior members of the Ministorum. He was attempting to build a powerbase through which to influence Imperial colonial policy. Through the use of covert blinds, I inserted materials of an incendiary nature into Braganza’s personal datastacks. The resultant discovery of these fabrications led to his death at the hands of his co-conspirators, and in turn the revelation of their identities.’

Valdor recalled the incident with Braganza; he had been implicated in the brutal murder of a young noblewoman, and after ironclad evidence had come to light damning him despite all his protestations to the contrary, the Triton electorate that had voted him into office had savagely turned against him. Braganza had apparently died in an accident during his transport to a penal asteroid. ‘You leaked the details of his prison transfer.’

Tariel nodded. ‘The cleanest kill is one that another performs in your stead with no knowledge of your incitement.’

The Custodian allowed him a nod. ‘I can’t fault your logic.’ He stepped back and let the infocyte have room to relax. ‘If you have so much data to hand, perhaps you can tell me something about the man we have been sent to find?’

‘Eristede Kell,’ Tariel answered instantly. ‘Clade Vindicare. Currently on an extended duration deployment targeted at the eventual eradication of exocitizen criminal groups in the Atalantic Delimited Zone. Among the top percentile of field-deployed special operatives. Fifty-two confirmed kills, including the Tyrant of Daas, Queen Mortog Haeven, the Eldar general Sellians nil Kaheen, Brother-Captain–’

Valdor held up his hand. ‘I don’t need to know his record. I need to know him.’

The Vanus considered his words for a long moment; but before Tariel could answer, a flash of fire caught Valdor’s eye through one of the viewports, and the Custodian turned towards it, his every warning sense rushing to the fore.

Outside, he glimpsed a spear made of white vapour, tipped with an angry crimson projectile; it described a corkscrew motion as it homed in on the aircraft. Alert sirens belatedly screamed a warning. He had barely registered the light and flame before the transport suddenly resonated with a colossal impact, and veered sharply to starboard. Smoke poured into the cargo bay, and Valdor heard the shriek of torn metal.

Unsecured, the two of them tumbled across the deck as the aircraft spun into the grip of the rusty haze.

A visit to the valetudinarium always made Yosef feel slightly queasy, as if the proximity to a place of healing was somehow enough to make him become spontaneously unwell. He was aware that other people – people who didn’t work in law enforcement, that was – had a similar reaction being around peace officers; they felt spontaneously guilty, even if they had committed no crime. The sensation was strong, though, enough that if ever Yosef felt an ache or a pain that might best have been looked at by a medicae, a marrow-deep revulsion grew strong in him, enough to make him bury it and wait for the issue to subside.

Unfortunate then that a sizeable portion of his duties forced him to visit the capital’s largest clinic on a regular basis; and those visits were always to the most forbidding of its halls, the mortuarium. Winter-cold, the pale wooden floors and panelled walls were shiny with layers of heavy fluid-resistant varnishes, and harsh white light thrown from overhead lume-strips filled every corner of the chamber with stark illumination.

Across the room, the dead stood upright in liquid-filled suspensor tubes that could be raised from compartments in the floor or lowered from silos in the ceiling. Frost-encrusted data-slates showed a series of colour-coded tags, designating which were new arrivals, which had been kept aside for in-depth autopsy and which were free to be released so that their families could perform final rites of enrichment.

Daig took off his hat as they crossed the chamber, weaving in between the medicae servitors and subordinate clinicians, and Yosef followed suit, tucking his brown woollen toque under an epaulette.

They were here to see Tisely, a rail-thin woman with hair the colour of straw, who served as the senior liaison between the mortuarium and the Sentine. She threw them a glance as they approached and gave a glum nod. An accomplished doctor and a superlative pathlogia investigator, Tisely was nevertheless one of the most joyless people Yosef Sabrat had ever met. He struggled to remember a single moment where she had expressed any mood to him but negativity.

‘Reeves,’ she said, by way of greeting, and immediately kept to form. ‘I’m surprised you made it in today. The traffic was very dense this morning.’

‘It’s the weather,’ offered Daig, equally downbeat. ‘Cold as space.’

Tisely nodded solemnly. ‘Oh yes.’ She tapped one of the suspensor tubes. ‘We’ll be filling more of these with those who can’t buy fuel for the winter.’

‘Governor ought to lower the tithe,’ Daig went on, matching her tone. ‘It’s not fair to the elderly.’

The clinician was going to follow on, but before the two of them could enter into a mutually-supporting spiral of circular complaining about the weather, the government, the harvest or whatever subject would come next, Yosef interrupted. ‘You have another body for us?’

Tisely nodded again and changed conversational gears seamlessly. ‘Cirsun Latigue, male, fifty years Terran reckoning. Gutted like a cliffgull.’

‘He died of that?’ Yosef asked, examining the face behind the glass. ‘The cutting?’

‘Eventually.’ Tisely sniffed. ‘It was done slowly, by a single blade, like the others.’

‘And he was laid out like the Norte case? In the star-shape?’

‘Across a very expensive chaise longue, in an aeronef gondola. Not nailed down this time, though.’ She reported the horrific murder in exactly the same tone she had used to complain about the traffic. ‘Quite a troubling one, this.’

Yosef chewed his lip. He’d gone over the abstract of the crime scene report on the way to the valetudinarium. The victim’s wife, who was now somewhere several floors above them in a drugged sleep after suffering a hysterical breakdown, had returned home the previous evening to find the flyer parked on the lawn of their home, the machine-brain pilot diligently waiting for a return-to-hangar command that had never come. Inside the aeronef’s cabin, every square metre of the walls, floor and ceiling was daubed with Latigue’s blood. The eight-point star was repeated everywhere, over and over, drawn in the dead man’s vitae.

Daig was looking at the data-slate, fingering his wrist chain. ‘Latigue had rank, for a civilian. Important, but not too much so. He worked for Eurotas.’

‘Which complicates matters somewhat,’ said Tisely.

She made it sound like a minor impediment, but in fact the matter of Cirsun Latigue’s employer had the potential to send Yosef’s serial murder investigation spiralling out of control. He had hoped that the sketchy report made by the jager on the scene might have been in error, even as some part of him knew that it was not. My luck is never that good, he told himself. Bad enough that the High-Reeve had put her measure into the bottle for all this, but with this latest victim now revealed as a ranking member of the Eurotas Consortium, a whole new layer of problems was opening up for the investigators.

Latigue and all those like him were on the planetside staff of an interstellar nobleman, who was quite possibly the richest man for several light years in any direction. His Honour the Void Baron Merriksun Eurotas was the master of a rogue trader flotilla that plied the spaceways across the systems surrounding Iesta Veracrux. Holding considerable capital and trading concerns on many planets, his consortium essentially controlled all local system-to-system commerce and most interplanetary transportation into the bargain. Eurotas counted high admirals, scions of the Navis Nobilite and even one of the Lords of Terra among his circle of friends; his business clan could trace its roots back to the time of Old Night, and it was said that the hereditary Warrant of Trade held by his family had been personally ratified by the Emperor himself. Such was his high regard that the man served the Adeptus Terra as an Agentia Nuntius, the Imperial Court’s attaché for every human colony in the Taebian Sector.

‘Tisely,’ Yosef lowered his voice and stepped closer, becoming conspiratorial. ‘If we could keep the identity of this victim under wraps, just for a few days, it would help–’

But she was already shaking her head. ‘We tried to keep the information secure, but…’ The clinician paused. ‘Well. People talk. Latigue’s staff saw it all.’

Yosef’s heart sank. ‘So the Consortium know.’

‘It’s worse than that, actually,’ she told him. ‘They’ve reclaimed the aeronef directly from evidentiary after using some pull with the Landgrave.’

‘They can’t do that…’ said Daig, with a grimace.

‘It’s already done,’ Tisely went on. ‘And there are Consortium clinicians on the way to take custody of the luckless Cirsun here.’ She tapped the mist-wreathed tube. ‘They’re probably caught in that cursed traffic, otherwise they’d have been here already and removed him.’

Yosef’s eyes narrowed. ‘This is a Sentine matter. It’s an Iestan matter.’ His annoyance burned cold and slow as he remembered Telemach’s words in the precinct; and yet a day later her superior was sweeping all that aside in favour of doing everything possible to appease the Consortium; because Iesta Veracrux supplied wines to the entire Ultima Segmentum, and without Eurotas, the planet’s economy would die on the vine.

Daig finally swore under his breath, earning him a censorious glare from Tisely. ‘It doesn’t stop there,’ she went on, as if to chastise him. ‘Latigue’s seniors sent an astropathic communiqué to the Void Baron himself. He’s apparently taking a personal interest in the incident.’

Yosef felt the colour drain from his face. ‘Eurotas… He’s coming here?’

‘Oh, I don’t doubt it,’ Tisely told him. ‘In fact, I hear a whisper that some of his personal agents are already in the warp, on their way.’

In spite of himself, that queasy feeling returned to Yosef’s gut and he took a breath of the chilled, antiseptic air. With a sudden jolt of anger, he snatched the data-slate from Daig’s hand and glared at it. ‘This isn’t an investigation any more, it’s a bloody poison chalice.’

Valdor snapped back to awareness with a jerk, and he stifled a reflexive cough. He felt a heavy weight across his torso and thick drifts of sandy matter all around him. There was heat, too, close and intense, searing his skin. He tasted the stink of burning fuel on his lips.

Checking himself, the Custodian found nothing more serious than a minor dislocation among the contusions he had suffered in the crash. With care, he rotated his forearm back into its socket and tested it, the flash of pain ebbing. Valdor placed both hands against the weight holding him down – a section of hull plate, he noted – and forced it up and away.

He came to his feet surrounded by flames and grey smoke. Valdor remembered the moment of the impact only in fleeting impressions; sparks of pain and the spinning of the cargo bay all around him as the wounded flyer slammed into the sand. He had heard Tariel cry out; there was no sign of the infocyte nearby. Valdor moved forward, picking his way over steaming mounds of wreckage, heated by the blazing slick of liquid promethium that had spilled out across the landscape. Sections of the transport lay in a line that vanished off across the ruddy plains, surrounding a black trail carved in the dirt by the craft as it had skidded to a halt, losing pieces of itself along the way.

He saw something that looked familiar; the cockpit pod, the egg-shape of it stove in and crumpled. Blood painted the canopy from the inside, and Valdor knew that the pilot would not have survived the landing. He turned this way and that. The encroaching flames were high and swift, and he had little room to manoeuvre. Sweeping around, he found what seemed to be the thinnest part in the wall of fire and ran at it, his legs pumping. At the last possible second, Valdor leapt into the flames and punched through, the sandcloak around him catching alight.

He landed hard on the other side of the wreckage and came up in a crouch. Snatching at the cloak, he tore it from himself as the fire took hold and threw it as hard as he could. Panting, Valdor looked up; and it was then he realised he was not alone.

‘Well,’ said a rough voice, ‘what have we got here?’

He counted eight of them. They wore the patchwork gear of a junkhunter gang, armour cobbled together from a dozen disparate sources, faces hidden behind breath filters and hoods. All of them were armed with large-gauge weapons – different varieties of stubber guns mostly, but he also spied a couple with twin-barrelled laser carbines, and one with the distinctive shape of a plasma gun held at the ready. Their collection of vehicles was as motley as everything else, a pair of four-legged walker platforms along with fast duneriders on fat knobbled tires, and a single ground-effect truck.

Valdor considered them with the cold tactical precision of a trained warrior. Only eight, eight humans, some of them likely to have reflex enhancements, perhaps even dermal plating, but still only eight. He knew with complete certainty that he would be able to kill them all in less than sixty seconds, and that was if he took his time about it.

There were only two things that gave him a moment’s pause. The first was the figure standing up through a hatch in the GEV’s cab, behind the pintle mount of a quin-barrel multilaser. The gunner had an unobstructed arc of fire that was directly centred on Valdor, and as resilient as he was, without his usual wargear to protect him the heavy weapon would put the Custodian down before he took ten paces.

The second thing was Fon Tariel, his face a mess of blood and bruises, on his knees in front of one of the walkers, with the muzzle of a junkhunter’s rifle pressed to his back.

‘Hah,’ he heard the infocyte say, labouring the words up past his injuries. ‘You’re all going to be sorry now.’

Valdor frowned, and continued to glance around, ignoring the gang and looking off in all directions, squinting towards the near horizon. It was difficult through the low sheen of rust-sand in the air, but his eyes were gene-altered for acuity.

‘Put up your hands,’ buzzed the junkhunter with the plasma gun. Valdor had guessed possession of the powerful weapon made that one the leader, and this confirmed it. He ignored the command, still looking away. ‘Are you deaf, freak?’

In the distance, perhaps a kilometre away, maybe more, the Custodian thought he saw something brief and bright. A glint off a metallic object atop a low butte. He resisted the urge to smile and turned back to the junkhunters, casually positioning himself in such a way that he could see both the flat-topped hill and the bandit crew. ‘I hear you,’ he told the gang leader.

‘He’s a big one,’ ventured one of the riflemen. ‘Some kinda aberrant?’

‘Could be,’ said the leader. ‘That what you are, freak?’

Tariel shouted at him, his voice high with fright. ‘What are you waiting for, man? Help me!’

‘Yeah, help him,’ mocked the GEV gunner. ‘I dare you.’

‘You’ve made a very serious error,’ Valdor began, speaking slowly and carefully. ‘I had hoped we could make a landing in the erg, scout you out for ourselves. But you took the initiative, and I must admire that. You saw prey and you attacked.’ Looking again, the Custodian could see a second, unmanned weapon mount on the rear of the hover-truck. Untended, it pointed the mouth of a surface-to-air missile tube skyward. ‘Lucky shot.’

‘Nothing lucky about it,’ said the leader. ‘You’re not the first. Won’t be the last.’

‘I beg to differ,’ Valdor told him. ‘As I said, you made an error. You’ve drawn the attention of the Emperor.’

The use of the name sent a ripple of fear through the group, but the gang leader stamped on it quickly. ‘Rust and shit, you’re some kind of liar, freak. No one cares what goes on out here, not a one, not a man, not the bloody Emperor hisself. If he cared, he’d come here and share a little of that glory of his with us.’

‘Let’s just kill them,’ said the gunner.

‘Valdor!’ Tariel blurted out his name in fear. ‘Please!’

Unseen by everyone else, the glimmer from the distant hill blinked once, then twice. ‘Let me tell you who I am,’ said the Custodian. ‘My name is Constantin Valdor, Captain-General of the Legio Custodes, and I hold the power of the Emperor’s displeasure in my hands.’

The gang leader snorted with cold amusement. ‘Your brain is broke, that’s what you have!’

‘I will prove it to you.’ Valdor raised his arm and pointed a finger at the gunner behind the multilaser. ‘In the Emperor’s name,’ he said, his tone calm and conversational, ‘death.’

A heartbeat later, the gunner’s upper torso exploded into chunks of meat on a blast of pink fluids.

The fear that the Emperor’s name had briefly conjured returned tenfold. Valdor pointed to the rifleman standing over Tariel. ‘And death,’ he went on. The junkhunter’s body bifurcated at the spine with a wet chug, collapsing to the sand. ‘And death, and death, and death…’ The Custodian let his arm fall, and stood still as three more of the gang were torn apart where they stood.

Tariel dived into the dirt and the rest of the junkhunters broke apart in a terrified scramble, some of them racing towards a vehicle, others desperately trying to find cover. Valdor saw one of them leap into a dunerider and gun the engine, the vehicle surging away. The windscreen shattered in a red blink of blood and the rover bounded into a shallow gulley, crashing to a halt. The others died as they ran.

A furious snarl drew Valdor’s attention back and he looked up as the gang leader came speeding towards him – too fast for a normal human, quite clearly nerve-jacked as he had first suspected. The junkhunter had the plasma gun aimed at the Custodian’s chest; at this close a range, a blast from it would be a mortal wound.

Valdor did nothing, stood his ground. Then, like the work of an invisible trickster god, the gun was ripped from the gang leader’s hand and it spun away into the air, the mechanism torn open and spitting great licks of blue-white sparks.

Only then did Valdor step in and break the man’s neck with a short chopping motion to his throat. The last of the junkhunter band dropped and was still.

The sun was dipping towards the horizon when a piece of the desert seemed to detach itself and transform into the shape of a man. A cameoline cloak shimmered from the colours of the rust-sand to a deep night-black, revealing a muscular figure in a stealthsuit that was faceless behind a gunmetal spy mask. The mask’s green eye-band studied Valdor and Tariel, where the two of them had sought shelter in the lee of the parked GEV truck. A spindly rifle, easily as long as the man was tall, lay across his back.

Valdor gave him a nod. ‘Eristede Kell, I presume?’

‘You are out of uniform, Captain-General,’ said the marksman. ‘I hardly recognised you.’ His voice was low.

Valdor raised an eyebrow. ‘Have we met before?’

The sniper shook his head. ‘No. But I know you. And your work.’ He glanced at the infocyte.

‘Vindicare,’ said Tariel, by way of terse greeting.

‘Vanus,’ came the reply.

‘I’m curious,’ said Kell. ‘How did you know I would be watching?’

‘You’ve been in this sector for some time. It stood to reason you would have seen the crash.’ The Custodian gestured around. ‘I had intended to find some of your prey in order to find you. It seems events altered the order of that but not the result.’

Tariel shot Valdor a look. ‘That’s why you didn’t attack them? You could have dealt with them all, but you did nothing.’ He grimaced. ‘I might have been killed!’

‘I considered letting that happen,’ said the sniper, with a casual sniff. ‘But I dismissed the idea. If a pair as unlikely as you two had come out here, I knew there had to be good reason.’

‘You almost missed that thug with the plasma gun!’ snapped the infocyte.

‘No,’ said Valdor, with a half-smile, ‘he did not.’

The sniper cocked his head. ‘I never miss.’

‘You came to the Atalantic zone without your vox rig,’ Valdor went on.

‘Comm transmissions would have been detected,’ said Kell. ‘It would have given me away to the bandits.’

‘Hence our somewhat unconventional method of locating you,’ continued the Custodian.

Tariel’s eyes narrowed. ‘How did you know when to fire?’

‘His weapon’s scope contains a lip-reading auspex,’ Valdor answered for the sniper. ‘Your assignment was open-ended, I believe.’

‘I’ve been systematically terminating the raider gangs as I find them,’ said Kell. ‘I still have work to do. And it makes good exercise.’

‘You have a new mission now,’ said Tariel. ‘We both do.’

‘Is that so?’ Kell reached up and took off the spy mask, revealing a craggy face with close-cut black hair, sharp eyes and hawkish nose. ‘Who is the target?’

Valdor stood up, and pulled a mag-flare tube from a compartment in his chest plate, aiming it into the sky. ‘All in good time,’ he said, and fired.

Kell’s eyes narrowed. ‘You are leading this mystery mission then, Captain-General?’

‘Not I,’ said the Custodian, shaking his head as the flare ignited, casting jumping shadows all around them. ‘You, Eristede.’

Four

Blood
Weapons
Face and Name

The coleopter’s chattering rotors made it impossible to have a conversation at normal levels in the cabin, and Yosef was reduced to growling into Daig’s ear in order to get something approximating privacy. ‘It’s the pattern I’m not certain about,’ he said.

Daig had a fan-fold file open on his lap, one hand holding in the slips of vinepaper, the other gripping a thick data-slate. ‘What pattern?’

‘Exactly,’ Yosef replied. ‘There isn’t one. Every time we’ve had a crazed lunatic go on a killing spree like this, there’s been some kind of logic to it, no matter how twisted. Someone is murdered because they remind the killer of their abusive stepfather, or because the voices in their head told them that all people who wear green are evil…’ He pointed a finger at the file. ‘But what’s the link here? Latigue, Norte and the others? They’re from all different walks of life, men and women, old and young, tall and short…’ Yosef shook his head. ‘If there’s a commonality between them, I haven’t seen it yet.’

‘Well, don’t worry,’ Daig said flatly, ‘there will be plenty of people willing to throw in their half-baked theories about it. After Latigue’s death, you can bet the watch-wire will be buzzing with this.’

Yosef cursed under his breath; with everything else that had been on his mind, he hadn’t stopped to think that if the Eurotas Consortium had become involved with the case, then of course the Iestan news services would have got wind of it into the bargain. ‘As if they don’t have enough doom and gloom to put on the watch-wire already,’ he said. ‘By all means, let’s add to everyone’s woes with the fear of a knife in the belly from every dark alleyway.’

Daig shrugged. ‘Actually, it might take people’s minds off the bigger issues. Nothing like a killer of men on the loose in your own backyard to keep you focussed.’

‘That all depends on how large your backyard is, don’t you think?’

‘Good point.’ Yosef’s cohort paged through the panes of data installed on the slate with solemn slowness. He paused on one slab of dense text, his eyes narrowing. ‘Hello. This is interesting.’ He handed the device over. ‘Look-see.’

‘Blood work,’ noted Yosef. It was the analysis reports from the site of the Latigue murder, multiple testing on samples that confirmed, yes, the fluids all over the walls of the gondola had once been contained inside the unfortunate clerk. At least, almost all of them. There was a rogue trace right in the middle of the scan reports, something picked up by chance from one of the medicae servitors. A single blood trace that did not match the others.

Yosef felt a slight thrill as he absorbed this piece of information, but he stamped down on it immediately. He didn’t dare jinx the chance that Daig might have just pointed out something that could be their first important break.

‘It doesn’t tally with any of the previous deaders, either,’ said the other reeve. He reached for the intercom horn. ‘I’ll comm the precinct, get them to run this up to the citizen database…’

But just as quickly as it had lit, Yosef’s brief spark of excitement guttered out and died as he read a notation appended to the bottom of the information pane. ‘Don’t waste your time. Tisely got her people to do that already.’

‘Ah,’ Daig’s expression remained neutral. ‘Should have expected that. She’s efficient that way. No joy, then?’

Yosef shook his head. The notification for a citizen ident read Not Found. That meant that the killer was unregistered, which was a rare occurrence on Iesta Veracrux, or else they were from somewhere else entirely. He chewed on that thought for a moment. ‘He’s an off-worlder.’

‘What?’

‘Our cutter. Not an Iestan.’

Daig eyed him. ‘That’s a bit of a leap.’

‘Is it? It explains why his blood’s not in the database. It explains how he’s doing this and leaving no traces.’

‘Off-world technology?’

Yosef nodded. ‘I admit it’s thin, but it’s a direction. And with Telemach breathing down our necks, we need to be seen to be proactive. It’s that or sit around waiting for a fresh kill.’

‘We could just hold off,’ suggested the other man. ‘I mean, if Eurotas has his own operatives inbound… Why not let them come in and take a pass over it? They’re bound to have better resources than we do.’

He gave his cohort an acid look. ‘Remember that engraving on your warrant rod that talks about “to serve and protect”? We’re called investigators for a reason.’

‘Just a thought,’ said Daig.

Yosef sensed something unsaid in his cohort’s words and studied him. To anyone else, Segan’s dour expression would have seemed no different from any of the other dour expressions he wore day in and day out; but the other reeve had been partnered with him for a long time, and he could read moods in the man that others missed completely. ‘What aren’t you telling me, Daig?’ he asked. ‘Something about this case has been gnawing at you since we had it dropped on us.’ Yosef leaned closer. ‘You didn’t do it, did you?’

Daig made a brief spluttering sound that was the closest he ever came to a laugh, but then he sobered almost instantly. After a moment of silence he looked away. ‘We’ve seen some things, you and I,’ he said. ‘This is different, though. It feels different. Don’t ask me to be objective about it, because I can’t. I think there’s more here than just… human madness.’

Yosef made a face. ‘Are you talking about xenos? There’s not an alien alive in this entire sector.’

Daig shook his head. ‘No.’ He sighed. ‘I’m not sure what I’m talking about. But… After Horus…’

Once more, the reeve felt the sudden tension that the name brought with it. ‘If I’m sure of anything, I’m damned sure that he didn’t do it.’

‘There are stories, though,’ Daig went on. ‘People talk about worlds that have declared for the Warmaster, worlds that go silent soon after. Those who make it out before the silence comes down, they’ve said things. Talked about what happened on those planets.’ He tapped a sheaf of crime scene picts. ‘Things like this. I know you’ve heard the same.’

‘It’s just stories. Just scared people.’ Yosef wondered if he sounded convincing. He took a breath. ‘And it has no bearing on what we’re doing here.’

‘We’ll see,’ Daig said darkly.

A thought occurred to Yosef and he reached for the intercom horn. ‘Yes, we will.’ He pressed the stud that would allow him to talk to the coleopter’s pilot. ‘Change of plans,’ he said briskly, ‘we’re not going back to the precinct house. Take us to the Eurotas compound.’

The pilot acknowledged the command and the flyer pivoted into a banking turn, the pitch of the rotors deepening.

Daig gave him a confused look. ‘The trader’s men won’t be here for another couple of days yet. What are you doing?’

‘Everyone wants to keep Eurotas happy, so it seems,’ Yosef told him. ‘I think we should use that to our advantage.’

They landed on a tree-lined transit pad just within the walls of the Consortium’s compound. In a definite attempt to stand out from the more typical Iestan architectural styles of the other great manses in the area, the Eurotas house was modelled on the Cygnus school of design, reminiscent of many reunification-era colony palaces from the early decades of the Great Crusade. It was an open, summery building, full of courtyards and cupolas, with fountains and small pocket gardens that were at odds with the cool pre-winter chill of the day.

The two reeves were barely to the foot of the coleopter’s drop-ramp when they were met by a narrow woman in the bottle-green and silver of the rogue trader’s livery. Standing behind her at a discreet distance were two men in the same garb, but both of them were twice her body mass with faces hidden behind the blank glares of info-visors. Yosef saw no weapons visible on them, but he knew they had to be carrying. One of the many tenets of the Consortium’s corporate sovereignty throughout the Taebian Sector allowed Eurotas to ignore planetside laws the Void Baron considered to be detrimental to his business, and that included Iestan weapon statutes.

The woman spoke before Yosef could open his mouth, firmly determined to set the rules of the impromptu visit immediately. ‘My name is Bellah Gorospe, I’m a Consortium liaison executive. We’ll need to make this quick,’ she told him, with a fake smile. ‘I’m afraid I have an important meeting to attend very shortly.’ The woman had the kind of silken Ultima accent that automatically categorised her as non-native.

‘Of course,’ Yosef said smoothly. ‘This won’t take long. The Sentine require access to the Consortium’s database of passenger and crew manifests for incoming starships to Iesta Veracrux.’

Gorospe blinked. She was actually startled by the directness of his demand, and didn’t say no straight away. ‘Which ship?’

‘All of them,’ Daig added, following his lead.

The automatic denial that she was trained to give came next. ‘That’s impossible. That data is proprietary material under ownership of the Eurotas Trade Consortium. It cannot be released to any local jurisdictional bodies.’ Gorospe said the word local as if it rhymed with irrelevant. ‘If you have a specific request regarding any data pertaining to Iestan citizens, I may be able to accommodate you. Otherwise, I’m afraid not.’ She started to turn away.

‘Did you know Cirsun Latigue?’ said Yosef.

That brought the woman to a halt. She covered her hesitation well. ‘Yes. We had cause to work together on occasion.’ Gorospe’s lips thinned. ‘Is that pertinent?’

‘We’re investigating the possibility that whoever murdered him is following a vendetta against employees of Baron Eurotas.’ That was an outright lie, but it got Yosef the response he wanted. The woman blinked, and she was clearly wondering if she could be next. The reeve had no doubt that by now everyone in the compound, no matter if they were supposed to know or not, knew exactly how horribly Latigue had died. ‘We believe the killer may have arrived on planet aboard a Eurotas-operated vessel,’ he added.

If the murderer was from another planet, then that was undeniable; the Consortium ran every inter-system ship that came to Iesta Veracrux, and as a part of Imperial transit law, all travellers were required to submit to cursory medical checks in order to prevent the spread of any potential biosphere-specific contagions from world to world. That data would exist in the Consortium’s records.

Gorospe was uncertain how to proceed. Her plan to dismiss the Sentine officers and return to whatever her other tasks were had crumbled. Yosef imagined that she was now thinking of a way to deal with this by invoking some higher authority. ‘Sanctioned Consortium security operatives will be arriving in fifty hours. I suggest you return at that time and make your request to them.’

‘It wasn’t a request,’ Yosef told her. ‘And given the frequency of the murders to date, there could be two, perhaps even three more deaths before then.’ He kept his voice level. ‘I think that even the Baron himself would agree that time is of the essence.’

‘The Baron is coming here,’ Gorospe noted, in an absent, distant manner that seemed to be half disbelief.

‘I’m sure he would want as much done as possible towards dealing with this unfortunate circumstance,’ said Daig. ‘And quickly.’

She glanced back at Yosef. ‘Please tell me again what it is that you need, reeve?’

He resisted the urge to smile and instead offered her the data-slate. ‘There’s an unidentified blood trace listed here. I require it to be cross-referenced with the Consortium’s database for any matches.’

Gorospe took the slate and her practised smile reappeared. ‘The Consortium will of course do anything possible to assist the Sentine in the pursuit of their lawful duties. Please wait here.’ She walked swiftly away, leaving the two silent men standing watch.

After a moment, Daig glanced at his cohort. ‘When Laimner finds out you brought us here without authorisation, the first thing he’s going to do is rip you down to foot patrol in the slums.’

‘No,’ said Yosef, ‘the first thing he’s going to do is cover his ample backside with Telemach so she won’t blame him for any fallout. But he won’t be able to pull out anything about jurisdiction if we bring him some actual evidence.’

Daig watched Gorospe vanish into the main house. ‘There is a large chance that she may not have anything we can use, you know.’

Yosef shot him a glare. ‘Well, in that case, our careers are over.’

Daig nodded grimly. ‘Just so we’re both clear on that.’

The night air was as warm as blood, and humid with it. It was still and oppressive, almost a palpable thing surrounding and pressing down on Fon Tariel. He sighed and used a micropore kerchief to dab at his head before returning to the nested layers of hololith panes floating above his cogitator gauntlet.

Across the sparse room, in a pool of shadow at the far window, the sniper sat cross-legged, his longrifle resting across the crook of his arm. Without turning, Kell spoke to him. ‘Are you really in so much discomfort that you cannot sit still for more than a moment? Or is that twitching something common to all Vanus?’

Tariel scowled at the Vindicare. ‘The heat,’ he said, by way of explanation. ‘I feel… soiled by it.’ He glanced around; judging by the detritus scattered all about them, the room had once been the central space of a small domicile, before what appeared to be a combination of fire and structural collapse had ruined it. There were great holes in the roof allowing in the light, tepid rain from the low clouds overhead, and other rents in the floor that emitted smells Tariel’s augmetic scent-sensors classified as human effluent, burned rodent meat and contaminated fusel oils. The building was deep in the ghetto shanties of the Yndenisc Bloc, where low-caste citizens were piled atop one another like rats in a nest.

‘I’m guessing you don’t leave your clade’s sanctum very often,’ said Kell.

‘There hasn’t been the need,’ Tariel said defensively. He and his fellow infocytes and cryptocrats had taken part in many operations, all of them conducted through telepresent means directly from the sanctum, or from aboard an Officio-sanctioned starship. The thought of actually physically deploying into the field was almost an impossibility. ‘This is my, uh, second sortie.’

‘The first being when Valdor brought you looking for me?’

‘Yes.’

Kell gave a sarcastic grunt. ‘What wild stories you’ll have to tell when you go home to your hive, little bee.’

Tariel’s grimace hardened. ‘Don’t mock me. I’m only here because you need me. You won’t find the girl without my assistance.’

The sniper still refused to look his way, eyes locked on the sights of his longrifle. ‘That’s true,’ he offered. ‘I’m just wondering why you have to be here with me to do it.’

Tariel had been asking himself the same thing ever since Captain-General Valdor had given mission command to the Vindicare and ordered them out to the tropics. As far as he could be certain, it seemed that operational confidence for this mission was of such paramount importance that detection of any live in-theatre signals transmitted from the Yndenisc Bloc to the Vanus sanctum could not be risked. He wondered what kind of foe could threaten to defeat the finest information security in the Imperium and found he had no answer; and the fact that such a threat could even exist troubled him in no small degree. ‘The quicker we get it done, then, the quicker we can leave this place and each other’s company,’ he said, with genuine feeling.

‘It will take as long as it takes,’ Kell replied. ‘Wait for the target to come to you.’

The infocyte disagreed but did not voice it. Instead, he returned to the hololiths, leafing through them as if they were pages made of glass hanging suspended in the air. Anyone watching him would have only seen the motions of his hands and nothing else; Tariel had tuned the images to a visual frequency only readable by his enhancile retinal lenses.

The penetration of the local sensor web had presented him with a minor impediment, but nothing that he would have considered challenging. The infocyte sent a small swarm of organic-metal netfly automata out to chew into any opti-cables they found, and parse what rich data flows they located back to him. Each fly was by itself a relatively unsophisticated device, but networked en masse, the information the swarm returned could be cohered into a dense picture of what was happening in the surrounding area. Tariel had already assembled maps of the nearby structures, the flows of foot and vehicular traffic, and he was currently worming his way into the encoding of several hundred monitor beads scattered throughout the zone.

The Yndeniscs called this locale the Red Lanes, and the area was a centre for what one might tactfully describe as hedonistic pursuits. The local confederation of warlords allowed the place a great degree of latitude from their already lax legal codes, and in return reaped a sizeable percentage of profit from the patronage of pleasure-tourists from all across Terra and the Sol system. Quite how a place like this was allowed to exist on the Throneworld was a mystery to Tariel, as much so as the tribes of bandits he had encountered out in the Atalantic Plain. His understanding of Imperial Terra was of a nation-world united and glorious – that was what he saw through the glassy lenses of his monitors from the safety of his workpod in the sanctum. But now, outside… He was quickly realising that there were many dirty, messy, dark corners that did not conform to his view of the Imperium.

A soft chime sounded from the gauntlet. ‘Are you through?’ asked Kell.

‘Working,’ he replied. The netflys had bored into a deep sub-web of imaging coils hidden several layers beneath the more obvious ones, and all at once he was assailed by a storm of images from the shielded rooms in a tall building across the square; images of men, women and other humans of indeterminate gender performing acts upon one another that were as fascinating as they were repulsive. ‘I have… access,’ he muttered. ‘Commencing, uh, image match sweep.’

The facial pattern Valdor had provided to Tariel phased through the images, one after another, like looking for like. The infocyte tried to maintain an objective viewpoint, but the feeds he was seeing made him uncomfortable; if anything, he felt more soiled by them than by the dirt and humidity of the night air.

And then suddenly, she was there, the tawny skin of the girl’s face dark in the lamplight of a red-lit room as the trace program found its target. ‘Location confirmed,’ he said.

‘Good,’ said Kell. ‘Now find me a way to contact her before she gets killed.’

And so Iota found herself in the room after opening her eyes. She had wondered if it would still be there when she looked again, and it was. This confirmed her earlier hypothesis, that the sensations she was experiencing were not hallucinatory but actually real. On some level, that was troubling to accept; perhaps, if she had understood her state more correctly, Iota would not have allowed some of the liberties that had been taken with her physical form to occur. But then again, they had been necessary to secure her cover in the Red Lanes. She remembered those activities distantly, like a half-recalled dream. The persona-implants that had been used to bolster the cover identity were crumbling like sand, and recollection of any particular point of them was difficult.

It wasn’t important. The false overlay was drifting away, and beneath was revealed her real self; such as it was. Iota was not a blank slate, as those who did not fully understand the works of her clade might think. No. She was a fluid in the bottle of herself, a shape without definition, a form needing direction, a space to fill.

She surveyed the crimson room, the walls covered with rich velvet hangings sketched with erotic detail in gold threads, the great oval bed emerging from the deep carpeting. Floating lume-globes provided sultry lighting, with a shuttered window the only entrance for any natural illumination.

The men who ran the doxy-house seemed caught in some peculiar kind of attract-repel balance with her. Iota’s gift made them uncomfortable without them ever knowing exactly why. Perhaps it was the hollow distance in her dark eyes, or the silence that was her habitual mien. However the gift manifested, it was enough to unsettle them. Some liked that, taking pleasure from the thrill of it as they might the tread of a scorpion across their naked flesh; most avoided her, though. She scared them without ever giving form to their fear.

Iota touched the ornamental torc around the dusky flesh of her throat. If only they knew how little of her they really sensed. Without the dampener device concealed in the necklet, the icy void inside her would have spread wide.

She sniffed the perfumed air. Iota felt odd to be out of her suit, but then she always did. The silken shift dress that covered her body was gossamer-thin, and she continually forgot that she was wearing it. Of its own accord, her right hand – her killing hand – reached up and buried itself in the tight cornrows of her shiny black hair. The hand toyed absently with the plaits dangling off her scalp, and she wondered how long it would be until the murder came. Her eyes wandered to the wooden box on the bed, and that was when she had her answer.

The other woman came into the room striding like a man, and around the back of her scalp she wore an emitter crown, the delicate filigree of crystalline psyber-circuits and implant tech glowing with soft light. She towered over the diminutive Iota, nearly two metres tall in elevated boots of shiny blue leather, a full and well-shaped body showing through a bustier-affair outfit that could only have been a few strips of hide if taken off and laid end to end. She carried a device that resembled a bulbous tonfa in one hand, one end of it bladed, the other crackling with energy.

The woman sneered at Iota. The expression was ugly and ill-fitting on her face, and Iota saw the small twitches of the nerves around her lips and nostrils as the crown worked on her. ‘You’re new,’ said the woman. The words were slightly slurred.

Iota nodded, remaining downcast and passive.

‘They tell me there’s something odd about you,’ she said, reaching for Iota’s hand. ‘Different.’ The ugly sneer widened. ‘I do enjoy things that are different.’

Then she knew for certain. There was a small chance it wasn’t going to be him, but the clade had invested too much time and effort into inserting Iota into the right place at the right time for a mistake to happen at this late stage. The voice belonged to the woman, but the words – and the personality animating her at this moment – belonged to Jun Yae Jun, scion of one of the Nine Families of the Yndenisc Bloc and warlord-general. He was also, as intelligence had proven, a deceiver who was disloyal to the Imperial Throne, in violation of the Nikaea Edict, and suspected of involvement in a counter-secular cult.

‘We will play.’ Jun made the woman say the words. He was on the other end of the emitter crown, somewhere nearby, his body in repose while he forced his consciousness onto the flesh of the proxy. It was a game the warlord-general liked a great deal, working a meat-puppet in order to slake his desires. Iota was aware that many of her guardians back at her clade’s holdfast viewed what Jun did with disgust, but she only felt a vague curiosity about him, the same clinical detachment that coloured almost all her interactions with other humans.

Iota wondered if the woman Jun controlled was conscious during the activities, and dispassionately considered the psychological effects that might have; but such thoughts were trivia. She had a murder to focus on. ‘Wait,’ she said. ‘I have something for you,’ Iota nodded at the box. ‘A gift.’

‘Give it to me,’ came the demand.

Iota let the shift dress fall from her shoulders, and with Jun’s second-hand gaze all over her, she picked up the box and brought it closer. Bloodlock sensors released the latches and she presented it, holding it up with one hand like a server offering a tray of food. The killing hand went to the torc and unfastened it.

‘What is this?’ A clumsy echo of Jun’s confusion crossed the woman’s face. ‘A mask?’

The lume light fell over the shape of a metallic skull. One eye was a glittering ruby, but the other was a cluster of lenses made from milky sapphire, spiked with stubby vanes and strange antennae. ‘Of a sort,’ Iota explained.

The torc released with a delicate click and Iota felt a sudden rush of cold move through her, as if a floodgate inside her had opened. At least for the moment, she no longer needed to hold it all in, to keep the emptiness inside her bottled up.

Jun made a strange noise through the woman that was half-cry, half-yelp, and then the psychoactive matrix of the crown began to fizz and pop, the tonfa falling from the proxy’s nerveless fingers. With a disordered, tinkling peal, the psionic crystals in the headdress began to shatter and the woman tottered on her spiked heels, stumbling over herself to fall upon the bed. She made moaning, weeping sounds.

Iota cocked her head to listen; the same chorus of wailing was coming from room after room down the corridor of the change-brothel, as the nulling effect of her raw self spread out.

Before the link could fully die, she sprang onto the bed and brought her face to the anguished woman’s, staring into her eyes. ‘I want to kiss you,’ she told Jun.

Through the window, across the companionway from the brothel building, the doors of a nondescript residential slum block had broken open and a tide of panicked figures was spilling onto the street, all of them half-dressed in clothes that marked them too rich to be locals.

Iota nimbly leapt back to the floor and unfurled the stealthsuit lying beneath the skull-helm, stepping into it with careless ease. The mask went on last, and it soothed her as it did so.

The weeping woman coughed out a last, stuttered word as Jun’s hold on her finally disintegrated. ‘Cuh. Cuh. Culexus.’

But Iota did not wait to hear it; instead she threw herself through the window in a crash of glass and wood, spinning towards the other building.

While they waited for Gorospe, Yosef glanced around the landing pad’s surroundings. The fountains, which were usually gushing with coloured water, were silent; and when he looked closer, he noted that the well-tended gardens seemed, if anything, considerably unkempt. There were even dead patches in the otherwise flawless lawns; the Consortium appeared to be slacking on matters of minor maintenance. He wondered what that small detail could mean in the greater scheme of things.

Daig had made an attempt to engage one of the security men in conversation, resorting to his usual gambit of complaining about the weather, but the guard had been disinterested in talking. ‘Nice outfits they have,’ he opined, wandering back to the parked coleopter. ‘Do you think they have to buy their own uniforms?’

‘Considering a career change, then?’

Daig shrugged. ‘Or maybe a sabbatical. A very long one, to somewhere quiet.’ He glanced up into the sky, then away again.

Yosef sensed something in his cohort and found himself asking the question that had been preying on his mind for a time. ‘Do you think he will come here?’

‘The Warmaster?’

‘Who else?’ The air around them seemed suddenly still.

‘The Arbites say the situation will be dealt with by the Astartes.’ Daig’s manner made it clear he didn’t believe that.

Yosef frowned. Now he had asked the question, he found he couldn’t stop thinking about it. ‘I still find it hard to grasp. The idea of one of the Emperor’s sons plotting a rebellion against him.’ The concept seemed unreal, like the rain rebelling against the clouds.

‘Laimner says there is no mutiny at all. He says it’s a disinformation ploy by the Adeptus Terra to keep the planets out in the deeps off-balance, keep them loyal to the Throneworld. After all, a fearful populace is a compliant one.’

‘Our esteemed Reeve Warden is a fool.’

‘I won’t argue that point,’ Daig nodded. ‘But then, is that any more shocking than the idea that the Warmaster would turn against his own father? What possible reason could he have to do that, unless he has some sort of sickness of the mind?’

Yosef felt a chill move through him, as if a shadow had passed over the sun. ‘It’s not a matter of lunacy,’ he said, uncertain as to where the words were coming from. ‘And fathers can be fallible, after all.’

He caught a flash of irritation on Daig’s face. ‘You’re talking about ordinary men. The Emperor is far more than that.’

Yosef considered an answer, but then his attention was drawn away by the return of the Gorospe woman. Her carefully prepared expression of superior neutrality had been replaced by a severe aspect, concern and irritation there in equal measure. He had to wonder what she had found to instigate so profound a shift in her manner. She held the data-slate in her hand, along with a page of vinepaper. ‘You have something for us?’ he asked.

Gorospe hesitated, then tersely dismissed the two security men. When it was just the three of them, she gave the lawmen a firm stare. ‘Before we go any further, there are a number of assurances that I must have from you. No information will be forthcoming if you refuse any of the following conditions, is that understood?’

‘I’m listening,’ said Yosef.

She ticked off the stipulations on her long, elegantly manicured fingers. ‘This meeting did not occur; any attempt to suggest it did at a later date will be denied and may be considered an attempt at slander. Under no account are you to refer to the method in which this information was brought to you in any official records of investigation, now or at a later date in any legal setting. And finally, and most importantly, the name of the Eurotas Trade Consortium will in no way be connected to the suspect of your investigation.’

The two men exchanged glances. ‘I suppose I have no choice but to agree,’ said Yosef.

‘Both of you,’ she insisted.

‘Aye, then,’ said Daig, with a wary nod.

Gorospe handed back the data-slate and unfolded the vinepaper. On it, Yosef saw file text and an image of a thuggish man with heavy stubble and deep-set eyes. ‘There was a match between the blood trace you provided and a single subject listed in our biomedical records. His name is Erno Sigg, and he is known to be at large on Iesta Veracrux.’

Yosef reached for the paper, but she held it away. ‘He was a passenger on one of your ships?’

When the woman didn’t answer straight away, Daig made the connection. ‘That’s a bondsman’s record you have there, isn’t it? Sigg isn’t a passenger. He works for you.’

‘Ah,’ nodded Yosef, suddenly understanding. ‘Well, that clears the mist, doesn’t it? The last thing the Void Baron would want is the good name of his clan being connected to a murderous psychotic.’

‘Erno Sigg is not an employee of the Consortium,’ Gorospe insisted. ‘He has not been a member of our staff for the last four lunars. His bond and his shares were cancelled in perpetuity with the clan, following an… incident.’

‘Go on.’

The woman glanced at the paper. ‘Sigg was cashiered after a violent episode on one of the Consortium’s deep space trading stations.’

‘He stabbed someone.’ Yosef tossed out the guess and the widening of her eyes told him he was right. ‘Killed them?’

Gorospe shook her head. ‘There was no fatality. But a… a weapon was used.’

‘Where is he now?’

‘We have no record of that.’

Daig’s lip curled. ‘So you decided to throw him out, just dump a violent offender on our planet without so much as a warning to the local law enforcement? I think I could find a judiciary who would classify that irresponsible endangerment.’

‘You misunderstand. Sigg was released after a period of detention commensurate with the severity of his misbehaviour.’ Gorospe looked at the paper again. ‘According to notations made by our security staff, he was genuinely remorseful. He voluntarily went into the custody of a charitable rehabilitation group here on Iesta Veracrux. That’s why he asked to be released on this planet.’

‘What group?’ said Daig.

‘The file notes it was part of an informal organisation called the Theoge.’

Yosef swore under his breath and snatched the paper from the woman’s hand. ‘Give me that. We’ll take this from here.’

‘Remember our arrangement!’ she insisted, her cheeks colouring; but the reeve was already stalking away towards the coleopter.

The Warlord Jun Yae Jun bolted upright from the ornate couch where he lay, his robe falling open, scattering the attendants from his sides. He spluttered and snarled, tearing at the web of golden mechadendrites that were wrapped about his head, winding into his ear canals, nostrils and mouth. ‘Get these things off me!’ he bellowed, flailing around, knocking over a hookah and table piled with wine goblets and ampoules.

With an agonised wrench he finally freed himself and glared around, looking for his guardian. Jun could hear the sounds of violence and panic in the halls beyond the room. Something had gone very wrong, and a tide of terror was welling up inside him. He turned it into fury as he found the guardian on his hands and knees, staring into a pool of vomit.

Jun gave him a violent kick. ‘What are you doing down there? Get up! Get up and protect me, you worthless wretch!’

The guardian stood, as shaky as a drunkard. ‘There is darkness,’ he muttered. ‘Black curtains falling.’ The man choked and coughed up bile.

Jun kicked him again. ‘You were supposed to protect me! Why did you fail me?’ His face was crimson with anger. In defiance of Imperial law, without grant or sanction from the Adeptus Terra, the warlord had secured himself a guardian who not only had combatant skills, but was also possessed of a measure of psychic ability. For months, his pet killer had been his most closely-guarded confidence, but now it seemed that his secret was out. ‘There’s a Culexus here! Do you know what that means?’

The guardian nodded. ‘I know.’

When he had first heard the name of the assassin clade spoken, when the story of what the word meant had been told to him, the warlord did not believe it. He understood psykers, the humans gifted – some said cursed – by the touch of the warp. A psyker’s essence burned bright in the realm of the immaterium, forever connecting the world of flesh with the world of the ethereal; but if psykers reflected the far extreme of a spectrum, and ordinary men and women the brief candles of life in the middle ground, then what could represent the opposite end of that balance? The darkness?

They were called pariahs. Chance births, less than one in a billion, children born, so it was said, without a soul. Where a psyker burned sun-bright, they were a black hole. They were antithesis, made manifest. Ice to the fire, darkness to the light.

And as with so many things, the Imperium of Man had found a use for such aberrations. The Clade Culexus harvested pariahs wherever they were found, and rumour suggested that they might even grow them wholesale from synthesis tanks in some secret fleshworks in the wilds of Terra. Jun Yae Jun had never believed in them until this moment, dismissed the very idea as a fiction created to instil fear in the kings and regents who ruled under the aegis of the Emperor. He knew fear now, though, and truth with it.

Jun stumbled towards the doorway, and hands pulled at his robes. ‘Warlord, please,’ said the attendant. The spindly man was speaking rapidly. ‘Stop! The game has not been completed. There is the letting of fluids to be gathered, the sacrament!’

The warlord turned and glared at the attendant. Like all the others who ran this sordid diversion for the masters of the Red Lanes, he was draped in strips of silk and painted with bright inks. He had numerous daubs across his skin, repeating the shape of a disc, a rod and opposed crescents. The design was meaningless to Jun. He tried to shove the man away, but he would not let go.

‘You must not leave!’ snarled the attendant. ‘Not yet!’ He gripped the warlord’s arm and held on tightly.

Jun spat and produced a push-dagger from a pocket. ‘Get off me!’ he roared, and stabbed the man in the throat with three quick moves. Leaving him to die, the warlord forced his way out into the corridor. The guardian stayed with him, his face pale and sweaty. He was mumbling to himself with every step. ‘Vox!’ shouted Jun. ‘Give me your vox!’

The guardian obeyed. A line of blood was seeping from his right eye, like red tears.

Barging his way through the change-brothel’s other clients, slashing a path with the push-dagger, the warlord barked a command string into the mouthpiece of the communicator. ‘Air Guard,’ he shouted. ‘Deploy mobiles for zone strike, now now now!’

‘Location?’ asked the worried voice of the coordinator, back at the Yae clan compound.

‘The Red Lanes!’ he replied. ‘Wipe it off the map!’

‘Lord, are you not in that area?’

‘Do it now!’ It was the only way to be certain of killing the Culexus. He had no other option open to him.

In the ruined apartment, Kell held his breath and listened. Over the disarray in the street below them, his spy mask’s audial sensors had detected the sound of gravity-resist motors. ‘Vanus,’ he said. ‘Do you hear that?’

‘Gunships,’ said Tariel, studying his hololiths. ‘Cyclone-class. I read an attack formation.’

Kell’s face twisted in a grimace, and he ejected the magazine from his weapon, quickly reloading it with a different kind of ammunition.

Crossing the courtyard, the warlord looked up into the rainy night as the first salvo of rockets slammed into the buildings surrounding the square. A massive fist of orange fire and black smoke engulfed the tallest of the shanty-towers, and curls of flame spun away, lighting new infernos wherever they landed.

His guardian was behind him, blinded by a roaring headache, barely able to stagger in a straight line, and with a monumental effort, the psyker bodyguard hauled himself to the groundcar parked near the gates. Dead bodies lay in a circle around the vehicle, shocked to death by the vehicle’s autonomic security system. Recognising him, the car’s driver-servitor opened the gull wing doors to allow the guardian and the warlord inside. Another strike hit home nearby, blasting tiles off the brothel’s roof, sending them down to shatter harmlessly against the vehicle’s armoured skin.

‘Get me out of here,’ demanded Jun. ‘Stop for nothing.’

The guardian, half in and half out of the door, coughed suddenly and blood spluttered from his mouth. He turned, the pain in his skull burning like cold fire, as a figure in glistening black fell the distance from the roof to the courtyard floor. A ring of invisible force radiated out from it, causing a halo of rain to vaporise into mist.

‘Kill her!’ shouted the warlord, his voice high and filled with terror. ‘Kill her!’

The psyker took a foot in the spine and Jun shoved him out of the safety of the car, onto his knees. The gull wing door slammed shut and sealed tight.

The Culexus assassin stepped forwards as the guardian got up again, catching sight of the rain rolling down the contours of her skull-helm, dripping from the orbit of the single ruby eye as if she were weeping. The guardian reached inside himself and went deep, past the blazing pain, past the horrific wave of nothingness that threatened to drown him. He found a breath of fire and released it.

The pyrokinetic pulse chugged into existence, streaming from his twitching fingertips. The blast hit the Culexus dead on, and she backed away, shaking her distended steel head; but the tiny flare of hope the guardian experienced died a second later as the fire ebbed, almost as if it had been pulled into the ribbing of the assassin’s sinister garb.

He was aware of the car moving forwards in fits and starts, but his attention could not stray from the grinning, angular skull. The sapphire eye-clutch shimmered and the punishing gaze of the weapon known as the animus speculum was turned upon him.

Power, raw and inchoate, sucked in from the fabric of the warp and from the guardian’s abortive attack, drawn in like light from the event horizon of a singularity, was now unleashed. A pulse of energy flashed from the psychic cannon and blasted the warlord’s bodyguard backward, slamming him into the wall of the courtyard. As he tumbled to the ground, he combusted from within, the fire consuming his flesh and his screams.

Jun Yae Jun was shouting incoherently at his driver-servitor as it used the bull-bars on the groundcar’s prow to shoulder pedestrians out of the way. The vehicle made it onto the street as fresh salvos of rocket fire tore the Red Lanes into rubble. The servitor gunned the engine and aimed the car towards the bridge that led back towards the Yae compound.

A black blur fluttered in the light of an explosion and the armoured windscreen cracked and crazed as indigo fire lashed across it. Great gobs of polymer glass denatured and collapsed, smothering the servitor in a suffocating blanket of superheated plastic. The car spun out and collided with a bollard.

Jun pulled wildly at the door’s locking handle, then stabbed it with the push-dagger. He was operating on blind panic.

Taking her time, the Culexus clambered in through the destroyed window and disarmed him, almost as an afterthought. The warlord soiled himself as the skull came closer. ‘I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry–’

‘Kiss me,’ she said, her voice devoid of all emotion.

Jun’s lips were pressed to the cold steel of the mask, and agony spiked through him. He fell back, and spat dust. Raw pain boiled at his extremities as his flesh blackened and became thick ash, crumbling before his eyes until those too rotted in their sockets and shrivelled to nothing. Jun Yae Jun’s very energy of life was drawn from him, leached into the force matrix webbing the assassin’s stealthsuit, until there was nothing left of him but a slurry of indeterminate matter.

Iota left the target’s vehicle and the area around her was suddenly drenched in brilliant white light. The downdraught from a gravity drive beat at the ground, stirring up debris and what remained of the warlord. The sensor suite inside her helm registered a gunship’s weapons grid locking on to her silhouette, and she paused, wondering if it were possible for her to die.

In the next moment, she saw a line of light across the infrared spectrum as a single high-impact bullet passed through the armoured canopy of the gunship, beheading both the pilot and the gunner. Suddenly unguided, the Cyclone’s autoflight system kicked in and brought it down to a soft landing.

Presently two men, one in the operations gear of the Vindicare clade and another in a more basic stealth rig, emerged from one of the smouldering buildings. Iota glanced at them, then went back to watching the spreading fires.

As the sniper tipped the corpses from the flyer’s cockpit, the other man warily approached her. ‘Iota?’ he asked. ‘Protiphage, Clade Culexus?’

‘Of course it’s her,’ said the Vindicare. ‘Don’t be obtuse, Tariel.’

‘You have to come with us,’ said the one called Tariel. He indicated the gunship as the sniper took the controls.

Iota ran a finger over the grinning teeth of her skull-mask. ‘Will you kiss me too?’

The man went pale. ‘Perhaps later?’

Five

Fears
Release
Innocence

‘Husband?’

Renia’s hand on Yosef’s shoulder shocked him out of the dreamless doze he had fallen into at the kitchen table; so much so that he almost knocked over the glass of black tea by his hand. Before it could tip, he snatched it back upright without spilling a drop.

He gave her a weak smile. ‘Heh. Quicker this time.’

Yosef’s wife gathered her thick housecoat around her and took the seat across from him. It was late, deep into the evening, and the house was unlit except for a single lume over the table. It had a sharp-edged shade around it that forced the cast light into a cone, reducing everything beyond it to vague shapes in the shadows.

‘Is Ivak up as well?’

‘No. He’s still asleep, and I’m pleased to see it. With everything that’s been going on, he’s had a lot of bad dreams.’

‘Has he?’ Yosef asked the question and immediately felt a flicker of guilt. ‘I’ve been absent a lot recently…’

‘Ivak understands,’ Renia said, cutting him off. ‘I didn’t hear you come in,’ she noted.

Yosef nodded and resisted the urge to yawn. ‘You and the boy had already turned in. I didn’t want to wake you, so I made tea…’ He sipped at the glass and found the contents had gone cold.

‘And fell asleep in the chair?’ She tutted quietly. ‘You’re doing this too often these days, Yosef.’ Renia brushed some stray threads of copper-coloured hair out of her eyes.

He nodded. ‘I’m sorry. It’s the investigation.’ Yosef sighed. ‘It’s… troubling.’

‘I’ve heard,’ she said. ‘The watch-wire was running stories about it for a while, before the news from Dagonet came in. Now that is all anyone is talking about.’

Yosef blinked. ‘Dagonet?’ he repeated. The planet was a trading partner with Iesta Veracrux, a few light years distant down the spine of the Taebian Sector’s mercantile routes, in a system orbiting a pale yellow sun. By the interstellar scales of the Imperium of Man, Dagonet was practically a neighbour. He asked his wife to explain; Yosef and Daig had both been buried in research on the serial murders all day long, fruitlessly looking for information about Erno Sigg, and neither of them had seen anything that wasn’t a case file or medical report.

For the first time since she had broken his dozing, Yosef realised that Renia was hiding something, and as she talked it became clear. She was worried.

‘Some ships came into the system from Dagonet,’ Renia began. ‘The Planetary Defence Force monitors couldn’t catch them all, there were so many.’

Yosef felt a peculiar thrill of fear in his chest. ‘Warships?’

She shook her head. ‘Transports, liners, that sort of thing. All Dagoneti ships. Some of them barely made it out of the warp in one piece. They were all overloaded with people. The ships were full of refugees, Yosef.’

‘Why did they come here?’ Even as he asked the question, he knew what the answer was most likely to be. Ever since stories of the galactic insurrection had broken out across the sector, Dagonet’s government had been noticeably reticent to commit on the subject.

‘They were running. Apparently, there’s an uprising going on out there. The population are split over their… loyalty.’ She said the word as if it was foreign to her, as if the idea of being disloyal to Terra was a totally alien concept. ‘It’s a revolt.’

Yosef frowned. ‘The Governor on Dagonet won’t let things run out of control. The noble clans won’t let the planet fall into anarchy. If the Imperial Army or the Astartes have to intervene there–’

Renia shook her head and touched his hand. ‘You don’t understand. It’s the Dagoneti clans who started the uprising. The Governor issued a formal statement of support for the Warmaster. The nobles have declared in favour of Horus and rejected the rule of Terra.’

‘What?’ Yosef felt suddenly giddy, as if he had stood up too quickly.

‘The common people are the ones fighting back. They say there is blood in the streets of the capital. Soldiers fighting soldiers, militia fighting clan guards. Those who could flee filled every ship they could get their hands on.’

He sat quietly, letting this sink in. There was, he had to admit, a certain logic to the chain of events. Yosef had visited Dagonet in his youth and he recalled that Horus Lupercal was second only to the Emperor in being celebrated by the people of the planet; statues in the Warmaster’s honour were everywhere, and the Dagoneti spoke of him as ‘the Liberator’. As the historic record went, in the early years of the Great Crusade to reunite the lost colonies of humanity, Dagonet languished under the heel of a corrupt and venal priest-king who ruled the planet through fear and superstition. Horus, at the head of his Luna Wolves Legion, had come to Dagonet and freed a world – accomplishing the deed with only one round of ammunition expended, the single shot he fired that dispatched the tyrant. The victory was one of the Warmaster’s most celebrated triumphs, and it ensured he would be revered forever as Dagonet’s saviour.

Small wonder then, that the aristocratic clans who now ruled the planet would give their banners to him instead of a distant Emperor who had never set foot on their world. Yosef’s brow creased in a frown. ‘If they follow Horus…’

‘Will Iesta follow suit?’ said Renia, completing his question for him. ‘Terra is a long way from here, Yosef, and our Governor is no stronger-willed than the rulers of Dagonet. And if the rumours are true, the Warmaster may be closer than we know.’ His wife reached out again and took both his hands, and this time he noticed that she was trembling. ‘They say that the Sons of Horus are already on their way to Dagonet, to take control of the entire sector.’

He tried to summon a fraction of his firm, steady voice, the manner he had been trained to display as a reeve when the citizens looked to him in time of danger. ‘That won’t happen. We have nothing to be afraid of.’

Renia’s expression – her love for him for trying to protect her there, but intermingled with stark fear – told him that for all his efforts, he did not succeed.

The chemical snows of the Aktick Zone, thick feathery clumps tainted a sickly yellow from thousands of years of atmospheric contaminants, beat at the canopy of the aircraft. Out beyond the bullet-shaped nose of the transport, there was only a featureless cowl of grey sky and the whirling storm. Eristede Kell gave it a glance and then turned away, stepping back from the raised cockpit deck to the small cabin area behind it.

‘How much longer?’ said Tariel, who sat strapped into a thrust couch, a half-finished logica puzzle in his soft, thin fingers.

‘Not long,’ Kell told him, deliberately giving him a vague answer.

The Vanus’s face pinched in irritation, and he fiddled with the complex knot of the logica without really paying attention to it. ‘The sooner we get there, the happier I will be.’

‘Nervous passenger?’ the sniper asked, with mild amusement.

Tariel heard it in his voice and fired him an acid look. ‘The last aircraft I was in got shot down over the desert. That hasn’t exactly made me well-disposed to the whole experience.’ He discarded the logica – which, to his surprise, Kell realised the Vanus had completed without apparent effort – and pulled up his sleeve to minister to his cogitator gauntlet. ‘I still don’t understand why I am needed here. I should have returned with Valdor.’

‘The Captain-General has duties of his own to attend to,’ said Kell. ‘For now on, we’re on our own.’

‘So it would seem.’ Tariel threw a wary look to the far end of the cabin, where the girl Iota was sitting. Tariel had placed himself as far away from her as it was possible to get and still be inside the aircraft’s crew compartment.

For her part, the Culexus appeared wholly occupied with the pattern of the rivets on the far bulkhead, running her long fingers over the surface of them, back and forth. She seemed lost in the repeated, almost autistic actions.

‘Operational security,’ said Kell. ‘Valdor’s orders were quite clear. We assemble the team he wants, and no one must learn of it.’

Tariel paused, and then leaned closer. ‘You know what she is, don’t you?’

‘A pariah,’ sniffed the Vindicare. ‘Yes, I know what that means.’

But the Vanus was shaking his head. ‘Iota is designated as a protiphage. She’s not human, Kell, not like you or I. The girl is a replicae.’

‘A clone?’ The sniper looked back at the silent Culexus. ‘I would not think it beyond the works of her clade to create such a thing.’ Still, he wondered how the genomasters would have gone about it. Kell knew that the Emperor’s biologians were greatly skilled and possessed of incredible knowledge – but to make a living person, whole and real, from cells in a test tube…

‘Exactly!’ insisted Tariel. ‘A being without a soul. She’s closer to the xenos than to us.’

A smile pulled briefly at Kell’s lips. ‘You’re afraid of her.’

The infocyte looked away. ‘In all honesty, Vindicare, I am afraid of most things. It’s the equilibrium of my life.’

Kell accepted this with a nod. ‘Tell me, have you ever been face to face with one of the Eversor?’

Tariel’s face went ashen, the tone of his cheeks paling to match the polar snows outside the flyer’s viewports. ‘No,’ he husked.

‘When that happens,’ Kell went on, ‘then you’ll truly have something to be afraid of.’

‘That’s where we’re going,’ offered Iota. Both of them had thought the girl to be wrapped up in whatever private reality existed inside her mind, but now she turned away from the bulkhead and spoke as if she had been a part of the conversation all along. ‘To fetch the one they call the Garantine.’

Kell’s eyes narrowed. ‘How do you know that name?’ He had not spoken of the next assassin on Valdor’s list.

‘Vanus are not the only ones who know things.’ She cocked her head to stare at Tariel. ‘I’ve seen them. Eversor.’ Iota’s hand strayed to her skull-helm, where it rested nearby on a vacant passenger couch. ‘Like and like.’ She smiled at the infocyte. ‘They are rage distilled. Pure.’

Tariel glared at the sniper. ‘That’s why we’re out here in this icy wilderness? To get one of them?’ He shuddered. ‘A primed cyclonic warhead would be safer!’

Kell ignored him. ‘You know the Garantine’s name,’ he said to Iota. ‘What else do you know?’

‘Pieces of the puzzle,’ she replied. ‘I’ve seen what he left behind. The tracks of blood and broken meat, the spoor of the vengeance killer.’ She pointed at Tariel. ‘The infocyte is right, you know. More than any one of us, the Garantine is a weapon of terror.’

The matter-of-fact way she said the words made Kell hesitate; ever since Valdor had appeared out there in the deserts with his commands and his authority handed down from the Master of Assassins himself, the Vindicare’s sense of unease had grown greater by the day, and now Iota cut to the heart of it. They were lone killers, all of them in their own ways. This gathering together sat wrongly with him; it was not the way in which things were to be done. And somewhere, deep in the back of his thoughts, Eristede Kell found he was also afraid of what such orders boded.

‘Vindicare!’ He turned as the transport pilot called out his clade’s name. ‘Approach control doesn’t answer. Something is wrong!’

Tariel muttered something about his cursed luck and Kell brushed past him, back into the cockpit. The pilot was already pushing the transport into a steep turn. Below them, distinguished only by a slight change in the tone of the chem-snow, he spotted the mottled lifeless landscape of the Aktick ranges through the spin and whirl of the blizzard-borne ice. There, beneath the craft, was a low blockhouse of heavy ferrocrete, distinguishable only by stripes of weather-faded crimson outlining the edges of it, and the steady blink of locator beacons. But where there should have been the hex-shape of a landing silo, there was only a maw belching black smoke and flickers of fire.

Kell caught the tinny sound of panicked voices coming through the pilot’s vox-bead, and as they banked, he thought he saw the blink of weapons discharges down inside the silo proper. His jaw stiffened; this was no chance accident. He knew exactly what had happened.

‘Oh. They woke him,’ said Iota, from behind, giving voice to his thoughts. ‘That was a mistake.’

‘Take us in,’ Kell snapped.

The pilot’s eyes widened behind his flight goggles. ‘The silo is on fire and there’s nowhere else to set down! We have to abort!’

The Vindicare shook his head. ‘Land us on the ice!’

‘If I put this craft down there, it might never lift again,’ said the pilot, ‘and if–’

Kell silenced him with a look. ‘If we don’t deal with this right now, by sunrise tomorrow every settlement within a hundred kilometre radius will be a slaughterhouse!’ He pointed at the snow fields. ‘Land this thing, now!’

Instead of returning home to the small apartment cluster where he lived alone, out near the western edge of the radial park, Daig Segan took a public conveyor to the old market district. At this time of night, none of the stalls were open to make sales but they were still hives of activity; men and women loaded produce and prepared for the dawn shift, moving crates on dollies this way and that across shiny tiled floors that were slick with sluice-water.

Daig crossed the covered market to the other conveyor halt and took the first ride that came in, irrespective of its destination. As the monorail moved along the line embedded in the cobbled street bed, he gave the carriage a long, careful sweep, running over the faces of the other passengers with a policeman’s wary eye. There were only a handful of people. Three teenagers in loader’s hoods, tired and serious-looking. An old couple, bound for home. Men and women in work-cloaks. None of them spoke. They either stared into the middle distance, or looked blankly out the windows of the conveyor. Daig could sense the tension in them, the unfocussed fear. It manifested in short tempers and hollow gazes, brittle silences and morose sighs. All these people and everyone like them, all were looking to a horizon lit by the distant fires of war, and they wondered – when will it reach us? It seemed as if Iesta Veracrux was holding its collective breath as the shadow of the rebellion drew ever closer. Daig looked away and watched the streets roll by.

He rode for three stops before disembarking once more. He took another conveyor back the way he came, this time stepping off the running board just as it pulled away from the halt before the market. The reeve jogged across the road, throwing a glance over his shoulder to be certain he had not been followed. Then, his toque pulled low to his brow line, Daig vanished into an ill-lit alleyway and found his way to an unmarked metal door.

A shutter opened in the door and a round, florid face peered out at him. Recognition split the face in a broad smile. ‘Daig. We haven’t seen you in a good while.’

‘Hello, Noust.’ He nodded distractedly. ‘Can I come in?’

The door creaked open in reply and he stepped through.

Inside it was warm, and Daig blinked a few times, his eyes watering as the chilled skin of his face thawed a little. Noust handed him a tin cup with a measure of mulled wine in it and the reeve followed the other man down a steel staircase. A breath of gentle music wafted up on the warm air as they descended.

‘I wondered if you might have changed your mind,’ said Noust. ‘Sometimes that happens. People question things after they take on the belief. It’s like buyer’s remorse.’ He gave a dry chuckle.

‘It’s not that,’ said Daig. ‘It’s just that I haven’t been able to get here. It’s the work.’ He sighed. ‘I have to be careful.’

Noust shot him a look over his shoulder. ‘Of course you do. We all do, especially in the current climate. He understands.’

Daig sighed, feeling guilty. ‘I hope so.’

The staircase deposited them in a cellar with a low ceiling. Lumes had been glued to the walls along the long axis of the chamber, and in rough rows there were a collection of seats – some plastiformed things pilfered from office plexes, others threadbare sofas from lost homes, a few little more than artfully cut packing crates – all of them arranged in a semi-circle around a cloth-covered table. Red-printed leaflets lay on some of the chairs.

High-Reeve Kata Telemach would have given much to find this place. It was one of a handful, each concealed in plain sight across Iesta Veracrux. There was no identifying symbol to show it was here, no secret passwords to be spoken or special sign that would grant access. It was simply that those who were called to know these places found them of their own accord, or else they were brought here by the like-minded; and despite what the High-Reeve insisted, despite all the hearsay and foolish gossip that was spread about what took place in such cellars and hidden spaces, there were no horrors, no murderous blood rites or dark ceremonies. There were only ordinary souls that made up the membership of the Theoge, that and nothing more. He thought on this as he rubbed his thumb over the smoothed gold of the aquila talisman about his wrist.

On the table, there was an elderly holographic projector that flickered and hummed; a blue-tinted image of Terra floated above it, a time-lapse loop of the planet’s day-night cycle. At the side of the projector was a book, open at a page of dense text. The book was made of common-quality vinepaper and it had been bound without a cover; Daig understood that a friend of Noust’s who worked the nightshift at an inkworks had used cast-offs from other jobs and downtime between the print runs of paying customers to run out multiple copies of the document.

The pages were careworn from many sets of hands upon them, and he wanted to pick them up and leaf through them, draw comfort from the writings. Daig knew that he only had to ask, and Noust would give him a copy of his own to keep, but to have the book in his home, somewhere it could be discovered by mistake or worse, used to incriminate him by people who didn’t understand the true meaning contained in it… He couldn’t take the risk.

Noust was at his side. ‘You timed it well. We were just about to have a reading. You’ll join us, yes?’

Daig looked up. There were only a few other people in the cellar, some of whom he knew, others not so familiar. He spotted a new face and recognised him as a jager from the precinct; the man returned a wary look, but Daig gave him a nod that communicated a shared confidence. ‘Of course,’ he said to Noust.

A youth with a bandaged hand picked up the book and handed it to Daig’s friend. On the front was the only element of adornment on the otherwise Spartan document.

Picked out in red ink, the words Lectitio Divinitatus.

If the Garantine had once possessed a true name, that time was long ago and of little consequence. The entire concept of a past and a future, these were strange abstracted notions to the Eversor. They were things that – if he had been able to stop to dwell on them – would have only brought tics of confusion; and as with all things about him, rage.

The Eversor existed only in a permanent state of the furious now and matters of before and after were limited to the most transitory of elements. Before, just heartbeats earlier, he had beheaded a guard attempting to down him with some kind of heavy webber cannon. In a moment more, he would leap the distance across the open space where the handling gantry for the flyers did not reach, in order to land among the group of technicians who were fleeing towards a doorway. In these small ways, the Garantine allowed himself to comprehend the nature of past and future, but to go beyond that was pointless.

It was the manner of his life that he existed in the thick of the killing. He had a dim understanding of the other times, the times when he would lie in the baths of amnio-fluids as the patient machines of his clade healed his wounds or upgraded the stimjectors and drug glands throughout his body. The times when, in the dreamless no-sleep between missions, hypnogoge data streams would unfold in his head like blossoms of information, target profiles linked to mood-triggers that would give him bursts of elation for every kill, jolts of pleasure for each waypoint reached, jerks of pain if he deviated off-programme.

These things had not happened here, though. He reflected on that as he completed his leap, his augmented muscles relaxing to take the impact of landing, the sheer force of his arrival killing one of the fleeing technicians immediately. As he spun about, the knife-claws on his hands and feet opening veins, the grinning rictus of his steel skull-mask steaming with splashes of blood, he searched for a programme, for a set of victory conditions.

There was none. Digging deeper, he reached for his stunted past. He remembered back as far as he could – an hour, perhaps? He replayed the moment. A sudden awakening. The transit cocoon that held him in its silent, womb-like space, where he could wait out the non-time until his next glorious release; suddenly broken. An error, or something else? Enemy action? That assumption was the Garantine’s default setting, after all. He reasoned – as much as he was able – that surely if he had been awakened for any other reason, the hypnogoges would have ensured he knew why.

But there was nothing. No parameters, only wakefulness. And for an Eversor, to be awake was to be in the glory of killing. A cocktail of stimulants and battle drugs boiled through his bloodstream, heavy doses of Fury, Spur and Psychon synthesised to order by the compact biofac implants in his abdomen. Under normal circumstances, the Garantine would have been armed with more than just his skinplanted offensive weapons and helm-mask; he would have been sheathed in armour and arrayed with a suite of servo-systems. That he did not have these only served to modify the killer’s approach to his targets. He had taken and employed several light stubber guns, using each until the ammo drum ran dry, then making the weapons into clubs he used to beat his kills to the floor; but the stubbers were only good for a few hits before his violence broke them across the frame and he was forced to discard them.

He punched a man with enough energy that it shattered his skull, and then he vaulted a makeshift barricade, moving faster than the men hiding behind it could aim. He killed them with their own guns and ran on, deeper through the complex.

Parts of the building might have looked familiar to him, if the Garantine had been able to stop the racing pace of his thoughts, if he had been able to slow his kill-need for just a moment; but he could do neither.

In the absence of orders, with no target to aim for, the Eversor did what he was trained to do; and he would go on, killing here and then moving on to the next set of targets, and the next and the next, forever in the moment.

Afterwards, Daig felt refreshed by his experience, but he had not come to the meeting for personal reasons. While some of the others talked amongst themselves, the reeve took Noust to one side and the two men shared cups of the warm wine, and questions.

Noust listened in silence to Daig’s explanation of his caseload, and at length, he gave a nod. ‘I know Erno Sigg. I guessed that might be why you’d come to see me. His face was on the public watch-wire. Said that he was sought after to assist in your “enquiries”.’

Daig suppressed a wince. Laimner, on Telemach’s orders, had deliberately leaked Sigg’s image to the media in a ham-fisted attempt to flush him into the open; but if anything, it appeared to have driven the man deeper into hiding.

Noust continued. ‘He’s a troubled fellow, to be certain. Someone without a compass, you could say. But that’s where the Theoge can be of help to a man. He learned of the text while he was incarcerated, from a ship-hand. Erno found another path with us.’ He looked away. ‘At least, for a time he did.’

Daig leaned in. ‘What do you mean?’

Noust eyed him. ‘Is that you asking, Daig Segan? Or is it the Sentine?’

‘Both,’ he replied. ‘This is important. You know I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t.’

‘Aye, that’s so.’ Noust sighed. ‘Here’s the thing. For a while, Erno was a regular fixture here, and he was trying to make something of himself. He wanted to make amends. Erno was working to become a better man than the angry, frustrated thug he’d left out there in space. It’s a long road, but he knew that. But then he started to come around less often.’

‘When did this happen?’

‘A few demilunars ago. Two, maybe. When I did see him, he was twitchy. He said that he was going to have to pay for what he had done.’ Noust paused, sorting through his thoughts. ‘I got the impression that someone was… I don’t know, following him? He was irritable, paranoid. All the old, bad traits coming back to the fore.’

Daig rubbed his chin. ‘He may have killed people.’

Noust gave the reeve a shocked look. ‘No. Never. Maybe once upon a time, but not now. He’s not capable of that, not any more. I’d swear that to the God-Emperor himself.’

‘I need to find Erno,’ said Daig. ‘If he’s innocent, we need to prove it. We… I need to protect all this.’ He gestured around. ‘I found my path here. I can’t lose it.’ Daig imagined what might happen if Telemach or Laimner got hold of Sigg, broke him in interrogation and then found the door to this place. In their secular, clinical world there was no place for the revelation of the Imperial Truth, the undeniable reality of the Emperor’s shining divinity. The church, such as it was, and all the others like it would be torn down, burned away, and the words of the Lectitio Divinitatus that had so transformed Daig Segan when he read them would be erased and left unheard. They would use Sigg and the crimes to excuse them as they put a torch to it all.

‘The Emperor protects,’ said Noust.

‘And I’ll help Him do it, if you give me the chance,’ insisted the reeve. ‘Just tell me where Erno Sigg is hiding.’

Noust finished his drink. ‘All right, brother.’

Behind her, she heard the clattering thunder of auto-fire and more screams. Iota skidded to a halt on the cold metal floor and cocked her head, letting her skull-helm’s autosenses take readings and pass the analysis back to her. He was very close; she had attracted his interest by appearing in the middle of a companionway, letting him see her clearly, and then breaking into a run. The Eversor knew another assassin when he saw one, and she was without doubt the most serious threat vector the rage-killer had encountered since his awakening. He was coming for her, but that didn’t stop him from pausing along the way to dispatch any of the facility’s staff who were unlucky enough to cross his path. The murderers of the Clade Eversor were like that; for all their bloody violence and instinct-driven brutality, they were still methodical. They left no witnesses, nothing but corpses.

Iota waited, rocking on her heels, ready to break into a run the moment he spotted her again. From what the infocyte had managed to piece together from the base’s cogitators, it seemed that there had been a catastrophic accident during the retrieval of the Garantine from one of the deep cold iso-stores beneath the mantle of the Aktick ice. The cryopod containing the assassin in his dormant state had cracked a fluid line; the burst conduit sprayed super-chilled methalon across the handlers, flash-freezing them all in an instant. By the time another team had made it down to the transfer area, the pod had drained and the Garantine was already awake. Even in his semi-dormant, unarmed state, they were easily cut down by him.

The clade’s technologians made the fatal mistake of addressing the problem of the coolant leak first – an easy choice to understand, given that this particular facility housed another nine Eversor field operatives down in the iso-stores. Left unchecked, the Garantine’s brethren would have eventually followed him into wakefulness. But the time spent stabilising the storage compartments had allowed the Garantine to fully thaw and begin the business of terminating every living being in the facility.

‘Culexus? Where are you?’ said Tariel, his voice a hiss in her helmet vox.

‘Area eight, tier one, facing west,’ she replied. ‘Waiting.’

‘I’ve accessed the main systems library,’ he told her, clearly impressed with his own achievement. ‘I’m closing the pressure hatches behind him as he moves.’

Iota glanced down at the multi-barrelled combi-needler fixed to her right wrist, considering it. ‘He’s not an animal, Vanus. He’ll know if you’re trying to herd him.’

‘Just keep him reactive,’ came the reply.

She didn’t say any more, because at that moment the Garantine came storming around the bend in the corridor, his thickset, densely-muscled body rippling with exertion. Chugs of white vapour puffed into the cold air from behind his metal mask, and as he moved, Iota saw the places where his bare skin showed and the shapes of implants beneath. The Garantine was covered from head to toe with daubs of human blood. He halted, rumbling like an engine, and eyed her with a low chuckle. In one hand he had a stubber carbine, liquid dripping from the blunt maw of the barrel.

She thought for a fleeting instant about attempting to reason with him, then dismissed the idea just as quickly. There were rumours that every Eversor had an abeyance meme encoded into their brains, a nonsense string of words that would lull them into inaction, or even send them into neuro-death if spoken aloud; but if this were so, Iota was sure that the rage-killer would have made certain any technologians in the base who knew the code were no longer able to voice it.

The Garantine pointed the broken gun at her. ‘You,’ he said thickly. ‘Quick.’

Perhaps it was a threat – a promise that he was going to end her swiftly – or perhaps it was a compliment on her agility, acknowledging Iota as the first real challenge he had come across since awakening. It mattered little; in the next second he was coming at her, charging like an enraged grox.

She fired a blast of glassaic needles at him, describing a seamless back flip to open the distance between them. The glittering shots clattered across the Eversor’s torso, burying themselves in the meat of his chest, but the rage-killer only grunted and batted them away.

Iota spun to a halt in front of a large oval exterior hatchway, as Tariel’s voice reached her once more. ‘Is he there?’ came the urgent question. ‘I… I am having difficulty reading the location of the Garantine…’

She nodded to herself. Among the many implants beneath the flesh of an Eversor were passive sensing baffles that could confuse the detector heads of many conventional scanners. ‘Oh, he’s here,’ Iota told him. ‘He will murder me in less than one hundred and ten seconds.’ The prediction was based on observing the other kills the Garantine had made.

‘Working,’ said the infocyte, a new urgency in his words.

‘Take your time,’ she replied.

The Eversor halted and cocked his head, considering her. Iota took a breath and drew in on herself. She let the force matrix built into the structure of her stealthsuit come alive, allowing it to reach its web of influence beyond the real and into the etherium of the warp; but the process was slow. Had she been fighting a psyker, she could have drained them dry in a moment, siphoned off their power for herself. But here and now, there was nothing but the commonplace energy of air and heat and life. She felt the eye of the animus speculum slowly iris open – but even as it did she knew it would not be ready in time.

The other assassin grunted out a laugh and stooped to rip a short stanchion pole from a support pillar, tearing it off in a flutter of sparks. He brandished the steel rod like a club and went for her.

At once, the hatch at Iota’s back groaned on heavy hydraulics and fanned open with a clatter of fracturing ice. A blast of polar air and windborne snow thundered in around her from outside. For a moment, the snowstorm whirled into the corridor, filling the space with whiteness.

The energy inside the animus was approaching readiness, but as she had predicted, the Garantine killer had her range and he did not hesitate again. Before Iota could release even a fraction of the psy-weapon’s potential, he slammed the bar into her chest with such force that she flew backwards, out into the snow-filled courtyard. Iota noted the snapping of several of her ribs with a disconnected understanding. She landed badly in a shallow drift of white and coughed up a stream of bloody spittle into her helmet. The fact she wasn’t dead made it clear he wanted to toy with her first.

They called him the Garantine because it was said he hailed from the Garant Span, an Oort cloud collective on the near side of the Perseus Null. A natural psychotic, he had killed everyone on his home asteroid, and all this as a child barely able to read. It was no wonder the Clade Eversor had been delighted to take ownership of him.

Iota struggled to get up, and through the optics of her skull-helm she looked to see another grinning rictus come into view. The Garantine grabbed her by the ankle and effortlessly threw her across the courtyard. This time the impact was lessened by a deep snow bank, but still the shock vibrated through her. She let out a tiny cry of pain. In her ear, the Vanus was jabbering something about closing the hatch, but that had no consequence to her. Iota focussed on bringing the animus to a firing state. If their plan failed, she would have to be the one to kill him, crushing his fevered mind with a blast of pure warp energy.

The Eversor bounded towards her, laughing, and at the last moment he leapt into the air. Time seemed to thicken and slow, the hazy man-shape falling down towards her; then she was distantly aware of a heavy report and suddenly the Garantine’s fall was deflected. He jerked away at a right angle, as if pulled on an invisible cord.

Iota saw the steaming wound in the rage-killer’s chest as he stumbled back to his clawed feet, shaking off the strike. Her head swimming, the Culexus searched and then found the source of the attack. A shimmering white figure stood up atop one of the nearby blockhouses, a longrifle in his grip. The white colouration faded into ink-black as the Vindicare deliberately reset his cameoline cloak to a null mode, allowing the Eversor to see him clearly. He raised the rifle to his shoulder as the rage-killer roared at him, and for the moment Iota was apparently forgotten.

The Eversor charged again, and the rifle shouted. The first shot had been a kinetic impact round, the kind of bullet that could shatter the engine block of a hover truck or reduce an unarmoured man to meat; that had been enough to attract the Garantine’s attention. The next shot whistled through the frigid air, blurring as it impacted the Eversor’s chest. The round was a heavy dart, fashioned from high-density glassaic. It contained a reservoir of gel within, pressure-injected into the target’s flesh on impact; but it was not a drug or philtre. An Eversor’s body was a chemical hell of dozens of interacting combat medicines, and no poison, no sedative could have been enough to slow it. The gel-matter in the rounds was a myofluid with a very different function; when exposed to oxygen it created a powerful bioelectric charge, a single hit strong enough to stun an ogryn.

It was a non-lethal attack, and the Garantine seemed incensed by that, as if he were insulted that so trivial a weapon was being used on him. He tore out the dart and came on. Kell fired again, flawlessly striking the same spot, and then again, and then a third time. The Eversor did not falter, even as crackles of blue sparks erupted from the weeping wound in his chest.

For one moment, Iota felt a rare stab of fear. How many rounds did the Vindicare have in the magazine of his longrifle? Would it be enough? She ignored the Vanus shouting in her ear and watched, as the crash of shot after shot was swallowed up by the hush of the falling snows.

The Eversor leapt up to where the Vindicare stood and swung a taloned hand at him, but his balance faltered, the warshot of a dozen darts pinning his flesh. The blow smashed Kell’s rifle in two and sent the pieces spinning. Iota was on her feet, aiming the animus; if she fired now, the Vindicare would be caught in the nimbus of the psi-blast.

But then the fight ebbed from the Eversor assassin, and the Garantine staggered backward, finally succumbing to all the hits he had taken. He made a last swipe at Kell and missed, the force of the blow carrying him back off the roof of the blockhouse and down into the courtyard.

Iota approached him carefully, loping low across the ground. She was not convinced. Behind her, the marksman came in to survey his work.

‘Is he down?’ she heard Tariel ask.

‘For our sake,’ Kell muttered, ‘I bloody hope so.’

Daig halted the groundcar at the foot of the hill and killed the engine. ‘We walk from here,’ he said, the weak pre-dawn light giving his face a ghostly cast.

Yosef studied him. ‘Tell me again how you came across this lead?’ he said. ‘Tell me again why you had to drag me out of my bed – a bed I’ve hardly had leave to be in these last few days, mind – to come out to a derelict vineyard while the rest of the city is sleeping?’

‘I told you,’ Daig said, with uncharacteristic terseness, ‘a source. Come on. We couldn’t risk coming in by flyer in case Sigg gets spooked… and he may not even be here.’

Yosef followed him out into the cold air, pausing a moment to check the magazine in his pistol. He looked up the low hill. On the other side of heavy iron gates, what had once been the Blasko Wine Lodge was now a tumbledown husk of its former self. Gutted by fire a full three seasons ago, the site on the southerly ridges had yet to be reopened, and it stood empty and barren. In the dampness of the dawn air, the tang of fire-damaged wood could still be scented, drawn out by the moisture. ‘If you think Sigg is in there,’ Yosef went on, ‘we should at least have some support.’

‘I don’t know for sure,’ Daig replied.

‘Not an overly reliable source, then,’ said Yosef.

That earned him a sullen look. ‘You know what will happen if I breathe a word of this at the precinct. Laimner would be all over it like a blight.’

He couldn’t disagree with that; and if Laimner was involved and Daig’s tip came to nothing, it would be the two reeves who would suffer for it. ‘Fine. But don’t keep me in the dark.’

When Daig looked at him again, he was almost imploring him. ‘Yosef. I don’t ask much of you, but I’m asking now. Just trust me here, and don’t question it. All right?’

He nodded at length. ‘All right.’

They got into the vineyard through a broken stand of fencing, and followed the driveway up to the main building. Small branches and drifts of wet leaves dotted the ground. Yosef glanced to his right and saw where unkempt, blackened ground ranged away down the steep terraces. Before the fire, those spaces had been thick with greenery, but now they were little more than snarls of wild growth. Yosef frowned; he still had a ten-year bottle of Blasko caskinport at home. It had been a good brand.

‘In here,’ whispered Daig, motioning him towards an outbuilding.

Yosef hesitated, his eyes adjusted to the dimness now, and his sight picking out what did not fit. Here and there he saw signs of recent motion, places where dirt had been disturbed by human movement. Looking up from the gates, an observer would have seen nothing, but here, close up, there was evidence. Yosef thought about the Norte and Latigue murders, and he reached into the pocket of his coat for the butt of his gun, comforting himself with the steady presence of the firearm.

‘We take him alive,’ he hissed back.

Daig shot him a look as he drew a thermal register unit from inside his jacket, panning it around to scan for a heat return. ‘Of course.’

They found their suspect asleep inside the cooper’s shack, lying in the curve of a half-built barrel. He heard their approach and bolted to his feet in a panic. Yosef put the brilliant white glare of his hand lantern on him and took careful aim with the pistol.

‘Erno Sigg!’ he snapped, ‘We are reeves of the Sentine, and you are bound by law. Stand where you are and do not move.’

The man almost collapsed, so great was his terror. Sigg flailed and stumbled, falling against the side of his makeshift shelter, before catching himself with an obvious physical effort. He held up his shaking hands, in the right gripping the handle of an elderly fuel-lamp. ‘H-have you come to kill me?’ he asked.

It wasn’t the question Yosef had expected. He had faced killers of men before, more often than he might have liked, but Sigg’s manner was unlike any of them. Dread came off him in waves, like heat from a naked flame. Yosef had once rescued a young boy held prisoner for weeks in a wine cellar; the look on the boy’s face as he saw light for the first time was mirrored now in Erno Sigg’s expression. The man looked like a victim.

‘You are suspected of a high crime,’ Daig told him. ‘You’re to come with us.’

‘I paid for what I did!’ he retorted. ‘I’ve done nothing else since!’ Sigg looked in Daig’s direction. ‘How did you find me? I hid well enough so even he couldn’t know where I was!’

Yosef wondered who he might be as Daig answered. ‘Don’t be afraid. If you are innocent, we will prove it.’

‘Will you?’ The question was weak and fearful, like the words of a child.

Then Daig said something that seemed out of place in the moment, and yet the words were like a calmative, immediately easing the tension in Sigg’s taut frame. Daig said ‘The Emperor protects.’

When Yosef looked back to Sigg, the man was staring directly at him. ‘I’ve done many things I’m not proud of,’ he told him. ‘But no longer. And not those things the wire accuses me of. I’ve never taken a man’s life.’

‘I believe you, Erno,’ said Yosef, the words leaving his mouth before he was even aware of them forming in his thoughts; and the strangeness of it was, he did believe him, with a totality that surprised the reeve with its strength. On some instinctual level, he knew that Erno Sigg was telling the truth. The fact that Yosef could not fathom where this abrupt conviction had come from troubled him deeply; but he did not have time to dwell upon it.

The roof of the cooper’s shack was a shell of corrugated metal and glass, some of it warped or shattered by the passage of the old inferno. From nowhere, as the dawn wind changed direction, the musty air was suddenly full of noise. Yosef recognised the rattling hum of coleopter rotors a split-second before harsh sodium light drenched the floor with white, the glare from spotlamps blazing down through the smoke-dirty glass and the holes in the roof. An amplified voice echoed Yosef’s original challenge to Sigg, and then there was movement.

The reeve looked up, shielding his eyes, and made out the blurs of jagers dropping from the hovering flyers, heavy guns in their grips at they fell on descender lines.

He looked back and saw pure fury on Sigg’s face. ‘Bastards!’ he spat venomously, ‘I would have come! But you lied! You lied!’

Daig was reaching out to him. ‘No, wait!’ he cried out. ‘I didn’t bring them! We came alone–’

Sigg cursed them once again and threw the fuel-lamp in his hand with a savage jerk. The lantern hit the ground and split in a crash of glass and fire, even as overhead the intact portions of the roof were breached by the jagers. As pieces of the roof rained down from above, the lamp’s burning oils kissed the soiled matter and old spills on the floor and a pulse of smoky flame erupted. Yosef pushed Daig aside as the new blaze rolled out, chewing on the piles of rotting wood and discarded sacks all around them.

Daig tried to go after Sigg, but the fire had already built a wall between them, and the droning throb of the coleopter blades fed it, raising it high. Sigg vanished into the heat and the smoke.

The jagers were disentangling themselves from their ropes as Yosef stormed over to them; one was already on the wireless for a firefighter unit. The reeve saw Skelta’s face among the men and grabbed him by his collar.

‘Who ordered you in?’ he shouted, over the sound of the rotors. ‘Who’s the shit who ruined this?’

But he knew the answer before he heard it.

Six

Ultio
Lies and Murder
The Death of Kings and Queens

The Officio presented the ship to them without ceremony. Like those it served, the vessel had a fluid identity; at the present moment, as it made its way towards the orbit of Jupiter, its pennants and beacons declared it to be the Hallis Faye, an oxygen tanker out of Ceres registered to a Belter Coalition habitat. Its codename, revealed to Kell and the others as they boarded, was Ultio.

Outwardly, the Ultio resembled the class of light bulk transport ships that travelled a thousand different sublight intrasystem space lanes across the Imperium. It was a design so commonplace that it became almost invisible in its ubiquity; a perfect blind for a craft in service to the Officio Assassinorum. Small by the standards of the mammoth starcruisers that comprised the fleets of the Imperial Navy and the rogue trader baronage, the Ultio was every inch a lie. A stubby trident, the shaft of the main hull – what appeared to be space for cargo – was in fact filled with the mechanisms and power train for an advanced design of interstellar warp motor. The craft had been constructed around the old engine, the origins of which were lost to time, and it was only the forward arrowhead-shaped section of the ship that was actually given over to cabins and compartments. This module, swept back and curved like an aerodyne, was capable of detaching itself from the massive drives to make planetfall like a guncutter. Inside, the crew sections of the Ultio were cramped and narrow, with sleeping quarters no larger than prison cells, hexagonal corridors and a flight deck configured with advanced gravity simulators so that every square centimetre of surface area could be utilised.

The ship had three permanent crewmembers, in addition to the growing numbers of the Execution Force, but none of them were what could be considered wholly human. As Kell walked towards the stern, he was aware that beneath his feet the ship’s astropath lay sleeping inside a null chamber, having deliberately shocked itself into a somnambulant state; similarly, the Ultio’s Navigator, who habitually remained far back among the systemry of the drive section, had also opted to drop into sense-dep slumber inside a similar contrapsychic chamber. Both of them had expressed grave displeasure at Iota’s arrival on board, but their requests that she be sequestered or drugged into stasis were denied. Kell could only guess at how the delicate psionic senses of the warp navigator and the astro-telepath would be perturbed by the ghostly negative aura cast by the Culexus; even he, without a taint of the psyker about him, found it profoundly unsettling to be around the pariah girl for too long. She had agreed to wear her dampener torc for the duration, but even that device could not block the eerie air that followed Iota wherever she went.

The third member of the Ultio’s crew was the least human of them all. Kell could still see the strange look of mingled horror and fascination on Tariel’s face as they had met the starship’s pilot. There was no body to the pilot, not any more; like the venerable dreadnoughts of the Adeptus Astartes, a being that had once been a man many centuries ago was now only a few pieces of flesh interred inside a body of iron and steel. Somewhere deep inside the block of computational hardware that filled the rear section of the crew deck, parts of a brain and preserved skeins of nerve ganglia were all that remained. Now he was the Ultio, and the Ultio was him, the hull his skin, the fires of the fusion core his beating heart. Kell tried to comprehend what it might be like to surrender one’s self to the embrace of a machine, but he could not. He was, on some base level, appalled by the very idea of such a merging; but what he thought counted for nothing. The pilot, the Navigator, the astropath and all the rest of them, they were here to serve the interest of the Assassinorum – to do, and not to question.

He halted outside a hatchway, his boots ringing on the metal-grilled deck. ‘Ultio,’ he asked the air, ‘Is the Garantine awake?’

‘Confirmed.’ The pilot-cyborg’s voice came from a speaker grille above his head. It had the flat tonality of a synthetic vocoder.

‘Open it,’ he ordered.

‘Complying,’ came the reply. ‘Hazard warning. Increased gravity field ahead. Do not enter.’

The hatch fell into the deck, and a waft of stale air, reeking of chemical sweat, wandered into the corridor. Inside, the Eversor sat uncomfortably on the floor, his breathing laboured. With visible effort, the rage-killer lifted his head and glared at Kell. ‘When I get out of here,’ he said, forcing the words from his mouth, ‘I am going to rip you apart.’

Kell’s lips thinned. He didn’t approach any closer. Although the Garantine was not tethered to the deck by any chains or fetters, there was no way he could have come to his feet. The gravitational plates beneath the floor of the Eversor’s compartment were operating well above their standard setting, confining the assassin to the floor with the sheer weight of his own flesh. Veins stood out from his bare skin as his bio-modified physiology worked to keep him alive; an unaugmented human would have died from collapsed lungs or crushed organs within an hour or so.

The Garantine had been in the room for two days now, enduring a regimen of anti-psychotics and neural restoratives.

Kell studied him. ‘It must be difficult for you,’ he began. ‘The doubt. The uncertainty.’

‘There’s no hesitation in me,’ gasped the Eversor. ‘Let me up and you’ll see.’

‘The mission, I mean.’ That got him the smallest flash of hesitation from behind the Garantine’s skull-face. ‘To wake without direction… That can’t have been easy on you.’

‘I will kill,’ said the Eversor.

‘Yes,’ agreed the Vindicare. ‘And kill and kill and kill, until you are destroyed. But it will be for nothing. Worthless.’

With an agonised grunt, the Garantine tried to lurch forward, clawing towards the open doorway. ‘I’ll kill you,’ he grated. ‘Worth something.’

Kell resisted the reflex to step back. ‘You think so?’

‘Broke your gun, back there,’ muttered the Eversor, the sweat thick on his bare neck. ‘Pity. Were you… attached to it?’

Kell didn’t rise to the bait; his prized longrifle had been custom-made by Isherite weaponsmiths, and it had served him well for years. ‘It was just a weapon.’

‘Like me?’

He spread his hands. ‘Like all of us.’ Kell paused, then went on. ‘The accident that woke you early… The Vanus Tariel tells me that it would take too long to put you under again, to go through all the hypno-programming and conditioning. So we either vent you to space and start anew with another one of your kindred, or we find–’

‘A different way?’ The rage-killer gave a coughing chuckle. ‘If I was chosen by my clade for whatever is planned, I’m the one you need. Can’t do it without me.’

‘I’m compelled to agree.’ Kell gave a thin smile. The Garantine was no mindless thug, appearances to the contrary. ‘I was going to say we would find an understanding.’

The other assassin laughed painfully. ‘What can you offer me that would be richer than tearing your head from your neck, sniper?’

The Vindicare stared into the Eversor’s wide, bloodshot eyes. ‘Nothing has been said yet, but the directors can only be bringing us together for one reason. One target. And I think you’d like to be there when he dies.’

He said the name, and behind his fanged mask the Garantine grinned.

Yosef’s hands were tight fists, and it was all he could do not to haul back and smack that weak half-smile off the face of Reeve Warden Laimner. For a giddy moment, he pictured himself with Laimner’s greasy curls in his hand, smashing his face against the tiled floor of the precinct house, beating him into a broken ruin. The potency of the anger was startlingly strong, and it took an effort to rein himself in.

Laimner was waving his hand in Daig’s face and going on and on about how all of this was Segan’s fault for not following proper channels, for not calling in backup units. He had been singing the same song all the way back from the Blasko lodge.

‘You lost the suspect,’ the warden bleated, ‘you had him and you lost him.’ Laimner glared at Yosef. ‘Why didn’t you take a shot? Leg hit? Put him down, even?’

‘I could have walked Sigg in through the front door,’ Daig grated. ‘He was going to surrender!’

Laimner rounded on him. ‘Are you an idiot? Do you really believe that?’ He stabbed at a pile of crime scene picts on the desk before him. ‘Sigg was playing you. He wanted to make meat-toys out of you both, and you almost let him do it!’

Yosef found his voice and bit out a question. ‘How did you know where we were?’

‘Don’t be stupid, Sabrat,’ said the warden. ‘Do you think the High-Reeve would let you off on a major case like this without having you tracked every second?’

Yosef saw Daig go pale at that, but he didn’t remark on it. Instead, he pressed on. ‘We had a solid lead, from a… a reliable source! We could have brought Sigg to book, but you came in mob-handed and ruined it!’

‘Watch your tone, reeve!’ Laimner shot back. He ran a deliberate finger down his warrant rod to emphasise his rank. ‘Remember who you’re talking to!’

‘If you want to run this case, then do it,’ Yosef continued. ‘But otherwise don’t second-guess the investigating officers!’

The warden’s sneering smile returned. ‘I was following Telemach’s orders.’

Yosef’s lip curled. ‘Well, thanks for making that clear. I thought it was just your impatience and poor judgement that would make this case fall apart, but it seems like the problem is further up the line.’

‘You insubordinate–!’

‘Sir!’ Skelta burst into the wardroom before Laimner could finish his sentence. ‘He’s here! The, uh, man. The baron’s man.’

Laimner’s attitude transformed in the blink of an eye. ‘What? But they’re not supposed to be here until tomorrow morning.’

‘Um,’ Skelta gestured at the door. ‘Yes. No.’

Yosef turned to see two figures entering behind the jager. The first was an ebon-skinned man who matched Sabrat for height, but was broader across the chest, with the thickset look of a scrumball player. He had ash-coloured hair that fell to his shoulders and an oblong data monocle that almost hid a faint scar over his right eye. At his side was a pale, thin woman with a bald head covered in intricate tattoos. Both of them wore the same green and silver livery Yosef had seen on Bellah Gorospe, but the man’s cuffs bore some kind of ornate flashing that had to be indicative of rank. The woman had a golden brooch, he noted, in the shape of an open eye. As he looked at her she raised her head to meet his gaze and he saw the unmistakable shape of an iron collar around her neck, like one that might be used to tether a dangerous animal. It seemed crude and out of place on her.

The man surveyed the room; something in his manner told Yosef he had heard every word of the argument that had preceded his entrance. The woman – it was hard to determine her age, he noted – continued to stare at him.

Laimner recovered well and gave a shallow bow. ‘Operatives. It’s a pleasure to have you here on Iesta Veracrux.’

‘My name is Hyssos,’ said the man. His voice was solemn. He indicated his companion. ‘This is my associate, Perrig.’

Daig was gawking at the woman. ‘She’s a psyker,’ he blurted. ‘The eye. That’s what it means.’ He tapped his lapel in the same place where Perrig’s brooch was pinned.

Yosef saw that the eye design was subtly repeated in among the woman’s tattoos. His first reaction was denial; it was common knowledge, even on the most parochial of worlds, that psykers were forbidden. The Emperor himself, at a council called on the planet Nikaea, had outlawed the use of psionic sensitives, even among the Legions of his own Space Marines. While some stripes of psyker were approved under the tightest reins of Imperial control – the gifted Navigators who guided ships through the immaterium or the telepaths who carried communications between worlds, for example – most were considered mind-witches, dangerous and unstable aberrants to be corralled and neutered. Yosef had never been face to face with a psyker before this day, and Perrig unnerved him greatly. Her gaze upon him made him feel like he was made of glass. He swallowed hard as at last she looked away.

‘My lord baron has sanction from the Council of Terra to employ an indentured psionic,’ Hyssos explained. ‘Perrig’s talents are extremely useful in my line of work.’

‘And what work is that?’ said Daig.

‘Security, Reeve Segan,’ he replied. Hyssos’s manner made it clear he knew the name of every person in the room.

Yosef nodded to himself. He knew that the Eurotas clan wielded great power and influence across the Ultima Segmentum, but he had never guessed it had such reach. To be granted dispensation against so rigid a ruling as the Decree of Nikaea was telling indeed; he couldn’t help but wonder what other rules the Void Baron was free to ignore.

‘I had expected you to go straight to the Eurotas compound,’ Laimner ventured, trying to recover control of the conversation. ‘You’ve had a long journey–’

‘Not so long,’ replied Hyssos, still sweeping the room with his gaze. ‘The baron will arrive very soon. He will want a full accounting of the situation. I see no reason to delay.’

‘How… soon?’ managed Skelta.

‘A day,’ Hyssos offered, his answer drawing Laimner up short. ‘Perhaps less.’

The Reeve Warden licked his lips. ‘Well. In that case, I’ll have a briefing prepared.’ He gave a weak smile. ‘I will make myself available to the baron on his arrival for a full and thorough–’

‘Forgive me,’ Hyssos broke in. ‘Reeves Sabrat and Segan are the lead investigators in the case, are they not?’

‘Well, yes,’ said Laimner, clearly uncertain of how he should behave towards the Eurotas operative. ‘But I am the senior precinct officer, and–’

‘But not an investigating officer,’ Hyssos went on, his tone level and firm. He gave Yosef a brief glance through his monocle. ‘The baron prefers to have information delivered to him as directly as possible. From the men closest to it.’

‘Of course,’ the warden said tightly, catching up to the realisation that he was being dismissed. ‘You must proceed as you see fit.’

Hyssos nodded once. ‘You have my promise, Reeve Warden. Perrig and I will help Iesta Veracrux to bring this murderer to justice in short order. Please pass that assurance on to the High-Reeve and the Landgrave in my stead.’

‘Of course,’ Laimner repeated, his smile weak and false. Without another word, he left the room, shooting Yosef a final, acid glare as he closed the door behind him.

Yosef felt wrung out by the events of the day even though it had hardly begun. He sighed and looked away, only to find the woman Perrig watching him again.

When she spoke, her voice had a melody to it that was at odds with the fire in her eyes. ‘There is a horror here,’ she told them. ‘Darkness clustering at the edges of perception. Lies and murder.’ The psyker sighed. ‘All of you have seen it.’

Yosef broke her gaze with no little effort on his part and gave Hyssos a nod. ‘Where do you want to start?’

‘You tell me,’ said the operative.

Ultio drifted into the gravity well of the gas giant, crossing the complex web of orbits described by Jupiter’s outer moons. It was almost a solar system in miniature, with the gas giant at its core rather than the blazing orb of a sun. The cloud of satellites and Trojan asteroids surrounding it were full of human colonies, factories and forges, powered by drinking in the radiation surging from the mammoth planet, feeding on mineral riches that in centuries of exploitation had yet to be fully exhausted. Jupiter was Terra’s shipyard, and its sky was forever filled with vessels. Centred around Ganymede and a dozen other smaller moons, spacedocks and fabricatories worked ceaselessly to construct everything from single-crew Raven interceptors up to the gargantuan hulls of mighty Emperor-class command-carrier battleships.

In a zone so dense with spacecraft and orbitals of every kind, it should have been easy for the Ultio to become lost in the shoals of them; but security was tight, and suspicion was at every point of the compass. In the opening moves of the insurrection, an alliance of turncoats, men of the Mechanicum and traitors from the Word Bearers Legion, had assembled in secret a dreadnought called the Furious Abyss, constructing it in a clandestine berth on the asteroid-moon Thule. The small Jovian satellite had been obliterated during the ship’s explosive departure and the ragged clump of its remains still orbited far out at the edges of the planetary system; but the shockwave from Thule’s destruction and the Abyss incident was still being felt.

Thus, the Ultio moved with care and raised no uncertainties, doing nothing to draw attention to itself. Secure in its falsehood, the vessel passed under the shadow of the habitats at Iocaste and Ananke and then deeper into the Galiliean ranges, passing the geo-engineered ocean-moon of Europa and Io’s seething orange mass. It followed a slow and steady course in across the planet’s bands of dirty orange, umber and cream-grey clouds, down towards the Great Red Spot.

A vast spindle floated there, bathed in the crimson glow; Saros Station resembled a crystal chandelier severed from its mountings and cast free into the void, turning and catching starlight. Unlike the majority of its industrial and colonial cohorts, Saros was a resort platform where the Jovian elite could find respite and diversion from the works of the shipyards and manufactories. It was said that only the Venus orbitals could surpass Saros Station for its luxury. Avenues of gold and silver, acres of null-g gardens and auditoriums; and the finest opera house outside the Imperial Palace.

The station filled the view through the Ultio’s canopy as the ship drifted closer.

‘Why are we here?’ asked Iota, with an idle sullenness.

‘Our next recruit,’ Tariel told her. ‘Koyne, of the Clade Callidus.’

At the rear of the flight deck, the Garantine bent his head to avoid slamming it against the ceiling. He made a rasping, spitting noise. ‘What do we need one of them for?’

‘Because the Master of Assassins demands it,’ Kell replied, without turning.

The Vanus glanced up from the displays fanned out around his gauntlet. ‘According to my information, there is an important cultural event taking place. A recital of the opus Oedipus Neo.’

‘The what?’ sniffed the Eversor.

‘A theatrical performance of dance, music and oratory,’ Tariel went on, oblivious to his derision, ‘It is a social event of great note in the Jovian Zone.’

‘Must have lost my invite,’ the Eversor rumbled.

‘And this Koyne is down there?’ Iota wandered to the viewport and pressed her hands to it, staring at Saros. ‘How will we know a faceless Callidus among so many faces?’

Kell studied the abstract contact protocols he had been provided and frowned. ‘We are to… send flowers.’

Gergerra Rei wept like a child as Jocasta went to her death.

His knuckles turned white as he held on to the balustrade around the edge of the roaming box the theatre had provided. Behind him, the machine-sentries in his personal maniple stood motionless and uncomprehending as their master’s lips trembled in a breathy gasp. Rei leaned forward, almost as if he could will her not to take the steel noose and place it over her supple neck. A cry was filling his throat; he wanted to call to her, but he could not.

The nobleman had seen the opera before, and while it had always held his attention, it had never touched him as much as it had this night. Every biannual performance of Oedipus Neo was a lavish, sumptuous affair orbited by dozens of stately dinners, parties and gatherings, but at the core it was about the play.

Everyone in the Jovian set shared the same fears about this year’s act; at first it had only been dreary naysayers who claimed it should not be put on because of the conflicts, but then after the diva Solipis Mun had perished in a tragic airlock accident… Many more had felt the opera should not have continued, as a mark of respect to her.

But if he was honest, Rei did not miss Mun onstage. As Jocasta, she had played the part with gusto and power, indeed, but after so many repetitions her investment in the character had grown careworn and flat. But now this new queen, this new Jocasta – a woman from the Venusian halls, as he understood it – had taken the part and breathed new life into it. In the first act, she seemed to mimic Mun’s style, but soon she blossomed into her own interpretation of the role, and with it, she eclipsed the late diva so completely that Rei had all but forgotten her predecessor as the opera rolled towards its conclusion. The new actress had also brought with her new direction, and the performance had been shifted from the usual modern-dress style to a strangely timeless mode of costume, all in metallic colours and soft curves that Rei found quite alluring.

And now, with the stage drenched in blood-coloured light and flickers of lightning from the Red Spot beyond the skylights, the character of Jocasta took her own life as the orchestra struck an ominous chord. Against reason, Rei hoped that the play might suddenly diverge from the story he knew so well; but it did not. As the actress’s body melted away into the wings and the final scenes of the opera unfolded, he found he could not focus on the fate of poor, blinded Oedipus, the lead actor giving his all in a finale that brought the audience to its feet in a storm of applause.

It was only as the floating viewing box returned to the high balcony with a silken thud that Rei regained a measure of composure, pulling himself back from a daze.

She had truly moved him. It had almost been as if this new Jocasta were performing only to Rei; he could swear that even in the moment of her drama’s suicide, she had looked directly to him and wept in unison.

Rei’s ranking meant that he had, as a matter of course, an invitation to the post-show gathering in the auditorium proper. Usually he declined, preferring the company of his machines to those of the venal peacocks who drifted about Jupiter’s entertainment community. Tonight, however, he would not decline. He would meet her.

The party was jubilant, high with the thrill of the performance’s energy as if it still resonated around the theatre even after the last note of music had faded. Critics from the media took turns to congratulate the director and the actor who had played the tortured king, but all of them did so while looking about in hopes of catching a glimpse of the true star of the show; the queen of this night, the new Jocasta.

Under the aegis of this, the invited nobles alternated between praising the opera and discussing the matters of the moment; and the latter meant discussion of the rebellion and of the pressures upon Jupiter and her shipyards. The wounds opened by the incident at Thule had not been healed, despite assurances from the Council of Terra, despite the quiet purges and the laying of blame. But accusations still crossed back and forth, some decrying the Warmaster for such perfidy and base criminality, others – those who spoke in hushed tones – wondering if the Emperor had let this thing occur just so he might tighten his grip on the Jovians. Every heartbeat of their forges was now turned to the construction of a military machine designed to break the turncoat advance, but many felt it was bleeding Jupiter white. Those who questioned this questioned other things as well; they asked exactly how it was that a force of Mechanicum Adepts and Astartes with traitorous intentions had been able to build a warship of the scope of the Furious Abyss, without alerting anyone to their duplicity.

Was it possible that Jupiter harboured rebel sympathisers? It had happened with the Mechanicum of Mars, and so some whispered, even among the warlords of Earth’s supposedly united nation-states. The questions turned and turned, but they faded when Gergerra Rei entered the room.

Resplendent in the circuit-laced robes of a Mech-Lord, Rei’s high status as master of Kapekan Sect of the Legio Cybernetica was known to all. Two full cohorts of combat mechanoids were under his personal command, and they had fought in many battles of note during the Great Crusade alongside the Luna Wolves and the Warmaster.

Like many of the Cybernetica, Rei eschewed the gross cyborg augmentations of his colleagues in the Mechanicum in favour of subtle enhancements that did not disfigure or dilute his outwardly human aspect; but those who knew Rei knew that whatever humanity he did show was rare and fleeting.

Behind him, moving with fluidity, his bodyguards were a three-unit maniple of modified Crusader-class robots. Painted as works of art, each insect-like machine was a stripped-down variant of its battlefield standard, armed with a discreetly sheathed power-rapier and a lasgun. A fourth mechanical, this one custom-built to resemble a female form rendered in polished chrome, walked at his side and served as his aide.

No one asked questions about loyalty when Rei was nearby. His machines could hear a whisper among a roaring crowd, and those who dared to suggest aloud that Rei was anything less than the Emperor’s obedient servant lived to regret it.

The Mech-Lord took a schooner of an indifferent Vegan brandy and pecked at a few small sweetmeats from ornamental serving trays offered by menials, allowing his mechanoid aide to delicately sniff at each before he ingested it; the robot’s head was filled with sensing gear capable of picking up any particulate trace of poison. The machine shook its head each time, and so he ate and drank but none of the rich foodstuffs sated the real hunger in him. Rei engaged in a moment or two of small talk with the director of the opera house, but it was a perfunctory and hollow exchange. Neither of them wanted to spend time with one another – Rei was simply uninterested and the director was doubtless wracked with worry over the reason why the Kapekan general had decided to take up his long-ignored invite – but both of them had to fake the genial nothings of greeting, for the sake of propriety.

‘My Lord Rei?’ He turned as a servant approached, a young man in the Saros livery with a wary cast to his face. He nervously side-stepped the Crusaders and offered a card to the Mech-Lord; and that was his error. The servant did not wait to be addressed, but instead proffered the card before it was acknowledged.

Rei’s aide stepped in to meet him with a faint hiss of hydraulics, and in one fluid motion took the hand holding the card and broke it at the wrist. The bone cracked wetly and the servant went white with shock, staggering. He would likely have fallen if the machine had not been holding him up.

‘What is this?’ he asked.

The servant spoke through gritted teeth. ‘A… A message for you, sir…’ He gasped and gave him a pleading look. ‘Please, I only did as the lady asked me to…’

‘The lady?’ Rei’s heart thumped in his chest. ‘Give it to me.’

His aide took the card and held it to her chromium lips. She licked it with a disconcertingly human-looking tongue, paused, then handed it on to her master. Had there been any contact toxins on the surface, she would have destroyed it.

The Mech-Lord fought off a tremor in his hands as he read the languid, flowing script written across the white card. It was a single word: ‘Come’. He turned it over and saw it listed a location in the apartments reserved for the opera house’s performers.

‘Is something amiss?’ said the director, his face pinched in concern.

Rei pressed his half-empty brandy glass into the man’s hand and walked away. His robots followed, and behind them the servant staggered down to his knees, clutching at his ruined wrist.

The apartments were a short pneu-car ride up three levels to Saros Station’s most exclusive residential decks. Rei had his own orbital out by Callisto and did not keep rooms here, but he had visited the chambers in the past during one of his many affairs and so he knew where to go. The presence of his maniple made sure that no one dared to waylay him, and presently he reached the room. His aide knocked on the door and it opened on silent servos.

From within came that silken voice. ‘Come,’ she said.

Rei took a step – and then hesitated. He pulse was racing like that of a giddy youth in the first blush of infatuation, and he had to admit, as much as he was enjoying the sensation of it, he was still the man he was. Still distrustful of everything on some deep level. His enemies had tried to use women as weapons against him before, and he had buried them; could this be one more attempt to do the same? His throat went dry; he hoped it would not be so. The strange, ephemeral connection he felt with the actress seemed so very real, and the thought that it might be a thing brought into existence just to hurt him cut deeply.

For a long moment, he wavered on the threshold, contemplating turning about and leaving, taking the pneu-car back to the docks and his yacht, leaving and never coming back.

Just making the thought felt like razors in his gut; and then she spoke again. ‘My lord?’ He heard the mirror of his own questions and fears in her words.

His aide walked in ahead of him and Rei went to follow, but again he hesitated. Even if what he hoped for would come about in this glorious evening, he could not afford to lose sight of the realities of his life. He turned to the Crusaders and spoke a string of command words. The robots immediately took up sentry positions around the door to the apartment, weapons ready, bowing their mantis-like heads low so that they would not damage the lamps hanging from the ceiling above.

Rei entered the room and became overcome by a vision.

His first thought was; she is not dead! But of course that was true. It had only been a play, and yet it had seemed so real to him. The woman stood, still dressed in her queenly costume, the sweep of her lithe and flawless skin visible through the diaphanous silver of the dress. Metallic glitter accented her cheekbones and the almond curves of her dark eyes. She bowed to him and looked away shyly. ‘My lord Rei. I feared you would not visit me. I feared I might have presumed too much…’

‘Oh no,’ Rei said, dry-throated. ‘No. It is my honour…’ He managed a smile. ‘My queen.’

She looked up at him, smiling too, and it was magnificent. ‘Will you call me that, my lord? May I be your Jocasta?’ She toyed with a thin drape of silk that curtained off one section of the apartments from another.

He was drawn to her, crossing the white pile of the anteroom’s rich carpeting. ‘I would like that very much,’ he husked.

The woman – his Jocasta – threw a look towards his mechanoid. ‘And will she be joining us?’

The open invitation in her reply made Rei blink. ‘Uh. No.’ He turned and spoke tersely to the robot. ‘Wait here.’

His Jocasta smiled again and vanished into the room beyond. Grinning, Rei paused and unbuttoned his tunic. Glancing around, he saw a spray of fresh Saturnine roses still in their delivery wrappings; he tossed his jacket down next to them and then followed her into the bedchamber.

Jocasta did not weep as Gergerra Rei went to his death.

The queen enveloped him in long, firm arms as he stepped in, bringing her body up to meet his, pressing her breasts to his chest, moulding herself to him. The Mech-Lord’s dizzy smile was shaky and he gasped for air. His reactions were perfect; his flawless new love for Jocasta – for that was what it was, the most pure and exact rendition of neurochemical release – was the final product of weeks of carefully tailored pheromone bombardment. Tiny amounts of metadopamine and serotonin analogues had been introduced to Rei over time, the dosages light enough that even the ultra-sensitive scanners of his machine-aide would not detect them. The cumulative amounts had pushed him into something approaching obsession; and combined with a physiological template based on his taste in female bed partners, the trap had been set and laden with honey.

Jocasta bent Rei’s head down to meet hers and pressed her lips to his. He shuddered as she did it, surrendering to her. It was so easy.

Gergerra Rei had been involved in the creation of the Furious Abyss. Not in a way that could be proven without doubt in a court of law, not in a way that connected him through any direct means, but enough that the guardians of the Imperium were certain of it. Whatever his crime, perhaps the transfer of certain bribes, the diversion of materials and manpower, the granting of passage to ships that should have been denied, the Kapekan Mech-Lord had done the bidding of the traitor Horus Lupercal.

The small weapon concealed between Jocasta’s tongue and the base of her mouth was pushed up, held in place by clenched teeth. A lick of the trigger plate was all that was needed to fire the kissgun. The needle-sized round penetrated the roof of Rei’s mouth and fragmented, allowing the threads of molecule-thin wire to explode outward. The threads whirled through the meat of his nasal cavity and up into his forebrain, shredding everything they touched. He lurched backwards and fell to the bed, blood and brain matter drooling from his lips and nostrils. Rei sank into the silken sheets, his corpse dragging them awry, revealing beneath the body of the actress whose face he had loved so ardently.

His killer moved quickly, shrugging off the illusion of the dead woman even as the target’s corpse began to cool.

Flesh shifted in small ways, the Jocasta-face slipping to become less defined, more like a sketch upon paper. The killer spat out the kissgun and discarded it, then drew sharp nails along the inside of a muscular thigh. A seam in the skin parted to allow a wet pocket to open, and long fingers drew out a spool and handle affair from within. The killer gently shook the device and padded towards the silk curtains. Rei had died silently but the machine-aide was clever enough to run a passive scan for heartbeats every few seconds; and if it detected one instead of two…

The spool unwound into a thin taper of metal, which rolled out to the length of a metre. Once fully extended, the weapon became rigid; it was known as a memory sword, the alloy that comprised the blade capable of softening and hardening at the touch of a control.

Koyne liked the memory sword, liked the gossamer weight of it. Koyne liked what it could do, as well. With a savage slash, the blade sliced down the thin silk curtain and the motion alerted the mechanoid – but not quickly enough. Koyne thrust the point into the aide’s chromium chest and through the armour casing around the biocortex module that served as the robot’s brain. It gave a faint squeal and became a rigid statue.

Leaving the sword in place, Koyne took a moment to prepare for the next template. Koyne knew Gergerra Rei as well as the actress who played Queen Jocasta, and would adopt him just as easily. The Callidus despised the term ‘mimicry’. It was a poor word that could not encompass the wholeness with which a Callidus would become their disguises. To mimic something was to ape it, to pretend. Koyne became the disguise; Koyne inhabited each identity, even if it was for a short while.

The Callidus was a sculpture that carved itself. Bio-implants and heavy doses of the shapeshifter drug polymorphine made skin, bone and muscle become supple and motile. Those who could not control the freedom it gave would collapse and turn into monstrosities, things like molten waxworks that were little more than heaps of bone and organs. Those with the gift of the self, though, those like Koyne, they could become anyone.

Concentrating, Koyne shifted to neutrality, a grey, sexless form that was smooth and almost without features. The Callidus did not recall any birth-gender; that data was irrelevant when it was possible to be man or woman, young or old, even human or xenos if the will was there.

It was then Koyne saw the flowers. They had been delivered by courier shortly before Rei had arrived. The assassin picked at the plants and noted the colour and number of the petals on the roses. Something like irritation crossed the killer’s no-face and Koyne paused at the vox-comm alcove in the far wall, inputting the correct sequence of encoding that the flower arrangement signified.

The reply was almost immediate, meaning that there was a ship nearby. ‘Koyne?’ A male voice, gruff with it.

The Callidus immediately copied the tonality and replied. ‘You have broken my silent protocol.’

‘We’re here to help you conclude your mission as quickly as possible. You have new orders.’

‘I have no idea who you fools are, or what authority you may think you have. But you are compromising my operation and getting in my way.’ Koyne grimaced. It was an ugly expression on the grey face. ‘I don’t require any help from you. Don’t interrupt me again.’ The Callidus cut the channel and turned away. Such behaviour was totally unprofessional. The clade knew that once committed, an assassin’s cover should not be compromised except in the direst of circumstances – and someone’s impatience was certainly not reason enough.

Koyne sat and concentrated on Gergerra Rei, on his voice, his gait, the full sense of the man. Skin puckered and moved, thickening. Implants slowly expanded to add mass and dimension. Moment by moment, the killer changed.

But the task was still incomplete when the three Crusaders crashed in through the doorway, searching for a target.

Kell glared at the vox pickup before him. ‘Well. That was discourteous,’ he muttered.

‘Arrogance is a noted character trait of many of the Clade Callidus,’ Iota offered.

The Garantine looked at Kell from across the Ultio’s cramped bridge. ‘What are we supposed to do? Take in a show? Have a little dinner?’ The hulking killer growled in irritation. ‘Put me down on the station. I’ll bring the slippery changer freak back here in pieces.’

Before Kell could reply, a sensor telltale on one of the consoles began to blink. Tariel motioned at the hololiths around his gauntlet and his expression grew grave. ‘The ship reads energy weapon discharges close to Koyne’s location.’ He looked up, out past the nose of the ship to where the hull of Saros Station drifted nearby. ‘The Callidus may be in trouble.’

‘We should assist,’ said Iota.

‘Koyne didn’t want any help,’ Kell replied. ‘Made that very clear.’

Tariel gestured at his display. ‘Auspex magno-scan shows multiple mechanoid units in the area. War robots, Vindicare. If the Callidus becomes trapped–’

Kell held up a hand to silence him. ‘The Master of Assassins chose this one for good reason. Let’s consider this escape a test of skill, shall we? We’ll see how good this Koyne is.’

The Garantine gave a rough snort of amusement.

Koyne made it into the enclosed avenue outside the apartments with only minor injuries. The Callidus had been able to recover the memory sword from the steel corpse of the aide, realising far too late that there had to have been a failsafe backup biocortex inside the machine, one that broadcast an alert to the rest of Rei’s bodyguard maniple. Koyne did not doubt that other robots were likely vectoring to this location from the Mech-Lord’s ship, operating on a kill-switch protocol that activated with the death of their master. The core directive would be simple – seek and destroy Gergerra Rei’s murderer.

If only there had been more time. If Koyne could have completed the change into Rei, then it would have been enough to fool the auto-senses of the machines, long enough to reach the extraction point and exfiltrate. Rei and the actress would have been found days later, along with all the evidence that Koyne had prepared to set the scene for a murder-suicide shared by a pair of doomed lovers. It had a neatly theatrical tone that would have played well to Saros Station’s intelligentsia.

All that was wasted now, though. Koyne limped away, pain burning from a glancing laser burn in the leg. The Callidus looked like an unfinished model in pinkish-grey clay, caught halfway between the neutral self-template and the form of the Mech-Lord.

There was a cluster of revellers coming the other way, and Koyne made for them, fixing the nearest with a hard gaze and imagining their identity as the assassin’s own. The Callidus heard the heavy stomp of the spindly Crusader robots as they scrambled in pursuit, chattering to one another in machine code.

The small crowd reacted to the new arrival, the merriment of the group dipping for a moment in collective confusion. Koyne pressed every grain of mental control into adopting the face of the civilian – or at least something like it – and swung into the mass of the group.

The robots stood firm and blocked the avenue, guns up, the faceted eyes of their sensor modules sweeping the crowd. The revellers lost some of their good humour as the threat inherent in the maniple of machines became clear.

Koyne knew what would happen next; it was inevitable, but at least the hesitation would buy the assassin time. The Callidus searched for and found a side corridor that led towards an observation cupola, and began pushing through the people towards it.

This was the moment when the machines opened fire on the crowd. Unable to positively identify their target among the group of people, yet certain that their master’s murderer was in that mass, the Crusaders made the logical choice. Kill them all and leave no doubt.

Koyne ran through the screaming, panicking civilians, laser bolts ripping through the air, cutting them down. The assassin vaulted into the corridor and ran to the dead end of it. Red light from the giant Jovian storm seeped in through the observation window, making everything blurry and drenched in crimson.

Time, again. Little enough time. The Callidus concentrated and retched, opening a secondary stomach to vomit up a packet of white, doughy material. With shaking hands, Koyne ripped open the thin membrane sheathing it and allowed air to touch the pasty brick inside. It immediately began to blacken and melt, and quickly the assassin pressed it to the glassaic of the cupola.

The robots were still coming. The shooting had stopped and the Crusaders were advancing down the corridor. Koyne saw the shadows of them jumping on the curved walls, lurching closer.

The assassin sat down in the middle of the room and drew up into a foetal ball, forgetting the face of the civilian, forgetting Gergerra Rei and the Queen Jocasta, remembering instead something old. Koyne let the polymorphine soften flesh into waxen slurry, let it flow and harden into something that resembled the chitin of an insect. Air was expunged, organs pressed together. By turns the body became a mass of dark meat; but still not quickly enough.

The Crusader maniple advanced into the observation cupola just as the package of thermo-reactive plasma completed its oxygenation cycle and self-detonated. The blast shattered the glassaic dome and everything inside the cupola was blown out into space. Rei’s guardian machines spun away into the vacuum even as safety hatches fell to seal off the corridor. Koyne’s body, now enveloped in a cocoon of its own skin, went with them into the dark.

Outside, the Ultio hove closer.

Seven

Storm Warning
An Old Wound
Target

Yosef Sabrat was out of his depth.

The audience chamber was big enough that it would have swallowed the footprint of his home three times over, and decorated with such riches that they likely equalled the price of every other house in the same district put together. It was a gallery of ornaments and treasures from all across the southern reaches of the Ultima Segmentum – discreet holographs labelled sculptures from Delta Tao and Pavonis, tapestries and threadwork from Ultramar, art from the colonies of the Eastern Fringes, triptychs of stunning picts in silver frames, glass and gold and steel and bronze… The contents of this one chamber alone shamed even the most resplendent of museums on Iesta Veracrux.

Thinking of his home world, Yosef reflexively looked up at the oval window above his head. The planet drifted there in stately silence, the dayside turning as dawn passed over the green-blue ribbons of ocean near the equator. But for all its beauty, he couldn’t shake the sense of it hanging over him like some monumental burden, ready to fall and crush him the moment his focus slipped. He looked away, finding Daig by his side. The other reeve glanced at him, and the expression on his cohort’s face was muted.

‘What are we doing up here?’ Daig asked quietly. ‘Look at this place. The light fittings alone are probably worth a governor’s ransom. I’ve never felt so common in my entire life.’

‘I know what you mean,’ Yosef replied. ‘Just stay quiet and nod in the right places.’

‘Try not to show myself up, you mean?’

‘Something like that.’ A few metres away, Hyssos was mumbling quietly to the air; Yosef guessed that the operative had to have some sort of communicator implant that allowed him to subvocalise and send vox messages as easily as the jagers of the Sentine used a wireless. It had been clear to him the moment the Consortium shuttlecraft had landed in the precinct courtyard, the elegant swan-like ship making a point-perfect touchdown that barely disturbed the trees; Eurotas’s riches clearly bought the baron and his clan the best of everything. Still, that didn’t seem to sit squarely with the neglect he’d seen at the trader’s compound a day ago. He thought on that for a moment, making a mental note to consider it further.

The shuttle had swiftly brought them into deep orbit, there to meet the great elliptical hulk of the Iubar, flagship of the Eurotas Consortium and spaceborne palace of the rogue trader who led it. A handful of other smaller ships attended the Iubar like handmaidens around a queen; and Yosef only thought of them as smaller because the flagship was so huge. The support craft were easily a match for the tonnage of the largest of the system cruisers belonging to the Iestan PDF.

The psyker Perrig remained on the surface, having insisted on being taken to the Blasko lodge to take a sensing. Hyssos explained that the woman had the ability to divine the recent past of objects by the laying on of hands, and it was hoped that she would find Erno Sigg’s telepathic spoor at the location. Skelta drew the job of being her escort, and the silent panic on the jager’s face had been clear as daylight. The reeve marvelled how Hyssos seemed completely unconcerned by Perrig’s preternatural powers. He spoke of her as Yosef or Daig would discuss the skills of the documentary officers at a crime scene – as no more than a fellow investigator with unique talents all their own.

In the hours after his arrival – and his blunt dismissal of Laimner – Hyssos had thrown himself fully into the serial murder case, absorbing every piece of information he could get his hands on. Yosef knew that the man had already been briefed as fully as the Eurotas Consortium could – how else could he have known the names of everyone in the precinct without prior instruction from Gorospe and her offices? – but he was still forming his view of the situation.

Daig took a few hours to sleep in the shift room, but Yosef was caught up by Hyssos’s quiet intensity and sat with him, repeating his thoughts and impressions to him. The operative’s questions were all insightful and without artifice. He made the reeve think again on points of evidence and supposition, and Yosef found himself warming to the man. He liked Hyssos’s lack of pretence, his direct manner… and he liked the man for the way he had seen right through Berts Laimner at first glance.

‘There’s more to this,’ Hyssos had said, over a steaming cup of recaf. ‘Sigg murdering and playing artist with the corpses… That doesn’t add up.’

Yosef had agreed; but then the message had come down from command. The Void Baron had arrived, and the Governor was in a fit. Normally, a visitation from someone of Baron Eurotas’s rank would be a day of great import, a trade festival for Iesta’s merchants and moneyed classes, a diversion for her workers and commoners – but there had been no time to prepare. Even as the shuttle had taken them up to meet Hyssos’s summons, the government was in turmoil trying to throw together some hasty pomp and ceremony in order to make it seem like this had been planned all along.

Laimner tried one last time to get a foot on the shuttle. He said that Telemach had ordered him to give the baron the briefing, that he could not in good conscience remain behind and let a lesser officer take the responsibility. He’d looked at Yosef when he said those words. Yosef imagined that Telemach was probably unaware of the shuttle or the summons, probably too busy fretting with the Landgrave and the Imperial Governor and the Lord Marshal to notice. But again, Hyssos had firmly blocked the Reeve Warden from using this as any way to aggrandise himself, and left him behind as he took the two lowly reeves up into orbit.

It was an experience that Daig was never to forget; it was his first time off-world, and his usual manner had been replaced with something that approximated stoic dread.

Hyssos beckoned them towards the far end of the wide gallery, where a dais and audience chairs were arranged before a broad archway. Inside the arch was a carved frieze made of red Dolanthian jade. The artwork, easily the size of the front of Yosef’s house, showed a montage of interstellar merchants about their business, travelling from world to world, trading and spreading the light of the Imperium. In the centre, a sculpture of the Emperor of Mankind towered over everything. He was leaning forward, holding out his hand with the palm down. Kneeling before him was a man in the garb of a rogue trader patriarch, who held up an open book beneath the Emperor’s hand.

Daig saw the artwork and gasped. ‘Who… Who is that?’

‘The first of the Eurotas,’ said Hyssos. ‘He was the commander of a warship that served the Emperor many centuries ago, a man of great diligence and courage. As a mark of respect for his service, the Emperor granted him the freedom of space and made him a rogue trader.’

‘But the book…’ said Daig, pointing. ‘What is he doing with the book?’

Yosef looked closer and saw what Daig was talking about. The artwork clearly showed what could only be a cut upon the Emperor’s downturned palm and a drip of blood – rendered here from a single faceted ruby – falling down towards the page of the open tome.

‘That is the Warrant of Trade,’ said a new voice, as footsteps approached from behind them. Yosef turned to see a hawkish, imperious man in the same cut of robes as the figure in the frieze. A group of guardsmen and attendants walked in lockstep behind him, but the man paid them no mind. ‘The letter of marque and statement granting my clan the right to roam the stars in the name of humanity. Our liege lord ratified it with a drop of his own blood upon the page.’ He gestured around. ‘We carry the book in safety aboard the Iubar as we have for generation after generation.’

Daig glanced about him, as if for a moment thinking he might actually see the real thing; but then disappointment clouded his face and his jaw set in a thin line.

‘My lord,’ said Hyssos, with a bow that the reeves belatedly imitated. ‘Gentlemen. Allow me to introduce his lordship Merriksun Eurotas, Void Baron of Narvaji, Agentia Nuntius of the Taebian Sector and master of the Eurotas Trade Consortium–’

‘Enough, enough,’ Eurotas waved him into silence. ‘I will hear that a thousand times more once I venture down to the surface. Let us dispense with formality and cut to the meat of this.’ The baron gave Yosef and Daig a hard, measuring stare before he spoke again. ‘I will make my wishes clear, gentlemen. The situation on Iesta Veracrux is delicate, as it is on many worlds among the Taebian Stars. There is a storm coming. A war born of insurrection, and when it brushes these planets with the heat of its passage there will be fire and death. There will be.’ He blinked and paused. For a moment, a note of strange emotion crept into his words, but then he flattened it with a breath of air. ‘These… killings. They serve only to heap tension and fear upon a populace already in the grip of a slow terror. People will lash out when they are afraid, and that is bad for stability. Bad for business.’

Yosef gave a slow nod of agreement. It seemed the rogue trader understood the situation better than the reeve’s own commanders; and then he had a sudden, chilling thought. Was the same thing happening on other planets? Had Eurotas seen this chain of events elsewhere in the Taebian Sector?

‘I want this murderer found and brought to justice,’ Eurotas concluded. ‘This case is important, gentlemen. Complete it, and you will let your people know that we… that the Imperium… is still in power out here. Fail, and you open the gateway to anarchy.’ He began to turn away. ‘Hyssos will make available to you any facilities you may need.’

‘Sir?’ Daig took a step after the rogue trader. ‘My, uh, lord baron?’

Eurotas paused. When he looked back at the other reeve, he did so with a raised eyebrow and an arch expression. ‘You have a question?’

Daig blurted it out. ‘Why do you care? About Iesta Veracrux, I mean?’

The baron’s eyes flashed with a moment of annoyance, and Yosef heard Hyssos take a sharp breath. ‘Dagonet is falling, did you know that?’ Daig nodded and the baron went on. ‘And not only Dagonet. Kelsa Secundus. Bowman. New Mitama. All dark.’ Eurotas’s gaze crossed Yosef’s and for a moment the nobleman appeared old and tired. ‘Erno Sigg was one of my men. I bear a measure of responsibility for his conduct. But it is more than that. Much more.’ Yosef felt the rogue trader’s gaze pinning him in place. ‘We are alone out here, gentlemen. Alone against the storm.’

‘The Emperor protects,’ said Daig quietly.

Eurotas gave him an odd look. ‘So they tell me,’ he replied, at length; and then he was walking away, the audience at an end and Yosef’s thoughts clouded with more questions than answers.

When the gull wing hatch of the flyer opened, the first thing that Fon Tariel experienced was the riot of smells. Heady and potent floral scents flooded into the interior of the passenger compartment, buoyed on warm air. He blinked at the daylight streaking in, and with wary footsteps he followed Kell out and into… wherever this place was.

Unlike the Eversor, who had not been afraid to provide the group with the location of one of their Terran facilities, the Clade Venenum made it clear in no uncertain terms that the members of the Execution Force would not be free to come to them of their own accord. The Siress had been most emphatic; only two members of the group were granted passage to the complex, and both were required to be unarmed and unequipped.

Tariel was learning Kell’s manner by and by, and he could see that the Vindicare was ill at ease without a gun on him. The infocyte was sympathetic to the sniper; he too had been forced to leave his tools behind on board the Ultio, and he felt strangely naked without his cogitator gauntlet. Tariel’s hand kept straying to his bare forearm without his conscious awareness of it.

The journey aboard the unmarked Venenum flyer had done nothing to give them any more clue to the whereabouts of the complex called the Orchard. The passenger compartment had no windows, no way for them to reckon the direction of their flight. Tariel had been dismayed to learn that his chronometer and mag-compass implants were being suppressed, and now as he stepped out of the craft they both flickered back to life, giving him a moment of dizziness.

He glanced around; they stood on a landing pad at the top of a wide metal ziggurat, just shy of the canopies of tall trees with thick leaves that shone like dark jade. The jungle smells were stronger out here, and the olfactory processor nodes in his extended braincase worked furiously to sift through the sensoria. Tariel guessed that they were somewhere deep in the rich rainforests of Merica, but it was only a speculative deduction. There was no way to know for sure.

A man in a pale green kimono and a domino mask emerged from a recessed staircase on the side of the ziggurat and beckoned them to follow him. Tariel was content to let Kell lead the way, and the three of them descended. The sunshine attenuated as they dropped below the line of the upper canopy, becoming shafts of smoky yellow filled with motes of dust and the busy patterns of flying insects.

A pathway of circular grey stones awaited them on the jungle floor, and they picked their way along it, the man in the kimono surefooted and confident. Tariel was more cautious; his eyes were drawn this way and that by bright, colourful sprays of plants that grew from every square metre of ground. He saw small worker mechanicals moving among them; what seemed at first glance to be wild growth was actually some sort of carefully random garden. The robotics were ministering to the plants, harvesting others.

He paused, studying one odd spindly blossom he did not recognise emerging from the bark of a tall tree. He leaned closer.

‘I would not, Vanus.’ The man in the kimono placed a gentle hand on his shoulder and reeled him back. Before he could ask why, the man made an odd knocking noise with his lips and in response the blossom grew threadlike legs and wandered away, up the tree trunk. ‘Mimical spiders, from Beta Comea III. They adapt well to the climate here on Terra. Their venom causes a form of haemorrhagic fever in humans.’

Tariel recoiled and blinked. Looking again, he drew up data from his memory stacks, classifying the plant life. Castor, nightshade and oleander; Cerbera odollam, digitalis and Jerusalem cherry; hemlock and larkspur and dozens of others, all of them brimming with their own particular strains of poisons. He kept his hands to himself from then on, not wavering at all from the pathway until it deposited them in a clearing – although clearing was hardly the word, as the place was overgrown with vines and low greenery. In the middle of the area was an ancient house, doubtless thousands of years old; it too was swamped by the jungle’s tendrils, and Tariel noted that such coverage would serve well as a blind for orbital sensors and optical scopes.

‘Not what I expected,’ muttered Kell, as they followed the man in the kimono towards an ivy-covered doorway.

‘It appears to be a manse,’ said the infocyte. ‘I can only estimate when it was built. The rainforest has reclaimed it.’

Inside, Tariel expected the place to show the same level of disarray as the exterior, but he was mistaken. Within, the building had been sealed against the elements and wildlife, and care had been taken to return it to its original form. It was only the gloom inside, the weak and infrequent sunlight through the windows, that betrayed the reality. The Vanus and the Vindicare were taken to an anteroom where a servitor was waiting, and the helot used a bulbous sensing wand to scan them both, checking everything down to their sweat and exhalations for even the smallest trace of outside toxins. The man in the kimono explained that it was necessary in order to maintain the balance of poisons in the Orchard proper.

From the anteroom, they went to what had once been a lounge. Along the walls there were numerous cages made of thin glassaic, rank upon rank of them facing outward. Tariel’s skin crawled as he made out countless breeds of poisonous reptiles, ophidians and insects, each in their own pocket environment within the cases. The infocyte moved to the middle of the room, instinctively placing himself at the one point furthest from all the cage doors.

A thing with a strange iridescent carapace flittered in its confinement, catching his eye, and the sheen of the chitin recalled a recent memory. The flesh of the Callidus had looked just the same when they had pulled Koyne out of the vacuum over Jupiter; the shapeshifting assassin had done a peculiar thing, turning into a deformed, almost foetus-like form in order to survive in the killing nothingness of space. Koyne’s skin had undergone a state change from flesh to something like bone, or tooth. Tariel recalled the disturbing sensation of touching it and he recoiled once again.

He looked away, towards Kell. ‘Do you think the Callidus will live?’

‘His kind don’t perish easy,’ said the Vindicare dryly. ‘They’re too conceited to die in so tawdry a manner.’

Tariel shook his head. ‘Koyne is not a “he”. It’s not male or female.’ He frowned. ‘Not any more, anyway.’

‘The ship will heal… it. And once our poisoner joins us, we will have our Execution Force assembled…’ Kell trailed off.

Tariel imagined he was thinking the same thing as the sniper; and what then? The question as to what target they were being gathered to terminate would soon be answered – and the Vanus was troubled by what that answer might be.

It can only be–

The thought was cut off as the man in the kimono returned with another person at his heels. Tariel determined a female’s gait; she was a slender young woman of similar age to himself.

‘By the order of the Director Primus of our clade and the Master of Assassins,’ said the man, ‘you are granted the skills of secluse Soalm, first-rank toxin artist.’

The woman looked up and she gave a hard-edged, defiant look at the Vindicare. Kell’s face shifted into an expression of pure shock and he let out a gasp. ‘Jenniker?’

The Venenum drew herself up. ‘I accept this duty,’ she said, with finality.

‘No,’ Kell snarled, the shock shifting to anger. ‘You do not!’ He glared at the man in the kimono. ‘She does not!’

The man cocked his head. ‘The selection was made by Siress Venenum herself. There is no error, and it is not your place to make a challenge.’

Tariel watched in confused fascination as the cool, acerbic mien Kell had habitually displayed crumbled into hard fury. ‘I am the mission commander!’ he barked. ‘Bring me another of your secluses, now.’

‘Are my skills in question?’ sniffed the woman. ‘I defy you to find better.’

‘I don’t want her,’ Kell growled, refusing to look at Soalm. ‘That’s the end of it.’

‘I am afraid it is not,’ said the man calmly. ‘As I stated, you do not have the authority to challenge the assignment made by the Siress. Soalm is the selectee. There is no other alternative.’ He pointed back towards the doorway. ‘You may now leave.’ Without another comment, the man exited the room.

‘Soalm?’ Kell hissed the woman’s surname with undisguised anger. ‘That is what I should call you now, is it?’

It was slowly dawning on Tariel that the two assassins clearly shared some unpleasant history together. He looked inward, thinking back over what he had managed to learn about Eristede Kell since the start of their mission, looking for some clue. Had these two been comrades or lovers, he wondered? Their ages were close enough that they could have both been raised in the same schola before the clades drew them for individual selection and training…

‘I accepted the name to honour my mentor,’ said the woman, her voice taking on a brittle tone. ‘I started a new life when I joined my clade. It seemed the right thing to do.’

Tariel nodded to himself. Many of the orphan children selected for training by the Officio Assassinorum entered the clades without a true identity to call their own, and often they took the names of their sponsors and teachers.

‘But you dishonoured your family instead!’ Kell grated.

And then, for a brief moment, the woman’s mask of defiance slipped to reveal the regret and sadness behind it; suddenly Tariel saw the resemblance.

‘No, Eristede,’ she said softly, ‘you did that when you chose to kill innocents in the name of revenge. But our mother and father are dead, and no amount of bloodshed will ever undo that.’ She walked by Kell, and past a stunned Tariel, stepping out into the perfumed jungle.

‘She’s your sister,’ Tariel blurted it out, unable to stay silent, the data rising up from his memory stack in a rush. ‘Eristede and Jenniker Kell, son and daughter of Viceroy Argus Kell of the Thaxted Duchy, orphaned after the murder of their parents in a local dispute–’

The Vindicare advanced on him with a livid glare in his eyes, forcing Tariel back against a cage filled with scorpions. ‘Speak of this to the others and I will choke the life from you, understand?’

Tariel nodded sharply, his hands coming up to protect himself. ‘But… The mission…’

‘She’ll do what I tell her to,’ said Kell, the anger starting to cool.

‘Are you sure?’

‘She’ll follow orders. Just as I will.’ He stepped back, and Tariel glimpsed a hollowness, an uncertainty in the other man’s eyes that mirrored what he had seen in the Vindicare’s sister.

The Iubar had decks filled with cogitator engines that hummed and whirred like patient cats, gangs of progitors moving back and forth between them with crystalline memory tubes and spools of optic coil. According to Hyssos, the devices were used to gather financial condition data from the various worlds along the Eurotas trade routes, running prognostic models to predict what goods a given planet might require months, years, even decades into the future.

‘What are we to do with these things?’ asked Daig. He’d never been comfortable with the thought of machines that could do a man’s job better.

Hyssos nodded at one of the engines. ‘I’ve been granted use of this module. Various information sources from Iesta Veracrux’s watch-wire are being collated and sifted by it.’

‘You can do that from up here?’ Yosef felt an odd stab of concern he couldn’t place.

The operative nodded. ‘The uptake of data is very slow due to the incompatibility of the systems, but we have some level of parity. Enough to check the capital’s traffic patterns, compare information on the suspect with the movements of his known associates, and so on.’

‘We have jagers on the ground doing that,’ Daig insisted. ‘Human eyes and ears are always the best source of facts.’

Hyssos nodded. ‘I quite agree. But these machines can help us to narrow our fields of inquiry. They can do in hours what would take your office and your jagers weeks to accomplish.’ Daig didn’t respond, but Yosef could see he was unconvinced. ‘We’ll tighten the noose,’ continued the operative. ‘Sigg won’t slip the net a second time, mark my words.’

Yosef shot him a look, searching the comment for any accusation – and he found none. Still, he was troubled, and he had to voice it. ‘Assuming Sigg is our killer.’ He remembered the man’s face in the cooper’s shack, the certainty he had felt when he read Erno Sigg’s fear and desperation. He looked like a victim.

Hyssos was watching him. ‘Do you have something to add, Reeve Sabrat?’

‘No.’ He looked away and found Daig, his cohort’s expression unreadable. It wasn’t just Sigg he was having his doubts about; Yosef thought back to what the other man had said in the ruined lodge, and the recent changes in his manner. Daig was keeping something from him, but he could not think of a way to draw it out. ‘No,’ he repeated. ‘Not now.’

What the others called the ‘staging area’ was really little more than a converted storage bay, and Iota saw little reason why the name of it made so much difference. The Ultio was a strange vessel; she was still trying to know it, and it wasn’t letting her. The ship was one thing pretending to be another, an assemblage of rare technologies and secrets that had been stitched into a single body; given a mission, thrown out into the darkness. It was like her in that way, she mused. They could almost have been kin.

The mind inside the ship spoke to her when she spoke to it, answering some of her questions but not others. Eventually, Iota became bored with the circular conversations and tried to find another way to amuse herself. As a test of her stealth skills, she took to exploring the smallest of the crawlspaces aboard the Ultio or spying on the medicae compartment where the Callidus was recovering inside a therapy pod. When she wasn’t doing this or meditating, Iota spent the time hunting down spiders in shadowed corners of the hull, catching and collecting them in a jar she had appropriated from the ship’s mess. So far, her hopes of encouraging the arachnids to form their own rudimentary society had failed.

She spotted another of the insects in the lee of a console and deftly snared it; then, with a cruelty born of her boredom, she severed its legs one by one, to see if it could still walk without them.

Kell entered the chamber; he was the last to arrive. The infocyte Tariel had been working at the hololith projector and he seemed uncharacteristically muted. The Vanus’s mood had been like this ever since he and the Vindicare had returned from Terra with the last of the recruits, the woman who called herself Soalm. The new arrival didn’t speak much either. She seemed rather delicate for an assassin; that was something that many thought of Iota when they first laid eyes on her, but the chill of her preternatural aura was usually enough to destroy that illusion within a heartbeat. The Garantine’s bulk took up a corner of the room, like an angry canine daring any one of them to crowd into his space. He was playing with a sliver of sharpened metal – the remains of a tool, she believed – dancing the makeshift blade across his thick fingers with a striking degree of dexterity. He was bored too, but annoyed with it; then again, Iota had come to understand that every mood of the Eversor was some shade of anger, to a greater or lesser extent. Koyne sat in a wire-frame chair, the Callidus’s smoothed-flat features like an unfinished carving in soapstone. She watched the shade for a few moments, and Koyne offered Iota a brief smile. The Callidus’s skin darkened, taking on a tone close to the tawny shade of Iota’s own flesh; but then the moment was broken by Kell as he rapped his gloved hand on the support beams of the low ceiling.

‘We’re all here,’ said the Vindicare. His gaze swept the room, dwelling briefly on all of them; all of them except Soalm, she noted. ‘The mission begins now.’

‘Where are we going?’ asked Koyne, in a voice like Iota’s.

Kell nodded to Tariel. ‘It’s time to find out.’

The infocyte activated a code-key sequence on the projector unit and a haze of holographic pixels shimmered into false solidity in the middle of the chamber. They formed into the shape of a tall, muscular man in nondescript robes. He had a scarred face and a queue of close-cut hair over an otherwise bare skull, and if the image was an accurate representation, then he was easily bigger than the Garantine. The hologram crackled and wavered, and Iota recognised the tell-tale patterns of high-level encoding threading through it. This was a real-time transmission, which meant it could only be coming from another ship in orbit, or from Terra itself.

Kell nodded to the man. ‘Captain-General Valdor. We are ready to be briefed, at the Master’s discretion.’

Valdor returned the gesture. ‘The Master of Assassins has charged me with that task. Given the… unique nature of this operation, it seems only right that there be oversight from an outside party.’ The Custodian surveyed all of them with a measuring stare; at his end of the communication, Iota imagined he was standing among a hololithic representation of the room and everyone in it.

‘You want us to kill him, don’t you?’ the Garantine said without preamble, burying his makeshift knife in the bulkhead beside his head. ‘Let’s not be precious about it. We all know, even if we haven’t had the will to say it aloud.’

‘Your insight does you credit, Eversor,’ said Valdor, his tone making it clear his compliment was anything but that. ‘Your target is the former Warmaster of the Adeptus Astartes, Primarch of the Luna Wolves, the Archtraitor Horus Lupercal.’

‘They are the Sons of Horus now,’ muttered Tariel, disbelief sharp in his words. ‘Throne’s sake. It’s true, then…’

The Venenum woman made a negative noise in the back of her throat. ‘If it pleases my lord Custodes, I must question this.’

‘Speak your mind,’ said Valdor.

‘Every clade has heard the rumours of the missions that have followed this directive and failed it. My clade-cohort Tobeld was the last to be sent on this fool’s errand, and he perished like all the others. I question if this can even be achieved.’

‘Cousin Soalm has a compelling point,’ offered Koyne. ‘This is not some wayward warlord of which we are speaking. This is Horus, first among the Emperor’s sons. Many call him the greatest primarch that ever lived.’

‘You’re afraid,’ snorted the Garantine. ‘What a surprise.’

‘Of course I am afraid of Horus,’ replied Koyne, mimicking the Eversor’s gruff manner. ‘Even an animal would be afraid of the Warmaster.’

‘An Execution Force like this one has never been gathered,’ Kell broke in, drawing the attention of all of them. ‘Not since the days of the first masters and the pact they swore in the Emperor’s service on Mount Vengeance. We are the echo of that day, those words, that intention. Horus Lupercal is the only target worthy of us.’

‘Pretty words,’ said Soalm. ‘But meaningless without direction.’ She turned back to the image of Valdor. ‘I say again; how do we hope to accomplish this after so many of our Assassinorum kindred have been sacrificed against so invulnerable an objective?’

‘Horus has legions of loyal warriors surrounding him,’ said Tariel. ‘Astartes, warships, forces of the Mechanicum and Cybernetica, not to mention the common soldiery who have come to his banner. How do we even get close enough to strike at him?’

‘He will come to you.’ Valdor gave a cold, thin smile. ‘Perhaps you wondered at the speed with which this Execution Force has been assembled? It has been done so as to react to new intelligence that will place the traitor directly in your sights.’

‘How?’ demanded Koyne.

‘It is the judgement of Lord Malcador and the Council of Terra that Horus’s assassination at this juncture with throw the traitor forces into disarray and break the rebellion before it can advance on to the Segmentum Solar,’ said Valdor. ‘Agents of the Imperium operating covertly in the Taebian Sector report a strong likelihood that Horus is planning to bring his flagship, the Vengeful Spirit, to the planet Dagonet in order to show his flag. We believe that the Warmaster’s forces will use Dagonet as a foothold from which to secure the turning of every planet in the Taebian Stars.’

‘If you know this to be so, my lord, then why not simply send a reprisal fleet to Dagonet instead?’ asked Soalm. ‘Send battle cruisers and Legions of Astartes, not six assassins.’

‘Perhaps even the Emperor himself…’ muttered Koyne.

Valdor gave them both a searing glare. ‘The Emperor’s deeds are for him alone to decide! And the fleets and the loyal Legions have their own battles to fight!’

Iota nodded to herself. ‘I understand,’ she said. ‘We are to be sent because there is not certainty. The Imperium cannot afford to send warfleets into the darkness on a mere “likelihood”.’

‘We are only six,’ said Kell, ‘but together we can do what a thousand warships have failed to. One vessel can slip through the warp to Dagonet far easier than a fleet. Six assassins… the best of our clades… can bring death.’ He paused. ‘Remember the words of the oath we all swore, regardless of our clades. There is no enemy beyond the Emperor’s wrath.’

‘You will take the Ultio to the Taebian Sector,’ Valdor went on. ‘You will embed on Dagonet and set up multiple lines of attack. When Horus arrives there, you will terminate his command with extreme prejudice.’

‘My lord.’ Efried bowed low and waited.

The low mutter of his primarch’s voice was like the distant thunder over the Himalayan range. ‘Speak, Captain of the Third.’

The Astartes looked up and found Rogal Dorn standing at the high balcony, staring into the setting sun. The golden light spilled over every tower and crenulation of the Imperial Palace, turning the glittering metals and white marble a striking, honeyed amber. The sight was awesome; but it was marred by the huge cube-like masses of retrofitted redoubts and gunnery donjons that stood up like blunt grey fangs in an angry mouth. The palace of before – the rich, glorious construct that defied censure and defeat – was cheek-by-jowl with the palace of now – a brutalist fortress ranged against the most lethal of foes. A foe that had yet to show his face under Terra’s skies.

Efried knew that his liege lord was troubled by the battlements and fortifications the Emperor had charged him to build over the beauty of the palace; and while the captain could see equal majesty in both palace and fortress alike, he knew that in some fashion, Great Dorn believed he was diminishing this place by making it a site fit only for warfare. The primarch of the Imperial Fists often came to this high balcony, to watch the walls and, as Efried imagined, to wait for the arrival of his turncoat brother.

He cleared his throat. ‘Sir. I have word from our chapter serfs. The reports of preparations have been confirmed, as have those of the incidents in the Yndenisc Bloc and on Saros Station.’

‘Go on.’

‘You were correct to order surveillance of the Custodes. Captain-General Valdor was once again witnessed entering closed session at the Shrouds, with an assemblage of the Directors Primus of the Assassinorum clades.’

‘When was this?’ Dorn did not look at him, continuing to gaze out over the palace.

‘This day,’ Efried explained. ‘On the conclusion of the gathering a transmission was sent into close-orbit space, likely to a vessel. The encryption was of great magnitude. My Techmarines regretfully inform me it would be beyond their skills to decode.’

‘There is no need to try,’ said the primarch, ‘and indeed, to do so would be a violation of protocols. That is a line the Imperial Fists will not cross. Not yet.’

Efried’s hand strayed to his close-cropped beard. ‘As you wish, my lord.’

Dorn was silent for a long moment, and Efried began to wonder if this was a dismissal; but then his commander spoke again. ‘It begins with this, captain. Do you understand? The rot beds in with actions such as these. Wars fought in the shadows instead of the light. Conflicts where there are no rules of conduct. No lines that cannot be crossed.’ At last he glanced across at his officer. ‘No honour.’ Behind him, the sun dipped below the horizon, and the shadows across the balcony grew.

‘What is to be done?’ Efried asked. He would obey any command his primarch had cause to utter, without question or hesitation.

But Dorn did not answer him directly. ‘There can only be one target worth such subterfuge, such a gathering of forces. The Officio Assassinorum mean to kill my errant brother Horus.’

Efried considered this. ‘Would that not serve our cause?’

‘It might appear so to those with a narrow view,’ replied the primarch. ‘But I have seen what the assassin’s bullet wreaks in its wake. And I tell you this, brother-captain. We will defeat Horus… but if his death comes in a manner such as the Assassinorum intend, the consequences will be terrible, and beyond our capacity to control. If Horus falls to an assassin’s hand there will be a gaping vacuum at the core of the turncoat fleet, and we cannot predict who will fill it or what terrible revenges they will take. As long as my brother lives, as long as he rides at the head of the traitor Legions, we can predict what he will do. We can match Horus, defeat him on even ground. We know him.’ Dorn let out a sigh. ‘I know him.’ He shook his head. ‘The death of the Warmaster will not stop the war.’

Efried listened and nodded. ‘We could intervene. Confront Valdor and the clade masters.’

‘Based on what, captain?’ Dorn shook his head again. ‘I have only hearsay and suspicion. If I were as reckless as Russ or the Khan, that might be enough… But we are Imperial Fists and we observe the letter of Imperial law. There must be proof positive.’

‘Your orders, then, sir?’

‘Have the serfs maintain their observations,’ Dorn looked up into the darkening sky. ‘For the moment, we watch and we wait.’

Eight

Cinder and Ash
Toys
Unmasked

The room in the compound they had given over for Perrig’s use was of a reasonable size and dimension, and the last of four that had been offered. The other three she had immediately rejected because of their inherent luminal negativity or proximal locations to undisciplined thought-groupings. The second had been a place where a woman had died, some one hundred and seven years earlier, having taken her own life as the result of an unplanned pregnancy. The adjutant, Gorospe, had looked at Perrig with shock and no little amount of dismay at that revelation; it seemed that no one among the staff of the Eurotas Consortium had had any idea the building on Iesta had such a sordid history.

But this room was quiet, the buzzing in her senses was abating and Perrig was as close to her equilibrium as she could be in a place so filled with droning, self-absorbed minds. Running through her alignment exercises, Perrig gently edited them out of her thoughtscape, eliminating the disruption through the application of a gentle psionic null-song, like a counter-wave masking an atonal sound.

She absently touched the collar around her neck as she did this. It was just metal, just a thing, secured only with a bolt that she herself could undo with a single twist. It had meaning, though, for those who looked upon it, for those who might read the words from the Nikaea Diktat acid-etched into the black iron. It was a slave’s mark, after a fashion, but one she wore only for the benefit of the comfort of others. It was not a nullifier, it could not hold her back; it was there so those who feared her ability could have her at their side and still sleep soundly, convinced by the lie that it would protect them from her unearthliness. The texture of the cool metal gave her focus, and she let herself draw inward.

The last thing she looked at before she closed her eyes was the chronometer on a nearby desk; Hyssos and the local lawmen had returned from the Iubar several hours ago, but she hadn’t seen any of them since the audience with the Void Baron. She wondered what Hyssos would be doing, but she resisted the urge to extend a tendril of thought out to search for him. Her telepathic abilities were poor and it was only her familiarity with his mind that allowed her to sense him with any degree of certainty. In truth, Perrig’s desire to be close to Hyssos only ever brought her melancholy. She had once looked into his thoughts as he slept, once when he had let down his guard, and there she saw that he had no inkling of the strange devotion the psyker had for her guardian; no understanding of this peculiar attachment that could not be thought of as love, but neither as anything else. It was better that way, she decided. Perrig did not wish to think of what might happen if he knew. She would be taken away from him, most likely. Perhaps even returned to the Black Ships from where Baron Eurotas had first claimed her.

Perrig suffocated the thoughts and returned to her business at hand, eyes tightly shut, her calm forced back into place like a key jammed into a lock.

The psyker knelt on the hard wooden floor of the room. Arranged in a semi-circle around her were a careful line of objects she had picked from the debris of the old wine lodge. Some stones, a brass button from a greatcoat, sticky grease-paper wrapping from a meat-stick vendor and a red leaflet dense with script in the local dialect of Imperial Gothic. Perrig touched them all in order, moving back and forth, lingering on some, returning to others. She used the items to build a jigsaw puzzle image of the suspect, but there were gaping holes in the simulacra. Places where she could not sense the full dimension of who Erno Sigg was.

The button had fear on it. It had been lost as he fled the fire and the howl of the coleopters.

The stones. These he had picked up and turned in his hands, used them in an idle game of throws, tossing them across the shack and back again, boredom and nervous energy marbling their otherwise inert auras.

The grease-paper was laden with hunger, panic. The image here was quite distinct; he had stolen the food from the vendor while the man’s back was turned. He had been convinced he would be caught and arrested.

The leaflet was love. Love or something like it, at least in the manner that Perrig could understand. Dedication, then, if one were to be more correct, with almost a texture of righteousness about it.

She dithered over the piece of paper, looking through her closed lids at the emotional spectra it generated. Sigg was complex and the psyker had trouble holding the pieces she had of him in her mind. He was conflicted; buried somewhere deep there was the distant echo of great violence in him, but it was overshadowed by two towering opposite forces. On one hand, a grand sense of hope, even redemption, as if he believed he would be saved; and on the other, an equally powerful dread of something hunting him, of his own victimhood.

Perrig’s psychometry was not an exact science, but in her time as an investigator she had developed a keen sense of her own instincts; it was this sense that told her Erno Sigg did not kill for his pleasures. As that thought crystallised inside her mind, Perrig felt the first fuzzy inklings of a direction coming to her. She allowed her hand to pick up the stylus at her side and moved it to the waiting data-slate on the floor. It twitched as the auto-writing began in spidery, uneven text.

Her other hand, though, had not left the leaflet. Her fingers toyed with the edges of it, playing with the careworn paper, seeking out the places where it had been delicately folded and unfolded, time and time again. She wondered what it meant to Sigg that he cared so much for it, and sensed the ghost of the anguish he would feel at its loss.

That would be how she would find him. The sorrow, fluttering from him like a pennant in the wind. The scribbling stylus moved of its own accord, back and forth across the slate.

Confidence rose in her. She would find Erno Sigg. She would. And Hyssos would be pleased with her–

Her heart jumped in her chest and she gasped. The stylus, gripped beyond its tolerances, snapped in two and the broken ends dug into her palm. Perrig was suddenly trembling, and she knew why. At the back of her mind there had been a thought she had not wanted to confront, something she took care to avoid as one might favour an ugly, painful bruise upon the skin.

But now she was drawn to it, touching the discoloured edges of the psychic contusion, flinching at the tiny ticks of pain it gave off.

She had sensed it after their arrival on Iesta Veracrux. At first, Perrig imagined it was only an artefact of the transition of her mind, from the controlled peace of her domicile aboard the Iubar to the riotous newness of the planet’s busy city.

Correction; she had wanted to believe it was that.

The trembling grew as she dared to focus on it. A dark shadow at the edges of her perception, close at hand. Closer than Erno Sigg. Much, much closer, more so than Hyssos or any of the Iestan investigators suspected.

Perrig felt a sudden wetness at her nostrils, on her cheek. She smelled copper. Blinking, she opened her eyes and the first thing she saw was the leaflet. It was red, deep crimson, the words printed on it lost against the shade of the paper. Panting in a breath, Perrig looked up from where she knelt and saw that the room, and everything in it, was red and red and red. She let the broken stylus fall and wiped at her face. Thick fluid came away from the corners of her eyes. Blood, not tears.

Propelled by a surge of fright, she came to her feet, her boot catching the data-slate and crushing the glassy screen beneath the heel. The room seemed humid and stifling, every surface damp and meat-slick. Perrig lurched towards the only window and reached for the pull to drag back the curtains so she might open it, get a breath of untainted air.

The drapes were made of red and shadows, and they parted like petals as she came closer. Something approximating the shape of a human being opened up there, suspended by spindly feet from the ceiling overhead. The heavy velvets thumped to the wooden floor and the figure unfolded, wet and shiny with oils. Its name impressed itself on the soft surfaces of her mind and she was forced to speak it aloud just to expunge the horror of it.

‘Spear…’

A distended maw of teeth and bone barbs grew from the head of the monstrosity. Stygian flame, visible only to those with the curse of the witch-sight, wreathed the abstract face and the black pits that were its eyes. In an instant, Perrig knew what had made all those kills, what hands had delicately cut into Jaared Norte, Cirsun Latigue and all the others who had perished at its inclination.

She backed away, her voice lost to her. More than anything, Perrig wanted to cover her eyes and look away, find somewhere to hide her face so that she would not be forced to see the Spear-thing; but there was nowhere for her to turn. Even if she clawed the orbs from her sockets, her witch-sight would still remain, and the aura of this monstrous creature would continue to smother it.

Horribly, she sensed that the killer wanted her to look upon it, with all the depth of perception her psychic talents allowed. It projected a need for her to witness it, and that desire drew her in like the pull of gravity from a dark sun.

Spear muttered to itself. When Perrig had touched the minds of other killers in the past, she had always flinched at the awful joy with which they pursued their craft; she did not see that here, however. Spear’s psyche was a pool of black ink, featureless and undisturbed by madness, lust or naked fury. It was almost inert, moving under the guidance of an unshakable certainty. It reminded her for one fleeting instant of Hyssos’s ordered mindset; the killer shared the same dogged, unflinching sense of direction towards its goals… almost as if it were following a string of commands.

And still it let her in. She knew if she refused it, Spear would tear her open then and there. She tried desperately to break past the miasma of cold that lay around her, projecting as best she could a panicked summons towards her absent guardian; but as she did this, she also let her mind fall into Spear, stalling for time, on some level repulsed and fascinated by the monster’s true nature.

Spear was not coy; it opened itself to her. What she saw in there sickened her beyond her capacity to express. The killer had been made this way, taken from some human stock now so corrupted that its origin could not be determined, sheathed with a skein of living materials that seemed cut from the screaming depths of the warp itself. Perhaps a fluke of cruel nature, or perhaps a thing created by twisted genius, Spear was soulless, but unlike any stripe of psionic null Perrig had ever encountered.

It was a Black Pariah; the ultimate expression of negative psychic force. Perrig had believed such things were only conjecture, the mad nightmare creations of wild theorists and sorcerous madmen – yet here it stood, watching her, breathing the same air as she wept blood before it.

And then Spear reached out with fingers made of knives and took Perrig’s hand. She howled as burning pain lanced through her nerves; the killer severed her right thumb with insolent ease and drew it up and away, toying with its prize. Perrig gripped her injured hand, vitae gushing from the wound.

Spear took the severed flesh and rolled it into its fanged maw, crunching down the bone and meat as if it were a rare delicacy. Perrig sank back to the blood-spattered floor, her head swimming as she caught the edges of the sudden psionic shift running through the killer.

The black voids of its eyes glared down at her and they became smoky mirrors. In them she saw her own mind reflected back at her, the power of her own psionic talents bubbling and rippling, copied and enhanced a thousandfold. Spear had tasted her blood, the living gene-code of her being – and now it knew her. It had her imprint.

She scrambled backwards, feeling the humming chorus of her mind and that of the killer coming into shuddering synchrony, the orbits of their powers moving towards alignment. Perrig cried out and begged it to stop, but Spear only cocked its head and let the power build.

It had not killed in this manner for a long time, she realised. The other deaths had been mundane and unremarkable. It wanted to do this just to be sure it was still capable, as a soldier might release a clip of ammunition to test the accuracy of a firearm. Belatedly Perrig understood that she was the only thing for light years around that could have been any kind of threat to it; but now, too late.

And then, they met in the non-space between them. Beyond her ability to stop it, Perrig’s psionic ability unchained itself and thundered against Spear’s waiting, open arms. The killer took it all in, every last morsel, and did so with the ease of breathing.

In stillness, Spear released its burden and reflected back all that Perrig was, the force of her preternatural power returning, magnified into a silent, furious hurricane.

The woman became ashes and broke apart.

Through the coruscating, unquenchable fires of the immaterium, the Ultio raced on, passing through the corridors of the warp and onwards beyond the borders of the Segmentum Solar. The ship’s sight-blind Navigator took it through the routes that were little known, the barely-charted passages that the upper echelons of the Imperial government kept off the maps given to the common admiralty. These were swift routes but treacherous ones, causeways through the atemporal realm that larger ships would never have been able to take, the soul-light glitter of their massive crews bright enough that they would attract the living storms that wheeled and turned, while Ultio passed by unnoticed. The phantom-ship was barely there; its Geller fields had such finely-tuned opacity and it engines such speed that the lumbering, predatory intelligences that existed inside warp space noted it only by the wake it left behind. As days turned and clocks spun back on Terra, Ultio flew towards Dagonet; by some reckonings, it was already there.

On board, the Execution Force gathered once more, this time in a compartment off the spinal corridor that ran the length of the starship’s massive drives.

Kell watched, as he always did.

The Garantine was still toying with his makeshift blade. He had continued to craft it into a wicked shiv that was easily the length of a man’s forearm. ‘What do you want, Vanus?’ he asked.

Tariel gave a nervous smile and indicated a large cargo module that replaced one whole wall of the long, low compartment. ‘Uh, thank you for coming.’ He glanced around at Kell, Iota and the others. ‘As we are now mission-committed, I have leave to continue with the next stage of my orders.’

‘Explain,’ said Koyne.

The infocyte rubbed his hands together. ‘I was given a directive by the Master of Assassins himself to present these materials to you only after the group had been completely assembled and only after the Ultio had left the Sol system.’ He moved to a keypad on the cargo module and tapped in a string of symbols. ‘I am to address the matter of your equipment.’

The Eversor assassin’s head snapped up, his mood instantly changing from insolence to laser-like intensity. ‘Weapons?’ he asked, almost salivating.

Tariel nodded. ‘Among other things. This unit contains the hardware for our mission ahead.’

‘Did you know about this?’ demanded the Garantine, glaring at Kell. ‘Here I am playing with scraps and there’s a war-load right here on board with me?’

Kell shook his head. ‘I assumed we’d be equipped on site.’

‘Why did someone fail to tell me there was an armoury aboard this tub?’ Tariel ducked as the Garantine threw his shiv and it buried itself in a stanchion close by. ‘Give me a weapon, now! Feels like I’m bloody naked here!’

‘What a delightful image,’ murmured Soalm.

‘He needs it,’ said Iota, distractedly. ‘He actually feels a kind of emotional pain when separated from his firearms. Like a parent torn from its child.’

‘I’ll show you torn,’ grated the hulking killer, menacing the Vanus. ‘I’ll do some tearing.’

‘Open!’ Tariel fairly shouted the word and the mechanism controlling the lock hissed on oiled hydraulics. The pod split along its length and rolled back, presenting brackets of guns, support equipment and other wargear.

The Garantine’s face lit up with something approximating joy. ‘Hello, pretty pretty,’ he muttered, drawn to a rack where a heavy pistol, ornate and decorated with metallic wings and sensor probes, lay waiting. He gathered it up and hefted it in one hand. Cold laughter fell from his lips as gene-markers tingled through him, briefly communing with the lobo-chips implanted in his brain, confirming his identity and purpose.

‘The Executor combi-pistol,’ said Tariel, blinking rapidly as he drew the information up from a mnemonic pool in his deep cortex. ‘Dual function ballistic bolt weapon and needle projectile–’

‘I know what it is!’ snarled the Garantine, before he could finish. ‘Oh, we are very well acquainted.’ He stroked the gun like it was a pet.

Kell spoke up. ‘All of you, take what you need but make sure you use what you take. Go back to your compartments and prepare your gear for immediate deployment. We have no idea how long we may have between our arrival and the target’s.’

‘He may already be there waiting for us,’ offered Koyne, drifting towards a different rack of weapons. ‘The tides of the warp often flow against the ebb of time.’

The Garantine greedily gathered armfuls of hardware, taking bandoliers of melta-grenades, a wickedly barbed neuro-gauntlet and the rig for a sentinel array. With another guttural laugh, he snagged a heavy, blunt-ended slaughterer’s sword and placed it under his arm. ‘I’ll be in my bunk,’ he sniggered, and wandered away under his burden.

Iota watched the Eversor go. ‘Look at him. He’s almost… happy.’

‘Every child needs its toys,’ said Soalm.

The Culexus gave the racks a sideways look, and then turned away. ‘Not me. There’s nothing here that I need.’ She shot the Venenum poisoner a look, tapping her temple. ‘I have a weapon already.’

‘The animus speculum, yes,’ said Soalm. ‘I’ve heard of it. But it is an ephemeral thing, isn’t it? Its use depends on the power of the opponent as much as that of the user, so I am led to believe.’

Iota’s lips pulled tight in a small smile. ‘If you wish.’

Tariel nervously approached them. ‘I… I do have an item put aside for your use, Culexus,’ he said, offering an armoured box covered with warning runes. ‘If you will?’

Iota flipped open the lid and cocked her head. Inside there were a dozen grenades made of black metal. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Explosives. How ordinary.’

‘No, no,’ he insisted. ‘This is a new technology. An experimental weapon not yet field-tested under operational conditions. A creation of your clade’s senior scienticians.’

The woman plucked one of the grenades from the case and sniffed it. Her eyes narrowed. ‘What is this? It smells like the death of suns.’

‘I am not permitted to know the full details,’ admitted the infocyte. ‘But the devices contain an exotic form of particulate matter that inhibits the function of psionic ability in a localised area.’

Iota studied the grenade for a long moment, toying with the activator pin, before finally giving Tariel a wan look. ‘I’ll take these,’ she said, snatching the box from his hand.

‘What do you have for the rest of us in your delightful toy box?’ Koyne asked lightly, playing with a pair of memory swords. They had curved, graceful blades that shifted angles in mid-flight as the Callidus cut the air with them.

‘Toxin cordes.’ The Vanus pressed a control and a belt threaded with glassy stilettos extended from a sealed drum marked with biohazard trefoils.

Koyne put up the swords and reached for them, only to see that Soalm was doing the same. The Callidus gave a small bow. ‘Oh, pardon me, cousin. Poisons are of course your domain.’

Soalm gave a tight, humourless smile. ‘No. After you. Take what you wish.’

Koyne held up a hand. ‘No, no. After you. Please. I insist.’

‘As you wish.’ The Venenum carefully retrieved one of the daggers and turned it in her fingers. She held it up to the light, turning it this way and that so the coloured fluids inside the glass poison blade flowed back and forth. At length, she sniffed. ‘These are of fair quality. They’ll work well enough on any man who stands between us and Horus.’

The Callidus picked out a few blades. ‘But what about those who are not men? What about Horus himself?’

Soalm’s lips thinned. ‘This would be the bite of a gnat to the Warmaster.’ She gave Tariel a look. ‘I will prepare my own weapons.’

‘There’s also this,’ offered the Vanus, passing her a pistol. The weapon was a spindly collection of brass pipes with a crystalline bulb where a normal firearm might have had an ammunition magazine. Soalm took it and peered at the mesh grille where the muzzle should have been.

‘A bact-gun,’ she said, weighing it in her hand. ‘This may be useful.’

‘The dispersal can be set from a fine mist to a gel-plug round,’ noted Tariel.

‘Are you certain you know how to use that?’ said Kell.

Soalm’s arm snapped up into aiming position, the barrel of the weapon pointed directly at the Vindicare’s face. ‘I think I can recall,’ she said. Then she wandered away, turning the pistol over in her delicate, pale hands.

Meanwhile, Koyne had discovered a case that was totally out of place among all the others. It resembled a whorled shell more than anything else, and the only mechanism to unlock it was the sketch of a handprint etched into the bony matter of the latch – a handprint of three overlong digits and a dual thumb.

‘I have no idea what that may be,’ Tariel admitted. ‘The container, I mean, it looks almost as if it is–’

‘Xenos?’ said Koyne, with deceptive lightness. ‘But that would be prohibited, Vanus. Perish the thought.’ There was a quiet cracking sound as the Callidus’s right hand stretched and shifted in shape, the human digits reformed and merging until they became something more approximate to the alien handprint. Koyne pressed home on the case and it sighed open, drooling droplets of purple liquid on to the decking. Inside the container, the organic look was even more disturbing; on a bed of fleshy material wet with more of the liquid rested a weapon made of blackened, tooth-like ceramics. It was large and off-balance in shape, the front of it grasping a faceted teardrop crystal the sea-green colour of ancient jade.

‘What is it?’ Tariel asked, his disgust evident.

‘In my clade it has many names,’ said Koyne. ‘It rips open minds, tears intellect and thought to shreds. Those it touches remain empty husks.’ The Callidus held it out to the Vanus, who backed away. ‘Do you wish to take a closer look?’

‘Not in this lifetime,’ Tariel insisted.

A pale tongue flickered out and licked Koyne’s lips as the assassin returned the weapon to the shell. Gathering it up, the Callidus bowed to the others. ‘I will take my leave of you.’

As Koyne left, Kell glanced back at the Vanus. ‘What about you? Or do those of your clade choose not to carry a weapon?’

Tariel shook his head, colour returning to his cheeks. ‘I have weapons of my own, just not as obvious as yours. An electropulse projector, built into my cogitator gauntlet. And I have my menagerie. The psyber eagles, the eyerats and netfly swarms.’

Kell thought of the pods he had seen elsewhere aboard the Ultio, where Tariel’s cybernetically-modified rodents and preybirds and other animals slept out the voyage in dormancy, waiting for his word of command to awaken them. ‘Those things won’t keep you alive.’

The Vanus shook his head. ‘Ah, believe me, I will make sure that nothing ever gets close enough to kill me.’ He sighed. ‘And in that vein… There are also weapons for you.’

‘My weapon was lost,’ Kell said, with no little venom. ‘Thanks to the Eversor.’

‘It has been renewed,’ said Tariel, opening a lengthy box. ‘See.’

Every Vindicare used a longrifle that was uniquely configured for their biomass, shooting style, body kinestics, even tailored to work with the rhythm in which they breathed. When the Garantine had smashed Kell’s weapon into pieces out in the Aktick snows, it was like he had lost a part of himself; but there inside the case was a sniper rifle that resembled the very gun that had been his constant companion for years – resembled it, but also transcended it. ‘Exitus,’ he breathed, stooping to run a hand over the flat, non-reflective surface of the barrel.

Tariel indicated the individual components of the weapon. ‘Spectroscopic polyimager scope. Carousel ammunition loader. Nitrogen coolant sheath. Whisperhead suppressor unit. Gyroscopic balance stabiliser.’ He paused. ‘As much of your original weapon as possible was salvaged and reused in this one.’

Kell nodded. He saw that the grip and part of the cheek-plate were worn in a way that no newly-forged firearm could have been. As well as the longrifle, a pistol of similar design lay next to it on the velvet bedding of the weapon case. Lined up along the lid of the container were row after row of individual bullets, arranged in colour-coded groups. ‘Impressive. But I’ll need to sight it in.’

‘We’ll doubtless all have many opportunities to employ our skills before Horus shows his face,’ said Soalm. She hadn’t left the room, but stood off to one side as the sniper and the infocyte talked.

‘We will do what we have to,’ Kell replied, without looking at her.

‘Even if we destroy ourselves doing it,’ his sister replied.

The marksman’s jaw hardened and his eyes fell to a line of words that had been etched into the slender barrel of the rifle. Written in a careful scrolling hand was the Dictatus Vindicare, the maxim of his clade; Exitus Acta Probat.

‘The outcome justifies the deed,’ said Kell.

What he saw in the room was like no manner of death Yosef Sabrat had ever conceived of. The killings of Latigue in the aeronef and Norte at the docks, while they were horrors that sickened him to his core, had not pressed at his reason. But not this, not this… deed.

Black ashes were scattered in a long pool across the middle of Perrig’s room, cast out of a set of clothes that lay splayed out where they had fallen. At the top of the cascade of cinders, a small hill of the dark powder covered an iron collar, the bolt holding it shut still secure, and in among the pile there were the silver needles of neural implants glittering in the lamplight.

‘I… don’t understand.’ The Gorospe woman was standing a few steps behind the investigators, outside in the corridor with Yosef where the jagers milled around, uncertain how to proceed. ‘I don’t understand,’ she repeated. ‘Where did the… the woman go to?’

She had almost said the witch. Yosef sensed the half-formed word on her lips, and he shot her a look filled with sudden fury. Gorospe looked up at him with wide, limpid eyes, and he felt his hands contract into fists. She was so callous and dismissive of the dead psyker; he fought back a brief urge to grab her and slam her up against the wall, shout at her for her stupidity. Then he took a breath and said ‘She didn’t go anywhere. That’s all that is left of her.’

Yosef walked away, pushing past Skelta. The jager gave him a wary nod. ‘Heard from Reeve Segan, sir. They called him in from his off-shift. He’s on his way.’

He returned Skelta’s nod and took a wary step through the field barrier and into the room, careful not to disturb the cluster of small mapping automata that scanned the crime scene with picters and ranging lasers. Hyssos was crouching, looking back and forth around the walls, staring towards the windows, then back to the ashen remains. He had his back to the doorway and Yosef heard him take a shuddering breath. It was almost a sob.

‘Do you… need a moment?’ As soon as he said the words, he felt like an utter fool. Of course he did; his colleague had just been brutally murdered, and in an abhorrent, baffling manner.

‘No,’ said Hyssos. ‘Yes,’ he said, an instant later. ‘No. No. There will be time for that. After.’ The operative looked up at him and his eyes were shining. ‘Do you know, I think, at the end… I think I actually heard her.’ He fingered one of the braids among his hair.

Yosef saw the semi-circle of objects on the floor, the stones and the paper. ‘What are these?’

‘Foci,’ Hyssos told him. ‘Objects imbued with some emotional resonance from the suspect. Perrig reads them. She read them.’ He corrected himself absently.

‘I am sorry.’

Hyssos nodded. ‘You will let me kill this man when we find him,’ he told Yosef, in a steady, measured voice. ‘We will make certain, of course, of his guilt,’ he added, nodding. ‘But the death. You will let me have that.’

Yosef felt warm and uncomfortable. ‘We’ll burn that bridge after we cross it.’ He looked away and found the places on the far wall behind him where the markings had been made. On his entry into the room, he hadn’t seen them. Like the paintings in blood inside the aeronef or the shape that Jaared Norte’s body had been cut into, there were eight-point stars all over the light-coloured walls. It seemed that the killer had used the residue of Perrig as his ink, repeating the same pattern over and over again.

‘What does it mean?’ Hyssos mumbled.

The reeve licked his lips; they were suddenly dry. He had a strange sensation, a tingling in the base of his skull like the dull headache brought on by too much recaf and not enough fresh air. The shapes were all he could see, and he felt like there was an answer there, if only he could find the right way to look at them. They were no different from the mathematical problems in Ivak’s schola texts, they just needed to be solved to be understood.

‘Sabrat, what does it mean?’ said Hyssos again. ‘This word?’

Yosef blinked and the moment vanished. He looked back at the investigator. Hyssos had removed something from among the ashen remains; a data-slate, the screen spiderwebbed and fractured. Incredibly, the display underneath was still operating, flickering sporadically.

Gingerly, Yosef took it from him, taking care to avoid touching the powder-slicked surfaces of the device. The touch-sensitive screen still remembered the words that had been etched upon it, and flashed them at him, almost too quickly to register.

‘One of the words is “Sigg”,’ Hyssos told him. ‘Do you see it?’

He did; and beneath that, there was a scribble that appeared to be the attempt to form another string of letters, the shape of them lost now. But above the name, there was another clearly-lettered word.

‘Whyteleaf. Is that a person’s name?’

Yosef shook his head, instantly knowing the meaning. ‘Not a person. A place. I know it well.’

Hyssos was abruptly on his feet. ‘Close?’

‘In the low crags, a quick trip by coleopter.’

The investigator’s brief flash of grief and sorrow was gone. ‘We need to go there, right now. Perrig’s readings decay over time.’ He tapped the broken slate. ‘If she sensed Sigg was in this place, every moment we waste here, we run the risk he will flee again.’

Skelta had caught the edge of their conversation. ‘Sir, we don’t have any other units in the area. Backup is dealing with a railganger fight that went bad out at the airdocks and security prep for the trade carnival.’

Yosef made the choice then and there. ‘When Daig gets here, tell him to take over the scene and keep Laimner occupied.’ He moved towards the door, not looking back to see if Hyssos was following. ‘We’re taking the flyer.’

The operative had lost colleagues before, and it had been difficult then as it was now; but Perrig’s death was something more than that. It came in like a bullet, cutting right into the core of Hyssos’s soul. Losing himself in the rush of the dark, low clouds outside the windows of the coleopter, he tried to parse his own emotional reactions to the moment without success. Perrig had always been a good, trusted colleague, and he liked her company. She had never pressured him to talk about his past or tried to worm more information out of him than he wanted to give. Hyssos had always felt respected in her presence, and rewarded by her competence, her cool, calm intelligence.

Now she was dead; worse than dead, not a corpse even, just dark cinders, just a slurry of matter that did not bear any resemblance to the human being he had known. He felt a hard stab of guilt. Perrig had always given him her complete and total trust, and he had not been there to protect her when she needed it. Now this investigation had crossed from the professional to the personal, and Hyssos was uncertain of himself.

Looking from the outside in, had he been a passive observer, Hyssos would have immediately insisted that an operative in his circumstances be withdrawn from the case and a new team assigned from the Consortium’s security pool. And that, he knew, was why he had not yet sent an official report on Perrig’s death to the Void Baron, because Eurotas himself would say the same.

But Hyssos was here, now, and he knew the stakes. It would take too long to bring another operative up to speed. As competent as locals like Sabrat were, the reeve’s seniors couldn’t be trusted to handle this with alacrity.

Yes. All those were good lies to tell himself, all gilded with the ring of truth, when in fact all he wanted at this moment was to put Perrig’s killer down like a rabid animal.

Hyssos clasped his hands together to stop them making fists. Outwardly his icy calm did not shift, but inside he was seething. The operative glanced at Sabrat as the flyer began to circle in towards a landing. ‘What is this Whyteleaf?’

‘What?’ Sabrat turned suddenly, snapping at him with venom, as if Hyssos had called out some grave personal insult. Then he blinked, the strange anger ebbing for a moment. ‘Oh. Yes. It’s a winestock. Many of the smaller lodges store vintage estufagemi here, holding barrels of it for years so it can mature undisturbed.’

‘How many staff?’

Sabrat shook his head distractedly. ‘It… It’s all automated.’ The flyer’s skids bumped as the craft landed. ‘Quickly!’ said the reeve, bolting up from his seat. ‘If the coleopter dwells, Sigg will know we’re on to him.’

Hyssos followed him down the drop ramp, into a cloud of upswept dust and leaves caught in the wake of the aircraft. He saw Sabrat give the pilot a clipped wave and the coleopter rattled back into the sky, leaving them ducking the sudden wind.

As the noise died away, Hyssos frowned. ‘Was that wise? We could use another pair of eyes.’

The reeve was already walking on, across the top of the shallow warehouse where they had been deposited. ‘Sigg ran the last time.’ He shook his head. ‘Do you want that to happen again?’ Sabrat said it almost as if it had been the operative’s fault.

‘Of course not,’ Hyssos said quietly, and drew his gun and a portable auspex from the pockets inside his tunic. ‘We should split up, then. Search for him.’

Sabrat nodded, crouching to open a hatch in the roof. ‘Agreed. Work your way down the floors and meet me on the basement level. If you find him, put a shot into the air.’ Before Hyssos could say anything in reply, the reeve dropped through the hatch and into the dark.

Hyssos took a deep breath and moved forward, finding another accessway at the far end of the warehouse. Pausing to don a pair of amplifier glasses, he went inside.

There was little light inside the winestock, but the glasses dealt with that for him. The pools of shadow were rendered into a landscape of whites, greys, greens and blacks. Reaching the decking of the uppermost tier, Hyssos saw the shapes of massive storage tanks rising up around him, the curves of towering wooden slats forming the walls of the great jeroboams. The smoky, potent smell of the wine was everywhere, the air thick and warm with it.

He walked carefully, his boots crunching on hard lumps of crystallised sugar caught in the gaps between the planks of the floor, the wood giving with quiet, moaning creaks. The auspex, a small device fashioned in the design of an ornate book, was open on a belt tether, the sensing mechanism working with a slow pulse of light. The unchanged cadence indicated no signs of human life within its scan radius. Hyssos wondered why Sabrat wasn’t registering; but then this building was dense with metals and the scanner’s range was limited.

The operative’s thoughts kept returning to the data-slate that Perrig had left behind. From the positioning of it among the psyker’s ashes, he supposed that it might have been in her hand when she met her end. She had seen Erno Sigg through the foci objects gathered from the Blasko Wine Lodge and tracked him here through the etherium – but the other word, the third line of letters on the slate… What meaning did they have? What had she been trying to say? How had she died in such a manner?

Finally, he could not let the question lie and he used his free hand to pull the smashed slate from his pocket.

Another error in judgement, said a voice in the back of his thoughts. The data-slate was evidence, and yet he had taken it from a crime scene. Pushing back the glasses to his forehead, Hyssos studied the broken screen in the dimness. The scribble of letters there were barely readable, but he knew Perrig’s steady, looping handwriting of old. If he could just find a way to see it afresh, to look with new eyes, perhaps he could intuit what she had been trying to write–

Spear.

It hit him like a splash of cold water. A sudden snap of comprehension. Yes, he was sure of it. The spin of the consonants and the loop of the vowels… Yes.

But what did it mean?

The next step he took made a wet ripping noise and something along the line of his boot dragged at him, as if a thick layer of glue carpeted the floor.

Hyssos sniffed the air, wondering if one of the mammoth wine casks had leaked; but then the stale, metallic smell rose up to smother the cloying sweetness all around. He dropped the slate back into his pocket and gingerly slid the goggles down over his eyes once more.

And there, rendered in cold, sea-green shades, was a frieze made of meat and bones. Across the curve of a wooden storage tank, beneath a wide stanchion and in shadow where the light of Iesta’s days would never have fallen, the display of an eviscerated corpse was visible to him.

The body was open, the skin cut so that the innards, the skeleton and the muscle were free for removal. The fleshy rags that remained of the victim were nailed up in the parody of a human shape; organs and bones had been taken and arranged in patterns, some of them reassembled together in horrible new fusions. Ribs, for example, fanned like daggers sticking into the wet meat of a pale liver. A pelvic bone dressed with intestines. The spongy mass of a lung wrapped in coils of stripped nerve. All about him, the blood was a matted, dried pool, a sticky patina that had mixed with wine spillages and doubtless seeped down through the floor of this level and the next. Thousands of gallons of carefully matured liquor was tainted, polluted by what had been done here.

At the edges of the ocean of vitae where the fluid ran away, eight-point stars dotted the bland wooden panels. Amid it all, Hyssos’s eyes caught a shape that focussed his attention instantly; a face. He gingerly stepped closer, his gorge rising as his boots sucked at the flooring. Narrowing his eyes, the operative drew up the auspex, turning its sensoria on the blood slick.

It was Erno Sigg’s face, cut from the front of his skull, lying like a discarded paper mask.

The chime of the auspex drew his gaze from the horror. Hyssos had been trained by the Consortium’s technologians on the reading of its outputs, and he saw datums unfurl on its small screen. The blood, it told him, was days old; perhaps even as much as a week. This atrocity had been done to Erno Sigg well before Perrig’s execution, of that there was no doubt. The auspex could not lie.

Swallowing his revulsion, Hyssos let the scanning device drop on its tether and raised his gun upwards, finger tightening on the trigger. His hand was trembling, and he could not seem to steady it.

But then the footsteps reached him. From across the other side of the lake of dried blood, a shadow detached from the darkness and came closer. Hyssos recognised the purposeful gait of the Iestan reeve; but he moved without hesitation, straight across the middle of it, boots sucking at the glutinous, oily mess.

‘Sabrat,’ called the operative, his voice thick with repugnance, ‘What are you doing, man? Look around, can’t you see it?’

‘I see it,’ came the reply. The words were paper-dry.

The amplifier glasses seemed like a blindfold around his head and Hyssos tore them off. ‘For Terra’s sake, Yosef, step back! You’ll contaminate the site!’

‘Yosef isn’t here,’ said the voice, as it became fluid and wet, transforming. ‘Yosef went away.’

The reeve came out of the dimness and he was different. There were only black pits glaring back at Hyssos from a shifting face that moved like oil on water.

‘My name is Spear,’ said the horror. The face was eyeless, and no longer human.

Nine

Dagonet
Assumption
Falling

The orbits above Dagonet were clogged with the wreckage of ships that had tried too hard to make it off the surface, vessels that were built as pleasure yachts or shuttlecraft, suborbitals and single-stage cargo barges for the runs to the near moons. Many of them had fallen foul of the system frigates blockading the escape vectors, torn apart under hails of las-fire; but more had simply failed. Ships that were overloaded or ill-prepared for the rigours of leaving near-orbit space had burned out their drives or lost atmosphere. The sky was filled with iron coffins that were gradually spiralling back to the turning world below them. At night, those on the planet could see them coming home in streaks of fire, and they served as a reminder of what would happen to anyone who disagreed with the Governor’s new order.

The Ultio navigated in on puffs of thruster gas, having left the warp in the shadow of the Dagonet system’s thick asteroid belt. Cloaked in stealth technologies so advanced they were almost impenetrable, it easily avoided the ponderous turncoat cruisers and their nervous crews, finding safe harbour inside the empty shell of an abandoned orbital solar station. Securing the drive section in a place where it – along with Ultio’s astropath and Navigator – would be relatively safe, the forward module detached and reconfigured itself to resemble a common courier or guncutter. The pilot’s brain drew information from scans of the traitorous ships to alter the electropigments of the hull, and by the time the assassin craft touched down at the capital’s star-port, it wore the same blue and green as the local forces, even down to the crudely crossed-out Imperial aquila displayed by the defectors.

Kell had Koyne stand by the vox rig, ready to talk back to the control tower. The Callidus had already listened in on comm traffic snared from the airwaves by Tariel’s complex scanning gear, and could perform a passable imitation of a Dagoneti accent – but challenge never came.

The tower was gone, blown into broken fragments, and all across the sprawling landing fields and smoke-wreathed hangars, small fires were burning and wrecked ships that had died on take-off lay atop crumpled departure terminals and support buildings. Gunfire and the thump of grenade detonations echoed to them across the open runways.

Kell advanced down the ramp and used the sights on his new longrifle to sweep the perimeter.

‘Fighting was recent,’ said the Garantine, following him down. The hulking rage killer took a deep draught of air. ‘Still smell the blood and cordite.’

‘They’ve moved on,’ said the sniper, sweeping his gaze over corpses of soldiers and civilians who lay where they had fallen. It was difficult to be sure who had been shooting at who; Dagonet was in the middle of a civil war, and the lines of loyalist and turncoat were not yet clear to the new arrivals. A blink of laser fire from inside one of the massive terminals caught his eye and he turned to it as the crack of broken air reached them a moment later. ‘But not too far. They’re fighting through the buildings. Lucky for us the place is still contested. Leaves us with less explaining to do.’

He shouldered the rifle as Tariel ventured a few wary steps down the ramp. ‘Vindicare? How are we to proceed?’

Kell walked back up a way. The rest of the Execution Force were gathered on the lower deck, watching him intently. ‘We need to gather intelligence. Find out what’s going on here.’

‘Dagonet’s extrasolar communications went dark some time ago,’ noted Tariel. ‘Perhaps if you could secure a prisoner for interrogation…’

Kell nodded and beckoned to Koyne. ‘Callidus. You’re in charge until we get back.’

‘We?’ said Soalm pointedly.

He nodded towards the Garantine. ‘The two of us. We’ll scout the star-port, see what we can find.’

‘Ah, good,’ said the Eversor, rubbing his clawed hands together. ‘Exercise.’

‘Are you sure two will be enough?’ Soalm went on.

Kell ignored her and moved closer to Koyne. ‘Keep them alive, understand?’

Koyne made a thoughtful face. ‘We’re all lone wolves, Vindicare. If the enemy come knocking, my first instinct might be to run and leave them.’

He didn’t rise to the bait. ‘Then consider that order a test of your oath over your instincts.’

Sabrat’s longcoat whirled as the horror coiled, leaping into the air towards Hyssos. The operative heard it snapping like sailcloth in a stiff breeze and recoiled, firing shots that should have struck centre-mass but instead hit nothing but air.

The thing that called itself Spear landed close to him and he took a heavy blow that threw him off his feet. Hyssos slammed into a tall pile of Balthazar bottles that tumbled away with the impact, rolling this way and that. Pain raced up his spine as he twisted and tried to regain his footing.

Spear tossed the coat away and then, with care that seemed strange for something so abhorrent in appearance, deftly unbuttoned the white shirt beneath and set it aside. Bare from the waist up, Hyssos could see that the creature’s flesh was writhing and changing, cherry-red like tanned leather. He saw what looked like hands pressing out from inside the cage of the monster’s chest, and the profile of a screaming face. Yosef Sabrat’s face.

The bare arms distended and grew large, their proportions ballooning. Fingers merged into flat mittens of meat, grew stiff and glassy. Hands became bone blades, pennants of pinkish-black nerve tissue dangling from them.

Hyssos aimed the gun and fired at the place where a man’s heart would have been, but down came the arms and the shot was deflected away. He smelled a slaughterhouse stink coming off the creature, saw the sizzling pit in the limb from the impact as it filled with ooze and knit itself shut.

The body of the thing was in chaos. It writhed and throbbed and pulsed in disgusting ways, and the operative was struck by the conviction that something was inside the meat of it, trying to get out.

As the eyeless face glared into him, the distended jaws opening wide to let droplets of spittle fall free, Hyssos found his voice. ‘You killed them all.’

‘Yes.’ The reply was a gurgling chug of noise.

‘Why?’ he demanded, retreating back until he was trapped against the fallen bottles. ‘What in Terra’s name are you?’

‘There is no Terra,’ it bubbled, horrible amusement shading the words. ‘Only terror.’

Hyssos saw the shape of the face again, this time pressing from the meat of Spear’s bloated shoulders. He was sure it was crying out to him, imploring him. Run, it mouthed, run run run run–

He raised the gun, shaking, his blood turning to ice. Hands tightening on the grip, aiming for the head. In his time, Hyssos had seen many things that defied easy explanation – strange forms of alien life, the impossible vistas of warp space, the darkest potentials of the human character – and this creature was first among them. If hell was a place, then this was something that had been torn out of that infernal realm and thrust into the real world.

Spear raised its sword-arms and rattled their hard surfaces off one another. ‘One more,’ it intoned. ‘One step closer.’

‘To what?’ The question was a gasp. It came at him again, and Hyssos shot it in the face.

Spear shrugged it off. The first downward slash cut away Hyssos’s right hand across the forearm, the gun falling with it. The second stabbing motion pierced skin, ribcage and lung before emerging from his back in a splatter of dark arterial crimson.

Hyssos was not quite dead as Spear began to cut him into pieces. His last awareness was of the sound of his own flesh being eaten.

Shots and cries of pain sounded distantly as they drew closer to the engagement. The crackling drone of an emplaced autocannon sounded every few moments from down in the open plaza.

They had found plenty of dead along the way, and to begin with the Eversor paused at the sight of each clash, looking around to see if any of the combatants had perished carrying weapons of any particular note. But he found nothing he wanted to salvage, all of it basic Nire-pattern stubbers and the occasional lasgun. The Garantine didn’t like lasers; too fragile, too lightweight, too prone to malfunction when worked hard. He liked the heavy certainty of a ballistic gun, the comforting shock of recoil when it fired, the deep bass note of the shells crashing from the muzzle or the whickering sizzle of needle rounds. The bulky combi-weapon in his mailed fist was a perfect fit; it was his intention rendered in gunmetal.

Crouching in the lee of a tall, broken terracotta urn, he studied the Executor pistol and worked his fingers around the grip. The desire to use it on some target, any target, was almost too much to hold in. The anticipation tingled in his lobo-chips, and he felt the chemoglands in his neck grow cool as they produced a calmative to regulate the hammering pace of his heartbeat.

‘Eversor.’ The sniper’s voice issued out from the earpiece of his skull-mask. ‘There’s a group of irregulars to the south, under the broken chronograph near the monorail entrance. They’re dug in with a heavy gun.’ The Garantine took a look around the urn and saw the shattered clock face. He grunted an affirmative and Kell went on. ‘They’re holding off a unit of Defence Force troopers. Not many of the PDFs left. Hold and observe.’

That last sentence actually drew a laugh from the Eversor. ‘Oh, no.’ He jumped to his feet, the hissing of stimjectors sounding in his ears, and rolling fire flooded through him. The Garantine’s eyes widened behind his mask and his body resonated like a struck chord. Kell was saying something over the vox, but it seemed like the chattering of an insect.

The Garantine leapt into the air from the balcony overlooking the ticketing plaza and fell two storeys to land on the top of the smashed clock, where it hung from spars extending from the ceiling. The weight of his arrival dislodged the whole construction and he dropped with it, riding it to the tiled floor below to land behind the makeshift gun emplacement. The clock exploded into fragments as it struck the ground, ejecting cogwheels and bits of the fascia in all directions, the shock of it staggering the men behind the autocannon.

Kell had called them irregulars; that meant they were not soldiers, at least in an official sense. His drug-sharpened perception took in all details of them at once. They were garbed in pieces of armour, some of it PDF or Arbites issue, and the weapons they carried were an equally random assortment. At the sight of the towering, skull-masked monster that had fallen from the skies above them, the men on the autocannon hauled the weapon around on its tripod, swinging it to bear on the Garantine.

He roared and threw himself at them, his shout lost in the scream of the Executor. Bolt shells broke the bodies of the men in wet, red bursts, and he fell into their line, raking others with the spines of his neuro-gauntlet. The barbs of the glove bit into flesh and sent those it touched reeling to a twitching, frenzied death. Those on the autocannon he killed by punching, putting his fist through their ribcages. As an afterthought, he kicked the tripod gun away, and it rolled to the tiled floor.

Shivering with the rush, he laughed again. Through his adrenaline haze, he saw the men in the PDF uniforms warily peer out of cover, and then finally advance towards him with laser carbines ready.

He gave a theatrical bow and addressed them. ‘A rescue,’ he snapped. ‘Consider it a gift from the ruler of Terra.’

‘Idiot.’ Kell’s words pierced the veil of his racing thoughts. ‘Look at their chest plates!’

He did so; all of the PDF soldiers wore the etched-out aquila that signified their rejection of the Emperor’s dominion. They started firing, and the Garantine laughed once more, diving into the beam salvo with the Executor at his lead.

Spear’s meal was methodical. All the eating of the human foodstuffs while it had been in quietus had been enough to fuel the camouflage aspect’s biology, but the layers of the killer’s true self were starting to starve. Sipping at the meat of the dockworker and the clerk had served to hold off the hunger pangs, but they had not been enough for true satisfaction; and the destruction of the telepath had taken a lot of energy from him.

Still; feeding now, and a full meal with it. Bones ground between razor teeth, organs still hot and wet bitten into like ripe fruits, and blood by the bucket for the drinking. Thirst slaked, for a while. Yes. It would do.

Deep in the canyons of his mind, Spear could hear the echo of the camouflage’s ghost-mind as it wept and screamed, forced to watch these deeds from the cage where it was held. It could not understand that it was only noise now, no longer a being with life and power to influence the outside world. For as long as Spear remained in control, it would always be so.

Yosef Sabrat was only the last in a long line of coatings painted over Spear’s malleable aspect, like a dye poured on silk. The killer’s flesh, infused with the living skin of a warp-predator, was more daemon than man and it obeyed no laws of the conventional universe. It was a shape with no shape, but not like those human fools who used chemical philtres to manipulate their skin and bone and think themselves clever. What Spear was went beyond the nature of disguise, beyond transformation. There was a word for it that the ancient banned theologies used to talk of their deities taking on human form; they called it assumption.

When he was sated, he gathered what remained of Hyssos and cautiously filled a barrel with the leavings. The operative’s clothing and gear he had stripped with care, placing it to one side for later use. The corpse-meat would be hurled from the roof of the winestock, where it would fall to the floor of the narrow crags far below, and into the rapids that would wash the leftovers out to sea; but first he had the final steps to perform.

From one of the giant tanks given over to the maturation of the wines, Spear dragged out a fleshy egg and used his teeth to open it. Foul gases discharged from within and a naked man dropped out on to the wooden flooring. The sac had grown from a seed Spear planted in the lung of a homeless drunkard shortly after arriving on Iesta Veracrux. Conjured by the sorcery of his masters, the seed consumed the vagrant to make the egg, giving birth to a stasis caul where Spear had been able to store Yosef Sabrat’s body for the past two months.

As the sac dissolved into vapour, he dressed Sabrat in the clothes he had worn while the aspect had been at the fore. The caul had done its work. The dead reeve looked as if he had been freshly killed; no human means of detection would say otherwise. The stab wound through the man’s heart began to bleed again, and Spear artfully arranged the body, finding the harvesting knife in a flesh pocket and applying it to the wound.

He paused to ensure that the puncture on the roof of Sabrat’s mouth was not visible. The iron-hard proboscis that penetrated there had licked at the matter of the lawman’s brain and siphoned off the chains of chemicals that were his memories, his persona. Then, Spear’s daemonskin had patterned itself on those markers, shifting and becoming. The change was so strong, so deep, that when Spear surrendered control to it, the camouflage aspect was not merely a mask that the murderer wore; it was a living, breathing identity. A persona so perfect that it believed itself to be real, resilient enough that even a cursory psionic scan would not see the lie of it.

Still, it had made sense to murder the psyker woman as soon as possible, if not only to protect the truth but also to force the hand of the investigators. Now the next phase was complete, and the Yosef Sabrat identity had played its role flawlessly. Soon Spear would begin the purgation of the disguise, and finally be rid of the man’s irritatingly moral thought processes, his disgustingly soft compassion, the sickening attachment to his colleagues, brood-child and bed partner. From this point on, Spear would only wear a face, and never again give himself over to another man’s self. He was almost giddy with anticipation. Just a few more steps, and he would be within striking distance of his target.

The murderer knelt next to Hyssos’s head, severed at the neck by a slicing cut, and gathered it up. With a guttural choke, Spear spat the proboscis from the soft palate of his mouth and into the skull through its right eye. Seeking, penetrating, it dug deep and found the regions of the dead man’s brain where his self was growing cold.

Spear drank him in.

Koyne put away the monocular and hid it inside a pocket of the officer’s tunic the infocyte had recovered from one of the airfield’s dead. It fit snugly, but the adjustment of the fluid-filled morphing bladders layered underneath the Callidus’s skin allowed the assassin to alter body mass and dimension to accommodate it a little better.

‘How do you propose we get inside?’ said Iota. The Culexus was almost invisible in the shadows by the broken window, with only the steel-grey curve of her grinning helmet visible in the moonlight. Her voice had a peculiar, metallic timbre to it when she spoke from inside the psyker-hood, as if it were coming to Koyne’s ears from a very great distance.

‘Through the front door.’ The Callidus watched the men walking back and forth in front of the communicatory, considering the cautious motions in their steps, analysing the cues of their body language not just for infiltration’s sake, but to parse their states of mind. Data-slates, recovered from what remained of the corpses of the turncoat patrol murdered by the Garantine, had provided the Execution Force with a lead on this facility. It was the nearest thing to a garrison for kilometres around, and at this stage Kell wasn’t ready to send the group out from the relative safety of the Ultio and down the long highway to the capital city, several kilometres to the south. The metropolis itself, the largest of all on Dagonet, could be seen clearly against the darkening sky. Some of the taller towers were still smoking, some had half-collapsed and fallen like drunkards suspended on each other’s shoulders; but no snakes of tracer lashed at the skies, there were no mushroom clouds or flights of assault craft buzzing overhead. It seemed calm, or at least as calm as a city on a world at war with itself had any right to be.

When Koyne had asked the Vindicare what he had learned on his scouting mission, the Eversor had just grinned and the sniper replied with a terse dismissal. ‘It’s complicated,’ he said.

Koyne did not doubt that. The Callidus had learned through many hundreds of field operations, a lot of them in active zones of conflict, that what generals in their places of comfort and control called ‘ground truth’ was often anything but true. For the soldier as much as the assassin, the only equation of truth that always worked was the simple vector between a weapon and a target. But now they were here, Koyne and the pariah girl Iota, the Culexus’s skin-crawling null ability brought along to protect the shade from any possible psionic interception.

‘Tariel was correct in his evaluation,’ said Iota, as a rotorplane chattered past overhead. ‘There is an astropath inside that building.’

‘Is it aware of you?’

She shook her head, the distended skull-helm moving back and forth. ‘No. I think it may be under the influence of chemical restraints.’

‘Good.’ Koyne stood up. ‘We don’t want the alarm to be raised before we are done here.’ Concentrating on a thought-shape and impressing that on flesh, the Callidus altered the dimension of its vocal chords, mimicking the tonality of an officer caught on one of the intercepted vox broadcasts. ‘We will proceed.’

The shapeshifter was as good as its word.

Keeping to the shadows and the low rooftops along the star-port’s blockhouses, Iota followed the Callidus and watched Koyne become a simulacrum of a turncoat PDF commander, advancing through the outer guard post of the communicatory without raising even a moment of concern. At one point, Iota lost sight of the Callidus, and when a man in Dagoneti colours approached her hiding place, she made ready the combi-needler about the wrist of her killing hand in order to silently end him.

‘Iota,’ called an entirely different voice. ‘Show yourself.’

She stepped into the light. ‘I like your tricks,’ said Iota.

Koyne smiled with someone else’s face and opened a door. ‘This way. I relieved the guards at the elevator in here so we won’t have much time. They’re holding the astropath on one of the sublevels.’

‘Why did you change it?’ Iota asked as they moved through the ill-lit corridors. ‘The face?’

‘I bore easily,’ replied Koyne, halting at a lift shaft. ‘Here we are.’

As the Callidus reached for the switch, the doors opened, flooding the corridor with light; inside the elevator two troopers saw the dark shape of the Culexus and went for their guns.

Spear swallowed Hyssos’s one undamaged eye before depositing the dead man’s reamed head among the rest of him; and then with a swift spin of his body, he pitched the remains into the canyon and watched them fall away.

Returning to the tank room, he skirted the beauty of the blood-art he had made from Erno Sigg’s corpse. He had used poor Erno as his stalking horse, tormenting him, pushing him to the edge of sanity before destroying him. The man had served his purpose perfectly. Spear moved on, checking once more that the body of Yosef Sabrat had been arranged just so. The evidence he had fabricated over the past few weeks was also scattered around, arranged so that when it was discovered, it would lead the investigators of the Sentine towards one undeniable conclusion – the killer of Jaared Norte, Cirsun Latigue, Perrig and Sigg and the rest of them was none other than their fellow lawman.

He made a mock-solemn expression with the new face he wore, trying the look on for size; but he had no mirror to see how it seemed on his new guise. Spear pawed at a face that now resembled that of the Eurotas operative. It felt odd and incomplete. The churn of new memories and personality sucked in from Hyssos was curdling where it mixed with those of Sabrat, making him thought-sick. It seemed it would be necessary to purge the stolid reeve’s self sooner rather than later.

With a deep sigh, Spear dropped to the floor and sat cross-legged. He drew on the disciplines that had been beaten into him by his master and focussed his will, seeing it like a line of poison fire laced with ink-black ice.

Reaching into the deeps of his thoughts, Spear found the cage and tore it open, clawing inside to gather up the mind-scraps that were all that remained of Yosef Sabrat. He grinned as fear resonated up from the shuddering persona as some understanding of its final end became clear. Then he began the purge, ripping and tearing, destroying everything that had been the man, vomiting up every nauseating, cloying skein of emotion, little by little sluicing Sabrat’s cloying self away.

Spear gave this deed such focus that it was only when he heard the voice he realised he was no longer alone.

Koyne’s hand flicked up and the toxin-filled stiletto hidden in a wrist sheath flew out in a shallow arc, piercing the stomach of the man on the left. The liquid inside was a consumptive agent that feasted on organic matter, even down to natural fibres and cured leather. He fell to the floor and began to dissolve.

The other man was briefly wreathed in white light that glowed down the hallway as Iota pressed a hand into his chest and shoved him back into the elevator. Koyne watched with detachment as the Culexus’s dark power enveloped the man and destroyed him. His silent scream resonated and he became a mass of material like burned paper. In moments, a curl of damp smoke was all that marked the man’s passing; the other hapless soldier was now a puddle of fluids leaking away through the gridded decking of the elevator floor.

Content that the toxin had run its course and consumed itself into the bargain, the Callidus kicked at the collection of inert tooth fillings, metal buttons and plastic buckles that had gathered and brushed them away with the passage of a boot. Koyne took a moment to break the biolume bubble illuminating the interior of the elevator, and then pressed the control to send it downwards.

They travelled in dark and silence for a few moments, and for Koyne the Culexus seemed to melt away and disappear, even though she was standing at her shoulder.

‘His name was Mortan Gautami,’ Iota said suddenly. ‘He never told anyone of it, but his mother had been able to see the future in dreams. He had a measure of postcognitive ability, but he indulged in narcotics, preventing him from accessing his potential.’ The skull head turned slightly. ‘I used that untapped energy to destroy him.’

‘I’ll bet you know the names of everyone you’ve terminated,’ said Koyne, with a flicker of cruelty.

‘Don’t you?’ said the Culexus.

The Callidus didn’t bother to grace that with an answer. The elevator arrived at the sublevel, and the guards standing outside fell to quick killing blows.

There was a spherical containment chamber in the middle of a room made of ferrocrete, festoons of cables issuing from every point on its surface. A heavy iron iris hatch lay facing them like a closed eye, a short gantry reaching it from the sublevel proper. Koyne stepped up and worked the lever to open it; there was a thin, high-pitched sound coming from inside, and at first the Callidus thought it was a pressure leak; then the iron leaves retracted and it became clear it was reedy, shrill screaming.

Koyne peered into the depths and saw the corpse-grey astropath. It was pressed up against the back of the sphere’s inner wall, glaring sightlessly towards Iota. ‘Hole-mind,’ it babbled, between howls. ‘Black-shroud. Poison-thought.’

The Callidus rapped a stolen pistol against the threshold of the hatch. ‘Hey!’ Koyne snarled in the officer’s voice. ‘Stop whining. I’ll make this simple. Give up the information I need, or I’ll lock her in there with you.’

The astropath made the sign of the aquila, as if it were some kind of ancient rite of warding that would fend off evil. The shrieking died away, and crack-throated, the psychic spoke. ‘Just keep it at a distance.’

Iota took her cue and wandered away, moving back towards the elevator shaft but still within earshot. ‘Better?’

That earned Koyne a weak nod. ‘I will tell you what you want to know.’

The assassin learned quickly that the astropath was one of only a handful of its kind still alive in the Dagonet system. In the headlong melee of revolution, in the process of isolating itself from the galaxy and the Imperium, the planet had begun to rid itself of all lines of connection back to Terra – but some of the newly empowered nobles had thought otherwise and made sure that at least a few telepaths capable of interstellar sending were kept alive. This was one of them, cut off from all means of speaking to its kindred, locked up and isolated. It was starved of communication, and once it began to talk in its papery monotone, the astropath seemed unable to stop.

The psychic spoke of the state of the civil war. As the brief given by Captain-General Valdor had said, Dagonet was a keystone world in the politico-economic structure of the Taebian Sector, and if it fell fully under the shadow of the Warmaster, then it would mark the beginning of a domino effect, as planet after planet along the same trade axis followed suit. Every loyalist foothold in this sector of space would be in jeopardy. In the first moments of the insurrection, desperate signals had been sent to the Adeptus Astartes and the Imperial Navy; but these had gone unanswered.

Koyne took this in and said nothing. Both the ships of the admiralty and the Legions of the Emperor’s loyalist Astartes had battles of their own to fight, far from the Taebian Stars. They would not intervene. For all the fire and destruction the collapse of Dagonet and its sister worlds might cause, there were larger conflicts being addressed at this very moment; no crusade of heroes was coming to ride to the rescue. Then the astropath began to lay out the lines of the civil war as it had spread up until this point, and the Callidus thought back to something said aboard the Ultio on their way to Dagonet.

The civil war was a rout, and it was those who stood in the Emperor’s name who were dying. Across the planet, the forces that carried Horus’s banner were only days away from breaking the back of any resistance.

Dagonet was already lost.

Reeve Daig Segan. Through Sabrat’s memories, Spear recalled that the man was as dogged as he was dour, and for all his apparently slow aspect, he was troublingly perceptive.

‘Yosef?’ said the reeve, moving through the gloom with a torch in one hand and a gun in the other. ‘What is that stench? Yosef, Hyssos… Are you in here?’

Segan had followed them to Whyteleaf, despite the orders Sabrat had given, the persona unaware of Spear’s subtle guidance bubbling beneath the surface. In his thoughts, the murderer heard the dim resonance of Sabrat’s essence crying out to be heard. Impossibly, the persona was trying to defy him. It was fighting its own erasure.

Spear’s body, cloaked in Hyssos’s proxy flesh, trembled. The purge was a complicated, delicate task that required all of his concentration. He could not afford to deal with any interruption, not now, not when he was at so critical a juncture…

‘Hello?’ Segan was coming closer. At any moment, he would come across Spear’s carefully constructed crime scene. But it was too soon. Too soon!

Very clearly, Spear heard Sabrat laughing at him. With sudden annoyance, he punched himself in the head and the pain of the blow made the ghost of the voice fall silent. His cheek and the orbit of his right eye sagged as they tried to retain the shape of Hyssos’s imprint.

Spear got up and went to meet Segan as he approached. The other reeve’s torch caught him and he heard the man gasp in shock.

‘Hyssos? Where’s Yosef?’ Segan peered at him. ‘What’s wrong with your face?’

‘Nothing,’ said the operative’s voice. ‘Everything is fine.’

The reeve seemed doubtful. ‘Can you smell that? Like blood and shit and all kinds of–’ Segan’s torchlight illuminated part of the operative’s coat, still wet with vitae. ‘Are you hurt?’

Spear was close to him now. ‘I had a job for you,’ he said. ‘A part to play. Why did you come here when I told you to stay in the city?’

‘Yosef told me to stay, not you,’ Segan retorted, becoming wary. ‘I don’t follow your orders, even if everyone else jumps each time your damn baron coughs.’

‘But you should have stayed,’ Spear insisted. ‘Now I’ll have to rewrite the scenario.’

‘What are you on about?’ said the reeve.

‘Come and see.’ Spear lashed out and grabbed him by the collar. Caught off-guard, Segan stumbled and that was all the murderer needed to destroy his balance and throw him down the length of the room.

Segan slammed into the floor, his gun skittering away into the shadows, sliding to a halt at the edge of the blood pool; he reacted with a sharp yelp. ‘Throne!’ He saw Sabrat’s body and Spear felt a moment of victory as something perished inside the other man. A little bit of his will shrivelled to see his friend so violated. ‘Yosef…?’

‘He did it all,’ said Spear. ‘How terrible.’

Segan shot a venomous glare in his direction. ‘Liar! Never! Yosef Sabrat is a good man, he would never… never…’

Spear frowned. ‘Yes. I knew you wouldn’t accept it. That was your role. There had to be one person in the Sentine who would fight this explanation, or else it would seem false. But now you’ve ruined that. I’ll have to compensate.’

At last, understanding dawned on the other man’s face. ‘You. You did this.’

‘I did it all,’ Spear chuckled. He let his face shift and transform, his eyes become black and dark. ‘I did it all,’ he repeated.

The blood drained from Segan’s face as Spear came closer, letting the change happen slowly. With trembling fingers, the reeve pulled something shiny and gold from inside his cuff and clung to it, as if it were the key to a door that would spirit him away from the horror all around him. The dour little man was pinned to the spot, transfixed with fright.

‘The Emperor protects,’ Segan said aloud. ‘The Emperor protects.’

Spear opened his spiked jaws. ‘He really doesn’t,’ said the murderer.

The distant hum-and-crack of mortar shells could be heard on the Ultio’s flight deck, through the opened vents in the canopy that let in wet, grimy air.

Koyne’s encrypted report, burst-transmitted via tight-beam vox, had reached them just after sunset and confirmed Tariel’s worst fears. The mission was over before it had even begun. He said as much to Kell and the others, earning himself a feral snarl from the Garantine.

‘Weakling,’ growled the Eversor. ‘You’re gutless. Afraid to get your robes dirty in the field!’ The hulking killer leaned towards him, looming. He had his mask off, and his scarred, broken face was if anything more ugly than the metal skull. ‘Mission circumstances always change. But we adapt and burn through!’

‘Burn through,’ repeated the Vanus. ‘Perhaps you misunderstood the meaning of Koyne’s report? Did the larger words confuse you?’

The Garantine rose to his feet, eyes narrowing. ‘Say that again, piss-streak. I dare you.’

‘This war is over!’ Tariel almost shouted it. ‘Dagonet is as good as conquered! Horus has won this world, don’t you see?’

‘Horus has not even set foot on Dagonet,’ countered Soalm.

He rounded on her. ‘Exactly! The Warmaster is not even here, and yet still he is here!’

‘Make him speak sense,’ the Eversor said to Kell, ‘or I’ll cut out his tongue.’

‘It’s not Horus,’ Kell explained. ‘It’s what he represents.’

Tariel nodded sharply. ‘The turncoat nobility on this planet don’t need to see Horus. His influence hangs over Dagonet like an eclipse blotting out the sun. They’re fighting in his name in fear of him, and that is enough. And when they win, the Warmaster’s work will be done for him. This same thing is happening all across the galaxy, on every world too far from the Emperor and the rule of Terra.’ He trembled a little with the sudden frustration he felt deep inside him. ‘When Dagonet falls, Horus will turn his face from this place and move on, his advance one step closer to the gates of the Imperial Palace…’

‘Horus will not come to Dagonet,’ said Soalm, catching on. ‘He will have no need to.’

The infocyte nodded again. ‘And everything we’ve prepared for, the whole purpose of this mission, will be worthless.’

‘We’ll lose our chance to kill him,’ said Kell.

‘Aye,’ snapped Tariel, and he shot the Garantine a glare. ‘Do you see now?’

The Eversor’s expression shifted; and after a moment, he nodded. ‘Then, we must make sure he does come to Dagonet.’

Soalm folded her arms. ‘How do you propose to do that? Once this planet’s Governor makes his allegiance known to the insurrectionists, perhaps the Warmaster may send some delegate to plant the flag, but no more than a starship admiral or some such. He won’t waste a single Space Marine’s time on matters of dispensation.’

The Garantine grunted with callous humour. ‘You all think I’m the slow one here, don’t you? But you miss the obvious answer, woman. If Horus won’t come to a fight that has ended, then we make sure the fight does not end.’

‘Deliberately prolong the civil war.’ Kell said the words without weight.

‘We draw him to us,’ said the Eversor, warming to his theme, showing teeth. ‘We make the taking of Dagonet such a thorn in his side that he has no choice but to come here and deal with it himself.’

Tariel considered the idea; it was blunt and crude, but it had merit. And it could work. ‘Dagonet has a personal resonance with the Warmaster. It was the site of one of his very first victories. That, and its strategic value… It could be enough. It would be a dishonour for him to let this planet slip from his control.’ Hearing footsteps across the deck, he glanced up to see Iota step on to the flight deck; behind her was a man he did not recognise in a PDF uniform.

‘Relax, Vanus,’ said the man, in a cynical tone that could only be Koyne’s. ‘I take it you found my report to be compelling reading. So; what have we missed?’

‘You exfiltrated without any complications?’ said Kell.

Iota nodded. ‘What is the local time?’

‘Fourteen forty-nine.’ Tariel answered automatically, his chronoimplant already synched to the Dagonet clock standard.

‘There’s six of us,’ the Garantine went on. ‘Each has destroyed rulers and broken kingdoms all on their own. How hard could it be to add some fuel to this little blaze?’

‘And what about the Dagoneti?’ Soalm demanded. ‘They’ll be caught in the crossfire.’

The other assassin looked away, unconcerned. ‘Collateral damage.’

‘What is the local time?’ Iota said again.

‘Fourteen fifty. Why do you keep asking–?’ Tariel’s reply was cut off by a flash of light in the distance, followed seconds later by the report of an explosion.

‘What in Hades was that?’ said Kell. ‘The… communicatory?’

‘A power generator overload. I made it look like the commoner freedom fighters did it,’ said Koyne. ‘We couldn’t afford to leave any traces. Or survivors.’

The Garantine’s grin grew even wider. ‘See? We’ve already started.’

Ten

Matters of Trust
Breakout
False Flag

‘Don’t run,’ snarled Grohl. ‘They see you running and they’ll know.’

Beye shot him a narrow-eyed look from beneath her forage cap. ‘This isn’t running. Believe me, you’d know if it was running. This is a purposeful walk.’

He snorted and clamped a hand around her arm, forcibly slowing her down. ‘Well, dial it back to a meander. Look casual.’ Grohl glanced around at the marketplace stalls as they passed through them. ‘Look like you want to buy something.’

At their side, Pasri made a face. ‘Buy what, exactly?’ asked the ex-soldier, her scarred nose wrinkling.

She had a point. Most of the stalls were bare, abandoned by owners who were either too afraid to leave their homes, or lacking for produce to offer after the nobles had instituted martial law and imposed checkpoints on all the out-of-city highways. Beye couldn’t help but glance over her shoulder. In the distance, what had once been a precinct tower for the capital’s regiment of Adeptus Arbites was now wreathed in thin smoke. The crossed-out Imperial aquila on its southerly face was visible through the haze, and the harsh croaks of police sirens wafted towards them on the wind.

‘Don’t stare,’ Grohl snapped.

‘You want us to blend in,’ she replied. ‘Everyone else is staring.’ Not that there were many people around. The few daring to venture out onto the streets of Dagonet’s capital kept off the rubble-strewn roads or minded their own business. No one assembled in groups of more than four, fearful of the edicts that threatened arrest and detention for anyone suspected of ‘gathering for reasons of sedition’.

Beye almost laughed at the thought of that. Sedition was the act of treason against an existing order, and if anything, she, Grohl, Pasri and the handful of others were the absolute antithesis of that. They were the ones championing the cause of rightful authority, of the Emperor’s rule. It was the noble clans and the weakling Governor who were the rebels here, rejecting Terra and siding with…

Her eyes flicked up as they passed into a crossroads. There on the island in the centre of the highway, a statue of the Warmaster stood untouched by the street fighting. He towered over her, standing tall with one hand reaching out in a gesture of aid, the other holding a massive bolter pistol upwards to the sky. Beye noticed with a grimace that votive candles and small trinkets had been left at the foot of the plinth by those eager to show their devotion to the new regime.

Grohl paused at the intersection, rubbing at his thin beard, his eyes flicking this way and that. Finally, he made a choice. ‘Over here.’

Beye and Pasri followed him across the monorail lines towards an alleyway between two shuttered storefronts. She managed not to flinch as a patrol rotorplane shrieked past over the rooftops, klaxons hooting.

‘It’s not looking for us,’ Pasri said automatically; but in the next moment, Beye heard a change in the aircraft’s engine note as it circled, looking for a place to put down.

‘Are you sure about that?’

Grohl swore. This entire operation had been a cascade of errors from start to finish. Firstly, the man who was meant to drive the GEV truck did not arrive at the rendezvous, forcing them to improvise with rods and ropes to hold down the steering yoke and throttle – because of course, Grohl would never have considered sacrificing himself for the cause on a target so ordinary. Then, at the approach, they found the barricades placed by the clanner troops had been moved, making their straight shot at the precinct doors impossible. And finally, as the payload of crudely-cooked chemical explosives had at last detonated in a wet blast of noise and light, Beye saw that the damage it inflicted on the building was superficial at best.

She had at least hoped they could escape the security dragnet. But if they were captured, their failure would be total and complete. Beye knew that the patrol flyers carried nine-man teams with cyber-mastiffs and spy drones. The first icy surges of panic bubbled up in her chest as she imagined the interior of a dank interrogation cell. She would never see Capra again.

Grohl broke into a run and she followed him with Pasri at her heels, listening for the metallic barks of the enhanced dogs. He slipped through a gap between two waste skips and down towards a side road. Ahead of him, a woman in a sun-hood and sarong stepped out from a doorway and looked up at them. Beye was struck by the paleness of her face; Dagonet’s bright sunshine tanned everyone on the planet’s temperate zone, which meant she was either a shut-in noblewoman or an off-worlder; and neither were likely to be seen in this part of the inner city.

‘Pardon,’ she began, and her accent immediately confirmed her non-Dagoneti status. ‘If I could trouble you?’

Grohl almost missed a step, but then he pressed on, pushing past the stranger. ‘Get out of my way,’ he growled.

Beye came after him. She heard the yelps of the mastiffs in the distance and saw Pasri looking back the way they had come, her expression unreadable.

‘As you wish,’ the woman said, spreading her hands. Beye saw the glint of metal nozzles at her wrists just as she pursed her pale lips and blew out a long breath. A vaporous mist jetted from the nozzles and engulfed them all.

The ground beneath Beye’s feet suddenly became the consistency of rubber and she stumbled, dimly aware of Grohl doing the same. Pasri let out a weak cry and fell.

As Beye collapsed in a heap, her limbs refusing to do as she told them, she saw the pale woman smile and lick beads of the spray off her fingertips. ‘It’s done,’ she heard her say, the words drawing out into a liquid, humming echo.

Beye’s senses went dark.

The acrid chemical stink of smelling salts jolted her back to wakefulness and Beye coughed violently. Blinking, she raised her head and peered at the room she found herself in, expecting the pale green walls of an Arbites cell; instead, she saw the gloomy interior of some kind of storehouse, shafts of daylight reaching down through holes in a sheet-plas roof.

She was tied to a chair, hands secured behind her back, ankles tethered to the support legs. Grohl was in a similar state to her right, and past him, Pasri looked back at her with an expression of tight fear. Grohl met her gaze, his face a mask of rigid, forced calm. ‘Say nothing,’ he told her. ‘Whatever happens, say nothing.’

‘Right on schedule,’ said a new voice. ‘As you said.’

‘Of course.’ That was the pale woman. ‘I can time the actions of my toxins to the second, if need be.’

Beye focussed and saw the woman in the sarong talking with an odd-looking youth wearing what looked like some form of combat gear. He was working a device mounted on his forearm, a gauntlet that grew a flickering holoscreen. Both of them glanced at their prisoners – for that was what they were, Beye realised belatedly – and then past their heads.

She heard motion behind her and Beye sensed someone standing at her back. ‘Who’s there?’ she said, before she could stop herself.

A third figure moved around the captives and came into view. He was tall, clad in a black oversuit with armour patches and gear packs. A heavy pistol of a design Beye had never seen before hung at his hip. He had a hawkish face that might have been handsome if not for the hardness lurking in his gaze. ‘Names,’ he said.

Grohl made a derogatory sound deep in his throat. The youth with the wrist-device sniffed and spoke again. ‘Liya Beye. Terrik Grohl. Olo Pasri.’

‘The nobles have files on all of you,’ said the hawkish man. ‘We took these copies of their database on the resistance when we destroyed the Kappa Six Communicatory.’

‘You did that?’ said Pasri.

‘Shut up,’ Grohl snarled. ‘Don’t talk!’

Beye kept silent. Like the rest of them, she’d been wondering just what had happened at Kappa Six ever since the newsfeeds had announced the ‘cowardly, treacherous attack by terrorist militants’ a few days earlier. In the end, Capra had suggested that it was either the work of an independent cell they weren’t aware of, or just some accident the nobles had decided to blame on them.

‘We’re nothing to do with those resistance radicals,’ insisted Pasri. ‘We’re just citizens.’

The youth sneered. ‘Please don’t insult my intelligence.’

‘Things are going badly for you, aren’t they?’ said the man, ignoring the interruption. ‘They’re getting close to finding your hideaway. Close to finding Capra and all his cell leaders.’

Beye tried not to react when he said the name, and failed. He turned to her. ‘How many of your people have surrendered in the past few weeks? Fifty? A hundred? How many have taken the offer of amnesty for themselves and their families?’

‘It’s a lie,’ Beye blurted out, ignoring Grohl’s hiss of annoyance. ‘Those who give up are executed.’

‘Of course they are,’ said the man. He nodded towards the youth. ‘We even have picts of the firing squads.’ He paused. ‘Your entire resistance network–’

‘Such as it is,’ said the youth, with an arch sniff.

‘Your network is on the verge of collapse,’ continued the other man. ‘Capra and his trusted core of freedom fighters are the only things holding it together. And the nobles know that all they really need to do is wait.’ He walked down the line of them. ‘Just wait, until you run out of supplies, of ammunition. Of hope. You’re all exhausted, pushed beyond your limits. Hungry and tired. None of you want to say it, but you all know it’s true. You’ve already lost, you just can’t admit it.’

That was enough for Grohl to break his own rules. ‘Go screw yourself, clanner bastard!’

The man raised an eyebrow. ‘We’re not… clanners, is it? We are not in the employ of the nobles.’ He leaned down and pulled something from the neck of his armour; an identity disc on a chain. ‘We serve a different master.’

Beye immediately recognised the shape of an Imperial sigil-tag, a bio-active recognition device gene-keyed to its wearer. An etching of the two-headed aquila glittered there on its surface. It could not be forged, duplicated or removed from the person of its user without becoming useless. Anyone wearing such a tag was a soldier in service to the Emperor of Mankind.

‘Who are you?’ Pasri was wary.

The man indicated himself. ‘Kell. These are Tariel and… Soalm. We are agents of the Imperium and the authority of Terra.’

‘Why tell us your names?’ hissed Grohl. ‘Unless you’re going to kill us?’

‘Consider it a gesture of trust,’ said the pale woman. ‘We already know who you are. And in all honesty, knowing what to call us hardly makes you a threat.’

Beye leaned forward. ‘Why are you here?’

Kell nodded to Tariel, and the youth produced a mollyknife. He moved to where Pasri was sitting and cut her loose, then proceeded to do the same with Grohl.

‘We have been sent by the Emperor’s command to aid the planet Dagonet and its people in this time of crisis.’ Beye was certain that she saw a loaded look pass between Soalm and Kell before the man spoke again. ‘We are here to help you oppose the insurrection of Horus Lupercal and anyone who takes his side.’

Grohl rubbed at his wrists. ‘So, of course you would like us to take you to the secret retreat of the resistance. Introduce you personally to Capra. Open ourselves up so you can murder us all in one fell swoop?’ He turned his head and spat. ‘We’re not fools or traitors.’

Tariel cut Beye loose and offered a hand to help her to her feet, but she refused. Instead, he gave her a data-slate. ‘You know how to read these, correct? Your file says that you served the Administratum as a datum clerk in the office of colonial affairs, prior to the insurrection.’

‘That’s right,’ she said.

Tariel indicated a text file in the slate’s memory. ‘I think you’ll want to look at this document. And please check the security tags so you are sure it has not been tampered with.’

Kell walked closer to Grohl. ‘I believe you when you say you’re not a traitor, Terrik Grohl. But you have been fooled.’

‘What in Stars’ name are you talking about?’ snarled the other man.

‘Because there is a traitor in this room,’ Kell went on; and then faster than Beye’s eye could follow, the Imperial agent’s hand flicked up from his belt with the blocky, lethal-looking pistol in its grip, and he shot Pasri dead through the heart at point-blank range.

Beye let out a cry of shock as Grohl started forward.

Tariel tapped the slate. ‘Read the file,’ he repeated.

‘And then search your good friend Olo,’ added Soalm.

Grohl did that as Beye read on. By the time she had finished, the colour had drained from her cheeks, and Grohl had discovered the wireless listening device concealed on the other woman. The files, as Tariel said, unaltered from their original form, were reports from the clanners about an informant in the resistance. Capra had suspected they had a leak for some time, but he hadn’t been able to discover who. According to the last entry, Olo Pasri had agreed to give up the location of the main freedom fighter safe zone, but was stalling for a larger finder’s fee and the guarantee of passage off-world.

All of this she told to Grohl, who listened with a stony, rigid expression. After a long moment, he spoke. ‘I don’t trust you,’ he said to Kell. ‘Even this, you could have faked it. Did it all just to get close to us.’

‘Grohl–’ Beye began, but Kell held up a hand, silencing her.

‘No, he’s right. Given time and effort, we could have engineered something like this. And if I were in your place, I would share your suspicions.’ He paused again, thinking. ‘So, then. We need to earn your trust.’

‘A demonstration,’ suggested Soalm.

Kell nodded. ‘Give us a target.’

Spear ran his hand up and down the arm of the grox-leather chair where he sat, guiding fingers moulded in fleshy echo of Hyssos’s body over the lustrous, tanned hide. The sensation was pleasing; it made him realise he had spent too long in quietus, denied the simple pleasures of awareness, allowing his consciousness to go dormant while the mind-ghost of Yosef Sabrat ran his flesh. Puppet and the puppeted, master and performer, their roles intermingled. He was tired of it.

At least now he had only to look the part, rather than literally become it. He glanced up and saw a reflection in the glass cabinet behind the desk of High-Reeve Kata Telemach; the ebon face of Hyssos staring back at him.

Telemach swivelled in her deep, wing-backed chair from the watch-wire console on her desk and replaced the bulky handset. Standing nearby like an overweight sentinel, the doughy figure of Reeve Warden Berts Laimner was uncharacteristically still. Spear imagined he was still trying to process all the possible outcomes of the revelation that Yosef Sabrat was the serial killer in their midst, looking for the results where he would come off best. He felt a particular kind of hate for the man, but when he concentrated on the shape of it, Spear could not be certain if it had originated in him, or in Yosef Sabrat. More than once, the reeve’s own temper had brushed against the killer’s, and in those moments threatened to awaken the dormant murderer.

He sucked in a breath and dismissed the thoughts as trivial, refocussing on Telemach, who sat glaring at the vinepaper documents before her.

‘How could something like this happen in my precinct, under my governance?’ she demanded. Typical of the woman, Spear thought. Her first consideration was not How could this tragedy have happened? or A good man like Sabrat a killer? Impossible! No, for all the death and bloodshed and fear that had swept across her city, her first impulse was to worry about how it would make her look. Telemach glared at Laimner. ‘Well?’

‘He… We never suspected for a moment that the killer could be a peace officer.’

The High-Reeve was about to spit out something else, but Spear intervened. In Hyssos’s voice he said ‘In fairness, how could your men have known, milady? Sabrat was a decorated member of the Sentine with over a decade of service under his belt. He knew your procedures and protocols intimately. He knew all the loopholes and blind spots.’

Laimner nodded. ‘Aye, yes. I have teams from the documentary office going over everything in his caseload, back years and years. They’ve already found incidences of file tampering, evidence manipulation…’

All of which Spear had been planting, little by little over the last few weeks. Very soon they would discover more killings that he had laid at the late reeve’s feet, from the deaths of minor citizens to shopkeepers and even a junior jager from this very precinct; every one of them Spear had murdered and impersonated for brief periods of time, working his way up to this identity. Step by step.

‘It was only a matter of time before he was caught,’ Spear-as-Hyssos went on, and he tapped the evidence bag on the desk that contained the harvesting knife. ‘I’ve encountered these kinds of criminals several times. They all become careless after a while, convinced of their own superiority.’

Telemach grabbed one of the more gory picts of the murder scene at the airdocks, waving it at him, and Spear resisted the urge to lick his lips. ‘But what about… all this?’ She jabbed at the beautiful perfection of the eightfold sigils drawn in the blood of the dead. ‘What does it mean?’

He sensed the edge of fear in her words, and relished it. Yes, she understood the common, squalid manners of death, when humans ended one another over trivialities like money and power, anger and lust; but she could not conceive of the idea that one might take life in the name of something greater… to appease something. Spear wanted to tell her. He wanted to tell her that her insect’s-eye view of the cosmos was pathetically naïve, blind to the realities that he had been made privy to at the Delphos on Davin and later, at his master’s hand.

He made Hyssos’s face grow grave and concerned. ‘Sabrat wasn’t alone in all this. His cohort, Segan… They were a partnership.’

‘That fits the facts,’ said Laimner. ‘But I’m not sure why Yosef killed him.’

‘A disagreement?’ offered Spear. ‘All I know is, the two of them conspired to get me alone with them at Whyteleaf. Then I was forced to watch as Sabrat ended Segan’s life, before he tried to do the same to me. I almost…’ At this point, he gave a staged shudder. ‘He almost killed me too,’ he whispered.

‘And the… symbols?’ Telemach asked.

‘These were ritualistic murders.’ He paused for the drama of it. ‘What do you know of this group called the Theoge?’

He had barely said the word before the High-Reeve’s face split in a sour sneer. ‘Those throwback religionists? This is their doing?’ She shot a look at Laimner. ‘I said they were part of this. Didn’t I say so? I knew it!’

Spear nodded. ‘They are some sort of fundamentalist cult, if I understand correctly. It seems that Daig Segan was the go-between for the Theoge, and in turn the murders committed by Sabrat with his help were likely motivated by some twisted set of beliefs.’

‘Human sacrifices?’ said Laimner. ‘On a civilised world like this? This is the thirty-first millennium, not primitive prehistory!’

Telemach answered immediately. ‘Religion is like a cancer. It can erupt without warning.’ For a moment, Spear wondered what great hurt in the woman’s past had occurred because of someone else’s belief; something scarring, no doubt, to make her hate any thought of such things with that undiluted venom.

‘I would advise you move against this group as soon as possible,’ he went on, getting to his feet. ‘Your media services have already learned of some elements of this case. I imagine those involved with the Theoge will quickly become targets for vigilantism.’

Laimner nodded. ‘Sabrat’s wife and child have already been attacked. I sent Skelta to the house… He said they were hounded and stoned.’

‘Find out if they were involved,’ Telemach insisted. ‘And by nightfall I want every single Theoge suspect on the books hauled in for questioning.’

Spear drew himself up, smoothing down the front of Hyssos’s tunic in a reflexive gesture copied from the operative’s own muscle-memory. ‘I see you have everything in hand. You have my report. I will take my leave of you now this matter is concluded.’

Laimner shook his head. ‘But, wait. There are proceedings… Testimony to be made, a tribunal. You will need to remain on Iesta to give statements.’

‘The Void Baron does not wish me to stay.’ All it took was a look from Hyssos’s eyes to the High-Reeve, and she buckled immediately.

‘Of course, operative,’ she said, the thought of defying Eurotas or one of his agents never occurring to her. ‘If any questions arise, a communiqué can be sent via the Consortium. We caught the killer. That’s all that is important.’

He nodded and made for the door. Behind him, he heard Laimner speak again. ‘The people will feel safer,’ he said. It seemed less like a statement of fact, and more like something the man was trying to convince himself of.

A brief smile crossed Spear’s changed face. The fear that he had unleashed on the streets of Iesta Veracrux would not be so easily dispelled.

Goeda Rufin was enjoying the difference in things.

Before, back when the Governor was still kowtowing to Terra and the nobles did nothing but grumble, Rufin had been destined to remain a low ranked non-commissioned officer in the Dagonet PDF. His life consisted largely of shirking his responsibilities – such as they were – and putting his workload on the junior ratings unlucky enough to be under his supervision at the vehicle pool. Since the day he had enrolled after a justicar gave him the choice between borstal or service, Rufin had never looked back to civilian life, but in all that time he hadn’t been able to shake the longing for a day when he could wear a coveted officer’s braid. It didn’t occur to him that his general level of ignorance outstripped any small measure of ability he had; Rufin was simply unable to grasp the idea that he had never risen in rank because he was a poor soldier. He was a makeweight in the city garrison, and everyone seemed to know it but him. To hear Rufin talk, it would seem like there was a huge conspiracy among the senior officers to keep him down, while other men were promoted up the ladder – men that he considered less deserving, despite copious evidence to the contrary. But Rufin wasn’t one to let facts get in the way of his opinions.

He was snide and demeaning to the back of every man who wore the braid. He amused himself by scribbling anonymous obscenities about them on the walls of the barracks washroom, dragging his heels over every order they gave him, this and a dozen other petty revenges.

It was because of that Goeda Rufin was in the office of his commander when the liberation took place. That’s what they were calling it now, ‘The Liberation’, the bloody day of upheaval that left Dagonet declared free of Imperial rule and true to the banner of the Warmaster Horus.

Rufin had been there, waiting, forgotten. He had been there for a disciplinary review – someone had heard him bad-mouthing his superiors one time too many – and if it had just been any other day, he would likely have ended up dismissed from the PDF for his troubles.

But then the shooting started, and he saw soldiers fighting soldiers in the courtyard. Warriors from the palace garrison, their uniforms marred by crossed-out aquila sigils, cutting down all the men he never liked. He was hiding in his commander’s office when the officer came running in, barking orders at him. At his heels were a pair of the palace men, and seeing them, Rufin at last caught up to what was going on. When his commander bellowed at him to come to his aid, Rufin took up the ornamental dagger the man used as a letter opener and stabbed him with it. Later, the leader of the invading troops shook his hand and offered him a marker with which to scratch out his own Imperial emblems.

He got his officer braid because of that, and all the men who surrendered with him took it too, that or the buzz of a las-round to the back of the head. After the dust settled the new regime needed officers to fill the ranks they had culled. Rufin was happy to accept; Emperor or Warmaster, he didn’t give a damn whose name he had to salute. He had no respect for any of them.

Rufin left the motor pool behind. His new command was the ‘emergency circumstances security camp’ established on the site of the capital terminus monorail station. Ever since the nobles had shut down the networks, the passenger trains had lain idle; but now they had a new duty, serving as prison accommodations for the hundreds of civilians and idiot rebels who had dared to defy the new order.

Rufin lorded it over them, walking back and forth across the high gantries above the choked platforms, making sure each inmate knew he held the power of life and death with random beatings and executions. When he wasn’t exercising his dull brutality and boredom on them, Rufin was prowling the ammo stores on the lower levels, in what used to be the maintenance wells for the engines. He liked being down there, among the smells of cordite and gunmetal. It made him feel like a real soldier to be surrounded by all that firepower.

Entering the observation cupola above what was once the station’s central plaza, he caught the watch officer sipping a mug of black tea and gave him a glowering stare. ‘Status?’ he barked.

The officer looked at his chronograph. ‘Check-in at the top of the hour, sir. That’s another quarter-turn away.’ He had barely finished speaking when the intercom grille over their heads crackled into life.

‘Early?’ said Rufin.

‘Control!’ said a panicked voice over the vox. ‘I think… I think there might be a problem.’

‘Post two, say again?’ began the watch officer, but Rufin snatched the handset from him and snarled into it.

‘This is the base commander! Explain yourself!’

‘Recruit Zejja just… Well, he just fell off the south wall. And Tormol isn’t responding to his wireless.’ Then, very distinctly, the open vox channel caught a sound like a quick, low hum, followed a heartbeat later by a wet chug and then the echo of a body falling.

Rufin thrust the handset back at the watch officer, uncertain what to do next. ‘Shall I try to raise the other guard posts now, sir?’ said the other man, stifling a cough.

‘Yes,’ He nodded. That sounded like the right sort of thing. ‘Do that.’

Then, without warning, the old control board left intact from the station’s prior function flickered into life. Lines of colour denoting tracks, blocks of illumination signifying individual carriages, all began to click and chatter as they activated.

Rufin shot a worried look out of the windows of the cupola and heard the mutter of dozens of electric motors coming alive. The sound echoed around the vaulted glass spaces of the station concourse and platforms. Below, the prisoners were scrambling to their feet, energised by the sound. Rufin drew his pistol on impulse and kneaded the grip. ‘What’s going on?’ he demanded.

The watch officer looked at the consoles before him in surprise. ‘That… That’s not possible,’ he insisted, coughing again. ‘All remote operations of station systems were locked down, the hard lines were severed…’ He swallowed hard, beads of sweat appearing on his high forehead. ‘I think someone is trying to move the trains.’

Below, the ornate copper departure boards for all the platforms began whirring in a rattling chorus of noise, each one flashing up destination after destination. With a sharp report, they all stopped at once, all of them showing the same thing; End Of The Line.

The prisoners saw the words and let out a ragged cheer. Rufin shouted abuse back at them, and caught sight of one of his men running up the platform with a heavy autogun in his grip. The trooper was perhaps twenty metres from the jeering prisoners when his chest exploded in a silent, red blossom, and he fell.

Finally, the correct words registered in his mind. ‘We’re under attack!’

When Rufin turned back to the watch officer, the man was lolling in his chair, eyes and mouth open, staring blankly at the ceiling. He caught a strange, floral smell emanating from the officer and gingerly extended a hand to prod his waxy, damp face. The watch officer slumped forward, knocking his tea glass over. The flower-stink grew stronger as the liquid pooled on the floor.

Rufin’s hand flew to his mouth. ‘Poison!’ Without looking back, he ran to the cupola door and raced away, footsteps banging off the metal gantries.

Spear reached out a hand and rubbed the edge of the ornate tapestry between Hyssos’s thick fingers. The complex depiction on the hanging was of the Emperor, smiting some form of bull-like alien with a gigantic sword made of fire.

He rolled his eyes at the banal pomposity of the thing and stepped away, carelessly brushing fibres of broken thread from his hands. Touching the object was forbidden, but there was nobody here in the audience chamber to see him do it. The killer idly wondered if the residue left by the daemonskin of his flesh-cloak would poison and shrivel the ancient artwork. He hoped it would; the idea of the humans aboard the Iubar running about and panicking as the piece blackened and corroded amused him no end.

He glanced out of the viewing windows as he wandered the length of the chamber. The curve of Iesta Veracrux was slipping away beneath the starship’s keel as it turned for open space, and Spear was not sorry to see it go. He had spent too long on that world, living in the inanities of its civilisation, play-acting at a half-dozen different roles. Since his arrival, Spear had been many faces – among them a vagrant, a storeman, a streetwalker, a jager and a reeve, living the lie of their ridiculous, pointless existences. He had stacked their corpses, and all the others, to make the ladder that led him to where he now stood.

A few more murders. One, perhaps two more assumptions. And then he would be close to the mark. The greatest prey of them all, in fact. A shiver of anticipation rippled through him. Spear was eager, but he reined the emotion in, pushed it down. Now was not the time to be dazzled by the scope of his mission. He had to maintain his focus.

Before, such a slip might have been problematic; he was convinced that such thoughts were how the psyker wench Perrig had been able to gather a vague sense of him down on Iesta. But with her no more than a pile of ashes in a jar in the Iubar’s Chamber of Rest, that threat was gone for the moment. Spear knew from Hyssos’s memories that Baron Eurotas had spent much influence and coin in order to bend the Imperium’s fear-driven rules about the censure of psychics; and given the present condition of the Consortium’s welfare, that would not be repeated. The next time he met a psyker, he would be prepared.

He smirked. That was something unexpected he pulled from the operative’s ebbing thoughts. The Void Baron’s secret, and the explanation for the shabby appearance of his agency’s compound on Iesta; for all the outward glitter and show the merchant clan put on for the galaxy at large, the truth whispered in the corridors of its ships was that the fortunes of Eurotas were waning. Little wonder then that the clan’s master was so desperate to hold on to any skein of power he still had.

It made things clearer; Spear had known that sooner or later, if he murdered enough members of the Eurotas staff and made it look like Sigg was the killer, the baron would send an operative to investigate. He never expected him to come in person.

Matters must be severe…

Spear halted in front of the red jade frieze, and reached out to touch it, tracing a fingertip over the sculpting of the Warrant of Trade. This place was full of glittering prizes, of that there could be no doubt. A thief in Spear’s place could make himself richer than sin – but the killer had his sights set on something worth far more than any of these pretty gewgaws. What he wanted was the key to the greatest kill of his life.

The hubris of the rogue trader irritated Spear. Here, in this room, there were objects that could command great riches, if only they were brought to market. But Eurotas was the sort who would rather bleed himself white and eat rat-meat before he would give up the gaudy trappings of his grandeur.

As if thought of him was a summons, the doors to the audience chamber opened and the Void Baron entered in a distracted, irritable humour. He shrugged off his planetfall jacket and tossed it at one of the squad of servitors and human adjutants trailing behind him. ‘Hyssos,’ he called, beckoning.

Spear imitated the operative’s usual bow and came closer. ‘My lord. I had not expected your shuttle to return to the Iubar until after we broke orbit.’

‘I had you voxed,’ Eurotas replied, shaking his head. ‘Your communicator implant must be malfunctioning.’

He touched his neck. ‘Oh. Of course. I’ll have it seen to.’

The baron went for a crystalline cabinet and gestured at it; a mechanism inside poured a heavy measure of wine into a glass goblet, which he snatched up and drank deeply. He gulped it down without savouring it. ‘We are done with our visit to this world,’ Eurotas told him, his manner veering towards a brooding sullenness. ‘And it has taken our dear Perrig along the way.’ He shook his head again and fixed Spear with an accusing glare. ‘Do you know what she cost me? A moon, Hyssos. I had to cede an entire bloody moon to the Adeptus Terra just to own her.’ He walked on, across the mosaic floor. The cabinet raised itself up on brass wheels and rolled obediently after him.

Spear searched for the right thing to say. ‘She had a good life with us. We all valued her contribution to the clan.’

The baron turned his glare on the vanishing planet. ‘The Governor would not stop talking,’ he said. ‘They wanted our fleet to remain in orbit for another week, something about “helping to stimulate the local economy”…’ He snorted with derision. ‘But I have little stomach for the festivals they had planned. I walked out on them. More important things to do. Imperial service and all that.’

Spear nodded thoughtfully, deciding to feed the man’s mood. ‘The best choice, my lord. With the situation as it is in this sector, it makes sense for the clan to keep the flotilla moving. To be in motion is to be safe.’

‘Safe from him.’ Eurotas took another drink. ‘But the bastard Warmaster is killing us by inches even so!’ His voice went up. ‘Every planet he binds to him costs us a weight in Throne Gelt that we cannot recover!’ For a moment, it seemed as if the baron was about to give voice to something that might have been considered treasonable; but then he caught himself, like a man afraid he would be overheard, and his expression changed. ‘We will head for the edge of this system and then make space to the rendezvous point at the Arrowhead Nebula.’

Spear knew already what their next port of call would be, but he asked anyway. ‘What will our intentions be there, lord?’

‘We will lay to wait to assemble the clan’s full fleet, and while we are there meet a ship from Sotha. Aboard are a party of remembrancers under the Emperor’s aegis. I will personally take them home to Terra, as the Council has requested.’

‘The security of the remembrancers is of great concern,’ said Spear. ‘I will make all arrangements to ensure their safety from the moment they board the Iubar to the moment we bring them to the Imperial Palace.’

Eurotas looked away. ‘I know you’ll do what is required.’

Spear had to fight down the urge to grin. The path was open, and now all that he needed to do was follow it all the way to the end. To the very gates of the Emperor’s fortress–

NO

The voice crackled in his ears like breaking glass, and Spear jerked, startled.

NO NO NO

The baron did not appear to have heard it; the killer felt a peculiar twitch in his hands and he glanced down at them. For one terrible moment, the skin there bubbled and went red, before shifting back to the dark shades of Hyssos’s flesh. He hid them behind his back.

NO

Then the echo made the origin of the sound clear. Spear let his gaze turn inwards and he felt it in there, moving like mercury.

Sabrat. Until this moment, Spear had believed the purgation that the idiot reeve’s cohort interrupted had gone to plan, but now his certainty crumbled. There was still some fraction of the stolid fool’s self hiding in the shadowed depths of the killer’s mind, some part of the false self he had worn that had not been expunged. He pushed in and was sickened by the sense of it, the loathsome, nauseating morality of the dead man staining his mind. It was bubbling up like bile, pushing to the top of his thoughts. A scream of recrimination.

‘Hyssos?’ Eurotas was staring at him. ‘Are you all right, man?’

‘I…’

NO NO NO NO NO

‘No.’ Spear coughed out the word, his eyes watering, and then with effort took control of himself once more. ‘No, lord,’ he went on. ‘I… A moment of fatigue, that’s all.’ With a physical effort, the killer silenced the cries and took a shuddering breath.

‘Ah.’ The baron approached and gave him a kindly pat on the shoulder. ‘You were closest to the psyker. There’s no shame in being affected by her loss.’

‘Thank you,’ said Spear, playing into the moment. ‘It has been difficult. Perhaps, with your permission, I might take some respite?’

Eurotas gave him a fatherly nod. ‘Do so. I want you rested when we reach the rendezvous.’

‘Aye, lord,’ Spear bowed again and walked away. Unseen by anyone else, he buried the nails of his hand in his palm, cutting the waxy flesh there; but no blood emerged from the ragged meat.

Rufin found another intercom panel on the station’s mezzanine level and used it to send out an all-posts alert; but if anything he became even more afraid when the only men that reported back were the ones at the armoury. He told them to hold the line and started on his way to them. If he could get there before any of the terrorist attackers did, he could open the secure locks and drag out all the big, lethal weapons that he had been so far denied the chance to use. There were autocannons down there, grenade launchers and flamers… He’d give these loyalist bastards a roasting for daring to cross him, oh yes…

Descending an enclosed stairwell, he caught sight of the western platforms. Monorails there were filling with prisoners, each one closing its doors and moving off seemingly of its own will, carrying the inmates to freedom. The first few to go had ploughed through the barricades across the lines; now there was nothing to stop a mass exodus. Rufin didn’t care, though; he would let them go, as long as he could keep the guns.

Reaching the lowest levels, he found the men at the first guard post were gone. In their place there were piles of clothing and lumps of soggy ash, illuminated by the flickering overhead strip lights. The air here felt cold and oppressive, and Rufin broke into a run again, propelled from the place by a cold pressure that was like a shadow falling over his soul.

He turned the corner and ran towards the armoury post. Six men were there, and all of them were pale and afraid. They saw him coming and beckoned frantically, as if he were being chased by something only they could see.

‘What happened back there?’ he snapped, turning his ire on the first man he saw. ‘Talk, rot you!’

‘Screaming,’ came the reply. ‘Oh, sir, a screaming like you ain’t never heard. From Hades itself, sir.’

Rufin’s fear bubbled over into anger and he backhanded the man. ‘Make sense, you fool! It’s the terrorists!’

At that moment, the floor below them exploded upwards, the iron grid-plates spinning away as a hulking figure burst out of the conduits beneath. Rufin saw a grinning, fanged skull made of tarnished silver and then a massive handgun. A single shot from the weapon struck one of the guards with such force it blew him back into another man, the velocity carrying them both into the curved wall where they became a bloody ruin.

Rufin stumbled away as the dark shape blurred, releasing an inhuman snarl. Gunfire sang from the weapons of the guards, but it seemed to make no difference. There were wet, tearing noises, concussive blasts of bolt-fire, the dense sounds of meat under pressure, breaking and bursting. Something whistled through the air and hit Rufin in the chest.

He went to his knees and slumped against the wall, blinking. Like a blood-painted dagger, a broken human femur, freshly ripped from a still-cooling corpse, protruded from his chest. Rufin vomited black, sticky spittle and felt himself start to die.

The skull-faced figure came to him, trembling with adrenaline, and spat through the grille of the mask. ‘Oh dear,’ it rumbled. ‘I think I broke him.’

Rufin heard a tutting sound and a second figure, this one more human than the clawed killer, hove into view. ‘This is the base commander. We needed him to open the ammunition store.’

‘So?’ said the skull-face. ‘Can’t you do your trick?’

‘It’s not a parlour game for your amusement, Eversor.’ He heard a sigh and then a sound like old leather being twisted.

Through blurry eyes Rufin saw his own reflection; or was it? It seemed to be talking to him. ‘Say your name,’ said the mirror-face.

‘You know… who I am,’ he managed. ‘We’re Goeda Rufin.’

‘Yes, that’s right.’ Now it sounded like him too.

The mirror-face drifted away, towards the locking alcove near the heavy iron hatch that secured the ammo stores. It was impregnable, Rufin remembered. The built-in security cogitator needed to recognise both his features and his vocal imprint before it would open.

His face and voice…

‘Goeda Rufin,’ said the mirror, and with a crunch of gears the armoury hatch began to swing open.

Rufin tried to understand how that could be happening, but the answer was still lost to him when his heart finally stopped.

The rendezvous was a spur-line outside a storage depot in the foothills, several kilometres beyond the capital. Under Tariel’s guiding hand, the simple drive-brains of the monorails had obeyed his command and cut fast routes through the network that confused the PDF spy drones sent to follow them. Now they were all here, emptying their human cargoes as the sun set over the hillside.

Kell watched the rag-tag resistance fighters gather the freed people into groups, some of them welcomed back into the fold as lost brothers in arms, others formed into parties that would split off in separate directions and go to ground, in hopes of riding out the conflict. He saw Beye and Grohl moving among them. The woman gave him a nod of thanks, but all the man returned was a steady, measuring look.

Kell understood his position. Even after they had done what he had charged them to do, and obliterated a major stockpile of turncoat weapons into the bargain, Grohl could still not find the will to trust them.

Because he is right not to, said a voice in his thoughts; a voice that spoke with his sister’s words. The rebels believed Kell and the others were some kind of advance unit, a scouting party of special operatives sent as the vanguard of an Imperial plan to retake Dagonet in the Emperor’s name. Like so many things about the assassins, this too was a lie.

A man in a hood emerged from the midst of the rebels and said something to Beye; but it was Grohl’s reaction that gave away his identity, the sudden jerk of the severe man’s head, the tensing of his body.

Kell drew himself up as the man came closer, drawing back the hood. He was bald and muscular, with a swarthy cast to his skin, and he had sharp eyes. The Vindicare saw the tips of complex tattoos peeking up from his collar. Kell offered his hand. ‘Capra.’

‘Kell.’ The freedom fighter took it and they shook, palm to wrist. ‘I understand I have the Emperor to thank for this.’ He nodded at the trains. ‘And for you.’

‘The Imperium never turns its face from its citizens,’ he replied. ‘We’re here to help you win your war.’

A shadow passed over Capra’s face. ‘You may be too late. My people are tired, few, scattered.’ He spoke in low tones that would not carry. ‘It would be more a service to help us find safe passage elsewhere, let some of us come back with the reprisal force as tactical advisors.’

Kell did not break eye contact with the rebel leader. ‘We did this in a day. Imagine what we can do together, in the days ahead.’

Capra’s gaze shifted to where the rest of the Execution Force stood, waiting silently. ‘Beye was right. You are an impressive group. Perhaps… Perhaps with you at our sides, there is a chance.’

‘More than a chance,’ insisted Kell. ‘A certainty.’

Finally, the man’s expression changed, the weariness, the doubt melting away. In its place, there was a new strength. New purpose. He wanted so badly for them to be their salvation, Kell could almost taste it. Capra nodded. ‘The fate of Dagonet rests with us, my friend. We will not forsake it.’

‘No,’ he said, as Capra walked away, gathering his men to him as he began to rally them with firebrand oratory.

But the rebels would not know the truth, not until it was too late; that the fate of Dagonet was only a means to a single end.

To place the Archtraitor Horus between Eristede Kell’s crosshairs.

Eleven

Hidden
Sacrifice
Cages

The caverns were deep inside the canyons of a rocky and forbidding landscape that the Dagoneti called the Bladecut. From the ground, the real meaning of the name wasn’t clear, but up high, when glimpsed through the lenses of one of the aerial drones the rebels had captured, it was obvious. The Bladecut was a massive ravine that moved easterly across the stone wilderness beyond the capital, the shape of it like a giant axe wound in the surface of the landscape. There were no roads, nothing but animal trails and half-hidden hunting routes that meandered into sharp gullies which concealed the mouths of the cave network. Thousands of years ago, this had been the site of the first Dagonet colony, where the new arrivals from Terra had huddled in the gloom while their planetforming technologies, now lost to history, had worked to make the world’s harsh environment more habitable for them. The rebels had retaken the old halls of stone, secure in the knowledge that deep inside nothing would be able to dislodge them short of bombing the hills into powder.

Jenniker Soalm walked through the meandering tunnels, her face concealed in the depths of her hood, passing chambers laser-cut from the rock, ragged chainmail curtains hanging over their entrances, others closed off behind heavy impact-welded hatches. Inside the caves everything was in a permanent twilight, with the only constant the watery glow of biolume pods glued to the stone ceiling at random intervals. Capra’s people – some of them warriors, many more civilians and even children – passed her as she walked on.

Soalm glimpsed snatches of the everyday life of the resistance through gaps in the curtains or past open doors. She saw Beye and a few others surrounding a chart table piled high with paper maps; across the way, a makeshift armoury full of captured PDF weaponry; a skinny cook who looked up at her, in the middle of stirring a huge iron drum of thick soup; refugees clustered around a brazier, and nearby a pair of children playing, apparently ignorant of the grim circumstances. The latter was no surprise to her; the rebels did not have much choice about where their people could go to ground.

Further on, she saw a side-chamber that had been converted into a drab approximation of an infirmary, right beside a workroom where figures in shadow were bent over a jury-rigged device trailing wires and connectors. Soalm detected the familiar odour of chemical explosives as she moved on.

A hatch was creaking shut as she approached, and she turned to see. As it closed, one of Capra’s men gave her a blank look from within; over his shoulder she saw a bloodied trooper in clan colours tied to a chair, a moment before he disappeared out of sight. She paused, and heard footsteps behind her.

Soalm turned and saw a pair of refugee children approach, eyes wide with fear and daring. They were both grimy, both in shapeless fatigues too big for them; she couldn’t tell if they were boys or girls.

‘Hey,’ said the taller of the two. ‘The Emperor sent you, right?’

She gave a nod. ‘In a way.’

There was awe in their expressions. ‘Is he like he is in the picts? A giant?’

Soalm managed a smile. ‘Bigger than that, even.’

The other child was about to add something, but an adult turned the corner ahead and gave them both a stern look. ‘You know you’re not supposed to play down here. Get back to your lessons!’

They broke into a run and vanished back the way they had come. Soalm turned to study the man.

‘Are you looking for something?’ he asked warily.

‘I’m just walking,’ she admitted. ‘I needed a moment… to think.’

He pointed past her, blocking her path. ‘You should probably go back.’ The man seemed hesitant, as if he wasn’t sure he had the authority to tell her what to do.

The Execution Force fit strangely among the freedom fighter group. In the weeks that had passed since they liberated the prison camp in the city, Soalm and the others had gained a kind of guarded acceptance, but little more. Under Kell’s orders, each of them had turned their particular skill-sets towards aiding the rebel cause. Tariel’s technical expertise was in constant demand, and Koyne showed a natural aptitude for teaching combat tactics to men and women who had, until recently, been farmers, teachers and shopkeepers. Meanwhile, Iota and the Garantine would go missing for days at a time, and the only evidence of their activities would be intercepted reports from the communication network, stories of destroyed outposts or whole patrols eviscerated by ghostly assailants. As for her brother, he kept his distance from her, working with Capra, Beye and Grohl on battle plans.

Soalm did her part too, but as the days drew on it disturbed her more and more. They were helping the rebels score victories, not just here but through other resistance cells all across the planet; but it was based on a lie. If not for the arrival of the assassins on Dagonet, the war would have been over. Instead they were bolstering it, infusing fresh violence into a conflict that should have already petered out.

The Venenum was precise in what she did; surgical and clean. Collateral damage was a term she refused to allow into her lexicon, and yet here they were, their presence more damaging to the locals than the guns of the nobles.

The man pointed again. ‘Back that way,’ he repeated. Dispelling her moment of reverie, Soalm realised that he was trying to hide something.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I think not.’ Before he could react, she pushed past him and followed the turn of the narrowing corridor as it dropped into a shallow slope. The man reached for her robes to stop her, and she tapped a dot of liquid onto the back of his hand from one of her wrist dispensers. The effect was immediate; he went pale and fell to the ground, the muscles in his legs giving out.

The corridor opened up into another cavern, this one wide and low. In the middle of the dimly-lit space there was a thermal grate throwing out a warm orange glow; surrounding it were rings of chairs, some scattered cushions and salvaged rugs. A knot of people were there, crowded around an older woman who held an open book in her hand. Soalm had the impression of interrupting a performance in mid-flow.

The older woman saw the assassin and fear crossed her expression. Her audience were a mix of all kinds of people from the camp. Two of them, both fighters, sprang to their feet and came forwards with threats in their eyes.

Soalm raised her hands to defend herself, but the old woman called out. ‘No! Stop! We’ll have no violence!’

‘Milady–’ began one of the others, but she waved him to silence, and with visible effort, she drew herself up. Soalm saw the echoes of a lifetime of grace and fortitude there in the old woman’s face.

She pushed through the ring of people and faced her interloper. ‘I am… I was Lady Astrid Sinope. I am not afraid of you.’

Soalm cocked her head. ‘That’s not true.’

Sinope’s aristocratic demeanour faltered. ‘No… No, I suppose it is not.’ She recovered slightly. ‘Ever since Beye told us you were on Dagonet, I knew that this moment would come. I knew one of you would find us.’

‘One of us?’

‘The Emperor’s warriors,’ she went on. ‘Capra said you were the instruments of his will. So come, then. Do what you must.’

‘I don’t understand…’ Soalm began, but the old woman kept talking.

‘I ask only that you show mercy to my friends here.’ Sinope held up the heavy book in her hands. ‘I brought this to Dagonet. I brought it here, to the resistance, when I fled the treachery of my former noble clan. If anyone must suffer because of that, it should be me alone.’ Her eyes glittered with unspent tears. ‘If I must beg you, I will. Please do not hurt them because of me.’

No one spoke as Soalm stepped past the two warriors and took the book from the old woman’s trembling hands. She read aloud the words on the page. ‘The Emperor protects.’

‘We only seek solace in His name,’ said Sinope, her voice falling to a whisper. ‘I know that it is forbidden to speak openly of Him and His divine ways, but we do so only among ourselves, we do not proselytise or seek out converts!’ She clasped her hands. ‘We are so few. We take in only those who come to us of their own free will. We have hurt no one with our beliefs!’

Soalm ran her fingers over the pages of dense, solemn text. ‘You are all followers of the Lectitio Divinitatus. You believe the Emperor is a living god. The only god.’

Sinope nodded. ‘And I will die with that belief, if that is what is required. But promise me I will be the only one. Please!’

She understood, finally. ‘I have not come to purge you,’ Soalm told them. ‘I… We did not even know you were here.’ There was a strange, giddy sense of events shifting around her.

‘But you were sent from Terra…’ said one of the men.

‘Not for this,’ said the Venenum, turning to meet Lady Sinope’s gaze, raising her arm as she did so and drawing back her cuff. ‘And until this moment, I was not certain why.’ Soalm showed them a small golden chain clasped around her wrist, a charm dangling from it in the shape of the Imperial aquila. ‘But now… Now I have an inkling.’

‘She’s one of us,’ said the man. ‘She believes.’

Sinope’s expression became one of joy. ‘Oh, child,’ she said. ‘He sent you. He sent you to us.’

Soalm returned the book to her and nodded.

Kell looked up as the men boiled into the central chamber in a rush of energy and jubilation, weaving through the scattered clumps of hardware and containers, the groups of people who stopped and smiled to see them returning. They still had the smell of cordite, woodsmoke and exertion on them. He scanned the group with a practised eye and saw they had all come back, and only with a few minor injuries. The squad leader, an ex-pilot named Jedda, came over to where Capra was standing at a vox console and enveloped him in a bear hug.

‘It’s done?’ said Capra.

‘Oh, it’s more than done!’ Jedda laughed, the rush of battle still there in his voice. His men shared the moment and laughed with him. ‘Tariel’s information was dead on! We blew out the supports for the bridge and the whole cargo train went down. Hundreds of clanner troops, a dozen fan-jeeps and armoured GEVs, all of it scrap at the bottom of the Redstone river!’

‘They’ll feel that,’ snorted one of the others. ‘The nobles will be tasting blood tonight!’

Capra turned and gave Kell a nod. ‘Thank your man for me. In fact, thank them all. A month ago I would never have thought I’d be saying this, but we actually have them on the defensive. The data and guidance you’ve provided us has enabled the resistance to make coordinated strikes all over the planet. The nobles are reeling.’

‘The mistake they made was their arrogance,’ said Koyne, wandering up to the group. The men parted to let the Callidus come closer; they were all unnerved by the bland, unfinished cast to the assassin’s neutral features. ‘They believed they had won, and lowered their guard. They didn’t expect you to hit back in synchrony. You’ve put them off balance.’

‘We’ll help you keep up the pressure,’ Kell told the resistance leader. ‘All we’ve done so far is show you how to find the cracks in their armour. You need to keep widening them until they break.’

Jedda nodded to himself. ‘We didn’t lose a single man tonight. We keep this up, the commoners who haven’t committed will side with us.’ He grinned at Kell. ‘At this rate, your fleet might get here and find it has nothing to do!’

‘We can only hope,’ said Koyne, drawing a look from the Vindicare.

‘Capra!’ Beye crossed the chamber at a jog, ‘Grohl’s back!’

Kell saw the grim-faced freedom fighter following her, unfurling his overhood and cloak. He had a scuffed carryall over one shoulder.

‘From the capital?’ said Jedda. ‘We made a lot of noise tonight, Terrik! Did they hear it back there in the towers?’ His triumphant mood rolled against the other man’s stony countenance and rebounded without effect.

‘They heard all right,’ said Grohl. He dropped the carryall on a crate being used as a makeshift table and threw off his robes with an irritable shake. ‘The Governor made a broadcast over all the communications channels. A declaration, he called it.’

The group fell silent. Kell saw the moment radiate out across the cavern to every person within earshot.

‘Let’s see it, then,’ said Capra.

Grohl opened the case and produced a memory spool, the commercial kind that any core world civilian home of moderate means possessed. ‘One of our contacts recorded this off the public watch-wire. It’s repeating in a loop at the top of each hour.’ Jedda went to take it from him, but Grohl didn’t give it up. ‘Perhaps you should look at this somewhere more… private.’

Capra considered that for a moment, then shook his head. ‘No. If it’s on the wire, then everyone else knows about it. Our people should too.’

Jedda took the spool and inserted it into a hololithic reader. With a buzzing hum, the device projected the ghostly image of a man in heavy dress uniform, a braided cap upon his head. He was standing before a lectern, and Kell noticed that it bore the sigil of an open, slitted eye; the symbol of the Sons of Horus.

‘Governor Nicran,’ said Jedda with a sneer. ‘I wonder where he recorded this? Cowering in the basement of his mansion?’

‘Quiet!’ hissed Grohl. ‘Listen.’

Kell watched the hololith carefully as the Governor began with empty pleasantries and vapid words of praise for his puppet masters in the noble clans. He read the politician’s expressions, for a moment imagining he was seeing that face down the sights of his Exitus longrifle. Nicran had all the look about him of a desperate man. Then he turned to the important part of the announcement.

‘Citizens of Dagonet,’ he said, ‘I have been gravely disturbed to learn of the deaths of many of our brave PDF troopers in the ongoing and ruthless attacks perpetrated by the resistance. Attacks that have also claimed the lives of many innocent civilians…’

‘Bollocks they have,’ snarled Jedda. ‘Clanner blood only!’

‘I applaud the vigilance of our troopers and recognise their bravery,’ Nicran continued. ‘But I also listen when their commanders tell me that the enemy hiding among us is a clear and present danger we have yet to overcome. And so, rather than prolong this terrible fighting and waste more precious Dagoneti lives, I have petitioned for assistance.’

‘What does that mean?’ muttered one of Jedda’s men. Kell kept his expression unchanged, aware that Koyne was watching him closely.

Across the chamber, a hush had fallen as everyone hung on Nicran’s words. ‘Centuries ago, when Dagonet was beneath the shadow of corrupt priest-kings, we faced a similar crisis. And then, as now, a warrior came to aid us. A master of war who freed us from fear and terror.’ The Governor blinked and licked his lips; Kell felt an odd tingle of anticipation in his trigger finger. ‘Citizens, I have this day received word from the fleet of the Sons of Horus. They are coming to Dagonet to deliver us, and the great hero Horus Lupercal will be with them. Have no fear. The retribution of the Astartes will be swift and terrible, but in its wake the freedom we crave, freedom of liberty, freedom from the stifling rule of a distant and uncaring Emperor, will be ours.’

Grohl tapped a key on the projector and the image died. ‘And there it is.’

It was as if something had sucked all the air from the chamber; Nicran’s statement had shocked the rebels into silence.

Jedda spoke first. ‘Astartes…’ he whispered, all trace of his earlier elation gone. ‘Coming here?’ He looked to Capra. ‘We… We can’t fight Space Marines. Clan troopers are one thing, but the Warmaster’s elite…’

‘They are like nothing we have ever seen,’ Grohl said darkly. ‘Genetically enhanced superhumans. Living weapons. Angels of death. A handful of them can crush armies–’

‘So what should we do, then?’ snapped Beye angrily. ‘Surrender at once? Shoot ourselves and save them the trouble?’

‘They’ll destroy us all,’ Grohl insisted. ‘The only hope we have is to disband our forces and lose ourselves in the general populace, that or flee off-world before their warships arrive.’ He glared at Kell. ‘Because our salvation won’t be here before Horus, will it?’

‘He’s right, Capra,’ said Jedda, his tone bleak. ‘Against men, we’ve got a fighting chance. But we can’t beat war gods–’

‘They’re not gods,’ Kell snarled, quieting him. ‘They are not invulnerable. They bleed red like any one of us. They can die.’ He met Grohl’s look. ‘Even Horus.’

Capra gave a slow nod. ‘Kell’s right. The Astartes are formidable, but they can be beaten.’ He gave the Vindicare a level stare. ‘Tell me they can be beaten.’

‘I killed a Space Marine,’ said Kell. Koyne’s bland expression flickered as something like surprise crossed the other assassin’s face. Kell ignored it and went on. ‘And I’m still here.’

‘Capra…’ Grohl started to speak again, but the rebel leader waved him into silence.

‘I need to think on this,’ he told them. ‘Beye, come with me.’ Capra walked away with the woman, and Kell watched him go. Grohl gave the Vindicare a harsh look and left him with Jedda and the other warriors following.

Kell picked up the memory spool and weighed it in his hand.

‘Did you really terminate an Astartes?’ said Koyne.

‘You know the rules,’ Kell replied, without looking away. ‘A clade’s targets are its own concern.’

The Callidus sniffed. ‘It doesn’t matter. Even if you did, it’s just one truth among a handful of pretty lies. That one, Grohl? He’s the smartest of all this lot. The Sons of Horus will destroy them, and turn this world into a funeral pyre along the way. I’ve seen how the Astartes fight.’

Kell rounded on the shade and stepped closer. ‘The Warmaster is coming here. That’s all that matters.’

‘Oh, indeed,’ said Koyne. ‘And by the time Capra and the other ones who have decided to trust you realise that’s all we want, it will be too late.’ The other assassin leaned in. ‘But let me ask you this, Kell. Do you feel any remorse about what we’re doing? Do you feel any pity for these people?’

The Vindicare looked away. ‘The Imperium appreciates their sacrifice.’

The quarters aboard the Iubar belonging to operative Hyssos were as predictably dull as Spear had expected them to be. There were only a few flashes of individuality here and there – a cabinet with a few bottles of good amasec, a shelf of paper-plas books on a wide variety of subjects, and some rather indifferent pencil sketches that the man had apparently drawn himself. Spear’s lip curled at the dead man’s pretension; perhaps he thought he was some kind of warrior-poet, standing sentinel over the people of the Eurotas clan by day, touching a sensitive artistic soul by night.

The truth was nowhere near as dignified, however. Delving through the morass of jumbled memories he had stolen from Hyssos’s dead brain, Spear found more than enough incidents where the security operative had been called upon to use his detective skills to smooth over situations with native law enforcement on worlds along the Taebian trade axis. The Consortium’s crews and officers broke laws on other worlds and it was Hyssos who was forced to find locals to take the blame or the right men to bribe. He cleaned up messes left by the Void Baron and his family, and on some level the man had hated himself for it.

Spear had extruded a number of eyes and allowed them to wander the room, sweeping for surveillance devices. Finding nothing, he reconsumed them and then rested, letting his outer aspect relax. The fleshy matter coating his body lost a little definition; to an outside observer, it would have looked like an image slipping out of focus through a lens. He sensed a faint call from the daemonskin. It wanted fresh blood – but then it always wanted fresh blood. Spear let some of the remains of Hyssos he had kept in his secondary stomach ooze out to be absorbed by the living sheath, and it quieted.

He sat at the desk across from the sleeping alcove. Laid out over the surface were a half-dozen data-slates, each of them displaying layers of information about the Iubar. There were deck plans and security protocols, conduit diagrams, patrol servitor routings, even a copy of the Void Baron’s daily itinerary. Spear’s long, spidery fingers danced over them, plucking slates from the pile for a moment, putting them back, selecting others. A strategy was forming, and the more he gave it his consideration, the more he realised that it would need to be implemented sooner rather than later.

The rogue trader’s flagship had dropped out of the churn of the warp near a neutron star in the Cascade Line, to take sightings and rest the drives before setting off to the rendezvous at Arrowhead. They would be here no more than a day, and once the Iubar was back in the immaterium, the energy flux from the vessel’s Geller field generators would interfere with Spear’s plans to break into Eurotas’s personal reliquary. The flux had the unfortunate side effect of causing distress to the daemonskin, rendering some of its more useful traits ineffectual. It would have to be done soon, then–

NO

Spear flinched and his whole body rippled with a sudden jolt of pain. The echoing screech lanced through him like a laser.

NO NO NO NO NO NO

‘Shut up!’ he spat, pushing away from the desk, shaking his head. ‘Shut up!’

The voice within tried to cry out again, but he smothered it with a sharp exhale of air and a tensing of his will. For a moment, Spear felt it inside himself, deep down in the black depths of his spirit – the flickering ember of light. A tiny piece of Yosef Sabrat’s soul, trapped and furious.

The killer dropped to the floor of the room and bowed his head, closed his eyes. He drew inwards, let his thoughts fall into himself. It was akin to sinking into an ocean of dark, heavy oil – but instead of resisting it, Spear allowed himself to be filled by the blackness, relishing the sensation of drowning.

He plunged into the void of his own shattered psyche, searching for the foreign, the human, the thought-colours of a dead man. It was difficult; the faint echoes of every life he had destroyed and then imitated all still lingered here somewhere. But they had all been purged through the ritual rites, and what remained was just a shallow imprint, like the shadows burnt on walls by the flash of a nuclear fireball. Something of Yosef Sabrat was still here, though. Something tenacious that obstinately refused to allow Spear to expunge it, clinging on.

And there it was, a glow in the gloom. Spear’s animus leapt at it, fangs out, ready to rip it to shreds. The killer found it cloaked in a memory, a moment – a terrible burning pain. He laughed as he realised he was experiencing the instant when he had pierced Sabrat’s heart with a bone-blade, but this time from his victim’s point of view.

The pain was blinding – and familiar. Spear hesitated; yes, he knew this feeling, this exact feeling. Sabrat’s memory echoed one of his own, a memory from the killer’s past.

Too late, Spear understood that the fragment had fled his grasp, cleverly cloaking itself in the similarity; and too late, he was dragged into his own past. Back to an experience that had made him into the monster he was.

Back to the cage. The pain and the cage…

Voices outside. The armoured warriors moving and speaking. War-angels and gun-lords, black souls and beasts.

Voices.

‘Is this it?’ A commander-master, clear from tone and manner. Obeyed, yes.

‘Aye, my lord,’ says the wounded one. ‘A pariah, according to the logs left by the Silent Sisterhood. But I have not seen the like. And they didn’t know what it was, either. It was bound for destruction, most likely.’

The master-to-be-his-master comes closer. He sees a face filled with wonderment and hatred.

‘I smell the witch-stink on it. It did not die with the rest of the crew and cargo?’

‘The Emperor’s Black Ships are resilient vessels. Some were bound to live beyond our bombardment.’

A pause, during which he takes some sharp breaths, trying to listen to the voices.

‘Tell me what it did.’

A sigh, weary and fearful. ‘I was attacked. It took a finger from me. With its teeth.’

Mocking laughter. ‘And you let it live?’

‘I would have destroyed it, lord, but then it… Then it killed the Codicier. Brother Sadran.’

Laughter stopped now. Anger colouring. ‘How?’

‘Sadran lost an ear to it. Eaten, swallowed whole. Then the witch stood there and waited to be killed. Sadran…’ The wounded one is finding it hard to explain. ‘Sadran turned his fury on the thing and it reflected it back.’

‘Reflected…’ The master-voice, different again. Interested.

‘Fires, lord. Sadran was consumed by his own fires.’ The shapes move around in the shadows beyond the cage bars.

‘I’ve never encountered a pariah capable of that…’ The master comes close, and he has his first real look at it. ‘You’re something special, aren’t you?’

‘It may be a fluke birth,’ says the injured one. ‘Or perhaps some throwback from the experimentations of the Adeptus Telepathica.’

A smile grows wide in the gloom. ‘It may also be an opportunity.’

He presses up towards the bars, allowing himself to reach the ethereal edges of his senses towards the commander-master.

‘We should kill it,’ says the other voice.

‘I’ll be the judge of that.’

He touches a mind, and for the first time in his life finds something that is darker than himself. A stygian soul, steeped in blackness, initiated into realms beyond his ability to know.

‘My Lord Erebus–’ the injured one tries to argue, but the master silences him with a look.

‘These are your orders, brother-captain,’ says the dark-hearted one. ‘Remove all trace that we were ever here, and ensure that this vessel becomes lost to the void. I will gather what we came for… and bring our new friend here into the bargain.’ The one called Erebus smiles again. ‘I think we will have use for him.’

As the other warrior departs, the master leans in. ‘Do you have a name?’ he asks.

It has been a long time since he has spoken, and it takes a moment to form the word; but finally he manages. ‘Spear.’

Erebus nods. ‘Your first lesson, then. I am your master.’ Then the warrior is a blur, and there is a blade in his hand, and then the blade is in Spear’s chest and the pain is blinding, burning.

‘I am your master,’ Erebus says once again. ‘And from now on, you will kill only who I tell you to kill.’

Spear reels back. He nods, giving his fealty. The pain fills him, fills the cage.

The pain and the cage…

The moment snapped like brittle glass and Spear jerked upright, his foot kicking out and knocking over a chair. He scrambled to his feet, catching sight of his face in a mirror. Hyssos’s aspect was pasty, like unfired clay. He grimaced and tried to concentrate; but the encounter with the memory fragment and the flash of his past had cut to his core. He was breathing hard, the daemonskin on his hands rippling crimson.

‘Operative?’ Someone was knocking on his cabin door. ‘I heard a cry. Are you all right in there?’

‘I’m fine!’ he shouted back. ‘It… I fell from my bed. It’s nothing.’

‘You’re sure?’ He recognised the voice now; it was one of the duty officers on this deck.

‘Go away!’ he snapped.

‘Aye, sir,’ said the officer, after a moment, and he heard footsteps recede.

Spear walked to the mirror and glared at Hyssos’s face as it resurfaced. ‘You can’t stop me,’ he told the reflection. ‘None of you can. None of you.’

In recognition of their help, the rebels had given all the members of the Execution Force quarters in one of the smaller chambers off the main corridor. The rooms were no bigger than holding cells, but they were dry and they had privacy, which was more than could be said for many of the communal sleeping areas.

Soalm didn’t knock and wait outside her brother’s compartment; instead she slammed the corroded metal door open and stormed into the room.

He looked up from the makeshift table before him, where the disassembled components of his longrifle lay like an exploded technical diagram. Lines of bullets were arranged in rows like tiny sentries on a parade ground. He stopped himself from drawing his Exitus pistol and returned to the work of cleaning his firearm. ‘Where are your manners, Jenniker?’ he said.

She closed the door and folded her arms. ‘We’re doing this, then?’ she said. ‘We’re actually going to sacrifice all these people just to complete the mission?’

‘What was your first clue?’ he asked. ‘Was it when I told you that was our plan, on board the Ultio? Or when Valdor made it exactly, precisely clear what our objective was?’

‘You’re manipulating Capra and his people,’ she insisted.

‘This is what we do,’ said her brother. ‘Don’t pretend you’ve never done the same thing to get close to a mark. Lied and cheated?’

‘I’ve never put innocents in harm’s way. The whole motive for the Officio Assassinorum is to move sightless and unseen, leave no trace but the corpse of our target… But you’re cutting a road of blood for us to follow!’

‘This isn’t the Great Crusade any more, dear sister.’ He put down his tools and studied her. ‘Are you so naïve that you don’t see that? We’re not thinning the ranks of a few degenerate bohemian fops in the halls of some hive-world, or terminating a troublesome xenos commander. We’re on the front lines of a civil war. The rules of engagement are very different now.’

Soalm was quiet for a moment. It had been many years since she had seen Eristede, and it made her sad to see how he had changed. She could only see the worst of him behind those dark eyes. ‘It’s not just the resistance fighters whose lives we are threatening. By keeping this conflict alive we will doom countless innocent people, perhaps even threaten the future of this entire planet and the sector beyond.’

‘Are you asking me if the death of Horus Lupercal is worth that price? That’s a question you should put to Valdor or the Master of Assassins. I am only doing what I was ordered to. Our duty is all that matters.’

She felt a surge of emotion in her chest and crushed it before it could become a snarl or a sob. ‘How can you be so cold-blooded, Eristede? We are supposed to protect the people of the Imperium, not offer them up as fodder for the cannons!’ Soalm shook her head. ‘I don’t know who you are…’

With a flash of anger, her brother bolted to his feet. ‘You don’t know me? I’m not the one who rejected her own name! I didn’t turn my back on justice!’

‘Is that what you tell yourself?’ She looked away. ‘We both had a choice all those years ago, Eristede. Escape, or revenge. But you chose revenge, and you condemned us to a life where we are nothing but killers.’

The memory came back to her in a giddy rush. They were both just children then, the scions of their family. The last surviving members of the Kell dynasty, their holdings destroyed and their parents exterminated during an internecine struggle among the aristocrats of the Thaxted Duchy. Orphaned and alone, they had been drawn into the halls of the Imperial schola and there both secretly selected by agents of the Officio Assassinorum.

Brother and sister had shown promise – Eristede was an excellent marksman for one so young, and Jenniker’s genius for botany and chemistry was clear. They knew that soon the clade directors would make their decisions, and that they would be split up, perhaps never to see one another again. In the halls of the schola they had made their plans to flee together, to eschew the assassin’s path and find a new life.

But then Clade Vindicare offered something that Eristede Kell wanted more than his freedom; the chance to avenge his mother and father. All they asked for in return was his loyalty – and consumed by hate, he gave it willingly. Jenniker had been left behind with nowhere to go but to the open arms of the Venenum.

Months later, she had learned that innocents had been killed in the hit on the man who murdered their parents, and that had been the day when she swore she would no longer go by the name of Kell again.

‘I’d hoped you might have changed since I last saw you,’ she said. ‘And you have. But not for the better.’

Her brother seemed as if he was on the verge of an outburst; but then he drew it back in and looked away. ‘You’re right,’ he told her. ‘You don’t know me. Now get out.’

‘As you command,’ Soalm said stiffly.

Twelve

A Single Drop
Messenger
Wilderness of Mirrors

The men guarding the chamber housing the Void Baron’s private reliquary had allowed their concentration to falter. Spear listened to them speak as he stood in the shadows beyond their line of sight, a few metres up along the vaulted corridor. News had filtered down through the crew hierarchy aboard the Iubar, fractions of the reports from the communicatory that warned of sightings of Adeptus Astartes on the move. No one seemed to know if they were warriors still loyal to the Emperor of Mankind, or if they were those now following the banner of the Warmaster; some even dared to suggest that all the mighty Legions of the Astartes had turned their faces from their creator, embarking on a jihad to take for themselves what they had captured for Terra during the Great Crusade.

Spear understood only small elements of the unfolding war going on across the galaxy; and in truth, it mattered little to him. The killer’s keyhole view of intergalactic conflict was enough. He cared little about sides or doctrines. All Spear needed was the kill. It was enough that his master Erebus had given him murders to commit; perhaps even the greatest murder in human history.

But before that could happen, he had steps to take. Preparations to be made.

Spear allowed the daemonskin to regain a small amount of control over itself, and the surface of his surrogate flesh shivered. Removing the shipsuit overall he had been wearing, he stepped naked into the deep shadows. Hair-like tendrils emerged from his epidermis, sampling the air and the ambient light all around. In moments Spear’s body became wet with sticky processor fluids, changing colour until it was night-dark. His features retreated behind a mask of scabbing crusts, and then he leapt soundlessly to the high ceiling. Secreted oils allowed him to adhere there, and the killer snaked slowly along his inverted pathway, passing over the heads of the guards as they fretted and spoke in low tones about threats they could not understand.

At the entrance to the reliquary there was an intelligent door possessed of a variety of sensory and thought-mechanical systems designed to open only to Merriksun Eurotas, or a member of his immediate family. It was little impediment to Spear. He slapped the daemonskin lightly as it whined in his mind, dragging on him a little as it sensed the guards and expressed a desire to drink their blood. Chastened, it obediently extruded a new, thickly-lipped mouth at his palm. Spear held the mouth over the biometric breath sensor, as the same time sending new hair-tendrils into the thin gaps around the edges of the door. They wormed their way into the locks and teased them open one by one.

It had been easy to sample the Void Baron’s breath; simply by standing close to him, Spear’s daemonskin sheath had plucked the microscopic particulate matter and DNA traces of his exhalations from the air, and stored them in a bladder. Now the second mouth puffed them out over the sensor.

There was the whisper of well-lubricated cogs and the door opened. Spear slipped inside.

Dagonet’s sun was passing low over the top of the ridgeline, and soon night would fall. Jenniker Soalm stood out on the flat expanse of stone that served as a lookout post, and looked out at the ochre rocks without really seeing them. She knew that the mission clock was winding down towards zero, and at best the Execution Force had only hours until they entered the final phase of the operation.

She could see that the others sensed it too. The Garantine had at last returned from whatever lethality he had been spreading on the clanner forces, menacing all who saw him. Tariel, Koyne and the Culexus waif were all making ready – and her brother…

Soalm knew exactly what her brother was doing.

‘Hello?’ The voice made her turn. With slow, careful steps, Lady Sinope emerged from the cave mouth behind her and approached. ‘I was told I might find you here.’

‘Milady.’ Jenniker bowed slightly.

Sinope smiled. ‘You don’t need to do that, child. I’m a noblewoman only in name now. The others let me keep the title as a gesture of respect, but the truth is the clans of this world have wiped away any honour we ever had.’

‘Others must have rejected the call to join Horus’s banner.’

The old woman nodded. ‘Oh, a few. All dead now, I think. That, or terrified into compliance.’ She sighed. ‘Perhaps He will forgive them.’

Soalm looked away. ‘I do not believe He is the forgiving kind. After all, the Emperor denies all word of his divinity.’

Sinope nodded again. ‘Indeed. But then, only the sincerely divine can do such a thing and be true in it. Those who think themselves gods are always madmen or fools. To be raised to such heights, one must be carried there on the shoulders of faith. One must guide and yet be guided.’

‘I would like some guidance myself,’ admitted the assassin. ‘I don’t know where to turn.’

‘No?’ The noblewoman found a wind-smoothed rock and sat down on it. ‘If it is not too impertinent a question, may I ask you how you found your way to the light of the Lectitio Divinitatus?’

Soalm sighed. ‘After our… after my parents were killed in a conflict between rival families, I found myself isolated and alone in the care of the Imperium. I had no one to watch over me.’

‘Only the God-Emperor.’

She nodded. ‘So I came to realise. He was the single constant in my life. The only one who did not judge me… Or leave me. I had heard stories of the Imperial Cult… It was not long before I found like-minded people.’

Sinope’s head bobbed. ‘Yes, that is often the way. Like comes to like, all across the galaxy. Here on Dagonet there are those who do not yet believe as we do – Capra and most of his people, for example – but still we share the same goals. And in the end, there are still many, many of us, child. Under different names, in different ways, everywhere you find human beings. As He led us to greatness and dispelled the fog of all the false gods and mistaken religiosity, the God-Emperor forged the path to the one truth. His truth.’

‘And yet we must hide that truth.’

The old woman sighed. ‘Aye, for the moment. Faith can be so strong at times, and yet so weak in the same moment. It is a delicate flower that must be nurtured and protected, in preparation for the day when it can truly bloom.’ She placed a hand on Jenniker’s arm. ‘And that day is coming.’

‘Not soon enough.’

Sinope’s hand fell away and she was quiet for a moment. ‘What do you want to tell me, child?’

Soalm turned to look at her, eyes narrowing. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I’ve been doing this since before you were born,’ said the woman. ‘Believe me, I know when someone is holding something back. You’re afraid of something, and it isn’t just this revolution we find ourselves in.’

‘Yes.’ The words came of their own accord. ‘I am afraid. I am afraid that just by coming to your world we will destroy all of this.’ She gestured around.

A brief smile crossed Sinope’s lips. ‘Oh, my dear. Don’t you realise? You have brought hope to Dagonet. That is a precious, precious thing. More fragile than faith, even.’

‘No. I did nothing. I am only… a messenger.’ Soalm wanted to tell her the truth, in that moment. To explain the full scope of the Execution Force’s plans, to reveal the real reasons behind their assistance to Capra’s freedom fighters, to cry out her darkest, deepest fear – that in her collusion with it all, she was no better than her bitter, callous brother.

But the words would not come. All she heard in her thoughts was Eristede’s challenge, the cold calculation he had laid before her; were the lives of these people worth more than the death of the Warmaster, the living embodiment of the greatest threat to the human Imperium?

Sinope came and sat with her, and slowly the old woman’s expression turned darker. ‘Let me tell you what I am afraid of,’ she said. ‘And you will understand why the struggle is so important. There are sinister forces at large in the universe, child.’

‘The Warmaster…’

‘Horus Lupercal is only an agent of that unchecked anarchy, my dear. There are manifestations coming into being on every world that falls into the shadows cast by the Warmaster’s ambition. Out in the blackness between the stars, cold hate grows.’

Soalm found the woman’s quiet, intense voice compelling, and listened in silence, captured by her words.

Sinope went on. ‘You and I, mankind itself and even the God-Emperor… All are being tested by a chorus of ruinous powers. If our Lord is truly divine, then we must know that He will have his opposite, something beyond our understanding of evil… What terrifies me is the dream of what will come if we let that hate overwhelm our glorious Imperium. There will be disorder and destruction. Fire–’

‘And chaos,’ said Jenniker.

Had the choice been his, the killer would have preferred to wait until the Iubar and its attendant ships had reached the Sol system before attempting this penetration; but Spear’s windows of opportunity were limited, and growing smaller with each passing hour. It was simply the most expedient option to do this now. Once they were within the boundaries of the Segmentum Solar, security around the Eurotas flotilla would increase tenfold and Operative Hyssos would have much to occupy his time and attention.

And then there was the other possibility to consider; that his target, once marked and stored, might be sufficiently powerful that Spear’s ability could be released against it from across an interplanetary distance. He hoped that would not prove to be so – Spear relished the moment of great joy when he looked a kill in the eye and saw the understanding of the end upon it. To be denied that in his crowning moment… It would be simply unjust.

The killer kept to the lines of tiles that glowed phosphor-green through the gelatinous lenses the daemonskin had grown over his eyes; normal human vision would have noticed nothing to differentiate the tiles on the floor of the reliquary, and so a luckless entrant would wander into one of the zones of contra-gravity stitched into the chamber – there to float trapped until the guards came with guns and ready trigger-fingers.

He ignored the works of art and objects of incredible value that arrayed the long gallery, each given pride of place in an alcove of its own. The remains of every Eurotas Void Baron since the first were held here, their ashes in urns as tall as a child, the containers made from spun diamond, tantalum, the shells of a Xexet quintal and other materials, each rarer and more expensive than the last. Portraits of lords and ladies from the clan’s history dominated every surface, and all of them stared out sightlessly at Spear as he threaded his way past, avoiding the perception spheres of beam sensors and magnetic anomaly detectors. The daemonskin’s fronds waved gently as he moved, continually tasting the ambient atmosphere and temperature to keep the intruder cooled in synchrony. The thermal monitors studding every square centimetre of the reliquary walls looked for the glow of body heat, but saw nothing. All the patient, clever machines continued to believe the chamber was still empty.

At the far end of the gallery, inside a glass stasis cage on a plinth made of white marble and platinum, was the Warrant of Trade.

Spear slowed as he approached it, licking his lips behind the bindings of his scab mask. The motion made the oily skin peel back over his cheeks, revealing teeth, a grin.

The book was made of real paper, fabricated from one of the last natural forests on Venus. The ink had been refined from burst-sac fluids harvested from Jovian skimmer rays. Artisans from Merica had assembled the tome, bound it in rich grox-hide. Inlaid on the cover, flecks of gemstones from all the colonised worlds of the Sol system shimmered in the light of the gallery’s electrocandles. This book was the physical manifestation of the Eurotas clan’s right to travel the stars. More than their fleets of vessels, their armies of staff and crew, more than the fiscal might they wielded over countless worlds and industrial holdings across the Taebian Stars – more than any of those things, the Warrant was what gave Merriksun Eurotas and his kindred the Emperor’s permission to trade, to voyage, to expand the Imperium’s influence through sheer economic power.

The killer almost laughed at that. As if any being could parcel out sections of the universe to his followers like plots of land or portions of food. What hubris. What monumental arrogance to assume that they had that entitlement. Such power could not be given; it could only be taken, through bloodshed, pain and the ruthless application of will.

The glass case had a complex mechanism of suspensors and gravity splines within it, and with the passage of a hand over a ruby sensor pad on the frame, the pages of the book inside could be turned without ever touching them. Spear flicked at the sensor and the Warrant creaked open, leaf after leaf of dense text flickering past.

It fluttered to a halt on an ornately illuminated page lined in gilt, purple ink and silver leaf. Words in High Gothic surrounded a sumptuously detailed picture repeating the image depicted in the jade frieze in the audience chamber – the Emperor granting the first Eurotas his boon. But Spear’s hungry gaze ignored the workmanship, turning instead towards a wet, liquid patch of dark crimson captured upon the featureless white vellum of the Warrant’s final page.

A single drop of blood.

He laid his hand on the edge of the case and let the daemonskin around his fingertips deliquesce, oozing into the weld holding the construction together. The heavy duty armourglass creaked and split down the seam, the malleable flesh pressing on it, shifting it out of true. All at once, a pane gave off a snap of sound, and the killer muffled it with his oily palms. The glass fell out of the frame and into his hand. He greedily reached inside, with trembling fingers.

Spear would rip the page from the ancient book, tear it out of the stasis field that had preserved it for hundreds of years. He would hold the paper to his lips and consume the blood, take it like the kiss of a lover. He would–

His hand reached for the pages of the Warrant of Trade and passed straight through it, as if the book were made of smoke. Inside the glass case, the tome seemed to flicker and grow indistinct, for one blinding moment becoming nothing but a perfect ghost image projected from a cluster of hololithic emitters concealed inside the frame of the cage.

The case was empty; and for a moment so was Spear, his chest hollowed out by the sudden, horrible realisation that his prize was not here.

But then he was filled anew with murderous rage, and it took every last fraction of his self-control to stop the killer from screaming out his fury and destroying everything around him.

After Lady Sinope had left her alone once more, Soalm remained where she was on the ridge and waited for the darkness to engulf her. The night sky, a sight that so often gave her a moment of peace as she contemplated it, now seemed only to veil the threats the old woman had spoken of. She shivered involuntarily and felt a cold, familiar pressure at the edge of her senses.

‘Iota.’ She turned and found the Culexus standing near the cave entrance, watching her. The dusky-skinned girl’s eyes glittered. ‘Spying on me?’

‘Yes,’ came the reply. ‘You should not remain outside for too long. There are ships in orbit and satellite systems under the control of the clan forces. They will be sweeping this zone with their long-range imagers.’

‘How long have you been watching?’

‘I do not believe He is the forgiving kind,’ she repeated, fingering the nullifier torc around her neck.

Soalm frowned. ‘You have no right to intrude on a private conversation!’

If that was meant to inspire guilt in Iota, she gave no such reaction. The pariah seemed unable to grasp the niceties of such concepts as privacy, tact or social graces. ‘What did the woman Sinope mean, when she spoke about “forces at large”?’ Iota shook her head. ‘She did not refer to threats of a military nature.’

‘It’s complicated,’ said Soalm. ‘To be honest, I’m not quite sure myself.’

‘But you value her words. And the words in the book.’

Soalm’s blood ran cold. ‘What book?’

‘The one in the chamber on the lower levels. Where the others gather with Sinope to talk about the Emperor as a god. You have been there.’

‘You followed me?’ Soalm took a warning step forwards.

‘Yes. Later I returned when no one was there. I read some of the book.’ Iota looked away, still toying with the torc. ‘I found it confusing.’

Soalm studied the Culexus, her mind racing. If Iota revealed the presence of the hidden chapel inside the rebel base, there was no way to predict what would happen. Many of Capra’s resistance fighters followed the staunchly anti-theist Imperial edict that labelled all churches as illegal; and she could not imagine what Eristede might do if he learned she had involvement with the Lectitio Divinitatus.

‘Kell will not be pleased,’ said the other woman, as if she could read her thoughts.

‘You won’t speak of it,’ Soalm insisted. ‘You will not tell him!’

Iota cocked her head. ‘He is blood kindred to you. The animus speculum reads the colour of your auras. I saw the parity between them the first time I watched you through the eyes of my helm. And yet you keep that a secret too.’

Soalm tried and failed to keep the shock from her face. ‘And what other secrets do you know, pariah?’

She returned a level stare. ‘I know that you are now considering how you might ensure my silence by killing me. If you make the attempt, there is a chance you may succeed. But you are conflicted by the thought of such an action. It is something your… brother… would not hesitate to do in your place.’

‘I am not Eristede,’ she insisted.

‘No, you are not.’ Iota’s face softened. ‘What is it like?’

‘What?’

‘Having kindred. Siblings. I have no concept or experience of it. I was matured in an enclosed environment. A research facility. Your experience… fascinates me. What is it like?’ she repeated

Strangely, Soalm felt a momentary pang of sadness for the Culexus. ‘Difficult,’ she replied, at length. ‘Iota, listen to me. Please, say nothing to the others about the chapel.’

‘If I do not, will you try to kill me?’

‘Will you force me?’

The Culexus shook her head. ‘No.’

Where? Where was the Warrant?

The question thundered through Spear’s mind and it would not let him go. He could not find rest, could not find a moment’s peace until the document had been located. Everything about his master’s careful, intricate plan hinged on the procurement of that one item. Without it, the assassination of the Emperor of Mankind was impossible. Spear was useless, a gun unloaded, a sword blade blunted. His existence had no meaning without the kill. Every single death he had performed, all of them, from the strangling of his birthparents to the ashing of the Word Bearer who came to slit his throat, the fools on Iesta Veracrux, the psy-witch, the investigators and the man whose face he now wore – all of them were only steps on a road towards his ultimate goal.

And now, Merriksun Eurotas had denied him that. The bloody rage Spear felt towards the Void Baron was so all-consuming that the killer feared merely laying eyes on the man would shatter his cover and send him into a berserker frenzy.

Spear had all but the most trivial of Hyssos’s memories absorbed within him, and the operative had never known that the Warrant of Trade on display in the reliquary was a fake. There were fewer than a dozen men and women in the entire Eurotas Consortium who outranked the operative in matters of security… Spear wondered if one of them might know the true location of the tome. But how to be sure? He could kill his way through them and never be certain if they had that precious knowledge until he sucked it from their dying minds; but he could not risk such reckless behaviour.

Eurotas himself would know. But murdering the Void Baron here and now, disposing of a body, passing through another assumption so soon after having torn Hyssos’s identity from his corpse… This was a course fraught with danger, far too risky to succeed.

No. He needed to find another way, and quickly.

‘Hyssos?’ The nobleman’s voice was pitched high and sharp. ‘What are you doing here?’

Spear looked up as Eurotas crossed the anteroom of the rogue trader’s personal quarters where he stood waiting. ‘My lord,’ he began, moderating his churning thoughts. ‘Forgive my intrusion, but I must speak with you.’

Eurotas glanced over his shoulder as he tied a velvet belt around the day robes he was wearing. Through a half-open door, it was possible to glimpse a sleeping chamber beyond. A naked woman was lying in a doze back there on a snarl of bed sheets. ‘I am engaged,’ the baron said, with a grimace. He seemed distracted. ‘Come to the audience chamber after we enter the warp, and–’

‘No sir,’ Spear put a little steel into Hyssos’s voice. ‘This won’t wait until we set off for Arrowhead. If I am correct, we may need to return to Iesta Veracrux.’

That got his attention. Eurotas’s eyes narrowed, but not enough to hide the flicker of fear in them. ‘Why would that be so?’

‘I have been retracing my steps, going over my notes and recollections from the Iestan murders.’ He fixed the baron with a level gaze and began to pay out the fiction he had created over the last few hours; a fiction he hoped would force the nobleman to give up the information he so desperately needed. ‘The two men… Yosef Sabrat and Daig Segan, the ones who did those terrible deeds. There was something they said that did not seem right to me, at the end when I thought I would be killed by them.’

‘Go on.’ Eurotas went to a servitor and had it pour him a glass of water.

‘Sir, they spoke about a warrant.’ The baron stiffened slightly at the word. Spear smiled inwardly and went on. ‘At the time I thought they meant warrants of arrest… But the thought occurs that they may have been talking about something else.’ He nodded towards a painting on the wall, an impressionistic work showing the current Void Baron reading from the Warrant of Trade as if it were some scholarly volume of esoteric knowledge.

‘Why would they be interested in the Warrant?’ Eurotas demanded.

‘I do not know. But these were no ordinary murderers, sir. We still cannot be certain by what exact means they terminated poor Perrig… And the things they did at the sites of their kills in the name of their Theoge cult–’

‘They were not part of the Theoge!’ snapped the baron, the retort coming out of nowhere. He shook his head and paced away a few steps. ‘I always knew…’ said the nobleman, after a moment of silence. ‘I always knew that Erno Sigg was innocent. That’s why I sent you, Hyssos. Because I trusted you to find the truth.’

Spear bowed, allowing his stolen face to grow saddened. ‘I hope I did not disappoint you. And you were correct, my lord. Sigg was a dupe.’

‘Those murdering swine were not part of the Theoge,’ Eurotas repeated, turning to advance on him once more. His face had lost some of its earlier colour and his gaze was turned inwards.

‘High-Reeve Telemach seemed to think otherwise,’ Spear pressed. ‘If I may ask, why do you disagree with her?’ The killer saw something ephemeral pass over the other man’s face; the shadow of a hidden truth. The understanding was coming up from Hyssos’s captured persona, from the operative’s instinctive grasp of fragile human nature, his ability to perceive the falsehood in the words of a liar. Spear let it rise; Eurotas was going to incriminate himself, if he could only be encouraged to do so. The Void Baron had known more than he had revealed about this situation all along, and only now was it coming to light.

‘I… I will tell you what I… believe,’ said the nobleman, moving to the door to close it. ‘Those madmen on Iesta Veracrux were not just spree killers tormenting and bloodletting to satisfy their own insanity. I am certain now that they were agents of the Warmaster Horus Lupercal, may he rot. They were part of a plot that casts a shadow over the Taebian Sector, perhaps over the whole galaxy!’ He shuddered. ‘We have all heard the rumours about the… things that happen on the worlds that have fallen.’ Then his tone grew more intense. ‘Discrediting the Theoge and blackening the name of our clan is just one part of this conspiracy of evil.’

Spear said nothing, dissembling the man’s words in his thoughts. It was clear now why Eurotas had been so quick to call the matter closed and depart from Iesta Veracrux as fast as decorum would allow. The involvement of Erno Sigg in the murders had been bad enough, but Eurotas had to be sure that sooner or later the clan’s name would become connected to the incident in another, more damning way. He was afraid…

On a swift and sudden impulse, Spear rocked off his feet from where he stood at attention and snatched at the Void Baron’s robes, pulling the man off-balance.

‘What in Terra’s name do you think you are doing?’ Eurotas cried out, affronted at the abrupt assault.

But in the next second his flash of anger died in his throat when Spear pulled up the voluminous sleeve of his robe to reveal a golden chain tight around his wrist, and on it the shape of an aquila sigil. This time he couldn’t resist letting a small smile creep out over Hyssos’s lips. ‘You’re one of them.’

Eurotas shrugged him off and backed away, a guilty cast coming to his eyes. ‘What are you talking about? Get out. You’re dismissed.’

‘I think not, sir.’ Spear gave him a hard look. ‘I think an explanation is in order.’

For a moment, the man teetered on the verge of shouting him down, calling in his personal guard from the corridor outside; but Hyssos’s unerring sense for the hidden told Spear that Eurotas would not. The dead man’s instincts were correct. The nobleman’s shoulders slumped and he planted himself in an ornamental chair, staring into the middle distance.

Spear waited for the confession that he knew would come next; men like the Void Baron lacked the will or the strength to really inhabit a lie. In the end, they welcomed the chance to unburden themselves.

‘I am not…’ He paused, trying to find the right words. ‘The people who call themselves the Theoge came after, do you see? It was we who came first. We carried the message from Terra, in safe keeping aboard our ships, across the entire sector. Every son and daughter of the Eurotas family has been a participant in the Lectitio Divinitatus, since the day of the boon. We carry the Emperor’s divinity with us.’ He said the words with rote precision, without any real energy or impetus behind them.

Spear recalled what Daig Segan had said just before he had torn him open. ‘The Emperor protects…’

Eurotas nodded solemnly; but it was abundantly clear that the light of true belief, the blind faith that Segan had shown in his dying moments, was in no way reflected in the Void Baron. If the nobleman was a believer in the cult of the God-Emperor, then it was only as one who paid lip service to it, because it was expected of him. Spear’s lip curled, his disgust for the man growing by the moment; he did not even have the courage of his convictions.

‘It is our hidden duty,’ Eurotas went on. ‘We spread the word of His divinity in quiet and secrecy. Our clan has been allied to groups like the Theoge on dozens of worlds, for centuries.’ He looked away. ‘But I never truly… That is, I did not…’

Spear watched and waited, saying nothing. As he expected, Eurotas was compelled to fill the silence.

‘Horus is destroying everything. Every thread of power and influence we have, broken one at a time. And now he strikes not only at our holdings, but at the network my forefathers built to carry the word of the Lectitio Divinitatus.’

‘A network of clandestine authority the Eurotas have used to control the Taebian Sector for hundreds of years.’ Spear shook Hyssos’s head. The human’s arrogance was towering; he actually believed that a being as great as the Warmaster would lower himself to such parlour games as disrupting the ambitions of a single petty, venal rogue trader. The reality was, the slow collapse of the Eurotas clan’s fortunes was just a side effect of Horus’s advance across the Ultima Segmentum.

Still; it would serve Spear’s interests to allow the man to think he was the focus of some interstellar conspiracy, when in fact he and all his blighted clan were little more than a means to an end.

‘Ever since the conclusion of the Great Crusade, it has become harder and harder to hold on to things…’ Eurotas sighed. ‘Our fortunes are on the wane, my friend. I have tried to hide it, but it grows worse every day. I thought perhaps, when we return to Terra, I could petition the Sigillite for an audience, and then–’

‘Where is the Warrant of Trade?’ Spear was growing tired of the Void Baron, and he struck out with the question.

Eurotas reacted as if he had been slapped. ‘It… In the reliquary, of course.’ The lie was a poor one at best.

‘I am your senior security operative, sir,’ Spear retorted. ‘Please credit me with some intelligence. Where is the real Warrant?’

‘How did you know?’ He shot to his feet, knocking the water glass to the floor where it shattered. A service mechanical skittered in across the carpet to clean up the breakage, but Eurotas paid it no heed. ‘Only three people…’ He paused, composing himself. ‘When… did you find out?’

Spear studied him. ‘That is of no consequence.’ After the abortive infiltration of the reliquary, the killer had been careful to ensure that no trace of his entry remained. ‘What matters is that you tell me where the real Warrant is now. If you are correct about these agents in the employ of the Warmaster, then we must be certain it is secure.’

‘They were looking for it…’ whispered Eurotas, shocked by the thought.

When the baron looked up at him with cold fear in his eyes, Spear knew that he had the man in his grasp. ‘My sworn duty is to serve the Eurotas clan and their endeavours. That includes your… network. But I cannot do that if the Warrant becomes lost.’

‘That must never happen.’ The Void Baron swallowed hard. ‘It is… not with the fleet. You have to understand, I had little choice. There were certain arrears that could not be paid, favours that were required in order to keep the clan operating–’

‘Where?’ Spear cracked Hyssos’s gruff voice like a whip.

Eurotas looked away, abashed. ‘The Warrant of Trade was touched by the hand of the God-Emperor of Mankind, and so in the eyes of those who embrace the word of the Lectitio Divinitatus, it is a holy object. In exchange for the nullification of a number of very large debts, I agreed to allow an assemblage of nobles involved with the Theoge to take possession of the Warrant for… for an extended period of pilgrimage.’

‘What nobles?’ Spear demanded. ‘Where?’

‘They have not answered my communications. I fear they may be dead or in hiding. When Horus’s forces find them, they will be wiped out, and the Warrant will be destroyed…’ His lip trembled. ‘If it has not already been.’ Eurotas looked up. ‘The Warrant is on the planet Dagonet.’

Finally. The answer. For a long moment, Spear considered breaking out of Hyssos’s restrictive body and reverting back to his kill-form, just to show Eurotas what sort of fool he was the instant before he ripped him to shreds; but instead he let the rage ebb and gave a sullen nod. ‘I will need a ship, then. The fastest cutter available.’

‘You cannot go to Dagonet!’ Eurotas insisted. ‘The government there has already declared for the Warmaster! There is word that the Sons of Horus are on their way to the planet at this very moment… It’s suicide! I won’t allow it.’

Spear twisted his proxy flesh into a sorrowful smile, and gave a shallow bow. ‘I swear to you I will recover the Warrant, my lord. As of this moment, my life has no other purpose.’

At length, the nobleman nodded. ‘Very well. And may the Emperor protect you.’

‘We can but hope,’ he replied.

Thirteen

Faith or Duty
Bonded
The Warrant

The summons came from the Vindicare, and so Iota joined Kell and the rest of the Execution Force in one of several storage rooms down in the web of caves, away from the more heavily-populated sections of the hideaway. The room smelled of promethium; drums of the liquid fuel were stacked to the ceiling in corners, and the air circulation system worked in fits and starts.

Kell had been careful to time the gathering to coincide with the regular overflights of clan patrol craft; every time it happened, the rebels would fall silent, go dark, and wait for the flyers to make their loop over the Bladecut before heading back to the city. It meant that Capra, Beye, Grohl and the others were all occupied, allowing the assassins to gather unnoticed, at least for a little while.

The Vindicare surveyed the room, looking at them all in turn. Iota noted that he looked to Soalm last of all, and seemed to linger on her. She wondered if his sibling understood the meaning behind that fractional moment. Iota regarded her understanding of human social interaction as an ongoing experiment, but her limited knowledge also afforded her a clarity that others lacked; for all the distance between the brother and sister, it seemed obvious to the Culexus that Kell cared for Soalm more than the woman knew – or wanted to know.

‘We’re entering the final phase,’ Kell said, without preamble. ‘Beye’s contacts in the city have sent word of sightings at the perimeter of the Dagonet system. Warp disturbances. The prelude to the opening of a gateway.’

‘How long until we know for sure?’ asked Koyne. The Callidus looked like a child’s doll the size of a man, all sketched, incomplete features and pale skin.

‘We can’t stay put and wait for confirmation,’ Tariel said, without looking up from his cogitator gauntlet’s keyboard. ‘By the time the warships enter orbit it will be too late.’

The Garantine made a rumbling noise in the back of his throat that appeared to be an affirmation.

‘We commit now,’ said Kell. ‘The Lance has been concealed, yes?’ He looked at Tariel, who nodded.

‘Aye,’ said the infocyte. ‘Grohl supplied transport from the star-port. I supervised the assembly of the component parts myself. It’s ready.’

‘But there’s no way to test it, is there?’ Koyne leaned forwards. ‘If this doesn’t work…’

‘It will work,’ Kell insisted. ‘Everything we’ve done has been leading up to this moment. We’re not going to start second-guessing ourselves now.’

‘I was only making an observation,’ said the shade. ‘As I will be the closest to the target, I think it’s fair to say I have the most invested in a trouble-free termination.’

‘Don’t fret,’ said the Eversor. ‘You won’t get too dirty.’

‘We have fall-back options in place.’ Kell ignored the comment and nodded towards Iota and Soalm. ‘But for now, we concentrate on the primary schema.’ He paused and threw Tariel a look.

The Vanus operative consulted a timer window among the panes of hololiths hanging before him, and then glanced up. ‘The clanner patrols should be heading back to the capital at any moment.’

‘And we’ll follow them.’ Kell reached for his spy mask where it hung from his gear belt. ‘You all have your own preparations to make. I suggest you complete them in short order and then head out. Each of us will go back into the capital individually via different routes, and rendezvous at the star-port. I’ll be waiting for you aboard the Ultio after sunset.’

The only member of the group who did not move after Kell’s dismissal was Soalm. She looked at the Vindicare, her lips thinning. ‘Has Capra been informed?’

‘Don’t be a fool!’ snorted the Eversor, before the other man could even speak. ‘We may have killed one of the turncoats in this little play-gang of rebels, but there are likely others, watching and waiting for something juicy to report before they betray this place.’ The Garantine opened his clawed hands. ‘These people are amateurs. They can’t be trusted.’

Soalm was still looking at Kell. ‘What are they supposed to do after it is done?’

Iota saw colour rise in the Vindicare’s cheeks, but he kept his temper in check. ‘Capra is resourceful. He’ll know what to do.’

‘If he has any sense,’ muttered Koyne, ‘he’ll run.’

Soalm turned away and was the first from the chamber.

Jenniker reached the compartment Beye had assigned to her and went in. What little equipment she had was there, cunningly disguised as a lady traveller’s attaché. It seemed strangely out of place among such drab accommodation, on the Imperial Army-surplus bedroll beside a drawstring bag of ration packs. She paused, studying it.

Inside the case, concealed inside clever modules and secret sections, there were vials of powder, flat bottles of colourless fluid, thin strips of metallised chemical compounds, injectors and capsules and dermal tabs. The manner and means to end an entire city’s worth of human lives, if need be.

For a while she thought about how simple it would be to introduce a philtre of time-release metasarin into the water system of the rebel hideout. Tailored with the right mix, she could make it painless for them. They would just fall asleep, never to wake. They would be spared the brutal deaths that were fated to them all – the payment that would be exacted no matter if the Execution Force succeeded or failed. She thought about Lady Sinope, of trusting Beye and the ever-suspicious Grohl.

Some might have said it would be a mercy. The Warmaster was not a magnanimous conqueror.

Soalm shook her head violently to dispel the thought, and hated herself in that instant. ‘I am not Eristede,’ she whispered to the air.

A sharp knock at the rusted metal door startled her. ‘Hello?’ said a voice. She recognised it as one of the men she had seen in the makeshift chapel. ‘Are you in there?’

She slid the door open. ‘What is it?’

The man’s face was flushed with worry. ‘They’re coming,’ he husked. She didn’t need to ask who they were. If Beye’s contacts in the city had spoken to Capra, then it was logical to assume that others in the rebel encampment knew of what was on the horizon as well.

‘I know.’

He pressed something into her palm. ‘Sinope gave me this for you.’ It was a tarnished voc-locket, a type of portable recording device that lovers or family members gave to one another as a memento. The device contained a tiny, short-duration memory spool and hologram generator. ‘I’ll be outside.’ He pulled the door shut and Soalm was alone in the room again.

She turned the locket over in her hands and found the activation stud. Holding her breath, she squeezed it.

A grainy hololith of Lady Sinope’s face, no larger than Jenniker’s palm, flickered into life. ‘Dear child,’ she began, an urgency in her words that Soalm had not heard before, ‘forgive me for not asking this of you in person, but circumstances have forced me to leave the caves. The man who gave you this is a trusted friend, and he will bring you to me.’ The noblewoman paused and she seemed to age a decade in the space of a single breath. ‘We need your help. At first I thought I might be mistaken, but with each passing day it has become clearer and clearer to me that you are here for a reason. He sent you, Jenniker. You said yourself that you are only “a messenger”… And now I understand what message you must carry.’ The image flickered as Sinope glanced over her shoulder, distracted by something beyond the range of the locket’s tiny sensor-camera. She looked back, and her eyes were intense. ‘I have not been truthful with you. The place you saw, our chapel… There’s more than just that. We have a… I suppose you could call it a sanctuary. It is out in the wastes, far from prying eyes. I will be there by the time you receive this. I want you to come here, child. We need you. He needs you. Whatever mission may have brought you to Dagonet, what I ask of you now goes beyond it.’ She felt the woman’s gaze boring into her. ‘Don’t forsake us, Jenniker. I know you believe with all your heart, and even though it pains me to do so, I must ask you to choose your faith over your duty.’ Sinope looked away. ‘If you refuse… The rains of blood will fall all the way to Holy Terra.’

The hologram faded and Soalm found her hands were shaking. She could not look away from the locket, grasping it in her fingers as if it would magically spirit her away from this place.

Lady Sinope’s words, her simple words, had cut into her heart. Her emotions twisted tight in her chest. She was a sworn agent of the Officio Assassinorum, a secluse of the Clade Venenum ranked at Epsilon-dan, and she had her orders. But she was also Jenniker Soalm – Jenniker Kell – a daughter of the Imperium of Man and loyal servant of the divine God-Emperor of Humanity.

Which path would serve Him best? Which path would serve His subjects best?

Try as she might, she could not shake off the power behind Sinope’s message. The quiet potency of the noblewoman had bled into the room, engulfing her. Soalm knew that what she was being asked to do was right – far more so than a blood-soaked mission of murder that would only lead to death on a far greater scale.

The church of the Lectitio Divinitatus on Dagonet needed her. When she had needed help after mother and father – and then Eristede – had been lost to her, it was the word of the God-Emperor that had given her strength. Now that debt was to be answered.

In the end she realised there was no question of what to do next.

The door opened with a clatter, and the rebel soldier started, turning to see the pale assassin woman standing on the threshold. She had an elaborately-etched wooden case over her shoulder on a strap, and was in the process of attaching a holstered bact-gun to her belt. She looked up, her hood already up about her head. ‘Sinope said you would take me to her.’

He nodded gratefully. ‘Yes, of course. This way. Follow me.’ The rebel took a couple of steps and then halted, frowning. ‘The others… Your comrades?’

‘They don’t need to know,’ said Soalm, and gestured for him to carry on. The two of them disappeared around a curve in the corridor, heading up towards the surface.

From the shadows, Iota watched them go.

Spear loathed the warp.

When he travelled through the screaming halls of the immaterium, he did his best to ensure that he did so in stasis, his body medicated into hibernation – or failing that, if he were forced to remain awake by virtue of having assumed the identity of another, then he prepared himself with long hours of mental rituals.

Both were in order to calm the daemonskin. In the realms of normal space, on a planet or elsewhere, the molecule-thin layer of living tissue bonded to his birth flesh was under his control. Oh, there were times when it became troublesome, when it tried to defy him in small ways, but in the end Spear was the master of it. And as long as it was fed, as long as he sated it with killings and blood, it obeyed.

But in the depths of warp space, things were different. Here, with only metres of steel and the gauzy energy web of a Geller field between him and the thunder and madness of the ethereal, the daemonskin became troublesome. Spear wondered if it was because it sensed the proximity of its kindred out there, in the form of the predatory, almost-sentient life that swarmed unseen in the wake of the starships that passed.

Eurotas had granted him the use of a ship called the Yelene, a fast cutter from the Consortium’s courier fleet designed to carry low-mass, high-value cargoes on swift system-to-system runs. The Yelene’s crew were among the best officers and men the clan had to offer, but Spear barely registered them. He gave the captain only two orders; the first was to make space for Dagonet at maximum speed; the second was not to disturb him during the journey unless the ship was coming apart around them.

The crew all knew who Hyssos was. Among some levels of the Eurotas clan’s hierarchy, he was seen as the Void Baron’s attack dog, and that reputation served Spear well now, glowering through another man’s face at everyone he saw, before locking himself into the opulent passenger cabin provided for his use. The cabin was detailed in rich, red velvet that made the murderer feel like he was drowning in blood. That comforted him, but only for a while.

Once the Yelene was in the thick of the warp, the daemonskin awoke and cried in his mind like a wounded, whining animal. It wanted to be free, and for a long moment, so did Spear.

He pushed the thought away as if he were drawing back a curtain, but it snagged on something. Spear felt a pull deep in his psyche, clinging to the tails of the disloyal emotion.

Sabrat.

NO NO NO NO

Furious, Spear launched himself at a bookcase along one of the walls and slammed his head into it, beating his malleable face bloody. The impact and the pain forced the remnant of the dead reeve’s persona away again, but the daemonskin was still fretting and writhing, pushing at his tunic, issuing tendrils from every square centimetre of bare flesh.

It would not obey him. The moment of slippage, the instant when the corpse-mind shard had risen to the fore, had allowed the daemonskin to gain a tiny foothold of self-control.

‘That won’t do,’ he hissed aloud, and strode over to the well-stocked drinks cabinet. Spear found a bottle of rare Umbran brandy and smashed it open at the neck. He doused the bare skin of his arms with the rich, peaty liquid and the tendrils flinched. Then, he tore open the lid of a humidor on a nearby desk and took the ever-taper from within. At the touch of his thumb, it lit and he jabbed it into the skin. A coating of bluish flame engulfed his hands and he bunched his fists, letting the pain seep into him.

The fire and the pain.

Outside the ship there is nothing but fire. Inside, only pain.

Where he stands, he is shackled to the deck by an iron chain thicker than a man’s forearm, heavy double links reaching to a manacle around his right leg. It is so tightly fastened that he would need to sever the limb at the knee to gain his freedom.

His attention is not on this, however. One wall of the chamber in which the master’s warriors placed him is not there. Instead, there is only fire. Burning madness. He is aware that a thin membrane of energy separates that inferno from him. How this is possible he cannot know; such science-sorcery is beyond him.

He knows only that he is looking into the warp itself, and by turns the warp looks back into him.

He howls and pulls at the chain. The runes and glyphs drawn all over his naked body are itching and inflamed, cold-hot and torturing him. The warp is pulling at the monstrous, unknowable words etched into him. He howls again, and this time the master answers.

‘Be afraid,’ Erebus tells him. ‘The fear will smooth the bonding. It will give it something to sink its teeth into.’

He can’t tell where the voice is coming from. Like so many times before, ever since the opening of the cage, Erebus seems to be inside his thoughts whenever he wishes to be. Sometimes the master comes in there and leaves things – knowledge, ability, thirsts – and sometimes he takes things instead. Memories, perhaps. It’s not easy to be certain.

He has questions; but they die in his throat when he sees the thing coming from the deeps of the warp. It moves like mercury, shimmering and poisonous. It sees him.

Erebus anticipates his words. ‘A minor phylum of warp creature,’ explains the master. ‘A predator. Dangerous but less than intelligent. Cunning, in a fashion.’

It is coming. The gauzy veil of energy trembles. Soon it will pucker and open, just for the tiniest of moments. Enough to let it in.

‘It can be domesticated,’ says the Word Bearer. ‘If one has the will to control it. Do you have the will, Spear?’

‘Yes, master–’

He does not finish his words. The predator-daemon finds the gap and streams through it, into the opened bay of the starship. It smothers him, skirling and shrieking its joy at finding a rich, easy kill.

This is the moment when Erebus allows himself a noise of amusement; this is the moment when the daemon, in its limited way, realises that everywhere it has touched Spear’s flesh, across every rune and sigil, it cannot release. It cannot consume.

And he collapses to the deck, writhing in agony as it tries to break free, fails, struggles, and finally merges.

As the hatch closes off the compartment from the red hell outside, Spear hears the master’s voice receding.

‘It will take you days of agony to dominate it, and failure will mean you both die. The magicks etched into you cannot be broken. You are bonded now. It is your skin. You will master it, as I have mastered you.’

The words echo and fade, and then there is only his screaming, and the daemon’s screaming.

And the fire and the pain.

A thin and cold drizzle had come in with the veil of night, and all across the star-port, the rain hissed off the cracked, battle-damaged runways and landing pads in a constant rush of sound. Water streamed off the folded wingtips of the Ultio’s forward module, down through the broken roof of the hangar, spattering against the patch of dry ferrocrete beneath the vessel where it crouched low to the ground. It resembled an avian predator, ready to throw itself into the sky; but for now the ship’s systems were running in dark mode, with nothing to betray its operable state to the infrequent patrols that passed by.

The star-port had remained largely abandoned since the start of the insurrection. It was still a long way down the clanner government’s long list of important infrastructure repairs. Rebel strikes against power stations and communications towers made sure of that, although Capra had been careful that lines of supply were kept open so that the native populace would not starve. He was winning hearts and minds, for all the good that would do him in the long run.

Kell stood at the foot of the Ultio’s landing ramp and peered into the rain through the eye band of his spy mask, letting the built-in sensors do their work, considering the freedom fighters once more. How would they react when they found the members of Kell’s team gone? Would they think they had been betrayed? Perhaps so. After all, they had been, in a way. And when the mission reached its endpoint, Capra would know full well who had been behind it.

‘Any sign?’ Tariel’s voice filtered down from above him. ‘The pilot-brain reports that the passive sensors registered a blip a short time ago, but since then, nothing.’

Kell didn’t look up at him. ‘Status?’

Tariel gave a sigh. ‘The Garantine has sharpened his knives so much he could slice the raindrops in two. I am monitoring the public and military vox-nets, and I have prepared and loaded all my data phages and blackouts. Koyne is in the process of mimicking the form of the troop commander we captured. I take it the Culexus and the Venenum have still yet to arrive?’

‘Your powers of perception are as sharp as ever.’

‘How long can we afford to wait?’ he replied. ‘We’re very close to the deployment time as it is.’

‘They’ll be here,’ Kell said, just as something shimmered in the downpour beyond the open hangar doors.

‘I am,’ said Iota, emerging from the grey rain. Her voice had a strange, echoing timbre inside her skull-helmet. She removed the weapon helm as she stepped into cover, and shook loose the thin threads of her braided hair. ‘I was delayed.’

‘By what?’ Tariel demanded. ‘There’s nobody out there.’

‘Nobody out there now,’ Iota gently corrected.

‘Where’s the Venenum?’ said Kell, his jaw stiffening.

Iota glanced at him. ‘Your sister isn’t coming.’

Kell’s eyes flashed with shock and annoyance. ‘How–?’

Tariel held up his hands in a gesture of self-protection. ‘Don’t look at me. I said nothing!’

The Vindicare grimaced. ‘Never mind. That’s not important. Explain yourself. What do you mean, she’s not coming?’

‘Jenniker has taken on a mission of greater personal importance than this one,’ the Culexus told him.

‘I gave her an order!’ he barked, his ire rising by the second.

‘Yes, you did. And she disobeyed it.’

Kell grabbed the other assassin by the collar and glared at her. He felt the black shadow of the pariah’s soul-shrivelling aura rise off her in a wave, but he was too furious to care. ‘You saw her go, didn’t you? You saw her go and you did nothing to stop it!’

A flicker of emotion crossed Iota’s face, but it was difficult to know what it was. Her dark eyes became solid orbs of void. ‘You will not touch me.’

Kell’s skin tingled and his hand went ice-cold, as if it had been plunged into freezing water. Reflexively he let the Culexus go and his fingers contracted in pain. ‘What were you thinking, girl?’ he demanded.

‘You don’t own her,’ Iota said, in a low voice. ‘You gave up your part in her life.’

The comment came out of nowhere, and Kell was actually startled by it. ‘I… This is about the mission,’ he went on, recovering swiftly. ‘Not about her.’

‘You tell yourself that and you pretend to believe it.’ Iota straightened up and stepped around him.

He turned; at the top of the ramp Tariel had been joined by the Garantine, the Eversor rocking back and forth, his massive hands clenching and unclenching with barely-restrained energy. A middle-aged man in PDF-issue rain slicker stood nearby, toying with a poison knife. The expression of the face that Koyne had borrowed was wrong, ill-fitting in some way that Kell could not express.

‘How much longer?’ snarled the Eversor. ‘I want to kill an Astartes. I want to see how it feels.’ His jittery fingers played with the straps of his skull-mask, and the pupils of his bloodshot eyes were black pinpricks.

Kell made a decision and stepped after the Culexus. ‘Iota. Do you know where she went?’

‘I have an inkling,’ came the reply.

‘Find Soalm. Bring her back.’

‘Now?’ said Tariel, his face falling. ‘Now, of all times?’

‘Do it!’ Kell insisted. ‘If she has been compromised, then our entire mission is blown.’

‘That’s not the reason why,’ said Iota. ‘But we can tell her it is, if you wish.’

The Vindicare pointed back out into the rains, which had begun to grow worse. ‘Just go.’ He looked away. There was something in his chest, something there he had thought long since vanished. An emptiness. A regret. He smothered it before it could take hold, turning it to anger. Damn her for bringing these feelings back to the surface! She was part of a past he had left behind, and he wanted it to remain that way. And yet…

Iota gave him a nod and her helmet rose to cover her face. Without looking back, she broke into a run and was quickly swallowed up by the deluge.

The Garantine came stomping down the ramp, seething. ‘What are you doing, sniper?’ He spat the words at him. ‘That gutless poisoner flees the field and you make things worse by sending the witch away as well? Are you mad?’

‘Is the notorious Garantine actually admitting he needs the help of women?’ said Koyne, in the troop commander’s voice. ‘Wonders never cease.’

The Eversor rage-killer loomed over the Vindicare. ‘You’re not fit to lead this unit, you never were. You’re weak! And now your lack of leadership is compromising us all!’

‘You understand nothing,’ Kell snarled back.

A steel-taloned finger pressed on his chest. ‘You know what’s wrong with your clade, Kell? You’re afraid to get the blood on you. You’re scared of the stink of it, you want things all neat and clean, dealt with at arm’s length.’ The Garantine jerked a thumb at Koyne. ‘Even that sexless freak is better than you!’

‘Charming,’ muttered the Callidus.

The Eversor went on, hissing out each word in pops of spittle through bared teeth. ‘Valdor must have been making sport when he put you in charge of this mission! Do you think we’re all blind to the way you look at that Venenum bitch?’

In an instant, Kell’s Exitus pistol was in his hands and then the muzzle of it was buried in the exposed flesh of the Garantine’s throat, pressing into the stressed muscles and taut veins.

‘Kell!’ Tariel called out a warning. ‘Don’t!’

The Eversor laughed. ‘Go on, sniper. Do it. Up close and personal, for the first time in your life.’ His clawed hands came up and he rammed the gun into the thick flesh beneath his jaw. ‘Prove you have some backbone! Do it!’

For a second Kell’s finger tightened on the trigger; but to murder an Eversor rage-killer at point-blank range would be suicidal. The gene-modifications deep inside the Garantine’s flesh contained within them a critical failsafe system that would, should the assassin’s heart ever stop, create a combustive bio-meltdown powerful enough to destroy everything close at hand.

Instead, Kell put all his effort into a vicious shove that propelled the Garantine away. ‘If I didn’t need you,’ he growled, ‘I’d blow a hole in your spine and leave you crippled and bleeding out.’

The Eversor sniggered. ‘You just made my argument for me.’

‘This is pointless,’ snapped Koyne, striding down the ramp. ‘No mission plan ever works as it should. Every one of us knows that. We can complete the assignment without the women. The primary target is still within our reach.’

‘The Callidus is correct,’ added Tariel, working his cogitator. ‘I’m reconfiguring the protocols now. There are overlapping attack vectors. We can still operate with two losses.’

‘As long as no one else walks off,’ said the Garantine. ‘As long as nothing else changes.’

Kell’s face twisted in a grimace. ‘We’re wasting time,’ he said, turning away. ‘Secure the Ultio and move out to your kill-points.’

The man’s name was Tros, and he didn’t talk much. He led Soalm out of the caverns through a vaulted hall of rock that had once held fuel rods for Dagonet’s long-dead atmosphere converters, and to a waiting GEV skimmer.

Once they were on their way out into the wilds, the noise of the hovercraft’s engines made conversation problematic at best. The assassin decided to sit back behind the rebel and let him drive.

The skimmer was fast. They wound through the canyons of the Bladecut at breakneck speed, and then suddenly the wall of rock dropped away around them, falling into the ochre desert. As storm clouds rolled in above them from the west, they went deeper and deeper into the wilderness. From time to time, Soalm saw what might have been the remains of abandoned settlements; they dated back to the early colonist decades, back to when this desert had been fertile arable land. That had been in Dagonet’s green phase, before the human-altered atmosphere had changed again, shifting the good climate northwards. The population had moved with it, leaving only the shells of their former homes lying like broken, scattered tombstones.

Finally the GEV’s engine note downshifted and they began to slow. Tros pointed to something in the near distance, and Soalm glimpsed the shapes of tents flapping in the winds, low pergolas and yurts arranged around the stubs of another forsaken township. As the skimmer closed in and settled to the sand in a cloud of falling dust, what caught her eye first was the mural of an Imperial aquila along one long pale wall. It looked old, weather-beaten; but at the same time it shone in the fading daylight as if it had been polished to a fine sheen by decades of swirling sand.

There had only been a handful of people in the makeshift chapel hidden in the rebel base, and Soalm had been slightly disappointed to see how few followers of the God-Emperor were counted among the freedom fighters. But she realised now that small group had only been a fraction of the real number.

The followers of the Lectitio Divinitatus were here.

She stepped from the skimmer and walked slowly into the collection of improvised habitats and reclaimed half-buildings. Even at first glance, Soalm could see that there were hundreds of people. Adults and children, young and old, men and women from all walks of life across Dagonet’s society. Most of them wore makeshift sandcloaks or hoods to keep the ochre dust from their mouths and noses. She saw some who carried weapons, but they did so without the twitchy nervousness of Capra’s rebels; one man with a lasgun eyed her as she passed him, and Soalm saw he was wearing the remnants of a PDF uniform, tattered and ripped in the places where the insignia had been stripped off – all except the aquila, which he wore proudly.

These people, the refugees, were in the process of gathering themselves together for the coming night, tying down ropes and securing sheets. Out here, the winds moved swiftly over the open desert and the particles of dark dust would get into everything. The first curls of the breeze pulled at the hems of her robes as she walked on.

Tros matched her pace and pointed to a strangely proportioned building with a slanted wall and a forest of skeletal antennae protruding from where its roof should have been. ‘Over there.’

‘These are Lady Sinope’s followers?’ she asked.

The man gave a snort of amusement. ‘Don’t say that to her face. She’d think it disrespectful.’ Tros shook his head. ‘We don’t follow her. We follow Him. Milady just helps us on the path.’

‘You knew her before the insurrection?’

‘I knew of her,’ he corrected. ‘My da met her once, when she was a younger woman. Heard her speak to a secret meet at Dusker Point. Never thought I’d have the chance myself, though… Milady has done much for us over the years.’

‘Your family have always been a part of the Imperial Cult, then?’

Tros nodded. ‘But that’s not a name we use here. We call ourselves the Theoge.’

They approached the building and at once Soalm realised that it was no such thing. The construction was actually a small ship, a good measure of its keel buried in the cracked, ruddy earth. Beyond it she saw the rusted frames of dock wharfs, extending into the air. Once this place had been a wide river canal.

There were tents arranged along the side of the old vessel, each lit from within by lamplight. ‘The people here are all from Dagonet?’

‘And other worlds on the axis,’ said the man. ‘Some of them were here on pilgrimages in secret. Got trapped when the clanner nobles tipped everything up.’

‘Pilgrimage?’ she repeated. ‘For what reason?’

Tros just nodded again. ‘You’ll see.’ He opened a heavy steel hatch for her and she went inside.

The old ship had once been a freighter, perhaps a civic transport belonging to some branch of the colonial Administratum; now all that stood was the gutted shell, the sandblasted hull and the corroded metal frames of the decks. Inside, the skeleton of the vessel had been repurposed with new walls made of dry stone or steel from the hulls of cargo containers. The door closed with a solid thump behind Soalm and took the brunt of the wind with it. Only a tendril of chill air reached through to paw at the small drifts of sand in the entryway.

‘Child.’ Sinope approached, and she had tears in her eyes. ‘Oh, child, you came. Throne bless you.’

‘I… owed it,’ said the Venenum. ‘I had to.’

Sinope smiled briefly. ‘I never doubted you would. And I know I have asked a lot from you to do this. I have put you at risk.’

‘I was on a mission I did not believe in,’ she replied. ‘You asked me to take up another, for something I do believe in. It was no choice at all.’

The noblewoman took her hand. ‘Your comrades will not see it the same way. They may disown you.’

‘Likely,’ Soalm replied. ‘But I lost what I thought of as my family a long time ago. Since then, the only kinship I have had has been with others who know the God-Emperor as we do.’

‘We are your family now,’ said Sinope. ‘All of us.’

Soalm nodded at the rightness of the old woman’s words, and she felt lifted. ‘Yes, you are.’ But then the moment of brightness faded as her thoughts returned to the content of the voclocket message. She retrieved the device and pressed it back into Sinope’s thin, wrinkled hands. ‘How can I help you?’

‘Come.’ She was beckoned deeper into the shadowed wreck. ‘Things will become clearer.’

The beached ship, like the camp beyond it, was filled with people, and Soalm saw the same expression in all of them; a peculiar mingling of fear and hope. With slow alarm, she began to understand that it was directed towards her.

‘Tros said you have refugees from all over Dagonet here. And from other worlds as well.’

Sinope nodded as she walked. ‘I hope… I pray that there are other gatherings hiding in the wilds. It would be so sad to admit that we are all that is left.’

‘But there must be hundreds of people here alone.’

Another nod. ‘Four hundred sixteen, at last count. Mostly Dagoneti, but a handful of visitors from other worlds in the Taebian Stars.’ She sighed. ‘They came so far and sacrificed so much… And now they will never return home.’

‘Help is coming.’ Soalm had said the lie so many times over the past few weeks that it had become automatic.

The noblewoman stopped and gave her a look that cut right through the falsehood. ‘We both know that is not true. The God-Emperor is embattled and His continued existence is far more important than any one of us.’ She gestured around. ‘If we must perish so that He may save the galaxy, that is a price we will gladly pay. We will meet again at His right hand.’

Sinope’s quiet zeal washed over her. Soalm took a second to find her voice again. ‘How long has the… the Theoge been here?’

‘Before I was born, generations before,’ said the old woman, continuing on. ‘Before the age of the Great Crusade, even. It is said that when the God-Emperor walked the turbulent Earth, even then there were those who secretly worshipped Him. When He came to the stars, that belief came with Him. And then there was the Lectitio Divinitatus, the book that gave form to those beliefs. The holy word.’

‘Is it true that it was written by one of the God-Emperor’s own sons?’

‘I do not know, child. All we can be sure of is that it is the Imperial truth.’ She smiled again. ‘I grew up with that knowledge. For a long time, we and others like us lived isolated lives, ignored at best, decried at worst. We who believed were thought to be deluded fools.’

Soalm looked around. ‘These people don’t look like fools to me.’

‘Indeed. Our numbers have started to swell, and not just here. Groups of believers all across the galaxy are coming together. Our faith knows no boundaries, from the lowliest hiver child to men who walk the palaces of Terra itself.’ She paused, thinking. ‘The darkness sown by the Warmaster has brought many to our fold. In the wake of his insurrection there have been horrors and miracles alike. This is our time of testing, of that I have no doubt. Our creed is in the ascendant, dear child. The day will come when all the stars bend their knee to Holy Terra and the God-Emperor’s glory.’

‘But not yet,’ she said, an edge of bitterness in her voice. ‘Not today.’

Sinope touched her arm. ‘Have faith. We are part of something larger than ourselves. As long as our belief survives, then we do also.’

‘The people from the other worlds,’ Soalm pressed. ‘Tros said they were here on a pilgrimage. I don’t understand that.’

Sinope did not reply. They followed a patched metal staircase into the lower levels of the old ship, treading with care to avoid broken spars and fallen stanchions. Down here the stink of rust and dry earth was heavy and cloying. After a few metres, they came to a thickly walled compartment, armoured with layers of steel and ceramite. Four men, each armed with heavy-calibre weapons, were crowded around the only hatchway that led inside. They had hard eyes and the solid, dense builds of humans from heavy-gravity worlds. The assassin knew immediately that they were, to a man, career soldiers of long and lethal experience.

Each of them gave a respectful bow as Sinope came into the light cast from the lumes overhead, doffing their caps to the old woman. Soalm watched her go to each in turn and talk with them as if they were old friends. She seemed tiny and fragile next to the soldiers, and yet it was clear that they hung on her every word and gesture, like a troupe of devoted sons. Her smiles became theirs.

Sinope gestured to her. ‘Gentlemen, this is Jenniker.’

‘She’s the one?’ said the tallest of the four, a heavy stubber at rest in his hands.

Sinope nodded. ‘You have all served the Theoge so selflessly,’ she told them. ‘and your duty is almost done. Jenniker will take this great burden from you.’

The tall man gave a regretful nod and then snapped his fingers at another of the four. The second soldier worked the thick wheel in the centre of the hatch, and with a squeal of rusted metal, he opened the door to the cargo compartment.

Sinope advanced inside and Soalm followed warily behind her. It was gloomy and warm, and there was a peculiar stillness in the air that prickled her bare skin. The hatch closed with a crunch.

‘Dagonet is going to fall,’ said the noblewoman, soft and sorrowful. ‘Death is close at hand. The God-Emperor’s love will preserve our souls but the ending of our flesh has already been written. He cannot save us.’

Soalm wanted to say something, to give out a denial, but nothing would come.

‘He knows this. That is why, in His infinite wisdom, the Master of Mankind had you brought to us in His stead, Jenniker Soalm.’

‘No,’ she managed, her heart racing. ‘I am here in service to a lie! To perish for a meaningless cause! I have not even been spared the grace to have a truth to die for!’

Sinope came to her and embraced the assassin. ‘Oh, dear child. You are mistaken. He sent you to us because you are the only one who can do what we cannot. The God-Emperor turned your destiny to cross my path. You are here to protect something most precious.’

‘What do you mean?’

The noblewoman stepped away and moved to a small metal chest. She worked a control pad on the surface – a combination of bio-sensor bloodlocks and security layers – and Soalm stepped closer to get a better look. She knew the design; the chest was of advanced Martian manufacture, a highly secure transport capsule fitted with its own internal support fields, capable of long-term survival in a vacuum, even atmospheric re-entry. It was very much out of place here.

The chest opened in a gust of gas, and inside Soalm saw the shimmer of a stasis envelope. Within the ephemeral sphere of slowed time was a book of the most ornate, fantastic design, and it seemed to radiate the very power of history from its open pages.

‘See,’ said Sinope, bowing deeply to the tome. ‘Look, child, and see the touch of His hand.’

Soalm’s gaze misted as tears pricked her eyes. Before her, gold and silver and purple illuminated a stark page of vellum. On it, the portrait of the angelic might of the God-Emperor standing over a kneeling man in the finery of a rogue trader. In the trader’s hands this book; and falling from his Master’s palm, the shimmering droplet of crimson vitae that rested on the recto page. The scarlet liquid glittered like a flawless ruby, frozen in that distant past, as bright and as new as it had been the second it fell.

‘Emperor’s blood…’ she whispered.

Jenniker Soalm sank to her knees in unrestrained awe, bowing her head to the Warrant of Trade of the Clan Eurotas.

Fourteen

Arrival
Let Me See You
Kill Shot

The dawn was close as the Dove-class shuttle dropped from the cold, black sky on its extended aerofoils. The craft made an elongated S-turn and came in from over the wastelands to make a running touchdown on the only runway that was still intact. The landing wheels kicked up spurts of rock dust and sparks as the Yelene’s auxiliary slowed to a shuddering halt, the wings angling to catch the air and bleed off its momentum.

The shuttle was the only source of illumination out among the shadows of Dagonet’s star-port, the running lights casting a pool of white across the cracked, ash-smeared ferrocrete. The surroundings had a slick sheen to them; the rains had only ceased a few hours ago.

No one came out from the dark, lightless buildings to examine the new arrivals; if anyone was still in there, then they were staying silent, hoping that the world would ignore them.

In the cockpit, the pilot and co-pilot exchanged glances. Following the operative’s orders, they had made no attempt to contact Dagonet port control on their way down, but both men had expected to be challenged by the local PDF at least once for entering their airspace unannounced.

There had been nothing. When the Yelene slipped into orbit, no voices had been raised to them. The skies over Dagonet were choked with debris and the remnants of recent conflict. It had tested the skills of the cutter’s bridge crew to keep the vessel from colliding with some of the larger fragments, the husks of gutted space stations or the hulls of dead system cruisers still burning with plasma fires. What craft they had spotted that were intact, the operative ordered them to give a wide berth.

Yelene came as close as she dared to Dagonet and then released the shuttle. On the way down the flight crew saw the devastation. Places where the map-logs said there should have been cities were smoke-wreathed craters glowing with the aftershock of nuclear detonations; other settlements had simply been abandoned. Even here, just over the ridge from the capital itself, the planet was silent, as if it were holding its breath.

‘You saw the destruction,’ said the pilot, watching his colleague skim across the vox channels. ‘All that dust and ash in the atmosphere could attenuate signal traffic. Either that or they’ve shut down all broadcast communications planetwide.’

The other man nodded absently. ‘Wired comm is more secure. They could be using telegraphics instead.’

Before the pilot could answer, the hatch behind them opened and the man called Hyssos filled the doorway. ‘Douse the lights,’ he ordered. ‘Don’t draw more attention than we need to.’

‘Aye, sir.’ The co-pilot did as he was told, and the illumination outside died.

The pilot studied the operative. He had heard the stories about Hyssos. They had said he was a hard man, hard but fair, not a martinet like some commanders the pilot had served with. He found it difficult to square that description with his passenger, though. All through the voyage from the Eurotas flotilla to the planet, Hyssos had been withdrawn and frosty, terse and unforgiving when he did take the time to bother speaking to someone. ‘How do you wish to proceed, operative?’

‘Drop the cargo lift,’ came the reply.

Again, the co-pilot did this with a nod. The elevator-hatch in the belly of the shuttle extended down to the runway; cradled on it was a swift jetbike, fuelled and ready to fly.

‘A question,’ said Hyssos, as he turned this way and that, studying the interior of the shuttle cockpit. ‘This craft has a cogitator core aboard. Is it capable of taking us to orbit on its own?’

‘Aye,’ said the pilot, uncertain of where the question was leading. ‘It’s not recommended, but it can be done in an emergency.’

‘What sort of emergency?’

‘Well,’ began the co-pilot, looking up, ‘if the crew are incapacitated, or–’

‘Dead?’

Hyssos’s hands shot out, the fingers coming together to form points, each one piercing the soft flesh of the men’s necks. Neither had the chance to scream; instead they made awkward gasping gurgles as their throats were penetrated.

Blood ran in thick streams from their wounds, and Hyssos grimaced, turning their heads away so the fluid would not mark his tunic. Both men died watching their own vitae spurt across the control panels and the inside of the canopy windows.

Spear stood for a while with his hands inside the meat of the men’s throats, feeling the tingle of the tiny mouths formed at the ends of his fingertips by the daemonskin, as they lapped at the rich bounty of blood. The proxy flesh absorbed the liquid, the rest of it dribbling out across the grating of the deck plates beneath the crew chairs.

Then, convinced that the daemonskin was in quietus once more, Spear moved to a fresher cubicle to clean himself off before venturing down to the open cargo bay. He decided not to bother with a breather mask or goggles, and eased himself into the jetbike’s saddle. The small flyer was a thickset, heavy block of machined steel, spiked with winglets and stabilators that jutted out at every angle. It responded to his weight by triggering the drive turbine, running it up to idle.

Spear leaned forward, glancing down at a cowled display pane that showed a map of the local zone. A string of waypoint indicators led from the star-port out into the wastelands, following the line of what was once a shipping canal but now a dry bed of dusty earth. The secret destination the Void Baron had given him blinked blue at the end of the line; an old waystation dock abandoned after the last round of climate shifts. The Warrant was there, held in trust.

The murderer laughed at the pulse of anticipation in his limbs, and grasped the throttle bar, sending the turbine howling.

He had to give credit to the infocyte; the location that Tariel had selected for the hide was a good one, high up inside an empty water tower on the roof of a tenement block a kilometre and a half from the plaza. It was for this very reason that Kell rejected it and sought out another. Not because he did not trust the Vanus, but because two men knowing where he would fire from was a geometrically larger risk than one man knowing. If Tariel was captured and interrogated, he could not reveal what he had not been told.

And then there was the matter of professional pride. The water tower was too obvious a locale to make the hide. It was too… easy; and if Kell thought so, then any officer of the PDF down in the plaza might think the same, make a judgement and have counter-snipers put in place.

The dawn was coming up as the Vindicare found his spot. Another tenement block, but this one was removed half the distance again from the marble mall outside the Governor’s halls. From what Kell could determine, it seemed as if the building had been struck two-thirds of the way up by a plummeting aerofighter. The upper floors of the narrow tower were blackened from the fires that had broken out in the wake of the impact, and on the way up, Kell had to navigate past blockades of fallen masonry mixed with wing sections and ragged chunks of fuselage. He came across the tail of the aircraft embedded in an elevator shaft, like the feathers of a thrown dart buried in a target.

Where it had impacted, a chunk of walls and floors was missing, as if something had taken a bite out of the building. Kell skirted the yawning gap that opened out to a drop of some fifty or more storeys and continued his climb. The fire-damaged levels stank of seared plastic and burned flesh, but the thick, sticky ash that coated every surface was dull and non-reflective – an ideal backdrop to deaden Kell’s sensor profile still further. He found the best spot in a room that had once been a communal laundry, and arranged his cameoline cloak between the heat-distorted frames of two chairs. Combined with the deadening qualities of his synskin stealthsuit, the marksman would be virtually invisible.

He tapped a pad on the palm of his glove with his thumb. An encrypted burst transmitter in his gear vest sent a signal lasting less than a picosecond. After a moment, he got a similar message in return that highlighted the first of a series of icons on his visor. Tariel was reporting in, standing by at his kill-point somewhere out in the towers of the western business district. This was followed by a ready-sign from Koyne, and then another from the Garantine.

The two remaining icons stayed dark. Without Iota, they had to do without telepathic cover; if the Sons of Horus decided to deploy a psyker, they would have no warning of it… but then the Warmaster’s Legion had never relied on such things before and the Assassinorum had no intelligence they would do so today. It was a risk Kell was willing to take.

And Soalm… Jenniker. The purpose of a Venenum poisoner was as part of the original exit strategy for the Execution Force. The detonation of several short-duration hypertoxin charges would sow confusion among the human populace of the city and clog the highways with panicking civilians, restricting the movements of the Astartes. But now they would do without that – and Kell felt conflicted about it. He was almost pleased she was not here to be a part of this, that she would not be at risk if something went wrong.

The echo of that thought rang hard in his chest, and the press of the sudden emotion surprised him. He remembered the look in her eyes when she had entered the room in the Venenum manse – the coldness and the loathing. It was identical to the expression she had worn all those years ago, on the day he had told her he was accepting the mission to find mother and father’s killer. Only then, there had also been pity there as well. Perhaps she had lost the capacity to know compassion, over time.

He had hoped, foolishly, he now realised, that she might have come to understand why he had made his choice. The killing of their parents had been an aching, burning brand in his thoughts; the need for raw vengeance, although at the time he had no words to describe it. A deed that could not be undone, and one that could not go unanswered.

And when the kill was finished, after all the deaths it took to reach it… Mother and father were still dead, but he had avenged them, and the cost had only been the love of the last person who cared about him. Kell always believed that if he had the chance to change that moment, to make the choice again, he would have done nothing differently. But after looking his sister in the eye, he found that certainty crumbling.

It had been easy to be angry with her at first, to deny her and hate her back for turning her face from him, eschewing her family’s name. But as time passed, the anger cooled and became something else. Only now was he beginning to understand it had crystallised into regret.

A slight breeze pulled at him and Kell frowned at his own thoughts, dismissing them as best he could. He returned to the mission, made his hide, gathering his gear and assembling what he would need for the duration in easy reach. Backtracking, he rigged the stairwells and corridors leading to the laundry room with pairs of trip-mines to cover his rear aspect, before placing his pistol where he could get to it at a moment’s notice.

Then, and only then, did he unlimber the Exitus longrifle. One of the Directors Tertius at the clade had told him of the Nihon, a nation of fierce warriors on ancient Terra, who it was said could not return their swords to their scabbards after drawing them unless the weapons first tasted blood. Something of that ideal appealed to Kell; it would not be right to cloak such a magnificent weapon as this without first taking a life with it.

He settled into a prone position, running through meditation routines to relax himself and prepare his body, but he found it difficult. Matters beyond the mission – or truthfully, matters enmeshed with it – preyed on him. He frowned and went to work on the rifle, dialling in the imager scope, flicking through the sighting modes. Kell had zeroed the weapon during their time with Capra’s rebels, and now it was like an extension of himself, the actions rote and smooth.

Microscopic sensor pits on the muzzle of the rifle fed information directly to his spy mask, offering tolerance changes and detailing windage measurements. He flicked down the bipod, settling the weapon. Kell let his training find the range for him, compensating for bullet drop over distance, coriolis effect, attenuation for the moisture of the late rains still in the air, these and a dozen other variables. With care, he activated a link between his burst transmitter and the Lance. A new icon appeared a second later; the Lance was ready.

He leaned into the scope. The display became clearer, and solidified. His aiming line crossed from the habitat tower, over the stub of a nearby monument, through the corridor of a blast-gutted adminstratum office, down and down to the open square the locals called Liberation Plaza. It was there that Horus Lupercal had killed the crooked priest-king that had ruled Dagonet’s darkest years, early in the Great Crusade. There, he had expended only one shot and struck such fear into the tyrant’s men that they laid down their guns and surrendered at the sight of him.

A figure swam into view, blurred slightly by the motion of air across the kilometres of distance between them. A middle-aged man in the uniform of a PDF troop commander. As he looked in Kell’s direction, his mouth moved and automatically a lip-reading subroutine built into the scope’s integral auspex translated the words into text.

He’s coming, Kell, read the display. Very soon now.

The Vindicare gave the slightest of nods and used Koyne’s torso to estimate his final range settings. Then the disguised Callidus moved out of view and Kell found himself looking at an empty patch of milk-white marble.

The sandstorm hid her better than any camouflage. Iota moved through it, enjoying the push and pull of the wind on her body, the hiss and rattle of the particles as they scoured her metal skull-helm, plucking at the splines of the animus speculum.

The Culexus watched the world through the sapphire eye of the psionic weapon, feeling the pulse and throb of it on the periphery of her thoughts like a coldness in her brain. Humans moved through the arc of fire and she tracked them. Each of them would register her attention without really knowing it; they would shiver involuntarily and draw their sandcloaks tighter, quickening their step to reach warmth and light and safety a little faster. They sensed her without sensing her, the ominous, ever-present shadow of null she cast falling on them. Children, when she turned her hard, glittering gaze in their direction, would begin to cry and not know the reason. When she passed close to tents full of sleeping figures, she could hear them mutter and moan under their breath; she passed over their dreams like a windborne storm cloud, darkening the skies of their subconscious for a moment before sliding beyond the horizon.

Iota’s pariah soul – or lack thereof – made people turn away from her, made them avert their eyes from the shadowed corners where she moved. It was a boon for her stealth, and with it she entered the sanctuary encampment without raising an alarm. She scrambled up a disused crane gantry, across the empty cab and along the rusted jib. Old cables whined in atonal chorus as the winds plucked at them.

From here she had a fine view of the beached ship at the centre of the settlement. What pathways there were radiated out from here, and she had already spotted the parked skimmer peeking out from beneath a tethered tarpaulin; the last time she had seen that vehicle, it had been in Capra’s hideaway. She settled in and waited.

Eventually, a hatch opened, spilling yellow light into the dusty air, and Iota shifted down along the length of the crane jib, watching.

A quartet of armed men exited, two carrying a small metal chest between them. Following on behind was the Venenum and the old noblewoman who had spoken in such strange ways about the Emperor. Auspex sensors in Iota’s helmet isolated their conversation so she could listen.

Soalm was reaching a hand out to brush it over the surface of the chest, and although she wore her hood up, Iota believed she could see a glitter of high emotion in her eyes. ‘We have a small ship,’ she was saying. ‘I can get the Warrant aboard… But after that–’ She turned her head and a gust of wind snatched the end of the sentence away.

The old woman, Sinope, was nodding. ‘The Emperor protects. You must find Baron Eurotas, return it to him.’ She sighed. ‘Admittedly, he is not the most devoted of us, but he has the means and method to escape the Taebian Sector. Others will come in time to take stewardship of the relic.’

‘I will protect it until that day.’ Soalm looked at the chest again, and Iota wondered what they were discussing; the contents of the coffer had some value that belied the scuffed, weather-beaten appearance of the container. Soalm’s words were almost reverent.

Sinope touched the other woman’s hand. ‘And your comrades?’

‘Their mission is no longer mine.’

Iota frowned at that behind her helm’s grinning silver skull. The Culexus would be the first to admit that her grasp of the mores of human behaviour was somewhat stunted, but she knew the sound of disloyalty when she heard it. With a flex of her legs, she leapt off the rusting crane, the jib creaking loudly as she described a back-flip that put her down right in front of the four soldiers. They were bringing up their guns but Iota already had her needler levelled at Sinope’s head; she guessed correctly that the old woman was the highest value target in the group.

Soalm called out to the others to hold their fire, and stepped forward. ‘You followed me.’

‘Again,’ said Iota, with a nod. ‘You are on the verge of irreversibly compromising our mission on Dagonet. That cannot be allowed.’ From the corner of her eye, the Culexus saw Sinope go pale as she dared to give the protiphage her full attention.

‘Go back to Eristede,’ said the poisoner. ‘Tell him I am gone. Or dead. It doesn’t matter to me.’

Iota cocked her head. ‘He is your brother.’ She ignored the widening of Soalm’s eyes. ‘It matters to him.’

‘I’m taking the Ultio,’ insisted the other woman. ‘You can stay here and take part in this organised suicide if you wish, but I have a greater calling.’ Her eyes flicked towards the chest and back again.

‘Horus comes,’ said Iota, drawing gasps from some of the soldiers. ‘And we are needed. The chance to strike against the Warmaster may never come again. What can you carry in some iron box that has more value than that?’

‘I don’t expect you to understand,’ Soalm replied. ‘You are a pariah; you were born without a soul. You have no faith to give.’

‘No soul…’ Sinope echoed the words, coming closer. ‘Is that possible?’

‘In this chest is a piece of the Emperor’s divinity, made manifest,’ Soalm went on, her eyes shining with zeal. ‘I am going to protect it with my life from the ruinous powers intent on its destruction! I believe this with my heart and spirit, Iota! I swear it in the name of the living God-Emperor of Mankind!’

‘Your beliefs are meaningless,’ Iota retorted, becoming irked by the woman’s irrationality. ‘Only what is real matters. Your words and relics are ephemeral.’

‘You think so?’ Sinope stepped fearlessly towards the Culexus, reaching out a hand. ‘Have you never encountered something greater than yourself? Never wondered about the meaning of your existence?’ She dared to touch the metal face of the skull. ‘Look me in the eye and tell me that. I ask, child. Let me see you.’

Somewhere in the distance, Iota thought she heard a ripple of jet noise, but she ignored it. Instead, uncertain where the impulse came from, she reached up a hand and thumbed the release that let the skull-helmet fold open and retreat back over her shoulders. Her face naked to the winds and sand, she turned her gaze on the old woman and held it. ‘Here I am.’ She felt a question stir in her. ‘Is Soalm right? Can you tell? Am I soulless?’

Sinope’s hand went to her lips. ‘I… I don’t know. But in His wisdom, I have faith that the God-Emperor will know the answer.’

Iota’s eyes narrowed. ‘No amount of faith will stop you from dying.’

The ship came out of the void shrouded in silence and menace.

Rising over the far side of Dagonet’s largest moon like a dragon taking wing, the Astartes battleship came on, prow first, knifing through the vacuum towards the combat-cluttered skies. Wreckage and corpses desiccated by the punishing kiss of space rebounded off the sheer sides of its bow as serried ranks of weapons batteries turned in their sockets to bear on the turning world beneath them. Hatches opened, great irises of thick space-hardened brass and steel yawning to give readiness to launch bays where Stormbird drop-ships and Raven interceptors nestled in their deployment cradles. Bow doors hiding the mouths of missile tubes retreated.

What few vessels there were close to the planet did not dare to share the same orbit, and fled as fast as their motors would allow them. As they retreated, they transmitted fawning, obeisant messages that were almost begging in tone, insisting on their loyalties and imploring the invader ship’s commander to spare their lives. Only one vessel did not show the proper level of grovelling fear – a fast cutter in a rogue trader’s livery, whose crew broke for open space in a frenzy of panic. As a man might stretch a limb to ready it before a day of exercise, the battleship discharged a desultory barrage of beam fire from one of its secondary batteries, obliterating the cutter. This was done almost as an afterthought.

The massive craft passed in front of the sun, throwing a partial occlusion of black shadow across the landscape far below. It sank into a geostationary orbit, stately and intimidating, hanging in place over the capital city as the dawn turned all eyes below to the sky.

Every weapon in the battleship’s arsenal was prepared and oriented down at the surface – torpedo arrays filled with warshots that could atomise whole continents in a single strike, energy cannons capable of boiling off oceans, kinetic killers that could behead mountains through the brute force of their impact. This was only the power of the ship itself; then there was the minor fleet of auxiliary craft aboard it, wings of fighters and bombers that could come screaming down into Dagonet’s atmosphere on plumes of white fire. Swift death bringers that could raze cities, burn nations.

And finally, there was the army. Massed brigades of genetically-enhanced warrior kindred, hundreds of Adeptus Astartes clad in ceramite power armour, loaded down with boltguns and chainswords, power blades and flamers, man-portable missile launchers and autocannons. Hosts of these warlords gathered on the mustering decks, ready to embark at their drop-ship stations if called upon, while others – a smaller number, but no less dangerous for it – assembled behind their liege lord high commander in the battleship’s teleportarium.

The vessel had brought a military force of such deadly intent and utter lethality that the planet and its people had never known the like, in all their recorded history. And it was only the first. Other ships were following close behind.

This was the visitation granted to Dagonet by the Sons of Horus, the tip of a sword blade forged from shock and awe.

Far below, across the white marble of Liberation Plaza, a respectful hush fell over the throng of people who had gathered since the previous day’s dusk, daring at last to venture out into the streets. The silence radiated outward in a wave, crossing beyond the edges of the vast city square, into the highways filled with halted groundcars and standing figures. It bled out through the displays on patched streetscreens at every intersection, relayed by camera ballutes drifting over the Governor’s hall; it fell from the crackling mutter of vox-speakers connected to the national watch-wire.

The quiet came down hard as the planet looked to the sky and awaited the arrival of their redeemer, the owner of their new allegiance. Their war-god.

Soalm’s hands were trembling, but she wasn’t sure what emotion was driving her. The righteous passion erupting from laying eyes on the Warrant rolled and churned around her as if she were being buffeted by more than just the gritty winds – but there was something else there. Iota’s hard words about Eristede had come from out of nowhere, and they pulled her thoughts in directions she did not wish them to go. She shook her head; now of all times was not the moment to lose her way. The ties that had once existed between Jenniker and her brother had been severed long ago, and dwelling on that would serve no purpose. Her hands slipped towards the concealed pockets in the surplice beneath her travelling robe, feeling for the toxin cordes concealed there. She wondered if the Culexus would fight her if she refused to carry out the Assassinorum’s orders. Soalm knew the God-Emperor would forgive her; but her brother never would.

The tension of the moment was broken as two figures approached out of the haze of the sandstorm, from the direction of the dry canal bed. She recognised Tros, his steady, rolling gait. At his side was a dark-skinned man whose threads of grey hair were pulled out behind him by the wind, where they danced like errant serpents. The new arrival had no dust mask or eye-shield, and he gave no sign that the scouring sands troubled him.

Sinope stepped towards him, and from the corner of her eye Soalm saw the noblewoman’s men tense. They were unsure where to aim their guns.

Iota made an odd noise in the back of her throat and her hand went to her face. Soalm thought she saw a flash of pain there.

‘Who is this?’ Sinope was asking.

‘He came in from out of the storm,’ Tros replied, speaking loudly so they all could hear him. Nearby, people had been drawn by the sound of raised voices and they stood at slatted windows or in doorways, watching. ‘This is Hyssos. The Void Baron sent him.’

The dark man bowed deeply. ‘You must be the Lady Astrid Sinope.’ His voice was resonant and firm. ‘My lord will be pleased to hear you are still alive. When we heard about Dagonet we feared the worst.’

‘Eurotas… sent you?’ Sinope seemed surprised.

‘For the Warrant,’ said Hyssos. He opened his hand and there was a thickset ring made of gold and emerald in his palm – a signet. ‘He gave me this so you would know I carry his authority.’

Tros took the ring and passed it to Sinope, who pressed it to a similar gold band on her own finger. Soalm saw a blink of light as the sensing devices built into the signets briefly communed. ‘This is valid,’ said the noble, as if she could not quite believe it.

Iota moved away, and she stumbled a step. Soalm glanced after her. The waif gasped and made a retching noise. The Venenum felt an odd, greasy tingle in the air, like static, only somehow colder.

Hyssos extended his hands. ‘If you please? I have a transport standing by, and time is of the essence.’

‘What sort of transport?’ said Tros. ‘We have children here. You could take them–’

‘Tros,’ Sinope warned. ‘We can’t–’

‘Of course,’ Hyssos said smoothly. ‘But quickly. The Warrant is more important than any of us.’

Something was wrong. ‘And you are here now?’ Soalm asked the question even as it formed in her thoughts. ‘Why did you not come a day ago, or a week? Your timing is very opportune, sir.’

Hyssos smiled, but it did not reach his eyes. ‘Who can fathom the God-Emperor’s ways? I am here now because He wishes it.’ His gaze cooled. ‘And who are you?’ Hyssos’s expression turned stony as he looked past Soalm to where Iota was standing, her whole body quivering. ‘Who are you?’ he repeated, and this time it was a demand.

Iota turned and she let out a shriek that was so raw and monstrous it turned Soalm’s blood to ice. The Culexus girl’s face was streaked with liquid where lines of crimson fell from the corners of her eyes. Weeping blood, she brought up the needler-weapon fixed to her forearm, aiming at Hyssos; with her other hand she reached up and tore away the necklet device that regulated her psionic aura.

Against the close, gritty heat of the predawn, a wave of polar cold erupted from out of nowhere, with the psyker at its epicentre. Everyone felt the impact of it, everyone staggered off their balance – everyone but Hyssos.

‘You pariah whore,’ The man’s expression twisted in odious fury. ‘We’ll do this the hard way, then.’

Soalm saw his face open up like a mechanism made of meat and blood, as ice formed on the sand at her feet. Inside him there were only his glaring black eyes and a forest of fangs about a lamprey mouth.

Rage flared like a supernova and Spear let it fill him. Anger and frustration boiled over; nothing about this bloody mission had gone to plan. It seemed as if at every stage he was being tested, or worse, mocked by the uncaring universe around him as it threw obstacle after obstacle into his path.

First the interruption of the purge and his inability to rid himself of the last vestiges of Sabrat’s sickening morality; then the discovery of the fake Warrant of Trade, and the ridiculous little secret of Eurotas’s shameful idolatry; and now, after an interminable voyage to find it, more of these pious fools clogging the way to his prize. He knew it was there, he could sense the presence of the true Warrant hidden inside that nondescript armoured box, but still they tried to stop him from taking it.

Spear had wanted to do this cleanly. Get in, take what he needed, leave again with a minimum of bloodshed and time wasted. It seemed the fates had other ideas, and the whining, pleading daemonskin was bored. The kills on the shuttle had been cursory things. It wanted to play.

In any event, his hand had been forced, and if he were honest with himself, he was not so troubled by this turn of events. Spear had been so set on the recovery of the Warrant and what it contained that he had hardly been aware of the gloomy presence at the edges of his thoughts until he turned his full attention towards it. Who could have known that something as rare and as disgusting as a psychic pariah would be found here on Dagonet? Was it there as some manner of defence for the book? It didn’t matter; he would kill it.

Unseen by the mortals around them, for a brief second the psyker bitch’s aura of icy negation had clipped the raw, mad flux of the daemonskin and the ephemeral bond that connected it – and Spear, as its merge-mate – to the psionic turmoil of the warp.

He knew then that this encounter was no chance event. The girl was an engineered thing, something vat-grown and modified to be a hole in space-time, a telepathic void given human form. A pariah. An assassin.

The girl’s null-aura washed over him and the daemonskin did not like the touch of it. It rippled and needled him inside, making its host share in the cold agony of the pariah’s mental caress. It refused to hold the pattern of Hyssos, reacting, shivering, clamouring for release. Spear’s near-flawless assumption of the Eurotas operative fractured and broke, and finally, as the rage grew high, he decided to allow it to happen.

The skin-matter masquerading as human flesh puckered and shifted into red-raw, bulbous fists of muscle and quivering, mucus-slicked meat. The uniform tunic across his shoulders and back split as it was pulled past the tolerances of the cloth. Lines of curved spines erupted from his shoulders, while bone blades slick as scimitars emerged from along his forearms. Talons burst through the soles of his boots, digging into drifts of sand, and wet jaws yawned.

He heard the screaming and the wails of those all around him, the sounds of guns and knives being drawn. Oh, he knew that music very well.

Spear let the patina of the Hyssos identity disintegrate and matched the will of the daemonskin’s living weapons to his own; the warpflesh loved him for that.

The first kill he made here was a soldier, a man with a stubber gun that Spear’s extruded bone blades cut in two across the stomach, severing his spine in a welter of blood and stinking stomach matter.

His vision fogged red; somewhere the pariah was crying out in strident chorus with the other women, but he didn’t care. He would get to her in a moment.

The sun rose off to his right, and Kell was aware of it casting a cool glow over the plaza. He changed the visual field of the scope to a lower magnification and watched the line of shadows retreat across the marble flagstones.

The morning light had a peculiarly crystalline quality to it, an effect brought on by particles in the air buoyed across the wastelands on the leading edges of a distant sandstorm. Ambient moisture levels began to drop and the Exitus rifle’s internals automatically compensated, warming the firing chamber by fractions of degrees to ensure the single loaded bullet in the breech remained at an optimal pre-fire state.

The sounds of the crowd reached him, even high up in his vantage point. The noise was low and steady, and it reminded him of the calm seas on Thaxted as they lapped at the shores of black mud and dark rock. He grimaced behind his spy mask and pushed the thought to the back of his mind; now was not the time to be distracted by trivia from his past.

Delicately, so the action would not upset the positioning of the weapon by so much as a millimetre, he thumbed the action selector switch from the safe position to the armed setting. Indicator runes running vertically down the scope’s display informed him that the weapon was now ready to commit to a kill. All that Kell required now was his target.

He resisted the urge to look up into the sky. His quarry would be here soon enough.

A kilometre to the west, Tariel licked dry lips and tapped his hand over the curved keypad on his forearm, acutely aware of how sweaty his palms were. His breathing was ragged, and he had to work to calm himself to the point where he was no longer twitching with unspent adrenaline.

He took a long, slow breath, tasting dust and ozone. In the corridors of the office tower, drifts of paper spilled from files discarded in panic lay everywhere, among lines and lines of abandoned cubicle workspaces left empty after the first shots of rebellion had been fired. No one had come up here since the nobles had forced the Governor to renounce the rule of Terra; the men and women who had toiled in this place had either gone to ground, embraced the new order or been executed. At first, the dead, empty halls had seemed to echo with the sound of them, but eventually Tariel had accepted that the tower was just as much an empty vessel as so many other Imperial installations on Dagonet. Gutted and forsaken in the rush to eschew the Emperor and embrace his errant son.

The Vanus crouched by the side of the Lance, and laid a finger on the side of its cylindrical cowling. The device was almost as long as the footprint of the tower, and it had been difficult to reassemble it in secret. But eventually the components from Ultio’s cargo bay had done as their designers in the Mechanicum promised. Now it was ready, and through the cowling Tariel could feel the subtle vibration of the power core cycling through its ready sequence. Content that the device was in good health, Tariel dropped into a low crouch and made his way to the far windows, which looked down into the valley of the capital and Liberation Plaza. The infocyte was careful to be certain that he would not be seen by patrol drones or ground-based PDF spotters.

He took a moment to check the tolerances and positioning of the hyperdense sentainium-armourglass mirrors for the tenth time in as many minutes. It was difficult for him to leave the mechanism alone; now that he had set a nest of alarm beams and sonic screamers on the lower levels to deal with any interlopers, he had little to do but watch the Lance and make sure it performed as it should. In an emergency, he could take direct control of it, but he hoped it would not come to that. It was a responsibility he wasn’t sure he wanted to shoulder.

Each time he checked the mirrors, he became convinced that in the action of checking them he had put them out of true, and so he would check them again, step away, retreat… and then the cycle of doubt would start once more. Tariel tightened his hands into fists and chewed on his lower lip; his behaviour was verging on obsessive-compulsive.

Forcing himself, he turned his back on the Lance’s tip and retreated into the dusty gloom of the building, finding the place he had chosen for himself as his shelter for when the moment came. He sat and brought up his cogitator gauntlet, glaring into the hololithic display. It told Tariel that the device was ready to perform its function. All was well.

A minute later he was back at the mirrors, cursing himself as he ran through the checks once again.

Koyne strode across the edge of the marble square, as near as was safe to the lines of metal crowd barriers. The shade scanned the faces of the Dagoneti on the other side of them, the adults and the children, the youthful and the old, all seeing past and through the figure in the PDF uniform as they fixed their eyes on the same place; the centre of Liberation Plaza, where the mosaic of an opened eye spread out rays of colour to every point of the compass. The design was in echo of the personal sigil of the Warmaster, and the Callidus wondered if it was meant to signify that he was always watching.

Such notions were dangerously close to idolatry, beyond the level of veneration that a primarch of the Adeptus Astartes should expect. One only had to count the statues and artworks of the Warmaster that appeared throughout the city; the Emperor had more of them, that much was certain, but not many more. And now all the towering sculptures of the Master of Mankind were torn down. Koyne had heard from one of the other PDF officers that squads of clanner troops trained in demolitions had been scouring the city during the night, with orders to make sure nothing celebrating the Emperor’s name still stood unscathed. The assassin grimaced; there was something almost… heretical about such behaviour.

Even here, off towards the edges of the plaza, there was a pile of grey rubble that had once been a statue of Koyne’s liege lord, shoved unceremoniously aside by a sapper crew’s dozer-track. Koyne had gone to look at it; at the top of the wreckage, part of the statue’s face was still intact, staring sightlessly at the sky. What would it see today?

The Callidus turned away, passing a measuring gaze over the nervous lines of PDF soldiers and the robed nobles standing back on the gleaming, sunlit steps of the great hall. Governor Nicran was there among them, waiting with every other Dagoneti for the storm that was about to break. Between them and the barriers, the faint glitter of a force wall was visible with the naked eye, the pane of energy rising high in a cordon around the point of arrival. Nicran’s orders had been to place field generators all around the entrance to the hall, in case resistance fighters tried to take his life or that of one of the turncoat nobles.

Koyne sneered at that. The thought that those fools believed themselves to be high value targets was preposterous. On the scale of the galactic insurrection, they ranked as minor irritants, at best. Posturing fools and narrow-sighted idiots who willingly gave a foothold to dangerous rebels. Moving on, the Callidus found the location that Tariel had chosen – in the lee of a tall ornamental column – and prepared. From here, the view across the plaza was unobstructed. When the kill happened, Koyne would confirm it firsthand.

Suddenly, there was a blast of fanfare from the trumpets of a military band, and Governor Nicran was stepping forward. When he spoke, a vox-bead at his throat amplified his voice.

‘Glory to the Liberator!’ he cried. ‘Glory to the Warmaster! Glory to Horus!’

The assembled crowd raised their voices in a thundering echo.

The Garantine ripped off the hatch on the roof of the security minaret as the shouting began, the sound masking the squeal of breaking hinges. He dropped into the open gallery, where uniformed officers pored over sensor screens and glared out through smoked windows overlooking the plaza. Their auspexes ranged all over the city, networking with aerial patrol mechanicals, ground troops, law enforcement units, even traffic monitors. They were looking for threats, trying to pinpoint bombers or snipers or anyone that might upset the Governor’s plans for this day. If anyone so much as fired a shot within the city limits, they would know about it.

They did not expect to find an assassin so close at hand. Firstly the Garantine let loose with his Executor combi-pistol, taking care to use only the needler; bolt fire would raise the alarm too soon. Still, it was enough. Two-thirds of them were dead or dying before the first man’s gun cleared its holster. They simply could not compete with the amplified, drug-enhanced reflexes of the rage-killer. All of them were moving in slow-motion compared to him, not a one could hope to match him. The Eversor killed with break-neck punches and brutal, bullet-fast stabbing. He wrenched throats into wreckage, stove in ribs and crushed spines; and for the one PDF officer who actually dared to shoot a round in his direction, he left his gift to the last. That man, he murdered by putting the fingers of his neuro-gauntlet through his eyes and breaking his skull.

With a rough chuckle, the Garantine let his kill drop and licked his lips. The room was silent, but outside the crowd cried for the Sons of Horus.

And then they came.

A knot of coruscating blue-white energy emerged from the air and grew in an instant to a glowing sphere of lightning. Tortured air molecules screamed as the teleporter effect briefly twisted the laws of physics to breaking point; in the next second, the blaze of light and noise evaporated and in its place there were five angels of death.

Adeptus Astartes. Most of the people in the plaza had never seen one before, only knowing them from the statues they had seen and the picts in history books and museums. The real thing was, if anything, far more impressive than the legends had ever said.

The cries of adulation were silenced with a shocked gasp from a thousand throats; when Horus had come to liberate Dagonet all those years ago, he had come with his Luna Wolves, the XVI Legiones Astartes. They had stood resplendent in their flawless moon-white armour, trimmed with ebony, and it was this image that was embedded in the collective mind of the Dagoneti people.

But the Astartes standing here, now, were clad in menacing steel-grey from helmet to boot, armour trimmed in bright shining silver. They were gigantic shadows, menacing all who looked upon them. Their heavy armour, the planes of the pauldrons and chest plates, the fierce visages of the red-eyed helms, all of it was as awesome as it was terrifying. And there, clear as the sun in the sky, on their shoulders was the symbol of the great open eye – the mark of Horus Lupercal.

The tallest of the warriors, his battle gear decked with more finery than the others, stepped forward. He was covered with honour-chains and combat laurels, and about his shoulders he wore a metal dolman made from metals mined in the depths of Cthon; the Mantle of the Warmaster, forged by Horus’s captains as a symbol of his might and unbreakable will.

He drew a gold-chased bolt pistol, raising it up high above his head; and then he fired a single shot into the air, the round crashing like thunder. The same sound that rang about Dagonet on the day they were liberated. Before the empty shell casing could strike the marble at his feet, the crowd were shouting their fealty.

Glory to Horus.

The towering warrior holstered his gun and unsealed his helmet, drawing it up so the world might see his face.

There could be no hesitation. No margin for error. Such a chance would never come again.

Kell’s crosshairs rested on the centre of the scowling grille of the Astartes helmet. The shimmering interference of distance seemed to melt away; now there was only the weapon and the target. He was a part of the weapon, the trigger. The final piece of the mechanism.

Time slowed. Through the scope, Kell saw armoured hands clasp the sides of the helmet, flexing to lift it up from the neck ring. In a moment more, flesh would be exposed, a neck bared. A clear target.

And if he did this, what then? What ripples would spread from the assassination of Horus Lupercal? How would the future shift in this moment? What lives would be saved? What lives would be lost? Kell could almost hear the sound of the gears of history turning about him.

He fired.

The hammer falls. The single shot in the chamber is a .75 calibre bullet manufactured on the Shenlong forge world to the exacting tolerances of the Clade Vindicare. The percussion cap is impacted, the propellant inside combusts. Exhaust gases funnel into the pressure centre of a boat-tail round, projecting it down the nitrogen-cooled barrel at supersonic velocities. The sound of the discharge is swallowed by suppression systems that reduce the aural footprint of the weapon to a hollow cough.

As the round leaves the barrel, the Exitus longrifle sends a signal to the Lance; the two weapons are in perfect synchrony. The Lance marshals its energy to expend it for the first and only time. It will burn itself out after one shot.

The round crosses the distance in seconds, dropping in exactly the expected arc towards the figure in the plaza. Windage is nominal, and does not alter its course. Then, with a flash, the bullet strikes the force wall. Any conventional ballistic round would disintegrate at this moment; but the Exitus has fired a Shield-Breaker.

Energised fragments imbued with anti-spinward quantum particles fracture the force wall’s structure, and collapse it; but the barrier is on a cycling circuit and will reactivate in less than two-tenths of a second.

It is not enough. The energy of the Lance follows the Shield-Breaker in as the force wall falls; the Lance is a single-use X-ray laser, slaved to Kell’s rifle, to shoot where he shoots. The stream of radiation converges on the exact same point, with nothing to stop it. The shot strikes the target in the throat, reducing flesh to atoms, superheating fluids into steam, boiling skin, vaporising bone.

The only sound is the fall of the headless corpse as it crashes to the ground, blood jetting across the white marble and the Warmaster’s shining mantle.

Fifteen

Rapture
Aftershock
Retribution

There was something exhilarating about taking kills in this fashion.

The many murders that lay at Spear’s feet were usually silent, intimate affairs. Just the killer and the victim, together in a dance that connected them both in a way far more real, far more honest than any other relationship. No one was really naked until the moment of their death.

But this; Spear had never killed more than three people at once because the need had never arisen. Now he was giddy with the blood-rush, wondering why he had never done this before. The joy of the frenzy was all-consuming and it was glorious.

Throwing off all pretence at stealth and subterfuge was liberating in its own way. He was being truthful, baring himself for everyone to see; and they ran screaming when they witnessed it.

Through the low howl of the sandstorm, the refugees were crying out and scattering. He sprinted after them, hooting with laughter.

He had never been so open. Even as a child, he had hidden himself away, afraid of what he was. And then when the women in gold and silver came for him aboard their Black Ship, he concealed himself still deeper. Even the men with eyes of metal and glass who had cut upon him, plumbing the depths of his anomalous, deviant mind, even they had not seen this face of him.

Spear was a whirling torrent of claws and talons, teeth and horns, the daemonskin blurring as it shifted and reformed itself to end the life of each victim in a new and brutal way. Gasping mouths opened up all over him where vitae spattered his bare flesh, drinking it in.

The last of the soldiers was shooting at him, and he felt bursts of burning pain as thick, high-calibre shots impacted his back and legs. The daemonskin screeched as it shunted away the majority of the impact force, preventing the rounds from ever penetrating Spear’s actual flesh. He spun on his heel, pivoting like a dancer, flipping over though the air. The other soldiers were lying in pools of their own fluids, the sand drinking in their last where heads had been torn open, hearts crushed. Spear skipped over the soldier’s comrades and ignored the burn of a shot that caressed his face. He came close and angled on one leg, bringing his other foot up in a speeding black arc. Talons flicked out and the impact point was the man’s nasal cavity. Bone splintered with a wet crunch, jagged fragments entering his brain like daggers.

How many dead was that? In the race and chase of it, the murderer had lost count.

Then he saw the witch hiding her face behind a steel skull and he didn’t care about that any more. The thin, wiry female shot a fan of needles at him and he dodged most of them, a handful biting into the daemonflesh before the skin puckered and vomited them back out into the dust. This was just a delaying tactic, though. He felt the tremor moving through the warp, the alien monster sheathing his body shivering and reacting in disgust at the proximity of her.

Ill light gathered around the assassin’s aura, sucked into the void within her through the fabric of her stealthsuit. The wind seemed to die off around the waif, as if she were generating a globe of nothingness that sound itself could not enter. The construct of lenses and spines emerging from the side of the grinning steel skull-helm crackled with power, and the perturbed air bowed like water ripples.

A black stream of negative energy cascaded from the weapon and seared Spear as he threw up his hands to block it. The impact was immense, and he screamed with a pain unlike any he had ever felt before. The daemonskin was actually burning in places, weeping yellowish rivulets of pus where it blistered.

All his amusement perished in that second; this was no game. The psyker girl was more deadly than he had given her credit for. More than just a pariah, she was… She was in a small way like him. But where Spear’s abilities were inherent to the twisted, warp-changed structure of his soul, the girl was only a pale copy, a half-measure. She needed the augmentation of the helmet-weapon just to come close to his perfection.

Spear felt affronted by the idea that something could approach the power of his murdergift through mechanical means. He would kill the girl for her pretence.

The daemonskin wanted him to fall back, to retreat and take vital moments to heal; he ignored the moaning of it and did the opposite. Spear launched himself at the psyker, even as he fell into the nimbus of soul-shrivelling cold all about her. He immediately felt his own power being dragged out of him, the pain so bright and shining it was as if she were tearing the arteries from his flesh.

For a brief moment, Spear realised he was experiencing some degree of what it was like for a psyker to die at his hand; this must have been what Perrig had felt as she transformed into ashes.

He lashed out before the undertow could pull him in. Claws like razors split the air in a shimmering arc and sliced across the armoured fabric and the flesh of the waif girl’s throat. It was not enough to immediately kill her, but it was enough to open a vein.

She clapped a hand to the wound to staunch it, but not quick enough to stop an arc of liquid red jetting into the air. Spear opened his mouth and caught it in the face, laughing again as she stumbled away, choking.

Inside Iota’s helmet, blood was pooling around her mouth and neck, issuing in streams from her ears, her nostrils. Her vision was swimming in crimson as tiny capillaries burst open inside her eyes, and she wept red.

The animus speculum worked to recharge itself for a second blast of power. Iota had made a mistake and fired the first discharge too soon, without letting it build to maximum lethality. Her error had been to underestimate the potentiality of this… thing.

She had no frame of reference for what she was facing. At first thought she had imagined he was another assassin, sent against her in some power play to undo the works of the Execution Force. She could not see the logic in such a thing, but then the clades had often pursued strange vendettas against one another to assuage trivial slights and insults; these things happened as long as there was no evidence of them and more importantly, no ill-effects to the greater mission of the Officio Assassinorum.

But this killer was something beyond her experience. That much was certain. At the very least, the glancing hit from the animus’s beam should have crippled him. Iota turned the readings of her aura-sensor across him and what she saw there was shocking.

Impossibly, his psionic signature was changing, transforming. The sinuous nimbus of ghost colours spilled from the peculiar flesh-matter shrouding his body, and with a sudden leap of understanding, Iota realised she was seeing into a hazy mirror of the warp itself; this being was not one life but two, and between them gossamer threads of telepathic energy sewed them both into the inchoate power of the immaterium. Suddenly, she understood how he had been able to resist the animus blast. The energy, so lethal in the real world, was no more than a drop of water in a vast ocean within the realms of warp space. This killer was connected to the ethereal in a way that she could never be, bleeding out the impact of the blast into the warp where it could dissipate harmlessly.

The shifting aura darkened and became ink black. This Iota had seen before; it was the shape of her own psychic imprint. He was mirroring her, and even as she watched it happen, Iota felt the gravitational drag on her own power as it was drawn inexorably towards the shifting, changing murderer.

He was like her, and unlike as well. Where the clever mechanisms of the animus speculum sucked in psionic potentiality and returned it as lethal discharge, this man… this freakish aberration… he could do the same alone.

It was the blood that let him do it. Her blood, ingested, subsumed, absorbed.

Iota screamed; for the first time in her life, she really, truly screamed, knowing the blackest depths of terror. The fires in her mind churned, and she released them. He laughed as they rolled off him and reverberated back across space-time.

Iota’s mouth filled with ash, and her cries were silenced.

The moment seemed to stretch on into infinity; there was no noise across Liberation Plaza, not even the sound of an indrawn breath. It was as if a sudden vacuum had drawn all energy and emotion from the space. It was the sheer unwillingness to believe what had just occurred that made all of Dagonet pause.

In the next second, the brittle instant shattered like glass and the crowds were in turmoil, the twin floodheads of sorrow and fury breaking open at once. Chaos exploded as the people at the front of the crowd barriers surged forwards and collapsed the metal panels, moving in a slow wave towards the ragged line of shocked clanner soldiers. Some of the troops had their guns drawn; others let themselves be swallowed up by the oncoming swell, deadened by the trauma of what they had witnessed.

On an impulse the Callidus could not quantify, Koyne leapt from the base of the pillar and ran behind the line of crackling force-wall emitters. No one blocked the way. The shock was palpable here, thick in the air like smoke.

The hulking Astartes were in a combat wheel around the corpse of their commander, weapons panning right and left, looking for a target. Their discipline was admirable, Koyne thought. Lesser beings, ordinary men, would have given in to the anger they had to be feeling without pause – but the Callidus did not doubt that would soon come.

One of them shoved another of his number out of the way, tearing off his helmet with a twist of his hand. For a fraction of a second Koyne saw real emotion in the warrior’s flinty aspect, pain and anguish so deep that it could only come from a brother, a kinsman. The Astartes had a scarred face, and this close to him, the assassin could see he bore the rank insignia of a brother-sergeant of the 13th Company.

That seemed wrong; according to intelligence on the Sons of Horus, their primarch always travelled with an honour guard of officers, a group known as the Mournival.

‘Dead,’ said one of the other Astartes, his voice tense and distant. ‘Killed by cowards…’

Koyne came as close as the Callidus dared, standing near a pair of worried-looking PDF majors who couldn’t decide if they should go to the side of Nicran and the other nobles, or wait for the Astartes to give them orders.

The sergeant bent down over the corpse and did something Koyne could not see. When he stood up once more, he was holding a gauntlet in his hand; but not a gauntlet, no. It was a master-crafted augmetic, a machine replacement for a forearm lost in battle. He had removed it from the corpse, claiming it as a relic.

But Horus does not–

‘My captain,’ rumbled the sergeant, hefting his boltgun with a sorrowful nod. ‘My captain…’

Koyne’s heart turned to a cold stone in his chest, and movement caught his eye as Governor Nicran pushed away from the rest of the nobles and started down the stairs towards the Astartes. The noise of the crowd was getting louder, and the Callidus had to strain to hear as the sergeant spoke into the vox pickup in the neck ring of his breast plate.

‘This is Korda,’ he snarled, his ire building. ‘Location is not, repeat not secure. We have been fired upon. Brother-Captain Sedirae… has been killed.’

Sedirae. The Callidus knew the name, the commander of the 13th Company. But that was impossible. The warrior Kell had shot wore the mantle, the unique robe belonging to the primarch himself…

‘Horus?’ Nicran was calling, tears running down his face as he came closer. ‘Oh, for the Stars, no! Not the Warmaster, please!’

‘Orders?’ said Korda, ignoring the babbling nobleman. Koyne could not hear the reply transmitted to the sergeant’s ear-bead, but the shift in set of the Space Marine’s jaw told the tale of exactly what had been said. With a jolt of fear, the Callidus turned and broke away, sprinting down the steps towards the crowds.

Koyne heard the peal of Nicran’s voice over the rush of the mob and turned in mid-run. The Governor was shaking his hands, wracked with sobs in front of the impassive, grey-armoured Astartes. His words were lost, but he was doubtless begging or pleading to Korda, vainly making justifications.

With a small movement, the warrior raised the barrel of his bolter and shot the Governor at point-blank range, blasting his body apart. As one, Korda’s men followed his example, turning their guns towards the nobles and executing them.

Over the bass chatter of bolt-fire, the Astartes roared out an order, and it cut through the bedlam like a knife.

‘Burn this city!’ he shouted.

Soalm stumbled through the butchery clutching the bact-gun and dragging the chest behind her. Sinope was with her, trying to support the other end of the container as best she could. The noblewoman’s men were all gone.

The dust-filled air was heavy with the sound of weapons-fire and pain, and there seemed nowhere they could turn that took them away from it.

Soalm stumbled against a shack just as a wave of ephemeral terror radiated out and caught her in its wake. The air turned thick and greasy with the spoor of psionic discharge – and then she heard Iota’s echoing screams, amplified through the vocoder of the Culexus’s helmet.

‘Holy Terra…’ whispered the old woman,

It could only have been Iota’s death-cry; no other voice could carry such dreadful emotion in it.

Soalm turned towards the sound and saw the ending of her happen. Particles of sickly energy were liberated from Iota’s twitching body in a rush of light and noise, and then her stealthsuit collapsed, the silver-steel helmet falling away. Clogged puffs of grey cinders spilled from the black uniform as it crumpled into a heap, the body that had filled it disintegrated in a heartbeat. The skull-faced helmet rolled to a halt, spilling more dark ash into the churning winds.

‘Jenniker!’ Sinope cried out her name as a shape blurred towards them. The Venenum felt a massive impact against her and she was thrown aside, losing her grip on the chest. She managed to fire two quick bursts from the bact-gun as she tumbled, rewarded with the pop and hiss of acids striking flesh.

Iota’s killer loomed out of the buzzing sands, back-lit by the harsh light of the sunrise. She was reaching for a toxin corde as he punched her savagely, disarming her with the force of the blow. The bact-gun tumbled away and was lost. Soalm felt a jagged slash of pain in her chest as her ribs snapped. Falling to the ground, she tried to retch, and found herself in a damp patch of earth, mud formed from sand and spilled arterial blood. A clawed foot swept in and struck her where she had fallen, and another bone snapped. Soalm looked up, hearing laughter.

The writhing shadow loomed, bending towards her; then a length of iron pipe came from nowhere and slammed into the killer’s spine, drawing an explosive hiss of fury. Soalm moved, agony racing through her, trying desperately to retreat.

Sinope, her face lit with righteous fury, drew back her improvised weapon and hit him again, the old woman putting every moment of force she could muster into the blow. ‘For the God-Emperor!’ she bellowed.

The killer did not allow her a third strike, however. He arrested the fall of the iron pipe and held it in place, his other hand snapping out to grasp Sinope’s thin, bird-like neck and pull her off her feet. With a vicious shove, he twisted his grip on the pipe and used it to run the noblewoman through; then he discarded her and strode away.

He came upon the chest where it had fallen, and Soalm gave a weak cry as the murderer’s inky, liquid flesh streamed into the locking mechanism and broke it open from within. The ancient book fell into the sand, and Soalm saw the stasis shell around it sputter out and die.

‘No,’ she croaked. ‘You cannot… You cannot take it…’

The killer crouched and picked up the Warrant, flipping through the aged pages with careless speed, the paper fracturing and tearing. ‘No?’ he said, without turning to her. ‘Who is going to stop me?’

He reached the last page and released a booming, hateful laugh. Soalm felt a lash of sympathetic pain as he ripped the leaf from the binding of the priceless Eurotas relic and cupped the yellowed vellum in his hand. For a moment, she thought she saw the shimmer of liquid on the page, catching the rays of the sunlight.

Then, as if it were some delicacy he was sampling at a banquet, the killer tipped back his head and opened his mouth, his forked jaws opening like an obscene blossom. A dozen more tiny fanged maws opened across his cheeks and neck as he tipped up the paper and swallowed the blood of the God-Emperor.

He began to scream and howl, and the riot of malformation in his flesh became a storm of writhing fronds, tenticular forms, gnashing mouths. His body lost control over itself, the red-black skin warping and distending into shapes that were nauseating and vile.

Weeping in her agony and her failure, Soalm dragged herself away towards Tros’s skimmer, desperate to flee before the killer’s rapture came to its end.

Kell was already on his way out even as the echo of his gunshot died around him. He drew up the cameoline cloak across his shoulders, pulling the Exitus longrifle over one arm. He set the timers on the emplaced explosives to ignite once he was clear. The Vindicare paused to add an extra krak charge to a support pillar in the middle of the laundry room; when it detonated, it would collapse the ceiling above and with luck, obliterate what remained intact of the hab-tower’s gutted upper levels. He had left no trace behind him, but it paid to be thorough.

Kell heard the sounds rising up from the streets as he dropped down to the tier below, moving towards his exit point. Disorder would spread like wildfire in the wake of the assassination; the Execution Force had to get beyond the city perimeter before the pandemonium caught up to them.

He went to the edge of the shattered flooring and looked out. He could see people beneath him, the tiny dots of figures running in the avenues. Kell kicked aside a piece of fallen masonry and recovered his descent gear.

The vox link in his spy mask crackled as the seldom-used general channel was keyed.

Kell froze. Only the members of the team knew the frequency, and all of them knew that the channel was a mechanism of last resort. Even though it was heavily encrypted, it lacked the untraceable facility of the burst transmitters; the fact that one of the team was using it now meant something had gone very, very wrong.

The next sound he heard was the voice of the Callidus. Every word said was being simultaneously transmitted to Tariel and the Garantine. ‘Mission fail,’ said Koyne, panting with the exertion of running. He could hear bolter shots and screaming in the background. ‘Confirming mission fail.’

Kell was shaking his head. That could not be true; the last thing he had seen through the Exitus’s scope was the flash of radiation as the Lance ended the target’s life. Horus Lupercal was dead…

‘Broken Mirror,’ said Koyne. ‘I repeat, Broken Mirror.’

The code phrase hit Kell like a physical blow and he sagged against the crumbling wall. The words had only one meaning – a surrogate, a sacrificial proxy had replaced their target.

A storm of questions rushed through his thoughts; how could Horus have known they would be waiting for them? Had the mission been compromised from the very start? Had they been betrayed?

The warrior Kell had placed between his crosshairs could only have been the Warmaster! Only Horus, the liberator of Dagonet clad in his mantle, would have made his grand gesture of the single shot into the sky… It could not be true! It could not be…

The moment of doubt and uncertainty flared bright, and then faded. Now was not the time to dwell on this turn of events. The first, most important directive was to exfiltrate the strike zone and regroup. To re-evaluate. Kell nodded to himself. He would do that, he decided. He would extract his team from this mess and then determine a new course of action. As long as a single Officio Assassinorum operative was still alive, the mission could still be completed.

And if along the way, a traitor came to light… He shrugged off the thought. First things first. The Vindicare keyed the general channel. ‘Acknowledged,’ he said. ‘Extraction sites are now to be considered compromised. Proceed to city perimeter and await contact.’

Kell secured the longrifle and fixed his descent pack to his back. ‘Go dark,’ he ordered, ending the final command with the tap of a switch that deactivated his vox gear.

An explosion made his head snap up and his spy mask’s optics located the thermal bloom in the corner of his vision, surrounding it with indicator icons. A vehicle had apparently been blown up by an exchange of gunfire. He wondered who would be foolish enough to shoot back at an Astartes just as a roar of engine noise swept over his head. Kell shrank into the cover of a partly-collapsed wall as a heavy, slate-coloured aircraft thundered around the habitat tower on bright rods of thruster flame – a Stormbird in the livery of the Sons of Horus.

For a moment, he feared the Astartes had detected his firing hide; but the Stormbird swept on and down into the city, passing him by unnoticed. Kell looked up into the early morning sky and saw more raptor-shapes falling from the high clouds, trailing streamers of vapour from atmospheric re-entry. Whoever it was that Kell’s kill-shot had executed, the Warmaster’s warriors were coming in force to avenge him.

When he was sure the Stormbird was gone, Kell backed off and then ran at the hole in the wall. He threw himself into the air and felt the rush of the wind as gravity claimed his body. For agonising seconds, the streets below rose up towards him; then there was a sharp jerk across his shoulders as the sensors in the descent pack triggered the release of the parafoil across his back. The iridescent curve of ballistic cloth billowed open and his fall slowed.

Kell dropped into the sounds of terror and violence, searching for an escape.

Every deck of the Vengeful Spirit shook with barely-restrained violence as drop-ship after drop-ship rocketed off the launch decks. They streamed away from the battleship in a long, unbroken chain, lethal carrion birds wheeling and turning in towards the surface of Dagonet, carrying fury with them.

Nearby, system boats in service to the PDF’s space division were either turning to flee from the ships of the Warmaster’s fleet, or else they were already sinking into their home world’s gravity well as flames crawled down the length of them. The Vengeful Spirit’s gunnery crews had been sparing with the use of their megalaser batteries, striking the ships hard enough to cripple them but not enough to obliterate them. Now the PDF cruisers would burn up in the atmosphere, and the fires of their deaths would be seen the whole planet over. It was a most effective way to begin a punishment.

The Vengeful Spirit and the rest of her flotilla encroached slowly on Dagonet’s orbital space, approaching the staging point where Luc Sedirae’s vessel, the Thanato, was waiting for them. Most of the Thanato’s complement of drop-ships had already been deployed, the men of the 13th Company falling onto the capital city in a tide of unfettered rage. The handsome and ruthless master of the 13th was beloved of his warriors; and they would avenge him with nothing less than rivers of blood.

The tall viewing windows of the Lupercal’s Court looked out over the bow of the Vengeful Spirit, the curve of Dagonet and the lone Thanato laid out before it. Maloghurst left the Warmaster where he stood at the windows and crossed the strategium towards the corridor outside. As he walked, he spoke in low tones to the troupe of chapter serfs who followed him everywhere he went. The equerry parsed Horus’s commands to his underlings and they in turn moved away to carry those orders about the fleet.

Beyond the doorway there was a shadow. ‘Equerry,’ it said.

‘First Chaplain,’ Maloghurst replied. His disfigured face turned its perpetual scowl at the Word Bearer, dismissing the rest of the serfs with a flick of his clawed hand. ‘Do you wish to speak with me, Erebus? I had been told you were engaged in your… meditations.’

Erebus did not appear to notice the mocking tone Maloghurst placed on his question. ‘I was disturbed.’

‘By what?’

The Word Bearer’s face split in a thin smile. ‘A voice in the darkness.’ Before Maloghurst could demand a less obtuse answer, Erebus nodded towards the far end of the chamber, where Horus stood observing the motions of his fleet.

The lord of the Legion was magnificent in his full battle gear, his armour striped with shining gold and dark brass, hides of great beasts lying off his shoulder in a half-cloak. His face was hidden in the gloom, highlights made barely visible by the cold glow of the data consoles before him.

‘I would ask a question of the Warmaster,’ said the other Astartes.

Maloghurst did not move. ‘You may ask me.’

‘As you wish.’ Erebus’s lip curled slightly. ‘We are suddenly at battle alert status. It was my understanding we were coming to this world to show the flag in passing, and little more.’

‘You haven’t heard?’ Maloghurst feigned surprise, amused that for a change he knew something the Word Bearer did not. ‘Brother-Captain Sedirae was given the honour of standing as the Warmaster’s proxy on Dagonet. But there was an… incident. A trap, I believe. Sedirae was killed.’

Erebus’s typically insouciant expression shaded dark for a moment. ‘How did this happen?’

‘That will be determined, in due time. For the moment, it is clear that the assurances claiming Dagonet City as a secure location were false. Through either subterfuge or inadequacy on the part of Dagonet’s ruling cadres, a Son of Horus lost his life down there.’ Maloghurst inclined his head towards the Warmaster. ‘Horus has demanded reciprocity.’

‘The nobles will die, then?’

The equerry nodded. ‘To begin with.’

Erebus was silent for a few seconds. ‘Why was Sedirae sent?’

‘Are you questioning the orders of the Warmaster?’

‘I only seek to understand–’ Erebus trailed off as Maloghurst took a step towards the Word Bearer, moving through the doorway and into the corridor.

‘You would do well, Chaplain, to remember that an honoured battle-brother was just murdered in cold blood. A decorated Astartes of great esteem whose loss will be keenly felt, not just by the 13th Company but by the entire Legion.’

Erebus’s eyes narrowed, showing his doubts at the description of Sedirae’s great esteem. While it was true the man was a fine warrior, many considered him an outspoken braggart, the Word Bearer among them. But as ever, the equerry kept his own opinions to himself.

Maloghurst continued. ‘It would be best for the Warmaster to deal with this matter without the involvement of those from outside the Legion.’ He nodded to a servitor in the lee of the doors, and the helot began to slide the towering panels closed. ‘I’m sure you appreciate that.’

There was a moment when the Word Bearer seemed as if he were about to protest; but then he nodded. ‘Of course,’ said Erebus. ‘I bow to your wisdom, equerry. Who knows the Warmaster’s moods better than you?’ He threw a nod and walked away, back into the shadows of the corridor.

They were killing everything that moved.

The Sons of Horus began by firing on the crowds in Liberation Plaza, routing the civilians and turning the mob into a screaming tide of bodies that trampled each other in a desperate attempt to flee back down the roads and away from the great halls.

Koyne fought through the mass, catching sight of some of the killings along the way. Kell’s emergency command echoed through the vox-bead hidden in the Callidus’s ear.

The Astartes walked, slow and steady, across the plaza with their bolters at their hips, firing single shot after single shot into the people. The missile-like bolt shells could not fail to find targets, and for each person they hit and instantly killed, others fell dead or near to it from the shared force of impact. The blasts rippled out through flesh and bone, the crowds were so closely packed together. And although Koyne never saw it, the assassin heard the hiss and crackle of a flamer being used. The smell of burned flesh was familiar.

The panic was as much a weapon as the guns of the Astartes. People running and pushing, drowning in animal fear; they trampled one another blindly as they tried to escape along the radial streets leading from the plaza. Some transformed their fear into violence, brandishing weapons of their own in vain attempts to cut a path through the madness.

Koyne rode the terrified mob as one might have floated on a turbulent sea, not fighting it, letting the frenzied currents of push and pull shove a body here and there. As the roads opened up into wider boulevards, the crush lessened and people broke into an open run; some of them were met by strafing fire from the first of the Stormbirds that swooped in low between the buildings.

The Callidus was carried to the edge of the street and found passage through a storefront damaged in the early days of the insurrection. Hidden for a moment from the screaming throng outside, Koyne dared to consult a small holo-map of the city; any one of the avenues would take the assassin straight out of the metropolis to the city perimeter, but down each street the Astartes were advancing in small groups, coldly pacing their kills into those who ran and those who surrendered alike.

After a moment, Koyne peered over the lip of a shattered window and saw that the leading edge of the crowds had passed by. Stragglers were still running past, heading southwards. Behind them, walking as if it were nothing more than a morning stroll, the Callidus spotted a single Astartes in grey ceramite, moving with a bolter at his shoulder. Sighting down the weapon as he went, he was picking targets at random and ending them.

This was not a military exercise; this was a castigation.

‘This is your fault!’ The voice was full of terror and fury.

Koyne spun and found a man, his clothes freshly torn and a new cut staining his forehead with blood. He stood across the rubble-strewn shop floor, glaring at the Callidus, pointing a shaky finger.

It was the uniform he was indicating. The dun-coloured tunic of the Dagonet Planetary Defence Force, in disarray now, but still a part of the false identity Koyne was operating under.

The man shambled through the glass, kicking it aside without a care for the noise he was making. ‘You brought them here!’ He stabbed a finger at the street. ‘That’s not Horus! I don’t know what those things are! Why did you let them come to kill us?’

Koyne realised that the man had no idea what had happened; perhaps he hadn’t seen the Shield-Breaker and the Lance. All he saw was a monstrous killing machine in armour the colour of storms.

‘Stop talking,’ said Koyne, pulling open the PDF tunic and feeling for a fleshpocket holster. With a gasp, the Callidus tabbed the seam. Koyne’s weapon was in there, but the assassin’s muscles were tight with tension and it was proving difficult to relax and ease the skin-matter open. ‘Just be silent.’

There was movement outside. Someone on a higher floor in the building across the street, probably some bold member of Capra’s rebellion or just a Dagoneti sick of being a victim, tossed a makeshift firebomb that shattered wetly over the warrior’s helmet and right shoulder. The Son of Horus halted and swiped at the flames where they licked over the ceramite, patting them out with the flat of his gauntlet. As Koyne watched, the Astartes was still dotted with little patches of orange flame as he pivoted on his heel and aimed upward.

A heavy thunderclap shot rang out, and the bolter blew a divot of brick from the third floor. A body, trailing threads of blood, came spiralling out with it, killed instantly by the proximity of the impact.

‘They… they want you!’ snarled the man in the shop, oblivious to what was taking place outside. ‘Maybe they should have you!’

‘No,’ Koyne said, fingers at last touching the butt of the pistol nestling inside the false-flesh gut over the Callidus’s stomach. ‘I told you to–’

Stone crunched into powder and suddenly the warrior was there in the doorway of the gutted shop, too big to fit through the wood-lined threshold. The emotionless eyes of the fearsome helmet scanned them both and then the figure advanced, its bolter dropping onto a sling. Koyne stumbled backwards as the Son of Horus tore through the splintering remains of the doorway, drawing his combat blade as he came. The knife was the size of a short sword, and the fractal edge gave off a dull gleam.

Before the Callidus could react the Astartes struck out with the pommel and hit the assassin in the chest. Koyne felt bones snap and spun away, landing hard. In a perverse way, the assassin was pleased; Koyne’s cover was clearly still intact. If the Astartes had known what he was facing, the kill would have come immediately.

The man was pointing and shouting; the Son of Horus, having decided to preserve his ammunition for the moment, advanced on the survivor, the top of his helmet knocking light fittings down from the patterned ceiling. A sweep of the combat blade silenced the man by taking his head from his shoulders; the body gave a peculiar little dance as nerves misfired, and fell in a heap.

Koyne had the gun but the twitching of the muscles and the flesh-pocket would not let it go; pain from the impact injury robbed the Callidus of the usual concentration and control needed at a moment like this.

The Son of Horus changed his grip on the knife, holding it by the blade, ready to throw it; in the next second a crash of bolter fire echoed and impact points appeared in a line of silver blooms across the chest plate and left shoulder pauldron of the Astartes.

Through blurry vision, Koyne saw a man-shape moving faster than anything human should have; and a face, a mask, a fanged skull made of discoloured gunmetal.

Scrambling backwards, the assassin watched as the Garantine sprinted around the Astartes in a tight arc, rolling over fallen counters and leaping from pillar to wall. As he moved, his Executor pistol was snarling, spitting out low-gauge bolt shells that clattered and sparked off the towering warrior’s armour.

The Astartes let the combat blade drop and brought up his bolter; the weapon was of a far larger calibre than the Executor. A single direct hit at the ranges these close quarters forced upon the combatants would mean death for the Eversor; but to kill him, first the Astartes had to hit him.

Koyne moaned in pain as the gun slowly eased out of the stress-tensed flesh pocket, watching as the two combatants tried to end each other. In the confined space of the destroyed store the bray of bolt shells was deafening, and the air filled with the stench of cordite and the heavy, choking dust from atomised flakboard. A support pillar exploded, raining plaster and wood from the broken flooring above. The Callidus could hear the animalistic panting of the Eversor as he moved like lightning back and forth across the Space Marine’s line of sight, goading the Astartes into firing after him. Stimm-glands chugged and injectors hissed as the Garantine’s bloodstream was flooded with bio-chemicals and cocktails of drugs that pushed him beyond the speed of even an Astartes’s enhanced reflexes.

Koyne’s gun, slick with mucus and fluids, finally vomited itself out of the assassin’s stomach and on to the floor. The Callidus clutched at it and released a shot in the direction of the grey-armoured hulk. The neural shredder projected a spreading plume of sickly energetic discharge around the Son of Horus and the warrior staggered with the hit, one hand coming up to clutch at his helmet.

The Garantine roared past, sprinting over Koyne where the Callidus lay propped up against a wall. ‘My kill!’ he was shouting, the words repeating and coming so fast they became a single stream of noise. ‘My killmykillmykillmykill–’

He was a blur of claws and gun, too fast for the eye to process the images. Sparks flew as the Eversor assassin collided bodily with the Astartes and knocked him down, the Garantine firing his Executor into the impact holes in the warrior’s chest at point-blank range, clawing wildly at his helmet with the spiked talon of his neuro-gauntlet. Koyne could hear the Astartes snarling, angrily fighting back, but the Eversor was like mercury, slipping through his clumsy armoured fingers.

Then dark, arterial blood spurted as the armour was cracked and the Garantine dug into the meat he found inside. His bolter dry, the Astartes punched and bludgeoned the Eversor, but if any pain impulses reached the Garantine’s mind, the brew of rage-enhancers and sense-inhibitors swimming through his bloodstream deadened them to nothing.

With a croaking, wet rattle, the Astartes sank back and collapsed. Chattering with coarse laughter, the Garantine swept up the fallen combat blade and pressed all his weight behind it. The weapon sank through sparking power cables and myomer muscles until it pierced flesh and cut bone.

After a minute or so, the Eversor dropped to the floor, still shaking with the aftershock of his chemical frenzy. ‘Ss-so…’ he began, struggling to speak clearly, forcing himself to slow down with each panting gulp of breath. ‘Th-this is how it feels to k-kill one of them…’ He grinned widely behind the fanged mask. ‘I like it.’

The Callidus stood up. ‘We need to move, before more of his brethren arrive.’

‘Aren’t you… aren’t you going to th-thank me for saving your life, s-shape-changer?’

Without warning, the Astartes suddenly lurched forwards, gauntlets snapping open, savage anger fuelling a final surge of killing fury. Koyne’s neural shredder was at hand and the assassin fired a full-power discharge into the skull of the Son of Horus; the blast disintegrated tissue in an instant wave of brain-death.

The warrior lurched and fell again. Koyne gave the Garantine a sideways look. ‘Thank you.’

Sixteen

Collision
The Choice
Forgiveness

A bombardment had begun, and the people of Dagonet’s capital feared it was the end of the world.

They knew so little of the reality of things, however. High above in orbit, it was only the warship Thanato that fired on the city, and even then it was not with the vessel’s most powerful cannons. The people did not know that a fleet of craft were poised in silence around their sister ship, watchful and waiting. Had all the vessels of the Warmaster’s flotilla unleashed their killpower, then indeed those fears would have come true; the planet’s crust cracked, the continents sliced open. Perhaps those things would happen, soon enough – but for now it was sufficient for the Thanato to hurl inert kinetic kill-rods down through the atmosphere, the sky-splitting shriek of their passage climaxed by a lowing thunder as the warshots obliterated power stations, military compounds and the vast mansion-houses of the noble clans. From the ground it seemed like wanton destruction; from orbit, it was a shrewd and surgical pattern of attack.

Koyne and the Garantine stayed off the main avenues and boulevards, avoiding the roadways where processions of frightened citizens streamed towards the city limits. Hours had passed now since the killing in the plaza, and the people had lost the will to run, numbed by their own terror. Now they stumbled, silently for the most part, some pushing carts piled high with whatever they could loot or carry, others clinging to overloaded ground vehicles. When people did speak, they did so in whispers, as if they were afraid the Adeptus Astartes would hear the sound of a voice at normal pitch from across the city.

Listening from the shadows of an alleyway across from a shuttered monorail halt, the Callidus heard people talking about the Sons of Horus. Some said they had set up a staging point in Liberation Plaza, that there were hordes of Stormbirds parked there disgorging more Astartes with each passing moment. Others mentioned seeing armoured vehicles in the streets, even Battle Titans and monstrous war creatures.

The only truth Koyne could determine from what he gleaned was that the Sons of Horus were intent on fulfilling the orders of Devram Korda to the fullest; Dagonet City would be little more than a smouldering funeral pyre by nightfall.

The assassin looked up to where a massive streetscreen hung at a canted angle from the front of the station building. The display was cracked and fizzing with patchy static; text declaring that the metropolitan rail network was temporarily suspended was still visible, the pixels frozen in place. Koyne eyed the device warily. The public screens all had arrays of vid-picters arranged around them, connected to the municipal monitoring network. The Callidus had a spy’s healthy disdain for being caught on camera.

As if it had sensed the shade’s train of thought, Koyne saw very clearly as one of the picters jerked on its gimbal, stuttering around to face the line of refugees. The assassin retreated back into the shadows, unsure if the monitor had caught sight.

A few metres down the alley, the Garantine was sitting atop a waste container, shivering with the come-down from his reflex-boosters, working with a field kit to close up the various wounds the Son of Horus had inflicted on him during the earlier melee. Koyne grimaced at the chewing sound of a dermal stapler as it knitted flesh back to flesh.

The Garantine looked up; his mask was off, and one of his eyes was torn and damaged, weeping clear fluids. He grinned, showing bloodstained teeth. ‘Be with you in a trice, freak.’

Koyne ignored the insult, shrugging off the ragged remains of the PDF troop commander tunic and replacing it with a brocade jacket stolen from a fallen shop-window dummy. ‘May not have that long.’

The Callidus shrank back against the wall and let the face of the portly PDF officer slip away. It was painful to make a change like this, without proper meditation and time spent, but the circumstances demanded it. Koyne’s aspect flowed to resemble that of a young man, a boyish face under the same unruly mop of thin hair.

‘Do you remember what you used to look like?’ said the Eversor, disgust thick in his tone.

Koyne gave the other assassin a sideways look, making a point of gazing at the topography of scarification and the countless implants both atop and beneath his epidermis. ‘Do you?’

The Garantine chuckled. ‘We’re both so pretty in our own ways.’ He went back to his wounds. ‘Any sign of more Astartes?’

The Callidus made a negative noise. ‘But they’ll be coming. I’ve seen this kind of thing before. They march through a city, putting the torch to everything they pass, daring anyone to stop them.’

‘Let them come,’ he grunted, tying the last field dressing around his thick thigh.

‘There will be more than one next time.’

‘Don’t doubt it.’ The Eversor’s hands were still twitching. ‘The poisoner girl was right. We’re all going to die here.’

That drew a harsh look from the Callidus. ‘I have no intention of ending my life on this backwater world.’

He chuckled. ‘Act like you have a choice.’ The Garantine made a metronome motion with his fingers. ‘Ticky-tocky. Odds are against us. Someone must’ve talked.’

That made the other assassin fall silent. Koyne had not wanted to dwell on the possibility, but the Garantine was right to suspect that their mission had been compromised. It seemed a logical deduction, given what had happened in the plaza.

The sharp cry of an animal drew Koyne’s attention away from such troubling thoughts and the assassin looked up to see a raptor bird flutter past the end of the alleyway, pivoting on a wing to glide in their direction.

There was a flurry of movement and the Eversor had his Executor aimed upward, the sensor mast of his Sentinel gear drawing a bead; the combi-weapon’s needler made a snapping sound and the bird died in mid-turn, falling to the ground like a stone.

Koyne went to the animal’s body; there had been something odd about it, a flicker of sunlight off metal…

‘Hungry, are you?’ The Garantine lurched along behind, limping slightly.

‘Idiot.’ Koyne held up the bird’s corpse; a single needle-dart bisected its bloody torso. The raptor had numerous augmetic implants in its skull and pinions. ‘This is a psyber eagle. It belongs to the infocyte. He’s looking for us.’ Koyne glanced up at the streetscreen once more, and the imagers beneath it.

‘Maybe it was him who talked,’ muttered the Eversor. ‘Maybe you.’

The image on the streetscreen flickered and changed; now it was an aerial view of the street, then shots of the alleyway, then a confused tumble of motion. Koyne suddenly understood the display was showing a replay of the visual feed from the eagle’s auto-senses.

Some of the refugee stragglers saw the same thing and stopped to watch the loop of footage. Koyne tossed the dead bird aside and stepped out into the street. Immediately, all the imagers along the bottom of the streetscreen whirred, moving to capture a look at the Callidus.

For a moment nothing happened; if Koyne was right, if it was Tariel watching through those lenses, the Vanus would be confused. Koyne’s face was different from the last one the infocyte had seen. But then the Garantine shuffled out into the open and all doubt was removed.

The refugees saw the hulking rage-killer and backed away in fear, as if suddenly becoming aware of a wild animal in their midst. In that, Koyne reflected, they were almost correct. The Garantine leered at them, showing his teeth.

A hooter sounded from the monorail halt, and in juddering fits and starts, the heavy metal gate closing off the station from the street began to draw open on automated mechanisms. The screen above flickered again, and this time the text displayed there announced that the rail system was now in operation.

Koyne smiled slightly. ‘I think we have some transport.’ The Callidus took a step, but a clawed hand grabbed the assassin’s arm.

‘Could be a trap,’ hissed the Garantine.

In the distance, another orbital strike screamed into the earth and sent a tremor through the ground beneath their feet. ‘Only one way to find out.’

On the elevated platform above the street level a single train was active. The web of monorail lines had been inert ever since the start of the insurrection against Terra, first shut down by the clanner troops as a way of imposing order by restricting the movement of the commoners through the city, and later forced to stay idle because of the mass breakout at the Terminus. But some lines were still connected to what remained of the capital’s rapidly-dying power grid, and the autonomic control systems that governed the operation of the trains and lines and points were simplistic devices; they were no match for someone with the skills of a Vanus.

Another psyber eagle roosted on the prow of the train and it called out a strident caw as Koyne and the Garantine sprinted on to the platform. The Callidus threw a glance down the wide stairwell; some of the bolder refugees were venturing inside the station after them.

‘Quickly,’ Koyne found an open carriage door and climbed inside. The train was a cargo carrier, partitioned off inside by pens suitable for livestock. The air within was thick with the stink of animal sweat and faeces.

As the Garantine climbed in, the eagle took wing and the train shunted forwards with a grinding clatter, sending sparks flying from the drive wheels gripping the rail. Ozone crackled and the carriages lurched away from the station, picking up momentum.

The train rattled along, a dull impact resonating off the metalwork as it shouldered a piece of fallen masonry off the rails. Koyne drew the neural shredder and moved back through the cargo wagon, kicking open the hatch to the next carriage, and then the two more beyond that. In the rear car the shade found the corpses of groxes, the bovines lying where they had fallen on the gridded metal flooring. They were still tethered to anchoring rings on the walls, doubtless forgotten and left to starve in this reeking metal box after the fighting had begun.

Satisfied they were alone, the Callidus walked back the length of the train to find the Garantine in the stubby engine car, watching the chattering cogitator-driver. Through the broken glass of the engine compartment canopy, the elevated track was visible ahead, dropping away down to the level of one of the main boulevards, paralleling the radial highway’s course.

‘If we’re lucky, we can ride this heap all the way out of the city,’ said Koyne, absently examining the charge glyph on the neural weapon.

The Eversor had his fang-mask back on, and he was growling softly with each breath, peering into the distance like a predator smelling the wind. ‘We’re not lucky,’ he retorted. ‘Do you see?’ The Garantine pointed a metal-taloned finger ahead of the train.

Koyne pulled a pair of compact magnoculars from a belt clip and peered through them. A fuzzy image swam into focus; grey blobs became the distinct shapes of Adeptus Astartes in Maximus-pattern armour, moving to block the path of the monorail. As the Callidus watched, they dragged the husks of burned-out vehicles across the line, assembling a makeshift barricade.

‘I told you this was a trap,’ rumbled the Garantine. ‘The Vanus is delivering us to the Astartes!’

Koyne gave a shake of the head. ‘If that was so, then why aren’t we slowing down?’ If anything, the train’s velocity was increasing, and warning indicators began to blink on the cogitator panel as the carriages exceeded their safety limits.

The wheels screeched as the train raced down the incline from the elevated rails to the ground level crossing, and metal flashed off metal as the Sons of Horus began to open fire on the leading carriage, pacing bolt shells into the hull from the cover of their obstruction.

The Garantine blind-fired a burst of full-auto fire through the broken window and then followed Koyne back through the wagons at a sprint. Shots punched through the walls of the cargo cars, rods of sunlight stabbing through the impact holes into the musty interior. The decking rocked beneath their feet and it was hard to stay upright as the train continued to gather speed.

They made it to the rearmost wagon as the engine car slammed into the barricade and crashed through it. The husks of a groundcar and a flatbed GEV spun away across the boulevard, throwing two Astartes aside with the force of the collision. Metal fractured, red-hot and stressed beyond its limits, and the guide wheels broke away from the axle. Instantly freed from the monorail, the train lurched up and twisted over on to its side. The carriages crashed down to the blacktop and scored a gouge down the length of the street, spitting cascades of asphalt and gravel.

In the rear car, the assassins were thrown into the grox carcasses, the impact absorbed by the foetid meat of the dead animals. Screeching and vomiting clouds of bright orange sparks, the derailed cargo train finally slowed to a shuddering halt.

Koyne lost awareness for what seemed like long, long minutes. Then the Callidus was aware of being dragged upwards and then propelled through a tear in what had once been the wagon’s roof. The shade took several shaky steps out on to the roadway, smelling hot tar and the tang of burned metal. Koyne blinked in the sunlight, feeling for the neural shredder. The weapon was still there, mercifully.

The Garantine lurched past, reloading his Executor. ‘I think we upset them,’ he shouted, pointing past Koyne’s shoulder.

Turning, the assassin saw armoured giants running down the road towards them, firing from the hip. Bolt-rounds cracked into the ground and the shattered train with heavy blares of concussion. Koyne drew the neural weapon and hesitated; the pistol had a finite range and was better suited to a close-in kill. Instead, the Callidus retreated behind part of the cargo wagon. Perhaps a lucky shot might take down one of the Sons of Horus, even hobble two of them… but that was a tactical squad back there, bearing down on the pair of them.

‘We’re not lucky,’ the assassin muttered, considering the possibility that this backwater would indeed be the place that claimed the life of Koyne of the Callidus. A ricochet careened off the roadway and the Garantine staggered back into cover. Koyne smelled the thick, resinous odour of bio-fluids; there was a deep purple-black gouge in the Eversor’s back. ‘You’re wounded.’

‘Am I? Oh.’ The other assassin seemed distracted, clearing a fouled cartridge from the breech of his gun. A metal canister rattled off the wagon and landed near their feet; without hesitation, the Garantine scooped up the krak grenade and threw it back in the direction it had come. Koyne could see that his every movement was an effort, as more thick, chemical-laced blood seeped from the injury.

The Eversor let out a low, ululating gasp as injectors discharged, nullifying his pain. He glared back at Koyne and his pupils were pinpricks. ‘Something’s coming. Hear it?’

Koyne was about to speak, but a sudden roar of jet wash smothered every other noise. From between the towers lining one of the side streets came a blunt-prowed flyer, the boxy fuselage suspended between two sets of wings that ended in vertical thruster pods; it was painted in bright stripes of white and green, the livery of the city’s firefighting brigade. There was a man in a black stealthsuit at an open hatch, a longrifle in his grip. A shot snapped from the gun muzzle and further down the road a car exploded.

Koyne pulled at the Garantine’s arm as the aircraft dropped towards the street. ‘Time to go,’ the Callidus shouted.

The Eversor’s muscles were bunched hard like bales of steel cable, and he was vibrating with wild energy. ‘He said he killed one of them, before.’ The Garantine was glaring at the oncoming Astartes. ‘That’s two now, if he’s to be believed.’

The flyer was spinning about, trying to find a place to settle as the Sons of Horus split their fire between the assassins and the aircraft. ‘Garantine,’ said Koyne. ‘We have to move.’

The rage-killer twitched and a palsy came over him. ‘I don’t like you,’ he said, slurring the words. ‘You realise that?’

‘The feeling is mutual.’ Koyne had to yell to be heard over the noise of the thrusters. The flyer was hovering less than a metre from the roadway. Tariel was at the canopy, beckoning frantically.

‘Good. I don’t want you to confuse my motives.’ And then the Eversor surged into a loping run, his legs blurring as he hurtled out of cover and straight into the lines of the Astartes. Shell casings cascaded out behind him in a stream of brass, falling from the ejection port of his combi-weapon.

The Callidus swore and sprinted in the opposite direction towards the flyer. Kell was in half-cover by the open hatch, the Exitus rifle bucking in his grip as he fired Turbo-Penetrator rounds into the enemy squad. Koyne leapt up and scrambled into the crew compartment of the aircraft.

Tariel was cowering behind a panel, pale and sweaty. He appeared to be puppeting the aircraft’s pilot-servitor through the interface of his cogitator gauntlet. The infocyte looked up. ‘Where’s the Garantine?’ he yelled.

‘He’s made his choice,’ said Koyne, slumping to the deck.

The Eversor ran screaming into the cluster of rebel Astartes, blasting the first he found off his feet with a screeching salvo of rounds from the Executor. He collided with the next and the two of them went down in a crash of ceramite and metal. The Garantine felt the boiling churn of energy racing through his veins, his mech-enhanced heart beating at such incredible speed the sound it made in his ears was one long continuous roar. The stimm-pods in the cavities of his abdomen broke their regulator settings and flooded him with doses of Psychon and Barrage pumped directly into his organs, while atomiser grilles in the frame of his fang-mask puffed raw, undiluted anger-inducers and neuro-triggers into his nostrils.

He rode on a wave of frenzy, of black and mad hate that sent him howling with uncontrollable laughter, each choking snarl rattling like gunshots. He was so fast; so lethal; so satisfied like this.

The Garantine had been awake now for the longest period of his life since before they had found him in the colony, the gnawed bones of his neighbours in his little child’s hand, the tips sharpened to make a kill with. He missed the dreamy no-mind bliss of the stasis cowls. He felt lost without the whispering voices of the hypnogoges. This kind of living, the hour-to-hour, day-by-day existence that the rest of them found so easy… it was a hell of stultifying torpor for the Garantine. He hated the idea of this interminable yesterday and today and tomorrow. He craved the now.

Every second he was awake, he felt as if the pure rage that fuelled him was being siphoned away, making him weak and soft. He needed his sleep. Needed it like air.

But he needed his kills even more. Better than the hardest hit of combat philtre, more potent than the jags of pleasure-analogue that issued from the lobo-chips in his grey matter – the kills were the best high of them all.

He was pounding on the Space Marine’s helmet, smashing in the eye-lenses, beating his clawed hands bloody. The Executor was a club he used to bludgeon and swipe.

Impacts registered on him, blasts of infernal heat throwing him off his victim, driving him hard into the road. Heavy, drug-tainted vitae frothed at his mouth and bubbled through the maw of the fang-mask. He felt no pain. There was only a white ball of warmth in the middle of him, and it was growing. It expanded to fill the Garantine with a rush the like of which he had never felt before. The implants in him stuttered and died, shattered by glancing bolter hits and knife stabs. He had nothing but rags below the right knee.

Every muscle in his body shuddered as the death-sign triggered a dormant artificial gland beneath his sternum. The engorged, orb-shaped organ spent its venom load, bursting as the end came close. The Terminus gland poured a compound into the Garantine that made the blood in his veins boil, turning it to acid. Every drug and chemical mixed uncontrollably, becoming potent, toxic, explosive.

The soft tissues of the Eversor’s eyes cooked in their orbits, and so he was blind to the final flash of exothermic release, as his body was consumed in an inferno of spontaneous combustion.

They hugged the contours of the city streets, moving fast and as low as they dared, but out on the edge of the capital the Sons of Horus had little presence. Instead, the rebel Astartes had allowed their orbital contingent to hammer at the walled estates and parklands belonging to the noble clans. The city was now ringed with a dirty chain of massive impact craters. The blackened bowls of churned earth were fused into glassy puddles in some places, where the force of the kinetic strikes had melted the ground into distended fulgurite plates.

The lines of refugees crossed the craters beneath them, streamers of people moving like ants across the footprint of an uncaring giant. The thick, smoke-soiled air over the destruction veiled the passage of the flyer. Tariel told them they were fortunate that the Adeptus Astartes had not deployed air cover; in this wallowing, keening civilian aircraft they would have been no match for a Raven interceptor.

On Kell’s orders the infocyte directed the flyer out over the wastelands beyond the city walls and into the dusty churn of the deserts. With each passing second they were putting more and more distance between them and the star-port hangar where the Ultio had been concealed.

Nothing followed them; at one point the sensors registered something small and fast – a jetbike perhaps – but it was far off their vector and did not appear to be aware of them.

Finally, Koyne broke the silence. ‘Where in the name of Hades are we going?’

‘To find the others,’ said the Vindicare.

‘The women?’ Koyne was still hiding behind a young man’s face and the expression the Callidus put on it was too old and too callous for such a youthful visage. ‘What makes you think they’re any less dead than the Eversor?’

Kell held up a data-slate. ‘You don’t really think I’d let the Culexus out of my sight without knowing exactly where she was, do you?’

‘A tracking device?’ Koyne immediately glared at Tariel, who shrank back behind the hologram of the flyer’s autopilot control. ‘One of your little toys?’

The infocyte gave a brisk nod. ‘A harmless radiation frequency tag, nothing more. I provided enough for all of us.’

Koyne turned the glare back on Kell. ‘Did you plant one on me as well?’ The boy’s eyes narrowed. ‘Where is it?’

Kell smiled coldly. ‘Those rations aboard the Ultio were tasty, weren’t they?’ Before the Callidus could react, he went on. ‘Don’t be so difficult, Koyne. If I hadn’t factored in a contingency, we never would have found you. You’d still be in the city, marking time until Horus’s warriors cut you down.’

‘You thought of everything,’ said the shade. ‘Except the possibility that our target would know we were coming!’

Tariel began to speak. ‘The target in the plaza–’

‘Was not the Warmaster!’ snarled Koyne. ‘I am an assassin palatine of more kills than I care to mention, and I have survived every sanction and prosecuted each kill because I had no secrets. No one to confide in. No chance for a breach in operational security. And yet here we are, with this grand and foolish scheme to murder a primarch crashing down around us, and for what? Who spoke, Kell?’ The Callidus crossed the flyer’s small cabin and prodded the marksman in the chest. ‘Who is to blame?’

‘I don’t have an answer for you,’ said Kell, in a moment of candour. ‘But if any of us were traitors to the Emperor, we’ve had opportunities aplenty to stop this endeavour before it even left the Sol system.’

‘Then how did Horus foresee the attack?’ asked Koyne. ‘He let one of his own commanders perish in his stead. He must have known! Are we to believe he’s some kind of sorcerer?’

A chime sounded from Kell’s data-slate, and he left the question unanswered. ‘A return. Two kilometres to the west.’

Tariel opened another pane of ghostly hololithic images and nodded. ‘I have it. A static location. The flyer’s auspex is detecting a metallic mass… conflicting thermal reads.’

‘Set us down.’

Below them, dust clouds whirled past, reducing visibility to almost nothing. ‘The sandstorm and the contaminants from the orbital bombing…’ The Vanus looked up and his argument died on his lips as he saw Kell’s rigid expression. He sighed. ‘As you wish.’

Two of Tariel’s eyerats found her, slumped over the yoke of a GEV skimmer half-buried under a storm-blown dune. From what the infocyte could determine, she had been injured before getting into the vehicle, and at some point as she tried to escape into the deep desert, her wounds had overcome her and the skimmer controls had slipped from her grip.

Kell, an expression of stony fury on his face, shoved Tariel out of the way and gathered up Soalm where she lay. Her face was discoloured with bruising, and to the infocyte’s amazement, she still lived.

Koyne drew something from the back seat of the GEV: a sculpted silver helmet in the shape of a skull, crested with lenses and antennae of arcane design. When the Callidus held it up to look it in the eye, black ash fell from the neck and was carried away on the moaning winds. ‘Iota…’

‘Dead,’ Soalm stirred at the mention of the psyker’s name. ‘It killed her.’ Her voice was slight, thick with pain.

‘It?’ echoed Tariel; but Kell was already carrying the Venenum back towards the flyer.

Koyne was the last inside, and the Callidus drew the hatch shut with a slam. The shade brought Iota’s helmet back, and sat it on the deck of the cabin. It fixed them all with its mute, accusatory gaze. Outside, the winds threw rattling curls of sand across the canopy, plucking at the wings of the aircraft.

Across the compartment, Kell tore open a medicae pack and emptied the contents across the metal floor. He worked to load an injector with a pan-spectrum anti-infective.

‘Ask her what happened,’ said Koyne.

‘Shut up,’ Kell snapped. ‘I’m going to save her life, not interrogate her!’

‘If she was drawn away on purpose,’ continued the Callidus. ‘If it was deliberate that Soalm was attacked and Iota killed…’

‘What could have killed her?’ Tariel blurted out. ‘I witnessed what she was capable of in the Red Lanes.’

Koyne scrambled across the cabin towards the sniper. ‘For the Throne’s sake, man, ask her! Whatever she is to you, we have to know!’

Kell hesitated; and then with deliberate care, he replaced the anti-infective agent with a stimulant. ‘You’re right.’

‘That could kill her,’ Tariel warned. ‘She’s very weak.’

‘No,’ Kell replied, placing the nozzle of the injector at her pale neck, ‘she’s not.’ He pressed the stud and the drug load discharged.

Soalm reacted with a hollow gasp, her back arching, eyes opening wide with shock. In the next moment, she fell back against the deck, wheezing. ‘You…’ she managed, her gaze finding Kell where he stood over her.

‘Listen to me,’ said the Vindicare, that curious unquantifiable expression on his face once again. ‘The Garantine is dead. The mission was a failure. Horus sent a proxy in his place. Now his Astartes are punishing the city for what we have done.’

Soalm’s eyes lost focus for a moment as she took this in. ‘A killer…’ she whispered. ‘An assassin… hiding behind the identity of a rogue trader’s agent.’ She looked up. ‘I saw what it did to Iota. The others it just murdered, but her… And then the blood…’ The woman started to weep. ‘Oh, God-Emperor, the blood…’

‘What did she just say?’ Koyne asked. ‘Idolatry is outlawed! Of all the–’

‘Be quiet!’ Tariel snapped. The infocyte leaned forward. ‘Soalm. There is another assassin here? It killed Iota, yes?’

She gave a shaky nod. ‘Tried to end me… Murdered Sinope and the others in the sanctuary. And then the book…’ She sobbed.

Kell extended a hand and laid it on her shoulder as she wept.

‘I can show it,’ said Tariel. Koyne turned to see the Vanus grasping Iota’s helmet in his hands. ‘What happened, I mean. There’s a memory coil built into the mechanism of the animus speculum. A mission recorder.’

‘Do it,’ said Kell, without looking up.

In short order, Tariel used his mechadendrites to prise open panels along the back of the metal skull, and connected cords of bright brass and copper between the hidden ports on the device and the hololith projector built into his cogitator.

Images flickered and jumped. Fractured moments of conversation blurred and sputtered in the air as the infocyte plumbed the depths of the memory unit, cutting though layers of encryption; and then it began.

Soalm looked away; she did not want to witness it a second time.

Tariel watched Iota die through her own eyes.

He saw the man in the Eurotas uniform transform into the thing that called itself ‘Spear’; he saw the perplexing readouts on the aura scans that matched nothing the psyker had encountered before; and he saw the horrific act of the taking of her blood.

‘It tasted her…’ Soalm muttered. ‘Do you see? In the moment before the kill.’

‘Why?’ Koyne was sickened.

‘A genetic lock,’ Tariel said, nodding to himself. ‘Powerful psionic rituals require the use of an organic component as an initiator.’

‘A blood rite?’ Koyne shot him a look. ‘That’s primitive superstition.’

‘It might appear so to a certain point of view.’

Iota died again, the audio replay catching the raw terror in her death-scream, and Tariel looked away, his gorge rising. The peculiar waif-like psyker had not deserved to perish in so monstrous a way as this.

No one spoke for a long time after the playback ended. They sat in silence, the images of the daemonic abomination embedded in their thoughts, the revolting spectacle of the girl’s murder echoing in the howling winds outside.

‘Sorcery,’ said Kell, at length. His voice was cold and hard. ‘The rumours about Horus’s sinister plans are true. He is in league with allies from beyond the pale.’

‘The ruinous powers…’ muttered Soalm.

‘It is not magick,’ Tariel insisted. ‘Call it what it is. Science, but the darkest science. Like Iota herself, a creation of intellects unfettered by morals or boundaries.’

‘What are you saying, that this witchling Spear is like her?’ Koyne’s eyes narrowed. ‘The girl was something bred in a laboratory, deliberately tainted by the touch of the warp.’

‘I know what it… what he is,’ said Tariel, yanking out the cables from the gauntlet and dousing the hologram’s deathly images. ‘I have heard the name of this creature.’

‘Explain,’ demanded Kell.

‘This must never be repeated.’ The infocyte sighed. ‘The Vanus watch all. Our stacks are filled with information on all the clades. It is how we maintain our position.’

Koyne nodded. ‘You blackmail everyone.’

‘Indeed. We know that the Culexus seek to improve upon their psychic abilities through experimentation. They gather subjects from the care of the Silent Sisterhood. Those they do not induct into their ranks, they spirit away for… other reasons.’

‘This Spear was one of ours?’ Koyne was incredulous.

‘It is possible,’ Tariel went on. ‘There was a project… it was declared null by Sire Culexus himself… they called it the Black Pariah. A living weapon capable of turning a target’s psionic force back upon it, without the aid of an animus device. The ultimate counter-psyker.’

‘What became of it?’ said Kell.

‘That data is not available. The starship the Culexus used as their base of operations was to be piloted into a sun. So the orders said. I know this because my mentor was tasked with gathering this intelligence.’

‘And this Spear is the Black Pariah?’ Kell frowned. ‘Not dead, but in service to the Warmaster.’ He shook his head. ‘What have we been thrown into?’

‘But why is it here, on Dagonet?’ insisted Koyne. ‘To destroy Iota? To disrupt our plan against Horus?’

Soalm gave a shuddering breath. ‘Iota was just in the way. Like all the pilgrims and the refugees. Collateral damage. Spear wanted the book. The blood.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Kell took her arm and pulled her around. ‘Jenniker, what do you mean?’

She told them; and as he understood, Tariel went weak and slumped against the side of the hull, shaking his head. His mouth silently formed the words no, no, no, over and over again.

Koyne snorted. ‘The Emperor’s blood? That cannot be! This is madness… Horus’s assassin tears a page from some ancient tome and with that he can strike at the most powerful human being who ever lived? The very idea is ridiculous!’

‘He has what he wants now,’ Soalm went on. ‘Synchrony with the God-Emperor’s gene-marker. Spear is like a primed bomb, ready to detonate.’ She blinked back tears. ‘We have to stop him before he leaves the planet!’

‘You saw what Spear did to Iota,’ Kell looked towards the Callidus. ‘If this thing is a mirror for psychic might, can you imagine what would happen if he got through to Terra? If he came close enough to turn that power on the Emperor?’

‘A cataclysm…’ husked Tariel. ‘The same thing that happened to Iota, but multiplied a million times over. A collision of the most lethal psychic forces conceivable.’ The infocyte swallowed hard. ‘Throne’s sake… He might even… kill him.’

Koyne gave a sarcastic snort. ‘The Emperor of Mankind wounded by something so fantastic, so ephemeral? I can’t believe it is possible. Spear will be swatted away like an insect. This woman’s reason cannot be trusted! Her kind are governed by archaic spiritual fanaticism, not facts!’

‘The God-Emperor alone guides me…’ she insisted.

The Callidus stabbed a finger at the poisoner. ‘You see? She admits it! She’s part of a cult forbidden by the Council of Terra!’ Before anyone else could respond, the shade went on. ‘We have a mission here! A target! Horus may have sent this Captain Sedirae to his death by design, or we may have tipped our hands by moving too soon, but it does not matter! The end result remains the same. Our mission is not yet ended.’

‘He will come down to Dagonet,’ said Tariel. ‘The Warmaster has no choice now. The punishment of this world must be seen to come from his hand.’

‘Exactly,’ insisted Koyne. ‘We have another chance to kill him. The only chance. A moment like this will never come again.’

Soalm painfully pushed herself to her feet. ‘You understand nothing about me, shapechanger, or what I believe!’ she snarled. ‘His divinity is absolute, and you delude yourself by your denial of it. Only He can save humanity from the darkness that gathers around us. We cannot fail Him!’ She lurched and fell against Kell, who caught her before she could stumble to the deck. ‘I cannot fail Him… Not again.’

Tariel spoke up. ‘If Soalm is right, if this is the Black Pariah and he has ingested a measure of Imperial blood… Spear will seek to flee this world and make space to Terra as quickly as possible. And if he has a ship that can get him to the warp, or worse, if Horus’s fleet is waiting for the assassin to come to them, there will be no way to stop him. Spear must be killed before he leaves Dagonet.’

‘Or we can trust in the Emperor and follow our orders,’ Koyne broke in. ‘You think him divine, Soalm? I may not agree, but I do believe he is strong enough to shrug off any attack. I believe that he will see this Spear coming and strike him from the sky.’ The Callidus’s boy-face twisted. ‘But Horus? The Warmaster is a serpent, rising for just one moment from his hiding place. We kill him here on this world and we end the threat he represents forever.’

‘Will it be that simple?’ Soalm snapped back. ‘A city full of people is being put to the sword out there because we killed a single Astartes. Do you think if the Warmaster dies, every rebel will fall to his knees and be crippled by grief? It will be anarchy! Destruction and chaos!’

‘I am mission commander,’ Kell’s voice cut through the air. ‘I have authority here.’ He glared at Soalm. ‘I will not be disobeyed again. The decision is mine alone.’

‘We can’t kill them both,’ said Tariel.

‘Get us airborne,’ said the Vindicare, reaching for his rifle.

There was a ragged group of men on the perimeter wall of the star-port, some of them soldiers, some of them not, all with looted firearms and the aura of hot fear about them. They saw the jetbike hurtling in from across the desert and they fired on it without hesitation. Everything had been trying to kill them since the shock of the dawn broke, and they did not wait to find out if this vehicle was friend or foe. Insanity and terror ruled Dagonet now, as men turned on men in their panic to flee the doomed city.

The stubby aerodyne had a single, medium-wattage lascannon mounted along the line of the fuselage, and Spear aimed it with twists of the jetbike’s steering handles, lashing along the battlement of the wall with lances of yellow fire. Bodies exploded in blasts of superheated blood-steam as shots meant to knock down aircraft eradicated men with each hit. Those who didn’t die in the initial volley were killed as they ran when Spear came around in a tight loop to strafe them off the line of the wall.

Threads of sinew and knots of transformed tissue flared out behind the killer’s head in a fan. Fronds from the daemonskin fluttered, sucking the mist of blood from the air as the bike passed over the wall and skimmed the runway towards the parked shuttle.

The Eurotas ship was untouched, although Spear noted two corpses off by the prow. The autonomic guns in the shuttle’s chin barbette had locked onto the pair of opportunists, who had clearly thought they could claim the craft to escape. The little turret turned to track the jetbike as Spear came in but it did not fire; the sensors saw nothing when they looked at him, only a jumble of conflicting readings the primitive machine-brain could not decipher.

He abandoned the flyer and sprinted towards the shuttle. Spear was electric; his every neuron sang with bubbling power and giddy anticipation. The tiny droplet of blood he had consumed was like the sweetest nectar. It bubbled through his consciousness like potent, heady wine; he had a flash of Yosef Sabrat’s memory, a sense-taste of drinking an elderly vintage with Daig Segan, savouring the perfection of it. This was a far greater experience. He had dared to sip from the cup of a being more powerful than any other, and even that slightest of tastes made him feel like the king of all creation. If this were an echo of it, he thought, what glory the Emperor must feel to simply be.

Spear released a deep, booming laugh to the clouded skies. He was a loaded gun, now. Infinitely lethal. Ready to commit the greatest murder in history.

He just needed to be close…

Under the starboard wing, he glimpsed a small drum-shaped vehicle on fat tyres; it was a mechanised fuel bowser, governed by simple automata. The device was one of many such systems in the star-port, machines that could do the jobs of men by loading, unloading or servicing the ships that passed through the facility; but like so many things on Dagonet, in the disorder that had engulfed the planet no one had thought to stand down the robots, and so they went on at their programmed tasks, ignorant of the fact that buildings had collapsed around them, unaware that their human masters were most likely dead in the rubble.

The automaton had dutifully done its job, and refuelled the shuttle with fresh promethium. Spear hesitated on the cockpit ladder and his ebullient mood wavered.

Overhead, red light and thunder rolled in across the runway from the burning city, and Spear’s fanged mouth twisted in something like a scowl. In truth, he had not expected the Sons of Horus to be so close behind him to Dagonet. He had hoped he might have a day, perhaps two – but the tides of the warp were capricious. He wondered if some intelligence had been at work to bring all these players to the same place at the same time. To what end, though?

Spear shook the thought away. He was so set on leaving this place behind he had not stopped to think that his means of escape might no longer be in place. It was likely that if the Warmaster’s fleet was here, then the cutter Yelene was either in their possession or smashed to fragments.

‘I must get to Terra…’ He said the words aloud, the need burning in him; and then he sensed a distant taint upon his perception. A powerful, sinister presence. Unbidden, Spear looked up again, into the storm.

Yes. The master was up there, looking down on Dagonet, searching for him. The killer could see the dark, piercing gaze of Erebus in the patterns of the clouds. The master was waiting for him. Watching to see what he would do next, like a patient teacher with a prized student.

Spear dropped off the ladder and moved back to the front of the shuttle. It was all falling into place. With the blood taken, he needed only to ride to his target and perform his kill. Erebus was here to help him; the master would give him the ship he needed. It would be his final act as a mentor.

The killer took one of the bodies on the runway and dragged it into the lee of the wing, under cover from the thick gobbets of black rain that were falling. Spear remembered the rituals of communication that Erebus had seared into his memory. It would only take a moment to arrange. He dipped his fingers into a deep wound on the man’s torso and cupped a handful of thickening blood; then, quickly, Spear used it to draw glyphs of statement on the cracked ferrocrete surface. He made the circles and crosses, building the shape of an eightfold star line by line. Once complete, it would be visible to Erebus like a flare on a moonless night. The master would see it and know. He would understand.

The wind changed direction for an instant, blowing the smell of the corpse and the tang of promethium across the sensing pits in Spear’s fanged maw; and, too, it brought him the skirl of humming turbines.

His head snapped up, catching sight of a white-and-green shape dropping down through the mist. Something flashed in the open hatch and Spear jerked away on reflex.

A bullet creased the surface of his daemonflesh face like a razor blade, opening a ragged gouge that spat out a fan of ebon fluid; the tainted blood spattered over the half-drawn glyphs, ruining the pattern. Spear stumbled. A fraction of a second slower and the bullet would have struck him between the fathomless black pits of his eyes.

Tightening the muscles in his arms, Spear put up his palms with a snap of the wrist, and the daemonflesh grew new orifices. Long spars of sharp bone clattered into the air in a puff of pinkish discharge.

‘Watch out!’ Tariel called, stabbing at controls to throw the flyer into a half-roll that showed the belly of the aircraft to their target.

Kell staggered, losing his balance for a second as he clung on to his rifle. Koyne, surprisingly strong for wearing a body that seemed insubstantial, grabbed him and held him up. Nearby, Soalm hung on for dear life, shivering in the cold draught billowing through the open hatch.

Bone shards peppered the hull of the flyer and punched through the metal fuselage. Kell flinched as several impacted his chest and buried themselves in the armour there. Koyne cried out and as the aircraft righted itself, the Callidus fell backwards, a circle of bright crimson blossoming through the material across the shade’s thigh.

Kell swept a hand over his chest, flicking the shards away. As they fell to the deck they denatured, becoming soft and pliant. To the Vindicare’s disgust, the shards began to writhe like blind worms. He stamped them into patches of white pus and brought the Exitus up to his shoulder. ‘Tariel! Bring us around!’

The flyer had come in upwind, their approach masked by the clouds and the thunder from the shelling of the capital. Now they were circling the parked shuttle, the livery of the Eurotas Consortium clear as day across the hull. What Kell saw through his targeting scope was disturbing; he had faced humans of every stripe, mutant creatures, even xenos. Spear was unlike any of them. Even from this distance, it exuded a tainted menace that sickened him to look at.

‘It’s making for the cockpit,’ Tariel called out. ‘Kell!’

The marksman saw the blur of the assassin-creature as it ran; the thing hazed the air around it like waves of heat rising from a searing desert, making it hard to draw a bead. His finger tensed on the trigger. There was a high-velocity Splinter round in the chamber – on impact with an organic target it would fracture into millions of tiny hair-like fragments, each a charged piece of molly-wire. The wires would expand in a sphere and rip through flesh and bone like a tornado of blades.

It would do this, if he hit his target. But Kell had missed with the first shot. Even from a moving platform, through rain, against a partly-occluded target, he should have found the mark.

The Vindicare made a snap decision and worked the slide of the rifle, ejecting the unspent Splinter bullet, in one swift motion thumbing a red-tipped round from a pocket on his arm into the open chamber.

‘What are you waiting for?’ Koyne shouted. ‘Kill it!’

The breech of the Exitus closed on the Ignis bullet and Kell swung the longrifle away from the target. He ignored Koyne’s cries and his scope filled with the shape of the fuel bowser.

The incendiary compound in his next shot hit the main promethium tank and combusted. A fist of orange fire flipped the shuttle over and engulfed it in flames. Shockwaves of damp air struck the flyer and the aircraft was forced down hard, the impact of the landing snapping off the undercarriage.

Kell got up as bits of hull metal clattered out of the sky, bouncing off the runway. For a moment, all he saw was the jumping, twisting shapes of the flames; but then something red and smoking tore itself out of the wreckage and began to run for the star-port terminal building.

The Vindicare snarled and raised the rifle, but the weight of the gun told him the magazine was empty. He swore, slamming a new clip into place, knowing as he did that it would not matter. When he peered back through the scope, Spear had vanished. ‘He’s gone for cover,’ he began, turning. ‘We need to–’

‘Eristede?’ His sister’s voice stopped him dead. She lay on the deck, and her face was waxy and dull. There was blood on her lips, and when she moved her hands he saw a jagged length of bone protruding from her chest.

He let the rifle fall and ran to her, dropping into a crouch. Old emotions, strong and long-buried, erupted inside him. ‘Jenniker, no…’

‘Did you kill it?’

He felt the colour drain from him. ‘Not yet.’

‘You must. But not out of fury, do you understand?’

The cold, familiar rage that had always sustained him welled up in Kell’s thoughts. It was the same burning, icy power that had spurred him on ever since that day in the schola, since the moment the woman in the Vindicare robes had told him they knew the name of the man who had killed his parents. It was his undying fuel, the bottomless wellspring of dark emotion that made him such a superlative killer.

His sister’s fingertips touched his cheek. ‘No,’ she said, her eyes brimming with tears. ‘Please don’t show me that face again. Not the revenge. There is no end to that, Eristede. It goes on and on and on and it will consume you. There will be nothing left.’

Kell felt hollow inside, an empty vessel. ‘There’s nothing now,’ he said. ‘You took it all when you broke away. The last connection I had.’ He looked down at his hands. ‘This is all I have left.’

Jenniker shook her head. ‘You’re wrong. And so was I. I let you go that night. I should have made you stay. We could have lived another life. Instead we doomed ourselves.’

She was fading now, and he could see it. A surge of raw panic washed over him. His sister was going to die and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

‘Listen to me,’ she said. ‘He is watching. The God-Emperor waits for me.’

‘I don’t–’

‘Hush.’ She put a finger on his lips, trembling with her agony. ‘One day.’ Jenniker pressed something into his palm and closed his fingers over it. ‘Save His life, Eristede. He will draw me to His right hand, to be with mother and father. I’ll wait for you there. We will wait for you.’

‘Jenniker…’ He tried to find the right words to say to her. To ask her to forgive him. To understand; but her eyes were all the answer he needed. He saw such certainty there, such absence of doubt.

With difficulty she pulled a slim toxin corde from her pocket. ‘Do this, my brother,’ she told him, her pain rising. ‘But not for revenge. For the God-Emperor.’

Before he could stop her, she touched the tip of the needle-like weapon to her palm and pierced the flesh. Kell cried out as her eyes fluttered closed, and she became slack in his hands.

The rains drummed on the canopy and the flames hissed; then he became aware of a presence at his side. Koyne stood there, holding his longrifle. ‘Vindicare,’ said the shade. ‘What are your orders?’

Kell opened his fingers and saw a gold aquila there, stained with dots of red.

‘In the Emperor’s name,’ he said, rising to his feet and taking the weapon, ‘follow me.’

Seventeen

Confrontation
Duel
Termination

Kell looked up as Koyne emerged from the hangar where the Ultio was hidden and his expression stiffened. The boyish face, the pretence at the shape of a human aspect, these were all gone now. Instead, the Callidus had stripped down to what existed in the core of the shade’s persona. An androgynous figure in the matt black overall of a stealthsuit similar to that worn by Kell and Tariel, but with a hood that clung to every contour of the other assassin’s face. The only expression, if it could be said to be such a thing, was from the emerald ovals that were the eyes of the mask. Cold focus glittered there, and little else. Kell was reminded of an artist’s wooden manikin, something without emotion or animation from within.

Koyne’s head cocked. ‘There’s still time to reconsider this.’ The voice, like the figure, was neutral and colourless. Without someone else’s face to speak from, the Callidus seemed to lose all effect.

He ignored the statement, rechecking the fresh clips of ammunition he had taken from the ship for the paired Exitus longrifle and pistol. ‘Remember the plan,’ said the Vindicare. ‘We’ve all seen what it can do. There’s just the three of us now.’

‘You saw it,’ Tariel said, in a small voice. ‘We all saw it. On the memory coil, and out there… It’s not human.’

Koyne gave a reluctant nod. ‘And not xenos. Not alien in that way.’

‘It’s a target, that’s all that matters,’ Kell retorted.

The Callidus scowled. ‘When you have been where I have been and seen what I have seen, you come to understand that there are living things out there that go beyond such easy categorisation. Things that defy reason… even sanity. Have you ever peered into the warp, Vindicare? What lives there–’

‘This is not the warp!’ grated Kell. ‘This is the real world! And what lives here, we can end with a bullet!’

‘But what if we can’t kill the fiend?’ said Tariel, a long ballistic coat pulled tight over him. Congregating under the shadows near his boots, Kell saw rodent-like forms sheltering from the rain.

‘I wounded it,’ said the Vindicare. ‘So we will kill it.’

Tariel gave a slow nod. Overhead, a crackling roar crossed the sky as something burning crimson-purple passed above them, obscured by the low, dirty clouds. Seconds later, impact tremors made the runway quiver all around them, and the winds brought the long, drawn-out rumble of buildings collapsing. The city was entering its death-throes, and when it was finally smothered, Kell doubted the fury of the Sons of Horus would be sated.

Tariel looked up. ‘Vox communications will be sporadic, if they even work at all,’ he said. ‘The radioactives and ionisation in the atmosphere are blanketing the whole area.’

Kell nodded as he walked away. ‘If one of us finds the target, we’ll all know quickly enough.’

The pain across his back was a forest of needles.

Spear ran on, skirting around the rings of broken ferrocrete that had been sections of the control tower, now fallen in a line across the landing pads and maintenance pits. He could feel the daemonskin working against the myriad fragments of metal that were embedded in him, deposited there by the explosion of the shuttle. One by one, the pieces of shrapnel were being expunged from his torso, the living flesh puckering to spit them out in puffs of black blood.

The burn from the blast was torture, and with every footfall jags of sharp agony raced up Spear’s changed limbs and tightened around his chest. When the fuel bowser had detonated, the concussion had caught him first and thrown him clear. The shuttle took the brunt of the explosion, and it was lost to him now. He would need to find another way off Dagonet. Another way to signal the master.

He slowed, clambering over a pile of rubble sloughed from the front of the terminal building, dragging himself up on spars of twisted rebar over drifts of shattered blue glass.

At the apex he dared to pause and throw a glance back through the filthy downpour. The shuttle wreckage was still burning, bright orange flames shimmering where the wet runway reflected them like a dark mirror. Spear’s segmented jaws parted in a low growl. He had allowed himself to become distracted; he was so enraptured by his own success at taking the Warrant he had not stopped to consider the meaning of the witch-girl’s company with the cultists of the Theoge.

Her appearance there had not been happenstance. At first he thought she was merely some defender, a palace guard put in place as a last line of defence by Eurotas’s fanatic cohorts; now it was becoming clearer. He was facing assassins, killers of his own stripe with their own weapons of murder.

He considered what their presence meant, and then discarded the concern. If his purpose on Dagonet had been known, if the forces of the arrogant Emperor had really, truly understood the threat Spear posed to their precious liege lord, this world would have been melted into radioactive glass the moment he set foot on it.

Spear chuckled. Perhaps they expected him to feel fear at his pursuit, but he did not. If anything, he became more certain of his own victory. The only thing that could have faced him on his own terms was the witch-girl, and he had boiled her in the crucible of her own powers. He had little fear of gun or blade after that.

The killer dropped through the yawning space of a tall broken window and landed in a cat-fall on the tiled floor of the terminal. Dust and death hung in the air. Sweeping his gaze around, he saw the remnants of a massive display screen where it had been blown from its mounts by the concussion of an impact several miles away. Across the debris-strewn floor there were a handful of corpses, ragged and gory where carrion-fowl had come to prey on them. The jackal birds glared at Spear from the gloomy corners of the chamber, sitting in their roosts and sniffing at the air. They smelled his blood and they were afraid of its stench.

The daemonskin rippled over him and Spear let out a gasp. It could sense the others coming, it could feel the proximity of bloodletting, of new murder.

He sprinted away into the shadows to prepare; he would not deny the needs of his flesh.

Tariel expected to feel a crippling terror when the others vanished into the shadows of the building, but he did not. He was never really alone, not if he were to be honest with himself. The infocyte found the makings of a good hide in a blown-out administratum room on the mezzanine level of the main terminal, a processing chamber where new arrivals to Dagonet would have been brought for interview by planetary officials before being given formal entry. The eyerats scrambled around him, sniffing at the corners and patrolling the places where there were holes in the walls or missing doorways; his two remaining psyber eagles were watching the main spaces of the atrium and occasionally snapping at the native carrion scavengers when they became too curious.

In a corner formed by two fallen walls, Tariel dropped into a lotus settle and used the cogitator gauntlet to bring up a schematic of the building. It was among the millions of coils worth of files he had copied from the stacks of the Dagonet governmental librariums over the past few weeks, the data siphoned into his personal mnemonic stores. It was habitual of him to do such a thing; if he saw information untended, he took it for himself. It wasn’t theft, for nothing was stolen; but on some level Tariel regarded data left unsecured – or at least data that had not been secured well – as fundamentally belonging to him. If it was there, he had to have it. And it always had its uses, as this moment proved.

Working quickly, he allowed the new scans filtering in from the rats and the eagles to update the maps, blocking out the zones where civil war, rebel attack and careless Astartes bombardments had damaged the building. But the data took too many picoseconds to update; the vox interference was strong enough to be causing problems with his data bursts as well. If matters became worse, he might be forced to resort to deploying actual physical connections.

And there was more disappointment to come. The swarm of netflys he had released on entering the building were reporting in sporadically. The infrastructure of the star-port was so badly damaged that all its internal scrying systems and vid-picters were inert. Tariel would be forced to rely on secondary sensing.

He held his breath, listening to the susurrus of the contaminated rainfall on the broken glass skylights overhead, and the spatter of the runoff on the broken stonework; and then, very distinctly, Tariel heard the sound of a piece of rubble falling, disturbed by a misplaced footstep.

Immediately, a datum-feed from one of the eyerats out in the corridor ceased and the other rodents scrambled for cover, their adrenaline reads peaking.

The infocyte was on his feet before he could stop himself. The lost rat had reported its position as only a few hundred metres from where he now stood.

I will make sure that nothing ever gets close enough to kill me. Tariel’s skin went clammy as his words to Kell returned to him, damning the Vanus with his foolish arrogance. He moved as quickly as he dared, abandoning his makeshift hide and ducking out through a rent in the fallen wall. He heard the psyber eagles take wing above as he moved.

Tariel flinched as he passed through a stream of stale-smelling water dripping down from above, dropping from ledge to ledge until he was in the atrium. He glanced around quickly; the chamber was modelled on a courtyard design. There were galleries and balconies, some ornamental, some not. Through the eyes of one of the birds, he saw a spot that had strong walls to the back and three distinct lines of approach and escape. Pulling his coat tighter, he moved towards it in the shadows, quick and swift, as he had been taught.

As he ran he tabbed the start-up sequence for the pulse generator and sent dozens of test signals to his implanted vox bead; only static answered him. Now, for the first time, he felt alone, even as the feeds from the implanted micropicters in the skulls of his animals followed him in his run. The tiny images clustered around his forearm, hovering in the hololithic miasma.

He was almost across the span of the courtyard when Spear fell silently out of the dimness above him and landed in a crouch on top of an overturned stone bench. The face of red flesh, silver fangs and black eyes looked up and found him.

Tariel was so shocked he jumped back a step, every muscle in his body shaking with surprise.

‘What is this?’ muttered the killer. Those blank, sightless eyes cut into him. The voice was almost human, though, and it had a quizzical edge, as if the monstrosity didn’t know what to make of the trembling, thin man in front of him.

And now the fear came, heavy and leaden, threatening to drag Tariel down; and with it there was an understanding that lanced through the infocyte like a bullet. He had fatally exposed himself, not through the deception of a superior enemy, but because he had made a beginner’s mistake. The falling stone, the lost signal – those had been nothing. Happenstance. Coincidence. But the infocyte had still run. He had committed the cardinal sin that no Vanus could ever be absolved of; he had misinterpreted the data.

Why? Because he had allowed himself to think that he could do this. The past days spent in the company of the Vindicare, the Callidus and Culexus, the Eversor and Venenum, they had convinced him that he could operate in the field as well as he had from his clade’s secret sanctums. But all Fon Tariel had done was to delude himself. He was the most intelligent person in the Execution Force, so why had he been so monumentally foolish? Tariel’s mind railed at him. What could have possibly made him think he was ready for a mission like this? How could his mentors and directors have abandoned him to this fate, spent his precious skills so cheaply?

He had revealed himself. Shown his weakness before the battle had begun. Spear made a noise in its throat – a growl, perhaps – and took a step forward.

The eyerats leapt from the rubble all around the red-skinned freak, claws and fangs bared, and from above in a flutter of metal-trimmed wings, the two psyber eagles dived on the killer with talons out. The slave-animals had picked up on the fear signals bleeding down Tariel’s mechadendrites and reacted in kind.

Spear’s arms went up to bat away the prey birds and he stamped one of the rodents to death with a clawed foot. The other rats clawed their way up the killer’s obscene, fleshy torso; another of them was devoured as a mouth opened in Spear’s stomach and bit it in half. The last was crushed in a balled fist.

The psyber eagles lasted a little longer, spinning about the killer’s horned head, fluttering and slashing with claws and titanium-reinforced beaks. They scored several bloody scratches, but could not escape the fronds of sinewy matter that issued out of Spear’s hands to entrap and strangle them.

Curiosity gave way to anger as the killer dashed the corpses of the birds to the ground; but for his part, Tariel had used the distraction well.

Dragging it from an inner pocket, the infocyte threw a stubby cylinder at Spear and hurled himself away in the opposite direction, falling clumsily over a collapsed table. Lightning fast, the freakish murderer snatched up the object; a grenade. When they had paused to rearm at the Ultio, Tariel had returned to the case of munitions he had presented to Iota during their voyage to Dagonet.

Spear sniffed at the thing and recoiled with a sputtering gasp. It was thick with the stench of dying stars. He hurled it away in disgust; but not quickly enough.

The device exploded with a flat bang of concussion and suddenly the courtyard was filled with a shimmering silver mist of metal snow.

The killer stumbled to his knees and began to scream.

His psyche was being flensed; the layers of his conscious mind were peeling away under an impossibly sharp blade, bleeding out raw-red thought. The agony was a twin to the pain the master had inflicted on Spear all those times he had dared to disobey, to question, to fail.

It was the particles in the air; they were hurting him in ways that the killer thought impossible, frequencies of psionic radiation blasting from every single damned speck of the glittering powder, bathing him in razors. Spear’s mouthparts gaped open and the sound he released from his chest was a gurgling cry of pain. His nerves were alight with phantom fires unseen to the naked eye. In the invisible realms of the immaterium, the shockwave was sawing at the myriad of threads connecting the killer to his etheric shadow. The daemonskin was battering itself bloody, tearing at his subsumed true-flesh as it tried to rip away and flee into the void.

Spear collapsed, shuddering, and mercifully the effect began to lessen; but slowly, far too slowly. He saw the human, the pasty wastrel that had come stumbling into his kill zone. The gangly figure peered out from behind his cover.

Spear wanted to eat him raw. The killer was filled with the need to strike back at the one who had hurt him. He wanted to tear and tear and tear until there was nothing left of this fool but rags of meat–

no

The word came like the tolling of a distant bell, drifting across the churning surface of Spear’s pain-laced thoughts. Quiet at first, then with each moment, louder and closer, more insistent than before.

no no No No NO NO NO

‘Get out!’ Spear screamed the words as loud as he could, the amalgam of his once-human flesh thrashing turbulently against the embedded sheath of the daemonskin symbiont that cloaked him. Skin and skin flexed, tearing and shredding. Black fluids bubbled from new, self-inflicted wounds, staining the broken stonework. He swung his head down and battered it against the rubble, hearing bone snap wetly. Real, physical agony was like a tonic after the impossible, enveloping pain from the cloud-weapon. It shook the grip of the ghost-voices before they could form.

NO NO NO

‘NNNNNnnnnoooo!’ Spear bellowed, so wracked with his suffering he could do nothing but ride it out to the bitter end.

The pale-skinned man was coming closer. He had what could have been a weapon.

Tariel opened his hand and the emitter cone for the pulse generator grew out of the gauntlet’s palm, tiny blue sparks clustering around the nib of the device. He was shaking, and the infocyte grabbed his wrist with his other hand to hold it steady, trying to aim at the writhing, horrible mass that lay on the stones, screaming and bleeding.

The psy-disruptor grenades had only been an experiment. He hadn’t really expected them to work; at best, Tariel thought he might be able to flee under the cover of the discharge, that it might blind Horus’s monstrous assassin long enough for him to escape.

Instead, the thing was howling like a soul being dragged into the abyss. It tore at itself in anguish, ripping out divots of its own flesh. Tariel hesitated, grotesquely fascinated by it; he could not look away from the twitching spectacle.

Faces grew out of the creature’s torso and abdomen. The quivering red skin bowed outwards and became the distinct shape of a male aspect, repeated over and over. It was silently mouthing something to him, but the words were corrupted and blurred. The expression was clear, however. The faces were begging him, imploring him.

The fizzing wash of static issuing from his vox broke for a moment and Tariel heard Koyne’s flat, emotionless drone in his ear. ‘Do not engage it, Vanus,’ said the static-riddled voice. ‘We’re coming to you–’

Then the signal was swallowed up again by interference as somewhere off in the distant city, a new slew of warheads were detonated.

The killer’s spasms of pain were calming, and Tariel came as close as he dared. He hesitated, the question spinning in his thoughts, the pulse generator humming and ready. Attack or flee? Flee or attack?

The faces faded, melting back into the crimson-hued flesh, and suddenly those black, abyssal eyes were staring into him, clear as nightfall.

Tariel triggered the blast of focussed electromagnetic force, but it was too late. Spear moved at the speed of hate, diving into him with his hands aimed forwards in a fan of unfolding claws, knocking his arms away. Wicked talons punctured the Vanus’s torso and tore through dermal flex-armour and meat, down into bone and organs; then the hands split apart and ripped Tariel’s ribcage open, emptying him on to the wet stones.

The slaughterhouse stink of Fon Tariel’s bloody demise reached Koyne as the shade bolted from the broken-ended skywalk spanning the main terminal atrium. The Callidus skidded to a halt and spat in annoyance as what was left of the infocyte was shrugged off his killer’s claws and pooled at the feet of the red-fleshed thing.

Koyne saw the shoals of mouths emerging all over the surface of the monstrosity, as they licked and lapped at the steaming remains of the Vanus. A furious surge of censure ran through the assassin’s mind; Tariel had been a poor choice for this mission from the start. If Koyne had been given command of the operation, as would have been the more sensible choice, then the Callidus would have made sure the Vanus never left the Ultio. Tariel’s kind were simply incapable of the instincts needed to operate in the field. There was a reason the Officio Assassinorum kept them at their scrying stations, and now this wasteful death had proven it. This was all the Vindicare’s fault; the entire mission was breaking apart, collapsing all around them.

But it was too late to abort now. The killer, the Spear-creature, was looking up, sensing the Callidus’s presence – and now Koyne’s options had fallen to one.

With a flexion of the wrist, the haft of a memory sword fell into Koyne’s right hand and the Callidus leapt from the suspended walkway; in the left the shade had the neural shredder, and the assassin pulled the trigger, sending an expanding wave of exotic energy cascading towards Spear.

The red-skinned freak skirted the luminal edge of the neural blast and dodged backwards, performing balletic flips that sent Spear spinning through pools of dark shadow and shafts of grey, watery sunlight.

Koyne pivoted to touch down on altered legs, shifting the muscle mass to better absorb the shock of the landing. The koans of the change-teachers learned in the dojos of the clade came easily to mind, and the Callidus used strength of will to forcibly alter the secretions of polymorphine from a series of implanted drug glands. The chemical let bone and flesh flow like tallow, and Koyne was a master at manipulating it from moment to moment. The assassin allowed the compound to thicken muscle bunches and bone density, and then attacked.

Spear grew great cleavers made of tooth-like enamel from orifices along the bottom of his forearms, and these blades whistled as they slashed through the air around Koyne’s head. A downward slash from the memory sword briefly opened a gouge on Spear’s shoulder, but it was knitting shut again almost as soon as it was cut. Another neural blast went wide. Koyne was too close to deploy the pistol properly, and feinted backwards, resisting the temptation to engage the enemy killer in close combat.

Spear opened his mouth and shouted awls of black cartilage into the air. Glancing hits peppered Koyne’s green-eyed hood and the darts denatured, dissolving into tiny crawling spiders that ate into the ballistic cloth with their sharp mandibles. Before they could chew through the emerald lenses to the soft tissues of Koyne’s eyes, the Callidus gave a snort of frustration and tore the hood away, discarding it.

The assassin saw a glimpse of a familiar face-that-was-no-face, reflected in a sheet of fallen glass. It was not as blank a canvas as it should have been; Koyne’s aspect trembled, moving of its own accord. The Callidus’s anger deepened, and so in turn the face became more defined. There was a slight resemblance there that veered towards the scarred visage of the Garantine.

Koyne didn’t like the thought of that, and turned away as Spear attacked again. The tooth-blades were continuing to grow, lengthening and becoming brownish-grey along the edges. Before the killer could close the range, Koyne aimed the neural shredder and depressed the trigger pad. Energy throbbed from the focussing crystal in a widening stream that swept over Spear and knocked him backwards.

The Callidus had claimed many victims with the weapon. It was a singular horror in its own way; not content with the cessation of a life, instead the pistol behaved as an intellivore, disintegrating the connections between the neurons of an organic brain, killing only memory and mind with the brutality of a hurricane sweeping through a forest.

On any other target, it might have worked. But this was an amalgam of uncontrolled human mutation, merged with a predatory form from a dimension made of madness. What it had that could be called mentality was a lattice of instinct and obedience suspended somewhere beyond the reach of anything in the physical plane.

Spear shrugged off the flickers of energy, folds of skin and fronds of flesh-matter crisping and peeling away from its head like a tattered layer of ablative armour. The grinning, fang-lined mouth underneath was wet with fluids and pus. The killer’s cutting blades swept in and the barrel of the neural shredder was severed cleanly.

The gun screamed and spat watery orange fluids in jerking sputters, twitching so hard that it jolted itself from Koyne’s grasp and tumbled away, falling into the shadows beneath collapsed sheets of flakboard. The Callidus shrank back, grasping for the twin to the memory sword already at point and ready.

The killer and the assassin fell into a blade fight, fat yellow sparks flying as the molecule-thin edges of Koyne’s rapiers cut into the organic swords and broke off brittle, sharp fragments with every hit. Spear’s blades flawed without blunting, as the Callidus learned at cost, the wet lines of them cutting deeply into the stealthsuit. Where blood was drawn, it was slow to clot. The tooth-matter exuded some kind of oily venom that kept the wounds from scabbing over.

Spear changed the balance of the combat, powerful muscles bunching beneath his red flesh, forcing Koyne back and back towards the fractured walls of the courtyard.

The animated contours of the Callidus’s face altered as each blow landed or was deflected. A whirlwind of parries flew from Koyne’s arms, but Spear was gaining ground, pushing the assassin deeper into a defensive stance with each passing moment. Koyne’s inconstant aspect showed a carousel of old faces and new faces, all of them in fury and frustration.

Spear laughed, threads of drool stringing from the split between the halves of his shovel-faced jaw, and in that second Koyne managed a downward slash of both blades. Spear barely parried the move – it was overly aggressive and unexpected, and the tips of the memory swords carved a cross over the killer’s scalp that penetrated to the blackened bone. Wire-thin worms poured from the wound, exposing a milky eye beneath the injury that wept ichor. Spear’s laugh turned to a howl of agony.

There was something fundamentally wrong with this creature. The assassin was not touched by witch-mark like Iota and her Culexus kindred, but still Koyne could sense on a marrow-deep level that Spear was not meant to exist in this world. The creature, whatever amorphous amalgamation of warp-spawn and human it was, flaunted reason by the mere fact of its existence. It was a splinter in the skin of the universe.

Koyne did the trick with the koans once again, marshalling the density of bone and lining of musculature for a leap into the air that defied human potential. The Callidus jumped upwards and pivoted in mid-flight, falling out of Spear’s line of sight over a buckled wall.

The killer came rushing over the hillock of rubble and followed his foe into the atrium proper. The wide, high chamber ran almost the entire length of the terminal, the litter of the dead and the wreckage of the port building lying ankle deep and swimming in stagnant falls of rainwater.

Koyne was rising back into a fighting stance, slower than the Callidus would have liked, but the stress of muscle reformation on the run took its toll. All the no-mind focussing mantras in the pages of the clade’s Liber Subditus were worth nothing against a blade in the hand of an enemy like this one.

When Spear spoke, Koyne knew that the moment was near. The fury in the killer’s hissing, sibilant voice was the sound of a serpent uncoiling, hood fanning open before the bite. ‘I murder and murder, and there is no end to you,’ he spat. ‘You are not challenges to me, you are only steps on the road. Markers for my path.’

‘What monstrosity gave birth to you?’ Koyne asked the question, thinking aloud, the changing face shifting anew. ‘You’re just a collision of freakish chance, an animal. A weapon.’

‘Like you?’ Spear’s mucus-slicked blades flicked back and forth, gleaming dully. ‘Like the wretch back there and the dark-skinned one I killed with my mind? But what have you done of worth, faceless?’ He threw an inelegant, bored attack at Koyne that the Callidus avoided, splashing back through a puddle into the shadows. ‘Nothing you have murdered has any weight. But what I destroy will tip the balance of a galaxy.’

‘You’ll be stopped!’ Koyne shouted the words with sudden, vicious energy, boiling up from a place of naked hatred.

‘You will never know.’ Spear gave a flick of his hand and shot a fan of bone shards at the assassin. Instead of dodging, Koyne rocked forwards, into the path of the darts, and parried them away with a web of mnemonic steel. Blades flashing, the Callidus pushed into the attack, aiming for the single vulnerable point in the killer’s stance.

Spear had left just such an opening to entice the shade, and seized the moment with vicious delight. New blades of fang-like matter burst from the surface of his churning skin and caught Koyne’s twinned strike, blocking the blow even as it fell.

Koyne’s changing face darkened with fright and then agony. Spear crossed his sword-arms like a falling guillotine and both of the Callidus’s slender, delicate hands were severed at the wrists.

Fountains of blood jetted across Spear’s torso as Koyne fell backwards with the force of the pain-shock, and the killer caught his victim before the assassin could tumble into the sloshing, grimy waters. ‘We’re alike,’ he told the Callidus. ‘Beneath the skin. Both the same.’

Koyne was a moment from death, and so Spear reached up and drove needle-sharp nails into the trembling skin of the assassin’s face; then with a single, horrific tearing, he ripped the flesh away to show the red meat underneath. Koyne’s body bucked with the sheer violence of the act, and Spear gave it a brutal shove.

The Callidus spun away and landed on a fallen spire of masonry, a pinnacle of marble bursting through the stealthsuit fabric. Pinned there, the body bled out and twitched, denied a quick death.

‘You see?’ Spear asked the question to the rag of skin in his hand. ‘The same, in our ways.’

The killer tipped back his head and ate his prize morsel. Now this matter was done with, now the Emperor’s ineffectual foot soldiers had been disposed of, Spear could return to the matter of the signalling. He looked around, searching for a wide, flat space where he might begin again on the drawing of the runes.

no

‘Be silent,’ he hissed.

The daemonskin muttered. Something was touching its surface. A breath of faint energy, a pinprick of ultraviolet light. Spear turned, senses altering to follow–

The bullet entered the killer’s head through the hollow black pit of his right eye, the impact transferring such kinetic force it blew Spear off his feet and into a spinning tumble, down into the debris and floodwater. The shot fractured into thousands of tiny, lethal shards that expanded to ricochet around inside the walls of his skull, shredding the meat of his brain into ribbons.

The faceless had given up life in order to draw him into the atrium, into a space under a sniper’s gun.

In those fractions of seconds as the blackness engulfed him, there was understanding. There had been another. In his arrogance, he had failed to account for a third attacker; or perhaps it been Sabrat’s final victory, clouding his mind at the crucial moment.

The killer was killed.

Kell lowered the longrifle and allowed the cameoline cloak to fall open. The echo of the gunshot, hardly louder than a woman’s gasp, still echoed around the rafters of the atrium. Carrion birds roosting nearby flashed into the air on black wings, circling and snarling at each other in their raucous voices.

The Vindicare slung the rifle over his shoulder and felt a tremor in his hands. He looked down at the gloved fingers; they seemed foreign to him, as if they belonged to someone else. They were so steeped in blood; so many lay dead at their touch. The single, tiny pressure of his finger on a trigger plate, such a small amount of expended force – and yet magnified into such great destructive power.

He willed himself to stay away from that secret place in his heart, the stygian well of remorse and wrath that had claimed him on the day he killed the murderer of his parents. He willed it, and failed. Instead, Kell succumbed.

It had been his first field kill.

The man, in transit via aeronef through the valleys of Thaxted Dosas, the dirigible floating beneath the hilltops, skimming the sides of the low peaks. Eristede Kell had made his hide eight days before, in the long grasses. The long grasses like those he and Jenniker played in as children, their games of fetch-find and hunt-the-grue. He waited under the suns and the moons, the former his father’s glory, the latter his mother’s smile.

And when the ’nef came around the hill, he fired the shot and did not make the kill. Not at first. The cabin window was refracted, disrupting his aim. He should have known, adjusted the sights. A lesson learned.

Instead of cold and steely determination, he unchained his anger. Kell unloaded the full magazine of ammunition into the cabin, killing everything that lived within it. He executed all who saw that moment of error, target and collaterals all. Men and women and children.

And he had his revenge.

Once more, he was in that place. Life taken to balance life taken from him, from his family – and once more, there was no sweetness in the act. Nothing but bitter, bitter ash and the rage that would not abate.

With an angry flourish, he grabbed the cable rig on his belt and used the fast-fall to drop quickly from his hide to the waterlogged floor below. The cloak billowing out behind him like the wings of the prey birds overhead, he strode towards the body of the Spear-thing, one hand snaking down to the clasp on the holster at his hip. He did not spare Koyne’s brutalised corpse more than a second glance; despite every tiny challenge to Kell’s authority, in the end the Callidus had obeyed and died in the line of duty. As with Iota, Tariel and the others, he would ensure their clades learned of their sacrifices. There would be new teardrops etched upon the face of the Weeping Queen in the Oubliette of the Fallen.

The monstrous killer lay cruciform, floating on the surface of the floodwater. Rust-coloured billows of blood surrounded the body, a halo of red among the dull shades of the rubble and wreckage.

Kell gave the corpse a clinical glare, barely able to stop himself from drawing a knife and stabbing the crimson flesh in mad anger. The skull, already malformed and inhuman in its proportions, had been burst from within by the lethal concussion of the Shatter bullet. Cracked skin and bone were visible in lines webbing the face; it looked like a grotesque terracotta mask, broken and then inexpertly mended.

Putting the longrifle aside, he drew the Exitus pistol, sliding his hand over the skull sigil on the breech and cocking the heavy handgun. He would leave no trace of this creature.

Kell’s boot disturbed the blood-laced floods and the misted water parted. Motion drew his eye to it; the rusty stain was no longer growing, but shrinking.

The wounds across the body of the killer were drinking it in.

He spun, finger on the trigger.

Spear’s leg made an unnatural cracking sound and bent at the wrong angle, hitting Kell in the chest with the force of a hammer blow. The Vindicare stumbled as the red-skinned creature dragged itself out of the water and threw itself at him. Spear no longer moved with the same unnatural stealth and grace he had seen down the sights of the longrifle, but it made up for what it lacked in speed and aggression. Spear battered at him, knocking the pistol from Kell’s grip, breaking bones with every impact of his jagged fists.

The skin of the killer moved in ways that made the Vindicare’s gut tighten with disgust; it was almost as if Spear’s flesh were somehow dragging about the bones and organs within, animating them with wild, freakish energy. Brain matter and thick fluids dribbled from the impact wound in the killer’s eye, and it coughed globules of necrotic tissues from its yawning mouth and ragged nostrils. The marksman took another hit as he tried to block a blow, and Kell’s shoulder dislocated from its socket, making him bellow in agony.

Stumbling, he fell against the crimson-stained spire where Koyne lay impaled. Spear advanced, with each footfall his body bloating and thickening as it drew in more and more of the blood-laced fluids sloshing about their feet.

There was a face in the bubbling skin of its torso. Then another, and another, biting and chewing at the thin membrane that suffocated them, trying to break free. Spear twitched and halted. It turned its clawed fingers on itself, slashing at the protrusions in its flesh, making scratches that oozed thin liquid.

The faces cried out silently to Kell. Stop him, they screamed.

The daemonskin had saved Spear’s life, if this could be considered life. It was so ingrained in the matter of his being that even the obliteration of his cerebellum was not enough to end him. The proxy-flesh of his warp-parasite contained the force of the bullet detonation – or as much as it was capable of, forcing the broken pieces of Spear back together into some semblance of their undamaged form.

But the daemonskin was a primitive creature, unsophisticated. It missed out petty things like control and intellect, holding tight to instinct and animal fury. The killer was self-aware enough to know that he had been murdered and returned from it, but his mind was damaged beyond repair and what barriers of self-control it had once had were in tatters.

Without them, his cages of captured memory broke open.

The formless force of a fragmented persona-imprint came crashing into Spear’s wounded psyche with the impact of a falling comet, and he was spun and twisted beneath the force of it.

Suddenly, the killer’s thoughts were flooded by an overload of sensation, a bombardment of pieces of emotion, shards of self.

–Ivak and the other boys with a ball and the hoops–

–the smell of matured estufagemi wine was everywhere. The warm, comforting scent seemed cloying and overly strong–

–Renia says yes to his earnest offer of a marriage contract, and he basks in her smile–

–shiny lumps of organ meat that caught the light, and other things pasty-white and streaked with fluid–

–I hate you!–

–the shot that kills the Blue Towers Rapist comes from his gun, finally–

–I’ve heard rumours. Stories from people who know people on other worlds, in other systems–

–No–

–a flicker of guilt–

–I’ve been absent a lot recently–

This was all that there was of Yosef Sabrat’s psyche, an incomplete jigsaw puzzle of a self, driven by the single trait that marbled all the man had been, and all that Spear had destroyed.

He had been waiting. Patient, clever Yosef. Buried deep in the dungeons of Spear’s dark soul, struggling not to fade away. Waiting for a moment like this, for the chance to strike at his murderer.

The phantom-taint of the dead lawman wanted justice. It wanted revenge for every victim in the killer’s bloody annals.

Every soul of those that Spear had slaughtered and looted, every ghost he had pillaged to assume them, to corrupt them into his disguises, each had tasted like a special kind of fear. A fear of loss of self, worse than death.

Now that fear was in him, as Spear clawed at the ragged edge of his own mind, dangling over the brink of a psychic abyss.

And when he spoke, he heard Yosef Sabrat’s voice.

‘Stop him!’

The face was not the thing of fangs and horns and dark voids any more. It belonged to a man, just a man in pain and sorrow, peering out at him as if through the bars of the deepest prison in all creation.

Kell’s breath was struck from him by the grief in those all-too-human eyes. He had seen it enough times, witnessed at a distance in the moment when death claimed a life. The sudden, final understanding in the eyes of a target. The pain and the truth.

He raced forward, ignoring the spirals of hot agony from the broken, grinding edges of his ribcage, stabbing slim throwing knives from his wrist-guard into the torso of the Spear-thing.

It cried out and he pushed past it, falling, slipping on the wet-slick tiles beneath his feet. Kell rolled, clutching for the fallen pistol, fingers grasping the grip.

The killer was coming for him, festoons of claws and talons exploding from every surface on its lurching body, the human face disappearing as it was swallowed by the fangs and spines. It thundered across the debris, crashing through the water.

Kell’s gun came up and he fired. The weapon bucked with a scream of torn air and the heavy-calibre Ignis bullet crossed the short distance between gunman and target.

The round slammed into the meat of Spear’s shoulder and erupted in a blare of brilliant white fire; the hollow tip of the bullet was filled with a pressurised mixture of phosphoron-thermic compound. On impact, it ignited with a fierce million-degree heat that would burn even in the absence of oxygen.

Spear was shrieking, his body shuddering as if it were trying to rip itself apart. Kell took aim again and fired a second shot, then a third, a fourth. At this range he could not miss. The rounds blew Spear back, the combustion of hot air boiling the water pooled around him into steam. The white flames gathered across the killer’s body, eating into the surface of his inhuman flesh.

Kell did not stop. He emptied the Exitus pistol into the target, firing until the slide locked back. He watched his enemy transform from a howling torch into a seething, roiling mass of burned matter. Spear wavered, the screams from its sagging, molten jaws climbing the octaves; and then there was a concussion of unnatural sound that resonated from the creature. Kell saw the ghost of something blood-coloured and ephemeral ripping itself from the killer’s dying meat, and heard a monstrous, furious howl. It faded even as he tried to perceive it, and then the smoking remains fell. A sudden wash of sulphur stink wafted over him and he gagged, coughing up blood and thin bile. The ghost-image had fled.

Nursing his pain, Kell watched as Spear’s blackened, crumbling skeleton hissed and crackled like fat on a griddle.

To his surprise, he saw something floating on the surface of the murky floodwaters; tiny dots of bright colour, like flecks of gold leaf. They issued out from the corpse of the killer, liberated by Spear’s death. When he reached for them they disintegrated, flickering in the wan light and then gone.

‘Not for revenge,’ he said aloud, ‘For the Emperor.’

The Vindicare sat there for a long time, listening to the drumming of the rains and the distant crashes of destruction across the distance to the capital. The explosions and the tremors were coming closer together now, married to the gouts of harsh light falling from the sky above. The city and everything in it was collapsing under the rage of the Sons of Horus; soon they would turn their weapons to the port, to the wastelands, to every place on Dagonet where life still sheltered from their thunder.

The Warmaster’s rebels and traitors would not stop on this world, or the next, or the next. They would cut a burning path across space that would only end at Terra.

That could not come to pass. Kell’s war – his mission – was not over.

Using the Exitus rifle to support his weight, he gathered what he needed and then the Vindicare marksman left the ruins of the terminal behind, beginning a slow walk across the cracked runways under darkening skies.

In the distance, he saw the Ultio’s running lights snap on as the ship sensed his approach.

Eighteen

I Am The Weapon
Into The Light
Nemesis

The guncutter climbed the layers of cloud, punching through pockets of turbulent air thrown into the atmosphere by storm cells, the new-born thunderheads spawning in the wake of orbit-fall munitions.

Somewhere behind it, down on Dagonet’s surface, the landscape was being dissected as lance fire swept back and forth. The killing rains of energy and ballistic warheads had broken the boundaries of the capital city limits; now they were escaping to spread across the trembling ground, cutting earth like a keen skinning knife crossing soft flesh.

The burning sky cradled the arrow-prowed ship, which spun and turned as it wove a path through the cascades of plasma. No human pilot could have managed such a feat, but the Ultio’s helmsman was less a man and more the ship itself. He flew the vessel through the tides of boiling air as a bird would ride a thermal, his hands the stabilators across the bow, his legs the blazing nozzles of the thrusters, fuel-blood pumping through his rumbling engine-heart.

Ultio’s lone passenger was strapped into an acceleration couch at the very point of the ship’s cramped bridge, watching waves of heat ripple across the invisible bubble of void shields from behind a ring-framed cockpit canopy.

Kell muttered into the mastoid vox pickup affixed to his jawbone, subvocalising his words into the humming reader in the arm of the couch. As the words spilled out of him, he breathed hard and worked on attending to his injuries. The pilot had reconfigured the gravity field in the cockpit to off-set the g-force effects of their headlong flight, but Kell could still feel the pressure upon him. But he was thankful for small mercies – had he not been so protected, the lift-off acceleration from the port would have crushed him into a blackout, perhaps even punctured a lung with one of his cracked ribs.

It remained an effort to speak, though, but he did it because he knew he was duty bound to give his report. Even now, the Ultio’s clever subordinate machine-brains were uploading and encoding the contents of the memory spool from Iota’s skull-helm, and the pages of overly analytical logs Tariel had kept in his cogitator gauntlet. When they were done, that compiled nugget of dense data would be transmitted via burst-signal to the ship’s drive unit, still hiding in orbit, within the wreckage of a dead space station.

But not without his voice to join them, Kell decided. He was mission commander. At the end, the lay of the choices were his responsibility and he would not shirk that.

Finally, he ran out of words and bowed his head. Tapping the controls of the reader, he pressed the playback switch to ensure his final entry had been embedded.

‘My name is Eristede Kell,’ he heard himself saying. ‘Assassin-at-Marque of the Clade Vindicare, Epsilon-dan. And I have defied my orders.’

Nodding, he silenced himself, discarding the mastoid patch. Kell’s voice seemed strange and distant to him; it was less a report he had made and more of a confession.

Confession. The loaded connotations of that word made him glance down, to where he had secured Jenniker’s golden aquila about the wrist of his glove. He searched himself, trying to find a meaning, a definition for the emotion clouding his thoughts. But there was nothing he could grasp.

Kell pressed another switch and sent the vox recording to join the rest of the data packet. Outside, the glowing sky had darkened through blue to purple to black, taking the rush of air with it. Ultio was beyond the atmosphere now, and still climbing.

Each breath he took felt tainted and metallic. Thick fluids congested at his throat and he swallowed them back with a grimace. The smell in his nostrils was no one’s blood but his own, and while the painkillers he had injected into his neck had gone some way towards keeping him upright, they were wearing thinner by the moment.

An indicator rune on the control console flared green; Ultio had been sent a line-of-sight signal from the drive unit. Out there in the wreckage-strewn orbits, the drive module was awakening, stealthily turning power to its warp engine and sublight drives. In moments, the astropath and Navigator on board would be roused from their sense-dep slumber. The Ultio’s descent module needed only to cross the space to the other section of the ship and dock; then, reunited, the vessel could run for the void and the escape of the immaterium.

Kell leaned forwards to stare out of the canopy. The only flaw in that otherwise simple plan was the gathering of warships between the guncutter and the drive module.

An armada barred his way. Starships the size of a metropolis crested with great knife-shaped bows, blocks of hideously beweaponed metal like the heads of god-hammers, each one detailed in shining steel and gold. Each with the device of an opened, baleful eye about them, glaring ready hate into the dark.

At the centre of the fleet, a behemoth. Kell recognised the lines of a uniquely lethal vessel. A battle-barge of magnificent, gargantuan proportions haloed by clouds of fighter escorts; the Vengeful Spirit, flagship of the Warmaster Horus Lupercal.

‘Pilot,’ he said, his voice husky with the pain, ‘put us on an intercept heading with the command ship. Put all available power to the aura cloak.’

The cyborg helmsman clicked and whirred. ‘Increased aura cloak use will result in loss of void shield potentiality.’

He glared at the visible parts of the pilot’s near-human face, peering from the command podium. ‘If they can’t see us, they can’t hit us.’

‘They will hit us,’ it replied flatly. ‘Intercept vector places Ultio in high-threat quadrant. Multiple enemy weapon arcs.’

‘Just do as I say!’ Kell shouted, and he winced at the jag of pain it caused him. ‘And open a link to the Navigator.’

‘Complying.’ The Vindicare thought he heard a note of grievance in the reply as the guncutter turned, putting its bow on the Vengeful Spirit. The sensors were showing the first curious returns from the picket ships in Horus’s fleet. They were sweeping the area for a trace, uncertain if their scry-sensors had seen something; but the Ultio’s aura cloak was generations ahead of common Naval technology. They would be inside the fleet’s inner perimeter before anyone on the picket vessels could properly interpret what they had seen.

Another rune on the console glowed; a vox channel was open between the forward module and the drive section. Kell spoke quickly, fearful that the transmission would undo all the work of the cloak if left active a second too long. ‘This is Kell. Stand by to receive encoded burst transmission. Release only on Omnis Octal authority.’ He took a shaky breath. ‘New orders supersede all prior commands. Protocol Perditus. Expedite immediate. Repeat, go to Protocol Perditus.’

It seemed like long, long seconds before the Navigator’s whispering, papery voice returned through the speaker grille. ‘This will be difficult,’ it said, ‘but the attempt will be made.’ Kell reached for the panel to cut the channel just as the Navigator spoke again. ‘Good luck, assassin.’

The rune went dark, and Kell’s hand dropped.

Beyond the canopy, laser fire probed the sky around the ship, and ahead the battle-barge grew to blot out the darkness.

Close-range lascannons on the hull of the drive module blew apart the paper-thin sheath of metals hiding the aft section of the ship, and the Ultio’s drive section blasted free of the station wreck in a pulse of detonation. Fusion motors unleashed the tiny suns at their cores and pushed the craft away, climbing the acceleration curve in a glitter of void shields and displaced energy. In moments, the vessel was rising towards one-quarter lightspeed.

Picket ships on the far side of the Warmaster’s fleet, ex-Imperial Navy frigates and destroyers crewed only by human officers, saw it running and opened fire. Most of the ships belonging to the Dagoneti had been obliterated over the past few hours, and the stragglers had either been forced down to the surface or cut in two by their beam lances.

Targeting solutions on the odd craft that had suddenly appeared on their holoscopes behaved unexpectedly, however. Weapon locks drifted off it, unable to find a true. Scans gave conflicting readings; the ship was monstrously over-powered for something of its tonnage; it seemed unmanned, and then it seemed not. And strangest of all, the glimmer of a building warp signature built up around its flanks the further it strayed away from the gravity shadow of the planet, racing for the jump point.

Warships dropped out of formation and powered after it, following the unidentified craft up and out of the plane of the Dagonet system’s ecliptic. They would never catch it.

Alone now on their headless beast of a vessel, the Ultio’s Navigator and astropath communed with one another in a manner most uncommon for their respective kinds; with words.

And what they shared was an understanding of mutual purpose. Protocol Perditus. A coded command string known to them both, to which there was only one response. They were to leave their area of operation on immediate receipt of such an order and follow a pre-set series of warp space translations. They would not stop until they lay under the light of Sol. The mission was over, abandoned.

Weapons fire haloed the space around the ship as it plunged towards the onset of critical momentum, the first vestiges of a warp gate forming in the void ahead.

The blood continued to stream from Erebus’s nostrils as he shoved his way out of the elevator car and through the cluster of helots waiting on the command deck. The fluid matted his beard and he grimaced, drawing a rough hand across his face. The psychic shock was fading, mercifully, but for a brief while it had felt as if it would cut him open.

There, in his chambers aboard the flagship, meditating in the gloom over his spodomancy and mambila divination, he attempted to find an answer. The eightfold paths were confused, and he could not see their endpoints. Almost from the moment they had arrived in the Dagonet system, Erebus had been certain that something was awry.

His careful plans, the works he had conceived under the guidance of the Great Ones, normally so clear to him, were fouled by a shadow he could not source. It perturbed him, and to a degree undeserving of such emotion. This was only a small eddy in the long scheme, after all. This planet, this action, a minor diversion from the pre-ordained works of the great theatre.

And yet Horus Lupercal was doing such a thing more and more. Oh, he followed where Erebus led, that was certain, but he did it less quickly than he had at first. The Warmaster’s head was being turned and he was wilful with it. At times, the Word Bearer allowed himself to wonder; was the master of the rebels listening to other voices than he?

Not to dwell, though. This was to be expected. Horus was a primarch. One could no more hope to shackle one down and command him than a person might saddle an ephemeral animus. The First Chaplain reminded himself of this.

Horus must be allowed to be Horus, he told himself. And when the time is upon him… He will be ready.

Still; the voyage to Dagonet, the fogging of the lines. That did not disperse. If anything, it grew worse. In his meditations Erebus had searched the egosphere of the planet turning below them, but the screaming and the fear drowned out every subtle tell. All he could divine was a trace of the familiar.

The pariah-thing. His Spear. Perhaps no longer on this world, perhaps just the spoor of its passing, but certainly something. For a while he was content to accept this as the truth, but with the passing of the hours Erebus could not leave the matter be. He worried at it, picked at the psy-mark like a fresh scab.

Why had Spear come to Dagonet? What possible reason could there be for the killer to venture off the path Erebus had laid out for him? And, more to the troubling point of it, why had Horus chosen to show the flag here? The Word Bearer believed that coincidence was something that existed only in the minds of men too feeble-brained to see the true spider web of the universe’s cruel truth.

It vexed him that the answer was there below on the planet, if only he could reach out for it.

And so he was utterly unprepared for what came next. The rising of the black shriek of a sudden psionic implosion. In the chamber, sensing the edges of it, turning his thoughts to the dark places within and allowing the void to speak to him.

A mistake. The death-energy of his assassin-proxy, hurtling up from the planet’s surface, the escaping daemon beast brushing him as it fled back to the safety of the immaterium. It hit him hard, and he was not ready for it.

He felt Spear die, and with him died the weapon-power. The phantom gun at the head of the unknowing Emperor, shattered before it could even be fired.

Erebus’s fury drove him from his chambers, through the corridors of the ship. His plan, this thread of the pathway, had been broken, and for Hades’s sake he would know why. He would go down to Dagonet and sift the ashes of it through his fingers. He would know why.

Composing himself, the Word Bearer entered the Lupercal’s Court without waiting to be granted entry, but even as Maloghurst moved to block his path, the Warmaster turned from the great window and beckoned Erebus closer. He became aware of alert sirens hooting and beyond the armourglass, fashioned in the oval of an open eye, he saw rods of laser fire sweeping the void ahead of the flagship’s prow.

Horus nodded to him, the hellish light of the weapons discharges casting his hard-edged face like blunt stone. He was, as ever, resplendent in his battle gear. In his haste, Erebus had come to the Court still in his dark robes, and for a moment the Word Bearer felt every bit of his inferiority to the Warmaster, as Horus seemed to loom over him.

None of this he showed, however. He bottled it away, his aspect never changing. Erebus was a prince of lies, and well-practised with it. ‘My lord,’ he began. ‘If it pleases the Warmaster, I have a request to make. A matter to address–’

‘On the surface?’ Horus looked away. ‘We’ll visit Dagonet soon enough, my friend. For the work to be done.’

Erebus maintained his outwardly neutral aspect, but within it took an effort to restrain his tension. ‘Of course. But perhaps, if I might have leave to venture down before the rites proper, I could… smooth the path, as it were.’

‘Soon enough,’ Horus repeated, his tone light; but the chaplain knew then that was the end to it.

Maloghurst hobbled closer, bearing a data-slate. He shot the Word Bearer a look as he stepped in front of him. ‘Message from the pickets,’ he said. ‘The other target is too fast. They scored hits but it will make space before they catch it.’

The Warmaster’s lips thinned. ‘Let it go. What of the other, our ghost?’ He gestured at the inferno raging outside.

‘Indeterminate,’ the equerry sniffed. ‘Gun crews on the perimeter ships report phantom signals, multiple echoes. They’re carving up dead sky, and finding nothing.’ Erebus saw his scarred face’s perpetual frown deepening. ‘I’ve drawn back the fighter screen as you ordered, lord.’

Horus nodded. ‘If he dares come so close to me, I want to look him in the eyes.’

The Word Bearer followed the Warmaster’s gaze out through the windows.

The slate in Maloghurst’s gnarled fingers emitted a melodic chime, at odds with the urgency of its new message. ‘Sensors read… something,’ said the equerry. ‘Closing fast. A collision course! But weapons can’t find it…’

‘An aura cloak,’ said Erebus, peering into the stormy dark. ‘But such a device is beyond the Dagoneti.’

‘Yes.’ Horus smiled, unconcerned. ‘Do you see him?’ The Warmaster stepped to the window and pressed his hands to the grey glass.

Out among the maelstrom of energy, as javelins of fire crossed and recrossed one another, scouring the sky for the hidden attacker, for one instant the Chaplain saw something like oil moving over water. Just the suggestion of a raptor-like object lensing the light of the distant stars behind it. ‘There!’ He pointed.

Maloghurst snapped out a command over his vox. ‘Target located. Engage and destroy!’

The gun crews converged their fire. The craft was close, closer than the illusory ghost image had suggested. Unbidden, Erebus backed away a step from the viewing portal.

Horus’s smile grew wider and the Word Bearer heard the words he whispered, a faint rumble in the deepest register. ‘Kill me,’ said the Warmaster, ‘if you dare.’

Ultio burned around him.

The pilot was already dead in the loosest sense, the cyborg’s higher mental functions boiled in the short-circuit surge from a hit on the starboard wing; but his core brain was intact, and through that the ship dodged and spun as the sky itself seemed to turn upon them.

The ship trailed pieces of fuselage in a comet tail of wreckage and burning plasma. The deck trembled and smoke filled the bridge compartment. A vista of red warning runes met Kell’s eyes wherever he looked. Autonomic systems had triggered the last-chance protocols, opening an iris hatch in the floor to a tiny saviour pod mounted beneath the cockpit. Blue light spilling from the hatch beckoned the Vindicare for a moment. He had his Exitus pistol at his hip and he was still alive. He would only need to take a step…

But to where? Even if he survived the next ten seconds, where could he escape to? What reason did he have to live? His mission… The mission was all Eristede Kell had left in his echoing, empty existence.

The command tower of the Vengeful Spirit rose through the forward canopy, acres of old steel and black iron, backlit by volleys of energy and the red threads of lasers. Set atop it was a single unblinking eye of grey and amber glass, lined in shining gold.

And within the eye, a figure. Kell was sure of it, an immense outline, a demigod daring him to come closer. His hand found the manual throttle bar and he pressed it all the way to the redline, as the killing fires found his range.

He looked up once again, and the first sighting-mantra he had ever been taught pressed itself to the front of his thoughts. Four words, a simple koan whose truth had never been more real than it was in this moment.

Kell said it aloud as he fell towards his target.

‘I am the weapon.’

Across the mountainous towers of the Imperial Palace, the sun was rising into the dusky sky, but its light had yet to reach all the wards and precincts of the great fortress-city. Many districts were still dormant, their populace on the verge of waking for the new day; others had been kept from their slumber by matters that did not rest.

In the ornate corridors of power, there was quiet and solemnity, but in the Shrouds, any pretence at decorum had been thrown aside.

Sire Eversor’s fist came down hard on the surface of the rosewood table with an impact that set the cut-glass water goblets atop it rattling. His anger was unchained, his eyes glaring out through his bone mask. ‘Failure!’ he spat, the word laden with venom. ‘I warned you all when this idiotic plan was proposed, I warned you that it would not work!’

‘And now we have burned our only chance to kill the Warmaster,’ muttered Sire Vanus, his synth-altered voice flat and toneless like that of a machine.

The master of Clade Eversor, unable to remain seated in his chair, arose in a rush and rounded the octagonal table. The other Sires and Siresses of the Officio Assassinorum watched him stalk towards the powerful, hooded figure standing off to one side, in the glow of a lume-globe. ‘We never should have listened to you,’ he growled. ‘All you did was cost us more men, Custodian!’

At the head of the table, the Master of Assassins looked up sharply, his silver mask reflecting the light. Behind him there was nothing but darkness, and the man appeared to be cradled in a dark, depthless void.

‘Yes,’ spat Sire Eversor. ‘I know who he is. It could be no other than Constantin Valdor!’

At this, the hooded man let his robes fall open and the Captain-General was fully revealed. ‘As you wish,’ he said. ‘I have nothing to fear from you knowing my face.’

‘I suspected so,’ ventured Siress Venenum, her face of green and gold porcelain tilting quizzically. ‘Only the Custodian Guard would be so compelled towards ensuring the deaths of others before their own.’

Valdor shot her a look and smiled coldly. ‘If that is so, then in that way we are alike, milady.’

‘Eversor,’ said the Master, his voice level. ‘Take your seat and show some restraint, if that is at all possible.’ The featureless silver mask reflected a twisted mirror of the snarling bone face.

‘Restraint?’ said Sire Vindicare, his aspect hidden behind a marksman’s spy mask. ‘With all due respect, my lord, I think we can all agree that the Eversor’s anger is fully justified.’

‘Horus sent one of his men to die in his stead,’ Sire Eversor sat once more, his tone bitter. ‘He must have been warned. Or else he has a daemon’s luck.’

‘That, or something else…’ Siress Venenum said darkly.

‘Missions fail,’ interrupted the silk-faced mistress of the Callidus. ‘It has ever been thus. We knew from the start that this was a target like no other.’

Across from her, the watchful steel skull concealing Sire Culexus bent forward. ‘And that is answer enough?’ His whispering tones carried across the room. ‘Six more of our best are missing, presumed dead, and for what? So that we may sit back and be assured that we have learnt some small lesson from the wasting of their lives?’ The skull’s expression did not change, but the shadows gathered around it appeared to lengthen. ‘Operative Iota was important to my clade. She was a rarity, a significant investment of time and energy. Her loss does not go without mark.’

‘There’s always a cost,’ said Valdor.

‘Just not to you,’ Venenum’s retort was acid. ‘Our best agents and our finest weapons squandered, and still Horus Lupercal draws breath.’

‘Perhaps he cannot be killed,’ Sire Eversor snapped.

Before the commander of the Custodians could reply, the Master of Assassins raised his hand to forestall the conversation. ‘Sire Vanus,’ he began, ‘shall we dispense with this hearsay and instead discuss what we know to be true of the fallout from our operation?’

Vanus nodded, his flickering, glassy mask shifting colour and hue. ‘Of course.’ He pushed at a section of the pinkish-red wood and the table silently presented him with a panel of brass buttons. With a few keystrokes, the hololithic projector hidden below came to life, sketching windows of flickering blue light above their heads. Displays showing tactical starmaps, fragments of scout reports and feeds from long-range observatories shimmered into clarity. ‘News from the Taebian Sector is, at best, inconclusive. However, it appears that most, if not all, of the prime worlds along the length of the Taebian Stars trade spine are now beyond the influence of Imperial governance.’ On the map display, globular clusters of planets winked from blue to red in rapid order, consumed by revolt. ‘The entire zone has fallen into anarchy. We have confirmation that the worlds of Thallat, Bowman, Dagonet, Taebia Prime and Iesta Veracrux have all broken their ties with the lawful leadership of Terra and declared loyalty to the Warmaster and his rebels.’

Sire Culexus made a soft hissing sound. ‘They fall as much from their fears as from the gun.’

‘The Warmaster stands over them and demands they kneel,’ said Valdor. ‘Few men would have the courage to refuse.’

‘We can be certain of only two factors,’ the Vanus went on. ‘One; Captain Luc Sedirae of the 13th Company of the Sons of Horus, a senior general in the turncoat forces, has been terminated. Apparently by the action of a sniper.’ He glanced at Sire Vindicare, who said nothing. ‘Two; Horus Lupercal is alive.’

‘Sedirae’s death is an important success,’ said the Master, ‘but it is no substitute for the Warmaster.’

‘My clade has already engaged with the information emerging from the Taebian Sector,’ said Sire Vanus. ‘My infocytes are in the process of performing adjustments in the overt and covert media to best reflect the Imperium’s position in this situation.’

‘Papering over the cracks with quick lies, don’t you mean?’ said Siress Callidus.

The colours of the Vanus’s shimmer-mask blue-shifted. ‘We must salvage what we can, milady. I’m sure–’

‘Sure?’ The silk mask tightened. ‘What are you sure of? We have no specifics, no solutions! We’ve done nothing but tip our hand to the traitors!’

The mood of the room shifted, and once again the anger and frustration simmering unchecked threatened to erupt. The Master of Assassins raised his hand once more, but before he could speak a warning bell sounded through the room.

‘What is that?’ demanded Sire Vindicare. ‘What does it mean?’

‘The Shrouds…’ The Master was coming to his feet. ‘They’ve been compromised…’ His silvered face suddenly turned towards one of the mahogany-panelled walls, as if he could see right through it.

With a bullet-sharp crack, ancient wood and rigid metals gave way, and a hidden door slammed open. Beyond it, in the ever-shifting puzzle of the changing corridors, three figures filled the space. Two wore amber-gold armour chased with white and black accents, their faces set and grim. They were veteran Space Marines of the VII Legiones Astartes in full combat plate; but eclipsing their presence was a warrior of stone cast and cold, steady gaze standing a head higher than both of them.

Rogal Dorn stepped into the Shrouds, his battle gear glittering in the light of the lume-globes. He cast his gaze around the room with an expression that might have been disgust, dwelling on Valdor, then the Master, and finally the deep shadows engulfing the farthest side of the chamber.

It was Siress Venenum who dared to shatter the shocked silence that came in the wake of Dorn’s intrusion. ‘Lord Astartes,’ she began, desperately trying to rein in her fear. ‘This is a sanctum of–’

The Imperial Fist did not even grace her with a look. He advanced towards the rosewood table and folded his arms across his titanic chest. ‘Here you are,’ he said, addressing his comments towards Valdor. ‘I told you our conversation was not ended, Custodian.’

‘You should not be here, Lord Dorn,’ he replied.

‘Neither should you,’ snapped the primarch, his voice like breaking stones. ‘But you brought both of us to it. To this… place of subterfuge.’ He said the last word as if it revolted him.

‘This place is not within your authority, Astartes.’ The voice of the Master of Assassins was altered and shifted, but still the edge of challenge was clear for all to hear.

‘At this moment, it is…’ Dorn turned his cold glare on the mirrored face staring up at him. ‘My Lord Malcador.’

A thrill of surprise threaded across the room, as every one of the Sires and Siresses turned to stare at the Master.

‘I knew it…’ hissed Culexus. ‘I always knew you were the Sigillite!’

‘This is a day of revelations,’ muttered Sire Vanus.

‘I have just begun,’ Dorn rumbled.

With a sigh, Malcador reached up and removed the silver mask, setting it down on the table. He frowned, and an eddy of restrained telepathic annoyance rippled through the air. ‘Well done, my friend. You’ve broken open an enigma.’

‘Not really,’ Dorn replied. ‘I made an educated guess. You confirmed it.’

The Sigillite’s frown became a brief, intent grimace. ‘A victory for the Imperial Fists, then. Still, I have many more secrets.’

The warrior-king turned. ‘But no more here today.’ He glared at the other members of the Officio. ‘Masks off,’ he demanded. ‘All of you! I will not speak with those of such low character who hide their faces. Your voices carry no import unless you have the courage to place your name to them. Show yourselves.’ The threat beneath his words did not need to break the surface.

There was a moment of hush; then movement. Sire Vindicare was first, pulling the spy mask from his face as if he were glad to be rid of it. Then Sire Eversor, who angrily tossed his fang-and-bone disguise on to the table. Siress Callidus slipped the silk from her dainty face, and Vanus and Venenum followed suit. Sire Culexus was last, opening up his gleaming skull mask like an elaborate metal flower.

The assassins looked upon their naked identities for the first time and there was a mixture of potent emotions: anger, recognition, amusement.

‘Better,’ said Dorn.

‘Now you have stripped us of our greatest weapon, Astartes,’ said Siress Callidus, a fall of rust-red hair lying unkempt over a pale face. ‘Are you satisfied?’

The primarch glanced over his shoulder. ‘Brother-Captain Efried?’

One of the Imperial Fists at the door stepped forwards and handed a device to his commander, and in turn Dorn placed it on the table and slid it towards Sire Vanus.

‘It’s a data-slate,’ he said.

‘My warriors intercepted a starship beyond the edge of the Oort Cloud, attempting to vector into the Sol system,’ Dorn told them. ‘It identified itself as a common freighter, the Hallis Faye. A name I imagine some of you might recognise.’

‘The crew…?’ began Sire Eversor.

‘None to speak of,’ offered Captain Efried.

Dorn pointed at the slate. ‘That contains a datum capsule recovered from the vessel’s mnemonic core. Mission logs. Vox recordings and vid-picts.’ He glanced at Malcador and the Custodian. ‘What is spoken of there is troubling.’

The Sigillite nodded towards Sire Vanus. ‘Show us.’

Vanus used a hair-fine connector to plug the slate into the open panel before him, and immediately the images in the ghostly hololith flickered and changed to a new configuration of data-panes.

At the fore was a vox thread, and it began to unspool as a man’s voice, thick with pain, filled the air. ‘My name is Eristede Kell. Assassin-at-Marque of the Clade Vindicare, Epsilon-dan… And I have defied my orders.’

Valdor listened in silence along with the rest of them, first to Kell’s words, and then to fragments of the infocyte Tariel’s interim logs. When Sire Vanus opened the kernel of data containing the vid-records from Iota’s final moments, he watched in mute disgust at the abomination that was the Black Pariah. As this horror unfolded before them, Sire Culexus bent forwards and quietly wept.

They listened to it all; the discovery of military situation on Dagonet and the plan to reignite the dying embers of the planet’s civil war; Jenniker Soalm’s rejection of the mission in favour of her own; the assassination of Sedirae in Horus’s stead and the brutal retribution it engendered; and at last, the existence of and lethal potential within the creature that called itself Spear, and the choice that the Execution Force had been forced to make.

When they had heard as much as was necessary, the Sigillite shouted at Sire Vanus to cease the playback. Valdor surveyed the faces of the clade directors. Each in their own way struggled to process what they had been brought by the Imperial Fists.

Sire Eversor, confusion in his gaze, turned on the Culexus. ‘That freakish monstrosity… you created that? For Terra’s sake, cousin, tell me this is not so!’

‘I gave the orders myself!’ insisted the psyker. ‘It was destroyed!’

‘Apparently not,’ Dorn replied, his jaw tightening.

‘But it is dead now, yes?’ said Sire Vanus. ‘It must be…’

Dorn’s dark eyes flashed with anger. ‘A narrow view. That is all your kind ever possess. Do you not understand what you have done? Your so-called attempts at a surgical assault against Horus have become nothing of the kind!’ His voice rose, like the sound of storm-tossed waves battering a shoreline. ‘Sedirae’s death has cost the lives of an entire planet’s population! The Sons of Horus have taken revenge on a world because of what your assassins did there!’ He shook his head. ‘If the counter-rebellion on Dagonet had been allowed to fade, if their war had not been deliberately and callously exacerbated, Horus would have passed them by. After my brothers and I have broken his betrayal, the Imperium would have retaken control of Dagonet. But now its devastation leads to the collapse of keystone worlds all across that sector! Now the traitors take a strong foothold there, and it will be my battle-brothers and those of my kindred who must bleed to oust them!’ He pointed at them all in turn. ‘This is what you leave behind you. This is what your kind always leave behind.’

Valdor could remain silent no longer and he stepped forward. ‘The suffering on Dagonet is a tragedy, none will deny that,’ he said, ‘and yes, Horus has escaped our retribution once more. But a greater cause has been served, Lord Dorn. Kell and his force chose to preserve your father in exchange for letting your errant brother live. This assassin-creature Spear is dead, and a great threat to the Emperor’s life has been neutralised. I would consider that a victory.’

‘Would you?’ Dorn’s fury was palpable, crackling in the air around him. ‘I’m sure my father is capable of defending himself! And tell me, Captain-General, what kind of victory exists in a war like the one you would have us fight?’ He gestured at the room around them. ‘A war fought from hidden places under cover of falsehood? Innocent lives wasted in the name of dubious tactics? Underhanded, clandestine conflicts, fuelled by secrets and lies?’

For a moment, Valdor half-expected the Imperial Fist to rip up the table between them just so he could strike at the Custodian; but then, like a tidal wave drawing back into the ocean, Dorn’s anger seemed to subside. Valdor knew better, though – the primarch was the master of his own fury, turning it inward, turning it to stony, unbreakable purpose.

‘This war,’ Dorn went on, sparing Malcador a glance, ‘is a fight not just for the material, for worlds and for the hearts of men. We are in battle for ideals. At stake are the very best of the Imperium’s ultimate principles. Values of pride, nobility, honour and fealty. How can a veiled killer understand the meaning of such words?’

Valdor felt Malcador’s eyes on him, and the tension in him seemed to dissipate. At once, he felt a cold sense of conviction rise in his thoughts, and he matched the Imperial Fist’s gaze, answering his challenge. ‘No one in this room has known war as intimately as you have, my lord,’ he began, ‘and so surely it is you who must understand better than any one of us that this war cannot be a clean and gallant one. We fight a battle like no other in human history. We fight for the future! Can you imagine what might have come to pass if Kell and the rest of the Execution Force had not been present on Dagonet? If this creature Spear had been reunited with the rebel forces?’

‘He would have attempted to complete his mission,’ said Sire Culexus. ‘Come to Terra, to enter the sphere of the Emperor’s power and engage his… murdergift.’

‘He would never have got that far!’ insisted Sire Vanus. ‘He would have been found and killed, surely. The Sigillite or the Emperor himself would have sensed such an abomination and crushed it!’

‘Are you certain?’ Valdor pressed. ‘Horus has many allies, some of them closer than we wish to admit. If this Spear could have reached Terra, made his attack… Even a failure to make the kill, a wounding even…’ He trailed off, suddenly appalled by the grim possibility he was describing. ‘Such a psychic attack would have caused incredible destruction.’

Dorn said nothing; for a moment, it seemed as if the primarch was sharing the same terrible nightmare that danced in the Custodian’s thoughts; of his liege lord mortally wounded by a lethal enemy, clinging to fading life while the Imperial Palace was a raging inferno all around him.

Valdor found his voice once more. ‘Your brother will beat us, Lord Dorn. He will win this war unless we match him blow-for-blow. We cannot, we must not be afraid to make the difficult choices, the hardest decisions! Horus Lupercal will not hesitate–’

‘I am not Horus!’ Dorn snarled, the words striking the Custodian like a physical blow. ‘And I will–’

‘Enough.’

The single utterance was a lightning bolt captured in crystal, shattering everything around it, silencing them all with an unstoppable, immeasurable force of will.

Rogal Dorn turned to the sound of that voice as every man, woman and Astartes in the chamber sank to their knees, each of them instinctively knowing who had uttered it. The Sigillite was the last to do so, shooting a final, unreadable look at the primarch of the Imperial Fists before he too took to a show of obeisance.

The question escaped Dorn’s lips. ‘Father?’

The darkness, the great curtain of shadows that had filled the furthest corner of the chamber now became lighter, the walls and floor growing more distinct by the moment as the unnatural gloom faded. He blinked; strange how he had looked directly into that place and seen it, but without really seeing it at all. It had been in plain sight for everyone in the room, even he, and yet none of them had registered the strangeness of it.

Now from the black came light. A figure stood there, effortlessly dominating the space, his patrician features marred by a mixture of turbulent emotions that gave even the mighty Imperial Fist a second’s pause. The Emperor of Mankind wore no armour, no finery or dress uniform, only a simple surplice of grey cloth threaded with subtle lines of purple and gold silk; and yet he was still magnificent to behold.

Perhaps he had been listening to them all along. Yet, it seemed to be a defiance of the laws of nature, that a being so majestic, so lit with power, could stand in a room among men, Astartes and the greatest mortal psyker who ever lived, and be as a ghost.

But then he was the Emperor; and to all questions, that was sufficient answer.

His father came towards him, and Rogal Dorn bowed deeply, at length joining the others at bended knee before the Master of the Imperium.

The Emperor did not speak. Instead, he strode across the Shrouds to the tall windows where the sailcloth drapes hung like frozen cataracts of shadow. With a flick of his great hands, Dorn’s father took a fist of the cloth and snatched it away. The hangings tore free and tumbled to the floor. He walked the perimeter of the room, ripping away every last cover until the chamber was flooded with the bright honey-yellow luminosity of the Himalayan dawn.

Dorn dared to glance up and saw the golden radiance striking his father. It gathered its brightness to him, as if it were an embrace. For an instant, the sunlight was like a sheath of glowing armour about him; then the primarch blinked and the moment passed.

‘No more shadows,’ said the Emperor. His words were gentle, summoning, and all the faces in the room turned to look upon him. He placed a hand on Dorn’s shoulder as he passed him by, and then repeated the gesture with Valdor. ‘No more veils.’

He beckoned them all to stand and as one they obeyed, and yet in his presence each of them felt as if they were still at his feet. His aura towered over them, filling the emotions of the room.

Dorn received a nod, as did Valdor. ‘My noble son. My loyal guardian. I hear both your words and I know that there is right in each of you. We cannot lose sight of what we are and what we aspire to be; but we cannot forget that we face the greatest enemy and the darkest challenge.’ In the depths of his father’s eyes, Dorn saw something no one else could have perceived, so transient and fleeting it barely registered. He saw sorrow, deep and unending, and his heart ached with an empathy only a son could know.

The Emperor reached out a hand and gestured towards the dawn, as it rose to fill the room around them. ‘It is time to bring you into the light. The Officio Assassinorum have been my quiet blade for too long, an open secret none dared to speak of. But no longer. Such a weapon cannot exist forever in the shadows, answerable to no one. It must be seen to be governed. There must be no doubt of the integrity behind every deed, every blow landed, every choice made… or else we count for naught.’ His gaze turned to Dorn and he nodded slowly to his son. ‘Because of this I am certain; in the war to come, every weapon in the arsenal of the Imperium will be called to bear.’

‘In your name, father.’ The primarch returned the nod. ‘In your name.’

Dagonet was all but dead now, her surface a mosaic of burning cities, churned oceans and glassed wastelands. And yet this was a show of restraint from the Sons of Horus; had they wished it, the world could have suffered the fate of many that had defied the Warmaster, cracked open by cyclonic torpedo barrages shot into key tectonic target sites, remade into a sphere of molten earth.

Instead Dagonet was being prepared. It would be of use to the Warmaster and his march to victory.

Erebus stood atop the ridgeline and looked down into the crater that was all that remained of the capital. The far side of the vast bowl of dirty glass and melted rock was lost to him through a mist of poisonous vapour, but he saw enough of it to know the scope of the whole. Transports were coming in from all over the planet, bringing those found still alive to this place. He watched as a Stormbird swooped low over the crater and opened its ventral cargo doors, dropping civilians like discarded trash amid the masses that had already been herded into the broken landscape. The people were arranged in lines that cut back and forth across one another, crosses laid over crosses. Astartes stood at equidistant points around the kilometres of the crater’s edge, their presence alone forbidding any survivor from making an attempt to climb out and flee. Those that had at the beginning were blasted back into the throng, bifurcated by bolt shells. The same fate befell those who dared to move out of the eightfold lines carved in the dust.

The supplicants – for they did not deserve to be known as prisoners – gave off moans and whispers of terror that washed back and forth over the Word Bearer Chaplain like gentle waves. It was tempting to remain where he stood and lose himself in the sweet sense of the dark emotions brimming across the great hollow; but there were other matters to attend to.

He heard bootsteps climbing the wreckage-strewn side of the crater, and moved to face the Astartes approaching him. All about them, thin wisps of steam rose into the air from the heat of the bombardment still escaping from the shattered earth.

‘First Chaplain.’ Devram Korda gave him a wary salute. ‘You wished me to report to you regarding your… operative? We located the remains you were looking for.’

‘Spear?’ He frowned.

Korda nodded, and tossed something towards him. Erebus caught the object; at first glance it seemed to be a blackened, heat-distorted skull, but on closer examination the cleft, scything jawbone and distended shape were clearly the work of forces other than lethal heat and flame. He held it up and looked into the black pits of its eyes. The ghost of energies clung to it, and Erebus had a sudden impression of tiny flecks of gold leaf on the wind, fading into nothingness.

‘The rest of the corpse was retrieved along with that.’ Korda pointed. ‘I found other bodies in the same area, among the ruins of the star-port terminal. Agents of the Emperor, it would appear.’

Erebus was unconcerned about collateral damages. His irritation churned and he brushed Korda’s explanation away with a wave of his hand. ‘Leave it to rot. Failures have no use to me.’ He dropped the skull into the dust.

‘What was it, Word Bearer?’ Korda came closer, his tone becoming more insistent. ‘That thing? Did you unleash something on this backwater world, is that why they killed my commander?’

‘I am not to blame for that,’ Erebus retorted. ‘Look elsewhere for your reasons.’ The words had barely left his lips before the Chaplain felt a stiffening in his chest as a buried question began to rise in him. He pushed it away before it formed and narrowed his eyes at Korda. ‘Spear was a weapon. A gambit played and lost, nothing more.’

‘It stank of witchcraft,’ said the Astartes.

Erebus smiled thinly. ‘Don’t concern yourself with such issues, brother-sergeant. This was but one of many other arrows in my quiver.’

‘I grow weary of your games and your riddles,’ said Korda. He swept his hand around. ‘What purpose does any of this serve?’

The warrior’s question struck a chord in the Word Bearer, but he did not acknowledge it. ‘It is the game, Korda. The greatest game. We take steps, we build our power, gain strength for the journey to Terra. Soon…’ He looked up. ‘The stars will be right.’

‘Forgive him, brother-sergeant,’ said a new voice, an armoured form moving out of the mist below them. ‘My brother Lorgar’s kinsmen enjoy their verbiage more than they should.’

Korda bowed and Erebus did the same as Horus crossed the broken earth, his heavy ceramite boots crunching on the blasted fragments of rock. Beyond him, Erebus saw two of the Warmaster’s Mournival in quiet conversation, both with eyes averted from their master.

‘You are dismissed, brother-sergeant,’ Horus told his warrior. ‘I require the First Chaplain’s attention on a matter.’

Korda gave another salute, this one crisp and heartfelt, his fist clanking off the front of his breastplate. Erebus fancied he saw a scrap of apprehension in the warrior’s eyes; more than just the usual respect for his primarch. A fear, perhaps, of consequences that would come if he was seen to disobey, even in the slightest degree.

As Korda hurried away, Erebus felt the Warmaster’s steady, piercing gaze upon him. ‘What do you wish of me?’ he asked, his tone without weight.

Horus’s hooded gaze dropped to the blackened skull in the dust. ‘You will not use such tactics again in the prosecution of this conflict.’

The Word Bearer’s first impulse was to feign ignorance; but he clamped down on that before he opened his mouth. Suddenly, he was thinking of Luc Sedirae. Outspoken Sedirae, whose challenges to the Warmaster’s orders, while trivial, had grown to become constant after the progression from Isstvan. Some had said he was in line to fill the vacant place in the Mournival, that his contentious manner was of need to one as powerful as Horus. After all, what other reason could there have been for the Warmaster to grant Sedirae the honour of wearing his mantle?

A rare chill ran through him, and Erebus nodded. ‘As you command, my lord.’

Was it possible? The Word Bearer’s thoughts were racing. Perhaps Horus Lupercal had known from the beginning that the Emperor’s secret killers were drawing close to murder him. But for that he would need eyes and ears on Terra… Erebus had no doubt the Warmaster’s allies reached to the heart of his father’s domain, but into the Imperial Palace itself? That was a question he dearly wished to answer.

Horus turned and began to walk back down the ridge. Erebus took a breath and spoke again. ‘May I ask the reasoning behind that order?’

The Warmaster paused, and then glanced over his shoulder. His reply was firm and assured, and brooked no argument. ‘Assassins are a tool of the weak, Erebus. The fearful. They are not a means to end conflicts, only to prolong them.’ He paused, his gaze briefly turning inward. ‘This war will end only when I look my father in the eyes. When he sees the truth I will make clear to him, he will know I am right. He will join me in that understanding.’

Erebus felt a thrill of dark power. ‘And if the Emperor does not?’

Horus’s gaze became cold. ‘Then I – and I alone – will kill him.’

The primarch walked on, throwing a nod to his officers. On his command, the lines of melta-bombs buried beneath the hundreds of thousands of survivors detonated at once, and Erebus listened to the chorus of screams as they perished in a marker of sacrifice and offering.

Acknowledgments

Once more, tips of the helm to Dan Abnett and Graham McNeill for that moment when the core concept for Nemesis emerged from our shared creative flux; to Nick Kyme and Lindsey Priestley for sterling editorial guidance, and once again, to the great Neil Roberts for crafting another stunning cover.

It is a time of legend.

Mighty heroes battle for the right to rule the galaxy.

The vast armies of the Emperor of Earth have conquered the galaxy in a Great Crusade – the myriad alien races have been smashed by the Emperor’s elite warriors and wiped from the face of history.

The dawn of a new age of supremacy for humanity beckons.

Gleaming citadels of marble and gold celebrate the many victories of the Emperor. Triumphs are raised on a million worlds to record the epic deeds of his most powerful and deadly warriors.

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

Organised into vast armies of tens of thousands called Legions, the Space Marines and their primarch leaders conquer the galaxy in the name of the Emperor.

Chief amongst the primarchs is Horus, called the Glorious, the Brightest Star, favourite of the Emperor, and like a son unto him. He is the Warmaster, the commander-in-chief of the Emperor’s military might, subjugator of a thousand thousand worlds and conqueror of the galaxy. He is a warrior without peer, a diplomat supreme.

As the flames of war spread through the Imperium, mankind’s champions will all be put to the ultimate test.

~ Dramatis Personae ~

The Primarchs

Lorgar, Primarch of the Word Bearers

Roboute Guilliman, Primarch of the Ultramarines

Magnus the Red, Primarch of the Thousand Sons

Corax, Primarch of the Raven Guard

Konrad Curze, Primarch of the Night Lords

Ferrus Manus, Primarch of the Iron Hands

Perturabo, Primarch of the Iron Warriors

The Word Bearers Legion

Kor Phaeron, First Captain

Erebus, First Chaplain

Deumos, Master of the Serrated Sun Chapter

Argel Tal, Captain, 7th Assault Company

Xaphen, Chaplain, 7th Assault Company

Torgal, Sergeant, Torgal Assault Squad

Malnor, Sergeant, Malnor Assault Squad

Dagotal, Sergeant, Dagotal Outrider Squad

The Crimson Lord, Commander of the Gal Vorbak

The Night Lords Legion

Sevatar, First Captain

Legio Custodes

Aquillon, Occuli Imperator, ‘Eyes of the Emperor’, Custodian

Vendatha, Custodian

Kalhin, Custodian

Nirllus, Custodian

Sythran, Custodian

The 301st Expedition Fleet

Baloc Torvus, Master of the Fleet

Arric Jesmetine, Major, Euchar 54th Infantry

Imperial Personae

Cyrene Valantion, Confessor of the Word

Ishaq Kadeen, Official remembrancer, imagist

Absolom Cartik, Personal astropath to the Occuli Imperator

Legio Cybernetica

Incaradine, Conqueror Primus of the 9th Maniple, Carthage Cohort

Xi-Nu 73, Tech-Adept of the 9th Maniple, Carthage Cohort

Non-Imperial Personae

Ingethel, Emissary of the Primordial Truth

‘Kill me then, “Emperor”. Better to die in freedom’s twilight than draw breath at the dawn of tyranny. May the gods grant me my last wish: that my spirit lingers long enough to laugh when your faithless kingdom at last falls apart.’

– Daival Shan, Terran separatist warlord,at his execution.

‘If a man gathers ten thousand suns in his hands... If a man seeds a hundred thousand worlds with his sons and daughters, granting them custody of the galaxy itself... If a man guides a million vessels between the infinite stars with a mere thought... Then I pray you tell me, if you are able, how such a man is anything less than a god.’

– Lorgar Aurelian, Primarch of theWord Bearers

‘There is no surer sign of decay in a country than to see the rites of religion held in contempt.’

– Nikollo Makiavelli, Ancient Eurasian philosopher

Prologue

The Grey Warrior

His sisters wept when the Legion came for him. At the time, he couldn’t understand why. There was no greater honour than to be chosen, so their sorrow made no sense.

The grey warrior’s voice was a machine’s rasp, deep and laden with static as he spoke from behind a death mask. He demanded to know the boy’s name.

Before the mother answered him, she asked a question of her own. It was her way to stand straight and strong, never to be bowed by the things she saw. It was a strength she had passed on to her son, and would stay in his blood despite the many changes to come.

She asked the question with a smile. ‘I will tell you his name, warrior. But first, will you tell me yours?’

The grey warrior looked down upon the family, meeting the eyes of the parents only once before he stole their child.

‘Erebus,’ he intoned. ‘My name is Erebus.’

‘Thank you, Lord Erebus. This is my son,’ she gestured to her boy. ‘Argel Tal.’

I

False Angels

I remember the Day of Judgement.

Can you imagine looking up and seeing the stars fall from the sky? Can you imagine the heavens themselves raining fire upon the world below?

You say you can picture it. I don’t believe you. I’m not speaking of war. I’m not speaking of promethium’s stinging oil-scent, or the burning chemical reek of flames born from missile fire. Forget battle’s crude pains and the sensory assault of orbital bombardment. I am not speaking of mundane savagery – the incendiary ills men inflict upon other men.

I speak of judgement. Divine judgement.

The wrath of a god who looks upon the works of an entire world, and what he sees turns his heart sour. In his disgust, he sends flights of angels to deliver damnation. In his rage, he seeds the skies with fire and rains destruction upon the upturned faces of six billion worshippers.

Now tell me again. Tell me again that you can imagine seeing the stars fall from the sky. Tell me you can imagine heaven weeping fire upon the land below, and a city burning so bright that all sight is scorched from your eyes as you watch it die.

The Day of Judgement stole my eyes, but I can still illuminate you. I remember it all, and why wouldn’t I? It was the last thing I ever saw.

They came to us in skyborne vultures of blue iron and white fire.

And they called themselves the XIII Legion. The Warrior-Kings of Ultramar.

We did not use those names. As they marched us from our homes, as they butchered those who dared to fight back, and as they poured divine annihilation upon everything we had built...

We called them false angels.

You came to me asking how my faith survived the Day of Judgement. I will tell you a secret. When the stars fell, when the seas boiled and the earth burned, my faith didn’t die. That is when I began to believe.

God was real, and he hated us.

–Excerpted from ‘The Pilgrimage’, by Cyrene Valantion

One

The Perfect City
False Angels
Day of Judgement

The first falling star came down in the heart of the perfect city.

The crowds were always dense and boisterous in the plaza’s midnight markets, yet everything fell silent when the sky wept fiery trails and the stars fell to earth in a stately drift.

The crowds parted, forming a ring around the huge arrival as it came down. Only when it came closer could the people see the truth. It wasn’t a star at all. It wasn’t formed of fire – it was breathing it from howling engines.

A smoke cloud drifted out from the downed craft, stinking of scorched oil and off-world chemicals. The ship’s hull was viciously avian, a raptor’s body of cobalt blue and dull gold. Its underbelly gleamed orange, bright with the hissing heat of orbital descent.

Cyrene Valantion was one of the gathered crowd, and three weeks shy of her eighteenth birthday. Whispers started up around her – whispers that became chants, chants that became prayers.

Jagged thunder echoed from nearby streets and plazas – the grumble of great engines and wheezing boosters. More of the stars-that-were-not-stars came raining down from heaven. The very air rattled with the hum of so many engines. Each breath tasted of exhaust.

The dark-hulled emissary from the sky was emblazoned with the symbol of the Holy Eagle, fire-blackened from its dive through the atmosphere. Cyrene’s vision twinned, blurring between what she was seeing now and what she’d seen in artistic renderings in childhood. She was far from being one of the faithful, but she knew this craft, elaborately brought to life in pictures of vibrant inks on scrolls of parchment. Such imagery was scattered throughout the scriptures.

And she knew why the elders in the crowd were weeping and chanting. They recognised it too, but not merely from the holy codices. Decades ago, they’d borne witness to the same vehicles arriving from heaven.

Cyrene watched as people fell to their knees, lifting their hands to the starry skies and weeping in prayer.

‘They have returned,’ one old woman was murmuring. She spared a moment from her obeisance to claw at Cyrene’s flowing shuhl robe. ‘On your knees, ignorant whore!’

By now, the whole crowd was chanting. When the old woman reached for her leg again, Cyrene shook herself free of the hag’s wrinkled talon.

‘Please don’t touch me,’ Cyrene said. It was tradition never to touch those who wore red shuhl robes without first gaining the maiden’s permission. In her fervency, the old woman ignored the ancient custom. Her fingernails raked the younger woman’s skin through the street dress’s thin silk.

‘On your knees. They have returned!’

Cyrene went for the qattari knife strapped to her naked thigh. Slender, ornamented steel gleamed amber in the firelight reflected from the sky-craft.

‘Don’t. Touch. Me.’

With a hissed curse, the old woman returned to her prayers.

Cyrene took a deep breath, seeking to slow her frenetic pulse. The air heated her throat, prickling at her tongue with the charcoal spice of thruster smoke. So they had returned. The angels of the God-Emperor had returned to the perfect city.

She didn’t feel the rush of reverence. Nor did she fall to her knees and thank the God-Emperor for his angels’ second coming. Cyrene Valantion stared at the vulture hull of the iron craft, while one question burned behind her eyes.

‘They have returned,’ the old woman murmured again. ‘They have returned to us.’

‘Yes,’ said Cyrene. ‘But why?’

Movement from the craft came without warning. Thick doors clanged wide and a ramp juddered down on squealing pneumatics. Between gasps and nervous weeping, the worshipful chanting grew louder. The people intoned prayers from the Word, and the last of those standing finally dropped to their knees. Cyrene was the only person left on her feet.

The first of the angels stepped from the thinning smoke cloud. Cyrene stared at the figure, her eyes narrowing despite the exalted rightness of the moment. A sliver of ice wormed through her blood.

As if one girl’s whispered protest could possibly change what was happening, she breathed a single word.

‘Wait.’

The angel’s heavy armour was at immediate odds with the images from scripture. It stood unadorned by the holy parchments that should detail its holiness in flowing script, nor was it clad in the winter-grey of the God-Emperor’s true angels. This one’s armour, like the craft it emerged from, was a deep and beautiful cobalt, trimmed with bronze so polished it gleamed close to gold. Its eyes were slanted red slits in a stoic facemask.

‘Wait...’ Cyrene said again, louder this time. ‘These are not the Bearers of the Word.’

The old woman hissed at her blasphemy, and spat on her bare feet. Cyrene ignored her. Her gaze never left the warrior armoured in cobalt, so subtly and distinctly different from the scriptures she’d been forced to study as a child.

The angel’s brethren emerged from the dark interior of their landing craft and descended to the plaza. All wore armour of the same blue. All of them carried great weapons too heavy for a mortal man to lift unaided.

‘They are not the Bearers of the Word,’ she raised her voice above the chanting. Several people kneeling around her replied with harsh whispers and potent curses. Cyrene was drawing breath to call out the accusation a third time when the angels, moving in inhuman unison, raised their weapons and aimed into the crowd of worshippers. The sight stole the breath from her throat.

The first angel spoke, its voice deep and raw, filtered through hidden speakers in its facemask.

‘People of Monarchia, capital city of Forty-Seven Ten, hear these words. We, the warriors of the XIII Legion, are oathed to this moment, honour-sworn to this duty. We come bearing the Emperor’s decree to the tenth world brought to compliance by the Forty-Seventh Expedition of humanity’s Great Crusade.’

All the while, the dozen angels kept their weapons aimed at the kneeling civilians. Cyrene could see the muzzles were as charred as the vulture craft’s hull, darkened from firing shells of monstrous size.

‘Your compliance with the Imperium of the Man has held for sixty-one years. With the greatest regret, the Emperor of Mankind demands that all living souls abandon the city of Monarchia immediately. Moments ago, your planetary leaders were given the same warning. This city is to be evacuated within six days. On the final day, your planetary leaders will be allowed to send a single distress call.’

The crowd kept silent, but their stares were now of confusion and disbelief, not reverence. As if sensing a drift in their attention, the angel aimed its weapon into the air and fired a single shot. The gunshot banged like a thunder peal rolling around a valley, storm-loud in the silence.

‘No one is to remain in Monarchia by dawn of the seventh day. Go now to your homes. Gather your belongings. Evacuate the city. Resistance will be met with bloodshed.’

‘Where will we go?’ a female voice called from the transfixed crowd. ‘This is our home!’

The first angel turned his weapon, aiming directly at Cyrene. It took several seconds for the young woman to realise she’d been the one to speak. It took much less time for those near her to break and flee, leaving her in an ever-expanding patch of sudden isolation.

The angel repeated its words, its emotionless inflection no different from before. ‘No one is to remain in Monarchia by dawn of the seventh day. Go now to your homes. Gather your belongings. Evacuate the city. Resistance will be met with bloodshed.’

Cyrene swallowed, saying nothing more. Cries and jeers rang out from the crowd. A bottle crashed against one of the angels’ helms, shattering into glass rain, and as several others shouted out demands to know what was happening, Cyrene turned and ran. Where the crowd wasn’t already fleeing with her, she forced her way through the press of people.

The throaty chatter of the angels’ weapons started up a handful of seconds later, as the God-Emperor’s messengers opened fire on the rioting crowd.

Three days later, Cyrene was still in the city.

Like many of the people calling Monarchia home, Cyrene’s dusky skin was a legacy of her ancestors’ lives in the equatorial deserts, and she had handsome eyes of a light brown that were rather like burnt auburn. Sun-lightened hazel hair fell in tumbling locks over her shoulders.

At least, her more infatuated lovers described her in such terms.

This was the picture her mind painted, though she no longer saw it when she looked in the mirror. Now her eyes were ringed from two nights without sleep, and her mouth was soured by dehydration.

Exactly how things had come to this point remained a mystery. Across the city, resistance to the invaders had been ferocious for the hour or so it had lasted. The greatest massacre had taken place at the Tophet Gate, when the protests became a riot, and the riot became a battlefield. Cyrene watched from the haven of a nearby church, though there hadn’t been much to see. Citizens cut down and culled, all for the crime of daring to defend their homes.

A battle tank of cobalt and bronze fired at the Tophet Gate itself, and though the slaughter was a tragedy, this was raw desecration. Grinding the dead beneath its treads, the tank fired a salvo at the towering structure. Its cannons left pain-scars across Cyrene’s sight, but she couldn’t look away.

The Tophet Gate fell, its marble bulk breaking into segments after it pounded into the plaza. A fortune in white stone and gold leaf, a monument to the God-Emperor’s true angels, shattered by invaders claiming to be loyal to the Imperium.

Cyrene could make out the unmoving bodies of fallen statues, toppled from the fallen gate. She knew them well, having attended many midnight markets in Tophet Plaza. Each time, marble angels had stared down at her from their places carved into the gate’s surface. Slanted, featureless eyes watched without blinking. Wingless suits of armour were rendered with exquisite skill in the smooth stone. These were not the false, feathered angels of ancient Terran myth, but holiness incarnate – the angels of death – formed in the fearful aspect of the God-Emperor. His shadows, his sons, the Bearers of the Word.

Through the dust, heretic silhouettes drifted closer to the tank. ‘The Warrior-Kings of Ultramar’, Cyrene had murmured in that moment. ‘The XIII Legion.’

Blasphemers, all. Their resemblance to the Bearers of the Word only compounded their impurity.

Planetary vox was down. She’d heard from a street vendor that the invaders destroyed all of Khur’s satellites before they came through the clouds. True or not, contact with other cities – even within Monarchia itself – was limited to word of mouth.

‘They rose up in Quami District,’ the vendor insisted. ‘Not just Tophet. Gulshia, too. Hundreds dead. Perhaps thousands.’ He shrugged as if such things were mere curiosities. ‘I’m leaving tonight. There’s no hope fighting devils, shuhl-asha.’

Cyrene said nothing, though she smiled at his gentlemanly use of her profession’s archaic title. But what was there to say? The invaders had the city in lockdown. The seeds of rebellion would never take root in such unfertile ground.

District by district, the exodus from Monarchia began after those first purges. Once the gates were opened, a ceaseless flood of humanity spilled from the city.

By nightfall, the mass evacuation was fully underway. Monarchia’s wealthiest citizens – most of them merchants or high-ranking clergymen serving as Speakers of the Word – secured their own transportation, leaving the city for secondary estates in other towns. The morning air above Monarchia was dense with shuttlecraft boosting away to other havens, ferrying the rich, the important, the economically vital and the spiritually enlightened to sanctuary elsewhere.

Cyrene hadn’t left yet. In truth, she wasn’t certain she would leave. She stood on the balcony of her second-floor habitation pod – somewhere between a room and a cell in the Jiro Apartment Block, in one of the cheapest parts of town.

The nearby speaker towers blared their message, over and over. ‘Strict weight allowances are in effect for personal belongings on the evacuation craft. All residents of Inaga District are to report to Yael-Shah Skyport or the Twelfth Trade Gate immediately. Strict weight allowances are...’

Cyrene tuned out the warnings, watching the people flocking through the streets below, strangling traffic with their slow, marching queues. There, at the end of the street, one of the XIII Legion directed the herds of people like livestock. In its hands, the false angel carried the same weapon as its brothers, the massive rifle with its supply of explosive ammunition.

Cyrene leaned on the balcony’s railing, bearing witness to the eternal theatre of oppressor and oppressed, of conquerors and the conquered. Her district was due to be evacuated by tomorrow morning. The process was stilted, with a great deal of curses cried and lamentations heaped upon the silent false angels.

‘Strict weight allowances are in effect,’ the speakers boomed again. Those vox-towers had been used for the city’s thrice-daily prayer readings, speaking words of tolerance and enlightenment to all sheltering within the city. Now their holiness was perverted, as they served as the invaders’ mouthpieces.

Too late, Cyrene saw she’d been noticed.

The air turned thicker and hotter from engine wash, as a small skycraft drifted over the street at the same level as her balcony. A two-man vehicle, its skin formed from sloping blue armour, was suspended on whining turbines as it weaved through the air. The false angels seated in its cockpit scanned the second-level windows of the buildings as they passed.

Cyrene’s shiver threatened to become a tremble, yet she remained where she was.

The craft hovered closer. Rotor fans blew hot air from the craft’s anti-gravitational engines. The false angel in the gunner seat leaned forward, adjusting a hidden control on his armour’s collar.

‘Citizen,’ the warrior’s vox-voice was a raw bark over the speeder craft’s engine. ‘This sector is being evacuated. Proceed to street level immediately.’

Cyrene took a breath, and didn’t move.

The warrior glanced at his companion in the pilot’s seat, then looked back to Cyrene in her quiet defiance.

‘Citizen, this sector is being evac–’

‘I heard you,’ Cyrene said, loud enough to carry over the craft’s infernal din.

‘Proceed to street level immediately,’ the warrior said.

‘Why are you doing this?’ she asked, her voice still raised.

The gunner shook his head and gripped the handles of the massive calibre weapon mount, aiming it directly at Cyrene. The young woman swallowed – the gun’s muzzle was the size of her head. Every bone in her body gave a panic-twinge, pleading she run.

‘Why are you doing this?’ she demanded, drowning her fear with anger. ‘What sins have stained us all, that we must leave our homes? We are loyal to the Imperium! We are loyal to the God-Emperor!’

The false angels remained unmoving for several seconds. Cyrene closed her eyes, waiting for the hammer-hard impact that would spell her destruction. Despite the moment, she felt a smile tickling her lips. This was an insane way to die. There’d be nothing left to bury.

‘Citizen.’

She opened her eyes. The warrior had lowered the cannon’s aim. ‘The Emperor, beloved by all, ordered the XIII Legion here and mandated our actions. Look at us. Look upon our armour, and the weapons we bear. We are his warriors, and we do his will. Proceed to street level and evacuate the district.’

‘The God-Emperor demanded that we abandon our lives?’

The warrior snarled. It was a crackling machine-growl, only rendered human by the hint of anger within. This was the first emotion Cyrene had heard from the invaders.

‘Proceed to street level.’ The warrior brought the cannon to bear again. ‘Now. I will slay you where you stand if you cast your ignorant heathen words once more over the name of the Emperor, beloved by all.’

Cyrene spat over the side of the balcony. ‘I will go, only because I seek illumination. I will find the truth in all this, and I pray there will come a reckoning.’

‘The truth will be revealed,’ the warrior said, as the craft made ready to hover away. ‘At sunrise on the seventh day, turn and look back to your city. You will witness the illumination you crave.’

And so dawned the seventh day.

The lightening sky found Cyrene Valantion standing atop a rise in the Galahe Foothills, her traditional dress hidden beneath a long jacket clutched tightly against the worsening autumn wind. Her hair blew free in a mane, and she watched the utterly silent, utterly still city to the east. In the last hours, burning blurs had floated upwards: each one a landing craft belonging to the XIII Legion, each one returning to the heavens now that their warriors’ work was done.

With creeping inevitability, the sun reached the horizon. Pale gold – cold for all its gentle brightness – spilled over the minarets and domes of Monarchia. A city of unrivalled beauty, the spear-tips of its ten thousand towers turned golden by the dawn.

‘Holy Blood,’ the young woman whispered, unable to find her voice and feeling the wet warmth of tear trails on her cheeks. To think that mankind could create such marvels. ‘Holy Blood of the God-Emperor.’

The sky grew brighter still – too bright, too fast. Barely past dawn, it was already becoming as bright as noon.

Cyrene raised her head, watching with weeping eyes as the clouds of heaven lit up with a second sunrise.

She saw the fire fall from the sky, lances of unbelievable light spearing into the perfect city from above the clouds. But she did not watch for long. The sun-spears’ incomparable brightness stole her sight after only the first few moments, leaving her in darkness as she listened to the sounds of a city dying. The world shook beneath Cyrene’s feet, casting her to the ground. Worst of all, her eyes itched as they failed, and the last clear sight she ever saw was Monarchia in ruin, its towers falling into the flames.

Blind and betrayed by fate, Cyrene Valantion cried out to the heavens and prayed for a reckoning, while the city of her birth burned.

II

The Last Prayer

‘Bearers of the Word, hear our prayer.

False angels walk in our midst, cast in your image but bringing none of your mercy. They call themselves the XIII Legion, the Warrior-Kings of Ultramar, and have spoken only threats of bloodshed and sorrow since they darkened the skies a week before. Their warriors have walked the streets of Monarchia, forcing the people to abandon the city. Those who resisted were butchered. Fate willing, they will be remembered as martyrs.

Monarchia is not alone. Sixteen cities across the planet stand empty, likewise swept clean of life.

For many days, we were silenced, unable to call out to you. The XIII Legion has allowed us this moment, in the hours before the last dawn. They have vowed to end the perfect city in a storm of fire as the sun rises this very day. Return to us, we beg you. Return to us and make them answer for this injustice. Avenge the fallen, and restore what will be lost when the horizon lightens.

Bearers of the Word, hear our prayer.

Return to us, sons of the God-Emperor, blessings upon His Name. Retur–’

– First and only distress call sent from Monarchia, capital of Khur.

Two

Serrated Sun
Devastation
Aurelian

Cyrene’s reckoning took two months to arrive. Almost nine weeks of lancing headlong through the tides of unspace, breaking through the immaterium with little thought of safety or control. They lost vessels. They lost lives. But they lost no time. Reality trembled in their wake.

The first ship to burst from the immaterium ripped back into reality on tormented engines. As it accelerated from the wound of re-entry, it seemed cast from the warp like a grey spear, trailing plasma mist the colour of madness. Its engines roared heavy and hot into the silence of space.

Along its ridged spine, statues of marble and gold stared out into the starry void. Armoured buildings of worship rose like overlaid carbuncles from the vessel’s skin. Battlements lined the walls of those cathedrals, and dozens of lesser temples were decorated with banks of weapon turrets in their tallest towers. The vessel, terrible in size and grim in aspect, was more a bastion city of prayer and warfare than a spaceborne vessel.

Its dangerous momentum sent shudders through its metal bones, and still it didn’t slow down. Blue-white engine wash streamed in disintegrating smoke trails from immense boosters that had taken decades to construct, by thousands of labourers working millions of hours. The ship’s prow was fashioned into a colossal ram – an eagle figurehead, wrought in dense metals polished to a silver sheen. In its talons, the eagle held the steel-forged icon of an open book. The beast’s head was frozen open in a silent shriek. Its cold eyes reflected the stars.

Other ships arrived, rending reality, breaking from the warp as lesser blurs of grey – a volley of arrows that eclipsed the stars around them. A few at first, then a dozen, soon a fleet, at last an armada... A hundred and sixteen ships, one of the greatest coalitions of force the human race had ever assembled. And still more arrived, savaging the layer between realms, dropping from the immaterium, attempting to race alongside their glorious flagship.

The grey armada moved in loose formation, the slower vessels falling behind as over a hundred ships closed in on a single blue-green world.

A world already surrounded by another battlefleet.

One of the armada’s vessels – a ship mighty enough in its own right, but utterly dwarfed by the flagship at the fleet’s vanguard – was the battle-barge De Profundis. In Low Gothic, its name translated with ragged eloquence into ‘Out of the Depths’. In the Colchisian dialect of the warship’s home world, it translated from those proto-Gothic roots as ‘From Despair’.

The terminal shuddering through the ship’s bones lessened with realspace reasserting its hold, and temporal engines took over from the overheated warp thrusters. The captain of De Profundis rose from his ornate command throne as his ship threw off the empyrean’s lingering shackles. The throne itself was carved ivory and black steel, draped with devotional parchment scrolls and taking up the centre of a raised dais. On the tiered steps leading up to his throne stood three other figures, each clad in the same granite grey battle armour, each one with their gazes cast at the display occulus taking up the entire forward wall.

The scene unfolding on the visual screen was one of unrivalled chaos. Order was breaking down before the fleet even engaged the enemy, as if the anger of every captain bled freely into the trajectories of their vessels, breeding irrationality where focus was needed.

The Chapter Master’s armour thrummed with energy, its exposed cabling connected to the back-mounted power pack. Ornate beyond many other suits of Astartes warplate, the personal armour of Chapter Master Deumos was unashamedly brazen in its declaration of his accomplishments. Detailed in engravings etched onto his pauldrons was a recording written in Colchisian cuneiform, the runic script listing his victories and kill-counts in poetic verse. Emblazoned on his left shoulder guard and overlaying the runic poetry was an open book sculpted from bronze, with its pages aflame. Each tongue of fire was hand-carved from red iron, welded with artful craft onto the book itself. In the right light, the metal pages seemed to flicker with iron flame.

Lastly, ringing one of the slanted red eye lenses of his snarling helm, was a stylised, spiked star of brass. It was a symbol repeated across the hull and spinal buildings of the De Profundis, heralding the battle-barge as the vessel of the Chapter of the Serrated Sun. Each ship in the fleet bore its own unique sigils – the Osseous Throne, the Crescent Moon, the Coiled Lash... symbol upon symbol, a stream of signifiers. Here, in the void, they were scattered like the hieroglyphs on a shaman’s runestones.

The eyes of every warrior, officer, serf and slave were fixed upon the planet of Khur, and the capital city that had once been visible from space. In a sense, it still was: an ashen stain blackening a quarter of a continent.

Deumos’s features could easily have been hewn from the metamorphic rock of Terra’s ancient Himalayan mountain range, not far from where he’d had been born two hundred years ago. Some men laughed, and laughed often. Deumos was not one of them. His humour ran along bleaker lines.

One of his subordinates, the Seventh Captain by rank, had once told him that his scarred face was a ‘chronicle of wars no one wished to fight’. Deumos smiled at the recollection. He was fond of Argel Tal’s attempts at wit.

Breaking from the momentary indulgence of reverie, Deumos regarded the occulus, still unsure exactly what he was bearing witness to. The rest of their ships spread out in loose attack formation, many of them still accelerating. The outriders and scouts were slowing significantly, their momentum dying as the rage of their engines faded.

‘What am I watching?’ Deumos asked. His helm emitted the words as a crackling growl. ‘Auspex, report.’

‘Initial auspex reports are filtering in now.’ The officers by the three-faced scanner table were all human, their uniforms the same stark grey as the Chapter Master’s armour. Their senior rating, the Master of Auspex, had gone pale. ‘I... I...’

The Chapter Master turned his glare on the humans. ‘Speak, and speak quickly,’ he said.

‘The enemy fleet in geostationary orbit above Monarchia registers as Imperial, sir.’

‘So it’s true.’ Deumos stared hard at the Master of Auspex, an ageing officer with a strong voice, who was frantically adjusting tuning dials on a display screen three metres square. ‘Speak.’

‘They’re Imperial, confirmed. They’re not the enemy. A host of transponder codes are flooding the sensors, actively broadcast. They’re announcing themselves to the entire fleet.’

The tension still didn’t bleed from Deumos. Instead, it wormed deeper into his thoughts, dredging the memory of that maddening message to the fore. Return to us, it had pleaded. They call themselves the XIII Legion. Return to us, we beg you.

Deumos let the disquiet sink back into the calmer sediment of his mind. He needed to focus.

He watched the occulus as grey-hulled ships slowed, their wide-mouthed engines breathing diminished flares. Several vessels veered away from the rest of the fleet, breaking the elegance of the attack formation. Doubt, most definitely. No captain could know what to do.

The perfect, regimented anger of the assault run was crumbling, unsalvageable with so many vessels slowing and breaking away. All around them, the colossal fleet on the edge of open warfare collapsed, powering down their weapons. As an astral ballet, it was running through these final anticlimactic motions with clear reluctance. Again came the sense of the ships’ captains infecting their vessels with emotion.

The planet itself was close, close enough for the enemy fleet to edge into visual range. At this distance, they were little more than dark specks framed by dense cloud cover, hanging in low orbit. Deumos turned to his brothers, his subordinates, each one of them standing on the lesser steps of his raised dais.

‘Now we discover the truth in all this.’

‘Today will end in darkness,’ this from the Seventh Captain, his left eye ringed by the serrated sun. ‘We know the truth, we know what our brothers have done. No explanation will quench the primarch’s sorrow. No reasoning will quell his rage. You know this as well as I, master.’

Deumos nodded. He’d indulged a moment of concern that the Lex wouldn’t slow down, that it would drive like a grey blade into the heart of the opposing fleet, its weapon batteries aflame as they sang their lethal songs. Brother against brother, Astartes against Astartes.

Once, he would have smiled at the delicious blasphemy of an impossible idea. Not now.

‘We’re being hailed,’ one of the vox-officers called from his console.

At last. A fleet-wide message, from the only voice that mattered. The message was relayed across the bridge, ruined by vox-breakage but recognisable nonetheless.

‘My sons.’ No amount of distortion could conceal the hurt and affection in the words. ‘My sons, we have reached Khur. The last prayer from Monarchia must now be answered. Today we witness with our own eyes the ruin our brothers have made of the perfect city.’

The four Astartes warriors around the command throne shared a glance, though their expressions remained hidden behind their Mark III helms. Each of them heard the tremor in their father’s voice.

‘My sons,’ the message continued. ‘Blood demands blood. We will have the answers we seek before the day is done. This, I swear t–’

The message didn’t end, it was cut off. An overriding signal took hold of the vox-network, powerful enough to eclipse the words of the Legion’s own primarch.

This voice was deeper, colder, and just as sincere.

‘Warriors of the Word Bearers. I am Guilliman of the XIII Legion, Lord of Macragge. You are ordered to descend to the surface immediately and muster in the heart of the razed site once known as Monarchia. Coordinates are being conveyed. There will be no defiance of this mandate. Your Legion, in its entirety, will gather as ordered. That is all.’

The voice ceased, and silence reigned.

Almost a hundred souls – human, servitor and Astartes – gathered on the bridge of De Profundis. None of them spoke a word for almost a full minute.

Without even acknowledging the others, the Seventh Captain turned and stalked across the chamber, his armoured boots thudding on the plasteel decking.

‘Argel Tal?’ Deumos spoke into his helm’s vox-link. His visor display tracked his subordinate captain, scrolling white text feeds of biorhythmic data across his vision. He blinked at a peripheral rune to clear the automatic tactical display.

The Seventh Captain turned, making the sign of the holy aquila over his chest, his gauntlets forming the God-Emperor’s symbol over the polished breastplate.

‘I go to ready Seventh Company for planetfall,’ he said. ‘The answers we seek are on the surface of Khur, in the ruins of the perfect city. I want those answers, Deumos.’

The air was gritty, thickened by dust and smoke haze. The ground was a black ash desert, with heat-seared patches of glass and melted marble that reflected the sunlight until they were crunched underfoot.

Argel Tal breathed in, tasting the recycled filtration of his own suit – the sweat, the chemical tang of his gene-enhanced blood – but he couldn’t bring himself to seal his suit completely. Each breath drew in a penitent trace of the brimstone and scorched rock reek of the surrounding devastation.

Nothing was left standing. Stone powder in the air, the result of a million pulverised marble buildings, was already coating their armour as the Word Bearers stood in the heart of Monarchia. Oath parchments and prayer scrolls attached to Astartes warplate turned a grey-white with settling dust. Argel Tal watched his warriors standing amidst the ruination – some picking through debris with no real intent, others simply remaining motionless – and he searched for the words this moment required.

Whatever those words were, they escaped him for now.

The vox crackled live, and Xaphen’s identifier rune flashed on the edge of Argel Tal’s red-tinted retinal display.

‘We stood here, six decades ago.’ Xaphen came to his captain’s side, his rare, gold-trimmed armour greyed by the falling dust. For once, the Chaplain of the 7th Company resembled his brothers, rendering every warrior equal as they stood among Monarchia’s bones. ‘Now the city is drowning in clouds of dust, but we stood in this very place. Do you recall it?’ Xaphen asked.

Argel Tal stared out at the annihilated terrain, seeing ghosts in the mist – the spires and domes of buildings that no longer existed.

‘I remember,’ he said. ‘This was the public plaza of Inaga Sector.’ The captain gestured south, though every direction offered nothing but the same ravaged landscape. ‘There stood the Tophet Gate, where the preachers and traders gathered.’

Xaphen nodded. His left eye bore the same mark as Argel Tal’s: the serrated star, symbol of a shared brotherhood. The weapon mag-locked to his back – a ritual crozius arcanum, the war maul of Word Bearer Chaplains – was forged in the same shape. Its hammerhead was a spiked sphere of dark iron, threaded with silver.

The conversation, such as it was, ebbed to nothing until the unwelcome serenity was broken by another company making planetfall. On howling thrusters, gunships made their final approaches, clawed landing feet crunching onto the fire-blasted ground. Usually, the flame-and-oil stench of their engine exhausts would assault the senses. Here, it was undetectable among the ruin already inflicted.

Bulkheads and ramps clanged open. Another hundred warriors in the etched armour of the XVII Legion took their first steps into the dead city. What little formation existed broke almost immediately as the Astartes scattered, struggling to come to terms with what they were seeing. Argel Tal blink-clicked a vox rune on his visor display, tuning into the general channel again. These new arrivals, wearing the heraldry of 15th Company, voiced their breathless disbelief and impotent anger. Their chestplates were marked with the sigil of heaped human skulls, the Chapter of the Osseous Throne.

Argel Tal offered a quiet greeting. The closest warriors saluted, respecting his rank despite his allegiance to another Chapter. Body and blood, every one of them was a Bearer of the Word. That outweighed all else.

Still more Thunderhawks streaked overhead, the gunships seeking clear ground to land. Between the warriors already on the surface and the gunships remaining where they’d landed, it was becoming a trial to deploy more of the Legion. East to west, north to south, the sky was a mess of shaking gunships and the heat-shimmers of engines struggling to keep the Thunderhawks airborne.

Every few minutes, the sky would fall dark, heralding the passage of a Stormbird. These largest landers carried entire companies, their deafening passing temporarily blocking out the sun.

Argel Tal walked without purpose, crushing ruined rock underfoot. He sealed his armour’s ventilation systems when he grew tired of inhaling the sulphuric stench of Monarchia’s grave. Melted rock and scorched earth were never easy on the nose, and the captain’s gene-enhanced olfactory senses were pained by the intensity. Breathing the recycled air of his suit’s internal filters, he walked on.

The ground was uneven, pounded into blackened craters by the Ultramarines’ orbital assault. Argel Tal felt his suit’s stabiliser pistons and gravity gyros shifting to compensate. There were brief hums of power as the mechanics in his armour’s knees and shins adjusted to new patches of uneven terrain.

He knew Xaphen was following him even without looking at the digital distance tracker on his retinal display. It was no surprise when the Chaplain spoke again.

‘I feel as though we’ve lost a war without firing a single shot,’ the Chaplain voxed. ‘But look to the skies, brother. Our father comes.’

The sky grew dark once more, and Argel Tal looked upward as the final Stormbird flew overhead. Its hull was gold, reflecting the midday sun in a spray of solar glare. The captain’s visor dimmed to compensate.

With greater clarity came the revelation of shame. Smaller gunships, Thunderhawks with hulls of blue, flew in formation around the mighty golden Stormbird. An escort squadron: watchmen, not honour guards. The Ultramarines were escorting the Word Bearers’ primarch down to the surface with all the undignified pageantry of a prisoner being led to execution.

Argel Tal’s visor zoomed in, responding to his narrowed eyes. Static fuzzed for half a second, quickly clearing as his eye lenses refocused at the new range.

Every turret on the Ultramarines gunships was trained on the golden hull of the Word Bearers Stormbird.

‘Do you see that?’ he voxed to Xaphen.

‘An insult like that is hard to miss,’ the Chaplain replied. ‘I’d believe it a lie, had I not seen it myself.’

Argel Tal watched the lander’s arc taking it deeper into the city, and without any other signal, every Word Bearer nearby turned and walked in the direction set by the massive gunship.

‘This has the stench of history in the making,’ Xaphen muttered. ‘Gird your soul, brother. Mind your humours.’

The captain had never heard the layer of unease in Xaphen’s voice before. It was not helping his own fragile calm.

‘Answers,’ Argel Tal replied, bringing up retinal readouts of bolter ammunition supplies, along with his armour’s power-pack temperature. ‘Answers, Xaphen. That’s all I want.’

Argel Tal and Xaphen led Seventh Company into the heart of the city, marching to where the Legion gathered.

One hundred thousand warriors stood in silence beneath the setting sun.

One hundred thousand warriors in perfect formation, bolters held in grey fists, helmed heads raised in pride. A hundred thousand pairs of red eye lenses stared ahead. Squad by squad, led by sergeants. Company by company, led by captains. Chapter by Chapter, led by Masters.

Standard bearers stood before each company, banners held high even as their details faded in the dust. Borne by Sergeant Malnor, the Serrated Sun Chapter icon rose alongside the war banners of its three component companies, eclipsing them in both size and significance. A spiked circle of burnished bronze mirrored the symbol around every warrior’s left eye, decorated with sixty-eight bleached skulls hanging on black iron chains. The skulls were human and alien, each one the head of a fallen enemy champion worthy of remembrance. The left eye socket of every skull was ringed by the serrated sun symbol, painted with Astartes blood, blessed by the company Chaplains.

Similar icons were held above the mustered Legion. They rattled in the wind, trinkets chiming in grim melody, while the company war banners waved.

Argel Tal moved forward with the other commanders of the Serrated Sun, leaving their warriors in assembled columns. Although the Chapter was far from the primarch’s favour – such honour belonged to the larger and more prestigious Chapters made from twenty or more companies – their ranks still entitled them to stand at the forefront of the gathered Legion.

As he walked through ranks of statue-still Word Bearers, Argel Tal switched to the vox frequency secured by Seventh Company prior to planetfall.

‘Stand tall, brothers. Enlightenment will soon be ours.’

A series of ten vox-clicks signalled the acknowledgement of every squad sergeant under his command.

Several captains voxed quiet greetings as they assembled in an ordered line, their helms and shoulder guards marked with evidence of their own Chapter allegiances.

Before them all, the golden Stormbird stood at bay, resting in the midst of six Ultramarines Thunderhawk gunships. The edges of their ceramite hulls were scorched bare in places from the fires of atmospheric descent.

One captain broke ranks. He took a single step forward, and Argel Tal felt the ground’s miniscule tremor as the warrior moved.

In hulking Terminator armour, the silver-wrought warplate still fresh from the forges of Mars, First Captain Kor Phaeron stood apart from his brothers, as was his right. In the armour of the Legion’s elite, he towered a metre above the lesser captains, clad in layers of reverently sculpted ceramite as thick as the hull-skin of a battle tank. He carried no weapons beyond those his armour already offered: oversized gauntlets ending in talons extending from each finger, the individual blades as long and curved as the primitive scythes used to harvest crops on backwater Imperial worlds. Delicate circuitry threaded along the blades – veins of power that would invest the claws with crackling force upon the First Captain’s desire.

Unlike the gathered captains, Kor Phaeron wore no helm, and it was fair to say no poet or painter could ever portray the First Captain as a handsome being without liberal artistic license. Argel Tal watched Kor Phaeron’s finger-blades ripple with electric current, a sure sign of impatience. The larger warrior’s expression was locked in the sneer of a man who tastes nothing but bitterness and ash, which was the only face Argel Tal had ever seen him wear. Despite the impressive armour, Kor Phaeron’s visage was corpse-gaunt and bone-pale, as it had been on each of the rare occasions the two captains crossed paths.

‘I hate him,’ Xaphen whispered over the vox. ‘He wears that armour as a shield for one thousand weaknesses. I hate him, brother.’

Argel Tal remained unmoving, bolter across his chest. He’d heard this from the Chaplain many times before, and could offer no answer to ease his friend’s choler.

‘I know,’ he said, hoping Xaphen would fall silent. This was hardly the time for such things.

‘He is not one of us. A false Astartes.’ Xaphen fell into the familiar lament with teeth-clenching passion. ‘He is impure.’

‘This is not the time for old grudges.’

‘Laxity like that is why you will never carry a crozius,’ the Chaplain said.

The nepotism behind Kor Phaeron’s ascension to the First Captaincy was no secret. As the primarch’s spiritual counsel and foster father during the years of Lorgar’s youth away from the Imperium, Kor Phaeron had helped shape the growing demigod in ways his true father had not. They stood together through the years of sacrifice and revolution, through the holy wars that threatened to tear Colchis apart before its unity under the benevolent rule of Lorgar.

When the God-Emperor came to Colchis over a century before to offer Lorgar command of the XVII Legion, Kor Phaeron had been far too old to receive the organ implantations and prepubescent genetic manipulations necessary to grow into one of the Astartes. Instead, through rejuvenat surgery, costly bionics and limited gene-forging, Kor Phaeron was exalted above humanity as a sign of the value placed in him by the primarch.

Despite leaving humanity behind, he had not ascended to the ranks of true Astartes. Argel Tal watched him now, this pinnacle of genetic compromise. Respect stilled his tongue, even if admiration did not.

Kor Phaeron spat onto the broken ground. The acidic gobbet of saliva hissed as it ate into the ruined stone. Only then did Argel Tal reactivate the vox-channel to Xaphen by blink-clicking his brother’s name-rune.

‘Are you galled only by the First Captain’s impurity? Or is it his complete lack of Legion discipline, and that his victories eclipse yours and mine put together?’

Xaphen chuckled, the sound low and dark. His crozius hammer was in his fists, its mace head resting on the ground.

‘He is at the primarch’s side for each campaign. He commands the First Company, the Legion’s finest, and wears the armour of the Terminator elite. It would take a fool to fail in those circumstances.’

‘I have heard him preach, brother. As have you. I do not like him, but I respect him. He speaks the Word with an insight possessed by no other, and his wisdom pours fire into my blood. He orchestrated victory in a planet-wide civil war when he was merely a human priest. Do not underestimate him now.’

Xaphen’s voice was sterner. ‘Impurity cannot be forgiven.’

‘The primarch chose him,’ the captain’s tone also grew stonier in response. ‘Does that mean nothing to you?’

‘I do not doubt our father’s judgement,’ came the reluctant reply.

Just when Argel Tal sensed more to come, Xaphen fell silent, perhaps detecting an implied lecture in his brother’s disapproval.

‘Stand ready,’ Kor Phaeron growled, his grinding voice at odds with his cadaverous face. ‘The primarch comes.’

As those words hung in the air, the ramp beneath the cockpit of the golden Stormbird began to ease down on smooth gears.

Argel Tal breathed out, slow and tense, feeling his primary heart thud faster. Although he wasn’t in battle, his secondary heart started a slower counter-beat to the hammering of his first.

The figure descended the ramp alone, and the Seventh Captain felt the stinging threat of worshipful tears even as he kept his gaze on the ruined ground. He’d not seen his primarch in almost three years. To be cast away from his radiance, even in the name of sacred duty, was to walk in shadow, devoid of inspiration.

The vox came alive with thousands of muted voices as countless Word Bearers breathed their father’s name. Many thanked fate for the chance to stand within his presence once again. Reverent chants ghosted over the communication channels, never rising above whispers. Argel Tal was one of the few that remained silent at first, thanking fate in voiceless piety.

Three years. Three long, long years of fighting in the darkness, praying for this moment to come. All doubt, all concern, all suspicion of the Ultramarines’ summons was erased in a dual beat of his twin hearts.

The figure stopped walking. Argel Tal knew this from the cessation of footsteps on blackened earth.

Only then did he speak. A single word: a name used only rarely beyond the warrior-sons who carried Lorgar’s blood in their veins, as they conquered an ignorant galaxy by crozius and bolter.

‘Aurelian,’ the captain said, the word drowning in so many similar whispers.

Argel Tal raised his eyes at last, to see the son of a living god standing in the heart of a necropolis.

Three

Blood Demands Blood
Sigillite
The Master of Mankind

The Seventeenth Primarch was known to the emergent Imperium by many names. The worlds left in his Legion’s triumphant wake knew him as the Anointed, the Seventeenth Son, or more elegantly, the Bearer of the Word.

To his primarch brothers he was simply Lorgar, the name given to him on his home world of Colchis during the years of turmoil before the Emperor’s arrival.

Yet as with many primarchs, he also bore an informal title – a term of respect often used by the eighteen Legions. Where Fulgrim of the III Legion was known respectfully as the Phoenician, and Ferrus Manus of the X Legion carried the Gorgon as his title, the lord of the XVII Legion was the Urizen – a name pulled from the half-forgotten writings of ancient Terran myth.

None of the one hundred thousand warriors gathered spoke those names now. As the Word Bearers Legion stood at its full, unbelievable strength in perfectly ordered ranks, every one of his sons chanted his true name in sibilant whispers, as if the syllables were an invocation.

Aurelian, they breathed in unison. Lorgar Aurelian, Lorgar the Golden One. Thus was the father known to his chosen children.

The Seventeenth Primarch turned his gaze to the ocean of grey-armoured warriors bred to do his bidding. He seemed to pause, just for a moment, at the immensity of what he was seeing. Those closest to him saw the fires of thought light up his eyes.

‘My sons,’ he said, colouring the words with a smile tainted by sorrow. ‘It lifts my heart to see you all.’

To stare at one of the God-Emperor’s sons was to drink in a vision of avataric perfection. Human senses, even the laboratory-forged perceptions of an Astartes warrior, struggled to process what they were seeing. When Argel Tal first stood before Lorgar as a boy still shy of his eleventh birthday, he had suffered nightmares of confusion and pain for a month.

The Legion’s Apothecaries who watched over the infant recruits were prepared for this. Turyon, the Apothecary who oversaw Argel Tal’s implantation surgeries during his pubescent years, had explained the phenomena to him in one of the tiny isolation cells granted to all Legion acolytes during their training.

‘The nightmares are natural, and will fade in time. Your mind must come to terms with what you have seen.’

‘I am not sure what I saw,’ the boy admitted.

‘You saw the son of a god. Mortal minds and eyes were never meant to witness such things. It will take time to adjust.’

‘It hurts when I close my eyes. It hurts to remember him.’

‘It will not hurt forever.’

‘I want to serve him,’ the eleven-year-old boy had promised, still trembling from the night’s visions. ‘I will serve him, I swear.’

Turyon had nodded, going on to speak of the many lethal trials ahead before he could wear the mantle of an Astartes. Argel Tal had listened to none of it – at least, not then, not that morning with the weak Colchisian sun bringing dawn to his single-windowed cell.

He still thought of Turyon. The Apothecary had died forty years before, and Argel Tal kept a memento of the battle. Even now, he could never hold the curved, broken alien blade without remembering Turyon’s slashed throat.

In truth, that was why he kept it. Remembrance. A morbid habit, perhaps, and one the Chaplains had often chastised him for. It was the mark of an unhealthy mind to gather the weapons that slew one’s brothers.

Argel Tal raised his eyes.

‘Blood demands blood,’ Lorgar said to the warriors gathered in Monarchia’s cratered grave. ‘Blood demands blood.’

As always when in his father’s presence, Argel Tal rationed his gaze to focus upon individual details, rather than his gene-father’s full manifestation.

Lorgar’s eyes, the snowy grey of Colchis’s winter skies, were ringed by kohl, setting them even brighter against the primarch’s skin – skin that seemed golden to unvisored eyes.

Argel Tal’s helm’s eye lenses filtered everything to a world of dark-washed tactical readouts, but it stole none of the detail. He could make out the thousands of individual Colchisian glyphs gold-inked onto the primarch’s white flesh. It was said the tattoos of cuneiform scripture covered most of Lorgar’s body. Certainly, they trailed down his face in tight, perfect lines, from his shaved head to his jawline, each sentence a prayer of devotion, a prophetic hope for the future, or an invocation of strength from a higher power.

Where Lorgar’s regalia hid his flesh, the writing continued over the golden plates of armour, acid-etched into the shining surfaces. Yet for all his majesty, the Seventeenth Primarch did not display his grandeur by ceremonial wargear. His armour may have been gold, but it was no more ornate than the Mark III plate worn by his captains. The oath papers and scrolls of scripture pinned to his breastplate and pauldrons told not of the primarch’s own glory, but his vows to his father, and his devotion to serve the people of the Imperium.

‘And so we come to this,’ the primarch said, his voice never rising far above a whisper, because it never needed to. It reached the ears of his closest sons, and translated smoothly across the vox for the rear ranks.

‘And so we come to this, yet still they make us wait for the answers we deserve.’

Human linguistics couldn’t convey the fierce, soulful confidence Lorgar exuded. His slender lips were curled into the crooked half-smile of an impassioned poet, despite standing in the grave of his greatest achievement. In his gauntleted hands, clutched in gold fists that seemed reluctant to raise the weapon, was a crozius the height of an Astartes warrior.

Illuminarum was the primarch’s one concession to grandeur. The weapon’s haft was the cream of ivory, reinforced by a grip of black iron. Its head was an orb of adamantium, stained black through a forgemaster’s touch and decorated with silver-leafed runes. Evenly-spaced spikes the length of human forearms projected from its outer edges, lending the mace a brutish air almost at odds with the philosophical seeker who carried it across the stars.

Despite the immense craftsmanship in its forging, Lorgar’s crozius was ostentation utterly without beauty. Entire worlds had been put to the flame by its bearer, while every Chaplain of the Word Bearers Legion wielded its lesser reflection.

None of Lorgar’s sons, even those who had spent years from his side, were blind to their father’s unease. The primarch cast glances back at the grounded Ultramarines Thunderhawks, waiting for any signs of emergence. Around his poet’s smile was the faint suggestion of black stubble, something Argel Tal had never seen before on his meticulous primarch.

Lorgar turned away from his sons, now staring down at the impassive gunships. His whisper carried to the entire Legion.

‘Guilliman, brother of my blood, if not my heart. Come to me and answer for your madness.’

In theatrical unity, the gunships’ ramps began to lower. The Legion heard their father’s last whisper, as the Ultramarines showed themselves at last.

‘Bearers of the Word,’ he murmured the warning, soft as snakeskin on silk. ‘Stand ready, and watch for the first sign of treachery.’

A mere hundred warriors stood opposed to one hundred thousand. Facing an ocean of grey armour, a single company of Ultramarines had made planetfall with their primarch. Even in the gravity of the moment, Argel Tal wasn’t sure whether to be mystified at this display, or insulted by it. He settled for both, his irritation rising all the while.

‘The 19th Company,’ Xaphen voxed, watching the Ultramarines banner waving in the gentle wind. It depicted a rearing white horse with a mane of fire, over a series of numerals. ‘Intriguing.’

Argel Tal watched the white horse rippling in the wind, trying to discern some significance in the 19th’s presence. The creature seemed in motion, the flames of its mane real and burning. Aethon Company, the Ultramarines 19th, was well-known to many outside Guilliman’s Legion. Aethon himself commanded an entire Imperial Expedition away from his primarch, and was rumoured to be a stern ambassador and a shrewd diplomat. Whatever the truth, the captain was trusted with a great deal more responsibility and independence than most other Astartes could ever claim.

‘They are named,’ Xaphen said, ‘for a fire-breathing horse, in ancient Macraggian mythology. Aethon was the name of a horse that pulled the sun-god’s chariot across the sky.’

Argel Tal resisted the urge to shake his head. ‘With the greatest respect, brother, I couldn’t care less.’

‘Knowledge is power,’ the Chaplain replied.

‘Focus,’ the captain snapped back. ‘You heard the primarch.’

Xaphen sent an acknowledgement chime across the vox – a single static buzz.

The final gunship ramp lowered on steam-venting pistons. Argel Tal remained still, his muscles locked tense, as the Thirteenth Primarch descended with his honour guard, followed by...

‘No,’ he said, shock stealing his breath.

‘Blood of the God-Emperor,’ Xaphen whispered.

Ahead of them, Lorgar watched with a viper’s smile. ‘Malcador the Sigillite.’

Next to the primarch armoured in battleplate of pearl and cerulean walked a slender figure in unassuming, plain robes. Human, utterly frail in Gulliman’s massive shadow, the First Lord of Terra clutched a staff of dark metal and rattling chains, topped by a twin-headed eagle.

Guilliman, by contrast, was hulking where the Sigillite was sparse. His warplate was the blue of Terra’s long-burned oceans, an echo from an age of legend, and edged by gold and mother of pearl, glinting in the rising moonlight.

‘What insanity is this?’ snarled Kor Phaeron, his voice thickened by emotion too rancid to suppress.

‘Peace, my friend,’ Lorgar murmured, his gaze never leaving the opposing line of warriors. ‘The answers we seek will soon be ours. Captains, step forward.’

At the command, one hundred captains advanced, bolters and blades held at ease in gauntlets of grey. One hundred Chaplains, their gold trimmings and crozius mauls marking them out from the ranks, remained a step behind. Behind the warrior-priests, a hundred thousand Word Bearers stood at the ready, holding ranks despite the uneven platform made by the pulverised ground.

Argel Tal tore his glance from Guilliman, the Lord of Macragge’s noble features as difficult to look upon as his own father’s. His eyes were the hardest part to take in. There was no doubt, no speculation, no curiosity – nothing that told of mortal emotion behind the deep-set eyes. The face could have been sculpted from suntanned stone. Dignity incarnate.

The Seventh Captain repressed a shiver, and turned his attention to the Sigillite. Too human to fear, yet too influential to ignore. The Emperor’s right hand and closest confidant.

Here.

Here, and apparently supporting the Ultramarines in their destruction of the perfect city. Argel Tal’s hand tightened on the bolter grip.

‘Brother,’ Lorgar spoke, his tones smooth on the surface, almost entirely hiding the tremble of grief his sons knew must be flowing through him. ‘And Malcador. Welcome to Monarchia.’ At these words, he gestured at the devastation, his handsome features lost to a sickened sneer.

‘Lorgar,’ Guilliman’s voice rumbled like distant thunder, and he said no more than his brother’s name.

Argel Tal narrowed his eyes at the absolute neutrality in the tone, not a ghost of emotion. He’d seen automatons in the Legio Cybernetica with more humanity than the Ultramarines primarch.

‘Primarch Lorgar,’ said Malcador, bowing by way of introduction. ‘It grieves us all to meet in these circumstances.’

The golden warrior took a step forward, his crozius resting on his shoulder. ‘Does it now? It grieves us all? You do not look grieved, my brother.’

Guilliman said nothing. Lorgar broke his stare after several moments, regarding the Sigillite.

‘Answers, Malcador.’ He took another step forward, now halfway between his Legion and the hundred Ultramarines. ‘I want answers. What happened here? What madness has been allowed to run unchecked?’

The Sigillite pulled back his hood, revealing a face so pale it bordered on grey unhealthiness. ‘You cannot guess, Lorgar?’ The human shook his head as if in sorrow. ‘Truly, this is a surprise to you?’

‘Answer me!’ the primarch screamed.

The Ultramarines flinched back, several raising weapons in hands that shook with surprise.

Lorgar threw his arms out to the sides, taking in the surrounding devastation a second time, and spit flew from his lips as he roared. ‘Answer me for what you have done here! I demand it!’

‘What do we do?’ Xaphen voxed. ‘What’s... what’s happening?’

Argel Tal didn’t answer. His blade and bolter were suddenly very heavy in his hands, and he stared at the Ultramarines displaying their own shock so openly. While they held ranks, it was clear they were uneasy. And rightly so.

‘What have you done to my city?’ Lorgar’s voice was a hissing whisper, spoken through a false smile.

‘It was not compliant,’ Malcador’s words were slowed by patience. ‘This culture, this world, was not comp–’

‘Liar! Blasphemer! It was the model of compliance!’

Several Ultramarines retreated a little now, and Argel Tal could see them looking to one another in doubt. A flutter of voices teased the vox-network as the Word Bearers picked up signals from the Ultramarines voxing each other in their unease. Only Guilliman appeared unmoved. Even Malcador was jarred, his eyes wide and his staff gripped tighter as he faced down the primarch’s anger.

‘Lorgar...’

‘They chanted my father’s name in the streets!’

‘Lorgar, they–’

‘They honoured him with each sunrise!’ Lorgar came closer, his eyes wild, focused like targeting reticules on his father’s advisor. ‘Answer me, human. Justify this, when statues of the Emperor adorned every place of gathering!’

‘They worshipped him.’ Malcador raised his head, for he was half the height of both primarchs. ‘They revered him.’ He looked up at Lorgar, seeking some sign of comprehension in the giant’s golden face. Seeing none, he drew breath again, and wiped a fleck of the primarch’s spittle from his cheek. ‘They worshipped him as a god.’

‘You plead my case for me?’ Lorgar dropped his crozius, letting it fall to the broken ground with a dull thud. He looked at his hands, fingers curled into claws as if he would tear out his own eyes. ‘You... you stand in the ruin of perfection, and you say yourself this city was annihilated for nothing? Have you travelled the length of the galaxy to show me you have lost your fragile mortal mind?’

‘Lorgar–’ the Sigillite tried again, but the rest of his words never left his throat. Malcador fell in silence, smashed aside by Lorgar’s backhanded strike. Every warrior nearby heard the wrenching snap of bones breaking, and Malcador crashed onto the rocky ground twenty metres away, tumbling to a halt in the dust.

Face to face with his brother, Lorgar bared his teeth into Guilliman’s impassive features.

‘Why. Did. You. Do. This.’

‘I was ordered to.’

‘By this worm?’ Lorgar laughed, reaching out a hand towards the fallen figure of Malcador. ‘By this maggot?’ The Word Bearers’ primarch shook his head and stalked back to his own warriors.

‘I will take my Legion to Terra, and inform our father of this... this madness, myself.’

‘He knows.’

The voice was Malcador’s. He rose on unsteady limbs, his words strained and spoken through bleeding lips. Guilliman inclined his head, the barest movement enough to send two of his warriors to aid the Emperor’s advisor. Malcador stood, still hunched from the pain, and ordered the approaching Ultramarines away. With his arm outstretched, his staff leapt from the ground a dozen metres away and slapped neatly into his palm.

‘What?’ Lorgar said, uncertain he’d heard correctly. ‘What did you say?’

The wounded First Lord of Terra closed his eyes, using his staff of office as a crutch.

‘I said, he knows. Your father knows.’

‘You lie.’ Lorgar clenched his teeth again, his breath coming fast and shallow. ‘You lie, and you are fortunate I do not kill you for this blasphemy.’

Malcador didn’t argue. He closed his eyes, raised his head to the sky, and spoke without sound. Every Word Bearer, every Ultramarine, every living being in a ten-kilometre radius heard the man’s psychic voice pulsing through their minds, such was its power.

+He will not listen, my lord. Not to me+

Lorgar froze, his hands a hair’s breadth from retrieving his crozius on the ground. Guilliman’s most expansive movement since arriving was to turn from his golden brother, not in disgust as Argel Tal first thought, but without any expression at all. He was simply shielding his eyes.

Malcador’s eyes remained closed, his face angled up to the heavens. To the vessels in orbit.

Lorgar stepped back, voicelessly mouthing ‘No, no, no...’, as if whispered words could somehow alter fate.

The world around them exploded in light.

The displacement of air resulted in a bang not far from a sonic boom, but that wasn’t what sent Argel Tal reeling. He’d seen teleportation technology used before – had travelled via such rare means himself – but the noise was filtered to tolerable levels by his helm’s perceptive systems.

And it wasn’t the light of a teleport flare that forced him to avert his eyes. This, too, would have been compensated for by his armour’s internal sensors, dimming his eye lenses immediately.

But he was blind. Blinded by gold, burning like molten metal.

The vox shrieked with thousands of his brothers voicing the same malady, but the reports from his brethren were dull, half-lost in an assault of noise that shouldn’t exist. It wasn’t a fault with the vox; it was in his head – a crashing of waves loud enough to throw off his balance.

Blind and almost deafened, Argel Tal felt his bolter slip from his grip. It took all his strength to remain standing.

Lorgar Aurelian saw none of this.

No blinding golden light. No deafening psychic roar.

He saw six figures standing in unity, five of whom he did not recognise, and one he did. Behind them, the Ultramarines – not afflicted as his warriors were – were on their knees in an orderly display. Only Guilliman and the Sigillite remained standing.

Lorgar looked back to the six. The five ringed the familiar figure, and though the primarch did not know them by name, he knew their creed. Achingly elaborate armour of rich gold. Cloaks of royal scarlet draped from their shoulders. Long halberds topped by weighty silver blades, gripped in hands that would never tremble.

Custodians. The Emperor’s guardians.

Lorgar looked to the sixth figure, who was just a man. Despite the vigour of youth, age lines showed time’s tracks across features that were both stern and gentle, all at once. The man’s appearance depended entirely on which facet of his face one focused upon. He was a tired, ageing man, and a heroic statue immortalised in life’s prime. He was a young, grimacing warlord with cold eyes, and a confused elder on the edge of weeping.

Lorgar focused on those eyes now, seeing the warmth of love within the benevolence of trust. The man blinked slowly, and as his eyes opened again, they were cold with the frigid touch of disappointment blending into the ice of disgust.

‘Lorgar,’ the man said. His voice was quiet but strong, lost in the indecipherable vista between hatred and kindness.

‘Father,’ Lorgar said to the Emperor of Mankind.

Four

A Legion Kneels
If Ultramar Burns
Grey

Sight returned, banishing the grotesque feeling of helplessness. Such emotion was anathema, prickling at Argel Tal’s skin with a thousand insect legs.

He managed to look through his dimmed visor, seeing a towering figure deep in a corona of agonising white light. Around the figure, cloaked and gold-armoured warriors hefted unique spears with practiced ease. Each one was the size of an Astartes, and no Astartes could fail to recognise them.

‘Custodes,’ he managed to speak through teeth gritted at the light’s intensity.

‘It’s...’ Xaphen stammered. ‘It’s the...’

‘I know who it is,’ Argel Tal exhaled the words through clenched teeth. And that’s when the voice hit him, hit them all, in a wave of invisible force.

+Kneel+ it whispered with the power of a hammer to the forehead. There was no resisting. Muscles acted instantly, no matter that many hearts fought not to obey. Argel Tal was one of them. This was not fealty, nor worship, nor service. This was slavery, and his instincts rebelled at the enforced devotion even as he obeyed it.

One hundred thousand Word Bearers kneeled in the dust of the perfect city, rendered prone by Imperial decree.

A Legion was on its knees.

Lorgar looked over his shoulder, taking in the seascape of his kneeling warriors. Fire flickered in his eyes when he returned his gaze to the Emperor.

‘Father–’ Lorgar began, but the man shook his head.

‘Kneel,’ he said. His timeless face was framed by dark hair the same colour as Lorgar’s facial stubble; like father, like son.

‘What?’ the primarch asked. He looked past the Emperor to Guilliman, straight-backed and proud. When he returned his gaze to his father, he wiped his eyes with his soft fingertips, as if to clear some lingering phantasm. ‘Father?’

‘Kneel, Lorgar.’

Argel Tal watched with clenched teeth as Lorgar lowered himself to one knee.

His first instincts were fading now, replaced by reason and the comfort of faith. It was only right to kneel before the God-Emperor. He willed his hearts to slow, despite the implied insult of his deity impelling him to abase himself.

The rebellious anger resurfaced in a stinging adrenal flood only a moment later, as he watched the Ultramarines rise to their feet at Guilliman’s command. He could see them watching, feel their eyes boring into him as he knelt before them. One Legion’s warriors stood in the Emperor’s presence with a primarch’s blessing, while another was on its knees in the bones of a dead city.

It was a moment that cast a dozen reflections, for the Word Bearers had mirrored this action many times before, under alien skies. Legions laying claim to less discipline or grace might beat their chests and howl at the moon upon achieving compliance, but among the sons of Lorgar, victory was to be cherished in reverence and dignity. The triumphant warriors would kneel in the heart of the fallen city, and heed the words of their Chaplains.

The Rite of Remembrance. A time to recall the sacrifices of lost brothers, and reflect upon one’s place in the Word.

Argel Tal felt sweat painting cold trails down his temples and cheeks. Trembling threatened to take hold as his traitorous muscles bunched, locking in painful cramps. The joints of his armour thrummed with unreleased strength, forcing him to endure this perversion of the Legion’s most sacred ritual.

The voice returned. This time, it gave the answers that the XVII Legion so craved.

Lorgar looked into his father’s unknowable face as the Emperor spoke.

‘You are a general, my son. Not a high priest. You were created for war, for conquest, to reunite the human race under the aegis of truth.’

‘I–’

‘No.’ The Emperor closed his eyes, and an image of Monarchia as it had been, bright and glorious, filled Lorgar’s mind. ‘This is worship,’ the Emperor said. ‘This is a poison to truth. You speak of me as a god, and forge worlds that suffer under the one lie that has brought humanity to the edge of extinction time and time again.’

‘The people are joyous–’

‘The people are deceived. The people will burn when their faith is proven false.’

‘My worlds are loyal.’ Lorgar was no longer kneeling. He rose to his feet, his voice rising with him. ‘My Legion shapes the most fiercely loyal worlds in your Imperium.’

+It is not my Imperium+

The words thudded into Argel Tal’s mind like a stream of bolter shells. For a brief, hateful moment, he glanced at his retinal display to check his life signs. He was certain he was dying, and had he not already been on his knees, he would’ve fallen to them now.

+It is the Imperium of Man. The empire of humanity, enlightened and saved by the truth+

He heard Lorgar’s reply this time.

‘I speak no lies. You are a god.’

+Lorgar+

‘I will not be silenced because you do not like the melody of one single word. In your grip, a thousand worlds turn! By your will, a million vessels sail the void. You are immortal, undying, seeing all and knowing all that transpires across creation. Father, you are a god in all but name. All that remains is to confess to it.’

+LORGAR+

The voice came with a wall of pressure now, dense and all too tactile. It pounded into Argel Tal like a miasma of engine wash, heating his armour and throwing him to the ground. Around him, he could see his brothers sent sprawling, their armour skidding across the dust.

Defiant in the cyclone of unseen energy, scrolls of scripture ripping from his armour, Lorgar raised his hand to point at his father.

‘You are a god. Say the words and end the lie.’

The Emperor shook his head, not in defeat, but calm defiance.

‘You are blind, my son. You cling to ancient perceptions, and endanger us all with them. Let this end, Lorgar. Let this end with you heeding my words.’

The psychic wind died with a peal of thunder.

Lorgar stood where he was, trembling for reasons his warriors couldn’t discern. Blood ran from one ear, running in a slow trail down his tattooed neck.

‘I am listening, father,’ he said.

The Seventh Captain hauled himself back to his feet, stumbling once and righting himself before his armour’s stabilisers needed to compensate. He was one of the first Word Bearers to rise. The others still struggled, shivering on hands and knees, or were locked in muscle spasms, their twitching limbs disturbing the dust.

Argel Tal helped Xaphen up, receiving a grunt of thanks.

+Word Bearers, hear me well. You, among all my Legions, are guilty of failure. You number more warriors than any other, excepting the XIII. Yet your conquests are the slowest, and your victories ring hollow+

It hurt too much to look directly at the figure of white-gold light, haloed by coruscating psychic fire, telling them with words of thunder that all their lives had been wasted.

+You linger on compliant worlds for years after final victory, driving the populace into the worship of false faith, seeding cults of the naive and the deceived, erecting monuments to lies. All you have done in the Great Crusade is for naught. While all others succeed and bring prosperity to the Imperium, you alone have failed me+

Lorgar stepped back from the figure, only now raising his arms to ward off its radiance.

+Wage war as you were created to do. Serve the Imperium as you were born to do. Take with you the lesson learned here this day. You kneel in the ruination found at the end of a false path. Let this be your Legion’s rebirth+

The primarch managed a weak ‘Father...’ but it was spoken to emptiness. Another sonic boom of displacing air heralded the Emperor’s return to orbit.

The Ultramarines remained, watching the kneeling, trembling Word Bearers in absolute silence. The Custodians stood alongside Guilliman, while the primarch conferred with their apparent leader, whose helm bore a red crest to match his cloak.

Argel Tal saw Kor Phaeron rising with painful slowness, despite his Terminator armour making the task easier with dense joints of snarling servos. Neither Argel Tal nor Xaphen offered to help. Both of them made for the primarch.

While the Word Bearers struggled to their feet, Lorgar crashed to his knees at last.

The Emperor’s golden son stared at the surrounding city as if he recognised none of it, with no idea how he had reached this place. Dead eyes too cold to cry looked out upon his shamed Legion, and the rubble of the lesson they needed to learn.

Argel Tal reached him first. Instinct compelled him to remove his own helm, and he disengaged the seals in his armoured collar, standing unmasked before his primarch.

‘Aurelian,’ he said.

For the first time, Argel Tal breathed the scorched air of Monarchia, unaltered by merciful filters. It reeked of the oil burned in a thousand years of industry. Xaphen’s earlier comment was haunting in its truth: it smelled like they’d lost a war.

He didn’t dare touch Lorgar. With his hand outstretched, just short of resting on his primarch’s shoulder, he whispered his father’s name.

Lorgar turned to regard him, his eyes lacking even a shadow of recognition.

‘Aurelian,’ Argel Tal said again. He glanced at the staring figures of Guilliman and the Custodians. ‘My primarch, come, we must return to our ships.’

For the first time, his hand rested on Lorgar’s armoured shoulder, where a scroll of scripture had once hung. Ignoring his touch, Lorgar threw his head back and roared. The captain gripped the primarch’s golden pauldron, doing all he could to keep the demigod steady.

Lorgar screamed, deep and low and long, at the uncaring sky. It lasted longer than mortal lungs would allow.

When the anguished cry finally faltered, he ran his bare fingers along the broken ground. With a shaking hand, the primarch smeared black ash across his face, tarnishing his features with the powdered bones of the perfect city.

Xaphen’s voice was low and urgent. ‘The Ultramarines are bearing witness to this. We must get him to safety.’

Lorgar’s mask of ashes was already streaked with tears that cut trails in the dust. The two warriors renewed their grips, trying to bring the golden giant to his feet. For a wonder, instead of the expected slackness in his limbs, Lorgar spat onto the ground and rose with their aid. Both of them felt the trembling in Lorgar’s limbs. Neither of them spoke of it.

‘Guilliman,’ the primarch spoke his brother’s name with an envenomed tongue. A shrug of his shoulders pushed Argel Tal and Xaphen aside, immediately forgotten.

Emotion flooded back into Lorgar’s eyes. His gaze was locked on Guilliman, who returned it – passionless where Lorgar was inflamed.

‘Does it please you,’ the Word Bearer lord sneered, ‘to witness my shame?’

Guilliman didn’t answer, but Lorgar wouldn’t back down.

‘Does it please you?’ he pressed. ‘Do you enjoy seeing my efforts reduced to ashes while our father favours you?’

Guilliman breathed slowly, utterly unfazed. He spoke as if no question had been asked.

‘Our father entrusted me to inform you of one last matter.’

‘Then speak it and begone.’ Lorgar reached for his crozius on the ground, and dragged it up from the ash. Dust rained from its spiked head.

‘These five warriors of the Legiones Custodes,’ the Ultramarines’ primarch inclined his head to them. ‘They are not alone. Fifteen more remain on my flagship. Our father has ordered them to accompany you, brother.’

Argel Tal closed his eyes at this final indignity. After kneeling in the ashes of failure, after being told by the Emperor that all their achievements were worthless... Now this.

Lorgar laughed, the sound ripe with derision. His face was still smeared with dust.

‘I refuse. They are not needed.’

‘Our father believes otherwise,’ Guilliman said. ‘These warriors are to be his eyes as your Legion rejoins the Great Crusade.’

‘And does our father set hounds to watch over you? Do they reside in your precious empire of Ultramar, whispering of your every move? I see the shadow of a smile on your lips. These others do not know you as I do, brother. Our sons may not see the amusement in your eyes, but I am not blind to such nuance.’

‘You have always possessed an active imagination. Today has proven that.’

‘My devotion is my strength.’ Lorgar clenched his perfect teeth. ‘You have no heart, and no soul.’ A snort blackened his angelic features with a disgusted twist. ‘I pray that one day, you feel as I feel. Would you smile if one of Ultramar’s worlds died in fire? Tarentus? Espandor? Calth?’

‘You should return to your fleet, brother.’ Guilliman uncrossed his arms, revealing the golden aquila emblazoned across his chest. The eagle’s spread wings glinted with reflected sunlight. ‘You have much work to do.’

The blow came from nowhere. In its wake, the air rang with the echo of metal on metal, the clashing chime of a great cathedral bell. It was almost beautiful.

A primarch lay in the dust, surrounded by his warriors. None present had ever witnessed such a thing. Argel Tal’s bolter was raised, aimed at the ranks of Ultramarines who mirrored the gesture in kind. A hundred gun barrels levelled at a hundred thousand. The Seventh Captain needed three attempts to form words.

‘Hold your fire,’ he whispered into the general vox-channel. ‘Do not fire unless fired upon.’

Lorgar rested the immense crozius mace on his golden shoulder. His grey eyes flickered with uncertain emotion as he bared his teeth at the fallen Lord of Macragge.

‘You will never mock me again, brother. Is that understood?’

Guilliman’s rise was slow, almost hesitant. The golden eagle on his breastplate was split, a valley-crack running through its body.

‘You go too far,’ a softer voice said. Malcador, First Lord of Terra, still clutched his staff. It was all that kept him standing. ‘You go too far.’

‘Be silent, worm. The next time you bleed my patience dry, I will do more than slap you aside.’

Guilliman was on his feet now. He turned an expressionless face back to his brother.

‘Is your tantrum concluded, Lorgar? I must return to the Crusade.’

‘Come, my son,’ Kor Phaeron’s corpse-sneer was directed at Guilliman even as his words were meant for his primarch. ‘Come. We have much to discuss.’

Lorgar exhaled, and nodded once. The anger was fading, and no longer offered a shield against shame. ‘Yes. Back to the ships.’

‘All companies,’ Kor Phaeron spat across the vox, ‘return to orbit.’

‘Yes, First Captain,’ Argel Tal replied with the others. ‘By your word.’

Argel Tal’s Thunderhawk nestled in the shadow cast by a ruined wall. This blasted slice of architecture stood almost alone in the ash desert, the last lingering piece of a building that would never rise again. The captain walked with Xaphen and his subcommanders, Brother-Sergeants Malnor and Torgal. Squads embarked aboard their own gunships, despondent gatherings of warriors walking in near-silence.

‘There will be no resettlement,’ Torgal said. ‘The city is a tomb. There is nothing left to rebuild.’

‘It is noted in many historical archives,’ said Xaphen, ‘that even the most enlightened primitive cultures on pre-Imperial Terra would salt the earth after razing a city to the ground. Nothing would grow for generations. The people of the defeated city had no choice but to leave and begin new lives elsewhere, rather than rebuild.’

‘How fascinating,’ said Malnor.

‘Be quiet,’ Torgal grunted. ‘Please continue, Chaplain.’

‘I am sure none of us are blind to the echoes of those ancient events taking place here. How many orbital bombardments have we prosecuted ourselves? How many times have we battled in the ruins of a sky-blasted city? This was more than simple destruction. This was eradication. The Ultramarines did as they meant to do, and wiped every significant remnant of Khur’s culture from the face of the planet. A lesson for us, and a lesson for the people.’

Argel Tal led the group into the Thunderhawk’s open cargo bay. Their boots clanged up the ramp.

‘I had my bolter aimed at one of the XIII Legion,’ he said at last. ‘Aimed at his throat.’ He tapped the softer fibre bundle cabling in his own armour’s flexible layered collar. ‘If I’d pulled the trigger, he would be dead.’

‘You didn’t pull the trigger,’ Torgal said. ‘None of us did. That’s what matters.’

Argel Tal nodded to a squad of Seventh Company as they moved past, and punched the sealant plate, activating the ramps’ pistons. The hydraulics compacted, lifting the gangway back up in a slow machine-grind.

‘I didn’t,’ the captain said. ‘But I wanted to. After what they did to our city. After they saw us kneel in false shame. I wanted to, and I almost did. I gave the order to hold fire, while silently hoping someone would break it.’

Malnor didn’t move. Xaphen said nothing. After several seconds, Torgal offered an unsure ‘Sir?’

Argel Tal stared through the diminishing slit of daylight allowed by the rising ramp. Without a word, he thudded a fist onto the control plate, halting the seal. The captain moved to the gang ramp as it made its shuddering descent again.

‘Sir?’ Torgal tried again.

‘I saw something. Movement, in the distance, at the edge of the northern craters.’

His visor zoomed and refocused, panning across the uneven horizon. Nothing. Less than nothing.

‘Dust and dead rock,’ said Malnor.

‘I will return shortly.’ Argel Tal was already moving back down the ramp. He didn’t reach for the bolter at his hip or the twin blades sheathed on his back.

‘Captain,’ Xaphen said. ‘We were ordered to return to orbit. Is this necessary?’

‘Yes. Someone is alive out there.’

The stranger staggered over the broken ground. When her foot caught on a jutting hump of rock, she tumbled forward without a sound, crashing down hard. There she remained, prone in the ash, breathing in arrhythmic wheezes as she sought to summon the strength to stand again.

Judging by the bleeding sores on her palms and knees, it was a performance she’d repeated many times, over many days.

Her scarlet robes were filthy and shredded, though they were clearly of inexpensive weave even before they’d suffered the indignity of neglect. Argel Tal watched her from afar, as the lurching figure made her painful way across the blasted terrain. She seemed to have no specific direction in mind, often turning back on herself, and pausing to crouch and catch her breath after each stumble.

The Astartes moved closer. The stranger’s head came up immediately.

‘Who’s there?’ she called.

Argel Tal’s helm turned his answer into a machine-growl, with a waspish, sawing edge. ‘Who indeed?’

The captain kept his gauntleted hands in full view, palms outward in the Khurian custom of greeting another without hostility. The young woman looked in his direction, but made no eye contact. She stared vaguely off to Argel Tal’s side.

‘You’re one of them,’ the human recoiled, her feet betraying her on the uneven rock and sending her down to the dust again. She was younger than Argel Tal had first guessed, but the warrior was poor at estimating human age. Eighteen. Perhaps younger. Certainly no older.

‘I am Captain Argel Tal of the Seventh Assault Company, Serrated Sun Chapter, Seventeenth Legio Astartes.’

‘Seventeenth... You... you are not a false angel?’

‘I came to this world six decades ago,’ the captain said. ‘I was not false then, nor am I now.’

‘You are not a false angel,’ the girl said again. She was clearly hesitant, still not looking directly at the Astartes as she rose on shivering legs. Argel Tal took a step closer, offering his hand. The young woman didn’t take it. She didn’t even acknowledge it.

The warrior’s eye lens displays flickered with crude bio-sign analyses that Argel Tal had no need to see. The female’s condition was obvious from her jutting facial bones, the patches of raw, discoloured skin decorating her body, and her limbs shaking in a manner that had nothing to do with fear.

‘You are on the edge of malnutrition,’ said the captain, ‘and the wounds on your hands and legs are grievously infected.’

This last was an understatement. Given the spread of flesh corruption below the knees, it was a miracle the girl could still walk at all. Amputation was a very real possibility.

‘What colour is your armour, angel?’ she asked. ‘Answer me this question, I beg you.’

The Word Bearer withdrew his offered hand.

‘And you are blind,’ the warrior said. ‘Forgive me for not noticing before.’

‘I saw the city die,’ she said. ‘I saw it burning as flame rained from the stars. The sky-fire stole my eyes on the Day of Judgement.’

‘It’s called flash blindness. Your retinas are bleached by an oversaturation of light. Sight may return in time.’

The young woman let out a panicked yell as Argel Tal rested his gauntleted fingers on her skeletal shoulder. She flinched back, but the Astartes kept her standing, not allowing her to fall.

‘Please don’t kill me.’

‘I will not kill you. I am guiding you to safety. We saved this world sixty years ago, Khurian. We never meant to bring this upon you. What is your name?’

‘Cyrene. But... what colour is your armour, angel? You never answered me.’

Argel Tal looked down into her blinded eyes.

‘Please tell me,’ she repeated.

‘Grey.’

The girl burst into tears, and allowed herself to be half-carried back to the shelter of the Word Bearers gunship.

Five

The Old Ways
The Soul’s Fuel
New Eyes

With that fierce breed of arrogance found only in the hearts of the truly ignorant, it was called the Last War.

The Last War – the conflict to end all conflict.

‘I remember it,’ Kor Phaeron murmured. ‘I remember every day and night we fought, while around us, Colchis burned.’

‘Six years,’ Lorgar’s smile was rueful, his eyes cast down to the marble floor of his meditation chamber. ‘Six long, long years of civil war. An entire world torn asunder, in the name of faith.’

Kor Phaeron licked his sharpened incisors. The chamber was lit only by candlelight, and the cloying reek of ashy incense was thick in the air.

‘But we won,’ he said. Seated opposite the primarch, Kor Phaeron wore the grey robe of Colchis’s ruling priest caste. Without his Terminator plate, he was as Lorgar had always known him: an ageing man despite physical enhancement surgery, skeletal of form, fierce of eye.

Lorgar wore nothing but a loincloth of coarse weave, leaving his immense but androgynously slender torso bare. Ritual branding marks, shaped like Colchisian runes, bled freely down his back, while older burn-scars had scabbed over with crusty seals. Fresh weals from the lash striped his shoulders – the overlapping wounds forming a cobweb of self-flagellation.

Erebus sat with his primarch and commander on the floor, wearing the black robe of the Legion’s Chaplains. It was difficult to breathe with Lorgar’s blood in the air. Such a potent, salty scent was almost dizzying. Primarchs did not receive wounds in war. It was a genetic blasphemy for one to bleed.

‘Yes,’ Lorgar said, scratching the stubble marking his jawline. ‘We won. We won and we spread our faith across our home world.’ He moistened his golden lips with a bitten tongue. ‘And look where we find ourselves in the wake of that triumph. A century later, we are the lords of nothing, kings of the only Legion ever to fail my father.’

‘You always taught us, sire–’

‘Speak, Erebus.’

‘You always taught us to speak the truth, even if our voices shake.’

Lorgar raised his head, a smile creasing the corners of his split lips as he met the Chaplain’s solemn eyes. ‘And have we done that?’

There was no hesitation. ‘The Emperor is a god,’ said Erebus. ‘We’ve taken the truth to the stars, and seeded it across the Imperium. We should feel no shame for how we acted. You should feel no shame for it, sire.’

The primarch wiped the back his hand across his forehead, brushing aside a streak of ash to reveal the gold beneath. Since leaving Khur less than a week before, Lorgar smeared dust from Monarchia’s surface over his features with each new day. His kohl-ringed eyes were darkened further by exhaustion and narrowed by the burden of shame, but this single gesture was the closest either warrior had seen to their primarch cleaning himself since his humiliation before the Emperor.

‘It all began on Colchis,’ he said. ‘And we have been in error since then. My visions of the Emperor’s arrival. The battles of the Last War. It all began with the belief that divinity deserved worship, purely because it was divine.’ He laughed without humour. ‘Even now, I ache to think of the faith we destroyed to make room for our beliefs.’

‘Sire,’ Erebus leaned closer, his eyes rapt upon his primarch’s. ‘We stand on the precipice of destruction. The Legion... its faith is shattered. The Chaplains remain stoic, but they are beset by warriors who come to them with doubts. And with you lost to us, with no guiding light, those who carry the crozius have no answers to give those in grey.’

Lorgar blinked, flecks of ash from his eyelashes dusting down to his lap.

‘I have no answers to offer the Chaplains,’ he said.

‘Perhaps that is so,’ allowed Erebus, ‘but you are still too mired in regret. “Draw inspiration from the past. Use it to shape the future. Do not let it strangle you with shame”.’

Lorgar snorted, though there was no malice in the sound. ‘You quote my own writings back to me, Erebus?’

‘They hold true,’ said the Chaplain.

‘You dwell on thoughts of Colchis,’ Kor Phaeron’s eyes glinted with reflected candlelight. To Erebus, he looked desperate on some subtle, secret level. A kind of insatiable, unfeedable, hunger brightened the elder’s eyes, eating at him from within. Most undignified. ‘If there is something you wish to speak of, my son...’ Kor Phaeron’s thin hand fell upon Lorgar’s golden, whip-scarred shoulder, ‘...then speak of it.’

The primarch looked to his oldest ally, with the cadaverous stare that forever lingered on the man’s face. Yet Lorgar saw beyond it, in a way few others ever could, seeing the kindness, the care.

The paternal love for an aggrieved son.

Lorgar smiled with genuine warmth for the first time in three days, and rested his tattooed hand over his foster father’s weaker, too-human fingers.

‘Do you remember the Emperor’s arrival? The exultation in our hearts, that we were proved right? Do you recall the savage vindication after six years of righteous war?’

The older man nodded. ‘I do.’

The young man with the golden skin drops to one knee, silver tears sparkling on his flawless features like droplets of sacred oil.

‘I knew you’d come,’ he weeps the words. ‘I knew you’d come.’

The God in Gold offers his armoured hand to the kneeling young man. ‘I am the Emperor,’ he smiles, benevolence incarnate, glory radiating from him in a palpable aura that hurts the eyes of every onlooker. Thousands of people line the streets. Hundreds of priests, clad in the dove-grey of the Covenant’s ecclesiarchs, kneel with Lorgar before the coming of the God-Emperor.

‘I know who you are,’ the golden primarch says through his dignified tears. ‘I have dreamed of you for years, foreseeing this moment. Father, Emperor, my lord... We are the Covenant of Colchis, and we have won this world through your worship, for the glory of your name.’

Lorgar turned to meet Kor Phaeron’s eyes.

‘That morning. As I knelt before the Emperor, with the home world’s holy caste chanting... With the red rock domes of Vharadesh made amber by the rising dawn. Did you see as I saw?’

Kor Phaeron looked away. ‘You will not like the answer, Lorgar.’

‘I have liked nothing of late, yet I still wish to know.’ He laughed suddenly, softly. ‘Speak the truth, even if your voice shakes.’

‘I saw a god in golden armour,’ Kor Phaeron said. ‘The very image of you, but aged in ways I couldn’t grasp. I never saw the figure as a benevolent one. His psychic presence pained my eyes, and he smelled of bloodshed, domination, and the many worlds already burned to ash in his wake. Even then, I feared we’d waged six years of war in error, butchering a true faith to replace it with a false one. In his eyes – eyes so like yours – I saw the promise of avarice, the hunger of greed. Everyone else saw nothing but hope. Even you... So I thought, perhaps, I had seen wrong. I trusted your heart, Lorgar. Not my own.’

Lorgar nodded, his contemplative eyes turning away again. Erebus listened in silence, for rare were the moments that any Word Bearer received insight into the primarch’s life before the Legion.

‘Of all the Emperor’s sons,’ Kor Phaeron said, ‘you are the one that most resembles your father in face and form. But you could never commit acts of cruelty and destruction while wearing a smile. The others, your brothers, can do this. They take after the Emperor in that way, where you do not.’

Lorgar lowered his gaze.

‘Even Magnus?’ he asked.

A giant stands with the Emperor – a figure robed in the azure of off-world oceans. One eye stares down at the kneeling figure. The other eye is lost, a scarred crater marking its lack.

‘Greetings, Lorgar,’ says the muscled giant. He is taller even than the God in Gold, and his long hair is styled in a scarlet mane, like that of a prideland lion. ‘I am Magnus. Your brother.’

‘Even Magnus.’ Kor Phaeron seemed reluctant to admit it. His features remained tense. ‘Though I respect him greatly, there is a deep cruelty, born of impatience, threaded through his core. I saw it in his face that day, and each meeting since.’

Lorgar looked down at his hands, ash-stained with crescent moons of blood beneath the fingernails.

‘We are all our father’s sons,’ he said.

‘You are all facets of the Emperor,’ Kor Phaeron amended. ‘You are aspects pulled from a genetic primer. The Lion is your father’s rationality – his analytical skill – unburdened by conscience. Magnus is his psychic potential and eager mind, unrestrained by patience. Russ is his ferocity, untempered by reason. Even Horus...’

‘Go on,’ Lorgar said, looking up now. ‘What of Horus?’

‘The Emperor’s ambition, unshaped by humility. Think of all the worlds where our Legion waged war alongside the Luna Wolves. You’ve seen it as well as I have. Horus hides his arrogance, but it is there – a layer beneath his skin, a shroud around his soul. Pride beats through his body like blood.’

‘And Guilliman?’ Lorgar let his hands rest on his knees again. A smile inched across his features.

‘Guilliman.’ Kor Phaeron’s narrow lips moulded into a grimace, opposing his primarch’s smirk. ‘Guilliman is your father’s echo, heart and soul. If all else went wrong, he would be heir to the empire. Horus is the brightest star and you carry your father’s face, but Guilliman’s heart and soul are cast in the Emperor’s image.’

Lorgar nodded, still smiling to see his advisor’s bitterness. ‘My Macraggian brother is as easy to read as an open book,’ he said. ‘But what of me, Kor Phaeron? Surely I bear more than my father’s features. What aspect of the Imperial avatar have I inherited?’

‘Sire?’ interrupted Erebus. ‘If I may?’

Lorgar granted permission with a tilt of his head. Ever the statesman, Erebus needed no time to compose himself, or his answer.

‘You embody the Emperor’s hope. You are his belief in a greater way of life, and his desire to raise humanity to achieve its greatest potential. You devote yourself to these ends, forever selfless, utterly faithful, striving for the betterment of all.’

Amusement gleamed in the primarch’s eyes – eyes so like the Emperor’s own.

‘Poetic, but indulgent, Erebus. What of my failings? If I am not proud like Horus Lupercal, nor impatient like Magnus the Red... What will history say of Lorgar Aurelian?’

Erebus’s solemn facade cracked. A moment of doubt flashed across his features, and he glanced to Kor Phaeron. The gesture drew a whispered chuckle from their primarch.

‘You are both conspirators,’ he laughed, the sound soft. ‘Do not fear my wrath. I am enjoying this game. It is enlightening. So enlighten me, this last time.’

‘Sire,’ Kor Phaeron began, but Lorgar silenced him, reaching to touch his foster father’s hand as it rested upon his shoulder.

‘No. You know better than that, Kor. I am not “sire”. Never to you.’

‘History will say that if the Seventeenth Primarch had one weakness, it was his faith in others. His selfless devotion and unbreakable loyalty caused him grief beyond the capacity of a mortal heart to contain. He trusted too easily, and too deeply.’

Lorgar said nothing for several moments, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. His shoulders rose and fell with his quiet breaths, the whip-welts inflamed and angry, burning with the faint sheen of sweat dusting his body. Fresher brand marks burnt into the flesh of his back were scabbing over now.

At last, he spoke, his eyes narrowed to slits.

‘My father was wrong about me. I am not a general like my brothers. And I refuse that destiny. I will not blindly walk the same paths they already tread. I will never understand tactics and logistics with the effortless ease of Guilliman or the Lion. I will never possess the skill with a blade shown by Fulgrim or the Khan. Am I diminished because I recognise my faults? I do not believe so.’

He looked down at his hands once more. Fine-fingered, barely callused, the hands of an artist or a poet. His mace – the black iron crozius arcanum – was as much a sceptre of office as it was a weapon.

‘Is that so wrong?’ he asked his closest advisors. ‘Is it so wrong of me to walk the ways of a visionary, a seeker, rather than a simple soldier? What is it within my father that renders him so thirsty for blood? Why is destruction the answer to every question he is asked?’

Kor Phaeron clutched Lorgar’s shoulder tighter. ‘Because, my son, he is gravely flawed. He is an imperfect god.’

The primarch met his foster father’s eyes in the chamber’s gloom, the glance sharp and cold. ‘Do not say what you are about to say.’

‘Lorgar...’ Kor Phaeron tried, but the primarch’s glare silenced him. His eyes were sharp with a plea, not with fury.

‘Do not say it,’ whispered Lorgar. ‘Do not say we tore our home world apart all those years ago in the name of false worship. I cannot live with that. It is one thing for the Emperor to spit on all we have achieved as a Legion, but this is different. Can you piss upon the Covenant and the peaceful Colchis we created after six years of civil war? Will you name my father a false god?’

‘Speak the truth,’ Erebus cut in, ‘even if your voice shakes.’

Lorgar lowered his ash-streaked face into his filthy hands. In that moment, Erebus and Kor Phaeron locked eyes. The latter nodded to the former, and the First Captain spoke again.

‘You know it is true, Lorgar. I would never lie to you. This is something we must all face. We must atone for this sin.’

‘The Chaplains stand with you, sire.’ Erebus added his voice to Kor Phaeron’s. ‘The heart of every warrior-priest in the Legion beats in rhythm with yours. We stand ready to act upon your word.’

Lorgar shrugged off their platitudes, as well as his foster father’s reassuring hand. The movement split the healing scabs on his shoulder blades, birthing trickle-rivers of dark blood weeping down his golden back.

‘You are calling my entire life a lie.’

‘I am saying we were wrong, my son. That’s all.’ Kor Phaeron dipped his gnarled hand into the bowl of ash by Lorgar’s side. Monarchia’s dust spilled through his curled fingers, stinking of charred rock and failure. ‘We prayed to the wrong god for the right reasons, and Monarchia paid the price for our mistake. But it is never too late to atone. We purged our home world of the Old Faith, and now you fear as we all fear: Colchis prospered under the old ways and its legends, until we ravaged it in the name of a lie.’

‘This is heresy,’ Lorgar trembled, barely containing his emotion.

‘It is atonement, my son.’ Kor Phaeron shook his head. ‘We’ve been wrong for so long. We must purge the root of our errors. The source lies on Colchis.’

‘Enough.’ The ash on Lorgar’s cheeks was split by trailing tears. ‘Both of you... Leave me.’

Erebus rose to obey, but Kor Phaeron rested his hand on the primarch’s shoulder once more. ‘I am disappointed in you, boy. To be so proud that you cannot face up to failure and make amends.’

Lorgar clenched his perfect teeth, saliva glistening on his lips. ‘You want to return to Colchis, the cradle of our Legion, and apologise for two million deaths, six years of war, and devoting an entire world to worshipping an unworthy god for almost a century?’

‘Yes,’ Kor Phaeron said, ‘because it is the mark of greatness to deal with one’s mistakes. We will reforge Colchis, as well as every world we have conquered since we first left our home world to join the Great Crusade.’

‘And every world we take in the future,’ said Erebus, ‘must follow a new faith, rather than worship the Emperor.’

‘There is no new faith! You both preach madness. Do you think my Legion kneeling in the dust shames me? Monachia was nothing compared to the rape of my own home world over a lie?’

‘The truth cares nothing for what we wish, sire,’ said Erebus. ‘The truth simply is.’

‘You studied the Old Faith,’ Kor Phaeron said. ‘You believed it yourself as a young seeker, before your visions of the Emperor’s arrival. You know the way to uncover whether it was a false faith, or a pure one.’

Lorgar wiped drying silver tears from his face. ‘You want us to chase a myth across the stars.’ His eyes flicked between them both, bright and focused. ‘Let us speak plainly now, more than ever before. You want us to embark on a fool’s odyssey through the galaxy, in search of the very gods we’ve spent decades denying.’

Lorgar laughed, the sound rich with disgust. ‘I am right, aren’t I? You want us to undertake the Pilgrimage.’

‘We are nothing without faith, sire,’ said Erebus.

‘Humanity,’ Kor Phaeron pressed his palms together in prayer, ‘must have faith. Nothing unites mankind the way religion inspires unity. No conflict rages as fiercely as a holy war. No warrior kills with the conviction of a crusader. Nothing in life breeds bonds and ambitions greater than the ties and dreams forged by faith. Religion brings hope, unification, law and purpose. The foundations of civilisation itself. Faith is nothing less than the pillar of a sentient species, raising it above the beast, the automaton, and the alien.’

Erebus drew his gladius in a smooth motion, reversing the grip and offering the sword to Lorgar.

‘Sire, if you have truly abandoned your beliefs, then take this blade and end my life now. If you believe there is no truth in the old ways – if you believe mankind will prosper without faith, then carve the two hearts from my chest. I have no wish to live if every principle guiding our Legion lies broken at your feet.’

Lorgar took the blade in a trembling hand. Turning it this way and that, he stared at his candlelit reflection – a visage of gold in the silver steel.

‘Erebus,’ he said. ‘My wisest, noblest son. My faith is wounded, but my beliefs remain. Rise from your knees. All is well.’

The Chaplain obeyed, stoic as ever, resuming his position across from Lorgar.

‘Mankind needs faith,’ said the primarch. ‘But faith must be true, or it will lead to devastation – as our brothers in the Thirteenth Legion have so viciously proved. And... and as we learned ourselves in six years of unconscionable war before the Emperor came to Colchis. It is time we learned from our mistakes. It is time I learned from my mistakes.’

‘There is one other to whom you can turn,’ Kor Phaeron pressed on, supporting his primarch’s rising resolution, ‘a brother with whom you debated the nature of the universe. You have often spoken of those nights – discussing philosophy and faith in the Emperor’s own palace. You know of whom I speak.’

Erebus nodded at the first captain’s words. ‘He may hold the key to proof, sire. If the Old Faith has a core of fact at its heart, he may know where to begin the journey.’

‘Magnus,’ Lorgar said the name in contemplative softness. It made sense. His brother, whose psychic strength and fierce intelligence put all other minds to shame. They’d spoken often in the Hall of Leng – that cold, regal chamber on distant Terra – arguing with smiles and scrolls over the nature of the universe.

‘It will be done. I will meet with Magnus.’

Kor Phaeron smiled at last. Erebus bowed his head, as Lorgar continued.

‘And if our suspicions prove correct, we will undertake the Pilgrimage. We must know if our Colchisian forefathers spoke the truth when they founded their faith. But we must also move with caution. The Emperor’s hounds prowl around our pack, and as wise as my father is, he has shown his blindness to the underlying truths of the universe.’

Kor Phaeron now bowed as well, mirroring Erebus. ‘Lorgar. My son. This will be our atonement. We can enlighten humanity with this truth, and wash away the stains of the past. In truth... I have feared this moment for some time.’

Lorgar licked his cracked lips. They tasted of ash. ‘If that is so, why have you waited to share your worries? Hindsight is a powerful vindicator, my friend, but none of us saw this coming. Not you, not I.’

Kor Phaeron’s eyes fairly gleamed. The elder leaned forward, as if the scent of some triumphant hunt filled his senses.

‘I have something I must confess, great lord,’ he said. ‘A truth that must grace your ears now, for the time has come.’

Lorgar turned to his foster father with threatening slowness. ‘I do not like your tone,’ he said.

‘Sire, my primarch, I tell no lie when I say I have feared this day would come. I took the smallest, most humble measures against its arrival, and–’

The words died in his throat, trapped there by his master’s hand. Lorgar squeezed the older man’s thin, tiny neck, cutting off speech and air with the barest use of strength. Erebus tensed, his eyes moving between the two figures.

Lorgar pulled Kor Phaeron closer, breathing deeply as if to mock the elder’s strangled gasps.

‘No more revelations, Kor Phaeron. Have we not confessed to enough of our own flaws this night?’

He loosened his grip enough for Kor Phaeron to rasp out the words.

‘Davin, seventeen years ago,’ the elder whispered. ‘Corossa, twenty-nine years ago. Uvander, eight years ago...’

‘Compliant worlds,’ Lorgar hissed into his foster father’s face. ‘Worlds where you yourself remained behind to begin their education in the Imperial Truth.’

‘Compliant... with the Imperial Truth. But embers of... cultures... were allowed to... remain.’

‘What. Embers.’ Lorgar growled.

‘Beliefs... that matched... the Old Faith... of home... I could not let... potential... truths... die...’

‘Can I not control my own warriors?’ Lorgar took a shuddering breath, and something clicked quietly inside Kor Phaeron’s neck. ‘Am I my brother Curze, struggling to control a Legion of liars and deceivers?’

‘Lord, I... I...’ Kor Phaeron’s eyes were rolling back into his skull. His tongue was dark now, slapping against his thin lips.

‘Sire,’ Erebus began. ‘Sire, you’ll kill him.’

Lorgar stared at Erebus for several moments, and the Chaplain wasn’t sure his liege lord even recognised him.

‘Yes,’ Lorgar said at last. ‘Yes. I could.’ He opened his fingers, letting Kor Phaeron collapse to the chamber floor in a heap of robed limbs. ‘But I will not.’

‘My lord...’ the elder heaved in air through blue lips. ‘Much to be learned... from those cultures... They are all echoes of ancestral human faith... Like you... I am no butcher... I wished to save... the lore of the species...’

‘It is a time of many revelations,’ the primarch sighed. ‘And I am not blind to why you did this, Kor Phaeron. Would that I had showed the same forethought and mercy.’

It was Erebus who replied. ‘You have asked the question yourself, sire. What if there is truth in the cultures we destroy? Kor Phaeron saved a handful, but the Great Crusade has annihilated thousands. What if we are repeating the sin of Colchis over and over and over again?’

‘And why,’ Kor Phaeron managed a faint smile as he touched his discoloured throat, ‘do so many cultures share the same beliefs as our own home world? Surely that suggests an underlying truth...’

The Seventeenth Primarch nodded, the motion slow and sincere. Already, even before this latest confession, his mind was turning to the future, tuning in to the endless possibilities. This was his genetic gift in action: a thinker, a dreamer, where his brothers were warriors and slayers.

‘We have worshipped at the wrong altar for over a hundred years,’ said Kor Phaeron, his voice returning.

Lorgar sifted through the bowl of ash, clutching another handful and smearing it across his face.

‘Yes,’ he said, with strength returning to his voice. ‘We have. Erebus?’

‘At your command, sire.’

‘Take my words to the Chaplains, tell them all of what transpires in the days I remain sequestered here. They deserve to know their primarch’s heart. And when you return for further counsel tomorrow, please bring me parchment and a pen. I have much to write. It will take days. Weeks. But it must be written, and I will not leave my isolation until it is done. You, both of you, will help me compose this great work.’

‘What work, sire?’

Lorgar smiled, and never had he looked so much like his father.

‘The new Word.’

Six

Kale the Servitor
Unfocused
Warrior-Priest

The girl found it difficult to sleep, with no grasp of where day ended and night began. There was never a cessation of sound; the room forever rumbled, even if only faintly, with tremors from the distant engines. With darkness and sound both constant, she wiled away the hours sitting upon her bed, doing nothing, staring at nothing, hearing nothing except for the occasional voice pass her door.

Blindness brought a hundred perceptive difficulties, but foremost among them was boredom. Cyrene had been a prolific reader and her job necessitated a fair amount of travel, seeing all of the public sights in the city. With her eyes ruined, both those paths were barred in any meaningful sense.

In her darker moments, she wondered at destiny’s cruel sense of humour. To be chosen by the Astartes, to dwell among the angels of the Emperor... To walk the hallways of their great iron warship, smelling the sweat and machine oil... but seeing nothing at all.

Oh, yes. Hilarious.

Her first hours aboard had been the hardest, but at least they’d been eventful. During a physical examination in a painfully cold chamber, with needles sticking into the wasted muscles of her legs and arms, Cyrene had listened to one of the angels explain about bleached retinal pigment, and how malnutrition affected the organs and muscles. She’d tried to focus on the angel’s words, but her mind wandered as she sought to embrace what had happened, and where she now found herself.

The last two months on the surface had not been kind to her. The wandering groups of bandits in the foothills around the city had no regard for the sacred shuhl robe, or its traditions of respect.

‘Our world has ended,’ one of them had laughed. ‘The old ways no longer matter.’

Cyrene had never seen him, but when she slept, her mind conjured faces he might have worn. Cruel, mocking faces.

During her medical examination, she couldn’t stop shivering, no matter how she tensed her muscles to resist. The angels’ solar-sailing vessel was cold enough to make her teeth clatter together when she tried to shape words, and she wondered if her breath was misting as it left her lips.

‘Do you understand?’ the angel had asked.

‘Yes,’ she lied. ‘Yes, I understand.’ And then, ‘Thank you, angel.’

Soon, other humans came to assist her. They smelled of spicy incense and spoke in careful, serious voices.

They walked for some time. It could have been five minutes or thirty – without her eyes, everything felt stretched and slow. The corridors sounded busy. Occasionally she’d hear the machine-snarls of an angel’s armour joints as the warrior walked past. Much more frequently, she heard the swish of robes.

‘Who are you?’ she asked as they travelled.

‘Servants,’ one man replied.

‘We serve the Bearers of the Word,’ said the other.

On they walked. Time passed, the seconds marked by footsteps, the minutes by voices passing by.

‘This is your chamber,’ one of her guides said, and proceeded to walk her around a room, placing her shaking fingers on the bed, the walls, the door release controls. A patient tour of her new home. Her new cell.

‘Thank you,’ she said. The room was not large, and only scarcely furnished. She was far from comfortable, but Cyrene wasn’t worried about being left alone here. It would be a blessing of sorts.

‘Be well,’ the two men said in unison.

‘What are your names?’ she asked.

The reply she received was the hiss-thud of the automatic door sealing closed.

Cyrene sat on the bed – it was a hard, thin mattress not far removed from a prisoner’s cot – and commenced her long, sensory-deprived existence of doing absolutely nothing.

The only break in her daily monotonies came from a servitor, who was remarkably reluctant (or unable) to speak in any detail, bringing her three meals of gruel-like, chemical paste a day.

‘This is disgusting,’ she remarked once, summoning up a frail smile. ‘Am I to assume it consists of many nutrients and other beneficial things?’

‘Yes,’ was the dead-voiced reply.

‘Do you eat it yourself?’

‘Yes.’

‘I am sorry to hear that.’

Silence.

‘You don’t speak much.’

‘No.’

‘What is your name?’ Cyrene tried at last.

Silence.

‘Who were you?’ she asked. Cyrene was inured to servitors; the Imperium had left behind the secrets of their construction sixty years before, and they were commonplace in Monarchia. Penance was the term used for the fate suffered by heretics and criminals. Either way, it amounted to the same. The sinner’s mind was scrubbed of all vitality, and bionics were installed within the body to increase its strength or enhance its utility.

Silence met her question.

‘Before you were made into this,’ she tried to make her smile more friendly. ‘Who were you?’

‘No.’

‘No, you don’t recall, or no, you won’t tell me?’

‘No.’

Cyrene sighed. ‘Fine. Go, then. See you tomorrow.’

‘Yes,’ it replied. Feet shuffled. The door hissed closed again.

‘I shall name you Kale,’ she said to the empty room.

Xaphen had visited her twice since the first day, and Argel Tal had come three times. Each meeting with the captain had played out much the same as the one preceding it: with stilted conversation and awkward silences. From what Cyrene gathered, the Legion’s fleet was en route to a world they were supposed to conquer, but were denied the order to begin the assault.

‘Why?’ she’d asked, glad to have even this uncomfortable company.

‘Aurelian remains in seclusion,’ Argel Tal had said.

‘Aurelian?’

‘A name for our primarch, spoken by few outside the Legion. It is Colchisian, the language of our home world.’

‘It’s strange,’ Cyrene confessed, ‘to have a nickname for a god.’

Argel Tal fell silent for some time. ‘A primarch is not a god. Sometimes the sons of gods, despite the power they inherit, are demigods. And it is not a “nickname”. It is a term of kinship, used only among family. It translates loosely as “the gold”.

‘You said he remains secluded.’

‘Yes. Within his chambers on our flagship, Fidelitas Lex.’

‘Does he hide from you?’

She heard the Astartes swallow. ‘I am not entirely comfortable with this line of discussion, Cyrene. Let us just say that he has much to contemplate. The God-Emperor’s judgement is a burden upon many souls. The primarch suffers as we suffer.’

Cyrene thought long and hard before what she said next. ‘Argel Tal?’

‘Yes, Cyrene.’

‘You do not sound upset. You don’t sound as if you’re suffering.’

‘Do I not?’

‘No. You sound angry.’

‘I see.’

‘Are you angry at the Emperor for what he did to you?’

‘I have to go,’ said Argel Tal. ‘I am summoned.’ The Astartes rose to his feet.

‘I heard no summons,’ the young woman said. ‘I’m sorry if I offended you.’

Argel Tal walked from the room without another word. It would be four days before she had company again.

Argel Tal regarded the headless body with momentary consternation. He hadn’t meant to do that.

Decapitated, the servitor toppled to its side and lay on the floor of the iron cage, shivering in fitful spasm. The captain ignored its lifeless twitching, instead focusing on the slack-mouthed head that had flown between the iron cage’s bars and thudded against the wall of the practice chamber. It watched him now, its dead eyes trembling, its augmented maw open – tongueless, with a jawbone of bronze plating.

‘Was that necessary?’ Torgal asked. The sergeant was stripped to the waist, his muscled torso a geography of swollen, layered muscles, formed by the biological tectonics at work in his genetic code. The fused ribcage robbed him of much of his humanity, as did the lumpen physicality of his musculature. If there was anything that could be considered handsome in the laboratory-wrought physiques of the Astartes subspecies, it was lacking in Torgal. Scars decorated much of his dark flesh: ritual brandings, tattooed Colchisian scripture, and the slitted valleys from carving blades that found their marks over the years.

Argel Tal lowered the practice gladius. The smeared redness along its length reflected the overhead lighting in wet flashes.

‘I am unfocused,’ he said.

‘I noticed, sir. So did the training servitor.’

‘Two weeks now. Two weeks of sitting in orbit, doing nothing. Two weeks of Aurelian remaining in isolation. I was not made to deal with this, brother.’

Argel Tal hit the release pad, opening the training cage’s hemispheres and stepping from its boundaries. With a grunt, he cast his bloodied sword to the ground. It skidded, rasping along the floor and coming to a rest by the dead slave.

‘It was my turn next,’ Torgal muttered, looking down at the slain slave with its six bionic arms. Each one ended in a blade. None bore traces of blood.

Argel Tal wiped sweat from the back of his neck, and tossed the towel onto a nearby bench. He was only half-paying attention to the maintenance servitors dragging the slain slave away for incineration.

‘I spoke with Cyrene,’ he said, ‘several days ago.’

‘So I heard. I’ve been thinking of meeting with her myself. You don’t find her a calming influence?’

‘She sees too much,’ said Argel Tal.

‘How ironic.’

‘I’m serious,’ the captain said. ‘She asked if I was angry with the Emperor. How am I supposed to answer that?’

Torgal’s glance took in the rest of Seventh Company’s practice chamber. The battle-brothers training elsewhere knew well enough to give their leader a respectful space when his humours were unbalanced. Wooden staves clacked against each other; fist fighting spars played out to the sound of meaty thumps; powered force cages muted the sounds of clashing blades within. He turned back to the captain.

‘You could answer it with the truth.’

Argel Tal shook his head. ‘The truth feels foul on the tongue. I won’t speak it.’

‘Others will speak it, brother.’

‘Others? Like you?’

Torgal shrugged a bare shoulder. ‘I am not ashamed to be angry, Argel Tal. We were wronged, and we’ve been walking the wrong path.’

Argel Tal stretched, working out the stiffness in his shoulder muscles. He took a moment to compose his reply. Torgal was a loudmouth, and he knew whatever he said would be carried to the rest of the company, perhaps even across to the rest of the Serrated Sun.

‘There’s more to this than whether the Emperor wronged us or not. We are a Legion founded on faith, and we find ourselves faithless. Anger is natural, but it is no answer. I will wait for the primarch to return to us, and I will hear his wisdom before I decide my path.’

Torgal couldn’t help but smile. ‘Listen to yourself. Are you sure you don’t want to carry a crozius? I’m sure Erebus would consider training you again. I’ve heard him express his regret to Xaphen more than once.’

‘You are an insidious presence in my life, brother.’ The captain’s scowl darkened his otherwise handsome features. His eyes were the blue of Colchisian summer skies, and his face – unscarred like so many of his brethren – still showed echoes of the human he might have been.

‘That ship sailed a long time ago,’ the captain said. ‘I made my choice, and the First Chaplain made his.’

‘But–’

‘Enough, Torgal. Old wounds can still ache. Has there been word of the primarch’s return?’

Torgal regarded Argel Tal closely, as if seeking something hidden in his eyes. ‘Not that I’m aware of. Why do you ask?’

‘You know why. You’ve not heard anything from the Chaplain gatherings?’

Torgal shook his head. ‘They’re bound by oaths of secrecy that a few innocent questions won’t break. Have you spoken with Xaphen?’

‘Many times, and he reveals little. Erebus has the primarch’s ear, and delivers Aurelian’s words down to the warrior-priests at their conclaves. Xaphen promises we’ll be enlightened soon. The primarch’s seclusion will be a matter of weeks, not months.’

‘Do you believe that?’ Torgal asked.

Argel Tal laughed, the sound bitter and short. ‘Knowing what to believe is the greatest threat we face.’

Cyrene was asleep the next time she received a worthwhile visitor. The sound of her door sliding open roused her to a layer of rest slightly above unconsciousness.

‘Go away, Kale. I’m not hungry.’ She rolled over and covered her head with the ungenerous pillow. Evidently the monkish, scarce comforts of the Legion’s warriors extended to their servants, as well.

‘Kale?’ asked a deep, resonant voice.

Cyrene removed the pillow. Coppery saliva tingled under her tongue, and her heart beat a touch faster.

‘Hello?’ she called.

‘Who is Kale?’ the voice asked.

Cyrene sat up, her blind eyes flicking left and right in futile instinct. ‘Kale is the servitor that brings me my meals.’

‘You named your servitor?’

‘It was the name of a meat vendor in the Tophet Plaza. He was lynched for selling dog meat instead of lamb, and sentenced to penance for his deceit.’

‘I see. Appropriate, then.’

The stranger moved around the cell with the light whisper of robes. Cyrene could feel the change in the air – the newcomer was a hulking figure, imposing beyond her blindness.

‘Who are you?’ she asked.

‘I thought you would recognise my voice. It is Xaphen.’

‘Oh. Angels sound very similar to me. All of your voices are so low. Hello, Chaplain.’

‘Hello again, shuhl-asha.’

She kept the wince from her face. Even the respectful term for her trade shamed her, when spoken in an angel’s voice. ‘Where is Argel Tal?’

Xaphen growled, like a desert jackal at bay. It took a few seconds for Cyrene to realise it was a chuckle.

‘The captain is attending a gathering of Legion commanders.’

‘Why are you not with him?’

‘Because I am not a commander, and I had my own duties to attend to. A conclave of the Chaplain brotherhood, aboard the Inviolate Sanctity.’

‘Argel Tal told me of those.’

Xaphen’s smile infected his tone, rendering the words almost kindly. ‘Did he? And what did he tell you?’

‘That the primarch speaks to one named Erebus, and Erebus carries the lord’s words to the warrior-priests.’

‘True enough, shuhl-asha. I was told your vision is still not showing signs of return. The adepts are considering augmetic replacements.’

‘Replacing my eyes?’ She felt her skin crawl. ‘I... I wish to wait, to see if they heal.’

‘It is your choice. Augmetics of delicate organs are specialised and rare. If you wish to have them, there would be a wait of several weeks before they were ready for implantation.’

The angel’s clinical tone was curiously unnerving. He delivered his blunt, kindly sentences with all the care of a hammer to the head.

‘Why are they considering it?’ Cyrene asked.

‘Because Argel Tal asked it of them. The Apothecarion on board De Profundis has the resources necessary for human augmentation, when it comes to valued mortal crew.’

‘But I am of no value.’ She didn’t speak from self-pity, merely gave voice to her confusion. ‘I do not know how I could ever serve the Legion.’

‘No?’ Xaphen said nothing for a several moments. Perhaps he looked around the featureless chamber. His voice was gentler when it returned. ‘Forgive my laxity in visiting you, shuhl-asha. The last days have been difficult. Allow me to cast some light on your situation.’

‘Am I a slave?’

‘What? No.’

‘Am I a servant?’

The angel chuckled. ‘Let me finish.’

‘Forgive me, Chaplain.’

‘Several other Chapters encountered lost souls in Monarchia’s graveyard. You were not the only Khurian to join the Legion when we left, but you were the only one taken in by the Chapter of the Serrated Sun. You ask how you could serve us. I would argue that you already do. Argel Tal is my brother, and I know the paths his thoughts take. He brought you as a reminder, a symbol of the past. You are the living memorial of our Legion’s greatest failure.’

‘The perfect city was no den of sin.’ She tried to keep the offence from her voice. ‘Why do you always speak of it so?’

A pause. The slow release of a deep breath. ‘The city itself was not the sin. It was what the city represented. I have told you what the God-Emperor decreed that day. You have a keen mind, girl. Do not ask for answers you can shape yourself. Now, this desire to serve the Legion: tell me why it matters to you.’

She’d not really considered it before. It seemed the only course to walk, given her presence here. Yet there was a deeper reason, a desire that pulled at her in the uncountable hours she sat in silence.

‘I owe my life to the Legion,’ she said, ‘and I wish to serve because it feels right that I should. It would be fair.’

‘Is that all?’

She shook his head, with no idea if Xaphen was even looking at her. ‘No. I confess I am also lonely, and very bored.’

Xaphen chuckled again. ‘Then we will deal with that. Were you one of the faithful on Khur?’

Cyrene hesitated, and moistened dry lips with a nervous tongue. ‘I listened to the Speakers of the Word preaching in the plazas, and the daily prayers echoing across the city. Nothing stirred my heart. I believed, and I knew the scriptures, but I did not...’

‘Care.’

Cyrene nodded. Her throat gave a sticky click as she took a breath. ‘Yes,’ she admitted. She couldn’t help the twitch when Xaphen’s hand rested heavy on her shoulder.

‘I’m sorry,’ the young woman said, ‘for my lack of faith.’

‘Don’t be. You were right, Cyrene.’

‘I... what?’

‘You showed insight, and the strength to doubt conventional belief. Over countless centuries, humanity has achieved great things in the name of faith. History teaches us this. Faith is the fuel for the soul’s journey. Without belief in greater ideals, we are incomplete – the union of the spirit with the flesh is what raises us above beasts and inhumans. But misplaced worship? To bow down before an unworthy idol? This is a sin of the gravest ignorance. And that is a sin you’ve never been guilty of. Be proud of that, lady.’

Warmth flooded through her, to earn the respect of an angel like this. Fervour filled her voice for the first time since the death of her city.

‘How could anyone bow before an unworthy idol?’

Another pause. A hesitation, before sighing out the words. ‘Perhaps they were deceived. Perhaps they saw divinity and believed it was worthy of worship purely because it was divine.’

‘I don’t understand.’ Her eyebrows met in confusion above unseeing eyes. ‘There’s nothing else to worship but the divine. There are no gods but the Emperor.’

She heard Xaphen take a breath. When the Chaplain spoke again, his voice was softer still.

‘Are you so certain, Cyrene?’

Seven

Compliance
Swords of Red Iron
Carthage

The world had two names, only one of which mattered. The first was used by the native population – a name that would soon be lost in history’s pages. The second was the name imposed by its conquerors, which would hold for centuries, branding an Imperial identity upon a dead planet.

The globe span in the void with an orbit of slow grace comparable to distant Terra, and its blue-green surface marked it as a younger sibling of that most venerated world. Where Terra’s seas were burned dry from centuries of war and tectonic upheaval, the oceans of Forty-Seven Sixteen were rich with salt-surviving life, and deep beyond poetic imagining. Perhaps the future would bring a need for this world to be a bastion-metropolis akin to Terra, where the buried earth choked beneath palaces and castles and dense hive towers. For now, its landmasses wore the green and brown of unspoiled wilderness, the white and grey of mountain ranges. Cities of crystal and silver, spires that speared the sky from almost laughably fragile foundations, dotted the continents. Each city was linked by well-worn trade roads – freight veins with traffic for blood.

This was Forty-Seven Sixteen, the sixteenth world ready to be brought to compliance by the 47th Expedition.

Four weeks after the Word Bearers fleet sailed from the ruin of Khur, they translated in-system here, prowling around Forty-Seven Sixteen with the predatory promise of ancient seaborne raiders.

The grey warships remained in orbit for eight hours, engines dead, doing nothing at all.

At the ninth hour, cheers echoed throughout every vessel in the fleet. The primarch appeared on the command deck of Fidelitas Lex, flanked by Erebus and Kor Phaeron. Both Astartes wore their battle armour – the former in the grey of the Legion, the latter in his brutal warplate of the Terminator elite.

A live pict-feed carried the image to the bridge of every warship bearing Legion colours, as thousands upon thousands of warriors watched their primarch return.

Clad in sleek armour of granite grey, somehow all the more regal for the lack of ostentation, Lorgar’s crooked smile spoke of some hidden amusement he ached to share with his sons.

‘I hope you will all forgive my absence,’ the words melted into a chuckle. ‘And I trust you have enjoyed this time of contemplation and respite.’

Around him, Astartes warriors broke into laughter. Kor Phaeron lowered his hollow eyes, giving a bleak smirk. Even Erebus smiled.

‘My sons, the past is the past and we look now to the future.’ In Lorgar’s grey fist was his crozius mace. He carried it over his shoulder with casual ease. ‘Those of you assigned to other expedition fleets will be granted leave to return to them shortly, but first, we will renew our bonds of brotherhood as a united Legion.’

Another cheer rang out across the decks of over a hundred of ships.

‘This is Forty-Seven Sixteen,’ Lorgar’s contemplative smile remained, though melancholy robbed it of some conviction. ‘A world of such great beauty.’

With his free hand, he smoothed his fingertips around his short brown beard, little more than neat stubble along his jawline. ‘I do not believe the people of this world to be irrevocably corrupt, but as we have seen, my judgement has its critics.’

More laughter. Kor Phaeron and Erebus met each other’s eyes, their chuckles joining the Legion’s. This levity was nothing less than an exorcism – a shedding of humiliation’s clinging stink – and both warriors sensed it clearly.

‘You have all seen the briefing details,’ said the primarch. ‘The First Chaplain and First Captain inform me that the Chapter leaders gathered this morning to discuss objectives and landing zones, so I will not waste your precious time.’ His dry smile bore little humour now, yet still it remained. ‘The Emperor wishes the XVII Legion to conquer with greater alacrity. If a world cannot be brought to compliance with haste, then it must be purged to its core. So we come to this.’

In unison, Erebus drew his crozius and lightning rippled in a jagged flow down the claws of Kor Phaeron’s gauntlets.

‘My sons.’ Their master’s smile died fast enough for many to doubt it had ever been there. ‘Forgive me for the words duty forces me to speak.’

Lorgar raised his maul of black iron, aiming it at the planet slowly spinning on the occulus viewscreen. Storms formed in a crawling, meteorological ballet as the Legion stood witness – the fleet’s low orbit was curdling the planet’s skies.

‘Word Bearers,’ said the primarch. ‘Kill every man, woman and child on that heretic world.’

Cyrene waited until she realised Argel Tal wasn’t going to continue. Only then did she speak.

‘And did you?’ she asked. ‘Did you do it?’

‘You didn’t feel the ship quake as it opened fire?’ The captain moved around the room. Cyrene wondered if he were pacing, or simply looking at what few personal effects she possessed. ‘I find it difficult to believe you slumbered through twelve hours of orbital barrage.’

Cyrene hadn’t slept at all. When the sirens wailed and the room shook two days before, she’d known what was beginning. The Word Bearers’ warships commenced their invasion with a full day of cannon-fire. At times, when myriad mechanical processes aligned just right, the main batteries hurled their incendiary payloads at the planet below in a united burst. The thunder rang in her ears for half a minute afterwards, and they were the worst moments: blinded and deafened, completely without senses. Anyone could enter her room, and she’d be none the wiser. Cyrene had lain on her uncomfortable bed in thrall to her imagination, praying not to feel unknown fingers on her face.

‘That’s not what I meant,’ she said. ‘Did you go to the surface after the sky-fire had ended?’

‘Yes. We landed in view of the only city that remained standing. It had to be destroyed from the ground. Our orbital weapons couldn’t pierce its defensive shield.’

‘You... killed an entire world in one day?’

‘We are the Legio Astartes, Cyrene. We did our duty.’

‘How many died?’

Argel Tal had seen the augury estimates. They put the number at almost two hundred million souls sacrificed that day.

‘All of them,’ said the captain. ‘A world’s worth of human life.’

‘I don’t understand,’ she said, closing her useless eyes. ‘All those people. Why did they have to die?’

‘Some cultures cannot be re-educated, Cyrene. When a civilisation is founded upon poisoned principles, redemption is a forlorn hope. Better that they burn, than live in blasphemy.’

‘But why did they have to die? What sins had they committed?’

‘Because the Emperor willed it. Nothing else matters. These people spat upon our offers of peace, laughed at our desire to integrate them into the Imperium, and openly displayed the gravest sin of ignorance, forging populations of artificial constructs. The breeding of false life in imitation of the human form is an abomination unto our species, and cannot be ignored.’

‘But why?’ she said. The words were almost her mantra these days.

Argel Tal sighed. ‘Are you aware of the old proverb: “Judge a man by his questions, not by his answers”?’

‘I know it. We said something similar on Khur.’

‘It is used across the galaxy, in one form or another. That was the Terran expression. But there is a Colchisian equivalent: “Blessed is the mind too small for doubt”.’

‘But why?’ the young woman repeated.

Argel Tal bit back a second sigh. It was difficult – the girl was immensely naive and Argel Tal knew he was no teacher – but enlightenment had to come from somewhere. There was no honour in making a secret of the truth.

‘The answer is in the stars themselves, Cyrene. We are a young species, spread thin across thousands of worlds. The space between the stars holds many threats: xenos creatures of countless breeds, evolved for predation. Those that do not immediately fall upon humanity to feed or destroy tend to be dangerous for other reasons. These ancient civilisations are in decline, either because they were too weak to stabilise after their growth, or because their own hubristic, deviant technologies doomed them. There’s nothing to learn from these races. History will discard them soon enough. So do we leave human colonies for aliens to prey upon, or do we claim their precious worlds to feed strength to the newborn Imperium? Do we allow these people to linger in ignorance and risk harming themselves – or us – or do we crush them before they can become a heretical threat?’

‘But–’

‘No.’ Argel Tal’s voice was cold stone. ‘There is no “but” this time. “The Imperium is right, and that makes it mighty”, so say our iterators, so the Word is written, and so shall it be. We succeed where every other human culture has failed. We rise where alien breeds fall. We defeat every solar empire or lonely world that refuses benevolent unity. What more evidence is needed that we, and we alone, walk the right path?’

Cyrene fell silent, chewing her lower lip. ‘That... makes sense.’

‘Of course it does. It’s the truth.’

‘So they are all dead. A whole world. Will you tell me what their last city looked like?’

‘If you wish.’ Argel Tal regarded the young woman for a long moment. She had healed well in the last four weeks, now clad in the shapeless grey robe of a Legion servant. When he’d first seen her wearing the uniform of a serf, she’d asked him what colour her new clothing was.

‘Grey,’ he’d said.

‘Good,’ she smiled at his answer, but didn’t elaborate.

Argel Tal watched her now. She stared at him blindly, her youthful features unclouded by shyness or doubt. ‘Why are you curious about their city?’ he asked.

‘I remember Monarchia,’ she said ‘It is only right that someone remembers this city as well.’

‘I’m unlikely to forget it, Cyrene. Spires of glass, and warriors formed from moving crystal. It was not a long compliance, but neither was it an easy one.’

‘Was Xaphen with you? He’s very kind to me. I like him.’

‘Yes,’ said Argel Tal. ‘Xaphen was with me. He was the first of Seventh Company to see the enemy’s blasphemy, when the city’s force shield came down.’

‘Will you tell me what happened?’

‘Captain,’ Xaphen voxed. ‘You’re not going to believe what I’m seeing.’

Argel Tal advanced through the outlying ruins, flanked by Torgal Assault Squad. His grey-clad brothers moved through the streets, crunching on shards of fallen glass architecture. Idling chainswords rumbled in every warrior’s gauntlets. Each toothed blade bore bloodstains.

‘This is Argel Tal,’ the captain voxed back. ‘We’re to the west – no resistance worth noting. Status report.’

‘Artificials,’ Xaphen’s voice was flawed by vox-distortion, but his disgust came through clear enough. ‘They’re deploying artificials.’

Argel Tal turned to the east, where the city of veined black stone and glass was already beginning to crack and splinter. Fire ran unchecked along the roads winding towards the city’s heart – the clearest sign of the Legion’s advance.

‘Torgal Assault Squad inbound,’ he voxed. ‘Word Bearers, with me.’

The bulky thrusters on his back cycled into life, propelling him skyward with a throaty roar.

The altitude gauge on his retinal display pulsed as it updated, overlaying the blue-tinted view through his eye lenses. Low towers of twisting glass and spiralling streets sailed by below. Here was a culture that bred architects who danced to their own tunes. The captain wasn’t sure if it was artistic license or the work of some logical process he couldn’t fathom. Still, a city of toughened alien glass... Roads of black stone...

It was beautiful, in a way. Madness often possessed a certain loveliness.

‘I see you,’ he voxed to Xaphen. Beneath him, squads of Word Bearers moved through the ruins of a levelled city block, pockets of grey armour engaged against a silver abomination that crackled with unhealthy energies. His armour’s receptive systems picked up on his confusion, and zoomed in on the enemy warriors.

Argel Tal still wasn’t sure what he was looking at.

‘Down,’ he commanded Torgal Squad. Acknowledgement pulses answered over the vox. Argel Tal killed his thrust with an instinctive thought – a flashing Colchisian rune on his visor display changed from red to white. With a judder, the jump pack’s primary boosters cut out. Smoke trailed from the deactivated wide-mouth thrusters as secondary jets fired, slowing his plummeting descent to a speed just shy of terminal.

He came down hard, his armoured boots crunching the road beneath his weight, sending cracks cobwebbing through the black stone. In a wave of howling engine wash and road-cracking landings, the rest of his warriors came down in a loose pack around him.

‘Stars above,’ said Torgal, gesturing over the devastation with his purring chainsword. ‘I see what the Chaplain meant.’

Across the ruined vista of tumbledown glass walls, one of the enemy artificials came on three insectile legs: each with too many joints, and each ending in a blade that spiked the ground with every step. Its torso could almost have been humanoid, but for the fact it was made entirely from moving glass. Beneath its transparent skin, circuits formed veins, metal bars made bones.

‘That has to be ornamental,’ Torgal said over the vox, as the artificial glided closer on bladed limbs. ‘I mean... just look at it.’

‘You took your damn time,’ said Xaphen. ‘Get into cover before it fires again.’

Argel Tal made a break for a nearby glass wall, where a handful of Xaphen’s warriors were crouching. They weren’t hidden, but it was cover nevertheless. The rest of his assault squad spread out.

‘It fires?’ Argel Tal asked. ‘Are you certain it’s not an automated statue, and you’ve been engaging some of the local art in a heroic battle?’

‘It fires,’ Xaphen grunted. ‘And it won’t die. Watch this. Malnor Squad, engage.’

From a crater ahead, several Word Bearers rose in trained unity, each of them opening up with bolt pistols. Shells hammered into the glass creature’s body, knocking it off-balance but inflicting no visible damage. Electrical force sparked where each bolt round punched home, detonating the shells before they inflicted anything more than minor kinetic annoyance.

‘Cease fire and fall back,’ Xaphen ordered.

‘I’m growing tired of hearing that order, sir,’ Malnor’s voice crackled, but the bolter fire stopped.

The creature immediately righted itself, and veered towards where Malnor’s warriors crouched in cover. The circuitry serving as its innards flared with phosphorous anger, and eye-aching electricity speared from its open mouth to dance across the edge of the crater, melting the black stone wherever it touched.

‘It’s made of unbreakable glass,’ Torgal voxed, ‘and it vomits lightning. The primarch was right to order these people dead. They are more than heretics – they forge insanity into physical form.’

Argel Tal swore softly as he listened to vox-reports of Legion squads encountering these things all over the city. With the capital’s protective shield down, he’d expected this to be easy. The planetary leaders were supposed to dead, damn it. Why wasn’t resistance crumbling?

‘Torgal Squad, to higher ground.’

‘By your word, captain,’ chorused the loyal responses. Heat haze rippled the air around each warrior as their bulky jump thrusters cycled back to life. The air was rich with charcoalish engine-stink.

Argel Tal boosted up, straight as a spear, coming down on a balcony overlooking the ruined street. The warriors of Torgal Squad followed, finding their own perches on the edges of nearby rooftops. Grey gargoyles, watching the battle below.

‘How many have you destroyed so far?’ asked Argel Tal.

‘Three, but two were downed by a Vindicator from Firestorm.’ Xaphen referred to the Serrated Sun’s armour battalion.

‘Don’t tell me the tank was destroyed.’

Malnor answered this time. ‘Then I won’t tell you, captain. But it’s not here anymore.’

Argel Tal watched the artificial stalking closer, maintaining its inhuman balance on those multi-jointed legs despite the punishing terrain. His visor zoomed in deep, clearing after a moment’s distortion. Silver veins threaded through the construct’s torso, flickering with power. Its skin moved like liquid glass, yet bolter shells sparked aside, as harmless as rainfall.

‘You said you’ve killed three of these, but the tanks destroyed two.’

‘I killed the third with my crozius,’ Xaphen replied. ‘The constructs seem vulnerable to power weapons.’

‘Understood. Leave this one to us.’ Argel Tal refocused his visor. ‘Torgal Squad, at the ready. We’ll fight fire with fire.’

‘By your word,’ came the voice chorus again.

Argel Tal drew both swords – each a red-iron blade housing generators in the ivory crosspieces. His fingers slid to the triggers along the leather-wrapped grips, and twin hums droned as the blades came alive, coated in jagged licks of electrical force.

‘For the primarch!’ The shout echoed across the street, drawing the artificial’s attention. It looked up with a featureless face – where a man’s mouth would be, the glass visage glowed with rising heat.

Argel Tal took two running steps; the first sent tremors through the balcony, the second shattered the railing as he kicked off from it, leaping into the air. His thrusters roared, breathing smoke and fire as he fell from sky. The twin blades trailed blurs of lightning.

‘Aurelian!’ the warriors of Torgal Squad cried out, leaping from their eyries to slice through the air, following their captain down on whining engines. ‘Aurelian!’

Argel Tal led the dive, hurling himself to the side as burning electricity arced up from the artificial below. A second later he was on the creature, twisting around it to bring his boot crashing against its glass head. Chips of diamond sprayed away as its skull snapped back. Both power swords fell a heartbeat later, the blades hammering into the artificial’s face. More twinkling shards scattered like hailstones.

Sergeant Torgal landed on the automaton’s shoulders from behind, his chainsword skidding and scraping along the glass. His bolter barked once, a shell hammering uselessly aside before detonating in the air.

With grunts of effort leaving their helm-speakers like avian cries, the rest of Torgal’s squad descended and added their grinding blades to the assault. They attacked in waves, thrusting skyward while those beneath struck, then diving for another strike as their brothers boosted away. The artificial staggered, reeling under the host’s attack, unable to bring its defences to bear against a single threat.

Argel Tal dived a third time, rasping his sword blades against each other, causing their overlapping power fields to hiss and spit. This time, the blades bit, both carving into the glass throat, sending diamond shards clattering against Argel Tal’s faceplate.

The construct died instantly. Its silver veins turned black, and it toppled to the dust on dead legs.

With sedate grace, the five warriors of Torgal Assault Squad drifted to the ground around their captain. Chainblades growled softer as trigger fingers relaxed. Jump thrusters exhaled as they cooled.

Xaphen and Malnor led their warriors from the ruins, bolters held across chestplates.

‘Nicely done,’ said the Chaplain. ‘Move ahead if you wish, brother. We will purge the road to the city’s heart. Don’t wait on our account.’

Argel Tal nodded, still not used to Xaphen’s repainted armour. The Chaplain’s warplate was black – darkened in remembrance of the ashes coating every warrior’s armour in Monarchia. Argel Tal had said nothing when he’d first witnessed this new tradition, but it still rankled. Some shames were better left forgotten.

A spurt of detuned vox preceded another broken voice. ‘Captain, this is Dagotal.’

Argel Tal looked to the spires making up the city’s core. Something there – some hidden machinery – was playing havoc with the communication channels.

‘I’m here, Dagotal.’

‘Requesting permission to summon Carthage.’

Xaphen and Malnor exchanged glances, their faceplates concealing their expressions. Torgal gunned his chainsword, the teeth chewing air for a few seconds.

‘Specifics, Dagotal,’ said Argel Tal.

‘It’s the artificials, sir. They have a king.’

Dagotal Squad kept moving through the streets, never going to ground, always watching. As Seventh Company’s outriders, penetrating a hostile city far ahead of the captain’s main force was nothing new.

This enemy, however, brought some foul surprises with them. The army of artificials stalking through the doomed city were putting up ferocious resistance – and that was before the Word Bearers advance forces began to encounter the Obsidians.

Dagotal was one of the first to spot one. He’d leaned forward in his saddle, forcing his visor to zoom and track the black construct making its ponderous way along the street ahead.

‘Blood of the Urizen,’ he swore. The thing was two storeys tall – an artificial on six legs, its torso cut not from clear glass, but opaque black.

He’d voxed the captain immediately, while his squad opened fire. The bolters mounted on each bike chattered and crashed. The black glass construct didn’t deign to notice. Despite the artificial’s apparent weight, its bladed limbs didn’t impale down into the road.

‘Fall back,’ Dagotal ordered his brothers. And they had – at speed.

The grey bikes snarled as they banked around a winding corner, tyres struggling to grip the smooth black stone of the road. Korus swerved in the lead, his braking wheels screeching as they sheared over the road’s surface.

‘Careful,’ Dagotal warned.

‘Easy for you to say, sergeant,’ Korus snapped.

Dagotal weaved between his brothers’ bikes, effortlessly outpacing them. His jetbike hovered two metres above the road, bucking forward with engine wails and bursts of acceleration at the merest pressure from his hands on the throttle. The jetbike ran cleaner than its grounded cousins, its power generator venting much less exhaust than the wheeled bikes in Dagotal’s squad.

The Word Bearer leaned to his right, sliding around another of the glass city’s insane spiralling corners. He slowed – if only a little – allowing his brothers to keep pace. From between two spires ahead, another immense artificial came forward on six legs, lightning ringing its faceless black skull in a radiant halo.

‘Another artificial,’ Dagotal voxed. He used the name already being cried out by Word Bearer squad leaders over the vox. ‘It’s another one of the Obsidians.’

‘We’re being boxed in,’ said Korus, drawing alongside. ‘Do we engage?’

‘For what? To waste shells?’ Dagotal accelerated, feeling the drag in his arms as the jetbike’s thrumming engine wailed louder. ‘Follow me.’

He veered left, taking another corner into a secondary street.

‘We can’t keep running,’ Korus growled. ‘Our fuel’s going to give out if we keep this up.’

Dagotal heard the whine of thirsty engines as his men took the corner behind him. Korus was right – their bikes’ growls were getting dry, and the squad had been playing a game of cat and mouse through these streets for hours now, scouting ahead of the Serrated Sun’s main forces.

‘We’re not running,’ he replied.

A shadow darkened the street, eclipsing the sun and filling the air with the grind of powerful engines. The sleek craft hovering overhead bore the bionic skull symbol of the Martian priesthood on its wings.

Dagotal smiled behind his faceplate. ‘We’re looking for somewhere Carthage can land.’

From beneath a red hood, three green eye lenses peered out at the burning city. This triad of visual receptors continually turned and refocused, each lens tuning to degrees of acuity that went far beyond the capacity of human sight.

‘Processing,’ the owner of the three eyes said. And then, after a pause of several seconds, during which the lenses continued to tune and retune, he added ‘Acknowledged’ in the same tone.

Dagotal’s outriders were using this chance to refuel, each Astartes filling their bike’s tanks with canisters of promethium taken from the Mechanicum lander’s hold.

Dagotal remained on his jetbike, the humming gravity suspensors pulsing quieter now they weren’t suffering strain.

‘Two Obsidians,’ he said to the three-eyed man, ‘coming this way.’ The vox was on fire with squads falling back, summoning help from the Carthage Cohort, requesting armour battalions... ‘The artificials are brutal, Xi-Nu.’

‘I am cognizant of the details, Sergeant Dagotal.’

Xi-Nu 73 was a stick-thin being, human only in the loosest sense. His red robe flapped in the heated wind, revealing an augmented body of lustreless iron bound together by industrial cabling. His arms, which he now raised in order to lower his hood, were a skeleton’s limbs constructed from contoured armour plating, ending in bronze hands with too many fingers. His face, such as it was, appeared from the lowered hood as a mess of thin wires and a noisy respiration mask, with no other discernible features beyond the green eye lenses that formed a triangle’s cardinal points.

Xi-Nu 73 had been human once – almost a century ago in the short, fragile two decades after his birth. Like all of the Mechanicum of Mars, he’d had to endure those early years living in a shell of warm meat and wet blood, until he gained the skill to purify himself.

He’d improved himself a great deal since then.

The tech-priest stood by the Mechanicum lander’s cargo ramp, overseeing the ungainly march of several towering figures. Each one was clad in dense armour plating painted in chipped coats of crimson. They stood almost five metres tall, their mechanical joints not even attempting to mimic human motion. The first two down the clanging ramp were gangly Crusaders, their long bladed arms swinging as their shoulders rocked side to side in awkward motion. Circuitry, thick and crude, was etched along the arm-swords’ edges, linking the blades to power generators in the robots’ bodies.

–Sanguine– said the first, vocalising in tinny machine tones, –standing ready–.

–Alizarin– the second intoned, –standing ready–.

The third figure to stomp down the ramp was twice the width of the first two, bulky where the Crusaders were gangly, great fists of riveted metal fused to form siege hammers. Even more than its kin, it reeked of greased machine parts and the earthy scent of lubricating oils. The Cataphract-class machine was hunched, made dense by sloping armour, and moved with even less claim to grace than the others.

–Vermillion– it droned as it clanked in line with the Crusaders, –standing ready–.

Xi-Nu 73 turned his eye lenses to regard the last machine emerging from the lander’s hold. This one seemed a compromise between its construct-kin, almost human in its posture and gait, armoured with thick plating and bearing weapons for arms. A third cannon rose from its shoulder, with ammunition belts trailing down its back, dreadlocks of bronze shells rattling with each step. Dagotal knew each of Xi-Nu’s wards, familiar with them from twelve years of sharing battlefields. This last was a Conqueror, and the primus unit of the group. It wore a Legion banner over its shoulder, and its armour plating was etched with Colchisian runes.

Several of the Word Bearers saluted this last robotic warrior. It didn’t acknowledge them.

–Incarnadine– the Conqueror declared in a voice devoid of personality, –standing ready–.

Xi-Nu 73 turned to the gathered Word Bearers, his eyes refocusing yet again. ‘Greetings, sergeant. Ninth Maniple of the Carthage Cohort, awaiting orders.’

Argel Tal hit the ground running, the boosters on his back cycling down as he ran. Both blades were sheathed; in his fists, a richly-inscribed bolter bucked with each fired shell. He took refuge with several of his warriors in the lowest level of a glass tower, shooting out of the stained glass windows. Whatever patterns the coloured glass once held were gone, smashed through by Word Bearers needing clear lines of fire.

The Obsidian in the street outside dwarfed them all, liberally blasting the road with streams of electrical force from its featureless face. Argel Tal reloaded, and as he slammed a fresh magazine home, he had a momentary glance of a glass shard by his boot – a fragment of the stained glass window showing a figure in golden armour.

Dagotal Squad was running interference, weaving between the artificial’s insect-legs, veering and jinking to avoid its lethal arcs of fire. Bolter shells hammered into its joints from where Torgal’s men took what cover they could find, but their efforts were little more than an irritant.

‘Xi-Nu 73,’ Argel Tal voxed. ‘We’re in position. Make this fast.’

‘Acknowledged, Seventh Captain.’

They came from behind the construct, emerging from a subsidiary road. Sanguine and Alizarin stalked forward first with all the grace of stumbling beggars, their movements a stark contrast to the liquid grace of the enemy machine. Lascannon fire streamed from the shoulder mounts of both Crusaders, carving searing scars into the Obsidian’s skin, the sludge-gleam of melted glass bright against the black. Their arm-blades came up on clanking, motorised hinge joints, slicing down to chop at the construct’s legs.

Recognising this new threat, the Obsidian span to face the Mechanicum war machines. It turned into a barrage of gunfire, shoulder-mounted heavy bolters punching shards from the construct’s face and torso with a torrent of explosive shells. Incarnadine, regal in form compared to its brothers, tracked every movement made by the enemy machine. It didn’t cease fire, even for a second. Nor did a single shot go wide.

The Obsidian’s storm-stream wasted itself, blasting up at the sky as the Mechanicum robotics knocked it off-balance.

The Cataphract-class Vermillion, as bulky as an Astartes Dreadnought, was an altogether more ponderous engine. Stocky and lumbering, it closed the distance as the Obsidian sought to right itself on its four remaining legs. Siege hammers swung in, meeting alien glass with a thunderclap’s refrain. Four legs became three – the glass machine crashed to the knees it had left.

‘Finish it,’ said Argel Tal. His jump pack burned again, groaning as the engines drew breath.

‘By your word,’ came the vox-replies.

The swords came free in smooth pulls, and Argel Tal let a short burst of thrust carry him skyward. Even prone, the Obsidian offered no purchase. As the Word Bearers came down in its back, most elected to hover, burning their jump jets rather than standing upon the thing’s body. Swords clashed and carved, but only Argel Tal’s empowered blades inflicted significant damage, sending shards of dark glass flying with each hack.

Even as it died, the Obsidian dragged itself across the street, a grasping hand reaching for the closest true threat. Incarnadine stepped back, autocannons laying into the outstretched hand, shearing fingers from the fist. Behind the Imperial war machine, Xi-Nu watched with unwavering attention, occasionally adjusting dials on his chestplate for reasons none of the Word Bearers had ever discerned, despite a decade of fighting by his side.

When the Obsidian lay still at last, Argel Tal and Dagotal came over to the tech-priest. The downed enemy construct had a shapeless resemblance to a melting ice statue, its body ruined by a thousand bullet impacts, blade cuts and lascannon beams. Both Word Bearers crunched closer on the glass shards lining the road.

‘Greetings, captain,’ said Xi-Nu 73. ‘Ninth Maniple of the Carthage Cohort, awaiting orders.’

Cyrene paused Argel Tal’s retelling with a hand on his forearm.

‘You used artificials yourself?’

He’d been expecting this. ‘The Legio Cybernetica is a treasured facet of the Mechanicum. The Great Crusade leans heaviest on the Legio Titanicus for their war engines, but Cybernetica plays its role among the noblest Astartes Legions. Their artificials are robotic shells housing machine-spirits. Cybernetica tech-priests engineer organic-synthetic minds from biological components.’

Cyrene reached for the glass of water on her bedside table. Her fingers slid across the metal surface, bumping the glass gently before she got a grip. When she drank, it was in little swallows, and she seemed in no rush to speak again.

‘You don’t see the difference,’ Argel Tal said, not quite asking.

She lowered the glass, facing him without seeing him. ‘Is there a difference?’

‘Do not ask that question to Xi-Nu 73, should your paths ever cross. He’d be insulted enough to kill you, and I would be vexed enough to kill him in return. Suffice to say, the difference is in the mind. Organic intelligence, even synthetic in nature, is still tied to the perfection of humanity. Artificial intelligence is not. That’s a lesson many cultures only learn when their machine slaves rise up against them, as the Obsidians would have done one day, to the people of Forty-Seven Sixteen.’

‘You always say we are perfect. Humans, I mean.’

‘So it is written in the Word.’

‘But the Word changes over time. Xaphen tells me it’s changing even now. Are humans really perfect?’

‘We‘re conquering the galaxy, aren’t we? The evidence of our purity and manifest destiny is clear.’

‘Other races conquered it all before we did.’ She took another sip of the room-temperature water. ‘Perhaps others will conquer it after we do something wrong.’ Then she smiled, brushing a lock of hair back from her face. ‘You are so certain in everything you do. I envy you for that.’

‘Were you not sure of your own life’s path back in Monarchia?’

She tilted her head, and he read a faint tension in her body language – the slight curl of her bare toes, the fingers gently clutching her grey robe. ‘I don’t wish to speak of that,’ she said. ‘I just find it curious that you have no regrets. No doubts.’

The Astartes wasn’t sure how to answer. ‘It’s not confidence. It’s... duty. I live by the Word. What is written must come to be, else all will come to nothing.’

‘That sounds like a great sacrifice to me. Fate shaped you into a weapon.’ Cyrene’s smile was tinged with an expression somewhere between amusement and melancholy. ‘The Speakers would say such things in their dawn prayers across the perfect city. “Walk the one true way, for all other paths lead to destruction”.’

‘That‘s from the Word,’ said Argel Tal. ‘Part of the primarch’s wisdom we left to guide your people.’

She waved a hand, batting aside his devotion to every detail. ‘I know, I know. Will you tell me the rest of the story? I want to know more of the city. Did the primarch fight with you?’

The captain took a breath. The girl’s mind moved with fleeting touches between subjects.

‘No. But we saw him at dawn. Before we reached his side, we crossed paths with Aquillon.’

‘Tell me what happened,’ said Cyrene. She lay down on her bed, making a pillow of her joined hands. For what use they were, her eyes remained open. ‘I’m not sleeping. Please, go on. Who is Aquillon?’

‘His title is Occuli Imperator,’ Argel Tal replied. ‘The Emperor’s Eyes. We encountered him as the sun set, while most of the city burned.’

Eight

Like Home
Gold, not Grey
At the Heart of a Fallen City

As dusk fell over the city’s remains, Argel Tal stood in battered armour, watching the amber disc sink beneath the horizon. It was a beautiful sunset, putting him in mind of Colchis, of home, of the world he’d not seen in almost seven decades. To his recollection, which bordered on eidetic, Argel Tal had seen the sun set on twenty-nine worlds. This was the thirtieth, and as lovely as the first.

The sky darkened in shades of blue and violet, heralding the coming night.

‘Chaplain,’ he said, ‘to me.’

Xaphen left the regrouping Word Bearers, walking to the captain at the end of the street.

‘Brother,’ Xaphen greeted him. Without his helm, the Chaplain watched the setting sun with naked eyes. ‘What do you need?’

Argel Tal nodded to the fading heavens. ‘Reminds me of home.’

He heard the faint growl of armour joints as Xaphen moved. A shrug, perhaps.

‘Where is Torgal and the Assault Squad?’

‘Scouting along the spire-tops,’ the captain said. ‘I will be glad when this world is at compliance, Xaphen. Despite the need to see battle, this is a hollow war.’

‘As you say, brother. What do you need?’ the Chaplain repeated.

Argel Tal refused eye contact.

‘Answers,’ he said, ‘before we return to orbit. The primarch remains away from us for a month, and the Legion’s warrior-priests gather in silence. What happens at the gatherings of those who wear the Black?’

Xaphen snorted, already turning away. ‘Now is hardly the time. We’ve a world to bring to compliance.’

‘Do not walk away from me, Chaplain.’

Their gazes met – the captain’s slanted eye lenses locked to the Chaplain’s narrowed eyes. ‘What is it?’ asked Xaphen. ‘What has you so unfocused?’ His tone mellowed, conciliatory despite its sternness. Argel Tal knew the voice well. It was how Xaphen spoke when warriors brought their doubts to him. Without knowing why, Argel Tal found it tainting his temper.

The captain aimed his sword down the street, where two squads were tending to their wounded. Much of the roadway was taken up by the corpse of another Obsidian, and Dagotal’s bikes undergoing battlefield repair by Xi-Nu 73.

‘We are all blind,’ said the captain, ‘except you. We are fighting as ordered, exterminating a heretic culture. And Aurelian was right – it is a purge of the past, and good for the blood. The Legion needed to stand in victory after gathering to commemorate failure. But after a month of silence since the perfect city’s grave, we are still blind.’

‘What would you have me say?’ Xaphen approached again, his gauntlet lifted as calculating indecision played across his features. He withdrew the hand, sensing if he rested it on Argel Tal’s shoulder, it would aggravate the captain, not remind him of kinship.

‘I would have you answer the question and enlighten your brothers, as your duty demands.’

Xaphen exhaled, and his patience left with his breath. ‘The gatherings of those in Black are inviolate and sacrosanct. None of us may speak of what transpires. You know this, yet still you ask? What of tradition, brother?’

Argel Tal lowered the sword. ‘What tradition?’ he laughed. ‘What of a Legion kneeling in the dust, and our primarch offering us nothing but silence for a month? The rest of us need answers, Xaphen. I need answers.’

‘By your word, captain. But all I may say are words I’ve spoken before. We look to the Word, and seek a new path. The Legion is lost, and we seek the answers to guide it again. Do you begrudge us that? Should we linger, lost in the void, cast from the Emperor’s light?’

Argel Tal felt acidic saliva stinging under his tongue. ‘Meanwhile, the Legion waits and wages war, equally blind in both states. Do the Chaplains have the answers they sought?’

‘Yes, brother. We believe so.’

‘And when did you plan to share these truths with us?’

Xaphen drew his crozius, clutching it in both hands as he turned back to the gathered squads. ‘Why do you think we came here? Purely to end these miserable blasphemers? To wipe this pathetic empire of one lonely world from the face of history?’

‘If you find my insight lacking,’ the captain spoke through clenched teeth, ‘then enlighten me.’

‘Peace, my brother. Lorgar knows the value of symbolism, and the purity of purpose. We followed a false path that ended in a city of ashes. In another city of ashes, we will take the first steps on the true path. He will show us the way, and we will perform the Rite of Remembrance as it should be performed, with honour and sincerity. Not collared by the Emperor and abused like disloyal hounds.’

This was, and wasn’t, a surprise to Argel Tal. It didn’t take a prophet to predict the primarch would speak after this compliance, but to have it framed as some first step on a new odyssey was both captivating and unnerving.

‘I lament that the Chaplain brotherhood kept this from us, but I thank you for speaking at last.’

‘There was little to tell before the primarch’s return today. It‘s no secret, in truth.’ Warmth returned to Xaphen’s craggy face as he smiled. ‘I expect word is filtering through the Legion even now. Aurelian will meet us in the heart of the city, once we’ve extinguished the last of this world’s unholy life. And this time, when the Legion kneels in the dust of a dead city, it will be because that city died in righteous flame.’

The vox chose that moment to crackle back to life.

‘Sir? Sir?’

‘This is Argel Tal. Speak, Torgal.’

‘Captain, I apologise for another unpleasant surprise, but you won’t believe what I’m looking at.’

Argel Tal swore under his breath, the clipped Colchisian syllables not carrying over the vox. He was growing tired of hearing those words on this world.

The five warriors killed in silence, their glaives spinning with the force and speed of turbine rotors, lashing through limbs and torsos with the ease of knives through mist. At last, with the Legion breaching deep into the city, Imperial forces encountered human resistance. The army of constructs seemed defeated, reduced to scattered pockets. It fell to the militia and the civilian population to die fighting, taking to the streets armed with weapons that would prove useless, seeking to squander their lives rather than surrender them.

Small-arms fire clattered from the warriors’ gold-wrought armour as they battled through the crowded street. The militia squads against them carried rifles that spat a solid shot not far removed from the smallest-calibre bolter shells. The culture’s ancestral connection to humanity’s pre-Imperial era was proven beyond dispute – and yet they were damned by their deviance.

Despite their worthless weaponry, they stood their ground in cover or arrayed in firing lines until they were overwhelmed. Their planet was finished and their final city was aflame. With nowhere to run, most simply didn’t try. They died in their uniforms, which were the same grey as the city’s architecture. Faceplates of clear glass shattered under stabbing blades as the spear-bearing warriors scythed into another phalanx of human militia.

The Custodes leader was obvious as he led the advance, his conic helm crested with a plume of red horsehair. In his hands, an immense two-handed sword span in blurring arcs, rising and falling, stabbing and carving. People tumbled away from him, some of them screaming, all of them falling to pieces in his wake. He killed and killed and killed, never missing a lethal strike, never slowing in his advance. Beneath his feet, the road ran red – the beginnings of a sick river, sourced by blood.

‘Aquillon,’ said Argel Tal from his vantage point above the carnage. He shook his head as he spoke the name. Unfeigned awe softened his voice. ‘I’ve never seen a Custodian fight.’

Several Word Bearers crouched at the lip of a roof overlooking the street. Argel Tal, Torgal, and the sergeant’s assault squad. The golden warriors moved ahead with consummate grace, the dance of their blades eclipsing anything a mortal could perform.

‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ Torgal said. ‘Should we join them?’

From below, a shout rose above the butchery. For the Emperor – a battlecry that hadn’t left a Word Bearer’s lips since Monarchia. Strange, how it sounded almost alien to Argel Tal’s ears.

‘No,’ the captain replied. ‘Not yet.’

Torgal watched for several more moments, one finger idly stroking his chainword’s trigger. ‘There’s something about the way they fight,’ he said. ‘Some flaw that I can’t make out.’

Argel Tal watched Aquillon, the Custodian’s blade reaving its way through countless lives, and saw nothing of the kind. He said so.

Torgal shook his head, still watching. ‘I can’t form the thought. They lack... something. They’re fighting... wrong.’

And this time, as soon as Argel Tal returned his gaze to the battle in the street, he saw it instantly. The way the Custodes fought seemed almost identical to the Astartes; it took a trained eye to see the subtle differences. The captain had missed it first by focusing on a single warrior. The moment he took in the full view...

‘There,’ said Argel Tal. ‘I see it, too.’

Was it a flaw? Perhaps by the standards of the Astartes, who waged war and lived life with brotherhood etched into their genetic codes. But Custodes were the sons of a more rarefied and time-consuming process – the biological manipulation that gave birth to the Emperor’s guardians bred warriors who weren’t shackled by bonds of loyalty to anyone except their Imperial overlord.

‘They’re not brothers,’ Argel Tal said. ‘Watch how they move. See how each one fights his own war, alone, unsupported by the others. They’re not like us. These are warriors, not soldiers.’

The thought made his skin crawl. It must have had the same effect on Torgal, for he voiced the words on his captain’s mind.

‘Lions,’ the sergeant said. ‘They’re lions, not wolves, hunting alone instead of as a pack. Gold,’ he added, and tapped the chestplate of his armour, ‘not grey.’

‘Good eyes, brother.’ Argel Tal still stared intently. Now he was aware of the disunity, it was all he could focus on. Here was a weakness, a savage one, masked only by the heroic skills of each warrior and the worthlessness of the enemies they faced.

A ripple of unease shivered through him as he bore witness. Those ancient words of the Emperor came to him, that first creed of the Legiones Astartes: And they shall know no fear.

Argel Tal was one of those who took the creed in its most literal sense, believing the sensitivity to feel fear was rewritten out of him at the genetic level. But even so, watching these brotherless cousins fight chilled him to his core. They lacked so much, despite their individual perfection.

‘In standing free of brotherhood,’ he said, ‘they also sacrifice its strengths. The tactics of a pack. The trust in those who fight by your side. I suspect the secrets woven into their body and blood gene-bind them to a higher loyalty – perhaps their only brother is the Emperor himself.’

Torgal was as perceptive as ever. ‘You no longer admire them,’ he said. ‘I hear it in your voice.’

Argel Tal smiled, choosing to let his silence answer for him.

Beneath them, the Custodians fought on. ‘That looks like trouble,’ one of the assault squad gestured down the road. They watched as a glass construct stalked into the avenue from a side street, and began to make its way down the thoroughfare towards the golden warriors.

Now Argel Tal rose to his feet. ‘Come, brothers. Let’s see how the wolves hunt with the lions.’

‘By your word,’ they chorused in perfect unity, and ten sets of thrusters howled as one.

Aquillon’s greeting was cautious. He made the sign of the aquila across his breastplate, where the Emperor’s two-headed eagle symbol was already in ornate evidence.

‘Hail, captain.’

Argel Tal returned the salute, crashing a fist against his chestpiece over his heart – the sign of Imperial allegiance in the Terran Unification Wars.

‘Custodian. A pleasure to be of service,’ Argel Tal gestured one of his blades at the ruined construct. It lay dead in the road, cut and battered, surrounded by slain militia.

‘A curious greeting, captain, to use a salute that fell out of favour before the Great Crusade even began.’

The Word Bearers formed up behind and around Argel Tal, just as the Custodians came to Aquillon’s side. It wasn’t quite a standoff, but none of the warriors were blind to the spectre of tension between them.

Argel Tal didn’t rise to the bait. ‘You seemed to need the help. I’m just glad we were here to assist you.’

Aquillon chuckled and walked away, saying nothing more. The Custodes formed up in imprecise formation and marched ahead. Evidently, their leader wasn’t rising to any bait, either.

‘Sir?’ asked Torgal. ‘Should we go with them?’

Argel Tal was smiling despite himself.

‘Yes. For what little there is left to do, we’ll fight with them.’

By dawn, the glass city’s death-throes were over.

The place chosen for the Legion’s gathering was expansive out of necessity, but still deep within the urban sprawl. Crystal towers, purged of life by the Terminator elite, stood unburned around an immense park. The earth was soon churned to mud under the grinding treads of tanks and the boots of a hundred thousand Astartes. The park itself reached for kilometres in all directions. In better times, it had served as a place of peace and celebration for the people of the city; now it was being used to celebrate their annihilation, and Argel Tal found a quiet pleasure in that little slice of irony.

Seventh Company trickled in – not first, but far from last – and took their appointed places. Xi-Nu 73 and his four robotic warriors knew their place, and made no attempt to approach the assembling rows of Word Bearers. The captain and his squad leaders bid the tech-adept farewell at the edges of the Legion’s formation, and the last sight Argel Tal had of the Mechanicum priest was with Incarnadine, the Conqueror Primus. The robot stood slightly hunched at its master’s side, still towering above the augmetic human, its unliving eye lenses tracking left and right with a camera’s patience. Xi-Nu 73 absently stroked its armour plating, as if it were a pet to have its fur patted.

While they stood separate from the Astartes, they were far from alone. Carthage Cohort was comprised of dozens of maniples, of which Xi-Nu’s four wards were just one. It looked as though many advancing squads had summoned aid from the Legio Cybernetica forces allied to the XVII Legion, for over a hundred robots stood proud in their black and scarlet livery.

A few rare units had oath parchments and scrolls of scripture bound to their armour plating, marking them as particularly accomplished in battle. These robots, from a variety of classes and designs, were enrolled in the Fidelitas Lex’s archives as honorary members of the Word Bearers Legion.

Incarnadine was one of them. The robot bore the serrated sun icon, plated in gold upon its forehead.

Aquillon and the Custodians broke away as Argel Tal and his brothers began to form ranks.

‘Be well, captain,’ said the leader, and offered another salute.

Argel Tal acknowledged the warrior with a nod. ‘And you, Occuli Imperator.’

With that, the Custodes made their way through the gathered Legion to stand apart in a small cluster. Hundreds of grey helms followed the warriors’ movements, watching, judging, hating.

Argel Tal and Xaphen moved to the front ranks alongside Chapter Master Deumos and the other commanders of the Serrated Sun. Considering their victory here, the greetings were oddly subdued. It took a moment for Argel Tal to realise why.

‘How long were you with them?’ Deumos asked, just short of a demand.

Argel Tal glanced at the chron display counting up on the edge of his visor display. ‘Eight hours, forty-one minutes.’

Deumos was bareheaded, and his time-cracked face was set in an expectant glower.

‘Well?’

‘Well, what?’ asked Argel Tal. ‘Have I erred?’

‘Of course not. You have nothing to report?’

‘I do, sir.’ Argel Tal faced forward. ‘But it can wait.’

‘Look at them, brother.’ Deumos was too careful to gesture, but his meaning was clear nevertheless. ‘See how they stand away from us, yet still expect to hear the primarch’s words.’

The Custodes stood spear-straight in two lines of ten, horsehair crests blowing in the wind. Halberds held at attention, just as they would be in the Emperor’s presence. Products of a refined process, where the Astartes were mass-produced – it was easy to imagine these gilded knights hailed as humanity’s finest, beneath only the primarchs themselves in grandeur. It was the natural instinct of the untrained and inexperienced to presume such a thing. For those who perceived their flaws, matters were less cut and dried.

Argel Tal still hadn’t decided how he felt about them. They were stunning in battle, yet deeply flawed. Aquillon was appointed to watch over the Legion and report its actions to the Emperor, yet he had – irritatingly enough – been likable during the hours they’d battled together, and a demonstrably focused warrior.

The Word Bearers stood beneath the scripture-laden banner of Seventh Company and the icon of the serrated sun, as they waited for their brothers to take position.

‘Carthage stands apart from us, yet they will hear the primarch,’ said Argel Tal.

‘That’s different,’ Deumos growled. ‘The Carthage Primacy was signed and oathed over a century ago. Almost a dozen of their war machines have been inducted as honorary Legionnaires since then. Aurelian will order them to leave, mark my words, but at least they have earned the right to stand with us.’

‘Given time, Aquillon might earn the same.’

Deumos laughed, the sudden sound turning nearby heads in his direction. ‘Do you actually believe that, captain?’

Argel Tal tore his gaze from the clustered Custodians. ‘No, lord. Not for a moment.’

Even in the scalding flare of teleportation’s aftermath, every warrior noticed the same thing. Lorgar manifested not in the armour of the Word Bearers’ warlord, but in the robes of an archpriest of their home world.

Kor Phaeron and Erebus stood at the primarch’s side, as all had expected, and as tradition dictated. Yet they too wore the cowled robes of the Colchisian priesthood, their genhanced physiques draped in layered cloth the colour of ashen earth.

Oath papers pinned to the captains’ armour flapped and curled with the breath of displaced air. Rank by rank, from first to last, a hundred thousand warriors went to one knee. Each lowering rank gave a united thud of ceramite on soil as they knelt. Only the banners remained held high above an ocean of granite grey.

Lorgar carried his crozius over his shoulder, mirroring the posture of every Chaplain in the Legion standing before him. Despite its savagery, the ritual weapon wasn’t out of place in the primarch’s more peaceful aspect.

Without his armour, he couldn’t speak across the vox. To compensate, Legion serfs deployed servo-skulls – the skinned, bleached, augmented skulls of former Legion servants who were chosen to continue serving the Word Bearers even in death. The skulls hovered on humming anti-grav suspensors, their eye sockets containing pict-imagers, their grinning jaws replaced by vox-speakers.

One of them bobbed past Argel Tal in its leisurely pathfinding, and a disquieting thought was dredged up in the skull’s passing. This might be Cyrene’s fate one day. If she got her wish to serve the Legion in the decades to come... Argel Tal turned to watch the servo-skull, curious at his own sudden discomfort. Most mortal serfs relished the promise that they might be granted immortality in even this stunted way. But Cyrene–

‘What are you doing?’ Xaphen hissed. ‘Focus.’

Argel Tal snapped back to attention, facing the primarch. Lorgar had chosen his arrival point with great care, standing atop a natural rise in the land before the orderly ranks of warriors sworn to his name.

Before speaking, the cowl came down, pulled back with sublime patience to reveal his strong, handsome features – the features of his father, but inked gold, with his eyes ringed by kohl. He was the very image of a hierophant preacher in Ancient Gyptus: a faroah’s high priest, ministering to the faithful.

‘My loyal sons. In the past, you have kneeled for each Rite of Remembrance, as you kneel even now. But no more. Word Bearers... Rise.’

Discipline be damned, the Astartes began to glance at one another, taken aback by their lord’s words. This was already unprecedented, and it had barely begun. Surprise and confusion actually had most of the Astartes defying their primarch’s order.

‘Rise,’ Lorgar said, a gentle laugh edging into his speech. ‘Rise, all of you. Now is not the time for obeisance.’

Xaphen rose immediately. All of the Chaplains did. Argel Tal stood slower, looking at his friend.

‘What’s going on?’ he asked.

‘You’ll see,’ said Xaphen.

Lorgar’s next words weren’t for his sons. He gestured with his free hand, the skin gold in the dawn, taking in the small phalanx of warriors at the edge of the sprawling conclave.

‘And what have we here?’ he asked. The servo-skulls projected his words to the thousands gathered, preserving the gentle voice even through crackling vox. ‘Our appointed overseers. I give you the thanks of the Seventeenth Legion for your aid in bringing this heretic world into compliance.’

The twenty Custodes bowed, not quite in unison.

Argel Tal was too far distant to hear Aquillon’s words, but the Custodes commander bowed lower than his comrades, and gestured to the gathered Legion.

Lorgar’s reply was delivered with the same gentle diplomacy as his gratitude.

‘You are correct, Custodian Aquillon. Your tenure with the Seventeenth Legion began under dark skies. However, I must beg your indulgence this once. The words I wish to share with my sons are not for the ears of others.’

Again, Argel Tal had no hope of hearing Aquillon’s reply. Lorgar smiled in response, making the sign of the aquila. When the primarch formed the symbol over his grey robe, the gold hands became an aquila akin to those that marked the breastplates of the Emperor’s own guardians. Argel Tal doubted any present could miss the gesture’s symbolic nature.

‘My sons have been shamed, and endured the shattering of their beliefs. I brought them to this world not simply to reforge them in battle, but to speak of the future. And that will be with my sons, and my sons alone. Look to the south, where even our Mechanicum allies withdraw out of respect.’

Argel Tal looked over his shoulder guard, seeing the primarch’s words taking shape as the Mechanicum withdrew. Only the few robots granted honorary Legion inductance were remaining. Incarnadine stood motionless, the Word Bearers banner draped over its shoulders like a cloak of royalty.

Lorgar smiled his father’s smile, cutting off Aquillon’s reply. ‘Every Legion has its rites and observations, Aquillon. The Rite of Remembrance is one of ours. Would you impose upon the Wolves of Russ when they howl around the stone cairns of their fallen? Would you intrude upon the Sons of Prospero as they meditate on the perfection of human potential?’

Aquillon stepped forward now. A floating servo-skull picked up his reply and broadcast the words across to the gathered Legion.

‘If the Emperor, beloved by all, ordered me to watch over those Legions...’

Lorgar clasped his hands together, his smile of indulgence so earnest that it bordered on mockery.

‘I was there when my brother Guilliman gave you your orders, Aquillon. You are to ensure the Word Bearers apply themselves wholeheartedly to the Great Crusade. And I – we, all of us – thank you for your presence. But you are breaching decorum now. You are showing us disrespect, and violating our traditions.’

‘I mean no offence,’ said Aquillon, ‘but my duty is clear.’

Lorgar nodded, feigning sympathy for their intentions. It was a sour display, and Argel Tal wasn’t sure whether to laugh or feel shamed by it.

‘But let us not exceed your mandate,’ the primarch said. ‘You are not entitled to watch over me like a pack of prison wardens. I am the Emperor’s son, formed by his mastery in order to carry out his will. You are a flock of genetic toys pieced together in a laboratory from vials of biological scrap. You are so far beneath me that I wouldn’t piss on your bodies even if you were aflame. So... let me be clear, in the spirit of preventing future misunderstandings.’

Aquillon stepped forward, but Lorgar halted him in his tracks with a single name.

‘Kor Phaeron.’

As soon as the name was spoken, the First Captain’s voice rasped across the vox. ‘All Word Bearers, take aim at the Custodes.’

Unlike the order to rise, this one brought no hesitation. The ranks of Word Bearers raised their bolters or gunned chainswords into life.

‘Farewell,’ said Lorgar, still wearing his father’s smile. ‘We will see you in orbit soon.’

Two servitors shared the weight of a bulky teleportation beacon the size and shape of a reinforced oil drum. The bionic slaves trundled from the Astartes’ front ranks, unceremoniously dumping the bronze and black iron marvel of engineering on the ground. As Aquillon stood unmoving, staring up at Lorgar, the beacon toppled and clanked onto the grass.

‘You may use this to return to the Fidelitas Lex,’ the primarch said. ‘Go in peace.’

‘Very well,’ Aquillon hesitated before reaching down to set the beacon right. ‘By your word.’

‘He just left?’ Cyrene asked. Her nose wrinkled, either in confusion or distaste, Argel Tal wasn’t sure which.

‘He had no choice,’ the captain replied.

‘And then what happened?’

‘And then... the primarch looked out over the Legion. He watched us for what felt like an age. And at last, just before speaking, he smiled.’

‘What did he speak of?’

‘Two things.’ Argel Tal looked away from her. ‘Firstly, an ancient belief called the Pilgrimage, to seek a place where gods and mortals meet. And then, he spoke of Colchis.’

‘Your home world?’ there was wonder in her voice. Colchis. The cradle of angels.

‘Yes,’ Argel Tal replied, seeing the reverence in her features. ‘We’re going home.’

Nine

Crimson King
The City of Grey Flowers
Blessed Lady

Colchis is a thirsty world.

Depending on the speaker, those words were voiced with a smile or a curse. But they remained true: the continents were raw with thirst, and the world itself was marked by memories.

At three times the size of Terra, with a fraction of the population, it took almost five standard years to turn once around its merciless sun. And it turned with great patience: a day lasting a Terran week, a week lasting a Terran month.

From orbit, its skin was a visage of unforgiving mountain ranges and auburn desert plains, veined by threading rivers. It was in dry lands like these that that humanity’s ancestors – the very first men and women on the world no longer called Earth – rose in lands that would become known as the cradle of civilisation.

Colchis was aboriginal in the same way. Mankind had been born in lands kin to those blanketing its surface, making Colchis an Earth that might have been, rather than the Terra that was.

Over the generations, civilisation had spread itself thin across the arid continents, with most cities clinging to the coasts. Each city-state maintained links to the others though sky trade and ocean freight, on a world where roads across the desert plains would be little more than folly.

Unlike much of the emergent Imperium, Colchis was unprotected by vast orbital weapon platforms. More tellingly, it also had little in the way of the industrious space stations responsible for feeding and refuelling parasitic expeditionary fleets in their crusades through the galaxy.

Colchis still bore scars of long-forgotten greatness – an age of wonders, ended in fire. In that sense, it was a future echo of what Khur had so recently become. The world’s surface was bruised dark by the bones of dead cities, fallen in unrecorded ages, never resettled. New cities rose elsewhere with the genesis of a simpler, quieter culture. The ancient ruins suggested a machine-driven empire once ruled Colchis, though little evidence ever came to light regarding its destruction. The lost kingdom’s legacy was evident even in orbit, where drifting, dead hulks – locked in orbits that would still take millennia to completely decay – marked the graves of interstellar shipyards.

Few Imperial fleets ventured near Colchis, and not merely because of its lack of resupply capacity. Rumours circulated, citing unreliable shipping lanes, and the disappearance of the 2,188th Expeditionary Fleet in a nearby region, added fuel to that particular fire. Colchis seemed a world focused upon looking inwards, even backwards, refusing to clear its skies of wreckage from the Dark Age of Technology, and resisting all Imperial edicts to establish new orbital bases. The planet’s one concession was to allow the Mechanicum of Mars access to those serene hulks, letting the tech-priests plunder whatever they desired.

And they’d done just that, with great enthusiasm, for great profit.

The region was not haunted. No Imperial commander would ever give voice to a laughable superstition, when such words were holdovers from a more indecorous age. Yet still Colchis saw scarce traffic, and its resistance to supplying the Great Crusade remained inviolate.

It was said this defiance could only have come from Lorgar, the Emperor’s Seventeenth Son, for no other authority would allow a planet to remain so curiously provincial. In the capital city, Vharadesh, a golden plaque was fixed to the immense doors leading into the Spire Temple of the Covenant. This tablet marked the primarch’s supposed words – words he’d never admitted, yet never denied, speaking to his father.

‘Take me from my home, and I will sail to the stars of your empire. I will serve as a son must serve. But let Colchis stand as I have shaped it: a planet of peace and prosperity.’

It was also said, by the few that witnessed such rare moments, that the primarch smiled each time he passed those words, and reached out to stroke his golden fingertips across the etched lettering.

Colchis was hardly devoid of technology. It enjoyed the benefits of Imperial life and culture, despite its master’s hesitance to supply materiel for the Emperor’s war. Auspices in the sky-traffic towers of Vharadesh tracked the activity in orbit, with scanner consoles lighting up at the sudden pulse of so many signals.

It had been many years since the Urizen returned home.

This time, there was someone waiting for him.

The ship bore a proud title, named in honour of a legendary city in the murky tides of Prospero’s complicated mythology. The Sekhemra was the only live vessel in the heavens above Colchis, and it rested in its geocentric orbit, weapons unpowered, shields inactive. The humble strike cruiser seemed content to wait in silence, bathing its red hull in the fierce illumination offered by the system’s sun.

Reality opened in an uneven rent, and the Word Bearers fleet streaked across the void, great engines also streaming light into the darkness as they powered towards their home world.

On the strategium of the Fidelitas Lex, the Lord of the Legion watched the red ship’s resolving image on the occulus. He smiled, and closed his eyes as emotion threatened to overtake him.

‘Incoming hail,’ a bridge officer called.

‘Open channel,’ Lorgar replied. The smile didn’t leave his face when he opened his eyes, and the occulus projected a grainy image from the opposing vessel’s command deck.

The pict revealed a giant in unprepossessing black-stained mail armour, surrounded by his own bridge crew. His skin had a dark, coppery hue, as if he spent many long days under alien suns, and his helm bore a scarlet plume of cresting hair. One eye was sealed, puckered shut from an old wound. The other glinted with a colour that couldn’t be made out through the image’s distortion.

‘A trifle melodramatic, brother,’ said the giant in an amused baritone. ‘That many ships, when I only brought one.’

‘You came,’ Lorgar said through his smile.

‘Of course I came. But you owe me some answers, dragging me across half the Imperium like this.’

‘You’ll have them, I promise you. It lifts my heart to see you.’

‘And mine, to see you. It has been too long. But... brother,’ the giant hesitated. ‘There was talk of Monarchia. Is it true?’

The smile faded. ‘Not now,’ Lorgar said. ‘Not here.’

‘Very well,’ said Magnus the Red. ‘I’ll meet you in the City of Grey Flowers.’

Life always struggles in the desert.

On Colchis, as on many of the Imperium’s dryest worlds, the indigenous life coped with the climate however it could. For the human population, it was a matter of coastal cities, immense water filtration facilities, irrigation farming, and dealing with the seasonal floods from the rushing rivers that acted as blood vessels for the arid plains.

Vharadesh, the Holy City, was the nexus of such industrious efforts. Swathes of irrigated farmland reached out from the city walls, a triumph of ingenuity over nature. Colchis was a thirsty world, but the perfection of the human form showed in all things.

For other forms of life, lacking the capacity to affect their own environment, adaptation and evolution went hand in hand. Many plants in the drought-wracked scrubland had leaves with a layer of fine hairs to catch and hold more moisture from the infrequent rainfall, and as a defence against the wind’s drying touch. Colchis demanded much from its native life.

These forms of plant life had been catalogued by Imperial scholars over the years, and promptly ignored. All except for one wildflower growing in the alluvial deserts – a flower that couldn’t be dismissed so readily when it meant so much to the Colchisian people.

The moon lily bloomed with leaves of silver, white and grey – all to reflect more of the sun’s harsh light, stunting its own photosynthesis in the name of survival. Fragile, beautiful, the moon lily was a gift between lovers, a decoration at weddings and festivals, and those trained in its breeding and care were as respected as teachers and priests among the populace.

Across balconies throughout the city, especially on the spires claimed by the Covenant, great hanging gardens of white and silver blooms contrasted against the tan stone walls. Vharadesh was the Imperial designative name for the capital, and in the ruling caste’s religious sermons, it was referred to with passion and pride as the Holy City.

But to the people of Colchis, Vharadesh would always be the City of Grey Flowers.

Its wide streets were filled with cheering crowds as the Legion returned home, and when the first Stormbird – a vulture of gold – roared in for a landing by the Spire Temple, the people flocked to see their messiah return, and the pilgrims he brought with him.

Argel Tal was approaching this carefully. He wasn’t sure how she would react.

‘You will have to be careful on the surface,’ he said.

It had taken four months to reach Colchis from the ruin of Forty-Seven Sixteen. Four months of flight through stable warp conditions, four months of training and prayer, four months of listening to Xaphen debate about the Old Faith, and what hidden truths might be contained within the legend of the Pilgrimage. Argel Tal wasn’t sure what he believed, and the alien presence of doubt left him cold. He’d spent much of his time with Cyrene, as well as drilling the Seventh Company to battle readiness, and duelling Aquillon in the practice cages. The Custodian was a nightmare of an opponent, and both warriors enjoyed the challenge offered by the other. They weren’t even close to being friends, but grudging admiration was a fine foundation for meeting each other in the duelling ring.

With the four months of travel to Colchis added to the rest, Argel Tal and the Chapter of the Serrated Sun had been absent from their own expeditionary fleet for well over half a year. From what little word reached him, apparently the 1,301st Expedition was sending repeated pleas for the Serrated Sun to return, for they were locked in a vicious compliance that required Astartes aid to break the enemy. Already one of the smaller fleets, they were apparently grinding to a halt without their Legion contingent.

One of the messages had been addressed to him personally, as Chapter subcommander. It came directly from Fleetmaster Baloc Torvus – a veteran of void war, but self-confessed at lacking insight into planetary engagements.

‘We’re hurling men at one of their mountain strongholds, but they hold every advantage of terrain, and our armour divisions are ground down by ambushes in the foothills. Would that you were here, subcommander. The blades of the Seventh would make brutally short work of this place.’

Argel Tal had saved it in the data-slate’s memory archive as a form of penance. He sometimes brought it back up to read over, masochistic in his frustration.

Soon, though. They would return to the Great Crusade once breaking orbit from Colchis. The primarch had business here, and in truth, it was a blessing to be able to return to the home world. Argel Tal hadn’t been back himself in three decades.

‘I said, you will need to be careful on the surface,’ he repeated.

Cyrene had changed. Gone was the emaciated wraith who wept as she left the ashen remnants of the perfect city.

‘I don’t understand,’ she said. Her sightless eyes were closed – a habit she’d unconsciously been forming in the past few months. As she spoke, she was arranging her hair in a fashion that seemed needlessly complicated to Argel Tal. Her hands moved slowly, carefully, sensing by touch what her eyes couldn’t see. He enjoyed watching her; it was something of a guilty pleasure. While nothing of attraction existed between them, he often found himself captivated by her fragile, gentle movements, as if she was forever careful about affecting the world around her. She seemed to want to leave no mark, no imprint, on anything she touched. There was no fear in her grace, no hesitation. Simply respect. Care.

The captain stood in full armour but for his helm, leaving his head bare, so the voice she heard was his own, not his helm’s. Cyrene was slowly learning to differentiate his voice from Xaphen’s, mostly through their accents. Argel Tal had a rough, almost impolite edge to his guttural intonation, whereas Xaphen – born in the Urals on Terra – had a clipped tendency to turn S’s into Z’s. The Chaplain spoke like a foreign diplomat. The captain like a ganger, or a boy living on the streets.

‘What don’t you understand?’ he asked her.

She toyed with a lock of hair as it lay against her cheek. ‘I don’t understand why I have to be careful.’

This was a difficult subject. Word from the Legion fleet was constantly cycled back to Colchis, for the people of the home world took great interest, and great pride, in the conquests of their chosen champions. Mothers and fathers listened in the hope some chronicle would detail the glory of a son taken from them in childhood and reshaped as one of the Astartes. Covenant clergy listened for inspiration to preach of the primarch’s righteousness.

This network was maintained by astropaths, sending short psychic pulses of information back to their counterparts on the home world. Several times a week, broadcast from speaker towers across the Holy City, updates of the Legion’s progress drew flocks of listeners. City-wide celebrations were declared by the Covenant each time a Legion expedition reached compliance.

Everyone – everyone – had listened to the reports of Monarchia. The Legion’s humiliation. The Word Bearers kneeling. The Emperor destroying the Imperial Creed forever.

The fleet’s return had an uncomfortable gravity about it, for despite the population’s joy, the whole thing reeked of so much more than a simple homecoming.

And then there was the matter of Monarchia’s survivors. The Legion had encountered few living souls in the ruined city, and Cyrene was one of only seven people taken from the devastation. Word of these holy refugees flashed through Colchisian society. Here were living martyrs, drawn from the ashes of the Legion’s shame. The Covenant sent entreaties to the Legion fleet, pleading with the primarch to allow the refugees to set foot on Colchis, perhaps even to be inducted into the holy order itself.

The seven names were already being spoken with all the reverence of saints’ titles, added into daily prayers. It was difficult to explain this, because Argel Tal had only learned the extent of the refugees’ fame an hour before. The Chapter of the Osseous Throne made planetfall shortly after the primarch, and the four refugees with them were mobbed by adoring crowds. Their every word was recorded, their names were chanted in the streets, while people sought to touch their skin in the hope of gaining some of their divine fortune.

Vox-reports immediately stabbed back to the ships in orbit, warning the other Chapters harbouring refugees that the City of Grey Flowers was as eager to see the Monarchians as it was to welcome the primarch home.

‘You have to be careful because there may be some people on the surface who seek your blessing, and approach you without warning. It might be disorienting.’

Her serf’s robe was a simple affair, but she smoothed it carefully against her returning figure. ‘I still don’t understand. Why would they want to see us?’

‘You are an icon,’ he said. ‘A living icon, a martyr in life rather than death. You paid the price for Colchisian ignorance, and in doing so, earned great respect from us all. I’m told they are saying the seven of you are tied to the Legion’s destiny. A reflection of failure, a hope for the future. Your life is a lesson, and one we must all learn.’

She faced him, without seeing him. ‘That’s very poetic for you, captain.’

‘It is the best way I can describe it.’

‘I’m an icon to them?’

He donned his helm, staining his sight blue and adding a layer of targeting information to his vision. His voice emerged as vox-growl.

‘Not just to them.’

The journey down to Colchis lasted twenty minutes.

In the Thunderhawk’s cockpit, Argel Tal stood behind Malnor, the pilot. They came in low over the parched earth, approaching the mud-brick city walls as the desert sliced past beneath. The city’s skyline showed a breathtaking view of tan buildings, brick spires as far as the eye could see. To the south, the great River Phranes flowed past – a wide road of sapphire glinting in the sunlight. River barges and bulk freight carriers crossed on the wide waters.

‘Legion gunship Rising Sun, this is western district control. Please respond.’

Argel Tal scowled behind his faceplate. This didn’t bode well.

‘They’re keen,’ said Malnor, and reached to activate the console’s voxsponder. ‘This is the Rising Sun, inbound.’

‘Rising Sun, please confirm you have the Blessed Lady aboard.’

‘The what?’ He deactivated the channel and looked over his shoulder. ‘Captain?’

Argel Tal swore in breathless Colchisian. ‘I think they mean–’

‘This must be a joke,’ Malnor muttered.

‘My blood’s running cold,’ said Argel Tal. ‘This is no joke.’

‘This is the Rising Sun,’ Malnor voxed again. ‘Repeat, please.’

‘Rising Sun, this is western district control. Please confirm you have the Blessed Lady aboard.’

‘I don’t know,’ the sergeant grumbled. ‘That depends on what you’re talking about.’

The voice on the other end of the vox-channel explained, and assigned landing coordinates accordingly.

‘This,’ Malnor said to Argel Tal, ‘is getting out of hand.’

The captain nodded. ‘Be ready. You’ve just volunteered to join the escort detail.’

‘By your word.’

The Thunderhawk shuddered as it graced the landing platform.

‘I hear something,’ Cyrene said. She stood in the gunship’s loading bay, flanked by Xaphen and Torgal.

‘It’s the engines cycling down,’ said Torgal, knowing full well it wasn’t. He’d seen the view from the cockpit window as they came in on approach, and like the other Astartes, his enhanced hearing could clearly differentiate between engine whine-down and the sounds outside the hull.

‘No,’ she said. ‘No, it’s voices. I can hear voices.’

Argel Tal stood ahead of them, ready to hit the door release and lower the gang ramp. Malnor came from the cockpit, thudding his way down the crew ladder. He saluted Argel Tal as he took up position behind the Monarchian.

‘You might be disoriented, Cyrene.’ Argel Tal’s vox-voice almost made the words a threat. ‘Do not fear, you will be between the four of us at all times. Malnor behind, Torgal to the left, Xaphen to the right. I will lead the way. It is only a short journey to the monastic spire where you will be staying.’

‘What’s happening?’ she asked. All four warriors could hear her heart beating faster now, a wet drum behind her ribcage. ‘What’s going on?’

‘There’s nothing to worry about,’ said Xaphen. They were the last words he spoke before donning his own helm. ‘We will be with you.’

‘But–’

‘You will be fine,’ Argel Tal said, and thumped the door release.

Sunlight flooded into the loading bay. As did thousands of cheering voices.

‘It’s going to be a long day,’ said Torgal.

Torgal’s prediction proved correct.

Cyrene was shaken by the day’s events, no doubt about it, but the Astartes believed she’d held up well. Colchis was a world of peace and law, and the City of Grey Flowers respected its holy leaders above all. On more barbarous worlds, the Monarchian refugees might have been besieged by adoring crowds in celebrations that bordered on riots, but here they were cheered from the side of roads, with the petals of moon lilies cast onto the ground before them.

Upon first leaving the gunship, Cyrene had lifted a hand to her mouth, almost staggered by the wall of sound that rose to meet her. Xaphen lightly rested his gauntlet on her shoulder in reassurance. She’d heard Argel Tal, a few steps ahead of her, swearing in a language she didn’t understand.

And then they were walking.

In the bellicose good cheer, she lost the second of her senses. After growing used to perceiving the world around her by sound, to have everything washed away in the crowd’s noise was a frightening loss. Several times she reached a hand out, her fingertips brushing the cold metal of Argel Tal’s back-mounted power pack.

‘Are they near?’ she asked. The crowd sounded close, so very close.

‘They won’t touch you.’ She thought it was Torgal’s voice, but through the helm filters, she couldn’t be sure. ‘We are between you and the crowd, little mistress.’

Definitely Torgal. Only he called her that.

‘Will they not touch your armour?’ she asked. ‘For good luck?’

‘No. It’s against tradition.’ She was certain that was Xaphen, but he said nothing more.

The crowd continued to chant. Sometimes, her name. Sometimes, her title.

‘How many are there?’ asked Cyrene, her voice small.

‘Thousands,’ one of the Word Bearers said. In the clash of noise, it was difficult to tell where their voices were coming from.

‘We’re almost there.’ That was definitely Argel Tal. She recognised his accent, despite the helm.

The captain couldn’t entirely swallow his unease. It lingered, coppery and unwelcome, on the underside of his tongue. Target locks flitted from peasant to peasant as he scanned the crowd. Row upon row of celebrants, lining the street. So much for a meditative homecoming.

‘Sir,’ Malnor voxed. ‘Oath papers?’

‘Permission granted.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

Malnor broke ranks, walking towards the crowd. The closest citizens knelt as he approached, and averted their eyes. Without ceremony, though with obvious care, the sergeant untied the parchment scroll bound to his right pauldron. He rolled it up into a scroll, and offered it to one of the kneeling peasants. An old man took it in hands that trembled. Whether they shook with emotion or palsy wasn’t clear, but the silver wetness in his eyes was testament to his devotion.

‘Thank you, great lord,’ the elder said, and pressed the gift to his forehead in thanks.

Malnor had another oath paper bound to the shin of his armour. He removed this next, and offered it to a woman who quietly wept.

‘Bless you,’ she whispered, and touched the scroll to her forehead, just as the old man had done.

‘From the fires of righteousness,’ Malnor intoned, ‘unto the blood of purity. We bring the Word of Lorgar.’

‘By your word,’ the nearby peasants chorused.

Malnor nodded his helmed head in acknowledgement, and walked back to join his brothers.

‘What happened?’ Cyrene asked. ‘Why did we stop?’

‘It’s considered a blessing to be offered the oath papers from our armour,’ said Argel Tal. A few minutes later, Argel Tal paused the march again to give one of his parchments to a young mother holding a baby. She pressed the scroll to her infant’s forehead, then her own.

‘What is your name, warrior?’ she asked, needing to crane her neck to look up at him.

‘Argel Tal.’

‘Argel Tal,’ she repeated. ‘My son will carry that name from this day forward.’

Insofar as it was possible for a walking suit of battle armour to look humble, the captain did so now. ‘I’m honoured,’ he said, and added ‘Be well,’ before rejoining the march.

Torgal glanced down at the frail figure of Cyrene. ‘Would you like my oath scroll, little mistress?’ he offered.

‘I don’t read very much anymore,’ she smiled, bright and sincere. ‘But thank you, Torgal.’

After the short march through streets she couldn’t see, Cyrene had spent the rest of the day in one of the Covenant’s temples. Argel Tal and his officers remained with her as she was interviewed and questioned by overeager priests. Instead of being given a seat, she was guided to recline on a long couch, made almost princely by too many cushions. It had the opposite effect of the intended one, leaving her shuffling to get comfortable no matter how she reclined. In the end, she just sat up straight, treating it like a chair.

‘What was the last thing you saw?’ one priest asked.

‘Describe the fire that rained from the sky,’ pressed another.

‘Describe the city’s towers falling.’

As the questions went on, she wondered just how many inquisitors were sat before her. The room was cold, and the faint echo when people spoke suggested a large chamber. A background hum pervaded everything, a thrum that set her teeth on edge – it was one thing to recognise the active buzz of Astartes armour, but another entirely to get used to it.

‘Do you hate the Emperor?’ one of the priests asked.

‘What happened in the months after the city fell?’ asked another.

‘Did you kill any of your abusers?’

‘How did you escape?’

‘Would you serve the Covenant as a high priestess?’

‘Why did you refuse the Legion’s offer of new eyes?’

The answer to this last question intrigued her interrogators a great deal. Cyrene touched her closed eyes as she replied.

‘On my world, there is a belief that the eyes were windows to the soul.’

They answered her words with muttering unintended for her ears. ‘How quaint,’ one of them replied. ‘Do you fear your soul would quit your body through hollow eye sockets? Is that it?’

‘No,’ said Cyrene. ‘Not that.’

‘Please enlighten us, Blessed Lady.’

She shifted in discomfort yet again, and still blushed each time they used the title. ‘It was said that those who wore false eyes would never move beyond this life to paradise beyond. Our mortis-priests always preached that they could see the trapped souls of the lost and the damned in the false eyes of servitors.’

There was silence, for a time.

‘And you believe,’ one of the priests said, ‘that your spirit would be sealed within your corpse if you surrendered your natural eyes?’

She shivered to hear it put like that. ‘I don’t know what I believe. But I will wait until they heal. There’s still a chance they might.’

‘Enough,’ a voice boomed, edged by vox-crackle. ‘You are making her uncomfortable, and I have given my word to the Urizen that she will be taken to the Spire Temple at midnight.’

‘But there’s still time for–’

‘With respect: be silent, priest,’ Argel Tal stepped closer to her, and she felt her gums itching at the drone of his armour. ‘Come, Cyrene. The primarch awaits.’

‘May the Blessed Lady return tomorrow?’ one priest piped up as they were leaving.

None of the Astartes answered.

Once outside, another crowd was waiting for her. She smiled in the direction of the noise, and offered the occasional wave, feeling her face burn with self-conscious doubt. First and foremost in her mind was the effort to keep her discomfort from showing. There would be no getting used to this. She knew she’d hate it until it either stopped of its own accord, or they left Colchis behind.

‘We didn’t have to leave,’ she said. ‘I could have answered more questions. Was I supposed to?’

Over the din of the crowd, she heard Argel Tal reply.

‘My apologies for using you as an excuse to leave,’ he said, ‘but it was too pointless to endure any longer. Questions that led nowhere, or were already answered in the Legion’s reports. Tedious bureaucracy, propagated by self-important men.’

‘Is that not blasphemy? Defying the will of the Covenant?’

‘No,’ said the captain. ‘It was a tactical retreat in the face of overwhelming boredom.’

She smiled at that, as the Word Bearers led her on.

Less than three minutes later, as Cyrene was drawing breath to comment on the warmth of the desert night’s wind, there was a crashing sound from above, the crash of a hundred windows smashing at once.

What she couldn’t see was all four of her warrior guides standing utterly still, staring up at the Spire Temple – that twisting tower of tanned stone, central in the city, taller than all else.

Around her, the crowd’s cheers soured into whispers and weeping. Two of the Astartes, she didn’t know which, began to chant prayers in monotone vox-voices, benedictions to the primarch.

‘What happened?’ she asked.

‘Move,’ Xaphen ordered. One of them gripped her elbow and forced her into a run. Their armour joints snarled with the change of pace.

‘What’s going on?’ she tried again. ‘What was that noise? An explosion?’

‘The primarch’s observatory on top of the central spire,’ he said. ‘Something is wrong.’

Ten

The Right to Lead a Legion
Empyrean
Misery

An hour before, Lorgar was leaning on the balcony’s railing, looking out over the city. The Spire Temple of the Covenant offered an unparalleled view of Vharadesh, and the primarch inhaled the scent of spice, flowers and sand as he watched the sun setting behind the horizon.

Magnus stood alongside him, still clad in the coat of black mail, his coppery skin burnished by occasional sweat trickles. Of the two brothers, Magnus was taller, and even in the years before losing his eye, he’d scarcely resembled their Imperial father. Lorgar was the image of the Emperor in an unknowable younger life – an immortal at thirty.

‘You have done great things here,’ Magnus said, also staring over the vista of Vharadesh. The spiralling towers, bedecked in sloping walkways, like twisted horns... The sea of red-walled homes... The great parks of moon lilies growing in unforgiving soil, ready to be spread over roads and balconies across the city...

‘I have seen Tizca,’ Lorgar’s smile was sincere, ‘and I am always honoured you can leave your City of Light, yet still praise my people’s work here.’

Magnus chuckled, avalanche-low. ‘To think such beauty could rise from riverside sand and bricks of compacted mud. The City of Grey Flowers is a haven for me, Lorgar. You have melded technology and antiquity with consummate skill. It puts me in mind of those first cities ever raised by mankind, in the deserts they were forced to call home.’

Lorgar laughed, shaking his head. ‘I’ve seen no such images in scrolls, brother.’

‘Nor have I,’ the one-eyed king smiled. ‘But in dreams. Meditations. In traversing the waves and depths of the Great Ocean.’

Lorgar’s smile fell a notch. Where his brothers were concerned, Magnus was highest in his affections, not only because he was the first of the family Lorgar had met, but because he was one of the few the Word Bearers lord could relate to. The others were, by varying degrees, feral simpletons, cold-hearted instruments of warfare, or vainglorious warlords.

Except for Horus, of course. It was impossible to hate Horus.

He loved Magnus as one of the few he could speak with, but he never believed himself his brother’s equal. Magnus’s psychic gifts were unrivalled – they’d often spoken of the things Magnus witnessed in his spiritual travels through the infinite. The past. The future. The hearts and minds of men.

‘Cairus,’ Magnus said, his voice softer now. ‘Alixandron. Babalun, most of all, for it possessed a great garden of hanging flowers akin to the one your city wears like a crown of silver blooms.’

Lorgar felt warmed by the image. The beauties of the past, rising again through human inspiration.

‘As I’ve told you before,’ he said, ‘it’s not my city. I had a hand in it, but I am not solely responsible for the wonders we see here.’

‘Always, this modesty.’ Magnus’s tone had the slightest edge of disapproval, perhaps hinting at a lecture soon to come. ‘You live your life for others, Lorgar. There is a line when selflessness becomes unhealthy. If all you do is to raise others from ignorance, when is there time for you to learn more yourself? If all you seek is a greater purpose in existence, where is the joy in your own life? Look to the future, but cherish the present.’

He nodded to his brother’s words, watching the sun set. Even as it darkened in the horizon’s clutch, it was still bright enough to pain mortal eyes. Lorgar was untroubled by such human concerns.

‘Another parade,’ he said, watching a distant street filled with revellers.

‘You sound melancholic,’ Magnus observed. ‘Your people are pleased you have come home, brother. Doesn’t that lift your spirits?’

‘In truth, it does. But that’s not a parade in my honour. It is for the refugees of Monarchia. I asked for the seven of them to be brought here after sunset. Judging by the crowd’s size, I would guess that’s the parade in honour of the Blessed Lady.’

Magnus leaned his huge hands on the balcony railing, as if leaning forward would bring the distant street into sharper focus.

‘Why is one of your refugees treasured above the others?’

‘It is the way of things,’ Lorgar inclined his head in the parade’s direction. ‘She is the only female, and I am told she possesses great beauty. Couple that with the fact she was the only one to actually witness Monarchia’s destruction. The orbital barrage blinded her. Such sacrifice appeals to the masses.’

Magnus’s patrician features hardened. ‘I hear Kor Phaeron’s calculations in your voice, brother. I have cautioned you before on heeding his words too closely, and too often. Bitterness burns within him.’

Lorgar shook his head. ‘He worries he isn’t worthy, that’s all. But you’re wrong – these refugees are nothing to do with Kor Phaeron, though I confess the Covenant dearly hungers to capitalise on their popularity. I requested their presence here tonight, for I wished to meet them. No more, no less.’

Magnus was appeased. Silence stretched out between them. As with all close brothers, it was a comfortable quiet, as meaningful and worthy as the words they shared.

Only one matter remained raw.

‘How did it come to this?’ Magnus eventually asked. ‘I know of Colchis’s religious wars. I remember the day I arrived with Father, and you offered him a world devoted in worship. But we have fallen so far, and so fast. How did it come to this?’

Lorgar didn’t meet his brother’s eye. He continued to look down upon the city.

‘This whole world burned under a crusade I led almost two centuries ago. I dreamed of god’s arrival. I suffered hallucinations, visions, nightmares and trances. Night after night after night. Sometimes, I would wake at dawn to find blood running from my eyes and ears, and our father’s face burned into my mind. Of course, I was too young, too naive, to realise what I was. How could I know what psychic power boiled within me, seeking a release? I was not you, to know from birth how to control my sixth sense. I am not Russ, to be able to howl and have every wolf in the world howl with me. My powers always fired in fits and bursts, coming in feasts or famines. I was eight years old when I realised that some people had pleasant dreams instead of endless nightmares. Nothing could have shocked me more.’

Magnus remained silent. Despite all their talks, all their closeness, this was a tale he’d not heard from his brother’s lips before.

Lorgar closed his eyes and continued.

‘I waged a holy war in the name of a father who finally descended from above, saw the oceans of blood and tears shed in his name, and simply didn’t care. I wasted my youth hunched over scripture and religious codices, planning for the messiah’s coming, believing he would give meaning to all human life – meaning that thousands of human cultures are forever seeking. And I was wrong.’

‘The Emperor brought meaning,’ said Magnus. ‘Just not the meaning you hoped for.’

‘He brought as many questions as he did answers. Father is hollowed through, infested by secrets. I hate that about him. He is a creature incapable of trust.’

Another pause reached out between them.

At last, Lorgar smiled, bleak and unamused. ‘Perhaps he did bring meaning. But he did not bring the meaning humanity needs. That’s what matters.’

‘Go on,’ Magnus said. ‘Finish the thought.’

‘Since then I have crusaded across his empire for over a century, raising icons and faiths in his image – and only now he objects? After a hundred years, only now am I told that all I’ve done is wrong?’

Magnus kept his silence. The doubt he felt shone through his narrowed eye.

‘Magnus,’ Lorgar smiled as he saw the emotion on his brother’s face, ‘only the truly divine deny their divinity. It’s written thus in countless human cultures. He never denied his godhood when he first came to Colchis to take me into the stars. You were there. He witnessed weeks of celebrations in his honour, never once rebuking me for lauding him as a god. And since then? He has watched me crusade for him, never saying a word about what I’ve done. Only now, at Monarchia, did he bring down his wrath. When he decided my faith had to be broken, after more than a century.’

‘Faith is an ugly word,’ Magnus said, idly stroking the bound spine of the great book he always carried chained at his hip.

‘Why were we born to be warriors?’ Lorgar asked, apropos of nothing.

‘Finally,’ Magnus laughed, ‘we reach the reason you summoned me to Colchis. Why are we warriors? A fine question, with a simple answer. We are warriors because that is what the Emperor, beloved by all, required in the galaxy’s reclamation.’

‘Of course. But this is the greatest age in mankind’s history, and instead of philosophers and visionaries... it is led by warriors. There’s something poisonous in that, Magnus. Something rotten. It is not right.’

Magnus shrugged, with a whisper of fine mail. ‘Father is the visionary. He needed generals at his side.’

Lorgar clenched his teeth. ‘By the Throne, I am sick to my core of hearing those words. I am not a soldier. I have no wish to be one. I am not a destroyer, Magnus. Not like the others. Why do you think I spend so long establishing compliance and creating perfect worlds? In creation, I am vindicated. In destruction, I am–’

‘Not a soldier?’

‘Not a soldier,’ Lorgar nodded. He looked exhausted. ‘There are greater things in life than excelling at shedding blood.’

‘If you are not a soldier, then you have no right to lead a Legion,’ said Magnus. ‘The Astartes are weapons, brother. Not craftsmen or architects. They are the fires that raze cities, not the hands that raise them.’

‘So we are speaking in hypocrisies today?’ Lorgar managed a smile. ‘Your Thousand Sons are responsible for much of Tizca’s beauty, let alone Prospero’s enlightenment.’

‘True,’ Magnus returned the smile, altogether more sincere, ‘and they are also responsible for a great number of faultless compliances. The Word Bearers, by comparison, are not.’

Lorgar fell silent.

‘Is this about Monarchia?’ Magnus asked.

‘Everything is about Monarchia,’ Lorgar admitted. ‘It all changed in that moment, brother. The way I see the worlds we conquer. My hopes for the future. Everything.’

‘I can imagine.’

‘Do not patronise me,’ Lorgar snapped. ‘With the greatest respect, Magnus, you cannot imagine this. Did the lord of all human life descended upon you, burn your greatest achievements to ash and dust, and then tell you that you – and you alone – were a failure? Did he throw your precious Thousand Sons to the ground and tell your entire Legion that every soul wearing their armour was a wasted life?’

‘Lorgar–’

‘What? What? I spent decades on Colchis dreaming of the day god himself would arrive and lead humanity to the empyrean. I raised a religion in his honour. For over a hundred years, I have spread that faith in his name, believing he matched every dream, every prophecy, every mythic poem about the ascension of the human race. Now I am told my life was a lie; that I have ruined countless civilisations with false faith; that every one of my brothers who laughed at me for seeking a greater purpose in life was right to laugh at our bloodline’s only fool.’

‘Brother, calm yourself–’

‘No!’ Lorgar instinctively reached for a crozius that wasn’t there. His fingers curled in a rage that couldn’t be released. ‘No... Do not “brother” me with indulgence in your eyes. You are the wisest of us all and you see nothing of the truth in this.’

‘Then explain it. And shackle your temper, I have no desire to be whined at. Or will you strike me, as you struck Guilliman?’

Lorgar hesitated. After a moment, he brushed a white petal from the railing with his golden palm. Anger quietened, without fully fading, as the petal flitted down through the air. He met Magnus’s gaze.

‘Forgive me. My choler is kindled, and my control lacking. You’re right.’

‘I always am,’ Magnus smiled. ‘It’s a habit.’

Lorgar looked back out over the city. ‘As for Guilliman... You have no idea how fine it felt to strike him down. His arrogance is unbelievable.’

‘We are blessed with many brothers who would benefit from being humbled once in a while,’ Magnus smiled, ‘but that is for another time. Speak what must be spoken. You are afraid.’

‘I am,’ Lorgar confessed. ‘I fear the Emperor will break the Word Bearers – and break me. We would be cast alongside the brothers we no longer speak of.’

The silence was hardly comforting. ‘Well?’ Lorgar asked.

‘He might,’ the one-eyed giant said. ‘There was talk of it, before Monarchia.’

‘Did he come to you to ask your thoughts?’

‘He did,’ Magnus admitted.

‘And he went to our brothers?’

‘I believe so. Don’t ask what sides were taken by whom, for I do not know where most of them stood. Russ was with you, as was Horus. In fact, it was the first time the Wolf King and I have agreed on anything of import.’

‘Leman Russ spoke in my favour?’ Lorgar laughed. ‘Truly, we live in an age of marvels.’

Magnus didn’t share the amusement. His lone eye was a deep, arctic blue as it fixed upon Lorgar. ‘He did. The Space Wolves are a spiritual Legion, in their own stunted and blind way. Fenris is an unmerciful cradle, and it breeds such things in them. Russ knows that, though he lacks the intelligence to give it voice. Instead, he swore that he’d already lost two brothers, and had no desire to lose a third.’

‘Two already lost.’ Lorgar looked back to the city. ‘I still recall how they–’

‘Enough,’ warned Magnus. ‘Honour the oath you took that day.’

‘You all find it so easy to forget the past. None of you ever wish to speak of what was lost. But could you do it again?’ Lorgar met his brother’s eyes. ‘Could you stand with Horus or Fulgrim, and never again speak my name purely because of a promise?’

Magnus wouldn’t be drawn into this. ‘The Word Bearers will not walk the same paths as the forgotten and the purged. I trust you, Lorgar. Already, there’s talk that compliance was achieved on Forty-Seven Sixteen with laudable speed. Settler fleets are en route, are they not?’

Lorgar ignored the rhetorical question.

‘I need your guidance, Magnus. I need to see the things you see.’ The gold-skinned primarch watched the procession weaving through the streets, marching closer by the minute.

‘You know of Colchisian mythology, and the Pilgrimage to where gods and mortals meet. You know how it matches the beliefs of so many other worlds. The empyrean. The Primordial Truth. Heaven. Ten thousand names in ten thousand cultures. It cannot be mere superstition, if shamans and sorcerers on so many words all share the same beliefs. Perhaps father is wrong. Perhaps the stars hide more secrets. Perhaps they truly do hide the gods themselves.’

‘Lorgar...’ Magnus warned again. He turned from the balcony, and moved back into the expansive chamber atop the Spire Temple. The domed ceiling was glass, offering a breathtaking view of the sky as night fell. The stars were beginning to make themselves known, pinpricks of light in the sapphire sky.

‘Do not hunt for something to worship,’ Magnus said, ‘merely because your faith was proven false.’

Lorgar followed his brother, slender fingers toying with the hem of his grey robe’s sleeve. The Word Bearers primarch spent much of his time on Colchis in this spire-top observatory, staring up at the stars. It was here that he’d watched and waited for the Emperor’s arrival so many decades ago, mistaken in the belief that he would be a god worthy of worship.

‘Is that how you see me?’ he asked Magnus, his voice softer than before. Hurt shone in his eyes, flecked with buried anger. ‘Is that how you judge my actions? That I cast about in ignorance, desperate for something, anything, to hear my prayers?’

Magnus watched the stars coming out for the night. He noted several constellations already – their shapes taken and bestowed on Chapters within the Word Bearers Legion. There, the faint image of a crozius crowned with a skull; there, the high seat, adopted as the symbol of the Osseous Throne; and there, the flared circle of the serrated sun.

‘That is how history will judge you,’ said Magnus, ‘if you remain devoted to this path. No one will see your desire to elevate humanity or raise the species into some unknown enlightenment. They will see you humiliated and weak, desperate for something to believe in.’

‘Humanity is nothing without faith,’ Lorgar whispered.

‘And yet we do not need religion to explain the universe. The Emperor’s light illuminates all.’

‘That is what you always fail to see,’ Lorgar moved over to a table with several crystal wine glasses. ‘You think faith is about fear. About needing things explained to ignorant minds. Faith is the greatest unifying element in mankind’s history. Faith was all that kept the light of hope burning through the millennia on the thousands of worlds we now reclaim in this Crusade.’

‘So you say, brother.’ Magnus shrugged. ‘You will not be judged kindly for that belief.’

Lorgar poured a glass of dark wine, its scent heightened by the powdered spices added during its fermentation. Lacking the climate for grape vineyards, Colchisian wine was almost always made from dates. The bitter drink reddened his lips as he sipped it.

‘We are immortal,’ Lorgar pointed out. ‘Why would we worry for the future when we will still be around to shape it?’

Magnus ventured no answer.

‘You’ve seen something,’ Lorgar pressed. ‘Something in the Great Ocean. Something in the warp you stare into so often. Some... some hint at what might be. A future yet to come?’

‘It doesn’t work that way, brother.’

‘You’re lying. You are lying to me.’

Magnus turned his gaze from the darkening sky. ‘Sometimes you see and hear only what you wish. You’re wrong, Lorgar. Father is not a god. There are no gods.’

At last, Lorgar smiled as if he’d waited hours for those words to be spoken.

‘Is he a magical sky-spirit dwelling inside a mythical paradise? No. I am not a fool. He is not a god as primitive cultures once understood the concept. But the Emperor is a god in all but name, Magnus. He is psychic power incarnated within a physical shell. When he speaks, his lips never move and his throat makes no sound. His face is a thousand visages at once. The only aspect of humanity he possesses is the facade he wears to interact with mortals.’

‘That’s a very melodramatic perception.’

‘And it is true. The only difference between you and I is that you call him father, and I call him a god.’

Magnus sighed, his breath rumbling as he suppressed a growl. ‘I see where you are leading with this. Now I see why you summoned me. And Lorgar... I am leaving.’

Lorgar offered a golden hand, reaching out to his brother. ‘Please, Magnus. If the Emperor is what he is, there might be other beings that wield the same power. How can so many legends of divinity, from so many disparate cultures, all agree on other powers that exist beyond the veil? There must be gods in the universe. Our species’ most natural instincts cannot be wrong.’

‘This reeks of desperation,’ Magnus sighed. ‘Have you considered that father warned you for a reason?’

‘There is no shame in seeking the truth, Magnus. You of all souls should know that. Have you seen nothing of this in your travels through the Great Ocean? No beings that a human civilisation could perceive as a god or daemon?’

Magnus did not reply. His gaze burned into his brother.

‘My mind is alive with questions,’ the Word Bearer lord confessed. ‘Where in the galaxy would gods and mortals meet?’

The giant’s lip curled. ‘The Great Ocean hides much beneath its tides, Lorgar. We have both walked worlds where the warp bleeds into our reality, only to be manipulated by heathen ritemasters and misinterpreted as “magic”. Would you deceive yourself as they do?’

‘Stay,’ Lorgar implored. ‘Help me.’

Magnus shook his head. ‘Help you stare into the abyss? You want me to guide you along the paths walked by primitives and barbarians?’

Lorgar drew a shaky breath before replying.

‘Help me seek the truth that lies behind the stars. What if we are waging a false crusade? This might be an unholy war... World after world is purged or brought to compliance... We might be strangling the truth – a truth believed in one form or another by countless cultures... We... We... I hear something call out to me, day and night. Something in the void. Is it fate? Is this how we perceive the future? By hearing destiny’s voice whisper our names?’

Lorgar fell silent as Magnus came to him, the larger brother gripping the other’s robed shoulders. The golden primarch’s lips were trembling. His fingers twitched and shook.

‘My brother, you are raving,’ said Magnus. ‘Look at me. Peace, Lorgar. Peace. Look at me.’

Lorgar did as he was asked. Magnus the Red, the Crimson King, fixed his brother’s gaze with his own remaining eye.

‘Your eye has changed colour,’ Lorgar murmured. ‘I hear them calling, Magnus. Fate. Destiny. I hear destiny’s thousand voices...’

‘Focus on me,’ Magnus intoned, speaking slow and soft. ‘Listen well to my words. You are speaking from fear. A fear of failing again. A fear of dooming another world to destruction. A fear that father will order a third Legion, and a third son, to be purged from history.’

‘The fear has faded. I am no longer afraid. I am inspired.’

‘You cannot hide it from me with mere words, brother. And you are right to fear what may come to pass. You stand on the precipice of destruction, and still contemplate a path that will send you falling over the edge. I understand your pain. Everything you achieved on Colchis was for a flawed faith. Every compliant world is one your Legion must revisit and reshape. But you cannot live in fear of making another mistake.’

Lorgar said nothing for several moments. At last, his shoulders slumped.

‘You could have helped me, Magnus.’ The Word Bearers’ primarch lifted his brother’s hands away, and walked back to the wine table. ‘We could have taken the Pilgrimage together, and sought the place where the stars are stained by divine influence. You see into the Great Ocean better than anyone else. You could have been my navigator.’

Magnus narrowed his good eye. In sympathy, the puckered scar marking the absence of his other eye pulled tight.

‘What do you intend to do, Lorgar? You have no idea of what you seek.’

‘I will continue the Great Crusade,’ Lorgar smiled, taking another swallow of the dark wine. ‘I will cast my fleet across the galaxy, and bring every world we find into compliance. And as we sail the heavens, we will be as pilgrims seeking a holy land. If there is truth behind the legends so many cultures share, then I will find it. And with it, I will enlighten humanity.’

Magnus said nothing. Disbelief robbed him of speech.

Lorgar drained the wine. It stained his golden lips again. ‘I will apply my Legion’s full strength to the Great Crusade, and never raise another monument in the Emperor’s image. I will do it all under the watchful eyes of his Custodes war dogs. Surely there is no harm in recording ancient tales of faiths from the cultures we encounter? You yourself assured me they were all false. Father said the same.’

‘I am leaving,’ Magnus said again, and moved to the centre of the room. Resting his gloved hand on the great leather-bound book chained to his belt, the primarch looked back at his brother. They would not meet again for almost forty years, and the galaxy would be a very different place by the time they did.

They both sensed this. It carried between them in that lingering stare: half-challenge, half-plea.

‘What swims within the Great Ocean that you’ve always kept from us?’ Lorgar demanded, teeth clenching. ‘What secrets hide within the warp? Why do you spend your life staring into it, if there’s nothing there? What if I asked our father about your secret travels into the aether?’

‘Farewell, Lorgar.’

The Word Bearers lord pulled back his hood, his handsome features rendered into true gold by the candlelight.

‘Is there a place where reality and unreality converge? An empyrean, a heaven that humanity has always misunderstood? A realm where gods and mortals meet? Answer me, Magnus.’

Magnus shook his head as motes of misty light began to form around him. A teleportation lock from his vessel in orbit. Wind, from nowhere, began to breathe.

‘What are the voices?’ Lorgar screamed over the rising winds. ‘Who calls to me?’

‘If you will not alter your path, then only one thing awaits you in the stars,’ said Magnus.

Lorgar stared in rapt silence, hungering for the answer, but Magnus spoke only a single word before vanishing in a burst of bright light and white noise.

‘Misery.’

Eleven

In a God’s Service
Confession
The Pilgrimage

For several kilometres around the Spire Temple, revellers in the streets looked up in horror as the tower-top exploded in searing light. A dusty powder rained down from the observatory – its glass dome pulverised to the tiniest, twinkling shards.

The sonic boom of teleportation faded, as did the rush of displaced air.

In the wake of Magnus’s thunderous departure, Lorgar stood unfazed. His robe fluttered in the evening wind, and he spared a moment’s consideration for his scripture scrolls and parchment notes blowing out into the city. His crystal glasses were as annihilated as the reinforced glass dome, and his writing desk was stained by an expanding pool of bitter wine.

After an unknowable time of staring down at Vharadesh, he became aware of a pounding on the iron door set in the only remaining wall. Distracted, he paid the sound only a little heed.

‘Enter,’ he said.

Ascending the spire temple had been an exercise in frustration, with Covenant priests frantic about both the Blessed Lady’s presence and the explosion almost ten minutes before, in the master’s observatory. On several occasions, the Word Bearers had threatened panicking clergymen, forcing them aside to clear the way.

‘He will not open the doors!’ one wailed with a flagellant’s desperation.

‘We will speak with the primarch,’ Xaphen assured the Covenant ministers. ‘He sent for the Blessed Lady, and our lord will open the door for us.’

‘What if he is wounded?’ one of them whined, an obese creature with shaking jowls in the layered white and grey robes of a deacon. ‘We must attend to the Urizen!’

‘Control your emotions, and move aside,’ Argel Tal growled, ‘or I will kill you.’

‘You cannot mean that, lord!’

Faster than human eyes could follow, the swords of red iron came free in hissing rasps. The tips of both blades rested against the fat priest’s three chins before he’d even had time to blink. Apparently, the lord did mean it.

‘Yes,’ the deacon stammered. ‘Yes, I...’

‘Just move,’ Argel Tal suggested. The priest took the suggestion, trying not to burst into tears. As he moved, an animal scent tainted the air; stronger than the fear-sweat and sour breath from the priests around them.

‘Sir,’ Torgal switched to vox, rather than speaking aloud. ‘The priest pissed in his robes.’

Argel Tal grunted, and lifted Cyrene over the warm puddle on the wooden stairs.

With the last of the clergy sent scurrying, the warriors ascended the wide, spiralling stairway with their ward guarded between them.

‘Enter,’ the voice called.

Argel Tal hadn’t sheathed his swords. He led the group into the primarch’s observatory, which was now little more than a stone platform exposed to the night’s breeze. Scrolls and books lay scattered across the floor, the former gently nudged by the wind, the latter having their pages turned by it.

The primarch stood by the platform’s edge, staring down at the city below. His shaven, tattooed head was bare, seemingly unmarked by injury, and the grey-white robe of Covenant hierarchs was free of bloodstains.

‘Sire?’ said Argel Tal. ‘What happened here?’

Lorgar turned slowly. Faint confusion marred his features, as if he’d expected someone else.

‘Argel Tal,’ he said, his voice rumbling. ‘Captain of the Seventh Assault Company, Subcommander of the Chapter of the Serrated Sun.’

‘Yes, lord. It is I.’

‘Greetings, my son.’

The captain fought to keep the unease from his voice as he replied. ‘Sire, the vox-network is aflame. May I inform the Legion that all is well?’

‘Why would all not be well?’ the primarch asked, his face still unresolved from distracted confusion.

‘The explosion, sire,’ said Argel Tal. ‘Nine minutes ago.’ He gestured around. ‘The dome,’ he added lamely.

‘Ah,’ Lorgar smiled. It was a magnanimous and entertained smile, crooked as if sharing a joke. ‘I will have to discuss the matter of teleportation inside sensitive structures with my beloved brother in the future. Captain, do you intend to murder me?’

Argel Tal lowered his blades, only then realising he held them en garde.

‘Forgive me, sire.’

Lorgar laughed, the feyness dissipating completely. ‘Please inform the Legion I am well, and apologise for my lack of contact. I was quite lost in thought.’

On shrieking engines, two gunships drifted out of the night, hovering close to the tower-top. Their engine wash sent the remaining scrolls scattering off the edges, and spotlights stabbed down to illuminate the primarch with Argel Tal’s coterie.

Argel Tal blinked at a flashing icon on his retinal display. ‘This is the Seventh Captain. Stand down, stand down. False alarm.’

The tower-top fell dark as the stab-lights cut out.

‘By your word,’ one of the pilots said. ‘Disengaging.’

Lorgar watched the gunships cruise away, back to their landing pads on the city’s outskirts. All sky-freight – most notably the Legion’s own military outposts – were situated in the desert outside the city walls. Vharadesh would not be defiled by warfare. Never again. Not after the civil war that crushed the Old Ways and brought the planet under Lorgar’s rule so long ago.

‘My lord,’ Argel Tal ventured. ‘You requested the presence of Cyrene, the Monarchian.’

Lorgar seemed to notice the others for the first time. A warm smile lit his features, and he stepped closer.

‘I was just musing, captain, on whether I have thanked you yet.’

Argel Tal sheathed his blades and removed his helm. The warm air felt good on his face and sweating neck.

‘Thanked me, lord?’

‘Yes,’ the primarch nodded. ‘Were you and your Chaplain not the two who lifted me from the perfect city’s dust, and set me on my feet once more?’

‘Yes, lord. That was us. With respect, we didn’t expect you to recall it.’

‘Kor Phaeron professed not to remember your names. The old man has a black sense of humour. But I recall the moment all too well, and I thank you for it. I will arrange for my gratitude to be shown in a more significant way soon.’

‘No, sire...’ said Xaphen.

‘That’s not necessary, lord...’ said Argel Tal.

Lorgar raised a hand to stall their protests. ‘Ah, ah. Enough of that foolish modesty. Now, this must be the Blessed Lady. Come forward, child.’

Torgal and Malnor, who’d been kneeling in their lord’s presence, rose to their feet and guided Cyrene closer.

In the presence of a primarch, most mortals were gripped by the immensity of just what they were seeing. Here, in physical form, stood majesty incarnate. The biological manipulation, flesh-smithing and genetic rewriting that goes into the construction of one of the Emperor’s sons was a unique and unrepeatable practice, with its roots hidden beneath layers of ubelievable secrecy, for even if another sentient being could glimpse the Emperor’s gestation laboratories, they would never understand what transpired within. Every mote of biological matter in their bodies was painstakingly shaped – forged on the quantum level to contribute to the whole. It was beyond science, beyond alchemy, beyond psychic sorcery, and yet drew from all of these and more.

Humans had suffered strokes and heart attacks in the presence of primarchs. Almost all, without exception, abased themselves upon first meeting one. Many wept without intention or reason.

Cyrene stood where she was led to stand, and she smiled at Lorgar. Directly at him – directly at his face.

‘Hello, Blessed Lady,’ the god’s son chuckled. She was just tall enough to reach his waist.

‘I... I can see you,’ she almost laughed. ‘I can see your smile.’

Lorgar saw his warriors begin to come closer, ready to examine her, to see if her sight was returning. He gestured them back with a hand, and shook his head.

+Argel Tal+ The primarch’s voice was sibilant in the captain’s mind. Despite the gene-link between them, it was unpleasantly invasive – a spike of cold cutting right to the brain. The captain felt his muscles bunch, and both hearts beat faster.

The Word Bearer nodded, hoping his liege didn’t detect his discomfort, but knowing he almost definitely did.

+It is said she was abused on Khur+ came the primarch’s voice.

The Word Bearer nodded again.

+What a creature is Man+, Lorgar’s silent voice seemed to sigh. +So much of life is wasted seeking dominance over all around us.+

Emboldened by his father’s familiarity tonight, Argel Tal tapped two fingertips beneath his eyes, one after the other.

+No+ Lorgar’s silent voice was weighted by emotion. +She cannot see me. She senses me, my aura, and her mind misinterprets it as sight. But her eyes are still dead. They will always be. Guilliman’s incendiary rage blinded her forever.+

All of this transpired in three beats of Argel Tal’s twinned hearts. Lorgar hadn’t even glanced in his direction.

‘Yes,’ the primarch said to Cyrene, and lowered himself to one knee. It brought his face almost level with hers. Her sightless gaze followed his movements, and he smiled to see the effect he had on her. ‘Yes,’ he said again. ‘You can see me.’

‘As bright as the sun,’ Cyrene whispered, crying now. ‘I see gold, and gold, and gold.’

A hand the size of her head touched her with a ghost’s softness, thick fingertips brushing her cheeks, drying her tears. She breathed out a sigh without meaning to, somewhere between a sob and a laugh.

‘Cyrene,’ Lorgar’s voice was resonant and low in her ears. ‘I am told you are something of a talisman to my warriors. A lucky charm, if you will.’

‘I couldn’t say, my lord.’

‘I am not your lord,’ Lorgar gently stroked her features, fingertips smoothing along her nose, her cheekbones, her jawline. It was as if he were the blind one, needing to touch her to imagine her features. ‘Your life is your own, not mine – not anyone’s – to claim.’

She nodded, unable to speak through the mask of tears shining on her face.

‘Do you know why I wished to see you, Cyrene?’

‘No,’ her voice was strengthless and breathless. She merely mouthed the word.

‘To ask you for something. A gift only you can give.’

‘Anything,’ she mouthed. ‘Anything.’

‘Will you grant me forgiveness?’ the primarch asked. He took her tiny hands in his own, the golden fingers enveloping hers completely. ‘Will you forgive what I did to your world, to your perfect city, to your precious eyes?’

She managed a nod, looking away from the golden light she thought she could see.

Lorgar kissed her knuckles, the barest touch of his lips against her skin. ‘Thank you, Blessed Lady. My soul is lighter in the wake of your words.’

He released her hands, and rose to his feet, moving away.

‘Wait,’ she called out. ‘Let me serve you. Let me serve your Legion. Please.’

Argel Tal repressed a shiver. Cyrene’s words were achingly similar to the vow he’d made himself upon first seeing the primarch. How curious it was, when the past reached through to the present with such clarity.

‘Do you know,’ Lorgar asked her, ‘what a confessor is? Did they have such positions on Khur?’

‘They did, master,’ Cyrene said. She’d still not recovered her voice. ‘They called themselves the Listeners. They would hear our sins, and forgive them.’

‘Exactly,’ Lorgar chuckled. ‘Your life is your own, Cyrene Valantion of Monarchia. But if you wish to walk with my warriors and journey through the stars, then there is the perfect role for you to fill. You have heard my sins, and forgiven me. Would you do the same for my sons?’

Her answer was to kneel, abasing herself in thankful prayer. Instead of replying, her whispering voice spoke invocations of piety, straight from the scriptures she studied as a child.

The primarch cast a last affectionate look at Cyrene, before turning to Argel Tal. ‘Captain,’ he said.

‘My lord.’ Argel Tal saluted, fist over his chestplate.

‘Erebus had much to say about you in the month I was secluded. When I recalled who pulled me up from my knees before my brother Guilliman, Erebus spoke of you.’

‘I... am surprised to hear that, lord.’

Lorgar wasn’t deaf to the hesitance in Argel Tal’s tone. ‘I had assumed your discomfort with Erebus had faded with time. Have I erred in that belief?’

Argel Tal shook his head. ‘No, lord. Forgive me a moment’s distraction. Our difficulties are in the past. The trials were long ago.’

‘That’s good to hear,’ Lorgar chuckled. ‘To be trained by Erebus himself, and choose the blade above the crozius. You walking another path is a great blow to his pride, and a disappointment that cut him to his core. But he has forgiven you. I wondered – could the same be said for you? Have you forgiven him?’

Choosing another path. That, Argel Tal thought, was putting it very delicately.

‘There was nothing to forgive,’ he said. ‘His anger at my decision was understandable.’

Lorgar watched him closely, the primarch’s grey eyes forever judging, despite the affection that lay within them.

‘Your compassion has always done you great justice, Argel Tal.’

‘I am honoured you believe so, sire.’

‘So now we come to the crux of why you were summoned.’

‘I stand ready.’

‘There will be some changes to the Serrated Sun when you return to the Great Crusade. I have chosen four Chapters to play host to our Custodes sentinels – each Chapter dealing with five of the twenty. It is with regret that I inform you the Serrated Sun is one of them. I understand you met Aquillon in the city of glass? I have granted his request that one of the Custodes groups travel with the Serrated Sun. I saw no harm in throwing the Emperor’s watchdogs this one bone.’

‘By your word,’ said Argel Tal.

‘There’s more, I’m afraid.’ Lorgar smiled again, every inch the charming, golden hierarch who led a revolution on this very world. ‘I trust you above and beyond the call of duty. You lifted me from shame, dragging me from the dust, and I thank you for it. So I would ask, in all humility, if you would grant me a favour, Seventh Captain Argel Tal.’

The words, and the tone in which they were spoken, drove Argel Tal to his knee in supplication. What other primarch – what other godlike being – would be so humble as to ask one of his own sons for the gift of a favour? It humbled Argel Tal to be born into this being’s bloodline.

Lorgar laughed, the sound melodious in the night’s faint breeze. A dozen metres away, Cyrene heard the sound and felt the threat of tears again.

‘Rise,’ Lorgar said through the smile. ‘Have you not knelt enough, Argel Tal?’

He rose, but kept his eyes at the primarch’s feet. ‘Ask anything of me, sire. Anything, and it will be done.’

‘I have travelled with thousands upon thousands of my warriors, decade after decade, acting the general, playing the admiral. I grow weary of such games. While the Legion scatters across the stars, I have no wish to cross paths with my brothers now. Their righteous indignation will grate on my last nerves. You could say I wish to hide, but that would be a lie. I simply wish not to be found. There’s a beautifully subtle difference between the two.’

‘I understand, lord.’

‘Tell me: your expeditionary fleet – which was it, again?’

‘The 1,301st, sire. Commanded by Fleetmaster Baloc Torvus, currently engaged in the Atlas subsector.’ And awaiting reinforcement, he didn’t add out loud.

‘Yes,’ Lorgar nodded. ‘The 1,301st. I have journeyed with eighteen of my Chapters since the dawn of the Great Crusade. This time, as we face our uncertain future, I would ask your permission to travel with the three hundred warriors of the Serrated Sun.’

Argel Tal looked over his shoulder at Cyrene, then Xaphen, before turning back to Lorgar. The Chaplain nodded once. The confessor had her hands over her mouth as tears streamed down her face.

‘Pardon me, sire?’ Argel Tal asked. ‘I am not sure I heard you correctly.’

‘I am asking this favour of you, my son. Kor Phaeron will lead the 47th Expedition in my absence. I may not be able to outrun the Occuli Imperator – he will follow me wherever I go – but I can seek the empyrean far from my brothers’ eyes. And that is enough for now.’

‘You will... travel with us?’

‘I would be honoured to,’ said the primarch. ‘I could ask this of any of my fleets, I know. But you were the one to raise me back to my feet, when my ignorance had murdered a world. So I am asking you.’

‘I... Sire... I...’

Lorgar laughed again, his golden hands reaching to prevent Argel Tal from kneeling a second time. ‘Is that a yes?’

‘By your word, Aurelian.’

‘Thank you. It’s a new age, Argel Tal. A new age of vision and discovery. Every Word Bearer fleet will be cast to the winds of fate, sailing where they will. We will reach farther from Terra than any other Legion, pushing the Imperium’s boundaries with each world we take.’

Argel Tal knew where this was leading. It could only be going one way. He sensed Xaphen approaching from behind, though the Chaplain elected to say nothing.

‘We are seekers,’ Lorgar smiled, enjoying the word on his tongue. ‘We seek the place where gods and mortals meet – seeking divinity in a galaxy my father believes is godless.’

Lorgar clasped his hands together, and lowered his head in readiness for prayer.

‘The Legion will undertake the Pilgrimage.’

III

The Faceless Tarot

The cards are faceless, devoid of illustration. This is intentional – it’s what makes them so valuable, for they respond to the touch of an unseen sense, never relying on a lesser artist’s imagery to limit the human consciousness.

The crystal wafers are cored by a psychoreactive liquid, the images taking shape in the celadon resin as the tarot reader holds each card in his hands.

He had hoped, in time, that every psychically gifted soul in his father’s Imperium would come to learn this tarot. Instead, their creation had been scorned – even by Magnus (who had no need of such foci for his powers) and Leman Russ (who derided them even as he cast runestones and knucklebones in a bid to see the future).

It will soon be time to leave Colchis.

He turns the first card. In its milky surface, he sees a burning torch carried in a strong hand. Truth.

Something calls to me. That is a truth I am only now coming to accept. Something out there is calling to me.

I am not Magnus, to stare into space and easily hear the heartbeat of creation. My powers are not those of my dearest brother, nor my ascendant father. But something has always called to me. In my youth, it reached my mind as visions, nightmares, hallucinations. And now...

Erebus and Kor Phaeron – through their patience and guidance – aided me in growing attuned to the call.

My tutors in the Covenant, and my heart’s family now. We meditated, pored over the Covenant’s texts, and we decided the Legion’s destiny.

Something calls me, faint but infinite, prickling my sixth sense like an echo in the stars.

He turns the second card, and sees himself – robed and cowled, turning away so as to avoid his own gaze. A common card, this one. Faith.

Humanity is nothing without faith.

Faith raises us above the soulless and the damned. It is the soul’s fuel, and the driving force behind millennia of mankind’s survival. We are hollow without it. Existence is cold and arbitrary in a godless galaxy – faith shapes us, raises us above all other life, defines us as perfect in our sentience.

In eras where faith was choked, weakness and decay infested the species, withering its innards. That is something the Emperor, beloved by all, has always known, but never admits.

Yet he knows, and he forges his empire accordingly. A god need not be named a god in order to stand in supremacy. Names are meaningless. Supremacy matters – and my father stands ascendant over all mortal life in the galaxy: a god in power, a god in wrath, a god in vision.

A god in all but name.

The Old Faith of Colchis is one that shares roots in thousands of human cultures, across thousands of worlds. That alone is evidence that somewhere within its meandering parables, and the unsubtle blending of myth into history and history into myth, there exists a core of absolute truth.

The loveliest legend is that of the empyrean, the Primordial Truth.

It is known by countless names, of course. The empyrean is the name we spoke on Colchis. Others named it heaven – a means of existing into eternity, long after the death of the mortal form. A realm of infinite possibility: a paradise of potential where the souls of every mortal in history coil around one another.

Even I know such things are myths, stories spoken and passed down imperfectly through countless generations.

But... imagine it. Imagine the reality behind the myths. Imagine a place in the universe where gods and mortals meet. Imagine the miracles of power that could be performed.

Imagine a state of utter chaos, utter purity, where anything is possible. Life ends in death, but existence does not.

If there is truth to the Old Faith, I will find it.

He turns the third card. A haze of heat makes the sky shimmer above a skyline of towers and domes. Colchis. The City of Grey Flowers. Home.

The people of Colchis have always looked to the stars for answers. The Legion born on that world, the Bearers of the Word, is no exception. Many Chapters within the Legion are named for the constellations that brighten the night sky. Even the name they bestowed upon me, the name spoken by no one outside the Legion, has its foundations in antiquity. ‘Aurelian’, they call out as they wage war. ‘The golden’.

Yet its linguistic roots go further back, to a truer meaning, created by those ancestors that forever stared skyward for inspiration.

Aurelian. The sun.

It is natural for us to seek answers in the stars. Life comes from them. The Emperor descended from them. The Legion rose into them.

Fate awaits us beyond them.

Colchisian legends tell tales of primitive space-faring vessels leaving the world in search of the gods, much in the same way the Afrikaharan and Grecianic peoples of Ancient Earth once sought their deities. I have read the fragments that remain of their cultures, and I have walked the ways of the past with my brother Magnus. The travels of Osyrus and Odisseon in Terran myth are the travels of Khaane, Tezen, Slanat and Narag – prophets born of Colchis, great seekers now lost to time’s embrace.

Their journey to seek the home of the gods is known to us as the Pilgrimage.

He turns the fourth card. The psychoreactive liquid forms architectural wonders in his fingertips: an arching bridge, a meandering path of stone through a great garden... A journey. A pilgrimage.

The Pilgrimage is the oldest legend in the Covenant of Colchis, and the one most often seen in human cultures scattered across the galaxy. Humanity has a fundamental need to believe in it. The Primordial Truth: heaven, paradise... It exists somewhere, in some form – home of the gods, underworld of the daemons. The layer behind natural reality. Anything is possible within its boundaries.

The Pilgrimage is nothing less than the journey to see it with one’s own eyes. To confirm where mythology ends and faith begins.

Heaven. Hell. Gods. Daemons.

I will have the answers I seek.

He turns the fifth and final card. The Emperor, bedecked in finery, all details writ with punishing clarity except the one aspect that matters: his face. A golden lord.

I was weaned on the old scrolls – the very scrolls we cast aside in favour of worshipping the Emperor. Now, I cannot help but look back to the teachings of my youth, and think of those legends and their cores of truth.

In crude imagery, the old works showed a stain on the stars – a scar in reality, where the Primordial Truth reached out into the universe of flesh, bone, blood and breath. Each of them foretold of a golden lord, a being of godly power that would carry humanity to divine perfection. It had to be my father. It had to be the Emperor. And I believed it was, until the moment it was not.

He was not the golden lord. The Emperor will carry us to the stars, but never beyond them. My dreams will be lies, if a golden lord does not rise.

I look to the stars now, with the old scrolls burning runes across my memory. And I see my own hands as I write these words.

Erebus and Kor Phaeron speak the truth.

My hands.

They, too, are golden.

IV

A Child’s Dreams

I can only imagine how the primarch’s heart shattered when the Pilgrimage ended.

Three years of the Seventeenth Legion scattered across the stars. Three years of the Word Bearers sailing farther and faster than any of their brother warriors, reaching into the edges of space and pulling the boundaries of the Imperium with them.

So much of humanity’s dominion over the stars is owed to the sons of Lorgar – a bitter reality after the years of ponderous, meticulous advancement, earning them nothing but scorn.

But I know the temperament of this Legion. For every peaceful compliance – for every culture brought into the Imperium and quietly encouraged to follow the new Word – there will have been a world that now spins in space as a dead husk, fallen victim to the Word Bearers venting their wrath.

The Pilgrimage revealed many truths: the flaws written into the Legion’s precious gene-seed; the arcane gestation of Lorgar Aurelian himself; the existence of the neverborn – named as daemons, spirits and angels by a million ignorant generations of mankind. But the greatest truth revealed was also the hardest to accept, and it broke a primarch’s heart.

And of course, it changed his sons. The Word Bearers could never go back to a time before the truth.

Argel Tal and Xaphen were my closest links to a world I could no longer see, and the Pilgrimage’s destination changed them in ways far more profound than mere physical differences. The knowledge was a burden to them: that they and their brothers in the Word Bearers Legion must be the ones to return to the Imperium with this terrible truth.

I cannot conceive how they endured, being the heralds of such tidings. To be the ones chosen to enlighten an entire species that humanity would struggle from now until the day creation died. There would be no Golden Age, no era of peace and prosperity. In the darkness of the future, there would be only war.

Perhaps we are all playing the roles marked out by the gods. People who are destined for greatness will often dream great dreams as children. Fate shapes them for the years to come, offering their young minds a teasing glance at what will be.

Blessed Lorgar, Herald of the Primordial Truth, dreamed like this. His childhood was tormented by visions of his father’s arrival – a god of gold, descending from above – as well as nightmares of someone unknown, something unseen, forever calling his name.

And that is perhaps the greatest tragedy of the Word Bearers Legion. Their father knew he would be one of those bringing enlightenment to humanity, but he could never foresee how it would come to pass.

The primarch has spoken of his brothers and how they dreamed similar dreams. Curze, born on a world of eternal night, dreamed of his own death. Magnus, Lorgar’s closest kin, dreamed the answers to the universe’s mysteries. One was cursed with foreknowledge; the other blessed by it. Both were destined to do great things as they reached maturity. Their actions have shaped the galaxy, just as Lorgar Aurelian’s have.

As for myself, I only remember one nightmare from my youngest years.

In my dream, I sat in a blackened room, as blind in the darkness then as I am now. And in that darkness I sat in silence, listening to a monster breathe.

Where is the line between prescience and fantasy? Between prophecy and a child’s imagination?

The answer is simple. Prophecy comes true.

We just have to wait.

Excerpted from ‘The Pilgrimage’, by Cyrene Valantion

Twelve

Death
Final Flight of Orfeo’s Lament
Two Souls

Xaphen lay dead at the creature’s feet.

His spine twisted, his armour broken, a death that showed no peace in rest. A metre from his outstretched fingers, his black steel crozius rested on the deck, silent in deactivation. The corpse was cauled by its helm, its final face hidden, but the Chaplain’s scream still echoed across the vox-network.

The sound had been wet, strained – half-drowned by the blood filling Xaphen’s ruptured lungs.

The creature turned its head with a predator’s grace, stinking saliva trailing in gooey stalactites between too many teeth. No artificial light remained on the observation deck, but starlight, the winking of distant suns, bred silver glints in the creature’s unmatching eyes. One was amber, swollen, lidless. The other black, an obsidian pebble sunken deep into its hollow.

Now you, it said, without moving its maw. Those jaws could never form human speech. You are next.

Argel Tal’s first attempt to speak left his lips as a trickle of too-hot blood. It stung his chin as it ran down his face. The chemical-rich reek of the liquid, of Lorgar’s gene-written blood running through the veins of each of his sons, was enough to overpower the stench rising from the creature’s quivering, muscular grey flesh. For that one moment, he smelled his own death, rather than the creature’s corruption.

It was a singular reprieve.

The captain raised his bolter in a grip that trembled, but not from fear. This defiance – this was the refusal he couldn’t voice any other way.

Yes. The creature loomed closer. Its lower body was an abomination’s splicing between serpent and worm, thick-veined and leaving a viscous, clear slug-trail that stank of unearthed graves. Yes.

‘No,’ Argel Tal finally forced the words through clenched teeth. ‘Not like this.’

Like this. Like your brothers. This is how it must be.

The bolter barked with a throaty chatter, a stream of shells that hammered into the wall, impacting with concussive detonations that defiled the chamber’s quiet. Each buck of the gun in his shaking hand sent the next shell wider from the mark.

Arm muscles burning, he let the weapon fall with a dull clang. The creature did not laugh, did not mock him for his failure. Instead, it reached for him with four arms, lifting him gently. Black talons scraped against the grey ceramite of his armour as it clutched him aloft.

Prepare yourself. This will not be painless.

Argel Tal hung limp in the creature’s grip. For a brief second, he reached for the swords of red iron at his hips, forgetting that they were broken, the blades shattered, on the gantry decking below.

‘I can hear,’ his gritted teeth almost strangled the words, ‘another voice.’

Yes. One of my kin. It comes for you.

‘This... is not what... my primarch wanted...’

This? The creature dragged the helpless Astartes closer, and burst Argel Tal’s secondary heart with a flex of thought. The captain went into violent convulsions, feeling the pulped mass behind his ribs, but the daemon cradled him with sickening gentleness.

This is exactly what Lorgar wanted. This is the truth.

Argel Tal strained for breath that wouldn’t come, and forced dying muscles to reach for weapons that weren’t there.

The last thing he felt before he died was something pouring into his thoughts, wet and cold, like oil spilling behind his eyes.

The last thing he heard was one of his dead brothers drawing a ragged breath over the vox-channel.

And the last thing he saw was Xaphen twitching, rising from the deck on struggling limbs.

He opened his eyes, and saw he was the last to awaken.

Xaphen stood stronger than the others, his crozius maul in his hands. Through the blur of Argel Tal’s returning consciousness, he heard the Chaplain speaking orders, encouragement, demands that his brothers stand and pull themselves together.

Dagotal remained on his knees, vomiting through his helm’s mouth grille. What he produced from his stomach was much too black. Malnor leaned against the wall, his forehead pressed to the cool metal. The others were in similar states of disarray, hauling themselves to their feet, purging their guts of stinking ichor, and whispering litanies from the Word.

Argel Tal couldn’t see the daemon. He looked left and right, targeting reticule not locking on to anything.

‘Where is Ingethel?’ he tried to ask, but the only sound he made was a sick, thick drawl of wordless growling.

Xaphen came over to him and offered a hand to help him rise. The Chaplain had removed his helm, and in the chamber’s gloom the warrior-priest’s face was unnaturally pallid, but otherwise unchanged.

‘Where is Ingethel?’ Argel Tal repeated. This time, the words came forth. It was almost, but not quite, his voice.

‘Gone,’ Xaphen replied. ‘The vox is back online, and power has been restored to the ship. Squads are checking in from all decks. But the daemon is gone.’

Daemon. Still so strange, to hear the word voiced out loud. A word from mythology, spoken as cold fact.

Argel Tal looked up at the glass dome ceiling, looking out into the void beyond. There was no space. Not true space, at least. The void was a swirling, psychotic mass of flensed energy and clashing tides. A thousand shades of violet, a thousand shades of red. Colours humanity had never catalogued, and no living beings had seen before. Stars, stained by the riot of crashing energies, winked through the storm like bloodshot eyes.

At last, in the window’s reflection, he saw himself. Pearls of sweat rolled down his face. Even his sweat stank of the daemon: bestial, raw, ripe – the reek of organs, failing to cancer.

‘We need to get out of here,’ said Argel Tal. Something moved in his stomach, something cold uncoiling within him, and he swallowed acidic bile to keep from throwing up.

‘How did this happen?’ Malnor groaned. None present had ever heard the stoic warrior so unmanned.

Torgal staggered over to them, rubbing reddened eyes in sallow sockets. His chestplate was painted with a messy scorch-streak of burned ceramite – the black acid-burn of his vomit.

‘We need to get back to the fleet,’ he said. ‘Back to the primarch.’

Argel Tal caught sight of his own broken blades, scattered in jagged pieces across the decking. Repressing the sting of loss, he reached for his discarded bolter. As soon as his gauntleted fingers touched the grip, an ammunition counter on his eye lenses flickered at zero.

‘First, we need to get to the bridge.’

Every human on board was dead.

This was something Argel Tal had first feared as he moved in a lurching stride from corridor to corridor. The fear became reality as more and more of Seventh Company’s squads voxed to report the same thing.

They were alone here. Every servitor, every serf, every slave and preacher and artificer and servant was dead.

Deck by deck, chamber by chamber, the Word Bearers hunted for any sign of life beyond themselves.

Smaller than De Profundis, the destroyer Orfeo’s Lament was an attack ship, a sleek and narrow hunter, not a line-breaking assault vessel like many Astartes cruisers. Its crew numbered just under a thousand humans and augmented servitors at full complement, in addition to the hundred Astartes – a full company’s worth.

Ninety-seven Word Bearers remained alive. Of the humans, not one.

Three Astartes had simply not awoken as the others had. Argel Tal ordered their bodies burned, with the remains to be blasted out of an airlock as soon as the ship managed to get clear of the warp storm.

When, and if, that would ever be.

Evidence of the human crew’s demise was everywhere to behold. Argel Tal, bred without the capacity to feel fear, was not immune to disgust nor shielded by his genes from feeling regret. Each corpse he passed watched him with a lifeless stare and open jaws. They screamed in silence. Shrunken, yellowed eyes accused him with every step he took.

‘We should have defended them from this,’ he murmured the words aloud without realising.

‘No.’ Xaphen’s tone invited no argument. ‘They were naught but resources for the Legion. We do the Legion’s work, and they were the price we paid.’

Not the only price, Argel Tal thought.

‘This decay,’ he said. ‘I don’t understand.’ The captain’s pace was increasing with each step he took, and the closer he came to the bridge, the nearer he found himself to running. Strength flooded him, its presence a welcome contrast to the weakness only minutes before.

The hallway was a major thoroughfare running along the ship’s ridged back like a spinal column. At all hours of day and night, it was busy with crew members going about their duties.

Except now. Now it was silent but for Argel Tal’s footsteps, and his closest brothers with him. Rotting bodies lay gaunt and withered along the decking, husked by the dry, stale air put out by the ship’s oxygen scrubbers.

‘These bodies have been dead for weeks,’ said Xaphen.

‘That’s not possible,’ Malnor said. ‘We were unconscious for no more than a handful of minutes.’

Xaphen looked up from where he knelt by the desiccated corpse of a servitor. Its bionics had shaken loose of the withering organic limbs, and lay pristine on the floor.

‘Unconscious?’ he shook his head. ‘We were not unconscious. I felt my hearts burst in that beast’s claws. I died, Malnor. We all died, just as the daemon said we would.’

‘My hearts beat now,’ the sergeant replied. ‘As do yours.’

Argel Tal saw the same. Retinal displays didn’t lie. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘is not the time. We need to get to the bridge.’

The warriors moved again, stepping over the dried corpses that grew more frequent as they neared the command deck.

Eighty-one dead bodies waited for them on the bridge.

They lay sprawled or sat hunched, with several locked foetal on the floor, while others were cringing, curled, in their seats.

‘They knew what was happening,’ said Xaphen. ‘This wasn’t fast. They felt something as they died.’

Argel Tal hesitated by the twisted figure of Captain Janus Sylamor, curled in her throne as if she sought, in her last moments, to escape something that prowled nearby. Her sunken features, almost mummified, told him all he needed to know.

‘Pain,’ he said. ‘What they felt was pain.’

Dagotal was already by one of the drive consoles, dragging an officer’s body off the controls. The cadaver slumped to the decking, only to find its rest further disturbed by Xaphen, who set about examining it – carving into it – with his combat blade.

Dagotal swore in back-alley Colchisian. ‘I drive a jetbike, sir. I can’t fly an Imperial warship, even if we had the slaves necessary to feed the engine furnace.’

Argel Tal turned from the ship captain’s husk. ‘Just give me an overview.’

His voice still didn’t sound, didn’t feel, quite right. As if someone nearby was speaking the words in unison with him, in mocking chorus.

‘We’re dead in space,’ Dagotal adjusted more controls to no effect. ‘Power hasn’t been restored to all systems. Not even close. The Geller Field is enabled, but we lack void shields, plasma propulsion, energy weapons, projectile weapons, and life support on half the decks.’

‘Manoeuvring thrusters?’

‘Sir,’ Dagotal hesitated. ‘We’ve drifted significantly in the storm’s tides from where we came to all stop. Taking that into account, and lacking warp flight... On manoeuvring thrusters it will take us at least three months to break clear of the... nebula.’

‘It’s not a nebula,’ Xaphen murmured. ‘You’ve seen what’s outside. It’s not a nebula.’

‘Whatever in the name of hell it is,’ Dagotal snapped back.

‘Hell is a good enough word for it,’ Xaphen muttered, still distracted in his work.

Argel Tal lifted the body of Captain Sylamor from the oversized Astartes command throne, laying her to rest at the edge of the command deck. When he returned, he took her place, his armour clanking against the metal of her seat.

‘Fire the thrusters,’ he ordered. ‘The sooner we begin, the sooner we’ll be back with the fleet.’

‘Bloodless,’ Xaphen announced. He rose from his knees, blade in hand, the grisly dismemberment complete at his feet. Vox-officer Amal Vrey’s autopsy would never enter any official record, but it was unarguably thorough.

‘The bodies,’ Xaphen said, ‘they’re bloodless. Something leeched the blood from their veins, killing them all.’

‘Ingethel?’

‘No, Ingethel was with us. Its kin did this.’

Its kin. The daemon’s words resurfaced in Argel Tal’s aching mind. ‘Yes. One of my kin. It comes for you.’

He felt something slither within him. Something stirring, wrapping around the bones of his arms and legs, coiling in a tight spiral around his spine.

‘Summon every warrior to the bridge,’ he ordered, hearing his own voice echoing in his mind, a silent chorus twinned with his words.

‘And Dagotal,’ said Argel Tal, ‘get us out of here.’

The ship that limped its way from the warp storm was a far cry from the noble Imperial vessel that had cut its way in. It trailed psychic fog around its membrane-thin Geller Field, turning in a slow roll that spoke of flawed guidance systems and damaged stabilisers.

Pulsing from its mangled communications towers was a repeated message, the Colchisian words rendered into fuzz by detuned vox.

‘This is the Orfeo’s Lament. Critical casualties sustained. Grievous damage. Requesting extraction. This is the Orfeo’s Lament...’

‘Contact re-established with Orfeo’s Lament,’ called out one of the bridge crew.

The command deck of De Profundis was alive with activity – a hive of officers, servitors, analysts and crew members of every stripe, all working around a central platform that rose above the consoles. On the platform, a golden giant in robes of grey silk watched the occulus screen. His face, so close to the face of his father, was softened in a way the Emperor’s never was: Lorgar was both curious and concerned.

‘Already?’ he said, glancing to the officers at the vox-console.

‘Sire,’ the Master of Auspex called from his bank of flickering monitors, ‘the ship is... horrifically damaged.’

The bustle of the bridge began to quieten, as more and more crew members watched the occulus, seeing the Orfeo’s Lament in its powerless drift.

‘How can this be?’ Lorgar leaned on the handrail ringing the raised podium, his golden fingers gripping the steel. ‘That’s not possible.’

‘Receiving a distress pulse,’ said one of the vox-officers. ‘Sire... My primarch... The Orfeo’s Lament has suffered critical casualties. We’re getting an automated message.’

Lorgar covered his parted lips with a hand, unable to conceal his unrest where another primarch might have stood stoic. Worry was etched onto his handsome features, replacing the confusion that had taken hold moments before.

‘Play the message, please,’ he asked in a soft voice.

It came through in a crackle of vox, grating across the bridge speakers.

‘...the Orfeo’s Lament. Critical casualties sustained. Grievous damage. Requesting extraction. This is the Orfeo’s Lament...’

‘How can this be?’ he asked again. ‘Master of Vox, get me a signal to that ship.’

‘By your word, sire.’

‘Argel Tal,’ Lorgar breathed his son’s name. ‘I know his voice. That was Argel Tal.’

At his side, Fleetmaster Baloc Torvus nodded, his stern features emotionless where his primarch’s were tormented. ‘Aye, sire. It was.’

Contact took three and a half minutes to restore, during which the rest of the 1,301st Fleet had raised its shields and armed all weapons. Tug-ships sailed from the flagship’s docking bays, ready to drag the limping Lament back to its sister vessels.

At last, a picture resolved on the occulus, showing the other vessel’s bridge. Audio contact filtered back a few seconds afterwards, heralded by a burst of static.

‘Blood of the Emperor,’ Lorgar whispered as he watched.

Argel Tal wore no helm. His face was gaunt, a pathetic wraith of his former vitality, with his eyes ringed by the dark smears of countless restless nights. Speckles of old blood decorated the left side of his face, and his armour – what was left of it – was pitted and cracked, devoid of any holy parchment.

He rose from his command throne on unsteady legs and saluted. There was the softest bang as his fist hit his breastplate.

‘You’re... still here,’ he rasped. All strength was gone from his voice.

Lorgar was the one to break the silence. ‘My son. What has befallen you? What madness is this?’

Behind Argel Tal, other figures were moving into view. Word Bearers, all. They were just as weak, just as ruined, as their commander. One fell to his knees as Lorgar watched, praying in a senseless stream of conflicting words. It took several moments for the primarch to realise it was Xaphen, recognisable only because of the broken black armour.

Argel Tal closed his eyes, letting out a breath. ‘Sire, we have returned, as ordered.’

Lorgar glanced at Torvus, before turning back to Argel Tal. ‘Captain, you’ve been gone no more than sixty seconds. We just witnessed the Lament enter the edges of the storm. You return to us less than a minute after your departure.’

Argel Tal scratched his ravaged face, shaking his head. ‘No. No, that cannot be.’

‘It can be,’ Lorgar stared hard at him, ‘and it is. My son, what happened to you?’

‘Seven months,’ the captain sagged, leaning on the arm of his throne to keep standing. ‘Seven. Months. There are barely forty of us left. No food. We ate the crew... hateful mouthfuls of leathery flesh and dry bones. There was no water. Water tanks ruptured in the storm damage. We drank promethium fuel... weapon oils... engine coolant... Sire, we’ve been killing each other. We have been drinking each other’s blood to stay alive.’

Lorgar looked away only for long enough to address one of the vox-officers. ‘Bring them in,’ he said, pitching his voice low. ‘Get my sons off that ship.’

‘Sire? Sire?’

‘I am here, Argel Tal.’

‘The Lament has had its final flight. We are on guidance thrusters alone.’

‘Thunderhawks are already launching,’ the primarch assured him. ‘We will return to safer space together.’

‘Thank you, sire.’

‘Argel Tal,’ Lorgar hesitated. ‘Did you slay the crew of Orfeo’s Lament?’

‘No. No, sire, never. We ate their carcasses. Carrion-feeders. Like the desert jackals of Colchis. Anything to survive. We had to bring you the answers you sought. Sire, please... There is something you have to know. We have the answers to all your questions, but one above all.’

‘Tell me,’ the golden giant whispered. He was unashamed at the tears in his eyes, to see his sons reduced to... to this. ‘Tell me, Argel Tal.’

‘This place. This realm. Future generations will name it the Great Eye, the Eye of Terror, the Occularis Terribus. In hushed voices, they will give a thousand foolish names to something they cannot understand. But you were right, my lord.

‘Here,’ Argel Tal gestured with a weak hand at the seething warp storm visible through the bridge windows, ‘is where gods and mortals meet.’

Soon, he was in isolation. Taken from his brothers.

This was not entirely unexpected, but they had also taken his weapons – ‘for much-needed maintenance, brother’ – and that, he’d not foreseen. They were cautious around him now. The escorts walking him to his meditation chamber had been tense, reluctant to speak, hesitant to answer even the simplest questions.

Never before had he felt this raw distrust between brothers. He knew what its genesis was, of course. The truth could never be hidden, and he had no desire to hide it. Yes, the survivors had eaten the human dead. Yes, they had butchered their own brothers. But not for sport. Not for glory. For survival.

To quench a lethal thirst, with the coppery wine that runs from cut veins.

What other choice was there? To die? To die away from the fleet, with the answers to every question the primarch had ever asked locked behind their dead lips?

But you did die. The traitorous thought rose behind his focus. You did die.

Yes. He did. He’d died before he chewed on the leathery skin of bloodless bodies. Before he’d used his dagger to slice open his brothers’ throats and drink their life to sustain his own.

Some of them had died twice, then. A final death, to fuel the lives of those who would survive.

Thirty-eight Word Bearers had left the wreck of Orfeo’s Lament. Thirty-eight, from one hundred. Far below half-strength. Seventh Company was devastated.

Argel Tal drew in a shivering breath. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw the storm outside. In the warp’s roiling tides, ten million faces silently screamed his name. He saw their lips moving, their teeth bared, their faces formed of clashing, psychic energy spilling across the ship’s Geller Field barrier. The flesh and blood of unformed daemons. The raw matter of souls.

He exhaled, and opened his eyes.

The walls of his personal chamber, his haven aboard De Profundis for so many years of the Great Crusade, seemed alien now. Strange, how seven months could change a soul. Seven months, and a skull full of unbridled revelations.

The chronometer above the doorway mocked him with a date over half a year in the past. The primarch’s words were an unwanted truth: seconds had passed at the edges of the warp anomaly. Months dragged by within.

Stripped of his armour, the captain examined his wasted body in the reflection of his dagger, the only weapon remaining to him. A revenant returned his gaze – a skeletal, hollow-eyed creature on the wrong side of the grave.

He lowered the blade, and awaited the chime he knew would come soon.

In his humility, Lorgar had never looked grander.

He came to Argel Tal wearing the layered, glyph-embroidered robes of a Covenant priest, with the hood raised, darkening his features. In his hands he carried a small wooden chest; the box was open, revealing a selection of vulture-feather quills with an inkpot. Under one arm, the primarch bore a roll of papyrus parchments to record his son’s words. As Lorgar entered, Argel Tal saw the hulking forms of two Word Bearers – brothers from the Serrated Sun, but not Seventh Company – standing outside his door.

Standing guard outside his door.

‘Am I a prisoner, father?’ he asked the primarch.

Lorgar drew back his hood, revealing his eternally youthful face and the uncertain smile upon it. His grey eyes were heavy with emotion, and little of it was pleasant. He grieved for his sons. He grieved for what he saw now.

‘No, Argel Tal. Of course you are not a prisoner.’ Their eyes met in that moment, and Lorgar’s smile froze on his perfect lips.

‘The guards at my door would seem to suggest otherwise,’ said Argel Tal.

Lorgar didn’t answer. The beautifully carved wooden box crashed to the bare metal floor. The noise drew attention, and the bulkhead door slammed open. Two warriors from 37th Company came in, bolters aimed at Argel Tal’s head.

‘Sire?’ they asked as one.

The primarch didn’t answer them, either. He stood in rapt silence, reaching out, almost touching the captain’s gaunt face. At the last moment, he drew his hand back before his fingers brushed Argel Tal’s sunken flesh.

Their eyes were still locked: primarch and captain, father and son.

‘You have two souls,’ Lorgar whispered.

Argel Tal closed his eyes to break the stare. Something – a hundred somethings – slithered through his blood, worming within his veins, pushed on by his heartbeat.

He rose to his feet at last.

‘I know, father.’

‘Tell me everything,’ said the primarch. ‘Speak to me of the daemon, and the world of revelation. Tell me why my son stands before me with his soul cleaved in two.’

Thirteen

Incarnadine
Stormlost
Voices in the Void

‘1301-12.’ As Argel Tal spoke the code, acidic saliva stung the underside of his tongue.

1301-12, the twelfth world to be brought to compliance by the 1301st Expeditionary Fleet. ‘Of the seven worlds we conquered in three years,’ he said, ‘this was the most painful.’

Lorgar did not disagree.

‘And yet,’ the primarch said, ‘it was also bloodless. Not a shot fired in anger, nor a blade drawn in rage. The pain was born of revelation.’

‘Three years, sire,’ said Argel Tal, looking away from his father’s eyes. ‘Three years, and seven worlds. History will point to those worlds, the husks we left, and describe how the XVII Legion vented its wrath in the wake of our failure. World after world burned, the populations butchered to slake our fury.’

Lorgar’s smile was pyrite-false. ‘Is that how you see our Pilgrimage?’

‘No. Never. But seven worlds died in fire, and we were almost destroyed after leaving the eighth.’

Lorgar’s grey gaze didn’t waver for a moment. He was seeing with his sixth sense, looking into his son’s heart, and sensing the second soul gestating there.

‘Enough of this maudlin remembrance,’ Lorgar’s tone betrayed his impatience. ‘Speak of the world we found.’

‘Do you remember,’ Argel Tal asked him, ‘when we first reached orbit?’

The floor was trembling in a most specific way.

Xi-Nu 73 processed this. Beneath his metal feet, the rumble of the ship’s deck had a very particular pulse – neither the arrhythmic flow of warp flight, nor the heartbeat tremor of sustained guidance thrust. Instead, murmurs coursed through his artificial bones, faint but blessedly metronomic.

Orbit.

Orbit, at last.

The last journey had been a long one. Xi-Nu 73 wasn’t a being given to indulging in speculation beyond the present, but his calculated projections were grim. The warp storms battering the fleet would certainly have claimed more than the three ships they’d already taken, had the 1,301st pressed on even farther past this world.

Xi-Nu 73 had heard one of his menials tell another that ‘the storm outside was hurling itself at the ship’s shields’, and he’d berated the worker for grafting human attributes onto an inappropriate subject. Such anthropomorphosis would harm the servant’s chances for future elevation within the Mechanicum.

It was a violent storm, no doubt there. But there existed no passion, no anger, no intent in the warp’s tides.

Elsewhere on De Profundis, the decks were alive with activity, as Astartes and human crew made ready for planetfall.

Xi-Nu 37 was largely immune to the brain chemistry necessary to feel excitement, having reengineered himself beyond such sensation. Instead, he focused entirely on his work, which stimulated the pleasure centres of his brain – a minute amount for each subroutine performed with absolute accuracy and ergonomic efficiency.

His fingers – fifteen of them spread across three mechanical hands – worked in the armoured bowl of Alizarin’s skull. It was a process of restructuring globs of bio-plastic, each one dripping with nutrient-rich juices, within the robot’s head. Each tract of spherical relay globes needed to be fixed and sealed into position, then connected to the slave systems they controlled, as well as the fail-safes they relied on in incidents of battle damage. Such were the workings of the robotic mind: an intelligence in mimicry of life, grown in a gene-lab to be used in a machine body.

The smell rising from this bowl of artificial cerebrospinal fluid was a revoltingly spicy reek reminiscent of rotting onions, but of course, Xi-Nu 73 had taken himself beyond the capacity to react to that as well. He only knew of the smell at all because his perceptive sensors streamed data onto his retinas, describing the stench in bland screeds of binary.

Despite the intricacies of his task, Xi-Nu 73 reserved a median five per cent of his focus to monitor his surroundings. Internal sensor arrays, perceiving the world through echolocation, first tracked the door to his workshop opening, then the movement of a figure traversing the chamber. The figure emitted an unmistakable power signature: armour, Mark III, Astartes.

Several other signals joined the first. Five Astartes in total.

These details flashed up as runic symbols on Xi-Nu 73’s vision display. He paid them little heed, knuckle-deep as he was in organic slime, plugging tiny interface feeds into segmented spheres of bio-plastic. Each sphere was a part of the cortex program. Each fibre-optic link simulated synapses.

The Astartes had the good grace not to interrupt. They waited the three point three-two minutes until Xi-Nu 73 had finished the current phase of ministrations. A satisfaction pulse wormed through Xi-Nu’s datacore. Dampened pleasure receptors fired. Work was complete.

At last, the Mechanicum adept turned from the workshop table. Ooze dripped from his fifteen metal fingers.

‘Subcommander,’ he said, neither acknowledging the senior sergeants at Argel Tal’s side nor offering the kind of respectful bow usually given by mortal members of the crew. ‘You are present to commence preparations on Incarnadine.’

Argel Tal was armoured for the coming planetfall, as were the officers with him. Xaphen, clad in black, Dagotal, Malnor and Torgal – all wearing the Legion’s granite grey.

‘It is time,’ said Argel Tal.

Xi-Nu’s three lens-eyes took a few seconds to refocus. ‘This way,’ the adept replied.

The warriors followed the machine-priest into the red-lit chamber beyond.

It wasn’t that Xi-Nu 73 felt any shame in Incarnadine’s induction into the Word Bearers Legion. Such an honour was tantamount to the highest accolades in the Legio Cybernetica, and evidence of the commanding adept’s mastery – such a machine clearly had a spirit of fierce intensity, and was worthy of recognition.

It was just that since the induction into the Serrated Sun, since the Chapter’s sigil had been etched onto the robot’s forehead, the Conqueror Primus of 9th Maniple was a touch more... erratic. The machine’s spirit had the error-laden propensity to act unpredictably, and that was unacceptable.

Even to a veteran adept like Xi-Nu 73, this made no sense outside of his deepest, darkest suspicions. He’d run several hundred diagnostics, as was his meticulous duty, but the discrepancies (the flaws? The aberrations?) in Incarnadine’s cortex would resurface after each maintenance.

On one occasion, never to be repeated, Xi-Nu 73 had taken the greatest, gravest risk, purging Incarnadine’s bioplastic brain. After flushing every trace of matter from the robot’s skull bowl, he rebuilt the cortex over the space of four months, using spare parts, ritually cleansed after being taken from his supply caches.

The robot had a new brain, for Cog’s sake. And still, still, it was...

Well. There was another problem. The Martian code-tongue lacked adequate description to summate the problem. Xi-Nu 73 had ventured the closest human term to describe the situation was that his Conqueror Primus was glitched. He considered this a symptom of his assignment, not just to the 1,301st Expeditionary Fleet, but to the Word Bearers Legion itself.

The war machines and expert technical crews of Carthage Cohort were spread across the many Word Bearers fleets, rather than housed on their own Mechanicum vessels the way the Titan Legions were. Lorgar’s own insistence made it thus. Decades before, when the Legio Cybernetica had first approached the Word Bearer lord, Lorgar had generously offered to modify his vessels to accommodate the specialist needs of his new Mechanicum allies.

‘We are all brothers under the same god’s gaze,’ he’d said to the Fabricator-General, during his first visit to the surface of Mars. Apparently, a concordance was reached soon after. The Carthage Cohort, one of Cybernetica’s proudest armies, would march with the XVII Legion, and dwell in the bowels of their vessels.

Xi-Nu 73 had not been present at the time this ancient oath was sworn – had not even been flesh-born back then – and this contributed to his doubts about the tale’s veracity. The reason it never cogitated as pure truth to Xi-Nu’s perceptions was simple: despite how useful the Carthage Cohort was to the Word Bearers Legion, the Astartes simply did not like the Mechanicum element in their midst. Relations were closer to cold than cordial, even taking the Mechanicum’s inhumanity into consideration.

It was said other Legions worked more harmoniously with the Martian Cybernetica cult, especially the blessed Iron Hands and unbreakable Iron Warriors – both of whom enjoyed the Mechanicum’s immense (and immensely valuable) respect from the first days their forces joined together in the Terran Emperor’s crusade.

But over time, Xi-Nu 73 – who had most humbly risen to oversee a maniple of four robots – came to realise that the Word Bearers were not like their Astartes brothers. It was an opinion shared by others of his rank, on those increasingly rare occasions he established contact with them.

As the fleets moved farther and farther apart since the last grand gathering at Colchis three years before, so too did contact between the Carthage maniples wane. Vox-signals would never reach across such distances. Even astropathy was rumoured to be becoming unreliable – not that Xi-Nu 73 had access to such a talent.

Xi-Nu 73’s principal problem where the Word Bearers were concerned was their fundamental organic nature. In short, they were too human. They valued the flawed aspects of faith, focusing on the flesh and the soul, rather than transcendence through oneness with the Machine-God. They were fuelled by emotion, rather than logic, which affected their tactical decisions and their very goals in the Great Crusade.

Most tellingly of all, many of the Serrated Sun’s warriors seemed uncomfortable around the Mechanicum adepts themselves, as if forever on the edge of voicing some accusation, or framing a grievous complaint.

Too human. That was the problem. Too emotional, too driven by instinctive faith and eloquent diction. Too human, resulting in distance between the factions.

The exception to this distance was a source of disquiet for Xi-Nu 73, because the exception was his own Conqueror Primus.

Incarnadine, blessings upon its brave soul, was sincerely respected by the Word Bearers.

Indeed, they called it ‘Brother’.

He led the Astartes into the preparatory chamber, where his wards were undergoing the final rituals before reawakening. The three armoured machines stood in impassive silence, doted on by Mechanicum menials, all under Xi-Nu 73’s command. Two of the robed attendants were lifting Vermillion’s back-mounted lascannon, hefting it up along its greased runner track, testing the smoothness of motion as they brought it up to the firing position on the Cataphract’s shoulder.

Sanguine, the gangly Crusader-class twin to Alizarin, was almost ready. The juddering clank of autoloaders filled the chamber as its shoulder cannon was fed fresh stores of ammunition. Servitors oiled its joints, only allowed near the war machine now that the vital work was complete.

Incarnadine was waiting for them.

That fact brought a stab of irritatingly human unease to Xi-Nu 73’s thought processes. The robot’s combat wetware was about to be installed, and then Incarnadine would be ready for deployment. But there it was: the anomalous reading in its brain patterns. An attention spike in the otherwise flat-lining rumble of its cognition. This flare of perception, along with the faintest adjustment of its visual receptors, only ever occurred in the presence of Word Bearers.

Like an animal instinctively recognising its kin, Incarnadine knew when warriors of the XVII Legion were near.

This was why Xi-Nu 73’s pride was tainted. The robot’s cortex shouldn’t have allowed for this level of recognition without its combat wetware installed. It shouldn’t be able to distinguish between targets and non-targets – seeing no difference between Astartes, human soldiers, aliens, or anything else.

In fact, it shouldn’t be able to perceive anything at all beyond the presence of walls and floors, with the simple operational understanding not to crash into anything. And yet the robot had been waiting for this moment. Xi-Nu 73 tracked the glitch in Incarnadine’s sensors as the Conqueror Primus recognised the Word Bearers before it.

‘Incarnadine,’ said Argel Tal, and the voice broke the adept’s scrambled line of reasoning. The subcommander wore no helm, and Xi-Nu 73 saw the Astartes looking up at the towering machine. With no small reverence, the warrior unrolled a scroll of parchment, and began to read.

‘As a warrior of the Seventeenth Legio Astartes, the Bearers of the Word, a brotherhood born of Colchis and born of Terra, do you swear to fight in the name of Lorgar – heart and soul, body and blood – until the world below, designated One-Three-Zero One-Nine, is brought to lawful compliance with the Imperium of Man?’

Incarnadine stood in silence. Argel Tal smiled, and didn’t look away.

‘Incarnadine,’ said Xi-Nu 73 from his position to the side, ‘swears the oath as it is written.’

The Astartes continued as if the adept wasn’t even there. ‘Incarnadine, your oath of moment is witnessed by your brothers...’

‘Dagotal.’

‘Torgal.’

‘Malnor.’

‘Xaphen.’

‘...and affirmed by myself, Argel Tal, Subcommander of the Serrated Sun.’ The captain affixed the scroll to Incarnadine’s armour plating, mounting it on the hooks designed especially for this use. All five of the Astartes wore similar scrolls attached to their shoulder guards.

Xi-Nu 73’s pride warred with his unfading irritation. Praise to the Omnissiah for the blessing of his own Conqueror Primus being accepted into an Astartes Legion’s ranks, but curse the influence such a loyalty was having on its cortex.

The ritual completed, the Astartes saluted with their fists over their primary hearts, and made their way from the chamber. There’d been a time when the warriors would have made the sign of the aquila, but Xi-Nu 73 hadn’t seen them perform the Imperial salute since the Legion’s shaming three years before.

In the red-lit gloom of the chamber, the adept focused his tri-lens gaze on the hulking form of his favoured ward.

‘Where do your loyalties lie, I wonder?’

Incarnadine didn’t answer. It stood as it had for hours now: silently awaiting the next battle.

The ship shook again – even in orbit, the void around this new world was rich with warp energies, and occasional pulses of force brushed the ship’s skin. Xi-Nu 73 had also stripped his brain function to deplete the fantastical outreaching of his human imagination, and yet the squealing of the storm against the hull sounded like... claws.

He filed the sound in his lobe archives, and went about his duties, only occasionally disturbed by the sound of nails clawing at the metal hull.

The Blessed Lady really needed to put some clothes on.

She reached blindly over the edge of her bed, her hand patting the floor, questing until she found her robe. Cyrene was slipping the garment over her head when she felt Arric’s arms encircling her from behind.

‘It’s still early,’ he said, breathing the words against her neck.

‘Actually, I think you’re already late. That wasn’t the dawn chime, it was the signal for noon.’

‘Don’t joke,’ he said, pulling her closer.

‘I’m not joking.’ Cyrene ran her fingers through her hair, ignoring his as they quested over her. ‘Arric,’ she said, ‘I’m really not joking.’

He rolled out of bed with an ‘Oh, shit...’ before repeating the curse a number of times, in various languages.

Being in love with an officer could, at times, be an educational experience – especially ones that could swear in eighteen Gothic dialects.

‘Shit,’ he finished the tirade back where he started. ‘I have to go. Where the hell is my sabre?’

She faced him without seeing him. ‘I think it slid under the bed. I heard it scrape on the floor last night.’

‘Where would I be without you?’ Arric dragged the blade out from beneath the bed, and fastened the leather belt around his crumpled, unbuttoned uniform. ‘I’ll be back later,’ he said.

‘I know.’

‘Planetfall today,’ he said, as if it would somehow be news to her. The ship quivered around them, and she reached out to the wall, steadying herself.

‘I know,’ she said.

‘Though with this storm...’

‘I know,’ she said again.

‘How do I look?’ he spoke the words with a grin, always enjoying this oldest of rituals between them. Usually she smiled back. Not this time.

‘Like someone who is late for a meeting with fleet command. Now go.’

Argel Tal nodded to Major Jesmetine as the human officer half-tumbled through the closing doors.

‘I’m here,’ he called out. ‘I made it.’

His ochre uniform, marking him as a senior commander in the 54th Euchar Infantry, wouldn’t pass muster on a parade ground without some serious tidying up first. His black hair was in a similar state, and he’d not shaved this morning, either.

He regarded the others gathered in the briefing room, where they all stood around an expansive central table. Forty men, women and Astartes (the latter, he smirkingly liked to call ‘post-humans’) turned to regard him in turn.

Above them, the chamber’s illumination globes flickered as the ship shuddered again.

‘Sorry,’ said the major. ‘I’m here now.’

Several heads shook, while irritated mutters broke out. The officer took one of the few places left at the table, next to a Word Bearer captain. The charged hum from the warrior’s armour joints was ear-achingly loud up close. It made it a chore to hear the others’ voices.

‘Good of you to join us, Arric,’ Fleet Commander Baloc Torvus said, scowling down the table at the breathless major. ‘As I was saying–’

‘My apologies,’ the major interrupted again. ‘The servitors on D deck are struggling with the... elevator... gyro-cogs. Something of a nightmare, really. Had to run the long way.’

From across the chamber, the armoured figure of Chapter Master Deumos thudded a fist onto the table.

‘Be quiet, you fool,’ he grunted.

‘Sorry, sir.’ Arric saluted – the pre-Crusade fist over his chest, rather than the aquila.

Xi-Nu 73 turned his hooded head with a rattle of grinding gears. ‘There is no component in the ship’s construction matching the term “gyro-cog”,’ he noted.

Arric narrowed his eyes at the tech-adept. Thanks for that.

‘I am aware,’ the Word Bearer lord growled, ‘that Major Jesmetine was lying through his teeth with very little skill. Torvus, get on with the details. We have a world to bring to compliance.’

Torvus began his summary, detailing land masses, population projections, and the disposition of forces. The people of 1301-12 were primitives, yet the entire Expeditionary Fleet was preparing for war: Army contingent, Astartes companies, Mechanicum forces – everything.

It all depended on first contact.

Arric listened to the things he’d already studied in the official reports. He caught the Word Bearer captain next to him glancing down.

‘Did you comb your hair with your fingers?’ Argel Tal asked.

The doors slid open before Arric could reply, but the retort would have been a rude one. Clad in ceremonial armour of chainmail and a breastplate of carved ivory, the primarch entered the war room.

‘My friends, please accept the sincerest apologies for my untimely arrival.’ Lorgar favoured them all with a beatific smile before taking his place at the head of the table. ‘I trust all is in readiness for planetfall?’

The gathered commanders assured him that it was. Resplendent in the ceremonial armour of a Covenant warlord, Lorgar listened to their reports in turn.

‘Sire,’ one said, at the conclusion.

‘Speak, Argel Tal.’

‘One matter still troubles me. It has been three weeks now,’ the captain said, ignoring the mutters that started up. ‘Where is the Unending Reverence?’

Lorgar rested his golden hands on the central table, leaning forward. All present could see in his eyes how much the words cost him.

‘It is stormlost. We will mourn the crew, and our brothers on board. But it is folly to hold out hope any longer.’

‘Sire...’ Argel Tal was far from placated. ‘We will not even search for them? One vessel stormlost is a tragedy, but three... Aurelian, please, the Expedition is threatened. We must seek them.’

‘How? In the warp?’

Another judder gripped the ship, this one lasting several moments. Lorgar smiled a downcast little smile, no doubt amused at the timing of the ship’s renewed trembling. ‘Even the aftershocks of this storm are savage. You wish to dive back into the warp to hunt three atoms in a whirlwind?’

‘I call again for the astropaths to make the attempt,’ said Argel Tal. ‘If they can find their counterparts on the Reverence–’

‘My son,’ Lorgar shook his head. ‘Your compassion does you great credit, but we cannot halt the Pilgrimage on account of one lost warship. The warp is a cruel mistress. How many vessels has the Imperium lost in its tides over the course of the Great Crusade? Hundreds? Perhaps even a thousand or more.’

Major Arric tapped a few buttons on his own data-slate. ‘We’re on the frontier, and we all know it. Reinforcements aren’t coming our way, no matter how loud we shout for help. How regularly are we receiving word from other fleets now?’

‘The time between contacts is rising exponentially,’ said Phi-44. ‘The last astropathic transmission from Lord Kor Phaeron’s main fleet was four months ago.’

Xaphen spoke up now. ‘The first captain’s last message contained updated star charts showing the Legion’s expansion to the Galactic Rim, and a list of compliances achieved. It also contained the sincerest gratitude for the eight thousand more words and three pict references to be added to their fleet’s copies of the Book of Lorgar.’

The primarch chuckled, but said nothing.

Xaphen continued, ‘The closest Imperial expedition to us is the 3,855th, almost a year’s warp flight distant.’

‘What Chapters lead the 3,855th?’ asked Deumos.

‘The Bloodied Visage,’ Phi-44 confirmed, ‘and the Crescent Moon. And Chaplain Xaphen is incorrect. The 3,855th Expeditionary Fleet is between thirteen and fifteen months distant, depending on the vagaries of the warp.’

Silence fell.

‘A year,’ said Lorgar. ‘How far we have come, to serve as humanity’s eyes in the dark. No other Imperials have spread themselves this far apart, nor travelled this far from Terra and its conquered territories.’

A year. Argel Tal was struck by the distance put into such terms. We are over a year’s flight distant from our nearest brothers, and even farther from the Imperium’s true edge.

‘So we’re well and truly alone,’ Arric echoed the captain’s thoughts, and the ship punctuated his words with another savage tremor.

‘Sire,’ Argel Tal began again.

‘Peace, my son,’ the primarch cut him off with a gentle lift of his hand. ‘Master Delvir? Can you offer Captain Argel Tal the solace he seeks?’

The Master of Astropaths was a watery-eyed rake of a man, clad in a robe of colourless grey that hung off his shoulders in velvet waves. He regarded the room with a kicked dog’s expression as he realised more and more faces were turning his way.

‘Our auguries are... That is to say... Our senses are... I can hear the world we move towards. It’s difficult to put into words.’

Lorgar cleared his throat to draw the man’s attention. ‘Master Delvir?’

‘My lord?’ the man asked in his whispery voice.

‘You are among equals, here. Friends. We all sympathise with the pressures the storm has placed upon you. Do not be nervous or hesitant in explaining the details.’

Shosa Delvir, Master of Astropaths, bowed without much in the way of grace. But it was sincere. Lorgar returned the bow, not to same depth, but with a smile.

‘Sometimes,’ the astropath began slowly, ‘mere chance is enough to bring an Imperial fleet to one of humanity’s lost worlds. Blessed are those occasions. More often, we rely upon the few ancient star charts that endured the chaos of Long Night and the Unification Wars that ravaged Terra. But when you rely upon us – when you call upon the astropathic choir – I... I will explain it as best I can.’

‘That,’ Argel Tal watched his father writing the words down, ‘was the first moment my blood ran cold. Anchored above the world, when the astropath told us how his kind saw through the storm.’

Lorgar nodded. ‘It was the moment I first knew we were reaching the end of the Pilgrimage,’ he said.

‘There’s truth in that,’ the captain sighed.

No longer did their eyes meet as Argel Tal spoke. The delicate scratching of a feather quill on parchment provided the only accompaniment to Argel Tal’s spoken words.

The Master of Astropaths only hesitated for a moment.

‘We hear voices in the void,’ he said. ‘A world is a hive of sound, the buzzing of locusts or flies, but far, far in the distance. It is never easy to make out one world in the endless reaches of space. The Imperium is an ocean of silence, and only the most intense focus allows us to hear the hum of human sentience. Imagine yourselves beneath the water of a great sea. All sound is muted, while the silence is powerfully oppressive. Now try to listen for voices in the nothingness, when all you can hear is your own heartbeat.’

‘Sire...’ Deumos interrupted. ‘Must we listen to this crude prose?’

Lorgar’s answer was to press a golden finger to his smile. ‘Let Master Delvir speak. I find his words enlightening.’

The astropath pressed on, avoiding any of their gazes. ‘If you focus too hard on listening for voices, you will forget to swim. You’ll drown. If you devote all your energy to swimming for the surface and breathing once more... you will hear none of the ocean’s sounds.’

‘You strive for balance,’ said Argel Tal. ‘That does not sound easy.’

‘It is not, but no soul in this room can lay claim to an easy existence.’ The astropath offered a respectful bow to the gathered warriors. Several acknowledged his respect with a salute. Argel Tal was one of them. He liked the scrawny little man.

‘What has changed?’ the captain asked. He felt the primarch’s eyes upon him.

‘This region of space is like no other we’ve seen in our travels. The warp is savage, and our ships are slaves to raging tides of aetheric energies.’

‘We have all seen warp storms before,’ said Lorgar. The glint in his grey eyes spoke volumes: he knew all of this, and was leading the astropath on, letting the psychic sensitive explain it to the fleet’s commanders.

‘This is different, sire. This storm has a voice. A million voices.’

It was safe to say he had the council’s attention. Argel Tal tasted poison as he swallowed. On a whim, he keyed in an activation code onto the table’s hololithic projector.

In flickering imagery, the region of space – zoomed out to display hundreds of suns and their systems – was beamed above the central table. It was impossible to miss what was wrong.

‘This region here,’ the astropath gestured. ‘If the choir closes its eyes and reaches out with its secret senses... all we hear is screaming.’

The area was vast. Bigger than vast. It covered hundreds upon hundreds of solar systems, ugly even on the hololithic. The warp anomaly showed as a gaseous fog staining the stars, coiling down to a centre of roiling, boiling energy.

‘When you all look at this,’ said Arric Jesmetine, ‘does anyone else see an eye? An eye in space?’

Many agreed. Lorgar did not.

‘No,’ the primarch said. ‘I see a genesis. This is how galaxies appear when they are born. My brother Magnus showed me such things in the Hall of Leng, on fair Terra. The difference is that this... birth... is not physical. This is the ghost of a galaxy. You all see an eye, or a spiral. Both are right, both are wrong. This is the psychic imprint of some incredible stellar event. It was powerful enough to rip the void apart, letting warp space bleed into the corporeal galaxy.’

The astropath nodded, awed gratitude in his eyes as the primarch spoke the words he lacked himself.

‘That is what we believe, sire. This is not merely a warp storm. This is the warp storm, and it has raged for so long that it now saturates physical reality. The entire region is both space and unspace. Warp and reality, all at once.’

‘Something...’ Lorgar stared at the bruised heavens, his gaze distant. ‘This is an abortion. Something was almost born here.’

Argel Tal cleared his throat. ‘Sire?’

‘It’s nothing, my son. Just a fleeting thought. Please continue, Master Delvir.’

The astropath had little more to say. ‘The storms that have wracked our journeys these last weeks emanate from this region. Around 1301-12, space is relatively stable. But think of the storm we endured to reach this point of stability. That storm blankets thousands of star systems around us. If we break from this narrow corridor, the energies playing out would be...’

He trailed off. Lorgar looked at him sharply. ‘Speak,’ the primarch commanded.

‘An old Terran term, sire. I would have said the storm is apocalyptic.’

‘What does that mean?’ asked Argel Tal.

It was Xaphen that answered. ‘Damnation. The end of everything. A very, very old legend.’ The thought seemed to amuse him.

‘If the storm is nothing but screaming,’ Argel Tal turned to Delvir, ‘then how did we find this world? How could you hear the life upon it?’

The astropath took a trembling breath. ‘Because something on the world below us screams even louder.’

‘Something,’ the captain said. ‘You did not say “someone”.’

The robed man nodded. ‘Do not ask me to explain, for I cannot. It sounds human, but is not. The way you would hear another warrior’s accent and know him to be from another part of your home world, the astropathic choir hears something inhuman screaming in human tongues.’

Lorgar cut off the discussion with a motion of his hand. ‘This region is unmapped and unnamed. What vessels were lost in the journey through the storm?’

Phi-44 answered before the fleetmaster could. ‘The Unending Reverence, the Gregorian and the Shield of Scarus.’

The Word Bearers present inclined their heads in respect. The Shield had been the strike cruiser of their own Captain Scarus and his 52nd Company. Their loss was a savage blow to the Serrated Sun, finding itself at two-thirds strength purely by the warp’s fickle winds.

‘Very well,’ said Lorgar. ‘Ensure all stellar cartography is updated, with records sent back to Terra. This region is hereafter known as Scarus Sector.’

‘Will we make planetfall, sire?’ This from Deumos.

With infinite care, the primarch took a rolled parchment from a wooden tube at his belt. He unrolled it with a precious lack of haste, and finally turned it to face them all. On the papyrus scroll, a spiralling stain was sketched in charcoal. Everyone recognised it immediately. It was already before them – the stain across the stars.

As the commanders watched, a vicious shiver ran through the ship. Emergency lighting stained all vision red for several seconds, and the hololithic winked out of existence. Argel Tal re-keyed the activation code as the lights returned.

The image flared back into jagged, unreliable life.

‘Bitch of a storm,’ Major Jesmetine muttered. A few quiet agreements were all the response he got.

‘This is drawn from memory,’ said Lorgar, meeting their eyes in turn. ‘But my Word Bearers will recognise it.’

‘The empyrean,’ the Legion officers said at once.

‘The Gate of Heaven,’ Xaphen amended, ‘from the old scrolls.’

‘We were summoned here,’ Lorgar said, his voice low and clear and unbroken by doubt’s shadow. ‘Something called out to our astropathic choir through the storm. Something wanted us here, and something awaits us on the planet below.’

The astropath broke decorum, possibly for the first time in his quiet and sheltered life. ‘How... how can you know that?’ he stammered the words through pale lips.

Lorgar let the scroll fall onto the table. Something like anger burned behind his eyes.

‘Because I hear the screaming, too. And it is not wordless. Something on the world beneath us is crying out my name into the psychic storm.’

Fourteen

Violet Eyes
Two Voices
Answers

Argel Tal looked at his reflection in the cup of water. Thin fingers touched the stark geography of his face. It was like stroking a skull.

Lorgar didn’t look up from writing.

‘Planetfall,’ said the captain.

Violet eyes.

It was only apparent deviation from the purestrain human breed. With violet eyes, the people stared at the emissaries from the stars. Barbarians, dressed in rags and wielding spears tipped by flint blades, confronted Lorgar and his sons.

And yet, the primitives showed little fear. They approached the Word Bearers’ landing site as a disjointed horde, divided by tribes, each host carrying flayed-skin banners and animal bone totems denoting their allegiance to the spirits and devils of their world’s faith.

Lorgar had taken a small host to make first contact with the humans of 1301-12. The rest of the fleet remained ready in the heavens above, but Lorgar preferred to orchestrate first contact in more humble ways.

At his side stood Deumos, Master of the Serrated Sun, with the captains Argel Tal and Tsar Quorel of the Seventh and Thirty-Ninth Companies respectively. Both captains brought their Chaplains, who in turn stood with their crozius mauls drawn. Behind them, one figure stood skeletally slender, clad in a hooded robe. Three mechanical eyes peered out from the cowl as Xi-Nu 73 watched proceedings taking place. At his side, Incarnadine waited motionless, exuding threat without moving a gear.

Only one figure stood apart from the pack; clad in gold, bearing a spear of exquisite craftsmanship. Vendatha, the Custodian. Aquillon would not be dissuaded from one of his brothers joining them. The Occuli Imperator made it a point for at least one of his warriors to always accompany the primarch on incidents of first contact.

The Custodian’s red helmet crest fluttered in the wind, as did the parchment scrolls bound to the Word Bearers’ armour. He stood closest to Argel Tal. In all Vendatha’s time with the fleet, no other Astartes present had showed him – or the other Custodes – the ghost of respect, let alone an offer of friendship.

At their backs, a Legion Thunderhawk sat at rest – traditional granite-grey, for Lorgar’s golden Stormbird remained with the 47th Expedition. The primarch didn’t miss it, even three years since last setting eyes upon it. The gunship’s ostentation had always reeked more of gaudiness than grandeur. Let the preening Fulgrim adorn his war machines like works of art. Lorgar’s tastes ran to less puerile pursuits.

‘Their eyes,’ said Xaphen. ‘Every one of them has violet irises.’

‘Look up,’ the primarch spoke softly.

Xaphen obeyed. They all did. The warp storm wracking the region shrouded most of the night sky, a great spiral stain of reds and purples staring down like an unblinking eye.

‘The storm?’ Vendatha asked. ‘Their eyes are violet because of the storm?’

Lorgar nodded. ‘It has changed them.’

Xaphen rested his crozius on his shoulder as he still stared into the sky. ‘I know the warp can infect psychics with the flesh-change, if their minds are not strong enough. But normal humans?’

‘They are impure,’ Vendatha interrupted. ‘These barbarians are mutants...’ he gestured with his spear at the approaching tribes, ‘...and they must be destroyed.’

Argel Tal glanced to his left, where the Custodian stood with his halberd lowered. ‘Does this not fascinate you, Ven? We stand on a world at the edge of the greatest warp storm ever seen, and its population comes to us with eyes the same colour as the tortured void. How can you damn that before asking why it happens?’

‘Impurity is its own answer,’ said the golden warrior. He refused to be drawn into debate. ‘Primarch Lorgar, we must cleanse this world.’

Lorgar didn’t look at the Custodian. He merely sighed before speaking.

‘I will meet these people, and I will judge their lives myself. Pure, impure, right and wrong. All I want is answers.’

‘They are impure.’

‘I am not slaughtering the population of an entire world because my father’s war hound whined at the colour of their eyes.’

‘The Occuli Imperator will hear of this,’ Vendatha promised. ‘As will the Emperor, beloved by all.’

The primarch took a last look at the blazing sky. ‘Neither the Emperor, nor the Imperium, will ever forget what we learn here. You have my word on that, Custodian Vendatha.’

The first of the barbarians approached.

Draped around her shoulders was a cloak of discoloured peach-brown, heavy like bad leather, bound by crude black stitching. Her eyes, that beautiful and disquieting violet, were ringed by white paint, daubed in tribal runes over her face. The symbols meant nothing to Vendatha.

But the cloak did.

‘Degenerates...’ the Custodian hissed over a closed vox-channel. ‘That is human skin. Dried, cured, worn like a cloak of honour.’

‘I know,’ Argel Tal replied. ‘Lower your weapon, Ven.’

‘How can Lorgar deal with these creatures? Flayers. Primitives. Mutants. They coat their skin in meaningless hieroglyphs.’

‘They’re not meaningless,’ said the captain.

‘You can read those runes?’

‘Of course,’ Argel Tal sounded distracted. ‘It’s Colchisian.’

‘What? What does it say?’

The Word Bearer didn’t answer.

Lorgar inclined his head in respectful greeting.

The barbarian leader, at the head of over a hundred ragged people dressed in similar rags and armour of disquieting ‘leather’, showed no trepidation at all. More tribes were still converging from across the plainsland, but they held back, perhaps in deference to the young woman with the raven hair.

Skulls tied to her belt rattled as she moved. Despite reaching the primarch’s waist, she seemed utterly at ease as she lifted her mutated eyes to meet the giant’s own.

When she spoke, a heavy accent and clipped syllables couldn’t disguise the language completely. It had come far from its proto-Gothic roots, but the Imperials recognised it, some with greater ease than others.

‘Greetings,’ the primitive said. ‘We have been waiting for you, Lorgar Aurelian.’

The primarch let none of his surprise show. ‘You know my name, and you speak Colchisian.’

The young woman nodded, seeming to muse on the primarch’s deep intonation, rather than agreeing with Lorgar’s words. ‘We have waited many years. Now you walk upon our soil at last. This night was foretold. Look west and east and south and north. The tribes come. Our god-talkers demanded it, and the warchiefs obeyed. Warchiefs always heed the shaman-kind. Their voices are the voices of the gods.’

The primarch watched the crowd for signs of such respected tribal elders. ‘How is it that you speak the tongue of my home world?’ he asked their leader.

‘I speak the tongue of my home world,’ the woman replied. ‘You speak it, also.’

Despite the burning skies and the surprises the girl brought, Lorgar smiled at the stalemate.

‘I am Lorgar, as you foresaw, though only my sons call me Aurelian.’

‘Lorgar. A blessed name. The favoured son of the True Pantheon.’

Through great effort, the primarch kept his voice light. No stray nuance could allow this first contact to go wrong. Control was everything, all that mattered.

‘I do not have four fathers, my friend, and I am not of woman born. I am a son to the Emperor of Man, and no other.’

She laughed, the melody of the sound stolen by the blowing wind.

‘Sons can be adopted, not merely born. Sons can be raised, not merely bred. You are the favoured son of the Four. Your first father scorned you, but your four fathers are proud. So very proud. The god-talkers tell us this, and they only speak truths.’

Lorgar’s casual facade was close to cracking now. The Word Bearers sensed it, even if the humans did not.

‘Who are you?’ he asked.

‘I am Ingethel the Chosen,’ she smiled, all innocence and kindness. ‘Soon, Ingethel the Ascended. I am your guide, anointed by the gods.’ The barbarian woman gestured at the plain, as if it encapsulated the world itself. More tellingly, she gestured to the warp-wracked void above.

‘And this world,’ she spread her painted hands in benevolence, ‘is Cadia.’

It was something of a unique first contact.

Never before had the Imperials been expected like this. Never before had they been greeted by a primitive culture that not only welcomed them, its people showed no fear at all in the face of giant armoured warriors striding through their midst. The Thunderhawk attracted some curiosity, though the primarch had warned Ingethel that the vehicle’s weapons were active, manned by Legion servitors who would open fire if the Cadians drew too close.

Ingethel waved the curious men and women away from the Word Bearers gunship. The language she spoke was quick and flourishing, with a wealth of unnecessary words bolstering every sentence. Only when she addressed Lorgar and his retinue did she seem to strip the language down to its core, striving for brevity and clarity, evidently speaking Colchisian rather than Cadian.

Lorgar stopped his son’s words with a concerned glance.

‘You are snarling as you speak,’ the primarch said.

‘It is unintentional, sire.’

‘I know. Your voice is as divided as your soul. I can see the latter with my psychic sense – two faces stare out at me, four eyes and two smiles. None would ever know of it, save perhaps my brother Magnus. But to know the truth, one has only to listen. Mortal ears will know of your affliction, Argel Tal. You must learn to hide it better.’

The captain hesitated. ‘I was under the belief that I’d be destroyed after telling you all of this.’

‘That is a possibility, my son. But I would take no pleasure in seeing you dead.’

‘Will the Serrated Sun be purged from Legion records?’

Before speaking, Lorgar trickled fine, powdery sand onto the parchment, helping to dry the inked words he’d written thus far.

‘Why would you ask that?’

‘Because where once three hundred warriors once stood loyal, now barely a hundred remain alive. Of the three companies, one remains whole. Deumos is dead, slain upon Cadia. A hundred of our brothers were stormlost, taken by the warp on the Shield of Scarus. And now my company returns to you broken and... changed.’

‘The Serrated Sun will always be a lesson for the Legion,’ said Lorgar, ‘no matter how the Pilgrimage ends. Some things must never be forgotten.’

Argel Tal took a breath. In the exhalation was a whispering sound. Something was laughing.

‘I do not wish to speak of Cadia, sire. You already know everything I know that transpired on the surface. The nights of discussions with Ingethel and the tribal elders. The comparisons of our star charts with their crude maps of the heavens. Their pictographs of the Eye of Terror, and how the Cadians’ images of the storm matched the empyrean from our scrolls of the Old Faith.’ Argel Tal laughed, and the sound lacked any humour. ‘As if we needed more evidence.’

Lorgar was watching him closely.

‘What, sire?’

‘The storm that blights this subsector. You called it the Eye of Terror.’

Argel Tal froze. ‘That... Yes. That’s what it will come to be called. When it opens wider across the void, when the trembling Imperium sees it as the galaxy’s own hell. A void-sailors’ dramatic name for the greatest mystery of the deep. It will be scrawled onto maps and digitally inscribed into stellar cartography databanks. Humanity will give it that name, as a child names its own simple fears.’

‘Argel Tal.’

‘Sire?’

‘Who is speaking to me now? That is not your voice.’

The captain opened his eyes. He didn’t recall closing them.

‘It has no name.’

Lorgar didn’t answer at once. ‘I believe it does. It has identity, as strong as yours. But it slumbers. I sense its dissipation within you. You absorb it into the cells of your body like...’ here, he paused again. Argel Tal had often wondered what it was like to see all life on every possible level, even the genetic one – the lives and deaths of billions of barely measurable cells. Could all primarchs perceive thus? Merely his own? He had no idea.

‘Forgive me, sire,’ he said to Lorgar. ‘I will keep my eyes open.’

Lorgar’s breathing quickened. No unaugmented man would be able to discern the difference in the primarch’s heartbeat, but Argel Tal’s senses were keener than a human’s by many degrees. In truth, they were keener than Astartes perception now. He could hear the tiniest creak-stresses in the metal walls of his chamber. The guards’ breathing outside the sealed bulkhead door. The skittering whisper of an insect’s legs in the ventilation duct.

He’d felt this acuity before, back on Orfeo’s Lament, during the seven months of drift-sailing in their bid to escape the Eye. The feeling had come many times, in truth, but none as strongly as when only a brother’s blood quenched his thirst.

‘I see two souls at war within you, and the violence behind your eyes. Yet I wonder,’ the primarch confessed, ‘if you are cursed or blessed.’

Argel Tal grinned, showing too many teeth. It wasn’t his smile. ‘The difference between gods and daemons depends largely upon where one stands at the time.’

Lorgar wrote the words down.

‘Speak to me of the last night on Cadia,’ he said. ‘After the religious debates and the tribal gatherings. I have no interest in repeating weeks of research and rituals performed in our honour. The fleet’s data-core is swollen with evidence that this world, like so many others, shares unity with the Old Faith.’

Argel Tal licked his teeth. It still wasn’t his smile. ‘None so close.’

‘No. None as close as Cadia.’

‘What do you wish to know, Lorgar?’

Here, the primarch paused, hearing his name leave his son’s lips with such casual disregard. ‘Who are you?’ he asked, neither threatened nor fearful, but not quite at ease.

‘We. I. We are Argel Tal. I. I am Argel Tal.’

‘You speak in two voices.’

‘I am Argel Tal,’ the captain said through clenched teeth. ‘Ask what you will, sire. I have nothing to hide.’

‘The last night on Cadia,’ said Lorgar. ‘The night Ingethel was consecrated.’

‘This is heathen sorcery,’ said Vendatha.

‘I don’t believe in sorcery,’ Argel Tal said back. ‘And neither should you.’

Their voices echoed in the temple chamber, which was no more than a roughly-hewn room in the endless network of subterranean caverns. With no structures of human craft on the face of Cadia, the Temple of the Eye was far less grand than its name suggested. Beneath the northern plains where the Legion had made planetfall, the caverns and underground rivers formed a natural basilica.

‘This world is a paradise,’ Vendatha remarked. ‘It beggars belief that so many tribes come to dwell here in these deadlands.’

Argel Tal had heard this complaint before. Vendatha, in his blunt and stoic wisdom, had seen the orbital picts as often as the Word Bearer captain had. Cadia was a planet of temperate forests, expansive meadows, healthy oceans and arable land. Yet here, in an uninspiring corner of the northern hemisphere, the vagabond population gathered en masse to eke out a living on the arid plains.

Xaphen walked with Argel Tal and the Custodian down the stone corridor. The temple’s construction was as flimsy as could be expected from a culture of primitives – the sloping walls showed the stone-scars of miners’ picks and other digging tools – but the chambers weren’t entirely devoid of decoration. Pictographs and hieroglyphs covered every wall, replete with symbols, charcoal murals and etched sigils that made little sense to Vendatha.

In truth, it hurt his eyes to look at many of them. Uneven, jagged stars were scrawled everywhere, as well as long mantras in a meaningless tongue, their sentence structure clearly indicative of verse. Sketches of the Great Eye, as the Cadians named the storm above, were also commonplace.

Torches of bundled sticks burned in wall sconces at irregular intervals, making the stone hallways misty with smoke. All in all, Vendatha had been to many more pleasant places. A pox on Aquillon for volunteering him to descend to the surface.

‘It is not difficult to comprehend why they come here, when you understand faith,’ said the Chaplain.

‘Faith is a fiction,’ Vendatha snorted.

Argel Tal had never wagered in his life – to gamble was against the Legion’s monastic code; it showed a reverence for worldly wealth which was meaningless to all pure-hearted warriors – but he would have been safe to gamble that the words Vendatha spoke most often were: ‘Faith is a fiction’.

‘Faith,’ said Argel Tal, ‘means different things to different beings.’ It was a weak attempt to sunder the argument he could feel building between the other two, and it failed, just as he’d suspected it would.

‘Faith is a fiction,’ Vendatha repeated, but Xaphen went on, warming to his captive audience.

‘Faith is why these people come here. It is why their temple stands at this spot. The stars are all in the right alignment at this place, and they believe it aids their rituals. The constellations mark the gods’ homes in the sky.’

‘Heathen magic,’ Vendatha said again, getting annoyed now.

‘Pre-Imperial Colchis was the same, you know.’ Xaphen wouldn’t let up. ‘These rites are little different to the ones performed in the generations before Lorgar’s arrival. Colchisians have always invested great significance in the stars.’

Vendatha shook his head. ‘Do not add mindless superstition to the list of grievances I have against you, Chaplain.’

‘Not now, Ven.’ Argel Tal was in no mood for the two of them to go through yet another debate on the nature of the human psyche and the corruption of religion. ‘Please, not now.’

While Argel Tal had slowly grown closer to the Custodes contingent in the past three years, often training his sword work with them in the practice cages, Xaphen seemed to take a kind of wicked delight in baiting them at every turn. Philosophical arguments almost always ended with Vendatha or Aquillon needing to leave the chamber before they struck the Chaplain. In turn, Xaphen counted these moments as great personal victories, and had an old man’s cackle about the whole thing.

‘If the stars are so precious to them,’ Vendatha’s voice was crackling through his helm’s speakers, ‘then why do they hide beneath the earth?’

‘Why don’t you ask them tonight?’ Xaphen smiled.

The three of them walked on, and the silence lasted for several blessed moments.

‘I hear chanting,’ the Custodian sighed. ‘By the Emperor, this is madness.’

Argel Tal heard it, too. The levels below them extended deep into the earth, but the thick stone carried sound with deceptive ease. To walk in the temple-caverns was to hear laughter, footsteps, prayers and weeping – at all times of day and night.

On one of those lower levels, the ritual was underway.

‘I have watched you clutch at parchments and babble to the Cadians in their own tongue for weeks now.’

‘It’s Colchisian,’ Argel Tal said, distracted, as he ran his gauntleted fingers along a charcoal depiction of what looked like the primarch. The image was crude, but showed a figure clad in a robe, next to another figure in mail armour, with one gaping eye. They stood atop a tower, in a field of shaded flowers.

This wasn’t the first such image Argel Tal had seen, yet they never failed to capture his interest. Serfs from the fleet had landed in huge numbers, set with the tasks of exploring the Cadian caves and taking pict references of every marking they found.

‘Is this is how your Legion repents for failing the Emperor?’ Vendatha asked. ‘After so many compliances, I’d dared to perceive you all in a new light. Monarchia was a past sin. Even Aquillon believed the same. And now we come here, and everything unravels as you stutter to these wretches in alien speech.’

‘It’s Colchisian,’ Argel Tal said, refusing to be riled.

‘I may not be fluent in your monotonous tongue,’ said Vendatha, ‘but I know enough. What leaves the Cadians’ lips is not Colchisian. Nor are these writings. This resembles nothing else. Its roots aren’t even in proto-Gothic.’

‘It’s Colchisian,’ Argel Tal said again. ‘It’s archaic, but it is Colchisian.’

Vendatha let the old argument go. Aquillon had already been informed, and had travelled down to the surface to see everything for himself. The Custodes leader was fluent in Colchisian, yet struggled with the words just as Vendatha did. The cognitive servitors brought down from orbit met with the same difficulties – no linguistic decoders could make sense of the runic language.

‘Perhaps,’ ventured Xaphen, ‘we are a chosen Legion. Only those of Lorgar Aurelian’s blood may speak and read this holiest of tongues.’

‘You would delight in that being the truth, wouldn’t you?’ Vendatha snorted.

Xaphen just smiled in reply.

The Custodian’s mood was black in the wake of his most recent failures to decipher the scrawls on these cave walls.

‘What does this say?’ he indicated a random verse written upon the uneven rock wall.

Argel Tal glanced at the prose, seeing more of the poetry he’d come to expect here: simple, more like a form of clumsy lyric than reverent chanting. Knowing the Cadians’ god-talkers, this was likely the work of a shaman, maddened with hallucinogenic narcotics, spilling his stream of consciousness onto the sacred walls.

‘...we offer praise to those who do,
That they might turn their gaze our way,
And gift us with the boon of pain,
To turn the galaxy red with blood,
And feed the hunger of the gods.’

‘It’s just more bad poetry,’ he said to Vendatha.

‘I cannot read a single word.’

‘It’s very artless,’ Xaphen smiled. ‘You’re not missing any insight into an advanced culture.’

‘It doesn’t concern you that I cannot read this?’ the Custodian pressed.

‘I have no answer for you,’ snapped Argel Tal. ‘It’s the feverish etchings of a long-dead shaman. It ties in to the Cadian belief in other gods, but its meaning is as lost on me as it is on you. I know nothing more.’

‘Were the weeks spent with the primitives in their tent-city somehow not enough, Argel Tal? Now you must attend the false worship of ignorant barbarians?’

‘You are giving me a headache, Ven,’ said Argel Tal, barely listening. His retinal display tracked a digital counter of the last time he’d slept. Over four days now. The conclaves with the Cadians ate up a great deal of time, as the Word Bearers pored over the humans’ scriptures and discussed their faith’s ties to the Old Ways of Colchis. Lorgar and the Chaplains were bearing the brunt of the ambassadorial and research efforts, but Argel Tal found his time occupied with plenty of tribal leaders pleading for his attention.

‘I confess,’ said Vendatha, ‘that I’d hoped the Legion would avoid tonight’s... foolishness.’

‘The primarch ordered our presence,’ Xaphen replied. ‘So we will be present.’ As the three warriors descended down more rough stone steps, the sound of distant drums grew more resonant.

‘You have agreed to witness these degenerates perform a ritual without knowing what they intend.’

‘I know what they intend,’ Xaphen gestured at the walls. ‘It is written everywhere, plain for all to see.’ Before Vendatha could answer, the Chaplain added something that Argel Tal hadn’t heard before. ‘The Cadians have promised us an answer tonight.’

‘To what?’ both the Custodian and the captain asked as one.

‘To what was screaming the primarch’s name in the storm.’

Argel Tal clenched his fist, but there was little anger in the gesture. He seemed content to watch the play of his muscles and the bones of his fingers working in natural, biological unity.

‘Deumos,’ he said. ‘It was not easy to see him die.’

The primarch’s quill stopped scratching at the parchment. ‘Do you mourn him?’

‘I did for a time, sire. But he has been dead over half a year to me. What I’ve seen since has made all previous revelations seem trivial.’

‘You are snarling again.’

Argel Tal grunted acknowledgement, but had no desire to speak of it. ‘The consecration,’ he said instead.

The captain was surprised when he first entered the main cavern, which wasn’t quite the same as being impressed.

It was certainly of considerable size, and given that the Cadians’ technology was somewhere in the region of Terra’s long-forgotten Age of Stone, it had likely taken years to carve out the subterranean chamber and etch the murals, symbols and verses upon the walls and floors.

An underground river ran in a rushing torrent below dozens upon dozens of arched stone bridges. The curving walls were lit by more smoky torches, casting myriad silhouettes across the cavern that danced in frantic abandon to the sound of the drums.

A central island formed a hub for the bridges to meet in the middle. Here, naked in the firelight, her pale skin painted with twisted runes, was Ingethel. For the ghost of a moment, the symbols tattooed on her body drew Argel Tal’s eyes. He recognised them all immediately, for each sigil was a stylised representation of a constellation drawn right from the night skies of Colchis. The Serrated Sun encircled the girl’s navel in blue ink.

Drummers surrounded her in a ring, beating leathery skins with animal bones. Thirty in all – their harmonic pounding like the world’s own beating heart. Hundreds and hundreds of Cadians lined the outer walls and walkways, all watching the performance as it was underway. Many chanted in praise of their heathen gods.

The alkaline smells of pure water, human sweat and ancient stone were almost overpowering, but Argel Tal still scented blood before he saw its source. Sensing his urgency, his visor tracked and zoomed across the scene. In the shadowed edge of the central ring, ten spears reached up from the ground.

The bases of nine of the wooden spears were streaked with blood and shit, forming sick pools on the stone. The spears themselves bore human fruit: each of the nine stakes played host to a tribesman – all impaled, all dead. The speartips thrust up through the dead men’s open mouths.

‘This cannot be allowed to continue,’ said Vendatha. Disbelief softened his voice.

And this time, Argel Tal agreed with him.

Ingethel danced on, her lithe figure silhouetted into blackness by the bright fires behind her. At the heart of it all, not far from the maiden’s undulating form, Lorgar towered above every other living being. He watched in silence with his arms crossed over his chest, his features masked by a raised hood.

Deumos stood by the robed primarch’s side, sweating in full battle armour. Captain Tsar Quorel and his Chaplain, Rikus, stood way behind. Both wore their helms. Both were watching the impaling spears, rather than the dancing human girl.

‘Brother,’ Argel Tal voxed to his fellow captain, ‘what blasphemy have we intruded upon?’

Tsar Quorel’s tone betrayed his own unease. ‘When we arrived, the woman was as you see her, and the primarch stood here watching. The atrocities on the spears were already committed. We saw as you see now.’

Argel Tal led Xaphen and Vendatha over a stone walkway, approaching the primarch. Cadians scattered like vermin before a pack of hunting dogs, bowing, scraping, reaching out with shaking fingers to touch the Colchisian runes engraved on their armour.

‘Sire?’ Argel Tal asked. ‘What is all this?’

Lorgar didn’t look away from Ingethel. Her dance seemed carnal to Argel Tal’s inexpert eyes, as if the maiden was mating with some unseen creature as part of her performance.

‘Sire?’ Argel Tal repeated, and the primarch glanced his way at last. Ingethel’s shadow danced across his eyes, reflected there by the firelight.

‘The Cadians believe this ritual will allow their gods to manifest among us.’ His voice was as low as the drums.

‘You allowed them to do this?’ He stepped closer, showing more disrespect to his gene-sire than he ever had in his life, for his hands fell to rest upon his sheathed swords. ‘You watched them commit human sacrifice?’

The primarch took no offence at his son’s boldness. In truth, he seemed not to notice it. ‘The blood offerings were made before I was invited into the sacred chamber.’

‘Yet you are still taking part. You tolerate this. Your silence endorses this barbarism.’

Lorgar turned back to watch the girl’s dance, which grew ever more frantic. Perhaps an edge of doubt marred his flawless features. Perhaps it was simply the maiden’s shadow flickering over the primarch’s face.

‘This is no different to the rituals practised on Colchis only decades before your birth, captain. This is the Old Faith in all its theatrical glory.’

‘This is an abomination,’ Argel Tal took another step closer.

‘All I want,’ Lorgar enunciated each word with patient care, ‘is an answer.’

Before them, Ingethel slowed in her whirling dance. Her tattooed skin was a living, sweating devotion to the Word Bearers’ Chapters and the Colchisian night skies from whence they drew their names.

‘It is time,’ she said to Lorgar in a hoarse, breathless voice. ‘It is time for the tenth sacrifice.’

The primarch tilted his head down at the girl, not quite a concession. ‘And what is the tenth sacrifice?’

‘The tenth sacrifice must come from the seeker. He chooses the slain. It is the final consecration.’

Lorgar drew breath to answer, but was denied the chance to speak.

A sinister crackle came into waspish life – all recognised the snapping buzz of a power weapon going live. Vendatha lowered his guardian spear, aiming the blade and bolter at Lorgar’s heart.

‘In the Emperor’s name,’ said the Custodian, ‘this ends now.’

Fifteen

Sacrifice
Baptism of Blood
Unworthy Truths

‘By the authority invested in me by the Emperor of Mankind, I do judge thee a traitor to the Imperium.’

Lorgar watched Vendatha, his benign expression unchanging all the while.

‘Is that so?’ asked the primarch.

‘Don’t do this,’ said Argel Tal. ‘Ven, please, do not do this.’

Vendatha didn’t take his eyes from Lorgar. The golden spire-helm faced forward, red eye lenses catching the flames’ reflection. Around them all, the drums were starting to slow and fall quiet.

‘If any of you reach for a weapon, this becomes an execution, not an arrest.’

The Word Bearers remained frozen. Some risks weren’t worth taking.

‘Lorgar,’ whispered Ingethel. ‘The ritual must not be interrupted. The wrath of the gods will–’

‘Be silent, witch,’ Vendatha said. ‘You have said enough already. Lorgar, Seventeenth Son of the Emperor, do you yield to righteous authority and give your oath to abandon this den of heathen belief? Do you vow to return at once to Terra and submit to the Emperor’s judgement?’

‘No,’ the primarch spoke softly. ‘I do not.’

‘Then you leave me no choice.’

‘There is always a choice,’ said Argel Tal.

Vendatha ignored the captain’s plea. He reached for the scrollwork etched into his ornate bracer, and pushed one of the mother-of-pearl buttons inlaid in the decoration.

Nothing happened.

He pressed the button again.

Nothing continued to happen.

The Custodian took a step backwards as the Word Bearers very, very slowly drew their weapons. The Chaplains unlimbered their crozius mauls. Tsar Quorel and Deumos raised their bolters, and Argel Tal unsheathed the swords of red iron.

‘I think you will find,’ the primarch smiled, ‘that your teleport signal has been blocked since you entered this chamber. Just a precautionary measure we took, you understand? Aquillon and your brothers will not be appearing to aid you. They will never even know you needed them.’

‘I confess I had not anticipated this,’ Vendatha said. ‘Well done, Lorgar.’

‘It’s not too late, Ven.’ Argel Tal raised his swords en garde. ‘Lower your weapon and we can end this without crossing the line.’

‘Great One...’ Ingethel whined. ‘The ritual...’

‘I said be silent, witch,’ snapped Vendatha.

Lorgar sighed, as if a great disappointment settled upon his shoulders. ‘Decide now, Custodian Vendatha, how best to serve my father’s Imperium. Do you flee, escaping this chamber, and bring a truth you don’t even understand to your brothers in orbit? Or do you shoot me now, and rid the galaxy of its only chance at enlightenment?’

‘The choice you offer is no choice at all,’ Vendatha said.

Argel Tal moved first, launching forward as the cavern echoed with bolter fire.

Vendatha was not a fool. He knew the odds of surviving the next few moments were slim, and he knew a primarch’s reflexes were the peak of biological possibility, faster than even his own, which bordered on the preternatural.

But Lorgar was at ease, his muscles loose. He actually expected his offer of truce to hold some weight, and that lapse in judgement was enough for Vendatha to take the chance. He pulled the haft-trigger, and his spear’s underslung bolter cracked off a stream of rounds on full-auto.

Argel Tal saw it coming. The swords of red iron smashed the first three bolts aside, their power fields strong enough to detonate the shells as they streaked towards the primarch’s heart. The explosions threw the captain to the ground, his grey armour scraping along the stone with the shriek of offended ceramite.

Vendatha was already in motion. The golden warrior leapt at the primarch, guardian spear spinning in his fists, an oath to the Emperor on his lips. Four Word Bearers blocked his path, and those four Word Bearers had to die.

Rikus was the first to fall. The Custodian’s blade crunched into the soft, jointed armour at the Chaplain’s throat, punching from the back of his neck. Tsar Quorel died next, decapitated with a buzzing sweep of the energised blade, dead before he’d pulled his trigger.

Deumos managed to fire a stream of bolt shells, none of which connected. Vendatha weaved left, thudded the base of his spear into the Chapter Master’s bolter, knocking it aside, and followed with a cutting swing that sheared both the Word Bearer’s hands from his body, severing them at the forearms. Deumos had a scarce moment to draw in a stunned gasp before the spear sliced again, this time cleaving through his collarbone and spine, ripping his head free.

Vendatha span the blade in his hands, letting it come to rest with the tip and gun barrel aimed at Lorgar’s heart again. Behind the Custodian, the bodies crashed to the ground in slow succession. Three seconds had passed.

Argel Tal was picking himself off the floor. Only Xaphen stood between the primarch and his attacker, but the Chaplain had used the scant, precious seconds to draw his bolter, which he aimed squarely at Vendatha’s faceplate.

‘Hold,’ he warned.

‘Lorgar, Seventeenth Son of the Emperor, surrender yourself into my custody at once.’

‘You killed my sons,’ Lorgar covered his mouth with a hand. ‘They had never wronged you. Not once. Is this what my father’s mandate allows you to do? To slaughter my sons if I do not dance to his ignorant tune?’

‘Surrender yourself,’ the Custodian repeated.

Vendatha had fought at the Emperor’s side many times before. Always writ upon the Lord of Man’s face was an unbreakable defiance, all emotion suppressed beneath the mask of stoic perfection.

Lorgar didn’t share his father’s capacity to conceal emotion. Hate bleached his features, and white teeth showed in a skull’s grin.

‘You dare threaten me? You murdered my sons, you soulless, worthless husk of genetic overspill.’

Vendatha squeezed the trigger again, but it was too late. Xaphen fired first.

Bolt rounds hammered into the Custodian’s golden armour, beating the faceplate and chest out of shape, tearing chunks of plating away as they detonated. Each suit of battle armour was individually wrought for the Custodian granted the honour to wear it, and despite their finery, Custodes armour was a step beyond the mass-produced wargear used by the Astartes Legions.

Even so, the burst of bolter shells to the head and upper torso was almost enough to kill the warrior outright.

Vendatha staggered back, the guardian spear falling from slack fingers and crashing to the stone. Even with his face a burned and bleeding ruin, even with his helm wrecked and its twisted metal digging into his broken skull, he stared through the one eye that still worked.

Xaphen reloaded. The primarch did nothing. The naked maiden tugged at Lorgar’s robe sleeve, imploring him to continue with the heathen rite, warning of the gods’ anger if he didn’t.

Vendatha reached for his fallen spear.

Wait. Where is Argel T–

The sword of red iron flew like a javelin, cracking Vendatha’s remaining teeth into porcelain chips as it smashed into his closed mouth. Two metres of shimmering blade lanced from the back of the Custodian’s head, while most of the warrior’s ruined face was covered by the hilt and handle protruding from his open jaws.

As Rikus, Tsar Quorel and Deumos had done only moments before, Vendatha crashed to the ground, felled by an Imperial blade.

Xaphen released a breath. ‘Nicely done, brother.’

The Chaplain had no warning, for Argel Tal struck without any. The captain’s fist crashed into Xaphen’s jaw, throwing him to the ground.

‘Brother?’ from his place on the stone floor, the Chaplain stared up at Argel Tal’s fury.

‘We have just killed one of the Emperor’s own guardians, and your eulogy in this moment is “Nicely done, brother”? Are you insane? We stand upon the edge of heresy against the Imperium. Sire, we have to leave this place. We must speak with Aquillon, and–’

‘Retrieve your blade,’ ordered the primarch. Lorgar stared into the middle distance, paying little heed to what unfolded before his eyes. His voice barely lifted above a whisper.

Argel Tal approached with slow steps, taking his second sword back without gentleness, yanking it from the corpse’s jaws. He froze as Vendatha’s remaining eye followed him, and the body’s fingers twitched.

‘Blood of the... Sire, he’s still alive,’ Argel Tal called back.

‘There is no virtue in cruelty,’ murmured Lorgar. ‘I wrote that once. In my book. I remember doing so. I remember the scratch of quill upon parchment, and the way the words looked on the page...’

‘Sire?’

Lorgar stirred, focused. ‘End his suffering, Argel Tal.’

All heads turned towards Ingethel as she cried out – wordless defiance, in a keening wail.

‘This was ordained by the gods.’ She gestured her tattooed hand to Vendatha’s ravaged form. ‘Lorgar is the seeker, the Favoured Son of the Great Powers, and he has provided the tenth sacrifice. Consecration may begin.’

A pack of Cadians came forward, their dirty hands pulling at Vendatha’s golden armour, stripping it from his dying body. Argel Tal kicked one of the jackals off the fallen Custodian and levelled his blades at the rest. They scattered; carrion-feeders disturbed from a meal at the last moment.

‘This was not a sacrifice for your blood magic,’ the captain said. ‘He aimed a weapon at the Emperor’s son, and he will die for the sin. That is all.’ Argel Tal looked over his shoulder. ‘Sire, we have to leave. No answer is worth this.’

Lorgar lowered his hood, looking at neither Argel Tal nor Ingethel. His gaze rested on a far wall, and a faint scowl creased his lips.

‘What’s that sound?’ the primarch asked.

‘I hear nothing but the drums, sire. Please, we must leave at once.’

‘You don’t hear that?’ Lorgar glanced at his two remaining sons. ‘Neither of you?’ Their silence answered for them, and Lorgar reached a hand to his forehead. ‘Is that... laughter?’

Ingethel was on her knees now, dragging at his robes, weeping in her worship. ‘The ritual... The gods come... It is not complete...’

Lorgar paid her heed at last, though the distant look never left his eyes. ‘I hear them. I hear them all. Like the memory of laughter. The forgotten faces of distant kin when one struggles to recall them.’

Argel Tal clashed the swords of red iron together; the skish-skash of metal on metal loud enough to draw the primarch’s attention.

‘Sire,’ he growled, ‘we must leave.’

Lorgar shook his head, infinitely patient, infinitely calm. ‘It is no longer our choice to make. Events are in motion. Stand away from the Custodian, my son.’

‘But sire...’

‘Ingethel speaks the truth. This was all ordained. The storm that stranded us. The screams that summoned us. The fear that led Vendatha to betray us. All part of a... a plan. It’s so clear to me. The dreams. The whispers. Decade after decade after decade of...’

‘Sire, please.’

Lorgar’s statuesque features were warped by a sudden rush of fury. ‘Stand away from that treacherous dog before you join him on an eleventh spear. Do you understand me? This moment is a crucible upon which all else spins. Obey me, or I will kill you where you stand.’

A shadow passed over Argel Tal’s sight – something terrible in aspect, something winged and wrathful beyond mortal imagining.

The moment passed. The darkness receded. Argel Tal did as Lorgar commanded, stepping away from the body and sheathing the swords of red iron.

‘No answers are worth this,’ the captain said.

Neither Xaphen nor Lorgar met his glare. With keen eyes, both watched the ritual proceeding again.

Here, Lorgar stopped writing. His smile was enriched by melancholy.

‘Do you believe I sinned in that moment?’

Argel Tal laughed, the sound black and bitter. ‘A sin is decided when mortal morality meets a code of ethics. Did you sin against a faith? No. Did you stain your soul? Perhaps.’

‘But you hate me, my son. I hear it in your voice.’

‘I think desperation blinded you, father. You may take no joy in sadism, but your need for the truth drove you to viciousness.’

‘And for this, you hate me.’ Lorgar was no longer smiling. His tone was low and barbed, while his eyes had all the warmth of a body on the battlefield.

‘I hate what you’ve forced me to see. I hate the truth we must bring to the Imperium of Man. Above all, I hate what I’ve become in service to your vision.’

Argel Tal grinned the grin that wasn’t his own. ‘But we could never hate you, Lorgar.’

Vendatha was still alive when they impaled him alongside the other nine sacrifices.

But, mercifully, not for long.

He never saw the consecration bought with his blood. He never saw what breached the barrier between the realm of spirit and the world of flesh.

Ingethel’s writhing dance came to an end. The maiden was bathed in sweat, her hair in greasy ringlets and her body shining in the firelight as if beaded with pearls. In her hands, she still gripped her wooden staff, the head carved in a curving crescent moon.

A tattooed god-talker stood before each of the occupied spears, blood from the slaughtered victims gathered into crude clay bowls that were clutched in white-knuckled hands. As Ingethel approached each in turn, the shaman would mark her flesh with a spiralling symbol, tracing blood onto her body with a fingertip.

It was impossible to miss the significance. They were drawing the Eye on her.

‘Incredible,’ said Lorgar. He looked pained – the veins in his temples swollen and pulsing.

‘I know this ritual,’ Xaphen said. ‘I know it from the old books.’

‘Yes,’ the primarch gave a strained smile. ‘This is an echo of an ancient Colchisian ceremony. Kingpriests – the rulers of old – were appointed like this. The maiden’s dance; the blood sacrifices; the constellations inked upon her flesh... All of it. Kor Phaeron would know it, as would Erebus. Both of them will have seen it before, with their own eyes, performed by the Covenant in the years before my arrival on Colchis.’

Argel Tal had considered their culture far beyond such decadence. Lorgar must have picked up on his disgusted thought, because the primarch turned to him with a sharp glance.

‘I do not perceive this as beautiful, Argel Tal. Merely necessary. You believe we have progressed past such superstition? I remind you that not all change is for the better. Buildings erode. Flesh weakens. Memories fade. These are all part of time’s progression, and all would be reversed, if a way could be found to do so.’

‘We are here to seek evidence for the existence of gods, sire. No gods worthy of worship could demand this of their followers.’

Lorgar turned back to the ceremony, massaging his temples. ‘Those, my son, are the wisest words anyone has spoken since we found this world. The answers I am finding have dismayed me. Torture? Human sacrifice?’ The primarch’s features drew into a slow wince. ‘Forgive me, I ramble. My mind aches. I wish they would stop laughing.’

The cavern echoed with the thunder of drums, and the air trembled with monotone chanting from hundreds of human throats.

‘No one is laughing, sire,’ said Argel Tal.

Lorgar turned a pitying smile on his son. ‘Yes, they are. You’ll see. It will not be long now.’

Ingethel came to the last god-talker. The shaman anointed her with Vendatha’s blood, outlining the Serrated Sun constellation on her bare stomach. With this last deed done, the maiden made her way back to the centre of the platform. There she stood, arms reaching out from her sides, head thrown back, crucified upon the very air.

The drumming intensified, a dragon’s heartbeat thudding harder and faster as it slipped from its rhythm. The chanting became shouted laments, with hands and faces raised to the rock ceiling.

Ingethel’s bare feet slowly left the ground. Blood was running down her legs in staining trails, dripping from her toes to the stone. The Cadians screamed. All of them, every single one, screamed. The captain’s helm dimmed its audio receptors to compensate, but it made no difference.

Lorgar closed his eyes, fingertips still at his temples.

‘Here it comes.’

Its arrival was heralded first by the reek of blood. Unbelievably potent, as rich and sour as spoiled wine, it flooded Argel Tal’s senses with enough violence to make him gag. Xaphen turned away and Lorgar’s eyes remained closed – Argel Tal alone saw what happened next.

Ingethel, risen above the ground in weightless crucifixion, died a dozen deaths in mere moments. Invisible forces excoriated her, flaying her skin away in ragged strips, letting them fall with wet slaps onto the stone below. Blood flowed from her mouth, her eyes, her ears and nose; from every entrance and exit in her body. She endured this for a handful of seconds, until what remained of her simply ruptured. Her musculature burst, showering the primarch and his sons with human meat and lifeblood.

Her skeleton, still articulated, remained before them for a moment more – only to splinter and shatter with the sound of smashing pottery. Bone chips cracked off Argel Tal’s armour, clacking like hailstones.

The maiden’s staff clattered to the ground.

Lorgar, said the creature taking form amidst the dead girl’s wreckage.

Lorgar placed the quill on the parchment and closed his eyes – a reflection of that moment in the cavern: months ago to Argel Tal, only a handful of nights ago to the primarch himself.

‘I curse the truth we have discovered,’ he confessed. ‘I curse the fact that we have reached the edge of reality, only for hatred and damnation to stare back at us from the abyss.’

‘The truth is often ugly. It is why people believe lies. Deception offers them something beautiful.’

The creature that was and wasn’t Argel Tal continued its recitation.

The primarch opened his eyes and looked upon the face of the future.

It towered above them all, taller even than Lorgar, and regarded them with mismatched eyes above an open maw. The Cadian worshippers were so silent, so still, that the Word Bearers were no longer sure any other beings remained alive in the cavern.

Tactical data streamed across Argel Tal’s eye lenses as his targeting sensors cycled in frantic inability to lock onto the creature. Each attempted lock drew an invalid response. Where his retinal view would always display analyses of an enemy’s armour and anatomy, a Colchisian rune now blinked Unknown, Unknown, Unknown across his eyes.

Xaphen voiced the same problem. ‘I can’t lock onto it. It’s... not there.’

Oh, I am here.

‘Did you hear that?’ the Chaplain asked. Argel Tal nodded, though his audio receptors had tracked no changes at all.

He disengaged the magnetic clamp sealing his bolter to his thigh, and aimed it the creature. He flinched when a golden hand rested on the weapon, lowering it to the floor.

‘No,’ Lorgar whispered. The primarch’s eyes shined. With the threat of tears? Argel Tal wasn’t sure.

Lorgar, the creature said again. The primarch met the thing’s unbalanced stare.

Four arms curled from its slender torso, each ending in a clawed hand. Its lower body was the mating of serpent and worm, ripe with thick veins in the grey flesh. Its face was almost entirely given over to its open jaws, with selachimorphic teeth in disorderly rows.

A biological impossibility. An evolutionary lie.

It was never still, never motionless, even for a moment. Veins throbbed beneath its discoloured skin, betraying its pulse, and its talons were constantly opening and closing. Only one of its four hands remained closed: gripping Ingethel’s ritual staff in a clawed fist.

One eye was sunken, dark and buried in a face of filthy fur. The other: swollen fit to burst, and the sickening orange of a dying sun.

Nothing remained of the maiden. What reared up before them on its coiled lower body was utterly beyond notions of gender.

I am Ingethel the Ascended, it said, and its silent voice was a hundred murmurs all at once. Argel Tal found his eyes drawn to the curved spines of blackened bone that arced out from the thing’s shoulder blades.

Wings, he thought. Wings of black bone.

Yes. Wings. Humanity forever lies to itself about angels. The truth is ugly. Lies are beautiful. So mankind makes the gods’ messengers beautiful. No fear, then. Lovely lies. White wings.

‘You are not an angel,’ Argel Tal spoke aloud.

And you are not the first Colchisians to reach this world. Khaane. Tezen. Slanat. Narag. All ventured here, millennia ago, guided by visions of angels.

‘You are not an angel,’ Argel Tal repeated, clenching his bolter tighter.

Angels do not exist. They have never existed. But I bring the word of the gods, as angels must do. Look for the core of truth at the heart of humanity’s lies. You will see me. My kind. Angels. The creature blinked. Its swollen eye wouldn’t allow it, but its black pebble of an orb vanished for a moment under wet, wrinkled flesh.

Angels. Daemons. Just words. Just words.

Lorgar stepped forward at last. To Argel Tal’s eyes, he seemed naked without a crozius in his hands.

‘How do you know me?’

You are the Chosen. You are the Favoured Son of the Powers. Your name has echoed across our realm since time immemorial, carried on the winds by the shrieks of the neverborn.

‘I do not understand what you are saying.’

But you will. There are lessons to be taught. Things that must be shown. I will guide you. One lesson comes first.

The creature, Ingethel, gestured two of its claws – one at Xaphen, the other at Argel Tal.

Your sons, Lorgar. Give me their lives.

‘You ask a great deal of me,’ said Lorgar. ‘You plead for my trust and for the souls of my sons, yet I owe you nothing. You are a spirit, a daemon; superstition born from nightmare and incarnated into flesh.’

All the while, Lorgar walked around the creature. He showed no fear, no trepidation. Argel Tal recognised the faint tension in the primarch’s fingers. The Urizen ached to wield the crozius that, for now, was not at his side.

You know of the Primordial Truth. You know that a secret lies behind the stars. You know this is not a godless galaxy. The very gods you seek are the Powers that sent me to you.

Lorgar’s angelic countenance twisted into a patient smile. ‘Or I could speak a single word to my sons, and their weapons would end this conjuror’s trick.’

Ingethel’s jaw quivered, its fangs clicking together in a grotesque failure of symmetry. Argel Tal had seen the expression on its face before, written on the wide-eyed, shivering visages of trapped vermin.

Your blood-sons could not end me.

‘They have ended everything else the galaxy has thrown at them.’ The primarch made no pretence at hiding his pride. Argel Tal and Xaphen raised their bolters in perfect unison, both warriors sighting down the gun barrels at the creature’s eyes.

I bring the answers you have sought all your life. If you wish to awaken humanity to enlightenment, if you wish to be the architect of the faith that will save mankind, I–

‘Enough posturing. Tell me why you must take my sons from me.’

It moved in a blur, its serpentine tail leaving a smear of residue the thickness of treacle along the stone. One moment, the creature stood in the centre of the platform, the next it slithered before Lorgar, staring down at the primarch.

Lorgar didn’t recoil. He merely looked up at the creature.

The Great Eye. I will guide them into the storm, into the realm of the Powers. That is the first step, written in fate’s own hand. They will return with answers. They will return as the weapons you require. Your time will come, Lorgar. But the Powers call for your sons, and I will guide them to where they must go.

‘I would not sacrifice them for answers.’

Ingethel’s jaw clicked as it trembled. Its laughter was little more than verminous chittering.

Do you believe that? Nothing matters more to you than the truth. The Powers know their son’s heart. They know what you will do before it is done. If you desire enlightenment, you will take this first step.

‘If I agree to this... will you harm them?’

Ingethel turned its bestial head to the side, watching the two warriors with its inhuman eyes.

Yes.

The decision was not to be made lightly.

As he was wont to do, the primarch retreated into seclusion, away from the distractions of fleet management, away from the menial responsibilities that came with soldiering, and remained in the caverns beneath Cadia’s surface.

Argel Tal and Xaphen returned to their Thunderhawk at the modest landing site, finding they had much to say to one another and little will to speak it. While the Chaplain voxed a scant, vague update to the ships in orbit, Argel Tal took the task of appraising Aquillon of the situation over a secure vox-channel.

Almost an hour later, the captain descended the gang ramp, standing once more on the desolate plains, watching the sky with its shroud of rippling violet.

Incarnadine, ever the silent watchman, stood as an imposing sentinel nearby. Argel Tal saluted, but the robot made no response. Next to the automaton, Xi-Nu 73 emitted a blurt of irritated machine-code. Something in his data readings apparently vexed him. At that point in time, the Word Bearer couldn’t have cared less.

When Xaphen joined him at last, Argel Tal had a hard time meeting his brother’s eyes. He placed his armoured boot on one of the swollen, twelve-legged beetles that scurried over the wastelands, killing it with a moist, crackling crunch.

‘What lies did you weave for the Eyes of the Emperor?’ asked the Chaplain.

‘A long and detailed tale that tasted foul to even speak. A Cadian sect attacked us out of bitterness, and Ven was lost with Deumos, Tsar Quorel and Rikus.’

‘Did they die like heroes?’

‘Oh, undoubtedly. Songs will be sung and legends forever told of their most noble ends.’ He spat acid onto the ground.

Xaphen gave a mirthless snort, and they fell silent.

The two Astartes watched the stained sky, neither wishing to be the first to broach the next subject. Ultimately, it was Argel Tal that ventured there first.

‘We’ve split the Legion and sailed to the galaxy’s edges, only to find... this. The Old Ways of Colchis were right. Daemons. Blood sacrifice. Spirits made flesh. All of it is real. Now Aurelian lingers in the darkness, sharing words with that creature, deciding whether to sell our souls for even uglier answers. If this is enlightenment, brother... perhaps ignorance is bliss.’

Xaphen turned from the burning sky. ‘We have defied the Emperor to find these truths – defied the spirit of his decrees, even if we obeyed the letter of the law. Now a Custodian lies dead, and Imperial blades have shed Imperial blood. There can be no going back from this. You know what the primarch will decide.’

Argel Tal thought back to Vendatha’s words: ‘The choice you offer is no choice at all.’

‘It will break his heart to do it,’ the captain said, ‘but he will send us into the Eye.’

Sixteen

Orfeo’s Lament
The Storm Beyond the Glass
Chaos

The vessel chosen was Orfeo’s Lament. A sleek, vicious light cruiser captained most ably by the famously tenacious Janus Sylamor. When the primarch’s decree had reached the 1,301st, Sylamor had volunteered the Lament before Lorgar’s vox-distorted voice had even finished the traditional blessings that ended his fleet-wide addresses.

Her first officer took a dimmer view of her eagerness, pointing out that this was the largest, most devastating warp storm ever recorded in the history of the species. Here was an anomaly with all the force of the legendary storms that severed humanity’s worlds from one another in the centuries before the Great Crusade.

Sylamor had clicked her tongue – a habit of hers that always showed her impatience – and told him to shut up. The smile she gave him would only be considered sweet by people that didn’t know her very well.

The departure window was set for sunrise over the wastelands, which left practically no time for preparation beyond the core necessities. Grey gunships graced the Lament’s modest landing bay, delivering squad after squad of dark-armoured Astartes. Storage chambers were cleared to house the Word Bearers, their ammunition crates, their maintenance servitors, as well as the contingent from the Legio Cybernetica that accompanied Seventh Company, led by an irritable tech-adept calling himself Xi-Nu 73.

Introductions were brief. Five Astartes marched onto the bridge, and Sylamor rose from her throne to greet them. Each spoke their name and rank – one captain, one Chaplain, three sergeants – and each saluted her in turn. She responded accordingly, introducing her own command crew.

It was polite but cold, and over in a matter of minutes.

Only when the Astartes remained on the bridge did Sylamor sense a breach in decorum. Unperturbed, the captain continued her final checks, pointing her silver-topped cane to each console station in turn.

‘Propulsion.’

‘Engines,’ replied the first officer, ‘aye.’

‘Auspex.’

‘Aye, ma’am.’

‘Void shields.’

‘Shields ready.’

‘Weapons.’

‘Weapons, aye.’

‘Geller field.’

‘Geller field, aye.’

‘Helm.’

‘Helm standing ready, ma’am.’

‘All stations report full readiness,’ she said to the Word Bearers captain. This was something of a lie, and Sylamor hoped her tone didn’t betray it. All stations had reported readiness, true, but the last hour had also seen reports of insurrection in the lower decks, put down by lethal force, and one suicide. The ship’s astropath had requested to be assigned to another vessel (‘Request denied’, Sylamor had frowned. ‘Who in the Emperor’s name does he think he is to even ask such a thing?’) and the Navigator was engaged in what he referred to as ‘intensive mental barricading so as to preserve one’s fundamental quintessence’, which Sylamor was fairly sure she didn’t even want to understand.

So instead of relaying all of this to the towering warlord standing next to her throne, she simply gave him a curt nod and said, ‘all stations report readiness’.

The Astartes turned his helm’s slanted blue eyes upon her, and nodded.

‘There will be one last vessel docking soon. Ensure all of your crew are removed from the bay once it arrives.’

Her raised eyebrow conveyed just what she thought of this unorthodox demand. And in case it didn’t, she added her own spice to it. ‘Very well. Now tell me why.’

‘No,’ said one of the other Astartes. He’d named himself as Malnor, a sergeant. ‘Just obey the order.’

The captain, Argel Tal, gestured for his brother to remain silent.

‘The last gunship will be bringing a creature on board. The fewer of your crew that are exposed to it, the better it will be for all of us.’

The first officer pointedly cleared his throat. Crew members turned in their seats. Sylamor blinked twice. ‘I will suffer no xenos presence on board the Lament,’ she stated.

‘I did not say it was an alien,’ said Argel Tal. ‘I said it was a creature. My warriors will escort it to the bridge. Do not look at it once we are underway. Focus on your duties, all of you. I have my men in the starboard docking bay, and will inform you when the gunship reaches us.’

‘Incoming hail from De Profundis,’ called an officer from the vox-console.

The Word Bearers went to their knees, heads lowered.

‘Accept the hail,’ Sylamor said. Without realising, she lifted a hand to check her hair was in neat order, and straightened her uniform. Around her, officers did the same, brushing epaulettes and standing straighter.

The occulus tuned into a view of De Profundis’s command deck, where the primarch and Fleetmaster Torvus stood in pride of place.

‘This is the flagship,’ Torvus said, ‘Good hunting, Lament.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ Sylamor replied.

An awkward silence reached between both bridge crews, broken by Argel Tal.

‘Sire?’

‘Yes, my son?’ Lorgar’s smile was sincere, though vox-crackle ruined his smooth voice.

‘We will return with the answers the Legion needs. You have my word,’ he gestured to the parchment bound to his shoulder guard, ‘and my oath of moment’.

The smile remained upon the primarch’s painted lips. ‘I know, Argel Tal. Please, rise. I cannot abide you kneeling before me in this moment of moments.’

The Word Bearers rose as ordered, and Argel Tal nodded to Captain Sylamor.

‘The last vessel has docked and my warriors are leading the creature to the bridge. Take us in, captain.’

The ship trembled as its engines came alive, and Orfeo’s Lament speared away from the planet, cutting through the void towards the storm’s distant edges.

‘Three hours until we reach the storm’s outermost border,’ one of the helmsmen called.

Argel Tal held his bolter in his fists, waiting for the bridge doors to open once more.

‘When the creature arrives, do not look at it.’ He seemed to be addressing everyone, while looking at none of them. ‘This is not a matter of decorum or politeness. Do not look at it. Do not meet its eyes. Try not to breathe too much of its scent.’

‘Is this creature toxic?’ asked Sylamor.

‘It is dangerous,’ the Word Bearer allowed. ‘When I say these instructions are for your safety and sanity, I mean those exact words. Do not look at it. Do not even look at its reflection in any screen or monitor. If it speaks, focus on anything but its words. And if you feel nauseous or afflicted in its presence, leave your station at once.’

Sylamor’s laugh was patently false. ‘You are unnerving my crew, captain.’

‘Just do as I ask, please.’

She bristled, not used to being given orders on her own deck. ‘Of course, sir.’

‘Don’t act so offended, Janus.’ The Word Bearer forced some warmth into his voice, which his helm’s vox-speakers immediately stole and twisted. ‘Just trust me.’

When the doors finally opened, the first thing to wash over the bridge was the smell, which caused several of the human crew to gag.

Commendably, only one turned around to see what entered, escorted as it was by a full squad of Word Bearers – and that one soul was Captain Janus Sylamor.

In accidental defiance of the promise she’d made only minutes before, she turned to the opening doors and saw the creature framed in the light of the illumination globes in the corridor behind. The first heave of bitter sick hit her teeth and lips so fast she didn’t have time to open her mouth. The rest spread onto the floor as she went down on all fours, purging her stomach of the morning’s caffeine and dry rations, and painting the decking with her bile.

‘I warned you,’ Argel Tal said to her, without taking his eyes from the creature.

Her answer was to heave some more, ending with a string of saliva hanging from her lips.

Ingethel wormed its way onto the bridge, leaving a discoloured smear in its wake. The tap, tap, tap of the staff’s base on the metal floor acted as accompaniment to the sound of its slick flesh slithering across the deck.

Officers abandoned their posts by the captain’s throne, stepping away with undisguised disgust and covering their mouths and noses. More than one vomited into their hands as Ingethel drew nearer, though for the creature’s part, it seemed to notice none of this. Its malformed eyes stared dead ahead at the storm taking over the occulus.

Sylamor rose to her feet again, after taking Argel Tal’s offered hand.

‘What have you brought onto my bridge, captain?’

‘It is a guide. Now with the greatest respect, Janus, wipe your mouth and do your duty. Next time, perhaps you will listen to me.’

She was familiar enough with Argel Tal from fleet command meetings to know that this curt treatment wasn’t like him at all. Of all the Word Bearer commanders, he’d always been the most approachable, and the most inclined to hear the concerns of the human officers.

She said nothing. Instead, she nodded, breathing through her mouth to hinder some of the obscene reek that only fuelled her nausea. The foulness of the stench wasn’t the worst part; it was the familiarity of it.

As a young girl on Colchis, she’d survived an outbreak of rotten lung in her village, and had been one of the few left to witness the arrival of a coven of mortuary priests from the City of Grey Flowers. Over the course of a single day, they’d erected a great pyre to cleanse the dead before scattering their ashes across the desert. The smell of that funeral pyre had never left her, and when it resurfaced now, it was all she could do not to choke at the creature’s stench.

A curious drip, drip, drip ate at her attention, drawing her glance to the deck by the creature’s sluggish body. A greasy, opaque plasm dripped from the muscled folds of its serpentine lower half, bleaching the steel decking where it fell.

‘Full speed ahead,’ said Sylamor, and swallowed before another purge took hold.

Orfeo’s Lament trembled – ever the eager huntress, ever the keen explorer – and increased her pace. The storm swelled in the occulus before them as they cruised closer to its edge.

‘Have the flagship’s augurs managed to measure the afflicted area of space?’ she asked.

Thousands upon thousands of solar systems lie within the Great Eye.

She froze, cheeks paling. ‘I... I heard a voice.’

‘Ignore it,’ ordered Argel Tal.

You could sail your mortal craft for a hundred lifetimes within its depths, and see no more than a shadow of its full glory.

‘I can still hear it...’

Argel Tal growled, deep and low, his head tilted towards the creature. ‘Do not toy with their lives,’ he said. ‘You have been warned.’

None of them will survive this journey. You are a fool to believe they will.

‘Did... did it just say...’

‘It said nothing,’ Argel Tal interrupted her stammer. ‘Ignore the voice. Focus, Janus. Attend to your duties, and leave all else to us. I will not let the creature harm you, or anyone in the crew.’

She does not believe you.

‘Be quiet, false angel.’

She knows you lie. You hear her heartbeat, as I do. She is terrified, and she knows you are lying to her.

Across the bridge, two menials vomited over their consoles. Another fainted at his station, with blood running from his ears in a slow trickle.

‘Will this keep happening?’ Sylamor asked Argel Tal, careful not to look at the creature over the warrior’s shoulder, and hoping her voice wasn’t shaking.

The Word Bearer didn’t answer immediately. ‘I believe so,’ came the eventual response.

One of the helmsmen jerked in his seat, cracking his head against the back of the throne. Through clenched teeth, he managed a thin wail before falling into a seizure, kept in place only by his restraint harness.

‘Medicae team to the helm,’ ordered the captain.

Sylamor’s patience was close to its end when one of her adjutant servitors unplugged itself from its post and began to painstakingly crawl across the floor. The servitor in question had no legs below the thighs, having had them surgically removed in order to better remain at its post at all times. When it detached itself from its bronze cradle and started clawing its way over the decking, Captain Sylamor watched this unprecedented behaviour for several stunned moments. The augmetic servant trailed wires and cables from its spine and severed legs, viscous oil leaking from its nose.

‘Blood of the Emperor,’ Sylamor cursed under her breath. ‘Stand back, everyone. Stand back.’

She put the servitor down herself with a single pistol round to the back of the poor thing’s head, and ordered two deckhands to remove it at once.

Vox-officer Arvas turned to his captain as she passed on the way back to her throne. ‘Do you hear that?’ he asked her.

‘A contact? Another vessel?’

‘No.’ He held his earpiece, face darkened by concentration. ‘I can hear him, captain.’

Mounting irritation overrode her unease. ‘Hear who?’

Janus had known Arvas for over a decade, and on one night in particular four years ago, she’d known him – and four bottles of silver Yndonesic wine – regrettably well. Despite that lone indiscretion, he was one of her most adept and loyal crew members. ‘Tell me who you hear, lieutenant.’

He tried to retune his console, twisting a row of dials. ‘I can hear Vanic dying. He screams, but not for long. The rest is white noise. Listen,’ he offered her his earpiece. ‘You can hear Vanic dying. You hear him scream, but not for long.’

She hesitantly reached to take the earpiece. Standing next to Arvas, Vox-officer Vanic gave her an attempt at a smile. Discomfort was written across his fat features.

Arvas unholstered his sidearm and pumped four rounds into the other man’s stomach. Blood, stinging and hot, flecked Sylamor’s face as Vanic collapsed screaming to the deck.

‘Now you hear it,’ said Arvas.

The captain had no time to react – a blur of dark grey shoved her aside. Before she’d even blinked, Arvas was kicking and dangling above the ground, held aloft by Argel Tal’s fist around his throat. The ship shivered around them as if it shared the crew’s disquiet.

As he was strangled in the warrior’s grip, Arvas’s fingers scraped across Argel Tal’s faceplate with all the ferocity of a cornered beast hoping to scratch out its killer’s eyes. Sweat-smears painted across the eye lenses.

The medicae team reached Vanic’s side in time for him to die at their feet. Arvas had been right – Vanic hadn’t screamed for long.

The Word Bearer ignored the fingers scrabbling over the implacable ceramite, and turned to address his warriors. ‘Dagotal, take this wretch to the containment cells.’ He passed Arvas towards the other Word Bearers, sending him sprawling with a shove.

Another of the Astartes stepped forward, catching the struggling officer by the collar and lifting him from the ground. Arvas took over where Vanic’s screams left off.

‘And render him silent,’ Argel Tal added.

‘By your word, brother.’ Dagotal gripped the officer’s neck, squeezing his windpipe with gentle force. The human’s voice faded to a gasping squeak as the Word Bearer hauled him from the bridge.

Captain Sylamor glared up at the towering figure of Argel Tal.

‘That creature cannot remain on my bridge. It is... doing something to us, isn’t it?’

‘I do not know.’

‘Then ask it.’

‘We will take it to the observation deck, captain. Ensure your crew vacate the area, as well as the corridors between. Make full speed for the storm’s edge. I will contact you with any alterations to those orders if the need arises.’

‘Thank you,’ she said to him.

Argel Tal returned a curt nod, and moved back to his brethren.

‘You should have killed the murderer,’ Xaphen admonished.

‘He will stand trial for his sin. It could be argued that his actions were not his own.’ Argel Tal turned to watch Ingethel as the creature began its slithering withdrawal from the command deck. They followed, avoiding the slick trail it left in its wake.

‘We are walking into the unknown, and there is nothing but darkness before my eyes,’ Argel Tal said to his Chaplain.

‘And that worries you.’

‘Of course it worries me. If we are on the precipice of enlightenment, why have I never felt so blind?’

‘Everything is darkest,’ Xaphen mused, ‘before the dawn.’

‘That, my brother, is an axiom that sounds immensely profound until you realise it’s a lie.’

The observation decks on most Imperial ships were places of great serenity. Although Orfeo’s Lament was a modest vessel compared to De Profundis, let alone the grandeur of the Fidelitas Lex, Argel Tal still felt his breath catch as he entered.

Midway along the cruiser’s battlemented spine rose an armoured dome, its clear surface offering an unparalleled view of the surrounding void. In normal space, the view of a billion stars in the infinite night never failed to capture his imagination – and, he’d admit in his prouder moments, his ambition as well. These were humanity’s stars. No other species had the right to claim them, for their ages had come and gone. The future was one of purity, and it belonged to mankind.

Here, now, the stars were stained violet. Argel Tal watched distant suns drown in curling, thrashing mists of purple and red.

Do you see?

Ingethel had reared up to its full unnatural height, four stick-thin arms spread in benediction to the burning heavens. From jaws that couldn’t close, it spat out a rattlesnake’s hiss.

Do. You. See.

Argel Tal tore his gaze from the night sky. The observation deck was spacious, fitted with Spartan furniture that none of the Word Bearers were using. Each remained standing, bolters clutched in their hands.

‘I see a storm,’ said the captain. ‘Nothing more.’

‘You and I both, sir.’ This, from Dagotal. The outrider sergeant had arrived several minutes after the rest of them, coming straight from the containment block where he’d left Lieutenant Arvas in the less than tender care of the brig officers. ‘I feel something, though. The ship’s shaking itself apart.’

‘Always thought I’d die in battle,’ grumbled Malnor.

Argel Tal shook his head. ‘You dragged us into this nexus of energies, Ingethel. It is time to tell us why. What are we supposed to be seeing?’

The truth. The truth behind the stars. The hidden layer of the universe.

‘I see a storm that threatens to kill us all, comprised of a thousand colours.’

No. You see target locks and biological data streams. You see the world before you through filtering lenses. You stand on the border of heaven, Word Bearer. Remove your helm. Look upon the home of the gods with your true eyes.

It took him a moment to comply, hesitating at the thought of the creature’s smell assaulting his olfactory senses without first being purified by his helm’s intake grille. He took a final breath of his armour’s stale, recycled air, and disengaged the collar seals.

It was worse than he’d imagined, and the bridge crew were to be commended for the fact so few of them vomited. The chamber already reeked of a charnel house; that coppery spice of fouled blood, the stinging meat-stink of digestive organs bared to the air.

‘I still see nothing,’ Argel Tal grunted. ‘I see the storm.’

You cannot lie to me as you lie to the humans. Stare into the clashing tides around us. Do you see what stares back?

The captain stepped closer to the dome’s edge, peering out into the roiling void, where the playing energies mixed and swirled. The ship gave another tremor at the mercy of the forceful tides. There, just a for a moment, as the ship shook...

You saw. Your heart quickened. Your eyes dilated. You saw.

Argel Tal stroked his hand along the dense glass wall, staring into the tumult beyond. How could one draw meaning from this madness? The ship shuddered in the aetheric tides again, and once more the riotous energies coalesced for the briefest moment.

A human face, spoiled by frightened eyes and a screaming mouth, formed from the burning matter outside the glass. It burst against the dome, dissipating back into the raging tides from whence it came.

Do you know what this storm is?

Argel Tal wouldn’t look away from the tides. ‘It’s warp energy. The aetheric current, reaching through into the material universe. Imperial records have chronicled the presence of alien creatures in the warp itself, but they are catalogued among the lesser xenos threats.’

Ingethel’s hiss echoed in his mind. How verminous, the creature’s laughter.

Do you know what those words mean? Or do you relate lore poured into your mind by the indoctrinations that shaped you? What do you see when you stare into this storm?

The Word Bearer turned to Ingethel. A face that would have been handsome – had it not suffered the trials of Astartes surgery – stared up at the creature. ‘This is the galaxy’s blood. Reality is bleeding.’

Close. The daemon-thing chittered with a rodent’s delight. Humanity is precious in its ignorance, but that cannot be allowed to last if your species is to survive. The warp is more than a realm for mortal vessels to cut into with impunity, and use its tides to sail faster than light.

What you are seeing is creation’s own shadow, where every mortal emotion and urge takes immortal form. You are sailing through seas made of psychic energy and liquefied sorrow. You are cast adrift in the heaven and hell of a million mythologies, Argel Tal.

This is where every moment of hatred, disgust, wrath, joy, grief, jealousy, indolence and decadence manifest as raw energy.

This is where the souls of the dead come to burn forever.

Orfeo’s Lament gave a horrendous shudder, and the sound of wrenching metal ran through the deck beneath them. Torgal and Xaphen went to their knees – the former with a gutter curse, the latter with an indignant grunt.

In the storm beyond, more images took shape. Hands pressed against the glass, leaving discoloured smears. Faces, warped by screams, aching in their familiarity. The shadow of something, something vast and dark and cold behind it all, sweeping past the ship like a whale passing in the deepest ocean.

For a moment, Argel Tal’s breath misted in the air. Frost beaded his skin. The shadow passed, and kept passing, disturbing the crashing energies with its immense, half-formed bulk.

A void leviathan. Fear would draw it closer, and this vessel would disintegrate in its jaws. But it passes, hunting other prey. In many of the futures I saw, it turned upon us, and your lives ended here. In three of those futures, Argel Tal, you were laughing as you died, dissolving in the energies outside the ship.

He was not laughing now.

‘This is hell.’ Argel Tal no longer struggled to see the faces shrieking in at him, nor the hands clawing at the glass. He could see nothing else. ‘This is the underworld of human imagination.’

Do not be blinded by dogma. This is the Primordial Truth. Creation’s shadow. The layer behind the stars.

The Word Bearer breathed a single word as he watched the sea of screaming souls beyond.

‘Chaos.’

The daemon’s maw twisted into a grin. Now you begin to understand.

Argel Tal sipped the water. It was brackish on his tongue, and distastefully warm. It was also the fifth such cup to sour in his hands like this, and he had the unsettling notion that it was his own body curdling the water.

‘We soon reached the first world,’ he said. ‘Melisanth. The world had no human name, but in ancient days, the eldar-breed xenos... they named it Melisanth.’

Lorgar’s flowing script recorded each word. ‘The eldar? What is their role in all this?’

‘Now? They have no role. They are the galaxy’s memory, fading night by night. But once, this region of space was their most precious dominion – the heart of their empire. Their decadence brought us forth, from our realm into this one. We watched their worlds burning in spectral fire, and we tore their souls apart in claws of spirit and flesh.’

‘Argel Tal.’

‘Every sensation was new to us. We were newborns in the material realm. Blood fed us. Pain fuelled us. You cannot know what it is like to grow stronger when a creature suffers nearby. To swell with power when parents watch their children burn. To grow in size and intellect with each sin you inflict upon mortal flesh. To know more of the universe’s secrets with each soul you swallow.’

‘My son... Please.’

‘But I was there, Lorgar. I saw these things. I did these things.’

‘You are Argel Tal. You were born on Colchis, in the village of Singh-Rukh, to a carpenter and a seamstress. Your name means “the last angel” in the dialect of the southern steppes tribes. You are the youngest warrior in the Legion ever to inherit the mantle of company captain. You once bore swords of red iron – the blades of your predecessor – which you lost in service to your primarch. You are Argel Tal, a Bearer of the Word. You are my son.’

The Word Bearer looked down at his skeletal hands. ‘Sire,’ he said softly. ‘Forgive me.’ Argel Tal managed to meet his primarch’s eyes, infinitely grateful that he saw no judgement in those grey depths.

‘There is nothing to forgive.’

‘You knew more of my life than I realised.’

Lorgar smiled. ‘All of my sons are precious to me.’

Argel Tal rubbed at his sore eyes. ‘Ingethel told us that our changes would begin at the ordained time, when the galaxy burns. But I am losing myself now. Is this the ordained moment already? Is the galaxy aflame? None of my memories are my own, father. There’s a copper taste on my tongue, like the echo of blood. Perhaps this is fear. Perhaps this taste is the fear so many poets and archivists have written about.’ The captain laughed, the sound hollow and humourless. ‘And now I speak my valediction.’

‘It need not be a valediction, Argel Tal. That cannot be decided until the tale is told.’

Seventeen

A Dead Empire
Revelations
Genesis

Ingethel gestured at the planet with a crooked claw.

They called it Melisanth. It was one of the last to feel the Eye’s spreading influence.

‘Auspex confirms no life readings, even down to the bacterial level,’ Captain Sylamor’s voice rasped over the vox.

‘She really needed to scan to see that?’ Torgal asked.

Below them was the ghost of a world – a globe of black oceans and grey landscapes, inexpertly guarded by thin cloud hazes. Even in orbit above Melisanth, the ship was buffeted by the warp-winds outside, while the observation dome endured the liquid, a tidal press of human faces and figures bursting against the reinforced glass. Each one splashed over the shielding with oil-on-water incandescence, flowing back into the maelstrom as soon as it destroyed itself.

After a while, Argel Tal started to see the same faces reappear. They seemed to be reforming out there in the winds and hurling themselves at the ship over and over again.

‘Are they souls?’ he asked aloud.

It is primordial matter. In the realm of flesh and blood, it manifests as psychic energy. Your thoughts give it shape. You see human souls, but it is so much more. Eldar souls. The flesh of the neverborn, that humanity once named daemonkind. Raw psychic currents. Possibility incarnate, when the mind shapes reality.

‘I want to walk the surface of that world.’

You will die.

Argel Tal rounded on the creature, anger marring his unscarred features. ‘Then why drag us here? What is the purpose of this journey if we cannot leave the ship? To stare at dead worlds from behind our Geller Field? To listen to the shrieking of lost souls?’

Ingethel slithered closer to the gathered Word Bearers. The black-wood staff, once carried by the maiden who sacrificed herself to bring the daemon into being, tapped on the decking like an old man’s walking cane.

Such things I have to show you.

It gestured two gnarled claws at the world below. There is no lesson in Melisanth as it is. You must see Melisanth as it was.

Close your eyes. Hear the storm outside. Listen to the tide breaking against your vessel’s skin.

Melisanth is but one world floating in the Sea of Souls. One amongst millions. Let me show it to you.

And then, no more than a heartbeat later – Open your eyes, Argel Tal.

He’d always treasured sunrise.

This one, an ocherous orb painting fierce light over a city of spires and minarets, was one to remember. Even with pain tolerance and resistance to light saturation written into his genetic code, the rising sun was bright enough to make his eyes ache. And that was beautiful too, for it had never happened before.

Ingethel was nowhere to be seen. They stood on a cliff’s edge, above an alien city turned golden by the dawn. Argel Tal turned to see his brothers: Xaphen, watching the xenos colony; Malnor and Torgal with him; Dagotal, staring up into the blue sky.

This was Melisanth, came the creature’s burbling voice in his mind. See the city made of bone and gemstones. See the spires too delicate for mortal physics to support them, standing only because of eldar witchcraft.

Now see the Fall.

In the sky above, the clouds raced in a cyclical dance – day and night flashing past in a blur of flickering grey. Tendrils of violet clawed across the heavens, thickening, linking, coiling, staining the air with red mist. Sweat broke out on Argel Tal’s face and neck in the savage heat. It warmed even the aqueous moisture that lubricated his eyes.

As he watched, the city below began to tumble, its spires and walkways falling to shatter on the ground, crushing crowds of slender alien figures and demolishing lesser buildings beneath.

Their sorceries are fading. This is on the edge of the Great Eye. The destruction took days to unfold on these lesser colonies. At the core of their empire, all life was ended in mere moments.

Argel Tal could hear the city dying, the sounds of thunder, sorrow and lamentation carried up to him on the wind.

‘Aliens,’ Xaphen smiled at the toppling towers. ‘May they all burn, soulless and forgotten.’

None of the others disagreed. ‘Why did this happen?’ asked Argel Tal.

The eldar were close to seeing the truth of the universe. Their civilisation spanned the galaxy, evolving for millennia under the guidance and worship of their gods. And then, at the last step... they faltered.

‘How?’

Look to the sky.

The storm clouds gathered in a threatening spiral, darkening the land to every horizon. From the very first raindrops – hot on the skin and rich in their metallic reek – it was clear what was in store for the city below. With a single peal of thunder, loud enough to vibrate the air itself, the blackened clouds ground together and signalled the opening of the heavens.

Sheets of scarlet rained from the sky, showering the broken city in blood so thick it stained the bone structures that still remained standing. Xaphen closed his eyes, lifting his face to the downpour.

‘This is not human blood. It’s too sweet.’

Argel Tal wiped his face clear of the raining gore. In the city below, creatures were melting from the shadows of fallen monuments, rising from the lakes of blood that were forming in the streets. They staggered and sprinted, each one uneven and unnatural in its own half-formed way. Some crawled on a multitude of boneless limbs. Others wailed as they dashed on spindly legs, reaching out with curling claws.

My kin, taking physical form. They hunt souls, and flesh, and blood and bone.

‘Why is this happening?’

The malformed beasts ran in packs, dragging down any of the slender, weeping survivors they found. The sight left him cold. Genocide should be a purification, and there was nothing of purity in this insane unleashing of unknowable powers.

‘Answer me,’ Argel Tal said softly. No answer came, beyond the blood running down his cheeks and over his lips. He could smell nothing else, taste nothing else, beyond the sanguine rain.

New towers rose from the tumbling city below – slender spires formed from pulsing walls of still-living flesh, decorated by voiceless faces and flayed arms stretching from the architecture. The rising towers reached for the panicking eldar in the streets, using their lives as raw material, their alien flesh as living mortar.

Watch them die. You would die the same way.

‘I told you to answer me,’ said the Word Bearer.

Watch and learn, Word Bearer.

‘We have records of the eldar and their histories.’ He spat the foul blood that kept running onto his tongue. ‘They speak of the Fall, when decadence and sin bred corruption throughout their culture. A spiritual cataclysm annihilated them centuries ago. That devastation is this? This... divine wrath?’

This is their judgement. In their ignorance, they see only the death of an empire as countless worlds drown in blood and fire. In this moment of ascension, the eldar choose terror over power, and damn their kingdom to ashes because the Primordial Truth frightens them all.

They have given birth to a god. A god of pleasure and promise. Yet they feel no joy.

‘Enough!’ Argel Tal threw back his head and drew breath into his three lungs. The storm intensified, its tortured skies bleeding onto the world below.

‘Answer me!’ he screamed at the sky.

This is the Fall they speak of in whispered tones. The eldar were blind. They could have lived in harmonic union with the Powers, as humanity must soon learn themselves. Instead, they are dying. Unable to accept the Primordial Truth, they are being destroyed by it.

You ask why? Can you not see why? This is not how empires die, Word Bearer. This is how gods are born. The eldar faith has given the galaxy a new deity. She Who Thirsts. Slaa Neth. It has a thousand names.

These are its first moments of life, and it wakes to find its own worshippers are abandoning it, out of ignorance and fear.

This endless storm, this Eye of Terror, is the echo of its birth-cries.

‘I have seen enough,’ Argel Tal watched the city below, now silent, flooded, reaped clean of all life. ‘Blood of the gods, I have seen enough.’

Then open your eyes.

Ingethel was watching them, its mismatched eyes unblinking as they reflected the sick light from beyond the dome. The stench of blood lingered in Argel Tal’s nostrils, despite the warriors’ pristine armour and clean skin.

‘That was unpleasant,’ said Torgal.

‘Sir,’ Dagotal reached for Argel Tal’s shoulder guard. ‘I think we should leave this place.’

It was Xaphen, not the daemon, that quelled such discussion. ‘You overstep your authority, sergeant. We will not flee from the truths we’ve travelled so far to find.’

Argel Tal ignored their bickering. His vox-network was alive with squads checking in, retinal runes flickering as each sergeant linked to him.

‘Sir, we just saw...’

‘Captain, there was a voice and... and a vision...’

‘This is Vadox Squad, reporting...’

The Word Bearer turned to the daemon. ‘Every one of my warriors on the ship saw what we saw.’

They hear my voice, the same as you. That is why they are here: to bear witness. To learn. The eldar failed, and the price paid for their sin was slow extinction. Humanity must not follow the same path. Mankind must accept the Primordial Truth.

‘We cannot carry this message back to the Imperium,’ said Argel Tal.

‘Of course we can,’ Xaphen narrowed his eyes. ‘We can and we will, because we must. This is humanity’s enlightenment.’

You came here seeking to learn if your home world’s Old Ways were true. And now you know they were.

‘This is a truth too ugly to be embraced by the Imperium.’ The captain watched the dead world below. ‘You, creature, know nothing of what you speak. But brother, do you expect us to sail into orbit around Terra and right into the Emperor’s welcoming embrace? The answers we carry home will make a lie of the Imperial Truth. All human emotion takes form as psychic force? Not only is the Emperor’s godless vision a lie, it must be crushed in favour of allying with daemons and spirits?’ Argel Tal shook his head. ‘It will be civil war, Xaphen. The Imperium will tear itself apart.’

The Chaplain gave a threatening growl. ‘This is why we came. The truth is all that matters. You speak as though you expected the primarch to be proved wrong, and panic now he was shown to be right.’

‘But the captain has a point,’ said Dagotal. ‘We will not be showered with medals for bringing home the truth that hell is a real place.’

They all turned as the daemon laughed in their minds.

You have seen nothing yet, but you already judge what is best for your species?

‘What more is there to see?’ asked Argel Tal.

Ingethel beckoned with its gnarled fingers. Close your eyes.

‘No.’ The captain took a calming breath. ‘I am finished with blind indulgence. Tell me what you wish to show us.’

I will show you how your primarch was born. I will show you why the Cadians called him the Favoured Son of the Four. The Emperor is not his only father.

Argel Tal glanced at the others, seeing their eyes already closed, the mention of their father enough to tempt them into obedience. He spoke into the vox, alerting the other squads.

‘Be ready, all of you, for what we see may be a deception.’

You have such little faith, Argel Tal.

The Word Bearer closed his eyes again.

The air’s touch was ice against his skin, and the first thing Argel Tal’s returning vision offered was his own breath misting before him. The smell here was neither the sanguine richness of the alien world, nor the musky odour of oxygen filtered through a vessel’s recycling scrubbers. A certain sharpness hung in the air: the chemical tang of volatile machinery and burning glass.

Argel Tal looked around the laboratory, surrounded on all sides by live generators, cluttered tables and humans at work in pressurised environment suits – some white, some bright yellow and marked by radiological sigils. Frost rimed their faceplates, scuffing away as powder when brushed off by gloved hands.

The Word Bearer had been in scarce few laboratories in the many decades of his existence, so his frame of reference was limited. Still, he could form a fair estimation that a facility this size would only be required for the most vital or visionary work. The walls were lost behind dense cabling and clanking generators; the technicians at work numbered in the hundreds, spread around tables, platforms and desks.

One passed Argel Tal, the figure’s environmental hazard suit rustling as it brushed the Word Bearer’s battle armour. The suit’s faceguard stole any hope of seeing the wearer’s face; either way, the technician ignored the Astartes completely.

Argel Tal reached for the figure.

Don’t.

He hesitated, grey fingers curling back. The tiny servos in his armour’s knuckles whirred as he pulled away from the technician’s shoulder.

Be careful, Argel Tal. These souls remain blind to you as long as you do not interfere with their work.

‘And if I did?’ he asked quietly.

Then one of the most powerful psychic forces in the history of life would be alerted to you, and would kill you where you stand. You are within the Anathema’s innermost sanctum. Here, it breeds its spawn.

‘The Anathema,’ Argel Tal repeated, looking around the colossal facility. The other Word Bearers walked to his side, none of them reaching for weapons just yet.

The Anathema. The creature you know as the God-Emperor.

Xaphen exhaled misty curls of vapour. ‘This... This is Terra. The Emperor’s gene-laboratories.’

Yes. Many years before the Anathema’s crusade to reclaim the stars. Here, with the full clarity of its emotionless inhumanity, it has finished shaping its twenty children.

The Chaplain crossed to a table, where vials of blood span in a centrifuge, separating into layers within each glass vial. ‘If this is a vision of the past, how could the Emperor destroy us here?’

You are protected for now, Xaphen. That is all that matters. This is what transpires on Terra, as the elder empire burns with soul-fire. The Anathema senses it will soon be time to begin his Great Crusade.

The Word Bearers moved along the rows of tables, their course taking them closer to the central platform standing above the laboratory. A column of black and silver machinery stood upon the decking there, ringed by a wide walkway. Argel Tal climbed the stairs first, his boots echoing on the metal, going unheard by the dozens of technicians nearby. Several passed him, paying no heed to anything beyond the digital streams on their frostbitten data-slates and the sine-wave readings on their handheld auspex readers.

Argel Tal walked across the platform, around the amniotic pods coupled to the main column – bound there by dense messes of wires, chains, cables and industrial clamps. The generators built into the column of metal made the same angry thrum as Astartes back-mounted power packs, and that little detail brought a smile to the captain’s face.

The womb of the primarchs. Here, the Anathema’s sons gestate in their cold cradles.

Argel Tal approached the closest pod. Its surface was unpainted grey iron, smooth in the few places where it wasn’t scabbed by machinery sockets and connection ports. Etched clearly onto its front plating in silver lettering was the Gothic numeral XIII. Beneath the silver plate, an inscription was scratched into the metal in tiny, meticulous handwriting.

The exact meaning of the words escaped Argel Tal – it seemed a long and complicated prayer, beseeching outside forces for blessings and strength – but the fact he could read them was mystery enough.

‘This is Colchisian,’ he said aloud.

It is, and it is not.

‘I can read it.’

The tongue you name Colchisian is a fragment of a primordial language. Colchisian... Cadian... these tongues were seeded onto your worlds in readiness for the coming age. The Emperor’s golden pets could not read those inscriptions, for they do not carry Lorgar’s blood in their veins. All of this was planned aeons ago.

‘And the Cadians?’

Their world was touched, as Colchis was touched. Seeds planted in abundance, all to flower in this moment.

Argel Tal approached the pod marked XIII. A glass screen at eye level showed nothing but the milky fluid within.

And then, movement.

Go no closer.

The briefest shadow of something stirred inside the artificial womb.

Stay back. The daemon’s voice was edged now – sharpened by concern.

Argel Tal stepped closer.

A child slumbered within the gestation pod, curled up in foetal helplessness, its eyes closed. It turned slowly in the amniotic milk, half-formed limbs moving in somnolent repose.

Stay back, Word Bearer. I sense your rising wrath. Do not assume I am the only one who is capable of feeling it. Strong emotion will also alert the Anathema.

Argel Tal leaned closer to the pod. His fingertips brushed frost from its surface.

‘Guilliman,’ he whispered.

The child slept on.

Xaphen moved away from the others, coming to the pod etched with XI. Rather than peer into its depths, he looked over his shoulder at Argel Tal.

‘The eleventh primarch sleeps within this pod – still innocent, still pure. I ache to end this now,’ he confessed.

Malnor chuckled from behind the Chaplain. ‘It would save us all a lot of effort, wouldn’t it?’

‘And it would spare Aurelian from heartbreak.’ Xaphen traced his fingertips over the designating numeral. ‘I remember the devastation that wracked him after losing his second and eleventh brothers.’

Argel Tal still hadn’t left Guilliman’s pod. ‘We do not know for certain if our actions here would change the future.’

‘Are some chances not worth taking?’ asked the Chaplain.

‘Some are. This one is not.’

‘But the Eleventh Legion–’

‘Is expunged from Imperial record for good reason. As is the Second. I’m not saying I don’t feel temptation creeping over me, brother. A single sword thrust piercing that pod, and we’d unwrite a shameful future.’

Dagotal cleared his throat. ‘And deny the Ultramarines a significant boost in recruitment numbers.’

Xaphen regarded him with emotionless eyes, seeming to weigh the merit of such a thing.

‘What?’ Dagotal asked the others. ‘You were thinking it, too. It’s no secret.’

‘Those are just rumours,’ Torgal grunted. The assault sergeant didn’t sound particularly certain.

‘Perhaps, perhaps not. The Thirteenth definitely swelled to eclipse all the other Legions around the time the Second and Eleventh were “forgotten” by Imperial archives.’

Enough of this insipid conjecture, came the disembodied voice again.

Argel Tal looked below the platform, where the scientists laboured at their stations. Most were dealing with bloodwork, or working on biopsies of pale flesh. He recognised the extracted organs immediately.

‘Why are these men and women experimenting on Astartes gene-seed?’ he asked. The other Word Bearers followed his gaze.

They are not experimenting on it. They are inventing it.

Argel Tal watched them work, as Ingethel’s voice hissed on. He saw several of the workers nearby slicing open the pale organs with silver scalpels. Each of them bore the numeral I on the back of their environment suits.

Your Emperor has conquered his own world with the proto-Astartes created in far inferior conditions. Now he breeds the primarchs, and in their shadow, he breeds the warriors he needs to lead the Great Crusade.

He watched them work, but the sight of his genetic genesis left his skin crawling.

These are the prototypical organs that will become the gene-seed for the first true Astartes. You know them as–

‘The Dark Angels,’ said Argel Tal. ‘The First Legion.’ Below him, the biotechnicians scalpelled through malformed organs, threaded veins, analysed with microscopes, and took tissue samples for further testing. The progenoid glands implanted in his own throat and chest throbbed with sympathetic ache. He lifted a hand to rub at the sore spot on the side of his neck, where the organ hidden beneath the skin did its silent work – storing his genetic coding until the moment of his death, whereupon it would be harvested and implanted within another child. The boy would, in turn, grow to become a Word Bearer. No longer human. No longer Homo Sapiens, but Homo Astartes.

It will be many Terran years before the organs below are ready for implantation in human youths. This is early in the process. Most of the flaws in gene-seed structure will be written out in the course of the coming decades.

The captain didn’t like the creature’s tone. ‘Most?’

Most. Not all.

‘The Thousand Sons,’ said Xaphen. ‘Their genetic code was misaligned. The Legion was afflicted by mutation and psychic instability.’

They are not alone in their flaws. The unwinding years will bring these biological errors to light. Gene-seed degeneration resulting in organ failure, stealing the ability to salivate venom; intolerance to certain radiation will alter a warrior’s skin and bones.

‘The Imperial Fists,’ said Malnor. ‘And the Salamanders.’

‘But what of us?’ Dagotal asked.

There was a pause as Ingethel whisper-laughed behind their eyes. What of you?

‘Will we suffer from those... impurities?’

‘Answer him,’ said Argel Tal. ‘He asks what we all wish to know.’

The code written into your bodies is purer than most. You will suffer no special degeneration, and endure no unique flaws.

‘But there is something,’ he said. ‘I hear it in your voice.’

No Astartes is as loyal to their primarch as the XVII are to Lorgar. No Imperial warrior believes in their father’s righteousness with as much faith and ardent devotion.

Argel Tal swallowed. It felt cold, and tasted sour. ‘Our loyalty is bred into our blood?’

No. You are sentient creatures with free will. This is no more than a minor divergence in an otherwise flawless code. Your gene-seed enhances the chemicals in your brain tissue. It gives you focus. It grants you unbreakable loyalty to your cause, and to Lorgar Aurelian.

‘I do not like the turn this revelation is taking,’ the captain confessed.

‘Nor I,’ admitted Torgal.

The surprise you feel is false, Argel Tal. You have seen this before, reflected in the eyes of your brother Legions. Think of the compliance of Cassius, when the pale sons of Corax watched you with distaste, arguing against your savage purge of the heathen population. The Thousand Sons at Antiolochus... The Luna Wolves at Davin... The Ultramarines at Syon...

All of your brothers have watched you and hated you for your unquestioning, focused wrath.

He moved back to Guilliman’s pod, examining it rather than paying attention to the technicians below. ‘I will speak of this no further.’

It is not a flaw to believe, Word Bearer. There is nothing purer.

Argel Tal paid the daemon’s words no mind. Something else had caught his attention and wouldn’t let go.

‘Blood of the... Look. Look at this.’ The captain crouched by the lower half of Guilliman’s coffin-womb. A bulky generator box was half-meshed with the main machinery behind the gestation pod. Coolant feeds quivered as they pumped fluid, and the details that could be made out through gaps in the armoured covering showed the generator’s internal compartments were filled with bubbling red liquid.

Dagotal looked over Argel Tal’s shoulder. ‘Is that blood?’

The captain gave Dagotal a withering look.

‘What?’ the sergeant asked.

‘It’s haemolubricant, for a machine-spirit. These secondary generators are fastened behind each pod. And look, they run along the spinal columns of these structures, up the tower.’

Dagotal and the others looked around. ‘So?’

‘So where have you seen power generators of similar design before? What engine requires a machine-spirit of this complexity to function?’

‘Oh,’ the sergeant said. ‘Oh.’

The Word Bearers looked up at the central column, juddering and humming with its machine-parts and multiple power supplies.

At last... Yes...

‘This is more than an incubation tower,’ said Xaphen.

You are so close now...

Argel Tal looked at the pods, each in turn, and the insanely complex array of machinery coupling them to the central column.

Yes... Yes... Witness the truth...

‘This is a generator,’ his voice softened in disbelief, ‘for a Geller Field.’

Xaphen circled the walkway, his clanging boot steps unheard by the horde of technicians working away. Argel Tal watched his Chaplain moving around the pods, a slow suspicion creeping over the back of his neck. Both warriors were unhelmed, and thin sheens of icy sweat glistened on their faces.

‘The most powerful Geller Field in existence,’ Argel Tal gestured to the machinery. ‘The generators on board our vessels, linked with the Navigators... they are a shadow of what we’re seeing here.’

You do not truly comprehend the effect you name a Geller Field. It is more than a kinetic shield against warp energy. The warp itself is the Sea of Souls. Your fields repel raw psychic force. They are a bulwark against the claws of the neverborn.

‘The question we must ask ourselves,’ Xaphen spoke as he stroked the surface of the pod marked XVII, ‘is why these incubators are shielded against...’

Say it.

Xaphen smiled. ‘...against daemons.’

Torgal joined the Chaplain before Lorgar’s pod. He stared inside at the slumbering infant for some time.

‘I believe I know. These children are almost grown to the point of birth. Daemon? Spirit?’

I am here.

Torgal looked acutely uncomfortable interacting with a disembodied voice. ‘The Legions tell the tale of the Emperor’s twenty sons being cast into the heavens by some great tragedy, some flaw in their creation process.’

You have been raised with tales of the primarchs that lead your Legions, but you have been fed centuries of lies. In a matter of moments, you will witness the truth. The Anathema dealt with the Powers of the warp long before he left Earth on the Great Crusade.

The Anathema desired mighty sons, and the gods granted him the lore to forge them with a union of divine genetics and psychic sorcery. He came to my masters, hungry for answers, beseeching the gods for power. With the lore they gave him, he shaped his twenty sons.

But treacheries have occurred. Oaths – sworn in blood and paid in soul – have been broken. The Anathema now refuses to show humanity the Primordial Truth, and the gods of the warp grow wrathful.

The Anathema is keeping its twenty primarch sons and paying no price to the Powers that gifted him with the knowledge to shape them.

Xaphen gripped the handrail to keep from going to his knees. ‘Our father – all of our fathers – are the spawn of ancient blood rituals and forbidden science.’

Argel Tal couldn’t keep from laughing. ‘The Emperor that denies all forms of divinity shaped his own sons with the blessings of forgotten gods. Prayers and sorcery are written upon their gestation pods. This is the most glorious madness.’

Be ready. The reckoning comes. The Powers will reach into the material realm to reclaim the sons they helped breed.

Argel Tal looked at the pods through a smile that wouldn’t fade. ‘This Geller Field. It fails, doesn’t it?’

It will fail in exactly thirty-seven beats of your heart, Argel Tal.

‘And the primarchs are seized – taken by your masters in the warp. That’s the accident that casts them across the galaxy.’

The warp gods are the primarchs’ rightful fathers. This is not to spite your Emperor. It is nothing but divine justice. And as these perfect children travel through the stars, they will grow. This is the first step in the gods’ plans to save mankind.

‘And Aurelian...’

Is the most important one of all. Lorgar’s incubation pod will be carried to Colchis, to walk the first steps to enlightening humanity of the Primordial Truth, and the gods behind the stars. Without the gods, humanity will die, piece by piece, under the predation of the aliens that still lay claim to much of the galaxy. Those that remain will die as the eldar died: in agony, unable to see the Primordial Truth before their very eyes.

This is Fate. It is written in the stars. Lorgar knows that humanity needs divinity – it is what shaped his life and Legion. It is why he was chosen as the favoured son.

Xaphen closed his eyes, murmuring a litany from the Word. ‘Faith raises us above the soulless and the damned. It is the soul’s fuel, and the driving force behind millennia of mankind’s survival. We are hollow without it.’

Argel Tal drew his weapons. The swords of red iron slid free from their scabbards with twin hisses.

Yes. Yes...

Both blades sparked into electrical life as the captain pulled the handle-triggers. Xaphen regarded him with hooded eyes.

‘Do it,’ the Chaplain said. ‘Let it begin.’

Argel Tal whirled the blades in slow, arcing loops, their crackling power fields growing more intense, the blades emanating ozone mist as they burned and rasped through the frozen air.

‘Aurelian,’ whispered Malnor. ‘For Lorgar.’

‘For the truth,’ Torgal said. ‘Do it, and we will carry these answers back to the Imperium.’

Argel Tal looked at Dagotal; the youngest of his sergeants, only recently promoted before the Legion’s humiliation. The outrider commander’s eyes were distant.

‘I am weary of being lied to by the Emperor, brother. I am so tired of being ashamed, when what we believe is the truth.’ Dagotal nodded, meeting his captain’s eyes at last. ‘Do it.’

Three.

He stepped forward, staring at a cluster of vein-like cables twitching as they channelled artificial blood around the semi-organic tower machine.

Two.

Argel Tal span the swords, leaving blurred trails of lightning in their wake.

One.

The blades chopped down, crashing through steel, iron, rubber, copper, bronze and vat-grown blood.

Both swords exploded in his hands, their blades shattering like smashed glass and decorating his bare face with bloody cuts.

And then, for one horrific, familiar moment, Argel Tal saw nothing but burning, psychic gold.

Eighteen

A Hundred Truths
Resurrection
Return

‘I heard your brother,’ Argel Tal confessed.

The primarch was no longer writing. For several minutes, Lorgar had done nothing but listen in mounting emotion as the captain relayed the events in Ingethel’s vision. Now, at these words, he released a breath he’d been holding for some time.

‘Magnus?’

Argel Tal had never heard his sire speak so softly. ‘No. The Warmaster.’

The golden-skinned giant brushed his hands over his face, seemingly afflicted by a sudden weariness. ‘I do not know that title,’ he said. ‘Warmaster. An ugly word.’

Argel Tal chuckled in two voices. ‘Of course, forgive us, Lorgar. He will not be named that for some time. He is still merely Horus. When the vision ended in golden light, we could see nothing beyond the flare. But we heard your brother Horus. The machinery was breaking down, rattling and crashing. There was gunfire. The rush of the most powerful wind we’ve ever felt. And we heard Horus’s voice – shouting, defiant, enraged. It was as if he were there with us, seeing what we saw.’

‘Stop saying “we”. You are Argel Tal.’

‘We are Argel Tal, yes. In forty-three years, Horus will speak four words that will save humanity or lead to its extinction. We know what those words are, Lorgar. Do you?’

Lorgar cradled his head in his hands, fine fingers pressed to the elegant runes inked onto his skin.

‘This is too much. Too much to bear. I... I need Erebus here. I need my fa— Kor Phaeron.’

‘They are far from here. And we will tell you something more: neither Erebus nor Kor Phaeron would struggle to accept the truths that we speak. Kor Phaeron has always kept his belief in the Old Ways hidden behind lying smiles, and Erebus drools in the presence of power. Neither of those twisted warlocks would hold their heads in their hands and panic about how the Imperium will–’

Argel Tal’s voices fell silent, quenched by the golden hand around his emaciated throat.

Lorgar rose to his feet in a smooth and effortless motion, dragging the Astartes up with him, the captain’s feet lifting from the deck.

‘You will watch your tongue when you speak the names of my mentors, and you will speak with respect when you address the lord of your own Legion. Is that understood, beast?’

Argel Tal didn’t answer. His hands clawed at the primarch’s forearm in desperate futility.

Lorgar hurled the skeletal figure against the wall. The captain crashed against the metal and tumbled to the floor.

‘Wipe that filthy grin from your lips,’ Lorgar demanded.

When the Astartes lifted his face to regard the primarch, it was Argel Tal who looked out through his own eyes once more.

‘Control yourself, captain,’ Lorgar warned. ‘Now finish your tale.’

‘I saw things.’ Argel Tal tried to rise on trembling limbs. ‘When the gold faded, there was more to see. Visions. I can’t explain it any other way, sire.’

Sensing his son’s return to the fore, Lorgar helped Argel Tal to a seating position.

‘Speak,’ he said.

One by one, the pods came down.

Alone now, Argel Tal stood on the surface of each world and watched them strike home. Not all of them; and that itself was a source of mystery. Was there some significance in the planetfalls he was entitled to witness? Why these, and not others?

The first was a blazing meteorite, ploughing into the soft soil of a temperate world. The pod didn’t punch deep; it carved a furrow in the ground and skidded to a halt in the midst of an evergreen forest so dense that the overhanging trees refused the moonlight above.

The child that emerged from the broken pod was pale of skin and fierce of eye. His hair was as black as the armour of the warriors he would grow to lead.

Twilight fell without warning–

–withering the trees to dust, their ashes scattering in the sudden wind. In place of the lush forest was bleak tundra reaching from horizon to horizon, populated by black rock and stunted, colourless flora.

The pod rained down aflame from the grey sky, crashing against the jagged slopes of a cliff side and causing an avalanche of tumbling rocks in its wake. When the dust finally cleared, Argel Tal saw a slender child rise from the wreckage of metal and stone, brushing his dusty hands through hair the white of flawless marble.

The boy looked to his surroundings, while–

–Argel Tal was alone on a mountaintop, snow clinging to his armour as it fell. On a distant peak, a fortress stood silhouetted against a clean sky, its exquisite stone battlements and towers lit by the sun shining down through a break in the clouds.

The Word Bearer stared upward, feeling the light snowfall cool his fevered skin as he watched the pod fall from the heavens. When it struck the earth, it hit with enough force to drive itself into the side of the mountain, shaking the ground with the anger of an artillery barrage.

Argel Tal waited, watching the wound in the mountainside. At last, a child emerged, climbing over the rocks with ease, his skin bronze in the high sun. For a moment, it seemed the child saw him, but–

–no world should ever be this dark.

Argel Tal’s eyes took a few seconds to pierce the deep night, and what met his gaze was no better than the preceding darkness. A lightless sky was dominated by an imposing moon that eclipsed the starlight rather than reflect the sun. A sprawling city on the horizon was barely lit, as though the eyes of its denizens would rebel against any true illumination.

Fire heralded the pod’s arrival – brightening the air over the wasteland with blazing light as it tore groundward. The impact was a spear-thrust into the metallic-smelling soil, driving the incubator deep into the ground with enough force to split the land with tectonic cracks.

The Word Bearer maintained his balance, breathing in air that tasted of iron and waiting for signs of movement from the chasm freshly-carved into the infertile earth.

The boy that rose under the night sky was corpse-pale, and unique among the progenitors Argel Tal had seen so far, for he carried a shard of his gestation pod clutched tight in his fist – a knife, crude and instinctive, made from the twisted metal of his pod.

Thunder announced itself overhead. The boy raised his face to the sky, a sudden trident of lightning illuminating the child’s gaunt, unhealthy features.

Argel Tal–

–stood atop another cliff edge, this one overlooking a valley that split a brutal mountain range.

The pod hammered down – a blur of grey metal – smashing against the rock walls without piercing the stone. Argel Tal watched as the pod span end over end, wrecking itself in its devastating fall down the mountainside. Dark metal ripped from its armoured hull, shed like peeling scabs.

It came to rest upside-down at the bottom of the valley, and Argel Tal’s visor zoomed in to compensate for the distance. He saw the pod shake once, twice, then roll aside, pushed away by the infant it had contained. Free of his burden, the boy touched trembling hands to a face awash with blood.

The scream of pain that rose from the valley had no place leaving the lips of a child so young.

When–

–everything changed again, Argel Tal watched the dusk through a haze of mist. The fog was thin, a sickly celadon jade that spoke of both chill air and toxicity. What little daylight pierced the mist was born of a pinprick sun, meagre in both size and generosity, setting below a flat horizon.

Plainsland stretched in every direction, as uninspiring and barren as any number of ignorable lifeless worlds Argel Tal had passed as part of the Great Crusade’s expeditionary fleets.

The falling pod trailed smoke and flame, burning with green fire as it ignited the virulence in the mist. Its final descent brought it hammering against the rocky ground, cracking open as it skidded over the shale.

The Word Bearer moved closer to the downed capsule, seeing tendrils of fog creeping through the rent metal, misting up the interior behind the clear viewplate. Something pale moved within, but–

–he was standing in the white stone and shining crystal heart of a city, surrounded by spires, pyramids, obelisks and towering statuary.

The pod fell from the summer sky at a meteor’s angle, shearing through a slender tower with a crash of breaking glass that could be heard across the city. A moment later, the incubator cracked the mosaic ground, sliding and burning across the white stone until it ended its fiery journey against the base of a great pyramid.

Crowds of tanned, handsome figures gathered in the afternoon sunlight, watching as the metal coffin’s rivets and bolts unscrewed and removed themselves, detached by unseen hands. Plate by plate, the pod’s armour plating lifted away, floating in the air above the crash site. At last, the final structural pieces drifted apart, while at the heart of the hovering display was a red-haired child, his eyes closed, his skin a burnished coppery red.

The boy’s feet didn’t touch the ground. He floated a metre above the burned mosaics, and at last opened his eyes. Argel Tal–

–walked the surface of a wasted world. The air held the taint of exhaust fumes, and the lifeless landscape was a grey twin to Luna, Terra’s only moon.

The pod fell from a night sky filled with stars – each of the constellations pregnant with the promise of deeper meaning. The ground rumbled in protest as the pod struck, and the Word Bearer climbed the small rise of a crater’s lip to see the incubator gouging a furrow through the silvery soil.

The pod’s door blasted open even as it was coming to rest, clanging loudly in the silent night. The boy that rose from the confines was inhumanly handsome, his fine features pale and contemplative, his grey eyes matching the earth of the world he’d landed upon.

There was no–

–chance to move closer.

He was home. Not the sterile decks of the expeditionary fleet, nor even the Spartan sanctuary of his meditation chamber aboard De Profundis. No, he was home.

The sky was a cloudless expanse of blue above the dusty desert, while a city of grey flowers and fire-hardened red bricks sat by the side of a wide river. Argel Tal regarded the Holy City from his position downriver; such was his pleasure at this curious homecoming that he forgot to look up until the last moment.

The pod – his father’s black iron womb – hit the rushing river with a great splash, throwing spray and a fine wet mist into the air. Argel Tal was already sprinting, his armour joints whirring as he ran over the arid soil. He didn’t care if this was a vision or if he was really here; he had to reach his father’s pod.

Astartes battle armour wasn’t made for this. With its immense weight, his boots sank into the sticking river mud, generating grinding protests from the inbuilt mercury-threaded stabilisers in his shins and knee-joints.

The Word Bearer hauled himself through the waist-deep mud, clambering lower down the riverbank to reach the downed capsule. As he neared the incubator, one thing was obvious above all else: Lorgar’s pod had suffered a great deal more damage than any other.

He reached out, the ceramite armouring his fingers just managing to scrape the pod’s side, and an image flashed before his eyes, superimposing itself over reality.

The pod rattled, spinning through the void, tumbling alone through the warp’s tides. Burn marks and cracks appeared as the lurching journey continued, while mist the colour of madness seeped in through the armour cracks. The child within slept on as pain marred its features, now restless in its repose.

See how the gods of this galaxy treasured your primarch above the others, keeping him in the Sea of Souls for decades, preparing him for the role he would play in the ascension of mankind to divinity.

Lorgar felt their blessed touch more than any of his brothers.

Argel Tal–

–stumbled, staggering to a halt.

The pod before him was a clone to his father’s, but growing faint and indistinct before his eyes. The ground was dark, the night sky was starless, and for a moment Argel Tal wasn’t sure whether he stood on the surface of a world or the deck of a powered-down ship.

As his senses faded, he caught a momentary glimpse through the viewplate on the pod’s bulky front. Whatever moved within the incubator had too many limbs to be a lone human child.

Argel Tal stepped closer, only to have his attention stolen by a blur of scarlet in the glass reflection. It was his helm, his chestplate, but warped by ivory protrusions – a twisted, gothic bio-architecture formed from ceramite and bone. The face that looked back was a tusked rendition of his war helm, painted crimson and black but for the golden star around his right eye lens.

He–

–opened his eyes.

The observation deck, on board the Orfeo’s Lament. The sky beyond the dome was full of thrashing chaos.

The daemon remained exactly where it had been, its muscled form never completely still, forever swaying side to side, its claws flicker-twitching in the air. Xaphen, Torgal, Malnor, Dagotal – all were exactly as they had been before.

The outrider sergeant checked his retinal chron. Three seconds had passed. Four. Five.

They’d been gone no time at all.

‘Was any of that real?’ he asked.

Ingethel the Ascended gestured with two of its spindly arms, the talons pointing to the ground behind the Word Bearers. There, on the decking, were the swords of red iron: broken beyond repair, the shards darkened by scorch markings from the detonation that ruined them.

‘That looks real to me,’ Xaphen chuckled.

You have seen much, and learned more. One matter remains. The daemon slithered around the Astartes, circling them with slow relish. Something akin to amusement glinted in its ugly eyes as it watched Argel Tal.

‘What remains?’

A leap of faith.

Xaphen’s eyes met Argel Tal’s. ‘We’ve come this far. We stand united.’

The captain nodded.

A choice must be made. You have witnessed the truth of the gods. You have seen the Emperor’s own lies laid bare, and you know the slow extinction that awaits humanity if the species remains blind to the Primordial Truth.

So choose.

‘Choose what?’ Argel Tal narrowed his eyes. Unwilling to tolerate the creature’s stench any longer, he put on his helm, breathing easier as the collar seals hissed and locked.

To lower this vessel’s Geller Field. Ingethel stroked a claw down the dome’s side. On the other side of the dense glass, screaming faces and frantic talons pressed against the daemon’s hand. Lower the Geller Field. Become the architects of humanity’s destiny, and the weapons Lorgar needs to wield against the Empire of Lies.

The Word Bearers didn’t all react alike. Xaphen closed his eyes with a knowing smile, as if this confirmed something he’d been waiting to hear. Torgal rested his hands on his holstered pistol and sheathed blade, while Malnor placed his grey gauntlet on the stocks of the two bolt pistols mag-locked to his thighs. Dagotal stepped back from the group, his body language betraying his unease even though his eye lenses gave no emotion away.

Argel Tal didn’t reach for a weapon. Instead, he laughed.

‘You are insane, creature.’

This is the respect you show to a messenger of the gods?

‘What did you expect? That the Word Bearers would kneel and accept everything you said as a divine mandate? We are done with kneeling, Ingethel.’

The daemon’s maw quivered as it offered a rattish hiss. Lower the Geller Field and you will taste the last promise of proof.

‘We must heed the messenger’s words,’ said the Chaplain.

‘Enough, Xaphen.’

‘Aurelian demanded this of us! We were ordered to follow the guide, no matter where he led us. How can you baulk at the final moment of truth?’

‘Enough. We are not risking the ship in this storm. We already lost the Shield of Scarus. A hundred brothers lost in this sector of space, and you smile when it comes to losing a hundred more.’

They were not chosen, Argel Tal. You are. It was their time to meet destruction. They lacked the strength of will to endure what you are being offered.

The captain rounded on the daemon. ‘What will happen if we lower the field? Will we be at the mercy of the storm? Pulled apart like every other Imperial vessel that lost Geller stability during warp flight?’

No. Lower the anathemic skin, and my kin will come to join us. To share the final revelation with the gods’ chosen warriors.

‘Daemons... on the ship.’ Argel Tal watched the faces of screaming souls thrashing against the dome. ‘This cannot be our choice. These cannot be the gods of the galaxy.’

Xaphen softened his voice. To Argel Tal’s ears, he’d never sounded more like Erebus, his former mentor.

‘Brother... We were never given a promise that the truth would be easy to bear. The way we were chosen – and our father favoured – by true divine power.’

Argel Tal turned to stare at Xaphen through a targeting reticule. ‘You seem very certain about this course of action, brother.’

‘Are you not honoured to be chosen like this? I wish to be one of the first to receive the blessing of the gods. It is a leap of faith, as Ingethel said.’

‘Sylamor will not lower the Geller Field, even if we order it. It would be suicide.’

There will be no fruitless death. This is your moment of ascension, Word Bearers. Let fate take its course. Think of your primarch, kneeling in the dust before Guilliman and the God-Emperor.

This moment will be the beginning of his vindication. The Emperor’s lies will damn your species. The Primordial Truth will set it free.

‘We can carry this lore back to the Imperium, but humanity will never surrender itself to this... chaos.’

Humanity has no choice. It will die under the claws of aliens, and those few that survive will be swallowed by the spreading influence of the warp gods. They only grow stronger, Argel Tal. If one refuses to worship them, then that species has no place in this galaxy.

The Word Bearer didn’t speak the words that lay on his tongue – nevertheless, the daemon sensed them.

What will you do, human? Fight us? Wage war against the gods themselves? How lovely, to imagine the little Empire of mortal man laying siege to heaven and hell.

Just like the eldar... You will see the Primordial Truth, or you will be destroyed by it.

‘One last question,’ he said.

Ask.

‘You name the Emperor as the Anathema. Why?’

Because of the future. The Emperor will damn your species, denying humanity its birthright as the chosen children of the gods. He wages war against divinity, shrouding your species in ignorance. That will damn you all. The Emperor is not only loathed for his treacheries against the gods, he is anathemic to all human life.

Lorgar knows this. It is why he sent you into the Eye. Your enlightenment is the first step in the human race’s ascendancy.

Argel Tal looked into the daemon’s eyes for a long, long moment. In the mismatched depths, he once more saw Lorgar abase himself in the dust. He felt the deceitful Emperor’s psychic gale throwing him from his feet, casting him to the dirt before the Ultramarines.

He felt the serenity of standing in the City of Grey Flowers, knowing beyond doubt that his cause was holy, that his crusade was just. How long had it been since he’d felt such purity of purpose?

‘Qan Shiel Squad,’ Argel Tal spoke into the vox. ‘Make your way to Geller Generation on deck three. Squad Velash, move to support Qan Shiel.’

Affirmations crackled back. ‘Orders, sir?’ asked Sergeant Qan Shiel. ‘I... we have all heard as you heard.’

The captain swallowed.

‘Destroy the Geller Field generator. That’s an order. All Word Bearers, stand ready.’

Ninety-one seconds later, the ship gave the slightest rumble beneath their feet.

Ninety-four seconds later, it pitched to starboard, wrenched from orbit by the storm’s rage, drowning in the thrashing tides.

Ninety-seven seconds later, light died on every deck, bathing the crew and their Astartes protectors in the red gloom of emergency sirens.

Ninety-nine seconds later, every vox-channel erupted in screaming.

Ingethel uncoiled itself and launched forward, reaching for Malnor first.

Xaphen lay dead at the creature’s feet.

His spine twisted, his armour broken, a death that showed no peace in rest. A metre from his outstretched fingers, his black steel crozius rested on the deck, silent in deactivation. The corpse was cauled by its helm, its final face hidden, but the Chaplain’s scream still echoed across the vox-network.

The sound had been wet, strained – half-drowned by the blood filling Xaphen’s ruptured lungs.

The creature turned its head with a predator’s grace, stinking saliva trailing in gooey stalactites between too many teeth. No artificial light remained on the observation deck, but starlight, the winking of distant suns, bred silver glints in the creature’s unmatching eyes. One was amber, swollen, lidless. The other black, an obsidian pebble sunken deep into its hollow.

Now you, it said, without moving its maw. Those jaws could never form human speech. You are next.

Argel Tal’s first attempt to speak left his lips as a trickle of too-hot blood. It stung his chin as it ran down his face. The chemical-rich reek of the liquid, of Lorgar’s gene-written blood running through the veins of each of his sons, was enough to overpower the stench rising from the creature’s quivering, muscular grey flesh. For that one moment, he smelled his own death, rather than the creature’s corruption.

It was a singular reprieve.

The captain raised his bolter in a grip that trembled, but not from fear. This defiance – this was the refusal he couldn’t voice any other way.

Yes, the creature loomed closer. Its lower body was an abomination’s splicing between serpent and worm, thick-veined and leaving a viscous, clear slug-trail that stank of unearthed graves. Yes.

‘No,’ Argel Tal finally forced the words through clenched teeth. ‘Not like this.’

Like this. Like your brothers. This is how it must be.

The bolter barked with a throaty chatter, a stream of shells that hammered into the wall, impacting with concussive detonations that defiled the chamber’s quiet. Each buck of the gun in his shaking hand sent the next shell wider from the mark.

Arm muscles burning, he let the weapon fall with a dull clang. The creature did not laugh, did not mock him for his failure. Instead, it reached for him with four arms, lifting him gently. Black talons scraped against the grey ceramite of his armour as it clutched him aloft.

Prepare yourself. This will not be painless.

Argel Tal hung limp in the creature’s grip. For a brief second, he reached for the swords of red iron at his hips, forgetting that they were broken, the blades shattered, on the gantry decking below.

‘I can hear,’ his gritted teeth almost strangled the words, ‘another voice.’

Yes. One of my kin. It comes for you.

‘This... is not what... my primarch wanted...’

This? The creature dragged the helpless Astartes closer, and burst Argel Tal’s secondary heart with a flex of thought. The captain went into violent convulsions, feeling the pulped mass behind his ribs like a bunch of crushed grapes, but the daemon cradled him with sickening gentleness.

This is exactly what Lorgar wanted. This is the truth.

Argel Tal strained for breath that wouldn’t come, and forced dying muscles to reach for weapons that weren’t there.

The last thing he felt before he died was something pouring into his thoughts, wet and cold, like oil spilling behind his eyes.

The last thing he heard was one of his dead brothers drawing a ragged breath over the vox-channel.

And the last thing he saw was Xaphen twitching, rising from the deck on struggling limbs.

Lorgar lowered the quill once more. An unknowable emotion burned in his eyes – whatever it was, Argel Tal had never seen it before.

‘And so we come full circle,’ said the primarch. ‘You died and resurrected. You found the crew slain. You sailed out from the Eye, taking seven months to do so.’

‘You desired answers, sire. We brought them to you.’

‘I could not be prouder of you, Argel Tal. You have saved humanity from ignorance and extinction. You have proved the Emperor wrong.’

The captain watched his father closely. ‘How much of this did you already know, sire?’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘You lingered for three nights in the Cadian caves with Ingethel. How much of this tale had the creature already told you before you sent us in to the Eye?’

Lorgar released a breath, not quite a laugh, not quite a sigh. ‘I did not know what would happen to you, my son. Please believe me.’

Argel Tal nodded. That was good enough.

He started to answer, but the affirmation caught in his throat. Was this the genetic loyalty all Astartes felt for their primarchs, only magnified in the XVII Legion? Would he ever be able to see deceit in his father’s eyes, even if the Urizen lied right to his face?

Entire worlds had fallen to Lorgar’s oratory without a single shot being fired in anger. In his son’s eyes, he personified the persuasive, soulful charm so resplendent in the Emperor – always seeming above anything as base and crude as deception.

And yet, Ingethel’s words cast the shadow of doubt.

‘I believe you, father,’ he said, hoping the words were true rather than knowing they were.

‘We must cover our tracks.’ Lorgar shook his head slowly. ‘The Cadians’ lives are evidence that the Emperor must never see. With his watchdogs among us, my father will know we witnessed the Cadian rituals, and that we ventured into the Eye. We must remain pure in the Emperor’s eyes. The storm revealed nothing. The Cadians... well, they were destroyed for their deviance.’

Argel Tal swallowed acid. ‘You will destroy the tribes?’

‘We must cover our tracks,’ Lorgar sighed. ‘Genocide has never given me pleasure, my son. Tales of unrest will be spread among the fleet, and we will use tectonic weapons on the landing site to destroy the tribes that occupy the wastelands.’

Argel Tal said nothing. There was nothing he could say.

‘You are reborn,’ Lorgar pressed his palms together. ‘The gods have reshaped you, granted you this great blessing.’

That’s one way of seeing this, Argel Tal thought.

‘I am possessed,’ he replied. The words did no justice to the sense of violation, yet any other explanation would be too crude a fit. ‘We were possessed, as evidence to you that Ingethel’s words of the gods were truth.’

‘I need no more convincing. Everything, at last, has fallen into place. I know my role in the galaxy, after two centuries of struggling to find the right path. And we will come to see your... union... as something avataric, something that exalts you in the eyes of the gods. Not a sacrifice. You were chosen, Argel Tal. Just as I was.’ And yet, he did not sound as certain as his words insisted. Doubt shadowed his tone.

Argel Tal seemed lost in thought, watching the skeletal play of his opening and closing hand.

‘Ingethel warned us all: this is merely the beginning. We will change as the possession takes hold, but not until the ordained time. These gods will cry out from their haven here in the storm, and when we hear them call to us, we will begin our... “evolution”.’

‘What form will these changes take?’ Lorgar was writing once more, recording every word in his rapid, elegant script. He never went back to amend mistakes in his handwriting, for there were never any errors to amend.

‘The daemon said nothing of that,’ Argel Tal confessed. ‘It said only that this age was coming to an end before another century has passed. When it does, the galaxy will burn and the gods will scream. Until then, we carry a second soul, letting it ripen inside us.’

Lorgar said nothing for some time. At last, he laid the quill aside and smiled at his son – a reassuring, welcoming smile.

‘You must learn to hide this from the Custodes. You must hide this from everyone outside the Legion, until you hear the gods call.’

Nineteen

Confession
Restoration
The Gal Vorbak

The Blessed Lady knew who it was even before the door opened.

She sat comfortably on the edge of her bed, hands folded in her lap, clad in her layered priestess’s robe of cream and grey. Her sightless eyes turned to him as he entered, following the sounds of his bare feet. She heard the swish of robes rather than the thrum of active armour, and the novelty brought a smile to her lips.

‘Hello, captain,’ she said.

‘Confessor,’ he replied.

It took considerable poise to hide her shock. His voice had changed from the months of privation, sounding dryer as it left his throat. And there was something else... Something more: a new resonance despite the current weakness.

She’d heard the rumours, of course. If the talk was true, they’d resorted to killing one another and drinking their brothers’ blood.

‘I thought you’d have come to me before now.’

‘Forgive the delay. I have been with the primarch since my return.’

‘You sound tired.’

‘The weakness will fade.’ Argel Tal sat on the floor by her bed, taking his customary position. He’d last sat there only three nights before, though for the Word Bearer, almost a year had passed.

‘I missed you,’ he told her. ‘But I am glad you were not with us.’

Cyrene wasn’t sure how to begin. ‘I heard... things,’ she said.

Argel Tal smiled. ‘They are likely all true.’

‘The human crew?’

‘Dead, to a man. That is why I am glad you were not on board with us.’

‘And you suffered as the rumours say?’

The Word Bearer chuckled. ‘That depends what the rumours say.’

His casual stoicism charmed her, as it always did. The hint of another smile tickled the corners of her lips.

‘Come here. Kneel, and let me see you.’

He complied, bringing his face before her and holding her wrists in a gentle grip as he led her hands. She brushed her fingertips along his skin, tracing the contours of his diminished features.

‘I have always wondered if you were handsome. It is so hard to tell with only touch to rely on.’

The thought hadn’t really crossed his mind before. He was bred above such matters. He told her so now, with an amused addendum: ‘Whether I was or not, I have looked better than I do now.’

Cyrene lowered her hands. ‘You are very gaunt,’ she noted. And your skin is too warm.

‘Sustenance was in short supply. As I said, the rumours were true.’

When silence reached out between them, she found it awkward and unsettling. Never before had they struggled for words to share. Cyrene toyed with a lock of her hair, which her maid had painstakingly arranged only half an hour ago.

‘I have come for confession,’ he said, breaking the silence at last. Rather than soothe her, it sent her heart racing faster. She wasn’t certain she wished to know what depredations had occurred on the Orfeo’s Lament.

But Cyrene, above all else, was loyal to her Legion. Hers was a cherished role, and she was honoured to perform it.

‘Speak, warrior.’ A friendly formality came over her voice. ‘Confess your sins.’

She expected him to relate how he’d butchered his brothers and supped their blood to survive. She expected tales of horror from the warp storm – a storm she’d never seen herself and had only the poorly-worded descriptions of other crew members to rely on.

The captain spoke slowly, clearly. ‘I have spent decades of my life waging war in the name of a lie. I have rendered worlds compliant to a false society. I need forgiveness. My Legion needs forgiveness.’

‘I don’t understand.’

He began to describe the last year of his life for Cyrene, just as he had for his father. She interrupted a great deal less often, and once the retelling was complete, she focused not on the greater ramifications, but the moment that she’d heard Argel Tal’s voice wavering more than any other.

‘You killed Vendatha,’ she said, keeping her voice soft to rob the accusation of its bite. ‘You killed your friend.’

Argel Tal looked into her blind eyes. Since returning from the storm’s depths, looking at living beings had a strangely pleasant edge. He’d always been able to hear the liquid rhythm of her heart, but now the sound was accompanied by the teasing sense of her blood running through her veins. All that warmth, all that taste, all that life: scarcely beneath her fragile skin. Looking at her, knowing how easy it would be to kill her, was a guilty pleasure he’d never felt before.

And it was so easy to imagine. Her heart would slow. Her eyes would glaze. Her breath would shiver as her lips trembled.

Then...

Then her soul would fall into the warp, screaming in that tumultuous abyss, to shriek into those thrashing tides until it was devoured by the neverborn.

Argel Tal looked away.

‘Forgive me a moment’s distraction, confessor. What did you just say?’

‘I said, you killed your friend.’ Cyrene touched a hand to her plain silver earring. A gift from her lover, Argel Tal suspected – Major Arric Jesmetine.

The Word Bearer didn’t reply right away. ‘I did not come to be forgiven for that.’

‘I am not sure you can be.’

The captain rose to his feet once more. ‘It was a mistake to come here so soon. I had feared this hesitance between us.’

‘Feared?’ Cyrene smiled up at him. ‘I have never heard you use that word before, Argel Tal. I thought the Astartes knew no fear.’

‘Very well. It is not fear.’ Those words spoken by any other might sound petulant and defensive, but she heard no such emotion in Argel Tal’s voice. ‘I have seen more than most Imperial souls will ever see. Perhaps I possess a greater understanding of mortality – after all, I have seen where our souls go when we die.’

‘Would you still give your life for the Imperium?’

This time, there was no hesitation in his answer. ‘I would give my life for humanity. I would never offer my life to preserve the Imperium. Day by day, we have sailed farther from my grandfather’s empire of lies. There will be a reckoning for the deceptions he has draped over the eyes of an entire species.’

‘It’s good to hear you speak this way,’ she said.

‘Why? You delight in hearing me speak blasphemy against the Emperor’s dominion?’

‘No. Far from it. But you sound so certain of everything once more. I am glad you made it back from that... place.’

Cyrene offered her hand, the way a Covenant priestess would offer her signet ring to be kissed. It was an old ritual between them; with no signet ring to kiss, Argel Tal’s cracked, warm lips met the skin of her knuckles for the briefest moment.

‘War will come from this,’ she said. ‘Won’t it?’

‘The primarch hopes it will not. Humanity has only one choice, and it must be made by those who have sought out the answers.’

‘Such as yourself?’

He chuckled again. ‘No. By my father, and the brothers he can trust. Some will be brought to his side by deception, if they are too dull-minded to come in perfect faith. But we are a populous Legion, and our conquests are many, with many more to come. Much of the Imperium’s border worlds will answer to the warriors of Aurelian first, and the Emperor second.’

‘You... you’re planning this, already?’

‘It may not come to war,’ he said. ‘The primarch is venturing into the Great Eye to witness his own revelations. Evidently, the lives of the Serrated Sun were spent and warped in what was merely truth’s prelude.’

Cyrene could hear the discomfort in his voice. He was making no move to hide it.

‘Do you believe the primarch sent you in first out of... fear?’

Argel Tal didn’t answer that.

‘Tell me one more thing before you leave, captain.’

‘Ask.’

‘Why did you believe all of this? Hell-worlds. Souls. Humanity’s slow extinction, and these... monsters... that call themselves daemons. What convinced you that it was more than some alien trick?’

‘Such creatures are no different from the gods of countless faiths that have risen and fallen over the millennia. Few gods were benevolent creators to any culture.’

‘But what if we’re being lied to?’

It would have been easy to say that the faith was its own sustenance and that humanity always reached for religion; that almost every rediscovered human culture clung to their own belief in the infinite and the divine; and that here was a realm of prophecy – where beings with the power of gods had proved beyond doubt that they’d summoned the Lord of the Seventeenth Legion, shaping fate to make these events unfold.

Whether they were benevolent creator gods from mythology or mere manifestations of mortal emotion was irrelevant. Here was the divine force in a galaxy of lost souls. On the edge of the physical universe, gods and mortals had finally met, and mankind would fall without their masters.

But Argel Tal said none of this. He was weary of such explanation.

‘I remember your words after Monarchia died in the Emperor’s fire. You told me it was the day you truly began to believe that gods were real, once you had seen such power unleashed. I felt the same when I saw the power at work in this storm. Can you understand that, Cyrene?’

‘I understand.’

‘I thought you would.’

And with those words spoken, he walked from her room.

Aquillon found him in the practice cages.

Both warriors were aware of each other long before either said a word. Aquillon watched in silence, respectfully waiting until Argel Tal finished his round of exercises, while the Word Bearer graced the Custodian with a perfunctory nod, saying nothing as he worked through his sword work routines. Finding balance in his weakened physique was a torturous affair. The deactivated sparring blades cut the air in dull sweeps – a poor shadow of the lost swords of red iron – and he was breathless with exertion as his hearts thudded to keep up with the demands he placed upon his emaciated physique.

At last, Argel Tal lowered the blades. His muscles ached from only two hours of training. Before his journey into the Eye, such a poor performance would see him doing penance for a ritual ninety-nine nights.

‘Aquillon,’ he greeted his friend.

‘You look as though you died and forgot to lie down.’

The Word Bearer snorted. ‘I feel like it.’

‘A shame. You’d managed to last almost four minutes against me last time we stepped into these cages together.’

‘I see you are not in a merciful mood.’ In better times, this banter would have come easily to Argel Tal. ‘Did you come to speak of Ven?’

Aquillon opened the force cage and took up a practice blade twin to the one Argel Tal still held. The sparring cage’s hemispheres closed around them both. Both warriors wore robes: one, the white of Terra’s palace servants, one, the grey of the XVII Legion.

‘I wanted to hear it from you.’ He raised the blade in a two-handed grip, mimicking his favoured weapon. His warriors carried the traditional glaives, but Aquillon’s antique bidenhander broadsword was a blade apart. He carried this blade as he wielded his own sword: with a confident, effortless grip.

Argel Tal raised his own swords in a defensive cross, feeling the burn of lactic acid in his muscles. The two warriors tended to play to their strengths in the past: Aquillon was ferociously offensive in his blade work; Argel Tal remained consummately defensive.

‘So will you tell me what happened?’

Aquillon was indeed not in a merciful mood. Before the Word Bearer could even answer, Argel Tal’s blades were knocked from his hands and the captain found himself on the floor, breathing against the Custodian’s sword point. It scratched the dirty skin of his throat, and Aquillon shook his head.

‘Pathetic.’ He offered his hand to help Argel Tal rise. ‘Try again.’

The Word Bearer rose without the offered hand, retrieving his blades. ‘I do not like the pity in your voice.’

‘Then do something to get rid of it. But at least answer my question.’

The next clash lasted several seconds, but ended the same way. The Word Bearer backhanded Aquillon’s sword away from his neck.

‘Have you read the reports?’ he asked the Custodian, again refusing his friend’s offered hand and rising unaided.

‘Yes. They are vague, and I am being generous when I say even that.’

Argel Tal had read them as well. The surface of Cadia... The journey into the Eye... The reports of each event were loose and evasive fictions that almost moved him to laughter. ‘They are vague,’ he conceded, raising his blades again. ‘But they are accurate. I will enlighten you where I can.’

This time, Argel Tal attacked. Aquillon disarmed him in two swings of his blade, and a boot to the solar plexus sent the Word Bearer back down to the floor.

‘Begin with Vendatha. He told me that Lorgar was attending a heathen ritual and several of the officers would be with him.’

‘That’s true enough.’

‘You are still blocking the feinted thrust, by the way.’

‘I know.’

‘Good. Now speak.’

Something burned in his blood. Something reactive, unwilling to be dominated. Argel Tal bit back a sudden need to curse at the Custodian in a language that was and was not Colchisian.

‘It... was not a ritual in the sense that we feared it would be.’ He rose to his feet as he continued. ‘A tedious recital of ancient texts. Prayers to spirits of ancestors. Dances, drums and herbal narcotics.’

Blades in hands, Argel Tal attacked again. Another clash, clash, clash, and he was dumped back onto the floor – the back of his head perilously close to the buzzing bars of the force cage.

‘Lorgar sent you into the storm based on this? A... theatrical performance of old lies?’ This time, Aquillon didn’t offer to help Argel Tal stand. A doubting scowl passed over his features.

‘Don’t be foolish.’ The Word Bearer rolled his shoulders, wincing at the crackle of abused muscle and vertebrae. ‘He never sent us into the storm. I volunteered. We lacked standard Mechanicum explorator vessels, so we used the smallest warship in the fleet.’

The two warriors circled one another, blades half a metre apart. ‘You volunteered?’

‘It was a last attempt to salvage some worth from the journey. One last venture beyond Imperial borders, before we turn around and make for new space. Aquillon... there is nothing out here. Do you think we wish to heap further shame upon ourselves by admitting that? Plenty of expeditionary fleets take months, even years, to find a world worthy of conquest – but this is our primarch’s fleet, even if only temporarily. Desperation drove us to try one last time. Don’t hate us for doing our sworn duty.’

The Custodian attacked, his blade lashing one of Argel Tal’s blades out of the captain’s grip, while a kick smashed the other aside.

The Word Bearer smiled through a face streaked with sweat, and went to recover his blades yet again.

‘And Vendatha?’ Aquillon asked.

Argel Tal’s smile faded, wiped from his face. ‘Ven died with my brothers. Deumos fell first, then Rikus and Tsar Quorel. Ven was last.’ The Word Bearer met the Custodian’s eyes, letting his sincerity show. ‘He was my friend, Aquillon. I mourn him as you do.’

‘And this... riot... on the planet that killed three Astartes and a Custodes?’

‘When the primarch renounced the barbarians and refused to draw them into the Imperium, they rose up in anger. What could we do? Their rituals are too far from the Imperial Truth. Never will they accept the Emperor’s rule.’

‘Invasion?’

‘The planet is sparsely populated, and much of it is a paradise despite its proximity to the hellish storm. Cyclonic torpedoes will annihilate the tribes, and leave the planet free for future colonisation – if the Emperor wills it.’

Aquillon released a pent-up breath. There was something unarguably youthful about the warrior, despite his ageless, regenerative immortality. ‘I commend Lorgar’s actions in rejecting the primitives on the world below. I have seen compliance after compliance executed to perfection for three years, and I do not judge his actions as flawed now. It’s difficult to believe Ven is dead, that’s all. He’d earned twenty-seven names in the Emperor’s service over a century of immaculate duty. The same mentor taught us both to wield a blade. Amon will grieve to learn of his fate.’

‘He died in the Emperor’s service, defending a primarch from the rebellion of heathen culture. You may not respect my sire, but he is still a son of the Emperor. If I could choose my hour of death, it would be in battle at Lorgar’s side.’

Aquillon raised his sword en garde, speaking with a curious formality. ‘Thank you for your candour, Argel Tal. Our presence is loathed by your Legion, but the Custodes have always appreciated your friendship.’

The Word Bearer didn’t answer. His next attack was deflected and beaten back within a matter of moments.

Aquillon offered a hand again, and this time, Argel Tal took it as he rose.

‘What now for the Serrated Sun?’ asked the Custodian.

‘There’s nothing left for us out here. Once Cadia is purged, we press on as part of the 1,301st, returning to more promising territory. I believe the primarch will rejoin the main crusade fleet, with Erebus and Kor Phaeron. He will be done with these provincial conquests. I suspect he also wishes to speak with several of his brothers.’

Aquillon nodded, and returned his practice sword to the weapon rack. His white robe was unmarked, while Argel Tal’s was bathed in sweat stains down the spine and around the collar.

The Custodian saluted, making the sign of the aquila over his chest. Argel Tal returned it, as he always did in his friend’s presence.

‘One last thing,’ the Custodian remarked.

The Word Bearer raised an eyebrow. ‘Speak.’

‘Congratulations, Chapter Master.’

Argel Tal couldn’t resist a smile. ‘I wasn’t aware it was public knowledge. Will you be at the ceremony?’

‘Without a doubt.’ In a moment of rare fellowship, Aquillon rested his hand on Argel Tal’s shoulder. ‘I wish you well on your return to health. I am glad that, at the end, Vendatha stood with a friend.’

An image of Ven’s last moments flashed through Argel Tal’s mind: the naked Custodian twitching, gagging, being dragged down and impaled upon the wooden spear.

Unable to speak another lie, the Word Bearer merely nodded.

The ceremony was attended by every officer of significant rank, as well as the remaining Word Bearers of the Serrated Sun, including the robed ranks of their Acolyte Auxiliary – many of whom would be elevated into the three shattered companies with the Legion’s losses in recent months.

Such a gathering required use of De Profundis’s primary hangar deck, which in turn offered a stunning, disquieting backdrop through the open bay doors’ shimmering force field. Through the haze of thin energies, the storm beyond was a swirling mess of psychic vitriol. The ship creaked and whined around them as they stood in orderly rows, facing Lorgar.

At the primarch’s side, the Blessed Lady carried a rolled scroll on a plain, white cushion. She stared blindly over the ranks of Word Bearers, occasionally glancing to the towering primarch as if she could somehow see him. On Lorgar’s left, Fleetmaster Baloc Torvus stood tall and proud in his ceremonial grey and white uniform, a fur cloak – once the skin of some immense arctic beast that the officer had never even seen, let alone killed himself – draped over one side of his body. None present could actually recall the last time Torvus had set foot on a planet; the man clearly treasured his place among the stars.

Fully a third of the Legion warriors were wasted husks in their half-repaired armour. These were the survivors of the Eye, standing in rows ahead of their hundred remaining brethren.

The Mechanicum contingent had manifested in full strength as well, though only one of their robotic charges was present. To no one’s surprise, Incarnadine was among the Word Bearers ranks, the scarlet war machine bedecked in honour scrolls and towering above its living kinsmen. Despite bearing the scarlet armour of Carthage, it was a welcome presence among the Legion’s grey.

Standing aside from all the others, four golden figures watched from a gantry above. Aquillon and his Custodians were resplendent in their armoured finery – the gold surfaces playing host to flickering reflections from the storm outside.

The primarch, clad in a shirt of fine silver mail, raised his hands for silence. All whispers died down immediately.

‘I have brought this expeditionary fleet far from the heart of my father’s kingdom. Every fleet with a Word Bearer presence has done the same, sailing far from beloved Terra, into the cold, away from the cradle of our species. We are far from our brothers and will hear tell of their travels and conquests in time, but I say this with confidence: none of my Legion has endured what you have. None have stared into the madness at the edge of the universe, as you have done. And you survived. You returned.’

Lorgar inclined his head at his warriors before continuing. ‘This Legion, more than any other, has suffered through change and evolution since its inception. But each phase exalts us, improves us and brings us closer to fulfilling our potential. The Emperor bred this Legion from his biological barracks on distant Terra, and for many years only Terrans filled its ranks. A more innocent age, an age when the Legion bore a different name, and today we begin to leave the last vestiges of those days behind. The Imperial Heralds became the Word Bearers, and the Word Bearers were shown the error of their ways in worshipping the Emperor. Change upon change, all leading towards this moment.’

The primarch gestured a gloved hand to a bulkhead in the closest wall, and spoke a single word. ‘Enter.’

The bulkhead opened to reveal two figures – both armoured in crimson ceramite – walking towards the primarch. The first bore a black helm with eye lenses of crystal blue. One eye was ringed by the golden Serrated Sun, and his power armour was edged in polished silver. The second carried a familiar crozius of black iron, with its armour trimmings formed of bronze and bone. Thick, ornamental chains rattled around their waists and wrists as both warriors moved. Prayer scrolls were bound to shin-guards and pauldrons, the parchment showing the primarch’s own flowing script.

‘Warriors of the Serrated Sun,’ Lorgar smiled. ‘Kneel before your new commanders.’

Every Word Bearer went to their knees. Incarnadine took several seconds longer to complete its obeisance, lowering itself on grinding hydraulics.

The first crimson warrior removed his helm. Argel Tal looked upon the gathered Legion, and called out across the deck.

‘Survivors of the Orfeo’s Lament, rise and step forward.’

They did as they were ordered. Behind Argel Tal, Xaphen removed his own skulled helm, remaining by the primarch’s side.

The new Chapter Master was still gaunt, as were the warriors he surveyed with a calm gaze. ‘Our sire has ordered we rebuild the Serrated Sun far beyond its former strength. We obey his word, as we have always obeyed. But he has offered more. You, the survivors of the Orfeo’s Lament, are to be honoured for your sacrifices.’

Argel Tal nodded to Xaphen, who took the scroll from Cyrene’s cushion and brought it to the Chapter Master.

‘This scroll is bare, but for two names. My own, and Chaplain Xaphen’s. If you accept the honour of joining us as the primarch’s chosen elite, then you will kneel before the Blessed Lady in this very hangar, and you will speak your name to her. It will be written upon this parchment, and stored in the vaults aboard De Profundis.’

Argel Tal looked each of the survivors in the eyes, one after the other. ‘We will be the Gal Vorbak, armoured in black and crimson, the elite of the Serrated Sun and the chosen of Lorgar Aurelian.’

Lorgar chuckled, light and pleasant, as he stepped forward to rest a hand on Argel Tal’s shoulder-guard.

On the gantry above, Kalhin let his glance flicker to Aquillon. His voice was low, despite the fact he wore his helm and none would overhear them speaking over the inter-squad vox.

‘Gal Vorbak. I did not study their culture as you did. Is that Colchisian?’

Aquillon nodded. ‘It means “Blessed Sons”.’

‘I am pleased for Argel Tal. He is healing well, and it will be good to turn back into fairer territory after this failed madness. Deumos was always cancerous, so I will shed no tears at his tenure coming to an end.’

That statement met with grunts of agreement from the others.

‘When Lorgar returns to the 47th Expedition, should we accompany him?’

Aquillon had been dwelling on that very thought. ‘Our mandate is to stand vigil over the Legion itself. Four Custodian teams, bound to four fleets. Iacus already claims the 47th, and I trust him as I trust any one of you. Let him play watchdog over this weakling primarch for a while. Our duties will keep us with the 1,301st, and the compliances to come.’

Kalhin released a slow breath. ‘I would pay dearly to set eyes on Terra’s skylines once more.’

‘You will,’ said Aquillon.

‘In forty-seven years,’ the other Custodian scoffed. ‘Remember the terms of our oath. Five decades among the stars. Fifty long, tedious years away from Terra.’

‘It beats the endless blood games,’ Nirallus shrugged.

‘You only say that,’ Kalhin pointed out, ‘because you are so awful at them.’

Aquillon heard the tension in his brothers’ voices. ‘The Word Bearers will not languish under suspicion forever. In three years, have you seen evidence that they still worship the Emperor? And look at them now: already their rites are growing closer to the traditions of the other Legions. This is almost like Sigismund knighting one of his templars at a gathering of the Imperial Fists.’

Kalhin shrugged. ‘Perhaps they have come a long way from the fanatics we joined, but the stink of desperation yet clings to their breath when they shout their battle cries. I still do not trust them.’

The Occuli Imperator didn’t take his eyes from the red-clad figure speaking with his new warriors as they knelt before the blind girl from the dead world.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Neither do I.’

‘Not even Argel Tal?’

‘One warrior in an entire Legion.’ Aquillon left the railing, turning back to his Custodians. ‘He is the only one I trust. That’s the problem.’

V

Smoke and Mirrors

It was a lie, of course.

Blessed Lorgar didn’t return to Imperial space right away. One of the fleet’s scout vessels was chosen to carry the primarch back to his main crusade fleet, and a grand event was held on every deck of De Profundis to honour the Urizen before he left.

And that was the lie.

I was there when the primarch bade farewell to his sons Xaphen and Argel Tal, and I travelled back to safer space with the new lords of the Gal Vorbak.

Lorgar, meanwhile, travelled the same path that the daemon Ingethel had chosen for his children.

With the Custodians blinded to his true destination, Lorgar went into the Eye.

His last words to Argel Tal will never leave me – not only for the events they set in motion, but for what they did to my friend, and how they changed him.

‘Take the truth to Erebus and Kor Phaeron. While I am gone, they will be the Legion’s lords, and they will orchestrate the spread of true faith in the shadows of my father’s empire. I shall return to them soon.’

Xaphen swore an oath never to fail his primarch.

Argel Tal did not. He spoke in a voice soft enough to break hearts, ‘We are heretics, father.’

Lorgar laughed his melodic laugh. ‘No, we are saviours. Is all in readiness?’

‘It is.’

‘Sail far and wide without me, but keep the Custodians away from Imperial listeners. Once you return to stable space, they will resume their astropathic contact with Terra. My father will suspect the truth if he knows we came this close to the galaxy’s edge, and suspicion alone will be enough to damn us. I cannot remain here to block their pet astropath’s reaching voice. Find a solution. Xaphen, look to the texts retrieved from Cadia. The rituals within them will provide the answer.’

‘By your word, sire.’

‘Keep his watchdogs alive, Argel Tal. There may yet be a means to win this war without bloodshed. But keep them silent.’

With his last words ordering the first of a thousand treacheries, the primarch boarded his vessel and left us.

What he saw within the Eye is the source of near-infinite speculation. Many of the Word Bearers came to me for weeks afterwards, wracked by dreams that barely faded when their sufferers awoke. The blood connection between Aurelian and his sons was a powerful one indeed, for what Lorgar saw with his own eyes, his sons witnessed in horrifying echoes.

It was Xaphen who spoke most of his dreams, while Argel Tal remained next to silent. The Chaplain would speak with a fevered cast in his voice, as if harsh whispers could pierce the walls of my humble chamber and reach the primarch halfway across the galaxy.

He spoke of Lorgar walking the surface of worlds where the oceans were formed from boiling blood, and the skies stood dark under heavenly cities of clanking black steel. He told me of an entire Legion in the crimson of the Gal Vorbak, waging war before the gates of a golden palace.

Most tellingly of all, he described world after world dying under the tainted touch of alien claws. He swore that this was the Imperium’s demise – a godless empire reaved clean by inhuman tides. Only faith would save mankind from fate’s promises. Only worship of the Great Powers nestling within the warp.

Perhaps these were the lessons Lorgar was seeing for himself, while his sons returned to spread the word among the other fleets.

Cadia burned, just as we’d all known it would. The tribes were destroyed by Argel Tal’s own command, and the world left in silence, ready to be seeded with colonists in the future. He never once asked me to forgive him for it, just as he never asked me to console him over the murder of Vendatha.

I love him above all others, not only for saving my life, but for the fact he stains his soul with such blackness, yet masks his guilt and shame so completely. He has never broken, despite carrying the secrets and sins that will damn or save our entire species.

I believe the only mistake he ever made was in allowing himself to grow closer to the Custodes leader, Aquillon.

But then, it was just like Argel Tal to endure such penance. He became a brother to the one man he knew he must eventually betray.

Excerpted from ‘The Pilgrimage’, by Cyrene Valantion

Twenty

Three Talents
A New Crusade
The Crimson Lord

Ishaq Kadeen was immensely proud of himself, for he did three things in life with a skill few others could match. These three talents had earned him enough coins to rub together, no doubt there, but they’d also elevated him from the depths of poverty that had swallowed his parents – and getting out of those slums was something far out of reach for most of the beggars and street-folk in his home city.

Three talents. That’s all it took.

And they weren’t even that hard. If he’d needed to practise them, then it might have been a different story. Ishaq Kadeen was one of those naturally lucky souls that live their lives in the moment. He never spared a thought for getting old, never saved money with any great care, and never worried overmuch what the enforcer patrol around the next street corner might have to say about his activities.

Three talents got him through life, pitching him in and out of trouble.

The first was to run, which was a skill he’d honed by putting it to good use in the criminal-infested lower sprawls of Sudasia’s primary hive city.

The second was to smile with a vicious blending of charm, smarm and intimacy, which had variously gotten him into several lines of employment, out of an entirely legal execution that he’d absolutely deserved, and even once into the fine, black lace underwear of a countess’s younger cousin – the night of the gala held to celebrate her coming of age.

The third talent, which was what had gotten him posted to his current situation in the first place, was the fact he could take a wicked pict when he wanted to.

Not a day passed that Ishaq didn’t think back to the conversation that damned him out here onto the fringes of space. He’d been sitting in an austere office, absently picking dirt from beneath his nails while a robed hierarch in the Remembrancer Order droned on and on about ‘noble goals’ and the ‘very real need’ to record the present for future generations to study in excruciating detail.

‘It is the greatest honour,’ the stern gentleman insisted.

‘Oh, I know.’ Ishaq started to bite his nails now they were clean. ‘The greatest.’

The older man seemed dubious. Ishaq thought he looked like a vulture disapproving of a potential meal, largely because it was still alive.

‘Thousands of archivists, sculptors, painters, pictographers, poets, playwrights have been sent. Tens of thousands have been rejected for lacking the thoroughness and flair that the Great Crusade deserves in its remembrancers.’

Ishaq made a noncommittal noise to encourage the hierarch to continue, while secretly musing over the number of artistic professions beginning with the letter “P”. Painters, pictographers, poets, playwrights...

‘So you see, to be chosen like this... You have to understand how fortunate you are.’

‘What about puppeteers?’ Ishaq asked.

‘I... what?’

‘Nothing. Never mind.’

‘Yes, well. I’m sure you can appreciate the gravity of the situation.’ The hierarch did his vulture-sneer again. Ishaq smiled back – his eyes brightened; a faint movement of his eyebrows suggested something delightfully wry; and a calculatedly cocksure amount of teeth were on display for a predatory moment – but the hierarch was neither female nor attracted to males, and that disinterest rather disarmed Ishaq’s best weapon.

‘Mr. Kadeen?’ the man said. ‘Are you taking this seriously? Do you wish to be shipped to Mars to end your years as a servitor?’

He really didn’t. If it came to a choice between paying for his crimes in the traditional manner or catching a transport ship halfway across the galaxy to serve as a remembrancer... Well, it wasn’t much of a choice at all. He wasn’t going to spend his life lobotomised into penal service.

So he assured the remembrancer hierarch that he was taking it very seriously indeed. Over the following two hours, he weaved a compelling fiction of interstellar ambition and an exploratory spirit that had suffered in the strangling confines of his birth-slums. Now, at last, he would be free to walk the stars, to gaze upon new suns, to chronicle the advance of mankind, to...

To lie through his teeth.

Ishaq, at thirty-five, was not an educated man, and he was fairly certain at several points he invented new words or mispronounced ones he’d only read before, but it did the trick. Three days later, his intermittent work as an imagist for almost-wealthy hive families and crime scene pictography was behind him – as was Terra itself and the shit-heap hive in which he’d been born.

Was it an honour, really? That all depended upon just where you were sent.

In the briefings, Ishaq had been hoping against hope for a posting that would actually mean something. While the major expeditionary fleets were already swollen with remembrancer hangers-on, there were still plenty of possible placements in the smaller fleets.

He might never get to lay eyes upon the Warmaster, or see his images depict the glory of a primarch like Fulgrim, but he’d not lost hold of the desperate, panicked hope that he’d be assigned to one of the Emperor’s so-called ‘glory Legions’. The Ultramarines, founders of the perfect empire... The Dark Angels, commanded by the consummate general... The Word Bearers, renowned for bringing the Emperor’s own wrath against enemy worlds...

At last, he’d been assigned. A full sprint through the order’s barracks had ensued, with remembrancers shoving past one another to reach the posted listings in the lobby. All dignity was cast aside in the rush – artists, poets, playwrights rioting against each other to see where in the galaxy they were being sent. Someone had even been stabbed during the crush of bodies – perhaps out of jealousy, since that imagist in particular had been assigned to a fleet commanded by the Emperor’s Children, and such a posting even among a modest fleet was worth its weight in gold.

There it was:

KADEEN, ISHAQ – IMAGIST
1,301st EXPEDITIONARY FLEET

What did that even mean? Were there even Legion forces with that fleet? He’d shouldered a young woman aside to use one of the barracks’ information terminals, and hammered in his keycode with trembling fingers.

Yes. Yes. Each line sent his heart beating faster.

1,301st Expeditionary Fleet.

Commanded by Fleetmaster Baloc Torvus.

3 Companies of XVII Legiones Astartes: Word Bearers.

Commanded by the Crimson Lord, Master of the Gal Vorbak.

Noted Citations: Honoured by the presence of the Emperor’s Custodian Guards, led by Aquillon Althas Nero Khai Marithamus... the name went on and on and on, but it didn’t matter.

He’d been posted to one of the most aggressive, renowned, largest Legions, responsible for more compliances in the last half a century than any other – and a fleet, minor or not, that was honoured to contain some of the Emperor’s own golden Custodes warriors. The images that could come from this... The fame... The attention...

Yes. Yes. YES.

‘Who were you posted to?’ he asked the girl next to him.

‘The 277th.’

‘Blood Angels?’

‘Raven Guard.’

He gave her a pitying smile and headed back to his room, making sure to tell everyone on the way back where he’d been assigned. This only backfired once, when a pretentious arse of a sculptor had sneeringly replied: ‘The Word Bearers? Yes, well, they’ve conquered much in recent years to make amends for their former flaws… but they’re not exactly the Sons of Horus, are they?’

The flight to join the 1,301st Expeditionary Fleet had lasted nineteen long, long months, during which Ishaq had slept with twenty-eight separate members of the transport ship’s crew, been slapped by three of them, taken almost 11,000 picts of tedious goings-on aboard the vessel, and passed out from ship-made alcohol more times than he could reliably remember.

He’d also lost a tooth in a fistfight with an angry husband, though he still claimed the moral victory in that one. Given all of this and the lifestyle that preceded it, it would be fair – but not entirely accurate – to assume that Ishaq Kadeen cared nothing for his work.

He didn’t consider himself lazy. It was just difficult to find things that inspired him, that was all.

The first pict he’d truly cared about had since done the rounds of the entire 1,301st fleet, and it was, in his own inestimable opinion, an absolute beauty. Already, it was being hailed as a masterpiece in the fleet’s archives, and he’d received a courier-brought note from the Crimson Lord himself, thanking him for the image.

When they’d arrived, dropping from a year and a half in the swirling tedium of the warp to approach the battlefleet, Ishaq had been unable to resist getting caught up in the moment.

With his picter rod in hand, about the size and heft of a cudgel, he’d aimed the eye lens at the view from the porthole, watching and recording the great warships drifting by.

And then, there it was. The grey-hulled fortress-flagship of Lord Argel Tal, silent and serene despite its world-breaking weapons array.

De Profundis. Ishaq’s new home.

Awe left his mouth slack as he clicked pict after pict. One of them – one of the very first he took – showed the warship abeam, slaved to a sharp perspective: a stone and steel bastion of Imperial might. Starlight cast raw glares across its dense armour plating, while a statue of the primarch jutted from the vessel’s spine – Lorgar, arms raised to the void, haloed by the system’s distant sun.

Click, went the picter, and Ishaq Kadeen fell in love with his work.

That had been three weeks ago. Three weeks spent waiting for inspiration to strike again. Three weeks spent waiting for today.

The starboard hangar deck was a messy maze of landed gunships, load-bearing vehicles and cargo containers, populated by an army of servitors, tech-adepts and human crew going about their business. Thunderhawks were being loaded, their swooping wings weighted down by racks of missiles, while boxes of bolter shell belt-feeds were installed by the defensive turrets. All around was the rattle, the clang, the clank of heavy machinery, which was doing nothing positive for Ishaq’s hangover.

At the heart of the organised chaos was the eye of the storm, where space had been cleared for the scheduled arrival. Ishaq stood at the edge of the cleared zone – just one of many witnesses to the morning’s events. A glance to the left revealed a flock of other remembrancers: there was Marsin, a painter, scribbling in his sketchpad. Lueianna, a skinny and pale little thing who composed entire concerts around various flute arrangements. Hellic, who almost definitely owed Ishaq some money from the last time they played cards.

What did Hellic do? Was he a composer, as well? Ishaq wasn’t sure. Whatever his fellow remembrancer did to express himself, he was a piss-poor gambler.

The Blessed Lady was here, of course – standing out from her maids and companions in a gown of arterial red that looked more suited to a Terran ballroom than the greasy, oil-blackened deck of a warship. She looked no older than her late-twenties, though given how long she’d been with the fleet, rejuvenation surgery must have featured heavily in her recent past.

Ishaq lost a fair few minutes just watching her. She was dusky-skinned, not as dark as Ishaq himself, but clearly from a desert people, and it was easy to see why she was considered blessed. He’d never seen anyone move with the same slow, effortless grace, or smile with such subtle brilliance. Every time she shared a word with one of her entourage, she seemed to be smiling with endearing shyness at some secret joke between them.

Ishaq decided, then and there, that he wanted her.

For a moment, he was certain she turned to regard him. Wasn’t she said to be blind? Was that a facade? A rumour to enhance her mystique?

An honour guard from the Imperial Army had deigned to show its face, too. White-clad officers of the Euchar 54th stood in neat ranks, their formalwear impressive in its ornate finery. Each of the officers rested a gloved hand on a sabre sheathed at their sides, while their free hands remained nestled in the small of their backs as they stood at attention. In the middle of the front row, Ishaq made out the grizzled, half-bionic figure of General Arric Jesmetine.

The general had a fearsome reputation on the ship: all the talk passed around the remembrancers had Old Arric pinned as a tyrant and a taskmaster. They’d only crossed paths once before, in an upper deck corridor while the new remembrancer was scouting around for something to inspire him.

Jesmetine had been with the fleet for sixty years, and every month of it showed. He walked with a silver cane, and most of the right side of his body hummed and whirred with the bionics beneath the old man’s uniform. His beard was kept trimmed close to his haggard face, a fine pelt of white around a scowl like a slit in old leather.

‘You there,’ the general had said. ‘Are you lost?’

Well, no, he wasn’t lost. But nor was he supposed to be up here on the operations decks.

‘Yes. Yes, I am.’

‘You’re a bad liar, son.’

This offended Ishaq a great deal, but he didn’t let it show. ‘Apparently so.’

‘You grin too much. If I had daughters, I’d kill you for ever going near them.’

‘With respect, sir, I’m not in the mood for a character assassination. And I am at least a little lost.’

‘See? Grinning again, you won’t charm me with that. Who are you?’

‘Ishaq Kadeen, official remembrancer.’ He liked the way that felt on the tongue, so he said it as often he could.

‘Oh.’ The old man cleared his throat with a sound like gargling gravel. ‘You’re not a poet by any chance, are you?’

‘No, sir. I’m an imagist.’

‘That’s a shame. The Blessed Lady has an ear for poetry. Though, hmm, it’s for the best if you never darken her door, I’m sure.’

This was before he knew who the Blessed Lady was, but that grumble alone was enough to make him vow to darken her door as soon as possible, whoever she might be.

‘So you’re hunting for picts to take?’

‘Guilty,’ Ishaq halted the grin before it reached his lips, ‘as charged.’

The old man scratched at his neat beard, fingers making scritch, scritch, scritch sounds against what was barely more than stubble. ‘This is a warship, you know. You can get in a lot of trouble wandering around like this. Go back to the lower decks, and wait for the Chaplain’s arrival like everyone else. You’ll get all your picts then.’

Ishaq considered that a fair deal, but as he turned to leave, he decided to push his luck a little more.

‘Sir?’

‘What?’ The old man was already walking away, cane tapping on the decking.

‘You don’t seem the merciless terror that the remembrancers have been told to fear.’

General Arric smiled, which made the slit in his face even less appealing. ‘That’s only because you’re not one of my men, Remembrancer Kadeen. Now get off the operations decks and back to the jury-rigged bar I know you little vermin are already setting up in the shadows of this blessed ship.’

‘It’s called the Cellar.’

‘How very apt,’ the old man huffed as he walked away.

So he’d waited eleven days, and true to both form and the general’s appraisal, he’d spent those eleven days in the bar.

Now he was here, after hauling his hungover carcass across to the main starboard hangar, waiting with the dregs and top brass alike for the Chaplain to arrive.

‘I thought the Crimson Lord was supposed to be here,’ he whispered to Marsin. The other remembrancer just shrugged, still taking notes and sketching vague figures.

The Astartes were here at least, though Ishaq took much less pleasure in their presence than he’d expected. Twenty of them in all: grey statues in two ranks of ten, not a ghost of movement between any of them. Immense bolt pistols were clutched to the Word Bearers’ chests, while unpowered chainswords were kept at their sides. Scrolls and iconography marked them as warriors from the 37th Assault Company.

Ishaq kept abreast of deployment chatter: most of 37th Company were engaged on the world below, waging a compliance war alongside General Arric’s Euchar regiments.

He snapped several images of the towering, silent Astartes, but his angle was far from perfect, and the edge of frame was ruined by servitors stumbling around in the background. He supposed there should be something glorious and inspiring about the warriors, but he found it hard to swallow if he looked too long in their direction. They weren’t inspiring at all. Just... imposing. Distant. Cold.

‘Attention!’ the general barked.

Ishaq conceded to this by standing slightly straighter. The Euchar officers went ramrod-straight. The Astartes still didn’t move.

The gunship came into the hangar on a sedate drift, guidance thrusters gushing pressurised air as it hovered down. Crimson armour plating coated the Thunderhawk in dry scales, while heavy bolter turrets panned left and right – the servitors slaved to the guns’ systems ever-alert to threats.

Landing claws kissed the decking. At last, the boarding ramp lowered on squealing hydraulics. Ishaq clicked a pict of the gunship’s yawning maw.

From the hangar’s edge, more Astartes entered – five warriors clad in armour of a newer, more streamlined design than their grey brethren, painted in scarlet and silver, with black helms staring ahead. The remembrancers turned as one, whispering and muttering, variously taking picts, making notes and sketching what they saw.

Gal Vorbak, came the whisper from many mouths.

Leading them was a warrior with a black cloak draped over his shoulders, and his Legion symbol hidden beneath yellowed parchment scrolls depicting his deeds. He stalked past the gathered remembrancers, the joints of his Mark IV battle armour humming a smooth hymn. Skulls of slain alien warlords rattled against his dark ceramite as they dangled from iron chains.

There he is, the whispers started up again. The Crimson Lord.

The warrior moved to the Blessed Lady’s side, whereupon he offered her a slight inclination of his head, and spoke the name ‘Cyrene’ with a growl of acknowledgement.

‘Hello, Argel Tal,’ she smiled without looking up at him. Her entourage of maids and advisors scattered back with dignified slowness as the Gal Vorbak took their places around their master.

Ishaq took another pict: the huge warrior in his snarling black helm, and the petite figure at his side, both surrounded by red-clad Astartes.

The figure that descended from the Thunderhawk onto the hangar deck wore armour to match his brothers in the Gal Vorbak, though his trimmings were reinforced bone and bronze, and his helm bore Colchisian runes painted in gold leaf.

Chaplain Xaphen walked down the gang ramp, briefly embracing Argel Tal at the bottom.

‘Cyrene,’ the Chaplain said afterwards.

‘Hello, Xaphen.’

‘You look younger.’

She blushed, and said nothing.

Argel Tal gestured to the Thunderhawk. ‘How were our brothers in the IV Legion?’

Xaphen’s rumbling voice was as vox-ruined as Argel Tal’s. ‘The Iron Warriors are well, but it is good to be back.’

‘I assume there’s much to discuss.’

‘Of course,’ the Chaplain replied.

‘Come, then. We’ll talk while the preparations are made for planetfall.’

The warriors walked past, and the orderly gathering began to dissolve into groups heading back to their duties. Just like that, it was over.

‘You coming?’ Marsin asked Ishaq.

Ishaq was looking down at his picter, intensifying the image on the small viewscreen. It showed the two commanders of the Gal Vorbak side by side, with the Blessed Lady nearby, her head tilted as she regarded them both with unseeing eyes – a look of adoring beneficence writ upon her lovely features. One of the Astartes carried his black crozius maul: the ornate weapon slung over his shoulder. The other, the cloaked Crimson Lord, sported deactivated claws of red iron, each oversized power fist ending in four talons the length of scythe blades.

Both suits of armour glinted with shards of yellow jade as they reflected the orange overhead lighting. Both helms had slanted, sapphire eye lenses that seemed to stare right into Ishaq’s viewfinder.

This, he thought to himself, might be another classic.

‘Are you coming?’ Marsin repeated.

‘What? Oh. Yes, sure.’

Twenty-One

Machinations
A Curious Deception
Indulgence

‘These remembrancers,’ Xaphen said with an air of displeasure, ‘are everywhere.’

‘Ours arrived this month. It was not possible to deny them access to the fleet any longer.’

‘Horus’s flagship has had the little rats crawling over its decks for two years. Can you believe that?’

Argel Tal shrugged his shoulders, uncaring either way. ‘Three of the poets read to the Blessed Lady, for which Cyrene is monumentally grateful. And I have a beautiful pict of De Profundis that one of them took on his first day. It almost stopped my heart to see the ship looking so grand.’

Xaphen chuckled. ‘You are growing soft, brother.’

The two warriors had retired to Xaphen’s prayer room, which was a rather immodest chamber by Argel Tal’s standards. The Chapter Master preferred Spartan furnishings and a minimum of distraction, but Xaphen’s personal reflection room was decorated in a plethora of banners and old prayer scrolls cast across the table and floor. Many of the banners were from victories fought with other Legions – as they talked, the Chaplain added another to the hallowed ranks. This one sported the metallic skull of the Iron Warriors, emblazoned with runes around the central symbol.

Several of them resembled Colchisian constellations. Argel Tal examined them each in turn. ‘What are these?’

‘Symbols of the Iron Warrior circles. They do not name them “lodges”, as the Sons of Horus do.’

Argel Tal removed his helm with a click-hiss of air pressure. As always, the Chaplain’s festooned chamber had the lingering twin-scent of dried spices and old incense.

‘You were gone much longer than expected,’ he said. ‘Problems?’

‘Nothing worth doing is ever easy.’

Argel Tal flexed his hands, closing and opening them from fists. They ached. They’d ached for days now.

‘That doesn’t answer my question.’

‘There were no problems,’ said Xaphen. ‘I stayed longer because it seemed prudent. Their circles are large, taking up the overwhelming majority of the Legion, but it was a critical phase. I was not the only Chaplain there.’

Argel Tal raised an eyebrow, not realising he was mimicking Cyrene’s bemused smirk out of habit. ‘Oh?’

‘Maloq Kartho was there to deal with another of the warrior circles, and I was treated to several of his sermons. The air fairly reeked of brimstone when he spoke. Var Valas was there, as well. Both were with the Iron Warriors after long tenures with the World Eaters.’ Xaphen sighed – a satisfied sound to match the brightness in his eyes. ‘The web is wide, brother. Lorgar’s conspiracy spans the stars themselves. At last count, there are over two hundred of our Chaplains seconded to other fleets. Erebus now stands at the Warmaster’s side. Can you give that countenance? Horus himself, heeding Erebus’s words.’

Xaphen laughed as he trailed off. ‘It begins, brother.’

Argel Tal didn’t share his brother’s relish. A scowl darkened features that had grown continually more scarred over the last half a century.

‘I do not like that word,’ he said, low and slow.

‘What word?’

‘The word you used. Conspiracy. It demeans the primarch’s vision. It demeans us all.’

Xaphen smoothed the black war banner against the wall before stepping back to admire it. ‘You are oversensitive,’ he muttered.

‘No, I am not. It is the wrong word, implying plotted schemes and ignoble secrecy.’

‘Dress it however you wish,’ the Chaplain said. ‘We are the architects of humanity’s ascension, and the web of necessary deceit is wide.’

‘I choose to see it in nobler terms. Now finish what you have to say. I am releasing the Gal Vorbak, and have final preparations to make.’

The Chaplain sensed Argel Tal’s recalcitrance. It was hard not to. ‘You are angry with me.’

‘Of course I am angry with you. I have five hundred warriors that haven’t seen a Chaplain from their own Legion in almost a year. You were many months overdue, fighting with the Iron Warriors. Oros, Damane and Malaki are also still with Perturabo’s lesser fleets, furthering the conspiracy.’ He sneered through the word.

‘What of Sar Fareth?’

‘Dead.’

‘What?’

‘Killed ten months ago, shortly after you left. Slain by a human, of all things. An unlucky thrust with a wooden spear.’ Argel Tal tapped two fingertips against his neck. ‘Tore out most of his throat, laid it bare to the bone. I’ve never seen anything like it. Blood of the gods, I’d have laughed if it hadn’t been so pathetically tragic. He bled out before the Apothecaries could reach him, still trying to shout the whole time.’

‘What happened to his killer?’

Argel Tal had seen it himself. Sar Fareth had gripped the human’s shoulder and leg, and pulled. The result came away in three bloody pieces before the Chaplain died.

‘Justice happened.’

Xaphen released a breath that wasn’t quite a sigh. Sar Fareth had been one of his own: trained by his hand to wield a crozius in Lorgar’s name.

Argel Tal crossed his arms over his armoured chest. ‘Will the Iron Warriors join us?’

The Chaplain’s smile returned. ‘Will they? Perturabo’s Legion has already abandoned the Great Crusade. I was with them on Olympia.’

That couldn’t be. ‘Olympia?’ Argel Tal managed to speak. ‘So soon?’

‘All of the primarch’s plans are coming to fruition. That, in truth, is why I returned. Olympia was in open rebellion against the Imperium, and the Iron Warriors declared war against their own people in desperation to pacify their home world. Brother, you cannot imagine the sight. The skies were black with Perturabo’s gunships and landers, while the ground shook from dawn to dusk under the wrath of half a million war machines.’

Argel Tal took a slow breath, forcing an unwilling imagination to picture Xaphen’s words. ‘A primarch has lost control of his own home world.’

‘You speak as if you never believed this day would come.’

Argel Tal said nothing, motioning for the Chaplain to continue.

‘All of it was orchestrated to the very finest degree. The Iron Warriors’ wrath was a sight to behold. They have instigated genocide against their own people. What choice do they have now? The call will come soon: Horus is already gathering his forces, cleansing them of unworthy elements. The Emperor’s Children, the Death Guard and the World Eaters are with him. The bulk of each Legion gathers in the Isstvan system, while Perturabo has betrayed the Imperium in his need for vengeance. He will stand with us when Lorgar throws off the False Emperor’s shackles.’

The fervency in his voice wasn’t new to Argel Tal, but without the presence of a Chaplain for almost a year, Xaphen’s eager passion had faded from his memory. He found his brother’s enthusiasm more unnerving than anything else.

‘When do we travel to the primarch?’

‘Soon.’ The Chaplain met his brother’s eyes. ‘I told you, I returned because the time has come. Soon, the call will come from Terra.’

Xaphen activated the wall-screen, cycling through visuals of stellar cartography. He added layer upon layer of superimposed fleet markers. Argel Tal watched the display taking shape, so beautifully complex in its completion.

‘Tell me what you see,’ Xaphen said with a smile.

Argel Tal glanced at him. ‘I see the death of my patience. I see my anger rising at how you hold all these answers purely by virtue of your position in the Chaplain brotherhood. I see me walking from this room without a straight answer given immediately.’

‘Such vim,’ the Chaplain chuckled. ‘Very well. Here is the Isstvan system. Here, far across the western spiral arm, is Terra. Take note of the compliances being carried out in the subsectors closest to Isstvan. Now, humour me. What do you see?’

Argel Tal recognised symbolising runes from four Legions – and no others. It formed a curious pattern, notable for the lack of Imperial Army or Mechanicum battlefleets, as well as the total absence of many notable Legions.

‘I see the hand of the Warmaster at work,’ said Argel Tal. ‘He has positioned certain fleets closest to him at Isstvan. These fleets could reach the system within a matter of days. Those on the outer arc will take longer, but... This is an immense gathering of force.’ Argel Tal looked at Xaphen, reluctantly drawing his eyes from the twinkling stellar ballet. ‘Now tell me why.’

‘Forgive me, brother. Little did I realise the frustration of isolation you’ve suffered in a fleet burdened by Custodes presence. Your duty was to maintain the lie, and you’ve done so to perfection. But you are owed enlightenment.’

Xaphen cancelled the cartographic imagery and continued. ‘Horus and Lorgar are already moving against the Emperor. The Warmaster has sworn devotion to the Hidden Gods, and now walks in their light. For now, the warp is pregnant with unrest, leaving much of the Imperium blind. Many of the established warp-paths are severed from each other by aetheric storms. The tumult will only grow worse, giving us enough time to enact the primarch’s will without fear of Imperial retribution. Such is the influence of the true gods. The warp itself is their canvas, and they paint to please us.’

The Master of the Serrated Sun let his scowl speak for him. He took offence to the way Xaphen insinuated they were no longer Imperial, purely for contemplating regicide. We are overthrowing a stagnant and ignorant ruling order. We are bringing enlightenment to our people, not ending the empire.

‘Go on,’ he said.

‘A call will reach us soon – a panicked plea that every astropath in the fleet will hear at once. A call from Terra. The Emperor will soon learn of Horus’s rebellion, and what choice does he have? He must order the closest Legions to destroy the Warmaster’s traitorous forces.’

Argel Tal pictured the Legion signifiers flashing closest to the sun named Isstvan.

‘Horus will be destroyed.’

The Chaplain laughed, relishing the moment. ‘He will be entrenched on an impregnable world, commanding four Legions. What could destroy him?’

‘The seven Legions tasked with doing so. Even with the Iron Warriors at our side, the other five Legions remain under the Emperor’s aegis. Six against five. Our losses will be catastrophic. How can we illuminate Terra when the Legions sworn to Lorgar and Horus are bloodied and broken?’

Xaphen didn’t answer immediately. His brother recognised something in his face – some creeping disquiet, close to the bladed edge of mistrust.

‘Do you have such little trust in your own Legion’s Chaplains, that our work has failed to turn the Night Lords, or the Alpha Legion? Lorgar has worked for half a century to spread the truth to those ears worthy of hearing it. Every Legion we need will be at our side. The loyalists will find nothing but extinction waiting for them on the surface of Isstvan V. They will never leave their dropsites alive, Argel Tal. I promise you that.’

‘This conspiracy,’ said Argel Tal, ‘disgusts me.’

‘It is the primarch’s plan, brought into being by Horus himself.’

Argel Tal shook his head. ‘No. This is not Aurelian’s work. This is Erebus and Kor Phaeron’s doing. Their treacherous stink comes off this vision in waves. Lorgar is a golden soul, a being of light. This shadowplay comes from the dreams of much smaller, darker men. The primarch, blessings upon him, loves that foul wretch. He embraces a viper to his breast and names it father.’

‘You should not speak this way of the Master of the Faith.’

‘Master of the...’ Argel Tal laughed. ‘Kor Phaeron? “Master of the Faith”? He coats himself in titles the way a killer’s knife is laced with poison. Truly, I have been isolated from the Legion too long, if Kor Phaeron is now beloved of the masses. You of all people, Xaphen – you loathed him. An impure soul. A false Astartes. Your own words, brother.’

Xaphen looked away at last, unwilling or unable to hold the gaze any longer. Nothing broke eye contact like shame. ‘Times change,’ the Chaplain said.

‘So it seems.’ Argel Tal closed his hands into fists to ease the pain in his bones. It didn’t work. His knuckles went on throbbing. ‘Just get on with it. I have a world to bring to compliance.’

‘If you please, I have questions of my own.’

‘Ask,’ said Argel Tal, ‘and I will answer.’

‘Cyrene,’ Xaphen began. ‘She has undergone more rejuvenation treatment.’

‘Do not look at me, nor should you accuse her of vanity. An astropathic order came from the primarch himself some time ago. He still holds her in high regard, and expressed his desire that she go through another cycle of treatments.’

Xaphen nodded. ‘And Aquillon?’

Argel Tal’s expression was unreadable. ‘As before. He knows nothing, and suspects even less. His messages to the Emperor never leave the fleet.’

‘My failsafe?’

‘Is still in effect.’

‘Have you checked yourself?’ The Chaplain knew his brother found certain methods distasteful. ‘It is integral you check yourself.’

‘I have,’ said Argel Tal. ‘Nothing has changed, put it from your mind.’

‘Then I am sanguine. Nevertheless, I will renew the wards tonight.’ He moved over to his writing desk, and unclasped a great book from where it was chained to his waist. Slowly, reverently, he leafed through the pages of the great, leather-bound tome – through pages and pages of elegant scripture, mathematical designs, astrological diagrams, chanted invocations and ritual formulae.

Argel Tal ached to step closer and read the secrets spilled from the primarch’s mind. Truly, Lorgar was sharing a great deal with the Legion’s Chaplain brotherhood.

‘You have added much to the book,’ he noted.

‘I have. Each month, we receive new chapters and verses for the holy work. The primarch’s mind is aflame with ideas and ideals, and we are honoured to hear them first. Thousand of epistles now grace these pages.’

The 1301st’s databanks would never be allowed to archive digital copies of the primarch’s scriptures, for such information could be accessed by the wrong souls. Instead, the Serrated Sun’s Chaplains each carried their own copies chained to their armour – forever adding to them as the Word grew and spread – using them to preach at secret sermons. Argel Tal had taken Sar Fareth’s Book of Lorgar from the Chaplain’s corpse, incinerating it on the battlefield; committing necessary blasphemy to prevent the tome ever falling into unintended hands.

The Chaplain took a slow breath. ‘I have been gone too long, Argel Tal. You’re right. I was lost in manipulating the dull-witted labourers of the IV Legion, when in truth I desired nothing more than to be here with my brothers, preaching the evolving Word of Lorgar.’

‘Apology accepted,’ said the Crimson Lord. ‘And you have thirty-eight minutes before planetfall. I will see you on the deck before the Rising Sun.’

Xaphen was reading the data screeds scrolling over his eye lenses. ‘There’s an order for the coming engagement, sanctioning the presence of remembrancers during combat operations. That cannot be correct, for I know you would never acquiesce to such a thing.’

Argel Tal grunted something that wasn’t quite an answer, and made his way to the door.

‘Wait.’

Argel Tal froze, already at the chamber door. ‘Yes?’

‘Think of all that has come to pass, brother. Focus upon how events are flowing faster towards the inevitable insurrection. Are you feeling anything within you? Any... changes?’

The Chapter Master’s hands ached with sudden ferocity. It was if his knuckles and wrists were hinged by broken glass.

Without knowing why he did it, Argel Tal lied.

‘No, brother. Nothing. Are you?’

Xaphen smiled.

Making war upon another human culture was always a distinct kind of poison, and Argel Tal loathed every time it became necessary.

These were unclean wars, and fought with bitterness bred into every soul doomed to take up arms against the Imperium. It wasn’t that the enemy dared resist that discomfited the Crimson Lord, nor was it the expenditure of munitions or the fact each of these worlds was peopled by defenders he came to admire for their tenacity. Those aspects grieved him, but the waste of life and potential from their defiance – that was what left scars.

He’d tried to raise the point with Xaphen in the past. With characteristic bluntness, the Chaplain had lectured him on the rightness of their cause and the tragic need to crush these cultures. Such discussion told Argel Tal nothing he didn’t already know. Similar talks with Dagotal and Malnor had progressed the same way, as had one with Torgal. The Gal Vorbak dispensed with all ranks outside of Argel Tal’s own, rendering all its warriors equal under the Chapter Master, and the former assault sergeant had struggled hardest to understand what Argel Tal was trying to explain.

‘But they are wrong,’ Torgal said.

‘I know they are wrong. That’s the tragedy. We bring enlightenment through unification with mankind’s ancestral home world. We bring hope, progress, strength and peace through unmatched might. Yet they resist. It grieves me that extinction is so often the answer. I pity them for their ignorance, but admire them for the fact they will die for their way of life.’

‘That is not admirable. That’s moronic. They would rather die being wrong than learn to embrace change.’

‘I never said it was intelligent. I said it grieved me to reave a world clean of life because of ignorance.’

Torgal mused on this, but not for very long. ‘But they’re wrong,’ he said.

‘We were wrong once, too.’ The Chapter Master held up a gauntleted fist to make the point: it was crimson, where it would once have been grey. ‘We were wrong when we worshipped the Emperor.’

Torgal had shaken his head. ‘We were wrong, and we adapted rather than be annihilated. I do not see the source of your grievance, brother.’

‘What if we could convince them? What if the flaw is with us, that we merely lack the words to win them to our side? We are butchering our own species.’

‘We are culling the herd.’

‘Forget I mentioned it,’ the Chapter Master conceded. ‘You are right, of course.’

Torgal would not be moved. ‘Do not mourn idiocy, brother. They are offered the truth and they have refused. If we had resisted the truth unto destruction, then we would have deserved our fate, just as these fools deserve theirs.’

Argel Tal hadn’t tried again. A treacherous and unworthy thought plagued him in those grimmest moments – how much of his brothers’ unquestioning belief was born of their own hearts, and how much was bred into them by their gene-seed? How many souls had he consigned to destruction himself, silently urged into bloodshed by sorcerous genetics?

Some questions had no answers.

Reluctant to burden Cyrene with his own troubles when she already served as confessor for hundreds of Astartes and Euchar soldiers, the only other time he’d spoken of his unease was with the one soul he knew he needed to guard against.

Aquillon understood.

He understood because he felt the same, sharing Argel Tal’s subtle lament at the need to destroy entire empires simply because their leaders were blind to the realities of the galaxy.

The latest world to earn destruction was called Calis by its inhabitants, and 1301-20 by the 1301st Expeditionary Fleet. A planetwide invasion was in the making even as Calis’s primitive orbital defences fell, burning, back into the atmosphere.

The population was sentenced to destruction on account of their dealing with xenos breeds. The purestrain human biological code of Calis’s citizens had been unalterably corrupted by the introduction of alien genetics. The people of the world below would not surrender the exact details to the Imperium, but it was clear from blood samples that the Calisians had cultured alien deoxyribonucleic acid into their own cells at some point in time.

‘Most likely to cure hereditary or degenerative disease,’ Torvus suggested. But the reason was meaningless. Such deviation could not be tolerated.

General Jesmetine’s Euchar regiments were tasked with taking hold of twelve major cities across Calis’s scarce landmasses, each with support from several Astartes squads.

The capital city – a sprawl of industrial decay by the name of Crachia – was also the seat of the planetary ruler, who claimed the evidently hereditary title of ‘psychopomp’.

It was this woman, Psychopomp Shal Vess Nalia IX, that had rebuffed the Word Bearers’ emissaries. And it was this woman, swollen with corpulence, who had signed her culture’s death warrant.

‘Leave the capital untouched,’ Argel Tal had informed Baloc Torvus at the preceding war council. ‘I will release the Gal Vorbak upon Crachia and take their queen’s head myself.’

The fleetmaster had nodded. ‘And what of the remembrancers? They’ve barely been with us a fortnight, yet already I’m suffering hourly beseeching from their representatives, begging that they be allowed to witness an assault.’

The Crimson Lord shook his head. ‘Ignore them. We are conquering a world, Baloc, not nursemaiding tourists.’

Baloc Torvus had grown deeply patient in his advancing age, which was one of the fleetmaster’s many virtues that his men admired and his fellow commanders relied upon. Argel Tal saw the beginnings of cracks in that ironclad facade now, showing in the lines around the ageing man’s eyes, and the way he adjusted his white cloak to calm himself before replying.

‘With respect, lord–’

Argel Tal raised a hand in warning. ‘Don’t fall into formalities just because you disagree with me.’

‘With respect, Argel Tal, I have been ignoring them on your behalf since their arrival, and for over a year before that. I have mouthed platitudes and composed missives refusing them access to the fleet, citing a hundred and more reasons that it would be inappropriate, impossible, or impractical to deal with them. Now they are here, and they come equipped with Imperial seals from the Sigillite himself, demanding that they be allowed to record the Great Crusade. Short of shooting them – and don’t think I can’t see that smile – how am I to continue delaying them?’

Argel Tal chuckled, the first break in his foul mood the fleetmaster had seen today. Whatever news the returning Chaplain had brought, it was not sitting well with the Chapter Master. ‘I see your point. How many have joined the fleet?’

Torvus consulted a data-slate. ‘One hundred and twelve.’

‘Very well. Make them choose ten. We’ll take them down with us in the first wave, and give them a minimal Army escort from the Euchars. The rest can follow once the landing zones are secure.’

‘What if they encounter significant opposition?’

‘Then they die.’ The Crimson Lord made to leave the room. ‘I do not care, either way.’

Torvus took several seconds to make sure Argel Tal wasn’t joking.

‘By your word.’

Twenty-Two

An Idea
Brothers
The Ordained Hour

Ishaq was faintly concerned that he was going to die down here, but that wouldn’t stop him enjoying it while it lasted.

The other remembrancers whined on and on, badgering their Echuar aides about where would be best to observe the battle without actually getting anywhere near it. Apparently they’d forgotten the honour of getting sent down here shortly after first setting foot on solid ground. Most of them seemed dedicated to completely missing the whole point of making planetfall in the first place, but that was fine by Ishaq. He wasn’t here to babysit their careers.

The ride down to the surface had been an uneventful drift through the afternoon sky – anticlimactic after all the tension of being selected, and boring enough for Ishaq to start wondering if there was really a war going on at all. The limited view from the dirty window had revealed a distant city of obviously human construction below.

Strange, to consider waging war against such a familiar scene.

Their lander was an Army troop transport, a shaking, rattling example of the ancient Greywing-class shuttles that he’d assumed were out of service these days, replaced by the smaller, sleeker Valkyries. Ishaq had looked at the boxy underslung compartment where the thirty passengers were evidently supposed to travel. He’d looked at the sloping wings, ran a gloved hand over the armour plating, pockmarked from battle and painted with faded lightning bolts from the Emperor’s Unification Wars on Terra two centuries before.

And he’d fallen in love.

He snapped several picts of the venerable old girl, pleased with each and every one of them.

‘What’s her name?’ he asked the pilot, who was standing around with the two dozen Army soldiers on the hangar deck and looking just as annoyed.

‘They didn’t name them back when she was made. Too many, produced too fast, by too few facilities.’

‘I see. So what do you call her?’ He pointed at the faint, stencilled print along the hull: E1L-IXII-8E22.

The man thawed a touch at Kadeen’s interest. ‘Elizabeth. We call her Elizabeth.’

‘Sir,’ Ishaq grinned. ‘Permission to come aboard your fine lady.’

So it’d started well. Once they were down, things took a turn for the worse. The officer in nominal command of their expedition wasn’t an officer at all – he was a Euchar sergeant who’d drawn the short straw and had to babysit the gaggle of pretension and nervousness that made up ten highly-strung artists in a warzone.

Ishaq half-listened to the sergeant arguing with a handful of the other remembrancers about just where would be acceptable for them to enter the city. He was already bored, standing on the edge of a rise about three kilometres from the city limits. The place itself looked no different from any industrialised sprawl on Terra, and there weren’t even any obvious signs of battle.

The nature of Astartes assault presented a problem for the people attempting chronicle the event. A direct drop-pod attack against the palace meant the remembrancers had to cross an entire hostile city alone, or would remain outside the city limits and ultimately witness nothing at all. The former was never going to happen. The latter almost definitely was.

Ishaq Kadeen was a naturally suspicious soul, and he felt a bleak sense of humour behind all this. Someone, perhaps even the Crimson Lord himself, was making fun of them all. Inviting them down here, but keeping them tediously safe and out of the way.

He trudged over to his minders: two men in the neat ochre uniforms of the Euchar 81st. Each of the remembrancers was similarly guarded. Ishaq’s own sentinels looked both bored and annoyed all at once, which was quite a feat for human facial expressions.

‘What if we just flew over to the palace?’ he suggested.

‘And get shot down?’ The Euchar was practically spitting. ‘That piece of shit would catch fire and fall out of the sky as soon as it came into range of the anti-air guns.’

With effort, Ishaq kept his smile cordial. ‘Then fly really, really high, and come down sharp on top of the palace. Then find somewhere to land.’ He demonstrated this feat of aeronautics with his hands. They didn’t seem convinced.

‘Not happening,’ one of them said.

Ishaq turned without another word, heading back into the dark confines of the Greywing’s passenger pod. When he emerged again, he had a plastek personal grav-chute pack tucked under one arm, clearly taken from the overhead storage lockers.

‘Then how about this? We fly really damn high, and anyone who actually wants to do their job can jump out and do it.’

The two soldiers shared a glance, and called their sergeant over.

‘What is it?’ the sergeant asked. His face painted enough of a picture: he needed another whining artist like he needed a hole in his head.

‘This one,’ the soldier pointed at Ishaq. ‘He’s had an idea.’

It took twenty minutes for the idea to become reality, and Ishaq regretted it right about the same time he jumped out of the gunship and started falling.

Below him sprawled the white-stone palace, like something from Ancient Hellas in Terra’s decadent past. It was coming up to meet him with surprising speed, while the wind was doing its best to beat him unconscious.

This, he thought, may have been a mistake.

He tapped the switches on his chest buckle that would engage the grav-chute. First one, then the other. First one, then the other.

‘Wait twenty seconds before you switch it on,’ the sergeant had said to the few of them that were making the drop. ‘Twenty seconds. Understood?’

Wait twenty seconds.

The wind roared against him, and the ground swelled below. Was he going to be sick? He hoped not. The queasiness in his stomach flipped and bubbled. Ugh.

Wait twenty seconds.

No sign of anti-air fire, at least. He could make out a spot among one of the inner courtyards – a blackened stain where a red drop-pod had beached itself. That was a good place to start.

Wait twenty seconds.

How... How long had he been falling?

Oh, shit.

Ishaq looked up, through bleary goggles he could see his two minders above. Both were far, far higher than him, shrinking all the while. Even smaller, above them both, were the others who’d caught onto his plan and given it enough credence to come with him.

He flicked the switches, first the blue, then the red. For several moments, absolutely nothing happened. Ishaq continued his plummeting death-dive, too surprised to even swear. He started flicking the switches in random panic, little realising that by doing so he wasn’t giving it time to warm up and engage.

The grav-chute finally kicked in hard enough to wrench the muscles in his neck, its gravity suspensors humming as they came alive. The late activation saved Ishaq from becoming a red smear along the wall of a palace tower, but he paid the price for distraction. Laughing with terror, he careened off the stone parapet, bouncing, giggling and trying not to soil himself as he tumbled through the air.

Forty-eight seconds later, the first of his minders touched down in the courtyard. He found Ishaq Kadeen a bloody mess, cradling his picter in bruised hands as he sat on the grass, rocking back and forth.

‘Did you see that?’ he grinned at the soldier.

Three remembrancers, six Euchar soldiers – a strike force of nine souls, moving through the corridors of the palace. It was a scantly-decorated affair with little in the way of art or ornamentation. The architecture was all pillars and arched roofs, while uncarpeted stone floors led them deeper into the structure, which had all the charm and warmth of a mountaintop monastery.

When they’d first entered the palace, leaving the fire-blackened Astartes drop-pod behind, Ishaq had wondered how they’d know which way to go. It turned out to be a needless worry. They just followed the bodies.

Evidence of the Astartes’ passing was everywhere. This wing of the palace was swept clean of life, with ruptured corpses left in place of traditional decoration. One of the other remembrancers, a whippet-lean imagist by the name of Kaliha, would pause every few minutes and compose a pict around the dead bodies. It was clear from the angle of her picter that she sought to avoid any real focus on the slain, perhaps leaving them as blurred images in the foreground.

Ishaq had no interest in chronicling this butchery – artfully, tastefully or otherwise. The ambitious, mercenary part of his brain knew there’d be no point: such work would never enter the most treasured archives. Truly morbid pieces rarely did. People on Terra wanted to see what was humanity was capable of creating, not the aftermath of what it destroyed. They wanted to witness their champions in moments of glory or struggling in righteous strife, not slaughtering helpless humans that resembled Terrans far more than the Astartes themselves did.

It was all about presentation, about presenting what people wanted to see, whether they knew it or not. So he left the bodies unrecorded.

He tried not to look at the corpses they passed. Their ruination was so brutally complete it was difficult to imagine that these gobbets of meat had ever been people. They hadn’t just been killed, they’d been destroyed.

One of the soldiers, Zamikov, caught Ishaq’s eye. ‘Chainblades,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘The look on your face. You’re wondering what does this to a body. Well, it’s chainswords.’

‘I wasn’t wondering that,’ Ishaq lied.

‘No shame in honest horror,’ Zamikov shrugged. ‘I’ve been with the Serrated Sun twelve years now, and I puked my way through the first two. The Crimson Lord’s lot do messy work.’

They took a left, stepping through another broken barricade that had failed to do its job. Gunfire in the distance hastened their strides.

‘I’d heard the Word Bearers always incinerated their enemies.’

‘They do.’ Zamikov hiked a thumb over his shoulder, at the corpses arrayed in various pieces around the furniture barricade. ‘That’ll come afterwards. First they kill, then they purify.’

‘They come back to burn the dead after a battle? They actually do it themselves?’

Zamikov nodded, no longer looking over at the imagist. Ishaq noticed the shift in the soldier’s stride – as soon as they’d heard the gunshots, each of the Euchars moved lower, faster, their lasrifles clutched tighter. It was like watching hive-street cats on the hunt for rats.

‘They do it themselves. No funerary serfs or corpse-servitors for the Word Bearers. They’re a thorough lot, you’ll see.’

‘I can already see.’

‘That a fact?’ Zamikov spared him a quick glance. ‘What do you see here?’

‘Bodies.’ Ishaq raised an eyebrow. What kind of question was that?

‘It’s more than that.’ The soldier looked ahead again. ‘This entire wing of the palace is cleaned out, but we’ve doubled back on ourselves more than once following the trail of dead. The Word Bearers aren’t racing to the throne room. That’s not how they do things. They’re killing everyone in the palace first, room by room, chamber by chamber. That’s punishment. That’s being thorough. You understand now?’

Ishaq nodded, not sure what else to say.

The sound of gunfire was joined by the guttural whine of motorised blades. He felt his heart quicken. This was it: battle, seeing the Astartes fight. And hopefully, not getting shot at himself.

‘Look alive,’ the sergeant grunted. ‘Rifles up.’

Ishaq didn’t have a rifle, but with his face set just as stern as Zamikov’s, he raised his picter.

When they caught up to the Word Bearers, the scene was nothing like he’d expected. Firstly, it wasn’t a squad of Word Bearers, it was just one. And secondly, he wasn’t alone.

The picter clicked and clicked and clicked.

They were twins in movement, a single weapon with a single intent. Neither led the other, neither moved any more or less than his twin. It was not competition. It was the perfection of unity.

They stopped as one, ending their advance to take stock of their surroundings. The city was in the throes of evacuation, for whatever good it would do the populace, and the air was a wailing morass of conflicting sirens audible even here within the palace. Platoons of defenders stood at every corridor corner and junction, armed with solid shot rifles that cracked and pinged harmlessly off Astartes armour.

The vox-network was calm. No cries for reinforcement. No demands for orders. The monotonous chanting so typical of Word Bearer squads was absent from the Gal Vorbak. Forty warriors, drop-podded into four sections of the royal castle, immediately splitting up to slaughter with muted grunts and growls.

Another barricade stood before the two advancing warriors, manned by dozens of the rifle-armed defenders in their ostentatious white and gold garb. Puffs of smoke preceded the click-clack-click of their bullets sparking harmlessly aside.

Both warriors broke into a run, boots crunching into the stone floor. Both vaulted the barricade of smashed furniture in the same moment, both grunting in effort as they leapt. Both landed at the same time, and both let loose with abandon, their weapons lashing out to shed blood. The defenders fell in pieces around them, chopped and carved faster than the eye could follow.

Ruthless familiarity with each other was all that made this possible. When one would weave low to thrust, the other would aim high to slice. Their movements were a blurring dance around each other’s forms, forever watching and anticipating the other’s movements even as they focused on slaying their enemies.

Around the two warriors, nineteen defenders were twitching human wreckage. The last to die had been disembowelled and decapitated by both warriors in the same heartbeat.

Now blood ran from the sword’s blade, just as it ran from the eight talons. Back to back, the warriors glanced at the ruination around them, took half a second’s note of the Euchar escorting the remembrancers down the hallway, and moved on in the same second.

Aquillon ran.

Argel Tal staggered.

Surprise froze the Custodian’s movements dead. As he turned, he saw the Word Bearer take another flawed step and crash to his knees among the corpses they’d created.

Aquillon span his blade – a deflective propeller to ward off any assassin’s shot. He wasn’t connected to the Legion’s networked data-stream, and couldn’t read Argel Tal’s life signs on a convenient retinal display. But there was no blood. No sign of injury, beyond the collapse and spasm.

‘Are you hit?’

Argel Tal answered with wordless rasps. Something wet and black dripped from his helm’s mouth grille, thinner than oil, thicker than blood, hissing like acid as it fell to the stone.

Aquillon stood above the prone Word Bearer, sword spinning in his gold hands. No matter where he looked, he couldn’t gain a target lock. There was no assassin – at least none that he could see. He risked another glance down.

‘Brother? Brother, what ails you?’

Argel Tal used his claws to rise, digging them into the wall and dragging himself to his feet. Black bubbles, silvered by saliva, swelled and popped at his mouth grille.

‘Rakarssshhhk,’ he said, in a greasy blurt of vox. The twitching was subsiding, but the Word Bearer seemed in no hurry to move.

‘What struck you down?’

‘Hnh. Nothing. Nothing.’ Argel Tal’s voice was a breathy wheeze. ‘I... Tell me you hear that.’

‘Hear what?’

Argel Tal gave no answer. The scream in his mind went on and on, a sound of sorrow and anger somehow ripened by amusement – a meaningless melange of incompatible emotion, curdled into a single scream. Each second it lasted, his blood boiled hotter.

‘Let’s move on,’ he growled at Aquillon through chattering teeth.

‘Brother?’

‘Move on.’

Torgal screamed in unison with the distant cry, sending human defenders panicking before him. The Gal Vorbak warriors by his side dropped their weapons, hands clutching at helms, wordless shouts of anguish vox-roaring throughout the throne chamber.

Psychopomp Shal Vess Nalia IX watched this sudden madness through tears in her eyes. The ruler of the planet Calis had, before this moment, been curled in her oversized throne – a mess of rich robes containing rolls of fat – weeping and wailing for all to hear. The last survivors of her royal guard, those who’d not fled to leave her to die at the hands of the invaders, were similarly taken aback now as the red-armoured slaughterers howled and ceased their butchery.

The guards’ ceremonial blades were worthless against Astartes armour, as were their solid-shot rifles. Instead of pressing the attack, they used the momentary respite to fall back to the psychopomp’s throne.

‘Highness, it’s time to leave,’ a house-captain told her. This was a refrain he’d been trying for days, but if it wouldn’t work now, at least he’d never need to try again.

She blubbed in response. Her chins jiggled.

‘Forget her,’ one of the others said. All of their faces were taut under the pressure of the invaders screaming so loud. ‘This is our chance, Revus.’

‘Defend me!’ the matriarch wailed. ‘Do your duty! Kill them all!’

Revus was fifty-two years old, and had served most loyally as house-captain to the current psychopomp’s father, who’d been a charismatic and effective ruler beloved by his people – everything his fat bitch of a daughter was not.

But he couldn’t leave. Or rather, he wouldn’t.

Revus turned to the prone invaders, watching them kneel and cry out in the sea of carved corpses around them, and made the last decision he would ever make. He would not run. It was not in him to do so. Instead, he would defend his sire’s indolent daughter with his life, breaking his blade upon the armour of his enemies, making sure his final words would be to spit defiance in their faces.

‘Turn and run, dogs,’ he snarled at his own men. ‘I will die doing my duty.’

Half of them seemed to take that as an order, for they fled immediately. Revus watched their dark-armoured forms slipping into servants’ passages, and despite himself, couldn’t wish harm upon them for their cowardice.

The house-captain remained in the screaming maelstrom with eight men: all too proud or too dutiful to run, and all on the veteran side of forty.

‘We’re with you,’ one of them said, his voice raised to make it above the shouts.

‘Defend me!’ the hideous girl wailed again. ‘You have to protect me.’

Revus spoke a small prayer of reverence, wishing the shade of her father well, and promising to see him soon in the afterlife.

The invaders rose again. The screams faded to moans and grunts. They reached for weapons that had fallen into the gore.

Revus yelled ‘Charge!’ and did exactly that.

He cared nothing for slaying one of the invaders, for he knew he couldn’t. All he wished to do was break his blade upon their red armour – to land a single blow, when so many of the royal guard had died without even striking once.

One moment he ran and roared, the next, he was crashing to the floor. There wasn’t even any pain as his legs went out from under him, just a moment of dizziness, before looking up to see the crimson warrior towering above. His blade remained unbroken. His last wish, denied.

The invader stepped on the dying man’s chest, crushing every bone in his torso and pulping the organs. House-Captain Revus died without even knowing his legs and waist were three metres away, severed from his body by the red warrior’s first blow.

Torgal dispatched the last of the ardent defenders, reaching the throne before the other Gal Vorbak. Acidic bile still stung his throat, but control and strength alike had returned to his limbs. The vox was a frenetic exchange of squads all reporting the same crippling pain and the sound of laughter.

‘Leave my world!’ the psychopomp squealed from her chair.

Torgal plucked her up by her fat neck. The weight was considerable, even for Astartes battle armour. He felt gyros in his shoulder and elbow joints lock to deal with the strain.

Next to him, Seltharis was replacing his helm after spitting black bile at one of the dead bodies. ‘Just kill the piggish creature. We need to return to orbit. Something is wrong.’

Torgal shook his head. ‘Nothing is wrong.’ He did his best to ignore the girl’s weeping protests. ‘But we must commune with the Chaplain at once. If this is the ordained hour, we must–’

‘What?’ Seltharis was almost laughing. ‘What must we do? I am hearing a spirit laughing inside my skull, while my blood boils hot enough to burn my bones. We have no plan for this. None of us truly believed it would ever come.’

‘Leave my world!’ the matriarch insisted. ‘Leave us in peace!’

Torgal sneered at her behind his faceplate, loathing her down to the wretched, alien fish-stink of her sweating skin. What abominable event in this world’s past had led to such deviancy? What could make such desecration – the corruption of the human genome with alien genetics – a necessary reality? These people seemed no stronger, no more enlightened, no more industrious than any other human culture. In truth, they were less advanced than most.

‘Why did you do this to yourselves?’ the Astartes asked.

‘Leave my world! Leave!’

He threw her aside. The fleshy pile crashed to the ground, her dynasty ended by a broken neck.

‘Burn everything,’ ordered Torgal. ‘Burn it all, and summon a Thunderhawk. We stand at the ordained hour. I will report to the Crimson Lord.’

The Crimson Lord surveyed the courtyard. Empty, but for the grounded gunship.

He lowered his claws.

Torgal reported the monarch’s downfall almost an hour before, but Argel Tal’s fervour had faded even before the announcement. With the echo of that silent scream still drifting through his skull, he stood in the shadows of his Thunderhawk, Rising Sun, abstaining from the final slaughter within the palace. With flamers and incendiary grenades, the Gal Vorbak were erasing all evidence of royal life, gutting the pillared palace from within.

Most were voxing questions to one another, coating the communication network in a buzz of aggressive, amused voices. The words Ordained Time surfaced with sickening frequency. Their blood was up, for it seemed the gods had called.

Aquillon had followed him, which was the first thing he expected, and the very last thing he needed. The four Custodes were scattered among the Word Bearers assaulting the palace. They had surely seen everything, and that was going to become a problem sooner rather than later.

Argel Tal watched the man he would soon be ordered to kill, and wondered if he were capable of the act, both physically and morally.

‘I have no answer for you,’ Argel Tal told him. ‘I do not know what happened. A momentary weakness played over me. I forced it back. That is all I can tell you.’

The Custodes sighed through his helm speaker. ‘And you are well now?’

‘Yes. My strength returned quickly. There has been no moment of similar weakness.’

‘My men report similar incidents,’ the Custodian said. ‘Many of the Gal Vorbak fell as if struck by unseen hands, at the same moment you lapsed yourself.’ Aquillon removed his helm in a gesture of familiarity. It was a gesture that went unreturned. ‘We have detected no enemy weaponry capable of creating such an effect.’

He could only meet Aquillon’s gaze with his own eyes guarded by the lenses of his helm.

‘If I knew what had afflicted me,’ Argel Tal said, ‘I would tell you, brother.’

‘We have to consider that this is some previously unknown flaw in your Legion’s gene-seed.’

Argel Tal grunted a vague noise that may or may not have been affirmation.

‘You understand,’ the Custodian continued, ‘I must report this to the Emperor, beloved by all, at once.’

Behind his faceplate, Argel Tal was drooling blood again.

‘Yes,’ he said, licking his lips clean. ‘Of course you must.’

At first, he believed the scream was returning. Only after listening to its ululating wail for several moments did he turn back towards the palace walls.

‘Do you hear that?’ he asked.

This time, Aquillon nodded. ‘Yes. I do.’

When the siren started, almost all of the Word Bearers requested confirmation of its origins. The Colchisian rune flickering across hundreds of retinal displays told a blunt, stark tale, but it was a story that made no sense.

Even among the Gal Vorbak, the red-clad warriors hesitated in their fire-bearing purges, voxing to the orbiting fleet for immediate confirmation and explanation.

In the courtyard, Argel Tal and Aquillon boarded the Rising Sun, ordering their warriors to return to their dropships without hesitation. The psychopomp’s palace no longer mattered. This entire compliance was now meaningless.

‘All Word Bearers, all Custodes, all Imperial Army forces of the 1,301st Expeditionary Fleet – hear these words. This is Argel Tal, Master of the Serrated Sun. Word has reached De Profundis from Terra itself, bearing the seal of the Emperor. The Isstvan System is in open rebellion, led by four of our own Legions. Rumours are rife, and facts are few. It is said the Warmaster has renounced his blood-oaths to the Throneworld. True or false, we will not go to war blinded by ignorance. But we will answer the primarch’s call, for Lorgar himself demands we respond.

‘Disengage from the surface attack, and regroup at your transports. Return to orbit at once. We are ordered to Isstvan, and we will obey as we were born to obey. The Word Bearers will cut to the heart of this betrayal, tearing the truth out from within. Officers, to your stations. Warriors, to your duties.

That is all, for now.’

Aquillon stood with the Crimson Lord in the gunship’s crew bay. ‘I cannot give this even a moment’s belief. Horus? A traitor?’ The Custodian ran his fingertips over the flat of his sword’s blade. ‘This cannot be true.’

‘You heard the message, just as I.’ Argel Tal blink-clicked a runic marker on his visor display, opening a vox-channel to the Gal Vorbak.

‘Confirm network security.’

Another rune twinned with the first, blinking in reassurance.

‘This is Argel Tal,’ he spoke only to his closest brothers now. ‘Aurelian calls us.’

A voice answered without the aid of vox, drifting through his senses with maddening familiarity.

They already know. They sense it.

I know this voice, he thought.

Of course we know it. It is our own voice. We are Argel Tal.

Twenty-Three

Traitors
Possession
The Choice

The astropath nodded.

Aquillon was too stunned to even feel rage. ‘Treason,’ he said. ‘How can this be?’

The astropath’s name was Cartik, and at his full height he cut an unimpressively short figure, only made worse by both advancing age and a tendency to hunch his shoulders like an animal about to be attacked. The psyker was pushing seventy years of age with a face cracked by time’s lines, and he’d hardly been spry even in youth. He was old now. It showed in everything he did, and how slowly he did it.

Surprisingly lovely eyes flickered about as they watched from beneath half-hooded lids, sunk into the sallow sockets of an ugly face formed by cruel genes and chubby cheeks. Upon seeing him once, a remembrancer had remarked that Cartik’s mother or father – perhaps even both – were almost definitely rodents.

He’d never been skilled at cutting comebacks. His talents simply didn’t lie in witticism. That was the last time he attempted to make friends among the newly-arrived civilians. He knew loneliness would drive him to try again, but was content to let it wait a while.

His position as personal astropath to the Occuli Imperator had brought his family on Terra a modest measure of wealth, though it had brought nothing but a lonely and boring indentured exile for himself. Such were the sacrifices made in this day and age. He was content enough to do the Emperor’s duty, safe in the knowledge that his family were well provided for.

Once or twice, remembrancers had come to him, seeking to use his position for their own ends, in their quest for stories to record and tales to tell. Cartik read the naked ambition in their eyes, as well as their utter disinterest in him, and made himself unavailable to such visitors. In truth, he’d grown used to the loneliness. He had no desire to be used just to escape it.

‘I confirm it,’ Cartik said. His speech, like his eyes, was deceptively pleasant. Not that anyone would ever know it beyond Cartik himself, but he had a wonderful singing voice, too. ‘Exalted sire, the aether has cleared a great deal in recent days, and the message from Terra was clear. It has come to treason.’

Aquillon looked at the others gathered in Cartik’s isolated chamber. Kalhin, the youngest, with barely nine names in the Emperor’s service. Nirallus, with his breastplate bearing twenty name-etchings, and the best of them all with a guardian spear. Sythran, still keeping his vow of silence sworn atop one of the few remaining mountains of Himalaya, looking up at the walls of the Imperial Palace. He viewed their assignment as penance, and would never speak a word until they returned to Terra in seven more years, at the completion of their five-decade service.

‘Four Legions,’ said Kalhin. ‘Four entire Legions have betrayed the Emperor.’

‘Led by the Warmaster,’ Cartik added to their discussion with awkward softness. ‘The Emperor’s most beloved son.’

Nirallus breathed out something between a snort and a laugh. ‘We are the Emperor’s most beloved sons, little warp-speaker.’

Aquillon ignored the old argument. ‘Argel Tal informs me we will reach Isstvan in thirty-nine days. Upon arrival, the Serrated Sun will rejoin the Legion and deploy alongside the other Word Bearers. No Army, Mechanicum or external forces are to join the assault, including us. This is an Astartes concern, apparently. They wish us to take command of four smaller vessels, to aid in repelling boarders. I have acquiesced to this.’

The others turned to him. Most nodded in acceptance at the honour offered to them, though they were still troubled.

‘Thirty-nine days?’ asked Nirallus.

‘Yes.’

‘That is incredulously quick,’ Kalhin said. ‘We’ve spent years pushing through turgid tides and bringing backwater worlds to compliance, and suddenly the Navigators are reporting clean warp-lanes all the way to where we need to be? A quarter of the way across the galaxy? That journey should take a decade.’

‘The warp has cleared,’ reiterated Cartik.

‘In good tides, it is still a journey of many months. Even years.’

Aquillon looked down at Cartik. One by one, so did the others.

‘Yes, Occuli Imperator?’ the man said.

‘Inform the Sigillite that we await his orders. The Astartes are resistant to exterior forces taking part in the coming battle, but we will be spread across the Word Bearers’ fleet, commanding four of their vessels.’

‘By your word,’ Cartik said reflexively. It would be a long night of pulsing so urgent a message all the way to Terra, and maintaining a link with an astropath on the distant home world long enough to carry a reply. ‘It will be as you wish.’

The Custodians left the room without saying another word.

Argel Tal shivered in his armour, cold despite the heat, icy sweat drenching his skin before it was absorbed into the layers of his armour and recycled back into his body.

The scraping of heavy ceramite on steel decking was a rhythmic rasp, screeching each time his body gave another shudder in time to his heartbeat. He’d tried to stand countless times. Each attempt met with failure, crashing back down to the floor of his meditation chamber, denting the deck and chipping paint from his armour.

An open vox-channel to the other Gal Vorbak brought him their curses and murmured prayers, but he could neither recall opening the link, nor remember exactly how to close it. They suffered as he suffered. Most didn’t sound capable of speech, either – their voices lost in feral, ragged snarls.

The door signal chimed once.

Argel Tal released a low growl, needing several moments to form a single word.

‘Who?’

The wall-speaker hissed. ‘It is Aquillon.’

The Word Bearer turned watering eyes to his retinal chron, seeing the digital runes counting up. He had forgotten something. Some... event. He couldn’t think clearly. Saliva stringed between his aching teeth.

‘Yes?’

‘You were not present at our sparring.’

Yes, that was it. Their daily spar.

‘Apologies. Meditating.’

‘Argel Tal?’

‘Meditating.’

There was a pause. ‘Very well. I shall return later.’

Argel Tal lay on the decking, shivering and whispering mantras in the language at Colchisian’s core, freed of its Terran and Gothic roots.

At one point, lost in a haze of pain, he’d drawn his combat blade. In a trembling grip, he used the sword to slice the palm of his gauntlet, seeking to release the burning from his blood. What dripped from the wound was like boiling oil, bubbling and popping, and it ate into the deck floor in hissing rivulets.

The slice closed the way a smile slowly fades. Even the cut in his armour resealed with disgustingly organic scarring.

He managed to haul himself to his feet after another hour had passed, composing himself enough to stand without trembling. Over the vox, his warriors were laughing, weeping, betraying emotion after emotion rarely heard from the throats of Astartes.

‘Xaphen.’

The Chaplain evidently needed several long seconds to reply. ‘Brother.’

‘We must... hide this from the Custodes. Spread the word. The Gal Vorbak are to be sequestered in meditation. Penance. Contemplation as we travel to Isstvan.’

‘We can just kill them.’ Xaphen barked the words over the vox-network. ‘Kill them now. The time has come.’

‘They die,’ Argel Tal swallowed a gobbet of acid, ‘when the primarch says they die. Spread the word across the ship. The Gal Vorbak is suffering penance, and refuses all outside contact.’

‘By your word.’

In the background, his brothers were screaming and howling. The sound of fists and foreheads crashing against walls transmitted over the vox in dull clangs. He couldn’t breathe. He had to get his stifling helmet off; even the ship’s warm, recycled air was better than choking in this ashes-and-ember reek.

Fingers clasped at his collar seals, but each tug jerked his whole head. The helm wouldn’t come free. Cold sweat, somehow, had cemented it to his face.

Argel Tal moved to the doorway, pressing the activation plate. Once the door was open, the Crimson Lord broke into a staggering, lurching run, moving down the corridors, seeking the one place of refuge his disoriented mind could focus upon.

‘Enter,’ she called.

The first thing she heard was the servo-snarl of armour joints with the booted thunder of Astartes tread. She opened her mouth to speak, but the smell silenced her. Aggressively strong, the potent chemical iron-reek of melting metal, with the ashen scent of burning coal.

The footsteps were uneven, leading into her chamber, and ended with a crash of ceramite on metal that shook her bed. In the wake of the crash, the door sealed again. She sat on the edge of her sleeping mattress, staring blindly where she’d heard the Astartes fall.

‘Cyrene,’ the warrior spoke. She knew him instantly, despite the strain in his voice.

Without a word, she slipped from the bed, feeling for where he’d fallen. Her hands brushed the smooth armour of his shin guard, and the tattered oath paper that hung there. With that as her frame of reference, she moved up, until she sat by the warrior’s shoulders, cradling his heavy helm in her lap.

‘Your helmet will not come off,’ she said.

This was his face now: this image of slanted eyes and snarling ceramite. He didn’t answer.

‘I... I will summon an Apothecary.’

‘Need to hide. Lock the door.’

She did so with a spoken command.

‘What is wrong?’ There was no concealing her concern, or her rising panic. ‘Is this what Xaphen spoke of? The... the ordained change?’

So the Chaplain had already told her everything. He knew he was foolish to be surprised by that fact – Xaphen had always shared all with the Blessed Lady, using her as yet another instrument in his spread of the new faith among the Legion and the serfs alike. Argel Tal blinked sweat from stinging eyes before he replied. A targeting lock outlined Cyrene’s face above him, and he voided it with gritted teeth.

‘Yes. The change. The ordained hour.’

‘What will happen?’ The unease in her voice was an aural nectar. Through a perception he didn’t quite understand, Argel Tal felt stronger when he heard the break in her breathing... the way her heart beat faster... the warmth of fear in her voice. Tears fell onto his faceplate, and even this made his muscles bunch with fresh strength.

We feed on her sorrow, the thought rose unbidden.

‘Are you dying?’ she asked through her tears.

‘Yes.’ His own answer shocked him, because he’d not expected it, and yet knew it was true the moment he spoke it. ‘I think I am.’

‘What should I do? Please, tell me.’ He could feel her fingertips stroking along the faceplate of his helm, cool to the touch, soothing some of the pain. It was as if her cold fingers rested directly against his feverish skin.

‘Cyrene,’ he growled, his voice barely his own. ‘This is the primarch’s plan.’

‘I know. You won’t die. Lorgar wouldn’t allow it.’

‘Lorgar. Does whatever. Must be done.’

He felt his voice growing fainter as he fell, drifting and slipping back from awareness as if into a sleep forced by narcotics. With ringing echoes, his thoughts split into an uncontrollable duality.

He could see her, her closed eyes that still trailed tears, her tumbling locks of chestnut hair curtaining down around her face. But he could see more: the pulse at her temple, where the vein quivered beneath her thin, too-human skin; The wet, crumpling boom of her heartbeat, pumping liquid life through her fragile body. The scent of her soul, escaping moment by moment throughout her entire life, breathed from her body until her body would breathe no more. She smelled alive, and she smelled vulnerable.

Somehow, that fired his hunger, like battle-lust, like starvation, but more potent than both – fierce enough to pain him. Her blood would tingle on his tongue, and sing through his digestive tract. Her eyes would be sweet balls of chewy, mouth-watering paste. He would break her teeth and swirl the shards around his mouth, before pulling her tongue from her bleeding lips and swallowing the severed length of flesh whole. Then she would scream, gurgling and tongueless, until she bled to death before him.

She was prey. Human. Mortal. Dying, minute by minute, and her spirit was destined to swim in the Sea of Souls until devoured by one of the Neverborn.

She was also Cyrene. The Blessed Lady. The one soul he’d come to at the nadir of his life, as his body broke and his faith broke alongside it.

She would be a joy to destroy. Her sorrow would sustain him, even enrichen him.

But he would not harm her. He could, but he would not. The wrath, born from nowhere, faded in the face of this realisation. He was not enslaved to his feral needs, despite their urgent strength.

He would never abandon his brothers, or shirk from Lorgar’s vision. Everything was a choice, and he would choose to suffer through this as the primarch had intended for him, carrying the changes so that others would never have to. Humanity would live on through the strength of the chosen few.

‘Argel Tal?’ she spoke his name as she always spoke it, with a curious gentleness.

‘Yes. We are Argel Tal.’

‘What’s happening?’

He managed a reassuring smile. It split the ceramite of his helm, and the faceplate smiled with him. She couldn’t see the daemonic visage leering up at her.

‘Nothing. Only the change. Watch over me, Cyrene. Hide me from Aquillon. I can control this. I will not harm you.’

He raised a hand, watching through swimming vision as the edges of everything grew blurry and indistinct. A bladed claw met his stare, a human hand coated in cracked crimson ceramite, the black talons stroking her hair with inhuman care. For a time, he simply watched his new claws catch what little light existed in the room’s ever-present darkness – the metal of his armour now an epidermis of ceramite, and the claws of his gauntlets now the talons of his own hand.

‘Your voice is different,’ she said.

His vision focused, the blurs fading, gelling into acuity. The claw was no more than his own gauntleted hand, as human as it had always been.

‘Do not worry,’ Argel Tal told her. ‘One way or another, it will be over soon.’

The Gal Vorbak did not remain in seclusion for long. Most emerged from their sealed chambers within a handful of nights. Xaphen was the first, leaving his chamber seemingly unchanged, though he was never without his helm as he travelled the ship’s decks. A brazier burned at all times from its cage mounting on his power pack, trailing the scent of ashes and coals wherever he went. He spent his time visiting the other Gal Vorbak in their meditation chambers, allowing no other visitors.

Argel Tal left Cyrene’s chamber after three nights. Aquillon was in the sparring halls, just as the Word Bearer had expected.

‘I had a feeling you’d be here,’ he said.

The Custodes stepped back from one another: Aquillon had been duelling with Sythran, both of them wielding live weapons and wearing full armour, including their crested helms.

Sythran deactivated his guardian spear, the spear blade turning off with a snap of discharged energy. Aquillon lowered his blade, but left it active.

‘A long meditation,’ he said, watching through ruby eye lenses.

‘Is that suspicion in your voice, brother?’ Argel Tal grinned behind his faceplate. ‘I had a great deal to dwell upon. Sythran, may I borrow your spear? I wish to duel.’

Sythran turned his head to Aquillon, saying nothing. The Occuli Imperator spoke for him. ‘Our weapons are keyed to our genetic spoor. They would not activate in your hands. As an addendum, it is considered the height of insult for one of us to let another touch the blades issued into our care by the Emperor himself.’

‘Very well. I meant no offence.’ Argel Tal moved to the weapon rack, donning a battered, ancient pair of power claws over his gauntlets. ‘Shall we?’

Aquillon’s golden helm tilted slightly. ‘Live weapons?’

‘Duellem Extremis,’ Argel Tal confirmed, tensing his fists to activate the electrical power fields around the long claws.

Sythran left the practice cage, sealing his commander and the Crimson Lord within. He’d seen Argel Tal and Aquillon cross blades on hundreds of occasions, and an educated, experienced estimate would see the Word Bearer defeated within sixty to eighty seconds.

The commencement chime sounded. Eleven clashes and five seconds later, the bout was over.

‘Again?’ enquired the Astartes. He heard Sythran’s quiet exhalation in place of speech. Aquillon said nothing, either.

‘Is something amiss?’ Argel Tal asked. With the claws on his gauntlets, he couldn’t offer a hand to help Aquillon rise.

‘No. Nothing is amiss. I had not expected you to attack, that is all.’

The Custodian regained his feet, his own armour joints humming as false muscles of machine-nerve and cable-sinew flexed and tensed.

‘Again?’

Aquillon hefted his long blade. ‘Again.’

The two warriors flew at one another, each strike flashing aside with bursts from their opposing power fields. Every second saw three strikes made, and each strike snapped back with the weapons’ electrical fields repelling one another after the metal kissed for the briefest moment. The air was rich with the ozone scent of abused power fields in only a matter of heartbeats.

This time, the two warriors were more evenly matched. Argel Tal’s strength lay in his awareness, not only of his own blade work but his enemy’s potential, betrayed by their own movements. It had always allowed him to stand his ground against superior weapon-masters, such as Aquillon, for a respectable amount of time before being unable to deflect the winning blow. Now he coupled that perceptive gift with speed to match the Custodian’s, and Aquillon was forced to bring desperate defensive strokes to bear for the first time in any of his duels with Argel Tal.

He gleaned the flaw in the Word Bearer’s sudden thrusts – that edge of indelicacy, the suggestion of imperfect balance – and struck out when the next opportunity presented itself. The flat of his blade crashed against Argel Tal’s breastplate, sending the Astartes stumbling back. Aquillon’s lips were already creasing into a smile as the crimson-clad warrior thudded to the deck.

‘There. The balance is restored. You are back where you belong: on the floor.’

Argel Tal’s voice told of the grin behind his faceplate. ‘I almost had you.’

‘Not a chance,’ the Custodian replied, wondering why it was suddenly true. ‘But you are different, brother. Energised. Vital.’

‘I feel different. Forgive me for now – I have duties to attend to.’

‘By your word,’ said the Custodian.

Both Aquillon and Sythran watched the Astartes leave. In the silence afterward, Aquillon said ‘Something has changed.’

Sythran, true to his vow of silence, merely nodded.

Twenty-Four

Isstvan V
Traitors
In Midnight Clad

Isstvan – an unremarkable sun, far from Terra, precious Throneworld of the Imperium.

The system’s third world, comfortably close enough to the sun to support human life, was a virus-soaked mass grave marking the anger of Horus Lupercal. The world’s population was nothing more than contaminated ash scattered over lifeless continents, while the bones of their cities remained as blackened smears of burnt stone – a civilisation reduced to memory in a single day. The orbital bombardment from the Warmaster’s fleet, payloads of incendiary shells and virus-laden biological warfare pods, had seemingly spared nothing and no one anywhere in the world.

Isstvan III lingered now in silent orbit around its sun, almost grand in the extent of its absolute devastation, serving as the scarred tombstone for the death of an empire.

The system’s fifth planet was a colder globe, able to support only the most resistant and genetically valiant life. Its skies were thick with storms, its skin was scabbed by tundra, and nothing on the face of the world promised an easy life for any that would settle upon it.

Ringing Isstvan V was one of the largest fleets ever gathered in the history of the human species. Without a doubt, it was the most impressive coalition of Astartes vessels, with the scouts, cruisers, destroyers and command ships of seven entire Legions. The matt-black hulls of the Raven Guard’s vessels blended into the void around their flagship, the sleek, vast and vicious Shadow of the Emperor. In a tighter formation, the green armour-plated warships of the Salamanders clustered in orbit around their primarch’s vessel, the immense Flamewrought, its edges and battlements bedecked in leering, draconic gargoyles of burnished bronze.

A much smaller fleet hovered in the high atmosphere, comprised almost entirely of smaller escorts around the hulking capital ship Ferrum, marked the presence of the Iron Hands. The vessels were denser, their armour thicker, and their black hulls were trimmed with gunmetal grey and polished silver. The Iron Hands had sent their elite companies, while the bulk of the Legion’s fleet remained en route.

Of the enemy fleet, there was no sign at all. The vessels of the Death Guard, the Emperor’s Children, the World Eaters and the arch traitorous Sons of Horus were gone – hidden from Imperial eyes and the Emperor’s vengeance.

In preternatural concordance, hundreds of vessels drifted closer to the world from the system’s farthest reaches. Clad in armour of midnight-blue, the warships at the vanguard bore the skullish insignia and bronze statuary of the Night Lords Legion. The Iron Warriors drifted alongside their brothers, bastion-ships of composite metals and dull iron ceramite barely reflecting the stars. The vessels of the Alpha Legion formed the peripheries of the massed fleet, their sea-coloured hulls painted with stylised scales in honour of the reptilian beast they’d taken as their symbol. Embossed hydras snarled into space from their places along the ships’ hulls.

At the core of the approaching armada, with more warships than any of their brother Legions, came the stone-grey battlefleet of the Word Bearers. The XVII Legion flagship, Fidelitas Lex, carved its way closer to the world ahead, massive engines vibrating with the gentle power of an approach vector’s thrust.

So many vessels breaking from the warp at once should have been a maelstrom of colliding hulls and spinning junk, yet the armada coasted closer to Isstvan V with maddening calm, safe distances maintained between every craft, and the void shields of each ship never once coming into crackling contact.

With a precision that required mass calculation, the fleets of seven Astartes Legions hung in the skies above Isstvan V. Shuttles and gunships ferried between the heaviest cruisers, while the decks of every warship made ready to deploy their warriors in an unprecedented, unified planetfall.

Horus, traitorous son of the Emperor, was making his stand on the surface. The Imperium of Man had sent seven Legions to kill its wayward scion, little knowing four of them had already spat on their oaths of allegiance to the Throneworld.

The cellar was crowded with the remembrancers and off-duty Army grunts barred from the operations decks. Ishaq shouldered his way through to the bar, earning a score of annoyed grunts and tutted threats that he knew wouldn’t ever go anywhere near an actual confrontation.

He ordered a plastic beaker (no expenses spared here in the Cellar) of whatever engine grease had been recently brewed without being immediately fatal. In payment, he scattered a few coppers on the bar’s stained wooden surface. In their absence, his pockets were distinctly empty.

Around him, the conversations were all keyed to the same subject. The planetfall. The betrayal. Horus, Horus, Horus. What he found most interesting was the tone such discussion was taking. ‘The Emperor abandoned the Great Crusade.’ ‘Horus was betrayed by his father.’ ‘The rebellion is justified.’ It went on and on, just as it had been doing for over a month now, during the entire time the fleet had been in the warp.

Ishaq tapped one of the nearest drinkers on the shoulder. The man turned, showing a face with an interesting geography of scars. He wore Euchar fatigues, and a holstered sidearm.

‘Yes?’

‘So tell me why you think this is all justified,’ Ishaq said. ‘Because it just sounds like treason to me.’

The Euchar trooper sneered and turned back to his friends. Ishaq tapped him on the shoulder again.

‘No, really, I’m interested in your perspective.’

‘Piss off, boy.’

‘Just answer the question,’ Ishaq smiled.

The Euchar gave a grin that would have been more threatening if he didn’t have flakes of his last meal caught between his teeth. ‘The Warmaster conquered half the galaxy, didn’t he? The Emperor’s been hiding back on Terra for half a century.’

Typical soldier logic, Ishaq thought. While one man dealt with the incomparable scale of managing an entire interstellar empire, he was infinitely less respected than the man who waged war in the most simple, aggressive terms, and always from positions of tactical, numerical and materiel supremacy.

‘Let me get this straight,’ Ishaq feigned a thoughtful expression. ‘You admire the man who has armies large enough never to lose a single war, but loathe the man responsible for the vision and effort of actually maintaining the Imperium?’

The Euchar scoffed at Ishaq’s description, and turned his back on the remembrancer. For just a moment, the imagist wondered if he was missing some key point in all this. The Word Bearers were here under Imperial orders, summoned to help put down Horus’s rebellion. Yet here, the human staff and crews of the expeditionary fleet were practically united in favour of Horus’s actions.

He sipped the drink and immediately regretted it.

‘Delicious,’ he said to the girl behind the bar.

The talk rattled on around him. Ishaq let it filter in, as he did most nights, listening without speaking, eavesdropping without being brazen about it. He was a passive seeker of public opinion. Easier to avoid fights that way – the Cellar had become a little more ‘fisticuffy’ since the soldiers had started drinking here too.

‘The Word Bearers won’t attack Horus,’ one voice said with solemn surety.

‘It’s not a war. They’re here to negotiate.’

‘It’ll be a war if the negotiations fail.’

‘The Emperor is a relic of the Unification Wars. The Imperium needs more from its leaders now.’

‘Horus hasn’t even committed any crime. The Emperor is overreacting out of fear.’

‘It won’t come to battle. Lorgar will see to that.’

‘The Emperor won’t even leave Terra to deal with this?’

‘Does he even care about the Imperium?’

‘I heard Horus will lead the other primarchs to Terra.’

Ishaq left his drink unfinished as he headed back to his personal chamber on the communal civilian deck. He wanted to believe he had only so much stomach for bad beverages and seditionist ideology, but the truth was far more prosaic. He didn’t have much money left.

Halfway to his room, he decided to change his course. Sitting bored in his chamber yet again wouldn’t achieve anything, and even without the coin to get pleasantly drunk, he could do what he’d done back in those first nights after joining the Legion’s fleet. It was a duty that had, for better or worse, lapsed in recent weeks. His endless attempts to arrange a meeting with one of the Gal Vorbak were rebuffed each and every time. The crimson warriors’ seclusion was ironclad, and it was rumoured even the Custodes were barred from accessing their meditation chambers. The continuous refusals and lack of battle had dulled the remembrancer’s ambitious interest somewhat, but with nothing else to do, it was time to get back in the game.

Ishaq checked his picter’s battery cell, and went off in search of something that would make him famous.

The primarch was waiting for them.

As they disembarked from the Rising Sun and onto the main hangar platform of Fidelitas Lex, Lorgar stood in full warplate, the massive crozius maul Illuminarum in his grey fists. At his side, Erebus and Kor Phaeron wore their own granite-dark armour, the surfaces of each armour plate etched with invocations from the Word. Behind them, the entire First Company formed an imposing welcome in their overbearing suits of Terminator wargear, bearing double-barrelled bolters and long blades in brutish fists.

Lorgar’s benevolent countenance broke into a warm smile as the thirty-seven crimson warriors walked onto the hangar deck. As one, they went to their knees before their liege lord.

Lorgar gestured for them to rise. ‘Are your memories so short? My Gal Vorbak need never kneel before me.’

Argel Tal was the first back to his feet, noting the distaste upon Kor Phaeron’s aged features. He growled, baring his teeth at the first captain as his gauntlet claws extended.

Lorgar chuckled at the display. ‘My prayers are answered,’ the primarch continued, ‘for you have arrived.’

‘As ordered,’ said Argel Tal and Xaphen in the same moment.

The Gal Vorbak had little cohesion in their ranks. There was no pretence of standing at attention or gathering in orderly rows. They stood together but alone, each one remaining among their brothers yet guarding their personal space with narrowed eyes behind crystal blue helm lenses.

‘We make planetfall within the hour,’ Lorgar said. ‘Argel Tal, Xaphen, for now, I would have you come with us. You will rejoin your brothers before we commence the assault.’

‘Very well,’ said Argel Tal.

‘The Custodes?’ Lorgar asked. ‘Tell me they still live.’

‘They still live. We have them scattered on four separate vessels, assigned with “overseeing the defence” if the vessels are boarded in the coming battle.’

‘They know there will be a battle?’ Lorgar rounded on Argel Tal.

‘They are not fools, nor are they inured to news as it spreads from ship to ship. They are placed on four vessels that are... delayed... in the warp. Their Navigators and captains have been appraised of the situation’s delicacy, sire. The Custodes will not arrive until the Battle of Isstvan is won.’

Xaphen broke in. ‘They were spared, as you ordered.’ He ignored Argel Tal’s glare, feeling it despite the fact his brother still wore his helm.

‘It was not my order – at least not in recent years.’ The primarch gestured to Erebus, who inclined his head in turn. ‘The First Chaplain has demanded they remain alive all this time. He weaves the plans that require them alive.’

Argel Tal said nothing, though he openly radiated annoyance. Xaphen was less restrained. ‘Erebus?’ he asked, smiling behind his faceplate. ‘I have paid heed to every addendum and subscript in the Book of Lorgar, brother. I’ve used many of your new rituals myself. I would be keen to learn more of this one.’

‘In time, perhaps.’

Xaphen thanked the other Chaplain as the group moved on. Erebus remained closest to the primarch as they walked away – his stoic, tattooed features as stern and dignified as ever. Kor Phaeron stalked in their wake, the heavy gear-joints of his Terminator armour grinding with each step. Xaphen kept his actions the very mirror of Erebus’s, but Argel Tal glanced at the First Captain with a smile.

‘What amuses you, brother?’ the ageing half-Astartes asked.

‘You do, old one. You reek of fear. I pity you, that they never bred the human terror out of your bones.’

‘You think I feel fear?’ The scarred face twisted into something even sourer. ‘I have seen more than you know, Argel Tal. We have not been idle in the true Legion, while you danced at the galaxy’s edge, playing nursemaid to the Custodes.’

Argel Tal merely chuckled, the laugh leaving his helm in a low growl of crackling vox.

The Fidelitas Lex played host to a gathering of rare significance.

Upon entering the war room, Argel Tal couldn’t hold back an exhalation of awe. He’d been expecting a gathering of Word Bearer captains, Chaplains and Chapter Masters. He’d not anticipated the presence of commanders from the Night Lords, Alpha Legion and Iron Warriors, let alone the three figures that stood around the central hololithic table.

The crowds parted, allowing Lorgar to proceed to the centre, where he stood alongside his brothers. None of the three welcomed him, just as none of them seemed overly respectful to each other, either.

Argel Tal grunted acknowledgement of the two captains closest to him as he took his place at the front of the gathered Astartes. Their heraldry offered their identities in flowing Nostraman script: the first – a tall, austere warrior with bronze-plated skulls hanging from his pauldrons on iron chains, bore the numerals of 10th Company, and the name-etching Malcharion.

The second needed no declarations of identity, for everyone knew him as soon as their eyes rested upon him. His armour was wreathed in stretched, leathery patches of flayed flesh, and his helm’s faceplate was a skullish glare of bleached bone. His was a name spread across the Imperium, almost as notable as that of Abaddon of the Sons of Horus, Eidolon of the Emperor’s Children, Raldoron of the Blood Angels... or even the primarchs themselves. Argel Tal inclined his head in respect to Sevatar, First Captain of the Night Lords Legion. The warrior nodded in return.

‘You are late,’ his voice issued forth as a grinding snarl.

Argel Tal didn’t rise to the Night Lord’s bait. ‘How perceptive of you,’ he replied. ‘You can read a chronometer.’

A guttural grunt of amusement issued from Sevatar’s skull-painted helm.

In the centre of the gathered leaders and lords, Lorgar raised his hands for silence. The baiting, grumbling and occasional laughter between the Astartes died down.

‘Time is short,’ said the golden primarch, ‘and events are already in motion. Those of us in this room are under no illusions as to what we face. Eight Legions, of which we are four, and countless worlds are rising in rebellion against the Imperium. If we are to march on Terra and take the throne, we must annihilate those Legions remaining loyal to the Emperor. And we must do so alone. No matter how loyal our Army regiments are, they will be devastated if they are committed to the surface of Isstvan. So we wage war without them: Astartes against Astartes, brother against brother. There is a poetry to that I am sure you will all appreciate.’

No one said a word. Lorgar continued.

‘You have all walked different paths, but together, we come to the same destination. The Emperor has failed us. The Imperium has failed us all.’

Here, Lorgar nodded to the largest gathering of Night Lords in their lightning-streaked warplate. ‘It has failed us by the laxity of its laws, the decadence of its culture, and in the injustices heaped upon those of us who served most loyally.’

He gestured to the bare metal ceramite of the Iron Warrior captains. ‘It has failed us by never recognising our virtues, never rewarding us for the blood we have shed in bringing about its ascendancy, and never providing unity when we needed it most.’

The Alpha Legion stood impassive and silent in their scaled armour. ‘It has failed us,’ Lorgar inclined his head to them, ‘by being flawed to its core, imperfect in its pursuit of a perfect culture, and in its weakness against the encroachment of xenos breeds that seek to twist humanity to alien ends.’

Finally, the primarch turned to his own captains, their grey armour decorated with prayer scrolls. ‘And it has failed us, most of all, by being founded upon lies. The Imperium is forged by a dangerous deceit, and erodes us all by demanding we sacrifice truth on the altar of necessity. This is an empire, propagated by sin, that deserves to die. And here, on Isstvan V, we begin the purge. From these ashes shall rise the new kingdom of mankind: an Imperium of justice, faith and enlightenment. An Imperium heralded, commanded and protected by the avatars of the gods themselves. An empire strong enough to stand through a future of blood and fire.’

The change in the room was subtle, but impossible for Astartes senses to miss. Every warrior stood taller, straighter, their hands resting upon the hilts and handles of sheathed weapons.

‘The Emperor believes us loyal. Our four Legions were ordered here on that misguided conviction alone. But our coalition here and now is the fruit of decades’ worth of planning. It was ordained, and brought about according to ancient prophecy. No more hiding in the shadows. No more manipulating fleet movements and falsifying expeditionary data. From this day forward, the Alpha Legion, the Word Bearers, the Iron Warriors and the Night Lords stand together – bloodied but unbowed beneath the flag of Warmaster Horus, the second Emperor. The true Emperor.’

The Astartes stared, none of them moving a muscle. The primarch could have been addressing an army of statues.

‘I see your eyes,’ Lorgar’s smile took in the room, ‘even behind your helms. I see the hesitation, the unease, the mistrust of the very brothers by your side. We are not friends, are we? We have never been allies. Our Legions are kin by bloodline, yet not brought together in proven, chosen brotherhood. But remember this, as you look upon the shades of armour so different to your own. You are united by righteousness. You are unified in revenge. Every weapon in this room is wielded for the same cause. And that, my sons, brothers and cousins... That is all the strength we need. After today, we will be brothers. The forge of war will see to that.’

Silence reigned in the wake of Lorgar’s words. The primarch turned back to the hololithic table, already entering the codes necessary to activate the image generator, when several muted clanks sounded behind him.

Lorgar looked over his shoulder, seeking the sounds’ sources. Several Word Bearer captains were shaking hands with their counterparts in the other Legions, with more joining in every moment. They gripped wrist-to-wrist, a traditional warrior gesture to seal a pact.

Argel Tal offered his hand to Sevatar. The Night Lord gripped the Word Bearer’s wrist as their emotionless faceplates met each other’s eyes.

‘Death to the False Emperor,’ said Sevatar, becoming the first living soul to utter the words that would echo through the millennia.

The curse was taken up by other voices, and soon it was being cried in full-throated roars.

Death to the False Emperor. Death to the False Emperor. Death. Death. Death.

At the heart of the cheering, the four primarchs smiled. Each curl to their lips was variously cold, ugly, mocking or indulgent, but it was as close as they’d come to showing any emotion so far.

Lorgar keyed in the last command code. The hololithic table rumbled into life, its internal generators cycling up to project a flickering image of the surface tundra. A grainy view, flawed by patches of static distortion, hovered in the air above the table. Helms of dark iron, midnight, sea-green, crimson and grey lifted to regard the holo image. It showed a ravine, gouged with tectonic ambivalence, running for several kilometres through the landscape.

‘The Urgall Depression,’ said one of Lorgar’s brothers in a rumbling baritone. ‘Our hunting ground.’

Konrad Curze had once, perhaps, been a majestic creature. Everything in his bearing spoke of a regal nature now shattered, all grace and grandeur cast aside to leave a warrior-prince skinned down to a core of lethal, cadaverous nobility. In black armour edged by unpolished bronze, the primarch of the Night Lords gestured to the ravine with a power claw of four curving blades. ‘Enhance the image.’

Unseen servitors did exactly that. The three-dimensional hololith blurred momentarily, before refocusing on a more detailed landscape. At one end of the ravine was a fortress of plasteel, ceramite and rockcrete, rendered indistinct by the haze of void shields protecting it from orbital bombardment. A massive panorama of bulwarks, barricades, trenches and earthworks stood implacable guard around it. Every warrior present could see it for what it was: a defensive masterpiece, constructed to repel tens of thousands of enemy troops.

At the other end of the canyon, a literal fleet of gunships and drop-pods lay in wait, but it was what turned the canyon’s centre dark that drew all eyes in the chamber.

Two armies were locked in pitched conflict, two greyish masses of grinding battle lines, reduced to an amalgamated horde.

‘Enhance central sector,’ ordered Primarch Curze.

The image blurred and refocused again, showing a flawed image, disturbed by interference, of...

‘Civil war,’ Konrad Curze smiled, all teeth and bright eyes. ‘The two sides are matched, with our brothers in the Death Guard, World Eaters, Sons of Horus and Emperor’s Children holding superior ground, and the Iron Hands, Salamanders and Raven Guard maintaining numerical superiority.’

Argel Tal growled as he breathed, feeling his lips moistened by bile. Nearby heads turned to him, but he ignored their watchful eyes.

‘Brother?’ Erebus voxed from his place at the primarch’s side.

‘I thirst,’ Argel Tal smiled as he spoke into the private channel.

‘You... thirst?’

‘I have tasted Astartes blood, Erebus. It is rich enough to never fade from memory, and its genetic holiness stings the tongue. I will taste it again, on Isstvan V.’

The Chaplain didn’t reply, but Argel Tal saw Erebus turn to Kor Phaeron, and knew all too well that they were conversing over a secure channel. The thought made him smirk. Silly little creatures. So precious in their meagre ambitions. So feverishly hungry for temporal power. He felt a moment’s pity for the primarch, to have spent the last four decades guided by their insipid scheming.

That thought cooled his condescending wrath, though. What had they done in all this time? Kor Phaeron’s remark about Argel Tal nursemaiding the Custodes away from the ‘true Legion’ had bitten deeper than he wished to confess.

The growl grew faint in his throat, taking on a bestial whine.

‘Be silent,’ grunted Sevatar.

Argel Tal tensed, holding his breath, suppressing the rush of anger he felt at being spoken to in such a way. Whatever was bonded to him truly loathed being pushed into situations of submission.

Raum.

What?

I am Raum.

Argel Tal felt his heart beat in time to the whispered syllables. The bile at his lips bubbled as it boiled, and his hands ached to the bone with merciless ferocity.

You are the second soul my father saw so long ago.

Yes.

You twist my thoughts. I am forever on the edge of rage, or speaking bladed words to my brothers.

I bring out only what is already present within you.

I will not let you claim me.

I will not try. We are one. I have slept long enough to drip into every cell within your body. It is your flesh, and it is my flesh. It will change soon. We are Argel Tal, and we are Raum.

Your voice is the same as mine.

It is how my soul speaks to yours, and how our shared flesh translates it into mortal meaning. I have no voice, except for the roars we will shout when we shed blood.

Argel Tal felt burning wetness around his gauntleted fingers. I am in pain. I cannot move my hands.

Symbiosis. Union. Balance. There will be times when you rise to the fore. There will be times when I am in ascendance.

Then what is this pain?

It is all a prelude for the changes to come.

The gods have already sent their call. The ordained time has come... I am faster, stronger, more vital than before. And I cannot remove my armour, nor take off my helm.

Yes. This is our new skin.

What more changes can there be?

Raum laughed, whisper-faint and teasingly distant. You will hear the gods many times in your life. The ordained time has not truly come. You heard the call to begin the Long War, but the gods have not screamed yet. This is the prelude.

But I heard them. We heard them.

You will know the scream when you truly hear it. This, I promise.

‘...the Gal Vorbak will stand with the Iron Warriors, forming the anvil,’ concluded Lorgar.

Argel Tal refocused on his surroundings. The pain in his hands faded once more. Not knowing what he should say, he nodded his head in the primarch’s direction, agreeing with Lorgar’s words without knowing what they were. The primarch offered a kindly smile, seeming to sense his son’s distraction.

Lord Curze turned his sleepless eyes upon his own Astartes. ‘Then we stand ready. My First Company will also join the Iron Warriors for the initial strike.’

‘Dath sethicara tash dasovallian,’ the Nostraman language hissed off his tongue. ‘Solruthis veh za jass.’

The Night Lord captains banged dark gauntlets against their chestplates. ‘In midnight clad,’ they chorused.

‘Iron within,’ Perturabo spoke gruffly, and hefted his massive warhammer over his shoulder. ‘Iron without.’ In response, his men thudded the hafts of their axes and hammers on the decking.

The warriors of the Alpha Legion, and their primarch himself, remained silent.

It fell to Lorgar, as Argel Tal had known it would, to finish the gathering.

‘The forces on the surface have been embattled for almost three hours with no clear victor emerging. Even now, the loyalists wait for us to make planetfall, believing we will reinforce their final advance. We all know our parts to play in this performance. We are all aware of the blood we must shed to spare our species from destruction, and install Horus as the Master of Mankind.

‘Brothers,’ the primarch bowed his head in reverence. ‘Today we take the first step towards forging a greater kingdom. May the gods go with you.’

As Argel Tal made to move from the chamber, he saw his former mentor beckon him closer. Erebus was handsome only in the way a weapon could be called such: a cold blade, dangerous no matter who holds it, reflecting the light while producing none of its own. The Gal Vorbak leader stalked closer, ululating a quiet growl in his throat, nursing it there and enjoying the feel of his rage.

Erebus wished to speak with him, and Kor Phaeron would almost certainly remain. That in itself was cause for disquiet. What ambitions had they fed to the primarch in four long decades? What had they seen, and what had they learned?

His growl grew louder.

Hate him, but do not strike him. He is chosen. Just like you.

Will I always hear your voice?

No. Our end is fated. We will be destroyed in the shadow of great wings. Then you will hear my voice no more.

Argel Tal felt his blood run cold, and knew that this feeling, at least, was not part of the promised changes to his body.

‘Erebus,’ he greeted the First Chaplain. ‘I am in no mind to argue.’

‘Nor I,’ the older warrior said. ‘Much has happened since we last spoke. We have both seen many things, and made difficult choices to bring us to this moment in time.’ Erebus met Argel Tal’s eye lenses with his own stony, solemn gaze. It was hard not to admire the Chaplain’s composure at all times, and his great patience.

It was also hard to forget his great disappointment, once it was earned.

‘I have heard of all you witnessed, and went through,’ Erebus continued. ‘Xaphen has kept me appraised.’

‘Do you have a point?’ Argel Tal murmured, and even to his own ears his words sounded puerile.

‘I am proud of you.’ Erebus briefly rested his hand on Argel Tal’s shoulder. ‘I simply wished to say that.’

Without another word, Erebus moved away, following the primarch. Kor Phaeron gave a wet, burbling chuckle, and stalked off in slower pursuit, Terminator joints grinding.

Twenty-Five

Second Wave
Changes
Betrayal

It was the battle to begin the war.

The Urgall Depression was churned to ruination beneath the boots and tank treads of countless thousands of Astartes warriors and their Legion’s armour divisions. The loyal primarchs could be found where the fighting was thickest: Corax of the Raven Guard, borne aloft on black wings bound to a fire-breathing flight pack; Lord Ferrus of the Iron Hands at the heart of the battlefield, his silver hands crushing any traitors that came within reach, while he pursued and dragged back those who sought to withdraw; and lastly, Vulkan of the Salamanders, armoured in overlapping artificer plating, thunder clapping from his warhammer as it pounded into yielding armour, shattering it like porcelain.

The traitorous primarchs slew in mirror image to their brothers: Angron of the World Eaters hewing with wild abandon as he raked his chainblades left and right, barely cognizant of who fell before him; Fulgrim of the lamentably-named Emperor’s Children, laughing as he deflected the clumsy sweeps of Iron Hands warriors, never stopping in his graceful movements for even a moment; Mortarion of the Death Guard, in disgusting echo of ancient Terran myth, harvesting life with each reaving sweep of his scythe.

And Horus, Warmaster of the Imperium, the brightest star and greatest of the Emperor’s sons. He stood watching the destruction while his Legions took to the field, their liege lord content in his fortress rising from the far edge of the ravine. Shielded and unseen by his brothers still waging war in the Emperor’s name, Horus’s lips were never still – he spoke continuous orders to his aides, who transmitted them across to the embattled warriors. His eyes remained narrowed as he watched the carnage playing out on the stage below, orchestrated and guided by his own will.

At last, above this maelstrom of grinding ceramite, booming tank cannons and chattering bolters – the gunships, drop-pods and assault landers of the second wave burned through the atmosphere on screaming thrusters. The sky fell dark with the weak sun eclipsed by ten thousand avian shadows, and the cheering roar sent up by the loyalists was loud enough to shake the air itself.

The traitors, the bloodied and battered Legions loyal to Horus, fell into a fighting withdrawal without hesitation.

Argel Tal watched all of this from the cockpit of Rising Sun as the Thunderhawk swooped low, engines howling as they carried it over the warring armies. A host of Word Bearer’s landing craft, the colour of their hulls matching the bleak weather of this cold world, headed for the ravine’s edges.

‘This is far enough. Set down,’ he ordered Malnor, who was piloting.

‘By your word.’

The two crimson gunships among the leaders of the grey pack began their downward drift. The Word Bearers, chosen landing site was close to the spread of terrain used by the Raven Guard in the initial assault, and the flock of regal, granite-grey aircraft touched down alongside their charcoal-black twins.

Affirmation pulses chimed across the beleaguered vox-network as the four Legions’ landers hit their marks. The tide was turned at the eleventh hour. Horus and his rebels broke into full retreat, fleeing back to their fortress.

Argel Tal walked down the gang ramp and into his first filtered breath of Isstvan V’s air. It was cold, cold and coppery, with the rich, earthy smell of churned mud and the ever-present smog of thruster exhaust. A quick scan through his eye lenses showed the panoramic view of the unfolding battle, where the Night Lords corvidish gunships were coming down on one flank, and the Alpha Legion’s war machines on the other. The main Word Bearer force bolstered both of their brother Legions on the Depression’s sides, and for a brief, uplifting moment, Argel Tal saw the flash of grey, ivory and gold that marked out Lorgar among the exalted First Company.

Then the primarch was gone, stolen by distance, smoke and the press of too many gunships between here and there.

The Iron Warriors had claimed the highest ground, taking the loyalist landing site with all the appearance of reinforcing it through the erection of prefabricated plasteel bunkers. Bulk landers dropped the battlefield architecture: dense metal frames fell from the cargo claws of carrier ships at low altitude, and as the platforms crashed and embedded themselves in the ground, the craftsmen-warriors of the IV Legion worked, affixed, bolted and constructed them into hastily-rising firebases. Turrets rose from their protective housing in the hundreds, while hordes of lobotomised servitors trundled from the holds of Iron Warriors troopships, single-minded in their intent to link with the weapons systems’ interfaces.

All the while, Perturabo, Primarch of the IV Legion, watched with passionless pride. He wore layered ceramite that would have looked at home as a tank’s armour plating, and clicking, crunching servos in his joints announced even the smallest shift in his stature.

Occasionally, he would spare a moment’s glance for the representatives from the other Legions among his number: nodding acknowledgement to the Word Bearers and Night Lords captains sharing his defensive bastions. The nod spoke volumes when coupled with the primarch’s bitter eyes: without even the pretence of respect, he acknowledged their presence and warned them to be about their business. Let them remain here as their primarchs had ordered, so long as they did not interfere. The Iron Warriors did not need them getting in the way. All the while, the sounds of warfare’s industry rattled and ground on, and the firebase structures lifted higher, their battlements forming and defensive cannons whirring as they took aim down at the central plain.

Argel Tal and Xaphen led the Gal Vorbak away from their Thunderhawks, through the statuary of landed gunships, and through to the barricades being raised by the metallic forms of the Iron Warriors. The ground trembled gently with the tread of Astartes boots as the Word Bearers seconded to Argel Tal’s command closed ranks and followed. Thousands of warriors awaited his signal, their companies and Chapters marked by banners raised high.

Down the line, past the mounting masses of Iron Warriors battle tanks and assembling Astartes, Argel Tal could make out the cloaked form of First Captain Sevatar and his First Company elite, the Atramentar. Bronze chains wrapped their armour, leashing weapons to fists, as the Night Lords made ready for the coming signal.

‘We are to be the anvil,’ Xaphen voxed to the gathered Word Bearers as they waited by the barricades. ‘We are the anvil, while our brothers form the hammer yet to fall. The enemy will stagger back to us, exhausted, clutching empty bolters and broken blades, believing our presence to be a reprieve. The Iron Hands have damned themselves by remaining in the field, but you see the survivors of two Legions coming to us even now. The Salamanders. The Raven Guard. We must hold them long enough for our brothers to annihilate them from the flanks and the rear.’

Argel Tal had tuned out already. He watched the battle breaking apart, seeing the defiant Iron Hands contingent ringing their primarch at the heart of the battlefield. The righteous indignation that kept them there would see them slain before any others.

The forest-green of Salamander ceramite formed a withdrawing mass scrambling its way back uphill to the Iron Warrior barricades over to the east, while the battered black armour of the Raven Guard warriors came towards the unified Night Lords and Word Bearers force. The loyalists’ shattered unit cohesion was already beginning to reform, reshaping around bannered sergeants as they marched up the incline.

Argel Tal swallowed a mouthful of something that tasted like poisoned blood. He couldn’t keep himself from salivating.

Raum, he said silently, but there was no answer. In a bizarre moment of clarity, he realised he could feel the wind against his skin. Not the focused feeling of pressure from a puncture in his warplate, but all over – a faint breath of wind against his flesh, as if his wargear had grown dull nerves capable of recognising external sensation. His hands began to ache again, and this time the pain brought something new: the sense of swelling, stretching, the torture of his own body-meat rendered as malleable as clay, with the brittle creaking of bone still inside.

Targeting circles that he hadn’t activated started to spin before his eyes, flickering across the blue lenses in search of prey.

Beneath them the Raven Guard in their thousands marched up the rise of land. Not a single one had escaped with his armour unscarred from the battle below. Despite their distance, Argel Tal’s vision was keen enough to make out how individual warriors marched with their bolters slung, out of ammunition, and oaths of moment reduced to burned, flapping parchment rags in the wind.

‘Sixty seconds,’ he growled into the vox.

‘By your word,’ chorused three thousand warriors in the ranks alongside him.

Dagotal sat in his saddle, looking over the barricades. The repulsor drive built into his jetbike’s chassis hummed in sympathy with his movements, whining louder as the rider leaned forward to watch the withdrawing Raven Guard draw nearer.

His task was to skirt the battle’s edges, cutting down any stragglers that sought to escape from the main melee. Although only five of his outriders had survived the transition into the Gal Vorbak so many years before, they sat at his side now, gunning their engines in readiness for what they were committed to do.

He blinked burning sweat from his eyes, breathing in laboured rasps, trying to ignore the voice howling in his mind. The pain in his throat had been building in intensity for hours to the point where swallowing caused excruciating pain. Now, even breathing was a trial. Venom dripped down his chin, bubbling hot, from his overworking saliva glands. The acidic poison dripped over his lower teeth every few seconds, and he could no longer bear to swallow and neutralise it.

‘Thirty seconds,’ came Argel Tal’s order.

Dagotal murmured meaningless syllables with a wet voice, as acid hissed from his helm’s mouth grille.

Torgal thumbed a gear-rune on his chainaxe’s control, shifting settings from soft tissue to armour plating. A thicker second layer of jagged teeth slid forward alongside the first. In truth, a chainbladed weapon would always struggle to do more than strip the paint from layered ceramite, but it would chew through fibre-bundle armour joints or exposed power cables with ease.

He had been weeping blood, without feeling sorrow or any emotion at all, for an hour. Had he been able to remove his helm, Torgal was certain the scarlet tracks would be stained across his cheeks by now, darkening the skin with a tattoo’s permanence. Each time he blinked, his tear ducts flushed more of the watery blood-fluid down his face. When his tongue moved in his mouth, it slid along a maw of jagged teeth that cut his tongue open, and he tasted coppery pain for the few seconds it took the little slice wounds to seal.

Blood, thick and dark, was leaking from the knuckle-joints of his gauntlets, cementing his fingers to the haft of his axe. He couldn’t open his hand. He couldn’t release the weapon, no matter how he tried.

‘Twenty seconds,’ said Argel Tal.

Torgal closed his eyes to blink them clear, but they wouldn’t open again.

Malnor’s breath sawed in an out of his vocaliser grille. A chorus of voices assailed him, and for the briefest moment, he believed he was listening to the sounds of everyone he had ever met in his life. There was a tremor in his bones that he couldn’t suppress.

‘Ten seconds,’ came Argel Tal’s voice. ‘Stand ready.’

Malnor’s twitched head turned to the advancing ranks of the Raven Guard. Distance markers flashed across his retinal display, flickering as it recognised individual squad sigils on their shoulder guards.

Malnor grinned, and clutched his bolter tighter.

‘Brothers,’ the voice crackled. ‘This is Captain Torisian, 29th Company, Raven Guard.’

At the vanguard of the marching Astartes, a cloaked captain raised his hand in greeting. A spent bolter was mag-locked to his thigh, and a gladius glinted in his left hand. The captain’s cloak, once a regal blue, was a ragged ruin. Argel Tal raised his own hand in response, and replied over the vox.

‘This is Argel Tal, Lord of the Gal Vorbak, Word Bearers Legion. How goes the battle, brother?’

The Raven Guard leader laughed as he came closer. ‘The traitorous dogs already flee the field, but they fight like bastards, each and every one. In Terra’s name, it is a blessing to see you. Our primarch has ordered us back for resupply – but Lord Corax is an unselfish man. He would not wish us to steal all the glory on this day of days.’

Argel Tal could hear the smile in the other warrior’s voice as he continued. ‘Good hunting down there, all of you. Glory to the Word Bearers. Glory to the Emperor!’

The commander of the Gal Vorbak didn’t reply. The advancing Raven Guard were almost at the barricades. He felt his muscles bunching and twitching with sick need.

‘Brother?’ asked Torisian. The captain’s armour was an older Mark III Iron-class suit, blocky and heavy, almost primitive compared to the Maximus-class armour worn by the XVII Legion. ‘What are your plans for assault?’

Argel Tal took a breath, and prepared to speak damnation.

Without knowing why, he couldn’t keep from thinking of Lorgar’s words to him, spoken so long ago. ‘You are Argel Tal. You were born on Colchis, in the village of Singh-Rukh, to a carpenter and a seamstress. Your name means ‘the last angel’ in the dialect of the southern steppes tribes.’

He thought, briefly, of his parents – two hundred years dead now. He had never visited their graves. He wasn’t even sure where they might be.

His father had been a quiet man with kind eyes, who had round shoulders from a lifetime of devotion to his craft. His mother was a mouse of a woman, with dark eyes and black hair in the ringlets preferred by the southern tribes. She had smiled a great deal. It was his abiding memory of her.

How far he’d come, in distance and time, from their riverside hut of packed mud and straw. He could almost feel the river water on his hands now, cooling to the touch even as it sparkled in the oppressive Colchisian sun.

He had four older sisters, each as distant and dead as his parents. They had wept when the Legion came for him, though at the time he couldn’t understand why. All he could see was the adventure, the joy, in being chosen by the holy warriors. The youngest – Lakisha, only a year older than he was – had given him a necklace of desert-dog teeth that she’d made herself. He felt it now, tied around his wrist, bound there each dawn upon rising and completing his meditations. The original string had long since rotted away, but he threaded the jackal teeth onto a new cord with the passing of every few years.

His oldest sister, Dumara, had spent every day telling him that he was good for nothing but getting underfoot. But she had no unkind words that day, and instead brought him a blanket of goat’s wool to take with him.

‘He will not require that,’ the massive grey warrior had declared in a machine-voice.

Dumara flinched back, clutching the blanket to her chest. Instead of offering it to the boy, she kissed his cheek instead. She was crying, too. He remembered how her tears made his face wet, and he hoped the warrior didn’t think it was he who’d been crying. He had to look brave, else the warrior might not choose him after all.

‘What is the boy’s name?’ the warrior demanded.

His mother had surprised him with a question of her own. ‘What is your name, warrior?’

‘Erebus. My name is Erebus.’

‘Thank you, Lord Erebus, this is my son, Argel Tal.’

Argel Tal. The Last Angel. He’d been born as a sickly little thing, during a year of blight and drought, and was given a name to mark him as the last child his mother would ever bring into their dry, thirsty world.

‘Forgive me,’ he whispered now. He hadn’t meant to speak the words aloud, but didn’t regret doing so.

‘Brother?’ Torisian’s voice crackled. ‘Repeat, please.’

Argel Tal’s grey eyes hardened to flint. ‘All Word Bearers,’ he said. ‘Open fire.’

Twenty-Six

Dropsite Massacre
Hull Breach
In the Shadow of Great Wings

Torisian shoved the body of his sergeant aside and scrambled forward. His ammunition counter flashed up the moment he touched a hand to his bolter, and it told a stark tale indeed. Among the clattering, crashing carnage, he drew his combat blade and charged.

‘Victory or death!’ he cried the call of his Legion. ‘We are betrayed! Attack!’

Bolt shells hammered into his chest and pauldrons as he ran, throwing him off-balance and breaking his armour apart. He sustained damage faster than his retinal display could track it. Torisian staggered, feeling fluid in his throat. A dense wetness was drowning him behind his ribcage.

The flash of blue hit him from nowhere, brighter than staring into the sun, tipping him back down to the ground. There he died alongside so many of his brothers, bisected by lascannon fire and dead from his wounds before he could drown in the blood filling his lungs.

The Raven Guard front ranks went down as if scythed, harvested in a spilling line of detonating bolter shells, shattered armour and puffs of bloody mist.

Black-armoured Astartes tumbled to their hands and knees, only to be cut down by the sustained volley, finishing those who fell beneath the initial storm of head- and chest-shots. Seconds after the first chatter of bolters, beams of achingly bright laser slashed from behind the Word Bearers as the cannon mounts of Land Raiders, Predators and defensive bastion turrets gouged through the Raven Guard and the ground they stood upon.

Argel Tal saw precious little of the bigger picture. Beams of ice-blue, as thick as his arm, slashed and burst overhead as they carved furrows in the soil and sliced cleanly through bodies. At his side, the Gal Vorbak stood in silence, clutching their axes and blades. The Iron Warriors and Word Bearers around them were variously reloading, opening fire again, hurling grenades, and preparing to fall back.

In the eye of this storm, Argel Tal looked on with hooded eyes. The vox-link to Torisian remained open long enough for him to hear the warrior die, wordless gurgles transmitting over the channel as the captain crashed to the ground.

Kor Phaeron licked his yellow teeth.

The wind howled around them, funnelled through the Urgall Depression in a noisy roar that challenged the battlefield’s thunder for supremacy. It was an unclean wind, carrying the bowel-smoke of tank engines in its breeze.

‘I cannot see,’ he confessed. ‘It is too far.’

The Word Bearers Legion had taken up landing positions on the west of the field, ready to sweep down and engage the Raven Guard from the flank. Three figures stood atop the roof of an ornate command tank, the Land Raider’s bronze and grey armour decked out with flapping banners and etched with fingernail-fine scripture over every visible surface.

Kor Phaeron, Master of the Faith, watched the distant dropsite through a desperate squint. He was unhelmed, and his massive Terminator warplate gave him the appearance of a hunched, armour-plated giant.

Erebus stood at his side, watching without effort, his Astartes vision keen enough to offer clarity.

‘We are winning,’ he said. ‘Nothing else matters.’ Only a flicker of emotion in his eyes betrayed his humour. Erebus was a dry soul, right to his core. ‘But already, the Raven Guard attacks the barricades. Far to the other side, the Salamanders fall to the guns of the other Legions. In the centre of it all, the few remaining Iron Hands encircle their doomed lord.’

Lorgar towered above both of them, but had no attention to spare for the treacherous opening salvoes against the warriors of the Raven Guard and Salamanders Legions. He stared into the battlefield’s heart, his eyes wide even in the wind, his lips gently parted as he watched his brothers killing each other.

Fulgrim and Ferrus, the fading sunlight flaring from the edges of their swinging weapons. The wind stole the clash and clang of their parries, but even in silence the duel was beyond captivating. No senses but a primarch’s could have followed such instant, liquid movements. The perfection of it all almost brought a smile to Lorgar’s lips.

Lorgar knew them both, though never as well as he’d wanted to. His approaches to Fulgrim had always been rebuffed with diplomatic grace, but his brother’s ire was clear: Lorgar, among all of the Emperor’s sons, was the failure that just wouldn’t remain silent. Even in the fifty years since his humiliation in Monarchia, as the Word Bearers had conquered more than any other Legion, desperate to match the tallies of the Sons of Horus and the Ultramarines. Fulgrim still wished nothing to do with him. The Lord of the Emperor’s Children – and oh, how proud he was that his sons alone among the Astartes could wear the Emperor’s aquila on their armour – had never voiced his distaste in express terms, but Fulgrim’s feelings were transparent enough. He was a being that valued nothing but perfection, and Lorgar was irrevocably stained by his flaws.

Ferrus, Lord of the Iron Hands, was an open book where Fulgrim was a closed one. Lorgar’s passion was ever on the surface, as was the passion of his Legion on the battlefield. Ferrus contained his wrath beneath a dignified facade but never buried it, and asked the same of his warriors. While Ferrus treasured those times on Terra he had spent working at the forge, shaping metal into weapons worthy of gifting to his demigod brothers, Lorgar had sequestered himself in the palace itself, debating philosophy, ancient history and human nature with Magnus and the Emperor’s more cerebral courtiers, advisers and viziers.

The closest they’d come to an accord was still a memory barely worthy of any family. Lorgar had come to find Ferrus in his forge, working at the construction of something molten, dangerous and undoubtedly destined to be a weapon of war. It seemed all the Iron Hands primarch was capable of.

Knowing the spiteful thought was petty, Lorgar had sought to temper it. ‘One wonders if you are capable of making anything that creates, rather than destroys.’ He tried to smile, hoping it would rob the accusation of any venom as he stood uncomfortably in the heat blaring from the open furnace.

Ferrus had cast a glance over his dark-skinned shoulder and watched his fey brother for a moment, not returning the smile. ‘One wonders if you are capable of creating anything worthwhile at all.’

Lorgar’s golden features had tightened, the smile now etched on rather than worn with any sincerity. ‘You summoned me?’

‘That I did.’ Ferrus stepped away from the anvil. His bare chest was flecked with miniscule marks of burn tissue, hundreds of them pockmarking his dark skin from stray sparks and spatters of molten metal. A lifetime of forge-work, worn like a coat of medals that scarred the flesh. ‘I made something for you,’ he said, his voice as low and rumbling as ever.

‘What? Why?’

‘I won’t call it a rescue,’ said Ferrus, ‘for my warriors wouldn’t stand for that. But I owe you thanks for the “reinforcement” at Galadon Secondus.’

‘You owe me nothing, brother. I live to serve.’

Ferrus grunted, as if doubting even that. ‘Be that as it may, here is a token of my appreciation.’

Ferrus’s Legion was named for the primarch himself. His arms were metallic, but not robotic, as if formed from some alien compound of organic silver. Lorgar had never asked about his brother’s unique biology, knowing that Ferrus would never explain it to him.

As he reached a nearby table, he lifted a long weapon with a sure grip. Without a word, he tossed it to Lorgar. The Word Bearer caught it neatly with one hand, though it was heavier than he’d expected and he winced under its sudden weight.

‘It’s called Illuminarum,’ Ferrus was already working back at his anvil. ‘Try not to break it.’

‘I... I do not know what to say.’

‘Say nothing.’ Already, the falling ring of hammer-hand upon yielding steel. Clang, clang, clang. ‘Say nothing, and leave me be. That will spare us any halting attempts at conversation when we agree on nothing, and have nothing but awkwardness to share.’

‘As you wish.’ Lorgar had forced a smile to his brother’s back, and left in silence. Such was the extent of his closeness to Fulgrim and Ferrus.

Lorgar stared at the two of them now, awe paling his features as their weapons cracked off each other, shedding sprays of power-field lightning.

‘What have we done?’ he whispered. ‘These are my brothers.’

Kor Phaeron grunted in wordless disapproval. ‘Boy, order the attack. We must support Argel Tal and the Iron Warriors.’

‘But what are we doing? Why have we done it this way?’

Erebus didn’t scowl, he was far too composed for that, but Kor Phaeron wore his human emotion with greater ease. He fairly snarled the words, leeching them of kindness.

‘We are bringing enlightenment to the galaxy, Lorgar. This is what you were born for.’

Erebus turned to regard his primarch. ‘Is it not a grand sensation, sire? To be the architect of all this? To see your designs reach fruition?’

Lorgar would not, could not, look away from his duelling kin. ‘This was not my design, and you know it as well as I. Let us not pretend I have any skill at orchestrating bloodshed and betrayal on this scale.’

Kor Phaeron’s lips twisted as close as they ever came to a smile. ‘You give me far too much credit.’

‘It is well-earned.’ The primarch’s gauntleted fist was tight around Illuminarum’s haft, and minute tremors narrowed his eyes with each blow that rained upon Ferrus’s black armour. ‘Ferrus is tiring. Fulgrim is going kill him.’

With a grinding purr of servos, Kor Phaeron came forward to rest a clawed hand on his foster son’s arm. ‘Do not let it grieve you. What must be, must be.’

Lorgar didn’t shake the hand off, which both Erebus and Kor Phaeron counted as enough of a triumph. Lorgar’s feyness had worn on them both, and it took great patience and subtlety to incite him to violence. This battle had been years in the planning, and they would not allow him to foul it now with misplaced compassion. Emboldened, Kor Phaeron continued. ‘The truth is ugly, boy, but it is all we have.’

‘Boy.’ Mirth had no place in Lorgar’s smile. ‘I am over two centuries old, and I am dragging my father’s empire to its knees. Yet you still call me boy. Sometimes I find that a comfort. Other times, a weight around my shoulders.’

‘You are my son, Lorgar. Not the Emperor’s. And you are bringing hope to mankind.’

‘Enough,’ said the primarch, and now he did shake his foster father’s hand loose. ‘Come. Let us get this day done with.’ Lorgar raised his crozius maul to the sky.

It was all the signal they needed. Thousands of Word Bearers roared their approval behind him, as their liege lord led them to war.

The war on the surface was of no concern to him anymore.

Staying alive was, but then, that was always a concern. He was forever aware of that fact, which was why he was so good at it. Still, he had to admit it had become a more pressing matter, and a more difficult aim to reach.

Ishaq had never been in a void battle before, and it wasn’t something he hoped to get into again. The ship shook as if in a storm’s grip, shuddering with a belligerent aggression that defied all expectation. Every two dozen steps he took found him thrown to the floor with knee-aching violence, and resulted in hisses of pain along with the creation of new swear words – the latter usually by melding three existing curses together in a stream of invective. When Ishaq Kadeen swore, he swore with feeling, even if not with sense.

Half of the problem was that he was lost, and the other half of the problem was that he was lost on what was jokingly-referred to as the monastic deck, where the Word Bearers and their Legion serfs went about the business of being heroes (and the slaves of heroes). Sneaking onto the deck had seemed a good idea at the time; he’d hoped for some panoramic views of Astartes training chambers, or discarded suits of armour awaiting repair, or immense weapon racks to show the scale of war waged by the Emperor’s Legions. All of these would have made for fine, private and personal images very rarely seen from the Great Crusade, and would have bolstered his portfolio immeasurably. Stealing the grey, hooded Legion robe had been no trouble at all. Even slaves with vows of silence had to do their laundry.

It had started well. Then the battle had started, and he’d got lost.

Luckily, no Word Bearers were on board, all of them committed to the world below. The Legion serfs he did see were hurrying along about their business, but even they were hardly a sizable population. Evidently they had other duties to perform when their masters went to war. What they might be, Ishaq had no idea.

‘Shields down,’ shouted a voice over the shipwide vox, accompanied by some truly horrendous shaking. ‘Shields down, shields down.’

Well, that wasn’t good.

He stumbled around a corner as the lights flickered above. Another long corridor awaited him, with various junctions leading off deeper into this never-ending maze. At the far end, he could see another bulkhead of dense, multi-layered metal. He’d come across several of these so far, and was almost certain that they led to the most interesting parts of the deck. Ishaq wasn’t about to attempt to gain entrance though – a single failed retinal scan would mark his location to the Army units on board, and he could look forward to a quick execution. Oh, yes. He remembered the penalties for coming here all too well.

The Euchar were proving to be a problem too. Squads of them patrolled the halls with their lasguns held diligently to their chests, and though he was immune to their gaze with his robe’s hood covering most of his face, they made it difficult to take any picts, even if he had actually come across anything worthwhile.

Ishaq was finally considering a tactical retreat when the ship shook with enough violence to send him sprawling off-balance, head banging off the steel wall. It hurt enough to stun him, and it stunned him enough that he didn’t even think of swearing.

That lapse was rectified several seconds later, when an automated voice declared a list of breached decks over the vox. The list came to a climax with the words: ‘Deck Sixteen, void breach. Bulkheads sealing. Deck Sixteen, void breach. Bulkheads sealing.’

In a moment of almost poetic disgust, Ishaq looked up to see the great, red ‘XVI’ emblazoned on the wall where he’d hit his head. It was even decorated with spots of his blood.

‘You’re kidding me,’ he said out loud.

‘Deck Sixteen, void breach,’ the crackling voice monotoned again. ‘Bulkheads sealing.’

‘I heard you the first time.’

The ship rattled again, with the definite booming of explosions only a few corners away. Smoke billowed from the far end of the corridor.

Ishaq’s world dimmed into the deep, unwanted red spectrum of emergency lighting. At best, it would ruin any picts he took. At worst, and much more likely, he was about to die.

Argel Tal drew back his claws. The blood lining them sank into the curling metal, drank as thirstily as desert soil drinks rainwater. He released a great howl to the sky as he waded forward, kicking aside wounded Astartes and carving out at the massed Raven Guard in range. Their blades broke against his armour, each strike hitting with a curiously muted sensation – he could feel the slices as if they were chopping into the skin of his armour, but they never bled, never caused any pain.

blade left danger kill

The warnings manifested with tickling pressure behind his forehead, somewhere between a voice, a premonition, and a tide of instinct. He wasn’t sure if Raum was warning him, or he was warning Raum – both voices were the same, and his movements were only half his own. He would swipe with a claw, but the blow would accelerate and hit harder than he could ever manage himself. He would block a sword blow, but would find his talons around the enemy’s throat before he had time to think.

He wrenched his head to the left – he smelled the metal tang of the descending blade, he caught the flash of sunlight along its edge without even looking – and Argel Tal span to kill its wielder. The Word Bearer’s claws raked across the warrior’s torso and the Raven Guard dropped instantly, his armour savaged and pulled from his body. Argel Tal’s fingers burned as they absorbed his brother’s blood. Under his helm, his grinning mouth was stained red by a bleeding tongue.

In every battle of his life, he’d felt a desperation beneath the ferocity of the moment. A feverish awareness of how to survive always nestled beneath his righteous anger, even in those moments of near-suicidal attack when he’d led dozens of his brothers against hundreds of the enemy. As his claws ravaged the armour and exposed faces of the Raven Guard around him, he cast that awareness aside.

‘Traitor!’ one of the Raven Guard cried at him. Argel Tal roared in reply, the ceramite of his helm cracking open to reveal a jagged maw, and leapt at the warrior. The Astartes died on the blood-mulched ground, pulled and torn to pieces by Argel Tal’s jointed claws.

He was dimly aware of snarling laughter coming over the vox. At one point, in the senseless, timeless melee, Xaphen had shouted to them all.

‘The Gal Vorbak are released at last!’

‘No,’ Argel Tal replied with growling certainty, without knowing how he knew. ‘Not yet.’

He tore the helm from a Raven Guard’s head and leered into the struggling warrior’s face.

‘Beast...’ the Astartes choked. ‘Corruption...’

Argel Tal caught his reflection in the warrior’s eyes. His black helm roared back at him, the left eye still ringed by a golden sun, the mouth grille split to reveal monstrous jaws of ceramite and bone, the crystal blue eye lenses leaking trails of blood down his painted faceplate.

Argel Tal sank his claws into the warrior’s body, feeling the tingle of leeching blood as his talons scratched at the man’s organs and bones. ‘I am the truth.’

He pulled, and the Raven Guard came apart in his hands, rendered into bloody chunks.

‘No peace among the stars,’ he said, unsure if both of his voices were speaking or if he merely imagined one of them.

‘Only the laughter of thirsting gods.’

The Gal Vorbak howled as one as they cast around for more prey, chasing down the Raven Guard that sought to regroup and oppose the unbelievable treachery facing them. Argel Tal howled loudest of all, but the sound soon died in his throat.

A shadow, the shadow of great wings, eclipsed the sun.

The ground murmured with his landing. Claws slashed from their power-fist housings with silver flashes, and shimmering wings of dark metal reached up from his shoulders into the air above. Slowly, so painfully slowly, he raised his head to the traitors. Black eyes stared from a face whiter than Imperial marble, and written across the pale features was the most consummate, complete anger Argel Tal had ever seen. It was an emotion truer and deeper even than the rage that ruined the faces of the daemons within the warp.

And Argel Tal realised it was not anger, nor rage. It went beyond both. This was wrath, in physical form.

The primarch of the Raven Guard turned with an inhuman cry, letting the thrumming wing-blades affixed to his smoking jetpack slice out with their killing edges. Word Bearers tumbled away in droves, shredded into lumps of armoured flesh. The claws followed, rending through any of the grey warriors unlucky enough to be within range of the warlord’s landing.

Once he was in motion, Corax never slowed. He was a blur of charcoal armour and black blades, carving, chopping, dismembering without effort, mutilating with the barest movement, butchering with an ease that belied his ferocity.

Lascannon fire rained towards the primarch as the Iron Warriors turned their turrets on the gravest threat in range. The Word Bearers caught in the net of streaming fire were sliced apart as surely as the ones killed by Corax’s claws, but the beams themselves flashed aside from the primarch’s armour, never striking it straight-on, leaving savage burn scars without once penetrating.

The voices of dying Word Bearers became a conflicting chorus over the vox.

‘Help us!’ one of the captains screamed to Argel Tal.

The Crimson Lord cast aside the last Raven Guard he’d killed – the warrior’s neck had crackled most satisfyingly as he was strangled – and ordered the Gal Vorbak to charge. It left his helm as a split-jawed roar, for even his face was no longer his own.

Even with the cry reduced to wordless malice, the Gal Vorbak understood and obeyed. The first to reach Corax was Ajanis, and the Raven Guard lord butchered the warrior without even turning to face him. A burst of flame from the flight pack seared Ajanis’s armour, slowing him long enough for the swinging wings to shear through his torso as Corax turned to face other enemies. The crimson Word Bearers leapt and struck at the primarch, but their assault did little more than their grey brothers’ had done.

We die in the shadow of great wings, came the voice from within.

I know.

Argel Tal leapt forward to meet his end at the hands of a demigod.

Lorgar hesitated, and in that moment his crozius maul lowered. Blood marred its ornate head – the blood of the Raven Guard: the same blood that ran in his brother’s veins ran through his genetic progeny.

Bolter shells cracked against Lorgar’s armour, their heat and explosive debris going utterly ignored. Just as the Word Bearers struggled to stand before Corax, so too did the Raven Guard fall back and die in droves to Lorgar’s dispassionate, surgical destruction through their ranks.

Lorgar’s head snapped back as a bolter shell thudded into his helm, disrupting the retinal electronics and warping the ceramite. He wrenched the mangled metal from his face and killed his attacker with a single swipe of Illuminarum. The blow sent the Raven Guard tumbling away over the heads of his retreating brothers, crashing down among them.

‘What is it?’ Kor Phaeron stalked to Lorgar’s side, his claws as wet as the primarch’s crozius. ‘Push on! They are breaking before us!’

Lorgar aimed his maul across the battlefield. Corax was wading through the Gal Vorbak, ripping the crimson warriors apart.

‘Who cares about the albino’s cowardice?’ Kor Phaeron was frothing, spit spraying from his lips as he cursed. ‘Focus on the fight that matters.’

Lorgar ignored the bile in his father’s words, as well as the infrequent shells crashing against his armour. Given a blessed respite from the primarch’s murderous advance, the Raven Guard were falling back from him in a black tide. They left their dead in a carpet at the primarch’s feet.

‘You do not understand,’ Lorgar shouted over the din. ‘My brother is not fleeing. He has flown to where the fighting is thickest. He is cleaving a path to his gunships, drawing the worst of our firepower, so his sons might escape.’

Erebus was a grey blur of lethal motion, hammering an unhelmed Raven Guard sergeant to the ground and killing him with a return swing that caved in the warrior’s skull.

‘Sire...’ The First Chaplain’s armour was blackened from flamer wash, the joints still smoking. ‘Please focus.’

Lorgar clutched his sundered helm in one hand. The vox-link was still open. He could hear the tinny screams of the dying. ‘He is killing so many of us.’

The helm fell, gripped no more. He held his bloodied maul in ironclad fists, and clenched his teeth just as tightly. ‘No,’ the word was breathed with absolute conviction.

Kor Phaeron’s face was a mess of wounds, and even with his augmentations, he was breathing in a hoarse rasp. The battle was costing him dearly. He met Erebus’s eyes for a moment – and something akin to disgust passed between them.

‘Your deeds are ordained on these killing fields,’ Erebus spoke almost as if delivering a sermon. ‘You must not face your brothers yet. It is fate. We play our destined parts, as the pantheon wills it.’

‘Kill. The. Raven. Guard.’ Kor Phaeron growled through bleeding lips. ‘That is what you are here to do, boy.’

Lorgar stepped forward and cast a sneer that settled over both his mentor and ancient foster father. ‘No.’

Kor Phaeron screamed in frustrated anger. Erebus remained composed. ‘You have laboured for decades to raise an army of the faithful, sire: a Legion that would die for your cause. Do not deviate from the path now you at last possess what you have dreamed of.’ Lorgar turned from them both, first watching the retreating Raven Guard, then seeing Corax slaughtering his way through Word Bearers – some armoured in grey, some in crimson.

‘We have found gods to worship,’ he said, staring without blinking. ‘But we are not enslaved to them. My life is my own.’

‘He’ll kill you!’ Kor Phaeron’s sluggish Terminator warplate wouldn’t let him run, but there was real fear, real sorrow, beneath the anger and panic. ‘Lorgar! Lorgar! No!’

Lorgar broke into a sprint, boots pounding over the churned earth and dead bodies of his brother’s Legion, and for the first time in his life, he went to engage in a battle he had no hope of winning.

‘My death is my own, as well,’ he breathed the words as he ran.

He saw his brother – a man he’d barely spoken to in two centuries of life, a man he barely knew – butchering his sons in a vicious rage. There was no thought of conversion. No hope of bringing Corax into the fold, or enlightening him enough to cease this murderous rampage. Lorgar’s own anger rose to the fore, burning away the passionless killing of only moments ago. As the Word Bearers primarch hammered his way through the Raven Guard to reach his brother, he felt power seethe within him, aching to rise out.

Always, he’d bitten back his psychic potential, hiding it and hating it in equal measure. It was unreliable, erratic, unstable and painful. It was never the gift it seemed to be for Magnus, and thus, he had swallowed it back, walling it up behind unyielding resolve.

No more. A scream of release tore itself free, not from his mouth, but his mind. It echoed across the battlefield. It echoed into the void. Energy sparked from his armour, and a sixth sense unrestrained at last, with its purity perhaps coloured by Chaos, exhaled from his core. A sound like the crashing of tides in the Sea of Souls swept through the ravine, and Lorgar felt the heat of his own fury made manifest. He felt his unchained power reaching out, not only to enhance his physical form, but reaching to his sons across the battlefield.

And there he stood at the heart of the killing fields, winged and haloed by amorphous contrails of psychic fire, shouting his brother’s name into the storm.

Corax answered with a shriek of his own – the call of the betrayer, the cry of the betrayed – and the raven met the heretic in a clash of crozius and claw.

This, came the voice, is the cry of the gods we have both been waiting for.

Argel Tal had no hope of replying. The pain knifing through every cell in his body was enough that he sought to slay himself, clawing at his helm and throat, feeling his fingers burning with his own blood as he ripped hunks armour from his flesh, and fistfuls of flesh from his bones.

Do not fight the communion.

Again, he ignored the voice. He wasn’t dying, no matter how he tried. A hooked claw tore the skin from his throat, and with it, half of his collarbone. He inflicted similar injuries upon himself with each second, but he wasn’t dying. He scrabbled at the armour and bone shielding his two hearts, feverish in his need to wrench both of them from his chest.

Communion... Ascension...

The winged shadow vanished from Argel Tal’s vision, and above him the sky was brightened by the last rays of the setting sun.

I am alive, he thought, even as he tore himself apart, even as he ripped a handful of steaming organ meat from his shattered ribcage and burst his first heart in his hand. I did not die beneath the shadow, and I cannot destroy myself now.

This pain will bleed you of sanity. Let me ascend!

Despite agony no living being had ever survived, there was still a moment of fierce resistance in the war behind Argel Tal’s eyes. He wanted to die, to taste nothingness, not to endure further corruption. The sentience that was Raum found itself shackled deeper within by a soul ruthlessly unwilling to surrender.

I will save us, not harm us. RELEASE ME.

The Word Bearer’s concentration went slack, not because he believed the daemon’s words, but from reaching the absolute end of his strength.

Argel Tal closed his eyes.

Raum opened them.

A cloven hoof of bleached bone, wreathed in ceramite that seemed moulded to fit, crushed a gasping Raven Guard warrior into the mud. Great claws with too many joints, resembling the lashing branches of winter trees, closed and opened, closed and opened, while each of its long fingers ended in black talons. Most of the crimson armour was bulked up and layered by dense bone ridges and knuckly spines. It stood taller than even an Astartes – though not equal to the primarchs battling a short distance away.

Its helm was crowned in pagan majesty with great horns of ivory, and silhouetted against the bright cannon fire it seemed to resemble the Taur of Minos from pre-Imperial Terran mythology. Its legs were jointed backwards and brutally muscled beneath the armour, with powerful black hooves leaving burning imprints in the soil. Its Astartes helm was split along the cheeks and mouth grille to reveal a shark’s maw with rows of bladed teeth, glinting with clear acidic saliva.

The daemon drew in a great breath and roared it back out into the retreating ranks of the Raven Guard. That terrible wall of sound hit the Astartes as if an earthquake was laughing at them. Dozens fell to their hands and knees.

Around the warped helm’s left eye lens, the golden sun was all that marked the creature as the man it had been.

Twenty-Seven

An Image to Make his Name
Sacrifice
The Burden of Truth

Ishaq made a jump for it, and rolled under the bulkhead before it slammed down. It was less daring than it sounded as the security doors were taking their sweet time to close, but with the sirens wailing and the emergency lighting darkening everything to deep red, he was hardly thinking clearly. He didn’t want to get sucked out of a void breach, but nor did he want to be caught up here when the battle was over. He needed to go, go, go.

Checking his picter was still in one piece, he broke into another sprint, desperate to get the hell off this deck. The labyrinthine corridors defied this, hindering him further by the fact most of the wall markings were in Colchisian rather than Imperial Gothic.

Have I been here before? One corridor was much the same as another. In the distance, he could hear bulkheads sealing shut and corridors collapsing as the ship sustained more damage. He’d already made it through several thoroughfares where the walls were reduced to wreckage scattered all over the floor in a twisted mess of grey steel and black iron.

He started running again. Four dead men waited around the next corner – four Euchar soldiers, half-crushed by an exploded, fallen wall.

No. Three dead. ‘Help me,’ said the fourth.

Ishaq froze while the ship shook around him. If this soldier survived and identified him later, he was a dead man for being on the monastic deck.

‘Please,’ the trembling man begged.

Ishaq knelt by the soldier and heaved some of the wreckage off his legs. The Euchar screamed, and the imagist squinted through the emergency darkness to see why. Some of the detritus had pierced the soldier’s legs and belly, pinning him to the floor. There’d be no helping him, after all. Pulling this out was the work of a skilled surgeon, and even then, it likely wouldn’t be enough to save the poor wretch.

‘I can’t. I’m sorry. I can’t.’ He rose to his feet. ‘I can’t do anything.’

‘Shoot me, you stupid bast–’

‘I don’t have a–’ He saw the soldier’s rifle half-buried in the junk, and hauled it free. As he tried to take aim, the shuddering ship almost sent him sprawling.

Click, went the trigger. Click, click, click.

‘Safety,’ the soldier groaned. Blood was pooling beneath him. ‘The... switch.’

Ishaq flicked the switch along the gun’s side, and pulled the trigger. He’d never fired a lasweapon before. The crack-flash left dancing lights before his eyes, and he struggled at first to see the soldier. The man was dead now, his head emptied against the wall behind him. The corridor itself was blocked by debris, and Ishaq dropped the rifle with a clatter, turning to head back the way he’d come.

The bulkhead at the end of the concourse thunked shut with a finality Ishaq almost swore was smug, trapping him in a corridor with four dead bodies and a lot of wreckage. One door led out of here, marked by what looked like Colchisian verse on the damaged walls either side.

He pounded his fists against it, getting no answer. The door was warm, charged somehow, as if the room on the other side were a living thing. Ishaq hammered meaningless numbers into the keypad, receiving the same amount of success.

At last, he took up the lasrifle again, closed his eyes, and shot the security panel. The keypad shorted out, flickering with small flames, and the door at the heart of the monastic deck opened with a sweltering whisper of released air. The sigh of pressure was obscene in its biological origins, stinking of unwashed flesh and the faecal reek of prolonged deprivation. Voices drifted out from the room as if carried on the air. They mumbled and muttered, and made no sense.

Ishaq stood, staring inside, unable to form words at what he was seeing.

His picter flashed. This, at last, was the image to make his name.

His brother was a warrior, a warlord, and from the very first moment their weapons met, Corax was fighting to kill, while Lorgar fought to stay alive. The battle moved too fast for mortal eyes to perceive, with both primarchs pushing themselves beyond anything else they’d endured.

Corax evaded the crozius without even once parrying. He weaved aside, threw himself out of reach, or fired his flight pack with enough force to boost him up and over Lorgar’s heavy swings. By contrast, sweat stung Lorgar’s eyes as he desperately blocked each of his brother’s attacks. Illuminarum’s great hammerhead rang like a church bell as it battered aside the Raven Lord’s claws.

‘What are you doing?’ Corax cried into his brother’s face as their weapons locked. ‘What madness has taken you all?’

Lorgar disengaged, hurling Corax backward with enough strength to leave his brother unbalanced. The Raven Lord compensated instantly, his flight pack breathing fire and propelling him back at his brother. Bladed wings flashed out to the side, but Lorgar was ready for them. He ignored their scraping, cutting wounds as they knifed through his armour, and focused on hammering Corax’s claws aside. In the seconds’ safety he bought for himself, Lorgar at last landed a true blow. Corax was sent sprawling again as the crozius pounded into his breastplate. The power field around the maul’s head struck with enough force to send a shockwave blasting out from the warring brothers, throwing all nearby Astartes to the ground.

In less time than it took to breathe in, Corax was back on his feet, thrusters firing, spearing at Lorgar once more.

‘Answer me, traitor,’ the Raven Lord grunted. His dark eyes were narrowed at the sickening light that haloed Lorgar. ‘You... are a poor reflection of our father... with that psychic gold.’

Lorgar felt himself slipping back in the mud, his boots grinding across the earth as his brother’s strength leaned heavier against him. He couldn’t break the weapon lock this time. Both Corax’s claws clutched at Illuminarum’s haft, burning the handle and the Word Bearer’s hands.

‘I am bringing the truth to humanity,’ Lorgar breathed.

‘You are destroying the Imperium! You are betraying your own blood!’ The wildness in the Raven Lord’s black eyes was something Lorgar had never even imagined before. Corax had always seemed so taciturn, so devoid of passion. That this warrior lay beneath the albino facade was a horrendous revelation.

The claw tips, spitting with crackling power fields, were a finger’s length from Lorgar’s face now. ‘I will kill you, Lorgar.’

‘I know.’ He spoke through gritted teeth, feeling strength bleed from his bones. ‘But I have seen what will be. Our father, a bloodless corpse enthroned upon gold, and screaming into the void forever.’

‘Lies.’ The black eyes narrowed, and the Raven Lord’s pale muscles bunched, locking harder. ‘You are reducing a kingdom to chaos. Overthrowing the perfect order.’

Lorgar’s grey eyes danced with light despite the strain on his body. ‘The opposite of chaos is not order, brother. It is stasis. Lifeless, unchanging... stasis.’

With a last grunt, Lorgar’s strength gave. Quivering hands could no longer keep his brother’s weapons back.

‘Here it is,’ Corax promised in a hiss, his saliva flecking Lorgar’s eyes and cheeks. ‘Here is the death you so richly deserve.’

The claws reached his brother’s face. Slowly, the metal burning-hot, they sliced over Lorgar’s golden skin. Inch by inch, blackening the golden flesh, cutting into the meat of his cheeks. Even should he escape, he would bear these scars until the day he died. He knew this, and did not care.

The psychic fire wreathing them both flared in response to Lorgar’s pain. Corax closed his eyes to spare his sight, and instinct cost him his quick victory. Lorgar threw the Raven Lord back again. Illuminarum rose, ready to strike, before a burst of smoky fire launched the Raven Lord up from the soil to come down on Lorgar from above. The Word Bearer smashed the first claw aside, striking the fist with enough force to shatter the gauntlet completely, but even as scythe-long claw blades span off into the surrounding melee, the second claw struck home.

Metre-long talons sank through Lorgar’s stomach, the tips glinting to the side of his spine as they thrust from his back. Such a blow meant little to a primarch – only when Corax heaved upwards did Lorgar stagger. The claws bit and cut, sawing through the Word Bearer’s body.

Illuminarum slipped from the impaled primarch’s fists. Those same hands wrapped around Corax’s throat even as the Raven Lord was carving his brother in half.

‘For the Emperor,’ Corax breathed, untroubled by his weaker brother’s grip. Lorgar crashed his forehead against Corax’s face, shattering his brother’s nose, but still he couldn’t free himself. The Raven Lord gave no ground, even as a second, third and fourth head butt decimated his delicate features.

‘But he lied to us,’ Lorgar spoke through lips that produced more blood than language. ‘Father lied.’

The claws jerked, snagged against Lorgar’s enhanced bones. Corax tore them free, inflicting more damage than the first impaling had done. Blood hissed and popped as it evaporated on the force-fielded blades.

‘Father lied,’ Lorgar said again. He was on his knees, hands clutched over the ruination of his stomach.

Corax’s black eyes gave nothing away. He stepped closer, his one functioning claw raised to execute his brother.

‘Do it,’ Lorgar snarled. The psychic wind, the misty fire – all were gone now. He was as he’d always been: Lorgar, the Seventeenth Son, the image of his father, the one soul in twenty who’d never wished to be a soldier. And here he would die, at the heart of a battlefield.

The foul irony of the moment settled on his shoulders, feeling grotesquely apt. He couldn’t move his legs. His body was a temple to nothing but pain. He could barely even see his executioner, for his psychic efforts had left him quivering with both weakness and a vision-blurring ache in his mind. A faint outline met his gaze, the blurred image of scythe-blades raised high.

‘Do it!’ Lorgar screamed at his brother.

The claw fell, and struck opposing metal.

Corax looked to meet eyes as black as his, in a face as pale as his own. His claw strained against a mirroring weapon, both sets of blades scraping as they ground against each other. One claw seeking to fall and kill, the other unyielding in its rising defence.

Where the Raven Guard primarch’s features were fierce with effort, the other face wore a grin. It was a smile both taut and mirthless – a dead man’s smile, once his lips surrendered to rigor mortis.

‘Corax,’ said the other primarch.

‘Curze,’ Corax said the name as the curse it was.

‘Look into my eyes,’ said the progenitor of the Night Lords Legion, ‘and see your death.’

Corax sought to wrench his claw free, but Curze’s second gauntlet closed on his brother’s wrist. ‘No,’ Curze’s laughter as was joyless as his smile. ‘Do not fly away, little raven. Stay. We are not finished, you and I.’

‘Konrad,’ Corax tried. ‘Why have you done this?’

Curze ignored the plea. He turned his void-like eyes on the prone Lorgar, with disgust written plain across his carcass face. ‘Rise from your knees, you accursed coward.’

Lorgar sought to do just that, using his brother’s midnight-blue armour as a crutch to haul himself to his feet. Curze bared his sharpened teeth. ‘You are the foulest weakling I have ever seen, Lorgar.’

Corax was not idle as this exchange took place. He fired his flight pack, burning his fuel reserves to escape Curze’s grip. The Raven Lord’s claw ripped free, and Corax soared skyward, carried on jet thrust away from Curze’s rising laughter.

On the ground, Curze shook himself free of Lorgar. ‘Sevatar,’ he spoke into the vox. ‘The Raven comes to you, to free his men.’

Battle sounds. Bolter fire. The roar of tank engines. ‘We will deal with him, lord.’

‘See that you do.’ Curze shoved Lorgar back towards his Word Bearers. Around them both, the grey Legion warred with the warriors in black. ‘I am done with you, golden one. Go back to killing Astartes with your pretty hammer.’

Lorgar’s preternatural biology was regenerating his damaged tissue with alacrity, but the primarch was shivery and weak as he reached for the fallen crozius.

‘Thank you, Konrad.’

Curze spat at Lorgar’s feet. ‘I will let you die next time. And if you...’

The Night Lord trailed off, his black eyes narrowing as he watched the figures appearing at Lorgar’s side. Their armour was crimson ceramite and ridged bone. Great claws, both metallic weapons and fleshy, jointed talons, extended from bestial arms. Every helm was horned. Every faceplate was split by a daemon’s skullish leer.

‘You are so much more than merely foul,’ Curze turned his back. ‘You are rancid in your corruption.’

Lorgar watched his brother stalking back through the ranks of Night Lords and Word Bearers, wading through them to reach the Raven Guard once more. Soon enough, the silver claws began to rise and fall as they always had, shearing through the armoured bodies of Curze’s enemies.

Lorgar turned to the Gal Vorbak. ‘Argel Tal,’ he smiled at one of them, knowing him instantly.

The creature grunted, twitchy with the need to shed blood. ‘It is I, sire.’

‘The warriors I would need,’ Lorgar murmured the old words with awe tainting his breath. ‘Truly, you are blessed by the gods. Go. Hunt. Kill.’

The Gal Vorbak withdrew from their lord, launching themselves back into the battle with leaps and snarls. Argel Tal lingered. A claw of ceramite and bone closed on Lorgar’s arm.

‘Father. I could not reach you in time.’

‘It does not matter. I live still. Hunt well, my son.’

The daemon nodded and obeyed.

Thunderhawk gunships in the colours of the Raven Guard and the Salamanders exploded at the launch site as the Iron Warriors turned their weapons from the slaughter and targeted the loyalists’ only avenues of escape.

Despite the grind of battle, dozens of the landing craft managed to make it back into the air. Most of these were soon sent spiralling back down to earth, streaming black smoke from lascannon wounds in propulsion systems. The Iron Warriors fired with impunity, caring nothing that many of the downed gunships fell groundward into the battle still being waged. The burning hulls of destroyed Astartes craft rained onto the killing fields, pulverising Word Bearers and Night Lords more often than they crashed into the few remaining pockets of Raven Guard and Salamanders survivors.

When contacted by Legion commanders protesting the careless destruction, the Iron Warriors captains replied with laughter that bordered on betrayal.

‘We are all bleeding today,’ an Iron Warriors captain voxed back to Kor Phaeron. ‘Have faith, Word Bearer.’ The link went dead to the sound of chuckling.

Time ceased to have any meaning for Argel Tal. When he was not killing, he was moving, hunting, seeking something else to kill. His claws savaged any Raven Guard warrior that came within his grip. Corax had thinned the ranks of the Gal Vorbak before Lorgar’s intercession, but enough of the chosen sons remained to form a feral pack that led their Legion, cutting into the diminishing foe.

In battle, he changed. His was not the ascendant consciousness. He ceded a measure of control to Raum, the surrender coming as naturally as breathing: it seemed simply a function of his new form. The daemon in possession added strength to even his lighter blows, and tore chunks from his enemies even as Argel Tal sought only to clutch onto them. His every motion was made feverish, hungrier somehow, drenched in blood and inhuman needs. As he wrapped his claws around a Raven Guard’s throat with the intent to strangle, his talons sank into the warrior’s neck and hooked around his spine. Every motion was instinctively more violent, breeding more pain in those foolish enough to stand before him.

Many of the Raven Guard sought to run. Argel Tal let these live, knowing his grey-armoured kin would cut these down with their bolters. It was a chore to resist the animalistic need to chase down prey – just seeing them flee from him was enough to tense his muscles into the desire for pursuit – but he knew his role in this war. He was a warrior, not a hunter.

A connection he’d not known existed went hollow and cold, and he felt, rather than saw, Dagotal die.

You are all bound. Blessed and bound.

A second of pain, like the memory of an old wound, and a curious loss stole over him. It was a lessening, as if the warmth of the sun had fallen behind a greying sky. The momentary chill passed, but the knowledge of his brother’s demise was etched into him, as cold as a stone in his skull.

He died in fire. Raum’s voice was as ecstatic as it was breathless. A cascade of chopping images flickered in Argel Tal’s mind, showing Dagotal engulfed in flame, surrounded by Raven Guard bearing flamer units. They bathed him in the corrosive fire, layering chemical propellant over his mutated armour, stoic against the unbelievable stench their murder was making.

The images flashed away, and Argel Tal dropped the corpse he’d strangled. Immediately, the need took him again. Like a hunger, a need for satiation, he physically ached unless he was moving toward prey. And he knew this ferocious need was the only emotion the neverborn could ever feel. This was how their minds worked – in stunted, brutal instinct.

The daemon moved to sate his new hunger.

The tremors eased, but didn’t cease. Still, Ishaq was thankful for small mercies. Nonessential bulkheads were grinding open now. The red light staining everything flickered back to standard illumination. He assumed De Profundis was pulling free of the main battle for... some reason. To rearm? To regroup? Whatever, he didn’t know and it didn’t matter. He was bolting through the corridors the moment he heard the first bulkhead unsealing.

Many were still shut tight, blocking off voided sections of the deck. This, too, didn’t matter. He didn’t want to explore any more, he just wanted to get out of here alive.

It was strangely worse to slow down and walk solemnly past Euchar infantry patrols than it was to pick and weave between the dead bodies that adorned some of the more damaged corridors. The Euchar squads were here to clean up, and he didn’t envy them that job. On several occasions, he moved past them in a dignified walk, seeing them gathering the fallen and bagging them up. He made sure his face was covered by the serf hood, and did his best to seem as if he paid little heed.

Once he was free of the monastic deck, he made his way to the Cellar, shaking loose the Legion robe on his way. His picter scanner was kept in a white-knuckled grip that would’ve broken a cheaper, less sturdy model.

The doors opened before him, revealing the Cellar in all its bustling slum hole glory. Even in the midst of the battle, the remembrancers and civilian crew had gathered here, gambling and drinking and doing their damndest to ignore the war raging outside. In truth, he didn’t blame them. He’d done it himself in smaller battles before.

His hands were shaking when he reached an empty table. A passing girl brought him something he didn’t order, and wouldn’t like even if he was in the mood to drink it. He scattered the few coins he had left, not caring that he overpaid. He just needed to be around people. Normal people.

‘Ishaq Kadeen. The imagist. I have your pict of De Profundis. A masterpiece, young sir.’

Ishaq looked up to meet the speaker’s dark-ringed eyes. He recognised the old man immediately.

‘You’re the astropath. The astropath for the Occuli Imperator.’

‘Guilty,’ the old man performed a strangely courtly bow, ‘as charged.’ He gestured to the chair. ‘Absolom Cartik at your service. May I sit?’

Ishaq’s grunt passed as a yes. The elder seemed nervous in the Cellar, just as he had last time Ishaq saw him in here. ‘I’ve not seen you in a couple of weeks. There was talk you’d be forsaking this place for good.’

‘I do not fit in well, but at times, the quiet gets to me. I feel the need to be around other people.’ Cartik gestured to the walls. ‘The battle,’ he swallowed. ‘They always get to me.’

‘I know that feeling. Sorry, but I’m not exactly wonderful company right now,’ Ishaq said.

The astropath was watching him with unwavering focus. ‘Your thoughts are very loud.’

All the blood drained from Kadeen’s face. ‘You’re reading my mind?’ He stood up fast enough to make himself dizzy. ‘Is that legal?’

The astropath waved his concerns aside. ‘I could never read a mind as you would understand it. Suffice to say, you are broadcasting your emotion with great intensity. Just as someone might see you laugh or cry, knowing your thoughts from your face, I can see the distress in your mind. No details, but it is very... loud,’ he finished lamely.

‘I don’t need this right now. I really don’t.’

‘I meant no offence.’

Ishaq took his seat again. The ship shook under enemy fire – enough to spill people’s drinks. Most pretended to ignore it. A few faked laughter, as if it were all part of the adventure.

‘Might I ask if you have any more masterpieces in the making?’ the old man asked. Ishaq glanced at his picter rod.

‘I’m not sure. Maybe. Look, I have to go.’ He squeezed his eyes shut, but everything looked the same when he opened them again. ‘I don’t want to be around anyone after all. And I’m not going to drink this, so consider it a gift.’

He slid the glass across the table. As Cartik took it, the astropath’s finger brushed the imagist’s knuckles. The elder jumped if kicked, staring with wide eyes. He looked as suddenly unwell as Ishaq felt.

‘By the Throneworld...’ he stammered. ‘Wh-what have you seen?’

‘Nothing. Nothing at all. Goodbye.’

Absolom Cartik’s elderly claw gripped onto the younger man’s wrist with all the tenacity of a raptor talon. ‘Where. Was. This.’

‘I didn’t see anything, you crazy old bastard.’

Their eyes met. ‘You wish to answer the question,’ Cartik said softly.

‘I saw it on board the ship.’

‘Where?’

‘The monastic deck.’

‘And you made recorded images? Evidence of what you saw?’

‘Yes.’

Cartik released the man’s wrist. ‘Come with me, please.’

‘What? No chance.’

‘Come with me. What you have seen must be shown to the Occuli Imperator. If you refuse, I can guarantee you only one thing: Custodian Aquillon will kill you for attempting to keep this a secret. He will kill everyone who has kept this a secret.’

The emergency lighting dimmed back into life. Complaints rang out across the Cellar, and the vessel around them shivered as its engines flared open again. They were returning to the battle.

‘I’ll... come with you.’

Absolom Cartik smiled. He was an ugly man – and age hadn’t helped change that fact – but he wore the kind of paternal, assured smile that stayed in a family’s memory for many years.

‘Yes,’ the old man said. ‘I thought you might.’

Twenty-Eight

Aftermath
Blood is Life
An Unusual Welcome

He found Dagotal after the battle.

First, he came across his brother’s jetbike, powerless and half-buried in the Urgall dirt. Not crashed. Abandoned. Abandoned when the change took place, abandoned in favour of running and killing with one’s own claws.

He moved on, stepping over the bodies of slain Raven Guard, their white Legion symbol tarnished by mud or split by savage weapons. A warrior nearby still lived, his breath straining from a broken mouth grille. With a reaching claw, Argel Tal enclosed the Raven Guard’s neck, squeezing the soft armour there and ending the warrior’s life with the popping crackle of destroyed vertebrae.

There was no flood of endorphins from a hunger momentarily sated. With each minute that passed, Raum’s consciousness ebbed from Argel Tal’s mind with the helpless loss of sand slipping through his fingers. With the daemon’s recession, Argel Tal’s own instincts and emotions rebuilt themselves in his mind. In place of bloodlust and unnatural appetites, he felt hollow, and used, and so very, very tired.

His shadow stretched before him, made uneven by the dead bodies it fell across. Great horns curled from his helm. His body was a nightmare of protruding bone ridges and crimson ceramite. His legs were... He didn’t even have the words. They were jointed like a beast’s hind legs – a lion or a wolf – and ended in huge hooves of black bone. His warplate still covered them, leaving his silhouette like the shade of a creature from unholy myth.

Argel Tal turned from his shadow. A wet, burbling growl rumbled in his throat. That scent. He snuffed the air twice. Familiar. Yes.

He stalked away, letting his shadow fall across other bodies. There. Dagotal. A blackened thing, ripe with the scent of baked blood and life reduced to ash. Grey and red armour was strewn all about him, making his husk the cremated statue at the heart of a fallen Word Bearers pack. In the deepest distance, bolters still chattered. Why? The battle was over. Prisoner execution, perhaps. It did not matter.

Still infused with the aftermath of Raum’s inhuman perception, he sensed the others approaching. All of them resembled Argel Tal to some degree. Malnor was a twitching, brutish thing, his bunched musculature claimed by frequent spasms. Torgal hunched as he moved, his faceplate moulded into a snarling face entirely lacking eyes. Argel Tal knew without asking that Torgal was blind. Perhaps he was aided by scent and sound, but he hunted by the daemonic awareness of mortality nearby. Instead of the claws most of the Gal Vorbak now sported, Torgal’s arms ended in lengthy bone blades, hooked like primitive scimitars. Jagged, knuckly teeth roughened the surface of them, showing where they’d once been his chainblades.

Eleven of the Gal Vorbak remained alive. Corax had slain over two dozen – their dismembered parts now scattered over the nearby area – red amidst the grey. In the heat of the battle, it had been an easy matter to ride Raum’s perceptions, discarding the fragmentary pulsing pain of his brothers’ lives ending. But now, in the bitter dusk, their absence was harder to ignore. Their loss left him cold.

With the passing minutes, Argel Tal could feel the daemon’s quiet, small presence wrapped in a crippling exhaustion. Raum was not gone, nor truly distant. The daemon slumbered, its cold weight seeking to warm itself within the Word Bearer’s mind.

The horrendous changes inflicted upon his body and armour began to undo themselves at last. Ceramite cracked and resealed. Bony protrusions sank back beneath his skin, dragged back into the bones from whence they came. As Ingethel had promised so long ago, it was not a painless process, but by now the Gal Vorbak had passed through the fire of that particular torment. Pain was just pain, and they’d endured so much worse. A few grunted as the changes unwrought and their Astartes physiques reformed, but none voiced a lament as bones creaked and muscles condensed.

Still, they’d been seen. Warriors from the other Legions had seen them during and after the battle, and made their distasteful fascination shown in varying measures. The Night Lords seemed particularly unwilling to approach the Gal Vorbak. When Argel Tal had neared Sevatar, the captain had removed his helm to spit acid on the ground by the Word Bearer’s feet. The Sons of Horus – the Warmaster’s own – were more willing to approach and speak of the change. Argel Tal was unwilling to indulge them, but Xaphen, the slowest by far in resuming his Astartes form, seemed all too keen to enlighten the Sons of what the future held for the gods’ chosen warriors.

Argel Tal waited an hour for his bones to cease their creak-aching, but the sense of relief was nothing short of divine when he disengaged his collar seals and pulled his helm free.

The battlefield stank of engine breath and chemical-rich blood, but he had no sense to spare for anything beyond the feel of the wind rushing over his face for the first time in so many weeks.

Boot steps, heavy and assured, came from behind. He knew who it would be without needing to turn.

‘How does it feel?’ came the expected voice.

‘Strong. Pure. Righteous. But then cold, and hollow. Violated.’ Argel Tal turned to meet the other’s eyes. ‘I feel the daemon within me now, weakened and slumbering. Even after knowing the change would grip and fade in tides like this, it was like nothing I can describe. I am uneasy in the knowledge it will happen again, but I also feel anticipation for it. I... I lack the words to do it justice.’

‘We saw you fight,’ said the other. ‘The “blessed sons” indeed.’

Argel Tal sighed, still enjoying the world’s air instead of the filtered oxygen of his warplate. ‘I was spiteful to you before the battle, master. I ask forgiveness.’

Erebus’s smile didn’t reach his lips, but the momentary warmth of sincerity showed in his gaze. ‘Master no more.’

Argel Tal broke the look to stare out over the battlefield. Thousands and thousands of armoured bodies. Hundreds of wrecked tanks. Gunship hulls, still burning in their craters. Roaring cheers from the ranks of the World Eaters as they gathered skulls. The buzzing grind of chainblades as the warriors of seven Traitor Legions looted the dead for trophies and relics.

‘I do not regret taking the sword instead of the crozius all those years ago. As I’ve proven so many times since, I lack the words to be a preacher.’

Erebus came alongside his former pupil, looking out over the desolation. His armour showed clear signs of the battle, cracked and scorched all over. Erebus was never one to send his warriors into battle without leading them in himself. The bas-relief etchings of his deeds in neat Colchisian were discoloured by burn markings and stripped paint showing flashes of metallic ceramite beneath.

‘I believe that night may have been the very first incident of an Astartes seeking to kill another Astartes.’

Argel Tal remembered it well. ‘The primarch told me, long ago when I last stood in the City of Grey Flowers, that you had forgiven me for that night.’

‘The primarch was right.’

Argel Tal narrowed his eyes. ‘I never asked for your forgiveness. Not for that.’

‘It is yours, nevertheless. You still believe I went too far in my methods. I do not. We will never agree upon it. Do you believe you were right in your reaction? To draw a weapon against a brother? To seek to slay a Chaplain of your own Legion?’

‘Yes.’ Argel Tal’s gaze was unwavering. ‘I still believe that. I would have killed you, had I the chance.’

Erebus remained impassive. ‘Beside that first and last betrayal, you were a better student than you give yourself credit for. Loyal, intelligent, and strong of both heart and will.’

Loyal.

Raum’s thought was somnolent, barely formed in a veil of fogged weariness. It brought Argel Tal on guard, as he expected the daemon’s intent had been.

‘Sometimes I wonder,’ he said, ‘just how much of our loyalty is written into our blood.’

Erebus wasn’t blind to the inference. ‘The gene-seed changes every Legion, but the Word Bearers would not follow Aurelian into damnation and triumph with equal passion. We follow him because he is right, not because we must.’

Argel Tal nodded, neither agreeing nor arguing.

‘I need answers,’ the Gal Vorbak commander said. His tone was cold and clear, and Erebus turned upon hearing it.

‘Is this really the time?’ he asked.

Argel Tal fixed his former mentor with a cynical scowl. ‘We stand in the midst of two Legions brought to extinction by traitorous hands, and walk the first battlefield of an Imperial civil war. There will never be a better time to talk of betrayal, Erebus.’

The slightest edge of a smile coloured the Chaplain’s lips. ‘Ask.’

‘You already know what I would ask, so spare me speaking the question.’

‘The primarch.’ Erebus was utterly neutral once more, ever the statesman. ‘You would have me relay what we have done in the main Legion fleet for forty years? There is no time for such discussion. Much of what we learned is contained within the Book of Lorgar.’

A curl to his lips showed how little Argel Tal liked that answer. ‘Which, it seems, you have written half of,’ the Gal Vorbak lord said.

Erebus acquiesced to this with a shallow nod. ‘I have added to the rituals and prayers within, yes. As has Kor Phaeron. We have learned much, and have guided the primarch as often as he has guided us.’

Argel Tal growled his displeasure. ‘Be clearer.’

‘As you wish. A moment, please.’ Erebus knelt to slide his gladius into the throat of a twitching Raven Guard warrior. As they walked on, he wiped blood from the blade with an oiled cloth from his belt pouch.

‘You do not know what it was like, Argel Tal. After venturing into the Great Eye, Lorgar was... distraught. His faith in the Emperor was already destroyed, and the truth he found at the galaxy’s edge tormented him as much as it inspired him. Indecision gripped him for months. Kor Phaeron took command of the fleet for a second time, and we did little but vent our wrath across the worlds we came across. Despite Lorgar’s return, the Legion felt no joy from the primarch’s presence. In truth, Aurelian wasn’t certain humanity was ready to learn of such... horror.’

Argel Tal’s skin crawled. ‘Horror?’

‘The primarch’s own word, not mine.’ Erebus nudged another body with his boot. When a rasping breath wheezed from its mouth grille, the Chaplain repeated his execution, cleaning the blade again afterwards. ‘The Legion never struggled to adopt the new faith. We are philosophers as much as warriors, and take pride in such. All could see how the gods had seeded their worship into our culture from generations in the past. The constellations. The cults that always looked skyward for answers. The Old Ways themselves. Few Word Bearers resisted the truth, for most had always felt it on some level.’

‘Few resisted...’ An uncomfortable thought climbed Argel Tal’s spine with prickling fingers. ‘Was there a purge? A purge of our own ranks?’

Erebus weighed his answer before giving it voice. ‘Not all wished to turn on the Imperium. They believed that stagnancy was strength, that stasis was preservation. No such reluctance remains in the Legion now.’

So Word Bearer had slain Word Bearer, unseen by the eyes of other Legions. Argel Tal breathed slowly, not wishing to ask yet unable to resist. ‘How many died?’

‘Enough.’ Erebus took no joy in confessing it. ‘Not many – nothing like the numbers of those who were culled from the faithless Legions – but enough.’

They moved around the charred hull of a Sons of Horus Rhino. The armoured personnel carrier’s tracks were shattered and scattered like teeth punched from a jaw, while the sloped green hull was pockmarked with bolter fire. Erebus glanced inside. The driver was dead, slain by the shell that destroyed the tank’s front plating, his sea-green ceramite ruptured with shrapnel as he lay slack in his seat.

‘Why do I sense that was not your only question,’ he muttered.

Argel Tal scratched his cheek, and the motion turned into a subtle check, feeling his face for any further changes. He was himself again, at least for now. The mutations were locked inside his genetic code as the daemon slumbered. He knew they’d return soon enough. Just dwelling on the thought was enough to set Raum stirring, the daemon slowly writhing in its repose, like a creature shifting in its sleep.

‘The Custodes,’ he said. ‘We have suffered a long exile to keep them alive. Xaphen’s ritual kept them silenced. Tell me why, Erebus. We have ached to be by the primarch’s side.’

‘So has every Word Bearer in every one of the Legion’s fleets.’

‘We are the Gal Vorbak.’ Argel Tal crashed a fist into the Rhino’s flank, denting the armour plating.

‘Temper, Argel Tal.’

‘We,’ the commander repeated, ‘are the Gal Vorbak. We brought the truth to the primarch at the cost of our own souls. I am not demanding glorification. I am asking for a reason why we were kept in exile.’

Erebus walked on, leaving the tank, and the two Salamanders warriors it had crushed, behind. ‘You came to reflect a side of the primarch’s doubts, until Kor Phaeron and I were able to reignite his conviction. We travelled to those first worlds we conquered – the ones that we’d allowed the Old Ways to in secret remain out of respect. On those worlds, Lorgar’s passion to enlighten the Imperium was reforged anew.’

‘So why were we not recalled? Xaphen’s ritual to silence the Custodes–’

‘I know the ritual,’ Erebus snapped. ‘I wrote the ritual myself, after weeks of communion. Only then did I provide it to Xaphen, and it has been refined each time the invocation was cast.’

The invocation. A spell. Sorcery. Argel Tal shuddered. The word alone was enough to make his skin crawl. On the hillside, the first construction work was beginning on a towering funeral pyre, and a platform for the Sons of Horus to aggrandise themselves above the ‘lesser’ Legions. Argel Tal and Erebus paid the work little heed.

‘I can read the reluctance in your voice, Argel Tal. You do not burn with fervour to kill them, and I will see through any lies you tell me otherwise.’

‘I have no desire to slay them. We have grown closer over time, bonding through battle. But I must know why they were ordered to be spared.’

‘I need them alive,’ the Chaplain admitted at last.

‘Obviously,’ Argel Tal snorted. ‘But why?’

‘Because of what they are. Imagine a life form that cannot reproduce. Imagine it self-replicates instead, but the process is not perfect. It only achieves immortality for its species by creating weaker versions of itself down the generations. We are an example of this. From the Emperor came the primarchs, from the primarchs came the true Astartes. We are a species that names the Emperor not only as our inceptor, but our grandfather.’

Argel Tal nodded, waiting for Erebus to continue. He felt the threat of a smile as he recalled their lessons just like this, back in the days of tutor and student, master and acolyte.

‘We are the third generation of this genetic line. But what if our fleshworkers, our Apothecaries, and our psychically-gifted warriors could use our link to the Emperor as a weapon against him? Should we not capitalise on that possibility?’

Argel Tal shrugged a shoulder. ‘I do not see how we could.’

Erebus chuckled. ‘Think back to the Old Ways, and the lore you know of that faith from archives. Think back to the superstition and dogma that the Emperor has sought to banish from the sphere of human knowledge in his precious “Great Crusade”. How much of humanity’s clearest, core beliefs centred around sacrifice and spells fuelled by blood? Blood is life. Blood is the focus of a million magics, linking invoker and victim, or serving as an offering to reach the higher powers within the warp. If you have a being’s blood, you can tailor a poison to slay them and no other – a venom bred to end a single life, but to spare all others.’

‘And our blood is the blood of the Emperor,’ Argel Tal finished for him.

‘Yes. But it is thinned and filtered by mass production, with too many artificial chemical components, making it too weak to use in either alchemy or sorcery. The link to our grandsire is far too tenuous.’

Alchemy. Sorcery. Argel Tal found it starkly ironic that even with a daemon in his heart, he hated to hear of these words spoken so lightly. Truly, the winds of change had blown hard in the four decades of his unofficial exile.

Erebus looked across the battlefield, where the Iron Warriors were gathering bodies with the blunt efficiency so typical of the Legion’s attitude to warfare. Tanks fitted with great plough blades heaved through piles of the slain, sending the bodies tumbling along towards the funeral pyre.

‘Do you understand?’ he asked, without taking his eyes from the funerary work.

‘You believe the Custodes offer a closer link to the Emperor.’

‘I do. They are born from the same genetic code, though ours was filtered for mass production. They are purer for their rarity, if not their quality.’

It was an old assumption, and one with no proof, to claim that the Emperor was a primarch to the Custodian Guard. Argel Tal shook his head.

‘You need living Custodes for their blood,’ he said, ‘in the hopes of chasing what may well be a myth.’

‘All weapons must be considered.’ Erebus was composed. ‘No one but the Emperor has ever had the chance to study the Custodes, and knowledge is power. It must be guarded well. We have tried rituals with the blood of eleven Legions now, and all results met with disaster. What if we master the secrets of the Custodian genus? We could harness that lore to strengthen ourselves, not simply harm our foes. The Custodians in the main fleet, led by Iacus, were killed in battle long ago. Aquillon and his minions present one of the few remaining opportunities. Their blood must be borne from a beating heart for the rituals to have any hope of success.’

Another thought occurred, and Argel Tal spoke before considering it. ‘Are not the primarchs closest to the Emperor? You could use their blood for these... rituals.’

Erebus laughed. For the first time in Argel Tal’s life, he heard the First Chaplain really, honestly laughing. ‘Truth,’ Erebus smiled, ‘from the mouths of babes. Do you see any willing primarchs? We failed to capture any of the Emperor’s sons here, and you will not find Horus or even Aurelian eager to let their blood be manipulated in such a way.’

Argel Tal hesitated. In his hand, his helm emitted a vox-crackle.

‘My lord?’ came the voice of Fleetmaster Torvus. The Word Bearer replaced his helm with a deep sigh of reluctance. His clear vision was immediately stained dark and flickered with targeting markers.

‘This is Argel Tal.’

‘Sir, our final four ships have broken from the warp. The Occuli Imperator is demanding to board De Profundis immediately.’

‘Allow it. It no longer matters. They will have their suspicions, but only evidence would rouse them to fury. We are returning to orbit within the hour, and will deal with them then. Has the ship sustained damage?’

‘A great deal, but we’ve held it together through spit, grit and prayer. The only damage you will consider vital was taken on the Legion’s sanctum deck. Several breaches, but all hull wounds are isolated and secured.’

Argel Tal swallowed. ‘The Blessed Lady?’

‘Secure and well. A Euchar force investigated not thirty minutes ago. The enemy fleet is dust and wreckage in orbit. How fares the surface battle?’

Argel Tal scanned the devastation for several moments before answering. ‘We won, Baloc. That’s enough for now.’

Aquillon walked from the eagle-winged shuttle and onto the empty hangar deck. He’d never seen it so quiet: a hollow space of silent, waiting cranes and idle servitors standing by their wall-stations. The Legion was deployed, and everything the Word Bearers commanded had been committed to the world below.

At the base of the ramp, several figures were waiting for him. Sythran inclined his head in silence. Kalhin and Nirallus likewise didn’t salute – it wasn’t their custom to show obeisance to anyone but the Emperor, beloved by all. The three warriors held their guardian spears in loose grips, but their body language and postures suggested restraint, rather than simply remaining casual. He could read the telltale tension in their muscles, even beneath their golden armour.

The other two figures drew Aquillon’s attention. The first was Cartik, who offered a deep bow. The old man was sweating in the cold hangar, and his ageing heart beat in an accelerated, irregular rhythm. The second was unknown to him. Dusky-skinned and keen of eye, daunted by nothing he bore witness to. A brave soul, this one. Or reckless.

‘A curious welcome,’ the Occuli Imperator said softly. He was not angry – not yet, at least – but his patience had bled dry many hours before. The loss of contact with the Word Bearers fleet left him rattled, and this was indeed an unusual welcome. He knew something was wrong the moment he saw his brothers waiting for him below.

‘Your ships were “delayed” as well,’ Aquillon surmised. ‘You were prevented from reaching the battle at all.’ All three warriors nodded.

‘I was first to arrive,’ Nirallus said. ‘Less than ten minutes ago. The approach to the fleet was a nightmare, and the auspex chimed out with hundreds of dead ships in the upper atmosphere. It will rain steel on Isstvan V for decades to come.’

‘I saw the same,’ admitted Aquillon. ‘No sign of any vessels bearing the traitors’ colours, but the loyal Legions have suffered horrendous losses themselves. And the wreckage patterns did not suggest accurate numbers. It seems two Legions have been annihilated. Others who were supposed to be present were simply never here.’

‘I have not been able to reach Argel Tal,’ said Kalhin. ‘Or anyone else on the surface.’

Aquillon looked down at the two humans. ‘Explain their presence.’

Sythran stepped forward, and offered Aquillon a bulky plastek picter rod. The imagifier was of expensive make, that much was clear. Aquillon took it, but didn’t look at the viewscreen.

‘You are an imagist?’ he asked the human.

‘Ishaq Kadeen,’ the man replied. ‘Yes, I’m an imagist. You activate the–’

‘I know how it works, Ishaq Kadeen.’ Aquillon thumbed the activation setting along the haft, and the small screen blinked into life.

Aquillon processed what he was seeing. His education and training at the Emperor’s side allowed him a broad view of human capability, and the possibilities of technology in union with living beings. He had never seen anything quite like this before, but he knew immediately what it had to be.

The Occuli Imperator handed the picter to Ishaq, who took with a mutter of gratitude. ‘You found this on the sanctum deck, I assume?’ Aquillon enquired.

‘The monastic deck? Yes.’

‘Of course.’ And then, with infinite dignity, Aquillon reached to unsheathe his blade. ‘My brothers,’ he said. ‘We are betrayed.’

‘I do not much like our chances against an entire vessel’s crew, even with the Legion off-ship. What do you suggest?’ asked Kalhin.

‘First, we find the depths of this betrayal. I must see this madness for myself, and tear the truth from the lips of those that keep it. Before we can even consider cutting out the cancer at this rebellion’s heart, we must secure passage to Terra and relay every detail to the Emperor.’

‘Beloved by all,’ said Kalhin and Nirallus at once. Sythran tapped his knuckles to his chestplate, over his heart. Ishaq’s own ‘beloved by all’ came a couple of awkward seconds later, though none of the others were paying him any attention anymore.

‘This will be a great deal of work,’ Kalhin grunted.

‘Who do we interrogate?’ asked Nirallus. There was no doubt in his voice – he didn’t ask because he had no idea of an answer, he asked because there were too many possible names and the decision ultimately rested with Aquillon. ‘The fleetmaster? The general?’

‘There’s one soul on this ship that has listened to the Word Bearers whisper their secrets for half a century. We will find this precious soul not far from where you found the evidence of their treachery. Come with me.’

‘H-how will you get onto the monastic deck?’ Cartik was already falling behind, practically ignored by the Custodes.

‘We will kill everyone that stands in our way,’ Nirallus replied as if the answer were obvious. ‘Return to your room, old one. It will not be safe at our side.’

The Custodes moved forward, blades drawn. Aquillon let emotion curl his lip into an ugly snarl. ‘Cyrene,’ he hissed. ‘Their “Blessed lady”.’

Twenty-Nine

Cyrene
Never Human
A Completed Vow

She lifted her head at the sound of blades against her door, though of course, she saw nothing. Heat came at her in a breathy wave, emanating in her direction from the thudding steel portal. Power weapons, then. They were cutting through with power weapons.

Cyrene typed as fast as she could, her fingertips dancing over the familiar keypad, but her efforts ended mid-sentence. The door slammed to the floor, and the thrum of live power armour filled the room. Joints whirred. False fibre-bundle muscles purred.

‘Aquillon. I knew you would c–’

‘Be silent, traitorous whore. The Word Bearers are gone, and you will answer to the authority of the Emperor. Order your maids to flee, or they will suffer alongside you.’

Cyrene inclined her head in a slight nod. The two older women fled the room barely short of a run.

‘Brother...’ began Kalhin, turning to the secondary chamber and the open door leading into it. Another figure had appeared there, doubtless hiding in wait.

‘The Word Bearers,’ it said, ‘are not all gone.’

‘You have no place here, tech-adept,’ Aquillon gestured with the point of his sword.

‘Correct.’ Xi-Nu 73 applied an exact amount of pressure on the trigger of the signum control in his left hand, and a massive figure made of gears and armour plating moved into view behind him. It took up the entire door arch as it gave a mechanical growl of warning. Xi-Nu 73 steeled himself to finish speaking. ‘I have no place here. But he does.’

The robot’s arms, both mounted with heavy bolter cannons, were preloaded and cycled live – they’d been powered up for hours, ready for this worst of possible moments. Cyrene hurled herself off the bed, seeking all the distance she could put between herself and Aquillon.

‘For the Legion.’ The voice was like steel bars tumbling over rock.

The Custodes were already moving, their halberds spinning, when Incarnadine opened up at them with a horrendous storm of fire.

Argel Tal sprinted up the gunship’s ramp, his boots clanging all the way into the troop bay. He was the last aboard. The vox was a hive of conflicting voices as the Gal Vorbak snapped at him to hurry. Other Thunderhawks, proud in the Legion’s grey, were already lifting off.

‘Take off,’ he ordered the pilot over the vox, unashamed by the threat of panic in his voice. ‘Get us back to the ship.’

Rising Sun shivered as its claws left the parched soil.

Argel Tal switched vox-channels. ‘Jesmetine. General, are you there?’

Distortion.

‘Answer me, Arric.’

‘Lord.’ The general was breathless. ‘Lord, they are loose.’

‘We just received the warning. Tell me exactly what has happened.’

‘They landed. The Custodes landed. They stormed the monastic deck soon after. Something has enraged them. They must have discovered the truth, though I’ve no idea how. All Euchar forces there are out of contact or already confirmed dead. One of them, one of them, is holding the corridor leading to Cyrene’s chamber. Blood of the gods, Argel Tal... he has a barricade made from the bodies of my men. Every charge sees more cut down. We cannot overwhelm one of them, let alone four.’

The Word Bearer felt the gunship lurch beneath his feet. ‘We have started primus burn, and are en route. What of Xi-Nu 73?’ Across the vox, he could hear the snap-crack of lasguns barking their payloads. More Euchar engaging in futility.

‘No word,’ the elder general replied. ‘Not a damn word. Where the hell are you?’

‘We are on our way.’ Raum? he quested.

Weak. The link was sluggish and feeble. Slumber.

The gunship climbed, its engines exhaling smoke and flame as it left the killing fields far below.

Sythran fought as he always fought: in the perfection of silence and solitude. Everything was in motion to an exacting standard – each twist of the spear haft brought the blade up to block las-fire or down to cut flesh, while each weave and duck was performed with the necessary vigour to keep him unwounded, but never left him overbalanced or needing to reposition himself. His footwork was stoic and rigid only long enough to kill the nearest soldier, before blending back into the dance of movement.

They fell back again. No, they fled.

Behind his faceplate, Sythran smiled. The bolter on his spear juddered with its release, punching explosive shells into the spines of all who were cowardly enough to turn their backs on him. The rhythmic pound of detonation after detonation made an abattoir of the hallway. Sythran went prone behind a mound of the dead, spinning his spear to hold the blade end. A clunk, a click, and the weapon was reloaded. Sythran rose again, already cutting the air with grand sweeps, batting aside the streaking laser fire.

‘Syth,’ crackled Aquillon’s voice. ‘We move.’

Sythran returned an acknowledgement blip by blinking at the affirmation rune on his retinal display. More Euchar, so very proud in their dull orange fatigues, came charging down the corridor. Sythran leapt his cadaver barricade and met them head on. They fell in pieces, and beyond a las-burn along his shoulder guard, the blood on his blade was the only evidence he’d even been fighting. The corridor was clear for now, populated by dead fools who’d believed they could bayonet him where their fellows had failed. Sythran looked over his shoulder in time to see his brothers emerge from the witch’s cell. But only two. Nirallus and Aquillon, their armour pitted and cracked by incendiary fire.

Perhaps they detected his questioning glance without seeing his face, for Aquillon said ‘Kalhin is dead. We must hurry.’

Well did he mark the blood shining on Aquillon’s sword point.

Xi-Nu 73 sighed. It vocalised from his rebreather mask as an insect’s buzzing. The sensory inhibitors lining his nerves like insulating cable around wire were doing all they could, but they failed to entirely mute the pain of shutting down. Shutting down? Dying. In his final mortal moments, he couldn’t resist the biological descriptor. Such resonance. Dying... Death... So dramatic.

He laughed, and made more static-laden buzzing. It became a cough that tasted of spoiled oil.

With his one remaining hand, the adept started the laborious task of dragging himself across the floor. A potential subroutine to this task presented itself as he moved. Could he not stop halfway and examine the corpse of the human female?

A cost/benefit analysis flickered in his thought-core. Yes. He could. But he would not. The subroutine was discarded. His hand clawed at the smooth deck, and he dragged himself another half-metre with the squeal of his metal body along the floor. All the while, functionality statistics formed charts behind his eyes. He realised there was a chance, though small, that he would terminate before he reached his objective. It spurred him on, while the bionic nodules attached to his few remaining mortal organs stimulated the fading flesh with jolts of electrical energy and injections of emergency chemicals.

The tech-adept was blind by the time he reached his destination. His visual receptors had failed, as blank as a monitor with no power. He felt his hand clank against his intended target, and used the motionless bulk to pull himself closer. The fallen robot was a toppled statue, a fallen avatar of the Machine-God, and Xi-Nu 73 embraced it as one would a beloved son.

‘There,’ he murmured, barely hearing his voice as his aural receptors failed next. ‘Duty done. Honoured. Name inscribed. In. Archive of. Visionary. Merit.’ His throat vocaliser failed at the last word, leaving him mute for the remainder of his existence.

Xi-Nu 73 expired twenty-three seconds later as his augmetic organs powered down without hope of restarting. He would have taken no pleasure at all in the irony that his withered organs of meat strove on for half a minute more, still trying to feed life through a body that couldn’t process it.

The chamber remained still and quiet for only a short while. Booted footfalls soon drummed down the hallway, heralding the arrival of more inhumans.

The figure in crimson armour stood in the doorway, framed against the bloodstained wall behind. He waited there without moving, unable to accept what lay before his eyes.

‘Let me through,’ said Xaphen.

Argel Tal stopped him with a glare, and went inside himself.

Xi-Nu 73 lay in embryonic repose, curled foetally beside Incarnadine’s cracked and broken shell. The robot was in complete ruin, its armour riven into a hundred chopped canyons inflicted by hacking blades. The war machine’s banner-cloak and oath scrolls were likewise ravaged, reduced to shredded rags. The walls and floor had fared no better. Holes showed through the sides of the armoured chamber into adjacent rooms, and where the walls still stood whole, they were cratered by punishing bolter fire.

Argel Tal noted all of these details in the time it took to blink, and paid no heed thereafter. He knelt by Cyrene’s slack form. Blood deepened the red of her gown – the same crimson as his own armour – and painted the floor beneath her. Liquid red flecked her neck and hair. The wound was a blatant one: a great split in her chest where the sword-tip had rammed into her. One blow, a heart strike, had been enough to pierce her precious mortality.

Blood. The presence was still thick and slow, but Argel Tal’s despondent anger was rousing the daemon to wakefulness. Blood soon. Hunt.

The change was taking hold again. The daemon sensed battle, and the flesh they shared began to warp in reaction. Argel Tal breathed a bestial rumble, but the sound died in his throat when Cyrene shuddered.

She lived. How had he not seen? The faintest, barest rise of her chest betrayed the life that still beat beneath.

‘Cyrene,’ he growled, as much Raum now as Argel Tal.

‘This...’ Her voice was a child’s whisper, so breathless that it barely made a sound. ‘This was my nightmare.’ Blind eyes found his with unwavering ease. ‘To be in the dark. To hear a monster breathe.’

Claws closed around her frail form with possessive, protective strength, but the damage had long since been done. Her blood stung his fingers where it dripped onto them.

‘What have they done to you?’ Cyrene asked with a smile.

She died in his arms before he could answer.

He heard the voices, but had no reason to pay heed to them. The Other, yes, he heeded such chattering. The bleating of humanity: fleshy tongues flopping in moist mouths, and the gusting of lung-breath over meat to make a sound in the throat. Yes, the Other listened to the voices and replied in kind.

Raum did not. He barked a word of hate, drawn from the Old Tongue, hoping it would silence their nasal noises. It did not. Hngh. Ignore them. Yes.

He had sensed the need for the blood-hunt, and risen to the fore in a rush of release. The Other’s body – no, the body they shared – assumed the hunting skin with ease now.

He ran, aching with need, pained by the pursuit of prey without catching it. Humans in his way were dashed aside. Raum did not look back. He smelled them die, scenting their lifeblood and brainmeat spilling out onto walls and floors.

Frail things.

You are killing the crew.

The Other was returning? This was good. They were stronger together. The Other’s silence had been a cause for fear. As he returned, Raum felt his instincts shifting, adapting, made sharper by reason and the concept of past and future. Intellect, not mere cunning. Sentience. Better. He charged down the corridor, roaring at the humans to frighten them aside. As he passed, he did not slay them.

They are allies.

They slowed the hunt. He felt an itching reluctance to confess to his weakness of reason and forethought. We will kill no more. We are whole.

I... I am back.

Argel Tal drew in a breath, tasting the ship’s recycled air with its stale-skin tang. Like a thread to be pulled loose, he scented something snagging at the edge of his perception. His friend. Aquillon. That ozone smell of charged weapons. The oils used to maintain the golden armour.

He ran on through the hallways, moving past more corpses, ended by blades rather than claws. De Profundis was packed with the dead, with slain Euchar lining the corridors.

You were gone too long. The humans bleat and snort at us.

The vox. Argel Tal blinked at the flashing runes. ‘I am here.’

‘Where?’ Xaphen sounded as furious as Argel Tal felt. ‘The Emperor’s bastard sons have decimated half the Euchar on board. Where are you?’

‘I… I lost control. I have Aquillon’s scent now. I... Thirteenth concourse, at the port hangar deck.’ Argel Tal stormed through the great doors onto the gunship bay.

The Rising Sun’s aft thrusters flared before him, as it roared its way out through the containment field and into the void beyond.

Argel Tal’s scream echoed around the hangar.

‘Brother?’ Xaphen was shouting. ‘Brother?’

They run to hide. The prey goes to ground.

‘They flee us,’ Argel Tal raved across the general channel. ‘They’re running to the planet. Baloc! Track the Rising Sun. All batteries, track that ship and fire at will.’

‘No!’ Xaphen called. ‘Erebus wants them alive!’

‘I do not care what Erebus wants. Send them to the ground in flames.’

De Profundis came about in a ponderous arc. Along with most of the Astartes Legion fleet, it had suffered hard in the void battle, and was loath to respond to orders now. Signals and firing solutions flew between all nearby Word Bearers vessels, and seven ships let loose with their broadsides, spilling their immensely destructive firepower into space in the hopes of hitting the tiny gunship.

Less than a minute after it had blasted its way from De Profundis’s hangar bay, the Rising Sun cut through the atmosphere of Isstvan V, its hull aflame and its heat shields glowing molten orange with the stress of a spiralling, rudderless atmospheric re-entry.

The capital ship Dirge Eterna claimed the kill shot.

Argel Tal listened to the scramble of conflicting voices over the vox, and the fleetmaster’s description of the Thunderhawk falling in an uncontrolled descent, but not destroyed outright. There would come a time to dispute the Dirge Eterna’s attempt for glory, but that time was not now.

‘Gal Vorbak to the assault deck,’ he ordered. ‘Ready a drop-pod.’

The gunship lay on its side, the very picture of twisted, miserable metal.

Red shards of hull were scattered across the surrounding terrain, while one engine still valiantly coughed, wheezing smoke too oily and black to be healthy thruster emission. For almost a hundred metres behind, a furrow was carved into the soil where the Thunderhawk had come down and slid, shuddering, along the ground before ploughing headfirst into the ruins of a city wall. This eroded stone stood as warden around a long-forgotten city, home of a long-dead culture. Chunks of masonry broke off as the gunship smashed to a halt, and old stone rained onto the mangled hull plating, punctuating the abuse with a final insult.

The sky lightened over the wreckage as sunrise came to Isstvan V. An unremarkable star winked over the horizon, more white than yellow, too distant to offer much warmth. On the other side of the continent, a great funeral pyre still burned.

He breathed the cold dawn air through open jaws, tasting burning oil on the wind. His brothers, his crimson kin, hunted around and through the gunship’s wreckage, seeking any spoor. Behind them, their drop-pod still hissed and creaked as the metal strained in the aftermath of plummeting through the atmosphere.

‘They have not been down long enough to hide.’ Xaphen spoke the words as an assured threat. At his side, Malnor was a twitching, ragged creature that drooled venom. Torgal climbed the gunship like something grotesquely simian, leaping and hooking into the hull with his bone-scythes to haul himself upward. His blinded face jerked to the side as he gave canine snuffs. Argel Tal stalked around the gunship’s base, his claws folding closed into knuckly fists, then opening again into raptor talons. Like a desert jackal pack, the eleven remaining Gal Vorbak swarmed the downed Thunderhawk, sniffing out their prey. They did not need to hunt for long.

‘So, at last, comes the Crimson Lord.’ Aquillon’s voice was biting in its insincerity. ‘Revealing his true self to those he has betrayed.’

The Custodes walked from the shadow of a broken wing, their weapons held in loose hands. Each of them exuded rigid confidence. Their gait was assured, their shoulders back, their armour damaged and dented, but ostensibly whole.

The Gal Vorbak closed in. At the centre of the crimson circle, the three golden warriors went back to back. They offered the Word Bearers nothing but breastplates emblazoned with the Imperial eagle, and blades that would only ever rise in the Emperor’s service. Of the Astartes Legions, only one had ever been honoured enough to engrave the aquila upon their armour – the once-noble Emperor’s Children, now a core part of the Warmaster’s rebellion. But these were Imperial Custodians, the praetorians of the Master of Mankind, and kept their mandate far above such concerns. The Custodes wore the aquila more often than the primarchs themselves. Each eagle symbol shone on their chests in solid silver, clutching lightning bolts in their claws. Nowhere else in the Imperium were the two symbols of the Emperor’s ascension twinned like this: forged into the armour of his chosen guardians.

The hunters drew even closer. At their vanguard, Argel Tal spared a brief moment’s concern for the fact the Custodes had not fired upon them. Perhaps they lacked ammunition after the battle aboard the ship. Perhaps they wished to end this cleanly, with blades rather than bolters.

‘You killed Cyrene,’ he said, the words thickened by spite and the acidic bile stringing between his jaws.

‘I executed a traitor who had borne witness to a Legion’s sins.’ Aquillon aimed at his sword at Argel Tal’s warped visage. ‘In the name of the Emperor, what are you? You seem more nightmare than man.’

‘We are the truth,’ Xaphen barked at the trapped Custodes. ‘We are the Gal Vorbak, the chosen of the gods.’ All the while, the Word Bearers stalked closer. A noose was closing around the Custodians.

‘Look upon yourselves,’ Aquillon said in disbelief. ‘You have cast aside the Emperor’s vision of perfection. You have abandoned everything it meant to be human.’

‘We were never human!’ Hissing spit sprayed from Argel Tal’s jaws as he roared the words. ‘We. Were. Never. Human. We were taken from our families to fight the Forever War in the name of a thousand lies. Do you believe this truth is easy to bear? Look at us. Look at us! Humanity will embrace the gods, or humanity will embrace oblivion. We have seen the Imperium burn. We have seen the species brought to extinction. We have seen it happen, as it happened before. The cycle of life in a galaxy owned by laughing, thirsting gods.’

Aquillon’s voice held nothing but kindness, and that made it all the crueller. ‘My friend, my brother, you have been deceived. The Emperor–’

‘The Emperor knows far more than he has ever revealed to you,’ Xaphen cut in. ‘The Emperor knows the Primordial Truth. He has challenged the gods and damned humanity with his hubris. Only through allegiance....’

‘...through worship...’ said Malnor.

‘...through faith...’ said Torgal.

‘...will mankind endure the endless wars against the tides of blood that will drown our galaxy.’

Aquillon turned to each of the Word Bearers as they spoke their piece of the sermon. He looked back to Argel Tal at its conclusion.

‘Brother,’ he said again. ‘You have been most blackly deceived.’

‘You. Killed. Cyrene.’

‘And you count this as some unfathomable betrayal?’ Aquillon’s laughter was rich and ripe, and to hear it made Argel Tal’s teeth grind. ‘You, who stand out of the Emperor’s light, malformed into a monster. You, who binds tortured souls into the walls of your ship with forbidden lore, letting them suck in all psychic sound for forty years? You, accuse me of betrayal?’

Even through the daemon’s rage fogging his thoughts, even through his grief-born anger at Cyrene’s murder, his brother’s words struck with enough force to wound. Argel Tal had walked through that chamber himself many times, and no matter how ardently he hated the necessity of it, he had still allowed its existence.

Images assailed him with guilty stabs, each memory knifing into him before he could cast it aside. Xaphen, chanting from the Book of Lorgar, as an astropath shrieked before him. She was being disembowelled, and not quickly, her pain serving as a focus while she was chained to the chamber walls. Colchisian symbols that had been tattooed onto her flesh an hour before still bled freely. The vitae engines, maintained by an Apothecary of the Legion, would keep her alive for many months to come. The daemon Xaphen summoned within her would enslave her mind to that most simple of tasks: to draw in and digest any psychic communication from nearby minds.

No word would ever reach Terra, but for the falsified reports the Word Bearers made themselves. Compliances achieved. The perfect Legion. Lorgar, the Seventeenth Son, as loyal as any father could hope.

‘I accuse you,’ Xaphen laughed himself, ‘of being a fool. Your precious astropath has been wailing your suspicions right into the mouths of listening daemons for four decades. Every time you huddled around him and heard the Emperor’s words, you were hearing nothing more than the lies I whispered into a daemon’s ears.’

Argel Tal did not add to Xaphen’s relish. The chamber was no source of sinister pride for him. He had condemned not one woman to die in agony there, but sixty-one souls in all. The strain of possession wore the astropaths down with disgusting rapidity. Their degradation was quick, but never merciful. Stinking black cancers ate through their bodies after only a few months. Most faded fast, their minds eroded by the warp’s winds like a cliff suffering in an endless storm. Few ever lasted a year – soon enough, it was always time to bind another helpless, screaming astropath into the life support engines, and inflict horrors upon their flesh with ritual blades and burning brands.

He considered it part of his penance to watch each binding. Each time, he would wait for the moment when the captive’s eyes would glaze, not in death, but in surrender. Each time he would watch for that precious second when the daemon’s consciousness devoured its way to the fore of the victim’s mind. The screaming would cease. Silence would resume, blessed in the wake of such sounds.

Nineteen had volunteered. Nineteen members of the fleet’s astropathic choir, nourished by years of Xaphen’s sermons, had volunteered for the honour of keeping the Legion’s greatest secrets. Curiously, these burned out the fastest, succumbing to biological erosion before those who were unwillingly bound. It seemed suffering was a source of strength in the ritual – Xaphen had noted it, and informed Erebus. He received thanks in return, and the rite was amended in the Book of Lorgar. Xaphen had blazed with pride for weeks afterward.

The Custodes had found the chamber at the heart of the monastic deck, but someone, somewhere, somehow, had found it first. Aquillon had been led there. Of that, Argel Tal was certain. He vowed in silence then. Whoever that treasonous soul might be, he would pull it apart and feast upon its flesh.

‘We were never human.’ He said the words quietly, not even realising he spoke them aloud. Raum seized hold in the moment of melancholic anger, and the body they shared broke forward into a run.

‘For the Emperor!’ Aquillon cried.

The Gal Vorbak answered with the laughter of daemons.

In the years to come, Argel Tal recalled precious little of the battle. Sometimes he attributed this to Raum’s presence in ascendancy, sometimes he attributed it to his own guilt seeking to purge the night from his mind. Whatever the truth, any reminiscence left him hollow and worn, at the mercy of fragmented images and half-remembered sounds.

It was like thinking back to the moments of earliest childhood, before genetics had shaped his mind with an eidetic memory, when it was a struggle to fill a forgotten time with all five senses and make them feel real.

We were never human. He never forgot those words, nor how they were both true and false, all at once.

Malnor.

Malnor sometimes rose from the churning mess and resolved with clarity. When had Malnor died? How long had they been fighting? He wasn’t sure. Nirallus’s blade had hewn the Gal Vorbak’s head clean from his shoulders, but Malnor did not fall. A wraithly image of his helm remained, snarling and shouting in silence. Nirallus, a blade master beyond anything Argel Tal had ever seen, had been forced to carve Malnor to pieces to put the warrior down for good.

The fight was too frantic and frenetic for sanity to have any place in its motions. Thought and formality vanished, replaced by training and instinct. A blur of blades and claws. The crack of ceramite. The grunts of pain. The smells of spit, of acid, of sweat, of parchment, of bone, of panic, of confidence, of smoky bolter muzzles, of charged blades, of tear-salt, of breath, of blood, and blood, and blood.

And then, the first kill.

Nirallus. The blade master. He killed Malnor, and that left him vulnerable. Torgal and Sicar had leapt onto the Custodian’s back. Chop, chop, chop went the hacking blades, biting into armour joints at the back of the neck and the base of the spine. A life for a life.

Nirallus fell. Torgal leaped away, to safety. Sicar stayed to feed, and earned death himself. Aquillon. The Occuli Imperator. He avenged his brother’s slaughter by ending Sicar a heartbeat later with clean, bright sweeps of his sword.

Argel Tal was on him in that moment. He remembered the leap, and the soreness in his throat as he roared once more. He remembered the juicy, meaty crunch as the Custodian’s head ripped free of its neck. Like a flopping serpent, Aquillon’s spine hung down from the dripping helm. A dizzying stench of blood; a maddened laugh that may or may not have been Argel Tal at all. He never knew for certain.

Six of the Gal Vorbak still drew breath. Six possessed warriors gave their desert dog cackles and ran for the last Custodes with daemonic vigour burning in their limbs.

And this was the last moment Argel Tal could ever recall, until the air was cold again and it was all over. Sythran pulled his helm free, and faced them bareheaded. Instead of waiting with his halberd in hand, he hurled it as a spear.

The Gal Vorbak scattered, but it still struck home. One of them took the blade in the chest with a crack like a falling tree. The spear pounded through ceramite, bone and meat with enough force to burst from the Word Bearer’s back. The Astartes flipped over with the impact, his chest cavity stripped hollow, his lungs and two hearts blasted out of him, reduced to pulped meat on the ground.

Sythran had smiled as the other five descended upon him. He considered his vow of silence complete given the circumstances, and he laughed at the warrior he’d killed.

‘I always hated you, Xaphen.’

VI

Valediction

It is so very like you, to think of one soul’s safety while an entire world burns beneath your feet. I reassured you that you were wrong to worry; that all would be well, as it always is.

Now the sirens wail and the corridors echo with gunshots. The precaution you ordered as a comfort is now a last hope of defence, and I am not a fool – I know they will not be able to protect me against what is coming.

I write these words as quickly as I can, hearing the crashing of blades getting closer with each moment. I could try to hide, but I won’t. The answer is obvious: they will find me no matter where I am, and I cannot outrun such enemies. They will find me if I cower in the cargo holds, or sit comfortably in my own chamber. The secrets I hold mean they have no choice but to come for me, and though you have left these breathless guardians, I am under no illusions. They will come and they will find me. When I die, I will die without betraying my Legion. I promise you that.

My life has been long, and I have no regrets. Few can say such a thing, and even fewer can do so with sincerity. Even you cannot make that claim, Argel Tal.

When you read these words, please know I wish you all the fortune in the world. I have heard the way you speak of Calth and the wars to come, and I trust in your vision and passion for the righteous crusade our Legion will lead. You will bring enlightenment to the galaxy. I have faith in that, never doubting it for a single moment.

Stand with Xaphen, as he stands by you. You are the sons of a demigod, and the chosen avatars of the true deities. No one can take that from you.

I hear blades against my door please remember th

Epilogue

The Crimson Lord

Calth.

A bountiful, beautiful world, a world under the aegis of the XIII Legion, as Khur had once been claimed by the XVII.

Calth. A name on the lips of every Word Bearer. Calth, where Guilliman’s Legion gathered for war.

Lorgar’s Legion sailed almost in its entirety. Enough warships to blockade the beloved kingdom of Ultramar, and burn the face of every world black. Enough warriors to drive the Ultramarines to their knees. Isstvan had been forced into history at the point of a traitor’s sword. Soon there would come another massacre to fit into Imperial archives alongside it.

Calth.

Argel Tal remained alone for now. He had no patience for the cries of praise his brethren kept offering in his presence. He had no desire for their regard or worship.

Instead, he sealed himself away from his own Legion, kept company only by the regrets he’d accrued over half a century of treachery.

Across his lap lay a golden blade of exquisite manufacture, etched and engraved for the hand of a master swordsman, gene-coded to activate only for the man it was made for. It was the weapon of one he had called brother, taken from Aquillon’s body in the light of an unforgettable sunrise.

In his hands was a digital data-slate, sized for human fingers. A cursor blinked halfway down the screen, waiting for words that would never be entered. An unfinished sentence ended the text. Argel Tal had read it more times than he cared to recall, each time hoping that he’d see the intent, the meaning, that never made it onto the page.

The ship shivered as it sailed through the underworld of human myth. They would reach Calth soon.

Aquillon. Xaphen. His brothers were gone.

Argel Tal put the sword aside, and left the data-slate on the modest table by his pallet. He rose to his feet, knowing it would soon be time to end this isolation. The Legion called. The Legion needed him. The primarch himself had asked if he would to stand with Kor Phaeron, leading the assault on Calth.

He would obey, even if he stood alone.

My brothers are dead.

No, the voice rose from within. I am your brother.

Acknowledgements

I owe some gushing thanks to a fizzy six-pack of people: Rob, for knowing when to ignore me; Mark Newton, for the discussions on selling-out; the Abnetts, for the advice about kicking in doors and the subsequent prisoner policy; and my editors Nick and Christian, for their judicious cutting of slack.

A statelier thanks goes to Alan Merrett, Dan, Graham and Jim for making room for the new guy without too much teasing.

It is a time of legend.

Mighty heroes battle for the right to rule the galaxy.

The vast armies of the Emperor of Earth have conquered the galaxy in a Great Crusade – the myriad alien races have been smashed by the Emperor’s elite warriors and wiped from the face of history.

The dawn of a new age of supremacy for humanity beckons.

Gleaming citadels of marble and gold celebrate the many victories of the Emperor. Triumphs are raised on a million worlds to record the epic deeds of his most powerful and deadly warriors.

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

Organised into vast armies of tens of thousands called Legions, the Space Marines and their primarch leaders conquer the galaxy in the name of the Emperor.

Chief amongst the primarchs is Horus, called the Glorious, the Brightest Star, favourite of the Emperor, and like a son unto him. He is the Warmaster, the commander-in-chief of the Emperor’s military might, subjugator of a thousand thousand worlds and conqueror of the galaxy. He is a warrior without peer, a diplomat supreme.

As the flames of war spread through the Imperium, mankind’s champions will all be put to the ultimate test.

~ Dramatis Personae ~

Primarchs

Russ, The Wolf King

Magnus, The Crimson King

The Rout

Onn

Gunnar Gunnhilt, Called Lord Gunn, jarl

Tra

Ogvai Ogvai Helmschrot, Jarl

Ulvurul Heoroth, Called Longfang, Rune Priest

Bear

Aeska, Called Brokenlip

Godsmote

Galeg

Aun Helwintr

Orcir

Jormungndr, Called Two-blade

Ullste

Erthung Redhand

Oje

Svessl

Emrah

Horune

Najot Threader, Wolf Priest

Fyf

Amlodhi Skarssen Skarssensson, Jarl
Varangr, Herald to Lord Skarssensson

Ohthere Wyrdmake, Rune Priest

Trunc

Bitur Bercaw

Imperial Personae

Giro Emantine, Prefect-secretary to the Unification Council

Kasper Hawser, Conservator, also known as Ahmad Ibn Rustah

Navid Murza, Conservator

Non-Imperial Personae

Fith of the Ascommani

Guthox of the Ascommani

Brom of the Ascommani

Lern of the Ascommani

In the Past

Rector Uwe

‘If I am guilty of anything, it is the simple pursuit of knowledge.’

– the Primarch Magnus, at Nikaea

‘Take but degree away, untune that string,
And, hark! what discord follows; each thing meets
In mere oppugnancy: the bounded waters
Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores
And make a sop of all this solid globe:
Strength should become the lord of imbecility,
And the rude son should strike his father dead:
Force should be right; or rather right and wrong
(Between whose endless jar justice resides)
Should lose their names, and so should justice too.
Then every thing, includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite.
And appetite, a universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce a universal prey, and last eat up himself.’

– attributed to the dramaturge Shakespire (fl. M2),
cited in The Prophecy of Amon of the Thousand Sons
(chp III, verse 230)

‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’

– unattributable (circa M2)

One

At the turning of Spring

Death had them surrounded.

It had come to cut threads, and today it wore four faces.

A burning death for those too hurt or too afraid to flee the settlement as the firestorm swept through it. A freezing death for those who ran away up the scarp to escape the murder-make. Even in spring, the wind came in off the ice flats with a death-edge that sucked an exposed man’s life-heat out through his lungs, and rotted his hands and feet into black twigs, and left him as a stiff, stone-hard bundle covered in rime.

For others, a drowning death, if they attempted to flee across the blue-ice around the spit. Spring’s touch was already working the sea ice loose against the shore, like a tooth in a gum. The ice would no longer take a man’s weight, not reliably. If the ice broke under you, down you went: fast and straight if you plunged through, slow and screaming if an ice plate tipped and slid you in. Either way, the water was oil black, and so cold it would freeze the thoughts in your brain before your lungs were even empty.

For the rest, for those who had remained to fight, a bloody death, the death of the murder-make. This was the death that knocked you down hard onto the ice with an axe or a maul, so you felt nothing except the cold burn of the ice, and the hot burn of your own blood, and the pain-scream of your crippling wound. This was the death that stood over you and knocked you again, and again, and as many times as necessary until you would not rise again, or until you were so disfigured that death could no longer bear to look at you, and moved off in disgust to find another soul to knock.

Any of those four faces would cut your thread as soon as look at you. And those were the faces the Balt were wearing.

The Balt. The Balt had brought the murder-make down on the Ascommani aett. Twenty boat. It was early in the season for a raid. A man had to be desperate to go out making red snow when he could wait for the first grasses and milder weather.

Twenty boat, and all of them still rigged for ice-running under their sea-sails.

If there had been time, the Ascomani might have wondered why their doom had come so early. Ironland, where the Balt had settled, had persisted twenty great years, but many now said its roots were soft. Many now said it would only be one more summer, two at the most, before the ocean sucked it down again into the world-forge.

Ascomani land ran from the spithead to the ice shelf, and was poor for farming and lacked natural defences, but it was yet just one great year old, and the dowsers had proclaimed it strong land, with many years left in it.

So land-thirst. Perhaps it was that.

Fith knew better. Nothing got the murder-urge pumping like fear, and nothing stoked up fear like a bad omen. A broom star. A day star. Colour in the ice. Bloom in the sea. Smoke out on the ice shelf where no settlement was. Some dead thing washed up that should not be. Something born to livestock or to a woman that should not be. Something with birth defects.

Sometimes a bad dream would be enough to do it, a bad dream that told you the tribe down the coast or around the headland was maleficarum. You let land-thirst be your excuse as you reached for your shirt and your blade, but you made sure the gothi marked your face in soot-glue with good cast-out marks like the sun-disk and the warding eye before you opened out your sails.

And there had been a bad omen, all right. Fith had seen it.

Fith had seen the make coming too. He’d seen the sails approaching along the in-shore early enough to blow the scream-horn, but too late for it to do any good. He had merely enabled his kinfolk to die awake.

The Balt main force had come up around the spit in their wyrmboats in the sightless pre-dawn grey, sailing black sails straight out of the water and onto the shore-ice on their rigs, translating from water-craft to ice-craft with barely a jolt. Their skirmishers had put ashore on the far side of the headland, and come romping in over the high back of the snow dunes to fall on the Ascommani settlement from the hind side.

After that, it had been fire and knocking. The Balt were mongrel-big, men with long faces and beards waxed into sun rays under their spectacle-face helms. They were horribly able with axe and maul, and the occasional high-status sword that some carried.

But they brought with them none of the screaming vigour of a normal Balt raid or murder-make. They were silent, terrified of what they had come to kill, terrified of its sky magic. They were silent and grim, and set to murder everything to wipe the magic away. Men, women, the young, livestock, nothing was spared a knock. There was not a shred of mercy. There was not a moment’s thought to claim prisoners or take slaves. Ascommani girls were famously fine-looking, and there were plenty of healthy girl-children too, who would make valuable breeding slaves in time, but the Balt had put away all appetites except for a fierce desire to be cleansed of fear.

The sound of an axe knocking-in is a wet smack of slicing meat and shattering bone, like sapwood being cut. A maul makes a fat, bruising sound like a mattock driving pegs into marsh loam or wet ice. Worse than both are the after-sounds. The screaming of the agonised, the ruined and the dying. The begging shrieks of the hurt and maimed. The hacking impacts of death knocking until the fallen stop being alive, or stop trying to rise, or stop screaming, or stop being in once piece.

Fith had just enough time to get his shirt on and loft his axe. Several other hersirs fell to arms with him, and they met the first skirmishers coming in through the walls and window-slits of the settlement head on. The panic was up already. It was blind blundering in the dark, a reek of urine, the first noseful of smoke.

Fith’s axe was balanced for a single hand. It was a piece of proper craft, with a high-carbon head that weighed as much as a decent newborn boy. From the toe of the blade to the heel of the beard, it had a smile on it wider than a man’s hand-span, and it had kissed a whetstone just the night before.

The axe is a simple machine, a lever that multiplies the force from your arm into the force delivered by the blade. The rudiments apply whether you’re splitting wood or men.

Fith’s axe was a bone-cutter, a shield-breaker, a helm-cleaver, a death-edge, a cutter of threads. He was a hersir of the Ascommani aett, and he knew how to stand his ground.

It was a throttle-fight in the settlement itself. Fith knocked two Balts back out of the tent wall, but the tight confines were choking his swing. He knew he needed to get out. He yelled to the hersirs with him and they pulled back.

They got out of the tents into the settlement yard, wrapped in swirling black smoke, and went eye to eye with the Balts in their spectacle-helms. It was mayhem. A free-for-all. Blades swung like windmills in a storm.

Fenk went down as a Balt axe split his left calf lengthwise. He bawled in rage as his leg gave out, useless. Seconds later, a maul knocked his head sidelong, snapping his neck and his thread. He flopped down on the earth, his shattered skull-bag leaking blood.

Fith drove off a Balt with a mattock, scared him back with the whistling circles of his swinging axe.

Ghejj tried to cover Fith’s flank, using the basics of shield-wall tactics. But Ghejj had not had time to collect a decent shield from the stack, just a tattered practice square from the training field. A Balt spear punctured him right through, and tore him open so thoroughly, his guts spilled out onto the snow like ropes of sausage. Ghejj tried to catch them, as though he could gather them up and put them back inside himself and everything would be all right again. They steamed in the spring air. He squealed in dismayed pain. He couldn’t help himself. He knew he was ruined unto death.

He looked at Fith as he squealed again. It wasn’t the pain. He was so angry that he was irreparably dead.

Fith put mercy into his stroke.

Fith turned away from his last picture of Ghejj and saw that there were fingers scattered on the snow, on the snow that had been churned up by scrambling and sliding feet, along with blood by the bowl-full. They were the fingers of women and children, from hands held up to protect themselves. Defensive wounds.

There on the snow, a complete hand, the tiny hand of a child, perfect and whole. Fith recognised the mark on the ring. He knew the child the hand had once belonged to. He knew the father the child had once belonged to.

Fith felt the red smoke blow up in his head.

A Balt came at him, silent and intent. Fith flexed the lever of his axe, hooked it in, and made a ravine of the Balt’s face.

Four hersirs left. Fith, Guthox, Lern and Brom. No sign of the aett-chief. The chief was probably dead and face down in the red snow with his huscarls.

Fith could smell blood. It was overpoweringly strong, a hot copper reek spicing the freezing dawn air. He could smell Ghejj’s insides too. He could smell the inner parts of him, the ruptured stomach, the yellow fat of his belly meat, the heat of his life.

Fith knew it was time to go.

The Upplander was in the furthest shelter. Even the Ascommani knew to keep him away from people.

The Upplander was propped up against cushions.

‘Listen to me,’ Fith hissed. ‘Do you understand me?’

‘I understand you. My translator is working,’ the Upplander replied, looking pale.

‘The Balt are here. Twenty boat. They will knock you dead. Tell me, do you want the mercy of my axe now?’

‘No, I want to live.’

‘Then can you walk?’

‘Perhaps,’ the Upplander replied. ‘Just don’t leave me here. I am afraid of wolves.’

There are no wolves on Fenris.

When the Upplander had been told this, years before, he’d laughed.

He had heard it from a venerated scholar and conservator, later celebrated iterator, called Kyril Sindermann. The Upplander, not long graduated with distinction from the Universitariate of Sardis, had won a coveted place on an eight-month field mission to audit and preserve some of the arcane datacores of NeoAleksandrya, before sandstorms and scorching radiation squalls erased the precious ruins into the melancholy emptiness of the Nordafrik zone forever. This was many decades before the Upplander decided to go to Fenris, or call himself Ahmad Ibn Rustah. Back then he was twenty-five years old, and known to his friends as Kasper.

Sindermann learned his name early on. Sindermann wasn’t the project head. He had been sent in for a three-week consult, but he was not afraid to get his hands dirty or to mix with the junior team members. He had an easy way with people. Names were important.

One evening, the team had fallen, according to their habit, into discussion over supper in the project’s base, a modular station overlooking the library ruins.

They were all exhausted. Everyone had been working inadvisably long shifts to get the mission accomplished. No one wanted to see the precious digital memories that lingered in the ruins lost for all time.

So, everybody was sand-burned, and everybody was sleep deprived, and everybody had lost significant body mass to water debt. The nights should have been time for restorative rest, but they had found their dreams populated by the data-ghosts of NeoAleksandrya, talkative phantoms that would not let the living slumber undisturbed. So they stayed up to keep the phantoms out, and the nights became time for tired companionship and reflection as the ablative winds howled in over the radgrave of NeoAleksandrya and assaulted the station’s bolted storm shutters.

They talked about everything, just to stay awake. Sindermann, perhaps the greatest polymath the Upplander would ever have the honour of knowing in his long life, had a tireless tongue.

The older team members talked about the various places they had visited in the courses of their careers, and the younger members talked of places they still wanted or hoped to visit. This led, inevitably, to the concoction of an ultimate wish list, a dream itinerary of the places in creation that any scholar, historian or remembrancer would give great wealth or a body part just to glimpse. It was a list of the universe’s secret places, its remote wonders, its enigmatic corners, its rumoured sites and mythical locales. Fenris was one such. Ironically, given what the Upplander would witness towards the end of one of his lives, Tizca was another.

Sindermann, though even then a man of great age and experience, had not been to Fenris himself. The number of outsiders who had ever gone to Fenris was alarmingly small. But then, as Sindermann put it, Fenris did not welcome visitors, nor was it a gracious host. Thanks to its extreme conditions, even a well prepared man might be lucky to survive a few hours on its open surface.

‘Still,’ he had said to them, ‘think of all that ice.’

It had sometimes reached forty degrees in the station at night, at least that when the climate control centre packed up. They had all groaned at Sindermann’s tormenting words.

Then, apropos of nothing in particular, Sindermann made the remark about the wolves, a remark that had been passed to him down such a long relay of other travellers and historians, its provenance was obscure.

‘There are no wolves on Fenris,’ he had said.

The Upplander had smiled, expecting some droll witticism to follow. His smile had covered the shiver he had felt.

‘Except, of course… for the wolves, ser?’ he had replied.

‘Exactly, Kasper,’ the old man said.

Shortly afterwards, the subject had changed, and the remark had been forgotten.

Fith didn’t much want to touch the Upplander, but he wasn’t going to walk far without an arm around his ribs. He hoisted the man up, and the Upplander groaned at the jolt.

‘What are you doing?’ Brom yelled. ‘Leave him!’

Fith scowled. Brom knew better than that. It wasn’t that Fith wanted to drag the Upplander around, but that was the thing with omens. You didn’t invite them into your aett, but once they were in, you couldn’t ignore them.

Fith could no more leave the Upplander lying there than the Balt could have refused to set out on the murder-make that midnight.

Lern stepped up and helped Fith handle the injured man. The shelters of the aett were ablaze, and choking the pale dawn sky with fat rivers of black smoke. The Balt hadn’t finished cutting threads. Sharp screams of anguish and pain split the air like arrows.

They ran along the edge of the scarp, stumbling with the burden of the injured man. Guthox and Brom followed them, snow-running with wide, splayed steps. Brom had got a spear from somewhere. A gang of Balt took off after them, chasing like hunting dogs across the snow, hunched and loping.

Guthox and Brom turned to meet them. Guthox’s axe knocked the first one onto his back, and a jet of blood squirted out in a five-metre arc across the snow. Brom’s spear-tip found the cheek of another Balt, and tore it like cloth, digging out teeth that popped free like kernels of corn. Brom clubbed his victim dead with the butt of his spear-shaft as the man fell down holding his face.

The Balt circled and danced away from Brom’s jabbing spear. Fith left Lern with the Upplander’s weight and turned back. He came past Brom in a screaming charge, and lopped off the top of a Balt’s skull with his circling axe. That shook things up. Spear or no spear, the Balt went for them. They tried to use their shields to get the spear out of their faces. One of them immediately took the spear in the breastbone. It made a dry-branch crack as the iron head went in, and the man puked blood. But the spear was wedged, and the Balt’s dead weight wrenched it out of Brom’s hands. He scrambled back with nothing but a long knife to guard himself.

Guthox used his axe to break a shield, and the arm holding it, then felled the Balt with a neck wound. He turned to fend off a bearded Balt axe with the cheek of his own, but the Balt was big and strong, and drove Guthox onto his heels with a series of relentless knocks.

Fith still had momentum. His charge ran down two more Balt, one of which he left bleeding to death, the other dazed, and he turned in time to rescue Guthox by burying the toe-point of his axe through the spine of the big Balt hacking at him.

Fith jerked the axe out with a snarl, and the Balt collapsed on his face. Brom was finishing another with angry, repeated stabs. The Balt had wounded Brom on his first pass, but had then made the mistake of getting too close to the hersir’s long knife.

They ran back to where Lern was toiling with the Upplander. Brom had recovered his spear, but he was leaving red snow behind him.

The Upplander was panting with effort. Heat was steaming out of his loose, gasping mouth. Under his storm cloak, the Upplander wore garments made from fabrics unfamiliar to Fith or his kinsmen. The sky-fall had hurt the Upplander, broken some bones was Fith’s guess, though Fith had never seen an Upplander opened up to know if they worked the same way inside as Ascommani, or Balt, or any other aettkind.

Fith had never seen an Upplander before. He’d never been tied up in an omen this bad. He wondered what had become of the aett’s gothi. The gothi was supposed to be wise, and he was supposed to use that wisdom to steer and safeguard the wyrd of the aett.

Fine job he’d done. The gothi had not known what to make of the Upplander when the hersirs had first brought him in from the crash site, and he hadn’t known what to do after that, except shake his bone jangles and his rattle full of fish teeth, and beseech the spirits with the same old tired chants, pleading with them to come down from Uppland and take back their lost kinsman.

Fith believed in the spirits. He firmly believed. He believed in Uppland above where the spirits lived, and the Underverse below, where the wights went. They were the only thing a man had to cling to in the changing landscape of the mortal world. But he was also a pragmatist. He knew there were times, especially when a man’s thread was pulled so thin it might snap, that you had to make your own wyrd.

Three bow shots away from the aett, the Ascommani kept a basin for their boats. It was a little ice crater open to the sea on the north head, and they had better than ten boat in it. Most were up on blocks, hoisted from the ice, so the men could labour in daylight hours to remove the rigs ready for the spring waters. But one was the aett-chief’s boat, ready to run at a moment’s nod. It was called ‘keeping it nocked’. You nocked the cleft of an arrow against a bowstring ready for tension, ready to fly. The chief’s wyrmboat stood on its runners on the hard ice, its sails ready to drop and fill, checked only by the anchor lines.

‘Into the boat!’ Fith ordered as they scrambled down the slope to the basin edge.

‘Which boat?’ asked Lern.

‘The chief’s boat!’ Fith snapped.

‘But it’s the chief’s boat…’ Guthox said, wary.

‘He’s not going to be needing it,’ said Fith. ‘Not as much as we do, anyway.’

Guthox looked at him blankly.

‘The chief’s sleeping on the red snow, you arsehole,’ said Fith. ‘Now get in the boat.’

They got into the boat, and laid the Upplander down in the bow. The Balt began to appear at the crest of the slope. The hersirs heard the air-buzz of the first arrows.

Fith dropped the sea sails, and they filled in an instant. The canvas cracked like thunder as it took the world’s breath. There was a hard snow-wind that morning, and he’d barely noticed it. The anchor lines creaked and strained as the wyrmboat mithered on the ice, impatient to slip.

‘Cut the lines!’ Fith yelled out.

Guthox looked at him from the stern, where the wind-pull was chaffing the taut lines against the rail.

‘He’s really not coming?’ he asked.

‘Who?’

‘The chief. You saw his thread cut?’

‘He’d be here if he was coming,’ said Fith.

They heard cracking sounds like green wood spitting in a fire. The iron heads of arrows were smacking into the ice around them, drilling up puffs of ice dust or cracking punctures into the blue-black glass of the crust. Two arrows hit the boat. One went into the main mast as deep as the length of a man’s forearm.

‘Cut the lines!’ Fith yelled.

Guthox and Lern cut the lines with their axes. The wyrmboat took off like an escaping animal, its sails bellied out full and as rigid as iron. The lurch shook them on their feet. The bladed runners of the ice rig shrieked as they scratched across the marble ice of the basin.

Lern took the helm. He was the best steersman of them. He draped his armpit over the tiller, loading it with his weight to drive the blade of the sternpost rudder into the ice, and balanced the tension of the ropes coming from the quarter rudders, one in each fist. Steering a rigger was a battle of muscle and wit. One bad judgement, one over-light feathering of the quarters, one heavy-handed dig of the main blade, and the combination of polished ice and raw wind shear could tumble even the biggest wyrmboat, and knock it into kindling.

They left the basin. They went through the sea-cut in the granite lip that let out onto the open water. But it wasn’t water. It was long past the great year’s glacial maximum, and time was turning, but this stretch of sea along the shadowed inlet remained the sky’s looking glass. In some places it was grey-green like an old mirror, in others blue like uncut sapphire, in others bright and clear like fine crystal, but everywhere it was thick to a depth two or three times the height of a man.

As soon as they were clear of the basin, and the boat’s runners were shrieking across the surface of the mirror sea like the baleful voices of the wights of the Underverse, the cold hit them. It was the open cold, the cold of the dull, iron-hard end of winter, the blunt cold of the open ice range. All of them gasped at the shock of it, and immediately laced up their collars or wrapped up scarf bindings to protect their mouths and noses.

Fith looked at the Upplander sprawled in the bow. He was panting from a combination of pain and exertion, and the breath heat was steaming out of him in great spectral clouds that the wind was stripping away.

Fith moved down the vibrating wyrmboat towards him, walking with the practised, rolling gait of an experienced ice-mariner.

‘Cover up your mouth!’ he shouted.

The Upplander looked up at him blankly.

‘Cover up your mouth! Breathe through your nose!’

‘What?’

Fith knelt down beside him.

‘The heat’ll bleed right out of you, with your mouth open like that. Breathe through your nose. Conserve it.’

He opened one of the woven-grass coffers tucked in under the boat’s rail, and pulled out a blanket and some furs. They were all stiff with cold, but he shook them out and swaddled the Upplander in them.

‘Through your nose,’ he reminded. ‘Don’t you know that? Don’t you know the cold?’

‘No.’

‘Then why the hell would you come to this land, if you didn’t know all the ways it would try to kill you?’

The Upplander had no answer. He couldn’t summon the effort. Renewed pain was gripping him, and it was extraordinarily comprehensive. It pinned his thoughts, and refused to allow him even a small reserve of mental power to use for other things. He’d never known pain like it, except perhaps once.

He could hear a clavier playing. The keys were ringing out a cheerful music hall melody that he could just pick out above the screaming of the runners and the roaring of the brutish crew.

He could hear a clavier playing, and he knew he ought to know why.

The Balt came after them. Lern shouted out as soon as he spotted them, and pointed astern. Wyrmboats were skating out from around the spithead. They were black-sail boats, rigged for a murder-make by night. The Balt were resolved to see the make through to its bloody end. Fith had hoped the Balt might give up once the main raid on the aett was over.

But no. The Balt had to be terrified to keep up the pursuit. They weren’t going to rest until everyone was dead.

What had their gothi told them, Fith wondered? What interpretation had he spouted that night when the broom star had sliced the sky, a ribbon of light that had left an accusatory glowing scar directly over Ascommani territory. How had he explained the land fall, the noise-shock of the star hitting ice?

What had he told his wide-eyed hersirs, his chief, the Balt womenfolk, the children woken up and crying because of the noise?

Fith had seen the Balt gothi once, three great years back, at a time when the Balt and the Ascommani had been on trading terms, when they could visit aett to aett for a barter-make with cargoes of pelts and grass-weave and smoked meat, and exchange them for preserved herbs, lamp-oil, whale-fat candles and ingots of pig iron.

There had been a formal meeting of the chiefs, with an exchange of gifts, a lot of bowing, a lot of long-winded rehearsal of lineage and bloodline from the skjalds, and a lot of blowing of the Balt’s bronze horns, which made a sound half like a sea-cave echo and half like a muffled fart.

The Balt gothi had been skinny, ‘taller than a warbow and twice as thin’ as the saying went, with a heavy jaw like that of a mule-horse or a simpleton. There were so many metal piercings in his lips and nose and ears, he looked as if he had been plagued with boils and cold sores.

He had a wand made of a bear’s arm blade, and a silver torc. Someone had braided seabird feathers into his long, lank hair, so that they made a white mantle around his bony shoulders. His voice was thin and reedy.

His name was Hunur.

He spoke sense, though. During the barter-make, Fith had come to the gothi’s shelter, joined the listeners sharing the fire, and listened to him talk. The Balt gothi knew how the world worked. He talked plainly about the Verse and the Underverse, as if he had been told their secrets by the wights themselves.

The Ascommani gothi was a crazy brute. He had fits, and he smelled like a sea-cow, both of which factors had probably led to his election as gothi. He was good with stars, Fith had to give him that. It was as if he could hear the noise their rigs made as they skated around the glass of the sky. But the rest of the time he was foul-tempered and raving.

His name was Iolo.

At the barter-make, Iolo and Hunur had squared up to one another, sniffed and growled like rutting bull seals, and then spent the whole time trying to steal one another’s secrets.

But it had also been as if they were afraid of one another. It was as if, in trying to steal one another’s secrets, they were afraid that they were risking infection.

That was how it went with magic. Magic had an underside. Magic could transform a man’s life, but it could corrupt it too, especially if you weren’t careful, if you didn’t watch it and soothe it and keep it sweet. Magic had a nasty undercurrent that could infect a man if he wasn’t paying attention.

Magic could turn nasty. Magic could turn on you, even if you were the most exact and painstaking practitioner or gothi.

The worst magic of all, that was sky magic, and it was sky magic that was riding in the bow of their wyrmboat.

Fith wondered what the Balt gothi had said to his people to get them so fired up.

Lern swung them west, down the mirror-throat of the inlet, under the shadows of the spithead cliffs and out onto the ice field, the apron of the great glacier.

Ice was better than water; the same area of sail could invest you with ten times the speed. But the effort was mighty. Fith knew they’d have to change steersman in another hour, or stop to let Lern rest, because the concentration was so intense. Already, Lern’s eyes looked drawn, what Fith could see of them over the lip of his collar.

They cut up across a long strayke of ice field the colour of grey fish-scales, and passed through the collar ridges where glacial moraines of broken rock pushed up through the ice of the glass like extrusions of deformed bone.

The Balt boats were steadily falling behind. A good Balt boat was one thing, axe-carved from ocean-wood and whale bones, but a good Ascommani boat was quite another, especially a fine rig built for an aett’s chief.

They might live yet.

It was a fragile thought, and Fith hated himself for even thinking it and thus jinxing it. But it was real. They might yet outrun the Balts’ murder-make and find sanctuary.

The Hradcana, they were the best hope. The Hradcana were a major power in the west, with several aetts along the jagged backbone of the ice field, less than a day away. More important, a peace-make understanding had endured between the Hradcana and the Ascommani for the lifetimes of the last six chiefs. Most important of all, the Hradcana and the Balt had quarrelled and made red snow on and off for ten generations.

When Guthox saw the first Hradcana sails ahead, Fith’s spirit lifted. Some beacon look-out had seen them raking in across the ice field and sent a horn-blast down the chain, and the Hradcana chief had ordered out his wyrmboats to greet and assist the Ascommani visitor.

Then he realised, with a sinking feeling, that the explanation didn’t fit the facts.

‘We’re too far out,’ he murmured.

‘What?’ Brom asked. He was trying to sew his cut up with fishing wire and a bone needle. The work was too fussy for gloves, but the windchill was too severe for bare hands to function with any finesse. He was making a mess of himself.

‘We’re too far out for any Hradcana lookout to have spotted us yet,’ Fith said. ‘They’re coming out because they knew we were coming.’

‘Crap!’ Brom snorted.

Fith looked at the sails of the Hradcana boats. Sails were the most distance-visible aspect of a boat, so they were often used to declare intention. A straw-yellow sail invited trade and barter. A purple sail indicated aett-mourning, the cut thread of a chief or a queen. A white sail, like the one dragging Fith’s wyrmboat, proclaimed open approach and embassy. A black sail, like the ones the Balt had come in under, was a treacherous sail, because it hid its declaration in the night, and thus defied the convention.

A red sail was an open announcement of the intention to murder.

The Hradcana sails were red.

Fith settled down in the rattling bow of the wyrmboat beside the Upplander.

‘What are you?’ he asked.

‘What?’

‘What have you done? Why have you brought this on us?’

‘I did nothing.’

Fith shook his head. ‘Red sails. Red sails. Gothi has spoken to gothi through the Underverse. The Balt came at us, now the Hradcana come at us too. Who else? Have you turned the whole Verse against us, or just against you?’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ the Upplander said.

‘Did you make it your destiny to die here?’ asked Fith.

‘No!’

‘Well,’ the hersir replied, ‘you certainly seem to have put some effort into making it happen.’

It was an exalted place.

Even on that pestilential day, with the tail-end of the six-week campaign to take the Boeotian citadel chattering and booming in the distance, there was an odd stillness in the shrine.

Kasper Hawser had felt it before, in other places where mankind had focussed its worship for unnumbered generations. A cathedral in Silesia, just the shell of it, brittle as paper, rising above the fuming, white rubble and slag of the atomic dustbowl. The deep, painted caves in Baluchistan where a closed priesthood had concealed precious cellulose scrolls inscribed with their sacred mysteries, and thus preserved the essence of their faith through the Age of Strife. The high, monastic refuges in the Caucasus where scholars and savants fleeing Narthan Dume’s pogroms had hidden in exile, forlorn, ascetic outposts perched at such an altitude, you could see the expanding hive zones of the Caspian Bloc to the east and the nano-toxic waters of the Pontus Euxinus to the west, and the voice of some forgotten god lingered in the wind and the thin air and the bright sky.

The scholars had come out of Dume’s Panpacific realm with a priceless cargo of data that they had painstakingly liberated from the Tyrant’s library prior to one of his data purges. Some of that material, rumour suggested, dated from before the Golden Age of Technology.

When Hawser and his fellow conservators finally located the refuges, they found them long-since extinct. The cargo of data, the books and digital records, had degraded to powder.

The more man masters, the more man finds there is to be mastered; the more man learns, the more he remembers he has forgotten.

Navid Murza had said that. Hawser had never seen eye to eye with Navid Murza, and the various associations they’d been forced to make during their careers had fostered a sour and immotile disdain between them.

But there was no faulting Murza’s passionate intent. The strength of his calling matched Hawser’s.

‘We have lost more than we know,’ he said, ‘and we are losing more all the time. How can we take any pride in our development as a species when we excel at annihilation and fail to maintain even the most rudimentary continuity of knowledge with our ancestors?’

Murza had been with him that day, in Boeotia. Both of them had been awarded places on the conservator team by the Unification Council. Neither of them had yet seen their thirtieth birthday. They were both still young and idealistic in the most vacuous and misguided ways. It rankled with both of them that they had tied in the appointment rather than one winning and one losing.

Nevertheless, they were professionals.

The vast refinery eight kilometres away had been mined by the retreating Yeselti forces, and the resulting fires had blanketed that corner of Terra in lethal black smoke, a roiling, carcinogenic soup of soot-black petrocarbon filth as thick as oceanic fog and as noxious as a plague pit. The conservators wore sealed bodygloves and masks to go in, shambling through the murk with their heavy, wheezing aug-lung packs in their hands, like suitcases. The packs were linked to the snouts of their masks by wrinkled, pachydermic tubes.

The grave gods loomed to meet them through the smoke. The gods wore masks too.

They stood for a while, looking up at the grave gods, as immobile as the ancient statues. Divine masks of jade and gold, and staring moonstone eyes looked down on haz-guard masks of plastek and ceramite, and lidless photo-mech goggles.

Murza said something, just a wet sputter behind his visor.

Hawser had never seen anything like the gods in the Boeotian shrine. None of them had. He could hear the visor displays of several team members clicking and humming as they accessed the memories of their data-packs for comparative images.

You won’t find anything, Hawser thought. He could barely breathe, and it wasn’t the tightness of the mask or the spit-stale taste of the aug-lung’s air flow. He’d scanned the grapheme inscriptions on the shrine wall, and even that quick glance had told him there was nothing there that they’d expected to find. No Altaic root form, no Turcic or Tungusic or Mongolic.

The picters they carried were beginning to gum up in the sooty air, and battery packs were failing left and right. Hawser told two of the juniors to take rubbings of the inscriptions instead. They turned their goggles towards him, blank. He had to show them. He cut sheets of wrapping plastek into small squares and used the side of the wax marker-brick to scrub over the faint relief of the mural marks.

‘Like at school,’ one of the juniors said.

‘Get on with it,’ Hawser snapped.

He began an examination of his own, adjusting the macular intensity of his goggles. Without laboratory testing, it was impossible to know how long the shrine had stood there. A thousand years? Ten thousand? Exposed to the air, it was degrading fast, and the pervasive petrochemical smog was destroying surface detail before his very eyes.

He had a desire to be alone for a minute.

He went outside, back up the throat of the entranceway. The Boeotian Conflict had uncovered this treasure. The site had been exposed by a parcel of wayward submunitions rather than the diligent hand of an archaeologist. But for the war, this treasure would never have been found, and because of the war, it was perishing.

Hawser stood at the entrance and put his aug-lung on the ground beside him. He took a sip of nutrient drink from his mask feeder, and cleaned his fogging goggles with hand spray.

To the north of his position, the conflict in the Boeotian citadel underlit the horrendous black roof of the sky, a bonfire shaped like a city. The blackness of the vast smoke canopy was all around, as dense as Old Night itself. Gusting pillars of bright flame came and went in the distance as the smoke shifted.

This, he remarked to himself with leaden irony, was what the great era of Unification looked like.

According to history tracts that were already published and in circulation, that were already being taught in scholams, for goodness sake, the glorious Unification Wars had brought the Age of Strife to an end over a century and a half earlier. Since then, there had been more than one hundred and fifty years of peace and renewal as the Emperor led the Great Crusade outwards from Terra, and courageously reconnected the lost and scattered diaspora of mankind.

That’s what the history tracts said. Reality was far less tidy. History only recorded broad strokes and general phases of development, and assigned almost arbitrary dates to human accomplishments that had been made in far less definitive instalments. The aftershocks of the Unification War still rolled across the face of the planet. Unification had been triumphantly declared at a point when no power or potentate could hope to vanquish the awesome Imperial machine, but that hadn’t prevented various feudal states, religious adherents, remote nations or stubborn autocrats from holding out and trying to ring-fence and preserve their own little pockets of independence. Many, like the Boeotian Yeselti family, had held out for decades, negotiating and conniving their way around treaties and rapprochements and every other diplomatic effort designed to bring them under Imperial sway.

Their story demonstrated that the Emperor, or his advisors at least, possessed extraordinary patience. In the wake of the Unification War, there had been a strenuous and high-profile effort to resolve conflicts through non-violent means, and the Yeselti were not tyrants or despots. They were simply an ancient royal house eager to maintain their autonomous existence. The Emperor allowed them a twilight grace of a century and a half to come to terms, longer than the lifespan of many Terran empires.

The story also demonstrated that the Emperor’s patience was finite, and that when it was exhausted, so was his mercy and restraint.

The Imperial Army had advanced into Boeotia to arrest the Yeselti and annex the territory. Hawser’s accredited conservator team was one of hundreds assigned to follow the army in, along with flocks of medicae, aid workers, renovators, engineers and iterators.

To pick up the pieces.

Hawser’s mask-mic clicked.

‘Yes?’ It was one of the juniors. ‘Come inside, Hawser. Murza’s got a theory.’

In the shrine, Murza was shining his lamp pack up angled stone flues cut in the walls. Motes of soot tumbled in the beam, revealing, by their motion, a flow of circulation.

‘Airways. This is in use,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘This isn’t a relic. It’s old, yes, but it’s been in use until very recently.’

Hawser watched Murza as he prowled around the shrine. ‘Evidence?’

Murza gestured to the faience bowls of various sizes dotted along the lip of the altar step.

‘There are offerings of fish and grain here, also copal resins, myrrh I believe. Scanners show carbon counts that indicate they’re no more than a week old.’

‘Any carbon count is compromised in this atmosphere,’ Hawser replied. ‘The machine’s wrong. Besides, look at the state of them. Calcified.’

‘The samples have degraded because of the atmosphere,’ Murza insisted.

‘Oh, have it both ways, why not?’ said Hawser.

‘Just look at this place!’ Murza shot back, gesturing with his gloved hands in exasperation.

‘Exactly what are you proposing, then?’ asked Hawser. ‘An occulted religious observance conducted outside the fringe of Boeotian society, or a private order of tradition sanctioned by the Yeselti?’

‘I don’t know,’ Murza replied, ‘but this whole site is guarding something, isn’t it? We need to get an excavator in here. We need to get into the recess behind the statues.’

‘We need to examine, record and remove the statues methodically,’ Hawser said. ‘It will take weeks just to begin the preservation treatments before we can lift them, piece by–’

‘I can’t wait that long.’

‘Well, sorry, Navid, but that’s the way it is,’ said Hawser. ‘The statues are priceless. They’re our first concern for conservation.’

‘Yes, they are priceless,’ Murza said. He stepped towards the solemn, silent grave gods. The juniors were watching him. A few took sharp breaths as he actually stepped up onto the base of the altar, gingerly placing his foot so as not to dislodge any of the offertory bowls.

‘Get down, Murza,’ said one of the seniors.

Murza edged up onto the second step, so he was almost at eye level with some of the gazing gods.

‘They are priceless,’ he repeated. He raised his right hand and gently indicated the blazing moonstone eyes of the nearest effigy. ‘Look at the eyes. The eyes are so important, don’t you think? So telling?’

He glanced over his shoulder at his anxious audience. Hawser could tell Murza was smiling, despite the haz-mask.

‘Get down, Navid,’ he said.

‘Look at the eyes,’ Murza said, ignoring the instruction. ‘Down through time, they’ve always meant the same thing to us, haven’t they? Come on, it’s basic! Someone!’

‘Protection,’ mumbled one of the juniors awkwardly.

‘I can’t hear you, Jena. Speak up!’

‘The eye is the oldest and most culturally diverse apotropaic symbol,’ said Hawser, hoping to cut to the chase and end Murza’s showboating.

‘Yes, it is,’ said Murza. ‘Kas knows. Thank you, Kas. The eye guards things. You put it up for protection. You put it up to ward off evil and harm, and to keep safe the things you hold most precious.’ His fingertip traced the outline of the unblinking eye again. ‘We‘ve seen this so many times, just variations of the same design. Look at the proportional values! The eye shape, the brow line, this could have been stylised from a nazar boncugu or a wedjat, and it’s not a million kilometres away from the Eye of Providence that is so proudly displayed in such places as the Great Seal of the Unification Council. These are gods of aversion, there’s no doubt about it.’

He jumped down from the steps. Some of the party gasped in alarm, but Murza did not disturb or break any of the precariously placed bowls.

‘Gods of aversion,’ he said. ‘Keep out. Stay away.’

‘Have you finished?’ Hawser asked.

‘The pupils are pieces of obsidian, Kas,’ Murza said eagerly as he came towards Hawser. ‘You get as close as I did, get your photo-mech to decent resolution, you can see that they’re carved. A circle around the edge, a dot in the middle. And you know what that is.’

‘The circumpunct,’ Hawser replied quietly.

‘Which represents?’ Murza pressed.

‘Just about anything you want it to,’ said Hawser. ‘The solar disc. Gold. Circumference. Monad. A diacritical mark. The hydrogen atom.’

‘Oh, help him out, Jena, please,’ Murza cried. ‘He’s just being awkward!’

‘The eye of god,’ said the female junior nervously. ‘The all-seeing singularity.’

‘Thank you,’ Murza said. He looked directly at Hawser. His eyes, behind the tinted lenses of the goggles, were fierce. ‘It says keep out. Stay away. I can see you. I can see right into your soul. I can reflect your harm back at you, and I can know what you know. I can read your heart. I can keep you at bay, because I am power and I am knowledge, and I am protection. The statues are priceless, Hawser, but they are gods of aversion. They’re guarding something. How valuable is something, do you suppose, that someone would protect with priceless statues?’

There was silence for a moment. Most of the team shifted uncomfortably.

‘They’re a family group,’ said Hawser quietly. ‘They are a representation of a dynastic line. A portrait in statue form. You can see the gender dimorphism, the height differentials, and the placements, thus determining familial relationships, hierarchies and obligations. The tallest figures on the highest step, a man and a woman, lofty and most exalted. Below them, children, perhaps two generations, with their own extended families and retainers. The first son and first daughter have prominence. It’s a record of lineage and descent. They’re a family group.’

‘But the eyes, Kas! So help me!’

‘They are apotropaic, I agree,’ said Hawser. ‘What could they be guarding? What could be more priceless than a gold and jade effigy of a god-king, and his queen, and his divine sons and daughters?’

Hawser stepped past Murza and faced the altar.

‘I’ll tell you. The physical remains of a god-king, and his queen, and his divine sons and daughters. It’s a tomb. That’s what’s in the recess. A tomb.’

Murza sighed, as if deflated.

‘Oh, Kas,’ he said. ‘You think so small.’

Hawser sighed, knowing they were about to go around again, but they turned as they heard noises from the entrance.

Five soldiers clattered into the shrine, spearing the gloom with the lamps strapped to their weapons. They were Imperial Army, hussars from the Tupelov Lancers, one of the very oldest regiments. They had left their cybernetic steeds outside the shrine and dismounted to enter.

‘Clear this site,’ one of them said. They were in full war-armour, combat visors down, frosty green photo-mech cursors bouncing to and fro along their optical slits.

‘We’ve got permission to be here,’ said one of the seniors.

‘Like crap you have,’ said the hussar. ‘Gather your stuff and get out.’

‘Who the hell do you think you’re talking to?’ Murza exclaimed, pushing forwards. ‘Who’s your commander?’

‘The Emperor of Mankind,’ replied the hussar. ‘Who’s yours, arsewipe?’

‘There’s been a mistake,’ said Hawser. He reached for his belt pack. Five saddle carbines slapped up to target him. Five lamp beams pinned him like a specimen.

‘Whoa! Whoa!’ Hawser cried. ‘I’m just reaching for my accreditation!’

He took out the pass-pad and flicked it on. The holographic credentials issued by the Unification Council Office of Conservation billowed up into the smoky air, slightly blurred and malformed by the edges of the smoke. Hawser couldn’t help but notice the Eye of Providence on the Council seal that flashed up before the data unfurled.

‘That’s all very well,’ said one of the hussars.

‘This is all current. It’s valid,’ said Hawser.

‘Things change,’ said the hussar.

‘This was personally ratified by Commander Selud,’ said one of the seniors. ‘He is primary commander and–’

‘At oh-six thirty-five today, Commander Selud was relieved of command by Imperial decree. All permits and authorities are therefore rescinded. Get your stuff, get moving, and live with your disappointment.’

‘Why was Selud removed?’ asked Murza.

‘Are you High Command? Do you need to know?’ sneered one of the hussars.

‘Just unofficially?’ Murza pleaded.

‘Unofficially, Selud’s made a total clusterfug of the whole show,’ said the hussar. ‘Six weeks, and he still manages to let the refinery fields catch fire? The Emperor’s sent someone in to tidy the whole mess up and draw a line under it.’

‘Who?’ asked Hawser.

‘Why are these civilians still here?’ a voice asked. It was deep and penetrating, and it had the hard edges of vox amplification. A figure had entered the chamber behind the Tupelov Lancers. Hawser wasn’t sure how it could have possibly walked in without anyone noticing.

It was an Astartes warrior.

By the pillars of Earth, an Astartes! The Emperor has sent the Astartes to finish this!

Hawser felt his chest tighten and his pulse sprint. He had never seen an Astartes in the flesh before. He hadn’t realised they were so big. The curvature of the armour plating was immense, oversized like the grave god statues behind him. The combination of the gloom and his goggles made it hard to resolve colour properly. The armour looked red: a bright, almost pale red, the colour of watered wine or oxygenated blood. A cloak of fine metal mesh shrouded the warrior’s left shoulder and torso. The helmet had a snout like a raven’s beak.

Hawser wondered what Legion the warrior belonged to. He couldn’t see any insignia properly. What was it that people were calling them these days, now that the bulk of all Astartes forces had deployed off Terra to spearhead the Great Crusade?

Space Marines. That was it. Space Marines. Like the square-jawed heroes of ha’penny picture books.

This was no square-jawed hero. This wasn’t even human. It was just an implacable thing, a giant twice the size of anybody else in the chamber. Hawser felt he ought to have been able to smell it: the soot on its plating, the machine oil in its complex joints, the perspiration trickling between its skin and its suit-liner.

But there was nothing. No trace, not even a hint of body heat. It was like the cold but immense blank of the void.

Hawser could not imagine anything that could stop it, let alone kill it.

‘I asked a question,’ the Astartes said.

‘We’re clearing them now, ser,’ stammered one of the Lancers.

‘Hurry,’ the Astartes replied.

The hussars started to herd the team towards the entrance. There were a few mumbles of protest, but nothing defiant. Everyone was too cowed by the appearance of the Astartes. The aug-lungs were wheezing and pumping more rapidly than before.

‘Please,’ said Hawser. He took a step towards the Astartes and held out the pass-pad. ‘Please, we’re licensed conservators. See?’

The hologram re-lit. The Astartes didn’t move.

‘Ser, this is a profound discovery. It is beyond value. It should be preserved for the benefit of future generations. My team has the expertise. The right equipment too. Please, ser.’

‘This area is not safe,’ said the Astartes. ‘You will remove yourselves.’

‘But ser–’

‘I have given you an order, civilian.’

‘Ser, which Legion do I have the honour of being protected by?’

‘The Fifteenth.’

The Fifteenth. So, the Thousand Sons.

‘What is your name?’

Hawser turned. The Tupelov Lancers had led most of the team out of the shrine, leaving only him behind. Two more Astartes, each as immense as the first, had manifested behind him. How could something that big move so stealthily?

‘What is your name?’ the new arrival repeated.

‘Hawser, ser. Kasper Hawser, conservator, assigned to–’

‘Is that a joke?’

‘What?’ asked Hawser. The other Astartes had spoken.

‘Is that supposed to be a joke?’

‘I don’t understand, ser.’

‘You told us your name. Was it supposed to be a joke? Is it some nickname?’

‘I don’t understand. That’s my name. Why would you think it’s a joke?’

‘Kasper Hawser? You don’t understand the reference?’

Hawser shook his head. ‘No one’s ever…’

The Astartes turned his beaked visor and glanced at his companions. Then he looked back down at Hawser.

‘Clear the area.’

Hawser nodded.

‘Once the security of this area can be guaranteed,’ said the Astartes, ‘your team may be permitted to resume its duties. You will evacuate to the safe zone and await notification.’

No notification ever came. Boeotia fell, and the Yeselti line came to an end. Sixteen months later, by then working on another project in Transcyberia, Hawser heard that conservator teams had finally been let into the Boeotian Lowlands.

There was no trace that any shrine had ever existed.

Fith wondered what kind of wight he would come back as. The kind that flashed and flickered under the pack ice? The kind you could sometimes see from a boat’s rail, running along in the shadow of the hull? The kind that mumbled and jittered outside an aett’s walls at night, lonely and friendless in the dark? The kind that sang a wailing windsong between the high ice peaks of a scarp on a late winter day?

Fith hoped it would be the darkest kind. The kind with the oil-black eyes and the slack-hanging mouth, the kind with rust and mould clogging the links of its shirt. The kind that clawed its way up from the Underverse using its fleshless hands as shovels, gnawed its way through the rock waste and permafrost, and then went walking at night.

Yes.

Walking until it reached Ironland and the hearth-aetts of the shit-breath Balt. Walking with a special axe in its hand, an axe forged in the Underverse from the bitter wrath of the restless and murdered, hammered out on god’s own anvil, and quenched in the bile and blood of the wronged and the unavenged. It would have a smile on it, a smile sparked on wyrd’s grindstone to a death-edge so keen it would slice a man’s soul from his flesh.

Then threads would be cut. Balt threads.

Fith hoped that would be the way. He wouldn’t mind leaving the Verse so much if there was an expectation of returning. He hoped the wights would let him do that. They could carry him away to the Underverse for all he cared, knocked down by a Balt maul or a Balt arrow, his own cut thread flapping after him in the gales of Hel, just so long as they let him return. Once he reached that unfamiliar shore, they had to remake him, build him back up out of his own raw pain, until he looked like a man, but was nothing more than an instrument, like an axe or a good blade, forged for one pure, singular purpose.

It wouldn’t be long before he found out.

Guthox had taken the tiller so that Lern could bind his rope-sawn fingers. The red sails were gaining on them, faster than the black sails of the Balt.

They had one chance left, in Fith’s opinion. A half-chance. One last arrow in wyrd’s quiver. If they cut north slightly, and ran through the top of Hradcana territory, they might make it to the ice desert beyond. The desert, well, that was death too, because it was a fatal place that no man or beast could live in, but that was a worry for later. They would make their own wyrd.

If they went to the desert, neither the Hradcana nor the Balt would follow. If they could get through a cut in the rock rampart the Hradcana called The Devil’s Tail, they’d be free and clear, free to die on their own terms, not hounded and knocked to Hel by a pack of soul-cursed murder-makers.

But it was a long run to The Devil’s Tail. Brom was too messed up to take a turn at the tiller, and even in rotation, the rest of them would be hard pressed to keep going. It was a run you’d break into four or five shorter runs, maybe sleeping out on the ice and cooking some food to rebuild your strength. To make it non-stop, that would be a feat of endurance, a labour so mighty the skjalds should sing about it.

If there were any Ascommani skjalds left alive.

Braced against the rail, Fith talked it over with Lern and Brom. All three of them were hoarse from the fight, from yelling hate back into the Balts’ faces.

Brom was in poor shape. There was no blood in his face, and his eyes had gone dim like dirty ice, as if his thread was fraying.

‘Do it,’ he said. ‘The Devil’s Tail. Do it. Let’s not give these bastards the satisfaction.’

Fith made his way to the bow, and knelt down beside the swaddled Upplander.

The Upplander was speaking.

‘What?’ asked Fith, leaning close. ‘What are you saying?’

‘Then he said,’ the Upplander hissed, ‘then he said I can see you. I can see right into your soul. That’s what he said. I can reflect your harm back at you and I can know what you know. Oh god, he was so arrogant. Typical Murza. Typical. The statues are priceless, Hawser, he said, but how valuable is something, do you suppose, that someone would protect with priceless statues?’

‘I don’t know what you’re telling me,’ said Fith. ‘Is it a story? Is it something that happened in the past?’

Fith was afraid. He was afraid he was hearing sky magic, and he didn’t want any part of it.

The Upplander suddenly started and opened his eyes. He stared up at Fith in sheer terror for a second.

‘I was dreaming!’ he cried. ‘I was dreaming, and they were standing looking down at me.’

He blinked, and the reality of his situation flooded back and washed the nonsense of his fever dream away, and he sank and groaned.

‘It was so real,’ he whispered, mainly to himself. ‘Fifty fugging years ago if it was a day, and it felt like I was right back there. Do you ever have dreams like that? Dreams that unwrap fresh memories of things you’d forgotten you’d ever done? I was really there.’

Fith grunted.

‘And not here,’ the Upplander added dismally.

‘I’ve come to ask you, one last time, do you want the mercy of my axe?’ asked Fith.

‘What? No! I don’t want to die.’

‘Well, first thing, we all die. Second thing, you’re not going to get much say in the matter.’

‘Help me up,’ said the Upplander. Fith got him to his feet and propped him against the bow rail. The first pricking gobs of sleet were hitting their faces. Up ahead, the sky had risen up in a great, dark summit of cloud, a bruised stain like the colour of a throttled man’s face, and it was rolling in on the ice field.

It was a storm, coming in hard, flinging ice around the sky. Late in the winter for a storm that dark. Bad news, whichever way you looked at it. The rate it was coming, they weren’t going to get anywhere much before it blew in across them.

‘Where are we?’ the Upplander asked, squinting into the dazzle of the ice field rushing by.

‘We’re somewhere near the middle of shit-goes-our-luck,’ said Fith.

The Upplander clung onto the rail as the wyrmboat quaked across a rough strayke.

‘What’s that?’ he asked, pointing.

They were coming up fast on one of the Hradcana’s remote northern aetts. It was just an outpost, a few shelters built on some crags that rose above the ice plain. The Hradcana used it to resupply and safe-harbour their fisher boats when the sea thawed out. It was uninhabited for months at a time.

A row of spears had been set tip-down in the sheet ice in front of the aett. They stood like a row of fence posts, six or seven of them. On the raised end of each spear-haft, a human head had been impaled.

The heads were turned to look out onto the ice field at them. Their eyes had been pinned open.

They were most likely the heads of criminals, or enemy captives, ritually decapitated for the purpose, but it was possible they were Hradcana, sacrificed in desperation because of the extremity of the maleficarum. Their eyes were open so they could see the evil coming and ward it off.

Fith spat and cursed. He dearly wished Iolo had been able to badge their faces with cast-out marks, to bounce the warding magic back. The wyrmboat had eyes on its prow, of course: the all-seeing sun-disc eyes of the sky god, painted bold and bright, and decorated with precious stones. All wyrmboats had them, so they could find their way, see off danger, and reflect an enemy’s magic.

Fith hoped it would be enough. The boat was a strong boat, an aett-chief’s boat, but it had run hard and it was tired, and Fith was worried that its eyes might not be powerful enough to turn the magic back anymore.

‘Gods of Aversion,’ the Upplander murmured, gazing at the staked heads. ‘Keep out. Stay away. I can see you.’

Fith wasn’t listening to him. He yelled back down the long, narrow deck at Guthox, signalling him to turn wide. The aett was inhabited. A second later, the spiked heads flashed by, and they were skating the inshore ice under the shadow of the crag.

Guthox cried out. They were still two or three decent bow shots from the islet, but someone was either gifted or favoured by the Underverse. An arrow had gone into him.

Now more struck, thakking into the hull or falling short and skipping across the ice. Fith could see archers on the rim of the islet crag, and others on the beach.

He raced back down the boat to Guthox. Lern and Brom were moving too.

It was a monstrously lucky shot, except for Guthox. The arrow had gone through the tight-ringed sleeve of his shirt, the meat of his left tricep, shaving the bone, and then through the sleeve again, and then the shirt proper, before punching into the hersir’s side between his ribs, effectively pinning his arm against his body. Guthox had immediately lost control of one of the quarter rudder ropes. The pain was immense. He had bitten through his tongue in an effort not to scream.

Two arrows were embedded in the deck boards beside them. Fith saw they had fish-scale tips: each head shaped and finished from a single, iron-hard scale from a deep water monster. They were barbed, like a backwards-slanted comb.

That was what had gone into Guthox. It would never come out.

Guthox spat blood and tried to turn the tiller. Brom and Lern were shouting at him, trying to take over, trying to snap the arrow shaft so they could free Guthox’s arm. Guthox was slipping away.

Another wave of arrows hit. One, perhaps, came straight from the same gifted or favoured archer. It hit Guthox in the side of the head, and ended his pain by cutting his thread.

Blood droplets and sleet stung their faces. Guthox fell away from the tiller and, though Brom and Lern sprang in, the wind became their steersman for a split-second.

That was all the time the wind needed, and it had no interest in sparing their lives.

Two

Dis-aster

The wind flung them into the rocks abutting the beach, and the wyrmboat shattered like a crockery jar. The impact was sustained, like a relentless series of hammer blows. The world vibrated and up-ended, and the shivering air filled with rock-grit and out-flung stones, along with sleet, with slivers of ice, and with raked splinters of deck-wood as sharp as darning needles. The maniacal wind tore the sails away, like a vicious child plucking the wings off a long-legged fly. The sailcloth, so full of hard air that it was splitting, cracked as it flew free, and the halyards screamed as they fled through the blocks and sawed into the pins. There was a brief, sharp reek of smoke from unwetted wood as the rigging lines friction-burned their way through and away. Under tension, the escaping lines whirred and buzzed like bees.

Fith smelled the wood-burn in the last instant of the wyrmboat’s life. The deck broke under him, and flipped him into the sleeting sky. Then he hit the ice with his face.

The wyrmboat had gone right over, and folded up into the rocks where the wind had driven it. Thrown clear, Fith slid face-down across the glazed sea, his throat full of ice and blood. He rotated, head and toe, as he slowly came to rest.

He raised his head. The ice beneath him was as dull and cold as the flat of a sword. His chest and face were one big aching bruise, and it felt like he had taken the smile of an axe in his breastbone, and another in his cheek.

He tried to get up. He felt as if he was too cracked to even breathe. Sucking air into his chest was like swallowing broken glass. Part of the wyrmboat’s mainsail, full of wind and trailing its lines, danced away along the shore of the islet like a gleeful phantom, like a capering wight with its arms outflung.

Fith began to limp towards the ruin of the boat. A few arrows hissed overhead. Hradcana bowmen were scrambling down the rocks to reach the wreck. Hradcana red sails were closing in across the ice. Fith could hear the shriek of their bladed runners.

The ice in his path was scattered with debris. Here was a piece of mast, sheared off. There was part of the starboard rigger, torn off, its iron-shod skate stuck in the crazed ice like a giant’s arrow. Here was a section of spar. Fith picked it up, and hefted it as a weapon.

There was Guthox’s body. The wyrmboat had spilled it as it tumbled, and one of the riggers had sliced right over it, mashing it flat at the waist.

A Hradcana arrow whipped past Fith’s face. He didn’t flinch. He saw his axe lying near Guthox, and discarded the spar.

He picked up his axe.

Close beside the mangled ruin of the wyrmboat, Lern was dragging the Upplander’s corpse onto the shoreline rocks. Blood was streaming down one half of Lern’s face and soaking his whiskers. Fith began to limp faster to reach them.

When he left the ice and set foot on the ice-fused shingle, the Hradcana had come close enough for him to see their wild eyes and the white ash-glue coating their faces. They were so close that he could smell the stink of their ritual ointments. These were foul-smelling pastes their gothi had made, aversion remedies to keep the maleficarum at bay. The warriors had put aside their bows and taken up their axes and their swords. A bad omen had to be more than just killed. It had to be cut apart, hacked apart, dismembered and un-remembered. That was how you got magic to leave you alone.

Brom had got up to face them with his axe. Fith wondered how he was even standing any more. He limped to stand at Brom’s side.

One of the Hradcana was shouting out at them. It wasn’t a challenge or a threat, it was a ritual thing, a statement of intent, a declaration of what they were doing and why they were doing it. Fith knew that from the sing-song cadence of the words, rather than the words themselves. The warrior was using the Hradcana’s private tribal tongue, their wyrd-cant, which Fith did not speak.

‘This is onto you and onto your heads, in the day and the night, in the time of the moving sea and in the time of the still sea,’ the Upplander suddenly said out loud as Fith stepped past him. He wasn’t dead after all, though both of his legs had undoubtedly been broken in the crash. Lern, blood still pouring from his scalp, was trying to make him secure, but the Upplander was pushing away and trying to pull himself up onto a rock.

‘This is the wyrd that you have written for yourself by taking the disaster into your aett and deciding to protect it,’ the Upplander continued. He looked at Fith. ‘That’s what they’re saying. My translator is reading it. Do you understand them?’

Fith shook his head.

‘Why do they call me a disaster? What did I ever do?’

Fith shrugged.

A look of realisation suddenly crossed the Upplander’s drawn face. ‘Oh, it’s just the translator! It’s literal, just literal… “dis-aster”… bad star. They’re calling me Bad Star.’

Fith stood beside Brom and faced the Hradcana. The Hradcana warrior was finishing his declaration. Behind him, Fith could hear the Upplander translating the last of it.

The Hradcana rushed them.

Without shields, the two Ascommani took the charge. They put over-swings into the first row of faces, and under-swings into the second. Like the surge of the sea when the sea was wet, the Hradcana slipped back and came in again across the shingle. Brom split a man’s shoulder. Fith smashed a man’s jaw into mammocks and managed to wrest the man’s shield away from him. He punched the iron boss of it into the face of the next Hradcana who came looking for an opening, and broke the man’s nose-bone up into his skull. A big axe, a two-hander, swept at Brom, but Fith knocked it away with his captured shield, and Brom tore out the owner’s belly while his arms were still pushed up.

The next wave came, breaking on their shield. They had to take a few steps back each time. Red-sailed wyrmboats were grounding on the beach, and men were disembarking.

‘Do you think they’ve brought enough bodies?’ Brom asked. He was panting hard, and his face was bloodless with pain and effort, but there was still a laugh in his voice.

‘Nothing like enough,’ said Fith. ‘And nothing like enough threads, either.’

Lern left the Upplander in the rocks and came to stand beside them. He took a sword out of a dead man’s hand, thanked him for it, and hunched his back to face the surge.

The storm was behind them. It was shrieking in across the ice field, across the stilled sea, wailing like an Underverse chorus. Everything in the world that was loose was beginning to shake. The three Ascommani felt the grit of sleet hitting their necks and the backs of their heads. They heard the prickle of it pelting off their mail shirts.

The storm of men was in front of them. They were Hradcana, most of them, three or four score painted for murder, but there were Balt too, just arriving in their slower boats, slithering up the ice-caked beach in their eagerness.

It was a strange eagerness. It was born of desperation, the frantic wish to be free of a burden or a curse, to discharge an onerous duty and be done with it. There was no yelling, no war-shouts, no rousing bellow of comradeship and common purpose. They had no taste for it, or else fear had soured the words in their mouths.

They were chanting instead, steady and slow. They were reciting the rhymes of banishment and aversion they had learned around the aett hearth as children, the sharpened words, the strong words, the power words, the words with enough of a death-edge on them to keep bad stars at bay.

But the bad star was keeping them at bay too.

They were a great gang of men: hersirs, mostly, veterans, riggers, strong men with arms made thick from axe-work and backs made broad from the long oar. They crowded the beach: an army, bigger than any decent raiding party, as many faces as Fith had ever seen in one place. With a host like that, you could take a kingdom. You could conquer a chief’s whole territory.

All they had to do, these men, was kill three hersirs and a cripple. Three hersirs and a cripple with but one shield between them, stuck on a shingle spit in the cold empty, with nowhere left to run and nothing at their backs except the approaching enmity of the winter’s last, psychopathic storm.

Yet they were faltering. They were wary. There was no conviction in their surges. When they rushed in, they rushed in with fear in their eyes and hesitation in their blades. Each surge drove the Ascommani back closer to the ice, where standing steady and meeting a push would be impossible. But after half a dozen surges, Fith, Brom and Lern had knocked ten men down with red snow under them.

Then Fith saw the Balt gothi, Hunur. A wyrmboat had just brought him in, and hersirs were carrying him to the beach. He stood up tall on their cupped palms, such a tall skinny bastard, waving his bear’s arm blade at Uppland above. The storm light, yellow and frosty as the sky closed down, glinted off the gothi’s piercings and silver torc. His mantle of seabird feathers streamed out in the air behind him, white like early snow.

He was screaming. He was howling toxic curses into the thundering wind, calling on the spirits of the air and the wights of the Underverse and all the daemons of Hel to come forth and extinguish the bad star. Fith felt a prickle on his skin that was more than the battering sleet.

The sight of the gothi spurred the Hradcana on, that and the sound of his screams. They surged again, and Fith knew this would be the worst rush yet. The shock of impact drove the three Ascommani back a step. Two axes hooked into Fith’s shield and dragged it down. A third broke its rim. Fith hacked his own axe into a Hradcana skull, then levered it out of the collapsing dead weight and swung it again. The poll of it broke a helmet’s cheek guard and cracked the rim of an eye socket. Fith could no longer cover Brom’s flank.

Brom was mindless with fatigue and pain. He was jeering and lunging with his axe, but there was no strength or skill left in his arm.

Fith heard Lern shouting at Brom to keep his eyes up. Lern was laying in with his wight-loaned sword. He knew to use the tip and not the edge in a crush-fight, jabbing it in at belt height, skinning ribs and gouging hips and rupturing bellies. The blade was good, with a keen point that pinged through the rings of a man’s shirt and speared the meat beneath.

Then one of the Hradcana got a shield in the way, and Lern’s sword punched clean through it, almost to the length of a man’s forearm. It punched clean through and the blade stuck fast in the tight-grained wood. Lern tried to pull it out, but the shield man pulled back and dragged Lern out of line. The Hradcana took him and cut his thread: four or five enemy swords stabbing into him repeatedly, rehearsing the lesson in sword-work that Lern had delivered.

He disappeared under their feet, and the surge rolled over him. Brom was on his knees. He wasn’t really aware of where he was any more. Fith had both hands clamped around the throat of his axe, and both sets of knuckles were dripping red.

The surge rolled back and parted, and the Balt gothi approached. Balt hersirs were still carrying him in a cradle of hands. He aimed the bear blade-bone at Fith and for a moment it felt like the two of them were alone on the sleet-battered beach.

The gothi started speaking. He started speaking magic words to forge a spell that would blast Fith off the beach. The men around him, Hradcana and Balt alike, covered their eyes or ears. The hersirs holding Hunur up began to weep, because their hands were busy and they could not block his words out.

Fith didn’t know the meaning of the words, and didn’t want to. He tightened his grip around the throat of his axe. He wondered if he could reach the gothi and bury the smile of it in his pierced face before the Hradcana and the Balt cut him down, or the gothi’s magic turned his bones to meltwater.

‘Enough.’

Fith glanced over his shoulder. The Upplander, crumpled in the lee of a wet-black boulder, his mangled legs twisted under him, had spoken. He was looking up at Fith.

Fith could see he was trembling. His heat was pouring out of his mouth in steaming clouds. Sleet pelted them both, and settled in small white clumps in the Upplander’s matted hair.

‘What?’ Fith asked.

‘I’ve heard enough,’ the Upplander said.

Fith sighed. ‘Have you? Have you, indeed? So now you want the mercy of my axe, now we’ve come to this? You couldn’t have asked the favour earlier, before–’

‘No, no!’ the Upplander snapped. Every word was an effort, and he was clearly frustrated to have to say anything more than was absolutely necessary.

‘I said,’ he replied, ‘I’ve heard enough. I’ve heard enough of that shaman’s ravings. My translator’s sampled enough, and it’s built a workable grammatical base.’

Fith shook his head, not understanding.

‘Help me up,’ the Upplander ordered.

Fith hoisted the Upplander a little more upright. The barest movement caused the Upplander to grimace in pain. The pulverised bones in his legs ground together. Tears welled in his eyes and froze on his lower lashes.

‘All right, all right,’ he said. He adjusted the little translator device woven into his quilted collar.

He began to speak. A huge voice, tinny and harsh, boomed out of the device in his collar. Fith recoiled at the sound of it. The voice boomed out words just like the words the gothi was yelling at them.

The gothi scrambled down out of his hersirs’ hands and stopped shouting. He stared at Fith and the Upplander. There was terror on his twitching face. The Hradcana and the Balt edged backwards, uneasy and unsettled.

‘What did you say?’ Fith asked in the silence as the sleet billowed around them.

‘I used his words back at him,’ said the Upplander. ‘I told him I’d bring a daemon out of the storm if they didn’t back off. If they’re afraid of me because they think I’m a bad star, I might as well act like one.’

The gothi was gabbling at his warriors, trying to spur them in again to finish the matter, but they were really reluctant to move. The gothi was losing his temper. He kept staring at Fith and the Upplander with the same, terrified look as before. So were a lot of the men.

Then Fith realised that none of them were looking at him or the Upplander after all.

They were looking past him. They were looking out at the ice field, out at the still sea, out at the Hel-storm that was screaming in and staining the sky black. Fith turned, the wind in his hair and the sleet in his face, to see the storm approaching. It was a low, racing blackness, like blood swirling through water. The snow and sleet that formed its bow-wave hazed the air like dust. Ice splintered up from the surface of the frozen sea, whirling away like petals in its vortex. Bars of lightning stabbed from the skirts and the belly of the storm like jagged, blinding lances, and smote the sea crust.

There was something in the storm. There was something just ahead of it, staying ahead of it, pounding out of the sleet-blur towards them.

It was a man. It was a huge man, a shadow on the ice, running towards them, running across the sea, outrunning the storm.

The Upplander’s bad star magic had brought a daemon down to punish them all.

Hunur screamed. His hersirs had been bewildered for a moment, but they snapped to attention at the squeal of his voice, and loaded their bows. Fith threw himself flat as the first salvo of arrows loosed at the approaching daemon. The men were firing at will, spitting iron-head darts into the air as though they hoped to pin the storm to the sky.

The daemon struck. He came in off the sea at the tip of the storm in great bounding strides. Fith could hear the ice crunch under each pounding step. Furs and a ragged robe fluttered out behind him. He leapt up into the beach rocks, turned the bound into a sure-footed hop that propelled him off one of the largest boulders and up into the air, arms outstretched. This soaring leap took him clean over Fith and the Upplander. Fith ducked again. He saw the great axe uplifted in the daemon’s right hand. The air was thatched with black arrows.

The daemon hung for a second in the mayhem of sleet, arms wide against the black sky like wings, robes trailing like torn sails. The host of Balt and Hradcana below him tilted back from him in fear, like corn stalks sloped by the wind.

Then he smashed down into them. The impact threw men into the air on either side. Shields, raised in haste at the last moment, fractured and splintered. Blades shattered. Bows broke. Arms snapped.

The daemon howled. He had landed in a crouch, at least two men crushed beneath his feet. He rose, hunched over in a fighter’s stance. He swung his broad upper body, and put the full force of his vast shoulders behind his axe. Its death-edge went through three men. Arterial blood, black in the foul light, jetted into the air, and drops of it rained down in the sleet. Men were screaming. Hradcana voices, Balt voices, all screaming.

The daemon drove into the enemy mass, breaking wood and bone. He seemed blade-proof, as if he was made of iron. The tongues of swords cracked as they rebounded off him, the handles of axes snapped. There were two or three black-fletched arrows buried in the daemon’s bulk, but he didn’t appear to even feel them, let alone be slowed down by them.

The daemon let out another roar. It was an animal sound, the deep, reverberative throat-roar of a leopard. The sound penetrated. It cut through the booming swirl of the storm, and through the frenetic din of steel and sleet and voices. It cut like the keenest death-edge. Fith felt it in his gut. He felt it shiver his heart, colder than ice, worse than fear.

He watched the slaughter unfolding in front of him.

The hulking daemon drove into the great gang of killers. He pushed them against the wind and down the beach. They mobbed around him and onto him, like dogs on a bear, trying to out-man him, trying to smother his blows and choke his swing, trying to ring him and pull him down. They were terrified of him, but they were even more terrified of letting him live.

Their efforts were nothing. It was as if the Hradcana and the Balt were made of straw, cloth dummies stuffed with dry grass, like they were empty vessels with no weight. The daemon broke them and knocked them down. He swung and sent them flying. Men took off from each ploughing impact. They left the ground, flung into the sleet, limbs pinwheeling, a boot flying off, a shield in tatters. They flew out sideways, tumbling over the ice-caked shingle and ending up in still death-heaps. They lofted up from an axe-whack, split asunder, squirting blood from their cleaved bodies, raining broken rings from their shredded shirts, chainmail rings that pinged like handfuls of coins as they scattered across the beach. They cartwheeled over his shoulders, pitched like forked bales.

They littered the shingle. Most times, they were no longer in one piece once he’d done with them. Some lay as if they were sleeping. Others were crumpled in limp, slack poses that the living could not mimic. Some were split and steaming in the sleet. Some were just portions and pieces scattered by the relentless axe. Blood ran between the ice-black beach stones, coiling, trickling, deep and glossy, thick red, meat red, or cooling into slicks of rusty brown and faded purple.

The daemon’s axe was a massive thing, a two-hander with a long, balanced handle. Both grip and blade were engraved with complex, weaving patterns and etched chequers. It sang to itself. Fith could hear it. The axe hummed and purred, as though the death-edge was privately chortling with delight at the rising tally of threads. A drizzle of blood droplets was flying off it, as if the blade was licking its lips clean.

Nothing stopped it. It was unimaginably sharp, and it was either as light as a gull’s bone, or the daemon was as strong as a storm giant. It carved through everything it encountered. It went through shields, whether they were cured leather or hardwood or beaten copper. It went through armour, through padded plates, through iron scales, through chain. It went through the hafts of spears, through the handles of good axes, through the blades of swords that had been passed down for generations. It went through meat and muscle and bone.

It went through men effortlessly. Fith saw several men remain on their feet after the axe had sheared off their heads, or half of their heads, or their bodies from the shoulders. They stayed standing, their truncated figures swaying slightly with the pulse of the blood spurting from the stump or cross-sectioned portion. Only then would they collapse, soft and boneless, like falling cloaks.

The murder-makers were close to breaking. The daemon had cut so many of their threads, and left so many of them scattered on the blood-drenched beach, their resolve had thawed like ice in springtime. The storm was right above the islet now, enfolding the beach and the crag in its sharp, screaming embrace. The wind had been put to a whetstone. The air was shot through with bullets of hail. Where the demented sleet hit the hard stones of the beach, it scoured the blood away, and turned the dead into puffy, bleached, white things that looked like they had been waterlogged for a month.

A fire was driving the gothi Hunur. A fire had been lit in his blood. He had seen the evil of the bad star hanging in the future, and he had raised the murder-make to exterminate it. Now the evil was manifesting, driven into the open, he was all the more determined to end it.

He scrambled back to some higher rocks above the beach, and yelled down at the last of the Balt wyrmboats, where men had yet to disembark. They got out their bows, and Fith saw a glimpse of tallow flame in the stormy gloom.

The bowmen started to loose pitch-arrows.

The arrows were longer than regular man-stoppers, with simple iron spike tips and knobs of pitch-soaked rag knotted around the shafts behind the head. The rags caught as soon as flame was applied. Burning arrows ripped into the lightning-split sky.

Other men were spinning bottles on leather cords, letting them fly under their own weight. The bottles were filled with liquid pitch and other volatiles. Their contents sprayed out as they struck the beach and shattered. The burning arrows quickly ignited the spreading slicks.

Bright flames leapt up with a plosive woof like the sound of wind biting sailcloth. A great thicket of fire spread along the beach, fed by the blazing arrows. The flames were painfully bright, almost greenish and incandescent. The daemon, and the press of murder-makers around him, were swept up in the flames within seconds.

A burning man’s screams are unlike the screams of a cut or knocked man. They are shrill and frantic. Engulfed, wrapped up in flames they could not shrug off or outrun, men stumbled out of the fight, mouths stretched wide, breathing fire. In the driving wind, the flames and the rank, black fat-smoke poured off them, like the burning tails of falling stars.

Their flaming arms milled in the air. Their hair and beards burned. Their undershirts ignited and cooked the rings of their shirts into their flesh. They ran into the sea, but the sea was just hard ice and couldn’t quench their agonies, so they fell down onto it instead, and burned to death with the ice crust sizzling under them. They were gaunt black shapes in clothes of fire, like the effigies that burned at Helwinter. They were human tinder, crackling and sparking and fizzling in the sleet, hearth-brush kindling blown on by the storm until it flared white-hot.

The daemon came through the flames. He was singed black, like a coal carving. His furs and ragged robe were alive with little blue flames. His eyes were like polished moonstones in his soot-black face. He roared again, the throat-thunder of a hunting cat. It wasn’t just his eyes that lit a wild white against his blackened flesh. His teeth glinted too: white bone, long canines no human mouth should possess.

The daemon buried the smile of his axe in the beach ice, and left it sticking fast with its handle pointing at the sky. Two more flaming arrows hit him. He tore one out of his cloak, flames licking around his fingers.

He brought something up from his side, something metal and heavy that had been strapped there. It was a box with a handle. Fith didn’t know what it was for. All he knew was it was some daemonic device. The daemon pointed it at the Balt wyrmboats.

The box made a noise like a hundred thunderbolts overlapping. The sound was so loud, so sudden, so alien, it made Fith jerk in surprise. Gouting flashes of fire bearded the front of the daemon’s curious box, blinking and flickering as fast as the rattling thunder-roar.

The nearest Balt wyrmboat shivered, and then disintegrated. Its hull shredded and flew apart, reduced to wood chips and pulp and spinning nails. The mast and the quarter rigs exploded. The figurehead splintered. The men on board atomised in puffs of red drizzle.

The wyrmboat behind it began to shred too, and then the boat beyond that. The daemon kept his roaring lightning-box aimed at the boats, and invisible hands of annihilation demolished the craft drawn up along the ice-line. A thick brume of wood fibre and blood-mist boiled off the destruction into the wind. Then the pitch bottles that had yet to be thrown exploded.

The inferno was intense. Despite the storm, Fith could feel the heat of it on his face. The line of boats lit off, like the fire graves of great heroes at a boat burial. Ash and sparks zoomed crazily like fireflies. The wind took hold of the thick black smoke coming off the burning, and carried it out across the sea almost horizontally like a bar of rolling fog.

The daemon’s lightning-box stopped roaring. He lowered it and looked up the beach at the gothi. Hunur was a shrunken, defeated figure, his shoulders slack, his arms down. A few Hradcana and Balt were fleeing past him up the rock slope, seeking the far side of the islet.

The daemon raised his lightning-box and pointed it at the gothi. He made it flash and bark just once, and the gothi’s head and shoulders vanished in an abrupt pink cloud. What remained of Hunur snapped back off the rock, as if snatched from behind.

The daemon walked down to the ice-line. The intense heat of the burning boats had liquefied the sea ice along the shore, creating a molten pool of viscous water that was greedily swallowing the boat wrecks down into the darkness in a veil of angry steam. The iron-edged smell of the ocean was released to the air for the first time that year.

The daemon knelt down, scooped water up in the cup of his massive right hand, and splashed it over his face. The soot streaked on his cheeks and brow. He rose again, and began to walk back up the beach towards Fith.

The hrosshvalur rose without much warning: just a blow of sour bubbles in the turbulent melt-pool and a sudden froth of red algae. Like all of the great sea things, its diet had been constrained by the ice all winter long, and it was rapaciously hungry. The burning boats had opened the sea to the air, and their cloudy ruins had brought down quantities of meat and blood to flavour the frigid water with an intoxicating allure. The hrosshvalur may have been leagues away when it got the taste; one particle of human blood in a trillion cubic litres of salt water. Its massive tail flukes had closed the distance in a few beats.

The daemon heard the liquid rush of its emergence, and turned to look. The melt-pool was barely big enough to fit the sea thing. Its scaled flanks and claw-toed flippers broke the ice wider, and it bellied up onto the beach, jaws wide and eager at the scent of blood. The flesh inside its mouth was gleaming white, like mother of pearl, and there was a painful stink of ammonia. Its teeth were like spears of ragged yellow coral. It brought its shuddering, snorting bulk up onto the shingle, and boomed out its brash, bass cry, the sound you sometimes heard at night, on the open water, through the planks of the hull. Smaller mushveli, yapping and writhing like worms, followed it up out of the melt-hole, equally agitated by the promise of meat. The hrosshvalur drove them aside, snapping the neck of one that got too close, and then wolfing it down whole in two or three jerking gulps. It levered its body across the shingle on its massive, wrinkled flippers.

The daemon crossed in front of the giant killer. He knew that its appetite was as bottomless as the North Ocean, especially since the turning of spring. It would not stop until it had picked the aett islet clean of anything remotely edible.

The daemon plucked his axe out of the ice-caked shingle. He pulled it up with his hand clasped high under the shoulder, and then he let the handle slip down through his loose grip, pulled by the head weight, until he had it by the optimum lever point between belly and throat. He ran at the ocean monster.

It blew its jaws out at him in a blast of rancid ammonia. The jaws hinged out so wide they formed a tooth-fringed opening like a chapel cave. The maw was so big that a full crew of men could have carried a wyrmboat into it on their shoulders. Then its secondary jaws extended too, driven by the undulating elastic of the throat muscles, bristling with spine teeth made of translucent cartilage. The spine teeth, some longer than a grown man’s leg, flipped up out of the gum recesses like the blades of a folding knife, each one as transparent as glacial ice and dewed with drops of mucus. The hrosshvalur lunged at the charging daemon, the vast tonnage of its bulk grinding and scraping off the beach stones.

The daemon brought his axe down and cut through the lower, primary jaw between the biter-teeth at the front, splitting the jaw like a hull split along its keel. Noxious white froth boiled out of the wound, as if the hrosshvalur had steam for blood. Whooping, it tried to turn its injured head away. The daemon knocked his axe into the side of its skull, so that the blade went through the thick scale plate to its entire depth. Then he put it in again, directly below one of the glassy, staring eyes that were the size of a chieftain’s shield.

The ocean monster boomed, and spewed out a great torrent of rank effluvium. The daemon kept hacking until there was a bubbling pink slit where the hrosshvalur’s head met its neck. The beach underneath them was awash with stinking milky fluid. The slit puckered and dribbled as air gusted out of it. The beast wasn’t dead, but it was mortally stricken. The yapping mushveli began to eat it alive. The daemon left it to die, and walked towards Fith.

The Upplander had been awake to see most of the spectacle. He watched the daemon’s approach. Close to, they could see the plated form of the daemon’s decorated grey armour under his scorched robes and furs. They could see the corded brown lines tattooed into his face, down the line of his nose, across the planes of the cheek and around the eyes. They could smell him, a scent like an animal, but clean, the heady pheromone musk of an alpha dog.

They could see his fangs.

‘You are Ahmad Ibn Rustah?’ the daemon said.

The Upplander paused while his translator dealt with the words.

‘Yes,’ the Upplander replied. He shuddered with cold and pain. It was a miracle he was still conscious.

‘And you are?’ he asked.

The daemon said his name. The translator worked quickly.

‘Bear?’ asked the Upplander. ‘You’re called Bear?’

The daemon shrugged.

‘Why are you here?’ asked the Upplander.

‘There was an error,’ said the daemon. The purring growl was never far from the edges of his voice. ‘An oversight. I made the error, so now I make amends. I will take you out of this place.’

‘These men too,’ said the Upplander.

The daemon looked at Fith and Brom. Brom was unconscious against a rock, dusted with pellets of hail. The blood seeping from his wounds had frozen. Fith was just staring at the daemon. There was still blood on the handle of his axe.

‘Is he dead?’ the daemon asked Fith, nodding at Brom.

‘We’re both dead,’ Fith replied. That was all that was left for him now; the voyage to the Underverse to be remade.

‘I haven’t got time,’ the daemon said to the Upplander. ‘Just you.’

‘You’ll take them. After what they gave today, keeping me alive, you’ll take them.’

The daemon let out a soft, throbbing growl. He stepped back and took some sort of tool or wand from his belt. When he adjusted it, it made small, musical noises.

The daemon looked out to sea, out into the storm in the direction he had come from. Fith followed his gaze. Driving sleet flecked his face and made him blink and wince. He could hear a noise like a storm inside the storm.

The daemon’s boat appeared. Fith had never seen its like before, but he recognised the smooth boat-lines of the hull, and fins like rudders. It was not an ice rig or a water boat: it was an air boat, a boat for riding the wind and the storm. It came slowly towards them across the ice, hanging in the sky at mast-top height. Screaming air blasted down from it, keeping it up. The air flung ice chips up off the sea. Small green candles lit on and off at the corners of its wind rigs.

It came closer, until Fith had to shield his face from the blitzing air and the ice chips. Then it settled down on the sea crust with a crunch and opened a set of jaws as large as the hrosshvalur’s.

The daemon scooped up the Upplander in his arms. The Upplander shrieked as his broken leg bones ground and rubbed. The daemon didn’t seem particularly bothered. He looked at Fith.

‘Bring him,’ he said, nodding at Brom again. ‘Follow. Don’t touch anything.’

Hawser had been working in the upper strata of Karelia Hive for over eight months when someone from the Council legation finally agreed to see him.

‘You work in the library, don’t you?’ the man asked. His name was Bakunin, and he was an understaffer for Emantine, whose adjunct had repeatedly refused Hawser’s written approaches for an interview or assessment. Indirectly, this meant that Bakunin reported to the municipal and clerical authorities, and was therefore part of the greater administrative mechanism that eventually came to the attention of Jaffed Kelpanton in the Ministry of the Sigillite.

‘Yes, the Library of the Universitariate. But I’m not attached to the Universitariate. It’s a temporary position.’

‘Oh,’ said Bakunin, as if Hawser had said something interesting. The man had one eye on his appointment slate and could not disguise his eagerness to be elsewhere.

They’d met in the culinahalle on Aleksanterinkatu 66106. It was a high-spar place, with a good reputation and great views down over the summitstratum commercias. Acrobats and wire artists were performing over the drop in the late afternoon sun that flooded through the solar frames.

‘So, your position?’ Bakunin inquired. Elegant transhuman waiters with elective augmetic modifications had brought them a kettle of whurpu leaf and a silver tray of snow pastries.

‘I’m contracted to supervise the renovation. I’m a data archaeologist.’

‘Ah yes. I remember. The library was bombed, wasn’t it?’

‘Pro-Panpacifists detonated two wipe devices during the insurrection.’

Bakunin nodded. ‘There can be nothing whatsoever to recover.’

‘The Hive Council certainly didn’t believe so. They passed the area for demolition.’

‘But you disagreed?’

Hawser smiled. ‘I persuaded the Universitariate Board to hire me on a trial basis. So far, I’ve recovered seven thousand texts from an archive that had been deemed worthless.’

‘Good for you,’ said Bakunin. ‘Good for you.’

‘Good for all of us,’ said Hawser. ‘Which brings me to the purpose of this meeting. Have you had a chance to read my petition?’

Bakunin smiled thinly. ‘I confess, no. Not cover to cover. Things are very busy at the moment. I have reviewed it quickly, however. As far as the general thrust of your position goes, I am with you all the way. All the way. But I can’t see how it isn’t already covered under the terms of the Enactment of Remembrance and–’

Hawser raised his hand gently. ‘Please, don’t point me to the Offices of the Remembrancers. My requests keep getting channelled in that direction.’

‘But surely you’re talking about commemoration, about the systematic accumulation of data to document the liberation and unification of human civilisation. We are blessed to be living through the greatest moment in the history of our species, and it is only right that we memorialise it. The Sigillite himself supports and promotes the notion. You know he was a direct signatory of the Enactment?’

‘I know. I am aware of his support. I celebrate it. So often, at the great moments in history, the historian is forgotten.’

‘From my review of your statements and personal history,’ said Bakunin, ‘I am in no doubt that I can secure you a high-profile position in the Remembrance Order. I can recommend you, and I’m confident I can do the same for several other names on the list you submitted.’

‘I’m grateful,’ said Hawser, ‘truly, I am. But that’s not why I requested this meeting. The remembrancers perform a vital function. Of course we must record, in great detail, the events that are surrounding us. Of course we must, for the public good, for the greater glory, for posterity, but I am proposing a rather more subtle endeavour, one that I fear is being overlooked. I’m not talking about writing down what we’re doing. I’m talking about writing down what we know. I’m talking about preserving human knowledge, systemising it, working out what we know and what we’ve forgotten.’

The understaffer blinked, and his smile became rather vacuous. ‘That’s surely… pardon me, ser… but that’s surely an organic process of the Imperium. We do that as we go along, don’t we? I mean, we must. We accumulate knowledge.’

‘Yes, but not rigorously, not methodically. And when a resource is lost, like the library here in Karelia, we shrug and say oh dear. But that data wasn’t lost, not all of it. I ask the question – did we even know what we had lost when the wipe devices detonated? Did we have any idea of the holes it was eating in the collective knowledge of our species?’

Bakunin looked uncomfortable.

‘I need someone to champion this, ser,’ Hawser said. He knew he was getting bright-eyed and eager, and he knew that people often found that enthusiasm off-putting. Bakunin looked uneasy but Hawser couldn’t help himself. ‘We… and by we I mean all the academics who have put their names to my petition… we need someone to take this up the line in the Administratum. To get it noticed. To get it to the attention of somebody who has the position and influence to action it.’

‘With respect–’

‘With respect, ser, I do not want to spend the remainder of my career following the various Crusade forces around like a loyal dog, dutifully recording every last detail of their meritorious actions. I want to see a greater process at work, an audit of human knowledge. We must find out the limits of what we know. We must identify the blanks, and then strive to fill those blanks or renovate missing data.’

Bakunin let out a nervous little laugh.

‘It’s no secret that we used to know how to do things that we can’t do anymore,’ said Hawser, ‘great feats of technology, and constructions, miracles of physics. We’ve forgotten how to do things that our ancestors five thousand years ago considered rudimentary. Five thousand years is nothing. It was a golden age, and look at us now, picking through the ashes to put it back together. Everyone knows that the Age of Strife was a dark age during which mankind lost countless treasures. But really, ser, do you know what we lost exactly?’

‘No,’ replied Bakunin.

‘Neither do I,’ Hawser replied. ‘I cannot even tell you something as basic as what we lost. I wouldn’t know where to start.’

‘Please,’ said Bakunin. He shivered as though he was sitting in a draught. ‘Caches of data are being recovered all the time. Why, just the other day, I heard that we now had complete texts for all three of Shakespire’s plays!’

Hawser looked the understaffer in the eye.

‘Answer me this,’ he said. ‘Does anyone even know why the Age of Strife happened? How did we end up in the great darkness of Old Night to begin with?’

Hawser woke up. He could still smell the whurpu leaf and hear the background chatter of the culinahalle.

Except he couldn’t.

Those things were years ago and far away. He’d blacked out and been dreaming for a second. He could smell blood and lubrication oil. He could smell body odours, scents of dirt and pain.

The pain of his own injuries was incandescent. He wondered if the Astartes – Bear – would give him a shot of something. It didn’t seem likely. Bear’s attitude towards suffering appeared to be fixed to a different scale. It was more probable that the Upplander’s mind would, at some point, cease registering the extremes of pain in a desperate effort to protect itself.

The cabin space was dark around the metal stretcher he had been laid out on. His limbs had been strapped down. They were in the air still. Everything was vibrating. There was a constant howl from the drop-ship’s engines. Every so often, turbulence jolted them.

Bear appeared. He loomed up over the stretcher, looking down. He’d sheared off the burnt ends of his mane of hair, and tied the rest back with a loop of leather. His face was long and noble, with high cheek ridges, a long nose and a prominent mouth, like a snout almost. No, not a snout, a muzzle. The intricate lines of the brown tattoos followed the geometry of Bear’s face, and accented the planes of the cheek and nose, and the angles of the cheeks and brows. His skin was wind-burned and tanned. It looked as if his face had been carved out of hardwood, like the figure post of a wyrmboat.

He stared down at the Upplander. The Upplander realised the Astartes was scanning him with a handheld device.

He clicked it off and put it away.

‘We’re coming in now,’ he said. The Upplander’s translator raced to keep up. ‘There’ll be a surgeon waiting to tend you, but this is a special place. You know that. So let’s start as we mean to go on.’

He reached down, and with the fingers of his left hand, he gouged out the Upplander’s right eye.

Three

Aett

If the daemon, Bear, represented salvation, then he also represented a final submission. The Upplander no longer needed to fight the cold to stay awake, or the pain to stay alive. He let go, and sank like a rock into the glassy silence of a freezing sea. Pain devoured him. It beset him like a blizzard, so violent and furious that he could see it, even with his blinded eye.

The blizzard continued long after the pain blew out.

They were approaching the special place that Bear had promised to take him to. They were arriving in a snowstorm. It was a terrible snowstorm.

Or was it white noise? Flecks of static instead of particles of snow? A faulty pict-feed? The signal trash of a damaged augmetic optic? Just fuzz, just buzzing white speckles against–

Against blackness. The blackness, now that had to be real. It was so solid. Solid blackness.

Unless it was blindness. His eye hurt. The absence of it hurt. The socket where his eye had been hurt.

Snow and static, blackness and blindness; the values interchanged. He couldn’t tell them apart. His core temperature was plummeting. Pain was being diluted with numbness. The Upplander knew he had long since ceased to be a reliable witness of events. Consciousness refused to reignite in any stable fashion. He was caught in an ugly cleft of half-awareness, a pitiful foxhole in the lee-side of a snow-bank of insensibility. It was unbearably hard to distinguish between memories and pain-dreams. Was he seeing white noise on a blacked-out display screen, or blizzarding snow against solid black rock? It was impossible to tell.

He fancied the blackness was a mountain beyond the snow, a mountain that was too big to be a mountain, a black tooth of rock that loomed out of the blizzard, broader and taller than could be taken in at a single glance. It was so big that it had already filled his field of vision, up and down and side to side, before he even realised it was there. At first, he thought it was the blackness of the polar sky, but no, it was a solid wall of rock, rushing towards him.

He sighed, reassured, able at last to comfort himself by definitively separating one memory-fact from dream-fiction. The mountain, that was definitely a dream.

No mountain could be that big.

He was carried in out of the storm, down into the warm and muffled blackness of a deep cave. He lay there and dreamed some more.

The Upplander dreamed for a long time.

The dreams started out as pain-dreams, sharpened by the pangs of his injuries, distorted by opiates flooding into his bloodstream. They were fragments, sharp and imperfect, like segments of a puzzle, or pieces of a broken mirror, interspersed with deadened periods of unconsciousness. They reminded him of the moves of a Regicide game, a match between two experienced players. Slow, considered moves, strategically deep, separated by long stretches of contemplative inaction. The Regicide board was old and inlaid with ivory. He could smell the lint that had collected in the corners of the board’s case. Nearby, there was a small toy horse, made of wood. He was drinking radapple juice. Someone was playing the clavier.

The sharp edges of his mental fragments dulled, and the dreams became longer and more complex. He began to dream his way through epic cycles of dreams. They lasted years, they enumerated generations, they saw the ice encroach and thaw away again, the ocean harden and return to motion, the sun rush across the cloud-barred sky like a disc of beaten copper, winking, glittering, growing bright like a nova and then dull like a dead stellar ember. Day, night, day, night…

Inside the dreams, men came to him and sat by him in the secret gloom of the cave. They talked. A fire was burning. He could smell the copal resin smoking into the air. He could not see the men, but he could see their shadows, cast up the cave wall by the spitting fire. They were not human. The shadow shapes had animal heads, or antlers, or horns sometimes. Man-shapes sat and panted through dog-snouts. Spiked branches of horn-crest nodded as others spoke. Some were hunched with the weighty shoulder hump of winter-fat cattle. After a while, he became uncertain if he was seeing shadows on the cave wall, or ancient parietal art, smudged lines of ochre and charcoal, that had been lent the illusion of movement by the inconstant flames.

He tried to listen to what was being said by the men during the long, mumbling conversations, but he couldn’t concentrate. He thought that if he was able to focus, he would hear all the secrets of the world come tumbling out in a murmured river, and learn every story from the very first to the very last.

Sometimes the Upplander’s dreams picked him up and carried him outside the cave. They took him up to some high vantage where there were only stars overhead, in a roof of velvet blue, and sunlit lands below, a tapestry of worlds, all sewn together, all the worlds in creation, like the inlaid board of a great game. And on that board, epic histories played out for him. Nations and empires, creeds and races, rising and falling, bonding and fighting, forming alliances, making war. He witnessed unifications, annihilations, reformations, annexations, invasions, expansions, enlightenments. He saw it all from his lofty vantage, a seat so high and precarious that sometimes he had to cling on to the throne’s golden arms for fear of falling.

Sometimes his dreams swept him back inside himself, into his own flesh, into his own blood, and there, at a microscopic level, he observed the universe of his own body as it disassembled atom from atom, his essence sampled down to the smallest genetic packet, like light sifted and split into its component colours by a subtle lens. He felt he was being dismantled, working part from working part, like an old timepiece, and every last piece of the damaskeened movement laid out for repair. He felt like a biological sample: a laboratory animal, belly slit and pegged open, its organs removed one by one like the gears of a pocket watch; like an insect, pinned and minutely sectioned for a glass slide to learn what made it tick.

When his dreams took him back to the cave, where the therianthrope shadows sat muttering in the firelight, he often felt as if he had been put back together in an altogether different order. If he was an old timepiece, then his dismantled movement had been rearranged, and some parts cleaned or modified, or replaced, and then his mainspring and his escapement, his going train and his balance wheel, and all his tiny levers and pins had been put back together in some inventive new sequence, and his cover screwed shut so that no one could see how he had been re-engineered.

And when he was back in the cave, he thought about the cave itself. Warm, secure, deep in the black rock, out of the storm. But had he been taken back there for his own protection? Or had he been taken back there for safekeeping until the man-shapes around the fire got hungry?

The strangest and most infrequent dreams of all were of the coldest, deepest part of the cave, where a voice spoke to him.

In this place, there was only blackness cut by a cold, blue glow. The air smelled sterile, like rock in a dry polar highland that lacked any water to form ice. It was far away from the soft warmth and the firelight of the cave, far away from the fraternity of murmuring voices and the smell of smouldering resin. The Upplander’s limbs felt leaden there, as though he had swallowed ice, as though cold liquid metal ran in his veins and weighed him down. Even his thoughts were slow and viscous.

He fought against the arctic slowness, afraid to let it pull him down into dreamless sleep and death. The best he could muster felt like a feeble twitch of his heavy limbs.

‘Be still!’

That was the first thing the voice said to him. It was so sudden and unexpected, he froze.

‘Be still!’ the voice repeated. It was a deep, hollow voice, a whisper that carried the force of thunder. It wasn’t particularly human. It sounded as if it had been fashioned out of the bleating, droning notes of an old signal horn. Each syllable and vowel sound was simply the same low, reverberative noise sampled and tonally adjusted.

‘Be still. Stop your twitching and your wriggling.’

‘Where am I?’ the Upplander asked.

‘In the dark,’ the voice replied. It sounded further away, a ram’s horn braying on a lonely cliff.

‘I don’t understand,’ he said.

There was a silence. Then the voice came again, directly behind the Upplander’s right ear, as if the speaker had circled him.

‘You don’t have to understand the dark. That’s the thing about the dark, it doesn’t need to be understood. It’s just the dark. It is what it is.’

‘But what am I doing here?’ he asked.

When the voice answered, it had receded. It came as a rumble from somewhere ahead of him, like the sound of a wind moaning through empty caves. It said, ‘You’re here to be. You’re here to dream the dreams, that’s all. So just dream the dreams. They’ll help pass the time. Dream the dreams. Stop your twitching and your wriggling. It’s disturbing me.’

The Upplander hesitated. He didn’t like the threat of anger in the voice.

‘I don’t like it here,’ he ventured at length.

‘None of us like it here!’ the voice boomed, right in the Upplander’s left ear. He let out an involuntary squeak of terror. Not only was the voice loud and close and angry, but there was a wet leopard-growl in its thunder.

‘None of us like it here,’ the voice repeated, calmer now, circling him in the darkness. ‘None of us chose to be here. We miss the firelight. We miss the sunlight. We’ve dreamed all the dreams they give us a hundred times over, a thousand times. We know them off by heart. We don’t choose the dark.’

There was a long pause.

‘The dark chooses us.’

‘Who are you?’ the Upplander asked.

‘I was called Cormek,’ the voice said. ‘Cormek Dod.’

‘How long have you been here, Cormek Dod?’

Pause, then a rumble. ‘I forget.’

‘How long have I been here?’

‘I don’t even know who you are,’ the voice replied. ‘Just be still, and shut up your racket, and stop disturbing me.’

Then the Upplander woke up, and he was still on the metal stretcher Bear had strapped him to.

The stretcher was swaying slightly, suspended. The Upplander’s vision swam into focus and he looked up, up at the chains rising from the four corners of the stretcher. They all met at a central ring, and became a single, thicker length of chain. The main chain, dark and oiled, extended up and away, into the oppressive twilight of the vast roof space above him. It felt like a cave, an enormous cave, but it wasn’t the dream-cave where the animal-men had murmured by the firelight, and it wasn’t the deep, cold cave with the blue glow either.

Everything was in shadow, in a twilight of a greenish cast. From what he could make out in the half-light, the cave was a vast space, like the nave of a cathedral, or the belly-hold of a voidship. And it wasn’t actually a cave, because the structural angles and edges were too straight and regular.

The Upplander couldn’t turn his head or move his limbs, but he was relieved to find that he was no longer in pain. There was not even a vestigial nag of discomfort from his torso or his shattered legs.

His relief was rather eclipsed by the anxiety he felt at his new situation: trapped and pinned, strapped down, unable to twist his head to see anything but the black roof space above. A dull, drowsy weight on his heart made him feel sluggish and leaden, as if he’d taken a tranquiliser or a sleeping draught. He blinked, wishing he could rub the grit out of his eyes, wishing the stretcher would stop swinging.

A swaying length of thick chain ran back down out of the darkness at an oblique angle to the central chain supporting him, and from its rhythmic jolts, it seemed clear that he was being hoisted up into the vaulted roof of the cathedral. The links clattered through an invisible block high above him.

He stopped ascending. The stretcher wobbled for a moment, and then swung hard to his left, out across the room, drawn with such force it started to rotate. Then the chain began to rattle back up in fits and starts, and the stretcher began to descend. The taut chains securing the four corners of the stretcher shuddered with every downward jerk.

He began to panic. He strained at the buckled canvas restraints. They wouldn’t give, and he didn’t want to tear or strain any of his wounds.

He came down lower, in a series of jolting drops, onto some sort of deck area or platform. Men moved in quickly from either side to take hold of the stretcher and steady it.

The Upplander looked up at their faces, and his anxiety transmuted into fear.

The men wore robes of simple, poor-quality cloth over tight body-suits of intricately fashioned brown leather. Each leather suit was constructed in artful panels, some shaped, some decorated with piercing or knotwork or furrowed lines, so that the whole resembled an anatomist’s diagram of human musculature: the wall of muscle around the ribs, the tendons of the arms, the sinews of the throat.

Their faces were animal skulls, masks fashioned from bone. Stub horns curled from discoloured skull brows. Branching antler tines rose from unicorn centre-burrs.

The eyes staring out of the mask slits at the Upplander were inhuman. They were the black-pinned yellow eyes of wolves. They shone with their own light.

Get off me! he shouted, but his voice was dust-dry in his throat, as though he hadn’t spoken for centuries. He coughed, panic rising in his chest. The bone faces crowded in around him, puzzled at his antics. All of them smiled the simpleton smile of skulls, the idiot grin of death’s face, but the eyes in the sockets and slits put the lie to that glee. The fire in the yellow eyes was predatory, a fierce intellect, an intent to do harm.

‘Get away from me!’ he cried, finding his voice at last, dragging it out, old and rusty, from the parched creek bed of his throat. ‘Get back!’

The skulls did nothing of the kind. They came closer. Hands sheathed in intricate brown leather gauntlets reached towards his face to clamp his mouth. Some of them had only two or three fingers. Some had dewclaws.

The Upplander began to thrash in his restraints, pulling and twisting in a frenzied effort born of panic. He no longer cared if he tore sutures, or reopened a healing gash, or jarred a mending bone fracture.

Something broke. He felt it snap, thought it was a rib or a hamstring, braced himself for the searing pain.

It was the canvas cuff on his right arm. He’d torn it clean off the metal boss that anchored it to the stretcher’s frame.

He lashed out with his freed arm and felt his knuckles connect with the hard ridges of a skull mask. Something let out a guttural bark of distress. The Upplander punched again, yelling, then he scrabbled at the buckles girthed around his throat, and undid the neck straps. With his throat free, he could lift his shoulders off the hard bed of the stretcher, and raise his head clear of the leather brace that was preventing all lateral movement. He bent up, leaning over to unfasten the canvas cuff holding his left wrist. The right-hand strap was still buckled around his right forearm with a frayed tuft sprouting from its underside where he’d torn it off the steel boss.

The skulls came at him, grabbing him and trying to press him back down. Unbraced, the stretcher swung wildly. The Upplander fought them off. His legs were still strapped in. He punched and twisted, and cursed at them in Low Gothic, Turcic, Croat and Syblemic. They gibbered at him, in commotion, trying to pin him and restrain him.

The Upplander’s right leg came free. He bent it, and then lashed out a kick with as much force as he could muster. He caught one of the skulls full in the chest, and rejoiced to see the figure recoil with enough violence to tumble at least another two of its robed companions backwards.

Then his left leg tore free too. As his weight shifted suddenly, the stretcher tipped and he spilled off, falling into half a dozen of the skulls trying to keep him in place. His fists were flying. The Upplander had never been taught to fight, and he’d never had to, but terror and a frantic survival instinct impelled him, and there didn’t appear to be any huge mystery to it. You swung your fists. If your fists connected with things, you hurt them. The things jerked backwards. They uttered growls of pain or barks of breath. If you were lucky, they fell down. The Upplander milled his arms like a madman. He kicked out. He drove them back. He kicked one of them so hard that it sprawled and broke its skull mask against the smooth granite of the platform.

The Upplander found his feet. The skulls were circling him, but they had become wary. Some of them had been bruised by his slugging fists. He snarled at them, stamping his feet and gesticulating wildly with his fists, as though he was trying to scare off a flock of birds. The skulls drew back a little.

The Upplander took a second to get his bearings.

He was standing on a platform of dark granite, a shelf that had been cut, sharp and square-edged, from the rock around it. Behind him, the stretcher was swinging on its chains. To his left, a row of oblong granite blocks lined one side of the platform, permanent catafalques onto which stretchers like his own could be lowered and rested. Above him dangled four or five more chain pulleys of various gauges and sizes.

To his right, the platform overhung a gulf. It went straight down into darkness, and smelled of wet minerals and the centre of the world. The gulf was a shaft, rectangular in cross-section, and the sides of the shaft had been cut, like the platform, out of the living rock. The shaft dropped into the darkness below him in square-cut, oblong bites, like the layers of a cake, or the cubic levels of a monolithic quarry. They looked like they had been cut with sideways slices of a giant chisel.

All around him, the chamber rose in majesty, its cyclopean walls rock-hewn like the shaft, too regular and rectilinear to be a natural cave, too make-shift and imperfect to have been planned in one piece. Monumental stonemasons and mining engineers had opened this cavity over a period of decades or centuries, excising one or two levels of oblong blocks at a time, increasing the space in rectilinear levels, quarrying each layer of stone away and leaving artificial lines of division and stratification in the gigantic walls. Each phase must have been a monstrous effort, from the sheer tonnage of rock alone. The square-cut bites showed how huge and unwieldy each removed block of stone must have been. The cubic mass of a mountain had been hollowed out of the heart of a bigger mountain.

The platform and the shaft top were lit by the frosty green twilight. Watermarks streaked the horizontally scored, stratified walls, leaving downstrokes of emerald minerals and algae stain. The Upplander could not see how far up the ceiling was, because it was lost in the cavity’s darkness.

He edged backwards, the skulls around him. He became conscious of the way that every sound they made became a deep bell-echo in the vast chamber. He tried to move to keep the catafalques between him and the skulls. They circled in between the biers, trying to outflank him. He noticed that, although they looked solid-hewn, the catafalques had metal plates set in their sides. The plates incorporated vent caps, indicator lights and recognisably Terran control pads. Stout, reinforced metal ducting sprouted like drainpipes from the plates and disappeared flush into the platform. There was tech in this primordially quarried chamber, a lot of tech, and it was largely concealed.

The skulls attempted to rush him. The Upplander darted backwards and reached the pendulating stretcher. He grabbed its metal frame and steered it at the skulls, ramming it at them. They jumped back out of its way, and he rammed it again to keep them at bay. He saw the buckled canvas cuffs anchored to the stretcher’s bed. He had assumed he’d simply pulled them all off their pins, like the right-hand cuff that was still fastened around his forearm. But both leg straps and the left-hand cuff had been ripped. The waxed canvas and leather trusses had torn open along their stitching. He’d as good as wrenched himself free of his bonds.

The thought disturbed him. He was sick and injured, surely? He didn’t feel sick and injured. The Upplander looked down at himself. He was whole. His feet were bare. They were pink and clean. The still-buckled canvas cuff hung around his right wrist. His body was cased in a dark grey bodyglove with reinforced panels at the major joints like the undersuit of some void-armour. It was tight and form-fitting. It revealed a figure that looked remarkably lean and strong, with surprising muscle definition. It did not look like the well-worn, over-taxed eighty-three year-old body he had last looked down at. No thickness at the hips, no incipient paunch from too many amasecs over too many years.

No augmetic implant from that day in Ossetia.

‘What the hell…?’ the Upplander breathed.

Sensing his sudden disconcertion, the skulls came at him.

He swung the stretcher into them with all the force he could muster. Its metal nose caught one in the breastbone, and almost flipped it onto its back. He glimpsed a cracked dog-skull mask, strap broken, sliding away across the platform. Another skull grabbed the opposite end of the stretcher and tried to wrench it out of his hands. The Upplander uttered a despairing, denying cry that echoed around the vast chamber, and hauled the stretcher out of the skull’s grip. The skull’s feet left the ground for a moment as it tried to cling on.

The Upplander pulled the stretcher right back and let it fly. It swung like a wrecking ball. It struck one skull down and slammed into a second, knocking it off the edge of the platform into the gulf.

The skull managed to catch the lip of the platform as it went over. Its hands clawed frantically at the granite surfaces. The weight of its legs and body slid it backwards. The other skulls rushed forwards and grabbed it by the hands and sleeves.

While they were occupied pulling their kin to safety, the Upplander ran.

He left the chamber, his bare feet slapping against the cool stone floor. He passed under a broad lintel, and down the throat of an entrance hall big enough to fly a cargo spinner through. The permeating green dusk cast a confused light. His shadow ran away from him in different directions.

The grand entrance hall, and the rock-cut tunnel that lay beyond it, were more finished than the vast chamber behind him. The rock walls had been planed or polished to a dull shine, like dark water ice in the middle of a hard winter. The floor was stone. The ceiling, and the edges of the floor where it met the wall, along with the interspersed archways, ribs and regular wall panels, were dressed in beams and fittings of gleaming off-white, like varnished blond wood. Most of the white wood finishings were massive, as thick as tree boles, and hard-edged, although some were expertly curved to form arches, or chamfered to make wall ribs.

The gloomy place made memories fire in his head, sudden and sharp. The halls reminded him of ikon caskets he had once recovered from atomic bunkers under the nanotic ground zero outside Zincirli, in Federated Islahiye. They reminded him of Gaduarene reliquaries with their engravings of lightning stones, and the case of Rector Uwe’s treasured old Regicide set. They reminded him of the elegant, silk-lined boxes of the Daumarl Medal. They reminded him of Ossetian prayer boxes, the ones made of grey slate set into frames of expertly worked ivory. Yes, that was it. Gold sheets, hammered around carcasses of wood and pin-screwed bone, so old, so precious. The white posts and pillars finishing his surroundings looked like they were made of bone. They had an unmistakable, slightly golden, cast, a warmth. He felt as if he were inside a box of Ossetian slate lined with ivory, as if he were the ancient treasure, the rusted nail, the lock of saintly hair, the flaking parchment, the keepsake.

He kept running, straining to hear whether he was being followed. The only sounds were the slaps of his soles and the faraway sigh of wind gusting along empty hallways. The draught made it feel as though he were in some high castle, where a casement shutter had been left open somewhere, allowing air to stir through unpopulated chambers.

He stopped for a moment. Turning to his left, he could feel the breath of the wind against his face, a faint positive pressure from one direction.

Then he heard something else, a ticking sound. A clicking. He couldn’t tell where it was coming from. It was ticking like a clock, but faster, like an urgent heartbeat.

He slowly made sense of what he was hearing.

Something was padding along the stone floor of the tunnel, somewhere close by, a quadruped, soft-footed, moving with purpose, but not running. It had claws, not the retractable claws of a feline, but the claws of a dog, prominent and unconcealed, the wear-blunted tips tap-tap-tapping on the stone floor with every step.

He was being stalked. He was being hunted.

He started to run again. The tunnel broadened out, under a fine, spandrelled arch of blond wood, and revealed a great flight of stairs up ahead. The steps were cut from the native rock, square and plain. They became winders after the first ten steps where the flight turned away. The depth of the tread and the height of the risers were two or three times the normal dimensions. It was a giant’s staircase.

He heard the claw-clicks closing in behind him, and began to bound up the steps. The lustrous green twilight threw strange shadows. His own shadow loomed alarmingly at his side, staining the wall like the therianthropic shapes in his dream-cave. His shadow-head looked more like an animal’s on the curving wall, so much so that he had to stop for a moment and feel at his face to check that he had not woken in possession of a snout or muzzle.

His fingers found the lean flesh of his face, human and familiar, with a trace of moustache and a patch of beard on the chin.

Then he realised he could only see out of one eye.

The last breathing memory he had was of Bear taking his right eye out with his fingers. The pain had been dull, but enough to shock him into unconsciousness.

Yet it was his right eye he could see out of. It was his right eye that was showing him the frosty green twilight around him. His left eye registered only blackness.

The claw-taps approached behind him, louder, nearly at the bullnose step at the foot of the flight. He resumed his escape. Looking down, he watched the shadows on the winding steps move and alter behind him. The edge-step shadows fanned out into a radiating geometric diagram, like the delicate compartments of a giant spiral seashell, or the partitioned divisions of some intricate brass astrolabe or timepiece.

Tick, tick, tick – each second, each step, each stair, each turn, each division.

A new shadow loomed below him. It spread up across the outside wall of the giant staircase, cast by something on the stairs but out of sight around the turn.

It was canine. Its head was down, and its ears were forward and alert. Its back, thickly furred, was arched and tensed. Its forepaws rose and took each step with mesmeric precision and grace. The ticking had slowed down.

‘I’m not afraid of you!’ he cried. ‘There are no wolves on Fenris!’

He was answered by a wet throat-growl that touched some infrasonic pitch of terror. He turned and ran, but his foot caught a step wrong, and he tripped and fell hard. Something seized him from behind, something powerful. He cried out, imagining jaws closing on his back.

A tight grip rolled him onto his back on the steps. There was a giant standing over him, but it was a man, not a wolf.

The face was all he saw. It was sheathed in a tight mask of lacquered brown leather, part man, part daemon-wolf, as intricately made as the bodysuits of the skulls. Knotted and straked, the leather pieces circled the eye sockets and made heavy lids. They barred the cheek like exposed sinew, and buffered the chin. They wrapped the throat, and were shaped to mimic a long moustache and a bound-up tusk of chin-beard. The eyes revealed through the mask slits were the colour of spun gold with black pinprick pupils.

The mouth held bright fangs.

‘What are you doing here?’ the giant rumbled. It bent down and sniffed at him. ‘You’re not meant to be here. Why are you here?’

‘I don’t understand!’ the Upplander quailed.

‘What are you called?’ the giant asked.

Some shred of wit remained in the Upplander’s head.

‘Ahmad Ibn Rustah,’ he replied.

The giant grasped him by the upper arm and dragged him the rest of the way up the stairs. The Upplander scrambled to keep up, his feet slipping and milling, like a child pulled along by an adult. The giant had a lush black pelt around one shoulder and his immense, corded physique was packed into a leatherwork bodyglove. The build, the scope of the giant’s physicality, was unmistakable.

‘You’re Astartes…’ the Upplander ventured, half-running, half-slithering in response to the dragging grip.

‘What?’

‘Astartes. I said, you’re–’

‘Of course I’m Astartes!’ the giant rumbled.

‘Do you have a name?’

‘Of course I have a name!’

‘W-what is it?’

‘It’s shut up or I’ll slit your bloody throat! That’s what it is! All right?’

They had reached a landing, and then the doorway of a massive but low-ceilinged chamber. The Upplander felt heat, the warmth of flame. Vision was suddenly, curiously, returning to his dead left eye. He could see a dull, fiery glow ahead. It was enough to catch the shape of things in the dark, the shape of things his right eye saw in hard, cold, green relief.

The giant dragged him in through the stone archway.

The chamber was circular, at least thirty metres across. The floor was a great disk of polished bone or pale wood, laid in almost seamless sections. There were three plinths in the room, each one a broad, circular platform of grey stone about five metres in diameter rising about a metre off the bone floor. Each plinth was simply cut and worked smooth. In the centre of each was a firepit, crackling with well-fed flames, oozing a blush of heat into the air. Conical iron hoods hung down over each fire from the low, domed ceiling to vent the smoke.

Through his right eye, the chamber was a bright place of spectral green light. The licking flames were blooming white in their brightness. To his left, it was a dark, ruddy cave suffused by an uneven golden glow from the fires. The expanse of bone floor and brushed pale stone reflected the firelight’s radiance. Opposite the chamber door, where the low wall met the down-curved edge of the domed roof, there were shallow, horizontal window slits, like the ports of a gun emplacement. The depth of the angled recesses around the slits spoke of the extraordinary thickness of the walls.

Four men occupied the room, all seated on the flat top of the furthest plinth. All of them were giants in furs and leather like the one who clasped his arm.

They were relaxed, sipping from silver drinking bowls, playing games with bone counters on wooden boards laid out on the plinth between them. It looked like one of the men, cross-legged and nearest the firepit, was playing all of the other three, simultaneously running three boards.

They looked from their games, four more daemon faces cased in tight leather masks, four more sets of yellow eyes, catching the lamplight like mirrors. The flash was brightest in the green-cast view of the Upplander’s right eye.

‘What have you found now, Trunc?’ asked one.

‘I’ve found Ahmad Ibn Rustah on the Chapter stairs is what I’ve found,’ replied the giant holding him.

Two of the men by the fire snorted, and one tapped a finger to his crown to imply a touch of simple-headedness.

‘And what’s an Ahmad Ibn Rustah, then?’ asked the first one again. The pelt he was wearing was red-brown, and his hair, long and braided stiff with wax or lacquer, projected out of the back of his full-head mask in an S-curve like a striking serpent.

‘Don’t you remember?’ the giant replied. ‘Don’t you remember, Var?’ The giant let go of the Upplander’s arm and shoved him down onto the bone floor until he was kneeling. The floor was warm to the touch, like fine ivory.

‘I remember you talking shit yesterday, Trunc,’ returned Var of the serpent-crest. ‘And the day before that, and the day before that. It all blurs into one to me.’

‘Yes? Bite my hairy arse.’

The men lounging on the plinth burst out laughing, all except the one sitting cross-legged.

‘I remember,’ he said. His voice was like good steel drawing across an oiled whetstone. The others fell silent.

‘You do?’ asked Trunc.

The one sitting cross-legged nodded. His mask was the most intricate of all. The cheeks and brow were seething with interlocking figures and spiralling ribbon-shapes. His wide shoulders were draped with two pelts, one coal-black, the other white.

‘Yes. And you’d remember him too, Varangr, if you only thought about it for a bloody minute.’

‘I would?’ asked Var of the serpent-crest uncertainly.

‘Yes, you would. It was Gedrath. It was the old Jarl of Tra. Remember now?’

Var nodded. The crest of bound hair went up and down like the arm of a hand pump. ‘Oh, yes, Skarsi, I do. I do!’

‘Good,’ said the man in the black and white pelts, and casually fetched Var an open-handed clip around the side of the head that seemed to deliver the same playful force of a mallet seating a fence-post.

‘I recognise my failing and will be sure to correct it,’ Var mumbled.

The man in the black and white pelts uncrossed his legs, slipped to the edge of the plinth, and stood up.

‘What do we do with him, Skarsi?’ Trunc asked.

‘Well,’ the man said, ‘I suppose we could eat him.’

He stared down at the kneeling Upplander.

‘That was a joke,’ he said.

‘I don’t think he’s laughing, Skarsi,’ said one of the others.

The man in the black and white pelts aimed an index finger at Trunc.

‘You go down and find out why he’s awake.’

‘Yes, Skarsi,’ Trunc nodded.

Skarsi turned the finger towards Varangr.

‘Var? You go and find the gothi. Bring him here. He’ll know what’s to be done.’

Var nodded his serpent-crest again.

Skarsi pointed at the other two men. ‘You two, go and… just go. We’ll finish the game-circle later.’

The two men got off the plinth and followed Var and Trunc towards the chamber door. ‘Just because you were losing, Skarsi,’ laughed one of them as he went by.

‘You’ll look pretty funny with a hneftafl board jammed up your arse,’ Skarsi replied. The men laughed again.

When the four of them had passed through the arched doorway and out of sight, Skarsi turned back to the Upplander and hunkered down to face him with his hands clasped and his elbows resting on his knees. He cocked his huge, masked head on one side, studying the man kneeling on the floor in front of him.

‘So, you’re Ibn Rustah, then?’

The Upplander didn’t reply at first.

‘You got a voice in you?’ Skarsi asked, ‘or is it just the words I’m using?’ He tapped the lips of his tight leather mask. ‘Words? Yes? You need a translator? A translator?’

The Upplander put his hand to his chest, and then remembered that his environment suit was long gone.

‘I’ve lost my translator unit,’ he replied. ‘I don’t know where it went. But I understand you. I’m not sure how. What are you speaking?’

Skarsi shrugged. ‘Words?’

‘What language?’

‘Uh, Juvjk, we call it. Hearth-cant. If I speak Low Gothic like this, is it any better?’

‘Did you switch just then?’ asked the Upplander.

‘Between Juvjk and Low? Yes.’

The Upplander shook his head, slightly mystified.

‘I heard a sort of accent shift,’ he replied, ‘but the words stayed the same. It was all just the same.’

‘You know you’re speaking Juvjk back to me, don’t you?’ Skarsi said.

The Upplander hesitated. He swallowed.

‘I couldn’t speak Juvjk yesterday,’ he confessed.

‘That’s what a good night’s sleep’ll do for you,’ said Skarsi. He rose. ‘Get up and come sit over here,’ he said, pointing at the plinth where the four Astartes had been gaming. The Upplander got up and followed him.

‘You’re Space Wolves, aren’t you?’

Skarsi found that amusing. ‘Oh, now those words aren’t Juvjk. Space Wolves? Ha ha. We don’t use that term.’

‘What do you use, then?’

‘The Vlka Fenryka, if we’re being formal. Just the Rout, otherwise.’

He beckoned the Upplander to sit on the broad stone plinth, sliding one of the wooden game-boards out of his way. In the firepit, kindling spat and cracked, and the Upplander could feel the fierce press of heat against his left side.

‘You’re Skarsi?’ he asked. ‘Your name?’

Skarsi nodded, taking a sip of dark liquid from a silver bowl.

‘That’s so. Amlodhi Skarssen Skarssensson, Jarl of Fyf.’

‘You’re some kind of lord?’

‘Yes. Some kind.’ Skarsi appeared to smile behind his mask.

‘What does Jarl of Fyf mean, then? What language is that?’

Skarsi picked up one of the bone-disc counters from the game boards and started to play with it absent-mindedly.

‘It’s Wurgen.’

‘Wurgen?’

‘You ask a lot of questions.’

‘I do,’ said the Upplander. ‘It’s what I do. It’s why I came here.’

Skarsi nodded. He flipped the counter back onto the board. ‘It’s why you came here, eh? To ask questions? I can think of plenty of better reasons for going to a place.’ He looked at the Upplander. ‘And where is here, Ahmad Ibn Rustah?’

‘Fenris. The fortress of the Sixth Legion Astartes, called – forgive me – the Space Wolves. The fortress is known as the Fang. Am I right?’

‘Yes. Except only an idiot calls it the Fang.’

‘What does a man call it if he isn’t an idiot?’ the Upplander asked.

‘The Aett,’ said Skarsi.

‘The Aett? Just the Aett?’

‘Yes.’

‘Literally clan-home, or fireplace? Or… den?’

‘Yes, yes, yes.’

‘Am I annoying you with my questions, Amlodhi Skarssen Skarssensson?’

Skarsi grunted. ‘You are.’

The Upplander nodded. ‘Useful to know.’

‘Why?’ asked Skarsi.

‘Because if I’m going to be here, and I’m going to ask my questions, I’d best be aware of how many I can get away with at a time. I wouldn’t want to piss the Vlka Fenryka off so much they decide to eat me.’

Skarsi shrugged and crossed his legs.

‘No one’s going to eat you for that,’ he said.

‘I know. I was joking,’ said the Upplander.

‘I wasn’t,’ replied Skarsi. ‘You’re under Ogvai’s protection, so only he can decide who gets to eat you.’

The Upplander paused. The heat of the firepit against the side of his face and neck suddenly felt unpleasantly intense. He swallowed.

‘The Vlka Fenryka… they’re capable of cannibalism then, are they?’

‘We’re capable of anything,’ replied Skarsi. ‘That’s the whole point of us.’

The Upplander slid off the plinth and stood up. He wasn’t sure if he was moving away from the Astartes lord or the disagreeable heat. He just wanted to move away, to walk around.

‘So who… so who’s this Ogvai who has power over my life?’

Skarsi took another sip from his bowl.

‘Ogvai Ogvai Helmschrot, Jarl of Tra.’

‘Earlier, I heard you say someone called Gedrath was Jarl of Tra.’

‘He was,’ said Skarsi. ‘Gedrath’s sleeping on the red snow now, so Og’s jarl. But Og has to honour any of Gedrath’s decisions. Like bringing you here under protection.’

The Upplander moved around the room, his arms folded against his chest.

‘So jarl. That’s lord, we’ve established. And tra and fyf? They’re numbers?’

‘Uh huh,’ nodded Skarsi. ‘Three and five. Onn, twa, tra, for, fyf, sesc, sepp, for-twa, tra-tra, dekk.’

‘So you’re lord of five, and this Ogvai is lord of three? Fifth and third… what? Warbands? Divisions? Regiments?’

‘Companies. We call them companies.’

‘And that’s in… Wurgen?’

‘Yes, Wurgen. Juvjk is hearth-cant, Wurgen is war-cant.’

‘A specialised combat language? A battle tongue?’

Skarsi waved his hand in a distracted manner. ‘Whatever you want to call it.’

‘You have a language for fighting and a language for when you’re not fighting?’

‘Fenrys hjolda! The questions never end!’

‘There’s always something else to know,’ said the Upplander. ‘There’s always more to know.’

‘Not true. There’s such a thing as too much.’

This last comment had been made by a new voice. Another Astartes had entered the chamber behind the Upplander, silent as the first snow. Varangr lurked at his heels in the doorway.

The newcomer had the stature of all of his breed, and was dressed in a knotwork leather suit like the others the Upplander had encountered. But he was not masked.

His head was shaved, apart from a stiffly waxed and braided beard that curled like a horn from his chin. There was a cap of soft leather on his scalp, and a faded tracery of tattooed lines and dots on the weather-beaten flesh of his face. In common with all of the Vlka Fenryka the Upplander had seen, the newcomer’s eyes were black-centred gold, and his lean, craggy face was noticeably elongated around the nose and mouth, as if he had the hint of a snout. When he opened his mouth to speak, the Upplander saw what the extended jaw was made to conceal. The newcomer’s dentition resembled that of a mature forest wolf. The canines in particular were the longest the Upplander had seen.

‘There’s such a thing as too much,’ the newcomer repeated.

‘Exactly!’ Skarsi exclaimed, getting up. ‘Too much! That’s exactly what I was saying! You explain it to him, gothi! Better still, you try answering his endless questions!’

‘If I can,’ said the newcomer. He gazed at the Upplander. ‘What is the next question?’

The Upplander tried to return the stare without flinching.

‘What did that remark mean? Too much?’ he asked.

‘Even knowledge has its limits. There is a place where it becomes unsafe.’

‘You can know too much?’ asked the Upplander.

‘That’s what I said.’

‘I disagree.’

The newcomer smiled slightly. ‘Of course you do. I am not at all surprised.’

‘Do you have a name?’ the Upplander asked him.

‘We all have names. Some of us have more than one. Mine is Ohthere Wyrdmake. I am Rune Priest to Amlodhi Skarssen Skarssensson. What is your next question?’

‘What is a Rune Priest?’

‘What do you suppose it is?’

‘A shaman. A practitioner of ritual.’

‘A rattler of bones. A pagan wizard. You can barely disguise the superior tone in your voice.’

‘No, I meant no affront,’ the Upplander said quickly. The priest’s lips had curled into an unpleasant snarl.

‘What is your next question?’

The Upplander hesitated again.

‘How did Gedrath, Jarl of Tra, die?’

‘He died the way we all die,’ said Skarsi, ‘with red snow under him.’

‘It must have been sudden. In the last few days.’

Skarsi looked at the rune priest.

‘It was a time ago,’ the priest told the Upplander.

‘But Gedrath gave me his protection, and that has passed to Ogvai. Ogvai must have replaced him in the last week. What? Why are you looking at me like that?’

‘You are basing your assumptions on a false premise,’ said Ohthere Wyrdmake.

‘Really?’ asked the Upplander.

‘Yes,’ said the priest. ‘You’ve been here for nineteen years.’

Four

Skjald

They gave Hawser the Prix Daumarl. When he was told of the decision, he felt flattered and nonplussed. ‘I’ve done nothing,’ he said to his colleagues.

There had been a shortlist of notable candidates, but in the end it had come down to Hawser, and a neuroplasticist who had eradicated the three strands of nanomnemonic plague devastating Iberolatinate Sud Merica. ‘He’s done something, a considerable something, and I’ve done nothing,’ Hawser complained when he found out.

‘Don’t you want the prize?’ Vasiliy asked. ‘I hear the medal is very pretty.’

It was very pretty. It was gold, about the size of a pocket watch, and it came mounted in a Vitrian frame in an elegant casket lined with shot purple silk. The citation bore the hololithic crests of the Atlantic legislature and the Hegemon, and carried the gene-seals of three members of the Unification Council. It began, ‘Kasper Ansbach Hawser, for steadfast contributions towards the definition and accomplishment of Terran Unification…’

Soon after the presentation, Hawser learned that the whole thing was politicking, which he generally detested, though he did not speak up as the politicking in this instance served the cause of the Conservatory.

The award was presented at a dinner held in Karcom on the Atlantic platforms, just after the midsummer of Hawser’s seventy-fifth year. The dinner was arranged to coincide with the Midlantik Conclave, and thus served as an opportunity to celebrate the Conservatory’s thirtieth anniversary.

Hawser found it all rather dreadful. He spent the evening with the elegant little purple box clutched to his chest and a sick smile on his face waiting for the interminable speeches to conclude. Of the many dignitaries and men of influence attending the dinner that midsummer night, no one was paid more deference than Giro Emantine. By then, Emantine was prefect-secretary to one of the Unification Council’s most senior members, and the common understanding was that Emantine would be given the next seat that came vacant. He was an old man, rumoured to be on his third juvenat. He was accompanied by a remarkably young, remarkably beautiful and remarkably silent woman. Hawser couldn’t decide if she was Emantine’s daughter, a vulgar trophy wife, or a nurse.

Emantine’s status placed him directly at the right hand of the Atlantic Chancellor (though nominally the guest of honour, Hawser was three seats down to the left, between an industrial cyberneticist and the chairman of one of the orbital banking houses). When it was Emantine’s turn to speak, he appeared to have great difficulty in remembering who Hawser was, because he spoke fondly of their ‘long friendship’ and ‘close working association’ down the ‘many years since Kas first spoke to me about the notion of founding the Conservatory.’

‘I’ve met him three times in thirty years,’ Hawser whispered to Vasiliy.

‘Shut up and keep smiling,’ Vasiliy hissed back.

‘None of this actually occurred.’

‘Shut up.’

‘Do you suppose he’s on some kind of strong medication?’

‘Oh, Kas! Shut up!’ Vasiliy bent close to Hawser’s ear. ‘This is just the way things are done. Besides, it makes the Conservatory look good. Oh, and his adjunct has informed me that he’ll want to see you afterwards.’

After the dinner, Vasiliy escorted Hawser up to the Chancellor’s Residence on Marianas Derrick.

‘It’s a beautiful city,’ Hawser remarked as they walked up the terrace. He had drunk a couple of amasecs at the end of the meal to settle himself for the acceptance speech, and then there had been the toasting, so he was in a wistful mood.

Vasiliy waited patiently for a moment as Hawser stopped to admire the view. From the terrace they could see out across the plated scape of Karcom and beyond. It glittered in the late sun, the surface of a metropolitan skin nine kilometres thick that capped and encased the ancient dead ocean like an ice-pack. Shoals of aircraft, silver in the sunlight like reef-fish, flitted and drifted over the scape.

‘Amazing enough that man could build this,’ said Hawser, ‘let alone build it three times.’

‘Man probably shouldn’t have kept nuking it, then, should he?’ said Vasiliy.

Hawser looked at his mediary. Vasiliy was terribly young, little more than twenty-five. ‘Isak Vasiliy, you have no soul,’ he pronounced.

‘Ah, but that’s why you hired me,’ Vasiliy replied. ‘I don’t let sentiment get in the way of efficiency.’

‘There is that.’

‘Besides, to me the very fact that the Atlantic platforms have been obliterated and re-built twice is symbolic of the Conservatory’s work. Nothing is so great that it cannot be recovered and restored. Nothing is impossible.’

They went into the Residence. Ridiculously ornate robotic servitors imported from Mars were attending the select group of guests. The Chancellor had commissioned the machines directly from the Mondus Gamma Forge of Lukas Chrom, an ostentatious show of status.

The windows of the Residence had been dimmed against the glare of the setting sun. A pair of servitors in the shape of humming birds brought Hawser a glass of amasec.

‘Drink it slowly,’ Vasiliy advised discreetly. ‘When you speak to Emantine, you need to be coherent.’

‘I doubt I’ll drink it at all,’ Hawser said. He’d taken a sip. The amasec served by the Atlantic Chancellor was of such a fine and extravagantly expensive vintage, it didn’t really taste like amasec anymore.

Emantine approached after a few minutes, his silent female companion in tow. He shed his previous conversational partners behind him like a snake sloughing skin; they knew when their brief allotted audiences with the prefect-secretary were done.

‘Kasper,’ Emanatine said.

‘Ser.’

‘Congratulations on the prize. A worthy award.’

‘Thank you. I… Thank you, ser. This is my mediary, Isak Vasiliy.’

Emantine did not register anyone as lowly as Vasiliy. Hawser felt the prefect-secretary was only registering him because he had to. Emantine drew Hawser away towards the windows.

‘Thirty years,’ Emantine said. ‘Can it really be thirty years since all this began?’

Hawser assumed the prefect-secretary meant the Conservatory. ‘Nearly fifty, actually.’

‘Really?’

‘We measure the life of the Conservatory from its first charter at the Conclave of Lutetia, which was thirty years ago this summer, but it took nearly twenty years to get the movement to that place. It must be fifty years ago I first contacted your office to discuss the very basic first steps. That would have been in Karelia. Karelia Hive. You were with the legation back then, and I dealt, for a long time, with several of your understaffers. I had a dialogue with them for a number of years, actually, before I met you for the first time and–’

‘Fifty years, eh? My my. Karelia, you say? Another life.’

‘Yes, it feels like that, doesn’t it? So, yes, I worked with a number of adjuncts to get some awareness. Made a bit of a nuisance of myself, I’m sure. Doling was one. Barantz, I remember. Bakunin.’

‘I don’t remember them,’ the prefect-secretary said. His smile had become rather fixed. Hawser took a sip of his amasec. He felt slightly invigorated, slightly warm. He had become fixated upon Emantine’s hand, which was holding a crystal thimble of some green digestif. The hand was perfect. It was clean and manicured, scented, graceful. The skin was white and unblemished and uncreased, and the flesh plump and supple. There were no signs at all of the consequences of age, no wrinkles, no liver spots, no discolourations. The nails were clean. It wasn’t the gnarled, sunken, prominently-veined claw of a hundred and ninety year-old man, and Prefect-Secretary Giro Emantine was at least that. It was the hand of a young man. Hawser wondered if the young man was missing it. The thought made him snigger.

Of course, the prefect-secretary had access to the best juvenat refinements Terran science could afford. The treatments were so good, they didn’t even look like juvenat treatments, not like the work Hawser had had done at sixty, plumping his flesh with collagenics, and filling his creases and wrinkles with dermics, and perma-staining his skin a ‘healthy’ tanned colour with nanotic pigments, and cleaning his eyes and his organs, and resculpting his chin, and pinching his cheeks until he looked like a re-touched hololith portrait of himself. Emantine probably had gene therapies and skeleto-muscular grafts, implants, underweaves, transfixes, stem-splices…

Maybe it was a young man’s hand. Maybe the skinweaves were why the prefect-secretary’s smile looked so fixed.

‘You don’t remember Doling or Bakunin?’ Hawser asked.

‘They were understaffers, you say? It was a long time ago,’ Emantine replied. ‘They’ve all climbed the ladders of advancement, been posted and promoted and transferred. One doesn’t keep track. One can’t, not when one runs a staff of eighty thousand. I have no doubt they’re all governing their own ecumenopolises by now.’

There was a slightly awkward pause.

‘Anyway,’ said Hawser, ‘I should like to thank you for getting behind the idea of the Conservatory all those years ago, be it thirty or fifty.’

‘Ha ha,’ said Emantine.

‘I appreciate it. We all do.’

‘I can’t take the credit,’ said Emantine.

Of course you damn well can’t, Hawser thought.

‘But the idea always had merit,’ Emantine went on, as if he was content to take the credit anyway. ‘I always said it had merit. Too easily overlooked in the headlong rush to build a better world. Not a priority, some said. The needs – and they’re budgetary often – of Unification and consolidation far exceed conservation. But, we stuck to it. What is it now, thirty thousand officers worldwide?’

‘That’s just direct. It’s closer to a quarter of a million counting freelance associates and archaeologists, and the off-world numbers.’

‘Superb,’ said Emantine. Hawser continued to stare at his hand. ‘Then of course, there’s the renewal of the charter, which is never opposed. Everyone now understands the importance of the Conservatory.’

‘Not quite everyone,’ said Hawser.

‘Everyone who matters, Kasper. You know the Sigillite himself is keenly interested in the Conservatory’s work?’

‘I had heard that,’ Hawser replied.

‘Keenly interested,’ Emantine repeated. ‘Every time I meet with him, he asks for the latest transcripts and reports. Do you know him at all?’

‘The Sigillite? No, I’ve never met him.’

‘Extraordinary man,’ said Emantine. ‘I’ve heard he even discusses the Conservatory’s work with the Emperor on occasion.’

‘Really?’ said Hawser. ‘Do you know him?’

‘The Emperor?’

‘Yes.’

A slightly glassy expression flickered across the prefect-secretary’s face, as if he wasn’t sure if he was being mocked.

‘No, I… I’ve never met him.’

‘Ah.’

Emantine nodded at the purple box still clamped under Hawser’s arm. ‘You deserve that, Kasper. And so does the Conservatory. It’s part of the recognition we were talking about. It’s high-profile, and it’ll bring around those few closed minds.’

‘Bring them around to what?’ asked Hawser.

‘Well, support. Support is vital, particularly in the current climate.’

‘What current climate?’

‘You should cherish that award, Kaspar. To me, it says that the Conservatory has matured into a global force for Unification…’

And it doesn’t hurt at all that your name is forever attached to it by the simple accident that you were at the top of the bureaucratic chain I first approached, Hawser thought. This has done your career no harm, Giro Emantine. To recognise the importance of the Conservatory project, to give it your support and backing when others scorned it. Why, what a wise, humanitarian and selfless man you must be! Not like all those other politicians.

The prefect-secretary was still speaking. ‘So we need to be ready for changes in the next decade,’ he was saying.

‘Uhm, changes?’

‘The Conservatory has become a victim of its own success!’ Emantine laughed.

‘It has?’

‘Whether we like it or not, it’s time to consider legitimacy. I can’t nursemaid the Conservatory forever. My future is beckoning in different ways. A seneschalship to Luna or Mars, maybe.’

‘A seat on the Council, I was told.’

Emantine pulled a modest face. ‘Oh, I don’t know.’

‘It’s what I heard.’

‘The point is, I can’t protect you forever,’ said Emantine.

‘I wasn’t aware the Conservatory was being protected at all.’

‘Its resource and personnel budget has become quite considerable.’

‘And is scrupulously policed.’

‘Of course. But it’s the mandate that bothers some. It’s having what is essentially a vital organ of government, a key and growing human resource, functioning separately from the Hegemonic Administration.’

‘That’s just the way it is,’ replied Hawser. ‘That’s just the way it’s evolved. We’re transparent and open to all. We’re a public office.’

‘It might be time to consider bringing the Conservatory in under the umbrella of the Administration,’ said Emantine. ‘It might be better that way. Centralised, which would help with the bureaucratic management, and with archiving and access, not to mention funding.’

‘We’d become part of the Administratum?’

‘Really just for book-keeping purposes,’ replied the prefect-secretary.

‘I… well, I think I’d be a little hesitant. Resistant, in fact. I think we all would.’

The prefect-secretary put his digestif down and reached out his hand to clasp it around Hawser’s. His young man’s fingers enclosed Hawser’s grandfather hand.

‘We must all move with a fluid, common purpose towards Unification, that’s what the Sigillite says,’ said Emantine.

‘The Unification of Terra and the Imperium,’ replied Hawser. ‘Not the literal union of the intellectual branches of mankind that–’

‘Doctor Hawser, they may refuse to renew the charter if you resist. You’ve spent thirty years showing them that the systematic conservation of knowledge is important. Now the feeling is – and it’s shared by many on the Council – conservation of knowledge is so important, it’s time it was conducted by the Administration of the Hegemony. It needs to be official and sanctioned and central.’

‘I see.’

‘Over the next few months, I’m going to be handing off a lot of responsibilities to my undersecretary, Henrik Slussen. Did you meet him earlier?’

‘No.’

‘I’ll see to it you meet him tomorrow at the manufactory visit. Get to know him. He’s extremely able, and he’ll steward this situation in directions that will reassure you.’

‘I see.’

‘Good. And once again, congratulations. A deserving winner. Fifty years, eh? My my.’

Hawser realised his audience had concluded. His glass was empty too.

‘How can it be so long?’ he asked, as the Astartes took him from the firepit chamber and out along the dark, breathing halls of the Aett. The wind gusted around them. Away from the firelight, his left eye lost its sight again.

‘You’ve been asleep,’ the rune priest replied.

‘You say nineteen years, but you mean Fenrisian years, don’t you? You mean great years?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s three, four, times as long in Terran years!’

‘You’ve been asleep,’ the rune priest said.

The Upplander felt light-headed. The sense of personal dislocation was intense and nauseating. He was afraid he might be sick, or pass out, and he was afraid of doing anything so frail in front of the Astartes. He was afraid of the Astartes. The fear added to his sense of personal dislocation, and made him feel sicker.

There were three of them with him, walking behind him: the rune priest, Varangr, and another whose name the Upplander did not know. Skarsi had shown no particular interest in coming with them. He had turned back to his playing boards, as though the Upplander was a mild diversion that was now finished with, and more important things, like bone counter discs on an inlaid board, had become more significant.

As they walked, the Astartes directed him with the occasional tap on the shoulder to turn him left and right. They walked him through great rock crypts and chambers of basalt, sulking voids of granite, and mournful hollowed halls panelled in bone. He saw all of these places through the green glare of his right eye, with only impenetrable darkness in his left. All of them were empty, except for the plaintive lament of the respiring wind. They were like tombs, tombs waiting to be filled, great sepulchres carved out in the expectation of an immense death toll, in anticipation of the corpses of a million warriors, carried in on their shields and laid to rest. A million. A million million. Legions of the fallen.

The wind was just rehearsing for its role as chief mourner.

‘Where are we going?’ the Upplander asked.

‘To see the priests,’ said Varangr.

‘But you’re a priest,’ the Upplander said to Ohthere, half-turning. Varangr gave him a little push to encourage him forwards.

‘Different priests,’ said Varangr. ‘The other kind.’

‘What other kind?’

‘You know, the other kind,’ said the nameless Astartes.

‘I don’t know. I don’t understand,’ said the Upplander. ‘I don’t understand and I’m cold.’

‘Cold?’ echoed Varangr. ‘He shouldn’t feel the cold, not where he’s been.’

‘It’s a good sign,’ said the other.

‘Give him a pelt,’ said the rune priest.

‘Do what?’ retorted Varangr.

‘Give him a pelt,’ the rune priest repeated.

‘Give him my pelt?’ Varangr asked, looking down at the red-brown skin around his shoulders. The S-curve of his lacquered hair rose like a spear-casting arm as his chin dipped. ‘But it’s my pelt.’

The other Astartes snorted and pulled off his own fur, a grey wolfskin. He held it out to the Upplander.

‘Here,’ he said. ‘Take it. A gift from Bitur Bercaw to Ahmad Ibn Rustah.’

‘Is this some kind of compact?’ the Upplander asked warily. He didn’t want to accidentally become beholden to a wolf Astartes on top of everything else.

Bercaw shook his head. ‘No, not anything with blood mixed in it. Maybe when you tell my account, you’ll remember this kindness, and make it part of the story.’

‘When I tell your account?’

Bercaw nodded. ‘Yes, because you will. When you tell it, you make me look good, sharing the pelt with you. And you make Var look like a selfish hog.’

The Upplander looked at Varangr. His eyes shone like lamps in the frosty dark. He looked as if he was going to strike Bercaw. Then he saw the rune priest watching him. He sagged a little.

‘I recognise my failing and will be sure to correct it,’ he mumbled.

The Upplander pulled Bercaw’s gift around his shoulders. He looked up at Ohthere Wyrdmake.

‘I still don’t understand.’

‘I know,’ said the priest.

‘No, no,’ the Upplander replied in frustration. ‘This is where you reassure me. This is where you tell me that everything will be explained.’

‘But I can’t,’ replied the priest, ‘because it won’t. Some things will be explained. Enough things, probably. But not everything, because explaining everything is never a good idea.’

They arrived at the drop.

The long, draughty hall came to an end and they were standing on the lip of a great cliff. A chasm plunged away beneath them, dropping sheer into total blackness. On the far side of the great drop, the Upplander could see the ghost-green ragged wall of the shaft. The sepulchral hall had brought them to an enormous flue, rising vertically through the rock in the heart of the mountain. The shaft vanished into darkness high above them. The winter gale gusted up from far below.

‘Which way now?’ asked the Upplander.

Varangr gripped him firmly by the upper arm.

‘Down,’ he said, and he stepped off the cliff and took the Upplander with him.

He was too shocked to scream out the terror that exploded his chest and burst his brain. They fell. They fell. They fell.

But not hard, and not to their deaths. They fell softly, like flecks of down from a torn sleeping roll, caught by the breeze, like papery flecks of ash, like a pair of humming bird servitors defying gravity with wings so fast they seemed still.

The wind of Fenris was everywhere inside the Aett, gusting in halls, breathing through crypts and vaults and chambers, but in the great vertical flue it blew with enough upward force to catch falling objects and cushion their descent. The rising gale lowered them slowly, dragging against their flapping pelts, and flapping the beads and straps of the Astartes.

Varangr stuck out an arm, the one that wasn’t gripping the Upplander’s limp frame. He stuck it out like an eagle’s wing into the updraught, and steered them. He turned them slowly, at an angle in the fierce blast. The Upplander’s tear-shot eyes, blinking furiously in the wind and out of gutting fear, saw another cliff-lip below, another shelf opening into the flue. They came into it at a perfect angle. Varangr landed on his feet, and turned the landing into a couple of quick steps that bled off his speed. The Upplander’s feet scrambled and kicked, and he fell on his face. The pelt flopped forwards over his head like a hood.

‘You’ll learn the knack,’ said Varangr.

‘How?’ asked the Upplander.

‘By doing it more,’ replied the Astartes.

On his hands and knees, the Upplander convulsed violently and retched. Nothing but spittle and mucus came up out of a gut that had been empty for nineteen years, but his body wrenched and wrung itself in a brutal effort to find something.

Bercaw and the rune priest landed on the lip behind them.

‘Pick him up,’ said the priest.

They carried him forwards, away from the cliff edge. His head lolled, but his left eye woke up. He saw a chamber up ahead, well lit with biolumin lamps and electric filaments in glass tubes. The sudden illumination was painful. He had a hot, orange version of the scene in his left eye, full of fire shadows and the warm yellow glow of tube lights and ivory flooring. In the other eye, the scene was an incandescent green, violently bright. The lamps and other light sources were so intense to his right eye, they had almost scorched out of vision entirely and become white-hot spots and after-image blooms. There were very few shadows in his right eye, and the focus was shot.

The Astartes put him down.

The Upplander could smell blood, salt water and the bleachy reek of counterseptic. The chamber was either a medical facility or an abattoir. Or perhaps it was both, or had been one and was now the other. There was also a hint of laboratory, and a smack of kitchen. There were metal benches and adjustable cots. There were clusters of overhead focus lights, and branches of automated servitor arms and manipulators sprouting from the ceiling like willow trees. There were stone slabs, like butcher blocks or altars. Hidden machinery hummed and whirred, and electronic notes sounded a constant background chorus like a digital rainforest. Archways led through to other kitchen-morgues. The complex was vast. He glimpsed the frosty doors of cryogenic units and the glass-lidded tanks of organic repair vats. Library shelves stretched off into the distance, lined with heavy glass bottles and canisters, like giant jars of pickled and preserved fruit in a winter root cellar. But the flasks did not contain vegetables or radapples in their dark, syrupy suspensions, and they were slotted into the shelves to connect with the facility’s vital support system.

Horned skulls appeared, robed men with animal skull heads like the ones who had surrounded him when he first woke up. The rune priest sensed his alarm.

‘They are just thralls. Servants and grooms. They will not hurt you.’

Other figures appeared from invisible corners of the rambling laboratory. These were Astartes, from the build of them. Horned skulls of significantly greater scale and threat than the ones worn by the thralls covered their faces. Their robes were floor length and had a quilted look, stitched together from sections of soft, napped leather. When they reached out their hands to greet or grasp the Upplander, he saw that their hands were covered in gloves patched together from the same material, and that the gloves were sewn into the enveloping cloaks, as if they were inside patchwork bags of skin with integral glove extensions that allowed them to work. The stitching on the patchwork seams, though expertly neat, reminded the Upplander far too much of surgical sutures.

They were sinister figures, and their presence was not helped by the fact that even Ohthere Wyrdmake showed deference to them.

‘Who are you?’ the Upplander asked.

‘They are the Wolf Priests,’ said Ohthere softly at his shoulder, ‘the geneweavers, the fleshmakers. They will examine you.’

‘Why?’

‘To make sure you’re healthy. To check their workmanship.’

The Upplander shot a quick glance at the rune priest.

‘Their what?’

‘You came to the Aett broken and old, Ahmad Ibn Rustah,’ said one of the wolf priests in a voice that creaked like floe-ice, ‘too broken to live, and too old to heal. The only way to save you was to remake you.’

One of the horned giants took his right hand, another his left. He let them lead him into the slaughterhouse chapel like parents leading a child. He took off the pelt and settled on the black glass bed of a body scanner. There were a lot of wolf priests around him now, shamanic shadows with feral horns and guttural voices. Some were intent on adjusting the backlit wall plates of the control panels. Others were occupied with the elaborate tapping and shaking of rattlebags and bone wands. Both tasks seemed to carry equal significance.

The scanner bed elevated him and tilted him backwards. Manipulator arms, some of them fitted with sensors, others with the finest micrometre tool-heads, clicked down around him in a cage, like a crouching spider. They started working, twitching and brushing and scurrying. He felt the tickle of scan-beams, the nip of pinpricks, the sting of diagnostic light beams penetrating his held-open eyes.

He looked up, past the surgical lights, and saw himself, full length, reflected in the tinted canopy of the body scanner.

He had the fit, athletic body of a thirty year-old. Fitter and more athletic, in fact, than the thirty year-old body he had once possessed. The muscle definition was impressive. There was not an ounce of fat on him. Nor was there any sign of the old augmetic. He had the makings of a moustache and beard, a fuzz of growth a few weeks thick. His hair was shorter than he chose to wear it, as if it was growing back in after being shaved. It was darker than it had been since his fiftieth birthday.

Behind the beard growth, his face was still his own: younger, but still his own. This fact filled him with greater relief and confidence than anything else that had happened since he had woken.

It was the face of Kasper Ansbach Hawser, twenty-five years old, back when he was headstrong and arrogant and knew nothing about anything. This latter detail seemed more than a little appropriate.

In the reflection, dozens of hands in gloves of patchwork skin worked on him.

‘You refashioned me,’ he said.

‘There was significant damage to your limbs and to your internal organs,’ said the ice-creak voice. ‘You would not have survived. Over a period of nine months, we used mineral bonding and bone grafts to reconstitute your skeletal mass, and then resleeved it in musculature gene-copied from your own coding, though reinforced with plastek weaves and polymers. Your organs are primarily gene-copied transplants. Your skin is your own.’

‘My own?’

‘Removed, replenished, rejuvenated, retailored.’

‘You skinned me.’

They did not reply.

‘You worked on my mind too,’ he said. ‘I know things. I know a language I didn’t know before.’

‘We did not teach you anything. We did not touch your mind.’

‘And yet here we are conversing, without a translator.’

Again, they did not reply.

‘What about the eye? Why did you take my eye? Why do I keep going blind in my left eye?’

‘You do not keep going blind in your left eye. The sight in your left eye is human-normal. It is your eye.’

‘Why did the warrior take my right eye?’

‘You know why. It was an implant. It was not your eye. It was an optical recording device. It was not permitted. Therefore, it was detected and removed.’

‘But I can see,’ the Upplander said.

‘We would not blind you and leave you blind,’ said the ice-creak voice.

He looked up at his reflection. His left eye was the eye that he remembered.

His right eye, gold and black-pinned, was the eye of an adult wolf.

Rector Uwe called them in, just as the moon rose. All the children had spent the day outside, because the weather was clement and the grids had forecast no rad clouds or pollution fogs on the desert highland.

The children had worked outdoors, especially the older ones. That, the rector taught, was the purpose of community. The parents, all the adults, they were raising the city, the great city of Ur. They were gone for months at a time, away in the sprawling work camps that surrounded the vast street plan that the Architect had marked out on the chosen earth. Rector Uwe showed the children scenes from Faeronik Aegypt in old picture books. Gangs of industrious labourers with uniform asymmetric haircuts pulled ropes to raise the travertine blocks that made the monuments of Aegypt. This, he explained, was very much the way their parents were working, pulling together with a single purpose to build a city. The difference, he added, was that in old Aegypt, the builders were slaves, and in Ur, the workers were freemen, come willingly to the task, and all according to Catheric teachings.

Though they could not work on the city itself, the children still worked. They harvested fruit and vegetables from the tented fields, and washed them and packed them to be shipped to the work camps. They patched and mended worn clothes sent back from the labour site in yellow sacks, and wrote messages of encouragement and salvation on slips of paper that they tucked into pockets to be discovered at random.

In the afternoons, the rector gave the children instruction. He taught lessons in language, history and Catheric lore in the long room of the commune, or out under the trees of the tent fields, or even out in the actual open, in fair weather. The children learned their letters and their numbers, and the basic elements of salvation. They learned about the world as well: the name of the desert highlands, and the long valley, and the site chosen for Ur. They learned the names of all the other communes, just like their own, where other rectors looked after other student bodies, all part of the greater community. Rector Uwe had no staff, except for Niina the nurse-cook, so as the older children learned, they took charge of the younger ones’ instruction. The rector let the brightest of all use the half-dozen teaching desks in the annex beside the commune’s library.

Kas was only a little boy, four or five, but he was already one of the brightest. Like a lot of the children in the rector’s care, Kas was an orphan as far as the rector could determine. One of the Architect’s surveyor troops had found him in the cot-box of an overturned trackwagon out on the radland flats, a year back. The wagon had tipped on a salt depression, with no hope of righting. Its cells were flat dead, and there was no sign of any adults, except for a few bones and hanks of clothing about a kilometre further on.

‘Figure predators got them,’ said the surveyor troop leader when he brought Kas in. ‘The ride went over, so they walked to find water and help, and preds found them first. The boy’s lucky.’

Rector Uwe nodded, and touched the little gold crux around his neck. It was an odd definition of the word.

‘Lucky we found him,’ the leader clarified. ‘Lucky the predators didn’t.’

‘You see any preds?’ the rector asked.

‘The usual meat-birds,’ the leader replied. ‘Plus dog tracks. A lot of dog tracks. Big, maybe even wolves. They’re getting bolder. Coming closer, every year.’

‘They know we’re here,’ replied the rector, meaning mankind, back to his old tricks, with all the bonus scraps and left-overs that entails.

There were a lot of orphans in the commune, because building a city was hard, but most came with names. The boy didn’t have one, so Rector Uwe chose one for him. A suitable name. The troops had found a little toy horse made of wood, like the Horse of Ilios, in the trackwagon with the child, so that made the choice easier.

He called them in at moonrise. After work and lessons, they had run out into the open woods and the meadow beyond the stream that moved their wheel. The meadow grass was the last, long straw from summer, bleached by sun and rads. The sky was wort-blue. Stars prickled the early evening. The children chased along the avenues of trees, under the tunnels of their rad-blacked leaves. They swung and played shouting games. Thunder warriors was popular with the boys. They made guns from fingers and death noises with their mouths, and came back in for supper with skinned knees.

There were always stragglers at supper call. Niina used the threat of wolves to bring the laggards in.

‘The wolves are out there! The wolves will get you, now the moon’s up!’ she’d call from the back door of the kitchen.

When he came in that night, red-faced and out of breath, Kas looked at Rector Uwe.

‘Are the wolves here?’ he asked.

The boy was flushed and sweating. He’d probably been playing thunder warriors with the older boys, running to keep up and shout as loud. But he also appeared scared.

‘Wolves? No, that’s just what Niina says,’ Rector Uwe replied. ‘There are preds, so we must be careful. Dogs, most likely. A lot of wild dogs, living in packs. They’re scavengers. Sometimes they come down off the high desert and raid our midden. But only if they’re bold, only if the winter’s been bleak. They’re more scared of us than we are of them.’

‘Dogs?’ Kas asked.

‘Just dogs. Dogs used to live with men, as their companions. Some communes still keep them as guards and to mind livestock.’

‘I don’t like dogs,’ the boy replied, ‘and I am afraid of wolves.’

He ran off to join the end of the noisy game. He ran with a little boy’s acceleration, from nothing to maximum speed in a blink. Rector Uwe smiled, but his heart was heavy. He wondered what it had been like in the cabin of that overturned trackwagon. He wondered how much a three year-old could remember. He wondered how close the preds had got, how close they had got to breaking into the wagon body, how terrifying they would have been.

The clement weather stayed with them for several weeks. Autumn was late. In the evenings, the light spun out, long and golden, and stretched the shadows of the raddled trees. The sky was like the glass of a blue bottle. Occasional little clouds dotted the horizon, cotton-white, like smoke signals lost for words. The children played out late. It was good to get open air into them, not recyc.

After supper, most nights, Rector Uwe liked to take out his regicide set and play a game or three with the smartest kids. He liked to teach them (he even had a few old books of instruction that he was prepared to lend) but he also enjoyed the challenge of a live player, however unschooled they might be, because it was an improvement over the programmed opposition provided by the teaching desks.

The rector’s Regicide set was very old and very worn. The case was something he called shagreen, framed with discoloured ivory and lined with blue velvet. The board, unfolded, was made of inlaid walnut (it was slightly warped), and the pieces were made of bone and stained hoganny.

Kas was a quick learner, quicker even than some of the older clever boys. He had the wit for it. Uwe taught him what he could, knowing it would take a long time to season him and show him a decent range of opening schemes and ending-outs.

As they played that night, a game that Rector Uwe easily won, Kas mentioned the name of one of the other boys, and said that the boy had heard dogs barking earlier that day.

‘Dogs? Where?’

‘Up on the western slopes,’ Kas replied, considering his next move with his chin on his fist, the way he had seen the rector do it.

‘Probably crows cawing,’ said the rector.

‘No, it was dogs. Did you know that all dogs, everywhere in our world, all of them descended from a pack of wolves tamed on the shores of the Youngsea River?’

‘I did not know that.’

‘It was fifty-five thousand years ago.’

‘Where did you learn this?’

‘I asked the teaching desks about dogs and wolves.’

‘You are properly afraid of them, aren’t you?’

Kas nodded. ‘It is sensible. They are predators and they devour.’

‘Are you afraid of meat-birds?’

Kas shook his head. ‘Not really, though they are ugly and they can hurt you.’

‘What about eater-pigs and wild swine?’

‘They are dangerous,’ the boy nodded.

‘But you’re not afraid of them?’

‘I would be careful if I saw one.’

‘Are you afraid of snakes?’

‘No.’

‘Of bears?’

‘What is a bear?’

Rector Uwe smiled. ‘Make your move.’

‘They are all animals besides,’ the boy said, moving his piece.

‘What are?’

‘The things you’re asking me about, the snakes and the pigs. Are bears animals? I think they are all animals, and some of them are dangerous. I don’t like spiders. Or scorpions. Or big scorpions, the red ones, but I am not afraid of them.’

‘No?’

‘Yaena has a red scorpion in a jar in his foot locker, and when he shows it to us, I am not afraid of it.’

‘I will be talking to Yaena about that.’

‘I am not afraid of it, though. Not like Simial and the others. But I am afraid of wolves, because they are not animals.’

‘Oh? What are they then?’

The boy scrunched up his face, as if determining the best way of explaining it.

‘They are… well, they are like ghosts. They are devils, like scripture tells us about.’

‘They are supernatural, you mean?’

‘Yes. They come to destroy and devour, because that is their nature, their only nature. And they can be wolves, that is dog-shape, or they can walk about in the shape of men.’

‘How do you know this, Kasper?’

‘Everyone knows it. It is common knowledge.’

‘It may not be correct. Wolves are just dogs. They are canine animals.’

The boy shook his head fiercely. He leaned forwards and dropped his voice very low.

‘I have seen them,’ he whispered. ‘I have seen them walk about on two feet.’

He was given some food, a basic nutrient broth and some dry biscuits, and then he was left on his own in a draughty room near the kitchen-morgue. The room was panelled in white bone, and it had a small firepit and a bench cot. It also had a lamp, a small metal-bodied biolumin unit of the type stamped out in their millions for the Imperial Army. Light from the lamp let him see the room around him with both eyes. He was getting used to the discrepancy between vision types.

The food had come on a brushed metal tray. It made a poor hand mirror, but a mirror nonetheless. He looked at his new eye in its rubbed surface.

His new eye had extraordinary night and low-light response. He had spent a great deal of his time, since waking, moving around in pitch darkness without even realising it. That was why his real eye had seemed blind. It was also why the world looked spectral green, and why actual light sources flared to white blooms of painful radiance. The Wolves of Fenris lived in darkness most of the time. They hadn’t much need for artificial light.

His new eye lacked good, defined distance vision. Everything became slightly unfocussed at distances of more than thirty metres, like looking through an extremely wide-angle optical lens, the sort he had often used on good quality picter units for architectural recording. But the peripheral vision and the sensitivity to movement were astonishing.

Exactly what you’d expect from a predator’s eye.

He held the tray up in front of his face, and closed one eye, then the other, back and forth. When he switched back to his wolf-eye for the fifth time, he noticed, in the battered reflection, the half-shadow in the doorway behind him.

‘You’d better come in,’ he said, without looking around.

The Astartes came into the room.

The Upplander put the tray down, and turned to look at him. The Astartes was as big as all his kind, wrapped in a slate-grey pelt. His fur and his armour looked wet, as if he had been outside. He had removed his leather mask, to show his face, weathered and tattooed. The Upplander knew the face.

‘Bear,’ he said.

The Astartes grunted.

‘You’re Bear,’ the Upplander said.

‘No.’

‘Yes. I don’t know many Astartes, I don’t know many Space Wolves–’

He saw the Astartes’s lip curl at the use of the term.

‘But I know your face. I remember your face. You’re Bear.’

‘No,’ the warrior said. ‘But you might remember my face. I’m known as Godsmote now, of Tra. But nineteen winters ago I was called Fith.’

The Upplander blinked.

‘Fith? You’re Fith? The Ascommani?’

The Astartes nodded. ‘Yes.’

‘Your name was Fith?’

‘My name’s still Fith. They call me Godsmote or Godsmack in the Rout, because I’ve got a good swing on me, a swing like an angry god, and I once buried the smile of a blade in the forehead of a warboss…’

His voice trailed off.

‘That’s another story. Why are you looking at me like that?’

‘They… they made you into a Wolf,’ said the Upplander.

‘I wanted it. I wanted them to take me. My aett was gone, and my folk. I barely had my thread left. I wanted them to take me.’

‘I told them. I told Bear to take you. You and the other one.’

‘Brom.’

‘Brom, yes. I told Bear to take the both of you. I told him to make bloody sure he took the both of you, after all you did for me.’

Fith nodded. ‘They changed you too. They changed us both. Made us both sons of Fenris. It’s what Fenris always does. Changes things.’

The Upplander shook his head in slow disbelief. ‘I can’t believe it’s you. I’m glad it is. I’m happy to see you alive. But I can’t believe… look at you!’

He glanced down at the brushed steel tray.

‘Come to that, look at me. I can’t believe this is me either.’

He stood up and held out his hand to the Astartes.

‘I want to thank you,’ he said.

Fith Godsmote shook his head. ‘No need to thank me.’

‘Yes, there is. You saved my life, and it cost you everything.’

‘I don’t see it like that.’

The Upplander shrugged, and lowered his hand.

‘And you don’t look too happy I saved your life,’ the Astartes added.

‘I was then,’ the Upplander replied. ‘Nineteen winters ago. Now, well, everything’s a little strange to me. I’m adjusting.’

‘We all adjust,’ said Fith. ‘It’s part of changing.’

‘Bear, he’s still alive, is he?’ the Upplander asked.

‘Yes. Bear’s running a thread still.’

‘Good. He didn’t think to come and see me now I’m awake?’

‘I don’t see he’s got much reason to,’ replied the Astartes. ‘I mean, his debt to you is long since done. He made an error, and he atoned for it.’

‘Yes, about that,’ the Upplander said, sitting down again and leaning back. ‘What was his error? His oversight, that he had to make amends for?’

‘It was his fault you were out there. It was his fault you fell as a bad star.’

‘Was it?’

Fith nodded.

‘Was it really?’

Fith nodded again. ‘You’ll see Bear, I should think, when Ogvai calls you to Tra. You’ll probably see him then.’

‘So why’s Ogvai going to call me to Tra?’

‘He’ll decide what we should do with you.’

‘Ah,’ said the Upplander.

Fith reached under his pelt and produced a limp plastek sack, tied shut. It was a miserable bundle, and the skin of the bag was wet with droplets of ice mush and meltwater.

‘When I heard you had come back awake, I fetched this. It’s the bits you were carrying with you when you came to Fenris. All that I could find, anyway. I thought you might want them.’

The Upplander took the cold, wet sack and began to unpick the knot.

‘So where is Brom?’ he asked.

‘Brom never made it,’ Fith replied.

The Upplander stopped picking at the knot and looked at the Astartes.

‘Oh. I’m sorry.’

‘No need to be. There is a place for all things, and Brom is in Uppland now.’

‘That word,’ the Upplander said, ‘I remember that word. When I got here, when the Ascommani pulled me from the crash site, that’s what you called me. An Upplander.’

‘Yes.’

‘It meant heaven, didn’t it? It meant the places up there, above the world?’ The Upplander pointed at the chamber’s ceiling. ‘Upplander is someone who comes down to the land, to the mortal Verse. The stars, other planets, heaven, they’re all the same thing, aren’t they? You thought I was some sort of god, fallen out of heaven.’

‘Or a daemon,’ Fith suggested.

‘I suppose. Anyway, my point is… you know about space and the stars now. You know about other planets. You must have been to some. Now you’ve become an Astartes, you’ve learned about the universe and your place in it.’

‘Yes.’

‘But you still use a word like Uppland. You said Brom is in Uppland. Heaven and hell are primitive concepts, aren’t they? Is it just the reassurance of old names?’

Fith didn’t reply for a moment. Then he said, ‘There’s still an Uppland, as far as I’m concerned. Just like there’s a Verse and an Underverse. And as for Hel, I know there’s a Hel. I’ve seen it several times.’

When they came to take him to see the Jarl of Tra, he was in fear for his life. This was an unnecessary fear, he reasoned, because the Wolves had put significant effort into preserving and maintaining his existence. It seemed unlikely that they would expend that effort only to dispose of him.

But the fear clawed him and would not go away. It hung around him like a pelt. Whatever they were, the Wolves showed absolutely not a scrap of sentiment. They arbitrated decisions, right or wrong, on what seemed like whims, though were probably the blink-fast instincts of accelerated warriors. He was, to them, a curiosity at best. The work they had put into saving his life must have been a considerable effort. To them, with their halfway-immortal lives, it might just have been a way of fending off boredom through a long winter.

Fith Godsmote came to fetch him, along with others from Tra whose names the Upplander would only learn later. Fith was junior to them all, and from a different company. They were hulking, longtooth monsters with shadowed eyes. The Upplander realised that Fith’s inclusion in the honour guard was a mark of respect shown to a novitiate by his elders. Fith had saved the Upplander and brought him to the Aett, so it was only right that he should be part of an escort, even if the escort duty would normally fall to the company veterans.

That made logical sense. It made logical sense when they first came to his white bone room and summoned him with a gesture. By the time they had ascended to the Hall of Tra, a climb that had taken an hour, and had woven up deep staircases and rock chutes and one, stomach-wrenching ascent on the wind itself, fear had mutated the logic, and the only sense the Upplander could see was that Fith Godsmote had to be present at his death as some form of punishment duty.

The Hall of Tra was cold and lightless. His wolf-eye caught the ghost radiation of barely smouldering firepits. In terms of heat and light, the Wolves were making no allowances for human tolerances of comfort. They had given him a pelt and an eye to see through the dark with. What more could he want?

He realised he wasn’t alone. The company was all around him. Their body heat was barely detectable, dimmer than the dull firepits. The Hall was a massive natural cavern, ragged and irregular, and the Astartes were ranged around it, huddled and coiled in their furs, as immobile as a sibling pack of predators, gone to ground overnight, dormant and pressed close for warmth. Faces cowled by animal skin hoods were watching his approach. There were occasional grumbles and murmurs, like animals growling in their sleep or tussling over bones. As his eye resolved the scene better, the Upplander saw some evidence of movement. He saw hands casually raise silver bowls and dishes so that men could sip black liquid from them. He saw hunched shapes engaged in the counter game, hneftafl, that the Upplander had seen Skarsi playing.

Little heed was paid to him. Tra Company was resting. They had not assembled to give him audience. He was just something being brought through their hall so that business could be settled. He was a minor distraction.

At the back of the hall, at the highest point of the cavern, was Ogvai Ogvai Helmschrot. High Wolf. Pack master. Jarl of Tra. Just from his bearing, his authority was beyond question. He was big, long-boned, a runner who would make pursuit relentlessly across waste and tundra with immeasurable stamina. His hair was long and straight, centre-parted, black, and his head was tilted back to invest his black-circled eyes and clean-shaven jaw with a commanding arrogance. The centre of his lower lip was tagged with a fat steel piercing that gave him a petulance that seemed childish and dangerous.

He slid forwards off a mound of battered old skins to get a look at the Upplander.

‘So this is what a bad omen looks like when it stands up in your face?’ he asked no one. The Upplander’s breath was steaming the frigid air, but barely a curl escaped Ogvai’s mouth alongside his words. Astartes biology was marvellously adapted for heat retention.

The jarl was wearing a laced leather jacket with no sleeves. His arms were long and his skin was sun-starved white. There were dark tattoos on the albino flesh there. He stretched one arm out and took up a silver bowl. It was full of a liquid so dark it looked like ink. The jarl’s fingers, curled around the lip of the silver lanx, were armoured with dirty rings. The Upplander imagined the jarl wore them less for decoration and more for the damage they would do to the things that he hit.

Ogvai took a sip, and then offered the lanx to the Upplander. He held it out.

‘He can’t drink that,’ said one of the escort. ‘Mjod will go though his innards like acid.’

Ogvai sniffed.

‘Sorry,’ he said to the Upplander. ‘Wouldn’t want to kill you with a toast to your health.’

The Upplander could smell the petroleum reek of the drink. There was blood in it too, he guessed. Liquid food, fermented, chemically distilled, extremely high calorific content… more akin to aviation fuel than a beverage.

‘It keeps the cold out,’ Ogvai remarked as he set the bowl down. He looked at the Upplander.

‘Tell me why you’re here.’

‘I’m here at the continuing discretion of the Rout,’ the Upplander replied in Juvjk.

Ogvai curled his lip.

‘No, that’s why you’re still breathing,’ he said. ‘I asked why you’re here.’

‘I was invited.’

‘Tell me about this invitation.’

‘I sent a number of messages to the Fenris beacon, requesting permission to enter Fenrisian world-space. I wished to meet with and study the Fenrisian Astartes.’

One of the escort standing behind the Upplander snorted.

‘That doesn’t sound like a request that we would say yes to,’ said Ogvai. ‘Were you persistent?’

‘I think I sent the request, with various elaborations, about a thousand times.’

‘You think?’

‘I can’t be sure. I had a log of the precise number, with transmission dates. My effects were returned to me, but all my data-slates and notebooks were missing.’

‘Written words,’ said Ogvai. ‘Written words and word storage devices. We don’t permit them here.’

‘At all?’

‘No.’

‘So all my notes and drafts, all my work, you destroyed it?’

‘I would think so. If that’s what you were idiot enough to bring with you. Don’t you have back up off-world?’

‘Nineteen great years ago, I did. How do you record information here on Fenris?’

‘That’s what memories are for,’ said Ogvai. ‘So you sent this message a lot. Then what?’

‘I got permission. Permission to set down. Coordinates were given. The permit was verified as Astartes. But during planetfall, my lander suffered a serious malfunction and crashed.’

‘It didn’t crash,’ said Ogvai. He took another sip of his ink-black drink. ‘It was shot out of the sky. Wasn’t it, Bear?’

Nearby, at the foot of the jarl’s seating mound, one of the dark masses of huddled furs stirred.

‘You shot him down, didn’t you, Bear?’

There was a grumble of reply.

Ogvai grinned. ‘That was why he had to come out and rescue you. Because he shot you down. It was a mistake, wasn’t it, Bear?’

‘I recognised my failing, jarl, and I was sure to correct it,’ Bear replied.

‘If you knew all this, why did you ask me?’ asked the Upplander.

‘Just wanted to see if you remembered the story as well as I did.’ Ogvai frowned. ‘Your telling’s not up to much, though. I’ll put that down to the fact that you’ve been in the icebox a long time and your brain’s probably still frosty. But as a skjald, you’re not really what I expected.’

‘As a skjald?’

Ogvai leaned forwards and rested the elbows of his long, white arms on his knees. His pale skin glowed in the gloom, like glacier ice.

‘Yes, as a skjald. I’ll tell it now, then. I’ll tell the account. Gedrath, who came before me, he warmed to your messages. He talked to us in Tra, and to me, who was his right hand, and to the other jarls, and to the Wolf King too. A skjald, he said. That would be amusing. Diverting. A skjald could bring new accounts from Upp and out, and he could learn ours too. Learn them, and tell them back to us.’

‘This is what you thought I’d be?’ asked the Upplander.

‘Is it what you thought you’d be?’ asked the jarl. ‘You wanted to learn about us, didn’t you? Well, we don’t give our stories cheaply. We don’t give them to just anybody. You sounded promising, and eager.’

‘Then there was the name,’ said one of the escort behind the Upplander. Ogvai nodded, and the Tra veteran stepped forwards. He was lanky and grey-haired, with blue tattooing writhing up and out from the edges of his leather face mask and across his deep brow. Plaited grey beard tails sprouted from the mask’s lower rim.

‘What’s that, Aeska?’ asked Ogvai.

‘The name he gave us,’ said Aeska. ‘Ahmad Ibn Rustah.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Ogvai.

‘Jarl Gedrath, rest his thread, had a romantic soul,’ said the warrior.

Ogvai grinned. ‘Yes. It appealed to him. To me too. I was his right hand, and he looked to me. He didn’t want to appear whimsical or weak, but a man’s heart can be touched by an old memory or the smell of history. That’s what you intended, wasn’t it?’

He was looking directly at the Upplander.

‘Yes,’ said the Upplander. ‘To be honest, after a thousand or so messages, I was willing to try anything. I didn’t know if you’d know the significance.’

‘Because we’re stupid barbarians?’ asked Ogvai, still smiling.

The Upplander wanted to say yes. Instead, he said, ‘Because it’s old and obscure data by any standard, and that was before I knew you kept no written or stored records. Long ago, before Old Night, before even the rise of man from Terra, and the Outward Urge, and the Golden Era of Technology, there was a man called Ahmad Ibn Rustah, or ebn Roste Esfahani. He was a learned man, a conservator who went out into the world to discover and preserve knowledge, learning it first-hand so he knew it to be accurate, to be the truth. He went from Isfahan in what we know as the Persian region, and travelled as far as Novgorod, where he encountered the Rus. These were the peoples of the Kievan Rus Khaganate, part of the vast and mobile genetic group that encompassed the Slav, the Svedd, the Norsca and the Varangaria. He was the first outsider to integrate with them, to appreciate their culture and to report them to be far more than the stupid barbarians they were thought to be.’

‘You see a parallel here?’ asked Ogvai.

‘Don’t you?’

Ogvai sniffed and rubbed the end of his nose with the pad of his thumb. His finger nails were thick and black, like chips of ebony. They each had deep and complex patterns embossed or drilled into them. ‘Gedrath did. You used the name as a shibboleth.’

‘That’s right.’

There was silence.

‘I understand I’ve been brought here so you can decide what to do with me,’ said the Upplander.

‘Yes, that’s about it. It falls to me to decide, now I’m jarl and Gedrath is gone.’

‘Not to… your primarch?’ asked the Upplander.

‘The Wolf King? That’s not the kind of decision he bothers himself with,’ replied Ogvai. ‘Tra had seneschalship of the Aett the season you came along, so Gedrath was the lord in charge. This is down to his whimsy. Now I find out if Tra comes to regret it. Do you really want to learn about us?’

‘Yes.’

‘That means learning about survival. About killing.’

‘You mean war? I have lived most of my life on Terra, a world that is still riven by conflict as it restores itself. I’ve seen my fair share of war.’

‘I don’t mean war so much,’ said Ogvai doubtfully. ‘War’s just an elaboration and codification of a much purer activity, which is being alive. Sometimes, at the most basic level, to be alive you must stop other people being alive. This is what we do. We are extremely good at it.’

‘I have no doubt of that, ser,’ the Upplander replied.

Ogvai picked up his lanx and held it pensively in front of his mouth in both hands, ready to sip.

‘Life and death,’ he said softly. ‘That’s what we’re about, Upplander.’ He said the name scornfully, as if mocking. ‘Life and death, and the place where they meet up. That place, that’s where we do business. That’s the space we inhabit. That’s the place where wyrd gets decided. You want to come with us, you’ll have to learn about both of them. You’ll have to get close to both. Tell me, you ever been close to either? You ever been to the place where they meet?’

He could hear music. Someone was playing the clavier.

‘Why can I hear music?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Murza replied. He clearly didn’t care either. A fat pile of manuscripts and maps was spread out over the battered desktop, and he was picking over them.

‘It’s a clavier,’ said Hawser, cocking his head.

The day was fine, sunny. The white dust kicking up from the Army shelling seemed to have dried out the previous day’s rain and left the sky a deep, dark blue, like the lid of a box lined with velvet. Sunlight sloped in off the street through the blown-out window and doorway, and brought the distant music with it.

The building had once been a clerical office, perhaps for patents or legal work, and a penetrator shell had gone through its upper storeys like a round through a brainpan. The floor of the front office they were standing in was stained navy blue from the hundreds of bottles of ink that had been blown off the shelves and shattered. The ink had soaked in and dried months before. The blue floor matched the sky outside. Hawser stood in the patch of sunlight and listened to the music. He hadn’t heard a clavier playing in years.

‘Look at this, will you?’ Murza said. He passed a hand-held picter unit to Hawser. Hawser looked at the image displayed on the back-plate screen.

‘This has just come through from our contact,’ he said. ‘Do you think it’s a match?’

‘The image quality is poor–’ Hawser began.

‘But your mind isn’t,’ snapped Murza.

Hawser smiled. ‘Navid, that’s probably the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.’

‘Get over it, Kas. Look at the pict. Is it the box?’

Hawser studied the image again, and compared it to the various antique archive picts and reference drawings that Murza had arranged in a line across the desk.

‘It looks genuine,’ he said.

‘It looks beautiful is what it looks,’ smiled Murza. ‘But I do not want to get bitten like we did at Langdok. We have to be sure this is genuine. The bribes we’ve paid, the finder’s fees. There’ll be more, you can count on it. The local priesthood will have to be financially persuaded to look the other way.’

‘Really? You’d think they’d be grateful. We’re attempting to salvage their heritage before this war obliterates it. They must realise we’re attempting to save something they can’t?’

‘You know that this is much more complicated than that,’ replied Murza. ‘It’s a matter of faith. That much should be obvious to a good Catheric boy like you.’

Hawser didn’t rise to the bait. He’d never made an attempt to hide the tradition of belief he’d been raised to. All teaching at the commune that had been his first home had been Catheric, as had all the communes and camps serving the Ur project. A city built by and for the faithful. It was an appealing idea, one of an infinite number that had tried and failed to make sense of mankind’s lot after Old Night. Hawser had never been much of a believer himself, but he’d had great patience and respect for the ideas of men like Rector Uwe. In turn, Uwe had never presumed to impose his beliefs on Hawser. He’d supported Hawser’s ambition to attend a universitariate. Almost accidentally, in conversation with a faculty senior many years later, Hawser had discovered that he had been awarded his scholarship to Sardis principally on the basis of the letter Uwe had sent to the master of admissions.

Without Rector Uwe, Hawser would never have left the commune and Ur, and entered academia. But for his place at Sardis, Hawser would still have been at the commune when the predators, the human predators, had stolen in off the western slope radlands and put an end to the dream of Ur.

It was a salvation he still found uncomfortable, two decades later.

Hawser was interested in the tradition and histories of faith and religion, but it was hard in the modern age to believe in any god who had never bothered to prove his existence, when there was one who most profoundly had. It was said that the Emperor denied all efforts to label Him a god, or entitle Him with divinity, but there was no getting around the fact that, as He had risen to prominence on Terra, all the extant creeds and religions of the world had correspondingly dried up like parched watercourses in summer.

Murza now, he hid his beliefs. Hawser knew for a fact that Murza had also been raised Catheric. They’d discussed it sometimes. Catheric had a strand of Millenarianism in it. The proto-creeds that had given rise to it had believed in an end time, an apocalypse, during which a saviour would come to escort the righteous to safety. An apocalypse had come all right. It had been called Strife and Old Night. There had been no saviour. Some philosophers reasoned that mankind’s crimes and sins had been so great, redemption had been withheld. Salvation had been postponed indefinitely until mankind had atoned sufficiently, and only once that had happened would the prophecy be revisited.

That didn’t satisfy Hawser especially. No one knew, or could remember, what the human race might have done to displease god so spectacularly. It was, Hawser reasoned, hard to atone if you didn’t know what you were atoning for.

The other thing that made him uneasy was that the rise of the Emperor was seen by an increasing number of people as evidence that the postponement was over.

‘I’m sorry. It’s easy to mock religion,’ Murza said.

‘It is,’ Hawser agreed.

‘It’s easy to scorn it for being old-fashioned and inadequate. A heap of superstitious rubbish. We have science.’

‘We do.’

‘Science, and technology. We are so advanced, we have no need of spiritual faith.’

‘Are you going somewhere with this?’ Hawser asked.

‘We forget what religion offered us.’

‘Which is?’

‘Mystery.’

That was his argument. Mystery. All religions required a believer to have faith in something inexpressible. You had to be prepared to accept that there were things you could never know or understand, things you had to take on trust. The mystery at the heart of religion was not a mystery to be understood, it was a mystery to be cherished, because it was there to remind you of your scale in the cosmos. Science deplored such a view, because everything should be explicable, and that which was not was simply beneath contempt.

‘It’s no coincidence that so many old religions contained myths of forbidden truth, of dangerous knowledge. Things that man was not meant to know.’

Murza had a way of putting things. Hawser believed that Murza was considerably more scornful of the faith that had raised him than Hawser was, even though Murza believed and Hawser didn’t. At least Hawser had respect for Catherisism’s morality. Murza made a great show of treating anyone who professed a faith as an irredeemable idiot.

But he cared. Hawser knew that. Murza believed. The little sign of the crux he wore under his shirt, the genuflection he sometimes made when he thought no one was looking. There was an inkling of the spiritual about the sardonic Navid Murza, and he kept it alive to preserve his sense of mystery.

It was mystery that propelled Murza and Hawser on their expeditions to recover priceless relics of data from the world’s shattered corners. Rescued data unlocked the mysteries that Old Night had burned into the tissue of mankind’s collective knowledge like lesions.

Sometimes it was mystery that sent them after spiritual relics too. Prayer boxes in Ossetia, for example. Neither of them believed in the faith that had constructed the boxes, or the sacred virtue of the things they were supposed to contain. But they both believed in the importance of the mystery the items had represented to past generations, and thus their value to human culture.

The prayer boxes had kept faith alive in this cindered part of Terra through the Age of Strife. There was very little chance they contained any data of actual, practical value. But a study of their nature and the way they had been crafted and preserved could reveal a great deal about human thought, and human codes, and the way man thought about his place in a cosmos where science was increasingly proving to be inimical.

There was a noise outside in the street, and Vasiliy stepped in out of the sunlight.

‘Ah, captain,’ said Murza. ‘We were about to send for you.’

‘Ready to advance?’ Vasiliy asked.

‘Yes, up through Old Town to a rendezvous point,’ said Hawser.

‘Our contact has come up with the goods,’ Murza added.

The captain looked reluctant. ‘I’m concerned about your welfare. In the last hour, this whole region has become very active. I’m getting reports of actions with N Brigade forces all down the valley as far as Hive-Roznyka. Moving through Old Town will make you very exposed.’

‘My dear Captain Vasiliy, Kas and I have absolute faith in you and your troops.’

Vasiliy grinned and shrugged. She was a good-looking woman in her mid-thirties, and the plating and ballistic padding of the Lombardi Hort battlegear did not entirely disguise the more feminine highlights of her form. Her right elbow was leaning on the chrome ’chetter strap hung from her shoulder. Sunlight glinted off the armoured links of the ammo feed that ran between weapon and backpack. A giant slide-visor of tinted yellow plastek came down over her eyes like an aviator’s headcan. Hawser knew its inner surface was flickering with eyeline displays and target graphics. He knew it because he’d asked her to let him try it on once. She’d grinned, and buckled the strap tight under his chin, and explained what all the cursors and tags meant. In truth, he’d only done it so he could see her whole face. She had great eyes.

In the street, the Hort forces were moving up. Vox-officers scurried like beetles with their heavy carapace sets and long, swaying antennae. Troopers prepped ’chetters and melters, and set off in fire-teams. The sunlight winked off their yellow slide-visors.

A modest sub-hive dominated the hill’s summit, punctured and dilapidated by fighting. In its foothills, the outskirts known as Old Town, much more ancient street patterns and urban growths fanned out like root mass from a tree trunk. Hawser could hear shelling away to the south, and rockets occasionally whooped and squealed as they spat off overhead.

Hawser and Murza had spent three months in the region, tracking down the prayer boxes through a long and complex series of contacts and intermediaries. The boxes were said to contain the relics of venerated individuals from the Pre-Strife Era, part of a local tradition of Proto-Cruxic worship. Some contained old packets of scripture on paper or old-format disk too. Murza was especially excited about the translation possibilities.

So far, they’d recovered two boxes. Today, they hoped, they’d get the third and best example before the brutal inter-hive warfare finally forced them to quit the region. The item was owned and guarded by a small, underground coven of believers, who had kept it safe for six centuries, but picture records made by an antiquarian ninety years earlier attested to its outstanding significance. The antiquarian’s records also spoke of considerable scriptural material.

‘You do as I say,’ Vasiliy told them, as she did every morning when she led them out into the open.

They moved through the town under escort.

‘Can you hear music?’ Hawser asked.

‘No, but I do hear it’s your birthday,’ said Vasiliy, by way of reply.

Hawser blushed. ‘I don’t have a birthday. I mean, I only have a rough idea what day I was born on.’

‘It says it’s your birthday on your bio-file.’

‘You looked me up,’ said Hawser.

She feigned disinterest. ‘I’m in charge. I need to know these things.’

‘Well, captain, the date on my bio-file is the birthday I was given by the man who raised me. I was a foundling. It’s as good a birthday as any.’

‘Uh huh.’

‘So why do you need to know?’ he asked.

‘It just occurred to me that tonight, when this business is done, we could raise a glass to celebrate.’

‘What a fine idea,’ said Hawser.

‘I thought so,’ she agreed. ‘Forty, huh?’

‘Happy birthday me.’

‘You don’t look a day over thirty-nine.’

Hawser laughed.

‘When you two have stopped flirting,’ said Murza. His link had just received a pict-message from their contact. It was another image of the prayer box, its lid open. The image was of better quality than the previous one.

‘It’s as though he’s teasing us, tempting us,’ said Hawser.

‘He says the box is safe in the basement of a public hall about half a kilometre from here. It’s waiting for us. He’s agreed terms and a fee with the cult elders. They’re just glad the box can be removed to safety before war tears the city down.’

‘But they still want a fee,’ said Vasiliy.

‘That’s really for the contact, not the elders,’ said Hawser. ‘One hand washes the other.’

‘Can we move ahead?’ asked Murza sharply. ‘If we’re not outside in twenty minutes, they’re going to call the whole thing off.’

Vasiliy signalled the troop forwards again.

‘He’s impatient, isn’t he?’ she said to Hawser quietly, nodding at Murza up ahead.

‘He can be. He worries about missed opportunities.’

‘You don’t?’

‘That’s the difference between us,’ said Hawser. ‘I want to preserve knowledge – any knowledge – because any knowledge is better than none. Navid, well I think he’s hungry to find the knowledge that matters. The knowledge that will change the world.’

‘Change the world? How?’

‘I don’t know… by revealing some scientific truth we’d forgotten. By showing us some technological art we’d lost. By telling us the name of god.’

‘I’ll tell you how you change the world,’ she said. She fetched a creased pict-print out of her thigh pouch. A sunny day, a grinning teenager.

‘That’s my sister’s boy. Isak. Every male in my family gets the name Isak. It’s a tradition. She got to marry, and raise the kids. I got to have a career. Apart from living expenses, every penny I earn goes back to her, to the family. To Isak.’

Hawser looked at the picture and then handed it back to her.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I like your way more.’

They came around a street corner and saw the clavier.

It was sitting in the middle of the street, an upright model, missing its side panel. Someone had wheeled it out of one of the bombed-out buildings for no readily apparent reason other than that it had survived. An old man was standing at its keyboard, playing it. He had to hunch slightly to accommodate the length of his limbs and the lack of a stool. He’d been good once. His fingers were still nimble. Hawser tried to recognise the tune.

‘I told you I could hear music,’ he said.

‘Clear the street,’ Vasiliy voxed to her men.

‘Is that necessary?’ asked Hawser. ‘He’s not doing any harm.’

‘N Brigade members strap toxin bombs to children,’ she snapped back. ‘I am not going to take chances with an old man and a wooden box large enough to take a mini-nuke.’

‘Fair enough.’

The old man looked up and smiled as the troops approached him. He called out a greeting, and changed what he was playing mid-bar. The tune became, unmistakably, the March of Unity.

‘Cheeky old bastard,’ muttered Murza. Vasiliy’s men surrounded the old man and began to gently persuade him away from his music-making. The march missed a few notes, added a few dud ones. The old man was laughing. The March of Unity became a jaunty music hall melody

‘So, your birthday,’ said Murza, turning to Hawser.

‘You’ve never remembered before.’

‘You’ve never been forty before,’ said Murza. He reached into his coat. ‘I got you this. It’s just a trinket.’

The music stopped. The Hort troopers had finally got the old man to step away from the clavier. His foot came off the forte pedal. There was a metallic whir, like the counterweight wind of a clock movement, as the firing plate of the nano-mine inside the clavier engaged.

In less time than it takes a man’s heart to beat its final beat, the clavier vanished, and the old man disappeared, and the troopers surrounding him puffed into vapour like cotton seed heads, and the surface of the street peeled away in a blizzard of cobblestones, and the buildings on either side of the road shredded, and Murza left the ground in the arms of the shock wave, and his blood got in Hawser’s eyes, and Hawser started to fly too, and all the secrets of the cosmos were illuminated for one brief moment as life and death converged.

Ogvai sent the Upplander away while he thought about his decision. Eventually, after what the Upplander calculated to be about forty or fifty hours, during which time he saw no one except the thrall who brought him a bowl of food, the warrior called Aeska appeared in his doorway, sent by the jarl.

‘Og says you can stay,’ he remarked, casually.

‘Will I… I mean, how does this work? Are there formalities? Are their patterns or style conventions for the stories I record?’

Aeska shrugged. ‘You’ve got eyes, haven’t you? Eyes, and a voice, and a memory? Then you’ve got everything you need.’

Five

At the gates of the Olamic Quietude

He asked them if, under the circumstances, he ought to be armed. The thralls and grooms who were preparing and anointing the company for drop cackled behind their skull masks and animal faces.

Bear said it wouldn’t be necessary.

The Quietude had placed a division of their robusts on the principal levels of the graving dock. The dock was an immense spherical structure comparable to a small lunar mass. It consisted of a void-armoured shell encasing a massive honeycomb of alloy girderwork in which the almost completed Instrument sat, embedded at the core, like a stone in a soft fruit.

Deep range scanning had revealed very little about the Instrument, except that it was a toroid two kilometres in diameter. There were no significant cavity echoes, so it was not designed to be crewed. An unmanned vehicle could only be a kill vehicle in the opinion of the commander of the 40th Imperial Expedition Fleet, and Ogvai Ogvai Helmschrot tended to agree.

Tra made entry via the polar cap of the graving dock megastructure. The company then moved down into the dock interior, descending via the colossal lattice of girderwork that cradled the Instrument. The Wolves came down, hand over hand, swinging from fingertips and toe holds, gripping struts with their knees, sliding, dropping, leaping from one support to another beneath. Hawser imagined that this process would look crude and ape-like; that the Astartes, bulked out even more than usual in their wargear, would appear clumsy and primitive, like primates swinging down through the canopy of a metal forest.

They did not. There was nothing remotely simian about their motion or their advance. They poured down through the interlocking ribs and spans like a fluid, something dark and glossy, like mjod, or blood. Something that ran and dripped, swelled and flowed again, a dark something that found in every angle, strut and spar the quickest unbroken route by which to follow gravity’s bidding.

Later, this observation was the first to earn Hawser any compliments as a skjald.

The Wolves descended and they did so silently. Not a grunt of effort, not a gasp of labour, not a click or crackle from a vox device, not a clink or chime from an uncased weapon or an unlagged armour piece. Hair was tied back and lacquered or braided. Gloves and boot-treads were dusted with ground hrosshvalur scales for grip. The hard edges of armour sections were blunted with pelts and fur wrappings. Behind tight leather masks, mouths were shut.

The Quietude’s robusts matched the Astartes in bulk and strength. They had been engineered that way. Each one was hard-wired with remarkable sensitivity to motion, to light, to heat and to pheromonal scent. Somehow, they still didn’t see the Wolves coming.

Why don’t the men of Tra draw their weapons, Hawser wondered? His panic began to escalate. Great Terra above, they’ve all forgotten to draw their weapons! The words almost flew out of him as the Wolves began to drop out of the girderwork and onto the heads of the robusts patrolling below them.

Most went for the neck. A robust was big, but the weight of a fully armoured Astartes dropping on it from above was enough to bring it down onto the deck, hard. With open hands, unencumbered by weapons, the Astartes gripped their targets’ heads, and twisted them against the direction of fall, snapping the cervical process.

It was an economical and ruthless execution. The Wolves were using their own bodies as counterweights to clean-break steelweave spinal columns. The first audible traces of the fight were the rapid-fire cracks of fifty or more necks breaking. The sounds overlapped, almost simultaneous, like firecrackers kicking off across the vast, polished deckspace. Like knuckles cracking.

Distress and medical attention signals began to bleat and shrill. Few of the robusts who had been brought down were actually dead, as they did not enjoy life in the same way that conventional humans did. The robusts were simply disabled, helpless, the command transmissions between their brains and their combat-wired bodies broken. An odd chorus of information alerts began to sound throughout the dock’s megastructure. Layer added upon layer incrementally, as different bands of the Quietude’s social networks became aware of what was happening.

Stealth ceased to be a commodity of any value.

Having made their first kills, the Wolves rose to their feet. They were all, very suddenly, aiming guns. The fastest way to arm themselves had been to appropriate the weapons that were ready-drawn and clutched in the paralysed hands of their robust victims. The Wolves came up raising streamlined chrome heat-beamers and gravity rifles. It was really not Hawser’s place, then or later, to remark how sleek and unlikely these weapons looked in the hands of Rout members. It was like seeing pieces of glass sculpture or stainless surgical tools gripped in the mouths of wild dogs.

Instead, Hawser’s account reflected the following point. It is, the Wolf King teaches, good practice to use an enemy’s weapon against him. An enemy may fabricate wonderful armour, but the Wolves of Fenris have learned through experience that the effectiveness of an enemy’s protection is proportionate to the efficacy of his weapons. This may be a deliberate design philosophy, but it is more usually a simple, instinctive consequence. An enemy may think ‘I know it is possible for armour to be strong to X degree, because I am able to forge armour that strong; therefore I need to develop a weapon that can split armour of X degree, in case I ever encounter an opponent as well-armoured as I know I can be.’

The heat-beamers emitted thin streaks of sizzling white light that hurt the eyes. They made no dramatic noises except for the sharp explosions that occurred when the beams struck a target.

The gravity rifles launched pellets of ultra-dense metal that laced the dock’s warm air with quick smudges like greasy finger marks on glass. These weapons were louder. They made noises like whips cracking, underscored by oddly modulated burps of power. Unlike the heat beams, which split robust armour open in messy eruptions of cooking innards and superhot plate fragments, the gravity rifle pellets were penetrators that made tiny, pin-prick entry marks and extravagantly gigantic exit wounds. Stricken robusts faltered as their chests caved in under scorching heat-beam assault, or lurched as their backs blew out in sprays of spalling, shattered plastics, liquidised internals and bone shards.

It was almost pathetic. The Quietude had a martial reputation that was measured in centuries and light years, and the robusts were their battlefield elite. Here, they were falling down like clumsy idiots on an icy day, like clowns in a pantomime, a dozen of them, two dozen, three, smack on their faces or slam on their backs, legs out from under them, not a single one of them even managing to return fire, not a single one.

When the robusts finally began to rally, the Wolves played the next card in their hand. They tossed away the captured guns and switched to their own weapons, principally their bolters. The Quietude’s social networks had frantically analysed the nature of the threat, and processed an immediate response. This took the networks less than eight seconds. The robusts were armoured with interlocking, overlapping skins of woven steel as their principal layer of protection, but each one also possessed a variable force field as an outer defensive sheath. After only eight seconds of shooting, the social networks of the Olamic Quietude successfully and precisely identified the nature of the weapons being used against its robusts. They instantly adjusted the composition of the individual force fields to compensate.

As a result, the robusts were effectively proofed against heat-beams and gravitic pellets at exactly the same moment as they started to take Imperial bolter fire.

Further humiliation was heaped upon the Quietude’s reputation. The men of Tra spread out, firing from the chest, mowing down the robusts as they attempted to compose themselves.

For this, thought Hawser, for this work, for these deeds: this is why the companies of Wolves are kept.

He had never seen a boltgun live-fired before. All his eight-and-the-rest decades of experience, all the conflict he’d witnessed, and he’d never seen a boltgun shot. Boltguns were the symbol of Imperial superiority and Terran unification, emphatically potent and reductively simple. They were Astartes weapons, not exclusively, but as a hallmark thing. Few men had the build to heft one. They were the crude, mechanical arms of a previous age, durable and reliable, with few sophisticated parts that could malfunction or jam. They were brute technology that, instead of being superseded and replaced by complex modern weapon systems, had simply been perfected and scaled up. An Astartes with a boltgun was a man with a carbine, nightmarishly exaggerated.

The sight of it reminded Hawser of how un-human the Wolves were. He had been amongst them for long enough to have become used to the look of them and the way they towered over him.

Still, they were positively reassuring compared to the forces of the Quietude.

Skull measurements and other biological data taken from captured Quietude specimens had confirmed their Terran ancestry. At some point long before the fall of Old Night, a branch of Terran expansion had brought the Quietude’s gene pool into this out-flung, unremembered corner of the galaxy. The commander of the 40th Imperial Expedition Fleet, along with his technical advisors and savants, believed that this exodus had taken place during the First Great Age of Technology, perhaps as long as fifteen thousand years earlier. The Quietude possessed a level of technological aptitude that was extremely sophisticated, and so divergent from Terran or even Martian standards as to suggest a long incubation and, possibly, the influence of a xenobiological culture.

At some early stage in their post-Terran life, the humans of the Quietude had given up their humanity. They operated in social networks, cohered by communications webs neurally spliced into them at birth. They sacrificed most of their flesh anatomy to ritualised surgical procedures during childhood that prepared them to inhabit artificial bodies. Pretty much all that remained of a Quietude adult, organically speaking, were the brain, skull and spinal cord. These rested in the neck socket of an elegantly engineered humanoid chassis, which contained the machine-analogue organs that fed the brain and kept it alive.

That explained why the shot-up robusts were pooling almost purple fluids around their carcasses instead of blood.

The citizens of the Quietude wore hoods of silver circuitry over their skulls, and hologram masks instead of faces. As the boltguns killed them, the masks flickered out and failed, and revealed the self-inflicted inhumanity beneath.

Aeska had carried Hawser down with Tra, instructing Hawser to hold onto his neck. He’d clung on like a pelt, and Aeska had carried him as if his weight had no significance to the Astartes, and even when they’d been going hand-over-hand down through the dock’s girder lattice, even when the only thing preventing Hawser from plunging to his death was the grip of his fingers around Aeska’s neck, he’d kept his eyes open. He had not done this because he’d jumped down enough flues in the Aett to develop a head for heights. He’d done it because he’d known he had to. It was expected of him.

On the principal deck level, as the assault began, Aeska had set Hawser on the ground behind him and told him to walk in his shadow. The vast, polished deck yawned away on either side of them, curved like the surface of a world seen from orbit, and the lattice above was like the branches of a dense thorn thicket. The air was laced with bolter fire.

Hawser needed very little encouragement.

Five minutes into the fight, the Quietude finally began to claw back. The first Rout blood they spilled was from a warrior called Galeg, who was hit by a gravity pellet. The shot turned his left arm, from the elbow down, into a bloody twig, rattling with bracelets of shattered armour. Galeg shut the pain down and advanced on his attacker, swinging out a chainaxe. Steam and blood-smoke sizzled from his injured limb.

The shot had not come from one of the robust warrior units. Three graciles, the lighter-weight technical versions, had retrieved the weapon of a fallen robust and set it up on a lattice walkway. Galeg bounded up onto the walkway as they missed him with two more desperate shots, and dismembered them with his wailing axe. He did this with relish, and let out wet growls as their fracturing chassis shattered under his axe-blows and emitted strangulated electronic shrieks.

When Galeg had finished his kill, he signalled his ability to continue with a casual air-punch of his bloody, ruined fist, a gesture that Hawser found chilling.

Several robusts had defended the entrance to a major engineering underspace with what looked like a heavier, perhaps crew-served, version of the gravity rifle. The colossal bursts of fire, ripping up the underspace approach from an unseen source, vaporised Hjad, the first Wolf to come into view. Bear wheeled the rest of his pack aside. There was no point in providing further targets. Hawser saw Bear take out a small handax, a one-piece steel cast, and mark the bulkhead beside the underspace slope. He did it quickly and deftly. It was evidently a mark he’d made many times: four hard cuts to form a crude diamond shape, then a fifth notch bisecting the diamond. Hawser considered the mark gouged into the bulkhead metal, and realised what it was.

It was an incredibly simplified symbol for an eye. It was a mark of aversion.

The Olamic Quietude had been hostile from the very point of contact. Suspicious and unwilling to formalise any kind of convergence, they had engaged the 40th Fleet in two separate ship actions in an attempt to drive the expedition out of Quietude space. During the second of these skirmishes, the Quietude managed to capture the crew of an Imperial warship.

The commander of the 40th Imperial Expedition Fleet sent a warning to the Quietude, explaining that peaceful contact and exchange was the primary goal of the Imperium of Terra, and the Quietude’s aggressive stance would not be tolerated. The warship and its crew would be returned. Negotiations would begin. Dialogue with Imperial iterators would begin and understanding reached. The Quietude made its first direct response. It explained, as if to a child, or perhaps to a pet dog or bird that it was trying to train, that it was the true and sole heir of the Terran legacy. As its name suggested, it was resting in an everlasting state of readiness to resume contact with its birthworld. It had waited patiently through the apocalyptic ages of storm and tempest.

The Imperials who now approached its borders were pretenders. They were not what they claimed to be. Any fool could see that they were the crude artifice of some alien race trying to mock-up what it thought would pass for human.

The Quietude supported this verdict with copious annotated evidence from its interrogation of the Imperial prisoners. Each prisoner, the Quietude stated, displayed over fifteen thousand points of differential that revealed them to be non-human impostors, as the vivisections clearly demonstrated.

The commander of the 40th Expedition Fleet sent for the nearest Astartes.

The longer Hawser lived amongst the Rout, the more the Astartes had to do with him. Warriors he did not know, from companies he had not encountered, would come and seek him out, and regard him suspiciously with their abhuman gold eyes.

They hadn’t learned to trust him. It wasn’t trust. It was as though they had got used to his alien scent being in the Aett.

Either that, or someone, someone or something with the authority to call off a pack of the wildest killers on Fenris, had ordered them to accept him.

It seemed, as it had with Bitur Bercaw, that the telling of stories mattered to them.

‘Why do the stories matter?’ Hawser asked one night when he was permitted to eat with Skarssen and his game-circle. Board games like hneftafl were for sharpening strategy.

Skarssen shrugged. He was too busy scooping meat into his mouth in a manner that wasn’t a human gesture. It wasn’t even the gesture of a ravenous human being. It was the action of an animal fuelling itself, not knowing when it would feed again.

Hawser sat with a meagre bowl of fish broth and some dried fruit. The Astartes of Fyf had mjod, and haunches of raw meat so red and gamey it stank of cold copper and carbolic.

‘Is it because you don’t write things down?’ Hawser pressed.

Lord Skarssen wiped blood from his lips.

‘Remembering is all that counts. If you remember something, you can do it again. Or not do it again.’

‘You learn?’

‘It’s learning,’ Skarssen nodded. ‘If you can tell something as an account, you know it.’

‘And accounts are how we don’t forget the dead,’ put in Varangr.

‘That too,’ said Skarssen.

‘The dead?’ asked Hawser.

‘They get lonely if we forget them. No man should be lonely and forgotten by his comrades, even if he’s a wight and gone away to the dark and the Underverse.’

Hawser watched Varangr’s face in the lamplight. There was no way to read it except as the dull-eyed mask of an apex predator.

‘When I was sleeping,’ Hawser said. It was the start of a sentence, but he hadn’t thought it through to the end, and nothing else came out.

‘What?’ asked Skarssen, annoyed.

Hawser shook himself, coming out of a brief trance. ‘When I was sleeping. In cold sleep, where you kept me. I heard a voice then. It said it didn’t like it in the darkness. It missed the firelight and the sunlight. It said it had dreamed all of its dreams a hundred times over, a thousand times. It said it hadn’t chosen the dark.’

He looked up and realised that Skarssen, Varangr and the other members of Fyf around him had stopped eating and were staring at him, listening intently. A couple had blood on their chins that they hadn’t wiped away.

‘It told me that the dark chooses us,’ Hawser said. The Wolves murmured assent, though their throats made the murmur into a leopard-growl.

Hawser stared at them. The twitching firelight caught golden eyes and gleaming teeth in shadow shapes.

‘Was it a wight?’ he asked. ‘Was I hearing a voice from the Underverse?’

‘Did it have a name?’ asked Varangr.

‘Cormek Dod,’ said Hawser.

‘Not a wight, then,’ said Skarssen. He sagged, as if disappointed. ‘Almost but not.’

‘Worse, probably,’ grumbled Trunc.

‘Don’t say that!’ Skarssen snapped.

Trunc bowed his head. ‘I recognise my failing and will be sure to correct it,’ he said.

Hawser asked what they meant, but they wouldn’t be drawn. His story had briefly piqued their interest, but now they were deflated. The jarl turned back to the subject of death.

‘We burn our dead,’ said Skarssen. ‘It’s our practice. There’s no soil on Fenris for burial. No ground that isn’t iron hard in the long winter, and no ground with any permanence in summer. We don’t leave markers or tombs, no graves for the worm-wed like other men. Why would a dead man want that? Why would he want his wight weighed down and anchored to one place? His thread’s cut and he can finally roam as he pleases. Doesn’t want a stone pinning him down.’

‘A story is better than a stone,’ said Varangr. ‘Better for remembering the dead. Do you know how to remember the dead, skjald?’

The medicae who tended him in the field station at Ost-Roznyka spent some time explaining that they’d nearly been able to save his leg.

‘The shrapnel damage would have been repairable,’ he said, as if discussing the re-liming of a wall. ‘What cost you was the crush damage. The blast carried you into a building, and brought a lintel down on you.’

Hawser felt nothing. His senses had been entirely fogged by opiates, he presumed. The Lombardi Hort field station was grubby and painfully under-provided, and the medicae’s scrub-smock, mask and cap were soiled so deeply it was clear he didn’t change them between patients, but there were several freshly used opiate injectors in a chrome instrument tray by his cot. They’d used precious pharm supplies on him. He warranted special attention. He was high status, a visiting specialist.

It was likely several regular soldiers would die or at least suffer terrible and avoidable pain because of him.

He felt nothing.

‘I think an augmetic will be viable,’ the medicae said, encouragingly. He looked tired. His eyes looked tired. All Hawser could see of the medicae above his soiled mask were his tired eyes.

‘I can’t do a proper assessment here,’ the medicae said. ‘I really don’t have the resources.’

Eyes, without a nose or mouth. Hawser felt nothing, but a current stirred deep down in his drugged torpor. Eyes without a nose or mouth, eyes above a soiled mask. That was wrong. He was used to seeing it the other way around. A mouth and no eyes. A mouth, smiling, and eyes hidden.

Really great eyes, hidden behind a tinted yellow slide-visor.

‘Vasiliy,’ Hawser said.

‘Hmh?’ replied the medicae. Someone was shouting outside. Cybernetica portage units were arriving with fresh casualties loaded onto their stretcher racks.

‘Vasiliy. Captain Vasiliy.’

‘Ahhh,’ said the medicae. ‘She didn’t make it. We worked on her, but there was too much organ damage.’

Hawser felt nothing. It was a state of mind that was not destined to last.

‘Murza,’ he said. His lips felt like dough. His voice flowed like glue.

‘Who?’

‘The other inspector. The other specialist.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said the medicae. ‘The blast killed him outright. There were barely any remains to recover.’

Hawser remembered the names of the dead whose threads were cut taking the Quietude’s graving dock. Five Astartes, five of Tra: Hjad, Adthung Greychin, Stormeye, Tjurl-On-The-Ice and Fultag Redknife.

He witnessed two of the deaths personally, and learned particulars of the others afterwards, so that he had at least one specific detail for each one, a piece that would make a proper end for each account.

For example, just before the robusts’ crew-served weapon had turned him into bloodsmoke and a rattling drizzle of armour fragments, Hjad had carried over two of the Quietude’s big fighting units by rushing them bodily. One had been too crippled to pick itself up again. The other had attempted to claw at Hjad, its face hologram blinking as it tried to reload into something more threatening. Hjad had punched his right fist through its torso and pulled out its spine. That was Hjad, the men of Tra agreed. Unflagging, unsentimental. A good account.

Hawser felt confident he had an idea of the desired form.

Adthung Greychin had cleared an entire deck level of the graving dock structure with his chainsword after a lucky shot damaged his bolter. He went through robusts and graciles alike, making them scatter. No one actually saw him take the two gravity penetrators that killed him, but Thel saw his body on the ground just after it dropped, and told Hawser that Adthung’s famous grey beard had been dyed almost indigo by the spatter of the enemy’s pseudo-blood. He had died well. He had left a litter of dead and a field of cut threads behind him. Hawser added a quip about sleeping on purple snow to the finish of Adthung’s tale, and that earned appreciative rumbles from Tra.

Stormeye went to the Underverse destroyed by beam weapons. Blinded, his face all but scorched off by damage, his mouth fused shut, he had still managed to split a robust from the shoulder to the waist with his axe before falling. Hawser had seen this feat for himself. A dead man pulling another down in death with him. This account’s ending was greeted by a grim but admiring silence.

Erthung Redhand told Hawser about Tjurl. Tjurl was known as Tjurl-On-The-Ice because he liked to hunt, even in the alabaster silence of Helwinter on Fenris. He would leave the mountain with his spear or his axe, and go out into the high wastes of Asaheim. His blood never froze, that’s what they said about him. Because of all that mjod he had drunk, Erthung liked to add.

Tjurl went hunting that day in the graving dock. He took many trophies. That was how Hawser told it. Not once did Tjurl’s fury grow cold. Not once did he freeze.

Last to fall was Fultag Redknife. Last story to learn and last to tell before the account of the taking of the graving dock could be finished. Fultag led the assault that took the dock control centre and slashed the throat of the Quietude’s social network system so that all the data drained out as useless noise.

The assault was not the act of vandalism that Hawser had expected. Fultag’s team did not smash the systems indiscriminately with a heathen lust to defile the artefacts of a more sophisticated culture. They disabled specific parts of the control centre using magnetic mines, gunfire and blunt force, but spared enough of the primary network architecture for the Mechanicum to later examine and, if necessary, operate.

The higher beings of the Quietude were clearly concerned about accidental weapons discharge in the control centre. None of the robusts there were armed. Instead, the area – a geodesic dome structure in the central dock space directly beneath the caged Instrument – was defended by squads of super-robusts. These were titans, reinforced heavyweights armed with concussion maces and accelerator hammers. Some of them had double sets of upper limbs, like the blue-skinned gods of the ancient Induz. Some even sported two heads, twin side-by-side mountings for vestigial organic components, each with its own silver-circuit hood and holomask.

Fultag’s team gave them a lesson in axe work. Ullste, moving in to support, witnessed the fight. Each blow shook the deck, such was the strength in those limbs, he said. Super-robusts and Wolves alike were knocked down by bone-crushing blows. It was a clubbing, battering fight that churned through the split levels of the centre, smashing the gleaming window ports, fracturing console desks as bodies reeled into them. The matt fabric of the floor was quickly covered with chips of glass and fragments of plastic and spots of purple pseudo-blood.

Fultag knocked down his first super-robust on the centre’s entry ramp. He ducked the mace it swung at his head. If it had connected, the blow would have pulverised even Fenrisian anatomy. The thwarted weapon made a woof through the air instead, a woof like a winded fjorulalli, the great seal-mother.

Fultag was wrong-footed by having to duck, and there was no time to plant his feet better to swing the smile of his axe in before the mace came back at him. He managed a half-swing instead, and connected with the poll of the axe-head. The blunt back of the head fractured the super-robust’s shoulder armour and impaired its limb function on one side. It compensated.

Fultag had already rotated his axe, reset his stance, and brought the axe through in a downsweep that severed one of the super-robust’s arms at the elbow and the other at the wrist. The detached pieces, still gripping the energy-sheathed mace, thumped onto the deck. Purple pseudo-blood jetted from the ruptured hydraulic tubes in the limb stumps.

The super-robust seemed to hesitate, as if it wasn’t sure how it should proceed.

‘Oh, fall down!’ Fultag growled, and kicked it over the way he’d kick a door in.

Several members of his team were by then engaging enemy units in the mouth of the hatchway at the top of the ramp. The hatch was effectively blocked by the savage melee. Fultag vaulted the ramp’s guardrail and edged along a parapet that ran around the dome’s outer surface. When he got to the first window, he stove it in with his axe and jumped inside.

The graciles manning the consoles had begun to disconnect and flee the moment the window exploded in at them and showered the control area with glass shards. Fultag managed to kick one over and chop it in half. A super-robust came at him, and he used his axe-haft to deflect its hammer. Like a staff fighter, he brought the knob of the axe-haft up across his body, two-handed, and smacked the Quietude warrior in the sternum. Then the smile of his axe went into the super-robust’s right shoulder.

It stuck fast, wedged. The thing wasn’t dead. It lashed at him. Fultag pulled out his long knife, the knife he had cut so many threads with, the knife that had earned him his name, and propelled himself forwards into it. He crashed it backwards against a console. The combined weight of them partially dislodged the console from its floor socket and snapped underfloor cables. The super-robust got its hand to his throat, but Fultag stabbed his knife into the middle of its face.

It died under him and went limp, arms, head and legs slack over the console like a sacrificial victim on an altar slab.

Before he could slide back off his kill and regain his feet, Fultag was hit across the back by another super-robust. The blow was delivered with an accelerator hammer. It cracked Fultag’s armour and broke his left hip.

He uttered a growl as he came around at his tormentor, his black-pinned golden eyes wide with rage. His transhuman Astartes biology had already shut the pain off, diverted ruptured blood vessels, and shunted adrenaline to keep Fultag moving on a half-shattered pelvis.

The super-robust was one of the quad-armed, two-headed monsters. Its upper torso and shoulder mount were wider than the driving cage of a Typhoon-pattern Land Speeder. It carried the concussion hammer with its upper limbs like a ceremonial sceptre-bearer. Fultag managed to evade its next blow, which folded and crushed the damaged console and the dead super-robust draped over it. The follow-up caught him across the right shoulder guard and hurled him sideways into another bank of consoles. Fultag growled, his teeth bared, and droplets of blood spraying from his lips, a wounded wolf now, hurt and deadly.

He went in at the super-robust and grappled to clamp its upper limbs and stop the hammer blows. The Quietude warrior actually found itself pushed back a few steps. It couldn’t wrench its arms free. It dug in with its secondary upper limbs, ripping low at Fultag to break his grip. It clenched hard on the broken armour and mashed hip, and managed to get a yowl of pain out of him. He butted its left side head, making its holomask short out. The real face behind was a flayed human skull wired into a plastic cup of circuits. The lidless eyeballs stared back. The impact of the headbutt had caused one to fill almost instantly with pseudo-blood.

Fultag guttered out an ultrasonic purr and butted again. As the super-robust recoiled, he yanked the hammer from its upper set of limbs, but its haft was slick with purple sap and it flew out of his hands.

He tore the super-robust’s left head implant out instead. He ripped it clean out of its shoulder socket – skull, neck mount and spinal cord. It came out in a spray like afterbirth. Fultag spat. He gripped the wrenched-out piece of anatomy in his right fist by the base of the spine and began to spin it like a slingshot. Then he swung it repeatedly at the super-robust in the manner of a ball and chain, and didn’t stop until its other head was caved in.

The men of Tra approved of this.

More of the enemy came at Fultag after that, and the only weapon in reach was the accelerator hammer. This was his downfall. Stung by the use of its own weapons against it, the Quietude had adjusted its operational settings. When Fultag attempted to defend himself with the hammer, it fired a massive charge of power through the grip that cooked and killed him where he stood.

Around the circle, men nodded gravely. A trick, a trap, an enemy deception, these were all the hazards of war. They would all have made the same choice as Fultag. He’d gone with honour, and he’d held the super-robusts long enough for Tra to take the centre.

The wolf priests attended the dead. Hawser saw some of the dark figures he’d glimpsed in the kitchen-come-hospital-come-morgue on the day he woke up. The priest who served Tra was called Najot Threader.

The death of Fultag troubled Tra most of all. His organics had broiled and burned. There was, Hawser learned, nothing for Najot Threader to recover.

Hawser didn’t know what that meant.

A warship closed in as soon as Tra signalled that the graving dock was taken. They felt the megastructure shudder as it took disabling hits from the warship’s massive batteries. The shots were annihilating secondary docks and support vessels, and crippling the graving dock’s principal launch faculty.

The deck vibrated. There was a dull, dead sound like a giant gong striking arrhythmically in a distant palace of echoing marble. The air began to smell quite different: drier, as if there was ash or soot flowing into its intermix. Hawser felt afraid, more afraid than when he’d been in the thick of the close fighting with Tra. In his imagination, the warship’s complement of monastically-hooded calculus bombardi, ranked in steeply-tiered golden stalls around the warship’s gunnery station, were intoning their vast and complex targeting algorithms into the hard-wired sentiences of the gun batteries too rapidly. Mistakes were being made, or just one tiny mistake perhaps, a digit out of place, enough to place the delivery of a mega-watt laser or an accelerator beam a metre or two to the left or right over a range of sixty thousand kilometres. The graving dock would rupture and burst like a paper lantern lit and swollen from within by combusting gas.

Hawser realised it was because he trusted the men of Tra to keep him safe, safe from even the deadliest super-robust. He was only afraid of the things they couldn’t control.

The next phase of the war unfolded. Word came that the Expedition Fleet’s principal assaults on the Quietude’s home world had begun. The men of Tra took themselves to the graving dock’s polar bays to observe.

The polar bays had been opened to allow access for the shoals of Mechanicum and Army vessels ferrying personnel onto the dock structure. Hawser joined the Wolves looking down through networks of docking gibbets and anchored voidboats. Below, vast cantilevered hatches and payload doors were spread open like the wings of mythical rocs.

Beneath that, the planet filled the view like a giant orange. The sharp airless clarity of the view made the reflected sunlight almost neon in intensity.

The men of Tra took themselves out along the latticework of girders and struts to get the best view of the operations far below. They were oblivious to the precipitous drop. Hawser tried to seem as matter of fact, but he fought the urge to hold on to any and every guardrail or handgrip.

He edged onto a docking girder after Aeska Brokenlip, Godsmote and Oje. Other Wolves crowded onto the gantries around them.

A formation of bulk capacity deployment vessels was moving into line of sight about three kilometres below them, and the men were keen to watch. Some pointed, indicating certain technical aspects. What struck Hawser most was the way the three men of Tra with him comported themselves. They dropped down onto the gantry like eager animals watching prey from a clifftop, Oje crouching and the other two sprawled. Like dogs in the sun, Hawser thought, panting after exertion, alert, ready to bound up again at a moment’s notice. The vast armour that cased them didn’t appear to offer the slightest encumbrance.

A flurry of small but searing flashes across the neon-orange view below announced the start of the surface bombardment. Dark patterns immediately began to disfigure the atmosphere of the Quietude’s world, as vast quantities of smoke and particulate product began to spill into it. The skin of the orange bruised. The slow-moving deployment vessels began to sow their drop vehicles: clouds of seed cases or chaff tumbling out behind the monolithic carriers.

The Wolves made remarks. Oje dripped a little scorn on the commander of the 40th Expedition Fleet and his council of tacticians for not synchronising the surface assault with the advancing nightside terminator, as he would have done, and thus maximise the psychological and tactical advantages of nightfall. Aeska agreed, but added he’d have run the whole attack on the nightside, except that the Army didn’t like to fight at night.

‘Poor eyes,’ he said, as though talking of invalids or unremarkable animals. ‘Sorry,’ he added. He cast the last comment over his shoulder to Hawser, who was perched behind them, holding on to a spar with white knuckles.

‘For what?’ asked Hawser.

‘He’s apologising to your human eye,’ said Godsmote.

‘Maybe someone should do you a favour and poke that out too,’ said Oje.

The three Wolves laughed. Hawser laughed to show he understood it was meant to be a joke.

The Wolves turned their attention back to the invasion below.

‘Of course, if I’d been in charge,’ said Aeska, ‘I’d have just dropped Ogvai into their main habitation, and then come back a week later to collect him and hose him down.’

The three Wolves laughed again, teeth bared. They laughed so hard the gantry vibrated slightly under Hawser.

A cry went up. They all turned to investigate.

Bear, and another of Tra named Orcir, had finally dislodged the crew of robusts who had earlier vaporised Hjad on the underspace slope. They dragged them out into the open, where a gang of Tra members gathered and slaughtered them in a manner that seemed both ritualistic and unnecessarily gruesome. Despite the inhumanity of the Quietude creatures, Hawser found himself glancing away uncomfortably, unwilling to let his eyes record the scene. The two warriors saved the worst of their ministrations for the gracile commander of the weapon crew. The men of Tra watching yelled out encouragement. There was glee in the dismemberment.

‘They are chasing out the maleficarum,’ said Ogvai. Hawser looked up. He had not heard the massive, battle-black jarl come up to him.

‘What?’

‘They are casting it out,’ said Ogvai. ‘They are hurting it so badly it will know not to come back. They are punishing it, and explaining pain to it, so it will not be eager to return and bother us.’

‘I see,’ said Hawser.

‘Make sure you do,’ said Ogvai.

The gracile was dead. The Wolves left all the bodies where they had fallen.

Bear walked across to the top of the underspace slope and, as Hawser watched, used his axe to excise the mark of aversion he had made earlier.

Six

Scintilla City

‘I’ve seen seventy-five years come and go,’ said Kasper Hawser, ‘and I’ve worked fifty years on this project–’

‘And the Prix Daumarl attests to the sterling–’

‘Could I finish? Could I?’

Henrik Slussen nodded, and made a conciliatory gesture with his gloved hand.

Hawser swallowed. His mouth was dry.

‘I have worked for fifty years,’ he resumed, ‘shepherding the concept of the Conservatory from nothing into this, this form. I was raised by a man who understood the value of information, of the preservation of learning.’

‘That’s something we all believe in, Doctor Hawser,’ said one of the thirty-six rubricators sitting in a semicircle in the writing desks behind Slussen. Hawser had asked Vasiliy to arrange the meeting in the college’s Innominandum Theatre, the lecture theatre panelled in brown wood, rather than the provost’s office as Slussen had requested. A psychological ploy; he could get Slussen and his entourage to take the fold-down seats built for students, and diminish them in contrast to his authority.

‘I believe the doctor was still a little way from finishing,’ Vasiliy told the rubricator. His tone was smooth, but there was unmistakable chastisement in his voice. Vasiliy was standing at Hawser’s left shoulder. Hawser could tell that his mediary had one hand inside his coat pocket, secretly holding on to the small vial of medication in case the tension of the situation became too much for Hawser.

The man worried too much. It was charming.

‘The work the Conservatory has done,’ said Hawser, ‘the work I have done… It has all been about expanding mankind’s understanding of the cosmos. It has not been about salvaging data and placing it in an inaccessible archive.’

‘Explain to me how you think that is happening, doctor?’ asked Slussen.

‘Explain to me the process by which any average citizen can access information from the Administratum datastacks, undersecretary?’ Hawser replied.

‘There is a protocol. A request is made–’

‘It requires approvals. Authorities. A positive request may take years to fill. A refusal may not be explained or appealed. Information assets, precious information assets, are being placed into the same vast pot as general global administrative data. Vasiliy?’

‘Current assessments made by the Office of Efficiency predict that the centralised data-wealth of the Imperium is doubling every eight months. Simply navigating a catalogue of that data-wealth will soon be arduous. In a year or two…’

Slussen did not look at Hawser’s mediary.

‘So it’s a problem of access, and of the architecture of our archives. These are issues that I am happy to explore–’

‘I don’t believe they are issues, undersecretary,’ said Hawser. ‘I believe they are symptoms and excuses. They are soft ways of censoring and forbidding. They are subtle ways of controlling data and deciding who gets to know what.’

‘That’s quite a claim,’ said Slussen, entirely without tone.

‘It’s not the worst thing I’m going to claim today by any means, undersecretary,’ said Hawser, ‘so hold on tight. High level control of global information, that’s bad enough. A conspiracy, if you will, that restricts and seeks to govern the free sharing of composited knowledge throughout mankind, that’s bad enough. But what’s worse is the implication of ignorance.’

‘What?’ asked Slussen.

Hawser looked up at the ceiling of the lecture hall, where egg tempera angels flew and cavorted through gesso clouds. He was feeling a little light-headed, truth be told.

‘Ignorance,’ he repeated. ‘The Imperium is so anxious to retain proprietorial control of all data, it is simply stockpiling everything without evaluation or examination. We are owning data without learning it. We don’t know what we know.’

‘There are issues of security,’ said one of the rubricators.

‘I understand that!’ Hawser snapped. ‘I’m simply asking for some transparency. Perhaps an analytical forum to review data as it comes in. To assess it. It’s six months since Emantine put you in charge, undersecretary. Six months since you began to steer the Conservatory into the dense fog of the Administratum. We are losing our rigour. We are no longer processing or questioning.’

‘I think you’re exaggerating,’ said Slussen.

‘Just this week alone,’ said Hawser, taking the data-slate Vasiliy held out to him, ‘one hundred and eighty-nine major archaeological or ethnological survey reports were filed directly to the Administratum through your office without going through the Conservatory. Ninety-six of those had been directly funded by us.’

Slussen said nothing.

‘Many years ago,’ said Hawser, ‘so many years ago it alarms me to count them, I asked someone a question. In many respects, it was the question that led us to this place, the question that drives the whole ethos of the Conservatory. It comes in two parts, and I’d be very interested to know if you can answer either.’

‘Go on,’ said Slussen.

Hawser fixed him with an intent stare.

‘Does anyone even know why the Age of Strife happened? How did we end up in the great darkness of Old Night to begin with?’

‘What are you going to do?’ asked Vasiliy.

‘Finish packing,’ Hawser replied. ‘Perhaps you’d like to help?’

‘You can’t leave.’

‘I can.’

‘You can’t resign.’

‘I did. You were there. I expressed a desire to Undersecretary Slussen to withdraw from the project for the time being. A sabbatical, I think it’s called.’

‘Where are you going to go?’

‘Caliban, perhaps. An investigative mission has been sent to audit the Great and Fearsome Bestiaries in the bastion libraries. The idea appeals. Or Mars. I have a standing invitation to study at the Symposia Adeptus. Somewhere challenging, somewhere interesting.’

‘This is just an overreaction,’ said Vasiliy. The afternoon sunlight was piercing the mesh shutters of the high-hive dwelling, an academic’s quarters, fully furnished, generous. The items in the room that were actually Hawser’s belongings were few, and he was hurling them into his modular luggage. He packed some clothes, some favourite data-slates and paper books, his Regicide board.

‘The undersecretary’s answer was just flippant,’ said Vasiliy. ‘Trite. He didn’t mean anything by it. It was a politician’s nonsense, and I’m sure he’ll take it back on reflection.’

‘He said it didn’t matter,’ said Hawser. He stopped what he was doing and looked at his mediary for a moment. He was holding a small toy horse made of wood, deciding whether to pack it or not. He’d owned it for a long time.

‘He said it didn’t matter, Vasiliy. The causes of the Age of Strife were of no consequence to this new golden age. I have never heard such folly!’

‘It was certainly hubristic,’ said Vasiliy.

Hawser let a thin smile cross his lips. His leg ached, as it always did in times of stress. He put the wooden horse back on a side shelf. He didn’t need it.

‘I’m going,’ he said. ‘It’s been too long since I did any field work, far too long. I’m sick to the eye teeth of this bean-counting and political fancywork. I’m not made for it. There is no part of me that ever wanted to be a bureaucrat – you understand that, Vasiliy? No part. It disagrees with me. I need to work in a marked trench, or a library, with a trowel or a notebook or a picter. I’ll only be gone a short while. A few years at most. Enough time to clear my head and refresh my perspective.’

Vasiliy shook his head.

‘I know I’m not going to talk you out of this,’ he said. ‘I know that look, the one you’ve got in your eye. It says stay away from the crazy man.’

Hawser smiled.

‘There, you see? You know the omens to look for. You’ve been warned.’

The Quietude’s home world, that neon orange ball, was actually skinned with ice in the parts that mattered. The Quietude, it appeared, had artificially extended its icecaps like an armoured sheath.

A message was sent to Ogvai asking for further expertise.

‘We’re going to the surface,’ Fith Godsmote said to Hawser. ‘You’ll come. Make an account.’

It almost sounded like a question, but it was really a statement of the imminent.

Stormbirds had been brought into the graving dock’s extravagant facilities. As the men of Tra readied their weapons and kit, and lined up to board, Hawser saw that some of them were engaged in half-joking arguments.

‘What’s going on?’ he asked Godsmote.

‘They are debating which bird you should ride on,’ said Godsmote. ‘When you came to Fenris, you were a bad star and you fell out of the sky. No one wants to ride down the sky with a bad star.’

‘I can imagine,’ said Hawser.

He looked at the Astartes, and called out, ‘Which craft is Bear travelling on?’

Some of the men pointed.

‘That one, then,’ said Hawser, walking towards the vehicle. ‘Bear won’t let me fall out of the sky twice.’

The men of Tra laughed, all except Bear. The laughter was edged with wet leopard-growls.

Hawser had to wear a plastek rebreather over his nose and mouth, because there was something in the atmosphere that didn’t agree with standard human biology. The Astartes had no need of support. Many went bare-headed.

The view was extraordinary. The sky, only faintly bruised by vapour, was an oceanic amber canopy that had such bright clarity it looked like blown glass. Everything had a slightly yellow cast to it, an orange tinge. It reminded Hawser of something, and it took him a little while to pull up the memory.

When he finally did, it was surprisingly sharp. Ossetia, a few days before his fortieth birthday; Captain Vasiliy sniggering as she allowed him to try on her heavyweight headgear, him blinking as he peered out through the giant slide-visor at a world tinted orange.

Then he heard, in his head, the March of Unity being played on an old clavier, and tried to think about something else.

They had set down on a great ice field. Under the orange sky, the landscape was flat but dimpled, like a textured flooring fabricated and rolled out from a machine. It was ice, though. The dimples were where small liquid ripples had flash-frozen, and punch samples had been taken by the engineer corps of the advancing Imperial Army brigades. The chemical composition matched those derived from orbital scanning. Stupendous towers the size of hive city spire caps, but of a design ethic that matched the graving dock far above, protruded from the ice field at regular intervals of approximately six hundred and seventy kilometres like cloves studding a pomander.

Almost the first thing the Wolf beside Hawser said was, ‘There’s no hunting here.’

He meant the ice was sterile. Hawser could sense it too. This was not the absolute white wilderness of Asaheim. This was an engineered landscape. The towers were generators, in his estimation. In the face of a massive extraplanetary invasion, the Olamic Quietude had used its appreciable technology to extend its natural icecaps to form shields. The thickness and composition were such that great parts of the orbital bombardment had been reflected or resisted.

There were cities under the ice where the Quietude was preparing its counter-attack.

The Imperial Army had targeted some of the towers, and were attacking them in vast numbers. Hawser saw tides of men and armoured fighting machines washing in across the ice towards one, pouring in across pylon bridges and support struts. Mass gunfire had stippled the ice field, and the crust around the tower’s structure was beginning to melt, suggesting that damage had been done to parts of its mechanism.

There were fires burning everywhere. Thousands of threads of dirty smoke rose into the ochre sky across the giant vista, each one spewing from a destroyed machine, just dots on the ice in the general mass of attackers. It was a scale that he could not really comprehend, like the scenic backdrop of some painting of a general or warmaster with a raised sword and his boot on a fallen helm. Hawser had always presumed the apocalyptic battle scenes rendered behind them were somewhat over-enthusiastic and largely intended to fluff the sitter’s importance.

But this was bigger than anything he had ever seen: a battlefield the size of a continent, an armed host that numbered millions, and that host only one of hundreds of thousands that the Imperium had birthed upon the awakening cosmos. In one repellant moment, he saw the contradictory scales of mankind: the giant stature that allowed the species pre-eminence in the galaxy, and the individual stature of a great-coated trooper, one of scores, falling and lost under the charging boots of his comrades as they stormed the alien gates.

Quietude defences lashed the advancing lines with withering disdain. Along the leading edge of the attack, the air seemed to distort as the Quietude’s weapon effects impacted and mangled armour, ice and human bodies. High on the ominous tower, massive lamp-like turrets rotated slowly and projected down beams of annihilating energy, washing them slowly as they turned like the beacons of fatal lighthouses. The beams left black, steaming, sticky scars gouged through the densely packed hosts of advancing Imperials.

Super-heavy tanks in deep formation braced for ice-firing and began to devastate the lower flanks of the tower. Parts of it blew out, ejecting huge sprays of debris. The explosions looked small from a distance, and the clouds of debris little more than exhalations of dust, but Hawser knew it was simply scale at work again. The tower was immense. The cloudbursts of debris were akin to those that might rain down after the destruction of a city block.

As he watched, a whole bridge section collapsed, spilling Imperial soldiers into the gulf between the tower and the ice shelf it was plugging. Hundreds of soldiers fell, tumbling, tiny, the sunlight catching braid and armour. Several armoured vehicles plunged with them, sliding off the bridge section as it caved, tracks snapping and lashing. They had been assaulting one of the main exterior gates, which had remained shut and unyielding throughout. Another bridge section collapsed about five minutes later when one of the tower’s subturrets succumbed to bombardment from the superheavy tanks and slumped like a landslip, its form unforming, its structure blurring, its weight ripping down off the face of the main tower and exploding the massive bridge into the gulf.

How many thousand Imperial lives went in that second, Hawser wondered? In that flash? In that senseless roar?

What am I doing here?

‘Come on. You, skjald, come on.’

He turned from his ringside view of armageddon and saw the flame-lit face of Bear. There was no smile or expression of regard to be found there. Hawser had learned this to be a character mark of the sullen Wolf. He presumed that Bear was particularly sullen with him because he, a human, had caused Bear, an Astartes, embarrassing problems in the eyes of his company, and the Vlka Fenryka as a whole.

‘Where?’ Hawser asked.

Bear bristled slightly.

‘Where I tell you,’ he said. He turned, and tilted his head to indicate that Hawser should follow.

They left the powdery, yellow lip of an ice ridge where most of Tra had settled to observe the assault. Behind them, an expanding column of thick cream dust was slowly filling the amber sky. It was emerging from the tumult surrounding the tower assault, climbing into the sky like a stained glacier, ponderous and threatening. The upper parts, where it broadened, were already seventy kilometres across, and the formations of Army gunships and ground-attack craft lining up on the tower were having to fly instruments-only as they penetrated the sulphurous pall.

Hawser followed Bear up the slope. The fine yellow powder-ice was adhering to the Wolf’s dark, almost matt-grey armour. Sometimes Hawser stumbled or slipped a little as the soft slope trickled or subsided under him, but every single step Bear took was sure: deep strides, planting his massive, armour-shod feet, not once having to steady himself with a hand. He began to leave Hawser behind.

Hawser fixated on the black leather braids and runic totems tied to the Wolf’s belt and carapace, imagined himself grabbing hold of them and clinging on, and tried to catch up.

They wound up the cliff slope, through groups of lounging Wolves, past the brooding Terminator monsters, their gross armour burnished and glinting in the sun, past teams of thralls making adjustments and spot repairs to seams and joints as their masters waited impatiently to go back and view the battle. The Terminators were as immobile and sinister as cast bronze sculptures, all arranged to face the nearby conflagration.

Away from the unmarked but defined perimeter of Tra’s vantage point, the rear echelon and supply encampments of the Imperial Army group were spread out like a souk. There was a dead space, a fringe of about two kilometres, between Tra’s position and the closest Army post, indicating the intense reluctance of any soldier, officer or even mediary of the Imperial Army to come within sight of a Fenrisian Wolf.

If only they knew, Hawser thought. There are no wolves on Fenris.

‘Keep up!’ Bear said, turning to glance back. Now at last there was an expression on his face. It was annoyance. His black hair made a ragged curtain that threw his eyes into shadow and made them shine with nocturnal malevolence.

Hawser was dripping with sweat under his bodysuit and the pelt draped over his shoulders. He was out of breath, and the sun was burning his neck.

‘I’m coming,’ he said. He wiped perspiration off his face, and took a long suck from the water-straw that fed into his rebreather mask. He stopped deliberately to catch his breath. He was interested to see how far he could push Bear. He was interested to see what Bear would do.

He hoped it wouldn’t be hit him.

Bear watched. He’d braided his jet-black hair around his brow and temples before the attack on the graving dock to afford and cushion the fit of his Mark-IV helm. One of the braids had worked loose, and was causing the curtain across his eyes. Bear began to plait it back into place, waiting for Hawser.

Hawser took another deep breath, flexed his neck in the prickling heat, and caught up.

They entered the Army encampment. It had only been there a few hours, but it was already the size of a large colony town. Arvus- and Aves-pattern transatmospheric lifters were still coming in and out to make drops in a haze of ice vapour on the far edge. The vapour was catching the sun and creating partial rainbows. The encampment, a patchwork of prefab tents and enviro-modules mixed with pods, containers, payload crates and vehicles: some beige, some gold, some khaki, some russet, some grey, looked to Hawser like a patch of mould or lichen, spreading out across the clean surface of the ice field. When he mentioned it later, this description also won him some approval from the Wolves.

No one challenged their entry into the encampment. Around the edges of the mobile base were pickets of Savarene Harriers with their shakos and gold-topped staves, and G9K Division Kill eliters wearing long dusters over semi-powered combat suits. Not a single gun twitched in their direction. As the Wolf approached with the human bumbling along behind him, the soldiers found other, far more important things to look at. In the ‘streets’ of the tent town, the bustling military personnel gave them a wide berth.

It was like a souk, a busy market, except all the traders were provisioners of military service and all the produce was munitions and materiel.

‘Where are we going?’ Hawser asked.

Bear didn’t reply. He just kept striding on through the camp.

‘Hey!’ Hawser shouted, and ran to catch up. He reached out, and pulled at the thick, blunt edge of Bear’s left armour cuff. The ceramite was numbingly cold.

Bear stopped, and very slowly turned. He looked at Hawser. Then he looked down at the vulnerable human hand touching his arm.

‘That was a bad idea, wasn’t it?’ said Hawser, removing his hand warily.

‘Why don’t you like me?’ he asked.

Bear turned away and started walking again.

‘I have no opinion either way,’ said Bear. ‘But I do not think you should be here.’

‘Here?’

‘With the Rout.’

Bear stopped again and looked back at him.

‘Why did you come to Fenris?’ he asked.

‘That’s a good question,’ said Hawser.

‘What’s the answer?’

Hawser shrugged.

Bear turned and started walking again.

‘The jarl wants you to see something,’ he said.

Close to the centre of the vast encampment, which was feeling more and more like a carnival ground to Hawser, a large command shelter had been erected. There were tented shades overhead to screen off the harshest of the ice desert’s hard sunlight, and walls of reinforced shockboarding to baffle any stray or lucky munition strike. Nearby, a crew of polished silver servitors laboured to install and activate a portable void shield generator that would, by nightfall, be protecting the high-value section of the encampment under a fizzling blue parasol. The tent shades and shockboarding distorted the travelling roar of the conflict on the other side of the ridge, and somehow made it louder and more intrusive than it had been on the slope where the Wolves had gathered.

A crowd of perhaps two hundred had gathered under the central awning. They were surrounding a mobile strategium desk, the top of which was alight with active and moving hololithic displays.

The crowd, all Imperial Army officers, parted to let Hawser and his towering Astartes escort through. As he stepped up on to the self-levelling interlock staging, Hawser felt a pop in his ears and a chill on his face that announced he had just entered an artificial environment bubble. He unclasped his rebreather, and let the mask dangle around his neck. He smelled clean air, and the body sweat of hot, agitated, tired men.

Ogvai was at the centre of the crowd beside the strategium desk. He was not escorted by any of Tra, and he had removed his helm and some of the significant parts of his arm, shoulder and torso plating. Hugely armoured from the gut down, he stood with his long, white arms emerging from the rubberised black of his sleeveless underlayer with its feeder pipes and heat soaks like necrotised capillaries, and his long, black centre-parted hair, resembling a wager-bout pit fighter ringed by an audience at a country fair.

As a child at the commune, Hawser had seen men of that kind many times. Rector Uwe had sometimes taken the children to the festivals at the work camps of Ur where, in sight of the slowly forming, monolithic plan of the city-dream, the labour force would halt to celebrate the periodic feasts of Cathermas, Radmastide and the Divine Architect, as well as the observances of the builder-lodges. These holidays were basically excuses for spirited fairs and jubilees. Some of the larger labourers would strip to the waist and invite all-comers to bouts of sparring for beer, coins and the crowd’s entertainment. They would tower head and shoulders above the onlookers too.

Except here, the onlookers were Army service personnel, many of them large and imposing men. Ogvai was a raw-boned monster in their midst. With his skin so white, he looked like he was carved out of ice and immune to the merciless heat, where they were all ruddy and sweating. The fat silver piercing in his lower lip made him look like he was taunting them all.

Why has he stripped back his armour, Hawser wondered? He looks… informal. Why does he want me here?

Bear stopped at the edge of the ring of onlookers with Hawser beside him. Ogvai saw them. He was in discussion with three senior Army officers around the desk. He leaned forwards, resting his palms on the edge of the desk and his weight straight-armed on his hands. It was casual and rather scornful. The officers looked uncomfortable. One was a field marshal of the Outremars, obediently holding up the holographic visage of his telepresent khedive master like a waiter holding a grox’s head on a platter. Beside him was a thick-set, choleric G9K Division Kill combat master in a flak coat and a quilted tank driver’s cap. The third was a freckled, pale-blond man in the austere uniform of the Jaggedpanzor Regiments. It was curious to hear Ogvai speaking in Low Gothic: curious to know that he could, curious to hear his jaw and dentition manage the brittle human noises.

‘We are wasting time,’ he was saying. ‘This assault is not punching hard enough.’

The hololithic image of the Outremar khedive squealed in outrage, a sound distorted by the digital relay.

‘That is a frank and open insult to the architects of this planetary attack,’ the image declared. ‘You exceed yourself, jarl.’

‘I do not,’ Ogvai corrected pleasantly.

‘Your comment was certainly critical of the competency of this assault,’ said the Jaggedpanzor officer, in a tone rather more conciliatory than the one the khedive had adopted, probably because he was actually standing in Ogvai’s presence.

‘It was,’ Ogvai agreed.

‘This is not “punching hard” enough for you?’ asked the G9K commander, making a general gesture at the display in front of them.

‘No,’ said Ogvai. ‘It’s all very well as mass surface drops go. I guess one of you planned it?’

‘I had the honour of rationalising the invasion scheme on behalf of the Expedition Commander,’ said the khedive.

Ogvai nodded. He looked at the Jaggedpanzor officer.

‘Can you kill a man with a rifle?’ he asked.

‘Of course,’ said the man.

‘Can you kill a man with a spade?’ Ogvai asked.

The man frowned.

‘Yes,’ he replied.

Ogvai looked at the G9K man.

‘You. Can you dig a hole with a spade?’

‘Of course!’ the man answered.

‘Can you dig a hole with a rifle?’

The man didn’t reply.

‘You’ve got to use the right tool for the right job,’ said Ogvai. ‘You’ve got a big, well-supported army, and a world to take. It doesn’t automatically follow that throwing the former at the latter will get you what you want.’

Ogvai looked over at Bear.

‘Like you wouldn’t try to hunt an urdarkottur with an axe, eh, Bear?’

Bear laughed a wet leopard-growl.

‘Hjolda, no! You’d need a long-tooth spear to get through the fur.’

Ogvai looked at the Army commanders.

‘The right tool for the job, see?’

‘And are you the right tool?’ the khedive asked.

Hawser heard the Jaggedpanzor officer gasp and recoil slightly.

‘Don’t push it,’ Ogvai said to the hologram. ‘I’m trying to help you save a little face here. It’s you the fleet commander is going to drag over the coals if this situation doesn’t start to improve.’

‘We are very grateful for any advice the Astartes can offer,’ the field marshal carrying the hololithic plate suddenly said, holding the platter to one side in case his distant, holoform-represented master said anything else provocative.

‘That’s why we sent the request to you,’ said the G9K man.

Ogvai nodded.

‘Well, we all serve the great Emperor of Terra, don’t we?’ he said, flashing a smile that showed teeth. ‘We all fight on the same side for the same goals. He made the Wolves of Fenris to break the foes that couldn’t otherwise be broken, so you don’t have to ask twice, or even that politely.’

Ogvai looked at the projected, slightly shimmering face of the khedive.

‘Though a little basic respect is always good,’ he said. ‘I want to be clear, mind. If you want us to do this, don’t get in the way. Go back to your superiors and make sure they send official communiqués to the Commander of the Expedition Fleet that my Astartes have been given theatre control to end this war. I’m not moving until I get that confirmed.’

Why did he want me to see that, Hawser wondered? Does he want me to be impressed? Is that it? He wants me to see him intimidate and bully senior and serious Crusade commanders. And he wants them to see he can do it stripped to the waist like he’s relaxing.

The meeting began to disperse. Ogvai wandered towards Bear and Hawser.

‘You see?’ he asked, in Juvjk.

‘See what?’ Hawser replied.

‘What I brought you here to see,’ snapped Bear.

‘That everyone fears you?’ asked Hawser.

Ogvai grinned.

‘That, yes. But also that I abide by the codes of war. We abide by the codes of war. The Vlka Fenryka abide by the codes of rule.’

‘Why is it important to you that I understand that?’

‘The Sixth Legion Astartes has a reputation,’ said Bear.

‘All the Legions Astartes have reputations,’ replied Hawser.

‘Not like ours,’ said Ogvai. ‘We are known for our ferocity. We are thought to be feral and undisciplined. Even brother Legions consider us to be wild and bestial.’

‘And you’re not?’ asked Hawser.

‘If we need to be,’ said Ogvai. ‘But if that was our natural state, we’d all be dead by now.’

He leaned down towards Hawser like a parent addressing a child.

‘It takes a vast amount of self-control to be this dangerous,’ he said.

Hawser requested permission to stay in the Army encampment for an hour or two more, until it was time to depart. Ogvai had already wandered off. Bear gave Hawser a small homer wand and told him to return to the dropsite the moment it chimed.

It had been a long time since Hawser had been around regular humans, a lifetime in which he had been reborn as something that was not entirely human any more. After waking, he’d lived in the fastness of the Fang with the Rout for the best part of a great year, acclimatising, learning their customs, learning their stories, learning his way around the gloomy vaults of the Aett.

In all that time, three things had been kept from him. The first was the person of the Wolf King. Hawser didn’t even know if the Sixth primarch was actually on Fenris during that period. He doubted it. The Wolf King was more likely upp, leading companies in the service of the Emperor. Hawser reconciled himself to the fact that Skarssen and Ogvai would be the most senior Wolves he would have access to.

The second thing was a secret, something about Hawser himself. It was hard to say how Hawser knew this, but he did. It was a gut response, an instinct. Wolves often described to him particular moments in combat in such terms: visceral stimuli felt in their living bowels that made the split-second difference between living and dying. They always sounded proud of being sensitive to them. Hawser flattered himself that his immersion in their society was teaching him to recognise the same trick.

If it was, then it was telling him something. The Astartes and their thralls were withholding some details from him, one thing in particular. It was an intensely subtle thing. There were no crass signs like conversations abruptly halting when he entered rooms, or sentences suddenly trailing off when the speaker thought better of them.

The third thing was Imperial human company.

Towards the end of his first great year, Dekk Company returned to the Aett from a long tour of service in the Second Kobolt War, and Tra found itself rotated into the line, with instructions to shadow and support the 40th Expedition Fleet in the Gogmagog Cluster.

There never seemed any question that Hawser, as skjald, would go with them. He was part of their portage, part of company support, along with the thralls, the armourers, the pilots, the servitors, the musicians, the victuallers and the butchers.

They embarked onto Nidhoggur, one of the grim, comfortless warships that served the Sixth Legion, and made the translation to the immaterium with a flotilla of service tenders in support. Nine weeks later, at a mandeville point shy of Gogmagog Beta, they retranslated and made contact with the 40th Expedition Fleet, which was, by then, pressing fruitlessly into Olamic Quietude territory.

‘What sort of thing are you?’

Hawser looked up from the strategium desk and found he was being addressed by the G9K Division Kill combat master who had been in conference with Ogvai.

‘Do you have clearance to be here?’ the man asked, clearly emboldened now that the brute Astartes had gone.

‘You know I do,’ Hawser replied with a confidence that surprised even him. The man was prepared to argue the toss, so Hawser brushed back his hair, which had grown long during the great year spent at the Aett, and properly revealed his gold and black-pinned eye.

‘I am a watcher, chosen by the favour of the Sixth Legion Astartes,’ said Hawser.

The combat master’s expression registered distaste.

‘But you’re human?’

‘Generally speaking.’

‘How can you live with those beasts?’

‘Well, I watch my tongue, for a start. What’s your name?’

‘Pawel Korine, combat master first class.’

‘I get the distinct impression that no one here is comfortable having the Wolves as allies.’

Korine studied Hawser uncertainly.

‘I’ll watch my tongue, I think,’ he said. ‘I don’t want them looking at me through your eyes and deciding I need to be taught a lesson in obedience.’

‘It doesn’t work like that,’ Hawser smiled. ‘I can be discreet and selective. I’d like to know what you think.’

‘So you’re some kind of… what? Chronicler? Remembrancer?’

‘Something like that,’ said Hawser. ‘I make accounts.’

Korine sighed. He was a heavy-set man with Prussian ethnic traits, and he carried himself with the manner of a career soldier. G9K had a considerable reputation as a front-line force. It famously maintained an archaic performance-based pay and advancement model that was said to have its origins in the prediluvian traditions of mercantile-sponsored mercenaries. For Korine to have achieved the post of combat master first class, he had certainly seen some considerable active service.

‘Tell me what you meant,’ said Hawser.

Korine shrugged.

‘I’ve witnessed plenty,’ he said. ‘I know, I know, that old soldier routine. But trust me. Thirty-seven years non-adjusted, that’s what I’ve spent in this Crusade. Thirty-seven years, eight campaigns. I know what ugly looks like. I’ve seen Astartes fight four times. Every time, it’s scared me.’

‘They’re designed to be scary. They wouldn’t be effective if they weren’t.’

Korine didn’t look especially convinced.

‘Well, that’s a whole different issue,’ he replied. ‘I say if man’s going to take back this great Imperium, he ought to do it by the sweat of his brow and the strength of his arm, and not build damned supermen to do the work for him.’

‘I’ve heard that line of argument before. It has some merit. But we couldn’t even unify Terra without the Astartes to–’

‘Yes, yes. And what will we do when the work is done?’ Korine asked. ‘When the Crusade is over, what will we do with the almighty Space Marines? What do you do with something that can only ever be a weapon when the war is over?’

‘Maybe there will always be war,’ said Hawser.

Korine crinkled his thin lips distastefully.

‘Then we really are all wasting our lives,’ he replied.

His wrist-mounted communicator, thickly cushioned in black rubber, beeped, and he checked the display.

‘Six hour evacuation has just been posted,’ said Korine. ‘I have to see what’s going on. You can walk with me if you wish.’

They went out, back into the open and the roasting sunlight. Hawser felt the artificial atmosphere sleeve pop around him and replaced his rebreather. Activity levels in the camp had risen. Out in the rainbowed band of vapour beyond the camp edge, lifter craft were queuing out across the ice desert in a wavering, hovering line as they waited their turn to swing in and load up. The distant ones crinkled in an eerie heat-haze.

‘You don’t approve of Astartes then, combat master?’ Hawser asked as they strode through the camp.

‘Not at all. Extraordinary things. Like I said, I’ve seen them fight four times.’

They entered the combat master’s command post, a large enviro-tent where dozens of G9K officers and technicians were already dismantling the site for withdrawal. Korine went to a small desk and began to sort through his personal equipment.

‘The Death Guard, once,’ he said, holding up a finger to begin a tally. ‘Murderous efficiency with such small numbers. Blood Angels.’ Another raised finger. ‘A firefight gone bad in a casein works on one of the Fraemium moons. They arrived like… like angels. I don’t mean to be glib. They saved us. It was like they were coming to save our souls.’

Korine looked at Hawser. He raised a third finger.

‘White Scars, side by side, for six months on the plains of X173 Plural, hosing xeno-forms. Total focus and dedication, merciless. I cannot, hand on my heart, fault their duty, devotion to the Crusade cause, or their supreme effort as warriors.’

‘You said four times,’ Hawser pressed.

‘I did,’ said Korine. He raised a fourth finger in a gesture that reminded Hawser of surrender.

‘The Space Wolves, two years ago non-adjusted. Dekk Company, they called themselves. They came in to support our actions during the Kobolt scrap. I’d heard stories. We’d all heard stories.’

‘What kind of stories?’

‘That there are Space Marines and there are Space Marines. That there are supermen and there are monsters. That in order to breed the Astartes perfection, the Emperor Who Guides Us All has gone too far once or twice, and made things he should not have made. Things that should have been stillborn or drowned in a sack.’

‘Feral things?’ asked Hawser.

‘The worst of them all are the Space Wolves,’ replied Korine. ‘They were animals, Great Terra, they were animals those things that fought with us. When you have sympathy with the enemy, you know you have the wrong kind of allies. They killed everything, and destroyed everything and, worst of all, they took great relish in the apocalypse they had brought down upon their foe. There was nothing admirable about them, nothing rousing. They just left a sick taste in the mouth as if, by calling on their help, we had somehow demeaned ourselves in an effort to win.’

Korine paused and turned to hand out instructions to some of his men. They were obedient, well-drilled, attentive. Hawser could see that Korine was a soldier who expected an army to be supremely disciplined in order to function. One of his men, a burly second-classer with a chinstrap beard, brought a data-slate over for Korine’s review. He glared belligerently at Hawser.

Korine handed the data-slate back to his officer.

‘Full withdrawal from the surface,’ he said. He sounded broken. ‘All forces. We’re to stand down and get clear so the Wolves can take it on alone. Shit. This assault has cost us thousands of men, and we’re just scrapping it.’

‘Better that than thousands more.’

Korine sat down, opened a haversack, and pulled out a slightly battered metal flask. He poured a generous measure into the cap and passed it to Hawser, and then took a swig from the flask.

‘When the 40th discovered that the Wolves were the only Astartes in range who could help us tackle the Quietude, we almost cancelled the request. I heard that as a fact from one of the senior men close to the fleet commander. It was a genuine consideration that we didn’t want to involve ourselves with the Wolves again.’

‘You’d rather face defeat?’

‘It’s about ends, and the means that get you there,’ Korine replied. ‘It’s about contemplating the question, what are the Wolves for? Why did the Emperor make them like that? What purpose could he possibly have for something so inhuman?’

‘Do you have answers to any of those questions, Combat Master Korine?’ asked Hawser.

‘Either the Emperor is not as perfect an architect of this new age as we like to suppose, and he is capable of manufacturing nightmares, or he has anticipated threats we can’t possibly imagine.’

‘Which would you prefer?’

‘Neither notion fills me with great confidence about the future,’ replied Korine. ‘Do you have an answer, as you keep their company?’

‘I don’t, said Hawser. He’d finished his drink, and Korine refilled the cap. It was a strong spirit, an amasec or a schnapps, and there was a flush on Korine’s cheeks, but Hawser felt nothing except the slightest burn in his throat. Life on Fenris had evidently bred a stronger constitution into him.

‘The things we fought in Kobolt space,’ said Korine quietly, ‘they were lethal and proud. They had no interest in human ways or human business, and they were quite capable of fighting us to a standstill. They had mighty vessels, like cities. I saw one of them. I was part of an assault against it. Someone called it Scintilla City because it sparkled like it was all made of glass. We later found out it was called Thuyelsa in their language, and it was a structure they called a craftworld. Anyway, we never worked out why they were fighting us or what they were trying to defend, except perhaps that they were trying to keep us at bay, or keep for themselves whatever it was they had, but you knew, you just knew inside yourself they had something worth defending. A legacy, a history, a culture. And it was all lost.’

Korine looked down into his flask, as if some truth might lurk inside in the dark. Hawser suspected he might have been looking in that very same place for an answer for quite some time.

‘At the end,’ Korine said, ‘they began to plead. The Wolves were upon them, and the city-vessel was shattering around them, and they realised that they were going to lose everything. They began to plead for terms, as if anything was better than losing everything. We never really understood what they were trying to tell us, or what kind of surrender they were trying to make. I personally believe that they would have given all of their lives if Scintilla City had been allowed to survive. But it was too late. The Wolves couldn’t be called off. They sacked it. The Wolves destroyed it all. There wasn’t even anything left for us to salvage, no treasure for us to plunder, nothing of value to claim as a prize. The Wolves destroyed it all.’

Korine fell silent.

The homer wand Bear had given to Hawser gave out a little beep.

Hawser set the cap down and nodded to the combat master.

‘Thank you for the drink and the conversation.’

Korine shrugged.

‘I think perhaps you malign the Wolves a little,’ Hawser added. ‘It may be that they are misunderstood.’

Korine made a sound, possibly a laugh.

‘Isn’t that what all monsters say?’ he asked.

Hawser left the G9K enviro-tent. All around him, personnel were busy dismantling the encampment for surface departure.

He stood for a moment, consulting the homer’s direction indicator. Behind his back, someone cursed him.

He swung around.

Korine’s second-classer, the man with the chinstrap, and several other G9Kers were loading impact-resistant crates onto a flatbed truck.

‘Did you speak to me?’ Hawser asked.

Chinstrap’s glare was toxic. He set down the crate-end he had been lifting, and walked towards Hawser. His men looked on.

‘Sack of shit animal,’ Chinstrap hissed.

‘What?’

‘Go back to the filth you run with. You should be ashamed. They’re not human. They’re animals!’

Hawser turned aside. The man was big and aggressive, and he was evidently upset. It was the sort of confrontation Hawser had sought to avoid for most of his life.

Chinstrap grabbed Hawser’s right arm. The grip was painful.

‘You tell them that,’ he said. ‘Seventeen hundred men Division Kill’s lost in one day of surface assault, and now those stupid animals tell us to piss off? Seventeen hundred lives wasted?’

‘You’re clearly upset,’ said Hawser. ‘This has been a costly engagement, and I am sympathetic to–’

‘Screw you.’

The other men, the members of Chinstrap’s loading team, had closed in.

‘Let go of my arm,’ said Hawser.

‘Or what?’ Chinstrap asked.

‘Run!’ Murza told him.

Murza was usually right about these things. It wasn’t that Murza was a coward, Hawser supposed, it was simply because he was far more the rationalist. After all, neither of them were fighters. They were academics, field archaeologists, average men with above average minds. Neither of them had any military schooling and neither had been on any kind of self-defence training programme. They were armed only with their wits and their accreditation papers, which stated their names, the fact that they had both recently celebrated their thirtieth birthdays, and their status as conservators working in Lutetia for the Unification Council.

None of which was going to do them very much good.

‘They can’t be allowed to get away with this–’ Hawser began.

‘Oh, just run you idiot!’ Murza shouted back.

The other members of the placement team were already running, no further encouragement needed. Their boots were clattering down the cobbled back alley as they scattered into the warren of unmapped streets criss-crossing the slum quarters of Lutetia around the dead cathedral.

The cathedral was just a giant corpse-building. It had died as a place of worship during the Nineteenth War of Uropan Succession three thousand years earlier, and since then its structure had been put to other uses: a parliament hall for three centuries, a mausoleum, an iceworks, an almshouse, and, latterly, a market when the last of the roof fell in. For the last eight hundred or so years, it had been an empty husk, a physicalised memory, lifting its rusting iron ribs at the overcast sky.

The rumours of its past had persisted as long as those ribs, if not longer. Murza had not been able to keep the excitement out of his voice when he’d briefed the team two days before. The site had been a place of worship for as long as records existed, and the cathedral stood upon the plot of previous structures called cathedrals, and was indeed only called a cathedral because of that masonic legacy.

There were cellars down there, deep under the foundations, the basements of previous incarnations, cisterns buried under the sub-fabric of later builds. Some said if you could trace your way down through the dark, you’d reach the centre of the Earth, and the catacombs of old Franc.

One of Murza’s contacts (and he, as usual, had a network of well paid informers watching the traffic of artefacts and relics throughout the entire Lutetian city-node area) had reported that a gang of labourers had excavated the entrance to a drainage sump while reclaiming old stone. Some silver amulets and a ring scooped from the sump had been enough to convince the contact that the area was worth a look, and worth the fee that the conservators would have to pay the gang to reveal the precise location.

Hawser had been mistrustful from the start. The labourers, all local, were big men caked in black mud from street work. All of them showed signs of atomic mutation, a trait common in the slum. Hawser immediately felt threatened by them, physically intimidated, the way he had been by the bigger, older boys back at Rector Uwe’s commune. He was no fighter. Confrontation, especially physical confrontation, made him lock up and freeze.

The slum district was a maze. Nothing identifiable remained of the planned city that had once occupied the area. The streets had corroded into sub-streets and under-runs, alleys and cul-de-sacs, all of them dark and thick with filth, none of them charted or named. Children played in the piles of trash, and the sounds of wailing babies and arguing adults echoed down from the tenement levels rising above them. Washing lines were strung from building to building, like the canopy of a dingy, man-made jungle. It was shadowy and airless.

The labourers led them into the alley maze. It seemed an unnecessarily circuitous route to Hawser, and he said so to Murza, who told him to hush. After walking for about twenty minutes, the labourers turned and told Murza it was time to pay them the agreed fee.

The leader of the gang happened to add that what he meant by the agreed fee was significantly higher than anything Murza had discussed with the team.

Hawser realised they were in trouble. He realised it was all simply a trap designed to extort, and that its most likely consequences would be a beating or a kidnapping. It was going to cost the Conservatory programme: it was going to cost them in medical fees, or ransom or simply excess pay-offs. It might even cost them lives. He felt outrage. He felt stupid that he’d allowed Murza to walk them into another less than brilliant situation.

‘This is no time to feel choleric!’ Murza shouted. The gang was closing in on them, surly, barking threats. Some had shovels or picks.

‘Run!’ Murza yelled.

Hawser recognised that running was the only sensible course of action, but the physical threat had finally eclipsed his outrage, and intimidation had glued him to the spot. One of the labourers stepped towards him, spitting curses through buckled brown teeth, shaking a fist with kielbasa knuckles. Hawser tried to force his feet to work.

Murza grabbed his arm so hard it hurt and yanked him backwards.

‘Come on! Come on, Kas!’

Hawser started to stumble, his legs beginning to move. The labourer was reaching for them. Hawser realised the labourer had drawn a gun, some kind of pistol.

Dragging Hawser after him, Murza looked over his shoulder and yelled something at the labourer, a single word or sound. There was an odd pulse, a pop like the equalisation of air at the skin of an environment bubble. The labourer yelled and fell backwards, writhing.

They ran, side by side, Murza still gripping his arm.

‘What did you do?’ Hawser yelled. ‘What did you do? What did you say to him?’

Murza couldn’t answer. There was blood drooling from his mouth.

Chinstrap’s fingers dug into his arm like hooks. Scared, Hawser shoved. He just shoved to lurch the man away, so he could walk on, get past them, leave them behind.

Chinstrap hit the side of the pile of rubber-sleeved crates on the back of the track. He was airborne and travelling backwards. His spine and shoulders took the first impact, and his skull cracked back across the top of the uppermost crate. Then he plunged forwards and hit the ground flat on his face, loose as a sack of stones. His face just slapped into the gritty ice, shattering his plastek rebreather.

While Chinstrap was still in the air, one of his men swung a punch at the back of Hawser’s head. The punch seemed to Hawser to be ridiculously telegraphed, as if the man was trying to be sporting and give him a chance. He put his hand up to stop the fist from hitting his face and caught it in his palm. There was a little shock. He felt finger bones break and knuckles detonate, and none of them were his.

The third man decided to kill Hawser, and made an effort to insert a heavy, cast iron crate spanner into Hawser’s skull. Once again, however, he appeared to be doing this in a delicate fashion, like an over-emphatic stage punch that goes wide of the mark but looks good from the audience. Hawser didn’t want the spanner to come anywhere near him. He swung out his left hand in an impulsive, flinching gesture to brush the man’s arm away.

The man screamed. He appeared to have developed a second elbow halfway down his forearm. The skin of his arm folded there like an empty sock. He fell over, the spanner bouncing solidly off the ice.

The other men fled.

Bear was waiting for him at the foot of a Stormbird ramp.

‘You’re late,’ he said.

Hawser handed the homer back to him.

‘I’m here now.’

‘We would have left without you if you’d been much longer.’

‘I’m sure you would.’

‘You smell of blood,’ said Bear.

‘Yes, I do,’ said Hawser. He looked at Bear.

‘Why didn’t you tell me how thoroughly you’d rebuilt me?’ he asked.

Seven

Longfang

Jarl Ogvai’s solution to the Quietude’s resistance was as direct as it was effective. Having been granted an unequivocal mandate for theatre control by the commander of the Expedition Fleet, he gathered his iron priests, gave them instruction, and set them to work.

It took them about two days to complete the calculations and the preparation work. By then, the fleet’s massive drop forces had been extracted from the planet’s surface.

At a moment on the third day considered propitious by the jarl’s closest advisors, the iron priests unleashed their handiwork.

A series of colossal controlled explosions tore the graving dock out of its stable orbit. Plumes of shredded, metallic debris streamed out behind it, glittering in the hard sunlight. The dock arced across the vast orange surface of the world, a tiny twin conjoined to it by the ligaments of gravity. They danced together, two encircling objects, like a child’s brightly coloured spinning toy.

It took eighteen full rotations for the murdered orbit to decay to the inevitable, the terminal. The debris plumes had formed fine brown threads around the world by then, like the most delicate of rings around a gas giant. Friction and atmospheric retardation were beginning to burn the graving dock, to ablate its superstructure. It began to glow as it fell, like a metal ingot in a smithy, first dull red, then pink, then white with heat. Its curving descent, the steady unwinding of orbital passage, was tantalisingly slow.

It fell as all bad stars fall. Hawser knew about that. As bad stars went, it was the worst.

It struck the ice field between two of the stupendous towers, the towers that rose at intervals of approximately six hundred and seventy kilometres, and probably had been there for thousands of years. There was, at first, a wink of light, then a rapidly expanding brilliance like a sunburst squirting up through the ice. The brilliance became a dome of blinding radiance that travelled outwards in all directions, vaporising the ice crust and annihilating the towers like trees in a hurricane.

The impact event created a lethal pulse of infrared radiation. Ejecta clogged the air and scarred the atmosphere with a vast darkness of dust and aerosolised sulphuric acid. Incendiary fragments vomited up by the bolide-type impact pelted back down, adding to the firestorm outwash.

Tra had gathered on the embarkation deck of the ship to watch the mortal blow being delivered via pict-feed to several huge repeater screens designed for assault briefings. Thralls and deck crew gathered too. Some still had tools or polishing rags in their hands, or even weapons that they were in the process of repairing or cleaning.

There was general silence as they watched the languid descent, a little muttering, a few murmurs of impatience. When the impact came at last, the Wolves exploded into life. They stamped their armour-shod feet and smashed the hafts of their axes and hammers on the deck; they beat their storm shields with their swords; they threw their heads back and howled.

The noise was numbing. It sent a shock wave through Hawser. All around him, the armoured giants bayed. Exposed throats swelled, mouths opened to what seemed like impossible widths, and spittle flew out between exposed canines and carnassials. The pronounced, ‘snouted’ shape of the Fenrisian physiognomy had never been more obvious to Hawser.

He only truly recognised that later. In the heat of the moment, there on the embarkation deck, all that he was able to register was the shock of the bestial noise. The savagery of the Wolves’ delight assaulted him like a physical trauma. It reached into his chest and squeezed with fingers that were prodigiously clawed. The hooded Fenrisian thralls, and even some of the deck crew, had begun to howl and shout too, shaking their fists. The roaring was tribal and primal.

Just as he began to believe he couldn’t tolerate it for a second more, Hawser tipped his head back, closed his eyes, and began to howl with them.

In the aftermath, a deluge of acid rain began to fall, and the stratosphere began to collapse. Tra’s Stormbirds led the way down into the toxin dust, into the discoloured smoke banks seething with crown-of-thorns lightning.

The dark ships, wings broad, looked to Hawser like their namesakes, circling ravens as black as thunderstorm clouds, as they descended into the broken and exposed heart of the ancient Quietude cities.

He said this to the Wolves, and they asked him what ‘ravens’ were.

The pacification took three weeks, ship time. Time to learn things, Hawser decided. Some of the things would be about himself.

Accounts were already accumulating. Some were brought back from the sub-surface fighting by packs returning for replevin, others relayed by the members of packs waiting in reserve, stories that had filtered up from the planet through the links.

Some were worthy accounts of actions. Others seemed to Hawser to display, already, the hallmarks of the embroidered, the enhanced. Mjod stories, Aeska Brokenlip had called these, accounts exaggerated by the strength of the Fenrisians’ lethal fuel.

Yet it didn’t seem likely they were mjod stories, because Aeska had also made it clear that no self-respecting member of the Rout, and certainly no man of Tra, would ever be boastful. The braggart was one of the lowest forms of life, according to the traditions of the Vlka Fenryka. A warrior’s stories were the measure of him, and the truth of them was the measure of his standing. A battlefield quickly exposed the braggart’s lies: it tested his strength, his courage, his technical prowess.

And, Aeska had added, that was another reason why skjalds existed. They were brokers of truth, neutral mediators who would not let any fluctuations like pride or bias or mjod affect the agreed value of truth.

‘So skjalds tell accounts to keep you entertained, to keep you honest, and to keep the history?’ Hawser asked.

Aeska grinned.

‘Yes, but mostly to keep us entertained.’

‘What entertains the Wolves of Fenris?’ Hawser pressed. ‘What entertains them most?’

Aeska thought about it.

‘We like stories about things that scare us,’ he replied.

Apart from the stories that appeared to be exaggerations, there were others that puzzled Hawser.

According to the general picture, the battle far below was apocalyptic. With the ice-shield gone, the core cities of the Quietude were exposed, like the setts of some animal dug up by trappers. Conditions were hellish. There was acid rain and a pestilential sub-climate that included noxious gas clouds and hail. The irradiated cliffs of the impact crater were continuing to collapse into the continent-sized hole. The cities were mangled, pinned and crushed like passengers in a wrecked vehicle, leaking life and heat, bleeding power.

The forces of the Quietude had nowhere left to run, so they were fighting to the last.

Tra formed the strategic spearhead of the Imperial assault. Imperial Army hosts, now equipped for chemical war and hazard environs, followed their lead.

The accounts that puzzled Hawser were strange fragments reporting almost pernicious brutality. The Wolves seemed eager to record moments that did not portray them as heroic or daring or even lucky; they seemed almost gleeful about scraps that illuminated nothing but atrocity.

They were non-stories, with no point, no beginning, middle and end. They were not cause and effect. They were simply descriptions of murder and dismemberment committed on Quietude combatants.

Hawser wondered if he was supposed to weave some kind of narrative thread around these anecdotes, to sew them into a context that might make them more heroic and dramatic. He wondered if he had misunderstood something, something cultural that even the processes nanotically wired into his brain had not been able to translate.

Then he recalled the assault on the graving dock, and the episode when Bear and Orcir had finally dislodged the crew of robusts who had earlier vaporised Hjad on the underspace slope. He recalled the grisly ritual slaughter that had followed.

They are chasing out the maleficarum, Ogvai had said. They are casting it out. They are hurting it so badly it will know not to come back. They are punishing it, and explaining pain to it, so it will not be eager to return and bother us.

These accounts, Hawser decided, were the same thing, marks of aversion in word form. They were designed to scare the maleficarum.

So what scares the Wolves, he wondered?

‘You look discomforted,’ remarked Ulvurul Heoroth. Heoroth, called Longfang, was Tra’s rune priest, a man far older than Ohthere Wyrdmake. Like Ogvai and many of Tra, he had a skin like ice, but it did not glow with inner light like a glacier, the way that Ogvai’s flesh did. It was glassy and dark, like the half-translucent plate of ice on a midwinter lake.

His skin was not the only evidence that he was old. He was lean and bony, and his long hair was thin and white. He appeared hunched and sclerotic in his runic armour. Age had not afflicted him the way it had altered other senior Wolves. It had bleached him and wizened him, and grown out his canines into the teeth that had given him his war-name. Some said there would be other longfangs one day, if any of the Rout lived long enough. Wyrd alone had kept Heoroth Longfang’s thread uncut. He was as old as it was possible for a Wolf to be, the oldest of the last few Sixth Legion Astartes who had been created on Terra and shipped to Fenris as the foundation of the Wolf King’s retinue.

The warship’s massive embarkation deck, a long gallery with Stormbirds racked laterally from overhead rails ready for launch, was quieter than it had been at the moment of impact. The priest was kneeling, like a crusader knight of Old Terra at a Cruxian shrine, looking up at the repeater screens. The two packs he was about to lead surfacewards in support of Ogvai were preparing nearby. Hawser could hear the shrill buzz of fitter drills screwing armour into place. He could hear the hiss of hydraulics and the whirr of lifter gear. Fifty metres away from him, along the main plain of the deck, a circle of Wolves gathered to kneel around their squad leader and take their pledge, the signifier known to other Legions Astartes as the oath of moment.

‘What are you doing?’ Hawser asked the rune priest. It was a blunt question, but he asked it anyway. Though he had spent more time with Tra than with any other portion of the Sixth Legion Astartes, he had exchanged almost nothing with the saturnine priest. Longfang had never given him a story to keep safe, nor offered comment on any account Hawser had delivered in his capacity as skjald. Longfang was also far less approachable than Wyrdmake, though even Wyrdmake was a chilling prospect.

Seeing Longfang alone for a moment, Hawser had taken his chance. Longfang had not needed to look around to know Hawser was behind him or, it seemed, what expression was on Hawser’s face.

The repeater screen showed the Quietude home world from high above: the hard clarity of space, the brilliance of direct sunlight. The world looked like an orange that had had a red-hot poker rammed into its upper hemisphere.

No, it looked like a radapple, one of the late crop, fat and russet pink, but marred with a huge, rusty blemish of rot.

Longfang continued to stare at the screen.

‘I’m listening,’ he said.

‘To?’

‘The snapping of threads. The shaping of wyrd.’

‘You’re not watching, then?’

‘Only the reflection of your face in the screen,’ said Longfang.

Hawser snorted a small laugh at his own foolishness. The Wolves liked to wrap themselves in a cloak of mystery and solemn, supernatural power, but such nonsense was the superstitious talk of barbarians, inherited from the Fenrisians they drew their strength from. The truly abnormal thing about the Wolves was the sharpness of their perception. They had taught themselves to notice everything about their surroundings, and to use every scrap of information at their disposal. Their reputation helped. No one expected brutes who looked like ritual-obsessed, bestial clansmen to be underpinned by peerless combat intelligence.

It was what made them such efficient weapons.

‘So why is there unhappiness in your visage?’ Longfang asked.

‘I am still uncertain of my place among you. Of my purpose.’

Longfang tutted.

‘First, it is every man’s lot to wonder at his own nature. That is life. To wonder at your own wyrd, that is the eternal state of contemplation for most men. You’re not alone.’

‘And second?’ asked Hawser.

‘It puzzles me, Kasper-Ansbach-Hawser-who-is-Ahmad-Ibn-Rustah-who-is-skjald-of-Tra, that you do not know yourself when, quite plainly, there are so many of you to know. It puzzles me that you chose to come to the Allwinter World, yet cannot account for that choice. Why did you come to Fenris?’

‘I’d spent my whole life learning,’ said Hawser. ‘Gathering data, collecting it, preserving it. Always my motive had been the betterment of mankind. I reached a place where I felt that my life of effort was being… squandered. Passed over as insignificant.’

‘Your pride was wounded?’

‘No! No, nothing like that. It wasn’t personal. The things I had cared enough about to conserve were just being forgotten. They weren’t being put to use.’

Heoroth Longfang made a small movement deep inside his etched, bead-draped carapace that may or may not have been a shrug.

‘Whatever the truth of that, it still does not explain Fenris.’

‘When my life’s work seemed to be stagnated,’ said Hawser, ‘I felt I should make one last voyage, broader and bolder than any I had made before, and close with some truth, some reality, greater than any I experienced in my career. Instead of probing mysteries of the distant past, I fancied to investigate curiosities of a more modern vintage. The Legions Astartes. Each one bound up in its own coat of mysteries, each one wrapped in its own trappings of ritual and lore. Mankind trusts his future to the diligent service of the Legions, yet does not know them. I thought I would choose a Legion, and go to them, and learn of them.’

‘An ambitious thought.’

‘Perhaps,’ Hawser admitted.

‘A dangerous one. No Legion makes its stronghold a welcoming place.’

‘True.’

‘So there was an element of bravado? Of risk taking? You would end your career with one last, bold flourish that would seal your reputation as an academic and repair your damaged pride?’

‘That’s not what I meant,’ said Hawser sourly.

‘No?’

‘No.’

Longfang fixed his eyes on Hawser. The vox-feed built into the helmet seal of his collar warbled and chittered. Longfang ignored it.

‘I see anger in your face, though,’ the priest said. ‘I think I’ve come closer to the truth than you have so far. You still haven’t really answered. Why Fenris? Why not another Legion-world? Why not a safer one?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Don’t you?’

Hawser couldn’t answer, but he had a nagging feeling he should have been able to.

He said, ‘I was told it was good to face your fears. I have always been afraid of wolves. Always. Since childhood.’

‘But there are no wolves on Fenris,’ Longfang replied.

The priest moved to rise from his kneeling position. He seemed to struggle, like a weary, arthritic old man. Forgetting himself, Hawser stuck out his hand to offer support.

Longfang looked at the proffered hand as if it was a stick that had been used to scrape a midden hole. Hawser feared the priest might lunge forwards and snap it off with a single, furious bite, but he was too frozen to withdraw the offer.

Instead, grinning, Longfang closed his massive, plasteel gauntlet around Hawser’s hand and accepted the support. He rose. Hawser meshed his teeth and let out a little squeak of effort as he fought not to collapse beneath the weight the huge rune priest leant on him.

Upright, Longfang towered over him. He let go of the skjald’s hand and looked down at him.

‘I’m grateful. My joints are old, and my bones are as cold as dead fish trapped in lake ice.’

He shuffled away towards the waiting packs, his wild, thin hair catching the light of the deck lamps like thistledown. Hawser rubbed his numb hand.

‘You’re leading a drop now?’ Hawser called out after him. ‘To the surface? A combat drop?’

‘Yes. You should come.’

Hawser blinked.

‘I’m allowed to come?’

‘Go where you like,’ said Longfang.

‘Three weeks I’ve been on this ship, getting accounts of this war second-hand,’ said Hawser, trying not to sound peevish. ‘I thought I had to ask permission. I thought I had to wait until I was permitted or invited.’

‘No, go where you like,’ said Longfang. ‘You’re a skjald. That’s the one great privilege and right of being what you are. No one in the Rout can bar you, or keep you at bay, or stop you from sticking your nose in.’

‘I thought I had to be protected.’

‘We’ll protect you.’

‘I thought I’d get in the way,’ said Hawser.

‘We’ll worry about that.’

‘So I can go anywhere? I can choose what I see?’

‘Yes, yes.’

‘Why did no one think to tell me that?’ Hawser asked.

‘Did you think to ask?’ replied the priest.

‘This is the logic of the Vlka Fenryka?’ Hawser said.

‘Yes. Catches in your flesh like a fish-hook, doesn’t it?’ replied the priest.

The packs Longfang was leading down were not familiar to Hawser. He knew just a few of the warriors by name and reputation.

Their blood was up, but they seemed subdued. There had been a tone of this in the air for days. As the Stormbirds made their long, silent dive from the strike ship, Hawser strapped in beside Longfang.

‘You said I looked discomforted, but there is a grim look in these eyes,’ Hawser said.

‘All of Tra wants to be away from here,’ said Longfang. ‘The glory’s gone from this war.’

‘Gone to Ullanor,’ said a Wolf strapped into the row of arrestor cradles facing them. Svessl. Hawser attached a name.

‘What’s Ullanor?’ Hawser asked.

‘Where, you mean,’ replied another Wolf, Emrah.

‘Where is it?’

‘A mighty victory,’ said Svessl. ‘Ten months ago, but word has just reached us. The Allfather made a mighty slaughter of the greenskins, laid them out on the red ground. Then he sank his sword tip into the soil and announced he was done.’

‘Done?’ asked Hawser. ‘What do you mean? Are you talking about the Emperor?’

‘He’s done with the Crusade,’ said Emrah. ‘He’s returning to Terra. He’s left His anointed successor to continue the war in His absence.’

Longfang turned to look at Hawser. His eyes were hooded and dark, like lightless pools.

‘Horus is chosen as Warmaster. We enter a new age. Perhaps the Crusade is nearing an end, and we will be put aside to let our teeth grow blunt.’

‘I doubt that,’ said Hawser.

‘Ullanor was a great war,’ said Longfang. ‘The greatest of all, the culmination of decades of campaigning against the greenskins. The Rout had heard of it, and hoped that we would be able to stand with the Allfather when the culmination of the struggle came. But we were denied that honour. The Wolves of Fenris were too busy on other errands, fighting dirty fights no one else wanted to fight in other corners of the galaxy.’

‘Fights like this one?’ asked Hawser.

The Wolves nodded. There were several growls.

‘No thanks we’ll get for this,’ said Longfang.

The bitter truth had emerged later, after Ogvai had been granted theatre command, after the commander of the Expedition had agreed to let the iron priests blast the graving dock out of orbit, after it had impacted. The Instrument cradled within the graving dock’s girderwork embrace was not the kill vehicle feared by the Expedition’s threat assessors.

After Tra had seized the facility, the Mechanicum had begun to examine it, especially the control centre area so scrupulously spared by Fultag’s assault. The implications of that examination only became clear once the graving dock, at the Expedition commander’s pleasure, had been used as a giant wrecking ball.

The Instrument was a data conveyor. The Olamic Quietude had been in the process of loading it with the sum total of its thinking, its artistry, its knowledge and its secrets. The intention was presumably to launch it, either as a bottle upon the ocean in the hope of some salvation, or towards some distant, unknown and unknowable outpost of the Quietude network.

Knowing what had been lost and, perhaps, understanding how that would reflect upon him in the eyes of men even more senior than himself, the commander of the Expedition Fleet flew into a recriminatory rage. He blamed poor intelligence. He blamed the slow function of the Mechanicum. He blamed factionalism in the Imperial Army. Most of all, he blamed the Astartes.

Ogvai was on the surface by that time, leading things, at the bloody end of the matter. When he heard of the commander’s wrath, he transmitted a brief vox-statement, reminding the commander and the senior fleet officers that they had insisted he solve their problem and break the deadlock, and had approved his use of all resources. They had given him theatre command. As was ever the case, the Astartes had not made a mistake. They had simply done what was asked of them.

Once the message was transmitted, Ogvai vented the spirit of his real responses on the warriors of the Quietude.

The Stormbird fell as a bad star falls.

Hawser had dropped to the surface with Tra before, but this time it was the suicidal plunge of a combat run. Inertially locked straps and an arrestor cage kept him stuck to the seating rig. The graduated compression provided by the tight bodyglove he was wearing as a base for his lightweight environment armour kept the lymphatic and venous systems of his limbs functioning. His heart banged like an x-ray star. His teeth chattered.

‘What story will you tell about this?’ Svessl asked, seeing his fear and enjoying it.

‘Not many hearth stories to tell about soiling yourself,’ said Emrah. Wolves laughed.

‘What angered you the most?’ Hawser asked, as loudly as he could, to any who would listen.

‘What?’ asked Emrah. Others turned to look his way. Full helms and knotwork leather masks glared at him.

‘I said what pissed you off the most, Wolves of Tra?’ Hawser asked, raising his voice above the howl of the engines and the judder of the airframe. ‘Was it that you missed the fight at Ullanor? The glory? Or was it that our Allfather chose Horus as Warmaster, not the Wolf King?’

They may kill me, thought Hawser, but at least the process will take my mind off this hellish descent. Besides, what better time to ask a pack of Wolves an awkward question than when they are all lashed into arrestor cages?

‘Neither,’ said Emrah.

‘Neither,’ agreed another Wolf, a red-haired monster called Horune.

‘We would have liked a taste of the glory,’ said Svessl, ‘to stand up in a great war and be counted.’

‘Ullanor was no greater than a hundred campaigns of the last decade,’ Longfang reminded the warrior.

‘But it’s the one where the Allfather laid down His sword and said His Crusade was done,’ Svessl replied. ‘It’s the one that will be remembered.’

And that’s what counts to you, thought Hawser.

‘And the Wolf King would never have been named Warmaster,’ said Emrah.

‘Why?’ asked Hawser.

‘Because that was never his wyrd,’ said Longfang. ‘The Wolf King was not made to be Warmaster. It’s not a slight. He hasn’t been passed over. The Allfather has not played favourite with Horus Lupercal.’

‘Explain,’ said Hawser.

‘When the Allfather sired His pups,’ said the priest, ‘He gave each one of them a different wyrd. Each one has a different life to make. One to be the heir to the Emperor’s throne. One to fortify the defences of the Imperium. One to guard the hearth. One to watch the distant perimeter. One to command the armies. One to control intelligences. You see, skjald? You see how simple it is?’

Hawser tried to make his nodded reply obvious through the vibration shaking him.

‘So what is the Wolf King’s wyrd, Heoroth Longfang?’ he asked. ‘What life did the Allfather choose for him?’

‘Executioner,’ replied the old Wolf.

The Wolves were quiet for a moment. The Stormbird continued to shiver with intense violence. The engines had reached a strangled pitch that Hawser hadn’t believed possible.

‘What pisses us off,’ said Emrah suddenly, ‘is that we weren’t present at the Great Triumph.’

‘They say it was a fine sight,’ said Horune, ‘a whole world laid bare to salute Horus’s ascendancy.’

‘We would have liked to gather there,’ said Longfang, ‘shoulder to shoulder with brother Astartes, in numbers not seen since the start of the Crusade.’

‘Shoulder to shoulder with Wolf companies we haven’t seen for decades,’ added Svessl.

‘We would have liked to raise our voices and join the roar,’ said Emrah. ‘We would have liked to shake our fists at the sky, and show our proud allegiance to the new Warmaster.’

‘That’s what’s pissing us off,’ said Svessl.

‘That, and you reminding us about it,’ said Horune.

The Stormbirds punched through the dense impact pall, poisonous vapour slipstreaming off their sleek wings and spiralling in the thunderclaps of their wakes like ink in fast water. Under the clouds, a nightmare rim of firestorms burned around the titanic entry wound. It was a kill-shot that had taken out a planet. The depth of the wound was astonishing. It did not look geological to Hawser. It looked as anatomical as the analogies filling his imagination. An exposed, surgical void of pulverised organs, muscles and bones, all tinted orange, all partially blackened as if blown out by a penetrating incendiary round.

Slower-moving Imperial Army drop-ships, vessels of much mightier draughts, were descending into the scalding pit. The Stormbirds streaked past them, and outpaced their Thunderhawk and gun-cutter escorts. The Astartes craft, in tight formation, passed below the level of the pit’s burning lip and knifed into the sub-glacial void, down through smoke, through burning air, through the shattered ruins of the Quietude cities.

The cities ran deep. Hawser was astonished to glimpse the complex, interlocking layers of them, rising up like cyclopean towers from profound geological foundations. He was also stunned by the degree of destruction. Upper levels had all been vaporised, and below that, the municipal stages and sections had been crushed down into one another. Tower structures had collapsed and pancaked into themselves, held in place only by the remaining mantle of super-thick ice that acted like a setting resin around the delicate, shattered wreckage. Hawser was reminded of the way Rector Uwe had always folded almonds and pecan nuts in a white napkin after supper, before striking the parcel with the back of a spoon. The debris would have flown everywhere but for that enveloping medium.

The ship’s thrusters were suddenly making an entirely different type of anguished scream.

‘Ten more seconds!’ Longfang yelled. The Wolves began to beat their swords and axes against their storm shields.

A savage change of momentum hammered Hawser’s innards. The bird had just used the bottom of its powerdive and ferocious upturn to dump colossal amounts of speed. Before he could adjust, the most violent impact of all occurred. They just fell. They fell hard into something with a noise like the steel gates of the Imperial Palace falling off their hinges.

They’d landed. They had landed, hadn’t they? Hawser couldn’t be sure. They looked to be moving still, but that could simply have been his head and his bewildered senses. There was a shrieking noise from outside, metal-on-metal. The Wolves were slamming aside their arrestor cages and leaping up.

‘On! On!’ Longfang yelled. Hawser realised they’d all been speaking Wurgen for the last ten minutes.

The boarding ramp was opening. Light flooded into the green twilight gloom of the drop cabin. Heat came with it, roasting, fireball heat that Hawser could feel sucking into his lungs down the chimney of his throat like a backdraught, despite his armoured breather mask.

‘Great Terra!’ he coughed.

The metal-on-metal squealing from outside was getting louder. They were moving. They were juddering and moving backwards.

The whole Stormbird was sliding.

Fleeting, jerking silhouettes loomed across the fire-bright gap of the open ramp in front of him. The Wolves, deploying. He could hear them howling.

No, it wasn’t howling. It was the wet leopard-growl, amplified: the resonating, deep-chest purr of a megafauna predator. It was a paralysing, infrasonic panther-snarl throbbing and then surging up from the specially adapted larynxes of apex carnivores.

He followed them out into the light and the searing heat. Some of them brushed against him as they charged out down the ramp, knocking him aside, spinning him. He had no idea what he should be doing. A giant plasteel hand grabbed him by the scruff of his suit and his feet dangled off the ramp for a second.

‘Stay with me!’ Longfang growled in Wurgen.

Hawser followed the old priest as he lumbered forwards. He focussed in on the details of Longfang’s armour, as he had done when instructed to follow Bear. Bear’s armour had been simple compared to Longfang’s, but then Bear was an ill-tempered youngster beside the veteran priest. His grey armour had been more modestly adorned and decorated.

Longfang’s case of armour was old, a work of art that owed its richness to both the armourer and the etcher. It was covered in runic symbols, some of which had been picked out in brass, or gold leaf, or glossy red enamel. Apotropaic eyes had been scratched, emphatically, into the shoulder guards. Besides the huge, gossamer-white pelt, Longfang was draped with skeins of beads, strings of charms, small trophies, and clattering amulets.

They came out from under the Stormbird’s shadow into the glare of a chemical firestorm. The Stormbirds had set down on a series of ornate platforms extending from monumental, fluted towers half encased in the surrounding ice-mantle. Great portions of the towers and their more massive neighbouring structures were ablaze. The wall of heat was oppressive. Light-rich flames boiled and tumbled up the ice chasm towards the top of the pit, drawn as if up a flue. Frequently oxygenated by sources Hawser couldn’t identify, the firestorms swelled and flared, rushing white-hot and spitting out clouds of molten sparks and incendiary cinders that blizzarded into the depths below. Hawser realised some of the vertical firestorms were bigger than cities he had spent whole chunks of his life living in. His mind could barely cope with the scale. He found himself focussing on single sparks, drifting silently in the air in front of him, as large close up as the firestorms were far away. To hold focus on a single, drifting spark was to hold on to a precious moment of sane tranquillity.

The air was full of sparks. There was also a strange smell, more than decay and burning. It was the smell of some synthetic substance that should never have been exposed to heat.

Portions of the pit’s upright city were collapsing into the yawning gulf below. Wars were happening on different levels. Hawser could see Imperial Army troops drop-landing on platforms above him, lit up by enemy fire as they swung in towards leaf-shaped platforms. To the west of his position, and slightly below, a tide of Expedition drop-troops assaulted across the spans of three or four intact inter-tower bridges, as gun-cutters and blitz ships swept in over them and raked the facades of the ancient citadels.

Longfang’s packs were driving in across the ornate platforms towards imposing, sullen mansions. The polished, orange material tiling the mansions and the platform surface was pitted and scorched. Everything was orange. The world was orange. It was partly the firestorm, and partly the ubiquitous material that the Quietude constructed everything from.

Again, for a split-second pang, Hawser was reminded of Vasiliy. To think she was a world and a life ago now was not even ironic.

Debris, including chunks of fallen masonry of considerable size, landscaped the platform. What had this place once been, Hawser wondered as he ran forwards through the murderous heat and the winnowing sparks. The landing stage of a parliament hall? The platform of a defence station? The private jetty of an aristocratic residence? Did the residents once look out over the platform and admire the view of the glowing ice caves beneath, or was it just a functional cavity to them? Had there been beauty here, before Ogvai’s kill-shot? Deliberate beauty, or just the accidental marvel of the nature that only human eyes recognised? Did the beings of the Quietude have souls?

He fancied perhaps they did. The platforms had ornate decorations worked into them, especially on their undersides, where they fanned out like ribbed lilies or acanthus leaves. Similarly, around the high, wide door spaces and side columns of the mansions they were attacking, there were simple lines of relief that suggested an aesthetic.

Enemy fire licked at them, most of it gravity rifle shot that pulverised the platform surfaces into dust where it hit. He heard the unmistakable sound of bolters firing and saw Horune and the others ahead, bounding away across the tumbled slabs and crushed stonework. He made a mental note to improve his next story; he had no idea an Astartes could move so fast.

The metal-on-metal shriek came again. He turned.

The Stormbird that had brought them in was sliding backwards. Unlike the other Stormbirds in Longfang’s flight, which had touched down securely on other landing levels and were already cycling back up for take-off, this craft had been forced to use the lip of its target platform by an overhead collapse. That it had landed at all was a testament to the devotion of the flight crew.

The weakened platform was shredding. The rear half of the Stormbird’s bulk was tipping off. The metal-on-metal shriek was the sound of the Stormbird’s landing claws as they tried to dig in and anchor on. The skids tore squealing gashes as they slipped backwards. The pilot was trying to fire mooring lines from under the nose. Each grapple rebounded from the polished orange tiles.

A Stormbird was a large transatmospheric craft with a broad, threatening profile designed to menace. It was considerably more substantial in both mass and sheer craftsmanship than the bulk-produced landers like the Thunderhawk and the Dropfalcon models that had been churned out of constructor factories as short-term, utilitarian solutions to the Crusade’s material demands. A Thunderhawk wasn’t designed to last: it was just a cheap, functional, template-pressed disposable.

The Stormbirds were legacies of the Unification Wars on Terra, superb machines that were far more costly and time-consuming to manufacture. Armadas of them were assembled for the Expansion, and only when the true scale of the Great Crusade became apparent was it realised that a cheap bulk supplement would be needed. They were not the sort of things that should look vulnerable or ungainly. They were lords of the air, soaring creatures that could dive from orbit straight down into the fires of hell, and survive.

Yet this one was stricken. It was doomed. Its backwards slide was accelerating. Its nose was tipping up, and the angle of that inclination was increasing. Metal shrieked on metal until the landing claws began to tear free, lifted too high by the dipping tail. Hawser could clearly see the frantic, chalk-white faces of the flight crew through the tinted cockpit canopy as they fought to stabilise their situation. The engines suddenly started racing, and hurricanes of loose debris and grit swirled into the intakes as someone tried to throttle up and… what? Push the ship back onto the platform? Relaunch?

The Stormbird tipped. Hawser saw it pass the point of no return. The boarding ramp was still down, and it looked for all the world like an open beak, like the ship was a fledgling bird, too damaged to fly, squawking in terror as it pitched from a nest.

With a sudden, jarring lurch, it was gone, and the shredded lip of the platform was gone too. Hawser felt the deck quiver as the Stormbird let go.

He mumbled something, something obscene and incoherent, unwilling to accept what he’d just seen. Part of his mind told him that the Stormbird would surely restart its engines as it fell and fly back up to them, magnificent and phoenix-like. Another part told him what a fool that made him.

He realised Longfang was shouting at him. There was a far more immediate issue.

The weight of the Stormbird, and the violent way it had quit its perch, had entirely undermined the integrity of the damaged platform.

Everything they were standing on was giving way.

He had once witnessed the explosive demolition of a stratified favela in Sud Merica. The slum hive, cleared of inhabitants and protesters by the Unification authority, was a towering ziggurat, a landfill mountain that had cast its shadow across a river basin for sixty generations. Hydroelectric projects would replace it and, during that work, Hawser and Murza would be granted access to explore the impossibly ancient foundations for relics of the Proto-Cruxian faith that was said to have persisted there like an isotope in the water table.

The demolition had brought the vast structure down like an avalanche, folding level into level, collapsing storey into storey like riffle-shuffled playing cards. He had been astonished by the seismic violence of the destruction, and by the overwhelming noise. Most of all, he had been staggered by the quantity of dust exhaled by such annihilation.

The platform went the same way. It disintegrated, letting the rubble and massive fragments fallen from the city above slide off into the gulf. Noise was vibration and vibration noise, and there was no division between them, and both of them were a visual blur. Orange tiles and support beams exploded and shattered in clouds of dust like flour.

Hawser ran towards the mansions. His future fell away behind him in the pit in a raging landslip. The ground steepened in front of him, and he realised he was running uphill. An elephantine block of stone, part of some city structure demolished far above, slithered towards him. Its impact had undoubtedly contributed to the platform’s fundamental weakness.

As it rushed down at him, he leapt up the face of it, hurling himself before it could turn him into a long red smear. He landed on the top of it, a hard, awkward landing that badly bruised his hip and ankle, but held on, his hands wrapped around the stub of a shattered finial.

The block kept sliding. Righting himself, he leapt again, clearing the slab and coming down on the other side, on the slope of the expiring platform. He scrabbled up, loose rocks pinging off his shoulders and his face mask. One hit so hard it crazed the left-hand eyepiece, and stunned him.

The noise of the tumult reached a peak. Blind, scrambling, he ran into something and found it was a wall.

‘Sit down. Sit down!’ a voice snarled in Wurgen. ‘You’re safe there, skjald.’

He could barely see. Most of the platform had gone, leaving a jagged strand of rockcrete stuck through with severed rib beams and shorting power lines. The destruction had exhaled so much dust into the air that there was a strange, farinaceous haze.

Hawser was hunkered right up against the foot of one of the mansion walls, spared from the fathomless drop by a ragged shelf of surviving platform no more than two metres broad at its most generous. Wolves were crouched with him, their pelts and armour dusted with yellow powder.

‘Are you alive?’ the Wolf beside him asked. Hawser didn’t know his name. The Wolf had eschewed his full plate helm for a knotwork leather protector that had entwined furrows in the shape of Fenrisian sea-orms forming the nasal guard and the heavy brows.

‘Yes,’ said Hawser.

‘You sure?’ asked Serpent-mask. ‘I see fear in that wrong eye of yours, and we don’t want fear tripping us up.’

‘I’m sure,’ Hawser snapped. ‘What’s your name? I want to make certain my account of this day records your concern for me.’

Serpent-mask shrugged.

‘Jormungndr,’ he said. ‘Called the Two-bladed Serpent. You insult me, skjald, that you haven’t heard of the famous Two-blade.’

‘I have,’ Hawser lied quickly. ‘But I have been shaken by that tangle with death, and I was slow to recognise the trait marks on your face guard.’

Jormungndr Two-blade nodded, as if this was acceptable.

‘Follow,’ he said.

Svessl had blown a way into the nearest of the structures Hawser thought of as mansions.

They passed through a gatehouse into a courtyard beyond. In amongst the debris of rubble, he saw the first of the enemy dead: graciles and robusts, and also other smaller forms new to him. The pale yellow dust, sifting in the air, stuck to the spattered pools of purple Quietude blood.

The Wolves were surging into the courtyard and splitting in all directions. Cloisters and inner entrances beckoned. Hawser, uncertain which way to go, heard enemy fire, and then answering blasts of bolter shot. The gunning bolters, often one at first and then joined by an emphatic chorus as multiple weapons were brought to bear on an identified target, had a distinctive metallic grinding note behind their deep shot-boom, like a bitter aftertaste.

He could hear other sounds, deeper, bigger sounds. They were the vast, echoing, booming noises of the unstable cities, creaking and swaying, uttering their slow and monumental death knell out across the immense gulf of the impact pit.

Hawser found himself walking slowly through the mansion zone, crossing from courtyard into cloister and back again. He felt immune to the battle that rang around him, incidental, close by, but not near enough to trouble him. Sparks sailed like stars through the dusty air. He stepped from the shadows of the covered walkways into the bright orange glare of the open courts, where the light of firestorms cast shadows of him, long and lean across the tiled ground.

He looked at his shadow, so distorted and extended, so longshanked and shifting in the flamelight. The pelt Bitur Bercaw had given him on the night he awakened in the Aett was still around his shoulders. He wore it at all times. The grey wolf pelt lent his spectral shadow a strangely hunched neck and shaggy back.

Much of the mansion complex’s infrastructure had been ripped out. He saw walls and ceilings where flush, polished panels had been torn out, revealing curiously organic layers of machinery. The purpose of the sub-layer systems was not apparent. They seemed to be complex arrangements, patterns that were both circuits and organic valves, power cables and blood vessels intertwined. Smouldering energy fumes wept out of torn and dangling tubes. Unidentifiable fluids dribbled from ruptured ducts.

He looked around. He looked up. The spavined city rose above him as if it was trying to claw its way out of its icy grave. Tracers of weapons fire, like bright lattices, criss-crossed the smoke-streaked air. Heavy weapon beams scored destructive lines several kilometres long across the darkness of the pit, projected by assault craft on attack runs. Where they touched, the city structures dissolved in walls of light and threw out arches of burning gas like solar flares. Flurries of missiles, visible from their exhaust flares alone, raced like schools of comets, spat out by gunships too dark to be seen in the smoke. At roof-level, to his left, two distant Warlord Titans were leading the Army in towards a bastion gate across a horizon formed by an inter-tower bridge. Clouds of tiny munition impacts billowed around their inexorable figures like fireflies at dusk.

He heard the deep, booming, background instability of the cities again. It sounded like a bell tolling in the core of the planet.

A sharper sound made him start. Concussion slapped him. Directly overhead, a formation of bulk landers was attempting to deliver platoons of Outremars onto upper platforms that jutted out like theatre balconies. One had been hit by ground fire. It had exploded in a staggering welter of flame and whizzing debris. The landers in formation with it attempted to steer out of the blast wash. One clipped another and they both had to pull off the drop target hard, engines protesting. A third was struck soundly along its flank by projectile debris from the lost unit. It shivered, mortally wounded. Black smoke began to gout from its port-side engines. It tried to get nose-up. It tried to get close enough to the platform to drop its ramp and let its cargo of soldiers deploy.

It hit the platform instead. The planing impact tore the underside away, peeling it off like the lid of a tin can. As the main hull began to disintegrate and the four engines exploded in a quick, fiery series, it began to rain bodies.

The Outremar troopers spilled by the wreck fell on the mansion complex, helpless, tumbling, flailing. Some were already dead. Some were still screaming when they made impact. They hit roofs, terraces, the canopies of cloisters, the open tiles of the courtyards. They glanced off sloping walls and made multiple further impacts before rolling to a halt. Burning debris rained down with them. Some of the bodies were on fire, or partially dismembered. Some struck with such force, blood spatter went five or six metres up the face of walls. Others landed whole and lay as if asleep.

Staring up, mesmerised by the human hail, it took Hawser a moment to register that there was every possibility he might be struck by some of the falling bodies. One came rushing down at him and he flinched to his left. It hit the tiled courtyard ground with a noise like smashing eggs and snapping celery. He looked down at the anatomically impossible position it had chosen to rest in for the remainder of eternity.

Another body impacted a few metres to his right like a bag of blood bursting. Hawser backed away. He looked up again in time to see a whirling piece of burning machine debris dropping towards him, end over end.

He ran. He made it to the cover of the nearest cloistered area as the wreckage struck. Then a human body smacked into the awning roof above him, splitting as it shattered orange tiles and produced a vile trickle of blood that pattered down onto the ground. He ran again, and sought greater sanctuary in the more substantial archway of the mansion proper.

He cowered briefly. The terrible downpour of bodies subsided. He looked up and took a step out of the shadowed archway.

A Quietude super-robust lunged at him. The towering beast had two heads and three surviving upper limbs. Something akin to a plasma beam had blown the other one off. The face-plates of its heads displayed hologram masks of psychopathic rage. It was wielding two large, hook-bladed weapons like tulwars with its upper limbs. It sliced at Hawser.

Hawser wasn’t sure how he moved out of its path. He threw himself away from it and hit the tiled ground of the courtyard several metres back from the archway, landing in a clumsy and painful tumble. The super-robust came after him, slicing with one blade, then the next. The tip of one hooked blade struck sparks off the tiles. It reached out with its third limb to seize him so it could pin him and butcher him.

He evaded again, this time more aware of what he was doing, of how superhumanly fast his reactions were, how ridiculously instinctive. The wolf priests, geneweavers and fleshmakers of the Vlka Fenryka, had done so much more than repair his wounds and shave years off his life. They had given him so much more than the enhanced vision of a wolf.

They had accelerated him, his senses, his speed, his strength, his muscle power, his bone density. Even without any combat training, he had snapped the limbs of the G9K malcontents who had outnumbered him.

Nevertheless, a super-robust of the Olamic Quietude, spiking on battle-stimms, would kill him easily.

He ducked a lateral sweep, and then rolled to avoid a downward slash. The super-robust kept coming, kept swinging. Hawser slipped in a pool of Outremar blood, and lost his footing.

Longfang slammed into the super-robust from behind. The priest had appeared without warning, moving like a phantom. There was no hint of infirmity about him, no creak of age. His eyes were bright and wild, and his long white hair flew out like a mane. This was not a man who needed the hand of another to help him get up off his knees.

Longfang expertly hooked his arms around the super-robust from behind in a grip that resembled a wrestling hold. He lifted the enemy warrior away from Hawser while keeping its limbs locked so it could not strike with either tulwar. Longtooth grunted with the effort. Having turned it aside, he sent the super-robust staggering forwards with a serious kick to the arse to create some safety distance, and drew his sword, a huge broad blade that slept in a knotwork scabbard across his back. It had a two-handed grip, and a runic blade that glowed like frost. As soon as it was drawn, it began to keen, a weird song only wights or the soulless could sing. Power crackled and hissed through its fierce edge.

The super-robust turned around and strode back to face and kill the interloper who had interrupted its attack. It seemed undaunted by the searing glimmer of the glacial blade that was whispering a death-lament for it. It flung itself forwards with its powerful upper limbs raised, raining alternating downstrokes with its tulwars. Longfang grunted, reacted, let his long blade and the armour of his left forearm soak up the multiple impacts. The super-robust was as strong as a template construction press. Hawser saw that the old priest had to plant one foot back to brace against the assault.

With a growl-bark, Longfang put a full body spin and the weight of his shoulders into the answering stroke. The blow sliced the third limb clean off the Quietude warrior’s torso. It staggered back, but it felt no pain. It resumed its drive at Longfang, chopping down alternating blows again. This time it had effect. The hybrid alloy of one of the tulwars smote through the forearm guard of the rune priest’s intricate armour. Leather bindings split, and snake-stones, bezoars, seashells and beads made of nacre scattered across the courtyard tiles. Blood gushed out, down to the cuff, dripping off the ridges of the huge gauntlet.

Longfang let out a wet leopard-growl that palpitated Hawser’s guts. He hacked at the super-robust with his frostblade, driving it backwards across the blood-stained, fire-lit yard. The last blow in the savage series cracked the top fifteen centimetres off the left-hand tulwar and stove a deep crack across the super-robust’s barrel chest.

At that point, two more super-robusts bounded into the courtyard. The first, armed with an accelerator hammer, went immediately to reinforce the unit fighting Longfang. The second, its hologrammatic face expressing first curiosity and then undisguised antipathy, turned for Hawser.

Heoroth Longfang had no intention of breaking the skjald-bond. He had told Hawser to go where he liked because he would be protected by Tra, and that was a compact he intended to honour, or forfeit with his life. A long and, for the most part, secret heritage of genetic engineering had culminated in the ability of Imperial Terra to manufacture hyper-organisms like him. He leapt with all the agility and power that heritage had provided him with, not as a man leaps to jump an obstacle, but as an animal pounces to bring down its prey. He left his immediate adversaries standing, almost awkwardly, suddenly devoid of a combat opponent.

He landed behind the super-robust rushing Hawser, and saved the skjald’s life for the second time in ninety seconds. The hissing frostblade went up over his white-haired head in a two-handed grip, and then came down in a single, splitting blow of extraordinary force that sheared the super-robust’s torso medially. The sectioned halves parted in an explosive cloud of purple bio-fluid liberated by the rupture, and fell heavily in opposite directions.

There were beads of glittering purple blood in Longfang’s fine white hair. He looked at Hawser with his tired gold and black-pinned eyes. He knew what was coming.

‘Find cover,’ he said.

Shock took him away. There was a bang like a sonic boom. Heoroth Longfang was simply removed, sideways, from Hawser’s field of vision.

Hawser reeled from the concussive blow, stunned, dazed, his breather mask cracking, his nose filling with blood from vessels burst by the over-pressure. The super-robust’s accelerator hammer had buried itself in Longfang’s left side and hurled him clean across the courtyard. The priest hit a wall, cracking the tiles, and landed on the ground.

Both super-robusts hastened to finish him as he tried to rise. Blood was leaking out of Longfang, from his lips, from the waist-joint and hip seals of his runic armour.

As the Quietude brutes closed in, Longfang raised his hand, as if he could fend them off with force of will alone, as if he could unleash magic, or even maleficarum, under such a miserable duress. For a moment, Hawser almost believed he could. He almost believed the wights of the Underverse might come howling down like an ice storm in response to Longfang’s furious will.

Nothing happened. No magic, no ice storm, no maleficarum. No wights from the Underverse wailing with rapturous glee.

Hawser snatched up a blood-flecked Outremar lasrifle, yanking the weapon’s strap free of its previous owner’s broken arm. The rifle had fallen out of the sky, but its mechanism was intact. He opened fire, raking the two super-robusts. His shots struck their backs and shoulders, denting the plasticated finish of their armour, scoring little holes and blemishes. The super-robust with the accelerator hammer even took a shot in the back of the head, causing its neck to whiplash slightly.

Both stopped, and turned slowly, smoke wisping from the superficial damage.

‘Tra! Tra! Help here! Help here!’ Hawser yelled, in Wurgen. He started firing again, unloading the entire energy clip at the super-robusts. They paced towards him, and the paces became faster and turned into running strides. The hammer and the tulwars were lifted up to strike. Hawser backed away, blasting, yelling.

Jormungndr Two-blade entered the courtyard. He came in over one of the cloister roofs where Outremar bodies had collected like autumn leaves. True to his name, he had a blade in each hand, a matched pair of power swords, shorter and broader than Longfang’s hissing frostblade.

He uttered the loudest roar of all, and landed hard on the tiles in front of the charging super-robusts. The impact made a sound like a dropped anvil, and pavers cracked under him. He met their united attack aggressively, hammering aside the super-robust with the tulwars with his right blade, and then blocking the hammer with his left.

The super-robust with the tulwars re-joined without hesitation, hacking at him. Two-blade blocked and parried with matching speed, allowing neither of the tulwars to slip past his guard. Simultaneously, his left-hand weapon fended away the follow-up swing from the super-robust with the hammer.

Now that one of the tulwars had lost a section in the clash with Longfang, the mis-matched lengths played to the super-robust’s advantage. As his left-hand sword was occupied with the other opponent, Two-blade found it supremely difficult to counter the rain of blows from the twin swords unless he managed to catch both down near the hilt. Twice, the broken tulwar flew past a parry that had blocked the long hook of its partner and gouged Two-blade. Within a few seconds of the struggle beginning, Two-blade was bleeding from a deep injury in his right arm.

He resolved the problem directly. Ducking a vicious but telegraphed swing from the accelerator hammer, he kicked out at the super-robust with the tulwars, catching it in the left kneecap. The huge plasteel boot delivered a torsion injury that twisted the super-robust off balance, and Two-blade put his right-hand sword through one of its faces.

The super-robust tottered backwards with sparks shorting and spitting from its splintered face mask. Purple gore splashed down its chest from under the mask’s rim.

Jormungndr Two-blade did not pause to enjoy the satisfaction of this advantage. He had to jerk his head back hard to avoid the hammer again. The evasion was whisker-close. The hammer-wielder had thrown such bodily force behind the latest blow that the swing had described an almost complete circle. The hammer head, missing Two-blade on the downward half of the orbit, ended up striking the ground of the yard and creating, with a painful, plosive bang, a radiating crater in the tilework that looked like a bullet hole in a mirror, or the ripple of a stone hitting the surface of still water.

Two-blade struck the super-robust with his left-hand sword. The super-robust deflected the slash with the long haft of its hammer, bringing it up level in front of its face like a stave, before swinging it up higher for another downward, post-setting blow. Two-blade managed to get his swords up and crossed against each other, and caught the neck of the hammer in the V formed by their blades. Even so, the impact drove him down onto one knee.

Straining, Two-blade kept the swords locked. The super-robust with the tulwars was recovering its wits as its secondary head took over its biological operations. It moved in from the side to attack Two-blade while his weapons were occupied.

Two-blade sliced his swords together, uttering a bellow of effort. The swords scissored the neck of the accelerator hammer. The hammer head was not entirely cut off, but the haft just below the head exploded and buckled as the Astartes’ blades sliced through grip, trunking, liner and core.

Two-blade came up off his knees and drove in against the super-robust, head-down, stabbing it repeatedly through the torso with murderous, under-arm punches, first with the right sword, then the left, and then alternating, jabbing blow after vicious blow. He drove it backwards, killing it three or four times over to make sure it was dead. By the end, it was only held upright by his blades.

He let it fall. The other one had reached him. He spun to greet its tulwars, and delivered a rotating lateral slash that knocked it flying. It landed on its face, and tried to rise. Two-blade pounced onto its back, held it face-down with his knee, and drove a sword down through it, pinning it to the ground.

Purple liquid began to creep out from under it.

Hawser crossed the yard to where Longfang lay. Two-blade wrenched his sword out of the super-robust’s corpse and followed. Two-blade’s escalated Astartes metabolism had already kicked in, and his wounds had stopped bleeding.

Heoroth Longfang’s wounds had not stopped bleeding. The priest had propped himself against a wall, his legs out straight in front of him. He was breathing hard. Blood was seeping out of far too many of the seams in his armour.

‘A fine day for sitting on your arse,’ remarked Jormungndr Two-blade.

‘I like the weather here,’ replied Longfang.

‘We’ll do all the work, then,’ said Two-blade. He was silent for a while, staring down at the old rune priest.

‘I’ll send Najot Threader back to you, when I find him.’

‘Not necessary,’ replied Longfang.

‘I won’t let you go without honour,’ said Two-blade. There was a tiny hitch in his voice that surprised Hawser. ‘When I find Najot Threader–’

‘No,’ Longfang replied more emphatically. ‘Eager though you are to see me off, I’m not going anywhere. I just need to rest. Enjoy this nice weather for a while.’

Hawser looked at Two-blade, and saw he was smiling a broad smile under his mask that showed his teeth.

‘I recognise my failing and will be sure to correct it,’ he said.

‘There’s a good boy,’ said Longfang. ‘Now go and kill something. The skjald here can stay and keep me company.’

Two-blade looked at Hawser.

‘Amuse him,’ he said.

‘What?’ asked Hawser.

‘I said amuse him,’ replied Two-blade. ‘You’re Tra’s skjald. Amuse him. Take his mind off what’s coming.’

‘Why?’ asked Hawser. ‘What’s coming?’

Two-blade snorted.

‘What do you think?’ he asked.

The big Wolf knelt down quickly, and bowed his head to Longfang.

‘Until next winter,’ he said.

Longfang nodded back. They clasped fists, and then Two-blade stood and walked away without looking back. His massive plasteel boots crunched on the grit coating the courtyard ground. By the time he was on the far side and vanishing from view, he had accelerated into a run.

Hawser glanced back at Longfang.

‘I know it’s an indelicate question, but what is coming?’ he asked.

Longfang laughed and shook his head.

‘You’re dying, aren’t you?’ asked Hawser.

‘Maybe. You don’t know much about Astartes anatomy. We can shrug off a hell of a lot of damage. But sometimes there’s a hell of a lot of pain in that process, and you’re never sure if you’re going to get there.’

‘What should I do?’ Hawser asked.

‘Your job,’ said the priest.

He sat down beside the priest.

Longfang’s skin looked even more translucent than before. He was speckled with blood, both purple and red, both human and foe. Some of it was drying and streaking.

His respiration was laboured. Something was critically wrong with his lungs. Every breath produced a blood mist.

‘So I… I am to amuse you, then?’ asked Hawser. ‘You want me to recite an account?’

‘Why not?’

‘You might want to tell me some of yours,’ said Hawser. ‘You might want to tell me anything that matters to you. In case.’

‘You’d be my confessor, would you?’ said Longfang.

‘That’s not what I meant. Aeska Brokenlip told me that the accounts that entertain the Rout most are the ones that scare them.’

‘True enough.’

‘So what scares you?’

‘You want to know?’

‘I want to know.’

‘What scares us most,’ said Heoroth Longfang, ‘are the things that even we can’t kill.’

Eight

Longfang’s dream of winter

‘We are the Allfather’s killers,’ said the rune priest.

‘You’re soldiers,’ said Hawser. ‘You’re Astartes born. Astartes are the finest warriors Terra has ever manufactured. You’re all killers.’

Longfang coughed. Blood from the mist he was exhaling was beginning to collect around his mouth and soak his beard. It dripped onto the gossamer-white pelt he wore.

‘That’s too simple a view,’ he said. ‘I told you this. A role for each primarch-son. A role for each primarch’s Legion. Defenders and champions, storm troops and praetorians… we all have our duties. Sixth Legion are the executioners. We are the last line. When all else fails, we are the ones expected to do whatever is necessary.’

‘Isn’t that true of all Legions?’ Hawser asked.

‘You still don’t understand, skjald. I’m talking about degree. There are lines that other Legions will not cross. There are divides of honour and fealty and devotion. There are some acts so ruthless, some deeds so unpalatable, that only the Vlka Fenryka are capable of undertaking them. It’s what we were bred for. It’s the way we were designed. Without qualm or sentiment, without hesitation or whimsy. We take pride in being the only Astartes who will never, under any circumstances, refuse to strike on the Allfather’s behalf, no matter what the target, no matter what the cause.’

‘It’s why the Sixth Legion Astartes is considered so bestial,’ said Hawser.

‘That’s secondary,’ Longfang replied. ‘It’s a by-product of our ruthlessness. We are not feral savages. It’s just that two centuries of doing things that other Legions find distasteful have earned us that reputation. The other Legions think we are untamed, untrained dogs, but the truth is that we are the most harshly trained of all.’

Longfang was about to say something else, but a tremor ran through him. He closed his eyes for a moment.

‘Pain?’ asked Hawser.

‘Nothing,’ Longfang replied with a dismissive wave of his right hand. ‘It’ll pass.’

He wiped the blood from his mouth.

‘We are the Allfather’s killers,’ he repeated. ‘It is a matter of honour that we will face anything down. This also may explain why others may regard us as deranged. We deny fear. It plays no part in our lives. Once we deploy, fear is gone from us. It doesn’t ride with us. It doesn’t stay our hands. We exclude it from our hearts and from our heads.’

‘So the stories?’ asked Hawser.

‘Think of the extremity of our lives,’ said Longfang. ‘The unremitting punishment of Fenris, the unstinting combat against mankind’s foes. Where do we find release from that? Not in the dainty pleasures of mortal men. Not in wine or song, or womenfolk, or banquet feasting.’

‘What then?’

‘The one thing denied to us.’

‘Fear.’

Longfang chuckled, though the chuckle was half-drowned in blood.

‘Now you understand. In the Aett, at the hearth-side, when the skjald speaks, then and only then do we allow the fear back. And only if the account is good enough.’

‘Letting yourself feel fear? That’s your release?’

Longfang nodded.

‘So what sort of account? A tale of war, or of hunting an ocean orm and–’

‘No, no,’ said Longfang. ‘Those are things we can kill, even if it’s hard and we don’t succeed every time. There is no fear there. A skjald has to find a story about something we can’t kill. I told you that. Something that is proof against our blades and our bolts. Something that will not fall down when you strike it with a back-breaker. Something with a thread that cannot be cut.’

‘Maleficarum,’ said Hawser.

‘Maleficarum,’ the priest agreed.

He looked at Hawser, and coughed again, aspirating more particles of blood.

‘Make it a good one, then,’ he said.

‘I was born on Terra,’ said Hawser.

‘Like me,’ put in Longfang proudly.

‘Like you,’ Hawser agreed. He began again. ‘I was born on Terra. Old Earth, as it was called in the First Age. Most of my life, I worked as a conservator for the Unification Council. When I was about thirty years old, I was working in Old Franc, in the centre of the great city-node Lutetia. It was ruins, most of it, ruins and sub-hive slums. I had a friend. A colleague, actually. His name was Navid Murza. He’s dead now. He died in Ossetia about a decade later. He wasn’t a friend at all, really. We were rivals. He was an extremely accomplished academic and very capable, but he was ruthless too. He’d use people. He didn’t care who he had to go through to get what he wanted. We worked together because that’s how things had turned out. I was always wary of him. He frequently took things too far.’

‘Go on,’ said Longfang. ‘Describe this Murza so I can see him.’

A clavier was playing. It was a recording, one of the high quality audio files that Seelia insisted on listening to in the pension. Hawser was sure that Murza had put it on. Hawser was sure that Murza was sleeping with Seelia. The woman was gorgeous and dark-skinned, with a cloud of tawny hair. During the first few days of the Lutetian placement, she’d seemed quite interested in Hawser. Then Murza had turned up the charm and that had been that.

If Murza had put the music on, then Murza had got back to the pension ahead of him. They’d become separated during the headlong flight. Hawser let himself in through the side entrance, using the gene-code keypad, and made sure the shutters were secure. The work gang who had tried to trap them at the old cathedral site knew where they were based. Some of them had come to the pension to discuss details with members of the Conservatory team.

Hawser took off his coat. His hands were unsteady. They’d nearly been beaten. They’d been threatened and nearly been assaulted, and they’d been forced to run for their lives, and adrenaline was thumping around his body, and that still wasn’t the reason he felt so badly shaken.

It was getting dark. He turned on some glow-globes. The whole team had scattered into the backstreets. They’d make their way back to the pension, one by one, given luck and time.

Hawser poured himself an amasec to steady his nerves. The bottle of ten year-old, his preference, was missing from the tray. He made do with the cheaper stuff. The decanter clink-clinked against the glass in his fidgety hands.

‘Navid?’ he called out. ‘Navid?’

There was no answer except the melody of the clavier, an old pastoral piece.

‘Murza!’ he shouted. ‘Answer me!’

He poured himself another amasec and went up the stairs into the dorm level.

The pension was a fortified manse in a gated block called Boborg, just off a thoroughfare called Sanantwun. It was one of a number of safe-homes that a big Uropan mercantile house used as accommodation for visiting trade delegates, and the Conservatory had leased it for a three-month period. It came furnished, with servitor staff, and was as safe as anywhere in Lutetia. The city was a sprawling, blackened, uncouth place, venerably old, but deteriorating into slums. Though Hawser appreciated it for its history, he couldn’t understand why anyone would choose to live there any more if they didn’t have to. For the wealthy and aristocratic who still dwelt in the city-node, and there were many enclaves, surely the Atlantic platforms offered a much higher standard of living, and the superorbital plates vastly more security.

Halfway up the stairs, at the turn, there was a tall slit of a window that allowed a view of the city over the block wall. It was getting dark, and the roofs were a lumpy black slope like the scaly ridge of a reptile’s back. The largest ragged lump, sticking up like a broken thorn, was the dead cathedral. It looked like a fang-shaped mountain, dwarfing other mountains around it. The sun, gone from the sky, had left pink smears on the western horizon behind it. Most of the evening light was the artificially bright and oddly unreal radiance cast by the plate that was presently gliding over the city in a north-western direction. Hawser wasn’t exactly sure which one it was, but from the time of day and the geography of its leading coast, he believed it to be Lemurya.

Hawser sipped his drink. He looked up the rest of the flight of stairs.

‘Murza?’

He went up. The music got louder. He realised how warm it was in the pension. It wasn’t just the amasec in his belly. Someone had cranked the heating system right up.

‘Murza? Where are you?’

Most of the bedrooms were dark. Lamplight and clavier music were coming out of the room Murza had picked when the team first moved in.

‘Navid?’

He went in. The rooms were only small, and Murza’s was almost stifling with heat. It was cluttered too, piled high with kit bags, discarded clothes, books, data-slates. The music was playing from a small device beside the bed. Hawser saw female garments jumbled amongst the others on the floor and a kitbag that wasn’t Murza’s. Seelia had moved her lovely, trusting self in with him.

Murza had left Seelia to run home on her own through the slum-streets of Lutetia after curfew, which was fairly standard behaviour for Navid Murza.

Hawser took another sip, and tried to quell his anger. Murza had got them all into danger, and not for the first time. That wasn’t the worst of it. The worst of it was something he didn’t really want to consider but knew he was going to have to face up to.

The bedroom wasn’t just hot. It was fuggy. Humid.

Hawser pulled open the folding door into the wash closet.

Murza was sitting in the bottom of the little shower stall with his knees tucked up under his chin and his arms wrapped around his shins. He was naked. Water, hot water from the stream coming out under the stall’s worn plastek bubble, was hosing down on him. He looked forlorn and blank-eyed, his dark hair plastered to his scalp and neck. He was holding the decanter of ten year-old amasec by its neck.

‘Navid? What are you doing?’

Murza didn’t answer.

‘Navid!’ Hawser called, and rapped his knuckles on the clear plastek bubble. Murza looked up at him, slowly focussing. It seemed to take him a long time to recognise Hawser.

‘What are you doing?’ Hawser repeated.

‘I was cold,’ Murza replied. His words came out slurred, and his voice was so quiet, it was hard to hear over the rush of the water.

‘You were cold?’

‘I came back here and I needed to be warm. Have you ever been that cold, Kas?’

‘What happened, Navid? That was a disaster!’

‘I know. I know it was.’

‘Navid, get out of the shower and talk to me.’

‘I’m cold.’

‘Get out of the damn shower, Navid. Come out here and tell me what you think you were playing at setting up a deal like that?’

Murza looked at him and blinked. Water dripped off his eyelashes.

‘Are the others back?’

‘Not yet,’ said Hawser.

‘Seelia?’

‘None of them.’

‘They’ll be all right, won’t they?’ Murza asked. His voice slurred again.

‘No thanks to you,’ Hawser snapped. He softened slightly as he saw the anguished look in Murza’s eyes.

‘They’ll be fine, I’m sure. She’ll be fine. We’ve planned for this. We know the contingency plan, the backup. None of them are stupid.’

Murza nodded.

‘I’m not so sure about you,’ Hawser added.

Murza grimaced and lifted the decanter he was holding to his mouth. A lot of the amasec was already gone. He took a big swig, swallowed some and then swooshed the rest around inside his cheeks as if it was mouthwash.

When he spat into the shower floor, Hawser saw blood swirling away down the chrome drain.

‘What did you do, Navid?’ he asked. ‘What the hell did you do to that man? How did you know how to do it?’

‘Please don’t ask me,’ Murza replied.

‘What did you do?’

‘I saved your life! I saved your life, didn’t I?’

‘I’m not sure, Navid.’

Murza glared at him.

‘I didn’t have to do that. I saved your life.’

He spat again, and more blood swirled in the water.

‘Get out of there,’ said Hawser. ‘You’re going to have to explain everything to me.’

‘I don’t want to,’ replied Murza.

‘That’s bad luck. Get out of that cubicle. I’ll come back in ten minutes. You’ll need to be ready to explain things. Then I’ll decide what we tell the others.’

‘Kas, no one else has to know about–’

‘Get out of there and we’ll discuss it.’

Hawser went down to the common room, refilled his glass and sat in an armchair trying to steady his wits. He’d been at it five minutes when the others came back, first Polk and Lesher, then the twins from Odessa, then Zirian and his pale, tearful assistant Maris. Finally, just as Hawser was really beginning to worry, Seelia appeared, escorted by Thamer.

‘Are we all here?’ she asked, trying to sound confident, but clearly exhausted and rattled. Several of the returning team had already disappeared to wash and change.

‘Yes,’ said Hawser.

‘Even Navid?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Bastard,’ Thamer muttered.

‘I’m going to talk to him,’ Hawser said. ‘Just leave it, please.’

‘All right,’ said Thamer, sounding unconvinced.

Hawser told Polk and the twins to prepare some supper for the team, and got Lesher and Zirian to begin planning some other ideas so that their placement wouldn’t be an entire waste of time. He knew it would be, but at least the semblance of activity kept their minds off the day’s unpleasantness. He couldn’t get the image of the pistol out of his mind. He kept seeing the black hole of the end of its muzzle aiming at him.

He went back upstairs. Murza’s shower was off, and Murza was sitting on the end of his bed wearing an undershirt and combat trousers. He had not bothered to dry himself off. Water dripped from his hair. He’d poured some amasec into a small porcelain cup and was drinking from that, nursing it morosely with both hands. The decanter was on the floor beside him.

‘We shouldn’t have gone into that,’ said Hawser, jumping straight in without preamble.

‘No,’ Murza agreed without looking up.

‘Your call, and it was a bad one.’

‘Agreed.’

‘You assured us the intelligence was good and we’d be safe. I shouldn’t have listened to you. I should have had security checked, and I should have set up a proper route for abort extraction, a vehicle, probably.’

Murza looked up at him.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But you didn’t, and you didn’t because you’re supposed to be able to trust me.’

‘Why do you do it, Navid?’

Murza shrugged. He reached one hand up to his mouth, and probed under his lip with a finger as if one of his teeth was loose. He winced.

‘Do you get greedy?’ Hawser asked.

‘Greedy?’

‘I know what that feels like, Navid. We’re two of a kind. We’re driven by a real hunger to discover and preserve these things, to find the lost treasures of our species. It’s a worthy, worthy cause, but it’s an obsession too. I know it. You know we’re more alike than either of us care to admit.’

Murza raised his eyebrows in a slightly amused agreement.

‘Sometimes you go too far,’ said Hawser. ‘I know I’ve done that. Pushed too hard, paid too much of a bribe, gone somewhere I shouldn’t have gone, faked up some paperwork.’

Murza sniffed. It was a sort-of laugh.

Hawser sat down on the end of the bed beside him.

‘You just take it further than I do, Navid,’ he said.

‘Sorry.’

‘It feels like you don’t care who gets hurt. It feels like you’d sacrifice everyone just to get what you want.’

‘Sorry, Kas.’

‘That’s greedy on a whole new level.’

‘I know.’

‘It makes me think that it’s greedy in a very different way. Not a worthy way, a selfish one.’

Murza stared at the floor.

‘Any truth in that?’ asked Hawser. ‘Is it a selfish flaw, do you think?’

‘Yes. Yes, I think so.’

‘All right.’

Hawser picked up the decanter at Murza’s feet and refilled his own glass. Then he leaned over and poured some amasec into the porcelain cup Murza was clutching.

‘Listen to me, Navid,’ he said. ‘Today you could have got us all hurt or worse. It was a total screw-up. Things like it have happened before. I’m not going to let them happen again. We play by the rulebook. We don’t mess around with safety and take chances from now on, all right?’

‘Yes. Yes, Kas.’

‘All right, let’s draw a line under that. It’s done. Conversation over. Clean slate tomorrow. It’s not what really troubles me, and you know that.’

Murza nodded.

‘You did something this evening in the shadow of the dead cathedral. I don’t know what it was. I’ve never seen or heard anything like it. I think you said a word or something like a word to that thug with the gun and knocked him right over.’

‘I think…’ said Murza very quietly. ‘I think I quite probably killed him, Kas.’

‘Fug me,’ Hawser murmured. ‘I need to know how that’s even possible, Navid.’

‘No, you don’t,’ Murza replied. ‘Can we not just leave it? If I hadn’t done it, he would have shot you.’

‘I accept that,’ said Hawser. ‘I accept you did it for good reasons. I accept you saved my life, probably, and reacted in a bad situation. But I need to know what you did.’

‘Why?’ asked Murza. ‘It’d be so much better for you if you didn’t.’

‘Two reasons,’ Hawser replied. ‘If we’re going to work together at all from this point on, I’m going to need to be able to trust you. I’m going to need to know what you’re capable of.’

‘Fair enough,’ Murza replied. ‘And the other reason?’

‘I’m greedy too,’ said Hawser.

Hawser stopped speaking. For a moment, he thought Longfang was asleep, or worse, but the rune priest opened his eyes.

‘You stopped,’ Longfang said in Juvjk. ‘Keep going. This man Murza you talk of, he has maleficarum in him, and yet you toast with him like a brother.’

Blood was still misting out of Longfang’s mouth with every halting breath. The fold of gossamer-white pelt below his chin had become quite dark and wet.

Hawser took a deep breath. His throat was dry. The rumble and flare of the doom come to the Quietude’s cities continued to roll around the vast, firelit darkness of the space around them. In the distance, beyond the high, tiled walls of the mansion complex, apocalyptic firestorms coiled up the far side of the pit, consuming citadel structures in showers of sparks like heartwood caught in a bonfire. Closer at hand, bolters and plasma weapons traumatised the air with their discharge.

‘This man,’ said Longfang, ‘this Murza. Did you kill him? Because of his maleficarum, I mean. Did you cut his thread?’

‘I saved his life,’ said Hawser.

‘You’ve never told me much about your childhood, or your education,’ Hawser remarked.

‘I don’t intend to start now,’ Murza replied.

He hesitated.

‘Sorry. Sorry, I didn’t mean to be sharp. It’s just that it’s all so complicated, and it will take time we haven’t got. Here’s the simple version. I was privately educated. The schooling was a tradition that mixed classical training with an emphasis on the esoteric.’

‘Esoterica is a very important branch of classical study,’ said Hawser. ‘For millennia, occulted knowledge has been passionately, jealously guarded.’

Murza smiled.

‘Why is that, Kas, do you suppose?’

‘Because men have always believed in supernatural forces that would grant them great powers, and give them mastery over the cosmos. We’ve been thinking that way since we watched the shadows play on the cave walls.’

‘There is another possible reason, though, isn’t there?’ Murza asked. ‘I mean, there has to be, logically?’

Hawser sipped his glass and looked at Murza beside him.

‘Is that a serious question?’ he asked.

‘Do I look like I’m serious, Kas?’

‘You’re smiling like an idiot,’ said Hawser.

‘All right… Did what I did tonight look serious?’

‘Are you suggesting that was something? Some kind of… what? It was a trick.’

‘Was it?’ asked Murza.

‘Some kind of trick.’

‘And if it wasn’t, Kas, if it wasn’t, then there’s another, logical reason why certain knowledge has always been very jealously guarded. Wouldn’t you say?’

Hawser stood up. He did it rather suddenly, and swayed, surprised by how considerably the amasec had gone to his head.

‘This is ridiculous, Navid. Are you saying you… you can perform magic? You honestly expect me to believe you’re some kind of sorcerer?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Good.’

‘I haven’t studied for anything like long enough.’

‘What?’ said Hawser.

‘Sorcerer’s the wrong word. Better terms would be adept or magus. At my very junior level, acolyte or apprentice.’

‘No. No, no, no. You had a weapon of some kind. Something small, concealed. Under your cuff or in a ring. Digitally based.’

Murza looked up at him. He ran his left hand through his dripping hair, trying to comb it back. There was a glitter in his eyes, an appealing, predatory thing. Navid Murza had always benefited from excess charisma. It was what carried him so far.

‘You wanted to know, Kas. You asked to know. I’m telling you. Do you want to hear it?’

‘Yes.’

Murza got dressed. Hawser went down to the others and made up some excuse about stepping out with Murza to ‘have a serious talk about his shortcomings’.

Murza was waiting for him on the small, rusty landing platform at the rear of the pension. It was dark and surprisingly cold. The petrochemical whiff of traffic exhaust mixed with the vent-off of cooking smells from the eating houses along Sanantwun. Beyond the secure walls of Boborg, the lights of Lutetia glimmered like a draped constellation.

Murza was wearing a long coat, and he had a small rucksack over his shoulder. He’d called a skike for them, and it was sitting on the platform with its potent little lifter motors revving. They checked with the Boborg watchman, signed their gene-codes out of the gated perimeter, and took the little transponder that would admit them back into the pension’s airspace later.

‘Where are we going?’ Hawser asked as they ducked in under the rain hood and took their seats behind the skike’s centrally-mounted servitor pilot.

‘It’s a secret,’ Murza smiled back, locking his seat belt in place. ‘It’s all about secrets, Kas.’

He pressed the ‘go’ switch, and the skike rose off the platform with a whine, carried by its three engines, the two under the passenger cage and the other one under the nose forks. At rooftop height, it rotated to face north, and then took off at a high rate of knots. From the high vantage, with the cold wind in his face, Hawser could see what seemed like the whole spread of night-shadowed Lutetia. They shared the darkness with the zipping running lights of other skikes and speeders.

‘You look nervous?’ Hawser said to Murza.

‘Do I?’

‘Are you nervous?’

Murza laughed.

‘A little,’ he admitted. ‘This is a big night, Kas. It’s been a while coming. I’ve wanted to tell you about this stuff for years, since we first met, really. I thought you’d understand. I knew you’d understand.’

‘But?’

‘You’re so serious! There was always a danger you’d go all disapproving and older brother on me, and spoil everything.’

‘Am I really like that?’

‘You know you are,’ chuckled Murza.

‘So this interest of yours has been going on for a long time?’

‘When I was still quite young, at the end of my schooling, I was inducted into a private society dedicated to the rediscovery and restoration of the powers man used to command.’

‘So, some foolish schoolboy club?’

‘No, the society is old. Hundreds of years old, at least.’

‘And does it have a name?’

‘Of course,’ smiled Murza. ‘But it’s too soon to tell you that.’

‘But its remit is essentially similar to the Conservatory’s?’

‘Yes, but more specific.’

‘It only concerns itself with what I might regard as occult material?’

‘Yes,’ said Murza.

‘Is this why you joined the Conservatory, Navid?’

‘Conservatory work gave me great access to the sorts of material the society was seeking, yes.’

Hawser glowered. He looked out of the skike to give himself time to check his annoyance. The superorbital plate Lemurya had long since slid out of the sky, but the immense moonshadow of Gondavana was passing silently over the world, east to west like a giant cyclonic pattern, and the slightly smaller ghost of Vaalbara was crossing beneath it, south-west to north-east.

‘So what do I conclude from that, Murza?’ Hawser asked at length. ‘That for years you’ve been passing stuff to this mysterious society? That the Conservatory work is just a cover for you? That you’ve been exploiting the Council’s investments and–’

‘You see? You see this? Just like an older brother! Listen to me, Kas. I have never betrayed the Conservatory. I have never withheld anything, not a single find, not a book, not a page, not a button or a bead. I have dedicated myself to my work. I have never given the society anything that I haven’t given to the Conservatory.’

‘But you’ve shared?’

‘Yes. At certain times, I’ve shared certain discoveries with the society. Isn’t sharing the point? Isn’t that the guiding principle of the Conservatory?’

‘Not in such a clandestine way, Navid. There’s a nuance here, and you know it. You’re observing letter, not spirit.’

‘Maybe this was a mistake,’ said Murza, sullenly. ‘We can get the skike to turn back.’

‘No, we’ve come too far,’ Hawser replied.

‘Yes, I think we have,’ said Murza.

Longfang lurched forwards violently as another spasm of pain shook him. Hawser recoiled. He wasn’t sure what to do. There was little help he could offer. He couldn’t do anything to make the rune priest more comfortable, and he felt in some physical danger from the convulsions. An armoured Astartes, even a dying one, was not something a human being could cradle in his arms.

‘I’m not dying,’ said Longfang.

‘I didn’t say you were,’ said Hawser.

‘I can see it in your eyes, skjald. I can see your thoughts.’

‘No.’

‘Don’t tell me “no”. You’re afraid of me dying. You’re afraid of what to do if that happens. You’re afraid of being left here on your own with a corpse.’

‘I’m not.’

‘And I’m not dying. This is just healing. Sometimes healing hurts.’

Hawser heard a sharp noise from somewhere close by. He glanced at Longfang. The priest had heard it too. Before the priest could do or signal anything, Hawser had put a finger to his lips and signed for quiet. He got up off the ground, and picked up the nearest weapon.

Slowly, with the weapon raised, he edged around the courtyard, checking each archway and cloister. There was no sign of anything. The noise had probably been debris falling from above, a false alarm.

Hawser went back to Longfang, sat down with him again, and handed the weapon over.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I needed something.’

Longfang looked down at the frostblade in his hands and then back up at Hawser.

‘You realise I’d have killed any other man for taking this without asking, don’t you?’ he said.

‘You’d have had to get up first, wouldn’t you?’ Hawser replied.

Longfang laughed. The laugh turned into a bloody cough.

‘I don’t remember Terra,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘I don’t remember it. I’m oldest of all, and I don’t remember it. I was made there, one of the last few that was, and I remind all the brothers of our proud link to the birth-sphere. But the truth is, I remember very little. Dark barrack fortresses, exercise camps, fight-zones, off-world expeditions. That’s all. I don’t remember Terra.’

‘Maybe one day you’ll go back,’ suggested Hawser.

‘Maybe one day you’ll finish this account and tell me something about it,’ replied Longfang.

The skike dropped them in a puddle of floodlights outside a sulking monster of a building in the western quarter of the city-node.

‘The Bibliotech,’ said Hawser.

‘Indeed.’ Murza was smiling, but his nerves were getting worse.

‘I called ahead. I’m hoping they’ll meet you.’

‘They?’

Murza led him up the steps into the vast portico. The ancient stone columns soared away into the darkness above them. The floor was tiled black and white. Hawser could smell the dry air of climate control. He’d been to the Bibliotech many times before, for study and research. Never in the middle of the night. The sodium lamps cast a frosty, yellow glare on everything.

‘The society has had its eye on you,’ Murza said. ‘For quite a while now, in fact. I told them about you, and they think you might be very useful to them. A useful ally, like me.’

‘Do they pay you for what you deliver to them, Navid?’

‘No,’ Murza said quickly. ‘No money. I’m not rewarded financially.’

‘But you are rewarded. How?’

‘With… secrets.’

‘Like how to kill a man with a word?’

‘I shouldn’t have done that.’

‘No, you shouldn’t.’

Murza shook his head.

‘No, I mean that was beyond my skill-set. Way beyond my skill-set. It was an abuse of my power. I don’t have anything like that level of control, which is why I damaged my mouth trying to do it. Besides, Enuncia shouldn’t be used for harm.’

‘What’s “Enuncia”, Navid?’

Murza didn’t answer. They had already taken stimm shots to lessen the effects of the alcohol in their systems, and used enzyme sprays to neutralise the stink of amasec in their mouths. The Bibliotech’s book priests were waiting for them, robed and silent in their ceremonial vestments. Murza and Hawser removed their boots and outer clothes, and the book priests dressed them in the visitor gowns: the soft, cream-felt, one-piece robes with integral gloves and slippers. The book priests fastened the robes around the men’s throats, then gathered their hair and added tight skull caps. Murza took two data-slates out of his rucksack and led the way into the Bibliotech. Book priests opened the towering screen doors.

The grand hall was empty. None of the long reading desks was occupied. Three hundred pendant lights hung from the high ceiling on long brass chains, and lit the great length of the room in pairs that marched away from them. It was like stepping into the stomach of a great whale. The light from the pendant lamps reflected in soft, brushed spots off the warm wood of the reading desks, and glittered wetly off the polished black ironwork of the shelf cages lining the walls.

‘Where are they then?’ Hawser asked.

‘They’re all over the world,’ Murza replied cockily. ‘But I’m hoping a few of the members who operate in Lutetia will be able to meet us here.’

‘This is about recruiting me, then?’

‘This could be the most exceptional night of your life, Kas.’

‘Answer the damn question!’

‘All right, all right,’ Murza hissed. ‘Keep your voice down, the book priests are looking at us.’

Hawser glanced and saw the disapproving faces of the priest officers peering in through decorative holes in the screen door. He lowered his voice.

‘This is about recruiting me?’

‘Yes. I don’t know what it is, Kas. I just can’t seem to keep them happy. They keep wanting more. I thought if I brought you in–’

‘I don’t like any of this, Navid. I don’t like where this is going.’

‘Just wait here, all right? Wait here and then hear them out.’

‘You probably can’t keep them happy because you’re such a liability, Navid! I don’t want to get drawn into your games!’

‘Please, Kas! Please! I need this! I need to show them I can deliver! And you’ll see! You’ll see what it can do for you!’

‘I’m not meeting anybody without knowing their names.’

Murza handed him one of the data-slates.

‘Sit down here. Read this. I’ve marked the file. I’ll be back in a minute.’

He hurried away.

Hawser sighed, and then pulled out a chair at one of the reading tables. He switched on the data-slate, lit it, saw the item Murza had called ‘For Kasper’, and selected it. It had a little marker image in the shape of a toy horse beside it. Preferring to read things on a large view, he plugged the slate into the reading table’s terminal jack, and opened the full screen. A seamless slot in the edge of the wooden desk top opened, and a hololithic screen a metre square projected up in front of Hawser, tilting to the optimum angle.

Images began to form and move.

It was random notes at first, digital facsimile pages copied from Murza’s tattered work journal. Hawser had seen the kind of thing before, because he had peer reviewed and worked up a lot of Murza’s material over the years. They counted on each other for that. Quite often, after a Conservatory expedition, one of them would supervise the physical archiving of any artefacts recovered, while the other collated and audited their working notes for the Imperial Catalogue and for scholastic publication. He was used to Murza’s short-hands, his annoying tics, his habit of skipping, and sometimes annotating laterally.

It was definitely Murza’s rough journal. Hawser found himself smiling at the old copperplate typeface that Murza always chose to work in, and the occasional doodles and sketches that he’d copied into the memory.

The pages seemed to have come from a number of different sources, though. They were extracts, bits that Murza had snipped and sampled from his journal from different times. Hawser recognised notes recorded during more than a dozen different expeditions they had made together over the previous few years. If this was all linked to Murza’s underlying obsession, then his madness did indeed run back a long way. Hawser saw reference to an expedition to Tartus that he knew Murza had made the year before their first meeting.

He looked up from the light screen. A sound.

One of the book priests, perhaps? There was no sign of anyone.

He went on reading, trying to make sense of what Murza had loaded into the file. There seemed to be no particular connection between the facts and locations Murza had put together. What was he missing? What had Murza found?

Just his own madness?

He looked up again.

He could have sworn that he’d heard footsteps, soft felt steps approaching across the stone tiles of the Bibliotech floor. Murza returning, perhaps.

There was no one there.

Hawser got to his feet. He walked down the table to the far end and back again. He stopped. He swung around sharply.

He thought he caught a glimpse of someone flitting past the backlit holes of the main screen doors. Just a glimpse. A robed figure.

‘Navid?’ he called out.

There was no reply.

He went and sat down again, and turned the display to the next sequence of pages. These were annotated pictures of excavation finds, artefacts removed from dig sites around the world. The annotations were all in Murza’s style. Two of the artefact specimens were from lunar excavations.

Had Murza been to the moon? He’d never said so. That was special permit work. You needed direct Council authority.

Hawser sat back for a moment. Maybe this was Murza simply studying artefacts retrieved by other field workers. He tried to find dig dates and source codes.

There weren’t any.

The artefacts were all figurines or amulets, worked in stone, in clay, in metal. They were, in no particular order, a sampler of the uncounted ethnic cultures that had formed the long and half-known patchwork of mankind’s history. Some were a thousand years old, some were tens of thousands. Some were so old or obscure in origin that it was impossible to cite their provenance. There was no commonality of age, or geographical location, no shared thread of ritual significance or religious practice, no unity of script or language. A five hundred year-old Panpacific Dumaic battle standard had been placed in the file between a four thousand year-old ceremonial synapse shunt from the Nanothaerid Domination and a thirty thousand year-old votive bowl from Byzantine Konstantinopal. There was absolutely no–

There was one linking element.

Hawser began to see it. He was trained to notice these things, and he’d been doing his job well for a long time. He had a memory that leaned towards the eidetic, and as he switched between the holo-images, rotating some in three dimensions with quick gestures of his felt-gloved hands, he saw what Murza had seen.

Eyes. Stylised eyes. A whole varied symbology of eyes, of eye-like dots, of circumpuncts, of monads, of omphalos, of aversion marks.

‘The all-seeing singularity,’ Hawser whispered to himself. You idiot, Navid. This is so simplistic. Every culture in human history has noted and reflected the significance of the eye in its ritual and art. You are making connections where there are no connections. These tiny similarities are only due to the fact that all of these things were made by human beings. For fug’s sake, Navid. You’re seeing some kind of conspiracy in history, some kind of illuminating tradition, an occult continuity, and it’s all nonsense! Your mind is simply making sense of shadows on the cave wall! There is no sense! They’re only shadows, Navid, they’re only–

Hawser blinked. His skin was prickling. It was the dry heat of the Bibliotech and the over-warmth of the felt robes. He had stopped at the annotated image of an uraeus or wedjat. It was an amulet, partially damaged, formed in the traditional eye-and-teardrop shape. Navid’s careful note indicated it was between thirty and thirty-five millennia old, and was composed of carnelian, gold, lapis lazuli and faience.

‘The wedjat/uraeus perfectly typifies ABSOLUTELY ambiguity of eye as symbol/motif,’ Navid’s rambling note went on, ‘espc. in the Faeronik Era, it seems it was both a talisman of protection, of guarding, AND of wrath & malice. It is good & evil AT ONCE, it is good & light and dark, it is positive & negative. The wedjat, later known as the Eye of Horus, may perhaps be said to represent DUPLICITY: a thing or person that can present one face to the world & then turn to present a contrary aspect. But this ‘traitorous’or ‘treacherous’ interpretation may be offset/modified/qualified by notion that wedjat is COSMOLOGICALLY NEUTRAL. Eye is both aggressive AND passive, protective AND proactive. Alignment depends upon WHO or WHAT is employing device.’

It was a simplistic conclusion, one that Hawser felt was beneath Murza’s range as a scholar. Why had Navid made these jottings with such haste and imprecision. Hawser wondered–

Hawser wondered why he couldn’t stop looking at the eye on the hololithic projection. It was gazing at him, as if challenging him to look away and defying his dismissal of Navid Murza’s scribblings. It was staring at him. It was unblinking. The pupil was static, black iris set in blue, hard as the sky. It made his eyes water. He couldn’t blink. He couldn’t break its stare. He tried to turn his head or fight off the force that was pinning his eyelids open and making his eyeballs itch and well up. His hands tightened on the edge of the reading table. He tried to push himself away, push himself back, break contact, as if the image was a live electrical wire he had brushed against and couldn’t break away from. It was like trying to haul out of the undertow of a bad dream that didn’t want to let him go.

The eye was no longer blue.

It was gold and black-pinned.

The back of his head hit the floor with a crack. Pain arrowed into his skull. He’d managed to tip his chair over and had ended up on his back. With his felt-slippered feet sticking up in the air, it would have been comical, except for the pain. He’d struck himself a serious blow hitting the floor.

Maybe he was concussed. He felt sick.

He felt weird.

What had just happened? Had Murza built some kind of hypnotic feedback pattern into his file? Was there some subliminal imaging?

He got up, and leaned hard on the edge of the table to steady himself. Then he pulled the data-slate link out of the table-jack without looking directly at the hololithic display. The light screen went out. He took a few deep breaths, and then leaned down and righted the chair. Bending over made his head pound and his stomach slosh. He stood up straight again to get some stability.

There was someone at the far end of the room.

The figure was about twenty metres away, at the end of the reading tables, standing by the inner stacks furthest from the screen door entranceway. It was looking at him.

He couldn’t see its face. It was wearing the same soft, beige felt robes of the Bibliotech he was, but it had raised the suit’s hood, like a monk’s cowl. Its arms were by its side. Everything about its outline was soft, almost plump. In the cream library robes, it looked like the naked form of a person who had lost great amounts of weight very dramatically, and whose flesh had become baggy and empty. In the Bibliotech’s half-light, it looked like a ghost.

Hawser called out, ‘Hello?’

His voice rolled around the twilight cavern of the Bibliotech like a marble in a foot locker. The figure did not move. It was staring right at him. He couldn’t see its eyes, but he knew it was. He wanted to see its eyes. He felt as if he needed to.

‘Hello?’ he called out again.

He took a step forwards.

‘Navid? Is that you? What are you doing?’

He walked towards the figure. It remained where it was, staring at him, its creamy form so soft in the gloom, it seemed phantasmal.

‘Navid?’

The hooded figure turned suddenly and began to walk away towards the carved black ironwork screen into the inner stacks.

‘Wait!’ Hawser called out. ‘Navid, come back! Navid!’

The hooded figure kept walking. It passed under the ironwork frame and disappeared into the shadows.

Hawser started to run.

‘Navid?’

He entered the inner stacks. Rows of shelving fanned out before him in the low light. The beautifully made wooden stacks were each twelve metres high, and each row ran off as far as he could see. Sets of brass library steps with complex gears were attached to each stack at intervals and could be run along the shelves on inertia-less rails to allow readers access to the higher levels. As Hawser moved, his body heat triggered catalogue tags on adjacent shelves. Hololithic tags lit up, and a pleasant voice spoke.

Eastern Literature, Hol to Hom.

Eastern Literature, sub-section, Homezel, Tomas, works of.

Eastern Literature, Hom to Hom continued.

‘Mute,’ Hawser instructed. The pleasant voice faded. The hololithic tags continued to flare up and then gradually fade as he hurried past.

‘Hello?’ he called. He ducked back and tried another row. How could a walking figure have vanished so quickly?

He caught movement out of the corner of his eye, and turned in time to see the hooded figure, just for a second, as it crossed a division between stacks. He broke into an urgent sprint to catch up with it, but when he got to the division, there was no sign.

Except a couple of hololithic shelf tags slowly fading away again, as if passing body heat had only recently brought them to life.

‘Navid! I’ve had enough of this!’ Hawser yelled out. ‘Stop playing games!’

Something made him turn. The hooded figure was behind him, right behind him, silent and ghostly. It slowly raised its hands up from its sides, raising them out straight like wings, or like a celebrant priest invoking a deity.

The softly gloved right hand held a knife.

It was a ceremonial blade. An athame. Hawser recognised its form at once. It was a sacrificial blade.

‘You’re not Navid,’ he whispered.

‘Choices have to be made, Kasper Hawser,’ said a voice. It wasn’t Murza, and it wasn’t the hooded figure either. Fear crushed Hawser’s heart.

‘What choices?’ he managed to ask.

‘You have much to offer, and we would be pleased to have a relationship with you. It would be of mutual benefit. But you have to make a choice, Kasper Hawser.’

‘I still don’t understand,’ Hawser replied. ‘Where’s Murza? He said he was bringing me to meet with the people he works with.’

‘He did. He has. Navid Murza is a disappointment. He is rash. He is unreliable. An unreliable servant. An unreliable witness.’

‘So?’

‘We are looking for someone more suited to our needs. Someone who knows what he’s looking for. Someone who can recognise the truth. Someone who can see with better eyes. You.’

‘I think you’ve mistaken me for some kind of idiot who wants to join a pathetic secret club,’ Hawser answered fiercely. ‘Take off that stupid hood. Let me see your face. Is that you, Murza? Is this another of your stupid games?’

The hooded figure took a step forwards. It almost seemed to glide.

‘You have to make a choice, Kasper Hawser,’ said the voice.

Hawser realised the voice was coming from all around him. It definitely wasn’t coming from the figure. It was the soft and pleasant system voice of the stack shelves. How could anything or anyone speak to him through the Bibliotech’s artificial system?

‘You have to make a choice, Kasper Hawser.’

Hawser heard Navid cry out. It wasn’t a vocalisation. It was a tremor of pain. He turned his back on the hooded figure, and started to stride down the aisle, not quite running, but moving more urgently than a walk.

‘You have to make a choice,’ the shelves whispered to him as he walked by. ‘You have to make a choice. See for us, and we will show you such things.’

‘Navid?’ Hawser called out, ignoring the voice,

A four-way junction in the stacks lay ahead. A set of library steps had been rolled to the end of one of the adjacent stacks, and Murza had been bound to its brass rail by his wrists. He was lying on the floor, half twisted, with his legs stretched out into the centre of the junction area and his arms pulled up painfully by the restraint. He looked half-drugged, or woozy as if he’d been felled by violence.

There were six more hooded figures standing in a vague semi-circle around him.

‘You have to make a choice,’ said the voice.

‘What are you doing to him?’ Hawser demanded.

‘You have to make a choice. See for us, and we will show you such things. Things you cannot imagine.’

Murza let out a low moan.

Hawser ignored the hooded figures and crouched down by Murza. He tilted the man’s face up. Murza was flushed and sweaty. Fear pricked his eyes.

‘Kas,’ he stammered. ‘Kas, help me. I’m so sorry. They like you. You interest them.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know! They won’t tell me! I just wanted to make an introduction, that’s all. Show that I was useful to them too, that I could bring them the people they needed.’

‘Oh, Navid, you’re such a fool…’

‘Please, Kas.’

Hawser looked up at the robed figures behind him.

‘We’re going to walk out of here now,’ he said, with more conviction than he actually felt. ‘Navid and I, we’re going to get up and walk out of here.’

‘You have to make a choice, Kasper Hawser,’ said the pleasant, artificial voice.

‘No, I don’t.’

‘Yes. We have extended an invitation to you. We do not extend invitations like this to just anybody. You are a rare creature, and this is a rare offer. Do not underestimate the potency of the things we are inviting you to share. They are the things you have spent your life seeking.’

‘This is a mistake,’ said Hawser.

‘The only mistake would be if you said no, Kasper Hawser,’ said the voice. ‘A yes is far simpler. The signifier of yes should be easy for a man of your education to recognise. It is around you.’

Hawser blinked. He looked at Murza, the figures, the looming shapes of the stacks, the extending perspective of the aisles.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘A ritual conducted on a crossed point, representing the unity of approaching directions. Eight adepts offering admission to one novitiate. Identities are masked, representing the mysteries awaiting beyond initiation. This is a variation on the initiation rites of the witch-cults of the Age of Strife. Which one? The Knower Sect? The Illuminated? The Cognitae?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said the voice.

‘No, because that’s the whole sell, isn’t it?’ said Hawser. ‘Caveat emptor. The initiate gets to know nothing: no truths, no names, no identities, until after initiation, when it’s too late. Revelation breaks the compact of secrecy. I know what you want from me.’

‘You have a choice to make.’

‘Eight adepts, but there can be only eight. The sacred number. One must step aside to let a replacement in. And one has made a mistake and broken the compact of secrecy.’

Murza moaned again. He pulled weakly at his bonds, making the set of brass library steps rattle.

The hooded figure with the athame held the blade out to Hawser.

‘Oh, please, Kas,’ Murza whimpered. ‘Please.’

Hawser took the blade.

‘You really have got yourself in a mess, Navid,’ he said.

Hawser made a quick, simple, strike with the dagger. Murza yelped. The cord binding his wrists parted.

Hawser turned to the hooded figures, brandishing the athame.

‘Now fug off!’ he said.

The semicircle of figures hesitated for a moment. Then they began to tremble. Each soft, cream suit began to shudder, as if pressurised air hoses had been attached to them to inflate them. They swelled slightly, in ugly, lumpen ways that evoked malformation and defect, and they began to writhe, stirred by ethereal things moving inside them. The felt suits grew plump, distending like balloons. A whine began, a high-pitched note growing louder and louder. It was a shrill wail coming from the stack voice system. Murza and Hawser clamped their hands to their ears. When the noise reached its peak, it cut off abruptly. The hoods of the shuddering figures slipped back and released vapour into the gloomy air. The vapour was golden and it vanished almost as soon as it emerged, like smoke, from the neck holes of the suits. Empty and slack, the seven felt body-robes fell softly onto the floor.

Hawser stared down at the empty suits, at the impossibility of them. There had been men inside them. Even the most subtle and fine-scale teleportation work could not have removed them from inside their robes. He realised he was breathing hard, and tried to contain his panic. He had a peculiar fear inside him, a kind he only rarely experienced, a kind that had followed him from childhood at the commune, from the nightmares he’d had of something scratching at the door.

Murza was clinging to the base of the library steps he’d been tied to. He was sobbing.

‘Get up, Murza,’ Hawser said. He felt something on his cheek, something too cold for a tear.

It had begun to snow in the library.

The snow was gentle and silent. It drifted down out of the fusty darkness above the stack tops, and glittered like starshine as it passed through the glow of the aisle lamps.

‘Snow?’ Hawser whispered.

‘What?’ Murza murmured.

‘Snow? How can it be snow?’ Hawser said.

‘What are you talking about?’ Murza said, not really interested.

Hawser stepped away from him, looking up into the darkness, his hands out, upturned, to feel the cold sting of snowflakes landing on his palms.

‘Great Terra,’ he whispered. ‘This isn’t right. Snow, that’s not right.’

‘Why do you keep talking about snow?’ Murza moaned.

‘This isn’t how it happened,’ said Hawser.

‘It’s enough like how it happened for the story to stay true,’ said Longfang.

Tra’s rune priest was lying at the mouth of the aisle to Hawser’s left, propped up against the stack as if it was the orange-tiled wall of a mansion in a city near another star. The blood down his front had caked dry like rust, and he was no longer breathing out a bloody steam, but his lips were wet and red, in sharp contrast to his almost colourless skin.

‘How can you be here with me?’ Hawser asked.

‘I’m not,’ said Longfang, his voice a sigh. ‘You’re here with me. Remember that? This is only your account.’

‘Kas?’ Murza called. ‘Kas, who are you talking to?’

‘No one,’ said Hawser.

The snow was falling a little more heavily. Hawser knelt down beside Longfang.

‘So, did you like my story?’

‘I did. I felt your fear. I felt his more.’

Longfang nodded his head towards Murza.

‘Who are you talking to, Kas?’ Murza called out. ‘Kas, what’s happening?’

‘He got in over his head,’ Hawser said to Longfang.

‘He was never trustworthy,’ the priest replied. ‘You should have smelled that on him from the start. In your tale, he was nicer, a better friend to you, than he is now I see him myself. You’re too trusting, skjald. People use you because of that.’

‘I don’t think that’s true,’ said Hawser.

‘What isn’t true?’ Murza whined.

‘You look old,’ said Longfang looking up at Hawser.

‘I’m a lot younger here than I am as you know me.’

‘We made a better you,’ replied Longfang.

‘Why is it snowing in here?’ asked Hawser.

‘Because the snow comforts me,’ said Longfang. ‘It’s the snow of Fenris. Of winter approaching. Get me up.’

Hawser reached out his hand. The priest took it and got to his feet. There seemed to be no weight to him this time. He left a pool of blood on the library floor.

The snowfall grew a little heavier.

‘Come on,’ he said. He started to shuffle down the aisle. Hawser walked with him.

‘Kas? Kas, where are you going?’ Murza called out behind them.

‘What happens?’ Longfang asked.

‘I’ll take him back to the pension, clean him up. We do some soul-searching. I try to weigh up the huge asset he represents to the Conservation programme in terms of his scholarship, ability and sheer tenacity against the huge liability of him consorting with dilettante occultists.’

‘What do you decide?’

‘That he was a valuable commodity. That I should keep any inquiry internal. That I believed him when he swore to me he was renouncing all his old connections and associations so he could dedicate himself to th–’

‘You should have smelled his treachery.’

‘Maybe. But for ten years after that night we worked together. There was never any more trouble. He was a superb field researcher. We kept working together until… until he was killed in Ossetia.’

‘There was never any more trouble?’ asked Longfang.

‘No.

‘Never?’

‘Never,’ said Hawser.

‘Kas?’ Murza’s voice echoed out. It was a long way behind them, muffled by the distance and the snow. ‘Kas? Kas?’

‘So you liked the account?’ Hawser asked. ‘It amused you? It distracted you?’

‘It was amusing enough,’ said Longfang. ‘It wasn’t your best.’

‘I can assure you it was,’ said Hawser.

Longfang shook his head. Droplets of blood flecked from his beard.

‘No, you’ll learn better ones,’ he said. ‘Far better ones. And even now, it’s not the best you know.’

‘It’s the most unnerving thing that happened to me in my old life,’ said Hawser with some defiance. ‘It has the most… maleficarum.’

‘You know that’s not true,’ said Longfang. ‘In your heart, you know better. You’re denying yourself.’

‘What do you mean?’

The snow had become quite heavy. It was lying on the ground, and their feet were crunching over it. Hawser saw his breath in the air in front of him. It was getting lighter. The stacks were just black slabs in the blizzard, like stone monoliths or impossibly giant tree trunks.

‘Where are we going?’ Hawser asked.

‘Winter,’ said Longfang.

‘So this is a dream too?’

‘No more than your tale was, skjald. Look.’

The snow was a kind of neon white, scorching the eye as it reflected a sun high up on a noon apex, the brief, bright bite of a winter day.

The air was as clear as glass. To the west of them, beyond a vast, rolling field of snow and a mighty evergreen forest, mountains rose. They were white, as clean and sharp as carnassials. Hawser realised the murderous gunmetal skies behind them weren’t storm clouds. They were more mountains, greater mountains, mountains so immense the sheer scale of them broke a man’s spirit. Where their crags ended, buried like thorns in the skin of the sky, the black-hearted wrath of the winter season Fenrisian storms were gathering and clotting, angry as patriarch gods and malign as trickster daemons. In no more than an hour, two at the most pleading limits of a man’s prayers, the sun would be gone and the light too, and the storms would have come in over the peaks on their murder-make. The fury would be suicidal, like men rushing a firm shield wall, and the snow-clouds would disembowel themselves on the mountain tops and spill their contents on the valley.

‘Asaheim,’ said Hawser, so cold he could barely speak. It felt as if all of his blood had gone solid.

‘Yes,’ said Longfang.

‘A whole great year I lived in the Aett, I never went outside of it. I never saw the top of the world.’

‘Now you’re seeing it,’ said Longfang.

‘What are we doing?’

‘We’re being quiet,’ said Longfang. ‘This is my tale.’

The rune priest began to advance down the long white shoulder of the vast snow field. His head was low, his stance wide-spaced. The gossamer-white pelt across his back caused him to almost vanish into the lying snow. He had a long steel spear in his right hand.

Hawser followed him, head down, putting his feet in Longfang’s footprints. The prints were shallow: the snow was as hard as rock. Their breath came out of their mouths in long sideways streams like silk banners.

Snow stopped its slow, gentle fall and began coming in from the direction of the mountains, loose flakes driven by the wind in circling, dizzy patterns. Hawser felt it sting his face. The nature of light in the world around them changed. A shadow against the sky tilted. The horizon was filling up with a grey vapour. The sun seemed to look away. It was as though a veil had been drawn, or a screen pulled across a door. There was still sunlight, bright yellow sunlight, at the top of the sky, and it was reflecting its neon-burn off the ridge of the snow line, but down where they were, the snow was suddenly a dark, cold pearl colour.

Longfang pointed. Down at the tree line, huge, slow shapes processed in a loose, plodding group. They were vast quadruped herbivores, part bison, part elk, darkly pelted in black, woolly coats. Their bone antler branches were the size of tree canopies. Hawser could hear the snort and huff of them.

‘Saeneyti,’ whispered Longfang. ‘Stay low and quiet. Their antlers work as acoustic reflectors. They’ll hear us long before they’re in spear-throwing range.’

Hawser realised he had a spear of his own.

‘Are we hunting?’

‘We’re always hunting,’ said Longfang.

‘So if they heard us, they’d run?’

‘No, they’d turn on us to defend the calves. Those antlers are longer and sharper than our spears, skjald. Remember to put that in your account.’

‘I thought this was your account, priest?’

Longfang grinned.

‘I just want you to get the details right.’

‘All right.’

‘And watch the tree line,’ Longfang added.

Hawser turned to look at the edge of the forest. He could see its shadowed, evergreen blackness through the snow. The towering tree trunks looked like the ends of Bibliotech book stacks. He knew that even in full sunshine, light didn’t dare penetrate the mossy darkness of the fir glades.

‘Why?’ he asked.

‘Because we may not be the only ones hunting,’ Longfang replied.

Hawser swallowed.

‘Priest?’

‘Yes?’

‘What is the point of this tale? What is the purpose of telling it to me?’

‘Its point is its point.’

‘Very gnomic. I mean what am I supposed to learn from it?’

‘It’s about time we trusted you with one of our secrets,’ Longfang replied. ‘A good one. A blood one.’

As if to emphasise the word, Hawser realised he could suddenly smell blood. He could smell Longfang’s blood. Immediately afterwards, he smelled something else too: the dung-stink and ferment-odour of cattle. He could smell the saeneyti.

The wind had changed. It was bringing the stink of the herd up towards them. The clouds moved, shoved by the wind, racing and scudding. The sun came back out and turned its glare on them like a lamp. They were black dots in a broad neon snow field.

They were painfully visible.

The big bull leading the herd turned its bearded head and made a booming, trumpeting sound through nostrils the size of sewer pipes. It shook its crown of antlers. The herd took off in agitation, hooting and braying, waddling their huge bodies away double-time, kicking up powder snow.

The bull peeled away from the fleeing herd and came back up the slope.

‘Shit!’ said Hawser. He hadn’t fully appreciated the size of the creature. Four, perhaps five metres tall? How many tonnes? And the width of those antlers, like the spread wings of a drop-ship.

‘Move yourself!’ Longfang shouted. He had his arm crooked back, the spear locked to throw, standing his ground. The bull was coming on. It was too big, too tall, too cumbersome to develop any real speed, but it was inexorable and it was angry.

‘I said move!’ Longfang cried.

Hawser started to stumble across the snow away from Longfang.

‘No. To the side. The side!’ Longfang ordered.

Hawser was running away from Longfang and the approaching bull. If it ran Longfang down, it would simply run him down too. Longfang intended him to turn wide, out of its line of charge.

Given the breadth of its antler crown, that was going to be some distance.

The snow was hard to run on. He was already out of breath. It felt like he was struggling with his old, human body, the one he had worn before Fenris, the weak, aging Kasper Hawser. Every step was an effort to lift his feet high enough to clear the snow. He had to bound. The light, fluorescent-bright, burned his eyes.

He looked back in time to see Longfang cast. The spear flashed in the bright sunlight. It seemed to strike the huge beast, but it vanished against shaggy black hair. The bull saeneyti kept coming. Longfang vanished in a welter of pulverised snow.

Hawser yelled the priest’s name involuntarily.

The bull swung towards him.

Hawser turned and fled. He knew it was futile. He could hear its muffled thunder, its snorting and grunting, the oceanic surge of its gastric caverns. He could smell its rank breath, its spittle, its giant mauve tongue. It boomed again like a carnyx.

Hawser knew he wasn’t going to outrun it. Expecting an antler spike to split through his torso from the back at any moment, he turned and threw his spear.

It weighed too much. It didn’t even reach the saeneyti, even though the bull was closing the distance and was scarcely five metres away.

Hawser fell on his backside. Wide-eyed and helpless, he watched death ploughing towards him, head down.

A black wolf hit the saeneyti from the side. It looked like a normal wolf, until Hawser tried to reconcile the size of it compared to the saeneyti bull, which he knew to be the size of the very largest prehistoric Terran saurians. The wolf had gone for the nape of the neck. It had closed its jaws just in front of the humped shoulder mass where the saeneyti carried its winter fat.

The bull lifted its head and let out an excruciating, throttled noise. It tried to twist its head to hook the predator with its crown of antlers and toss it away, but the wolf was tenacious and held on. Jaws clamped, it made a wet leopard-growl that was half muffled by the bull’s pelt.

Blood as black as ink was running down the bull’s wattle, spattering the snow between its front feet. It was streaming down through the black wool. The saeneyti snorted again, pink froth foaming at its mouth and nose. Its eyes were wild and mad, red-rimmed, staring insanely out from under the thick fringe of winter fur.

It went down hard, front legs collapsing first. It fell onto its front knees, and then the back end followed. Finally, its body went over in a catastrophic roll onto its side like the hull of a capsizing yacht. Hawser could see the saeneyti’s huge, protruding tongue shuddering between its yellow teeth, lips peeled back. Its breath pumped out in clouds like a malfunctioning steam engine. Blood vomited out of its mouth across the snow and lay there smoking.

The wolf maintained its grip until the bull gave up its last, trembling rumble, then it let go. Blood dripped from its snout. It padded around the massive corpse twice, moving quickly, head low, sniffing.

It stopped beside the head of its kill, and raised its own head, ears upright, to stare at Hawser. Its eyes were golden and black-pinned. Hawser stared back. He knew if he tried to get back on his feet, the wolf would still be taller than him.

‘There are no wolves on Fenris.’

Hawser looked up. Longfang was standing beside him, staring at the wolf.

‘That’s evidently not true at all,’ Hawser replied in a tiny voice.

Longfang grinned down at him.

‘Try to keep up, skjald. There were no wolves on Fenris until we got here.’

Longfang looked back at the wolf.

‘Twice he’s helped protect you,’ he said.

‘What?’ asked Hawser.

‘He had a different name last time you were in his company,’ said Longfang. ‘Then, he was called Brom.’

The black wolf turned and ran for the forest, accelerating as only a mammalian apex predator can. It vanished into the enormous darkness under the evergreens.

After a few seconds, Hawser saw its eyes staring out of the blackness at them: luminous, gold and black-pinned.

It took him another few moments to realise that there were another ten thousand pairs of eyes watching them from the shadows of the forest.

‘I think you should explain,’ said Hawser. He felt angry, and curiously cold given the heat washing across the courtyard. ‘What do you mean he was called Brom? What do you mean by that?’

Longfang didn’t answer. He stared back at Hawser with a sneering look that defied argument.

‘This is ridiculous!’ Hawser exclaimed. ‘This is just some of your myth-making! This is a mjod story! A mjod story!’

He hoped this would provoke a reaction, stir something in the old rune priest that would make him reveal some actual truth.

Longfang remained silent.

‘Well, I don’t think much of your account then,’ said Hawser.

He heard footsteps behind him and turned. Bear was walking towards him, with Aeska Brokenlip close behind him. They were both spattered with Quietude gore. Hawser became aware again of the constant noise around him, the swirling din of end-war circling the pit.

‘Tell him to speak plainly to me!’ Hawser said to Bear, rising. ‘Tell him not to insult me with riddles!’

Bear crouched down beside the priest. He leaned his axe against the orange-tiled wall and reached out to the priest’s throat. Aeska looked on, wiping spats of blood off his nose.

Bear stood again and looked at Aeska.

‘What?’ asked Hawser.

‘Heoroth Longfang has gone,’ said Aeska.

‘What? No. He’s hurt but he’s mending.’

‘Bio-track on his armour says his thread parted twelve minutes ago,’ said Bear flatly.

‘But I was just talking to him,’ said Hawser. ‘I was just talking to him. I was watching over him while he healed himself.’

‘No, skjald, you were seeing him through the last of the pain,’ said Aeska. ‘I hope your account was a good one.’

‘I was watching over him while he healed!’ Hawser insisted.

Bear shook his head.

‘He was holding on long enough to watch over you,’ he said.

Hawser gazed down at the body of the rune priest propped up in a sitting position against the alien wall. He had words in his mouth, but they were all broken and none of them worked.

Others were approaching. Hawser saw it was Najot Threader, Tra’s wolf priest. He approached with a retinue of thralls clad in cloaks of patchwork skin.

‘Look away,’ said Aeska Brokenlip.

Nine

Twelve minutes

For all of the forty-week voyage, he considered those twelve minutes.

Their work done, Tra left the 40th Expedition to stamp out the ashes of the Olamic Quietude, a miserable effort of funereal cleansing that would eventually take three years, and effectively end the 40th Expedition’s exploration. Tra had been summoned to its next operation. Hawser was not told what it was. He did not ask. He did not expect to be told.

What he did expect was censure for the death of Heoroth Longfang. He felt the loss was essentially down to him and, adding the fact of Longfang’s high status as a veteran, he didn’t hold out much hope for a continuing relationship with the Vlka Fenryka.

Or, indeed, with breathing.

No censure was made. As the ship got under way, the company just gathered quietly to make its respects. Hawser was given simple instructions.

‘They’ll each come to you,’ Bear told him. ‘Learn their accounts.’

‘Who will?’ Hawser asked.

‘All of them,’ Bear replied, as if it was a stupid question.

‘Was that a stupid question?’ asked Hawser.

‘You have no other kind,’ replied Bear. ‘Learn their accounts.’

They came to him, all right. Every single member of Tra, one at a time, or in small groups. They came to Hawser and they told him the stories they had of Heoroth Longfang.

There were a lot of them. Some were multiple versions of the same event, retold by different witnesses. Some were contradictory. Some were short. Some were long and ungainly. Some were funny. Some were scary. Most were fearsome and bloody. Many recounted incidents when Longfang had saved the storyteller’s life, or taught the storyteller a valuable wisdom. There were expressions of gratitude, and respect and appreciation.

Hawser listened to them all and he learned them all, relying on all his eidetic tricks and Conservatory training. By the end of the process, he had committed four hundred and thirty-two discrete accounts of the rune priest to memory.

Some of the stories had been given to him flat and expressionless, matter-of-fact. Others had been related grimly by men moved over the loss. Some had been told to him by men who were plainly poor storytellers, and he’d had to go back several times and quiz the teller to make sense of what he was being told. Some had crucial elements missed out accidentally due to enthusiasm. Some were just tangled messes he’d had to unpick. Some were stories related with mirth, remembering Longfang with considerable affection. In such cases, the process of conveying the stories to Hawser was often interrupted as the tellers struggled to stop laughing so they could finish their accounts.

All the while, listening to the stories with a serious or smiling aspect as was appropriate, Hawser thought of the twelve minutes. Heoroth Longfang had stayed with him for twelve minutes, talking, finishing his story, sharing his truth. Twelve minutes from his bio-track flatlining. Twelve minutes of postmortem survival.

Heoroth Longfang had stolen twelve minutes from the Underverse’s tally-stick for a reason. To keep him safe? To show Hawser something? To prove something?

Once the stories were his, the sending away began. Longfang’s body, held in a stasis casket, would be shipped back to Fenris to be burned out on the ice fields of Asaheim, at some high point overlooking the forest migration trails of the saeneyti where the old priest had liked to hunt, but this was another kind of letting go. The company gathered in one of the ship’s main chambers to feast in memory of Longfang for as many days and nights as Hawser’s account lasted.

Godsmote had shown Hawser some pity. He had warned him to rehearse well, to practise dramatic recitation, to space the stories out so that smaller reflections were worked in between longer epics. He told the skjald that, under no circumstance, should he hurry along. Long rests should be built in, long rests of ten hours or more. These periods of reflection also prolonged the event. The recitations would be done in Juvjk, the hearth-cant, because that was one of the solemn and sacred uses of the hearth-cant. Wurgen terminology could only be used for technical embellishment.

Tra was using a warship called Nidhoggur. Hawser did not imagine that the warships of the Vlka Fenryka resembled the ships of other Legions Astartes except, perhaps, in their basic construction. Hawser had not seen other Astartes warships, but he’d travelled on several Imperial Fleet vessels, and Nidhoggur was a strange craft by comparison. He got the impression that the Vlka Fenryka regarded both their starships and their transatmospherics as boats, and the void simply an extension of the gale-wracked oceans of their home world. Interior spaces had been finished with bone, polished ivory and wood, like the inside of the Aett. It was a Unification Era cruiser that had been progressively altered and adorned until most of its old identity had been lost, and a great deal of new identity imposed.

Environmental controls were set several points down from Imperial standard, so Nidhoggur was darker and colder than any vessel he’d travelled on before. Too much warmth, Hawser was reminded as he shivered in a corner of the living spaces, made a man sluggish. Too much light, and a man’s vision grew blunt. A lamplit dusk prevailed in most of the deck spaces.

The chamber employed for the sending off was a hold space that was left unused except for such events. Only a member of the Vlka Fenryka as venerable as Longfang deserved such a ceremonial farewell.

The hold reminded Hawser of a slice of urban underhive, a piece of favela wasteland from the slums of an old-Terra city. It was dirty and littered, and twilight-dark. Most of the surfaces of the place were blackened with soot. Piles of loose cables, insulation, broken metal spars, ceiling liners and tangled wire suggested that the space had been either vandalised or customised over the years, perhaps both.

Combustible material was dragged in, heaped up, and lit under the scorched vents of the hold’s extractor ducts. Eye-watering smoke filled the chamber. On this deck level, Hawser presumed, the ship’s emergency detection and containment systems had been disabled, or had long since fried out.

He sat by a wall, watching the ceremony take shape. Over time, sitting exactly where he now sat, others had worried away at the wall by the jumping firelight. The ivory panelling lining most of the hold was covered in intricate, hand-done knotwork, the same ancient weave pattern that marked the Rout’s weapons and armour, especially their leatherware. He felt the surface with his fingertips in the shadows, touching where one pattern ended and another took up, blade marks as distinctive as handwriting or voices. He realised how old Nidhoggur was. Two hundred, maybe even two hundred and fifty years old. He thought of the Vlka Fenryka as a well established order, with old and honoured traditions, but this vessel had come out of the fitters’ yards before the Sixth Legion Astartes had even left Terra and been rehoused on bleak Fenris. Hawser had committed most of his life to the search for history, and here it was right under his fingertips. He knew the scale of history, but he’d never really thought about its varying intensities. The long, slow tracts of stability, the abiding Ages of Technology, like endless hot summers, were bland and uneventful compared to the furious two centuries Nidhoggur had witnessed. The remaking of mankind’s fortunes. The rebuilding of mankind’s estate. Would any ship ever last so long or see so much of that which mattered?

Tra assembled. The men came dressed in their pelts and their leatherwork. They were shadows with beast faces, shades with knotwork masks. Hawser could smell the petroleum reek of mjod, mjod in copious quantities. Thralls in horned headdresses and long, ragged cloaks of patchwork hide moved through the assembling company with drink to fill and refill each lanx. They brought red meat too; panniers of it to stoke the accelerated metabolisms of the Astartes.

Drums were sounding. There was no unifying rhythm. It seemed to be more a matter of pride for a man to be belligerently out of tempo with the neighbouring beats. Playing along with crude pipes and trumpets, made from bone and animal horn, the drums were designed to make noise, a kind of assaulting anti-music. Some of the drums were hoops of wood or bone, or even heated and bent tusk that had been covered in tight skins. Others were giant fish scales, or plates of hammered metal that Hawser eventually realised were pieces of armour taken as trophies from enemies. These hardskin drums made battering rows like cymbals or sistra.

In no order of seniority, and apparently casually, the men came up to the main fires and placed offerings in the ash spill. Hawser saw them leave beads or small trophies, claws and fish teeth, small graven figures shaped from bones and wax, and shell cases etched with knotwork scratches and plumed with seabird feathers. When they left a gift, they took a handful of ash and, removing their leather masks or their entire headgear in some cases, marked their faces with smudges of grey. Najot Threader, his head covered in a tight leather mask that crowned in two vast, winter-black antlers, stood by the fires and watched the men make their marks. He spoke to some, stopping them, a hand on their shoulders, making marks of his own sometimes with ash or red paste on their brows or on their cheekbones under their eyes.

‘What do I give?’ Hawser asked.

Fith Godsmote was sitting beside him, gnawing at a handful of raw meat. Hawser could smell the blood, a pervasive metal stink that was turning his stomach.

‘You’ve got your account to give, so that’s enough,’ Godsmote said. ‘But you should go and get marked by the priest.’

‘I’ve got this feeling,’ said Hawser.

‘What?’ asked Oje from the other side of him.

‘This whole thing is going to end up with me ceremonially offered up in Longfang’s memory.’

‘Hjolda!’ Oje laughed. ‘That’s an idea that would please some!’

‘It’s not how it works,’ said Godsmote, wiping his mouth, ‘but I could have a word with the jarl if you like.’

Hawser scowled at him.

‘You think we blame you for Longfang?’ Godsmote asked.

Hawser nodded.

‘That’s not how it works,’ Godsmote repeated. ‘Wyrd sometimes takes and sometimes gives. Some things seem more important than others when they’re not. Other things, they seem less important than others, when in fact they’re the most important things of all. You didn’t take Longfang from us. It was his time to go. And you’ve brought things to the Rout that they’re grateful for.’

‘Such as?’

Godsmote shrugged.

‘Me,’ he said.

‘You’ve got a pretty high opinion of yourself, Fith of the Ascommani,’ said Hawser.

‘I don’t mean it like that,’ said Godsmote. ‘But I’m useful, a useful arm. I’ve done good work for the jarl and the Rout. I wouldn’t be here unless I was meant to be here. But I wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t fallen out of Uppland that spring.’

‘So I wasn’t such a bad star for you, then?’

‘Neither of us would be here unless we were supposed to be here,’ said Godsmote. ‘You see what I’m saying?’

‘I still feel I’m here on sufferance,’ said Hawser.

‘What does that mean?’ asked Godsmote.

‘I feel I’m tolerated because there’s not a lot else you can do with me.’

‘Oh, there were plenty of things we could have done with you,’ said Oje matter-of-factly as he bit into some meat.

‘Ignore him,’ said Godsmote. ‘Look, they’re closing the bounds so we can begin. Go up now and show us the value of a skjald, and you’ll know you’re not with us under sufferance.’

At the exits and entrances of the hold space, members of Tra were using plasteel hand-axes to strike marks of aversion into the hatch sills and door frames, duplicating the device Hawser had seen Bear make on the graving dock. The area was now contained and access from the outside forbidden until the ceremony was played out. The anti-music noise rose to a peak, and then stopped.

Hawser approached the flames.

Najot Threader, wolf priest, loomed over him like a bull saeneyti, his antlered head backlit by the fire. Despite the crackling blaze and the throat-closing smoke, Hawser felt cold. He pulled the fur that Bitur Bercaw gave him close around his throat and shivered inside his clammy bodyglove. Someone, the priest perhaps, had thrown seedcases and dried leaves on the fire, and they were burning with an unpleasantly sweet aroma.

‘Name yourself,’ said Najot Threader.

‘Ahmad Ibn Rustah, skjald of Tra,’ Hawser replied.

‘And what do you bring to the fireside?’

‘The account of Ulvurul Heoroth, called Longfang, as is my calling,’ said Hawser.

The priest nodded, and marked Hawser’s cheeks with grey paste. Then he leaned forwards with a small straw made from a hollow fish bone. Hawser closed his eyes just in time as Najot Threader used the straw to blow a spray of black paint across his eyes.

His tear ducts stinging, Hawser turned to face the company, circling the main fire as boldly as he felt able. He was trying to control his breathing, trying to remember to pace himself and project his voice. His throat was dry.

With a gesture of confidence and command, he held out a hand. One of the thralls obediently handed him a lanx, and Hawser drank without even checking to see if it was mjod. It wasn’t. The thralls were aware of his biological limits and careful not to cripple him by accident.

Hawser took another sip of watered-down wine, rinsed it around his gums, and handed back the drinking bowl.

‘The first account,’ he said, ‘is the story of Olafer.’

Olafer rose from his place amongst one group and nodded, raising his lanx. There was a ragged cheer.

‘On Prokofief,’ Hawser began, ‘forty great years ago, Olafer and Longfang fought against the greenskins. Bitter winter, dark sea, black islands where the greenskins massed in numbers like the shingle on a beach. A hard fight. Anyone who was there will remember it. On the first day…’

Some parts of the account were greeted with roaring enthusiasm, others with grim silence. Some provoked laughter and others barks of sorrow or regret. Hawser warmed to his task, and began to recognise which of his techniques worked well and which seemed to impress the least.

His only real mis-step came when he described some fallen enemies in one account as ‘finally succumbing to the worms in the soil’.

Someone stopped him. It was Ogvai.

The jarl held up a ring-heavy hand. His look of confusion was accentuated by the heavy piercing in his lower lip.

‘What is that word?’ he asked.

Hawser established that the word ‘worms’ wasn’t known to any of the Wolves. Somehow, he’d slipped out of Juvjk and fallen back on his Low Gothic vocabulary.

It was strange, because he knew the Juvjk word for worms perfectly well.

‘Ah,’ said Ogvai, nodding and sitting back. ‘I understand now. Why didn’t you say so?’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Hawser. ‘I have travelled a long way, and picked up as many words as I have stories.’

‘Continue,’ Ogvai instructed.

He continued. He built in the rests he’d been advised to incorporate, and slept for a few hours at a time as the men drank mjod, and talked. Sometimes, the drumming and the anti-music would start up again, and some of the men would dance a sort of furious anti-dance, a wild, heedless, ecstatic frenzy that looked as if they had been possessed or suffered a mass psychogenic chorea. It grew so warm in the chamber that Hawser began to go to the fireside without his pelt when he was called.

It was a test of endurance. He ate what the thralls brought him, and drank copiously to maintain his fluid levels. The stories, even the shortest and most incomplete tales, seemed to crawl by, etching out Longfang’s lifespan slowly, like careful knotwork. Four hundred and thirty-two stories took time to tell properly.

The last of all would be the account of Longfang’s death, a tale that combined Hawser’s memories with those of Jormungndr Two-blade. Hawser knew he would be tired by the time he reached it.

He also knew he had to make it the best of all.

It was still a long way off, with over sixty stories left to tell, when Ogvai rose to his feet. They had stopped to rest. Aeska shook Hawser awake. The drumming was quietening down from another frenzied bout, and dancers were slumping to the deck, laughing and reaching out for mjod.

‘What’s happening?’ Hawser asked.

‘Part of the sending off is the choosing of the next,’ said Aeska.

There were several men in Tra who were alleged to have the sight like Longfang. They also served in priest-like capacities, and one would be selected to fulfil Longfang’s senior role.

They came forwards and knelt in a circle around Ogvai. The jarl’s centre-parted hair fell straight on either side of his face like black-water cataracts. He was stripped to the waist. He tilted his head back and reached out his hands, flexing the huge muscles of his arms, his shoulders and his neck. Grey ash had been smeared on his snow-white flesh. Like Hawser, Ogvai had black paint across his eyes.

In his right hand, he held a ceremonial blade. An athame.

The jarl started to speak, intoning in turn the virtues of each candidate.

Hawser wasn’t listening. The athame, the pose with the arms outstretched, it violently reminded him of the figure in the Lutetian Bibliotech, a story that had been locked in his head for decades, a story he had only brought out again for Heoroth Longfang.

He stared at the athame.

It wasn’t just similar. Kasper Hawser was an expert in these things. He knew about types and styles. This wasn’t a misidentification based on similarity.

It was precisely the same blade.

He rose to his feet.

‘What are you doing?’ asked Godsmote.

‘Sit down, skjald,’ said Oje. ‘It’s not your turn.’

‘How is that the same?’ asked Hawser, staring at the ceremony.

‘How is what the same?’ asked Aeska, annoyed.

‘Sit down and shut up,’ growled another Wolf.

‘How is that blade the same?’ Hawser asked, pointing.

‘Sit down,’ said Godsmote. ‘Hjolda! I’ll smite you myself if you don’t sit down!’

Ogvai had made his choice. The other candidates bowed their faces down to the deck to acknowledge the authority of the decision. The chosen man rose to his feet to face the jarl.

Tra’s new rune priest was young, one of the younger candidates. Aun Helwintr had earned his name because his long hair was as white as deep season snow, despite his age. The leatherwork of his mask was so dark it was almost black, and he wore the pelt of a tawny animal. He was known for his strange, distant manner, his odd bearing, and his habit of getting into impetuous fights that he miraculously survived. Wyrd gathered inside Aun Helwintr in a way that Ogvai wanted to harness.

Some rite was about to take place. Hawser felt the silence close in. He believed himself to be the cause of it.

That was not the case. The Wolves had turned to look towards one of the chamber hatches, golden eyes baleful in the firelight.

A group of thralls stood there, escorting a terrified-looking member of Nidhoggur’s bridge crew. They had entered despite the marks of aversion at the doorways.

Ogvai Ogvai Helmschrot swapped the athame into his left hand and picked up his war axe. He strode across the hold space to dismember them for their violation.

Halfway across the deck, he stopped and checked himself. Only an idiot would ignore a mark and break in on such a private ceremony.

Only an idiot, or a man with a message so important that it couldn’t wait.

‘So you liked the account?’ Hawser asked. ‘It amused you? It distracted you?’

‘It was amusing enough,’ said Longfang. ‘It wasn’t your best.’

‘I can assure you it was,’ said Hawser.

Longfang shook his head. Droplets of blood flecked from his beard.

‘No, you’ll learn better ones,’ he said. ‘Far better ones. And even now, it’s not the best you know.’

‘It’s the most unnerving thing that happened to me in my old life,’ said Hawser with some defiance. ‘It has the most… maleficarum.’

‘You know that’s not true,’ said Longfang. ‘In your heart, you know better. You’re denying yourself.’

Hawser woke with a start. For a terrible, rushing moment, he thought he was back in the Bibliotech, or out on the ice fields with Longfang, or even in the burning courtyard of the Quietude’s sundered city.

But it was all a dream. He lay back, calming down, trying to slow his panicked breathing, his bolting heart. Just a dream. Just a dream.

Hawser settled back onto his bed. He felt tired and unrefreshed, as if his sleep had been sour, or sedative assisted. His limbs ached. Sustained artificial gravity always did that to him.

Golden light was knifing into his chamber around the window shutter, gilding everything, giving the room a soft, burnished feel.

There was an electronic chime.

‘Yes?’ he said.

‘Ser Hawser? It is your hour five alarm,’ said a softly modulated servitor voice.

‘Thank you,’ said Hawser. He sat up. He was so stiff, so worn out. He hadn’t felt this bad for a long time. His leg was sore. Maybe there were painkillers in the drawer.

He limped to the window, and pressed the stud to open the shutter. It rose into its frame recess with a low hum, allowing golden light to flood in. He looked out. It was a hell of a view.

The sun, source of the ethereal radiance, was just coming up over the hemisphere below him. He was looking straight down on Terra in all its magnificence. He could see the night side and the constellation pattern of hive lights in the darkness behind the chasing terminator, he could see the sunlit blue of oceans and the whipped-cream swirl of clouds, and, below, he could see the glittering light points of the superorbital plate Rodinia gliding majestically under the one he was aboard, which was…

Lemurya. Yes, that was it. Lemurya. A luxury suite on the underside of the Lemuryan plate.

His eyes refocussed. He saw his own sunlit reflection in the thick glass of the window port. Old! So old! So old! How old was he? Eighty? Eighty years standard? He recoiled. This was wrong. On Fenris, they’d remade him, they’d–

Except he hadn’t been to Fenris yet. He hadn’t even left Terra.

Bathed in golden sunlight, he stared at his aghast reflection. He saw the face of the other figure reflected in the glass, the figure standing just behind him.

Terror constricted him.

‘How can you be here?’ he asked.

And woke.

The chamber was cold and dark, and he was on the deck under his pelt. He could feel the distant grumble of Nidhoggur’s drive. Nightmare sweat was cold on his gooseflesh.

No one had seen Ogvai since the interruption to the ceremony. Fith said that Tra had received an urgent notification and been retasked, but there was nothing concrete. As usual, Hawser didn’t expect to be told much. He waited a while to see if the ceremony would be resumed, but it was clear the moment had passed. The fires were allowed to go out, and the men of Tra dispersed. Hawser found most of them in the arming chambers, readying their weapons and their battlegear, or in the practice cages. Blades were being whetted so they held the best edge, armour was being polished and adjusted. Small refinements were being added, small trinkets or decorations. Beads and loops of teeth were being wired in place. Marks of aversion were being notched onto the tips of bolder-rounds. In the harder gantry lighting of the arming chambers, Hawser reflected how much like flayed humans the Wolves looked in their leatherwork gear. The knotwork and straked pieces resembled sinews, tendons and sheets of muscle.

No one paid him any heed. His head bubbling with unhappy dreams and a sense that he had slept too long for his own good, he wandered back to the hold space.

The air smelled of cold smoke. He touched the marks of aversion on the door sills, felt the rough metal edges where they, like the others marked in place before them, had been defaced and robbed of potency.

Hawser wandered into the hold space, and stood for a while beside the smouldering heap of the main fire. He saw the glitter of the offerings the men had left in the grey ashes, and the stains of mjod splashed on the decking. He saw the discarded drums and sistra. Thralls had collected up all the lanx dishes and flasks. There were no signs of the ritual items used by either Najot Threader, the wolf priest, or Ogvai.

Go where you like.

That’s what Longfang had told him.

‘You’re a skjald. That’s the one great privilege and right of being what you are. No one in the Rout can bar you, or keep you at bay, or stop you from sticking your nose in.’

Hawser headed for the jarl’s chamber.

Ogvai occupied a stateroom near the core of the starship. If Nidhoggur was Tra’s lair, then the chamber was the darkness at the very back of the cave reserved for the alpha male. It was sparsely furnished, and screened with veils of metal link, like curtains of chainmail. Hawser’s Fenrisian eye found no trace of body heat in the chilly shadows, and his nose detected barely any pheromones in the pelts scattered around the deck.

Adjoining Ogvai’s sleeping chamber was a weaponarium. Most of the items and devices on display were trophies that the jarl had taken from vanquished foes. There were xenos-form weapons whose form and function Hawser could barely imagine: staves, wands, fans, sceptres, small delicate machines. On other shelves and racks were arranged biological weapons: teeth, claws, spines, toe-hooks, mandibles, stingers. Some were preserved in jars of fluid suspension. Others were dried. A few were burnished, as if for use. Hawser paused for a moment to marvel at the grotesque size of some of the specimens. One sickle talon was as long as his arm. There was a quill as big as a harpoon. He tried to imagine the proportions of the creatures that had once been attached to them.

On other stands, firearms and blades were displayed. Hawser hunted along the lines of them until he found the collection of daggers and shorter blades.

There were several athames. Some were Fenrisian. The conservator in Hawser wished to hell he knew where Ogvai had come by the others. They were priceless relics from before the Age of Strife.

‘You could ask him.’

Hawser snapped around. Without hesitating, he had slipped one of the displayed athames off its hooks and aimed it at the shadow that had spoken.

‘It’s one of a number of questions you have for him, isn’t it?’

‘Show yourself,’ said Hawser.

Something took the athame out of his hand. Hawser felt a painful bump, and then he was being strangled, his feet kicking free in loose air.

He had been picked up and hung from the tip of the sickle talon by his pelt. The athame he had been brandishing was embedded in the wall, quivering. He tried to pull away the knot holding the pelt in place. It was hanging him. He couldn’t get his head free. His legs pinwheeled frantically.

He was lifted down and thrown onto the deck, choking and gasping.

Aun Helwintr crouched down beside him, his elbows on his knees.

‘I don’t care who you are,’ said the new rune priest. ‘You don’t pull a blade on me.’

‘I recognise my failing and will be sure to correct it,’ Hawser coughed out, snidely.

‘You were looking for something, weren’t you?’ remarked Aun Helwintr. ‘You were looking for something and it’s not here.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Your mind is loud, skjald.’

‘My what?’

Aun Helwintr gestured to the racks containing the daggers and athames.

‘It’s not here. The particular blade you were looking for.’

Helwintr’s skin was almost gelid blue under his mane of straight, white hair. His features were long and sharp, like a blade, and his eyes were edged in kohl. He looked amused, like some kind of cunning, dangerous boreal trickster-god.

Hawser stared up at the rune priest in quiet alarm. He could hear Aun Helwintr’s voice, but the priest’s lips were not moving.

‘The measure of your surprise, Ahmad Ibn Rustah,’ the rune priest murmured without using his mouth, ‘reflects the unconscious contempt you have for the Sixth Legion Astartes.’

‘Contempt? No–’

‘You cannot hide it. We are barbarians, arctic savages, gene-fixed and dressed up with war-tech, and sent off to do unseemly labour for our more cultured masters. It is a common belief.’

‘I never said that–’ Hawser protested.

‘Or even consciously thought it. But deep down inside you, there is a patronising sense of superiority. You are a civilised man, and you’ve come to study us, like a magos biologis observing some primitive tribe of throwbacks. We live like animals, and we follow shamans. And yet… Great Terra! Could it be that our shamans have real gifts? Genuine powers? Could it be that they are more than just bone-rattling, bead-jangling gothi, out of their heads on mushrooms, howling at the sky?’

‘Psionics,’ whispered Hawser.

‘Psionics,’ Aun Helwintr echoed, smiling. He used his real voice.

‘I had heard that some of the Legions actually had psyker contingents,’ said Hawser.

‘Most of them have,’ replied Helwintr.

‘But the occurrence is so very rare,’ Hawser said. ‘The mutation is a–’

‘The psyker mutation is a priceless asset to our species,’ said Helwintr. ‘Without it, we would be condemned to captivity on Terra. The Great Houses of the Navigators allow us to expand our reach. The astrotelepaths allow us to communicate over the gulfs. But caution must always be exercised. Control.’

‘Why?’

‘Because when you gaze out with your mind, you never know what will stare back.’

Hawser got up and faced the rune priest.

‘Was there a purpose to this demonstration, apart from scaring me?’ he asked.

‘The purpose was the fear,’ Helwintr replied. ‘Just for a second, you thought some kind of fell magic had swept you away. Some kind of maleficarum. You felt the same way that night, years ago, beside that cathedral corpse.’

Hawser looked at him sharply.

‘I can read the pin-sharp memory you shared with Longfang,’ Helwintr told him.

‘Are you saying,’ Hawser began, ‘are you saying that my colleague Navid Murza was a psyker, and I never knew it?’

‘You come from a society that accepts and uses psykers, skjald. On Old Terra, they walked amongst you on a daily basis. Did you recognise them all? On Fenris, could you tell a ranting shaman from a man who truly has the sight?’

Hawser tightened his lips. He had no answer. Helwintr leaned closer, and stared down into Hawser’s eyes.

‘The truth of it all is that your colleague probably wasn’t a psyker. He had found a crude shortcut to something else. And that is the point. That is the lesson. Psyker ability is not a thing of itself. It allows us to draw on a greater power. It is just another path to that same something else. The best path. The safest path. Even then, it’s not without its pitfalls. If you’d care to, you may define maleficarum as any sorcery that is not performed under the most stringent application of psyker control.’

‘Just like that, you tell me I live in a universe of magic,’ said Hawser.

‘Just like that,’ agreed Helwintr. ‘Is it so hard to reconcile with all the other wonders and horrors?’

‘What about the knife?’ asked Hawser. ‘It was the knife.’

‘It was not the same,’ Helwintr replied. ‘But something wanted you to think it was. Something wanted you to think that the Sixth Legion Astartes had manipulated you and intervened in your life at some point in the past. Something wanted you to mistrust us and make us enemies.’

He took an athame off the stand and showed it to Hawser.

‘This is the blade Ogvai used,’ he said. ‘You recognise it well enough now, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ said Hawser.

‘It was made to look like the one you remembered,’ said Helwintr. ‘Something got into your memories and altered them to turn you against us.’

Hawser swallowed.

‘What could do that?’ he asked. ‘Who could do that?’

Helwintr shrugged, as though he didn’t care.

‘Perhaps it was whoever made sure you could speak Juvjk and Wurgen from the moment you arrived on Fenris,’ he said.

Aun Helwintr raised his left hand and beckoned, though Hawser was sure the gesture was unnecessary. Fith Godsmote disengaged his practice cage and jumped down to approach them.

It was extremely noisy in the training hall of Nidhoggur’s company deck. Godsmote’s cage was whining to a halt, but most of the others were still occupied, and their mechanised armatures of blades of target drones were emitting high pitched screams as they whirled around. On the open deck mats, Wolves in leatherwork armour sparred with each other using staves of bone.

Godsmote, like all of them, looked like a flayed human in his leatherware. His black-pinned gold eyes blazed inside the slits of his gleaming brown mask. He had been training with two axes, and he held on to them as he came over rather than racking them.

‘Priest?’ he said.

‘A duty for you,’ said Helwintr.

‘I serve,’ Godsmote nodded.

Helwintr glanced at Hawser.

‘Say to him what you said to me,’ the priest prompted.

‘I’ve never been a fighter,’ said Hawser.

Godsmote snorted.

‘This is known about you,’ he remarked, amused.

‘Can I finish?’ Hawser asked.

Godsmote shrugged.

‘I’ve never been a fighter, but the Vlka Fenryka have seen fit to rebuild me with great strength and speed. I have the physical capacity, but none of the skills.’

‘He wants to learn how to handle a weapon,’ said Helwintr.

‘Why?’ asked Godsmote. ‘He’s our skjald. We’ll protect him.’

‘If he wants to, it’s his choice,’ said Helwintr. ‘Tell yourself that part of our duty to protect him is teaching him to protect himself.’

Godsmote looked down at Hawser dubiously.

‘There’s no sense trying to teach you everything,’ he said. ‘We’ll pick one thing and focus on that.’

‘What do you suggest?’ asked Hawser.

The axe was a single-bladed weapon with an almost silvered finish to the plasteel head. Its haft was a touch under a metre long, and hand shaped from a piece of bone from Asaheim. The polished ivory possessed a yellow glow. Hawser wasn’t sure what kind of animal the bone had been taken from, but he had been told it was supple and pretty much unbreakable.

Unbreakable for his purposes, anyway.

The axe lived on his hip in a loop of plasteel that was held to his belt by a piece of leatherwork.

‘Don’t loiter,’ Bear warned him.

Hawser didn’t intend to, but he was sweating like a pig in the heat, and it was a considerable effort to keep up with the striding Astartes.

He was the only regular human amongst them; a slight figure dwarfed by the two dozen fully armoured Wolves thundering down the tunnel around him. The thralls and the regular human-sized servants were following them at a distance.

Ogvai Ogvai Helmschrot led the party, his helm clamped under his arm. There was no orderly ranking to the group, but Aun Helwintr and Jormungndr Two-blade flanked the jarl, and Najot Threader and the other wolf priests seemed to glide along in the rear part of the group.

The Wolves were marching purposefully, as if Ogvai was in a hurry to be somewhere. After forty weeks of transit, Hawser wondered what could be so important it couldn’t have been undertaken with more circumspection. They had deployed from Nidhoggur the moment it achieved high anchor, which made it feel like an urgent combat drop, but it was clearly not that at all. They had come in blind, through terrifying atmospherics that had required instrumentation-only guidance, and eventually slid under a volcanic shelf and set down in deep, sheltered landing pits.

The local heat was immense. The rock around them was black and volcanic, and there was a bad-egg whiff of sulphur in the air. The air itself shimmered with a haze of heat. As he walked down the Stormbird’s ramp behind Godsmote, Hawser had felt an ear-pop sensation that suggested that vast, hidden atmosphere processors were waging a monumental war to maintain a viable environment.

This wasn’t a world designed to support life.

The landing pits, and the tunnels that led away from them into the core of the planet, had been clean cut on a massive scale, as if with industrial meltas. The tunnels sliced through the volcanic rock, leaving an unnaturally smooth surface like glass. There was a constant rumble of the storms outside, and the seismic growing pains of the young planet under their feet. Fiery light, undulating and seething, oozed through the glassy walls and floor of the tunnels, and lit their way. It was like being stoppered inside a glass bottle that had been cast into a bonfire. Hawser was disconcerted by an odd sense of the very old and the very new. The subterranean spaces were like ancient habitation cave sites he had investigated on many Conservatory expeditions during his life, yet these had been cut recently, by hand. There was an odd disconnection between the temporary and the permanent too: someone had commanded enough power and resources to bore holes and chambers out of the solid rock of a supervolcano, and to install a zone of safe environment on an inimical world, both of them monumental feats of physical engineering.

Yet Hawser had the distinct feeling that once the intended business here, whatever it was, was done, the whole site would be abandoned. It was purpose-built. It was not beyond reason to presume that the lifelessness of the world was part of that purpose. Whatever that business, there was a chance it might turn ugly. Of course there was. An entire company of the Vlka Fenryka had been summoned to achieve it.

Whoever had ordered the construction of this environment, had wanted it done in a remote place where there was no danger anyone could get caught in the crossfire.

‘What is this place?’ Hawser asked, scrambling to keep up.

‘Quiet,’ Bear hissed.

‘Forty weeks! How much longer before you tell me anything?’

‘Quiet,’ Bear hissed, with greater emphasis.

‘I can’t tell the account if I don’t know the details,’ said Hawser, a little more loudly. ‘It’d be a poor story then, not at all fitting for Tra’s fireside.’

Ogvai came to a sudden halt, so sudden it almost took the fast moving group by surprise. Everyone stopped obediently. Ogvai turned, and glowered back through the figures at Hawser. Sweat was running down Hawser’s face in the heat. All the Wolves had mouths half-open, teeth bared, and were slightly panting, like dogs on a warm day.

‘What’s he saying?’ he growled.

‘I’m asking how I’m supposed to be a skjald if you don’t tell me anything, jarl,’ Hawser called back.

Ogvai looked at Aun Helwintr. The rune priest closed his eyes for a second, took a calming breath, and nodded.

Ogvai acknowledged the nod and turned back to Hawser.

‘This place is called Nikaea,’ he said.

They entered a great circular chamber, melta-cut from the bedrock. The surfaces of the room were like black glass shot with glittering mica, but still it reminded Hawser of the ivory-cased chambers of the Aett.

People were waiting for them. Warriors of the Sixth Legion Astartes had been posted around the perimeter, but they were not from Tra. Another company was present.

Amlodhi Skarssen Skarssensson, Jarl of Fyf, rose to his feet from a stone bench.

‘Og!’ he growled, and the two mighty jarls bear-hugged, banging their armoured chests against each other. Ogvai exchanged some rough sparring remarks with Skarssen and then turned to the other alpha wolf who had been sitting with the Jarl of Fyf.

‘Lord Gunn,’ Ogvai acknowledged with a tip of his head. The other warrior was older and bigger than either Skarssen and Ogvai. His beard was waxed into two, sharp, up-and-forward-curving tusks, and the left side of his face was inked with dark lines that resembled knotwork.

‘Who’s that?’ Hawser asked Godsmote.

‘Gunnar Gunnhilt, called Lord Gunn, Jarl of Onn,’ Godsmote replied.

‘He’s jarl of the First Company?’ Hawser asked.

Godsmote nodded.

Three companies. Three companies? What could be happening on this place Nikaea that demanded the presence of three companies of Wolves?

Lord Gunn pushed past Ogvai and confronted Hawser.

‘Is this the skjald?’ he asked. He took Hawser’s head between his huge hands and wrestled it back, stretching Hawser’s eyes wide to peer into them, and then pulled open Hawser’s jaw and leaned down to sniff Hawser’s breath, as though he was livestock.

He let go of Hawser and turned away.

‘Has it begun?’ asked Ogvai.

‘Yes,’ Skarssen replied, ‘but only in a preliminary way. They don’t know we’re here yet.’

‘I don’t want them to know,’ said Ohthere Wyrdmake. Wyrdmake was one of a number of rune priests who had been standing, silent, spectral and attentive, behind the seated jarls. They were all panting slightly, open-mouthed. The volcanic heat of the chamber didn’t seem to touch Skarssen’s priest. Even the diffuse, pulsating light of it on his face took a greenish cast, like cold fire. Wyrdmake looked at Aun Helwintr. Something passed between them.

‘I don’t want them to know,’ Wyrdmake repeated.

‘We’re here purely as a safety measure,’ said Lord Gunn. ‘Make that understood. We only reveal our strength if wyrd turns against us. If that happens, this becomes a no-quarter operation, where our only purpose is to secure the primary. Anything and everything that moves contrary to us under those circumstances gets a kill-stroke. Are we clear? I don’t care who it is. This is why we exist. Make sure that all in Tra know that–’

Wyrdmake cleared his throat.

‘Something to say, priest?’ Lord Gunn asked.

Wyrdmake nodded his head towards Hawser.

‘You said it was safe enough to talk,’ said Lord Gunn.

‘We’re as safe as we can be down here,’ Wyrdmake replied. ‘However, I don’t see the need to discuss Rout strategy in front of a skjald. He can wait somewhere.’

‘Varangr!’ Skarssen called. His herald appeared from the ranks around the chamber walls.

‘Yes, Skarsi?’

‘Var, take Ibn Rustah and put him somewhere.’

‘Where, Skarsi?’

‘I think it was suggested earlier today that he should be put in the quiet room as soon as he made planetfall.’

‘Really, Skarsi? Really? The quiet room?’

‘Yes, Var!’ Skarssen snapped. He looked at Lord Gunn. ‘You have a problem with that?’ he asked.

Lord Gunn shrugged and chuckled a little wet leopard-chuckle.

‘Valdor made a special point of asking us not to do anything provocative, but we don’t take our orders from him. What do you think, priest?’

Wyrdmake gently bowed his head.

‘Whatever pleases my Lord Gunn,’ he said.

‘Very little ever pleases me, gothi,’ replied Lord Gunn. ‘Being here doesn’t please me. The nature of this council, the gravity of what’s at stake here, the infernal politicking and pussy-footing, none of it pleases me. However, sticking this little runt in the quiet room might amuse me for a short while.’

All of the Wolves in the group laughed. Hawser shivered.

‘This way,’ said Varangr.

Wyrdmake stopped Hawser as the herald of Fyf began to lead him away.

‘I am told you were with Longfang when his thread was cut.’

‘I was,’ said Hawser.

‘Don’t forget where he led you,’ said Wyrdmake. ‘He would have led you further, except he couldn’t follow.’

Varangr led Hawser out of the chamber, and down a melta-cut tunnel towards the enigmatic ‘quiet room’. They had barely entered the tunnel when Hawser started to feel queasy.

‘Gets into your guts, doesn’t it?’ asked Varangr with relish. ‘Like a knife. No, a branding iron.’

‘What is that?’

‘It’s them,’ the herald replied, as if that explained everything. Tectonic booming echoed up through the tunnel floor, and luminous orange blossoms of lava lit up and flowed past the vitreous walls. Hawser felt unsteady, his head swimmy. He leant against the tunnel wall for support, not caring how painfully warm the glassy surface felt.

‘You’ll get used to it,’ said Varangr. ‘Don’t know what’s worse, the feeling of them, or the feeling of what they keep out.’

At the end of the tunnel, there was a rough-notched mark of aversion staring out of the rock lintel.

They passed by it, and Varangr led him out into a large, square chamber, smaller than the space that had housed the Fenrisian jarls. The floor was made of a rough, grey pyroclastic rock, though displays of volcanic firelight still shimmered through the glassy walls and ceiling to provide light. Six tall figures were sitting on bench blocks cut from the flaky grey rock. They rose to their feet as one the moment Varangr and Hawser entered and faced them.

‘Refreshments,’ Varangr said, gesturing at a tray that had been placed on a smaller grey block. On the tray were some dried field kit rations, a jug of tepid water, a flask of mjod and a lidded bowl. From the smell, Hawser could tell that the bowl contained fresh meat that had begun to turn in the sweltering heat.

‘Help yourself,’ Varangr said, and left.

Hawser looked at the six figures facing him. They were tall, taller than him, and female, all dressed in ornate, high-collared war armour. The armour looked gold or hammered bronze in the firelight. Despite the heat, the females wore floor length cloaks of a rich, crimson fabric. Exquisite parchments, manuscripts and prayer strips hung from their belts and armour plates, attached by red wax seals and ribbons. Kasper Hawser could recite copious amounts of evidentiary research on the historical use and significance of prayer strips. He knew a great deal about the importance, the actual psychophysical potency, that primitive cultures had once invested in the written word. To many human civilisations in the past, prayers or wards or imprecations written down in some ritual fashion and pinned or otherwise attached to a person in a ceremonial manner were things of supernatural force. They protected the wearer. They were marks of aversion, or the means to vouchsafe good fortune. They were ways of making hoped-for futures become reality. They were charms for fending off bad things.

The fact that the women wore such adornments, like old Cruxian pilgrims, felt like the most spectacularly pagan thing Hawser had seen in a long time, and that was saying something given how long he’d lived with the Vlka Fenryka. The Fenrisians were tempered by the primitive climate of their planet. These females were coldly beguiling, their arms and armour the product of High Terran technology. Each one had a silver longsword, a powerblade of horrible beauty. The swords rested upright, tips to the floor between the women’s feet. Each female had her armoured wrists crossed on the pommel of her sword.

None of the females wore a helmet, but the grilled throat guards of their golden armour rose up high, obscuring their mouths and the lower halves of their faces. Eyes without a nose or mouth, eyes above golden grilles. They reminded him of an old memory, faded and creased. A mouth, smiling, and eyes hidden.

The eyes of each of the females were intense and unblinking. Their heads were shaved except for bound top knots of long hair.

‘Who are you?’ he asked, wiping sweat off his brow. His skin had gone clammy.

They didn’t reply. He didn’t want to look at them. It was the strangest thing. The swimmy, bilious feeling returned, far more unpleasantly than before. The females were fascinating, beautiful figures, but he did not want to regard them. He wanted to do anything but. The sight of them repelled him. The very fact of them made him recoil.

‘Who are you?’ he demanded, turning away. ‘What are you?’

No reply came. He heard the faintest metal scratch as a sword tip lifted away from pyroclastic rock floor. Still looking aside, Hawser drew his axe. It was a firm, fluid draw, just the way Godsmote had taught him: left hand under the head, thumb behind the shoulder, pulling to almost throw it clear of the plasteel belt-loop before letting it go, so he caught the haft around the belly with his right hand and clamped the throat with his left hand again, and there it was across his chest, ready to knock into someone.

A voice rumbled something. A command. The voice was so deep, it sounded like an extension of the seismic turmoil beneath them.

Hawser dared to raise his eye line. He maintained his grip on his axe, fully prepared to strike.

The beautifully hideous, hideously beautiful females had encircled him. Their longswords were all aimed at him in double-handed grips. Any one of them could extinguish his life with a turn of her wrists.

The voice rumbled again. It was louder this time: the throat-noise of an animal mixed with a volcanic detonation, the furious blast of the top coming off a mountain.

As one, the females took a step back, all switching to a formal ‘rest’ position, with their swords raised at their right shoulders and no longer directly threatening. The voice muttered a third noise, a softer growl, and the females stepped back, breaking the circle around Hawser.

Hawser moved clear of them, further into the chamber. He could see a dark shape ahead of him, a mass of shadows in the ruddy firelight. It was the source of the voice.

Hawser could hear the soft, deep, quick panting of a big animal bothered by heat.

The figure spoke. Hawser felt its voice vibrate his diaphragm. He felt terror through to his core, but, curiously, it was a clean, simple feeling, preferable to the revulsion the females had inspired.

‘I don’t understand,’ Hawser said. ‘I don’t understand what you’re saying to me.’

The voice trembled him again.

‘Ser, I can hear your words, but I don’t know the language,’ Hawser insisted.

The figure stirred and looked directly at him. Hawser saw its face.

‘I was told you spoke the cants of the Vlka Fenryka,’ said Leman Russ.

Ten

Witness

The Wolf King straightened up, like some elemental giant rousing from its telluric slumber.

‘Juvjk. Wurgen,’ he said. ‘I was informed you spoke both fluently.’

The distinctive wet leopard-growl of the Fenrisian Astartes haunted every syllable of his words. Hawser was mesmerised by the primarch’s size. Every physical dimension exceeded that of an Astartes. It was like meeting a god. It was as though one of the great and perfectly proportioned statues of classical antiquity, one scaled fifty or seventy-five per cent bigger than human standard, had come to life.

‘Well?’ asked Russ. ‘Or have you lost your command of Low Gothic too?’

‘Ser, I…’ Hawser began. ‘Ser… you’re speaking Low Gothic?’

‘I am now.’

‘Then I don’t know,’ said Hawser. He wished, desperately, his voice didn’t sound so pathetic and paper-thin. ‘I could speak both Juvjk and Wurgen before I was brought to this quiet room. Then again, I could speak neither of them until I came to Fenris, so make of that what you will.’

The Wolf King pouted thoughtfully.

‘I think it confirms what Wyrdmake and the others have believed all along. You’ve been tampered with, Ahmad Ibn Rustah. At some point prior to your arrival on Fenris, some agency, probably a psyker, altered your mind.’

‘Aun Helwintr suggested as much to me, ser. It’s quite a thing to take in. If it’s true, then I can’t trust myself.’

‘Imagine how we feel.’

Hawser stared at the Wolf King.

‘Why do you even tolerate me, then? I’m untrustworthy. I’m maleficarum.’

‘Oh, sit down,’ said the Wolf King. He held out a huge open hand and gestured to a stone bench beside him. ‘Sit down and we’ll talk about it.’

The Wolf King was also seated on a stone bench. He had a deep silver lanx near to hand, brimming with mjod. His armour appeared almost black, as if it had been scorched and tarnished in a smithy, but Hawser felt that was just the way the gloom of the firelight played upon it. Under an open sky, he thought, it would be tempest grey.

The armour was by far the heaviest and most marked power plate Hawser had ever seen. It dwarfed the formidable suits of the Terminators. It was notched and gouged, and the damage was as much decoration as the knotwork and tooled etching on the main plates. Around his shoulders, Russ wore a black wolf-skin. The pelt seemed to surround him and clothe him, like a forest beards a hillslope or a storm cloud smokes a peak. His face was shaved clean, and his skin was white like marble. Close to, Hawser could see light freckles on it. The Wolf King’s hair was long. Thick plaits of it hung down across his chest plate, weighted at the tips by polished stones. The rest of it was lacquered into a spiked mane. Hawser had heard many stories about the Wolf King from the men of Tra. They had all described his hair as red, or the colour of rust, or of molten copper. Hawser wasn’t so sure. To him, the Wolf King’s mane looked like bright blond hair stained in blood.

Russ watched Hawser take his seat. He sipped from his lanx. He was panting still, through parted lips, like a large mammal made uncomfortable by the heat but unable to shed its fur.

‘This chamber has proved the tampering.’

‘They called it the quiet room,’ said Hawser. ‘Who are those females, ser?’

He gestured towards the armoured figures waiting near the mouth of the chamber, but he could not bring himself to look at them.

‘Members of the Silent Sisterhood,’ Russ replied. ‘An ancient Terran order. Null-maidens, some call them.’

‘Why do I find them so… distressing?’

Russ smiled. It was an odd expression. He had a long philtrum and a heavy lower lip. These, combined with the high, freckled cheekbones, made his mouth into something of a muzzle, and his smile into a threat display of teeth.

‘That’s their function… aside from the fact they fight like bastards. They’re blanks. Untouchables. Psyker-inert. Got the pariah gene in them. Nothing on Nikaea can see us or hear our minds while we’re in here with them. There are more of them stationed throughout these chambers, and their effect is general enough to cloak the presence of the Vlka Fenryka. But Gunn thought it a good idea if I stayed in here, in the heart of it.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t want to upset my brother,’ replied Russ.

‘Why? What might he do?’ asked Hawser, swallowing hard. The question he’d really wanted to ask was, who is your brother?

‘Something stupid that we’d all regret for a damned long time,’ said Russ. ‘We’re just here to make sure he arrives at the right decision. And if he doesn’t, we’re here to make sure the repercussions of the wrong decision are restricted to a bare minimum.’

‘You’re talking about another primarch,’ said Hawser.

‘Yes, I am.’

‘You’re talking about taking arms against another primarch?’

‘Yes. If needs be. Funny, I always seem to get the dirty jobs.’

The Wolf King rose to his feet and stretched.

‘The moment you came in here, ser,’ Russ said, mocking Hawser’s use of the honorific, ‘the scramble-your-guts sisters blocked whatever was playing with your head. I’d be very interested to know who was handling you.’

‘Handling?’

‘My dear Ahmad Ibn Rustah, wake up and see where you are. You’re a spy. A pawn in a very long game.’

‘A spy? I assure you, not willingly, ser! I–’

‘Oh, be quiet, little man!’ the Wolf King growled. The vibratory force alone sat Hawser back on his stone bench. ‘I know you’re not. We’ve spent a long time and a lot of effort testing you. We want to know what kind of spy you are: a basic intelligence gatherer, or something with a more insidious mission. We want to know who’s running you, and who sent you to infiltrate the Vlka Fenryka twenty years ago.’

‘That was my choice. I chose Fenris, out of academic interest and–’

‘No,’ said Leman Russ. ‘No, you didn’t. You think you did. You feel like you did, but it’s not true.’

‘But–’

‘It’s not true, and you’ll see that yourself in time.’

The Wolf King sat down again, facing Hawser. He leaned in and stared into Hawser’s eyes. Hawser trembled. He wasn’t able not to.

‘People think the Sixth are just savages. But you’ve spent enough time among us to know that’s not true. We fight smart. We don’t just charge in howling, even if it looks like we do. We gather impeccable intelligence and we use it. We exploit any crack, any weakness. We are ruthless. We’re not stupid.’

‘I’ve been told this,’ said Hawser. ‘I’ve witnessed it with my own eyes. I’ve heard Jarl Ogvai repeat the lesson to the men of Tra.’

‘Jarl Ogvai knows how I like my Legion run. He would not have been named jarl otherwise. There are certain philosophies of war that I adhere to. Does that surprise you?’

‘No, ser.’

‘You may have been placed among us by an enemy, or a potential enemy,’ said the Wolf King. ‘Rather than just disposing of you as a threat, I’d like to use you. Are you willing to help me?’

‘I serve,’ said Hawser, blinking fast.

‘It might get your thread cut,’ rumbled Leman Russ through a smile, ‘but I want you to test the ice and see if you can’t get whoever sent you to show themselves.’

Russ rose again.

‘Women!’ he shouted, and made a great beckoning gesture for the Sisters of Silence to follow them. All six moved in perfect coordination, and swung their longswords up to a shoulder guard position from the tip-down stance. Hawser heard six, quick simultaneous scratches of metal on rock.

Russ took another swig of mjod, set his lanx aside, and lumbered out of the cavern through a melta-cut gap opposite the corridor Hawser had entered by. Following close behind him, Hawser had time to appreciate the size of the broadsword the Wolf King wore in a leatherwork and nacre scabbard across his back. He was struck by its beauty. It had the same hypnotic perfection as an approaching storm, or the gape of an apex predator a millisecond away from biting. The sword was bigger than him, taller. It would not have fit into a coffin built for Kasper Hawser.

The gold-plated female warriors fell in step around them as an honour guard, three on each side. Hawser felt his skin crawl at their proximity. He had not put his axe away since drawing it at the chamber mouth, and his hands white-knuckled around the warm bone grip. Sweat beaded on his face.

The gap was short, and led down a series of crude, torch-cut steps into a soaring, lofty chamber. After the confines of the tunnels and the quiet room, its size took Hawser’s breath away. An immense bubble had once been trapped in the lava stream that had solidified to compose this part of the mountain. The floor had been levelled off with melta work, but the upper reaches of the cavern were naturally arched, mimicking a cathedral’s nave. Though the air was warm, there was a murmur in it, the echo of many voices dwarfed by a great space.

The chamber had been set up as a command post. On top of the metal decking plates set up on the heat-levelled floor, portable power units were running cogitator sets and deep-gain vox-casters. There were lighting rigs and, Hawser noted, automated sentry guns and field generators at the outer exits. This was a strongpoint. The area had been made defensible. Solemn rows of Imperial banners and flags had been suspended down the length of the chamber from the ceiling, hanging limp and heavy in the heat. They were martial symbols and honour rolls, vast sheets of cloth and gold thread evidencing the dignity and import of the Imperium of Man. Here, even here in a rock-cut facility built for temporary purposes, it had been considered necessary to make such a display, as though the chamber was one of the great halls of the Royal Palace of Terra.

A curious mix of personnel manned the command post. There were hundreds of humans and servitors at work. More of the silent Sisters lurked around the corners of the vast space, lending their distressing absence to the location. At the bustling console positions, most of the personnel were uniformed officers of the Imperial Fleet and the Hegemonic Corps, though Hawser saw some Sixth Legion thralls along with liveried human servants from other institutions.

The most striking figures were the giants dressed in gold. There were at least a dozen of them in the chamber, supervising different tasks. Their armour was ornate, like that worn by the Astartes, but it was more lightly and finely built, as if forged by more subtle craftsmen. Some of the giants were bareheaded. Others wore conical golden helmets with green-glowing eye slits and red horse-hair plumes.

They were Custodes, the praetorian bodyguards of High Terra. Their accelerated post-human nature had been derived by yet another different principle to those which had produced the Astartes and the primarchs, and they fitted in magnitude between the two: far fewer in number yet greater in faculty than the Astartes.

‘I can think,’ Hawser began.

‘What?’ asked Russ gruffly, swinging round to look at the skjald behind him. ‘What did you say?’

‘I said I can think of only one reason why the warriors of the Legio Custodes would be here,’ said Hawser.

‘Then you’re thinking well,’ Russ snapped.

‘He’s here,’ said Hawser.

‘Yes, he’s here.’

Kasper Hawser slowly tilted his head back and looked up at the roof of the glass-rock cave. Magmatic light pulsed inside the volcanic walls, but all he really saw was the light in his imagination. He had never thought, never ever thought, he would stand in such proximity–

‘He’s here?’ he whispered.

‘Yes! That’s why we’re on our best behaviour.’

The Wolf King gestured insistently at one of the noble golden figures who was standing at a codifier not far away, observing the crew of operators at work. The figure had already noticed the entry of the glowering Wolf King. So had other people in the room. They were approaching with some haste, as if they didn’t want to keep him waiting.

Or they didn’t want to leave him alone long enough to cause a problem.

The Custodes reached them first. Close up, it became clear how ornamented the surface of his gilded armour was. Serpents curled around the seals of the gorget, and writhed around the shoulders and breastplate. Suns, stars and moons of all phases ran around the vambraces and the arm-guards. There were trees, flames, petals, diamonds, daggers, figures of tarot and open palms. Eyes and circumpuncts gazed out. The symbological historian in Hawser saw a lifetime’s work in every part of the Custodes’s plate, in the heraldic and cultural significance of every mark and engraving, every inscription and device. The man was a walking artefact. An incomplete but tantalising primer to mankind’s esoteric tradition presented itself in the form of power armour.

Over his armour, the Custodes wore a long red cloak and a red kilt covered by a war skirt of studded leather. His all-enclosing conical helm with its flowing plume of red hair made him a towering prospect. He regarded the Wolf King with his softly glowing green eye slits, and curtly nodded his head in deference.

‘My lord, is there something the matter?’ he asked, his voice sounding slightly boxy due to the helmet vox.

‘I was just saying, we’re on our best behaviour, Constantin.’

‘Indeed, my lord. Now, is there something? I thought you were resting in the quiet room. We are rather occupied at the moment.’

‘Yes. Constantin, this is the skjald of Tra Company. I’ve said he can look around. Skjald, I present to you Constantin Valdor, Praetor of the Custodes. Look suitably impressed. He’s a very important fellow. It’s his job to keep my father safe.’

‘My lord, might I speak to you privately for a moment?’ Valdor asked.

‘I’m making introductions here, Constantin,’ snapped Russ.

‘I insist,’ said Valdor, his vox-clipped tones sounding threatening. A second Custodes had arrived behind Valdor, along with two fully armoured Astartes, one in crimson armour, the other in heavy Terminator plate that was ash grey trimmed with green. A single horn protruded from his helmet like a tusk. A lot of other personnel in the immediate area were stopping to watch the exchange. Two cherub servitors, the size of real human babies, flew in low on damselfly wings. Their faces were silver masks and their wings made drowsy, thrumming beats like outboard motors.

‘You know what?’ said the Wolf King. ‘The last time anyone insisted anything to me, I twisted their arms off and stuck them up their arse.’

The cherubs squealed and swooped into Valdor’s shadow to hide.

‘My lord,’ replied Valdor levelly. ‘This constant need of yours to playfully maintain the role of barbarian king is most amusing, but we are busily occupied with–’

‘Oh, Constantin!’ Russ chuckled. ‘I honestly hoped you’d go for it!’ He gave the Praetor an open-handed slap on the arm that Hawser was quite sure left a dent in the golden plate.

‘Lord Russ, I must support Lord Valdor’s statement,’ said the Astartes in red. ‘This is no place for a…’

His voice trailed off to the crackle-stop of a vox speaker turning off. He nodded his head at Hawser.

‘A person brandishing an axe,’ he finished.

Hawser realised the axe was still in his hands. He quickly slipped it back into the loop at his hip.

‘Look now, skjald,’ said the Wolf King, sweeping his hand out to encompass all four imposing figures confronting them. ‘They’re ganging up on you. You see the one in red? That’s Raldoron, Chapter Master of my brother Sanguinius’s Blood Angels. And the handsome brute in grey, that’s Typhon, First Captain of the Death Guard. Remember their names so you can tell the account of this day in all detail and particulars at Tra’s hearth-side.’

‘Enough, my lord,’ said Typhon. ‘There are matters of security–’

‘Oh-ho! Over-stepping your mark, First Captain!’ said Russ, taking a step forwards and aiming an accusing finger at the Astartes in ash grey. ‘You do not… You do not tell a primarch “enough”.’

‘Maybe I’m allowed to, then,’ said another voice. They turned. The towering newcomer had the presence of Leman Russ and the charisma of a main sequence star. He was light and aesthetic perfection where Russ was visceral dynamism and blood-gold hair. Between them, they outshone even the magnificent Custodes.

‘You,’ said Russ grudgingly. ‘Yes, you’re allowed to, I suppose.’

He glanced at Hawser.

‘You know who this is?’

‘No, ser,’ mumbled Hawser.

‘Well, ser, this, ser, is my brother Fulgrim.’

The primarch of the Emperor’s Children was dressed in finely wrought wargear of purple and gold. His white hair framed a face of almost painfully perfect grace. He smiled down at Hawser politely, briefly.

‘Were you getting fretful in your quiet room again, brother?’ Fulgrim asked.

‘Yes,’ Russ admitted, looking away.

‘You realise you need to stay there for now? Your presence might be seen as inflammatory, especially when he finds out you pushed for this censure.’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Russ impatiently.

Fulgrim smiled again. ‘Console yourself. Concealing you means that the revelation of the evidence we have at our disposal will carry more effect. Your man Wyrdmake is about to step up to make account.’

‘Good. Then the secrecy will be done with and I can stop hiding behind the Sisters,’ said Russ.

‘Still,’ he added, with a plaintive tone, ‘how I would love to see the look on his face when Wyrdmake is revealed. Or, at least, how I would love to hear that look described at the fireside in years to come by my skjald here.’

The Wolf King got hold of Hawser’s upper arm and dragged him forwards, shaking him a little for emphasis.

‘We’re trying to be patient with you, brother,’ said Fulgrim.

‘Please, my lord,’ added Valdor. ‘It’s inappropriate for–’

‘You never let me introduce him properly,’ said Russ, blithely cutting them off. ‘Not very polite of you. He is skjald of Tra, also called Ahmad Ibn Rustah, also called Kasper Ansbach Hawser.’

There was a pause, a hesitation.

‘You dog, Russ,’ murmured Fulgrim.

Valdor reached his hands up to the sides of his steeple helmet, disengaged the neck seals with a pneumatic hiss, and removed it. He handed the helm to his fellow Custodes.

‘Playing games with us a little, my lord?’ he asked. It sounded from his tone as though he was trying to appear amused. Valdor’s head was shaved back to a stubble of white, and he was deep-browed and aquiline. It looked like he seldom found cause to smile at anything.

‘Yes, Constantin,’ Russ purred. ‘I got bored in my quiet room. I had to find something to do.’

‘You might have told us this man’s identity a little sooner,’ said Valdor. He took a hand scanner from his companion and swept Hawser.

‘Because my identity matters somehow?’ asked Hawser.

‘Of course, Kasper,’ said Fulgrim.

‘You know who I am?’ Hawser stammered.

‘We’ve been briefed,’ said Raldoron in a crackle of helmet vox.

‘Kasper Hawser, distinguished and fêted scholar and academician,’ said Typhon, ‘founder and director of the Conservatory project that enjoys the Emperor’s personal approval.’

Typhon removed his brutally horned helm. The choleric face beneath was bearded and framed by long dark hair. ‘Resigned suddenly about seventy years ago adjusted, and subsequently disappeared, apparently while making an inexplicable and ill-advised voyage to Fenris.’

‘You know who I am,’ Hawser breathed.

‘Let’s get him debriefed,’ said Constantin Valdor.

‘You talk as if my whole life has been played out to someone else’s rules,’ said Hawser. The servitors hummed around him.

‘Perhaps it has,’ said Valdor.

‘I refuse to accept that,’ said Hawser.

‘How many people have got to tell you before you start listening?’ asked Russ, his voice a rumble.

‘Please, my lord,’ chided the other Custodes attending them.

‘Constantin, keep your puppy in check,’ warned Russ.

Valdor nodded in the direction of the other Custodes, who had removed his engraved helm to reveal the face of a younger man.

‘Amon Tauromachian is a bit more than a puppy, Wolf King. Don’t goad him.’

Russ laughed. He was sitting on the raised edge of the command post’s staging area, watching the bio-checks. Standing at his side, arms folded, Fulgrim smirked and shook his head.

They had taken Hawser to a small medical monitoring area set up in a corner of the main hall. He had been required to lie down on a padded couch. Specialist personnel were running biometric scans using both paddles and skin-patch contacts. Servitors were swabbing spots on Hawser’s skin so that small terminals could be attached.

‘I went to Fenris because I was driven by the same urge to learn and discover that has inspired me since childhood,’ said Hawser, aware that his tone was defensive. ‘The decision was prompted by dissatisfaction that after long and devoted service to the cause of Unification, my work was being sidelined and shelved. I was frustrated. I was disappointed. I decided to turn my back on the ridiculous politicking of Terra that was foundering my efforts, and undertake an expedition of pure research, as a cultural historian, to one of the wildest and most mysterious worlds in the Imperium.’

‘Even though you’ve suffered from a crippling fear of wolves since your earliest years?’ asked Valdor.

‘There are no wolves on Fenris,’ replied Hawser.

‘Oh, you know there are,’ growled Russ, his voice a wet leopard-purr, ‘and you know what they are.’

Hawser realised his hands were trembling slightly.

‘Then… then if you’re searching for some deep-seated psychological reason, perhaps I was seeking to face and overcome my childhood phobia.’

Aun Helwintr had joined them from the outer halls. He sat nearby on one of the other padded couches, rolling polished sea shells out of one gloved palm into the other. The weight of him put huge strain on the adjustable rod frame of the couch.

‘Doubtful,’ he said. ‘I think it’s the key. The fear. That specific fear. It has potency. I think it’s how they found a way into you in the first place. Still, we’ve never been able to discern the trigger, despite what we milked from your thoughts during the cold dreaming, and despite how close Longfang came to seeing it. The trigger remains too well clouded.’

‘What trigger?’ asked Hawser. ‘What cold dreaming?’

Constantin Valdor was consulting a data-slate.

‘You won the Prix Daumarl among many other citations. Your work was acclaimed by academicians throughout the inner systems. Some of your papers became springboards for lines of research and development that have had profound and positive implications for society. The Conservatory wielded formidable political influence.’

‘That’s not true,’ said Hawser. ‘We had to fight for every centimetre of ground.’

‘And other political bodies did not?’ asked Raldoron, who stood nearby.

‘No,’ said Hawser, moving so sharply that one of the terminals detached from his skin. ‘The Conservatory was an academic foundation with a simple mandate. We had no influence. By the time I left, we were going to be absorbed into the Hegemonic administration. I couldn’t stomach it. Don’t tell me we had influence. We were thrown to the wolves.’

He looked over at the Wolf King.

‘No offence, ser.’

Russ boomed another laugh that showed his teeth in a distressing way.

‘Try not to do that, dear brother,’ said Fulgrim. ‘You’re scaring him.’

‘I believe you may have had a great deal of influence,’ said Valdor. ‘If I may say, ser, your greatest crime was naivety. At the very highest level, your work was admired, and received tacit protection. Other institutions of the Imperium’s political machine were aware of that. They were afraid of you. They were jealous of you. You didn’t see it and you didn’t know it. It’s a common mistake. You were a superb academic trying to run an academic foundation. You should have got on with your study and left the job of management to someone more suited to the task. Someone sharp and savvy who could have kept the wolves at bay.’

Valdor turned to Russ.

‘I speak metaphorically, my lord,’ he said.

Russ nodded, still amused.

‘That’s all right, Constantin. Sometimes I dismember metaphorically.’

‘Navid always filled that role,’ Hawser said quietly, to himself. ‘He loved the machinations of the Hegemony and the academies. He was never happier than when competing for a stipend or negotiating for a procurement fund.’

‘This is Navid Murza?’ asked Valdor, consulting the slate. ‘Died young, I see. Yes, you were quite a team. Your brilliance at field work supported by his boundless enthusiasm in the bureaucratic arena. He was killed in Ossetia.’

‘The death may have been significant,’ said the other Custodes.

‘Oh, please!’ Hawser snorted. ‘Navid was killed by an insurgent’s bomb.’

‘Nevertheless,’ said Valdor, ‘it removed him from the Conservatory and took him from your side.’

‘I did not decide to go to Fenris because Navid Murza was killed in Ossetia,’ said Hawser angrily. ‘A number of decades separate those two events. I refuse to believe–’

‘The scale of your thinking is too small, ser,’ said the other Custodes, the one called Amon. ‘Murza was eliminated, and the benefits he brought to you and the Conservatory were eliminated with him. Did you ever replace him? No. He had been your friend for a long time, you were used to him. You took on the responsibilities yourself, even though you knew you weren’t suited to them like he was. You forced yourself to be a political animal because to find a replacement would have felt like a betrayal. You didn’t want to dishonour his memory.’

‘So you were much more worn down when the time came, Kasper,’ said Fulgrim. ‘You were tired from years of bureaucracy, years of doing the job Murza always should have done, years of not getting on with the work you really enjoyed. You were absolutely primed and ready to throw it all away and go to Fenris.’

‘There’s still the matter of a trigger,’ said Aun Helwintr.

‘Yes, that remains a mystery,’ Valdor agreed.

‘Not the timing,’ said Typhon. The ash-grey Terminator stood on the far side of the medical couch. Like Valdor, he was consulting a data-slate.

‘He was ripe,’ said Fulgrim.

‘With respect, yes, my lord,’ said Typhon. ‘The subject was ready. I meant the timing in terms of who was directing the subject.’

He looked at his data-slate again.

‘Spool eight-six-nine-alpha,’ he said. Valdor consulted his slate, and Fulgrim produced one of his own.

‘I refer you to the report filed by Henrik Slussen, the undersecretary brought in to facilitate the Conservatory’s incorporation into the Administration.’

‘That was the straw that broke my spirit,’ said Hawser. ‘Slussen was an odious man. He didn’t begin to appreciate what I was–’

‘He may have been a more sympathetic ally than you thought, Kasper,’ said Fulgrim. The primarch’s smile was calm and reassuring, and his tone supportive. ‘At the time of your resignation and disappearance, Slussen filed a report to his superiors. There’s a copy in the file spool here. He was recommending that the Conservatory’s independence be preserved. He suggested that absorption into the Administratum would seriously hamstring the Conservatory’s work, and the benefits it could offer.’

‘The proposal was approved by Lord Malcador,’ said Valdor. ‘The Sigillite placed his personal seal upon the ratification of the Conservatory’s autonomy.’

‘The Sigillite?’ asked Hawser.

‘He always took a great interest in your work,’ Valdor replied. ‘I think he was your champion behind the scenes. If you had not vanished, ser, you would have been granted the authority you craved. Your staff would have increased, along with the scope of your operation. I believe that within three to five years, you would have found yourself with a secretarial position on the advisory council of the Inner Hegemony. You would have been a man of great influence.’

‘First Captain Typhon is quite probably correct,’ said Fulgrim. ‘You would have been less malleable. Your frustrations would have receded. Whoever was running you had to pull the trigger, in that small window, or run the risk of losing all control over an agent they had spent upwards of five decades developing.’

Hawser stood up. The sensors that had been attached to him pinged off under tension, one by one.

‘Ser, we haven’t quite finished–’ a medical orderly began to protest.

Fulgrim held up a hand to hush the man gently.

‘No one spends that long grooming and deploying an agent,’ Hawser said quietly.

‘Yes, they do, Kasper,’ said Fulgrim. ‘The main institutions of the Imperium wouldn’t think twice about procuring agents at birth and arranging deployments that saw out their lifetimes. Most of these things are done without the agents in question even knowing.’

‘You’d do it, ser?’ Hawser asked, looking up at him.

‘We’d all do it,’ said Valdor bluntly. ‘The business of intelligence is vital.’

‘We kept you on ice for nineteen great years just to find out who had sent you,’ said Russ.

‘Predictions may be made,’ said Aun Helwintr. ‘Wyrd may be parsed. A man’s character may be analysed, and that analysis extrapolated to foresee what career he might take, and where he might find himself at certain points in his life. An experienced diviner can chart a man’s life, and train him like a plant, tend him, make him grow in a specific direction for a specific purpose.’

‘Who did that to me?’ asked Hawser.

‘Someone who exploited your innate characteristics, Kasper,’ said Fulgrim. ‘Someone who saw that your innocent hunger for lost knowledge could be harnessed for their benefit.’

‘He means our benighted brother,’ said the Wolf King.

The Custodes called Amon took Hawser out of the vast cathedral of the command post, and up through melta-cut tunnel levels guarded by Astartes of the Ninth and Fourteenth Legions Astartes. The Custodes carried his ceremonial weapon, the guardian spear, an ornate golden halberd that incorporated a master-crafted bolter. The tunnels were smoky and hazed with heat. Hawser could feel the steady and monumental pump of the atmosphere processors preserving the engineered enclave of Nikaea from instant incineration. His heart thumped and he felt sick. The beautiful Primarch Fulgrim had suggested he be allowed to walk and settle his thoughts, though Hawser suspected that, yet again, other hands were directing his life.

He was glad to be away from the group of worthies, however. To be the focus of attention for two primarchs, two Custodes and three senior Astartes was overwhelming. They had all loomed over him literally and in terms of potency. He had felt like a child in a room with adults, or an insect in a specimen jar.

Or a livestock animal tethered out as an offering for predators.

‘Are we not moving out of the range of the untouchables?’ Hawser asked his escort.

‘Yes,’ replied the Custodes. ‘Only the lower levels are thought-proofed.’

‘So my mind is about to become visible?’ Hawser asked. ‘Visible, perhaps to my manipulator? Isn’t there a risk that I’m about to give a great deal away?’

Amon nodded.

‘There’s also a good chance of securing some leverage,’ he said. ‘The Wolf King knew you were a spy, but he kept you around for a long time. He kept you on Fenris and took you out into the Crusade. He wanted whoever was spying on him to see what you saw, and to understand that he was aware of them. The Wolf King believes that he doesn’t win battles by hiding secrets from his enemies. He believes he wins them by showing his enemies exactly what they’re up against and how miserably they’re going to lose.’

‘That’s arrogant.’

‘That’s his way.’

‘This enemy, it’s not really an enemy, is it? Another primarch? We’re talking about rivalry, aren’t we?’

‘All of the Legions run networks of intelligencers,’ replied the Custodes. ‘But they do it for different reasons. The Space Wolves do it to strategically evaluate any opponent they might ever, even theoretically, face. The Thousand Sons do it primarily to feed their hunger for learning.’

‘Learning?’ Hawser echoed. ‘What do they want to know?’

‘As I understand it,’ replied the Custodes, ‘everything.’

He ushered Hawser ahead of him with a subservient gesture. There was a light ahead of them, as if the sun was rising, shafting its rays down the throat of a specially aligned barrow-grave. The tunnel was broadening out and opening.

Hawser stepped out onto a platform of black rock like an immense gallery that curved around the upper level of the vast volcanic interior. The ragged lip of the cone above him was backlit by a sky lit pink with Nikaea’s vulcanism. It reminded Hawser, for a swift, unmanning moment, of the view up out of the entry-wound pit on the Quietude’s home world, the view he had turned to look up at so he did not have to behold Longfang’s doom.

Above the pink horizon, the open sky above the cone was still. There was an eerie calm inside the colossal space that the supervolcano enclosed.

Hawser glanced at the Custodes, who nodded reassuringly. Around the curved range of the huge gallery, other figures had gathered, looking down into the volcanic bowl. Hawser stepped forwards to the lip, a waist-high wall of glittering black basalt. He felt its gritty surface as he leaned against it. He felt the tug of soft wind stirring far below, the tremor of an atmosphere subjugated but defiant.

The gallery and its lip had been melta-cut. Below, similar industry had carved out more galleries in concentric rings, stepping down the inner slopes of the cone flue until they became, in turn, stacked tiers of black benches, hewn from the rock, forming a monumental amphitheatre.

Figures crowded the watching galleries, and packed the benched tiers. Hawser peered to make them out. Most were so far away, they were specks: robed adepts, nobles in finery with attendants, groups of Astartes.

Hawser glanced back at Amon, his escort.

‘What is happening here?’ he asked.

‘Philosophies are being tested,’ replied the Custodes. ‘The uses and abuses of power are being considered and weighed.’

‘By whom?’ asked Hawser.

Amon Tauromachian made a sound that was probably laughter.

‘My dear ser,’ he said, ‘look again.’

Hawser looked down. The wind stirred up at him. Vertigo tugged his belly at the soaring plunge past the galleries beneath, down the sculpted slopes, over the banked tiers of seating, staged like an ancient Romanii arena, where freemen would bay and jeer as slaves were thrown to wolves.

Down, down, over the heads of some of the Imperium’s most potent and significant beings, to the polished floor of the amphitheatre, where a spread eagle the size of a Stormbird had been inlaid in gold in the black marble.

Adjacent to the inlaid eagle’s head was a stepped dais.

The dais held light.

The light had been there all the time, too bright to be reconciled, so sublime that his mind had denied it rather than recognise it. It was the source of the rays he had mistaken as sunrise. It was a supernova of blue-white radiance that shafted light into the sky like a spear.

It was a light and it was a figure, and the thought and reality of both made him sob out loud. He had been looking right at it, but his brain had been too afraid to consciously acknowledge what it was seeing.

The Master of Mankind was holding audience, and the light of his magnitude was humbling to behold.

It was the second most extraordinary thing Kasper Hawser would ever witness.

‘You have to look,’ said Amon.

‘I can’t bear to,’ mumbled Hawser, wiping the tears from his eyes.

‘You can’t look away either,’ replied the Custodes.

Shaking, Hawser gazed down. He perceived the shape of a throne in the radiance, a seat of flaring wings. Black banners hung above the seated figure, suspended by choirs of cherubs that were barely visible in the glare.

Flanking the throne on the dais were Custodes warriors, their lance weapons held at attention. The outflung light seemed to infuse them too, transforming their lustrous golden armour into living, writhing magma.

‘Who are those other men?’ asked Hawser. ‘They can’t even be men, to stand on the dais so close to the light and not be burned away.’

Amon stepped in beside him, and identified the figures one by one, pointing his index finger.

‘The Choirmaster of the Astropaths, the Lord Militant of the Imperial Army, my lord Kelbor-Hal, Fabricator General of Mars, the Master of Navigators, and my lord Malcador, the Sigillite.’

‘Ser, I have lost the ability to feel,’ said Hawser. ‘This day has numbed me. Awe has given way to some kind of trauma, I think. My mind is broken. My sanity has fled. I can no longer register shock, or be impressed. You have just named the five principals of the Emperor’s court, and they are just words to me. Words. You might as well tell me I have sunk with Atlantys or been buried in the caves of Agarttha. A man should not be forced to face the myths that underpin his universe.’

‘Unfortunately, some men must,’ said Amon. ‘And isn’t that what you’ve been doing your entire life? So your bio-briefing ran, anyway. You’ve searched your whole career for the myths that have been hidden by the dust of ages, and now they confront you, you shy away? It suggests a lack of backbone.’

Hawser jerked his gaze away from the spectacle and stared at the towering Custodes by his side.

‘I think I might be permitted a little recoil! I’m not used to this rarefied society like you!’

‘I apologise, ser,’ said Amon, ‘if I offended you, but it is your inquisitive quality that caused you to be selected as a player in the game. It’s what made you appealing to the Fifteenth Legion Astartes. You were already an eager seeker of knowledge. They merely had to harness it.’

‘How could they do that? I’ve never even encountered one of their kind.’

‘Never?’ asked Amon.

‘Never! I–’

Hawser’s voice dried up. Another memory swam close out of the lightless abyss at the back of his mind.

Boeotia. So long ago, so very, very long ago.

He had asked, ‘Ser, which Legion do I have the honour of being protected by?’

‘The Fifteenth.’

The Fifteenth. So. The Thousand Sons.

‘What is your name?’

Hawser had turned. The Tupelov Lancers had led most of the team out of the shrine, leaving only him behind. Two more Astartes, each as immense as the first, had manifested behind him. How could something that big have moved so stealthily?

‘What is your name?’ the new arrival had repeated.

‘Hawser, ser. Kasper Hawser, conservator, assigned to–’

‘Is that a joke?’

‘What?’ Hawser had asked. The other Astartes had spoken.

‘Is that supposed to be a joke?’

‘I don’t understand, ser.’

‘You told us your name. Was it supposed to be a joke? Is it some nickname?’

‘I don’t understand. That’s my name. Why would you think it’s a joke?’

‘Kasper Hawser? You don’t get the reference?’

‘It was years ago,’ Hawser said to Amon. ‘Just once, and so briefly. I had barely remembered it. It couldn’t have been then. It was so… insignificant. They asked about my name.’

‘Your name?’

‘There’s nothing wrong with my name, is there?’ Hawser asked.

‘Names are important,’ said Amon. ‘They invest power on those who own them, and grant power over those who own them to those who learn them.’

‘I… what?’

‘When you know someone’s name, you have power over them. Why do you suppose no one knows the Emperor by anything other than his rank?’

‘You speak of this as if it were sorcery!’ exclaimed Hawser.

‘Sorcery? Now there’s an accusation. You know the power of words. You saw what Murza did with words in Lutetia.’

‘Has the damn rune priest shared that story with everybody?’ Hawser snapped.

‘Who gave you your name?’

‘Rector Uwe, when I was a foundling. No one knew my name when I was brought to the commune. He chose it for me.’

‘It is a name from a folktale. Kaspar Hawser, Casper Hauser, there are variant forms. In ancient times, in the city of Nuremborg, before even the Age of Technology, he was a boy from nowhere, without parents or a past, who had been raised in nothing but a darkened cell, with nothing but a toy horse carved of wood to play with, who emerged into the world only to die in equal mystery, a riddle, in the gardens of Ansbach. This rector, he chose your name well. It is suffused with a sublime power derived from significance. The foundling child. The past of utter darkness. The quest for truth. Even the wooden horse, an attendant symbolism, representing the deceit by which one party may penetrate the defences of a rival.’

‘The Strategy of Ilios?’ asked Hawser. ‘Is that what I am?’

‘Of course,’ said Amon. ‘Though the Wolves, with their senses sharper than any of the Astartes, saw through it in a second.’

‘It is simply preposterous to suggest my life has been controlled through my name,’ spat Hawser. ‘Where would you come by such a notion?’

The Custodes tapped the throat of his armour.

‘Names are crucial signifiers for my kind. A Custodes’s name is engraved inside the chest plate of his gold armour. The name begins at the collar, on the right side, with just the first element exposed, and then runs around the inside of the plate. For some of the oldest veterans, the accumulated names filled up the linings of their torso plates, and were engraved outside like belts across the abdomen. Constantin Valdor’s name is nineteen hundred and thirty-two elements long.’

‘I know this tradition amongst the Custodes,’ said Hawser.

‘Then you will understand that “Amon” is just the start of his name, the earliest part of it. The second part is “Tauromachian”, then “Xigaze”, the site of his organic birth, then “Lepron”, the house of his formative study, then “Cairn Hedrossa”, the place where he was first tutored in weapon use–’

‘Stop. Stop! You mean to say your name, not his,’ protested Hawser.

‘When one shares a name,’ said the voice that belonged to Amon, Custodes of the first circle, ‘it becomes especially easy to achieve mastery and control. My name is also Amon. For the moment, I have used that coincidence to eclipse your noble escort. Turn and know me, Kasper Ansbach Hawser.’

Hawser was abruptly aware that the Custodes was oddly still, as if paralysis had seized him, or his burnished armour had been used to clothe a statue. Amon Tauromachian, Custodes, stood with one hand resting on the gallery parapet, gazing out into the amphitheatre, utterly still.

Hawser began to turn, looking to his right. His skin began to crawl. An emotion finally pierced the traumatic numbness that had overwhelmed his mind.

It was fear.

Something else stood behind him, something that had approached behind his back without betraying its presence. It was an Astartes warrior in red and gold, his bulk half blurred by the distortion field of a falsehood device. He leaned his massive elbows on the parapet, like a casual spectator, the gaze of his green-lensed visor on the theatre below rather than on Hawser.

‘I am Amon of the Fifteenth Astartes, Captain of the Ninth Fellowship, Equerry to the Primarch.’ The Astartes was using his own voice now.

‘How long have I been conversing with you rather than the Custodes?’

‘Since we came into the open air,’ the Equerry replied.

‘Did you create me?’ asked Hawser. ‘Did you twist me to your will?’

‘We guided you to our pathway,’ the warrior replied. ‘Hidden Ones are more obliging if they are not bent against their will, even unconsciously.’

‘So you freely admit I’m an asset?’

‘Curious, is it not? We know you’re our spy, and so do the Wolves. One might be tempted to presume you were useless.’

‘Why am I not?’

‘Because things are not yet played out.’

The Equerry of the Thousand Sons gestured down at the bowl of the amphitheatre. Far below, a shock-haired giant was ascending a small plinth to stand at a wooden lectern facing the radiant dais.

‘This is not a council,’ said the Equerry. ‘This is a trial without legitimacy or statute. My beloved primarch, behold him there, is about to plead for mercy on behalf of knowledge to a court driven by superstition and credulity. The Emperor has been steered into this. He has been manipulated into serving judgement on the Crimson King.’

‘By who? How is that even possible?’ asked Hawser.

‘By the Crimson King’s brothers. Other primarchs are jealous of the Thousand Sons, and the arts we have mastered for the benefit of the Imperium. They call our talents sorcery, and rail against them, but it is simply jealousy. Some hide their envy well. Sanguinius, for example, and the Khan, they pretend it is a minor concern that should simply be settled for the good of everyone, but inside they burn with a jealous rage. Others cannot even begin to hide it. Mortarion. The Wolf King. Their hatred is perhaps more honest because it is open.’

The Equerry looked at Hawser for the first time. The red and gold visage of his crested helm was threatening. The lens slits shone with green light, but the light died as the Equerry lifted the helmet clear of his head. The Equerry was a veteran soldier, with a close-cropped grizzle of hair, and skin like aged paper.

‘The Council of Nikaea is intended to resolve the issues surrounding the use of Librarian adepts in the Legions,’ he said. His voice, no longer disguised by the helmet-mic, was deep and rich. ‘We believe that what some call magic is a tool vital to the continued survival of the Imperium. Our opponents call us heretics and decry the lore we have accumulated. If the Emperor rules against us, a divisive wedge will be driven so deeply into the brotherhood of primarchs it will never recover.’

‘Especially if you defy the Emperor’s ruling,’ said Hawser.

‘He would have no choice but to sanction us,’ the Equerry of the Thousand Sons agreed.

‘And that sanction would be the Sixth.’

‘Sanction is the only reason he permits the feral and monstrous Sixth to endure. The only way he can justify their creation and continued existence is as his ultimate deterrent.’

‘And I am your early warning. Through me, you will see them coming.’

‘Yes, Kasper Hawser. Just so.’

‘He will rule against you,’ said Hawser. ‘No matter how you dress it up, the art you speak of is maleficarum, and that, I have come to believe, is what led mankind into Old Night.’

The Equerry turned to look back at the scene below. Hawser studied his profile. He wondered what a warlock was supposed to look like. He wondered if sorcery had a smell.

He tried to remember if it had been this warrior’s face that had been waiting behind him that morning when he had woken on the orbital plate and looked down at Terra. Had it been this face? Was it familiar?

‘Let me tell you of Old Night,’ said the Equerry, ‘since you’ve spent your career trying to uncover its traces. It was the catastrophe of universal proportions the myths say it was. A cosmological apocalypse. And yes, the abuse of certain arcane and transformatory talents were specific causal events. But I stress the word abuse. I’m talking about whole cultures and societies misusing and misapplying esoteric practices, often because they had no understanding of what they were doing. But do you know the most frightening thing about Old Night, Kasper?’

‘No,’ Kasper replied.

‘I’ll tell you. The term is imprecise. There was no Old Night. When we look back across time, across the train of history, it is possible to discern hundreds of disasters. Whole eras lost to the outer darkness, from which man rebuilt, only to be swept down again. Civilisation has come and gone more times than can be remembered. Atlantys and Agarttha, ser. There have been versions of the rule of man before that have left no lasting trace. This is a natural process.’

‘Natural? Surely it’s testament to man’s meddling with destructive powers!’

‘No,’ said the Equerry, adopting a patient tone as though he was a tutor coaching a faltering student. ‘Think of a forest, afflicted by raging fires from time to time. The fires denude and raze, but they are part of the cycle because they allow for vigorous new growth. Mankind is regrowing from the ashes of the last conflagration, Kasper. What we learned from that is that knowledge is the only continuity. Knowledge is the only strength. Without it, we will burn again, so the primary devotion of the Fifteenth Astartes is the accumulation of knowledge. Just like you, Kasper. That was why you were such a suitable candidate for recruitment. That’s why your mind didn’t even murmur in protest when we yoked your ambitions to ours. Knowledge is life and power, and protection against the dark. Forgetfulness is the true abomination, and the wound that darkness tries to inflict upon us.’

He touched his fingertips to his brow.

‘Here, more than anywhere, is where it matters. Commitment to knowledge. Not in books or in slates or data-stores, but in the memory. Tell me, don’t the Wolves themselves, for all their protestations against maleficarum, proudly pursue a tradition of oral histories? Isn’t memory and retelling the only form they respect, skjald?’

‘Yes,’ Hawser admitted, quietly and grudgingly.

‘There is an old myth,’ said the Equerry. He paused, and looked up at the frozen violence of the Nikaean sky. ‘It is a story of Thoth, a god of the Faeronik Era. He invented writing, and he showed it to the King of Aegypt. The king was horrified, because he thought it would promote forgetfulness.’

The Equerry turned and looked directly at him again.

‘We did not come to you with words, or instructions on a page. We did not try to influence you with things that could be erased or tampered with. We spoke in your dreams, and wrote on your memories, where it would matter.’

‘You gave me no choice, you mean,’ replied Hawser. ‘You altered my life and shaped my wyrd, and I had no say in the course of it.’

‘Kasper–’

‘You say forgetfulness is the true abomination? Then why do you employ it? Why can I remember some things so clearly, while others are invisible to me? If forgetfulness is the greatest evil of all, why did you use it to shape me? Why is my memory selective? What is it that you don’t want me to see?’

The Equerry’s eyes became cold.

‘What are you saying?’ he asked.

‘He’s saying step back,’ said Bear.

Eleven

Blood and names

‘Step back,’ Bear repeated, with greater emphasis.

Amon of the Thousand Sons turned and looked at the Space Wolf over Hawser’s shoulder. He reignited his smile.

‘You’re aiming a weapon at a fellow Astartes, wolf-brother?’ he asked. He looked slightly amused. ‘Is that wise? Is it even… decent?’

Bear’s bolter did not waver.

‘I’m protecting the skjald, as is my bond. Step back.’

Amon of the Thousand Sons laughed. He took a step or two away from Hawser and the parapet. The Custodes was still frozen in place, but he was trembling ever so slightly, like a sleeper trying to swim clear of a dream and awake.

‘Are we to bicker and brawl while history is made below us?’ the Equerry asked.

‘It’s a possibility,’ said Aun Helwintr. The rune priest had approached silently from the other side, flanking the Thousand Sons Equerry.

‘Two of you?’ Amon declared, with mock delight.

‘The skjald is under our protection,’ replied the priest.

‘But I make no threat towards him,’ Amon answered lightly. ‘We were just talking.’

‘Of what?’ asked Helwintr.

‘Idle things,’ Amon replied. ‘Innocent things. A toy horse made of wood, the inlay of a Regicide board, the taste of radapples, the playing of a clavier. The things that string a life together. Nostalgia. Memories.’

‘Step back,’ Bear repeated.

‘Oh, so terse and humourless that one,’ said Amon.

‘Step back and take your magic with you,’ said Aun Helwintr. The rune priest moved forwards, left foot ahead of right, assuming a ritual-specific stance. His hands locked, the left arm up like a lindorm about to strike, the right low at the waist and palm-up with the fingers curled like fish hooks. Hawser suddenly felt an increase in air pressure.

‘What I especially admire,’ said the Thousand Sons Equerry, ‘is your hypocrisy. You hound us and harass us over our so-called sorcery, yet you do not shrink from using it, shaman.’

‘There is a vast gulf between what I employ for the good of the Rout and what you practise, warlock,’ Helwintr replied, ‘and the chief part of that gulf is control. Only the naive would think that mankind could survive in the cosmos without some measure of craft and cunning to protect him, but there is a limit. A limit. We must know what we can master and what we cannot, and we must never allow ourselves to step beyond that line. Tell me, how many steps have you taken? One? Three? A dozen? A thousand?’

‘And thanks to our innate superiority to your gothi fumblings, we have mastered every one,’ Amon returned. ‘You have barely dipped your toe in the Great Ocean. There is always something more to know.’

‘There is such a thing as too much,’ said Hawser.

Amon smiled.

‘Words said to you by that treacherous priest Wyrdmake on the day you awoke on Fenris.’

Hawser looked at Helwintr.

‘From his own mouth,’ Hawser said. ‘I don’t know what further proof we’d need that the Fifteenth have been using me as a spyglass since I entered the Aett.’

The smile left Amon’s lips. He glanced at the poised rune priest.

‘Aun Helwintr!’ he cried. ‘Plainly named in the bright thoughts of the skjald! You have no sway over me now I have your name in my mouth!’

The air seemed to buckle explosively between the Equerry and the rune priest. The force of it knocked Hawser to the ground. Light blistered. Helwintr was hurled back against the rear wall of the gallery space, his hands smoking. His impact grazed a dent in the wall’s basalt face.

Bear fired three precise shots with his bolter. It was ridiculously close range, and Bear was taking no chances. Each one was a kill-shot. Each one was a man-stopper. He did not even consider laming the Thousand Sons Equerry when a hostile act had been made against his priest-brother, and a threat remained to his skjald. His response was automatic, and no Astartes could miss under such circumstances with his signature weapon.

On the ground, rolling over, Hawser felt time bulge and contort. He could see the mass-reactive shells in flight as they went over him, smudging out lines of grease-on-glass slipstream behind them, like comet tails, like bad stars streaking towards impact.

The shots burst before they could hit Amon. They ruptured into little flattened disks of shock wave fire and filled the air with white, papery dust that rained down like ash or deep winter snow. Amon came through the swirling blizzard at Bear, arms outstretched, roaring Bear’s name aloud. Hawser knew the name had been stolen from his mind, just as Helwintr’s had been. The Equerry had Bear’s name, and so had power over him.

Bear threw aside his bolter, its dependability found wanting, and put his right fist into Amon’s face.

The Equerry crashed backwards into the parapet wall, his lips and nose mashed and bloody. His recoil from the blow was so sudden, Hawser had to squirm away to avoid being trampled underfoot. Indignant fury blazed from the Equerry, along with a measure of shock. The name should have stopped Bear in his tracks.

Bear hit him again, twice more, both body blows. The Wolf was snarling. Amon went back against the parapet, and the force of his impacts knapped flakes of basalt off the lip of the wall. He threw a blow at Bear that Bear seemed not to feel.

The impacts and the shock had broken Amon’s concentration. The noble Custodes, pinned like a specimen by the power of his name since the Equerry’s first appearance, let out a strangled cry as he tore himself back into mobility. It was an awful sound, the sound of a man who had been drowning and had never thought to breathe air again, the sound of a man waking from an immobilising nightmare. He shuddered backwards out of his stance, and then tried to lunge at the Thousand Sons warrior.

‘Amon Tauromachian!’ the Equerry proclaimed, and the Custodes slammed over onto his back. It was as though he had been knocked down by typhoon winds. He slid backwards along the gallery floor for a dozen metres, his armour scraping up flurries of sparks off the rock, driven by a hurricane-force blast no one else could feel.

The Equerry held out his right hand, and Amon Tauromachian’s guardian spear flew to him from where it had fallen. It landed in his palm with a solid smack. Wielding it expertly, and transferring it into a two-handed grip, he swept it laterally at Bear. The toe of the blade caught Bear’s left shoulder-plate and rotated him brutally. Slivers of ceramite plating spun away from the impact.

Bear drew out his axe, and used the haft to stop the next swing. He tried to hook the attacking weapon away, but the guardian spear had a much greater reach. Amon’s use of it was so precise, Hawser had no doubt that the Equerry had simply lifted decades of practice drill and technique from the mind of the Custodes. The halberd’s blade ripped the Fenrisian war axe from Bear’s grip, and then came back again to cripple him.

All the men of Tra, indeed every man of the Rout, had been taught that the only thing of consequence was victory. Outsiders considered the Sixth Astartes notorious for their wild belligerence, but that was simply an inevitable by-product of their defining mindset. The Vlka Fenryka were stoically resolved to take any action necessary in order to win.

The truth is that we are the most harshly trained of all.

Bear tilted slightly and took the blade in his side. It cut through the torso plating under his left arm. An Astartes from another Legion might, if faced with the same dire threat, perhaps have tried to hunch and shield himself with his shoulder plate. The result would have cost him an arm. Bear threw his guard wide, arm raised, and absorbed the hit in his physical core. The impact made him roar to vent the pain. Hawser, watching wide-eyed in horror, saw the daggers of Bear’s fangs. He saw the blood gout from the trench wound puncturing Bear’s flank.

Bear clamped his left arm down like a vice and trapped the halberd buried in his ribs. He gripped the golden haft, slippery with blood, and yanked Amon close. The Equerry couldn’t pull it out. With his free right fist, Bear punched Amon in the face repeatedly, each blow delivered with a roar of pain and triumph, each blow causing blood to spray. The fifth or sixth blow caught the Thousand Sons warrior in the throat. Gore from his pulverised face covered the front of his glorious armour.

Amon slipped backwards, swaying, releasing his grip on theguardian spear. Bear wrenched it out of him and hurled it away. Hawser ducked as the blood-splattered weapon clattered past him.

Bear grasped Amon by the chest plating with one hand and the scalp by the other. He twisted the Equerry’s head back, exposing his throat, and lunged in, teeth bared.

‘No!’ Hawser yelled.

Poised to bite and finish his prey, Bear snarled a wet leopard-growl at Hawser. His black-pinned golden eyes had gone dark with pain, pain and some other feral property.

‘Don’t!’ Hawser cried, holding out a staying hand. ‘We need him alive! Alive, he’s testimony for us! Dead, he’s proof simply of our aggression!’

Bear relaxed his grip slightly, and pulled back from the threatened bite, though his mouth still gaped hungrily and his teeth gleamed. He punched Amon again, punishingly hard, and laid him out on the basalt floor.

‘Blade!’ he demanded.

Hawser unlooped his axe, and tossed it to Bear. The Wolf caught it neatly in his right hand, knelt down over the Equerry, and hacked the mark of aversion into his chest plating.

The Equerry of the Thousand Sons screamed. He thrashed and convulsed with demented fury and threw Bear backwards. His fists and feet hammered the floor in an insane blur, and his screams turned to choking gulps as blood and plasmic matter sprayed from his mouth. As his convulsions reached a pitch, a torus of sizzling, foul-smelling energy blasted out of him, soiling the air with streaks of sooty smoke.

Shuddering and wailing, he clambered to his feet. He was aspirating blood and other fluids through the pulped ruin Bear had made of his face. His shaking was like a palsy, a nervous judder. Clouds of vapour were pouring off him, rank and oily. Almost at once he was moving, fleeing, thumping quickly but unsteadily away along the gallery, his arms clenched around his torso.

Bear struggled to rise and give chase. He was intercepted by the Custodes, who was finally back on his feet and free of the sorcerous yoke. Deep gouges marked the Custodes’s golden armour.

‘Wait,’ he said to Bear. ‘I’ve signalled the Custodian force. The upper galleries will be sealed. He cannot escape. The Sisterhood will silence him, and my brothers of the Legio Custodes will bring him down.’

‘I will hunt him myself!’ Bear insisted.

‘No,’ said the Custodes, more firmly. He looked over at Hawser.

‘Ser,’ he said. ‘I apologise. I failed you badly.’

Hawser shook his head. He walked to the parapet and looked down. Far below, the proceedings of the great council were continuing without interruption. The cone of the supervolcano was so vast, no one on the chamber floor had been aware of the violent altercation in the upper parts of the auditorium.

Aun Helwintr appeared at Hawser’s side. His face was paler than usual, as if he had been starved of light and food for a year. He had removed the gauntlets of his power armour. His hands were miserably scorched, raw-red and blistered. He gazed down into the bowl of the amphitheatre.

‘A report must be passed to the Emperor without delay,’ he said, speaking not to Hawser but to Amon Tauromachian and Bear. He was staring straight down at the bright form on the dais, and the shock-haired giant pleading his case from the wooden lectern before him.

‘No matter what argument the Crimson King presents,’ said Helwintr, ‘this will surely influence whatever decision the Master of Mankind makes.’

‘It’s the most unnerving thing that happened to me in my old life,’ said Hawser. ‘It has the most… maleficarum.’

‘You know that’s not true,’ said Longfang. ‘In your heart, you know better. You’re denying yourself.’

Hawser woke with a start. For a terrible, rushing moment, he thought he was somewhere else, but it was a dream. He lay back, trying to slow his bolting heart. Just a dream.

Hawser settled back onto his bed. He felt tired and unrefreshed. Sustained artificial gravity always did that to him.

There was an electronic chime.

‘Yes?’ he said.

‘Ser Hawser? It is your hour five alarm,’ said a softly modulated servitor voice.

‘Thank you,’ said Hawser. He sat up. He was so stiff, so worn out. He hadn’t felt this bad for a long time. His leg was sore. Maybe there were painkillers in the drawer.

He limped to the window. The shutter rose into its frame recess with a low hum, allowing golden light to flood in.

The sun was just coming up over the hemisphere below him. He was looking straight down on Terra in all its magnificence. He could see the night side and the sunlit blue of oceans and the whipped-cream swirl of clouds and the glittering light points of a superorbital plate gliding majestically past beneath him.

He saw his own sunlit reflection in the thick glass of the window port. Old! So old! So old! How old was he? Eighty? Eighty years standard? He recoiled. This was wrong. On Fenris, they’d remade him, they’d–

Except he hadn’t been to Fenris yet. He hadn’t even left Terra.

Bathed in golden sunlight, he stared at his aghast reflection. He saw the face of the other figure reflected in the glass, the figure standing just behind him.

Terror constricted him.

‘How can you be here?’ he asked.

And woke.

‘Who were you talking to?’ asked Ogvai.

‘His dreams,’ said Aun Helwintr. ‘They’re getting louder.’

Hawser sat up. They were in the chamber beyond the quiet room. The moving light of magmatic turmoil dappled the walls. It was uncomfortably hot. The warmth of the smoky air had caused him to doze. He imagined that sleep was an attempt by his mind and body at self-preservation after the unsettling clash with the Thousand Sons warlock.

Considerable numbers of Tra were gathered in the chamber, along with Wolves from Onn and Fyf.

‘Did they catch him?’ Hawser asked.

Helwintr glanced at him, and then shook his head. He was applying salve to the weeping burns on his hands. Given the damage Hawser had seen earlier, the flesh was healing with astonishing speed.

‘He slipped into the shadows,’ said Helwintr.

‘Spineless Custodes lost him,’ said Skarssen.

‘It doesn’t matter anyway,’ rumbled a voice. ‘It doesn’t matter a damn now.’

The Wolf King loomed into the chamber, a hulking mass of shadow backlit by the fire-glow. He was flanked by the painfully beautiful maidens bearing their raised longswords.

He came closer, and the men bowed their heads, even Ogvai and Lord Gunn. The flickering flame light revealed his face, half shadowed, and the broad smile that exposed his inhuman teeth.

When he spoke, it was with a wet leopard-growl.

‘The Emperor has made His ruling,’ he said.

Twelve

Thardia

‘So you liked the account?’ Hawser asked. ‘It amused you? It distracted you?’

‘It was amusing enough,’ said Longfang. ‘It wasn’t your best.’

No…

‘I can assure you it was,’ said Hawser.

Longfang shook his head. Droplets of blood flecked from his beard.

‘No, you’ll learn better ones,’ he said. ‘Far better ones. And even now, it’s not the best you know.’

No, again… not this memory… You keep sticking on this memory… We have to get past it…

‘It’s the most unnerving thing that happened to me in my old life,’ said Hawser with some defiance. ‘It has the most… maleficarum.’

‘You know that’s not true,’ said Longfang. ‘In your heart, you know better. You’re denying yourself.’

Hawser woke with a start. It was all a dream. He lay back, calming down, trying to slow his panicked breathing, his bolting heart. Just a dream. Just a dream.

Better. We’re closer now. Past the memory of Longfang, closer to the one that matters.

Hawser felt tired and unrefreshed, as if his sleep had been sour, or sedative assisted. His limbs ached. Sustained artificial gravity always did that to him.

Golden light was knifing into his chamber around the window shutter, gilding everything, giving the room a soft, burnished feel.

There was an electronic chime.

Keep with it. Focus.

‘Yes?’ he said.

‘Ser Hawser? It is your hour five alarm,’ said a softly modulated servitor voice.

‘Thank you,’ said Hawser. He sat up. He was so stiff, so worn out. He hadn’t felt this bad for a long time. His leg was sore. Maybe there were painkillers in the drawer.

He limped to the window, and pressed the stud to open the shutter. It rose into its frame recess with a low hum, allowing golden light to flood in. He looked out. It was a hell of a view.

Ignore the view. Who cares about the view? You’ve seen it before, over and over, in life and in your dreams. It’s what’s behind you that matters. Focus!

The sun, source of the ethereal radiance, was just coming up over the hemisphere below him. He was looking straight down on Terra in all its magnificence. He could see the night side and the constellation pattern of hive lights in the darkness behind the chasing terminator, he could see the sunlit blue of oceans and the whipped-cream swirl of clouds and, below, he could see the glittering light points of the superorbital plate Rodinia gliding majestically under the one he was aboard, which was…

It doesn’t matter. It. Doesn’t. Matter. Stay in that moment. Focus your mind on that memory, on the one part of the memory that’s really important!

Lemurya. Yes, that was it. Lemurya. A luxury suite on the underside of the Lemuryan plate.

His eyes refocussed. He saw his own sunlit reflection in the thick glass of the window port.

You’re distracted! Don’t be distracted! Ignore what you look like! This is a dream! A memory! Behind you, that’s all that counts! Turn around! Look behind you! Focus! Who’s behind you?

Old! So old! So old! How old was he? Eighty? Eighty years standard? He recoiled. This was wrong. On Fenris, they’d remade him, they’d–

Except he hadn’t been to Fenris yet. He hadn’t even left Terra.

Focus! Who’s behind you?

Bathed in golden sunlight, he stared at his aghast reflection. He saw the face of the other figure reflected in the glass, the figure standing just behind him.

Yes! Yes!

Terror constricted him.

‘How can you be here?’ he asked.

And woke.

Hawser groaned. He was covered in sweat and his heart was palpitating. The astringent smells of herbal ointments and body paint assaulted his nose.

‘Did you see?’ asked Aun Helwintr.

‘No,’ said Hawser.

‘Ah,’ said the priest.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Hawser.

The priest shrugged.

‘We’ll try again,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow, or later tonight if there’s strength in you.’

‘It was very close this time,’ said Hawser. ‘I mean this time, I actually turned around earlier. I changed my memory, I behaved differently in it. I turned around, but it still wasn’t fast enough.’

‘Next time,’ said Helwintr. He seemed distracted.

They had come up through the silent stands of forest into the crags above the high station, a two-hour trek they had made every day for a week. It was cold, and if they made an early start, frost could be found lingering on the trail. The rocks of the crags, grey and cream, were sheathed in beards of winter lichen: purple, mauve, blue, red, some as rough as sandpaper or as soft as moleskin.

Aun Helwintr claimed that the loneliness of the crags aided contemplation and inner sight. It was away from the traffic of voices and everyday life, and on Thardia, where humans had only inhabited the high station and the research facility, there was no legacy of wights or ghost memories to tangle a man’s threads.

Helwintr liked the cold too. Even at its polar extremes, Thardia barely approached the lethal majesty of a Fenrisian winter, but the priest liked the bracing climate and the marks a man’s breath left in the air.

Helwintr collected up the pots of salve, the talismans, and the other paraphernalia he had arranged around the table rock they had chosen for the day’s effort. The rock, low, flat-topped and large enough for Hawser to lie on it, full length, like a man stretched out on a bed, had a bluish coat of lichen on it. It reminded Hawser of the worn velvet lining of an Ossetian prayer box or an old gaming board.

The priest was fully caparisoned with winter pelts and his leatherware garb. His mask, head-binding, chest and shoulder wear and arm guards were all of glossy black leather with involuted knotwork. His long white hair, lacquered into an S-tail, was protruding from the back of his scalp-case. His black face-guard was a prophylactic fear-mask with a daemon-snarl to the mouth and snout intended to scare wights away.

Hawser wore leather gear of his own, dark brown and of simpler design, with a half-mask and no full-head casing. It had been a twenty-six week translation from Nikaea to Thardia, and he’d used his time to learn and practise some basic hideworking skills. Men from Tra, at different times, had shown him various techniques, and had reviewed his work and suggested refinements. Hawser had begun some rudimentary knotwork decoration down the left arm guard, but it was slow, and he was disgruntled at his lack of ability. The rest of the leatherware was plain and undecorated.

His accoutrements gathered, Helwintr crouched on a slab of rock, his legs bent wide, his back hunched. The pose reminded Hawser, just for a moment, of an amphibian on a lily-pad. Then it reminded him of something else: a lupine predator, vigilant on a rock, calm but alert in the sunlight, resting but surveying the forest below.

Helwintr took an athame from his belt and began to make marks in the lichen covering the rock he was squatting on.

Hawser was cold. He left the priest to whatever abstruse gothi business had engaged him. The open air of any planet’s biosphere was more conducive to such activities than the chambers of a void-borne starship. Helwintr was making the best use of the task force’s brief stay-over at Thardia.

To the east, in the glassy sky, a constellation unfamiliar to the heavenscape of Thardia glimmered and shone. It was a star-pattern that this world’s sky had never seen before, and never would again, a star-pattern that even a spiritually bankrupt gothi could read as an astral house of doom and destruction.

It was the lights of the task force ships at high anchor. Task force Geata, six companies of the Sixth, along with their support vessels and enthralled servers. A notable concentration of strength by the standards of any Legion, especially in this age when the demands of the Great Crusade diluted the Astartes across the vast celestial stage. By the standards of the Sixth, almost unheard of. The official line was that the companies were assembling at Thardia for a moot and resupply, but Hawser knew something else was going on.

There was a chill in his bones. Hawser drew his axe and moved down the slope away from the priest, beginning his long, repetitive regimen of practice strokes and turns that Godsmote had taught him. He was beginning to handle the weapon well enough to have earned Godsmote’s approval once or twice. Hawser could turn the axe, rotate and check the angles of stroke and attack, block, and switch hands, either from one to another or from a single to a double-handed grip. He had even mastered a showy little spin, a rapid, one-handed rotation that mimicked some of the dazzling blade skills he’d seen displayed by warriors like Bear and Erthung, but Godsmote had warned him against it. Too flashy, he’d said. Too much risk of losing control or grip, just for the sake of showing off.

Axe-fighting was a complex and demanding dance. It looked much more brutal and simplistic than sword-work, but in some respects it was vastly more subtle than the ballet of the swordsman. The killing edge of an axe was in a position to harm an opponent for a much smaller percentage of engagement time than the killing surfaces of a sword. Axe-fighting was about swinging and circling, moving and evading, choosing the moment to land the blow. It was about seeing that opening coming three or four steps ahead, like a good Regicide player, and then taking advantage of it without telegraphing the stroke. It was about predicting the interface between swing and moving target. Misjudge that, and you’d lose the fight.

Axes were cold-climate weapons, because they were as much working tools for ice and firewood and butchery as they were weapons. But the art of using an axe in a fight was about predictive judgement, so it was no wonder that cultures like the Fenrisians had become preoccupied by prophecy. Reading the future was a survival skill at the micro level, and thus had become bred into their culture at the macro. Games of predictive strategy were compulsory activities in the Rout.

For his part, Hawser had spent many of his childhood hours playing Regicide with Rector Uwe.

Hawser put his shoulders and back into the loops and turns, making his weapon hum as it cut the air. The exercise began to warm him up too.

He turned hard, swinging around, chopping the axe in a figure of eight, and as he did so, he realised that he was clearly beginning to inherit the Vlka Fenryka’s gift for prophecy. He knew before he’d even turned that he was going to have to stop the axe swing short.

Ohthere Wyrdmake was standing right behind him. The keen bite of Hawser’s redirected axe still barely missed him.

‘Move,’ said Wyrdmake. ‘With me, now.’

‘What?’

‘Now!’

Wyrdmake’s manner was hard to read at the best of times. His inscrutability, the sheer imposing threat of him, made him an uncomfortable presence to be around, and the rune priests were the most remote and inhuman of all the Vlka Fenryka.

He was blinking rather rapidly, though, and there was a touch of perspiration on his brow. To Hawser, Wyrdmake seemed agitated and uncomfortable.

‘There’s danger here,’ he said.

‘We must warn Helwintr,’ Hawser replied. He looked back up the slope to the rock where Aun Helwintr had been crouching. There was no sign of Tra’s rune priest.

Hawser looked back at Wyrdmake. The priest put an index finger against his lips, seized Hawser by the wrist, and started to drag him towards the forest line.

The forest vegetation was dark, tuberous growths with glossy black trunks and lacy foliage like the ragged wings of dead insects. Only at a distance, in general, structural terms, did it resemble actual trees.

Some of the growths were of fantastic size, bloated and wizened with age. Hawser had paid them little attention each day as he’d trekked through the glades. Now he was among them, furtive and confused, he became aware of how alien they were. There was a smell of dust and cinnamon. A black humus of decaying leaves covered the soil, and insects, tiny as pepper dust, billowed in the sunlit spaces between the plant shadows.

Hawser tried to make as little noise as possible, desperately trying to apply the techniques of stalking and foot-placement Godsmote had taught him, but he was like a noisy sack that Wyrdmake was dragging behind him. The priest moved in utter silence.

They got into cover in the shadow of a vast tuber-growth. The veined filigree of its canopy hung overhead like a widow’s veil. Hawser had leaf dust in his throat and tried not to cough.

Wyrdmake pushed Hawser back against the plant bole. The bark of the tuber was as glossy and black as the skin of an aubergine. The priest held up a hand indicating that Hawser should keep himself there, and then raised his head.

Hawser could half-see Wyrdmake in the shadows in front of him. Like Hawser and Helwintr, the priest of Fyf was clad in leatherwork gear, pelts and mask. Totemic strings of beads and animal teeth were looped around his neck. Hawser wondered how they didn’t make a sound when he moved. He became locked on the question. It was so silly. It almost made him laugh out loud. How did they not make a noise? Was there a trick to it?

Wyrdmake kept himself raised up for a moment, panning his head around, watching the glade, listening. Then he crouched down beside Hawser and started to fiddle with one of the bead strings around his neck.

‘I know what Helwintr’s been doing this past week,’ Wyrdmake whispered to him. ‘He’s had my blessing and advice on the matter. Getting past your sculpted memories is a very worthwhile goal for you and the Vlka Fenryka.’

Hawser swallowed and nodded. Wyrdmake had taken two black feathers off his necklace, and he was using a small length of thin silver wire to bind them to a garnet bead and a human finger bone he’d produced from a belt pouch.

‘The memory architecture is very strong,’ Wyrdmake continued as he worked, his voice barely a whisper. ‘There is cunning in it. Maleficarum. Helwintr reports to me every day. He is frustrated. Today, he tried a new technique. A new way, perhaps to unlock your thoughts. You know Eada Haelfwulf?’

Hawser nodded. Haelfwulf was another rune priest attached to Tra Company, serving their needs as one of Helwintr’s senior gothi. He was a tall, raw-boned warrior who dyed his leather gear red to match his flame-hair and beard.

‘Haelfwulf came with you today.’

‘I didn’t see him,’ Hawser whispered.

‘That was the idea,’ Wyrdmake whispered back. ‘He stayed back, out of sight, to secretly push at your memories from another angle while Helwintr kept you occupied.’

‘So? What’s happened?’

Wyrdmake shook his head.

‘I don’t know. But about an hour ago, I felt a terrible presentiment. A beforehand sense that something ill was about to take place up here in the crags. I came at once.’

‘You’re scaring me,’ Hawser whispered.

‘Good. That means you’re taking me seriously.’

‘Where’s Helwintr?’

‘When I arrived, all I saw was you, busy at your axe-work.’

‘Helwintr was right there!’ Hawser hissed. ‘He was on the rock not twenty metres back from me.’

‘Not when I arrived.’

‘He wouldn’t just disappear. He was busy with something. Some cunning work. He was listening.’

‘He’d sensed it too,’ Wyrdmake said. He had finished what he’d been doing with the feathers and the trinkets from his pouch. He cupped them in his hands, blew on them, and then threw his hands up.

Something black fluttered away into the canopy. Hawser heard its noisy wings. He got the brief impression of a raven, even though he knew no raven could have been hidden about Wyrdmake’s person.

‘What–’ he began.

Wyrdmake silenced him.

‘Wait now.’

The priest closed his eyes, as if concentrating hard. Hawser became acutely conscious of the sound of his own breathing. The forest was eerily quiet. There was an occasional sound: the fidget of the wind, or of some small creature, the tick of burrowing insects, the soft brush of leaf litter drifting down from the tuber-trees.

He heard a flutter from not far away. The sound of a large bird moving through the upper levels of the canopy.

‘Did you… did you make a crow?’ Hawser asked.

Wyrdmake peered at him.

‘A what?’ he whispered.

‘A crow.’

‘What word is that, skjald?’

‘Crow.’

‘You mean crow?’ the priest asked.

‘That’s what I said,’ Hawser whispered.

‘Not in Juvjk or Wurgen you didn’t. You spoke the Terran-tongue name for it.’

‘No, I didn’t, I–’

‘Be. Quiet.’

Wyrdmake closed his eyes again. Hawser shut up. He heard the wings beating once more, but further off. He heard another noise too, the faintest suggestion of something moving somewhere through the trees. Whatever it was, it was bigger than a burrowing insect or a forest floor creature.

Wyrdmake’s eyes snapped open.

‘I see it,’ he whispered, almost to himself. ‘Hjolda, it’s big.’

He looked at Hawser.

‘Head up towards the crags as fast and as quietly as you can. Don’t look back.’

Wyrdmake reached under his pelts and produced a compact plasma pistol. He armed it. It looked utterly incongruous and yet utterly appropriate in his leather-clad hands.

‘Go!’ he said.

The priest turned and sprang out of the shadows of the vast tuber-tree. His pelts flowed out behind him like a cloak as he headed deeper into the forest with great, bounding strides, towards the source of the noise. Within seconds, he had vanished from view.

Hawser waited a moment, willing the priest to reappear. Then he got up, axe in hand, and started to move as he had been instructed. He cursed every noisy step he took, every crunch of leaf-mould, every crack of dry twig. He felt like a blundering fool.

He hadn’t gone far when he heard a sound. He stopped and looked around. The forest space was black shadows and bars of white light. Tiny flies danced in the beams. Withered leaf shapes made shadows like calcified wing membranes. He heard the sound again.

A flutter. A flutter of wings, not far away. A slight disturbance in the forest cover. Branches rustled. Another flutter.

Without warning there was a frenzy of noise, a violent thrashing that was over as fast and as abruptly as it began. Not ten metres from him, undergrowth shook and tore. He dropped down low, weapon ready. Something that wasn’t human let out a brief, raucous shriek.

There was a wet leopard-snarl.

Then, from behind him, deep in the forest, came a cry of agony.

Hawser knew it was Wyrdmake.

He rose and turned. The priest was hurt. In trouble. He couldn’t just…

He heard a throb of sound, the throat-rumble of a carnivore. It was close by. He couldn’t tell which direction it had come from. Fear-sweat was trickling down his back. He raised the axe ready to strike. He moved forwards. He edged around a massive tuber bole that came up out of the dusty forest brush like an inverted mushroom. He kept his back to it. Slowly, ever so slowly, he leaned forwards to peer around the trunk.

He saw the wolf.

Half-saw it. It was just a shadow. A wolf-shaped shadow. A shadow-shaped wolf. Vast and ominous, like a blood-dark midnight sky; spectral and malevolent like the final whispered curses of a dying lunatic. It existed in the shadows but not in the patches of sunlight. Hawser could feel the grumble of its throat-noise. Terror was upon him, like all the cold of Fenris concentrated in a hyperdense lump inside his heart.

The almost-wolf had something in its jaws, a gleaming black tangle of something. It dropped it onto the forest floor. It let out a growl that sounded like the lowest bass thump of a tribal bodhran. Hawser waited for it to turn. He waited for it to turn and see him. He stopped breathing. He pressed himself into the sticky black skin of the tuber bole.

He waited. He waited. He waited for the jaws to close on him. He waited for eternity to pass so he could breathe again.

The almost-wolf uttered another wet leopard-growl.

Hawser heard the dry ground cover stirring, leaf-mulch sifting.

He risked a second look.

There was no sign of the almost-wolf. It had moved away. It had slipped into the darkness, into the forest.

Hawser waited a moment more. Hands tight around the haft of his axe, he slid from the tree shadow and stepped into the gloom of the glade where the almost-wolf had been standing.

In the mid-point of the clearing, the something that the almost-wolf had dropped was lying on the leaf-loam. It was a muddle of torn black feathers. The feathers were sheened like jet silk. It was Wyrdmake’s crow. It was dead, mangled, one wing almost bitten off. Droplets of blood spattered the feathers and the ground around it, glinting in the dim light like amber beads. Under the feathers, the cunningly wrought thing was just the bones it had always been.

Hawser had been with the Vlka Fenryka long enough to understand Wyrdmake’s distant cry of pain. Sympathetic magic. What had been done to his cunning spy had also been done to him.

Hawser straightened up. He tried to remember which direction the priest’s cry of pain had come from. He tried to orientate himself. It was hard. The clotted fear inside him was very great and very cold. It was sliding up his gullet like a glacier. He tried to think like a Wolf, like a man of Tra. He tried to think strategically, as if all he was contemplating was the next move or two on Skarssensson’s hneftafl board, or Rector Uwe’s regicide set.

He let the axe slip down through both palms, until he had it clenched around the very throat and knob of the haft. This was a battle-ready grip called ‘the open bite’ in Wurgen. It was the maximum extension of arms and haft, so it afforded the longest reach and the greatest leverage. It was not a subtle position from which to start a fight. If he encountered the almost-wolf again, Hawser didn’t expect the fight to be subtle.

He moved forwards, through the light and shadow, under the canopy of insect-wing leaves. He kept the axe at full extension in the double-handed brace. He became aware of a new sound. It was breathing. Laboured, human breathing. The struggling respiration of someone injured.

Hawser ducked under a low band of ghost leaves, and saw a large body crumpled in the shade of a misshapen tuber trunk. The man was Astartes. His leatherwork wargear was red.

‘Eada?’ Hawser whispered, crouching down beside him.

Eada Haelfwulf blinked and looked up at him.

‘Skjald,’ he smiled. His face was drawn with pain. His torso was wet with gore. Something had delivered several crippling bites to his flank and hip.

‘Shhhhh!’ Hawser hissed.

‘The wolf had me,’ Eada whispered. ‘Came out of nowhere. Something brought it forth. Someone here today is working against us.’

‘I saw it. Stay still.’

‘Give me another minute. My wounds are knitting and the blood vessels are closing off. I’ll be on my feet again in a moment.’

‘Wyrdmake’s hurt,’ said Hawser.

‘I heard him. We have to find him,’ Eada replied.

‘I don’t know what happened to Helwintr,’ said Hawser.

Eada Haelfwulf looked at him in a grave way that suggested he really ought to know. Haelfwulf had pulled off his leather mask. There were specks of blood all over the white skin of his cheek and brow.

‘What did you mean, Eada? What did you mean when you said that someone here today was working against us?’

Eada Haelfwulf coughed, and the action of it made him wince slightly.

‘Helwintr and I were working into your memories, skjald.’

‘I know,’ said Hawser.

‘Imagine your mind like a fortress. Well defended, high ramparts. Helwintr was trying to get in through the front gate. He was out where you could see him, an open approach. I was behind the fort, trying to scale the ramparts while Helwintr’s attack engaged your attention. My aim was to get into an inner chamber next door to the one you keep locked.’

‘What happened?’ asked Hawser.

‘He broke into someone else’s memories,’ said a voice from behind him.

Hawser turned.

Aun Helwintr was standing at the edge of the glade, staring at them. He had a short, thick-bladed fighting sword drawn.

‘Come here, skjald,’ he said.

‘Hjolda!’ Eada exclaimed. ‘In the name of all the wights of the Underverse, skjald, stay here by me!’

‘What?’ Hawser stammered.

Helwintr took a step closer. Hawser kept staring at him, his grip on his axe tight. He could hear Haelfwulf making a huge effort to rise behind him. He heard Haelfwulf drawing his blade.

‘Stay close by me,’ Eada Haelfwulf hissed. ‘I broke through into someone else’s memories, all right. Some thing else’s. It was whatever had reshaped your thoughts, skjald. It had left a doorway open, a doorway back to its own mind, so it could slip back and revisit you whenever it wanted. I looked through the doorway. So did Helwintr. It saw us looking, and it didn’t like it.’

‘Come here, skjald,’ said Helwintr, taking another step forwards. He beckoned with his free hand, the warrior’s cocky invitation to an enemy. ‘Come on. Don’t listen to him.’

‘Stay where you are,’ Haelfwulf grunted, straightening up behind Hawser. ‘Get ready to move behind me. I’ll defend you.’

‘But Helwintr–’ Hawser began.

‘Hjolda, listen to me!’ Haelfwulf rasped, his voice cut by a throb of pain. ‘Understand me! The thing that saw us, it didn’t like us prying. It lashed out at us. We fell back, but not fast enough. It touched us with its maleficarum. It touched Helwintr.’

Hawser gazed in horrid disbelief at Aun Helwintr. The priest took another step forwards. A deep rumble came out of him, a wolf-growl. Through the slits of his mask, his eyes were black-pinned gold.

‘You’re the wolf,’ Hawser said, his voice tiny.

‘Everything Eada Haelfwulf said is pretty much true,’ said Helwintr. ‘Except one part.’

Helwintr took another step closer.

‘It was Eada that was touched by the maleficarum.’

Hawser froze up. He heard the sounds coming from the wounded rune priest behind him. The ragged, pained breathing slowly became a deeper, panting, huffing noise. He heard skin and sinew stretching, he heard the phlegmy click and gurgle of cartilage and joint fluid. He heard bones protesting as they deformed, and organs bubble and slosh as they realigned. He heard the stifled agony of something enduring extreme physical transmutation.

‘Don’t look around,’ said Aun Helwintr. The priest stood his ground and brought his sword up to a ready stance.

Hawser felt the hot breath on the nape of his neck, the wet, frothing leopard-purr.

He turned. The open bite grip delivered the axe in a full, chest-height rotation swing, a half-circle blow that buried the axe-head in the right shoulder of the thing behind him.

The almost-wolf that had been Eada Haelfwulf roared in frustrated pain. The weight of it struck Hawser and smashed him over onto his back. He couldn’t even see it. It was just a shadow blur and a predator sound. He glimpsed teeth. He rolled hard on the leaf-loam, seeing the teeth raking for him.

Helwintr charged the almost-wolf head-on. The pair clashed, grappled and went over in a thrashing, struggling tangle. Even as an insubstantial shadow, a smoke-wisp that only existed where the sunlight didn’t fall, the almost-wolf was twice the size of the Astartes. Locked together, they became a furious blur. Hawser tried to get up. He couldn’t find his axe. He cried out as blood jetted out of the fight and spattered his face and chest. He couldn’t tell if the blood had been spilled by teeth or sword. He couldn’t tell if it belonged to Helwintr or the almost-wolf.

He circled the tumult of the fight. Helwintr had almost disappeared into the spreading shadow the almost-wolf cast around it. Both combatants were moving too fast for him to track.

There was a crack of bone, a sound of flesh shredding. Helwintr flew backwards in a shower of blood. He hit a tuber bole and somersaulted onto the forest floor. His leather gear was ripped and his sword was missing. He was wounded badly in the face, neck and left leg. He tried to rise, yelling at his limbs to move, to obey.

The almost-wolf uttered its loudest throat-noise yet. It swung its massive snout around to face Hawser, ignoring the Astartes it had maimed. All Hawser could see was the shadow of it, like a piece of night cut out and pasted onto daylight. At the heart of the darkness, the huge teeth glimmered like icicles.

A thin, searing beam of light squealed across the glade and exploded the ground underneath the almost-wolf. As it tried to recover, a second beam hit it squarely in the chest and threw it backwards. It demolished two large tuber trees as it went tumbling over. The dry boles burst like ripe seed cases and filled the air with a choking blizzard of string vegetable pulp. Broken, parts of the canopy foliage came crashing down.

Ohthere Wyrdmake lowered his plasma pistol. His left arm hung slack and limp. Blood around the shoulder, not yet dried, made it look as though his arm had almost been bitten clean off.

On the far side of the demolished tuber trees, sunlight fell on Eada Haelfwulf lying tangled in a sticky mass of broken bark and vegetable matter. Dense clouds of disturbed spores and plant dust billowed in the sunlit air.

Smoke rose from the terrible plasma weapon wound that scorched Eada’s chest. Hawser’s axe was still buried in his right shoulder.

The thralls and wolf priests backed off, and slipped out of the deep armoured chamber in the heart of Nidhoggur. Powerful banks of lights had been secured to the ceiling to bathe the chamber in a constant, simulated daylight. Marks of aversion had been notched into the chamber floor.

Eada Haelfwulf, stripped of his pelt, his wargear and his armour, was chained to an upright cruciform of plasteel in the centre of the chamber. He was near death. The apparatus that secured him was the work of the wolf priests, part restraint, part interrogation device, part life support mechanism. Tube lines and feeds ran from beating vital units on the floor behind the cross, and burrowed like worms into the sutured flesh graft that patched the wound cavity in his chest.

He looked out at Hawser and the Wolves, imploring, ashamed, knowing what he had done, what he had been. Clear fluid, viscous, wept from his nose, mouth and tear ducts, matting his beard and drying like glue on his bare flesh. There was a musky animal stink in the chamber that overwhelmed the astringent smell of counterseptic and the odour of blood.

‘Forgive me,’ he gurgled. ‘I could not fight it.’

‘What did you see?’ asked Ohthere Wyrdmake.

Eada whined, as if the memory was too painful to recall. He closed his eyes and turned his head from side to side reluctantly. Mucus ran from his mouth and nose.

‘Even if he answers, we can’t trust anything he says now,’ said Helwintr. ‘It’s been inside him. It’s used him. Its touch is on him and he won’t ever cast it out in this life.’

‘I’d still like to hear his answer,’ replied Wyrdmake. The senior priest of Fyf flexed his left arm. The injury done by sympathetic magic was healing with the usual, startling speed of Astartes self-repair, but it was still sore.

‘And I’d like it if he wasn’t on my damn ship,’ grumbled Ogvai from behind them. ‘He’s poison. He’s spoiled. He’s turned.’

Wyrdmake raised a hand to crave the jarl’s indulgence.

‘A little of Eada Haelfwulf yet remains,’ he said.

Eada moaned. Spittle and flecks of mucus flew from his lips and face as he shook his head.

‘I recognise my failing and will be sure to correct it,’ he moaned.

‘Too late,’ said Ogvai.

‘The maleficarum could have taken any of us,’ said Wyrdmake.

‘It could just as easily have swallowed me,’ added Helwintr. Helwintr’s wounds were bound up too. He looked up at Haelfwulf.

‘Do what you can, Eada,’ he said. ‘You can’t make this right, but you can carve some honour out of this yet. What did you see?’

‘I saw through the doorway in the skjald’s memories,’ Eada said. He shuddered, and a thick curd of mucus welled up over his lower lip and rolled down his chin into his beard.

‘And what did you see there?’ asked Hawser.

‘Whatever redesigned the architecture of your mind,’ Eada said, struggling to speak, ‘it left a link into you, a trap door so it could creep back in and make further adjustments as necessary. When I probed you from the blindside, I went through the trap door by mistake. The thing in there, it was focussed on keeping Helwintr out. Like you, it was looking at him. I stepped into one of its memories for a moment.’

‘I’m waiting,’ said Ogvai.

‘I saw a blade, lord,’ said Eada Haelfwulf. ‘A sacred dagger like the ritual knives we use, but an old and wretched thing, crafted by alien hands, shaped by alien thoughts. Its proportions are wrong. It is a nemesis weapon. It is sentient. It lies within the rusting hulk of a ship cast down from the stars, a ship that wallows in the depths of a miasmal fen. The blade is called the Anathame.’

Eada broke off as more coughing wracked him, and foul, syrupy matter splattered down his chest.

‘So?’ asked Ogvai.

‘It didn’t want me to see it, lord,’ said Eada Haelfwulf. ‘It didn’t want me to be able to tell you about it. It seized me, and skinwrought me, and turned me against the skjald and my brothers. The only good that comes of this is that I can tell you about this thing. This Anathame.’

‘And what is it for?’ asked Wyrdmake.

‘It will split the race of men,’ said Eada. ‘It will warp the future. It will murder the Wolf King’s brother, great Horus, honoured Warmaster.’

‘Murder him?’ Ogvai echoed.

‘The Warmaster we admire and follow will cease to be,’ said Eada.

‘Lies,’ said Ogvai. He turned away from the chained figure. ‘These are just the false things the maleficarum wants us to hear. His mouth lies. That is how he wants to split the race of men, by dividing us with mistrust and infamy.’

‘Please, lord!’ Eada cried.

‘Perhaps we should listen to this,’ said Hawser. ‘Perhaps there is some kernel of truth here that Eada Haelfwulf is trying to impart. He–’

‘No,’ said Ogvai.

‘He may yet–’

‘No!’ Ogvai snapped. He looked down at Hawser. ‘Don’t listen to his lies, skjald. Look for yourself.’

Hawser looked at the figure chained to the plasteel cruciform. The chamber’s harsh overhead lights were casting a sharp, black shadow on the deck below the structure’s base. The shadow silhouette of the spread-eagled figure did not belong to a man.

It belonged to a monstrous wolf.

Hawser recoiled from the sight.

Ogvai looked over at Helwintr. Wyrdmake had turned his gaze towards the aversion marks on the deck.

The Jarl of Tra walked up to the foot of the heavy shacklepost, and looked up at the miserable body suspended on it. Mucus dripped out of Haelfwulf’s mouth.

He gazed down at his lord and whispered, ‘I recognise my failing and will be sure to correct it.’

‘I know,’ said Ogvai. ‘Until next winter.’

Ogvai drew his bolt pistol, pressed the muzzle up under Eada’s chin, and vaporised his head with a single mass-reactive round.

‘So you liked the account?’ Hawser asked. ‘It amused you? It distracted you?’

‘It was amusing enough,’ said Longfang. ‘It wasn’t your best.’

‘I can assure you it was,’ said Hawser.

Longfang shook his head. Droplets of blood flecked from his beard.

‘No, you’ll learn better ones,’ he said. ‘Far better ones. And even now, it’s not the best you know.’

‘It’s the most unnerving thing that happened to me in my old life,’ said Hawser with some defiance. ‘It has the most… maleficarum.’

‘You know that’s not true,’ said Longfang. ‘In your heart, you know better. You’re denying yourself.’

Hawser woke with a start.

Godsmote was shaking him.

‘Wake up,’ the warrior said.

‘What?’ Hawser murmured, his head still murky with sleep. He was in his quarters aboard Nidhoggur. Godsmote had interrupted his repeating dream pattern and, somehow, that was more distressing and confusing than following it to its usual frustrating conclusion.

‘Get up,’ said Godsmote.

‘What’s happening?’ Hawser asked.

‘Someone’s calling for you,’ said Godsmote.

A pinnace carried Hawser and his escort from Tra’s cruiser to the Wolf King’s massive warship. The anchored fleet components looked like monolithic blocks of dark grey stone suspended over the disk of Thardia. Everything had the hard-edged shadow of light in a vacuum.

Hawser peered out. The scale of the vessel was incredible. Even the smaller escorts and fleet tenders were blunt-nosed slabs like slices of mountain cliff. The principal warships were shockingly vast. The surface detail of their flanks took forever to flash past the ports as the pinnace flitted between them.

The most massive ship of all was a slate-grey monster with a ploughshare prow. This was the apex predator, the alpha male of the fleet.

‘The Hrafnkel,’ said Godsmote. ‘Flagship of the Wolf King.’

The deck spaces of the flagship, vast as cityscapes, were heaving with activity. Hundreds of thousands of ratings, thralls and servitors worked to status-sweep the colossal ship from its last translation and prep it for the next immaterial transfer. Deck plates and interior struts were being examined and reinforced. Power lines were being tested. In some stretches of companionway, inspection plates had been lifted in forty- or fifty- metre long trenches. In the lofty arming chambers, cathedrals of war, automated hoists raised payloads of void munitions from the armoured magazines to delivery points where gunnery trains coiled like sea-orms, waiting to thread the service arteries of the ship and deliver the titanic warheads to the Hrafnkel’s batteries. Regiments of men, dwarfed by the arched vaults, unpacked weapons and laid them out in rows along the deck to be stripped and hand-checked before distribution to the troop contingents.

The moaning shiver of the ship’s vast engines rose and fell, swelling and dying away, making the intensity of the deck lights rise and fall. The drive was being tested. It was like a warrior limbering his shoulders and flexing his sword arm.

‘War,’ said Hawser as they strode along.

‘Always,’ said Bear.

‘This isn’t normal readiness,’ said Hawser. ‘This is something particular. It’s–’

‘It’s only war,’ said Helwintr. ‘Whatever else it is, it’s only ever war.’

Leman Russ dominated the command bridge, even though the command bridge was a multi-levelled vault that reminded Hawser of a palace throne room. Officers and servitors attended control positions wrought from brass and gold which encircled the great dome of the bridge and plugged into the bulkhead walls with fat braids of gilded cables, circuits and tubes. These extending fans of tubework made the consoles resemble giant pipe organs. To reinforce the mental image, most control positions had triple or quadruple sets of keyboards. The keys were made of bone, inlaid with instructional marks. Use and age had yellowed some. They looked like the grin of old teeth.

They looked like the keys of a battered clavier.

Hololithic screens, many projected from overhead or under-deck emitters, turned the central part of the command area into a flickering picture gallery. The crew moved among the images, surrounding some for study, adjusting the data flow of others with finger touches of their reactive gloves. Some images were large, others small, or arranged in stacked series that could be flipped through with a deft gesture. As Helwintr, Bear and Godsmote brought him in, Hawser saw one ensign slide a luminous rectangular map of fleet dispersal through the air for his superior’s attention. Some of the slightly incandescent images showed topographical maps, contour overlays, positional guides or course computations. Others scrolled with constant feeds of written data, or showed, in small frames, real-time pict-links to the talking heads of other ship commanders as they reported in.

The air was filled by the mechanical chatter of machinery, the brittle stenographic clack of keys, the crackle of voxed voice messages or Mechanicum vocalisers, the drone of background chatter. Command officers with cuffs and high collars stiff with gold braid rasped orders into vox-mics that were attached to the consoles by flex leads. They held the mics up to their mouths, and the small acoustic side-baffles of the microphone heads obscured the lower parts of their faces like half-masks. Just eyes, without noses or mouths, which reminded Hawser of something.

Cherubs, giggling at private jokes, buzzed through the bridge hustle, carrying messages and communiqué pouches. Insectoid remotes, as perfect and intricate as dragonflies, kept obedient station in the air at the shoulders of their Mechanicum masters, their wings droning in hover-mode at a disturbingly low vibrational threshold.

In the centre of the command bridge was a massive brass and silver armature, an instrument designed for complex celestial display and calculation. It resembled an orrery with its skeletal metal hemispheres and its surrounding discs and measuring orbits, but it was ten metres in diameter and grew out of the desk grille on a stand as thick as a tree trunk. Attendants manned small lectern consoles around it, tapping out small adjustments that caused the main frame of it to turn, realign and spin in subtle measures.

The hemispheric theatre of the planetarium was currently used to display a large-scale hololithic image of a planet. The glowing topographical light map, three-dimensional and rotating in an authentic orbital spin showed day and night side and was contained inside the moving, spherical cage of the brass instrument. Smaller side projections hung in the air, enlarging particular surface details, and various declinations, aspectarians, and astronomical ephemerides.

The planet under scrutiny was as beautiful as a star sapphire. The hololithic resolution imaged its greens and blues, its ribbons of cloud and mountain range, its traceries of river basins, its sheened oceans, its turquoise aura of atmosphere. As he got closer, Hawser saw that the vast image was actually a mosaic compiled from thousands of separate detailed pict scans, a work composition that suggested a vast effort of careful and systematic intelligence gathering.

Despite the size and majesty of the planetarium display, Russ was still the most compelling thing in the chamber. As soon as he saw Hawser and his escort arrive, he pushed aside the huddle of Navigators clutching their dossiers of sidereal times and zodiacal interlocks.

‘Bring him!’ he growled, and pointed to the shipmaster’s reclusiam.

Helwintr, Bear and Godsmote led Hawser into the reclusiam space behind the Wolf King. The shipmaster, a stern giant with a long, wirewool beard of grey and an extravagantly peaked cap, saluted and withdrew to give the primarch privacy. Command officers scurried after their immaculately uniformed master, clutching armfuls of data-slates and dockets.

Russ waved a jewelled sceptre and raised falsehood screens around the reclusiam space. The ambient noise of the bridge chatter dropped away. It was suddenly as quiet as a monastic chapel.

The Wolf King idly tossed the sceptre away. It bounced into the seat of the shipmaster’s red-leather throne. He turned to face Hawser. His presence was almost intolerable. A dynamic, lethal energy pulsed within him. He was hunched, his arms clamped around his body, as though he was trying to prevent himself from exploding. If the explosion happened, Hawser had no doubt it would take the entire flagship with it.

‘Do you hear me, brother?’ he asked Hawser.

‘What?’ Hawser replied, trembling. ‘Lord, what are you asking me?’

‘I know you can hear me, brother,’ Russ said. ‘I know you can.’

‘Lord, please,’ said Hawser. ‘Explain to me what you’re saying.’

The Wolf King ignored his words. He continued to stare into Hawser’s eyes, as though they were murky pools out of which something might suddenly surface.

‘Magnus, Magnus, Crimson King, brother of mine,’ he said. ‘I know you can hear me. You planted this instrument, this poor unwilling fellow, Ibn Rustah, you planted him among us so you could learn our secrets. Guess what? We’re as smart as you. Smarter, perhaps. We saw your spy for what he was, and we made no effort to remove him. We kept him with us so we could look back at you, Magnus. So we could learn your secrets. An eye can look out and it can look in. You should know that, you who look deeper than most.’

The Wolf King turned and walked a few paces away. He picked up the sceptre again, and sat down in the throne. He rested the sceptre in his lap, leaned his head on one fist and gazed back at Hawser.

‘I’ve got nothing to hide from you, Magnus. Nothing. You know how I work. My enemies should know what’s coming to greet them. It fixes them in the right mental place to be annihilated. I don’t like to hide my strengths or my approach. I’d rather my foe knows the full, unimaginable fury that is about to descend upon him.’

The Wolf King paused. He swallowed. He seemed to be considering his next words.

‘That’s not why I’m talking to you now. I’m talking to you because I hope you’ll listen. I’m talking to you as the personal courtesy extended from one brother to another. What is about to happen should not be happening. You know I do not want this. You know it tears my heart to commit against you, and it breaks the very soul of our father to place his sons in opposition. But you have done this. You have brought this. You have brought this action.’

Russ swallowed again. He looked down at the deck, though he was still directing his words at Hawser.

Hawser stood numb, shaking, rooted to the spot.

‘We gave you every chance, Magnus. We indulged your learning, we gave you room to explore. When we became fearful of where those explorations were leading you, and how they might endanger everything we value, we told you of our concerns. The Council at Nikaea, that was supposed to be a moment of reconciliation. You swore you would renounce the cunning arts. You swore! You swore you would abide by our father’s ruling!’

His voice dropped to a whisper.

‘You did not. You have proved your intent to ignore the Ruling of Nikaea beyond all doubt. So this is on you. You must have known our father’s hands would be tied. He would have no other option than to turn to me to issue sanction.’

Russ looked up into Hawser’s eyes.

‘This is a courtesy, then. From brother to brother. A grace period I would extend to no other enemy. Settle your affairs. Evacuate the civilians from your cities. Deactivate your defence systems. Bring yourself and your Thousand Sons out into the open, and prepare to surrender to me upon my arrival. Please, Magnus. The Wolves of Fenris have been unleashed upon you. Only you have the power to make the consequences bloodless.’

He rose to his feet.

‘Please, Magnus. Please.’

The Wolf King looked away. He turned his back on Hawser.

‘Does he answer?’ he asked, distractedly.

‘I cannot feel an answer,’ Hawser replied, his voice wobbling. ‘But then, I’ve never really known how I work as a conduit.’

Russ grunted.

‘Or if I do,’ Hawser added. He was painfully aware that the other Wolves, especially Helwintr, were glaring at him.

‘I’ve never been totally convinced of that either,’ he said.

The Wolf King made no comment.

‘My lord,’ said Hawser. ‘What… what did your brother do?’

‘He performed an act of maleficarum that drove his sorcery right to the heart of Terra and into the presence of the Emperor,’ said Helwintr.

‘But… why?’ asked Hawser.

‘It was an alleged attempt to communicate a warning,’ said Russ without turning. His voice was a soft grumble, like thunder grinding in the far distance.

‘A warning, my lord?’

‘One of such terrible importance, Magnus felt it was worth exposing his own treachery to reveal it,’ Russ murmured.

‘Forgive me,’ said Hawser, ‘but does that not speak to some loyalty in your brother? Has the warning been examined? Has it been taken seriously?’

Russ turned back to face him.

‘Why would it? My brother is a madman. A dabbling warlock.’

‘Lord,’ said Hawser, ‘he was prepared to admit he was ignoring the edicts of Nikaea, and risk the censure that he knew must result from that admission, to relay a warning. Why would he do that unless the warning was valid?’

‘You’re not a warrior, skjald,’ said the Wolf King in an almost kindly tone. ‘Strategy is not your strong suit. Consider the reverse of your proposition. Magnus wants the ruling of Nikaea overturned. He wants permission and approval to continue with his arcane tinkerings and his foul magics. So he manufactures a threat, something he can warn us about that is so astonishing we would have to forgive him, and set aside our objections. Something so unthinkable, we would have to thank him and tell him he had been right all along. All along. This is his ploy.’

‘Do you know what was so unthinkable? asked Hawser.

‘Magnus claimed that great Horus was about to turn against the Imperium,’ said Russ. ‘From the look on your face, Ahmad Ibn Rustah, I see you recognise how ridiculous that sounds.’

Hawser switched his gaze to Helwintr. The priest’s masked face was unreadable.

‘Wolf King, great lord,’ Hawser began, ‘that’s not the first time that warnings concerning the Warmaster have been voiced. Please, lord–’

‘Our skjald refers to the incident involving Eada Haelfwulf, lord,’ said Helwintr.

‘I know of it,’ said Russ. ‘It seems corroborative, I grant you. But once again, consider the strategy. It involved maleficarum turning and twisting one of our own gothi, in the immediate vicinity of you, an identified conduit for the enemy’s power. Of course poor Haelfwulf would gabble out the same damned lie with his dying breath. It’s supposed to make Magnus’s story sound more credible by coming from a secondary source.’

Russ looked down into Hawser’s eyes.

‘Truth is, it’s the proof I need that Magnus is desperately trying to coordinate a campaign of disinformation to support his ruse. He doesn’t need to answer through you, skjald. He’s answered already.’

The Wolf King turned to Helwintr and the escort.

‘Take him away, but keep him with us, right to the advance. I want that channel to my brother left open. My poor brother. I want him to see us coming. I want him to know it’ll never be too late for him to beg for mercy.’

‘My lord,’ said Hawser. ‘What happens now?’

‘Now?’ Leman Russ replied. ‘Now, Prospero falls.’

Thirteen

The sanction of the Sixth

I name myself Ahmad Ibn Rustah, skjald of Tra, and I bring to this hearth the account of the Vlka Fenryka’s raid upon Prospero, as is my calling.

Many voices can be heard in mine, many memories, for as skjald of Tra I have done my duty, the duty given to me by Ogvai Ogvai Helmschrot, Jarl of Tra and, before him, Gedrath Gedrathsa, Jarl of Tra, to gather all the stories the men of Tra have, and make memories out of them so that they can be retold, over and again, until wyrd decides when my thread must be cut.

You who gather here at the hearthside, you who listen to me by the firelight, and sip your mjod, and wait for your part of the account to be recited, you will need to forgive me. This is my story too, and I am inside it, my voice and my memories, and I cannot be taken out. For I name myself also, Kasper Hawser, visitor to Fenris, comrade of the Sixth, pawn of the Fifteenth, witness, outsider.

The account of Prospero is several things. We all know that. Foremost, it is a testament to the courage and loyalty of the Sixth Astartes. It is the story of a duty performed without hesitation or equivocation. The Allfather told the Rout what task he needed them to do, and it was done. No one will ever hear this account and question the devotion of the Vlka Fenryka.

It is also a lament. This was a sad necessity regretted by all. It gave no pleasure to perform it, not even the reward of glory. The prosecution of a fellow Legion, even when it is done so successfully, is no easy thing to square in a man’s mind. This has ever been the burden of the Wolves of the Sixth Astartes that their calling as the Allfather’s chosen hunters places a solemn burden of responsibility on their shoulders greater than any endured by other Legions. There is no shame in admitting this is an account of sorrow, a mournful thing. It is an account we could happily wash away from our memories and wish undone.

Prospero burned. The Wolves of Fenris fell upon it, and it blazed up brightly, and died into the darkness. Though strong in many arts of war and lorefare, the brotherhood of Tizca could not withstand the murder-make. Bloody was the fighting, savage and unholy. Only one result was ever likely. No one survives the coming of the Wolves, not even the Crimson King and his Thousand Sons.

We know the conclusion. We know how it ends. We know that Magnus fled, broken, with the last surviving scraps of his once noble force, and, in fleeing, proved beyond any doubt the extent of his necromantic talents. Only the darkest magics allowed him to escape the field of war alive.

There is one part of the account you do not know, however, and it is my part, and I will tell it once.

Here and now.

There was drumming; the anti-music of a sending off. I had been given armour, thrall-armour, to wear under my pelt and reinforce the knotwork leather that had become my everyday garment. I had my axe, and a displacer field unit, and I had been given a short-form laspistol of excellent manufacture. I believe it had come from Jarl Ogvai’s weaponarium. The weapon was old, but in pristine condition. It had been disassembled and reassembled many times to keep its component parts clean and serviceable. During its life, which had been longer than mine, the hand grip had been removed, perhaps due to wear, and replaced with a simple shaped piece of radapple wood that fitted around the frame’s handle-spur. On the faces of the wooden grip, the symbol of Ur was inlaid in gold wire. The weapon had once been the property of an officer in the Defence Corps of the great, doomed Catheric city-project of Ur. Aun Helwintr, proud rune priest, had selected it for me, knowing the account I had made of my own past, and my connection, as a child, to the Ur labour communes.

‘Ur was one of many grand and admirable schemes to achieve a finer future for mankind,’ Helwintr told me when he presented me with the weapon. ‘It failed, just as many of them failed, but its spirit was great, and its intention beyond fault. I give this to you to remind you of that spirit. What we do today, however bloody, is done with the same intent. Unification. Salvation. The betterment of man.’

I could not argue with his words. Toil and blood, effort and hardship, these were payments worth making in return for a greater future. Ideals were never won cheaply, whether the cost was the raising of one dream city or the razing of another.

My only doubt, and I confess doubt lurked in my heart, was that Ur had any significance for me at all. I had lived my life assuming it did. I had lived my life trusting the solidity of my identity and my memories. Now I trusted nothing. I heard a clavier playing. I saw a toy horse made of wood. I watched the dawn rising over Terra, and turned from a window port to see a face I could not recall. Eyes without features. Features without eyes. Pieces on an old game board. An athame, softly glowing in the darkness like a blade of ice.

I took the weapon anyway.

Nidhoggur’s carrier decks were swarming. Hoists conveyed drop-ships overhead to the catapult ramps. Munition trains clattered across the deck grilles. Smoke as white and fine as summer cloud filled the embarkation space to thigh level, because so many transatmospheric drive units were test firing and venting. Under the brilliant light-banks of the ceiling rigs, it felt as though we were gods of Uppland, walking abroad in the heavenscape, masters of creation and destruction. We could hear the rapid hammer and air-gun stutter of the armourers making their last minute adjustments. Wyrd was being forged here.

I was placed with Jormungndr Two-blade’s pack. Bear was amongst them, and Godsmote and Aeska and Helwintr. Every member of the pack kept their eyes on me, watching to see if I would fall down and roll back my eyes, and froth at the lips and plead for mercy in the voice of the Crimson King.

I never did. He never chose to speak through me.

The Wolf King had brought the entire Sixth to sanction Prospero. A full Legion to punish a full Legion. The fleet components that had assembled at Thardia translated to three further assembly points, gathering strength as they went. Amongst them were forces of the Silent Sisterhood and the Custodes, bequeathed by the Allfather himself to strengthen our cause.

The full force of the Sixth was something I did not believe needed strengthening. There is not an Astartes in the Imperium who can out-match a warrior of the Rout, one to one, and we held a significant numerical superiority. Much is said of Prospero’s noble Spireguard, and other auxiliary contingents, but the only true consideration was Astartes numbers, and Magnus the Red’s Legion was small compared to the Vlka Fenryka.

However, there was an ugly mood of caution amongst the Sixth. The Crimson King’s edge derived from maleficarum, the very root of the entire dispute. Now it came down to a bare fight, he would show his sharpest claws. No matter that we had ten or a hundred or even a thousand times his Thousand Sons, magic could level any fight. All the pack leaders agreed, loath as they were to admit it out loud, that the Silent Sisterhood might make the difference between triumph or destruction. Only they, Allfather willing, might cancel out or dilute the sorcery of Magnus and his disciple-sons.

There was fear. You could feel it in the thralls at least, and in the support forces. I do not think an Astartes can feel fear, not fear as a man knows it. Trepidation, perhaps. But I knew that the Rout always craved stories of maleficarum, because it was the only thing they couldn’t kill, and thus the only thing that lent their lives even a thrill of apprehension.

We were slamming out of the immaterium into the face of maleficarum.

I felt fear. Fear was in my heart. I put on my mask to scare it away.

I had finished my Rout-mask and leatherware during the passage from Thardia to the target system. Aeska Brokenlip had lent me some general advice, and both Orcir and Erthung Redhand had shown me knotwork designs that I chose to copy. I chose to make the mask with the stylised antlers of a bull saeneyti spreading out from the bridge of the nose to form the brow ridges. I did this in honour of the memory of Ulvurul Heoroth, called Longfang, who sleeps upon the red snow. I stained my mask and all my leather gear black, and added the circumpunct, the mark of aversion, to the centre of the mask’s forehead. With its warding eye, and flaring bull antlers and snarling lips, the mask’s threat would drive off all but the darkest maleficarum.

The men of Tra armed for the onslaught. This was a murder-make, and they had come to cut threads, and they wore all the faces that Death needed to wear to get the task done. Blades and boltguns predominated, of course: the true, trusted weapons of the Vlka Fenryka were their primary resource. But all the jarls had opened their weaponariums, and Ogvai had shared out devices amongst men in his company who were willing and skilled to operate them. I was not the only soul that day to have received a weapon from the hoard as a gift.

Some Wolves had enhancements that turned their armoured gauntlets into huge wrecking fists, or even industrial talons. Others prepared enormous melta-weapons with armoured feeder cables, ornately engraved lascannons, or colossal assault cannons with rotating barrels that seemed barely man-portable.

On the repeater screens up in the rafters of the embarkation deck between the Stormbirds hung like game in a larder, the forward-scan images of ghostly, utopian Prospero grew steadily larger.

On the final night, a dream came to me. It was the dream I had been having since I left Terra, the dream I no longer trust. It purports to be a memory, but it is laced with deceit. I know that I stayed aboard the superorbital plate Lemurya during the last months before my departure. I leased a luxury suite on the underside of the plate. That much is real. I know that the prolonged exposure to artificial gravity made me feel tired and unrefreshed.

I remember that golden light sliced into my chamber around the window shutter every morning, gilding everything, giving the room a soft, burnished feel.

I remember there was always an electronic chime before the hour five alarm.

I had gone to Lemurya to void-acclimate before transferring to the ship on which I had arranged passage. I had also gone there to avoid people. I was hell-bent on taking my sabbatical, on freeing myself from the chains of Terra, and I did not need well meaning souls like Vasiliy trying to convince me otherwise.

Of course, now I realise that the circumstances were not quite as I understood them. My situation with the Conservatory was not as untenable and unappreciated as I had thought. These facts I have had from exemplary sources.

I do not think I was in my right mind. I was being influenced even then. Indeed, perhaps the manipulation long pre-dated that moment. The urge to leave Terra had been put into me. So had the urge to experience Fenris. Honestly, brothers, tell me, what man who is afraid of wolves goes to face his fear by voyaging to a planet of wolves? It is nonsense. I was not, forgive me, even especially interested in Fenrisian culture.

The fascination was put into me too.

The other reason I spent time on the superorbital was to visit the biomech clinics. Some instinct, or implanted instinct, had warned me that Fenris was not a place where a man could make notes or keep written records. I had therefore undertaken an elective procedure to replace my right eye with an augmetic copy that was also an optical recording device. My real eye, surgically removed, is being held in stasis in the clinic’s organ banks, ready to be replanted on my return.

Sometimes I wonder what dreams it is seeing.

My recurring dream finds me waking in my room as the hour five alarm rings. It is the day of the scheduled implant surgery. I am old, older than I am now in every respect except years. My body is weary. I rise and limp to the window, and press the stud to open the shutter. It rises into its frame recess with a low hum, allowing golden light to flood in. I look out and drink in the view. I have done this every morning of my stay, because I know these may be the last chances I get to see such a magnificent view with my own eyes. My real eyes.

On that last night before Prospero, the dream had been embellished. I do not believe any new elements had been added, I just think that I had stepped through the dream so many times, I was noticing things in finer and finer detail.

Through the half-open doors of the closet, I glimpsed a toy horse made of wood standing on top of the foot locker. I could hear clavier music playing from a neighbouring room. I could smell fresh-pressed radapple juice. On a shelf in the corner, my Prix Daumarl sat in its pretty little casket beside an old Ossetian prayer box. By the window, a Regicide set lay open on a small table. From the look of the pieces, the game was just two or three moves away from its end.

I stepped to the window, waiting to see the reflection of the face of the figure standing just behind me. I waited for the terror to constrict me.

I waited to ask, ‘How can you be here?’

I turned, hoping the face would be another detail I could resolve in greater clarity than before.

All I glimpsed before I woke were eyes. They were eyes without features, and they blazed like marks of aversion.

We had anticipated resistance. Of course we had. For all our confidence and innate superiority, for all our show of terrible force, we did not expect to be unopposed. Never let it be said that the Thousand Sons of Prospero were not great warriors. They were Astartes! That fact alone puts them on a different order of being. During the Great Crusade, we had respected them as brothers and comrades in arms, and now we respected them as mortal foes. Even without their warlock sorcery, they were to be taken seriously.

Moreover, Prospero was their home world. A Legion is always strongest at its base. The fortress homes of the Allfather’s eighteen Legions Astartes are the most formidable and impregnable sites in the new Imperium.

As the sanction fleet burned in towards Prospero like a massed, migrating pod of hrossvalur, it became evident that the planet had not lit its defences. The grids were down from outer orbital to close surface. Individual cities were screened, but that was standard operation and not a response to the approaching threat. There were signs that civilian ships had fled or were fleeing the planet and the system in considerable numbers.

Some of the escaping vessels were overtaken and boarded. Their crews and passengers were taken captive and interrogated by the rune priests, so that every useful scrap of information could be gathered. Later, I heard that one such ship, the Cypria Selene, was carrying Imperial remembrancers who had been posted to Prospero to observe the Fifteenth Astartes. One of them, I was told, was an old man described as ‘the Scribe of Magnus’.

I would like to have met them, and spoken with them. I would dearly like to have listened to their accounts, and heard the voice of the other side. I did not get the opportunity. I only learned of their presence long after the day was done, and their ultimate fates are unknown to me.

Two-blade conjectured that the Crimson King had capitulated. Magnus the Red had not signalled surrender, but he had seen the error of his actions and the disgrace he had brought upon the Fifteenth Astartes, so he had sent the innocents away and thrown his defences wide open in order to accept his fate with humility, as a guilty man places his exposed neck upon the headsman’s block. If true, this spoke to great remorse and contrition on Magnus’s part. Two-blade ventured that the action would be over in hours.

But Ogvai gainsayed him. With wise counsel, the jarl reminded us all that witchcraft had brought this sentence of doom upon Prospero and the Crimson King. It was likely that he had defences, raised and ready, lethal and primed, that were maleficarum and invisible to our sensors.

We waited. The high-resolution image of Prospero was so large that it filled the repeater screens. We began to feel the slight artificial gravity tugs of orbital corrections.

An hour later, the main lights on the embarkation deck began to dim for periods of several seconds at a time.

‘What’s doing that?’ I asked Aeska Brokenlip.

‘The main batteries are drawing power,’ he replied. ‘We have begun the orbital bombardment.’

When the time came for the drop, I think I was dozing, or daydreaming. I had been thinking about the commune where I had grown up, the tent fields on the desert highlands, the long room, the teaching desks in the library annex, the bedtime stories of wolves to keep us in our place.

Godsmote nudged me.

‘We’re ready,’ he said.

The drums were thundering. We boarded our Stormbird. As skjald, I had the right to go where I wanted, and choose any accelerator seat I liked, but I took one of the spares at the back of the cabin and not one of the numerical ranks. I would not insult my brothers by breaking their cohort.

Each seat’s arrestor cage locked down with a pneumatic hiss. We checked our restraints. Thralls and servitors secured bulkier weapons to the overhead racks or the magnetic stowage plates, and then scurried clear as the ramp began to rise. The entire airframe was already rattling with pent-up main-engine fury, and the burner roar almost drowned out the screaming vox-chatter of pilots, ground crew and deck supervisors.

Then the lights went as red as blood, and the sirens howled like carnyx horns, and the hydraulic bolts fired like lightning stones, and acceleration hit us like a warhammer blow.

One after another, our Stormbirds spat out of Nidhoggur’s belly like tracer rounds from a basket magazine. In the sky around us, a score of other ships discharged their cargoes in similar fashion.

I looked at Godsmote.

‘We are all bad stars now,’ I said.

The hearth-fire still burns brightly. There is still meat on your plate and mjod in your lanx, and I still have more of this account to tell.

So then, on Prospero, many great years ago, we fought against the Traitor Fifteenth. A hard fight. The hardest. The most bitter in the history of the Vlka Fenryka. Firestorms, burning air, crystal cities where the Thousand Sons waited for us with flame-light reflecting off their casement glass. Anyone who was there will remember it. No one who was there could forget it.

We descended through flames. We speared down past orbital defence platforms ablaze from end to end, great rigs that had been crippled before they could take a shot. They burned as they tumbled and rolled away in slow, decaying orbits, spilling out trails of debris or shorting out great blossoms of reactor energy.

Below, the world burned too. The fleet’s bombardment had torched Prospero, and ignited the atmosphere. Spiral patterns of soot and particulated debris thousands of leagues across cycled like hurricanes. Giant columns of plasma energy had roasted all vegetation and wildlife, and turned the seas into scalding banks of steam and toxic gas. Vast las bombardments from the heavy batteries had evaporated river deltas and flash-thawed icecaps. Kinetic munitions and gravity bombs had fallen like Helwinter hail, and planted new forests of bright liquid flame that sprouted and grew, spread and died back, all in a few minutes. Shoals of targeted missiles, silver-swift as midsummer fish running from a catcher’s net, delivered warheads that blasted the soil into the sky and thickened the air into poisonous soup. Magma bombs and atomics, the godhammers, had altered the geography itself. Mountains had been levelled, plains split, valleys thrown up into new hills of rubble and spoil. Prospero’s crust had fractured. We saw the throbbing, glowing tracks of its mortal wounds, brand-new canyons of fire that split entire continents. This was the grand alchemy of war. Heat and light, and energy and fission had transformed water into steam, rock into dust, sand into glass, bone into gas. Swirling mushroom clouds, as tall as our Aett on Fenris, punctuated the horizon we rushed towards.

The ride was not smooth. No power dive from a low-anchored carrier ever is. We dropped straight, like stooping hawks, and only levelled out when the surface was right under us. As our nose came up, fighting like a great ocean orm on a hook, the gravity force was huge. The Stormbird shook as if it was intent on shredding to pieces. Then we were level and hugging the topography. Our pilots did not stint on speed. The craft continued to quake. We bellied and bounced as the terrain shifted, and banked hard at every squeal of the collision alarms.

Some of our drop-boats did not survive the experience. Some failed to recover from their dive approaches. Two that I know of were destroyed when they collided and tore the wings off one another. By then, of course, the warriors of Prospero had finally begun to respond. Battery fire was coming up from the main city. Inbound boats were blown out of the air, exploding outright or veering wildly away like burning moths. Wyrd’s hand was on us. Threads were being cut. We–

Brother, what? I said we were like stooping hawks. Hawks. You know the word, surely? Ah. Ah, I see what has happened. Sometimes, in my excitement, in my enthusiasm for the drama of the account, I lapse back into my old ways, and use a word of Low Gothic instead of Juvjk. It is a habit of mine that I have never left behind, the last traces of the language I spoke in my previous life. I ask your pardon. I did not mean to interrupt the tale.

The first thing I did when I set foot on Prospero was kill a man.

This is an important part of my personal account, for until that day, I had never cut a thread. No, not ever. I am a skjald, not a warrior, but that day, that dark day, I was determined I would be more than a helpless observer. On the home world of the Olamic Quietude, men had given of themselves to protect me during the fighting. I did not want to be a burden of that sort again. I had asked for weapons and armour so I could protect myself, and on Prospero I intended to do more than that, and fight with my brothers as the need arose. The wolf priests built my arms and back strong for just such a purpose, after all.

The Stormbird carrying us, its lifters howling, settled us down with a hard slam on a space of flat rockcrete below some derrick or manufacturing facility in the industrial quarters of Tizca, Prospero’s glorious city of cities. Even now, brothers, even now it is gone, the idea of Tizca will persist down the ages like Roma and Aleksandrya and Memphys as one of the great cities of mankind. It was and is a Carthage, a L’Undone, an Atlantys even, its thread burned and cut, its towers fallen, its rubble long since ploughed under, yet persisting in the memory of our race. It had been planned and raised as a magnificent open city, with beautiful acres of parkland and urban gardens spacing out the vast towers of glass and the crystal ziggurats. Their sheer glass faces reflected either the sun, so they radiated light like mirrors, or the bruise-blue sky, so they became part of heaven. At night, they were reflecting bowls for the stars, perfect scrying surfaces in which the constellations could be watched as they performed their ritual choreography. There were busy quarters of bustling streets and squares, of fine markets and elegant public spaces, especially leading down towards the harbour.

We set down in one of the vast city’s less glamorous wards, one of the necessary, functional sectors, and even here there was splendour. Buildings of the most mundane and unremarkable function were clad in glass, or raised to be crowned with majestic finials or spires. Tizca’s basic functions of trade and produce-handling, cargo transfer, manufacturing, provision and distribution were all contained by a mask of aesthetic perfection where most cities wear such crude organs around their skirts away from the sites of civic refinement.

When we arrived, the mask was already knocked away. The hammering shock of the bombardment, as well as several munition strikes, had shattered most of the glass off the buildings around us, exposing their superstructures and girderwork. Some burned furiously. The air wobbled with heat distortion. The open spaces and loading yards were littered with mirror shards, like beaches of polished glass shingle, and every last fragment reflected back a version of the flames so they twinkled and flashed like trillions of fireflies. Each step we took as we bounded from the Stormbird’s ramp crunched. Penetrating warheads had blown titanic holes in the rockcrete ground, revealing some of the service tunnels below, the hidden network of arteries that invisibly maintained the city’s needs.

Other Stormbirds shrieked overhead, so low it felt we could reach up and touch them. Some set down on nearby sites. The daylight had turned an odd, murky colour, a violet hue that suggested the blue sky had contracted some kind of disease. Smoke moved in the wind, swirling and spinning, reducing our visibility. All I could smell was burning. All I could hear was howling: transatmospheric engines howling, infernos howling, voices howling.

Then I began to hear, behind the howling, the distant thump of bombs and the nearby bang of bolter fire.

We entered the derrick tower, a multi-levelled manufacturing plant that had been skinned of its glass cladding. Fire squirmed in its upper levels, silhouetting the black ribs of the girders against bright orange. Low down, where we were, the fire cast hectic, jumping shadows. The Wolves did not hesitate. They ploughed in, hunting targets, dividing to quarter the area. Godsmote and Aeska were the first two to mount the metal-mesh stairs up to the second level, where a railed hoist platform connected to a larger gantry over some kind of machine bay. I ran with them. I jumped as I heard the sudden, shocking retort of bolters discharging underneath us as our comrades met the first resistance. Aeska yelled something and began firing at a walkway on the level above us. His mass-reactive rounds bit chunks out of the decking and the rail. I saw human bodies fall into the flames far below. I realised we were being shot at.

I saw men on the same platform level as us, men in crimson coats and silver helmets. They had golden braid frogging on their coats, as though they had dressed for a parade in the sun. Some had sabres in their hands, drawn and ready. All of them were blasting with lasweapons.

Godsmote roared and ran at some, his axe raised. I saw one of the red-coated figures burst as a bolt from Aeska’s gun struck him. Smoke from the fires above us suddenly gusted down as the wind direction changed, and fogged my location, blinding me for a moment.

As the smoke sucked back out, I felt a dull concussion from the front, then another. Two las-rounds had struck my displacer field, and been dissipated in crackling balls of energy. The shooter was directly ahead of me, six spans away, beside the gantry rail. He was a young man, handsome, regal in his gold-frogged red coat and his silver helm. He was aiming his lasweapon and yelling at me. He fired again, and the shot crackled off my body-shield.

The pistol from Ur was in my right hand. I didn’t even think about it. My reaction was instinctive, but made swift and effective by the training I received from Godsmote. I fired back and killed him.

The only thing that betrayed my novice status, the only thing that gave me away as a combat virgin, was the fact that I employed overkill. Godsmote had taught me to aim and shoot. I could pull a gun and hit a target at twenty spans. My first shot went into his chest and would have been entirely sufficient. But he was shooting at me, and he’d have killed me already had it not been for the displacer field, so I kept the trigger squeezed.

The pistol from Ur put three more rounds into his belly, and the sheer force of impact doubled him up so the next two shots punched into the side of his neck and the top of his head. He fell against the rail, and then collapsed in a sort of sitting position, all very suddenly and untidily. I kept waiting for him to fall down completely and stretch out dead on the deck, but he did not. He remained tangled and contorted, half-raised by the rail behind him.

I stepped towards him. My shots had killed him three or four times over. Blood from the rupturing torso wounds was streaming out of his corpse and spattering down through the deck grille into the darkness below. There was a huge, scorched puncture mark in the crown of his polished silver helmet as though a blacksmith had hammered a sooty augur through it. A steam of blood vapour wafted out of it from his cooked braincase.

I expected his expression to register something. Anger, perhaps, defiance, or full on hatred for me. I expected at least a rictus of agony, or even a look of sadness or dismay.

There was nothing. His face was slack. Not one hint of a vital emotion could be read. I have come to learn since that is the case with the faces of the dead. We find no messages or legacies there, no final communication. Life departs, and the face sinks. As the thread is cut, the tension goes, and only the untended ruin of absence remains.

The soldiers in red coats were the Prosperine Spireguard. Their noble and well-appointed regiments were the domestic defence forces. They were as finely drilled and effective as any elite division of the Imperial Army.

They looked too civilised and decorative to bear the brunt of the Wolves’ assault. They looked like men confounded by disruption to some formal colours ceremony. They looked as if they ought to be running away.

They did not run away. Let us agree on their courage and make it part of this account. They met the Sixth Astartes, the most efficient and ruthless killing machine in the entire arsenal of the Imperium, and did not give ground. They faced demented, barbarian giants that looked like feral caricatures of Astartes, and did not break. They had been ordered to defend Tizca, and they did not falter from that order.

And so they died. This is what happens when loyalty meets loyalty. Neither side was going to leave its grim and onerous duty undone, and so destruction of at least one was assured.

The Spireguard had ballistic armour woven into their distinctive red coats, but this could not withstand the mass-reactive devastation of bolder-rounds. Some carried displacer fields or riot shields, but neither could cope with the withering ferocity of autocannons. Their silvered helms, some plumed, all alloyed from plasteel, were unable to block the slicing edge of axes or frostblades. Their gun-carriages and fighting vehicles were well plated and, in some cases, shielded, but all crumpled into mangled wreckage when struck by shoulder-launched missiles or conversion beamers, or burned like corpse-boxes on funeral pyres when caught by heavy flamers or melta effects. Jarl Ogvai, so several brothers attest, faced one gun-carriage down as if it was a saeneyti calf that he intended to wrestle to the ground and hogtie. He gutted it with his power claws, shredding metal like scraps of foil. He split its casing wide open and then filled its interior with bolter fire that pulped the crew.

The devastation was heartbreaking. The ground, as we advanced, was littered with the tattered and disfigured dead. Blade weapons had sectioned some, heat weapons had blackened and fused others. The marks of bolter impacts had left huge wounds that looked like deep bitemark craters in radapples. For their part, the Spireguards’ lasguns and autoweapons barely scratched the marauding Rout. Minor injuries were taken. Only crew-served weapons and fighting vehicles offered any genuine hazard. Once the Sixth’s armoured support began their advance, clanking and clattering up from the steam-haze of the seafront zones where their heavy landers had come in, even that small hope was extinguished. Predators and Land Raiders, grey as granite and just as monolithic, crushed through buildings in the lower town, levelled structures and demolished towers. Their tracks cut new roads into the city’s street plan, death roads of pulverised rubble. Their weapons selected and annihilated anything that crossed their range.

Dark shapes ran with them and around them, bounding along the new-made death roads into the fire of combat. They looked like wolves, or the shadows of wolves at least. I am not sure if they were real, or just the product of my imagination. The smoke was treacherous, and played many tricks.

I have never known my Rout brothers as savage as they were that day, nor have I ever known them so grim. There is a strange lightness to them in most times of war, an execution yard humour that allows them to bond and endure, and to laugh wyrd in the face. It is almost a glee, a relish, the eagerness of a duty well done. Even during the war with the Olamic Quietude I saw it: the caustic jokes, the barracking, the acid comments, the bleak, phlegmatic mindset.

But not on Prospero. The task was too dark, too thankless. Nothing could lighten the burden of what they were about, so they lost themselves in the fury of their actions. In some ways, this made Prospero’s punishment all the more extreme and unholy. Not only was no quarter offered, no quarter was even considered. Teeth were only bared in wet leopard-snarls of rage and hatred, not in menacing grins. The only words uttered were curses and condemnations. Golden, black-pinned eyes darkened with resolve and hardened with duress. Blood begat blood. Slaughter begat slaughter. Fire fed fire, and in that fuelled frenzy, a planet perished, a society bled out, and a wound was torn in the flank of the Imperium that would never heal.

The Rout of the Vlka Fenryka did everything that was asked of them, without question or dubiety. They were not in the wrong. They were the perfect warriors, the perfect executioners, precisely as they were engineered and bred to be. They were the Emperor’s sanction. This account, my account, absolves them of all blame and celebrates their trueheartedness.

It must also reflect one other thing. This account must reflect one other, secret thing. Hear it, and decide what must be done, even if what must be done is slit my throat and cut my thread so I can never recite this account again.

The day blurs in my memory. An experience of such extreme intensity, of such violence and unending cacophony, will always do that. Moments conflate, events knock into one another and overlap.

I remember I was in a park, or what was left of some public garden. All the vegetation was burning. There was a small shrine structure, which had taken an indirect hit and was bleeding smoke into the violet air. We had entered from the east, with crossfire coming at us. I had temporarily turned off my displacer field because it was beginning to lose its charge.

Then we met the Thousand Sons for the first time.

Something had made them hold back. It was not fear. Perhaps they could not stomach the heresy of a fight against their Astartes kin. Perhaps it was some kind of tactical ploy intended to achieve an advantage.

Perhaps it was restraint. As though accepting their punishment, they had not opposed our initial advance, but, like the Spireguard, they ultimately found they could not stand by and watch their city burn.

They were resplendent in gold-edged red, their helmets marked with the distinctive nasal crest of their Legion. Though in form and armour and stature they were equivalent to the warriors of the Sixth, they could not have been more different. They moved differently. The Wolves bounded and sprang; they seemed to glide and stride. The Wolves were head-down and fast moving; they were upright and measured. The Wolves were howling; they were silent.

I was standing in the middle of the burning lawns as the lines of rival Astartes first engaged, wild grey shapes hurling themselves at gold and red centurions. The noise was like a thunderclap. It was the slap of great masses crashing together, like the clashing rocks of myth, but there was a ringing peal to it as well. It sounded like the voice of the monstrous storms that sheer altitude sometimes detonated outside the high places of the Aett on Fenris.

This was how battles must have looked when only gods and their demigod offspring walked upon Terra. Humanoid giants in regal armour, some dark and pelt-clad like sky deities of boreal Aesir, some golden and haughty like scholar gods of Faeronik Aegypt. Immense blows were landed by warriors of either side: men were smashed off their feet, or cut apart, bodies were rotated hard, heads snapped around. Fenrisian blades hammered into Prosperine armour, Prosperine force burned back into Fenrisian plate. The line faltered in both directions as it compensated for the force of collision. Then it seemed as though the carnivorous lust of the Vlka Fenryka would entirely overwhelm the warriors of the Fifteenth.

That was the moment we started to die, my brothers. That is the moment we started to die in any significant numbers. The Thousand Sons unleashed their maleficarum, the poison in their veins.

Electrical discharge leapt from staffs and fingertips. Radiant filth, like the unlight of the warp, spilled out of eye slits and speared from warding palms. Wolves were torn apart by the touch of their battle magic, or thrown back, mangled and scorched. Some were petrified into smouldering attitudes of excruciation. Their weapons charged with sorcerous power, fuming with helsmoke and sick light, the accursed traitors launched into our assaulting ranks.

Threads were cut in swathes, like scythed corn. Threads were more than cut. Some were torched back along their lengths, so that men did not merely die; the lives they had led before their deaths burned away into forgetfulness. Some were left as smears of blood, or haphazardly butchered carcasses. Some were pulled limb from limb by invisible wights and the sprites of the air. Some were left as nothing but heaped white bones and scads of blackened armour.

Oje died there, turned inside out by a warlock’s gesture. I saw Svessl too, split in two by an invisible blade. His blood came out of him with great, explosive force, like liquid from a pressurised cask. Hekken: cooked inside his armour. Orm Ormssen: exsanguinated. Vossul: blinded and pulped. Lycas Snowpelt: gutted and decapitated. Bane Fel: engulfed in a cold blue fire that consumed him but would not go out. Sfen Saarl: withered to a vile powder. Aerdor: transmogrified into a twisted, steaming, inhuman stump.

Too many. Too many! The accounts needed for all their sendings off would last for months. The kindling needed for all their funeral pyres would exhaust an entire great year’s supply.

I felt vindication, for the maleficarum of the Thousand Sons was everything it had been accused of being. Our prosecution was legitimised. But I felt fear, for I did not believe we would win or even live. For all our fury, for all our might as warriors, we would be exterminated, proving that the Thousand Sons of Prospero were monsters and warlocks.

I did the one thing a skjald should not do. I looked away. I averted my gaze so that I did not have to witness the fall of the Rout.

I missed, therefore, the beginning of salvation. I missed the first glimpse of the null-maidens pouring down the black heaps of burning rubble into the fight. Their blades were bright. Pulsing beads and beams of energy spat from their weapons. They uttered no war cry or challenge.

The blankness of them washed across the line. The rank clouds of maleficarum burned away, or blew aside like fog in a night wind. The warlocks of the Fifteenth choked on the abominable words of their conjurations. They gagged on the pestilential utterance of their spells. I saw them stagger back, clutching at their throats, pawing at the neck seals of their helms. I saw blood spurting and leaking through visor slits in stringy ropes. I saw arcane gestures and motions seize up and cripple hands into palsied, arthritic claws.

Seconds after they had stunned and disempowered the traitors of the Fifteenth with their insidious silence, the sister-warriors struck. They surged through the recoiled mass of Wolves and began to hack and slice with their longswords. Their assault was an odd mixture of frenzy and elegance. Every stroke, every cut, every turn was the skilled action of an elite swordfighter, yet it was driven along by a berserk mania, a hysterical orgy of wounding and killing.

The Wolves did not hold back either. Released from the hammerblow onslaught of magic, they set in beside the Sisters, matching them blow for blow and kill for kill. The war was physical again. It was kinetic, concussive, visceral and explosive. Blood lay like dew upon what was left of the grass, and hung in the air like a mist.

Custodes had appeared with the null-maidens. Their golden forms gleamed amid the swirling scrum of fighting bodies. Released into battle from their normal, solemn duties, they were as unrestrained as any Wolf. The blades of their halberds were thirsty for blood–

Put drink in my lanx. I am thirsty too. My throat is dry from the urgency of this account. I want you to hear all of this. I want you to see it in your minds.

See? Do you see? Prospero burns.

We were driving them back towards the great glass pyramids of Tizca. Drop-pods rained down through the stained sky like meteor showers. The light was bad: not insufficient, I mean. The daylight had gone bad, like meat goes bad.

Tizca had been violated and deformed. Most of its street plan had been erased, and its buildings and monuments demolished. The landscape was a tangle of black rubble and debris, some of it heaped into steep mountains and ridges, some of it cratered by vast munition strikes. There were corpses everywhere, and in the craters and the gullies, blood had pooled. In places, it ran in gurgling brooks between broken pipes and shattered masonry. Pulped organic matter spattered amongst the debris was the only residue of some fallen souls.

Each phase of assault was another climb up another hill that had not been there an hour earlier. The rubble slopes were sooty and treacherous. The air was full of beams and pulsed lasers, of hard rounds and rockets and squealing missiles. There was an almost constant downpour of micro debris, and, with that, oily rain as the boiled oceans began to condense and fall back onto the persecuted land. War machines, soiled by smoke-wash, streaked by rainfall, rolled and clanked and strode through the rubble-wastes, their weapons banks flashing and spitting. Pneumatic cannons recoiled pugnaciously into their mounts as they discharged. Main turret weapons boomed like the voice of the Allfather. Flocks of whooping rockets flew together in search of roosts.

I was with Godsmote and Orcir. We scrambled up another ridge of jumbled wreckage. I was trying to keep up with their fierce rate of advance.

To the west of us, as we arrived at the summit, one of the great glass pyramids began to collapse, devoured by a languorously slow bloom of fiery light that swelled and expanded, and allowed the monumental structure to fall into its incandescent embrace.

There was howling in the air once more, the growing chorus of Wolves. Over the din of war and even the tumult of material collapse, the sacking of Prospero was dominated by that sound: part wail, part wet leopard-growl. We know ourselves, my brothers, as Astartes warriors, but I tell you this as an outsider. It is the most chilling sound in the cosmos. It is the primal noise that accompanies death. Nobody who hears it ever forgets it, and few who hear it ever survive. It heralds the approaching destruction, and gives notice that the time for any parlay or mercy is long gone. It is the sound of the sanction of the Sixth, the hunting call of the Space Wolves. It is the dread-sound of wyrdmakers. It turns the blood to ice and the gut to water. I do not believe, and I speak in all honesty, that the Thousand Sons, even though they were Astartes and therefore engineered to be free of fear, were not inspired to terror when they heard it.

You scare me, wolf-brothers. You scare everything.

As a prelude to my recurring dream, I often remember a conversation I had with Longfang. I had shared with him, at his request, an account of maleficarum, an event that had befallen me in my previous life, in the ancient city of Lutetia. Longfang told me it was a good tale, but it wasn’t my best. He told me I would learn better ones. He told me I already knew a better one, but I was simply denying it.

I’m not sure how he was certain of these things. Right then and there, with his thread breaking, I believe he could perceive time in ways that we cannot. I believe he was not bound by the thread of life and could, in those twelve minutes surrounding his death, look up and down its length, and know the elusive past and the inescapable future.

For the latter point, the account I was denying, I believe he meant the event-memory that forms the kernel of my recurring dream. The face I could never turn in time to see, the face at my shoulder, that was the truth he wanted me to admit. By the time I came to Prospero, I was desperate to free myself of the burden too.

I did, though in doing so, I merely replaced it with a greater one.

I ran with Tra, with the wolf-shadows in the smoke, across the ravished landscape. It was late in the day. The flame-light of the tortured world was keeping the encroaching gloom of evening at bay, but when night finally fell, as it must, I knew it would be eternal and no sunrise would ever dispel it.

I had killed six men – two with my axe, four with my pistol. These are the ones I know of, clean kills in the dizzy incoherence of war. I had also helped to slay one of the Thousand Sons. He would have killed me, one to one. He had felled Two-blade in a bruising clash, and pinned him to the ground with the tongue of a fighting spear, which had gone through-and-through Two-blade’s hip and into the soil. Leaning on the spear to keep the brave Wolf down, he was drawing his bolt pistol to cut Two-blade’s thread.

I suppose he considered me of no consequence: a thrall, a less-than-Astartes thing blundering in the smoke. He reckoned without the Fenrisian strength the wolf priests had woven into my limbs when they re-engineered me. I cried out a battle curse in Wurgen, and sprang at him, putting the momentum of my running leap into a two-handed downstroke that buried the smile of my axe in the top of his skull. The attack left me rolling on the blood-mire of the earth. The Thousand Sons warrior lurched backwards off Two-blade, uttering some foul, gurgling sound. He let go of the fighting spear’s shaft and clawed at his scalp with his left hand, trying to grasp the blood-slick axe and wrench it out. I had not killed him. His helm had cushioned most of the blow. He swung around and aimed his bolt pistol at me, to punish me for the affront I had caused.

Two-blade pulled himself up, the spear still through him. He unpinned himself from the ground and came for the traitor foe from behind. He used his famous paired swords like shears and snipped off the warrior’s head. Blood jetted into the air. I had to brace my foot against the detached head to twist my axe free.

Jormungndr Two-blade dragged the spear out of himself, glanced at me, and continued on his way.

Some enemy resistance had collected in the glass precincts and annexes of one of the great pyramids. I wanted to see one of these places for myself. I wanted to see its fine decoration and soaring majesty before it was lost to the eyes of man.

Fine alabaster steps detailed with gold led up to a portico of glass and silver. The only thing that marred the entranceway was the stream of blood running down the fine steps from the sprawled body near the top. Orcir and Godsmote were ahead of me. The doors and walls and ceiling were vitreous mirrors. Shots had struck the mirroring in places, punching holes that were encircled by crazed lines and the talcum scurf of powdered glass. Inside, it was still, the horror without muffled and kept at bay. We could hear the distant rumble of the war, the patter of debris and rain on the high roof panes. Wisps of smoke drifted in the air like holy incense. The mirrored structure of the precinct hall trapped light and bathed us in an ethereal radiance. We slowed our surging advance down to a walking pace and cast our eyes around the glory of the interior. This was but an annex, a side chapel. What wonders must the pyramids contain? The conservator part of me, relic of my old lifetime, stirred within my breast, and urged me to examine the complex symbology of the designs wrought in the gold and silver frames of the looking-glass walls, and to record the delicate tracery of glyphs chased into the crystal.

We saw ourselves too, reflected in the gleaming surfaces: startled and uneasy, dark and hunched, barbaric intruders besmirched with gore, framed in the honeyed light. We were uninvited, invaders, like wild animals that had worried a fence post loose or leapt a boundary ditch and found their way into some civilised commune to desecrate and befoul the place, and scavenge for food, and kill.

Predators. We were predators. We were why walls were raised and watchfires lit at night.

Shots came at us down the length of the hall and broke our contemplation. They whipped past us, small bad stars. Some struck the floor and excavated sprays of pulverised stone. Some struck the mirror-walls and punched holes through them. The impacts made the glass walls shiver. The reflections of us hastening to cover wobbled and shuddered. We returned fire, positioned behind turned glass pillars and rows of silver statues. Some of the gunshots screaming at us were bolder-rounds. Terrible bites were torn from the gleaming pillars. Silver figures lost their heads or limbs, or toppled from their plinths. I saw one of the Thousand Sons at the end of the hall, unloading his bolter at us. An aura surrounded him, as if he was wearing his own personal storm. Orcir swung from cover and let rip with his heavy bolter. The shots annihilated the traitor, and threw his torn corpse back into the mirrored wall behind him, which promptly shattered and came down in a deafening cascade of glass.

Orcir and Godsmote moved up. Enemy fire was still coming our way. From the gauge of it, we suspected Spireguard. I could hardly bear to see the incrementally increasing damage that was being done to the grand hall: the spreading cracks, the falling glass, the shot holes, the collapsing statuary, the destroyed detailing. Orcir fired his huge, underslung weapon again, clearing the way. I slipped to the left behind him, into the mouth of a side hallway, hoping to find better cover. My displacer field had still not recharged. The rate of gunfire suddenly increased again, and drove me back along the side hall. I lost sight of Godsmote and Orcir. Mirrors were around me. Looking glass, reflecting me. I pressed on, gun drawn, axe slung but ready, to the end of the side hall, and opened a glass door. There was a room beyond. I stepped through.

Golden light was knifing into the chamber, gilding everything, giving the room a soft, burnished feel.

I stepped forwards, wary. There was an electronic chime.

‘Yes?’ I whispered.

‘Ser Hawser? It is your hour five alarm,’ said a softly modulated servitor voice.

‘Thank you,’ I replied. I was so stiff, so worn out. I hadn’t felt so bad for a long time. My leg was sore. I thought, maybe there are painkillers in the drawer.

I limped to the window, and pressed the stud to open the shutter. It rose into its frame recess with a low hum, allowing more of the golden light to flood in. I looked out. It was a hell of a view.

The sun, source of the ethereal radiance, was just coming up over the hemisphere below me. Solar disc, circumpunct, it stared at me, an eye. I was looking straight down on Terra in all its magnificence. I could see the night side and the constellation pattern of hive lights in the darkness behind the chasing terminator, I could see the sunlit blue of oceans and the whipped-cream swirl of clouds and, below, I could see the glittering light points of the superorbital plate Rodinia gliding majestically under the one I was aboard.

I knew where I was. I had reached the end of my dream.

My eyes refocussed. I saw my own sunlit reflection in the mirror of the window port. I saw the face of the other figure reflected in the glass, the figure standing just behind me.

Terror constricted me.

‘How can you be here?’ I asked.

I did not wake.

‘I have always been here,’ answered Horus Lupercal.

Fourteen

Looking glass

He did not need to name himself. I had seen his proud likeness many times on posters and pict-casts, on souvenir medals and holo-portraits: Primarch, Warmaster, the beautiful one, the foremost of the first sons. He was a giant, like all of his brothers. The little sleepchamber of the superorbital suite barely contained the scale of him. He was wearing the striking, Imperial white-gold armour of his Legion. A single, staring eye was fashioned across the breastplate. It was surrounded by an eight-pointed star.

He smiled down at me, a reassuring smile, the smile bestowed by a wise father on a miscreant child.

‘I don’t understand,’ I said.

‘You were never supposed to, Kasper,’ he said. ‘You were only ever a playing piece on a board. But I have grown fond of you down the years, and I wanted to see you one last time before the game was over.’

‘We’ve never met before, my lord,’ I said. ‘I would have remembered.’

‘Would you? I doubt it,’ he replied.

‘Ser,’ I said. ‘I have been privy to warnings. Grave warnings. A threat upon your life. I was shown a weapon–’

‘This?’ he asked. He drew the Anathame from his belt. It shone with malign light, just as it had done in my un-memories. ‘It’s too late. A year or so from now, this blade will have done its work upon me. I will be finished, and I will be renewed.’

‘A year or so from now? How can you speak of time in such a topsy-turvy sense?’

He smiled again.

‘When this blade cuts my thread, Kasper, occulted gods will take me in their arms. They will warp me. My life will change from mortal order to immortal Chaos. I will defy the laws of the cosmos and the rules of creation. Look at the two of us here, standing in your past. Prospero burns in your present, Kasper, but neither of us is there.’

‘Why?’ I cried. ‘Why? What have you done? What madness have you wrought?’

‘I am clearing the board for the game to come,’ he said. ‘I am setting it out the way I want it. Two key obstacles to my ambitions are the Sons of Prospero and the Wolves of Fenris. The former is the only Legion that has lorecraft enough to hinder me magically; the latter is the only Legion dangerous enough to represent a genuine military threat. The Emperor’s sorcerers and the Emperor’s executioners. I have no wish to store up a fight with either for my future, so I have invested time and energy arranging events to turn them upon each other.’

I gazed at him in disbelief. He shrugged, ruefully.

‘I had hoped for more, if I am honest,’ he said. ‘Magnus is terribly misguided. His dabblings have brought him perilously close to damnation, and my father was right to restrain him. But he would never have toppled over the brink without this violent provocation. I had so wanted the Wolves and the Sons to annihilate each other here on Prospero, and remove themselves as threats at a stroke. But Magnus and Russ have remained true to character. Magnus, high-minded and pious, has accepted his punishment and been destroyed. Russ, relentless and brute-loyal, has not wavered in his appalling task. The Thousand Sons have been destroyed. The Wolves remain in play.’

He looked at me, and there was a glitter in his eye.

‘But in the fate of Magnus and his sons, there is compensation for me. Broken by defeat, they nevertheless come across to my side. As a consequence, I earn some redress against the fact that the Vlka Fenryka remain a stark and extant danger to me.’

‘No man can do this,’ I cried, shaking my head. ‘No man can orchestrate events on such a scale!’

‘No? Not with years of gamesmanship and manipulation? Not with the dissemination of secrets and lies? Ugly rumours of Magnus’s necromantic practices? Blunt questions about Russ’s psychopathic tactics? Plus, of course, the deliberate manufacture of a network of spies like you, Kasper, real spies and pawns to make both sides paranoid, to make both sides suspect the worst and prepare for reaction? I turned the very traits and habits of each Legion’s character into weapons of self-destruction.’

‘No!’ I insisted. ‘No man can do such a thing.’

‘Whoever said I was a man?’ he replied.

I backed away. I felt the cold glass of a window or a mirror against my back.

‘What are you really?’ I asked.

‘You know my name,’ he laughed.

‘That’s just a mask, isn’t it?’ I said, pointing at his face. ‘What are you really?’

‘Which mask would you prefer?’ he asked. He raised his hand to his face, and tore away the flesh. It split like the husk of a peapod, like fibrous vegetable matter, spilling sap like languid honey. The features of Horus Lupercal parted, and underneath them was the laughing face of Amon, Equerry to the Crimson King.

‘This one? The one you spoke to on Nikaea? The real Amon was far below at his primarch’s side.’

He dropped the shredded Horus face onto the deck. It landed with the splat of rotten fruit. Then he peeled the Amon face away too. Milky sap spurted out and spattered down his breastplate, drooling across the great staring eye. Now the sadly knowing features of my old colleague Navid Murza gazed at me.

‘Or this one?’

‘The real one,’ I said. ‘The real one. No mask, just your real face.’

‘You could not bear to look upon it,’ Navid said. ‘No one can behold the baleful light of the Primordial Annihilator and survive. Your sanity would be the last thing to burn up, Kasper. Oh, Kasper. I was not lying when I said I had grown fond of you. You were good to me. I am sorry for the life I have given you.’

‘What is the Primordial Annihilator, Navid?’ I asked. ‘What is it?’

‘The warp, Kasper,’ he said. ‘The warp. The warp is everything, and everything is the warp. Your Allfather thinks He can win a war against it where other, greater races have lost. He can’t. Mankind will be the warp’s finest victory.’

He took a step towards me. At his throat, I could see the glint of the Catheric crux he always wore. It was melting.

‘We got rid of our gods, Kas. Something was always going to take their place.’

His face was pleading. It was the face I had known for years, un-aged since the day he perished in Ossetia. He was no longer wearing the Warmaster’s armour. He was human-sized, and dressed in the soft, cream-felt robes of the Lutetian Bibliotech.

I knew, with painful certainty, that Navid Murza’s face had been the one I had turned around and seen that day, long ago, in my suite aboard the Lemuryan superorbital. His was the face that my dreams had blocked, the face my memories had refused to recover. This had been the trigger event: a man, dead for so long, come back to find me in a locked room to warp my mind with fear, reboot my memories, adjust my will and drive me to Fenris.

This was the ‘best piece’ of maleficarum, the one that Longfang knew I had.

‘So all this is for nothing?’ I whispered. ‘Prospero has burned, for nothing? Astartes has murdered Astartes, for nothing?’

Navid grinned.

‘It’s exquisite, isn’t it?’

‘The Crimson King was loyal. Misguided, but loyal. So this tragedy need never have happened?’

‘I know!’ he said, exalted, his eyes bright. ‘But now this has happened, oh Kas, now this has happened, a door has been opened. A precedent has been set. If you think Prospero is a tragedy, an abomination, a terrible mistake, you should see what happens next. Two Legions Astartes, locked in mortal combat? Kas, that’s just the overture.’

He was close to me. His hands were reaching out. He had folded back the integral gloves of the soft robes to free his hands. I did not want him to touch me.

‘How long did I know you before you weren’t Navid Murza any more?’ I asked.

‘I was always me, Kas,’ he cooed. He touched the side of my face with one hand. I felt his fingers against the knotwork of my mask. My headgear’s marks of aversion were not keeping him at bay.

Him. It, I think. I could smell its breath, the charnel stink of a predator’s bacteria-swilling mouth, the venomous air of Prospero outside my private dream, burning up at the end of all its days.

‘Always you?’ I asked. ‘No, I think there was a Navid Murza once, and you took his place.’

‘It’s naive of you to think so, Kas,’ it said, stroking my cheek.

‘It’s naive of you to get this close,’ I replied, and spoke the word Navid had spoken, all those years before, in the back alley behind the cathedral corpse. Enuncia, he had called it, part of the primeval vocabulary of magic. He had been so cocky, so arrogant; he had never expected me to retain its form, not after so many years and so brief an exposure, but I had spent a long time with the rune priests of Fenris recovering and replaying my memories. I had heard it over and over again, enough times to commit its jagged, razor-edged shape to memory.

I had it, word perfect.

I spat it into the thing’s face. It was the single most important word I have ever uttered as a skjald.

Its face exploded in a blizzard of flesh and blood. Its head snapped back as though it had been struck in the face with an axe. It tumbled away from me, screaming and howling, the sounds horribly muted by its mangled mouth.

I was hurt too. I could feel how raw my throat was from retching up the word. I could taste the blood in my mouth. My lip was split. Several of my teeth were loose.

Caring little for any of that, I moved forwards, raising my pistol.

‘Tra! Tra! Help here!’ I shouted, and then had to spit blood through the slit of my mask.

I fired at the writhing, robed form. Its cream-felt shape crashed over the chamber’s bed and fell on the floor on the other side, squealing like a butchered pig. Furniture toppled over. Books spilled from broken shelves. Damaged, the bedside dataplate began to repeat, ‘Ser Hawser? It is your hour five alarm. Ser Hawser? It is your hour five alarm…’

I fired at the thrashing shape again.

‘Skjald? Skjald?’

Voices were calling me in Wurgen. The chamber door opened, and Godsmote appeared with Orcir. They hesitated for a second. Behind them lay the bright glint of the looking-glass hallway on Prospero. Ahead of them lay a cramped and gloomy sleepchamber overlooking Terra. At the doorway, where they stood, two realities had been grafted together. Their dismay was understandable.

‘Help me!’ I yelled. I pointed at the thrashing figure in the corner of the room.

‘Kill it!’

Orcir pushed past me, bracing his heavy bolter. There was no hesitation. He fired a sustained burst of shots from the massive weapon, the noise of which was overwhelming in the confines of the tiny room. The bolts shredded the figure. They blew the soft, plump folds of its Bibliotech robes apart and obliterated the body underneath. Blood, sap and fibrous tissue plastered the wall behind it.

But it was not dead.

It rose up, a shattered human skeleton, dripping with gore, and remade itself. It grew. Skin rewove. Organs reassembled or uncooked. The last remnants of the cream Bibliotech robes sloughed off like shedding skin as white-gold armour formed underneath it. Remade, the Warmaster wore a vengeful, insane expression. One of his eyes was blown.

‘Get back,’ I warned my brothers.

‘Hjolda!’ Orcir gasped. ‘Lupercal? Lord Lupercal?’

‘Get back!’ I cried.

‘Orcir,’ Horus whispered, saying the name like a charm. An unseen force propelled Orcir towards the giant.

The Anathame glimmered in Horus’s hand. He struck it down into Orcir’s chest. Orcir screamed out. His thread already cut, he tried to use his heavy bolter, point-blank, against his killer. Horus spoke Orcir’s name again, and once again the name gave Horus power over our wolf-brother. This time, the unseen force lifted Orcir off the killing blade, and threw him like a doll across the bedchamber. His armoured corpse hit the viewing port, and the window shattered.

There was a monstrous bang of decompression. Every stick of furniture, every loose object in the room, every bead of blood, rushed out of the broken port along with the atmosphere and all the tumbling shards of window glass. Orcir’s body, limp and spread-eagled, fell away from the window, spinning end over end, and dropped towards Terra, getting smaller and smaller, beginning to burn up like a shooting star.

The decompression did not dislodge Horus. He roared in the failing air. I felt my feet lose purchase. I tried to brace, but the explosive voiding of the chamber would not let me go. The glass shade of a lamp smashed off my shoulder. A book struck my knee. I grabbed the doorframe. A toy horse made of wood flew past my head and went out into the blackness.

I could not hold on. My grip broke, and I shot backwards like a cork. I was suddenly pulled up hard as Godsmote’s fist clamped around my arm and anchored it. He had hooked the head of his axe to the door frame, and was clenching the weapon’s haft with one hand as he clung on to me. The effort of pulling me in made him roar. As soon as I had a grip too, I added my strength to his.

We pulled ourselves through the doorway, and slammed the door. On the outside, it was just a mirrored surface. We were in the temple precinct again, in the glass hall.

I expected questions from Godsmote, urgent demands for explanation, but he did not even break stride. Driven and single-minded as all Wolves, he knew we were not yet safe. We moved quickly, down the side hall into the main atrium, the space ruined by gunfire.

Horus came behind us. He exploded through the temple’s glass wall, bringing sheets of mirror down as though they had been rammed by a Land Raider. He tore his way from one reality to the next, out of my past into my present, out of my memories into my reality. He was running, each great, racing stride ringing out on the polished floor.

‘Kasper!’ he commanded.

I felt the tug upon me, the power of my name, but Kasper Hawser is only one of the many names I own, and none of them are my true, birth-name, my signifier. Not even I know that. I resisted.

He was gaining on us. Godsmote turned to fight him, Astartes against primarch-thing, Fenrisian Wolf against Luna Wolf.

‘Godsmote!’ Horus declaimed. Godsmote faltered for a second, and then put his arms into that famous stroke of his, his godsmack. The axe-bite took Horus in the ribcage on the left side, and actually knocked him sideways a few paces. He howled. Godsmote ripped his axe out and did it again, ripping a gash in the Warmaster’s left thigh.

‘Fith of the Ascommani!’ Horus bawled out. He had dug deeper into my memory and found a truer, older name for my friend and wolf-brother. At the merest breath of it, Godsmote was picked up and tossed across the hall. He slammed against the looking-glass wall four or five metres off the floor, cracked a huge sunburst pattern in its surface with his impact, and fell onto the ground beneath.

Horus straightened up and came for me. I shot at him until my cell was spent, and then threw the pistol aside and drew my axe. He knocked me down with a slap, tore off my displacer field unit, and wrenched my axe from my hands. His titanic hand was around my throat. My feet left the ground.

‘I had grown fond of you,’ he hissed in Navid Murza’s voice. ‘I even confessed as much. And you repay my indulgence with this abuse when you should have accepted the gift of a painless death that I was offering you. Now it certainly won’t be painless.’

‘I don’t care,’ I grunted back.

‘Oh, you will,’ he promised.

The gleaming, frostblade head of a Fenrisian axe flashed down between us and parted his arm at the elbow. I fell onto the floor with his severed forearm still clutching at my throat. His blood, or whatever foetid ichor passed for his blood, hosed at me.

‘Step back,’ said Bear, and put two more axe strokes into him. Horus bellowed Bear’s name, in rage and pain, but obtained no mastery of him. Bear’s axe continued to bite him. Just as had been the case when it wore the mask of Amon on Nikaea, the Primordial Annihilator could not subdue Bear with his name.

Bear had done terrible damage to the Horus-thing. One arm was off, the white-gold armour was rent open in a dozen bloody places, and there was a grisly cleft through the side of the Lupercal’s head. The brainpan had split open. The white bone of skull fragments protruded. Part of his cheek had torn away. The blood streaming out of him was forming a widening pool around his feet.

‘Skjald?’ Bear growled. ‘Run now.’

I got up. Bear settled his grip and prepared to face the next round. Twitching, the Horus-thing advanced, splashing one step after another through its sappy blood, leaving footprints of gore on the glass floor.

‘Run now,’ Bear urged me.

The Horus-thing accelerated. Bear bent low and put his back into the swing that greeted it. The blow didn’t land. Pain and anger seemed to amplify the Horus-thing’s power. It smashed Bear aside with a vicious sweep of its remaining arm, and then stooped and tried to rain blows down on the fallen Wolf. Bear rolled wildly to avoid them, escaping a pounding fist that cracked the floor in several places. With no time or opportunity to rise again, Bear slid around on his back, and hacked at the monster again, with his axe, left-handed.

The Horus-thing caught the axe-head this time. It caught it neatly in its huge, armoured paw, and locked its grip. Blood and oily fluid bubbled out of its mouth as it looked down at Bear and uttered some eldritch unword of Enuncia.

Balefire, the corposant that lights treetops and mastheads in the darkest winter nights, swirled down the axe from head to throat, wrapping it in greenish yellow flame, consuming it. The flames spread to Bear’s left hand and forearm, burning them away in a wild, incandescent flare. Bear howled. The Horus-thing was exacting punishment for his own missing arm. He was a predator, playing with his prey before the kill.

I snatched up my axe from the floor where it had landed. I did not hesitate. I got between them and struck off Bear’s left arm just below the elbow before the maleficarum could spread to the rest of him. He had saved me by severing a limb. I was determined to repay him, and repay him for the constant protection he had offered me, without comment, since our first meeting on the shore of the ice field, when I mistook him for a daemon.

I knew, now, what a daemon really looked like.

Bear rolled clear, clenching his teeth in pain. I tried to drag him back towards the hall’s portico. I confess I did not expect to have done much more than delay our ultimate demise.

By then, Aun Helwintr had felt the terrible forces that had been released in the temple precinct. Ominous in his pelt and his long black cloak, his white hair twisted and lacquered into horns, he stepped into the crystal hall behind us, forming with his hands the warding gestures that all rune priests are taught, the gestures of banishment and aversion. The Horus-thing vomited blood and recoiled, but its power dwarfed that of the imposing priest.

For this reason, Helwintr had not come to our aid alone.

One entire glass wall of the temple hall, on the right-hand side, blew in and shattered in a vast cascade of glass. A second later, the same thing happened to the left-hand side. Light and smoke from the killing grounds outside swirled in through the building’s ruptured frames. Parts of the roof glazing fell in and smashed.

A huge and heavy shape strode into the hall through the torn down right-hand wall. It was a biped, a construct five metres tall, squat but massive, thickly armoured with adamantium, badged in the colours of the Vlka Fenryka. On either side of its bulky main hull, weapon-pods cycled and target-locked.

A second Dreadnought entered through the gap blown in the left-hand side of the hall. It cycled its weapons. The constructs closed the distance a little, vicing the Horus-thing between their positions, driving it back towards the end of the hall. Each step they took shook the ground.

They opened fire in unison at some shared, mind-linked command. The tempest wrath of assault cannons and twin-linked lascannons macerated the Horus-thing. Flailing, it was blasted into fragments, into a haze of matter that spattered what little of the hall’s mirrored surface remained, and stained it like mould.

Something thrashed at the heart of the blast zone, something that took form as the humanoid figure of Horus was annihilated. Gale force winds and energies screamed out at us. The air filled with swarms of flies.

Something rose up, slowly, out of the molten fireball created by the Dreadnoughts’ barrage. It was hard to look at, hard to understand. It defied visual interpretation, like a dream that refuses to let you turn around and see its face.

It was tall and misshapen, a shadow cast by shadows. There was a suggestion of anatomy that was both utterly human and corrupted beyond any organic limit. Everything about it had been put together wrong, so that the sight of it dislocated the senses and depraved the mind. It was gristle and rancid meat, blisters and herniated intestines, ulcerated tongues and rotting teeth. It was blinking eyes that were as large as drinking bowls or clustered like the spawn of amphibians. It had horns, two huge, upcurved horns.

Everything in the room suddenly cast too many shadows. The clouds of flies grew thicker, trying to invade our eyes, our nostrils, our mouths, our wounds.

A voice said, ‘Oh, Aun Helwintr. You do not learn from your mistakes. You have brought mighty warriors to confront me and drive me out, but I know their names and thus have power over them. I name them both. Patrekr the Great Fanged. Cormek Dod.’

‘I recognise my failing and will be sure to correct it,’ Helwintr replied. I was astonished to see that he was smiling. Figures streamed into the shattered hall behind him, and stepped in through the walls the Dreadnoughts had breached. A dozen null-maidens. Two dozen. Their swords were drawn. Their leader, Jenetia Krole, raised her hand and pointed an accusing finger at the shadow-shape looming before us.

It let out a long and harrowing cry of anguish as it felt its power negated. The pariah gene shared by the members of the Silent Sisterhood blocked the puissance of its sorcery and banished its potent maleficarum. The wind immediately began to die back. The swarming flies fell dead, and piled on the ground in black drifts as thick as the heaps of fragmented glass.

‘Knock it down and cut its thread,’ ordered Aun Helwintr, and the Dreadnoughts resumed their conflagration.

They did not stop until every last speck of the deviltry was obliterated.

Fifteen

Threads

I do not believe we killed it, brothers. I do not think the Primordial Annihilator can be harmed in the way that a mortal thing can. But we drove it back, we drove it out. We hurt it for a while at least.

When we emerged, the battle was done. The Wolf King had engaged Magnus in monumental single combat, and broken his spine. Then, at the very moment when we bested the daemon in the temple hall, sorcery boiled loose across the entire, ruined world. Blood rain fell. The Crimson King, and those of his Thousand Sons who had survived, vanished, fleeing by means of their proscribed magic.

Only in this way could they escape total extermination by the Rout.

Let this lesson be remembered.

Bloody rain was still falling as we regrouped. The sky was nightfall dark, black as a raven’s wing feathers, and underlit by the firestorms engulfing the glass city. With Godsmote, who had recovered from his injuries enough to walk, I stayed with Bear as the wolf priests tended his arm.

Bear’s face was impassive. He showed no hint of pain or discomfort as the priests worked at his stump with bone cutters and hooks. An augmetic would be fitted in time. But I saw him grimace slightly as a Dreadnought thumped by our position in the streaming downpour.

Drops of blood rain beaded Bear’s face.

‘I don’t mind the arm,’ he grumbled. ‘Not when you consider.’

‘Consider what?’ I asked.

‘It’s supposed to be an honour,’ said Godsmote, nodding towards the Dreadnought as it moved away. ‘But who wants to lose so much they end up like that? That’s no way to live forever.’

Bear nodded grimly.

‘What I don’t understand,’ I said, ‘is how you broke its spell. It knew the names of every one of us, and yet that power had no mastery over you.’

‘It’s probably because it learned all our names from you, skjald,’ Godsmote said. ‘And you’ve never got his name right, not since the first day you came to us.’

I have remarked that whatever put the fluency in Juvjk and Wurgen into my mind did a good but imperfect job. Sometimes, at points of stress or when distracted, I lapse, and mis-speak a word, regressing to the Low Gothic of my former life. For reasons I cannot explain, this is especially frequent in the case of terms for birds and animals.

From the outset, my mind had decided that Bear’s name was Bear. But that was the Low Gothic translation. It was a habit that had stuck, and Bear, forever taciturn, had never seen fit to correct me.

In the language of the Vlka Fenryka, his name was Bjorn.

I recognise my failing and will be sure to correct it.

Once Prospero had burned, I felt great pity for the Wolves. Not for their losses, which were great and lamentable, but for their emptiness. Their anger was spent, and though complete, their victory seemed hollow. They stood around me, silent and hunched, mongrel figures in the blackened ruin, washed by the blood-dark rain. Their fury was exhausted because they had run out of enemies to kill.

They seemed lost, as if they did not know what to do next. They would not take part in any rebuilding or recovery. They would not manage the aftermath.

The Vlka Fenryka only know how to do one thing.

Sparks fly up. Memory contracts like the flesh on a corpse, tightening on the increasingly pronounced bones pulling the jaws open in a silent scream. In deep lakes of black water, we can watch the reflections of sidereal time pass overhead. I see the Wolves as inheritors, the last guardians of an ancient domain that is so old and crumbling into neglect it has become an incomprehensible ruin. Still, they guard it, like dogs left to guard a house they do not understand.

As long as they endure, their accounts will live on, told and retold by skjalds like me to men like you. A fire will be burning. We will smell the copal resin smoking into the air. Perhaps I will not see the men around me, but I will see their shadows, cast up the cave wall by the spitting fire, like cave art lent the illusion of movement by the inconstant flames.

I will try to listen to what is being said by the men during the long, mumbling conversations, so that I can hear all the secrets of the world, and learn every account from the very first to the very last.

In the coldest, deepest part of the cave, there is a blackness cut by a cold, blue glow. The air smells sterile, like rock in a dry polar highland that lacks any water to form ice. It is far away from the soft warmth and the firelight of the cave, far away from the fraternity of murmuring voices and the smell of smouldering resin. It is there I will be forced to sleep out most of my days. I am too dangerous to keep among the Rout, too compromised. I know too much, and too much knows me. But the Vlka Fenryka have grown fond of me, and with that strange, gruff sentimentality of theirs, they cannot bring themselves to quickly and mercifully cut my thread.

So I will be put to sleep in the deep cold of the ice, in stasis far below the Aett, with only Cormek Dod and the other muttering Dreadnoughts as companions. None of us like it there. None of us choose to be there. We miss the firelight. We miss the sunlight. We’ve dreamed the same dreams a hundred times over, a thousand times. We know them off by heart. We don’t choose the dark.

Nevertheless, once in a while, when we are disturbed and revived, we are never content to see the daylight.

If you have to come and wake us, times are not good.

I am standing in the high meadow in Asaheim where I last saw Heoroth Longfang alive, but it is the Wolf King who is towering at my side. The air is as clear as glass. To the west of us, beyond a vast, rolling field of snow and a mighty evergreen forest, mountains rise. They are white, as clean and sharp as carnassials. I know full well that the grey skies behind them aren’t storm clouds. They are more mountains, greater mountains, mountains so immense the sheer scale of them breaks a man’s spirit. Where their crags end, buried like thorns in the skin of the sky, the wrath of the winter season Fenrisian storms is gathering and clotting, angry as patriarch gods and malign as trickster daemons.

It is the last hour of the last day before I voluntarily enter stasis.

‘You understand why?’ asks the Wolf King at my side. His voice is a wet leopard-purr.

‘I do,’ I say. ‘I understand.’

‘Ogvai, he speaks highly of your skills as a skjald.’

‘The jarl is kind.’

‘He’s honest. That’s why I keep him. But you understand, you can’t play out a game with a broken piece on the board.’

‘I understand.’

‘The accounts, though. We don’t want to lose them. Future generations should hear them, and learn from them.’

‘I’ll conserve them for you, lord,’ I say. ‘They will be here in my head, ready to tell.’

‘Good,’ he says. ‘Make sure of it. I won’t be around to watch over the Vlka Fenryka forever. When I’m gone, you’d better make sure they hear the stories.’

I laugh, thinking he’s joking.

‘You’ll never be gone, lord,’ I say.

‘Never is a long time, skjald,’ he replies. ‘I’m tough, but I’m not that tough. Just because something’s never happened, it doesn’t mean it never will.’

‘There’s a first time for everything.’

‘Exactly,’ he grunts.

‘The unprecedented. Like… Astartes fighting Astartes? Like the Rout being called to sanction another Legion?’

‘That?’ he answers. He laughs, but it is a sad sound. ‘Hjolda, no. That’s not unprecedented.’

I am lost for a reply. I am never sure when he is joking. We are looking towards the forest line. The first flakes of snow are fluttering down.

‘Are there wolves on Fenris?’ I ask.

‘Go and look for yourself,’ he tells me. ‘Go on.’

I look at him. He nods. I start towards the forest line across the snow. I begin to run. I pull my pelt, the one Bercaw gave me, tight around me, like a second skin. In the enormous darkness under the evergreens, I see eyes staring at me: luminous, gold and black-pinned. They are waiting for me, ten thousand pairs of eyes looking out at me from the shadows of the forest. I am not afraid.

I am not afraid of the wolves any more.

Behind me, the Wolf King watches me until I’ve disappeared into the trees.

‘Until next winter,’ he says.

Thanks to

Graham McNeill, Jim Swallow, Aaron Dembski-Bowden, Nick Kyme, Gav Thorpe, Nik, and Big Steve Bissett, for consults and suggestions, and the BL staff and readers for their patience.

About the Authors

Dan Abnett is the author of the Horus Heresy novels The Unremembered Empire, Know No Fear and Prospero Burns, the last two of which were both New York Times bestsellers. He has written almost fifty novels, including the acclaimed Gaunt’s Ghosts series, and the Eisenhorn and Ravenor trilogies. He scripted Macragge’s Honour, the first Horus Heresy graphic novel, as well as numerous audio dramas and short stories set in the Warhammer 40,000 and Warhammer universes. He lives and works in Maidstone, Kent.

Aaron Dembski-Bowden is the author of the Horus Heresy novels Betrayer and The First Heretic, as well as the novella Aurelian and the audio drama Butcher’s Nails, for the same series. He also wrote The Talon of Horus, the popular Night Lords series, the Space Marine Battles book Helsreach, the Grey Knights novel The Emperor’s Gift and numerous short stories. He lives and works in Northern Ireland.

Mike Lee’s credits for Black Library include the Horus Heresy novel Fallen Angels, the Time of Legends trilogy The Rise of Nagash and the Space Marine Battles novella Traitor’s Gorge. Together with Dan Abnett, he wrote the five-volume Malus Darkblade series. An avid wargamer and devoted fan of pulp adventure, Mike lives in the United States.

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

James Swallow is best known for being the author of the Horus Heresy novels Fear to Tread and Nemesis, which both reached the New York Times bestseller lists, The Flight of the Eisenstein and a series of audio dramas featuring the character Nathaniel Garro. For Warhammer 40,000, he is best known for his four Blood Angels novels, the audio drama Heart of Rage, and his two Sisters of Battle novels. His short fiction has appeared in Legends of the Space Marines and Tales of Heresy.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

Fallen Angels first published in Great Britain in 2009.
A Thousand Sons first published in Great Britain in 2010.
Nemesis first published in Great Britain in 2010.
The First Heretic first published in Great Britain in 2010.
Prospero Burns first published in Great Britain in 2011.
This edition published in 2015 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS UK.

Cover illustrations by Neil Roberts.

The Horus Heresy Volume Three © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2015. The Horus Heresy Volume Three, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
All Rights Reserved.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-78251-993-5

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.