Table of Contents

The Horus Heresy Volume Four – Cover

The Horus Heresy Volume Four – Title Page

Age of Darkness – Cover

Age of Darkness – Title Page

The Horus Heresy

Rules of Engagement – Graham McNeill

Liar’s Due – James Swallow

Forgotten Sons – Nick Kyme

The Last Remembrancer – John French

Rebirth – Chris Wraight

The Face of Treachery – Gav Thorpe

Little Horus – Dan Abnett

The Iron Within – Rob Sanders

Savage Weapons – Aaron Dembski-Bowden

The Outcast Dead – Cover

The Outcast Dead – Title Page

The Horus Heresy

Dramatis Personae

Prologue

Part 1 – Dreams of the Red Chamber

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Part Two – The Veiled City

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Deliverance Lost – Cover

Deliverance Lost – Title Page

The Horus Heresy

Dramatis Personae

Part One – Echoes of Isstvan

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Part Two – Reconstruction

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Part Three – Monsters And Martyrs

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Epilogue

Know No Fear – Cover

Know No Fear – Title Page

The Horus Heresy

Dramatis Personae

TARGET//ACQUISITION

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

ABSOLUTE//OVERWHELM

1

2

3

SYSTEM//KILL

1

2

3

TARGET//ENGAGEMENT

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

USHKUL//THU

1

2

3

RUIN//STORM

1

2

3

4

5

6

UN//DOING

Epilogue

Thanks

The Primarchs – Cover

The Primarchs – Title Page

The Horus Heresy

The Reflection Crack’d – Graham McNeill

Dramatis Personae

Feat of Iron – Nick Kyme

Dramatis Personae

Wrought of Iron

Will of Iron

Wrath of Iron

The Lion – Gav Thorpe

Dramatis Personae

The Serpent Beneath – Rob Sanders

Dramatis Personae

Alpha

Beta

Gamma

Delta

Epsilon

Omega

About the Authors

Legal

THE HORUS HERESY

It is a time of legend.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He wanted to weep, but the last two years had turned his heart to stone. Too much had been asked of him, too much had been lost, and he had no more sorrow left. Brothers forsaken, a world of Ultramar burned and the golden dream of galactic unity reduced to ashes. Such a singular moment in history should be mourned. It demanded tears, a rending of clothes, a tearing of hair, or, at the very least, an outburst of primal rage.

He indulged none of these cathartic releases.

If he allowed tears of sorrow to fall, they might never stop.

The interior of the Arcanium was a twenty metre square cube with an arched doorway in each wall, softly lit by thick candles held aloft in iron sconces worked in the form of eagles and lions rampant. The floor was of a dark slate, and its walls were formed from bare timbers, polished and worked smooth by a plane wielded by his own hands. He remembered finding refuge here many years ago, when the incessant bickering between the senators of Macragge had become too unbearable for a boy who thrived on action and excitement.

That boy was gone now, drowned in the blood of Konor’s murder and the greater tide of slaughter he had unleashed in the wake of that treachery. Once he had called it justice, but the passage of time gave him the perspective to recognise the truth of his motivation. Revenge was never a worthy reason to send men to war, and he had resolved to never again fall prey to its seductions. Having identified the flaw, he had taken steps to purge himself of that weakness, and the execution of Gallan had been the last time emotion guided his hand.

He returned his attention to the book before him, hearing the bustle of the fortress beyond the lovingly crafted walls of his private sanctum. Once this place had been remote from any petitioners, built hundreds of miles from the nearest settlement, but its isolation was now a thing of the past. Acres of marbled walls, glittering geodesic domes, soaring towers and perfectly proportioned structures surrounded it. An entire library had been raised up around the chamber, and though the architects and mathematicians had begged him to consider the harmonious geometry of the golden mean inherent within their plans, he had refused to allow the Arcanium to be demolished.

He wanted to smile, recognising that perhaps Gallan’s execution hadn’t quite been the last time emotion had played a part in his decision-making process after all. But the smile refused to come, and in the face of all that occupied his thoughts now, his determination to hang on to this fragment of his youth seemed a wilfully petty thing.

Seated at a heavy table of dark wood that filled the centre of the chamber, he read the words he had just written in the enormous tome before him. Its spine was a metre long and thick enough to enclose a book fully thirty centimetres deep. Brilliant gold leaf edged the warm leather binding, and the pages were pale vellum that still carried the scent of the beast from which it had been cut. Tightly wound script filled the leftmost page, each letter precisely formed and arranged in perfectly even lines of text.

The work was progressing, and every day brought him closer to completion.

It was to be his greatest work, his Magnum Opus, the undertaking for which he would be forever remembered. Some might consider such sentiment to be vanity on his part, but he knew better. This was a work that would save everything his gene-father had tried to build. Its teachings would form the foundation of what was needed to weather the coming storm. Selflessness, not pride, guided his hand as he set down decades of accumulated wisdom, each chapter and verse a fragment of his biologically encoded genius, each morsel of imparted knowledge a building block that would combine to form a work immeasurably greater than the sum of its parts.

In the wake of the devastation unleashed on Calth, the Legion was looking to him for leadership more than ever. His warriors had suffered a grievous blow to their pride, and desperately needed to see their primogenitor. Helots brought petitions for audiences from his Chapter captains every day, but this endeavour was too important to grant such requests.

They did not understand why he sequestered himself away from his sons, but they did not need to understand. All that was required of them was obedience, even when his orders made no sense and seemed as heretical as those that had set the galaxy ablaze.

In all his years of service to his gene-father, he had never faced so terrible a choice.

The Imperium was lost. Everything he knew told him so, and this betrayal was the one thing that would save the dream at its heart from extinction.

The body of the Imperium was dying, but the ideals of its foundation could live on.

His father would understand that, even if others would not.

Roboute Guilliman wrote two words at the top of the right-hand page: words of treachery, words of salvation. Words to herald a new beginning.

Imperium Secundus.

Engagement 94

His name was Remus Ventanus of the Ultramarines 4th Company, and he was a traitor.

This sat ill with him, but there was little he could do to change it. The orders came directly from the primarch, and if there was one thing drilled into Ultramarines from the earliest days of their training it was that orders were always obeyed, no matter what.

Intermittent flashes lit the mountains of Talassar with a scratchy, pale glow as bright streamers of fire dropped burning traceries like phosphor tears across the night sky. The retreat from Castra Publius had been long and gruelling, made more so by the relentless, dogged pursuit of their attackers. Like razorfins with the scent of blood in the water, the warriors of Mortarion never gave up, never let up the pressure and never, ever, stopped attacking once battle had been joined.

It was a trait Remus had once admired.

He had no idea how the war across the rest of Talassar went. All he knew was what the planners in the grand strategium fed him through his helmet, but they jealously guarded their secrets and were miserly when it came to distributing information.

Eighteenth Company had held Castra Publius to the last man, long enough for the remainder of the Ultramarines to escape, falling back to pre-prepared positions raised by helots, Talassar Defence Pioneers and the monstrous construction engines of the Mechanicum. Those engines were proving key to their strategy, and Remus was grateful the primarch had seen fit to demand a permanent presence of the Martian priesthood on each world of Ultramar before the Red Planet had fallen to the Warmaster’s allies.

Remus pushed himself to his feet and lifted his bolter from the rocks beside him. He ran through the readiness checks and snapped home the safety, the action so ingrained it was automatic. Just like everything a warrior of the XIII Legion did. He clamped the weapon to his thigh and looked out over the landscape around him.

The mountains of Talassar snaked across the planet’s single continent like a buckled spine, each vertebra a gnarled peak and each gap a series of corrugated valleys with hairline fractures that penetrated deep into the rock to form hidden valleys, dead-end grabens and narrow gorges whose floors never saw sunlight. It was terrain to favour the defenders, and every scenario of invasion relied upon the mountainous bulwark and its linked fortresses.

What those scenarios hadn’t counted on was a foe as implacable as the Death Guard.

An angled wall of compacted rubble and rapid-setting rockcrete sealed this particular valley with a series of fortified redoubts and strongpoints. Remus was no stranger to the speed and completeness with which the Mechanicum could sculpt landscapes, yet the sight before him was still incredible.

The valley had grown wider and deeper, its flanks blasted, excavated, drilled and dug out to form the linked series of earthworks that spanned its width. He and the 4th Company had deployed from here less than half a day ago, when the valley floor had been smooth and empty, and the black, volcanic walls were coloured by hardy lichen and projecting evergreen firs. All that was gone; the once verdant highland valley now resembled a quarry that had been worked for decades. Talassar Auxilia units manned artfully wrought redoubts formed from pre-stressed slabs, and Ultramarines heavy guns occupied revetments that hadn’t been there ten hours ago.

It had been a hard retreat, with the forward units of the Death Guard harrying them every step of the way. Remus had balked at the idea of allowing the enemy to maintain the initiative, but the new doctrine required them to give ground.

Gathered in carefully placed groups, the three thousand Legiones Astartes of the 4th Company took their rest behind the high wall, and Remus threaded his way through them. He shivered as he passed beneath the shadow of one of the Mechanicum’s construction engines. It towered over him, longer and wider than the Gallery of Swords on Macragge; and set the earth trembling with the low bass note of its mighty engine core. Its enormous bulk was a dusty ochre colour, studded with weapon mounts, striped with hazard chevrons and stamped with monochrome representations of the Cog Mechanicum.

His warriors were deployed behind the wall, each squad placed exactly according to the new tactical doctrines recently put in place. As part of a radical shake-up of the way the Legion was organised, a series of new regulations and orders of battle had come down from the Fortress of Hera, imposing strict guidelines upon how each warrior and squad operated within the Legion as a whole. It felt strange to devolve command autonomy to a set of predetermined strictures, but if there was anyone who could devise a tactical doctrine to meet any foe and any situation, it was Roboute Guilliman.

He saw Sergeant Barkha at the steps leading to the fighting platform, listening to the reports from the 4th Company Scouts on the cliffs above. Of all the warriors of the Ultramarines, these warriors had the toughest time adapting to imposed rules, but such was the comprehensive nature of their new operating procedures that even the 4th Company’s irascible Head Scout, Naron Vattian, was finding it near impossible to find fault with them.

‘Any sign yet, sergeant?’ asked Remus.

Barkha turned and hammered his fist to his chest, the pre-Unity salute. It felt strange to see his sergeant make such a gesture, but Remus supposed it was more appropriate than the aquila, given that they were now traitors.

‘Lots of activity around Castra Publius, but no sign yet that they’re on their way,’ said Barkha, his hands now ramrod straight at his side, as though he stood on a parade ground instead of a battlefield.

‘We’re not on Macragge, sergeant,’ said Remus. ‘No need for such arch formality.’

Barkha nodded, but his stance remained unchanged.

‘Standards, captain,’ replied the sergeant. ‘Just because we’re on a war footing is no reason to let them slip. That’s how this mess began after all. Standards slipped. Won’t happen on my watch.’

‘Is that a rebuke?’ said Remus, wiping the coarse black dust of the mountains from the azure surfaces of his battle-plate.

‘No, sir,’ replied Barkha, staring at a point over his right shoulder. ‘Simply a fact.’

‘You’re absolutely right, sergeant,’ said Remus. ‘If only the Warmaster had been attended by a naysmith like you, then this could all have been avoided.’

‘I was being serious, captain,’ said Barkha.

‘So was I,’ replied Remus, climbing the steps to the ramparts and casting his gaze down the mountains. Barkha dutifully followed him and stood at his side, ready to enact whatever order he gave. Though Remus couldn’t see them, he knew Death Guard units were probing the lower valleys, seeking the weakness in the Ultramarines defence line.

‘I’m no engineer, but even I can see we won’t hold this wall,’ said Barkha.

‘Why do you say that?’

‘They’ve built the wall too far out. The narrowest part of the valley is behind us.’

‘And?’

‘That’s made the wall too long,’ said Barkha, as though unable to comprehend how his captain couldn’t see what was so obvious to him. ‘We don’t have enough warriors or heavy guns to repel a serious assault.’

Barkha gestured over his shoulder. ‘Yaelen’s Gorge is to the south, but it’s too narrow to move heavy armour at any speed. Castra Maestor blocks the Helican Stairs to the north. This is the only viable route through our line, and the Death Guard will see that swiftly enough.’

‘All of what you say is true, sergeant,’ said Remus. ‘Do you have a point?’

‘Of course. It’s almost like you want them to attack here. What I don’t understand is why we are letting them when we should be taking the fight to them.’

‘The Death Guard advance like a surge tide,’ said Remus. ‘If we meet them head on, their strength will sweep us away. But we pull back, drawing them ever onwards until they are thin and spent. Then we will strike them.’

‘This is your plan?’

‘No,’ said Remus. ‘It is our strategy as decreed by the primarch’s writings.’

‘Permission to speak freely, captain?’ asked Barkha.

‘Granted.’

‘Are we really going to play this out basing our tactics on a book?’

‘The primarch’s book,’ Remus reminded him.

‘I know, and I mean no disrespect by these questions, but can any book – even one written by a primarch – cover every tactical eventuality?’

‘I suppose we are about to find out,’ said Remus, as he heard chatter over the vox.

Death Guard units were moving into the lower reaches of the valley.

‘Stand the men to arms, sergeant,’ ordered Remus.

‘Aye, captain,’ said Barkha. He saluted and turned to get the 4th Company moving.

Remus Ventanus stared off into the distance, seeing a glitter of fires from further down the mountains. Castra Publius was gone, Ultramarines were being lost and the Death Guard were coming to destroy them.

How had it come to this?

The Death Guard attacked fifty-two minutes later, a brutal assault spearheaded by heavy armour and Dreadnoughts. It was a mailed fist, calculated to bludgeon the defenders into insensibility before the follow-up punch slammed home to complete their destruction. Mechanised infantry squads rumbled forwards in the wake of olive-painted Land Raiders that hurled incandescent bolts at the defenders. Disciplined phalanxes of warriors armoured in the same livery deployed from the armoured transports and began their inexorable advance upon the Ultramarines position.

Laser fire and bolters hammered the advancing warriors, punching holes in the advance but slowing it not at all. What little artillery they had dropped specially manufactured munitions into the enemy ranks, felling enemy squads in shrieks of light and sound. Enemy Dreadnoughts waded into the fight, weaponised arms sawing through the defenders with machine-like precision and lethality.

Remus saw an entire squad of Ultramarines put down by two Dreadnoughts working in concert, and bellowed to his one remaining heavy weapons team to take them out. A trio of missiles leapt towards the Dreadnoughts, and one fell silent as it was struck in the flank by two warheads. The second was dealt with moments later as a multi-melta scored a direct hit on its sarcophagus.

These were fleeting victories, bright moments in the face of overwhelming odds. The Death Guard fought like machines, driving forwards with the unthinking, unfeeling ardour of something soulless and mechanical. Remus was a warrior, a gene-crafted killer of superlative ability, but he had been created to be so much more than that. He took pride in his abilities as a warrior, relishing the chance to match his skill against another, but to see the Death Guard at war was to face an opponent to whom war was simply attrition.

But Remus had no intention of dancing to the Death Guard’s war drums.

Tactical feeds flickered and scrolled on his visor, casualty rates, kill-ratios, projected outcomes, and a dozen other battlefield variables. The flow of information would have left even an augmented Imperial Army Tacticus overwhelmed, but Remus’s genhanced cognitive architecture processed it in the time it took to blink.

As the Death Guard regrouped for another assault on the walls, Remus’s eidetic memory accessed the parameters of battle as contained in the primarch’s tactical schematics. He found a match, following the logic path through its predetermined courses of action. Now was the time to pull back.

Remus clamped his bolter to his thigh and issued the withdrawal order, one of two dozen permitted options available to him. With smooth precision, the Ultramarines began falling back by squads as the Talassar Auxilia filled the killing ground before the wall with las-fire. The Mechanicum engine, though not designed as a war machine, was nevertheless equipped with a fearsome array of defensive weaponry. As its enormous treads ground it away from the battle, the barking roar of its close-in guns ripped overhead, the sound strangely flat and without the usual percussive banging of massed bolters. Artillery pieces launched a last volley over the walls before turning and racing up the winding road through the mountains.

Remus turned and dropped from the wall, joining Sergeant Barkha and the depleted ranks of his command squad. Ithus, Helika and Pilus were gone, which left his squad dangerously under strength, but the primarch’s writings had considered such an eventuality, and Remus acquired replacements from those squads who had come through the fighting unscathed.

Behind them, the Death Guard finally reached the wall, forcing their way over it as the defenders made their escape. As the Ultramarines crested the ridge behind the wall, Remus sent a coded burst transmission to the Mechanicum adept in the gargantuan construction engine. Seconds later, a controlled series of detonations brought down the valley walls in a thunderous avalanche. It was little more than a delaying tactic. The Death Guard would break through before long, but it was enough for now.

Barkha nodded to him as they retreated into the mountains.

‘We’re running out of room,’ said Barkha. ‘You think we’ve done enough to break them against the walls of Castra Tanagra?’

Remus didn’t answer right away. The tactical plots of kill-to-casualty ratios were scrolling down his screen. It made for grim reading, but they were still within the parameters set by the predicted conditions of the engagement. Overviews from the grand strategium filtered through the tactical information, revealing the extent to which the Death Guard had been bled white by constantly hammering the Ultramarines fortifications.

‘It looks like it,’ he replied. ‘The other Chapters have done well.’

‘Not as well as us, though?’ asked Barkha.

‘No, not as well as us,’ said Remus. ‘No one outdoes the Troublesome Fourth, eh?’

‘Not on my watch,’ agreed Barkha.

Remus liked the heart his sergeant displayed, pleased to hear such proud aggression in the warrior’s voice. It seemed the primarch’s purely doctrinal approach to war was holding up to the vagaries of battle.

But this was simply one fight, and one opponent of many ranged against them.

The real tests would come later.

Engagement 136

The holo-pict projected above the glossy surface of the plotter cast a stark light around the grand strategium. It folded sharp shadows around the gleaming walls and bleached deeply tanned faces of colour. The air was thick and close, redolent with the toxic oils and caustic unguents smouldering in the Mechanicum’s censers. It smelled of engine oil mixed with at least a dozen poisonous elements, and though it was Mechanicum witchery, it was certainly effective. The Legiones Astartes endured these effluvia without effect, but the mortals within the grand strategium coughed and rubbed eyes that constantly streamed with tears.

Remus Ventanus didn’t know if they were tears engendered by the petrochemical irritants in the burners or the sight of so beautiful a world being destroyed. A measure of both, he surmised.

He stared at the desolation of Prandium and wanted to weep. The most beautiful world of Ultramar by any reckoning, its wondrous forests, sculpted mountains and shimmering lakes were either burning or wreathed in smoke and choked with pollutants.

Never afraid of extreme measures, Angron had let slip his World Eaters in the most vicious way imaginable. Remus had once heard his primarch say that Angron’s Legion could succeed where all others would fail because the Red Angel was willing to go further than any other Legion, to countenance behaviour that any civilised code of war would deem abhorrent.

Seeing what had been done to Prandium, Remus understood completely.

This was no honourable war, this was butchery and destruction embodied. The primarch’s great work could surely never have contemplated war with so terrible a face.

The World Eaters had dropped on Prandium after a punishing saturation bombardment that levelled most of its great cities and set the world ablaze from pole to pole. In truth, there was little worth saving. Millions of people were dead and the detonations of volatile munitions had polluted the atmosphere and seas for millennia to come.

Yet Prandium was still valuable. Its orbital track passed close to the coreward jump-point, meaning that whoever controlled Prandium could control entry to Ultramar. Even if Prandium was reduced to a barren, lifeless rock, it was still a world of Ultramar, and nowhere trod by Roboute Guilliman would be surrendered without a fight.

Coming so soon after the devastation wrought on Calth’s sun, it seemed to Remus that their worlds were being torn apart piece by piece. Like an ancient, crumbling standard removed from its stasis vault in the Fortress of Hera, the warp and weft of Ultramar’s fabric was coming undone. Alone among the many savage assaults tearing at the Ultramarines empire, the invasion of Talassar had been repulsed. Driven on by their apparent success, Mortarion’s warriors had over-extended their forces and been left dangerously exposed when they finally hurled themselves at the mountain fastness of Castra Tanagra.

Elements of the 4th, 9th and 45th Companies had garrisoned the fortress, and as the Death Guard attacked, the encircling horns of the 49th, 34th, 20th and 1st Companies drew in and completed the destruction. It had been an uplifting moment, yet Remus could not see how something similar could be done here.

Surrounding the plotter, their faces grim and carved from granite, were the captains of fourteen of the Ultramarines battle companies, together with their lieutenants, senior sergeants and savants. Battle-logisters pumped information into the plotter, real-time strategic data that depicted a world torn apart by war.

A world dying before their very eyes.

‘Fifth Company manoeuvring into position,’ said Captain Honoria of the 23rd. ‘Seventeenth moving in support.’

‘Enemy forces engaging the Twenty-fifth,’ said Urath of the 39th.

‘Eastern flank of Adapolis is folding,’ commented Evexian of the 7th. ‘They’ll break through in a matter of hours. I’m ordering the Forty-third and the Thirty-seventh to fall back.’

‘Are the Thirteenth and Twenty-eighth in position to meet the northern push?’ asked Remus.

‘They are,’ confirmed Honoria. ‘World Eaters Third, Fifth and Ninth are pushing hard at the borders of Zaragossa Province. If we don’t send in reinforcements, we could lose the entire western flank.’

Remus circled the plotter with his hands behind his back, looking for some flaw in Angron’s battle plan. As senior captain in the grand strategium, he had overall command of Ultramarines forces on Prandium, a level of command he had never before held, but the primarch himself had made the appointment.

Why had he been chosen? There were others in the grand strategium with more experience. Since Talassar, Remus and the 4th Company had fought dozens of smaller actions, each time emerging victorious, but each of them had been a company-level engagement, with no more than a few thousand warriors at his command.

This was another strata of warfare entirely. To command the defences of an entire world was something that Remus had, of course, trained for but never actually done. The primarch’s teachings were indelibly etched on his mind: options, variables, parameters, action paths, outcome responses and a thousand detailed plans covering every possible eventuality of war.

It had worked on Talassar, and Remus had to trust that it would work here.

He stepped up to the tactical plotter and took in the strategic overview in a heartbeat. The motion of armies, divisions and cohorts – a thousand elements of planetary warfare – was a spider’s web of furious advances, flank marches, brutal battles and encirclements. At Pardusia, the 19th Company had been all but destroyed, and the World Eaters had powered north through the wastelands of what had once been ornamental pasturelands where wild horses had roamed freely and rare flora, virtually extinct in Ultramar, had again bloomed in glorious bursts of kaleidoscopic colour.

The assembled captains glared at him, resentful at sending their brothers to die following orders that broke the cohesion of the Ultramarines defence lines. Arcs and lines of blue snaked across the map at random, each one an isolated bastion of Ultramarines, Defence Auxilia and requisitioned Imperial Army units.

‘What are your orders, Captain Ventanus?’ demanded Captain Honoria.

Remus stared at the map, feeding the current situation through the filters of the primarch’s work. Orders presented themselves to him, but they made no sense. He checked his conclusions again, knowing they were correct, but checking them anyway.

‘Order the Twenty-fifth and the Seventh to realign their frontage,’ ordered Ventanus. ‘The Seventeenth is to halt and hold position.’

‘But the Fifth,’ protested Urath. ‘They’ll be cut off without the Seventeenth covering their flank.’

‘Do it,’ said Remus.

‘You will condemn those warriors to die needlessly,’ said Honoria, gripping the side of the plotter tightly. ‘I cannot stand by and watch you lose this world and our Legion’s best and bravest with such insanity.’

‘Are you questioning my orders?’ asked Ventanus.

‘You’re damn right I am,’ snapped Honoria, before remembering himself. The captain of the 23rd took a deep breath. ‘I know what you did on Calth, Remus. Damn it, we all respect you for that, and I know you have the primarch’s ear. He has his eye on you for great things, I know that, but this is madness. Surely you must see that?’

‘Question my orders and you question the primarch,’ said Remus softly. ‘Is that really a stance you wish to take, Honoria?’

‘I question nothing, Remus,’ said Honoria guardedly. He swept his hand out to encompass the disastrous tactical situation on the projection of Prandium. ‘But how can those manoeuvres halt the World Eaters? The Red Angel’s butchers are gutting Prandium, and you are helping them to do it.’

Remus held his tongue. For all that he agreed with Honoria’s sentiments, he had to trust that the primarch knew what he was doing. To try and understand the workings of a mind crafted by the genetic mastery of the Emperor was as close to unattainable as it was possible to be. The leaps of imagination, intuition and logic the primarch of the Ultramarines could make were unreachable to anyone save another primarch. And even then, Remus doubted any of Roboute Guilliman’s brothers could match his grand strategic vision.

Yet what he had devised and passed down to them would only work if every cog in the machine was turning in the same direction. Honoria, for all his courage and honour, was twisting the machine’s workings. And that couldn’t be allowed. Not now.

‘You are relieved of command, Honoria,’ said Remus. ‘Remove yourself from this post and have your lieutenant step up.’

‘Ventanus, wait–’ began Evexian.

‘You wish to align with Honoria?’ said Remus.

‘No, Captain Ventanus,’ said Evexian with a curt bow. ‘But even you must admit that your orders appear somewhat… contradictory. You know this, I can see it in your eyes.’

‘All I need to know is that my orders bear the authority of the primarch,’ said Remus. ‘Do any of you believe you know better than our progenitor? Can any of you say that you have a better grasp of the nuances of war than our sire?’

Silence provided Remus with all the answer he needed.

‘Then carry out my orders,’ he said.

Prandium burned. Smaller Ultramarines icons winked out as they were destroyed, and the angry red icons of the World Eaters slowly broke apart like ripples of blood. No part of Prandium was left unscathed. The beautiful wild woods of the southern provinces were ashen, atomic wastelands, the crystal mountains of the east irradiated with toxic fallout that would take thousands of years to dissipate. Glorious cities of soaring gold and silver marble had fallen to ruin, pounded to rubble by orbital barrages that wiped them from the face of the world as if they had never existed.

What had begun as a worldwide conflict had degenerated into a thousand or more scrappy brushfire wars waged between isolated battle groups. Ultramarines forces fought within a few miles of one another, but might as well have been on different worlds for all the support they could provide to one another.

Remus felt as though he was sinking fast, already regretting his decision to remove Honoria from the command echelons of the grand strategium. Hadn’t he spoken of the value of a naysmith with Barkha? Didn’t every leader need a voice of dissent at his ear to force him to question his decisions?

He searched the tactical plot for any sign of hope, wondering where he had gone wrong. What could he have done differently? What aspect of his primarch’s teachings had he failed to heed? He had reacted to every development with a rigorous application of the new doctrines, yet Prandium was on the verge of being lost forever.

‘Push the Thirteenth forward,’ he said, as automatic memory called up yet more of the primarch’s lessons. ‘Bolster the Seventeenth, and order the Eleventh to reform to flank the World Eaters advancing on Thardonis. Advance to contact and pin them in place.’

‘So ordered,’ replied Urath.

‘Order the Eighth Battle Group to withdraw to the borders of Ixian Province. Mechanicum units to cover and pioneers to establish temporary fortifications,’ said Remus as yet more tactical variables fed into his precise recall. A pattern emerged, and Remus began to appreciate just how tenuous the World Eaters position was. It had cost blood and lives to bring them to this point, but only now did Remus see how delicately balanced this grand strategy had been.

‘To win the greatest victory, one must take the greatest risks,’ the primarch had told him on the rad-wastes of Calth.

‘You never take risks,’ countered Remus.

‘Not that you would know,’ replied Guilliman.

As the myriad situational variables displayed on the plotter flooded into the processing centres of Remus’s consciousness, the answers and manoeuvres required leapt to the forefront of his brain. He had heard it said that the greatest generals were those who made the fewest mistakes, but that was nonsense of the highest order. The greatest generals were those who planned for every eventuality and knew exactly how their foes would fight. Seeing the breathtaking beauty and complexity of the stratagems unfolding in his mind, he knew without a doubt that Roboute Guilliman was just such a general.

The words virtually said themselves, using him as their conduit to life.

‘Order Battlegroup Ultima to realign its frontage along the River Axiana,’ he said. ‘Ninth and Twenty-fifth to alter the direction of their advance. North-east to grid reference six-nine-alpha/eight-three-delta.’

The captains followed his orders without question, but Remus wasn’t done. Orders poured from him, each one spat like a poisoned dart into the heart of the enemy commander. His subordinates could barely keep up with him as he sent manoeuvre orders into the field with breathtaking rapidity. Confusion lit every face, but as the worldwide stance of the Ultramarines armies began to realign and enact Remus’s orders, he watched those same faces transform into expressions of wonderment.

In the centre of the Praxos Territories, a cluster of red icons, representing one of the main World Eater battlegroups, now found itself surrounded on all sides as previously isolated Ultramarines units merged and swung around like closing gates to trap it within a deadly killing zone. Within minutes those icons were winking out as the combined firepower of three Ultramarines battle companies flensed the region with artillery, massed bolters and overlapping fields of fire from cunningly positioned Devastators.

All across Prandium, World Eater cohorts were suddenly surrounded and cut off from one another as their hot-blooded aggression pushed them straight into the Ultramarines guns. The effect was akin to a million dominos ranked up in seemingly random patterns that tumbled together to create a masterpiece of kinetic energy at work. Ultramarines companies that had been in full retreat swung around to link with their brothers to seal the World Eaters in deadly traps from which there was no escape.

Like the most graceful ballet, the Ultramarines danced to the tune of Remus’s commands, working together in flawless harmony: an elegantly and perfectly designed killing machine. One by one, the red icons of the invaders winked out, while those of the Ultramarines remained a steady blue. Casualty indicators began dropping, until eventually falling to zero. And the World Eaters continued to die.

Within an hour, the battles were over and Prandium was saved.

‘I don’t believe it,’ whispered Urath as reports of secure battlefields chimed in from all across the ravaged world.

‘It doesn’t seem possible,’ breathed Evexian. ‘So fast, so merciless.’

In truth, Remus was having a hard time believing the end had come so swiftly. It was one thing to have trust in the primarch’s vision for his great work, quite another to see it in action.

‘What’s our operational effectiveness level?’ asked Remus.

His captains hurried to collate the information, filtering in reports from the field, casualty reports, ammo expenditure levels and unit degradation ratios. Reports streamed across the plotter, a few in red, fewer in orange, but the majority in a healthy green. Urath summed up the incoming flow of information, but Remus needed no interpretation of the data, the visual results were clear enough.

‘Seventy-seven per cent of units in the field report immediate battlefield effectiveness,’ said Urath. ‘Eight per cent are at minimum or unsafe levels of readiness, and a further thirteen per cent are at dangerous threshold levels of unit effectiveness. Only two per cent are combat ineffective.’

‘If I hadn’t seen it for myself…’ said Evexian, voicing the thoughts of them all.

‘And this all came from the primarch’s work?’ said Urath.

‘Did you ever doubt it?’ asked Remus.

‘Damn me, but I wondered for a moment, Remus,’ replied Urath, wiping the sweat from his brow. ‘Reprimand me if you must, but I feared Prandium was lost. Along with much of the Legion.’

‘Prandium might as well be lost,’ said Evexian bitterly. ‘Look at what those murderous bastards did to the Fair Maiden of Ultramar. How could any planet recover from such an ordeal?’

‘Worlds of Ultramar are stronger than most, Evexian,’ said Remus, letting out a long breath and smiling at the victory he had just won. ‘Prandium can recover from this and bloom even more beautiful than before. Trust me, it would take more than Angron’s butchers to snuff out her radiance.’

Engagement 228

‘I don’t like this,’ said Sergeant Barkha. ‘Feels like we’re flying in a rations can. I could spit through this fuselage.’

‘You can spit acid,’ Remus reminded him. ‘There aren’t many hulls or fuselages you couldn’t put a hole in with your saliva.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘I do, but I wouldn’t worry. The Thunderhawk is just a stopgap design. It won’t be around for long.’

‘Good,’ said Barkha, looking around the crude, factory-stamped interior of the rolling gunship. Its metal ribs were exposed and the wiring guts of the aircraft were visible in tag-tied bundles of cabling that snaked from one end of the boxy fuselage to the other. Ultramar was far from the centres of Mechanicum forge-worlds, and the XIII Legion had only recently taken delivery of a fleet of the new gunships. It irked Remus to see the hasty work, the shoddy specifications and unprofessional workmanship that had gone into the design and construction of the aircraft.

No craftsman had deemed the design worthy of attaching his name, and Remus wasn’t surprised. This aircraft had all the hallmarks of servitor-assembled work, and that he was forced to trust his life to it didn’t make him feel any better. The stamp of the Mechanicum was acid-etched onto the bulkhead beside him, and Remus touched it for good luck.

‘I saw that,’ said Barkha. ‘Superstitious are you?’

The question was lightly asked, but Remus heard the warning behind it, the suggestion that his answer should be carefully chosen. Barkha would be quite within his rights to condemn his superior officer for conduct unbecoming an Ultramarines warrior. Even now, in the midst of a combat situation.

Especially now.

‘No, but I take reassurance from the fact they believe in this machine enough to mark it with their seal.’

‘It’s probably the only thing holding it together,’ observed Barkha as the gunship banked around one of the sun-baked agri-silos of Quintarn. Spars of light from the vision blocks inset in the gunship’s fuselage swayed with the motion, and Remus felt something shear from the underside of the craft. Impact or system failure? His heart lurched as the gunship dropped, its wings passing within a metre of the silver-skinned silo.

‘Target ahead,’ came a voice over the internal vox, sounding strained with the effort of holding the bucking craft steady. The timbre of the pilot’s voice told Remus exactly what the crew of this new craft made of it. A Stormbird had weight behind it, a solidity that made it a pleasure to fly and a safely cocooned means of transporting the killer Legionaries where they needed to be.

Remus linked his helmet’s inloaders with the forward picters mounted in the gunship’s prow, seeing the pristine symmetry of Idrisia, one of the most central of the great agricultural hydropolis cities of Quintarn. Though given over to the utilitarian need for crops and industry, the city was still beautiful in its own way, with majestic towers, pillared hangars and marble-fronted meeting halls. Its street plan overlaid his vision, a masterful arrangement of function and aesthetic. Like most things in Ultramar, the primarch had turned his genius to the design and layout of its cities.

Too bad he hadn’t turned it to the design of this gunship.

Enemy strongpoints within the city were marked in red, and Remus saw how deeply they had sunk their fiery claws into the metropolis. City fighting was where this particular enemy excelled, with a propensity for weaponry that functioned best at short to mid range and could burn through cover as though it didn’t exist.

This would be the most testing battle yet. The others had driven them to the point of defeat before the primarch’s great work had proved its worth. It had done so time and time again, in engagement after engagement. The 4th Company was by no means the only company now armed with their primarch’s incredible achievement. Even as the 4th Company’s aerial assault drew closer to its target, other companies were engaged in varied theatres of war with the enemy on Quintarn.

But Remus felt sure that he and his warriors were the ones who would be watched the closest to see whether its teachings would embed in their psyche.

In some circles they were known as the Troublesome Fourth, a company known for its daredevil actions, heroic follies and the personal bravery of its individual warriors. If the primarch’s work could be made to stick with the 4th Company, then it would stick anywhere.

And after Calth…

Where the 4th Company led, the other battle companies followed.

Remus switched out of his tactical view as the gunship juddered and the pilot jinked it to the side in a series of gut-wrenching evasion manoeuvres. The ready light above the forward assault ramp flashed from red to green and Remus slammed his palm against the gravity harness. The restraint lifted up and over his head, and he retrieved his bolter from the niche beside him. The Thunderhawk might be a ramshackle piece of junk, but it had cleverly designed stowage that at least made it functional.

‘Fourth!’ yelled Remus. ‘Touchdown in fifteen seconds.’

Thirty warriors filled the interior of the Thunderhawk, a force capable of meeting most enemy forces with a high degree of certainty that they would destroy it. Yet it felt strange to Remus to be going into battle without at least fifty warriors at his back. Warfare wasn’t about being fair or acknowledging the honour of your opponent, it was about crushing him into the dust with overwhelming force. Few enemies would survive the attention of fifty warriors of the Ultramarines.

True, not many would survive an attack by thirty, but the point still rankled.

Remus took his place at the front of the assault ramp, as the pitch of the gunship’s engines changed and the pilot brought it to a shrieking hover. The ramp dropped and the dry heat of scorched stone and hot metal filled the compartment. As powerful as those smells were, they couldn’t compete with the reek of synthetic fertilisers, chemical soil additives, the rich scent of turned earth and thousands of acres of crops. Remus charged out, his warriors forming up in perfectly aligned squads to either side of him. They spread out, keeping low to avoid the searing jetwash from the Thunderhawk.

They were on a roof, seared black and reeking of burning propellant. Green-armoured bodies lay unmoving at the roof parapets, and Remus saw numerous missile tubes amid the clusters of the fallen.

‘Good landing kills,’ said Barkha, following his gaze.

‘True,’ replied Remus. He hadn’t felt the Thunderhawk’s nose guns firing, but supposed that was only natural. To effect an assault drop in a hot landing zone was a difficult and risky manoeuvre, but the guns of the Thunderhawk had efficiently cleared their insertion point of hostiles. He almost pulled up short at that last thought. It had been easy enough to submerge himself in the immediacy of his previous engagements, but this operation was very different.

‘Something the matter, captain?’ asked Barkha. ‘We need to keep moving. We’ve caught them by surprise, but that won’t last.’

‘I’m fine,’ Remus assured him, taking a last look at the bodies and shaking his head. The unthinkable had become a very real threat, and it was beholden to him to keep what was at stake in mind at all times. The nature of the opponent didn’t matter. All that mattered was the outcome. The Ultramarines had to fight, and they had to win.

The stakes had never been higher.

Victory ensured the survival of the most precious thing in the galaxy.

Defeat would see it snuffed out forever, never to be seen again.

Remus shook off thoughts that had no bearing on this fight. He was a captain of the Ultramarines and had a job to do. The enemy command post was located in this structure, and taking it out was key to the primarch’s overall strategy. Weeks of probing, cipher-breaking and after-action interpretation had allowed Ultramarines strategic planners to plot the most probable deployments of the enemy command and control elements. With the war for Quintarn still hanging in the balance, the time to make use of that predictive intelligence had arrived.

As armoured elements engaged the leading edge of the dug-in defenders, Remus led his thirty warriors in a precise strike to decapitate the enemy command structure. Intercepted code transmissions indicated that the senior enemy commander was in theatre and this was too good an opportunity to pass up.

Remus knew the layout of this structure intimately, and led his warriors towards the armoured blockhouse that contained the stairwell to the upper cloister. He kept low and hugged the parapet, his bolter aimed at the door. It didn’t make sense for the enemy to venture out, but these weren’t Ultramarines. Who could say how recklessly they would behave?

He paused by a series of raised compression pipes, the metal hot to the touch and dripping with condensate. His warriors were moving into position, ready to assault the blockhouse, and he took a moment to glance over the angled parapet at the roof’s edge.

The city stretched out around him, its metal-skinned towers and gleaming silos shining like silver beneath the beating sun. The Ultramarines quickly formed a perimeter as the gunship lifted off in a howl of engines that sounded like its namesake, and Remus watched as it peeled away, moving into formation with two-dozen others. Rippling beams of light lashed up from the ground towards the aircraft. Concealed batteries flayed the sky and half a dozen Thunderhawks were struck, each one falling out of formation and describing sinuous arcs towards the ground.

Remus didn’t watch them fall, but pressed on towards the blockhouse mounted in the centre of the roof. Its door was armoured and no doubt sealed, but it would present no challenge to his assault team. No orders needed to be given. He had briefed his warriors prior to dust-off, and each man was aware of his role. Not only that, but following the prescriptions of the primarch’s great work, each man knew the role of every one of his brothers. Should any man fall, another of his brothers could take up his responsibilities.

He moved forwards at speed, his bolter pulled tight into his shoulder. He could hear the sounds of fighting coming from other buildings: the sharp bangs of bolters and the whoosh-roar of enemy flame units. Remus felt his lip curl in a sneer. Such weapons might scare xenos forces, but held little fear for warriors armoured in the finest battle-plate forged by the weapon-masters of Macragge.

Sergeant Archo and Brother Pilera ran to the armoured door. With practiced swiftness they rigged the hinges and lock with krak charges. Det-cord unspooled from their gauntlets as they took position to either side. At a nod from Remus, a silent data-squirt blew the charges and the door bulged inwards, as though struck by an invisible fist of colossal dimensions. Remus and Barkha ran forwards and thundered their boots against the door. The metal buckled, folded nearly in two by the awesome force.

The twisted door toppled inwards, and before it had landed, another two Ultramarines hurled a handful of grenades through the smoking hole. Rippling detonations, curiously muted, like a string of firecrackers, echoed up from below. Barkha stepped towards the ruined frame, but Remus held up a fist, holding his warriors in place.

A liquid jet of flame roiled up from within the blockhouse, bellowing with seething power as it licked up the stairs beyond the door. The blaze erupted from the door, but before the weapon could fire again, Remus nodded to Barkha. His sergeant swung around the door and loosed a barrage of bolter fire on full auto down the stairs. The noise was deafening, the booming reports echoing madly around the interior of the stairwell and lighting it with strobing flashes.

Barkha pounded down the stairs and his squad followed him down. Remus led the second squad down, as Sergeant Archo formed his warriors behind him. The interior of the stairwell was blackened and scorched, like the flue of a volcano.

Should make the bastards feel right at home, thought Remus.

He emerged from the stairs into a wide cloister that ran around the inner faces of the structure. The building itself was a hollow rectangle with an interior courtyard, fifty metres wide and a hundred long. Gunfire snapped and banged from below, the enemy desperately trying to reorganise and realign their defences. Remus saw three command tanks – two Rhinos and a Land Raider – each with a forest of whip antenna bristling on its topside. The armoured vehicles were painted a drab green with black draconic heads embossed on their side doors.

‘Archo, sweep left, Barkha, go right!’ he shouted.

The words were unnecessary; both men knew exactly what to do. They had read the primarch’s treatise on such storming actions, and needed no input from him. Green-armoured warriors emerged from chambers further along the cloister, guns levelled, but they were already too late.

The Ultramarines filled the space with shots, putting down such a weight of fire that even artificer-crafted battle-plate couldn’t withstand it for long. Remus fired his bolter on the move, compensating for the additional weight on the underside of his barrel. He automatically braced his shoulders for recoil, before remembering there was no need. The two warriors before him fell back, one toppling over the balustrade into the courtyard below, the other dropping with altogether less theatrics.

Remus knelt beside the body, studying the armour and its iconography. Jagged-toothed dragons emblazoned upon fields of fire combined with hammer and forge symbols to create an earthy, Promethean feel. Too feral, too cultish to be Imperial. It had the look of a savage culture raised up to civilisation, but which would never really be civilised.

Salamanders. Even the name sounded barbarous. A Legion named for the legendary fire-breathing monsters of a forgotten age. The name had no gravitas, and Remus shook his head at its primitive, visceral nature.

‘How does it feel to die knowing you are my enemy?’ Remus asked the fallen Salamander.

‘No different than when I died as your brother,’ said the warrior, before his head rolled to the side.

Remus nodded, and paid the warrior no more attention.

His visor changed to display the tactical situation. His warriors had swept through the upper reaches of the building, and were fighting their way to the lower level. The suddenness of their assault had caught the Salamanders off-guard, but there was still some fight left in these fire-loving cultists. Remus matched the ongoing status of the fight into his perfect recall of the primarch’s works, and immediately saw how they were going to break the defences open.

‘Sergeants,’ said Remus. ‘The north stair is ready to fall. Archo, I want your squad on the south cloister. Lay down suppressing fire on those tanks and the warriors in the courtyard. Barkha, you and I will break in through the north while Archo keeps their heads down.’

‘Understood,’ said Sergeant Archo. ‘Moving into position now.’

Remus led his men around the cloister. Flames jetted up from below, and here and there grenades clattered as they looped over the parapet. Ultramarines hurled them back, but the Salamanders soon learned to hang on to their explosives before hurling them. Remus kept his head down as a cluster of grenades burst against a wall further along from him. Two of his warriors went down, their armour shrieking as they fell. He felt the enormous pressure wave roll over him, but it wasn’t enough to put him out of the fight.

‘On!’ he cried. ‘Up and forward!’

The Ultramarines rose and bolted for the stairs. Remus saw Barkha’s men opposite, and rolled around the corner to see the forward elements of his squad pouring fire down the stairwell. Barkha rounded the corner of the opposite cloister at the same time, and both men took up position at the top of the stairs.

‘Resistance?’ asked Remus.

‘Minimal, easily dealt with,’ was the terse reply.

‘Assault in, three, two one…’

Almost exactly on cue, a volley of heavy gunfire erupted on the far cloister. The chugging bark of heavy bolters filled the courtyard, followed straight after by the swooshing hiss of missiles. The fire up the stairwell slackened almost immediately. Remus spun around the corner and took the stairs down to the courtyard two at a time. A Salamander appeared at the opening below, the archway sparking with coruscating residue of the specially modified missile warheads. He levelled a meltagun at Remus, but a shot from Barkha took him in the head and punched him out of sight. Another Salamander fired his weapon around the archway without exposing himself, but the shots were wild. Remus’s armour registered an impact on his right shoulder, but the strike was glancing, and wasn’t nearly powerful enough to stop his charge.

Remus burst into the courtyard, firing precise bursts of bolter fire at exposed enemy warriors. Hunched behind their vehicles to shelter from Archo’s fire from above, they were dangerously exposed from the rear, and three bursts of fire put down two of his opponents. The third Salamander took the hit, but didn’t fall. He raised his weapon, a pitch-blackened multi-melta. Remus pulled the trigger, and the hammer of his bolter fell on an empty chamber.

He cursed his lax fire discipline and ran for the cover of an out-of-action Rhino.

Before the multi-melta could fire, a missile struck the ground beside the gunner and the concussive force of the blast knocked the warrior from his feet. Remus slammed into cover, grateful that at least one of Archo’s gunners had thought to keep a shot back for an act of 4th Company recklessness. He grinned. Not even a primarch’s tome could completely erase the spirit of the Troublesome Fourth.

Remus slotted home another magazine and scanned the killing ground of the courtyard, looking for rank badges or some other form of officer markings. He saw etchings of teeth, dragon amulets and various forge symbols, but nothing that resembled a logical progression of rank. He’d been briefed on the Salamander’s system of rank markings, but could see nothing that indicated any high level of commander lay among the dead.

Had their intelligence been flawed?

The thought was discarded immediately. The idea that Roboute Guilliman could be wrong about anything was beyond ridiculous. It was heretical, which, given this current engagement, was a rich irony indeed. He returned his attention to the battlefield, anxious that this mission be successful. So far the 4th Company had the foremost record of all the Legion’s battle companies, and he wasn’t about to blot their copybook with failure now.

The two Salamanders Rhinos were registering as out of action, their command and control facilities destroyed beyond repair, yet the mighty, cliff-sided Land Raider was merely crippled. Its weapons were disabled, and one of its track units had suffered a debilitating impact. It wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry, but whoever was inside it was likely still alive.

As if to confirm that fact, the Land Raider spun on its axis, its one functioning track grinding the flagstones to powder beneath the vehicle’s monstrous weight. The frontal assault ramp dropped and three figures emerged, titans amongst mortals, giants to their mere men.

Terminators.

Remus had seen Terminator armour during the battle for Calth, mighty suits of armour so colossal it seemed impossible that men could wear them. Such was the newness and complexity of the suits that only a handful of the Ultramarines 1st Company had been trained in their use. Nor were there nearly enough to outfit more than a few hundred of the 1st, for the initial Mechanicum mass conveyers had only just arrived at Macragge when news of the massacre at Isstvan V had arrived.

Hulking, armour-plated behemoths, each Terminator was a full head and shoulders taller than the Ultramarines, the thick plates of their armour shrugging off bolter fire like light rain. Remus had seen the effect these warriors had had on the Word Bearers, but to face one was a new experience, and not one he was keen to repeat.

One warrior bore a cloak of olive green mail over his left pauldron, and the vast skull of some unknown beast with elongated frontal fangs was affixed to his helmet, giving him the hideous appearance of some strange xenos barbarian warrior. In one hand, this warrior carried an enormous, oversized hammer wreathed with crackling energies, in the other a shield worked in the form of the honour badge that granted him the right to wear such terrifyingly powerful armour.

Two others warriors accompanied this brutish war leader – surely the commander of this force of Salamanders – each a humanoid fighting tank armed with a monstrously oversized fist and a bulky weapon resembling two bolters welded together.

Their bolters opened up with a ripping storm of fire, raking the courtyard from left to right in controlled bursts. Three Ultramarines went down, bracketed and gunned down by the commander’s two praetorians in concert. This was no random spray of fire, but a methodical slaughter. Shots flashed past Remus, but he ducked back into the cover of the Rhino as the streaking fire turned in his direction.

The enemy commander didn’t come at them, instead turning his vast hammer on the walls of the courtyard in the lee of the Land Raider. One swing of the hammer put a man-sized hole in the wall. Masonry and steel reinforcement bars were smashed aside by the lethal weapon. Two more blows at most would see the enemy commander break free of their surprise assault. It would be next to impossible to mount an effective pursuit through the streets of Idrisia. Remus’s armour was already registering the flurry of vox traffic coming from the enemy commander as he summoned reinforcements. Within moments, the target would be lost.

‘All forces, converge and close the net,’ he ordered. ‘Command target is on the move.’

Ultramarines warriors broke cover, moving in stepped overwatch patterns, but where any normal enemy would be forced to keep their heads down under such a fusillade, the Terminators walked tall through enough firepower to reduce entire squads to shredded meat.

Remus saw Barkha hit, his armour struck by multiple impacts from the oversized bolters. Barkha cursed and loosed a string of Talassarian vulgarities before dropping to the ground and lying still. Pinned down and with a rapidly diminishing roster of warriors, Remus knew he had only one chance to win this fight. The tactical situation had only one option left, and he opened a channel to Sergeant Archo.

‘Archo, suppressive fire on the courtyard. Now!’

‘Captain, that places you in the kill zone.’

‘I know, just do it! Fill this place with fire!’

The order didn’t need to be repeated. Archo knew his place in the chain of command. As did Remus. The mission was paramount. The primarch’s writings made it clear that the lives of friendly combatants were of paramount importance, especially Legiones Astartes lives, for they were sure to be in short supply in the coming years of war.

But just as clearly, the primarch knew that wars were won by the blood of the soldiers fighting them. Sometimes the only way to win was to sacrifice everything for the victory.

‘Hurry, Archo!’ he shouted as the enemy commander finally tore down the wall between him and escape.

The courtyard erupted in fire and flame as missile after missile tore down into the courtyard. Heavy bolters raked back and forth, their fire brutally effective and lethally indiscriminate. A missile took the Salamander captain on the shoulder and the impact spun him around as another struck him full in the plastron. The force of the warheads drove him to his knees. Another missile streaked downwards, but the Salamander warrior brought his shield up to block it. The deflected missile corkscrewed into the courtyard, where it exploded in the midst of a knot of Ultramarines hunkering down behind what little cover remained.

An unending storm of gunfire filled the courtyard, and Remus lost track of everything as the deafening cacophony of sound rolled through him. He’d lost control of this battle, but he could regain it if he could only see what had become of the Salamander war leader.

He belly-crawled around the Rhino, his bolter crossed on his forearms as he skidded through the debris of battle. Shell casings, crushed masonry and bodies. The vox crackled and barked in his ear: nearby squads requesting updates, intercepted chatter from enemy units en route to the building, Thunderhawk pilots yelling warnings at one another. Remus blotted it all out, concentrating on moving at speed to fulfil his objective.

Remus reached the end of the Rhino and scrambled to his knees. He had no chance to weigh his options or consult his primarch’s words, and simply swung around the corner of the vehicle’s track units. The Salamander Terminator had found his feet, though Remus’s visor displayed numerous weakened points on his armour.

The Salamander war leader, perhaps sensing his presence, turned to face him. Remus met his gaze, eye lens to eye lens. Remus sighted along the length of his bolter, and though he couldn’t see beyond the snarling ceramite war mask, he felt he could see the warrior’s coal dark skin and infernal red eyes. Of course that was ridiculous, but there was a weak spot on the warrior’s faceplate, one that a skilled marksman could exploit…

Remus squeezed the trigger and the bolter spat a single shot. Though the weapon fired at supersonic speed, Remus felt he could trace its passage through the air. Even as fired, he knew the shot was true. It struck the Salamander square in the face and Remus watched as his visor registered the kill. The Terminator didn’t fall; the armour was too massive to let the wearer collapse, even in death.

Remus let out a breath, rolling onto his back and letting the exertions of this latest engagement drain from him. Though it had been among the shortest, it had been one of the most demanding.

High above the building, roaring Thunderhawks descended like carrion birds circling in anticipation of a feast.

Engagement 314

A cold wind blew down the basalt canyon, carrying dust from the high peaks of Macragge. Remus smelled the pinesap of highland evergreens and the crystalline sharpness of mountaintop tarns on the breeze. He crouched low behind a marker cairn, a three-metre cone of stacked volcanic rock with ancient markings that directed travellers to safe paths through the mountains, locations of water and shelter. Cut in the ancient cuneiform of Macragge, these markings would be unreadable to anyone not native to this world, meaningless even to another citizen of Ultramar.

It had been many years since Remus had run through these mountains as a boy, staggering in an exhausted, near-death state from one cairn to another as he fought for his place in the Ultramarines. Of all the boys that had set off on that last run, he alone had survived; the others dying one by one of heat exhaustion, dehydration, or falls from high cliffs, or being picked off by the vicious, cave-dwelling mountain cats that stalked the high peaks.

Tumbling through the bronze gates of the Fortress of Hera, Remus had been met by Captain Pendarron, the heroic warrior who had fought alongside Roboute Guilliman in the untamed lands of Illyrium before Gallan’s betrayal of the Battle King Konor. The captain had picked him up, dusted him down, and sent him to the apothecarion with a curt nod of approbation.

Thinking back to that time brought a welcome flush of endorphins, but it was a short-lived pleasure. That was another life ago, and nearly two centuries of war separated that young boy from the Legiones Astartes Remus had become. Decades of training still awaited that young boy, but they had been years of intense pressure, tribulation and, yes, joy. Proving himself worthy of a place within the ranks of the Ultramarines had been his greatest honour, and he still recalled his mother’s pride at seeing him march through the streets of Macragge clad in brilliant blue battle-plate.

He had never seen his mother again, yet the loss did not touch him as deeply as he felt it should. His mind had been reshaped in myriad ways, and though the capacity for sadness and emotion had not been removed, it took extreme stimuli to trigger emotions connected with his previous life as a mortal.

A crackle on the vox-network brought Remus out of his reverie, and he shook off thoughts of golden days and concentrated on the present dark ones. This campaign had been the toughest of all, for the Sons of Horus had consistently outfought and outmanoeuvred them at every turn. In space, the Warmaster’s fleets had battered through their picket lines, and flanking forces of stealthy ambush vessels had appeared from nowhere to wreak havoc within the Ultramarines precise battle lines.

World after world had fallen. Tarentus, Masali and Quintarn were gone, the loss of the latter planet bringing a lump of bile to Remus’s throat after all the 4th Company had gone through in their struggle against the Salamanders. Prandium was now lost, the devastation begun by the World Eaters now concluded by a viral bombardment that stripped the ruined planet of all living matter in a viral hellstorm. All that was left of Prandium was a barren rock.

Iax had been firebombed until the Garden of Ultramar was an ashen wasteland. No two campaigns the Warmaster waged were fought the same way, and Remus had heard whispers in the higher echelons of command that the planners in the grand strategium were running out of ideas to fight him. Remus knew that could not be true. The primarch’s writings would have a solution to this assault on Ultramar, it was just too complex and overarching a plan to be comprehended by mortals, even ones as cognitively enhanced as the Legiones Astartes.

Roboute Guilliman had never yet lost a war, and he certainly wouldn’t lose this one.

Macragge could not fall.

It just couldn’t.

Remus didn’t know whether to think of that as fact or wishful thinking.

Barkha scrambled over the rocky ground towards him, keeping low behind the fangs of rock that sheltered this element of the 4th Company. Thirty metres below, the floor of the canyon twisted a serpentine path through the mountains, the ground flat and hard-packed. Well away from the battles being fought in the lowland approaches to the Fortress of Hera, it had been decided that it was certain the Warmaster would move flanking forces through these canyons to open a second front against the Ultramarines last bastion.

The 4th Company guarded the passes to ensure no second front was opened.

‘They’re coming,’ said Barkha. ‘Sons of Horus armour units, with speeders and bikes in the vanguard. It’s a pretty small force, but there’s bound to be others threading their way over the mountains.’

That was true enough, but numerous elements of the 4th Company were watching the secret paths through the mountains.

‘What’s their separation like?’

‘Sloppy,’ said Barkha. ‘They’re in a hurry. The tanks are labouring, and the bikes are slowing down to keep close.’

Remus looked down into the canyon, hearing the distant rumbling of the enemy vehicles as they approached the killing box. The mountains of Macragge were a different order of inimical environment to any the Sons of Horus would have encountered before. Time and time again, the enemies of Macragge had been undone by its hostile geography. The Sons of Horus would be no different.

‘Pass the word. Fire on my signal. Target the lead tank and the rear tank. Trap them in the box and then work your way to the centre.’

‘Understood,’ said Barkha, and Remus heard the note of exasperation in the sergeant’s voice. The 4th Company had practised drills like these countless times, and didn’t need him to tell them how to run an ambush. Remus checked his bolter one last time and propped himself against a rock with a view through a knife-cut in the rocks before him. He could see down into the canyon, but the shadows and dark hue of the rock concealed him from view.

He overlaid a tactical schematic over the view of the canyon, seeing his warriors picked out in pale blue throughout the overlooking crags and gullies. There wasn’t an angle left uncovered, an escape route that wasn’t a death trap or a square centimetre of ground that couldn’t be reached by Ultramarines gunfire.

‘Easy meat,’ whispered Remus.

The noise of engines grew louder, echoing from the canyon walls. Remus heard the chugging breath of Rhinos, the deeper, throaty rumble of Predators and the roaring thunder of at least one Land Raider. The high-pitched bleat of bikes carried over the noise, and Remus kept his head down as a pair of speeders zipped into view.

Both were painted in the sea green of the Sons of Horus, their frontal glacis emblazoned with a flame-coloured eye. The speeders paused, like sniffer dogs hunting a scent, but Remus knew these mountains well and had placed his kill teams with perfect cover. No matter how sophisticated the speeders’ surveyor packages were, they wouldn’t find his warriors.

The speeders carefully eased their way into the canyon, swiftly followed by a five-strong squad of bikes, each one heavily armoured and fitted with forward-firing bolters. A black banner decorated with yet another eye symbol flapped behind the lead bike, and Remus fought the urge to open fire on these invaders.

Then the tanks came, a pair of Rhinos, swiftly followed by three Predators and the grumbling monster of a Land Raider. Another three Rhinos followed it, and yet another pair of Predators formed a rearguard. Barkha had called this a small force, and measured against the scale of warfare a Legion could put in the field it was, but this was still a formidable display of firepower.

The bikes and speeders moved off, and Remus knew they were never going to get a better chance than this. He pushed onto his knees and sighted down his bolter at the pilot of the nearest speeder. He squeezed off a round, and was rewarded by a kill signal in his helmet. The vehicle slewed away as the pilot slumped over his controls. Remus’s shot was the signal to his ambush force, but before a single shot could be fired, a booming volley of gunfire sounded from higher in the mountains.

Remus saw his men die in droves from the deadly accurate fire, and spun to see dozens of muzzle flashes from the rocks higher in the mountains. Ultramarines icons were winking out on his visor, and his moment of paralysed shock almost cost him his life. His armour registered two impacts, both glancing and not serious enough to hamper him, but he dived into the cover of the stacked cairn.

‘Barkha!’ he yelled, returning fire uphill. ‘Do you have a visual?’

‘Affirmative,’ came the sergeant’s harried voice over the vox. ‘Sons of Horus infiltrators. Squad markings match those on the vehicles below.’

Remus was stunned at this turn of events. How could the Sons of Horus have gotten behind them? How had they known the Ultramarines were lying in wait for them?

Furious exchanges of gunfire flickered back and forth between the two forces, and Remus knew the vehicles below would soon be adding their own weight of fire to the fight. The ambushers had been ambushed, and there was no sense in continuing an engagement that was already lost. The primarch’s words on the subject were abundantly clear.

When they have the drop on you, don’t draw.

‘All units,’ ordered Remus. ‘Withdraw and regroup. Rally point Ultima Sextus. Go!’

Remus bounded from cover to cover, firing as he went. He had no time to aim, and just had to hope that his wild shots hit one of these Sons of Horus bastards. He heard the bark of gunfire all around him, punctuated by the roar of vehicle engines and the crash of artillery pieces launching arcing volleys of shells. A ragged group of Ultramarines ran with him, an amalgamation of three squads he’d gathered after the rout from Konor’s Gate further down the mountains.

Every move they’d made, the Sons of Horus had countered or circumvented. It had been humiliating to find that every recourse to his primarch’s words had resulted in dismal failure. Remus despaired of winning this fight, but had to keep faith that some grander stratagem was yet to reveal itself.

Bolts of light streaked overhead, withering storms of las-fire as helots traded fire with forward units of the Warmaster’s army. Remus had no tactical view; a shot from a Sons of Horus sniper had damaged his helmet beyond repair and so he had discarded it three kilometres back. To fight with his head unprotected was an alien sensation to Remus, denying him access to all manner of battlefield information, but the connection to the visceral nature of the fighting couldn’t be denied. To smell the acrid reek of propellant fuel, the backwash of shellfire and the burnt air taste of las-fire was a powerful kick in the guts to keep your head down.

Sweat streaked his face and black dust covered his scalp. Above him, the sky was a swirl of colourful streaks of gunfire and arcing explosions. The noise was unlike anything he had experienced before, a mix of snapping small-arms fire, mixed with the deeper bangs of close-firing heavy guns.

Sergeant Archo crouched in a makeshift trench; his warriors taking cover beneath its firing step as the Sons of Horus advanced behind a creeping barrage of artillery. Just like in the canyons to the south, the Warmaster’s forces had consistently blindsided the Ultramarines, which seemed so absurdly improbable, that Remus wondered if this was not some hideous nightmare from which he could not awaken.

He risked a glance over the rocks, seeing a grimly advancing wave of warriors armoured in the colours of the Sons of Horus. Each bore the eye of Horus device upon their chest, and that same symbol was repeated on the banners flapping from the aerials of the hundreds of armoured vehicles pouring fire uphill.

‘Not so fancy now, are they?’ said Barkha, dropping in beside Remus. Like the captain of the 4th Company, Barkha had removed his helmet, his leathery skin tanned almost black and his hair bound in tight cornrows to a short ponytail at the nape of his neck.

‘They don’t need to be,’ replied Remus.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Exactly what I said. We’re all out of options. The Warmaster has a knife to our throat, and he has no more need for subtlety. This is the death blow.’

‘Truly?’ said Barkha, and Remus saw the fear of that fact written all across his face. ‘We must have some plan to meet this attack?’

‘Then tell me what else we can do? Every stratagem has been met and countered. Every subterfuge of war has been anticipated and defeated. All we can do now is fight like true warrior kings of Ultramar and take as many of the bastards with us as we can.’

‘But the primarch must have considered this situation,’ pressed Barkha. ‘You must have misread his words or issued a wrong order. That’s the only way we could have been brought to this.’

Remus shook his head. ‘You think I haven’t thought that since this engagement began? I’ve been over it all a hundred times, and I forgot nothing, misread nothing. We did everything that could have been done.’

‘Then how has it come to this?’

‘Because there are some things that can’t be met with plans and preparation,’ said Remus. ‘Some warriors are clever enough to ram a speartip through the spokes of any plan, no matter how brilliantly conceived. The Warmaster is such a warrior.’

‘But Primarch Guilliman…’

‘Does not fight with us,’ snapped Remus. ‘Now stop talking and start killing!’

Step by brutal step, the Ultramarines were pushed back up the mountains, leaving thousands of fallen warriors in their wake. Every metre gained by the Sons of Horus was paid for in lives, but Remus had been right; this was the death blow.

With the Fortress of Hera at their backs, the defenders of Macragge prepared for their last battle. To yield the land of their forefathers without a fight was not the Ultramarines way, but the time was almost at hand where they would need to face the Warmaster from behind marble parapets and towers of gold and silver. If this was the end then it would be the most glorious end imaginable.

Remus had volunteered the 4th Company to act as the Ultramarines rearguard, and they took position on the Via Fortissimus, the great road that led from the plains below to the mighty bronze gate of their Legion fortress. Behind them, the depleted ranks of the Ultramarines battle companies that still survived all but fled to the transient safety of the Fortress of Hera.

If the Warmaster’s armies had made one thing clear, it was that nowhere was truly safe.

On Macragge or anywhere in the galaxy.

As the Sons of Horus prepared for their final push towards the gates, Remus saw a colossal Land Raider rumble through the ranks of the enemy. Though no larger than any other such armoured vehicle, a trick of the moment seemed to render it mightier than any vehicle had a right to be. Bellicose cheers greeted this tank, and as its assault ramp lowered to the volcanic rock of the mountains, Remus saw why its arrival warranted such an outpouring of devotion.

The warrior who stepped from its red-lit interior was of such magnitude that it seemed he dwarfed all those around him. His armour was of deepest black, gleaming and pristine with gold chains and a fur-lined cape of foxbat hide. A helmet of such perfect symmetry that it made Remus want to weep concealed the warrior’s face, and though he knew whose face lay behind the visor, he dreaded seeing it lifted.

Remus felt the breath catch in his throat.

The Warmaster. Horus Lupercal…

The Emperor’s brightest, bastard son had come to witness the final humiliation of the Ultramarines.

The Sons of Horus cheered, the sound echoing from the mountains like the battle cry of some ancient, heathen tribe. Their war shouts were imprecations to forgotten, bloody gods, and every man of the 4th Company felt a tremor of fear worm its way into his heart at the sight of this avatar of blood and death.

What could stand against such a foe and live?

What army could withstand the genius of this warrior’s intellect?

We may not defeat him, but that we stand against him will be remembered, thought Remus. Perhaps that is enough…

‘Warriors of Ultramar!’ bellowed Remus. ‘Remember where you are and in whose name you fight. Each and every one of you is a hero of the Ultramarines, a warrior without compare, and a killer whose heart is unbroken!’

Remus felt his conviction and choler grow with every word, his voice carrying easily over the mountains to the Ultramarines warriors withdrawing to the fortress and the assembling Sons of Horus. ‘Only in death does our duty to the Emperor’s dream end, and only with our death will it die. I will not let that dream die, will you?’

As one, the 4th company answered with a resounding, ‘No!’ and their denial echoed strangely from the mountainsides such that it sounded as though some among the Sons of Horus joined in.

The mighty warrior in the centre of the enemy ranks raised his fist. Sunlight caught the gold edging of his gauntlet as four gleaming blades slid from its upper faces. The gauntlet swept down and the Sons of Horus charged.

The battle was without finesse, without glory and without hope of success for the XIII Legion. Though Remus had followed every tenet contained within the primarch’s writings, everything came down to this last desperate fight. It was an artillery bombardment, a long range duel, a short range firefight and, at the last, a close-up storm of blades and fists.

Remus had long since expended his cache of ammo, and switched to his blade. His every blow was struck with desperate fervour, his every parry made with a frantic desire to stay alive and to kill as many of these invaders as possible. Any semblance of shape to the battle had been lost the instant the two forces collided.

Warriors in brilliant blue swirled in an ever-shifting mêlée of hacking blades with traitors in the green of a distant ocean. Even as he fought, Remus wondered how history would remember this war. Who would be recalled as the traitors? Future history was the provision of the victors, so who could say in what role the Ultramarines would be cast? Would-be saviours of a glorious ideal that died in the mountains of Macragge, or base traitors whose arrogance was matched only by the scale of their failure?

They fought in an ever-decreasing circle of warriors, Ultramarines falling with every passing moment as the enemy overwhelmed them. Like a noose tightening on the throat of a condemned man, the life was choked from the 4th Company’s defiance until only Remus remained.

He had given his all, but it had not been enough. The strength that had fuelled him during these engagements fled his body. He had been struck so many times that it was a wonder he was still standing. Remus slumped to his knees, broken by disappointment and robbed of his certainty by this defeat. His head bowed as he imagined the scale of his failure.

Remus looked up as an enormous shadow enveloped him.

The Warmaster towered over Remus, his vast gauntlet raised high like the talons of some lethal predator. Remus awaited the blow that would end this farce, but instead of death, the Warmaster’s claws retracted into the gauntlet. Horus Lupercal raised his hands to his helmet, unsnapping the gorget seals that secured it in place.

Remus couldn’t bear to look at him.

‘Look at me,’ said a voice golden with perfection.

‘I can’t,’ said Remus. ‘I failed.’

‘No, Remus Ventanus,’ said Roboute Guilliman. ‘You didn’t. The failure was mine.’

Remus sat alone on the spur of a rocky cliff overlooking the Fortress of Hera. It seemed absurd for it to look so quiet, when only hours before it had been the scene of so terrible a conflict. Helots and Legion serfs scoured the mountainside of debris, shell-casings and dented pieces of armour torn from the combatants.

The Legion armourers were already repainting the suits of battle-plate and vehicles that had masqueraded upon the field of battle in the Sons of Horus livery. The halls of the Legion stank of thinner and paint as ‘enemy’ colours and markings were once again removed from armoured plates and weaponry.

Remus had deposited his battle-plate in his arming chamber and instructed his new equerry to have it cleaned and serviced, a task he would normally attend to himself, but which felt somehow wrong today. He had torn the laser designator from the barrel of his weapon and hurled it from the cliffs, despising what it represented and hating that such a device had even been necessary.

Dressed in tan fatigues and a simple chiton of pale blue, Remus let the sun warm his face and awaited the reprimands that would undoubtedly follow his and the Legion’s failure to resist the attack of the Sons of Horus.

Was there anything he could have done?

Could any warrior have bested the Sons of Horus?

A sudden smile crept across his face as Remus realised there was one warrior who might have turned the tide of battle…

‘There was nothing you could have done,’ said a voice behind him, and Remus turned to see Roboute Guilliman. He rose to his feet, bowing his head in contrition to his gene-sire. One could not look too long at the sun without being blinded by its radiance, and the same was true of Roboute Guilliman. Sculpted to perfection, his classical features were tanned and smooth, gracefully formed and handsomely arranged like the statues lining the Via Triumphal that led to the Sanctuary of Correction at the heart of the Fortress of Hera.

Guilliman walked to the edge of the cliff, staring out over his domain, and Remus took his position at the primarch’s shoulder, though the top of his head reached only to the middle of his liege-lord’s bicep. Like Remus, Guilliman was stripped out of his armour and wore light training robes, though Remus could not shake the image of the primarch clad in the midnight-black plate of the Warmaster. Though patches of its cerulean brilliance had shone through like sunlight on a cloudy day, the image of so fine a figure as the Ultramarines primarch clad as a traitor would never leave him.

‘I must have done something wrong,’ said Remus. ‘It is the only explanation.’

Guilliman shook his head and smiled grimly. ‘You credit me with too much, Remus. I am not infallible. This last engagement should have shown you that.’

‘I can’t accept that,’ said Remus.

‘What is so hard to accept?’ said Guilliman. ‘You followed my teachings, and they led you to defeat. If this and Calth have taught us anything it is that we must always be adaptable and never too hidebound in our thinking.’

‘But your teachings…’

‘Are yet flawed,’ said Guilliman. ‘No one, not even one such as I, can anticipate every possible outcome of battle. My words are not some holy writ that must be obeyed. There must always be room for personal initiative on the battlefield. You and I both know how one spark of heroism can turn the tide of battle. That knowledge and personal experience can only be earned in blood, and the leader in the field must always be the ultimate arbiter of what course of action should be followed.’

‘I’ll remind you of that when the Troublesome Fourth are next in the field.’

Guilliman chuckled. ‘Be sure that you do, Remus. I am aware that some think me emotionless, the Talos of ancient days come to life, and desiring only to suffocate free thinking with my prescriptive ways. But such times are upon us that brook no deviation from our course.’

‘So was there a way to win that last fight?’

‘Perhaps, but I will let you find that answer.’

‘And what will you do?’

‘I will continue to pen the Codex Astartes,’ said Guilliman.

‘Codex Astartes?’ said Remus. ‘Is that what you are calling it?’

Guilliman smiled and nodded. ‘Yes, I think it has an appropriately weighty feel to it, don’t you? In war and in peace it will provide an invaluable repository of knowledge, but I do not wish it to be regarded as a substitute for reason and initiative. Do you understand?’

‘I think so,’ said Remus, as Guilliman beckoned him over to the edge of the cliff.

‘These are the darkest days the Imperium has known,’ said Guilliman. ‘And I fear for what the future will bring. Calth is lost to us, and Isstvan. Who knows how many other worlds my brother will burn in his madness?’

‘But you have a plan to fight him?’ pleaded Remus.

Guilliman did not answer, as though afraid of what Remus might make of his answer.

At last he said, ‘I have a plan, yes, and it is a dangerous one, too dangerous to divulge for the moment. But when the time comes to put it into action, I must ask you all to trust me as never before. When that time comes, you will be called traitors, cowards and faithless weaklings, but nothing could be further from the truth. I can see no hope in the times ahead for the Imperium as we know it, and that is why I had you fight these mock engagements. However this war plays out, it is inevitable that you will need to fight warriors you count as brothers. Perhaps even those who currently stand in opposition to the Warmaster.’

‘I won’t pretend to understand what that means, but you can count on us to do everything you ask of us,’ promised Remus.

‘I know I can,’ said Guilliman.

‘We beat every army you sent at us, but I have had time to think why we lost against the Sons of Horus.’

‘That was quick.’

‘I’m a fast learner.’

‘True. So what is your conclusion?’ asked Guilliman.

‘It wasn’t a fair contest of arms.’

‘How so?’

‘You didn’t fight alongside us,’ said Remus.

‘And you believe that would have made a difference?’

‘I know it would have made a difference,’ said Remus, looking up at Guilliman’s perfect features. ‘And you know it too.’

Guilliman shrugged modestly, but Remus could see that the primarch agreed with him.

Roboute Guilliman looked up into the heavens, as though trying to perceive some far distant truth or faraway battle yet to come. At last Guilliman turned to Remus, and the captain of the 4th Company saw a haunted look in his eyes, like a desire clung to in the face of hopelessness.

‘Then let us hope that when the Warmaster is to be put down, I am the man facing him.’

+++Broadcast Minus Zero Zero [Solar]+++

The voice from the speaker horn above the square was metered and automatic, and it did not differ from the everyday tonality it gave to matters of the most mundane news. The flat, near-emotionless words rang out over the streets of Town Forty-Four, across the mainway and the alleys, over the rooftops of the general store and the rover stables. The people under the shadow of the Skyhook stood rooted to the spot in shocked silence, or else they wandered in circles, fear and confusion robbing them of reason.

The recording reached its conclusion and began again.

‘The Imperium speaks,’ said the humming, clicking voice, a chime of orchestral tones jangling beneath the opening phrase. ‘On this day, news from the core reaches the agricultural colony of Virger-Mos II.’ That part of the statement was always the same, promising the people of Forty-Four and the other settlements across this backwater world a measure of understanding about the galaxy at large around them.

Today, the prologue rang an ominous note, the familiar turning sinister. The main body of the message began; somewhere far over their heads, at the summit of the Skyhook, was the planet’s lone astropath. The psyker’s sole duty was to parse news into palatable forms and send it down the telegraph. ‘This is Terra calling, and with grave import. Make all citizens aware and know this grim certainty. The battle has broken the Eternity Gate. The Imperial Palace falls as Terra burns around it. It is our great sorrow to announce that the Emperor of Mankind lies dead at the hand of Horus Lupercal, Warmaster.’

Some of the townsfolk began to weep, others cradled their heads and tried to deny the voice’s words. One man laughed, a humourless bark of utter disbelief. And then there were others, who looked on and said nothing, only nodding as if they had known all along that this day would come.

Beneath the speaker horn, the marquetry boards ticked and clicked, the carved wooden slates turning about to form the shapes of the words. ‘The Emperor joins the roll of honour alongside his sons: Sanguinius, Dorn, Russ and the Khan. The remnants of his forces now sue for peace. Surrender is at hand here. The inter-Legionary conflict is no more. The battle for independence is concluded, and Horus has his victory. Even now, ships are being dispatched to all points of the etheric compass to cement his new rule as Imperator Rex.’ There was a moment of silence, as if the machine-speaker could not fully grasp the words it projected. ‘Know this. The war is over. Horus has the throne.’

The speakers fell silent and the panic began to bed in.

In the cool of the icehouse’s porch, Leon Kyyter’s gaze dropped to the upturned palms of his hands and he saw the line of little white crescents where he had dug his fingernails into his own flesh. He felt dizzy and sick inside. The youth was afraid to stand up for fear he might stumble and collapse upon the cracked blacktop of the mainway. It was a nightmare; it felt like a dream, there was no other explanation. Nothing else made any kind of sense.

The Emperor, dead? It was impossible, unbelievable. The birds in the sky would speak High Gothic and the seasons would rewrite themselves before such a thing could happen! Leon refused to accept it. He would not!

‘Horus has the throne…’ He heard the words repeated by one of the grainwives from the Forroth farmstead. She was trying the phrase out, speaking it aloud to be sure it wasn’t just a string of nonsense words.

‘Will he come here?’ asked someone else, and the question was like a spark to kindling. Suddenly everyone in the town square was talking at once, voices rising in angry confusion. Leon was buffeted by fragments of conversation coming from all around.

‘...how long would that take?’

‘...already on their way...‘

‘...but there is nothing for them here!’

‘...could he be killed?’

‘...this world will fall under the Warmaster’s shadow...’

The youth scowled and pulled himself to his feet, pushing away quickly, almost as if he could outrun the dark thoughts swirling in his mind’s eye. Terra on fire. The palace collapsing. A sky black with starships. A battle zone choked with silenced guns.

He forced his way through the mass of people; there had to be hundreds of them, almost the entire populace of Town Forty-Four crowding into the open space to hear the voice of the weekly broadcast. Was the same scene being played out in every other township down the wires, from the capital, Oh-One, to the icewheat farms up in Eighty-Seven?

Leon looked up and traced the lines of the telegraph cables with his gaze, the web of black threads dangling from the slender impact-plastic poles. The line of the weathered, bone-coloured masts led away out of the town and vanished across the endless landscape of barley fields. Beyond the limits of the settlement, the land was flat and featureless from horizon to horizon, broken only by the occasional steel finger of a silo or the lines of a railhead. It was a static, unchanging landscape, symbolic of the planet itself.

Virger-Mos II was an agri-world, a breadbasket colony so far off the axis of the core Imperial worlds that it was almost invisible; still, it was one of hundreds of similar planets that fed a hungry empire, and in that manner, perhaps it might be thought, to have some minor strategic value. But it was an isolated place in the Dominion of Storms, ranged in the deeps of the Ultima Segmentum. A remote, unimportant world that turned unnoticed by the rest of the galaxy. There were less than a million people living on the second planet’s wind-burned surface, all of them working in service to farms in one way or another.

And none of them could forget their place, especially those who lived in Forty-Four. Turning to face the other way, Leon’s view was immediately dominated by a tower of black shadow that rose from behind the service complex beyond the square, vanishing into the sky. Tipping his head back, the space elevator seemed to thin away to a thread’s diameter as it went towards orbit. Inside, automated systems that few human beings had ever seen worked without pause, gathering the cargo pods full of grain that arrived via the railheads on drone-trains, and carrying them up into space. The Skyhook was Town Forty-Four’s sole reason to exist; while there were farmers who nominally called it home, they kept mostly to their ranches. The settlement was for those whose lives revolved around the elevator and its operation; but in truth, their function was almost cosmetic.

Leon recalled one night, when his father, Ames, had come home from the tavern in his cups and offered the boy a gloomy lesson; he told him that the town had no reason to exist. Every system inside the Skyhook, from the cargo handlers to the complex mesh of diamond ropes that hoisted the pods towards space, was run by automata. Every soul in Forty-Four could die in their beds at once and the elevator would run on, taking the grain and raising it high to where cargo lighters could meet it in orbit. The lesson, Ames Kyyter had said, was that even when people deluded themselves into thinking they were important, the reverse was usually the truth.

The young man didn’t see it that way, though. He didn’t think of the shadow of the Skyhook as something to be detested, like his father did. The old man cast the tower like a monster, and he glared up at it each day, as if he was daring the orbital tether to snap and come down upon him. No, Leon saw it as a bridge to something greater, a monument to human endeavour. In the shadow he felt protected, as if somehow the aegis of the Emperor was captured in its shade.

He had felt that way until today.

Thoughts of his father drew Leon back down the shallow rise towards the dormitory house that had been owned by his family for seven generations. He was so intent on it that he wandered straight into a knot of people gripped in tense, emotive conversation.

‘It doesn’t matter what you think!’ Dallon Prael worked as a senior solarman out in the vane orchard, where the light from Virger-Mos’s bright yellow sun was captured and turned into power for the township. He was a large man, but his size was all illusion; Prael was flabby and lacked any muscle or stamina, as Leon had observed over spirited games of pushpull at the tavern. His chubby hands wove in the air. ‘We all heard the telegraph!’

Among the group, a handful of the assembled townsfolk gave Prael’s words nods of approval. But the man he was addressing grew a grimace across his face.

‘So what do you propose, Dallon?’ Silas Cincade put the question with force. ‘We stand around and fret?’ In contrast to the solarman, Cincade was tall and wiry, but his real strength was underneath his aspect. Silas’s elderly father owned the rover stables and his son worked maintenance on the vehicles there. Leon couldn’t recall a time when the man didn’t have grease-smeared hands or the scent of battery fluid about him.

Prael and Cincade were tavern-mates, but here and now that seemed irrelevant. This wasn’t an argument over politics at the bar-step, but something else, propelled by fear. The tension in the air was strong, like the crackle of pre-storm static. Leon began to wonder if the two men might come to blows; not a week’s end had passed in the last two years that someone had not caused an argument on the matter of the civil war, and this pair were often at the heart of it.

‘You would rather we stumble blindly?’ Prael was demanding. ‘I spoke to Yacio. He’s telling me that every other telegraph channel has gone black. No connections coming in, nothing but silence.’ He folded his arms. ‘What do you make of that, eh? That’s military doctrine, isn’t it? Cut the lines of communication.’

‘What do you know about soldiering?’ Cincade snapped back. ‘The only Imperial Army garrison is in Oh-One and you’ve never left this quad!’

‘I trained!’ Prael retorted hotly. ‘When the Imperial Army came here and showed us how to drill, I trained for the town watch!’

Cincade opened his hands. ‘That would be the watch we don’t have and never needed?’

‘Maybe we need it now!’ said one of the others, a ginger-haired man from the medicae’s office.

Prael nodded. ‘Aye! If I wasn’t here talking, I’d be dusting off my rifle!’

The mechanic rolled his eyes and caught sight of Leon, looking to him for support. The youth could only manage a tense shrug. ‘Look,’ said Cincade, trying to inject a note of calm into his voice. ‘You know how the air goes. Lines drop out all the time.’

In that, he was correct. Some peculiarity of the mineral-laced soil of the colony played havoc with vox-transmitters, meaning that communications were solely sent and received by telegraphic cables strung across the landscape, and here, up the side of the Skyhook. Without a wire, the towns on Virger-Mos II were reduced to using message riders or heliographs. The rich soil made it a wonder for growing crops, but the abrasion of it scoured the rockcrete walls of every building and made blackcough the colony’s worst killer. Sometimes the windborne powder was enough to chew through the shielded lines stretching across the countryside.

‘If the capital has gone quiet, there’s a rational explanation for it,’ Cincade went on.

A woman, red-faced with near hysteria, glared at him. ‘You can’t know that!’

‘We need to protect ourselves,’ said Prael. ‘That’s what we should be thinking about!’

Cincade grimaced. ‘All right, all right! How about this, then? I’ve got my trike in the stables. How about I drive out to Oh-One and find out what’s going on? I could be there and back before nightfall.’

‘It’s not safe.’ Leon said the words without thinking.

The mechanic shot him a look. ‘How do you know?’

‘The boy is right!’ Prael went on. ‘Throne and Blood, did you not hear the broadcast, Silas? The war–’

‘Is not our concern!’ Cincade replied. ‘We’re in the arse-end of the Imperium, where neither man nor primarch would bother to turn his gaze! So this sort of sorry panic is pointless. Better we find out what is happening from the colonial governor himself, yes?’ The man turned to Leon and gave him a light shove in the back. ‘Go on, son, get home. Look to your Da.’ He glanced up as he walked away. ‘And the same to the rest of you, too!’

Prael muttered something under his breath as the red-faced woman glared after the mechanic. ‘He’s always swanned around this town like he smells sweet,’ she grated. ‘Now the grease-monkey is giving orders?’

Leon became aware she was looking at him, waiting for the youth to agree with her. He said nothing and went on his way, heading back towards the dormitory.

His father wasn’t there when he arrived. Leon took the stairs to the top floor two at a time, brushing his hand over the forever-closed door to his mother’s room as he passed it, as a matter of ingrained habit. At the landing, he went to the suite – it was a fancy name for the chambers, something that seemed too grand for just a nondescript bedroom-balcony-fresher combination. He rapped on the door with the back of his hand, calling loudly.

‘Esquire!’ Leon kept up the insistent pace of his knocks; there were no other residents at the dormitory house, and there hadn’t been for some time. These were the fallow months when the drivers from the far fields stayed at their ranches rather than venture in under the shadow of the Skyhook. ‘Esquire Mendacs, are you there?’

He heard movement through the door and presently it slid open on oiled runners. ‘Young Leon,’ said the man, absently smoothing down the front of his tunic. ‘Such urgency.’

‘The telegraph–’ Leon spoke so quickly he stumbled over his words and had to gulp in air and begin again. ‘The telegraph says the Emperor is dead and Horus has taken Terra! The war is over!’ He blinked. ‘I don’t think it can be true…’

‘No?’ Mendacs wandered back into the apartment and Leon trailed after him. ‘Or do you mean you wish it not to be true?’

The esquire was a slight man, his skin pale in comparison to the tanned natives of the agri-world, and he had long fingers that reminded the youth of a woman’s. Still, he carried himself with a kind of certainty that Leon kept trying to emulate. Mendacs had a quiet confidence that radiated from him; it was peculiar how someone who at first glance could appear unassuming, could also command attention if need be.

He poured a measure of amasec from a flask on the table and glanced at where Leon stood. The young man’s hands kept finding one another of their own accord, knotting and wringing.

Leon repeated the telegraph message as best he could remember it, the words spilling out of him. Emotion coloured every syllable, and he felt his cheeks redden and go warm as he reached the conclusion. Mendacs just listened, and took small, purse-lipped sips from the liquor.

‘Horus’s warships are coming here,’ Leon went on. ‘They may already be close by!’

‘One cannot tell,’ Mendacs offered. ‘The currents of warp space are strange and unpredictable. The passage of time there is somewhat elastic.’

Frustration furrowed Leon’s brow. Of all the reactions he had expected from the esquire, this was not one of them. The man seemed almost… resigned. ‘Are… Are you not troubled by this turn of events? The war comes to us! The Imperium is in tatters! Are you not afraid of what will happen next?’

Mendacs put down the glass of amasec and wandered to the window. His pict-slates and a quiver of stylus-rods lay there in an untidy pile. ‘It’s not that, Leon,’ he said. ‘Any sane man is concerned about the future. But I have learned that you can’t let yourself be ruled by questions of what may be about to happen. A life lived in the shadow of unfulfilled possibility is inward-looking and limited.’

The youth didn’t understand the man’s meaning, and told him so.

A moment of dismay crossed Mendacs’s face. ‘The dust storms that come during this season. Are you afraid of them?’

‘Not really... I mean, they can be dangerous, but–’

‘But you understand them. You know you cannot change them. So you take shelter and let them pass, then pick up your life and progress as if they had never been.’ Mendacs made an inclusive gesture that encompassed them both. ‘We are little people, my friend. And the likes of us cannot change the course of wars that span the galaxy. We can only live our lives, and accept what fate presents to us.’

‘But the Emperor is dead!’ Leon blurted out the words, his voice rising. ‘I can’t accept that!’

Mendacs cocked his head. ‘You can’t change that fact. If it is so, you must accept it. What alternative is there?’

Leon turned away, shaking his head, closing his eyes. ‘No. No…’ He felt dizzy all over again, and stumbled into a drape partitioning off part of the bedroom from the main space of the suite. For a moment, he found himself looking into Mendacs’s sleeping area. He saw the low, narrow bed, the rail of clothes hangers.

On the bed there was a case – the small valise the esquire had carried on a shoulder strap when he first arrived, Leon remembered – and it lay open. Inside lay not clothes or more pict-slates, but a conformal array of equipment that resembled nothing familiar to the youth. It wasn’t metallic and greasy-looking like the innards of a rover engine; it gave the impression of being fragile, like fans of black glassaic and silver filigree.

But then the train of thought forming in Leon’s mind was abruptly forestalled by the harsh bark of his father’s voice echoing up the stairs. ‘Boy! Get yourself out here!’ He could hear the tromp of boots on the staircase.

‘You should go,’ Mendacs said, without weight.

Ames Kyyter was at the landing as Leon left the room. He gave the other man a terse nod and then glared at his son. ‘I’ve told you before not to pester the esquire. Come on, down with you.’ He gave Leon a cuff around the ear and the youth ducked it, racing back to the lower floor.

His father came at his back. ‘Where did you go?’ he demanded. ‘I told you to stay here, wait for me to come home. Instead I return and you’re gone.’

‘The telegraph!’ Leon piped. ‘Did you hear it?’

Ames’s face soured and he shook his head. ‘That’s got you worked up, has it? I should have known.’

Leon could hardly believe his father’s cavalier dismissal of the import of the message. First Mendacs and now him? ‘Of course it has! The war, Da! The war is coming here!’

‘Don’t raise your voice to me!’ Ames snapped back. ‘I heard the bloody spool. I know what it said! But I’m not going to wet my britches over it!’ He blew out a breath. ‘At a time like this, a man needs to be calm. Understand the import of the day, not run around like a damned fool.’

Leon felt a wash of cold roll through him. ‘Da. What’s going to happen to us?’ He hated the way the question made him sound like a frightened little boy.

‘Nothing. Nothing,’ insisted his father. ‘You think the Warmaster gives a wet shit about this colony? You think he even knows the name of this star system?’ He scowled. ‘You think that the Emperor did?’

Despite himself, Leon let his hands contract into fists. It made him angry when the old man spoke about the Emperor in that tone of voice. Dismissive. Disrespectful.

He opened his mouth to answer back, but the thin scream of a woman sounded. Both of them went to the front door, following the cry, and there, out on the street, they found people pointing into the south-western sky, a new shade of fresh fear on their faces. Leon stepped out and turned his head to see.

The low sun was at their backs, and the sky was a shade of deep blue, broken with a few long lines of grey-white clouds. High up, the moons were visible as ghosts, but what caught his eye were the lights.

For a moment, he wasn’t sure what he was seeing. They were lines of fire, thread-thin, marching slowly across the heavens towards the far horizon. There were lots of them, a dozen or more at his count. It was hard to be certain. They were reflecting sunlight as they fell.

‘Invasion,’ said someone, and the word was almost a sob.

‘The Warmaster!’ Leon turned and saw the red-faced woman again. She was stabbing her finger at the air. ‘He’s coming down from orbit!’

‘They’re heading in the direction of the capital,’ said another bystander. ‘Isn’t that how they do things? Droppers or something, they call them. Packed full of soldiers and weapons!’

‘Drop-pods,’ Leon corrected, half to himself.

‘What was that, boy?’

Leon turned to the woman. ‘No, I mean, I don’t think–’

‘You’re the expert all of a sudden then, are you?’ she retorted, glaring at him.

‘I’ve read books,’ he replied weakly, and pushed on before she could speak again. ‘I mean, we don’t know what that is. The lights in the sky… they c–could be meteorites. I’ve seen them many–’

The woman’s pinched face stiffened. ‘Don’t talk rot!’ She glared at Leon’s father. ‘Ames, is your boy as big a fool as he sounds? See it right there!’ She kept pointing upwards. ‘The Legiones Astartes have come!’

The youth looked to his father for support but Ames was shaking his head; and again the townsfolk were all talking at once, and whatever he said went ignored.

+++Broadcast Minus Eight Weeks [Solar]+++

The train of empty cargo capsules passed through the ultraviolet anti-bacteria field and out of the throat of the Skyhook, the complex handling claws and mag-rail points snapping back and forth. Occasional flashes of sparks and running lights cast weak, sporadic illumination inside the depot complex at the foot of the space elevator. An identical train of pods moved in the opposite direction, these ones laden with vac-sealed sheaves of freeze-dried crops. With a grind of gears, the line of six capsules mated to the ascent line and they rose up the steep ramp until the train was moving vertically. The drive-head engaged and the pods raced away, up towards the night. In two hours’ time, they would be in the microgravity zone of the loading station in low geostationary orbit. There, mechanical menials would unload the train and move the cargo to a staging area, ready to await the arrival of the next interstellar freighter. The operation went on without a human hand in the process.

Across the yard, the other, empty pods ground to a sudden halt as they moved beneath the unblinking eye of a terahertz-wave scanner. An alert horn hooted twice and the train shunted sideways, all six pods opening automatically. Chem-nozzles on spidery manipulator arms unfolded from the ceiling and began to probe the interiors of the capsules, coughing spurts of caustic foam into the darkened corners. The sensor had detected something inside one of the pods, and initiated a pest-control subroutine. It wasn’t unknown for creatures from other biospheres to make their way through the loading–unloading process, and off-world vermin had the potential to wreck a colony’s entire ecosystem.

Nothing alive was meant to find its way up or down the Skyhook, no passengers, only inert cargo. The single landing strip out in Oh-One that could be considered a space port was the sole point of contact between off-worlders and the colony, although it was very rarely used. The transports that came for the planet’s bounty occasionally off-loaded supplies, but mostly they came to gather up the harvest and take it away. The crews of those vessels didn’t bother to venture down to the surface; they let their cogitators handle the business of arrival and departure. No one wanted to stay near Virger-Mos II any longer than they had to.

The nozzles found their target and bracketed it with bursts of hot liquid; but the life-form inside walked through the boiling rain and clambered out onto the floor of the depot. The automated system was not programmed to anticipate anything like intelligent behaviour from a xenos pest, and so did nothing as the man doffed the plastoid oversuit that had protected him from the chill, folding it away in a case on his back.

He removed the backpack and separated it into two discrete sub-cases, and after a few minutes of preparation, he walked on. The new arrival casually made his way across the depot, taking care to skirt the autonomous loaders, until he reached one of the few human-accessible maintenance bays. It hadn’t been used in decades, and it was an effort to get the doors open; but once he was done, the man was able to make his way out of the facility and onto the mainway.

Because his masters had trained him exceptionally well, no one in Town Forty-Four saw him; at least, not until he wanted them to.

He’d changed into a commonplace, but well appointed, traveller’s robe, and after crossing around the edge of the township, he doubled back and approached from the east. He would appear to be walking in from across the plainslands, out of the warm, dusty evening.

It wasn’t necessary for him to ask directions or even consult the detailed topographic map copied from the files of the Departmento Terra Colonia. Every town like this one was the same; not in a literal sense, not in the manner of the lay of roads and of houses, but in character. The dynamic of the settlement matched those on dozens of other human worlds; the personality of the place, for want of a better word, was alike.

Even as Mendacs let himself be drawn towards the lights and the noise coming from the tavern, he was opening up his senses to Town Forty-Four. He wanted to know it; and in many ways, he already did.

He entered the hostelry and was immediately aware of every eye upon him. That came as no surprise; an unannounced visitor in a remote township such as this one was akin to a minor miracle. Even as he crossed the room to the auto-bar on the far side, conversations were starting up, loaded with speculation about who he was or where he might be from.

He ordered a bottle of a coarse local beer from the mechanical tending the counter, and waited for the first of them to gather enough courage to approach. He took care pouring the ale into a glass, using the moment to discreetly survey the room. There were pushpull chairs and gaming tables here and there. Regicide seemed popular in this place, and that was good; it gave him a point of commonality with the locals that he could exploit.

Perhaps a third of the beer was gone when, at last, a man spoke to him. ‘Pardon, esquire,’ he began, inclining his head. ‘Silas Cincade. Can I ask if you’re from the Tolliver ranches?’

It was a poorly concealed gambit intended to draw him out, but it was exactly what he wanted. ‘I’m afraid not,’ he replied, with a smile. ‘My name is Mendacs. I’m, ah, passing through.’

‘Oh, I see,’ said Cincade, although it was clear he didn’t. ‘Have you ridden in? I have stables for any rovers.’ Mendacs caught the aroma of engine oil on the man.

He gave a shake of the head. ‘I walked. From the next settlement.’

Cincade’s eyes widened. ‘From Two-Six? That’s quite a hike!’

‘Two-Six,’ Mendacs repeated, with a nod. ‘It is. And dry with it.’ He gently modified his tone, dropping the softer, more educated manner of a core worlder to emulate something closer to the rough-edged vowels of the mechanic’s colonist accent. ‘I admit it gave me a thirst.’ He saluted with the beer, and Cincade nodded back with a knowing smirk, ordering the same for himself.

‘Cuts the dust, that’s truth.’

Mendacs saw that Cincade’s compatriots – a chubby man, a youth and a dour fellow in a tunic – were sat around a gaming table, trying not to appear interested in the newcomer. ‘I’d like to take the weight off me,’ he went on, gesturing at the bags he carried. ‘Get a little distraction into the bargain.’

‘Games?’ Cincade raised an eyebrow. ‘Do you play castles, then?’ It was a common variant of Regicide that dated back to before the Great Crusade, and Mendacs did indeed know it, along with many ways to cheat himself into the winner’s circle.

He nodded. ‘I dabble.’

Cincade was already walking away. ‘We got a spare seat over here. Come join, if you’d like.’

‘Absolutely.’ Mendacs gathered up his drink and followed.

Within a couple of hours, he had slowly allowed himself to lose a small amount of Imperial scrip, and the looks on the faces of Cincade and his associates when Mendacs offered to cover the loss with a single gold Throne told him what he wanted to know. He tossed the coin onto the board and watched the pattern of their thoughts on their faces.

The chubby one, Prael, fancied himself as something of an authority on everything, but in reality he was an abrasive personality, self-important and priggish. Mendacs doubted that the others seated around the table would have spent any time with him, had this not been a small town where they couldn’t avoid his company and the reactions any snub might create. The dour man, Kyyter, almost licked his lips to see the coin; but the youth, his son, showed a very different kind of greed. Mendacs could see the boy was withdrawn among the men, and starved for anything of interest.

They were chatting amiably now, like good friends known for years and years. It was a gift, to be able to read people as he could. As easy as breathing, Mendacs was deft at drawing others into what seemed like polite, casual conversation. The fact was, people liked to talk about themselves, and they would often do so if only one would give them opportunity and impetus.

Only the boy kept probing at him; and after a while, Mendacs knew it was time to give up a little of his own mystery.

‘I’m travelling the outer colonies all across the Dominion of Storms,’ he explained. ‘I’m a remembrancer.’ He glanced at the youth. ‘Do you know that term, Leon?’

He got a vigorous nod in return. ‘You’re creating artworks for the Administratum. Documenting the glory of the Imperium.’

‘The glory?’ said Ames, with a half-smirk that didn’t mask the true acid beneath it. ‘There’s not much of that hereabouts, I’ll mark you.’

‘Respectfully, I disagree,’ said Mendacs. ‘The golden oceans of grain, the perfect blue of your skies… Oh, sir, there is beauty here. And it would do well for those who walk the halls of Terra to know of it.’

‘You… You have been to Terra?’ Leon asked, awed by the idea.

Mendacs knew he had the youth then. ‘My young friend, I was born there.’

‘Is that so?’ said Prael. ‘Is it like they say?’

He gave a solemn nod, building the drama of the moment. ‘It is all that and more, Esquire Prael.’

‘C–can you tell us about… it?’ Leon leaned forwards intently, hanging on his every word.

‘About what?’

‘About all of it!’ The youth’s excitement crackled. ‘I’ve always wanted to see the Sol system!’

Mendacs gave the boy an indulgent smile, and a worldly, inclusive nod to the other men. ‘I plan to stay here a while. I’m sure I could tell you a few things.’

Behind him, the tavern door opened, and the room fell silent again for a brief instant. Mendacs turned to see a severe-looking man in a mandarin cap and grey robes striding across the floor. People began to turn their chairs out to face him as he crossed to the bar.

‘Oren Yacio,’ explained Ames. ‘He’s the telegraphist here. Brings the regular weekly news broadcast from the wires.’

‘It’s a good place to play it,’ Prael noted. ‘We don’t have wires to individual houses here, like they do in Two-Six or the capital. Anyhow, not like there’s anywhere else for folks to spend an evening hereabouts, neh?’

‘Interesting.’ Mendacs watched as Yacio fed a fat data spool into a console near the bar.

The telegraphist cleared his throat. ‘On this day, news from the core reaches the agricultural colony of Virger-Mos II. This is Terra calling.’ He pressed a control with a flourish, and from hidden speakers in the ceiling, a synthetic-sounding voice began to speak.

Along with everyone else, Mendacs sat silently and listened to the steady stream of pro-Imperial propaganda. All is well. The turncoat Warmaster is being beaten back. There are victories at Calth and Mertiol and Signus Prime. You have nothing to fear. The Emperor will be victorious.

He smiled as he watched them listen, and in a little way he was disappointed. He wouldn’t be challenged here. This would be as simple as all the others.

After the spool was concluded, the conversation went on about the contents of the broadcast, and Mendacs saw the nothings and the disinformation taken in by everyone in the tavern as if it were the word of unquestioned truth. He feigned fatigue, and it was then Ames made mention that he had rooms to rent. A couple more gold Thrones sealed the deal, and the cheerless man ordered his son to escort the remembrancer back to the dormitory house.

Leon almost fell over himself in eagerness to carry Mendacs’s baggage, and together the pair of them walked back along the mainway. Night had drawn close in the meantime, and the air was crisp and cold.

‘Just you and your father here, then?’ he asked.

The youth nodded. ‘The blackcough took my Ma a couple of seasons back.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Thanks.’ Leon’s head bobbed. He didn’t want to dwell on that. ‘Where in Terra where you born? Was it Merica, or Hy-Brasil? Bania?’

‘Do you know the Atalantic ranges? I grew up in a town a bit like this one, although the landscape was quite different.’ It was an infrequent truth in his arsenal of lies, but then such details always served as the bedrock of a firm legend.

‘I do, I do!’ Leon talked about the great plains of the long-dead ocean and the mountains that bisected it, with the enthusiasm of a devotee. He repeated rote descriptions, and Mendacs imagined that the boy was recalling the pages of pict-books he had read a hundred times over. He began a steady bombardment of questions that carried them all the way down the street. Had Mendacs ever been to Luna? The Petitioner’s City? What was it like to look upon the Imperial Palace? Had he ever seen a Space Marine?

‘I’ve been in the presence of the Legiones Astartes, more than once.’ A primarch, too, although that fact he kept to himself. ‘They’re like gods of war made of flesh and metal. Terrible and beautiful.’

Leon let out an awed, hushed breath. ‘I should like to see them too.’

‘Are you certain of that?’ Mendacs asked, as they entered the dormitory house. ‘Where they walk, only war follows. It is what they are made for.’ The boy would be his barometer, he decided. Through him, he would be able to take the measure of the mood of the community, and by extension, the entire colony.

The youth swallowed hard. ‘I’ve read much about them. I wonder…’ He caught himself and stopped, halting by the door to the guest room.

‘Wonder what?’ Mendacs asked, as he took the key rod from Leon’s outstretched hand.

Leon took a deep breath. ‘How can they fight each other? Brother against brother? It makes no sense!’

‘It does to Horus Lupercal.’

The name actually made the boy flinch. ‘How?’ he repeated. ‘What madness sunders the Legions and makes them attack one another? More than two solar years now, and the conflict rages on with no end in sight. Even out here, word of the war is never far away.’ He shook his head. ‘The holocaust of Isstvan and all that followed could only be the work of one turned insane!’

Mendacs took his bags and entered the room. ‘I would not even try to guess,’ he said. ‘Don’t try to map the thoughts and ways of men to the Legiones Astartes, Leon. They are not like us.’ Unbidden, a note of rare, honest awe crept into his voice. ‘They are an order of magnitude beyond our crude humanity.’

He closed the door to the room and stood in silence, listening until he was sure the boy was gone. Then he spent another hour moving around the suite by lamplight with an auspex in his hand, letting the device sniff the air for electromagnetic waves, thermal patterns or anything else that might indicate the presence of a listening device. Mendacs knew he would find nothing, but it was good tradecraft to make the sweep. The habits of espionage were what kept his kind alive, in the end.

He placed his baggage and clothes, settling himself in the room. It was actually better accommodation than he was expecting, modest but comfortable. He recognised the old touches of a woman’s hand, now ill-cared for. A remnant of the dead mother’s influence.

When he was ready, Mendacs opened up the smaller valise case and disengaged the thin hide-panels over the real contents. He worked a crystal control and set the systems inside to a waking mode. The autonomous cogitator programs inside the mechanisms would run a series of tests to ensure the unit was in full working order, but he expected no problems. The unit was highly resilient.

As the device chimed to itself, Mendacs opened his tunic and drew out the small witness rod secreted in an inner pocket, and disconnected it from the microphone head fitted into his cuff. He unfolded a disc-shaped panel from the rod to manipulate the recording, cutting it into a rough edit for transfer. He had all of Yacio’s broadcast copied on there, the voice and the template sampled in near-flawless detail. When the unit was done, he inserted the rod into a data port and let the recording migrate.

The valise’s innards were a suite of advanced microelectronics and crystallographic matrices; it was capable of many functions: vox communications, variable range narrow/broadcast, frequency jamming, countermeasures, simulation, data parsing, and more. He doubted anyone on Virger-Mos II could even comprehend the true potential of the unit; even in the core worlds, technology of this kind was both rare and prohibited.

The rod gave off a soft ping and he removed it, unfolding a screen from the inside of the valise to examine the waveforms of the artificially generated voice. Mendacs paused, examining the pattern in the way an artist might view a blank canvas before committing the first brushstroke.

He paused; it was dry and warm, and the task he was about to perform would take a while. He shrugged off his tunic and rolled up the sleeves of his undershirt, making himself comfortable before he picked up his edit-stylus.

If anyone had been in the room with Mendacs, as he moved they might have briefly glimpsed an icon tattooed on the inside of his forearm; in green ink, the symbol of a mythic hydra, its tail raised and three heads rearing back in fanged defiance.

+++Broadcast Plus Eleven Hours [Solar]+++

A dust storm was brewing far out on the plains, and while it was too distant from Forty-Four to cause any damage, the trailing edges of it were brushing the outskirts of the town, darkening the sky and pushing ripples of grit down the streets.

Some of the people who assembled outside the telegraph station had goggles and masks dangling about their necks in readiness; others already wearing them. Along with the masks, there was a ready profusion in the number of weapons that were being worn openly. Mostly, they were low-calibre stubber rifles and shot-rods used for keeping down the population of grain vermin. Some had farming implements, although what enemy they hoped to defend against was unclear. It was more a matter of the weapons being there to soothe the ones who carried them, rather than being of any actual use in a confrontation.

Dallon Prael had the only thing that could be considered a ‘modern’ weapon, and even that definition stretched credibility. The laslock rifle he held tightly was over a hundred and forty years old, bequeathed to the Prael family by a great-great-grandmother who had served with honour in the Imperial Army. The relic gleamed in the lamplight, and the fat man carried it as if it were his badge of office.

Town Forty-Four had never had a constable; there had never been the need, what with a circuit lawman from Oh-One passing through once a lunar. But Prael fancied himself as some kind of just man, as if the owning of the rifle made him heir to that office.

He glanced at Ames Kyyter, who stood with his perpetually grim expression glaring hard over his folded arms. The dormitory owner gave a sullen nod. ‘Is there a purpose to this gathering?’

Prael cast around. No one had made any announcement, but still the majority of the township was represented here, faces from almost all the families that lived inside the dominions. Those that were not here were being debated on by the rest of them, their names taken in vain. After all, if you didn’t stand up and be counted, then you had to be hiding something, didn’t you? You had to be afraid to take a side.

Nobody had done anything so foolish as to lay a blow on another or rattle their weapon, but it was getting close to that. Questions and disagreements were reaching a head, fierce discussions building into simmering rage. Prael listened, venturing an interruption when he thought he was in the right and likely to be agreed with. All the talk broke down into two opposing viewpoints and the schism was growing larger with each passing moment. Rather than building consensus, the impromptu town meeting was widening the cracks.

If the Emperor was truly dead, so some were saying, then what did that mean to the people of the colony, of this township? What did it really mean?

Prael had no doubt in his mind that the message on the telegraph was authentic. After all, there were mechanisms in place to make sure that the astropathic signals from the Sol system and the core worlds were immune to distortion. He had been told this by other broadcasts and he believed it. He didn’t need to know how that worked, only that it did. Although he disliked the religionist nature of the word, he had faith.

The message said the Emperor was dead; so he was. And where did a man like Dallon Prael go from there? Horus would be on the throne of Earth now, and he would be gathering his new empire to him. They all knew the stories of the worlds razed to ash for daring to show defiance to the Warmaster – like the planets of the Taebian Stars and other nearby sub-sectors, burned and left as dead balls of stone.

Some voices called for submission, for the intelligent, logical course of action. They wanted to put up the flag of the Warmaster, fly the Eye of Horus on every pennant. What other way was there to save themselves, if not declaring their loyalty to the new Imperator Rex? If they chose otherwise, when the Legiones Astartes finally arrived, they would be put to the sword en masse.

Others showed disgust at such an idea. This was an Imperial world, after all. Founded by Terra and the Emperor, brought to life by Imperial will, from the sweat of the brow of Imperial citizens and in service to the Imperium of Man. A loyal world of loyal colonials who should rightly spit hate in the eye of a turncoat murderer like Horus Lupercal.

Prael listened to the arguments fly to and fro, and held his own tongue. The Virger-Mos system was so very far from Terra, so isolated and remote that it was barely part of the Imperium, just in name and manner only. He dared to ask himself the question – would it matter?

How would it matter to a world like this one who ruled from a distant Earth? Horus or the Emperor? What possible difference could it make? They would still grow their grain and ship it out, they would still be born and toil and die under the shadow of the Skyhook. The only change would be the colours on the flag and the voice on the broadcasts.

So, was his fealty that cheap? Was the loyalty of a single colony to its birthworld so fragile and meaningless, that it could be broken by some lights in the sky and the phantom threat of a reprisal?

‘We can’t just roll over like dogs!’ Prael startled himself by letting the thought take voice in a sudden outburst. His eyes misted with the force of his emotion, suddenly given a release. ‘Are we that weak?’

‘It’s not weakness, it’s pragmatism!’ Ames Kyyter shot back an angry retort, backed by a handful of nodding people. ‘It means nothing to us whose backside lies on the Throne of Terra! So we say a different oath, so what? At least we live! I’m not going to lose all I have in the name of someone I have never seen, someone who doesn’t even know this planet exists!’

Prael took a threatening step towards the other man. ‘You don’t understand!’

‘It might not even be Horus, did you think of that?’ Ames retorted. ‘Maybe it’s the remnants of the Emperor’s stalwarts, come here to make planetfall!’

Behind them, the door to the telegraph office slammed open and Oren Yacio came out, moving woodenly, his face drained of colour. He still had the complex set of headphones in his hands, the ones he wore while he worked at the telegraphic console. A loose wire trailed after him, dangling from an implant in the back of his neck.

No one spoke as Yacio took the steps down to the road, blank-faced and sweaty. The only sound was the rattle and twang of the cables over their heads as the touch of the distant storm-winds brushed over them.

Finally, the telegraphist spoke, raising his voice to be heard. ‘On this day, news from… News reaches the colony...’ He was trying to keep a professional tone to his words, but he failed. Yacio swallowed and began again, eschewing his normal air of formality. ‘A fragmentary broadcast has come across the wires. It was piecemeal and it took me many hours to reassemble it. Sporadic reports from Oh-Nine, One-Five and the capital.’

‘The drop-pods,’ asked a woman. ‘Is it the Sons of Horus?’

A torrent of other questions erupted after her, and Yacio waved his hands and let out a screech. ‘Quiet! Quiet! Listen to me!’ He shivered despite the warmth of the night air. ‘It is my duty to tell you all that his honour Esquire Lian Toshack, Imperial Governor-Select of the Virger-Mos colony, took his own life this day in his chambers. There… There is confusion about how next to proceed.’

A ripple of reaction crossed through the small crowd. Prael said nothing, his sweaty fingers kneading the frame of the laslock. Toshack had killed himself rather than face the invasion. How many others would do the same, too terrified of the Warmaster to even bear the thought of facing his Legions?

‘There’s more,’ Yacio went on, shaken by the portent of his news. ‘Other townships are passing on unconfirmed reports of… of sightings.’ He licked his lips. ‘Massive figures in dark armour have been seen advancing from town to town. Those settlements that sent such reports have all gone off the wire shortly afterwards.’

‘Space Marines,’ breathed Ames. ‘Throne and blood, they’re really here.’ He nodded to himself with the bleak solemnity of a man standing before the executioner’s block. ‘I knew it.’

‘No!’ Prael snapped. ‘No, we don’t know!’ He grabbed Yacio’s arm. ‘You said “unconfirmed”. That means this could be some kind of mistake, or–’

‘Open your eyes!’ screamed the woman. ‘We are invaded, you idiot!’ Her words were like a match to kindling, and everyone on the street was shouting and wailing.

Panic hit Prael like a wave, and he felt the mood of the townsfolk crumbling. He knew that if he didn’t act now, the whole settlement would fall apart. With a grunt of effort, he hauled himself up onto the hood of a parked trailer and waved the laslock in the air, filling his lungs to shout.

‘Listen to me!’ he bellowed, drawing their attention. ‘I have lived my life in this township, just like all of you! And the blight can take Horus Lupercal for all I care!’ He shook the rifle, finding a new reservoir of will inside himself. ‘I will die before I allow that traitor bastard and his turncoat whoresons to take my home from me! I’d rather burn than surrender!’

His blunt, forceful oratory got him a ragged chorus of cheers from those in the crowd who felt the same, but there was still a sizeable number who looked on, sneering at his words.

And just then, from his higher vantage point, Prael saw something coming. Lights, bobbing as they moved, and the sound of an engine behind them. Something dark and large caught in the nimbus of the storm, coming down the mainway from the edge of town.

‘It’s them!’ screamed a voice. ‘They’re already here!’

The crowd scattered, some of them stumbling over one another in wild haste, others fleeing to find anything that approximated cover.

The motions of his hands were automatic; Prael found the laslock coming up to his shoulder, his eye peering down the iron sights. The training and the days of vermin-shooting with a slug-thrower snapped back to him. The old laser rifle warmed up and went live. His finger was on the knurled trigger-plate.

The dark shapes were closing in, riding on a plume of windborne dust. Prael wondered what was out there, behind those lights. An armoured tank, a cross-terrain vehicle? Perhaps lines of Legiones Astartes walking single file? He’d heard they did that to hide their numbers.

‘Prael!’ Ames was shouting at him, trying to pull him off the trailer. ‘Get down from there, you worthless idiot! You’ll be the death of us all! Put down the bloody gun before they see you!’

In all his life, Dallon Prael had wanted to be something. To be more than just a solarman, to have his existence matter. No, more than that. He wanted to be a hero.

His finger tightened on the trigger-plate. He would be a hero. Even if he had to die to do it. He would teach these invaders a lesson.

The laslock released a pulse of brilliant red light with a shriek of split air, and the shot hit the mark Prael had made for it.

He let out a breath and felt suddenly dizzy. He waited for the reprisal. And waited.

The wind and dust went on and brushed past him with a crackle of grit, and Prael stumbled down, advancing towards his aim point. Acrid smoke curled in the air and he smelled burned flesh.

He stopped, and found himself looking at Silas Cincade’s corpse, lying where the body had been blown out of the saddle of an idling rover trike. A good quarter of the mechanic’s face was a blackened ruin of meat, where the las-bolt had hit just above his right eye.

Prael started shaking, the rifle falling from his nerveless fingers.

In the end, it fell to Yacio to approximate something approaching organisation. While Prael went to pieces, weeping like a child, the telegraphist called on the townsfolk to find whatever they could to barricade the roads in and out of Town Forty-Four. They obeyed, mostly out of the need to feel like they were doing something that mattered instead of just waiting to die.

Cincade’s body was taken, and somebody got the laslock away from Prael. The mechanic had ridden to Oh-One in search of information, and now they would never know what he had to tell them; most of the town had already assumed Silas to be dead anyway, fearful that the wandering invaders out there in the fields would have killed him before he ever reached the capital beyond the horizon.

Yacio warned them that the Legiones Astartes would come here. It was inevitable. The Skyhook was here, and that made it a tactical location. They had to protect it – either from an invading army come to plant its flag or for a brigade of defenders come to protect them from a heartless dictator. The space elevator was all they had that might be able to keep them alive.

What troubled Oren Yacio the most was the question of what he would do when he finally learned who had arrived on Virger-Mos II. The forces of the Emperor, or the Legions of Horus?

Did it actually matter?

+++Broadcast Minus Two Weeks [Solar]+++

The title of the book was Insignum Astartes: The Uniforms and Regalia of the Space Marines, and it was a real tome in the traditional sense of the word. Not a pict-book to be read by a data-slate, but a physical object made of plaspaper, like the ones his mother had always favoured.

Leon took great care with it, as the binding was old and the pages uneven where the glue holding them in place had yellowed and gone to powder.

He looked over age-dulled images of armoured warriors, captured by picters or rendered in artwork as they strode battlefields like mythic storm-lords. He knew the representations intimately, every shade and line and colour. He knew every word in the book by heart. The careworn pages showed details of Legion sigils, banners and insignia, basic facts on the nature of the Legiones Astartes and their battle doctrines. The book smelled of age and solemnity. At his feet, hand-drawn sketches that were full of painstaking detail, rendered on scraps of butcher’s paper, lay in an untidy pile beneath his bed.

Leon’s scribblings were crude in comparison to the illustrations in the book, but still he poured his full measure of intent into them. The best of his work – such as it was – was pinned to the walls of his small, narrow bedroom, along with yellowing newsprint clippings and pages kept from leaflets provided by the colonial authorities. The rest of his books and spools of picts lay on plastic shelves above his bed. They jostled for space with a collection of figurines, some stamped from metal and brightly painted, others formed from off-cuts of wood that Leon had carved himself. The youth’s room was, in its own way, a dedication to the great dreams of the Emperor and his warriors, to their glory and the glory of humanity.

Pride of place went to a single cylinder made of heavy-gauge brass, polished to a bright sheen: the spent casing of a bolt shell. He put down the book and reached for it, taking the case between thumb and forefinger, turning it so it caught the light. Not for the first time, Leon wondered where the shot it contained had been fired. He tried to picture the mass-reactive shell head and the damage it would have wrought on impact. Who died for the sake of this? He asked the question in silence. Leon tried to imagine himself there in that moment, looking on as the round took the life of an enemy of the Imperium.

The door to his room opened and Leon jerked, startled from his reverie. He’d been so engrossed in his own thoughts he hadn’t heard his father’s approach; certainly the man would never give him the grace to knock before entering.

Immediately, he saw the shell casing in Leon’s hand and his expression soured. ‘I can see you’re busy.’

Leon coloured, feeling foolish. ‘What’s wrong?’ He fumbled with the casing, unsure where to put it. The man who sold it to him had taken a high price for it, and Ames had beat him when he learned how much scrip he had ‘wasted’; but the casing had fallen from the ejection port of a Space Marine’s bolter, and owning it made Leon Kyyter feel somehow connected to the warrior kindred he saw in the books.

‘It’s worthless, you know that, don’t you?’ Leon’s father pointed at the brass cylinder. ‘It was probably picked from the mud beneath the boots of some idiot in the Imperial Army, if that. That shell’s never been within a light-year of a Space Marine.’ He glanced around the room disapprovingly, as he always did.

Leon kept his silence. He didn’t care to believe what Ames said. In his eyes, the casing was real and true, and that was all that mattered.

‘I’ll never comprehend why you hold so much interest for…’ He sneered at the crude drawings on the walls and the metal figures. ‘For all this.’ Bitterness clouded his father’s tone. ‘The Space Marines, the Emperor, all of them… They don’t care about you as much as you care about them. Terra thinks nothing of Virger-Mos or the people who live here. I keep wondering when you’re going to grow up and realise that.’

Still, Leon said nothing. He didn’t want to repeat the same pointless argument they had fought a hundred times over.

Ames tapped a picture of the Imperial Palace cut from a pamphlet, the edges of it curling inwards. ‘I know you think that one day you’ll go see this for real. But sooner or later, you have to learn that won’t happen. It’s a fantasy, son. You were born here, and you’ll die here. And the Imperium will go on without you. It won’t care.’

‘What do you want?’ Leon said, at last.

His father frowned and turned away. ‘Do something useful. Take the kitchen remains to the burner.’

Leon waited until he was gone, and then replaced the shell. He put the copy of the Insignum Astartes back on the shelf, where it would be pressed flat and kept safe, and then dolefully took up the duty he had been given.

He walked across the dusty patch of grass behind the dormitory house to where the maw of the burner protruded from its underground hollow, and kicked the grate open with his feet. Leon let his mind wander, pretending instead he was on Terra, walking the halls of the Emperor’s Palace; but then the stink of the burner reached him and the pleasant illusion was destroyed. Scowling, he poured the pail of slops into the drop tube and let the furnace start its work.

Through habit, he looked up at the Skyhook. At this time of day, the sun was throwing the space elevator’s shadow directly over the building.

In the shade, Leon found Esquire Mendacs sitting cross-legged on the grass with a water flask and a cloth bag at his side. The remembrancer was working at a pict-screen, moving a stylus across it. He saw the youth and threw him a wan smile, beckoning him over.

He left the pail and wiped his hands on the thighs of his trousers. ‘Beg pardon, esquire,’ Leon said as he came closer. ‘If I smell a little. The kitchen remains, I was just disposing of them.’

Mendacs nodded. ‘It doesn’t notice. Are you well, Leon?’

‘Well enough.’ He nodded at the hand-held screen. ‘What is that you’re doing there?’

‘See for yourself.’ Mendacs offered him the device, and Leon took it gingerly, cautious not to touch any of the tabs or buttons around the pict-screen’s frame.

A half-finished image was centred in the middle of the display, a line sketch of the township from the shallow rise where the dormitory house sat. The rise of the Skyhook dominated the drawing.

Leon felt a brief flash of jealousy. Mendacs’s skill with the pen was an order of magnitude beyond the youth’s crude attempts, and even the incomplete piece here made his scribblings look like the work of an infant. He nodded. ‘It’s impressive.’

‘It will be the basis for a digi-painting, perhaps,’ Mendacs said airily. ‘We’ll see when I’m finished with it.’

When Leon didn’t answer, the remembrancer’s expression shifted and he frowned. The other man’s cool, steady gaze seemed to bore straight into the youth, and he wanted to look away.

‘Your father…’ Mendacs paused, feeling for the right words. ‘He doesn’t seem to have an appreciation for art.’

Leon gave a glum nod. ‘Aye.’

‘Your mother did, though.’

‘How did you know that?’

Mendacs smiled. ‘Because you do, Leon. And because there are still traces of her lingering in your home.’ He stopped, suddenly concerned. ‘Forgive me. Am I speaking out of turn?’

Leon shook his head. ‘No, no. You’re exactly right.’ He sighed. ‘I’d like to have the talent that you do, but I don’t.’

‘I’m sure your skills are balanced in other ways,’ offered the remembrancer.

‘My Da doesn’t seem to think so.’

Mendacs studied him. ‘Fathers and sons always have a fractious relationship. This is a truth that spans the galaxy. One pulls against the other… one rebels, defies… The other tries to hold on to the old order of things, against reason.’

‘We don’t see eye to eye,’ Leon sighed. ‘He thinks the Imperium ignores us out here on the periphery. He tells me that it’s all far away and unreachable. Terra, and all those things.’

‘That is as much true as it is false,’ said Mendacs, ‘but I imagine Esquire Kyyter would not hear that.’ He leaned in. ‘Do you think he is right?’

‘No,’ Leon answered immediately. His temper began a slow burn. ‘He doesn’t see what I see. He’s blind, too set in his ways. And he wants me to follow in his footsteps. I’ve tried to get him to see things like I do, but he doesn’t want to hear it. He thinks…’ The young man paused. ‘I think he believes I’m turning on him.’

‘A traitor to your kin.’ Mendacs said the words without weight. ‘It’s strange, isn’t it? How fathers and sons can be so close but at the same time be so far apart?’ He paused and looked away. ‘Do you imagine that Horus Lupercal shared a measure of what you feel now, Leon?’

‘What?’ The question came from nowhere, and in its wake Leon felt unsettled. ‘No! I mean...’ He stopped and shook his head. ‘The Emperor and the primarchs are not like us.’ The idea seemed ludicrous.

‘No?’ Mendacs went back to his sketching, the stylus moving over the screen in small flicks of motion. ‘Even those who transcend humanity must stem from it. The bonds of family, of brotherhood and fatherhood… They still exist in them. They cannot escape such truths.’ The remembrancer looked back at him. ‘Just like you, Leon. It is something that all men must face. The question: May I defy my father?’

‘The Warmaster’s defiance has cost the lives of millions,’ Leon blurted.

Mendacs looked away again. ‘All choices have their price.’

+++Broadcast Plus Twenty-Two Hours [Solar]+++

Leon crouched by the windowsill, the lights in his room doused, straining to listen. From the township proper, the sounds of breaking glass and the crack of gunfire echoed up towards him. He felt hollow inside, watching the plumes of black smoke rising into the night sky. The faint glow of fires was visible through the lines of the alleyways; he guessed that the general store was burning, but he couldn’t understand why anyone would have wanted to put it to the torch.

It was hours since his father had left, ordering him on no account to leave the dormitory house. Ames didn’t know that his son had seen him pick up the revolver he hid in the cellar, and tuck it into his waistband before he went. Leon tried to understand what that might mean. Why would his Da need a weapon, unless he knew that danger was coming to Forty-Four? Or was there another reason? Another kind of threat?

Leon’s hands knitted and he looked around the room, the faint light throwing shadows over his pictures. He wanted to do something, but he didn’t know what it might be. None of his books or his drawings could give him any kind of answer.

Then he heard the door close downstairs. Leon blinked and peered back out of the window; that seemed wrong. Had his father returned?

Instead, he saw a shape in motion through the places where the light from the township didn’t fall, slipping away from the house. The figure was careful to stay in the shadows at all times, never once passing into the light.

It could only have been Mendacs; but the man moved in a way Leon had never seen before, almost as if his entire body language had gone through a subtle shift. On an impulse he couldn’t quite grasp, the youth scrambled to his feet and went after him.

The remembrancer’s course skirted the edges of the township, and having lived his entire life within its confines, Leon soon knew where Mendacs was heading. The alleyways and cut-backs the man took were part of the map of the youth’s world, places where he had run as a child and played at games of Great Crusade with his friends.

Mendacs was heading for the base of the Skyhook, and his path avoided all the places where the citizens of Forty-Four were gathered. Keeping his distance, Leon tried not to let the sights around him distract him from the follow; but it was not easy to put aside the sounds of the fires and the screaming.

At the corner of the Adjunct, some men had been hung from the lamp posts, and they swayed in the wind, the fibre cord about their necks creaking. Leon recognised faces from the tavern up there, now bloated and pale. Along the top of the mainway, it looked as if people had built barricades, although he was too far away to be sure. Once or twice he spied small groups of people armed with anything that could be turned into a weapon, some stalking the streets, others hiding in wait as if looking for something to ambush. Windows were stove in on some houses; he saw one with the name of the Warmaster daubed across the front door. He couldn’t tell if it was as a warning or as a mark of hate. And at the westerly point, a telegraph pole had been cut down with chainsaws, lying where it fell with a mess of torn wires about the head of it.

Leon lost sight of Mendacs as the remembrancer approached the service block at the foot of the space elevator. He was distracted by a moment of angry shouting between two men that ended abruptly in the blast of a shot-rod. One of the voices was familiar to him: Kal Muudus, a neighbour from a few doors down the lane. He was yelling something about the Emperor, but his words were barely coherent.

A moment of real fear washed over Leon and it took all his will to stay where he was in the shadows, and not run pell-mell back to the dormitory house.

He stiffened, digging deep to find what small measure of courage he had. Leon’s world was collapsing around him as the day drew on, and in this instant of understanding, he questioned if Esquire Mendacs might have something to do with it. The tensions and unspoken discord between the settlers of Town Forty-Four had been there before Mendacs had arrived; but it was only after he came that they bubbled to the surface. Only after the remembrancer had taken residence had the darkness of the Great War out there seemed to reach its inky fingers towards the colony.

Leon drew himself up and sprinted the distance to the service blockhouse. The door was locked shut, but there was a narrow vent shaft up above it that the youth was skinny enough to enter.

He expected to be bombarded by the screams of alarms, but Leon dropped to the floor with only the clatter of his boots on the deck. He shrank into cover behind a cargo rig, but the sound of his arrival was lost in the steady background noise of the Skyhook’s inner workings.

Even with the troubles in Town Forty-Four, the mechanised elevator went on regardless, ignoring the human drama beyond as it continually ferried trains of cargo capsules up to the orbital transfer station. A part of Leon was dazzled by his own daring at penetrating the blockhouse, and doing it with so little effort – but then he recalled that everyone in the settlement had been drilled with the warning never to enter the chambers within. Not only would the machines in there likely kill them by accident, but to do so was a violation of the colonial charter. Those found guilty of that were reclassified as indentured helots and sent to the frozen polar zones, to work off a decade or two on a punishment detail. Fear of that reprisal had kept the place sacrosanct.

Now he was inside, Leon was fascinated by what he saw, the motion of the mech-arms, the rail points and the pod-trains. If an ant could have crawled inside a working rover engine, it might have experienced the same sights and sounds.

Movement drew his eye to a line of six empty capsules, their gull-wing hatches all open. At the front of the line, Mendacs was leaning over a control console, working at buttons and switches with deft, singular focus. At once, a siren gave a low hoot, and the train began to move forwards, the hatches slowly dropping to seal shut. Mendacs grabbed his bags and threw them into the closest pod, before stepping in after.

Leon came up out of the shadow as the train pulled away, the gaps left by the hatch doors growing smaller every second. He knew where the pods would be going, where Mendacs had to be going. Up, to the station, and off-world.

If he did nothing, he would never know why, would never know what was happening to his town and his colony. But the risk… the risk was more than he had ever known in his life.

He took it anyway. At the last possible second, Leon sprinted to the rearmost pod of the train and ducked under the closing hatch. The pod rang as the door sealed shut with a hiss of air.

The boy felt an abrupt shock of acceleration as the train moved onto the ascent rails; and then it settled onto a vertical rise and Leon tumbled into a corner, banging his head on an inner wall. Spirals of light behind his eyes followed him into darkness.

The modified cogitator program did exactly what Mendacs wanted, shunting the cargo pods into a siding once they entered the transfer station, instead of moving the containers straight to unloading. He disembarked and gathered his gear, pausing only to throw a wry smile in the direction of the rear of the train, and then moved off.

The gravity plates in the deck of the transfer station shifted the orientation of ‘up’ and ‘down’ so that the colony was actually at his back. The platform itself, at the three-quarter point of the Skyhook’s length, was a flat disc shaped like a three-lobed cog; each of the cog’s teeth was an automated loading airlock for freight tenders to nuzzle to, although all but one was vacant. The vessel at the occupied airlock was greatly undersized in comparison to the grain carriers that usually made port there. It was just a simple warp-cutter, little more than a courier ship. Mendacs had been careful to dock it at the upper tier, so that anyone with a telescope on the ground would not be able to see it.

He didn’t go straight to his ship. First, he dumped the baggage – he wouldn’t need it for the last stage of the operation – and headed spinwards around the disc to the sealed astropath’s chambers.

The laspistol he had carried on his arrival was still where he had left it, hanging by a lanyard from the hatch controls. Mendacs recovered it, checked the charge as a matter of course, and then opened the heavy steel door. He heard the crackle of the energy-dampening field as he stepped through.

Nothing had changed; the astropath’s residence globe was as he’d left it, the iris hatch wide open, showing a glimpse of the padded zero-gravity space inside, the litter of debris still where it had fallen when he had been forced to pistol-whip the psyker to show the seriousness of his intent.

And the astropath herself. Still there, lying in a heap, her sallow face and mane of coiled locks staring blankly up at the ceiling. Mendacs cocked his head, watching the play of a nimbus of green-orange light that enveloped the woman, the radiance issuing from an iron box the size of a man’s torso. The stasis generator had performed its function perfectly.

He bent down on one knee and examined the astropath. Behind the glitter of the stasis field, she resembled an image from a video feed frozen in mid-motion. Mendacs didn’t understand the technology by which the device worked, knowing only that it could cast an envelope over a limited area, and within that barrier the passage of time slowed to a crawl. He had been on Virger-Mos II for almost two solar months, yet for the woman, only seconds would have passed. From her viewpoint, he would never have left.

Mendacs reached down and touched the control to deactivate the field. It winked out, and the psyker jerked back into life.

‘Please, do not kill me!’ she wailed, resuming a conversation that was weeks past and forgotten.

‘I will let you live if you do something for me,’ he told her. ‘Send a message. Only that.’

The astropath shook her head, and he held up the laspistol, pointing it at her face. She looked away, and then sighed.

‘It is not something that can be done at a whim. There must be preparations. A certain readiness is needed–’

Mendacs held up his hands. ‘Don’t lie to me. You can transmit at a moment’s notice if need be. I’m not some Administratum tech that you wish to baffle with the mystery of your talent.’ He tapped the barrel of the pistol against his temple. ‘I know how you work.’

Her eyes widened. ‘Without correct foundation, I could be injured! The warp eats the unprepared mind. Please, do not force me!’

She was a psyker of only minor talent; that was undeniable. The fact she was posted here, to this backwater instead of to a starship or colony of real note, confirmed that. The astropath’s days would have been a lonely, tedious string of parsing news from the core and the occasional communion with a comrade aboard a passing ship. Mendacs’s unexpected arrival was practically a gift.

He pressed the laspistol muzzle into her cheek and regarded her impassively. ‘I have other means to send this on my ship,’ he said, ‘but I would prefer that you do it. If your answer remains no, this will end now.’

At last the woman gave a nod. ‘Very well. To where do you wish me to speak?’ Mendacs reeled off a set of spatial coordinates committed to his memory and watched in amusement as the psyker’s expression became one of shock. ‘There?’ she asked. ‘But that is beyond the lines of… It is for his ears?’

Mendacs returned her nod. ‘The Warmaster, yes, after a fashion.’ He gestured with the gun. ‘Send exactly this, no different. Seven words.’

‘Tell me,’ she said, glowering.

‘Mission complete. Proceeding to next target. Mendacs.’

Leon wasn’t certain what would happen next.

He had never been this close to a psyker before, never even seen one in the flesh; for blight’s sake, he had never even been off the surface of his home world before this day, and now he crouched, trying to merge with the shadows out in the corridor beyond the astropath’s quarters.

Awaking with a start as the cargo train came to a halt at the transfer station, the youth had been transfixed by fear, sickened almost to the point of vomiting. Everything felt strange, the pull of gravity on him unusually light, the illuminators in the ceiling too bright, the air cold and artificial-tasting.

He hid inside the pod, afraid that Mendacs would come to find him, waiting until the remembrancer’s footsteps died away. When he recovered a scrap of his bravery, Leon dared to step out and follow the man on as best he could. Through trial and error, he had found his way here – but not before happening on a viewing port that presented to him the curve of his planet and the infinite void that surrounded it.

Leon looked into the blackness and had never been so terrified in all his life. He saw the dark and the fragile mass of Virger-Mos II, and suddenly realised that his father had been right all along. The universe beyond the home they knew was a vast and uncaring space; one glimpse of this awesome sight showed the truth of those words.

He dared to look up from his cover as Mendacs spoke his own name, holding the slim pistol in his hand on the telepath. The woman did something strange, and the air around him seemed to ripple and flex like a lens of oil. A sharp, greasy taint flowed through the chamber, prickling his skin. Leon felt a spider web touch all over his body and he almost cried out. It was the warp. The gossamer edges of it bleeding out from the astropath as she sent the signal.

The youth began to tremble, rocking back and forth, begging fate to make the sensation go away; and then, as quickly as it had come, it dissipated.

‘It is done,’ the woman was saying, her voice carrying to him. ‘Traitor swine.’

Mendacs stepped back and sniffed. ‘That’s a very simplistic view,’ he replied. ‘Loyalty is an elastic concept. You’d be surprised what it can encompass, given enough impetus.’

‘You will not succeed,’ spat the psyker. ‘I know what you are. I see the brand. Alpha Legion.’ She pointed at his arm, where a tattoo protruded from his sleeve. ‘You’re the tool of monsters and turncoats. A liar, a walking falsehood!’

‘I will succeed,’ Mendacs countered. ‘I have succeeded. Here, on Virger-Mos II and dozens of other worlds, all of them of similar stripe. This is not the first planet I have brought to the edge, nor the last.’

‘If… If your masters come to invade, they will be made to pay for whatever they take. The Emperor’s Legiones Astartes will come here and take it back!’

He shook his head, smiling slightly. ‘You don’t understand. Let me make it clear to you, mind-speaker. I alone am the invasion. And my work is done. There will be no massed attack from the stars, no bombardments and battle fleets.’

‘But Horus–’

Mendacs chuckled. ‘The Warmaster has more important things to do than send his men to this dreary corner of the galaxy. Are you so arrogant as to think it would be worth a primarch’s effort? Do you really believe he would commit ships to the capture of a farm?’ He spat the last words with a harsh sneer. Mendacs was warming to his subject; Leon recognised the same manner in his speech that the man had shown to the youth when speaking of his travels. ‘Horus’s fleet, as large as it is, cannot be everywhere at once. But to sow fear into the hearts of the loyalists, it must appear as if it can. Do you see? I am only one of dozens of operatives sent by Alpharius to create dissent and dissolution all across the galaxy.’ He nodded. ‘You are quite correct. I am indeed a liar, and one of the most potent strength. I sampled the signals you sent down to the populace, copied them, emulated them. Then it was only a matter of inserting them into the telegraph network, and letting the paranoia and petty fears of these parochial fools do the work for me. A handful of small asteroids captured from the Oort cloud and kicked into the atmosphere by automata-drones, and the fires were lit.’ He flashed a grin. ‘I made their sky fall.’

With each word the man said, Leon’s fury had grown and grown. His terror gave way to anger, hard resentment at his betrayal. Finally, he could hold it in no more, and he burst from his cover and threw himself at Mendacs, cursing his name.

The remembrancer – no, the spy – let him come running, at the last moment swinging up the laspistol and using it to crack the boy across the face. Leon cried out in agony as the butt of the gun broke his nose and he tripped, stumbling to the floor.

Without pause, Mendacs turned back to the astropath and executed her, the howl of a single las-bolt resonating in the chamber as it blew through the psyker’s heart and killed her instantly.

Leon scrambled backwards, bringing up his hands in a fruitless gesture of self-protection, gagging on the stink of burnt meat. Mendacs ignored him, instead stooping to pick up the box-shaped device lying on the floor. He holstered the gun and walked away.

He was almost out of the room before Leon gathered the wits to call after him. ‘She was right, you are a traitor bastard! You’re a mass-murderer!’

Mendacs halted on the threshold. ‘That’s not true, Leon. I’ve taken only one life since I came to this planet.’ He nodded at the dead psyker. ‘It’s the people who are killers. People down there, in Town Forty-Four and every other place just like it. People like your father and Prael and all the rest. They let themselves be manipulated, because deep within them, they want to be right. They want to have their darkest fears come true, to validate their loathing of the lives they lead.’

‘You did it all!’ Leon shouted. ‘You faked the drop-pods in the sky; you used those things in your case to corrupt the broadcasts… You turned neighbours against each other with your lies and propaganda!’

‘I did. And I will again, and again…’

Leon’s shoulders fell. ‘Are… you going to kill me now?’

Mendacs shook his head. ‘No. I knew you were following me. I wanted to see how far you would come.’

‘Why?’

He shrugged. ‘It amused me. I so rarely have a witness to the full scope of my work.’ The man nodded in the direction of the transfer station core. ‘You’re clever enough to find a set of cargo pods on the downbound rails. They’ll take you home.’

Leon climbed unsteadily to his feet. ‘When I get back,’ he husked, ‘I will tell everyone what you have done. I’ll stop you. I’ll make sure all the other worlds are warned!’

‘No, you won’t.’ Mendacs turned away. ‘You have a choice, Leon. You must swear your loyalty to Horus Lupercal and deny the Emperor’s dominion. Because by the time the Skyhook carries you down to the surface, the colony of Virger-Mos II will belong to the Warmaster. Not through force of arms, but because of the weakness of the people who live there. Because they have exchanged their fear of one thing they have never seen for the fear of another.’ He spared the youth one last look. ‘And if you do not join them, they will be the ones who kill you.’

The warp-cutter detached and turned about its axis, the slower-than-light fusion engines coming online to propel the vessel up and away from the colony world.

In the cockpit module, Mendacs finished the last of the entries in his mission log, pausing to study the details of the mining outpost six light years distant where he would begin his work anew.

Content that he was prepared, he settled back into the acceleration couch and reached for the stasis field generator. He keyed the deactivation timer to trigger a week out from orbital insertion, so that he would have time to intercept the outpost’s vox-transmissions and begin work on a new plan of subterfuge.

Mendacs closed his eyes and flipped the switch; to him, he would awaken a second later and begin again.

It was what he was best at.

Leon Kyyter leaned forwards and let his forehead touch the cold glassaic of the armoured viewport, his hands splayed palm open either side of his face.

He looked down, not daring to glance towards the threatening dark, watching the agri-world beneath him. Night covered the landscape, but there was light, here and there in scattered bands and broken commas of colour.

Light from the fires of burning towns, yellow-orange and hellish in shade, falling everywhere he turned his gaze.

In the cold and the silence, Leon watched the distant flames spread.

Landfall
I

Heka’tan rose from the smoke cloud like a statue of living onyx. The woman was alive but unconscious. Grey tendrils of smoke coiled off the warrior’s ebon skin from where he’d shielded her from the blast. Debris crunched underfoot – most of the ceiling, together with the lume-strip array, had collapsed. Somewhere in the crawl space above, an orange glow flickered.

The fire hadn’t reached the meditation chamber yet and the billowing smoke coming through the vents was escaping upwards. At least she wouldn’t choke to death on the fumes. Others might be injured, in need of rescue. The ship lurched suddenly, throwing Heka’tan against the wall. It was in its death throes now. He could feel the shuddering of the failing engines through the bulkhead, hear the whine of rapid depressurisation from the gash in the fuselage.

The door was blocked. Heka’tan felt the heat beyond it and heard the crackle of flames ravaging the adjacent corridor section. During meditation, his battle-plate was secured in the armourarium. He recalled the oaths of moment affixed to his shoulder guards and greaves. One of those vows was echoed in the onyx flesh of his naked torso too, branded eternally.

Protect the weak.

It was written in sigil-language, the ancient tongue of Nocturne. Heka’tan was born from fire on this hell-world. Rather than debilitate, the blaze invigorated him. He tore the door off its hinges, closing his eyes as the flames swept out and over him. They burned out quickly, devouring the oxygen. Heka’tan stayed anchored in place until it was done, a light tingling on his skin the only lasting evidence of the fire’s touch.

A corridor stretched in front of him. The air hazed with the heat of conflagration. Again, the ship bucked. Not long now before impact. He glanced back at the woman.

The vox alongside him crackled to life, the pilot’s last words.

’...ing down. Brace... selves... impact. Emperor... preserve us...’

Detached and calm, even in the face of imminent and violent landfall, Heka’tan found the last remark curious. It sounded almost like a prayer.

The engine drone became a scream. For a few seconds, Heka’tan remembered... The screaming, the death and blood. ‘Hell made real’ – they were Gravius’s words. Heka’tan staggered, but not from weakness or fatigue. He staggered at the memory of it, of that place where so many had died and so much had gone wrong.

Father.

The thought was a painful one, forming unbidden.

Vulkan was alone. He was alone and surrounded. They were coming for him. He was... he...

...shook his head to banish the nightmare. The smoke in the chamber and the corridor was thickening. Heka’tan heard shouting above the roar of the flames. The desperate ship was arrowing through the sky too fast, too steep. Its sides shuddered hard, presaging a terminal impact.

A sudden change in pitch signalled the ship was coming to the end of its fiery trajectory. The hold was ahead. Heka’tan was halfway down the corridor when he realised he wouldn’t make it in time. Arcadese would have to protect the others, assuming he wasn’t already dead.

‘I’m coming, human…’ he muttered, turning on his heel and racing back through the door. At least he could save one life.

As Heka’tan embraced her, the Stormbird hit the ground with all the force of a drop-pod and the world exploded into hell and fire.

II

Earlier...

Persephia eyed her master with fear.

Hulking plates, edged with gold, sat atop his shoulders. A blade as thick and long as her arm was strapped to the warrior’s thigh. Cobalt metal armoured his form. She found only cold grey stone in the giant’s eyes, glaring back at her with piercing intensity, and looked down again.

The Immortal Emperor’s Legiones Astartes, His Angels of Death – no, that wasn’t right – his Angels of Death, created to protect mankind from threats beyond the stars. A billion, billion worlds; a million, million cultures all compliant – now at war.

Who will protect us from ourselves? Persephia wondered, keeping her eyes on the shaking deck. Who will protect us from you?

War was everywhere, or so it seemed, so the propagandists, the rabble-rousers and Imperial Army press-gangers would have the galaxy believe. Where then the promised era of prosperity and peace made possible through the pre-eminent Imperium? The reality was a galaxy divided.

Join the Emperor, a distant, untouchable figure – after all, who beyond His favoured sons had ever even seen Him? – or be denounced as traitor. Heretic.

No, that wasn’t right again.

Great pains had been taken to assert the empirical fact that the Emperor was not a god. There were no gods.

The propagators, the pamphleteers, had not been seen or heard from again. Idolatry was to be stamped out – science and reason were the future; logic would bring the human race to its apex, and yet… there were whispers.

And what of the other choice? Horus. Warmonger, planet-killer, ruthless demagogue of a bloody crusade allied to old religion, old faith. The smear campaign had been waged with military brutality on Terra. Vilified, demonised, Horus was a monster, a thing of childhood nightmares. How quickly the gilded could fall.

‘Be still,’ said the cobalt giant.

Persephia could barely hear her own thoughts above the droning engines, let alone her actual voice. The giant had heard her as easily as if they were engaged in polite conversation in a quiet room. And his voice had carried with all the force of a thunderclap.

‘My lord?’

‘I said, be still,’ the giant repeated. He had a stylised ‘U’ on his chest plate. A curved helmet, with a vox-grille for a mouth and cold crimson lenses, sat mag-locked to his thigh. Even without his full complement of weapons, secure in the ship’s locker, he was still formidable.

‘The vessel you’re riding in is a Stormbird – though, it scarcely resembles one any more – it has endured harder journeys.’

Persephia was humble and contrite. ‘Yes, my lord. I’m sorry.’

Seemingly satisfied, the warrior shifted back in his grav-harness but was no less threatening. Bionics beneath his armour whirred as he moved, betraying old injuries. It was why the giant had missed out on front-line duties and part of the reason Persephia accompanied him. She had once been an artisan, but since the Edict of Dissolution her role as a remembrancer was a memory long dead. War had come to the galaxy and Persephia’s talents were put to the forge like the rest of the human race.

No one wanted to remember any more.

A bout of turbulence rocked the ship, causing Persephia to stumble.

The pilot’s voice came from the cockpit through the vox.

‘Entering Bastion’s atmosphere. Experiencing wind shear. Attempting to correct.’

Persephia’s gaze alighted on the cobalt giant. His eyes were closed, his respiration barely visible in the movement of his chest.

‘I am not supposed to be here, not like this.’ She clenched her fists tightly, willing the turbulence to abate.

‘You and I have something in common, human. Neither of us should be here. We’ve both been left behind.’ His eyes snapped open, tainted with hurt and anger. ‘Heka’tan’s meditations are almost over. He will have need of his armour.’ The giant closed his eyes again as the artificer moved towards the back of the ship. His sonorous voice followed her.

‘Forgotten… both of us.’

III

Heka’tan was naked but for a pair of training fatigues. He had prepared the ash and the brazier. He had observed the rites and warmed the branding iron. The flame was born in the cradle, and within its blazing grasp he found purity and a sense of truth. Repressed memory came with it…

The drop-ship was taking fire from all sides. Much of its armour plating was punched through by lascannon blasts and several of its heavy bolter armaments were destroyed. Heat emanated from the interior. Shadows lurked there, of broken bodies silhouetted a visceral red from the incendiary fires inside. The guts of the ship lay strewn across the Isstvan plain where a cloying fug of smoke roiled. Hot tracer whickered through air screaming with the discharge of bolters and heavy cannon. Somewhere in the distance, by a shrouded ridgeline, an explosion blossomed.

‘Ta… king… vy… ire…’ The broken vox report crackled in Heka’tan’s ear.

‘Gravius! Is that you, brother?’

‘Affir… mative, brother… aptain…’

‘Fall back immediately and assume defensive postures.’

Around him, the fight was intensifying. Gunfire, scores of overlapping bolter bursts, rose to a deafening frenzy. Enemy cohorts were massing from the east and west, and advancing on their position.

Enemy cohorts.

The notion was insane, a crazed nightmare brought to life on a dead world with only the dead to witness it. For surely, that’s what they all were.

‘Brother… aptain…’ There was a pause not caused by the static interference.

Figures were resolving through the artificial fog. Their hulking forms wore the colour of hard steel, of grey unyielding metal. Iron.

The Urgall Depression was no place for a last stand. The ravine resembled a charnel field and not a place about which great deeds were sung. There would be no glory, face down in the blood-drenched tundra slain by one’s own brothers.

Gravius continued and for once the link was clean. ‘What’s happening?’

Heka’tan had three hundred and sixty-two Legiones Astartes left in his command. They had forged a ring around the shattered drop-ship. Over half that number again was forever entombed inside their vessel, lost before the fight had even begun, a fight the brother-captain didn’t understand.

‘Assume defensive postures,’ he answered, for want of something better, something that made sense.

The line of iron opened up with its weapons. Fusillade met fusillade as both sides engaged, hundreds of muzzle flares ripping up the smoke like jagged knives of hot light.

It was but a skirmish in a maelstrom of death. This was a battle like no other. It was a reckoning. It was a show of force. But above all else it was fratricide on an epic scale.

Heka’tan’s words to Gravius sounded hollow even to him. ‘Hold out as long as you can.’

It was over. Even before he’d seen the armoured column advancing behind the infantry, Heka’tan knew it. He took a round to the shoulder, the explosive impact nearly tearing off the pad and spinning him. A second struck him in the chest and he staggered.

One of his own, Ikon he thought, died to a throat wound. More followed, too numerous and rapid to count. Apothecaries were a pointless luxury during this nascent massacre. The air shimmered with the heat of shells passing so close that some struck one another and deviated from their original targets. Above, Thunderhawks and Stormbirds tried to escape. Heka’tan saw several in the livery of the Raven Guard and Iron Hands plunge from the smoke-blackened sky like broken comets. Distant explosions announced their destruction.

Bleak was not the word for their chances.

Fatalism, yes, but capitulation was not amongst Heka’tan’s emotional vocabulary. Sons of Nocturne were born of sterner stock. They came from the earth and its fiery heart-blood. They would not go to Mount Deathfire with the foe unbloodied.

‘Burn them!’

A wave of super-heated promethium spewed from the Salamanders’ serried ranks. Several Iron Warriors fell to the flamers, first going to their knees before collapsing onto the shell-strewn earth.

It wasn’t enough. More were coming. Tongues of fire spilled off their armour like bright vapour contrails. They brought autocannon and multi-lasers, Rapier and Tarantula guns.

Brother killed brother in an endless firestorm that had yet to even reach its full fury.

Now, the long turrets of the battle tanks made themselves known. It was easy to imagine skulls being crushed beneath their tracks, the slow and steady disintegration of civilisations under their massive bulk. Kill markings marred their hulls. How many would be attributed to the Salamanders Legion before this madness was done, Heka’tan wondered?

The tanks were still manoeuvring into position when the Son of N’bel fell upon the line of iron, bending it to his will. A gleaming figure surged into the Iron Warriors, distant but still magnificent. Vulkan and the Pyre Guard slammed into the betrayers with unrelenting vengeance. The primarch’s hammer smashed a bloody wedge into the throng, slow to react to the flank attack.

From below, Heka’tan found it hard to keep track of his father, but saw enough to know iron helms were sundered and chestplates crushed against his wrath. A spit of flame drove the traitors back up the hill, colliding with the advancing armour. Vulkan’s gauntlet engulfed them in a conflagration so intense that power armour was no defence against it.

He reached the first of the battle tanks, a Demolisher that the primarch lifted with his bare hands and turned over. A second he punched through the hull with his hammer, wrenching out the crew within before the Pyre Guard, his retinue and inner circle warriors, followed up with grenades. The back of the tank blew out in a plume of fire, smoke and shrapnel.

Then Heka’tan was running, back up the hill towards his father.

‘Forward in the name of Lord Vulkan! Unto the anvil!’

The ring of three hundred took up the charge, ragged banners snapping defiantly in the icy wind. Snow turned to slush with the heat of their flamers, levelled at the crumbling line of Iron Warriors.

‘Perturabo!’ The voice shook the very ridgeline as deep and forbidding as a Nocturnean lava chasm. Vulkan was enraged, battering tanks aside like children’s toys. He was not the most gifted swordsman, nor was he a master strategist or a psyker of any note, but his strength and fortitude… in that, the Eighteenth Primarch was unrivalled.

Had Ferrus Manus lived there might be cause for debate, but with the Iron Hands primarch’s head lying separate from his body in the shrinking snow that point was now moot.

The low whine of a missile barrage cutting through the air at speed answered Vulkan and he looked to the heavens.

Heka’tan followed his primarch’s gaze a second later and saw the danger too late.

Fury lit up the ridgeline, ripping tanks and bodies the same, tossing Salamanders and Iron Warriors indiscriminately. The backwash boiled down the hill in a fiery bloom, thundering into Heka’tan just as Vulkan was obliterated from his sight. Then the world faded, darkening in every sense and–

–he awoke.

Something was scratching at the Salamander’s fingers. The efforts were frantic but ineffective. Heka’tan opened his eyes, still shaking. His hand was clenched around a woman’s throat. Eyes narrowed, he released her.

‘What are you doing here?’ He rose from his haunches but the artificer backed off when he tried to approach her. She massaged her throat, trying to breathe.

The skin around her neck was already bruising and there were burn marks where Heka’tan’s fingers still carried the brazier’s heat.

‘Brother Arcadese…’

‘Should not have sent you.’ Heka’tan glowered.

The artificer shook her head. ‘What did I do?’ She was raving a little now, afraid and a little incensed.

Heka’tan rose to his full height, and loomed over her. ‘The rites of Nocturne are for Vulkan’s sons alone.’ There was obvious reproach in his voice. The artificer’s annoyance melted away with the sudden fire blazing in the Salamander’s eyes. They were red but stoked like a furnace. The effect, coupled with the warrior’s ebon skin, was disturbing. ‘Nor do we have use for artificers.’ He would speak to Arcadese later.

‘You’re my first Salamander,’ she admitted, mustering her courage in the face of the diabolic warrior.

‘Then you’re fortunate, for there are few of us left.’ Heka’tan turned away. ‘Now leave me. A Salamander must be fire-touched before battle.’

‘Battle? I thought this was a diplomatic mission?’

The Salamander glared at her. ‘Do I look like a diplomat to you?’

‘No, my lord.’

‘Don’t call me that. I am not your lord, I merely am. Now, go.’

A sudden jolt through the chamber sent the artificer scurrying for footing. Heka’tan caught her. His grip was gentle this time.

A vox crackle made them both turn towards the receiver unit on the wall. The frantic voice of the pilot quickly followed.

‘…vasive action… brace for… mpact!’

‘Huh–’ The half-formed thought was smothered by the explosion rocking the hull and the blast wave ripping through the ceiling.

Heka’tan bore down on Persephia like the coming of night.

Then came smoke and the scent of burning.

Debris
I

The sleek vessel touched down with barely a tremor. Its long silver prow shone in the setting Bastion sun, slightly at odds with the functional grey and bronze of the docking towers. This was not a sleek, smooth shipyard; it was a place of hard edges, of logical, minimalist architecture, of sprawling technological megaliths and super-rigs.

Servitors, haulers, deckers, overseers and foremen clogged companionways, thronged dizzyingly high gantries and lofty work platforms. This was industry. It was grind and solidity. This was Bastion.

Cullis was its prime-clave. A hard city, full of hard men, not just workers and engineers but military men, and it was their might and native arsenal that had afforded them choice.

No real opposition to a Legion, Bastion none the less represented an expenditure of time, a manoeuvring of resources – a surfeit that neither side was willing to commit. Armies were stretched the length and breadth of the galaxy as it was. Better to court its people with words and argument than risk turning Bastion into a wasteland that was no use to either faction.

Ortane Vorkellen knew this as he stepped onto the gangramp of his cutter, shielding his gaze against the dipping sun.

‘Smells of oil and metal,’ muttered Insk, his scrivener. ‘Should’ve brought rebreathers.’

‘And risk offending the natives,’ Vorkellen returned in a quiet voice, his painted smile pitched perfectly for the greeting party.

A gaggle of archivists, lex-savants and codifiers followed him and Insk down the ramp as they descended to the deck floor.

‘Greetings, travellers,’ uttered a moustachioed clave-noble. He towered over the visitors in a bespoke rigger, an exo-skeletal frame of bronze that added a metre to his height and bulked out his limbs with its chassis. Weapon mounts, ordinarily positioned at either shoulder and below the abdominals, were absent, a concession that this was to be a peaceful engagement. Likewise, the noble’s three marshals wore only ceremonial flash-sabres – no barb-whips, no rotor-threshers or other hand-held cannon. A high-marshal accompanied them, making five men in total.

The Bastionites were a people that appreciated all things martial. Perhaps that was why compliance had been so easy to achieve here, despite the world’s obvious military might – they respected strength and knew its measure well. Certainly Perturabo’s Legion had experienced harder-fought, longer campaigns than the one to assimilate Bastion and its annexe-worlds. They had simply recognised the power of the Space Marines and sworn fealty then and there without the expected siege. A contingent of Iron Warriors had been left behind, presumably to garrison the planet, but had left prior to the outbreak of the war with no reason given. Their primarch’s influence was still felt, however, in the statues of Perturabo that rose from the cities like spires.

‘Greetings from the clave,’ added the noble. His russet and silver jacket was pressed and pristine, perfectly accenting the polished bronze of his exo-rigger. His boots, fastened in the machine’s stirrups, were black and shining.

Vorkellen had never been to Bastion, but he had researched the world and its customs. He knew the clave represented the socio-political-martial inner circle of the world’s infrastructure and that every one of Bastion’s nine continents, be they ice-plain, desert flatland or mountain fastness, adhered to the will and guidance of a clave. A naturally occurring thermo-nuclear resource provided light and heat, heavily shielded and stockpiled in underground silos that ran throughout Bastion like arteries. Cullis was the capital and the prime-clave, which was why Vorkellen had travelled there for the negotiations.

‘My lord brings you greeting and honours the clave,’ he replied, bowing at the foot of the gangramp in the custom befitting obeisance to a clave-noble of Bastion. ‘Lord Horus conveys through me his gratitude at this meeting.’

The noble nodded. ‘It is received and noted by Cullis-Clave. Please follow.’ He turned then, his exo-rigger whirring with servos and pistons and pneumatics, and proceeded to clank across the dock towards a great mechanised gate. It was magnificent on account of its size and the inner workings, displayed like a body’s perfect organs on a mortician’s slab. But it was ultimately artless and cold.

Vorkellen followed, his lackeys in tow. ‘You’ve prepared our petition?’ he asked Insk.

The scrivener proffered the data-slate to his master.

Vorkellen took it and proceeded to read. The guards, high-marshal and clave-noble paid them no heed, eyes front and marching to the rapidly approaching gate.

The visitors were shown into a long gallery festooned with banners and laurels.

‘This is where you’ll await audience with the clave-nobles,’ the high-marshal said.

As he was taking in the austere surroundings, Vorkellen asked, ‘Have the representatives from Terra arrived yet?’

‘They are delayed.’

‘Doubtless the Emperor would prefer a show of overwhelming force to bend the clave’s will.’

The high-marshal scowled. ‘You will get your opportunity to present your case to the clave in due course.’

‘Of course, sire. I merely hope to settle this matter of allegiance quickly,’ he replied contritely. A pity we cannot unleash the World Eaters on this place and raze it, he thought behind a strong smile that spoke of his sterling character and honourable ideals.

The high-marshal saluted – a gesture curiously similar to the old sign of Unification, a clenched fist striking the chest. ‘The clave convenes in two hours and thirteen minutes.’

Horus’s iterator smiled again, this time it was thinner, like an adder’s lipless mouth.

Even Erebus couldn’t pull this off as well as me, he thought, hubris overflowing.

‘We’ll be ready,’ he promised.

II

The Stormbird’s side hatch burst open with a well placed kick. The portal was drooling smoke as a broad, flame-limned silhouette filled it.

Arcadese was wearing his battle-helm and had the pilot’s body slung over his shoulder. The human was blood-stained, his fingers and hair blackened by soot.

The angle was wrong as he reached the hatch’s threshold. The Stormbird had hit nose-first, crumpling its cockpit and breaking off portions of wing. Fuselage and engine components lay scattered in the wake of their descent like entrails. A dozen fires ravaged the hull but they were burning out.

Arcadese leapt from the hatch, landing squarely a few metres from the wreck. The ground yielded underfoot and the Ultramarine sank a few centimetres. The lights and industry of Cullis were pinpricks on the horizon, no more than an hour’s march away. In the distance he could see the stilts lifting the platforms and rigs above the grey-brown ash sump surrounding it. It was a petro-chemical mulch, redolent of power plant refuse and engine yard effluvia.

He set the pilot down and returned to the ship.

‘Salamander,’ he called into the dissipating smoke. Emergency lighting flickered.

A figure emerged from the smog, another smaller one in his arms.

‘I’m here.’ The artificer was cradled in Heka’tan’s arms. Her eyes were red-ringed and stinging, and she coughed.

A word resolved in Arcadese’s mind when he saw her: Burden.

‘What of the others?’ Heka’tan asked, stomping into the light halo from the broken hatch.

‘One survivor. Outside. Where is your armour, brother?’

‘Within,’ said Heka’tan.

Arcadese reached for the woman. ‘Give her to me. Go retrieve your armour and our weapons. We may not be on neutral soil after all.’

Heka’tan handed the female over and headed back into the carnage of the ship.

III

An awkward silence persisted between Arcadese and the artificer.

‘How will we get back?’ she asked at last.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Were we attacked?’

‘It appears likely.’

She glanced around the industrial sump fearfully. ‘Are we safe here?’

‘I doubt it.’

‘Will we–’

‘Cease with your questions!’ The Ultramarine turned his steel gaze on her and Persephia shrank a little.

‘I’m sorry,’ she sobbed. ‘I was trained to question… when I was asked to remember.’

Arcadese looked away, his face like stone. ‘Not any more,’ he stated flatly and resumed his vigil outside the broken ship.

IV

Arcadese was relieved when Heka’tan emerged at the hatch carrying two bulky munitions crates. Each was Legion-stamped, the Eighteenth and Thirteenth respectively. He tossed them onto the ground, one after the other, and leapt out.

Heka’tan frowned when he saw Persephia. ‘Is she injured?’

‘She’s human, brother – that is all,’ Arcadese replied, busy with unlocking the crate. He smiled at the sleek, gunmetal stock, the spare clips cushioned in tight-fitting foam. Running his gauntleted hand across the bolter, he found the grip and tugged the weapon free.

‘Are you hurt?’ Heka’tan asked the artificer.

‘I’m fine,’ she snapped, whirling to face him. She wiped at her tears. ‘I’m fine. Just let me do my work.’

Arcadese was about to intercede when Heka’tan stopped him. ‘Leave her.’

The Ultramarine snorted, shucking the bolter around his shoulder on its strap. ‘There’s no threat out here, brother.’ He pointed towards Cullis. ‘Our enemies are in there.’

Heka’tan had started to pull on the mesh under-layer of his power armour. He allowed Persephia to assist with some of the rear-mounted joints and clasps. ‘These are peaceful negotiations, Arcadese.’

‘You of all people should know the falsehood of that.’

Heka’tan didn’t answer.

‘We are forgotten sons, you and I,’ Arcadese continued, ‘you by the Imperium and I by my Legion. To be revived from a coma and faced with this… Nikaea, Isstvan V, our beloved Warmaster a traitor – it is beyond comprehension. I should be at Calth with my father and brothers, not on this backwater world, playing diplomat.’

Heka’tan attached his greaves and chest plate in silence.

An incredulous grunt from the Ultramarine made the Salamander look up.

‘Don’t you want vengeance?’ Arcadese asked.

He was referring to Isstvan and the massacre.

‘I don’t know what I want. Duty will suffice for now.’

Arcadese approximated a shrug and went to retrieve the prone pilot.

‘Leave him.’

The Ultramarine stopped, looking to Heka’tan for clarification.

‘He’s dead.’

V

There was a jagged tear in the fuselage, fringed by incendiary burns. ‘I’ve seen a lot of downed ships. This looks like outside in rather than inside out.’

‘Indeed,’ Heka’tan replied. With Persephia’s help he was fully armoured, a forest-green monolith.

Arcadese was nearby and could barely contain his anger. ‘We were shot down.’ He wanted retribution.

Heka’tan could relate to that. ‘There’s nothing we can do about it now.’

‘What about her?’ Arcadese gestured to the artificer who stood a way back from the wreck, her head bowed.

‘She’s coming with us.’

‘She’ll slow us down.’

‘Then consider it a mercy that no one else survived.’ The rest of the small crew were all dead. ‘I’ll carry her if needs be.’

With an all human crew, the Stormbird had been retrofitted and re-appropriated as a diplomatic vessel, shedding armour and weapons for private chambers, archives and sleeping quarters. Considering the condition of the wreck, Heka’tan wondered at the wisdom of those measures now.

‘This work,’ said Arcadese at length, ‘does not honour warriors.’

‘We are warriors no longer,’ Heka’tan answered, tired of the Ultramarine’s dissatisfaction, and traced his finger down the jagged blast gouge.

Arcadese stalked off, ignoring the artificer. ‘Do what your conscience dictates, brother.’

Heka’tan was no longer listening. He dwelled on the broken Stormbird. It reminded him of another damaged vessel, on another battlefield…

…They were fleeing the landing zone, Stormbirds little more than armoured pyres with his brothers inside.

He was being dragged. Lucidity eluded him, ears ringing with the sound of the blast.

Burned into his mind, Heka’tan saw his father engulfed by fire and death. For a moment he panicked, and struggled against the two Salamanders hauling him.

‘Where is he? What happened? Why are we leaving?’

He tried to get free but he was too weak. His armour was broken and bloody.

A beaked battle-helm, the forest-green streaked with arterial crimson, looked down at him. ‘He is gone, brother.’

‘What? No!’ Heka’tan struggled again, but a jolt of pain from his injuries crippled his efforts. ‘We have to go back.’

‘There is no back. There is nothing there. Vulkan is gone.’

Railing that they had to turn around, they had to find him, Heka’tan passed out and saw only darkness.

Suddenly aware of being watched, Heka’tan came to and looked around. A landman, one of the labour-claves that worked the sump farms at the periphery of Bastion’s major cities, stood watching him. He wore a rebreather, anti-rad coat and sumper-boots. In his left hand, he carried a tilling-stave used to test the depth of sump-ash.

The landman, never before looking upon such a warrior, nodded.

Persephia had gone after Arcadese. Heka’tan nodded back, then went after them.

Negotiation
I

‘Relinquish your weapons, brother.’

Heka’tan kept his voice calm and level inside the gallery. Beyond it, through a vast stone doorway, was the auditorium where Bastion’s clave-nobles would hear their petition. As well as being sealed for the duration of the proceedings, weapons were strictly forbidden in the chamber.

It was a fact the Ultramarine didn’t take well.

‘A Legiones Astartes does not surrender his arms. Prise my weapon from my cold, dead fingers – that is the only way a warrior of Ultramar would give up his bolter, so says my Lord Guilliman.’

‘And my Lord Vulkan counsels temperance in the face of impasse. That pragmatism not pride is the solution to seemingly irreconcilable discord.’ Heka’tan unloaded his bolter clip and sprang a shell from the breech before handing it over to a sanctum-marshal. ‘Relinquish it, Arcadese. We cannot negotiate armed and armoured. Nor can we go back.’

The Stormbird was destroyed, and the march through the sump swamp had done nothing to improve Arcadese’s mood, even though Heka’tan had carried the artificer to speed their progress.

‘We will be defenceless.’

Heka’tan returned a carefully impassive expression. ‘A warrior of the Legion is never defenceless, brother.’

‘Cold, dead fingers, remember. I am an Angel of Death. I am death.’

Heavier-armoured marshals entered the gallery and levelled rotator-cannons at the Ultramarine.

Arcadese drew his combat blade with a belligerent shriek of steel. ‘To take arms against one is to take arms against all the Legiones Astartes!’

A stern grip on his wrist brought more anger but stopped any potential bloodshed in the making.

Heka’tan’s hold was unflinching. His red eyes blazed with captured fire. ‘Think. Any killing here won’t further our cause, it will end it… And us. Use the wisdom your father gave you.’

Though reluctant, Arcadese saw sense and relented. Scowling at the relieved marshals, he relinquished his weapons.

He was about to move forwards into the auditorium when a pair of marshals blocked his path.

Arcadese glared at them.

‘Now what?’

‘Your armour, too,’ said the high-marshal from behind him.

The Ultramarine shook his head and gave Heka’tan a rueful look as he unclasped a gauntlet. ‘This gets better.’

Persephia moved in to assist him.

‘See that they are well tended,’ Arcadese said in a threatening undertone. The artificer merely nodded, carefully removing a vambrace.

The high-marshal looked on. ‘Who speaks for the Imperium?’

‘I will,’ said Arcadese. He’d removed his breastplate and pulled the torso portion of his mesh under-layer away. Grotesque bionics were revealed beneath, a legacy of Ullanor where he’d fallen in battle to the greenskin. He’d been comatose and hadn’t witnessed the Emperor’s last war, his greatest victory. Instead, he’d awoken to a world that no longer made any sense.

Heka’tan smiled, starting to remove his own battle-plate. ‘Can’t you tell he’s the natural negotiator?’

II

They stood before the clave-nobles wearing borrowed robes.

‘We are a sight to stir even the Sigillite to laughter,’ Arcadese had remarked upon their apotheosis to diplomats.

Persephia had rejoined them later, having disappeared with the equipment to ensure it was properly stored.

Though they still wore their boots and mesh leggings, the fact of being unarmoured still rankled at the Ultramarine and he took the artificer to one side when she returned. ‘I need you to do something for me…’

The rest of his request was lost to the sound of the great doors to the auditorium closing behind them.

After a loud, concussive boom, a quintet of sombre figures emerged in the sepulchral gloom. They were under-lit by a dimmed lantern array that cast haunting shadows over their faces, and seated on a dark balcony. In a gallery looking down on the auditorium floor and the petitioners was a host of shadow-veiled faces – lesser nobles of Bastion, their politicians and leaders. Judges all.

In the darkness, the vast auditorium’s form was only hinted at. Heka’tan discerned more hard edges, square and functional. The air smelled of stone and steel. The chamber was much more than its name suggested. It had multiple levels, corridors and conduits. Labyrinthine, the auditorium was just a part, and a small one at that. The Salamander’s gaze rested on the other petitioners.

‘Hard to believe Horus sent an iterator and not a Legion.’

Arcadese looked over at the oleaginous men and women clustered around a besuited central figure. ‘I thought the enemy had disbanded the remembrancers, like us.’

‘Horus is a conqueror, brother. He wants his victories to become a part of history.’

‘Aye,’ Arcadese agreed, bile rising in his throat at the sight of the craven humans, ‘he seeks immortality, and to assert his cause is righteous.’

Heka’tan muttered, ‘Tell that to my cold brothers on Isstvan.’

The Ultramarine was only half-listening. His gaze went to a benighted balcony, high in the auditorium’s vaults opposite the clave-nobles. ‘Don’t be sure the Warmaster hasn’t sent warriors. Our ship didn’t crash itself.’

A brazier ignited with azure flame, ending the conversation on a tense note, and illuminated the form of the high-marshal standing in the middle of the auditorium floor.

‘All attend,’ he boomed, his voice augmented by a vox-hailer unit attached to his mouth like breathing apparatus. ‘Senate is in session.’

Arcadese scowled at the ceremony. Fighting the ork would be preferable to this. ‘Take me back to Ullanor,’ he grumbled.

III

Vorkellen affected a serious and professional air. Inwardly, he was ecstatic. This was his battlefield, a war in which even against the Legion he had the surer footing.

He eyed the Ultramarine briefly. ‘I will destroy you,’ he whispered. He needed no Legionaries. What use were they? All their strength and power would only go so far; hearts and minds could not be manipulated by brawn.

‘The Emperor sends warriors to do the work of ambassadors,’ Insk smirked.

‘Indeed,’ Vorkellen agreed, averting his gaze when he noticed the Salamander was looking at him. ‘An abject failure.’ He chuckled mirthlessly. To see them humbled, without arms or armour, was delicious.

The clave-nobles were addressing the assembly, explaining to all that this was a negotiation to decide the fealty of Bastion and its armies, for Horus or the Emperor. Both sides were permitted to petition for their allegiance and based on their arguments Bastion would make its choice. The losers would be granted immunity until they had returned to their starships, then they would be considered an enemy combatant and treated as such.

As they arrived first, the representatives of Horus were permitted to speak first.

As the high-marshal retreated into the shadows, Vorkellen stepped forwards.

‘Our Lord Horus is portrayed as a monster and a tyrant by some. That is not so. He is a warmaster, a warrior-general who seeks only to unify mankind under a single rule. Pledge your allegiance to Horus and become part of that unity,’ he said, ‘I will tell you of tyrants, of butchers and massacres most foul. On Monarchia, where the Emperor’s hubris turned to madness…’

IV

High up in the vaulted auditorium echelons, far from the audience, a shadow stirred. Ready and in position, it contented itself to watch. For now.

Tyrants
I

Vorkellen thrust out an arm, ‘Behold.’

A hololithic image materialised in front of him from a sub-projector in the auditorium floor. It depicted a glorious city of temples, spires and cathedra. Even in the flickering haze of the hololith’s resolution it was possible to pick out statues of the Emperor, great arches of veneration carved in his image.

‘Monarchia…’ Vorkellen said again, leaving a pregnant pause, ‘…before the Legion of Roboute Guilliman levelled it.’

A second projection crackled to life, replacing the first. This was of a sundered ruin, little more than a smoking crater where civilisation had once existed. Bodies were strewn across the wreckage, those too foolish or adamant, or too afraid, to leave.

‘Devastation.’ Vorkellen announced it like a death knell. ‘And for what reason? Why was this massacre sanctioned by the Emperor, beloved of all?’ He opened his hands in a plaintive gesture. ‘Love. The people of Monarchia dared to show their love for their Master of Mankind, they dared to honour and revere him, and this was their reward – death.’

He eyed the Legionaries, his gaze studiously accusing. This was their fault too. They were his warriors, his butchers.

‘And look,’ said Vorkellen, his eyes going to the Imperial representatives, ‘one of the Ultramarines warriors is with us. The Thirteenth Legion, those who consider themselves above all others, the very template that their fellow Space Marines should aspire to conform too, are the slayers of innocent women and children.’

II

Arcadese glared, observing the self-assured gait, the undercurrent of arrogance in the iterator’s expression, the finery of his attire and the many expensive rejuvenat surgeries employed to preserve his youth. Vanity and confidence bled off him like an invisible fluid.

He clenched a fist. It was his Legion at Monarchia, though he himself had not been present.

‘Stay calm, brother,’ whispered Heka’tan. ‘He is trying to anger you.’

Arcadese nodded. He would not rise to it. All eyes turned to the Ultramarine then, inviting his riposte.

‘The citizens of Monarchia were given ample time to evacuate. We are not monsters. We–’

The iterator cut in. ‘So the Thirteenth Legion did not perpetrate the destruction of Monarchia and the subsequent massacre of much of its population?’

‘They were warned,’ Arcadese growled. ‘Monarchia practiced proscribed religion. Idolatry is the path to damnation. They would not see the light.’

‘An intriguing turn of phrase,’ Vorkellen bit back. ‘Isn’t religion the true path to enlightenment?’

‘It is not a question of theological debate. This is law. Monarchia was–’

‘And who laid down these edicts, these commandments that all of mankind shall adhere to upon pain of brutal sanction? Was it the Emperor?’

‘You know it was.’

‘And so tell me this, also. Who was it that the people of Monarchia were revering that such stern measures be taken against them? Some despot’s graven image, a demagogue of a corrupt and baseless faith, or worse, perhaps a denizen of Old Night?’

‘They worshipped the Emperor.’

‘He who lays down his laws from on high, he who created the most formidable fighting force the galaxy has ever known through science and gene-craft, this… being, who taught men how to span the great gulf of the galaxy and can kill with a thought, this is the one they honoured?’

Arcadese spoke through gritted teeth. ‘Yes.’

Vorkellen snorted his impatience and turned to his audience. ‘How can you trust an Emperor who punishes those that worship him, that makes hypocritical decrees? Is this the Imperium you wish to serve?’

There were mutterings from the shadows and even the five high-nobles swapped remarks and glared seriously at the Ultramarine.

‘Those people were given seven days to evacuate the city. Faith is dangerous; it unlocks the road to destruction.’

‘Spoken like a true fanatic,’ Vorkellen replied. ‘This is the reward the Emperor offers for your loyalty. He sends his Legions to murder and burn and sunder. It is the fate that awaits you should Bastion side with the Imperium.’

He paused and his voice changed. It was level, matter of fact, infused with irrefutable truth. ‘Horus did not rebel against an absent father; he opposed a tyrant, masquerading as a pacifist and a benevolent ruler.’

‘Lies!’ Arcadese’s voice echoed loudly, betraying his anger.

A shocked silence filled the auditorium.

Heka’tan shifted uneasily behind him. ‘Brother…’

Arcadese unclenched his fist. The Ultramarine opened his mouth to speak but could find no words. It was heresy, wasn’t it? That was why Monarchia burned. It was a lesser evil to prevent a greater one. It was…

‘My apologies.’

The eyes of the entire assembly aligned on the Ultramarine, heavy with the weight of judgement.

One of the high-nobles gave their disdain a voice. ‘Then prepare your next words carefully.’

Arcadese nodded stiffly, glancing daggers at the iterator. He turned and hissed at Heka’tan, ‘I knew this was folly.’

‘It is barely begun, brother. Have patience.’ He looked around. ‘Where did you send the artificer?’

‘To watch over my bolter and blade. We may need them before this farce is over, if only to skewer Horus’s pampered snake.’

Heka’tan was about to reply when his gaze was drawn inexplicably to the upper echelons of the chamber.

III

The shadow figure hiding on the balcony shifted slightly. The red-eyed one was looking at it. For a moment it thought it was discovered and its hand strayed towards the rifle. Then the warrior turned away and the shadow figure relaxed. Not yet… not yet…

IV

Persephia had been an excellent artisan. Before the Edict of Dissolution, she had been a sculptor – it made the transition to artificer easier. It also meant she wasn’t pressed into the service of the Imperial Army or sent into the manufactorums to make shells and bombs. She heard about the conditions of those places, of the relentless overseers that made men and women into the blood-gruel of the Imperial war machine. Gone was the era of hope, of glorious conquest she’d longed to be a part of – in its place reigned an age of darkness instead.

The armoury where the Legionaries’ equipment was being kept was directly below the auditorium in a sub-level. As unthreatening as she was, the guards allowed her passage into the darkened under-deeps without question. Their attention was wholly fixed on the two massive warriors addressing the clave.

The words of her master returned to her.

I need you to bring me my weapons. Smuggle them back into the auditorium – no one will pay you any attention – and put them somewhere I can easily find them.

She’d nodded, not daring to question the cobalt giant.

Our ship was attacked, you know that. There are enemies on Bastion. I believe they want to kill us and tip these negotiations in the Warmaster’s favour. I would not have us exposed.

She’d headed off after that, fearful of what she might discover.

Cold, grey stone and struts of functional steel lined the corridors below the auditorium. There were anterooms and chambers, mainly stores or vast offices cluttered with slates and papers. The armoury was ahead and Persephia was still trying to work out how she would smuggle out one of the Ultramarine’s massive weapons when a light prickling heat assailed her skin and nostrils. It was heady, and if she strained she could hear the droning of machinery.

She continued to her destination but found more guards outside the corridor to the armoury that hadn’t been there before. She ducked into an alcove before she was seen and after a minute decided to double back. She couldn’t get through that way but perhaps she could go around and find a different route in.

Another corridor led off from the main, grey artery. It was here that the machine-drone was loudest, so she followed it hoping it might bring her out on the opposite side and let her slip past the guards.

The further Persephia went, the louder the sound became. Some kind of vast machinery she could only guess at. Soon the barren walls and struts gave way to engines and pipes and conduits. There were temperature gauges and funnels, oblong chambers shielded by many-layered plascrete. A throbbing nexus of energy glowed somewhere beneath her. She had reached the end of the tunnel and found herself standing at the edge of a circular chasm ringed by gantries.

Bizarrely, the way was open. None of the gates this far down were locked and there were no further guards she could see. Intermittently, she came across slumped gun-drones but the cyb-organics were deactivated.

Labour servitors moved back and forth, though, engrossed in menial tasks. Persephia moved around them gingerly, careful not to interrupt their routines or touch them, as she descended. The heat was increasing. Patches of sweat darkened her underarms and a veneer of perspiration circled her brow.

She saw a servitor at work by one of the consoles. A bank of screens displayed some of the other geothermal nuclear sites on Bastion. They all looked disturbingly alike. Persephia moved on, drawn by curiosity and the distant nuclear glow coming closer.

Someone was moving below her. Not a servitor – its movements were not syncopated enough. Too large as well, and much bigger than one of the cyb-organic drones. It worked at one of the consoles, attaching something. Persephia was too far away to see what it was. Something about the figure made her pause. She felt disquieted as she watched its bulk shifting subtly in its work.

She suddenly realised why there were no active guards, why the route to the nuclear core was open. Persephia wondered how far up the auditorium level now was and how far away. She’d lost track of time.

There was danger here. Her instincts screamed it. To let the figure see her was to invite that trouble to her. It was to invite death.

A bead of sweat ran down Persephia’s brow and into her eye. She gasped.

The figure looked up, hard eyes glaring through crimson lenses. It was grey; grey like the walls. The figure’s armour was fringed in a dirty gold and a skull icon emblazoned its left shoulder guard like an omen. It saw the woman and crouched.

It took Persephia a few seconds to realise what was happening. Boosting from a squat position, the figure had climbed the gantry immediately above. Then it repeated the motion and did the same again. Underfoot, the metal shook her.

She ran.

Another tremor rippled through the gantry, stronger this time, perhaps only a few levels down. Clanking footfalls followed, resonating behind her, and Persephia realised the figure was now pursuing directly. She heard the hard chank of metal slamming against metal and ducked behind a servitor. A second later there was an almighty boom and the menial exploded in a shower of bone and machine-parts.

Persephia picked up the pace. Her ears were still ringing. Death was behind her. It wore a face of iron and she couldn’t outrun it.

A hard engine growl assaulted her ears, as the sheer size of the Iron Warrior engulfed her.

The engine growl became a wet churn and then a scream as Persephia let out her death cry. She spat a torrent of blood over her clothes and then her slayer before her eyes became glassy and still.

Enemies Among Us
I

Heka’tan was listening to more of the iterator’s diatribes against the Imperium and the Emperor, watching Arcadese slowly losing his cool. His mood was agitated too, but for a different reason.

‘She’s been gone too long.’

Arcadese half-turned as he heard the Salamander begin to move. ‘Where are you going?’

‘To find her.’

‘What?’ he hissed, only half hearing the iterator’s continued verbal assaults. ‘I need you to speak of Isstvan V. As a witness, your testimony is crucial.’

‘I have to find her, Arcadese.’

The Ultramarine’s face creased with confusion. ‘Why?’ He grimaced. Arcadese’s injuries had not fully healed; they would never fully heal. His bionics gave him motion but at a cost in pain. No human could bear it. For a Legionary such as the Ultramarine it left him debilitated. Even had he awoken from his sus-an membrane coma in time for the muster to Calth, Arcadese would not have gone. He was no longer a front-line trooper. Denial raged in his words and his manner but his eyes couldn’t hide it. Heka’tan saw it as easily as he did his own failings.

‘We were charged with her protection, brother. We swore an oath, both of us, in case you don’t remember. An oath of moment. I’m assuming that still means something to you.’

Arcadese straightened suddenly and for a moment Heka’tan thought he might strike him. Then he relaxed, bionics cycling down to a low hum from their agitated squeal.

‘I’m not sure what anything means, any more,’ he conceded in a low voice, not referring to his honour parchments. ‘I remember,’ he added, louder, ‘but this is our duty too.’

‘I just want to know she is safe.’

Arcadese sighed, resigned. ‘Do what you must, but when Bastion swears for Horus and we are ejected unceremoniously from its atmosphere, do not lay the blame squarely on my shoulders, brother.’ The Ultramarine’s face and demeanour changed abruptly. ‘What’s wrong with your hand?’

It was shaking, so slightly Heka’tan hadn’t realised.

‘Nerve tremor,’ he lied, ‘probably from the crash. Soon as I find the artificer, I’ll return.’

There was no time for a reply. All eyes were on Arcadese again as he took his turn to try and sway the clave. ‘I need battle, not debate,’ he muttered, totally unaware that he was about to get his wish.

II

A blighted plain of ruined cities and virus-scoured landmarks scrolled before the clave-nobles in grainy panoramic. The recording had sound as well as image but was eerily quiet.

‘What do you hear?’ Arcadese asked, leaving a long pause to emphasise his point. ‘It is the sound of death. It is Isstvan III, where Horus Lupercal committed genocide and set in motion a galactic war. An entire planet destroyed by viral weaponry. Fratricide amongst the Legiones Astartes themselves, conducted on a massive scale. Only by the efforts of Captain Garro of the Death Guard, escaping on the frigate Eisenstein, is anyone alive to tell of this atrocity. No fair warning, no order to stand down. Just death.’

Arcadese signalled for the image to be shut off. He pressed his palms together. ‘These are the deeds of a dictator, one who has turned from the Emperor’s light and embraced darkness.’

The Ultramarine scowled. ‘Isstvan III was a ploy to draw out those still loyal to the Emperor and cull them in one blow. Ally with Horus, and you join forces with a madman.’

Vorkellen spoke up quickly. ‘Isstvan III was a planet in open revolt. Its lord commander was a psyker-mutant called Vardus Praal that had declared against the Imperium. It was on the orders of the Council of Terra itself that the Sons of Horus and their brother Legions were sent there.’

‘What is your point, iterator?’ asked the head high-noble.

‘That Horus was ordered to the Isstvan system by the agents of the Emperor’s will and yet it is claimed this was somehow part of the Warmaster’s plan to rid himself of internecine traitors? He was sent there,’ his gaze went to the Ultramarine, ‘Sent. There. By Terra.’

Arcadese clenched his fists. ‘He slew billions, bombarded the surface and then unleashed his mad dog upon those warriors still loyal to the Emperor.’

‘A world in the thrall of a dangerous defector from Imperial Law, a psyker-mutant no less – a creature with the ability to affect the minds of men,’ the iterator continued. ‘We were not at Isstvan III – your fighting days were done at Ullanor, were they not?’

Arcadese didn’t answer. His teeth were clenched and he glowered.

Vorkellen went on. ‘I have testimony that a vein of disaffection ran through the Imperial forces, and that the Emperor sought to rein in the Warmaster’s pre-eminence. Certainly, his cult of personality was growing ever since the Emperor abandoned the Great Crusade. Can gods be jealous?’

‘This is idiotic,’ Arcadese pleaded to the clave. ‘These are facile notions designed to muddy the truth – that Horus committed genocide and staged a pre-emptive strike against warriors in his Legion and the Legions of his traitorous brothers that were still loyal to the Emperor.’

‘Horus only acted when forced,’ Vorkellen replied, ‘when he realised factions within his own ranks, warriors sworn loyal to him, were gathering against him, he did the only thing he could. He stopped them.’

‘And in so doing, slew thousands,’ replied Arcadese, ‘scribes, poets, imagists and iterators from the Remembrancer Order into the bargain. He is a monster.’

III

The word was hard to use.

Monster.

Horus was still a father figure of sorts to this Legionary, Vorkellen saw it described in the anguish on the Ultramarine’s face.

He is still struggling to understand, he thought. The Emperor was a fool to send warriors such as these. They are broken soldiers, gratefully forgotten by their Legions. He has doubts, and if he has doubts… well…

‘It was your beloved master who put these men and women in danger. Sent to document the Great Crusade, to cement forever in living memory the deeds of the Emperor and his primarchs. Their deaths were a tragedy, but war, a war brought about by an absent father who failed to attend to his sons, has many casualties. It hardly makes the Warmaster a monster.’

As the Ultramarine’s face screwed up into a snarl, Vorkellen allowed himself a tiny smile. Go on then, now is the time – seal my victory.

‘What has been promised you, eh, Vorkellen is it?’ The Ultramarine couldn’t keep the venomous sneer from his lips.

‘I am merely a humble servant, here to see that my master is fairly represented.’

‘Do you honour a pact with some fell power, a concubine perhaps?’

Vorkellen’s eyes were icy. ‘You would like to crush me, wouldn’t you?’

Arcadese nodded slowly, drawing an objection from the clave that Vorkellen waved down.

‘The Emperor sends warriors when he really needs ambassadors, those who won’t embarrass themselves in unfamiliar surroundings where a bolter and blade is of no import.’

‘I don’t need my weapons to break you!’ Arcadese was raging again and stepped towards the iterator.

And there it is. Vorkellen smiled, just for the Ultramarine. You cannot fight nature.

A squad of marshals wielding flash-sabres moved in to intercept him.

IV

Arcadese knew he could crush them without his weapons, do it so quick and clean he’d be at Vorkellen’s throat before the emergency command be given and the chamber flooded with armed men.

Instead, he put up his hand.

The guards backed off.

Arcadese sagged, feeling the tendrils of defeat tighten around his heart.

Heka’tan, where are you?

Bodies
I

The levels below the auditorium were vast and labyrinthine. It would take an army of men weeks to find an individual in its depths if it didn’t want to be found. Heka’tan was but one man, and he had a few hours at most.

At least the shaking had ceased. When he’d forced the guard to let him go below and the dark had enveloped him, he’d leant against the wall and closed his eyes. Images of the dropsite massacre had sprung unbidden into his mind. He remembered his last sight of Vulkan, the primarch engulfed in bright magnesium light.

Dead? No one knew. It was a mystery that haunted the Legion. Ferrus Manus was dead. A terrible fate for any Legion to lose their father, but at least the Iron Hands had closure, at least they knew. In many ways, for the Salamanders, it was worse. And what now for them? A bit part in a galactic war where the fate of humanity and Terra was the prize and cost.

Heka’tan put the thoughts from his mind and started to search.

He found Persephia’s body after thirty minutes.

She lay discarded like refuse in one of the archive chambers, her innards pooled in her lap like glossy red ribbons. The artificer’s face was locked in a horror-grimace, flecked by her own dried blood.

She hadn’t died here. There were drag marks on the floor, hastily concealed. Heka’tan held out his hand and detected a tiny prickling sensation on his fingertips. Heat. It was bleeding upwards from below.

Heka’tan looked back to the corpse. The wound in Persephia’s chest was familiar to him. He knew what had caused it. She had been eviscerated by a chainsword. It was a Legion weapon. Arcadese was right, Horus had sent warriors.

The Salamander followed the source of the heat.

II

The shadow shifted on the balcony. It caressed the rifle in its hands now. The red-eyed one was missing, and it didn’t like that. Made it feel vulnerable, potentially exposed when there was a Legionary unaccounted for. The work below was supposed to be finished, now the second phase began. There were four marshals below, watching the stairways into the lower chambers. Another four stood nearby in the dark. No guns here. No weapons of any sort. How foolish they were. How arrogant.

The high-marshal was alone and pensive as the proceedings went on. He was blind, just like the clave-nobles and the other onlookers were blind. They would see. Everyone would see. But then it would be too late. Then there was the iterator and his cronies, and the other warrior; the broken one, the half-Space Marine. Little did he realise it wasn’t just his body that had been ripped by the greenskin.

It was nearly time. The shadow shifted on the balcony, bringing the rifle sight up to its eye. The target sat snugly in its crosshairs. A second and it would be over. Just one second, the time it takes to squeeze a trigger. Soon.

III

They were losing. He was losing. Not a bolt fired, nor a blade drawn and still Arcadese knew the battle was being lost, metre by agonising metre. For a warrior, it was a strange sensation, not how he had pictured his service to his Legion.

The human iterator, despite his outward frailties, had a formidable intelligence; in a fit of pique, Arcadese thought he’d been mind-augmented or hypno-conditioned.

Dagonet was a disaster. Vorkellen painted Horus as victim and the Imperium as dishonourable murderers. A fortunate twist of fate had allowed the Warmaster to escape a heinous assassination attempt; whilst leaving one of his captains and a vaunted Legionary, Luc Sedirae, slain in cold blood. The massacre that followed was retaliatory, an effort to find and execute the perpetrators. Collateral damage was inevitable. The Emperor’s hand had caused this, or the agents acting in his stead.

Prospero was no better. Wolves unleashed on a cultured world and a son that desired only to please his father. The subsequent razing of the Planet of the Sorcerers was made to show the Emperor’s inability to forgive or grant mercy. Was Magnus really such a threat? Leman Russ and his Legion made sure that question could never be answered.

None of it added strength to Arcadese’s cause, and he felt the allegiance of Bastion slipping from his grasp. He had only one argument left, but the one to give it was nowhere to be found.

IV

Unarmed and wearing robes, Heka’tan knew he was at a distinct disadvantage against another warrior of the Legiones Astartes.

He could have gone back, raised the alarm, but then Persephia’s murderer might have already escaped and they would never know what was really going on here. He told himself this was the reason but the truth of it was his rage for Isstvan V had been impotent for too long; he needed to vent it.

It didn’t take long to follow the murderer’s trail. It led Heka’tan to a steel gantry looking down on Bastion’s nuclear core. He recognised the figure still toiling in its depths. Memories of fighting a desperate last stand in the Urgall Depression came back to him.

‘Iron Warrior!’

The grey-metal Legionary turned, his helmet lenses glinting coldly in the reflected nuclear light.

He scoffed, a harsh and tinny sound that emanated from his vox-grille. ‘Aren’t your kind all dead?’

Heka’tan roared and threw himself over the gantry. He collided with the Iron Warrior – hitting the ceramite like it was a fortress wall. He didn’t have time to evade the plunging Salamander. He’d only half-drawn his chainblade when Heka’tan knocked it buzzing from his grasp and onto the lower gantry floor.

Instantly the two Legionaries became locked in a fearsome embrace. But with his power armoured battle-plate, the Iron Warrior was stronger.

‘What gave me away?’ he growled, forcing Heka’tan to his knees, the fingers of both combatants laced together in a wrestler’s grappling hold. ‘It was the human, wasn’t it? So like your benevolent, dead Vulkan to come looking for an innocent.’

A surge of anger leant Heka’tan strength. He pushed with his legs, using sheer brute force to draw level and stand face-to-face with the Iron Warrior.

‘Don’t sully his name with your tongue, betrayer,’ he spat.

The Iron Warrior seized Heka’tan’s fingers in his gauntleted grip, causing the Salamander to cry out as he flung him across the gantry and down to the level below.

Pain blurred Heka’tan’s vision but he saw his enemy coming to finish him well enough. He reached over and his shattered fingers found what they sought.

The Iron Warrior raised a massive fist, intent on beating his former brother to death, when he found the buzzing teeth of his own chainsword lodged in his gut. He had charged right onto it.

Heka’tan held onto the hilt as long as he could before struggling to his feet and barging into the flailing, bleeding Iron Warrior. The two of them broke the gantry rail and plunged over the edge.

Heat radiation coming off the nuclear core warmed Heka’tan’s skin. He was hanging one-handed off the twisted railing several levels down, the Iron Warrior doing the same a few metres away. His armour was blistering, the black and yellow painted chevrons flaking away.

‘This changes nothing, Salamander. Vulkan is dead,’ he laughed. ‘You’re all dead.’ He reached for his bolt pistol sat snug in his side holster and made the railing squeal. He was too heavy for it to hold. The metal broke away and the Iron Warrior fell. Heka’tan watched him carom off another gantry, then a piece of piping, before bouncing off into the nuclear core itself. There was a brief flash of azure fire and the Legionary disappeared, burned to ash.

With some effort, Heka’tan dragged his body back up onto the gantry. He tried not to think about the Iron Warrior’s last words, what he’d said about his father. It wasn’t true. He was merely being goaded.

The enemy had dropped something when they’d fought. It was a data-bundle of some kind, taken from one of the subterranean terminals. It was smashed up but the last piece of data was still on the recorder: war machine schematics, vast and terrible engines the likes of which Heka’tan had never seen. They’d been kept here in secret and now the saboteur was erasing their existence. Coming to Bastion had never been about winning allegiance. Limping, he went to the terminal screen. It displayed all the other nuclear hubs around the planet, but he didn’t know why.

With time running out and still weaponless, Heka’tan hurried back to the auditorium.

V

Arcadese had done his best, but the time for talking was over.

The clave had heard the petitions of both parties, had deliberated and were about to give their answer.

On the balcony above, the high-noble came forwards into the light. His expression was unreadable.

‘We of Bastion are a proud people. None the less we joined the nascent Imperium on the promise of unity and prosperity. I would prefer independence but since that would see us consigned to atoms by Legion starships, I have little choice.’ The high-noble seemed reluctant to continue. ‘We honour our original oaths, Bastion will pledge for Hor–’

‘Arcadese!’ The warning brought all eyes to the Salamander and came three seconds before the rifle shot. The Ultramarine had enough time to discern the grainy red light from the laser sight, to catch the opening bloom of the muzzle flash as it flared wide and put his body between the assassin and its target.

Iterator Vorkellen screamed as the Legionary bore down on him, believing at first that the Ultramarine had finally cracked. The marshals were too slow to intervene, just as surprised as the iterator.

The bullet forced a grimace as it grazed Arcadese’s shoulder. He was trying to twist mid-air so he didn’t crush Vorkellen’s bones to paste when they landed. The second shot, taking a marshal in the neck and killing him instantly, gave the others pause. Only when the third went down, right eye ventilated, did they all look to the other balcony.

VI

He was crouched, nose of the rifle just peeking over the balcony edge, when Heka’tan found him.

The Salamander made the assessment of his enemy quickly, as he was reaching the top of the stairs and advancing.

Human, wearing nondescript clothes. He recalled the landman from earlier and knew this was the same individual. He also saw a sanctum-marshal’s garb in a bundle nearby to the shooter’s position. The rifle was custom – it looked almost ceramic. That’s how he’d avoided detection. Nine marshals entered; now, only eight took up their positions. It was so dark, slipping away would’ve been easy.

‘You overextend yourself,’ said the Salamander, slowing to a walk, filling the balcony walkway with his onyx-black bulk. ‘I saw your rifle tip from below. I saw it earlier too, I think. You were the one that shot down our ship.’

The landman stood and nodded. Evidently, the rifle was spent. He’d discarded it and drew a long blade from his side instead – literally from his side. Heka’tan’s eyes widened when he saw it snuck out of the assassin’s flesh.

‘You should’ve hit the fuel tanks and not the wing,’ the Salamander went on, creeping closer, allowing Arcadese time to catch up and support him. It looked like a man before him, but the Space Marine’s instincts told him otherwise. This was something else. ‘Your aim was off if you were planning on killing everyone on board.’

‘Was it?’ The assassin flashed a smile and his eyes changed colour, even the hue of his skin seemed to shift.

Heka’tan lunged just as the blade was flung at him. He dodged, reacting to the sudden move, but cried out as it shaved his skin. He missed the assassin by a hand span, grasping air as he leapt off the balcony and to the floor below.

VII

Arcadese swung at the assassin’s leaping form with a flash-sabre from one of the dead guards but missed. He about-faced but couldn’t stop two more marshals dying to the assassin’s finger-blades. A third fell to what looked like a barbed tongue, lashing from the man’s mouth.

The Ultramarine gave chase, but his bionics slowed him down. The assassin had reached the shadows and led into the corridors beyond. Even on the upper level, the auditorium space was a honeycomb of passageways and conduits.

Heka’tan was right behind him.

‘You’re bleeding,’ he remarked, noting the bullet graze along the Ultramarine’s shoulder.

‘So are you.’

Heka’tan dabbed at his flank with a finger and felt the blade wound. ‘Then we owe him two cuts, one each,’ he promised and followed the assassin into the darkness. Behind them, the remaining marshals were trying not to panic. They’d also foregone pursuit to secure the clave-nobles. The high-marshal was vociferous above the clamour, bellowing frantic orders.

Vorkellen was screeching at his lackeys, in obvious pain. It drew a smile to Arcadese’s lips, smothered by the shadows that engulfed him.

With the darkness the sound died away and the Legionaries slowed.

Heka’tan hissed, ‘You were right, brother.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Arcadese, staying as low as he could and watching the deeper shadows.

‘I found another of Horus’s emissaries below, an Iron Warrior.’

That piqued the Ultramarine’s interest.

‘I killed him but he was doing something below, something that the garrison here has been working on. He was monitoring the nuclear hubs too. I don’t know why. Answers may come from our assassin. Either way, word must reach the rest of the Imperium.’

‘And we are sealed in,’ Arcadese remarked ruefully.

Heka’tan’s eyes blazed belligerently.

‘But so is he.’

Hunters
I

The attack was swift. The red-eyed one was easy to spot; the broken one it could hear fifty metres away. They were not stealthy targets, either of them.

A shallow cry of pain felt satisfying as it plunged a blade into red-eyes’s shoulder. A heavy punch into the broken one’s ribs made an audible crack. So much for the dense bone-plate – the surgeries must have weakened it.

It dodged a reply, then a second. Rolling up to its full height, it disengaged the holofield trapping it in the landman’s form.

II

Arcadese swung wildly, but met only air with his borrowed flash-sabre. Next to him, Heka’tan grunted and he assumed the Salamander had failed to make contact too.

The assassin was fast – faster than them. Faster than him. Not for the first time, he cursed at his bionics.

He was rolling and Arcadese was turning, Heka’tan too. What met them both as the darkness parted before the flash-sabre’s magnesium flare was not what the Ultramarine expected.

He was not a man at all, at least not one that adhered to the normal conventions of size. He was massive, taller than either Arcadese or Heka’tan, and he was fierce. Tattoos around the attacker’s neck described a long chain of words, a name, or several fractions of a name, recounted on his body, disappearing beneath a loose-fitting bodyglove of red leather. The armour looked gladiatorial. There was something Terran about it. When Arcadese saw the marking on the warrior’s fist as he swung the spatha around in a lazy rotational arc, he knew.

‘Custodian.’

III

When the blade flashed in, the Ultramarine parried quickly. He was already backing away. Heka’tan was trying to circle. He’d made the connection too, realising the landman was merely a projection, courtesy of a holofield.

The Salamander tried to shoulder barge the warrior, distract him and bring him into his battle-brother’s arc, but he weaved aside, slamming his elbow down on Heka’tan’s spine. Then he went down, snapping a blade-kick into Arcadese’s gut that sent him sprawling.

When both Legiones Astartes had got up, the assassin was gone, absorbed into the darkness.

Arcadese retrieved his flash-sabre and went to give chase. Heka’tan seized his shoulder, stopping him.

‘No, that’s what he wants. Wait. Think.’

The Ultramarine nodded. ‘You’re right.’ His mind was reeling – a Custodian, here on Bastion, trying to kill Horus’s iterator. What was this – Plan B? ‘Should we even fight him? Could we? I’m surprised we lived as long as we did.’

Heka’tan only glowered at the dark. ‘We need to dig in and wait it out.’

‘He will pick us off, one by one. We cannot wait.’ He glanced back askance at the Salamander. ‘We could always just give him what he wants.’

‘No, something isn’t right.’

‘Then what do you suggest? The Custodians are loyal only to the Emperor. They are his lions, Salamander. They do not question, they merely do. If we are between him and his prey–’

‘That’s not a Custodian,’ Heka’tan interjected. ‘It is similar, but its movements are copied, its form a facsimile, a simulacrum.’

Arcadese hissed, retreating into the light with his brother. ‘How can you be sure?’

Their eyes met. Heka’tan’s flared with an angry glow.

‘Because if it was real, we’d already be dead.’

IV

There was panic in the auditorium. The shot and subsequent commotion had lit a spark of fear in the assembly that was growing from a flame into a conflagration. Streams of politicians and senators were rushing from their seats to pound on the doors to the auditorium. Some screamed, others sobbed, a few merely stayed seated and stared.

By now the clave-nobles had been evacuated from the balcony and were on the main auditorium floor, surrounded by their bodyguards with the rest of the trapped civilians.

Other soldiers were scanning the upper echelons and alcoves for further assassins. They would find none.

Amongst the visitors, Vorkellen was profoundly unhappy and addressed the already stressed high-marshal who was trying to restore order. ‘What are you doing to get us out of here?’

Insk was nearby, muttering soothing words to his master and requesting relaxants from another aide. Vorkellen waved them away with bitter tirades.

V

Arcadese was in unsympathetic mood and replied in the high-marshal’s stead. ‘We are trapped, you idiot. There’s nothing he can do.’

The iterator looked about to respond but bit back his tongue when the Ultramarine glowered. Arcadese let him be, and approached Heka’tan. Frantic as they were, the people kept away from the two Legionaries.

The Salamander leant in close, talking softly so that no one else could hear him.

‘Whatever that thing is, it will come for us.’

‘I know.’ Arcadese had his eye on the humans. They’d started to huddle around the sealed door and were spilling out into the centre of the chamber. ‘Their fear disgusts me. I thought this was meant to be a war-like world.’

‘They are not soldiers, not all of them, and they’ve never been trapped in a room with something like this before,’ Heka’tan paused, feeling sympathy for the panicked mob. ‘We have to hunt it down.’

Arcadese nodded.

Heka’tan went on, ‘You were right. We cannot wait. We waited at Isstvan.’ His eyes went off to a dark place, one from memory. ‘We waited and died.’ His hand was shaking again. He clenched it with his other hand to steady it.

Arcadese lowered his voice. ‘I’m sorry that you’re still affected by it, brother. I cannot imagine the pain.’

‘The legacy isn’t mine to bear. It’s for those who follow, for whatever happens next.’

Regarding the dead marshals, left where they’d fallen, Arcadese changed subject. ‘This matter was always going to be decided by blood. These entire proceedings were a farce. Unless we find that assassin, the Imperium will be accused of treachery. No one will negotiate with us.’

Heka’tan was shaking his head slowly. ‘Perhaps? But I feel there is something else going on here, something from back when the Iron Warriors had a garrison on this world.’

‘Then we must expose the truth, whatever that might be. Our best chance is tracking the iterator’s would-be killer.’

‘I cannot help think it merely shrouds an even greater atrocity.’ Heka’tan gestured to the crowd. Some of the fervour had died down now. There was moaning and grim-faced acceptance. ‘And there are the humans to consider.’

Arcadese looked nonplussed. ‘What about them?’

‘If we’re outmanoeuvred the assassin would make a red mess of them.’

‘They’ll have to look to their own defence.’

‘One of us should stay.’

‘We need both of us to kill this thing. Since when did the sons of Vulkan not present a united front?’

‘We’re pragmatists too, brother, and know when to adapt,’ said Heka’tan. ‘We cannot wait around to be murdered where we stand. So, I’ll go.’

‘You?’ Arcadese’s displeasure was obvious. ‘If you want to protect the humans so badly then stay behind and do just that.’ A few of the civilians had turned as the volume of the conversation rose.

‘I wish I could, but only one of us can hunt. You are not able.’

The Ultramarine’s tone darkened. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Look at you,’ offered Heka’tan with traditional Salamander bluntness. He hadn’t meant to be insulting, he just didn’t appreciate his words and manner could be construed that way.

‘I am a warrior still,’ Arcadese asserted, ‘as strong and capable as any uncouth barbarian from a tribal culture.’

‘Prove it then.’

‘What?’

‘Attack me, see if you can humble–’

Arcadese launched himself at Heka’tan, flash-sabre blazing. He was slow though, just a second or two, but enough of a lag for the Salamander to avoid the blow and head-butt the Ultramarine fiercely across the bridge of his patrician nose.

Blood gushed, streaking Arcadese’s lips, before Heka’tan used the Ultramarine’s bulk against him and sent him sprawling across the auditorium floor. A few of the nobles had to scurry out of the way. There were fearful gasps as their protectors turned on one another.

Arcadese was up as swiftly as his bionics allowed but found his flash-sabre taken and levelled at his neck.

‘I will hunt,’ Heka’tan told him. ‘You stay.’

Breathing hard, the Ultramarine nodded slowly. ‘I won’t forget this, son of Vulkan.’

‘I know you won’t.’ Heka’tan jogged off into the darkness, flash-sabre in hand.

VI

The Salamander returned less than an hour later.

Arcadese had his back to him. The Ultramarine’s demeanour hadn’t improved.

‘Have you given up already? I thought Salamanders were supposed to be tenacious.’

‘I found a spoor and followed it into the deeper conduits,’ Heka’tan replied. Arcadese noticed he was holding the flash-sabre in the opposite hand. ‘It seems the assassin had an escape route planned from the beginning.’

‘So, he’s gone?’

Heka’tan nodded, ‘Through a way we can’t follow. It’s too narrow, too steep, and goes right to the bowels of the complex, to the geothermal sub-levels.’

‘We wait then,’ said Arcadese, turning his back on Heka’tan, ‘for the gates to open and our failure to be known to our Legions. Horus has won this world, brother.’

‘It is worse than that,’ said Heka’tan, in a voice that sounded only partially like his own.

Rather than being shocked, Arcadese dropped his shoulder for the attack he knew was coming. He turned, bringing up another flash-sabre, parrying Heka’tan’s bone-blade that had rapidly morphed from his fingertips.

‘How did you know?’ asked the assassin.

Their blades were locked, spitting sparks and bone chips.

‘The smell,’ Arcadese told his attacker. He smiled as a thunderous bulk rammed into the assassin, crumpling his flank.

‘I reek of ash and heat,’ said the real Heka’tan, having exploded from the shadows where he’d been lurking since his initial departure. ‘Your wound obviously wasn’t quite deep enough.’

They wrestled, Salamander and assassin, the latter transforming even as they moved.

A metamorphic catalogue of identities blended and re-blended across the alien’s face, first the landman, then the subtle facial shift to the marshal, finally the Custodian upon which it settled.

‘You are no lion,’ snarled Heka’tan, snapping a vertebra in the creature’s spine.

Around them, the crowd shrieked and shouted in terror. The throng pressing up against the door became a crush.

The assassin mewled in pain, a tonal, bird-like resonance that set the Salamander’s teeth on edge.

‘Clever,’ it hissed through clenched teeth, bringing its knees up sharply into Heka’tan’s sternum and vaulting him off its body.

The Salamander landed in a wide sprawl, a few metres away.

‘A lie to snare a liar.’ Arcadese came crashing in, two-handed, with the flash-sabre. A ball of light blazed and faded at once as the weapon connected with stone not flesh.

The assassin bounded backwards, weaving to avoid the Salamander’s heavy cross as it came within range.

The bone-blade became a Custodian’s training spatha in its right hand and it slashed at Arcadese.

Faux-steel screeched against true-steel as the Ultramarine took the blow on his bionic arm. It was only his forearm that was augmetic but it provided an effective foil. He stomped, aiming for the assassin’s foot to cripple it. Rockcrete splintered beneath him, the ground webbing outwards in tiny fault lines.

‘Yield, you are undone,’ snapped Arcadese.

Heka’tan loomed in snatches of the Ultramarine’s vision, just behind the assassin.

He flung his arms out and snapped them together like mechanical foundry tongs, seizing the assassin in an onyx-black grip.

‘You are the ones who are undone,’ the creature cackled, spitting a gobbet of intestinal acid that seared Heka’tan’s cheek. The Salamander didn’t even flinch, he merely squeezed.

Arcadese caved in the creature’s face with a bionic fist, the bone-blade ripped from the assassin’s grasp but still lodged in his forearm.

It wheezed like a perforated lung as Heka’tan slowly crushed it. The integrity of the creature’s mimicry was breaking down with the onset of its death. Personas strange and familiar raced across its form and countenance like the changing of the seasons.

‘What was your purpose here?’ Heka’tan growled, bearing the lacrymole down, for it could be no other xenos abomination. ‘What greater evil are you masking?’

Vampiric shapeshifters, the Emperor and his Legions had taken great pains to ensure the annihilation of the lacrymole and yet, like the Terran atom-roach, they refused to become extinct.

Even its true form was nebulous, a conglomeration of wrongly shaped limbs and distended flesh-parts. Its eyes were discernable, however – pitiless black pinpricks of endless hate.

It died laughing, a hot, wet sound more choke than mirth.

‘What I cannot fathom,’ uttered Heka’tan when it was done and the broken sack of muscle and bone shards slid from his forge-smith’s grasp, ‘is how it could emulate a Custodian?’

Arcadese mashed the lacrymole’s quivering cranium with his boot. The bionic force he applied was enough to pulp it. The lacrymole needed to taste their prey, absorb them, before they could copy them biologically. To emulate one almost perfectly, it meant this alien had somehow bested and consumed the biological matter of one of the Emperor’s lions. Such a thing didn’t seem possible.

The Ultramarine shook his head. ‘What did it mean, “You are the ones that are undone”?’

Planetkill
I

The answer came with the thunderous boom that shook the flagstones of the auditorium floor. The explosion emanated from far beneath them, in the lowest levels at Cullis’s nuclear hub.

Subdued by the death of the assassin and the relief that brought, the trapped Bastionites started to panic anew and hammered at the door again.

Another explosion rocked the chamber and a crack formed underfoot. A clutch of senators disappeared into the darkness and in the plume of fire that spewed up after them.

One of the clave-nobles had broken free of his bodyguards and was tugging at Arcadese’s robes. ‘Save us... please.’

The Ultramarine looked down on the man with disdain.

Heka’tan interrupted his response. ‘We have been doubly deceived, brother.’

A twitch below Arcadese’s right eye betrayed the pain of the injuries the Ultramarine had sustained in the fight with the lacrymole assassin. He was angry at being duped. ‘A saboteur?’

‘Willing to destroy an entire planet to keep its secrets,’ said Heka’tan. Another tremor shook the chamber. A column split from its dais and crushed more of the civilians. There would be no hope of restoring order now.

‘Then these minor explosions are merely a preamble to something much bigger.’ The clave-noble was still scrabbling at the Ultramarine’s garb. He pushed the human away. ‘Begone! By holding court with Horus you have doomed yourself and your world.’

‘Perhaps not...’ Heka’tan was looking past the frightened crowd to the door. The broken masonry had fallen against it. The column had been heavy enough to put a wide crack in the door’s surface.

Some of the trapped civilians were even now pulling at it.

‘Stand aside,’ Arcadese bellowed, ‘in the name of the Legiones Astartes!’

The frightened throng parted for the two warriors who reached the door and each taking a side of the fissure, which was deep enough to get their fingers in, pulled. The stone door came away in chunks now that its structural integrity had been compromised. The crack widened.

Bullied to the front by his entourage, Vorkellen was right behind the Legionaries.

‘Get us out,’ he pleaded in a small voice, clinging to Heka’tan’s arm. ‘I too have been deceived.’

The Salamander looked down at him like he was the intestinal remains of an enemy he’d just gutted. ‘Where is your ship?’ he demanded, before the majority of the auditorium floor collapsed into a fiery chasm. Most of the senators went with it. Only those clustered next to the exit were spared death by fire.

‘Close, at the end of the gangway just outside,’ said the iterator. All of his suave self-assurance was evaporating before the prospect of his imminent demise.

Debris was falling from the ceiling, killing Bastionites by the score.

The gap in the door was wide enough for the Legionaries to squeeze out, which meant it was also large enough for the humans too. There were precious few left, just the clave-nobles and a handful of senators and marshals, and the iterator with his cronies of course.

Arcadese was first out and began waving the others on. Heka’tan was last through just as an almighty conflagration swept across the sundered auditorium. Smudged silhouettes in the smoke cloud screamed for rescue but the Salamander closed his senses to them.

‘They’re good as dead,’ he said as he met the hard gaze of the Ultramarine. It wasn’t an easy choice to make.

II

Then they were running, even as Cullis was collapsing around them. Portions of the city were giving way under the chain of incendiaries planted by the Iron Warrior. Out in the slums, great cracks were opening up in the ground, pulling in vast tracts of sump-ash. Distant landmen drove their hauler-trucks in crazy arcs to avoid the growing fissures. On the horizon behind them, the super-rigs and megaliths of other Bastion cities burned.

Out on the landing platform the air hazed. Ash and flesh-smoke baked on the hot breeze. Girders and gantries groaned in protest as they buckled and fell in the expanding conflagration below.

They were fleeing across the exit strip that led to the deck where Vorkellen’s ship was still anchored when a fuel hopper burst and sent a plume of fire and force into the air.

Several of the civilians were thrown off the narrow companionway and plummeted screaming.

Leading, Arcadese, turned to see another group crushed by a collapsed comms tower. They died without uttering a sound.

Heka’tan was missing. Just a few more metres to the ship and he’d lost the Salamander. Vorkellen, too, was nowhere to be seen. Smoke and fire dirtied the view.

The Ultramarine waved the few survivors on. ‘Into the ship.’ He seized one of the iterator’s cronies by the arm as he hurried past. The scrivener had a cut to his forehead and looked dazed. ‘Wait for us,’ Arcadese told him. After the scrivener had nodded feebly, the Ultramarine let him go and went back into the smoke cloud.

‘Heka’tan!’ The pall was thick, getting thicker. Arcadese wished he still had his battle-helm; the task of finding his battle-brother was made more difficult without it.

Below the belt of charcoal-grey, the Ultramarine saw four grasping fingers. They were black, like onyx.

Arcadese cried, ‘Hold on!’ and rushed to the ragged lip of the companionway. He thrust his hand down but Heka’tan slipped and fell another half-metre. Gripping a twisted metal rebar, he looked up at the Ultramarine. There was blood on his face and one of his eyes was swollen shut.

‘Save him.’ He had to shout above the roar of the flames boiling below.

Arcadese’s gaze flitted to Vorkellen, who was also stranded and clinging on desperately. The iterator peered down intermittently, white-faced and clammy.

The Ultramarine shook his head and reached harder, farther. ‘You first. Reach up.’

‘Protect the weak,’ Heka’tan told him. ‘No matter who that is.’

In no mood to debate, Arcadese growled, ‘Reach up. Now!’

Still holding on with one hand, Heka’tan swung up the other and stretched. Their fingertips could almost touch.

‘A little more…’

‘It’s too far. Get out while you can.’

Arcadese shook his head. ‘We are so close…’ he said. His face was wrenched with effort. He leaned and found purchase on Heka’tan’s fingers…

…just as the Salamander’s hand began to tremble. As the nerve tremor took hold it shook Arcadese’s grip free. Heka’tan was flailing now. The explosions, the smoke and fire – he was reliving Isstvan all over again.

‘Steady yourself… I can’t…’ Arcadese snatched at Heka’tan’s shaking hand, but was unable to get a grip. ‘Steady yourself, brother.’

Their eyes met, the reflection of the destruction trapped in the Salamander’s locked there forever.

‘Let me go,’ he said, lowering his quivering hand. His voice was calm, his mind decided.

Arcadese raged, gesturing frantically. ‘I can lift you. What are you doing?’

‘Going to join my brothers.’ He let go.

Bellowing denial and utterly powerless, the Ultramarine watched Heka’tan plummet for a few metres until he was swallowed by the explosions. Arcadese thumped the companionway, splitting the rockcrete. Nearby, Vorkellen was screaming.

‘Don’t let me die, please don’t let me die…’

Bereft of all pity, of any feeling, his organic flesh as inured as his augmetic implants, Arcadese grabbed the iterator’s wrist and dragged him up.

Just a few seconds later, a column of fire erupted skywards from where Vorkellen had been swinging. The human staggered to his feet. He was weeping uncontrollably. Arcadese picked him up and threw him over his shoulder.

Then he ran as the world of Bastion submitted to its death throes behind him.

III

From the shuttle hold, Arcadese looked down upon the ruination of a world. Cooking off in the wake of the incendiaries, Bastion’s thermo-nuclear stockpiles were tearing the planet apart.

Long chains of fire stitched the world’s surface like its seams had been unpicked and were slowly being burned apart. Continents cracked and mountains sank. The oceans boiled to gas and the cities were consumed. Billions would look to the artificial nuclear sunrise, their retinas seared away in seconds, the skin of their bodies flaking like parchment only to become as ash on the wind. And even that was ephemeral, torn apart and scattered to oblivion by the blast wave that followed.

A small armada of ships had managed to achieve orbit; others had been swallowed up in the chaos, failing to achieve loft and put enough distance between themselves and the rapidly unfolding cataclysm.

They were headed for the Imperial starship at anchor on the edge of the system. Arcadese had already voxed a warning to its captain but no attack had come from any vessel affiliated with the Warmaster. The work here was done. The Iron Warrior had achieved his mission. Whatever the purpose of the schematics Heka’tan had described, it would not be discovered until it was too late. The message was sent. Horus wanted the galaxy to know, he had used Bastion as an example.

Ally with the Imperium and die.

Neutral planets would go down on bended knee for the Warmaster now, the threat of reprisals too real and absolute for them to ignore.

Heka’tan had believed in the possibility of a peaceful solution. Despite everything, he dared to hope that the Traitors would adhere to the rules of engagement.

Now, the Salamander was dead, slain like so many of his Legion.

Arcadese muttered an oath for the Nocturnean beneath his breath. ‘You will not be forgotten, brother,’ he promised. ‘You shall have vengeance.’

The one responsible would be brought to account. Arcadese might have no place on the front line, but he could do that for a fallen brother. He could do that for all the forgotten sons of the Imperium.

‘In an age of darkness the truth must die’

– Words of a forgotten scholar of ancient Terra

They murdered the intruder ship on the edge of the Solar System. It spun through space, a kilometre-long barb of crenellated metal, trailing the burning vapours of its death like the tatters of a shroud. Like lions running down a crippled prey two golden-hulled strike vessels bracketed the dying ship. Each was a blunt slab of burnished armour thrust through space on cones of star-hot fire. They carried weapons that could level cities and held companies of the finest warriors. Their purpose was to kill any enemy who dared to enter the realm they guarded.

This star system was the seat of the Emperor of Mankind, the heart of an Imperium betrayed by its brightest son. There could be no mercy in this place. The ship had appeared without warning and without the correct identification signals. Its only future was to die in sight of the sun that had lit the birth of humanity.

Explosions flared across the intruder ship’s hull, its skin splitting with ragged wounds that spilled dying crew and molten metal into the void. The two hunters silenced their guns and spat boarding torpedoes into the intruder’s flanks. The first armoured dart punctured the ship’s command decks, its assault ramps exploding open and disgorging amber-yellow armoured warriors in a roar of fire.

Each boarding torpedo carried twenty Imperial Fists of the Legiones Astartes: genetically enhanced warriors clad in powered armour who knew no fear or pity. Their enemy bore marks of loyalty to Horus, the Emperor’s son who had turned on his father and thrust the Imperium into civil war. Red eyes with slit pupils, snarling beast heads and jagged eight pointed stars covered the hull of the ship and the flesh of its crew. The air had a greasy quality, a meat stink that penetrated the Imperial Fists’ sealed armour as they shot and hacked deeper into the ship. Blood dripped from their amber-yellow armour and tatters of flesh hung from their chainblades. There were thousands of crew on the ship: dreg ratings, servitors, command crew, technicians and armsmen. There were only a hundred Imperial Fists facing them but there would be no survivors.

Twenty-two minutes after boarding the ship the Imperial Fists found the sealed doors. They were over three times the height of a man and as wide as a battle tank. They did not know what was inside but that did not matter. Anything kept so safe must have been of great value to the enemy. Four melta charges later, a glowing hole had been bored through two metres of metal. The breach still glowing cherry red the first Imperial Fist moved through, bolt pistol raised, tracking for targets.

The space beyond was a bare chamber, tall and wide enough to take half a dozen Land Raiders side by side. The air was still, untouched by the rank haze that filled the rest of the ship, as if it had been kept separate and isolated. There were no jagged stars scratched into the metal of the floor, no red eyes set into the walls. At first it seemed empty, and then they saw the figure at the centre of the room. They advanced, red target runes in their helmet displays pulsing over the hunched man in grey. He sat on the floor, the discarded remains of food and crumpled parchment scattered around him. Thick chains led from bolts in the deck to shackles around his thin ankles. On his lap was a pile of yellow parchment. His hand held a crude quill made from a spar of metal; its tip was black.

The sergeant of the Imperial Fist boarding squad walked to within a blade swing of the man. More warriors spread out into the echoing chamber, weapons pointing in at him.

‘Who are you?’ asked the sergeant, his voice growling from his helmet’s speaker grille.

‘I am the last remembrancer,’ said the man.

The nameless fortress hid from the sun on the dark side of Titan, as if turning its face from the light. A kilometre-wide disk of stone and armour, it hung in the void above the yellow moon. Reflected light from the bloated sphere of Saturn caught in the tops of its weapon towers, spilling jagged shadows across its surface. It had been a defence station, part of the network that protected the approaches to Terra. Now the treachery of Horus had given it a new purpose. Here in isolated cells suspected traitors and turncoats were kept and bled of their secrets. Thousands of gaolers kept its inmates alive until they were of no further use: until the questioners were finished with them. There were countless questions that demanded an answer and its cells were never empty.

Rogal Dorn would be the first primarch to set foot in the nameless fortress. It was not an honour he relished.

‘Vile,’ said Dorn, watching as the void fortress grew nearer on a viewscreen. He sat on a metal flight bench, the knuckles of his armoured gauntlet beneath his chin. The inside compartment of the Stormbird attack craft was dark, the light from the viewscreen casting the primarch’s face in corpse-cold light. Dark eyes set above sharp cheekbones, a nose that cut down in line with the slope of the forehead, a down-turned mouth framed by a strong jaw. It was a face of perfection set in anger and carved from stone.

‘It is unpleasant, but it is necessary, my lord,’ said a voice from the darkness behind Dorn. It was a low, deep voice, weighted with age. The primarch did not turn to look at the person who spoke, a grey presence standing on the edge of the light. There were just the two of them alone in the crew compartment. Rogal Dorn commanded the defence of Terra and millions of troops but came to this place with only one companion.

‘Necessary, I have heard that often recently,’ growled Dorn, not looking away from the waiting fortress.

Behind Dorn the shadowed figure shifted forwards. Cold electric light fell across a face crossed by lines of age and scars of time. Like the primarch, the figure wore armour, light catching its edges but hiding its colours in shadow.

‘The enemy is inside us, lord. It does not only march against us on the battlefield, it walks amongst us,’ said the old warrior.

‘Trust is to be feared in this war then, captain?’ asked Dorn, his voice like the growl of distant thunder.

‘I speak the truth as I see it,’ said the old warrior.

‘Tell me, if it had not been my Imperial Fists that found him would I have known that Solomon Voss had been brought here?’ He turned away from the screen and looked at the old warrior with eyes that had vanished into pits of shadow. ‘What would have happened to him?’

The flickering blue light of the viewscreen spilled over the old warrior. Grey armour, without mark or rank, the hilt of a double handed sword visible from where it projected above his shoulders. The light glittered across the ghost of a sigil on the grey of his shoulder guard.

‘The same as must happen now: the truth must be found and after that whatever the truth demands must be done,’ said the old warrior. He could feel the primarch’s emotions radiating out from him, the violence chained behind a facade of stone.

‘I have seen my brothers burn worlds we created together, sent my sons against my brothers’ sons. I have unmade the heart of my father’s empire and clad it in iron. You think I wish to avoid the realities that face us?’

The old warrior waited a heartbeat before replying. ‘Yet you come here, my lord. You come to see a man who, in all likelihood, has been corrupted by Horus and the powers that cradle him.’ Rogal Dorn did not move but the old warrior could feel the danger in that stillness like a lion poised for the kill.

‘Have a care,’ said Dorn, in a whisper like a sword sliding from a scabbard.

‘Trust is a weakness in our armour, lord,’ said the warrior, looking directly at the primarch. Dorn stepped forwards, his eyes deliberately tracing the bare grey surfaces of armour that should have displayed Legion heraldry.

‘A strange sentiment from you, Iacton Qruze,’ said Dorn.

The old warrior nodded slowly, remembering the ideals and broken oaths that had brought him to this point in time. He had once been a captain in the Luna Wolves Legion, the Legion of Horus. He was almost the last of his kind, and he had nothing left but his oath to serve the Emperor, and the Emperor alone.

‘I have seen the price of blind trust, my lord. Trust must be proved.’

‘And because of that we must throw the ideals of the Imperium to the flames?’ said Dorn, leaning close to Qruze. Such focus from a primarch would have forced most mortals to their knees. Qruze held Dorn’s gaze without faltering. He knew his role in this. He had made an oath of moment that he would stand watch over Rogal Dorn’s judgement. His duty was to balance that judgement with questions.

‘You have intervened, and so the judgement on this man is yours. He lives at your word,’ said Qruze.

‘What if he is innocent?’ snapped Dorn. Qruze gave a weary smile.

‘That proves nothing, my lord. If he is a threat he must be destroyed.’

‘Is that what you are here to do?’ said Dorn, nodding at the hilt of the sword on Qruze’s back. ‘To play judge, jury and executioner?’

‘I am here to help you in your judgement. I do this for the Sigillite. This is his domain and I am his hand in this.’

An expression that might have been distaste ghosted across Dorn’s face as he turned his back on Qruze.

On the viewscreen the side of the nameless fortress filled the screen; a toothed set of doors opening to greet them like a waiting mouth. Qruze could see a vast loading bay beyond lit by bright light. Hundreds of troops in gloss-red armour and silver-visored helmets waited in ranks, filling the docking bay floor. These were the gaolers of the nameless fortress. They never showed their faces and had no names, each was simply a number. Amongst them the hunched figures of the questioners stood in loose clusters, their faces hidden by hoods, fingers augmented with needles and blades protruding from the sleeves of their red robes.

The Stormbird settled on the deck with a purr of an antigravity field. Ice beaded its sleek body and wings as the warm air met void-cold metal. With a pneumatic hiss the ramp opened beneath the Stormbird’s nose and Rogal Dorn walked into the stark light. He shone, the light reflecting from the burnished gold of his armour, glittering from rubies clutched in the claws of silver eagles. A black cloak lined in red and edged in ivory fell from his shoulders. As one every person in the docking bay knelt, the deck ringing with the impact of a thousand knees. Rogal Dorn strode through the kneeling ranks without a glance. Behind him Iacton Qruze followed in his ghost-grey armour, like a shadow in the sun’s wake.

At the end of the ranks of crimson guards, three figures knelt and waited. Each wore armour the same gloss-red as the kneeling guards, their bowed heads encased by masks of tarnished silver. These were the key keepers of the nameless fortress. Qruze was one of the few people to have ever seen their faces.

‘Ave Praetorian,’ called one of the bowed figures in a booming electronic voice. With one voice every kneeling human echoed the call. The primarch spoke over the fading echoes.

‘Take me to the remembrancer Solomon Voss.’

The man was writing when the cell door opened. The light from the glow-globe above him created a murky yellow halo that cast all but the makeshift desk and the man into shadow. Thin shoulders hunched over a sheet of parchment, a quill in a thin hand scratching out black words. He did not look up.

Rogal Dorn stepped into the cell. He had removed his armour and wore a black tabard held around the waist with a belt of gold braid. Even without his battle-plate he seemed to strain the dark metal walls of the cell with his presence. Qruze followed, still in his grey armour.

‘Solomon Voss,’ said Dorn in a soft tone.

The man looked up at them. He had a flat, handsome face, the skin smooth and lined only around the eyes. His steel-grey hair was pulled back into a ponytail that hung over the rough fabric covering his back. In the presence of a primarch many people would struggle to speak. The man nodded and gave a tired smile.

‘Hello, old friend,’ said Voss. ‘I knew someone would come.’ His eyes flicked to Qruze. ‘Not alone though, I see.’ Qruze felt the disdain in the words but held his face impassive. Voss starred at him. ‘I know your face from somewhere.’

Qruze did not reply. He knew who the man was, of course. Solomon Voss: author of The Edge of Illumination, witness to the first conquests of the Great Crusade, according to many the finest wordsmith of the age. Qruze had met Voss once, long ago in a different age. So much had left its mark on Qruze since then that he was surprised his old face triggered even the weakest memory in this man.

Voss nodded at the bare grey of Qruze’s armour. ‘The colours and markings of a Legion were always a mark of pride. So what does unmarked grey imply? Shame, perhaps?’ Qruze kept his face emotionless. Such a remark would once have angered him. Now there was no false pride for it to cut. He had passed far beyond his lost life as a Son of Horus or Luna Wolf.

Dorn looked at Qruze, his face unreadable but his voice firm.

‘He is here to observe, that is all.’

‘The silent hand of judgement,’ said Voss, nodding and turning back to the sheet of parchment. The quill began to scratch again. Dorn pulled a metal-framed chair close to the desk and sat, the chair creaking under his weight.

‘I am your judge, remembrancer,’ said Dorn in a low voice tinged with a tone that Qruze could not place.

Voss did not reply but completed a line of lettering. He made a low half-whistling noise as he paused over a word. Qruze thought he could see feelings play over the remembrancer’s face, a twinge of apprehension and defiance. Then, with a flourish, the quill completed a line and Voss placed it on the desk. He nodded at the drying words and smiled.

‘Done. In all honesty I think it is my best work. I flatter myself that you would not find its equal amongst the works of the ancients.’ He turned to look at Dorn. ‘Of course, no one will ever read it.’

Dorn gave a half-smile as if he had not heard the last remark and nodded at the pile of parchment on the desk.

‘They let you have parchment and quill, then?

‘Yes,’ sighed Voss. ‘I wish I could say it was kind of them, but I rather think that they hope to scour it for secrets afterwards. They can’t quite believe I am telling the truth, you see, but they also can’t stop hoping that I am. The information on your brother, you see. I can feel their hunger for it.’ Qruze saw the slightest tightening in Dorn’s face at the mention of his brother.

‘You have been questioned?’ asked Dorn.

‘Yes. But the heavy stuff has not started. Not yet.’ Voss gave a humourless laugh. ‘But I have a feeling that it was not far off. Until they stopped asking questions and just left me here.’ Voss raised an eyebrow. ‘That was your doing?’

‘I was not going to let the great Solomon Voss disappear into an interrogation cell,’ said Dorn.

‘I am flattered, but there are many more prisoners here, thousands I think.’ Voss was looking around at the metal walls of his cell as if he could see through them. ‘I can hear the screams sometimes. I think they want us to hear them. They probably think it makes us easier to question.’ Voss’s voice trailed away.

This man is broken, thought Qruze, something within him has died and left only a half life.

Dorn leaned towards Voss.

‘You were more than a remembrancer,’ said Dorn. ‘Remember?’

‘I was something once,’ he nodded still starring into the darkness. ‘Once. Back before Ullanor, when there were no remembrancers, when they were just an idea.’ Voss shook his head and looked down at the parchment in front of him. ‘It was quite an idea.’

Dorn nodded and Qruze saw the ghost of a smile on the primarch’s normally grim face.

‘Your idea, Solomon. A thousand artists sent out to reflect the truth of the Great Crusade. An idea worthy of the Imperium.’

Voss gave a weak smile. ‘Flattery again, Rogal Dorn. Not completely my idea, as you must remember.’ Dorn nodded and Qruze heard a note of passion in Voss’s voice. ‘I was just a wordsmith tolerated amongst the powerful because I could turn their deeds into words that could spread like fire.’ Voss’s eyes shone as if reflecting the light of bright memories. ‘Not like the iterators, not like Sindermann and the rest of his manipulating ilk. The Imperial truth did not need manipulation. It needed reflecting out into the Imperium through words, and images and sounds.’ He broke off and looked at the black ink stains on his thin fingers. ‘At least, I thought so then.’

‘You were right,’ said Dorn and Qruze saw the conviction flow into the primarch’s face. ‘I remember the manuscripts you presented to the Emperor at Zuritz. Written by you and illuminated by Askarid Sha. They were beautiful and true.’ Dorn was nodding slowly, as if trying to tease a response from Voss who was still looking at his hands. ‘The petition to create an order of artists to “witness, record and reflect the light of truth spread by the Great Crusade”. An order of people to be the Imperium’s memory of its foundation: that was what you argued was needed. And you were right.’

Voss nodded slowly, then he looked up and there was a hollow look in his eyes. It was the look of someone thinking about what they had lost, thought Qruze. He knew. He had worn it himself in many dark hours in recent years.

‘Yes, fine times,’ said Voss. ‘When the Council of Terra ratified the creation of the Order of Remembrancers, for a moment I thought I knew what you and your brothers must have felt, seeing your sons bringing illumination to the galaxy.’ He gave a dismissive snort. ‘But you are not here to flatter, Rogal Dorn, you are here to judge.’

‘You vanished,’ said Dorn in the same soft tone he had begun with. ‘In the moments after the betrayal you vanished. Where have you been?’ Voss did not answer for a second.

‘I have been telling the truth since your sons took me from that ship,’ he said, and looked at Qruze. ‘I am sure it is in their mission accounts.’

Qruze stayed silent. He knew what Voss had said to the Imperial Fists that found him, what he had been saying to his interrogators ever since. He knew, and Rogal Dorn would know, but the primarch said nothing. The silence waited until Voss looked at Dorn and said what the primarch had been waiting for.

‘I have been with the Warmaster.’

Iacton Qruze kept his distance as the primarch watched the stars turn above him. They were in an observation cupola, a blister of crystal glass on the upper surface of the nameless fortress. Above them Saturn hung, its bands of muddy colour reminding Qruze of fat running through meat. Dorn had cut short the questioning of Solomon Voss, saying that he would return soon. He had said to Qruze that he needed to think. So they had come here to think beneath the light of the stars and the eye of Saturn. Qruze thought that Dorn had hoped that Voss would deny his earlier claim, that he would find a reason to set him free.

‘He is as I remember him,’ said Dorn suddenly, still gazing out at the scatter of stars. ‘Older, worn, but still the same. No sign of corruption to my eyes.’

I must do my duty, thought Qruze. Even though it is like stabbing a blade into an unhealed wound. He took a deep breath before speaking.

‘No, my lord. But perhaps you see what you want to see.’ The primarch did not move but Qruze sensed the shift in atmosphere, a charge of danger in the cold air.

‘You presume much, Iacton Qruze,’ said the primarch in a low growl.

Qruze took a careful step closer to Dorn and spoke in a level voice. ‘I presume nothing. I have nothing but one unbroken oath. That oath means I must say these things.’ The primarch turned and straightened so that Qruze had to look up into his face. ‘Even to you, lord.’

‘You have more to say?’ growled Dorn.

‘Yes. I must remind you that the enemy is subtle and has many weapons. We can protect against them only with suspicion. Solomon Voss might be as you remember him. Perhaps he is the same man. Perhaps.’ Qruze let the word hang in the air. ‘But perhaps is not enough.’

‘Do you believe his claim? That he was with Horus all this time?’

‘I believe the facts. Voss has been amongst the enemy, whether willingly or as a captive. He was on a ship enslaved to Horus that bore the marks of the enemy. The rest could be...’

‘A story.’ Dorn was nodding, a grim expression on his face. ‘He was the greatest teller of stories that I have ever known. There are billions in the Imperium that only know of our deeds by the words he wrote. You think that he is spinning a tale now?’

Qruze shook his head. ‘I do not know, lord. I am not here to judge, I am here to question.’

‘Then do your duty and question.’

Qruze took a breath and began to count off points, raising a finger for each one. ‘Why did he go to Horus if he is not a traitor? Horus slaughtered the rest of the remembrancers when he purged the Legions. Why would he keep one of them alive?’ When Dorn did not interrupt Qruze continued. ‘And an enemy ship, with a single man held safe within it, does not drift into the Solar System alone.’ He paused for a second, thinking of the thing that worried him most. Dorn was still looking at him, silently absorbing Qruze’s words. ‘It was not accident. He was returned to us.’

Dorn nodded, forming Qruze’s worry into a question. ‘And if he was, why?’

‘Why did you go to Horus?’ asked Rogal Dorn.

They were back in the cell. Solomon Voss sat by his desk with Rogal Dorn opposite him and Qruze standing by the door. Voss took a sip of spiced tea from a battered metal cup. He had asked for it and Dorn had assented. The remembrancer swallowed slowly and licked his lips before beginning.

‘I was on Hattusa, with the 817th fleet, when I heard that Horus had rebelled against the Emperor. I could not believe it at first. I tried to think of reasons why, to put it into some form of context, to make some sense of it. I could not. But when I realised that I could not make sense of it I knew what I needed to do. I needed to see the truth with my own eyes. I would witness it and I would make sense of what I saw. Then I would put it into words so that others could share my understanding.’

Dorn frowned. ‘You doubted that Horus was a traitor?’

‘No. But I was a remembrancer, the greatest remembrancer. It was our duty to make sense of great events in art. I knew that others would doubt or would not believe that the brightest son of the Imperium could turn against it. If it was true I wanted that truth shouted from the works of as many remembrancers as possible.’

Qruze saw the passion and fire flash through Voss’s face. For a moment the tiredness was gone and the man’s conviction shone from him.

‘You take much on yourself. To make sense of something that is senseless,’ said Dorn.

‘Remembrancers made what happened in the Great Crusade real. Without us who would remember any of it?’

Dorn shook his head gently. ‘A war between the Legions is not a place for artists.’

‘And the other types of wars we had been recording, were they more suitable? When all that had been built by you, by us, had been plunged into doubt, where else should I have been? I was a remembrancer; it was my duty to witness this war.’ Voss put his cup of spiced tea down on his desk.

‘I had started to make plans to get to Isstvan V by calling in favours and contacts.’ Voss’s mouth twisted as if chewing bitter words. ‘Then the Edict of Dissolution came through. The remembrancers were no more, by the order of the Council of Terra. We were to be removed and dissolved back into mundane society. Those already amongst the war fleets were no longer to be allowed to record events.’

Qruze could feel the bitterness in the man’s words. In the wake of the news of Horus’s betrayal many things had changed in the Imperium. One of these changes had been the removal of official backing for the remembrancers. With a stroke of a pen the remembrancers had been no more.

Better that than what could have become of them, thought Qruze. The image of men and woman dying under the guns of his former brothers flicked across his mind. An age ago, but no time at all, he thought. He blinked and the cell snapped back into sharp reality.

‘But you did not obey,’ said Dorn.

‘I was angry,’ spat Voss. ‘I was the father of the Order of Remembrancers. I had witnessed the centuries of the Great Crusade since it began on Terra. I had looked on demigods and the scattering of blood amongst the stars that has been the birth of the Imperium.’ He raised his hand as if gesturing to stars and planets above them. ‘I made those events real to minds that will never see them. I bound them in words so that those wars will echo into the future. In millennia to come there will be children who listen, or read, and will feel the weight of these times in my words.’ He snorted. ‘We remembrancers served illumination and truth, not the whim of a council of bureaucrats.’ Voss shook his head, his lip curled for a moment and then he blinked.

‘Askarid was with me,’ he said quietly. ‘She said that it was an impossible idea, dangerous and driven by ego. A pilgrimage of hubris, she called it.’ He smiled and closed his eyes for a moment, floating in lost happiness.

Qruze knew the name Askarid Sha, illuminator and calligraphist. She had lettered Voss’s work into scrolls and tomes as beautiful as his words.

‘Your collaborator?’ asked Qruze, the question slipping out of his lips. Dorn shot him a hard look.

‘Yes, she was my collaborator, in every sense.’ Voss sighed and looked at the dregs of tea in his cup. ‘We argued, for days,’ he said quietly. ‘We argued until it was clear that I was not going to change my mind. I knew it was possible to get to Isstvan V. I had contacts throughout the fleets, on both sides of the war. I knew I could do it.’

Voss paused, staring into space as if someone stood there looking back at him from a lost past. Dorn said nothing, but waited. After a few moments Voss spoke, a catch in his voice.

‘Askarid came with me, even though I think she feared how it would end.’

‘And how did it end?’ asked Dorn. Voss looked back at the primarch, his eyes still wide with memory.

‘Isn’t that what you are here to decide, Rogal Dorn?’

‘He was right, about the Edict of Dissolution,’ said Dorn. Voss had asked to sleep and Dorn had permitted it. He and Qruze had returned to the dome of crystal beneath the starfield. Qruze could feel the leaden mood of the primarch as he stood looking at the stars.

‘The end of the remembrancers?’ said Qruze, raising an eyebrow and looking up at Dorn. ‘You think that they should be allowed to wander through this war? Recording our shame in paintings and songs?’ There was a pause. Qruze expected another growl of rebuke but Dorn showed no emotion other than in the slow breath exhaling from his nose.

‘I had my doubts when the Council ratified the edict,’ said Dorn. ‘The position as presented at the time was perfectly logical. We are at war with ourselves; we do not know how far the treachery of my brother spreads. This is not a time to allow a menagerie of artists to walk freely amongst our forces. This is not a war to be reflected in poetry. I understand that...’

‘But beyond logic, you had doubts,’ said Qruze. He felt that he suddenly understood why Rogal Dorn, Praetorian of Terra, had come to see an old remembrancer in a prison cell.

‘Not doubts, sorrow.’ Dorn turned, pointing out at the stars beyond the crystal glass. ‘We went out into those stars to wage war for a future of enlightenment. We took the best artists with us so that they could reflect that truth. Now our battles go unremembered and unrecorded. What does that tell us?’ Dorn let his hand fall.

‘It is a practicality of the situation we face. The survival of the truth that we fought for makes demands that must be met,’ said Qruze.

‘Demands that must be wrapped in silence and shadow? Deeds done that must remain unremembered and unjudged?’ Dorn began to walk away from the glass, his steps raising dust from the floor.

‘Survival or obliteration: that will be history’s judgement on us,’ said the grey warrior.

Dorn turned to stare at Qruze, the ghost of anger on his face. ‘And the only way is for the Imperium to become a cruel machine of iron, and blood?’ said the primarch in a hard-edged whisper.

‘The future will have a price,’ said Qruze, not moving from the viewport. Dorn was silent. For an instant Qruze thought he saw a flicker of despair in the primarch’s eyes. Behind him the planets of the Solar System glittered as cold points of light beyond the towers of the nameless fortress.

‘What will we become, Iacton Qruze? What will the future allow us to be?’ said Dorn, and walked away without looking back.

‘When we reached Isstvan V the massacre was complete,’ continued Voss. ‘I never got the chance to see the surface, but the void around it sparkled with debris. I watched it drift past the viewport of my stateroom, fragments still cooling, fires feeding on oxygen trapped in wrecks.’

Dorn nodded, his face unreadable as he listened to the remembrancer’s story. Something had changed in the primarch after they returned from the observation deck. It was as if he had begun to wall something up inside him. It reminded Qruze of the gates of a citadel grinding shut before the advance of an enemy. If Voss noticed he did not show it.

‘They came for us, the Sons of Horus. It was not until I saw them that I began to think that I had misunderstood this civil war.’ Voss glanced at Qruze and the old warrior felt an ice-cold touch in his guts. ‘Metal, sea green metal, edged with bronze and covered with red slit eyes. Some had dried blood flaking from their armour. There were heads hanging on chains and by bunches of hair. They reeked of iron and blood. They said to come with them. Only one person asked why. I wish I could remember her name, but at the time I just wanted her to be quiet. One of them walked over to her and pulled her arms from her body, and left her screaming on the floor. We went with them after that.’ Voss paused, his eyes unfocused as if seeing the woman die again in her own blood.

Qruze found his hands had clenched, angry questions surging through his mind. Which one had it been? Which one of his former brothers had done that deed? One that he knew? One he had liked? He thought of the moment when he had learnt the truth about the men he had called brothers. The past can still wound us, he thought. He let out a quiet breath, releasing the pain. He must listen. For now, that was what he was here to do.

‘There were many remembrancers with you?’ asked Dorn.

‘Yes,’ said Voss with a shiver. ‘I had persuaded a number of others to come with me. Other remembrancers who agreed we had a duty to show the truth of this darkening age. Twenty-one came with me. There were others too, taken from the ships of the Legions who had only just showed their allegiance.’ Voss licked his lips, his eyes wandering again.

‘What happened to them?’ said Dorn.

‘We were taken to the audience chamber on the Vengeful Spirit. I had seen it once before, a long time before.’ Voss made a small shake of his head. ‘It was not the same place. The viewport still looked out on the stars like a vast eye and the walls still tapered to darkness above. But things hung from the ceiling on chains, dried mutilated things, that I did not want to look at. Ragged banners, splattered with dark stains, covered the metal walls. It was hot, like the inside of a cave beside a fire pit. The air stank of hot metal and raw meat. I could see the Sons of Horus standing at the edge of the room, still, waiting. And at the centre of it all was Horus.

‘I think I still thought I would see the pearl-white armour, the ivory cloak and the face of a friend. I looked at him and he was looking at me, right at me. I wanted to run, but I could not, I could not move to breathe. I could only stare back at that face framed by armour the colour of an ocean storm. He pointed at me, and said “All but that one.” His sons did the rest.

‘Three seconds of thunder and blood. When it was quiet I was on the deck on my hands and knees. Blood was pooling around my fingers. There was just blood and pulped meat all around me. The only thing I could think of was that Askarid had been stood beside me. I felt her hand around mine just before the shooting started.’ Voss closed his eyes, his hands held together in his lap.

Qruze found that he could not look away from those ink-stained hands, the skin wrinkled, the fingers gripped together as if clutching a memory.

‘But he kept you alive,’ said Dorn, his voice as flat and hard as a hammer falling on stone.

Voss looked up, his eyes meeting the primarch’s. ‘Oh yes. Horus spared me. He walked to stand above me; I could feel his presence, that chained ferocity, like a furnace’s heat. “Look at me,” he said and I did. He smiled. “I remember you, Solomon Voss,” he said. “I have cleansed my fleets of your kind: all but you. You I will keep. No one will harm you. You will see everything.” He laughed. “You will be a remembrancer,” he said.’

‘And what did you do?’ asked Dorn.

‘I did the only thing I could. I was a remembrancer. I watched every bloody moment, heard the words of hate, smelt the stink of death and folly. I think for a time I went mad,’ Voss chuckled. ‘But then I realised what the truth of this age is. I found the truth I had come to see.’

‘What truth is that, remembrancer?’ said Dorn, and Qruze could hear the danger in the words like an edge on a blade.

Voss gave a small laugh, as if at a child’s foolish question. ‘That the future is dead, Rogal Dorn. It is ashes running through our hands.’

Dorn was on his feet before Qruze could blink. Rage radiated from him like the heat of a fire. Qruze had to steady himself as Dorn’s emotion filled the room like an expanding thundercloud.

‘You lie,’ roared the primarch in a voice that had cowed armies.

Qruze waited for the blow to land, for the remembrancer to be nothing more than bloody flesh on the floor. No blow came. Voss shook his head. Qruze wondered at what the man must have seen to make this primarch’s rage blow over him as if it were a gust of wind.

‘I have seen what your brother has become,’ said Voss, carefully measuring his words. ‘I have looked your enemy in the eye. I know what must happen.’

‘Horus will be defeated,’ spat Dorn.

‘Yes. Yes, perhaps he will, but I still speak the truth. It is not Horus that will destroy the future of the Imperium. It is you, Rogal Dorn. You and those that stand with you.’ Voss nodded to Qruze.

Dorn leant down so that he was looking the man in the eye.

‘We will rebuild the Imperium when this war is done.’

‘From what, Rogal Dorn? From what?’ sneered Voss, and Qruze saw the words hit Dorn like a blow. ‘The weapons of this age of darkness are silence and secrets. The enlightenment of Imperial truth, those were the ideals you fought for. But you cannot trust any more, and without trust those ideals will die, old friend.’

‘Why do you say this?’ hissed Dorn.

‘I say it because I am a remembrancer. I reflect the truth of the times. The truth is not something this new age wants to hear.’

‘I do not fear the truth.’

‘Then let my words,’ Voss tapped his parchment, ‘be heard by all. I have written it here, everything I saw, every dark and bloody moment.’

Qruze thought of the words of Solomon Voss spreading through the Imperium, carried by the authority of their author and the power of their message. It would be like poison spreading through the soul of those resisting Horus.

‘You lie,’ said Dorn carefully, as if the words were a shield.

‘We sit in a secret fortress built on suspicion, with a sword over my head, and you say I lie?’ Voss gave a humourless laugh.

Dorn let out a long breath and turned away from the remembrancer. ‘I say that you have condemned yourself.’ Dorn moved towards the door.

Qruze made to follow but Voss spoke from behind them.

‘I think I understand now. Why your brother kept me and then let me fall into your hands.’ Dorn turned from the open cell door. Voss looked back at him, a weary smile on his face. ‘He knew that his brother would want to save me as a relic of the past. And he knew that I would never be allowed free after what I had seen.’ Voss nodded, the smile gone from his face. ‘He wanted you to feel the ideals of the past dying in your hands. He wanted you to look it in the eye as you killed it. He wanted you to realise that you two are much alike, still, Rogal Dorn.’

‘Bring me my armour,’ said Rogal Dorn, and red-robed serfs scuttled from the darkness. Each bore a section of gold battle-plate. Some pieces were so large and heavy that several had to carry them.

Dorn and Qruze stood once more in the observation dome. The only light in the wide, circular chamber was from the starfield above. Rogal Dorn had not spoken since he had left Voss in his cell, and Qruze had for once not dared to speak. Voss’s words had shaken Qruze. No mad ranting or proclamation of Horus’s greatness. No, this was worse. The remembrancer’s words had spread through him like ice forming in water. Qruze had fought it, contained it within the walls of his will, but it still clawed at his mind. What if Voss had spoken the truth? He wondered if it was a poison strong enough to burn the mind of a primarch.

Dorn had stood looking out at the stars for over an hour before he had asked for his armour. The serfs would normally have armoured Dorn, cladding him in his battle-plate piece by piece. This time he armoured himself, pulling a hard skin of adamantium over his flesh, framing his stone-set face in gold: a war god rebuilding himself with his own hands. Qruze thought that the primarch looked like a man preparing for his last battle.

‘He has been twisted, my lord,’ said Qruze softly and the primarch paused, his bare right hand about to slot into a gauntlet worked in silver with eagle feathers. ‘Horus sent him here to wound and weaken you. He said as much himself. He speaks lies.’

‘Lies?’ said the primarch.

Qruze steeled himself and asked the question he had feared to ask since they had left Voss’s cell. ‘You fear that he is right? That the ideals of truth and illumination are dead?’ said Qruze, an edge of urgency to his voice.

As soon as he spoke he did not want to know the answer. Dorn put his hand into the gauntlet, the seals snapping shut around the wrist. He flexed his metal-sheathed hand and looked at Qruze. There was a coldness in his eyes that made Qruze remember moonlight glinting from wolves’ eyes in the darkness of lost winter nights.

‘No, Iacton Qruze,’ said Dorn. ‘I fear that they never existed at all.’

The door to the cell opened, spilling the shadows of Rogal Dorn and Iacton Qruze across the floor. Solomon Voss sat at his desk facing the door as if waiting for them, his last manuscript on the desk at his side. Rogal Dorn stepped in, the low light catching the edges of his armour. He looked, thought Qruze, like a walking statue of burnished metal. There were no sounds other than the steps of the primarch and the hum of the glow-globes.

Qruze pulled the door shut behind them and moved to the side. Reaching behind his shoulder he gripped the hilt of the sword sheathed at his back. The blade slid out of its scabbard with a whisper sound of steel. Forged by the finest warsmiths at the command of Malcador the Sigillite, Regent of Terra, its double-edged blade was as tall as a mortal man. Its silvered surface was etched with screaming faces wreathed by serpents and weeping blood. It bore the name Tisiphone, in memory of a forgotten force of vengeance. Qruze rested the blade point down, his hands gripping the hilt level with his face.

Voss looked up at the armoured figure of Rogal Dorn and nodded.

‘I am ready,’ said Voss and stood up, straightening his robe over his thin body, running a hand over his grey hair. He looked at Qruze. ‘Is this your moment, grey watcher? That sword has waited for me.’

‘No,’ came the voice of Dorn. ‘I will be your executioner.’ He turned to Qruze and held out his hand. ‘Your sword, Iacton Qruze.’

Qruze looked into the face of the primarch. There was pain in Dorn’s eyes, unendurable pain locked behind walls of stone and iron, glimpsed for an instant through a crack.

Qruze bowed his head so that he did not need to look at Dorn’s face, and held the sword out hilt first. Dorn took the sword with one hand, its size and weight seeming to shrink as he took it. He brought it up between him and Solomon Voss. The sword’s power field activated with a crackle of bound lightning. The twitching glow of the blade cast the faces of both man and primarch in death-pale light and folds of shadow.

‘Good luck, old friend,’ said Solomon Voss, and did not look away as the blade fell.

Rogal Dorn stood for a moment, the blood pooling at his feet, the cell silent and still around him. He stepped towards the man’s makeshift desk where the heap of parchment lay neatly stacked. With a flick, the power wreathing the blade vanished. Slowly, as if goading a poisonous serpent, Dorn turned the page with the tip of the deactivated blade. He scanned one line of text. I have seen the future and it is dead, it read.

He let the blade drop to the floor with a clang and walked to the cell door. As it opened he looked back at Qruze and pointed at the parchment and at the corpse on the floor.

‘Burn it,’ said Rogal Dorn. ‘Burn it all.’

I have no idea how long I’ve been out. I should have; my enhanced memory and catalepsean function should have retained some trace, but everything is blank.

Presumably, that is part of the process. They want to induce doubt, to make me question whether I am up to this. If that is so, then they have succeeded. My total lack of recall preys on my mind. I do not like not knowing. It feels, certainly, like I’ve been ignorant of far too many facts for far too long.

But I am alive, and my hearts beat. That is something. Since coming round, I have had several minutes to reflect on my situation. That is useful too, though also no doubt part of some planned sequence.

I run down the basics, the physical aspects of my predicament. It helps, to force my mind into something mechanical. As I do so, I feel a degree of mental alertness returning.

I am in a chair. I am naked. My wrists, ankles, neck and chest are shackled with iron bands.

No, not iron – I’d be able to break that. Something similarly blunt and uncomfortable.

There is almost no light. I can make out the outline of my limbs dimly, but little else. My breathing is light, and there is an old pain behind my rib-fused chest. My secondary heart is still beating, indicating that I am recovering from some extensive trauma or exertion. I can feel no major wounds on my body, though there are many hundreds of bruises and abrasions, consistent with having been in action recently.

I have no mind-sight. I sense no souls nearby. For the first time since ascending into the ranks of the Legion, I remember what it is like to be alone with my own thoughts. At first, this is strangely comforting, like stumbling across a memento of a happy childhood.

But I do not take comfort for long, since my non-psychic senses are not as truncated. As my body adjusts and my faculties return, I realise that I am not alone. There is someone in the chamber with me, invisible in the dark. I cannot see him, but I can smell him and hear him. There is blood on his hands, and it makes the air of this confined chamber sharp and unsavoury. He breathes in ragged, shuddering draughts, like a panting animal held briefly at bay.

For the moment, that is all I sense. We sit in silence for a while longer, and I try to recall the events leading up to this moment. They come back to me only slowly, and in disconnected parts.

It takes a long time for him to speak. When he does, the voice takes me by surprise.

It is magnificent. There is tightly-contained savagery in that voice, a throat-wet growl that slips round the words and underpins each of them with a precise degree of mordant threat. I suspect this is no charade to make me uneasy, but simply the way my interrogator talks.

So the process begins the way these things always begin, the way a million interrogations have started since the dawn of organised violence.

‘Tell me your name and company designation,’ he says.

And for a moment, for a terrible moment, I realise that I cannot remember.

The Geometric pulled into high orbit, running silent, hull-lights extinguished. Two hundred kilometres down, the planet was almost as dark. It was void-black, laced with cracks of angry red where magma, or maybe surface fires, scored the crust.

Brother-Captain Menes Kalliston stood on the bridge of the destroyer and watched the approach through the realspace viewers. He was wearing battle-plate, but his head was bare. His dark eyes stayed fixed on the curve of the planet, now filling most of the plexiglass screens above him. His blunt, severe features were characteristically static. A slender patrician nose bisected rough-cut cheekbones. His flesh looked dry, like old parchment, and his burnt-umber hair was cropped close to the scalp. A single tattoo marked his right temple, an owl-archetype, symbol of the Athanaean cult discipline.

His armour was a deep, glossy red. His shoulder-guards were decorated in white and gold, picking out the icons and numerals of the Fourth Fellowship of the XV Legion Astartes, the Thousand Sons.

As he stood in contemplation, another figure came to join him. The new arrival had a stockier, shorter, more vigorous frame, and his features were closer to the Space Marine median – bull-necked, angular jaw, taut flesh over heavy bones. He might have been younger than the first, but the vagaries of gene-conditioning always made it so hard to tell.

‘No enemy signals?’ asked Kalliston, not turning.

‘None,’ confirmed Brother-Sergeant Revuel Arvida.

‘And you sense nothing?’

Arvida, who was Corvidae, gave a rueful smile.

‘It’s not as easy as it used to be.’

Kalliston nodded.

‘No. That it isn’t.’

To Kalliston’s left, a control column blinked with several runes. A hololith emerged above it, a rotating sphere marked with precogitated atmospheric descent routes.

‘Landers are prepared, captain,’ said Arvida. ‘We can do this whenever you want.’

‘And you’re still not sure we should.’

‘You know I’m not.’

Only then did Kalliston turn from the viewers and look his subordinate in the eye.

‘I’ll need you down there,’ he said. ‘I don’t care what the augur readings say, it’ll be dangerous. So, if your hearts aren’t in this, tell me now.’

Arvida returned the gaze steadily, the ghost of a smile on his lips.

‘So I get to choose which missions I go on?’

‘I won’t force you to come on this one.’

Arvida shook his head.

‘That’s not how it works. You’ll go, and I’ll follow, as will the rest of the squad. You’ve convinced them, at any rate.’

‘They needed little convincing.’

‘There are other mysteries to solve, and I don’t see how coming here helps with those.’

Kalliston let a flicker of exasperation escape from the edges of his severe expression.

‘We have to start somewhere.’

‘I know. And, like I said, if you’re sure about this, then I’ll be with you. Just be sure.’

Kalliston looked back up at the vision in the realspace viewers. The planet had a deathly aura to it, one that would have been evident even to the most warp-blind of mortals. The gaps between the rivers of fire were a deep sable, like shafts opening out onto nothingness. Something vast and terrible had happened there, and the residues of it were still echoing.

‘I am sure, brother,’ he said, and his voice was firm. ‘We were preserved for a reason, and that gives us responsibilities. We’ll make planetfall on the night-side of the terminator.’

His dark eyes narrowed, scrutinising the close view of the planet’s hemisphere. It looked like he was trying to conjure up a vision of something long gone, something destroyed beyond recovery.

‘Less than six months since we were ordered to leave,’ he said, talking to himself now. ‘Throne, Prospero has changed.’

‘Menes Kalliston, Captain, Fourth Fellowship, Thousand Sons.’

I remember that after a few moments, and the words come quickly to my parched lips. That is what one is meant to say, I believe – name, rank and serial number.

Perhaps I should resist saying more, though I feel strangely reluctant to stay silent. They may have injected loquazine into my bloodstream, but I doubt it. I see no reason not to talk for a while. After all, I have no idea why I’m here, or what’s going on, or how long I will be alive.

‘What are you doing on Prospero?’ he asks.

‘I could ask you the same thing.’

‘You could. And I could kill you.’

I think he wants to kill me. There’s something in the voice, some timbre of eagerness, that gives it away. He’s holding himself back. He’s a Space Marine, I guess. There’s very little else like that voice, rolling up from those enhanced lungs and that muscle-slabbed gullet and that great barrel-chest like water from a deep mill.

We are brothers then, of a sort.

‘What do you know of the destruction of this planet?’ he asks.

His voice hasn’t been raised yet. He speaks carefully, keeping the tide of violence in check. It would not take much to break that dam.

‘We were ordered to leave orbit six months ago,’ I say. The truth seems the best policy, at least for now. ‘Some questioned it, but I did not. I never doubted the orders of my primarch. It was only later, when we could not make contact, that we realised something was wrong.’

‘How much later?’

‘Weeks. We’d been in the warp.’

‘Why did you not come back at once?’

Ah, yes. I have asked myself that many times. As the questions come, I remember more of myself. I still cannot recall what led me to this place, though. The blank is complete, like a steel mask over the past. There is an art to making such a mask, and it is not easy to master. I realise the calibre of those who have me captive.

‘I wanted to. Others did not. We made enquiries through astropaths, but our battle-codes were rejected whenever we made contact. Soon after that, our ships were attacked. By you, I presume, or those in league with you.’

Does my guess hit home? Am I nearing the truth? My interrogator gives no sign. He gives nothing away but the smell of blood and the hot, repeated breathing in the dark.

‘Did many of you survive?’

‘I don’t know. Dispersal was the only option.’

‘So your ship came here alone.’

‘Yes.’

Should I be more evasive? I really don’t know. I have no strategy, no objective. None of the information I give him seems important. Perhaps it would do, if I could remember more of the circumstances of my capture.

My mind-sight remains dark. To be confined to the five senses of my birth has become crippling. I realise then that the withdrawal will only get worse. I don’t know whether it’s permanent, or some feature of the chamber I’m in, or a temporary injury. As an Athanaean, I have become used to picking up the mental images of others shimmering beyond their faces, like a candle flickering behind a cotton sheet.

I’m handling its removal badly. It’s making me want to talk, to find some way of filling the gap. And, in any case, I don’t need psychic senses to detect the extremity of my interrogator. He’s cradling some enormous capacity for rage, for physical violence, and it’s barely in check. This is either something I can use, or it places me in terrible danger.

‘Even so, it took you a long time to come back,’ he remarks.

‘Warp storms held us. They were impenetrable for months.’

My interrogator laughs then, a horrifying sound like throat-cords being pulled apart.

‘They were. Surely you know what caused them.’

I sense him leaning forwards. I can see nothing, but the breathing comes closer. I have a mental image of a long, tooth-filled mouth, with a black tongue lolling out, and have no idea how accurate it is.

‘You were either blessed, or cursed, that you made it through,’ he says, and I feel the joy he takes in the control of my fate. ‘I have yet to determine which it will be, but we will come to that soon.’

There were no Stormbirds left in the hold, and the Geometric had never carried Thunderhawks, so the descent had to be in a bulk lander. The destroyer’s crew had been whittled down to a bare skeleton – a couple of hundred mortals, some still in Spireguard livery. In times past they would have looked up at their Legiones Astartes masters in awe as they worked to prepare the lander, but the events of the last few months had shaken that hold. They had seen the ruin of Prospero for themselves, and it had crushed what spirit remained in them.

Many, perhaps, had had family still on the planet when destruction came. Those connections, Kalliston knew, were important to mortals. He himself couldn’t remember what it was like to find such things significant, but he felt the loss in other ways.

After launch, the lander fell through the thickening atmosphere clumsily, responding to the pilot’s controls like an over-enthusiastic steed. The control column had been designed for smaller hands than a Space Marine’s, and the atmosphere was still clogged with clouds of ash, blown across the charred terrain below by the angry remnants of continent-wide storms.

The lander made planetfall hard, jarring the crew against their restraint-cages as the retro-burners struggled against the inertia of the plummet. None of the squad members spoke. The cages slammed up, freeing them to take up their weapons. Kalliston, Arvida and the other battle-brothers in the load-bay mag-locked bolters and power-blades smoothly before the rear doors wheezed open.

The air of Prospero sighed into the load-bay. Kalliston could taste the afterglow of the furnace through his helm’s rebreather. The atmosphere was still warm, still bitter with floating motes of ruin.

Night had fallen. The sky was the dark red of an old scab, broken with patches of messy shadow where the smog-clouds raced. Ruined buildings broke the horizon in all directions, skeletons of libraries and treasure houses, armouries and research stations. There was no sound save the winding-down of the lander’s twin engines and the enervated brush of the hot wind.

Kalliston walked down the ramp first. His boot crunched as he came off the end of it. He looked down. The earth of Prospero glistened. A carpet of glass fragments lay there, as deep and smooth as a dusting of snow.

Everything was glass, once. The pyramids, the libraries, the galleries. Now, it is our dust.

‘Sweep pattern,’ he ordered over the vox. ‘Ranged weapons. Rendezvous point Aleph.’

The remaining Space Marines spread out slowly from the embarkation point. The two who’d piloted the ship during the descent remained to guard it, stationed at the end of the ramp under the shelter of the rear fuselage. The seven others lowered bolters and walked as stealthily as they could across the glittering glass-dust. They organised themselves into a rough semi-circle, each brother heading for a different point in the line of buildings ahead. They stayed within a hundred metres of one another, opening out into a wide net. Steadily, they began to sweep though the devastated streets ahead.

Kalliston blink-clicked a rune to enhance his night vision lens-feed. The terrain around him shimmered into false colour contours. There were no target runes, no life-signs, no proximity warnings. The sterile bones of the shattered buildings loomed up towards him from the heat-hazed dark.

There was no chatter over the comm. The battle-brothers went reverently. They were treading on the tombs of their home world.

Kalliston raised his head fractionally, watching as a tall spur of metal emerged from the dark. It was over a hundred metres tall, but as thin as a burned-out tree-trunk. It had once supported a much bigger construction, but now tottered alone, a rare survivor of the firestorms that had raged through Tizca.

The City of Light. The home of our people.

‘Are you getting anything, brother-captain?’ came Arvida’s voice over a private channel.

Arvida had moved slightly ahead of the others, and his route had taken him out of formation. On another mission, Kalliston might have rebuked him for that.

‘Negative,’ replied Kalliston, keeping any emotion out of his voice. He could sense Arvida’s scepticism even from a hundred metres distant. Back on Prospero, Kalliston’s mind-scrying abilities had returned to their peak, and the moods of his squad were transparent to him.

‘There may be nothing left to get,’ said Arvida.

‘It’s possible.’

‘So how long are we going to look?’

‘I’ll determine that. Reserve your energies for the hunt, brother.’

Kalliston cut the comm-link.

The squad pressed on, passing deeper into the shattered city. Darkness clung to the bases of the ruined walls, squatting in the eaves of plasma-charred doorways that led nowhere.

Kalliston felt his boot crunch through something fragile, and looked down. A ribcage lay there, shattered by his heavy tread, as brittle and black as coal. It wasn’t big enough to be an adult’s.

He looked further up the street. Bones were strewn everywhere ahead, all of them human-sized.

Briefly, something flickered on his helm-display. Kalliston was instantly alert, though the signal, a threat rune on the edge of his armour’s detector range, disappeared as soon as it had come.

‘Captain,’ voxed Phaeret, one of his squad members. ‘You’ll want to see this.’

Kalliston blink-clicked an acknowledgement. The threat rune didn’t make another appearance on his display. Possibly a false reading, or some malfunction in the long-range augurs in his armour.

Both those possibilities were unlikely. Kalliston kept his boltgun muzzle in firing position as he walked towards Phaeret’s location marker, and his senses remained alert. He was perfectly aware of the danger, and perfectly aware of the opportunity.

Something else was alive on Prospero.

‘So how did you feel, seeing the destruction of your home world?’

The question surprises me. What does it matter, what I feel about anything? If this is an interrogation by a member of the forces occupying the planet, I would have expected questions on the disposition of the remains of my Legion, on the lingering capabilities of the survivors – something, at least, about military matters.

But then, there is much that is strange about this interrogation. I have the overwhelming feeling that I am not just here for the information I can provide. No, this unseen questioner wants something else.

‘Uncomfortable,’ I reply. ‘But nothing more than that. We knew something of what to expect. My deputy is a seer, and he had made us aware of what had happened in its broadest outline.’

At the mention of Arvida, I wonder if he still lives. Perhaps he is being questioned in a cell like this too, or maybe he lies dead in the glass dust of the city.

‘Uncomfortable?’ he repeats.

The word seems to irritate him, and the breathing becomes more erratic.

‘You were spineless,’ he says, and the voice is harsh and accusatory. ‘You come back here, like damned reclamators, picking through the rubble of what you let be destroyed. If this had been my world I’d never have left it. I’d have killed any invader who dared come close to it, and damned be my primarch’s orders. You were weak, Captain Kalliston. Weak.’

He insists on the term, spitting it out. I sense his body coming closer. He is looming in the dark now, just beyond the ends of my chair-arms. Exhalations brush against my face, hot and caustic, like the breath of a dog.

‘If we’d known–’ I begin, starting to defend myself. I don’t know why I feel the urge to do this. It doesn’t matter what the questioner thinks of me, for my own conscience is untroubled.

‘If you’d known!’ he roars, cutting short my half-hearted response. Droplets of spittle hit my face. For a moment I think he’s flown into a rage, but then I realise he’s laughing. ‘Listen to yourself, Thousand Son. You’ve always been so proud, strutting across worlds conquered by the prowess of other Legions, glorying in your superior understanding of what we uncovered for you. Not for you the dirty work of fighting with your hands. Oh, no. There were always other fighters to do that for you, to take on the danger at close-quarters, freeing you up to spend those hours in your libraries. Did you ever guess how much we all held you in contempt?’

‘We knew well enough,’ I say.

It’s perfectly true – we knew just how much our brothers mistrusted us, and as a result worked hard not to provoke them. He’s entirely wrong that we gloried in our superior understanding. Instead, we hid it, tried to show it as little as possible. Those instincts, as it turns out, may well have been mistaken.

‘You knew? You could have fought like warriors, rather than drift into witchery. You had choices. I don’t understand you.’

Did we have choices? Prospero was a world soaked in the psychic possibility of the Great Ocean. We were all touched by it, for better or worse. I don’t think we could have turned down the opportunities that gave us, even though we knew it made the other Legions uneasy.

Ultimately, though, the question is pointless. We did what we did, and no power in the universe has ever been able to undo the past.

‘We fought,’ I reply, remembering the conquest of Shrike, when Magnus himself had led us in war. He’d been magnificent, unstoppable, just as much as Russ or Lorgar, every bit the vision of the Emperor’s most favoured son. ‘We played our part.’

‘No longer,’ comes the riposte, savage with satisfaction. ‘Your part is over. Your pyramids are destroyed, and your bastard primarch’s back broken.’

He hates us. The hatred has not diminished with the humbling of my Legion. That may be why he brought me here. To gloat. My mind-sight is beginning to return, and I sense enormous frustration boiling within him. He has been left behind while others have departed for further conquest. This is one source of his anger. Soon, he will vent it on me.

But I cannot believe that is the only motivation. I am aware still how little I know. Why was Prospero destroyed? What, exactly, brought that doom upon us? The ignorance of that is more torture than anything this interrogator has planned for me. To die without uncovering those truths would be the most shameful way to go, and one that would vindicate Arvida’s doubts about coming back.

Can I use the instability in my questioner to my advantage? Would he let slip secrets if I goaded him? A dangerous course of action – his cooped-up rage is like that of a beast, wild and indiscriminate. But then, there is little for me to lose. My Legion is scattered, my primarch missing, my home world blasted into a ball of lifeless slag. I would like some answers before he loses control of the furnace within him and ends this conversation for good.

‘Magnus is not dead,’ I say. ‘I would know if he’d died. It was in the hope of finding him that we came back here. You, though, seem to know everything about us and what happened to our planet. You hint at more, things that I can only guess at. Since you know so much, and I know so little, should it not be me asking the questions?’

In the near-complete dark, I make out only the sharpest flash of dirty-grey. A gauntlet plunges out of the shadow and grabs my neck. The fingers squeeze painfully, just below the chin and just above the metal band that holds my head in place.

‘You are prey for me, traitor,’ comes the bloody rumble of a voice. ‘Nothing more than that. Forget it, and I will end you with agony.’

The threat means little. As I struggle to breathe, though, I realise something else. My aether-drawn powers are returning. They are weak, to be sure, but they are creeping back to me in drabs. Perhaps he knows this, perhaps he doesn’t. In any case, I have a glimmer of a chance now. The longer this thing lasts, the stronger I will become. Maybe, just maybe, strong enough to break these bonds.

The Ungifted Warriors have always underestimated what can be done with the mind, no doubt because we gifted have always been reluctant to use our skills unless pressed by necessity.

He releases his fist, and I gulp in draughts of blood-tanged air. He withdraws, though I can still feel him seething. He keeps his anger on an uncertain leash, as if it were a ravening predator continually tugging at its inadequate restraint.

‘How many were in your squad?’ he asks, recovering his poise with difficulty.

That’s good. I hope he has many such questions. I will answer them all fully, all the while letting my control over the aether return.

‘Nine,’ I say, and though my speech is grudging and surly, in my mind there already kindles an eager anticipation for what is to come. ‘There were nine of us.’

By the time Kalliston arrived, Phaeret was crouched down before the base of a pillar. The shaft was broken off about two metres up and rubble littered the surroundings. There were more ruined remnants of other buildings ahead, some no more than swaying spurs hanging over the curves of blast craters.

‘What is it?’ Kalliston asked, coming down to the same level.

Phaeret gestured towards the ground, saying nothing.

There was a gauntlet lying amid the blasted stone. Kalliston picked it up, turning it over to make the most of the light. It was gunmetal-grey and ready to fall into pieces. The construction was Legiones Astartes power armour – no mortal would have been able to wear such gear. Two of the fingers were missing, and the hollow stumps were black from burning. On the back of it, where the main ceramite plate guarded the warrior’s fist, a rune had been inscribed. There was nothing clumsy about it. Even Kalliston, who was by no means an expert on artificer tech, could see the careful workmanship.

‘And which of our brothers makes use of the runes?’ he asked, speaking to himself.

His mind went back to the assault on Shrike, the name his Legion had given to Ark Reach Secundus. It was there that Magnus and Russ had first clashed over the preservation of the avenians’ libraries. That had been a terrible day. Kalliston had been there when the Wolf King had stormed across the causeway with terrible violence in his eyes, and it had seemed as if Space Marine would fight Space Marine. He remembered the sheer majesty of the Wolves of Fenris, the terrifying potency locked into their single-minded frames. True, they had been stopped by sorcery for a time, but the barrier would have broken eventually. They would have kept on coming, heedless of the casualties, spinning into contact like a shell loosed from a gun-barrel.

Remorseless. The power that, once loosed, can never be called back.

‘This is their work,’ said Phaeret, and his young voice was savage with emotion. ‘The Wolves of Fenris.’

Kalliston stood, his eyes still locked on the gauntlet.

They had always been the primary suspects. The bad blood between Magnus and Russ had been well-known, as had the capability of the Wolves for sudden and unpredictable brutality. The trial at Nikaea had been at the instigation of Russ, so it was rumoured. The Wolf King’s hatred of sorcery had given him the pretext, and it seemed that he had acted on his intolerance at last.

But how had such a thing been dared? Had Russ gone rogue, finally giving in to the barbarism that burned in his feral soul? Or had this thing been sanctioned by a higher power?

The more Kalliston gazed at the gauntlet, letting his eyes run over the single rune etched into the ceramite glove, the more questions clamoured at him. It was one thing knowing the perpetrator of an act; quite another to understand his reasons.

‘Captain,’ voxed Arvida, breaking into Kalliston’s train of thought. ‘Evidence. There are traces of Space–’

‘I know it,’ said Kalliston, a dead weariness hanging on the words. ‘Russ’s dogs.’

‘Armour fragments,’ confirmed Arvida. ‘And they’ve carved things in the walls. Some of them are... obscene.’

Kalliston felt a stab of anger then. They were brutes, the Wolves, as shallow and thuggish as greenskins. He’d never understood what place they’d had in the Great Crusade, other than to ruin the reputation of enlightened humanity and stain the achievements of Unification. Only Angron’s berserkers were worse, and at least they’d been taken under the wing of the Warmaster. There had been no such wise, restraining hand to keep the Wolves of Fenris within civilised parameters, and it looked like they’d finally lost any semblance of control.

‘We’re getting more signs, the further we go,’ replied Kalliston, speaking to the whole squad over the mission channel. ‘Head to the Pyramid of Photep, where we’ll regroup.’

Phaeret started to move off immediately, but Arvida maintained the comm link.

‘There may still be Wolves on the planet,’ he warned. ‘Is this zone clear of targets?’

‘I read nothing,’ replied Kalliston, giving away his irritation. Arvida was only doing his job, but something about the sergeant’s drip-feed of scepticism was getting under his skin. ‘Move to heading–’

Even as he spoke, Phaeret’s head and shoulders disappeared in a cloud of whirling armour, bone and blood. The booming report of heavy weapons echoed down the street, followed by the sharp clatter of bolter fire.

Kalliston threw himself behind the pillar, feeling the stone tremble as the reactive rounds thumped into it and blasted the stone open. He scrambled backward, away from the firestorm and into the lee of a more solid wall-section. As he went, more shells impacted around him, throwing up glittering waves of glass.

There were cries of alarm over the comm, and a thin recording of bolter-fire. His squad were all coming under fire. Two more life-sign runes dropped out of his helm-display.

Throne, where are they coming from?

‘Heavy incoming!’ reported Orphide, two hundred metres away. ‘Getting multiple–’

Then his signal wavered and died, leaving static on the channel.

‘Lock on to my position!’ ordered Kalliston, whirling round, trying to make the best sense of the terrain around him. There were plenty of cover-points in the ruined cityscape, but nothing much that would stand up to concerted assault. ‘Fall back to this location. Repeat, fall back to this location.’

He risked a look through a gap in the wall, keeping his helm as low as possible. There were still no target runes on his helm display, but auspexes could be jammed.

Two hundred metres distant, at the far end of the desolate street, he saw movement for the first time. Something pale grey flitted between cover, head low, moving fast. The profile was unmistakable – Space Marine power armour. Kalliston saw no others, but knew there’d be more out there. He checked the magazine was locked in place and that the ammo counter read full. His hearts had begun to beat in that steady, deep rhythm that always preceded action. He felt the familiar prickle across his skin as stimms entered his bloodstream and primed the muscle-nerve interfaces of his carapace.

‘This is my world, dogs,’ he snarled, his voice eager. ‘So you’re going to have to fight me for it.’

‘Nine of you,’ he says. ‘Nine fools. You seem to have had few plans, other than to sniff around in the ruins and look for scraps. Did it never occur to you that the destroyers of Prospero would leave troops behind?’

‘Of course it did.’

‘And you still came.’

I briefly ponder whether to try my luck again. I can make him angry so easily, but there is the question of timing. For the moment, I restrain myself.

‘Yes. Our position was in any case bleak. We were alone, separated from what remained of our fleet. In such a position of ignorance, we were vulnerable. I decided to seek survivors on Prospero, perhaps the primarch himself. We knew that there were unlikely to be any, but there were other reasons to – as you say – sniff around in the ruins.’

There was a minuscule pause then, a slight catch in the otherwise metronomic regularity of the breathing.

‘Other reasons?’

I decide to keep talking, to stick to the truth. This interrogation will be coming to an end soon in any case.

‘Prospero was the greatest seat of learning in all the worlds of men,’ I say, and make no effort to keep the pride out of my voice. ‘There were libraries here that were the envy even of the ancient races. There were secrets in our vaults, secrets that even we hadn’t fully had the time to unlock properly. While you were sailing across the sea of stars, plundering and maiming, we were learning.’

As I speak, I recall using much the same words to persuade Arvida of the wisdom of returning home. He’d listened just as intently as my questioner did now.

‘You speak of witchery,’ I say. I dare a little more. ‘You know nothing of it. There are subtleties to the Great Ocean that only we understood. We could peer into the very stuff of the warp and make sense of the patterns there. We saw glimpses of the future, of possibilities more magnificent than there are words to describe.’

I begin to enthuse myself. I remember the devices that we used for learning, for discovery, for healing – the enormous potential that they had. We were like children, stepping into a dimension of wonder, our eyes glistening from the reflected glory.

‘I thought that, if some of those things survived, then we could retrieve them. If the fates determined that we were to be cast adrift, we could at least make some use of the tools that we’d accumulated.’

‘Did you find any?’

He is still eager, hungry for information now. The scorn has left his voice, replaced by something like need. Perhaps he has no idea how transparent he is. Odd, that he should be so brittle. I’d always imagined the Wolves being more sure of themselves.

‘No,’ I say, deflating his hopes as bluntly as I can. ‘We had no time. And, in any case, I doubt anything could have survived the mess you made of this place. You have destroyed everything. If I’d known it was you behind this carnage, I’d have expected nothing less. You are butchers and psychopaths, sadists and morons, the lowest of the–’

I know what I’m doing. His psychology is increasingly open to me. I raise his hopes, then dash them. I sense the fragility of his mind, and strike where I know the pain will be greatest.

I only stop speaking as the fist crashes into my jaw. Even inured as I am to physical shock, it staggers me. He moves fast; far faster than I could have done. I feel bone breaking, my jawline fragmenting, and my head jarring back against the metal of the chair. Pain flares up, hot and bright behind my eyes. Then a secondary bloom of agony, rolling across my face.

‘You know nothing of us!’ he roars, and the voice is instantly unhinged with rage.

Groggily, I realise I have unleashed something of incredible magnitude, and my stomach tightens.

He strikes me again, using his other fist, and my head bounces painfully from its bonds. What little vision I had disappears, to be replaced by a red-black, blotchy haze. Something else – a boot? – thuds into my exposed midriff, cracking my fused ribs and driving the plates in.

‘Nothing!’ he bellows, and a whole curtain of saliva slaps across my ruined cheeks. He is screaming into my face.

I can summon nothing against this. I have moved too soon, and he will surely kill me. More hammer-blows impact, breaking my skin, tearing my muscles, shivering the bone beneath. My head rocks on my neck like a top, cracked back and forth by the casual, deadly fists. If it were not for my restraints keeping me in check, my neck would be severed clean by now.

Then he stops. Merciful Throne, he stops.

I hear him raging still, incoherent with mania. He paces back and forth, trying to rein in whatever dark forces I have unleashed. I gasp for breath, feeling my punctured lungs labour. My head feels swollen with blood. The world reels around me, thick and dizzy with pain.

His breathing is like an animal’s, ragged and laced with moisture. For a long time, he doesn’t speak. I don’t think he can. It takes time for the rage to subside.

‘You know nothing of us,’ he growls again, and the voice has resumed its terrifying, purring threat.

I cannot respond. My own lips are puffy and cracked, and I feel my blood clotting in hard nodes within my wounds.

‘So certain,’ he spits, and I feel a slug of oily phlegm hit my body. ‘You’re so damned certain. And yet, as it turns out, you know even less than you think.’

He comes close again, and I smell his sour aroma. That odour gives much away. There is a bestial quality to it, like the sodden flank of an old hunting dog, but there’s something else. Chemical, perhaps.

‘You still don’t know why I brought you here,’ he says. His contempt is needle-keen. ‘Time to shed some light.’

As he says it, wall-mounted lumens flare into life. The sudden exposure only adds more pain to the riot of it in my head, and my bruised eyes screw shut. It takes time for them to open again, gingerly, the lids trembling under flakes of dried blood.

For the first time, I can see my questioner. As I look into his face, blurry and floating amid the harsh lights, I finally make out some detail, some identity.

It is then that I realise, just as he said I would, that I know nothing at all.

Revuel Arvida ran fast, keeping his head low, watching where his boots fell carefully. He reached his destination, a tall column of semi-melted metal on the corner of what had once been an intersection between two transit corridors.

He slid down against the broken column and risked a look round the corner. The body of Orphide lay in the middle of the open street. On either side of him the hollow carcasses of buildings stretched away down the long avenue. There was no visible movement.

He glanced at the proximity readings on his helm display. No enemy signals, and three of his battle-brothers dead. Three other active signals were converging on Kalliston’s location, a few hundred metres distant. Arvida was furthest away, out of position and isolated.

The city was whisper-quiet, but Arvida’s aural amplifiers picked up a faint shuffling from a long way down the street. Something was moving towards him, sheltered by the drifting smog and the urban ruins.

He crouched down with his back against the metal. Arvida was Corvidae, a master of the shifting patterns of the future. Back on his home world and surrounded by its familiar resonance, he felt particularly powerful. He allowed his consciousness to rise quickly through the enumerations.

He saw paths stretching away from him, overlaid onto the pattern of the streets around him. There were many clear possibilities, each running amid the others like a herd of panicked, stampeding prey. Some routes were obscured, but many were clear. He saw the approach of his enemy, their movements and their tactics. They had encircled Kalliston’s position. There were dozens of them.

‘Brother-captain,’ he voxed. ‘Advise retreat to the lander. There’s too ma–’

Arvida broke off, sensing footfalls closing rapidly. The footfalls hadn’t happened yet, but they would soon. His future-sense was shadowing the world around him, exposing the immediate course of events in a ghostly superimposition on the present.

He got to his feet and retreated back the way he’d come. He went quickly, keeping his bolter held ready at chest height.

There was no reply from Kalliston over the comm. Jammed, perhaps. The enemy seemed to know all their weaknesses. How long had they lain in wait, planning for this?

He reached the end of another shattered avenue. Four roads met there, and a blackened statue of Qeras the Episteme still stood at the intersection. The charred eyes gazed east, though lines of oil ran down the stone.

Arvida saw the incoming future-trails of the enemy like hololiths, and acted accordingly. They were moving to intercept him. Several had come down the street where Orphide lay. Two others had tracked back across a block and were heading towards his current position, closing fast.

Arvida shrank back into the shadow of the statue, waiting for them to come into view. They arrived in moments, only just behind their future-trails, hunting eagerly as if they knew their own doppelgangers were almost within blade-range.

Arvida let them pass him, then whirled round and out of cover. He took aim quickly, loosing two shots from his bolter. They were locked at the heads of the enemy, one for each. The first shell impacted perfectly, exploding as it snapped into the back of a pale, bloodstained helm. The target rocked, stumbled forwards, and smashed heavily to the ground. A flurry of glass shards flew up as he crashed earthwards.

But precognition was never perfect. The second shell grazed the other Space Marine’s armour, knocking him off-balance but failing to drop him. The warrior regained his poise almost instantly, falling low and twisting round. A brace of white-hot plasma bolts flew directly at Arvida.

By then the Corvidae had already moved, darting back into the protection of the statue as the energy-pulses hammered into the stone. It broke open on the second impact, cracking from head to foot and toppling into pieces. Arvida burst left from the tumbling remnants, squeezing off another controlled salvo from his bolter.

His enemy hadn’t stood waiting to be hit, but had closed in for the kill. He had a chainaxe in his left hand, buzzing like a furious swarm of insects. His movements were powerful and fast, aimed perfectly and backed up with crushing force. The chainaxe whirred in close, going for the chest then suddenly banking up towards Arvida’s neck.

Without precognition, he’d have been dead. His adversary was stronger, quicker and had the momentum behind him. But when the blades whistled into position, Arvida had already moved, weaving away from the preordained pattern of the cutting edges. Shifting his weight expertly in the wake of the axehead, he pivoted out of contact and fired three rounds into his enemy’s face at point-blank range. They detonated immediately, throwing both of them apart with the crack of the explosion.

Arvida checked his fall, springing back up, and prepared to fire again. He didn’t need to. His enemy’s face was ruined, a hollow shell of blood, armour-chips and skull-fragments.

For a moment, Arvida stood over the defeated warriors , feeling his pulse throb in his veins. It was the first time he’d got close to those who’d hunted his squad through the ruins.

As he looked at the livery on the shoulder-guards, his satisfaction at the kill was replaced by shock.

Then there were more sounds of pursuit, echoing in his future-sense like the memory of a dream. Other warriors were closing fast.

Arvida broke into a run, heading into cover past overhanging building-remnants and loping quickly towards the lander coordinates. There was no way he could fight to Kalliston’s position alone, and he’d help no one by getting pointlessly killed. The only option was to gain the ship, take off and attempt an airlift recovery.

It was as he went, darting between shadows like a ghoul, that he tried to make sense of his attackers’ identity.

But it made no sense. No sense whatsoever.

My questioner’s armour, which I had thought was grey in the near-total dark, is a dirty white. The shoulder-guards were once a bright blue, though every exposed surface on his battle-plate is covered by a translucent layer of brown-red filth.

So he is a War Hound. Or, as I believe they’ve started calling themselves, a World Eater. The assumed name is ludicrous, a perversion of everything the Legiones Astartes used to stand for. However, to the extent that I understand the ways of other Legions, it is perfectly accurate. They do devour planets. I have heard tales of outrages under Angron’s insane tutelage that make my stomach turn. The only Legion with a comparable reputation is the Wolves, so perhaps it’s not surprising that I found it so easy to believe I was held by one of Russ’s dogs.

In the dark, I had imagined my interrogator being something akin to a beast, slavering on the edge of madness. The reality is only a little less disconcerting. The World Eater’s head is uncovered, exposing the full distortion of his features. His flesh is bronzed and supple, though there are deep wells of shadow under his low brow. He has long cheekbones and a blunt, slabbed chin. His head is shaved bare, the scalp puckered with scars. There are regular marks on his temples and a series of iron studs further up on the smooth skin. In another Legion, those studs might have indicated long service, but I know their purpose on him. As with all his kind, there are implants under the flesh, implants long forbidden by the Emperor. The prohibition is for good reason. They accelerate the rage and stoke it, amplifying an already testosterone-charged kill-factory into a bringer of truly ludicrous levels of violence.

And there is something else. The Space Marine before me is no ordinary World Eater, if such a thing could even be said to exist. A few select members of that terror Legion have carved a name for themselves outside their closed, brooding brotherhood. This is one of them. I know, without needing to use my fractured mind-sight, that I am in the presence of Khârn, Captain of the Eighth Assault Company and equerry to the primarch. If I needed any confirmation that my death is close, I have it now.

He stares at me. His eyes are the yellow of curdled milk, rimmed with red where the lids are pulled back. Veins pulse at his temples, bulging darkly against taut skin. He has a line of drool still, glistening against his chin. If I ever wish to conjure up the image of a psychopath again, I will have this picture to bring to mind. Khârn is almost a parody of himself, the apotheosis of martial insanity, a walking furnace of unfettered bloodlust.

He was not always like this. Even in the stories I have heard, he was ferocious but not mad. Something has happened to change him. Something terrible.

‘Why have you brought me here?’ I ask.

Khârn smiles, but there is no mirth there. It is as if his facial muscles pull naturally into a leer unless continually suppressed.

‘I am here for the same reason as you,’ he says. ‘Hunting through the wreckage, looking for something to salvage.’

Even in my weakened state, that image brings a choking, bitter laugh to my lips. I cannot imagine World Eaters salvaging anything. They are the soul of destruction and nothing else.

‘And did you find what you were looking for?’

Khârn nods.

‘There is a cavern, far below the surface of Tizca. You will know of it – the Reflecting Cave. We speculated that the Wolves might have missed it, despite their reputation for thoroughness. There was something down there I was ordered to retrieve.’

He withdraws an iron pendant from his armour. It is fashioned into the shape of a wolf’s head howling against a crescent moon. The metal is black, as if placed in a fire for too long.

‘The Moon Wolf,’ says Khârn. ‘Your primarch used it to make contact with Horus. It was a part of the Warmaster’s armour once, and so has a sympathetic connection with him.’

He speaks as if those words should mean something to me, though I struggle to see the significance of them.

‘It could be used again, and Horus has no wish to be reached for further discussions. It will be destroyed, and another potential chink in our defences will be closed off. Then, thank the gods, I shall be free to undertake more fulfilling work for the cause.’

‘I do not understand,’ I say, and the passing reference to gods makes me uneasy. ‘What has Horus to do with this? What has happened here?’

Khârn doesn’t smile this time, but I can sense a vicious amusement cradling in him. I sense more than that, too. He is burning with agony, an agony that can only be discharged by murder. The Moon Wolf was not the only reason he came to Prospero.

‘You really know nothing,’ he says. ‘I had planned to torture you for your secrets, but I see that you have none. So I shall torture you another way.’

He leans forwards, and I recoil at the raw-meat stench of his breath.

‘Listen to me, Thousand Son, and I will tell you a story. I will tell you of the great movement that is taking place across the galaxy. I will tell you of the ruin of all your primarch’s hopes and the final triumph of the virtuous strong over the craven weak. And then, before I kill you, I will tell you of the final destination of this crusade, the crusade men are already beginning, in their infinite ignorance, to call the Heresy.’

The volume of fire was deafening. Bolter rounds exploded into the surrounding walls, shredding them into dust. Heavier weapons were being brought to bear, too. A missile screamed overhead, crashing into a stone balustrade less than five metres from Kalliston’s position.

The Thousand Sons captain was hunkered down in an old blast crater somewhere deep in the centre of the city. Two of his squad were with him, crouched against the lip of the torn-up earth, their shoulders juddering as they loosed streams of shells into the night. The quantity of incoming fire was far greater than anything they could match, and the warm night air was streaked with tracer fire heading in their direction. A fourth body lay, immobile, at the bottom of the crater.

‘Prepare to fall back,’ announced Kalliston, watching his magazine empty. He was running out of choices. It was difficult to make out numbers in the dark and at such range, but there must have been more than thirty Space Marines closing in on them. Those numbers made holding ground impossible.

‘Where to, brother-captain?’ asked Leot, one of the two surviving Thousand Sons. There was no fear in his deliberate voice, but there was an undertone of reproach. He knew how slim the options were.

‘To the lander,’ replied Kalliston, ejecting the magazine and slamming home a replacement. ‘But not direct. We’ll break back towards the colonnade, and then cut round.’

He gauged the likely location of the closest enemy targets by the pattern of fire, threw himself onto the edge of the crater and let fly with a controlled salvo before dropping back again. As he landed out of harm’s way, the thick crust of earth, glass and rubble exploded in a plume of fire. Then there were more bolt impacts, and the second whine of a missile launch.

‘Now,’ Kalliston ordered, beckoning his men to go ahead while he covered the retreat.

The two Space Marines fell back quickly, keeping in the lee of the crater shadow and moving to the far side of the bowl. As they reached the ridge, they broke out quickly. Kalliston stood up, releasing a final burst before racing to join them. He ran quickly up the uneven slope, feeling the thud of the incoming shells as they landed only metres short.

Then he was out, back onto the street level, running behind his battle-brothers, searching out fresh cover.

Too late, Kalliston realised that there were more attackers closing in from the very point they were heading towards.

‘Incom–’ he started, seeing the missile contrail too late.

The shoulder-launched missile slammed into the ground just ahead of him, throwing him into a roaring confusion of pain and tumbling movement. Kalliston felt several further heavy impacts, including one that exploded against his chest. His body cartwheeled through the air, buffeted by the backwash of the multiple blasts, before slamming into something unyielding. His spine compressed agonisingly, and he felt the bones of his right leg fracture. His vision went cloudy, and the world reeled around him in a blur of lurid colour.

Dimly, he heard treads rushing towards him in the dust, and the ragged bark of bolter-fire. A muzzle was pressed against his temple, clinking sharply against the smooth curve of his helm.

‘No,’ came a voice from close by, bestial in character and alive with a barely suppressed pleasure in the kill. ‘Alive.’

Then agony surged through Kalliston’s body, forking through his frame like storm-lightning. There was a numb falling away. Then there was nothing.

I had always considered it a gift to be able to peer inside the veils of a man’s mind. I had always valued my ability to tell whether my interlocutor was lying or telling the truth, just as an ungifted mortal might make imperfect use of pulse-rates, sweating, or evasive gazes. Such a capability seemed to me one of the most precious of possessions, just one more piece of evidence for the ineluctable progress of mankind towards mortal godhood.

Now I recognise the price for such perspicuity. I cannot doubt the things I have been told. I cannot reassure myself that Khârn is concealing the truth from me, because his mind is like a translucent vial and there is no concealment possible.

So I must believe. I must believe what he says about the ruin of the Great Crusade and the turning of the primarchs to darkness, and the gathering storm that even now extends its pinions towards Terra. I must believe that my gene-father, whom I had revered along with the rest of my brothers, was guilty of the most terrible miscalculation, and has passed beyond the confines of the physical universe with the remnants of our Legion. I must believe that my survival is a pointless thing, a piece of unresolved business from a war that I have been denied any meaningful part in.

As he speaks, my recovery accelerates, and my ability to make use of my powers returns more quickly. My body embarks on the astonishing process of repair that it has been able to conduct ever since the implant of my enhanced organs. I am preparing to extend my life again, to resist whatever fresh assault comes my way.

That is what I have been turned into, a vehicle for survival. Even in the face of such overwhelming trauma, my blood still clots, my sinews pull back into shape and my bones repair the cracks in their structure. By telling me these things, in such agonising detail, he has given me the space to become myself again. I have weapons. I have the ability to hurt him, perhaps even the ability to kill him. Does he know this? Is my degradation so complete that he no longer sees me as any kind of threat?

He may be right. My spirit, my certainty is gone. The actions of Magnus are either incomprehensible or evil. In either case, I cannot focus my thoughts on anything but the betrayal.

Why did he send us away? He must have known we’d seek to return, or that the vengeful forces that destroyed this world would come after us in the void. He was the mightiest of us all, the magus, the one who saw the snaking paths of the Ocean most clearly of all. So I cannot put it down to simple omission. There are patterns here to be read. There are always patterns.

‘So, Thousand Son,’ asks my tormentor. ‘What do you make of that?’

He delights in my misery. It draws his attention from his own discontent. It is a cliché as old as the universe, the bully inflicting pain in order to send it away from himself.

It won’t work. The pain will catch up with him in the end, even if he has to kill every other sentient life-form in the galaxy first.

‘You allied yourself with the traitor,’ I say, and I hear the hollow ring to my words.

‘You call him traitor. History will call him redeemer.’

‘And you tell me the Wolves of Fenris did this to punish our treachery. Then why do you hunt us?’

‘They came for you because they believed you had turned. We come for you because we know that you didn’t. Not truly. Not reliably. Our cause demands commitment.’

‘So you never did believe in Unification? It was always a sham for you?’

Khârn grimaces. He is like a child, and his emotions play across his face nakedly. My mind-sight is overkill here – the rawest practicus could read him now.

‘We believed in it completely,’ he growls, and the raw emotion rises to just below the surface. ‘None believed in it more than we did. None laid their bodies on the line to the extent that we did.’

He comes closer. His eyes stare at me, glistening in the bright light.

‘We are fighters,’ he says. ‘We are made in the image of our primarch, just as you are made in the image of yours, and he has been betrayed and cast aside, even as the rule of the galaxy passes from the warriors to the slavemasters.’

I do not understand the reference to slavemasters, but it scarcely matters, for Khârn is no longer talking to me.

‘They will use us again to fight their battles while they remain in the audience, laughing. They are the audience, who watch as we come for them in their stalls. We will do to them what Angron should have done in Desh’ea. We will fulfill the potential within us.’

I see his pupils flicker, and can only guess at what scenes he is seeing. Like a prophet trapped in his own visions, Khârn is locked in a world of unreliable memory and paranoia. The damage done to his mind is heartbreaking. All that energy, all that raw potency, has been harnessed to an engine of lunacy.

Enough. It is time to show him how much I understand.

‘You didn’t come here for the Moon Wolf,’ I say, keeping my voice quiet. ‘You came here because you knew what devices once existed on Prospero. You hoped to find a cure.’

That halts him. He glares at me, and a fleck of spittle shines on his hanging lip like a jewel.

‘There is still time,’ I say, knowing the danger it places me in. I begin to wonder if this encounter was foreseen after all. ‘The devices have all been destroyed, but I can replicate their functions. I can heal your mind. I can remove the implants and give you back your sleep. I can take away the fire that drives you onwards, the fire that goads you to the acts you abhor. Even now, I know that a part of you still abhors what you have done.’

The spittle hangs, trembling, on his unmoving flesh.

‘I can help you, brother. I can heal your mind.’

He remains locked, frozen in indecision. If I had been Corvidae, I could have seen the paths of the future bisect within him, one going left, one going right. He is at the juncture now, what the ancients called crisis. He has the power to choose, to pull back or to plough on. I cannot intervene. The slightest nudge now will unleash the inferno, one that would toss me aside like dried brush in the hurricane.

I dare to believe in him for the space of a heartbeat. He looks at me, and I see the vindication of my guesses. He is lost in a universe of pain, one that is only temporarily forgotten in the action of killing. I know that my words have reached the sliver of his old self that still endures. I know he can hear me.

And so we remain, alone, locked away somewhere in the ruins of Prospero, a tiny mirror of the battle of wills taking place all across the galaxy.

And for that single heartbeat, I dare to believe.

‘Witch!’ he roars then, and the spittle flies from his lips. ‘You cannot heal this!’

Like a prey-beast springing away from the spear, he drags up a cry of tortured rage, shaking his head from side to side, flailing sweat from the bronze skin. He balls his massive fists, and I know they will come for me soon. His face contorts into a vice of bitter anguish, the expression that it will surely wear for millennia hence if I cannot stop him now.

He has chosen.

I cry aloud words of power, words I had forgotten existed until this moment. I am weak, crippled by the rigours of my captivity, but the lessons of my long conditioning are strong.

I am Athanaean, a master of the hidden ways of the mind, and there are more weapons in the galaxy than fists and blades.

My bonds shatter, freeing me to move. I rise from the chair, wreathed in the blazing light of the unbound aether, ignoring the protests of my broken limbs.

He comes at me then, the Eater of Worlds, and there is murder in his red-rimmed eyes. I have hurt him by exposing the source of his anguish, and I know then he will not stop until I lie dead and my blood paints every wall of this cell.

But we are on my world, the wellspring of my Legion’s ancient power, and the very dust of Tizca fuels my mastery of the warp. I am more powerful than he guesses.

He howls, this ruined abomination, as he thunders into strike-range. I meet the challenge, and my conscience is clear.

I cannot cure him, so I will have to kill him.

Arvida arrived at the landing site just in time.

Just in time to see the corpses of the pilots being dragged across the ground, leaving furrows in the sharp-edged dust. Just in time to see the krak-charges being laid around the flanks of the lander. Just in time to hear the rasping laughter of victory from the berserkers who’d stormed the vehicle.

There were twenty-seven World Eaters clustered around the empty crew-bay. One of them lay in the dust, his armour punched open from bolter impacts. The only other casualties were the two Thousand Sons who’d been left to guard it. They hadn’t stood much of a chance.

Arvida ducked down, keeping hidden behind a tangled hedge of semi-melted girders thirty metres away. As he watched, the helms of his brothers were torn off. Their exposed faces were punched, over and over again. The heads lolled lifelessly, turning into raw lumps of gore and gristle under the pointless barrage. The World Eaters laughed some more, cheering as each fist hit home.

Arvida turned away. He felt angry enough, but not towards Angron’s warriors – they were just savages, and had long ago ceased to be capable of anything more than boneheaded thuggery. His real anger was directed towards Kalliston, the one who had led them here against his counsel. The captain had always had too much faith in the providence of fate. The very idea that Magnus might have been fallible, that the primarch’s leadership might have been badly misguided, was anathema to him. Clearly it had been. They should have remained in space, searching for more survivors before heading into the emptiness of the void to recover. Prospero was nothing but a graveyard.

Even so, that left much to be explained. Arvida might have understood if there had been Wolves on Prospero, but World Eaters were another matter. Had the two Legions been acting in concert? Had all the other Legions turned against the Thousand Sons? If so, then why now? And for what reason?

The World Eaters began to strip the rest of the armour from their captives, and the desecration of their bodies began in earnest. Whoops and roars filled the otherwise tranquil air as they set to work.

Arvida glanced at his helm display. His squad were all gone, their life-signs inactive. He was alone, facing an enemy he couldn’t hope to contest.

The safest course of action would be to retreat, to flee back through the silent streets and wait for something to turn up. He knew he would have to withdraw soon enough, but the senseless barbarism in front of him offended his highly-developed sense of pride in the rules of war. His Legion had never broken them.

He rose from cover and drew his bolter up in a single, flowing movement. As he took aim, he saw the path of the shell that he would fire snaking into the future, and took some solace from the certainty of the kill. He squeezed the trigger, then turned and sprinted back into the shadows.

Arvida didn’t see the captain of the World Eaters collapse to the ground, his helm carved in two by the detonation of the bolt-round, but he heard it. Then he heard the roars of anger, and the thud of four dozen boots as the warband wheeled and charged towards the source of the shot.

He ran, keeping his head low, ducking and weaving through the thickets of blasted iron. The noise of the pursuit echoed in his ears, harsh and brutal. If they caught him, he’d be lucky to suffer a quick death.

Arvida upped the pace, pushing his body into a new burst of speed, barely noticing the skeletal buildings rush past in the night. He knew it had been reckless to fire that shot. Stupid, even.

But, and just for a moment, it had felt good.

His strength is breathtaking. It is as if every aspect of the Legiones Astartes has been stripped away in favour of that single facet. His fists move in blurs of speed, backed up by the prodigious power of his massive body. He has no weapon, but that scarcely seems to matter. He is used to carving up his foes with his hands.

He is always attacking, always looking for the way in. I parry as best I can, holding him back by attacking his only vulnerable part. I see his mind now as it will become in the future – a cauldron of seething, perpetual violence. The brief window I had on another Khârn has closed, and the corrupted half is all that remains. I can hammer away at that, flexing my telepathic muscles as he flexes his unnaturally stimmed physical ones, though I fear my attacks have little bite.

He wades through warp-born attacks that would floor a lesser adversary. I know I must be hurting him, but he brushes it off. Perhaps there is no pain I could inflict that is greater than the one he inflicts on himself.

‘Witch!’ he roars again, coming at me in a barrelling, swaying charge.

I leap to the side, crashing against the metal walls of the cell, only evading his outstretched hands by finger-widths. I unleash everything I have then, a whirling torrent of memory-scorching agony capable of ripping the sanity from a man and dissolving it like magnesium in water.

But there is so little sanity to rip away, and he barely stumbles.

I make use of the gap I created, and throw a heavy punch at his exposed head. My fist connects. It is a well-aimed blow, and impacts with all the force I can deliver. His skull rocks back and blood joins the trails of saliva in the air.

Then I am moving again, evading the furious response. He is like a whirlwind, a morass of hurtling limbs. I feel a heavy thud as his boot rises, catching me on my hip. There is a jarring crack as my pelvis fractures.

I scramble away from him, sprawling face-down to the floor. Another foot connects, breaking the femur in my trailing leg. Out of my armour, I have so little defence against attacks of this quantity and magnitude. The absurdity of my defiance is laughable.

I roll over onto my back, spinning away from a floor-breaking fist-plunge.

Khârn towers over me. Froth spills from his lips, and his eyes bulge from their swollen sockets.

It is my pity that has doomed me. Pity is the only emotion he can no longer tolerate, the one that reminds him of what he once was. If I had not offered to cure him, perhaps I would have lived. Perhaps he would have persuaded me of the righteousness of his cause, and I would have joined the movement that he says will liberate the galaxy.

It is that thought that persuades me I was right to try. As I gaze up into the mask of trembling fervour above me, I see what fate would have awaited me as a part of that dark crusade. He has lost himself, and what remains is now much less than human.

His clenched gauntlet swoops down, hitting me square in the face. The bones, already weakened, crunch inwards. I feel the back of my head drive a dent into the metal floor, and the hot stickiness of the blood in the well as it rebounds out again.

The world tilts, rocking on an axis of nausea. I only dimly feel the second blow, cracking into my ribs. My body becomes a chorus of pain, resounding in discordant polyphony.

Through blood-swelled eyes I see the fist coming that will finish me. It is fitting, to witness the cause of my own death. As a loyal son of the Imperium, I never wished for more than that.

I have time for only one more thought before the end comes.

I gave you the choice, Khârn. When the murder and madness are over, you will have the leisure to reflect on that. You could have turned back.

That knowledge, I know, will haunt him. I dread to think what he will become when his rampage ends and he is forced to confront that.

I can guess. I guess that he will become uncontainable, and will turn on whatever force has sought to channel his rage for its own purposes. None shall master him, for he has lost mastery over himself.

When the fist lands, that is what I am thinking. There is no comfort in it. And, of course, there will be no comfort in anything again.

Arvida kept moving. The dead city was crawling with World Eater kill-squads, roving through the empty hab-blocks like underhive murder-gangs. For the time being, he was ahead of them. He knew Tizca better than them, and remembered the intricate pattern of its streets perfectly. What was more, his future-sense still lingered, warning him away from taking wrong turns and preventing fatal mis-steps.

It wouldn’t last forever. Sooner or later, he’d have to rest, to sleep, to find something to eat. His enhanced constitution could stave off that need for days, but not forever. The Wolves had burned Prospero almost completely to the ground, so there would be meagre hunting ahead.

His only chance of survival would be to stay in the city, evading the predators and searching for some kind of transport off-world. He assumed the Geometric was still in orbit, though his attempts to send a signal had failed. The ship was not without its defences, though it would struggle against a well-crewed World Eaters warship.

So. The options were limited, and the odds long.

Kalliston had been a fool. Coming back to Prospero had been a predictable error, one caused by excessive faith in the primarch. Arvida had never shared that faith, not even when the Legion had been intact. Whatever cataclysm had occurred here had been beyond Magnus’s power to prevent, so it was folly to retain faith in his stratagems. Any survivors from the sack of Prospero were alone now, a scattered band of warriors cast adrift on the rip-tide of the galaxy like the spars of a ruined galleon.

Arvida had no idea how many of his brothers still lived. Perhaps there were hundreds. Perhaps he was the only one.

He reached the end of a long, shallow climb away from the mass of the central conurbation. Arvida turned then, looking back the way he’d come. He had a view far across the centre of the city. Under the starlight, the fields of glass glittered with a pearlescent sheen. It was beautiful.

The City of Light.

He paused for a moment, lost in the vision of what had once been. Nothing moved. Even the drifting clouds of smog were still, suspended in a rare moment of calm.

Only one certainty remained. Arvida knew, as only a Corvidae could know, that death would not find him on Prospero. That was no consolation for what had been lost, but at least it lent the task of planning his next move a certain urgency.

He would survive. He would discover the true causes of his Legion’s destruction, and live to fight them. He would neither pause nor stumble until everything had been revealed to him, everything that would give him a weapon to employ.

‘Knowledge is power,’ he breathed.

Then he turned away from the scene, and stole quickly back into the occlusion of the ruins. As he went, the dim red light of the angry magma fires caught on his shoulder-guard, exposing the serpentine star set about the black raven-head of his cult discipline.

Then he was gone, a shadow among shadows.

Artificial eyes scoured the firmament, seeking a telltale reflection of radiation, looking for a pinprick of light, searching for the merest hint of heat in the coldness. The enemy were out here somewhere, lurking in the shadow of Isstvan VI’s rings. Ice and dust particles provided ample cover for a starship, a hindrance compounded by the residual plasma clouds and radiation from the battle just fought.

Six vessels prowled the void. At their head was the battle-barge Dedicated Wrath, its flotilla of two strike cruisers, one grand cruiser and two destroyers spread across hundreds of thousands of kilometres of space. They approached Isstvan VI warily, unsure how many of the enemy had escaped the initial battle. Plasma reactors on idle, they drifted out-system by inertia; what power they were expending directed to the banks of scanner antenna jutting from their prows.

On the bridge of the Dedicated Wrath Lieutenant-Commander Nigh Vash Delerax fixed his stare on the main screen. The huge display dominated the wall of the main bridge, covered with an anarchic maze of surveyor data and scanner sweep returns. Isstvan VI loomed large in the display, its gold and blue rings shimmering coldly in the faint light of the system’s star.

‘Industrious reports possible scanner return in quadrant eight-theta,’ reported one of the aides at the scanning console behind the Legiones Astartes commander. He was non-Legiones Astartes, though his body showed signs of augmetic surgery and his left eye was a bionic replacement that twinkled red in the bright glow of his screen. ‘Too big to be an asteroid, though possibly an uncharted moonlet.’

Delerax moved his gaze to the top of the screen, to the area mentioned. It was pointless, he realised; even his augmented eyes would not spot something before the systems of the battle-barge, especially since the visual display he looked at was itself a construct based on that data. If the Dedicated Wrath could not see the enemy, neither could he.

‘Tell Industrious to close to within fifty thousand kilometres of the source,’ said Delerax, pulling his eyes away from the screen. ‘Move Justified Aggressor to a triangulating point.’

‘Affirmative, lieutenant-commander,’ said the aide.

The thought that he might have found his prey sent a buzz of excitement through Delerax. He had spent many days fruitlessly searching the outer reaches of the Isstvan system and had almost come to believe that the enemy were not here at all.

His pre-cortical implant responded to his change of mood. With the tiniest of vibrations, the device triggered a wave of chemicals through Delerax’s brain. Immediately every sense was heightened. He could smell the sweat of the men at the consoles, the oil from the machinery. He could taste the static from the display screens and feel the soft currents of air from the overhead ventilators. The blue and white of his armour seemed brighter and every hiss, bleep and breath across the bridge echoed in his ears.

‘Industrious confirms contact,’ the aide said excitedly. ‘Positive transmission identification. It’s a Salamanders ship, strike vessel classification.’

‘At last!’ Delerax let out his pent-up frustration with a shout. He turned and stomped across the bridge towards the communications desk. ‘Signal the whole flotilla. Manoeuvre for immediate attack. Transmit the following to the enemy: This is Lieutenant-Commander Delerax of the World Eaters. Stand down your weapons and prepare to be boarded. Non-compliance will result in your destruction. You will receive no further warning.’

‘They’re making a run for it,’ the scanning officer called out. ‘Cutting away from Isstvan VI, gaining speed.’

‘Flotilla move to intercept,’ said Delerax. ‘Target engines at earliest opportunity. If they get away, you will answer to me!’

The World Eater’s implant was in full battle-mode now, sending jolts through his adrenal system, gearing up his whole body for the coming fight. The sensation was a curious blend of clarity and euphoria: a general sense of well-being that pleasantly dulled the lieutenant-commander’s thoughts while his instinctual reactions raced away, filling him with a barrage of sensation.

As the World Eaters flotilla powered up their engines the Salamanders cruiser turned out-system and darted for its next patch of cover – a cloud of asteroids some five hundred thousand kilometres from Isstvan VI. Like a pack of hounds the ships of the World Eaters gave chase, the more powerful engines of the Dedicated Wrath pushing the battle-barge to the front of the pursuit.

‘Prepare warp torpedoes, maximum spread,’ Delerax ordered as the Dedicated Wrath continued to close the range. If the strike cruiser was allowed to gain the sanctuary of the asteroid field the less manoeuvrable battle-barge would likely lose its prey; this was a kill that Delerax wanted for himself.

The Salamanders were still several thousand kilometres from safety when the gunnery captain reported that they were now within maximum torpedo range. Delerax held off the order to fire, judging the distance to be too great. He paced back and forth across the bridge, impatiently waiting for the moment to fire when the torpedoes would give the enemy the least time to react but catch the strike cruiser before it reached the asteroid field.

He listened to the range being counted down by one of the aides and occasionally glanced across to the main screen. The strike cruiser’s position was highlighted by a glowing reticule but the ship itself was still too distant to be seen, even with full magnification.

‘Our guest wishes to be updated on the current situation.’

Delerax turned to see his second-in-command, Captain Althix Kordassis, had entered the bridge. His blue-and-white armour was trimmed with gold, his right arm a mechanical prosthetic clad with plates painted to match his powered suit. Most remarkable was the look of disdain on his face as he spoke of the Warmaster’s representative.

‘He can monitor the comm-feed like everybody else,’ growled Delerax. ‘I’m busy.’

‘He wants a personal report,’ Kordassis said with a look of apology.

‘He won’t get one,’ snapped Delerax. With combat stimms flowing through his body he was in no mood for the petty requests of Horus’s ambassador. The thought of even looking at the Space Marine envoy that had been forced upon him made Delerax quiver with anger.

‘What shall I tell him?’ asked Kordassis.

‘Whatever you like,’ replied Delerax, turning back to the main screen. ‘This is none of his business.’

Kordassis waited a few moments longer before realising he would get nothing else from his commander.

‘I might as well stay here and watch the excitement then,’ said the captain.

‘You’re welcome,’ said Delerax. ‘Man the weapons station.’

When the range had closed to the optimum opportunity, Delerax gave the order to loose a full torpedo salvo. The battle-barge shuddered as the gigantic missiles were launched. They appeared instantly on the screen, four flares of yellow plasma against the stars that suddenly winked out of existence as their warp drives engaged.

Skipping in and out of warp space, the torpedoes left a trail of multicoloured flashes in their wake, describing an arc that slowly curved to the right as the Salamanders craft tried to evade them. Then they were out of sight, reduced to warp-echo registers on the scanners.

‘Twelve thousand kilometres to target,’ reported a weapons officer, reading from a glowing green screen. He was Skanda Vior, a World Eater too, and like Delerax and Kordassis was clad for battle in his armour. Unlike the officers, he had painted much of his armour red, a growing trend amongst the Legion; an acknowledgement of Angron’s warrior cult. Vior waited a few seconds.

‘Eleven thousand kilometres to target.’

The countdown continued and Delerax ceased his pacing at seven thousand kilometres.

‘Six thousand kilometres to target,’ said the weapons officer. ‘Switching to onboard data scanners; preparing for spread.’

A sub-screen flickered into life on the main viewer, showing an aggregate view from the torpedoes, rendered in a stark black and red monochrome. Strange shapes whirled and Delerax realised they must have switched view while the torpedoes were in mid-jump. A moment later they rematerialised in the real universe and the strike cruiser flashed into view.

It was long and thin, with a launch bay built on its dorsal superstructure. Pinpricks of plasma erupted like sparks from the flight deck as the Salamanders launched attack craft to intercept the incoming torpedoes.

‘Five thousand kilometres, spread launch,’ announced the officer.

The torpedo-generated image swirled into static for a few seconds as the missiles separated, each disgorging four hundred warheads at the Salamanders cruiser. When the relay returned the view was filled with a cloud of sixteen hundred glimmering projectiles. Explosions blotted out the stars as the Salamanders craft swooped and climbed and rolled through the mass, blasting away with cannons and lasers. As the warhead launchers continued to power towards the strike cruiser – each containing a five megatonne nuclear charge – the defence turrets of the Salamanders vessel opened up. Ripples of plasma blasts and flashes of high-velocity munitions streaked across the view, detonating even more of the warheads.

The torpedoes were close enough now to relay a direct-image. The construct-based picture was replaced by a near real-time view of the strike cruiser. It was dark green and banded with broad irregular stripes of yellow, the badge of the Legion visible against a huge white circle near its prow. Through the haze of detonations, it turned away, the captain trying to narrow the ship’s profile against the swarm of incoming warheads. Plasma engines shone like stars through the fog of explosions, distorted by a shimmer of energy fields.

‘Fool,’ said Delerax, smiling at the weapons officer. ‘A rudimentary mistake. One should turn into a torpedo attack, protecting the engines. A novice, no doubt.’

Blue and purple lightning flickered as the remaining warheads, several hundred of them, slammed into the strike cruiser’s shields. The vessel was engulfed by a blaze of detonations, so bright it appeared on the main display like a nova being born. More explosions followed as the shields overloaded and the remaining warheads struck the cruiser’s armoured hull. Plasma billowed from a ruptured engine duct.

A moment later the mini-screen vanished as the warhead launchers detonated.

‘Scanners confirm severe engine damage and moderate damage to the starboard gunnery decks.’

‘Signal the flotilla, close in for the kill,’ replied Delerax.

‘Receiving transmission from Legion command,’ declared a communications aide. ‘Strapped with a priority subsignal.’

‘On speakers,’ replied Delerax, not moving his eyes from the screen.

The bridge hissed with static and a series of coded beeps and buzzes sounded before a bass voice broke across the noise. Delerax’s attention was immediately fixed on the message, all other considerations forgotten as he recognised the voice of Angron, the World Eaters primarch.

‘The treacherous sons of Corax continue to elude that lumbering engineer, Perturabo. The Warmaster has seen fit to give me free hand at the hunt and I will bring down the scum of Deliverance within days. All ships are to return to orbit to conduct the search. To me, my savage hounds! We shall let loose our fury upon the Raven Guard and wipe them from history. Obey with immediate effect.’

‘Shall we break away?’ asked Kordassis.

‘No,’ replied Delerax. He looked at the strike cruiser limping towards the asteroid field followed by a trail of expanding plasma: a predator seeing its prey wounded and ready for the kill. ‘Let the others chase the Raven Guard back and forth across the mountains. A few more hours will make no difference. I have a Salamander to slay.’

Branne frowned and looked at the scanner report again. It did not make any more sense on the second reading. He turned to his companion, the Imperial Army praefector, Marcus Valerius.

‘A large residual trace of plasma and radiation, plus scattered debris clouds,’ said the Raven Guard commander.

‘A space battle?’ asked the praefector.

‘A large one,’ replied Branne. ‘Too large.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Valerius.

Branne handed him the report and walked over to the men working the scanner console, his armour’s heavy boots muffled by the thick carpet laid over the decking. ‘Have these readings been confirmed by the rest of the fleet?’

‘Yes, commander,’ replied the chief officer. ‘Within standard parameters, all sensor returns are showing the same across the fleet.’

‘What do you mean by “too large”?’ said Valerius.

‘Dozens of destroyed ships,’ said Branne. ‘More ships than the entirety of the Luna Wolves fleet.’

‘Imperial Army vessels turned by the Warmaster, perhaps,’ suggested the officer. ‘Oh, and were they not renamed the Sons of Horus?’

The praefector toyed with the red sash across his chest, a symbol of his family’s nobility. It showed signs of wear from Valerius’s constant fidgeting during the long warp jump from Deliverance to Isstvan. The praefector’s nervousness was understandable, though it irritated Branne considerably. Valerius had persuaded the Raven Guard commander to abandon his role as garrison leader of the Ravenspire to come to Isstvan and had vouched for the act with his life. Branne was more than willing to exact the price offered if the trap he suspected proved to be true.

‘Even so, it would indicate almost total destruction of the involved fleet,’ said Branne, ignoring the praefector’s correction. ‘That many destroyed ships indicate a much larger battle.’

‘How do we proceed?’ asked Valerius.

Branne considered his options. His fleet, composed of three Raven Guard vessels including his battle-barge and a handful of Imperial Army transports and frigates, had entered Isstvan perpendicular to the orbital plane. He studied the schematic display of the fleet’s position on a monitor; a projected course drew a dotted line around the Isstvan star towards the planets currently on the other side of the system.

‘Activate sensor dampening protocols,’ said the commander. ‘Rig reflex shields for silent approach. We’ll come in across the star to mask our signature. I don’t want to be seen.’

‘What about my vessels?’ asked Valerius. ‘We don’t have that capability.’

‘Get them to run as quiet as possible,’ said Branne. ‘Until we find out what has happened, I don’t want anyone else to know we are here.’

‘Quiet running will slow us down,’ said Valerius. He blinked rapidly, another nervous tic he had developed. ‘What if we are being too cautious and arrive late?’

‘Late for what?’ rasped Branne, out of patience with the praefactor’s constant hectoring. ‘The battle’s already happened, Marcus. Whatever occurred here is over.’

Five days closer to Isstvan V, where the majority of the fighting appeared to have taken place, Branne was in his quarters when he was passed word that the ship was receiving a transmission from Valerius’s flagship.

‘Send it through to my personal comm,’ said Branne, putting aside the data-slate of sensor readings he had been studying. The reports all confirmed the initial survey. A space battle, or rather several battles in a short period of time involving nearly a hundred vessels, had raged around Isstvan V and out-system towards Isstvan VI.

‘Commander Branne, we have picked up a signature code.’ Valerius’s voice sounded reedy and weak over the hissing comm-link. ‘It’s an Iron Hands identification transmission. A ship identifying itself as the Glory of Victory. It’s automated. Trying to track the signal for reply.’

‘Negative,’ snapped Branne. ‘Do not open transmission. Do you want everybody in the Isstvan system to know we are here?’

‘My apologies, commander,’ said Valerius. ‘However, a narrow-beam signal would be very hard to detect. Perhaps those on the Iron Hands ship can tell us what happened here.’

‘Negative,’ Branne said again. ‘Continue to monitor for other transmissions.’

‘But what if they need our help?’ said Valerius.

‘We can’t trust them,’ said Branne.

‘I don’t understand, commander,’ said the praefector. ‘We can’t trust the Iron Hands?’

‘My technicians have been analysing the readings from the battles,’ Branne explained. ‘It’s hard to be certain, but it seems that the fleet sent to deal with Horus split and fighting broke out. I fear it is not just the Luna Wolves that have turned against us. Until we know for sure who is loyal, we have to suspect everybody.’

Static filled the room as Valerius absorbed this revelation. Eventually the officer spoke again, his voice a barely-heard whisper in the hiss.

‘But if that is true, what of the Raven Guard?’ he said.

‘Your dreams may have had something to them after all, Marcus,’ said Branne.

‘So now we set full speed?’

‘No, not yet.’ Branne took a deep breath, only now consciously acknowledging a doubt that had nagged him since he had first begun to suspect the extent of the treachery at Isstvan. ‘We have to be careful. We may be the last survivors of the Raven Guard.’

Three days out from orbit of Isstvan V, Branne’s fleet ghosted in on minimal power, every spare watt of energy from the reactors diverted to the sensor arrays and communications systems, seeking answers to horrifying questions. The evidence was overwhelming: Horus had allies from within the fleet sent to bring him to order.

Branne spent most of his time on the bridge of his battle-barge, the Avenger. For the last two days he had hosted Valerius on board, to ensure that the praefector was within easy reach if things went amiss. The Imperial Army officer sat beside the communications console gnawing at a worn nail, cheeks sunken, his usually smooth skin dark with stubble. He stared at the screens with haunted, bloodshot eyes rimmed with darkness and Branne guessed that the nightmares still plagued the officer, though he had not mentioned them again since they had set out from Deliverance.

‘Picking up some garbled comm traffic,’ one of the attendants reported. Valerius sat bolt upright, turning on the bench to Branne. ‘World Eaters protocols. Trying to crack them now, commander.’

‘Who are they signalling?’ asked Branne.

‘General Legion broadcast, commander,’ the aide replied. ‘Also picking up registers of Word Bearers and Emperor’s Children signals. They seem to be communicating with the Sons of Horus.’

Valerius seemed to become even paler, if that was possible. He met Branne’s narrowed gaze with a wild look.

‘The World Eaters, Emperor’s Children and Word Bearers?’ he said. ‘All of them turned?’

Branne said nothing, finding such a treachery impossible to comprehend. He tried to think of some other explanation for what they had discovered but could not escape the truth. This was no simple rebellion; this was the birth of civil war.

He sat in his command throne, armour servos creaking and whining as his fingers tightened on the arms. Head bowed, he tried to clear his thoughts, to come up with a plan of action. What had happened made no sense and his mind kept coming back to an unanswered question.

‘What of the primarch and the Legion?’ he asked quietly.

‘No Raven Guard transmission detected, commander,’ said the communications orderly. ‘We’ve scanned all Legion frequencies and beyond, but no recognisable signatures detected.’

Branne sighed. His earlier fears had come true, and Valerius’s dire predictions also. The Raven Guard were no more.

‘Signal the fleet to prepare for new course orders,’ he said.

‘What?’ Valerius was on his feet. ‘Change course for where?’

‘Out of here,’ said Branne. ‘We’re too late.’

‘There may be survivors,’ said Valerius. He opened his hands imploringly towards the commander. ‘We have to at least get closer to find out the truth.’

‘That can come later,’ said Branne. ‘Our immediate task is to elude detection and leave the system in one piece. After that we can work out what happened.’

‘Commander, we are picking up a broad-beam transmission from the surface of Isstvan V,’ said the comms officer.

‘Directed to us?’ said Branne, taken aback.

‘No, commander, it is a general broadcast. Minimal encryption. You should hear this.’

‘Very well,’ said Branne, leaning back in his command throne.

The voice that boomed from the speakers was edged with madness, every syllable spat like a curse.

‘...nd then we shall crush the misguided sons of Corax completely. They think they can evade us forever? They are wrong! I will hunt down Corax and break him myself. The Raven Guard have nowhere left to run. In two days our victory will be complete and the last survivors will be crushed by the World Eaters. Blood demands victory, and we shall let it flow!’

‘That can only be Angron,’ said Branne when the transmission was cut. On the one hand, he was elated that Corax and the Legion still survived; on the other, it seemed that survival would not last much longer. ‘Can you source that transmission?’ he demanded, standing up.

‘Better, commander,’ replied the technician. ‘There are planetary coordinates attached to the signal, indicating where the World Eaters plan to attack, calling for orbital support.’

Pushing aside his doubts and confusion, Branne set his mind in motion. A strategy immediately sprang to mind, but it was risky. He reconsidered, analysing his options, but was drawn to the same conclusion. A third evaluation did not suggest any alternatives.

‘Marcus, I need you to signal your fleet,’ Branne announced. ‘Tell them to make full speed for Isstvan IV.’

‘Isstvan IV? Not Isstvan V? And won’t full speed make us instantly visible on every scanner within range?’

‘That is my intent,’ said Branne.

‘A decoy.’ Valerius spoke flatly, as if his last shred of emotion had been drained from him. ‘You want to use my ships and men as decoys.’

Branne nodded and said nothing. Valerius closed his eyes and pinched his nose, as if he had a headache. He nodded to himself, jaw clenched.

‘Very well,’ said the praefector, opening his eyes to stare at the Raven Guard commander with resignation. ‘I shall return to my flagship and make the preparations.’

‘No, you will continue to serve here,’ said Branne. ‘As we agreed, you do not leave my side.’

‘You still do not trust me?’ The praefector sighed heavily. ‘What more proof do you need?’

‘When the primarch is safe and our brothers aboard, I might trust you then,’ said Branne. ‘Until that time, you stay here.’

‘You plan an evacuation under fire,’ said Valerius. ‘I’ll have my transports send over as many shuttles and drop-ships as your flight bays can hold.’

‘That would be good,’ said Branne. ‘Let us hope that we need that many.’

With a growl, Delerax jabbed a finger onto the transmission key.

‘I do not care what problems you are having,’ he snarled. ‘Run the reactors at one hundred and twenty per cent.’

‘We risk plasmic extrapolation, lieutenant-commander,’ the engineer replied. ‘It could shut down the whole system.’

‘The greatest battle in the World Eaters’ history is about to take place on Isstvan V,’ said the lieutenant-commander. ‘Do you think I want to arrive late for that? You have your orders, I expect them to be obeyed.’

Delerax cut off the response and whirled towards the navigation officers.

‘And you!’ he snapped. ‘I want to hear no more about gravity wells and safe distances. Get me to Isstvan V by the shortest route. No excuses!’

The helmsman nodded nervously and turned his gaze back to the controls. Delerax continued to stalk the bridge, seeking any way to get to the battle even faster. Angron was due to initiate his final assault on the Raven Guard in six hours and Delerax was determined that he would be there to take part. Already the rest of the flotilla had been left half a day behind, unable to keep up with the battle-barge’s superior power. The Dedicated Wrath would be on hand to rain down fire on the remnants of Corax’s Legion, whatever it took. If all went well, Delerax would be able to join in the fighting directly. Drop-pods were being prepared for a combat launch.

The World Eater smiled at the thought of butchering some Raven Guard. Kordassis noticed his commander’s expression and joined him beside his chair.

‘We will have our chance this time,’ said the captain. ‘The slight against us at the dropsite will be expunged.’

‘Did you not hear the Warmaster’s words?’ Delerax replied quietly, a sneer twisting his lips. ‘To take part in the fleet battle was a great honour, essential to our victory.’

‘It was an insult,’ said Kordassis. ‘The primarch saw it for what it was and did the right thing. To simply obliterate a foe from afar lacks glory. What honour is there when one cannot see the life fade from the eyes of a fallen enemy or smell the blood spilling from his wounds?’

‘None,’ agreed Delerax. His implant buzzed in response to his mood, sending a jolt through his thoughts. ‘The cowards of the Raven Guard will be shown the true face of war.’

‘And what of the Warmaster’s ambassador?’ whispered Kordassis. ‘What if he chooses to interfere again?’

‘He is but a single warrior,’ said Delerax. ‘He is no longer relevant.’

‘I understand,’ said Kordassis. ‘Do you want me to deal with him now?’

The thought entertained Delerax, a murderous impulse stimulated by his implant. He quivered as he pictured Horus’s representative lying mangled at his feet but fought through the urge to kill.

‘No,’ he told Kordassis. ‘There is no reason to risk the Warmaster’s displeasure, as satisfying as it might be. Just be ready should I need you.’

‘I’ll be ready,’ said Kordassis with a grin. ‘Have no worry about that.’

Delerax checked the chronometer again. Four hours until the assault began. He was pleased, knowing that he would reach orbit in time to take part. The drop-pods were prepared for immediate launch, his twenty-strong bodyguard ready for the attack.

The lieutenant-commander sat in his chair trying to remain composed. It was a hard task; visions of what he would do to the Raven Guard kept flickering through his thoughts. His implant responded again and again, rewarding his thoughts of killing with surges of chemical stimulants.

‘Receiving word from Legion command,’ announced Kordassis. He gave an angry growl as he read the message. ‘An enemy fleet has been detected in the vicinity of Isstvan IV, lieutenant-commander. The fleet is being ordered to depart and engage them.’

‘Depart?’ Delerax snarled. ‘Now? What of the assault on the Raven Guard? We cannot let the Legion attack without orbital support.’

‘The orders come directly from the Warmaster,’ said Kordassis, directing a meaningful look at the lieutenant-commander.

‘I take my orders from our primarch,’ replied Delerax.

‘Legion command has confirmed the orders,’ said Kordassis. He shook his head sorrowfully. ‘They are authorised by Angron.’

‘Let the rest of the fleet deal with the problem,’ said Delerax. ‘They do not need us there.’

The internal communicator crackled into life and a mechanical voice cut across Kordassis’s reply.

‘I have monitored a transmission from your Legion commanders,’ it said. ‘Why have we not yet altered course to deal with this emerging threat?’

Clenching his fists, Delerax resisted the urge to smash the speaker. He took a deep breath, steadying himself as his lobotomiser initiated another flood of hormones and chemicals through his brain. With some effort he unclenched his fingers and flicked the comm switch.

‘I was denied at the dropsite, I will not be denied again,’ he told Horus’s liaison. ‘It is also tactically unsound to have no orbital support for the assault.’

‘That will be dealt with by other fleet vessels,’ said the other Space Marine. ‘Your orders are clear, lieutenant-commander. Obey them.’

‘Then let those other vessels deal with the situation at Isstvan IV,’ snapped Delerax. ‘The World Eaters should be protecting their own.’

‘You are part of an alliance, lieutenant-commander,’ replied the voice. Its sterile calmness, its assured tone, enraged Delerax more. ‘We each do our part for victory. Your part at this moment is to join the rest of your fleet moving to Isstvan IV. Do not forget you are Legiones Astartes. Maintain discipline and obey your orders.’

Branne felt uncomfortable as he watched the glowing blips on the sensor return moving from orbit around Isstvan V. Not until he had come to the system had he known apprehension, but it had become his permanent companion since he had realised the extent of the treachery that was unfolding here. At least he maintained some semblance of composure, unlike Valerius.

The praefector lurched between near-catatonia and panic. At the moment he was asleep, muttering to himself with head laid on a display screen. He twitched and mumbled, fingers dragging along the metal of the console on which he was slumped. Branne could only guess at the nightmare that plagued him, and was thankful that Legiones Astartes were not vulnerable to such terrors.

‘The World Eaters fleet is moving away,’ announced one of the scanner technicians.

Branne looked back at the display and saw the signal returns drifting further from Isstvan V, heading in-system.

‘It worked,’ he said. Branne nodded towards the fitful praefector. ‘Wake up Marcus.’

One of the aides shook the Imperial Army officer gently. Valerius rose from his dream with a moan and looked around the bridge, eyes fearful. He settled after a few moments and focussed on Branne.

‘What is happening?’ he asked, scratching a stubbled cheek with ragged nails.

Branne directed Valerius’s attention to the screen.

‘It worked?’ said the praefector, disbelief written on his features. His expression changed to a broad grin and he looked at the Raven Guard commander with wide eyes. He laughed. ‘They took the bait. They took the bait!’

‘Yes, they did,’ said Branne. ‘We have less than two hours to get into position. In one hour we will move to full drop formation. Brief your shuttle crews.’

‘Yes, I will,’ said Valerius, staggering towards the door.

‘Before you do, might I suggest you take a moment to make yourself presentable to your men,’ said Branne.

Valerius looked down at his dishevelled uniform and ran his fingers over the bristles on his chin. He nodded and straightened his sash. With a nervous cough, he left the bridge, walking with slow, deliberate strides. When he was gone, Branne turned his attention back to his crew, glad to be free of the distraction.

‘Any more comm intercepts?’ he asked.

‘None that are good, commander,’ said the crewman in charge of the communications array. He swallowed nervously and could not meet Branne’s eye. ‘World Eaters signals suggest they believe the Legion to be below ten thousand strong. Angron is all over the frequencies, declaring the destruction of the Raven Guard.’

‘We will not allow that to happen,’ said Branne. He turned to the sensor console. ‘What orbital assets have the World Eaters kept?’

‘None, commander,’ replied the technician. He wiped sweat from his bald head and leaned back in his seat. ‘None that we can detect.’

‘Perhaps this is just an elaborate trap,’ said Branne, thinking aloud. ‘They could have ships lying in wait for us. Maybe they’ve been monitoring us all along and this is to draw us in.’

‘Unlikely, commander,’ said the aide. ‘At this range, even on lowest output we would detect any plasma readings. It’s only our dispersion reflex shield that stops us being detected. The World Eaters don’t have those.’

‘That makes no sense,’ said Branne, returning to his command throne. ‘Why leave a gap in their defences? Are any other vessels moving to provide orbital support?’

‘Negative, commander,’ said the scanning officer. ‘The only other vessel in the vicinity is a World Eaters battle-barge, and it is changing course to follow the main fleet.’

Branne was immediately suspicious. It was not only a foolish oversight, it was inconceivable that a Space Marine would make such a mistake.

‘Ground defences in that area?’ he asked.

‘None that we are aware of,’ said the officer. ‘Archives on Isstvan V are quite up-to-date. The mountainous region is almost devoid of population, no defence installations. We are too far away to detect anything without revealing our location.’

As unsettling as the apparent lapse was, it was an opportunity that could not be thrown away. Branne checked the display again, calculating scanner ranges and speeds for the enemy vessels. They were already too far away to respond to the presence of the Raven Guard fleet. The longer he waited, the greater the chance that the World Eaters would attack. Angron was known for his lack of patience and might well launch his assault ahead of schedule. Stealth had again proven its worth. Now was the time for swiftness of action to show its value.

Branne swung in his chair towards the communications team.

‘Signal the fleet. Drop reflex shields and divert all power to engines and navigation. Inform all flight decks and drop-bays to prepare for immediate launch. Air crews to their craft. This is our chance to strike. The enemy will know that the Raven Guard are not yet dead!’

Metal rang on metal, filling Delerax’s chamber with noise. Steel plate buckled and tore as he pounded his fists into the wall, every impact sending a shower of metal splinters into the air. He grunted and growled as he punched, every smashing blow delivered with a snarl. His mind was aflame with his anger, his implant feeding his rage with a cocktail of stimulants.

He barely heard the sound of the comm alert through the thundering of his hearts. He ignored it and continued to vent his ire on the battered wall, slamming the cracked knuckles of his gauntlets into metal until he was pulverising the rockcrete bulkhead beneath.

A more insistent noise broke through his frenzy: the battle alert. The communications system bleeped again.

Shaking from frustration, the World Eater almost destroyed the communications panel with his stabbing finger. The speaker spat sparks but still worked, the voice of the chief scanning officer filtering through the rush of blood in Delerax’s ears.

‘Lieutenant-commander, we have detected an enemy fleet achieving orbit around Isstvan V. They are en route for the Legion’s position!’

‘Turn to engage, all power to engines!’ Delerax snarled. He did not care how the ships had eluded detection, or who they were. He felt a surge of vindication, his anger dissipating.

He ran from his quarters and headed for the bridge, pounding along the corridors until he reached the mechanical conveyor. His personal comm-system chimed in his ear.

‘Lieutenant-commander, what are your orders?’ asked Kordassis. ‘Sensors report a Raven Guard battle-barge and two cruisers in escort.’

‘Attack!’ Delerax snarled as he stepped through the opening doors of the conveyor. He prodded the button for the bridge. ‘Make all speed to intercept the flagship.’

‘Is that wise? We are outnumbered.’

‘Show some pride, Kordassis. We have been made to look like fools by Corax’s cowardly subterfuge. We attack, as World Eaters should.’

There was the sound of another communication connection for a few moments before Horus’s representative spoke into Delerax’s ear.

‘Why have we changed course, lieutenant-commander?’

‘Have you been asleep? The Raven Guard are attempting to escape.’

The conveyor jolted as it reached the level of the bridge and headed towards the prow of the battle-barge.

‘That is not your concern, lieutenant-commander,’ said Horus’s representative. ‘The matter is being dealt with.’

‘How?’ snapped Delerax. ‘We are the only ship with a hope of intercepting the evacuation fleet.’

‘Your orders have not changed, lieutenant-commander. If you persist in this disobedience I will have you removed from command.’

‘This is my ship, I will not be threatened by the likes of you,’ Delerax replied. He pulled the comm-bead from his ear and dashed it against the metal wall of the conveyor. The doors slid open a few seconds later and the World Eater strode out into the corridor and turned towards the bridge.

Inside, Kordassis was waiting, fully armoured, helm hanging from his belt. The scars on his face twisted as the captain smiled.

‘Not listening to your minder?’ said Kordassis.

‘What can he do to stop me?’ Delerax loomed over the navigation officers. ‘How long until we reach the Raven Guard ships?’

‘Twenty-six minutes, lieutenant-commander,’ the man replied. ‘Twenty if we overcharge the reactors.’

‘Do it. Every minute wasted gives the Raven Guard a chance to escape Angron’s assault.’ He turned his attention to the communications officer. ‘Any message from Legion command or the primarch?’

‘Negative, lieutenant-commander,’ the technician replied. ‘They may not even be aware of the fleet’s arrival.’

‘Signal them with the news and pass on that we are en route to engage the enemy,’ said Delerax. He addressed all of the bridge crew, looking at Kordassis. ‘We shall be lauded in the World Eaters’ roll of honour for today. It is we that shall bring about the destruction of Corax and his Legion!’

‘Contact established with the primarch!’ Valerius’s announcement that Corax still lived brought a cheer from the other members of the bridge staff. ‘The drop-ships are landing now.’

Branne nodded his understanding and looked at the main display. The course of the World Eater battle-barge was being tracked by a red dot. It was heading directly for the Avenger.

‘Time until the evacuation is complete?’ he asked.

‘Thirty minutes, at least,’ came the reply from Valerius.

‘Too long,’ Branne muttered. He opened up the fleet frequency with an armoured finger. ‘This is Commander Branne to all vessels. We will remain in position for extraction. The evacuation is your only concern.’

A series of acknowledgements came back. It was a gamble. The fleet was too low in orbit and too close together to properly engage the incoming World Eaters ship, but if they dispersed, the lift to orbit would take even longer. Once every shuttle and drop-ship was back on board, the Raven Guard could fight off their attacker and leave.

‘First craft laden and taking off,’ reported Valerius.

There was a laugh from one of the communications aides.

‘Listen to this!’ he said, channelling a signal to the bridge’s speakers.

‘...ng away! Fall upon them, my World Eaters, do not let them escape!’ A bestial, rage-filled howl rang around the bridge. ‘Corax! I know you can hear me! Come back and fight like a Space Marine, you coward! I have promised your blood to my blade and your head to the Warmaster, and I shall deliver both. Face me, you dishonourable bastard!’

Angron’s voice devolved into snarls and wordless pants. Branne signalled for the officer to cut the signal.

The minutes ticked past slowly. Branne sat in his command throne, dividing his attention between the chronometer and the position of the enemy battle-barge. It was going to be close.

‘Corax is aboard the last drop-ship,’ Valerius said. He slumped back into his seat and looked at Branne. ‘Do you trust me now?’

The Raven Guard commander crossed the bridge and gently grasped the red sash across the praefector’s chest.

‘Your life is yours,’ said Branne. He let go of the sash and soothed away the crease he had made. ‘Your family’s honour is upheld. I am sorry for my distrust, Marcus.’

Valerius sighed and smiled.

‘It does not really matter, does it?’ he said, tugging at the sash. ‘Honour, loyalty, family. Horus will care for none of that.’

‘And that is why they are more important than ever,’ said Branne. ‘Especially loyalty.’

Weapon bays opened along the length of the Dedicated Wrath revealing banks of macro-cannons, plasma drivers and missile bays, like a savage hound baring its teeth. Along the dorsal superstructure, bombardment turrets swivelled, their cannons extending from armoured towers. Retro-thrusters fired along the battle-barge’s length as it reduced speed for the attack, its course curving gracefully to starboard so that its massive broadside would be brought to bear.

On the bridge, Delerax stood behind his command throne, his fingers gripping its back. The display was alive with signals showing the position of the Raven Guard vessels and their returning drop-craft. The World Eater had calculated his angle of attack to bring him between the enemy battle-barge and the returning flotilla of landing craft.

He heard the growl of the bridge doors opening and turned to see Horus’s representative enter. The Space Marine wore his helmet, as he had done in every meeting since coming aboard. His armour was painted in blue livery, but was otherwise devoid of any organisational markings.

‘Cease your attack, lieutenant-commander.’ The order came in a calm, clipped tone from the Space Marine’s external address system, and had the ring of artificial modulation to disguise it.

Delerax laughed and turned back to the main screen.

‘Corax and his Legion are doomed,’ he said. ‘See for yourself. In less than ten minutes, we will open fire and destroy them forever.’

‘I speak with the authority of the Warmaster,’ said the Space Marine. ‘Cease your attack immediately.’

‘That authority counts for nothing here,’ said Delerax. He turned and squared off against the other. ‘If you want your orders to be obeyed, return to the Alpha Legion where you belong.’

‘It is has been decided that Corax has still a part to play,’ said the Alpha Legionnaire. ‘It has been decided that for the moment he will be allowed to live.’

‘Decided by you?’ Delerax’s question was harsh with scorn. ‘Who are you to make such a decision?’

‘I am Alpharius,’ said the Legionnaire.

‘Remove yourself from my bridge, or I will have your corpse removed.’

Delerax glimpsed Kordassis to his left, pulling a bolt pistol from its holster. The World Eater smiled at the Alpha Legionnaire. His smile faded as he felt the cold touch of a muzzle against his cheek. He turned his head a fraction to see Kordassis holding his pistol to Delerax’s head.

‘What is this?’ the lieutenant-commander hissed. ‘What are you doing, Kordassis?’

‘I am not Kordassis,’ said the Space Marine holding the bolt pistol. ‘I am Alpharius.’

Delerax twisted and made a lunge for the traitor’s gun. Muzzle flash blinded the World Eater and an instant later he felt the side of his skull exploding.

Branne stood in the docking bay watching the drop-ships landing. The first were already disembarking their passengers. With weary steps, the survivors of the Raven Guard filed down the ramps onto the deck.

They were a terrible sight. Most showed signs of injury. Their armour was a patchwork of colours; here the silver of an Iron Warrior shoulder pad; there the grey breastplate of a Word Bearer. Their armour was cracked and broken, bloodied and stained, and every face Branne looked upon was etched with fatigue. Glassy-eyed, the last survivors of the dropsite massacre trudged across the loading bay, welcomed by smiles and cheers from Branne’s warriors.

The last of the shuttles touched down. Branne approached it as the docking ramp lowered. The first Space Marine out was a bizarre sight, his armour a mess of colours and bare ceramite. Only his shoulder pad bearing the Legion’s badge remained from his original suit. He took off his helmet and tossed it the floor.

‘Agapito!’ Branne laughed. He slapped a hand to his true brother’s chest. ‘I knew you would be alive. Too stubborn to let something like this kill you.’

Branne looked closely at his brother, amazed by his outlandish appearance. A new scar ran from his right cheek to his throat, but beyond that it was the same face Branne had known for his whole life. Agapito returned the smile wearily. His deep brown eyes regarded Branne warmly. He reached a hand behind Branne’s head and pulled him closer. The two touched foreheads in a sign of respect and comradeship.

‘I see you have not managed to stay out of trouble, Branne.’

The commander stepped back from Agapito to see Corax descending the ramp. The primarch towered over his Legiones Astartes, his black armour showing as much wear and tear as that of those under his command.

‘I was monitoring your transmissions,’ said Corax. ‘Why did the enemy abort their attack?’

‘I have no idea, Lord Corax,’ said Branne. ‘Perhaps they thought better of the idea, taking on three vessels at once.’

‘Where are they now?’ asked the primarch.

‘They’ve withdrawn to a hundred thousand kilometres,’ Branne replied. ‘They don’t look as if they’ll try to attack again.’

‘Odd,’ said Corax. He shook his head as if dismissing a thought. ‘Signal the other ships to make course for Deliverance.’

‘Yes, Lord Corax,’ Branne said, holding his fist to his chest. ‘And where are we to head?’

‘Terra,’ replied the primarch. ‘I must have an audience with the Emperor.’

Blood and brains leaked from the side of Delerax’s skull. The World Eaters lieutenant-commander could feel his life leaking away with it. He could not move his legs and arms, and could feel nothing below his neck. It was an effort just to breathe.

He swivelled his eyes up to Kordassis, wondering who it was he looked at.

‘Why?’ he asked, his voice barely a whisper.

The Alpha Legionnaire loomed into view, stooping over Delerax. The World Eater could see his ravaged face reflected in the dark eye lenses of the Alpha Legionnaire’s helmet. That blank mask betrayed nothing of the Space Marine’s thoughts or mood. His metal-edged voice seemed distant as Delerax drew a last, rattling breath.

‘In times such as these, even the most trusted face can conceal an enemy.’

‘Look like the innocent flower,
but be the serpent under it.’

– Litus, Remarks.

Let us speak of Little Horus, Little Horus Aximand. His aspect was the half moon, and his disposition, according to the humours, was inclining towards melancholia. This explained, many thought, his prevailing mood of sorrow and inner trouble, though he frequently denied it. ‘The melancholic humour is misunderstood,’ he said. ‘You think too literally. It has, in fact, the quality of autumn. It is the spirit of contemplative change, the accelerator of death, the enabler of ends and beginnings. Autumn clears away the world so that a new one may rise. This is my purpose. I am not sad.’

Of course, once they reattached his face, all he ever really looked was angry.

Dwell lay in their path, and illumination was required. The Dwellers were not Old Way ignorant. The shadows of the Long Night had been previously banished from their shores, and they had been compliant since their recovery thirty-two years earlier. The Dwellers had supplied eighty fine, loyal regiments to the Crusade armies.

Isstvan was fresh in the memory, however, and blood-stained rumours of the infamy were spreading. A ferocious series of repercussive combats had flared through the Momed, Instar and Oqueth sectors. The instigator was a leader of the Iron Tenth, a flesh-spare warleader of the Sorrgol Clan named Shadrak Meduson, and it was he who marshalled the loyalists against the approaching fleet of the Warmaster’s 63rd Expedition. Meduson and his formations had come too late to stand with their Iron-handed master at Isstvan V. Rage, and calculated vengeance, smoked in his alloy heart. He had gathered fifty-eight full battalions of the Imperial Army about him, war hosts from the Momed voidhives, along with a flotilla of siege hulks from Nahan Instar, a half-broken cadre of Salamanders, some Mechanicum claves, and a White Scars raid-force rerouted from a return voyage to the Chondax war front.

Dwell, with its fortified cities, orbital batteries, ship schools, and eight million pinnacle-grade fighting men, would be the cornerstone of Meduson’s line. And any fool could see the Elders of Dwell would never side against the Throne.

It was a matter of priority that their ignorance be illuminated swiftly, before they fell in step with the determined son of Medusa.

Aximand’s face had earned him his name, though he was not the only member of the Sixteenth Legion who resembled the primarch. For a good many, including the First Captain, elective genetics had guaranteed it. They were sons, true sons, amongst the Sons.

Aximand was the most alike of them all. It was not only the face; there was something in the manner of him.

Of course, he was Horus too, a common Cthonic name made popular because of the primarch. They were all sons of Horus in the end.

Little Horus. That’s what he was called, in tones simultaneously affectionate and mocking: Little Horus Aximand.

There was nothing little about him. Captain of the Fifth. One quarter of the Mournival.

‘He who serves as a captain here would be as a primarch in the company of others,’ said Abaddon, and he was talking of Aximand when he said it.

The reattachment left a scar. It set the character of the face differently, altered the seating of the muscles. Somehow, the wrongness, the imperfection, made him more like Horus, not less.

Steel forged on Medusa has such a fine edge.

He had a dream he never shared with anyone. First Captain Abaddon had indeed proclaimed that dreams were a weakness to be eschewed by all the Adeptus Astartes. The dreamless Luna Wolves were surely the purest of all.

But times changed. The Luna Wolves had become the Sons of Horus. Kin had become unkind. The all-father of man had become the enemy. And, since Isstvan, Little Horus Aximand had begun to dream.

Every dream was essentially the same. Aximand would dream about the events of the day. The dream would match, in all particulars, his experiences, except that someone else was present. Someone else had come to join him, an intruder who remained just out of sight or in distant shadows, in the next room, or the corner of his eye. Aximand could not see the intruder’s face, but he knew he was there.

Aximand could feel him watching. He could hear him breathing.

Little Horus was afraid of the dreams at first. He was afraid to have started dreaming, afraid of what Abaddon might say if he found out, afraid of the faceless intruder watching him whenever he slept.

But he was not afraid of change. Change was, he insisted, part of his ruling character.

‘The melancholic humour is protean,’ he said. ‘It possesses the quality of autumn. It is transformative, the accelerator of death, the enabler of ends and beginnings. Autumn clears away the world ready for renewal. This is my purpose. I am not afraid.’

Then again, after they reattached his face, all he ever really looked was unlike himself.

Another change, forced on them by the circumstances of Isstvan, was the loss of the Mournival. Changing the name of the Sixteenth, changing the colour of their armour, those transformations had been embraced willingly as positive reinforcements of their resolve. They had never changed their allegiance: they still followed Horus and the Imperium.

The Mournival, though, the Mournival was a painful loss. That small clique of sons, of peers, of brothers, selected to counsel the Warmaster had always been vital, organic.

Little Horus still wore the mark of the half-moon on his helm, above the right eye-piece.

As the fleet translated into the Dwell system, he spoke to Abaddon on the subject.

‘It is an antiquated concept,’ said the First Captain. ‘See how poorly it served us at Isstvan?’

‘People served us poorly,’ Aximand replied, ‘not the Mournival. The Mournival was always intended to provide even-tempered advice. It was supposed to provoke discussion and dissent, so that we could properly debate each issue and be sure of arriving at balanced reasoning.’

Abaddon looked at him, uncertain.

Aximand smiled back.

‘It is true to say,’ he added, ‘that the decisions we had to make at Davin and Isstvan were so extreme, the natural dissent was...’

‘Was what?’ asked Abaddon.

‘Intense. Those who lost the argument could not be permitted to live. It is the way of things. When the matter is so great, those who speak against it become our enemies. They had to say no, for in their no our yes was consecrated.’

They. Abaddon and Aximand never spoke the names any more. Previous members of the Mournival, perhaps: Berabaddon, Syrakul, Janipur and dear Sejanus. All of them were spoken of, as one would speak of beloved ancestors. But the last two to come and go, their names were never uttered. They were memories too painful for even a transhuman to bear.

‘The mechanism always worked,’ Aximand pressed, dropping his soft voice to a leaf-rustle whisper, making Abaddon bend closer to hear. Below them, the vast bridge bustled with activity.

‘The mechanism always worked, even when we had to kill our dissenters. The method was valid and valuable. The Mournival provides balance, and guarantees the right decisions.’

‘So you would reinstate it?’ asked Abaddon.

‘Do we not need balance now, more than ever?’

‘You would reinstate it?’ Abaddon repeated.

‘It was never gone,’ said Aximand. ‘There are simply vacancies.’

‘Who would you approach?’ asked Abaddon.

‘Who would you?’

Abaddon sniffed.

‘Targost.’

Aximand shrugged.

‘A sound suggestion. Serghar Targost is heartwood like us, but he is also lodge-master. The lodge needs him clear-minded, not compromised by Mournival duties.’

Abaddon nodded, seeing the sense of this.

‘Falkus Kibre,’ said Abaddon.

‘Hmmm.’ Aximand smiled again. Widowmaker Kibre was a true son, but he was also Captain of the Justaerin, and thus Abaddon’s number two. Too much weight in one corner of the Legion.

‘Kibre’s an excellent man,’ he began.

‘Kalus Ekaddon,’ said Abaddon, before Aximand could finish.

Ekaddon. Captain of the Catulan Reaver squad. Another of Abaddon’s company. Aximand wondered if Abaddon properly understood the concept of balance.

‘You make a suggestion, then,’ said Abaddon.

‘Tybalt Marr.’

‘The Either? He’s a good man, but he hasn’t got the stomach for the job, not even now he’s shaken off Moy’s shadow. Kibre is a good–’

‘Jerrod,’ said Aximand.

‘He’s got his hands full taking the reins of the Thirteenth now Sedirae’s gone,’ Abaddon replied.

‘He’s more than able.’

‘He is, but he has new responsibilities,’ said Abaddon.

‘Grael Noctua,’ said Aximand.

The First Captain paused.

‘Of the Twenty-Fifth Warlocked?’

‘Yes.’

‘He’s just a squad commander.’

Aximand shrugged. He took up a silver cup from the side table and sipped.

‘There is no rule that members of the Mournival be seniors or captains. In fact, if it were just composed of senior men, where would its point be? The Mournival is about balance and perspective. Wouldn’t a good squad leader’s insight complement the judgement of a first captain?’

‘Noctua is a fine soldier,’ Abaddon mused.

‘A captain in the making.’

‘He’s young.’

‘We were all young once, Ezekyle.’

Abaddon took up a cup of his own, not to drink, just to have something to toy with while he considered.

‘There is precedence, of course,’ said Aximand. ‘To remind you, Syrakul was a squad leader when Litus proposed him. He was ascendant. He was young, but Litus saw his qualities. You’ve said yourself, Syrakul would have been first captain if he’d lived.’

‘The same could be said for many,’ Abaddon replied. ‘We should consult Lupercal and–’

‘Why would we?’ asked Aximand. ‘The Mournival has always been an autonomous body. Lupercal likes it that way.’

Abaddon frowned.

‘I suppose. So, Kibre and Noctua?’

‘Yes.’

‘You will approach Noctua, if I make the overture to Falkus?’

‘Agreed.’

‘Put him in the line with you at Dwell,’ said Abaddon. ‘Measure him one last time to be sure. You know the old saying? Measure twice, cut once.’

The Mausolytic Precinct was regarded as one of the top three objectives, along with the primary port and the city of the Elders. The Precinct was sited on a high plateau overlooking Tyjun and the Sea of Enna. In its great, stone structures lay the dead of Dwell, each previous generation interred in ritual cybernation so that their collective thoughts, memories and accumulated knowledge could be accessed and consulted, like books in a library.

The Mausolytic Precinct was Aximand’s responsibility. First Company would lead the attack on the city of Elders. Lithonan, the acting Lord Commander of the Army, would take responsibility for the port, with Jerrod and the Thirteenth as their spearhead.

‘I would be disappointed if we were forced to lose a resource like the Mausolytic Precinct,’ the Warmaster told Little Horus. ‘But I would be more disappointed if we lost this fight. Burn it only if the alternative is losing.’

‘Yes, my lord,’ said Aximand.

‘I would be disappointed if we were forced to lose a resource like the Mausolytic Precinct,’ the Warmaster told Little Horus. The only light in the chamber came from the fire crackling in the great stone bowl.

‘But I would be more disappointed if we lost this fight. Burn it only if the alternative is... Aximand?’

‘Yes, my lord?’ said Aximand.

‘Your attention is elsewhere, I think.’

‘Lupercal, I’m sorry. For a moment there...’

‘What?’

‘I could hear breathing, my lord.’

The Warmaster regarded him with what looked like amusement.

‘We all do it,’ he said.

‘No, I mean... Do you not hear it?’

‘I hear weakness,’ said the Warmaster. ‘Where is this frailty coming from, Aximand? You’re jumpy.’

‘My lord, is there somebody else in your quarters with us?’

‘No. No, there isn’t. I know this for a fact.’

Aximand rose to his feet.

‘Then who is that?’ he asked. ‘Lord, who is that, standing just there, on the other side of the fire?’

‘Oh Little Horus,’ said the Warmaster, ‘you are beginning to speak with the tongue of madness.’

And just as Aximand realised that he was, he woke.

He assembled his squad commanders, and reviewed the tactical data. Aximand was, perhaps, the most scrupulous of all the Sixteenth Legion’s captains. He was not one, like Targost for example, who only ever wanted to know the fundamentals of a target, or was annoyed by extraneous detail. Aximand liked to know everything, every last facet. He studied climate charts. He learned the names and phases of Dwell’s eighteen moons. He studied the intelligencer plans of the Mausolytic Precinct, and had the Fleetmaster’s strategic architects fashion a sensory simulation he could walk through.

He learned the names of his foe. The Tyjunate Compulsories, a high-calibre division of ceremonial city troops whose duty it was, by tradition, to protect the Precinct. The Chainveil, an elite corps named after the ritual screen surrounding the thrones of the Elders of Dwell, who were rumoured to be supplementing the Mausolytic defence.

No confirmation had yet come of Meduson or any of his agents reaching Dwell. If he had beaten the 63rd in the race, it was thought unlikely he would position himself at the Precinct. This role would probably be handed off to one of his trusted warleaders, perhaps Bion Henricos, or to one of the White Scars captains such as Hibou Khan or Kublon Besk.

‘Let us hope for the Fifth,’ said Lev Goshen, Captain of the Twenty Fifth Company, who was to command the second wave behind Aximand. ‘Ill-favoured for static defence, they will make themselves crazy waiting for our overture, stuck in one place.’

‘The Scars should not be underestimated,’ said Grael Noctua, Sergeant of the Warlocked Tactical Squad.

Goshen glanced up from the strategium display, looked at Noctua, and caught Aximand’s eye.

‘He’s got a voice, then,’ he remarked.

There had been some murmuring amongst the upper ranks of the Legion when Noctua’s role as second to Aximand for the Mausolytic assault had been announced.

‘I have been advised I had better use it well, captain,’ said Noctua. There was a reserve to him, a restraint that reminded Aximand of someone. Noctua had that true son face, but the balance of humours was unusual: there was less of the arrogant charismatic and more of the calculated intellectual. Abaddon described Noctua as a blade weapon rather than a firearm.

Goshen grinned.

‘Let’s have your wisdom, Noctua,’ he said.

‘I had the honour to serve alongside a detachment of the Fifth Legion seven years ago during the Tyrade System Compliance. They impressed me with their battlecraft. I was reminded of the Wolves.’

‘The Luna Wolves?’ asked Goshen.

‘The Wolves of Fenris, sir,’ Noctua replied.

‘That’s two enemies you’ve mentioned,’ said Goshen. ‘You understand they are our enemies, don’t you, Noctua?’

‘I understand they are both utterly lethal,’ replied Noctua. ‘Should we not appreciate the qualities of our enemies above all else?’

Goshen hesitated.

‘This terrace here, this parade,’ he said, returning to the chart display. ‘We will need air cover to achieve it.’

The briefing continued. Aximand thought for a moment that someone else had something to say, someone who had come into the room late, to stand at the back of the grouped officers.

But there was nobody there.

‘I hear you’re considering Kibre and Noctua,’ said the Warmaster.

‘You hear everything, as usual,’ Aximand replied.

‘Not Targost, then?’

‘He has other responsibilities,’ said Aximand, ‘and we did not wish to dilute them.’

The Warmaster nodded. He moved another carved bone counter across the board between them. Of all his sons, Aximand most enjoyed the practice and discipline of strategy games. The anteroom was furnished with many fine sets, most of them gifts from war leaders or brother primarchs. There was regicide, chatranj, caturanga, go, hneftafl, xadrez, mahnkala, zatrikion... It was rare to find a primarch’s homeworld where a skill-honing wargame had not evolved.

‘Ezekyle favoured Targost, didn’t he?’ asked the Warmaster as Aximand studied the field and contemplated his reply.

‘He did, sir.’

‘And when you persuaded him against the choice, did you tell him the real reason, or did you manufacture one that would be more palatable to him?’

Aximand hesitated. He remembered the conversation with Abaddon, wherein he had not chosen to say that Targost, the Captain of the Seventh Company, was not a son, a true son. He was Cthonic stock. Aximand had not chosen to reveal that part of his disinclination.

‘I didn’t–’ Aximand started to say.

‘Tell him?’ asked the primarch.

‘I didn’t... recognise my true motive,’ Aximand replied, with reluctance.

‘Interesting when you see it, though, don’t you think?’ the Warmaster asked, sitting back. ‘You and Ezekyle, Widowmaker and Noctua, all of you... What is it you call it? True sons?’

‘True sons,’ Aximand echoed.

‘So, do you suppose,’ the Warmaster chuckled, ‘it is because you prefer the reassurance of a familiar face? Or is there another face you wish to block out?’

Dry air, cool, a faint hint of salt. The Sea of Enna in the flat rift valley below, like a sheet of glass in a culvert. Along its shore, the teeming city of Tyjun, collected like flotsam, like multicoloured shingle. On the far side of the immense valley, across the back of the sleeping sea, the block line of the opposite valley wall, squared off and velvet black in the dawn light. The sky was violet, shot with stars and occasional moons. To the north, the pre-glow of the rising sun. To the east, the false dawn of the port, on fire since midnight. That was the handiwork of Jerrod and Thirteenth Company.

In the high morning of the Mausolytic plateau, the buildings of the Precinct stood like stone hangars for vast airships. Rectangles, unadorned, they were faced with yellow stone rendered gold by the early light. In places they were linked by soaring colonnades and porticos, gold stone columns the size of ancient redwoods. The pavements were made of etched steel, polished like mirrors. The atmosphere held a dry, static charge, as if great electromagnetic machines operated nearby.

The vaunted Chainveil made no appearance in the direct line at the Precinct. Chainveil soldiers caused a brief delay to Abaddon’s advance into the City of Elders. The First Captain made curt, grudging reports of their determined resistance. Goshen’s advance took a bastion west of the city where the defenders boasted they were Chainveil, but Goshen was sure they were merely regular army claiming to be the elites, so as to seem more intimidating.

He slew them all, anyway.

The Tyjunate Compulsories, resplendent in silver and crimson wargear, formed the main defence. The troopers were armed with long power swords, with energised axes and pikes, with munition-loaders, with sonic tubes, with plasmic-system weapons and las-rifles. Entering combat, they engaged individual, segmented force shields, light-absorbing fog that dimmed the glory of their ritual uniforms and made them look as if they’d each been enveloped in a hand-cut piece of storm cloud.

The shields were annoyingly effective, and deflected most gunfire over a certain range. When a Legiones Astartes bolt-round did pierce them, either through a direct hit or by finding the joint between segments, the Compulsory inside detonated, and his explosive demise was contained, pressurised, inside the shield, like a firecracker destroying a piece of soft fruit inside a bottle. The noise of it was dull, muted, like the slap of a muffled bass drum.

It was infuriating. Dug in around the looming structures of the Precinct, the Compulsories were actually retarding a Legiones Astartes assault. They were holding the line against the Sixteenth.

Yet they were men. Just men. Aximand felt a sense of injustice. The force shields, certainly not the best he’d ever seen, but made effective by their individual mounts and portability, were giving the Compulsories enough of an edge to bother the Sons of Horus. It was an aberration brought about by circumstance. Human soldiers, no matter how good they were, did not resist transhuman soldiers. Aximand wanted to crush them, pulverise them for their temerity, to call in an orbital barrage, ranged shelling, or even one of the squadrons of superheavy armour pieces that were basking nearby like vast crocodilian predators in the rising sun, waiting for his word to send them slipping down to the kill.

However, any of those actions would also raze the Precinct. The Compulsories were protected by the very buildings they were defending. Aximand had latitude, but he sincerely intended to prove he didn’t need it.

Less than twenty minutes from drop landing, the assault on the Mausolytic Precinct had grown bitter and choked. The Sons of Horus and their Army auxiliaries had lost momentum, their offensive stalled, all their advantages cancelled out by the clear-sighted deployment of professional soldiers exploiting their combat assets.

Yade Durso, second captain of Aximand’s company, cursed all the spirits of vengeance and destiny over the vox-link, but Aximand knew Durso was actually cursing him. Xachary Scipion of Metallun Reaver reported his assumption of squad command. His sergeant, old Gaspir Yunkwist, was dead. There was heat in Scipion’s voice. He was calling for an Apothecary. Zeb Zenonius of Bale Tactical reported two fallen.

Somewhere, someone was breathing.

Taking hits, driven into cover, Aximand looked up at the sky above the plateau. It was still flooded with the blue ink of night, but the pale margins were increasing. He could see four of Dwell’s moons in the sky, one large, the other three not much larger than stars. Because of their relative positions, they were each in a different phase: full, gibbous, half, new.

The sight of it let his anger breathe out for a second. It was, what? A sign? A portent?

His vox tapped. Visor display identified the link as Grael Noctua.

‘Forget bolters,’ said Noctua. ‘Blades.’

‘Indeed?’ Aximand replied.

‘Get in close, and the fools do not stand a chance,’ Noctua replied.

Aximand smiled.

‘Blades! he yelled. He locked his bolter to his hip, and unsheathed his sword. Double-edged, power-active, Cthonic bluesteel, etched along the fuller. He’d called it Mourn-it-all. His combat shield was already on his left arm.

He didn’t wait to see his order observed. He powered out of cover, lasbolts clipping his shield face and dinking his leg plates. Two big, bounding strides put him on the colonnade, moving fast, head down, blade up. He saw the first of the Compulsories up ahead, fogged in their shields, dug in around the massive pillars, firing at him. He could see their faces, pale and astonished.

Transhuman dread. Aximand had heard iterators talk of the condition. He’d heard descriptions of it from regular Army officers too. The sight of an Adeptus Astartes was one thing: taller and broader than a man could ever be, armoured like a demigod. The singularity of purpose was self-evident. An Adeptus Astartes was designed to fight and kill anything that didn’t annihilate it first. If you saw an Adeptus Astartes, you knew you were in trouble. The appearance alone cowed you with fear.

But to see one move. Apparently that was the real thing. Nothing human-shaped should be so fast, so lithe, so powerful, especially not anything in excess of two metres tall and carrying more armour than four normal men could lift. The sight of an Adeptus Astartes was one thing, but the moving fact of one was quite another. The psychologists called it transhuman dread. It froze a man, stuck him to the ground, caused his mind to lock up, made him lose control of bladder and bowel. Something huge and warlike gave pause: something huge and warlike and moving with the speed of a striking snake, that was when you knew that gods moved amongst men, and that there existed a scale of strength and speed beyond anything mortal, and that you were about to die and, if you were really lucking, there might be just enough time to piss yourself first.

Aximand saw that dumbfounded look on the faces of the Dwellers he was about to gut and section. He heard the men of Fifth Company following behind him. He felt the joy of being Horus’s son.

Noctua was right. They had been wasting time and effort with guns and bolters. The shields were good enough to make the percentages of a firefight poor. The shields were good enough to stop blades too. Bayonets, that was. Pole arms. A sabre. Maybe even a powered blade.

But not, not for a moment, a powered blade driven by transhuman arm.

The shields shattered. They cracked and broke with the sounds of smashing glass. Sharp chips of shield segment flew into the air for a microsecond after each blow before evaporating, the shield first, and then the body inside: the energy shell, then the meat. Blood exploded from the yawning wounds under pressure, jetting into the morning air, hosing Aximand and the great columns of the colonnade with arterial spray. Each sword stroke made an explosion of viscera, a puff of red in the air as if a bag of blood had been detonated and its contents particulated.

Whatever edge the Tyjunate Compulsories had owned, they lost it the moment the most advanced warriors in the Imperium remembered they were adaptable enough to fight the old-fashioned way: blade and trade, strength of arm, sword-school close combat.

The Fifth made the entrance to the Precinct less than five minutes after Aximand’s inspiring charge.

Aximand went into the thick of it with three sons at his side: Zenonius of Bale, Ger Geraddon, and Mir Amindaza, both of Tithonus Assault. They went in at the end of the grand colonnade, under a gateway called the Arch of Answers. Dweller Compulsories were packed in beneath the shadow of the vast archway, ready to defend the sunward entrances of the East Mausolytic Hall.

The air was full of shots, like neon rain, horizontal. Energy bolts and tracer rounds shone especially brightly in the shade of the vast archway. The Sons struck the line with their heads down and their shields up, sucking up the lancing gunfire, barrelling Compulsories over in a crush, like a surging mass of rioters. Dwellers fell, their shields still lit, rolling and bouncing inside the hard-light shells. There was a crush, a sense of crowd momentum, of thousands of bodies rippling as one mass. There were bodies underfoot. Hands clawed. Weapons fired point blank.

The Sons bit deeper. Their shields were ploughs and rams. Their swords were scythes and pikes. Compulsories dropped, spilling from their shredding, fizzling shields in tattered states, blood sobbing and squirting out of the compromised fields. Blades hooked other men, hurled them into the air, their bodies spinning, tumbling, flailing overhead, above the crowd, crashing back down on the necks and shoulders of their kin. Some men were dead, upright, their bodies kept from falling by the press of the mass. The mirrored pavements were running with blood. The huge pool, draining out from under the fighting mass, spread its racing edges out across the etched steel, wider, broader, crimson in the sunlight, scarlet in the shadows, flooding around the bases of the columns, making islands out of plinths and pillars.

The screaming voices of the Compulsories were either muffled by their cocooning shields or rendered tinny and raw by the vox-intercept feeding into the comm systems of the Legiones Astartes. Most of the sounds Aximand registered were the concussive impacts as he chopped and barged and hacked. Mourn-it-all was running red on its hilt and grip, blood-smoke cooking off the powered blade. Blood had painted Aximand’s sword arm to the elbow and was dripping off the edges of his vambrace. His shield boss was bruised, and splattered with gore and brain matter.

Behind everything, he could hear breathing.

Zenonius moved past him, shield up, ripping through waists and hips and ribcages with broad, horizontal slashes, bisecting bodies, rupturing shields. It was a devastating, mechanical action, almost agricultural rather than martial. He was reaping his way through the enemy to reach the Mausolytic Halls. Like a worker in a field of crops, he was cutting his row, back and forth, swinging his long blade from the shoulders.

To Aximand’s left, Amindaza was treating it more as sport. His blade was shorter, and he toyed with the Compulsories he was rushing, as if trying to engage them in combat and test their skill. He looked for blades to lock with, to deflect. No one met his challenge. They were too busy trying to fall back out of the path of his butcher assault. Amindaza favoured hacking downstrokes, deep, crushing blows coming from over the shoulder that demolished his foes and smashed them onto the ground at his feet. Aximand could hear him calling out his enemies, daring them to fight him. He railed contempt at their attempts to retreat. He killed men whether they were facing him or not.

For his part, Aximand, like Geraddon, preferred a more textbook mass assault form: shield at eye level, used as ram; sword tip-forward at chest level, punching and stabbing like a piston from under the shield rim. It was relentless. It was like rolling a heavy piece of fruit into rows of toy soldiers and watching them knocked down and scattered.

The assault was so fierce that a brown smoke of aerosolised blood was fuming off the fighting line into the sunlight.

Zenonius reached the East Hall entrance, and slaughtered a dozen Compulsories around the ornamental fountain and pool in the deep, sunlit antehall. Larger cohorts of Aximand’s company were on their heels on the colonnade. The lake of blood was so deep and swollen, there was some pressure in it as it grew and spread. Bodies on the smooth, polished floor rotated in its current, end to end, like sticks of driftwood caught by an overspilling river.

Aximand followed Zenonius into the antehall. The walls were sheer, the height of the hall impressive, though the floor plan was a small, square area with a central fountain. The top was open to the sky, so that sunlight could lance down and illuminate the quiet space, the polished floor, the clear water, the calyx and tulip carvings of the fountain’s main figure.

Blood spattered the floor, and pooled around crumpled figures and broken weapons. Bloody handprints marked the edges of the fountain bowl where men had struggled to prop themselves up as their last breaths escaped. On the intricately carved walls, jets of blood had left long, pressure-pattern arcs, huge horsetail fans or fern-frond spatters. Some stretched five or six metres up the sheer walls.

Aximand prowled forward. The place was almost tranquil. The din of fighting outside, muffled by the walls, sounded more like the grumble of a distant storm. Zenonius moved ahead, pausing to finish a wounded Compulsory. Amindaza stepped into the light on the far side of the ante-hall, blade sizzling with frying blood. He had entered via one of the other doorways. Two Compulsories and a Precinct docent rushed him, and he turned to greet them with his sword.

Aximand could hear breathing again. It was close now, closer than ever before, closer than a pulse beat in a man’s brow. The breathing, the sense of presence, had followed him out of his dreams and into his daily life. It had got closer and closer, until it was hovering at his shoulder. Now it sounded as though it were sharing his helmet, as though there were two heads in the one helm. Aximand stopped breathing for a moment to see if it was just some acoustic trick, an echo of his respiration.

Silence.

He was about to breathe again when it started, quiet but close, slow and clam, like the hushing of a gentle sea.

‘Where are you?’ he asked.

‘Say again!’ Amindaza crackled over the vox.

‘Specify, sir?’ Geraddon linked.

‘Nothing, nothing!’ Aximand answered. ‘Continue.’

Foolish, so foolish, to let it better him like that. To make him speak of it, to speak out loud. He was only talking to himself, to a trick of his mind. He was only talking to his fear.

And fear, like dreams, was something an Adeptus Astartes was not supposed to have.

He knew fear, and he knew the fear would go the moment he could identify the stranger, the moment the intruder’s face became plain to him. Little Horus Aximand wasn’t afraid of anything except the unknown.

A Compulsory charged him from the brown shadows, a lance in his hands. The blade-tip twinkled with blue light, a photonic edge.

Aximand sidestepped, swung his shield, and put the man on the floor. The blow cracked the Compulsory’s bodyshield and broke his arm. He yelped. Aximand was about to put his foot on him and finish the job when two more came at him. Faster now, more urgent, he rotated, scooping Mourn-it-all around in a backwards stroke that snipped the blade-heads off the lances stabbing at him. The blunt hafts cracked and bent against his ceramite armour. His sword ripped one man apart, opening his shield and eviscerating the body inside. He kicked the other backwards, crunching man and energy cocoon into the ante-hall wall. The impact grazed the stone, and caused chips to fly out. Stepping in, Aximand put his blade through the man’s chest. Mourn-it-all punched through the shield shell, the man, and the wall behind him. The Compulsory was pinned there for a second, like an insect specimen on a felt pad, his body-shield flickering and blinking as it shorted out.

Aximand yanked the blade out, and the man collapsed at his feet.

The breathing had drawn so very close.

Aximand stepped forward, through a tall archway, into one of the main Mausolytic Halls. The space was vast, and the air was radiant with yellow light. It was like stepping into heaven. The thin, quiet, shrouded dead of Dwell were suspended all around him in clear glass tubes, supported horizontally in columns of light. A million bodies, framed in light and glass and gravimetric energy, united in cybernation.

Zeb Zenonius of Bale tactical squad lay dead on the floor. He had been split open like a piece of shellfish.

The sight should have put Aximand on guard, on the highest pitch of readiness and alertness. But the breathing was louder than ever and, despite his transhuman instincts, he tried to see where it was coming from.

So the first blow took him by surprise. His attacker struck from the side. Only by fluke did Aximand’s shield take the brunt of it. The attacker’s sword split the shield, and cut into Aximand’s forearm beneath. Aximand staggered backwards, outraged and surprised.

Outraged by his distracted error.

Surprised by the vast strength of the being assaulting him.

Aximand rallied, blocking with his sword. He was face to face with a Legiones Astartes, a flesh-spare brute whose glossy black armour was laced with augmetic systems and stark white insignia: a senior captain of the Tenth Legion, the Iron Hands of Medusa. For a moment, Aximand thought it was Shadrak Meduson himself. The warrior had the stature of a warleader, and bore the sigils of the Sorrgol Clan. But visual tagging via visor display identified his foe as Bion Henricos, Meduson’s favoured lieutenant. Henricos’s sword was a long blade of augmented-function Medusan steel.

They whirled down the cybernation hall like dancers, trading blows. Henricos represented a greater challenge than all the Compulsories Aximand had doomed that day, combined. The Medusan’s skill was formidable. His augmetic strength far exceeded Aximand’s. His speed was breathtaking.

For a thrilling instant, Aximand wondered if he was, at last, experiencing transhuman dread for himself.

They fought their way towards the centre of the hall, where a great bio-stasis generator stack rose like a temple altar, gilded and covered with angelic figures. The glass-packed bodies radiated out from it, stack upon suspended stack. Huge white statues, demi-gods shrouded in long capes, bright as snow, knelt in obeisance before the central block.

The silvered-black armour of the Iron Hands warrior gleamed like slicked oil in the Precinct’s weird light. His blade moved like a ribbon of light. Aximand got around the expert guard, and delivered a glancing blow with his hilt that cracked the chest plating of Henricos’s wargear. Henricos responded by planting his feet, locking their blades in a rigid cruciform, and shoulder-barging Aximand.

Little Horus lurched backwards and crashed into the nearest row of cybernators. Glass sleeves shattered, and showers of fragments flew up and caught the light like spring petals. Cybernation tubes cannoned into one another, cracking and disintegrating. Some were pushed clear of the gravimetric support fields and fell, smashing on the polished metal floor. Power relays shorted out. Desiccated bodies tumbled out into the air like bundles of roots and twigs.

Bion Henricos crunched over broken glass and dry bones to get at Aximand. He shoved suspended glass sleeves out of his way. There was a bitter stink of resins and preserving spices. Aximand struggled to get up. Flickers of energy, dark and unhealthy, were flaring like troubled synapses out from the disrupted area of the Mausolytic array. The coloured bursts writhed and fired out into the serene, golden layers of the undamaged structure. Odd harmonics, like the low moaning of a thousand voices relayed by a low quality vox signal, filled the hall.

Henricos reached Aximand. Mourn-it-all cut him across the eyes, shattering one lens unit, and raked a gouge down his stomach and hip. Henricos struck with a swing that would have severed Aximand’s head if he had been a hand-span closer. He drove the Medusan warleader back across the carpet of ancient, pulverised glass and mummified scraps. His next blow wounded Henricos in the thigh. Something silvery, like liquid mercury, sobbed out.

Henricos put him on the ground. Aximand wasn’t quite sure how he’d been hit, but the impact rattled his brain inside his skull and filled his mouth and nostrils with blood. He was face down, groping for his fallen sword, concussed and dazed and vulnerable.

He looked up, wondering why Henricos hadn’t finished him. Amindaza of Tithonus was locking swords with his opponent. Amindaza had fought his way into the Hall, and Geraddon wasn’t far behind. The loud and repeated discharge of weapons from outside the entry space suggested that the assault had washed into the main area of the Precinct, and that the Compulsories were in retreat.

Amindaza had been wounded on his way into the Hall, and his arm was slow. His arrival and interception had saved Aximand, but it had also doomed Amindaza. Henricos was a far superior swordsman. Before Aximand, dazed and spitting blood, could get back up, Henricos had delivered a blow that split Amindaza from his left shoulder to his right hip. He was simply bisected, diagonally, in one stroke. The sections of him fell hard, messily, in an apocalyptic release of blood.

Geraddon flew at him, and Henricos knocked him aside. Geraddon smashed into another row of caskets.

Aximand put Mourn-it-all through Henricos’s spine so that the tip shattered the aquila on the Medusan’s breastplate.

Henricos fell to one knee, and then onto his face. Aximand knelt on his back and cut his helmet off. Henricos’s pale face was turned to the side, cheek to the floor, the white skin flecked with beads of dark red blood.

‘Pray this death takes you, traitor,’ said Aximand. ‘Other deaths would be less forgiving.’

Henricos gurgled something.

‘What?’ asked Aximand, pressing his blade against the neck of the Iron Hands warleader.

‘You are not the trophy we hoped for,’ Henricos whispered.

‘Trophy?’

‘Knew we couldn’t beat you, wanted to hurt you instead. Thought... thought he would value the Mausolytic Precinct above all, and lead this segment attack personally.’

‘This was supposed to be a trap for Lupercal?’

‘May he burn forever.’

Aximand laughed.

‘But your master is a coward and a traitor,’ murmured Henricos, ‘and all he sends is you.’

‘It would appear I’m quite enough,’ replied Aximand. ‘What did you hope to do?’

Henricos gurgled.

‘I said, what kind of trap is one flesh-spare warrior?’

Henricos did not reply. All the life had drained out of him.

Aximand rose, and kicked the corpse.

Geraddon had got back up.

‘What was he saying?’ he asked.

‘Nonsense,’ Aximand replied. ‘Simply nonsense. He was desperate.’

‘It was supposed to be a trap,’ said Geraddon, ‘so why was he alone?’

The sound of breathing had come back. Aximand turned slowly and realised that it was simply the background noise of the Mausolytic Hall, the slow, throbbing murmur of the cybernation system. It was the pulse of the sleeping dead.

He felt like a fool. When the operation was over, he would meditate. He would clean his mind of the fears and dreams that had accumulated. He would purify his thoughts and expel his weaknesses. To serve the Warmaster, he needed to be an even-tempered weapon.

He had let himself slacken. It was time he recommitted his mind and made himself truer to the image of Lupercal.

Aximand opened the vox, and took stock. Large portions of the Precinct were in Sixteenth Legion hands. Grael Noctua reported the West Hall and the approaches secure. Aximand ordered squads forward into the East Hall, to his position. He ordered all access ways closed.

He looked at the cybernation array around them. A little damage had been done, but not too much. The facility was essentially intact, and a little pressure applied to Dweller technadepts would soon have repairs completed.

The huge white statues of shrouded demi-gods, bright as snow, that had been kneeling in obeisance around the central great bio-stasis generator stack were gone.

‘Wait–’ Aximand began.

The White Scars killteam rushed them. The five killers of the Fifth Legion had thrown off the white cloaks they had used for concealment. They had used chalk dust or some funereal powder to mask the crimson edges of their armour. Their helms were crowskull, the Corvus pattern. It seemed Lev Goshen had been badly mistaken. The White Scars did have the patience to wait. What on the open field was fast hit and run became, in city fighting, stealth and swift ambush.

Grael Noctua’s warning had been shrewd.

The first one was on him. It was Hibou Khan. Aximand identified him from his rank and company pins. This was the practice of burkutchi, to ‘cut the head’. The term came from the Chogorisian art of hunting with eagles, the great akwilluh, using the birds to draw out and isolate the bull leader of a herd. Once the bull was dead, the herd was broken.

It had been their intention to decapitate the Sixteenth. Thwarted, they were going to make do with other prey: other bulls, junior bulls, company captains.

Aximand smashed Hibou away, and broke the White Scar’s blade on Mourn-it-all’s edge. Another Scar lunged in. Aximand parried and heard Geraddon cry out as two blades punched through him. Aximand drove his sword down through the cap of the next snow-white crowskull helm that came at him. Suddenly, not all the red decorating the White Scar wargear was scarlet lacquer. He reached for his bolter.

Gunfire ripped through the Mausolytic Precinct. More White Scars and renegade Iron Hands had sprung their trap. Squads of Aximand’s company were meeting both, bolter to bolter. Fighting on, out-numbered, Aximand slew another White Scar, blasting his bolter point-blank through an eyeslit. He yelled over the link to Noctua and his lieutenant captains to close the fight down.

To be on alert that their enemy was hunting captains as trophies.

To be aware that they weren’t facing Tyjunate Compulsories or Chainveil anymore.

They were facing Adeptus Astartes transhumans.

Hibou Khan had got back on his feet. To replace his own, broken sword, the White Scar had snatched up the long blade of Medusan steel that Henricos had wielded. His first blow notched Mourn-it-all, his second beat Aximand’s guard.

His third blow caught Little Horus vertically at the cheek, in a line that began just over the right eye-piece where his Mournival mark was displayed. The bonded ceramite of his helm didn’t even seem to stop the Medusan weapon.

Aximand fell. There was a great deal of blood suddenly, and he couldn’t properly account for its source. He saw something on the etched steel floor in front of him.

It was the visor and snout section of his own helmet, the entire faceplate. It had been sheared off, peeled cleanly away, as though shaved by an industrial slicer.

And it was not empty.

The reattachment left a scar. It set the character of the face differently, altered the seating of the muscles. Somehow, the wrongness, the imperfection, made him more like Horus, not less.

Noctua brought his squads into the East Hall in a rapid counterstrike, and broke the burkutchi. Hibou Khan was denied the opportunity to finish the job. Most of the loyalist Space Marines were driven back out into the lap of Lev Goshen and his Terminator squads.

Hibou Khan fled, leaving twelve men of Aximand’s company dead by his own hand, and earning himself a place on Aximand’s death list.

A new helm was forged for him, with the half-moon above the right eye. The armourers were already busy graving Mournival marks to the helms of Grael Noctua and Falkus Kibre. When Aximand was shown the pieces of his old headgear, he saw that the blade had sliced his half-moon mark in half.

Had he been a man prone to superstition and belief in omens, he might have read bad things into this. But he was not afraid of change. He was not really even a man.

Under the surgeon’s knife, in stasis sleep, he had dreamt one final dream. The identity of the faceless intruder had ultimately been revealed. Aximand had been slightly apprehensive that the intruder’s face would turn out to be his own, or one just like it, and that lengthy psychological work would be required as a consequence.

It was not. As they restored his face, he dreamt the face of the other.

It was the face of Garviel Loken.

When Aximand woke, he felt a measure of happiness and relief. A man could not be afraid of the dead, and Loken was dead, and that fact would not change.

Not that he was afraid of change. Change was, he always insisted, part of his ruling character.

‘The melancholic humour is protean,’ he said. ‘It possesses the quality of autumn. It is transformative. It makes me the accelerator of death, the enabler of ends and beginnings. I was made to clear away this world ready for renewal. To change the order of things. To cast out the false and enthrone the true. This is my purpose. I am not afraid.’

Then again, once they reattached his face, all he ever really looked was invincible.

The iron within. The iron without. Iron everywhere. The galaxy laced with its cold promise. Did you know that Holy Terra is mostly iron? Our Olympian home world, also. Most habitable planets and moons are. The truth is we are an Imperium of iron. Dying stars burn hearts of iron; while the heavy metal cores of burgeoning worlds generate fields that shelter life – sometimes human life – from the razing glare of such stellar ancients.

Empires are measured in more than just conquered dirt. Every Iron Warrior knows this. They’re measured in hearts that beat in common purpose, thundering in unison across the void: measured in the blood that spills from our Legiones Astartes bodies, red with iron and defiance. This is the iron within and we can taste its metallic tang when an enemy blade or bullet finds us wanting. Then the iron within becomes the iron without, as it did on what we only now understand to be the first day of the Great Siege of Lesser Damantyne…

The Warsmith stepped out onto the observation platform, each of his power-armoured footfalls an assault on the heavy grille. The Iron Warrior’s ceramite shoulders were hunched with responsibility, as though the Space Marine carried much more than the deadweight of his Mark-III plate. He crossed the platform with the determination of a demigod, but the fashion in which his studded gauntlets seized the exterior rail betrayed a belief that he might not make the expanse at all. The juggernaut ground to an irresistible halt.

A rasping cough wracked the depths of his armoured chest, his form rising and falling with the exertion of each tortured, uncertain breath. Imperial Army sentries from the Ninth-Ward Angeloi Adamantiphracts watched the Warsmith suffer, uncertain how to act. One even broke ranks and approached, the flared muzzle of his heavy carbine lowered and scalemail glove outstretched.

‘My lord,’ the masked soldier began, ‘can I send for your Apothecary or perhaps the Iron Palatine…’

Lord Barabas Dantioch stopped the Adamantiphract with an outstretched gauntlet of his own. As the Warsmith fought the coughing fit and his convulsions, the armoured palm became a single finger.

Then, without even looking at the soldier, the huge Legiones Astartes managed: ‘As you were, wardsman.’

The soldier retreated and a light breeze rippled through the Iron Warrior’s tattered cloak, the material a shredded mosaic of black and yellow chevrons. It whipped about the statuesque magnificence of his power armour, the dull lustre of his Legion’s plate pitted with rust and premature age, lending the suit a sepia sheen. He wore no helmet. Face and skull were enclosed in an iron mask, crafted by the Warsmith himself. The faceplate was a work of brutal beauty, an interpretation of the Legion’s mark, the iron mask symbol that adorned his shoulder. Lord Dantioch’s mask was a hangdog leer of leaden fortitude with a cage for a mouth and eyes of grim darkness. It was whispered in the arcades and on the battlements that the Warsmith was wearing the mask – pulled glowing from the forge – as he hammered it to shape around his shaven skull. He then plunged head and iron into ice water, fixing the beaten metal in place forever around his equally grim features.

Gripping the platform rail, Dantioch drew his eye-slits skywards between his hunched, massive shoulders and drank in the insane genius of his creation. The Schadenhold: an impregnable fortress of unique and deadly design, named in honour of the misery that Dantioch and his Iron Warriors might observe if ever an enemy force was foolish enough to assault the stronghold. During the process of Compliance, as part of the Emperor’s strategy and holy decree, thousands of bastions and citadels had been built on thousands of worlds, so that the architects of the Great Crusade might watch over their conquered domain and the new subjects of an ever expanding Imperium. Many of these galactic redoubts, castles and forts had been designed and built by Dantioch’s Iron Warrior brothers: the IV Legion was peerless in the art of siege warfare, both as besiegers and the besieged. The galaxy had seen nothing like the Schadenhold, however – of that Dantioch was sure.

Under his mask the Iron Warrior commander’s pale lips mumbled the Unbreakable Litany. ‘Lord Emperor, make me an instrument of your adamance. Where darkness is legion, bless our walls with cold disdain; where foolish foes are frail, have our ranks advance; where there is mortal doubt, let resolution reign…’

The Warsmith had blessed the Schadenhold with every modern structural fortification: concentric hornworks; bunkers; murder zones; drum keeps; artillery emplacements and kill-towers. The fortress was a monstrous study in 30th Millennium siegecraft. For Dantioch, however, location was everything. Without the natural advantages of material, elevation and environment, all other architectural concerns were mere flourish. A stronghold built in a strategically weak location was certain to fall, as many of Dantioch’s kindred in the other Legions had discovered during the early trials of Compliance. Even the Imperial Fists had had their failures.

Dantioch had hated Lesser Damantyne from the moment he had set foot on the dread rock and had felt instantly that the planet hated him also. It was as though the world did not want him there and that appealed to the Warsmith’s tactical sensibilities: he could use Damantyne’s environmental hostilities to his advantage. The small planetoid was situated in a crowded debris field of spinning rock, metal and ice that made it seem unfinished and hazardous from the start. The cruisers of the 51st Expedition that had brought the Warsmith and his Iron Warriors there had negotiated the field with difficulty. Although the planet had tolerable gravity and low-lying oxygen that made an outpost possible, the surface was a swirling hellstorm of hurricane winds, lashing lightning and highly corrosive, acid cloud cover. Nothing lived there: nothing could live on the surface. The acidic atmosphere ate armour and ordnance like a hungry beast, rapidly stripping it away layer by layer in an effort to dissolve the flesh and soft tissue of the Legiones Astartes beneath. Even the most heavily armoured could only expect to survive mere minutes on the surface.

This made vertical, high-speed insertions by Stormbird the sole way down and that was only if the pilot was skilful enough to punch through the blinding cloud cover and down into one of the narrow, bottomless sinkholes that punctuated the rocky surface. Through some natural perversity of Damantyne’s early evolution, the planetary crust was riddled with air pockets, cavities and vast open spaces: a cavern system of staggering proportion and labyrinthine madness. Dantioch chose the very heart of this madness as the perfect location for his fortress, in a vaulted subterranean space so colossal it had its own primitive weather system.

‘From iron cometh strength. From strength cometh will. From will cometh faith. From faith cometh honour. From honour cometh iron. This is the Unbreakable Litany. May it forever be so. Dominum imperator ac ferrum aeturnum.’

The Iron Warriors were not the first to have made Lesser Damantyne their home. Below the surface, the lithic world was rich with life which had evolved in the deep and the dark. The only real threat to the Emperor’s chosen were the megacephalopods: monsters that stalked the caverns with their sinuous tentacles and could collapse their rubbery bulk through the most torturous of cave tunnels, creating new entrances with their titanium beaks. The Legiones Astartes, first few years on Lesser Damantyne comprised a war of extermination on the xenos brutes, who seemed intent on tearing down any structures the IV Legion attempted to erect.

With the alien threat hunted to extinction, Dantioch began construction on his greatest work: the Schadenhold. While Iron Warriors had been battling chthonic monstrosities for planetary supremacy, Dantioch had had his Apothecaries and Adeptus Mechanicum advisors hard at work creating the muscle that would build his mega-fortress. Iron Warrior laboratories perfected genestock slave soldiers, colloquially known as the Sons of Dantioch. Although the Warsmith’s face had been hidden for many years behind the iron of his impassive mask, it was plain to see on the gruesome hulks that had built the Schadenhold.

Taller and broader than a Space Marine, the genebreeds used the raw power of their monstrous bulk to mine, move and carve the stone from which the fortress was crafted. As well as physical prowess the slave soldiers had also inherited some of their gene-father’s cold, technical skill and the Schadenhold was more than a hastily constructed rock edifice: it was an enormous example of strategic art and siegecraft. With the fortress complete, the Sons of Dantioch found new roles in the maintenance and basic operation of the citadel and as close-quarters shock troops for the concentric kill zones that layered the stronghold. It pleased the ailing Warsmith to be surrounded by brute examples of his own diminished youth and physical supremacy and, in turn, the slave soldiers honoured their gene-father with a simple, unshakable faith and loyalty: a fealty to the Emperor as father of the primarch and the primarch as father of their own.

‘I never tire of looking at it,’ a voice cut through the darkness behind. It was Zygmund Tarrasch, the Schadenhold’s Iron Palatine. Dantioch grunted, bringing an end to his mumbled devotions. Perhaps the Adamantiphract had sent for him; or perhaps the Iron Palatine had news.

The Space Marine joined his Warsmith at the rail and peered up at the magnificence of the fortress above. Although Dantioch was Warsmith and ranking Legiones Astartes among the thirty-strong Iron Warrior garrison left behind by the 51st Expeditionary Fleet, his condition had forced him to devolve responsibility for the fortress and its day-to-day defence to another. He’d chosen Tarrasch as Iron Palatine because he was a Space Marine of character and imagination. The cold logic of the IV Legion had served the Iron Warriors well but, even among their number, there were those whose contribution to Compliance was more than just a conqueror’s thirst – those who appreciated the beauty of human endeavour and achievement, not just the tactical satisfaction of victory and the hot delight of battle.

‘Reminds me of the night sky,’ Tarrasch told his Warsmith. The Iron Palatine nodded to himself. ‘I miss the sky.’

Dantioch had never really thought of the Schadenhold in that way before. It was certainly a spectacle to behold and the final facet in the Warsmith’s ingenious design, for the two Iron Warriors were standing on a circular observation platform, situated around the steeple-point of the tallest of the Schadenhold’s citadel towers. Only, the tower did not point towards the sky or even at the cavern ceiling: it pointed down at the cavern floor.

The Schadenhold had been hewn out of a gigantic, conical rock formation protruding from the roof of the cave. Dantioch had immediately appreciated the rock feature’s potential and committed his troops to the difficult and perilous task of carving out an inverse citadel. This hung upside-down, but all chambers, stairwells and interior architecture were oriented skywards. The communications spires and steeple-scanners at the very bottom of the fortress were hanging several thousand metres above a vast naturally-occurring lake of crude promethium, which bubbled up from the planet depths. At the very top of the stronghold were the dungeons and oubliettes, situated high in the cavern roof.

As Dantioch cast his weary eyes up the architecture, he came to appreciate the comparison the Iron Palatine was making. In the bleak darkness of the gargantuan cavern, the bright glare of the fortress searchlamps and soft pinpricks of illumination escaping the embrasure murder holes appeared like a constellation in a deep night sky. This was accentuated further by the phosphorescent patches of bacteria that feasted on the feldspar in the cavern roof and the dull glints reflecting off the shiny, pitch surface of oozing promethium below: each giving the appearance of ever more distant stars and galaxies.

‘You have news?’ Dantioch put to Tarrasch.

‘Yes, Warsmith,’ the Iron Palatine reported. The Space Marine was also in full armour and Legion colours, bar gauntlets and helmet, which he clutched in one arm. The vigilance (or paranoia, as some of the other Legions believed) of the Iron Warriors was well known and the Schadenhold and its garrison maintained a constant state of battle readiness. Tarrasch ran a hand across the top of his bald head. His dark eyes and flesh were the primarch’s own, a blessing to his sons. As the Warsmith turned and the light of the observation platform penetrated the slits of his iron mask, Tarrasch caught a glimpse of sallow, bloodshot eyes and wrinkled skin, discoloured with age.

‘And?’

‘The flagship Benthos hails us, my lord.’

‘So, the 51st Expedition returns,’ Dantioch rasped. ‘We’ve had them on our relay scopes for days. Why the slow approach? Why no contact?’

‘They inform us that they’ve had difficulty traversing the debris field,’ the Iron Palatine reported.

‘And they hail us only now?’ Dantioch returned crabbily.

‘The Benthos accidentally struck one of our orbital mines,’ Tarrasch informed his master. Dantioch felt something like a smile curl behind the caged mouth of his faceplate.

‘An ominous beginning to their visit,’ the Warsmith said.

‘They’re holding station while they make repairs,’ the Iron Palatine added. ‘And they’re requesting coordinates for a high speed insertion.’

‘Who requests them?’

‘Warsmith Krendl, my lord.’

‘Warsmith Krendl?’

Tarrasch nodded: ‘So it would appear.’

‘So Idriss Krendl now commands the 14th Grand Company.’

‘Even under your command,’ Tarrasch said, ‘he was little more than raw ambition in polished ceramite.’

‘You might just get your night sky, my Iron Palatine.’

‘You think we might be rejoining the Legion, sir?’

For the longest time, Dantioch did not speak – the Warsmith lost in memory and musing. ‘I sincerely hope not,’ the Warsmith replied.

The answer seemed to vex the Iron Palatine. Dantioch laid a gauntleted hand on Tarrasch’s shoulder. ‘Send the Benthos coordinates for the Orphic Gate and have two of our Stormbirds waiting near the surface to escort our guests in.’

‘The Orphic Gate, sir? Surely the–’

‘Let’s treat the new Warsmith to some of the more dramatic depths and cave systems,’ Dantioch said. ‘A scenic route, if you will.’

‘As you wish, my lord.’

‘In the meantime have Chaplain Zhnev, Colonel Kruishank, Venerable Vastopol and the cleric visiting from Greater Damantyne meet us in the Grand Reclusiam: we shall receive our guests there and hear from Olympian lips what our brothers have been doing in our absence…’

The Grand Reclusiam rang with both the wretched coughing of the Warsmith and the hammer strokes of his Chaplain. The chamber could easily accommodate the thirty-Iron Warrior garrison of the Schadenhold and their cult ceremonies and rituals. In reality – with the fortress in a state of constant high alert – there were ordinarily never more than ten Legiones Astartes in attendance during any one watch.

Dantioch and his Chaplain had not allowed such a restriction to affect the design and impact of the chamber. The Iron Warriors on Lesser Damantyne were few in number but great of heart and they filled their chests with a soaring faith and loyalty to their Emperor. To this end the Grand Reclusiam was the largest chamber in the fortress, able in fact to serve the spiritual needs of ten times their number. From the vaulted stone ceiling hung a black forest of iron rods that dangled in the air above the centrum altar approach. These magnified the cult devotions, rogational and choral chanting of the small garrison to a booming majesty – all supported by the roar of the ceremonial forge at the elevated head of the chamber and the rhythmic strikes of hammer on iron against the anvil-altar.

The aisles on either side of the centrum consisted of a sculptured scene that ran the length of the Grand Reclusiam, rising with the flight of altar steps and terminating at the far wall. Towering above the chamber congregation, it depicted a crowded, uphill battle scene crafted from purest ferrum, with Iron Warrior heroes storming a barbaric enemy force that was holding the higher ground. The primitive giants were the titans and personifications of old: the bastions of myth and superstition, smashed upon the armour and IV Legion’s virtues of technology and reason. As well as serving as an inspiring diorama, the sculpture created the illusion that the congregation was at the heart of the battle – and there was nowhere else Dantioch’s men would rather be.

Beyond the sculpture on either side, the rocky walls of the chamber had been lined with polished iron sheeting, upon which engraved schematics and structural designs overlapped to create a fresco of the Emperor looking on proudly from the west and the Primarch Perturabo from the east.

‘My lord, they approach,’ Tarrasch announced and with difficulty the Warsmith came up off one devout knee. Shadows and the sound of self-important steps filled the Reclusiam’s grand arch entrance. The Iron Palatine turned and stood by his Warsmith’s side, while Colonel Kruishank of the Ninth-Ward Angeloi Adamantiphracts hovered nearby in full dress uniform. His reverential beatings complete, Chaplain Zhnev uncoupled the relic-hammer from a slender, bionic replacement for his right arm and shoulder. He handed the crozius arcanum attachment to a hulking genestock slave whose responsibility it was to keep the ceremonial forge roaring. Zhnev made his solemn way down the steps, nodding to the only member of the congregation who was not part of the Schadenhold garrison: a cleric dressed in outlandish, hooded robes of sapphire and gold.

‘They come,’ Zhnev murmured as the delegation marched into his Reclusiam and up the long approach to the altar steps.

Out front strode Idriss Krendl, the new Warsmith of the 14th Grand Company. The intensity of his Olympian glower was shattered by the scarring that cut up his face. Following, clad in the crimson robes of the Adeptus Mechanicum, was an adept, whose own face was lost to the darkness of his hood. A sickly yellow light emanated from three bionic oculars that rotated like the objective lenses of a microscope. Beside him was a Son of Horus. The eyes on his shoulderplate and chest were unmistakable and his fine armour was of the palest green, framed in a midnight trim. His unsmiling face was swarthy and heavy of brow, as though in constant deliberation. Flanking them, and marching in time, were Krendl’s honour guard: a four-point escort of Legiones Astartes veterans in gleaming, grey Mark-IV Maximus suits lined in gold and gaudiness.

‘Warsmith,’ Krendl greeted his former master coolly, at the foot of the altar steps.

A moment passed under the engraved eyes of the Emperor.

‘Krendl,’ Dantioch replied.

The Iron Warrior pursed his mangled lips but let the failure to acknowledge his new rank pass. ‘Greetings from the 51st Expedition. May I introduce Adept Grachuss and Captain Hasdrubal Serapis of the Sons of Horus.’

Dantioch failed to acknowledge them also. The Warsmith gave a short cough and waved a gauntlet nonchalantly behind him.

‘You know my people,’ Dantioch said. Then added, ‘and yours.’

‘Indeed,’ Krendl said, raising a ragged eyebrow. ‘We bring you new orders from your primarch and your Warmaster.’

‘And what of the Emperor’s orders? You bring nothing across the stars from him?’ Dantioch asked.

Krendl stiffened, then seemed to relax. He gave Serapis a glance over his armoured shoulder but the captain’s expression didn’t change.

‘It has long been the Emperor’s wish that his favoured sons – under the supreme leadership of his most favoured, Horus Lupercal – guide the Great Crusade to its inevitable conclusion. Out here, amongst a cosmos conquered, the Warmaster’s word is law. Dantioch, you know this.’

‘Out here, in the darkness of the East, we hear disturbing rumours of this cosmos conquered and the dangers of the direction it is taking,’ Dantioch hissed. ‘Rector, come forth. You may speak.’

The cleric in sapphire and gold stepped forwards with apologetic hesitation. ‘This man,’ Dantioch explained, ‘has come to us from Greater Damantyne with grave news.’

The priest, at once scrutinised by the supermen, retreated into the depths of his hood. He fumbled his first words, before gaining his confidence.

‘My lords, I am your humble servant,’ the rector began. ‘This system is the terminus of a little-known trade route. Merchants and pirates, both alien and human, run wares between our hinterspace and the galactic core. In the last few months they have brought terrible news of consequence to the Emperor’s Angels here on Lesser Damantyne. A civil war that burns across the Imperium, the loss of entire Legions of Space Marines and the unthinkable – a son of the Emperor slain! This tragic intelligence alone would have been enough to bring me here: the Space Marines of this rock have long been our friends and allies in the battle with the green invader. Then, a dread piece of cognisance came to my ears and made them bleed for my Iron Warrior overlords. Olympia – their home world – the victim of rebellion and retribution. A planet razed to its rocky foundations; mountains aflame and a people enthralled. Olympia, I am heartbroken to report, is now no more than an underworld of chain and darkness, buried in rotten bodies and shame.’

‘I have heard enough of this,’ Serapis warned.

Krendl turned on the Warsmith. ‘Your primarch–’

Dantioch cut him off. ‘My primarch – I suspect – had a hand in these reported tragedies.’

‘You waste our time, Dantioch,’ Krendl said, his torn lips snarling around the hard consonants of the Warsmith’s name. ‘You and your men have been reassigned. Your custodianship here is ended. Your primarch and the Iron Warriors Legion fight for Horus Lupercal now and all available troops and resources – including those formally under your superintendence – are required for the Warmaster’s march on ancient Terra.’

The Grand Reclusiam echoed with Krendl’s fierce honesty. For a moment nobody spoke, the shock of hearing such bold heresy in a holy place overwhelming the chamber.

‘End this madness!’ Chaplain Zhnev implored from the steps, the forge light flashing off his sable-silver plate.

‘Krendl, think about what you’re doing,’ Tarrasch added.

‘I am Warsmith now, Captain Tarrasch!’ Krendl exploded, ‘whatever rank you might hold in this benighted place, you will honour me with my rightful title.’

‘Honour what?’ Dantioch said. ‘The rewards of failure? You command simply because you lack the courage to be loyal.’

‘Don’t talk to me about failure and lack of courage, Dantioch. You excel in both,’ Krendl spat. He bobbed his head at Serapis, the splinters of frag still embedded in his face-flesh glinting in the chamber light. ‘That is how the great Barabas Dantioch came to be left guarding such a worthless deadrock. Lord Perturabo’s favourite here came to lose Krak Fiorina, Stratopolae and the fortress world of Gholghis to the Vulpa Straits hrud migration.’

As Krendl growled his narrative, Dantioch remembered the last, dark days on Gholghis. The hrud xenos filth. The infestation of the unseen. The waiting and the dying, as Dantioch’s garrison turned to dust and bones, their armour rusting, bolters jamming and fortress crumbling about them. Only then, after the intense entropic field created by the migratory hrud swarms had aged stone and flesh to ruin, did the rachidian beasts creep out of every nook and crevice to attack, stabbing and slicing with their venomous claws.

Most of all, Dantioch remembered waiting for the Stormbird to lift the survivors out of the remains of Gholghis: Sergeant Zolan, Vastopol the warrior-poet and Techmarine Tavarre. Zolan’s hearts stopped beating aboard the Stormbird, minutes after extraction. Tavarre died of old age in the cruiser infirmary, just before reaching Lesser Damantyne. Vastopol and the Warsmith had considered themselves comparatively fortunate but both had been left crippled with their aged, superhuman bodies.

‘He then thought it wise,’ Krendl continued with acidic disdain, ‘to question his primarch’s prosecution of the hrud extermination campaign. No doubt as a way to excuse his loss of half a Grand Company, rather than laying the blame where it really belonged: the Emperor’s bungled attempt at galactic conquest and his own failed part in that. The IV Legion spread out across the stars. A myriad of tiny garrisons holding a tattered Compliance together in the wake of a blind Crusade. Our once proud Iron Warriors, reduced to planetary turnkeys.’

‘The primarch was wrong,’ Dantioch said, shaking his iron mask. ‘The extermination campaign prompted the migration rather than ending it. Perturabo claims the hrud cleansed from the galaxy but, if that is the case, what is quietly wiping out Compliance worlds on the Koranado Drift?’

The new Warsmith ignored him.

‘You disappoint and disgust him,’ Krendl told Dantioch. ‘Your own primarch. Your weakness offends him. Your vulnerability is an affront to his genetic heritage. We all have scars but it is you he cannot bear to look upon. Is that why you adopted the mask?’ Krendl smiled his derision. ‘Pathetic. You’re an insult to nature and the laws that govern the galaxy: the strong survive; the feeble die away. Why did you not crawl off and die, Dantioch? Why hang on, haunting the rest of us like a bad memory?’

‘If I’m so objectionable, what is it that you and the primarch want with me?’

‘Nothing, cripple. I doubt you would live long enough to reach the rendezvous. Perturabo demands his Iron Warriors – all his true sons – for the Warmaster’s offensive. Horus will take us to the very walls of the Imperial Palace, where the Emperor’s fanciful fortifications will be put to the test of our mettle and history will be made.’

‘The Emperor has long grown distracted in his studies on ancient Terra,’ Hasdrubal Serapis insisted with venom. ‘The Imperium has no need of the councils, polity and bureaucracy he has created in his reclusion. We need leadership: a Great Crusade of meaning and purpose. The Emperor is no longer worthy to guide humanity in the next stage of its natural dominion over the galaxy. His son, Horus Lupercal, has proved himself worthy of the task.’

‘Warsmith Krendl,’ Zhnev said, blanking out the Son of Horus and taking several dangerous steps forwards. ‘If you stand by and do nothing, while the Warmaster plots patricide and pours poison in his brother primarch’s ears, then you too plot a patricide of your own. Perturabo is our primarch. We must make our noble lord see the error of his judgement – not reinforce it with our unquestioned compliance.’

‘Lord Perturabo is your primarch, indeed. Is it so difficult to obey your primarch’s order?’ Serapis marvelled at the Iron Warriors. ‘Or does mutinous Olympian blood still burn in your veins? Krendl, to have your home world rebel in your absence is embarrassment enough. I trust you will not allow the same to happen amongst members of your own Legion.’

‘Save it, pontificator,’ Krendl snapped at the Chaplain. ‘I have heard the arguments. Soon the Legion will have little use for you and your kind.’ The Warsmith turned on the silent, seething Dantioch. ‘You will surrender command of this fortress and troops to me immediately.’

A moment of cool fury passed between the two Iron Warriors.

‘And if I refuse?’

‘Then you and your men will be treated as traitors to the primarch and his Warmaster,’ Krendl promised.

‘Like you and your Cthonian friend are to his majesty, the Emperor?’

‘Your stronghold will be pounded to dust and traitors with it,’ Krendl told him.

Dantioch turned and presented the grim iron of his masked face to Colonel Kruishank, Chaplain Zhnev and his Iron Palatine, Zygmund Tarrasch. Their faces were equally grim. Allowing his eyes to linger for a second on the visiting rector, Barabas Dantioch returned his gaze to his maniacal opposite. Krendl was flushed with fear and fire. Serapis merely watched: a distant observer – the puppet master with strings of his own. Adept Grachuss gurgled rhythmically and rotated his tri-ocular, the lens zeroing in on Dantioch. The Warsmith’s honour guard stood as statues: their bolters ready; their barrels on the custodians of the Schadenhold.

‘Vastopol,’ Dantioch called. ‘What do you think?’

A vox-roar boomed around the chamber, causing the iron rods suspended above the Reclusiam to tremble and dance. Something large and ungainly moved amongst the giant, iron sculptures of the aisle diorama. The most primitive of preservation instincts caused Krendl and his honour guard to spin around in shock. One of the sculptures had come to life. Seeming small in the choreographed throng of titan attackers, the assailant’s bulk and breadth swiftly grew as it advanced and towered over the astounded Iron Warriors.

The Legiones Astartes were presented with one of their own. A Dreadnought. A brooding, metal monster, as broad as it was tall and squatset with chunky weaponry. The Venerable Vastopol: with his Warsmith, the last surviving Iron Warriors of the Gholghis fortress world. Wracked with horrendous injury and premature age, Dantioch had had the Space Marine entombed in Dreadnought armour, so that the warrior might continue to serve and keep the chronicles of the company alive. The war machine had been hastily sprayed black in order to blend in with the surrounding diorama and with movement the fresh paint left a black drizzle behind the beast.

As the wall of ceramite and adamantium came at them, Krendl’s armed escorts tried to bring their bolters to bear. The Venerable Vastopol’s gaping twin-autocannons were already loaded, primed and aimed right at them. The weapons crashed, chugging explosive fire at the two rearguard Space Marines and filling the chamber with the unbearable cacophony of battle. At such close range, the heavy weapon reduced the two Legiones Astartes to thrashing blurs of blood and shattered armour.

With more grace and coordination than would have been thought possible in the hulking machine, the charging Dreadnought turned and smashed a third Iron Warrior guard into the opposite aisle with a power claw-appendaged shoulder. The Space Marine’s glorious Maximus suit crumpled and the Legiones Astartes within could be heard screaming as bones snapped and organs ruptured. With Krendl and Serapis backing for cover, silent pistols drawn, and the Mechanicum adept knocked to the Reclusiam floor, the Warsmith’s remaining honour guard flung himself at the Dreadnought. Lifting his bolter above his head, the Iron Warrior blasted the Venerable Vastopol’s armoured womb-tomb with firepower.

Sparks showered from the Dreadnought’s adamantium shell. Vastopol gunned the chainfist bayonet that underslung his autocannons. Slashing at the Iron Warrior with the barbed nightmare, the war machine chewed up the Space Marine’s weapon before opening up his armour from the jaw to the navel. With chest cavity and abdomen spilling their contents out through the ragged gash, the honour guard dropped to his knees and died. Having come away from the wall of sculpture, the Dreadnought had allowed the crushed Legiones Astartes he’d pinned to the merciless iron to thunk to the ground. Lifting a huge metal foot, Vastopol stamped down on the Iron Warrior’s helmet, bespattering the polished stone with brain matter and putting the mauled Space marine out of his howling misery.

As Dantioch came forwards, flanked by Tarrasch and Zhnev on one side and the rector and colonel on the other, Krendl and the Son of Horus retreated: the rage and horror evident on their contorted faces. Both Legiones Astartes officers were backing step by step towards the Grand Reclusiam entrance, their pistols aimed at the unarmed Warsmith and his heavily-armed Dreadnought. Krendl and Serapis were politicians, however, and knew that their best chance of escaping the fortress alive lay in their threats rather than their pistols.

The Venerable Vastopol plucked Grachuss from the floor with the chisel-point digits of his power claw, holding the Mechanicum adept by the temples and hooded crown like an infant’s doll. The sickly yellow lens of the tech-priest’s tri-ocular revolved in panic while his respiratory pipes bubbled furiously.

‘I fear Warsmith Krendl brought you with instructions to catalogue our fortifications,’ Dantioch addressed the suspended Grachuss, ‘so that you might return with stories of our siege capability. A greater Warsmith than he would have done that himself, of course. Vastopol here was the chronicler for our company: he’s not much of a talker now. Vastopol,’ Dantioch called. ‘How does Adept Grachuss’s story end?’

The Dreadnought’s power claw attachment began to revolve at the wrist, wrenching the tech-priest’s hooded head clean from his spinning shoulders. His body struck the altar steps, a cocktail of blood and ichor pumping from the ragged neck stump.

‘Insanity!’ Krendl bawled at the advancing Dantioch. ‘You’re dead!’ The threats had begun.

‘Captain Krendl,’ Dantioch hissed. ‘This is an Iron Warrior stronghold. It does not, nor will it ever serve the renegade Warmaster. My garrison and I are loyal to the Emperor: we will not share in your damnation.’ The cold pride that afflicted the Legion, as well as their Iron father, glinted in Dantioch’s cloudy eyes. ‘It seems I have one last opportunity to prove my worthiness to the primarch. I will not fail him this time. The Schadenhold will never fall. Do you hear me, Idriss? This stronghold and the men that defend it will never be yours. The Iron Warriors on Lesser Damantyne fight for their Emperor and they fight for me. You will taste failure and it will be your turn to return to the primarch’s wrath. Now run, you cur. Back to your renegade fleet and take this heretic dog with you.’

Stepping back through the archway of the Grand Reclusiam with a wary Serapis, the wide-eyed Krendl thrust his pistol behind him and then back at the Iron Warriors and their Dreadnought.

‘All of this,’ Krendl waved the muzzle of the bolt pistol around, ‘dust in a day. You hear, Dantioch? Dust in a day!’

‘I dare you to try,’ Dantioch roared, but his challenge dissolved into raucous coughing. As the Warsmith fell to his armoured knees with wheezing exertion, Tarrasch grabbed Dantioch’s arm. Patting the Iron Palatine’s ceramite, the Warsmith caught his breath. Tarrasch let him go but the exhausted Iron Warrior commander remained kneeling and head bowed. Slowly he turned to the hooded rector.

‘So,’ the cleric said, ‘you hear it for yourself: straight from traitor lips. Our brothers’ hearts steeped in warped treason.’ The rector reached inside the rich material of his robes. The soft whine of the displacer field – all but imperceptible before – died down through the frequencies, unmasking the priest and revealing his true dimensions. As the cleric lowered his hood the reality about the huge figure fell out of focus for a moment before reassuming a searing clarity.

Their minds unclouded, the Schadenholders beheld a brother Space Marine: his ornate plate of the deepest blue. He held a plumed helmet under one arm and an ornate gladius sat in a sheath across his thigh. His surcoat robes hung from the resplendent flourishes of his artificer armour, with battle honours and commendations dripping from his glorious plate. The symbol on his right shoulder identified him as an Ultramarine; the bejewelled Crux Aureas crafted into his left as Legionary Champion, Tetrarch of Ultramar and Honour Guard to Roboute Guilliman himself.

‘You played your part well, Tetrarch Nicodemus. Are the Ultramarines usually given to such theatricality?’ Dantioch asked.

‘No, my lord. We are not,’ the champion answered, his cropped hair and fair patrician looks the mark of Ultramar’s warrior elite. ‘But these are uncommon times and they call for tactics uncommon.’

‘Let me be candid, Ultramarine. When you arrived on Lesser Damantyne with your slurs and distant intelligence, I almost had Vastopol blow you from the Schadenhold’s battlements.’ The Warsmith came up from his knees, once again with the help of Tarrasch. The Tetrarch shot him hard eyes: one of which was encircled by a neat tattoo of his chapter symbol.

‘It is not easy for an Iron Warrior to hear of his brothers’ weakness,’ Dantioch continued. ‘In that, even Idriss Krendl and I agree. You slandered my father primarch and besmirched the IV Legion with accusations of rebellion, heresy and murder. We’ve allowed your insults to go unpunished; you’ve allowed us the luxury of hearing kindred treason first hand. Our accord is sealed in truth. What now would Roboute Guilliman have of us?’

Tauro Nicodemus looked about the gathering. Tarrasch and Zhnev’s bleak pride matched their Warsmith’s own; the Venerable Vastopol existed only to fight and Colonel Kruishank’s default loyalty was plain to see on his face – allegiance to the Emperor offering him solace in the face of calamity.

‘Nothing you haven’t freely given already,’ Nicodemus insisted. ‘Deny the Warmaster resource and reinforcement. Hold your ground for as long as you can. The efforts of a faithful few could slow the traitor advance. Minutes. Days. Months. Anything, to give the Emperor time to fortify Terra for the coming storm and for my lord to cut through the confusion Horus has sown and prepare a loyalist response.’

‘If we are to give ourselves for this, level Iron Warrior against Iron Warrior, then it would be good to know that Guilliman has a strategy,’ said Dantioch.

‘Yes, my lord. As always, Lord Guilliman has a plan,’ the Ultramarine champion told him evenly.

As the congregation went to leave the blood-spattered Grand Reclusiam, Dantioch asked, ‘Nicodemus?’

‘Yes, Warsmith?’

‘Why me?’

‘Lord Guilliman knows of your art and expertise in the field of siegecraft. He suspects these skills will be sorely needed.’

‘He could count on my skill but what of my loyalty?’ Dantioch pressed. ‘After all, my Legion has been found wanting in its faith.’

‘You spoke candidly before, my lord. Might I be allowed to do the same?’

Dantioch nodded.

‘The Warmaster could exploit the weakness of your primarch’s pride,’ the Tetrarch explained cautiously. ‘Your history with Perturabo is no secret. Lord Guilliman feels he too can rely on this same weakness in you.’

Once again, the Warsmith nodded. To Nicodemus and to himself.

I was there. On that tiny world, in a forgotten system, in a distant corner of the galaxy: where a mighty blow was struck against the renegade Warmaster and his alliance of the lost and damned. There, on Lesser Damantyne. I was among the few, who stood against many. The brother who spilled his brothers’ blood. The son who betrayed his wayward father’s word. And that word was… heresy.

For a bloody day beyond an Ancient Terran year we fought. Olympians all. Iron Warriors answering the call of their primarch and Emperor. The cold eyes of both watching from afar. Judging. Expecting. Willing their Iron Warriors on like absentee gods drawn to mortal plight by the reek of battle: the unmistakable stench of blood and burning.

I was there when Warsmith Krendl visited upon us a swarm of Stormbirds. Disgorged from the fat cruiser Benthos and heavily-laden with troops and ordnance, the aircraft blotted out the stars and fell upon our world like a flock of winged thunderbolts. Blasting through the thick cloud of Damantyne’s hostile surface, the Stormbirds would have rocketed through the cave systems and disgorged their own brand of horror on our readying position. Warsmith Dantioch had ordered the Orphic Gate collapsed mere hours before, however, and all the flock found there was rock and destruction, as, one after another, they struck the planet surface.

I was there when the mighty god-machines of the Legio Argentum, denied entrance to the gate also, had to stride through the acid hellstorms of Lesser Damantyne. Like blind, tormented behemoths they tumbled and crashed through the squalls and cyclones, their armoured shells rust-riddled and giant automotive systems eaten away. The infamous Omnia Victrum, the sunderer of a hundred worlds, was one of three flash-flayed war machines that managed to stumble to a sinkhole colossal enough to admit their dimensions. And there the screaming hordes that crewed the god-machines were confronted with the unfathomable labyrinth of the planet’s gargantuan cave system and the reality that they might be lost for eternity in the deep and the dark.

I was there when Warsmith Dantioch ordered the giant ground-pumps to life and the lake of crude promethium burst its banks, flooding the floor of our huge cavern-home with a raging, black ichor. I watched as the Nadir-Maru 4th Juntarians and more bombardment cannon than a man could count were drowned in a deluge of oil and death. I roared my dismay as columns of my traitor brethren marched on the pumps through the settling shallows, to sabotage the great machinery. I roared my delight when my Warsmith ordered the slick surface of the crude promethium ignited about them. A blaze so bright that it not only roasted the Iron Warriors within their plate but brought light to the cavern that the depths had never known.

I was on the Schadenhold’s battlements as our own cannon and artillery placements reduced Warsmith Krendl’s reserve Stormbirds to fireballs of wreckage. I saw the small armies they landed on our keeps and towers fall to their deaths like rain from our inverse architecture. I fought with the Sons of Dantioch – genebred hulks of monstrous proportion – as they tore Nadir-Maru 4th Juntarians limb from limb in the kill zones and courtyards. I walked amongst Colonel Kruishank’s Ninth-Ward Angeloi Adamantiphracts as their disciplined las-fire lit up the ramparts and cut their traitor opposites to smouldering shreds. I looked down on a fortress swamped in carnage, where you could not walk for bodies and could not breathe for the blood that lay hanging in the air like a murderous fog.

Finally, I fought in the tight corridors and dread architecture of the Warsmith’s design. Took life on an obscene scale, face-to-face with my Iron Warrior brethren. Murdered in the Emperor’s name and matched the cold certainty of my brothers’ desire. Killed with the same chill logic and fire in my belly as my enemy had for me. Measured my might in the blood of traitors whose might should have measured my own. I was there. In the Schadenhold. On Lesser Damantyne. Where few stood against many and, amongst the fratricidal nightmare of battle, brothers bled and heresy found its form.

The Schadenhold shook.

Dust rained from the low ceiling and grit danced on the dungeon floor. The subterranean blockhouse seared with gunfire. Its hoarse boom split the ear and the flash of hot muzzles dazzled the eye. Barabas Dantioch had supreme confidence in his nightmare stronghold’s design. He’d told Idriss Krendl that the Schadenhold would never be his. Even at this stage – three hundred and sixty-six Ancient Terran days into the murderous siege – he could count on the fortress keeping his word. With traitor Titans and Mechanicum war machines haunting the caverns, swarms of Stormbirds strafing the citadel towers and enemy Legiones Astartes storming its helter-skelter battlements, he knew the brute logic of the Schadenhold’s design and the rock from which that inexorability had been crafted would not let him down. Dantioch’s tactical genius extended far beyond the unrelenting architecture of the stronghold exterior: any Warsmith worth their rocksalt, regardless of the boasts they might make, planned for the inevitability of failure. A life lived under siege had taught the Iron Warriors that enemies were not to be underestimated and that all fortresses fall – sooner or later. A Warsmith’s gift was to make this eventuality as late as possible. The blockhouse was a perfect example of the principle in action.

Throughout the citadel, on every level and in every quarter, there was a blockhouse chamber. A fallback position for the Iron Warrior garrison within: each bolthole was equipped with its own secreted supplies of food, water and ammunition, as well as rudimentary medical and communications equipment. The chambers themselves were dens of devious geography, every one with its own unique design and layout. No lethal opportunity had been left unexploited and every fire arc and angle had been measured to perfection. In each the Warsmith had created a crenellated deathtrap of chokepoints, hide sites and killspots that doubled as training facilities for the Legiones Astartes warriors during the simpler, silent times of peace.

The blockhouses had not only provided Dantioch’s hard-pressed garrison with respite and supplies but had also frustrated any hopes Warsmith Krendl might have had of a swift victory, once his invading force had breached the citadel’s considerable, exterior defences. Fighting inside the Schadenhold had been as bloody as the slaughter on the battlements beyond. The fortress stank of hot metal and swift death. Every wall was a bolt-hammered vista of splatter and gore, every chamber carpeted with armoured bodies.

Kneeling down on one rusted knee, Dantioch mused over a crumpled, blood-spotted pile of schematics. The Schadenhold diagrams covered the floor of the embrasure platform and were stained and scratched with ink, Dantioch’s strategic annotations almost obscuring the detail of the stronghold’s grand design. About the Warsmith, armoured feet shuffled and the air sang with the relentless crash of firing mechanisms. Nearby slumped an Angeloi Adamantiphact, breathing through a ragged hole in his chest, while another bled away his life as an Imperial Army chirurgeon fussed over his missing arm. The edges of the schemata vellum soaked up the growing pool, but the Warsmith – feathered quill to the mouth grate of his mask – was so involved in his three-dimensional visualisation of the two-dimensional prints, that he barely noticed.

‘Have Squad Secundus fall back to the hold point on the floor above, they’re about to be cut off,’ Dantioch ordered.

While Adamantiphracts lanced the long corridor approach to the blockhouse with broad-beam las-fire from the flared barrels of their carbines, the ranking Angeloi Adamantiphact officer in the blockhouse – Lieutenant Cristofori – carried a useless, mangled arm in a sling and doubled as Dantioch’s tactical and communications dispatch. Operating a small but robust vox-bank, set in the embrasure wall, Cristofori was the Warsmith’s eyes and ears about the Schadenhold. While the lieutenant conveyed the order through a bulky vox-receiver, he filtered the flood of reports coming in from the vox-links of individual Iron Warriors and the comms stations of different blockhouses. Replacing the receiver, he put a finger to his headset and nodded.

‘Sir, Nine-Thirteen reports enemy reinforcements on the hangar deck,’ the lieutenant relayed.

‘Legiones Astartes?’ Dantioch asked. It would be hard to believe. If the bodies were anything to go by, Krendl must have committed a full demi-Grand Company by now. The Schadenhold was swarming with Perturabo’s progeny.

‘Imperial Army, my lord. Looks like foot contingents of the Bi-Nyssal Equerries.’

Dantioch allowed himself a hidden smile. New blood. It seemed that Krendl had been reinforced. This both pleased and vexed the Warsmith. Krendl had been sent to acquire reinforcements for the primarch and Horus Lupercal, not expend the Warmaster’s valuable manpower. That would be embarrassing enough. The problem with reinforcement was that it meant that Krendl had been outfitted to see the siege through to the end. Horus could not allow word of Lesser Damantyne’s resistance and the loyalty of the Iron Warriors to reach other Legions. The end was near.

‘Nine-Thirteen have been forced back to the fuel depot. Awaiting orders,’ Cristofori added.

Dantioch grunted. ‘Tell the ranking wardsman that he has permission to use the Nine-Thirteen’s remaining detonators on the promethium tanks.’ The Warsmith slashed a cross through the Schadenhold’s Stormbird hangars on the floor schematic. ‘We won’t be needing them. Let’s deny our enemy also. Nine-Thirteen can fall back by squads to this maintenance opening,’ he continued, stabbing the quill point through the vellum. ‘Then on to Sergeant Asquetal in the North-IV blockhouse.’

‘Sir, also – blockhouses South-II and East-III report dwindling supplies of ammunition.’

‘Collapse all of our people on levels two and three back to Colonel Kruishank’s hold point in the Hub,’ Dantioch grizzled above the gunfire.

‘The colonel’s dead, sir.’

‘What?’

‘Colonel Kruishank is dead, sir.’

‘Then Captain Galliop, damn it! They still have some limited supplies.’

‘Yes, my lord,’ Cristofori said unfazed and began relating the Warsmith’s orders.

This had been the order of things for as long as the Schadenholders could remember: battle coordinated a hair’s breadth under the fury of boltfire. Whereas the elevated embrasure was intended to provide space for such luxury, below on the chamber floor, Iron Warriors, Adamantiphracts and gene-stock ogres fought with adrenaline-fuelled frenzy. Each knew that his life depended upon the relentless taking of others and nowhere was this more evident than at the gauntlet-entrance to the blockhouse. The walls about the opening had lost their angularity and harsh edges. The perpetual assault of bolt-rounds and las-fire had chewed up the stone and returned the entrance to the rocky, cavernous irregularity of the cave system beyond. From the ceiling rained the gore of those who had failed to breach the chamber; the floor underneath was a mound of gunfire-shredded bodies and trampled armour.

At the centre of the blockhouse stood the Venerable Vastopol. The Dreadnought was too large to take advantage of much of the architectural cover and instead had stood its ground like a machine possessed, hammering anything advancing with the glowing barrels of its raging autocannons. The war machine had borne the brunt of the blockhouse defence; however, the reinforced plate of its sarcophagus body was a sizzling, bolt-punctured mess. The monstrous machine stood in a pool of its own hydraulic fluid and showered sparks from one of its clunky legs. The muzzle of its lower cannon barrel had been shorn off and the mangled chainfist bayonet below hung in a serrated tangle. About the Dreadnought, firing from loopholes and crescent alcoves in merlon walls, were its superhuman kindred. Experts in the art of encumbrance, the Legiones Astartes prided themselves on their beleaguered worth: every defending Iron Warrior had to slay so many of his traitor brothers in order to satisfy the Warsmith’s equations: algebraic notations calculated in time and blood.

‘Missile launcher!’ Tarrasch yelled from the chamber floor. As Legiones Astartes and Adamantiphracts retracted barrels and slammed their backs into protective scenery, the warhead rocketed up the passage and into the blockhouse. Striking a merlon wall the missile exploded, showering razor frag across the heads of hidden defenders.

Angeloi Adamantiphract marksmanship seared the length of the approach, hammering the plate of storming Iron Warriors and cutting up their Imperial Army opposites, las-fodder from the Expeditionary Fleet’s Nadir-Maru 4th Juntarians. Those that made the gauntlet-entrance faced a storm of their own: disciplined, ammunition-conserving blasts from the barrels of garrison battle-brothers. Armoured Legiones Astartes besiegers who breached the chamber dived out of the path of withering autocannon fire and las-streams and peeled off left and right, desperate for cover. Their desire to establish a foothold in the blockhouse took them straight into the reach of the Iron Palatine and his assault troops.

The Sons of Dantioch, scarred genebred hulks, pumped to obscenity with hormones and fervent loyalty, came at the interlopers with the mammoth tools of their trade – diamantine-tip hammers, serrated shovels and clawpicks. If that wasn’t enough of a nightmare for the blockhouse breachers, the Iron Palatine, Chaplain Zhnev and the Ultramarine Tauro Nicodemus were leading the charge.

An Iron Warrior invader broke from a cannon-mauled throng, a yellow and black-striped blur. With his Mark-IV plate alive with ricochets, the brute pushed himself away from one wall and then the other before tumbling into a messy roll. He was followed by two other traitors who blazed away with their bolters and a trail of opportunistic Nadir-Maru 4th Juntarians.

Genebred hulks descended upon the spearheading Space Marine, their picks and shovels sparking off his savaged ceramite. The second turned his wild bolter straight on Nicodemus, the azure glint of the Ultramarine’s armour instantly attracting the warrior’s attention. Zhnev wasted no time with the third, firing the pistons in his replacement shoulder. His hammer-fashioned crozius arcanum swung through the air in an unpredictable, pendula-jointed arc, crashing past the Iron Warrior’s helmet. Cleaving through armour plating and bone where the Space Marine’s neck met his shoulder, the Iron Warrior Chaplain fired his pistons again, swiftly retracting the sacred relic. Spinning with the pendula motion of the crozius, Zhnev howled his fury before striking the heretic’s helmet from his body.

Tarrasch plugged the resulting bloodhaze with alternate rounds from each of his bolt pistols, cutting down the Nadir-Maru troopers streaming in through the gauntlet-entrance. Dark, shiny faces beneath extravagant turbans bared bleach-white teeth at the Iron Palatine. The former Iron Warrior captain barked directions to the Angeloi Adamantiphract warriors at the embrasure walls and the Sons of Dantioch below to bring down the Juntarians in their own inimical ways.

With an enemy Legiones Astartes pounding across the killing ground at him, Brother Nicodemus of Ultramar took several practice sweeps with the gleaming blade of his gladius. On his other arm he supported the weight of a huge storm shield. The shield was as tall as the Ultramarine – a sub-rectangular plate, the curved, semi-cylindrical surface of which crackled with a protective energy field. The champion clutched it to his side like an airlock bulkhead.

Dantioch’s Iron Warriors were savage hand to hand fighters – equals of the unstoppable World Eaters or the Blood Angels’ loyal fervour. The Iron Warriors were deadlier still when they were cornered: cold machines of dread and determination. None had the martial grace or unadulterated skill with a blade that Nicodemus exhibited. Nicodemus batted the Iron Warrior’s bolter aside with the weight of the sizzling shield before shearing through the weapon with a murderous downwards cut of his gladius. Before the dazed Iron Warrior could snatch a hammer from his belt the Ultramarine had flashed the gladius back and forth across his opponent’s armour. The blade sang through the Iron Warrior’s chestplate and helmet, spraying the chamber with Olympian blood.

Nearby the Space Marine that had spearheaded the daring assault broke free of the geneslave mob. A chainaxe screamed from the scrum of hulking bodies. The Iron Warrior burst from the prison of muscular flesh, sweeping heads and elephantine limbs from the Sons of Dantioch in his path. Chaplain Zhnev’s crozius sang through the air on its pendula attachment, smashing the motorised axehead into pieces. The Iron Warrior responded immediately by plunging his gauntlet into a holster and drawing a bolt pistol. Before he could end the Chaplain, Tarrasch hammered the heretic with a feverish hail of bolts from his own pistols. The angle was hastily improvised and no one round found its way through the Maximus suit plating. The onslaught had cut the Space Marine’s escape dead, however, and the genestock hulks – hungry for a rematch – seized the Iron Warrior. One monster got a bulging arm around the Legiones Astartes’s armoured neck while two others snatched an arm each. The ogres gave a brutal heave on the traitor’s limbs and with a sickening crack and sudden release, the suit seals and the body within tore apart.

On the opposite side of the gauntlet-entrance the ogres’ genestock brothers were murdering Nadir-Maru Juntarians with equal delight. As las-fusillades and dark faces parted, two more armoured figures were revealed. Their armour was busy with chevron designs and yellow striping, and on their backs – either side of their suit packs – were a pair of brass promethium canisters. Stomping up through the Juntarians, the Iron Warriors presented their chunky nozzles, the scorched, dribbling muzzle of each weapon situated at the end of a long firepole.

Tarrasch turned to the blockhouse with just two words on his thin lips: ‘Take cover!’

The blast wave from the erupting inferno knocked the Iron Palatine from his armoured feet. In the confines of the chamber, the heavy flamers did their worst. Everything became roasting heat and smoke, the ink-blot obscurity punctuated by blinding streams of pressurised promethium. As gouts of destruction felt their fiery way through the defensive architecture, sound and smell dominated. Above the boom of the Iron Warrior firepoles, the chatter of bolters could still be heard. Above this was the strangled shrieking of men aflame: Angeloi, genebreeds and Nadir-Maruvians all. Scorched within their suits, Iron Warriors stumbled through the firestorm, searching for respite.

It could have been a bolt-round, fired blindly into the darkness and fury, or perhaps a stream from the flared muzzle of a lascarbine or laspistol. Most likely it was a blast from the Venerable Vastopol’s raging autocannons, but something hit one of the brass fuel canisters. A succession of explosions rippled through the thick smoke, knocking all that still lived in the chamber onto their backs. Flame rolled across ceiling and floor; through the tactical arrangement of the blockhouse; through the gauntlet entrance and down the crowded passage beyond.

Dantioch’s gauntlet grabbed the top of the platform wall like a grapnel. The Warsmith heaved himself to unsteady feet in the swirling smoke, stamping out the small fire that was his burning schematics. Cristofori was dead, as well as the injured Adamantiphract and his chirurgeon. As the smoke began to clear, Dantioch took in the blockhouse floor. There were bodies everywhere, both loyal and traitor: a carpet of scorched armour and charred flesh. Similar destruction extended up the passage to the gauntlet entrance. There was movement, however, and it wouldn’t take their attackers long to organise an assault to capitalise on the inferno.

Leaning against the wall for support, the Warsmith came down the embrasure steps.

‘Tarrasch!’ Dantioch called. From the soot and smaze came sudden movement.

‘Sir,’ came the Iron Palatine’s reply. The explosion had knocked the Iron Warrior senseless into a wall. His words were shaky but the Space Marine was alive.

‘It’s over. We are compromised. Enemy forces imminent. Get the living to their feet.’

‘Yes, my lord.’

As Tarrasch stumbled through the carnage, searching for survivors, Dantioch ran his gauntlets along the wall. The Warsmith began to knock experimentally against the stone as he slouched along its expanse. Satisfied, the Warsmith stopped and turned on the hulking Dreadnought that still stood sentinel in the middle of the blockhouse, autocannons at the ready.

‘Vastopol, are you still with us, my friend?’ the Warsmith asked.

In answer the Dreadnought just burned. The explosions had done little to the machine but scorch its adamantium and set fire to the scrolls, banners and decorative flourishes that adorned the bulky form.

‘Don’t be like that,’ Dantioch said. ‘It’s over. We could fight to the last man but what would that achieve?’

Still the Dreadnought stood immobile.

‘This isn’t Gholghis,’ Dantioch told his battle-brother. ‘It is the prerogative of the Warsmith when to war and when not to. We are beaten here. It is time to take the war elsewhere. Now get over here and help me; you may still have a story to tell.’

As the Venerable Vastopol dragged its mangled and sparking leg across the bodies of the blockhouse floor, Tarrasch worked his way through the dead and dying. The Angeloi were all dead, as were the remaining Sons of Dantioch. The raging inferno had done for both and only a handful of Legiones Astartes, protected from the worst of the explosion by their battle-plate, had survived the catastrophic accident.

‘Enemy advancing!’ Tarrasch called from the gauntlet entrance.

‘Come on, come on!’ Dantioch urged Space Marines emerging from the smoke and destruction.

Tauro Nicodemus was suddenly beside him: his immaculate armour soot-stained and blood-spattered.

‘I thought this was the fallback position,’ the Tetrarch said. The Ultramarine had accepted that he was to die there, taking as many traitor lives with him as he was able.

‘Game’s not over,’ Dantioch said. ‘Gather your weapons.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘Through this wall.’

Dantioch knocked on a section of the blockhouse wall. A deliberate, architectural weak point. ‘Vastopol.’

The Dreadnought limped at the wall, crashing through the masonry with one of its chunky shoulders. Rock and dust fell about the war machine. Extracting itself from the ragged aperture, Vastopol stood back to admit the surviving Legiones Astartes: the Warsmith, the Iron Palatine, Brother-Sergeant Ingoldt, Brothers Toledo and Baubistra, the Ultramarine Nicodemus and Chaplain Zhnev. Beyond a broad set of steep, rocky stairs extended, running parallel with the wall and reaching up into the Schadenhold’s cavernous ceiling foundations. With the Legiones Astartes striding up ahead, the Venerable Vastopol negotiated the steps with difficulty, its mangled leg a handicap on the shambling ascent.

The stairwell rumbled and shook.

‘What was that?’ Tarrasch called. For a moment nobody answered in the darkness. Then a quake rolled through the stone about them. The steps shook under their feet and fractures split the stairwell’s rough roof and walls.

‘It’s the Omnia Victrum,’ Dantioch said. ‘Krendl finally has his Titans in position.’ The Warsmith tried to picture the acid-scarred colossi outside, the remaining war machines of the Legio Argentum. The Omnia Victrum was an Imperator-class Titan. A mountain of rust-eaten armour, striding across the cavern like a vengeful god. At its sides it mounted weaponry of titanic proportion: monstrous instruments of destruction, capable of razing cities and felling enemy god-machines. Upon its hunched back sat a small city of its own: a Titanscape of corroded steeples, towers and platforms. A base of operations and a mobile barracks of waiting reinforcements.

‘She’s softening up the south face of the Schadenhold with her cannons and turbolasers before landing troops.’ The Imperator was huge and certainly tall enough to stand beside and beneath the Iron Warrior citadel. It could disgorge a siege-ending horde of traitor Iron Warriors and reinforcement foot contingents of the Bi-Nyssal Equerries. As fresh blood rampaged through the south section of the Schadenhold, joining Krendl and his depleted forces in the north, loyalist Iron Warrior resistance would be overrun and crushed. Even Dantioch’s ingenious blockhouse fallbacks would not be able to save the Schadenholders from the wall-to-wall carnage that was to come.

Tremors swept through the stairwell once more, knocking several Space Marines from their footing. Dantioch fell into Tarrasch, who steadied his Warsmith, but most were staring at the ceiling. Rock and dust rained down on the Iron Warriors and the walls trembled.

‘The passage is collapsing,’ Nicodemus called, holding his storm shield above him.

‘The structure will hold,’ Dantioch assured them. They were in the cavern ceiling foundations of the Schadenhold. The Omnia Victrum’s artillery assault was pummelling the citadel into submission, shaking the fortress to its rocky core. From the bottom of the stairwell came the fresh chatter of weaponry. Bolters and lascarbines, clutched by the traitor Legiones Astartes and Nadir-Maru 4th Juntarians. The enemy that had flooded the empty blockhouse had followed them through the hole in the wall. Firepower came up the stairs at the loyalists with Krendl’s besiegers climbing behind. ‘Come on!’ Dantioch shouted and continued his ascent.

‘Warsmith,’ he heard Tarrasch call and upon turning found his Iron Palatine skidding back down the steps towards the Venerable Vastopol. Although the south wall had held, it had partially collapsed, creating a bottleneck through which the Dreadnought’s broad bulk could not pass. With his armoured shoulders askew but braced between the walls of the stairwell, the war machine was trapped: held fast by the rock and unable to find footing with his mangled leg.

Enemy fire hammered into the Dreadnought’s armoured back. Brother-Sergeant Ingoldt and the Iron Palatine grabbed the war machine’s limbs and heaved at the metal monster. With the intensity of firepower beyond growing and casting the Venerable Vastopol in silhouette, the Iron Warriors fought to free their comrade. The Dreadnought’s vox-speakers trembled with the groans of the warrior inside, as the relentless streams of las-fire and bolt-rounds shredded Vastopol’s rear plating.

Baubistra and Chaplain Zhnev ran down the steps at the war machine. Brother Baubistra leapt onto the front of the sarcophagus body section and clambered up the chunky weaponry. Between the top of the Dreadnought’s mighty shoulders and the stairwell roof, Baubistra found a gap for his bolter and began answering back with ammo-conserving blasts. Zhnev came straight at Vastopol’s midriff, slamming his battle-plate into the Dreadnought in the hope that his assault might dislodge the war machine. The Chaplain failed. The Venerable Vastopol had become the immovable object. Only the unstoppable force of Krendl’s traitor troops would remove him and until then, the Iron Warrior Dreadnought became a wall of adamantium and ceramite dividing the two.

Tarrasch heard a familiar whine.

‘Missile launcher!’ he called.

A rocket slammed into the back of the Dreadnought, knocking Baubistra from his perch and drawing from the Venerable Vastopol a vox-roar of agony and anguish. Two more followed, ravaging the armoured shell of the beast. Vastopol’s groans were constant now and the Iron Warrior’s hulking, metal body was failing about him. Dantioch stomped down the steps towards the Dreadnought.

‘Get him out,’ the Warsmith ordered.

‘He’ll die,’ Zhnev replied over the boom of battle beyond.

‘Do it.’

Tarrasch looked to Dantioch and his Chaplain. Then up to Tauro Nicodemus, who was waiting further up the stairwell.

‘My lord,’ Tarrasch said, ‘we need specialist tools and Magos Genetor Urqhart for such a procedure.’

Dantioch laid his gauntlets on the cold metal of the Venerable Vastopol’s sarcophagus section. The Iron Warrior within continued to moan his agonies through the vox-speakers.

‘Vastopol, listen to me,’ the Warsmith said. ‘We won’t leave you, my friend. We need to get you out. Can you help us?’

The Dreadnought’s power claw came up slowly between them. Askew as he was, the war machine still had use of the appendage, but little else. Bringing the clawtips together like a spike, the Dreadnought thrust the weapon through the armour plating of his sarcophagus. Magna-pistons and hydraulics shifted and locked in the appendage, opening the claw within. With a mighty heave the arm retracted. The Dreadnought’s armoured body fought back, resisting the act of self-mutilation, but finally the plate tore away from the machine’s pock-marked shell.

Amnio-sarcophagal fluid cascaded from the pod within, splashing the steps and nearby Space Marines. Power arced across the ruined section and the cavity steamed. The stench was overpowering. Small fires had broken out within, while lines and wires smoked and sparked. Interred, like an ancient foetus, lay what remained of the former Brother Vastopol. The warrior-poet was barely alive. His parchment skin was both wrinkled and pruned and his arms skeletal and wasted. He’d long lost his legs and his torso was a scrawny cage of bones, infested with life-support tubes and impulse plugs that ran lines between the aged Legiones Astartes and his metal womb-tomb.

‘Get him out,’ Dantioch ordered.

Chaplain Zhnev and Brother Toledo pulled the emaciated Iron Warrior from the sarcophagus, extracting tubes from between his withered lips and yellow teeth and unplugging the pilot from his mind-impulse interface with his shattered Dreadnought body. With his arms draped over ceramite shoulders, the two Iron Warriors carried Vastopol between them, his skullface and wet, threadbare scalp resting against the Chaplain’s plate.

More missiles struck the barricade of the Dreadnought’s evacuated shell and the Iron Warriors fled up the rocky stairwell. Despite being exhausted from the siege the Space Marines made swift progress, slowed only by the fragility of Vastopol’s failing condition and the hacking cough that paralysed the Warsmith with infuriating regularity. At the top of the stairwell they encountered an iron hatch set in the passage roof. Making his feeble way up the final few steps, Dantioch ordered the hatch unlocked and the Iron Warriors through.

The chamber beyond was large and dark. The Warsmith pulled down on a robust handle set in the stone of the wall and lamps began to flicker on. The still air about the Legiones Astartes came to life with the rumble of powerful generators.

‘Seal it,’ Dantioch told Brother Baubistra, indicating the hatch. Striding across the chamber, Dantioch was followed by questions. The chamber was no blockhouse, although it did seem to house a small armoury of its own: bolters on racks, ammunition crates, grenades and several suits of Mark-III plate. The Warsmith ignored his brothers’ enquiries and fell to work at a nearby runebank. ‘Sergeant Ingoldt, Brother Toledo, please be so good as to clad the Venerable Vastopol in one of those suits of spare plate.’

‘That won’t save him,’ Zhnev informed his Warsmith.

‘Chaplain, please. While there’s still time.’

‘Warsmith, I must press you for an explanation,’ Tauro Nicodemus said, after casting his eyes about the chamber. ‘I thought we were falling back to a further hold point.’

‘To what end, Ultramarine?’ Dantioch put to him as his gauntlets glided over the glyphs and runes of the console. ‘The Schadenhold is lost. Those loyalists remaining in the citadel will be overrun by Krendl’s reinforcements and the Omnia Victrum will reduce the rest to rubble. This stronghold has bought the Emperor and Roboute Guilliman three hundred and sixty-six Ancient Terran days. Three hundred and sixty-six days bought with Olympian blood, so that they might formulate a response to the Heresy and better fortify the Imperial Palace – to buy a more favourable outcome than our own.’

‘What is the plan, my lord?’ Tarrasch said, his words giving shape to the thoughts of all in the chamber.

Dantioch looked about their cavernous surroundings.

‘This is the last of the Schadenhold’s secret strategies,’ the Warsmith said. ‘A final solution to any siege and an answer to any enemy that might push us this far.’

‘You said the fortress was lost,’ Nicodemus said.

‘There are many moments in a battle, when we can exploit our enemy’s weakness. We have, over the course of this siege, exploited nearly all of them. It is nothing less than irony that an enemy is at its very weakest mere moments before victory: when they are at their most stretched and committed in seeking such success. We are going to capitalise on that now.’

‘How?’ the champion pressed him.

‘In a siege, finalities must come first. We must accept our eventual doom and prepare for its coming. This chamber was one of the first I had constructed when crafting the Schadenhold. It is situated in the cavern ceiling, right in the rocky foundations of the fortress. It houses two important pieces of equipment, linked by a common console: a trigger for both if you will. The first is a small teleportarium with the associated generators required to power such a piece of equipment. The second is a detonator: wired to explosives situated at key weak points in the citadel foundations. Gravity will do the rest.’ Dantioch let the enormity of his plan sink in. ‘Chaplain Zhnev, please begin the rites for teleportation. Our journey will be swift but our destination important.’

As the Chaplain approached the transference tablets of the teleporter beyond, Tarrasch helped Ingoldt and Toledo get the barely breathing Vastopol sealed in plate.

‘Where is that destination?’ Nicodemus asked the Warmith. The Ultramarine was unused to being kept in tactical darkness.

‘The enemy has committed everything they have to taking this stronghold, undoubtedly leaving their own weak. We are going to teleport to the Benthos and take the bridge by surprise and by force. Brothers, time is upon us. Take your positions, please.’

As Tarrasch and the two Iron Warriors dragged the power armoured form of the Venerable Vastopol over to the transference tablets, Nicodemus hefted his storm shield up onto a shoulder mounting. The Ultramarine followed uncertainly.

With his helmet to the hatch, Baubistra said: ‘I think they’ve broken through, Warsmith. The enemy are approaching.’

‘Very good, Brother Baubistra: now join your brethren.’

As Baubistra strode by, Dantioch went through the motions of arming the explosives sunk deep in the ceiling rock of the Schadenhold’s foundations. Then he opened channels on all floors and vox-hailers across the citadel.

‘Idriss Krendl,’ Dantioch hissed. ‘Captain, this is your Warsmith. I know that you are there, somewhere in my fortress. I know you keep company with traitors and stand in the shadow of the Collegia Titanica’s god-machines. Faced with such odds, I am speaking to you for the last time. And I say to you again that this fortress will not serve the interests of our unloving father or his renegade Warmaster. But, Captain, I was wrong when I told you that the Schadenhold would never fall. Idriss, it will fall…’

With that the Warsmith locked off the channels and initiated the trigger for both teleporter and detonators. Taking his position amongst Nicodemus and the Iron Warriors on the transference tablets, Dantioch straightened his cloak. Sealing his mask, the Warsmith blinked about the darkness within and felt the unnatural pull of the warp on his armour. Somewhere in the distance he fancied he heard the first of the detonations: massive explosions, ripping through the strategic weaknesses of the fortress foundations. With his eyes closed and the horrors of teleportation about him, Dantioch imagined what he had always known he could never see.

The fall of the Schadenhold. Its literal fall from the ceiling of the cavern. Trillions of tonnes of rock and devious architecture falling to the rocky floor, taking with it the thousands of traitor Iron Warriors and Imperial soldiers that had secured the Schadenhold’s defeat. The fortress’s final defiance, issued in gravity, fire and stone: falling and crushing beneath it, in a behemothic mountain of blood and rubble, the mighty Omnia Victrum and the colossal god-machines of its undoing.

Unsealing his mask, Dantioch cast his eyes across the flight deck of the flagship Benthos. The deck was largely empty; most of the cruiser’s Warhawks and Stormbirds had been involved in deployment and aerial attacks on the Schadenhold. The Stormbird around which the Iron Warriors had materialised was pale green and bore symbols and flourishes marking it out as belonging to the Sons of Horus – Hasdrubal Serapis’s personal transport.

Tarrasch marched down the Stormbird’s ramp carrying a teleport homer. Dantioch had ordered the device secretly planted on the vessel during their meeting with Krendl and the Sons of Horus captain in the Grand Reclusiam.

‘How are we going to get to the bridge?’ asked Chaplain Zhnev.

‘With as little bloodshed as possible,’ the Warsmith told him. ‘This is the 51st Expedition’s flagship. Iron Warriors are a common sight among its decks. Let us be that common sight.’

‘What about him?’ Tarrasch asked of Tauro Nicodemus. Despite the soot and gore, the brilliance of the Ultramarine’s armour still shone through.

‘The crew will not question a Legiones Astartes.’

Marching out purposefully across the flight deck, Dantioch was followed by his loyalist compatriots. The Space Marines fought their desire to hold their bolters at the ready, opting for more casual or ceremonial poses. Brother Toledo and Sergeant Ingoldt carried the limp plate of the Venerable Vastopol between them, lending the infiltrators even less the appearance of an attacking force.

There were virtually no Legiones Astartes left aboard the vessel, almost every Iron Warrior being committed to the depths of the planet below. Largely the Space Marines encountered regimental staff and the cruiser’s multitudinous crew. Few among these mortals allowed their eyes to linger on the demigods – especially under Krendl’s brutal regime – and their passage to the command deck was uneventful. Dantioch’s strategy had been so bold and audaciously executed that none aboard the Benthos, even for a second, entertained thoughts that they were under attack.

Their silent, uneasy approach to the bridge was shattered by an unexpected klaxon. Bolters came up and the Iron Warriors fell immediately into defensive positions.

‘As you were,’ Dantioch instructed.

The loyalists could hear the thunder of power armoured boots on the deck ahead. ‘We are not discovered. We are not under attack,’ Dantioch said. Fighting natural inclination and the brute vulnerability of their situation, the Iron Warriors let their barrels drift back down to the deck. A small contingent of Krendl’s 14th Grand Company veterans marched across an intersection in the corridor ahead. As their footfalls faded, Dantioch turned to his own veterans. ‘By now,’ he told them, ‘survivors on Lesser Damantyne will have reported the devastation below, the loss of Krendl, the Warmaster’s forces and the Omnia Victrum. Whoever is in command will want visual confirmation of such an impossible report. Five fewer brother Legiones Astartes for us to deal with.’

Dantioch turned and marched with confidence up the steps to the bridge, flanked by Brother Baubistra and the Iron Palatine. As the Warsmith reached the top and looked down across the expansive bridge of the Benthos he fell into a coughing fit once more: a spasm of hacking convulsions that turned heads and drew attentions.

The bridge of the Benthos was a hive of activity, with petty officers and sickly servitors busy at work amongst the labyrinth of runebanks, cogitators and consoles that dominated the command deck. Two Maximus-plated Iron Warriors stood sentry on the bridge arch-egress and Lord Commander Warsang Gabroon of the Nadir-Maru 4th Juntarians stood at conference with turbaned officers of his tactical staff. The Lord Commander stood as Dantioch remembered him, unconsciously twirling the braids of his beard and launching stabbing glares of jaundiced incredulity and disappointment at his inferiors.

At the epicentre of the activity and the destination of all reports, data and information were three Sons of Horus: swarthy Cthonians with superior sneers and knitted brows of insidious cunning. Among their number was one who immediately recognised what all others aboard the Benthos had failed to: the threat before them. The enemy Warsmith, Barabas Dantioch.

Baubistra and Tarrasch barged onto the bridge, past their master. Putting the muzzles of their weapons to the temples of the traitor sentries they roared at their Olympian brothers to drop their weapons and fall to their knees. Abandoning their burden, Sergeant Ingoldt and Toledo came forwards with bolters raised and pointed at the Sons of Horus. The two traitors flanking Hasdrubal drew their bolt pistols and activity on the bridge slowed to a raucous stand-off. The traitor captain screamed his disbelief and insistence as Iron Warriors and Sons of Horus held each other in their sights. With the Chaplain kneeling beside the dying Vastopol and Dantioch clutching the archway in his coughing fit, it fell to Tauro Nicodemus to break the deadlock.

The Ultramarine champion strode forwards, the only thing moving on the stricken command deck. Undaunted, Nicodemus marched past an apoplectic Lord Commander Gabroon, who was screaming, ‘No shooting on the bridge,’ at the warring demigods. Hasdrubal Serapis’s face screwed up with rage and confusion. The destruction on Lesser Damantyne and the appearance of Dantioch and his Iron Warriors on the bridge had been disturbing enough. Now one of Guilliman’s sons stood before him: a mysterious Ultramarine who had involved himself in the Warmaster’s business and no doubt had something to do with the Iron Warrior resistance on the planet below.

Hasdrubal backed towards one of the great lancet screens that towered above the bridge: the thick glass was the only thing separating the Space Marine captain from the hostile emptiness outside. His two sentinels held their ground, tracking the advancing Nicodemus with their bolt pistols. Hasdrubal looked at the Iron Warriors, with their weapons aimed up the bridge and at him in front of the huge window. Gabroon continued to screech his alarm. Hasdrubal nodded, confident that the Iron Warriors were not foolish enough to fire and blast out the viewport, dooming all on the bridge to a voidgrave.

‘Kill that damned Ultramarine,’ Hasdrubal seethed.

The Sons of Horus fired. Iron Warriors thrust their bolters forwards with an intention to respond in kind.

‘Hold your fire!’ Dantioch managed between torso-wracking convulsions. With his Iron Warriors facing the bridge lancet screens, he could not afford a stray shot to pierce the hull of the ship.

Nicodemus hefted the mighty storm shield from its shoulder mounting and brought it around just in time to soak up the first of the traitor Space Marine’s bolt-rounds. As the shots hammered into the cerulean sheen of the plate, the Tetrarch thumbed the shield’s protective field to life. The marksmanship of the Sons of Horus was a beauty to behold. Every bolt-round found its mark, and had Nicodemus not been advancing behind the storm shield he would have been run through by a relentless onslaught of armour-piercing shot.

Closing on the traitors, the pistols’ effective range shortened and the storm shield’s energy field was breached. One of the adamatium-core Space Marine killers passed through the armour plating and clipped the Ultramarine’s shoulder. As Guilliman’s champion continued to advance, Hasdrubal’s features contorted further in fury and disbelief. The Sons of Horus ejected spent magazines from their sidearms before slamming home another and repeating the treatment. Nothing would stop Nicodemus, however.

As Hasdrubal’s Space Marines emptied their weapons for the second time, Nicodemus took a round through the thigh, one in the chest and another in the shoulder. This time the adamantium slugs found their target and punctured holes through the shield and the Ultramarine’s artificer armour. The energy field sizzled and spat to overload and all Nicodemus had was the bolt-punched plate between him and his enemies. Running the final stretch of command deck, the Ultramarines champion closed with the Sons of Horus.

Desperate now, the traitors went for their Cthonian blades. Nicodemus already had a gauntlet on his own gladius. His armoured palm was slippery with the blood that had run down his arm from the grievous wound in his shoulder. Spinning between the two Legiones Astartes, Nicodemus slammed the storm shield into the first. He felt the slash of the enemy blade on the battered plate and hammered the Son of Horus again. Extending his arm and moving the shield aside like an open door, the Ultramarine allowed the traitor a single, wild thrust. The sword stabbed through the open space between the champion’s elbow and hip. Nicodemus swept down with the blade of the gladius, cutting through the Space Marine’s armoured forearm. Gauntlet and blade clattered to the deck.

The Ultramarine pressed his advantage: one honour guard to another. He smacked the traitor senseless with the storm shield, the plate edge dashing his helmet this way and that. Dazed, the Son of Horus slipped in his own gore and hit the deck. Nicodemus buried the toe of one power armoured boot in the traitor’s faceplate, rolling him over. Standing over his prone enemy, Nicodemus hovered the bottom edge of the rectangular shield over the Space Marine’s throat. He looked to Hasdrubal and his one remaining sentinel, who stood defiantly between the Ultramarine and his master. Nicodemus brought down the weight of the storm shield with a sickening crack. The seal between helmet and suit cracked and the shield edge cut through the traitor’s neck.

The Ultramarine’s armoured chest heaved up and down with exertion as he took a moment to recover, before hoisting the mighty shield around and running straight at the Son of Horus sentinel. Again, Nicodemus felt the pointless slash of the lighter, Cthonian blade on the bolt-shot plate. This time the Ultramarine didn’t stop. He rammed the Son of Horus straight into the thick glass lancet window. Crushed between the observation port and the Ultramarine, the traitor abandoned his weapon and tried to grab the edge of the shield with his ceramite fingertips. Nicodemus smashed him into the glass a second and third time. Finally, the Son of Horus managed to get a grip on the shield – his intention to push the plate aside and get his gauntlets around the Ultramarine’s neck.

He never got the chance. Pulling back his gladius, Nicodemus rammed the point of the blade through the back of the storm shield and skewered the Space Marine beyond. There was a gasp. Light. Almost inaudible. Retracting the blade, Nicodemus stepped aside and allowed the shield and Son of Horus to smash to the bridge floor.

Hasdrubal had turned away. Like everyone else on the bridge, the captain had thought that the Ultramarine was going to put the Space Marine straight through the window, crashing thick glass about them and inviting the void inside. The captain looked fearfully at Guilliman’s champion. Nicodemus paced up and down in front of him with the gore-smeared gladius held in one gauntlet. He unclipped his helmet and slipped the plumed helm off the back of his head. Gone was the martial grace and patrician calm. Nicodemus spat blood at the deck. A bolt pistol shook in Hasdrubal’s gauntlet. Iron Warriors surrounded them both, bolters gaping at the traitor.

‘It’s over,’ Dantioch called, his grim insistence cutting through the cacophony of a bridge in uproar. Hasdrubal turned from the Ultramarine’s fury to the cold, foreboding of Dantioch’s iron mask. ‘You lost,’ the Warsmith informed his enemy.

Hasdrubal’s bolt pistol tumbled from his ceramite fingers. As Toledo and Sergeant Ingoldt secured the prisoner, Nicodemus sheathed his gladius and limped back up the length of the bridge. Lord Commander Gabroon was still shrieking his protestations. The demigod silenced the officer with a slow finger to his lips.

Nicodemus joined Dantioch on the deck, next to the Venerable Vastopol. The Warsmith had ordered Tarrasch to take command of the bridge. Ingoldt and Toledo had been tasked with securing the traitor Hasdrubal Serapis and preparing him for interrogation. Chaplain Zhnev and Brother Baubistra were assigned to Warsang Gabroon, to ensure that the Lord Commander’s remaining troops and the crew of the Benthos accepted the swift and relatively bloodless change of regime and the new orders that accompanied it.

Standing over the two survivors of the Gholghis fortress world, the Ultramarine asked: ‘Is there anything I can do, Warsmith?’

Dantioch didn’t look at the Tetrarch. The Warsmith’s eyes were on the helmetless Vastopol. The ancient lay motionless in battle-plate on the deck, propped up against the wall. The Iron Warrior’s grizzled and aged skull was criss-crossed with wisps of white hair and his face lined with premature centuries. Two milky orbs twitched and wandered between Dantioch, Nicodemus and the bridge.

‘Our honoured brother is taking his leave,’ Dantioch said. His words were hollow and shot through with loneliness and the simple sadness of loss. The Venerable Vastopol had not only survived the dreaded hrud on Gholghis. He’d resisted death’s cold invitation and forged on through the agonies of age to be of use to his brothers once more. Untimely ripped from his metal womb, Vastopol had still clung to life. Until now.

‘He was our chronicler,’ Dantioch said, ‘and carried with him our remembered triumphs. Once, on Gholghis, he told me that such stories of the past ground us in the challenge of the present, like a fortification or citadel built upon foundations of ancient rock. I have none of his skill – crafting in iron and stone what he would in words. I live to tell the tale, however, of the Iron Warriors’ final victory: the last loyal triumph of the IVth Legion. He would want the story to go on. Alas, his story,’ Dantioch said grimly, ‘like that of our Legion, is at an end.’

‘Warsmith,’ Nicodemus began slowly, ‘that need not be the case. I assured you once that my Lord Guilliman had a plan. You have executed your part of that plan flawlessly, Iron Warrior. Lord Guilliman still has need of such ingenuity and skill. The Imperium is frail, Dantioch. An Iron Warrior’s eye could spot such weakness and the good grace of his hand might make it strong once again.’

‘What more would you ask of me?’ the Warsmith said.

‘To stand shoulder to ceramite shoulder with my Lord Guilliman and help him fortify the Imperial Palace.’

‘Fortify the Palace…’ Dantioch repeated.

‘Yes, Iron Warrior.’

‘Perturabo will make us pay for such fantasies.’

‘Perhaps,’ Nicodemus said solemnly. ‘But I believe the genius of your victory today lay in your acceptance that the Schadenhold – for all its indomitable art – would fall. Lord Guilliman shares your vision. Humanity’s future lies in such contingency.’ The Ultramarine let the enormity of the idea linger.

Dantioch didn’t answer. Instead he watched the remaining vestiges of life leave the body of his friend and battle-brother. Vastopol’s crusted eyes fluttered before rolling and gently closing, the dry whisper of a dying breath escaping the warrior-poet’s lips.

As the Venerable Vastopol faded and left them, he heard Dantioch tell the Ultramarine: ‘You talk of the arts of destruction. Perturabo’s progeny are unrivalled in these arts: indomitable in battle and peerless in the science of siegecraft. Show me a palace and I’ll show you how an Iron Warrior would take it. Then I’ll show you how you would stop me. I don’t know how long I am for this Imperium, but I promise you this: whatever iron is left within this aged plate, is yours…’

The iron within. The iron without. Iron everywhere. Empires rise and they fall. I have fought the ancient species of the galaxy and my Legiones Astartes brothers will fight on, meeting new threats in dangers as yet unrealised. We are an Imperium of iron and iron is forever. When our flesh is long forgotten, whether victim to the enemy within or the enemy without, iron will live on. Our hives will tumble and our mighty fleets decay. Long after our polished bones have faded to dust on a gentle breeze, our weapons and armour will remain. Remnants of a warlike race: the iron of loyalist and traitor both. In them our story will be told – a cautionary tale to those that follow. Iron cares not for faith or heresy. Iron is forever.

And as our battle-plate, our blades and bolters rot in the sand of some distant world, they will pit and tarnish. Their dull sheen will corrode and crumble. Grey will turn to brown and brown to red. In the quietly rusting scrap of our fallen empire, iron will return to its primordial state, perhaps to be used again by some other foolish race. And though the weakness of my flesh fails me, as the weakness of my brothers’ flesh will ultimately fail them, our iron shall live on. For iron is eternal.

From iron cometh strength. From strength cometh will. From will cometh faith. From faith cometh honour. From honour cometh iron. This is the Unbreakable Litany. And may it forever be so.

‘In raising these men to watch over mankind, we have bred a legion of inhumans whose sole purpose is to defend that which they no longer understand. Their duty, borne with pride; their curse, carried with grace – but let it never be forgotten what we have done to Caliban’s finest sons. Unending Imperial ambition has not bred warriors with the warm hearts of men, but angels with the cold hearts of weapons.’

No soul so changed will recover what was lost. No weapon so savage can be wielded without cost.’

– The Verbatim, Lutherian Amendments,
Chapter I: These Savage Weapons

I

The beast never dies in his dreams.

He watches it slink through the trees, keeping its sinuous body low to the ground, its movements fluid enough to be sickening and boneless. Its ears rake back flat against its head, while its clawed paws are silent on the deep snow. The creature hunts, eager but passionless, its dead cat’s eyes glinting with emotionless hunger.

The boy takes the shot, and the shell goes wide.

With the cold air split by the crack of gunfire, the beast twists in the snow, ghost-light on the ground as it snarls at its attacker. Quivering black spines rise from the denser white fur at its back and neck, an instinctive defensive response. A tail lashes behind the beast in threatening rhythm, coiling and thrashing in time with the boy’s own heartbeat.

For a moment he sees what the elder knights all claimed to see – a sight he’d always believed to be the lies of ageing warriors girding their fading legends with false poetry.

Yet there it is in the beast’s black eyes, something beneath the raw desire to survive. Recognition stares back at him: a crude intelligence, malicious despite its feral simplicity. The moment shatters as the creature vents its anger. Something between a lion’s burbling snarl and a bear’s hoarse roar rings out in the cold air between them.

The boy fires again. Three more shots echo through the forest, disturbing the snow bundled on branches above. Shivering fingers seek to reload the primitive pistol, but the beast’s sinewy weight pounds into his chest, hurling him away, throwing him down onto the frost. In the same moment the boy hits the ground, he feels the chunky shells scatter from his grip, spilling out onto the snow. The beast’s bulk on his back saps his strength as well as his breath. What little air he drags into his abused lungs reeks of the creature’s foetid exhalation, and a hot, wet mist of stinking tumour-breath washes over the back of his head. Whatever the beast is, it’s rotting from within. Saliva runs in a slick string from the beast’s jaws, spattering onto his bare neck.

Corswain swings over his shoulder, hammering the body of his pistol against the beast’s skull. Bone gives with a muffled crack, eliciting a whine that’s almost feline. As the creature rears in response, the boy scrabbles across the snow, regaining his feet in a staggering run. Steel whispers as it slides from his sheath, a sword almost as long as the boy is tall, clutched in two shivering hands. As the beast stalks closer, he sees the malign hunger in its eyes cool to a feral wariness. It’s afraid now, or at least cautious. Flakes of snow drift onto the blade, freezing into diamonds wedded to the steel.

‘Come on,’ the boy breathes the whispered words. ‘Come on...’

The beast leaps, striking his chest with the force of a stallion’s kick, and he’s down again. This time his sword spins from his grip, stabbing into the snow like a grave marker. The ache in his chest is a dull, creaking crackle, as if his lungs are filled with dry leaves. He knows his ribs are shattered, but there’s almost no pain at all.

The boy strains under the creature’s weight, his young muscles bunched taut as he struggles to strangle through the thick fur. The spined quills pierce his fingers and the backs of his hands, each one tipped by beads of clear, stinging venom. His hands tremble as the toxins attack his blood.

When he coughs, steaming bile gurgles from his mouth in a bitter rush. The puke hisses onto the snow, eating holes in the frost with acidic eagerness. The boy barely notices his useless hands falling away from the beast’s neck, nor how they curl into arthritic claws.

Convulsions wrack his whole body no more than three heartbeats later. The venom has him now. A scream leaves his lips as nothing more than a silent mime.

Slowly, everything starts to whiten, to fade away. He feels himself dragged, body scraping over the snow, but other, truer sounds begin infiltrating his thoughts: the sound of a ticking fan blade in a labouring air filtrator; boot-steps on the deck above; the omnipresent rumble of live engines.

At last, he opens his eyes.

It plays out like this each time he sleeps. The beast never dies in his dreams.

II

His mind wandered during the morning vigil. As Corswain knelt with his brothers, his head bowed against the hilt of his sword, he gave all the appearance of another knight in dutiful reflection of the coming crusade. In truth, he dwelled in memories. His thoughts flew home to a world that hated him.

Caliban.

The name brought a smile to his lips, hidden by the hood that cast his features into shadow. Caliban, that lethal haven of burning summers and vicious winters; where the unending forests permitted no sunlight to fall beneath their boughs, and every ancient tree defended itself with poisonous sap for blood; where every beast hunted with killing talons, mythic agility, or acidic venom. Biting insects spread plagues that left entire settlements silent and lifeless within days. Chittering clouds of locusts descended over the land year after year, annihilating villages and towns in their wake.

Orders of knights shared the grim duty of burning devastated settlements with each yearly cycle around the sun. On Caliban, the number of names inscribed upon the rolls of the dead matched the lists of the newborn. Imperial ledgers coded the world In Articulo Mortis, ‘at the moment of demise’, with the slang tag of ‘Death world’. Corswain had laughed when he first saw those words written in an archive.

The scribes’ notations damned the world as a worthless globe deserving no further colonisation. It was rendered exempt from paying Imperial tithe even when all other worlds began to suffer such demands from the fledgling usurers of Terra, and pledged itself only to sell its sons into willing slavery in the Emperor’s First Legion.

On and on the negative declarations went, citing brutal weather conditions that would affect sensitive orbital communication satellites; continental forests useless for lumber because of the unsafe biochemistry in the world’s flora; and screeds of lore decreeing Caliban’s fauna among the most predatory yet found on any colonised world – from the lowliest vermin that showed no fear of humankind to the great beasts that mercifully stood on the edge of extinction.

Corswain knew it was all of that and worse. But it was also home, a home he’d not seen in three long decades. A home he no longer believed he would ever see again. His smile in the morning vigil was both secret and bittersweet.

Alajos called to him once the reverence ended. The other knights filed from the chamber of reflection, their white surplice robes not enough to cover the battle scarring that ravaged every suit of black armour.

We have been fighting this war for two years, and I recall each day, each night, every order to draw steel and every shell fired in anger.

Two years. Two years since Horus committed his first act of insanity. Two years since the VIII and I Legions both found themselves ordered into the void, feuding over possession of an entire subsector. Neither side gave ground without taking it back elsewhere. Neither side charged without leaving a vulnerable flank open to assault. Neither Legion lost a battle when their progenitors led them to war.

Two years of civil war. World against world, fleet against fleet, brother against brother.

‘Hail,’ Alajos greeted him.

Corswain nodded in reply. ‘Is something amiss?’

Alajos, like his brothers, wore his full armour beneath a clean surplice. The hood was up, leaving his features in shadow.

‘The Lion summons us,’ he said.

Corswain checked his weapons. ‘Very well.’

III

The lord of the First Legion sat as he so often sat these nights, leaning back in an ornate throne of ivory and obsidian. His elbows rested upon the throne’s sculpted arms, while his fingers were steepled before his face, just barely touching his lips. Unblinking eyes, the brutal green of Caliban’s forests, stared dead ahead, watching the winking dance of distant stars. Every so often there’d be the slightest betrayal of movement: the rise and fall of his armoured shoulders, or a moment taken to blink and shake his crowned head in silent dismissal.

The warlord’s armour was the same rich, unspoiled black as the void into which he stared. Sculpted across his breastplate and greaves, rearing lions formed from red gold – that rarest of metals dredged from the dusty crust of Mars – bared their teeth at a diligent and devoted bridge crew. He wore no helm while he sat in repose, yet the mane of ashen blond locks was bound back in a tight horsetail to keep his face free of distraction, and a simple silver circlet adorned his tanned brow. This last trinket sported no ostentation, being nothing more than an echo of tradition from the disbanded knightly orders of the Lion’s adopted home world. By such simple crowns were the knight-lords of Caliban once known.

Alajos and Corswain approached the throne as one. In perfect unity, they drew their blades and kneeled before their liege. The Lion watched their obeisance with impassive eyes. When he spoke, his voice was the grind of thunder at the horizon – it could never be mistaken for human.

‘Rise.’

They rose as commanded, sheathing their swords in twinned movements. Alajos remained hooded, ignoring the bustle of the command deck around them, his hidden eyes focused only on the enthroned warlord. Corswain stood more at ease, arms crossed over his breastplate, his armour enlivened by the thick, white fur pelt draping down his back. The skinned beast’s fanged head draped over his shoulder guard, forming the cloak’s binding.

‘You summoned us, my liege?’

‘I did.’ The Lion remained seated with his fingers steepled before his lips. ‘Two years, little brothers. Two years. I can scarce give it countenance.’

Corswain allowed himself a smile. ‘I was thinking the very same thing no more than half an hour ago, my liege. But what causes you to dwell upon it?’

Now the Lion rose, leaving his long blade and helm resting on the throne’s arched sides. ‘It is not because I share your impatient nature, Cor. I assure you of that.’

Alajos snorted. Corswain grinned.

‘Come with me,’ the Lion said, his tone neither kind nor cold, and the three warriors moved to the holo-lithic table at the heart of the command chamber. At the Lion’s order, a robed servitor triggered the projectors into life, bathing them all in the ethereal green half-light of flickering holo-images. The patchwork display hovering in the air before them showed the suns of the Aegis Subsector, each with their child worlds. Heraldor and Thramas flashed brighter than any other, both systems marked by a messy display of Mechanicum symboliser runes.

Corswain saw nothing new. A long crescent of pulsing red worlds marked the spread of systems locked in open rebellion; these were the worlds existing in defiance of the Imperium, flying the banners of Horus Lupercal and the Mechanicum of Old Mars. Entire solar systems in breach of the Emperor’s will, opposing just as many systems crying for Imperial aid and Terran reinforcement.

‘Parthac fell earlier this evening,’ the Lion gestured to one of the systems ringed by Martian glyphs. ‘The Fabricator-Governor of Gulgorahd reported his victory four hours ago.’ The primarch’s subtle mirth would be invisible to all but his closest kin. ‘He was less elated when I informed him that his push to take Parthac left Yaelis open to attack. The rebels took Yaelis less than an hour ago.’

‘He overcommitted.’ Corswain watched the flashing glyphs before looking to his liege lord. ‘Again.’

Alajos spoke before the Lion could reply. ‘Did he tender an apology for failing to heed your words when you promised this is exactly what would happen?’

‘Of course not.’ The Lion leaned on the table, his fists on the smooth surface. ‘And that is not why you are here, so spare me the righteous indignation, even if it is fairly placed.’

‘Contact with the Imperium?’ Alajos let hope filter into his voice.

‘No.’ The Lion brushed his gauntleted hand through the flickering hololithic image, seeming to drift deeper into his own thoughts. ‘No, our astropaths are still rendered mute by the warp’s turbulence. I believe the last recorded contact is currently listed as four months and sixteen days ago.’ The warlord’s cold green eyes never wavered from the holo image. ‘Two years of void skirmishes, two years of planetary sieges, two years of global invasions and worldwide retreats, orbital assault and shipboard evacuation... and we have a chance to end it at last.’

Corswain narrowed his eyes. He’d never heard the Lion speak in possibilities before. Always, the primarch spoke with a pragmatist’s tongue guided by an analytical mind, his every wartime utterance drenched in logic, with all sides considered before any remark left his lips.

‘Curze,’ Corswain ventured. ‘Have we located Curze, my liege?’

The Lion shook his head. ‘My venomous brother,’ he gestured to the hololith again, ‘has located us.’

The hololith wavered, crackling audibly as it re-tuned to present another image. ‘One of our outrider vessels, the Seraphic Vigil, received this message from a deep-void beacon left in its patrol path.’

Corswain read the distorted words, silently mouthing them as he did so. They made his skin crawl. ‘I don’t understand,’ he confessed. ‘One of the Lutherian Amendments to the Verbatim. And an unpopular one, at that. Why leave this for us to find?’

The Lion’s murmur of agreement sounder closer to a feral growl. ‘To bait us with mockery, using words Curze likely believes are apt. The beacon was set to transmit coordinates in addition to this message. It appears my beloved brother wishes to meet at last.’

‘This can only be a trap,’ said Alajos.

‘Of course,’ the Lion agreed easily. ‘And yet we will sail into the beast’s jaws this once. We cannot spend eternity butchering one another’s warriors the way we have these last years. If this crusade is ever to end, my brother and I must face one another.’

‘Then continue the hunt,’ Alajos insisted. ‘We catch their fleets–’

‘As often as they catch ours.’ The Lion spoke through closed teeth, his armoured shoulders rising and falling with his heavy breath. ‘For twenty-six months I have chased him. For twenty-six months, he has fled from me, burning worlds before we arrive, crippling supply routes, annihilating Mechanicum outposts. Every ambush we plan, he slips from our fingers, wriggling away unseen. For every victory we claim, Curze gifts us with a loss in return. It is not a hunt, Alajos. If a primarch does not fall, this will be war without end. And neither he nor I will fall without death bestowed by a brother’s hand.’

‘But, my liege–’

‘Be silent, Ninth Captain.’ The Lion’s voice remained measured and low, but cold passion, almost feverish in its intensity, burned in his eyes. ‘We are one of the last loyal Legions left at full strength in the Imperium, and we are alone in the void, seeking to hold the entire kingdom together while all other eyes turn to Terra. Do you think I have no desire to stand with Dorn on the battlements of my father’s palace? Do you believe I wish to linger here in the silence of space, piecing together the shards of this shattered empire? We cannot reach Terra. We tried. We failed. That war is denied to us by the warp’s treacherous tides. But the rest of the galaxy is falling dark, and we may be the only living Legion that bears the Emperor’s light out here among the stars.’

The Lion straightened again, his eyes still fierce with suppressed emotion. ‘That is our duty, Alajos of the Ninth Order. And our Legion has always done its duty. We must win this war. An entire subsector with its forge-worlds bleeding their genius and materiel into surviving, rather than supplying other Imperial forces. The knight worlds do the same, as do the harvest worlds, the host worlds, the ore worlds. The sooner we complete this crusade, the sooner every Imperial sector is bolstered by its efforts, and the sooner we sail to join forces with Guilliman.’ He sighed at this last declaration. ‘Wherever he may be.’

Corswain remained silent throughout all of this. When the Lion’s last words trailed off, leaving the promise hanging in the air, the knight cleared his throat to speak.

‘I understand why you will rise to Primarch Curze’s bait, my liege. But why did you summon us?’

The Lion exhaled slowly, indicating a world on the hololith at the edge of the Eastern Fringe. ‘The coordinates mark this system. I cannot risk the entire Legion fleet abstaining from the crusade on a fraternal whim.’ Here, he grinned – a smile nothing like his subtle, sincere smirk. This was a tiger baring its fangs. ‘I will take a single company and a handful of warships, with a small support fleet. Enough to repel and evade treachery if it strikes, but not enough to risk losing any ground in this pitiful, eternal deadlock if it is all nothing more than a false trail.’

Alajos saluted immediately. ‘The Ninth Order will be honoured to serve as your personal guard, my liege.’

‘And I am honoured to be served by them.’ The Lion nodded in acknowledgement. ‘Cor. You seem thoughtful, little brother.’

‘What is this world’s name?’ Corswain asked.

The Lion consulted the data-screen mounted on his side of the table. ‘Tsagualsa. Listed as barren and unsuitable for colonisation, with no evidence of settlement during Old Night.’

‘So we are summoned by a blood enemy to a dead rock at the galaxy’s edge.’ Corswain glanced at Alajos. ‘If the entire Night Lord fleet is there, you may cross blades with Sevatar a second time.’

The captain lowered his hood, revealing his devastated face. Most of his ruined visage was marred by lumpen scar tissue and discoloured synthetic flesh that hadn’t healed cleanly at the seams. His teeth were blunt steel pegs affixed into reconstructed gums.

‘Good.’ Alajos narrowed his eyes – practically the only unflawed feature on his face. ‘I owe him for this.’

IV

The strike cruiser Vehemence translated in-system alone. It burst into the silence of realspace on grinding, protesting engines, braking as it slowed from the warp rupture in its wake. Momentum desistors fired along the ship’s prow and central spine, lesser brake-engines howling to slow the warship’s forward flight.

In space, it came to a slow crawl in noiseless elegance. On board, the shaking hull coupled with the screaming engines made for a scene altogether less graceful. Hundreds of sweating crew members in the enginarium chambers worked to maintain the immense plasma furnaces, while uniformed officers on the command deck called and demanded status reports from every section of the ship. The Lion’s throne on board the Invincible Reason was a grander affair than anything on the bridge of the Vehemence, and rather than take the captain’s position, the Lion allowed Captain Kellendra Vray to ostensibly remain in command of her vessel. While she sat in her smaller throne, her greying hair bound in a severe ponytail, the Lion stood to the side with his arms crossed over his breastplate as he stared at the oculus screen.

Tsagualsa turned in the void before them: grey, bare, granted only the thinnest cloud cover over its visible hemisphere.

Corswain and Alajos stood away from their lord, watching the world themselves. ‘Permission to speak freely, my liege.’

The Lion nodded, not taking his eyes from the oculus. ‘Granted, Cor.’

‘The enemy has summoned us to a purgatorial shithole.’

The Lion’s lips curled. To the humans nearby, it was a cold sneer. To his warriors, it was the ghost of amusement. ‘I will be sure to include that in the rolls of honour for this campaign. Auspex?’

An officer by the auspex station conferred with the three robed servitors hardwired to the console. He called over to the Lion a moment later. ‘The planet reads as lifeless, my lord – a thin atmosphere, tolerable but devoid of any mass life trace. The soil appears to be faintly irradiated, a natural phenomenon. A fleet with Legiones Astartes code returns is stationed in high geocentric orbit on the planet’s sunless side.’

‘Such literal creatures,’ the Lion growled. ‘Fleet size? Disposition?’

‘Counting for long-range auspex unreliability and warp echoes, it looks like seven vessels. One cruiser and six support ships, all in abeyance of standard formation protocols.’

The Lion rested his hand on the pommel of his sheathed blade. ‘When our support translates in-system, hold a loose formation on approach. Master of vox-officers, when we are in range, hail the enemy cruiser.’

The Angel fleet, modest as it was, arrived piecemeal over the course of the next three hours. When the final destroyer, Seventh Son, drifted into formation with the gathered ships, the Vehemence powered up its engines and guided the flotilla closer to the dead world.

‘We’re already being hailed,’ the master of vox-operators called out. ‘Audio only.’

The Lion inclined his head at the man. A moment later, a soft voice breathed over the bridge speakers, flawed by vox-crackle.

‘Well, well, well. Look what stumbled into our system.’

‘I know that voice.’ The Lion’s tone was ice itself. ‘Cease your barking, dog, and tell me where I will find the master that holds your leash.’

‘Is that any way to greet a beloved nephew?’ The soft voice broke away into short chuckle. ‘My master makes ready to walk the surface of the world below, for he expects you to meet with him. To prove our good intentions, our fleet will move out of orbit, beyond the range necessary to fire on the surface. Meanwhile, scan the world yourself. In the northern reaches of the largest western continental plate, you will find the foundations of a fortress. My primarch will meet you there.’

‘This still reeks of an ambush,’ Alajos warned.

The Lion didn’t reply. Instead, he answered the vox-voice. ‘What is to stop me firing on those coordinates from orbit?’

‘By all means, do just that. Commit to whatever course of action it takes to ease your suspicions. When you have ceased panicking and firing into the shadows, please inform me. I will ask my lord to wait until then.’

‘Sevatar.’ Corswain had never heard the Lion pour so much threat into a single name.

‘Yes, uncle?’ the soft voice chuckled again.

‘Tell your master that I will meet him where he wishes. Inform him to limit his honour guard to two warriors, for I will be doing the same.’

The Lion drew a thumb across his throat, signalling the vox-channel’s termination. Those cold eyes turned upon his closest two sons, and he reached for his helm. ‘Alajos. Corswain. Come with me.’

V

He hated doing this.

‘Permission to speak freely, my liege.’

The Lion stood in full armour now, his features masked by the snarling helm with its angular crest of splayed angel wings. The helm’s slanted red eyes emanated disapproval even before the Lion’s rumbling baritone left the speaker-grille.

‘Not this time, Cor. Focus yourself.’ The sword at the Lion’s hip was as tall as a Legiones Astartes warrior in full war plate. The primarch’s left hand rested on its hilt, his posture somewhere between the piratical grace of a gunslinger and the cautious reverence of a knight preparing to pull steel.

Corswain kept his silence, bolter loosely clutched in his hands. The chamber around them was almost devoid of Gothic ornamentation, its ceiling and walls instead given over to the cabled, thudding engineering of Mechanicum teleportation generators. Several of the rattling engine pods vented near-continuous gushes of steam for no reason Corswain could comprehend.

‘Begin,’ the Lion ordered. At the chamber’s edges, cowled tech-menials cranked levers and manned great bronze wheels, turning them on squealing mechanisms. As they worked, each one chanted a different numerical line of a binary cant, like some bizarre mathematical sea shanty.

The engines started to judder, whining as they cycled up to engage. On a raised platform above the flat chamber deck, a choir of nine robed astropaths sang with closed eyes. Their Gregorian chants were at eerie odds with the blurted coding issued forth from the menials.

Corswain truly loathed travelling like this. Seat him down in the deployment bay of a Stormbird gunship screaming through low atmosphere and into the face of enemy fire rising up from the ground, and he wouldn’t think twice. Buckle him into a drop-pod and spit him from the bowels of an orbiting ship to plough into the soil several kilometres below, and he’d do his duty without a whisper of complaint.

But telepor–

VI

–tation was something else.

Even before the flash of white-gold faded, he felt the world’s wind pushing against his armour with weak breaths, strong enough to do no more than tear at his surplice and the oath scroll bound to his shoulder guard. His bolter was up and ready in the seconds it took for his vision to clear of the chemical-scented mist from their teleportation. Artificial thunder from displaced air echoed in his ears, filtered to tolerable levels by his helm’s autosenses.

The aura of coiling mist would’ve lingered longer but for the breeze. Corswain took a moment to feel the hard earth beneath his boots, to assure himself that he was whole and complete. With teeth gritted and skin crawling, he panned his bolter across the vista before him.

Dusty wind gritted against his visor as his gunsight followed the horizon. They’d materialised in the heart of a crater, spanning at least a kilometre across in all directions. Black stone foundations jutted from the ground – too new to be ruins, they were low walls and pillars that would form the basis of a huge building above. The Night Lords were building something here. A fortress... but the work crews had evidently been withdrawn to make way for this meeting.

Nothing moved. Nothing breathed.

‘Clear,’ he called, in the same moment Alajos called the same.

The Lion moved to one of the black rock pillars, stroking a gauntleted hand down its sculpted side. Corswain doubted it escaped the primarch’s notice that the stone was clearly quarried off-world and brought here for use.

‘Do you hear something?’ he asked.

Alajos turned to the primarch. ‘The wind, my liege.’

Corswain didn’t answer at first. Could he hear something beneath the wind clawing at his helm’s receptors? Something beyond his own slow breathing and the machine-beat of his pulse tracker at the left edge of his retinal display? With a blink-click, he disabled his active retinal screen.

The world’s breath howled on.

‘Just the wind, sire.’

‘Very well,’ the Lion replied. ‘Now we wait.’

VII

On the strike of the third minute, a second sonic boom of displaced air heralded the enemy’s arrival. Corswain looked into the nexus of spreading mist as the ship’s atmosphere teleported down with the enemy dissipated into the wind. His lenses didn’t filter out the light fast enough, and in the wake of the transition flare, Corswain had to blink to clear his aching eyes. Tears came unbidden, not from pain or torment, but as the biological response to soothe the irritation.

The Lion anticipated his movements, for he said ‘Weapons down, little brothers,’ as soon as the knight felt his muscles bunch.

‘Yes, my liege,’ Alajos murmured, displeasure raw in his tone.

Corswain swallowed his awe at what stood before him. A cadaverous god, in midnight clad, each armoured finger ending in a charged blade the length of a scythe. Black hair at the mercy of the world’s winds streamed back from a corpse’s face. Chained skulls rattled against war plate etched with runic writing rejoicing in past massacres and celebrating atrocity against the empire of humanity. This husk of nobility, this emaciated wraith now no more than the shadow of a prince, bared teeth filed to fangs as he opened his arms to the Lion, offering a welcoming embrace.

‘My brother,’ hissed Konrad Curze, Lord of the VIII Legion. His was a viper’s smile, just as predatory, just as brazen in its hunger. ‘I have missed you.’

The Lion hesitated. He raised his hands to his collar, unlocking the helm’s seals hidden there, and pulled the helmet free. An expression of naked surprise marked his features, yet his face was still an angel’s countenance – not the beatific, handsome lies of ancient religious myth, but rather the truth of Terran artistry: a face that could’ve been shaped from tanned marble, emerald eyes with soulful depths, contrasted by a mouth that would forever struggle to show emotion.

To Corswain’s eyes, Curze was pathetic, ghoulish, in comparison. A wretched husk facing a knight-lord, claws against a prince’s sword.

‘Curze?’ The Lion asked, his resonant voice softened by disbelief. ‘What has happened to you?’

The Night Lord ignored the question, speaking with insincerity rich enough to make Corswain’s teeth ache. ‘Thank you for coming. How it warms my heart to see you.’

The Lion drew his blade in a slow, clean movement. He neither brought it en garde, nor threatened the other primarch. Instead, he clutched it in both black gauntlets, the crosspiece hilt before his face as he stared at Curze above the quillions.

‘I will ask you this once and once only: Why did you betray our father?’

‘I would ask you something in return, brother,’ Curze answered with a grin, his filed teeth on display. The clawed primarch’s eyes were unhealthily bright, rich with a secret sickness. ‘Why did you not?’

The Lion lowered his blade to end the salute, knightly respects now paid. ‘Our father has charged me to take your head back to Terra.’

‘Our father said nothing, for he hides within his dungeons, collecting the secrets of the universe and sharing them with no one. Lorgar and Magnus have seen everything our father sought to hide, so do not carry a precious little lie as your shield, Lion. You are Dorn’s hound, running here to the Eastern Fringe because he ordered you.’ Curze licked his filed teeth. ‘Come, brother. Let us at least do one another the service of being honest. I know Dorn.’ Here, the Night Lord gave his cadaverous smile again. ‘He sent you to do that which he feared to try himself.’

‘I did not come to duel with words, Konrad. I came to end this crusade.’

The Night Lord shook his head, his pallid face grey in the weak moonlight. His lips were the only colour on his visage, and even they were a bloodless blue. ‘Speak with me, brother. Listen, reply in kind, and then decide if we must continue this war.’

‘You will not sway me with your traitor’s tongue.’

Curze nodded, utterly unsurprised. His vile facade cracked for a moment, revealing the warrior he’d once been – perhaps never pure, never free of torment, but capable of emotion beyond this condescending bitterness. The strain lines of pain faded from his brow, and the serpent’s sneer left his lips. His voice was still raw, still ruined, but now carried an edge of sorrow. ‘I know. So what harm is there in speaking together, this one last time?’

The Lion nodded. ‘Wait here,’ he ordered his sons. ‘I will return soon.’

VIII

The two Night Lords had no need to introduce themselves, for their identities were known throughout the million-strong ranks of the Legiones Astartes. Both wore helms with painted-skull faceplates; both bore armour trophies of oversized skulls and Dark Angel helms hanging from their war plate on bronze chains; and both stood at ease, watching the warriors from the First Legion through red eye lenses. One of them leaned on the haft of a long halberd, a weapon he was renowned for. The other held a bolter at rest, a cloak of black weave draped over one shoulder and down his back.

‘You look familiar,’ the first warrior spoke. He nodded his head towards Alajos. ‘We met at Kruun, did we not?’

Alajos’s voice barely rose above a growl. ‘Aye. We did.’

‘Yes, I recall the moment now.’ The Night Lord chuckled whisper-soft, and mimed a two-handed chop with his halberd. The deactivated chainblade atop the spear’s haft was over a metre long, grinning with its stilled teeth. ‘I’m surprised you survived, Angel. It was careless of me to allow that. How is the face?’

Corswain moved to rest his hand on his brother’s bolter. He spoke over their helm-vox, so the Night Lords wouldn’t hear. ‘Be calm, captain. Don’t let him wound you with childish words.’

Alajos nodded. He spoke as Corswain moved away. ‘It has healed well. Your flawed carving did sting for several minutes afterwards, though.’

‘That’s good news. It is wise of you to wear the helm this time, cousin. The last time I saw your face, most of it was a wet ribbon of flayed flesh stuck to the ground by my feet. My brothers in the First Company enjoy the tale, for it was the first time I’ve ever started to skin an Angel while he was still alive.’

Alajos grunted in reply, his hands fairly twitching with the need to raise his bolter and open fire. ‘I will kill you, Sevatar. On my life, I swear it.’

‘Cousin, cousin, cousin... I outrank you, do I not? That’s First Captain Sevatar to you, little Angel.’

‘Peace,’ Corswain voxed. ‘Peace, brother. Vengeance will come, and be all the sweeter for this moment.’

This time, the cloaked warrior spoke. ‘You. Angel in the fur. Do you know me?’

Corswain turned to them both. He felt the wind pick up, ruffling the white fur cloak around his shoulders. ‘Yes, Sheng. I know you.’

‘The skinned animal you wear as a trophy. I’ve never seen such a thing. What manner of creature is that?’

Corswain grinned. ‘It’s the beast that never dies in my dreams.’

‘Is that some crude Calibanite poetry? We had few poets on our home world, but their works would have made you weep. Our tongue lends itself to melodic prose very gracefully.’

‘Nath sihll shah, vor’vorran kalshiel,’ Corswain said, in fluent Nostraman. Sheng and Sevatar shared another laugh.

‘Your accent is brutal,’ Sevatar admitted, ‘but that was nicely done. It will be a shame to kill you both when the time comes. You have my oath here, on VIII Legion soil, that we will make trophies from your helms. You deserve nothing less.’

‘How comforting,’ Corswain chuckled with them. ‘I have a question of my own.’

Sevatar performed a mocking little bow. ‘We are at your service, cousins.’

‘Your gauntlets,’ Corswain said, and left it at that.

Sevatar held up his free hand, as he continued to lean on the halberd with the other. The gauntlet was at odds with his midnight armour – where the war plate was deep, dark blue and marked by streaks of lightning, his gauntlets were painted arterial red.

‘A mark of shame in our Legion,’ the Night Lord’s voice still betrayed more amusement than regret. ‘A warrior’s gauntlets are marked this way when he has failed the primarch gravely enough to warrant death. He will wear the stain of failure on his hands until his execution, at the hour of the primarch’s choosing.’

Corswain watched the enemy captain through the filter of retinal target locks. ‘A curious custom.’

‘Perhaps. But so is hiding your armour beneath cloth robes.’

Corswain felt himself grinning again. ‘A knightly tradition from our home world.’

Sevatar nodded. ‘This is a gang tradition from ours. The hands of traitors and fools were tattooed red by their families to show them as deathmarked. A sign that no gang or family would tolerate grave failure, but that the condemned still had labours to perform before they were allowed to die.’

‘So which are you, a traitor or a fool?’

The Night Lord’s voice revealed his own smile, even if his soulless helm did not. ‘Both.’

Alajos was losing his patience. ‘Why do you revel with these wretches, brother? And what did you say in their snake-tongue?’

‘I told them that I knew they mated with pigs.’

‘Madness. Do they have no honour? Why would they laugh at such an insult?’

‘Because they are not knights. They possess honour of a kind, it is simply different to ours.’

‘Perhaps you should spend less time in the archives learning the tongues and traditions of murderers.’ Alajos’s tone carried more than a hint of reprimand. It was almost an accusation.

‘And what of “knowing one’s enemy”? Balance your humours, I am on your side, remember.’ Corswain turned to the west as the primarchs stalked back, moving slowly, still speaking in low voices. ‘The Lion returns. Be ready.’

Alajos grunted again, his mood too sour to bother with words.

IX

The warriors fell silent as their lords returned – still distant, but close enough to be heard. The Lion acknowledged his warriors with a curt nod. They responded with salutes, forming the sign of the aquila over their tabards. Curze ignored his sons, still addressing his brother.

‘Horus himself charged me to speak those words to you,’ he said. If the Night Lord had seemed cadaverous before, now he was practically exhumed. The primarch’s eyes, with what little white actually showed around the black pupils, were inhumanly bloodshot. His gaunt features were dusted with a faint sheen of cold sweat, and a trickle of dark blood ran from his nose. He wiped it away on the back of his gauntlet. ‘Savage weapons, one and all, too dangerous to be wielded without cost. That is all history will see of us. Even you, Lion. Even you.’

The Lion shook his crowned head. ‘You underestimate our father’s empire.’

‘And you overestimate humanity. Look at us. See how we’ve duelled for the last two years out here in the void. A crusade between two Legions and countless worlds that is still only just beginning. You have chased me for two years, across a hundred battlefields, and why do we meet now? Because I allow it.’

The Lion conceded to that with a slight nod. ‘You hide, like vermin fleeing the coming of dawn.’

Curze shrugged, the barest rise of one shoulder guard. ‘You will never reach Terra in time to defend it, brother. The warp will not let you. This crusade will not let you. I will not let you. Do you think the archives of future generations will look upon you kindly for your absence?’

Curze paused in his diatribe, wiping away a fresh trickle of blood. ‘Or will the human descendants of this Imperium look to your legend and whisper of doubt? Will they ask why you were not present to defend the Throneworld, and speak likely lies that perhaps the Lion was not as loyal and true as the mighty, perfect Rogal Dorn? Perhaps the Lion and his Dark Angels waited in the deepest reaches of space, watching, listening, and deciding to join the fight only when an obvious victor emerged.’

The Night Lord’s eyes glinted again, with both amusement and sorrow. ‘That is your fate, Lion. That is your future.’

‘Forgive me, brother.’

Curze tilted his head. ‘For what?’

Corswain was watching both primarchs yet still never saw what happened, such was the speed of the Lion’s movements. One moment the two brothers were speaking – the Lion’s features cast down in contemplation, Curze’s eyes fever-bright as he promised an ignoble fate. The next, Curze’s features twisted into a taut rictus of pain, blood running between his clenched teeth. The Lion held tight to the grip of his blade, buried to the hilt in his brother’s stomach. More than a metre of shining, bloodstained steel thrust from the back of Curze’s armour.

‘For such a dishonourable blow,’ the Lion whispered into Curze’s pale, bleeding face. ‘I do not care who knows the truth now, tomorrow, or in ten thousand years. Loyalty is its own reward.’

The Lion pulled his sword free. The Night Lord fell back.

At the same moment, the chainblade atop Sevatar’s halberd snarled to life.

X

Corswain vaulted a low wall and crouched behind it, taking aim over the top. His visor display realigned, targeting reticule skipping left and right, locking onto nothing. Sevatar and Sheng had vanished as soon as the first blow fell. Alajos and Corswain had raised their weapons, issuing a challenge to empty air. The Lion was already following the retreating, limping Curze, leaving his two warriors behind.

Alajos pinned himself to a pillar now, his breathing coming over the vox. ‘I didn’t see where they went.’

‘Nor I,’ Corswain confessed. ‘This is Corswain of the Ninth, to the Vehemence. Respond, Vehemence.’

‘Vray of the Vehemence.’ How calm she sounded. Corswain almost laughed.

‘Ware treachery in the heavens,’ he said. ‘We’ve engaged the enemy.’ Corswain caught sight of the Lion through a small forest of pillars, advancing on the retreating Curze, their weapons crashing together several times a second.

‘Do you require a teleportation recall?’ the mortal captain’s reply came back.

Corswain risked another glance over the wall, but saw no sign of Sevatar or Sheng. They’d gone to ground in the foundations of the fortress, out of sight but not out of mind.

‘No. We need to move. You won’t be able to maintain a recall lock.’

Alajos stared around the stone column. ‘Let’s go.’

Corswain followed, keeping low, trusting the wind’s roar to mask the sounds of his boots on the ground.

XI

The primarchs duelled, heedless of their sons’ hunt. The Lion’s blade wove an exquisite dance, while pain acted as Curze’s catalyst. The Night Lord ignored the bloody wound in his belly, letting his arcane genetics quickly seal the injury shut. He fought as he always fought – like a killer backed into a corner. Brutal scythes slashed from their housings on the back of the primarch’s oversized gauntlets, and the air rang with the clash of metal against metal, with the fizzing crack of opposing power fields.

The Lion wrenched his blade back, the silver steel breaking through the air in lashing chops, blurring into a crescent that reflected the moons above. Each carving strike crashed against Curze’s blocking claws. Both warriors moved beyond mortal capability, with speed that defied sight. Yet one was a knight, the other merely a murderer. Curze’s grin was a brittle facade at the best of times. Now it turned to glass.

‘We never sparred, did we?’ the Lion sounded almost bored, his words still carrying over the vox. Every few seconds would see a new cut ripped open in Curze’s armour or slashed across his face. He was fast enough to avoid death at the Lion’s hands, but not skilful enough to flawlessly defend against every attack.

‘I never cared for swords,’ Curze weaved under the carving blade, thrusting out with both claws. The Lion tilted back, his balance executed to preternatural perfection. Curze’s claws shredded the ivory tabard, barely scratching the layered ceramite beneath.

‘There exists nothing of elegance inside you.’ The Lion turned the blade in his hands, parrying another dual-claw strike with his single blade. ‘And nothing of loyalty. For a time, I considered you my truest brother. No others grew untouched by civilisation, only you and I.’

Curze licked his sharpened teeth, eyes narrowed with effort. ‘You should be with us, brother. Even your own Legion senses it. The First Legion’s strife is not unknown to the Warmaster.’

‘There is no strife.’

Their blades locked in that moment, Curze catching the Lion’s sword in the net of his linked claws.

‘No?’ The Night Lord spat the word as a curse. ‘No risk of the fair Angels falling? When did you last walk upon the soil of Caliban, oh proud one?’

The Lion smiled – the first time Curze had ever seen it – but the movement of his brother’s lips still did nothing to warm his statuesque visage. Stone gave off more warmth than that smirk. He gave no answer beyond the smile.

Curze returned it, just as insincere, just as lifeless. In that moment, he stopped fighting, ceased his measured duelling, and leapt at his brother with a howl. Where the warring primarchs had represented the pinnacle of human possibility in warfare, now the Lion’s poise, skill and grace counted for nothing. They brawled as brothers, rolling across the ground, hands at each other’s throats.

When the tumbling ended, Curze knelt atop the Lion. Pinkish saliva sprayed from his pale lips as he bore down on his brother, claws clasped to strangle, to inflict that most slow and intimate of murders, when slayer and slain stare into each other’s eyes.

‘Die,’ Curze breathed. Desperation ruined his voice, rasping it from bleeding lips. ‘You should never have survived that tainted world you call home.’

The Lion’s armoured hands grasped his brother’s throat in mirror response, but the Night Lord’s advantage was crystal clear. Curze shook the Lion’s neck in his fists, cracking his brother’s head against the rocky ground again and again and again.

‘Die now, brother. History will be kinder to you this way.’

XII

He was getting farther ahead, weaving through a forest of stone columns and rockcrete walls, far enough for Alajos to warn him, ‘Caution, brother. We’re being hunted.’

‘Why haven’t you summoned the Ninth Order?’

Alajos grunted in response. ‘I already have. A drop-pod assault will still take seven minutes to reach us.’

Corswain moved to another pillar, his eyes gleaming red and his tabard turned cream in the gloom. ‘I’m going to help the Lion.’

‘Corswain...’ Alajos warned again. ‘He needs none of our help to slay that ghoul.’

‘I saw him go down into the dust.’ Corswain risked another glance. The fortress’s foundations were a forest of stone columns and walls, and the wind whipping through the crater stole any hope of hearing the Night Lords’ armour thrumming.

‘What did you see?’ Alajos’s voice came more hesitantly now, ripe with doubt.

‘The revenant leapt at the Lion. They went down into the dust.’ Corswain listened to the wind clawing at his helm, muffled to dull buffeting. ‘I think I see them. Cover me.’

‘Wait!’

He didn’t wait. He sprinted through the construction site, falling under fire almost immediately. Sheng. It had to be. Corswain weaved through fire from his left, ignoring Alajos’s warning cries. Several shells struck home, ripping chunks from his war plate and sending black armour shards cracking against the stone walls. Each detonating shell kicked like a warhorse, knocking him off-balance, but he could focus on nothing but the Lion lying in the dirt, his slack neck in a heretic’s grip.

The enemy fire ceased. Alajos was breathless over the vox, ‘I’ll... kill Sheng.’ The audible clashing of blades served as percussion to the words. The captain already battled the Night Lord. ‘Behind you!’ he threw another warning over the vox.

As Corswain tore closer to the prone figure of his liege lord, the snarl of a chainblade throttling up came from behind. He didn’t turn as Sevatar finally made himself known, never breaking the headlong sprint.

‘I can outrun him,’ he whispered into the vox. The chainspear’s growl was already fading. His hearts thudded as hard as a warhorse’s hooves on the snowy ground. Around pillars, over low walls, he sprinted and weaved, doing all he could in case Sevatar opened fire.

Behind him, only silence. Over the vox, the crash of blade on blade.

‘Brother,’ Alajos voxed, ‘keep running.’ The tone of his voice was enough to make Corswain turn, though he didn’t slow down. After vaulting another wall, he looked over his cloaked shoulder just in time to see his captain die.

XIII

Alajos was many things beside his rank of Ninth Captain: a loyal son; a dutiful knight; a gifted tactician; and a warrior with a head for the detailed logistics of planning and organising a crusade force. He was also one of the finest swordsmen in the First Legion, and had once lasted almost a full minute in a spar with his primarch.

He suspected the number of Legiones Astartes warriors capable of besting him numbered fewer than twenty across all the Legions. Ezekyle Abaddon of the traitorous Sons was one; Jubal Khan of the Scars another; and Templar Sigismund of the Fists definitely another.

As was Sevatar. His name joined the others, coursing through both sides of the Imperial Civil War, cheered by some, cursed by others.

Sheng was Nostraman gutter trash – he offered almost no threat at all despite being his primarch’s huscarl. When Alajos assured Corswain he would kill the Night Lord, it hadn’t been false bravado. He could, and would, do just that. The first clashes of blade on blade told Alajos all he needed to know about the other warrior’s form: Sheng was an aggressive killer, seeking to stab rather than chop, dodging rather than blocking. But the tells betrayed him, as they always did to those who knew what to seek. Sheng was slower than Alajos. Weaker. Less experienced. He overbalanced when he dodged. He missed the perfect angle of his blade each time he parried.

Appallingly inelegant swordwork. He’d be dead in minutes. Alajos engaged him and held nothing back, utterly convinced of victory.

When Sevatar finally broke cover behind Corswain, Alajos had whispered his warning. Corswain chose to run on. Sevatar, curse his eyes, chose not to pursue. Alajos had watched Corswain’s pounding boots breed more distance between them, while Sevatar stalked back to aid his foul brother, Sheng.

Alajos backed away from them both now, his blade up to guard against Sheng’s stabbing sword and Sevatar’s grinding halberd. The Night Lords stalked closer, stolen skulls and Dark Angel helms clacking against their ceramite war plate as they dangled on chains.

On a whim, Alajos tore the helm from his head. If this was the end, then by the Emperor’s blood, it would be done properly. He raised his blade in salute to them both, ceremonially kissing the hilt as he watched them come closer.

The blade lowered, at the ready.

‘I am Alajos,’ he told them. ‘Captain of the Ninth Order of the First Legion. Brother to all knights, son to one world, sworn to one lord.’

Sevatar lowered his halberd with a lance’s intent. The whirring teeth chewed air with a petulant whine. ‘I am Sevatar the Condemned,’ he growled, ‘and I will wear your skin as a cloak before dawn ruins the sky.’

‘Come then,’ Alajos chuckled, though never in life had he felt less like laughing. They charged as one, a short blade and cutting spear descending in the same moment. The Angel parried, barely, his long sword catching both strikes with awkward grace. All the while he surrendered ground, backing away, drawing the Night Lords with him.

In his own Legion, only two knights had managed to beat him in the sparring circles. One was Astelan, absent these past years from the Great Crusade. The other was Corswain, Paladin of the Ninth Order, bearer of the Mantle of the Champion.

With Alajos’s death, he would buy his brother’s life.

‘Brother,’ he voxed, ‘keep running.’

XIV

Corswain’s retinal display blurred as it refocused. The autosenses obeyed his impulse, tracking the distant movement and zooming to capture Alajos backing away from his attackers. It ended with humiliating speed, despite the captain parrying several strikes in a matter of heartbeats. Even at this distance, Sevatar was a blur of movement in grainy night-vision, his long halberd cutting and chopping, coming closer to digging into the Angel’s armour with each strike.

The end came when Sheng’s blade plunged into Alajos’s thigh, driving the knight down to one knee. The Angel’s return cut cleaved through the Night Lord’s forearm, chopping the hand – and the sword it held – free. Even as Sheng was staggering back, Sevatar let his blade fall.

Corswain saw his brother’s head roll clear of the armoured shoulders, the murder that failed all those months ago finally finished.

He turned and ran again, rounding the final pillar. Alajos’s sacrifice bought him precious seconds. He used them to hurl himself onto the primarch’s back, driving his sword through the spine of one of the Emperor’s sons.

XV

Curze screamed, his ghastly face raised to the sky. More blood drizzled from his pale lips as the insane pressure in his back and chest increased, until his breastplate gave way with a brittle crack that split the night. The wounded demigod clutched at the sword tip poking from below his collarbone, screaming like a man doused in chemical fire. More than a shriek of pain, it was an aural assault in itself, sending Corswain staggering back. The knight’s grip slipped from his blade – in desperation he clutched at whatever he could reach. One hand fisted in the primarch’s lank black hair, the other snagged a thick chain hanging from Curze’s pauldron.

The Night Lord primarch staggered to his feet, hauling the struggling warrior up with him. Corswain yanked the primarch’s head back, pulling out a fistful of tangled hair, while ripping the bronze chain from the shoulder guard gave him a weapon. Instead of lashing it against the primarch’s skull as a whip, he slapped it around Curze’s throat, holding tight to both ends. The cold metal garrotte tightened as the Night Lord stumbled and thrashed. Corswain tugged harder, hearing the soft, wet clicks of vertebrae giving way beneath Curze’s ragged gasps.

Corswain had broken horses as part of his squire training back on Caliban. Instinct made him tense the first time a horse bucked beneath him, and his rigid muscles had seen him easily thrown from the beast’s back. To break a horse, especially the proud and muscled chargers so prized by the home world’s knights, required as much grace and care as it did raw strength. The key was to move with the horse, to stay balanced, for the rider to keep his muscles loose and flexible in order to adapt to whatever tricks the creature might try. Corswain hadn’t thought of those days in a long time, but the bucking, thrashing ride he endured now brought it all rushing back. He knew he couldn’t have been on the primarch’s back for more than a handful of seconds, but it already felt like an age.

Curze twisted again, with enough force this time that the Angel lost his grip on the heavy chain. Corswain ended his tumbling fall by crashing against a stone pillar, the impact of his armour plating taking a huge chunk from the dense stone. He’d been shrugged off like a bothersome insect. Even strangled, beaten, bleeding, cut and stabbed, Curze had hurled him aside with almost no effort at all.

He hurt. Blood of the Emperor, he hurt. But he scrambled back to his feet, reaching for his sword in the dirt. If he could–

The shadow fell over him. Something hit – a mountain avalanche against his left side – throwing him back into the air. The ground spun, became the heavens, became both earth and sky at once. Corswain felt himself thudding along the rocky earth until he crashed to a rest against a stone wall.

For a moment, all he could taste and see was dust and blood, blessedly knocked insensitive to the protests of his tormented body.

The dull-witted invulnerability passed all too quickly, leaving him at the mercy of his injuries. His head was a swollen globe of blunt pain, contained by the helm that prevented his skull from coming to pieces. Agony replaced strength in his body; his entire left side felt shattered, literally broken into fragments. When he rose, it was with a scream of spasming effort. Only one leg and one arm obeyed his needs. One shattered eye lens showed a flawed, lagging view of the foundation site. The other showed nothing at all. He was blind in that eye, feeling something hot, wet and useless now occupying the broken socket. Three teeth fell from his lips as he voiced a second scream. They rattled at the base of his helmet.

Through what remained of his vision, he saw his liege lord standing once more. The Lion, a bleeding statue, advanced on Curze with sword in hand. In turn, Curze readied his claws. Several of the talon-blades were broken, scattered over the ground. They came together yet again, weapons sparking and flaring.

Corswain’s muscles ached with the sudden influx of chemical stimulants as his armour’s internal systems sought to keep him alive. He doubted it would work for long. Something dense and heavy hung in his chest, turning each breath into breathing fire. Something had burst within him, he was certain of it. Acidic spittle ran from his lips, pooling at his sealed collar. He’d drown in his own blood and spit if he didn’t get his helm off soon, or at least unseal the mouth-grille.

A figure obstructed his view of the primarchs. A figure with a spear in its hands.

‘Not much left of you, is there?’ Sevatar chuckled in a low, crackling vox-voice.

‘The moons are crying,’ Corswain breathed, and crashed down to his knees. His fading eye stared skywards, watching as the moons wept fire.

XVI

The first drop-pod hammered home into a gravel slope, sending ashy stones spraying out in a burst of debris. Heat-shielding on its black hull glowed from the atmospheric descent, while the whining turbines hissed with vented steam. Sealant bolts popped with gunshot cracks, and the pod’s sides opened with all the crude grace of a mechanical flower. The Dark Angels emerged with their bolters up and firing.

The second landed cleaner, followed by the third and fourth. All three struck home across the crater, spilling their knights onto the construction site.

‘How quickly the tide turns.’ Corswain was grinning bloodily behind his helm now. The shadows vanished. Sevatar and Sheng fled as abruptly as they’d descended.

Rattling like hailstones, more drop-pods fell from above. Some were blackened by allegiance, others by the atmospheric fire. Both fleets in orbit disgorged warriors onto the surface, even as they were surely battling in the void. Here on the ground, Corswain could barely see anything at all. He heard the Legions meeting in the skidding clashes of chainblades on ceramite, and the insistent crash of bolters, but saw precious little. With the hand that still obeyed him, he dragged his helmet off, wincing as the cold night air hit his savaged face.

The Lion was in similar ruin, surrounded by his black-clad warriors. Blood sheeted down the back of his head, a liquid cloak down his shoulders. Corswain had no idea how he still lived with so little of his skull intact.

Curze laughed – at least, he began to – before his own warriors began to drag him back just as the Angels dragged the Lion. The two primarchs staggered back from one another, cursing each other above their sons’ heads, both hindered by weakened limbs and grievous wounds that made the air stink with their genetically divine blood.

The great sword impaled the ground as it fell from the Angel Lord’s grip, while Curze could no longer lift his claws.

Corswain felt himself sliding back down to the ground despite his attempt at moving to the primarch’s side. Strong hands pulled at him, hauling him up, forcing him to do what his muscles wouldn’t allow. He turned his head, seeing with his good eye.

‘Alajos,’ he said.

‘The captain is dead, Your Grace. It is I, Sergeant Tragan.’

‘Sevatar is here. Watch for him. He is here, I swear it. He killed Alajos. I saw it happen.’

‘Yes, Your Grace. Come... this way. Thunderhawks are inbound.’ Across the vox, he yelled to every surviving soul, ‘First Legion, fall back!’

Corswain limped in his brother’s arms, vaguely wondering if he was dying. It felt like it, though never having died before, it was a guess.

‘You’re not dying, Your Grace,’ Sergeant Tragan laughed now. Corswain hadn’t realised he was murmuring out loud.

His last vision was of the primarchs, both near driven to their knees, surrounded by growing phalanxes of their armoured sons. Curze reached his claws for the Lion, snarling and cursing, too weak to resist his Legion dragging him from the field. The Lion’s reaction was a foul mirror, made all the more hideous because of the warlord’s majesty. He screamed oaths from his bleeding, angelic face, pulled back from the battle by his own sons.

Above the battle, he heard Sevatar’s cry. ‘Death to the False Emperor! Death to his Angels in Black!’ His skin crawled in the wake of those words. Such conviction. Such hate.

‘The Thramas Crusade,’ Corswain sighed. ‘They are right, all of them. This war is just beginning.’

‘Your Grace?’

‘My sword,’ Corswain reached a hand out, as if he could touch the opposing groups of warriors.

‘Where is it, Your Grace?’

‘Gone,’ Corswain closed his remaining eye. ‘I left it in a primarch’s spine.’

XVII

The beast never dies in his dreams.

He watches it slink through the trees, keeping its sinuous body low to the ground, its movements fluid enough to be sickening and boneless. Its ears rake back flat against its head, while its clawed paws are silent on the deep snow. The creature hunts, eager but passionless, its dead cat’s eyes glinting with emotionless hunger.

The boy takes the shot, and the shell goes wide.

With the cold air split by the crack of gunfire, the beast twists in the snow, ghost-light on the ground as it snarls at its attacker. Quivering black spines rise from the denser white fur at its back and neck, an instinctive defensive response. A tail lashes behind the beast in threatening rhythm, coiling and thrashing in time with the boy’s own heartbeat.

For a moment he sees what the elder knights all claimed to see – a sight he’d always believed to be the lies of ageing warriors girding their fading legends with false poetry.

Yet there it is in the beast’s black eyes, something beneath the raw desire to survive. Recognition stares back at him: a crude intelligence, malicious despite its feral simplicity. The moment shatters as the creature vents its anger. Something between a lion’s burbling snarl and a bear’s hoarse roar rings out in the cold air between them.

The boy fires again. Three more shots echo through the forest, disturbing the snow bundled on branches above. Shivering fingers seek to reload the primitive pistol, but his aim was true and his father’s pistol sang its killing song. The beast limps now, dragging itself closer in a grotesque, mangled run.

He feels the chunky shells scatter from his grip, spilling out onto the snow. It’s too cold to reload with his fingers numbed to raw senselessness. He drops the pistol, too. Not from fear or pain, but because he needs two hands for what will come next.

Steel whispers as it slides from his sheath, a sword almost as long as the boy is tall, clutched in two shivering hands. As the beast stalks closer, he sees the malign hunger in its eyes cool to a feral wariness. It’s dying, but that only makes it bolder. Its foul sentience knows it no longer has anything to lose. It hunts now out of malice alone.

Flakes of snow drift onto the blade, freezing into diamonds wedded to the steel.

‘Come on,’ the boy breathes the whispered words. ‘Come on...’

The beast leaps, striking his chest with the force of a stallion’s kick, and he’s down on his back. The beast weighs as much as a warhorse, its twitching bulk pressing down on the boy’s slender body. The ache in his chest is a dull, creaking crackle, as if his lungs are filled with dry leaves. He knows his ribs are shattered, but there’s almost no pain at all. Steaming blood courses down the blade and onto his hands.

Finally, the beast ceases its shaking. The boy gathers his strength and counts to three, rolling the stinking creature onto its side. The spines still quiver and leak clear fluid. He’s careful not to touch those.

The sword in his hands is bonded to his fingers by a coating of the beast’s cooling blood. He lets the blade fall into the snow, and draws the serrated skinning knife from his boot. Birds sing in the branches above, though birdsong on Caliban is never beautiful. Raptors cry challenges at one another, while carrion birds caw for corpse-meat.

Slowly, everything starts to whiten, to fade away as other, truer sounds begin infiltrating his thoughts: the sound of a ticking fan blade in a labouring air filtrator; boot-steps on the deck above; the omnipresent rumble of live engines.

At last, he opens his eyes.

Both of them. Both work. He looks at the harsh illumination globes above, smelling the sharp disinfectant smell of the medicae chambers.

With a pained grunt, Corswain rises and says, ‘Water.’

XVIII

His mind wandered during the morning vigil. As Corswain knelt with his brothers, his muscles still stiff with aches and discoloured by bruises, he found the serenity of purposes ever more difficult to attain. His head remained bowed against the hilt of his sword, and he gave all the appearance of another knight in dutiful reflection of the coming crusade. In truth, he dwelled in memories. His thoughts flew back to a world that hated him.

Tsagualsa.

The name brought a sneer to his lips, hidden by the hood that cast his features into shadow. Tsagualsa, a dead world the Night Lords claimed as their own; a world where primarchs had been reduced to screaming brothers, and the foundations of a fortress would one day rise to become an enemy stronghold.

Tragan called to him once the reverence ended. The other knights filed from the chamber of reflection, their white surplice robes not enough the cover the battle scarring that ravaged every suit of black armour.

‘Your Grace,’ Tragan greeted him as he limped closer.

Corswain smiled in reply. ‘You do not need to call me that any more, captain. Is something amiss?’

Tragan, like his brothers, wore his full armour beneath a clean surplice. The hood was down, revealing his strong, aquiline features for all to see.

‘The Lion summons us,’ he said.

Corswain would‘ve checked his weapons, had they still been at his side. Instead, he nodded. ‘Very well.’

XIX

The lord of the First Legion sat as he so often sat these nights, leaning back in his ornate throne of ivory and obsidian. His elbows rested upon the throne’s sculpted arms, while his fingers were steepled before his face, just barely touching his lips. Unblinking eyes, the brutal green of Caliban’s forests, stared dead ahead, watching the flickering hololith of embattled stars.

Tragan and Corswain approached the throne as one. In a display far from perfect unity, the captain drew his blade and knelt before his liege, while Corswain went down slower – his body still sore, muscles still at odds with his desires. The Lion watched their obeisance with impassive eyes. When he spoke, his voice was the grind of thunder at the horizon – it could never be mistaken for human, and the pale scar across his tanned throat didn’t help humanise his tone.

‘Rise.’

They rose as commanded. Corswain stood with muscles taut, arms crossed over his breastplate, his armour enlivened by the thick, white fur pelt draping down his back. The skinned beast’s fanged head draped over his shoulder guard, forming the cloak’s binding.

‘You summoned us, my liege?’

‘I did.’ The Lion remained seated with his fingers steepled before his lips. ‘We have made contact with Imperial forces.’

‘Orders?’ Corswain asked, feeling his heart beat faster. ‘A summons?’

‘Neither. We will not abandon the Thramas Crusade until these systems are ours. The Imperium lives and dies by what we do here in the deepest reaches. Defending Terra means nothing if the rest of the empire is ash.’

‘I do not understand, sire. What force has made contact with us?’

The Lion shook his crowned head again, watching the hololith. His eyes reflected bright clusters of stars and worlds, while his voice was uncharacteristically soft.

‘We have made contact with several of my brothers and their Legions,’ he said, ‘for the first time since we parted company with the Wolves.’

‘Is it the Wolf King, sire?’ Corswain made no effort to disguise his reluctance. The Angels and the Wolves had hardly parted on brotherly terms.

‘No, Cor. The hail comes from Guilliman and our cousins within the Thirteenth Legion. Knowing we have been unable to reach Terra, it seems the Lord of Ultramar wishes us at his side instead.’

Before the warriors could reply, the Lion narrowed his Calibanite eyes. ‘Unending Imperial ambition has not bred warriors with the warm hearts of men, but angels with the cold hearts of weapons.’ He rose from his throne, circling the hololithic table, watching the worlds turn about their suns.

‘My sons,’ he smiled, though it was utterly without warmth. ‘It seems Horus is not the only soul to believe he is heir to the empire.’

THE HORUS HERESY

It is a time of legend.

Mighty heroes battle for the right to rule the galaxy.

The vast armies of the Emperor of 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 City of Sight

Nemo Zhi-Meng, Choirmaster of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica

Aniq Sarashina, Mistress of the Scholastica Psykana

Evander Gregoras, Master of the Cryptaesthesians

Kai Zulane, Astropath seconded to Navigator House Castana

Athena Diyos, Astropath of the City of Sight

Abir Ibn Khaldun, Astropath of the City of Sight

The Outcast Dead

Atharva, Adept Exemptus of the Thousand Sons

Tagore, Sergeant, 15th Company, World Eaters

Subha, Warrior of the 15th Company, World Eaters

Asubha, Warrior of the 15th Company, World Eaters

Severian, Warrior of the 25th Company, Luna Wolves – The ‘Wolf’

Argentus Kiron, Warrior of the 28th Company, Emperor’s Children

Gythua, Warrior of the 4th Company, Death Guard

The Hunters

Yasu Nagasena, Seer Hunter of the Black Ships

Kartono, Bondsman to Yasu Nagasena

Maxim Golovko Major general, commander of the Black Sentinels

Saturnalia, Warrior of the Legio Custodes

The Lords of Terra

Rogal Dorn, Primarch of the Imperial Fists

The Petitioners’ City

Palladis Novandio, Priest of the Temple of Woe

Roxanne Castana, Supplicant of the Temple of Woe

Babu Dhakal, Clan-lord of the Dhakal

Ghota, Dhakal enforcer

Wonders are many on Earth, and the greatest of these is Man, who rides the Great Ocean and makes his way through the deeps, through wind-swept valleys of perilous seas that surge and sway.

– attributed to the Tragedean Sophocles, pre-M1

Dreams are mirrors in which are reflected the true character of the dreamer. What should happen when the individual face of the dreamer sees himself reflected in the collective dream mirror of all humanity?

– Aniq Sarashina, Oneirocritica Sarashina,Vol XXXV

Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.

– Nemo Zhi-Meng, Choirmaster of the
Adeptus Astra Telepathica.

From: Chirurgeon Bellan Tortega (BT), certified neuro-psychic attendant
To: Patriarch Verduchina XXVII,
House Castana, Navis Nobilite
Observed period: Cycles 15-18
Subject: Zulane, Kai (KZ)
Evaluation summary: NON-FUNCTIONAL/POTENTIALLY SALVAGEABLE

Excerpted from 4423-4553: Full Case Notes to follow.

TRANSCRIPT EXCERPT BEGINS.

BT: Can you tell me what happened on the Argo?

KZ: No.

BT: No?

KZ: No.

BT: Why not?

KZ: I don’t want to.

BT: With respect, you are in no position to withhold anything you know. The incident involving the Argo represents a significant financial deficit for House Castana, not to mention the considerable loss of prestige with respect to the XIII Legion.

KZ: Take it up with Nemo. I was only loaned to Castana – I don’t care about their losses.

BT: You should. You should also know that my evaluation will play a significant part in deciding whether you can continue with House Castana. Or continue at all, for that matter.

KZ: Like I said, I don’t care.

BT: Do you WANT to be sent to the hollow mountain?

KZ: Of course not. No sane person would.

BT: Then I would cooperate if I were you.

KZ: You don’t understand, it’s not about cooperation.

BT: Then enlighten me, Kai. What IS it about?

KZ: It’s about hearing ten thousand men and women die. It’s about hearing every single last thought as their bodies were torn apart by things. It’s about hearing the terror of people about to die every time I close my eyes. It’s about not putting myself through that nightmare again. [Subject breaks down. Three minutes of sobbing.]

BT: Are you finished?

KZ: For now.

BT: Then do you feel like talking about what happened?

KZ: Terra, no! Maybe someday, but even when I do, it won’t be with you.

BT: Why not?

KZ: Because you’re not here to help me.

BT: That’s EXACTLY why I’m here, Kai.

KZ: No it’s not, and stop calling me Kai as if we’re friends. Your only purpose in being here is to show the XIII Legion that House Castana can keep its house in order. I’m an embarrassment to your precious patriarch.

BT: No, you are part of the family. All Patriarch Verduchina wants is to help.

KZ: Then leave me alone. The Argo isn’t a memory I want to go back to. Not yet, maybe never.

BT: Confronting the past is the only way you can face the future. Surely you can see it’s not healthy to dwell on such macabre memories. Purge them and you can return to your duties.

KZ: You’re assuming I WANT to return to my duties.

BT: Don’t you?

KZ: [One minute pause] I don’t know.

TRANSCRIPT EXCERPT ENDS.

Addendum:

Sire, as this excerpt clearly shows, Kai Zulane displays classic symptoms of denial, paranoia and an inability to face the truth of his ordeal. It is my conclusion that he believes he is responsible for the events that led to the loss of the Argo, though the truth of this is for others, more qualified in the fields of multi-dimensional overlaps, to determine. However, I do not believe any individuals could live through so traumatic an experience without some psychic scarring, none of which is evident in Kai Zulane’s aetheric aura. I would, therefore, venture the opinion that Kai Zulane is not beyond recovery. Kai Zulane represents a significant investment in time and effort (both by House Castana and the Adeptus Astra Telepathica) and to simply ‘cut our losses’ and send him to the hollow mountain would, at this point, be premature.

In summary, it is my recommendation that Kai Zulane be returned to the auspices of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica for immediate rehabilitation. This will reaffirm our commitment to the XIII Legion, and effectively allow House Castana to pass the burden of responsibility elsewhere.

I remain your humble servant in all things, and can offer further clarifications, should they be required, on Kai Zulane’s psychic pathology at your convenience.

Neuro-psychic attendant 343208543.

It is the hour before dawn when the hunters come for them.

Nagasena checks his rifle, already knowing it is fully functional. On a day like today he needs the solace of things done in the right order. Too many of this newly emergent Imperium’s people rush around without taking the time to ensure they are properly prepared. Truth and order are Nagasena’s watchwords, for they provide a centre from which all other things can flow. He has learned this from the teachings of a wise man born in these parts in an age now long forgotten.

Those teachings survive only in scattered texts comprising gnomic aphorisms and proverbs, each one passed down from mentor to student over thousands of generations in secret script known only to a chosen few. Nagasena has lived his life by these teachings, and he feels they have guided him well. His life has been lived truthfully, and he has few regrets.

This day’s hunt will, he thinks, be one of them.

He uncoils from the cross-legged position in which he sits and slings his rifle across his shoulder. Around him, men come to their feet, energised by his sudden movement.

‘Is it time?’ asks Kartono, handing him a long bladed sword with just the barest hint of a curve. It is a wondrous weapon, sheathed in a scabbard of lacquered wood, jade and mother of pearl. A master of the metal arts crafted this blade to Nagasena’s exacting specifications, yet it is no sharper, no lighter or in any other way superior to the millions of sword blades churned out by the armouries of Terra. But it was crafted with love and an attention to detail that no machine could ever replicate.

Nagasena knows the weapon as Shoujiki, which means Honesty.

He nods respectfully to Kartono as Golovko approaches, bullish and bearing the scent of gun oil, sweat and lapping powder. In an elder age Nagasena’s ancestors would have considered him a barbarian, but now he is an honoured man. Golovko’s armour is bulky, cumbersome and designed to intimidate. His face looks much the same.

He gives no greeting and his lip curls in instinctive distaste as he sees Kartono.

‘We should have struck in the middle watches of the night,’ he says, as Nagasena slips his sword through the black sash tied at his waist. ‘We would have surprised them.’

‘It would make no difference what time we came,’ says Nagasena, smoothing out his long black hair and settling a long scalp-lock over his shoulder. ‘Such men as we hunt will never truly be at rest, and there will never be a best time to fight them. As soon as the first is taken, most likely even before then, the rest will be instantly alert and dangerous beyond imagining.’

‘We have three thousand soldiers,’ points out Golovko, as though numbers are all that matter at a time like this. ‘Black Sentinels, Attaman Janissaries, Lancers. Even the high and mighty Custodians sent a squad.’

‘And it may still prove to be insufficient,’ says Nagasena.

‘Against thirty?’ says Golovko, but Nagasena has already dismissed him from his thoughts.

He turns away from the bellicose general and moves through the assembled soldiers silently awaiting his signal. They are nervous, dislocated. Most of all, they are horrified that they are about to take up arms against those who fight in their name on worlds far distant from Terra.

Nagasena looks up at the building that houses the Crusader Host. It is known locally as the Preceptory, and it is a triumphant structure of rearing golden lions, fluted columns and warrior statuary, capped by a lightning-shot dome of black marble. Heroic imagery adorns the fresco of the pediment high above the portico, and the grand approach leading to the entrance is paved with enormous flagstones bearing the names of worlds the Legiones Astartes have brought to compliance.

Every day these flagstones are cut with fresh tallies, and Nagasena wonders how these men of war feel to see the litany of their brothers’ victories grow ever larger while they remain on Terra, ever more distant from the bloody edge of the Imperium’s frontier.

‘What are your orders, lord?’ asks Kartono.

His companion is unarmed, but needs no weapons to be lethal. His former masters trained him to such a high degree of lethality that he is a weapon himself. Many people dislike Kartono for reasons they can never quite articulate, but Nagasena has long since grown used to his presence. He looks at the soldiers, confident that they are well hidden in the warren of gilded avenues and columned processionals that garland this region of the Imperial Palace like jewellery around the neck of a favoured concubine.

Three thousand armed men await his signal to advance, and Nagasena knows that by giving that signal, many of those men will die. Maybe all of them. He relishes few of his hunts, but this one in particular sits ill with him. He wishes he were back in his mountain villa, where his only concerns are the mixing of paints and tending to his garden, but his likes and dislikes are immaterial here.

A mission has been set, and he is duty bound to obey. And though he does not like this order, he understands it.

‘Walk with me, Kartono,’ says Nagasena, stepping out onto the grand walkway of victories. Kartono trots after him, surprised at his master’s sudden movement. Nagasena hears Golovko through the vox bead situated in his ear and pulls it free. The man’s protests become tinny and distant.

‘They will know we are coming for sure now,’ says Kartono, and Nagasena nods.

‘Your presence alone will have alerted at least one of them,’ he says. ‘Did you really think so many armed men could approach a place like this without its occupants knowing of it?’

‘I suppose not,’ agrees Kartono, glancing over his shoulder. ‘The Major General will not be pleased. He will make trouble for us.’

‘That is a problem for another day,’ says Nagasena. ‘I will be sufficiently pleased if we live through this morning. It is highly likely we will die here.’

Kartono shakes his head. ‘You are fatalistic today.’

‘Perhaps,’ says Nagasena as they climb the first steps of the Preceptory. ‘I dislike rising before the sun. It feels impolite.’

Kartono knows his moods well. Nagasena has grown tired of hunting, but this task has been given to him by a man whose orders come with the highest authority. Refusal was not an option. He feels the chill of the day through his silken robes, but does not allow it to lessen his focus. Knowing that his armour will afford him little protection against the weapons of his prey, he does not have Kartono encase him within its lacquered plates of bonded ceramite and adamantine weave.

A figure steps into view on the portico above, and Nagasena feels his heart beat just a little quicker. He is tall and broad-shouldered, as one would expect for a warrior genhanced to be the pinnacle of physicality, but there is a gracile quality to him that is unexpected. His hair is longer than usual, tied in a short ponytail, and his face is broad, with the congenital flatness of features so common amongst his kind. Nagasena is reassured to see that he wears no armour, perhaps indicating that he has not come to fight. His robes are crimson, edged in ivory, and a jade scarab set in amber rests upon his chest.

The man watches as he and Kartono climb to the top of the steps, his face unreadable and without expression. No, that is not quite correct. There is a sadness to him, visible only in the tiniest descending curve at the corner of his lips and a tightness around his eyes. At last Nagasena reaches the top of the steps and stands before the man, who towers over him like the oni of legend. The oni were also said to dwell in the mountains, but the old myths told of ugly creatures possessing horned skulls and wide mouths filled with terrible fangs.

There is nothing ugly about this warrior: he is a perfect specimen.

‘Oni-ni-kanabo,’ whispers Kartono.

Nagasena nods at the aptness of the expression, but does not reply.

The warrior nods and says, ‘Oni with an iron club?’

‘It means to be invincible or unbeatable in battle,’ says Nagasena, trying to hide his surprise that the warrior knows this ancient tongue of Old Earth.

‘I am aware of that,’ says the warrior. ‘Another meaning is “strength upon strength” whereupon one’s innate power is bolstered by the manipulation of some kind of tool or external force. Very apt indeed.’

‘You are Atharva?’ asks Nagasena, now understanding how he can know their secret language.

‘I am Adeptus Exemptus Atharva of the Fifteenth Legion,’ confirms the warrior.

‘You know why we are here?’

‘Of course,’ says Atharva. ‘I expected you sooner.’

‘I would have been surprised if you had not.’

‘How many soldiers did you bring?’

‘Just over three thousand.’

Atharva mulls over the number. ‘My brothers will be insulted you came with so few. You should have brought more to be certain.’

‘Others thought such numbers sufficient.’

‘We shall see,’ observes Atharva, as though it is no more than an intellectual exercise they are considering and not a terrible, unthinkable waste of Imperial lives.

‘Will you fight us, Atharva?’ asks Nagasena. ‘I hope you will not.’

‘You brought your clade pet hoping it would dissuade me,’ replies Atharva, with a curt gesture towards Kartono, ‘but do you really think he can stop me from killing you?’

‘No, but I hoped his presence might give you pause.’

‘I will not fight you, Yasu Nagasena,’ says Atharva, and the sadness in his eyes is achingly visible. ‘But Tagore and his brothers will walk the Crimson Path before they allow themselves to be taken.’

Nagasena nods and says, ‘So be it.’

Prologue

Abir ibn Khaldun exhaled cold air and saw myriad patterns in the swirling vapour of his breath, too many to examine fully, but diverting nonetheless. An inverted curve that augured danger, a genetically dense double helix that indicated the warriors of the Legiones Astartes, and a black planet whose civilisation had been ground to black sand by a cataclysmic war and the passage of uncounted aeons.

The mindhall was quiet, the metallic-tasting air still and cool, yet there was tension.

Understandable, but it made an already difficult communion that much harder.

The presence of the thousand-strong choir of astropaths surrounding Ibn Khaldun was like the sound of a distant ocean, or so he imagined. Ibn Khaldun had never heard any Terran bodies of water larger than the vast, basin cisterns carved within the lightless depths of the Urals and Alpine scarps, but he was an astropath and his life was swathed in metaphors.

Their psychic presence was dormant for now, a deep reservoir of energy he would use to distil the incoming vision from its raw state of chaotic imagery to a coherent message that could be easily understood.

‘Do you have communion yet?’ asked the Choirmaster, his voice sounding as though it came from impossibly far away, though he stood right next to Ibn Khaldun.

‘Give him time, Nemo,’ said Mistress Sarashina, her voice maternal and soothing. ‘We will know when the link is made. The astropaths of the Iron Hands are not subtle.’

‘I am aware of that, Aniq,’ replied the Choirmaster. ‘I trained most of them.’

‘Then you should know better than to rush this.’

‘I know that well enough, but Lord Dorn is impatient for news of Ferrus Manus’s fleet. And he has a gun.’

‘No gun ever helped speed things up in a good way,’ said Sarashina.

Ibn Khaldun smiled inwardly at her gentle admonition, though the mention of the lord of the Imperial Fists reminded him how important this communion was to the Imperium.

Horus Lupercal’s treachery had overturned the natural order of the universe, and emissaries from the palace were shrill in their demands for verifiable information. Expeditionary fleets of Legiones Astartes, billions-strong armies of mortal soldiers and warfleets capable of planetary destruction were loose in the galaxy, and no one could be sure of their exact locations or to whom they owed their allegiance. News of world after world declaring for the Warmaster had reached Terra, but whether such stories were true or rebel lies was a mystery.

The old adage that in any war the first casualty was truth was never more apt than during a civil war.

‘Is it dangerous to link over so great a distance?’ asked Maxim Golovko, and Ibn Khaldun sensed the man’s natural hostility in the flaring crimson of his aura. ‘Should we have Sentinels within the mindhall?’

Golovko was a killer of psykers, a gaoler and executioner all in one. His presence within the Whispering Tower was decreed by the new strictures laid down after the great conclave on Nikaea, and Ibn Khaldun suppressed a spike of resentment at its hypocrisy. Bitterness would only cloud his perceptions, and this was a time for clarity like no other.

‘No, Maxim,’ said Sarashina. ‘I am sure your presence alone will be sufficient.’

Golovko grunted in acknowledgement, oblivious to the veiled barb, and Ibn Khaldun shut out the man’s disruptive psyche.

Ibn Khaldun felt a growing disconnection to the individuals around him, as though he were floating in amniotic gel like the princeps of a Mechanicum war-engine. He understood the urgency of this communion, but took care to precisely enunciate his incubating mantras. Rushing to link with an astropath he didn’t know would be foolhardy beyond words, especially when they were halfway across the galaxy and hurtling through the warp.

En route to an unthinkable battle between warriors who had once stood shoulder to shoulder as brothers.

Not even the most prescient of the Vatic had seen that coming.

Ibn Khaldun’s heart rate increased as he sensed another mind enter the sealed chamber, a blaze of light too bright to look upon directly. The others sensed it at the same instant and every head turned to face the new arrival. This was an individual whose inner fire was like the blinding glare of a supernova captured at the first instant of detonation. Mercury-bright traceries filled his every limb, blood as light, flesh woven from incomprehensible energies and sheathed in layers of meat and muscle, skin and plate. Ibn Khaldun could see nothing of this individual’s face, for every molecule that made up his form was like a miniature galaxy swarming with incandescent stars.

Only one manner of being was fashioned with such exquisite beauty…

‘Lord Dorn?’ said the Choirmaster, surprise giving his voice a raised tone that turned his words into a question. ‘How did you–?’

‘None of the gates of Terra are barred to me, Choirmaster,’ said Dorn, and his words were like bright streamers ejected from the corona of a volatile star. They lingered long after he spoke, and Ibn Khaldun felt their power ripple outwards through the awe-struck choir.

‘This is a sealed ritual,’ protested the Choirmaster. ‘You should not be here.’

Dorn marched towards the centre of the mindhall, and Ibn Khaldun felt his skin prickle at the nearness of such a forceful, implacable psyche. The majority of mortal minds simmered with mundane clutter close to the surface, but Rogal Dorn’s mind was an impregnable fortress, hard-edged and unyielding of its secrets. No one learned anything from Dorn he did not want them to know.

‘My brothers are approaching Isstvan Five,’ said Dorn. ‘I need to be here.’

‘Communion has yet to be established, Lord Dorn,’ said Sarashina, clearly understanding the futility of attempting to eject a primarch from the mindhall. ‘But if you are to stay, then you may only observe. Do not speak once the link is achieved.’

‘I do not need a lecture,’ said Dorn. ‘I know how astropathic communion works.’

‘If that were truly the case, then you would have respected the warding seal upon this chamber,’ said Sarashina, and Ibn Khaldun felt the momentary flare of anger from behind the monolithic walls of Rogal Dorn’s mind fortress. Almost immediately it was followed by a mellow glow of begrudged respect, though Ibn Khaldun sensed this only because Dorn allowed it to be sensed.

‘Point taken, Mistress Sarashina,’ said Dorn. ‘I will be silent. You have my word.’

Ibn Khaldun dragged his senses away from the primarch; a difficult feat in itself, for his presence had a gravity that drew in nearby minds. Instead, he splayed his mind outwards into the echoing space of the vast chamber in which he lay.

Fashioned in the form of a great amphitheatre in the heart of the Whispering Tower, this chamber had been shaped by the ancient cognoscynths who first raised the City of Sight, many thousands of years ago. Their unrivalled knowledge of psychically-attuned architecture had been hard-won in a long-forgotten age of devastating psi-wars, but their arts were long dead, and the skill of crafting such resonant structures had died with them.

Amid the blackened mindhalls of the City of Sight, the Whispering Tower reached the farthest into the gulfs of space between the stars, no matter what lofty claims the Emperor’s grand architects might make of the ornamented spires they had built around it.

A thousand high-ranking astropaths surrounded Ibn Khaldun, seated in ever-ascending tiers like the audience at some grotesque spectacle of dissection. Each telepath reclined in a contoured harness-throne, appearing as shimmering smears of light in Ibn Khaldun’s consciousness, and he sharpened his focus as a subtle change in the choir’s resonance tugged at the edge of his perceptions.

A message was being drawn towards the tower.

Whisper stones set within the ironclad walls shone with invisible light as they eased the passage of the incoming message, directing it towards the centre of the mindhall.

‘He’s here,’ said Ibn Khaldun, as the presence of the sending astropath swelled to fill the chamber like a surge tide. The sending was raw and unfocussed, a distant shout straining for someone to listen, and Ibn Khaldun folded his mind around it.

Like strangers fumbling to shake hands in a darkened room, their thoughts slowly meshed, and Ibn Khaldun gasped as he felt the hard texture of another’s mind rasping against the boundaries of his own. Rough and sharp, blunt and pugnacious, this sending was typical of astropaths who spent prolonged periods assigned to the Iron Hands. Cipher codes flashed before him in a complex series of colours and numbers, a necessary synesthesia that confirmed the identity of both astropaths before communion could begin.

‘You have it?’ asked the Choirmaster.

Khaldun didn’t answer. To grasp the thoughts of another mind from so far away demanded all his concentration. Fluctuations in the warp, random currents of aetheric energy, and the burbling chatter of a million overlapping echoes sought to break the link, but he held it firm.

As lovers gained a slow understanding of their partners’ rhythms and nuances, so too did the union of minds become easier. Though to call anything of this nature easy was to grossly understate its complexity. Ibn Khaldun felt the cold wastes of the immaterium all around him, roiling like a storm-tossed ocean. And like the oceans of Old Earth, it was home to creatures of all shapes and sizes. Ibn Khaldun sensed them swarming around the bright light of this communion like cautious predators circling potential prey.

‘I have communion,’ he said, ‘but I won’t be able to hold it for long.’

The spectral outline of somewhere far distant began to merge with Ibn Khaldun’s sensory interpretation of the mindhall, like a faulty picter broadcasting two separate images on the same screen. Ibn Khaldun recognised the hazy image of an astropath’s chamber aboard a starship, one that bore all the stripped-down aesthetic of the X Legion. Figures appeared around him, like faceless ghosts come to observe. They were mist-limned giants of burnished metal with flinty auras, angular lines and the cold taste of machines.

Yes, this was definitely a ship of the Iron Hands.

Ibn Khaldun ignored the additional presences and let the body of the message flow into him. It came in a rush of imagery, nonsensical and unintelligible, but that was only to be expected. The psychic song of the choir grew in concert with his efforts to process the message, and he drew upon the wellspring of energy they provided him. Will and mental fortitude could cohere simple messages sent from planetary distances, but one sent from so far away would need more power than any one individual could provide.

Khaldun was special, an astropath whose skills in metapsychic cognition could transform confused jumbles of obscure symbolism into a message that even a novitiate could decipher. As the raw, urgent thoughts of the expeditionary astropath spilled into his mindscape, his borrowed power smoothed their rough edges and let the substance of the message take shape.

Ibn Khaldun interpreted and extrapolated the images and sounds together, alloying astropathic shorthand with common allegorical references to extract the truth of the message. There was art in this, a beautiful mental ballet that was part intuition, part natural talent and part training. And just as no remembrancer of a creative mien could ever truly explain how they achieved mastery of their art, nor could Ibn Khaldun articulate how he brought sense from senselessness, meaning from chaos.

Words sprang from him, reformed from the encrypted symbolism in which they had been sent. ‘The world of black sand. Isstvan,’ he said. ‘The fifth planet. The Legion makes good speed. Lord Dorn’s retribution flies true, yet the sons of Medusa will strike before even the Ravens or the Lords of Nocturne. Lord Manus demands first blood and the head of the Phoenix.’

More of the message poured through, and Ibn Khaldun felt some of the astropaths in the tiers above him perish as their reserves of energy were expended. Such was the import of this message that losses amongst the choir had been deemed acceptable.

‘The Gorgon of Medusa will be the first warrior of the Emperor upon Isstvan. He will be the speartip that cleaves the heart of Horus Lupercal. He will be the avenger.’

Ibn Khaldun slumped back in his harness as the message abruptly ended, and allowed his breathing to return to normal. His mind began the tortuous process of re-ordering itself in the void left by communion’s end, but it would take many days’ rest to recover from this ordeal.

As always, he wanted to sit up and open his eyes, but the restraints of his harness and the sutured veil of skin over his empty eye sockets prevented him from doing either.

‘It is done,’ he whispered, his words echoing around the chamber as though he had shouted at the top of his voice. ‘There is no more.’

Mistress Sarashina took his hand and stroked his glistening brow, though his consciousness was already fading after such strenuous mental exertion. Lord Dorn loomed over him, a glittering nimbus of light playing around the golden curves of his battle plate, and the proximity of such naked power was like a defibrillating jolt that kept Ibn Khaldun from slipping into a recuperative trance.

‘Damn your impatience, Ferrus, you will be the death of me,’ hissed Dorn, his voice betraying a measure of the terrible burden he bore. ‘The plan requires you to follow my orders to the letter!’

The primarch of the Imperial Fists turned to the Choirmaster. ‘There is no more? You are sure this is the entirety of the message?’

‘If Abir Ibn Khaldun says there is no more, then there is no more,’ stated the Choirmaster. ‘The cryptaesthesians will filter the Bleed for any residual meaning or hidden subtexts, but Ibn Khaldun is one of our best.’

Rogal Dorn rounded upon the man. ‘One of your best? Why would you not employ your best telepath for so crucial a message?’

The Choirmaster exchanged a look with Sarashina, and Ibn Khaldun felt their unease as they formed the image of an astropath who had long since left the Whispering Tower for the lofty heights of secondment to a patrician House of the Navis Nobilite.

‘Our best is not yet among us,’ said the Choirmaster.

‘I ordered you to utilise every and all means to bring me reliable information from the frontier,’ said Dorn, his hand closing over the onyx and gold pommel of his heavy-bladed sword. ‘Do any of you people understand what is at stake? I am forced to wage a war I cannot see, to fight a foe I cannot gauge, and the only way I can do that is if I know exactly what is happening en route to Isstvan. To save the Imperium, I need you to use only your best operatives. The truth is all that matters, do you understand?’

‘We understand all too well, Lord Dorn,’ said the Choirmaster after a moment’s hesitation.

‘Our best operative is returning to us as we speak,’ added Sarashina, ‘but he will not be in any state to help us. Not yet.’

‘Why not?’ demanded Rogal Dorn.

Sarashina sighed. ‘Because his mind must be remade.’

One

Roof of the world
Little girl
Homecoming

Through the petrified forests of Uttarakhand and the barren rad-wastes of Uttar Pradesh the travellers climbed. Then through the Brahmaputra valley, drawing closer to the roof of the world with every passing day. Onto the Terai-Duar flatlands, now colonised by the shipwrights of the Mechanicum for their dry-dock repair yards. Through those acetylene-lit cathedrals of iron, they rose still higher, into the thin air of the Bhabhar, where the land was cut with collimated streambeds that had once carried meltwater from the highest peaks to the plains below.

Vast swathes of subtropical forest had once flourished here, before ancient wars had destroyed almost everything living on the surface of the world. Oceans had boiled, continents burned; so much of what made this land special had been lost in those wars, but the world had endured. This particular forest had been dominated by the sarja, a tree favoured by an ancient god of a long dead empire that had once dominated the lands hereabouts.

One of the few surviving myths of that empire was that its greatest queen had given birth to a mortal god while gripping the branches of a sarja tree in a village of the Sákyans. This god had spawned a new religion, but nothing now remained of his teachings and no tales told whether he had been a wrathful or a benevolent god.

The travellers knew nothing of the region’s history, for the Bhabhar was now a desolate hinterland of sprawling worker camps that filled the landscape as far as the eye could see. Millions of craftsmen, labourers and hulking migou gathered together in industrious cities of canvas and prefabricated plasteel, the raw meat and muscle driving the engine of construction that now enveloped the farthest reaches of the mountains.

Higher still, into the Shiwalik belt of upland rock, where the travellers rested overnight in the statue-lined Chitwan Processional before making the push through the Mohan Pass into the Mahabharat Lekh, where the first of the great gates reared from the titanic peaks like a sepulchral portal into the lair of a sleeping giant.

This was the Primus Gate, and in more peaceful times, the sunlight had made the damascened silver and lapis lazuli coffers shine like dew on the morning of the very first day in creation. Those coffers were now obscured by adamantium panels, the exquisite decor that had been a traveller’s first sight of the Emperor’s Palace now locked away in secure vaults. Towering cranes and bulk lifters sprouted from its battlements, and cascades of sparks fell from phosphor-tipped welding torches.

Thousands of petitioners and supplicants gathered before the gate, patiently waiting their turn to pass through its towering magnificence. Not all would reach the lofty heart of the palace. The climb would prove to be too arduous for many, the journey too long or the wonders too great to bear. A phalanx of soldiers in gleaming breastplates of ivory and jade kept watch on the petitioners, and the air was charged with frightening strangeness. A lone figure armoured in all-encasing gold plate moved through the crowds, and the crimson of his helm’s horsehair plume stood out like a bloodstain on snow.

Never before had the Primus Gate been shut, and the stark fact of its closure struck a clear note that the axis of the galaxy had tilted. Humanity had a new enemy, one that wore a familiar face, and whose agents might even now be among them.

No longer could Terra’s citizens walk freely within the domain of their master.

Until now, the travellers’ journey into the peaks had been largely unhindered by the rigorous new security that surrounded the continental palace of the Emperor, but they had drawn too near the bright flame at the heart of the Imperium to pass unnoticed. Millions of migrant workers had come to the palace, and so many faces needed watching.

As it transpired, the Primus Gate was traversed without much in the way of inconvenience, for they had come with documents affixed with the seal of one of the great Navigator Houses, and its amethyst hue was given due deference by the gate’s castellans as the way was opened. Passing beneath its shadow took many hours of travel, and once beyond the gate the magnificence of the palace proper began.

It had been described as a crown of light atop the world, a continental landmass of unrivalled architectural brilliance, and the greatest work of man, but such descriptions failed to capture its epic immensity, the sheer weight of awe it engendered and the colossal impossibility of its very existence. Many supplicants who had spent their life’s worth to see the palace passed its first gate and climbed no further, humbled to the point of insensibility by even its least noteworthy avenues, processionals and towers. It was a monumental endeavour built not to the scale of men, but the scale of gods.

Beyond the docking rings and landing fields of the Brahmaputra Plateau rose the tallest peaks: the Naked Mountain, the Great Black, the Turquoise Goddess, and once mightiest of them all, the Holy Mother. None of them had escaped the attentions of the Mechanicum or the Emperor’s warmasons, their summits planed flat, and their bedrock burrowed deep to anchor the footings of the mighty palace.

‘Impressive,’ said Bellan Tortega from the back of the luxurious, up-armoured skimmer.

Kai Zulane fixed the chirurgeon with a hostile stare. ‘I hate you,’ he said.

The interior of the skimmer was panelled with off-world wood from the broadleaf forests of Yolaeu, its metallic surfaces edged with chased platinum and inset with smooth pict slates that displayed a rolling series of serene alien landscapes. The seats were plush amethyst velveteen, with the crest of House Castana embroidered in gold. Subtle lighting kept the hard edges of the interior soft, and a well-stocked chill-bar meant even a long journey could pass in comfort. All that spoiled the elegant luxury of the interior was the presence of four House Castana armsmen.

Clad in loops of gleaming black carapace and bonded leather armour, they filled the interior of the skimmer with their augmented physiques. Castana was pre-eminent among the families of the Navis Nobilite and could easily afford the ruinous cost of Mechanicum enhancements for their security personnel. Their faces were invisible behind glossy black helm visors, and each was wired with crystalline psi-dampers – as was the skimmer itself – to shield them from psychic intrusion.

Ostensibly, these men were here as a protective escort, but the combat shotguns gripped tightly in heavy leather gauntlets left no doubt in Kai’s mind that he was little better than a prisoner. He eased his back into the wide seat, finding himself unable to enjoy comfort he had once taken for granted. He cradled a glass of mahogany-coloured amasec, swirling the drink in a cut crystal glass that would cost more than most citizens would earn in a year. Idly he thought of throwing the glass out of the window, but decided that such petty rebellion would only irritate him afterwards.

Besides, the liquor dulled the ache of psi-sickness that had plagued him since his return to Terra.

Across from Kai, Bellan Tortega stared out of the window with open-mouthed delight. It was the chirurgeon’s first time visiting the palace, and it showed. He had been naming landmarks and marvelling at the sheer number of people within the palace precincts ever since they had passed beneath the Primus Gate, nearly twenty hours ago. Their route took them over the Brahmaputra Plateau, and Kai kept an artfully bored expression glued to his face. He knew it was an honour to see the cradle of humanity up close, but was too wrapped in his own misery to take much notice of his surroundings.

‘I believe that covered amphitheatre, the one encased in scaffolding, is the Investiary,’ said Tortega. ‘The statues of the primarchs within are hooded with mourning shrouds.’

‘Why?’ asked Kai.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean why hood a statue? It’s not like it can see.’

‘It’s symbolic, Kai,’ said Tortega. ‘It represents the desire of the Emperor to shield his sons from the treachery of their brothers.’

‘Represents a waste of time if you ask me. I would have thought the Emperor had more to worry about than pointless symbolism.’

Tortega sighed. ‘You know your biggest problem, Kai?’

‘I am well aware of my problems, good chirurgeon,’ snapped Kai. ‘You never tire of reminding me of them every day.’

‘You take no appreciation of how lucky you are,’ said Tortega, as if Kai hadn’t spoken.

Kai bit back a caustic response and took another drink.

‘Patriarch Verduchina would have been well within his rights to have you cast out of the Telepathica, and then what would you have done? You’d have been picked up by the psi-hounds within a day.’

Kai used to try to defuse these lectures while in the medicae facilities of House Castana on the island crag of Kyprios, but time and apathy had made him realise that once Tortega had begun, there was no stopping him.

‘You think you could have afforded those ocular augmetics without the Castanas?’ continued Tortega. ‘Disgrace the House and they’ll take them back, mark my words. You have a lot to be thankful for, young man, and it’s time you realised that before it’s too late.’

‘It’s already too late,’ said Kai. ‘Look where we are, where I’m going.’

‘We’re in the bosom of our species, Kai. And when the Imperium is reunited after this silly war, people will flock to this place,’ said Tortega, leaning forward and placing a hand on Kai’s knee.

The sensation was painful, and Kai flinched at the chirurgeon’s unwarranted over-familiarity.

‘Don’t touch me,’ said Kai. ‘Don’t you know anything about telepaths? Do you really want me to know all your dirty little secrets?’

Tortega snatched his hand back, and Kai shook his head. ‘Idiot. I’ve no talent for psychometry, but you were worried, weren’t you? What are you keeping from old Verduchina? Drug abuse? Illicit liaisons with your patients? Aberrant sexual deviancy?’

The chirurgeon reddened, and Kai laughed. ‘You’re a pathetic little man, Tortega. You think Verduchina values you? Likes you? You’re nothing to him, just another disposable functionary. That is if he even knows your name.’

Tortega’s back stiffened, but he refrained from rising to Kai’s bait. Instead, he returned his gaze to the wonders passing their skimmer.

‘There,’ said Tortega archly, ‘that’s the Hamazan Ossuary. I’ve seen picts, but they don’t capture the grandeur of its scale. You really have to see it to appreciate the harmony of its proportions. And there, I believe that colonnaded archway with the golden finials and weeping domes leads to the Astartes Tower. They say it’s the last place the Emperor and the primarchs spoke before the expedition fleets set off to the far corners of the Imperium. The glorious arias of Kynska’s The Score of Heroes tells of each day the Emperor spent with his sons.’

‘I’ll bet he wishes he’d spent longer,’ said Kai idly, finishing his drink and placing the glass on the polished mahogany rest beside him. He wanted another, to drain the entire bottle. Anything to dull the ache.

‘What do you mean?’ said Tortega.

‘Maybe if the Emperor had spent longer than a day with Horus Lupercal, we wouldn’t be in this mess.’

‘Hush,’ said Tortega. ‘You cannot say such things, not here, not in this place.’

‘Who is to stop me?’

Tortega shook his head. ‘What pleasure do you get from being so provocative?’

Kai shrugged. ‘I was just pointing out that had the Emperor spent more time with his primarchs, then perhaps they might not have turned on him. It’s hardly a treasonous thought.’

‘Who is to say what is treason these days?’ sighed Tortega.

‘Just ask the Crusader Host,’ said Kai. ‘I’m pretty sure they could tell you.’

It took another day to reach their destination, and Tortega spent his time cataloguing wonders of the palace he would probably never see again: The Gallery of Winter, Upanizad’s Tomb, the Petitioners’ Hall, the Crystal Observatory, the fire-blackened Preceptory, the Long Room and the Forge of Flesh and Steel, where the historic pact between the Martian priesthood and Terra had finally been sealed. Its double-headed eagle capstone was fashioned from ouslite and porphyry. In the dying sunset it looked bloody.

Kai sensed the presence of the City of Sight long before he saw it over the horizon, a grimly empty space amid this teeming anthill of mental activity. The psi-dampers fitted to the skimmer had blocked virtually every stray thought from the billions of workers, labourers, scribes, technicians, artisans and soldiers within the palace walls, but Kai had still sensed the background thrum of so vast a populace.

Approaching the headquarters of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica, there was nothing, no trace that anyone lived in this forsaken part of the palace. Kai knew better, having spent nearly a decade within its bleak towers, learning how to harness his abilities for the betterment of the Imperium. Thinking back to those days, he felt a fleeting touch of nostalgia, but quelled it bitterly, for this was no joyous homecoming.

Where other regions of the palace were celebrations of Unity, the builders of the City of Sight seemed to have gone out of their way to craft something calculated to weigh on the soul. Beyond the domain of the astro-telepaths, the architecture of the palace was raised up in glorification of mankind’s achievements, its statuary fashioned to remind a grateful populace of all that had been rebuilt in the wake of the terrible, world-spanning wars that had almost dragged the species down into extinction.

None of that was to be found in the City of Sight, and Kai felt only aching despair as the skimmer passed beneath the Obsidian Arch in its outer walls. Tortega twisted his head as he stared at the forest of iron towers, lightless garrets and silent thoroughfares within. The streets of the palace beyond the glossy black archway were alive with the heaving, vibrant mass of humanity, but only solitary ghosts in hooded green robes populated these streets.

‘A lot of memories here for you, I expect,’ said Tortega.

Kai nodded and said, ‘I really hate you.’

It was foolish to be out on the streets this late, but Roxanne had little choice but to risk the darkness. Though it was night, the Petitioners’ City was never truly dark. Drumfires cast flickering illumination on the walls of the buildings around her, and hooded lanterns hung from hooks on makeshift lamplighter posts.

Fumes from chemical burners clung to leaning structures built from prefabricated panels stolen from the spoil heaps of the Mechanicum or the construction fields before the palace walls. Whip antennae reached up into the smoky haze hanging over the ad hoc city from some of the larger dwellings, and cloth bunting was strung from corner to corner in a failed effort to leaven the appearance of squalor. The wall next to her was plastered with Lectitio Divinitatus flyers, crudely printed on old propaganda sheets.

Roxanne’s every instinct had counselled against her leaving the temple, but the sight of Maya’s crying children had persuaded her that there was no other option. The infections ravaging their tiny frames were well advanced and, without medicine, they would be dead by morning. Two of Maya’s offspring were already laid at the feet of the Vacant Angel while their mother wept and wailed to its featureless face.

Palladis had given her directions to the Serpent House, and Roxanne took care to follow them exactly. She had never travelled so far from the temple, and the experience was fearful and exciting in the same breath. To a girl raised a virtual prisoner by her own family, the sense of danger was liberating and intoxicating.

And just as the city was never truly dark, nor was it ever truly silent.

Metal hammered on metal, children cried, mothers shouted, lunatic preachers read their holy writ of the Emperor, and drunks yelled obscenities at the air. Roxanne had read volumes of history in the family library that spoke of Old Earth’s cities, how they had been teeming slums where millions of people lived cheek by jowl with one another in appalling poverty.

That, her carefully-vetted tutors told her, had been an ancient age, an age before the coming of the Emperor. To Roxanne’s freshly-opened eyes, it didn’t look like much had changed. It seemed absurd that poverty like this could exist in the shadow of the palace, the living symbol of this new age of progress and enlightenment. The gilded halo around the palace bathed the tallest buildings of heroic architects with lambent illumination, but little hint of the light and wonder the Emperor’s armies were bringing to the galaxy fell upon the Petitioners’ City.

Roxanne wondered if her family had sent anyone to find her; if there were, even now, agents of her father scouring the streets of the city looking for his wayward daughter. Perhaps, but most likely not. The dust had yet to settle from the scandal surrounding her last voyage, and she imagined there would be those amongst the family hierarchy who would be more than happy to see her lost amongst the faceless masses.

She put such thoughts from her mind and concentrated on the route ahead.

Dangerous enough to roam the streets of the City this late without letting her mind dwell on the injustices of the world or the life on which she had turned her back. This was her life now, and it was about as far from the one she had known as it was possible to get.

Swathed in a hooded robe of rough muddy brown fabric that Roxanne wouldn’t have dreamed of wearing a few months ago, she was an innocuous enough presence on the streets. The few people she passed carefully avoided her glances and made their own furtive ways through the streets. She kept her hood pulled tight around her head, keeping her features in the shadows and walking with the hunched gait common amongst the city’s inhabitants.

The less notice she attracted the better.

The Serpent House was deep in Dhakal territory, and she most assuredly did not want to run into any of the Babu’s men before she got there. At best they would kill her quickly and rob her. At worst they’d take their time in violating her before dumping her mutilated corpse in the gutter.

Roxanne had seen the body of a girl who’d run into Ghota, the Babu’s most feared enforcer, and she found it impossible to comprehend that a human being could do such terrible things. The girl’s father had brought her to the temple and handed over everything he owned. Palladis had tried to stop the man leaving, knowing full well where he would go, but the father’s grief was unassailable. His dismembered body had been found hanging from iron meat hooks on the edge of the Dhakal territories the following night.

Yes, it was dangerous to be out in the Petitioners’ City after sundown, but Maya’s little ones needed counterbiotics and Antioch was the only chirurgeon who had medicine that hadn’t been cut with too many impurities to do any good. The old man’s prices were ruinous, but that didn’t matter to Palladis when it came to children.

In any case, what price could you put on a life when the temple was never short of money?

The bereaved were generous with their coin, as though fearing any hint of pecuniary reticence would somehow prevent their dead from finding peace. Imperial truth owned to no life beyond the corporeal, that death was the end of a person’s journey, but Roxanne knew better. She had stared into the tenebrous realm that lay beyond the hideously permeable borders of reality, and seen things that made her question everything she had been told.

She shook off such dangerous thoughts, feeling her breath quicken and her heartbeat race. Suppressed memories threatened to surface, horrors of skinless bodies on fire from the marrow, wet organs hanging from ruptured torsos and skulls licked clean from the inside, but she fought to quell them by fixing on something inconsequential.

The wall next to her was daubed with graffiti, and she focussed the entirety of her attention upon it as her memory recalled the smell of blood and the ozone stink of failing shields. It was a mural depicting hulking warriors of the Legiones Astartes atop newly conquered worlds, gaudy in colour and robust in vigour if not aesthetic merit. The artist was clearly ignorant of their true scale, as the armoured figures were not much bigger than the mortal soldiers accompanying them.

Roxanne had seen the terrible might of the Legiones Astartes, and knew just how unnaturally swollen they were, their bulk freakishly ogre-like, yet surprisingly supple and graceful.

The mural had been vandalised, and several of the figures were partially obscured with hurled whitewash and slogans that reassuringly told her that the Emperor protected. The purple of the Emperor’s Children and the blue of the World Eaters was almost completely gone, while the white and ochre green of the Death Guard poked out from numerous angry brush strokes. A Luna Wolf howled from behind a wide splash of paint, while an Iron Warrior’s face had been unfairly hacked from the wall and lay in pieces on the hard-packed earth.

Roxanne’s breathing slowed and she reached out to touch the mural, letting the reassuring solidity of the wall bring her back to a place of equilibrium. She closed her eyes and rested her forehead against the rough brickwork, taking in slow breaths and imagining the expanse of an empty desert wasteland. The metallic reek of innards faded, and the pungent odour of roasting meat and stale sweat returned with its all-too-human aroma. The toxic smell of bac-sticks waxed strong in the mix.

‘In the desert there is no life,’ she said, repeating the mantra her tutors had taught her so long ago. ‘In the desert I am alone and nothing can touch me. I am inviolate.’

‘Too bad you’re far from a desert, little girl,’ grunted a voice behind her.

Roxanne turned in fright, all thoughts of equilibrium and deserts falling from her mind like leaves in autumn. Three men in heavy furs and rough canvas work overalls lounged beside the wall opposite the mural. All three smoked, and clouds of blue hung like a fog over their heads. Swarthy and rough-skinned, they were brutish and clumsy looking, but Roxanne knew better than to dismiss them as common drunks or thugs.

‘I am not looking for trouble,’ said Roxanne, lifting her hands, palm up, towards the men.

They laughed, and a man with thin eyes and a long drooping moustache stepped forward.

He flicked his bac-stick away. ‘That’s too bad, little girl, because trouble’s found you.’

‘Please,’ said Roxanne. ‘If you are Babu Dhakal’s men, you should walk away. It would be better for everyone if you just left me alone. Trust me.’

‘If you know we work for the Babu, then you know we’re not going to let you go,’ said the man, beckoning his companions to his side. Roxanne saw heavy pistols stuffed into the waistbands of their overalls, and crude, hand-made shanks strapped to their thighs. The moustachioed leader pulled a gleaming weapon from his belt, a long knife with the blade angled forward. He lifted it to his lips and ran a yellowed tongue over the cutting edge of the knife. Blood dripped down his chin and he smiled, exposing reddened teeth.

‘You’re from the death church, aren’t you?’ said the man.

‘I am from the Temple of Woe, yes,’ confirmed Roxanne, keeping her voice as neutral as possible. ‘That is why you should leave me alone.’

‘Too late for that, little girl. I’m guessing you’re heading for Antioch’s, and that means you must have plenty of coin to afford his prices. Hand it over now and we’ll go easy on you, maybe only cut you a little.’

‘I cannot do that,’ said Roxanne.

‘Of course you can. Just reach inside that robe and hand it over. Trust me, it’ll be easier for you if you do. Anil and Murat aren’t kind like I am, and they already want to kill you.’

‘If you take my money, you will be killing two children,’ explained Roxanne.

The man shrugged. ‘They won’t be the first. I doubt they’ll be the last.’

With a gesture, the two men either side of the lead thug rushed towards her. She turned and ran for the end of the road, screaming for help though she knew no one would answer. A hand grabbed her robe. She squirmed free. A fist punched her on the shoulder and she stumbled, reaching out to the wall to steady herself.

A portion of the adobe wall came loose and she cried out as she fell to her knees. She found herself face to face with a piece of brickwork bearing the helm of a warrior in armour of red and white. A foot planted itself between her shoulder blades and shoved hard. Roxanne’s face slammed into the earthen street and blood filled her mouth as she bit the inside of her cheek. Rough hands rolled her onto her back.

Roxanne’s hood fell back, along with a knotted bandana, and her assailant leered a gap-toothed grin.

‘Pretty, pretty!’ he spat. His shank caught the light of a nearby torch.

A second pair of hands tore open her robe and Roxanne thrashed in their grip.

‘Get off me!’ she screamed, but Babu Dhakal’s men weren’t listening.

‘I warned you,’ said the leader of the thugs, almost amiably.

‘No,’ said Roxanne. ‘I warned you!’

The thug pawing at her belt suddenly spasmed as though a high voltage electric current was passing through him. Blood-flecked froth burst from behind his teeth and his eyes boiled to glutinous steam within their sockets. He screamed and rolled off Roxanne, clawing at his smoking skull and thrashing as though assaulted by a host of invisible attackers.

‘What did you do?’ snarled the second man, scrambling away in terror.

Roxanne sat up and spat a broken tooth, her anger and hurt too powerful for any thoughts of mercy to intrude. She fixed the frightened man with her gaze and, once again, did the very thing her tutors had always warned her never to do.

The man screamed and bright red blood squirted from his nose and ears. The life went out of him in an instant, and he slumped against the wall like a drunk. Roxanne climbed unsteadily to her feet as the third man backed away from her in horror.

‘You are boksi!’ cried the man. ‘A daemon witch!’

‘I told you to leave me alone,’ said Roxanne. ‘But you wouldn’t listen.’

‘I’ll kill you!’ screamed the man, reaching for his pistol.

Before the weapon cleared his overalls, he fell back with sizzling brain matter leaking from every orifice in his skull. Without a sound, he toppled sideways and his head caved in like an emptied air bladder as it hit the ground.

Roxanne steadied herself against the wall behind her, breathless and appalled at the violence she had unleashed. Swiftly she retrieved her bandana, and pulled up the hood of her robe, lest anyone see her face and recognise her for what she was.

Once again, blood and death had followed her. She was what ancient mariners had once called a Jonah, and it seemed that no matter where she hid, ill-fortune and death would surround her. She hadn’t meant to kill these men, but raw survival instinct had kicked in and there was little she could have done to prevent their deaths.

She saw the clan markings tattooed on the arm of the man she had killed first, and the cold realisation of what she had done flooded her.

These were Babu Dhakal’s men!

He would demand blood in return for their deaths, and the Babu was not a man given to restraint in his vengeance. When retaliation came it would be exponentially worse.

‘Throne, what have I done?’ she whispered.

Roxanne fled into the night.

The skimmer eased through the City of Sight, its blue and amethyst colours bright in the overlong shadows that filled the city’s gloomy precincts. Few statues were raised here, and though many of the pale, columned buildings were grandly shaped and heroically proportioned, they were brooding, monolithic structures that pressed down on the skin of the mountains like architectural black holes, sucking in the available light and warmth of the failing day.

Kai knew he was being melodramatic, a trait he despised in others, but couldn’t help himself from such indulgence. He had long thought himself done with this bleak place, but here he was again, cast back like a failed aspirant.

The image was an apt one, he realised, for wasn’t that exactly what he was?

The hollow mountain loomed above the city, casting its shadow over Kai. Though he affected an air of disinterest, the idea of being taken there sent breathless jolts of fear through his body. He pushed thoughts of that dreadful place from his mind and concentrated on the road ahead. Tortega had turned away from the window, proving that even a fool could sense the weight of solemnity that pervaded the City of Sight. Kai reached out with the tiniest measure of his psychic senses to determine exactly where he was. Thanks to his augmetic eyes, precision-fashioned ocular implants ground and crafted by Mechanicum adepts bonded to House Castana, he had little reason to employ his blindsight, and it took a moment for him to adjust his perceptions from visual to psychic.

He closed his eyes, feeling the weight of the nearby buildings and the aetheric bulk of the many high towers of psykers. It took a moment to orient himself, but in seconds he had shaped the surrounding architecture into ribbons of light and gleaming threads of colour. The skimmer was passing the Gallery of Mirrors, a vast, cathedral-like building through which successful initiates passed on their way to the awe-inspiring caverns beneath the city. Far beneath the palace, they would kneel before the Emperor and have the impossibly complex neural pathways of their mind agonisingly reshaped to better resist the dangers of the warp.

Kai remembered being shepherded through the gallery by a company of Black Sentinels, nervous, excited and unsure of what was to come. He supposed the mirrors were there to give the aspirants a last look at their faces before their eyes were seared from their sockets by a force so potent it was beyond imagining. In the years since Kai had taken that walk, he had never been able to decide if that was merciful or cruel.

He shook off the memory, unwilling to relive such a singular moment in the presence of those who would misread his pained expression as fear of where they were going. Instead, he cast his mind-sense forward, along the flat plane of the road towards the tallest tower of the city. Alone of all the structures around it, the Whispering Tower shone with a lattice of silver light, though it was a light that existed beyond the sight of most mortals.

Yet for all its brightness, its glow was eclipsed utterly by the burning lance of light that speared from the hollow mountain. That brilliance was of another order of magnitude entirely, and Kai was able to tune it out of his perceptions only with difficulty.

‘Why are there no telepaths on the streets?’ asked Tortega. ‘I’m only seeing servitors, sherpa-couriers and a few Mechanicum thralls.’

Kai opened his eyes, and the cityscape of light and colour vanished from his mind, replaced with the prosaic geometry of its mundane stones and stolid angles. Though he had jumped at the chance to have his sight restored, it was at moments like this he almost wished he had not.

‘The students and adepts of the Telepathica mostly travel by means of a network of tunnels and crossways cut into the rock beneath the city. Very few come above ground if they can help it.’

‘Why is that?’

Kai shrugged. ‘Feeling sunlight on your skin is just another reminder of what you’ve lost.’

‘Of course, I see,’ nodded Tortega, as though grasping some complex insight into the human psyche instead of something that should have been obvious.

‘The city walls and the rock below us are threaded with psi-disruptive crystals, which makes it quieter too,’ said Kai. ‘Travelling above ground is noisy for an astropath. You keep hearing undisciplined thoughts, random chatter and wild emotions. You’re taught to tune it out, of course, but it’s always there in the background. It’s just easier to travel where you don’t hear it.’

‘Are you hearing anything now?’

‘Just your incessant prattle,’ said Kai.

Tortega sighed. ‘Your hostility is just a defence mechanism, Kai. Let it go.’

‘Spare me,’ said Kai, resting his head on the soft fabric of the headrest and closing his eyes. His blindsight picked out the shimmering glow of the Whispering Tower and the minds that waited at its entrance.

One was welcoming, while the other bristled with hostility not even a shielded helmet could contain.

The skimmer glided to a halt and the batwing doors hissed as they swooped up with a hiss of high-end pneumatics. Three of the armsmen climbed from the skimmer, while the fourth gestured to Kai and Tortega to disembark with a curt swipe of his shotgun barrel. Tortega hurriedly got out, but Kai poured himself another measure of amasec, taking his time and delaying his inevitable fate as long as possible.

‘Get out,’ said the armsman.

‘One last drink,’ said Kai. ‘Trust me, they don’t have anything this good in there.’

He drained the glass in one swallow, and coughed as the liquor set his throat on fire.

‘You done?’ asked the blank visor across from him.

‘So it would appear,’ said Kai, lifting the bottle from the chill-bar and tucking it under his arm as he climbed from the comfortable warmth of the skimmer.

The freezing air of the mountains hit him like a blow, and he took a frigid breath that burned his throat more thoroughly than the amasec. He’d forgotten just how bone-achingly cold it was here. Kai had forgotten a lot of things about the City of Sight, but he had never forgotten the kindness of the woman who stepped from the arched entrance to the tower.

‘Hello, Kai,’ said Aniq Sarashina. ‘It is good to see you again.’

‘Mistress Sarashina,’ he said with a short bow. ‘I hope you will not take this the wrong way, but I cannot say the same.’

‘No, I expect not,’ she said with a sad, but wry smile. ‘You never could conceal how much you wanted to be away from this place.’

‘Yet here I am,’ said Kai.

The man beside Sarashina took a step forward, his bullish manner more than matched by the rippling haze of belligerence surrounding him. Encased in beetle-black armour and with the craggy, unforgiving lines of his face concealed by a reflective helm, he wore his power like a mailed fist.

He received a rolled parchment from the lead armsman and broke the waxen seal. Satisfied with its contents, he nodded and said, ‘Transfer is acknowledged. Kai Zulane is now in the custody of the Black Sentinels.’

‘Custody, Captain Golovko?’ said Kai, as a group of soldiers in contoured breastplates of burnished obsidian and tapered helms, not unlike an early make of Legiones Astartes armour, emerged from the tower. Each was armed with a long, black-bladed lance, their hafts topped with sparkling crystalline spearheads.

‘Yes, Zulane. And it’s Major General Golovko now,’ said the man.

‘You’ve gone up in the world,’ said Kai. ‘Were all the senior members of your organisation killed in some terrible accident?’

‘Kai, one does not begin the healing process with insults,’ said Tortega.

‘Oh, shut up, you bloody imbecile!’ said Kai. ‘Just go away, please. Take your precious patriarch’s skimmer and get out of here. I can’t stand to look at you any more.’

‘I’m just trying to help,’ said Tortega with a hurt pout.

‘Then leave,’ said Kai. ‘That’s how you can help me best.’

Kai felt a soft hand take his arm, and calming energy filled him, easing his barbed thoughts and imparting a measure of serenity he hadn’t felt in months.

‘It’s alright, Chirurgeon Tortega,’ said Aniq Sarashina. ‘Kai is home and he is one of us. You have done all that you can, but it is time to let us take care of him.’

Tortega nodded curtly and turned on his heel. He paused, as though about to say something, then thought the better of it and climbed back into the skimmer. The Castana armsmen followed him, and the doors slammed down with a solid clunk.

The skimmer spun on its axis and sped away as though eager to be gone.

‘What an odious little shit,’ said Kai, as the skimmer vanished from sight.

Two

The cryptaesthesian
Temple of Woe
Homecoming

In the depths of the Whispering Tower, a lone figure hooded in a robe of embroidered jade stood in the centre of a domed chamber that echoed with the myriad voices of a departed choir. Garbled and indistinct sounds swirled around him like a corrupted vox-signal or a transmission hurled across galactic space in ages past.

At the dome’s apex was a crystalline lattice pulsing with internal illumination that cascaded from its multi-angled facets in a waterfall of shimmering light. Evander Gregoras stood in the centre of the swirling mist, his arms sweeping out like the conductor of an invisible orchestra. Hazy shapes formed around him, innumerable faces, objects and places. They surfaced in the light like phantoms then faded into the mist, each one summoned and dismissed with a precise gesture.

The voices rose and diminished, snatches of wasted words and redundant phrases that would be meaningless to anyone not trained in the art of the cryptaesthesian. Gregoras sifted the Bleed with the efficiency of a surgeon, discarding that which was of no importance and memorising those items that piqued his interest.

Gregoras was not a man whose company others craved. Though entirely average in appearance, he had seen the secret, ugly face of humanity and such sights made a man melancholy of aspect. Where others might talk of love, truth and a new golden age, Gregoras saw lust, deceit and the same tired melodramas played out in the psychic waste of every communiqué that passed through the City of Sight.

Never more so than now.

With the treachery of the Warmaster and the departure of Rogal Dorn’s annihilation fleet, the astro-telepathic choirs were operating beyond capacity to satisfy the demands of waging a distant war against this rebellion. Horus Lupercal had cast his treacherous spark into an unstable galaxy, and entire systems were declaring for his forces in wave after wave of defection.

It seemed the Emperor’s dream of galactic unity was slipping away day by day.

Aetheric space was awash with telepathic communication, and messages were being hurled into the void that screamed for help or simply blared hatred. The trap chambers beneath the iron towers of the city were filled with psychic residue from the thousands of messages, and Gregoras’s cryptaesthesians could barely keep up with the brutal pace. In the face of treason, every message sent to Terra had to be carefully scrutinised, no matter how mundane it might appear. The Bleed was scoured for signs of encryption that might be a communication intended for embedded agents of the Warmaster.

Insane amounts of communication traffic were coming from the palace every day, and the City of Sight’s astropaths were burning out with greater rapidity than ever before. The captains of the Black Ships attempted to spread their nets ever wider for emergent psykers to replace these burn-outs, but the war had cut off many of the more promising systems.

New astropaths arrived every week, but the Imperium’s need was continually outstripping demand.

Yet amongst this fresh influx there was one addition to the tower’s roster of astro-telepaths that Gregoras believed to be a liability.

He had railed against allowing Kai Zulane to return to the tower, arguing that the man should be dismissed to the hollow mountain, but the Choirmaster had ignored his objections. Sensing Sarashina’s hand in Zulane’s repatriation, Gregoras had confronted her at the Obsidian Arch as she returned from another conference with the Sigillite’s emissaries. Her steps were weary, but Gregoras had cared nothing for her lethargy.

‘Your student returns to us then?’ he had said, not bothering to disguise his venom.

She turned to him, and he felt her brief surge of irritation, quickly suppressed.

‘Not now, Evander,’ she had said. ‘Can I at least enter the tower before you berate me?’

‘This won’t wait.’

She sighed. ‘Kai Zulane. Yes, he will be here within the week.’

‘I assume you know Castana are just dumping him here to save face with the Thirteenth Legion. If you cannot fix him, the blame falls on us, not them.’

‘I will not need to “fix him”, because he is not broken,’ Sarashina had said, walking briskly towards the tower. ‘Everyone experiences loss and trauma at some point in their service.’

Gregoras shook his head. ‘Not like Zulane did. He and the girl should have had a bullet in the back of their heads as soon as the Space Marines found them. Verduchina knows it, so does the Choirmaster, but not you. Why is that?’

‘Kai is stronger than any telepath I have ever trained,’ said Sarashina. ‘He is more resilient than he knows.’

‘But what they saw and heard…’

‘Was more terrible than you or I can imagine, but they survived, and I will not condemn them for that. I believe they survived for a reason, and I would know what that reason is.’

‘The Vatic have seen nothing to validate that belief,’ said Gregoras. ‘I would know of it.’

‘Not even you can uncover every potential, Evander.’

‘True, but I see more than you. Enough to know that Kai Zulane should not be here.’

‘What do you know?’ asked Sarashina. ‘What have your grubby little scavengers found that I should hear?’

‘Nothing concrete,’ admitted Gregoras, ‘but there are dark currents in the echoes of every vision we parse from the Bleed, hidden things without form or presence. I do not understand them, for they do not appear in any of my oneirocritica.’

‘You have consulted the Alchera Mundi?’

‘Of course, but even in Yun’s collection I can find no correlation of imagery beyond the vulgar texts of pre-Unity dreamers: daemons, gods and the like.’

‘You should know better than to give credence to the dreams of those who professed belief in the divine and the sorceries of magicians. I am surprised at you, Evander.’

No more had been said, and despite his continued objections, the Choirmaster had allowed Kai Zulane to return to the City of Sight. For once, Gregoras had found himself in accord with Maxim Golovko, a situation that was almost too ridiculous for words.

He pushed thoughts of Kai Zulane aside as yet more psychic emanations spilled into the chamber, the aftermath of the messages sent in the wake of Abir Ibn Khaldun’s communion with the X Legion. The knowledge that Ferrus Manus was racing ahead of his main fleet for personal revenge had prompted a barrage of messages from Rogal Dorn, urging caution and rigid adherence to his order of battle, but whether any would be heeded was another matter entirely. With wide sweeps of his hands and deft strokes of his fingertips, Gregoras began the process of psychic examination, hoping he might see yet another fragmentary hint of the pattern that had been his passion for over a century.

Gregoras sat at the crossroads of the Imperium, where lines of communication crossed and re-crossed. From here, expedition fleets were despatched, recalled or regrouped. The fate of tens of thousands of worlds was decided within the walls of the palace, and it all passed through the City of Sight. To sift through the vast quantity of psychic debris that was left in its wake was the task of the cryptaesthesians, a task few relished but which Evander Gregoras had made his life’s work.

Telepaths on every world of the Imperium had been sending their thoughts to Terra for nearly two centuries, and each one had eventually come to him in this chamber. They spoke of wars, of lost branches of the species, of heroes and dastards, of loyalty and betrayal and all the millions of trivial matters inbetween.

He had sifted the psychic waste of millions of astro-telepaths for over a hundred years, and uncovered all manner of hidden vice, greed and sedition in the detritus of transmitted messages. He had seen the very worst of people, the dark, petty, ridiculous, malicious subtexts hidden in a thousand different places in everything they said without ever realising.

And amid the countless dream-borne messages that came to the City of Sight, Evander Gregoras had begun to see a pattern emerge. For decades he had studied any Bleed that carried a tantalising hint of this emergent cohesion, learning more of its brilliant complexity with every scrap he uncovered. Perhaps only one in every hundred messages would contain a veiled reference to it, then one in a thousand, ten thousand. Each time, the truth of the message would be veiled in secrecy or lunacy, buried in subtextual codes so subtle that few would ever recognise it as a cipher – even the senders of such messages.

Through the decades, it became clear that there was a secret to the Imperium that was known only to a fragmented diaspora of madmen who were wholly ignorant of each other’s existence, yet who hurled their desperate messages into the void in the impossible hope that their warning would be heeded.

Only here in the Whispering Tower did their disparate scraps converge, like a single song straining to be heard amid a cacophony of voices.

Gregoras had not fully deciphered the truth of this song, but had come to one inescapable conclusion.

It was getting louder every day.

Dawn brought light, but no respite from the cold. The mountains above were achingly white with snow, but little of that lay upon the roofs of the Petitioners’ City. Thousands of people clustered together in such confined spaces raised the ambient temperature enough to prevent the snow from lying, but kept it cold enough to bite. Roxanne pulled her robes tighter about her body and shivered as she pushed open the sheet steel door of the temple. It squealed noisily, setting her teeth on edge, and slammed heavily behind her as she entered the echoing space given over to grief.

Like most buildings in the Petitioners’ City, the temple had been constructed from random materials appropriated from the endless cycles of construction, repair and rebuilding that now engulfed the palace. Its walls were raised with marble offcuts stacked and mortared by itinerant migou expelled from the Masonic Guilds for habitual usage of narcotics.

That stonework had been shaped and carved into a menagerie of forms: distraught angels with upraised arms, weeping cherubs with silver trumpets and great birds with golden wings dipped in sorrow. Mosaics of mourners fashioned in Gyptian pebble looked down from brick corbels and death masks of stillborn children stared out from painted frescoes assembled from crushed glass.

A mish-mash of pew-like benches filled the temple, many occupied by wailing families gathered round the body of a loved one. Sometimes these bodies were old, mostly they were not. Roxanne kept her head bowed as people looked up at the sound of the door slamming. She was known here, but not known enough for people to want to speak to her, which was just how she liked it. Someone like her would attract attention, and that was the last thing she wanted.

At the far end of the temple was its crowning glory, a tall statue of dark hue that had come to be known as the Vacant Angel. Thanks to some imperfection in the Syryan nephrite, the warmasons had rejected the base material and cast it on the spoil heaps. Like most things discarded by the palace, it had found its way to the Petitioners’ City.

Carved in the form of a kneeling man, its muscular body was classically proportioned and in need of finishing. The face was blank, no doubt intended to be completed in the likeness of some Imperial hero by a Masonic sculptor. It had stood in the temple for over a year, but Palladis had – for reasons he kept to himself – chosen not to give it a face, though Roxanne could never shake the feeling it was looking at her with eyes just waiting to be carved.

Compared to the chambers in which Roxanne had spent her youth, the temple’s ornamentation was crude and unsophisticated, yet the grieving statue possessed a grace that far surpassed anything she had grown up around. What made it all the more incredible was that it was all the work of one man.

Palladis Novandio stood beside Maya, who knelt weeping at the feet of the Vacant Angel. She cradled an unmoving infant close to her breast, as though expecting to suckle it once again. Maya’s tears fell on the child’s eyes and rolled down its cold cheeks. Palladis looked up and gave Roxanne a nod of welcome as she took a seat to one side of the nave. She sat within sight of the Imperium’s secular heart, and yet here she was in a temple. The thought made her smile, as precious little else had done since she had returned to Terra in disgrace.

A stoop-shouldered man touched her arm, and Roxanne jumped. She hadn’t heard him approach. He stood next to her, his face draped with the emptiness of loss.

‘Who have you lost?’ he asked.

‘No one,’ she replied. ‘At least no one recently. You?’

‘My youngest sons,’ said the man. ‘That’s my wife at the statue.’

‘You are Estaben?’

The man nodded.

‘I’m so sorry for your loss,’ she said.

The man shrugged, as though the matter were of no consequence. ‘Maybe better this way.’

Before Roxanne could ask him what he meant, Estaben handed her a folded sheaf of papers and made his way down the nave. He limped over to Maya and lightly took her by the shoulder. She shook her head, but her husband bent to whisper in her ear and her wails took on a new pitch of misery as she put down her dead son.

Estaben led her away from the statue, and Roxanne bowed her head as they passed, ostensibly leaving them to their sorrow, but secretly fearing their grief and ill-fortune might be contagious. She looked up in time to see Palladis taking a seat in the pew in front of her. She gave him a weak smile.

‘Did you get the medicine?’ he asked without preamble.

She nodded. ‘Yes, though it took a while to rouse Antioch from a qash stupor.’

‘The man likes to sample his own wares,’ said Palladis, shaking his head. ‘Foolish.’

‘Here,’ said Roxanne, handing over a cloth bag the size of her fist. ‘It should be enough for both children.’

Palladis took the medicine and nodded. His hands were rough and callused, the nails permanently edged in black from long years working stone with rasp and chisel. He was a man of middling years, with greying hair and a face weathered like the side of a cliff from a lifetime spent in the open air, carving statues, columns and detailed adornments for pediments and vaulted arches.

‘Maya will be grateful to you,’ said Palladis. ‘Once she has finished her mourning.’

‘You paid for it – I just went to get it.’

‘At no small risk to your person,’ pointed out Palladis. ‘You encountered no problems?’

She lowered her head, knowing she had to tell him what had happened, but fearing his disappointment more than any censure.

‘Roxanne?’ he said when she didn’t answer.

‘I ran into some of Babu Dhakal’s men,’ she said at last.

‘I see,’ said Palladis. ‘What happened?’

‘They attacked me. I killed them.’

He sighed. ‘How?’

‘How do you think?’

Palladis raised a placatory hand. ‘Did anyone see you?’

‘I don’t know, probably,’ said Roxanne. ‘I didn’t mean to kill them, not at first, but they’d have cut my throat as soon as they were done with me.’

‘I know, but you must be more careful,’ said Palladis. ‘The Babu is a man of great rages, and he will find out what happened to his men. He will come here, that much is certain.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to bring you trouble. That’s all I ever seem to do.’

Palladis laced his big, callused hands in her fingers and gave a slow smile.

‘One problem at a time, Roxanne,’ he said. ‘Let tomorrow look after itself. Today we are alive and have medicine to give two children a chance to see another dawn. If you learn anything in your time here, let it be that death surrounds us in all its myriad forms, just waiting to catch you unawares. Bend all your efforts to keeping it at bay. Honour death in all its forms. Appease it and you will be spared its cruel attentions for a time.’

He spoke with the passion of a zealot, yet there was kindness in his eyes. Roxanne knew little of his past, save that he had once been a master craftsman under the suzerainty of Warmason Vadok Singh. That he had suffered loss was obvious, but he had never spoken of what had driven him to raise a temple from the ashes and debris of the Petitioners’ City.

Roxanne bowed her head. She knew all too well how easily death could reach out and completely change the course of a life, even one spared its attention.

‘What did Estaben give you?’ asked Palladis.

She looked at the papers as though seeing them for the first time. The paper was thin and looked like whatever was printed on it now wasn’t the first ink it had known.

‘The usual,’ she said, flicking through the palimpsest and picking out phrases at random. She read them aloud.

‘The Emperor of Mankind is the Light and the Way, and all his actions are for the benefit of mankind, which is his people. The Emperor is God and God is the Emperor, so it is taught in the Lectitio Divinitatus, and above all things, the Emperor will protect–’

‘Let me see that,’ said Palladis, with a sharpness she had not heard in his voice before.

She held out the pamphlet, and he snatched it from her hand.

‘Not this Lectitio Divinitatus nonsense again,’ he said with a sneer of contempt before ripping the pamphlet in two. ‘A bunch of desperate people beguiled by a glittering light and who have yet to discover that all that glitters is not gold.’

‘They’re harmless enough,’ said Roxanne with a shrug. ‘It’s comforting even.’

‘Nonsense!’ snapped Palladis. ‘It’s dangerous self-delusion, and I hear they’ve even spread these fantasies off-world. This is the very worst kind of lie, for it comforts people with a hope of protection that does not exist.’

‘Sorry,’ said Roxanne. ‘He just gave me it. I didn’t ask him to.’

Palladis was immediately contrite. ‘Yes, of course, I’m sorry. I know that, but I don’t want you reading anything like this. There is only one truth, and that is the finality of death. This is the worst kind of lie, because, let me tell you, the Emperor most assuredly does not protect.’

Kai had heard a wise man say that you can never go home, and until now he had never understood the sense of that. Born to a wealthy family of the Merican hinterlands, Kai had travelled extensively with his father, a cartel agent who brokered trade contracts between Terran conglomerates and the surviving mercantile interests of newly-compliant worlds.

As a youngster, Kai had scaled the heights of the mid-Atalantic ridges, explored the majestic ruins of Kalagann’s cities of Ursh, bathed in the glow of the pan-pacific magma-vents, and descended into the Mariana Canyon to gaze in awe at the great cliff sculptures carved by geological artists of a forgotten age. He had spent much of each year travelling the globe, following his father from negotiation to negotiation.

Life had been one adventure after another, but no matter how exhilarating each trip had been, Kai would always relish the sight of the family home, perched high on the cliffs of what had once been a carven monument to long-dead kings of antiquity. His mother would be there with a welcoming smile that was just a little bit sad because she knew it wouldn’t be long until her husband and son would be travelling again.

Home was more than just a physical place, it was a state of mind, and even after he had come of age, and the men of the Black Ships had come for him, he always longed to return home to see that sad, welcoming smile.

The City of Sight had become his home, but it was one to which Kai had never wanted to return. The interior of the tower was lightless, cold and high-ceilinged, but Kai’s augmetic implants compensated for the low light and his surroundings swam into focus with a lambent green glow.

It wasn’t that the builders had set out to make the tower inhospitable, it was more the purpose it had been put to and the mien of its inhabitants that coloured it so. Kai imagined that with the gilt-edged hangings and dazzling lights that illuminated every other structure in the palace, the Whispering Tower could be just as impressive.

The stonework of its walls tapered inwards, planed smooth and cut with mason’s marks that helped the newly blind discern their location. Here and there, an inset whisper stone glinted in the dim light, and Kai wondered what secrets they passed between each other in such troubled times. Kai followed Sarashina along the narrowing chamber towards a curved wall, machined smooth and silver, incongruously modern amidst the ancient stone. Two Black Sentinels stood guard before a psi-sealed doorway in the silver wall, and they stood aside as Golovko waved a data wand before them. Kai watched the glowing hash of code cyphers reflected in the visors of the soldiers, automatically storing the binaric information before it faded.

The door slid open, and a cold gust of air sighed from within. Kai shivered as the psychically charged air caressed the skin of his face. Inside the silver chamber was a grav-lift shaped in the form of a double helix that ran the full length of the tower. A nimbus of light surrounded the gravity field, and Kai’s augmetics picked out the differing waveforms that rippled up and down the shimmering cascade.

Around the outer walls of this silver chamber, sealed doors led into iron-clad mindhalls, where choirs of astropaths distilled messages sent from all across the galaxy, while others led to vaulted libraries, filled with arcana gathered from the distant corners of Terra.

‘We are going to the novitiates level,’ said Sarashina, stepping into the leftmost curve of the double helix. The grav-lift enfolded her in its gentle embrace and carried her with smooth grace down into the tower. Kai hesitated at the edge of the light, knowing that once he took this step, there would be no going back.

‘Hurry up, Zulane,’ said Golovko. ‘I have better things to do than baby-sit you.’

‘I seriously doubt that,’ said Kai, stepping into the light.

Any step was a good one if it carried him away from Golovko.

The light surrounded Kai, and carried him into the tower. He travelled down the spiral, turned around as he descended into the bowels of his former abode. He passed numerous jutting steps where he could have stepped from the grav lift, but Sarashina had said they were going to the novitiates level, and that was right at the bottom of the Whispering Tower.

At last Kai felt the reassuring feel of solid ground beneath him, and stepped out of the light. His eyes adjusted immediately to the brightly lit surroundings. Not everyone who navigated these passages was blind, and bare lumen globes hung from the brickwork ceiling on linked loops of brass cabling. This chamber had been hacked from the bedrock of the mountains and faced with ceramic tiles of bottle green. It had the feel of a medicae chamber, and a number of locked doors led deeper into the guts of the tower. Some led to the novice libraries, where new additions to the tower learned astropathic shorthand, common symbols and the basic mantras of the nuncio. Others led to the novices’ cells, yet more to communal facilities for eating and ablutions, while yet others ended in hermetically-sealed isolation chambers.

In the moments before Golovko and his Sentinels arrived, Kai took a moment to study his former mentor.

Aniq Sarashina had aged since Kai had seen her last, and the naked light from the lumens was unflattering. Her hair had lost the last of its blonde lustre and was now completely silver. Puckered lines radiating from the plastic hemispheres inserted into her eye sockets had grown deeper and more pronounced. She had been old when Kai had last been here, but she now looked positively ancient.

‘Do I look so different?’ asked Sarashina, and Kai blushed at being caught in his frank appraisal of her appearance.

‘You look older,’ he said at last.

‘I am older, Kai,’ said Sarashina. ‘I have travelled the warp for too many years, and it has left its mark upon me.’

She reached up and ran her fingers over the rumpled skin of his face, her touch feather-light and tender. ‘As it has on you too.’

The curse of the astropath was premature ageing, and Kai didn’t need Sarashina to tell him that he had lost the clean lines of his high cheekbones and his growth of fine, salt and pepper hair. Though he was in his late thirties, he had the appearance of a man in his fifties, at least. The face that looked back at him in the mirror – on those days he could face his reflection – was gaunt and hollow, with pinched cheeks and sunken eyes. Only the most expensive juvenat treatments could conceal the damage constant warp travel wreaked on a human being, and no astropath, even one of House Castana, was worth that indulgence of vanity.

Kai backed away from her touch. ‘I never thought I would return here,’ he said, anxious to change the subject.

‘Few of us ever do,’ agreed Sarashina.

‘Should I be honoured at being one of those few?’

‘That depends on how you view your return.’

‘As a punishment,’ said Kai. ‘What other way is there to interpret it?’

‘I will leave you to ponder that question for now,’ said Sarashina as Golovko stepped from the grav-lift.

His Black Sentinels swiftly followed, and when they were all assembled, Sarashina unlocked the door to her immediate left. Kai frowned at this new direction.

‘I am not a novice,’ he said. ‘This route leads to the training halls set aside for initiates of the nuncio.’

‘It does indeed, Kai,’ agreed Sarashina. ‘Where else would your training begin?’

‘Begin? I’ve served the Telepathica for over a decade, and I know the rites of incubation. I don’t need to be treated like a child.’

‘We’ll treat you how we damn well please,’ snapped Golovko, pushing him towards the open door. ‘You don’t have any say in the matter, and if it was up to me, I’d never have allowed you back. You’re dangerous, I can feel it.’

‘You should watch those “feelings”, Golovko,’ said Kai, shrugging off the man’s grip. ‘Things like that will get the psi-hounds sniffing around you. And I don’t think you’ve got what it takes to cut it here.’

‘Enough, both of you,’ said Sarashina. ‘Your petty posturing is ridiculous, and will only cause tremors in the aether.’

Kai said nothing, knowing she was right and remembering the low-grade irritation he’d felt whenever outsiders had let their emotions get the better of them in close proximity to a whisper stone. Without further protest, Kai followed Sarashina along the passageway, the brickwork faced with tiles of ochre ceramic and the glow of the entrance hall fading behind them. Reinforced doors punctuated its length, each one marked with a number and name. Within each marked cell, an initiate of the Scholastica Psykana slumbered, perhaps dreaming, perhaps not. With the psi-shielded doors, it was impossible to know for sure. The darkness soon became absolute, yet Kai could still see perfectly well.

‘You are not using your blindsight,’ said Sarashina, with a slight incline of her head. Kai thought he detected a hint of disappointment in her tone.

‘No, my augmetics allow me to see perfectly well in the darkness.’

‘I know that, but what need of them did you have?’

‘I didn’t like being blind. Properly blind, I mean. I missed reading.’

‘There are books for those without eyes.’

‘I know, but I prefer to let the words come to me,’ said Kai. ‘There is more to the written word than lifting the words from the page with my fingertips. Language has visual beauty that touch-script can never match.’

‘I would debate that with you, but that is a discussion for late at night with a good book between us and a pot of hot caffeine. Could it be that you wished eyes again to hold onto some aspect of your life before entering the Telepathica?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Kai. ‘Maybe. I don’t see how it’s important.’

‘It may be crucial to understanding why you can no longer master the nuncio and open yourself to the dreams of your brothers.’

‘I know the nuncio,’ said Kai defensively. ‘I mastered it within a year.’

‘Then why are you here? Why does House Castana send its pre-eminent astropath back to the City of Sight?’

Kai did not answer her, and she stopped beside the open door of a cell.

‘I am here to help you, Kai,’ said Sarashina. ‘You were my greatest student, and if you have failed, then I have failed.’

‘No,’ said Kai. ‘It’s not that, it’s just… what happened on the Argo…’

Sarashina raised a hand to stop him.

‘Do not speak of it here while others are abed,’ she said, gesturing to the rows of cells that lined the corridor. ‘Sleep. Meditate for a while if it helps you. Refresh yourself, and I will speak to you in the morning.’

Kai nodded. Though his thoughts ran amok, his body craved sleep, and no matter that the bed of a novice was far from comfortable, it would be welcome. He stepped into the cell, catching a ghostly susurration of a distant voice in the darkness as he crossed the threshold. A whisper stone glinted on each side of the doorway, and he wondered into whose dream or memory he had briefly intruded.

Memories were all too common in the walls of the City of Sight, and most of them were ones you wouldn’t want. No one dwelled too long on memories if they valued their sanity.

Kai knew that better than anyone.

The door to Kai’s cell closed with a heavy thud of wood on stone. There was no click of a lock, as was common for novice cells, but he could sense the presence of two Black Sentinels outside. Sarashina might talk to him like a prodigal son, but Golovko was another matter entirely. Kai could only imagine the nightmares Golovko’s bilious presence was provoking among the true novices.

His travel trunk hadn’t yet made it to his cell, and he supposed the Black Sentinels were examining his personal effects for any hint of something dangerous. They wouldn’t find anything. Kai had wanted nothing from the Argo, and his possessions amounted to little more than a few undershirts, his hygiene kit, a finely-tailored suit from the seamstress-houses of the Nihon peninsula, and, of course, his many leather-bound oneirocritica.

The books would mean nothing to the Black Sentinels, but the cryptaesthesians would examine them thoroughly to ensure there was no latent symbolism that was cause for alarm.

They wouldn’t find anything, but he understood they had to check.

The interior of the cell was bare and devoid of anything that might have indicated who had lived here before him. That was sensible, for any lingering sense of a previous occupant would influence Kai’s dreaming. A cot bed lay along one wall, with a simple footlocker at its base. A small writing desk and chair sat opposite the bed, and a black notebook lay on a blotting pad, next to an inkhorn and pen.

Empty shelves lined the wall above the desk, ready to be filled with an astropath’s steadily growing oneirocritica collection. The shelves were short, for a novice would take time to build a comprehensive library of imagery, symbolism and dream recordings.

Kai placed the bottle of amasec he’d taken from the Castana skimmer on the table and lifted the notebook from the desk. He idly fanned its thick pages, smelling the crisp newness of the paper. Each page was blank, ready to be filled with dream perceptions, and he carefully placed the book down. It was empty, but the potential of what might fill its pages was like a loaded gun.

Given his level of expertise, Kai wanted to feel offended at being put in a novice’s cell, but the anger wouldn’t come. It made sense, and he realised the lack of responsibility it implied was refreshing. He lay back on the bed and closed his eyes, letting his breathing slow as the ache of psi-sickness gnawed at his bones.

Though his thoughts were troubled, sleep was a state few astropaths had trouble attaining. With the right mantras and incubation techniques, any state of mind was possible.

Sleep came easily to Kai, but his dreams were not restful.

Three

The best move
Rub’ al Khali
Arzashkun

‘Your Empress is exposed,’ said the Choirmaster of Astropaths with a grin.

‘I am aware of that,’ replied Sarashina, moving the carved piece of coral from the ocean world of Laeran across the board. ‘Do you think this is the first time I have played regicide?’

Nemo Zhi-Meng smiled and shook his head. ‘Of course not, but I do not want to win through your inattention.’

‘You are assuming you are going to win.’

‘I normally do.’

‘You won’t today,’ said Sarashina, as Zhi-Meng took a Castellan with his Chevalier and laid it on the carpeted floor. The board and its pieces had been a gift of the Phoenician himself, and the ornamentation on each figurine was wondrous. Each figure was worked to an obsessive degree, with a character all of its own, as one would expect from the hand of a primarch who was the embodiment of such attention to detail. The feel of them was exquisite, and to touch such pieces was as pleasurable as the game itself.

‘I think you are wrong,’ said Zhi-Meng as Sarashina pushed her Divinitarch across the board.

‘You should think again,’ said Sarashina, reclining on the wealth of sumptuous cushions spread over the floor of the Choirmaster’s chambers. ‘You see?’

Zhi-Meng leaned over the board and laughed as he perceived the arrangement of pieces on the grid.

‘Inconceivable!’ he said, clapping his thin, sculptor’s hands. On the heart finger of his left hand was an onyx ring carved with intertwined symbols that might have been language, but more likely to be ornamentation. Zhi-Meng had told her the ring was purchased from a man who claimed to have journeyed from the Fourth Dominion, but Sarashina suspected this was another one of the Choirmaster’s mischievous boasts. If he had retained his eyes, they would have twinkled as he told the story. Instead, his almond-shaped eyes were sewn shut, telling anyone who knew of such things that he had been blinded over a century ago when such techniques were common.

The Choirmaster shook his head and he scanned the board again, as though checking he was truly beaten. ‘I am defeated by the assassin’s blade hidden in the velvet sleeve. And here I thought I had planned enough moves ahead to win with ease.’

‘A good regicide player thinks five moves ahead,’ said Sarashina, ‘but a great regicide player–’

‘Only thinks one move ahead, but it is always the best move,’ finished Zhi-Meng, stroking the long forks of his white beard. ‘If you’re going to quote Guilliman to me, at least have the decency to let me win first.’

‘Maybe next time,’ answered Sarashina as a blinded servitor entered the Choirmaster’s chambers. Robed in white and with no thoughts of its own, it was a ghostly apparition, its presence visible as a blur of murky light in her mind. Elements of the servitor’s brain had been removed with gemynd-shears, and only the most rudimentary cognitive functions remained.

‘Do you know why I insist we play regicide?’ asked Zhi-Meng.

‘To show off?’

‘Partly,’ admitted Zhi-Meng, ‘but there’s more to it than that. Regicide helps us develop patience and discipline in choosing between alternatives when an impulsive decision seems very attractive.’

‘Always teaching, is that it?’

‘Learning is always easier if the subject doesn’t know it’s being taught.’

‘Are you teaching me?’

‘Both of us, I think,’ said Zhi-Meng as the servitor deposited a steel-jacketed pot of tisane, and the smell of warm, sweetened honey came to Sarashina.

‘You and your sweet tooth,’ she said.

‘It is a weakness, I confess,’ said Zhi-Meng, dismissing the servitor with a gesture and reaching over to pour two small cups of the warm liquid. He handed her a cup and she sipped it gingerly, savouring the sweet taste.

‘It gives me solace,’ said Zhi-Meng, with a smile. ‘And in such times, solace must be taken wherever it can be found, don’t you agree?’

‘I thought that was what the qash in the hookah pipe was for.’

‘Solace comes in many forms,’ replied Zhi-Meng, removing his belt and letting his robe fall to the floor. His body was thin and wiry, but Sarashina knew that there was strength in those limbs that belied their frail appearance. His skin was parchment taut and pale, every centimetre covered in tattoos inked by his own hand with a needle said to have been snapped from the spine of a fossilised beast found in the bedrock of the Merican rad-wastes. A cornucopia of warding imagery was wrought on the canvas of his flesh: hawk-headed birds, snakes devouring their tails, apotropaic crosses, eyes of aversion and gorgoneion.

That such symbols flew in the face of the Imperial Truth mattered little to the Choirmaster, for he was the oldest living astropath in the City of Sight, and his knowledge of what protective wards would guard against the dangers of the immaterium was second to none.

He lay down next to Sarashina, and he stroked her arm with great tenderness. She smiled and rolled onto her front, letting Zhi-Meng massage her back and ease the tensions of yet another arduous day of passing increasingly desperate messages from the mindhalls to the Conduit and onwards to their intended recipients. Zhi-Meng had studied with the ancient wise men who had dwelled in these mountains before the coming of the Emperor and his grand vision of a palace crowning the world, and his touch spread healing warmth through her aged bones.

‘I could let you do that all night,’ she purred.

‘I would let you,’ he replied. ‘But such is not our lot, my dear.’

‘Shame.’

‘Tell me of the day’s messages,’ he asked.

‘Why? You already know what’s passed through the tower today.’

‘True, but I like to hear what you think of it,’ he said, working a stubborn knot of tension in her lower back.

‘We have been getting a lot of traffic from worlds demanding Army fleets to keep them safe from any rebel forces.’

‘Why not ask for Legion forces?’

‘I think people are afraid that if four Legions can turn traitor then maybe others will too.’

‘Interesting,’ said the Choirmaster. His hand kneaded the bunched muscles around her shoulders and neck as he spoke. ‘Go on. Tell me of the Legions. What news comes to Terra of our greatest warriors?’

‘Only fragments,’ admitted Sarashina. ‘Some Legions send daily for tasking orders, a few are beyond our reach and others appear to be acting autonomously.’

‘Tell me why Space Marines deciding their own orders sets a dangerous precedent,’ asked Zhi-Meng.

‘Why do you ask questions that you already know the answer to?’

‘To see if you know the answer, of course.’

‘Very well, I’ll indulge you, since you’re making me feel human again,’ said Sarashina. ‘Once loosed, such power as the Legions possess will be difficult to shackle to Terra once more.’

‘Why?’

‘To think that the Space Marines are simply gene-bred killers is to grossly underestimate them. Their commanders are men of great skill and ambition. Free to act on their own authority, they will not take kindly to being brought to heel once again, no matter who demands it.’

‘Very good,’ nodded the Choirmaster.

‘But it will not come to that,’ said Sarashina. ‘Horus Lupercal will be crushed at Isstvan. Not even he can stand against the force of seven Legions.’

‘I believe you are right, Aniq,’ said Zhi-Meng. ‘Seven Legions is a force with a power beyond imagining. How long will it be until Lord Dorn’s fleet reaches Isstvan Five?’

‘Soon,’ said Sarashina, knowing the vagaries of warp travel made precise predictions impossible.

‘Something bothers you regarding the coming battle? Aside from the obvious, I mean.’

‘The primarch of the Eighth Legion,’ said Sarashina.

‘I hear from the Raven Guard that he is reunited with his warriors.’

‘Exactly, but Lord Dorn was adamant that we not send the fleet assembly orders for the Isstvan expedition to Konrad Curze, only to the Night Lords Chapters stationed within the Sol system.’

‘And this has caused alarm within the palace?’ said Zhi-Meng, more to himself than Sarashina. ‘That a primarch rejoins his Legion?’

‘To say the least,’ said Sarashina. ‘No one seems to know where Curze has been since the Cheraut compliance.’

‘Lord Dorn knows, though he will not say,’ replied Zhi-Meng, ‘He bade me send a message to Lords Vulkan and Corax.’

‘What kind of message?’

‘I do not know,’ said Zhi-Meng. ‘It was composed in a manner unknown to me, some form of battle-cant known only to the Emperor’s sons. I can only hope it reaches them in time. But enough of matters upon which we can have no further effect. Tell me of Prospero. Why do you think we have had no contact for months?’

‘Perhaps Magnus is still smarting after his treatment at Nikaea,’ said Sarashina.

‘That is certainly possible,’ agreed Zhi-Meng. ‘I saw him after the Emperor pronounced his judgement, and it is a sight I will never forget. His anger was terrible indeed, but even worse was the hurt and betrayal I felt in his heart.’

‘I can assign more choirs to reaching Prospero,’ offered Sarashina.

Zhi-Meng shook his head. ‘No. Magnus will re-establish contact before long, I am sure. As hurt as he was by the judgement, he loves his father too dearly to remain estranged for long. There, you are done.’

Sarashina turned onto her front, rolling her shoulders and rotating her neck. She smiled, feeling her joints and muscles flex and rotate freely.

‘Whatever the holy men of the mountain taught you, it has potency,’ she said.

Zhi-Meng laced his fingers together and flexed them outwards with a smile. ‘I taught you what they taught me, remember?’

‘I remember. Lie down,’ she said, sitting up as he lay face down in the space she had just vacated.

She straddled him, and worked her fingers along the length of his tattooed back. Hawk-headed men and grinning snakes stretched and swelled beneath her fingertips.

‘Tell me of Kai Zulane,’ he said. ‘I felt the power of his nightmares through the whisper stones.’

‘There were few in the tower who did not,’ noted Sarashina.

‘His mind is damaged, Aniq, badly damaged. Are you sure it is worth the effort to save him from the hollow mountain? The great beacon will always need fresh minds. Now more than ever.’

Sarashina paused in her massage. ‘I believe so. He was my best student.’

‘Once, maybe,’ said Zhi-Meng. ‘Now he is just an astropath who can send no messages. One who chooses not to send or receive.’

‘I know that. I’ve assigned my best seeker to bring him back. I think you’ll approve.’

‘Who?’

‘Athena Diyos,’ said Sarashina. ‘She has a rare skill in rebuilding damaged minds.’

‘Athena Diyos,’ mused Zhi-Meng with a contented purr as Sarashina walked the heels of her palms over his shoulder blades. ‘Throne help him.’

‘Mistress Sarashina tells me you can no longer master the nuncio,’ said Athena, her voice dripping with venomous scorn. ‘The most basic of the telepathic disciplines, without which no astropath can function. Not much of an astropath are you?’

‘I suppose not,’ said Kai, trying not to stare.

‘Is there something wrong?’

‘Ah, well, it’s just that you’re not quite what I expected.’

‘What did you expect?’

‘Not… this,’ replied Kai, knowing how ridiculous that sounded.

To say that Athena Diyos was not what Kai had expected was an understatement of magnificent proportions. After a night of restless dreams, Kai had been summoned to one of the anonymous training cells on the novitiates’ level. Bereft of furniture beyond a single chair, the cell was as bare of signifiers as it was possible to be.

Athena Diyos had been waiting for him, and Kai immediately sensed the sharpness of her personality.

Her body reclined in a floating chair, contoured to the twisted shape of her spine and what little remained of her limbs. Athena’s legs had been amputated at mid-thigh, and her left arm was a puckered mass of scar tissue. In place of her right arm, a thin manipulator augmetic tapped an impatient tattoo on the brushed steel of the chair. Her skull was hairless and the skin there was like the weathered surface of an ancient ruin. The sockets of her eyes were concave hollows of vat-grown skin, the only part of her face that had escaped the trauma of whatever fate had seen her consigned to this chair.

‘Use those fancy ocular augmetics to blink-click a picture,’ snapped Athena. ‘You can study it at your leisure once we’re done. But for now we have work to do, understood?’

‘Of course. Yes, I mean, sorry.’

‘Don’t be sorry,’ she said. ‘I don’t want your pity.’

Her chair spun around and drifted to the other side of the chamber, and Kai took the opportunity to apply a medical filter over his augmetics to examine her one remaining arm. Dermal degradation and scar density told him she had suffered these wounds no more than a few years ago. Evidence of tissue crystallisation indicated her wounds were at least partially caused by vacuum damage.

Athena had been crippled on a starship.

If nothing else, they had that in common.

‘Sit,’ said Athena, turning to face the room’s only chair.

Kai took a seat, and the padded chair encased his body. Pressure sensors shifted internal pads to match his bone structure. It was the most comfortable seat Kai had ever known.

‘Do you know who I am?’ asked Athena.

‘No.’

‘I am Athena Diyos, and I am a seeker. That means I am going to find the pieces of your ability that still work and put them back together. If I succeed you will be of use again.’

‘And if you fail?’

‘Then you will be sent to the hollow mountain.’

‘Oh.’

‘Is that what you want?’ asked Athena, her augmetic arm ceasing its relentless tattoo on the arm of her chair.

‘At this point I’m past caring,’ said Kai, crossing his legs and rubbing a hand across his stubbled cheeks. The light in the room was offensively bright and shadowless, making it feel horribly clinical. Athena’s chair hovered close to him, and he smelled the counterseptics and pain balms slathered on her ruined arm. He noticed a gold ring on her middle finger, and zoomed in on the tiny engraving at its centre: a feathered bird arising from a cracked egg in the midst of a raging fire.

She saw his glance, but didn’t acknowledge it.

‘Do you know what happens in the hollow mountain?’ she asked.

‘Of course not,’ said Kai. ‘No one speaks of it.’

‘Why do you think that is?’

‘How should I know? A rigorous code of silence?’

‘It’s because no one who goes into the hollow mountain ever comes out,’ said Athena. She leaned forward, and Kai fought the urge to press himself further back in his own chair. ‘I’ve seen what happens to the poor unfortunates who go in there. I feel sorry for them. They’re gifted with power, just not enough to be useful in any other way. It’s a noble sacrifice, but sacrifice is just a pretty way of saying that you’re going to die.’

‘So what happens to them?’

‘First your skin cracks, like paper in a fire, falling from your bones like dust. Then your muscles waste away, and though you can feel the life being drawn out of you, it’s impossible to stop. Piece by piece, your mind dies: memory, joy, happiness, pain and fear. It all gets used. The beacon wastes nothing of you. Everything you were is sucked from your frame, leaving nothing but a withered husk, a hollow shell of ashen, dry skin and powdered bones. And it’s painful, agonisingly painful. You should know that before you so lightly dismiss this last chance of life I’m offering you.’

Kai felt the heat of her breath on his skin, hot and scented with a sickly sweet aroma of medicines.

‘I don’t want that,’ he said.

‘I didn’t think so,’ said Athena, the manipulator augmetic pushing her away from Kai.

‘So how are you going to help me?’

‘How long since you entered a receptive trance?’ asked Athena.

The question took Kai aback. ‘I’m not sure.’

‘If I am going to keep you from the hollow mountain, then you need to give me something to work with, Kai Zulane. If you ever lie to me, ever hold anything back or make me think that in any way you are impeding my work or putting a single living soul within this city in danger, then I won’t hesitate to write you off. Am I making myself clear?’

‘Amply,’ replied Kai, now understanding that his life was in this disfigured woman’s lap. ‘It has been several months since I’ve entered a receptive trance.’

‘Why? That must be painful to you,’ said Athena. ‘Are you psi-sick?’

‘A little,’ admitted Kai. ‘It hurts in my joints and I have a low grade headache all the time.’

‘Then why avoid a trance?’

‘Because I’d rather be sick than feel what I felt on the Argo.’

‘So it’s nothing to do with any lack of ability. That’s a relief. At least I’ll have something to work with.’

Athena’s chair slid towards him again, and she held out her hand. The skin was puckered and tight, ribbed with buckled ridges of hardened, discoloured flesh. It was glossy and wet looking, and he hesitated for the briefest second before taking her hand in his own.

‘I’m going to enter a nuncio trance,’ said Athena. ‘You’ll follow my words, but I want you to form the dreamscape. Whatever you normally use to blank the canvas prior to a message, do nothing different. I will be with you, but all we’re doing is forming the dreamscape. We’re not going to send or receive a message. Understand that before we go in.’

‘I understand,’ said Kai. ‘I don’t like it, but I understand.’

‘You don’t have to like it. Just do it.’

Kai nodded and closed his eyes, slowing his breathing and running through the preparatory mantras that would expand his consciousness into the dreamscape. This part was easy. Anyone could do it, even a non-psyker, though all they would get out of it was a sense of relaxation. It was the next part that would be troublesome, and he tried to force down his apprehension.

‘Rise into the dreamscape,’ said Athena, her voice losing its harsh edge and becoming almost pleasant.

A mild sensation of vertigo tugged at Kai’s mind as he let the mantras lift consciousness from his body. He heard the suggestion of singing, like a choir in a far distant theatre. The tower’s astropaths were busy, but that was only to be expected in such turbulent times. A million sibilant voices filled the tower, but the whisper stones kept them separate. Kai dismissed any thoughts of the rebellion on the edge of Imperial space, picturing a soothing light enveloping his body in a protective sheath.

Now he was ready.

He could feel Athena’s presence as her consciousness flowed alongside his own. In such a mental state, there was no such thing as up or down, but human perceptions couldn’t help but shape so formless a space. Each astropath entered a receptive state in their own way, some surrounding themselves with imagery relating to the telepath whose projections they were attempting to receive, others by focussing on the key symbolic elements common to most senders.

Kai employed neither method, preferring to create his own mental canvas upon which to imprint the sending telepath’s imagery. All too often, a message could be distorted by the mental architecture of the receiving mind, and such misinterpretations were the bane of every astropath. In all his years of service, Kai had never yet wrongly interpreted an incoming vision, but had heard – as had all students of the City of Sight – horror stories of telepaths who had misread desperate pleas for aid or despatched expeditionary fleets to destroy worlds whose inhabitants were loyal servants of the Throne.

He felt heat and his skin prickled with sweat.

False heat, but real enough in this place of dreams and miracles.

Kai opened his eyes and the desert stretched out for kilometres all around him.

White sand shimmered in the heat haze, a vast empty landscape of nothingness that was completely free of anything troubling. Nothing disturbed the achingly empty vista – it was as though all life and character had been utterly erased from the world.

Kai’s dreamscape had been this way ever since his return to Terra.

Hypnopompic drugs had kept him awake aboard the salvage cutter, but the human mind could not long escape the need to dream. Denied such sleep-depriving narcotics in the Castana medicae facility on Kyprios, his first night back on Terra had almost shattered his fragile psyche, before his training had kicked in and he had taken control of his dreaming. Aside from last night, he had come to this place in his dreams and wandered its wondrous emptiness until he woke.

Such sleep refreshed the body, but left the mind without any form of release.

‘This is your canvas?’ asked a voice behind him, and Kai turned to see Athena Diyos walking towards him. Her long robes flowed around her shapely body, and long hair, auburn with a hint of gold red flowed to her shoulders.

‘You look surprised,’ she said.

‘I suppose I am,’ replied Kai, as taken aback as when he had first seen her.

‘You shouldn’t be. This is the realm of dreams after all. You can shape your form to how you wish yourself to be.’

‘But not you,’ said Kai, catching the well-honed deflection. ‘This is the real you.’

Athena swept past Kai, and instead of the medically-prescribed chemical reek of her skin, she smelled of cinnamon and almonds.

‘You are beautiful,’ said Kai.

She looked over her shoulder with a smile, and her face came alive. ‘You are kind. Most people say you were beautiful.’

‘You’ll come to understand that I’m not “most people”.’

‘I’m sure,’ said Athena. ‘So this is your dreamscape?’

‘Yes, this is the Rub’ al Khali,’ said Kai.

‘I don’t know what that means.’

‘It means the Empty Quarter,’ said Kai. ‘It was a desert of Old Earth that grew and grew until it merged with another great sandscape that eventually filled the mid-terrene oceans to create the dust bowl.’

‘It is the mental mindscape of a dreamer who does not want to dream,’ said Athena. ‘It is not healthy to inhabit a level of cognition that denies the subconscious mind any release. No symbolism, nothing to remind a dreamer of the waking world and nothing to reveal so much as a single aspect of the dreamer.’

‘So what do we do now?’ asked Kai.

‘We explore,’ said Athena. ‘I need to get a feel for your mind before I can see the cracks.’

‘There isn’t much to explore in the Rub’ al Khali.’

‘We’ll see. Tell me why you are here.’

‘In this trance?’

‘No, in the City of Sight. I read your file. You were attached to the Ultramarines Legion aboard the Argo, a helot-crewed frigate en route to the Jovian shipyards for a structural refit prior to making the translation to Calth. Tell me about why you are here and not en route to Ultramar.’

‘I don’t think we should talk about that,’ said Kai. The landscape on the far horizon rippled as though something vast moved just below the surface of the sand. He tried to ignore it, but the featureless wasteland of his dream shifted to accommodate this new intrusion.

Athena followed his gaze, seeing the cascade of white sand from the ridge above them.

‘What is that?’ she asked.

‘You read my file,’ said Kai, straining to keep the fear from his voice. ‘You should know what it is.’

‘I want you to tell me.’

‘No,’ said Kai.

Something broke the surface of the sand, something glistening and metallic, cobalt blue and gold, like the scaled hide of a serpent breaking the surface of the ocean. It moved with a hunter’s grace and a killer’s patience before vanishing beneath the surface.

‘We’re very exposed out here,’ said Athena, matter-of-factly.

‘I know that,’ snapped Kai.

‘Don’t you think we ought to find somewhere safe?’

‘Where would you suggest?’ snapped Kai. ‘We’re in the desert.’

His heart was hammering against his ribs, and his palms dripped sweat. His mouth felt dry and his bladder wanted to empty itself. He shielded his eyes from the blazing sun and scanned the horizons for any sign of the subterranean predator.

‘No, we are not,’ said Athena. ‘We are in your mind, sharing your fear. Whatever is out there is part of you, and the only one who will let it hurt us is you. Come on, Kai, have you forgotten the first principles of psychic defence?’

‘I can’t stop it from coming.’

‘Of course you can,’ said Athena, taking his hand. ‘Craft whatever it is that kept you safe before.’

Kai saw the glint of metal breaking the sand over Athena’s shoulders, and all thoughts of even the most basic training tenets fled from his mind. The fear was all-encompassing, and he heard the sound of screaming, a host of terrified voices that seemed to ooze from the sand like the cries of an entire army buried alive.

‘You can do this, Kai,’ said Athena, glancing down at the sand. ‘Hold on to my voice.’

Athena began reciting the basic exercises of the nuncio, and the soothing cadence of her voice was like a calming soporific. ‘This is the dream I craft for myself. It is a place of tranquillity. I am the master of this domain. Say it with me, Kai.’

‘I am the master of this domain,’ said Kai, trying to force himself into believing it. The shadow of the thing beneath the sand spread on the surface, a gathering darkness that wouldn’t fade. It was circling beneath them, rising to the surface with lazy sweeps of its metallic body. It knew its prey was vulnerable, and was in no hurry to rush the kill.

‘Say it like you mean it!’ hissed Athena. ‘I don’t want to see that thing any more than you do.’

‘I am the master of this domain!’ yelled Kai.

‘Now craft us somewhere safe,’ said Athena.

Kai tried to clear his thoughts as the sand shifted beneath them. The screaming voices were closer to the surface now. A leviathan moved beneath him, and its bulk was impossibly vast, stretching out kilometres to surround Kai and Athena.

He knew what it was, but that knowledge only made him more determined to avoid it.

‘I know somewhere safe,’ he said.

‘Show me,’ said Athena.

Slowly, stone by stone, Kai pictured the construction of a fortress of light in the raw fecundity of his mindscape. Fictive turrets, domed towers, pleasure gardens and tree-lined processionals erupted from the sand around them, rising higher and higher with every passing moment. Gilded arches, ornamented balconies and minarets of jade, mother of pearl and electrum formed from the building blocks of imagination and recall.

This was a fortress of ancient times, a wonder of the world that no longer existed.

Athena’s eyes widened at the sight of the magnificent fortress, its walls glittering with hoar frost and polished smooth as though formed from vitrified sand. The ground rose beneath them and they were carried into the air on a high wall, hundreds of metres from the undulant sand.

‘What is this place?’ asked Athena as their dizzying ascent halted.

A fierce wind whipped around them and Kai held her tight as it sought to hurl them from the walls.

‘It is the Urartu fortress of Arzashkun,’ said Kai. ‘It once stood at the headwaters of a great river that was said to have its source in the garden that birthed humanity.’

‘Does it still stand?’ asked Athena as more towers, higher walls and yet more barred gateways formed from the shimmering sand of the dreamscape.

‘No, it was destroyed,’ said Kai. ‘A great king razed it to the ground many thousands of years ago.’

‘But you know its likeness?’

Kai heard the rumble of something vast approaching the surface of the sand, but kept his attention firmly focussed on Athena’s question. If he allowed his thoughts to stray beyond the walls of the fortress they would come crashing down. Instead, he cast his mind back to the glass walls of an incredible library that nestled amongst towering highland forests.

‘Not long after I took up my position with the Thirteenth Legion, I was lucky enough to be allowed access to the Crystal Library on Prandium,’ said Kai, focusing on the past to avoid the present. ‘You should see it, Athena, tens of millions of books and paintings and symphonies contained within resonant crystals set all along the length of the canyon walls. The warden showed me one of Primarch Guilliman’s works, just set in the cliff like it was nothing out of the ordinary. But it was incredible, and it wasn’t what I’d expected either. There wasn’t any illuminated scriptwork or exquisite calligraphy, just a painstaking attention to detail that no mortal writer could ever match.’

‘And this fortress was in the book?’ said Athena.

‘Yes. On a page that told of Lord Guilliman’s time on Terra before his Crusade fleets set out into the galaxy. I saw a sketch of this fortress, so real that I could feel the hardness of its stone and the strength of its walls. It was a footnote really, a veiled reference to when the primarch’s father had travelled there and studied its architecture. I have been to those lands, and nothing remains of Arzashkun now, not even memory, but Lord Guilliman’s skill had rendered it as clearly as if Rogal Dorn himself had handed him the plans.’

‘If only that were true,’ said Athena, and Kai followed her gaze beyond the walls.

His breathing quickened and he struggled to keep his equilibrium as a bloom of red appeared on the sand, like a splash of blood in milk. His racing heart rate increased still further, and he swallowed as he felt the furious tugging of memory. A child’s pleading voice intruded on his thoughts and the red stain expanded at a geometric rate.

The shadowy hunter beneath the ground surged towards the spreading crimson mass, hot and urgent in its desire. It broke the surface beyond the walls, all angles, blades and red noise. A ghost ship brought to the surface of the deepest ocean, it breached like an ambush hunter and crashed back down with a thunderous boom. Its flanks were iron and blue, gold and bronze. It was a world killer, a monster capable of unimaginable destruction, and his fortress of light was no match for its terrible power.

It came on a tide of screams, ten thousand voices shrieking in terror and pain. It knew his name and it wanted him to join the dead whose bones and blood filled its wailing corridors and chambers.

Kai was catapulted from his dreamspace with a terrified shout as the fortress was overwhelmed in a crescendo of leering faces, black blades and tearing fangs.

His eyes flicked open and he jack-knifed upright in his chair. The whisper stones glowed angry red as they dissipated the psychic residue of their connection into the trap chambers beneath the tower. Kai pressed the heels of his palms into his face, feeling the chill ceramic and steel of his artificial eyes against his skin. Revulsion, guilt, sorrow and terror vied for space in his frontal lobes and a strangled sob burst from a throat that was raw from screaming.

No tears fell, but the anguish he felt was no less potent.

The desert was gone and the blunt, geometric forms of Athena’s chamber rushed to fill his senses with bland, clinical reality.

‘That was the Argo?’ said Athena.

Kai nodded. He realised he was still holding her hand, his knuckles white with tension. Tiny crescents of blood welled from where his nails had cut the thin layer of her regrown skin. Instantly contrite, he pulled his hand away.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean…’

Athena closed her fingers into a pained fist.

‘I felt it,’ she said, taking his hand again. ‘Everything you felt as they died. I felt it all.’

Kai wept tearlessly for the lost souls of the Argo.

But most of all he wept for himself.

Four

Ghota
Old gods
Faces of death

Working with the dead was thirsty work, and Palladis Novandio took a sip of brackish water from the wooden barrel set up at the door of the crematorium. The men who worked to load the bodies into the incinerator were hard men, inured to the cold, stiff reminders of their own mortality. They worked without words, hauling the pallets of the dead towards the giant furnace built into the rock, stripping them of their clothes and dignity before taking them by ankles and wrists and swinging them into the fire.

The Petitioners’ City had no shortage of dead, one of the few commodities it had in abundance.

The piles of clothes were sorted and cleaned by the women of the temple before being distributed to those in need. On some days it seemed as though the population of the city never changed, and you might stop someone, thinking they were miraculously returned to life, but who was simply wearing the coat of a dead man. Palladis took a measure of comfort in knowing the dead could yet give something to those they left behind.

Most of them, anyway.

He wiped the ashen residue of the incinerator from his face with a mixture of the water and his own sweat. The taste of cinders and fat was always at the back of his throat, but it never occurred to him to do anything else. Without any meaningful civic authority, bodies were a common sight on the streets of the Petitioners’ City: those who had given up or simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Death could take you in any number of ways, too many to count.

The millions of people coming to Terra filtered through the mountains en route to the palace, but only a fraction of those numbers made it this far. That still left thousands who clamoured at the gates, beseeching the faceless warriors who marched along the battlements to grant them passage. The streets of the Petitioners’ City were filled with those who sought meaning in their life, answers to their questions or those who simply came to view the magnificence of the Emperor’s demesne.

Palladis remembered a time when the Petitioners’ City had retained a semblance of an ordered community, when it had been small enough to maintain a form of order and stability. But as more and more people found their way to the walls of the palace, its ordered structure had begun to break down. The buildings that appeared overnight and pushed the city limits further down the mountains became steadily more temporary, more numerous and altogether more squalid.

Then the gangs had moved in, sensing opportunity amongst the desperate petitioners like vultures circling a wounded man in the desert. Gangs from the mountains, gangs from the plains and gangs from the battlefields of Unity were drawn to the ever-expanding city, sensing vulnerable people ready to be exploited. The killings had begun, bloody and designed to spread fear like a contagion.

Babu Dhakal’s gang had been the worst. His men were stronger, faster and more ruthless than any others, and there was no level of mutilation and degradation to which they would not stoop. Palladis had seen one of his men stabbed though his eyes and left to bleed to death on the steps of a medicae facility. That man’s killers had their limbs hacked off and their broken bodies left impaled on tall spears for the carrion birds to devour. Revenge killings, honour killings, random killings. None of it made any sense, and by the time the worst of it was over, only Babu Dhakal was left standing.

No one knew where the feared gang warlord had come from, but there were many rumours. Some claimed he was a member of the Legio Custodes who had never come back from a Blood Game. Others said he was one of the Emperor’s thunder warriors who had somehow survived the end of the Wars of Unity. Yet more claimed he was a Space Marine whose body had rejected the last stage of his elevation to transhuman and had fled before he could be put down. Most likely he was simply a ruthless bastard who had proved to be more of a ruthless bastard than anyone else.

But his evil reputation didn’t put off those who desperately sought entry to the palace, and day by day, year by year, the Petitioners’ City grew ever larger. Armed forces from the palace periodically swept the streets of the city, gathering up the dregs and lowlifes too slow or too stupid to hide, but it achieved little more than salving the consciences of the noble-born lords of Terra. For all intents and purposes, the Petitioners’ City was a law unto itself.

Imperial heralds escorted by hundreds of armed men occasionally ventured as far as the Proclamation Arch to read the names of those whose luck had finally turned and would be allowed to enter the palace. Few of those called ever made their way through the archway to the Petitioners’ Gate. Most were either lying dead in a nameless alley or, having given up all hope of ever attaining entry, had simply returned to whatever corner of the globe they had once called home.

Palladis had been one of the lucky ones, called to the palace with his family while the Petitioners’ City was still a place of quiet order. He had come from the southern lands of the Romanii, where he had plied his trade as a crafter of stone and worker of marble in the palaces of the burgeoning technocratic cartel houses that rose from the drift sand at the edge of the dust bowl. But as the megastructures rose higher and higher and steel and glass replaced the ancient weight of stone, Palladis found himself forced to seek work elsewhere.

With his wife and newborn sons, Palladis had crossed a landscape still bearing the scars of global war that had raged for as long as anyone could remember. Only now was it beginning to reveal the potential glory spoken of by the Emperor’s heralds. In search of that glory, he had crossed the peaks of Serbis and followed the Carpathian Arch before entering the homeland of the Rus and following the trade caravans along the ancient Silk Road across the plains of Nakhdjevan. There they turned east through Aryana and the newly-fertile lands of the Indoi, before the ground began to rise and the mountains that marked the edge of the world came into view.

It had been an awe-inspiring sight, one that would be forever etched on his memory, but one that had become bittersweet in the years that followed.

Palladis turned from the memories of murder and pushed through the plastic slats that kept the worst of the ash from leaving the crematorium. The air was thick with it. The incinerator would need to be emptied soon, as the remains of the dead were backing up in the firebox. He hung up his rubberised apron and removed his heavy canvas gauntlets. The wetted cloth around his mouth and nose came off next, followed by his ash-smeared goggles.

Taking a moment to run his hands through his unkempt hair, Palladis stepped through the doorway into the main area of the temple. As always, it was crowded with mourners, and the soft sound of weeping women and men drifted to the stoic angels worked into the eaves. Palladis felt his eyes drawn to the smooth curves of the Vacant Angel, and placed his hand on its cool marble surface.

The dark nephrite was from Syrya, hand-finished and polished to a degree of smoothness that only an artisan’s love could fashion. And yet Vadok Singh had rejected it and cast it aside. He felt his hands bunch into fists at the thought of the Emperor’s warmason. So obsessed with his art was Singh that he cast aside anything that did not match his exacting demands: materials, tools, plans or people.

Especially people.

His gaze was drawn to the featureless face, again wondering whose likeness had been planned for its unfinished surface. It didn’t matter now. It would never be completed, so the question was immaterial. He dragged his eyes from its blank countenance as he heard someone call his name, and looked across the chamber.

Roxanne sat with Maya and her two surviving children, both of whom had responded well to the counterbiotics she had obtained from Antioch. The woman’s husband, Estaben, sat to one side, and Palladis felt a stab of annoyance. He had forbidden the man to distribute more of his Lectitio Divinitatus leaflets, knowing it was unwise to attract additional attention to a place people insisted on calling a temple.

Roxanne raised her hand, and he returned the gesture, knowing it was only a matter of time until she brought trouble down upon them. Someone like her could not remain hidden forever, even in a place like the Petitioners’ City. No one here knew it, but she was an exceptionally rare woman, and her family would eventually demand that she return to them. By force if need be.

He walked over to her, giving smiles of sympathy to those who mourned and nods of understanding to those who stood with them. Roxanne looked up as he approached and put her hand on the head of the child nestled in Maya’s arms.

‘Looks like the medicine is working,’ she said. ‘I think they’ll both be fine.’

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said Palladis, tousling the hair of the boy beside Maya.

‘His name’s Arik,’ said Maya, reaching out to stroke the child’s cheek.

‘A good strong name,’ said Palladis, addressing the boy. ‘Do you know what it means?’

The boy shook his head, and Palladis made a fist. ‘Arik was one of the Emperor’s lightning-bearers in the first epoch of Unity,’ he said. ‘They say he was taller than the hollow mountain and that he carved the pass at Mohan with his fists. Give it time and I think you might grow as big.’

The boy smiled and made a fist too. Maya reached out and placed a palm on her son’s shoulder.

‘Emperor love you,’ she said. ‘Are you blessed with children?’

Palladis sighed wearily, but nodded. ‘Two boys.’

‘Are they here?’ asked Maya. ‘I would love to meet them and tell them what a kind father they have.’

‘They were here,’ said Palladis. ‘They died.’

‘Oh, I am so sorry,’ said Maya. ‘I didn’t know.’

‘What happened to them?’ asked Arik.

‘Hush now, Arik!’ cried Maya.

‘No, it’s alright,’ said Palladis. ‘He should know and understand such things.’

Palladis took the boy by the shoulders and looked him straight in the eye, wanting him to understand the gravity of what he was about to hear.

‘I once worked for a powerful man who desired I work for no other,’ said Palladis. ‘I did not like such restrictions, and secretly accepted a commission from another, though I knew the price of discovery would be high. The powerful man learned of my other work and sent men to my house to express his displeasure. I was working in a limestone quarry west of the palace, but my wife and two boys were home. The men cut my wife’s throat and shot my boys in the heart. I returned from the quarries to find all three lying where they had fallen.’

The boy’s eyes widened, and Palladis knew he had frightened him. That was good. Fear would keep him alive to the many ways in which death was stalking him.

‘You poor man…’ said Maya, while pulling her son away from Palladis.

He deflected her fearful sympathy and his own rising grief by looking over at her husband, who sat to one side. His face was expressionless, crushed and empty, as though all the life had been drained from him.

Palladis knew that expression well. Sometimes he felt it was the only one he wore.

‘Estaben?’ said Palladis, but the man didn’t look up.

He repeated the man’s name, and at last his head came up.

‘What?’

‘Your sons are recovering, Estaben,’ he said. ‘You must be relieved.’

‘Relieved?’ said Estaben with a shrug. ‘Vali and Chio are with the Emperor now. If anything, they’re the lucky ones. The rest of us have to live in this world, with its suffering and pain. Tell me, priest, why should I be relieved?’

Anger touched Palladis. ‘I am sorry for your loss, but you have two sons who need you. And I am not a priest.’

‘You are,’ said Estaben. ‘You don’t see it, but you are a priest. This is a temple, and you are its priest.’

Palladis shook his head, but before he could rebut Estaben’s words, the crack of splintering timber filled the building, followed by the heavy thud of a door falling from its frame. Cries of alarm sounded, and people began moving from the entrance.

Seven men stepped over the ruin of the door. Big men. Hard men. Dangerous men.

They were swathed in furs, leather straps and plates of steel beaten into the semblance of armour. Two wore spiked helmets, one carried a vicious, flanged mace of pig iron, while another carried a bulky gun with a flared barrel and lengths of copper piping running along the barrel to a sparking cylinder filled with tiny arcs of lightning. Swirling tattoos writhed on the muscles of their beefy arms, and each man bore a jagged brand of a lightning bolt above his right eye.

‘Babu Dhakal’s men,’ hissed Roxanne, but Palladis waved her to silence.

He stepped into the central aisle, his hands held up before him.

‘Please,’ he began. ‘This is a place of peace and solemnity.’

‘Not any more,’ said a broad-shouldered figure, entering the building behind his vanguard. He towered over the seven dangerous men, making them look small in comparison. Crossed bandoliers of knives made an X on his chest, and a trio of jangling meat hooks hung from his belt next to a holster containing a wide pistol that was surely too heavy for any normal man to fire without losing his arm to recoil. Barbed iron torqs encircled his biceps, making the pulsing veins throb like writhing snakes beneath the skin.

The man’s flesh was emblazoned with the tattooist’s art, myriad representations of lightning bolts, hammers and winged raptors. What little of his natural skin tone remained was the unhealthy pallor of a corpse, and a thin line of blood oozed from the corner of his mouth.

But it was the man’s eyes that told Palladis who had come for retribution. Pupils so fine they were little more than black dots in a sea of petechial haemorrhages, the man’s eyes were literally red with blood.

‘Ghota,’ said Palladis.

Athena rose through the central spine of the Whispering Tower, carried aloft on the double helix of gravity-defiant particles. It made her skin itch abominably, and the scar tissue that capped her amputated thighs throbbed painfully in the flux. Why the Whispering Tower’s builders had thought a pneumatic lift was unnecessary was a constant mystery, and she never failed to curse them whenever she was forced to move vertically through its structure.

She badly needed to see Mistress Sarashina, and rose through the levels of the tower towards the upper wing of the Oneirocritica Alchera Mundi, the great dream library of the City of Sight. A stack of papers and dream logs rested in her lap, a volatile record of her latest flight into the immaterium that required a second interpretation. No one had a better understanding of Vatic prognostication than Aniq Sarashina, and if anyone could provide clarification of her latest vision, it would be her.

At last the stream of particles came to a diffuse end, and she used her manipulator arm to work the controls of her chair. It lurched as one repulsor field was exchanged for another, and Athena winced as the drum-taut tissue of her ravaged limbs pulled tight.

Passing through the arched entrance of the library, Athena nodded to the detachment of Black Sentinels stationed by the heavily armoured doors. She felt the humming machine spirits set into the arch cast their unfeeling eyes over her, ensuring she brought nothing forbidden into the library.

Towering shelves, rearing hundreds of metres into the air, filled this section of the Oneirocritica Alchera Mundi, groaning stacks radiating from the central hub filled with interpretive texts, dream diaries, vision logs and the many books of common astropathic imagery. Every vision received and sent from the City of Sight was here, a complete record of communication that passed between Terra and the wider galaxy.

Scores of hunched astropaths drifted through the stacks like green ghosts, seeking clarification of a vision, while elder telepaths added freshly approved symbols to the ever-growing library. Every addition to the library was ratified by Artemeidons Yun, the custodian of this invaluable repository, and Athena saw the corpulent old telepath shuffling through the stacks with a gaggle of bobbing lumen globes and harried aides following in his wake.

Athena circled the hub until she sensed Sarashina’s presence in the section devoted to elemental symbolism in visions. She floated towards Sarashina, and her former tutor looked up as Athena approached. Though astropaths lacked traditional visual acuity, their blindsight allowed them to perceive the world around them just as well as sighted individuals.

‘Athena,’ said Sarashina with a smile of genuine warmth. ‘How are you?’

‘Pained and tired,’ said Athena. ‘Is there any other way for an astropath to feel?’

Sarashina nodded in understanding. Athena caught the brief flare of sympathetic regret, and swallowed her anger at Sarashina’s pity.

‘Have you come to talk to me about Kai Zulane?’ asked Sarashina, ignoring Athena’s brusque tone.

‘No, though Throne knows he is damaged.’

‘Beyond repair?’

‘Hard to say for sure,’ said Athena. ‘There’s a lot of aversion in him, and he’s psi-sick because of it, but I think I can bring him back.’

‘So if you are not here to talk about Kai, what else is troubling you?’

‘I had a precept concerning the Tenth Legion,’ said Athena. ‘Right after I saw Zulane.’

Sarashina gestured to the end of the stack furthest away from the hub, where numerous reading tables and data-engines were spread along the curved inner face of the tower. Sensing Athena’s unease, Sarashina picked an empty table far from astropaths studying the touch-script books and manuscripts.

Athena floated behind Sarashina and deposited her dream logs on the table.

‘This precept,’ asked Sarashina. ‘Have you logged it with the Conduit?’

‘Not yet, I wanted to speak to you first.’

‘Very well, but log it immediately after we speak. You know the purpose of the Tenth Legion’s expedition?’

‘Of course,’ said Athena. ‘And that’s what scares the crap out of me, because I don’t think it’s a true precept.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean I don’t think it’s a vision of the future. I think it’s happening right now.’

‘Tell me what you saw,’ said Sarashina. ‘Leave nothing out.’

‘I was on a sun-parched desert when I saw an obsidian statue rise from the sands, a muscular figure clad in a breastplate of burnished iron and chained to a rock. The statue’s fists were encased in silver, and sitting on one of them was an amber-eyed falcon with ocean-green plumage and a hooked beak.’

‘The statue is obvious enough,’ said Sarashina. ‘Prometheus.’

Athena nodded. A vision of the Titan of ancient myth who signified belief in humanity even over divine decree was a common visual metaphor used by astropaths to represent the primarchs. The silver of the statue’s gauntlets was the final confirmation of this one’s identity.

‘Yes, Ferrus Manus,’ said Athena. ‘Primarch of the Iron Hands.’

‘So what happened in this vision?’

‘A shadow fell across the sun, and I looked up to see darkness eclipsing the face of its brightness until it resembled a world of black, granular sand. It’s a new symbol, but it’s one I’ve seen a lot of recently.’

‘Isstvan Five,’ said Sarashina.

Athena nodded. ‘No sooner had the sun gone black than the statue of Prometheus pulled against the chains holding it fast to the rock. The falcon took to the air as the metal links shattered, and a spear of fire appeared in the giant’s fist. The statue surged forward and cast the spear into the heart of the black sun, and the tip punched into its heart in a shower of blazing sparks.’

‘That bodes well for Lord Dorn’s fleet,’ noted Sarashina.

‘I’m not finished yet,’ said Athena.

She took a deep breath before continuing. ‘Even as the statue slew the sun with its spear cast, I saw it had left much of its inner substance behind. Chunks of obsidian remained stuck to the rock, and I knew the giant had struck prematurely, without his full weight behind the blow. Then the statue sank beneath the sand, and the falcon flew back to the rock. It swallowed the chunks of obsidian and then took to the air with a caw of triumph.’

‘That is everything?’ asked Sarashina.

‘That’s everything,’ agreed Athena, tapping her dream records. ‘I checked my Oneirocritica and it makes for uncomfortable reading.’

Sarashina extended her hands, nodding in agreement as her fingers danced over the raised words and letters.

‘Ferrus Manus always was impetuous,’ she said. ‘He races ahead of his brothers to Isstvan Five to deliver the death blow to the rebels, while leaving much of his force behind.’

‘Yes, but it’s the hawk with the amber eyes that concerns me,’ said Athena.

‘The importance of the falcon is paramount,’ agreed Sarashina. ‘Its obvious implication is troubling. What elements Ferrus Manus leaves behind will be devoured. What other interpretation do you give the falcon?’

‘It’s a symbol of war and victory in most cultures.’

‘Which, in itself, is not troublesome, so what gives you cause for concern?’

‘This,’ said Athena, opening her oldest Oneirocritica with her manipulator arm and turning it around. As Sarashina’s fingers slipped easily over the pages, her serene expression turned to a frown as the words imprinted on the pages went on.

‘This is ancient belief,’ said Sarashina.

‘I know. Many of the gods worshipped by these extinct cultures displayed hawks as symbols of their battle prowess, which just confirms the more obvious symbolism. But I remembered the text of a rubbing taken from a marble sculpture uncovered by the Conservatory only a year ago in the rubble of that hive that collapsed in Nordafrik.’

‘Kairos,’ said Sarashina with a shudder. ‘I felt its fall. Six million souls buried under the sands. Terrible.’

Athena had been aboard Lemurya, one of the great orbital plates circling Terra, when Kairos hive sank into the desert, but she had felt the aetheric aftershock of its doom like a tidal wave of fear and pain. An empathic shudder of grief pulsed from Sarashina’s aura.

‘The hive’s fall exposed a series of tomb-complexes further west, and among the mortuary carvings were hawks. It’s said that the Gyptians considered the hawk to be a perfect symbol of victory, though they viewed it as a struggle between opposing elemental forces, especially the spiritual over the corrupt, as opposed to physical victory.’

‘And how does that fit within your precept?’ asked Sarashina.

‘I’m getting to that,’ said Athena, pushing a sheet of paper towards her. ‘This is the text of a scroll I copied a few years ago from a deteriorating data-coil recovered from the ruins of Neoalexandria. It’s just a list, a pantheon of old gods, but one name in particular stuck out. Taken together with the amber eyes and the colouring of the hawk’s plumage…’

‘Horus,’ said Sarashina as her finger stopped halfway down the list.

‘Could the hawk with the amber eyes represent the Warmaster and his rebels?’

‘Pass this to the Conduit,’ said Sarashina. ‘Now!’

‘Please,’ said Palladis. ‘Don’t hurt these people, they have already been through enough.’

Ghota took a step into the temple, his heavy, hobnailed boots sounding like gunshots as he crushed glass and rock beneath them. He swept his gaze around the terrified throng, finally settling on Roxanne. He smiled, and Palladis saw his teeth were steel fangs, triangular like a shark’s.

Ghota pointed at Roxanne. ‘Don’t care about others,’ he said. ‘Just want her.’

The man’s voice was impossibly deep, as though dragged unwillingly from some gravelled canyon in his gut. It sounded like grinding rocks, flat and curiously not echoing from the stone walls of the temple.

‘Look, I know there was some blood spilled, but your men attacked Roxanne,’ said Palladis. ‘She had every right to defend herself.’

Ghota’s head cocked to one side, as though this argument had never been put to him before. It amused him, and he laughed, or at least Palladis guessed that the sound of a mountain avalanche coming from his mouth was laughter.

‘She was trespassing,’ growled Ghota. ‘She needed to pay a toll, but she decided it didn’t apply to her. My men were enforcing the Babu’s law. She broke the law and now she has to pay. It’s simple. Either she comes with me or I kill everyone in here.’

Palladis fought down his rising tension. All it would take would be one person to panic, and the temple would become a charnel house. Maya sheltered her two boys, while Estaben had his eyes closed and muttered something inaudible with his hands clasped before him. Roxanne sat with her head bowed, and Palladis felt her fear hit him like a blow.

So easy to forget how different she is…

He took a step towards Ghota, but the man raised his hand and shook his head.

‘You’re fine where you are,’ said Ghota, ‘but I can see you’re hesitating, trying to think if there’s some way you can talk your way out of this. You can’t. You’re also thinking if there’s any way the boksi girl can do what she did to the men she killed. She might be able to kill a couple of them, but it won’t work on me. And if she tries it I’ll make sure she doesn’t die for weeks. I know exactly how fragile the human body is, and I promise you that she’ll suffer. Agonisingly. You know me, and you know I mean what I say.’

‘Yes, Ghota,’ said Palladis. ‘I know you, and trust me, I believe every word you say.’

‘Then hand her over, and we’ll be gone.’

Palladis sighed. ‘I can’t do that.’

‘You know what she is?’

‘I do.’

‘Stupid,’ said Ghota, drawing his heavy pistol with such swiftness that Palladis wasn’t sure what he’d seen until the deafening bang filled the chamber with noise. Everyone screamed, and went on screaming as they saw what the gunshot had done to Estaben.

It had destroyed him. Literally destroyed him.

The impact pulped his upper body, hurling it across the chamber and breaking it apart over the chest of the Vacant Angel. Ribbons of shredded meat drooled from the statue’s praying hands and sticky brain matter and fragments of skull decorated its featureless face.

Maya screamed and Roxanne threw herself to the floor. Weeping mourners huddled together in the pews, convinced they were soon to join their loved ones. Children screamed in fear and mothers let them cry. Roxanne looked up at Palladis and reached for the hem of her hood, but he shook his head.

Ghota flexed his wrist, and Palladis found himself looking down the enormous barrel of a weapon that could obliterate him. Coils of muzzle smoke drifted from the gun, and Palladis could smell the chemical reek of high-grade propellant. The dim light of the temple reflected from an eagle stamped on the pistol’s barrel.

‘You are next,’ said Ghota. ‘You’ll die and we’ll take the girl anyway.’

Palladis felt his body temperature drop suddenly, as though a nearby meat locker had just opened and gusted a breath of arctic air into the chamber. The hairs on his arms stood erect, and he shivered as though someone had just walked over his grave. Sweat beaded on his brow and though every one of his senses was telling him the chamber was warm, his body was shivering like it had on the nights he’d spent on the open plains of Nakhdjevan.

The sounds of frightened people faded into the background, and Palladis heard the snorting, wheezing emphysemic breath of something wet and rotten. Colour drained from the world and even Ghota’s colourful tattoos seemed dull and prosaic. The cold air bloated the chamber, a sudden swelling of icy breath that swirled around every living thing and caressed it with a repulsively paternal touch.

Palladis watched as one of Ghota’s thugs stiffened, clutching his chest as though a giant fist had reached inside his ribcage and squeezed his heart. The man turned the colour of week-old snow and he collapsed into a pew, gasping for breath as his face twisted in a rictus mask of pain and terror.

Another man fell as though poleaxed and without the drama of his comrade. His face was pulled tight in a grimace of horror, but his body remained unmarked. Ghota snarled and aimed his pistol at Roxanne, but before he could pull the trigger, another of his men shrieked in abject terror. So stark and primal was his scream that even an inhuman monster like Ghota was caught unawares.

Colour flooded back into the world, and Palladis threw himself to the side as Ghota’s pistol boomed with deafening thunder. Palladis didn’t see what he’d shot at, but heard a buzzing crackle as it hit something. More screaming sounded from the far end of the chamber, frantic, urgent and terrified. Palladis squirmed along the floor between the pews, knowing something terrible was happening, but with no idea what it was.

His breath misted before him, and he saw webs of frost forming on the back of the timber bench at his side. He flinched as Ghota fired again, roaring with an anger that was terrifying in its power. The sound of his rage went right through Palladis, penetrating to the marrow and leaving him sick and paralysed with terror.

No mortal warrior could vent such battle rage.

Pinned to the floor with terror, Palladis wrapped his hands over his head and tried to shut out the sounds of terrified screams. He kept his face pressed to the cold flagstones of the temple floor, taking icy air into his lungs with every terrified breath. The screaming seemed to go on without pause. Shrieks of terror and pain, overlaid with angry roars of thunderous defiance in a strange battle-cant that sounded like the fury of an ancient war god.

Palladis remained motionless until he felt a drop of cold water on the back of his neck. He looked up to see the frost on the back of the bench was melting. The freezing temperature had vanished as swiftly as it had arrived. He felt a hand touch his shoulder, and cried out, flailing his arms at his attacker.

‘Palladis, it’s me,’ said Roxanne. ‘It’s over. He’s gone.’

Palladis struggled to assimilate that information, but found it too unbelievable to process.

‘Gone?’ he said at last. ‘How? I mean, why?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Roxanne, peeking over the top of the bench.

‘Did you do it?’ asked Palladis, as a measure of his composure began to return. He pulled himself upright and risked a quick look over the top of the bench.

‘No,’ said Roxanne. ‘I swear I didn’t. Take a look. This isn’t anything I could have done.’

Roxanne wasn’t lying. Ghota was gone, leaving a greasy fear-stink in the air and a fug of acrid gunsmoke.

Seven bodies lay sprawled by the entrance to the temple: seven hard, dangerous men. Each one lay unmoving with their limbs twisted at unnatural angles, as though they had been picked up by a simpleminded giant and bent out of shape until they broke. Palladis had seen his share of abused corpses, and knew that every bone in their bodies was crushed.

‘What in Terra’s name just happened?’ said Palladis, moving to stand in the centre of the temple. ‘What killed these men?’

‘Damned if I know,’ said Roxanne, ‘but I’m not going to say I’m not grateful for whatever did it.’

‘I suppose,’ agreed Palladis, as heads began appearing over the tops of benches. Their fear turned to amazement as they saw Palladis standing amid the ruin of seven men. Palladis saw the awe in their faces and shook his head, holding his hands up to deny any part in their deaths.

‘This wasn’t me,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what happ…’

The words died in his throat as he looked back down the central passageway of the temple towards the Vacant Angel. The viscera that had been blown out of Estaben’s guts hung from the statue like grotesque festival decorations, and Maya wailed like a banshee at this latest agonising loss.

For a fleeting second, it was as though a pale nimbus of light played around the outline of the statue. Palladis felt the lingering presence of death, and was not surprised to see a leering, crimson-eyed skull swimming in the dark-veined marble of the statue’s face. It vanished so suddenly that Palladis couldn’t be sure he’d seen anything at all.

‘So you have come for me at last,’ he whispered under his breath.

Roxanne was at his side a moment later.

‘What did you say?’

‘Nothing,’ said Palladis, turning away from the statue.

‘I wanted to thank you,’ said Roxanne.

‘For what?’

‘For not letting them take me.’

‘You’re one of us,’ he said. ‘I’d no more let them take you than anyone else.’

He saw the disappointment in her eyes, and immediately regretted his thoughtless words, but it was too late to take them back now.

‘So what happened here?’ asked Roxanne.

‘Death happened here,’ said Palladis, fighting the urge to look over his shoulder at the Vacant Angel. He lifted his voice so that the rest of his congregation could hear him. ‘Evil men came to us and paid the price for their wickedness. Death looks for any chance to take you into his dark embrace, and to walk the path of evil is to bring you to his notice. Look now, and see the price of that path.’

The people of the temple cheered, holding one another tight as his words reached them. They had stepped from the shadow of death and the light beyond had never seemed brighter. The colours of the world were unbearably vivid, and the comfort of the loved one nearby had never been more achingly desirable. They looked at him as the source of their newfound joy, and he wanted to tell them that he had not caused these men to die, that he was as shocked as they were to still be alive.

But one look at their enraptured faces told him that no words he could summon would change their unshakable belief in him.

Roxanne gestured to the dead bodies. ‘So what do we do with them?’

‘Same as all the rest,’ he said. ‘We burn them.’

‘Ghota won’t take this lightly,’ said Roxanne. ‘We should get out of here. He’ll raze this place to the ground.’

‘No,’ said Palladis, picking up the strange rifle one of Ghota’s men had carried. ‘This is a temple of death, and when that bastard comes back, he’s going to find out exactly what that means.’

Five

Old wounds
The unthinkable
The troubled painter

Kai and Athena descended the tower, making their way down the grav-lifts towards the mess facilities near the base of the tower. They hadn’t spoken since breaking their most recent connection to the nuncio, and both were drained with the effort of maintaining a shared dreamspace. An appraisal of his improvement could wait until they had the distraction of a drink and the barrier of a table between them.

The mess halls of the tower were iron-walled, stark and low-lit, reminding Kai of the serving facilities aboard a starship. He wondered if that was deliberate, given where most astropaths were destined to spend much of their lives. Solitary figures were scattered around the echoing chamber, lost in thought, trailing their fingers over an open book or adding fresh interpretive symbols to their Oneirocritica. They found a table and sat in silence for a moment.

‘So, am I getting better?’ asked Kai.

‘You already know the answer to that,’ replied Athena. ‘You managed to send a message to an astropath in the Tower of Voices, and it almost drained you.’

‘Still, it’s an improvement, yes?’

‘Fishing for praise won’t do you any good,’ said Athena. ‘I won’t give it out for anything less than the full return of your abilities.’

‘You’re a hard woman.’

‘I’m a realistic one,’ said Athena. ‘I know I can save you from the hollow mountain, but I need you to know it too. You have to be able to send messages off-world, to starships a sector over, and you need to send them accurately. You’ll have a choir for the last part, but you know as well as I do that the best of us work alone. Are you ready for that? I don’t think so.’

Kai shifted uncomfortably in his seat, fully aware that Athena was right.

‘I don’t feel safe hurling my mind out too far,’ he said.

‘I know, but you’re no use to the Telepathica unless you will.’

‘I… I want to, but… you don’t know…’

Athena leaned forward in her chair, the electro-magnetics of its repulsor plates setting Kai’s teeth on edge.

‘I don’t know what? That we take risks and brave horrors that even the most heroic Army soldier or Legionary wouldn’t be able to comprehend? That every day we could be corrupted by the very powers that make us useful? That we are in the employ of an empire that would collapse without us, yet fears us almost as much as the enemies at our frontiers? Oh, I am very much aware of that, Kai Zulane.’

‘I didn’t mean–’

‘I don’t care what you meant,’ snapped Athena. ‘Look at me: I’m a freakish cripple that any medicae worthy of the name would have let die the moment he laid eyes on me. But because I’m useful I was kept alive.’

Athena tapped her scarred palm on the metal of her chair. ‘Not that this is any kind of life, but we all have our burdens to bear. I have mine, and you have yours. I deal with mine, and it’s time you dealt with yours.’

‘I’m trying,’ said Kai.

‘No, you’re not. You’re hiding behind what happened to you. I’ve read the report of what happened on the Argo. I know it was terrible, but what good do you do by letting yourself get drained in the hollow mountain? You’re better than that, Kai, and it’s time you proved it.’

Kai sat back and ran a hand over his scalp. He smiled and spread his hands out on the table. ‘You know, that was almost a compliment.’

‘It wasn’t meant as one,’ replied Athena, but she returned his smile. The tight skin at her jawline stopped the right corner of her lip from moving, and the gesture was more like a grimace. A robed servitor brought them two mugs of vitamin-laced caffeine. He took a sip and sucked his cheeks in as the bitter flavour filled his mouth.

‘Throne, I’d forgotten how bad the caffeine here is. Not as strong as they make it on Army ships, but pretty damn close.’

Athena nodded in agreement and pushed away the mug in front of her. ‘I don’t drink it any more,’ she said.

‘Why not? Aside from the fact it tastes like bilge water and you could repair blast damage on a starship’s hull with it.’

‘I acquired a taste for fine caffeine aboard the Phoenician. Her quartermasters and galleymen were the very best, and when you’ve tasted the best, it’s hard to go back.’

‘The Phoenician? That sounds like an Emperor’s Children warship.’

‘It was.’

‘Was?’

‘It was destroyed fighting the Diasporex,’ said Athena. ‘It took a lance hit amidships and broke in two.’

‘Throne! And you were aboard at the time?’

Athena nodded. ‘The engine section was dragged into the heart of the Carollis Star almost immediately. The forecastle took a little longer. A secondary blast took out the choir, and venting plasma coils flooded the ventral compartments in seconds. My guardians got me out of the choir chamber, but not before… Not many of us escaped.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ said Kai, with a measure of understanding. ‘I’m glad you got off though.’

‘I wasn’t,’ said Athena. ‘Not for a while, at least. I was living with a lifetime’s worth of pain every day until Mistress Sarashina and Master Zhi-Meng taught me tantric rituals to make it bearable.’

‘Tantric?’

‘You know how Zhi-Meng works,’ said Athena neutrally.

Kai considered this and said, ‘Maybe they could teach me?’

‘I doubt it. You’re not as broken as me.’

‘No?’ said Kai bitterly. ‘If feels like I am.’

‘Your body is still in one piece,’ pointed out Athena.

‘Your mind is still in one piece,’ countered Kai.

Athena gave a gargled chuckle. ‘Then between us we have a functioning astropath.’

Kai nodded, and the silence between them was not uncomfortable, as though in sharing their hurts they had established a connection that had, until now, been missing.

‘Looks like we are both survivors,’ said Kai.

‘This is surviving?’ said Athena. ‘Throne help us then.’

At the heart of the web of towers within the City of Sight lay the Conduit, the nexus of all intergalactic communication. Carved by an army of blind servitors from the limestone of the mountains, these high-roofed chambers were filled by black-clad infocytes plugged into brass keyboards and arranged in hundreds of serried ranks. Once each telepathic message had been received and interpreted – and sifted by the cryptaesthesians – it was processed and passed on by the Conduit to the intended recipient by more conventional means. Looping pneumo-tubes descended from the shadowed ceilings like plastic vines, wheezing and rattling as they sped information cylinders to and from the clattering, clicking keystrikes of the infocytes.

Overseers in grey robes and featureless silver masks drifted through the ranks of nameless scribes on floating grav-plates that disturbed the scattered sheets of discarded meme-papers covering the floor. The smell of printers’ ink, surgical disinfectant and monotony filled the air alongside a burnt, electrical smell.

Those of the Administratum who had seen the Conduit found the sight utterly soulless and monstrously depressing. Working as an administrator was bad enough, where faceless men and women were lone voices among millions, but at least there was a slim possibility that talent might lift a gifted individual from the stamping, filing and sorting masses. This repetitive drudgery allowed for no such escape, and few administrators ever returned to the Conduit, preferring to turn a blind eye to its harsh necessity.

Vesca Ordin drifted through the Conduit on his repulsor plate, information scrolling down the inside of his silver mask as his eyes darted from infocyte to infocyte. As his eye glided over each station, a noospheric halo appeared over its operator with a host of symbols indicating the nature of the message being relayed. Some were interplanetary communications, others were ship logs or regularly scheduled checks, but most were concerned with the rebellion of Horus Lupercal.

In all his thirty years of service in the Conduit, Vesca had always prided himself on making no judgement on the messages he passed. He was simply one insignificant pathway among thousands through which the Emperor ruled the emerging Imperium. It did not become a messenger to get involved. He was too small in the grand scheme of things, just an infinitesimally tiny cog in an inconceivably vast machine. He had always been content in the certainty that the Emperor and his chosen lieutenants had a plan for the galaxy that was unfolding with geometric precision.

The Warmaster’s treachery had seen that certainty rocked to its foundations.

Vesca saw the glaring red symbol that indicated a more urgent communication, and he flicked his haptically-enabled gauntlets to bring a copy of the message up onto his visor. Another missive from Mars, where loyalist forces were struggling to gain a foothold in the Tharsis quadrangle after insurrection had all but destroyed the red planet’s infrastructure.

The Martian campaign was not going well. The clade masters had taken it upon themselves to insert numerous operatives in an attempt to decapitate the rebel leadership, but the killers were finding it next to impossible to penetrate the rigorous bio filters and veracifiers protecting the inner circles of the rebel Mechanicum Magi. This was yet another death notice bound for one of the clade temples. Callidus this time.

Vesca sighed, flicking the message back to the station. It seemed distasteful that the Imperium should rely on such shadow operatives. Was the threat of the Warmaster so great that it required such agents and dishonourable tactics? The fleets of the seven Legions despatched to bring Horus Lupercal to heel were likely even now waging war on Isstvan V, though confirmation of victory had yet to filter through from the various astropathic relays between Terra and the Warmaster’s bolthole.

The daily vox-announcements spoke of a crushing hammerblow that would smash the rebels asunder, of the Warmaster’s treachery inevitably destroyed.

Then why the use of assassins?

Why the sudden rush of messages sent from the Whispering Tower to the fleets forming the second wave behind the Iron Hands, Salamanders and Raven Guard? These were concerns that normally did not trouble Vesca, but the assurances being passed throughout the Imperium seemed just a little too strident and just a little too desperate to sound sincere.

More and more messages wreathed in high-level encryption were being sent from Terra to the expeditionary fleets in order to determine their exact whereabouts and tasking orders. A veteran of the Conduit, Vesca had begun to realise that the Imperium’s masters were desperately trying to ascertain the location of all their forces and to whom they owed their loyalty. Had the Warmaster’s treachery spread further than anyone suspected?

Vesca floated over to a terminal as a request for confirmation icon shimmered to life over the terminal of an infocyte. Despite each operative being hard-wired to a terminal, the staff of the Conduit were not lobe-cauterised servitors. They were capable of independent thought, though such things were frowned upon.

A noospheric tag appeared over the head of the infocyte.

‘Operative 38932, what is the nature of your query?’

‘I… uh, well, it’s just…’

‘Spit it out, Operative 38932,’ demanded Vesca. ‘If this is important, then clarity and speed must be your watchwords.’

‘Yes, sir, it’s just that… it’s so unbelievable.’

‘Clarity and speed, Operative 38932,’ Vesca reminded him.

The infocyte looked up at him, and Vesca saw the man was struggling to find the words to convey the nature of his request. Language was failing him, and whatever it was he had to ask was finding it impossible to force its way out of his mouth.

Vesca sighed, making a mental note to assign Operative 38932 a month’s retraining. His repulsor disc floated gently downwards, but before he could reprimand Operative 38932 for his lax communication discipline, another request for confirmation icon appeared over a terminal on the same row. Two more winked to life on another row, followed by three more, then a dozen.

In the space of a few seconds, a hundred or more had flickered into existence.

‘What in the world?’ said Vesca, rising up to look over the thousands of infocytes under his authority. Like the visual representation of a viral spread, white lights proliferated through the chamber with fearsome rapidity. The infocytes looked to their overseers, but Vesca had no idea what was going on. He floated down to Operative 38932’s terminal and ripped the sheet of meme-paper from his trembling fingers.

He scanned the words printed there, each letter grainy and black from the smudged ink of the terminal. They didn’t make sense, the words and letters somehow jumbled in the wrong order in a way that was surely a misinterpretation.

‘No, no, no,’ said Vesca, shaking his head, relieved to have found the solution. ‘It’s a misinterpreted vision, that’s all it is. The choirs have got this one wrong. Yes, it’s the only possible explanation.’

His own hands were shaking and no matter how hard he tried to convince himself that this was simply a misinterpreted vision, he knew it was not. An incorrect vision might have triggered two or three requests for confirmation, but not thousands. With a sinking feeling in his gut that was like having the air sucked from his lungs, Vesca Ordin realised his infocytes were not requesting confirmation on the veracity of the message.

They were hoping he would tell them it wasn’t true.

The meme-paper slipped from his fingers, but the memory of what was printed there was forever etched on the neurons of his memory, each line a fresh horror building on the last.

Imperial counter-strike massacred on Isstvan V.

Vulkan and Corax missing. Ferrus Manus dead.

Night Lords, Iron Warriors, Alpha Legion and Word Bearers are with Horus Lupercal.

High on the western flank of the mountain known as Cho Oyu, a graceful villa of harmonious proportions sits upon a grassy plateau. Sunlight reflects from its white walls and shimmers upon the red-clay tiles of the roof. A thin line of smoke curls from a single chimney, and a number of custom-bred doves sit along the ridgeline of the roof. A thin, square tower rises from the north-eastern corner of the villa like a lonely watch tower on a great wall or a lighthouse set to guide seafarers to safety.

Within this tower, Yasu Nagasena stands before a wooden stretching frame, upon which is a rectangle of white silk held in place with silver pins. Cho Oyu is the old name for this mountain, words in a language that has long since been assimilated into a tongue that in turn has been outgrown and forgotten. The migou say it means the Turquoise Goddess, and though the poetry of that name appeals to Nagasena, he prefers the sound of the dead words.

The tower overlooks the Imperial Palace and affords a spectacular view of the hollow mountain to the east. Nagasena does not look at the hollow mountain. It is an ugly thing, a necessary thing, but he never paints it, even when he paints the landscapes of the east.

Nagasena dips his brush into a pot of blue dye and applies it lightly within the boundary lines he has previously applied to prevent the colour bleeding into the material. Painting in the freehand mo-shui style, he lays depths of sky to the fabric and nods to himself as he watches the colour flow.

He is tired. He has been painting since dawn, but he wants to finish this picture today. He feels he might never finish it if he does not do so today. His bones ache from standing so long. Nagasena knows he has seen too many winters to indulge in such foolishness, but he still climbs the seventy-two steps to the tower’s uppermost chamber every day.

‘Well, are you coming in or not?’ asks Nagasena without turning. ‘You are distracting me just standing there.’

‘Apologies, master,’ says Kartono, moving from the doorway to stand at his master’s right shoulder. ‘And to think some of the servants believe your hearing is going.’

Nagasena snorts in amusement. ‘It keeps them on their toes, and you would be amazed what insights you pick up when people think you cannot hear them.’

They stand in silence for some moments, Kartono intuitively recognising it will be for Nagasena to decide when to speak. Kartono keeps his eyes averted from the painting, knowing that Nagasena detests people looking at incomplete works. ’One should only look upon art when it is complete’ is one of his favourite sayings.

Instead, Kartono stares over Nagasena’s shoulder through the wide openings in the walls. Nagasena designed the chamber at the top of the tower specifically for painting, and the width of the world is laid before him.

Shutters on each wall keep the wind out, and even when Nagasena does not paint, he often climbs the many steps to enjoy the views over the landscape when he needs a place of serenity. At present, the northern and easternmost shutters are thrown open and the Imperial Palace is spread out in all its glory.

Gilded roofs, jagged spires and mighty towers jostle for space, and the vast city-palace heaves with motion like a living thing. Supplicants, servants, soldiers and scribes fill its vast districts with life and noise. Smoke rises from the cook fires of the Petitioners’ City, but the air is clearer than Nagasena remembers it. He tastes the fragrances brought to the palace on the wind like travellers from far-off lands.

‘What do you see?’ asks Nagasena, pointing to the window.

‘I see the palace,’ replies Kartono. ‘And it is a fine sight. Robust and healthy, full of life.’

‘And beyond the city?’

‘More mountains and a world rebuilt. The sky is clear, like a spring stream, and there are clouds like the breath of giants around the peaks of Dhaulagiri.’

‘Describe the mountain,’ commands Nagasena.

‘Why?’

‘Just do it, please.’

Kartono shrugs and turns his gaze upon the mountain, its tall, rugged flanks shining like silver in the sunlight. ‘It gleams like a polished shield rising from the landscape, and I think I can see the high peaks of the Gangkhar Puensum behind it.’

‘You can see Gangkhar Puensum?’

‘Yes, I think so. Why?’

‘It is a bad omen, my friend. The migou legends say that when Pangu, the ancestor of their race died, his head turned into Gangkhar Puensum and that it is the emperor of all mountains. The ancient migou kings would climb its slopes to petition the gods and seek the blessings of heaven. So far none have ever reached its summit, and the migou say this is why they remain bonded as virtual slaves.’

‘Migou kings? The migou have no kings or ancestors,’ points out Kartono. ‘They are a gene-forged race of labourer creatures. They have no past to have had any kings.’

‘That is as may be,’ answers Nagasena. ‘You know that and I know that, but do the migou, I wonder? Have they invented a fictitious history and mythical past to justify their place in the world? Does it make it easier to bear a life of servitude if you believe it is the will of the gods?’

‘Is seeing the mountain a bad omen?’ asks Kartono.

‘So the migou say.’

‘And since when do you consult omens?’ asks Kartono. ‘Such things are for the simple minded and the migou.’

‘Perhaps,’ says Nagasena, ‘but I have painted the landscape to seek guidance.’

‘Painted the landscape? Is that some new form of prognostication introduced by the remembrancers?’ laughs Kartono. ‘I confess I have not heard of it.’

‘Do not be flippant, Kartono,’ snaps Nagasena. ‘I will not stand for it.’

‘Apologies, master,’ says Kartono, instantly contrite. ‘But I find the idea of divining omens through painting… unusual in these times.’

‘That is because you do not paint, Kartono,’ points out Nagasena. ‘The ancient artists believed a spark of the divine moved in every artist. They believed it was sometimes possible to discern a portion of heaven’s scheme for mankind if one had eyes to see it. Jin Nong, the great artist of Zhou, was said to have painted the greatest picture in the world, and when he looked upon what he had wrought, he saw the will of heaven and went mad, for such things are not for mortals to know. He burned the painting, foreswore his previous life and became a hermit in the mountains, where he dwelled alone with his secrets. Those who desired a quick and easy route to wisdom would seek him out and beg him to teach them what he knew, but Jin Nong would always send such fools away. Eventually, a band of unscrupulous men captured Jin Nong and tortured him in an attempt to prise the secrets of the divine from him, but Jin Nong told them nothing and eventually his captors threw him from a cliff.’

‘Not a happy story,’ says Kartono. ‘I hope you do not plan on following Jin Nong’s footsteps?’

‘I am talented, Kartono, but I am not that talented,’ says Nagasena. ‘Anyway, the story does not end there.’

‘No? So what happened next?’

‘When Jin Nong’s soul departed his body, the gods interceded and allowed the artist his choice of existence for his next life on earth.’

‘He was reincarnated?’

‘So the legends say,’ replies Nagasena.

‘What did he choose to return as?’

‘Some say he reincarnated as a pomegranate tree in the Lu Shong gardens, while others claim he came back as a cloud. Either way, he achieved the favour of Heaven, which is something to be proud of.’

‘I suppose it would be,’ says Kartono. ‘So… do you see anything in your painting?’

‘You tell me,’ answers Nagasena, stepping away from the stretcher frame.

Kartono turns to look at the painting and Nagasena watches his eyes roam the colours and lines rendered there. Nagasena knows he has talent as an artist, and the landscape beyond the shutters is rendered on the silk with uncommon skill.

He is not seeking approbation, but confirmation of something that has been troubling him all day.

‘Speak,’ commands Nagasena, when Kartono does not say anything. ‘And be honest.’

Kartono nods and says, ‘The tops of the palace buildings gather like conspirators, and the mountains tower over everything. They cast a cold shadow over the land. I thought the peaks shone like silver, but you have painted them in the white of mourning. The clouds hang low and brood like dissatisfied children amid the heavy sky. I do not like this picture.’

‘Why not?’ asks Nagasena.

‘I sense threat from it, as if something malevolent lurks in the warp and weft of the silk.’

Kartono looks up from the picture, frowning as he sees nothing of its content in the world beyond the windows of the tower. The sun shines golden on the mountains, and lazy clouds drift like wandering minstrels across an invitingly open blue sky.

‘You painted this today?’ asks Kartono.

‘I did,’ confirms Nagasena.

‘I do not see what you see, master.’

‘Nor would I expect you to. We all see with different eyes, and how we perceive the world around us is coloured by the landscape within our heart. You look on the world and see the optimism of a life spent away from hunting and killing, but I see…’

‘What? What do you see?’

‘Ah… I am an old man, Kartono, and my eyes grow dim,’ says Nagasena, suddenly reticent. ‘What do I know?’

‘Tell me what you see,’ pleads Kartono.

Nagasena sighs and looks into the depths of the painting. ‘I see a time of darkness ahead for us. The world knows it and it is afraid of the bloodshed to come. I fear we are about to walk into the lair of a sleeping dragon and awaken the most terrible danger imaginable.’

Kartono shakes his head. ‘You are speaking of Horus Lupercal. What have we to do with the rebel Warmaster? His army will be ashes by now. Ferrus Manus and the rest of Lord Dorn’s strike force will be celebrating victory even as we speak.’

‘I fear you are wrong, Kartono,’ says Nagasena. ‘I believe the Warmaster is a more terrible threat than anyone can imagine. And I believe that Lord Dorn has gravely underestimated how far his reach has spread.’

Nagasena puts down his brush and makes his way from the tower. He descends its seventy-two steps and enters his rose garden, wishing he could spend more time here, but knowing that such a desire is impossible. Kartono follows him, and they move through the delicately proportioned and harmoniously appointed chambers of the villa like ghosts.

‘What are you planning?’ asks Kartono, as Nagasena enters his private chambers. Three walls are painted white, adorned with long silk hangings and ancient maps of long-vanished lands, while the other is covered with shelves laden with rolled up scrolls and heavy textbooks. A narrow desk of dark walnut sits low in the centre of the room, and writing implements are arranged neatly on its polished surface.

‘I am preparing,’ answers Nagasena cryptically, running his hands over the one bare wall in the chamber in a series of complicated patterns.

‘Preparing for what?’

The wall in front of Nagasena slides back to reveal a deep compartment filled with racked weapons and armour. Conversion generators, web-guns, long rifles, energy blades, digital lasers, plasma pistols, cestus gauntlets, shot-casters, fire-lances, photon-nets and stasis grenades. Implements of pursuit and capture.

‘For the hunt,’ says Nagasena.

‘Who are we hunting?’ asks Kartono, exasperation beginning to enter his voice.

Nagasena smiles, but there is no warmth in it, for he knows the answer will only confound his friend further.

‘I do not know yet,’ says Nagasena.

Six

Woe-weavers and doomsayers
Acceptance
The red eye

News of the massacre on Isstvan V spread, as all bad news does, with gleeful rapidity, as if those who bore it took unseemly relish in passing it on. The effect on the populace of the palace was immediate and contradictory. In the worker habs of the Brahmaputra Plateau, riots broke out between those who railed against the notion of the Warmaster’s treachery and those who decried him as a faithless oath-breaker. In the precincts of Ter-Guar, ten thousand wailing women knelt before the towering fortress of the Eternity Gate and begged the Emperor to give the lie to the news.

Woe-weavers and doomsayers roamed the streets, screeching of brother turned on brother as they wailed and gnashed their teeth with zealous frenzy. Panic swept through the palace like the dreaded Life-eater virus, leaving ashen hopes and broken dreams in its wake. Men wept openly before their wives and children, their faith in the infallibility of the Emperor shaken to the core. That Horus Lupercal could have betrayed his father was terrible beyond imagining, but to learn that so many of the Emperor’s sons had followed him into rebellion was more than many could bear.

The people of Terra were waking up to a very different reality, one with which many of the globe’s inhabitants found themselves unable to cope. To have a dream so precious that its demise made life unbearable was the cold reality of the day following the news of the bloodshed on Isstvan V.

Hundreds of inconsolable citizens of Terra threw themselves from the cliffs of the palace or quietly took blades to their necks and wrists in the cold confines of their homes. On the Merican plains of Jonasburg, seven thousand men and women of a bio-weapons storage facility exposed themselves to a pernicious strain of the newly-developed gangshi virus and perished in the flames of automated decontamination procedures rather than live in a world where the Emperor could be betrayed.

When word reached the Diemensland prison island, the inmates declared themselves loyal servants of the Warmaster and slaughtered their overseers. Regiments drawn from the Magyar Ossurites mustered in the Meganesian heartlands, but the battle to retake the island would take many bloody weeks.

All over the globe, the solid certainty of the Imperium’s invincibility was crumbling, but worse was to come. As the sun reached its zenith above the hollow mountain and the shadows hid, word came that one of the Emperor’s sons had fallen on the sands of Isstvan V. Ferrus Manus, gene-sire of the Iron Hands was dead, slain, it was said, by the hand of his most beloved brother.

It was impossible to believe, ridiculous. That a demi-god could be slain was preposterous, the lunatic notion of a delusional fool. Yet as the hours passed and fragments of information eked from the City of Sight, it became harder to deny the truth of Ferrus Manus’s death. People tore out their hair and mortified their flesh in bloody honour of the Emperor’s fallen son. Vulkan too was rumoured to be dead, though no one could yet say for sure whether this was true or fevered speculation. Yet even as cold facts spread into the global consciousness, they came on a tide of wild rumour and manic embellishment that grew with every retelling.

Some tales spoke of the Warmaster’s fleet breaching the outer perimeter of the solar system, while others had his warships on the verge of entering Terra’s orbit. False prophets arose on every continent, spreading a credo of falsehoods and misinformation until Imperial Arbitrators or gold-armoured warriors of the Legio Custodes silenced them. As more and more lies spread across the world, suspicions began to form in the minds of Terra’s leaders that not all were the result of panic and the mutational power of rumour and distance, but of deliberate misinformation by agents of the Warmaster.

The cryptaesthesians passed word to the Legio Custodes of numerous messages sent to Terra with concealed subtexts, hidden encryptions and suspicious routings. Acting on such information, the Custodians made numerous arrests, all of which only fanned the flames of unrest. The notion of the enemy within turned brother upon brother, neighbours into potential spies, and any word of dissent marked a man out as a traitor.

In such a climate of fear, the people of Terra turned to whatever gave them comfort. For some it was the solace of loved ones, for others the oblivion promised by alcohol or narcotics. Some swaddled themselves in hope that the Imperium was strong enough to weather this terrible storm, placing their faith in the Emperor’s wisdom and the power of his remaining armies.

Others’ faith in the Emperor was of a radically different stripe, and the clandestine churches of the Lectitio Divinitatus grew from small gatherings of like-minded individuals to massed congregations that met in secret basements, echoing warehouses and other such unremembered spaces.

In time of turmoil, the human mind seeks solace wherever it can, and never more so than in times of war. For it was clear to everyone on Terra that the Warmaster’s treachery was no longer simply an isolated rebellion.

It was nothing less than galactic civil war.

The temple had never been busier, which was ironic given that it was likely to be razed to the ground sometime soon. Ghota had not returned, but Roxanne knew it was only a matter of time. She wondered if she could have done anything differently, if there was something she could have done that might have avoided this inevitable doom. No, she had been defending herself, and were it not for her unique abilities then she would have suffered a lingering, degrading and painful death.

Roxanne had come to the temple believing that she deserved such a fate, but time and distance had given her a perspective on what had happened aboard the Argo. It hadn’t been her fault, despite what her father and brothers kept telling her. The vessel had been commissioned at the outset of the Great Crusade and the demands of war had kept it from its regularly scheduled maintenance refits. With such inherently unstable technology as Geller Fields, it had only been a matter of time until disaster struck.

She swallowed hard as a mouthful of bile rose in her throat at the memories of being trapped in her crystal dome, protected and left to wonder what had become of the crew, but knowing full well what their fate had been.

Roxanne rubbed the heels of her palms against her eyes and took a deep breath.

‘Calm is the way that the eye sees,’ she said. ‘The storm parts before me and the swells of the ocean rise to meet me in glorious concord.’

‘Talking to yourself is a sign of madness,’ said a voice at her shoulders. ‘That’s what my dad always said.’

Roxanne looked down and saw the tiny and lost features of Maya’s eldest surviving son.

‘Arik,’ she said. ‘Your father was a clever man. I think he was onto something.’

‘Are you mad?’ asked the boy.

Roxanne considered the question seriously. She wasn’t sure she knew the answer.

‘I think we all go a little mad sometimes,’ replied Roxanne, sitting next to Arik on a wooden bench. ‘But it’s nothing to worry about.’

‘I thought I was going mad when my brothers died,’ said Arik, staring at the Vacant Angel at the end of the building. ‘I kept seeing faces on that statue, but mum kept telling me I was making it up and that I was being stupid.’

Roxanne risked a glance at the faceless statue, unwilling to spare it more than a glance. Palladis had told her what he thought he’d seen there after Ghota’s men had been killed, and now she wondered what manner of presence might have fleetingly turned its gaze upon them. Roxanne knew from long experience that there were innumerable things that could be drawn to strong emotions, but she had never heard of them existing in this world.

‘I don’t think you should be looking at it like that,’ she said, turning his small face away with the gentle pressure of her fingertips. He was resistant at first, but at last his head turned away.

‘They say that we’re all going to be dead soon,’ said Arik.

‘Who says?’

The boy shrugged.

‘Who says that?’ pressed Roxanne. ‘Who’s been telling you that?’

‘I listen and I hear things,’ said Arik. ‘Too many people crowded in here not to hear what they’re saying.’

‘And what are they saying?’

‘That Horus is coming to kill us all. His fleets are on their way to Terra right now and he’s going to slaughter us all. Just like they say he did with the Iron Hands. He’s burning up all the worlds out in space, and folk are scared he’s going to do the same to us.’

The boy began to cry softly, and Roxanne put her arm around him. She pulled him close and looked for Maya, but Arik’s mother was nowhere to be seen. She had spent a day and a night shrieking at the feet of the Vacant Angel, but Palladis had eventually led her away as the crowds of people flocking to the temple grew ever larger.

Word of what had happened spread through the Petitioners’ City faster than news of a name being called to the inner precincts of the palace, and the curious, the desperate and the needy had flocked to the temple. Palladis had turned them away at first, but it quickly became a futile effort. Over three hundred people filled the temple, many with truthful grief to vent, others here simply to feel part of something bigger than themselves.

Roxanne let the boy cry and tried to think of something hopeful to tell him.

‘The Warmaster is a long way away,’ she said. ‘It will take him a long time to get to Terra from Isstvan Five, but the Emperor’s fleets will stop him before he gets here.’

Arik looked up, his face red and puffy with snot and tears.

‘You promise?’

‘I promise,’ said Roxanne. ‘Trust me, I know these things. I used to work on a starship, so I know how long it takes to get from one side of the galaxy to the other.’

Arik smiled, and she tried to keep the truth of the matter from him. True, Isstvan was incredibly distant from Terra, but with fair tides and a steady course, the Warmaster’s forces could reach the heart of the Imperium within months.

Not for the first time, Roxanne wondered what she was doing here, surrounded by people she didn’t know. For all its faults, her family had always drawn tight around its members, even the ones who – rightly or wrongly – were believed to have brought shame upon the good name of Castana. Even she had been brought into the bosom of the family in the wake of the loss of the Argo, albeit with the crushing power of imposed guilt.

With Babu Dhakal’s inevitable retribution looming like an oncoming storm, she knew it would be far safer for her to leave this place. She wore a silver ring that could send a locator pulse to the Castana estates and have a skiff en route to her within minutes. Inside an hour she could be back in the gilded halls of her family’s sprawling Galician manor house, with its great libraries, portrait-hung galleries and luxurious appointments. Without even realising it, she was twirling the ring around her right index finger, her thumb hovering over the activation stud and the first code phrases forming in her mind.

Roxanne took her thumb away from the ring, knowing that however much she might desire to flee, she would never abandon these people. No matter that Babu Dhakal’s thugs had given her no choice, it was her fault they would come and destroy this place and everyone in it. She could no more abandon these people to their fate than she could trick her heart into stopping beating.

Arik reached up and wiped his nose and eyes with his sleeve. His eyes were swollen with tears, but he had found a place of calm within himself.

‘What did you used to do on a starship?’ he asked.

Roxanne hesitated, not yet ready to share her identity with the people around her. Like the blind astro-telepaths of the City of Sight, her people were vital to the continued existence of the Imperium, but were feared as much as they were needed. Like most misunderstood things, fear of their abilities had made them outcasts.

‘I helped to make sure it reached where it was supposed to go,’ said Roxanne.

‘That’s why you wear that bandana under your hood,’ said Arik.

‘In a manner of speaking,’ said Roxanne, suddenly wary.

‘You’re one of them Navigators, ain’t you?’

Roxanne’s head jerked up and she looked around to see who had heard the boy’s question. If anyone was listening, they gave no sign of it. She lowered her head towards Arik and whispered to him.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I am, but you can’t tell anyone. People don’t really understand what we are and how we do what we do. That makes them afraid, and frightened people can do terrible things to the things that frighten them.’

Arik smiled through his tears. ‘You don’t have to worry about that.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Everyone knows what you are,’ he said. ‘They’ve known ever since you came here. My dad told me what you were a while ago. Even before you went to get the medicine for me.’

Roxanne was astonished. ‘People know what I am?’

‘Yeah, I heard people talking about it weeks ago.’

She sat back on the bench and let the weight of secrecy fall away from her. All her life she had been taught that the common man feared her and would seek to persecute her if given the chance. The words of one small boy and the actions of the people around her had given the lie to that notion in one fell swoop, and the sudden lightness of being that filled her was like an elixir of purest light poured into her veins.

She looked at the plain, unassuming, ordinary faces that surrounded her, seeing them now for the wonderful, powerful and determined individuals they were. She was accepted amongst them simply because she was here, not through any familial connection, trade agreement or covenant of service.

‘Is it true you’ve got another eye under that bandana?’

Roxanne nodded. ‘Yes.’

‘Can I see it?’

‘No, I’m afraid you can’t, Arik.’

‘Why not?’

‘It can be dangerous,’ explained Roxanne.

‘I hear you can kill people with it.’

Roxanne ruffled the boy’s hair. ‘You shouldn’t believe all you hear about Navigators, Arik. Yes, people can get hurt by looking at it – that’s why I keep it covered up. I don’t want to hurt anyone.’

‘Oh,’ said Arik, and shrugged off his disappointment to ask, ‘But you can see the future, right? With your hidden eye, I mean?’

‘I’m afraid not,’ replied Roxanne. ‘We just guide starships, that’s all.’

Arik nodded, as though he fully understood the complexities and nuances to being one of a caste that was both shunned and required for the Imperium to function. A group that was both powerful and wealthy, yet could never take a rightful place amongst the people they served.

A sudden thought occurred to Roxanne, and she asked, ‘Does Palladis realise that everyone knows?’

‘Nah, he thinks he’s the only one,’ said Arik. ‘I think losing his boys must’ve rattled some of the marbles loose in his head. He don’t trust anyone.’

‘I think you might be right,’ whispered Roxanne. ‘You’re a clever boy, Arik, do you know that?’

‘That’s what my mum always tells me,’ he said with a proud smile.

She pulled Arik close and gave him a kiss on the forehead.

‘You have no idea how precious a gift you have just given me,’ she said.

He looked confused, but nodded with a child’s seriousness.

‘Here, let me give you something in return,’ said Roxanne, tugging at her finger and placing something in the centre of his palm. She closed his fingers over it before anyone could see what she’d given him.

‘What is it?’ asked Arik.

Roxanne smiled. ‘It’s a magic ring,’ she said.

The white sands of the Rub’ al Khali rose and fell in endless dunes beyond the walls of the fortress of Arzashkun. Kai wandered the empty ramparts and deserted towers with a pleasant aimlessness to his steps. The sands beyond the walls were silent and dusted by a warm sirocco that carried a pleasing scent of roasted meat, mulled wine and exotic perfumes.

He trailed his fingers over the silver-gold battlements, letting the peace and emptiness of his surroundings calm him. Nothing moved in the sands, no shadowy hunters or buried memories threatening to burst to the surface, for Kai was merely dreaming. His metacognitive powers were developed enough that he could understand he was dreaming and shape his surroundings to a degree beyond most sleepers.

Though Arzashkun was his refuge from the dangerous presences of the immaterium, it was much more than that. It was a place where he could find peace and a measure of solace and isolation. No one else could come here, save by his express invitation to a shared dreamspace, and Kai revelled in the silence that filled every vaulted chamber and domed cupola of the ornately decorated structure.

Kai descended the steps to the courtyard, his steps light and the black mood that had been his constant companion since the disaster on the Argo lightening by degrees. The fear was still there, lurking at the threshold of his perceptions, but he refused to acknowledge it. To remember was to feel, and to feel was to experience. Ten thousand deaths screaming in his head had unhinged his mind for a time, and he wasn’t entirely sure it had returned to him intact.

Yet the few times he was able to escape to Arzashkun were where he could heal in private, where he could experience all the human mind could conjure without fear of dreadful memories and sympathetic terrors. Kai pushed open the doors to the main hall, and breathed in the aroma of scented lanterns and fresh growth. A circular pool glittered in the centre of the hall, its base tiled with a gold and scarlet lozenge pattern, and a silver fountain in the shape of a trident-bearing hero shimmered in the sunlight drifting down from a stained-glass dome.

Palm fronds waved gently in the breeze from the opened door, and the scent of lemongrass and hookah smoke was strong. The air was redolent with the fragrances of distant kingdoms of long ago, and the connection with the past was a potent anchor to Kai in this realm of imagination and dreams. Had he wished, Kai could conjure anything his consciousness desired into being, but this was all he needed. Peace and solitude and an end to the thousands of voices that clamoured for his attention.

Pillars of marble and nephrite supported the roof, and Kai wove a path through them as he made his way to the wide staircase that swept up to the cloisters above. Battle flags of crimson, emerald and gold hung from the graceful arches, honours won in battles no one now remembered. Strange how something so terrible and vital to the lives of thousands of people could so easily be forgotten. The men who had fought in these battles were naught but the sand of the Empty Quarter, but their lives had mattered once. No matter that the tide of history had ground each of them down to insignificant specks of grit, they had once been important, they had once made a difference.

That the difference existed now only in a dream did not lessen their lives. Kai recalled them, even if it was a borrowed memory from a primarch’s writings. In time, he too would be forgotten, but instead of frightening Kai, the thought made him smile. To be forgotten in times like these would be a blessing. To be lauded by everyone, to be depended upon by so many would be a burden no one should ever have to bear.

Kai wondered how people like Malcador, Lord Dorn or the Choirmaster stood it.

He paused at the bottom of the wide staircase, closing his eyes and letting the burbling sound of the fountain wash over him. His blindsight trembled and a breath of wind sighed across the skin of his face, as Kai inhaled the scents of a land long since consigned to history. Smell was one of the strongest senses in the dream landscapes, and the heady aroma of alinazik, habesh and mahlab transported Kai’s thoughts to an open-air souk, its thronged pathways filled with jostling, sweating bodies: chattering vendors, haggling customers and slit-mouthed cutpurses.

Kai could taste the smoke of cookfires, the billowing clouds of hashish and the potent reek of papazkarasi as it was poured from clay ewers into pewter mugs nailed to drinking posts. So real was the sensation that Kai had to hold onto the carved balustrade to keep himself from sinking to his haunches at the aching sadness he felt.

Tears pricked at the corners of his eyes, and Kai wondered at how he could know these sounds and smells. This was no fantasy conjured from the depths of his imagination, these were sense-memories that belonged to a mind other than his own. These sensations had been dredged from the depths of a memory so ancient that it staggered Kai that any one mind could contain so much history.

Kai gasped and opened his eyes. The world wavered as his grip on its solidity faltered for an instant. His breath came in sharp hikes, though he knew in this dreamspace he was not truly breathing. Kai’s body lay asleep on his cot bed, but certain laws still held true in the world of dreams as they did in the real world – though such a term was almost meaningless to one whose existence was lived in a world beyond the comprehension of most mortals.

A flicker of movement caught his eye, and Kai looked up to the cloister in time to see a figure move out of sight. He stood dumbfounded for a moment, unable to believe what he’d just seen. Someone else in his dreamscape? Kai had heard fanciful tales of powerful psykers who were able to invade the dreams of sleepers and alter their mindscapes, but the last such cognoscynth was said to have died thousands of years ago.

‘Wait!’ cried Kai, turning and taking the stairs two at a time. He was out of breath by the time he reached the landing, and turned ninety degrees to mount the last flight of stairs. The terrazzo floor was patterned in a square-edged spiral motif, a maze with only one way in and out, and Kai rushed along the cloister towards where he had last seen the mysterious figure.

Silken curtains bellied out from arched openings, carrying the beat of a distant drum that echoed like a heartbeat from another epoch of the world. Kai could see no musicians, and knew the sounds were as impossible as the sight of an intruder in his dreams. He ran along the cloister, leaving the sound of percussion in his wake, and passed through a curtained doorway into a chamber of light and verdant growth. Trees grew through the floor as though nature had reclaimed this fortress after thousands of years of neglect by man. Creeping vines hung like gilded wall hangings from the pilasters, and waving fronds garlanded the window openings.

At the far end of the chamber a tall figure in long robes of white and gold stepped towards a doorway. Too distant to make out his features, his eyes were pools of great sorrow and infinite understanding of the price men pay for their dreams.

‘Stop!’ cried Kai. ‘Who are you? How can you be here?’

The figure did not answer and stepped out of sight. Kai ran through the room, brushing drifting leaves and questing vines from his path as he fought towards the doorway through which the robed figure had passed. The scents of spices, fresh growths and old memory was strongest here, and Kai shouted out in triumph as he finally reached the doorway. The smell of salt water and hot stone came from beyond the door, and – now that he had reached it – Kai found himself strangely reluctant to pass through.

Summoning up what little courage he possessed, Kai stepped over the threshold.

He found himself on a balcony he had never known existed, high on the side of the central tower of the fortress. The sun was a burning eye of searing red, and a lake so vast it better deserved to be called an ocean stretched out before him, wondrously blue and almost painful to look at. Birds flocked over the water, and small fishing boats bobbed close to the shore.

The balcony was deserted, which was impossible, as there was no way the intruder could possibly have escaped. Save the door behind him, a drop of hundreds of metres was the only way off the balcony. Only the creator of the dreamspace had the power to alter the laws that governed the logic of a dream, and even then it was dangerous, so how this mysterious stranger had escaped Kai was beyond him.

Kai walked to the edge of the balcony and rested his hands on the sun-warmed stone. He took a breath of the clean air, sharp and free of the chemical tang that pervaded the Terran atmosphere.

‘Where is this place?’ said Kai, knowing somehow that the man he had been chasing would hear him.

A hand clamped his shoulder with a powerful grip. The touch was electric, and Kai had the sense that had he chosen to do so, the owner of this hand could break him into tiny pieces with a simple twist of his wrist.

‘It is Old Earth,’ said a voice at his ear. Soft, lyrical, but with a core of steel.

‘How?’ asked Kai, enthralled by the man’s voice.

‘The human mind is impossibly complex, even to one such as I,’ said the man, ‘but it is no great feat to share my memories with you.’

‘You’re really here?’ asked Kai. ‘I’m not imagining this?’

‘You are asking if I am really here? In a dream you created?’ said the man with a wry chuckle. ‘That’s one for the philosophers, eh? What is reality anyway? Is this any less real to you than your life in the Whispering Tower? Does fire in a dream not warm you just as well as one of timber and kindling?’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Kai. ‘Why are you here? With me, right now.’

‘I wanted to see you, to know more about you.’

‘Why? Who are you?’

‘Always the obsession with names,’ said the man. ‘I have had many names over the long years, and one is as good as another until it is shed for the next.’

‘So what do I call you?’

‘You don’t call me anything,’ said the man, and the power of the grip on Kai’s shoulder increased exponentially. Kai winced as the complex arrangement of bones in his shoulder ground together. ‘You just listen.’

Kai nodded, and the pain in his shoulder eased a fraction. The birds over the lake swooped down over the fishing boats, their caws echoing from the water as though from a great distance. Kai narrowed his eyes. Staring at the vivid blue of the lake was hurting his eyes, and his augmetics had no power to help him in this dream.

‘Great and terrible forces are abroad in the galaxy, Kai, and the billions upon billions of threads they weave into the future are beyond the comprehension of even the greatest of the eldar seers, but one particular thread I have seen entwines with my own. Can you guess whose that is?’

‘Mine?’ ventured Kai.

The man laughed, the sound so infectious it made Kai smile despite the growing ache in his shoulder. Yet it felt somehow insincere, as though this man had not laughed in a very long time and had forgotten how it was supposed to sound.

‘You, Kai Zulane? No, you are not destined to be remembered by the saga-tellers of the ages yet to come,’ said the man, and Kai felt him look into the glaring red eye of the sun. ‘It is of another I speak, one who has the ability to undo all that I have achieved and cut my thread, but whose face is hidden from me.’

‘So why are you here talking to me?’ asked Kai. ‘If you are who I think you are, then there must be a million things more important than me for you to deal with.’

‘Very true,’ agreed the man. ‘But I am here talking to you because you will bear witness to my ending. I sense you are being pulled along by the unseen thread that leads to my death. And if you can see it, then I can know it.’

‘And you can stop it?’ asked Kai, as the red sun began to descend.

‘That remains to be seen.’

The regicide board lay untouched. This was no time for games, and they all knew it.

Nemo Zhi-Meng paced his chambers with a harried expression creasing his already craggy and lined features. Since the Conduit had passed word of the disaster at Isstvan V, he had not slept, and the strain was beginning to show.

‘Sit down, Nemo, you’re wearing me out,’ said Sarashina.

‘And put some damn clothes on,’ added Evander Gregoras.

‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘I do my best thinking on the move. And it helps being naked, the energies flow through me so much better.’

‘You know that’s nonsense,’ said Sarashina.

Zhi-Meng’s head snapped up and he waved her objections away. ‘You know as well as anyone that whatever works for you only works because you make it so.’

Sarashina lay back on a contoured couch, trying to let its massaging texture ease out the terrible cramps in her shoulder and neck muscles. It was a hopeless task. Days of constant telepathic communion with astropaths all over the Imperium had pushed them all to the end of their endurance. The Choirs were operating far beyond safe limits, and hundreds had burned out like quick-burning star shells fired over a midnight battlefield.

Over a dozen had suffered catastrophic intrusions that had required the intervention of Golovko’s Black Sentinels. Thankfully such incidents had been contained and the cells of those poor unfortunates were now sanitised by fire and sealed with psi-locks.

‘And the Vatic saw no sign of this?’ Zhi-Meng asked. ‘We’re sure of that?’

‘Nothing was logged with the Conduit apart from the dream vision of Athena Diyos,’ said Gregoras, flicking through reams of sifted data on his data-slate. ‘Not even any residuals or imagery they interpreted wrongly.’

‘And you’re sure about that, Evander?’ demanded Zhi-Meng. ‘The palace wants heads on spikes, and we’re next in line at the chopping block.’

‘I am sure, Choirmaster,’ said Gregoras in a tone that conveyed his irritation at the idea his people might have missed something. ‘If there was something to be found, the cryptaesthesians would have seen it.’

Zhi-Meng nodded and resumed his naked pacing.

‘Damn it, but why didn’t Athena send her vision straight to the Conduit? Why did she waste time going to you, Aniq?’

‘I’ll let the insult in that question go this time, Nemo, but don’t ever speak to me like that again.’

‘Sorry, but you know what I meant.’

Sarashina smoothed out her robes and said, ‘It would have made no difference, and you know it. By the time Athena interpreted her vision it was already too late. The traitors had already struck. There was no way we could have warned Ferrus Manus or the others.’

‘I know that, but it rankles,’ said Zhi-Meng, pausing to suck on the coiled pipe of a gently smoking hookah. Aromatic fumes, redolent of desert mountains, filled the air. ‘Lord Dorn is ready to break down the Obsidian Arch and drag me out by the scruff of the neck for this. He wants to know why we didn’t see this coming. What am I supposed to tell him?’

‘You tell him that the currents of the immaterium are always shifting, and that to think that you can use them to predict the future with anything other than best guesses is like shooting an arrow on a windy day and predicting which grain of sand it will hit.’

‘I told him that,’ said Zhi-Meng. ‘He wasn’t impressed. He thinks we failed, and I’m inclined to agree with him.’

‘Did you tell him that we are not seers?’ asked Gregoras. ‘That if we could predict the future, we’d be locked up in the Vault with the Crusader Host and the rest of the traitors the Custodians have rounded up?’

‘Of course, but Lord Dorn is a blunt man, and he demands answers,’ said Zhi-Meng. ‘We all know that it is possible to see potential futures, echoes of events yet to come, but for not one single astropath in this city to get so much of a glimpse of this strikes me as awry. Not one of your Vatic caught so much of a whiff of this, Aniq, not one!’

‘Apart from Athena Diyos,’ said Gregoras.

‘Apart from Athena Diyos,’ repeated Zhi-Meng. ‘How is that possible?’

‘I do not know,’ said Sarashina.

‘Find out,’ ordered Zhi-Meng.

‘Perhaps this is the pattern,’ said Gregoras.

‘You and your pattern,’ cried Zhi-Meng, throwing his arms into the air and slapping them down on the top of his head. ‘There is no pattern. You are inventing things, Evander. I have seen the things you have seen, and I detect no pattern.’

‘With all due respect, Choirmaster, you do not live in the detritus of dreams as I do, and you do not see what I see. I have studied the pattern for centuries, and it has been building to something terrible for many years. All the voices speak of a great red eye bearing down on Terra, a force of awesome destruction that will forever change the course of history.’

Zhi-Meng stopped his pacing. ‘That’s what your precious pattern is telling you? I don’t need Yun’s Oneirocritica to tell me what that means. A novice could tell you the red eye represents Horus Lupercal. If that’s all your years of looking for patterns that aren’t there has told you then you’ve been wasting your time, Evander.’

‘The eye does not represent Horus,’ said Gregoras.

‘Then who does it represent?’ asked Sarashina.

‘I believe it to be Magnus the Red,’ said the cryptaesthesian. ‘I think the Crimson King is coming to Terra.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Evander,’ hissed Zhi-Meng. ‘Magnus is still on Prospero, nursing his wounded pride after Nikaea.’

‘Are we sure about that?’ asked Gregoras.

Seven

Cognoscynths
The cave
The gate is broken

Even in a place as lightless and silent as the Whispering Tower, the lair of the cryptaesthesians was gloomy and foreboding. Kai and Athena moved swiftly through the melta-bored tunnels, pausing every now and then to run their fingers along the wall to check for the notched guide marks. Astropaths soon learned to navigate the familiar corridors of their tower, but none visited the deep levels where the cryptaesthesians plied their trade without very good reason.

‘This is a bad idea,’ said Kai, feeling the psychic pulse of whisper stones bleeding the residue of hundreds of astropathic visions into the trap chambers.

‘I know, but it was your idea,’ Athena reminded him, the sound of her support chair sounding disproportionately loud in the angular corridor. ‘I distinctly recall telling you it was a bad idea several times. You don’t go looking for the cryptaesthesians – they find you.’

Hundreds of metres below ground, the temperature was low and Kai’s breath misted before him. The dimly lit corridor stretched out before him for hundreds of metres, unmarked doors blending with the walls, and only the occasional mark on the walls giving any indication as to how far they had travelled.

‘You can always go back,’ said Kai.

‘And miss seeing you get chewed up by Evander Gregoras? No chance.’

‘I thought Sarashina told you to help me.’

‘She did,’ said Athena. ‘And right now I’m helping you by making sure you get out of this level with your brain still in your skull.’

‘Now you’re being dramatic.’

‘Tell me that when Gregoras has you wired up to his machines, then we’ll see how dramatic I’m being.’

Kai knew Athena was right. It was foolish to seek out the cryptaesthesians, for the towers of the astropaths were awash with dark rumours of their powers. Some said they could pluck secrets from the darkest parts of a person’s psyche, others that they could brainwash any individual into any act imaginable. Yet more told that they could read the minds of the dead.

Such talk was just that, talk, but Kai had no clear idea of how these most secret astro-telepaths worked. He suspected they were associated with the security of the City of Sight, assessing the messages that came to the towers for any warp-borne corruption. Where the Black Sentinels protected the physical aspects of the city, Kai believed the cryptaesthesians looked to its psychic defences.

He reached out to run his fingers along the wall, feeling the particular notches that told him he was on the right level and a few metres away from his destination.

‘This is it,’ he said as they stopped before a plain door of brushed steel.

‘You don’t have to do this,’ she said. ‘I told you, it was just a dream. You know anything can happen in a dream. Especially the dreams of a telepath. They don’t have to mean anything.’

Kai shook his head. ‘Come on, you are Vatic, you know better than that.’

‘You’re right, I do know better than that, but I also know that this is a dangerous door to open, and one that will not easily be shut. To invite a cryptaesthesian to examine the interior architecture of your mind is to forever alter it, to bare the darkest, secret parts of the mind to their scrutiny. Once a cryptaesthesian is in your head, nothing is hidden from them.’

‘I have nothing to hide,’ said Kai.

‘We all have something to hide,’ said Athena. ‘Something we don’t want the rest of the world to know. Trust me on this. I’ve seen the astropaths the cryptaesthesians have questioned, and they all ended up being sent to the hollow mountain.’

‘Well if that’s where I’m heading anyway, then this can’t do any harm.’

Athena reached up with her twisted arm and took hold of his elbow.

‘Of course it can,’ she said. ‘Mistress Sarashina told me to bring you back, but I can’t do that if the cryptaesthesians have reduced your mind to a fractured mess. Kai, think, really think about what you’re doing.’

‘I have,’ said Kai, rapping his knuckles on the brushed steel door.

The sound drifted down the corridor with mocking echoes, and Kai waited for the door to open with held breath. Finally it slid into the wall, and Kai found himself face to face with Evander Gregoras.

Looking at the man’s sallow, pinched features he could see why so few sought him out. Though his features were completely unremarkable to the point of being bland and forgettable, there was a calculating sharpness to his gaze that made Kai feel like a specimen on a dissection table.

‘The whisper stones are awash with your incessant chatter, and I need to rest,’ said Gregoras. ‘Why are you disturbing me?’

Kai was momentarily taken aback, and struggled to find his voice. Beyond Gregoras, he saw a room at odds with the bland-faced man, but Gregoras quickly stepped between Kai and his view of the interior.

‘I am a busy man, Kai Zulane, as are we all in these times,’ said Gregoras. ‘Give me one reason not to send you on your way with a reprimand.’

‘I want to know about the cognoscynths,’ said Kai, and the dismissive expression in the cryptaesthesian’s eyes was replaced with one of guarded interest.

‘The cognoscynths? Why? They are long gone.’

Kai took a breath and glanced at Athena, aware that he was crossing a very dangerous threshold. He shucked the fabric of his robe from his shoulder to reveal a yellow-purple bruise in the shape of a powerful man’s hand.

‘I think I met one,’ he said.

The interior of the cryptaesthesian’s chambers were superficially similar to a novitiate’s: walls of cold stone and iron, an uncomfortable bed, whisper stones set in copper settings, but there the resemblance ended. This chamber was much larger, filled with rack upon rack of shelves, and where a novitiate’s shelves would be empty, awaiting the amassing of a dream library through time and experience, Gregoras boasted an impressive collection.

Leather-bound books, data-spikes and rolled-up parchments vied for space on bookcases overflowing with scraps of paper, celestial charts and handwritten lists. Scores of Oneirocritica lay strewn across the floor, and every square inch of wall was covered in a looping pattern of chalked curves, angles and scrawls that at once seemed dreadfully familiar and utterly unknown to Kai.

Evander Gregoras was a man Kai had known of before he’d left the City of Sight, but he was not a man he had ever had cause to meet.

Right now, he wished that were still the case.

‘Move some of those books if you want somewhere to sit,’ said Gregoras, sorting through a pile of papers stacked at random on a wide desk of scuffed dark wood. ‘Not you, Mistress Diyos. You don’t need to bother.’

Kai wondered if Gregoras was being cruel, but decided he was simply being factual. He shifted a heap of parchments on the bed to make room. He craned his neck to look at the writing on the wall, seeing that the handwriting was the same as filled the parchments. At first glance the designs looked like star charts or some form of celestial cartography, or perhaps the most complex genealogical record imaginable, but none of the symbols and intersecting lines made sense of that interpretation.

‘Don’t bother trying to understand it, Zulane,’ said Gregoras, lifting a book from the desk and sweeping a layer of dust from its cover. ‘I have been trying for nearly two centuries and I understand only a fraction of it.’

‘What is it?’ asked Athena, gliding next to him as her manipulator arm tapped a nervous tattoo on the silvered armrest.

‘Please stop that, Mistress Diyos, it is most irritating,’ said Gregoras before continuing without missing a beat. ‘I call it the pattern, and as to what it is…’

Gregoras pulled a chair from the desk and sat before Kai with the book in his lap. He gazed up at the symbols and lines on the wall like a man seeing the landscapes of Kozarsky for the first time. ‘I believe it is a fragmented vision of a coming apocalypse. A vision of the future experienced by humanity aeons ago and shattered into billions of unrelated shards that have been spinning in the species’ consciousness for hundreds of thousands of years. I have been trying to piece it together.’

He had the certainty of a zealot in his voice, and Kai wondered just how much of what he had heard of the cryptaesthesians was due to this man.

‘So when is this apocalypse?’ said Kai. ‘Not for a while, I hope.’

‘It is happening now,’ said Gregoras.

Kai almost laughed, but thought the better of it when he saw the seriousness of Gregoras’s expression.

‘You’re joking, yes?’ said Kai.

‘I never make jokes,’ replied Gregoras, and Kai believed him.

‘Is it about Horus?’ asked Athena.

‘Possibly, or one of his brothers, but there are many potential interpretations, so I cannot know for sure. There are still too many variables, and much of what I can glean is… of questionable veracity at best. Now, tell me again why you are interrupting my rest cycle.’

‘The cognoscynths,’ said Athena. ‘What can you tell us of them?’

Gregoras leaned back in his chair and shook his head with a sigh. ‘The last of the cognoscynths was slain thousands of years ago,’ he said. ‘Why do you wish to know of an extinct discipline?’

Kai hesitated before answering. Though there was nothing overtly threatening about Gregoras, he exuded bureaucratic threat with his clinical detachment. The kind of man who would sign a hundred death warrants in the same breath as asking for a pot of fresh caffeine. He had a bland, authoritarian coldness that warned Kai not to let his guard down and say anything foolish.

‘I told you, I met one,’ replied Kai.

Gregoras laughed, a dry cough of a laugh, and said, ‘Impossible.’

‘Does this look like something impossible?’ asked Kai, pulling his robe away from his shoulder and once again revealing the bruise in the shape of a man’s hand. The cryptaesthesian put down his book and examined the bruising on Kai’s flesh. Against the paleness of his skin, it was a stark discolouration.

Gregoras laid his own hand on top of the mark. It fitted easily within the bruise. He reached down and pulled Kai’s hand up to his shoulder. It too was smaller than the bruise.

‘A big man with a large hand,’ said Gregoras. ‘Are you sure you did not fall afoul of one of Golovko’s Black Sentinels and get frogmarched back to your cell? Be truthful, I will find out if you lie to me.’

‘I swear to you that mark was not there when I went to sleep,’ said Kai. ‘I was getting dressed the next morning when I saw it. I can’t explain how it got there.’

‘Except by the presence of a psyker breed whose powers have been extinct for thousands of years or more,’ said Gregoras. ‘That is quite a leap of logic.’

‘Well, how do you explain it?’ asked Athena.

‘I don’t have to explain anything,’ said Gregoras, lacing his delicate fingers together on his lap. ‘You are the ones who came to me. I could go into your mind and look for any lingering traces of another psi-presence, but it is not a delicate procedure, and it is not painless. Are you sure you are ready for such a painful intrusion to your mind?’

‘I need to know for sure if I was just dreaming or if it was real.’

‘Of course you were dreaming,’ said Gregoras, as though that explained everything. ‘You had a dream, Zulane, nothing more. As if it wasn’t bad enough that you return to us broken, you now tell me that you have lost the ability to tell dream from fantasy.’

‘It was more than a dream,’ insisted Kai.

‘Any novitiate would say the same thing.’

‘Kai is not a novitiate,’ said Athena.

‘Really?’ snapped Gregoras, rounding on Athena. ‘Yet he is quartered with them, and I am given to believe that he can no longer employ the nuncio. Nor is he capable of sending or receiving astro-telepathic communion. He is fit only for the hollow mountain. Am I incorrect in any of these statements?’

‘As a matter of fact, you are,’ said Athena. ‘Kai has a long way to go before he is fully recovered from the incident on the Argo, but his abilities return with every passing day. I will have him back in the mindhalls before long, you can be sure of that.’

A surge of gratitude washed through Kai as Athena spoke in his defence. They had known each other for a short time only, and though their initial meeting hadn’t exactly been a roaring success, their shared damage had at least established a common ground between them. Gregoras sensed her protectiveness and sat back with a slight smile playing around his thin lips. The cryptaesthesian took a shallow breath and brushed a piece of lint from his robe before opening the book in his lap.

‘A cognoscynth is a powerful psyker indeed, one with a very distinct modus operandi,’ said Gregoras. ‘It would be hard for one to use his abilities on Terra without at least one operative of the City of Sight being aware of it.’

‘So you don’t believe me?’ asked Kai.

‘Let us say I maintain a healthy degree of scepticism,’ replied Gregoras, ‘but I will indulge your delusion for the moment and tell you of the cognoscynths.’

Halfway across the galaxy, two men had met in a glittering cave, far beneath the paradise world they called home. The walls of the cave sang with unheard harmonies, the music of a world alive with the background hum of latent psychic powers bubbling beneath the surface of the planet’s consciousness.

One of the men was a giant, a towering figure robed in white and bearing a heavy leather book hung with small thurible and parchment strips. His name was Ahzek Ahriman, and among mortal men he was a demi-god, a figure of such awesome power and intellect that few of Terra’s greatest minds could match him in contests of wit and knowledge. His face was downcast as he stared at the second figure sitting cross-legged on the rocky floor at the exact centre of the cave.

Though Ahriman was a giant, the seated figure was even bigger. Likewise robed in white, he was a strange individual, with skin like burnished bronze and a mane of crimson hair like that of a furious lion.

On this world, at this time, there could be only one individual that gathered the light and power of the cave into himself.

Magnus the Red. The Crimson King, Primarch of the Thousand Sons and Master of Prospero.

None who knew the primarch would ever give identical descriptions of his face, attribute the same colour to his eyes, or give the same impression of his humours. Inconstant as the wind or the ocean waves, no two aspects of Magnus could ever be the same, and the light from the glittering crystals carried by the hundreds of thralls around the edges of the cave was both reflected and absorbed by his skin.

A faint shimmer of illumination connected Magnus to a strange device hanging from the cavern’s ceiling. Shaped like a giant telescope, its surfaces were carved with sigils unknown beyond this world, and silver vanes projected from a platinum rim around a giant green crystal at its centre.

For two nights Magnus had meditated, and for many more he had sat motionless beneath the bronze device as his acolyte read passages from the book in a never-ending recitation of formulae, incantations and numerical algorithms.

Had any of the polymaths of Terra been present, they would have wept at the beautiful complexity and lyrical simplicity of these equations. Devised by Magnus over decades of research and study, they were unique and known only to the Thousand Sons. A lifetime’s worth of irreplaceable knowledge was bound within the pages of the book carried by Ahriman, and its incalculable value was beyond imagining.

The Chief Librarian of the Thousand Sons had not faltered in his reading, every complex syllable voiced with a perfection that would have made the most demanding captain of the Emperor’s Children proud. He watched over Magnus with a son’s love for his father, and though he believed in his primarch’s genius and wisdom, he could not disguise the unease he felt at what they attempted here.

Magnus had not moved in four days, his subtle body crossing the unremembered and unknown reaches of the immaterium en route to a fateful meeting.

In his heart Magnus had carried a warning for his father’s Imperium, but in his actions he carried the seeds of its doom.

Gregoras turned the book in his lap around to face them, and Kai saw a colour plate spread over two pages depicting a scene of battle. Yet this was no ordinary contest of arms, it was a conflict between warring soldiers of Old Earth, fought beneath a raging, bilious sky that split apart with shards of lightning and grotesque faces pressing through the clouds. A leering sun bathed the scene with a hellish light, and the faces of the combatants were twisted, not in hate, but in terror and anguish.

‘Sargon of Akkad at the Gates of Uruk,’ said Kai, reading the caption beneath the picture. ‘I can’t say I’ve heard of this battle.’

‘Unsurprising,’ said Gregoras, ‘though I presume you will have heard of the psi-wars?’

Kai nodded. Athena nodded.

‘Of course you have – you would be ignorant psykers indeed had you not. Truth be told, little is known of those global wars with any certainty, just fragments culled from surviving records that escaped the purges of its aftermath. We believe they began, as all wars do, with ambition and greed, but it soon became clear that the warrior kings at each other’s throats were being directed by the will of power-mad individuals hidden in the shadows.’

‘The cognoscynths?’ asked Kai.

Gregoras nodded. ‘Psykers are an uncommon mutation. Perhaps one child in a million may be born with some latent power. And of those children, perhaps a tenth will have power worth harnessing. The gene-code for the cognoscynth is two orders of magnitude rarer. Now I want you to understand what that means, for it is not just a hyperbolic phrase. Cognoscynths are considerably rarer than any normal psyker, so to have so many arise on Old Earth at once was an event so singular as to demand its own named epoch. Yet no such epoch exists in the records, for some times are best forgotten.’

Kai had heard a bowdlerised version of the early years of the psi-wars, but his knowledge was sketchy at best. That period of psyker history was not well taught at the City of Sight. No one wanted to remember a time where psychic powers almost destroyed the world, least of all the psykers themselves.

‘Eventually it came to light that the great states of the world were simply pawns for powerful individuals who set nation against nation for their own savage amusement. No normal telepath could have done this, only one with the unique power of a cognoscynth.’

‘Why would anyone want to do that?’

Gregoras shrugged, but said, ‘You know the lure of psychic powers, Zulane. Despite the dangers, every astropath acquires a taste for using their powers. Once your mind touches the immaterium, it craves that wellspring of limitless potential like nothing else. Do you remember the first time you used your powers?’

‘Yes,’ said Kai, ‘it was intoxicating.’

‘Mistress Diyos?’

‘My mind could reach across the heavens, and I felt as though I was part of the fabric of the universe itself,’ said Athena.

‘Indeed, but no matter how many times you achieve communion after that first time, it is never quite the same,’ said Gregoras. ‘Every communion is dangerous, but you still willingly hurl your mind into a realm of terrible danger just to feel that rush of its power again.’

‘But you never can,’ said Kai.

‘No,’ agreed Gregoras. ‘And if you stop trying…’

‘You get psi-sick,’ finished Athena. ‘Your mind aches for what it once had. I felt it when they brought me back from the Phoenician and I couldn’t use my powers for weeks. I never want to go through that again.’

‘The cognoscynths could maintain that first sensation,’ said Gregoras. ‘Every time they touched the warp was like the first time. They became addicted to the power, and it is said they were virtually immune to the dangers of the warp. No immaterial creature could touch them, and without limits on their power and ambitions, the cognoscynths became obsessed with dominating lesser men, believing that they alone could control the destiny of the species. And they had the power to do it.’

‘I’ve heard rumours of what they could do, but it all seems too overblown, the kinds of powers ordinary folk think we have.’

‘Whatever you have heard is likely true,’ said Gregoras. ‘There was little a cognoscynth could not do. After all, if you can control people’s minds, you can do anything at all.’

‘They could go into your mind and… change things?’ asked Kai.

‘They could go into your mind and do anything at all,’ repeated Gregoras. ‘For example, I could no more compel you to throttle Mistress Diyos than I could have you slit your own throat with a sharp blade. Nor, I suspect, could I convince you of the dissonant beauty of Dada’s Antisymphony, no matter how hard I tried. Most people’s own innate sense of self-preservation and understanding of right and wrong are too ingrained to overcome, but a cognoscynth could make you his puppet with no more effort than breathing. He could compel you to perform unimaginable acts of horror and make you laugh as you did them. He could erase your memories, graft new ones in their place and make you see what he wanted you to see, feel what he wanted you to feel. Nothing of the spaces in your mind that make you who you are would be beyond his reach.’

Kai felt his skin crawl at such invasive psykery.

‘No wonder our kind are feared,’ he said.

‘Our kind have always been feared, even before the psi-wars,’ said Gregoras. ‘It is the way of men that they fear what they do not understand and seek to bring it to heel. The aftermath of the psi-wars was a perfect excuse to do so. And here we are, shackled to a bleak iron city in the midst of the greatest fortress this world will ever see.’

‘How did the wars end?’ asked Athena.

‘The legends say a great warrior with golden eyes arose, the only man whose will was strong enough to resist the influence of the cognoscynths. He rallied the armies of those few kingdoms left and trained a cadre of warriors like no other – stronger, faster and tougher than any of the great bands of old. One by one, they stormed the citadels of the cognoscynths on the backs of great silver flying machines. Not even the most powerful cognoscynths could dominate the golden-eyed warrior, and every time he slew one of these psyker-devils, the enslaved armies were freed from bondage, and willingly joined the forces of the great warrior. It took another thirty years, but eventually his armies brought down the last cognoscynth, and the people of the world were free again.’

‘And what became of the warrior?’ asked Kai.

‘No one knows for sure. Some legends say he was killed in the battle with the last cognoscynth, others that he tried to take power himself and was killed by his men.’

Gregoras paused and a wrinkle at the side of his mouth told Kai he was smiling. The gesture was unsettling, like the death grin of a corpse. ‘Some even say the warrior still lives among us, waiting for the day when the power of the cognoscynths returns.’

‘But you don’t believe that?’ asked Athena.

‘No, of course not. To imagine that any such being could still exist is the stuff of children’s tales and foolish saga poets. No, that warrior, if he even existed as the legends recall, is long-since dust and bones.’

‘Shame,’ said Kai. ‘The Imperium could use someone like him right now.’

‘Indeed,’ said Gregoras. ‘Now that you know the true measure of a cognoscynth’s power, tell me the substance of your so-called encounter with one.’

And so Kai took Gregoras through every stage of his dream: the Empty Quarter, the deserted fortress and the strange sounds and smells of a distant land that emerged from the air itself. He spoke of the harsh blue of the lake and the glaring red eye of the sun that beat down on the desert sands like a burning hammer. Finally, Kai ended his tale with the ghostly figure that drifted through the empty halls of Arzashkun with easy familiarity.

Gregoras sat opposite him as he spoke of his meeting with the figure, the unseen presence and the powerful grip he had taken on Kai’s shoulder. He related all that the figure had said, and ended his tale by showing Gregoras the marks on his shoulder once more.

The cryptaesthesian licked his lips, and Kai struggled to hold back an expression of revulsion. The gesture was like a lizard’s anticipation of a fresh meal, yet there was a tightness to Gregoras’s posture that had been absent when they had first arrived at his chambers. Though it seemed hard to credit, Kai believed the cryptaesthesian to be worried.

‘Tell me again of the sun,’ Gregoras demanded. ‘Speak, and be clear. How did it look, how did it make you feel? What imagery did you use to describe it? The metaphor and the impression. Tell me of them, and do not add or embellish. Just as you saw it.’

Kai cast his mind back to the moment before the robed figure appeared behind him.

‘I remember the simmering heat of the desert, the salt-tang of the air and the rippling horizon. The sun was red, vivid red, and it seemed as though it was looking down on the world, as though it was a huge eye.’

‘The red eye,’ whispered Gregoras. ‘Throne, he’s almost here.’

‘Who?’ asked Athena. ‘Who is almost here?’

‘The Crimson King,’ said Gregoras, looking beyond Kai at the impossibly complex pattern sketched out on the wall behind him. ‘Sarashina, no! It’s happening now. It’s happening right now.’

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 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 and 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 numinous 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 around, their barrels spooling up to fire. Lighting 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 Legio Custodes were at arms, but nothing in their training could have prepared them for what came next.

A form began pressing 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 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 had 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 had changed forever.

Eight

Take but degree away
The veil is broken
Dreams of the Red Chamber

Aniq Sarashina’s day had begun badly. She woke at dawn with the lingering residue of a dream she couldn’t remember filling her gut with a nauseous, roiling ache. It felt like the sickness she suffered aboard a starship just before it translated, but more persistent. The fact that she couldn’t remember the dream was also troubling. The Mistress of the Vatic should have perfect recall of all her visions, for who knew what clues to the future were held there?

The rest of the morning passed in a dull haze, with her blindsight blunted, as though she had been drinking heavily or imbibing mentally unfettering narcotics with Nemo. It had been days since she had taken anything stronger than caffeine into her system, so it was doubly unfair to feel so wretched. For the first time since she had taken her place in the ranks of the Telepathica, Aniq Sarashina felt truly hampered by her lack of eyes.

An oppressive sense of claustrophobia hung over her as she spent a morning digesting the latest red-flagged communications passing through the City of Sight. In the wake of the Dropsite Massacre, as many were taking to calling it, the Imperium’s armed forces were reeling, still on the back foot as Legion expeditions and Army groups attempted to reorganise their battle-lines and sort friend from foe.

Of the forces that had been betrayed on Isstvan V, almost nothing was known.

No word had been received from the Raven Guard, lending weight to careless rumours from Er scryers that Primarch Corax and his Legion had been destroyed utterly. A few elements of the Salamanders were believed to have escaped Isstvan V in disarray, but the only reports of this were third hand at best. Primarch Vulkan’s fate was unknown, but many feared that he too was lost.

The Iron Hands were all but gone, their devastated Chapters scattered to the winds in the aftermath of the primarch’s death. Despite the completeness of the betrayal, Sarashina still found it hard to accept the idea that a primarch could die. But as shocking as it had been to learn of Horus Lupercal’s betrayal, subsequent events were piling impossibility upon impossibility until now nothing was beyond belief.

Rogal Dorn’s emissaries to the Whispering Tower demanded answers, but the Choirmaster had little concrete information to give them. Traitor fleets had cut the escape routes from the fifth planet, and for all intents and purposes the system was as dark as a dead moon. Nothing was getting in or out of the Isstvan system – no information, and certainly no loyalist warriors.

Worse, the defeat on Isstvan had galvanised scores of cowardly planets and systems throughout the Imperium to openly declare for the Warmaster. A sense of hurt, betrayal and horrified incomprehension was paralysing the Imperium’s response to this gross betrayal when decisive action was needed more than ever.

And then a ray of hope. A message from the very edges of the Isstvan system.

Garbled and fragmentary, but bearing all the synesthesia codes of the XVIII Legion.

The Salamanders.

Sarashina rushed immediately to the largest mindhall in the Whispering Tower.

Abir Ibn Khaldun was already in place, surrounded by the Choir Primus. Only the lambent glow of dimmed lumens cast light around the chamber, its ironclad walls coffered and deaf to the psychic white noise that filled it.

Two thousand astropaths of the Choir Primus reclined in their contoured harnesses, each struggling to distil a message hurled from the outskirts of the Isstvan system. Abir Ibn Khaldun sat in the centre of the chamber, wrestling with the confused allegorical concepts and baffling symbolism they were sending him.

Sarashina had briefly linked her mind to his, but could make no sense of the imagery she saw there. A mountain dragon drinking from a golden lake, an orchid emerging from the crack in an obsidian plain that stretched for thousands of kilometres in all directions, a flaming sword hanging motionless over a world utterly devoid of life or geography. Twins conjoined by a single soul, tugging in different directions.

What did any of it mean?

Choir Primus were the strongest second-tier psykers in the Whispering Tower, and could normally distil the interpretation of a message sent from the other side of the galaxy without difficulty, but what they were sending to Ibn Khaldun made no sense.

A voice sounded in her head, cultured and deeply lyrical.

+I confess I am all at sea, Mistress Sarashina.+

+As am I, Abir,+ she replied.

+It is as though the astropath is quite mad.+

+That may well be the case. Who knows what they have gone through to get this message to us.+

Another thought occurred to her. +Could the incoming message have been intercepted en route to us?+

+Perhaps, but such interference is patently obvious in most cases. This message evinces no such distortion. I believe that whatever is warping this message is here on Terra, but I have no clue what it could be.+

+Keep trying. Lord Dorn is expecting progress.+

Sarashina broke the link to Ibn Khaldun. He would need every ounce of his concentration to make sense of the message. Synesthesia confirmed that the message had originated with an astropath of the Salamanders Legion, but beyond its identity, nothing of its contents made sense.

She sighed, feeling the beginnings of a pounding headache building in her sinuses. Head pains were nothing out of the ordinary for an astropath, especially in the presence of a demanding communion, but she could already feel that this would be a bad one. A low-level irritation had been griping at the back of her mind all day, a persistent whining drone, like a desperate insect trapped in a glass jar.

She wasn’t the only one feeling it. The whole tower was on edge, and not just the overtaxed astropaths. Even the Black Sentinels were jumpy, as though the latent pressure from the exhausted psykers was somehow bypassing the psi-shielding of their helmets and racking up their aggression. It felt like the drawn-out moment before a battle, where the tension stretched to unbearable levels before a single shot began the killing.

Despite the welcome news of contact with a loyal Legion, Sarashina couldn’t shake the feeling that this was a harbinger of something so terrible that it was beyond her ability to understand. She knew she was being melodramatic. After all, any event of such magnitude would have been seen by the Vatic. Future-scrying was an imperfect discipline, but could anything as bad as she feared have escaped the notice of her viewers?

She didn’t know, and that scared her more than anything.

Sarashina felt something wet on her top lip. She dabbed the skin and her fingertips came away sticky. Blood was flowing from her nose in a steady stream, and Sarashina let out a small moan as she tasted it on her lips.

‘Oh, no,’ she whispered as the steadily building pain in her head flared to a white hot spike of agony rammed through the frontal lobes of her brain.

Sarashina’s blindsight distorted like a static-filled picter held too close to a powerful magnet, and she staggered as her balance was thrown off. The world tilted crazily, and she fell to the mosaic-tiled floor as an incomprehensibly vast tide of psychic energy surged into the mindhall.

The cataclysm unleashed by the arrival of the Crimson King and the breaking of the mighty wards around the golden gateway in the dungeons spread through the mountains like the blast wave of an atomic detonation. A tsunami of psychic force thundered upwards from the bowels of the palace in a raging torrent that touched every mind on the surface of the globe.

The gilded towers of the palace shook with the force of it, and priceless, irreplaceable statuary toppled from plinths as the shockwave trembled the very rock of the mountains. The madness, fear and panic that hung over the palace roared back to life like a resurgent wave of pestilence.

Mobs of lunatics bearing cudgels and brickbats laid siege to columned palaces and clashed with other mobs for no reason any one person could adequately explain. Blood flowed on the marble-paved thoroughfares and golden processionals, madness stalked the illuminated galleries and insanity held court all across the roof of the world.

Yet as quickly as it began, the insanity of their actions became clear to the mobs, and they guiltily slunk from sight to lick their wounds, nurse newly-acquired grievances or shut themselves away from revenge attacks. Within minutes of the psychic shockwave, it had passed from the high summits of the palace and spread across the globe like the fiery advance of a plague.

Those on the dark side of the world suffered nightmares the like of which had not been experienced since the bleakest watches of Old Night. Genetic memory of that horrific time of madness surged to the fore of sleepers around the world, bringing dreams of blood-drenched metropolises, planetary exterminations and species slavery.

Entire cities of Terra awoke screaming and millions died by their own hand as their minds fragmented in the face of such psychic assault. Others awoke with their minds altered in fundamental ways that rendered them into entirely new individuals. Fathers, wives and children forgot one another as mental pathways were erased or rewritten in vulgar ways that wiped entire families from existence.

In places where the barrier between the material realm and the warp was already thin, manifestations of dreams and nightmares stalked the landscape. Black-furred wolves with burning lights for eyes descended from the mountains to devastate entire communities, and no weapon could slay them. Entire populations vanished as their towns and burgs were swallowed whole by catastrophic overspills of warp energy, leaving nothing but eerily empty buildings in their aftermath.

All over the globe, the people of Terra suffered for Magnus’s hubris, but nowhere felt the shockwave of his return more powerfully than the City of Sight.

Sarashina closed her mind to her abilities and threw up her psychic defences as colossal amounts of raw, unfettered psychic power bloated the chamber, like an overloading plasma reactor in the instant before its coolant system failed. She felt the tsunami of psychic power roaring over the mountains, a horrendous outpouring of warp energy unleashed from the very heart of the palace.

Even disconnected from her higher powers, Sarashina felt the searing wave of psychic energy trapped in the mindhall find earthing conduits through the astropaths of Choir Primus. Five hundred died instantly as their minds were reduced to blackened cinders by a flash of supercharged psychic energy.

Choir Primus shrieked in unison, each suffering the agony of a slow, searing psi-death. Fully aware of their brains being seared from their skulls, the astropaths howled like wounded animals as their higher functions were burned away, until their crazed autonomic functions spasmed and broke limbs, spines and fractured skulls as they literally thrashed themselves to death.

Sarashina’s mental defences were among the strongest in the City of Sight, but even she strained to hold back this unknown attack, her layered wards like a levee pounded by hurricane-driven waves. A cramping pain seized her gut, and Sarashina howled.

When the permeable wall between realities was torn aside by a starship’s warp engines, every psyker within ten light years would feel a measure of discomfort.

This felt as if she were chained in the terrible heart of a warp engine.

The pain was intense, translation pain, but there was no reason for it.

It felt as if Terra itself was about to plunge into the immaterial chaos of the warp. The thought was ridiculous, but it lodged like a splinter in soft skin. In the instant of the thought forming, Sarashina felt a fiery sickness build in her stomach. She cried out and grasped her stomach as hot bile and the partially digested remains of last night’s hastily snatched meal erupted from her mouth in a tide of acidic vomit.

The maelstrom of psychic energy raged around her, ravaging the minds and bodies of Choir Primus with its towering, elemental fury. The life-lights of the astropaths were being snuffed out one by one, as easily as a man might snuff out the candles of a mourning chamber.

But the choir did not die easily or quietly.

Sarashina tried to shut her mind off to the death-screams of the astropaths around her, but such a feat was impossible in the face of so unified a death cry. Memories dying, lives left unfinished and the terror of knowing that everything you were was being slowly, agonisingly, destroyed. The horror of your brain disassembling, and knowing there was nothing you could do to stop it. Every defence you had against it was futile, every mantra you had been taught to ward against such attacks useless.

Sarashina felt it all, every emotion, every horror, every last iota of loss and desperation. It flooded through her, permeating every cell of her body with anguish. Yet even as the astropaths died, they fulfilled their last duty. The surging, killing brightness of the psychic energy fuelled their powers to unimaginable heights for the briefest instant, making them – for a last shining moment – the greatest astropaths in the history of the galaxy.

Like madmen and prophets, the dead and the dying, they tapped deeper into the well of infinite knowledge contained in the warp. To the shape of things that had been, and were yet to come to pass. What a radical adept of Mars had sought to harness through technology, they broke open with the very power that was killing them.

It was intoxicating and numbing, overpowering and deadly.

The message from the Salamanders was obliterated, and their song immolated Abir Ibn Khaldun in a thunderclap of psychic discharge. Vast and incomprehensible power was distilled by the last breath of Choir Primus and shaped into a singularity of psychic energy that blared from Ibn Khaldun’s last scream and burned with the light of a thousand suns in the heart of the chamber.

Impossible colours, undreamed of light from the universe’s beginning and the knowledge of all things hung in the centre of the chamber like the frozen pulse of a neutron star. Even those without ability would have seen its glittering beauty had they somehow survived the initial blast wave of immaterial energy.

The last surviving members of the choir shrieked as geysers of light erupted from their scalps. Howling monstrosities and nightmare aberrations were carried on the light, searing their way into the material universe through living hosts. The majority of these formless spawn withered in the face of the hostile environment of the material universe, but others devoured the flickering remains of their dying brethren and grew stronger. They flocked in dirty scraps of debased light as Sarashina picked herself up from the floor, wiping drooled bile and vomit from her chin.

Klaxons and warning bells were sounding throughout the City of Sight and she heard gunshots from somewhere nearby. Evidently this mindhall was not the only place within the Whispering Tower to suffer breaches in the fabric of reality.

The warp creatures descended from the upper reaches of the mindhall, surrounding the sphere of impossible light where Abir Ibn Khaldun had once sat, like weary travellers gathered around a cookfire. None of them were a threat to her, their substance too insubstantial and weak to trouble her, but their presence would draw the Black Sentinels. Already she could hear the soldiers beating at the locks of the sealed mindhall, but she paid the sound no mind, her attention firmly fixed on the shimmering, glittering light in the centre of the chamber.

It swirled like a ball of liquid gemstones, blue and white, green and red and every other colour imaginable. Inconstant and insubstantial, it appeared as dense as a black hole and as transient as mist in the same instant. Sarashina felt the siren song of its magnificent power and felt herself drawn to it as carrion-eaters are drawn towards rotten meat. The imagery disturbed her, for it was not of her own making, but conjured from the depths of this coalesced energy.

Sarashina had been fortunate never to suffer the pain of psi-sickness, but faced with this potency, her mind ached like a novitiate shorn of his power. Her entire being craved this, and with every step she took, Sarashina knew she would not be able to resist its incredible potential.

It swam in the air before her, the warp creatures parting before her like a curtain at a production of the Theatrica Imperialis. She felt their unthinking hunger for her, a mindless desire to drain her of her very essence. With a thought they retreated from her like whipped hounds. A crashing detonation sounded behind Sarashina, but she was oblivious to everything except the wondrous light before her.

It promised so much, this doorway into a realm of infinite possibilities.

Truth, knowledge, power.

The Vatic aspect of her powers saw the potential to know the course of the future in perfect clarity. With that knowledge she could forewarn the Emperor’s armies and be instrumental in stamping out the rebellion of Horus Lupercal. In the space of a breath, she could know the future of all things.

One touch was all it would take.

Yet still she hesitated, knowing on a primal and conscious level that nothing of the warp could be trusted. The psi-sickness in her gut intensified, and the unclean scraps of warp-life swirled around her in streamers of ghostly light. No matter what warnings her higher brain functions were screaming, she had to touch this power, just to feel the heat at the heart of creation for one fleeting instant.

Sarashina reached out with trembling fingers and touched the raw energy of the warp.

And screamed as she saw the red chamber in all its infinite horror.

Nine

Sentinels
Where you will not go
Saturnalia

Evander Gregoras dragged Kai through the chaos of the Whispering Tower like a child. Almost paralysed by choking terror, Kai stumbled through a red mist of horror as the sights and sounds and smells of the Argo returned to him with evil clarity. They had long since left Athena in their wake, darting along low-roofed corridors and narrow tunnels that seemed designed for emaciated midgets. The cryptaesthesian knew the tower intimately, bypassing the commonly trod halls and screaming mindhalls as the psychic shockwave echoed and roared within the city of the astropaths.

Kai had no idea what had just happened, but every scrap of self-preservation was begging him to find a place of safety. Screams clung to the air, the whisper stones carrying them around the interior of the tower like horrible secrets. Alarum bells rang and barking gunshots swiftly followed angry bellows from the Black Sentinels.

‘Throne!’ bellowed Gregoras. ‘Pick up your feet, Zulane.’

‘I can’t,’ sobbed Kai. ‘I can’t do this again.’

Gregoras stopped and backhanded Kai across the face. The slap was shocking and sharp, the sound like splitting wood. Kai flinched from the blow, blood and snot mingling on his top lip as he dropped to the floor like a beaten slave.

‘Get up, damn you,’ said Gregoras.

‘Why?’ hissed Kai. ‘We’re all going to die here. The daemons are coming in and they’re going to kill everyone. I won’t survive a second time.’

Gregoras hauled him to his feet, his previously bland and unremarkable face now clenched in fury. ‘I said, get up! This is the pattern. Get up or so help me I will hand you over to Maxim Golovko myself and laugh as he puts a bullet in your brain.’

Kai wiped his bloody nose with the sleeve of his robe, understanding only a fraction of what Gregoras was saying.

‘Why do you need me?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know,’ admitted Gregoras. ‘I wish I did not, but this is what I have been searching for all my life. You have glimpsed a portion of it, and you will help me understand it. Do you understand?’

‘No, not even a little bit.’

Gregoras shrugged. ‘I don’t care,’ he said. ‘You’re coming with me anyway.’

He hauled Kai by the scruff of the neck, propelling him along an iron-framed corridor that looked as though it ran between one of the mindhalls and a section of the Oneirocritica Alchera Mundi. Whisper stones bled thoughts of rape and murder, torture and degradation, and Kai fought to keep them out. It had been thoughts like these that had turned the crew of the Argo into debased monsters, cannibals and violators of the dead.

Kai had only lived by isolating himself in his astropathic chambers, to which no one but the captain and his equerry had access. They had been the first to die when the protective shields collapsed, and though the fiends had clawed at his chambers, none could reach him.

While the monsters and maddened crew could not drag him from his sanctuary, he could not shut his mind to the horrors that devoured their humanity. He heard every scream from their murderous orgies and tasted the loathsome appetites of the creatures that emerged from their bloody murders.

Aboard the Argo he had a place of refuge. Here he was horribly exposed.

How could he possibly survive this?

He followed Gregoras blindly, dragged along in his wake, not knowing where they were going or what had happened to the tower. Were they under attack? Had the forces of Horus Lupercal already reached Terra and begun their invasion by crippling the Telepathica?

‘What in the Emperor’s name is happening?’ he shouted.

Gregoras didn’t answer, and Kai saw him crouch to run his fingertips over the notched marks on the wall next to him.

‘Do you even know where we are?’

‘Of course I know,’ snapped Gregoras. ‘We are in the bleed channels under the Zothasticron.’

‘The what?’

‘The bleed channels,’ said Gregoras, running his hands along the opposite wall. ‘The whisper stones gather the excess energies of communion and carry it down to the trap chambers beneath the towers. How else do you think we dissipate the psychic energy?’

‘I didn’t know we needed to,’ said Kai.

‘Then you are a bigger fool than you look.’

Despite his dislike of Gregoras, Kai wasn’t about to abandon his only anchor of safety in this maelstrom of unleashed horrors. So far they hadn’t seen anything beyond running Sentinels, but the flickering images of bloated bodies, fly-ridden corpses and skinless faces parading through his hindbrain told him that the Whispering Tower was now a place of horrors to match the Argo.

Gunfire echoed down the channel, followed by an explosion and the dull cough of grenade launchers. Kai heard screams, the sounds amplified by the acoustics of the narrow tunnel, but he couldn’t be sure he was really hearing them or if they were being carried into his mind by the whisper stones.

‘What’s happening?’ asked Kai.

‘Magnus is here,’ said Gregoras.

‘Magnus the primarch?’

‘Of course Magnus the primarch, who else could unleash such powerful psychic force?’

‘How can he be on Terra? He’s halfway across the galaxy.’

‘I don’t know how, but Magnus the Red is here and his coming has unleashed power unlike anything you can possibly imagine.’

‘So is this an attack?’

Gregoras took a breath as he considered the question. ‘Not as such. I do not believe Magnus has betrayed us, at least not intentionally, but he has acted with such hubris that there will be no forgiveness for this act. The Emperor will have no choice but to make an example of him.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘You know what it means.’

‘No, I don’t,’ said Kai. ‘Tell me.’

‘It will mean the Wolves will be loosed again.’

Kai shivered, unsure of what Gregoras meant, but knowing on a primal level that it would be unwise to ask more.

‘Back in your chambers you said Mistress Sarashina’s name,’ said Kai. ‘Is she in danger?’

‘The very worst kind,’ confirmed Gregoras, finally finding the mark he sought on the walls. ‘The warp is giving her exactly what she wants. Damn, but I should have seen this. The Maiden and the Great Eye. Truth and the future, all bound together. The silver vixen, the heralds of the final truth. It all makes sense now.’

Gregoras was rambling now, random phrases from his insane researches spilling from his lips like a madman’s stream of consciousness. None of it made sense, but nothing of this made any sense. Who better to make sense of madness than a madman?

‘I don’t understand what you’re talking about, but if Mistress Sarashina is in danger, then we need to help her.’

Gregoras nodded and said, ‘If it is not already too late for her.’

Kai and Gregoras emerged from the bleed channels in one of the central hub chambers heading towards the base of the tower. Yellow light flashed from warning lumens and a number of bodies were stacked like cordwood at the entrance to one of the libraries. Kai gagged at the stench of blood and the actinic tang of lasfire. Streams of hard light blasted into the library from ranked-up squads of Black Sentinels.

Another group worked at the door to the Choir Primus mindhall, rigging melta-charges to detonators, while Maxim Golovko paced impatiently behind the demolition crew like a caged predator. Alone of the Black Sentinels, Golovko went without a helmet, an open insult to the psykers of the Whispering Tower.

I do not fear you or need protecting from you, the gesture said.

A handful of Black Sentinels spun to face them as they emerged from the channel, rifles brought to bear with exacting precision and speed.

‘Hold!’ cried Gregoras. ‘Protocol cryptaesthesian!’

The guns were lowered, and Golovko strode through their ranks as more gunfire blasted into the library. The major general was livid, yet Kai sensed that he was taking great relish in his task of extermination.

‘I might have known I would find you drawn to the heart of this,’ he said.

‘Sarashina is in there?’ said Gregoras, pushing past the commander of the Black Sentinels.

‘With the Choir Primus,’ replied Golovko. ‘Do you know what’s happening?’

‘I have my suspicions, but we don’t have time for discussion. You need to get that door open. Now.’

An explosion blew out a choking cloud of dust, splinters and mulched paper from the library, and a howling scream of something unnatural rang from the walls. Whisper stones shattered with glassy pops, and Kai felt a surge of bloodthirsty rage fill him. His teeth bared and his fists clenched, but it passed as soon as Gregoras touched his shoulder. Kai felt the anger pour out of him, blinking away the red veil that had descended on him.

Gregoras had one hand on his shoulder, another pressed against a whisper stone that had survived the psychic surge.

‘Think!’ snapped Gregoras. ‘Maintain your defences.’

Kai nodded, ashamed he had allowed his mental buttresses to become so weakened in his fear of what was happening.

‘Get some null grenades in there,’ said Golovko, his tone brusque, but clipped and businesslike. ‘Don’t let that happen again.’

Kai had never liked Golovko, but the man had just endured a psychic attack without flinching. The only sign of the strain of holding it at bay was a pulsing vein at his temple that throbbed like a hydraulic pipe. Golovko saw his look and shook his head with a sneer.

‘It’ll take more than that to get by this soldier.’

Kai didn’t answer, and concentrated on maintaining his own wards against the power washing from the library. Through the smoke and sliced-up bodies at the entrance, Kai saw a swirling morass of light and flesh, a patchwork monstrosity formed from still-living hosts and torn flesh given form and mobility by immaterial energies. He looked away as the entity sensed his scrutiny and wisps of light darted towards the door.

‘Don’t look at it,’ hissed Gregoras. ‘You of all people should know better than that.’

Another volley of gunfire stitched across the nascent form of the thing in the library, followed by a dull crump of psychically resonant grenades. Immediately the air took on a thick, grainy quality, and the raging static of the warp spawn diminished to bearable levels.

‘Yeltsa, get in there and push that thing out of my tower,’ ordered Golovko, before turning back to the mindhall of Choir Primus. ‘How’s that breaching charge coming on?’

‘Done, sir,’ replied the demo-tech, backing away from the rigged door and handing the detonator box to Golovko.

Kai and Gregoras pressed themselves to the walls as Golovko stood in front of the door, unlimbering a bulky grenade launcher from his back.

‘Remember that’s Aniq Sarashina in there,’ said Gregoras.

‘We don’t know what’s in there,’ said Golovko. ‘But if it’s hostile, it’s going to die.’

‘If you kill her, you’ll answer to the Choirmaster.’

Golovko shrugged and pressed the activation thumb-switch on the detonator box.

Kai had been expecting a thunderous detonation and had his ears covered, but the melta-charges simply glowed a fiery blue-white, and the only sound was the hiss of metal flashing to superheated liquid in seconds. Gobbets of molten metal drooled down the carven face of the door as the charges burned through the lock.

Golovko dropped the detonator and racked the loading tube of his grenade launcher.

He kicked the door open, and a host of gibbering voices flew from the unsealed chamber. Shrieks of babes yet to be born and corpses cold in the ground for millennia blasted from the mindhall, a chorus of the dead and still to die coalesced in one almighty bellow of fear and regret. Golovko stood firm in the face of this cyclone of the dead, unmoved and uncaring of their torments or lives unlived.

Kai felt the torrent of unleashed psychic energy and winced as it battered the defences of his mind. He felt the horror of each death within the mindhall, and impossible tears spilled down his cheeks as he felt the last moments of each of the astropaths within. A pale light, like a beacon lit far beneath the surface of a clear ocean spilled from the mindhall, wavering and uncertain. It threw Golovko’s shadow out behind him and, for a fraction of a second, Kai could have sworn his face was a mask of blood, as though some nightmare parasite had exploded from within his skull.

‘Are you coming in then?’ asked Golovko, and the impression of his horrific injury vanished. ‘I might need your help.’

Gregoras pushed himself from the wall and Kai saw his indecision.

‘I’m coming with you,’ he said. ‘If Sarashina’s in trouble, then I want to help.’

Gregoras nodded and they set off after Golovko. A dozen Black Sentinels came with them, and they plunged into the wavering, uncertain light. The mindhall was cold, like a frozen tundra, and the floor crunched with newly-formed ice beneath their feet. Spiderwebs of frost crazed the wooden panels of the lower tiers, and puffs of ventilated smoke rose from the backpacks of the Black Sentinels.

Kai kept close to Gregoras, knowing on a very basic level that the cryptaesthesian was helping to shore up his mental defences. The power at work within the tower was so great that Kai didn’t think he’d have been able to resist it were it not for his help.

It was difficult to see exactly what was happening in the mindhall. The light at its centre was so powerful it outshone everything else. Kai had the powerful impression of a black silhouette, a black slice of limbs touching a sun that burned with a blinding sapphire light.

‘Mistress Aniq!’ he shouted, and the words left his mouth in a trail of colourful smoke, giggling gleefully as they took form and life before dissolving into the fertile air. Gregoras shot him a say nothing look, and Kai’s mouth snapped shut before he could do anything else stupid.

The Black Sentinels spread out, rifles raised and grenades primed. Golovko marched at their head, the bulky launcher held out before him. He said nothing, but his manner suggested that he had seen this sort of thing before, though Kai couldn’t imagine where. He’d heard of warp-spawned creatures using astropaths as vessels to force their way into the material universe, but an entire mindhall?

Scraps of light swirled at the apex of the chamber like flocking birds, and Kai forced himself to look away from them. As his eyes began to adjust to the power of the light, he lifted a hand to his face and looked up into the tiers surrounding the centre of the chamber.

The astropaths of Choir Primus lay rigid in death, their eyes alight with eldritch fire that streamed from their useless sockets like phosphorent smoke. Their mouths were stretched in skeletal grins, and that same dead light burned between their burned lips as though they were screaming light.

The Black Sentinels surrounded the sphere of light, and Kai saw its surface was alive with writhing patterns, sun-bright streamers and spiralling grooves of emptiness. It shone like a miniature sun, but one that was the antithesis of Terra’s star. This was a dead sun, one that sucked life from the bodies around it.

Aniq Sarashina stood before the dead sun, her hand outstretched and bathed in the fires of its unnatural energies. Corposant-like lines of raw energy coiled up her arms, and her flesh was translucent. Veins, bones and muscle were plain to see, and the same light that streamed from the eyes of Choir Primus burned in hers.

Kai wished he could cry, for the sadness he felt was all too real. Mistress Sarashina was dying, any fool could see that, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. He wanted to save her, as she had once saved him from a life wasted, but he could do nothing but watch as the warp light burned her away from the inside.

Ghosts of energy limned her body with ectoplasmic mist, creatures that pressed almost too lightly on the matter of the universe to be seen. They were little more than shimmers of consciousness, barely able to hold their presence in this world, yet they swirled protectively around Sarashina as though she was a prize they were unwilling to relinquish.

‘Gregoras?’ said Golovko. ‘How dangerous are these things?’

‘They are nothing,’ said Gregoras. ‘Base desires given form. They cannot hurt us.’

‘Really? This seems like quite an intrusion for something so powerless. Doesn’t seem like nothing to me.’

‘They are opportunistic parasite creatures. They crossed over when the walls collapsed.’

‘And what about that ball of light? Should I be worried about that?’

‘When you are dealing with the warp you should always be worried.’

‘So how do you destroy it?’

‘You don’t,’ said Gregoras. ‘I do.’

Gregoras stepped towards the sphere of light, his hands outstretched, and Kai felt the build-up of potent psychic energy. Gregoras was already a powerful psyker, with abilities Kai would never be able to understand or wield, but in the aftermath of the Crimson King’s arrival on Terra, his strength was so much greater.

‘My mind is untouchable. It is as a locked room,’ he said. ‘None can enter without my authority. You have no power over me.’

The creatures of light withdrew from him, recognising a more powerful entity than they could hope to overcome. The burning sun seethed in mute rage, its brightness diminished, but still awesomely powerful.

‘These are not the fields you know,’ continued Gregoras, infusing every syllable with power and will. ‘This world is not yours and you do not belong here. Leave and befoul this place no more.’

The creatures hissed soundlessly, but retreated still further. They were not completely cowed, for they had a wellspring of energy to draw upon. The sphere of energy spun with ever greater urgency, as though its purpose here was not yet done, and a keening screech filled the mindhall. Kai’s hands flew to his ears, and even Golovko winced at the piercing volume.

The black-armoured Sentinel commander took aim over the oversized barrel of his grenade launcher.

‘No!’ yelled Kai. ‘Please.’

At the sound of his voice, Sarashina turned towards him, and Kai felt her pain descend upon him. She knew she was dying, but she had held on for just this moment. Kai sank to his knees as he saw the weight of guilt and sorrow within her. He saw the anguish that she had been forced into this path, but beyond that was the determination that she would not fail, as though the fate of the galaxy itself hung upon what she must now do.

‘Don’t you move,’ warned Golovko, taking a step forward.

Sarashina didn’t even acknowledge him and took another step towards Kai.

Despite the cold, Kai was sweating, imagining what kind of dark power burned inside Sarashina. Gregoras shouted at him to move back, but Kai was pinned in place by Sarashina’s fiery eyes. They were locked to his, and Kai’s body was no longer his to command.

Gregoras began chanting the words of banishment, words taught only to the highest ranking members of the Telepathica, for to use them was to know the powers of the creatures of the warp, and such knowledge was not taught lightly.

Kai felt Sarashina’s grip on life slipping, as Gregoras poured his will into stopping her in her tracks. Golovko grabbed Kai’s shoulder to haul him away, but a sharp bang of energy threw him back. Smoke rose from where Golovko had touched him, but Kai was unhurt by the fire. Dimly he recalled that was where the robed stranger in his dream, the cognoscynth, had laid his hand.

‘Get away from him!’ screamed Gregoras, pouring all his power into his words of banishment.

‘I am not here to hurt him, Evander,’ said Sarashina, the words sounding as though the woman who spoke them was falling farther and farther away with every passing second.

‘Then why are you here?’

‘To give him a warning.’

‘Warn him of what?’

‘A warning he must pass on to another.’

Gregoras approached Sarashina warily, as though unsure whether to continue his words of banishment or abandon them in the hope of learning something of value from Sarashina.

‘Is it the pattern? Tell me, Aniq, is it the pattern?’

‘Yes, Evander, it is,’ replied Sarashina, ‘but it is so much bigger than you ever knew. Or ever will. Not even the Emperor knows it all.’

‘Please, you can tell me,’ pleaded Gregoras. ‘What is it? What have you seen?’

‘Nothing you would ever want to know,’ said Sarashina, turning her gaze upon Kai once more. ‘Nothing anyone should know, and for that I am truly sorry.’

‘Sorry?’ said Kai. ‘Sorry for what?’

Sarashina darted forward, fast as quicksilver, and took hold of Kai’s head with both hands. The light that burned in her eyes flared, and Kai screamed as a host of burning, screaming, violent, bloody and sharp-edged images poured through him, filling his brain to capacity and beyond. Kai screamed as his mind sought to process this immense flood of information. A billion times a billion pictures, events, memories and perceptions flashed through his consciousness, the sensory input of a life lived over thousands of years. No mortal brain could contain such a vast repository of knowledge. Such a wealth of experience could only be contained by a mind that existed outside the physical world, a mind that was not constrained by physical limitations of flesh and blood.

Amid the chaos of his overfull mind, Sarashina’s voice cut through the crescendo of new thoughts like a diamond blade.

This warning is for one person, and one person alone. You will know who when you see him. Others will seek to know what I have given you, but you must never tell them what you have learned. They will break you open to learn what I have told you, but they will not find it. I will hide it in the one place you will not go.

Kai’s augmetic eyes rolled back in their sockets, and tears of blood spilled from his eyes. The world receded to a white point of light.

He heard the booming report of a heavy gun, a splash of warm wetness on his face.

A light was snatched from the world, and the torrent of life flowing into Kai was abruptly cut off, like a data cable wrenched from a Mechanicum logic engine. From a deluge of a thousand images every instant, one single image expanded to crystal clarity.

A face, ancient and wise, ruthless and single-minded.

A man who was so much more than a man: a warrior, a poet, a diplomat, an assassin, a counsellor, a killer, a mystic, a peacemaker, a father and a war-bringer.

All these and thousands more.

Yet it was his eyes that captured Kai’s attention.

They were the most beguiling colour of warm honey.

Like coins of the purest gold.

Kai opened his eyes and found himself looking at the bare iron dome of the mindhall. The watery light from the dead star was gone, and the harsh illumination of arc lights filled the space with an unforgiving clarity. He wanted to sit up, but his limbs were locked to his side. His head ached abominably. Shooting pains stabbed his brain repeatedly, and he groaned as what felt like the mother of all migraines surged to the fore of his skull.

Colours flashed before him, sickening and dizzying. His gut lurched, and he fought to keep his bile from exploding from his gullet. This wasn’t psi-sickness, this was overload. Just as too little use of an astropath’s powers was painful, too much could be just as debilitating.

‘What…?’ was all he could manage before a face appeared above him, upside down.

‘You’re awake,’ said Gregoras.

‘I think so,’ he said. ‘What happened?’

‘What do you remember?’ asked Gregoras, moving around so that he was the right way up.

‘Not much,’ said Kai. ‘I feel terrible. Why can’t I move?’

Gregoras nodded and looked down at Kai’s body. Kai followed his gaze and saw that he was bound at the wrists and ankles by shackles of gleaming silver. Intricate carvings were acid-etched into the metal, and Kai zoomed in on them.

‘Warding sigils?’ he said. ‘Why am I in chains covered in warding sigils?’

Gregoras sighed. ‘You really don’t remember what happened when Sarashina touched you?’

Kai shook his head and Gregoras looked up at something out of his eye line.

‘First of all Golovko shot Sarashina in the head,’ said Gregoras. ‘Now I never liked her much, but she didn’t deserve that. Gunned down like a common criminal.’

‘She’s dead?’

‘Didn’t you hear what I said? She was shot in the head by a Black Sentinel. Nobody survives that, Zulane.’

‘You still haven’t answered my question,’ said Kai, the sickening pain in his head shortening his already finite patience. ‘Why am I chained?’

‘For safety. Yours and mine.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘No, you don’t,’ said Gregoras. ‘I suspect you never will.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ demanded Kai.

‘It means I was right to think you were going to be trouble.’

Heavy hands came from behind and hauled Kai to his feet. His limbs felt like rubber, as though the strength had been drained from him, and he stumbled as his legs tried to bear his weight. The hand that held him upright kept him from falling without effort. His flesh ached and his skin felt as though a low-grade electric charge ran over its surface.

Kai’s own shadow was thrown out before him, an elongated slice of blackness. Two shadows went with it, but these were broader and longer by far, the shadows of giants. Kai turned to see what manner of ogre stood behind him, and the breath caught in his throat as he saw the two figures that had lifted him from the floor as though he weighed nothing at all.

Their armour was unblemished gold, heavy plate and tightly-hammered mail weave, with kilts of segmented leather and brushed steel. Cloaks of the deepest crimson were fixed to their shoulders by carven pins in the shape of lightning bolts. Both wore tapered helmets, one with a dangling horsehair plume of blood red, the other with silver wings affixed to the cheek plates.

They carried tall spears with ivory coloured hafts, each one terminating in a blade as long as Kai’s arm and bearing a monstrously large projectile weapon slung beneath the cutting edge. The plates of their armour were not smooth – they bore intricately carved renditions of words that curled around greaves, along the edges of breastplates, beneath pauldrons and around gorgets.

‘Legio Custodes…’ breathed Kai.

Kai had heard that Custodians earned their names through the course of their enhanced lives, and if that were true, then these warriors were clearly long-lived specimens of the order. They stood immobile as the golden statues said to guard the great subterranean pyramids of the sub-stratum deserts of the Sudafrik, but Kai guessed they could spring into action faster than he could think.

‘Kai Zulane,’ said one of the golden giants, the one with the silver wings on his helm.

‘Yes,’ replied Kai, surprisingly calm at facing such a deadly warrior.

‘I am Saturnalia Princeps Carthagina Invictus Cronus Ishayu Kholam, and you are bound by Imperial law to my custody. If you attempt to escape or employ any facet of your astropathic abilities, you will be terminated instantly and without recourse to any higher authority. Is anything I have said unclear?’

‘I’m sorry, what?’

The giant leaned forward, and it seemed to Kai that the red eye-lenses of his helmet narrowed. Saturnalia’s head inclined to the side and Kai tried to imagine what thoughts must be going through the Custodian’s mind. Saturnalia looked over at Gregoras.

‘Has he been made imbecilic?’ asked the Custodian.

‘No,’ answered Gregoras. ‘I believe he is simply confused.’

The Custodian found this puzzling. ‘I was quite clear.’

‘Nevertheless,’ said Gregoras. ‘If you will allow me…?’

Saturnalia nodded and stood upright.

‘I don’t understand what’s happening,’ said Kai. ‘Where are they taking me? I haven’t done anything.’

‘Sarashina touched you, a powerful telepath who was, if not possessed, then at least acting as a conduit for high level warp intelligences using her Vatic abilities. Whatever passed through her is now inside you, and we are going to find out what it is.’

‘We? Who is we?’

Saturnalia answered that question. ‘The neurolocutors of the Legio Custodes,’ said the Custodian. ‘You are being taken to the dungeons of the Imperial Palace, and whatever is in your head will be stripped out by people skilled in the obtaining of information at any cost.’

‘Wait!’ said Kai, turning to Gregoras. ‘You can’t let them take me! I didn’t do anything.’

His cries fell on deaf ears, and the cryptaesthesian simply watched as the Custodians fastened a brass circlet around Kai’s temples.

‘No! What’s that?’ cried Kai.

His question was answered a second later as he heard a soft buzzing sound and his nervous system shut down, leaving him limp in the grip of the Custodians.

‘No!’ wept Kai. ‘Please, I’m begging you. I don’t know anything. She didn’t pass anything to me, I swear. You’re wasting your time, please! You’re making a mistake!’

‘The Legio Custodes does not make mistakes,’ said Saturnalia.

‘Gregoras!’ yelled Kai. ‘Please help me! I’m begging you!’

The cryptaesthesian did not answer, and Kai screamed as he was dragged from the mindhall towards a steel gurney and interrogators equipped with scalpels, trepanning drills and invasive neuro-psychic probes.

Can you imagine what it means to be blind?

Truly blind, not the simple removal of the visual sense or the temporary darkness of night, but utterly bereft of sensation. That is what they think they have done to me by severing my connection to the Great Ocean, but such a concept displays a literalness of thought that betrays ignorance of the warp’s true nature.

It is all around me, no matter what my gaolers believe, but it pleases me to let them think they have wounded me with their damping collars and walls impregnated with psi-resistant crystals. I felt the cataclysmic arrival of my gene-father in the depths of the palace, and I still feel the havoc that resonates around the globe in its aftermath. I touched the mind of the Crimson King and I saw a measure of what drove him to such desperate action.

Though I am Athanaean, the foresight of the Corvidae and the vanity of the Pavoni are not unknown to me. Nor are the visceral arts of the Raptora or the Pyrae beyond my reach, though it irritates me to wield such vulgar powers. An Adept Exemptus of the Thousand Sons is master of many things and is a more terrible foe than anyone here understands.

But it is well to keep your foes ignorant of your true strength.

All war is deception, and wars are won by those who can best conceal their blows.

I can hear the thoughts of my caged brothers, the controlled anger of Asubha and the febrile rages of his twin. The dour gloom of Gythua is amusing in small doses, as are the petulant diatribes Argentus Kiron composes. No one who matters will hear them, but his desire to perfect his outrage knows no bounds.

All of them rage at the injustice done to us, not one of them understanding that it could be no other way. Tagore still broods on the insultingly small force sent to apprehend us, but his rage is spread thin: at our captors for coming for us in the first place, at the men who killed his fellow warriors, at his Legion for abandoning him.

But most of all, it is directed at me for not warning them.

How can I begin to explain my reasoning to him when I do not understand it myself?

It was not the words of the psi-hunter that persuaded me to stand aside. His words were as meaningless as the random mind-noise of warp-scraps. Rather, it was the dream that stayed my hand, the dream of the icy, blue-lit tomb that gave me pause.

In my dream I walk its frozen catacombs and I see that the ground is littered with shards of glassy bone. Millions of them carpet the flagstones, pouring from the broken sepulchres in an endless tide. I see each individual fragment, each one reflective and carrying a memory etched on its vitrified surface.

A great red eye reflected in broken shards of bone.

I know this eye. I know it well, and it is speaking to me of a terrible crime, though I do not yet understand what it is saying.

It is a bleak place, this tomb where I wander in the dull light of torches frozen in time, their flames unmoving and lifeless. The dead are all around me – I can feel them looking at me. The weight of their accusations is like a curse, to use a pejorative of the ancients.

Though this is a city of death, it is frighteningly beautiful. Rearing statues of hooded reapers and spiteful angels adorn the grand avenues of the dead, their expressions frozen at their most tempestuous.

Something flits past the edge of my vision, something vividly coloured in this landscape of the morbid. It darts between the towering, monolithic statuary, a scavenger creature that could not possibly be here. I recognise its tapered snout and rust-coloured fur, the black edging to its ears and feet.

Canis Lupus, a species extinct for thousands of years, yet here it is.

I am no Biologis, but somehow I know this creature will not die here. The wolf shadows my path through the blizzard of bone, drawing closer with every passing moment, though I wave my arms and shout bloody threats at it. Seeing that the wolf will not be dissuaded from its approach, I ignore its presence and concentrate on where my steps carry me.

Towards a monstrous statue, one that was not there a moment ago, but which rears from the landscape like a vast missile emerging from a silo. It is the winged statue of a faceless angel, fashioned from a strange, twilight-black stone. Bone dust falls from its wide shoulders, and avalanches big enough to bury one of the Terran hives thunder past. Like any initiate of the word of Magnus, I understand the symbolism of powerful elemental forces, and know full well the times of upheaval they herald.

I sense something within this statue, something malevolent watching through its smooth featureless face.

As I am aware of its presence, it too is aware of me.

The sky above this newly emerged statue gleams with dull metal and golden spires. A starship hangs motionless above this mausoleum city. Its pristine blue paint has been burned away, and only the pearlescent stubs of its master’s insignia remain to indicate that it was once a vessel of the XIII Legion. The ship’s name is etched into its hull in letters hundreds of metres high, the curling script hammered onto its adamantium hull in the shipyards of Calth.

The Argo.

I know this vessel. It is a ghost ship, gutted from within by nightmarish creatures of sublime horror. Red-scaled skin, oily black tongues and eyes that reflect every vile thought you ever had. Everyone on that vessel is dead, and their deaths weigh heavily on the conscience of one who draws ever nearer.

He believes it is his fault. I know this with a certainty that is as unshakable as it is ludicrous. What could he possibly have done to condemn that incredible vessel to such a violent death?

Yet certainty is foolish in a place like this, a place where truth and lies can cross the vast gulfs of space in an instant. I deal in the intangible, the allegorical and the phantasmal, yet I assert certitude. The irony is not lost on me.

Only then do I realise I am not alone; there are others with me.

I recognise them and I see that they are all dead. Ghosts yet to be. They lament their passing and try to tell me of the manner of their deaths, but their words are nonsensical and I cannot understand them. By their own choosing, each one of them is outcast and dead. Each one has been slain for reasons only he can know, be it honour, pride, vanity or a hunger for knowledge.

Noble reasons all.

I listen to their doomed mantras and I sing them lustily to the shining beacon of light that reaches out to the farthest extent of the galaxy.

The one the Eye has spoken of is here.

Ten

Praetorians
Psychic excavations
Blood protects its own

Beneath the peak known as Rakaposhi, the Legio Custodes kept their gaol – where those individuals deemed hostile to the Emperor were isolated from the world above. Dug into the rock of the mountain, its limestone walls were clad in adamantium plate, resistant to virtually all forms of weaponry and deaf to the pleas of innocence that echoed from its cells.

In an ancient, long-dead tongue, it had been known as Khangba Marwu, an all too literal name that gave some clue to its age. Only the most senior Custodians bothered to use its original name, and to those condemned to its cells, never again to see the light of day, it had an altogether more prosaic name.

They knew it simply as the Vault.

Khangba Marwu had always been part of the mountain, or at least so it seemed to those who even knew of it. It had always been a site of incarceration, a hidden place to cage the most violent, the most dangerous, and the most reprehensible evildoers the world had ever known. No one knew who had first hacked its cells and passageways from the bedrock of the mountain, but its origins went far beyond the limits of memory and surviving documentation.

Stories of the heinous criminals incarcerated in its lightless depths stretched back thousands of years, their names now meaningless and their crimes long forgotten. Yet there were villains aplenty plucked from living memory who had darkened its sterile corridors and died insane within its unfeeling walls.

The lieutenants of the Pan-Pacific tyrant had been brought here, as had the Ethnarch of the Caucasus Wastes, the so-called ‘First Emperor’ and a being known only as the Reaper – a monster that legend said was an angel sent to cleanse mankind from the world. Uilleam the Red, the tyrannical blood-drinking prince of Albyon had been brought here for execution after his defeat at the Battle of the Blue Dawn. Uilleam’s debased followers conquered a quarter of the globe, but were finally halted by an army of powerful warriors raised by a Nordafrik warlord known as Kibuka, who was said to have called lightning from the clouds and granted his warriors superhuman strength. In time, Kibuka himself was hauled in chains to Khangba Marwu, but no history remained to tell of who had overturned his rule.

A persistent rumour told that the Emperor himself had designed a cell especially for Narthan Durme, but which had gone unused following the tyrant’s death during the final battle to bring down his inhuman regime. Scurrilous whispers maintained it had been the urging of Constantin Valdor that saw Durme executed in the ruins of his empire, a half-mad, half-genius psychopath deemed too dangerous to live.

Cardinal Tang had been bound for this specialised gaol, but like Durme he never saw the inside of his cell. Inmates who had suffered the worst tortures imaginable in his bloody pogroms broke open his isolation tank and tore his body apart with their bare hands before his transit from Nusa Kambagan could be arranged.

In all its long history, only one individual had ever escaped Khangba Marwu, a congenital dwarf named Zamora who was said to have once attained the rank of major in the proto-Legio Custodes, a fact that made the stories of his escape all the more ridiculous.

Since the beginning of the Great Crusade, Khangba Marwu had seen no shortage of inmates, deluded fools and doomsayers who raved and ranted of the Emperor’s folly or greedy opportunists who sought to exploit this new golden age for their own benefit. None of those incarcerated could boast a pedigree as infamous as Tang or Durme or Uilleam, but that would all change once this rebellion was put down.

Khangba Marwu’s most impregnable cellblock was even now being made ready to contain the most dangerous individual in the galaxy.

But could any facility on Terra hope to hold Horus Lupercal prisoner?

Primus Block Alpha-One-Zero was never dark. The diurnal phases of the planet above were inconsequential to the workings of the Vault or the needs of its inmates. Darkness was an aid to escape, and was thus banished. Uttam Luna Hesh Udar halted before the last security checkpoint before the cells, allowing the biometric surveyors in the walls, floor and ceiling to verify his identity.

Air-samplers tasted his breath, body-mass sensors registered his weight and radiation detectors measured the decay rate of isotopes in his blood and bones. Over a hundred such measurements and genetic markers were compared against real-time data logs to ensure no intruders were able to penetrate Khangba Marwu’s security net without detection.

Uttam wore the gold armour of a Custodian, the cheek plates of his full-face helm folded back into its layered structure. His features were unmoving and expressionless, the result of a greenskin bacteriological pathogen that had left the upper right quadrant of his face unresponsive to muscle stimulus. His enhanced metabolism had easily purged the toxin, but the after-effects of the injury had reduced his reflexive response times to a level below the minimum required for front-line service.

A proud man, Uttam had taken his removal from the fighting ranks of the Legio Custodes hard, but he had adapted and taken to his new role as gaoler of the Vaults with the same determination and attention to detail that had seen him closest to full infiltration in a Blood Game until Amon Tauromachian Leng’s most recent attempt.

Uttam had studied the young Custodian’s route to the palace, finding no fault with any of his decisions until the final moment when he had chosen to throw caution to the wind and leap to the attack like a common assassin. Uttam would have drawn his victim in like a struggling insect in an arachnid’s web.

Far better to let the prey do the work and subtly calve it from its protectors.

Uttam stared into the blank slate above the armoured doorway, letting the retinal signifiers examine his eyes. This part always took longer than usual, his damaged eye making the machines work hard to establish his identity. This deep in the Vault, such measures were virtually unnecessary, but protocol was protocol, and Uttam never willingly ignored protocol.

The thought made Uttam turn to glance at the procession of veteran soldiers following him. Chosen from the most professional regiments based on Terra, they were armed with a collection of strange weapons, ranging from web-guns, plasma nets, iso-capacitors and mass-crushers to more commonplace melta-guns and hellguns.

A full head and shoulders over even the tallest soldier, Uttam could barely contain his disdain as they filed past the signifiers. It sat ill with him that these men were not Custodians, for the threat rating of the prisoners kept in Primus Block Alpha-One-Zero was far too lethal for these men to face, regardless of what weaponry they carried. Significant levels of the Legio’s operational strength had been despatched on a mission to Prospero alongside the Space Wolves. The purpose of the mission had not been stated, but there could be only one reason to send so many of the Emperor’s praetorians from his side at such a time.

Two soldiers in crimson battle plate and gold-mirrored visors guided a metallic box shaped like an oversized coffin floating on repulsor fields. A standard nutrition dispenser, it had been modified by the Vault’s Mechanicum staff to provide the specialised foodstuffs of these prisoners. Uttam found it incomprehensible that these men had been allowed to live. They were the most dangerous men on Terra, and no good could come of their continued existence.

The signifiers confirmed the identity of the last of the soldiers, and the armoured door slid upwards with a hiss of pneumatics and a gust of cool air that spoke of a vast open space ahead. Beyond the door, the iron-sheathed walls of the prison complex gave way to the rough-cut stone of the mountain’s footings. The smell of cold earth and stone that had once rested beneath the deepest ocean blew from within. Glaringly bright lumen globes provided stark illumination and banished shadows.

Thirty metres in, a pair of servitor-crewed turrets spooled up and snapped towards them, clicking and whirring as target locks were established. Heavy calibre autocannons whined with the rotational speed of their barrels as Uttam stepped into the killing box.

‘Uttam Luna Hesh Udar,’ he said, enunciating each syllable with precise modulation.

The augmetic eyes of the servitors changed from red to green, and Uttam ushered the soldiers through as his rearguard warrior approached.

Sumant Giri Phalguni Tirtha was a veteran Custodian, whose name was said to bear at least seventy-six awarded titles. His armour was polished and carved with words of approbation in addition to his earned honours. Uttam did not know how Tirtha had come to Khangba Marwu. He bore no obvious injury and was in prime physical condition, but rumour said he had once questioned an order from Constantin Valdor.

The master of the Legio Custodes was a stern, uncompromising man, and though Uttam had never had the honour of meeting him, he doubted Valdor was so petty as to banish another from his side for so slight an offence. The Legio valued thinking warriors, doggedly determined men who would question and question again until an answer was forthcoming.

‘Is there a problem, Uttam?’ asked Tirtha. ‘Why do you pause?’

‘No reason,’ said Uttam, ashamed at his lapse into speculation.

‘Then let us be on our way,’ said Tirtha. ‘I dislike being here – the air stinks of them.’

Uttam nodded. The air did taste different. The unique physiology of the prisoners made them different from mortals, even Custodians, in many obvious ways, but also in many less evident ones. Whatever crimes a man might have committed, he was still recognisably human, still clearly part of the human race. These prisoners smelled subtly different… almost alien, and that rankled almost as much than their betrayal.

Almost.

‘Biometrics confirmed,’ said Uttam, and the security door slid closed behind Tirtha. As the metres-thick locking bars slid home, he said, ‘Primus Block Alpha-One-Zero is now sealed and secure.’

‘So confirmed,’ said Tirtha, striding to the front of the column. Uttam now took up the rearmost position, and took short steps as Tirtha led them down the wide corridor. Though they were selected from the bravest and most professional regiments still based on Terra, there was no disguising the soldiers’ nervousness as they passed between the turrets. Though rigorous safeties had been engaged by Uttam’s command, the guns could open fire in a heartbeat, and the green eye-lenses of the servitors promised no mercy to anyone caught in the killing box.

Uttam followed Tirtha and the soldiers towards a wide archway lined with las-mesh emitters, through which came the bass note of colossal generators and the actinic tang of powerful energy fields. Uttam passed beneath the arch, emerging into an enormous cavern, a kilometre wide at its narrowest part, with glistening walls and a dizzyingly high roof. The cavern had no floor, simply a bottomless pit that spanned its entire width. Uttam knew that such a term was hyperbole of the worst kind, but it was apt for all intents and purposes.

He stood on a wide platform built at the edge of cavern, in the shadow of a slender bridge of latticed steel that reared up like the body of an enormous crane. Tirtha stood at its control console, and Uttam watched as he manoeuvred the bridge towards an island of rock that floated in the centre of the cavern, suspended on a hazy cushion of invisible energy.

Enormous machines like vast engines were bolted around the circumference of the cavern walls and Uttam felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand to attention in the electro-statically charged air. At a moment’s notice, these generators could be disengaged and the island would be allowed to plummet into the depths of the world. With such dangerous prisoners, no chances could be taken.

The bridge made contact with the floating island, and a host of automated gunpods mounted in the walls of the cavern swung long barrels to bear on the island. Thirty isolated cells stood on the floating rock, but only twelve housed inmates.

With the bridge in place, Uttam marched onto the bridge, with the soldiers and Tirtha following behind him. The bridge rang with the sound of his armoured boots, and he kept his gaze focussed firmly ahead of him. He unlimbered his guardian spear from the quick-release sheath on his back and rolled the muscles in his shoulder to loosen them in readiness.

‘Expecting trouble?’ asked Tirtha over the helmet vox.

‘No,’ replied Uttam. ‘But I always feel better facing these bastards with a weapon in my hands.’

‘I know what you mean,’ said Tirtha. ‘I almost hope one of them tries something.’

‘Don’t even joke about it,’ warned Uttam as he reached the end of the bridge.

The first cell was a square block of triple-layered and ceramite-laced permacrete that gave little clue to the nature of the inmate within. Featureless aside from an alphanumeric designation stencilled on its side and a transparent door of armaglas normally found in the viewports of starships, it was a box that no one entered or exited without the say so of the Legio Custodes.

Uttam approached the door, feeling a familiar knot of tension in his gut: the flush of endorphins and battle stims that preceded a combat engagement. The sensation was welcome, even though he did not expect to fight here.

A single figure sat cross-legged in the centre of the cell, his muscular physique barely contained by the bright yellow of his prison-issue bodyglove. Long hair, dark as oil, spilled around a broad face with genetically spread features that should be ugly, but somehow combined in a handsome whole.

Though this prisoner was deadly beyond words, he had a smooth grace that was disarming. Uttam knew better than to underestimate Atharva simply because he came from a Legion of scholars. Where the others raged or spat biliously at their gaolers, Atharva appeared to accept his incarceration without rancour.

Atharva opened his eyes, one a glittering sapphire, the other a pale amber.

‘Uttam Luna Hesh Udar,’ said the warrior. ‘You are interrupting my ascent into the Enumerations.’

‘It is time for you to eat,’ said Uttam, as the nutrition dispenser was slotted home in the clear glass of the door. A cellulose bag of foodstuff dropped into the cell, and Atharva watched it fall with a mixture of distaste and resignation.

‘Another day, another banquet,’ said the Thousand Sons warrior.

‘You are lucky we feed you at all,’ said Uttam. ‘I would let you starve.’

‘Then you would become the villain of the piece,’ said Atharva. ‘And as the Emperor’s praetorians that must never be the case, is that not so?’

‘Do not say his name. You are not fit to speak it, traitor.’

‘Tell me, Uttam, who had I betrayed when I was brought here?’ said Atharva, uncoiling from his seated position to stand in one smooth movement. ‘When Yasu Nagasena led his three thousand into the Preceptory, who exactly had I betrayed? No one, yet here I am locked up in a cell with warriors whose Legions are rightly named oath-breakers.’

‘When a group has a plague-carrier in its midst do you only remove those who are sick or do you quarantine the entire group?’ asked Uttam.

‘Allow me to counter your example,’ said Atharva. ‘If a man develops a tumour, do you selectively destroy it with treatment or do you simply kill the man?’

‘The tumour dies either way.’

‘Then let us be thankful you are not a medicae, Praetorian Uttam Luna Hesh Udar,’ said Atharva.

They came back to him in the darkness, every face, every scream and every last, terrified breath. Kai lay on a hard stone bench that doubled for a bed, and curled in a foetal ball, rocking back and forth as he tried to forget the memories of pain they forced him to relive. A flyer had carried him from the Whispering Tower, high into the mountains, through starlit cloudbanks and moon-painted peaks of dizzying height.

That had been his ascent. Then had come the descent into the lightless depths of a mountain that seemed somehow darker, somehow more threatening than any mountain had a right to be. As though it carried a weight of anguish borne by those taken into its depths.

Down corridors and through echoing passageways he was taken. Into rumbling elevators and pneumo-cars that carried him deeper and deeper into the unknown reaches of the sullen mountain until at last he was deposited in a bare cell, cut directly from the rock, with only the most basic human functions catered for. A rusted pipe in the corner of the room dribbled brackish water, and a circular pit in the opposite corner appeared to be a receptacle for bodily waste.

The walls were painted a faint bluish grey, glossy and hard-wearing. Previous occupants had scraped their presence into the walls with broken nails and whatever else could make an impression in the paint. Primitive, primal things, Kai couldn’t make out what many of them were: random collections of lightning bolts and men with long spears for the most part. The carvings were little more than desperate pleas to be remembered by men now long forgotten and, presumably, long dead.

Kai wanted to add his own mark, but he had nothing with which to score the painted walls.

His captors had left him to sweat for an unknown period of time, letting the imagined horrors to be inflicted upon him do their work for them. Kai was not a brave man, and he had screamed that he would tell them what they wanted to know if he only knew what it was.

Though his mind was racing in a dozen different directions, Kai forced himself to sleep, knowing that whatever was to come would be more easily endured were he rested. He dreamed, but not of the Rub’ al Khali, not of the great fortress of Arzashkun, but of a cold void, populated by the voices of the dead. He saw a blonde-haired girl with a blue bandana he had known on the Argo. He knew her name, they had been friends of a sort, but his memory was hazy, too overwhelmed with the chattering voices of the dead.

They swarmed his dream-self, begging to know why he had been spared and they had been taken. Why the monsters of the deep had come for them with their brazen swords and chitinous claws that tore meat from bones and left gouging wounds that would never heal.

Kai had nothing to tell them, but still they demanded answers.

Why, on a ship of innocents, had he been one of only two to survive?

What gave him the right to live while they were condemned to eternal torment?

Kai wept in his sleep, reliving the horror of their deaths over and over again.

Only one voice was free of accusation, a soothing, cultured voice that spoke without words, but eased him from memories of pain with visions of a paradisiacal world of high mountains, verdant plains and beautiful cities of glittering pyramids constructed from crystalline glass.

When he woke, it was to find two people standing in his cell, a man and a woman, blandly attractive and dressed in crisp white tunics that had the look of lab coats and hazmat gear all in one. The man was the kind of handsome that comes from fashionable cosmetic sculpting, whereas the woman had lavished all her attention on her eyes. Pale emerald orbs, they were the most captivating eyes Kai had ever seen.

‘You’re awake,’ said the man. Needlessly, thought Kai.

‘It’s time we found out what you know,’ added the woman.

Kai rubbed his face, feeling the sagging skin of his jowls and a day’s worth of stubble.

‘I told you, I don’t know anything,’ said Kai. ‘If I did, I promise I would tell you. I barely remember anything that happened in the mindhall.’

‘Of course, we don’t expect you to have any conscious recall of the information implanted in you by Aniq Sarashina,’ said the woman, her expression plastic and unchanging. ‘But it is in you, that much is certain.’

‘It’s our job to remove that information,’ said the man.

‘Fine,’ said Kai. ‘Hook me up to a psi-caster and let’s be done with it.’

‘I’m afraid it won’t be quite that simple,’ said the man.

‘Or that painless,’ added the woman.

‘Who are you?’ asked Kai. ‘You’re not part of the City of Sight, so who do you work for?’

‘My name is Adept Hiriko,’ said the woman, ‘and this is Adept Scharff. We are neurolocutors, psi-augers if you will. That’s auger with an e.’

‘As in a drill,’ added Scharff. ‘My role is to assist Adept Hiriko in boring into your psyche and rooting out whatever information has been secreted within your mind.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘Quite serious,’ said Scharff, as though puzzled as to Kai’s meaning. ‘We are here at the behest of the Legio Custodes. Our orders come with the highest authority, giving us carte blanche to achieve our goals by any means necessary.’

‘I’m afraid it is likely you will not survive the process,’ said Hiriko. ‘But if you do it is more than probable that you will be left in a permanent vegetative state.’

‘This is insane!’ cried Kai, backing away from these monsters.

‘If you think about it clearly, it’s really the only option open to us,’ said Scharff.

‘We anticipated you would be reluctant to help us,’ added Hiriko. ‘How disappointing.’

Kai could not speak. A gum shield that prevented him from biting off his tongue filled his mouth with a rubberised, antiseptic taste. An air pipe plunged down his throat, and a leather headpiece studded with needles and electrodes enveloped his head like a pilot’s helmet. A wealth of intravenous drips fed into his veins and the blood vessels beneath his skull, while a lid-lock held his eyes open. Slender output jacks were plugged into the base of each orb, and bronze wires trailed to banks of ocular-visual recording equipment.

The interrogation chamber was horribly mundane, a simple metal box without windows or mirrors or anything in the way of character. Portable banks of monitoring equipment surrounded Kai as he lay back on a steel-framed gurney, each one telling a tale of his internal biorhythms.

A humming device like a gleaming scorpion’s tail was bolted to the metallic floor behind him, arching overhead and festooned with dangling instruments that seemed designed to terrify as much as provide any function. Hiriko and Scharff busied themselves with monitoring the drugs flowing into his bloodstream, while the gold-armoured figure of Saturnalia stood at the far end of the chamber, his guardian spear held loosely in one hand.

‘Are you ready to begin?’ asked the Custodian.

‘Almost,’ replied Hiriko. ‘This is a delicate procedure, and one doesn’t want to rush.’

‘The information you seek has been well hidden, Custodian,’ added Scharff. ‘We will have to go deep into his psyche, and such a journey requires faultless preparation.’

‘We risk breaking his mind without due care and attention.’

The Custodian took a step towards the psi-augers, his fingers clenching tightly on his guardian spear.

‘The Mistress of the Telepathica spoke of the Emperor,’ said Saturnalia, ‘and anything that concerns the Emperor is my business. Do not waste time in telling me of preparation and semantics. Find what she placed in his head, and find it now. Breaking his mind is a price that concerns me not at all.’

Kai wanted to rage at them, but his mouth couldn’t form the words. He wanted to yell that he was a human being, an astropath of value to the Imperium. But he knew that even if he could make them hear, they would not care, Saturnalia because his duty to the Emperor overrode all other concerns, Hiriko and Scharff because they were simply doing a job.

He tried to struggle, but the restraints and drugs held him utterly immobile.

Hiriko sat beside him on a wheeled stool, and consulted a data-slate hanging from the side of the gurney.

‘Excellent,’ she said. ‘You’re making wonderful progress, Kai. We should be ready in just a moment.’

Adept Scharff sat opposite Hiriko and Kai saw him insert a screw-plug into the back of his neck, where he could just see the gleam of implanted cognitive agumetics. He took the other end of the cable and plugged it into a featureless black box fitted to the side of the gurney. He smiled at Kai, unspooling a thin cable from the box and snap fastening it to a connective port on Kai’s leather headpiece. His eyes lost their focus for a second, and Kai felt a stab of pressure in the frontal lobes of his brain.

‘Are you in the umbra?’ asked Hiriko.

‘Yes,’ answered Scharff, his voice distant. ‘Ready for your insertion.’

‘Good,’ said Hiriko, and likewise wired herself up to the featureless black box. She too fastened the end of a cable to the apparatus covering Kai’s skull and, once again, he felt the pressure of an invasive presence within his mind.

‘Now,’ said Hiriko. ‘Let us begin.’

She depressed an orange stud on the side of the box, and Kai’s mind filled with light.

The light grew to unbearable brightness, like the surface of a star viewed so close that it would burn his eyes away. Kai screamed, and the light faded until it became tolerable. He found himself standing in the middle of the desert, nothing around him for hundreds of kilometres in all directions. A hot wind feathered the lips of dunes around him, and the hammerblows of the searing sun were a welcome relief after the sterile environment beneath the mountain.

This was his place of safety: this was the Empty Quarter.

Whatever they had done to him hadn’t worked.

Kai knew this wasn’t real, knew it was an artificially conjured dreamscape, and in that realisation, he knew he should not have come here. This was what they wanted. They wanted him here, where his innermost thoughts were laid bare, and his deepest secrets might be revealed.

Though he had professed a desire to tell Hiriko and Scharff what they wanted to know, an unbidden imperative arose in his mind that warned him against that path of least resistance. His life depended on keeping what he had been given secret. Only the man with the golden eyes could be told what he knew, and only by keeping it safe from Hiriko and Scharff would that be possible.

No sooner had he given them names, than he felt their presence in his mind. He couldn’t see them, but he knew they were there. Lurking, waiting for him to lead them to what they wanted to know.

A figure appeared on the sand beside him, a robed woman with long silver-grey hair with eyes that were kind and warm. He knew her, but not like this, not with eyes of flesh and blood. They were emerald green, sparkling and full of life. It seemed perverse to have willingly exchanged such beautiful eyes just to have gained protection from the creatures of the warp.

‘Aniq,’ he said. ‘You’re dead.’

‘You should know better than that, Kai,’ said Sarashina. ‘No one is ever really dead so long as someone remembers them. As the great poet said, “That which is imagined, need never be lost.”’

‘Sarashina told me that, but you are not Sarashina.’

‘No, then who would you have me be?’ said the woman, her features transforming in a heartbeat to those of his mother. Her eyes remained emerald green, but where before there was warmth, now there was only aching sadness.

Kai turned away from those eyes, remembering the looks of sorrow every time he and his father had left on another adventure across the globe. He fought to remain dispassionate, but it was difficult in the face of the woman who had raised him and helped shape him into the man he had become.

Except this wasn’t her.

His mother was dead, just as Sarashina was dead.

‘You are Adept Hiriko, aren’t you?’

‘Of course,’ said his mother.

‘Then look like you’re supposed to,’ snapped Kai. ‘Don’t hide behind disguises.’

‘I wasn’t hiding,’ said Hiriko, assuming the form with which Kai was more familiar. ‘I am simply trying to put you at your ease. This process will go much smoother if you don’t fight us. I know you don’t know what Sarashina told you, but I need to find it.’

‘I don’t know where it is.’

‘I think you do.’

‘I don’t.’

Hiriko sighed and linked her arm with his, guiding him towards the gentle slope of a sand dune. ‘Do you know how many psychic interrogations I’ve done? No, of course you don’t, but it’s a lot, and the subjects who fight us are always the ones who end up brain dead. Do you want that?’

‘What kind of stupid question is that?’

She shrugged and continued as though he hadn’t spoken. ‘The human mind is a dizzyingly complex machine, a repository of billions of memories, inputs, outputs and autonomic functions. It’s hard to break into it without causing irreparable damage.’

‘So don’t break in,’ said Kai.

‘I wish that were possible, I truly do,’ said Hiriko with a smile. ‘I like you, but I will tear the meat of your mind apart with my bare hands if I have to. Everyone yields their secrets in the end. Always. It’s just a matter of how much damage they’re prepared to live with at the end of it.’

They reached the top of the sand dune, and Kai found himself looking down at the shimmering fortress of Arzashkun. Its tallest towers wavered in the heat, and Kai shielded his eyes against the reflected glare of sunlight from its golden minarets.

‘Impressive,’ said Hiriko. ‘But it won’t keep me out. Don’t think for a minute it will.’

Kai stopped and turned about, scanning the sands for some sign that they weren’t alone. A suggestion of shadow moving under the sand on a far distant dune flickered at the corner of his vision.

‘Where is Scharff?’ he asked. ‘Doesn’t he join you?’

‘He’s here, but I’m leading this auger.’

Intuition surfaced in Kai’s mind like a sunrise, and a slow smile creased his features.

‘He’s here to pull you out if this gets too dangerous, isn’t he?’

A flash of irritation in her emerald eyes confirmed his insight.

‘You don’t know if you can do this, do you?’ he said.

Hiriko’s grip on his arm tightened. ‘Trust me, I can do this. The only question is how hard you want it to go. I’ll demolish that fortress in a heartbeat, tear down every fictive stone and brick. I’ll break it down to dust and powder until you won’t be able to tell its remains from the sand of the desert.’

She stretched out her hand, and the tallest tower of the fortress began unravelling. What had seemed solid only moments before was now dissolving into smoke and vapour. She clicked her fingers and another tower fell apart. Hiriko met his gaze as she undid in a heartbeat what had taken him years to perfect, but his eyes were on something far distant, something fashioned from dark memory and horror. It pushed through the sands towards them, the predator with the scent of blood in its nostrils.

Kai felt a spike of pressure behind his eyes and Hiriko turned in time to see the dark shape power to the surface of the sand. It came on a tide of blood, a subterranean river violently thrust to the surface of the desert. It roared, this river. It roared and screamed and filled the world with thousands of death cries and agonising last moments. Like a deluge of crimson oil it spilled over the desert, filling the depressions between the dunes with pools of stinking death fluids, washing up their slopes like an angry tide.

‘Is this your doing?’ demanded Hiriko.

‘No,’ said Kai.

‘Stop it,’ ordered Hiriko. ‘Now.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Of course you can, this is your mind. It bends to your will.’

Kai shrugged as the swelling lake of oily blood rose higher, its surface rippling with the motion of thousands of hands and faces pushing up from below. Until now, Kai had always feared this buried monster, its rages and its guilt, but now the sight of it was a blessed relief. The oozing tide rolled uphill in defiance of hydrodynamics, and gelatinous shapes at last broke the surface of its stinking substance. Tall and thin, with spindly limbs of red scale and volcanic breath, they folded themselves into existence with thin, screeching wails. Their distended skulls formed glossy and horned, their mouths ripped open with jagged fangs.

Creatures of memory to be sure, but no less dangerous for that in a place of dreams.

‘What are you doing?’ demanded Hiriko.

‘I told you, it’s not me,’ said Kai. ‘It’s the Argo.’

The tide of night-skinned monsters roiled towards them, and Hiriko looked up to the sky.

‘Get me out of here,’ she said. ‘Now.’

The adept vanished, and the tide of darkness that billowed and seethed like a living curtain of endless darkness spilled over the top of the dune, swallowing Kai and plunging him into an abyss from which there could be no escape.

‘What just happened?’ demanded Saturnalia.

Hiriko lay on the floor of the interrogation room, her eyes rolling back in their sockets, and blood running from her nose like a tap. Scharff propped up her head and administered a hypo of clear fluid via a canula on her forearm.

‘I asked you a question,’ said Saturnalia.

‘Be silent!’ said Scharff. ‘I just extracted her from a hostile dreamspace without any of the proscribed decompressions. Her mind has gone into shock, and if I don’t bring her back we might lose her completely.’

Saturnalia bristled with anger at being spoken to like a subordinate, but bit back his anger. Consequences for speaking out of turn to a warrior of the Legio Custodes could wait.

‘What can I do?’ he said.

‘Nothing,’ said Scharff. ‘It’s up to her now.’

Scharff continued to speak to Hiriko in low, soothing tones, stroking her cheek and holding her hand. Eventually, her eyes fluttered open and gained a clarity Saturnalia hadn’t been sure she would ever know again.

‘This is going to be harder than I thought,’ said Hiriko.

Eleven

Erosion of the self
An open door
Aeliana

Time became meaningless to Kai. Days, weeks and months passed in his dreamscapes, passages of time that bore no relation to the waking world. He recalled ceramic tiled rooms, rocky passageways and the glacier blue walls of his cell, but which of these experiences were real was beyond his ability to guess. The psi-sickness had gone from him, washed away in the daily exercises of his ability to enter a nuncio-receptive state.

He was fed and bathed, for he lost control of his bodily functions when severed from the routine cycles of existence. So much time was spent in realms of the senses beyond those endured by mortals blessed without psychic powers that Kai grew ever more disconnected from what was real and what was imagined.

He thought he saw his mother, standing at his cell door with a wistful expression. Her green eyes drew him in, but no sooner had he opened his mouth to speak to her than a black figure loomed behind her and drew a blade across her throat. An ocean of blood spilled from her ruined neck, a thousand voices screaming in the darkness.

Once, as he wandered a desolate plain of ashen grey, Kai thought he saw a shining figure armoured in red and ivory. The figure was calling to him in a language Kai did not know, but which faded in and out of clarity as a ghostly wind rose and fell. Kai wanted to run to the warrior, feeling that he represented some kind of salvation, but each time he turned towards him, the warrior retreated as though not yet ready to face him.

Time and time again, the neurolocutors went into Kai’s mind. Sometimes Scharff, sometimes Hiriko, but each time they were cast out by the oily black thing and the howling revenants of the Argo. In the few moments of lucidity Kai grasped onto, he spat hatred and admiration at the late Aniq Sarashina. Hiding her message in his memories of that doomed vessel had been a masterstroke. As much progress as Kai had made, she knew he was not yet ready to face the horrors unleashed upon that ghost ship.

He could sense the growing frustration of his captors, and revelled in it.

They quickly abandoned such direct attacks on his psyche and changed tack to more subtle, less invasive approaches. While Scharff attempted to reason with him, Hiriko attempted seduction. Pleasure dreams, power dreams and a thousand gratified desires were paraded before Kai in myriad guises. Some masqueraded as reality, some as fantasy, but none could reach the buried secrets contained in the black horror of the Argo.

‘We cannot remove it,’ said Hiriko after a particularly gruelling session. Kai’s face glistened with sweat, his body a husk of papery skin draped over a thin collection of bones, wasted muscle and sunken meat.

A giant loomed over Kai, and his augmetic eyes whirred as they shifted focus. Saturnalia’s broad cheekbones and tapered jaw stared at him with contempt written all over his features.

‘Why not?’

‘It is buried deep inside a memory he will not face,’ said Scharff.

‘The Argo?’

‘Indeed,’ said Hiriko. ‘Sarashina, or whatever was acting through her, knew what she was doing. It is most aggrieving.’

‘So if you can’t get it out, who can?’ demanded Saturnalia, and Kai could feel the man’s urge just to kill him and be done with the matter.

‘Only one person has the key to unlocking the information you require,’ said Hiriko.

‘Who?’

Hiriko placed a hand on Kai’s shoulder. ‘Kai himself.’

Kai laughed, but the gum shield in his mouth turned it into a gurgling sob.

The crudity of their methods was what angered him the most. Like chirurgeons attempting brain surgery with a logger’s saw and stonemason’s chisel, they hacked into delicate aetheric structures of mental architecture without thought or hope of success. Atharva felt every brutal thrust of the psi-augers, their clumsy attempts to hack out the information they sought, and the childishly simple blandishments they hoped would seduce it to the surface of their captive’s mind. Like a clawed gauntlet down a blackboard, the shrieking squalls of their brutish methods pained him on every level.

Like any true craftsman, amateurish work offended him, and though he was by no means certain that he could lift something evidently buried deep in the captive’s mind, he would have a better chance than the two butchers they had working here.

He sat cross-legged in the centre of his cell, letting his mind wander the labyrinthine passages of Khangba Marwu, testing the boundaries of his confinement with casual ease. It amused him to let his gaolers think him confined to his cell, going slowly mad with the isolation like his brothers. It had been months since Yasu Nagasena had come for them, and in that time the captive warriors of the Crusader Host had seen no one but the two Custodians and their woefully inadequate company of mortal soldiers.

Atharva had touched each and every mind within this subterranean prison, some lightly, others less gently. A mind was like a delicate lock, the tumblers of each psyche requiring the precise amount of pressure before it yielded all its secrets. The trick was in recognising the correct points to apply that pressure, the exact memories, desires or promises that would open a mind like a new blooming flower.

To an adept of the Athanaean cult, it was skill of no great consequence to lift thoughts from the surface of a mind. Far greater challenge was to be had in going down through the layers of a mortal consciousness, to plunge beyond the random surface clutter, past the basic desires and drives, beyond the secret vices and petty depravities lurking in the sewers of every individual to the heart of a person. This was where the truth could be found, the lightless place where the naked beast of existence lurked and every thought was exposed.

Reaching this place without detection was a talent few possessed, but one which Atharva had honed in his many years as a truth-seeker. Ever since the Crimson King had rescued the Legion from destruction, the truth-seekers had been the first to serve in the ranks, scouring the dormant minds of those who had been saved from the horror of the Flesh-Change for any latent signs of weakness.

Atharva knew his mortal gaolers better than they knew themselves. He knew their fears, their desires, their guilty secrets and their ambitions. He knew everything about them, and it amused him to know how simply their minds were assembled. How could any living thing that professed self-awareness function with such basic cognitive faculties?

Ah, but the Custodians…

Their minds were things of beauty, artfully-wrought arrangements of psychic engineering and genetic perfection. Like the most complex machines imaginable, they were like steel traps ready to snap shut on an unwary intruder. Like a cogitator protected from infiltration by a skilled infocyte, their minds were fully able to defend themselves from attack, and Atharva had not even attempted to do more than drift the outer edges of their brilliant consciousnesses.

Yet even though the Custodes were fascinating beyond measure, Atharva’s thoughts were forever drawn to the mind the psi-augers were attacking. At first glance, there was little to distinguish this person from the hundreds of others incarcerated here, save the modicum of psychic ability and the glassy scarring left by the Soul Binding.

He understood the man’s selfishness, the entitled conceit bred by years spent with Guilliman’s Legion. Understandable, but not the man’s true self. He was better than he knew, but it was going to take great hardship to strip that away, a process that had already begun, but would likely be left undone before his death.

Kai Zulane was the man’s name, the man the Eye had spoken of, but it was a name unknown to Atharva. Even with all the man’s memories laid bare, there was little to indicate what interest anyone could have in him. Yet there was something buried within him that not even Atharva could see, something wrapped in a black horror of raw aetheric rage and guilt that would be impossible to remove without the right tools.

Force was useless – this horror was stronger than any threat of violence. Likewise, it could not be appealed to by external reason or promises of gratification. This was an ordeal that could only be ended from the inside, yet what treasures might lurk within so heavily guarded a prison?

Atharva loathed mysteries, and this was one that demanded to be revealed. His scholar’s brain had to unravel this secret. The Crimson King had taken an ill-advised step in coming to Terra, but his arrival had shown Atharva what needed to be done. Kai Zulane was vital to the future in ways no one could understand, but if there was anyone who would relish the chance to prise open his mind, it was a mystic of the Thousand Sons.

Atharva opened his eyes as a pack of guards moved past the glass door of his cell. All but one managed to avoid looking in his direction, and Atharva flicked a barb of his consciousness into the man’s mind.

He was called Natraj, and Atharva smiled at the appropriateness of the name. Natraj was a soldier in the Uralian Stormlords, an elite drop-troop regiment that had served the Imperium since the early years of the wars of Unity alongside the gene-septs of the southern musters. His wife was raising their five sons in a hydro-farm collective on the slopes of Mount Arkad, and his brothers were all dead. Natraj was an honest man, a good man, but a man who no longer wished to serve in the Imperium’s armies.

His devotion to his fellow soldiers and the oaths he had sworn before the regimental Ark of Wings bound him to his role as soldier and gaoler, but Natraj was nearing his fortieth year, and desired only to return home to his family and see his boys grow to men.

A simple desire. An understandable one.

An open door to an Athanaean.

Kai lay on the floor of his cell, sweat layering his skin and his heart racing as though he had sprinted the entire height of the Whispering Tower. His body ached and his eyes felt as though the sutures binding them to his skin were tearing loose. The bilious taste of vomit caked the inside of his mouth and his robes stank of urine and uncontrolled bowel movements.

Every portion of his anatomy ached, and micro-tremors in his muscles kept him from any form of rest. Bright light filled his cell and harsh static blared from an unseen vox grille. Kai wanted to pick himself up, to face his interrogators with dignity and courage, but he had nothing left in him for defiance.

His clawed hand scratched at the floor, and the ghost of a smile creased Kai’s face as he finally made a mark of his own in the fabric of the cell. His parched tongue rasped over his cracked lips and he blinked away the raw, infected tissue gathering at the corner of his eyes.

Kai had no idea how long he had been lying here in pools of his own ejected matter, and, in truth, had stopped caring. He watched the patterns his breath made in the vomit, like ripples on the surface of a vast lake that sweltered beneath a glaring red sun.

Then, a change. A shiver of air movement. A door opening.

Kai tried to move, but he could no longer move his limbs. He saw a pair of boots, heeled and fashioned from expensive materials available only to the moneyed and influential of Terra. He heard a woman’s voice, dull and indistinct, then hands were under him, grabbing him and hauling him upright. Kai flinched at their touch, his body a morass of pain that shied away from human contact. Dragged across the floor of the cell, he was deposited on the edge of the bunk. Two figures in bulky black armour, layered bands of what looked like leather and bonded ceramite plate, took a step back from him as the most exquisite woman Kai had ever seen appeared between them.

Kai squinted through the glare of his cell’s lights. His visitor was unknown to him, a woman of undoubted noble breeding and subtly judged cosmetic surgery. Her eyes were vivid green, the surgically enhanced structure of her features framing them perfectly with high cheekbones. She wore her blonde hair in an elfin bob, asymmetrically cut and laced with amethyst beads.

A black bodyglove enclosed her lithe form, and a purple weave of shimmering fabric spiralled around her body like a frozen whirlwind. She was dressed for one of the grand Merican ballrooms, not a gaol beneath a forgotten mountain, and Kai wondered what she could possibly want from him.

‘Do you know who I am?’ she asked.

Kai licked his lips with the little moisture left in his mouth.

‘No,’ he said, his voice a barely audible whisper. The dusty rattle of a desert corpse.

‘And why should you? I move in circles far beyond your limited understanding,’ said the woman, picking her way carefully through the matter on the cell floor and kneeling beside him. Her dress moved with her, slithering around her form like a snake and ensuring it never touched the ground.

She saw him notice and smiled. ‘Nanofabric programmed to remain a fixed position and distance from my body at all times.’

‘Expensive.’

‘Monstrously,’ she agreed.

‘What do you want?’

The woman snapped a finger.

‘Give the man a drink. I can barely hear him.’

One of the woman’s protectors knelt beside Kai and offered him a plastic tube he detached from the shoulder of his armour. A droplet of moisture beaded the end of the tube, and Kai gratefully sucked cool liquid from the trooper’s recyc-pack. That the water was reconstituted from the man’s sweat and bodily waste did not bother Kai one iota. He felt it flowing through his body, along his limbs and revitalising him like a stimm shot.

Instantly, his thoughts sharpened and the sickness that plagued him abated.

‘That’s more like it,’ said the woman. ‘Now I don’t have to get so close to you to hear what you’re saying.’

‘That wasn’t water,’ said Kai, indicating the trooper as he snapped the clear plastic pipe back to his shoulder plate.

‘No, it wasn’t, but you feel better, don’t you?’

‘Much better,’ agreed Kai.

The woman cocked her head to one side and let her eyes roam his face. They were quite magnificent eyes, genuine and likely gene-tailored in utero. Kai’s augmetic eyes saw the faint outline of an electoo just beneath the third dermal layer, and unconsciously brought it into clarity. Rendered in a familiar cursive, it was an italicised capital C, and Kai groaned as he touched the underside of his wrist, where an identical electoo had been applied.

‘You are from House Castana,’ he said.

‘I am House Castana,’ said the woman. ‘I am Aeliana Septmia Verduchina Castana.’

‘The Patriarch’s daughter,’ said Kai.

‘Just so,’ said Aeliana, lifting her fringe to reveal a bejewelled patch in the centre of her forehead concealing her third eye. ‘And you are an embarrassment to my House, Kai Zulane.’

‘I never meant to be, Domina,’ said Kai, quickly averting his gaze and employing the formal means of address. To look into the eye of a Navigator was death, and he had more than earned such a fate in the eyes of the Castana family of the Navis Nobilite.

‘I am not here to kill you,’ said Aeliana. ‘Though Throne knows, that would solve a world of problems. I am here to give you a second chance. I am here to give you a chance to make amends for the loss of the Argo and the near-crippling loss of face my father has endured among the Conclave of Navigators.’

‘Why would you do such a thing?’

‘Because I dislike waste,’ said Aeliana. ‘For all the trouble you have caused, you are a skilled astropath and I would recoup the significant outlay my father incurred in securing your secondment to our House.’

‘You can secure my release from this place?’ asked Kai.

Aeliana smiled and shook her head as though amused at the naïve questioning of an infant.

‘I am Navis Nobilite,’ she said. ‘I speak and the world listens.’

‘Even the Legio Custodes?’

‘Even the praetorians,’ said Aeliana. ‘On assurance that I never allow you to return to Terra. A small price to see an end to this… unpleasantness, I think you’ll agree?’

Kai nodded. To never see the planet of his birth again would be no price at all.

‘And you can take me out of here?’ he asked.

‘I can, but first you have to do something for me.’

‘What? Anything, Domina,’ said Kai, reaching out to take Aeliana’s hands.

Her skin was smooth, yet there was a hardness to it that spoke of subdermal haptic implants. Aeliana’s eyes bored into his, and once again he was struck by the lambent green of her perfectly circular irises.

‘I need you to look at me and understand that House Castana does not hold you responsible for what happened aboard the Argo. It was an old ship and well beyond its scheduled maintenance refit date. The vanes of its Geller field generators had been damaged in transit through the asteroid belt around Konor, and it was only a matter of time until they failed. It had nothing to do with you.’

‘I was transmitting just before they failed,’ said Kai, so softly he wasn’t even sure he’d spoken aloud.

‘What?’

‘I was in a nuncio trance,’ said Kai. ‘I was sending a message to Terra when the shields failed. I was the way in for those… monsters… those things that live in the warp. The shields might have been cracked and ready to fail, but I was the hammer that finally broke them. The whole crew slaughtered and it’s my fault!’

Aeliana gripped his hands tightly and looked him straight in the eye.

‘It was not your fault,’ she said. ‘The creatures of the warp are dangerous, yes, but you are not to blame for what happened. I have seen the shipwright’s report on the wreck that emerged from the warp, and it is a miracle the Argo made it back to realspace at all. You and Roxanne were all that brought it home at all.’

‘Roxanne…’ said Kai. ‘Yes, that was her name… I remember. We knew each other. What became of her?’

‘She is well,’ said Aeliana, but Kai caught the hesitation before her answer. ‘After a brief convalescence, she returned to her duties. As you must, but you need to tell the Custodians what Sarashina told you. There is no reason not to. You have my word as Mistress of House Castana that no harm will befall you, whatever words you speak to me.’

Kai tilted his head back and stared into the bright light filling his cell. He could see no source of illumination, yet the walls shone with reflected light. The grainy static noise swelled, and now he recognised it for what it was: a desert wind blowing through the valleys and troughs of a dune sea, reshaping the landscape with every gust.

‘Very good,’ he said. ‘You almost had me.’

Aeliana’s grip tightened, and the perfect cast of her bone structure wavered for the tiniest fraction of a second. But with awareness of its falsehood, the rest of the fiction fell away with increasing rapidity, and the walls of the cell fell away like the threadbare backcloth of a cheap playhouse.

In their place, the achingly empty expanse of the Rub’ al Khali stretched out to the edge of the world. The armed troopers melted away like wind-blown sand sculptures and Kai found himself seated upon a shelf of rock overlooking the fortress of Arzashkun.

‘What was my mistake?’ said Adept Hiriko, the guise of Aeliana falling away from her.

‘The eyes for starters,’ said Kai. ‘You can never change your eyes, and though I forget each time, you can never hide them.’

‘That is all?’

‘Well, no,’ said Kai. ‘You made one other mistake.’

‘Oh, what was that?’

‘Aeliana Castana is a complete bitch,’ said Kai. ‘She would never be so understanding to someone who had cost her House so dearly.’

Hiriko shrugged. ‘I have heard that, but gambled on you never having met her.’

‘I haven’t, but word travels.’

Hiriko still held his hands and she leaned in to him. Her skin smelled of cheap herbal soap, and the sheer ordinariness of it made Kai want to weep. If only he could.

‘Whether or not you believed the dreamscape is immaterial,’ said Hiriko. ‘The words I spoke with her lips are no less true. You were not to blame for what happened to the Argo. Only by accepting that will you be able to let go of what holds you here.’

‘Maybe I don’t want to let go of it. Maybe I feel I deserve to be punished just for surviving. Had you thought of that?’

‘Why would you do something so self-destructive?’ asked Hiriko. ‘This augering is killing you every day. You must know that.’

Kai nodded. ‘I know it.’

‘Then why do it?’

‘Aniq Sarashina bade me tell what I know to one person, and one person alone.’

‘Who?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Kai, scooping up a handful of sand and letting it spill between his open fingers. The wind snatched the falling grains, sending them out over the dunes to be lost in the endless desert. Kai imagined himself as one of those grains, carried away by the warm sirocco, to be lost beyond any hope of ever being found.

‘That doesn’t make any sense,’ said Hiriko.

‘It doesn’t have to,’ said Kai. ‘But a promise is a promise.’

‘Do you want to die here?’

Kai considered the question, wondering if death was truly what he wanted. A release from the nightmares and constant guilt at his survival would be welcome, but he was too much of a coward to let death claim him with such ease. Or was it strength that kept him struggling for life and the chance to give his survival meaning?

‘No,’ said Kai at last, as the answer came to him. ‘I don’t want to die here.’

‘Telling me what Sarashina told you is the only way you will live,’ promised Hiriko.

‘You’re wrong,’ he said, without knowing how he could be so certain. ‘I am going to pass on what I was told.’

Hiriko shook her head. ‘Saturnalia will kill you first.’

The Bleed was tempestuous, but what else could he have expected after so potent a psychic burst as the arrival of the Crimson King? Magnus himself had manifested on Terra from half a galaxy away, and Evander Gregoras could not even begin to imagine what an expenditure of power such a feat had cost him.

How had he done it?

Magnus was a primarch, true, but even a god-like being with such mastery of the psychic arts surely had limits. No psychic discipline of which Gregoras was aware could transport the physical body of an individual over so great a distance, so how had he done it? Legends told that the cognoscynths could open gateways through space and time, but even the most outlandish tales only spoke of travel from one side of a planet to another. To travel between worlds would require the greatest mind the galaxy had ever seen…

Gregoras had told Zulane that the cognoscynths were all gone, but might the Emperor have created another in the form of Magnus? Had that been the figure Zulane had met in his dream?

But to travel from Prospero to Terra!

Such a feat spoke of powerful sorcery, and it boded ill for the Imperium if Magnus had unlocked that forbidden door. As he had told Kai, there could only be one punishment for such blatant disregard for the Emperor’s decree.

The Bleed roared and seethed like an atmospheric superstorm, raging with the distilled nightmares and collected visions of thousands of traumatised astro-telepaths. Hundreds had been killed in the psychic shockwave that still echoed in the planet’s aether, and hundreds more would never regain full use of their abilities. At any time that would have been a calamity, but in the midst of a full-scale civil war, it was nothing less than catastrophic. The City of Sight was effectively blinded, an irony not lost on Gregoras, but which Lord Dorn found less than amusing.

To relive the nightmares of an entire city was no small task, and the cryptaesthesians were suffering what their fellows had suffered all over again. The whisper stones ran red with incorporeal blood, fat with the bleak visions and darkest fears of those they had saved from psychic overload. The cascade of light from the dome’s crystal lattice was bleeding its horrors down onto Gregoras, and no matter that he had steeled himself with rituals of isolation and mantras of protection, he still wept with every fresh terror that cohered in the mists of psychic debris.

He saw loved ones ripped apart, nightmares of needles and crawling things. Dreams of abandonment, nightmares of pain and fears of rejection. He saw childhood traumas, relived pain and imagined terrors that had no frame of reference. All this and more oozed from the whisper stones like pus from a wound. Only by expelling every last morsel of trauma would the City of Sight be able to function again, and only the cryptaesthesians had the skill to make it happen.

Nemo Zhi-Meng had personally tasked Gregoras with purging the city of the power that had manifested within the mindhall of Choir Primus.

‘Make the nightmares go away,’ had been his simple instruction.

Simple to say, but difficult to obey.

The power within Aniq Sarashina that had destroyed Choir Primus was so vast that elements of it had insinuated their way into the collective psyche of the Whispering Tower. Infinitesimally small fragments of its purpose had lodged in the minds of all who heard its screaming siren song, and those fragments had been absorbed by the whisper stones.

And from there, it had bled into the shadowy realm of the cryptaesthesians.

To a mind not attuned to the secret pattern that underpinned the galaxy, such fragments would have been meaningless, a garbled hash of random images, absurd metaphors and mixed allegories.

Gregoras knew better and in every horrific image he lifted from the Bleed, he could see tiny references to the pattern, as though the madmen and prophets scattered throughout the galaxy had poured all their ravings and dreams into one mighty shout. The pattern was here, right in front of him, and the key to unlocking the mystery he had studied for the entirety of his adult life was secreted in Kai Zulane’s mind.

Sarashina had said she was passing on a warning, but a warning to whom? And what kind of warning would not be best shouted from the highest rooftop instead of being hidden away in the mind of a broken telepath?

The truth of the matter was right here, in the nightmares of the tower’s astropaths, and Gregoras was going to find it. The neurolocutors of the Legio Custodes were having no success in plucking Sarashina’s legacy from Zulane’s head, but the secret of whatever had come to the Whispering Tower was here in the Bleed, he was sure of it.

All he needed to find it was time.

Twelve

The enemy within
The fellowship of vanity
A promise kept

Though his armour insulated him from the cold beneath the mountains, Uttam Luna Hesh Udar felt an insidious chill creep into his bones as he watched the mortal soldiers manoeuvre the nutrition dispenser along the bridge towards the floating island at the heart of Khangba Marwu. A fine mist of rain drizzled from the darkened recesses of the cavern’s roof, and droplets of moisture condensed on the blade of his guardian spear. They hissed as the energy field vaporised them instantly, sounding like snakes drifting through the air.

Its power would deplete more quickly, but when there were enemies all around him, the seconds it would take to energise could cost him his life. Sumant Giri Phalguni Tirtha stood beside him, his guardian spear also fizzing in the moist air. He looked up, droplets rolling down the golden plates of his helm like tears.

‘Rain beneath the mountains,’ he said. ‘I have never known the like.’

‘Cold in the world above,’ said Uttam. ‘What does it matter?’

‘The mountain weeps,’ said Tirtha.

‘What?’

Tirtha shrugged, as though embarrassed to continue.

‘Spit it out,’ said Uttam. ‘What troubles you?’

‘I have read the history of Khangba Marwu,’ said Tirtha. ‘It is said the mountain wept on the day Zamora escaped.’

‘No one is escaping today,’ said Uttam. ‘Not on our watch.’

‘As you say,’ agreed Tirtha, and though his face was hidden behind his helm’s visor, Uttam sensed a lingering unease in his body language.

‘Come,’ he said. ‘Do not let a coincidence of subterranean precipitation keep the warriors of the Legio Custodes from their duties.’

‘Of course,’ said Tirtha, as the soldiers eased the nutrition dispenser onto the cell-island.

The bulky container slipped as its repulsor field interacted with a stray wave emanation from the mighty generators holding the cell-island afloat. A trooper in the grey tabard of the Uralian Stormlords cursed as the intersecting fields shocked him and he lost his grip.

‘Watch what you’re doing, damn it,’ he snapped, directing his anger outwards.

‘Hold your end properly and it won’t slip,’ said the man across from him, a veteran sergeant of the Gitanen Outriders, an elite unit of flyers based in the Baikonur crater aeries.

‘I’m carrying half your weight,’ said the man. His name was Natraj, and Uttam had, until now, thought him one of the steadier members of his detail.

‘Be silent,’ said Uttam. ‘It is forbidden for you to speak while on duty.’

‘Apologies, Custodian,’ said Natraj. ‘It will not happen again.’

‘We are as one,’ added the Outrider, but Uttam suspected that whatever ill-feeling existed between them would be taken up once they were beyond the confines of the mountain.

‘When we are done here you will return to the surface and collect your dismissal papers. I have no use for men who cannot follow orders,’ said Uttam.

‘Custodian?’ said Natraj.

‘My lord, please–’

‘Hold your tongues, both of you,’ said Uttam. ‘I do not tolerate dissent. You fail to understand what it is you do here, the danger of the prisoners you attend. Your commanding officers will hear of this lapse in discipline.’

Both men glared at him, and Uttam’s stim glands swelled with trigger chemicals as his combat reflexes instinctively recognised anger and the threat of imminent violence. His grip tightened on his spear, but just as suddenly as the anger had surfaced it vanished without trace, cut off as suddenly as though a switch had been thrown.

‘Follow me,’ said Uttam, turning and leading the soldiers between the cells. The lingering traces of combat stims danced in his veins, and Uttam scanned the spaces between the cells for enemies. The only enemies on the island were locked up, but the brief exchange between the mortals had disquieted him. He was no believer in omens, but taken together with the drizzling rain, it had set him on edge, combat ready and instinctive.

Not a good state to be in when caution and thoroughness was key.

‘Which one first?’ asked Tirtha.

‘Tagore,’ said Uttam, indicating a cellblock to his right.

Uttam despised Tagore – he had killed three hundred and fifty-nine men before he had been subdued, and that made him almost as dangerous as a Custodian. The soldiers hauled the nutrition dispenser around as Uttam took position in front of the door.

The warrior inside paced the length and breadth of the cell like a caged raptor, tension knotting his muscles and keeping his jaw clenched like a rabid wolf. The prisoner’s physique was enormous: a giant clad only in a tattered loincloth. It had once been a standard issue prison bodyglove, but the inmate had torn it to shreds. His body was a lattice of scars layered over gene-bulked muscle and ossified bone, while his flesh was a canvas of linked tattoos. Axes and swords mingled with skulls and jagged teeth that swallowed worlds whole.

The back of the man’s head was a nightmare of metal plates embedded in furrowed grooves cut into the bone of his skull, and there was a demented look to the warrior that no amount of self-control could quite mask.

‘Back away from the door, traitor,’ ordered Uttam.

The warrior bared his teeth, flinching at the word traitor, but complied. His back was to the far wall, but his muscles were bunched in anticipation of violence. Tagore was a World Eater, and Uttam had never seen him in anything less than an attack posture. The others of his Legion were just the same, and Uttam wondered how they could stand to be so highly poised at all times. Some called the World Eaters undisciplined killers, psychopaths with tacit approval to be mindless butchers, but Uttam knew better. After all, what kind of discipline must it take to maintain such a level of aggression so close to the surface on so tight a leash?

The World Eaters were more dangerous than anyone gave them credit for.

Tagore eyed him with a feral grin, but said nothing.

‘You have something to say?’ snapped Uttam.

Tagore nodded and said, ‘One day I will kill you. Rip your spine out through your chest.’

‘Empty threats?’ said Uttam. ‘I expected better from you.’

‘You are more foolish than you look if you think I make empty threats,’ said Tagore.

‘And yet you are the one in confinement.’

‘This?’ said Tagore, as the nutrition dispenser dropped a pair of foodstuff bags into the cell. ‘This won’t hold me for long.’

Uttam smiled, amused despite himself by Tagore’s posturing. ‘Do you really believe that, or is it just that abomination hammered into your skull that makes you think so?’

‘I am World Eater,’ snarled Tagore proudly. ‘I do not deal in abstracts, I deal in the reality of absolutes. And I know that I will kill you.’

Recognising the futility of further discussion, Uttam shook his head and moved deeper into the prison complex. The other inmates gave him cold glares or venomous hostility, but as always it was Atharva who perturbed Uttam the most.

The witch stood in the centre of his cell, hands straight down at his side and his chin tilted slightly up, as though he was waiting for something. His eyes were closed and his lips moved as though in silent supplication. The rain fell harder here, dripping from the hard permacrete edges of the cellblock. Uttam’s eyes narrowed as the same chill he had felt upon entering the chamber grew stronger still. His combat instincts, already honed from the brief stimm shunt drew in close as he sensed danger.

The spear spun in his hand as Atharva’s eyes opened, and Uttam gasped as he saw they were no longer amber and blue, but the shimmering white of a winter sun.

‘Pull back,’ he ordered, moving away from the cell door. ‘Evacuate immediately.’

‘It’s too late for that,’ said Atharva.

‘Tirtha!’ shouted Uttam. ‘Danger threatens!’

A blast of superheated air sounded like the crack of a whip, and Uttam spun on his heel. Natraj of the Uralian Stormlords held his plasma gun pulled in tight to his shoulder, the vents along its barrel drooling exhaust gasses.

Custodian Sumant Giri Phalguni Tirtha fell to his knees with a smoking hole burned through the centre of his stomach.

‘The mountain weeps,’ he said, before pitching onto his front.

The interrogation chamber was cold, as it always was, but Kai sensed a strained atmosphere that had nothing to do with Scharff and Hiriko’s continued failure to reach the information Sarashina had placed within him. Though Kai’s physical frailty made restraints unnecessary, he was still strapped into the contoured chair in the centre of the chamber. Adept Hiriko sat opposite him, and Kai saw dark smudges under her eyes that hadn’t been there the last time they had met in the waking world. The process of interrogation was draining her almost as much as it was draining him.

Kai said, ‘Please, do we have to do this again? I can’t give you what you want.’

‘I believe you, Kai, I really do,’ said Hiriko, ‘but if the Legio Custodes cannot have the secrets in your head, they will settle for you dead. They are an unforgiving organisation. And if you won’t give me what I want willingly, then I have no choice but to tear it out of you.’

‘What does that mean?’

Hiriko fixed him with a stare that was part melancholy, part exasperated. ‘It means exactly what you think it means, Kai. You won’t survive this.’

‘Please,’ said Kai. ‘I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die like this.’

‘That doesn’t matter any more,’ said Hiriko. ‘Others have decided that you must, but if it is any comfort, know that you will soon be unconscious and won’t feel a thing.’

The door to the interrogation chamber opened before Kai could answer. Adept Scharff entered, looking as though he had been deprived of rest for weeks. The man gave Kai a weak smile and Hiriko looked up with a concerned glance.

‘You are late,’ she said. ‘You’re never late.’

‘I slept badly. I dreamed of a figure armoured in crimson and ivory,’ said Scharff, and something about that description tugged on a thread in Kai’s mind. ‘He was calling to me.’

‘What was he saying?’ asked Hiriko.

‘I do not know, I could hear nothing of his words.’

‘Residue from the umbra perhaps?’ asked Hiriko. ‘Should I be vexed?’

Scharff shook his head. ‘No, I believe it to be bleed-off from the psychic trauma caused by the arrival of Primarch Magnus. The crimson and ivory of the figure’s armour suggests a link to the Thousand Sons after all.’

Hiriko nodded. ‘That appears likely.’

Scharff took a seat beside Kai and sifted through the many chem-shunts and canula needles piercing his pallid skin. Kai couldn’t move his head to see what he was doing, but his peripheral vision was almost as clear as his binocular vision. Scharff’s eyes were ever so slightly unfocused, like a sleeper suddenly awoken from a deep slumber. The man’s hands were out of sight, but Kai heard a soft hiss as one of the drug dispensers introduced yet another foreign substance into his bloodstream.

Expecting unconsciousness, Kai was mildly surprised to feel tingling at the extremities of his limbs. His eyes flicked to Hiriko, but her beautiful green eyes were perusing lines of text scrolling down the face of a data-slate. Kai looked over to Scharff, now able to move his head as whatever chemical he was being fed began to fully counteract the muscle relaxants and anaesthesias keeping him docile.

Kai bit his lip as control returned to his body. His limbs were his own again, but it was more than that. This was rejuvenation, a stimulus that was restoring his body with vitality. He wanted to ask Scharff what he was doing, but an instinct for danger warned him to keep his mouth shut. His actions couldn’t escape Hiriko’s notice for long, and the machines monitoring Kai’s vital signs registered his increased brain activity and elevated heart rate.

Hiriko glanced over at the bio-readouts with twin lines creasing the smooth skin at the bridge of her nose. Her eyes darted from readout to readout, taking in at a glance Kai’s return from the brink of dormancy.

‘Scharff? Have you seen these readings?’ she asked, putting aside the data-slate and rising to her feet. When her companion didn’t answer, she finally turned to face him and the surprise in her face was compounded with irritation.

‘Sharff? What are you doing? We need Kai unconscious for this procedure.’

‘No,’ said Scharff.

‘No?’ replied Hiriko. ‘Have you lost your mind? Stop whatever it is you’re doing.’

‘I can’t do that, Adept Hiriko,’ said Scharff, in a voice that suggested he very much wished he could. Scharff’s hands danced over an exposed keypad on the black box that had been the source of so many of Kai’s nightmares recently. Hiriko circled the chair and took hold of Scharff’s arm. Kai saw her register what he had understood only moments before.

‘Adept Scharff,’ snapped Hiriko. ‘Back away from the prisoner immediately. I believe your mind to be compromised.’

Scharff shook his head, and the veins at his temples throbbed like a heart on the verge of cardiac arrest. ‘The subject must be conscious and motile if he is to leave the facility.’

‘He’s not leaving, Scharff,’ insisted Hiriko.

Kai felt the metal restraints that bound him to the chair release with a pneumatic hiss as the blare of alarm klaxons sounded throughout Khangba Marwu.

‘Oh, but he is,’ said Scharff in a voice that was not his own.

Natraj was dead before Tirtha hit the ground. Uttam’s guardian spear spat a bolt from the weapon beneath the blade and the man’s body blew apart into vaporised blood and bone shrapnel. Two of the nearest soldiers went down with the force of the explosion, but Uttam was already moving as alarm klaxons and warning bells filled the cavern with noise. Natraj had been compromised, and the loyalty of his fellows was likewise in doubt. For that, all would have to die.

Uttam swayed aside from a hellgun shot and rammed his spear through the chest plate of a soldier armoured in crimson battle plate. Blood sprayed the golden visor of his helm as he was cloven from hip to collarbone. A rifle barked to the side, deflected by Uttam’s shoulder guard. He spun low, his spear sweeping in a low arc that sliced through the knees of four of his attackers. A searing blast of plasma blinded him momentarily as it flashed past his helmet and he dropped into a defensive crouch, sweeping his spear around him in a spinning blur of silver and adamantium.

Shots ricocheted from the blade, but none penetrated his defences. His sight returned a moment later, and Uttam pulled his spear in tight to his body. Diving forward he rolled to his feet and another shot punched a warrior armoured in mirror-black armour from his feet. The pulped remains slammed into the wall of the nearest cellblock.

Threat protocols picked out the dangers.

Uralian Stormlord with a hellgun. Minimal threat.

Two Vitruvian Commissars, one with an ion breaker, the other with a grenade launcher. Moderate threat.

Three Crimson Dragoons: webber, plasma carbine and a mass crusher. Immediate threat.

They were firing and moving, working better as attackers than they ever had as gaolers, but even six highly trained mortals with advanced weaponry were no match for a warrior of the Legio Custodes. Uttam swung his spear around and killed the dragoon armed with the mass crusher, taking his head off with a neat cut that cauterised the wound even as it decapitated. The plasma carbine fired again. Uttam deflected the shot with a horizontal slash, sending the superhot bolt into the chest of the Commissar with the grenade launcher. He fell with a strangled scream that changed to a shrill howl as the air in his lungs ignited.

A hellgun shot impacted on the side of his helmet, and Uttam spun to face the shooter, but the two surviving dragoons obscured his aim. They fired at the same time, but Uttam was already among them. His blade sliced the first soldier’s arm from his body, and the return stroke of the haft shattered every rib in his chest.

A warm mist of sticky mucus-like liquid enveloped Uttam, and he felt the rapidly solidifying web gel hardening around his armour. Anyone not blessed with the preternaturally swift reflexes of the genhanced would have been trapped completely by the web’s ultra-rapid setting, but Uttam pulled clear before the worst of the gel had done its work. His spear arm was gummed with sticky strands of the stuff, but his left was still free and lethal.

A pistoning jab caved in the front half of the web gunner’s face and a following elbow broke the neck of the plasma gunner even as he brought his recharged weapon to bear once more. That just left the grey-clad Stormlord, and Uttam jogged in the direction the man had run, shaking the last strands of dissolving web gel from his arm.

‘You have to die now,’ said Uttam, rounding the corner of the cellblock.

Shock and horror pulled him up short as he saw the Uralian Stormlord standing before an opened cell with Sumant Giri Phalguni Tirtha’s bloodstained signifier ring pressed to the locking panel. A towering figure of rage and scar tissue stood by the opened door, pumping muscles bunched and writhing beneath his tattooed skin.

‘I am going to kill you,’ said Tagore of the World Eaters. ‘Rip your spine out through your chest.’

From a cross-legged position, Atharva watched the dance of his puppets with a satisfied smile. A tug of thought brought the Uralian Stormlord running towards his cell while Tagore and Custodian Uttam faced off against one another. Time was critical. He couldn’t let the World Eater kill the Custodian or this escape would be over before it began.

His other thrall was already rousing Kai Zulane, though it was proving difficult to maintain his control over Scharff. The man had some training in resisting mental intrusion, basic training compared to that endured by adepts of the Thousand Sons, but he had natural talents that ensured his will was a slippery thing. His attempts to break Atharva’s control were amusingly naïve, but he had help from his compatriot, and she was a sly little fox.

Beads of sweat trickled down Atharva’s face like tears. Though it was an uncomplicated matter to exert control over mortals, maintaining it through psychically warded permacrete and without being able to see his thralls took great effort.

A shape appeared at the door to his cell, a man in a grey tabard marked with lightning bolts and a crude representation of a diving raptor. The soldier’s face was pale and he wept even as his hand shuddered with the effort of trying to resist Atharva’s control.

‘Don’t try to fight it, Tejas,’ said Atharva. ‘You don’t have the strength.’

Tejas Doznya had served with the Uralian Stormlords for six years, and had been passed over for promotion three times. Too reckless, his superiors said, which, in a regiment renowned for leaping from perfectly good aircraft with nothing but a flimsy grav-chute to prevent gravity working its inevitable end result on their fragile bodies, was saying something. This secondment to the Legio Custodes was intended to temper his reckless streak with the discipline of the Emperor’s praetorians, but his resentment at being sidelined had only festered until it was practically begging to be used as leverage to open his mind to control.

With a cry of impotence, Tejas placed the Custodian’s signifier ring against the lock plate and the door slid into the walls of the cell. Cut from the hand of a dead man, the ring’s skeleton key properties spoke to the arrogance of the Legio Custodes that they had never considered the possibility of one of their precious rings falling into enemy hands.

Atharva stood in a fluid, uncoiling motion, like a rearing snake poised to strike down its victim. He stepped from the cell, gasping in remembered pleasure as he felt the power of the Great Ocean swell around him. The psi-damping collar around his neck cracked and broke apart as though twisted by invisible hands. Its remains clattered to the ground and Atharva laughed as he felt the currents and tides of the Great Ocean rush to fill his body.

‘Tejas, the ring if you please,’ said Atharva, extending his hand.

The horrified Tejas dropped the ring onto the plateau of Atharva’s palm, and he lifted it to his lips, as if to kiss it. His tongue flicked out to clean it of blood, and the gene-rich flavour of the Custodian’s essence flooded his senses, an ambrosia of genetic mastery.

‘Oh, this is a wonder indeed, Tejas,’ said Atharva. ‘What secrets might be unlocked by its study? What wonders and miracles might a master like Hathor Maat work with such a palette of genius?’

Tejas didn’t answer and Atharva handed the pristine ring back to him. He placed one oversized hand upon his thrall’s shoulder, placing the images of five warriors in the forefront of his mind. Five. All that would be useful from twelve. What a waste.

‘Tejas, I want you to release these men, and these men only,’ said Atharva.

The man nodded, his mind bursting with the need to do Atharva’s bidding and the horror of what he was doing. Though every fibre of the man’s willpower was trying to fight off his control, he was a leaf in the face of a hurricane. Atharva watched him run towards the other cells, and let his mind float into the mid-level heights of the Enumerations that would better enhance his skills in bio-manipulation. Sense organs at the back of his throat struggled to assess the content of the Custodian’s blood, though they could not hope to unravel something so exquisitely constructed. Yet what understanding they could glean might be enough.

Though Atharva’s skills as a Pavoni were not the equal of Hathor Maat, he had mastered enough of the vain Fellowship’s arts to achieve what would be required to leave this place of confinement.

So long as Tagore didn’t kill Uttam Luna Hesh Udar too soon.

Fists and elbows, knees and feet. They fought in a blur of thundering punches, bone-breaking kicks and titanic impacts. Two warriors, crafted to be the pinnacles of fighting men, flew at each other with rage and neuro-cortical implants and the finest genetic manipulation on either side of loyalty.

Tagore fought with teeth bared, eyes bulging madness. He fought without heed or thought of restraint, with no care for injury or death. Uttam Luna Hesh Udar fought with precision, grace and exacting killing blows straight from the combat forges of the Legio Custodes.

Two warriors of extremes, two warriors primed to deal death in completely different ways.

Uttam was armoured, Tagore was bare-skinned and bleeding.

The Custodian’s guardian spear lay broken between them, its haft snapped like matchwood in Tagore’s grip. Its blade fizzed and spat in the moisture drizzling from the cavern’s roof. Tagore spun around Uttam, kicking his heel into the back of the Custodian’s knee. Uttam went down with a grunt, catching the follow-up knee to the face in his blocking gauntlets. Uttam twisted his grip, spinning Tagore from his feet. He followed up, foot thundering down to crush the World Eater’s head.

Tagore rolled, came up, and punched the side of Uttam’s thigh. Plates cracked and the paralyzing nerve-impact dropped him to one knee. A right cross tore his helmet off and an uppercut threw him onto his back. Tagore scissored himself to his feet and hurled himself at the fallen Custodian. Uttam met his flying leap with a downward-bludgeoning fist that drove Tagore into the ground like a downed Stormbird. Tagore rolled aside from the inevitable head-crushing elbow and sprang to his feet in time to meet the Custodian’s charge.

They grappled like street brawlers. Rabbit-punching kidneys, legs locking and unlocking as each warrior sought a hold that would drop their opponent. The iron plates bolted to Tagore’s head spat fat red sparks as they pumped chem-stimms and rage boosters into his bloodstream and electrical impulses to the anger centres of his brain. His fury had been building to critical mass ever since his incarceration, and this was just the fight to unleash it.

The first advantage went to Uttam. Every blow Tagore struck was against artificer-forged plate, hand-shaped in the armouries beneath the Anatolian peaks, where Uttam hammered unprotected flesh. Pure concussive force cracked the bone shield in Tagore’s chest, and he grunted as a piledriver of an uppercut drove up into his gut. The briefest flinch, but an opening nonetheless.

Uttam twisted and slammed his elbow into Tagore’s jaw. Blood and teeth flew from the World Eater’s jaw. Uttam closed for the killing blow, but pain was just another stimulus to a killer like Tagore. The World Eater spat a tooth, and caught Uttam’s fist in one raw meat palm. He caught the other fist mid-punch and smashed his forehead into Uttam’s face. The Custodian’s nose broke, and both cheekbones shattered. Blood blinded him for an instant before he shook his eyes clear of it, but an instant was all Tagore needed.

His blooded fist hammered into Uttam’s chest, driven by rage and betrayal.

Ceramite shattered, adamantium buckled and bone broke.

Tagore bellowed in atavistic triumph as his power, momentum and strength drove his fist deep into the Custodian’s chest. Meat and blood parted before his digging hand until his fingers closed on iron-hard bone.

The Custodian’s eyes were wide with agony, his body still fighting for life even as Tagore ripped it out of him. Tagore spat blood in his face, grinning a manic skull’s grin.

‘Still think I make empty threats, Custodian?’ he snarled.

Uttam tried to respond, but only managed a horrid sucking noise from his gored chest cavity. Tagore felt bone buckle, crushed beneath his implacable grip. Strong and tough, but not as strong or tough as a sergeant of the World Eaters.

A figure appeared at his back, tall and reeking of cold metal and ice.

‘Damn you, Tagore, I need him alive,’ said a voice that could only belong to Atharva of the Thousand Sons. ‘He can still survive this, Tagore. Don’t kill him.’

‘Only Angron and his captains can tell me what to do,’ hissed Tagore. ‘One of Magnus’s bastards cannot.’

With an awful cracking sound that seemed to go on and on, Tagore twisted his grip and wrenched his arm from Uttam’s chest. Crimson past the elbow, nubs of broken bone protruded from either side of his fist. Glistening mucus-like blood and spinal fluid dripped from the ruptured bone, and in the last seconds of life left to Uttam, he realised he was looking at a portion of his own spine.

‘Rip your spine out through your chest!’ yelled Tagore, hurling the wreckage of Uttam’s bone to the ground. ‘And what I say I will kill, I kill.’

The Custodian toppled onto his side, his body still trying to fight the inevitability of his death. But even the formidable endurance wrought into so magnificent a body could not survive such a grievous wound, and Uttam Luna Hesh Udar’s life ended in a shimmering pool of his own blood at the feet of a warrior to whom each opponent bested was a badge of honour.

‘By the Eye, Tagore,’ snapped Atharva, dropping to one knee beside the slain Custodian. ‘Do you realise what you’ve done?’

‘Killed a powerful foe, one worthy of remembrance,’ said the World Eater.

Atharva waved away Tagore’s words.

‘Irrelevant,’ he said, looking up at the cavern’s ceiling and walls as nearly a hundred blister-turrets unmasked in readiness to cleanse this floating island of life. Both warriors knew they could not survive such weight of fire.

‘The Crimson Path before the Iron Fetter!’ bellowed Tagore, lifting his arms to meet death head on.

Atharva laughed in the face of such a wantonly self-destructive code of honour, knowing there was only one way they were going to live through the next few seconds.

‘My apologies for this desecration, Uttam Luna Hesh Udar, but my need is greater than yours,’ said Atharva, tearing the dead Custodian’s head from his shoulders.

Thirteen

The Crusader Host
Freedom
If you want to live

With the power of the Great Ocean at his disposal, there was little beyond the reach of an Adept Exemptus of the Thousand Sons, but even Phosis T’kar would have been hard pressed to create a kine shield capable of withstanding so many guns. Atharva could protect himself with such a shield, but the rest of the Crusader Host would surely be killed, and – for the moment – he needed them alive.

Freed from the limiting confines of his cell, Atharva’s power flowed back into his body. He wanted to savour this moment, to revel in the return of his full gamut of abilities and the clarity of thought that was his to command, but time was now his enemy and the Eye had work for him.

Custodian Uttam’s blood flowed from the ruined stump of his neck, spilling over Atharva’s hand and streaming down his arm. The cracked tip of a crushed vertebra jutted from the wound and the grey matter within would be beyond use in a few moments.

But a few moments was less time than he had.

The guns on the cavern walls opened fire and a cascade of lasers and solid rounds drowned the din of alarms. Thousands of shells bombarded the floating island in a blitzing storm of fire. Atharva dived inside the cell that had recently housed Tagore, but the World Eaters sergeant flattened himself against its outer walls, too stupid or too proud to take refuge within its confines.

‘Can you stop this?’ bellowed Tagore, his voice almost lost in the crescendo of gunfire. Acrid propellant smoke and billowing clouds of pulverised permacrete filled the air as the solid rounds smacked into the cells and chewed them apart like necrotic viral strains attacking healthy cells.

‘That remains to be seen,’ shouted Atharva in response, pushing his consciousness into the Custodian’s head, directing the living power of the warp into the myriad dying blood vessels in an effort to keep brain death at bay.

A breath sighed from the head as the mouth fell open in a silent scream. Atharva felt the crackle of neural activity in the fitfully sparking synapses, and meshed his mind with the dying brain. He goaded it back to life with immaterial energy, letting the power of the Great Ocean reanimate cells that had been on the brink of disintegration. Atharva felt Uttam’s horror pricking the edge of his perception, and briefly wondered what manner of awareness the dead Custodian might yet be experiencing.

As more of Uttam’s brain returned to life, the stronger the maddened horror became, but Atharva kept it at bay for now. With his mental architecture attuned to the rhythms of the Pavoni in the sixth Enumeration, Atharva let his body’s newfound familiarity with Legio Custodes blood restructure itself, altering his biometrics to more closely match those of his erstwhile gaoler. Though Atharva’s body did not change outwardly, his inner flesh took on the guise of Uttam Luna Hesh Udar at the cellular level. A crude deception, conceived in haste, that would not fool any gene-sampler for long, but perhaps long enough.

Much of what the Custodian knew was Atharva’s to know: the layout of Khangba Marwu, its security protocols, its roster of forces and, most importantly, its entrances and exits. Though in the current situation, the disabling codes for the cavern guns was top of Atharva’s list of information to pluck from the dead man’s skull.

Taking a deep breath, Atharva cowled himself in the crudest of kine shields and stepped from the cell. A storm of shells battered him, enough to saw through an entire company of Imperial Army troopers in an instant, but the shield held firm for now. It seemed as though every gun on the cavern walls was aimed right at him, and Atharva knew he would not have much time to make this work.

‘All guns disengage and power down,’ he shouted, his voice so perfect an imitation of Uttam Luna Hesh Udar that no vox-sampler ever made would dispute the authenticity of the speaker. ‘Authorisation Omega Omicron Nine Three Primus.’

The deafening barrage of fire ceased in an instant as every gun retracted into an armoured housing and shut down. Smoke and dust drifted on the wind currents created by the sudden heat and passage of tens of thousands of expended rounds. The howling alarms seemed almost quiet by comparison.

Atharva dropped his kine shield and let out a relieved breath as shapes emerged from the choking dust clouds. Five of them, all bulked by unimaginably complex science to a size far beyond human, yet moving with a gait that was clearly authored from the template of homo sapiens. The twins were the first to emerge from the dust, Subha and Asubha, the butcher and the assassin. World Eaters and killers, neither bore the nightmarish augmetics of Tagore, but like their brother sergeant, their bodies were pitched in a posture of taut aggression.

Gythua followed them, a warrior from Mortarion’s Legion whose bulk and solidity had made others in the Crusader Host give him the epithet of ‘Goliath’, a giant from ancient myth. Argentus Kiron, the tall, broad-shouldered swordsman, jogged alongside him. The pair shared an unlikely friendship, for who would have thought warriors of the Emperor’s Children and Death Guard might find much in the way of common ground?

Lastly came Severian, dubbed the Wolf by his fellows for the secretive and lonely path he trod. Atharva barely knew him, but as a warrior from the Legion of Horus Lupercal, he held a unique position amongst the warriors of the Crusader Host.

Crusader Host…? The name was a joke now…

The three World Eaters greeted each other with clenched fists and primal displays of their strength, though Atharva saw the subtle dance of superiority in its ritualistic displays of prowess. Alpha male and subordinates were clearly defined in the tilt of their heads and the baring of necks. It made Atharva want to smile, but Tagore would take a dim view of any such analysis of his warriors.

Tagore swept up the guardian spear of the first Custodian to die, testing the edge of the blade with a satisfied grunt. He snapped the haft just below the cutting edge, making what was left look more like a long-bladed cleaver as Subha took up the spear blade Tagore had broken in his battle with Uttam.

‘How are we free?’ asked Kiron, picking up a fallen plasma carbine. The weapon looked absurdly tiny in his hands, but with a snap of a trigger guard, the weapon became useable. ‘Is this your doing, Atharva?’

Severian slid a blade from the shoulder scabbard of a dead soldier clad in crimson plate. In the dead man’s hands it would have been a monstrous blade, a two-handed hewer of men, but to the Luna Wolf it was little more than a gladius.

‘It is indeed my doing,’ replied Atharva, already jogging towards the bridge that led from the island. ‘But explanations can wait until we are free of the mountain.’

Tagore ran alongside him, glancing warily at the silent guns.

‘How did you do that?’ he demanded, his words still slurred with the after-effects of combat drugs and the stress of his battle with the Custodian.

Atharva shook his head. ‘It would take too long to explain.’

The World Eater took his arm in a powerful grip. ‘I am not a fool, Atharva. Tell me.’

Atharva wondered for a moment how he could possibly explain the intricacies of bio-psychic engineering to a warrior of the World Eaters. It would be as futile as attempting to elaborate upon the shortcomings of Pandorus Zheng as a scholar relative to the achievements of Ahzek Ahriman to an amoeba.

He held up the severed head and said, ‘I was able to extract the deactivation codes from the Custodian’s brain before it ceased to function.’

Tagore eyed the head of the man he had killed with grim fascination.

‘You sounded like him,’ he said.

Not quite the barbarian then…

‘I am a talented mimic,’ said Atharva, once again using a flicker of his powers to alter the density and length of his vocal chords to match those of Custodian Uttam.

The bridge rang to the sound of heavy Space Marine treads as they crossed to the spur of rock at the edge of the depthless chasm. The warriors paused as they stepped from the bridge, all recognising the significance of the moment. They were clear of their cells, but there was fighting yet to be done if they were to truly call themselves free.

Atharva felt Kiron’s eyes upon him.

‘Is that head still alive?’ asked the warrior of the Emperor’s Children, with a grimace of distaste. Artificial colour in the warrior’s hair had made him look albino while they had been honoured as representatives of the conquering Legions, but deprived of his dyes as a prisoner, dark roots were showing at his temples.

‘After a fashion,’ said Atharva, ‘I can use it to get us past the guns, but we will have to hurry before the synapse connections degrade beyond the point where I can sustain them.’

‘You dishonour a fallen enemy,’ said Subha, pushing into Atharva’s face.

Atharva sent an exasperated glance in Tagore’s direction, and though the World Eaters sergeant clearly shared Subha’s feelings towards violating a fallen enemy’s body, he nodded in understanding. Tagore thumped a fist against his chest, an old Unity salute that seemed more in keeping with their status as captives than the aquila.

‘We are World Eaters, Subha,’ said Tagore. ‘You were there at the great breaking of the chains. We swore to be no man’s slaves, remember?’

‘I remember,’ said Subha with a feral snarl, his fists clenched.

‘We all remember,’ added his twin. ‘The Crimson Path before the Iron Fetter.’

‘Good words,’ said Tagore, gesturing beyond the stone archway before them. ‘Words to live by. Words of meaning.’

‘Angron’s words,’ said Subha, as though that settled the matter, but Atharva didn’t miss the uneasy glance shared by Asubha and Tagore.

‘Beyond that arch lies freedom, but that freedom has to be won in blood,’ said Tagore, brandishing the spear blade. ‘We will show our enemies what it means to put chains on a World Eater.’

‘We’re wasting time,’ said Severian. ‘We should go. Now.’

‘First sensible thing anyone’s said,’ grunted Gythua. ‘Like as not we’ll all die trying to get out of this place, but at least it’ll be on our feet and facing our enemies.’

‘Die?’ said Kiron. ‘What force could lay low the Goliath? You are too big and stubborn to die, my friend.’

‘We can all die, Kiron,’ said Gythua. ‘Even me.’

Kai sprang from the chair as alarm klaxons echoed from far away. It didn’t take a psychic to figure out that something terrible was happening, something that had never happened in the gaol of the Custodians. Scharff’s inexplicable behaviour and the alarms could mean only one thing. Someone was escaping from the mountain, and though he didn’t know whom or how, Kai knew he was somehow included in this prison break.

He wrenched the canula and drips from his body, crying out as the needles ripped his skin. Blood ran down his arm and clear plastic piping drooled coloured fluids to the tile floor of the interrogation room. The chemical stink of them was pungent, and Kai recoiled from the idea that he had been subjected to their effects.

Kai backed away from Adept Hiriko, putting the chair between them. The extremities of his limbs were still tingling, and there was a clearness to his thinking that could only have come from the stimulants Scharff had fed him. His body was dreadfully weakened from the psychic abuses Hiriko had heaped upon him, and Kai had no idea how long he would be able to function before this new state of physical and mental clarity began to fade.

‘Get back on the chair,’ ordered Hiriko, and Kai laughed.

‘Seriously? You want me to get back into a chair for a procedure that’s going to kill me?’

‘More lives than yours are at stake,’ said Hiriko, her green eyes boring into his. ‘Lives more important than yours.’

‘Not a chance,’ said Kai.

‘The Emperor’s life,’ said Hiriko.

That gave Kai pause, for he was still a loyal servant of the Imperium.

‘You can’t ask me to make that sacrifice,’ said Kai, his voice pleading.

‘Why not?’ said Hiriko, circling the chair. ‘You already gave up your eyes. Listen, Kai, everyone makes sacrifices for the Emperor: the soldiers of the Imperial Army, the warriors of the Legiones Astartes, all the astro-telepaths who died in the Whispering Tower. Why should you be any different? All these sacrifices mean something, and you can make yours mean something too, something infinitely greater than you can imagine. You would be a hero.’

Kai shook his head as a wave of dizziness washed over him. ‘I’m not a hero,’ he said. ‘I can’t do something that’s going to kill me. I don’t have the courage.’

‘Of course you can,’ said Hiriko. ‘You think heroes aren’t afraid? Of course they are. That’s why they are heroes. They faced their fear and they overcame it. They did the right thing even though it meant the end of their lives.’

The tingling in Kai’s limbs began to fade, and an icy numbness replaced it. He glanced over at Scharff, but the man simply stood there with the dead-eyed stare of a mannequin. There would be no help from that quarter.

Hiriko lifted a long, sharp-tipped hypodermic from the silver tray attached to the chair and stabbed the needle into a bottle filled with clear liquid. She drew a measure of the fluid into the body of the injector and tapped it to remove any lingering air bubbles.

‘Very well, Kai,’ she said, as a droplet of liquid beaded at the sharp tip of the needle. ‘If you can’t be a hero yourself, then I’ll make you into one.’

Into the corridor that led from the island. Bright lumen strips banished shadows as Atharva led the way down the rock-hewn passageway. Subha and Asubha flanked their sergeant, while Kiron and Gythua ran side by side, with Severian at the rear of their ad hoc formation. Ahead, two servitor-crewed turrets spun around to face them, servos whining as multiple barrels rotated and auto-loaders slammed shells into breeches.

Red-eyed targeter lenses bored into Atharva like the eyes of a daemon.

‘Atharva,’ said Tagore.

‘I see them,’ he answered, holding the disembodied head before him and allowing the targeting cogitators to scan its contours and electrical activity. He fed the dying cells within the brain, keeping them alive like a medicae fighting to save a patient he knows will not survive his wounds.

‘Uttam Luna Hesh Udar,’ said Atharva, once again using his Pavoni arts to replicate the dead Custodian’s voice.

‘It’s not working,’ said Kiron, pressing himself against the side of the passageway as the barrels continued to spin.

‘It’s working,’ said Atharva through clenched teeth. The Custodians used advanced biometric readers in their automated weaponry, but hopefully not ones that could tell the difference between a warm body and one kept alive by psychic means. Atharva felt the machines scan the head again, before remembering – though the memory was not his own – that the greenskin toxin that had taken Uttam out of the front line made it more difficult for the signifiers to read him.

‘Uttam Luna Hesh Udar,’ he repeated with confidence, and this time the weapons accepted that one of their masters was standing before them. The barrels slowed and the eyes of the servitors changed from red to green.

‘Take them,’ said Atharva.

The three World Eaters sprang forward like hunting dogs loosed from their chains.

Asubha sprinted towards the gun on the left and vaulted onto the rungs of the maintenance ladder bolted to its side. His hand speared out, fingers rigid, and the servitor’s head was severed from its neck as cleanly as though cut with an energised blade.

His twin and Tagore sprang onto the turret on the right, their blades hacking deep into the servitor’s body in a flurry of rapid, punching blows. In seconds, nothing even remotely human was left of the cybernetic creature, just slopping chunks of carved meat that fell from the turret with a series of moist slaps. Yet for all the butchery of the slaying, there was no frenzy to the attack; each blow was precise and controlled without any wasted effort.

‘Let’s move,’ said Tagore, dropping to the ground.

Atharva moved past the turrets, impressed despite himself at the thoroughness and speed of the World Eaters’ attack. Kiron, Gythua and Severian followed at his heels, and Atharva felt their admiration for their fellows’ speed.

At the end of the passageway, a heavily armoured door blocked further progress, its impenetrable facings painted black and gold and marked with numeric codes that told Atharva exactly where they were in the prison complex. Gythua braced himself on the door and closed his eyes. Surely he didn’t think to break the door open on his own?

‘Two metres thick at least,’ said Gythua, the muscles at his shoulders and biceps flexing like inflating fuel bladders. ‘If I had time and leverage I could open it.’

‘Which you don’t,’ pointed out Kiron, aiming the plasma carbine at the door.

‘That won’t even scratch the paintwork,’ said Gythua with a disdainful glance.

‘Not even the combined strength of all seven of us will be able to break it down,’ said Asubha. ‘Atharva, is there any life left in that head of yours? Can it open this door?’

‘It better, or this is going to be a damn short escape attempt,’ said Subha.

Atharva ignored them and lifted the head towards the black slate of the signifier mounted above the door. His hand was sticky with blood, and he felt the weight of death dragging the struggling synapses of the Custodian’s consciousness down into oblivion.

‘One last favour I must ask of you, Custodian Uttam,’ said Atharva as he held the severed head up towards the signifier. His breath came in short hikes as he poured the power of the Great Ocean into the dying organ within the severed skull. Such energies were creation unbound, but what was dead was dead, and there could be no return from that black abyss. All Atharva could hope was that Uttam Luna Hesh Udar had not fallen too far into its embrace. Every scrap of his skill went into honing his deception, his genes donning the mask of another and his muscle density altering to match the body mass of the Custodian.

The signifier clicked as the machine brain behind the blank slate considered the living creature before it.

‘It’s not working,’ he heard Kiron say. ‘Why would you break us out if you didn’t have a plan to get us beyond the first damn door? I thought you Thousand Sons were supposed to be clever?’

‘Be silent,’ hissed Severian.

‘I’ll speak my mind as I please, Wolf,’ said Kiron with a poisonous glare.

‘Enough,’ hissed Asubha. ‘Give it a chance to work before admitting failure.’

The hiss and thump of disengaging locks answered before Kiron could take issue with Asubha’s words, and Atharva sagged against the walls of the passageway as the door swung slowly open on greased hinges. The Great Ocean was a powerful tool to achieve impossible ends, but it was also a demanding master. No sooner had the door opened enough to allow passage than Severian ghosted through the gap.

Tagore bent down to look Atharva in the eye.

‘Can you continue?’ he asked.

Atharva nodded and took a deep breath as he pushed himself upright. ‘I can continue.’

‘Good,’ said Tagore. ‘I don’t want to die here when the open sky is so close.’

‘You would stay here and die with me?’ said Atharva. Tagore was a killer, but at least he was a loyal killer, like a faithful war hound that would fight and die beside its master.

Tagore regarded him strangely, as though the question was beneath him. ‘I do not like you, Atharva, and there is yet a reckoning to be had between us, but you are a brother of the Legiones Astartes. We fight and die as one.’

Atharva doubted the rest of their group felt as strongly, but kept that thought to himself.

‘Besides,’ added Tagore, gesturing to the severed head Atharva carried, ‘you are the only one who knows the way out.’

‘About that,’ said Atharva. ‘We need to make a detour before we get to the surface.’

‘A detour? What are you talking about?’

Atharva dropped Custodian Uttam’s head and wiped frosty sweat from his brow.

‘There is another prisoner we have to free before we leave this place of incarceration.’

‘More soldiers are coming,’ said Tagore. ‘We do not have time for fool’s errands.’

‘This is no fool’s errand,’ snapped Atharva. ‘We free this prisoner or else we may as well surrender now.’

‘Who is this prisoner? What is he to us?’ demanded Tagore.

‘Someone more important than you can possibly imagine,’ said Atharva. ‘Someone upon whom all our fates may rest.’

Kai could not take his eyes from the droplet on the end of the needle. The label on the bottle from which it had been drawn was turned away from him, but he had no doubt that it was a powerful sedative. The hypodermic contained enough to put him out in moments or perhaps even kill him.

‘Adept Scharff or whoever you are,’ said Kai. ‘Are you just going to let her do this?’

Scharff flinched at the mention of his name, but did not move or otherwise acknowledge Kai’s words. Whatever notion had possessed Scharff to help him had clearly passed, but neither had he shown any inclination to help his former colleague.

‘This is Adept Hiriko. Immediate assistance required,’ said Hiriko, speaking into a vox-bead at her collar. ‘Interrogation cell four seven, primus zero.’

She smiled and said, ‘In moments there will be a squad or more of soldiers here, perhaps even a Custodian, so you might as well surrender now.’

‘I’ll take my chances,’ said Kai, lunging for the door. He pressed the opening mechanism, but the door stayed resolutely closed. It had been a forlorn hope to imagine the door wouldn’t be locked, but it was all he had.

He turned just as Hiriko lunged at him with the needle extended before her. He raised his hands to fend her off, and more by luck than judgement managed to grip her forearms with the needle less than a hand span from piercing the pulsing vein at his neck. Though she was short and slender, Hiriko was stronger than she looked, and the needle inched towards his skin. Whatever Scharff had given him to counteract the soporific drugs that had kept him placid was clearly wearing off.

Kai found himself staring into Hiriko’s lambent green eyes and had a brief moment to reflect that if he was going to die here, at least it would be while staring at something beautiful.

He felt the needle depress the surface of his skin, but before it could draw blood, Adept Scharff had his hands wrapped around Hiriko’s shoulders. He yanked her off her feet and hurled her against the chair that had held Kai prisoner for so many nightmarish sessions of psychic interrogation.

‘Scharff!’ yelled Hiriko. ‘Whatever is in you, fight it!’

Her attacker paid no heed to her words and Kai slid down the wall beside the door as he punched her square in the face. Hiriko reeled from the blow and sagged against the chair. Scharff leapt upon Hiriko and wrapped his hands around her neck, throttling the life out of her even as his face purpled with the effort of resisting the force that impelled him to murder.

Kai knew he should join this struggle, but his limbs were filling with ice water and lead.

Scharff’s hands were crushing the life from Hiriko, and the restraint she had shown towards her fellow neurolocutor was forgotten as she accepted that the force controlling Scharff was too strong for him to defy.

Kai saw the needle glint in the harsh overhead lights, and watched as it described a short arc that saw it thrust into Adept Scharff’s eye. The man howled and his back arched in pain. Scharff hurled himself away from Hiriko, as though distance from the source of his hurt could somehow lessen it. Viscous fluids drooled down Scharff’s cheek and he flopped onto his back as the chemicals raced to his brain.

His body convulsed as rogue electrical impulses sent his muscles into spasm. Spittle flew from his mouth and a hideous wet gurgling bubbled up from his lungs with bile-flecked foam. Scharff beat his heels on the floor and scrabbled with clawed hands, tearing out his fingernails and leaving bloody tracks on the tiles.

Hiriko slumped to the floor as Scharff’s body twitched with what remained of his life, and Kai felt sick to his stomach at the sight. He had watched the astropaths of Choir Primus die, had felt Sarashina’s blood on him, and had listened to the entire crew of the Argo die, but to see a man die so painfully right in front of him was a truly horrific sight.

The interrogation chamber was silent save for the soft chiming of the bio-monitoring equipment, Hiriko’s laboured breathing and the dripping of noxious saliva from Scharff’s gaping mouth.

Kai let out a terrified breath, knowing he had only a few precious moments to make the most of the opportunity Scharff had given him. Before he could do more than recognise that fact, a booming impact struck the door of the interrogation chamber. Another swiftly followed, and Hiriko smiled as she slid down onto her side.

‘They’re coming for you,’ she said, her words coming out in a hoarse rasp.

Another impact shook the door, and this time it buckled inwards, the locks holding it closed shattered by the force assaulting them. One further blow tore the door from its housing, and it landed on the tiles with a booming clang. A towering shape in a form-fitting yellow bodyglove ducked through the doorway, and Kai backed away from this new terror.

Long black hair framed a face of thick, flattened features that nevertheless combined in a handsome whole, and Kai smelled a pungent reek emanating from the warrior’s skin as he extended a hand towards him.

‘Kai Zulane, I am Atharva of the Thousand Sons,’ said the giant. ‘Come with me.’

Fourteen

Flight and Fight

The giant’s words took a moment to sink in, and even then Kai couldn’t process their meaning. There could be no question that this figure was a Legiones Astartes warrior: his bulk and unspoken threat was undeniable, but there was more to it than that. Kai saw the world through artificial eyes, and every sweep, curve and angle of the giant’s face seemed somehow more solid than any other living soul he had seen.

‘You are Legiones Astartes,’ said Kai, his words slurred and little more than a whisper.

‘I already said that,’ stated the giant, taking hold of Kai’s shoulder and hauling him to his feet as though he weighed nothing at all. Atharva was enormous, as tall as Saturnalia, but broader and more powerfully built.

‘Why?’ said Kai.

‘I have little time for questions, and no patience for ones so ambiguously formed,’ said Atharva. ‘Our escape has not gone unnoticed, and warriors we cannot face will be on their way. Now we must hurry.’

Kai stumbled through the buckled doorway of the interrogation chamber. He glanced over his shoulder at the recumbent form of Adept Hiriko, wondering if she were alive or dead. Despite all that she had subjected him to, Kai hoped she still lived.

Six figures filled the vestibule beyond the chamber in which he’d spent an unknown amount of time, six warriors of enormous bulk and distinct character that was immediately apparent even if they hadn’t sported tattoos and Legion markings on engorged biceps, mountain-ridge shoulders and forearms larger than Kai’s thighs. Instantly, he knew who had rescued him from his cell.

‘You are the Crusader Host,’ he said.

‘What is left of it,’ said a warrior with hair that was a dirty mix of pale white and dark roots. ‘You do not see us at our best.’

‘That name is meaningless to us now,’ said another with a bare chest that rippled with muscles and crudely-inked tattoos of weapons and teeth. ‘We are dead to the Imperium.’

‘We are outcast,’ spat the warrior next to him, and Kai saw a resemblance between the two that went beyond their shared genhancements.

‘The Outcast Dead,’ said Atharva, with a sly twist of a grin. ‘If you knew what that meant in ages past, you would appreciate the irony.’

‘The Outcast Dead,’ repeated a grim-faced warrior who was a giant even in the company of giants. ‘A dishonourable name for warriors, but a more fitting one than the last we bore.’

‘What’s happening here? I don’t understand what’s going on,’ said Kai.

‘What is there to understand?’ said a brute with half his head encased in hammered pig iron and plugged with copper-wound wires. ‘We are fighting to be free. You are coming with us.’

‘Why?’

‘Again with the vaguely-worded questions,’ said Atharva, shaking his head. ‘Tagore, Asubha and Subha are World Eaters, Kiron is Emperor’s Children, Severian a Luna Wolf and that hulking brute with the shaved skull is Gythua, a true son of Mortarion. We were incarcerated, as were you. And as Tagore says, we are fighting to be free, a situation that would be made a great deal easier if you were to save your questions until later. Understood?’

Kai nodded, and Atharva gestured to the corridor behind the warrior he had named as Kiron. Severian ghosted down its length, far faster and quieter than a man of such bulk had any right to move.

Atharva turned to one of the World Eaters and said, ‘Subha, keep this one safe.’

‘I am not your lapdog, sorcerer,’ snapped the warrior.

‘And yet you will do it,’ said Atharva with a firm, demanding tone. Kai sensed a brief flare of psychic energy, but said nothing as Subha nodded and took hold of him. The warrior’s fingers easily encircled Kai’s upper arm, and he winced at the strength of the grip.

Atharva gave him a smile that was part conspiratorial, part shared secret, and set off after Severian. The rest of the group fell in behind them, moving with a familiarity that spoke of decades of training.

He had seen warriors of the Legiones Astartes many times before aboard the ships of the XIII Legion, but where the Battle Kings of Macragge were honourable paragons of all that it meant to be noble, these warriors were more like corsairs or mercenaries.

Or traitors, thought Kai, remembering why they had been held captive in the first place.

He was in the company of traitors, so what did that make him?

The pace was brutal, and Kai wasn’t so much walking behind the Space Marines as being dragged by them. Tunnels of rock, corridors of antiseptic sterility and bare stone passageways passed in a blur until Kai lost all sense of direction.

‘Enemies,’ came a voice from ahead. Little more than a whisper, yet sounding as though the speaker were right in front of him. Kai saw Severian at a cross junction, making a chopping motion with his hand along a corridor at right angles to their route.

‘Tagore,’ said Atharva.

‘On it. Asubha, low and fast.’

‘Me first,’ said Kiron, rolling around the corner with a rifle that looked absurdly tiny in his fist. He fired two blisteringly bright shots in quick succession, before ducking back into cover.

‘Go,’ he said.

Tagore bared his teeth and ran around the corner with Asubha at his side. Kai heard the pounding of feet and a feral roar that sounded inhuman in its ferocity. The grip on his arm tightened, and Kai let out a muffled grunt of pain.

‘My arm, you’re hurting me,’ he said.

Subha looked down at him, as though offended he was even talking to him.

‘My brothers kill, yet I am nursemaid to a mortal,’ he hissed, but the grip on Kai’s arm relaxed a fraction. Screams of pain and fear echoed from the walls, and Kai jumped in fright.

‘The way is clear,’ said Atharva, rounding the corner and gesturing for the others to follow. Kai was dragged along with the Space Marines, and the scene of carnage he faced at the end of the corridor was so utterly horrific that he retched until his throat was raw.

A host of bodies – it was impossible to say how many – lay in dismembered abandon at yet another cross-junction. Broken limbs, caved-in skulls and ruptured torsos lay scattered like the leavings of a slaughterhouse and wild arcs of blood looped over the walls in scarlet arches. That Space Marines were killers of men was a fact Kai understood on a very basic level, but to see the reality of their unleashed power was a shocking, sobering moment.

Kai had done nothing wrong, but these warriors’ Legions had betrayed the Emperor. Just by talking to them he would be considered no better than a betrayer. Yet they had saved him from death and were killing these men for reasons he could not even begin to fathom. Though this scene of butchery sickened him, Kai had sense enough to know that any chance of life was better than the death he was certain to face had he remained here.

Only two bodies had escaped the attention of the butchers that had made a ruin of more than a dozen men in a few seconds. These two soldiers had been armed with large-calibre energy weapons, and both were headless, their necks ending in cauterised stumps.

‘You shoot well,’ said Atharva as Kiron moved up the corridor.

‘Marksman first class,’ said Kiron, tapping his shoulder. ‘Only Vespasian ever outshot me in tourneys.’

‘Tourneys?’ spat Tagore. ‘Why waste time on play when there are wars to be won?’

‘To hone one’s skills, Tagore,’ said Kiron, as though offended. ‘Perfected skill beats raw violence every time.’

Tagore clenched his fists over the broken stub of his spear blade. ‘Another time and I would show you the error of that belief.’

‘Pissing contests? Now? Are you insane?’ demanded Gythua.

Tagore laughed and slapped a hand on Kiron’s shoulder with enough force to draw a scowl of displeasure from the Emperor’s Children warrior.

‘Another time,’ repeated Tagore.

Kai let out a pent-up breath, feeling the horrible tension that had built up in that fleeting confrontation. Their prowess as warriors gave meaning to each Space Marine, and to impugn that was the gravest of insults. In a brotherhood of equals, such posturing was friendly rivalry, but among warriors who shared no bond other than that forced upon them, it could be deadly.

‘Where to now?’ said Tagore. ‘The net will be closing.’

‘This way,’ said Severian, taking a passageway that led upwards.

‘You knew the Custodian’s mind,’ said Tagore. ‘Is the Wolf right?’

‘He is,’ confirmed Atharva. ‘Severian’s awareness serves him well.’

Again they set off, and each time the Space Marines met resistance, they demolished it with efficiency that would have been cruel had it not been achieved with such clinical precision. Only the three World Eaters seemed to take any pleasure in the violence, but even that was more about the display of prowess than any base enjoyment of slaughter.

Onwards and ever upwards they pushed, sometimes fighting their enemies, sometimes avoiding them. Severian and Atharva had knowledge of this prison that was more than the equal of the soldiers tasked with preventing their escape, though Kai could not imagine how they could have come by such information.

‘Where are the Legio Custodes?’ asked Kai, in a moment between desperate flight and visceral bloodshed. None of the Space Marines had an answer for him, though he saw the same question had occurred to them all.

‘They are not here,’ said Gythua. ‘That is all that matters.’

‘They are heading to Prospero,’ said Atharva. ‘If they are not there already.’

‘Prospero?’ said Kiron. ‘Why?’

‘To slay my primarch,’ said Atharva, and Kai heard the resignation in his voice.

Even Tagore had no reply to that, and Kai sensed their shock at so bald an assertion. Clearly there was little love lost between these warriors, but to hear so terrible a thing spoken aloud reminded them of what they had lost by being brought here.

‘Is such a thing even possible?’ asked Kai.

Atharva looked at him as though he had said something profoundly stupid, but the moment passed. ‘Regrettably, it is entirely possible. We are all wrought from the raw matter of stars and the Great Ocean, but even stars can die and oceans turn to dust.’

‘How do you know this?’ asked Asubha.

‘I know it because Primarch Magnus knows it,’ said Atharva.

No more was said on the matter, and their brutal, bloody ascent to the surface of the world continued. Where ambushes were laid, Severian would strike from the shadows. Where attacks came upon them without warning, Tagore and Asubha would counterattack with furious strength. Where men with guns filled the passages with fire, Kiron would drop them with pinpoint shots that boiled brains within skulls before bursting them like overfilled balloons of blood and brain matter.

When barriers were erected to bar their path, Gythua would wade through hails of gunfire to batter them down, shrugging off the shots of his enemies as though they were of no more consequence than insect bites. Dried blood slathered the Death Guard’s chest, and a charred crater the size of Kai’s fist had been bored in his side. Armoured doors presented no obstacle to them, for Atharva possessed a golden ring, like that worn by Saturnalia, which unlocked every portal closed against them.

As the last such shutter was opened, Kai was bathed in the most beautiful illumination he had ever seen, a light he thought he had forgotten, the light of Terra’s sun. Kai’s augmetics recognised the filtering effect of an integrity field on the sunlight and realised they were in a mountainside embarkation bay. A row of gold-trimmed shuttles and landers lined one of the cavern’s walls, and a number of less ornate craft hissed and vented pressurised gasses as servitors and loaders cleared their cargo holds and stowage bays.

‘Move,’ said Severian, looking back the way they had come. ‘They know where we are now, and aerial units will be scrambling soon.’

Half carried, half dragged by Subha, Kai and the others ran into the hangar. Surprised faces turned towards them, ground crew, tech-priests and menials. None of them dared challenge the intruders in their midst, for it was clear that these bloodied daemons were butchers of men.

Gythua led the way, a limping mass of bloodied muscle and scar tissue. He growled with a mixture of pain and anger, leaving a spotty trail of sticky droplets in his wake. Kiron ran alongside him, ready to help his friend should he falter yet keeping his hands to himself lest the proud Gythua take offence. Severian followed and Tagore went with him. Asubha ran to the nearest craft, a sleek cutter that had not long touched down by the heat haze rippling around its engine vanes.

‘Can you fly it, brother?’ shouted Subha.

‘This thing? In my sleep,’ replied his twin.

A tech-priest in crimson robes with a rotating series of eye lenses attached to a radial disc attempted to intervene, but Subha put him down with a casual swipe of his spear. Even as the shorn halves of the Martian fell, the body’s upper half continued to harangue the World Eater as a burst of panicked binary static screeched from his shoulder-mounted augmitters.

Alarms shrieked from above, and an armoured blast door began rumbling across the wide rectangle of open space visible through the integrity field. Spinning warning lights threw stark shadows and a hellish orange glow through the hangar as the ground crew who could flee took to their heels.

‘Get on!’ shouted Kiron. ‘Hurry, the close-in defence guns are coming online!’

Subha dispensed with any pretence of courtesy and picked Kai up as though he were a recalcitrant child. The World Eater sprinted towards the open hatchway as the rest of the Outcast Dead climbed aboard.

‘Atharva!’ shouted Subha. ‘Catch.’

Kai yelled as he sailed through the air, but Atharva caught him without difficulty and swung him around to plant him in a crew seat bolted to the fuselage. Kai felt as though every single bone in his body had been battered, and bit back a vulgar insult as Atharva pressed him into his seat.

‘Don’t move,’ he said. ‘This will not be a smooth ride.’

Subha threw himself on board as Asubha feathered the engines of the craft with a sudden shriek of power injection. The cutter leapt into the air and spun around as the crew door slid shut with a pressurising hiss of pneumatics.

‘Go!’ shouted Kiron. ‘Get us out of here, World Eater.’

The cutter leapt forward like an unleashed colt, and but for Atharva’s restraining hand, Kai would have been hurled down the length of the compartment. The craft lurched and he heard hammering blows on the aircraft’s hull.

‘Are they firing on us?’ he yelled over the screaming engines and battering impacts.

Atharva nodded, bracing himself with his free hand on the ceiling of the cutter’s crew compartment. Gythua slumped against the bulkhead, as Kiron held a stanchion beside him. Subha lay prone on the metal decking, and Tagore clung to the bulkhead at the entrance to the cockpit while Severian simply stood in the centre of the compartment as though this was just a routine lift off.

Kai screamed as the cutter rolled sharply and Asubha pushed the throttle out. The trailing edge of the cutter’s left wing clipped the edge of the closing blast door, sending it into a wild spin. Centrifugal force pressed Kai into his seat, and he lost all sense of spatial awareness as the cutter boomeranged out into the open air.

Up was down and down was up. Kai lost all sense of whether they were falling or climbing as the walls and floor spun crazily. Sky and mountain flipped sickeningly through the toughened viewports, and Kai closed his eyes. At any moment they would be dashed to a million pieces against the rocks, their shredded remains spread over hundreds of square kilometres of the mountainside.

Warning lights flashed and alarms from the cockpit echoed down the fuselage. Kai heard Asubha yelling obscenities at the controls and avionic cogitator.

‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry…’ said Kai through gritted teeth, repeating the words over and over again as they tumbled through the air like a dying bird until he felt the pressure of Atharva’s restraining hand lift.

‘For whom are you apologising?’ asked Atharva.

Kai opened his eyes as his lurching senses told him they were flying level again. Hope and amazement vied for centre space in his mind as he saw tall spires of gold and the rugged flanks of the mountain sweeping past through the view ports.

‘The dead,’ said Kai without thinking.

‘The dead need no one to apologise for them,’ said Atharva. ‘It is the living who need forgiveness.’

Though the words were said lightly, Kai sensed the bitterness behind them. Atharva had the bearing of a scholar trapped in a warrior’s body, but there was no mistaking the potential for violence that swelled within his breast.

‘Good flying, Asubha,’ shouted Tagore.

‘We’re not done yet,’ said Asubha. ‘Incoming fighters vectoring in on our position. Firelances by the speed of them.’

‘How far?’ called Atharva.

‘One hundred and eighty kilometres and closing fast.’

‘Fly nap of the earth and hold your course,’ ordered Atharva.

‘That won’t hide us,’ Asubha warned him.

‘I know, but I have wiles beyond your understanding,’ said Atharva, closing his eyes.

Flight Leader Ptelos Requer eased up on the afterburner, letting Eastern Light flatten out the steep curve of its ascent from Srinagar Station. The roar of the Firelance’s engine was like the bellow of a giant beast, and the force of acceleration was like being kicked in the back by one of the migou labourers that worked in the camps before the palace walls.

Tobias Moshar flew Promethean Ark just off his right wing, and Osirin Falk captained Twilight’s Fade on his left; three flyers with a combined kill count of over two hundred enemy aircraft. Most of their combat flying had been done over two centuries ago, but the pilots remembered and their enhanced cognitive recall had lived those fights scores of times.

Requer was a natural flyer, a man who felt ill at ease when not able to take a warplane into the sky, a man who regarded a life lived on the ground as a waste of potential. The majority of sorties he flew these days were nothing more than routine intercepts of privateers bringing contraband into the mountains aboard prop-driven aircraft that pre-dated the beginning of the Wars of Unity.

This flight promised to be different.

A red-ball alert had come down from on high, and Requer had been first to the flight line, running through his pre-flight check in the shortest time before waving away the ground crew and punching the lifter-jet to get him airborne. Operations had vectored them to the target, and checking the readings on the slate before him, Requer felt his initial exhilaration bleed away as he saw how slowly the target was moving.

‘Do you have the contact, Torchlight?’ came the voice of Operations.

‘Got it,’ answered Requer. ‘Bearing two-seven-nine, one hundred and sixty-seven kilometres out, altitude one thousand metres.’

‘That’s it, Torchlight,’ confirmed Operations. ‘Your orders are to close and destroy the target. Visual confirmation of destruction is required.’

‘Understood, Operations,’ said Requer. ‘What is the nature of the target?’

‘As I have it, the target is a Cargo 9 escort cutter.’

‘An escort cutter?’

‘That’s what I have here,’ said Operations. ‘Its destruction comes with the highest authority prefix.’

‘I think we can handle an escort cutter,’ said Requer.

‘Understood,’ said Operations. ‘Good hunting.’

Requer shut off the link and opened the vox to his fellow flyers.

‘You all heard that?’ he asked.

‘Someone really wants that cutter brought down,’ said Moshar.

‘Who do you think is aboard?’ asked Falk.

Requer plotted a reverse vector for the cutter and let out a whistling breath of surprise.

‘Looks like it’s come from Khangba Marwu, so I’m thinking there must be some escapees on board,’ he answered. ‘Must be some very bad men aboard that cutter, so let’s get this done right. We’re coming up on the initial point, so climb to Angels minus two thousand on my mark.’

Moshar and Falk acknowledged his command with a click on the vox and Requer turned his attention to the countdown unfolding on the ranging scope. When the number reached zero, he pulled back on the stick and pulled the Firelance into a steep climb. Their closure rate would put them in missile range inside two minutes, but Requer wasn’t about to launch until he had a visual on the fleeing cutter.

The mountains flashed past to his right, a blur of icy rock that moved too fast to make out any detail. Despite the novelty of escapees from Khangba Marwu, this mission looked like it would be as routine as any other. After all, a Cargo 9 was no match for even one Firelance, so three was overkill. The structures of the palace below were a blur, a streaking tapestry of gold, silver and white marble. Requer had flown the length, breadth and circumference of the palace a hundred times or more, and every time he found some new wonder at which to marvel. Yet he had no eyes for its magnificence on this flight – he was on a war footing and all his attention was claimed by his target.

The range marker was slipping closer to the centre of his display, and Requer looked down as he saw a flash of silver against the black rock of the mountains. The cutter was jinking left and right, hugging the side of the mountain in the false hope that such manoeuvres would keep it safe from a hunting Firelance. The pilot had skill, weaving in and out of natural rock formations at high speed to keep his pursuer from obtaining missile lock, but it would take more than that to evade Ptelos Requer.

He checked his scopes one last time. The direction was right, and the returns were solid. He craned his neck, twisting left and right to make sure there was nothing else in the air with them. The last thing he needed was an accidental shoot down of some civilian craft straying too close to an engagement zone.

Satisfied this craft below him was the Cargo 9 he had been ordered to kill, Ptelos Requer armed the weapons systems and almost immediately his helmet was filled with the harsh buzzing of a missile lock.

He eased the stick forward, pushing Eastern Light into a shallow attack dive.

‘Target acquired,’ said Requer, flipping up the trigger guard on his control column.

Kai looked up at Atharva, feeling a build up of psychic power that filled the air with an actinic chill and the bilious taste of metal. The nuncio was nothing compared to this, and even the vatic and the er employed no abilities of this magnitude. Atharva was a battle psychic, a warrior-mystic who wielded his powers for destruction and violence, and Kai had tasted its like only once before, in the mindhall of Choir Primus.

Without thinking, Kai opened himself a fraction to that power, feeling himself dragged along with Atharva’s abilities, seeing the mountainside flash past as though he were a bird flying at impossible speed through the air. He saw the majesty of the palace below them, ten thousand towers and domes, a multitude of grand colonnades and the palatial demesnes that housed the billions of loyal servants of the Administratum.

Kai was a comet, a shooting star of thought and purpose. Incandescent, he raced through the sky until he saw three bat-winged specks that arced over the mountains towards them. The shapes grew larger until Kai saw the fighter aircraft clearly, the Firelances Asubha had spoken of: graceful war machines that could jink and spin through the air like dancers.

Their combined essence entered the mind of the lead pilot, and Kai’s thoughts were immediately filled with trajectories, approach vectors and deflection values. It meant nothing to him, but the dominating presence of Atharva absorbed it in a second.

Kai looked through the pilot’s eyes, seeing the ghostly green of a projected display and feeling the constricting grip of his pressurised flight suit. He felt the heaviness of his helm and the exhilaration of making an enemy kill. A warbling tone in his ear told him the missile pods slung beneath the wings had a target lock, and his thumb hovered over the firing trigger.

Before the pilot could fire, a conflicting impulse arose in his mind.

Ptelos Requer felt a sudden conviction that the aircraft on which he was about to fire was not an enemy craft at all, but an Imperial one. His thumb slid away from the trigger and he re-engaged the safeties on his missiles.

He blinked in confusion, pulling out of his attack dive and flying over the target. His breathing was laboured and his flight suit hissed as it compensated for his elevated heart rate and increased blood pressure.

‘Requer? What happened?’ asked Moshar. ‘Do you have a weapons failure?’

He tried to answer, but he couldn’t remember what had happened, only that he had an undeniable urge not to fire. A grey fog filled his head, making it impossible to think clearly. Flickering images of things he didn’t understand flashed in his mind, painful and intrusive.

‘Ptelos?’ said Falk. ‘Talk to me. What happened?’

Requer shook his head, trying to push the cacophony of thoughts from his head. He banged the side of his helmet in an attempt to clear his head, but the images kept coming.

‘I’m fine,’ he said, but the fug of confusion pressed even deeper into his thoughts. ‘I had a fire control glitch. Coming around for another pass. Hold station.’

He rolled his Firelance and pulled into a wide turn that brought him in behind the Cargo 9 once more. Promethean Ark and Twilight’s Fade followed the cutter, their blue hot engines burning like bright pulsars in the early evening sky. Their light was so bright he had trouble focusing, and his mouth dropped open as the blood drained from his head.

Requer checked his scopes again, and let out a breath. Two threat icons had appeared on his scope, enemy aircraft right in front of him. He was right on top of the enemy and they hadn’t seen him! His wingmen were gone, shot down in all likelihood, and he had the drop on the enemy aircraft that had blown them from the sky.

With calm, methodical precision, Requer tagged all three contacts in front of him – the two new ones and the Cargo 9 – and once again armed his missiles.

‘Requer! What are you doing?’ yelled a garbled voice that sounded familiar yet completely alien to him. An enemy trick, no doubt.

‘I have good tone,’ he said as the trill of a target lock sounded in his helmet.

‘Ptelos, your weapons are glitching again!’ shouted Moshar, pulling away and climbing.

‘Requer, stand down!’ shouted another voice that was unknown to him.

Three missiles leapt from the rails in a bloom of smoke and peeled off in search of their targets. The first sliced up on a perfect trajectory and flew right into the engine of Promethean Ark. The warhead exploded deep in the guts of the Firelance and blew it apart in a spinning fireball of orange flame and silver wreckage. The remains of the blazing fuselage spun down towards the mountain, trailing thick black smoke and blisteringly bright flares of exploding munitions.

The second enemy pilot cut in his afterburners, but against missiles launched at such close range, he had no chance to evade. Every jink and roll was met and countered by the missile’s seeker head until the aircraft could run no more. The pilot cut his burners and threw out the air brakes in an attempt to cause an overshoot, but the missile was already too close and its proximity fuse detonated less than ten metres from its yawning air intakes.

Flames and thousands of razor-sharp pieces of spinning shrapnel were sucked into the aircraft’s engines, tearing them apart in a thunderous, chugging explosion that ripped the aircraft in two. The sight of an enemy craft so comprehensively destroyed would normally have sent a surging thrill of adrenaline through Requer’s body, but he felt nothing as he watched the burning remains of his victim plummeting downwards.

Requer released his control column as he searched his scope for the third contact. Had his missile downed it already? He couldn’t see it, but it had been close to where his second kill had gone down. Requer knew he should make a visual check for the third target, but it was all he could do to keep his eyes focused on the landscape around him. The idea that an enemy craft might be lining up a shot on him concerned him not at all, and a vacant smile spread across his face. The grey fog that filled his mind soothed him and kept any thoughts of the aircraft he had shot down at bay.

That contented smile never left Ptelos Requer’s face as he flew his Firelance into the side of the mountain.

Fire and smoke filled the crew compartment, and Kai gagged, his consciousness returning to his body with a violent jolt. His flesh felt suddenly heavy, and he let out a cold breath as he looked up into Atharva’s eyes. Flecks of winter white danced in his pupils, fading like a dream as their natural colours restored themselves.

A long tear in the aircraft’s fuselage billowed smoke and Kai saw the jagged stub of the cutter’s wing hanging by a collection of thick cables and dangling struts. The heavy cutter shuddered and lurched like a dying bird, dropping through the sky at high speed towards an unforgiving ground. The breath was snatched from Kai’s throat and the cold of the mountains hit him like a physical blow. Roaring winds tore through the crew compartment, fanning the flames and doing its best to sweep its occupants from within.

Kiron and Gythua clung onto broken stanchions, and Severian pressed himself to the side of the aircraft. Tagore and Subha were braced against the aircraft’s interior, while Atharva stood before him. The Thousand Sons warrior held onto the stowage racks above him and pressed himself against Kai to keep him from being snatched away by the wind.

‘I can’t hold her in the air!’ shouted Asubha from the cockpit. ‘We’re going down!’

‘How did you do that?’ shouted Kai over the deafening howl of the wind.

Atharva ignored the question and said, ‘Do not do that again. You could have stranded both our consciousnesses out there in that pilot’s skull when he hit the mountain.’

‘You made that pilot shoot down his own aircraft.’

Atharva shook his head. ‘No, all I did was show him something that more closely matched his parameters of an enemy target and let him make the decision. I altered nothing of his own essential thought processes. I am powerful, but I am not that powerful.’

Kai thought back to what Evander Gregoras had told him of the cognoscynths, but realised that Atharva’s abilities had only steered the pilot’s thought processes, not altered them.

A subtle, but important difference.

Right now it seemed irrelevant, as the ground rushed to meet them with terrible inevitability. Towers that seemed tiny and distant from the air were now horribly close, and Kai could see a rushing collage of ramshackle structures speeding below them, close enough to make out individual buildings and streets as Asubha fought to control their descent.

The cutter made a last-ditch effort to evade gravity’s clutches, but it was a fight it could never win. With one wing missing and a hole blown in its side, the cutter slammed into the ground with a thunderous impact of splintering metal that seemed to go on for ever and ever.

Fifteen

The hunters assemble
Reluctant Petitioners
The clan lord

Yasu Nagasena is well known in this city, and no one challenges him when he passes beneath the Obsidian Arch on his way towards the tower at its heart. It has been a long time since he trod its empty boulevards and gazed in admiration at the sublime constructions that no one beyond its walls even knows exists. The palace masons, perhaps knowing that the City of Sight’s inhabitants seldom venture beyond the walls of their prison, spared no expense and employed every subtlety of their art to render the city as beautiful and harmonious as it was isolated.

‘I wonder who named this place,’ muses Nagasena, looking up at the gilded capitals and ornamented pediment of the Emerald Ossuary. The bones of Terra’s astro-telepaths are interred within, together with those who did not survive the final rituals to render them fully capable of service. It is a place of sadness rendered in joyous architecture.

‘The Ossuary?’ asks Kartono.

‘No, the City of Sight.’

‘Someone with a perverse sense of humour.’

‘Perhaps,’ replies Nagasena. ‘Or perhaps someone who appreciated the true value of what these poor, blind souls do here.’

Kartono shrugs, uncaring and uncomfortable at being here. Nagasena does not blame him. To his bondsman, this place is anathema. Kartono is hated by most people, for reasons they can never fully articulate, but in this place, those who encounter him hate him and know exactly why.

Kartono makes them truly blind.

The streets are deserted. Everyone in the City of Sight knows they are here, sensing the empty hole in the constant chatter that throngs the air with invisible voices. They are a silence in a city of voices, and they do not pass unnoticed.

Nagasena sees them first, but it is Kartono that gives them name.

‘Black Sentinels,’ he says, watching the armoured squad marching towards them with rifles held at their shoulders. ‘Golovko’s men.’

‘Led by the man himself,’ says Nagasena, spotting the bulky form of Maxim Golovko at their head. ‘We are honoured.’

‘Honours like this I could do without.’

‘Maxim has his uses,’ says Nagasena. ‘Some hunts require stealth, others require the hunters to flush their prey into the open with… less subtle means.’

Kartono nods, and falls in behind Nagasena as Golovko brings his men to a halt before them with a crash of boots stamping the ground in unison. They are formidable soldiers, well trained, disciplined and without mercy, yet they are blunt instruments compared to the needle-precision of Nagasena.

‘Maxim,’ says Nagasena with a bow deep enough to indicate respect, but shallow enough to convey his superiority. It is a petty gesture, but it amuses Kartono, and Maxim will never realise its significance.

‘Nagasena,’ replies Golovko. ‘Why are you here?’

‘I am here for the hunt.’

‘You received a summons?’

Nagasena shakes his head. ‘No, but I am needed, yes?’

‘We can catch these traitors without your help,’ states Golovko. ‘I’m assembling a team right now, and this will all be over by the day’s end.’

Nagasena looks up as a long cloudbank covers the sun.

‘Show me this team,’ he says.

There are three of them of note, and Nagasena considers them all.

Saturnalia is Legio Custodes, and his anger is matched only by his shame. The astropath, Kai Zulane, and the warriors of the Crusader Host escaped from his gaol, and such a grievous lapse can only be erased by their immediate recapture. He is angry, but he is steady. Nagasena knows he can count on a Custodian to follow instructions and Saturnalia will be the only one who stands a chance against the hunted warriors if they turn and fight.

Adept Hiriko is uncomfortable here, and Nagasena knows why. Her neck is bruised and her eyes are dotted with red pinpricks of blood where her former colleague attempted to strangle her. Though she feigns indifference, Nagasena sees his death has affected her more deeply than she will admit. She is no hunter and has only one skill that will be of use in the hunt. Hiriko is a psychic extractor, and she believes she can remove the secrets that make Kai Zulane so valuable.

Athena Diyos is a crippled astropath whose presence on such a hunt Nagasena would not normally countenance. Her body is broken, and her life-sustaining chair will only slow them down, but she has been into Kai Zulane’s mind and that gives her a unique insight. She can guide them to him when he is near, and though she is an unwilling participant in this hunt, she knows she has little say in the matter.

They are gathered in the chambers of the Choirmaster, and Nemo Zhi-Meng paces the length of his sumptuous chambers with nervous energy, his white robes flapping around him like the wings of a panicked bird.

‘You must get him back, Yasu,’ he says, pausing in his pacing long enough to address Nagasena. His white hair is unbound and his beard is ragged. The last few days have taken a heavy toll on him, and the strain of holding an inter-galactic communications network together is visible in every strained gesture and barked utterance.

‘I will, Nemo,’ promises Nagasena with a bow of deep respect. ‘Now tell me why this man is so important. Why did seven Space Marines put their own escape at risk by bringing him with them? There was no need for them to do such a thing.’

Zhi-Meng hesitates before answering and Nagasena tries not to read too much into that pause. ‘Before the loss of the Argo, Kai Zulane was one of our finest operatives,’ says the Choirmaster. ‘He has the synesthesia codes for our highest tiers of communication. If he sends that information to traitors in service to Horus Lupercal then our entire network is compromised.’

‘Zulane’s record indicates he is defective as an astropath,’ says Nagasena, sensing that the Choirmaster’s explanation is a lie. His fingers tighten on the grip of Shoujiki. The blade is his touchstone to honesty, and though Nagasena does not always need to know why he is hunting, he dislikes hunting for the wrong reasons.

‘He was,’ says Zhi-Meng. ‘But Mistress Diyos was working to restore his abilities.’

Nagasena turns to Athena Diyos and kneels beside her, sweeping his robes out behind him. She cannot see him with her eyes, but he knows she feels his presence.

‘And how successful had you been? Can Kai Zulane send anything off-world?’

Athena Diyos takes her time before answering, but Nagasena believes she is truthful. ‘No. Not yet. He is recovering, but I think he is still too afraid to cast his mind into the warp.’

‘That may not matter if he is in the company of Atharva,’ says Saturnalia. ‘Sorcery may be able to pluck the codes from his mind.’

‘Is he capable of that?’ asks Nagasena, turning back to Nemo Zhi-Meng.

‘Little is known of the abilities possessed by Magnus’s warriors,’ admits Zhi-Meng, ‘but I wouldn’t count it beyond the realms of possibility.’

‘Then we must apprehend Kai Zulane swiftly,’ says Nagasena.

‘Can’t you just change the codes?’ asks Kartono.

‘Do you have any idea what that involves?’ snaps Zhi-Meng. ‘Developing new ciphers for a galaxy-wide network requires decades of preparation and attempting such a task in the midst of a rebellion would be madness. No, we must find Kai Zulane before the traitor Space Marines wring the information from him.’

‘If they haven’t already,’ says Saturnalia.

‘Of all the places they had to crash,’ says Golovko. ‘It had to be the damn Petitioners’ City. There’re no maps, no plan and a thousand places they could go to ground.’

‘An astropath and seven Space Marines will find it hard to stay out of sight, even in a warren like the Petitioners’ City,’ points out Nagasena.

‘We need to get to that crash site,’ says Golovko. ‘Pick up the trail from there.’

‘Agreed, but to hunt with success, we must first understand our prey,’ says Nagasena. ‘We are hunting an astropath and seven Space Marines. What I want to know is why only seven? Why did they not free everyone before they fled?’

‘Does it matter?’ asks Saturnalia. ‘Seven traitors at liberty on Terra is seven too many.’

‘Everything matters,’ states Nagasena. ‘Only warriors from the Legions that have sided with Horus Lupercal were freed. I believe Atharva is the leader of these warriors, and he knew enough to recognise which of the imprisoned warriors would follow him. The question then becomes, why did a warrior of the Thousand Sons engineer such a break out? His Legion is still counted as loyal to the Throne, is it not?’

Saturnalia steps forward and grips his spear in both hands. ‘No, it is not.’

Hiriko and Diyos gasp in shock, and even Kartono lets out a surprised breath.

‘Would you care to elaborate?’ asks Nagasena.

‘The Emperor has pronounced judgement on the Thousand Sons and its primarch,’ says Saturnalia. ‘Even now, my fellow Custodians draw near Prospero in the company of Russ and his warriors. Primarch Magnus is to be brought to Terra in chains.’

‘Why?’ asks Nagasena.

‘For breaking the edicts of Nikaea and employing sorceries forbidden by the Emperor,’ says Saturnalia. ‘Valdor himself has unsheathed his blade.’

‘Then Magnus will be lucky to leave Prospero alive,’ says Nagasena, and he sees Saturnalia wonder if he is insulting the master of the Custodians.

‘We’re wasting time,’ says Golovko. ‘I can fill the Petitioners’ City with Black Sentinels in thirty minutes. We’ll take that shithole apart, brick by shitting brick, until we find them.’

Nagasena shakes his head, already irritated at Golovko’s lack of subtlety.

‘Choose thirty of your best men, Maxim,’ he says. ‘More will only hinder us.’

‘Thirty? You saw how badly they mauled us when we first came for them.’

‘This time it will be different,’ says Nagasena.

‘How so?’

‘This time they care if they live or die,’ he says.

An hour earlier, Kai had woken in agony in a flaming steel coffin. His body felt broken, and he struggled to draw breath as something heavy pressed down on his chest. He coughed as acrid smoke drifted in a soft wind, and he heard the creak of twisted metal and sparking of ruptured cables over the crackle of flames.

He turned his head, even this small movement painful, to survey his surroundings.

The interior of the cutter had flattened on impact and the hull was an oval tube laced with broken spars of metal and hung with ribbed piping that spat hissing gasses or drooled hydraulic fluid. Atharva lay next to him, and Kai saw it was his arm that lay across his chest and pinned him to the ground.

Smoke-filtered light filled the cabin, the heavy fuselage torn open down the entire length of the cutter, and Kai was amazed he had survived so ferocious an impact. Across from him, a figure with dirty white hair picked himself up from the wreckage and shook his head.

‘That’s what you World Eaters call a landing?’ said Argentus Kiron.

A blackened shape at the front of the craft pulled itself from a heap of broken panels and coils of spitting wiring.

‘Any landing you walk away from is a good one,’ said Asubha with a wide grin. It looked to Kai as though he had enjoyed crashing the cutter.

‘Does it still count if you can only crawl?’ asked Subha, pushing himself to his knees and spitting a wad of teeth.

‘You are alive,’ said Tagore, wiping blood from a series of deep gashes on his chest and smearing it over his shoulders and face like tribal war paint. Kai tried to push Atharva’s arm from his chest, but he was still too weak and the warrior’s arm was too heavy. The cold-eyed features of Severian appeared above him, regarding him as a hunter might study a snared animal.

‘I’m trapped,’ said Kai, and Severian lifted Atharva’s arm from his chest. He moved on before Kai could thank him. The movement stirred Atharva, and he rolled onto his side with a groan of pain. Blood was coagulating on his face and arms, and he pulled a shard of metal the size of a dagger from his side.

A sudden cry of alarm made Kai jump and he smacked his head on the buckled side of the cutter. He saw Kiron kneel at the edge of the hole torn in the side of the cutter, presumably by a missile impact or the crash itself. He clambered over the crumpled interior of the cutter to the light and saw Gythua sitting upright in a pool of blood with torn spars of metal jutting from the centre of his stomach and chest.

‘Looks like the Goliath was right,’ said Subha. ‘He can die.’

‘Don’t say that!’ snapped Kiron with a venomous glare.

Severian knelt beside the Death Guard warrior and probed the bloody mess of his guts.

‘The wound is mortal,’ he said. ‘We should leave him.’

‘He’s right,’ said Gythua with a grimace of pain.

‘I’m not abandoning you,’ said Kiron.

‘I meant about the wound being mortal,’ said the Death Guard. ‘I’m dying, but you’re not going to bloody leave me here for the hunters.’

‘We leave no one behind for the hunters,’ agreed Tagore.

Kai was surprised to hear such a sentiment from a World Eater. From all he had heard, Kai had assumed Angron’s warriors to be brutal killers, without compassion or mercy. It was hard to believe a warrior that looked so feral and brutal could have any mercy in him, but the steel in Tagore’s voice brooked no disagreement.

Severian saw the same thing and gave a small shrug of acceptance.

‘Then we need to get him off these spikes of metal,’ he said.

‘Lift him clear,’ said Tagore, waving Asubha and his twin forward. Kai turned away as they bent down to pull Gythua free.

‘Do it quickly, World Eaters,’ said Gythua.

‘Don’t you worry about us,’ Subha told him. ‘You just mind your own self.’

Kai put his hands over his ears, but could still hear the terrible scraping of metal on bone, the awful suction of pierced flesh. The World Eaters strained with the effort of pulling Gythua clear, but to the Death Guard’s credit, no more than a grunt of pain escaped his lips as he came free of the metal spars.

Kai felt pressure on his arm, and let himself be guided from the wreckage. Gythua gave out great shuddering breaths as his body tried to fight the inevitable, and Kai let out an involuntary cry of horror as he saw the monstrously bloody ruin of Gythua’s body.

‘Don’t know what you’ve got to be bothered about,’ said Gythua, climbing to his feet with help from Kiron. ‘It’s me with the hole right through me.’

‘Sorry,’ said Kai, stepping from the remains of the crashed cutter.

Kai blinked his augmetic eyes, and he smiled at the simple pleasure of sunlight on his skin. The cutter had come down in a wide courtyard space between a series of abandoned structures that might once have been warehouses. The ground was hard-packed earth and bare rock; the buildings clustered close like curious onlookers at the scene of an accident.

No two were the same, constructed from sheets of corrugated metal and crudely shaped stone. Even over the reek of scorched iron and burning fuel, Kai could smell the wretched aroma of human waste, sweat and bad meat. How far had they travelled from the gaol? This surely could not be part of the Emperor’s Palace.

‘Where are we?’ he asked, as Atharva joined him.

‘My guess would be the Petitioners’ City.’

‘It’s awful,’ said Kai. ‘People actually live here?’

Atharva nodded. ‘A great many of them.’

‘A good place to stay hidden,’ said Severian, moving to the edge of the courtyard in which they had crashed.

‘Hide?’ said Tagore. ‘I don’t plan on hiding from anyone.’

‘No? Then what is your plan?’

‘We make our way to the nearest port facility and capture another flyer, one capable of getting into orbit without getting its arse shot off.’

‘And then what?’ asked Severian.

Tagore shrugged. ‘We have an astropath,’ he said. ‘We get him to send for our brothers.’

‘You make it all sound so simple,’ said Severian with a wry grin. ‘And I was worried for a moment that it would be difficult to escape from Terra.’

‘I am a World Eater,’ said Tagore, a warning in his tone. ‘Do not mistake simple for stupid.’

Severian nodded and turned away as Subha and Asubha helped Gythua from the cutter. Kiron emerged from the wreckage with his upper body now bared to the elements, and Kai was reminded of the marble statues with perfect physiques that flanked the steps of the Circus Athletica on the island crag of Aegina. Where the other Space Marines were bulky to the point of being ungainly and grotesque, Kiron was more akin to the proportions of a mortal, albeit one whose body was shaped to an idealised form. The torn fabric of his bodyglove now plugged the hole in Gythua’s stomach, and Kai saw the yellow cloth was already stained crimson.

The Death Guard warrior had an arm around the twins’ shoulders, and he took in their surroundings with a stoic shrug.

‘So this is the Petitioners’ City,’ he grunted. ‘Don’t suppose there’s much chance of finding a Legion Apothecary around here?’

They torched the wrecked cutter with three blasts from Kiron’s plasma carbine and moved into the winding streets of the city. Severian led the way, putting as much distance between them and the crash as possible, given that the wounded Gythua limited their speed. They kept to the shadows and the farther they travelled into the city, the more Kai lost track of the age in which he lived.

The lanes were dark, cool and filled with shadow, the buildings between which they travelled ancient and dilapidated, stone facades crumbling and grimed, patched with ad-hoc repairs and haphazard necessity. Wirework traceries of cabling skeined the surfaces and roofs of the buildings, a fragile network of illicit power that looked as fragile as silken cobwebs.

Between the wires, the sky diminished to a thin brush stroke of deepening blue.

All signs of technology began to vanish, and the air grew sharper with spices and perfumes and sweat, undiminished by the stale, metallic smell of the Imperium. The sounds changed too: echoing noises of children reciting nonsense verse, the hectoring voice of a man sounding like he was preaching, the buzz and whirr of stone on stone, knife sharpeners and a hundred other hawkers.

They turned into older streets, so narrow that the Space Marines had trouble moving two abreast. Ragged awnings and sagging balconies jutted into the passageways, making it difficult for Kai to see more than a few metres in any direction. His mental map spun, flipped around and turned inside out. Everything around him looked so different, but, perversely, it all began to blur together until he had no idea in which direction they were heading.

Those few people who saw them stared in wonder at the giants, and pressed themselves to the sides of the ramshackle buildings or turned and ran for their lives. Children in bright robes and tattooed faces gawped at them as women in orange shawls hurried them away. A multitude of skin tones dwelled here, from the exotic to the mundane, and he saw styles of dress from every corner of the globe: turbans, baggy silk pantaloons, all-enclosing robes that left only the eyes open to the world, labourers’ clothes and clothes that looked fit for any royal palace. Kai wondered what these people thought to see warriors in their midst, towering figures of heroic might that now passed through their slums.

Did they fear them as much as he did?

Kai stumbled after Severian in a daze, losing track of his surroundings. He had been psychically mauled and chemically subdued by his captors, both of which had weakened his body to the point of ruination. Kai’s body felt like one enormous wound, and he put one foot in front of the other mechanically, too exhausted to care where they were going or what they were going to do when they got there.

Tagore expected to send an astropathic message to his brothers off-world, but he was going to be disappointed if he thought Kai could be that messenger. By the last test Athena had set him, Kai could barely manage to reach a receiving astropath one tower distant. What chance did he have of reaching one on a far-distant world? The World Eater did not look like the kind of warrior who would take disappointment well, and Kai felt a numbing dread take hold of him at the thought of his anger when he discovered Kai’s limitations.

How had his life taken such a strange turn?

Kai had been honoured to serve the XIII Legion, happy to be part of so vast an undertaking as the conquest of the galaxy, and content in the knowledge that there was no better astropath in the service of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica. Now he was a hunted man, shorn of his abilities and travelling in the company of warriors the Imperium counted as base traitors.

He thought back to when this had all begun, the moment his life had turned to shit.

‘The Argo,’ he said.

‘A helot vessel of the Ultramarines,’ said Atharva. ‘Its keel was struck in the shipyards of Calth a hundred and fifty-six years ago.’

‘What?’ said Kai, unaware he had spoken aloud.

‘The Argo,’ said Atharva. ‘You served on her for eleven years.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘I know a great deal about you, Kai Zulane,’ said Atharva, tapping the side of his head.

‘You read my mind?

‘No,’ said Atharva. ‘My primarch told me of you.’

Kai searched Atharva’s face for any sign of mockery, but it was hard to read his features with any degree of accuracy. Though Kai and Atharva shared the same basic physiognomy, the features of the Space Marines were subtly different from those of mortals and the same visual cues did not quite hold true between the two branches of humanity.

‘Really? The Crimson King told you of me?’

‘He did,’ agreed Atharva. ‘How else did I know to come for you? How else would I know that you were aboard the Argo when it suffered a critical failure of its Geller field, allowing a host of warp entities to rampage through its halls to slaughter the crew, leaving you and Roxanne Larysa Joyanni Castana as the only survivors.’

Kai felt sick to his stomach at the mention of the massacre aboard the Argo, and he reached out to steady himself on the wall of a nearby building. His stomach flipped and though he couldn’t remember the last time he had eaten anything solid, he felt as though whatever was in his stomach was about to be ejected.

‘Please,’ he gasped. ‘Please don’t talk about the Argo.’

Atharva held him upright and said, ‘Trust me, Kai, I know the dangers of the Great Ocean better than most, and believe me when I say that the loss of that vessel was not your fault.’

‘You can’t know that,’ said Kai.

‘Oh, but I can,’ said Atharva. ‘My subtle body has flown the farthest immaterial tides and plunged to the warp’s most secret dreamings. I know its limitless potential and I have fought the creatures that dwell in its darkest places. They are dangerous beyond your understanding, but to think that you alone could have doomed an entire ship is laughable. You credit yourself with too much.’

‘Is that supposed to make me feel better?’

Atharva frowned. ‘It was a statement of fact. Whether it makes you feel better or not is irrelevant.’

Kai sank to his haunches and rubbed a hand across his brow. His skin was greasy with sweat and the roiling sensation in his stomach was continuing unabated. He retched up a thick rope of acrid saliva and spat it to the ground.

‘Please,’ he said. ‘I need to stop. I can’t go on like this.’

‘No, you cannot,’ replied Atharva. ‘Pause a moment here.’

Kai took a deep breath and fought to quell the sickness in his belly. After a few minutes he began to feel better and looked up. Severian and Tagore were arguing, but he couldn’t hear their words. Asubha supported Gythua, whose features were ashen and corpse-like. Blood stained his thighs and even Kai could see he was living on borrowed time. Kiron kept watch on the rooflines with his rifle while Subha examined the Death Guard’s wound.

Of all the Legions, Kai imagined the World Eaters must know the most of battlefield injuries, that those who understood the mechanics of taking bodies apart should also understand the most about putting them back together.

‘He’s going to die, isn’t he?’ said Kai.

Atharva nodded. ‘Yes, he is.’

Smoke and the smell of roasting meat filled the warehouse, gathering in a layer below the roof and wreathing the iron girders in a misty fog. The walls were hung with long strips of cloth and panelled with sheets of layered metal and ash. A long fire of glowing coals burned low in a trench in the centre of the space, and spits of questionable meat turned as the skins cracked and drizzled fat.

Hard men filled the warehouse, sitting on rough wooden benches or cleaning weapons and speaking in low voices. Each one was a broad-shouldered brute, made huge by unnatural muscle growth and a rigorous regime of fighting and tests of strength that would not have been out of place in the training halls of the Legiones Astartes. They dwarfed the slaves that served them, though none of the wretched individuals bound to the Dhakal clan were particularly diminutive.

Most of these hard men bore heavy-calibre pistols, and long, factory-stamped blades hung from their belts. The biggest carried weapons of a bygone age: leaf-bladed axes, long-hafted falchions and chain-length flails. Like the warriors who once roamed the wastelands of Old Earth, they were an anachronism in this golden age of scientific advancement and progress, but here in the heart of the Petitioners’ City, they ruled with the iron fist of might.

Weapon racks lined one wall and sheets of iron beaten into the shape of kite shields ringed a shallow pit at one end of the hall. It had the appearance of an arena, and the dark earth was stained a deep, muddy brown from the hundreds of frightened men and women who had been thrown in to die for the amusement of the hard men and their master.

Nor was this fighting pit the only indication that the occupants of the warehouse were bloodthirsty beyond imagining. A dozen long chains attached to windlass mechanisms of black iron descended from the roof, and mounted on each was a blackened corpse, pierced through by a hook intended for a meat-vendor to hang his butchered carcasses upon. The corpses reeked of putrefaction, but no one in the hall appeared to care or even notice them. In time they would be thrown out for the city’s feral dogs to devour, but there would always be fresh meat to fill an empty hook.

The master of this hall sat at the other end, upon a vast throne of beaten iron, though none of the hall’s occupants dared turn their gaze upon him.

To look upon the clan lord without permission was death, and everyone knew it.

Dim light penetrated the gloom of the warehouse as a shutter door in the centre of one wall rumbled open. The hard men barely looked up, knowing that no one would be foolish enough to come to this place with violence in mind. Even the arbitrators of the Emperor’s law did not come here.

A few heads nodded in greeting as the towering figure of Ghota entered, dragging a weeping man clad in rough, workman’s clothes. Ghota’s meaty fist was wrapped around the man’s neck, and though he was a stockily-built labourer, the clan lord’s chief enforcer carried him as easily as a man might hoist a wayward child.

Ghota was clad in a heavy bear pelt cloak and padded overalls unzipped to his muscled belly, and the crossed bandoliers of blades glittered in the red glow of the coals. His flesh shone with ruddy light that almost, but not entirely, gave his pallid complexion a more natural tone.

The tattoos cut into his flesh bunched and writhed as he approached the iron throne, and he spat a wad of grisly phlegm to the floor. Men avoided his gaze, for Ghota was a man of unpredictable moods, quick temper and psychotic rages. His blood-red eyes were impossible to read, and to speak with Ghota at all was to dance with death.

Ghota halted before the throne and beat a barb-wrapped fist against his breast.

‘What do you bring me, Ghota?’ said the figure on the throne in a voice wet with the gristle of cancerous tumours. None of the dim light from the fire trench reached the speaker, as though understanding that some things were better left to the shadows.

Ghota hurled the labourer to the floor in front of the iron throne.

‘This one speaks of warriors drawing near, my subedar,’ he said.

‘Warriors? Really? Has the palace grown bold, I wonder?’

‘No ordinary warriors these,’ added Ghota, delivering a heavy boot to the labourer’s gut. The man screamed in pain and rolled onto his side, coughing blood and screwing his eyes shut. Ghota’s kick had ruptured something inside him, and even if the hard men didn’t kill him out of hand or toss him into the pit for a moment’s amusement, he would be dead by sunrise.

‘Speak, wretch,’ ordered the master of this hall, leaning forward so that the barest hint of light shone from a shaven scalp and glittered on six golden studs set in his thunderous brow. ‘Tell me of these warriors.’

The man sobbed and pushed himself up onto one elbow. He could barely breathe, and spoke in wheezing gasps.

‘Saw them out by the empty ranges to the east,’ he said. ‘Fell outta the sky and smashed down in a wrecked lifter. Cargo 9 by the looks of it.’

‘They crashed, and yet they walked away unhurt?’

The labourer shook his head. ‘One of ‘em was bloody and they had to carry him. A big man, bigger than any man I ever seen.’

‘Bigger than my Ghota here?’ asked the shadowed figure on the throne.

‘Aye, bigger than him, they all were. Like the Space Marines on the Petitioners’ Gate.’

‘Intriguing. And how many of these giants were there?’

The man coughed a wad of bright, arterial blood and shook his head. ‘Six, seven, I ain’t sure, but they had a scrawny fella with them too. Didn’t look like much, but one of the big men was making special sure he took care of that one.’

‘Where are these men now?’

‘I don’t know, they could be anywhere now!’

‘Ghota…’

Ghota leaned down and hauled the man upright until his feet were dangling just above the floor. His arm was fully extended, but he gave no sign that this feat of strength was any effort whatsoever. With his free hand, Ghota drew an enormous pistol from his holster, a weapon that bore an eagle stamped onto its foreshortened barrel.

‘I believe you. After all, why would you speak false when you know you are going to die anyway?’

‘Last I saw they was heading towards the Crow’s Court, I swear!’

‘The Crow’s Court? What draws them in that direction, I wonder?’

‘I don’t know, please!’ sobbed the labourer. ‘Maybe they’re taking the wounded one to Antioch.’

‘That old fool?’ laughed the wet voice. ‘What would he know of the miraculous anatomy of the vaunted Legiones Astartes?’

‘Anyone desperate enough to crash here might risk it,’ said Ghota.

‘They might indeed,’ agreed the figure on the throne. ‘And I have to ask what brings warriors like that to my city.’

The figure stood and took a step down from his throne. The labourer whimpered in fear at the sight of the man, a grossly misshapen giant with a physique so enormous he was more powerful than Ghota. Muscles like mountains clung to his body, barely contained by curved plates of beaten iron and ceramite strapped to his body in imitation of the battle plate worn by the Legiones Astartes.

Babu Dhakal approached the sobbing labourer and bent down until their faces were centimetres apart: one a blandly unremarkable face worn thin by a lifetime of work, the other a pallid corpse face of dry, desiccated skin pierced by numerous gurgling tubes and criss-crossed by metal sutures holding the cancerous flesh in place. A thin Mohawk of hair ran in a widow’s peak from the clan lord’s studded forehead to the nape of his neck, and lightning bolt tattoos radiated from this centreline in a jagged arc to his shoulders.

Like Ghota, his eyes were a nightmare of petechial haemorrhages, red with ruptured blood vessels and utterly devoid of human compassion or understanding. These were the eyes of a killer, the eyes of a warrior who had fought from one side of the world to the other and slaughtered any man who stood in his way. Armies had quailed before this man’s gaze, cities had opened their gates to him and great heroes had been humbled before his might.

A sword as tall as a mortal man was strapped to his back and he drew it slowly and with great care, like a chirurgeon preparing to open a patient.

Or a torturer readying an instrument of excruciation.

Babu Dhakal nodded and Ghota released his grip on the man.

The sword swept out, a blur of steel and red, and a vast gout of crimson splashed to the floor of the warehouse. It hissed and bubbled as it landed on the coals, filling the air with the scent of burned blood. The labourer was dead before he felt the impact of the blade, carved in a neat line from crown to crotch like a side of beef. The shorn halves of the man crumpled to the floor, and Babu Dhakal cleaned his blade on Ghota’s bear-pelt cloak.

‘Hang those up,’ he said, gesturing to the lifeless sides of meat splayed on the floor as he sheathed his sword over his shoulder. Babu Dhakal returned to his throne and lifted an enormous weapon from a hook welded to its side.

It gleamed with all the love and care that had been lavished upon it, a hand-finished assault rifle crafted in one of the first manufactories to produce such weapons. It bore a carven eagle upon its barrel, and though it was much larger than the pistol borne by Ghota, it clearly belonged to the same class of firearm.

It was a boltgun, but no warrior of the Legiones Astartes had carried a weapon of such brutal, archaic design since the union of Terra and Mars.

‘Ghota,’ said Babu Dhakal with undisguised hunger. ‘Find these warriors and bring them to me.’

‘It shall be done,’ said Ghota, hammering a fist to his chest.

‘And Ghota…’

‘Yes, my subedar?’

‘I want them alive. The gene-seed is no use to me in corpses.’

Sixteen

A different drum
Mechlairvoycance
Blind

Severian led them to the ruined shell of what had once been a haphazardly built tenement block, but which had collapsed after one too many floors had been added to an already unstable and poorly built structure. Atharva sensed the lingering anger of those who had died here, the psychic echoes that had not yet been dispersed and reabsorbed by the Great Ocean.

Sadness dwelled here, and even those without sensitivity to the workings of the aether stayed away. In a city of millions, Severian managed to find them a deserted corner in which to take refuge and catch their breath. The Luna Wolf claimed they had come here unseen, though Atharva found it hard to imagine that their passing had gone completely unnoticed.

Water fell in runnels from the cracked floors above them, a zigzagging collection of sheet metal and timber that looked horribly unsafe, but which Gythua claimed was in no danger of imminent collapse. The Death Guard was sitting propped up against one wall with Kiron speaking to him in low tones, while the World Eaters twins were examining the two blades they had taken from the dead Custodians. The power cell housings were open and it seemed they were attempting to get the energy fields working again.

Severian knelt by the largest opening in the buckled wall, scanning the approaches to their refuge for any signs of the hunt that must surely be closing in on them. Kai lay sprawled on his side in the driest part of the structure, his chest rising and falling in the gentle rhythm of sleep. The mortal was exhausted, his mind and body on the verge of complete collapse, but Atharva knew he would go on. The power that had touched his mind would not allow him to fail, and Atharva had to know what that was. Like all in his Legion, he abhorred ignorance, viewing it as a failure of effort and determination. Whatever was in Kai’s mind had been deemed vital enough that the Legio Custodes had brought in psychic interrogators, and that made it a personal challenge that he be the one to extract it.

Atharva closed his eyes and let his subtle body drift from his flesh, feeling the lightness of being that came with loosening the bonds of corporeal confinement. He could not remain parted from his body for long, as their hunters would be sure to have psi-hounds in their midst, and a subtle body would be a shining beacon to them.

The mental noise of the Petitioners’ City washed over Atharva, a background haze of a million people’s thoughts. Banal and irrelevant, he filtered out their hopes of one day being admitted within the walls of the palace, their fear of the gangs, their despair and their numbness. Here and there, he felt the unmistakable hint of a latent psyker, a talented individual with the potential to develop their abilities into something wondrous.

It saddened him that these gifted ones would never have that chance on Terra. Had they been born on Prospero, their abilities would have been nurtured and developed. The great work begun by the Crimson King before the betrayal of Nikaea had offered blinkered humanity a chance to unlock the full potential of their brilliant minds, but Atharva knew that fragile moment when dreams take flight had been shattered forever and could never be remade.

Yet even as the thoughts of the city faded, Atharva sensed another presence hidden within its depths, something powerful and alien. His subtle body felt its nearness and he fought the urge to fly the aether towards it. Somewhere close, something had found a way through the veil that separated this world from the Great Ocean, a passage that had escaped the notice of the material world’s inhabitants.

And as Atharva became aware of this intelligence, it too became aware of him and shrank back into whatever shell currently hosted its form. He could still sense it; something that powerful could not completely conceal its presence; it was a thorn in the flesh of the world that would never completely heal.

Atharva dismissed it for now and turned his thoughts to Kai Zulane. He let his body of light drift into the upper reaches of the astropath’s mind, sifting through the clutter of his waking thoughts and the panic and fear of his last few weeks. The savage scarring left by the neurolocutors angered him, and Kai shifted in his dreams as that anger bled into his thoughts.

Atharva saw fleeting images of a vast desert and a towering fortress he recognised as the long-vanished Urartu fortress of Arzashkun. A dry, but informative text of Primarch Guilliman had described it, and a copy of that work resided in the Corvidae library in Tizca. Why would Kai Zulane be dreaming of such a place? True, he had served with the XIII Legion, and it was not beyond the realms of possibility that he might have seen the original work somewhere in Ultramar, but why would he have need to dream of it?

Pushing deeper into that dream, Atharva smelled the aroma of the souk, the fragrance of hookah smoke and the spiced flavour of a dead culture. He had no frame of reference for these sensations, but he sensed their importance to whatever secret Kai held within his mind.

What did the Eye want with this mortal? What could be so important that it would be placed within such a fragile vessel instead of someone worthy of its protection?

Atharva smiled as he recognised a hint of jealousy in his thoughts.

He pressed harder against the edge of Kai’s dreams, employing skills beyond the imaginations of the simpletons who had tried to open his mind. He saw the desert and the vast emptiness it represented. He recognised the significance of the great fortress and the prowling shadow that circled it with a predator’s patience. This was Kai’s refuge, but it would prove wholly inadequate to keep a truth-seeker of Atharva’s skill from eventually breaching its defences.

With a thought, Atharva was at Arzashkun’s mighty gates and he looked up at the brilliant whiteness of the fortress’s many towers and gilded rooftops. Portions of its silhouette were missing, and he could picture the neurolocutors disassembling its structure in an effort to intimidate their captive.

‘You only drove him deeper in,’ said Atharva.

He extended his hand towards the great defensive gates and willed them to open. When nothing happened, he repeated the gesture. Again the gates remained stubbornly closed to him, and Atharva felt a prescient sensation of warning as the sand around him erupted with black streamers of oozing menace. Screams of the dying enveloped him and grasping, clawed hands of glistening black matter pulled at his subtle body, tearing shards of light from his immaterial form that would leave black repercussions on his physical body.

Atharva rose up from the cloying morass of horror and fear, irritated that he had allowed himself to be surprised by such base emotions. His body floated high above Arzashkun, but the black ooze rose up like creepers climbing an invisible building towards him. Atharva had the strongest sensation that Kai’s own guilt was shielding the secret within him, and he smiled in admiration for whoever had placed it there.

‘Very clever,’ he said. ‘The defences can only ever be opened from the inside.’

Atharva opened his eyes and groaned as he allowed his subtle body to return to his flesh abode in the material world. The quality of light in their hiding place had changed, the sun drawing close to the western horizon as night drew in on the mountains.

‘Where did you go?’ said Tagore, and Atharva flinched as he realised the World Eater was right beside him.

‘Nowhere,’ said Atharva.

Tagore laughed. ‘For someone supposed to be clever, you are a terrible liar.’

Atharva had to concede the point. ‘I am a scholar, Tagore. I deal in facts and facts are always true. Lies are for lesser minds who cannot face the truth.’

‘You are a warrior, Atharva,’ said Tagore. ‘First and foremost, that is what you were created to be. Do not forget the truth of that fact.’

‘I have fought my share of wars, Tagore,’ said Atharva. ‘But it is always such a brutal business that teaches nothing except how to destroy. Knowledge can only ever be lost in war, and such loss is abhorrent to me.’

Tagore considered this and jerked a thumb in Kai’s direction.

‘So we broke him out and he’s still alive. Are you going to tell me what’s so important about him and why we risked our lives for him?’

‘I am not sure yet,’ said Atharva. ‘I was attempting to go into his mind to find out what the Legio Custodes wanted from him, but it is hidden deep.’

‘Something to do with the Emperor,’ said Tagore. ‘That’s the only reason for the Custodians to get involved.’

‘You could be right,’ agreed Atharva.

‘Now you will tell me why you spoke with the hunter on the steps of the Preceptory.’

Atharva had been waiting for this. There was no mistaking the vibrating chord of anger within the World Eaters sergeant, and for all Tagore’s lack of subtlety, he would be swift to spot any falsehood.

‘It is hard to explain,’ Atharva began, holding up a hand to forestall Tagore’s ire, ‘but I do not say that to evade an answer. My Legion has many of its warriors dedicated to the arts of divination, sifting the currents of the Great Ocean – the warp as some know it – for threads that link past, present and future. Everything that ever was and ever will be can be read in its depths, but sorting what will be from what could be requires decades of study, and even then it is an imprecise art.’

Atharva smiled, wondering what Chief Librarian Ahriman would make of that.

‘Are you one of these seers?’ asked Kiron, moving away from the recumbent form of the unconscious Gythua. ‘Can you see the future?’

‘I am Adeptus Exemptus, a high-ranking member of my fellowship, and I have trained in all the arts of my Legion, but I am not skilled enough to future-see with any degree of certainty.’

‘But you saw something that day, didn’t you?’ asked Asubha, the blade in his hand crackling with power. ‘Something that made you stand aside when you could have warned us of the approach of our attackers.’

‘I did,’ said Atharva. ‘I saw the galaxy overturned, and moving to the beat of a different drum. I saw us as guardians of a secret that could alter the outcome of this rebellion of Horus Lupercal.’

‘Enough riddles,’ snapped Subha. ‘Speak plainly of what you saw.’

‘I can speak only in possibilities, for that is all I have,’ said Atharva. ‘For reasons none of us can guess, Horus has turned on his father, and three of his brothers have turned with him. Lords Angron, Fulgrim and Mortarion have joined Horus in rebellion, but I do not believe they will be the only ones.’

‘Why not?’ asked Tagore.

‘Because Horus is no fool, and he would not risk everything in one gamble on the sands of a dead world. No, Isstvan Five is just the beginning of the Lupercal’s plan, and there are players yet to reveal their faces.’

‘So what does this have to do with him?’ asked Kiron, jerking his thumb at Kai.

‘I believe that Kai Zulane knows the outcome of Horus’s grand plan,’ said Atharva.

He paused to let the implications of that sink in, letting each man reach the inevitable question in their own time. In the end it was Asubha who gave it voice.

‘So what happens? Does Horus defeat the Emperor?’

‘I do not know,’ answered Atharva, ‘but either way, Kai Zulane is now the most important man in the galaxy. His life is worth more than any of ours, and that is why I had us break him from captivity.’

‘But you say the information is locked inside him,’ said Tagore. ‘How do you get it out?’

Atharva sighed. ‘I am not sure I can,’ he said. ‘The information was hidden in the deepest recesses of his guilt, and such an emotion is powerful enough to defeat any interrogation.’

‘Then what use is he?’ demanded Subha. ‘We should kill him and be done with it. All he’ll do is slow us down and get us killed.’

‘There is merit in what Subha says,’ pointed out Kiron. ‘If the future is predestined, what does it matter whether the astropath lives or dies? The outcome will be the same.’

‘I do not believe in predestination,’ said Atharva. ‘By gaining knowledge of the future, we inherit the ability to change it, and I will not allow the future to pass me by and know that I had a chance to shape it.’

‘That smacks of arrogance,’ said Severian, turning from his vigil at the entrance.

Atharva shook his head. ‘Does it? Is it arrogant to want to change the course of a war that will claim hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives? Imagine the power of an army that marched to war knowing with absolute certainty that it could not lose. Now imagine that same army learning that no matter what they could not win. Knowledge is power, the Mechanicum know this, and my Legion knows it too. Whoever holds the truth that hides in this astropath’s head will be the victor in this war.’

‘So what do we do with him?’ asked Kiron.

‘We take him to Isstvan Five,’ said Subha. ‘Isn’t it obvious? Our place is with our Legions, and if the Red Angel has thrown in his lot with Horus, then he clearly had a good reason.’

Tagore nodded in agreement and Atharva saw that Kiron believed the idea had merit too. Asubha remained impassive and Severian did not look up. Atharva took a deep breath, knowing that what he was about to say was dangerous.

‘But by the same token, if the Emperor has named them traitors, might he too have had a good reason? Perhaps your Legions are not worthy of your loyalty.’

Tagore surged to his feet, blade in hand.

‘The Legio Custodes call me traitor, and now you too? I should kill you where you sit.’

‘The Phoenician a traitor?’ said Kiron, aiming his plasma carbine at Atharva’s head. ‘I’ll thank you to choose your words with more care, sorcerer.’

Atharva knew he could not back down, but nor could he so baldly assert the facts in the face of such an emotional response.

‘How can any of you say for sure what has happened to any of our Legions? When was the last time any of us spent any time alongside our battle-brothers? Fifty years? A century? Who can say for sure what their Legion has become in that time? I have not laid eyes upon the Crimson King in over seventy years, and Tagore, it has been over a century since you knelt before Angron.

‘We were locked in Terra’s deepest gaol simply for the insignia on our armour, not the truth in our hearts, so who is to say where our loyalty lies now? Our first loyalty is to the Imperium, is it not?’

‘Any master that puts me in chains is not worthy of my loyalty,’ said Tagore.

‘Perhaps not, but what of our brother Legionaries? What can break such bonds of brotherhood as are forged in war? Is our loyalty now to them alone? Or is it to this fledgling band of brothers we now find ourselves within? Consider this, we have been given a unique chance, a chance to decide for ourselves the master to whom we will swear our loyalty.’

‘A pretty speech,’ said Tagore, tapping the side of his head. ‘But I know where my loyalty lies – it is to the primarch whose words and deeds I have followed into the fires of battle and who granted me the gift of rage bound by steel.’

‘I expected as much from you Tagore. You fought alongside Angron from the last days of the War Hounds, ever since Desh’ea, but what about you two?’ asked Atharva, nodding towards Asubha and Subha. ‘Neither of you have yet been augmented like Tagore. What do you say?’

‘I agree with Tagore,’ said Subha, an answer Atharva had expected.

‘And you?’

Subha’s twin met Atharva’s unblinking stare with one of his own. His face was thoughtful, measured, and Atharva liked that he took time to consider the question properly.

‘I believe we do not have enough facts to make a decision as important as this,’ he said.

‘A coward’s answer,’ snapped Tagore, and Atharva saw the undercurrent of anger in Asubha’s face. Tagore was his sergeant and deserved his respect, but they were far from the strictures of their Legion, and it was never wise to use such pejorative words amongst warriors of such notorious violence.

‘You mistake prudence for cowardice, Tagore,’ said Asubha. ‘It may be that Horus Lupercal and our primarchs have just cause for rebellion, but Atharva speaks truly when he says that none of us know our Legions any more. Perhaps they have fallen to petty jealousies or allowed ambition to blind them to their oaths of loyalty – who can say?’

‘Loyalty is all I need,’ said Subha, moving away from his brother. ‘I will find a way to rejoin the Legion and fight by my primarch’s side.’

‘Spoken like a true World Eater,’ said Tagore, clapping a hand on Subha’s shoulder. ‘We should all rejoin our Legions. If you want to stay on Terra, Atharva, that is your business, but I will find a way to return to my primarch. I have my strength and battle-brothers to guard my flanks. I will find a way off Terra. It may be that I will walk the Crimson Path before I get to Isstvan Five, but this is a road I intend to travel.’

‘And what then?’ asked Atharva. ‘What if you manage to reach Angron’s side only to discover he is a corrupt traitor who does not deserve your loyalty?’

‘Then I will take up my sword and die trying to kill him.’

‘Are you hearing all this?’ asks Saturnalia. ‘The madness of it astounds me.’

‘I hear it,’ says Nagasena, ‘and the sadness of it almost breaks my heart.’

Saturnalia looks up at him, unable to read his face, and Nagasena knows he is trying to decide whether he is joking or being disloyal.

‘Choose your words carefully, hunter,’ says the giant Custodian, ‘lest you find yourself dragged back to Khangba Marwu alongside these traitors.’

‘You misunderstand me, friend Saturnalia,’ says Nagasena. ‘I will hunt these men until the ends of Terra. Without mercy and without pause, but to hear their fear and confusion is to know that, but for an accident of genetics, they could have fought at our side. They are lost and do not know what to do.’

‘I don’t know what feed you were listening to,’ says Golovko, looking up from the data-slate carried by Kartono. ‘but I heard them say that they were going to try and get off-world to rejoin their Legions. We have to stop them.’

‘Agreed,’ replies Nagasena with a nod, staring hard into the grainy image flickering on the data-slate. The signal is weak and distorted by all the metal and illegal antennae that cluster like wire-weed on the roofs of nearby buildings, but it is clear enough to give the hunters their first glimpse of their quarry.

Behind Nagasena, the burned remains of the Cargo 9 smoulders in the purple glow of evening, surrounded by Black Sentinels with their weapons primed and held to their shoulders. Night is drawing in, and the Petitioners’ City is a dangerous place in darkness, but they have no choice but to continue onwards. Much of the shuttle has been picked clean by scavengers, its wings cut free with acetylene torches and the metal ribs of its internal structure stripped to form supporting columns or girders.

Some of the salvagers fought them, believing them to be rivals for these valuable parts, but they are now dead, shot down by the Black Sentinels as they swept in from the landing site, two hundred metres back. Saturnalia and Golovko wasted valuable time in searching the wreckage, but Nagasena knew they would find nothing.

Severian had made sure of that, and Nagasena knows he will be the most formidable of the renegades to catch. That one is a wolf, a loner who will not hesitate to abandon his fellows when he feels the breath of the hunters at his neck. Adept Hiriko stands by the crushed fuselage, running her palm over the warm metal and attempting to draw out any latent psi-traces of their targets. It is a hopeless task. Too many have travelled in this craft and too many have touched it since it crashed for any real trace to be left, but every avenue must be explored, every element considered.

Saturnalia is impatient to begin the hunt again, but Nagasena knows their prey is not going anywhere in the immediate future, and there is much that can be learned by simply observing them for a time. While the escaped Space Marines debate their future, unaware that their every move is being watched – thanks to the coerced cooperation of House Castana and Kartono’s technical ability – they will gradually reveal their strengths and weaknesses, making the hunt’s outcome inevitable. It is the way Nagasena trained to hunt, the way he has worked for many years, and no amount of pressure from Saturnalia or Golovko will change that.

Saturnalia turns to Kartono, his manner brusque and irritated.

‘Can you identify their location from this feed?’

Kartono looks over at Nagasena, and nods slowly before answering. ‘Not precisely, but maybe to within a few hundred metres.’

Saturnalia then addresses Athena Diyos. ‘And if you are that close, can you establish a more precise location?’

Athena Diyos does not want to be here, but she knows she has little choice. From what Nagasena has learned of her, he knows her to be an unforgiving tutor, but a staunch friend of those who earn her trust. It is not hard to see why she should feel protective of Kai Zulane.

‘I think so,’ she says.

‘Then we need to move,’ says the Custodian.

Nagasena steps to Saturnalia, blocking his path. ‘Be mindful, Custodian,’ he says. ‘This is my hunt, and I set the pace. You underestimate these men at your peril. In any scenario they are dangerous beyond belief. Corner them and they will fight like Thunder Warriors of old.’

‘There’s only seven of them, and I doubt the Death Guard will see the sunrise,’ sneers Golovko. ‘Throne only knows what you think you gain by waiting.’

‘I gain understanding of the truth,’ says Nagasena, resting his right hand on the pommel stone of his sword. ‘And that is the most important thing.’

‘Truth?’ asks Saturnalia. ‘What truth do you think to learn from traitors?’

Nagasena hesitates before answering, but he will not lie to Saturnalia, for a lie would diminish him.

‘I hope to learn whether I should catch these men at all,’ he says.

Kai woke from a terrible dream in which his head was being slowly encased in clay that hardened around him with each breath. Like being bricked up in a suffocating cave the exact dimensions of his body, each breath came shorter and more forced than the last. As awareness of his surroundings returned to Kai, his fatigue crashed down upon him as though he had not rested at all.

His eyes hurt and he rubbed the skin around them. His skull felt as though it was vibrating from the inside, and the interrogation clamps that had widened the orbits of his eye sockets to allow the insertion of ocular-recording equipment had badly bruised his cheeks and forehead. He scratched his eyes, feeling as if there was an itch beneath his skin he couldn’t reach.

Kai felt the eyes of the Outcast Dead upon him and took a deep breath as he saw the sky beyond the entrance of their hiding place was a yellowed purple, like an intensely livid bruise.

‘What’s happening?’ he asked, sensing the tension in the warriors before him. ‘Are we in trouble?’

Severian chuckled and the World Eaters grinned broadly.

‘We are branded as traitors and are being hunted by our enemies,’ said Tagore. ‘It’s fair to say we are going to be in trouble for some time.’

‘That’s not what I meant,’ said Kai.

‘We are deciding what is to be done with you,’ said Atharva, and Kai felt a tremor of fear at the casual nature of his words.

‘Oh,’ he said, scratching the skin beneath his eyes. ‘Did you reach a decision?’

‘Not yet,’ admitted Atharva. ‘Some of our number want to escape Terra and take you to Horus Lupercal, while others want to just kill you.’

‘Kill me? Why?’ gasped Kai.

‘You represent a very real danger, Kai,’ said Kiron, putting a hand on his shoulder, and Kai felt the killing power in that grip. The Space Marine’s hand was so enormous it cupped his entire shoulder, from clavicle to scapula. With only the slightest increase of pressure, Kiron could break every bone without even thinking about it.

‘Danger, what danger?’

‘I suspect the information you carry is knowledge of the future,’ said Atharva. ‘And truth is the most dangerous weapon in any war.’

‘But I don’t know anything,’ protested Kai. ‘I told them that!’

‘You do,’ said Kiron, pressing hard enough to make Kai wince in pain. ‘You just don’t know you do. The army that carries truth as its banner cannot falter. Picture a perfect war, waged by warriors who know they cannot lose. That is the promise you carry within you, and to possess that knowledge, great and good men will do anything to make you their banner.’

‘We will fight our way off this world, and you will help us,’ said Tagore.

‘Leave Terra?’ said Kai, baring his teeth and rubbing his temples with the heels of his palms. ‘Throne, it feels like my eyes are on fire.’

‘What is wrong with him?’ asked Subha.

Asubha knelt beside Kai and took his head in his hands. The World Eater turned Kai’s head and peeled back the skin at the juncture of his augmetics. A tear of blood ran down Kai’s cheek.

‘Angron’s blood,’ swore Asubha. ‘Be silent all of you – they are watching and listening.’

Kai struggled in the World Eater’s grip, but it was utterly implacable. He could no more move his head than he could move his shoulder. Asubha stared straight into Kai’s eyes and had he been able to move, he would have flinched at the venom he saw there.

‘Clever,’ said Asubha, resting his fingertips on Kai’s cheeks, ‘but this is where it ends.’

‘What are you talking about?’ gasped Kai.

‘What are you doing?’ said Atharva.

‘Covering our trail,’ said Asubha, digging his thumbs into the meat of Kai’s skull and gouging out his eyes in a welter of blood and cabling.

Seventeen

Death is coming
A snare slipped
Antioch

Kai wore a mask of blood and oil and coolant fluids. Subha held him up as they plunged deeper into the city, moving as fast as the wounded Gythua allowed. Tagore and Kiron supported the wounded Space Marine, and no amount of his demands to be left to die would make them drop him. Kai had given up screaming. The pain was shocking, and showed no sign of fading. He didn’t think that was a good sign.

Wires flopped on his cheeks, and though he was suddenly plunged into the world most astropaths lived in daily, he was finding it hard to adjust after such a sharp trauma. Yet for such an apparently senseless and brutal act, the removal of Kai’s eyes was as precise as any augmetic specialist could have managed.

Blurred lines of smudged light flashed past Kai as his blindsight struggled to reorient itself to being his primary mode of perception. He travelled in a world of sound and smell, of taste and touch. He felt the rough cobbles beneath his feet, and the cold air of night on his skin. The smell of cooking fats and precious woodsmoke drifted through covered alleyways, and the warm reek of close-packed humanity was a pervasive odour that overlaid every other ingredient.

‘Why did he do that?’ hissed Kai between strangled sobs and pained gasps as Severian halted them at a junction of three streets.

‘What?’ said Subha. ‘Who?’

‘Your twin, why did he take my eyes?’

Subha was visible as an angry blur of red and gold, a jumble of sharp edges and confusion, his aura rippling with an almost crippling sense of isolation. Subha missed the brotherhood of his Legion, and that weakness was killing him inside.

‘You were a spy,’ said the warrior.

‘What? No! I wasn’t. I don’t understand.’

‘Your eyes,’ explained Subha. ‘The people hunting us were using your eyes to watch us. They heard and saw everything in that ruined place.’

Kai took a breath and forced the pain down to a manageable place.

‘How could they do that?’ he asked.

Subha shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Asubha’s the clever one, not me. He was going to be sent to Mars to train as a Techmarine before we got posted to Terra.’

‘Your augmetics were provided by the Telepathica?’ asked Atharva, taking hold of his head and peering into the caverns of his eye sockets. Kai wanted to close his eyes, but he had no lids to close, and he could not turn away from the golden brightness of Atharva’s outline. Where the rest of the world was subtly out of focus, the warrior of the Thousand Sons was a crystal clear silhouette of shimmering light and wonder. So real was Atharva that it set off a roiling nausea in Kai’s belly.

‘No,’ said Kai. ‘House Castana arranged the implants.’

‘The Navigator House?’

‘Yes,’ nodded Kai, and instantly regretted it as the motion made him sick to his stomach. He grabbed onto Subha’s arm, feeling the colours and light of the world swirl around him like a shimmering rainbow whirlpool. His legs gave out and he retched glistening wads of bile.

Subha lowered him to the ground and let him heave until there was nothing left to come up. Kai felt as weak as a newborn, the strength that had sustained him until now pouring from him in each expulsion. Atharva knelt beside him.

‘Our hunters are cunning,’ he said. ‘They must have been given the specifications for your augmetics from House Castana and acquired the feed from your optic conduits. The Eye alone knows how much they heard and saw, but we must assume they are close.’

Kai felt himself being propped up against a rough wall of poorly-formed adobe bricks. The texture was rough, but simply to pause for a moment was the most sublime sensation. He rested his head on the bricks, feeling the pulse of life behind it. This was a dwelling place, a home where people lived, loved and dreamed. Kai missed his clifftop home, perched on the smooth rock of what had once been an ancient king’s brow. He missed the sad smile of his mother and the warm embrace of the very notion of home.

‘I want to go home,’ he said, as a welcome peace settled upon him. ‘I miss my home… it was a nice home. You would have liked it, Athena. It had floors of pearl-smoked marble and domed ceilings painted with replicas of Isandula Verona’s work.’

‘What’s he talking about?’ asked a gruff voice he felt sure he should know. ‘Who is this Athena he’s talking to?’

A hand touched his brow, rough and callused from a life of hard work. It was a large hand, too large for any normal man’s hand.

‘His body is giving out,’ said another voice. ‘He was virtually dead by the time we got to him, and the crash and Asubha’s surgery has almost finished the job. He needs medical attention.’

‘What do any of us know about mortal bodies?’ asked a silver voice with a petulant edge to its vowels. ‘None of us are apothecaries.’

‘There will be one in this city, several probably.’

‘And you know where to find one?’

‘No, but someone here will.’

‘Someone who can heal Gythua too?’

‘Don’t be foolish,’ rasped the blunt edged voice of a chained angel in red. ‘Gythua is on the Crimson Path, and no one in this city can turn him from its end.’

Kai heard the voices, but it seemed they belonged to shimmering ghosts that gathered around him like angels of legend. He remembered tales carved into the pillars of a sunken hall discovered by agents of the Conservatory in the fjord-beds of Scandia that spoke of warrior maidens who carried the souls of the dead to a heroic afterlife of battle and feasting.

He laughed at the idea of warrior maidens coming for him. What had he done to deserve such a gathering? Warm wetness gathered on his cheeks and he reached up to one of the figures, a golden giant limned in a halo of shimmering light.

‘I saw you…’ he said. ‘In Arzashkun. You were in my dreamscape…’

‘I was?’

‘Yes, I mean, I think it was you,’ said Kai, his voice trailing into a whisper as the abuses heaped upon his already weakened body took their toll. ‘I remember thinking you must have a thousand more important things to do than talk to me.’

‘You spoke to me?’ asked the golden figure, his form leaning close.

Kai nodded. ‘You said you wanted to know your future, and that I was the key to understanding it…’

‘You are,’ said the voice, with undisguised interest. ‘And you can tell me of it whenever you are ready.’

‘I will,’ promised Kai, feeling as though his body was becoming lighter by the second. He wondered if that was what these beings were waiting for. Perhaps it was easier to carry him away if he shed his mortal flesh. But there was one thing he wanted to know before they took him up.

‘Why the Outcast Dead?’ he asked. ‘Why did he say it was an appropriate name…?’

Kai felt the golden giant’s amusement and was content to know he had managed to please him.

‘When this was a world of gods, men believed that if they prayed hard enough and lived their lives according to laws handed down by mad prophets they would go to a wonderful afterlife upon their death. They would be buried in ground deemed sacred, and at the appointed hour they would rise up to take their place in this miraculous dimension. But those who these prophets deemed outcast were not afforded such bounty, and the bodies of the unwanted, the forgotten and the invisible were sunk in the liminal spaces of the world. No markers. No headstones. Quicklime and a shallow pit. Forgotten and discarded. They were the Outcast Dead, and so are we.’

‘I see…’ said Kai, happy to have learned this last fact.

Another shape appeared beside the golden angel, and his aura was like a shadow, half-glimpsed and elusive. To Kai’s fading senses it was beautiful, more akin to something animal instead of a man.

‘Can he continue?’ asked this lupine shape.

‘No,’ answered Kai. ‘I think I’m done.’

Fresh wetness rolled down his cheeks, and a finger gently pressed it away.

‘Am I crying?’ asked Kai.

‘No,’ said the lonely warrior. ‘You are dying.’

The hunters fan out through the ruined tenement block, searching for any sign of where the escapees might have gone. Golovko paces like an angry bear, cursing the World Eater for realising they were observing them, while his Black Sentinels overturn broken pieces of furniture and ragged bundles of sodden cloth.

Saturnalia kneels beside a wet patch of cracked permacrete and dabs his fingers in it, his golden armour glistening with moisture and the red horsehair plume of his helm hanging limply at his shoulder.

‘They were here, damn it,’ snarls Golovko. ‘We just missed them. Someone must have seen them, so we need to get out there and break some heads until someone starts talking.’

Saturnalia and Nagasena share a wordless glance that says all that needs to be said of Golovko’s outburst. Water cascades through the cracked slabs, and the sound is soothing as Nagasena moves through the space as though stalking a prey creature. His legs are slightly bent, his head cocked to one side as if listening for a telltale crackle of a breaking twig or the rustle of leaves.

Nagasena looks towards the torn entrance to the block, sliding down to sit with his back to the wall. He leans to the side and rests his head on the floor, feeling the last lingering trace of warmth from a human body.

‘We’re on a damn hunt, and you’re lying down,’ snaps Golovko. ‘They were just here, and we need to get out there to find them.’

Nagasena ignores him and the Black Sentinel moves towards him.

‘Are you listening to me?’ says Golovko.

Kartono steps between them, and Golovko’s face crumples in disgust. ‘Get away from me, freak,’ he says.

‘Call him that again and I will let him take you to task for your rudeness,’ says Nagasena.

‘I’d like to see him try.’

‘Ulis Kartono was trained by the Clade Masters of the Culexus,’ says Saturnalia, as though speaking to a child. ‘You would be dead before you could raise your rifle, Maxim Golovko.’

Golovko spits a wad of saliva, but turns away, unwilling to rise to Saturnalia’s challenge.

The Custodian kneels beside Nagasena and follows the direction of his gaze.

‘Kai Zulane lay here?’ he asks.

‘Yes,’ agrees Nagasena.

Saturnalia nods. ‘I found blood by the entrance. Mortal blood, still wet.’

‘It is Zulane’s,’ says Nagasena, reaching beneath a pile of tumbled blocks of permacrete that fell from the roof an indeterminate time ago. His fingers encounter crushed fragments of stone and dust, but then he feels the cold touch of metal and smooth glass and pulls out the still-wet remains of a pair of augmetic eyes.

Saturnalia smiles as Nagasena holds them up, the thin cables dripping with bio-oils and optical fluids.

‘How did you know?’

‘Asubha tore out Zulane’s eyes here, and he is left-handed,’ says Nagasena. ‘It seemed logical he would discard them in this direction.’

‘So you have his eyes,’ asks Saturnalia. ‘Does that help us find him?’

Nagasena stands and pats his robes free of grey dust. ‘Possibly. It is a breadcrumb that neither you nor I can follow, but perhaps others can.’

‘The telepaths?’

‘Just so,’ says Nagasena, as Saturnalia beckons Athena Diyos and Adept Hiriko to enter the ruined tenement block. Both women are frightened, and they do not want to be here: on the hunt or in the Petitioners’ City. It is an environment that is utterly alien to them, and Nagasena wonders if he will have to coerce their cooperation.

Athena Diyos looks up at the sagging roof, imagining it looks ready to collapse, while Adept Hiriko stares straight ahead, moving like an automaton. The death of her fellow neurolocutor hangs around her neck like a lead weight, but this hunt has no time for compassion. Nagasena hands the torn augmetics to Hiriko and she grimaces in revulsion.

‘Are those Kai’s?’ asks Athena Diyos.

‘They are,’ says Nagasena, and Hiriko places them in Athena’s outstretched manipulator arm as though they are poisonous serpents. The astropath brings the torn augmetics closer to her face, studying them intently.

‘And what do you expect us to do with them?’

‘I had hoped you would be able to use them in locating Kai Zulane,’ says Nagasena. ‘I understand from your file that you do not specialise in the arts of the metron, but you have some talent in that regard.’

‘Once maybe,’ says Athena. ‘But ever since the destruction of Phoenician I haven’t been able to read things like I used to. You’d be better off getting one of the metron from the City.’

Nagasena cannot tell for sure if she is lying – the corrugated scar tissue of her face contorts her features in unusual ways that conceal the usual telltales of a liar. He decides she is bluffing and says, ‘You will attempt to make a reading on those augmetics or there will be dire consequences.’

‘If you’ve read my file then you know my psychological profile says I don’t respond well to threats.’

‘I did not mean for you,’ says Nagasena. ‘I meant the Imperium.’

‘You’re being melodramatic,’ she says, but Nagasena sees the crack in her reluctance.

He kneels beside her silver chair and places his hand over hers. The skin does not feel like skin – it has the unpleasant hairless texture of artificially grown flesh.

‘Do you think we are hunting Kai Zulane?’ he says. ‘We are not. We are hunting seven of the most dangerous men imaginable. Men who have killed hundreds of loyal soldiers of the Imperium. Kai is their prisoner, and they mean to take him to Horus Lupercal. You understand? Whatever it is that Kai knows, the Warmaster will know. None of us know for sure what Mistress Sarashina placed within Kai’s mind, but do you really want to risk it falling into the hands of our greatest enemy?’

‘Is that really true?’

Nagasena stands and draws his sword in one smooth motion. The blade glitters in the half-light of the ruined tenement, the blade an arc of polished silver and its black and gold wrapped handle wound in soft leather and copper wire. Athena and Hiriko’s eyes widen at the sight of the weapon, but Nagasena has not drawn it with violence in mind.

‘This is Shoujiki,’ he says. ‘Master Nagamitsu crafted it for me many years ago, and its name means honesty in a dead tongue of a long lost land. Before this sword came to me, I was a fool and a braggart, a man of low morals and wicked temperament. But when Master Nagamitsu presented this blade to me, its truth became part of me, and I have never spoken falsely or dishonoured its name since. I do not do so now, Mistress Diyos.’

He sees the acceptance of his words as she nods slowly and transfers the eyes from her augmetic arm to her other hand.

‘Hiriko,’ she says. ‘I’ll need your help.’

‘Of course,’ says the neurolocutor. ‘What do you need me to do?’

‘Place your hands at my temples and focus your mind on everything you learned from Kai, every dream you shared, every word you spoke. All of it.’

Hiriko nods and does as Athena says, standing behind her and placing a hand on either side of her head. Athena’s fingers close over Kai’s plucked eyes and she rolls the glassy orbs dextrously around in her palm like a conjurer. Dried spots of blood smear her skin, and Nagasena wonders if that will help her divine Kai Zulane’s location.

‘How long will this take?’ asks Saturnalia.

‘As long as it takes,’ says Athena. ‘Or perhaps you would like to try?’

Saturnalia does not reply and Athena’s head sinks to her chest as she enters a nuncio trance. Her breathing deepens, and Nagasena moves away, feeling a sudden chill as her mind reaches out into invisible realms he cannot even begin to understand.

While Golovko’s men kick down nearby doors and barrage any inhabitants they find with questions, Nagasena casts his eyes around this squalid refuge, and feels nothing but remorse for the fate that has seen these men condemned as traitors.

Nagasena scabbards his sword as Saturnalia approaches. Though their goals are aligned, it is never wise to bear an unsheathed blade in the presence of a Custodian.

‘How could the World Eater have known they were being observed?’

Nagasena shakes his head. ‘I do not know, but in the end it is irrelevant. These men are Space Marines and I am coming to realise that we have underestimated them.’

‘How so?’

‘They were created to be the ultimate warriors, and it is easy to assume they are nothing more than gene-bred slayers whose only purpose is to kill and destroy. But they are far more than that. Their minds have been enhanced beyond mortal comprehension and their brains work in ways I will never be able to replicate.’

‘Are you saying you cannot hunt them?’ asks Saturnalia.

Nagasena allows himself a small smile. ‘No, nothing of the sort. For all their genhancements and physical superiority, they are still men at heart.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What is the biggest factor slowing their escape?’ asks Nagasena.

‘They are carrying a wounded man,’ replies Saturnalia. ‘The Death Guard will not survive much longer. They should have left him at the crash site. To risk everything by keeping him with them is illogical.’

‘Would you leave an injured Custodian behind?’ asks Nagasena.

‘No,’ admits Saturnalia.

‘They are still bound by their oaths of brotherhood,’ says Nagasena sadly. ‘They are acting with honour. Not behaviour I would expect from traitors.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘And you were mistaken,’ says Nagasena, ignoring Saturnalia’s question and pointing to the spattered trail of blood on the ground. ‘They are carrying two wounded men.’

Atharva battered a fist on the painted metal door and waited for an answer. The building was a ragged lean-to built at one end of a refuse-cloaked square partially sheltered by tattered canvas awnings. A number of narrow streets led here, and ironwork crows were perched on many of the surrounding buildings, staring impassively down into the square like mute observers. Though they remained out of sight, Atharva knew at least a hundred pairs of eyes were upon them.

‘Just kick the damn door down,’ snapped Tagore, and Atharva saw the pulse of the veins at the side of his head. The neural-implants grafted to his skull fizzed in the cold air, and Atharva wondered what damage it was wreaking in the delicate mechanisms of his brain.

‘We need this chirurgeon to help us,’ said Atharva. ‘How well disposed towards us do you think he will be if we break down his door?’

‘You say that like I give a damn,’ replied Tagore, planting a foot in the centre of the shutter and battering it down with a single kick. The door crashed down inside a room dimly lit by a low-burning lantern of crude oil and animal grease. The smell of chemicals, hung herbs and spoiled meat that wafted out was potent.

Asubha and Kiron dragged Gythua inside and deposited him on a wide cot bed that groaned in protest at his weight. Subha carried Kai over one shoulder, the astropath’s body looking limp and already dead. His aura was dull and listless, but Kai was not beyond saving and it would blaze fully once again.

‘Put him there,’ said Atharva, indicating a wooden bench pushed up against one wall.

Subha gently lowered Kai to the bench and Atharva took a moment to survey their surroundings more fully. The room was made small by their presence, yet from what Atharva had seen of the Petitioners’ City, he suspected it would be considered expansive.

The walls were hung with bundles of dried herbs, mouldering shanks of salted meat and curling sheets of paper depicting chemical structures and anatomical references. A number of tables sagged under the weight of heavy books and trays of rusting surgical equipment. Cupboards with cracked glass fronts contained hundreds of unmarked bottles of fluids, powders and crushed tablets. A bank of bio-monitors sat in the corner next to a petrochemical generator, though Atharva doubted any of them still worked.

‘Are you sure this is the place?’ demanded Tagore. ‘Looks like just another shitty house to me. You really think a chirurgeon lives here?’

‘The signs all pointed to this place,’ said Atharva, lifting a dusty copy of The Book of Prognostics from a nearby table. He saw other works by Hippocrates, scattered without thought for any system he could discern, amongst the writings of Galen of Pergamon, Abscantus and Menodotus. These were ancient texts and priceless beyond imagining, though woefully outdated.

‘What signs?’ asked Kiron, wiping a smear of resin from his shoulder. ‘How can people live like this?’

‘People live how they must,’ said Atharva. ‘And the signs were there for anyone with eyes to see them. This is a Serpent House.’

‘A what?’ said Subha.

‘A place of healing,’ explained Atharva, pointing to a mural on the door Tagore had kicked down. The door was in two pieces, but it was still possible to make out the image of a bearded man clad in a long toga who bore a staff with a coiled snake entwined along its length.

‘Who is that supposed to be?’ asked Kiron.

‘He is Aesculapius,’ said a hoary old voice from the shadows. ‘An ancient deity of the Grekians. Or at least he was until your ugly bastard friend put his bloody foot through him.’

A lumpen shape rolled from a previously unseen bed at the back of the room, and Atharva now picked out the reek of the man’s unwashed body and sweat from the cocktail of chemicals hanging in the air. Tagore was on the man in an instant, lifting him up by the neck and pinning him against the wall. Killing fury lit his eyes as his fist pulled back to strike.

‘Don’t kill him, Tagore!’ cried Atharva.

Tagore’s fist slammed into the wall, breaking it apart and sending a cloud of brick dust and fragments falling to the floor.

‘Who are you?’ he demanded.

‘You’re in my house,’ snapped the man. ‘I’m the chirurgeon, who do you think I am?’

‘Tagore, let him go,’ said Atharva. ‘We need him.’

Reluctantly, Tagore lowered the man and pushed him towards Atharva.

‘My apologies, medicae,’ said Atharva. ‘We mean you no harm.’

‘Are you sure he knows that?’ said the man, glaring at the World Eater and rubbing his neck. ‘And who in the name of the Emperor’s balls are you?’

Wearing only a thin nightshirt, the medicae was an unimpressive sight. From the smell of him and the look of his eyes, he was a drunk and an imbiber of narcotics, but the signs had led them to this place, and there was likely to be no other practitioner of the healing arts close enough to be any use.

‘I am Atharva, and we need your help. What is your name, friend?’

‘I am Antioch, and I’m not your friend,’ said the chirurgeon. ‘It’s too bloody late for this kind of thing, so what are you doing here, breaking my door down and insulting my housekeeping? I’m too drunk and messed up to do anything for you just now.’

‘This is a matter of life and death,’ said Atharva.

‘That’s what they all say,’ snapped Antioch.

‘He meant yours,’ said Tagore, looming over Antioch’s shoulder.

‘Threatening me?’ said Antioch. ‘Good one. That’s the way to get my help.’

Atharva took the diminutive chirurgeon’s shoulder and led him towards the bench and table where Gythua and Kai were laid out.

‘What’s wrong with them?’ asked Antioch, barely looking at them.

‘I thought you were the chirurgeon,’ snapped Kiron. ‘Can’t you tell?’

Antioch sighed and said, ‘Listen, tell Babu Dhakal if he wants to keep injecting his men with growth hormones and messing with their gene-code then he can count me out of helping him get them back on their feet. He’s going too far now.’

‘Babu Dhakal? I don’t know who that is,’ said Atharva.

Antioch snorted and looked up at him sharply, as though seeing him clearly for the first time. He peered from beneath bushy eyebrows and through rheumy eyes, studying Atharva and the warriors around him intently.

‘You’re not from the Babu?’

‘No,’ agreed Atharva. ‘We are not.’

Antioch came closer and craned his head upwards, the reality of his situation now penetrating the fug of whatever narcotic haze was enveloping his brain. He rubbed his eyes with a stained sleeve and blinked furiously as though clearing it of grit.

‘You are of the Legiones Astartes…’ he breathed, looking from warrior to warrior.

‘We are,’ said Atharva, guiding him towards Kai. ‘And he needs your help.’

‘Help Gythua first,’ said Kiron.

‘No,’ stated Atharva. ‘Gythua can wait, Kai cannot.’

‘Gythua is a Legionary,’ protested Kiron. ‘You would put a mortal above him?’

‘I would put him above you all,’ said Atharva, before turning to Antioch. ‘Now heal him.’

Antioch nodded, and Atharva almost felt sorry for the man, woken from a stupor to find angry giants demanding that he save two lives that hung by the slenderest of threads. Even a man as disoriented at Antioch could sense that his life hung on those same threads.

To his credit, the chirurgeon rallied well, taking a deep breath and fetching from the table opposite a tray of surgical instruments that probably harboured more bacteria than a Biologis gene lab. He bent over and began to examine Kai’s bloody eye sockets.

‘Augmetic scarring. Input jacks torn out, and bruising around the ocular cavity,’ said Antioch, dabbing away the sticky blood on Kai’s cheeks with the sleeve of his nightshirt. He removed a sealed package from a bottle-filled cupboard and tore the sterile lining to expose its contents. Without looking up from his work, Antioch laid a number of smaller packets on Kai’s chest and with a care and precision Atharva hadn’t expected began to apply counterseptic gel to the inside of Kai’s eye sockets before packing them with what smelled like a mix of saline and petroleum gauze.

‘How did this happen?’ asked Antioch. ‘It wasn’t surgical, but it’s neat.’

‘I pulled his eyes out,’ said Asubha.

Antioch glanced up, as though trying to work out whether Asubha was joking.

He shook his head and sighed. ‘I won’t ask why. I get the feeling I won’t like the answer.’

‘The people hunting us were using them to spy on us,’ said Subha.

Antioch paused and bit his lip. ‘So who hunts seven warriors of the Legiones Astartes?’ He held his hand up before Subha could answer. ‘That’s a rhetorical question, by the way. I definitely won’t like that answer. Now be quiet all of you if you want this man to live.’

Opening a suture kit, Antioch began sealing Kai’s sockets with deft strokes of the needle, working swiftly and methodically on each eye. Sweat like bullets popped on his forehead, and Atharva could see the effort it was taking for the chirurgeon to maintain his composure and steady hand. With the sutures complete, Antioch wrapped a bandage around Kai’s head that, miraculously, appeared to be free of stains.

‘How is it a man of your skill comes to live in a place like this?’ asked Atharva as Antioch tied the bandages off and stood upright with a groan of relief.

‘None of your damn business,’ was the curt answer. ‘So, are you going to tell me what else is wrong with him or do I have to guess?’

‘He was drugged and repeatedly psychically interrogated by skilled neurolocutors.’

‘Of course he was,’ sighed Antioch, wiping his hands on his chest. ‘And I suppose that helping you with these men makes me an accomplice in whatever it is you’re mixed up in, yes?’

‘Perhaps,’ said Atharva. ‘That depends. Save their lives and we will be gone. No one will ever know we were here.’

Antioch gave a bitter bark of a laugh. ‘Half the city will already know you are here, and the other half will know by morning. You think seven warriors like you can move through a city like this without attracting notice? However superhuman you are, you’re not that skilled.’

‘He’s right,’ said Tagore. ‘We should not linger here.’

‘We’re not leaving before he treats Gythua,’ said Kiron.

‘I didn’t say that,’ snapped Tagore angrily. ‘Don’t put words in my mouth.’

Antioch ignored the altercation and rummaged through his cupboards to concoct a hybrid potion of chemicals from a series of unmarked bottles. He filled a cracked hypo with the end result and pressed the needle against the loose flesh of Kai’s arm. Before depressing the injector trigger, the wiry chirurgeon looked up at Atharva.

‘You’re a son of a bitch, you know that?’ said Antioch.

Atharva chuckled. ‘I have fought alongside the Vlka Fenryka,’ he said. ‘You are going to have to do better than that if you are trying to offend me.’

‘I’ll keep that in mind,’ he said, and depressed the trigger.

Kai drew in a sucking lungful of air and his back arched with an audible crack. His muscles spasmed and a geyser of noxious fluids erupted from his mouth. Kai danced the dance of the hanged man on the bench, his heels rattling on the wood as his body evacuated itself from every orifice.

‘I’d turn him on his side if I were you,’ said Antioch, stepping away from the convulsing astropath. ‘There’s some clean-ish clothes in the back he can have once he’s done shitting and puking. He’s going to need them.’

Tagore grabbed Antioch and said, ‘The astropath will live, yes?’

Antioch’s face crumpled in pain at the World Eater’s grip. ‘The chem-purgatives should clean out his system, yes, but he’s so exhausted and worn thin it’s a miracle he’s still alive.’

‘Good enough,’ said Tagore, pushing Antioch towards the Death Guard. ‘Now do the same for our brother.’

Gythua was barely breathing, his body having suspended most of its surface functions to divert its energies into restoring itself. Atharva had seen Space Marines survive wounds more hideous than these, but without the facilities of an apothecarion to hand, he suspected Gythua had been broken beyond repair.

Antioch bent over Gythua and, using the same instruments with which he had examined Kai’s wounds, he made a thorough inspection of the bloody craters and valleys torn in the Death Guard’s pallid flesh. From his expression, Atharva’s worst suspicions were confirmed.

‘This man should be dead,’ said Antioch at last. ‘For starters, this wound here looks like it’s ruptured his heart, and I think both his lungs have collapsed. And I don’t even recognise the organ this wound’s damaged. He’s been shot by energy weapons and there’s enough bullets in him to equip an entire squad of Army grunts.’

‘Are you saying you can’t save him?’ demanded Kiron.

‘I’m saying I can’t even begin to guess at the anatomy beneath what’s left of his skin,’ said Antioch. ‘He’s beyond my help. Beyond anyone’s help would be my guess, but I think you all know that.’

‘Damn you,’ said Kiron, pressing the chirurgeon against the wall of his home. ‘You have to do something. Do you realise who this is? This is Gythua of the Fourteenth Legion. He was the first Lantern Bearer, one of the original Seven! This man saved my life when we drove the Ringers from the equatorial ridges of Iapetus. He carried the Emperor’s banner and planted it in the dark heart of Cassini Regio at the fall of Saturn. Do you understand?’

Atharva and Asubha prised Kiron’s fingers from the chirurgeon’s neck before his anger and grief overcame his intellect.

‘Kiron, let go,’ said Atharva. ‘Killing him won’t help Gythua.’

‘He has to save him!’

‘Nothing can save Gythua now,’ said Asubha. ‘He has walked the Crimson Path.’

Kiron stepped away from Antioch, his fists balled and a perfect rage boiling behind his grey eyes. He stared in hatred at the cowering chirurgeon, but even as the need to break something threatened to turn his anger into murder, Severian called out a warning from his watchful position at the doorway.

‘Save your anger, brothers,’ he said. ‘A better target for it comes this way.’

‘Our hunters?’ demanded Tagore. ‘Who is it, Imperial Fists or Legio Custodes?’

The Luna Wolf shook his head.

‘I don’t know who they are,’ replied Severian, looking back out of the door into the square beyond, ‘but they are armed and they are definitely not Imperial.’

Eighteen

Dark Imperium
The Battle of Crow’s Court

All of it was here, all of the echoes of truth retraced, all the wasting light and the garbled words of a million madmen. It seethed in the whisper stones, swirling around the length of the tower like caged electricity that must soon earth or else burn away the fool who has summoned it into being.

Evander Gregoras swayed on the point of exhaustion, his body wasted and his flesh drained of life and vitality. He had not eaten or slept in days, the obsession to unlock the truth of what had come to this tower driving him to that liminal space between devotion and madness. A lifetime’s worth of text in touch-script filled the air, a static explosion in a library held aloft in the aetheric energy that engulfed the chamber.

His books, his scrolls and every single note he had ever assembled on the Pattern were here, and the letters shimmered as though embossed with luminous gold script. The walls of the chamber oozed light into the motionless forest of pages, and as each word bled into the air it was lifted from the page before dissipating into the aether.

As each one vanished, Gregoras subsumed its meaning and assimilated it into his understanding of the Bleed. He knew that his greatest work was dying around him, but it was a small sacrifice to unlock the elusive meaning that danced around him.

The lattice above him pulsed with light, but it was light that neither illuminated nor warmed the skin. It was a gateway to the nightmares of a city of telepaths, stored and tapped and dissected like an anatomist with a hitherto unknown form of life. The worst of the nightmares were gone, purged by the diligent and methodical work of his cryptaesthesians, but the core of it… ah, the heart of the nightmare… he had kept that here, wrapped in such complex allegory, tangential metaphors and obscure symbolism that only one as versed in the Pattern as he would ever know it for what it was.

This was what Kai Zulane knew – this was the secret he carried within him that only he could understand. This was what Sarashina had thought was so important that it could be trusted to no one else. Nothing of such power could pass through the Whispering Tower without leaving a bruise, and if you knew how and where to look you could reform the source of that impact.

Like a forensic chirurgeon reconstructing a murder weapon from the damage done to the victim, so too was Evander Gregoras assembling the billion fragments of information that had been hidden within the mind of the tower’s greatest failure.

Its pieces were cohering, but too slowly…

He had seen tantalising hints… word shapes, expressions that meant nothing to him, but which were redolent with the promise of grim darkness in a far future…

An age of war in a lightless millennium…

Great Devourer…

Apostasy…

The Blood of Martyrs…

The Beast Arises…

Bloodtides…

Times of Ending…

Over everything, he heard the dolorous sound of marching feet, of armies going to war in an endless parade of slaughter and mayhem that could only end with the extinction of all things. These armies would never surrender, never forgive and would only ever lay down their weapons when death claimed them at the end of war itself.

Was Kai foreseeing the end of the Imperium? Had he seen the ultimate victory of Horus Lupercal? Gregoras did not think so, for these words and images were heavy with age, dusty and burdened with a weight of history that could only be earned after the passage of millennia. Little more than fleeting glimpses, they nevertheless left Gregoras in a state of dreadful terror, like a man trapped in a nightmare of his own making and from which he knows he cannot ever awaken.

‘The truth once learned, cannot be unlearned,’ had been a favourite aphorism of his teachings, but oh, how he wished it could be…

Each piece was a horror of war and destruction, of stagnation and doom. As his notes dissolved around him, they fed new morsels of information into his head in an unstoppable and inevitable torrent. It was coming faster now, each unlocked piece of the puzzle adding a piece to another, larger image, until the entirety of what had come to Terra in the wake of Magnus’s foolhardy intrusion began to emerge.

It rose from the patterns of light like a black colossus, a destiny and a nightmare all in one. His mind tried to grasp the full scale of what he was seeing, but it was too large, too monumental and too terrifying to ever be contained within one fragile mortal skull.

Gregoras screamed as he saw a dark world of teeming insects, clad in black and grey, toiling endlessly in darkened hives and subterranean nests of squalor and misery. This was a world where nothing ever changed, nothing grew and nothing of worth was created. And yet, this was a world where such horror was not seen for the nightmare it was, but as a victory, as an existence to be celebrated and rendered magnificent.

Gregoras could not imagine how the insects could bear to live such terrible lives, never knowing the glory that could be theirs, never understanding that the horror of their daily lives was unendurable. Not only did the insects exist in such stagnation, they actively fought to preserve it. Inexhaustible armies poured from this world to drive back invaders and outsiders, but instead of reforging their destiny anew on the worlds they claimed, they willingly recreated the lightless hell world from which they had come.

He knew this world, just as he knew that these insects were not insects at all.

The Pattern filled the chamber, pouring in with geometric accumulation of all that had passed through the whisper stones and the minds of the dead and dying. Gregoras could not bear it all, falling to his knees as the last of his books burned to ashes in the fire of truth that consumed them and poured into his mind.

‘Take it back!’ he yelled. ‘Please, take it back! I don’t want this, I never wanted to see this…’

Gregoras fell forward onto his hands and knees as the dream of the red chamber and its fallen angels filled his mind with all its awful truth. He saw everything Sarashina had seen, the clash of blades, the offer and the sacrifice, the honour and the evil. He saw it all in a blink of an eye that went on for an eternity.

And towering over it all was a seated giant atop a monstrous throne of gold, a nightmare engine constructed by lunatics and sadists. The giant’s flesh was withered and long dead, a living corpse of metastasised bone and endless agony. Invisible light poured from this giant, and the torment behind his eyes was the purest pain in the world because it was borne willingly and without complaint.

‘Oh, no…’ whispered Gregoras, as the last fraying thread of his sanity began to unravel. ‘Not you, please not you…’

The giant turned its gaze upon him, and Evander Gregoras screamed as he finally understood how this nightmare had come to be.

Atharva ran to the doorway of Antioch’s lean-to, searching the darkness for sign of the new arrivals. They weren’t hard to find, and were making no effort to conceal their approach. Every third man carried a lit torch, and the flames glittered on the ironwork crows that stared down at the unfolding drama with sculpted indifference.

Atharva counted thirty of them, tall men armoured in contoured plates of beaten iron shaped into a form that was at once familiar and yet subtly different. It took a moment for Atharva to recognise the shapes before him, for their armour was an almost perfect representation of a form of war plate no longer manufactured, a style that had not been worn in battle for hundreds of years and existed now only in revisionist history books and the dusty annexes of the Gallery of Unity. They carried guns that Atharva recognised as a kind he had once touched in that same gallery, weapons that were no less deadly for their age.

Anger touched Atharva, for the appearance of this rabble ran roughshod over the honour of the Legions, whose appearance was openly mocked by such accoutrements of war.

That they were not Legiones Astartes was immediately apparent, but who were they?

‘Who in the name of all that’s perfect are they?’ asked Kiron at his shoulder.

‘I do not know,’ said Atharva, ‘but I intend to find out.’

He closed his eyes and let his mind drift beyond the confines of this squalid refuge. He felt the glaring mind presences of the men, recognising the touch of bio-manipulation in their inflated physiques and gnarled genetic code. They were freaks, abominations against humanity crafted by a geneticist with no sense of beauty or the natural workings of a body. The Pavoni bent the base codes of physicality, but even they were bound by the fundamental building blocks of life.

These men had been twisted out of shape and pressed into a mould, the functionality of which their bodies could never hope to maintain. To a man, they were dying, but didn’t realise it. Their minds were a crude mesh of aggression, fear and incipient psychosis. On any civilised world, they would have been locked away for the rest of their lives or handed over to the Mechanicum to be wrought into the most basic servitor class.

Yet in the centre of these men was a very different figure, a man whose flesh had likewise been augmented beyond the human norms, but whose body displayed none of the crudity employed in enhancing the others. This man’s physique was a work of genius, in the same way that the printing press had been a work of genius in comparison to handwritten manuscripts. And just as the printing press of old had been superseded by more powerful solutions, so too had this man’s biology…

Atharva briefly touched his mind, and recoiled at the jagged, razor edges he found in its construction. Like volcanic rock formed from the heat and pressure of the deep earth’s forces, it was glassy and scarred, shaped to one purpose and one purpose alone: to conquer a world.

The vitrified scarring on this man’s mind was familiar and it took a moment only for Atharva to recall where he had seen such rude psycho-cognitive engineering.

Within the mind of Kai Zulane.

He pulled back as he sensed the rampant hostility of the man’s unconscious mental defences, all belligerence and vicious barbs – like an attack dog guarding a threshold. There would be no dominating this man with the Athanaean arts. Atharva opened his eyes, looking at the bulky, crudely-armoured form of the man with a new sense of wonder and awe.

‘To destroy you would be to run amok with a flame-lance in a library of priceless tomes.’

‘What did you say?’ growled Tagore.

‘These are no ordinary men,’ said Atharva. ‘Do not underestimate them.’

Tagore shook his head. ‘They will die like ordinary men,’ he spat. ‘Thirty warriors? I will kill them myself and we will be on our way.’

Atharva placed a restraining hand on Tagore’s shoulder and tried not to flinch when the World Eater gave him a ferocious grimace of bared teeth and wild aggression. The implants on the back of his skull hummed with activation, and Atharva saw the danger inherent in the habitual use of such augmetics. Tagore was as much a prisoner of its siren song of violence as Angron had ever been of the slave culture said to have trained him in the arts of slaughter. He wondered if Angron appreciated the irony of enslaving his own men.

‘Antioch!’ shouted the man with the vitrified mindscape. ‘The men in there with you, send them out. Babu Dhakal wants them.’

‘Shitting, bastard hell,’ hissed Antioch. ‘It’s Ghota. Throne help me, we’re dead.’

Atharva spun to face the cowering chirurgeon. ‘Who is he, and who is this Babu Dhakal?’

‘Are you serious?’ said Antioch, crawling on all fours to get beneath the heaviest table in his shack. ‘Babu Dhakal is trouble, like you hadn’t brought enough to my door already!’

‘And Ghota?’

‘The Babu’s attack dog,’ said Antioch, trying to put as much heavy furniture between himself and the open doorway as possible. ‘You don’t mess with Ghota if you know what’s good for you. People who do end up hung from hooks in pieces.’

Asubha hauled the man from his hiding place and said, ‘Who is Dhakal, a local governor? The authority around here?’

Antioch gave a strangled laugh. ‘Sure, you could say he’s the authority around here. He’s a gang lord, one of the last left standing after the Blood Eagle War. He controls all the territories from the Crow’s Court to the Petitioners’ Arch and south to the Dhakal Gap. And if you know what’s good for you, you’ll do as Ghota says.’

‘I’m getting tired of waiting, Antioch!’ shouted Ghota, his voice a gurgling rasp of cruelty.

Tagore and Subha flanked the doorway, and Severian peered through a gap in the ill-formed brickwork. Atharva moved to where Kai lay in a cursive pose of misery, his body a reeking mess of vomit and expelled matter. Thankfully, he was unconscious, though he shivered with micro-tremors as his body purged itself.

Atharva heard the metallic clatter of weapons being readied to fire and swept Kai into a protective embrace as thirty heavy calibre rifles opened fire.

A sawing blitz of gunfire tore into Antioch’s surgery, ripping through the adobe bricks and sheet metal like a las-cutter through flesh. Woodwork splintered, brickwork was pulverised to powder and the air filled with ricochets, flying glass and smoke. The noise was deafening, thunderous and intended to intimidate as much as cause harm.

In a bygone age and against any other targets it might have worked.

Atharva looked up as the barrage ceased, his enhanced sight easily picking out the forms of his fellows. None had been hit by more than a passing sliver of glass or bullet fragment.

Severian grinned and said, ‘What’s your plan, son of Magnus?’

As much as he loathed resorting to violence, Atharva knew this was no time for subtlety or clever words. Only one plan of action would see them through this encounter.

‘Kill them all,’ he said.

Tagore grinned. ‘First sensible thing you’ve said all day.’

The World Eaters charged from the smoke and dust of gunfire, sprinting with ferocious speed that seemed impossible for such enormous figures. Atharva watched them run with the morbid fascination a man might reserve for watching one alien species destroy another.

Tagore hit first, his fist punching clean through the breastplate of a warrior with twin topknots of black hair and a forked beard. Even as the man fell, Tagore stripped his dead hands of his weapon and turned it on the men standing beside him. The armour Ghota’s men wore looked like Thunder Armour, but that resemblance did not stretch to its protective qualities. Thudding recoil and enormous muzzle flare obscured Atharva’s view for the briefest second, but in its wake he saw three men cut virtually in two by Tagore’s point-blank discharge.

Subha and Asubha charged at his flanks, the energised blades torn from the spears of the dead Custodians flickering with blue light. Subha’s charge was the hammerblow of pure force, scattering men like the detonation of a grenade. Though the blade he bore was more akin to a greenskin’s cleaver, Asubha wielded it with the precision of a skilled dissector of the dead. Two men went down, headless, a third and fourth with their innards tumbling to the square in looping ropes of wet meat. A fifth lost both his arms and collapsed with a gurgling scream of pain.

Atharva emerged from the bullet-riddled remains of Antioch’s surgery with Kai held at his side. He maintained a kine shield around the astropath’s body as he watched his brothers of the Crusader Host take Ghota’s men apart. Argentus Kiron loosed relentless bursts of plasma from a position of cover in the ruined façade, incinerating heads with every shot and sheltering from the desultory return fire coming his way.

Yet for all the initial damage wreaked by the Outcast Dead, these men were not ordinary mortals who would be cowed by such horrific slaughter. They had been engineered by unknown means to disregard fear or compassion, and fought back with instinctive brutality. Tagore took a round to the side and roared in pain as a shower of bright blood erupted from the wound.

The World Eater shouted, ‘In the name of Angron!’ and put a fist through the shooter’s face, spinning on his heel to unleash a hail of fire into his scattering enemies. Two men were punched from their feet by the impacts. A knot of warriors armed with pistols and long, gutting knives surrounded Asubha stabbing and cutting with manic fury. Atharva saw one blade cut deep into the meat of Asubha’s bicep, but the World Eater twisted aside before the blow cut the tendons of his shoulder.

He spun low and cut his attacker in two, darting like a striking snake as he stabbed and thrust with his butcher’s blade. Tagore appeared at his side and shot two men in the back before they could turn to face him. The World Eaters sergeant laughed, revelling in the murderous ballet that raged around him, and didn’t see the blow that drove him to his knees.

Ghota loomed above Tagore, a heavy hammer of wrought iron spinning around his body as though it weighed nothing at all. Another crashing hammer blow thundered into Tagore’s side, sending him spinning through the air as he struggled to rise. Subha threw himself at Ghota, but a backhanded jab of an elbow smashed into his jaw and sent him flying.

‘Kiron!’ shouted Atharva, edging towards one of the narrow alleyways that led from this battleground. ‘Kill that one!’

A bright lance of plasma energy spat from the ruins, but either Ghota had heard Atharva’s shout or some preternatural sense warned him of imminent danger, and he swayed aside from the killing blast. The warrior of Fulgrim’s Legion vaulted from the ruins and ran towards Ghota, outraged that this upstart had ruined his perfect record of headshots.

Asubha thrust with his crackling blade, but Ghota turned it aside and sent a thunderous left hook into his attacker’s jaw. Asubha staggered, his face a mask of shock more than pain. A pistoning jab crashed into Asubha’s face, then another, and the warrior reeled as Ghota swung his hammer in a killing arc.

Atharva dropped his kine shield long enough to lift his mind into the lower Enumerations where he could draw on the basic abilities of the Pyrae. With a surge of thought, Atharva hurled a searing bolt of crackling fire towards Ghota. It struck the hulking warrior before he could deliver the deathblow to Asubha, and the cloak at his shoulders erupted with flame.

Ghota roared in pain and tore the blazing cloak from his armour as a fluid shape emerged on the flank of the attackers. The ghostly form of Severian slid from the shadows like a wolf on the hunt. He killed without warning, leaving dead bodies in his wake and moving before his victims were even aware of their danger.

Kiron threw aside his discharged plasma carbine and swept up Subha’s fallen blade. The edge no longer crackled with energy, but Kiron did not care. His dirty white hair flowed behind him as he attacked like a swordsman forced to fight with an unbalanced blade.

‘You might look like us, but you’re just a pathetic copy,’ snapped Kiron.

Ghota laughed. ‘Is that what you think?’

A duel between a swordsman and a longer-reaching hammer was an unequal contest, but these were no ordinary combatants. As Severian killed with impunity and the World Eaters regrouped in the midst of a furious short-range firefight, Kiron darted and wove between slashing blows of Ghota’s hammer. His skill was prodigious, his footwork flawless and his attacks launched with no hint of their target, and Atharva saw him working towards a decapitating strike.

It was a battle of contrasts: precisely controlled skill and perfect discipline against raw violence and hunger for the kill. In the end, there could only be one victor. Kiron ducked beneath a killing arc of the hammerhead and thrust his blade into the narrow gap between Ghota’s breastplate and pauldron. The blade stabbed deep into the meat of the man’s body, yet he merely grunted as the blade went in. Ghota shoulder barged Kiron, gripping him by the neck and smashing his forehead into the exquisitely handsome features of his opponent.

Kiron’s nose and cheeks broke, transforming his beautiful face into a shattered mask of fractured bone and squirting blood. Atharva paused in his escape, stunned at Kiron’s wounding. Though gunfire and screams still filled the square, the tempo of the battle seemed to drop as the combatants on both sides watched so perfect a warrior fall.

Ghota’s hammer looped around in a bludgeoning curve, and smashed into Kiron’s shoulder, destroying muscle and flesh and driving down into his chest in a welter of broken ribs. Atharva heard the crack of bones and felt a sympathetic spasm of pain as Kiron’s agony flared in the aether.

Kiron spat a torrent of blood, staring defiantly at his killer.

Ghota’s hammer swung around to crush Kiron’s skull to splinters.

A heavy fist caught the enormous weapon’s haft on its downward arc, a pale, sepulchral hand streaked with blood and empowered with all the strength bred into the warriors of Mortarion’s deathly Legion.

Gythua sent a right cross into Ghota’s jaw, the blow hitting home like a pile-driver and sending Babu Dhakal’s warrior reeling.

‘That’s my friend you’ve killed,’ he barked.

Atharva knew the Death Guard should not be alive. He should already be dead, a bled-out corpse cooling on Antioch’s bench. He shouldn’t even have survived the crash, but here he was, unyielding even unto the end. Ghota shook his head and spat blood, taking in the measure of his opponent and giving a crooked-toothed smile.

‘You’re as good as dead,’ said Ghota.

‘That’s as may be,’ agreed Gythua. ‘But come near my friend again and your blood will run with mine on this fine ground.’

‘I’ll kill you before you can raise a fist,’ Ghota promised.

‘Then come on, boy,’ snapped the Death Guard. ‘You’re boring me already.’

Gythua’s talk was brave, but Atharva knew he could not hope to stand against Ghota. Determination and honour were keeping Gythua on his feet, but they wouldn’t be enough against so formidable an opponent.

The sounds of gunfire slackened, and Atharva saw that as Kiron and Ghota had fought, Severian and the World Eaters had finished the battle. Bodies littered the square, some cut open, some headless and some simply torn limb from limb. The odds in this battle had turned on their head, and Atharva saw that understanding in Ghota’s blood-red eyes.

The warrior raised his hammer and spat on the ground before walking away from the slaughter. No one raised a weapon against him, though Tagore had one of his victim’s guns held across his bloodied chest. Subha and his twin watched Ghota go with a mixture of wary respect and anger, while Severian swept up a fallen rifle and scanned for fresh threats.

With Ghota out of sight, Gythua sank to his knees beside Kiron, his head dropping to his chest as the life ebbed from him. Atharva ran to his side and laid Kai down on the ground in time to catch the Death Guard as his indomitable strength finally gave out. He held the dying warrior and wiped blood from his ghostly pale face.

Beside him, Kiron coughed a frothed mouthful of blood and struggled to speak through the pain of his shattered body. The World Eaters gathered round, bloodied angels of death come to witness the final moments of their fallen brothers. Even Antioch had emerged from the wreckage of his home to see something most mortals would never see through the entire span of their impossibly brief lives: the death of a Space Marine.

‘Didn’t… think… you’d get a… glorious death… all to… yourself, did you?’ hissed Kiron with gurgling, breathy effort.

‘Can’t say I was… trying… to die at all,’ replied Gythua. ‘Damn fool of you to go up against that big bastard.’

Kiron nodded. ‘He made me miss, and… I never… miss…’

‘I won’t tell,’ said Gythua, and the last of his life bled out.

Kiron nodded and put a hand on Gythua’s shoulder before letting out a rattling cough that stilled his breath. Atharva watched the light of his aura fade to grey and bowed his head.

‘They are gone,’ he said.

‘They died well,’ observed Tagore, one hand pressed to his side where he had been shot.

Asubha knelt beside the two dead warriors and closed their eyes.

‘Their Crimson Path is ended,’ said Subha.

Tagore looked over at Atharva and aimed his gun at Kai. ‘You still think the astropath is worth this?’

‘More than ever,’ said Atharva with a nod as Severian emerged from the shadows with a weapon held at his shoulder.

‘Good enough,’ said Tagore, lifting the weapon as though seeing it for the first time.

Severian turned his gun around in his hands and said, ‘You know what these weapons are, who they were made for?’

‘Yes,’ replied Atharva. ‘I do.’

‘I heard they were dead,’ said Tagore. ‘I thought they all died in the last battle of Unity.’

‘So history tells us, but apparently Terra holds its own secrets,’ said Atharva, staring at the thin wisp of fumes drifting from the hissing patch of ground where Ghota had spat.

‘History can wait,’ said Severian. ‘Our hunters will not, and this will draw them to us like moths to a flame.’

‘What about Gythua and Kiron?’ asked Subha. ‘We can’t just leave them here like this.’

Atharva turned to Antioch. ‘Do you have any suggestions, chirurgeon?’

‘I can’t keep them,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I’m in enough trouble as it is.’

‘No, but as chirurgeon in a place like this, you must be aware of places where dead bodies can be taken.’

Antioch looked up, and whatever caustic reply was forming on his lips remained unspoken as he saw the deadly earnestness in Atharva’s eyes.

‘Best you can do is to take them to the Temple of Woe,’ he said. ‘There’s an incinerator there if you don’t want the bodies picked clean by daybreak.’

‘The Temple of Woe?’ asked Atharva. ‘What is that?’

Antioch shrugged. ‘A place where folk that don’t want their dead left to rot take their bodies. They say it’s run by a priest, if you can believe that. I hear he’s some madman who lost his mind and thinks that death is something you can appease with prayers.’

‘And how would we find this place?’

‘It’s a few kilometres east of here, built into the foot of the scarp you can see over the roofs there. You can’t miss it, there’s dozens of statues carved into its walls. Leave your friends at the feet of the Vacant Angel, and they’ll be done right.’

Atharva’s psychic senses flared at Antioch’s words, and the memory of his recurring vision returned with all the clarity of a lucid dream.

A haunted mausoleum, a stalking wolf and the towering statue of a faceless angel…

Nineteen

Enemy Emperor
Night is falling
Execution

Kai felt warmth on his face and a cool breeze caressed his skin with fragrances of glittering oceans, long grasses and exotic spices designed to inflame the senses. He wanted to open his eyes, but some lingering anxiety made him keep them shut for fear that this precious moment of peace might be snatched away from him.

He knew he was dreaming, and the realisation of that did not worry him unduly. The life he had left in the waking world was one of pain and fear, emotions he did not have to face in this state of limbo. Kai stretched out his senses, hearing the soft sighing of water on a beach, the rustle of wind through high treetops and the emptiness of space that can only be felt in the greatest wildernesses.

‘Are you going to make your move, Kai?’ asked a voice that came from right in front of him. He knew the speaker instantly: the golden figure he had pursued through the marble cloisters of Arzashkun. Hesitantly, he opened his eyes, surprised for some reason that he could do so.

He sat on a wooden stool before a polished regicide board on the shores of the lake beyond Arzashkun’s walls. The game was underway, and the silver pieces were arranged before Kai, the onyx ones laid out before a tall figure clad in long robes of deepest black. His opponent’s face was hooded, but a pair of golden eyes glittered deep in the blackness within. Embroidered words in fine black thread were stitched into every seam and fold of the fuliginous robes, but Kai couldn’t read them, and gave up trying when the figure spoke again.

‘You have come a long way since last we spoke.’

‘Why am I here?’ asked Kai.

‘To play a game.’

‘The game’s already begun,’ pointed out Kai.

‘I know. Few of us are granted the privilege of being present for the beginning of events that shape our lives. One must look at the board one is presented with and make of it what one can. For example, what do you see of my position?’

‘I’m not much of an expert on regicide,’ admitted Kai, as his opponent pulled back his hood to reveal a face that shimmered in the haze of sunlight that danced through the waving leaves of this oasis. It was a kindly face, a paternal one, yet there was a core of something indefinable, or perhaps undefined, behind that mask.

‘But you know the game?’

Kai nodded. ‘The Choirmaster made us play it,’ he said. ‘Something about making us appreciate the value of taking the proper time to make a decision.’

‘He is a wise man, Nemo Zhi-Meng.’

‘You know him?’

‘Of course, but look at the game,’ insisted his opponent. ‘Tell me what you see.’

Kai scanned the board, seeing that a number of the pieces were hooded, making it impossible to ascertain their loyalty. From what he understood of the game’s complexities, it appeared there could only be one outcome.

‘I think you’re losing,’ said Kai.

‘So it would appear,’ agreed the figure, drawing the hood from one of the pieces, ‘but appearances can be deceptive.’

The revealed piece was a Warrior, one of nine remaining to onyx, rendered as an ancient soldier in gleaming battle plate.

‘One of yours,’ said Kai.

‘Then make your move.’

Kai saw the revealed piece had been pushed forward as part of an aggressive opening, but it had been left unsupported by its fellows. Kai moved his Divinitarch from a nearby square and took the piece, placing it on the side of the board.

‘Did you mean to sacrifice your Warrior?’ asked Kai.

‘A good sacrifice is a move that is not necessarily sound, but which leaves your opponent dazed and confused,’ said the figure.

‘I was told that it is always better to sacrifice your opponent’s pieces.’

‘In most cases, I would agree, but real sacrifice involves a radical change in the character of a game, which cannot be effected without foresight and a willingness to take great risks.’

And so saying, the figure swept his Fortress down the board and toppled Kai’s Divinitarch. The piece in the figure’s hand glittered in the sunlight, seeming to shift from black to silver and back to black.

‘The sacrifice of a Warrior is most often played for drawing purposes,’ said the figure with a sad smile. ‘Against the very strongest players it can prove to be quite useful, and one of the advantages of playing so risky a gambit is that the average opponent knows little of how to defend against it.’

‘What if you’re not playing an average opponent?’ asked Kai. ‘What if you’re playing someone just as clever as you?’

Kai’s opponent shook his head and crossed his arms. ‘If you allow timidity to guide your play then you will never achieve victory, Kai. All you will find are new ghosts to fear. Too often you allow the fear of that which your opponent has not even considered to keep you from greatness. That is the truth of regicide.’

Kai looked down at the board, enjoying this moment of calm in the pain-filled nightmare his life had become. That it was a temporary fiction made it no less real at this point, and Kai had no intention of rushing to embrace the madness of his waking life.

‘Do I have to go back?’ he asked, moving his Templar forward.

‘To the Petitioners’ City?’

‘Yes.’

‘That is up to you, Kai,’ said the figure, repositioning his Emperor. ‘I cannot tell you which path to choose, though I know the one I would wish you to take.’

‘I think the warning I have is for you,’ said Kai.

‘It is,’ agreed the figure. ‘But you cannot tell me yet.’

‘I want to,’ said Kai. ‘If you are who I think you are, can’t you just, I don’t know, lift it from my mind?’

‘If I could, do you not think I would have done so?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘I have seen a great many things, Kai, but some secrets are hidden even from me,’ said the figure, indicating a handful of hooded pieces that Kai was sure hadn’t been there a moment ago. ‘I have watched this moment many times and replayed our words a thousand times, but the universe has secrets it refuses to reveal until their appointed hour.’

‘Even from you?’

‘Even from me,’ said the figure with a wry nod.

Kai took a deep breath and rubbed his eyes. The skin around them was irritated and sore.

‘The Choirmaster always said regicide was about truth,’ said Kai as they took turns to move their pieces across the board.

‘He was right,’ said the figure, moving his Emperor another square forward. ‘No fantasy, however rich, no technique, however masterly, no insight into the psychology of your opponent, however deep, can make regicide a work of art if it does not lead to the truth.’

Despite Kai’s averred lack of skill in regicide, the game appeared to be balanced in neither player’s favour, though he had more pieces remaining. After the opening salvoes and the mystery of the middle game, it was clear the endgame was in sight. Both players had lost a great many pieces, but the lords of the board were coming into their own.

‘Now we come to it,’ said Kai, moving his Empress into a strong position to trap his opponent’s Emperor. In the early stages of their game, Kai’s Emperor bestrode the board with a confident swagger, while his opponent’s had remained steadfastly in defence, but now the master of onyx drew nearer the fighting line.

Their pieces jostled for position, and Kai had a growing sense that he had been lured into this attack, but he could see no way his opponent could win without the ultimate sacrifice. At last, he made a confident move, sure he had the onyx Emperor boxed in by his cardinal pieces.

Only when the robed figure moved his Emperor boldly forward did he realise his error.

‘Regicide,’ said his opponent, and Kai saw with growing admiration and shock how deftly he had been manoeuvred into baring his neck to the executioner’s blade.

‘I don’t believe it,’ he said. ‘You won with your Emperor. I thought that almost never happens.’

His opponent shrugged. ‘During the opening and middle game stage, the Emperor is often a burdensome piece, as it must be defended at all costs, but in the endgame it has to become an important and aggressive player.’

‘It was a bloody game,’ Kai pointed out. ‘You lost a great many of your strongest pieces to bring my Emperor down.’

‘Such is often the way with two equally skilled players,’ said the figure.

‘Do we play again?’ asked Kai, reaching for the pieces lost in the game.

The figure reached over and took hold of Kai’s wrist. The grip was firm, unyielding, and Kai sensed strength that could crush his bones in an instant.

‘No, this is a game that can only be played once.’

‘Then why is the board ready to play again?’ asked Kai, seeing that all the pieces were restored to their starting positions without him having touched them.

‘Because there is another opponent I must face, one who knows every gambit, every subtlety and every endgame. I know this, because I taught him.’

‘Can you defeat him?’ asked Kai with a mounting sense of unease as a shadow moved on the edges of the oasis.

‘I do not know,’ admitted the figure. ‘I cannot yet see the outcome of our meeting.’

The robed figure looked down at the board, and Kai saw the pieces had moved once more, into a convoluted arrangement that defied interpretation. He looked up and saw his opponent clearly for the first time, seeing the burden of an entire civilisation resting upon his broad shoulders.

‘How can I be of service?’ asked Kai.

‘You can go back, Kai. You can go back to the waking world and bring me the warning Sarashina gave you.’

‘I’m afraid to go back,’ said Kai. ‘I think I might die if I do.’

‘I fear that you will,’ agreed the figure.

Kai felt a cold knot in the heart of his stomach, and the fear that had consumed him since the Argo returned with a sickening lurch. The sky darkened, and Kai heard muttering voices raised in argument from somewhere far distant.

‘You’re asking me to sacrifice myself for you?’

‘No sacrifice is too great for the scalp of the enemy Emperor,’ said the figure.

Cold mist gathered around the many benches bearing laboratory equipment, and the hum of generators could be heard beyond the insulated walls of the low-ceilinged chamber. Banks of equipment that would not look out of place in the halls of a Martian geneticist whirred as centrifuges spun clinking vials of raw materials, incubators nursed gestating zygotes and vats of nutrient-rich liquid fostered the growth of complex enzymes and proteins.

That such a well-equipped laboratory existed on Terra was not surprising, but that it was to be found in the heart of the Petitioners’ City was nothing short of miraculous. It was akin to finding a fully functioning starship buried in the ruins of Earth’s prehistory.

Babu Dhakal tended to a silver incubation cylinder in which a chemical soup of elements bubbled with life. The clan lord’s armour had dulled with condensation, and the dying flesh of his face was limned with hoarfrost. He no longer felt the cold, as he no longer felt pain or heat or pleasure. One by one, the joys that made existence such a gift were dying.

Just as he was dying.

Dhakal’s former master had wrought him to be faster, stronger and more powerful than any of the feral barbarian gene-sept warriors that claimed fealty over humanity’s birthrock, a soldier to drag their world back from the anarchy into which it had fallen. Those had been golden days, when the eagle and lightning banner had marched before unstoppable armies of Thunder Warriors.

Battles had lasted weeks on end, with body counts in the millions and duels of titanic warlords that sundered mountains and split continents. Those victories were now dismissed as lurid hyperbole, and historians now refused to believe that such clashes of arms could possibly have been fought. Why their worthless hides were not flogged for this dull-witted blindness was beyond him, but in his heart of hearts he knew that this dreary new age could not sustain such legends without scoffing at the sturm und drang of those heady, bloody days.

Dhakal remembered toppling the Azurite Tower with his bare hands, and wondered what the scuttling little remembrancers that documented this shining bauble of an Imperium would make of the tales he might tell.

The machine before him chimed and Babu Dhakal turned from reveries of his glory days to the task at hand. The silver steel tube vented coolant gasses and a ribbed tube gurgled as nutrient fluids drained away. The upper half of the cylinder hissed open, revealing a gauzy mesh cushion, upon which lay a glistening organ of raw, fresh-grown meat. A web of artificial capillaries fed the organ hyper-oxygenated blood, but patches of necrotic black veined the organ like a diseased lung.

‘Not another one’ whispered Babu Dhakal, his hands curling into fists. ‘I am trying to correct what cannot be corrected.’

He closed the incubation cylinder gently, taking deep breaths to calm the rising fury within his chest. He supposed he should be used to such failures, but he was not a man to whom such acceptance came easy. Would he have fought through five battle legions of Grinders had he been such a man? Could he have cast down the Hammer Halo of the Iron Tzar had he been a man to accept failure?

He gripped the edge of the bench in his thick hands, buckling the metal with his furious disappointment. Babu Dhakal wanted to sweep the equipment from the benches and vent his towering fury on the laboratory that had defied him for so long, and only with the greatest effort did he manage to restrain himself. Like everything else in his body, impulse control was eroding and he was a hair’s breadth from becoming no better than the barbarian people thought him to be. Yes, he had killed men since the bitter day of Unity, yes he had yoked a city’s worth of people beneath his rule, but had he not done that with a greater purpose in mind?

A flashing red light accompanied the rattling of a decompression shutter behind him. Only one other had permission to enter this place of forgotten wonders and miracles, and Babu Dhakal turned as Ghota entered with a downcast expression on his face. Even his eyes, so red with blood, were hooded with failure.

‘You return in defeat,’ said Babu Dhakal, the word ashen and alien on his tongue.

‘Yes, my subedar,’ said Ghota, dropping to his knees and lifting his head to expose the cabled veins of his neck. ‘My life is yours to end. My blood is yours to spill.’

Babu Dhakal stepped down from the platform upon which he had been working and drew a long dagger with a serrated blade from a thigh scabbard. He rested the killing edge on the pulsing artery in Ghota’s neck, and toyed with the idea of driving it home just to feel the warm wetness of the man’s blood.

‘Back in the day I would have taken your head without a thought.’

‘And I would have welcomed it.’

Babu Dhakal sheathed his dagger and said, ‘This is a new age, Ghota, and there are few enough of us left alive to continue the old ways,’ he said. ‘For now, I have need of your heart remaining within your chest.

Ghota stood and balled his fist upon his chest, a salute that had now fallen out of favour, but which still held meaning for warriors born in a forgotten time.

‘Subedar,’ said Ghota. ‘Command me.’

‘The men you took with you?’

‘All dead.’

‘No matter,’ replied Babu Dhakal. ‘They were but failed experiments. Tell me of these “Space Marines”. What are they like?’

Ghota sneered and squared his shoulders, though he had no right to do so. ‘They are not our equal, but they are warriors fit to bear the eagle.’

‘And so they should be,’ said Babu Dhakal. ‘They stand on our shoulders to achieve greatness. Without us, they would not exist.’

‘They are but pale shadows of what we were,’ said Ghota.

‘No, they are the next step in the evolution of the superwarrior – it is we who are pale shadows of what they are. Yes, we are stronger and hardier than them, but our genetic legacy was never meant to last. Old Night may be over, but for us a new night is falling. We were not built to live beyond Unity, did you know that?’

‘No, my subedar.’

‘Our genes were always flawed but I cannot decide whether that was deliberate or simply ignorance. I hope for the latter, but I suspect the former. This world’s master is careless with his creations, and I wonder if his primarchs know that when their task is done they will be cast aside in favour of the mortals in whose name they fight. Like the angels of old, I fear they will not take the idea of such rejection well.’

Ghota said nothing, the reference to the ancient text lost on him.

‘How many warriors did you face?’ asked Babu Dhakal.

‘Seven, but two of them are now dead, my subedar,’ said Ghota. ‘Only five remain.’

‘You killed those two yourself?’

‘One of them, the other was dying anyway.’

‘Then we must find them, Ghota,’ said Babu Dhakal, lifting a metal device from a nearby bench and affixing it to the upper face of his gauntlet. A whirring series of needles, blades and surgical tools snapped from the mountings with a hiss of cryo-cooled air, and Babu Dhakal smiled.

‘We are dying every day, but with their genetic material I may yet find a way to reverse the slow decay of our bodies. You understand the significance of this?’

‘I do, my subedar,’ said Ghota.

Babu Dhakal nodded, and asked, ‘Where are these five warriors now?’

Ghota said, ‘In the east. I have men watching them. Word will be sent.’

‘Good,’ said Babu Dhakal. ‘We will do this ourselves, my jamadar. You and I. We will rip the bleeding progenoids from their living flesh and we will have that which the Emperor has denied us.’

‘Life,’ said Ghota, savouring the feel of the word.

Moonlight pools in the open square, bleaching it of colour, but no light from the night sky can dull the vivid redness of the blood splashed around its haphazard mix of cobbles, flagstones and bare earth. Nagasena scans the rooflines for any lingering threat, though he does not expect to meet any real resistance here. At least not from their prey. Ironwork crows festoon the eaves and ridges of the buildings, and refuse piles at the edges of the square.

Debris from a daytime market, he thinks.

Tossed in with the rest of the day’s refuse are a host of dead bodies, at least twenty-five, maybe more. Each one has been killed without mercy, shot or eviscerated with guns, blades and bare hands.

‘This is Space Marine killing,’ he says, and Saturnalia nods in agreement.

Hiriko and Athena stare in open-mouthed horror at the damage wrought upon these men, amazed how disastrously a human body can be broken into pieces. They are not used to physical violence, and to see the sheer visceral capabilities of the Legiones Astartes has shocked them to their core.

‘It is hard to see, is it not?’ asks Nagasena, not unkindly.

Adept Hiriko looks up, her face pale and her lips dry.

She nods and says, ‘I know what the Space Marines are, but to see just how thoroughly they can dismantle another man’s body is…’

‘Terrible,’ finishes Athena Diyos. ‘But it is what they were created to do.’

‘That and so much more,’ says Nagasena.

Hiriko looks at him in puzzlement, but says nothing.

Athena Diyos has led them to this square, following the fading, intangible thread of Kai Zulane’s agony, and though it is hard for her to aid his hunters, her loyalty is first and foremost to the Imperium. She trusts Nagasena’s vow of honesty, though he is having a harder time in justifying this hunt to himself.

He already knows the Choirmaster’s explanation of why Kai Zulane needed to be found was a lie, but that does not offer him any comfort. Especially in light of what Nagasena heard Atharva tell his fellow escapees through the optic feed. Saturnalia and Golovko dismiss the words of traitors, but Nagasena knows that just because a man is labelled a traitor does not make him a liar.

If Kai Zulane does know the truth, has Nagasena any right to suppress it?

He rebuilt his life on the basis of truth being the rock upon which all things stood, and he had vowed on the ashes of his old ways never to hide from the truth or allow others to obscure it. Nagasena wonders how that will go at the end of this hunt…

‘The bodies are still warm,’ notes Saturnalia. ‘We are close.’

‘Who do you think they were?’ asks Athena, grimacing in distaste as Kartono eases past her, making sure he does not touch her. Nagasena’s bondsman pulls a dismembered arm from the wet pile of torn meat and wipes blood from a bicep that still twitches with residual electrical activity. A tattoo of crossed lightning bolts has been added to with an artful representation of a bull’s head. Nagasena knows that bovine animals were once sacred to the people that lived in this region, but his knowledge of the symbol’s significance ends there.

‘This is Babu Dhakal’s clan marking,’ says Kartono.

‘Is that supposed to mean something to us?’ snaps Hiriko. Her hostility is borne of nothing Kartono has done, but simply of his very nature. He has long grown used to the unreasoning hatred of telepaths, and lets her anger wash over him.

‘He is a criminal,’ says Kartono. ‘The clan master of a gang that runs most of the Petitioners’ City. Whores, food, drugs, weapons, you name it, none of it moves without the Babu’s say so.’

‘So how did these men fall foul of our prey?’ wonders Nagasena.

‘Who cares?’ states Maxim Golovko. ‘They’re traitors to the Imperium and if they want to kill some crime lord’s men then so much the better.’

‘Look at these men, Maxim,’ Nagasena urges him. ‘These are not normal men.’

‘They’re dead men,’ says Golovko, as though that is the end to the matter.

Saturnalia takes Golovko by the arm and holds him fast. The master of the Black Sentinels is a position of great respect, but even he must bow to the power of the Legio Custodes. The Custodian dwarfs Golovko, and his gold armour lends weight to his authority.

‘Listen to what Yasu Nagasena has to say,’ suggests Saturnalia.

Golovko nods and shrugs off his hand. ‘So what’s so special about them?’ he asks.

‘Look at their size,’ says Saturnalia.

‘They’re big, so what?’

‘I know it is hard to tell, but I would estimate that most of these men were as tall as the men we are hunting,’ says Nagasena, imagining these body parts reassembled into human form. ‘And that crossed lightning bolt tattoo was once the symbol of the Thunder Warriors who fought at the side of the Emperor in the earliest wars of Unity.’

‘What are you saying?’ asks Athena Diyos. ‘That these are those same warriors?’

Nagasena shakes his head. ‘No, they are long dead, but I believe someone has replicated at least part of the process involved in transforming a mortal man into such a warrior.’

‘Impossible,’ says Saturnalia. ‘Such technology is the domain of the Emperor alone.’

‘Clearly not,’ replies Nagasena. ‘And the question we now face is how these men came to run afoul of our prey? I do not believe it to be simple happenstance. I believe they were seeking them out. And that means that whoever engineered these men is clearly aware of the nature of the men we hunt.’

He looks down at the bodies and adds, ‘If not their capabilities.’

‘In other words, we are not alone in our quest,’ says Saturnalia, reaching the logical conclusion of Nagasena’s thought.

Golovko shakes his head and says, ‘Then we’re wasting time,’ before leading the Black Sentinels into the square. They move like the professional soldiers they are, and Nagasena follows them out, knowing immediately where he needs to go as his eyes alight on the smouldering remains of a lean-to structure that has been shredded by heavy calibre gunfire.

‘That’s bolter damage,’ says Saturnalia, levelling his spear and squaring his shoulders.

Nagasena nods, unlimbering his long rifle and unsnapping the safety as he moves towards the ruined structure. He sees a host of battle indicators strewn on the ground, broken blades, torn cloth and brass shell casings that are large enough to have been ejected from a bolter, which makes them far older models than are used today.

Blood splashes and footprints show signs of a furious battle, but the scavengers who picked this place clean have obscured any tracks or clues to their prey’s route. He moves to the edge of the ruins, detecting a fragrant smell he recognises as burning qash. For the briefest moment, Nagasena remembers losing himself in a qash haze, sprawled in the silken dragon houses of Nihon with a gun in one hand and an urge to turn it on himself.

He shakes the moment loose and raises his rifle as he sees a thin-boned man seated on a tall stool, the only piece of furniture to have escaped the furious barrage that tore his home apart. He smokes a thin-stemmed pipe amid a storm of broken glass and splintered wood. Fragrant smoke drifts from the pipe’s wide bowl, inviting and redolent with forbidden pleasures.

‘You are a chirurgeon,’ says Nagasena.

‘I am Antioch,’ says the man, his manner distracted and his voice slurred. ‘I am having a smoke. Would you like to join me?’

‘No,’ says Nagasena.

‘Come on,’ laughs Antioch. ‘I see the way you’re looking at the pipe. You are a lover of the resin, I can always tell.’

‘Once maybe,’ admits Nagasena.

‘Always,’ sniggers Antioch as Saturnalia and Golovko pick their way through the rubble.

‘They were here, weren’t they?’ says Nagasena.

‘Who?’

Golovko backhands the man from his stool, and he crashes down into the shattered pieces of a toppled cabinet. Glass pricks his skin, but Antioch seems not to care. He spits blood and does not protest when Golovko hauls him to his feet by his soiled nightshirt.

‘The traitor Space Marines,’ snarls Golovko. ‘They were here, we know they were here.’

‘Then why did he ask?’ replies Antioch.

Golovko hits the man again, and Nagasena says, ‘Enough. The man is smoking the Migou resin – he will not care or feel it if you beat him.’

Golovko seems unconvinced, but leaves the man alone for now. Saturnalia lifts an overturned table that is sticky with glossy blood. He bends to sniff the table’s surface and nods.

‘Space Marine blood,’ he says.

‘They came to you for help,’ says Nagasena. ‘What did you do for them?’

Antioch shrugs and bends to retrieve his fallen pipe. He gently blows on the bowl, and it glows a warm, inviting orange. He takes a draw and exhales a number of perfect smoke rings.

‘Yes,’ he says, ‘they were here, but what do I know about their anatomy? I couldn’t do anything for the big man. He was dying before I even touched him.’

‘One of them is dead?’ says Saturnalia. ‘Who?’

Antioch nods dreamily. ‘I think they called him Gythua.’

‘Death Guard,’ says Golovko with a nod. ‘Good.’

‘What about Kai Zulane?’ asks Saturnalia. ‘They had an astropath with them too.’

‘Is that what he was?’ replies Antioch. ‘Fella had no eyes, right enough. Never thought he was an astropath. I thought they all lived up in the City of Sight?’

‘Not this one,’ says Nagasena. ‘He was badly hurt. Does he still live?’

Antioch smiles and shrugs, as though the matter is no longer of concern to him. ‘I patched him up, sure. Cleaned up his eyes and packed the wound with sterile gauze. For all the good it’ll do him.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that he’s dying,’ snapped Antioch. ‘Too much trauma, too much pain. I’ve seen it before in the Army, some boys just give up when they can’t take any more hurt.’

‘But he is still alive?’ presses Nagasena.

‘Last I saw of him, yes.’

‘What happened here?’ asks Saturnalia. ‘Why did those men outside come here?’

‘The Babu’s men? I don’t know, but they wanted them to come out and surrender.’

Nagasena nods, his suspicion that Babu Dhakal’s men knew the Space Marines were here and what they were now confirmed. In a place like this it would be hard to keep anything secret, but what could make a man like that actively seek to engage Space Marines in combat? Surely such a man would know how deadly these warriors would be? Why risk confrontation unless they had something he needed enough to risk the lives of so many men?

‘But they didn’t surrender,’ says Antioch, shuddering at the memory, even through the bliss of a narcotic haze. ‘Never seen anything like it in my life, and hope I never do again. I watched them take the Babu’s men apart like they were simpletons. Six men against thirty and they killed them as if it was nothing at all. Only Ghota walked away alive.’

‘Ghota? Is he one of Babu Dhakal’s men?’

‘He is that,’ agrees Antioch. ‘Big son of a bitch, almost as big as the men you’re after. And if you don’t mind me saying, I don’t think you want to find them. Even though there’s only five of them left alive, I reckon you don’t have enough men to put them down.’

‘Five?’ says Nagasena.

‘Ghota killed the white-haired one,’ says Antioch, and Nagasena shares an uneasy look with Saturnalia. The unspoken question hangs between them like a guilty secret. What kind of mortal could kill a Space Marine?

‘Where are they now?’ demands Golovko. ‘Where did they go after you aided the escape of traitors?’

‘Ah, now I’ve been helpful to you, but I don’t think I want to tell you anything else,’ says Antioch. ‘Doesn’t seem right.’

‘We are servants of the Imperium,’ says Saturnalia, looming over the fragile chirurgeon, who looks up at him like a child defying his father.

‘That’s as may be, but at least they were honest,’ says Antioch.

Nagasena steps between Antioch and Golovko before the man can strike him. He beckons to Adept Hiriko and says, ‘Can you find what you need in his mind?’

Hiriko steps gingerly over the wreckage towards Antioch. The man looks at her warily, but says nothing as she places her hands either side of his head.

‘What’s she doing?’ asks Antioch.

‘Nothing for you to worry about,’ Nagasena assures him.

The chirurgeon is not reassured and looks at her suspiciously, a nervous glint in his eye.

‘What is she?’ he asks.

‘I am a neurolocutor,’ says Hiriko by way of explanation. ‘Now be still or this will hurt.’

Antioch stiffens in expectation of pain as Hiriko closes her eyes.

What might the mind of a man in a qash stupor be like? Will it even be possible to lift anything of use from him, or will his mind be like a fortress with its gates lying open and every door left unlocked?

Hiriko does not move for almost a minute, then lets out a powerful exhalation as her hands slip from Antioch’s head. Her eyes are glassy and Nagasena wonders if the effects of the qash have passed into her mind.

‘Oh,’ she says, shaking her head.

‘Did you get anything?’ asks Nagasena.

She nods, still purging the after-effects of delving into Antioch’s mind. The man is fearful now, and Nagasena sees that Hiriko has rid him of the qash haze. Forced to face reality without the comforting curtain of the resin to hide behind, the world is a frightening place.

‘They are going to a place called the Temple of Woe,’ says Hiriko.

‘Do you know where that is?’ Golovko asks her.

Hiriko looks into Antioch’s eyes. ‘Yes. It’s east of here. I know the way now.’

‘Then we don’t need this traitor any more,’ growls Golovko.

Before Nagasena can stop him, the Black Sentinel draws his pistol and puts a bullet through Antioch’s head.

Twenty

Colours and hues
The end of everything good
Kill team

When Kai woke, it was to a surprising lack of pain and an almost overwhelming sensation of relief. He lifted his head, feeling hard edges of metal digging into his belly. The world around him shone with contours of light and shadow, psychic emanations and dead space. It painted a clear portrait of the buildings, streets and space around him, a representation of the world as clear and vivid as any perceived by those with their birth eyes.

‘Stop,’ he said, his voice hoarse and parched. ‘Stop, please. Put me down.’

The juggernaut upon which he was being carried halted, and rough hands lifted him carefully to the ground. A giant clad in burnished plates of metal stood before him, a warrior of enormous proportions made even larger by the crude plates of sheet steel strapped to his enormous frame and the sharp lines of pistols tucked into his belt. A faint golden haze clung to him, like wisps of cloud caught by the trailing wings of an aircraft.

The image sparked a memory of his dreamspace, but the substance of it drifted just beyond reach, though he was sure that something of vital importance had occurred there. He had a vague recollection of a regicide board and a hooded opponent, but he could not yet grasp its meaning.

‘Atharva?’ said Kai, as the cold reality of this world intruded.

‘Yes,’ said the giant. ‘You gave me cause for concern. I did not know if you would live.’

‘I’m not sure I did,’ moaned Kai as he stood on unsteady legs, amazed he could remain upright after so fraught a journey. ‘I feel as if one of you has punched me in the face.’

‘That is not too far from the truth,’ admitted Atharva, looking over at the heavily armoured form of Asubha. The Outcast Dead had changed since last Kai saw them. Armoured in beaten iron breastplates, curved pauldrons and archaic helms, they looked like the barbarian warriors of pre-Unity, the bloodthirsty tribesmen who had ruled Old Earth before the coming of the Emperor. Subha even carried a wooden shield.

Kai had always known his fellow escapees were warriors, but to see them garbed for war was a stark reminder that they were only his protectors because it aligned with their purposes. Should that change, he would be of no more use to them.

‘Where did you get the armour and weapons?’ he asked, seeing the strange array of pistols and blades they carried, enough to equip three times their number.

‘Some very stupid people got in our way,’ said Asubha. ‘But they are dead now.’

Ghosts of light limned each warrior against the darker, iron blacks, steel greys and umber brickwork of the background. He knew them all by their colours and hues: Tagore, Subha and Asubha in angry reds, purples and killing silver; Atharva in gold, ivory and crimson; and Severian shrouded in stormcloud grey and mist. Kai saw Argentus Kiron and Gythua, propped up against a landslip of rock, the last traces of their auras bleeding into the air like warmth from a cooling corpse.

‘We lost Gythua and Kiron,’ said Subha with very real pain. ‘They had one big bastard who knew how to fight.’

‘And we beat him like a whipped cur,’ said Tagore.

‘But he’ll be back,’ said Asubha. ‘Someone like that won’t give up.’

‘So next time we kill him properly,’ snarled Tagore with bared teeth. Kai saw the aura around his skull flare with a shimmer of cold iron, like the yoke of a hound’s master pulling taut. Tagore’s muscles bunched and swelled in anticipation of violence, but the World Eater exhaled loudly and turned away before his control slipped away.

‘Where are we?’ asked Kai, extending his senses.

‘Still in the Petitioners’ City,’ said Atharva. ‘But we are almost at its eastern edge.’

Kai nodded slowly. From the background buzz of thoughts and life, he had known they were still in the Petitioners’ City. Though the pain in his head was intense, it was manageable and he felt curiously liberated at employing his blindsight instead of expensive augmentations. It had been so long since he had used his psychic abilities to navigate and understand the world around him.

The mountains towered above Kai, so vast it seemed as though there was no end to them. Though the peaks were not alive, they had accumulated a wealth of emotion and experience from those who had clambered over their rocky flanks in the painful epochs since they had been thrust from the bottom of an ancient seabed. A haze of permanence hung over the mountains, split by the searing torrent of psychic energy that speared from the hollow mountain to the farthest reaches of the galaxy. Now that the threat of being sent to its nightmarish depths was gone, Kai found its presence curiously reassuring, like the half-heard voice of an old and trusted friend.

Deeper in the city, the air was a heady mixture of sweat, boiling fats, rotten meat, spices and perfumes, but here it was clean, and the winds coming down from the high ranges were refreshing rather than chilling.

Tagore lifted Gythua’s body and slung it over one shoulder, while Asubha lifted Kiron’s body with somewhat more respect for his fallen brother. Severian turned and set off towards an opening in the rock that led towards a sheer scarp of rock climbing almost vertically to a rampart crowned peak.

‘Come on,’ said Atharva. ‘It is just a little farther.’

‘What is?’ said Kai.

‘The Temple of Woe,’ said Atharva.

The Temple of Woe turned out to be something altogether less sinister that its ominous name had suggested. Built from what looked like a thousand mismatched pieces of variegated marble, it was a formidable structure that rose high above its nearest neighbours. Situated towards the end of a narrowing canyon, its façade was graced with numerous handsome statues depicting weeping angels, mothers holding their stillborn children and skeletal harbingers of death.

Reapers skulked in alcoves, while mourners worked in polished granite clustered around biers of fallen heroes and ouslite pallbearers took the dead to their final rest. Any one of the rival Masonic guilds that had raised the glory of the palace would have dismissed its haphazard beauty with a glance, but it possessed a grandeur and welcoming air the greatest structures of the palace could only dream of.

The road leading towards the temple was festooned with offerings – children’s dolls, picts of smiling men and women, wreaths of silken flowers and scraps of paper embossed with poetic eulogies and heartfelt farewells. Hundreds of people knelt in supplication, gathered in weeping groups around drum fires placed along the length of the wide road that led towards heavy iron doors that led within. Oil-burning lanterns hanging from the outside of the temple cast flickering shadows that made the statues dance.

‘What is this place?’ said Subha.

‘A place of remembrance and farewell,’ said Kai.

He felt a tremendous surge of emotion as his blindsight took in the full panoply of conflicting auras that swirled around, within and through the building. Enormous sadness washed over him as the weight of grief that filled the street threatened to overwhelm him.

‘So much loss,’ he said. ‘The sadness and pain, it’s too much. I don’t think I can stand it.’

‘Steel yourself, Kai,’ said Atharva. ‘Grief and guilt are powerful emotions. You know this all too well. You have held yours at bay long enough for this to present no problem.’

‘No, there’s something else,’ he whispered. ‘There’s something in there that’s more powerful that any guilt I’ve ever known…’

Atharva leaned in close, so that only Kai could hear his next words.

‘Say nothing of it,’ warned Atharva. ‘Our lives will depend on it.’

Without explanation, Atharva followed Severian into the canyon, and Kai felt the hostile gazes of the mourners turn on them. Their anger was matched by their fear, and though every one of them looked as if they wanted to hurl some missile or shout an obscenity, none dared move or open their mouth. There was recognition in their anger, but surely that was impossible.

‘Whoever those men were you killed, I think they were known here,’ he said.

‘I think you might be right,’ agreed Atharva as the shutter doors to the Temple of Woe opened with a squeal of rusting bearings. A tall man with wild grey hair and a face that spoke of a life lived in the open emerged from the building. His aura was so choked with guilt that Kai drew up in shock to see someone burdened with a heavier share than his own.

Kai became acutely aware of the hundreds of people pressing in around them. They had been afraid of them before, but they drew strength from this man, and their anger was building moment by moment. The Outcast Dead were powerful, but could they kill so many without being overwhelmed? More to the point, could they stop the mob from killing him?

‘Get out,’ said the man. ‘Didn’t you learn anything the last time you came here?’

‘We are here for the dead,’ said Asubha. ‘We were told this was a place to bring fallen warriors.’

‘You are not welcome here,’ said the man. ‘If you’re looking for the men you left here, you can tell the Babu they went into the fires, same as all the others.’

Tagore said, ‘You will stand aside or you will die,’ and Kai felt the pulsing waves of belligerence surrounding the World Eaters sergeant. His anger was a wild dog, kept in check by only the slenderest of threads, and the device in his skull frayed that thread with every angry beat of its mechanical heart.

Atharva stepped forward, and placed his hand on Tagore’s shoulder. Atharva’s golden light bled into the killing red surrounding the World Eater, and the taut aggression of his posture eased a fraction.

‘We are not here for killing,’ said Atharva, altering his voice so that everyone gathered in the canyon could hear him. Its cadence and tone conveyed a calming effect that diminished the anger radiating from the gathered people. ‘And we are not Dhakal’s men. We took this armour and these weapons from Ghota’s thugs when they attacked us without provocation.’

‘Ghota is dead?’

‘No,’ said Atharva. ‘He fled like the coward he is.’

Kai felt the subtle psychic manipulations Atharva was employing, amazed at the power of the Thousand Sons warrior. Like most people, Kai had heard the rumours concerning the Legion of Magnus, but to see him so casually wield such abilities was astounding.

The grey-haired man took a closer look at the Outcast Dead and his eyes widened as he recognised them for what they were.

‘The Angels of Death,’ said the man. ‘You have come at last.’

The dimly-lit halls of the cryptaesthesians were unpleasant at the best of times, and the Choirmaster’s senses were vibrating like a badly-struck tuning fork. He disliked coming down here, but Evander Gregoras had ignored his every summons and there was work to be done that required him to forgo the study of his precious Pattern.

A trio of Black Sentinels had accompanied him ever since the psychic intrusion of Magnus, though he could not decide whether Golovko had assigned them to protect him or to kill him in the event of another attack. Probably both, he thought.

Black walls of bare stone passed him, feeling like they were pressing in on him with every step he took deeper into the lair of the cryptaesthesians. His head ached from the aftermath of a particularly difficult communion, a garbled message that claimed to be from an astropath attached to the XIX Legion, but had no synesthesia codes verifying its truth. The message spoke of the death of Primarch Corax, and Nemo desperately wanted to believe it was false, a piece of deliberate misinformation designed to demoralise the forces loyal to the Emperor. Though the message had the ring of truth to it, he had chosen not to pass it to the Conduit for fear of the damage it might wreak.

Nor was this the only piece of bad news. Rumours had come from the Eastern Fringe of a cowardly ambush sprung on the XIII Legion around Calth, and two score astropaths had gone mad attempting to make contact with the sanguinary Legions of the Blood Angels. What monstrous fate had befallen the scions of Baal, and why could no word penetrate the Signus Cluster without dreams of madness and slaughter afflicting those who made such attempts?

The astropaths of the City of Sight could not cope with the demands the palace was placing upon them. They had reached breaking point, and the Choirmaster needed the cryptaesthesians of Evander Gregoras to take their places in the choirs if the entire network was to be saved. Sifting the psychic debris or hunting for hidden truths in the background noise of the universe would have to wait.

At last they came to the correct doorway, and the Choirmaster rapped his thin knuckles on the shutter, careful to avoid damaging his ring from the Fourth Dominion. He waited, but no answer was forthcoming, and he frowned. He could feel the presence of Gregoras’s mind beyond the door, and could hear the sounds of paper tearing.

‘Evander!’ he shouted, though he hated to raise his voice. ‘Open the door, I have to speak with you.’

The sounds within the cryptaesthesian’s chamber stopped for a moment then began again, more vigorously than before.

‘I need your cryptaesthesians, Evander,’ said Nemo. ‘I need them to ease the backlog of communications. We simply don’t have enough telepaths, and with the Black Ships not coming through, we’re burning out. Evander!’

Clearly, Gregoras wasn’t about to answer, and the Choirmaster nodded to the sergeant of the Black Sentinels.

‘Open it,’ he said, irritated that the master of the City of Sight could not open every door in his city without the say so of the Black Sentinels. No door was barred to them, and the sergeant waved a data-wand in front of the locking pad. The door slid open, and Nemo stepped into Gregoras’s chambers with a shocked expression as he saw the disarray within.

The nature of the cryptaesthesians’ work made them gloomy and introspective, but given to eccentric behavioural quirks. Gregoras was a cantankerous bastard, but he was the best there was at sifting the Bleed, and thus Nemo had tolerated his obsession with the Pattern. He had seen the work Gregoras had done, but where the cryptaesthesian saw order and meaning, Nemo saw only chaos and happenstance. That work had filled these chambers, every square inch of wall covered with unintelligible script, every shelf bowing under the weight of books, data-retrieval cogitators, statistical compilers, maps, plotters and devices he had devised for the purposes of translating the heartbeat of the universe.

All of it was gone.

Evander sat on a high-backed chair in the centre of the room with a book resting on his lap. One hand pressed down on the cover, as though trying to keep its pages from flying open. The other hung at his side, holding a quill that dripped ink to the floor. The Choirmaster took a hesitant step into the chamber, feeling the pressure of an overwhelming psychic presence in the room that had nothing to do with Gregoras or his own powers.

‘Evander,’ hissed the Choirmaster. ‘Your eyes…’

The cryptaesthesian’s cheeks were streaked with impossible tears, and the traceries of light that filled his body shone from his eyes in a glittering sheen of organic tissue.

Evander Gregoras was no longer blind.

The cryptaesthesian did not answer, his eyes screwed tightly shut and his face contorted with the effort of holding some terrible fear at bay. His entire body was tense, and the tendons stood out as hard edges against the soft skin of his neck. His hands shook on the cover of the book, a black leather-bound Oneirocritica.

‘Evander, what’s happening here?’ he asked.

‘I saw it all,’ said Gregoras, dropping the quill and placing both hands on the cover of the book. ‘It needed me to see and it gave me back my eyes! Throne, it gave me back my eyes so I could see it.’

‘See what, Evander?’ said the Choirmaster. ‘You’re not making any sense.’

‘It’s hopeless, Nemo,’ said Gregoras, shaking his head as though trying to lose some hideous memory. ‘You can’t stop it, none of us can. Not you, not me, no one!’

‘What are you talking about?’ said Nemo.

The Choirmaster took another step forward, crouching in front of Gregoras. A hint of spectral illumination, like starlight reflected on the surface of a river, danced beneath his tightly closed eyelids.

‘It’s all for nothing, Nemo,’ said Gregoras, his chest heaving with sobs. ‘Everything we did, it’s all for nothing. It all stagnates. Nothing really lives, and it’s a slow death that lingers for thousands of years. Everything we strove for, everything we were promised… all a lie.’

The knuckles of his fingers were white with the effort of holding the cover of the Oneirocritica closed, but he removed one hand long enough to reach inside his robes to remove a small calibre snub-nosed pistol.

The Choirmaster stood erect and moved away from Gregoras as the Black Sentinels raised their rifles and took aim.

‘Put the gun down!’ barked the sergeant. ‘Put the gun down or we will shoot you dead.’

Gregoras laughed, and the pain and soul-sick loss in that sound broke the Choirmaster’s heart. What could be so terrible that it could make a man give voice to such a plaintive sound?

‘Evander,’ said the Choirmaster. ‘Whatever has happened here, we can deal with it. We can handle anything. Remember our time on the Black Ships? That boy from Forty-Three Nine? He killed almost everyone on that vessel, but we contained him. We contained him, and we can stop this, whatever it is.’

‘Stop it?’ said Gregoras. ‘Don’t you understand? It’s already happened.’

‘What’s happened?’

‘The end of everything good,’ said Gregoras, putting the pistol in his mouth.

‘No!’ shouted Nemo, but nothing could stop the cryptaesthesian from pulling the trigger.

His head bucked and a thin wisp of smoke emerged from his mouth as his jaw fell open. A line of blood ran from his nose and fell to the cover of the Oneirocritica. In death, Gregoras’s eyes opened, and the Choirmaster saw they were the colour of amber set in rose gold.

The book slid down the dead man’s knees and fell to the ground. The Choirmaster took a deep breath as he felt whatever malign presence had occupied the space between worlds begin to dissipate. He stared at the body of his once-friend, trying to imagine what might have driven so rational a man to suicide.

His blindsight was drawn to the fallen book. The droplet of blood on its cover shone with the last vital energies of the dead man, and the Choirmaster felt an immense sadness as the shimmering life-light faded to nothing.

‘What did you see, Evander?’ he said, knowing there was only one way to find out for sure and wondering if he had the strength to look.

Nemo Zhi-Meng picked up the last Oneirocritica of Evander Gregoras and began to read.

Kai followed the Outcast Dead as they entered the Temple of Woe, feeling the weight of grief and guilt that pervaded the air like invisible smoke. Like the outside façade, the interior of the building was also embellished with funereal statuary depicting mourning in all its varied forms: wailing mourners, deathbed vigils, raucous wakes and dignified farewells. Torches hanging from iron sconces filled the temple with a warm glow, and a circular rim of what had once been the cog-toothed wheel of some enormous Mechanicum war-engine now served as a hanging bed for hundreds of tallow candles.

Groups of mourners gathered in sombre groups on wooden benches, the lucky ones whose turn had come to bring their dead inside. People looked up as they entered, some staring in amazement, others too wrapped in their grief to pay them more than a cursory glance. A man and a woman wept beside a body that lay at the foot of a polished black statue of a faceless, kneeling angel. A faint black haze clung to the sweeps and curves of the angel’s wings, and though it had no features carved into its head, Kai sensed something behind that unfinished surface, like a face half-glimpsed in the shadows.

‘What is it?’ he asked, knowing Atharva was staring at him and would understand his meaning.

‘I suspect it is not one thing, but many,’ said Atharva. ‘The Great Ocean is a reflection of this world, and as the alchemists of old knew: as above, so below. You cannot vent so much grief in one place without attracting the attention of something from beyond the veil.’

‘Whatever it is it feels dangerous,’ said Kai. ‘And… hungry.’

‘An apt term,’ nodded Atharva. ‘And you are right to believe it is dangerous.’

Fear touched Kai, and he said, ‘Throne, should we warn these people to get out?’

Atharva laughed and shook his head. ‘There is no need, Kai. Its power is not so great that it can escape the prison of stone in which it currently resides.’

‘You like my statues?’ said the custodian of the Temple of Woe, closing the doors and coming to join them.

‘They are magnificent,’ said Kai. ‘Where did you get them?’

‘I did not get them anywhere, I carved them myself,’ said the man, holding out his hand. ‘I am Palladis Novandio and you are welcome here. All of you.’

Kai shook the proffered hand, trying to hide his discomfort as he felt the sharp stab of the man’s grief and guilt.

‘It is a mausoleum,’ said Tagore. ‘Why do you gather so much death in one place?’

‘They are images of aversion,’ said Palladis.

‘What does that mean?’ asked Subha.

‘By gathering so many images of death and grief in one place, you rob them of their sorrow,’ said Kai with sudden insight.

‘Exactly so,’ said Palladis. ‘And by honouring death, we keep it at bay.’

‘We bring warriors who have walked the Crimson Path,’ said Tagore. ‘Their mortal remains are not for the scavenger or the vulture to dishonour. We were told you had an incinerator here.’

‘We do indeed,’ said Palladis, pointing to a square arch at the rear of the structure. Kai felt the finality that existed beyond that door, a barrier that couldn’t quite keep the smell of burnt flesh from permeating the air of the temple.

‘We have need of it,’ said Atharva.

‘It is at your disposal,’ said Palladis, with a respectful bow.

Kai watched as the Outcast Dead lifted their fallen brothers between them like enormous pallbearers, the World Eaters bearing Gythua, as Atharva and Severian hoisted Argentus Kiron to their shoulders.

‘The fallen warrior should be honoured in death by his blood-comrades,’ said Tagore, ‘but these heroes are far from their Legion brothers, and they will never see their home worlds again.’

‘This is their home world,’ said Atharva.

‘And we are their comrades now,’ added Subha.

‘We will honour them,’ said Asubha. ‘As brothers of battle, we owe fealty to no brotherhood but our own.’

Kai was surprised to hear such words from these warriors. In the brief time he had spent with them, he had not thought them close, but these words spoke of a bond that ran deeper than he would ever know, a bond that could only ever be forged in the bloody cauldron of battle and death.

‘Come,’ said Palladis Novandio. ‘I’ll show you.’

Tagore placed a hand on Palladis’s chest and shook his head. ‘No, you won’t,’ he said, his teeth bared and a barely restrained hostility razoring the edges of his words. ‘The death of a Space Marine is a private affair.’

‘I apologise,’ said Palladis, recognising the threat. ‘I meant no disrespect.’

The Space Marines moved down the central aisle of the temple, and all sounds of mourning faded as those who bore witness to the solemn parade bowed their heads in silent and unspoken respect. Atharva’s power flared like a half-glimpsed flicker of lightning, as the door to the incinerator opened on rust and ash-gummed hinges.

Kai watched them pass from sight, and let out the breath he’d been holding.

It took a moment for him to realise the significance of the moment, but when he realised that he was alone and free, all he felt was a strange sense of emptiness. He no longer knew whether he was a fellow fugitive or a prisoner of the Outcast Dead, but he suspected that hinged upon what he carried within his head.

Kai turned towards the door through which he and the Space Marines had entered the temple. Slivers of torchlight eased through its imperfectly-fitted frame, and that soft glow was the promise of everything he had been denied: the freedom from responsibility, the choice to live or die and, finally, a chance to be no one’s slave.

The last realisation was hardest to admit, for Kai had always believed he was master of his own destiny. Here, alone and hunted in a temple dedicated to the dead, he realised how naïve he had been. The worth of the individual was the greatest lie the Imperium had made its people swallow. From soldiers in the army to the scribes of the palace to the workers toiling in the factories, every human life was in service to the Emperor. Whether they realised it or not, the human race had been yoked to the singular goal of the galaxy’s conquest.

For the first time in his life, Kai saw the Imperium for what it was, a machine that could operate on such a vast scale only because its fuel of human life was in never-ending supply. He had been part of that machine, but he was a tiny cog that had slipped its gear and was tumbling without purpose through its delicate workings. Kai knew enough of such mechanisms to know that such a random piece could not be allowed to remain within the body of the machine. Either that piece was returned to its designated place, or it was cast out and discarded.

‘Death surrounds you, my friend,’ said Palladis. ‘You were right to come here.’

Kai nodded and said, ‘Death surrounds me wherever I go.’

‘There is truth in that,’ agreed Palladis. ‘Do you mean to stay with the Angels of Death?’

‘Why do I get the feeling that you’re not using that as a nickname?’ asked Kai.

‘The Legiones Astartes are the physical embodiment of death,’ said Palladis. ‘You have seen them kill, so you must know that.’

Kai thought back to the bloodshed of their escape from the Custodes gaol, and suppressed a shiver at the ferocious carnage.

‘I suppose it’s apt,’ he agreed. ‘The Angels of Death. It has a ring to it.’

‘You haven’t answered my question,’ pointed out Palladis.

Kai thought for a moment, torn between his desire to shape his own future and the insistent voice that urged him to remain with the Outcast Dead.

‘I’m not sure,’ said Kai, surprising himself. ‘I feel that I want to leave them, but I’m not sure I should. Which is stupid, because I think they mean to take me to… to a place I don’t think I’m meant to go.’

‘Where do you think you are meant to go?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Kai with a wan smile. ‘That’s the problem, you see.’

‘Then how do you know you are not already there?’ said Palladis, before giving his arm a gentle squeeze and making his way towards the man and woman who wept over the body of an old man at the foot of the faceless statue.

Before Kai could ponder the man’s last words, the door to the temple opened and a girl with a familiar aura entered. Though his psychic senses told him as much, he knew she had long blonde hair beneath her hood and a blue bandana wrapped around her forehead. He smiled, finally understanding that there were no accidents, no coincidences and no pieces of the universal puzzle that were not just links in a causal chain that stretched back to the very beginning of all things.

‘Perhaps I am where I’m meant to be,’ he said softly, as the girl saw him and her eyes widened in surprise.

‘Kai?’ said the girl. ‘Throne, what are you doing here?’

‘Hello, Roxanne,’ said Kai.

Nagasena watches the approaching vehicles with irritation and a sense of events moving faster than anyone gathered here can control. Six armoured vehicles, boxy and reeking of engine oil and hot metal. They have been forced to wait for these tanks by an order from the City of Sight. No explanation was forthcoming, and for nearly ninety minutes they have allowed their quarry to put ever greater distance between them.

‘We should not have waited,’ Kartono says to him, but he does not reply. The answer is self-evident. No, they should not have waited, but his every instinct is railing against this hunt. He tells himself that he is foolish to put faith in omens, that he should have continued without Golovko and Saturnalia.

He knows where his prey has gone, and he could be there already but for his hunt companions. Yet he did not set off on his own. He waited. Speed and the relentlessness of pursuit are his greatest weapons, and he has sacrificed them both.

Why?

Because this hunt does not serve the truth, it is intended to bury it.

Saturnalia stands at a crossroads to the east, eager to be on the hunt, but unwilling to disobey an order that comes countersigned with the authority of his own masters. Golovko sits with his men, displaying patience Nagasena had not suspected he possessed. He is a man to whom orders are absolute, a man who would kill a hundred innocents if so ordered. Such men are dangerous, for they can enact any horror in the unshakable belief that it serves a higher purpose.

The lead vehicle grinds to a halt in a squall of rubble and screeching metal. It is painted black and red, with the markings of a fortress gate upon which are crossed a black bladed spear and a lasgun. Golovko and Saturnalia join him as the side hatch opens and a junior lieutenant in a black breastplate and helmet emerges, looking as though he wishes he were anywhere but here.

The lieutenant marches over to Golovko and hands him a sealed, one-time message slate.

A code wand slides from Golovko’s gauntlet and the slate flickers into life. Softly glowing text appears on its smooth surface, and the man’s face breaks into a grin of feral anticipation.

Nagasena has seen that look before, and he does not like it.

‘What does the message say?’ he asks, though he fears he knows the answer.

Golovko hands the message slate to Saturnalia, who scans its contents with a nod that confirms what Nagasena is already suspecting. He turns away as Saturnalia offers him the slate.

‘We are no longer hunters,’ says Nagasena. ‘Are we?’

‘No,’ says Saturnalia. ‘We are a kill team.’

Twenty-One

Catharsis
I might kill you
The Thunder Lord

Roxanne threw herself into Kai’s arms with the passion of a long-lost lover, wrapping him so tightly that he thought he might break. He returned her embrace, relishing the closeness of another human body and the sight of someone familiar. He and Roxanne had worked together on the Argo for many years, though the strict code of conduct enforced upon all Ultramarines vessels had prevented them from becoming truly close.

‘You’re going to break my ribs,’ said Kai, though he didn’t want her to let go.

‘They’ll heal,’ said Roxanne, pressing even tighter. ‘I never thought I’d see you again.’

‘Nor I you,’ he said, as she finally released him and took a step back, though she kept a grip on his shoulders.

‘You look terrible,’ said Roxanne. ‘What happened to your eyes? After they separated us on the Lemuryan plate, they wouldn’t tell me where you were.’

‘Castana’s armsmen picked me up and took me to the medicae facilities on Kyprios then left me in the care of an idiot,’ said Kai with a sneer. ‘But when the Patriarch realised they might be held liable for the loss of the Argo, they threw me back to the City of Sight.’

‘Bastards,’ said Roxanne. ‘They took me back to our estates in Galicia and tried to hide me away as if I didn’t even exist.’

‘Why?’

‘I was an embarrassment to them,’ said Roxanne with a dismissive shrug. ‘A Navigator who can’t even guide a ship home in the same system as the Astronomican isn’t much of a Navigator.’

‘That’s insane,’ he said. ‘You can’t guide a ship when it’s in the middle of a warp storm.’

‘I told them that,’ she said with an exaggerated gesture, ‘but it doesn’t look good when a ship is lost. The Navigator’s always the first one people want to blame.’

‘Or the astropath,’ whispered Kai.

He felt her scrutiny, and returned it. The last time Kai had seen Roxanne, she had been a physical and emotional wreck, as haunted by the unending screams of their dead crew as he had been, but her aura showed little sign of that trauma.

Roxanne guided him from the aisle to find a seat in the pews, taking his arm as though he were blind or infirm.

‘I can see, you know,’ he said. ‘Probably better than you.’

‘Typical,’ said Roxanne. ‘It takes losing your eyes to make you see things clearly.’

Kai smiled as Roxanne took hold of his skeletally thin hands. He felt the warmth of her friendship, but instead of recoiling, he let it wash over him like a cleansing balm. Ever since he had been evacuated from the wreck of the Argo, Kai had been treated like a leper or an invalid, and to be viewed as an equal was just about the most wonderful thing anyone had done for him.

‘So what are you doing here?’ asked Kai, hoping to steer the conversation away from the Argo. ‘This doesn’t seem like your kind of place.’

‘I suppose not, but it turns out it’s just my kind of place.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’m Castana,’ said Roxanne. ‘I’ve never wanted for anything in my life, and that meant I didn’t appreciate anything I was ever given. If I broke something or lost something, it would be instantly replaced. Being with the people of the Thirteenth Legion taught me how selfish I’d been. When I returned to our estates I couldn’t face going back to the person I was. So I left.’

‘And you came here?’ said Kai. ‘Seems like a bit of an extreme reaction.’

‘I know, but, like I said, I’m Castana – we don’t do things in half measures. At first I was just going to run off to teach my family that they couldn’t treat me like a child. Then, when they realised how much they needed me, they’d come for me and I’d have earned their respect.’

‘But they didn’t come, did they?’

‘No, they didn’t,’ said Roxanne, but there was no sadness to her at the idea of being abandoned by her family. ‘I found a place to stay, but I still had nightmares about the Argo, and it was eating me up inside. I knew what happened wasn’t my fault, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. One day I heard about a place in the Petitioners’ City where anyone could lay their dead to rest and find peace. So I made my way here and volunteered to help in whatever way I could.’

‘Did it help? With the nightmares, I mean?’

Roxanne nodded. ‘It did. I thought I’d stay a few days, just to clear my head, but the more I helped people, the more I knew I couldn’t leave. When you’re surrounded by death every day it gives you perspective. I’ve heard hundreds of stories that would break your heart, but it showed me that what I’d gone through wasn’t any worse than what these people live with every day.’

‘And what about Palladis Novandio, what’s his story?’

He sensed reluctance in Roxanne’s aura, and immediately regretted the question.

‘He suffered a great loss,’ she said. ‘He lost people he loved, and he blames himself for their deaths.’

Kai turned to watch Palladis Novandio as he spoke in a low voice with the people of his temple, now understanding a measure of the man’s enveloping grief. He recognised the all-consuming guilt and desire for punishment as the mirror of his own.

‘Then we’re very similar,’ whispered Kai.

‘You blame yourself for what happened on the Argo, don’t you?’ said Roxanne.

Kai tried to give a glib answer, to deflect her question, but the words wouldn’t come. He could read auras or use his psychic abilities to understand emotions without effort, yet he would not turn that insight upon himself for fear of what he might learn.

‘It was my fault,’ he said softly. ‘I was in a nuncio trance when the shields collapsed. I was the way in for the monsters. I was the crack in the defences. It’s the only explanation.’

‘That’s ridiculous,’ said Roxanne. ‘How can you think like that?’

‘Because it’s true.’

‘No,’ said Roxanne firmly. ‘It’s not. You didn’t see what was happening beyond the ship. I saw what hit us, and any ship would have been overwhelmed. A squall of warp cyclones blew up out of nowhere and hit a vortex of high-energy currents coming in from the rimward storms. No one saw it coming, not the Nobilite Watcher Guild, not the Gate Sentinels, no one. It was a one in a million, one in a billion, freak confluence. Given what’s happening here on Terra and out in the galaxy, I’m surprised there aren’t more of them surging to life. It’s a mess out there in the warp, and you’re lucky you don’t see it.’

‘You might have seen it, but I heard it,’ said Kai. ‘I heard them die.’

‘Who?’

‘All of them. Every man and woman on the ship, I heard them die. All their terrors, all their lost dreams, all their last thoughts. I heard them all, screaming at me. I can still hear them whenever I let my guard down.’

Roxanne gripped his hand fiercely and he felt the power of her stare, though he had no eyes with which to return it. The force of her personality blazed like a solar corona, and only now did Kai realise how strong she was. Roxanne was Castana, and there were few of that clan who lacked for self-assuredness.

‘They tried to blame us both for the loss of the Argo, so what does that tell you about how little they know about whose fault it was? Someone had to be responsible. Something terrible had happened, and it’s human nature to want someone else to pay for it. They told me, day and night, that it was my fault, that I’d done something wrong, that I had to retrain. But I said no – I told them I knew it wasn’t my fault. I knew there was nothing I or anyone else could have done to save that ship. It was lost no matter what I did. It was lost no matter what you or anyone else did.’

Kai listened to her words, feeling each one slip past his armour of certainty like poniards aimed at his heart. He had told himself the same things over and over again, but the mind has no greater accuser than itself. The Castanas told him he caused the death of the Argo, and he had believed them because, deep down, he wanted to be punished for surviving.

They needed a scapegoat, and when one of their own wouldn’t fall on her sword, he had been the next best thing: a willing victim. Kai felt the black chains of guilt within him slip, a tiny loosening of their implacable hold. Not completely – nothing so simple as the words of a friend could cause them to break their grip so easily, but that they had slackened at all was a revelation.

He smiled and reached up to touch Roxanne’s face. She was wary of the gesture, as were all Navigators, for they disliked other people’s hands near their third eye. Her cheek was smooth and the brush of her hair against his skin felt luxurious. These moments of human contact were the first Kai had known in months that didn’t involve someone wanting to take something from him, and he let it linger, content to take each breath as a free man.

‘You’re cleverer than you look, do you know that?’ said Kai.

‘Like I said, this place gives you perspective, but how would you know? You can’t even see me with that bandage over your eyes. You never did say what happened to them.’

And Kai told her all that had befallen him since his arrival at the City of Sight, his retraining, the terror of the psychic shockwave that had killed Sarashina and placed something so valuable within his mind that people were willing to kill to retrieve it. He told of their escape from the Custodians’ gaol, the crash and their flight through the Petitioners’ City, though this last part of his recall was hazed with uncertainty and half-remembered visions where fear and dreams collided. He told Roxanne of the Outcast Dead’s plans to bring him to Horus Lupercal, and the mention of the Warmaster’s name sent a tremor of fear through her aura.

When Kai finished, he waited for Roxanne to ask about what Sarashina had placed in his mind, but the question never came, and he felt himself fall a little in love with her. She looked over at the door through which the Space Marines had taken their dead.

‘You can’t let them take you to the Warmaster,’ she said.

‘You think I owe the Imperium anything, after all they did to me?’ said Kai. ‘I won’t just hand myself over to the Legio Custodes again.’

‘I’m not saying you should,’ said Roxanne, taking his hands again. ‘But even after all that’s happened, you’re not a traitor to the Imperium, are you? If you let them take you to Horus, that’s what you’ll be. You know I’m right.’

‘I know,’ sighed Kai. ‘But how can I stop them from taking me? I’m not strong enough to fight them.’

‘You could run.’

Kai shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t last ten minutes out there.’

Roxanne’s silence was all the agreement he needed.

‘So what are you going to do?’ she asked at last.

‘I haven’t the faintest idea,’ said Kai. ‘I don’t want to be used any more, that’s all I know for sure. I’m tired of being dragged from pillar to post. I want to take control of my own destiny, but I don’t know how to do that.’

‘Well you’d better figure it out soon,’ said Roxanne, as the heavy door at the rear of the temple swung open. ‘They’re back.’

The dead were ashes. Argentus Kiron and Orhu Gythua were no more, their bodies consumed in the fire. Tagore felt numb at their deaths, knowing he should feel a measure of grief at their passing, but unable to think beyond the anticipation of his next kill. Ever since the battle with Babu Dhakal’s men, his body had been a taut wire, vibrating at a level that no one could see, but which was ready to snap.

It felt good to have blood on his hands, and the butcher’s nails embedded in his skull had rewarded him for his kills with a rush of endorphins. Tagore’s hands were clenched tightly, unconsciously balled into fists as he scanned the room for threats, avenues of attack and choke points. The people in here were soft, emotional and useless. They wept tears of what he presumed were sadness, but he could not connect to that emotion any more.

While Severian and Atharva spoke to the grey-haired man who owned this place – he could not bring himself to use the word temple – Tagore sent Subha and Asubha to secure their perimeter. His breath was coming in short spikes, and he knew his pupils were dilated to the point of being totally black. Every muscle in his body sang with tension, and it took all Tagore’s iron control to keep himself from lashing out at the first person that looked at him.

Not that anyone dared look at a man who was so clearly dangerous. No eye would meet his, and he took a seat on a creaking bench to calm his raging emotions. He wanted to fight. He wanted to kill. There was no target for his rage, yet his body craved the release and reward promised by the pulsing device bolted to the bone of his skull.

Tagore had spoken of martial honour, but the words rang hollow, even to him. They were spoken by rote, and though he wanted to feel cheated at how little they meant to him, he couldn’t even feel that. They were good words, ones he used to believe in, but as the tally of the dead mounted, the less anything except the fury of battle came to mean. He knew exactly how many lives he had taken, and could summon each killing blow from memory, but he felt no connection to any of them. No pride in a well-placed lunge, no exultation at the defeat of a noteworthy foe and no honour in fighting for something in which he believed.

The Emperor had made him into a soldier, but Angron had wrought him into a weapon.

Tagore remembered the ritual breaking of the chains aboard the Conqueror, that mighty fortress cast out into the heavens like the war hound of a noble knight. The Red Angel, Angron himself, had mounted the chain-wrapped anvil and brought his callused fist down upon the mighty knot of iron. With one blow he had severed the symbolic chains of his slavery, hurling the sundered links into the thousands of assembled World Eaters.

Tagore had scrapped and brawled with his brothers in the mad, swirling mêlée to retrieve one of those links. As a storm-sergeant of the 15th Company, he had been ferocious enough to wrest a link from a warrior named Skraal, one of the latest recruits to be implanted with the butcher’s nails. The warrior was young, yet to master his implants, and Tagore had pummelled him without mercy until he had released his prize.

He had fashioned that link into the haft of Ender, his war axe, but that weapon was now lost to him. Anger flared at the thought of the weapon that had saved his life more times than he could count in the hands of an enemy. Tagore heard the sound of splintering wood, and opened his eyes in expectation of violence, but from the pinpricks of blood welling in his palms, he knew he had crushed the projecting lip of the bench.

Tagore closed his eyes as he spoke the words to the Song of Battle’s End.

‘I raise the fist that struck men down,
And salute the battle won.
My enemy’s blood has baptised me.
In death’s heart I proved myself,
But now the fire must cool.
The carrion crows feast,
And the tally of the dead begins.
I have seen many fall today.
But even as they die, I know
That our blood too is welcome.
War cares not from whence the blood flows.’

Tagore let out a shuddering breath as he spoke the last word, feeling the tension running through his body like a charge ease. He unclenched his fists, letting the splintered wood fall to the floor. He felt a presence nearby and inclined his head to see a young boy sitting next to him. Tagore had no idea how old this boy was – he had no memory of being young, and mortal physiology changed so rapidly that it was impossible to gauge the passage of years on their frail flesh.

‘What was that you just said?’ asked the boy, looking up from a pamphlet he was reading.

Tagore looked around, just to be sure the boy was, in fact, addressing him.

‘They are words to cool the fires of battle in a warrior’s heart when the killing is done,’ he said warily.

‘You’re a Space Marine, aren’t you?’

He nodded, unsure what this boy wanted from him.

‘I’m Arik,’ said the boy, holding out his hand.

Tagore looked at the hand suspiciously, his eyes darting over the boy’s thin frame, unconsciously working out where he could break his bones to most efficiently kill him. His neck was willow thin – it would take no effort at all to break it. His bones were visible at his shoulders and ridges of ribs poked through his thin shirt.

It would take no effort at all to destroy him.

‘Tagore, storm-sergeant of the 15th Company,’ he said at last. ‘I am a World Eater.’

Arik nodded and said, ‘It’s good you’re here. If Babu Dhakal’s men come back then you’ll kill them, won’t you?’

Pleased to have a subject to which he could relate, Tagore nodded. ‘If anyone comes here looking for me, I’ll kill him.’

‘Are you good at killing people?’

‘Very good,’ said Tagore. ‘There’s nobody better than me.’

‘Good,’ declared Arik. ‘I hate him.’

‘Babu Dhakal?’

Arik nodded solemnly.

‘Why?’

‘He had my dad killed,’ said the boy, pointing to the kneeling statue at the end of the building. ‘Ghota shot him right there.’

Tagore followed the boy’s pointing finger, noting the silver ring on his thumb, its quality and worth clearly beyond his means. The statue was of a dark stone, veined with thin lines of grey and deeper black, and though it had no face, Tagore felt sure he could make out where its features were meant to be, as if the sculptor had begun his work, but left it unfinished.

‘Ghota killed one of my… friends too,’ said Tagore, stumbling over the unfamiliar word. ‘I owe him a death, and I always repay a blood debt.’

Arik nodded, the matter dealt with, and returned to reading his pamphlet.

Tagore was in unfamiliar territory, his skills of conversation limited to battle-cant and commands. He was not adept in dealing with mortals, finding their concerns and reasoning impossible to fathom. Was he supposed to continue speaking to this boy, or were their dealings at an end?

‘What are you reading?’ he asked after a moment’s thought.

‘Something my dad used to read,’ said Arik, without looking up. ‘I don’t understand a lot of it, but he really liked it. He used to read it over and over again.’

‘Can I see it?’ asked Tagore.

The boy nodded and handed over the sheet of paper. It was thin and had been folded too many times, the ink starting to smudge and bleed into the creases. Tagore was used to reading tactical maps or orders of battle, and this language was a mix of dialects and words with which he was unfamiliar, yet the neural pathways of his brain adapted with a rapidity that would have astounded any Terran linguist.

‘Men united in the purpose of the Emperor are blessed in his sight and shall live forever in his memory,’ read Tagore, his brow furrowed at the strange sentiment. ‘I tread the path of righteousness. Though it be paved with broken glass, I will walk it barefoot. Though it cross rivers of fire, I will pass over them. Though it wanders wide, the light of the Emperor guides my step. There is only the Emperor, and he is our shield and protector.’

Tagore looked up from his reading, feeling the pulse of his implant burrowing deep into his skull as his anger grew at these words of faith and superstition. Arik reached over and pointed to a section further down the pamphlet.

‘The strength of the Emperor is humanity, and the strength of humanity is the Emperor,’ said Tagore, his fury growing the more he read. ‘If one turns from the other we shall all become the Lost and the Damned. And when His servants forget their duty they are no longer human and become something less than beasts. They have no place in the bosom of humanity or in the heart of the Emperor. Let them die and be outcast.’

Tagore’s heart was racing and his lungs drew air in short, aggressive breaths. He crumpled the pamphlet in his fist and let it drop to the ground.

‘Get away from me, boy,’ he said through bared teeth.

Arik looked up, his eyes widening in fear as he saw the change in Tagore.

‘What did I do?’ he said in a trembling voice.

‘I said get away from me!’

‘Why?’

‘Because I think I might kill you,’ growled Tagore.

Nagasena watches the building from a projection of rock at the mouth of the canyon, knowing his prey is close. In the streets behind him, six armoured vehicles and nearly a hundred soldiers wait in anticipation of his orders. Though there is only one order to give, Nagasena hesitates to issue it. Athena Diyos and Adept Hiriko wait with them, though there is likely no part in this hunt left for them to play.

Even Nagasena concedes that in the latter stages of a hunt there is a certain thrill, but he feels none of that now. Too much uncertainty has entered his life since he left his mountain home for him to feel anything but apprehension at the thought of facing Kai Zulane and the renegades.

Through the scope of his rifle he can see there are no escape routes from the structure, its statue-covered façade presenting the only obvious way in or out. Hundreds of people are gathered before the building, and they have brought their dead with them. Nagasena understands the need to cling onto the lost, to honour their memory and ensure they are not forgotten, but the idea of praying to them or expecting that they will pass onto another realm of existence is alien to him.

The advanced optics on Nagasena’s scope, obtained at ruinous cost from the Mechanicum of Mars, penetrates the marble frontage, displaying a coloured thermal scan of the building’s interior. Through a fine copper-jacketed wire, that image is displayed on Kartono’s slate.

Perhaps sixty people are inside the temple, and the Legiones Astartes are immediately apparent in their heat signatures as well as their size. It is impossible to pick out which of these people might be Kai Zulane. As Antioch had said, there are five of them, and they are gathered around a much smaller individual. Their heat signatures blur. Something behind their overlarge bodies is scattering the readings from his optics, wreathing the entire image in a grainy static that makes Nagasena’s eyes itch.

‘So much for those expensive bio-filters,’ grunts Kartono, slapping a palm against the side of the slate. The image quality does not improve, but they have enough information to mount an assault on the building with a high degree of success.

‘We should storm the building,’ says Golovko. ‘We have over a hundred men now. There’s nowhere left for them to run. We can end this within the hour.’

‘He’s right,’ says Saturnalia with obvious reluctance to align himself with the Black Sentinel. ‘We have our quarry boxed in.’

‘And that makes them doubly dangerous,’ says Nagasena. ‘There is nothing more dangerous than a warrior who is cornered and has nothing left to lose.’

‘Just like the Creatrix of Kallaikoi,’ says Kartono.

‘Exactly so,’ snaps Nagasena, unwilling to relive that particular memory right now. He still bears scars that will never heal from that hunt.

Saturnalia takes the slate from Kartono’s hands and holds it up in front of Nagasena, as if he has not yet seen it. He taps the hazed images of the five men they have come to kill.

‘There is no reason not to go in,’ says the Custodian. ‘We have our orders, and they are clear. Everyone here is to die.’

Nagasena has read and reread their orders, searching for a way to interpret them in a manner that will not scar his memories for life and result in the deaths of so many innocents, but Saturnalia is right: their orders are without ambiguity.

‘These are Imperial citizens,’ he says, though he knows he is wasting his breath trying to convince Saturnalia to alter his course. ‘We serve them with our deeds, and to betray them like this is wrong.’

‘Wrong? These traitors have been welcomed amongst these people, and they are guilty by association,’ says Saturnalia. ‘I am a warrior of the Legio Custodes, and my duty is the safety of the Emperor, a duty in which there can be no compromise. Who knows what treachery these men may have already spread among the people of the Petitioners’ City? If we allow any they have touched to live, then their betrayal will fester like a rank weed, drawing nourishment from the darkness and growing even greater and more deeply entrenched.’

‘You can’t know that,’ protests Nagasena.

‘I don’t need to know it, I just need to believe it.’

‘This is your Imperial Truth?’ asks Nagasena, almost spitting the words.

‘It is just the truth,’ says Saturnalia. ‘Nothing more, nothing less.’

Nagasena’s eyes lock with those of Kartono, but he sees nothing in his bondsman’s eyes that gives any clue to his emotions. Clade Culexus saw to that. He grips the tightly-wound hilt of Shoujiki and knows he should walk away, but that would be as good as signing his own death warrant. For good or ill, he is bound to this hunt until its end.

He nods, and hates that Saturnalia and Golovko share the triumphant grins of conspirators.

‘Very well,’ he says. ‘Let us get this over with.’

Before any attack order can be given, Kartono gives a shocked breath of surprise. He consults the imagery on his slate and looks up in confusion.

‘We may have a problem,’ he says, pointing down into the canyon. ‘New arrivals.’

Atharva watched Tagore rise from the bench and walk stiffly across the nave as he made his way towards their gathering. The warrior’s aura blazed with anger, the swirling colours of angry bruises and hot, pumping blood. Just touching that fire enflamed Atharva’s own aggression, and he rose into the lower Enumerations to better control himself.

‘We may have a way off Terra,’ said Asubha as Tagore joined them.

The World Eaters sergeant nodded, his teeth still clenched and his skin drained of colour.

‘How?’ he asked.

‘Tell him,’ said Atharva, gesturing to Palladis Novandio.

‘At the top of this scarp is the dwelling place of Vadok Singh, one of the Emperor’s war masons,’ said Palladis with such bitterness and reluctance that it almost made Atharva flinch. ‘He oversees all aspects of the construction work to the palace, and he likes the high perch.’

‘So?’ demanded Tagore, wearing his impatience like a spiked cloak.

‘The warmason likes to observe some of his grander constructions from orbit,’ clarified Palladis. The man did not want them to leave, and only Atharva’s insight had made him divulge this latest morsel of information.

‘You understand now?’ said Severian.

‘He has an orbit-capable craft?’ demanded Tagore, his anger morphing into interest.

‘He does,’ said Palladis.

‘We can get off-world,’ said Subha, punching a fist into his palm.

‘Better,’ said Asubha. ‘If we can get to one of the orbital plates, we can get aboard a warp-capable craft.’

‘So we are agreed?’ said Atharva, with a sidelong glance at Palladis Novandio. ‘We are bound for Isstvan?’

‘Isstvan,’ agreed Tagore.

‘The Legion,’ said Asubha and his brother together.

‘Isstvan it is,’ said Severian. ‘I will find us a way to the warmason’s villa.’

Atharva nodded as the Luna Wolf slipped away into the darkness at the rear of the temple.

‘Where will you go once you are off-world?’ asked Palladis Novandio, unable to mask his disappointment. ‘You would not consider remaining here? Where else should the Angels of Death be but a temple dedicated to its name?’

Tagore rounded on the man and lifted him from his feet.

‘I should kill you now for what you have allowed to take root here,’ snarled the World Eater. ‘You call a building a temple, and people will find gods within it.’

‘What are you talking about, Tagore?’ said Atharva.

Tagore held Palladis Novandio at arm’s length, as though the man carried some virulent infection. ‘He is a promoter of false gods. This is no place of remembrance. It is a fane where the Emperor is held up as some kind of divine being. All this, it is all a lie, and he is its chief prophet. I will kill him and we will be on our way.’

‘No!’ cried Palladis. ‘That’s not what we do here, I promise.’

‘Liar!’ bellowed Tagore, drawing his fist back.

Before Tagore could unleash his killing power, the doors of the temple were flung wide and two enormous figures were silhouetted in the glow of a hundred lamps and flickering torches from outside. Fear billowed in with them on a wave of ash-clogged wind, and Atharva suddenly sensed the predatory minds of hunters beyond the walls of the temple.

He recognised Ghota from the battle outside Antioch’s surgery, but the second warrior took his breath away with his sheer scale.

Enormous beyond even Ghota’s monstrous size, the warrior was taller than Tagore and broader in the shoulder than Gythua had been. He was clad in a suit of burnished war plate the colour of bronze and midnight. Fashioned in a form worn by a band of warriors long dead, he wore the armour as though born to it. At his side was an outdated model of bolter, and across his back was sheathed a vast-bladed sword.

‘I am the Thunder Lord,’ said Babu Dhakal. ‘And you have something I want.’

Twenty-Two

Living history
Temple of blood
A worthy foe

The warrior before him should not have been possible. His kind were all dead and gone, slain in the last battle of Unity. It was a measure of their heroic sacrifice that they had all died to win the last and greatest victory for the Emperor. Yet here he was, towering and magnificent, terrible and shocking. The skin of his face was grey and dead, his eyes blood-red, and his aura too bright to look upon. His presence had a gravity all of its own, demanding all attention and fear.

‘You are Babu Dhakal?’ said Atharva, though the question was unnecessary.

‘Of course,’ said the Thunder Lord.

As though Babu Dhakal and Ghota projected some form of force field before them, every man, woman and child retreated to the back of the temple, huddled in the shadow of the faceless statue. Atharva caught sight of Kai and a blonde-haired woman with a bandana tied around her temple. He saw what she was immediately, and wanted to smile at the fortune that had sent him an astropath and a Navigator. Truly, the cosmic puzzle of the universe was revealing itself to him little by little.

Tagore bristled at his side, and he felt the spiking anger that threatened to boil over at any minute. Subha and Asubha followed their sergeant’s lead, though their battle-rage was nowhere near as volatile as Tagore’s. He could not sense Severian’s presence, and hoped he had been able to escape the temple already.

‘You killed a warrior of the Legiones Astartes,’ said Tagore, the words a guttural bark towards Ghota. ‘I’ll have your heart for that.’

Ghota grinned and bared his teeth. ‘I beat you once and I can do it again, little pup.’

Babu Dhakal raised a hand to forestall Tagore’s anger.

‘I did not come here to fight you, Legiones Astartes,’ he said. ‘I came to offer you something. Would you be prepared to listen?’

The unexpectedness of the warrior’s words took Atharva by surprise. He had not sensed any desire to parley in Babu Dhakal, but then he could barely stand to turn his psychic senses upon him without fear of being overwhelmed.

‘What is it you want?’ he asked in a voice that didn’t betray his unease.

‘There are men beyond this building who wish to kill you,’ said Babu Dhakal.

‘I know this,’ said Atharva, and Babu Dhakal laughed, the sound turning into a wet, animal gurgle in his ruined throat.

‘You know it because I now allow you to know it,’ said the warrior.

‘Once I have broken you across my knee, I will kill all of them too,’ promised Tagore.

‘There are a hundred at least, a Custodian, a clade killer and a man who carries something more deadly than anything any warrior here can face.’

‘A weapon?’ asked Subha.

‘No, the truth.’

‘Who are you?’ demanded Atharva. ‘I know your name to be meaningless. Babu simply means “father” in the ancient tongue of Bharat. And Dhakal? That is simply a region of this part of the mountains. So who are you?’

‘I have had many names over the years,’ said Babu Dhakal, ‘but that is not what you mean, is it? No, you want my true name, the one I bore in the battles to win this world?’

‘Yes,’ said Atharva.

‘Very well, since I am here to trade, I will offer you my name as a gesture of good faith. I no longer remember my mortal name, but when my flesh was reborn into this new form, I was named Arik Taranis.’

The name had a weight all of its own, a silencing quality that stole the anger from the World Eaters and dumbfounded Atharva with its historic resonance. There was not one among them who did not know that name, the battles he had won, the foes he had slain and the great honours he had earned.

‘You are the Lightning Bearer?’ asked Tagore.

‘A title given to me after the Battle of Mount Ararat in the Kingdom of Urartu,’ said Babu Dhakal. ‘I had the honour of raising the Banner of Lightning at the declaration of Unity.’

Atharva could barely believe his eyes. This warrior was history wrought into living form: the Victor of Gaduaré, the Last Rider, the Butcher of Scandia, the Throne-slayer…

These and a hundred other battle-laurels earned by this warrior tumbled through Atharva’s memory, finally culminating in the end of that great warrior’s legendary life atop a once-flooded mountain.

‘History says you are dead,’ said Atharva. ‘You died of your wounds once the banner was raised. You and all your warriors fell in that battle.’

‘You look like a clever man,’ said Babu Dhakal. ‘You should know better than to take what history says literally. Such tales as are told of us come from the mouth of the last man standing, and it would not do for the Emperor to have to share his victory with others. Where is the glory when you conquer a world with an unstoppable army at your back? To begin a legend, you must win that war single-handedly, and there must be no one left alive to contradict your version of events.’

‘Are there others like you?’ said Subha.

Babu Dhakal shrugged. ‘Perhaps others escaped the cull, perhaps not. If they did, they are probably dead by now, victims of their own obsolescence. Our bodies were designed to win a world, not conquer a galaxy like yours.’

Atharva listened to Babu Dhakal’s words, amazed at the lack of bitterness he heard. If what the warrior was saying was true, then he and all his kind had been cast aside by the Emperor in favour of the Legiones Astartes gene-template. Yet Babu Dhakal appeared to bear his creator no ill-will for this monstrous betrayal.

‘So how is it that you are still alive?’ asked Atharva, now beginning to suspect what Babu Dhakal might want from them.

‘I am a clever man,’ said Babu Dhakal. ‘I learned what I could from my creator in the years of war, and I came to know much of his ancient science. Not enough to halt my deterioration, but enough to cling onto life long enough for fortune to smile upon me.’

‘Speak plainly,’ ordered Tagore. ‘What is it you want?’

Babu Dhakal raised his right arm, and Atharva saw a boxy device attached to the armoured plates of his vambrace. It had none of the elegance of the devices employed by the Legion apothecaries, but it was unmistakably a reductor. Alongside the narthecium, it was an essential piece of an Apothecary’s battle gear.

The narthecium healed the wounded, but the reductor was for the dead.

Its one and only purpose was to extract a fallen Space Marine’s gene-seed.

‘I want you to help me live,’ said Babu Dhakal.

Kai read the shock in Atharva’s aura, but before the Space Marine could answer, the roof of the temple imploded in a series of detonations that sent timber beams and limestone tiles tumbling to the floor in a rain of flaming debris.

‘Watch out!’ shouted Kai as a piece of burning rafter slammed down in front of him, crushing an aged man beneath it. He and Roxanne backed away in panic from the tumbling wreckage as black-armoured soldiers dropped into the temple on ziplines in the wake of booming stun grenades.

The throaty grumble of heavy vehicles and the chatter of automatic gunfire sounded from beyond the temple doors. The hard echoes of heavy calibre shells impacting on the canyon walls were punctuated by the screams of terrified people.

‘Down!’ cried Kai as one of the soldiers loosed a sawing blast of fire from his weapon. Solid rounds tore up benches and chewed the marble walls. Kai pulled Roxanne to the floor and dragged her away from the soldier, but screaming people blocked every avenue of escape through the overturned benches. A man toppled to his knees before Kai, his chest blown out and his head burned by a las-blast.

‘What’s going on?’ cried Roxanne, blinking away the after-effects of the grenade flashes and covering her head as pulverised marble fragments rained down on them.

‘Those are Black Sentinels,’ said Kai. ‘They’re here for me.’

He risked casting his mind-sense beyond his immediate surroundings, flinching with every rattle of gunfire and disorientating thunder of grenade detonations. Expanding banks of smoke rolled through the temple, but such obstacles to sight were no barrier to an astropath’s blindsight. He saw soldiers fan into the temple, gunning down anyone they encountered with ruthlessly efficient bursts of fire.

A knot of soldiers moving in perfect concert was coming his way, but no sooner had one shouted a warning than a hulking warrior bearing a broken guardian spear was among them. Tagore hacked three men down in as many blows and gutted another two before the others could even react. Two more died with their skulls caved in, and another fell with his neck broken.

Subha fought at his sergeant’s side, killing with artless fury as he strove to imitate Tagore’s furious destruction. Kai shifted his gaze, seeing Asubha moving like a ghost through the clouds of thick smoke. Unlike his brother, Asubha was a methodical killer, picking his targets with a clear precision. A Black Sentinel with an auger was killed first, then another with a plasma-coil weapon. There was clear order to Asubha’s kills, a methodology that was quite at odds with the seemingly random violence of his brother.

Other figures moved through the confusing flares of psychic light. The red of violence filled the air as surely as grenade smoke, and it became harder to pick out individuals amongst the pulsing anger that allowed combat soldiers to function.

A host of figures blazed amid the crimson fog, individuals whose energy and vitality were undimmed and untouched by this unleashed violence. One he knew to be Atharva, another two as Babu Dhakal and his lieutenant. Blinding flares of psychic energy streamed from Atharva, and dozens of soldiers died in the fire he drew forth from the immaterium. Babu Dhakal moved swifter than any man Kai had ever seen, slipping through the chaos of the fighting as though simply willing himself from one place to the next. Where men came at him, he killed them effortlessly, but where they ignored him, he returned the favour and let them live.

The barrage of gunfire was unrelenting, and the slaughter of the temple’s supplicants was indiscriminate. Kai and Roxanne crawled towards the back of the temple, scrambling over torn up bodies and overturned benches in their desperation to escape. Kai turned to look over his shoulder as a giant in heavy plates of polished armour strode into the temple. Where others were sheathed in crimson or gold, his aura was a pure and lethal silver. Kai felt his entire body flinch as he recognised the baleful, unrelenting purpose of Saturnalia.

Another man came with him, slighter than the Custodian, but no less bright and dangerous. Kai’s stomach lurched in sudden pain as he felt the presence of something abhorrent, something that made him think of every shameful deed that had ever troubled his conscience. Kai stopped his crawling and put his head in his hands as his entire body began to shake with unreasoning horror. He perceived nothing that could explain this feeling, but he instinctively curled into a ball as the colour and life bled out of the world.

‘Kai!’ shouted Roxanne, sounding far away. ‘Where are you?’

At the mention of his name, the smaller man with Saturnalia whipped around and unsheathed a sword whose blade was limned with the purest light Kai had ever seen.

‘Kai Zulane!’ shouted Saturnalia. ‘Come forward!’

In response two shapes moved from the red mist, twin smudges of vicious light and fury whose light was the equal of Saturnalia. Where the Custodian was a controlled flame, they burned like the fires that swept over the Merican plains when the summers were long and hot. Subha and Asubha attacked Saturnalia together, their fury and control mingling into the perfect combination to face so disciplined a warrior.

Kai swallowed his sickness back as the swordsman moved deeper into the temple with steps that were swift and assured. He ignored the battle between the World Eaters and Saturnalia. He was here for Kai, and seemed desperate to reach him before anyone else. Kai retched and rolled onto his side. He had to get away, but to where? Black Sentinels filled the temple with gunfire as they fought the Outcast Dead. Kai lost track of his former protectors, now regretting his desire to be free of them.

Kai took a deep breath and pushed himself to a crouch. He followed the amber light of Roxanne’s presence. A hand took hold of his shoulder and he tried to shrug it off, but the grip was implacable. Kai was hauled to his feet, and found himself face to face with the warrior bearing the white-lit sword.

He could hear another man next to the swordsman, but he was utterly invisible to Kai’s blindsight. The skin-crawling revulsion Kai felt told him there was something there, but he sensed not simply an absence of life, but a presence that actively repelled life. Whatever it was, it was a void in the colour of the world, and Kai finally understood the source of his bone-deep horror as his blindsight guttered and slid inexorably into darkness.

‘Pariah…’ he said.

The swordsman gave him a short bow, the gesture so ridiculous in the face of such slaughter that Kai wanted to laugh.

‘I am Yasu Nagasena, and you are coming with me,’ he said, the words clipped and precise.

A vast shadow moved in the mist of light and smoke beside Kai. Though his blindsight was virtually extinguished, he instantly recognised the iron taste of shadow’s aura.

‘No,’ said Tagore with a growl that sounded like an avalanche. ‘He’s not.’

Roxanne couldn’t see anything. Her eyes streamed and her throat was raw. The caustic banks of smoke obscured anything beyond a metre or so away, but she kept crawling because it was better than staying in the same place. She’d lost Kai, but didn’t dare turn back. The noise of rattling bursts of gunshots and the zip-crack of lasfire was frightening, but not as terrifying as the softness of bodies she crawled over in her eagerness to escape.

Tears poured down her cheeks, partly from the grenade fumes, but mostly for the dead who now filled the temple. These were her people, and they were being slaughtered. She could hear heavier gunfire coming from outside the temple, and knew that even those who gathered in the canyon beyond were being killed.

A hand reached for her and she cried out as it brushed her arm. She took hold of the hand, but released her grip when she saw the man to whom it belonged was dead. Blood stained his chest and stomach, and his grasping fingers fell away as she crawled onwards. The movement she had felt in his hand had been the result of debris from the roof falling on him.

This was senseless, the wholesale murder of innocents in the search for one man.

She could not understand the mentality of those who would kill their own people in some vague pursuit of a greater good. Didn’t they realise that by murdering their own citizens they were killing a part of themselves?

Through a gap in the smoke, Roxanne had a brief glimpse of the furious chaos engulfing the temple. The soldiers Kai had called Black Sentinels still fought the Space Marines for dominance, and were paying a heavy price to win it. Scores were dead already. The warriors of the Legiones Astartes were nothing if not thorough in their butchery.

At the centre of the temple, a warrior with plates of crimson buckled to his body killed the attackers with streaming bolts of blue fire and arcing traceries of lightning. Las-fire bent around him like refracted light, and hard rounds smacked to a halt a metre from his body as though meeting invisible resistance.

The Black Sentinels fighting him burned like pyres or erupted in pillars of boiling blood. There was madness in his eyes, a spiteful need to take decades of frustration out on those who had forced him to hide his true nature. Roxanne had never met a warrior of the Thousand Sons, and seeing the joy this one was taking in unleashing his vengeance, she never wanted to see another.

‘Roxanne!’ cried a voice over the din. ‘Over here! Hurry!’

She ducked as a flurry of lasbolts blew scorched holes in the stone beside her. Squinting through the smoke, she saw Maya and her two children huddled in a makeshift fortress of fallen blocks of stone and roof timbers. Maya beckoned to her, and Roxanne skidded and slipped over the broken flagstones towards her.

‘Here, child,’ said Maya, dragging her into the relative safety of their ad hoc refuge at the foot of the Vacant Angel.

‘Maya,’ said Roxanne, hugging the woman tightly.

Arik and her youngest son, a tousle-haired boy whose name she had never learned, lay with their heads buried in their hands, sobbing at the bloodshed unleashed around them.

‘What’s happening?’ asked Maya, holding back her tears with visible effort.

‘They’re going to kill us all,’ said Roxanne without thinking. ‘No one’s leaving here alive.’

‘Don’t say that, Miss Roxanne,’ pleaded Maya. ‘My boys, they’re all I’ve got left. It’s got to be a mistake! They wouldn’t hurt my boys!’

Roxanne couldn’t tell if that was a question, and simply shook her head.

‘No, they wouldn’t,’ she said, and Maya gave Roxanne a look of such relief that she hoped she wouldn’t be made a liar by these soldiers. Though she was safer than she had been out in the open, Roxanne felt hungry eyes fastened upon her, as though a dangerous beast was poised to leap on her.

She spun around in fear, but saw nothing.

The hot jolt of fear wouldn’t leave her and she looked up into the smooth face of the Vacant Angel. The blank head of the statue seemed to regard her curiously, and Roxanne shook her head at the strangeness of the notion. She reached up with outstretched fingers, and it seemed as though the head of the hulking statue leaned in towards her. The sounds of battle grew faint and Roxanne’s lips parted in a soft sigh as she saw the suggestion of a pale face swim into focus in the infinite depths of the polished nephrite.

Roxanne rose to her knees, drawn in by the mesmerising allure of that impossible face.

‘Are you mad?’ hissed Maya, grabbing her robe and dragging her back to the floor. The deafening crescendo of battle swelled, and when Roxanne looked back up to the Vacant Angel, the pale face had vanished.

‘Do you want to get that pretty head shot off your shoulders?’ demanded Maya.

Roxanne shook her head and pulled herself tight to Maya. She was a big, motherly woman, and Roxanne felt safer just being near her. She saw Arik turning the gleaming silver ring over and over in his fingers.

‘They’re going to kill us,’ said Arik, and though he was only whispering, the words flew to Roxanne’s ears with the poignancy of their simple desire. ‘Please help us, please help us!’

A shape moved in the swirling fog, and Roxanne grabbed hold of a piece of broken bench with a sharp tip. It wasn’t much of a weapon, but it would have to do.

She relaxed as Palladis Novandio emerged from the smoke, his face spattered with blood and his eyes streaming with tears. He staggered like a drunk and Roxanne felt anger overtake her fear at the thought of what was being done here.

‘Palladis!’ she cried, and he turned towards her in desperate relief. ‘Over here!’

‘Roxanne…’ he wept, stumbling towards her and collapsing just as he reached her. He fell into her arms and she felt his racing heartbeat. He sobbed into her shoulder, and held her tight as the slaughter continued around them.

‘I failed,’ he said. ‘It was never enough… I couldn’t keep it away and now everyone else has to suffer.’

Roxanne pulled him behind their flimsy barricade, and he looked up at the Vacant Angel.

‘Why?’ he demanded of the faceless statue. ‘I did everything I could to keep you appeased! Why must you take these people? Why? Take me instead, take me and let them live! I will see you again, my love! My sweet boys, father will see you soon!’

Palladis rose to his feet, screaming at the statue, his words accusing and demanding.

‘Take me, you bastard!’

Roxanne wanted to tell him to be quiet, but she knew no words of hers would dam the heartbreaking flow from the depths of his soul.

‘Take me!’ sobbed Palladis, sinking to his knees. ‘Please!’

‘Go,’ says the warrior Nagasena knows as Tagore, and Kai Zulane takes to his heels. Kartono is after him in a heartbeat, and Nagasena lets him go. He needs all his concentration for the battle to come. Tagore is a savage, deadly opponent, but Nagasena knows he must fight him. Honour demands it, and if this is the last honour he can salvage from this hunt, then that will be sufficient.

Tagore bears a long, wide-bladed spearhead. Nagasena recognises it as a broken guardian spear, and hopes its edge is no longer energised. Nagasena drops into a fighting crouch and raises his sword above his head, the tip aimed at Tagore’s heart.

‘You think you can fight me, little man?’ says Tagore, a killing light in his eyes.

Nagasena does not reply, his eyes darting over the World Eater’s enormous physique in search of some weak spot, any past hurt that might offer him an advantage: a bullet wound in his side, and traces of a yellow black bruise extending beneath the plates of armour he has taken from the dead men at Antioch’s.

‘I will break that little needle of yours then tear your head off,’ promises Tagore, and Nagasena knows he is more than capable of backing up such threats.

Tagore attacks without warning, slashing with his butcher’s blade. The blow is ferocious, but not without skill. Nagasena sways aside and lashes out with Shoujiki, landing a stinging blow on Tagore’s forearm. A return stroke is only just deflected and Nagasena reels from the incredible power behind the Space Marine’s strike. He has fought Legiones Astartes warriors before in training cages, though never with real weapons and never with any success. This will be a battle he will be lucky to live through for more than a few seconds.

Tagore reads his hesitancy as fear and grins.

They dance with thrust, slash and riposte, each gauging the other’s skill with every blow. For all his rage, Tagore is a fine warrior and a competent swordsman, but what he lacks in skill, he more than makes up for in determination and relentless ferocity. Every attack, from the first to the last, is launched with exactly the same power and desire. Nagasena avoids the most powerful blows, deflects others and launches his own attacks when he can. His bladework is superior to Tagore’s, but they have trained in such different forms of combat that it is proving difficult for either warrior to gain the measure of the other.

‘You are good, little man,’ says Tagore. ‘I thought you would be dead by now.’

‘You will find I am full of surprises,’ says Nagasena.

‘I will still kill you,’ promises Tagore as Nagasena spins around and launches a dazzling series of low thrusts and high cuts. Tagore parries some, dodges others and allows some to strike him. His armour is dented and torn, but Nagasena has not been aiming for one killing blow. Instead he has been working his attacks subtly towards the cratered bullet hole in Tagore’s side.

As the World Eater sways to the right, Nagasena sees his opening and spins low beneath a beheading cut of the guardian spear. He rams his sword forward with all his strength, plunging the blade into the scabbed wound in Tagore’s side. The metal hits hard meat and bone, but Nagasena uses his momentum and Tagore’s forward movement to drive the point deep into his opponent’s body.

Tagore grunts as the tip of Nagasena’s sword bursts from his back. His eyes widen in pain and the metal plates driven into his skull crackle with power they it counteract the agony of Nagasena’s blow with pain-suppressants. Nagasena twists his blade to free it from the Space Marine’s flesh, but it is wedged deeper than he has strength to overcome. He lingers too long with the effort and a backhanded fist slams into his shoulder.

He loses his grip on Shoujiki and falls heavily to the floor.

Nagasena grips his shoulder, knowing at least one bone there is broken. He rolls onto his side as Tagore’s foot slams down where he lay, moving as fast as he can to avoid the World Eater’s hunger to destroy him. In his haste, he fails to spot a projecting spar of broken roof timber and stumbles as it catches the edge of his foot.

Nagasena manages to avoid falling, but his momentary distraction is the opening Tagore needs. The guardian spear stabs out, catching Nagasena on his wounded shoulder in imitation of the blow he landed on Tagore. The speartip breaks Nagasena’s clavicle neatly in two, and severs the tendons connecting his muscles to the bone. It is a precise blow, at odds with the killing fury in Tagore’s eyes, and Nagasena again realises he has underestimated the World Eater.

Nagasena is plucked from the ground, hanging suspended like a worm on a hook before his opponent. Tagore grins at him and reaches his free hand towards Nagasena’s neck.

‘I told you I would kill you,’ says Tagore. ‘And what I say I will kill, I kill.’

Nagasena says nothing. He is in too much pain and there is nothing he can say that will save his life.

Tagore’s free hand reaches out and his thick fingers close around Nagasena’s neck, easily encircling his throat. All it will take is one squeeze and the bones of his spine will be powder, his windpipe crushed, and the fragile thread of his life will be cut.

But the pressure never comes.

A blinding spear of blue white light flashes past Nagasena, the heat of it burning the skin beneath his robes. He is momentarily blinded, but hears the wet drool of blood pouring from a broken body and smells the ripe, repulsive stench of seared human flesh. As his sight returns after the flash, he sees that Tagore has been eviscerated by the close-range blast of a plasma weapon of some sort.

Tagore drops to his knees, a gaping crater scorched through his body. His face is contorted in agony that not even Legiones Astartes training and genetics can bear. His grip on Nagasena loosens and he slumps to the side, rolling onto his back as his body fights to keep him alive.

It is a fight Nagasena knows he will lose.

Tagore pulls Shoujiki from his body with a grimace of pain. The blade is sticky with blood, and he offers it to Nagasena with respect.

‘You were… a worthy… foe,’ gasps the dying World Eater. ‘Fight… well. For a mortal.’

Nagasena accepts the compliment with a deep bow, and takes the proffered sword.

‘And you were worthy prey,’ he offers in return, though he knows it will be scant comfort.

‘I have… walked the… Crimson Path,’ says Tagore with a slow nod. He closes his eyes and says, ‘My war… is… ended.’

Though it goes against every creed of the swordsman, Nagasena sheaths his sword with the blood of his enemy still upon the blade and turns to see Maxim Golovko with a humming plasma rifle held at his side. The charging coils still hold a faint glow and its barrel drools liquid smoke into the air.

‘He was going to kill you,’ says Golovko with relish. ‘You can thank me later.’

Kai ran from the swordsman, stumbling as the cramping sensation in his gut eased and his blindsight returned the interior of the temple to dim hues of muted colour. His skin ran with sweat at his brush with the pariah, and he dropped to one knee as delayed shock and fear suddenly swamped him.

He had heard of pariahs, in rumours and whispers that travelled the City of Sight, but never truly believed in their existence until now. The abject emptiness of that man was terrifying. The gaping, infinite void a human life should fill with memory, life and vital energies was utterly absent in him.

Even the thought of his non-presence was horrifying, and Kai felt the nausea of his soul-absence returning.

‘Oh, no…’ he whispered, spinning around and hunting the source of his sickness. He could see nothing, but knowing what he was looking for now, he sought out the emptiness of the pariah.

There, a void in the billowing red mist of violence!

Kai turned and ran, but the pariah was faster, Though Kai could perceive the emptiness of the man’s presence, he could not evade him. A hand took him by the scruff of the neck and pulled him up short with great strength. The grip was like that of a machine, powerful and unyielding.

‘That’s far enough,’ said a voice that grated like rusty nails along his spine.

Kai wanted to be sick, his entire body trembling in horror at the utter wrongness of this man, a man who should not be.

‘Who are you?’ gasped Kai.

‘My name is Kartono,’ said his captor. ‘And now it’s time for you to die.’

Twenty-Three

The Crimson Path
Clade pet
Angel unleashed

It had been over a hundred years since Asubha and Subha made war together, a century and more since they had fought as brothers on a field so soaked with blood against a foe so terrible. Live or die, the Custodian was a warrior to honour with a glorious death, and Asubha wished his Legion brothers could have witnessed this fight.

Warriors of their skill in a contest of arms with a single opponent should have been no contest at all, but the praetorian was no ordinary foe. He fought with precise grace, his every blow weighted and measured, his movements anticipating theirs on every level. The three of them moved in a graceful ballet of thrust, dodge, counterattack and parry.

Subha fought like Angron in the arena: with fury and unrelenting pressure. He was the perfect foil for Asubha’s careful skill. While an enemy was desperately defending against the flurry of Subha’s terrible blows, Asubha would be striking with cool precision, hunting for the killing blow that would end any opponent’s resistance in a heartbeat.

But this fight was not going the way either of them expected.

The Custodian repelled Subha without apparent effort, his guardian spear moving with such speed that it was surely impossible. Asubha fired his pistol, but the gold-armoured warrior swayed aside as the shot was fired. His spear spun around and hacked the barrel in two before reversing the blow and hammering the barbed haft into Subha’s stomach. The colossal impact staggered his twin, and Asubha took the opportunity to slash with the long knife he had taken from one of Babu Dhakal’s men.

The blade scraped over the Custodian’s shoulder guard and bounced from the cheek plate of his helmet. His foe slammed an elbow into Asubha’s face and he reeled at the power behind the strike. Asubha took a step back to reorient himself as Subha circled around to flank the Custodian.

‘I always wanted to fight a Custodian,’ snarled Subha.

‘We wondered who would emerge triumphant,’ added Asubha. ‘One of us or one of you?’

‘There are two of you,’ pointed out the Custodian.

‘True, but the question still stands. Our debates would always end in stalemate, for there can be no true answer without death hanging on the outcome,’ said Asubha.

‘You know the answer. I can see it in your eyes. You know you cannot defeat me.’

Asubha laughed and reversed his blade. ‘Tell me your name,’ he said. ‘That we might remember the mighty warrior we slew on Terra.’

The Custodian brought his spear around to the guard position. ‘I am Saturnalia Princeps Carthagina Invictus Cronus–’

‘Enough!’ barked Subha, launching himself at Saturnalia. His twin still bore the blade snapped from the haft of the Custodian they had killed in the Vault. Though a poor mirror of that wielded by Saturnalia, it was still a deadly weapon in the hands of a World Eater. Saturnalia stepped into the attack, going low and driving his speartip at Subha’s gut. His twin spun aside from the blow, hammering his blade against Saturnalia’s shoulder. A gold plate spun off, but the heavy mail weave beneath sent the edge skidding away before it could draw blood.

Asubha followed up and aimed a thunderous kick towards Saturnalia’s unprotected side. A burnished hip plate crumpled under the impact, and drove Saturnalia to the ground. Asubha thrust with his blade, but the Custodian leaned away from the blow, the tip of the blade scraping a furrow in his helmet’s visor.

Saturnalia’s leg swept out in a scything arc, smashing Asubha from his feet. He rolled as he landed, barely avoiding a guillotine-chop of the Custodian’s guardian spear. Asubha was on his feet a moment later, and saw Subha slam his fist into the side of Saturnalia’s red-plumed helm. The Custodian went down hard, but before Subha could press his advantage, he wrenched off his battered helmet and swung it in a punishing arc that smashed into Subha’s jaw with a crunch of breaking bone.

Subha toppled backwards, and Asubha threw himself at Saturnalia as he discarded his ruined helm. The two warriors went down in a tangle of powerful limbs, punching, gouging and jabbing with elbows and fists. Asubha rammed his forehead into Saturnalia’s face and grinned as he felt the warrior’s nose shatter. He dug for his knife, pistoning the blade towards the Custodian’s jaw. Saturnalia blocked the blow with his forearm, and the knife blade drove up through his vambrace and bone. They rolled, and an armoured fist slammed into the side of Asubha’s face.

Asubha was thrown clear by the power behind the blow. He spat blood and rose to a crouch, ready to hurl himself at Saturnalia again. All finesse was gone – his fury had taken over and he and his brother were as one. Subha was already on his feet, his lower jaw all but hanging from his skull, but so too was Saturnalia. The Custodian had retrieved his guardian spear and its tip was aimed at Subha’s heart.

A pumping barrage of shells exploded from the weapon and Subha rocked back as the explosive bolts tore into him. Each one detonated within his flesh, mushrooming from his back in fans of bright blood and splintered bone. Subha crumpled, the life already vanishing from his eyes as he fell onto his front.

‘Now you know,’ said Saturnalia with a rictus grin of blood.

Asubha felt the red rage take him, and though he had always longed for the butcher’s nails, he knew now he did not need them to reach the clarity of undiluted fury. Saturnalia saw the change in him and took a step away. Asubha screamed his brother’s name and threw himself back into the fight.

The guardian spear swung out, but Asubha dived beneath its killing arc and swept up Subha’s fallen blade. He slashed twice in quick succession as he rolled upright in one smooth motion. Blood sprayed from the twin cuts through the flexible mail weave at the back of Saturnalia’s knees, and the Custodian fell into a pool of blood, unable to stand, but still able to fight.

Asubha circled around to face him, his anger filling him with its purity of purpose.

‘You will die here today,’ hissed Saturnalia through his agony. He held his guardian spear before him, and Asubha took a step forward until the tip was resting on his chest.

‘I know that,’ agreed Asubha. ‘But so will you.’

Asubha drove his bloodied blade down through Saturnalia’s skull as the Custodian thrust his spear with the last of his strength. The guardian spear clove Asubha’s heart and tore through his lungs, wreaking irreparable damage to his body. Both warriors slumped against one another as though embracing in honour of their fight to the death.

Asubha slid to the side and fell beside the body of his twin.

As he bled out onto the temple floor, he pressed the broken blade that had ended Saturnalia’s life into his brother’s dead hand.

‘We walk the Crimson Path together, brother,’ said Asubha.

Atharva saw a lithe man in a loose bodyglove lift Kai from the ground, and thrust his hand towards him, uttering the fireborn cant of the Pyrae. A horizontal pillar of fire burned its way across the temple, setting alight every single piece of smashed timber and every body in its path. Flames leapt to life, greedily devouring this feast of combustible material, but they guttered and died before they reached the man holding Kai in his grip.

The man turned as Atharva ran towards him with heavy thudding footsteps, and the building of a Pavoni flesh manipulation faded in his mind as he recognised Yasu Nagasena’s clade pet. He reached for the blade at his belt, stifling a twist of nausea in his gut at the thought of being so close to such anathema to his powers.

Waving streams of gunfire zig-zagged through the temple, but Atharva pushed them aside with short-lived kine shields as he ran through the flames of his own making. He had seen Tagore fall to Yasu Nagasena, but had no clue as to the fates of Subha and Asubha. With Severian in hiding or fled, he could expect no aid in the fight against this clade warrior.

‘Oni-ni-kanabo,’ said the man with a wretched grin that made Atharva sick to his stomach. ‘Come one step closer and Kai Zulane dies.’

Atharva’s lip curled in a grimace of distaste. ‘You are going to kill him anyway, pariah.’

‘How does it feel, warlock?’ asked the clade warrior. ‘How does it feel to be blind?’

‘Liberating,’ lied Atharva, taking another step forwards. ‘But I can kill you without recourse to my powers.’

‘Perhaps,’ conceded the pariah, tightening his grip on Kai’s neck. ‘Though I doubt you can kill me before he dies.’

Though he could see the man clearly with his genhanced eyes, Atharva found it difficult to keep his image from blurring. His vision was far superior to that of mortals, but the pariah’s umbra made it almost impossible to fix him in his mind’s eye. He forced himself into the lower Enumerations, honing his concentration and sharpening his focus. The pariah’s blurred form swam into clarity, a black outline against a haze of yellow smoke and orange flames.

Atharva tried to summon the tiniest morsel of the Great Ocean into his flesh, but the proximity of such an unnatural creature made even such a simple task impossible. The pariah was a hole in the world that drained every scrap of energy.

Kai squirmed in the warrior’s grasp, his face twisted in pain at the pariah’s touch. He let out a cry of such desperation that even Atharva was moved to pity. As vile as it was to be near this man, Atharva could not bear the thought of being touched by him. The clade killer withdrew a long knife with a serrated edge and a blade that ended in two distinct points.

‘Whatever you wanted from him is gone,’ said the pariah.

Before the pariah could stab Kai, a shape rose up behind him and swung a long spar of jagged timber at his head. The clade warrior sensed the incoming attack at the last moment and twisted out of the path of the blow. He could not avoid it completely, and instead of hammering the side of his skull, it slammed into his shoulder.

Atharva saw the Navigator woman raise the piece of wood to strike again, but the clade warrior was not about to give her a second chance. He ducked under her clumsy swing and slammed an open palm against her chest. The woman flew back, slamming into the faceless statue with a sickening thud of flesh on stone.

Atharva seized the opportunity and lunged forward with his own blade extended. The clade warrior dropped Kai and bent his entire body back, swaying aside from Atharva’s thrust. His hand chopped down, but Atharva’s flesh and bone were genetically toughened to withstand pressures greater than any mortal, even a clade-trained one, could bring to bear.

Atharva backhanded the pariah in the chest, and the warrior turned the impact into a springing vault. He landed lightly amid the flames, one leg extended to the side, the other curled up beneath him.

‘So many psykers,’ he giggled. ‘It’s almost too easy.’

Before Atharva could wonder what he meant, a rippling series of metallic plates rose up from the warrior’s neck. As though growing organically at high speed, curved sections of chromed metal unfolded to encase the pariah’s head in a bulbous helm of gold and silver. A tubular device extruded from the side of the pariah’s newly-formed headgear, and lenses tinted with unfathomable colours slotted into place over one eye.

Atharva sensed a terrible threat in this strange device, and put himself between the clade warrior and Kai. He passed his blade from hand to hand, readying himself to fight in close combat. Behind him, Kai groaned as the nausea of the pariah’s touch eased.

‘I should thank you,’ said Atharva. ‘It has been too long since I fought blade to blade. It will make a refreshing change to kill without my powers.’

The pariah leapt into the air and the strange device attached to his helmet spat a stream of black light from the unnatural lenses. Instinctively, Atharva threw up a kine shield, but the power of the Great Ocean was dead in him. The bolts struck him in the chest, the plates of sheet steel strapped to his body offering no protection against so abominable a weapon.

An inferno of cold fire filled Atharva, a numbing pain that felt like liquid nitrogen flowing through his veins. Pulsing waves of dark energy exploded within him, like the supernova of a dead star. And just as an exploding sun must collapse into the gravitational hell of a black hole, so too did Atharva feel his life contracting into a deathly singularity from which there could be no escape.

This was not just death, this was an ending that would deny his life force its release into the Great Ocean where it would exist forever as raw potential. The horror of so bleak a fate gave Atharva the strength to resist it, and he roared as he surged to his feet. The pariah landed next to him, its blade stabbing again and again. Blood oozed from the cuts, and Atharva felt a soul-deep horror at each blow.

His every instinct was to escape this nightmarish being, this abomination that had no right to exist in a world where living things claimed dominion. Unreasoning terror made Atharva want to run and hide, anything to get away from this terrible, abhorrent creature. He fought against the insidious effects of the pariah as another knife thrust opened the meat of his body and a scorching blast of black fire from the clade warrior’s helmet enveloped him.

Through the shocking pain, Atharva saw the unfolding battle as though viewed through a slowly shattering window. Black-clad soldiers moved like glacial automatons through the burning temple, the bullets of their weapons stuttering in slow motion as they slaughtered the huddled people taking shelter from the carnage. He saw Tagore lying where he had fallen, his stomach a smoking ruin and a gaping hole cut in his chest.

Across from the dead warrior, Atharva saw Asubha and Subha. The twins lay side by side in death, next to the cloven body of a Legio Custodes warrior. Like Tagore, their chests had also been cut open, and they lay in vast lakes of impossibly bright blood. The temple was lost, and any hope they had of bringing Kai Zulane to the Warmaster was now ashes.

Atharva knew he had only one option left to him, and though it was a monstrously drastic solution, it was the only way he could fight the pariah and prevent what Kai Zulane knew from reaching those who were now his enemies. It was a solution almost as grievous as death, but without making this ultimate sacrifice, he could not fight on. Atharva was a Space Marine, a warrior, and though it was giving up that part of him that made him whole, there was no other choice.

He reached deep inside himself, to the secret place that could look into the Great Ocean and draw on its limitless power. It was a fragile thing, the incalculably precious result of a billion random mutations that had built upon one another over an unimaginably vast span of time. For a frozen instant that lasted an eternity, Atharva wondered whether death would be preferable to being blind for the rest of his life.

‘Only those sacrifices that have worth are meaningful,’ he said, crushing that secret part of his existence and forever severing his connection to the warp.

He screamed in anguish, as no warrior of the Legiones Astartes had ever screamed or ever would again until the last moments of this war, when men would discover the true depths of suffering the universe could inflict upon them.

Atharva was alone, all his carefully-wrought plans in ashes. With nothing left to lose, and with the last shred of power left to him, he reached up to the faceless angel that loomed above him with a vulture’s anticipation. He sensed the gathering anticipation of the neverborn creatures hidden behind its featureless mask, and tore aside the veil that kept them chained within it.

‘Kill them all,’ he commanded. ‘Leave none alive!’

Kai experienced Atharva’s battle with the pariah through a haze of blurred and overlapping auras. His body was wracked with spasms of pain at its presence, and he fought to hold onto consciousness as its repellent presence turned his stomach inside out. He huddled in the lee of the faceless statue, helpless in the face of the bloodshed that had come to the temple, cradling Roxanne to his chest as a woman he didn’t know did the same with two young boys.

He heard Atharva shout at the statue above him and felt a bone-deep chill as a layer of frost crackled into existence on the smooth dark stone. Kai flinched at the sharp cold, and looked up as he felt the sudden presence of something far worse and infinitely more terrible than any pariah could ever be.

The outline of the Vacant Angel shimmered, as though two of them fought to occupy the same space. Like a pair of overlaid transparencies, they jostled and ran together. Kai saw a host of eyes, fanged mouths and claws press outwards from one of the images. As though the universe could no longer cope with two such competing realities, the wavering outlines snapped apart and the temple was split by a shrieking cry of birth more painful and more joyous than any endured by a mortal newborn.

A ghostly form rose from the Vacant Angel, and though Kai’s blindsight was not yet restored, he saw its shape completely. It resembled a tattered giant in spectral robes with a hood that concealed a depthless void in which galaxies went to die and the empty wasteland that could only exist beyond the event horizon of a black hole. Skeletal arms unfolded, and its voluminous robes billowed in howling winds of aetheric energy. A pair of icy white wings furled into existence from its back, cutting streamers of frozen vapour through the air.

Crackling webs of frost formed on the stone walls of the temple, and glass shattered as the temperature plummeted to below zero in an instant. Kai’s breath misted before him and he shivered in terror at the magnificent and terrible creature Atharva had drawn out of the faceless statue.

Its horror touched Kai deeper than any fear he had known, even in his darkest moments aboard the Argo. All the grief, all the suffering, all the unendurable pain and woes given voice in this place had shaped its form, a creature of immaterial energy now coalesced into this monstrous, avenging angel.

Death had been wept into its faceless heart and it had been commanded to unleash that in the most direct way imaginable. The Vacant Angel swept down into the temple with its arms outstretched and a drawn-out shriek of grief exploding from beneath its hood. Kai pressed his hands to his ears as the sound cut into him like a cold knife to the heart.

The Black Sentinels shot at the angel, but nothing so paltry as gunfire could harm such a creature. Bullets passed through its ghostly form and lasblasts simply twitched its shape with light as they passed harmlessly through. Men dropped to their knees as it flew at them, driven to madness by even a glimpse of the angel’s hooded face.

The angel’s gaze was death, and wherever it turned its head, soldiers fell to the ground as their hearts froze in their chests. Its scream was an unending lament for the dead, a solemn, piercing hymnal to the futility of life and the inevitability of death. To hear its scream was to feel the cold touch of the grave, and those Black Sentinels who had not already perished turned their weapons on themselves.

Atharva staggered into the lee of the statue, and though he had loosed this terrible angel, Kai saw his aura was grief-stricken, as though he had lost that which meant most to him in all the world. Even through the haze of the pariah’s presence, Kai could see that was exactly what had happened.

Atharva was no longer psychic.

‘What did you do?’ gasped Kai, his breath misting before him.

‘What I had to,’ said Atharva, as Kai felt Roxanne stir. Kai turned his horrified gaze from the warrior of the Thousand Sons to the girl cradled in his arms. She lifted her head, but before she could take in the full horror of the daemonic avatar at loose, Kai turned her head away.

‘Don’t look at it,’ he said, and she knew enough to listen.

‘What is it?’ she asked, keeping her eyes tightly shut.

‘It’s death,’ said Kai, knowing that was only half the truth.

He felt movement beside him, and turned as Palladis Novandio walked out into the chaos of the temple’s destruction. The sanctuary he had built from the ashes of his own grief was a charnel house, a tomb for the living and a dreadful mirror of what he had tried to achieve.

‘Palladis! What are you doing?’ yelled Kai.

‘What I must,’ he wept as he marched toward the angel laying waste to the living.

‘I told you to take me!’ screamed Palladis. ‘Take me and be gone!’

The angel was hovering just below the shattered remains of the temple’s roof, its aetheric form bathed in the hellish light of the fires burning beneath it. The darkness beneath its hood flickered, as though the angel recognised something of its creation in the man approaching it.

The creature descended through the air with its arms spread wide, leaving a glittering trail of frozen moisture in its wake. Its keening lament grew sharper, and Kai could only watch in horror as its shimmering, icy wings began to wrap Palladis Novandio in a macabre embrace.

‘Palladis, please!’ screamed Roxanne as she saw what he was doing. ‘Come back!’

The master of the temple turned at the sound of her voice, but made no move to escape the angel’s clutches.

‘It’s alright, Roxanne,’ he said, as the wings closed upon him. ‘I’ll be with them now…’

Like the soldiers before him, Palladis Novandio slumped to the floor of the temple, dead in an instant, his soul now free to join his lost family.

‘No!’ screamed Roxanne, and the angel looked up, fastening its eyeless stare upon the huddled group of mortals that sheltered below the statue that had imprisoned it for so long. Its mournful cries echoed from the walls like a chorus of all the souls damned to oblivion throughout the ages. Kai heard his death in the sound.

Roxanne took hold of his hands and turned him to face her.

‘Kai, this has to end,’ she said. ‘And it has to end now!’

He shook his head. ‘I can’t stop this. I don’t know how.’

‘You do,’ she said. ‘That’s the only thing I know for sure about all of this. Only you can stop it.’

‘How?’ said Kai, feeling the inexorable approach of the daemonic angel.

‘Come with me,’ said Roxanne, closing her eyes.

Warmth spread from Roxanne’s hands, passing from her flesh and into his. Her breathing deepened, and Kai felt the touch of her strange manifestation of psychic energy. The Navigators were a breed apart from astropaths, and no one beyond the confines of the Navis Nobilite truly understood the full extent of their powers. Kai’s breathing deepened, and he felt as though his very essence was being drawn into Roxanne.

He wanted to rebel against this surrender of the self, but Roxanne’s soothing voice drew him into her. The sensation was not unlike the early stages of a nuncio trance, and though their physical bodies were in mortal danger, Kai let himself be enfolded in Roxanne’s strange power. If this was death, then where better to meet it than in the soul-embrace of a friend?

‘Where are we going?’ he asked.

‘To the Argo,’ said Roxanne.

Kai opened his eyes and found himself in the familiar dreamscape of the Rub’ al Khali, the endless desert sweeping to the edges of the world in cursive arches of golden sand. He stood by the azure lake, its waters rippling with strange tides and the sun hanging on the far horizon like a semicircle of molten bronze.

The fortress of Arzashkun glittered like a bauble in the middle distance, its towers turned gold in the sunset and its walls shimmering in the heat haze coming off the desert. He knew he should try to reach the safety of the fortress, but felt a curious reluctance to venture in that direction. Instead he turned his gaze towards the shores of the lake.

A regicide board was set up on a low table, the pieces arranged apparently at random, for it seemed as though certain pieces were placed on squares they couldn’t possibly have reached. Kai remembered playing against someone here, a hooded figure with golden eyes, but the memory refused to divulge any further details.

Roxanne stood beside him, holding his hand as the sun sank slowly to the horizon.

‘The sun is setting,’ said Kai. ‘It’s never done that before.’

‘This isn’t just your dreamspace any more. It’s mine too.’

‘I know, but I don’t mind.’

‘It’s beautiful here,’ said Roxanne. ‘I can see why you come here.’

‘It’s safe,’ said Kai. ‘At least it used to be.’

‘Before the Argo?’

He nodded, already sensing the lurking presence of the black horror beneath the sand. It felt like an age since he had come here, though he knew it could only have been a day or so. Time was meaningless in a nuncio trance, and a dreamer could live an entire lifetime in the course of a single dream.

‘It’s here, isn’t it? The Argo.’

‘Yes,’ said Kai, as the shadow beneath the sand drew ever closer. He could feel the grasping claws of guilt and the tendrils of remorse working their way towards the surface of the sand, but he felt no urge to run for the safety of the fortress.

Roxanne said he had to end this, and nothing was ever ended by running away.

This time he would face whatever emerged from the depths of his subconscious.

As though drawn towards them by Kai’s willingness to face it, the horror of the Argo pushed up from the sand, an oozing black nightmare of screaming death. Kai struggled against its pull, and the fear that Roxanne’s presence had kept at bay rose up in a suffocating wave.

‘I can’t do this,’ he said.

‘You can,’ replied Roxanne, taking his hand. Kai wished he possessed even a fraction of her composure. ‘I’m right beside you, and this is my dreamspace too, remember?’

‘I remember,’ said Kai as the black tide dragged them down like oily quicksand.

‘Then let me show you what I saw,’ said Roxanne.

Twenty-Four

The Argo
The dead can forgive
The end of the game

The black sand swallowed Kai, and his panic slammed into him like a resurgent tide. He took a terrified breath, but rather than the oily liquid texture he expected, a breath of achingly cold air filled his lungs. Instead of total darkness, Kai was plunged into a kaleidoscopic hallucination of myriad colours and swirling vortices. He felt sick to the pit of his stomach at the churning maelstrom of phantom images, howling currents and voids of non-space exploding around him.

Yet for all its horror, there was a reluctant beauty to everything, an ethereal quality that thrilled as much as it terrified. It stretched all around him as far as his eyes could see, and it took Kai a moment to recognise that he was seeing this magnificent vista through more than two eyes.

No sooner had the realisation come than he felt the immense, implacable weight of the starship beneath him, its massive bulk stretching behind him like a vast slice of an azure city cut from the metal skin of a planet, set on a course through the stars. He knew this ship, though he had never seen it from such a vantage point.

Whole once again, this immense marvel of technology was the Argo.

The entire vessel shuddered like a newborn, and Kai wondered at the forces required to so easily buffet such an incredible weight. A lashing tendril of variegated light swirled down from an unfolding nova of black energy and slammed down towards the ship. A flare of actinic light shimmered on the edge of perception as it struck the vessel’s shields, dissipating with what sounded like a roar of terrible frustration.

Another smear of red stormclouds spiralled into existence just off the curving, plough-blade of a bow, and Kai felt the ship’s engines strain as it tried to avoid the burgeoning fury. As though sensing the Argo’s attempts to evade, the stormclouds swelled and threw out grasping spears of hungry light. They too smashed into the shields, and the squalling flare of light seemed more piercing, more strained to Kai.

The entire vessel lurched as yet more tempests blew up around it, slamming it to the side with no more effort than a leaf in the wind. An explosion on the tapering topside flared, and Kai saw a series of towers studded with thin pylons vanish in a searing, short-lived fireball.

A portion of the shields collapsed, a gaping wound in the Argo’s protection, and he sensed the ship’s captain turn the vessel away from the most violent monsoons in an effort to protect the open flank.

Whatever beauty Kai felt this region possessed was immediately forgotten. This was a place of terrible, unimaginable danger. No right thinking person would willingly cast themselves here. This realm of existence was anathema to life, and it was not meant that humanity should venture far from its home of placid existence on Terra.

Fresh detonations blossomed along the length of the Argo, and more of the vaned towers collapsed as the storms overloaded the pylons’ ability to keep them at bay. A forward portion of the starboard flank exploded outwards, venting frozen air like a spray of white blood.

Kai wanted to close his eyes, but he was not cast in this unfolding drama as a participant, merely an observer. He twisted as the ship trembled like a wounded beast, the thunderous detonations wracking its hull eerily silent from his vantage point. The power of the destruction working its way along the vessel was like the hammerblow footsteps of a Mechanicum battle engine.

The darkness gathered. The red cloud surged towards the Argo like a gaping maw and the spiralling arms of the black vortex clawed at the shields with ever greater ferocity. To his untrained eyes, it was as though a gross and malicious sentience guided their fury, for what else could explain the predator’s glee he felt from the ugly stains that surrounded the vessel?

He wanted to turn from the horror, to shut himself off from a firmament awash with nightmares, half-glimpsed visions of hungry eyes and mountainous bodies the size of continents shifting in the depths. Yet he had not come here to turn away from this. He had been blind to the reality of the Argo’s death for too long, and no matter what, he was not turning away from it now.

Roxanne was right. This had to end now.

One by one, he watched the shield vanes collapse, and the warp poured in like a polluted sea through a disintegrating dam. Immaterial energies bathed the vessel, and Kai saw barely visible shapes as they swam into existence within the bounds of those shields that still functioned: scaled red beasts like skeletal men with long curling horns and clawed arms that flashed like swords. Monsters dredged from the deepest nightmares of the crew spun like smoke as they revelled in their newly birthed forms.

The hull was no barrier to them, and they passed through the metres of adamantium to manifest within the crew compartments and companionways of the ship. Formless spawn roamed the hull, their very touch disassembling the solid matter of its gun ports, commandways and cargo holds. The vessel groaned and more compartments blew out into space as its collapse continued at a geometric rate. Cathedral-like holds imploded with soundless screams of tearing metal, and Kai wept as he saw thousands of men and women pulled out into the void.

The screams echoed in his skull, but there was nothing he could do to block them out, no fortress of Arzashkun and no Rub’ al Khali in which to shut himself away from everything. Here, Kai was forced to face his daemons, and he watched the death of the Argo with a heavy heart, knowing it was doomed, but pledged to honour its last moments.

Then, just when it seemed as though the vessel must surely break apart and be claimed by the void, a slender thread of golden light penetrated the darkness. Little more than a sliver against the raging inferno of colour, it was nevertheless a lifeline, and one the Argo flailed for in desperation. The ship turned its collapsing prow towards the light, lurching with the last of its strength as a drowning man grasps for an outstretched hand.

Where the golden light shone, no storms could touch, and where it surged strong, they were driven back. A narrow channel of dead space opened up in front of the Argo, and Kai’s heart soared as the last gasp of the vessel’s engines saw it slip into this miraculous channel.

Broken and torn into a raw, ragged shadow of its former self, the Argo fell into the fragile gap in the tempests. All around it, blistering squalls of impossible light and sentient cyclones battered at this corridor of serenity, but the light was inviolable and held firm against the warp’s every predation. He gasped as his mind was filled with a vision of the greatest mountain on Terra, a hollowed out peak of sadness and service, where the most glorious and most powerful beacon in the galaxy was born.

Kai had never been told how the Argo had managed to return to realspace after the monsters attacked. He had assumed the captain had been lucky enough to find a warp gate that led back to the Sol system, but he saw how naïve such a belief had been. The captain and all the crew were dead, and the only two people left alive within the dying vessel were Kai and Roxanne. Had Roxanne found this wayward strand of the Astronomican and pulled them to safety? He knew such an analogy was crude, but what other way was there to explain it?

Even though this was a memory from another mind, Kai felt an inordinate sense of relief as the empty corridor of calm space enfolded the Argo. The vessel was plummeting through a web of sticky strands that fought to cling onto its prize, but the power of the Astronomican was at its strongest here, and the Argo was dragged back into the material universe.

Kai’s stomach sank, and he swallowed a mouthful of bile as his body shifted from one plane of existence to another. Translating from the warp to realspace was never easy, but to do it while looking into the heart of baleful storms was even harder. He fought to hold onto consciousness, and let out a shuddering series of breaths as the sickening colours of the warp faded and the distant sprinkling of diamond stars against the darkness of realspace swam into focus.

Now subject to the principal laws of the universe, the Argo twisted as gravity tore at it with jealous claws. Portions of the ship buckled inwards, and others tore away in the violence of translation. How galling it would be to have survived such violent warp storms only to be destroyed by the very laws held in abeyance beyond the veil of the immaterium.

Yet Kai knew they had not been destroyed – they had lived.

He remembered the salvage crews cutting him from his astropath’s chamber. He remembered screaming and clawing and biting at them, raving and demented from his nightmarish solitude. He had heard the crew die, their every last thought and final moment of agony, and it had driven him to the brink of madness. To have lived through so horrendous an ordeal was more than most minds could survive, and Kai knew that a man of lesser mental fortitude would have died along with the crew.

For the longest time he had derided himself as weak and foolish, haunted by his own survival and blaming himself for every death to which he had been forced to listen. He knew now that his survival was only thanks to his strength and ability to shut off that part of himself that could not hope to deal with such a trauma. Enough people had told him that the death of the Argo was not his fault, for good reasons and for bad, but only by seeing it for himself could he truly accept the truth of it.

And with that truth came revelation.

I was there the day Horus slew the Emperor.

The delicious treason of it. The punchline undelivered. Words from another time and another mind. The warrior of the new moon will say it and it will sound like a joke, but it will soon be ashes in his mouth, a bitter memory he wishes he could erase. It is both true and false. Blood spilled through misunderstanding.

Kai sees the Red Chamber.

Crimson light spills over him like oil: thick, slow and choking. It envelops him until it seems there is nothing left of the world but blood.

He is disembodied, or his body has been destroyed. It is impossible to know which.

The Red Chamber is like the interior of a diseased ventricle, pulsing with ruddy light and weirdly angled, as though the fundamental laws of physics no longer apply. Lines and curves intersect and diverge, forming decks and walls and ceilings at impossible angles to one another.

Everywhere drips blood, or is that his imagination?

Red-lit hololiths on one wall show a gently spinning orb of silver and blue, a haze of fire rippling the lower levels of its atmosphere. This world burns with war, and it does not surprise him when he sees the familiar outlines of the Nordafrik continental mass emerge from the storm-lit clouds that gather like gnarled fists over the landscape.

This is Terra, and it is under attack.

Kai has no sensation of form, nothing to give him a clue as to how he can be in this place. Is he a fragment of soul, a sliver of consciousness? A passive observer or a shaper of events yet to come? No matter how he shifts his awareness, there is no sensation of weight or substance.

Flicker. Time shifts.

He sees as he once saw – with his birthsight – and he wishes he did not.

This is a place of carnage, a slaughterhouse where dissected bodies have been hung from the walls, and skulls jangle on hooks like bone totems of primitive savages. Banners of black canvas ripple with no wind to stir them, as though the loathsome devices worked into their fabric quiver with life of their own.

A battle has been fought here. Or will be fought here. It was or will be a battle like no other, and its outcome has yet to be understood by the cosmos at large. This moment, this epochal paradigm shift in the affairs of the galaxy, is his alone to see, but soon it will echo through the aeons like the ringing of the mightiest bell ever tolled.

This is history being written before him, and history demands to be witnessed.

Bodies are strewn around him, titanic warriors in warplate scored with sword and axe wounds, punctured by missile impacts and ripped open by the claws of savage monsters. The ruin of flesh is unimaginable: meat and bone reduced to a gruel of marrow, bodies twisted and gnawed like cast-off butcher scraps. Kai is used to death, and knows full well the horrors man is capable of wreaking on his brothers, but this is something else.

This butchery has all the hallmarks of hatred, and no hate is as bitter as that which was once love. These warriors knew each other, and what was waged in this red chamber was not war, it was murder. It was fratricide of the worst and most unforgivable kind.

His gaze roams the corpses, drawn towards the focal point of the struggle, a stepped dais where a horror like no other awaits him. He wants to look away, to spare himself the awful certitude that will come with seeing what has happened upon the dais. His survival instinct begs him to look away, knowing he will be driven to madness by the sight of it.

Kai knows that to shirk this vision is cowardice. Yet he fears this understanding. He fears it will open a door that cannot ever be closed. Once knowledge moves from potential to actuality, there can be no unlearning, no undoing and no return to the life he once lived.

Flicker. Time shifts again…

Shapes and shadows move around him, vast, cosmic things without shape or form. They are invisible, but he knows they are there. He can sense their horror and disbelief at what has happened here, their galactic rage at an outcome none of them had foreseen. Time skips around him, droplets of blood reversing their course in the air to return to the split arteries from which they fell. Shouts of protest, cries of pain and booming laughter echo and return, echo and return, roosting in the throats of those that wrought them. In an instant, the horror upon the dais is undone and he sees fragments of what has gone before.

Black and red entwined, a golden eye, slitted like a cat’s. Ivory pinions, a boom of air and a clash of swords. Halo and thorny crown clash, a beating of breasts. Luminous and wondrous rears above hard-edged plate and monstrous ambition. They are clawed and enraged. A stalemate of blows, a battle of wills fought in realms beyond the understanding of mortal senses.

It is martial perfection unmatched. Only one battle in the history of the galaxy will ever eclipse its fury, and it will be fought in the same place in a matter of moments. That one such battle should take place is remarkable. Two is unheard of.

There are no forms he can see, only light and darkness, fleeting impressions of battling titans. These warriors are avatars, numinous and filled with the light of creation at the heart of the universe. Moulded into ideally-wrought mortal forms and unleashed upon the galaxy, they are brightly burning stars, all the brighter for their achingly short existence.

Voices take shape, but Kai is relieved beyond imagining that he cannot understand them, for who would dare listen to the words of gods? These incredible beings come together once more, and though their language is unknown to him, meaning seeps into his consciousness.

Gods may be beyond understanding, but they will be heard.

Promises are made. Offers of power and servitude. Seductive bargains offered as promises. Angelic scorn is poured upon them. Hurt tears of rage and rejection. Bloody tears on golden features, a necessary death, the most infinitesimal crack in the most impenetrable armour. A life given willingly, a sacrifice on the altar of the future.

A death for a death. One to provoke the other…

Black and crimson collide one last time. An explosion of red light swamps Kai and time skips back and forth once again. Is this the future or the past? He sees this place as it must once have looked: the sterile, functional interior of a warship’s strategium. Breaths of recycled air stir freshly-won honour banners, liveried crewmen attend to their duties with pride, and the limitless potential of the galaxy is a spray of stars in the viewing bay.

In a heartbeat it changes, now a temple to a living god.

A dark-armoured god whose divinity was wrought by his own hands. Once the favoured avatar of a greater god, but now slipped from any notion of servitude, even to those who elevated him beyond the limits set upon his superhuman existence. This is a god who forges his own destiny with brute strength and implacable will, moulding the future to a shape pleasing to him and him alone. He calls no man master, but he will at the end.

Flicker. Forward and back. Flicker, flicker.

The warp makes a mockery of any notion of time as linear.

Kai sees him dead, once a haloed messenger of crimson perfection, now a broken sacrifice who guided the executioner’s blade to his own heart. Dead. Unthinkable, and his mind recoils from the horror of this vision. It is vile and spiteful, a parade of horrors conjured for no more reason than to break his spirit.

Yet the warp is capable of so much more, and these are but tasters for a greater horror.

He sees it unfold in unflinching detail, every golden hue of armour, every play of light around features that are ever-changing, but always broken-hearted. He sees hatred, love, guilt, horror, resolve broken and renewed in the same breath, and a depthless well of sadness for a future he sees and knows he has created.

The temporal flow is out of joint, flexing like a broken spine. Though Kai sees this in random flickers of spinning time, he knows this can only be the future.

And it is not distant.

The golden light flinches, and he feels its impossible scrutiny. It is looking back at him. It sees him and knows everything about him in a span of time so small it has no method of being measured. The light sees what he has seen, knows now what he saw upon the raised dais, and he senses a measure of its acceptance of that knowledge.

Words form in his mind, softly spoken and without the need of anything as crude as a voice, yet they have the force of the most violent hurricane. He understands these words, and knows now why no mortal should ever hear the voice of a living god.

He sees what happens next in awful clarity, gold and black, master and servant, god and demi-god.

Father and son.

It can end only one way, and the knowledge of what has already happened, but is yet to come, is enough to break the sanity of any mortal, no matter how strong their mind might be. Yet Kai has been tempered with guilt and horror, and has a strength beyond that of others.

He has one more task left to perform.

The vision vanished in a burst of golden light and Kai was hurled from the Red Chamber into a place of warmth, aromatic perfumes, scented oils and the sound of a gurgling fountain. He opened his eyes and found himself reclining on a padded couch fashioned from the hide of some exotic beast. His entire body felt as though he floated on an invisible cushion, and all the hurts done to him since his return to Terra were undone.

‘Oh, Aniq,’ he whispered. ‘That we had to see such things…’

He could remember every detail of the Red Chamber, and though it presaged a horror greater than anything he could possibly have imagined, he felt strangely detached from it, as though it was a matter of no consequence to him.

Kai sat up and looked around to see that he lay in one of the principal guest suites of Arzashkun, a chamber so ostentatiously appointed it was almost obscene. Not only was his physical body restored, but a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders, a burden he had not realised was so monstrous until its removal. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes, listening to the fading sound of thousands of voices in his head as they receded into the chambers of memory.

As they pulled away from him, he felt their voices join as one in a wordless sensation of release. The dead could not return, but they could forgive. Kai knew he would never forget these people, and they would never forget him. The thought that they would always be with him made him smile, for they were now part of his story and not a burden to carry.

Kai stood as a warm breeze stirred an invitation at the silken curtain of an opened door that led out onto a balcony. He walked across the marble floor, feeling as though Arzashkun was no longer a place of refuge, but a place of wonder. He had crafted its every tower and chamber from memory, but he had never truly basked in its magnificence. Only now did he appreciate the miraculous skill of its ancient builders, their sense of proportion and joy as they raised its beauty to the skies.

He stepped onto the balcony, but instead of the endless sands of the Rub’ al Khali, he saw a verdant landscape of lush forests, sweeping grasslands and crystal rivers. This was the Empty Quarter before the sands had swallowed it, a bounteous land fought over by kings and emperors since the dawn of civilisation. This was the land where his race had been born, and it shone with the unlimited potential of humanity.

Kai wasn’t surprised to see a regicide board set up waiting for him. His opponent from the game by the shore sat before the onyx pieces, and the memory of that conversation returned to him with sudden clarity. Where before his opponent had been indistinct, now he went bare headed, and Kai nodded in respect as he saw a face more commonly seen rendered in marble.

‘You look different, Kai,’ said the figure, his golden eyes like shimmering coins.

‘I am different,’ he said, taking a seat before the silver pieces of the board. ‘I feel free.’

The man smiled and said, ‘Good. That is all I ever wanted for you.’

‘You brought the Argo from the warp,’ said Kai, moving a silver piece forward.

‘Are you asking me a question?’

Kai shook his head. ‘No. I don’t want to know. The truth only spoils things.’

‘The truth is a moving target,’ said the figure, moving a Templar across the board.

‘Did you see?’ asked Kai, already knowing the answer.

‘I saw what Sarashina hid within you, yes.’

Kai said nothing, and they played in silence, trading pieces back and forth across the board. Mindful of his last encounter over the regicide board, Kai played a cautious game, husbanding his pieces, unwilling to take unnecessary risks.

‘Do you not want to play?’ asked his opponent.

‘I don’t know what to say to you,’ replied Kai, sitting back in his chair. ‘Knowing what you know of the future, you still want to play a game?’

‘Of course. At a time like this, it is the best way to stay focused,’ said the figure, moving his Emperor forward in an aggressive move designed to tempt Kai to rashness. ‘If you want to know a man’s true character, play a game with him. In any case, the future is the future, and my feelings towards it will not change it one way or the other.’

‘Truly? Even you can’t change it?’ said Kai, willingly taking the bait.

The figure shrugged, as though they discussed something trivial. ‘Some things need to happen, Kai. Even the most terrible things you can imagine sometimes need to happen.’

‘Why?’

His opponent moved his Divinitarch into a blocking position, and said, ‘Because sometimes the only victory possible is to keep your opponent from winning.’

Kai scanned the board, seeing he had no more moves to make.

‘Stalemate,’ he said.

The figure spread his hands in an empty gesture of apology. ‘I know some people think me omnipotent, but there is a catch with being all powerful and all knowing.’

‘Which is?’

‘You can’t be both at the same time,’ said the figure with a wry smile.

‘So what happens now?’

‘I finish the game.’

‘This one?’ asked Kai, puzzled.

‘No,’ said the figure. ‘Our game is done, and I thank you for it.’

‘Will I see you again?’

His opponent laughed. ‘Who knows, Kai? If our game has taught me anything, it is that all things are possible.’

‘But you’re going to die.’

‘I know,’ said the Emperor.

Kai opened his eyes and saw only blackness. He felt cold, and a suffocating claustrophobia enveloped him. He slid his hands from Roxanne’s and reached up to rip away the bandages wrapped around his head. He tore at them in a frenzy, pulling away handfuls of textured cloth and wads of sticky gauze as he heard the shrieking moans of the Vacant Angel as it drew closer.

The last of the bandages fell away, and Kai looked into Roxanne’s pearlescent eyes. They were the most wondrous shade of gold-flecked amber, and he wondered how he had not noticed that before. The answer came in a heartbeat.

His augmetics, as expensive and precise as they were, could not hope to replicate the wonder of human eyes. He saw Roxanne’s expression of shock, and reached up to touch his face. Instead of bruised and puffy flesh where Asubha had ripped out his eyes of glass and steel, he touched soft skin and the gentle give of organic tissue.

‘Kai,’ breathed Roxanne. ‘Your eyes…’

He looked up, seeing the interior of the temple with the eyes bequeathed to him by his mother and father, and though they were imperfect organs at best, he revelled in this gift, no matter how short-lived it might be. It mattered not that his first sight in years was of a ruined building that had become a battleground; that he was seeing at all was a miracle.

Bodies lay strewn in disarray, men and women, soldiers and civilians. Amid the destruction, Kai saw Golovko and Yasu Nagasena, their faces twisted in horror at the hideous form of the Vacant Angel as it feasted on the energies of the dead. Kai tore his gaze from the deathly being and watched as his erstwhile protector and captor fought his last battle.

Atharva and the pariah duelled in the shadow of the faceless statue, one a genhanced superhuman engineered to be the greatest warrior of the Imperium, the other a killer of men like him. The pariah moved like an acrobat, his every movement controlled and precise. Against the bulk of the warrior of the Legiones Astartes, he was a frail and insubstantial figure, but he fought with a confidence born of his unique power to confound and discomfit psykers.

He did not yet know what Kai knew of the Thousand Sons warrior.

Atharva staggered as though in pain, and the pariah leapt in for the killing blow as a long, energised blade snapped from the sleeve of his bodyglove.

Atharva righted himself in an instant, and caught him in mid air.

Even though the pariah was helmeted, Kai felt his shock.

‘Once I could see, but now I am blind,’ said Atharva, with terrible sadness and anger in his voice.

Kai knew just how great a sacrifice Atharva had made to fight the clade killer, and he doubted anyone else could truly appreciate what he had given up. The pariah struggled in Atharva’s grip, but there could be no escape from such grievous power. The energised blade stabbed down through Atharva’s chest, and the warrior grunted in pain as the blade clove his heart.

Atharva hurled the clade warrior away, slamming him into the wall of the temple with a crunching crack of breaking bones. The pariah slumped to the ground, his body a twisted mass of limbs bent at impossible angles for a living being.

Atharva wrenched the blade from his body and stared into the blackened hood of the Vacant Angel.

‘Just you and me,’ said Atharva as the ghostly form of the angel descended towards him.

Kai knew there was no way Atharva could fight such a terrible apparition, yet he stood firm, putting himself between the Vacant Angel and the mortals at his back. The creature spread its arms, but before it could sweep Atharva into its monstrous embrace, it loosed a piercing shriek of pain. The creature threw back its head and let out a howl of abject agony as portions of its ragged form bled into the air like flares from the surface of a star.

Kai watched as the creature unravelled, its outline wavering and blurring as it was forced back to the realm from whence it had come. He could see no cause for the angel’s dissolution until he cast his gaze towards the temple doors and saw a group of lithe figures armoured in gold and silver pushing into the temple.

They wore helms that obscured the lower half of their faces, and each of them was an albino with a white topknot trailing from the crown of their shaven skulls. White spotted hides were draped across their shoulders, where long bladed swords with wide quillons were sheathed.

They advanced into the temple without words, bearing long spears with crystal blades extended before them. Their supple movements marked them as women, and like hunters driving a dangerous beast back to its lair, they formed a perfect semi-circle around the Vacant Angel.

Its screaming was never ending, but its form was little more than a scrap of dirty, yellowed light as its power was stripped away. Soon, even that was gone, and its keening lament came to an end as the power that sustained it was stripped away.

‘The silent sisterhood,’ said Roxanne.

Kai had known who these women were, but it was the giant in golden armour who entered the temple behind them that captured all his attention.

‘Lord Dorn,’ said Atharva.

Twenty-Five

The only victory
My last hunt
Legacy

To see a primarch with his own eyes was a last gift to Kai, and it took all his composure not to throw himself to his knees before the lord and master of the Imperial Fists. With the ending of the Vacant Angel, silence filled the temple as Rogal Dorn marched down the nave. Clad in his war plate of burnished red gold, the primarch dominated the space, a living gravity well to which every eye was drawn.

‘Stand down, Atharva of the Thousand Sons,’ said Dorn, his voice as hard and unyielding as the stone of the mountains. ‘It is over.’

‘Nothing is ever over, Rogal Dorn,’ said Atharva. ‘You of all people should know that.’

The gold-armoured sisters accompanying Dorn flinched at Atharva’s use of his given name, but of course said nothing. More people entered the temple, armsmen clad in looped bands of black and bearing an amethyst crest upon their left breast. At their head marched a beautiful woman whose face he had last seen while a prisoner beneath the mountains. There, she had been an illusion, but Kai had no doubt that this Aeliana Septmia Verduchina Castana was the real thing.

Roxanne let out a soft breath at the sight of her family’s representative and snapped her head in the direction of a young boy held tight to the matronly woman that huddled in the shelter of the statue with them. She knelt beside him and opened his tightly clenched fist to reveal a silver ring set with an amethyst that blinked with a soft purple glow.

The boy’s eyes were rimed with tears.

‘You said it was a magic ring,’ he said.

‘And so it is,’ said Roxanne with a rueful sigh, taking hold of Kai’s hand as they stood together to face Rogal Dorn and his allies. Among them, Kai saw Adept Hiriko and Athena Diyos. Though he knew she must have helped his pursuers, he was glad to have this last chance to see her again.

‘Give us the astropath,’ ordered Rogal Dorn, and Kai had to stop himself from taking an involuntary step forward.

Atharva shook his head. ‘He is not yours to command.’

Dorn laughed, though Kai heard uncertainty in the sound.

‘Of course he is,’ said Dorn, drawing a vast pistol of chased gold and ebony. ‘I am the Emperor’s chosen champion. Everything on Terra is mine to command.’

Atharva looked over his shoulder and gave Kai a nod of respect.

‘Not everything,’ he said as Rogal Dorn’s weapon fired with a deafening roar.

Anger touched Kai as he watched Atharva fall, the back of his head a smouldering ruin of blackened meat and skull fragments. The warrior of the Thousand Sons toppled to the temple floor, dead before he hit the ground.

Kai gripped Roxanne’s hand tightly, trying not to show how afraid he was. His gaze moved from Lord Dorn to Adept Hiriko and Athena Diyos, and he knew he would not be able to keep them from learning what he knew. He was not strong enough to resist their interrogation, and he dearly wished he could unlearn what he knew.

What he knew would destroy them; its truth was too terrible for them to bear. In that moment Kai knew he could not allow them to take him. Some things were too dark, too impossible and too dreadful to be known. A slow smile crept across his face as he remembered the words of his regicide opponent.

Sometimes the only victory possible is to keep your opponent from winning.

Quite whose victory he was winning Kai wasn’t sure, but he knew that the Imperium could not stand against the armies of Horus Lupercal if they dragged the truth out of him. Atharva had failed in his bid to bring him to the Warmaster, and now the fate of millions rested on Kai’s shoulders.

This was his moment, his last chance to take control of his destiny and serve the Emperor with the only thing that was his to give.

‘Roxanne,’ he said evenly. ‘I need you to do something for me.’

The battle is over, but Nagasena does not yet know who has emerged victorious. The renegade Space Marines are all dead, and the building is secure, but too much has been lost for him to think of this hunt as anything but a failure. He kneels beside the broken body of Kartono, grieving for his fallen companion. His bondsman is a broken thing, his body shattered in every place, and Nagasena does not know how it is possible he is dead.

They had been together for so long, he had never considered the possibility a foe could end him, let alone one empowered by the warp. How Atharva could have stood to touch Ulis Kartono, let alone best him like that is a question that will forever go unanswered, and Nagasena is a man who hates to leave matters unresolved.

He wipes a tear from his eye and watches as the House Castana armsmen secure the building, moving with admirable speed and thoroughness to ensure no one is left alive. A striking woman in a dress of amethyst directs their operations, and when Nagasena sees the elaborate headpiece that covers her forehead, he knows she must be Aeliana Castana.

Kai Zulane stands next to the last survivors of this massacre, a heavyset woman with two young boys held tight to her, and a pretty girl with a blue bandana tied around her forehead. Her features share a clear similarity to Aeliana Castana, and Nagasena realises he has seen her face before. She is Roxanne Larysa Joyanni Castana, the other survivor of the Argo, and Nagasena senses a confluence of events that speaks of a universal order at work.

The warrior women of the Silent Sisterhood have already withdrawn and Lord Dorn kneels over the bodies of the World Eaters, a look of consternation on his handsome, patrician features. Maxim Golovko hovers nearby, basking in the primarch’s magnificence like a devotee.

No one has yet approached Kai Zulane, and Nagasena understands that they are all afraid of him, even Lord Dorn. Everyone can see that Zulane’s eyes have been restored, but how such a thing can be possible terrifies them. But more than that, they fear what he represents. They fear to learn the truth he knows. They hunger for it, but he suspects they will come to regret such cursed knowledge. Truth has been Nagasena’s bedrock, but even he knows there are some truths that cannot be faced without a heavy price being paid. Kai Zulane’s truth is such a thing, but there can be no turning from it.

Nagasena walks towards the man he has hunted through the Petitioners’ City, and his hand strays to the hilt of Shoujiki as he looks up at the featureless face of the kneeling statue. Whatever beast Atharva unleashed from within its stonework is gone, but it retains a grim aspect. Whatever else happens here today, it will certainly be destroyed.

Kai Zulane speaks animatedly with Roxanne Castana, and though Nagasena cannot hear what he is saying, he can read the nature of it without difficulty. Roxanne Castana shakes her head, tears flowing freely down her face, but Zulane is insistent. Nagasena hurries his step, a terrible fear growing in the pit of his stomach.

‘Kai!’ he shouts, and every eye in the building turns towards him.

The astropath does not respond, as he had known he would not, and Nagasena cries out as Roxanne Castana lifts the bandana from her forehead.

Kai’s eyes widen as he stares into the depths of Roxanne’s third eye, and he crumples to the ground with a sigh of what Nagasena can only interpret as relief. Nagasena grabs hold of Roxanne Castana and pulls her towards his body, hoping to break the connection long enough to keep whatever power she possesses from completing its work. Even as he does so, he knows he is too late.

Roxanne turns to him, and Nagasena catches the briefest glimpse of what lies beneath her bandana. It is milky white and utterly black, a vortex of infinite depths and impenetrable opacity that can see nothing and everything at once. Nagasena feels the alien touch of somewhere far distant, yet all around him, a realm of limitless potential and abject horror that no mortal should ever dare know of for fear of going utterly insane. The thinnest skein divides the domain of Man from the warp, and it chills Nagasena to know how fragile that barrier between worlds really is.

He peers into the nightmare realm of the warp and his spirit is falling, drawn into its unknowable depths. He tries to scream, but he has no voice, and in that fraction of a second, he sees what Kai Zulane saw in Roxanne’s eye, but before he can suffer the same fate, a nictitating fold of skin flicks down over the unnatural orb, obscuring it from sight. The terrible connection between Nagasena and Roxanne Castana is broken, and he drops to his knees as she turns her face away and pulls her bandana back down.

Breath heaves in his chest, and he looks down at Kai Zulane.

The man is clearly dead, yet Nagasena sees a look of such peace on his face that he almost envies him. Kai is serene and the lines of care that aged him beyond his years are softened to the point of making Nagasena think that he is many years younger than his biographical information claimed.

Kai Zulane’s eyes are open, and Nagasena sees they are the most intense shade of violet. In ancient cultures, such a hue would have marked a man out for greatness.

‘Your journey is at an end, Kai Zulane,’ says Nagasena, reaching out to gently close the dead man’s eyes. Roxanne Castana kneels beside him, and he covers his face.

‘My eye is shut,’ she says, and Nagasena looks up.

‘Why?’ he asks, and does not need to elaborate.

‘He was my friend,’ says Roxanne through her tears, but before she can say more, the Castana armsmen haul her to her feet.

‘Wait,’ he says, and such is the authority in his voice that they obey him.

‘Was what he knew so terrible?’ asks Nagasena.

‘I don’t know what he knew,’ replies Roxanne.

‘I believe you, but they will ask hard questions of you, and they will not ask kindly.’

Roxanne shrugs. ‘I can’t tell them anything. Whatever it was he knew is gone forever.’

‘What did he say to you?’ pleads Nagasena.

‘He said that sometimes the only victory possible is to keep your opponent from winning.’

Nagasena knows the words: they are those of an ancient regicide grandmaster, and his heart sinks at the loss of Kai Zulane’s truth.

Before any more can be said, Aeliana Castana approaches and Roxanne musters enough courage to meet her disapproval with a haughty, defiant expression of her own.

‘You are a disgrace,’ says Aeliana Castana. ‘Patriarch Verduchina is greatly disappointed. You have brought great shame upon our House.’

Roxanne says nothing, and the Castana armsmen march her away. Nagasena watches her taken from the temple with a mixture of regret and sorrow, knowing that she goes towards an uncertain future. She is Navis Nobilite, and whatever else becomes of her, the Imperium will always have a use for her.

Rogal Dorn approaches with Maxim Golovko in his wake, and Nagasena gives the primarch a deep bow, careful to remove his hand from Shoujiki’s hilt. Lord Dorn’s face is unreadable, a cliff of craggy features that takes in the carnage wrought here with a dispassionate eye.

‘Was it all for nothing, Yasu Nagasena?’ asks Lord Dorn, staring down at Kai Zulane’s body. ‘What happened here tonight?’

Nagasena has only one answer for him. ‘The truth died here tonight.’

‘Perhaps that is for the best,’ answers Dorn.

Nagasena shakes his head. ‘I cannot believe that. Do we not serve the Imperial Truth? If we do not have truth, then what are we creating? The Imperium must have truth at its heart or else it is not worth building.’

‘Be careful what you say, Nagasena,’ warns Dorn, and the threat is clear.

‘Long ago I took a vow never to speak false, and I will never lie,’ says Nagasena. ‘Even to you, my lord.’

Dorn places a vast, gauntleted hand on Nagasena’s shoulder, and for the briefest moment, he wonders if he too will be sacrificed on the altar of loose ends. But Lord Dorn does not have murder in mind.

‘You are an honest man, Yasu Nagasena, and I have need of honest men.’

Nagasena nods and says, ‘I am yours to command.’

‘Then there is another task I would beg of you.’

‘Name it, my lord,’ says Nagasena, knowing Lord Dorn honours him by presenting his order as a request.

‘General Golovko tells me one of the renegades is still unaccounted for,’ says Dorn.

Nagasena knows immediately who it will be.

‘The Luna Wolf,’ says Golovko. ‘His body isn’t here.’

‘Just so,’ agrees Dorn. ‘I would not have one of Horus Lupercal’s men at liberty on Terra.’

‘I will find him,’ says Nagasena. ‘But this will be my last hunt.’

The primarch nods and looks down at Kai Zulane.

‘What did you know?’ wonders Dorn aloud, and Nagasena hears something he would never have expected to hear in the voice of such a singular warrior: uncertainty. ‘The first axiom of defence is to understand what you defend against, Yasu, and I fear that this man could have helped me understand…’

‘Understand what?’ asks Nagasena, when Dorn does not continue.

‘I do not know,’ says Dorn. ‘But this day has diminished us all.’

The primarch marches away, and Yasu Nagasena feels a chill travel the length of his spine that has nothing to do with the katabatic winds sighing through the shattered windows and punctured roof of the temple.

What are you afraid of, wonders Nagasena. What are you really afraid of?

The silver cylinder hummed as it drew near the end of its incubation period. A host of wires and tubes ran from a bank of protein vats, each one encased in temperature-controlled pipework that gurgled as it fed the nutrient-rich broth within. The laboratory was cold, and its lights were dim, as though the work being done here was somehow secretive and its results uncertain.

Shielded and insulated cables connected the silver cylinder to three clear glass jars, each one containing a small, unremarkable looking mass of soft, plum-coloured tissue. A host of fine extraction needles and gene-samplers pierced these strange organs, and they pulsed like children’s hearts as the information encoded on every zygote and impossibly complex amino-acid chain was decoded.

A bank of monitoring equipment carefully regulated the process, a fantastically delicate operation that could go wrong in a million ways and which had an almost infinite amount of steps that needed to be exactly right before anything approaching success might be achieved.

Eventually, a series of gem-like bulbs on the upper surface of the silver cylinder flickered to life, each one turning green in rapid succession. A soft chime sounded, and coolant gases vented from a grille on the side as the nutrient fluids were drained.

The cylinder slid open with a pneumatic hiss, and a mist of chemically-complex vapour drifted from the glistening organ within. Its surfaces were glossy red and purple, webbed with myriad networks of super-oxygenated blood. Fresh grown and throbbing with potential, it was as close to perfection as could be imagined.

Only one other laboratory on Terra could have identified this organ, and it was deep beneath the skin of the world, protected as no other place of that planet was protected. No mortal geneticist could have unravelled the complexities of this biological miracle, and only one other individual could have replicated the process of its creation.

‘Did it work?’ asked Ghota.

‘Yes, my son,’ said Babu Dhakal with a triumphant exhalation. ‘It worked.’

THE HORUS HERESY

It is a time of legend.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~ Dramatis Personae ~

The Emperor, Master of Mankind

Primarchs

Corvus Corax, Primarch of the Raven Guard Legion

Rogal Dorn, Primarch of the Imperial Fists Legion

Alpharius/Omegon, Twin primarchs of the Alpha Legion

Horus, Warmaster, Primarch of the Sons of Horus

The Raven Guard Legion

Branne Nev, Commander of the Raptors

Agapito Nev, Commander of the Talons

Solaro An, Commander of the Hawks

Aloni Tev, Commander of the Falcons

Lancrato Nestil, Sergeant of the Talons

Hadraig Dor, Sergeant of the Talons

Keremi Ort, Battle-brother of the Talons

Balsar Kurthuri , Battle-brother of the Talons

Lukar Fereni, Battle-brother of the Talons

Marko Diz, Battle-brother of the Talons

Stradon Binalt, Techmarine

Vincente Sixx, Chief Apothecary

Navar Hef, Novitiate

The Traitor Legions

‘Alpharius’, The Alpha Legionnaires

Ezekyle Abaddon, First Captain of the Sons of Horus

Erebus, First Chaplain of the Word Bearers

Fabius, Apothecary of the Emperor’s Children

Hasten Luthris

Armanitan, Captain of the Emperor’s Children

Imperial Personae

Malcador the Sigillite, First Lord of Terra.

Marcus Valerius, Praefector of the Imperial Army, commander of the Therion Cohort

Nexin

Orlandriaz, Mechanicum genetor

Pelon, Manservant to Marcus Valerius

Arcatus Vindix

Centurio, Warrior of the Legio Custodes

Non-Imperial Personae

Athithirtir, An antedil, Envoy of the Cabal

‘Did the Emperor ever have to contemplate such a thing? Was there a moment when he looked upon his work and wondered who or what had given him the right to pursue it? Did he ever doubt the righteousness of his cause or the methods circumstance forced him to employ? Are such doubts just weakness, possessed only by lesser creatures than the Master of Mankind?

‘I look upon my works and I know despair and hope in equal measure. I realise now that I have done a terrible thing, yet I cannot bring myself to ask forgiveness. Even with all that has happened I do not believe that I acted other than with the best of intentions and the noblest of goals. They were the darkest times that we have ever known, and if it seems in hindsight that I acted through selfishness I can only say that we were beset by a foe the likes of which we had not only never faced, but had never contemplated facing.

‘All we had created, all that we had striven for long years to bring about, teetered on the precipice of annihilation. It was not just that the glories of the past stood to be destroyed, but that the whole future of the galaxy was hanging in the balance. None who did not live through those times can stand in judgement of those of us who did.

‘Even now I cannot understand the motives of those who were to become my enemies by misfortune or intent, and I have even less sympathy. Yet for all that, I know that it was not mere foible or whim that caused this strife. Men of power, men of ambition and means, have goals loftier than others, and justify themselves by morals above those of normal, mortal folk.

‘Though I remained true to the greater purpose of my existence, I do not pretend that I did not suffer the same vanity of righteousness that undoubtedly fuelled the actions of others who will also be assessed by future generations. Even when we were at our peak we performed acts that would be considered at best questionable in times of more civilised contemplation. The lesson is not in what happened, but why it happened. In darkness, in desperation, we did something that could only be justified by cruel necessity.

‘Do not judge me.

‘I am above your judgement, even as I am unworthy of your forgiveness.’

– Recovered record fragment,
author unknown, c.M31

One

Memories of Greatness
Brothers Reunited
Branne’s New Command

The last time he had been in the Isstvan system, his departure had been very different. Eight hundred company banners had snapped and flapped in the strong wind, displaying the company insignias of the Legion in gold, silver and white upon black backgrounds. Wings and claws of various designs fluttered amongst icons of swords and shields. The purple and dark green heather had been trampled flat beneath armoured boots, large patches of blue lichen scuffed away by countless footsteps to reveal dark earth and pale rock beneath.

Drawn up in unmoving rank and file, the legionaries of the Raven Guard filled the floor of the Redarth Valley, their Stormbirds, Thunderhawks and other drop-craft commanding the heights around them, silhouetted against an early evening sky of dark blues and purples. Trails of ragged, violet cloud stretched from horizon to horizon as if dragged across the skies by the fingers of some godly hand. The air above the army was criss-crossed with vapour trails from patrolling aircraft, and pinpricks of light moving across the heavens showed the presence of the ships in low orbit, like slow-moving shooting stars carefully observing the proceedings below.

At the head of the valley, to the north, waited the Raven Guard’s allies. In red and gold, the Therion Cohort stood beside their tanks and transports, arrayed in swathes of twilight and shadow cast by the immense Titan war machines of the Legio Victorum and the Legio Adamantus.

In front of the massed Legion waited a body of five hundred men. Most were garbed in plated carapace armour of shining black, their hoods drawn back to reveal heads of close-cropped hair, faces tattooed with swirling patterns. The soldiers’ targeter lenses gleamed red in the dusk light, gun-halberds drawn up to the salute. At their front stood the elite guard, armoured in enamelled silver, surrounding a handful of civilian dignitaries in ornate robes and coats trimmed with gold braid and heavy epaulettes.

At a signal from one of the elderly men, the soldiers and leaders as one dropped to a knee and bowed their heads to the giant figure pacing slowly out of the ranks of the Raven Guard. The man approaching the Isstvanian delegation was more than a man: he was a primarch. Lord Corax, commander of the Raven Guard, towered above his superhuman warriors, his armour as dark as the night, chased with filigreed designs of towers and ravens and intricate scrollwork. His head was bare, showing pale flesh and straight black hair that hung to the exposed collar of his ornate breastplate. A flight pack fashioned with black wings stretched from the primarch’s back, metallic feathers whistling shrilly in the breeze as he advanced. Dark eyes regarded the delegation with solemn pride.

With hands sheathed in clawed gauntlets, Corax gestured for the Isstvanians to rise.

‘You kneel as a defeated foe. Now stand as men of the Imperium,’ the primarch declared. His voice carried easily over the wind that tousled his hair across his thin face. ‘We have waged war against each other, but the Imperial Truth has prevailed and you have sworn to accept its teachings. In complying with the Emperor’s wishes you have proven yourselves men of wisdom and civilisation, fitting partners to the many other worlds you now join as part of the Imperium of Man. Not conquered, not subjugated, but free men, who have shown courage and pride in defending their values but who have seen the light of the Imperial Truth and now welcome the benefits it will bring.’

Corax turned to his Legion and his voice increased in volume, echoing to the furthest ends of the valley with little effort.

‘We have fought hard and we have fought bravely, and another world is brought from the darkness of superstition and division into the light of the Emperor’s clarity and unity,’ he told his warriors. ‘It is with honour to the fallen and respect to all who stand here that I can declare the Isstvan system brought to compliance!’

A deafening roar of approval sounded from the vocalisers of eighty thousand armoured warriors, joined by cheers drifting down from hundreds of thousands of Therion throats; a clamour which was drowned out by the celebratory blare of the Titans’ war sirens.

Almost fifteen years later, Corax had returned with his brother primarchs to bring the rebel Horus to account, but at the dropsite his former allies had shown their true colours. Turning on the Iron Hands, Salamanders and Corax’s Raven Guard, the traitors had all but destroyed those loyal to the Emperor as they had dropped on the world.

Corax had survived the treacherous ambush, though only just. With the remnants of his Legion, the primarch had attacked and retreated, pursued across the wild hills and mountains of the world by half a dozen Legions. Now the Raven Guard had been forced to stand at the last, driven into the open to face the wrath of their pursuers.

The Raven Guard’s first war at Isstvan had been a great victory. Their latest was a humbling defeat. It was a very different noise that provided the background symphony concluding Corax’s latest campaign in the Isstvan system.

The first missiles from the World Eaters’ Whirlwinds were streaking through the sky towards the Raven Guard. Corax’s legionaries refused to take shelter, proud to stand their ground against this enemy after many days of hit-and-run attacks and desperate retreat. The explosions tore through the squads, slaying dozens. Corax stood amidst it all as if in the eye of a hurricane. His officers looked to him and drew strength from his bold defiance of the World Eaters.

Caught upon the windswept mountainside his Legion remained resolute. Behind the peak stretched great salt plains that had forced them into this last, defiant stand. Ahead of them massed the might of the World Eaters, the rage-driven Legion of Angron, who strode at their head roaring for the blood of his brother primarch. A sea of blue spattered with the red of gore swept up from the valley intent on the destruction of the Raven Guard. Maddened by neural implants and driven into a battle-frenzy by inhuman cocktails of stimulants, the berserk warriors of the World Eaters pounded up the sloping mountainside while their tanks and guns provided covering fire; every warrior bellowed his eagerness to fulfil the blood oaths he had sworn to his primarch.

As explosions rocked the slopes, missiles from the Whirlwinds hammering into legionaries and rock in fountains of fire, Corax glanced up to see more vapour trails crossing the open skies, but something was wrong with their direction.

They came from behind the Raven Guard.

Corax saw broad-winged aircraft plunging down from the scattering of cloud, missile pods rippling with fire. A swathe of detonations cut through the World Eaters, ripping through their advance companies. Incendiary bombs blossomed in the heart of the approaching army, scattering white-hot promethium over the steep slopes. Corax looked on with incredulity as blistering pulses of plasma descended from orbit, cutting great gouges into Angron’s Legion.

The roar of jets became deafening as drop-ships descended on pillars of fire: black drop-ships emblazoned with the sigil of the Raven Guard. The legionaries scattered to give the landing craft space to make planetfall. As soon as their thick hydraulic legs touched the ground, ramps whined down and boarding gateways opened.

At first the Raven Guard were in stunned disbelief. A few shouted warnings, believing the drop-ships to be enemy craft painted to deceive. The comm crackled in Corax’s ear. He did not recognise the voice.

‘Lord Corax!’

‘Receiving your transmission,’ he replied cautiously, gaze fixed on the World Eaters as they recovered from the shock of the surprise attack and made ready to advance again.

‘This is Praefector Valerius of the Imperial Army, serving under Commander Branne, my lord.’ The man’s voice was stretched, thin with tension, the words snapped out like a drowning man snatching breaths. ‘We have a short window of evacuation, board as soon as you are able.’

Corax struggled to comprehend what the man was saying. He fixed on a detail – Commander Branne. The Raven Guard captain had been left in charge of the Legion’s homeworld of Deliverance, and Corax had no answer to why Branne was now here at Isstvan. Adjusting quickly to the development, Corax realised that the Raven Guard who had been left as garrison were here, ready to evacuate the survivors of the massacre.

Corax signalled to Agapito, one of his commanders. ‘Marshal the embarkation. Get everybody onboard and break for orbit.’

The commander nodded and turned, growling orders over the vox-net to organise the Raven Guard’s retreat. With practised speed, the Raven Guard dispersed, the drop-ships launching in clouds of smoke and dust as soon as they were full, heading for the ship or ships that had despatched them. Corax watched them streaking back into the skies as shells and missiles fell once again on the Raven Guard’s position. An explosion just to his left rocked him with its shockwave.

Ignoring the blast, Corax glared down the slope at the approaching World Eaters and their leader. The Raven Guard primarch had resigned himself to death here at the hands of his insane brother. It would be a fitting end to fall to Angron’s blades, and there was always a slim – very slim – chance that Corax might instead cut down the World Eater and rid the galaxy of his perfidious existence.

A moment later, Commander Aloni was at his side. Like the rest of the Raven Guard, his armour was battered and cracked, a mishmash of plates and parts scavenged from fallen enemies. He had lost his helmet at some point and not found a replacement. The commander’s tanned, wrinkled face betrayed a mix of astonishment and concern.

‘Last transport, lord!’

Tearing his gaze away from Angron, Corax saw a Stormbird with its assault bay open, just a few metres away. Taking a deep breath, the Raven Guard primarch reminded himself of the teachings he had drilled into his warriors; teachings he had lived by for the whole of his life.

Attack, fall back, attack again.

This was more than a tactical withdrawal. This was surrender. It ate at Corax’s gut to depart Isstvan in such shame. Corax glanced again at the drop-ship and back at the World Eaters. They were only a couple of hundred metres away. More than seventy-five thousand of his Legion had been killed by the traitors, many of them by the berserk legionaries rushing towards him. It was a dishonour to the fallen to abandon them, but it was pointless pride to believe that he could right the wrongs done here by himself.

Attack, fall back, attack again.

Biting back his anger, Corax followed Aloni up the ramp, his boots ringing on the metal. As the ramp began to close, he looked out across the World Eaters army, baying like frustrated hounds as their prey slipped from their grasp.

‘We survived, lord.’ Aloni’s tone conveyed his utter disbelief at the truth of this. ‘Ninety-eight days!’

Corax felt no urge to celebrate. He looked at Aloni and the other legionaries sitting down on the long benches inside the transport compartment.

‘I came to Isstvan with eighty thousand warriors,’ the primarch reminded them. ‘I leave with less than three thousand.’

His words hushed the jubilant mood and a sombre silence replaced it, the only sound that of the drop-ship’s roar. Corax stood beside a viewing port, the deck rumbling beneath his feet, and looked at the hills of Urgall dropping away, picturing the thousands of fallen followers that he was leaving behind.

‘What do we do now?’ asked Agapito.

‘We do what we have always done.’ Corax’s voice grew in strength as he spoke, his words as much a reassurance to himself as his warriors. ‘We fall back, rebuild our strength and attack again. This is not the last the traitors will know of the Raven Guard. This is defeat but it is not the end. We will return.’

The cloud obscured his view, blanking it with whiteness, and he thought no more about the dead.

Corax could not bear the bleak expressions of his warriors and left to find himself a brief moment of sanctuary in the linking corridor that sloped gently up towards the cockpit. He was alone and had time to consider what had happened.

Twice in the last one hundred days he had stared death in the face and twice he had survived. He had not just been in battle; such hazard was the life of any legionary or primarch. He had been poised moments from death in a way he had never experienced before.

Stooping to prevent his head from banging the passageway ceiling, Corax turned his back to the wall and leaned back, legs braced against the opposite side of the corridor. He took off his helmet and gazed numbly at the battered grille of its faceplate before dropping the helm to the floor from weary fingers. He saw the dents and cracks in his armour, its ornate engravings pitted with bolter-round impacts, the delicate designs smeared into ruin by las-blasts and missile explosions. Beneath the plasteel and ceramite, his wounds ached. He could smell his own blood, clotted across a dozen grievous injuries.

The primarch’s keen ears could pick up the background chatter of the communications net receiver in his discarded helmet, his subconscious mind absorbing the flow of information even as his conscious thoughts drifted elsewhere. The danger was not yet over. He knew he should contact Branne and establish the facts of the situation, but could not bring himself to do so just yet. From the vox traffic, he surmised that there was a World Eaters battle-barge nearby. Listening for a few more seconds, as the vox-unit continued to relay the Traitors’ position and course, Corax discovered that the World Eaters ship had earlier been on an attack heading but was now slowly withdrawing from the Raven Guard flotilla. The primarch dismissed the threat as minimal as recent events crowded his thoughts.

Danger had been his companion since his first memories, and war had been his calling. Not once had he ever felt afraid to die, and even against the toughest enemies of the Emperor he had approached every confrontation with a certainty of survival and victory. Ninety-eight days had washed away his confidence. Nearly a hundred days of staying one step ahead of his pursuers. Nearly a hundred days of being hunted by his fellow primarchs. Ninety-eight days of constant movement, of attack and retreat, of counter-assault and withdrawal.

He shuddered as he remembered the start of that testing time, when the traitors had revealed their intent and Corax had come so close to death at the hands of Konrad Curze, his brother who took such delight from being called the Night Haunter. Corax knew himself to be numbered amongst the best fighters in the service of the Emperor, and he had never considered Curze his equal. Curze was ill-disciplined, capable of sporadic genius but equally prone to moments of emotional blindness, moments a warrior like Corax could exploit with deadly effect. Yet there had been something about the Night Haunter that had unnerved the Raven Guard’s primarch, an aura that had reached into Corax’s spirit and found weakness. The hatred of Curze had shocked him, adding to the devastation he had felt at the treachery of Horus and many of his fellow primarchs; yet it was no excuse for fleeing from Curze.

Fear. He had felt a moment of fear when confronted by his demented brother, and in the peace of the passageway he understood what it was that had caused him a moment of dread, looking into the dead eyes of the Night Haunter.

They were moulded of the same stuff, Corax and Curze, creatures born and raised in shadow and fear.

Curze had lived in the night-shrouded streets and alleys of Nostramo Quintus; Corax’s infancy had been amongst the tunnels and dungeons of the prison-moon of Lycaeus. Curze and Corax alike had seen worlds enslaved to the will of evil men, where the weak and destitute had toiled until death for the power and pleasure of others.

In that moment, subjected to the full brunt of the Night Haunter’s scorn, Corax had realised how close he might have been to becoming the creature that was trying to kill him. Their lives were the toss of a coin apart. Corax had been taken in by men learned in politics and the human heart, and they had shown him compassion and support; Curze had received no such upbringing and had become a figure of vengeance and terror.

To look at Curze had forced Corax to see himself as he might have been, shorn of the civilising influence of others and the code and principles his mentors had instilled in him. In that moment it had not been fear of Curze that had unmanned Corax but a dread of himself and, to his shame, he had fled rather than destroy the object of his dread.

Alone in that vestibule on the roaring, shaking drop-ship, Corax despised himself for his moment of cowardice. He should have stayed and fought, should have slain the Night Haunter and killed pathetic Lorgar of the Word Bearers straight after, denying the rebels two of their commanders, even though it might have cost him his life. Perhaps that was why he had been so resigned to die at the hands of Angron, to sacrifice himself to the World Eater to absolve the shame of his earlier weakness.

The door from the cockpit hissed open and Corax instantly straightened as best he could, resuming the poise of the Raven Guard primarch, Master of Deliverance and Lord of the Legiones Astartes. The co-pilot was startled by Corax’s presence just outside the door, his young face a mask of surprise.

Corax smiled to ease the youth’s shock.

‘What is it?’ asked the primarch.

‘Sorry, lord, you were not answering your vox. We have Commander Branne on the main link.’

‘Very well,’ said Corax, nodding encouragement. ‘I will speak with him shortly.’

As the co-pilot slipped back into the cockpit, Corax looked past him, through the main canopy. Ahead, the battle-barge of Commander Branne grew larger, a dark shape blotting out a swathe of stars. The Avenger, which Corax had last seen in orbit of Deliverance, was now here at Isstvan, against all expectation, a sight that lifted his spirits. Bombardment cannon turrets jutted from dorsal ridge of the ship, pointed at the world below. The weapons batteries were showing, deck upon deck of massed missile launchers and cannons bared like the fangs of a hound. The drop-ship yawed gradually, bringing the painted symbol of the Raven Guard on the battle-barge’s beaked prow into view as the pilot steered towards the gleaming light of the landing bays.

Beyond were sparks of light brighter than the stars: the plasma engines of more vessels. The pinpricks of drop-ship and shuttle jets converged on the black-liveried ships as the evacuation came to its conclusion. Already the flotilla was turning away from the planet, ready to speed out into the void with the rescued legionaries.

Corax smiled again, this time with relief. He did not understand how it was that Branne came to be here, but he was grateful for the fact. Deadly absolution at the hands of Angron would have been a righteous end, but with everything considered, Corax was glad he had survived to fight again.

Branne stood in the docking bay watching the drop-ships landing. The first ones to touch down were already disembarking their passengers. With weary steps, the survivors of the Raven Guard filed down the ramps onto the deck.

They were a terrible sight. Most showed signs of injury. Their armour was a patchwork of colours: here the silver of an Iron Warriors shoulder pad, there the red breastplate of a Word Bearer, cracked and broken, bloodied and stained. Every face Branne looked upon was etched with fatigue. Glassy-eyed, the last survivors of the dropsite massacre trudged across the loading bay, welcomed by smiles and cheers from Branne’s warriors.

Serfs came forwards with food and drink on plain metal trays, which the dull-eyed legionaries gulped and wolfed down without ceremony, replenishing superhuman bodies tested to the limit by their long guerrilla war. Shoulder pads were stripped off, weapons taken away for repair, while Apothecaries, Techmarines and their assistants tended to the most immediate issues of injury and maintenance.

Though the events that had led up to the return of the survivors were unique, the doctrine of the Legion remained the same. A battle, whether won, lost or simply survived, was history and the next battle would come soon enough. A warrior unprepared to fight again was no warrior at all. Though exhausted, their guns spent, their armour battered, their spirits stretched to breaking, the Raven Guard were in a warzone and so they took up fresh bolters and magazines of ammunition, and allowed the Techmarines and Apothecaries to render such help as was needed to allow them to fight again if the need arose.

Half-machine, half-human servitors clunked and hissed through the growing throng, bearing crates of ammunition, boxes of grenades and spare parts for Legiones Astartes power armour. Other servitors, hulking things with cranes for arms and tracks for legs, rumbled to the drop-ships, replenishing bombs and missiles from racks on trailers hitched to their metal spines.

The last of the shuttles touched down. Branne approached it as the docking ramp lowered. The first legionary out was a bizarre sight, his armour a mess of colours and bare ceramite. Only his shoulder pad, bearing the Legion’s badge, remained from his original suit. He took off his helmet and tossed it to the floor.

‘Agapito!’ Branne laughed. He slapped a hand to his true brother’s chest. ‘I knew you would be alive. Too stubborn to let something like this kill you.’

Branne looked closely at his brother, amazed by his outlandish appearance. A new scar ran from his right cheek to his throat, but beyond that it was the same face Branne had known for his whole life. Agapito returned the smile wearily. His deep brown eyes regarded Branne warmly. He reached a hand behind Branne’s head and pulled him closer. The two touched foreheads in a sign of respect and comradeship.

‘I see you have not managed to stay out of trouble, Branne.’

The commander stepped back from Agapito to see Corax descending the ramp. The primarch towered over his legionaries, his black armour showing as much wear and tear as that of those under his command.

‘I was monitoring your transmissions,’ said Corax. ‘Why did the enemy abort their attack?’

‘I have no idea, Lord Corax,’ said Branne. ‘Perhaps they thought better of taking on three vessels at once.’

‘Where are they now?’ asked the primarch.

‘They’ve withdrawn to a hundred thousand kilometres,’ Branne replied. ‘They don’t look as if they’ll try to attack again.’

‘Odd,’ said Corax. ‘Signal your other ships to make course for Deliverance.’

‘Yes, Lord Corax,’ Branne said, holding his fist to his chest. ‘And where are we to head?’

‘Terra,’ replied the primarch. ‘I must have an audience with the Emperor.’

Branne and Agapito shared a glance with each other but said nothing as Corax strode out of the docking bay. Branne looked again at his brother and saw a strange look in Agapito’s eyes. They roved around the deck, taking in every detail, settling nowhere.

‘Relax, brother,’ said Branne, slapping his hand to Agapito’s arm. ‘No enemies here. You’re safe.’

Agapito turned a distant look on Branne and nodded uncertainly. His confusion and discomfort passed and Agapito smiled, gripping Branne’s arm in return.

‘Yes, that’s true,’ said Agapito. ‘I thought I would never see the inside of a Raven Guard ship again.’

A warning siren sounded three times, its piercing blare cutting through Branne’s thoughts.

‘Strategium to Commander Branne,’ a voice announced over the general address system. ‘Proximity warning. Enemy ships have altered course towards our position. Intercept estimated at five hours.’

‘Stand by to engage reflex shields,’ he replied over his vox-bead. He darted a look at Agapito, forcing an encouraging smile. ‘Well, maybe not safe just yet.’

The Avenger broke with the other two ships of the flotilla, all three vessels leaving orbit on different headings to confuse and disperse their energy trails. The other two ships, Triumph and Raven’s Valour, would head out-system before translating to the warp and their journey back to the Legion homeworld of Deliverance. Corax commanded the Avenger to make for Isstvan IV, both to confuse pursuit and with a hope of linking up with a small fleet of Therion ships Branne had despatched to that world several days earlier to misdirect the Traitor blockade of Isstvan.

The hope that the Imperial Army ships had survived was faint; the Therions had last been the target of a World Eaters armada and several other vessels. With the Raven Guard Legion and fleet on the brink of extinction, every ship and soldier was a vital asset, and after weighing up the rewards and risks, Corax judged it worth a few days to see if he could bolster his forces a little more with the Therions.

Branne had also argued persuasively that the Raven Guard had an obligation to their allies to at least attempt to link up. As much as the Therions might be a military asset, the message that those loyal to the Emperor would not be abandoned was equally important given the calamitous events that Isstvan had witnessed. Corax had made it clear to his commanders that the Avenger was now too valuable to risk without good cause, and that the search would be short. If there was any risk of discovery, the battle-barge would immediately cease the hunt and head out-system for warp transit.

As soon as the Raven Guard’s ships were far enough from the planet below to be safe from ground-based fire, they engaged their reflex shields. An innovation from the planet of Kiavahr, orbited by the home-moon of the Raven Guard, the reflex shield was a modified version of the void shields that protected most Imperial warships and installations.

A void shield worked by using the power of the warp itself to displace incoming projectiles and high-energy attacks. The reflex shield changed the modulation of the warpcores that powered the void shields, calibrating them to a much higher tolerance and turning them inwards, so that matter and energy generated by the ship was redirected instead; all forms of radiation emitted by the Raven Guard’s ships could be displaced, rendering them undetectable to scanning equipment.

The advantages of the reflex shield technology fitted well with Corax’s ethos of war, allowing Raven Guard ships to approach their targets unseen, striking swiftly and decisively before withdrawing. The low energy requirement meant that such stealth could be maintained almost indefinitely. There was, however, a serious downside to their use. By employing its void shield generators for the reflex shields, a Raven Guard vessel had no defence against physical attack and it took time to power the generators from one state to the other, leaving a ship vulnerable for several minutes with neither its cloaking field nor its energy defence fully operational, hence the swift exit from orbit.

To the augurs and scanning arrays of the Traitor bases and ships throughout the Isstvan system, the three Raven Guard ships seemed to melt away into the stars. To the naked eye they would have appeared to shimmer for a while, as the reflex shields engaged and shifted away the light reflecting from the ships’ surfaces, until eventually all such energy was being dampened and the vessels were rendered invisible.

One other problem with the reflex shield, one that Corax had unsuccessfully laboured to overcome for many years, was the low energy threshold for which it could compensate. Reactors could only be run at half power without generating too much energy to be displaced, in turn reducing top speed and blinkering the ship’s sensor capabilities. So it was that slowly, half-blind, the Avenger slipped away from Isstvan V, tracing an arc around the world until it came to its chosen heading.

The ship did not make directly for Isstvan IV, it being a doctrine of the Legion to always approach a target by an indirect route, but instead took a circuitous, zigzagging path, using a timing and distance formula devised by Corax to maximise the damping effect of the reflex shields, enough to throw off any pursuer or sensor that might somehow detect them. Corax did not believe in taking chances when it came to moving freely and unseen.

It would be several days before the Avenger would bring Isstvan IV within range of its reduced sensor screen, and Corax took the time to review the organisation of the remnants of his Legion.

Including Branne’s companies, he had a little fewer than four thousand legionaries of varying ranks and specialisations. The majority he had formed into the ‘Talons’ – tactical companies under Agapito’s command. The survivors of the various assault platoons, along with several Dreadnought-incarcerated veterans, had been banded together into the ‘Falcons’, led by Aloni Tev. Lastly, the handful of bike squads, land speeders and aircraft crews still remaining were put together under the command of Captain Solaro An, and were given the designation ‘Hawks’.

Two days out from Isstvan V, Corax called a council of his four commanders and explained the reorganisation and reassignments that would be made once the Legion was gathered again at Deliverance.

The five of them met in Branne’s chambers, given over to the use of the primarch since his arrival on the ship. The main room was plainly decorated, the plasteel walls painted a muted blue, broken only by an armour and weapons rack on which the commander’s artisan-crafted wargear would normally hang; it was empty at the moment as every legionary in the force was permanently geared for battle, so that they even slept in their armour with a bolter in their hands.

The floor was carved with a relief of the Raven’s Guard’s device – a heraldic bird with wings and claws outstretched, surrounded by a coiled chain. Upon the symbol was a table of burnished bronze-like metal, inscribed also with the insignia of the Legion, circular in shape and with vox-thieves and display stations for a dozen attendees. The screens were dull slabs of lifeless grey at the moment, their keypads and emitters dormant while silent running protocols were in effect; every watt of energy saved might prove the difference between escape and detection.

Corax stood facing the double doors that led back to the strategium, leaning forwards with his fists resting on the table. Agapito and Aloni sat to his right, Branne and Solaro to his left. As brothers, Branne and Agapito were alike, with square jaws, heavy brows and flat cheeks. Both were from the slave-prison of Deliverance and even the augmentations and manipulations that had turned them into legionaries had not completely eradicated the somewhat sallow and pitted cast to their skin. Agapito was marked out by his fresh scar, but it was the anxious flicker that occasionally crept into his gaze that bore greater testament to the harsh experience he had suffered during the dropsite massacre.

Solaro was the youngest and had been only a child when Corax had freed Deliverance from the tyrannical grip of the Kiavahran overlords. He was pale, like the primarch, with a sharp nose and thin lips, and had an air of constant movement about him. Even as he listened to his primarch, his gauntleted fingers fidgeted on the edge of the table, tapping and scratching.

Aloni was the eldest of the four, and of entirely different complexion. Born amongst the Asiatica dustfields on Terra, his skin was darker than the others, and there was a narrowness and slant to his eyes not found in children of Lycaeus. His head was shaved bald, with many gilded service studs riveted into his scalp.

‘And what is to be my purpose, Lord Corax?’ asked Branne when he realised that he had not been assigned a command.

‘You will be my Commander of Recruits,’ Corax informed him.

‘Recruits?’ Branne did not hide his disappointment. ‘But for a quirk of chance, I would have been with you on Isstvan and Aloni or Agapito would have drawn the lot to stay with the garrison at Deliverance. I would prefer a combat command, my lord.’

‘And you have it,’ replied the primarch, leaning closer to place a hand on Branne’s shoulder guard. ‘Horus and his traitorous allies will not allow us the luxury of keeping our recruits long from the fighting.’

‘With respect, lord, I am not of a disposition to be leading Scout squads,’ said Branne.

It pained him to argue with his primarch, and he feared that perhaps pride fuelled his words, but even in the couple of days since the rescue, Branne had noticed a difference growing between those who had been on Isstvan V and those who had not. The Legion once had been bound by common experience, now it seemed that the massacre and escape was a stronger bond than the Legion, one not shared by Branne and his warriors. He wanted to prove himself worthy amongst his peers, and the thought of being left on Deliverance again to marshal recruits soured his mood.

‘Perhaps I could be the captain of your guard,’ Branne continued. ‘Since Arendi was killed at the dropsite you have yet to name a successor.’

There were chuckles from the other commanders, sharing some joke that Branne did not understand. It irked him to feel so detached from his comrades.

‘I dispensed with the pretence of an honour guard,’ said Corax, not unkindly. The primarch straightened and fixed Branne with his dark, penetrating stare and the commander expected a rebuke for his stubbornness. Instead, Corax smiled slightly.

‘It is to you that I am bestowing the greatest honour, Branne,’ said the primarch. ‘As a reward for coming to our rescue, I am placing you in charge of rebuilding the Legion. There is no more important task I could give to you. In your hands will be the future of the Raven Guard.’

Branne thought about this for a moment, his confidence restored a little by Corax’s words. He looked at the others and saw them nodding in agreement with the primarch, sincerity in their expressions.

‘I accept the honour, lord, of course,’ said Branne, bowing his head. ‘But, still…’ he muttered to himself. ‘Running around with the Scouts?’

‘There will not be any more Scouts,’ said Corax, his acute hearing catching Branne’s slight whisper. ‘The existing Scout squads will become part of Solaro’s recon forces. Any of them that are close to full initiation will be given their black carapaces and taken into the Talons. Your recruits will have to learn to fight as full warriors from the outset; we do not have years to train them cautiously.’

This brightened Branne’s mood further and he felt some contentment at his allotted role. The discussion moved on to other topics, including the need to replenish the Legion’s stock of weapons and ammunition as well as its warriors. A full audit of all armour, armaments, vehicles and ships would need to be undertaken to evaluate the extent to which the Raven Guard’s claws had been dulled.

‘What of the rest of the fleet?’ asked Solaro. He looked at Branne. ‘Any sign that any of our ships escaped?’

‘Unlikely,’ said Branne. ‘A few might have been able to get away, but I would not hold out any hope. We detected no transmissions, though any Raven Guard vessel would have been running silent by the time we arrived.’

‘The Shadow of the Emperor was certainly destroyed,’ said Corax, referring to his flagship, ‘along with the escort flotilla. I received their stand-to and distress broadcasts when the Traitors opened fire. It was cut off within minutes, too soon for the reflex shields to have been raised, and against such numbers that would have been the only defence.’

Silence followed, a tension brought about by mention of the treacherous act committed by Horus and the Legions that had sided with him. Branne saw Agapito unconsciously hunch his shoulders, a distant look in his eyes. Solaro’s gauntlets formed fists on the table while Aloni bowed his head in contemplation, eyes closed.

‘The fallen will be avenged.’

Corax’s words were a whisper, but spoken with such vehemence that Branne did not doubt his primarch for a moment.

The chime of the door broke the pregnant atmosphere within the chamber. Corax operated the control and the double doors slid open to reveal a human member of the crew dressed in a white tunic and black leggings, a digital slate in his hand. Even the Avenger’s internal vox frequencies had been suspended to conserve energy usage, so that a number of the fittest serfs and crew were employed as runners to convey orders and messages around the battle-barge.

‘Forgive the intrusion, lord, masters, but Controller Ephrenia sends word that we are within nominal scanning range of Isstvan IV,’ the messenger reported.

‘Very good,’ said Corax. ‘Tell Ephrenia to divert twenty per cent reactor capacity from engines to the surveyor arrays. I will join her shortly.’

The serf bowed and left the commanders with their primarch.

‘Someone should inform Marcus,’ said Branne.

‘Marcus?’ asked Corax.

‘Praefector Valerius,’ explained Branne, ‘the ranking officer of the Therions. It was his ships and men I sent to Isstvan IV.’

Branne did not mention that it was also Valerius’s strange dreams that had eventually prompted him to come to Isstvan in the first place, overruling his primarch’s orders to garrison Deliverance. The whole matter had been unsettling for Branne, and it was something he wished to discuss with his lord in private. An occasion had not yet arisen to do so.

‘As you say,’ said Corax, gesturing for the commanders to precede him to the door. ‘Inform the praefector that we can spare seven hours to perform a sweep for his ships, no more. He is welcome to join me on the strategium during the operation.’

Branne nodded and went, leaving the chamber before the others. Three youths, two boys and a girl, stood to one side in the corridor beyond, dressed in simple tunics and hose. Branne gestured for one of them to step forwards.

‘Take a message to Praefector Valerius, ask him…’ Branne stopped himself. ‘Never mind, I will see him myself. Stand down.’

The commander turned aft and strode away quickly as the others came out of the chamber. He would have to tell Lord Corax about the dreams soon, but it would be better if Valerius did not say anything just yet. When they were away from Isstvan and the situation was calmer, the two of them could broach the thorny subject.

Two

A Primarch’s Summons
Ghosting By Reflex
The Cabal Steers a Path

‘What is it?’ Marcus asked as he heard his manservant, Pelon, calling his name.

The praefector was lying on his bunk, a thin treatise on naval tactics held in his hands, though he had read the last page more than a dozen times since Corax had come on board and not taken in a word of it. He had yet to see the primarch, a matter that gave him a small measure of regret, but equal relief.

‘Commander Branne to see you, master,’ Pelon informed him. The youth stepped through the doorway from the main room into the bunk chamber, swathed in the shadow of the legionary behind him.

Marcus swiftly hauled himself from the bed and tucked the tail of his shirt into his breeches. He smoothed his hair with a quick hand as Pelon stepped aside and ushered Branne into the small bunk room.

‘Commander, I am honoured,’ said Marcus, bowing briefly. ‘I thought you would be busy with other duties.’

‘I am,’ said Branne, his expression hard. He glanced at Pelon.

‘Leave us please, Pelon,’ said Marcus. ‘Perhaps you could head to the officers’ galley and inquire after my luncheon?’

Pelon nodded and left them. Branne said nothing until the outer door had hissed open and closed with a dull thud.

‘Lord Corax has permitted us seven hours to search for your fleet,’ said the commander. ‘No more than that.’

‘A vain search, I fear,’ sighed Marcus. He sat down on a low, plain couch and gestured an invitation to Branne to do the same. The commander declined with a shake of the head and a scowl.

‘You are also invited to attend the primarch on the stategium.’

‘Invited?’ Marcus smiled. ‘That is most welcome. I have been eager to pass on my regards to Lord Corax since his arrival.’

‘The dreams, Marcus, have they stopped?’ Branne loomed over the army officer, arms folded across his massive chest.

‘Yes, thankfully, yes they have,’ said Marcus. ‘The ravens call no more, the fires have burned out in my nightmares.’

‘That is good,’ said Branne, his expression lightening slightly. He bent one knee so that his face was level with Marcus’s. ‘It would not be wise to distract Lord Corax with unnecessary concerns.’

‘Unnecessary concerns? I am not sure what you mean, commander.’

‘Don’t mention the dreams when you see the primarch.’

‘Well, I wasn’t going to blurt it out in front of everyone on the strategium, if that’s what you were thinking,’ said Marcus, offended by the suggestion. ‘It is a delicate matter, I understand that.’

‘More than delicate, Marcus.’ Branne’s eyes were intent, his expression ferocious. ‘There may be something unnatural about those dreams. It is not normal for a man to know what happens to another light years distant.’

‘Of course there is something abnormal,’ said Marcus. ‘It is not natural for a man to have such dreams, but I think Lord Corax is far from natural.’

‘You still think the primarch sent the dreams to you? That he somehow called to you across the void to warn of the danger he was in?’

Marcus was unsettled by the note of accusation in Branne’s tone.

‘Undoubtedly,’ the praefector said, standing up. ‘Perhaps there is something in your Legion conditioning that hardened your minds to his message, I don’t know. I am sure Lord Corax will confide in us when he feels the time is right.’

‘Don’t embarrass me, Marcus, not in front of the primarch,’ said Branne, betraying the cause of his anger. ‘He has not inquired deeply as to why we left Deliverance, it may be better that the matter is left to lie in silence.’

‘Whatever you think best, commander,’ said Marcus, holding up a placating hand, worried by the tension in Branne’s voice. ‘I will not raise the matter if you or Lord Corax do not.’

‘And what of the serf?’

‘Who?’

‘Your boy, the one that was just here. Can he be trusted not flap his tongue?’

‘Oh, Pelon. He is utterly trustworthy. His family have served the Therion nobility for generations. Loyalty is bred into him like that blond hair and flat nose. He attends a praefector of the Therion Cohort and understands his place, and the necessity of discretion.’

‘Be sure that he does,’ said Branne. ‘For your sake, it is better that there is no rumour flying around at this time. Horus’s treachery, and the turning of the other Legions, has made everyone very suspicious. Your dream hints at something strange, something that should not be spoken of.’

‘I understand,’ said Marcus, though he did not. The edgy look in Branne’s eyes was something the praefector had never seen in the expression of a legionary before. If he didn’t know better, Marcus would have taken it as a sign of fear.

‘We had best not keep Lord Corax waiting,’ said Marcus, stepping past Branne to unhook the dress coat hanging on the wall. He pulled on the heavy coat, adjusted the braiding and epaulettes to fall smartly, and nodded towards the door. ‘After you, commander.’

The strategium was silent save for the background hum of the surveyor stations and the mechanical chatter of data-strip printers. Corax stood behind the command throne – the chair was too small for his massive frame – while his commanders waited behind him on the upper tier overlooking the strategium. Marcus Valerius stood, with head bowed, beside Branne, dwarfed by his legionary companions.

It was a risk to stay in the Isstvan system any longer than was absolutely required, and even more of a risk to come so close to Isstvan IV, where a large part of Horus’s armada was mustering. Yet for all the risk, Corax knew that he owed it to the brave men and women of Therion to look for any survivors. He held little hope – no hope if he was being truthful with himself – but in times such as these it was important that the debt he owed to the Therions was recognised.

The Avenger ghosted towards Isstvan IV on minimal engine power, nothing more than a smear of background radiation on the screens of the enemy fleet. It was not solely to honour the Therions that Corax dared approach so close. Any intelligence he could gather regarding the capabilities and dispositions of the Traitors might prove vital, for the war that was to come as well as his chances of leaving Isstvan alive.

There were dozens of ships, perhaps even hundreds. They belonged to the Sons of Horus, the Word Bearers, the World Eaters, the Iron Warriors, and others who had, for reasons Corax would never understand, turned on the Emperor.

He had not seen the like since first coming to the system, when the Raven Guard and the Therions, along with vessels representing the Mechanicum of Mars and others involved with the Great Crusade, had brought compliance to Isstvan. He had been sent here by Horus, before he had been elevated to Warmaster. Back then it had been a request, an invitation even, rather than an order, but to Corax, a word from Horus had been like a command from the Emperor.

The primarch of the Raven Guard had never been on cordial terms with Horus. He had always found him too extravagant, too ready to make displays of power during his conquests. Corax preferred to be understated, to obtain compliance with the minimum of fuss and posturing.

Yet for all he had disliked Horus, Corax had admired him. He had admired his easy camaraderie with those under his command, and had known that Horus was the more accomplished commander over many campaigns, gifted with a rare ability for both the overview and the fine management of details, something that Corax had never quite equalled.

Physically, Horus and Corax had proved an even match for each other in their mock-duels and wrestling bouts. Such sparring had not created any greater bond between them, as it had done with the other primarchs, but Corax had never considered the possibility that one day he might have to test his worth against Horus for real.

He had been happy to provide the services of the Raven Guard, to lead the attack secretly against those that held out against compliance, fighting behind enemy lines, attacking shipping like a common pirate to weaken supply lines, while Horus and his Legion – they had been the Luna Wolves back then – had reaped the glory with their eye-catching drop assaults and massed battles.

Corax had allowed Horus the plaudits; he had no need for them. The Emperor had told Corax as much on several occasions. The Master of Mankind knew Corax’s worth, even if it was not loudly praised, and that was enough for the Saviour of Deliverance.

Now Horus’s brashness looked like vanity, and his extravagance seemed to be warmongering, when viewed through the lens of his treachery. He had teetered on the precipice of self-aggrandisement, and he had dragged many of Corax’s gene-brothers with him when he had finally fallen.

‘Quadrant six report is in, lord,’ announced Controller Nasturi Ephrenia, breaking into Corax’s thoughts. She was a short, ageing woman, a native of Deliverance. Ephrenia’s skin was deeply wrinkled, her white hair thinning, but her eyes were sharp and intelligent as she bowed over the cluster of screens at the primary surveyor station. Artificial tubing snaked just beneath her skin, pulsing gently from the life-sustaining fluids passing within. Augmetic braces glinted on either side of her neck and along the fingers of her hands as she tapped protocols into a keypad.

The strategium controller was dressed in simple grey trousers tucked into short boots, the lapels of her black, wide-collared jacket pierced with a single ruby-headed brooch in the shape of the Legion’s icon to signify her position as controller of the strategium. Her expression betrayed nothing as she looked at the most recent scanner returns and communications sweeps.

She always had been cool-headed, even as an infant.

There was almost no light at all. Something glittered through a crack in the rocks, providing just enough of a glow for him to make out the outline of the objects around him. There was something half-buried in the rubble behind the boy, cracked and distorted by an immense impact, shattered glass spread across the uneven floor.

The light glinted from one thousand and eighty-six shards.

He wondered if that was important, and decided it wasn’t. What was important was that the air was breathable, well within tolerable limits, and the gravity a little less than… less than what? What did ‘Terran-normal’ mean? His thoughts were still scattered. He understood gravity, and if asked could have written out many long equations regarding the calculation of its strength and effect, but it was just one fragment of information tossed haphazardly across his mind, like the shining glass pieces strewn over the floor.

There was quite a lot of nitrogen in the air.

How did he know that? He took another deep breath, and came to the same conclusion. He just knew it to be true, just as he also detected a higher concentration of carbon dioxide. Both of these facts hovered in his thoughts before a connection was made and a conclusion surfaced.

An artificial atmosphere.

It was by no means a definitive conclusion, but seemed a safe assumption given the other environmental factors his body had been steadily assessing since in the few moments since he had awoken in this dark place.

There was definitely a generator close by; he could sense the electromagnetic disturbance emitted from its coils.

The source of the light strobed at a particular frequency that resonated with the generator coils. That was how he knew the light was electrically generated, which was confirmed by his analysis of the spectrum of light falling onto his enhanced retinas.

It was very disturbing.

He had no memory of this place at all. In fact, all he could recollect was soft warmth, some muffled background whirrs and clicks, and a dull light permeating a layer of liquid. Not at all like this cold, dry, black place.

And some voices, disturbing, demented voices that hovered on the edge of memory. He could not recall what they had said, but was left with an uneasy feeling of defiance and distrust.

Air moisture was also quite high. Combined with the low temperature, he was forced to conclude that he was close to ice of some kind. He noticed his breath formed vaporous tendrils against the flickering gleam.

He remembered his ears, surprised that he had not paid attention to them sooner.

There were sounds nearby, sounds that did not seem artificial in origin; sounds that reminded him of occasional visitations while he had been growing and learning. Human sounds.

Voices.

He could understand the concept of language. He knew seven thousand, six hundred and forty-one languages, dialects, argots and cants from across the Old Empire. He was not sure how he knew them, and was trying work out into which of them the words he heard could be categorised. There was something of a Pan-Sannamic lilt to the words, but their expression was harshly pronounced. He could not identify the particular sub-strand of the idiom, but it was not so great that he could not form a cognitive appreciation. In short, he decided what they were speaking and listened in.

‘Near four hundred dead, at least.’

‘Four hundred less mouths to feed,’ said another voice. ‘Least, that’s the way they’ll see it.’

‘These arc-drills are not meant for icework,’ said another. ‘This was bound to happen.’

‘Quit gossiping and start digging!’ This was spat, filled with false authority. He could hear the trembling beneath the vehemence, the edge of fear that lurked in the speaker’s subconscious.

There came a high-pitched whining, and a flickering red light shone through the tiny gap while the rock started to vibrate fractionally more.

He waited, apprehensive but intrigued.

The laser drill crept closer and closer. Rock splintered and light flooded in as the chamber was breached. He took in the scene in an instant. A crowd of humans dressed in shabby blue overalls, seven male and three female, were directing the laser, five of them steering its head, another five on the tracked cart behind. Their age was indeterminate, obliterated by obvious signs of malnourishment and hard labour. Creased, leathery skin, cracked lips and sunken eyes gave them all an aged appearance that was probably beyond their chronological existence.

There was also a child with them. A female infant, clinging to the leg of one of the women riding on the traction cart that propelled the drillhead. She had long blonde hair and a narrow face with large lips and bright blue eyes. She seemed very thin, as fragile as an icicle. She was covered in rock dust like all of the others, but had smeared it away from her forehead with a wipe of her hand, revealing skin that was unhealthily pale.

Every one of them had ceased working and was now staring at him. He swiftly concluded that they had not intended to find him, and he wondered why his presence here was a surprise. It was another vexing question.

‘What’s stopping you?’ Another male, bigger built and better fed than the others, stepped from behind the mining cart. He wore trousers and a jacket of dark blue, covered with a film of dust. His feet were booted, the thick footwear capped with metal at toe and heel. His face was concealed behind the tinted visor of a helmet, and in his hand he carried a whip whose handle was heavy enough to serve as a cudgel. The man stopped in his tracks as he also saw what was in the pocket chamber that had been breached. ‘How the…?’

The adults, the ones in the coveralls with the tools, started jabbering amongst themselves, almost too fast for him to understand. The one with the whip, the one with the false authority in his voice, pushed to the front. The small girl had dropped down from the cart and was walking through the breach into the chamber.

‘Get back,’ said the uniformed man, snatching hold of the girl’s hair to drag her from the gap.

He decided he did not like the man with the whip. The girl’s shriek was full of pain and fear, cutting through his thoughts like a hot knife touching a nerve.

He stood up and walked towards the group. They backed away from him, still whispering and muttering in fear. The man who had hurt the girl stood his ground, pushing the infant aside. The man lunged forwards to grab him, but he moved so slowly it was easy to avoid the outstretching hand. The boy nimbly stepped around the flailing grasp of the guard and grabbed the wrist in both hands. It snapped easily, bringing a howl of pain from the man.

The bullying man reared up as his shattered hand flopped loosely at the end of his arm, bringing back the whip in the other. The barbed tip of the lash cracked forwards, but it was a simple enough matter to elude it and snatch up the end of the whip in his fist. The man laughed, partly in hysteria, and yanked, trying to unbalance him. The boy spread his legs and held firm, jarring the guard’s arm, before pulling back. Rather than release his grip, the guard was hauled from his feet, landing face first in the dust and rocks in front of the others.

Pacing forwards, the boy saw the look of surprise, terror and hope in the eyes of the workers. The little girl smiled at him, even as tears streaked the grime on her face. He wanted to make her happy, to give her something as a sign that everything would be all right.

‘What’s your name?’ she asked. ‘Mine is Nasturi. Nasturi Ephrenia.’

He grabbed the helmeted head of the guard, twisted and gave a pull, ripping it free. He offered it up to the girl, who laughed even as the adults started to cry out in panic. He saw himself reflected in the visor and realised the reason for the alarm he had caused.

He was nude, and clothed in the body of a child no older than Ephrenia. Blood was spattered across his snow-white skin, his crimson-splashed face framed with a shock of coal-black hair. His eyes were utterly black, darker than night.

He searched for an answer to the girl’s question as blood dribbled down his naked arms. Only one reply seemed appropriate, drawn up from the depths of embryonic memory.

‘Nineteen,’ he said. ‘I am number Nineteen.’

‘Nothing detected, lord,’ Ephrenia reported. ‘A little background echo on the Therion frequencies, but nothing less than five days old.’

‘Enemy?’ asked Corax, one hand gripping the back of the command throne.

‘Six more frigate-sized vessels detected, lord,’ reported Ephrenia. ‘Two strike cruisers and one battle cruiser. All using Word Bearers protocols as far as we can determine. They are moving out-system.’

‘It’s too dangerous to remain here,’ Agapito said from the gallery. ‘That makes it thirty-eight vessels detected in proximity to Isstvan IV.’

‘The Therions are gone,’ said Solaro.

‘I have to concur.’ Valerius’s voice was quiet, his face pinched with emotion. He darted a sideways glance at Branne and then returned his gaze to the primarch. ‘I hope their sacrifice will be remembered. I will provide a list of ranks and names when we have returned to Deliverance.’

‘They will be lauded, have no worry in that regard,’ Corax assured him. The primarch’s dark eyes glittered in the glow of the screens that covered the walls and station panels of the strategium. ‘Their loss will not go unremembered. Nor will it go unavenged.’

‘My thanks, Lord Corax,’ Valerius said with a deep bow.

A dull tone sounded from one of the main speakers.

‘Reactor energy spike, lord,’ said Ephrenia.

‘Reduce scanning array output to navigational,’ the primarch replied quickly. ‘There is nothing more we will find here. Adjust course to shortest route to translation distance, evasion pattern three.’

The black- and white-clad serfs moved to their control stations without word and within a minute the warning tone fell quiet.

‘Augur sweeps being targeted to our vicinity, lord,’ said Ephrenia, her words quick but calm. ‘Three frigates have changed bearing, moving ahead of our position. Monitoring increase in closed communications traffic.’

‘The traitors smell something amiss,’ said Corax. He strode across the strategium to join the controller and looked at the display screens. ‘Keep to plotted course. Reflex shield status?’

Ephrenia consulted a sub-screen before replying.

‘Masking is at ninety-nine point three per cent, lord,’ she told the primarch. ‘Should we slow down?’

Corax performed some quick calculations in his head, factoring the scanner ranges of the enemy vessels and the time required to get away.

‘No change,’ he commanded. ‘A little more speed will serve us better than complete masking. When we are two hundred thousand kilometres from the enemy, increase speed by twenty per cent. We should be at the translation point in seven days.’

The primarch looked again at the displays, seeing in his mind’s eye the dispositions of the enemy fleet. They had quickly thrown up a blockade position around the inner planets, correctly expecting him to have headed in-system rather than directly out of the star’s gravity well. Corax reminded himself that his enemies were commanded by Horus, one of the greatest strategists of the Imperium.

His traitorous brother knew well the capabilities of the Raven Guard, having benefited greatly from their expertise during his campaigns. They would have to be careful and take nothing for granted. The Raven Guard might have been pulled from the trap on Isstvan V, but they were still far from safe.

In a darkened chamber close to the strategium of the Vengeful Spirit, a meeting was being held. The room was large, big enough for several dozen occupants to be seated, the light of the single great lantern hanging from the centre of the ceiling barely reaching the banner-hung walls. A few data stations blinked with ruddy lights on the far wall, beneath an embroidered standard depicting the Eye of Horus in gold on burgundy. The floor was plain plasteel mesh, scuffed to a dull grey by the countless footfalls of booted feet.

As the door closed behind Alpharius, the primarch’s eyes instantly adjusted to the gloom. The space seemed cavernous, occupied by only three others. Alpharius was surprised; he had been expecting several of his brother primarchs to be attending the council. As he stepped forwards he realised that this was not a war council, it was an impromptu interrogation. Perhaps even a trial.

The thought did not sit comfortably with him as he regarded the chambers’ other occupants with what he hoped was an impassive expression. Alpharius knew that he tested the patience of the Warmaster, and here at the heart of his lair there was no telling what he might do.

Horus, Warmaster, Primarch of the Luna Wolves – the Sons of Horus, Alpharius corrected himself – sat on a broad, high-backed throne, robed in heavy black and purple, hands on his knees. His face was heavily shadowed, eyes hooded with darkness with just a glint at their core. Even seated, the Warmaster’s presence dominated the room. Alpharius had spent time with Horus before – when loyal to the Emperor and since – and never before had he felt threatened. This time was different. Horus seemed bigger than ever.

Alpharius was the smallest of the primarchs, but had not allowed this to undermine his confidence. Now that he looked at Horus, tree-trunk-thick arms stretching the fabric of his robes, Alpharius realised that his fellow primarch could crush him, tear him limb from limb, without warning.

Their relationship had changed, that much was clear. The primarchs had once been brothers, equals. When Horus had been made Warmaster he had been treated as the first amongst equals. Looking at Horus now, Alpharius was left with no doubt that Horus considered himself master, a lord to whom fealty was owed. The obedience of his co-conspirators was no longer demanded, it was expected.

There was also no mistaking the Warmaster’s perception of his role in the coming meeting. He was the judge at a trial. His eyes remained fixed on Alpharius as the primarch walked to the centre of the room. The gloomy surrounds, the half-lit shapes at the edge of vision, were a crude trick, Alpharius told himself, only capable of intimidating lesser individuals. For all that, the primarch of the Alpha Legion felt a cold trickle of uncertainty creeping through his gut.

At the Warmaster’s right shoulder stood First Captain Abaddon, fully armoured and with a power sword at his hip. He had a look that matched his reputation: his hard eyes were those of a stone-hearted killer. At the Warmaster’s left was the Word Bearer Erebus, his armour painted a lavish crimson, adorned with golden sigils and hung with fluttering pieces of parchment covered with tiny scrawls of Lorgar’s meandering litanies. The Word Bearer leaned closer and whispered something in Horus’s ear, so quiet even Alpharius’s superhuman hearing could not detect it. The Warmaster looked sharply at the primarch of the Alpha Legion, eyes narrowing.

‘It would be unwise to take my name in vain, Alpharius,’ said Horus, fingers tightening with anger. ‘You claimed my authority and misled Angron and his World Eaters, allowing Corax and his Legion to escape.’

‘Perhaps your conversion to our cause is less than complete,’ added Erebus, before Alpharius could reply.

The Alpha Legion’s primarch held his tongue for the moment, quickly adjusting his demeanour in the face of Horus’s hostility. He stood in front of the Warmaster, helm under one arm, head bowed in obeisance, the picture of the diffident servant.

Abaddon put his hand to the hilt of his sword and growled.

‘Your duplicitous nature is well known,’ said the captain, teeth bared in anger. ‘The Warmaster saw fit to bring you into the light of his plans, I hope you have not made a mockery of his fair judgement.’

‘I seek to place Horus on the throne of Terra, the same as you,’ replied Alpharius, lowering to one knee in deference. It was an instinctive reaction, though such submission grated at the primarch’s pride. ‘If I acted out of turn it is only because circumstance forced me to make a decision quickly.’

‘I have not yet heard an explanation for your actions,’ said Horus.

The Warmaster’s gaze was piercing, as if trying to bore into the primarch’s mind to see his thoughts. Alpharius matched the stare without fear. Horus knew nothing of the Alpha Legion’s true aims. If he had any inkling of the part made out for him by the Cabal, Alpharius would already be dead. ‘I consider it a grave crime to usurp my authority, a crime compounded by the severity of the consequences.’

‘The Raven Guard have not yet been apprehended,’ said Erebus, a sneer twisting his lips. ‘Though but a shadow of their former strength, it was foolish to allow them to escape.’

‘You must trust me,’ said Alpharius, ignoring the two legionaries, his attention focused on his brother primarch. It was the Warmaster’s will, or whim, that needed to be swayed to Alpharius’s cause. ‘The military potential of the Raven Guard has been expended, they are no physical threat. Their survival, Corax’s escape, will play a greater role in this war we have unleashed.’

‘Will it?’ Abaddon spat the words, his scorn etched into the creases in his brow. ‘What greater role?’

Alpharius kept his gaze on the Warmaster, noting that his displeasure did not seem so deep. It was clear that he did not have Horus’s full trust, but Alpharius did not care for that. His brothers had always been wary of the Alpha Legion, always suspicious of their methods, if not their motives. Horus was no different. He had consistently underestimated the power of subterfuge, eschewing the subtler weapons of espionage and misdirection in favour of overt action. Alpharius had not answered the Warmaster’s summons to excuse his actions, he had come to persuade Horus of their merit. That he could do so without the interference of the other Legion commanders was an advantage.

‘The Alpha Legion have infiltrated the Raven Guard,’ Alpharius said bluntly.

He saw Horus’s eyes widen slightly with surprise, and suppressed an expression of pleasure at the Warmaster’s nonplussed moment. Far from an admission of guilt, it was a declaration of strength; the unveiling of a weapon that the Alpha Legion kept hidden.

Alpharius could see the calculation behind the Warmaster’s eyes. If the Alpha Legion could infiltrate the Raven Guard, they could have done the same to any Legion. The Warmaster cocked his head to one side, momentarily perturbed, his eyes flicking away from Alpharius for the first time since he had entered, glancing at Abaddon.

‘To what purpose?’ asked Horus, recovering his composure, his stare returning to its previous intensity. ‘Had they been destroyed, what would be the point of spying on corpses?’

‘You allowed Corax to get away from the World Eaters to protect your operatives.’ Erebus levelled the accusation with a pointed finger, pushing Alpharius’s patience beyond its limit.

‘I am a primarch, genetor of the Alpha Legion, and you will show me due respect!’ snapped Alpharius, standing up.

He took two steps towards Erebus, eyes glittering. Abaddon moved to intercept him, half-drawing his blade

‘Don’t make the mistake of letting that sword leave its scabbard,’ said Alpharius, fixing Abaddon with a venomous glare. ‘I may prefer to work in subtle ways, but if you continue to insult me, I will slay you here and now.’

Horus held out a hand, waving Abaddon back, a thin smile on the Warmaster’s face. He seemed pleased at Alpharius’s anger. ‘You are somewhat defensive, my brother,’ he said, gesturing for Alpharius to seat himself on one of the chairs arranged around the throne. ‘Please explain to me the benefits of allowing Corax to escape.’

Alpharius sat down, reluctantly accepting the Warmaster’s invitation, darting a warning look at Erebus just as the Word Bearer opened his mouth to speak.

‘Save your posturing for those that are swayed by it,’ said Alpharius. ‘Your change of loyalty proves the vacuity of your proselytising. You are privileged to stand in the presence of your betters, and should know not to speak until spoken to.’

The primarch enjoyed the contortions of anger that wracked the First Chaplain’s face, but Erebus heeded the warning and said nothing.

‘I have good information that Corax will attempt to return to Terra,’ Alpharius said, turning his attention back to Horus. ‘He will entreat the aid of the Emperor, and be given access to some secret of Old Night that we can use to our advantage.’

‘From where does this “good information” come?’ asked Horus, affecting disinterest though Alpharius could see that the Warmaster was intrigued.

‘We each have our own means and sources,’ replied Alpharius, flicking a meaningful gaze towards Erebus. The Alpha Legion had made it their business to know as much as possible about their fellow conspirators, and Alpharius was well aware of the strange rituals that Lorgar and his Word Bearers now indulged in. The Alpha Legion’s allies in the Cabal had furnished them with much information concerning the Primordial Annihilator, the Power of Chaos. It would not hurt to pretend that the Word Bearers were not the only Legion who had influence with the powers of the warp. ‘I am not of a mind to share mine with you at the moment.’

‘Are you not?’ said Horus, irritated. ‘Why would you keep secrets from me?’

‘Perhaps it is just my nature to do so. Secrecy is my best weapon.’ Alpharius smiled apologetically and gave a slight shrug. ‘Also, I do not believe myself or my Legion indispensable in your endeavours, so it would be unwise to surrender the few small advantages I possess. I know that my behaviour in the past and in recent times does not engender trust, but I assure you that this information is not only legitimate, but accurate.’

‘I will accept your assurances,’ said Horus, ‘for the moment.’ He leaned back in his throne, visibly relaxing as if to back up his words. Alpharius knew not to be lured into a sense of security. The Warmaster’s temper might change at a wrong answer from him or a sly word from Erebus. ‘What is your intent?’

‘We will allow Corax to obtain whatever it is he seeks, and then take it from him, turning it to our purpose.’

‘How do you think your operatives will remain undetected?’ Abaddon asked. ‘Our reports show that less than four thousand Raven Guard fled from Angron. New faces will be easily spotted, your legionaries exposed.’

‘That is why they wear old faces,’ Alpharius told him. He smiled and explained further when the others’ frowns deepened. ‘The Raven Guard were scattered as they fled the massacre at the dropsite. It was several days before they convened their strength again, during which time many were cut down in pursuit and anarchy reigned through their organisation. It was no simple matter for my Apothecaries to transplant the facial features of several fallen Raven Guard onto volunteers from my Legion, but they have had a lot of practice. As you may have heard, such facial surgery is not uncommon in the ranks of the Alpha Legion. My warriors are skilled and experienced, able to blend in without attracting attention. Even now they are with the Raven Guard, waiting for the opportunity to report.’

‘You stole their faces?’ Abaddon’s expression was a mixture of incredulity and disgust.

Alpharius nodded and looked for Horus’s reaction. For a moment the Warmaster had the same guarded look as earlier, but his aggression swept it aside as he leaned forwards, brow furrowing.

‘You are sure of their success?’ asked Horus, the words laden with accusation. ‘You have heard from them since they began their infiltration?’

Alpharius hesitated at this question, not sure of his reply. There was no point lying at this stage, even though the truth might upset the Warmaster further.

‘They have not yet been in contact,’ Alpharius admitted. ‘It is possible that they have been discovered, or perhaps slain in the fighting, but it is unlikely. They will send word when there is something of note to report.’

‘That will be a feat in itself, considering how far away they might be,’ said Abaddon.

‘As I said before, I have my means.’

Saying nothing, Horus regarded Alpharius for some time, his shadow-hidden eyes never leaving the face of the Alpha Legion primarch. Erebus bent down to say something but the Warmaster held up a hand to stop him.

‘You should have come to me with this intelligence before you interfered with the World Eaters,’ Horus said, his voice quiet. Alpharius chose not to repeat his point that he had had no such time to seek the Warmaster’s authority, and certainly didn’t voice his view that permission would not have been given. The judge was about to pronounce his judgement and Alpharius could not tell which humours held sway over the Warmaster. He held his breath, trying not to tense lest his anxiety was seen as guilt. ‘Angron has been given further cause to doubt my commands, and he is not shy in voicing his displeasure. I do not appreciate your scheming, brother, and I will be watching you closely.’

Which meant that no action more imminent would be taken against the Alpha Legion. Alpharius breathed out slowly, still on his guard.

‘We have a possible contact with a Raven Guard vessel heading out-system from Isstvan IV, Warmaster,’ said Abaddon. ‘Should we call off the pursuit, if it is your desire to let them escape?’

Horus looked to Alpharius, one eyebrow raised, seeking his opinion, though Alpharius sensed he was still being tested.

‘I would humbly suggest that the pursuit continues as normal for the moment,’ said the primarch. ‘Corax may already be suspicious of the events that allowed him to elude the World Eaters, any further deficiency in our attempts to bring him to battle might cause him to act with greater caution and ultimately thwart the reasons for allowing the Raven Guard their freedom.’

‘I concur,’ said Horus. ‘I have every confidence in Corax’s ability to escape my clutches without further help, and it will cause further consternation and questions amongst our allies if I am seen to interfere again.’

‘A wise decision,’ said Alpharius, bowing his head. ‘If there is nothing more to discuss, I must return to my Legion and continue the operation.’

Horus signalled for Alpharius to depart and the primarch felt the Warmaster’s heavy gaze on his back as he walked towards the door. The hydraulically-locked doorway remained closed to him, but Alpharius did not turn around.

The murmur of Erebus hovered on the edge of Alpharius’s hearing as the primarch waited for the portal to open.

‘If I thought for a moment, brother, that you were working against me, I would destroy you and your Legion,’ Horus declared.

Alpharius looked over his shoulder at the Warmaster and his two advisors.

‘I have never doubted that, brother.’

The door hissed open in front of Alpharius and he stepped out of the star chamber, trembling at the experience.

When Alpharius had left, Abaddon asked leave of his Warmaster.

‘Wait a moment, Ezekyle,’ said Horus. His gaze moved between Abaddon and Erebus. ‘If the Alpha Legion have managed to infiltrate the Raven Guard, I believe they will have no compunction about doing the same to their allies. We have already suffered from disloyalty, I will allow no further disruption. Erebus, send word to Lorgar before he leaves for Calth. I want more of his Apostles spread through our forces. Ezekyle, conduct a thorough security review of our protocols, and report anything directly to me. Conduct any further purges as required.’

‘What of Alpharius?’ asked Erebus. ‘He plays a game with us, of that I am sure.’

‘He follows his own agenda, that much is certain,’ replied the Warmaster. He stood up, dwarfing the two legionaries. ‘I am equally certain that we will never have definitive proof of treachery. What is the current position of his battle-barge?’

‘The Alpha is in orbit over Isstvan III,’ said Abaddon. ‘Should I assign a ship or two to watch them?’

‘Yes,’ said Horus. ‘And pass on my command that the Alpha is to join my fleet when we leave the system. Let us keep Alpharius on a tight leash for the moment, until we see how his scheme plays out.’

When he had returned to the Alpha, Alpharius headed straight for his personal chambers. The meeting with Horus had unsettled him, more than he had expected. He wondered if it would be simpler to reveal the existence of the Cabal to the Warmaster. If Horus knew of the ancient pan-alien conglomeration that had persuaded Alpharius to side against the Emperor, the loyalty of the Alpha Legion would not be in doubt and they would have more freedom to pursue their goals.

In the longer term, that knowledge raised other questions, questions whose answers would be counterproductive, and Alpharius always took the long view. The Cabal had shown him Horus’s self-destruction after the Warmaster’s victory over the Emperor, ultimately sparing the galaxy from the eternal threat of the Primordial Annihilator. This outcome had to remain a secret. If that knowledge were to be revealed, Horus would be forewarned and it would not come to pass, meaning the Alpha Legion’s treason against the Emperor would be for nothing.

As they had done so many times before, Alpharius and his Legion had stepped upon a narrow path, playing a part to two opposing sides to achieve a third, more desirable outcome. One distraction, one wrong step, would see them utterly isolated and most likely destroyed.

These thoughts occupied Alpharius as he made his way along the dimly-lit corridors of his battle-barge. The massive vessel seemed empty and he passed only a few of the Legion’s human serfs and half-mechanical servitors. They bowed their heads in deference to their master, as befitted one of the Alpha Legion, but were unaware that he was the primarch. His appearance was nondescript and his movements, like those of all of his warriors, were ever masked in distraction and diversion, so that his whereabouts were never certain even to those under his command.

Most of the Alpha Legion was still on Isstvan V, where they had taken part in the massacre at the dropsite, destroying the Iron Hands, Salamanders and Raven Guard, fighting alongside the other Legions who had thrown in their lot with Horus.

It had been a subterfuge worthy of Alpharius’s twisted schemes, but there had been survivors, and news of Horus’s great betrayal was surely spreading. The Alpha Legion would act as the Warmaster’s eyes and ears across the galaxy, keeping watch not only on those remnants that still backed the Emperor, but also on those Legions that had sworn loyalty to Horus. According to the Cabal, there was a balance to be achieved. Horus must be victorious, but his hold on power precarious enough to precipitate the implosion of the traitor forces after the victory. This would result in the destruction of the traitors that Alpharius had already begun to engineer.

In keeping with Alpharius’s usual appearance as a normal legionary, his chambers were just one of the many assigned to the Legion captains normally aboard the Alpha. A nondescript metal door in a side passage marked the entrance to his personal chambers. According to the small nameplate beside the door they were the rooms assigned to Captain Niming; a conceit of an ancient, dead Terran language that Alpharius found as amusing as it was useful. When more of his Legion was on board, several different individuals would use the quarters, according to secret rota, and there were other such ‘blind’ chambers on the other ships of the fleet. With such methods, Alpharius could move amongst his Legion without drawing attention to his presence.

Alpharius punched in the lock code and the door slid open, revealing a small, wood-panelled antechamber just a few strides across, leading to another sealed portal. He locked the outer door behind him and checked the security log terminal hidden behind one of the timbers, assuring himself that none of the chamber’s other pseudo-captains had returned to the battle-barge yet.

Entering the cipher for the second door, Alpharius entered the quarters proper: three linked rooms furnished sparingly with old Terran cabinets, chairs and tables of nondescript origin. The floor was carpeted with a dark red, the plascrete bulkheads obscured behind more wooden panelling. In the main chamber were three high-backed couches, reinforced to support the weight of several legionaries. The archway to the right led to the sleeping chambers, but it was to the left that Alpharius turned first, to the arming room.

The primarch did not divest himself fully of his armour; such a thing required the attendance of several serfs and he was not prepared to let anyone else into the chambers while he still had his secret visitor on board. The room was plain save for the weapons racks on the walls and the steel stand for his armour. An alcove in one wall contained two automated, mechanical arms. He backed into this space and activated the backpack removal system. With a hiss of disengaging cables and crackle of detaching power conduits, his backpack was lifted from his armour, turned one hundred and eighty degrees and plugged into a recharging port at the back of the alcove, linked to the Alpha’s energy grid.

With this completed, Alpharius took off his helm and shoulder guards and placed them on the armour stand. He removed his gauntlets, vambraces and elbow guards and locked them in place too, before removing the outer greaves protecting his lower legs.

He had eschewed his more formal ceremonial garb for the audience with Horus. This particular suit of armour was the same as that issued to many of his legionaries, bearing no symbols that would mark out Alpharius as anything other than an ordinary warrior of the Alpha Legion. Painted with several coats of blue over the bare ceramite, it was the third such suit Alpharius had possessed on board the Alpha, though he had others on several different vessels, each identical to this. The first had been abandoned on Thiatchin after anti-compliance forces had compromised Alpharius’s desert bunker complex and the primarch had been forced to retreat without it. The second had been half-destroyed during fighting against orks on Actur Three-Eighteen and the battle damage had rendered it easily identifiable. This suit had lasted for twelve years so far, but Alpharius’s meticulous maintenance and attention to the replenishment of the livery and insignia meant that it was as flawless as the day the artificers had created it. There was not a scratch, burr, mark, dent or even brushstroke that marked it out as exceptional, not a detail that might be used to identify Alpharius amongst the other warriors of the Legion.

+I sense a presence.+

The clipped, false tones of his guest’s translating device sounded from the sleeping chamber. Alpharius, now divested of much of his armour, crossed the main room quickly and entered the bunkroom.

The Cabal’s emissary hovered at the foot of the low bunk. At first glance it appearance to be a glass sphere no larger than his palm, filled with swirling yellow and green gases, several digital devices attached to the globe without any obvious pattern. Looking more closely, one could see the creature itself inside its artificial habitat. It looked like a tiny skeletal hand, with seven fingers and no thumb, its sensory organs dark, shimmering lines against the brittle, pale flesh of its body.

Its true name was unpronounceable, its gender uncertain, but Alpharius thought of the alien as a ‘him’ due to the thin, reedy voice emitted by the translator, and referred to the creature by the approximate name of Athithirtir.

Bubbles formed in the gas, though from what orifice Alpharius was not sure, and the translator emitter set at the bottom of the globe rattled into life.

+I sense you have met the Warmaster.+

‘Horus has allowed us to continue with the infiltration of the Raven Guard,’ said the primarch. ‘Everything will proceed as we have discussed.’

+I sense that you are not being forthright.+

Alpharius suppressed a growl of annoyance. Athithirtir had some kind of empathic ability which even his primarch mind could not block. The envoy had introduced itself as an antedil, and mentioned a gas giant homeworld somewhere on the rim in the galactic north. Its psychic sense had developed under the crushing pressure and intense gravity of such a planet, where normal senses and limbs would have been inadequate.

‘Horus is suspicious, that is all,’ said Alpharius. ‘He will need to be handled carefully.’

+I sense reticence. Your role is clear. Horus must win this war outright. The Primordial Annihilator gathers strength. It is linked to the Warmaster now. Rituals are being performed and creatures summoned from the–+

The translator let out a stream of incomprehensible high-pitched sounds.

‘From the warp, you mean?’ said Alpharius.

+Such a short word for such a complex phenomenon.+

‘Creatures are being summoned from the warp? You mean daemons, yes?’ Alpharius sat on the end of the bunk and the environment globe lowered, floating level with the primarch’s face, just out of reach. Different coloured bubbles flashed in the depths.

+Wheels are turning. Traps are being laid. Your brothers loyal to the Emperor will face their darkest foes. They must fall.+

‘So you have said before. For the moment we must wait to find out what Corax will do and if your prophecies are true.’

+Not prophecies. Accurate. True. The Raven will meet the Emperor and he will be given a gift that can change the course of the coming war. This must be destroyed.+

‘It seems such a waste, to destroy this gift,’ said Alpharius. He stood up and paced to the door before turning to look at Athithirtir. ‘I think it would be better in the hands of the Alpha Legion than turned to scrap.’

+That is not what we agreed. I insist that you remember our agreement. The device and the Raven Guard will be destroyed. The plan must continue.+

‘I think not,’ said Alpharius. ‘Already my twin brother Omegon is on Kiavahr, the world around which Deliverance orbits. We have allies amongst the people there, old foes of Corax who do not like their new Mechanicum masters and who strive for independence from the Imperium. Rest assured, the Raven Guard will be destroyed, but not before Omegon claims this prize for the Alpha Legion.’

The alien’s words came out as a flutter of untranslatable mechanical shrieks, and its globe bobbed up and down in agitation, the gas roiling within.

‘Settle yourself,’ said Alpharius with a laugh. ‘We wouldn’t want you to break on something, would we?’

+Your dishonesty will be communicated to the Cabal.+

‘When I have the prize in my hands, and Horus is one step closer to overthrowing the Emperor, we shall see if the Cabal disapproves of my actions,’ said Alpharius as he stepped out of the bunk chamber. ‘Until then, you can keep your opinions to yourself.’

He hit the lock switch on the bedroom door, cutting off Athithirtir’s enraged metallic screech.

Everything had been set in motion, and now came the hardest part: waiting. Waiting for his counterpart on Kiavahr, his twin Omegon, to make contact with the anti-Imperial forces on the forge-world; waiting for his operatives within the Raven Guard to make themselves known to Omegon.

Alpharius sat on one of the couches, elbows on knees, fingers steepled at his chin, as his mind went over the plan as it stood. With Horus now set up to play his part, there was nothing to interfere with the smooth enactment of the Alpha Legion’s scheme. Everything would pan out as Alpharius had envisaged.

Three

A Traitor in the Midst
Blacklight
Corax Makes a Speech

‘Picket ships detected.’ Ephrenia’s announcement stilled the activity on the strategium.

‘Three destroyers, overlapping sensor sweeps, detecting plasma trails of three more vessels, probably light cruiser class,’ she continued.

The Avenger was only two days from reaching translation point, far enough away from the gravitic pull of Isstvan’s star to make a safe warp jump. For the last three days the net thrown up by the traitor ships had been closing in, but this was the closest they had come, only a few hundred thousand kilometres away.

Corax glanced at a screen in the arm of the command throne, showing the relative positions of the vessels. In a moment he had assessed their trajectories and the coverage of the scanner sweeps.

‘Too close to alter course,’ he declared. ‘We will have to make a dash for the translation point. Shut down all auxiliary systems, impose blacklight protocols, divert power savings to the engines.’

A series of affirmatives chorused from the assembled staff and legionaries. The primarch turned his attention to Commander Branne.

‘I want you and Agapito to make a stern-to-prow inspection. Ensure all support systems are at minimal output. Pass the word to Solaro and Aloni to enforce the blacklight protocols.’ The primarch raised his voice. ‘I want full energy balance in ten minutes, no later.’

‘Aye, lord, I’ll see to it,’ replied Branne.

‘Detecting launch, Lord Corax,’ said Ephrenia. ‘Picket ships are firing torpedoes, wide dispersal.’

‘Direction?’ snapped Corax, returning to his place behind the command throne, eyes fixed to the small data screen.

‘Crossing pattern,’ Ephrenia replied. ‘Even at our increased speed they will pass ahead of us.’

‘Clever bastards,’ muttered Branne from behind the primarch. ‘Hoping to get lucky with blind firing.’

‘Save three per cent of energy output for manoeuvring, just in case,’ said Corax. ‘All personnel to attend to battle stations.’

‘Weapons, Lord Corax?’ asked Ephrenia. Her expression was as calm as ever, but the primarch detected the slightest hint of tension in her voice. ‘Shall we reserve any output for the weapons batteries?’

‘No,’ replied the primarch after a moment’s thought. ‘We won’t be able to fight our way out of this one if we are discovered.’

‘And the void shield transformers, Lord Corax? Shall I have them running on standby?’

‘No,’ Corax said. ‘All power to reflex shields and engines, nothing else. If they hit us, it will be too late anyway.’

Taking the shield transformers offline would add almost four minutes to the time required for the reflex shields to revert to defensive void shields; extra minutes during which untold damage might be incurred by the Avenger. For the first time since he had come aboard, Corax noticed hesitation in the controller. It lasted only a heartbeat before Ephrenia nodded and turned to the task at hand. He heard the doors opening and glanced over his shoulder to see Branne departing on his inspection.

He checked the display again. They were two hundred and fifty thousand kilometres from the Traitor picket. Seven more vessels had been picked up by the low-band sensor screen, creating three layers of defence between the battle-barge and the safe translation point. If there was even a momentary blip in the reflex shields, or one of the torpedoes caught the Avenger in its blast, the primarch’s ship would quickly find itself surrounded by enemies.

He could not outpace his foes and he could not outfight them. Corax’s only option was to hold his nerve and stay focused on evading detection. It was something he had been good at since he was a boy, and he was not going to start making rash decisions now.

Blacklight protocols meant the complete shutdown of all non-essential systems. One by one, life support, lighting, heating and other environmental systems powered down to their minimum levels; just enough for the human crew to survive. Even the artificial gravity was lessened to one-half Terran normal, freeing up valuable power for the plasma drives.

In the busy transport compartments in the depths of the hold, nearly fifteen hundred legionaries were packed together as darkness descended. The battle-barge had been designed to carry a fraction of that number.

Space had been made in storage holds, weapon bays, and amongst the gantries and decks of the engine rooms. Squads had found room in maintenance crawlways and in stairwells, and several dozen elevator and conveyor shafts had been decommissioned to provide even more space. Even with such measures, the warriors of the Raven Guard had little freedom of movement. Only the main access corridors had been kept clear, to allow runners easy access between the strategium and other essential stations.

Amongst the throng, Alpharius watched the lights dimming and then going out. Of course, he was not the Alpharius, but by some clever mind-programming and a little psychic intervention by the Legion’s Librarius, he had chosen to forget his real name. To all intents and purposes, he now was Alpharius.

And he was a little concerned. He sat with his adopted squad on a gangway above the plasma reactors, clad in his armour. Environment warning sigils lit up in his display as the air thinned and gravity lessened. Without thought he gave a sub-vocal command to power up the auto-senses of his helmet.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’

Alpharius turned his head as Command Aloni’s voice rang along the gantry. He realised the captain was talking to him.

‘You know what blacklight means,’ continued Aloni. ‘Power to minimal. Do you realise what kind of energy signature one and a half thousand power armoured legionaries are going to give off? Everybody pay attention! Everything is to be set to minimum output, lowest cycle. Rebreathing, moisture recycling, locomotion. Everything. No communications, no external address, no movement.’

Nodding his compliance, Alpharius powered down his suit, becoming an immobile statue of ceramite, plasteel and adamantium. His secondary heart began to beat, compensating for the lower temperature outside, and his multi-lung inflated, enabling him to cope with air that had not been properly recycled.

Around him the others were doing the same. Here, out by the reactors, all life support was being withdrawn, leaving each legionary cocooned within his own personal environment. Artificial night descended, broken only by the wink of illuminated gauges and monitor lights on the twin reactors fifty metres below the walkway. Moisture began to ice over the armour of the legionaries, thin trails of vapour dribbling from face masks and backpack exhaust vents.

Locked inside his suit, Alpharius realised how precarious his position was. Discovery was not an immediate problem. What with the reorganisation of the Legion, and the general unwillingness of the others to discuss what had happened on Isstvan, it had been simple enough to take up his new role.

His face was still sore from the grafting surgery, particularly where the implanted flesh of his new face met his original skin at the base of his neck and around his throat. The bone beneath had been remoulded and ached, while tendons and muscles that had been shortened or lengthened felt raw beneath his stolen skin.

Alpharius swallowed, remembering where the body had been found, no more than five minutes dead, leg blasted off by a Whirlwind rocket, spine snapped across a ridge of rock. The Apothecaries had acted as quickly as possible. For decades the Alpha Legion had striven to look alike, modelling themselves on their primarch, glorying in their anonymity. To have black hair, to have distinctive features and eyes that were a pale green, was a new sensation for him.

And the memories lurked inside his mind too. He knew a little about the legionary whose persona he had taken. He had taken in the meat of the fallen Raven Guard, allowing his omophagea to dissect and absorb the information about his prey. Bolstered by the abilities of the Librarians – abilities forbidden by the Decree at Nikaea but still widely practised by the Alpha Legion – he had gathered what fragments he could of the dead legionary’s life.

He could feel them, flashes of images, snippets of conversation. More than that, Alpharius could feel how his new persona had felt. He had been proud, a veteran of the Lycaeus uprising, and had earned distinction with the Raven Guard since they had been united with their primarch.

The memories itched as well, jarring inside his thoughts, confusing him occasionally. Over the time he had spent fleeing across Isstvan V with his new comrades, he had learned their names and faces and the way they fought. The most fraught time had been the first few days, when commands had been issued in code-phrases, and formations called out in battle-lingua that he did not know, a language evolved on Deliverance that he had not grown up with. Yet he had been picked for this mission because of his gift with languages, his quick mind and his instinct for adaptation. His deficiencies had been covered by the efficiency and cohesion of the Raven Guard themselves and soon he had managed to blend in during the hit-and-run attacks, avoiding the suspicion of his squad comrades as well as the deadly attention of those pursuing the Raven Guard.

All of that seemed to be poised on the verge of pointlessness now, as he sat immobile over a reactor that would turn into a small star the moment it was breached, aboard a warship ghosting through an enemy fleet protected by nothing more than a few metres of bonded plasteel and adamantium. One lucky hit and he would be incinerated, along with the rest of those aboard the Avenger.

He did not know how many others of the Alpha Legion had been successful in taking their place; he did not know if he was the only one or if there were dozens of them. It did not matter. For the moment he was alone, and had to act accordingly. He had to do all he could to stay alive, remain undetected, observe Corax and get in touch with Omegon once they returned to Deliverance.

As fervently as he had ever hoped for success, he now hoped for his allies to fail. Whoever it was out there chasing the ship – Word Bearers, Alpha Legion, World Eaters, Sons of Horus, Iron Warriors, Imperial Army – Alpharius wished them every disaster that he could imagine: engine failure, outbreaks of disease, weapons malfunction, anything that would stop that one lucky hit from eradicating his existence. He was prepared to give his life for his primarch and his Legion, but not this way, not without a foe to fight and a mission to protect.

It would be such a pointless way to die, he thought, as the sound of a detonation echoed dully through the hull.

‘Nova cannon shell,’ reported Ephrenia. ‘Six thousand kilometres, starboard bow.’

Corax did not react immediately. Two cruisers had joined the destroyers, the growing enemy flotilla saturating the intervening gulf of space with torpedoes, missiles and plasma blasts in an attempt to catch the Avenger in a blanket of fire. It was not a particularly effective tactic. The volume of void they were trying to cover was vast and they were trying to get very lucky, or frighten Corax into an act that would betray his location.

That the Traitors knew the battle-barge was in their vicinity was beyond doubt, but the question that now concerned Corax was whether they knew any more than that. The nova cannon detonation had not been so close as to convince him it had been deliberately aimed at the Avenger, but neither had the margin of the miss been enough that it was outside the normal margin of error for such a long-ranged shot. Could he afford to wait for a second plasma explosion to prove things one way or the other?

‘Decline by fifty thousand metres, three degrees starboard,’ he snapped to the men at the helm controls.

‘Navigational shields absorbing plasma residuals and debris,’ announced another crewman. ‘Nearing reflex shield tolerance levels.’

Corax gritted his teeth. The low-power navigational shields were usually in place to ward away micro-asteroids and other space-borne debris, but now the nova cannon blast was swamping them with more than they were intended to handle. If he increased power to prevent any of the shockwave reaching the Avenger, the energy spike would reveal their position.

‘Ride it,’ he said, as the ship started shuddering around him. ‘Implement previous order.’

The battle-barge made best use of the space available, using all three dimensions to change course away from the point at which the nova cannon had been targeted. It was not an eventuality Corax had expected – the nova cannon was still considered highly experimental by most Imperial forces, and few commanders would allow one to be mounted on their vessel.

‘Can you calculate the launching vessel?’ he asked Ephrenia.

‘Just detecting a third line-class ship, Lord Corax,’ the strategium controller replied. ‘Probably a grand cruiser. Approaching from almost directly astern, broadcasting Iron Warriors identifiers.’

‘Typical,’ Corax whispered. Give one of Perturabo’s captains the chance to mount a bigger gun and he would snatch your hand off to take it.

‘Detecting another nova cannon launch,’ warned Ephrenia.

In her worry, she had forgotten his title, something the primarch had thought impossible. Corax noticed her face paling and the knuckles of her thin hands whitening, supporting callipers flexing, as she grabbed the edge of the display console, expecting an impact. There was no way a warning could be given to the crew without giving away the battle-barge’s position, and if the nova cannon scored an unlikely direct hit, no amount of bracing and preparation would save lives.

‘Passing to port, fifteen thousand kilometres and increasing, Lord Corax,’ Ephrenia said, smiling slightly and relaxing her grip. ‘Detonation detected. Seventy thousand kilometres away.’

‘It is safe to assume the fire is random. Set in a course for closest translation point.’

Corax had noted the two separate detonation points and filed them away in his memory. It seemed likely the Iron Warriors were using a firing formula to calculate their target points. Three or four more detonations would allow Corax to calculate the formula in retrospect and take appropriate action to decrease the odds of another close call. Other than that, there was nothing else to do except continue to hope for the best.

The Avenger continued on, dipping and rising, zigzagging its way towards the translation point, cutting an elusive path through the net of Traitor ships. At times Corax headed directly towards the enemy, passing within ten thousand kilometres of battle cruisers and frigates, trusting the reflex shields to mask any emission that would betray their presence.

The cordon tightened, the glimmers on the traitors’ scanner displays drawing in more and more vessels, chasing ghost returns that were little more than fuzzy mirages against the backdrop energy haze of the universe.

Sitting in the darkness of his requisitioned command chamber, Corax felt the change in vibrations that signalled another course alteration. They were less than half a day from the translation point. It was tempting to make the warp jump now and take the risk of gravimetric interference, but he stayed patient.

There had been some close calls: torpedoes unleashing their warheads a few thousand kilometres from the Avenger, last moment changes in direction to avoid enemy scans, nova cannon detonations that had pushed the navigational shields to the limit, random reactor spikes that had brought the battle-barge to a virtual halt to compensate for the energy flare-ups.

The primarch had taken all of this without a moment’s fear. There was no room for error, but there was also no room for uncertainty. His situation was very stark: escape and survive or be detected and destroyed. Such extremes made clarity simple, and drove away other thoughts that might have clouded his judgement.

For the moment they were exploiting a small break in the traitor cordon and had had several hours of unopposed travel. Blacklight protocol was still in full operation, and so Corax sat at the large command console staring at the blank screens and dead displays, his eyes picking out the details of the room in the smallest glow from blinking red standby lights and the gleam from the doorway leading to the strategium.

He was used to waiting.

Over long years, he had learned the lessons of patience, of precise timing. During hundreds of battles he had known the moment to act and the moment to pause, and had known victory every time because of those decisions.

The massacre at the dropsite had caught him off-guard. It troubled the primarch that he had perceived nothing of the traitorous intent of his fellow Legion commanders. Sitting in the dark, alone with his thoughts, he wondered if he had been blinded to their treachery by some weakness in himself. Had he been too trusting? Ignored subtle signs of his brothers’ intent? Been over-confident?

What had happened had been unthinkable, and that was part of the problem for Corax. Should it have been so outlandish that he had never considered having to fight his brothers? He had been sent with the others to Isstvan to bring Horus to account – surely he should have wondered whether Horus had acted entirely alone. Had the shock of the Warmaster’s turn against the Emperor befuddled him, caused him to blunder into an obvious trap?

The questions were all the harder because they were unanswerable.

Another vibration, another course change. The hours ticked past. The primarch needed no data-screen to tell him what was happening. He had a picture in his mind of the Avenger and the ships arrayed against it, their courses plotted in his thoughts as accurately as any schematic. Any notable divergence from the picture he had drawn would be reported, and he had received no such communication from Ephrenia. The complex web being woven to catch the Avenger was not tight enough, there were always gaps.

Patience.

Hours, days, weeks of waiting. Years, in fact, when he had been making his preparations, hidden amongst the prisoners of Lycaeus. There was something of a purity in the stillness; something energising about the solitude.

His wounds still pained him, occasional stabs of sensation that broke through the walls of his semi-mesmeric state. He would shift his weight to relieve the stress on ravaged ribs, to move pressure away from damaged organs. Corax’s engineered body could withstand incredible amounts of damage, and yet there was something deeper than the physical wounds that afflicted the primarch. The pain was something he forced himself to endure, as a reminder of his failure. He suffered a hurt that no superhuman body could rectify: a grievous injury that the attention of the Apothecaries would not cure. Until he could bring an end to that internal agony, he would not allow his body to heal.

Roused from his contemplation by one such brief burst of pain, Corax activated a data-screen. Analysing the intersecting courses displayed on the monitor, Corax spotted something he had not seen before: a convergence of possibilities brought about by some minor alterations in the enemy’s disposition a few hours ago.

There was a gap. Or rather, there was not a gap, but a coming together of four Traitor ships. The wash from their own plasma drives, the emissions of their reactors, would obscure the Avenger and provide a pathway to the transition point earlier than he had planned, if he dared take it.

Seeing the possibilities unfolding, Corax stood up, re-examining the chart. He was sure he was correct. Passing from inaction to motion in moments, the primarch leaned over towards the communicator activation stud.

He stopped with his finger millimetres from the switch.

Corax weighed up the situation once more, cooling his excitement, ignoring the lure of sudden activity. The manoeuvre would bring the Avenger within range of the guns of at least three enemy vessels. If he changed to the new course, they would be committed. Any significant alteration by the enemy would change the dynamic, revealing the Raven Guard’s position dangerously close to the foe.

He discarded the idea.

Though Corax was eager to reach the relative safety of the warp – eager to do anything proactive – there was more to be said for caution than daring at the moment. He had gone after Lorgar at the dropsite, driven by a thirst for revenge, briefly abdicating his responsibility as a Legion commander. Had that emotive response cost his Legion, more of them falling to the ambush than would have done had he been commanding the retreat? He would not act rashly again.

The most important thing was that he had lived, and that was as true now as then. Half a day was not important; survival was important. That need to survive, that animal instinct to keep drawing breath had driven him on, filled him with purpose. He would not lie down and accept death willingly. Even now, his Legion almost wiped out, his enemies outnumbering his allies, Corax knew that he could not give up. His duty now was to keep the Raven Guard alive, no matter the temptations and instincts to act with resolve and daring.

On Deliverance, when it had been called Lycaeus, there had been true desperation. Weaker men had fallen and lesser men had balked at the task ahead. Not Corax. He had dragged Lycaeus, bloodied and screaming, into freedom, and not once doubted the righteousness of his effort. Why now did he wonder if he had the resolve to triumph?

He sat immobile in the darkness once more. He liked the dark; the shadows had always been an ally. He might spend the last hours of his life like this, waiting, anticipating the next shudder of a course correction, expecting a knock at the door to bring a fresh report of the enemy’s movements, trying not to relive the mistakes and horrors of Isstvan.

Trying, but failing.

The room was dank with the smell of sweat, the air thick with the stench of his own fear. Marcus was more than happy to face any foe in an open fight, or even to stand firm while battleships destroyed each other with blasting broadsides. This war, the Raven Guard way of war, vexed his nerves and tightened his chest around his heart.

The praefector lay on his bunk, his eyes closed, wishing the ventilators could be activated to siphon away the filth of his perspiration. His hands trembled on his chest, his hair was lank across his brow and the pillow and sheets were soaked beneath him.

All it would take was one warhead to find the Avenger and they would all be killed. Valerius was certain of it; the reflex shields provided no defence against a dozen megatonnes of atomic destruction. The walls vibrated with the shockwaves of distant detonations – thousands of kilometres away, yet all too close for the praefector’s liking.

Pelon was in the antechamber. Marcus could hear his short, panicked breaths and imagined his servant sitting in the corner of the room hugging his knees to his chest. The praefector understood well the dread that gripped his man, because he shared it.

The bombardment had started less than half an hour ago. He had been sent from the strategium by Corax as the first nova cannon shells had erupted, far from the battle-barge yet too close for comfort. As he had hurried down the corridors and descended seemingly endless stairwells, he had felt the ship vibrating beneath his tread, the metal of the handrails quivering under his fingers.

He had tried not to run. The Raven Guard he had passed were unperturbed by their predicament, trusting their existence to power of the reflex shields in a way that Marcus simply could not. He was Imperial Army, a Therion, and he was used to fighting an enemy he could see, his life entrusted to power fields or tank armour or the metres-thick walls of a bunker. He had endured artillery duels and orbital attacks, but nothing compared to the helplessness he felt right now.

The darkness was absolute. No lights could be lit. In a way, he was grateful. It was better that he was confined to quarters, where Lord Corax and the others could not see his cowardly reactions, could not hear his suppressed whimpers with each rattle of a passing shockwave.

Yet it was also a nightmare to be alone. Pride might have helped him master the fear, had he been within sight of others. With just himself to impress, his resolve was revealed to be woefully weak. The darkness was as cloying as the sweaty air. It weighed heavily on his chest, pushing the wind from his lungs, throttling him.

He choked and gasped and swung to the edge of the bed, booted feet touching upon the bare decking, arms hugged tight around his chest as he winced at another vibration that rattled from starboard to port, accompanied by creaks and cracks from the bulkheads around him.

‘This is insanity,’ he muttered.

His words were a whisper, but echoed inside his head. Sanity had been a scarce resource of late for the praefector. At first he had been relieved that the nightmares had ended. The blissful oblivion of sleep had been returned to him and he had embraced it.

The sensation of relief had not lasted long. Barely a few days after the evacuation of Lord Corax and the Legion, Marcus’s empty dreams had started to nag at him. He woke in the middle of the night watches, a void in his thoughts, feeling dragged down into an abyss. Soon he had come to fear the nights as much as when the fires and the cries of dying ravens had haunted him. It was not the searing hot terror, the paranoia that had gripped him before, it was a cold dread that trickled down his spine and sank to the bottom of his stomach.

Alone in the dark of his cabin, that dread had returned, seeping out of the darkness while missiles and shells lit up the firmament beyond the steel and rockcrete walls. The nothing that awaited him was too much like the vacuum of space. In his dread, Marcus was convinced that he was going to die. Just as he had dreamt of the Raven Guard’s predicament, now his sleeping thoughts were bringing him a vision of his doom. He would die alone, freezing in the void, swallowed by the emptiness of the universe.

Marcus let out a whimpering moan and threw himself face-first into the pillows and covers, trying to bury his head, striving to block out the emptiness that was leeching away his existence.

‘That was a little too close,’ remarked Branne as a nova cannon shell blossomed into nuclear life a few thousand kilometres off the starboard bow.

‘Too close is a hit,’ replied Agapito. ‘Anything we survive is far enough away for me.’

‘Hush,’ said Lord Corax. His voice was calm, his features expressionless, as he watched the dull glow of sensor readings on the primary display. ‘I am thinking.’

The primarch had taken over the helm controls as soon as the latest raitor fusillade had started, guiding the Avenger along a safe course that only he himself could see, his mind constantly calculating and adapting with each launched torpedo salvo and nova cannon detonation.

‘Lord, we are heading to danger-close proximity with an enemy cruiser,’ warned one of the attendants at the scanner array.

‘I know,’ replied the primarch, eyes locked on the display.

‘Lord, they will detect our plasma wash if we pass that close,’ Controller Ephrenia added, her tone quiet and respectful, yet tinged with concern.

‘That is not all they will detect,’ Corax replied, turning to smile at the woman. He paused for a moment and then held up a finger. ‘I judge that we have reached safe distance for translation.’

‘Lord?’ Ephrenia’s confusion was matched by Branne’s. A sideways glance at Agapito and Aloni showed that his fellow commanders were tense, eyes narrowed.

‘We will not be fleeing without a last remark to our enemies,’ said Corax.

‘Should we power up the void shields and weapons batteries, lord?’ asked Ephrenia, hand hovering over the command terminal.

‘No,’ said the primarch. ‘I have something more dramatic in mind.’

On the strategium of the Valediction, Apostle Danask of the Word Bearers was finding his latest duty a stretch on his patience. The joyful anarchy and slaughter of the dropsite attack seemed a distant memory after days of fruitless searching for the fleeing Raven Guard. His latest orders were no more exhilarating. For more than a day his ship had been sporadically firing torpedo spreads into the area the Warmaster had ordered, with no result at all. It was a waste of time, and made all the more insulting because his brother legionaries were already en route to Calth for their surprise visit to the Ultramarines. It was hard not to feel that this was in some way a punishment for some breach of Legion rules of which he had not been made aware.

Danask wondered if perhaps he had not been dedicated enough in his devotion to this new cause. He had noticed Kor Phaeron looking at him strangely on occasion, and was sure that the Master of Faith was testing him in some fashion. He had offered no complaint when he had received his nonsensical orders, and had offered effusive praise to the primarch for considering him for such an onerous but essential duty.

‘Energy signature detected!’

The words of Kal Namir came as a triumphant shout from the scanner panels, snatching the Apostle from his thoughts.

‘Where?’ demanded Danask, rising up from the command throne. Sirens blared into life, shattering the quiet that had marked most of the patrol’s duration.

‘Almost on top of us, two thousand kilometres to port,’ announced Kal Namir. ‘Weapons batteries are powering up. Void shields at full potential.’

‘Mask energy signature and get me a firm location. Brace for impact,’ snapped the Apostle, realising that the enemy would only reveal himself to open fire.

He heard Kal Namir mutter to himself, swearing under his breath.

‘Speak up or stay silent, brother,’ rasped Danask. He was in no mood for his subordinate’s grumbling. He punched in a command on the arm panel of the throne and brought up a real-time view of the enemy’s rough location. A shimmer against the stars betrayed the presence of the Raven Guard ship.

‘The scanners must have malfunctioned. This makes no sense,’ Kal Namir said. He checked his displays again and then turned to look at Danask with eyes wide from shock. ‘Signature is a warp core spike, commander…’

On the screen, the enemy battle-barge came into view, dangerously close, black against the distant pale glimmer of Isstvan’s star. Moments later the space around the vessel swirled with power, a writhing rainbow of energy engulfing the ship from stem to stern.

‘Take evasive action! yelled Danask, but even as he barked the words he knew it was too late.

The Raven Guard ship disappeared, swallowed by the warp translation point it had opened. The warp hole roiled wider and wider, washing over the Valediction. Danask felt the flow of warp energy moving through him, a pressure inside his head accompanied by a violent lurching of the cruiser.

‘We’re caught in her wake,’ announced Kal Namir, somewhat unnecessarily, thought Danask.

The Valediction shuddered violently as the spume of warp energy flowed past, earthing itself through the void shields. Tendrils of immaterial power lashed through the vessel, coils of kaleidoscopic energy erupting from the walls, ceiling and floor, accompanied by the distant noise of screaming and unnatural howls.

More warning horns sounded a moment before an explosion tore apart the stern of the ship, the void shield generators overloaded by the surge. Secondary fires erupted along the flanks of the Valediction, detonating ammunition stores for the weapons batteries, opening up ragged wounds in the sides of the vessel.

The shriek of tearing metal accompanied fiery blasts of igniting atmosphere gouting from the massive holes to port and starboard. The Valediction heaved and bucked, artificial gravity fluctuating madly, tossing Danask and the others on the strategium to the ceiling and back to the floor. To the right of the Apostle, a communications attendant fell badly, snapping his neck on the mesh decking.

Then there was stillness and silence.

The shielding of the reactors had held firm and no further explosions occurred. Several minutes of disorientation ensued, during which the strategium staff busied themselves getting damage reports. The scanners were all offline due to the warp wash, the dozens of screens surrounding Danask all grey and lifeless.

‘Get me helm control,’ he rasped.

Anti-damage procedures continued for some time. Danask’s head throbbed, an ache in the base of his skull growing in intensity until it threatened to be a significant distraction.

‘That could have been worse,’ said Kal Namir. ‘At least we survived.’

Blood started to drip from the Word Bearer’s eyes and nose, thick rivulets of crimson streaking Namir’s face. The blood vessels in his eyes were thickening and his skin was becoming stretched and thin. Danask held a gauntleted hand to his nose as he tasted blood, and saw a drop of red on his fingertip.

One of the weapons console attendants gave a scream and lurched away from his panel, his robes afire with blue flames. The man flailed madly as others tried to help him, pushing him to the floor and swatting at the flames with cloaks and gloved hands.

‘Get them off me! My face! Get them off my face!’ shrieked another serf, tearing at his eyes and cheeks with his fingers, stumbling from his stool.

A subscreen flickered into life at one end of the scanning panel. Danask knew what he would see but looked anyway. Outside the ship the stars had disappeared, replaced by a whirling vortex of impossible energies that hurt his eyes to look at, even through the digitisation of the display.

They were in the warp.

Without their Geller fields.

Unprotected.

As realisation settled in the Apostle’s numbed mind, he felt something clawed scratching inside his gut. He dared not look down.

A detached part of his brain marvelled at what had happened. To engage warp engines close enough to drag the Valediction into the immaterium yet far enough away not to destroy the cruiser was an incredibly difficult thing to do. He wondered what manner of man could do such a thing.

Around him, madness reigned. He felt apart from it all as his serfs and legionaries howled and roared, limbs cracking, warp energy swirling through their bodies, distorting and tearing. He realised he had asked the wrong question. Exposure to the warp was the most horrific death that could be visited upon any living creature. It was not what manner of man could do such a thing, it was what manner of man would do such a thing.

He never got to answer his own question. Moments later, a horned, red-skinned beast erupted from his innards, splaying out his fused ribs and chest, his twin hearts held between fanged teeth.

Danask’s agonised scream, so inhuman, so unlike a legionary, joined with cries of the rest of his crew.

They were safe in the warp. As safe as the warp could ever be, though the Avenger’s Navigators had complained about a roiling tempest as soon as they had translated. The Astronomican, the light that guided them through the immaterial aether, was all but obscured by storms of immense proportions.

Corax had told them to do the best they could. Their goal was simple: head to the source of the Emperor’s light and they would reach Terra.

The primarch stood on the strategium with his commanders, the pick-up for the internal vox system small in the palm of his hand. Blacklight protocols were over, the reactors running at full capacity. The strategium was awash with light, bright after the days of gloom. The primarch’s disposition did not match the brightening of the environment.

Hesitating, Corax wondered what he would say to his warriors. What words of encouragement could he speak when he felt so devoid of hope himself? The Traitors had struck so well, their concealed blow aimed with deadly effect; it seemed unlikely that they could be stopped. He had given many speeches in his life, to rouse the weary to fight on, to inspire his warriors to acts of great bravery; all of the words that sprang to mind now seemed to the primarch to be hollow platitudes.

It did not matter. He drove out the doubt with a surge of will. Now was the time when he needed most to display the leadership for which he had been created. It was at times like this, not in the heat of battle where his physical abilities could sway the day, that his true worth was judged. He was the primarch of the Raven Guard and his legionaries would look to him for guidance and strength. Many had seen rough times before, though nothing compared to the cataclysm that Horus had now unleashed upon them. Some were survivors of the Unification Wars, others the veterans of Lycaeus’s rebellion. All of them were warriors, with the pride of the Legion in their hearts.

‘We leave Isstvan in defeat,’ he said, his words broadcast the length and breadth of the ship. ‘It is not a pleasant feeling, but I want you to remember it. Take it into your hearts and nurture this sensation. Let it flow through your veins and fuel your muscles. Never forget what it feels like to fail.’

He stopped for a moment, taking a breath, letting another emotion replace the hurt and the despair.

‘Do not give in to feelings of desperation. We are the Legiones Astartes. We are the Raven Guard. We have been bloodied but we have survived. Take that sorrow and pound upon it with your anger, until you have forged a new purpose. Those who we once called brothers…’

Corax stopped again, the words catching in his throat as he said them. He glanced at Agapito, then Branne, then Solaro and finally at Aloni. His commanders’ eyes were bright with emotion, jaws clenched with suppressed fury. The primarch let out a growl, giving vent to feelings he had put aside since fleeing Isstvan.

‘Those who we once called brothers are now our enemies. They have betrayed us, and worse still, they have betrayed the Emperor. They are dead to us, and we will not give them the dignity of our sorrow. Anger is all we shall have for them. Anger the likes of which we have never unleashed before. Only months ago ago we still unleashed our fury in the name of Enlightenment. We brought war to the galaxy in the name of the Imperial Truth. Those days have finished. The Great Crusade has been brought to an end by the treachery of those we now call foes.

‘Hate them! Hate them as you have never hated an enemy before. Loathe the air they breathe and the ground upon which they tread. There is nothing so cowardly as a traitor, nor anything so worthy of our abhorrence. Hate them!’

Pain flared through Corax’s chest. In his agitation he had opened up the wounds he had suffered, causing blood to trickle down his body. A normal man would have been slain by any one of these injuries, but the primarch bore the pain without visible sign, stoically moving the agony to the back of his mind.

Corax’s hands were trembling and he took a moment, trying to bring some peace to his thoughts.

‘They tried to kill us, tried to annihilate the Raven Guard and erase us from the pages of history. But they made one mistake: they failed. We are bowed but not broken, wounded but not slain. I swear by my oaths to the Emperor and by my dedication to you that we will have revenge on those that have so wronged us! They will pay for their mistake with blood and death, and not until the last of them lies dead by our hand shall we know any measure of contentment or satisfaction. We will destroy them wherever we find them, as only the Raven Guard know how.

‘Swear with me now, my children, to follow me wherever this road leads. Swear to show no mercy to the traitors. Swear to slay them with hatred in your heart. Swear to excise this cancer that Horus has nourished in the heart of the Imperium. Swear to bring again the Imperial Truth to the galaxy. Swear that we will never fail again!’

Deep in the bowels of the Avenger, Alpharius listened to the primarch’s words and could not help but feel stirred by them. Such defiance was noble. Pointless, but noble.

Four

Journey to Sol
Meagre Repast
The Way is Barred

There was much work to be done. With blacklight protocols lifted, the warriors and crew of the Avenger could direct their efforts towards the consolidation of their strength. The hasty rearmament and reorganisations after Isstvan were superseded by more deliberate measures. Ad-hoc squads were broken up and reformed; legionaries were promoted to sergeants, and sergeants raised to higher ranks still.

Amongst those who were busiest were the remaining handful of legionaries from the armourium. The Raven Guard had lost most of their equipment during the long hit-and-run battles of Isstvan V, and to the Techmarines now fell the task of ordering and repairing and restocking the wargear of the reconstituted squads. The Avenger’s holds gave up a great store of ammunition, but new power armour and weapons were insufficient for the two and a half thousand legionaries on board. Armour replacements and spare parts were also at a premium, and so, along with his fellow Techmarines, Stradon Binalt spent much of his time working on the guns and armour the Raven Guard had salvaged from their defeated foes.

His existence became a blur of work, every waking hour filled with the crackle of arc-welders, the smell of livery paint, the squeal of pneumatic ratchets and the heat of the ceramite kilns.

Binalt was intrigued by the wargear that he came across, some of it very familiar, some of it of radically different design, issued to other Legions from dozens of forge-worlds across the Imperium. As best he could, he cobbled together repairs for the Mark IV suits of armour worn by the majority of his comrades, bastardising pieces from the older Mark II and III suits taken from the bodies of Word Bearers, Iron Warriors and World Eaters. Nothing was perfect and every patch and jury-rig came only with the assurance that it would last a battle or two, should the Avenger encounter the enemy again before reaching Terra.

There was little enough aboard the Avenger to work with, so compromises had to be made. Most of the Legion’s armoured vehicles had been destroyed or abandoned at the Urgall plateau, so spare parts for tanks and transports were not in short supply. Binalt and his fellow Techmarines devised a way to reinforce the armour they had created, using the molecular bonding studs usually employed for affixing armour and ablative plates to Rhinos and Predators. This gave the suits a particular appearance, the shoulder guards sealed with rows of large rivets that looked like nodules or blisters. Other vehicle parts – transmission cabling, servos, even spare track links – were pressed into service as makeshift components for the new armour design.

Slowly the legionaries started to look like Raven Guard again. Greaves, plastrons, shoulder guards and vambraces that had sported the colours of all the Legions that had fought on Isstvan were painted in the black of the Raven Guard, insignia lovingly applied, each stroke of brush or sweep of spray obliterating the colours of former friend and foe alike, as if the Legion were cleansing itself of the memories by covering their marks with their own livery.

Spare time was in short supply, and in the few breaks he had, Binalt contemplated another, more personal project. He had secured himself a small space between two of the starboard gun towers, a noisy little chamber that reverberated with the clank of the auto-loaders and drummed with the feet of the crew as they performed their gun drills, ever ready for battle.

There was room only for a small worktop and a set of shelves – no chair for Binalt, so he stood instead. The Techmarine looked at the large pile of broken parts gathered on the table and wondered where he would begin. Pieces of shattered ceramite and twisted metal sat under nuts and bolts and a nest of wires and cables. Here and there he could identify a servo or actuator or muscle-like fibre bundle, all systems he was used to dealing with in a suit of power armour, but fashioned in a way he had never encountered elsewhere.

He admired the beauty of the craftsmanship even as he marvelled at the engineering and design that had been laboured upon the haphazard scattering of pinions and power relays.

Binalt started by sorting through all of the parts, splitting them into piles by form and function, leaving some aside whose purpose he had not yet divined. Day by day, sometimes snatching only a few minutes at a time when others were gratefully taking their allotted few hours of rest, he began to make sense of the mess. Alone with his thoughts, bringing rational observation to emotions thrown into disorder by recent events, he contemplated the nature of the daunting project he had chosen to undertake and broke it down into achievable goals. It was relaxing in an odd way, removing the Techmarine from the clutter of the Legion and the memories of Isstvan; a perfectly self-contained sphere in which he could operate, with definable outcomes all within his control.

It would be a long time until he was finished – perhaps longer than he would survive – but Binalt was determined, filled with a need to do this particular work of artifice. If he could complete this, the world would be right again, and his existence would make sense once more.

There was little to do except drill, eat and rest. The Avenger had translated from Isstvan seventy days ago and the warp storms were making progress slow. Alpharius worked with his squad, each day learning more about them and more about the person he was supposed to be.

He had heard rumours that they were not going to Deliverance, but were en route to Terra. The thought intrigued, excited and worried him in equal measure. He had never been to Old Earth, and for many years had aspired to do so. Before the twin primarchs had commanded that the Legion back Horus, Alpharius had often quizzed the older Alpha Legionnaires about the world of mankind’s birth. None of them had been back since they had embarked upon the Great Crusade, and certainly none of them had truly believed that they would ever again witness the glory of the Imperial Palace.

Alpharius knew that his loyalties were now to a different cause, but the thought of being close to the Emperor still sent a thrill through him, matched only by the pleasure he had experienced on being singled out by the true Alpharius for this mission. The primarch had taken him into his confidence and explained the nature of the Legion’s change of allegiance. The Emperor had, perhaps unwittingly, betrayed his sons and their Legions. He had abandoned them, and in turn had allowed the Great Crusade to falter. The primarch could not explain why this had happened, but had been adamant that Horus would set mankind back on the path of the Imperial Truth.

Alpharius wondered if he would get a glimpse of the Emperor, and then fretted that if he were brought into the Imperial presence, his duplicitous nature might be revealed. Surely a man as gifted as the Master of Mankind would not be fooled by an altered face and name change?

More than that, Alpharius’s guise was Terran-born. What if the others born of Terra – only a handful left after the massacre but still alive the nonetheless – saw some flaw in his disguise; what if he betrayed his lack of knowledge to the other Terrans?

There was little time to worry about the future, Alpharius had to stay constantly alert to maintain the facade he had adopted. He was fortunate in one sense: his new self had a reputation for being taciturn, and this meant he was not expected to speak much. With the help of the Apothecaries and the material absorbed by his omophagea, his vocal chords and mouth had been reshaped to better resemble that of the legionary whose identity he had assumed, but to the keen ears of a Space Marine, any small difference might give rise to suspicion.

His greatest defence, shared by the others he hoped had also succeeded in their infiltration, was in the unlikelihood of what the Alpha Legion had done. Why would any Raven Guard suspect that their foes had taken on the faces of the fallen? It was a wonderful machination by the primarch and so characteristic of his genius. For another legionary to have doubts about Alpharius’s true nature was to invite thoughts of paranoia. It was so improbable that any suspicion without good evidence was likely to be dismissed out of hand.

Alpharius bent his mind to ensuring there would be no evidence, training and eating and sleeping alongside his adopted Legion. He showed pride as his ragtag armour was replaced, speaking words of vengeance and swearing oaths of loyalty to the Emperor and Lord Corax alongside his new brothers-in-arms while they repainted their icons.

There had been a few occasions when Alpharius had come close to revealing himself. Each day he learned a little more – small mannerisms, turns of phrase, and Legion protocols – that enabled him to blend in better with his fellow legionaries, but it was not a perfect process.

His latest close call had come during a hand-to-hand combat drill. The company had gathered in one of the hangar bays, amongst the dormant shapes of Thunderhawks and Stormbirds – the Avenger’s dedicated training chambers being insufficient for the large number of warriors on board.

Sergeant Dor had called the squad to order and given a disturbing speech.

‘We must learn to fight a new enemy,’ he had told them. ‘For decades we have honed our skills against savages and inferior foes, and faced strange adversaries such as the Isstvan Warsingers and the Ninturnian Devil-Blades. Now we face something entirely different. Now we must fight other Space Marines.’

It was an obvious thing to say but having the situation mentioned so baldly brought home to the legionaries just how much the galaxy had changed. There were mutters of discontent, but Alpharius held his tongue, not wishing to betray his own thoughts on the matter.

‘We train against each other every day,’ Lukar had said. ‘What difference should we expect?’

‘We have never tried to kill each other,’ had been the sergeant’s reply.

The squad had paired off, armed only with their monomolecular-edged combat blades. Alpharius had found himself facing Lukar, and the two of them had started at the sergeant’s command, thrusting and parrying, trying to find the weak points in each other’s armour, probing for the flexible joint seals, reinforced eye lenses and the gaps between armour plates.

Blades flickering, other pairs duelling around them, Lukar and Alpharius were a match for each other; equal in speed and strength. Their blades clanged against each other, were caught on shoulder guards or deflected by angled movements of their forearms, neither able to find an opening.

It was then that Alpharius had made his mistake.

Feinting high, he had dropped to one knee as Lukar’s blade had shot up to meet the blow. Under his opponent’s guard, Alpharius had reversed his grip on the knife and swung back-handed, driving its point towards the vulnerable sliver of material between Lukar’s upper thigh armour and his groin guard.

Lukar had frozen, Alpharius’s blade just millimetres from contact.

‘You have me,’ declared Lukar, stepping back, shaking his head. There was surprise in his voice. ‘Where did you learn such a move?’

Alpharius had hesitated, realising that the manoeuvre had been part of his Alpha Legion training, not replicated in the doctrine of the Raven Guard.

‘I saw a Traitor using it at the dropsite,’ Alpharius had said quickly. ‘I watched a Word Bearer take out one of our brothers from the Salamanders with that move.’

The rest of the squad had stopped their drills and were looking at Alpharius and Lukar. Alpharius did not like being the centre of attention. He had stood up and sheathed his blade as Sergeant Dor approached, helmeted head cocked to one side.

‘What was that?’ the sergeant had asked. ‘Using the tactics of the traitors?’

‘It seemed effective at the time,’ Alpharius had replied, remaining calm.

‘Pay attention,’ Dor had said, waving the rest of the squad closer. ‘Why don’t you show us that again?’

Alpharius did as he was asked, demonstrating the undercutting blow to the others. There were murmurs of appreciation and Dor had slapped him on the chest with a word of thanks.

‘This is what we must do,’ the sergeant had said. The red of his eyeplates had seemed to fix on Alpharius for some time before he continued, moving his gaze to the rest of the squad. ‘We need to learn from our enemies, adapt to the way they will fight. Any other innovations, any edge you can give us, share with the rest, all right?’

‘Yes, sergeant,’ Alpharius had replied.

Though his cover had remained intact, it was later that same day that Alpharius had realised what he had done. One day, a Raven Guard might use that move on an Alpha Legionnaire, or defend himself against it and so be victorious. Alpharius’s purpose was to learn about the Raven Guard, not enhance their skills. The situation was getting more complicated than he had imagined, the considerations more numerous.

Alpharius focused on what was important. He was an actor playing a part, learning more about his role with every day. In his heart he knew he was sworn to the Alpha Legion and felt no guilt at lying to those who he had once called his allies. It was not their fault that they had chosen the wrong side in the coming war. Alpharius did not feel contempt or pity for the Raven Guard, but had only a mild sense of regret that he could never genuinely call the legionaries around him brothers again. Their names slipped from his tongue as easily as the false declarations of allegiance and revenge, but he was not one of them. Like the rest of the Alpha Legion, he had been chosen for a greater purpose, one that the twin primarchs had assured him went beyond loyalty to the Emperor or Horus, and concerned the fate of the galaxy itself.

And like all of those who were blind to the greater truth, the Raven Guard were expendable. They would serve their part and then be destroyed, and he would be returned to his Legion to fight amongst his true battle-brothers again. It was this thought, this goal, that focused Alpharius as he lay awake pondering the unknown task ahead. He was Alpha Legion and so did not expect to be lauded or singled out – such glory-mongering was not in the Legion’s traditions. He would fulfil his purpose, take contentment from the knowledge of a mission accomplished and the praise of his twin primarchs, and become one of the many again.

From a gallery overlooking one of the impromptu mess decks that had once been a live firing range, Corax looked down at several companies of his Raven Guard filling themselves with ship’s rations. They stood at long trestle tables – chairs were another scarce commodity on board – and diligently ate from platters laden with synthetic meat and dry soybread. The fare was tasteless, but rich in the proteins and carbohydrates the legionaries needed to sustain themselves. Nutrient supplements were imbibed in the form of fortified water drunk straight from crude jugs turned out by the serfs in the lower deck workshops.

‘How are our stores?’ the primarch asked. He knew the answer but wanted to make sure that his commanders were abreast of every detail of the ship’s running.

‘Of no immediate concern, lord,’ replied Agapito. Branne and Solaro made up the quartet, with Aloni on watch command at the strategium. ‘The Avenger was stocked for a full three-year tour, more than enough for our current needs.’

‘The Navigators are reporting the same difficulties as before,’ added Branne. ‘It’ll be at least another forty days until we reach the Sol system. They have requested that we make another realspace drop to confirm our location.’

‘They are guessing,’ said Corax, sighing. ‘The rising warp storms almost blot out the Astronomican. We’ve translated three times already, and every time we have been at least five light years off course.’

‘Do you think that the rebels have something to do with the warp storms?’ asked Agapito. ‘Is that possible?’

‘I would not rule out anything at the moment,’ said Corax. He knew more about the strange ways of the warp than the commanders with him, and it was not unreasonable to assume that Horus might have acquired some form of technology or other power that had allowed him to conjure the roiling tempest befouling the Immaterium. The nature of what that other power might be, the hints he had learned from the Emperor and gleaned from his fellow primarchs, was best not shared. ‘There is the possibility that this turmoil hampers our enemies as much as it does us, but only a possibility.’

‘If it is not impertinent to ask, lord, why are we heading for Terra?’ asked Branne. ‘Although I can’t begin to guess at the motives of the Warmaster, the treachery at Isstvan suggests he wants to remove all opposition as swiftly as possible. Would it not be safer to secure Deliverance against attack?’

‘Horus might expect as much,’ said Corax, turning his back to the balustrade to face his commanders. There was noise from below as the assembled legionaries finished their meals and began to pile up the empty platters. ‘That is good enough reason not to go there. I have even stronger reasons for going to Terra.’

The statement floated in the air for a while until Agapito realised it was up to him to ask the next question.

‘Are you willing to share those reasons with us, lord?’

‘I must speak with the Emperor,’ replied Corax. ‘We do not know yet whether news of Horus’s perfidy has reached the Imperial Palace.’

‘Surely the Emperor is gifted enough to know when such a tragedy has befallen his realm?’ said Branne.

‘The warp storms may serve another purpose beyond stifling travel,’ said Corax. He looked at his commanders, seeing confusion in their expressions. ‘The warp, the Navigators, the astropaths and even the Emperor are linked together. They derive their powers from its energy, and so the storm cover might shield the Emperor’s far-seeing gaze as much as it blinds the Navigators to the route to Terra.’

‘Do you think Horus will attack the Emperor directly?’ asked Solaro. ‘Does he plan to invade Terra?’

‘Certainly,’ said Corax. ‘He has turned from the Imperial Truth and must either destroy the Emperor or be destroyed. The Warmaster’s actions have set us on a course to this confrontation; there can be no other outcome.’

This was greeted with intakes of breath and thoughtful silence for a few moments. Corax sympathised with his subordinates. The magnitude of what Horus had done was difficult to comprehend.

‘It seems Isstvan will become Horus’s folly,’ said Branne. ‘Even with the backing of so many Legions and the blow he dealt at the dropsite, he cannot hope to stand against the rest of the Imperium.’

‘We must assume the worst,’ said Solaro, before Corax could speak. ‘If those of the other Legions, who we once trusted with our lives, can be turned, we can place no faith in the loyalty of the Mechanicum or the Imperial Army.’

‘You are right,’ said Corax. ‘We have no idea of the true strength of the rebels.’ He stopped. The word ‘rebels’ did not convey nearly enough the gravitas of what Horus and his conspirators had perpetrated. ‘The traitors will have planned their moves for some time. Horus is prone to grand gestures, to displays of power, but he does not move without due preparation. Be sure of it, he did not act until he was ready, and that must mean he sees now as his best chance of a swift victory.’

‘It’ll be up to us to deny him, of course,’ said Branne, lip curling with anger.

‘Of course,’ said Corax, smiling thinly. ‘It is not in our foes’ interests to see the Imperium destroyed. They look to usurp the Emperor and become the rulers of the galaxy. So they must act quickly, destroying the Emperor and those who will fight with him, before the rest of the Imperium is dragged into the war. No matter what powers Horus has at his disposal, I agree with Branne. The traitors cannot win a long war.’

The legionaries were filing out below, while more were entering from the open doors in the far wall. Dozens of serfs were clearing the tables and bringing out heaps of fresh rations for the new arrivals. Corax looked down, meeting the eyes of the Raven Guard looking up at their leader. There was a dreary defiance etched into the features of those passing below, a moroseness that the primarch did not like.

‘Sergeant Nestil,’ Corax called out, halting the squad leader. The sergeant stood transfixed for a moment, like a target seeing the glint of a weapon pointed in his direction.

‘Lord Corax?’ Nestil replied. ‘How may I serve?’

‘Why so glum, sergeant?’ Corax kept his tone light-hearted. ‘Is the food not to your liking?’

‘I have eaten better, I must admit, lord,’ said the sergeant.

‘I suspect Horus is sitting on a big pile of grox steaks, sergeant. When we have permission from the Emperor, we’ll go and relieve him of them.’

There was laughter from the gathered legionaries, a little thin but better than the depression that Corax had sensed before.

‘Aye, lord, and no doubt Fulgrim has a few fancies too that we could help him with,’ replied Sergeant Nestil, earning more laughs.

‘You can be sure of that, Lancrato, you can be sure,’ said Corax, laughing along with the poor joke.

The primarch waved the legionaries on and turned his attention back to his commanders. His smile faded quickly.

‘We cannot allow the wounds of Isstvan to fester,’ he told them. ‘The Legion is depleted in strength, but it is the injuries to our spirit that are more grievous. We live or die by our successes, and they have been short of late.’

‘We will fight to the last man,’ said Solaro. ‘Yes,’ said Corax. His next words were to encourage himself as much as his companions. ‘Yet it would be better if we could get Horus’s forces to do that instead. We need a victory, something to restore honour and prestige. If we hole up in Deliverance, we surrender the initiative to our foes. That is not how we fight. With whatever force we can muster, we must take the fight to the traitors. We must prove to ourselves and others that they are not impervious, that an assault on Terra is not inevitable. At the moment we have been dealt a harsh blow, but we cannot run forever. The sooner we turn and fight back, the sooner we will sow doubt amongst the traitors and cracks will appear in their alliance.’

‘Are you so sure they will be so easy to break apart, lord?’ asked Agapito. Corax started to walk along the gallery. The great arched windows to his right were shuttered with ribbed steel blocking the view of the warp outside, but he could still feel its presence, like an oppressive atmosphere, a tension that permeated everything. To think that it might be under the control of Horus in some way was disconcerting.

‘Easy? No,’ said Corax in reply to Agapito’s question. ‘Yet there will be disunity. Even under the banner of the Emperor my brothers and I could find cause for argument. Horus may have the ears of some for now, but each seeks to profit in his own way from this rebellion. When it becomes clearer that those goals will not be achieved without great effort, their resolve will wane and their common cause will fracture.’

‘Let us hope we can bring that about,’ said Agapito.

Corax directed a stern stare at the commander, stopping just before the narrow doorway at the end of the gallery. Agapito wilted slightly under the primarch’s unforgiving gaze.

‘We have no room for hope,’ said Corax. ‘We plan and we act. Hope is for dreamers and poets. We have our will and our weapons and we shall dictate our own fate.’

When Corax had departed, Branne, Agapito and Solaro made their way back to the quarters they now shared.

‘Why did you mention hope, brother?’ Branne asked harshly. ‘Do you not remember those same words he spoke at Gate Forty-Two?’

‘It was just a turn of phrase, brother,’ said Agapito, clearly taken aback. ‘Of course I remember Gate Forty-Two. Who could forget that slaughter?’

‘Be more careful with your words in the future,’ snapped Branne. ‘Lord Corax does not need any extra distractions at the moment.’

Agapito looked as if he would argue, but then bowed his head, accepting the admonishment.

‘As you say, brother,’ he said. ‘I will watch my words carefully in future.’

Looking at the nearly-empty jars in his small case, Pelon wondered how much longer he could make the spices and herbs last. The praefector had said nothing of the crude fare Pelon had been forced to serve him of late – his breeding was far too good and his military experience too long for such complaints – but it nagged at Pelon’s conscience that a noble of Therion should endure the same bland meals as a common serf.

He had done his best to make Valerius’s sparse quarters accommodating, setting out such belongings as the praefector had brought aboard on the narrow shelves and bedside table. Valerius’s full dress uniform and parade regalia were hung on one wall, along with his gold-hilted power sword, but their bright appearance only highlighted the drab, unpainted bulkheads, rather than drawing the eye away from them.

Pelon had managed to procure a few paints and brushes from the ship’s stores, not enough to liven up the whole chamber but sufficient to add some colour to the plain furnishings and the bare tin plates and cups he had taken from the mess. The Raven Guard seemed to revel in their austerity, he had decided, embracing the harsh conditions of their home on Deliverance instead of celebrating the luxuries and frivolities that should have come with compliance. The manservant had never thought he would miss those endless corridors of the old mines, or the empty vistas through the windows, but since coming on board the Avenger he had come to see the time he had spent on the dusty moon as comparative opulence.

He heard the outer door hissing open and finished his fussing around the small table he had set out for the praefector’s supper. Valerius came into the main chamber and sat down without comment, his eyes passing quickly over the carefully sliced protein slabs dusted with chemyrrh and orthal. The praefector lifted the dented metal cup, its edge painted with a fine line of red by Pelon, to his lips, but stopped before he took a sip. He lowered the cup to the table and finally looked at his manservant.

‘I miss wine,’ said Valerius. ‘A nice carafe of Mastillian red, a glass of bubbly Narinythe. For shame, I’d even settle for a sip of that stuff Prime Tribune Nathor rustled up on Hedda-Signis.’

Pelon said nothing. It was not his place to speak, but to listen. He had overstepped the mark before, back on Deliverance, and no end of trouble had come from it. With everything that had been going on – and he had overheard a lot from the Raven Guard and the crew about events that had taken place on Isstvan – he was happy to be safe and able to concentrate on his sole duty of providing for the praefector.

‘Mustn’t grumble, though, Pelon,’ said Valerius, as if his servant was the one who had voiced the lament. ‘Latest estimate says we’re just twelve days from translating into the Sol system. Though judging by their recent success rate, I’d not be surprised if the Navigators took twice that time. It’s exciting though, isn’t it? Terra, Pelon! Won’t that be something of remark?’

Pelon was not sure if he should reply or not. It was difficult sometimes to judge whether he was simply an ear for the praefector to speak into or if his master wanted to engage in conversation. Valerius did not continue, and had a look of expectation that suggested to Pelon that he was waiting for a reply of some kind.

‘I would have never have thought I would see such a thing, master,’ Pelon said dutifully. In truth, he had been exceptionally anxious about the upcoming stop at the centre of the Imperium. No doubt there would be all manner of dignitaries there to greet their arrival. It would be a shocking failure on Pelon’s part if Valerius turned up looking like some ragamuffin officer from one of the professional regiments, but he only had limited resources to launder and repair his master’s uniform. ‘It is an honour that I can scarce believe.’

‘You’re not wrong about that,’ said Valerius, plunging his fork into a piece of synth-squash that Pelon had artfully carved into a slim-petalled flower. An hour’s work was demolished in seconds by the praefector’s chewing. ‘There are lord-commanders of Therion who have not had the privilege.’

‘You seem to be of good mood today, master,’ said Pelon, sitting at the end of the bed as he dared to venture his opinion.

‘I have had a conclave with Corax and the Raven Guard commanders, Pelon,’ said Valerius, between mouthfuls of food. ‘I fear our stay on Terra will be short-lived. As soon as I can secure passage, I am to travel back to Therion to entreat further forces. With the losses the Legion has suffered, and the regrettable sacrifice of my own command, it is desired that I raise a new cohort to fight alongside Lord Corax against the traitors.’

‘It is good that he would entrust such a duty to you, master,’ said Pelon. He regretted his words as Valerius purposefully placed his knife and fork on the half-empty plate and turned a frown on the manservant.

‘Why ever would they not trust me?’

‘I was not speaking of you in particular, master,’ Pelon said hurriedly. ‘Trust has been in short supply of late, is all. Even I get wary glances from the crew as they see me about my business. Times such as these, it’s good the primarch has every faith in Therion to fight for the Emperor.’

‘Yes, you are right,’ said Valerius, resuming his meal. He smiled through the laborious mastication of a faux-grox fillet, his words coming as a mumble. ‘It is quite an important duty. We’ll need every able man and woman who can carry a lasgun. It’ll be like the founding after compliance. Bigger even!’

The praefector finished his supper, washed it down with his recycled water and stood up.

‘Dark times, Pelon, but aren’t all great moments in history seeded in the dark?’ he said, kicking off his short boots and flopping onto the bed. ‘Nobody remembers those who lived in times of joy and plenty.’

‘Indeed not, master,’ said Pelon, collecting up the dishes and cup. He stopped just before the door. ‘Will you need me for the next hour, master? I’ve got some time in the laundries, is all.’

‘No, I think I can be without you for an hour,’ said Valerius, sounding tired. Pelon glanced over his shoulder and saw the praefector’s eyes were closed, his chest already rising and falling gently. ‘Perhaps a little more salt next time,’ the praefector murmured, his voice trailing away into sleep.

‘As you say, master,’ Pelon said to himself with a smile of satisfaction, closing the door behind him.

One hundred and thirty-three days after departing from Isstvan, the Avenger finally reached the Sol system, heart of the Imperium, birthplace of mankind.

On Corax’s orders, the ship came in and deployed its void shields immediately; it would be incautious to arrive without some form of protection but using the reflex shield had the potential to invite immediate suspicion.

The sensor reports were also flooding in, bringing with them a picture of a star system in considerable turmoil. Dozens of warships, haulers and transports were moving back and forth from the Lunar bases and Terra, navigating their way through layer after layer of minefields, orbital defence platforms and out-system heavy monitors. More still were arriving; there was not an hour that passed without at least two or three ships breaking from warp.

Word was spreading across the Imperium. The warp storms that had so hampered the Raven Guard on their journey also disrupted astrotelepathic communication. Even in the best of conditions it took many weeks, sometimes several months, for messages to be relayed from the heart of the Imperium to its outer reaches. Add to this the violence of the warp tempest and it could still be many months before some systems were even aware of the Warmaster’s treachery.

This was just the beginning, Corax sensed. Dozens of ships would become hundreds, thousands perhaps. For the moment Horus had the element of surprise, but the behemoth that was the Imperium was being roused to confront this new threat. The resources of the Emperor were vast, but ponderous; but once they had achieved a critical momentum they would be unstoppable. Of this, the primarch was certain. Horus’s only chance of triumph was a swift victory, and Corax would do all he could to ensure that such a thing would not happen.

After the standard delays in bringing the scanners and communications arrays online after the warp transit, the Raven Guard found themselves being insistently hailed by the Wrathful Vanguard, a strike cruiser of the Imperial Fists Legion. Captain Noriz was threatening all manner of violence if they did not identify themselves.

It was clear from Noriz’s hails that unexpected visitors were not welcome.

‘This is the Avenger, battle-barge of the Raven Guard,’ replied Branne, with Corax standing beside him. ‘We are carrying Lord Corax to Terra. Please ensure we have a clear path.’

There was a delay before the Imperial Fists communication returned. Even with audio-only exchanges, there was a noticeable time lag between message and response, indicating that the Wrathful Vanguard was several hundred thousand kilometres away.

‘You are not authorised to proceed. Power down your shields and prepare to receive a boarding party. Failure to comply will be treated as an act of aggression and you will be destroyed.’

Corax laughed at this, but Branne was in no mood to bandy words with the Imperial Fists captain.

‘Watch your tone, captain! Lord Corax will be meeting the Emperor in person. If you have a problem with that, perhaps Rogal Dorn himself would like to come aboard and discuss it. If you have finished insulting my primarch, provide us with escort to get us to Terra without further interference.’

‘I am not at liberty to indulge you, primarch aboard or not,’ came Noriz’s terse reply. ‘All non-sanctioned vessels are to be inspected. If you have not noticed, one legionary’s word to another doesn’t count for much anymore. We will board and if you refuse, your vessel will be destroyed.’

His jaw clenching with anger, Branne reached for the transmit button, but he was stopped by Corax. The primarch gently pushed the commander aside and bent down to the communications array.

‘Captain Noriz, your attention to duty and protocol is admirable,’ said the primarch, his deep voice edged with humour. ‘I am more than happy to welcome a delegation from my brother’s Legion aboard, but please dispense with the threats. This is a battle-barge carrying several thousand legionaries; you have a strike cruiser with a complement of fifty legionaries.’

More silence followed, longer than the previous pause.

‘Please identify yourself.’

Sighing, Corax shared a glance with the others around him before he activated the transmit switch.

‘I am Lord Corvus Corax, Primarch of the Raven Guard, Saviour of Deliverance, Commander of the 27th and 376th Expeditions, acting Marshal of the Therion Cohort and lauded conqueror of a thousand worlds. Please come aboard and I will show you my other credentials.’

Static buzzed across the network for a while, until Noriz had conceived a suitable reply.

‘I will lead the boarding party, Lord Corax. Please lower your shields in preparation.’

Corax gave a nod to the technicians at the defence control station and stepped back from the communications panel.

‘Be nice, he is only doing his duty,’ the primarch told Branne. ‘The quicker we sort out this inspection, the sooner we can be on our way.’

‘Aye, but he doesn’t have to be so stiff about it, does he?’ said the commander.

‘He’s an Imperial Fist,’ replied Corax. ‘He can’t help it.’

Though he kept his tone light, the primarch was wary. He was sure there was nothing on board the Avenger that would cause problems, but he had an instinctual aversion to close scrutiny. He suppressed his apprehensions and motioned for Branne to welcome Captain Noriz.

The scraping of a rock chisel smuggled from the mineworkings rang tinnily from the walls of the small cell. Reqaui sat in the corner of the room whittling away at a lump of slag, the form of his latest creation not yet discernable. Corvus lay on the small mattress, listening intently to the old man with his eyes closed, his hands behind his head. It had been only two years since his discovery; two years of moving from prison block to prison block while his body had grown to that of a twelve-year old. Reqaui was only the latest in a line of imprisoned dissidents and anti-establishment intellectuals who had learned of Corvus’s existence and volunteered to teach the strange boy what they knew of people, politics and history.

It was the one area Corvus really hadn’t known anything about. His technical knowledge was vast, encapsulating the greatest scientific learning of mankind. Corvus could identify the molecular composition of the walls, the door and the bed. He knew the biological processes that had formed the cataracts in Reqaui’s eyes. The old man had turned down Corvus’s well-meant offer to surgically remove them, saying it would arouse suspicion in the guards.

For all of that immense knowledge, Corvus knew little enough about people. It was if his education had been cut short before that lesson had been learnt, leaving him bereft of the subtleties of human nature, a blank slate waiting for more information to be written upon it. He was aware enough to know he was very naive in this regard, and his first tutor, Manrus Colsais, had swiftly exhausted his own store of wisdom concerning the human condition. So had begun the process of Corvus’s education, hidden amongst the masses of the prison-mine that he now knew was called Lycaeus.

‘That was the end of the third Facian dynasty,’ Reqaui was saying. Motes of detritus floated in the air and created a grey patch on the flagstoned floor around the elderly agitator. His chisel continued its work, seemingly independent of his whitening eyes, which were fixed on a point somewhere near the dim light globe set into the ceiling. ‘With the usurpation by Neorthan Chandrapax, the First Settlements began. Lotteries were held for the colonists, so great was the urge to leave Kiavahr’s smoke-ridden cities and polluted seas. In a way, it was the first time in seven hundred years that anything like a democracy was in effect. Regardless of station, every family was given equal chance to be crew on the ark-boats being built. Of course, the higher-ups weren’t being stupid. While everyone had an equal chance to participate, only the elite would be in charge as officers. The new colonies would have mayors from the old families, the College networks would still be in place and the workers would still be the downtrodden in their new lives.’

‘Someone’s coming,’ said Corvus, hearing beyond the walls the distinctive tramp of boots and the specific noise of the door at the far end of the corridor opening. ‘Flash inspection!’

‘Quick, lad, you know what to do,’ said Reqaui, bounding to his feet with sprightly energy.

Corvus rolled off the bed as Reqaui scattered the evidence of his hobby with a sweep of his foot. The old man stuffed the chisel and lump of slag into a pocket sewn into the bottom of the mattress, while Corvus moved aside the old tin bucket that served as a latrine. He could hear the clank of the locks being unwound from the main lever further down the corridor, and a moment later the latch on the cell door sprang open with a rusty screech. The door swung outwards on its spring, opening onto the brightly lit corridor, letting the thudding of the boots into the cell.

‘I don’t have to hide,’ said Corvus, hesitating as he lifted up the slab that concealed the crawlspace he had dug through the core rock beneath the prison block. ‘I can only hear six of them. It wouldn’t be any trouble to kill them.’

‘Oh, not trouble for you, for sure,’ said Reqaui, scowling. ‘But where there’s six, there’s six thousand. Think you can take on all of them, do you?’

‘I could try,’ said Corvus.

‘Not yet, lad,’ said Reqaui. ‘Not ’til you know what’s worth fighting for. Told you before, what you have is a gift, but it could be a curse too. Gotta be right, when you kill a man. Gotta mean something.’

Corvus sighed and slipped into the dark space under the floor. He dragged the slab back into place and fumbled in the dark for the matches and candle stub. The youth did not really need them – there was enough light trickling through from the crack around the loosened slab for him to see perfectly – but Reqaui had provided them for Corvus’s comfort and he felt honour-bound to make use of them.

As the candle flickered into life, its light gleamed from Reqaui’s carvings that Corvus had placed on a narrow shelf that ran the length of the crawlspace. There were all kinds of animals and birds, some complete, others just heads or faces. Each seemed a grotesque parody of the creatures locked inside Corvus’s head, but Reqaui assured him that they were real, true-to-life representations of mutant creatures that dwelled in the slime pools, acid grottos and sprawling enzyme marshes of Kiavahr.

Corvus wondered much about this world. He had seen it several times through the armorplex windows on the transit galleries, like a red and blue eye glaring up at Lycaeus. Manrus had explained that Lycaeus was a prison, on a moon orbiting Kiavahr. The first prisoners had been sent here centuries ago, for speaking out against the coronation of the Fourth Dynasty. Then the mineral deposits had been discovered, and more and more were found guilty of dissent and sentenced to work to death in the burgeoning mines.

That much Corvus had understood, even if Manrus had spelled it out in no uncertain terms that such political imprisonment was immoral. To remove one’s enemies made sense to Corvus, especially if they could be turned to a more profitable endeavour. It was the condemnation of the families that Corvus had not fully understood. Again, he could perhaps justify the imprisonment of those related to the first agitators and demagogues, because there would be grounds to suspect a criminal’s beliefs might be shared by those around him. What stretched Corvus’s comprehension was the continued internment of those born and raised in the mines.

The people of Lycaeus were no longer just prisoners, they were a colony, of families and children, whose entire lives would be spent in the stuffy false atmosphere contained by the energy domes and mineworks. No child could be accused of insurrection, surely?

Manrus had explained carefully that Lycaeus was a prison only in name now. It was a slave factory, its purpose to provide resources for the great manufactories of the world below. That had made Corvus angry, especially when Manrus had revealed that only a few hundred members of the tech-guilds, the descendants of the old Colleges, benefited from the mass industrialisation. Manrus considered this deeply unfair, and therefore so too did Corvus.

Corvus listened to the guards above shouting for the prisoners to stand in the corridor for inspection as he crawled along the narrow tunnel, admiring the skill with which each sculpture had been fashioned. Every feather, scale and hair was rendered in fine detail, etched from the hard slag by that tip of chisel.

The candle flame flickered slightly as someone moved across the false flag above. There was a strange hollow thump and Corvus froze, realising he had not replaced it properly. There was a confused exchange between the guards and two further stamps on the offending slab.

Corvus blew out the light and retreated to the far end of the hideaway, some three metres from the entrance. There was a scraping noise as a knife was inserted into the narrow gap between the flag and its neighbours.

Bunching his muscles, Corvus formed his hands into fists and bared his teeth, ready to slay those who could discover him. He must not be found. Over and over, from everyone through whose wardship he had passed, he had been told this: do not be found. He was an anomaly, something beyond the understanding of the Kiavahrans. If they discovered him, he would be taken away.

Corvus did not want to be taken away. He had friends here. Friends like Ephrenia and Manrus and Reqaui.

The slab lifted up and the beam of a flashlight flickered around the tunnel mouth.

‘What have we here?’ said one of the guards, ducking his head into the opening.

Corvus shrank back as far as he could, pressing himself against the jagged rock wall, eyes narrowed. The beam of the torch moved towards him and stopped when it reached the shelf of sculptures.

‘Seems Raqaui’s been up to his scrimshawing again,’ said the guard. Corvus did not detect much malice in the man’s tone.

‘Leave it be,’ said another voice from above. ‘It does no harm. More paperwork for us if we report it.’

‘I don’t know,’ said the guard squatting above the hole. ‘It is contraband, and if someone else finds it, we’ll be up for penal shifts, or worse.’

‘Let me see.’

The guard moved away and his helmeted head was replaced by another, this time with the silver strip across the nose guard that signified a wing corporal. He flashed the torch around some more, the beam of light coming to rest directly on Corvus.

The youth tensed every muscle, ready to leap forwards and tear off the corporal’s head the moment he tried to raise the alarm.

To Corvus’s amazement, the corporal said nothing. He played the flashlight around the tunnel for a few more seconds, its beam twice more moving slowly over Corvus, and then stood up.

‘You’re right,’ said the wing corporal. ‘Not worth reporting that. We’ll get him to hand over whatever he’s using as a tool, might use it as a weapon otherwise.’

The slab slammed down with a ring that shook Corvus. He squatted panting in the dark, unable to work out why he had not been discovered.

Eventually the boots thudded away and the door creaked shut again. There was a gentle rap on the concealing slab.

‘You still down there, lad?’

With a laugh of relief, Corvus crawled to the slab and pushed it up, glad to see Reqaui’s perplexed, bearded face.

‘Still here,’ said Corvus.

‘I thought they’d find you for sure,’ said Reqaui, helping Corvus up through the hole, though the youth needed no such aid. ‘I swear they was looking right down there.’

‘They did,’ said Corvus. ‘They didn’t see me. How’s that possible?’

Reqaui shook his head and slumped onto the mattress while Corvus replaced the slab, this time ensuring it fit as snugly as possible.

‘How’s anything possible where you’re concerned?’ said the old inmate. ‘How’s it possible a baby boy’s found a kilometre deep inside a glacier? How’s it possible he pulls off the head of a grown man? How’s it possible he ages five times faster than any other folk? There’s all sorts that’s possible when we’re talking about you.’

‘They looked right at me, and didn’t see me…’ The possibilities were flashing through Corvus’s mind. He thought how wonderful it would be to travel the wings without concern, moving from one block to the next without the guards ever noticing him. Deep inside himself, from some place of instinct rather than intellect, he knew this was something he could do. Like all of the other gifts he had been given, this was an ability that was meant to be used, though to what purpose he still was not sure.

‘It was nice of the guards not to take your sculptures,’ said Corvus, bringing himself back to the present.

‘Nice, my arse,’ said Reqaui. ‘That corporal gave me a truncheon in the gut before he left. They’re all bastards, lad, never forget that.’

‘I won’t,’ said Corvus. ‘They’re all bastards. Don’t worry, Reqaui, one day we’ll be settling the score.’

Reqaui smiled and leaned forwards, gesturing for Corvus to sit beside him. He placed a wiry arm across the boy’s shoulders and gave him a hug.

‘Sure enough, lad,’ said the inmate. ‘A few more years, you’ll have to be patient. A few more years and you’ll be ready. You’ll make the bastards pay, no doubt about it.’

Corvus smiled at the thought.

True to his word, Corax met with the arriving Imperial Fists, accompanied by his senior officers and company captains. Noriz arrived with a full complement of legionaries, who disembarked from the Stormbirds in the docking bay and formed a guard of honour for their captain.

Noriz appeared last, crested helmet under one arm, a long cloak of scarlet trailing from his armour. He seemed very young for a captain to Corax’s eye, his head covered in a short-cropped nest of blond curls, bright blue eyes fixing immediately upon the primarch. The captain swallowed hard and continued to stare at Corax.

‘Is there something amiss, captain?’ asked the primarch.

‘No, not at all,’ said Noriz. ‘We thought… We did not expect to encounter Raven Guard, much less yourself, primarch.’

‘And why would that be?’

Noriz’s discomfort increased.

‘We have received word that you were all dead,’ he said quietly. ‘The Raven Guard, Salamanders and Iron Hands… We, that is Legion command, were told that there had been no survivors from Isstvan.’

‘I am pleased to contradict such rumours in person,’ said Corax. ‘As you can see, the Raven Guard continue to serve the Emperor.’

The captain said nothing in reply. Corax realised that Noriz had to consider an alternative explanation for the Raven Guard’s survival: that they were loyal to Horus.

‘I understand your suspicions, captain,’ said the primarch. ‘When so few have survived such treachery, it is hard to believe we did so without collusion. I would assuage your doubts in any way that I can. Whatever assurances you require, we will provide them.’

‘My apologies for this necessary inspection, primarch,’ said Noriz, eyes averted. ‘I am under standing orders to conduct a search of every vessel entering this quadrant without authorisation.’

‘The Raven Guard will cooperate in any way we can,’ replied Corax. ‘We understand well the need for security at this time. What do you require of us?’

Noriz looked along the line of Raven Guard officers: a row of scarred faces regarding him with distaste bordering on hostility. He sought sanctuary in the more welcoming expression of Corax.

‘We are ordered to conduct a thorough search of the ship and all personnel aboard, primarch.’ He glanced back at his legionaries. ‘We shall conduct our investigation in ten teams, if that is possible. If you would appoint a liaison officer, I can brief him on the details of the process.’

‘I do not wish to be delayed, captain,’ said Corax. ‘I am on my way to an audience with the Emperor.’

‘I am sure that, with your cooperation, we can be thorough and efficient, primarch,’ said Noriz. ‘It should take no longer than a couple of days.’

‘Very well,’ said Corax, though the thought of being kept here for any longer irked the primarch. He pointed to Branne. ‘Commander Branne is captain of this vessel, you may conduct all communication through him. He will make other officers available to assist your inspection. All holds, bays, storage areas, weapons lockers and barracks will be opened to your men. I shall have my Legion prepared for the inspection.’

‘Thank you, primarch,’ said Noriz. He looked as though he was about to say something else, but stopped himself. Corax was not sure, but he had the sense that Noriz had wanted to offer more than just gratitude: sympathy perhaps. ‘We will begin our inspection immediately.’

Five

Inspection and Appraisal
Arrival at Terra
Malcador

Along with the rest of his company, Alpharius stood to attention in one of the primary cargo bays. The order had gone out across the Avenger for all squads and crews to make ready for an inspection. In full armour, bearing their weapons, the Raven Guard had turned out en masse, filling the flight bays, storage areas, gun decks and mess chambers with rank upon rank of warriors.

The Alpha Legionnaire waited patiently while an officer in the livery of the Imperial Fists, introduced as Captain Noriz, prowled between the ranks, checking every legionary in turn. Every now and then he would ask a question, probing for some hint that the Raven Guard were traitors.

‘Do they think the rebels are just going to turn up and ask to see the Emperor?’ muttered Doril to his left.

‘Maybe they think we’re on some kind of scouting mission for Horus,’ replied Ordin, standing on Alpharius’s right. ‘They probably have no idea who is friend and foe.’

‘It’d be a pretty brazen Traitor to turn up with just one battle-barge,’ said Doril. ‘If that’s Horus’s strategy this’ll be over in a year. I don’t know why the primarch is allowing this.’

‘Because he has nothing to hide,’ said Alpharius. ‘Every Legion is under suspicion at the moment, and nobody, least of all Dorn, is going to take anyone’s loyalty for granted.’

‘Well, I’ve got a scar on my left arm from a World Eater chainaxe if this jumped-up policeman wants any proof of my loyalty,’ said Ordin.

‘Quiet!’ snapped Sergeant Dor.

They fell silent as Captain Noriz continued his tour through the lines. Alpharius stayed calm as the captain approached from the left and stopped in front of him. His helmet was on his belt, leaving him fully exposed to the scrutiny of the others, but there was nothing outward that would betray his true identity. He met the Imperial Fist’s gaze with an emotionless stare as the captain eyed him closely.

There were no questions. Noriz moved on further down the line. Alpharius quashed the urge to sigh with relief, realising how tense he had become, even though he had kept his exterior utterly placid.

Soon enough, the order to disperse was given and the company broke into squads.

‘What next, sergeant?’ Ordin asked as they filed out of the chamber.

‘The Imperial Palace,’ replied Dor with a grin.

Despite finding no hint of suspicious activity on his inspection, Captain Noriz insisted that his orders required the Imperial Fists contingent to remain aboard the Avenger until it reached Terra. Not wishing to create more problems, Corax agreed, placing him under the stewardship of Branne. As ship’s captain, it was his responsibility to accommodate the visitor and Branne did his best to be helpful and cordial, if not outright friendly. Noriz did not make the task any easier; he was a tight-lipped warrior, monosyllabic for much of the time, unwilling to shake a certain distrust of his hosts.

The journey from the translation point to Terra would take eleven days, during which time Noriz was invited by the primarch to brief him and his command council on the current intelligence regarding Horus and the situation at Isstvan.

They convened in the command chamber beside the strategium, Corax choosing to stand while the others were sat around the table. As a courtesy, Noriz had brought over some personal stores from his strike cruiser before despatching it to continue on patrol, and so there were several bottles of wine, plates of fresh meat and bowls of ripe fruit for the council to enjoy. Branne would have been grateful for the gesture, had it not been performed in a manner that indicated Noriz believed it his honour-bound duty to offer this gift rather than acting out of genuine comradeship for his fellow legionaries. For all that, the commander showed no hesitation in consuming the fresh provisions with gusto, as did the other commanders.

‘You must be aware that I am not privy to high levels of intelligence,’ Noriz began, casting a worried glance at Corax, who stood a little apart from the rest of them, looming over the group like a shadowy statue.

‘Just tell us what you already know,’ said the primarch.

‘Details are scarce, as you might expect,’ said the Imperial Fist. His uncertainty continued, either from genuine lack of knowledge or reluctance to share what he knew with the Raven Guard. ‘Some of our Legion were sent to Isstvan and are still unaccounted for. The rest are garrisoning Terra and dealing with the Martian situation.’

‘What situation?’ said Solaro. ‘What is happening on Mars?’

‘Insurrection, bordering on civil war,’ replied the captain with a sour expression. ‘It seems Horus has allies within the Mechanicum as well as the Legiones Astartes and Imperial Army.’

‘There is fighting on Mars?’ Agapito’s incredulity was betrayed by his tone. ‘That puts the traitors within striking distance of Terra already!’

‘I expected as much,’ said Corax, leaning forwards to pick up a wine bottle in his giant hand. He delicately poured himself a glass of red, the crystal goblet seeming tiny in his fingers as he raised it to his lips. ‘Horus would not be able to launch a war against the Imperium without support from the tech-priests. That it reaches as far as Mars is worrying, but not a revelation.’

Corax sipped his drink and nodded to Noriz to continue. The captain cleared his throat and looked at the assembled commanders.

‘If you do not trust us now, Horus has struck an even keener blow than I had feared,’ said Corax, sensing the captain’s continuing reluctance. ‘Your reticence is starting to become tiresome, captain. Are we wasting our time here?’

‘Our primary focus is the fortification of Terra and the defence of the Sol system,’ Noriz told them, pouring himself a drink. He looked long at Corax and the commanders and then gave a single, unconscious nod, indicating that he was willing to trust them. ‘The turncoats on Mars are contained, their defection destabilising our efforts rather than directly threatening them. With the loyal Mechanicum occupied with the enemy within their ranks, they can provide little support for our growing war effort.’

‘Which is all very interesting, but we want to know what happened to other Legions on Isstvan. Who is left to fight Horus?’ This was from Agapito.

‘I was hoping that you might know more than me on that account,’ confessed Noriz. ‘There has been scattered traffic returning from the system, a ship or two bearing survivors, but little else. We’re not really sure what happened out there. As I said before, we had heard that the Raven Guard had been eliminated.’

‘Though the news has proven false in that case, we must still assume for the moment that the Salamanders and Iron Hands have been wiped out,’ said Corax. ‘Ferrus Manus was slain, I saw as much myself, and nothing has been seen of Vulkan. It is likely that their Legions were also destroyed. What of other loyal forces? How far has the taint spread to the Imperial Army? Any news from Guilliman, or Jonson, or the Khan?’

‘I do not know,’ Noriz said with a shrug. ‘Nothing has been passed down to me from Legion command, you will have to speak to Lord Dorn about that.’

‘The Emperor, what is the Emperor doing?’ asked Aloni. ‘Surely he will lead the fight against Horus.’

A pained look crossed the face of Noriz.

‘We have heard nothing directly,’ said the captain, placing his cup on the table in front of him. ‘Lord Dorn has been placed in charge of the Sol defence and the fortification of the Imperial Palace. Malcador appears to be acting as regent on Terra, with the authority of the Emperor alongside the primarch. We have been told that the Emperor is engaged fully in his own endeavours to defeat the traitors, though what that means I have no clue.’

The Raven Guard commanders muttered shock and disapproval at this revelation, until Corax stepped up to the table.

‘Quiet,’ said the primarch. He cast a stern look at the legionaries. ‘If the Emperor is embroiled in some unseen effort, we must trust that it is the surest road to victory. Did you think he would come out of the Imperial Palace, sword in hand, and cast down these traitors with a single blow? The Emperor created us to be his warriors, and we will bring him victory.’

With further questioning it became clear that Noriz could furnish them with little more information other than the ongoing defensive measures being undertaken. Jaghatai Khan and his White Scars were presumably en route to Terra, having been recalled from Chondax by Dorn himself, but no other communication had been received from them for some time. The First Legion, the Dark Angels under Lion El’Jonson, had not been heard from and were likely unaware of the recent treachery of Horus. Leman Russ and his Space Wolves were equally incommunicado, having been despatched by the Emperor to deal with the problem of the Thousand Sons and their continuing sorceries many months before. The Ultramarines, largest of the Legions, had been sent to the opposite side of the galaxy by Horus prior to the massacre, and were unlikely to be able to intervene any time soon. For the moment, the only Legions that could be accounted for and depended upon were the Raven Guard and the Imperial Fists.

The council ended with little learnt, but what small amount of intelligence Noriz had passed on was far from comforting. The warp storms were, as Corax had suspected, widespread; perhaps the whole galaxy was engulfed. Certainly the region around Isstvan was cloaked in a massive tempest that blocked navigation and communication.

It seemed increasingly likely that the warp disruption was part of Horus’s strategy. The last time warp storms had raged like this, the worlds of mankind had been divided and isolated, leading to the onset of Old Night and the dissolving of the original human empire. Unable to unite properly, prevented from coordinating their strategy or enforcing loyalty to the Emperor, the disparate planets of the Imperium would be much easier pickings for the traitors. With a swift strike to secure power on Terra, Horus could emerge as a new uniter of humanity, sweeping away the rule of the Emperor at a stroke.

The preparations for Terra’s defence became more evident as the Avenger moved in-system towards Terra. The Sol battlefleet, the largest single armada in the Imperium, was gathering in strength. Dozens of warships blockaded Mars, while hundreds of other vessels took station in orbital positions over the other planets, their sensors turned outwards in readiness for the arrival of Horus’s fleet.

The communications networks were overloaded with activity, the strat-net frequencies used by the Legiones Astartes and Imperial Army sometimes so clogged with data that it took many hours for messages to be relayed. There was a tangible aura of desperation amidst the turmoil, as though any day would see the warp tearing apart with the arrival of hundreds of traitor ships.

As they neared their destination, the Raven Guard encountered increasing numbers of security screens. Warship patrols hailed them frequently, while massive star forts locked their guns upon the arriving vessel, keeping watch until it had passed out of range. Passing further and further into the heart of the Sol system, the Avenger was subjected to constant scrutiny, though its passage was never barred outright.

Gaining orbit over Terra was an expedition in itself, despite the assurances and assistance of Captain Noriz. After three days entangled in the security protocols of half a dozen different military jurisdictions and organisations, Corax finally lost patience. Dismissing the communications attendants from their posts, he keyed in a failsafe code for the most secure channel: an ultra-secret frequency used by only the primarchs and, before his self-seclusion on Terra, the Emperor himself.

There was no reply for half an hour, as Corax paced back and forth across the strategium. Finally the vox crackled into life, with a voice that was deep and thoughtful, every word carefully enunciated, every syllable spoken with crisp authority.

‘Is that you, Corax? It is about time you contacted me, brother. I was wondering if the news that you were still alive had been yet another breakdown in communication.’

‘Brother Rogal, yes it is Corax,’ replied the primarch. ‘If you do not find me an orbital station in the next five minutes, I’m going to use my weapons batteries to make a space for myself.’

There was a short but hearty laugh over the vox.

‘That would not be a good idea!’ said Rogal Dorn. ‘I heard that you had arrived, but then I must admit that your whereabouts were washed away in all of the other clutter. Do you want to berth at a platform or take up an independent orbit?’

‘We need to resupply,’ said Corax. ‘I’ll shuttle down with an advance guard.’

‘I will send you the coordinates of Beta-Styx platform. It has a fully-stocked victualling yard. You can come down to Lion’s Gate port and I will despatch a delegation to meet you.’

‘A delegation? Too busy to greet your brother in person?’

‘Yes. I will be back at the Imperial Palace within the day.’

‘Understood, brother. I wish our reunion was in much lighter times.’

‘It is not for our kind to meet in peace, brother, you should know that. We will talk more tomorrow; I have something I must attend to urgently.’

With that, the frequency devolved into static once more. A data screen flickered into life, a list of spatial coordinates scrolling across it in yellow lettering and signed with the insignia of the Imperial Fists.

‘Prepare for docking manoeuvres,’ Corax announced. ‘And ready me a Stormbird. Agapito, choose a company to act as honour guard. Branne, you have command.’

A series of affirmatives chorused across the strategium as the primarch walked towards the doors. Corax stopped as they slid open and turned his head.

‘Branne?’

The commander froze, halfway into the control throne. He stood and looked back at the primarch and saw a lopsided smile on Corax’s face.

‘Yes, lord?’

‘As much as I appreciate your arrival at Isstvan, please stay where I put you this time.’

‘Aye, lord. I will.’

As the Avenger powered towards the orbital dock, preparations were made for Corax and a small entourage to descend to the surface of Terra. Branne found Agapito on the launch deck, with a company of his legionaries. The clatter of a heavy servitor’s tracks echoed from the metal walls, blotting out the dormant whine of a Stormbird’s engines. Branne thought he sensed some anxiety in his brother’s demeanour.

‘Relax, brother, this is not a combat mission,’ said Branne.

‘And all the more dangerous for it,’ replied Agapito. ‘Suspicion surrounds us like a cloud. You saw how Captain Noriz treated us. I expect no warm welcome on the surface.’

‘So it will be up to you to assure our allies that we can be trusted,’ said Branne.

Agapito hesitated, and glanced over Branne’s shoulder. Corax entered the flight bay, nodded to the two commanders and strode up the Stormbird’s boarding ramp without a word.

‘I’m not the only one that feels it,’ said Agapito, his gaze on the drop-ship, his thoughts clearly on the primarch now aboard. ‘Now is not the time for rash displays of loyalty. I’m worried Lord Corax will promise more than we can currently deliver.’

‘We can’t afford to let the traitors make their preparations without pause,’ said Branne. ‘Would you want us simply to let them proceed as they wish?’

Leaning closer, Agapito’s voice dropped to a whisper.

‘We were nearly wiped out, brother,’ he said. ‘If we do not tread carefully, the execution Horus planned for us at Isstvan will be carried out at another place. You know that we lack the strength to fight at the moment.’

Concerned by his brother’s words, Branne slapped a hand to Agapito’s shoulder guard.

‘What happened on Isstvan is over,’ said Branne, guessing the source of Agapito’s hesitance. ‘We lost most of the Legion, but we survived.’

‘“We” survived, brother? I don’t remember you at the dropsite.’

‘Through no fault of my own!’ snapped Branne, snatching back his hand. He was infuriated that of all his comrades, it was Agapito who had given voice to the accusation Branne had suspected lingered in the minds of his battle-brothers. ‘How can I be held responsible for the drawing of lots that left me as garrison commander?’

‘You misunderstand me, brother,’ said Agapito, with a sorrowful shake of the head. ‘It is not personal, but you can never understand what it was like to be there. I don’t begrudge your absence, I envy it.’

‘You haven’t talked about the dropsite at all, to me or the primarch,’ said Branne, his anger punctured by Agapito’s confession. ‘Some of the others, they have found it helpful to discuss what they saw, to share their stories. Tell me, what happened to you at the dropsite?’

‘No,’ said Agapito, stepping away. He signalled to his warriors to begin boarding as the launch bay lights dimmed in readiness for the main doors to open. Overhead, klaxons sounded the five-minute warning. ‘Some stories are best left untold. You do not want to know what I did at the dropsite.’

Branne said nothing as his brother turned away, confused by the change he had seen in Agapito. His fellow commander had once been the first to swap war stories on the ship back to Deliverance, taking great delight in recounting his kills and close calls with death. Even as young boys, when they had fought for the liberty of Deliverance, before the Emperor had come and brought the Legion, Agapito would rouse the flagging spirits of the freedom fighters with tales of his daring and their victories over the Kiavahran enslavers.

He watched as Agapito stood at the bottom of the ramp, counting off the squads as they ran into the Stormbird amid the thunderous falls of boots on metal. As the last of the legionaries passed him, Branne noticed something on their shoulder guards, a small device painted under the Legion symbol. It was a grey skull, almost as dark as the black of their armour. Now that he noticed it, Branne saw it in the insignia of all the company’s warriors. He waved aside one of the squad leaders as he jogged past.

‘Sergeant Nestil, a word,’ said the commander.

‘Yes, captain,’ said Nestil, coming to attention in front of Branne.

‘What does this mean?’ asked Branne, prodding a finger towards the small sigil.

‘Isstvan veteran, captain,’ replied the sergeant with no hint of reluctance. ‘There was no official campaign badge or honours issued, captain. We thought it would be good to remember the fallen.’

‘You have all taken this on?’ said Branne.

‘All of us that fought there, yes, captain, at least in the Talons,’ said Nestil. He glanced towards Agapito, and Branne took his meaning.

‘Whose idea was this?’ asked Branne.

‘I’m not sure, captain,’ admitted Nestil. He looked away, glancing again at Agapito. ‘It was just one of those ideas that seemed to catch on.’

‘Sorry to delay you, sergeant,’ said Branne, waving Nestil to carry on.

Not good, thought Branne as he watched Agapito follow Nestil up the ramp onto the Stormbird. A commander being close-lipped about what he had done and legionaries giving themselves honours. The dropsite massacre had caused serious damage to the Raven Guard, even more than the seventy-five thousand dead legionaries.

Strapped into his berth beside one of the viewing ports, Alpharius had a good view of Terra as the Stormbird dipped away from the Avenger. It had been a fortunate turn to be included in Corax’s honour guard and would provide, he hoped, a good opportunity to see the defences being prepared to welcome Horus. Aside from whatever else he might be asked to do, his role in the Raven Guard was to gather intelligence for the final, inevitable assault on the Emperor’s stronghold. Everything he could learn now would give the Warmaster and his allies a valuable warning of what to expect.

‘What is that?’ one of the legionaries asked from further down the compartment. Alpharius turned to see the other Raven Guard straining at their harnesses to look out of the starboard windows. ‘It’s bigger than a star fort!’

Alpharius could not see clearly from his position but glimpsed a massive vessel in low orbit. It seemed to stretch on and on, a gilded construction shaped like an eagle with outstretched wings, bedecked with fortified gun towers, lance batteries, missile tubes and bombardment cannons. So vast was the orbiting station, its faint shadow could be seen on the cloud layer wreathing Terra. The flicker of void shields surrounded the immense floating edifice, dappling the gold of its heavily-buttressed superstructure with purple and red. Smaller ships – some of them mighty battleships in their own right – were dwarfed by its presence, its turret-encrusted docks large enough for cruisers several kilometres long.

‘That’s Phalanx,’ said Sergeant Nestil. ‘Base ship of the Imperial Fists. Impressive, isn’t it? Never mind a battle-barge, that’s what we should’ve taken to Isstvan.’

It certainly was impressive, but no surprise. Everyone had heard of Phalanx and its presence in the Sol system was to be expected. Horus was well aware of the star fortress’s capabilities and defences already, and no doubt had devised a way to counter them. This was not the object of Alpharius’s mission. Of more interest to the Alpha Legionnaire was a golden-hulled cruiser rising out of the dock neighbouring the Avenger. Though he was not sure, it looked like a vessel belonging to the Legio Custodes, the Emperor’s elite protectors. He wondered where they were going, when all other effort was being directed towards the defence of the Master of Mankind.

And then everything outside turned white as the Stormbird dropped into the thickening Terran atmosphere, enveloping the craft in bright flames. As they descended, the visibility momentarily cleared, revealing a vista that sent a thrill through Alpharius.

Large platforms could be half-seen amongst the dense cloud, drifting serenely through the air surrounded by swarms of shuttles and cargo-lifters. The closest floating city, its name unknown to Alpharius, was glimpsed between breaks in the whiteness, a mass of towering buildings, winding roadways and landing aprons. Sunlight glittered from coiling spires made of multicoloured glass and dazzled across the mirrored plates of photo-receptors and vapour condensers.

The splendour of graceful lines and arcing bridges was marred by blocky aberrations: gun towers and bunkers surrounded by scaffolding that was thick with workers. As the Stormbird banked onto its final course, Alpharius’s augmented eyes could see flashes of yellow armour amongst the robes and overalls of the work teams: Imperial Fists supervising the construction of the defences.

The nose of the Stormbird dipped and cloud again swathed Alpharius’s view, blotting out the vision of the hovering city. The engines whined as the craft slowed for its landing, and banked once more, circling over the Lion’s Gate starport that spread darkly across the bare rock of Terra’s surface in a vast maze of ferrocrete and plasteel. Alpharius had a glimpse of landing platforms that stretched for kilometres, shadowed beneath control towers and defence laser turrets.

The Alpha Legionnaire was glad that his arrival was in the guise of a friend and wondered if, at some point of the future, he would be returning here as a foe. He had made dozens of combat drops during his long years of service, but seeing the immense barrels of the orbital defence cannons and the flicker of power fields, he knew that whichever Legion ultimately had the task of securing Lion’s Gate would suffer heavy casualties.

Even as he thought of the assault that was sure to come, Alpharius’s mind was analysing the growing defences. Any insights he could glean from this opportunity to examine Dorn’s fortifications first-hand might prove invaluable to Horus, and so in turn were of significant worth to the Alpha Legion. His eye caught the telltale capacitors and conduits of power field generators, while he calculated the zones of fire of the smaller rings of protective pillboxes and automated lascannon mounts.

With a thud and a hiss of hydraulics, the Stormbird extended its landing gear, breaking Alpharius’s thoughts. So engrossed had he been in his intelligence-gathering, he had quite forgotten where he was. Alpharius took a deep breath as the Stormbird touched down, rocking slightly on its gear, clouds of smoke and plasma-wash billowing around the craft.

He was on Terra, the capital of the Imperium, home to the Emperor.

As promised, there was a contingent waiting for the arrival of Corax. As the primarch descended the Stormbird’s ramp, he saw a group of thirty gold-armoured Custodians. In height and size, they were the match of the Legiones Astartes, if not bigger, though Corax was taller still. Every warrior of the Custodian Guard was armoured uniquely, their heavy gorgets decorated with eagle devices, winged skulls and other icons, their high, conical helms topped with flowing scarlet crests. Clusters of studded red leather pteruges hung from their belts and high shoulder guards, tipped with pointed gold weights, and their wide greaves and heavy vambraces were chased with intricate designs that matched the rest of their armour. They held guardian spears with red power field-clad blades held across their chests, carried behind tall shields emblazoned with designs of the Imperial aquila and laurel-crowned skulls.

With them stood an ageing man Corax recognised immediately: Malcador the Sigillite. The Regent of Terra wore a voluminous robe, unadorned in stark contrast to the ornamentation of his guard of honour. His weathered, ancient face was half-hidden behind the fold of his hood. The gusts of wind blowing across the open landing apron tugged at the rim of the hood, showing glimpses of reinforced pipes connected to a collar around the Sigillite’s throat that disappeared into the swathe of his garments. In his hands he held a black marble staff taller than himself, its head a soaring eagle shaped in gold, wreathed in flames that sprang from the rod itself. The Emperor’s regent leaned heavily on his staff of office but nonetheless managed to maintain an air of statesmanlike authority.

Malcador bowed his head in greeting and Corax returned the gesture as his guard of honour filed into ranks behind him.

‘I hope they are for ornamentation and nothing else,’ said Corax, directing a purposeful gaze at the armed Custodians.

‘Purely ceremonial, I assure you,’ replied Malcador. ‘I apologise for the formalities you have been forced to endure, but you understand that we cannot afford any laxity in our security in these times.’

‘It seems a primarch’s word is no longer his bond,’ said Corax as he stepped forwards, the Custodians moving to form two lines of escort around him and Malcador, encircling the primarch’s entourage of Raven Guard.

‘Only for some, Corax,’ said the Sigillite. ‘A number of your brothers remain true to their oaths of allegiance. Your loyalty is greatly appreciated.’

The primarch laughed, but there was no sign of humour in the Sigillite’s expression. Malcador continued to talk as they walked from the landing apron.

‘Rogal asked me to assure you that he will be joining us tomorrow as he promised. We are very keen to hear everything you can tell us about Horus’s forces and perhaps what you think he intends to do.’

‘I can add little to the discussion,’ said Corax. They passed under an arching silver gateway a hundred metres high and headed down a ramp leading to a line of silver-hulled shuttle craft. They looked like giant scarabs, with steel wings that fluttered under the vibration of idling engines. ‘It sounds like there are other survivors.’

‘Of course,’ said Malcador, waving for Corax to precede him onto the ramp of the closest atmospheric shuttle. Inside, the main compartment was furnished like an austere lounge, with low couches and tables on a carpeted deck, the walls covered with hangings depicting scenes from the Unification Wars. Corax assumed it was Malcador’s personal transport. The Sigillite sat down on one of the long couches and instinctively waved a hand for Corax to do the same. The primarch declined with a shake of his head, knowing that the furniture was totally unsuited to someone of his height and weight. He leaned against the bulkhead instead, head dipped beneath the shuttle roof.

‘There are not only those like yourself who escaped the ambush,’ the Sigillite continued, ‘but also brave warriors who have recently arrived from within the traitors’ ranks.’

‘And you can be sure of their loyalty? Misdirection and falsehood seem to be Horus’s primary weapons at the moment.’

‘We are convinced of their continuing support for the Emperor,’ said Malcador. ‘They will have a very important role to play in the waging of the war to come.’

‘The war has started already, if you haven’t noticed,’ growled Corax. He had noticed Captain Noriz using a similar turn of phrase, implying that somehow the massacre at Isstvan had been an end point rather than a beginning.

The two of them were alone in the shuttle, the Custodians and legionaries being directed to the other transports. With a growl, the engines of the craft throttled to full, the hull trembling as the ornithopter’s wings sprang into blurred life. The shuttle lifted quickly away from the starport and turned northwards, rising to clear a range of mountains that thrust up from the ground. The mountains were as much artifice as natural phenomena. Corax could see vast galleries and windows several storeys high cut into the crags and ridges, betraying the labyrinthine structure hidden beneath the snow-capped peaks.

Corax sensed Malcador studying him at length, but the two of them sat in silence for some time as the ornithopter sped over the mountains, shuddering slightly in the buffeting winds. Occasionally the primarch glimpsed one of the other shuttles through the oval windows, their shining fuselages glimmering against the white and grey of the sheer-sided peaks.

‘And what is the opinion of the Emperor?’ Corax asked, realising that Malcador had yet to mention him specifically. ‘Dorn said that he had been placed in charge of the defence.’

‘The Emperor is very aware of the situation and Dorn has his full support,’ replied the regent.

‘That’s it?’ said Corax. ‘His Warmaster turns half the Legions against him and all he has to say is that Dorn has his full support?’

‘He is entirely absorbed in another matter, one which overshadows his thoughts even more than this distraction with Horus. If his current endeavour is successful, this rebellion will be short-lived.’

‘I have come to Terra to seek audience with the Emperor,’ said Corax. He glanced out of the window and saw cranes and earth-movers remodelling a massive shoulder of the mountain below, crafting immense revetments and fortifications from the naked rock. Swarms of thousands of labourers were at work.

‘It is with regret that I must warn you that is highly unlikely,’ said Malcador, his gaze unwavering as Corax turned his stare back on the Sigillite. ‘His current project requires all of his attention. I have seen him only a handful of times since we learned of the events at Isstvan. Dorn has not spoken to him at all, receiving the Emperor’s instruction only through me. I cannot give you any guarantee that our master will grant you an audience.’

The firm expression on Malcador’s face forestalled any further comment Corax might make on the matter. Though he did not say as much, the primarch believed that he would be seen by the Emperor. No matter what Malcador said, there could be no endeavour so pressing that the Emperor could not find time to speak with one of his primarchs at this dark hour.

Then a thought occurred to him, which would explain why Malcador was being slightly evasive and seemed so convinced that Corax would not get an audience.

‘The Emperor is aware of my arrival?’ asked the primarch.

‘No,’ said Malcador. ‘I have been unable to contact him since you first entered the Sol system.’

‘Unable or unwilling?’

If Malcador took any offence at the question, he did not show it. His reply was calm, his face earnest.

‘The Emperor wages a different sort of war to the ones you and I have ever seen,’ explained the Sigillite. ‘To attempt to contact him whilst on one of his… expeditions, would be to endanger his cause. When he has returned, he will be immediately informed of your presence, rest assured.’

‘You make it sound as if the Emperor is not on Terra.’

As before, Malcador hesitated, though Corax did not sense any duplicity in him, merely reluctance. The regent’s thin fingers slowly tapped the haft of his staff as he contemplated his answer.

‘That is not a thing I can easily quantify,’ said Malcador. ‘Forgive my vagueness, but I am not at liberty to discuss the Emperor’s plans, nor am I in a position to fully comprehend them. It would be indiscreet, a betrayal of my position as regent, if I were to furnish you with information that the Emperor has not chosen fit to share with you himself.’

What Malcador was saying unsettled Corax greatly. Ever since his return to Terra after the victory at Ullanor, the Emperor had shrouded himself in secrets, when once he had walked freely amongst his sons and shared his plans and visions. Malcador spoke with such a reverent tone that Corax was left in no doubt that the Emperor’s current campaign was indeed very important, but the Sigillite’s assurances that it was more worthy of attention than Horus’s treachery rang hollow. The Imperium, the spreading of Enlightenment, had been the Emperor’s great scheme, and now it was all for nothing. Surely he would have to emerge from his cloistered endeavours to lead those still loyal to him?

As the squadron of ornithopters swept along a high-sided valley, Corax wondered what he would do if he could not speak with the Emperor. After the debacle at Isstvan, the primarch was not sure of anything, including his ability to effectively command. He needed the Emperor’s guidance now more than ever, and the thought of returning to Deliverance without seeing his gene-father filled him with a subtle dread. With primarch turning on primarch, Corax wanted to bend his knee to the Emperor once more and assure him of the loyalty of the Raven Guard.

The flight up into the mountains took the Raven Guard past the burgeoning fortifications being erected under the leadership of Dorn. The scale of the endeavour was vast, larger than anything Corax had witnessed before, and he had seen the rebuilding of worlds shattered by his Legion.

The mountains themselves were being shaped into great bastions, carved by explosive charges and monolithic machines into buttresses and keeps, curtain walls and towers. The shadows of the ornithopters flitted over many-tracked cargo haulers in convoys kilometres long, bringing loads of ferrocrete and adamantium, ceramite and thermaglas, plasteel and diamatite. With them came cranes with booms half a kilometre long, and shovel-fronted earth movers the size of tenement blocks.

Snaking multi-compartment crawlers edged along newly laid roadways, their cargo more workers to join the hundreds of thousands already labouring on the upper slopes. These caravans were in turn supplied by forage trucks and water tankers numbering in the hundreds. Everywhere was seen the blazon of the Imperial Fists and the splash of their golden livery.

‘My brother does not take half measures,’ said Corax, looking across the cabin to Malcador.

The regent roused himself from a half-slumber and glanced out of the window, barely interested by the gargantuan effort laid out below.

‘A wall unmanned is no defence against attack,’ said the Sigillite. ‘If Horus’s forces were to strike now, who would hold the ramparts and gates?’

‘I thought the White Scars were headed for Terra.’

‘Jaghatai Khan was ordered to return with his Legion, but we have had no contact with the White Scars since the warp storms began anew.’

Corax absorbed this news in silence, still looking at the edifice taking shape around him. Peaks were being toppled, the material thus created used to erect walls closing off the passes and valleys between. Huge lifters powered by dozens of rotors and thrusters hovered over the vales, carrying generators and building-sized capacitors to new defence laser silos. The barrels of these weapons were transported on flat-beds a hundred metres long, over bridges and through tunnels carved from naked rock.

Within this growing outer cordon, the activity was less frenetic. Here and there a slope was broken by high gallery windows or the curving front of an embrasure. Roadways disappeared into dimly-lit passages and forests grew around flattened landing pads. These were the outer reaches of the old palace, first raised up by the Emperor as the Great Crusade began. Buildings fashioned in layout to appear as Imperial aquilas from above clustered atop a peak to the east. To the west, down a winding valley, hundreds of square kilometres were covered with huge wind farms powering the city hidden beneath, each fan three hundred metres high.

Ahead were the tallest mountains, still silhouettes against the sky. One of the floating sky platforms had been brought down to dock, a thirty kilometre-wide city jutting from the side of the mountain like a balcony, resting on a maze of piles and girders stretched between two summits. The shuttles banked away, turning more to the west where the sun was setting behind jagged peaks. The last rays of sunlight glinted on golden arches and pearlescent towers, stark against the blues and purples of the dusk.

After several hours, the shuttles reached a cavernous dock set into the side of a mountain whose peak had been flattened and replaced by a sprawl of jutting antennae and communications dishes. An immense pillar stood to each side of the kilometre-wide opening, carved with lightning bolt designs that forked between rising, turning columns of eagles.

Swallowed up by the dark interior of the shuttle port, the ornithopter’s lights flickered on inside and out, strobing navigation lights illuminating row after row of craft on the wide landing apron beneath. Corax saw Thunderhawks and Stormbirds, plus dozens more of the ornithopters. There were larger craft too: slab-sided Harbinger drop-ships in the varied colours of many Imperial Army regiments.

Into this vast dockyard descended the craft carrying Corax’s warriors, spiralling down after each other before scattering to their allotted landing spaces. The primarch glanced towards Malcador with a frown.

‘Accommodation has been made for your legionaries,’ said Malcador. ‘They will be well catered for.’

The Sigillite’s shuttle did not land amongst them, however, the pilot steering it up towards a much smaller opening a little below the vaulted roof of the port. Rising towards this tunnel, the shuttle’s lights passed over gallery after gallery overlooking the port. The area was strangely deserted, a city delved for millions of inhabitants who were now absent. The thrum of the ornithopter’s wings echoed in the immense hollow, interrupted by no other sound.

Passing into an opening between the legs of another carved eagle, the ornithopter followed a narrow channel for several hundred metres until it came to land in a circular chamber situated at the heart of the mountain. Its walls were of plain dressed stone, showing the striations of the mountain rock. A single door led from the docking site, fashioned from bronze, embossed with two crossed lightning bolts beneath an armoured fist. With a whine of decreasing power, the shuttle’s wings settled and Malcador’s craft lurched to a halt on the stone floor. The doorway opened with a rush of escaping air and immediately Corax detected an atmosphere far thinner than at ground level. Malcador led the primarch out of the shuttle, seemingly unaffected by the low oxygen content in the air.

‘If you will follow me, I will show you to the quarters that have been set aside for you, while your warriors will be garrisoned close at hand.’

The door opened at the Sigillite’s approach, Corax hearing the faintest buzz of a communications connection emitted from Malcador’s staff. Beyond, steps led steeply downwards into the bowels of the Imperial Palace.

Watching the gold-armoured figures of the Legio Custodes advancing ahead of him, Alpharius could not help but measure himself against them. Physically they did not seem to be any more impressive than a legionary, though certainly their armour and weapons seemed to be individually fashioned, something only a captain might expect in the Legions. He had heard before that each warrior was also a product of unique effort, as hand-crafted by the genhancers and tech-serfs as his wargear was by artisans of the Mechanicum. Since he had gunned down several Salamanders at the dropsite, he had been confident that the Alpha Legion were the match of any in the Legiones Astartes, but it was not until he had been confronted by the ranks of the Custodian Guard that he had contemplated fighting against the Emperor’s other servants.

There was some idle chatter from the other Raven Guard as they followed the Custodians deeper into the Imperial Palace. Corax and Malcador had left them not far from what Alpharius assumed was the Sigillite’s private shuttle chamber – another little nugget of intelligence to pass on – and they had descended through forty-six floors in a gigantic elevator to the barracks level.

The upper parts of the palace had been ornate, fashioned from marbled stone and obsidian, hung with banners and paintings of scenes from before the Unification Wars. Alpharius had seen depictions of old cities with onion-domed towers and ruined pyramids jutting from desert, rivers flowing in swift torrents over wide falls and landscapes of green pastures. Nothing of those times remained except for these pictures; the beauty of ancient Terra had long ago succumbed to millennia of pollution and war.

After leaving the elevator, the Raven Guard had been brought into an area far more functional and austere in appearance. The walls were of rough ferrocrete, covered by plain whitewash. The long dorms that opened out through arches on either side of the corridor were empty, and the smell of fresh paint and residual particles of rock dust still in the air indicated that they had been newly built, no doubt to house more defenders in the future.

There was little enough to report at the moment, but Alpharius kept his eyes and ears open for anything that might be of value. It was impossible to tell how deep within the mountain they were. There were no windows, the light provided by endless glowing stripes set into the ceiling and walls, the air coming through ventilator housings too small to allow entry or exit except perhaps by a child. The only way in or out was through the doors at each end of the main corridor, a defensive measure in all likelihood, but it also made for an effective prison. There was some discontented muttering amongst those Raven Guard who had been raised in the cells of Lycaeus, but this was stilled by a few words from the sergeants.

The leader of the Custodian Guard stopped and pointed with his spear to an archway on the left, beyond which was a dormitory housing several hundred beds in long lines. There were lockers and shelves, as well as weapons racks and armour stands. Everything was proportioned for legionaries, larger and more robust than the furniture required by normal men.

‘Remain here,’ the Custodian leader said sharply, his voice coming through the grille of his helm tainted by an external emitter. ‘Food and drink will be brought to you. There are drill rooms suitable for close-quarters weapons practice at the southern end of the hall,’ his spear tip pointed further down the corridor, ‘and should you wish to conduct live firing exercises you will be taken to an appropriate part of the facility.’

‘And how will we contact you?’ asked Commander Agapito, his voice conveying his displeasure at this abrupt treatment. ‘We are here to escort our primarch, not lounge around down here with you for company.’

‘Lord Corax is under constant watch, be sure of that,’ replied the Custodian, his metal-edged voice betraying no hint of whether that was for the primarch’s safety or other reasons. ‘You will be assigned a secure communications frequency. You may make full use of the barracks and its attached facilities, but you are not authorised to move beyond the southern and northern extents of this hall. Failure to abide by these restrictions will result in summary execution.’

‘Nice to be trusted,’ said Agapito.

The Custodian turned his head towards the Raven Guard commander, bringing the black lenses of his helm to focus on the legionary.

‘Trust is a depleted resource, commander. There will be no exceptions. I have been given personal authority over your stay here. I am Arcatus Vindix Centurio. All communications will be directed through me. My companions are not authorised to communicate with you, so save both your time and theirs by sparing them any questions or complaints. I will return in one hour to conduct a full security briefing.’

The Custodian Guard filed out through the gigantic lock-door at the end of the corridor, leaving the Raven Guard to their own devices. Squad by squad, the quarters were allocated. Alpharius found his squad assigned bunks close to the corridor, but he did not entertain any thoughts of sneaking out for further investigation. His primarch had made it clear that he was to remain undiscovered at all costs, until the full nature of his mission had been revealed. He was not going to risk exposing himself to go on a sightseeing jaunt under the noses of the Custodians.

When the legionaries had ordered the dormitory to their liking, stowing weapons and other gear on the racks bolted to the walls, Agapito called the company to attend him.

‘I know this is all quite strange, and those Custodian Guard are stiffer than a dead man’s fingers, but this is the situation and we must deal with it,’ said the commander. ‘When we have communications access, I will signal Avenger that we have arrived and I will parley with Arcatus to arrange a suitable routine. I don’t know how long we will have to stay here, so let’s just keep alert and wait for the primarch’s orders.’

There being little point in staying at combat readiness, the Raven Guard aided one another with the removal of their armour, each legionary stripping down to bodysuits and robes. Normally such assistance would be provided by the Legion’s army of non-augmented attendants, but there was no such personnel available here. Despite the apparent security of their barracks, a watch rota was drawn up and the squads allocated shifts on duty. A lifetime of routine and discipline could be quickly eroded by periods of inactivity and Agapito was not going to allow any laxity to grow in the minds of his warriors.

As Arcatus had promised, attendants arrived with food, which was brought to the dining area in the chamber on the opposite side of the main passage. The serfs came and left in silence, obviously under orders not to fraternise with the legionaries in any way. They were all middle-aged men and women, wearing identical white jackets embroidered with the aquila of the Emperor, baggy black trousers and slippers of the same thick material, their faces etched with polite indifference from years of experience.

Alpharius was able to loiter in the passageway for a little while, and had a look past the sealed door at the end of the corridor when the attendants were leaving. As he suspected, beyond lay another chamber and another lock-door. There certainly would not be any way to slip out through there.

He rejoined his squad and sat down at the long table, taking a welcome lungful of steam that was rising from the roast meats laid on platters before each legionary. Fresh fruit and vegetables were heaped in bowls along the length of each table, along with an assortment of other foodstuffs. After many days of ship’s rations, it certainly was a feast. There were harsher conditions in which he might have found himself trapped, and as Alpharius ripped a leg from some giant poultry bird in front of him, he considered this one of the less arduous duties he been asked to perform for the Legion.

Six

A Guest of the Emperor
Hall of Victories
Omegon Prepares

In contrast to the confinement of his honour guard, Corax was quartered in some comfort and opulence, given a villa-like suite of chambers that overlooked a vast underground lake. Lit from below the water’s surface by powerful lights, the stalactite-clustered ceiling glittered with crystal deposits that glinted in the dappling glow from the waters beneath. The rooms were lavishly furnished with dark wood and gilded furniture, hanging tapestries and deep carpets. From the ceilings hung chandeliers with real candles, something of a novelty to the primarch who had been raised under the dim glow of lumen strips.

The fact that the chambers were scaled to the height and bulk of a primarch was something of a pleasant surprise. It occurred to Corax that primarch-appointed quarters should not have been a shock, given that he was on Terra. He wondered briefly if they had been intended as guest quarters, or something more permanent once the Great Crusade had been finished. His brothers had sometimes quarrelled about what would happen when the last planet was conquered and the Emperor’s dream made a reality, but Corax had been more than content to allow others to take over the burden of administering the Imperium in the wake of the Legiones Astartes. He was a commander, not a governor, and if he had no more battles to fight, he could have happily spent his remaining years, however many hundreds or perhaps thousands that might be, in comfortable retirement; perhaps compiling a treatise on the political lessons he had learned from his mentors on Lycaeus.

It was quite literally a world away from his quarters on Deliverance, which were by necessity rather cramped and functional. Not that luxury had ever been a consideration of the primarch. His home had always been a battlefield, a ship’s deck or the rooms of a command centre.

Once Malcador had taken his leave, Corax had been left alone, with a handful of Custodians on hand to act as guides and guards; and the small company of servants who had seemed to spring into existence as Corax had moved from room to room, each more than happy to see to the wants and needs of their primarch guest. For the first time since he had awoken in the dark cellar of Lycaeus, Corax felt as if he was in a place intended for him. The humans that attended him were dwarfed by their surroundings, diminutive figures let free to roam in the house of a giant, but seemed accustomed to the strangeness of the household in which they served.

For a short time, the primarch tried to relax, though his ribs were sore and the lacerations on his back plagued him with spasms of pain. Even on the long voyage to Terra he had not allowed himself time to rest, to allow his body to recover. The constant activity and Corax’s unsettled mood had prevented any meaningful recuperation. In a way, the injuries Corax felt were a reminder to him of what had happened, making real an event that sometimes seemed to have been a nightmare. Every twinge of torn muscle and stab of ripped flesh was a physical companion to the torments of his thoughts, a memorial of the tens of thousands that would never return to Deliverance.

The novelty of the environment wore off as lights were dimmed in an approximation of night. Agitated by what he had heard from Dorn and Malcador, Corax was full of energy and had no desire to sleep. At his request, a writing tablet was brought to the primarch and he started to make notes of everything he had seen since he and the other Legions had arrived to bring Horus to justice for his actions at Isstvan III.

At first his words were functional, listing the dispositions of the different Legions, their agreed strategy and the intelligence reports concerning the Sons of Horus. He remembered in exact detail the initial fleet manoeuvres performed to encircle the ships of the Warmaster, even as drop-pods, Hawkwings, Thunderhawks and Stormbirds were readied for the assault on the planet below. At the time nothing had seemed amiss, but on reflection Corax could see the plots of his treacherous brethren already being set in motion.

The integration of the Legions had seemed a wise move given the circumstances, a united front against the perfidy of Horus and his legionaries. In retrospect, it had allowed the traitors close, their battle-barges and cruisers alongside those of the Salamanders, Iron Hands and Raven Guard.

Ferrus Manus had led the attack against the reasoning of Corax and the strategy devised by Dorn, determined that the traitors would be brought down. Perhaps he had been goaded into it by some quiet word from Fulgrim or Lorgar. They would never know, as the Gorgon had been slain on Isstvan V. That the second wave was composed entirely of those who had sworn allegiance to Horus was the greatest machination, an attack against which the loyalists could muster no defence.

As he wrote, Corax’s account gradually grew more personal. It was impossible to separate himself from the bald facts of what had happened. His fingers flew over the screen of the writing pad, charting his feelings of horror and disgust as the Iron Warriors and Word Bearers had opened fire from the hills overlooking the Urgall Depression. He could not help but recall his own burning rage as his claws had scythed through the traitors, every sweep of his weapons accompanied by a surge of anger.

He stopped as his memories brought him to Lorgar.

How could he find the words to describe the loathing he had felt for his brother? And if he found the words for that, how would he then explain his feelings when the Night Haunter, Konrad Curze, had stopped Corax’s lightning claw milliseconds from Lorgar’s throat?

The servants were bustling again, and hearing their scattered conversation, the primarch realised that the night had already passed and they were preparing a breakfast for him. He scanned the last few paragraphs he had written, amazed by the vitriol let free from his thoughts. He considered deleting the whole document, expunging his memories at a stroke, but resisted. As painful as it was, he had to carry on.

He described his encounter with Lorgar and Curze in a few brief lines, reverting to the perfunctory style with which he had started, swiftly moving on to his withdrawal to a nearby Thunderhawk; a withdrawal that had been cut short by enemy fire, bringing the craft down only a few kilometres from the massacre.

The account came easily again, the turmoil in his thoughts subsiding as he recounted the gathering of the Raven Guard and the retreat into the mountains, striking back at the traitors when they could, fading into the shadows of the caves and valleys when the enemy came with too much strength.

He finished with a terse telling of Branne’s arrival as it had been relayed to him by the commander, and the extraction from Isstvan. Corax was sure he had not heard the whole of the story. For Branne to have disobeyed his orders and left Deliverance had been a bold move. Also the Therion, Praefector Valerius, was involved somehow. That part of the story did not yet make sense, and Corax resolved to find out the truth behind it when he returned to the Avenger.

He took the tablet with him as he moved to the feasting chamber, compiling and annotating tables of warships and other forces he had documented during the entire campaign. As he wolfed down the food, barely registering its taste or texture, Corax added an appendix detailing the enemy forces and tactics he had seen on Isstvan, and a few more notes regarding the fleet movements observed as they had fled the star system.

His account complete, he sealed the file and passed it to one of the attendants, commanding that it be taken to Malcador. The Sigillite would ensure that the information was passed on to Dorn and any others that would find it of benefit.

Writing down his experiences on Isstvan had not brought any sense of satisfaction or release. There were still so many unanswered questions, Corax could not begin to articulate them. Again and again he was left with a sense of loss and emptiness, not knowing what had turned his brothers against the Emperor.

Seeking peace and distraction, the primarch left the chambers and walked out onto the balcony overlooking the inner sea. He put aside all of the thoughts crowding into his head and tried to focus only on the ever-shifting play of light and the constant gurgle and ripple of water.

After spending some time marvelling at the beauty of the lake cavern and taking a few minutes to explore his immediate surroundings, the primarch chose to rove further afield. There were several other self-contained habitats in the vicinity, facing onto a circular plaza decorated with an abstract mosaic. All of the other residences looked empty at the moment. Corax counted twenty of them, a number that was surely not coincidence. That answered the question of how long ago they had been built, for surely a more recent construction would have numbered only eighteen.

From outside there was no way of telling one apartment suite from the other, and Corax quickly grew bored of trying to guess who might have been housed behind which doors. He was about to summon the elevator situated in a grand column at the central plaza when one of the residence servants came hurrying out.

‘Lord Corax, there is a message for you!’ The primarch turned back to see a woman of middle years running across the plaza. ‘Lord Dorn has returned and wishes to meet with you and Malcador.’

At that moment a chime sounded from the elevator and a panel in the marble-like pillar slid open to reveal a captain in the livery of the Imperial Fists.

‘That would be your guide, Lord Corax,’ said the servant. ‘Sorry for the delay in finding you.’

‘No matter,’ said Corax.

The Imperial Fist slapped a hand to his chest in salute and bowed his head as Corax stepped into the elevator. The door closed, enveloping the primarch and legionary in a soft blue glow of artificial light.

‘Where am I going to meet my brother?’ asked Corax.

‘Malcador will host you in the Hall of Victories, lord,’ replied the captain. ‘It will only take a few minutes to get there.’

They said nothing further to each other as the elevator continued to descend, dropping several kilometres into the heart of Terra. Eventually the conveyance slowed and Corax estimated that they were some distance below sea level. A short distance from the shaft the Imperial Fist brought him in front of a massive set of double doors, each gilded and engraved, showing a picture of a man and a woman facing each other. On the left door, the woman held a babe in the crook of one arm and a sword in her hand, her hair flowing like a waterfall, mingling with a billowing dress that in turn merged with the long grass at her feet. On the right, the man, dressed in a worker’s overalls, a chain with the crossed lightning bolt of Unification hanging around his neck, had a wrench in one hand and a pistol in the other, looking to the skies. Between them burned a stylised star, surrounded by other pinpricks in the sky.

Ornate scrollwork held a caption across the heavens, in one of the Terran languages of old. Corax had not been much of a scholar and had studied little of pre-Imperial Terran culture, unlike many of his brothers. He had felt little interest in the past, preferring to concentrate his thoughts and actions on the proper shaping of the future. Despite that, he could instinctively decipher the emblazoned message, crudely translating it as ‘People of Earth, Together.’

The doors opened easily at Corax’s push, swinging silently inwards to reveal a hall several hundred metres long. Corax was surprised to see arched windows along the wall to his right, with sunlight streaming through them.

Given the name of the place, Corax had expected to see lines of battle honours and banners, displays of armour and weapons lining the walls. Instead there were many glass cabinets varying from those small enough to fit in Corax’s palm to some the size of battle tanks, arranged in rows across the hall, each containing an object from across the galaxy and dating back centuries, millennia, tens of millennia.

Stepping up the nearest cabinet, Corax stooped to examine the contents. He felt a tingle of static and heard the faint buzz of a stasis field generator. Enclosed within was a small circuit board, its function unknown. On the stand below, a small steel plate etched with plain text revealed its importance:

Navigational Circuit from the first warp-capable starship

Corax stepped back in surprise. Intrigued, he turned around and found himself looking at the skeletal form of a wheeled vehicle, barely large enough for a normal man to sit inside. Its balloon tyres made up the greater part of its bulk. Corax stepped up to examine the title plate.

Titan Rover

The primarch was not sure what to make of it. It certainly looked like no Titan ever produced by the Mechanicum, which were towering war machines tens of metres high. He looked more closely at the vehicle, but could not see anything that might be a weapon mount.

With a grunt of confusion, he moved on, eyes passing over various technological artefacts and coming to rest on a glass tube filled with a pulsating liquid coloured a deep blue, located about a dozen metres further down the hall. The words beneath, though written in Imperial Gothic, might well have been an alien or lost language, for all the sense Corax could make of them.

Mendelian Eukaryotic Genesis Formula

Raking his fingers through his hair, which had slipped across his face, Corax straightened, bringing something else into his eyeline. It was a small cabinet, less than half a metre to each face, but its positioning on the central aisle seemed to mark it out as of particular importance.

Within was a broken piece of pottery. It was utterly unremarkable, shattered into eight curved shards of crude unpainted clay, marked with fingerprints and dents. Piercing the parts together in his mind, Corax worked out that it was a bowl of some kind.

He heard the whisper of the doors opening and turned back to see Malcador entering the hall, striding with purpose. His face was flushed with blood, his eyes bright and alert.

‘What is this place?’ Corax asked. ‘What manner of victories are celebrated?’

‘The most important kind,’ said the Sigillite, joining Corax beside the shattered bowl. He pointed with a skeletal finger at the contents of the cabinet. ‘One of the first pieces of pottery ever made by human hand. Hundreds of thousands of years old.’

‘It doesn’t seem like much of an achievement, compared to some of the things in here,’ said Corax. ‘It’s so simple, a child could make it.’

‘And yet perhaps one of the most important advances in our entire history, Corax,’ said Malcador. ‘Without this bowl, without the mind that devised it and the hands that shaped it, the rest of the hall would be empty. We have come a long, long way since one of our ancestors noticed a certain type of mud hardening in the sun and decided to make something, but without a first step, no journey is ever begun.’

‘All of these are technological achievements? First steps into new epochs of human history?’

‘Most are technological or scientific, a few are cultural,’ said Malcador. He waved his hand towards the far end of the hall where a number of paintings, statues, carvings, tapestries and other works of art were stored.

Before the primarch could investigate, the doors opened again, revealing a figure almost as tall as Corax and broader at the shoulders. Rogal Dorn’s white-blond hair was cropped short and spiked, framing his weathered features like a corona. He was dressed in demi-armour: chest, shins and forearms protected by plates and sheaths of golden metal etched with swirling designs similar to those on Corax’s own suit. A cloak of deep red reached down to Dorn’s ankles, held with a clasp shaped into a clenched fist on his left shoulder, pinned with a brooch in the form of the Imperial aquila on the right. He wore a skirt of golden mail that hung to his knees, and at the primarch’s waist was a belt that held a chainsword with fang-like teeth and a holstered bolter. Dorn’s hands were covered by segmented gauntlets of gold, each knuckle embedded with a sizeable ruby. His skin was leathery and heavily tanned, covered by traceries of thin scars and brand marks.

‘Brother!’ Dorn called out with a hand raised in greeting, his voice booming down the hall, disturbing the air of quiet reverence.

The two primarchs met and clasped wrist-to-wrist in welcome. Dorn slapped a hand to Corax’s shoulder and smiled briefly.

‘I promised I would be here today,’ said Dorn.

‘As ever, your word is as secure as the fortresses you raise,’ replied Corax, stepping back and releasing his grip on his gene-brother. Dorn’s expression darkened.

‘I hope that my latest work proves equal to the task.’

‘Your work is as exceptional as ever, Rogal,’ said Malcador. He waved for them to accompany him to the line of benches beneath the high windows. ‘There is not another in the galaxy the Emperor would want to raise up his walls for him.’

Corax stopped before sitting and looked out of the windows. Beyond was a wide valley, which appeared to be made entirely of metal. Glancing up, he saw the dull sky several hundred metres above. The entire edifice was delved into a deep fissure and continued to stretch below out of sight, storey after storey of windows and walkways, the divide criss-crossed by covered bridges, curving railway tracks and black roads.

‘The clerical tenements,’ explained Malcador, peering past Corax. ‘Three million men and women devoted to the administration of Terra and the Sol system.’

‘Three million? For one system?’ Corax could not believe what he heard. ‘Why so many?’

‘Oh, that’s just a fraction of the civil population, Corvus,’ said the Sigillite. ‘It’s barely enough to keep track of all the comings and goings here. Most of the others live in the service towers over at the Chivolan Heights, about seven hundred million of them.’

‘It is barracks space that concerns me more,’ said Dorn, lowering himself to the dark blue couch. ‘Your army of scribes and auditors are not going to keep Horus at bay.’

‘Give them guns and I am sure they will do their best,’ countered the Sigillite, sitting on the next bench.

‘I’ve already sent your honour guard to the new garrison quarters not far from here,’ Dorn told Corax as the Raven Guard primarch continued to look out of the window. ‘There is room for several thousand more, once the rest of your Legion arrives.’

Corax turned, eyebrows raised in surprise.

‘You think I’m bringing the Raven Guard here?’

‘Where else would they go? By the sounds of it, there are barely enough of you to make Deliverance look inhabited. We need every warrior we can to defend Terra. Captain Noriz tells me that you had one thousand, seven hundred and fourteen legionaries and other ranks on board Avenger. How many more can I factor into my plans to arrive from Deliverance?’

‘You are getting ahead of yourself, brother,’ Corax said, crossing his arms. ‘I came here to see the Emperor and will seek his permission to launch attacks against the traitors.’

‘Unwise,’ muttered Malcador, obviously to himself yet not quiet enough to avoid Corax’s keen hearing. The primarch rounded on Malcador.

‘I am not staying here to get trapped like a rat in a hole,’ snapped Corax. He calmed down and looked at Dorn again. ‘You know how we fight, brother. We were never expert at manning a tower or trench line. If the Raven Guard are to play their part, we need freedom to operate without our backs to a wall.’

‘Impossible,’ said Dorn. ‘Like it or not, I must insist that your Legion be stationed here to bolster the defence of the Emperor. Horus will be coming here, make no mistake about that. Our first duty – our only duty – is the protection of Terra. What damage do you think you can do on your own? You have, what, three thousand warriors? Horus now has many hundred times that number, and who can say how his ranks might swell? Your place is here, on Terra, like it or not.’

‘I like it not, and I do not care what you insist,’ said Corax, infuriated by Dorn’s assumption that the primarch of the Raven Guard would demurely acquiesce to his demand. ‘I swore my oath to the Emperor, not to you, and nor to you Malcador, before you start claiming any authority as regent.’

Dorn and the Sigillite said nothing as Corax stepped away from the windows, one hand rubbing at his brow in agitation. The Raven Guard primarch stopped his pacing and turned back to the others, hand held out in conciliation.

‘Why do you assume that Horus must attack Terra?’ Corax asked.

‘If he wishes to depose the Emperor and claim the galaxy for himself, there is no other way,’ said Malcador.

‘We will not allow that to happen,’ added Dorn.

‘You misunderstand me,’ said Corax. ‘You assume that Horus will reach Terra. You have already surrendered the initiative to our enemy and now run around making the best you can of the time he will allow you. We need to strike back fast, dull any momentum he has gained from the massacre at Isstvan, and stop this rebellion in its infancy.’

‘That was why you were sent to Isstvan,’ said Malcador, sighing heavily. ‘It is you who does not understand the situation fully. Horus has the allegiance of his own Legion, the Word Bearers, the Alpha Legion, the Iron War–’

‘I know the faces of the traitors, I saw them first hand at Isstvan,’ snarled Corax. ‘We are not without allies. The Khan and his White Scars, the Lion with the First. What of the Ultramarines and the Thousand Sons?’

There followed an uncomfortable silence, while Dorn and Malcador exchanged a worried glance. The primarch gave Malcador a slight nod.

‘The Thousand Sons cannot be numbered amongst those loyal to Terra,’ said the Sigillite. ‘I won’t go into details, but Magnus proved his untrustworthiness and has been dealt with. Leman Russ and his Legion were despatched to bring Magnus to account for breaking the Nikaea Decree.’

‘What does that mean?’ said Corax.

‘What happened is uncertain so far,’ said Dorn, his tone blunt. ‘The Wolves of Fenris were over-zealous. They have destroyed Prospero and wiped out the Thousand Sons.’

‘What would you expect, unleashing the Wolf King like that?’ said Corax.

‘If that were true, our woes would be lessened,’ said Malcador, his gaze moving between Corax and Dorn. ‘Only this morning I have reports from Prospero that Magnus and some of his Legion escaped the attack. I fear the numbers of our enemies will be swelled by Russ’s headstrong actions rather than reduced. Though there is no great kinship between Magnus and Horus, it seems we have given them a common foe.’

Dorn let out a growl of irritation, his fist thumping down onto the fabric of the bench. The primarch stood up and stared at Corax.

‘Every warrior will count,’ said Dorn. ‘We need you on Terra. We cannot stop Horus coming here. Accept that as fact and bring your Legion to the defence.’

‘Not unless the Emperor himself commands it,’ said Corax, once more pacing back and forth in front of the other two, driven by agitation. ‘I will not sit idle while Horus and our other traitorous brothers bide their time and ready themselves for the battle. They must be harangued and harried, made to pay swiftly for what they have done. They will be brimming with supreme confidence at the moment. I will puncture their pride and show them that they have not won yet.’

Corax stopped and fixed his glare upon Dorn.

‘I trust no one more than you, brother, to see the Emperor safe, but I do not have your confidence or patience. I must fight back and hurt the traitors, for what they have done to my Legion.’

‘A personal vendetta?’ said Malcador.

‘An act of defiance,’ replied Corax. ‘There are those that Horus will try to recruit. He can virtually guarantee them victory at the moment, with no evidence to counter his claims. I will send a message across the Imperium that the Emperor and his Legions have not abandoned them.’

The Raven Guard primarch spun away and strode towards the doors.

‘Where are you going?’ Dorn called out, standing up.

‘To see the Emperor!’ Corax snarled in reply.

‘He won’t see you, Corax, do not disturb him,’ Malcador cried out, hurrying after the departing primarch.

Corax hauled open the doors and found himself confronted by a contingent of Malcador’s Custodian bodyguard.

‘You,’ he snapped, pointing to their leader. ‘Take me to the Emperor.’

The Custodian said nothing, but turned his head to look at Malcador as he came up beside Corax.

‘This is unwise, Corax,’ the Sigillite said.

‘Be sensible, brother,’ said Dorn, laying a hand on Corax’s arm. The Raven Guard pulled away from his brother’s grip.

‘I am primarch of the Raven Guard, son of the Emperor,’ said Corax. ‘It is my right! Take me to the Emperor now, or I will find him myself.’

Dorn met his glare with a doubtful expression, his hand straying to the hilt of the chainsword at his hip in warning.

‘Enough! I will brook no dispute in my palace.’

Corax and Dorn looked at Malcador, who had spoken, though the voice was deep and resonant, unlike the whisper of the Sigillite. Malcador’s eyes shone with golden light, his face a mask of beatific happiness. His lips moved again, as though divorced from the rest of his body, and he held out a gnarled hand surrounded by a shimmering aura.

‘My Emperor?’ Dorn lowered to one knee and bowed his head. ‘I am sorry for causing conflict.’

‘Do you not share your brother’s shame?’ said the voice through Malcador’s flesh as the Sigillite’s golden eyes turned on the primarch of the Raven Guard.

‘My apologies, father,’ said Corax, dropping to one knee beside Dorn.

Malcador’s form leaned forwards and rested his palm atop Corax’s head.

‘Heed my wisdom.’

Light and warmth pierced Corax’s thoughts, blinding him to all else.

For a moment, Corax glimpsed a vast chamber. The hall was filled with machinery: coiling pipes and cables snaked across the floor and walls from banks of equipment set with thousands of dials and gauges. The air was thick with ozone, the rattle and hum of generators making the floor throb underfoot. Transformers crackled with energy and pistons thudded in the distant shadows.

In the glimmer of light and dark, Corax could see hundreds of robed figures attending to the machinery. Beneath red cowls he spied half-machine faces and from scarlet sleeves protruded limbs of metal and wire.

Corax took all of this in at a glance, his eye being drawn to the strange but magnificent edifice at the centre of the hall. It was a gigantic, towering dais, stretching away to the far wall, sheathed in gold that reflected the thousands of surrounding lights and inlaid with silvery circuitry. Dozens of cables and pipelines connected the dais to the accompanying machines and electricity thrummed across its surface. A huge pair of doors was set into the base of the plinth, large enough to allow a tank or even one of the Mechanicum’s scout Titans to pass through.

Yet it was not this that fixed the primarch’s gaze.

The upper part of the building was fashioned in the form of an immense chair, ringed about by sparking conduits and pulsing energy fields. Seated in the chair was the Emperor, garbed in golden armour, his head bowed with eyes tightly shut in fierce concentration. Waves of purple and blue energy flowed across his skin, a miniature lightning storm playing about his furrowed brow.

As Corax watched, a single bead of glittering sweat broke from the Emperor’s brow and fell like a golden droplet from his cheek. The Emperor’s jaw was clenched, either from effort or pain. The primarch had never seen his father look as he did now, and he felt a moment of worry.

The scene faded, replaced by a landscape suffused with light. It seemed to exist nowhere, formed of the light and nothing more. At the heart of the glare the Emperor was sitting as he was before, though now he was upon a golden throne that blazed with energy. A giant eagle sat atop its back, two-headed, glaring at Corax with ruby eyes. The Emperor’s face was calm here, showing no evidence of the strain the primarch had glimpsed before. The Master of Mankind seemed to be in deep meditation, unmoving on his seat of gold.

‘Father, my Emperor, it is Corvus,’ he said, lowering himself to one knee. ‘If you can hear me, please heed my words. My Legion is all but dead and our enemies grow stronger with each passing day. I would know what you would wish me to do. It is in my heart to strike back at these traitors, to shed their blood as they have shed mine. All I ask is your blessing on this endeavour and I shall take the battle to the foe with righteousness in my heart and your glory in my mind.’

There was no change in the Emperor’s demeanour.

‘Father! Hear me!’ In his straining, Corax felt his wounds reopening under his armour, thick blood trickling down his side. He ignored the surge of pain. ‘The Raven Guard will fight to the last to protect the Imperial Truth. We are not so strong as once we were, but we will lay down each life left to us in your defence. But I need your help. Please, give me your wisdom, grant me your guidance.’

He broke down, collapsing as a wave of fatigue washed through him. For more than three hundred days he had fought back the injuries of Isstvan, pushing himself on. At first his Legion had needed him. Later, he had held on for this moment, enduring his agony in silence so that he might come before the Emperor and seek his lord’s command.

He had failed.

He had failed on Isstvan and he had failed here. Blood was leaking from his many wounds, as if in response to the hurt he felt in his psyche. With it, his vigour died and his will faded.

‘Son.’

That one word resounded across the glowing firmament, echoing and rebounding, filling Corax’s thoughts even as the sound came to his ear.

The Emperor’s eyes were open, glittering orbs of gold that bored into Corax’s soul. Motes of golden energy danced in those orbs, but their look was not without kindness. The Emperor stood, his armour melting away into wisps of golden threads to be replaced by robes of flowing silver that cascaded from his body like an argent waterfall.

The Emperor stood, seeming diminished in size, but not presence, by the removal of his armour. Particles churned as smoke, forming insubstantial steps that allowed the Emperor to descend as effortlessly as a normal man walks down a flight of stairs.

The Emperor reached out a hand and Corax felt hot fingers upon his brow. Energy flowed through the primarch, knitting his shattered bones, stemming his pouring blood, healing wounded muscles and organs. The primarch gasped, filled with love and adoration.

‘Stand.’ Corax did as the Emperor commanded, his strength restored.

‘I am sorry, father,’ said Corax, dropping to his knees once more. ‘I know that your labours are important, but I have to speak with you.’

‘Of course you do, Corvus,’ said the Emperor. The majesty and power had gone from his voice, leaving only a tone of respect and admiration. ‘You have endured much to come here.’

Corax felt a hand on his arm and he straightened under the Emperor’s guidance. His father appeared less majestic, the light dimming beneath his skin, his face taking on the features of a normal man with brown eyes while long, dark hair flowed from his scalp.

‘Is this your true face?’ asked Corax.

‘I have no such thing,’ replied the Emperor. ‘I have worn a million faces over the millennia, according to need or whim.’

‘I remember this one,’ said Corax, dimly recalling a dream he had glimpsed when overcome by his wounds in the crashing Thunderhawk. ‘This was how you appeared to me when I was born within my pod.’

‘Yes, it is strange that you should remember that,’ said the Emperor. His expression became sterner. ‘What do you wish to ask of me, my son?’

‘The Raven Guard verge on being a spent force, but I would rebuild them if I had the chance,’ said Corax. ‘Yet I cannot spare a warrior from the fighting to come, nor the time to raise up a new generation of the Legion. I seek your permission to launch attacks against the traitors, to mark our final passing in the glory of battle.’

‘You wish to sacrifice your Legion?’ The Emperor seemed genuinely surprised. ‘In what cause?’

‘I do not do it out of woe but necessity,’ explained Corax. ‘I must atone for the failure at Isstvan, for it will tear me apart as surely as my wounds did, if allowed to fester in my heart. Forgive me, but I cannot defend Terra, idly awaiting my fate to come to me.’

The Emperor did not reply for some time, his brow creased slightly with deep thought. Corax waited patiently, eyes fixed to the Emperor’s face.

‘I concur,’ the Master of Mankind said eventually. ‘It is in your nature to cry havoc and wreak the same upon your foes. Yet there is no need for sacrifice. I am reluctant, but you have my trust, Corvus. I will grant you a gift, a very precious gift.’

Once more the Emperor reached out his hand and laid it upon Corax’s head.

For an eternity Corax was overwhelmed by the mind of the Emperor. An existence that had spanned more than thirty millennia tried to crowd into the primarch’s thoughts, sending pain searing through him.

In a moment the pain had ceased, the imprint upon his memories a shard of what had come before, the tiniest fraction of the Emperor’s being. Still reeling from the psychic onslaught, Corax wondered if this was how the astrotelepaths felt during the Soul Binding, their minds conjoined with the psychic might of the Emperor.

Flashes of new memories coursed through his thoughts, blocking out all other sensation, a succession of images burnt into his psyche. The primarch’s body quaked with the sensation, rebelling against the patterns and images thrust into his brain.

He could smell the tang of cleansing fluids, and hear the buzz of machines and the hiss of respiration devices. Corax glimpsed metal cylinders with glass viewplates, arranged in a circle at the heart of a clinically sterile chamber, a maze of wires and pumps and tubes splaying from each steel sarcophagus.

The primarch did not just see the scene, he was part of it, speaking to a white-coated technician in a language he did not understand. There were other orderlies, with cloth face masks and tight hoods drawn over their heads, their hands gloved in white.

Corax walked amongst the incubators, noting at a glance the digital displays plugged into each, satisfied with the life signs beeping and chiming from each device. He felt enormous satisfaction.

There was still much to do. The physical bodies were being nourished, their superhuman forms each developing over the genetic matrix inlaid inside each chamber. They were only empty shells though, and the greatest part of the project was yet to come. Their nascent brains were ripe for the template integration.

Even as he had these thoughts, Corax did not understand them. More arcane and technical phrases came to him, their meaning lost in the translation to his mind. Yet for all their complexity, the primarch felt on the verge of recognition.

Like his brothers, Corax’s intellect was as enhanced as his body and his brain was a vast repository of knowledge, both military and technical. There was something new in there as well, placed at the same time as the memories. In his mind’s eye he saw genetic splicing and hybridisation calculations, and understood now that the Mendelian eukaryotic genesis formula was the first ever successfully cloned human gene-code.

He understood the mechanics behind his own creation and marvelled at the ingenuity of the mind that had conceived of them. There were areas that were left blank though, intentionally he assumed. Details of the parts of the Emperor’s own genetic strand that were employed in the creation of the primarchs. Obviously the Emperor did not trust Corax that much.

There were other memories too: the dismantling of the laboratory after the strange warp phenomena that had swept away the incubators and scattered them across the galaxy. Corax saw it being reassembled in another place, far from prying eyes.

He knew where that place was.

Corax realised his eyes were closed and opened them. The Emperor was watching him, waiting patiently for his son to explore the gift he had given him.

‘You have given me the secrets of the primarch project?’ said Corax, his voice a whisper of amazement.

‘The parts that were relevant to the creation of the Legions, yes,’ said the Emperor. He did not smile. ‘I must return to the webway, my absence will be sorely missed. That is all the help I can offer you.’

‘The webway?’

‘A portal into the warp, of sorts,’ said the Emperor. ‘This is my great endeavour. Beyond the veil of reality, the forces of the Imperium wage war with a foe just as deadly as the Legions of Horus. Daemons.’

Corax knew the word, but did not understand why the Emperor had used it.

‘Daemons?’ said Corax. ‘Insubstantial creatures of nightmare? I thought they were a fiction.’

‘No, in truth they do exist,’ said the Emperor. ‘The warp, the other-realm we use to travel, is their home, their world. Horus’s treachery is greater than you imagine. He has aligned himself to the powers of the warp, the so-called “Gods of Chaos”. The daemons are now his allies and they seek to breach the Imperial Palace from within. My warriors fight to hold back the incursion, lest Terra be overrun with a tide of Chaos.’

‘I still do not understand,’ admitted Corax.

‘You do not have to,’ said the Emperor. ‘Know only that my time is scarce and my power bent towards securing our ultimate victory over these immaterial foes. It is to you, and your brothers who have remained true to their oaths, that the physical defence of the Imperium must fall. I have shown you the way by which the Raven Guard might rise from the ashes of their destruction and again fight for mankind.’

‘It is an incredible gift,’ said Corax, ‘but even with this I am not sure what you intend for me to do.’

‘I have already informed Malcador of my intent and he gathers such aides and companions as you will need to recover the gene-tech,’ said the Emperor. ‘You asked me for help, but now you must help yourself. Rebuild the Raven Guard. Strike down the traitors and let them know that my will shall still be done.’

‘Yes, I shall,’ said Corax, bowing his head and lowering to one knee. ‘The Raven Guard will rise from the grave of defeat and bring you victory.’

‘I not only give you the gift of these memories and this technology, I place upon you the burden of its protection. You will have the power to create armies as I once did, and that in itself would be reason enough to jealously guard its existence. More than that, the gene-store contains the means to destroy what it created. That which I bound within the fibre of every Space Marine can be undone, unravelling their strength and purpose at a stroke.’

‘I understand,’ said Corax. ‘I will defend it with my life.’

‘No, you must swear more than that, Corvus,’ said the Emperor, his voice becoming aggressive, his words sending a surge of energy through Corax. ‘Swear to me that should our enemies learn of its existence, you will destroy it, and everything created by it. It is too dangerous to keep if there is even the possibility that Horus might take it. With its power he could unleash devastation even greater than you can imagine, and raise up such a force that no defence Rogal might build could withstand it. Swear that oath to me.’

‘I swear, as your son and servant,’ said Corax, trembling with the ferocity of the Emperor’s demanding voice.

‘Even if it means the destruction of the Raven Guard and all that you have striven to build?’ The Emperor’s words were like an implacable storm, pushing into Corax’s mind, demanding obedience.

‘Even so.’

The Emperor turned away and walked back towards the Golden Throne. The light consumed him once more, burning through his flesh, his robes forming the hard edges of armour. He stopped just before the throne and looked back at Corax.

‘One other thing, my son,’ he said, calmly and slowly. ‘The gene-tech is protected. Only I can deactivate the defences in person, but I cannot spare the time away from this place to do so. I am sure with the knowledge I have given to you that you will find a way through.’

Corax said nothing as an aura of golden light surrounded the Emperor, lifting him up to the seat of the Golden Throne. The Master of Mankind grew in stature once more, as armoured plates slid into place and his form was again encased in the golden aegis that Corax had seen on many battlefields.

The Emperor closed his eyes and with a pulse of energy that rocked the whole chamber, sparks flew and psychic energy danced, embroiling the seated figure in a storm of power.

Corax came to his senses, lying on a marbled floor with Dorn and Malcador bent over him, still not sure he believed what had passed. The memories were there, embedded in his brain, like a vault of treasures to be unlocked, and he clung to them as proof of the Emperor’s will.

‘Thank you, father,’ Corax said. He looked up at Malcador, who nodded in understanding.

‘You have been set a difficult task, Corax,’ said the Sigillite. ‘We should begin your preparations.’

Steam and other vapours filled the sub-level chamber with distorting clouds and whorls of gas. The thump of heavy machinery made the whole basement shudder every few seconds, setting the cable bundles on the wall rattling and sending the glow-globes circling in eccentric orbits about their hanging wires.

It was certainly not the most pleasant location for a lair, and by far one of the noisiest Omegon had ever inhabited, but it served its purpose well. Situated below the forges of the Wellmetal district of Kiavahr’s largest city, Nabrik, the four adjoining rooms occupied by the primarch of the Alpha Legion were at the heart of the old industrial complex from which the technocrats had ruled the world before the coming of the Emperor.

These days the furnace rooms and manufactories bore the symbols of the Mechanicum of Mars, but for thousands of years before their coming, Kiavahr had been a powerhouse of weapons manufacture and shipbuilding. The old tech-guilds had divided their planet’s resources between them and each taken to themselves rulership of Kiavahr, trading very successfully with the few neighbouring systems that had been within reach during Old Night.

It had been a blow to the prestige of the tech-guild when Corax had led the rebellion of the mining colony of Lycaeus, Kiavahr’s largest moon; further insult had been added to this gratuitous injury when the Emperor had arrived and the tech-guilds had been sworn in as members of the Imperium. Had they known then that the Martians would dismantle their monopoly and re-order their society, the tech-guilds might have resisted further.

Omegon was pleased that they had not fought to the last. Enough of them remained alive, kept from death over the decades by inhuman augmentations and anti-ageing narcotics – many of them now illegal under the regime of the Mechanicum – that he had a ready core of resentment from which to recruit. He had been here for less than a hundred days and already he had established contact with three of the surviving tech-guild overseers. Progress had been swift, their agreement to cooperate in the liberation of Kiavahr quickly accomplished.

With the network of the Alpha Legion spreading across the forge-world, both in terms of Omegon’s own operatives and the agents of the tech-guilds, he was confident that the remaining five houses of the old rulers, those who had some surviving scion hidden away amongst the smoke and flames of the irradiated wastelands, would soon add their support.

Omegon had little interest in the freeing of Kiavahr from the Emperor’s clutches, except insomuch as it would inconvenience his enemies and prove to be the downfall of Corax. Though the Kiavahrans measured themselves amongst the highest in terms of technical accomplishment, they were in truth of only average ability and output in comparison to many of the Mechanicum’s forge-worlds. The primarch was ever quick to further inflate the bloated self-esteem of the tech-guilders though, and with promises and veiled assertions he had led them to believe that once they had thrown off the yoke of Imperial tyranny – he had used that phrase so often of late – the Kiavahrans would be the equal of Mars.

Sitting beneath a scalding hot pipe, nestled between a reactor feed core and a colossal drive shaft, Omegon opened up a tripod on the bare floor in front of him and set upon it a small communications device about the size of his fist.

He keyed in a sequence of frequency ciphers from memory – cracking the security protocols of the Mechanicum’s on-world communications network had taken him five whole days of calculations – and began to set up the signal. He routed the transmission through fifteen different sub-stations, bounced the carrier wave from two orbiting stations, established three dead-end backtrace locations, including one on Deliverance for his own amusement, and finally entered his personal command code check.

As Omegon worked, he felt a measure of contentment. While he had no preference regarding the existence or extinction of Corax and his Legion in themselves, their removal, and the securing of the Terran tech which the Cabal had assured they would come in possession of, would be a step closer towards achieving the aim of the twin primarchs. If Horus were to be given the greatest chance of success, the Emperor had to be isolated. In their death, the Raven Guard would provide further means for that to be accomplished.

Satisfied that only the most diligent search would indicate he was hijacking the constant datastream that criss-crossed the Mechanicum’s new estate, Omegon finally punched in the frequency address of Iyadine Nethri, his contact within the White Iron guild.

The communicator crackled for a while and then an affirmative beep told the primarch that the connection had been established. His eyes went to the small schematic readout on the front of the communicator, assuring himself that the transmission was free from monitoring. He pressed the acceptance key.

‘Councillor Effrit, I was expecting contact earlier.’ Nethri’s voice was muffled from the many layers of compression and encryption through which the transmission was being squeezed. ‘I hope that nothing is amiss.’

‘All is well,’ replied Omegon. His voice as it would emerge at the other end of the line would be nothing like his own, modulated and warped several times over to eradicate any trace of his identity. ‘I had to confirm certain orders and agreements.’

Omegon had not had to do any such thing, but was masquerading as an intermediary rather than the orchestrator of this particular coup-in-waiting.

‘We are ready to make our report to the revolutionary council,’ said Nethri.

‘Go ahead,’ said Omegon, smiling. He had created three different cells, one for each of the guilds already sworn to his cause, and while he waited, intelligence from the Alpha Legionnaires hidden in the Raven Guard had sent them on all manner of inconsequential missions and information-gathering expeditions. It was good to keep them occupied and distracted, and also necessary to test their competence and security procedures. So far his operatives had done well, and the Kiavahran authorities had no reason to suspect anything was wrong with their world.

‘The storage bays at Pharsalika have been emptied of their usual promethium consignments. We are investigating to what purpose. Coldron Diaminex has been promoted to Vice-Regent of the Augmetical Society. He was one of the most vocal political opponents of the Imperium before compliance.’

Omegon continued to listen as more pointless trivia was rambled out to him by Nethri, until one particular piece of information piqued his curiosity.

‘Please repeat that last section,’ he said.

‘Output from manufactorum thirty-eight has been re-routed to manufactorum twenty-six, councillor,’ Nethri said again.

‘Confirmed,’ said Omegon. Manufactorum thirty-eight had been employed since the coming of the Raven Guard in the construction of power armour energy conduits. That the factory had ceased production was intriguing, and ran counter to Omegon’s expectation. He would have thought that all elements of armour production would have increased since the massacre, but the opposite was proving true. For the last eighteen days, production was being scaled down.

‘Any reason given as to why this has happened?’ he asked.

‘We are not sure, councillor. There has been an increase in astrotelepathic traffic through the Cortex Spire, and I have heard gossip that a new armour design is being awaited.’

‘Understood,’ said Omegon. He checked the passive interference monitor again. There was still no sign the transmission had been detected. The primarch could not bring himself to listen to the rest of the agent’s interminable report and so asked for the only piece of information he considered pertinent. ‘What news of the Raven Guard? Is there any sign of Corax?’

‘There is no news concerning the usurper, councillor,’ replied Nethri. ‘Current reports show only those ships and personnel previously communicated to you. We have not heard of anything that would suggest when, or if, he intends or is able to return.’

‘Very well. Please submit the rest of your report by standard data packet. Ending transmission.’

He cut the link and set about dismantling the maze of communications loops and checks he had erected. While he did this, he used his Legion transmitter to contact Verson. The operative answered within moments.

‘We need an operative inside manufactorum thirty-eight,’ he said.

‘Understood,’ replied Verson. ‘I’ll have someone in place by moonfall.’

There was no need to say anything further and the communicator buzzed and fell silent.

Having completed his shut-down, Omegon dismantled the communicator and stowed it in a hip-sack that he slung onto his belt as he stood. He wore the red robes of a Mechanicum acolyte, and put on a silver and pearl mask to conceal his face before pulling up the gold-trimmed hood. Amongst a populace that contained vat-grown slaves, half-machine servitors and the augmetically-enchanced, Omegon’s size would not be worthy of remark. Even so, when forced to move openly, he travelled only during the ’tween-shift hours and through the areas of least traffic. It was better to be certain than sorry.

It was time to quit his uncomfortable environs and move on to the next safe area. Two days was long enough to be staying in one place. He already had his next location in mind.

Seven

Servant of Terra
To the Mountain
Hold Fire

Marcus Valerius blinked hard, his thoughts clouded with a vision of a golden panorama and the echoes of a resonant voice whose words he could not quite understand. His temples throbbed painfully and his eyes ached for some reason he could not fathom. The voice in the praefector’s head changed, becoming more mundane and insistent, close at hand.

‘Are you all right, praefector?’

Blinking again, Valerius focused on the man in front of him. It was Pelon. After-images of golden eyes faded from memory, replaced by the manservant’s plain features.

‘Yes, I am fine,’ said Marcus, rubbing his brow with his knuckles. He turned and looked out of the metres-thick plasglass at the ship tethered alongside the viewing gallery.

His strange daydream becoming more unreal with each passing second, Marcus felt a moment of pride as he looked at the Servant of Terra III, lit by the dock lights against the shadowed orb of Terra. His new command, it was nothing more than a messenger cutter, smaller than a destroyer, but still large enough to boast a warp-capable engine. His requisition had been fast-tracked through the station’s official channels, countersigned by Corax himself, and the refitted cutter had been found to take him back to Therion.

‘The shuttle will be here in five minutes, praefector,’ said Pelon.

Valerius turned his head and saw his manservant being followed by a motorised trolley, steered by the half-form of a servitor. Several chests and bags were piled on the bed of the trolley.

‘Is all of that mine?’ said Valerius, startled by the amount of luggage. ‘We have a cutter, not a bulk hauler!’

‘Most of it is supplies I have managed to acquire whilst on the station, praefector,’ confessed Pelon. The trolley whined to a stop beside Valerius. ‘I spoke with one of the crew of the Namedian Star, which arrived this morning. The warp storms have been continuing. I thought it better to prepare for a long journey. Even before the storms, it would have taken us forty days or more to reach Therion.’

‘Very good,’ said Marcus. His sigh made a lie of the words.

‘What is wrong, praefector?’ Pelon shot an accusing glance at the baggage. ‘Have I forgotten something?’

‘Not at all, Pelon. Your attention to your duties, as ever, is nothing less than absolute.’ Valerius glanced up and down the gallery and saw they were alone. He felt an odd sensation of anti-climax. His visit to Terra had been short and uneventful, his time taken up with administrative work concerning the loss of his regiment. ‘I must admit to mixed feelings about our return to Therion. My command has been destroyed and I return in ignominy.’

‘Far from it, praefector,’ replied Pelon. He rummaged through the bags and produced a small silver flask and cup. The manservant poured a measure of dark red liquid from the flask and handed it to Valerius. ‘If not for you, the Raven Guard would have been wiped out.’

‘But nobody can know that, or at least my part it in,’ said Valerius, keeping his voice hushed. ‘Branne was right, the dreams that led to our rescue attempt will be viewed with suspicion.’

‘Then it is with admirable humility that you must bear the secret, praefector,’ said Pelon. ‘It was not to further your own fame that you went to Isstvan.’

‘They’ll strip me of my praefecture, Pelon,’ said Valerius, with another deep sigh. ‘I would not blame them. I have proven myself a less than competent commander.’

‘Again, I think your modesty does you injustice, praefector. The sacrifice of your command was a terrible but necessary thing to do. Had Commander Branne not insisted on your staying on the Avenger, I am sure you would have proudly led the diversionary attack in person. To preserve life when its sacrifice is required is worthy, praefector, but wrong. You showed your merits in making that difficult decision.’

‘That is true.’ Valerius was heartened a little by his servant’s assurance, though doubts lingered still. Past his reflection in the window, he saw a glimmer of light from a shuttle’s engines emerging from the hull of his new ship. He turned to Pelon. ‘You have the air of a philosopher about you, Pelon. Where did you learn such a thing?’

‘A life below and between the decks of a warship, praefector,’ Pelon said with a sly smile. ‘There’s enough personalities and merchantry going on there to give any man a sound understanding of politics and trade. Though I wouldn’t be expecting an Imperial governorship any time soon.’

‘Where is this shuttle picking us up?’

‘Bay fourteen, praefector,’ said Pelon. He said something to the driver-servitor and the trolley wheeled around on its thickly tyred wheels. ‘Follow me.’

Valerius took another look at the starship, and wondered if it would be the last thing he ever commanded. He took a deep breath, straightened the blood-red sash across his body and stepped out after his servant, determined to make a good first impression on his new crew. It might be his last command, but that was no excuse to make it a bad one.

In a secluded valley a few kilometres from the mountain keep where Corax had met with Malcador and Dorn, three ornithopters and two bulk-lifters waited on the main apron of the terminus. Sleeting rain drenched their metal hulls and formed small lakes on the wide circle of black asphalt. Distant thunder rumbled, adding to the noise of idling engines and the tramp and splash of booted feet.

The wind whipped Corax’s hair across his face and drove the icy rain hard against his skin, but he did not flinch from the elements. Being raised in the claustrophobic confines of Lycaeus, he relished the outdoors, whether sun or snow, night or day. To breathe air under an open sky – even air as tainted as that of Terra –was a luxury the primarch had only dreamed of during his early years.

His Raven Guard filed quickly onto the transports, accompanied by long lines of servitors carrying weapons and equipment for the expedition. The Emperor had not been more forthcoming about the defences that protected the ancient gene-tech and so Corax had prepared for all eventualities.

Alongside the black armour of his legionaries strode twenty figures of gold: Legio Custodes led by Arcatus. Malcador had said they were assigned by the Emperor, but Corax wondered if they were not present to keep an eye on the legionaries rather than aid them. Corax had detected a degree of animosity between his Raven Guard and the Custodians, brought about by his legionaries’ forced internment for the last few days. It mattered little to Corax, he was glad of any extra aid that could be offered, and if the Custodian Guard turned out to be a hindrance he could demand that Malcador recall them from the expedition, though whether that demand would be met was less certain.

A splash of red came into sight: Nexin Orlandriaz. He wore the robes of the Mechanicum, and with him came an entourage of half-machine orderlies and brain-scrubbed servitors. Malcador had assured Corax that the genetor majoris was loyal to Terra, and considered the foremost expert in genetics currently able to assist. The primarch could not process all of the information and memories implanted by the Emperor – it came to him in flashes and starts, nightmarish and fragmented – and was sure the knowledge of Nexin would prove a useful guide in unravelling the secrets of the gene-tech.

A hydraulic hiss followed by the whine of armour caused Corax to turn towards the door leading from the control tower’s interior. Dorn stepped up to the parapet, now fully armoured in gold and yellow inlaid with obsidian and malachite, his gauntlets ornamented with rubies and black gemstones. Lines of concern furrowed Dorn’s heavy brow.

‘You have everything you need?’ asked the Imperial Fists primarch.

‘If not, it is too late to worry about it,’ replied Corax. ‘We will adapt.’

Dorn did not meet Corax’s gaze, but stared out into the distance to where sheets of rain fell on the steel-girdered gantries and black-tiled roof of a half-built gun tower.

‘I know that the Emperor has given his permission for this venture, but I cannot allow you to leave without asking you one more time,’ he said. ‘Will you not bring the Legion to Terra?’

‘My mind is set,’ said Corax. ‘The Emperor has shown me a way to bring the Raven Guard back into the war, in a way that suits us all.’

‘I don’t know what it is you are after and, unlike you, I know better than to ask,’ said Dorn. ‘I trust the Emperor to know best.’

‘That implies that you do not necessarily trust that I do.’

‘If the Emperor wills it, I am agreed. I do not have doubts about you, brother. We must forever hold the Emperor’s judgement as the highest there is, or we must wonder if we are nothing more than creations of vanity. He is the Master of Mankind, and he will steer us to Enlightenment.’

‘He made us what we are, but I cannot divine his purpose any more,’ said Corax. ‘Do you think we have failed?’

‘We conquered the galaxy in his name, brother. We brought humanity into the light from the darkness of Old Night. He created us for that purpose and no other.’

‘The Emperor also created Horus and made him Warmaster,’ countered Corax, unsettled by Dorn’s words. ‘He brought the likes of the Night Haunter into his plans.’

‘What else could he have done?’ said Dorn. ‘Curze is one of us, though perhaps a victim of circumstances none of us can even imagine. I know better than anyone exactly what he is capable of.’

Corax nodded grimly. ‘The likes of Curze and Angron were broken from the start. You know the ultimate sanction open to the Emperor. He could have–’

Dorn raised a hand before he could finish. ‘I find your doubts disturbing, brother.’ The wrinkles on his forehead deepened further in annoyance as he gazed across the shuttle port, his fists clenched by his sides. ‘It is still the Emperor’s will that mankind become the masters of the galaxy.’

‘And we shall ensure it,’ said Corax. He took hold of Dorn’s arm and guided the Imperial Fist to look at him. ‘I will do nothing to endanger the Imperium, brother. I just have to do this. You have not seen your Legion crushed, not heard the dying cries of thousands of your sons in a few minutes. Understand, brother, that I will do anything to destroy Horus.’

‘I can tell that the Emperor showed you something of what I have also glimpsed. This war is greater than Horus. There are eternal powers out in the universe that crave dominion over mankind, that lust to turn humanity into their servants and playthings. Horus is just a figurehead. He must be destroyed, but not at a cost of losing the wider war. There can be no room for pity.’

‘I have no pity for the traitors,’ snapped Corax.

‘No, it is self-pity that I warn you against,’ Dorn replied calmly. ‘Whether yourself or for others, your pity will be turned against you, and become a weapon of the enemy. You are a primarch, harden yourself to loss and woe. We were born to greatness, but we must endure tragedy.’

Corax stayed silent. He saw nothing but earnest concern in the face of Dorn, and he nodded, accepting his brother’s wisdom.

‘Whatever it is you are looking for, it is not worth risking your life,’ said the Imperial Fist.

‘Is that concern I detect?’ said Corax with half a smile. ‘You are becoming sentimental, Rogal.’

‘Not at all,’ came the other primarch’s gruff reply. ‘I have few enough allies as it is. To lose another would be inconvenient. You intend to leave as soon as you have retrieved your prize?’

‘Yes, I must return to Deliverance as soon as possible. I will not see you again before I depart.’

‘Travel well and fight hard, Corvus,’ said Dorn.

‘Protect the Emperor, Rogal,’ replied Corax.

They clasped wrist-to-wrist, as they had greeted, and parted with a respectful nod to one another.

The snow came in flurries, whirled about the rocky ledge by winds gusting over the shoulder of the mountain. It had taken Corax several days to find this place, guided only by snatches of the Emperor’s memories. To find one mountain amongst the many had proven a difficult task, made all the harder for the decades that had changed the appearance of the peak since the Emperor had been here. Aerial survey had been all but impossible in the harsh weather, so the Raven Guard had searched on foot, a difficult mission for heavily armoured warriors forced to forge across metres-deep snow drifts that hid sheer-sided ravines and treacherous cliffs.

As the Raven Guard unloaded their equipment, the edges of the ornithopter’s blades were already beginning to sparkle with accumulating ice. Agapito coordinated the disembarkation, the air thick with vapour from the mouth grilles and backpack vents of the Raven Guard as they pounded up and down the ramps, helping the servitors to speed the disembarkation and allow the shuttles to depart before their engines froze.

Alpharius did as he was asked, heaving up a crate of bolter ammunition and jogging back down the bulk hauler’s gangplank. He felt no slight at performing work normally carried out by serfs and servitors, sharing with his adopted brothers some excitement at finally reaching their goal. The snow had been packed almost to ice by the comings and goings of the legionaries and their half-human servitors, but the grip of his boots was secure underfoot.

He placed the crate in the designated space and stepped aside for a moment. He caught sight of Corax standing beneath the great overhang that protected the shelf from the deluge of snow from above. The primarch appeared to be staring at a bare wall of rock.

There had been little explanation as to the purpose of the mission. Agapito had simply told the Raven Guard that they were venturing into the depths of an old storage facility to retrieve a weapon for the Legion. Alpharius had felt a thrill of achievement from this announcement. It was obvious to assume that this was the reason he had been sent to the Raven Guard. Whatever was being held in that facility – a well-protected facility judging by the amount of materiel being unloaded – was sure to be of some value to the Alpha Legion. Though he would have to confirm his conclusions with Omegon once he had reached Deliverance, Alpharius was sure that his real mission was just starting.

‘It can’t be that much of a big deal,’ Lukar said from behind Alpharius, startling him from his thoughts.

‘What?’ replied Alpharius, unsure if he had missed the start of the conversation.

‘Whatever is hidden here, it can’t be that important,’ Lukar explained.

‘How so?’ Sergeant Dor joined the pair of them beside the pile of crates. ‘It is important enough to keep us on Terra.’

‘No towers, no defence turrets, nothing to protect it at all,’ said Lukar. ‘If it was a big deal, this place would be more heavily guarded than Ravenspire.’

As Alpharius considered this, slightly deflated by Lukar’s theory, he heard the crunch of snow underfoot and turned to see Corax looming over the group. Evidently he had overheard the exchange.

‘A simplistic approach to defence,’ said the primarch, looking displeased. ‘Have you forgotten the doctrines of the Raven Guard?’

Lukar said nothing, glancing at Sergeant Dor in his confusion.

‘The most powerful defence is to never present yourself as a target,’ the sergeant said, banging a fist against the side of Lukar’s helm.

‘There is nothing that says “attack me” like ten kilometres of curtain wall and a hundred gun towers,’ said Corax, glancing back at the bare cliff. ‘On the other hand, a nondescript stretch of mountain pass would be the ideal place to conceal a powerful weapon.’

‘Forgive my stupidity,’ said Lukar, bowing his head to the primarch. ‘I was not thinking clearly.’

Alpharius’s eyes narrowed in suspicion behind the lenses of his helm. As yet he had not made contact with any other member of the Alpha Legion. He had no means to do so until instructed by Omegon. Lukar’s mistake hinted that he did not think in the same way as a Raven Guard. Alpharius decided to keep an eye on his squad-brother to see if there was any other cause for concern. If one of the Alpha Legion betrayed the presence of infiltrators, it would go ill for all of them.

‘How do we get in?’ asked Alpharius, seeking to change the subject and divert attention away from Lukas.

Corax looked down at the legionary.

‘We knock,’ the primarch said with a thin smile.

When all had been unloaded and his warriors assembled, Corax called the expedition to order. His troops lined up in their squads, while the Custodian Guard and agents of the Mechanicum gathered in their own groups to one side.

‘Though we stand on the rock of Terra, we are about to put our lives in peril,’ the primarch announced. ‘Ancient defence systems protect the prize we seek beneath this peak. Know that this mission we are about to perform is not only necessary for the future of our Legion, it will allow us to strike back at those who sought to destroy us. This day will live long in the annals of the Raven Guard and you will all be remembered for your role in it. The past is history. It matters not what went before. All that should concern you is how we act from now on. The future lies beyond this wall.’

Corax turned and strode towards the seemingly impenetrable cliff face. His first sight of it had triggered one of the memory-shards implanted by the Emperor. The primarch had not been joking when he had told the legionary that they would knock to enter.

The vault beyond was barred by a harmonic lock, attuned to an extremely narrow frequency of sound wave. There were certain parts of the rock that were linked to amplifiers within the structure, and the location of these had been revealed to Corax by the Emperor’s memories. He raised his fist to the first area and ran through the position and timing of each blow required to generate the correct harmonic key.

He banged his gauntlet against the rock face, the blows resounding deep within the hollow beyond the cliff but muffled by the howling wind and snow.

Knock. Knock-knock knock-knock. Knock-knock.

The dull echoes faded away and Corax wondered if he had mis-timed the blows or directed them at the wrong spots. His doubt disappeared as the grinding of gears and wheeze of pneumatics shuddered across the cliff face.

The primarch stepped back as a massive portal swung inwards, two doors of solid rock several metres thick effortlessly parting, revealing a mosaic floor. The wind blew flurries of snow over the small black and red geometric designs and howled madly as it entered the cavernous space beyond.

‘Wait for my command,’ Corax told his warriors as he took a stride across the threshold. The Emperor’s memories contained nothing that suggested the outer gate was lethally defended, but that was no guarantee of safety. He felt the faintest of tremors and, from the knowledge passed to him by the Emperor, knew that many kilometres below, ancient power plants had been stirred into life by the opening of the doors. Plasma was flaring within containment fields, electricity searing along cables and wires throughout the mountain’s depths.

Lights flickered into life, ruddy strips that ran the length of the arched ceiling, bathing the interior with a hellish glow. The walls and ceiling ran straight ahead, covered with slabs several metres across and engraved with a simple lightning bolt design. At the far end, a little less than two hundred metres into the mountain, the hall-like chamber ended abruptly, several of the wall-slabs replaced with gilded portals. Square pillars lined the corridor every ten metres, decorated with sparse geometric carvings.

Looking along the broad corridor, Corax saw that the floor tile designs were not simply ornamentation. He could recognise the pattern, discerning its message in a complex numerical code; whether from the Emperor’s memory or his own knowledge he was not sure. The tiles contained a message, a quote in an ancient Terran tongue; probably intended only for the Emperor himself, a small conceit by the Master of Mankind. Though it was in a long-dead language, Corax understood it.

In Egypt’s sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows:
‘I am great OZYMANDIAS,’ saith the stone,
‘The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
‘The wonders of my hand.’ The City’s gone,
Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon.
We wonder, and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro’ the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chase,
He meets some fragments huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

The primarch considered the words, but could not divine their meaning. His mentors on Lycaeus had taught him of poetry, of rhyme and metre and cadence, but he had never quite been able to see the appeal. Poems reminded him too much of the work-songs the prisoners had invented to keep up their spirits while they had hewn with pick and laser drill at the unforgiving stone of the penal colony. The last three lines left Corax feeling disquieted, though, as if the Emperor had suspected that his Imperium could not endure any more than the great empires of mankind’s long history.

Questions gnawed at Corax as he signalled for his expedition to prepare to enter the vault. If the contents of this trove were so dangerous, why had the Emperor kept them? He had abandoned the primarch project after the strange scattering of his progeny by the warp-bound entities called the Primordial Chaos. This much the Emperor had explained to Corax on their first meeting. Had the Emperor conceived of a time when this technology would be needed again? Had he, in truth, foreseen that one day one of his sons would require its secrets? Was it simply pragmatic not to destroy that which had taken so much labour to build? Or was this simply an extension of the Hall of Victories, in spirit if not location, a secret museum standing testament to the Emperor’s greatest achievement?

The noise of armoured boots echoed around Corax as the Raven Guard and Custodians entered, oblivious to the concealed warning beneath their feet. The clank of servitors and the drone of wheeled equipment transports filled the hall with raucous echoes, dispelling the reverent atmosphere of silence.

Searching the fragments of the memories lodged in his mind, Corax knew that the bulk of the facility lay beneath them, deep within the rock of the mountain. The doors ahead were elevators that would take them down to the hidden levels. He could not recall any traps or alarms in this place, but warned the expedition to proceed with caution nonetheless – the Emperor’s recollections were hazy in places and a slight delay for caution would do no harm.

‘Squads seven, eight and nine, secure rearguard,’ said Corax as the last of the Raven Guard passed through the portal. He moved to a slab about twenty metres from the entrance. It angled up at his touch, revealing a bank of controls. Corax punched in a sequence dredged up from his borrowed memories and the outer doors began to swing shut. ‘Transports to leave. Monitor secure channel epsilon-six for our transponder signals.’

The doors came together with a surprisingly delicate thud, leaving the Raven Guard in the red glow of the lights. Corax took the lead, quickly striding to the front of the column, where he found Agapito and the Mechanicum agent, Nexin Orlandriaz. The two of them were having an argument.

‘But it is imperative that we preserve any technology we find,’ the genetor was saying, the words coming as a clipped whisper from a mechanical grille set beneath the left side of the man’s jaw. His mouth was sealed with a pipe that looped over his shoulder into some form of rebreathing unit that hissed and whirred with metronomic precision.

The genetor was swathed in a voluminous red robe, the sleeves and hem threaded with gold designs in the shape of a cog’s teeth. A heavy chain bearing the gear-rune of Mars hung across his chest, and the device was repeated on several small ceramic studs above Nexin’s right eye. Other than the lung unit, he showed little outward signs of the heavy mechanical augmentation seen on many of the Mechanicum’s agents, but there was a strange lustre to his skin, a sheen of silvery quality. His eyes were also bizarre, seeming too large for his face, with no visible iris and dark red pupils. Given Nexin’s particular expertise – a genetor of the Magos Biologis – Corax concluded the Mechanicum operative had experimented on himself with other, less obvious, artificial enhancements.

‘The lives of my warriors are more important than any piece of equipment,’ Agapito replied. ‘We have lost enough legionaries already, I will not see any more fall without good cause.’

‘You do not seem to understand the weights being brought to the balance,’ argued Nexin. ‘A single warrior is limited. He can achieve only so much and then his light is extinguished. A weapon, a piece of technology, a fragment of our past glories, can live on for eternity, transforming the lives of billions.’

‘Life is just a commodity, right?’ Agapito snarled. He towered over the slight form of the magos, causing Nexin to flinch. ‘I remember well that attitude. That was the Kiavahran creed.’

‘Commander, what is the problem?’ Corax said briskly.

Agapito kept his gaze firmly on the genetor when he replied.

‘This half-man says we cannot fire our weapons in this place,’ said the commander.

‘Live rounds and explosive contain the potential to inflict irreparable damage to the contents of this vault,’ the Mechanicum agent added, turning his unnatural eyes to Corax. ‘Our quest will be in vain if we destroy that which we seek.’

‘And what do you know of our objective?’ said Corax. ‘What do you think might be endangered by weapons fire?’

‘The Sigillite did not furnish me with much data,’ said Nexin, stepping away from the brooding presence of Agapito. ‘However, given my proclivities and technical disposition, I have compiled my own theory on the issue.’

‘And your conclusion?’ asked Corax, gesturing for Agapito to stand down.

‘I am a genetor, therefore it is logical that we seek an object that is genetic in nature. I do not speculate, but it is reasonable to deduce that this would relate in some way to one of three prior endeavours by the Emperor: the Thunder Warriors, the primarchs and the Legiones Astartes. I do not know which.’

‘Is that right?’ asked Agapito, turning his helmeted face to the primarch. ‘Gene-tech?’

‘A means to rebuild the Legion,’ replied Corax. His gaze moved between the two of them when he next spoke, his displeasure clearly visible. ‘We are the Legiones Astartes and we do not relinquish our weapons. If at all possible, we will act to preserve the contents of this vault. If any life is put in immediate danger, we shall respond without hesitation. With that understood, there is to be no weapons fire in any other situation unless authorised by me.’

‘Yes, lord,’ said Agapito, with a nod.

‘My entourage and I will comply with your policy,’ said Nexin.

‘Agapito, if you have any cause for dispute, bring it to me,’ Corax told the commander, before turning the full force of his glare on the genetor. ‘Understand that I and many of my warriors have no fondness for those who pursue industrial strength or mechanical domination at the expense of lives or liberty. Your presence here is by no means essential, magos.’

‘I wish merely to participate and elucidate where possible,’ said Nexin. ‘Please also understand that I know something of your Legion’s history. Your oppressors were not part of the Mechanicum and it is inappropriate to conflate the misguided tech-guilds of your home system with the great endeavours of Mars. However, I recognise that we all share the same goal and at this time I will ensure that my acolytes are sensitive to any issues your past misfortunes may bring about.’

Not sure whether this amounted to an apology or not, Corax simply turned from the genetor and looked further down the hall. The end could be dimly seen in the ruddy glare: three immense doorways.

The expedition reached the far end of the corridor to find that the three doors each had a keypad set into the wall next to them, with only two buttons on each.

‘Perhaps some kind of binary code is required?’ suggested Nexin, examining the central doorway.

‘Or a finger,’ said Agapito, pushing an armoured digit into the upper button. ‘It’s an elevator.’

The door rumbled up into the ceiling to reveal an enclosed conveyor large enough for thirty or forty men, or ten legionaries with all of their equipment.

‘We will have to descend by squad,’ said Corax. ‘Agapito, I’ll leave it up to you to organise the details. I will, of course, be going down first.’

The order was not as simple to execute as first seemed. Agapito wanted to send down the Raven Guard with the primarch to act as a vanguard in case of danger. Arcatus was adamant that he and several of his warriors were in the first shift. Though the Custodian did not say as much, Agapito believed he did not trust Corax out of his sight. On top of this, Nexin was also insistent that he be included in the first party, but would not be separated from his two hulking gun-servitors.

After some further negotiation, it was agreed that Corax would descend with the Custodians while Nexin and his armoured servitors would accompany one of the Raven Guard squads. Several of the legionaries had to suffer the indignity of riding on the backs of the tracked servitors as there was not enough room for all of them to fit into the elevator.

Corax paid only vague attention to these arrangements, confident that Agapito would find a solution. The primarch searched his memories, trying to work out what awaited the expedition at the bottom of the shafts. Try as he might, he had no recollection of this place, just as he had had no memory of the main door until he had laid eyes upon it. Whatever gifts the Emperor had given him, they were highly contextual. Corax wondered if this was intentional or simply a side-effect of the psychic implantation process.

The sight of Agapito bathed in the ruddy glow, guiding a squad into the right-hand elevator, triggered an altogether different kind of memory.

The security alert lighting flickered orange and red, in time to the slow warning klaxons ringing along the corridor. Twenty inmates, dressed in their standard coveralls and heavy boots, gathered in a group beside the tower transit shaft. They carried an assortment of wrenches, picks, hammers and other tools – improvised weapons that had been carefully stashed after the work-shifts for the last thirty days.

‘Are you sure this is the right way?’ asked Nepenna, his grease-covered face screwed up with consternation, blond hair matted with oil. The ex-engineer knelt beside the open mechanical access hatch, his kit of handmade tools spread out on the bare rockcrete floor next to him. ‘If we don’t shut down these lifters, the guards will be here in minutes.’

‘It is the right way,’ Corvus assured him. The layout of the entire facility was etched on his memories. He could not explain to his companions how he had managed to explore the maze of corridors and mineworking unseen by the guards, but they had to trust him. ‘The diversionary riot in the hangar block will take the security forces away from the guard block above and along to the transit hub two miles towards the spire. That is why I chose the hangar area to catch their attention.’

‘What if you are wrong?’ This came from one of the youngest prisoners, a youth barely in his teens called Agapito, a third-generation internee. His skin showed the characteristic sallowness of those who had spent their entire lives in the artificial habitat, his eyes dark and brooding.

‘Has he ever been wrong?’ Dorsis was the team leader, a middle-aged political poet appointed by Corvus for his steady head and creativity. The others looked up to him and took comfort from Dorsis’s calm demeanour. ‘We all know the plan. The guards evacuate the block up-tower, we break into the arms lockers and take ammunition. In and out, nothing fancy.’

The patter of feet alerted Corvus to the approach of Ephrenia. She was three years older now than at their first encounter. They had shared a few months as friends when he had been found, but his swiftly maturing mind and body had left her far behind. Even so, she was devoted to Corvus, a nimble-minded and -footed messenger who was adept at using crawlspaces and service ducts to elude the pickets of the sentries.

‘The fire has been started on deck four of the north hangar,’ she reported breathlessly. ‘Danro and the others have holed up in the maintenance bay like what you said.’

‘Good,’ said Corvus, ruffling the girl’s hair. Her smile sent a shiver through him, of joy and despair in equal measure. Joy that he might be the one to free her from this life of bondage; despair that he might get her killed in the attempt.

It was not good to think about such things. Corvus knelt down beside Ephrenia.

‘There will be guards on the overhead monitoring gallery,’ he told her. ‘You know which way to go?’

‘Yes, Corvus, of course,’ she replied, in a tone children seemed to reserve for patronising adults. ‘I’ll pass by the kitchen flues, the ovens will have been damped at first alert.’

‘Good,’ Corvus said again, sending the girl on her way with a paternal smile. ‘Get something to eat.’

She nodded and ran off down the corridor.

‘Come on, come on,’ muttered Standfar, a white-haired old-timer who had been chosen as lockpick on the mission.

‘Relax,’ said Dorsis. The team leader glanced at Corvus and then at the battered bronze chronometer he had been given. ‘At least another two minutes until the next patrol.’

Corvus nodded in agreement. He needed no timepiece, his internal clock as accurate as anything that could be fashioned or stolen by the prisoners. They waited in tense silence as the rumble of the lift grew louder and louder.

With a heavy thud, the elevator arrived. Nepenna was packing his tools into a soft leather cloth, placing each into its pocket in the fabric. Agapito and Laudan grabbed the concertina doors and hauled them open. The others had their tools raised, ready to fight.

The elevator was empty.

‘I wish you were coming with us,’ said Agapito, as the others hurried into the lift. The youth craned his neck to look into the face of the prisoners’ guerrilla commander, who now stood more than a head higher than the tallest amongst them, his unnatural growth showing no signs of abating. No worksuit would fit him any more, and so his followers had tailored him a uniform out of stolen blankets, wire thread and dyed sheets. Black and grey, it seemed an appropriate yet underplayed mockery of the commandants’ gaudy outfits. The suit fitted perfectly for the moment, but Corvus knew that in only a few weeks’ time his constant increase in mass would have it bursting at the seams.

‘Too much chance that I will be seen,’ replied Corvus, slapping the young man on the arm. ‘If a guard were to see me, our secret would be out. Better that I keep my head down for the moment. I know you will do just fine without me.’

With a nod, Agapito stepped into the conveyor with the others. Corvus slammed the doors closed with a smile and an encouraging wink. Now alone in the hall, he felt very exposed. The clatter of the elevator chains sounded dully from the shaft as the lift ascended towards the upper levels.

It was hard not to get excited. The nascent rebellion was barely started, but momentum was surely building. Corvus had spent a year planning this first phase, travelling far and wide across Lycaeus, invisible to the eyes of the wardens. He had scouted out the forces opposed to him, learnt every step of the complex that housed several million internees. He had established communications cells in each wing and tower, and devised a dead-drop system to pass messages between the groups as the work-shifts changed.

Corvus had watched and noted the guards’ actions when a few small-scale incidents had been staged. A fight here, a sit-in protest there. He had, somewhat foolhardily he realised, sat unnoticed in security briefings and listened to the vice-commandants detail the patrols and schedule the inspections, and with this information he had set up smuggling circuits and hidden caches that avoided the security sweeps.

This exercise was just the latest in the last few days to test out his theories. It would not be wise to act too soon, and every tiny insurrection and discipline breach had been carefully timed not to arouse suspicion. If the enemy had any idea that their charges were building up to something, the patterns would change and Corvus would be forced to start over. Even so, he was committing his followers to a road that would lead inevitably to outright rebellion. The ammunition that would be stolen by the party he had just sent would not be missed for another ten days – he had checked the manifest inspection dates that morning. By then the guards might connect the theft to the weapons missing from Tower Four, and a full-scale security clampdown would ensue.

In fact, Corvus was depending upon it.

When the guards left their blocks, they were vulnerable. Though they outgunned the prisoners, they were hugely outnumbered. When the revolution proper was started, they would be swept away in a few bloody days.

The clump of a boot forced Corvus to retire into the nearby shadow of a support girder. Three guards, one of them a corporal, marched directly past him, their eyes passing over Corvus as if he was not there.

As they were about to turn the corner, the corporal stopped. His head turned towards the maintenance access panel. Corvus could see nothing wrong, but the guards were suddenly wary for some reason. It was then that Corvus saw what the corporal had spotted: tiny flecks of oil spattered on the whitewashed wall.

Unnoticed, Corvus emerged from his hiding place, stepping silently to come at the guards from behind. He flexed his fingers and decided which two of the three would have their necks snapped first. He chose the one on the right and the one in the centre. The third would be silenced by an elbow smash.

It would mean a step up in the timetable. The death of three security men would not go unpunished. Corvus considered his contingency plans as he loomed over the guards.

‘Find out who’s on cleaning rota for this sector,’ the corporal said, jabbing his truncheon towards the offending oil stain. ‘Punishment detail, five days.’

‘Yes, corp,’ replied one of the guards.

Corvus stopped mid-stride, hands moments from the necks of his chosen victims, who were still oblivious to his presence.

The trio moved on and Corvus breathed out slowly, fading back to the shadows.

All was well. The plan was still on track. In forty days from now, Lycaeus would be free.

‘What’s he doing now?’

Lukar, as usual, felt the need to give voice to the question that the rest of the squad had not dared ask. Sergeant Dor had Alpharius and the others covering three of the dozens of branching corridors that led away from the chamber at the bottom of the elevators. The rest of the Raven Guard were placed in defensive positions close to the other entrances.

Alpharius glanced quickly to his right to where Corax paced back and forth between the various openings, head bowed in thought. The Custodians stood close to the primarch, helmeted heads turning left and right as they followed his reciprocating course. The Mechanicum contingent were fussing over one of the combat servitors, which had burst several hydraulic lines under the weight of the legionaries that had ridden on it during the half-hour long elevator descent.

‘We’re stuck,’ said Canni, his multi-melta directed down the leftmost of the three passageways. ‘What else would it be?’

‘No, that can’t be right,’ said Sergeant Dor. ‘He must know the way.’

‘Something isn’t right,’ said Alpharius. ‘Everything about this mission has been ad-hoc so far. We’ve barely had a briefing. I’m with Canni, I think we’re trapped here.’

‘We can’t be trapped,’ insisted Dor. ‘There’s only been one way to come so far: one big entrance tunnel and then the elevators. Marko, watch your sector! That goes for the rest of you.’

Marko turned his head back towards the passage with a grunt of apology.

‘But he doesn’t know where to go next,’ said Lukar. ‘Or if he does, he’s taking his time deciding what to do.’

‘Ancient defences,’ said Dor. ‘There must be something up ahead that he’s trying to figure out.’

‘He has a plan.’ Marko’s interjection silenced the others. The heavy weapons specialist did not say much, but when he spoke it was usually insightful. ‘The primarch knows it is going to be dangerous. He is facing a difficult decision.’

‘Aye, that’s it,’ said Dor. ‘Weighing up the different options. Just like that time in Fellhead.’

The Lycaeus veterans laughed. Alpharius, masquerading as Terra-born, knew not to join with their reminiscing from the time of the rebellion.

‘A right bad job that was,’ chuckled Lukar. ‘Do you remember Thaneus getting his finger snapped off by that vent slam-door?’

‘Shouldn’t have been poking around in dark places,’ said Dor. His laugh stopped quickly. ‘Wait, it looks like the primarch’s ready to go.’

Alpharius risked the sergeant’s wrath with another glance towards Corax. He was in conversation with the ranking Custodian and Commander Agapito, finger pointing out one of the arched openings.

‘Squad, stand by for orders,’ said Sergeant Dor.

Eight

Akin to Theseus
Dark Alliances
Hidden Defences

The Emperor remembered this place as the Labyrinth, a name from ancient Terran legend that only had vague meaning for the primarch. Corax knew that it did not matter which of the corridors they followed initially. Each led into a randomly shifting network of passages and bridges that responded to the presence of intruders, directing them away from the inner vault. There were also numerous automated defences, both in pre-planned killzones and wandering the maze. It was a cunning artifice, allowing no strategy because there was no logic to out-think.

Corax remembered that the shutting and opening of doors, the shifting of movable gantries and the spinning of enormous turntables, was directed by the random melting of a glacier on the other side of the mountain, impossibly intricate to predict even for his superhuman mind.

He could have the entirety of his old Legion and not be able to find a route through by trial and error. At first he had been dismayed by the thought of getting trapped in the Labyrinth, but the more he had considered the problem the more Corax had convinced himself that the Emperor had implanted some clue or stratagem that would outfox the random nature of the situation. If not, he had been sent on a fool’s errand, and that seemed equally as impossible as the task at hand.

There had to be a way, and so the primarch wracked every memory he could pull from his thoughts, seeking some tiniest nugget of truth that would provide a solution. The Labyrinth had been activated after the Emperor’s final visit, and so the Master of Mankind had never traversed its depths. There was nothing to be learnt from first-hand experience.

A flash of inspiration had come to Corax. The Emperor had overseen the construction of the Labyrinth, and in that there was a pattern. As ingenious as its operation was, the Labyrinth was not infinite; there were only so many possible configurations it could align itself to at any given time.

Slowly an image formed in the primarch’s thoughts, of passages being delved and bridges erected. He saw the great engines being sunk into the rock that would power the Labyrinth, the power channels that linked those engines to the sensor beneath the glacier, the pneumatics and gears that drove the whole machine.

Just like the mosaic behind the door, there was a formula to be discovered, a single equation that could sum up the immense operation of the Labyrinth. Corax could not compose such an equation in his head, it was too vast, but from what he could now remember of the construction it was possible to make a start.

As the workings of the Labyrinth unravelled in front of his mind’s eye, Corax saw a weakness. It was possible to present the Labyrinth itself with a dilemma it could not solve, requiring it to respond in contradictory ways that could not be physically accomplished.

The Labyrinth could be tricked into jamming itself open.

‘I need three exploration teams,’ he told Arcatus and Agapito, speaking quickly. ‘Take the sixth, eighteenth and thirtieth corridors.’

‘Is it wise to split our force, lord?’ asked Agapito. ‘You warned us of defence systems.’

‘We must split our force, commander. The squads must be on full alert.’ Other memories were becoming fixed in Corax’s mind. ‘They will encounter mobile sentry devices as well as fixed gunnery emplacements. They employ laser weaponry and solid shot cannons, easily powerful enough to penetrate Legiones Astartes armour. These devices use broad spectral analysis, heat and vibration detectors, and proximity trips. Blind grenades and plasma discharges will render them inoperational for short periods. Tell the legionaries to look for sensor plates, they are likely to be mounted on the weapons themselves as well as at points on the walls. Do not forget to check the ceilings and floors.’

‘Destroy the sensors and the guns will be blind?’ said Arcatus.

‘Best to destroy the guns as well,’ said Corax. ‘There may be redundancies and cross-weapon networks in the defence grid. Warn your warriors that the battlescape will be changing constantly. The area they are about to enter is highly active, capable of transitioning from one format to another. They will come across meeting points between the elements of the maze, likely doorways and bridges. Crossing the threshold of these points will activate a transformation of the layout. Our warriors must also be prepared for environmental and gravitic changes?’

‘Gravitic changes?’ said Arcatus. ‘What sort of place is this?’

‘Some of the tunnels can invert, and there are chambers set with gravity devices counter to the standard field,’ continued Corax. ‘Also beware of thermal and atmosphere changes. The maze is hazardous, but it contains nothing that our troops cannot surmount.’

‘This sounds like a nightmare,’ said Agapito. ‘How are we supposed to get any kind of force through that? And what about those who get left behind?’

‘I know how the maze will react, and every action will be guided by me. All movements and contacts are to be reported directly to me across the command channel. All orders from me must be acted upon without delay. Arcatus, you must be my spearhead.’

‘I am under orders not to leave your side,’ replied the Custodian.

‘I must remain here to coordinate the mission,’ Corax told the gold-armoured warrior. ‘I need your group, there are not enough Raven Guard to unlock the Labyrinth. I need your warriors, Custodian, and their complete obedience.’

‘My orders were specific,’ said Arcatus, shaking his head. ‘Who can say what will happen to us in that maze?’

‘You must trust me, Arcatus,’ said Corax.

‘The Legio Custodes cannot afford the luxury of trust,’ came the reply.

The primarch searched for an alternative, eyes settling on the cyborg creations of the Mechanicum. He dismissed them. The servitors were too slow to respond to orders, and would be more of a liability than an asset during this part of the operation. Corax turned back to Arcatus.

‘I am asking for your help, Custodian,’ said the primarch. ‘Your orders may be to watch me, but your role is to protect the Emperor. With the secrets held beyond the Labyrinth, I can forge a new Raven Guard Legion. That Legion will fight against Horus. If the Custodians wish to have such allies, you must aid me now.’

Arcatus remained silent for a while, the mask of his helm hiding any thoughts and expressions.

‘Do you require all of my men?’ he asked.

‘Preferably,’ said Corax, making quick calculations. ‘Fifteen may be sufficient.’

It was some time again before Arcatus spoke next.

‘Very well,’ he said. ‘We will all venture into this labyrinth. What do you require of us?’

‘Thank you, Arcatus. Adjust your communications to the Raven Guard frequencies, Commander Agapito will furnish you with the details. Please divide your Custodians equally between the three expeditions. Agapito, you will lead team one. Arcatus, I will give you command of team two. Senior sergeant in the force is Nestil, correct?’

‘Yes, lord, Nestil has seniority,’ replied Agapito.

‘He shall be commander of the third team. Teams are to advance in combat squads, five men each, with ten metre dispersal in each squad and a twenty metre gap between squads. Is that understood?’

‘Yes, lord,’ said Agapito. ‘I shall start the briefing.’

‘This seems too dangerous work for uncertain reward,’ said Arcatus. ‘I hope it is worth it.’

Considering Arcatus’s words, the primarch took a moment to evaluate his course of action. From the moment the Raven Guard entered the Labyrinth, Corax and his warriors would be committed. The deadly series of traps and defences would be set in motion and there would be no chance of withdrawal. They would either reach the vault or die in the attempt. The leader of the Raven Guard was sure that the gene-tech held the key to resisting Horus, no matter the sacrifice required to acquire it.

‘It will be worth it, Custodian,’ replied Corax. ‘The Emperor would not go to all of this effort to protect something of no value. This gene-tech contains the secrets of our creation, and with those secrets the forces of the Emperor will multiply a hundredfold. When the Raven Guard strike back at Horus, you will be thankful of the choice you have made.’

‘If we survive that long,’ said Arcatus.

‘That will depend on your discipline and swift reactions,’ said Corax, ‘and I am in no doubt the Custodians have both in ample supply.’

With a nod, Arcatus returned to his men. The large hall rang with the thunder of boots as the Custodians and Raven Guard moved to their designated positions. Corax blocked out the chatter over the vox. He closed his eyes, creating a picture of the Labyrinth in his mind. No one had set foot within its walls since its completion, and so the primarch knew the starting layout from the schematics gifted to him by the Emperor.

The Emperor had designed the maze to outwit any foe, but had given Corax just enough insight to tip the balance. It was up to the primarch now to make the correct decisions. Corax had learnt to pick locks from Olda Geb back on Lycaeus, but he was about to pick the most complicated lock in all of the Imperium, devised by the Emperor himself.

He took a deep breath, focusing on the first fifty metres of the Labyrinth. He would know within that distance whether he could crack the secret of the maze. If not…

Corax chided himself for the moment of doubt. There would be no failure. He could not allow it. He had not said as much to Agapito, but in his calculations he had allowed for a ten per cent attrition rate. If that proved to be true, those Custodians and Raven Guard who gave their lives to the Labyrinth could not be allowed to die in vain.

He let out the breath.

It was time to start.

The drone of the air barges powering through Kiavahr’s polluted skies thrummed constantly through the cracked tiles on the roof, the vibrations sending a tiny but constant stream of dust across the glimmer of light that crept through a crack between the ill-fitting metal plates of the wall. The workers’ shack was dark except for that single glimmer, which created a dim pool of light in the centre of the hut and touched upon half-seen machines and tools piled along the walls. The air was thick with the smell of rust, moisture seeping through a small culvert beneath a broken sink on the wall opposite the door.

Omegon heard footsteps on the metal gantry outside. He stayed immobile, hidden by the shadows, his bolter held ready.

The plate of the door creaked open, shedding flakes of oxidised iron into the light that trickled through the opening. The doorway was lit from behind by the glow of a strobing searchlight, flickering through a red haze of rust-polluted air. A man with a loose tunic and baggy trousers appeared in silhouette. He darted a glance over his shoulder before stepping inside and closed the door behind him, blocking out the glow of the air barge navigation lights.

‘Councillor Effrit?’ he asked, stepping into the thin shaft of light. His pupils were wide, ineffectively trying to pierce the gloom. Omegon could see that his clothes were well-tailored, fashioned in the style favoured by the guilds before the coming of the Mechanicum. Layers of ornate cloth obscured the man’s figure, but from his pinched face and vein-heavy hands, Omegon could see that he was frail, his skin worn thin from decades of anti-agapics. His voice shared a reedy quality with his body. ‘It is Armand Eloqi.’

‘I can see who you are,’ said Omegon. The voice modulator trembled at his throat, adding two octaves to the pitch of his words. ‘Welcome.’

‘I cannot see you,’ said Eloqi.

‘That is for the best, for the moment,’ Omegon told him. ‘There is a seat to your left. Make yourself comfortable.’

‘It is a risk, meeting like this.’ Eloqi’s eyes continued to dart nervously from side to side, unable to locate Omegon. He did not sit down.

‘You were not followed,’ said Omegon. ‘You will be returned to the guild hall by the same means you arrived, with no suspicions aroused.’

‘Still, it seems to be an awful risk for no reason.’

‘Please, sit down, guildmaster,’ said Omegon. ‘We have a little while longer to wait.’

‘Wait?’ There was an edge of panic in Eloqi’s voice. Omegon smiled in the darkness. It was good that the guildmaster, and his allies, were on edge. In truth, there was no cause for them to be suspicious. The Mechanicum were totally unaware of any plot in their midst, but it suited Omegon’s need for secrecy for his pawns to be ever vigilant. Their nervousness also made their negotiating position weaker.

‘Sit down.’ Omegon did not bark or snarl the words, but he added just a little of the authority he could muster; authority that had sent warriors into battle without fear and equally despatched operatives to their necessary deaths.

Eloqi hesitantly sat on the rickety remnants of an old armchair, the fabric worn thin by generations of foremen who had slunk off their shifts to this hidey-hole to enjoy a moment’s peace from the docking yard below. It had not been used in years, not since the coming of the Mechanicum.

‘Your fortunes have failed of late,’ Omegon said quietly, his words delivered in a sympathetic tone. ‘Once you and your guild claimed rulership of Kiavahr, now you are reduced to underlings of the Mechanicum. A whole continent used to labour for your benefit, guildmaster, and the populace of an entire moon worked to death to bring ore and aggregate to the guilds’ workings. You grew powerful and your lives were filled with luxury. Do you miss that time, guildmaster?’

‘Of course,’ the old man snapped. ‘The dogs of Mars have swept away everything with their stupid hierarchies and cults. Not a die stamps nor a bolt is tightened without their artificial eyes watching, their mechanical brains counting. Scraps from their table, that’s what we must survive on now. They have not the courage to do away with us entirely, instead they inflict this wasting disease upon the guilds, bleeding us dry so that we will eventually wither and die, leaving them with the riches of Kiavahr.’

‘And you want to take that power back,’ Omegon prompted. ‘That is understandable. Why should you slave for the distant, uncaring Emperor or the Magi of Mars when your halls stand half-empty, your tables sparse and your treasuries looted.’

‘Exactly,’ said Eloqi. ‘Exactly my point, councillor. We were cowed, broken by the threat of annihilation, but the Mechanicum made a mistake in letting us live. We will take back Kiavahr. It took a hundred generations to build this world, and if it takes a hundred more to reclaim it, we will.’

‘Your freedom is so much closer than that,’ said Omegon. ‘Within the year, I predict, the guilds will control Kiavahr again. You have a powerful ally, whom I represent. The Warmaster himself, Horus Lupercal, saviour of the Imperium, stands ready to support you.’

‘Horus?’ There was awe in the guildmaster’s voice. It turned to suspicion. ‘What interest does Horus have in humble Kiavahr?’

‘You will hear soon many disturbing tales about the Warmaster,’ said Omegon, ignoring the question. ‘There will be lies, spread by agents of the Emperor to sow discord amongst those who doubt the rightful rule of Terra. You must see through the deceit and stay true to your ideals. Horus looks to those who have suffered the tyranny of the Emperor to stand up for the cause of justice. Across the galaxy there are hundreds of worlds like yours, denied their freedom, denied the right to rule themselves because of some misguided notion of compliance. Horus will give you back your freedom, and in return he expects nothing more than the support of Kiavahr should he ask for it.’

‘Wait, this sounds a lot more dangerous than it did a moment ago,’ said Eloqi, standing up. ‘I am not sure I like where this is heading. Why have you only just mentioned Horus’s interest? What does he care for the fate of Kiavahr?’

‘Relax, Armand,’ Omegon said, in his most conciliatory tone. ‘We are allies, but we must be cautious. The Emperor and the Mechanicum will do everything they can to cling on to their power. You must understand that I had to assure myself of your dedication to freedom. Throwing off the shackles of the Mechanicum will not be easy, but you must understand that you must also face down the warriors of the Raven Guard.’

‘We cannot afford a war against the Legiones Astartes,’ said Eloqi. ‘You mentioned nothing of overt action, councillor. Do you think we are fools? Our aim is to gradually usurp power, not to openly wrest it from those who deny us the right to rule ourselves. I do not like the way in which you have changed the stakes.’

‘No trickery is intended,’ said Omegon, lying through his teeth and enjoying the manipulation of this weak-willed, ambitious man. He had said much the same thing to the other guildmasters, making each feel indispensable to the cause, massaging their precious egos. ‘It is because I can trust you that I reveal this information. You alone are privy to this knowledge and I know you will guard it with your life. The Raven Guard will pose little threat to the true rulers of Kiavahr. I can tell you now that they have suffered a massive reversal. I am sure you will learn the same from other sources soon.’

This much was true. By some means, news of Horus’s actions would spread and it would come to Kiavahr that half of the Legiones Astartes had turned on the Emperor. It was better that Horus’s version of events was heard first, casting doubt on the rumours and propaganda that would be following. Part of the bargain agreed with the Warmaster was for the Alpha Legion to spread disinformation ahead of this, whilst seeking new forces for Horus’s cause. It was a mission Alpharius and Omegon were well-prepared to undertake. On many other worlds, Alpha Legion operatives and legionnaires were already sowing discord amongst the Emperor’s followers and stoking thoughts of rebellion in those who had been forced into compliance by the Legiones Astartes.

‘I have heard whispers that Deliverance is all but empty, guarded by a handful of ships and no more,’ said the guildmaster.

‘They attempted to defy the Warmaster and now the Legion has been all but destroyed. With your help, we will finish their destruction and restore the rule of Kiavahr to those who deserve it.’

‘I do not understand this,’ said Eloqi. ‘The Raven Guard attacked the Sons of Horus?’

‘Indeed, just so. The Emperor, jealous of Horus’s power and popularity, sought to withdraw the rights he had granted his Warmaster, and sent several Legions to force Horus to surrender. Horus is not without many friends, though, and the lackeys of the Emperor were destroyed. The Raven Guard escaped by a twist of fate, but they are spent. Now is the time to strike. Unless, of course, you do not support Horus in his fight for liberty.’

Omegon left the consequences of such a view unsaid, but he could hear Eloqi’s heart beat a little faster as he filled in the blanks left by the primarch. A vague reference to punishment was worth a dozen specific threats in the minds of the weak. Whatever the guildmaster imagined would happen to him was far more worrying and personal than anything Omegon could devise.

‘The Warmaster will respect the power of the guilds? He will allow us to reinstate the old laws?’

Omegon could hear the calculation in Eloqi’s tone; the greed and desire to rule. The primarch knew what the guildmaster wanted to really hear but was too afraid to voice.

‘Deliverance will be overthrown and the colony of Lycaeus returned to the guilds,’ said Omegon. ‘Horus will give you autonomy, from Terra and Mars. He does not even demand your fealty, only your friendship. He asked for you by name, guildmaster.’

‘My name? Known to the Warmaster?’

A slight wheezing outside the shack came to Omegon, almost unheard amongst the clatter of a passing freight car.

‘My other guest will be arriving in moments,’ he told Eloqi. The guildmaster was nervous enough without having another arrive without some kind of warning. ‘Do not be alarmed.’

The door opened a few seconds later. A robed figure entered, swathed in folds of black and red. A gold mask glinted beneath a heavy cowl, cables and pipes protruding from the faceplate, linked to an ornate brass machine on the newcomer’s chest.

‘What is this?’ hissed Eloqi, backing away from the new arrival. Omegon silently side-stepped into the other corner, to avoid the guildmaster stumbling into him. ‘You have betrayed us.’

‘I said not to be alarmed,’ said Omegon. ‘Do not judge by appearances.’

‘I am Magos Unithrax, guildmaster,’ said the newcomer, his voice ringing from behind the mask. ‘I am here to help you overthrow the tyranny of Mars.’

‘You… You are one of them! One of the Mechanicum!’

‘Yes, and no,’ Unithrax said calmly. ‘I come from the Order of the Dragon, and answer to a different power from Terra. With the aid of my associates, I will see the guilds restored to power on Kiavahr.’

Eloqi was speechless, his terror still gripping him.

‘Unithrax will ensure the grip of the Mechanicum is broken from within,’ Omegon explained, speaking slowly to ensure the guildmaster heard him. ‘With the magi in disarray, the guilds will be able to overthrow the usurpers. You need his help, Armand. Believe me, you need his help.’

‘What if I choose not to ally myself with this thing?’ said Eloqi. ‘Maybe we do not want any more of your conspiracy.’

‘It is too late,’ said Unithrax. ‘Already wheels are in motion. You can either be elevated to power or be crushed by the forces we will unleash. The guilds will control Kiavahr and Lycaeus again. Whether you choose to number yourself amongst those guildmasters or not is irrelevant to our plans.’

Seeing that he had no choice, Eloqi nodded firmly, affecting an air of bravado.

‘Well, it seems that I was right to trust you, councillor,’ he said. ‘I knew there was more to you than a simple alliance of the guilds. The Warmaster can expect my full support.’

‘Good, I am glad that we are in agreement, Armand,’ said Omegon, suppressing a laugh at the hollow arrogance of the man. He could imagine the guildmaster’s ambitions growing, seeing himself in audience with Horus, perhaps a master of a dozen worlds or more. It was pitiful, really. ‘It would be wise of you to leave now. You will be contacted again in due course.’

‘Yes, very well,’ said Eloqi, circling around Unithrax to reach the door.

‘One other thing, guildmaster,’ said the magos as Unithrax was about to leave.

‘Yes?’

Unithrax held out a hand sheathed in a silvery gauntlet.

‘I am pleased to make your acquaintance,’ said the magos.

Eloqi grunted and took the proffered hand in his grip. A moment later he squealed and ripped away his hand as if stung.

‘A guarantee of your cooperation, guildmaster,’ said Unithrax, holding up a fingertip that glinted with a needlepoint in the low light.

‘What have you done?’ demanded Eloqi, looking at his wrist.

‘A neurotoxin, guildmaster. It is inactive at the moment, of no threat. However, should you disclose my presence or betray our cause in any way, you can be assured that the catalysing agent will be introduced into your system: air, food, water, all can be used.’

Aghast, Eloqi stared at the puncture mark on his wrist and then glared at the magos before stumbling from the cabin.

‘Was that really necessary?’ Omegon asked, cautioning himself not to get too close to the renegade magos. It was possible that the Order of the Dragon had a poison that would work on primarchs too. ‘You can be so unsubtle at times.’

‘Let us hope it is a needless precaution, but it is not without benefit,’ replied Unithrax. ‘When the Order of the Dragon takes control, the guilds will be of no further use. Better to lay the groundwork now and ease their disposal later. Before I leave, I have messages for you, from the Fabricator-General, concerning developments on Mars.’

‘I am sure you do,’ said Omegon. ‘I am sure you do.’

The walls of the passageway were lined with large panels of a dark grey material. Alpharius ran a hand over it, the sensors in his gauntlets conveying its smooth texture to his fingertips. Tiny temperature detectors told him it was cold to the touch. Slamming his fist into one of the panels, Alpharius noted hairline cracks appearing, radiating out from the impact.

‘Ceramite,’ he said. ‘Like our armour.’

‘Don’t touch anything,’ snapped Sergeant Dor. ‘Not without the primarch’s say-so. If something shoots at you, shoot back, but don’t do anything else without orders.’

‘Yes, sergeant,’ said Alpharius, regretting his action immediately. Curiosity was not a trait that would be rewarded in his current situation. He stepped back into the group of legionaries, realising he had drawn attention to himself.

Dor and his squad were the lead element, split into two five-man groups. Alongside Dor were Alpharius, Lukar, Velps, and Marko with the multi-melta. They had covered perhaps seventy metres of the passageway, which was lit by strips inserted into the angle between ceiling and walls, bathing the legionaries in an unwavering yellow glow.

‘Look at that,’ said Lukar, pointing to one of the ceramite slabs ahead. ‘Switch to thermal.’

Alpharius did so, a film of red falling over his vision as his armour’s auto-senses tracked through the frequencies to the infra-red end of the spectrum. Behind the panel Lukar had pointed at he could see a tracery of brighter lines.

‘Power cables,’ said Alpharius. ‘Sergeant?’

‘I see it,’ replied Dor, holding up his hand to signal the halt. ‘Commander, we have some kind of power conduit ahead.’

‘Understood.’ Agapito’s reply was immediate, his voice tense. ‘Await orders.’

‘Proceed thirty metres, Sergeant Dor.’ The primarch’s deep voice cut across the vox. ‘You will see a sealed door ahead of you. Wait by the door for further instructions.’

‘Affirmative, lord,’ replied Dor, waving his hand to set the squad moving again. ‘Keep an eye out for weapons systems.’

They had advanced only another five metres when a panel in the ceiling hinged open and a multi-barrelled gun dropped into view. Lukar was the first to react, unleashing a salvo from his bolter into the opening, the explosive shells tearing through a nest of cables. Sparks showered down and the weapon wilted on its mechanical arm, twitching fitfully.

‘If that’s the worst this place has to offer, this shouldn’t be too hard,’ said Lukar.

As if in response to his bravado, there was a shout of alarm from behind the squad, followed immediately by the crack of a laser bolt.

‘Eyes front!’ snapped Dor. ‘Not our problem. Keep advancing.’

The chatter of bolter fire and the distinctive crackle of a plasma gun echoed along the passageway as the squad continued on. As Corax had told them, they came upon a chamber a few metres wider than the corridor, bare except for a door in the opposite wall. The portal was slightly recessed into the ceramite, made of the same material. Alpharius could see no sign of a handle or lock, though his thermal vision showed several power cables leading into the sill around the door.

‘We just wait here?’ asked Velps. He pulled a melta-bomb from his belt and held it up. ‘This’ll burn through that door in no time.’

‘Don’t you do anything,’ said Dor, warning Velps back with a raised hand as the legionary took a step across the room.

Alpharius looked around the square chamber. Other than its dimensions there was nothing to mark it out from the passage that had led to it. The featurelessness of the corridor, the perfect uniformity of it, unsettled him. He was an Alpha Legionnaire and intimately knew the disorientating power of anonymity. It would be very easy to get lost in such a place, and Alpharius had no intention of ending his life in this bland but deadly warren of passages and rooms.

‘Perhaps we should mark our progress somehow, in case we get turned around,’ he suggested.

‘What do you mean?’ asked Dor.

Alpharius drew out his combat blade and etched a cross into the ceramite wall to his left.

‘If we see that again, we know we’ve come in a circle,’ he said.

They waited for several minutes. Alpharius looked back down the corridor and saw the other half of the squad a dozen metres behind, still in the corridor. The heat from the power packs of the following legionaries was building up, distorting the air with a haze. To Alpharius’s thermal vision the vents on the backpacks of the other legionaries were bright white.

‘Commander, we are giving off a high heat signature,’ said Alpharius. ‘The primarch said that the defence systems had thermal registers.’

‘Good point,’ replied Agapito. ‘All squads, set cooling systems to minimum. Reduce heat signatures.’

‘Negative, do not adjust heat signatures.’ Corax’s tone was quiet but terse. Alpharius realised the primarch had to be monitoring every squad communication, a considerable mental feat. ‘I need you to trigger the thermal sensors if necessary. Team two will shortly be in position. Their progress will trigger the first transformation. The door ahead of you will open in two minutes. Stand ready.’

In the entry chamber, Corax had his eyes closed, the totality of his mind focused on picturing the mechanism of the Labyrinth and the positions of his squads. He had blocked out all input save for the constant narration that streamed across the command network into the communications bead in his ear.

Like a burglar examining the most complicated lock ever devised, the primarch imagined the interplay of revolving rooms, rising bridges, closing doorways and collapsing arches. The three forces had already begun to divide, combat squads directed through new openings to trigger the next transformation of the maze. With each random change, Corax’s plan evolved and solidified, as possible avenues of approach opened or were shut. He could not predict every movement of the Labyrinth, but he could respond swiftly to each development. The timing of each move had to be precise, and he snapped out orders in a clipped voice, redirecting the combat squads to where they were needed.

He blotted out the sound of gunfire and the rumble of mighty engines and immense pistons. He ignored the curses and warnings of his warriors. His sole purpose was the unpicking of the lock.

Twenty-three minutes and one hundred and seventeen metres after first entering the Labyrinth, the Raven Guard suffered acasualty. A legionary under Agapito’s command was struck in the chest by a laser bolt from an automated turret that had risen from the floor.

‘We have no Apothecary,’ the sergeant reported. ‘Mathan looks in a bad way.’

‘You must leave him behind, Sergeant Cannor,’ Corax replied quickly. ‘We will return for him later. Move the rest of the squad up to the second archway on your left. The doorway ahead of you will be closing in seven seconds.’

‘Mathan is still alive, barely. He needs treatment.’

‘You have your orders,’ Corax said coldly. The gene-tech – the rebirth of the Raven Guard – was a prize greater than any individual life. There could be no delays. The Labyrinth would already be moving towards its next configuration. To falter would be to fail, and that would make every life lost a vain sacrifice. ‘Move your squad now.’

‘Confirmed, Lord Corax.’

Distracted by the event, the primarch had almost missed an opportunity to get Agapito’s lead squad across a bridge that might ascend into the heights when Arcatus’s men entered the chamber ahead of them. Corax made a swift calculation and judged there still to be time enough for the crossing.

The ramp ahead seemed innocuous enough to Arhuld Dain, special weapons bearer of Squad Seven, though Lord Corax had warned the squad to approach with caution. The ferrocrete causeway rose ten metres above the floor of the chamber, leading to a circular door that looked like a ship’s airlock. Dain looked up and saw a similar opening directly above, and what appeared to be the rungs of a ladder leading from one of the walls across the ceiling.

‘How would anybody get up there?’ he asked, adjusting his grip on his flamer as the five-man combat squad advanced towards the causeway.

‘I have no idea,’ replied Sergeant Caban. ‘Stay focused.’

With a loud hiss, the double doors through which the squad had entered slid shut behind them. Dain detected vibrations pulsing through the floor at the same time as a distinctive crackling came to his ears.

‘Wait!’ the legionary snapped, stopping in mid-stride. Sergeant Caban took another step onto the causeway before turning back.

‘What is…’ The sergeant’s voice trailed away as the whole chamber lurched, spinning quickly on its axis, spilling the squad into the air.

Dain felt himself go light, drifting away from the floor. The ceramite underfoot provided no purchase for the magnogrips of his boots and he floated away, the rest of the squad lifting up around him. Sergeant Caban slipped past him, propelled through the air by his last step, gently inverting as he slowly glided towards the wall behind Dain.

The Raven Guard found themselves suspended about three metres above the floor, which had become a wall. Dain tried to twist towards the rungs of the ladder, whose purpose became clear. Angling his flamer, he fired a short burst, using it as a crude propellant to send him flying towards the ladder.

‘What are you doing?’ demanded Caban. The sergeant came to halt against the far wall, one hand outstretched to stop himself.

Dain reached out with his left hand, flailing for the closest rung. His fingers closed around the metal.

The crackling noise increased in pitch, becoming a pulsing whine. Dain looked around, trying to find the source. The ladder was thrumming with energy between his fingers. Realising his error he let go and tried to push himself away with his legs.

Lightning arced from the ladder, coruscating across Dain’s armour, earthing through exposed cabling around his midriff. The muscles in his abdomen tightened as electricity surged through the legionary, his spasm causing him to kick out, hurling himself across the room as spark erupted from his armour and flames burst from melting seals and blown circuits. He could feel his flesh charring and cracking, the pain muted by a sudden rush of anaesthetic compounds produced by his body. Dain’s jaw felt as if it had been welded shut while agony flared through his head.

Spinning madly, he blacked out, his last vision that of the room turning again, his companions plummeting towards the new floor.

‘Incoming orders,’ said Dor, motioning with his bolter for Marko and Alpharius to move through the doorway ahead. ‘Distributing on squad channel.’

Alpharius and Marko edged through the opening with their weapons ready. They found themselves on the edge of a large, vaulted chamber. Ten metres from them, the floor dropped away into a dark chasm, a natural fault in the strata of the mountain. With the thermal sight of his suit, Alpharius could see the telltale glint of power cables and weapons positions on the ceiling above, not yet activated.

‘In thirty-two seconds, a bridge will descend to your position,’ came Corax’s voice, relayed through Sergeant Dor’s vox-unit. ‘You will have forty-three seconds to cross that bridge.’

‘There are seven weapons turrets,’ Marko reported. ‘Irregularly spaced. We only have clear lines of sight to three of them from this side. We will have to get onto the bridge before we can see the others.’

‘No cover,’ added Alpharius. ‘We’ll be targets on a shooting range.’

‘Blind grenades,’ replied Corax. ‘They will disable the units for twenty seconds.’

‘Still not enough time, lord,’ said Dor. ‘The gorge must be at least two hundred and fifty metres wide.’

‘Sprint, sergeant,’ came the primarch’s clipped response.

Alpharius was about to protest but held his tongue, as if the order had been given by his own primarch. The others seemed willing to trust in Corax’s judgement and he could not afford to show any dissent.

‘I’ll go first,’ he said. ‘Marko, can you target that second turret on the right?’

‘From the edge of the chasm, yes,’ said Marko.

‘Wait!’ snapped Dor, as Alpharius readied a blind grenade from his belt. The Alpha Legionnaire froze in place.

The sergeant took a few steps past the pair, looking around.

‘Save it for when we reach the bridge,’ said Dor, lifting his bolter towards the darkness that hid the far side of the chamber. ‘We can take out these turrets before we cross.’

A deep rumbling reverberated around the cathedral-like hall, sending dust shaking down from jagged stalactites that had grown up around the heavily riveted girders that held back the weight of the ceiling. From a recess far above, a metal structure descended into view, swaying on dozens of chains each as wide as a legionary’s shoulders.

‘You have forty-three seconds.’ Corax’s voice was calm, almost emotionless.

Dor spat out a string of orders and the squad burst into action. Alpharius headed towards the metal pillars that marked where the bridge would fall. The clump of his boots activated a sensor and a turret directly above his head extruded from the metal of the ceiling. Lukar fired his bolter, shredding the gun’s casing in a storm of sparks.

Alpharius carried on, trusting to his squad to protect him as he primed the blind grenade in his fist. The whine of the multi-melta filled his ears for a split second before another turret disintegrated into a mist of molten metal that rained down on the Alpha Legionnaire’s armour.

With a thunderous clang, the bridge hit the braking pillars and rocked to a halt. Alpharius was already bounding along its length as it settled, his boots sending up flakes of rusting metal from the mesh of its floor.

‘Thirty-five seconds,’ Dor warned them, his words almost lost in another blaze of bolter fire, this time from Velps. Another turret burst into flames.

Alpharius ran across the bridge, blind grenade held ready, arms and legs pumping, his armour-assisted run covering three metres with every stride. He heard the clamour of the others following behind, and tensed, waiting for the distinctive snap of a las-bolt.

‘On the right, quadrant three!’ barked Dor. Alpharius did not look, but heard the sound of Velps behind him sliding to a halt. A red flash blazed from the gloom, melting through the bridge just a metre behind him. Velps’s bolter roared and the defence turret was silenced.

‘Grenade away!’ Alpharius bellowed, hurling the blind field detonator far ahead of him. The orb arced through the darkness, glinting ruddily as another turret opened fire, its blast scorching a line across Alpharius’s vision as it bit into the bridge decking just in front of him. The machines controlling the turret had adapted and anticipated his run; only the momentary pause to throw the grenade had saved Alpharius from a direct hit.

He bent forwards into a full sprint as the blind grenade erupted into life at the far end of the bridge, forming a whirling cloud of silvery particles and swirling forks of electromagnetic energy.

Again the system controlling the defences had evolved. The turrets were blinded, but whereas before they had ceased their fusillades, now they opened fire with a storm of bolts, flashing randomly around the chamber with a criss-cross of ruby beams. As a beam seared past his right shoulder, Alpharius almost cursed in his native tongue, the words stopped by his gritted teeth as he plunged into the storm of the blind field.

Clanking gears and hissing pistons sprang into life. The bridge lurched under Alpharius’s feet, almost sending him toppling over the low rail. The blind cloud raged around him, blotting out all of the data being fed through his armour’s auto-senses. In silence and blackness, Alpharius leapt, powering himself into the air.

It seemed to take an age for the legionary to land, swallowed up by the blind field, oblivious to the crackling las-bolts that were undoubtedly flaring all around him.

He landed with a heavy thud and almost lost his footing, coming down hard on one knee, the impact sending alarm signals through his suit. He surged to both feet and pressed on, trusting that the others were following him, trusting also that Corax was correct and there was an archway or open door ahead to provide sanctuary. The blind cloud was already collapsing, the chaff and distortive energies fluttering into the darkness.

Freed from the effects of the blind grenade, Alpharius’s comms and auto-senses sprang into life again. Las-fire blazed around him, sending up wisps of molten rock from the floor. There was no point trying to dodge the haphazard fusillade and he pressed on up the slightly sloping floor while his auto-senses shuddered. Patches of light swam across his eyes and a dull ringing sounded in his ears as the suit’s systems recovered from the blind field.

‘–igh and left,’ Dor was shouting as he emerged from the spreading miasma of disruptive energy. ‘High and left!’

Alpharius swung his bolter up to a firing position and saw through the infrared haze a flicker of the turret’s artificial eye blinking in the darkness. He fired three rounds, puncturing the casing of the gun position, sending shards of metal through the air.

‘Keep moving,’ Lukar said, slapping a hand to Alpharius’s shoulder as he ran past. Alpharius looked ahead and saw a blast door descending over a yellow-lit opening.

The legionaries ducked under the closing portal in quick succession, armour clattering. Marko was the last in line, slightly slower due to the weight of his heavy weapon. A red beam of laser energy spat down from the ceiling and shattered the armour of his right leg. Twisting, Marko tried to fall under the closing door but fell short.

‘Leave him,’ Dor snapped.

Alpharius ignored the command and acted out of instinct, dropping his bolter to grab Marko’s backpack with both hands. He hauled with all of his strength, dragging the stricken legionary under the door moments before it slammed closed with a resounding crunch.

They were in a corridor much like those they had first encountered in the maze, with drab grey walls without markings. It curved away sharply to the right, the route ahead hidden after ten metres.

‘Sergeant Dor, report status.’ Corax’s voice was assured, confident that his warriors had succeeded.

Dor looked at the squad, the lenses of his helm glinting in the bright light that came from a single strip in the roof.

‘We’re through, Lord Corax,’ he reported. ‘Marko is hurt, though.’

‘Can he move?’ The question hung in the air while Marko pulled himself to his feet with Lukar’s aid. He hefted his multi-melta, checking the power cabling that linked it to his backpack.

‘I’m not staying here,’ Marko said, voice strained. ‘But don’t expect me to do any more running.’

‘He can move,’ Dor passed on the legionary’s assessment. ‘What are our orders?’

‘Continue along the passageway for thirty metres.’

‘Understood. We are advancing,’ Dor replied.

At that moment, something came around the bend in the passage, clanking and hissing. It was a strange mix of bipedal machine and small tank, with tracked feet of metal links, its main body shaped like a turret with two multi-barrelled cannons protruding menacingly from the front. Sensor discs and artificial eye lenses dotted a small module atop the machine.

Alpharius watched as the barrels spun up to speed, momentarily taken aback by the machine’s sudden appearance; Corax had warned of such a thing but until now they had only encountered the fixed defences. Even as he lifted his bolter to fire, he realised he had reacted too slowly.

A weight smashed into the side of Alpharius, sending him reeling to his left just as the guard-machine opened fire. Lukar was firing his bolter as he took the brunt of the cannonade, fist-sized shells hammering into his armour in a welter of ceramite shrapnel and ripped metal.

Lukar was hurled backwards by the impact, his shattered armour slamming to the floor, cratered and cracked. Alpharius fired his bolter, targeting the sensor array, smashing lenses and aerials.

The side of the machine exploded into a shower of molten drops from the blast of Marko’s multi-melta, exposing steaming circuitry and wires. Dor’s bolts slammed into the rent a second later as the turret spun towards Marko. Velps leapt forwards with a melta-charge in his fist. He ducked beneath the blaze of bullets as the guardian opened fire again, smashing Dor from his feet. With a snarled oath, Velps slapped the charge on the casing beneath the guns and dived away.

The machine detonated, its destruction filling the tunnel with incandescent fury that caused heat warnings to flare across Alpharius’s helm display, an explosion far greater than that caused by the melta-bomb alone. Shrapnel carved into Alpharius’s chest and shoulder, but his armour held. The ceramite walls were similarly crackled and pitted with debris.

‘Self-destruct,’ said Velps, the paint of his armour blistered away by the fiery blast. He fired several rounds into the smoking, twitching mechanical remains, snarling curses.

Alpharius turned to where Lukar lay awkwardly on the grey floor. The face of his helm was a mess, the Raven Guard symbol embossed on his breastplate mangled beyond recognition, blood seeping from a dozen gouges in his armour.

‘The sergeant looks alive,’ reported Marko, kneeling beside Dor’s supine form. The sergeant weakly held up his hand to confirm the fact.

‘Lukar’s dead,’ Alpharius said quietly. The Raven Guard had taken the full brunt of the attack, saving Alpharius’s life. As he looked down at the blood-spattered, broken armour of Lukar, Alpharius shook his head with disbelief. ‘Why did he push me out of the way?’

‘Why did you drag me to safety?’ Marko replied, pulling Dor to his feet.

Alpharius had no answer. These warriors were Raven Guard, his enemies. His sole purpose was to ensure their destruction, but the mission required that they succeed in retrieving whatever it was that Corax sought in the vaults. That meant they had to stay alive to breach the inner sanctum of the mountain.

Yet there was more to it than that. Their eventual deaths would be a necessity, but as individuals Alpharius had respect, perhaps even friendship, for his fellow squad members. Whether this was some remnant of memory from the warrior-material in his omophagea, or something altogether more vexing and problematic, he did not like to guess.

‘We are brothers-in-battle,’ Dor said quietly, crouching to place a hand on the shattered remnants of Lukar’s chest.

‘Aye,’ said Velps, pressing his fist to his chest in salute. ‘Battle-brothers.’

‘Battle-brothers,’ Alpharius whispered, pulling his gaze from the dead legionary, unable to deal with his confused thoughts.

Arcatus eyed the channel ahead with suspicion. The passageway was long and narrow, no more than two metres wide and at least three hundred metres long, turning abruptly to the right to continue out of sight. About fifty metres away, a small gutter-like trench emerged from the wall, cutting diagonally across their line of advance. He called his Custodians to a halt and waited for instruction from Corax. In the three and a half hours since he had entered the Labyrinth, Arcatus had found a new respect for the primarch, and perhaps even a little trust. Four times, Corax’s last-minute warnings or orders had saved the him and his group of Custodians and Raven Guard from deadly traps and mechanical attack. Only a few minutes earlier, Arcatus had drawn back just in time to avoid a vaporous acid spray that would have melted through his armour in seconds.

A rivulet of liquid ran along the channel, a dark green, viscous fluid that flowed sluggishly, its level growing higher.

‘I think this passage is going to be flooded, Corax,’ Arcatus reported.

‘It is just lubricating fluid,’ the primarch replied. ‘It is no threat. Proceed to the end of the passageway. There will be three doors. Take the door on the left. Beyond is some kind of energy grid, a laser trap perhaps. Be wary.’

This last comment seemed unnecessary – Arcatus had been wary from the moment he had first stepped into the deadly maze. He followed Corax’s instructions, taking the squad to the bend in the corridor. A shouted warning caused him to turn as a previously invisible hatch opened in the ceiling. Three silver orbs, each no bigger than his fist, dropped into view.

The first exploded into molten shards as Custodian Ganius swept the blade of his guardian spear through it. The other two detonated of their own accord, showering Ganius and the Raven Guard next to him with jagged, smoking shrapnel. Wisps of vapour rose from their armour as the acidic compound melted swiftly through to flesh.

Ganius cried out – the first time Arcatus had ever heard a Custodian react to pain – and struggled to disconnect his breastplate. The Raven Guard legionary toppled to the floor with a crash, a hole melted through his helm, a slush of liquefied skull and brain matter dribbling onto the bare floor.

‘It’s through my ribs!’ snarled Ganius, dropping to one knee, clutching at his chest.

Arcatus acted without thought, to spare Ganius the inevitable agony of having his heart and lungs melted. His power halberd gleamed with energy as he swung the weapon, taking Ganius’s head from his neck in one stroke. Ganius’s decapitated corpse flopped to the ground, the echo of the impact resounding along the passageway.

‘Move up, door on the left,’ Arcatus snapped, waving his halberd to get the survivors advancing.

He stood over the remains of Ganius, alert for any more of the silver globes. Arcatus followed after the last of the Raven Guard to pass, remembering the primarch’s promise that the vault contained something that would ensure Horus’s defeat. With a last glance back to Ganius’s body, which was collapsing in on itself as the acid chewed through his spine, Arcatus vowed to himself that he would hold Corax to his word.

Nine

The Depths of Terra
Nikaea’s Legacy
Genesis of the Primarchs

The gene-tech vault lay within reach. Corax allowed himself a moment to see if he remembered anything about the inner defences, but there was nothing in the Emperor’s memories. Once through the Labyrinth, Corax would simply have to unlock the vault doors and they would stand before the prize.

‘Ready your servitors,’ the primarch told Nexin. ‘We enter the Labyrinth in two minutes.’

Twenty-three Raven Guard were dead, another seventeen crippled and left in the Labyrinth to be recovered later, a further thirteen wounded but able to continue. The Custodians had also lost three warriors. Corax had committed all of their names to memory but now was not the time to mourn or mark their passing. The Labyrinth remained to be unlocked.

Corax’s commands continued to spill from his lips in a constant stream, moving the pieces of the puzzle to where they were needed. He tried not to think of them as living, breathing warriors. Ever since he had first sent his prison-army to fight against the guards of Lycaeus, he had known his orders would see men die. Though the adversary he now attempted to outwit was no sentient foe – though, in a sense, he was being pitted against the guile of the Emperor himself – the sacrifices required were no different. Millions, probably billions, of the Emperor’s followers would die if the Raven Guard failed today and could not cause Horus to pause in his advance on Terra.

So it was that the chatter of bolter fire that now echoed distantly from the maze and blared harsh over the vox-net did not divert his attention from the task. He thought only of report and command. His Legiones Astartes had sworn oaths to lay down their lives in his service and for the cause of the Emperor, and it would be vanity to think this battle was any different.

The lead elements of the force were almost two-thirds of the way through the maze. Parts of the Labyrinth had been secured – the positions of the squads and the routes they had taken forcing the mechanism of the Labyrinth into impossible choices so that engines broke, pistons froze and gears seized.

The hardest part was over. The remaining possible configurations had dwindled to the extent that Corax could clearly see the path ahead. It was just a matter of time until the Labyrinth was bested. The primarch warned himself against complacency. The Labyrinth was still a random device, constantly changing, and could throw up a challenge he had not yet encountered and could not foresee. His brave Raven Guard and the warriors of the Legio Custodes still placed their lives in his hands.

He directed several squads to converge on a massive turntable that would open up a main accessway towards the inner reaches of the mountain. This done, he signalled Arcatus on a direct channel.

‘Custodian, you must move your men into the chamber flanking your right,’ he said. ‘You will be breaching a line of strong defences. Be prepared.’

‘The Custodian Guard is always prepared, primarch,’ Arcatus replied. ‘It seems from the reports I have been hearing that you have directed my squad into the teeth of the hardest opposition. Perhaps you hope we will fall, and thus rid yourself of our scrutiny?’

‘I have no desire to do so,’ Corax replied without rancour at the accusation. ‘Had I wished you disposed of, I have had many opportunities already. Your warriors see the hardest fighting because they are the best under my command. You and your men have abilities even above those of my legionaries and so it is against the toughest challenges you have been pitched. The Raven Guard owes you a debt of honour for your aid, which I have found of the highest value, making this task a little easier for all of us.’

There was no reply for a while, the Custodian perhaps taken aback by Corax’s words.

‘Very well,’ Arcatus said. ‘We shall continue as you say.’

The whine of hydraulics caught Corax’s attention as Nexin and his servitors joined the primarch.

‘The vault is open?’ the magos asked.

‘It will be soon,’ said Corax. He worked out the quickest route through the Labyrinth to the front of the advance and pointed to one of the openings. ‘This way. Follow me.’

Standing close to Corax, Alpharius could hear the primarch’s conversation with Arcatus, Agapito and the tech-priest. They discussed the immense vault door that now barred further progress. It was circular, five metres across, and of a metal that reflected the light dully, something which Alpharius had not seen before. The hinges were massive, as tall as him, but there was no sign of a locking mechanism: no runepad, no scanner, not even a keyhole. Around the door smoked the remains of four gun turrets that had sprung from the floor as the lead elements of the force had approached.

Alpharius listened patiently as the commanders discussed the options. Agapito favoured melta charges, but the primarch was not convinced they would breach the barrier. The magos claimed his servitors could cut their way through.

More squads were emerging from the beaten Labyrinth; some of them bearing dead warriors. Corax had assured his force that the fighting was over for the moment. Alpharius had been alarmed when the maze had been held in the grip of a titanic shuddering, the screeching of metal echoing along the tunnels and rooms, smoke from burning oil drifting through the air. It had lasted several seconds, and the Alpha Legionnaire had thought the whole complex was collapsing.

When it had finished, Corax had announced calmly that the Labyrinth was stuck, unable to respond to further movement. He had despatched search teams to return to isolated and fallen brethren, but Alpharius and his fellow squad members had been directed towards the vault entrance along with the majority of the expedition. It was there he had come across the senior leaders of the force, baulked by this final obstacle. The conversation had reached an impasse.

‘Burrowing through would take many hours, days perhaps, if it is even possible,’ Agapito was saying. ‘Is there no other way?’

Corax seemed lost in thought for a moment, eyes half-closed, before he replied.

‘It is a psychic lock,’ said the primarch, his whole demeanour changing, shoulders slumping with disappointment. ‘It can only be activated by the mind of the Emperor.’

‘Then we must rely upon physical means,’ said Orlandriaz. The magos gestured towards the two heavy servitors looming over the group. ‘I shall prepare my servants.’

‘There is another way,’ said Corax, straightening, filled with purpose again. He glanced at Arcatus before his eyes came to rest on Alpharius. The Alpha Legionnaire was disturbed by that dark gaze but did not react. ‘Balsar Kurthuri is in your squad, yes?’

‘He is, lord,’ replied Alpharius, glancing towards the named legionary who stood a few metres away from the group.

‘He was once a member of the Librarius,’ Corax continued.

Alpharius did not know his squad-brother was a psyker, and was taken aback by the thought, but assumed Corax would not have misremembered. He nodded.

‘Yes, lord, he was,’ said Alpharius, unsure of the primarch’s intent. He called for Balsar to join his superiors.

‘This is unwise,’ said Arcatus, stepping between the primarch and the approaching legionary, his halberd raised. ‘Do you not remember these words: “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.” Such were the words of the Emperor.’

‘The Edict of Nikaea,’ Corax said with a nod. ‘I remember the words well, Custodian. I heard them myself from the lips of the Emperor.’

‘Then you understand their meaning: sorcery is condemned. I cannot allow this,’ said Arcatus.

Corax pursed his lips in thought and then gently laid a hand on the warrior’s shoulder, guiding him aside. He looked at the legionary standing before him.

‘Balsar, you have powers of the mind, yes?’ he asked.

‘I was a Librarian, lord, it is true,’ replied the battle-brother. ‘I have not exercised my powers since the Librarius was disbanded by your command, and have sworn not to employ them.’

‘To whom did you swear that oath, Balsar?’

‘To you, Lord Corax,’ the legionary replied.

‘And if I release you from that oath, can you use your powers now?’

‘My lord… I also swore in the name of the Emperor to cease using my abilities,’ said Balsar, his voice trembling. ‘Are you ordering me to break my oath?’

The words struck a chord in Corax, his lips twitching with frustration. It lasted only for a few seconds before the primarch’s expression hardened again, dark eyes narrowing.

‘This will not happen,’ barked Arcatus before Corax could speak. His Custodians assembled around him, summoned by some means Alpharius had not detected. ‘The Edict of Nikaea is absolute.’

Corax ignored them all and addressed Balsar again.

‘Have you ever felt “dark temptations”?’ the primarch asked, his tone harsh and dismissive. ‘Do you feel any now?’

‘No, my lord, I have never felt any temptation, dark or otherwise,’ Balsar replied dryly. ‘My life has been woefully bereft of temptation since I left Terra.’

‘I will not allow sorcery, not here on Terra itself,’ said Arcatus. A glimmering field sprang into life along the length of his halberd blade and was matched by the glow of the other Custodians’ weapons. This was greeted by the raising of several dozen bolters by the assembled Raven Guard. Alpharius followed suit a moment later, directing his weapon at the Custodian Guard.

‘You use words whose meaning you do not understand,’ said Corax, his expression growing grim. ‘The Emperor guards Terra from the most unnatural powers. Do you think he will allow such a thing on his world?’

‘I do not guess the mind of the Emperor, I merely ensure his decree is enforced,’ replied Arcatus. He looked around at the legionaries that surrounded him and then back at Corax. ‘Sorcery is forbidden.’

‘Do you judge the Emperor to be a sorcerer, Custodian, or perhaps his regent, the Sigillite?’

‘The edict does not concern my superiors, only the warriors of the Legiones Astartes,’ Arcatus said coolly.

The two sides faced each other in silence, fingers tight on their weapons. Alpharius looked at Corax, trying to judge the primarch’s next move. It would go badly if the Custodians were killed. Investigations would follow that would not only hamper the retrieval of the vault contents but might also lead to the discovery of the Alpha Legion infiltrators. There was also the very real possibility that Alpharius would be killed in the fighting, as Corax’s summons had brought him close to the Custodians. It was impossible to guess at Arcatus’s intent, his face hidden behind his golden-masked helm. Similarly, the Raven Guard were faceless warriors, their weapons showing their intent with no hint of reluctance.

Only Corax’s face could be seen. The primarch looked pensive, but his eyes never moved from Arcatus. Corax held no weapon, but Alpharius knew well enough that the primarch was fully capable of killing Arcatus without armament. He wondered what ‘dark temptations’ played on the primarch’s mind at that moment. A single blow would fell Arcatus and the Raven Guard had the other Custodians surrounded, though the gold-armoured warriors would surely slay many legionaries before they fell.

‘Father, do not abandon us.’ Corax’s voice was a whisper, not meant to be heard by the others. There was anguish in those few words, spoken between gritted teeth.

Alpharius sensed something, a motion or sensation on the edge of awareness. It seemed that he heard distant howling and screaming, for a fraction of a moment. It was as if he was in the heart of fiery battle, his body responding as if he was fighting for his life, hearts pounding, blood racing. A looming presence filled the corridor, an oppressive surge of power that seemed to compress Alpharius’s skull. From the disconcerted murmurings of others, he knew he was not alone in feeling it.

A dull clang echoed from the door.

All eyes turned towards the portal, where a golden gleam emanated from the metal, glittering with power. The door swung inwards and lights flickered into life beyond as the auric glow faded to reveal a white-walled antechamber. There was a smaller door beyond, of silvery metal. Every surface was covered in a thin icy sheen. Vapour swirled as cold, sterile air washed from the entranceway.

The silence was absolute as the assembled warriors stared in disbelief at the open doorway. Corax briefly bowed his head, eyes closed, his lips moving, though the words he spoke were too quiet to hear.

Alpharius glanced at Balsar and saw a few golden motes of energy dancing from the lenses of his helm. Corax noticed this too and stepped between the former Librarian and Arcatus, quickly blocking the Custodian’s view.

‘It seems the Emperor has intervened,’ said the primarch, directing his gaze towards the Custodians.

Arcatus and his warriors remained poised. Corax motioned for his Raven Guard to lower their weapons, some of them doing so only reluctantly. The primarch turned his attention back to Arcatus, who stood down his own men after a moment.

‘Wait!’ said Corax. Suddenly weapons were raised again. Behind the primarch, Nexin had taken a step towards the opening. The magos stopped and looked back to see the scowl on the primarch’s brow.

‘Apologies, Lord Corax,’ said the Martian, with a deep bow. ‘You will lead. I will follow.’

Alpharius lingered a moment as Corax and the others headed towards the vault. He stopped Balsar with a hand on his arm.

‘That was not the will of the Emperor, was it?’ Alpharius said.

‘I do not know what you mean,’ replied the legionary. ‘It is forbidden for me to use my powers. I was not relieved of my oath.’

‘But still,’ said Alpharius. It seemed unlikely that the Emperor had intervened on their behalf, having not made his presence felt throughout the tortuous journey through the death-traps. It had to have been Balsar’s doing. ‘That wasn’t really the Emperor, was it?’

Balsar said nothing and left Alpharius to fall in behind the departing primarch and commanders. Alpharius could not tell whether Balsar was lying or not, though there had been no trace of deception in his voice. He felt tense at the thought of psykers using their powers again, and equally disturbed by the idea that the Emperor had perhaps witnessed what went on and intervened on Corax’s behalf. No amount of deception would protect him if one of the former Librarians decided to delve into his mind, despite the precautions taken by the psykers of the Alpha Legion to shield his mind from casual inspection. The threat of psychic discovery had always been present, but the realisation that such a warrior was in Alpharius’s squad was a more distinct worry.

If the Librarians returned, his task would become a lot harder. He would have to watch his thoughts as much as his deeds and words.

The main vault was a circular room, with a domed ceiling carved into the naked rock. There were several other doors leading from it, but it was the contents of the central chamber that dominated Corax’s thoughts as he stepped across the threshold. He could not recall any defences in this inner sanctum though he had a flash memory of a final failsafe – any interference with the outer door would have seen the contents destroyed by a fusion charge set underneath the vault. Perhaps it was the presence of this memory that had stopped the primarch ordering the cutters and drills brought forth, though it was only now that the dire consequences of such an act were clear to him.

His misgivings about the events that had just transpired evaporated, replaced by satisfaction, curiosity and a sense of awe. Here was the Emperor’s laboratory, where it could be said the Imperium was truly created. This was the birthplace of the primarchs.

Everything was pristine, environmental regulators and stasis fields maintaining the facility in the exact condition it had been left. The air was clean, every surface brightly scrubbed. A large device sat at the heart of the room, dormant for the moment but riddled with energy cables and pipes, not dissimilar to the machinery Corax had thought he had glimpsed around the Emperor’s Golden Throne. It reached to the ceiling, covered with glass-panelled openings that showed hundreds of dials and phials, tubes of coloured liquids and touch-screen interfaces.

Under the direction of Agapito and Arcatus, the Custodians and Raven Guard fanned out, securing the other doorways. The Emperor’s memories were hazy on what lay behind them, but Corax had a dim recollection of vast generators, freezing chambers, databanks and room upon room of cogitating machines.

Thick cables coiled out from the central machine, snaking across the plainly tiled floor to twenty other devices, arranged in a circle around the chamber. Corax recognised them immediately: the incubators of the primarchs. They were empty of their artificial amniotic fluids, their glass cases raised open. Where lights had flickered, gauge needles had wavered and monitoring systems chirped and beeped, now there was lifelessness and silence.

Magos Orlandriaz started gasping and muttering, wandering from one machine to the next with wide eyes. Corax smiled at the almost childlike delight with which the tech-priest was drawn from one sight to the next, occasionally pausing to place a reverent hand on a piece of technology, often stopping to gaze dumbly at something suddenly revealed to him.

Each of the incubators was numbered on its side. Corax quickly sought out number 19, his own chamber. He realised something was wrong as he approached. The incubator was incomplete, its insides missing like a tomb with no coffin within. Only the casing and outer protective canopy remained: a mess of cables and pipes lay loose at the bottom of the shell, disconnected.

He remembered the cracked and broken machine that had been found beside him beneath the glacier. For years, long and lonely years, he had wondered about that machine and its purpose. Only when the Emperor had come to Deliverance had the primarch learned what he was and how it was he had awoken on that strange, desolate moon.

Corax still vividly remembered that meeting. Laying his hands upon the incubator chamber brought it back to his thoughts.

‘Scanners have picked up an object moving towards the main dock,’ reported Agapito, standing at one of the scanner arrays. The youthful freedom fighter was wearing the black trousers of a guard, the jacket that had completed the disguise discarded once the tower had been opened to the guerrillas. A curving slash was slowly forming a scab across his bare chest and his left arm was wrapped in a fresh bandage. ‘Trajectory implies a landing pattern, but it is impossible to say what sort of craft.’

The main tower was still heavily damaged and in disarray from the fighting. Corvus’s followers manned the stations as best they could, but the equipment was barely functioning and most of them were working from guesswork rather than training. That anything had been detected by the shattered scanner array was remarkable.

The bodies of those who had worked here before had been removed, but there were still bloodstains on the grille of the floor and brushed metal consoles; cleaning up the detritus of revolution was low on Corvus’s list of priorities whilst there remained men alive on Kiavahr who opposed his rebellion. Many of the screens and keypads were shattered from weapons fire and exposed wiring burst messily from larger rents in the equipment banks, but power had been restored and a few crackled with life under the nurturing of Corvus’s most technically gifted followers.

The defence turrets that littered the immense spire of the main guard tower were definitely operational. The revolutionaries under Corvus’s command had ensured they had been taken intact, as their leader had instructed.

‘Bringing the weapons systems to lock-on,’ announced Branne, standing at the firing console. Like his brother, he showed the wounds of war, sporting a graze across his cheek, a patch of blood matting the light scattering of downy hair on his chin.

The tower rumbled as immense turrets moved into position, targeting their mass drivers towards the incoming vessel. Branne looked expectantly over his shoulder at the revolutionary leader, tousled hair falling over his youthful face.

‘Shall we fire?’ asked Branne.

‘No,’ replied Corvus.

He stood at the armoured window of the control room looking out into the darkness. Kiavahr was waxing towards full, looming large behind the mineworkings and crane gantries on the horizon. From this distance it looked the same as ever, but Corvus knew that below the welter of swirling red clouds the planet was in turmoil. He fancied he could still see the aftermath of the atomic detonations unleashed by the mining charges his forces had dropped down the gravity well to the import station below, but it was just a fancy.

The guilds were broken, that much he had already learned. Denied the resources of Lycaeus, their counter-attacks against the moon bloodily repelled, they had taken to fighting amongst themselves, pitting the strength of their city-factories against each other. Some had sent signals asking for truce, fearing further atomic bombardment from orbit. Corvus had ignored their pleas. Let them kill each other, he thought, staring at the world that had enslaved millions for generations.

Corvus’s reflection was superimposed over the rising orb of Kiavahr against the thick glass. He was a grown man now, more than a grown man. There was barely room for him to stand straight in the control chamber at the summit of the Black Tower. They were calling him the Saviour now, those he had led to freedom, and he had felt their awe at his continued growth. A decade had passed since his first encounter with the inmates of Lycaeus, but it was only now that he enjoyed his first moment of celebration.

Victory was his, the overlords had fallen.

‘Craft still approaching,’ said Agapito, his voice betraying nervousness. ‘Branne, how is that lock-on holding up?’

‘Still have half the weapons systems targeted, brother, no problems,’ replied Branne. ‘Corvus, we only have a few minutes until the flight path brings the approaching craft too close to fire.’

‘We will not fire,’ Corvus said, turning to face his companions. ‘It may be a diplomatic mission from Kiavahr. I can see it: it is a shuttle, nothing more. It can’t hold more than a dozen men at the most, no threat to us. Have a company of the Eighth Wingers meet me at the main dock.’

There was something else about the shuttle that intrigued Corvus. At the moment it was barely a glint of gold in the distance, but the revolutionary leader was filled with a sense that its passengers were important. The sense nagged at him, not as a warning, but something else he was unable to define. Corvus felt assured that those aboard the approaching craft bore him no ill intent, though he could not say why he felt such conviction that this was true.

‘Let me know if anything changes,’ he told the others, patting the bulky communications handset hanging from his belt.

Corvus ducked under the rim of the mangled security door and into the corridor beyond. A handful of prisoners with scavenged shotguns stood guard outside; an unnecessary precaution, but one that had been insisted upon by his followers. The self-appointed bodyguard fell in behind their commander without command, joining him in the chamber of the Black Tower’s main conveyor.

The elevator rattled down several dozen floors until it reached the accessway that led to the main port landing apron. Ignoring his companions, Corvus strode quickly along the passageway, past work teams that were busy labouring with welders and metal panels to reinforce the repairs that had been hastily made after the tower’s occupation. Blue sparks danced in the air as Corvus made his way towards the landing port.

Gapphion, one of his senior lieutenants, waited for him on the main deck with a hundred of his men from the company of the Eighth Wing. Above, the energy dome of the landing field crackled yellow against a starless sky.

‘That was quick,’ Corvus remarked to his lieutenant.

‘We were close by,’ Gapphion replied, a hint of a smile on his lips. The left side of his face was heavily bruised, his eye closed tight, a cut running across his brow. His grey hair was cropped short but his beard dangled almost to his belt. He still wore his grey prison coveralls, but the collar was marked with half a dozen lapel studs taken from dead security officers. There was blood on most of them.

‘A happy coincidence,’ said Corvus, directing an inquiring stare at the man. Gapphion shrugged away his leader’s suspicion and turned to shout an order to his men, directing them to set up perimeter around the landing apron.

They moved like soldiers, Corvus thought as he watched the ex-prisoners spreading out across the ferrocrete. A few years ago they had been gangsters and philosophers, thieves and agitators. Now they were his army, well-drilled and highly motivated. He knew much of the credit was his, but in turn he owed a lot to whoever had given him the gifts he possessed. People listened to him without doubt, and he had an innate understanding of fighting. To direct an attack or devise a strategy came as naturally to Corvus as breathing.

Some of the men were pointing upwards and shouting.

A craft appeared beyond the field barrier, twin trails of plasma bright against the dark sky. As it descended through the barrier high above, Corvus saw that it was shaped like a great mechanical bird of prey, golden in colour, with angled wings that stretched back like those of a diving hawk.

It hovered for a moment, and plasma engines dimmed as the pilot switched to anti-gravitic impellers to land the craft. Falling slowly, the shuttle came to rest at the centre of the apron, within the inner circle marked there in red paint.

Corvus looked through the canopy and was surprised to see that the cockpit was empty. He suddenly felt a hint of suspicion at the seemingly unmanned craft; perhaps it was loaded with explosives, a desperate act of petty revenge from one of the guildmasters.

‘Ready weapons!’ Gapphion called out.

The men raised an assortment of slug-throwers, shotguns and lasrifles looted from dead guards and captured weapons lockers.

A door opened in the side of the shuttle beneath the right wing, directly opposite Corvus. Light spilled from within as a gangplank extended from the craft with a clang. A shadow appeared in the light, waiting for a moment at the entryway before emerging into view.

Whispers spread through the men, of surprise and amazement. Guns quivered in shaking hands and there were clatters as some of the soldiers dropped their weapons. Seemingly without prompt, the men lowered themselves to the ground, putting aside their weapons and bowing their heads. Some prostrated themselves, whispering fervently.

Corvus glanced to Gapphion beside him. The lieutenant was on his knees too. There were tears in his eyes and an expression of joy etched on his slack-lipped face.

‘So majestic…’ Gapphion muttered. ‘What glory. What power.’

Confused, Corvus directed his attention to the man descending the landing ramp. He seemed unremarkable. In fact, he seemed so unremarkable that Corvus could not discern a single distinguishing feature about him. He was of average height, with dark hair and moderately tanned skin. In build he was neither bulky nor slight, but of normal proportion, slightly larger than the malnourished men who now abased themselves before him. He was dressed in a robe of white linen, free of ornamentation except for a necklace of gold on which hung a pendant fashioned in the shape of an eagle with outspread wings, a lightning bolt in its claws.

The man’s eyes were as indistinct as the rest of him, neither blue nor green nor grey nor brown, but a flecked mixture of all. Yet there was something in those eyes that reached into Corvus and touched upon his inner self. There was wisdom and kindness there, and antiquity that was very humbling but also disconcerting.

And at the same time as Corvus saw this, he also witnessed the arrival of a demigod, wreathed in golden light and dressed in white finery that burned with its own light. He saw a stern face set with two golden orbs for eyes, piercing in their intensity, searing into the core of his being. The stranger seemed to tower over the kneeling men, borne forwards upon a carpet of undulating flames.

It was impossible to reconcile the two images. The supreme, grandiose king of men approached Corvus, but all the while the slight, unimposing man flickered within. Finally Corvus’s mind could fight no longer against the glamour and he saw the new arrival as his followers did, and was filled by an overwhelming urge to pay obeisance to this stranger.

He fought that instinct. He had waged a war so that his people would not bow before another man. The newcomer’s effect on Corvus’s men unsettled the rebel leader. He stared with narrowed eyes, unable to discern which image was true and which was illusion as the stranger paced slowly and confidently across the ferrocrete.

‘Who are you?’ Corvus demanded. ‘What have you done to my men?’

The stranger looked around at the guerrilla fighters regarding him with adoration, seeming to Corvus slightly nonplussed at the scene. His blond hair fell in waves across his shoulders as he turned his head, spilling like fiery liquid. Another wave of majesty swept over Corvus and again the guerrilla commander had to make a physical effort not to fall to his knees.

‘An occupational hazard,’ said the man, returning his attention to Corvus. He fixed the rebel leader with a stare, his eyes now permanently golden like bottomless wells of light. There was a glow of power beneath his skin, as if the stranger’s flesh were embers masked behind thin paper. Corvus experienced a momentary fluttering in his breast and a knot of anxiety in his gut, a fraction of the effect the man was having on his warriors. ‘I am the Emperor of Mankind. I created you.’

Hearing these words was like a veil lifting from Corvus’s eyes. He saw the Emperor as he had seen him before, watching the growing infant through the canopy of an incubator. His face had been distorted by curved plates of glass, but the features were unmistakeable. The guerrilla leader had long pondered the face from his earliest memories, wondering to whom it belonged. Now vague recollections became sharp memory. Corvus recalled the noise and lights and booming voices that had engulfed him, remembered the surge of power and disorientation as unnatural forces had borne him away from the place of his creation.

Now he saw and knew for certain the face of his father, the only individual worthy of Corvus’s unwavering obedience. He lowered himself to one knee in deference, understanding that the stranger spoke the truth. Here was the Master of Mankind.

‘What do you call this place?’ the Emperor asked.

‘It used to be called Lycaeus,’ Corvus replied. ‘Now we know it as Deliverance.’

‘A good name,’ said the Emperor. ‘Please, rise, my son. We have much to talk about.’

And they did. Corvus withdrew from his men and took the Emperor to his quarters, an old guard station in the mid-levels of the Black Tower. Corvus sought out food and drink for his guest, ashamed at the meagre fare he could offer his father. The Emperor waved away his concerns, sitting on the rough bunk that served as a chair for the massive rebel commander.

‘Do you recognise me?’ the Emperor asked. His expression was hard to read, but Corvus thought he detected a hint of surprise behind the question. Whatever glamour had befallen the guerrillas had a lesser effect on Corvus, and the man before him was definitely the same as from his old memories.

‘As if from a dream,’ he replied.

‘Interesting,’ said the Emperor, with a smile and a nod.

They spoke about many things. Though Corvus was bursting with questions, about the Emperor, himself and the wider galaxy, he found that he did most of the talking, answering constant queries from the Emperor concerning what had taken place on Deliverance and Kiavahr. Corvus furnished him with all the information he could concerning the history of the star system and the war for freedom he had waged over recent years.

Corvus paced the room while he spoke, animated and energised. The Emperor sat on the bunk and nodded occasionally, in understanding rather than approval. In fact he showed no judgement of any kind: no condemnation or endorsement of Corvus’s actions. He listened intently to everything Corvus told him, sometimes asking exceptionally pertinent questions about the tiniest of details, wishing to absorb everything about Corvus’s life.

‘But there is one piece missing that I cannot answer,’ Corvus said, finally voicing what his heart had yearned to know since his first discovery. ‘How is it that I came to be here?’

The Emperor’s mood darkened and his face grew grim. For the first time, he took a sip from the glass of water Corvus had given to him hours earlier, eyes haunted.

‘There is another universe,’ he said. ‘It lies alongside ours, part of it but also separated. It is called the warp.’

‘I know of it,’ said Corvus. ‘Though I have not seen it, I hear that ships can use it to travel to distant stars. Some of the machines of Kiavahr are said to harness the energy of the warp.’

‘It is a universe of boundless power, and can be accessed as you say, by ships and by the minds of special men that we call psykers,’ the Emperor continued. ‘Like our galaxy, the warp is inhabited, by creatures not of flesh but thought. Sometimes they hunger for our material lives, wishing to feast on our mortality. You and your brothers were taken from me by denizens of the warp before you were ready.’

‘Brothers?’ Corvus was excited by the prospect, pushing aside the questions that the Emperor’s answer had prompted. Though he had made many friends amongst the prisoners of Lycaeus, always Corvus had been aware of his otherness, and when they had started to call him Saviour any hope of normal relationships had ended. That there were others like him filled Corvus with hope again.

‘Yes, you have brothers,’ said the Emperor, smiling at his son’s delight. ‘Seventeen of them. You are the primarchs, my finest creations.’

‘Seventeen?’ Corvus asked, confused. ‘I remember that I was number nineteen. How can that be so?’

The Emperor’s expression grew bleak, filled with deep sorrow. He looked away as he replied.

‘The other two,’ he said. ‘That is a conversation for another day.’

‘Where are my brothers now? Are they with you?’

‘You and the other primarchs were snatched from me by strange powers of the warp, thrown across the galaxy on unnatural tides. That is how you came to rest beneath a glacier on this moon. Yes, I have seen what befell you, learning your life the moment I laid eyes upon you. The rumour of you, of a magnificent being who led a rebellion here, has travelled farther than you realise, and it was word of this that attracted my attention. Your brothers, those I have found, were similarly scattered to far-flung worlds. Like you, they are all great warriors and leaders. That was my gift to you. You are supreme commanders, with intellect and physical ability unmatched by anything in the mass of humanity. I engineered you from my own genetic structure, to be my sons and my lieutenants in the Great Crusade.’

‘What is this crusade? How many of my brothers have you found?’

‘Most of them,’ replied the Emperor. ‘I have vast armies: the Legiones Astartes. As you are crafted from me, so they are created from you. The primarchs are the generals of those armies, leading humanity’s reconquest of the galaxy. The Long Night, the Age of Strife, has ended. The remnants of the old empires smoulder out in the darkness, the dying coals of humanity almost smothered by the dark. The Great Crusade fans the flames into life, bringing with it reason to drive out superstition, Enlightenment to replace barbarism. With your help, I will unite humanity and lead mankind to rule the stars.’

It was so much to take in, but Corvus knew it to be true. Not only the words of the Emperor seemed certain, the idea of what he described meshed with a much deeper feeling. Knowing he was a primarch, that he had been created to fight and to command, explained much that Corvus had never understood about himself. On a level that he understood in his spirit and was encoded into every cell of his body, Corvus knew what he was.

‘I swear my loyalty to you,’ said Corvus, sinking to one knee in front of the Emperor. He met the Emperor’s gaze and felt elation like no victory had given him before. ‘I am your son, your primarch, and your will shall be my command.’

‘That is good,’ said the Emperor. ‘I have an army waiting for you. They are the Raven Guard, highly decorated and distinguished in my campaigns already. When you are ready, you will assume command of the Legion.’

‘Am I not ready now?’ Corvus said, having been elevated and then deflated by the Emperor’s words.

‘Not yet, my son,’ said the Emperor. ‘But soon you will emerge to join your brothers and take your place at my side and at the head of the Raven Guard. First though, tell me of Kiavahr. What are your intentions?’

‘To bring peace to both the world and its moon, and to heal the wounds of the past,’ said Corvus. ‘With your help, I will succeed.’

‘Peace is the hardest goal to achieve,’ said the Emperor. ‘Victory, the cessation of war, the demilitarisation of our opponents, these we can obtain with might of arms and perseverance. Peace? That is an altogether different beast.’

Corvus frowned, but nodded slowly.

The Emperor sipped from his glass, his gaze unmoving. ‘Tell me again, then. Tell me of the wounds you and your followers inflicted upon this world, and of the peace you would bring to it with my help.’

There was palpable excitement amongst the legionaries within the inner vault. Alpharius had seen many things in the service of his Legion – sights that would stay with him until he died, of strange worlds and even stranger foes – but the very mundanity of his surroundings added to their mystique. This was a place of science, the laboratory where the Emperor had set about bringing to life his vision for the galaxy.

Unnoticed by the others, Alpharius walked around the circle of incubators until he came to the one numbered 20. The last, always overlooked, his primarchs had begun their lives in this metal and glass construction. It looked the same as the others, no larger to account for the twins that had been nurtured within. Perhaps the Emperor had not intended for there to be Omegon and Alpharius. That the two had been nourished as one accounted for their strange bond, and perhaps their slighter build in comparison to their brother primarchs.

Had the Primogenitors of the Alpha Legion known this was where they would send their agent? Surely not, Alpharius thought. Who would have believed that this place still existed?

Everything was pristine, exactly as it had been for decades, centuries perhaps. Alpharius wondered why this place had been kept in this way. What purpose did it serve? He heard Magos Orlandriaz talking excitedly as he accessed a data terminal in the central tower. Wires snaked from the wrist of the tech-priest, plugged into a series of sockets beneath a flickering holographic runepad. A wide screen scrolled with a mass of symbols, the green light reflected in the magos’s eyes.

‘This… This is amazing,’ gushed the tech-priest. ‘So much is here. So much!’

‘What have you found?’ asked Corax, as the primarch looked over the magos’s shoulder.

‘Everything, I would say. All of the genetic files for you and your brothers. I have studied the splicing of genes and the manipulation of the same for over a hundred years and I cannot comprehend more than a fraction of this.’ The magos glanced at Corax, his strange eyes wide. ‘The root factors alone will take several years of analysis to deconstruct.’

‘We do not have years,’ said Corax. ‘Horus readies himself for his offensive. I need something that will enable me to rebuild the Raven Guard, not spawn endless theses and theories for your Martian friends.’

‘Of course,’ muttered Orlandriaz. He busied himself at the console for a while longer while Alpharius absorbed what had been said.

Corax intended to bring the Raven Guard back to full strength, that much was now clear. Alpharius did not know if such a thing was possible, but if it were, a restored Raven Guard Legion would be a serious threat to the Warmaster’s plans. The Alpha Legionnaire was confused by the possibility; the Raven Guard had been close to destruction, so what purpose would be served by allowing them to escape and cling to this lifeline?

It struck Alpharius that there was some more complex scheme at work than the simple elimination of his adopted Legion. He considered the possibilities and came to the inevitable conclusion: the Alpha Legion could do what Corax intended. If he was able to secure the secrets of the gene-tech for his primarch, his Legion would become paramount amongst those who had turned against the Emperor. He could see the sense in such a plan, and was pleased that it offered some explanation as to why the Alpha Legion had sided with Horus. The Warmaster had struck the first blow against the Emperor, but it would be the Alpha Legion who would eventually emerge from the shadows to take their rightful place.

His thoughts were interrupted by an exclamation from the magos.

‘Look at this!’ Corax leaned even closer, brow furrowed as he observed Orlandriaz’s work. ‘Here we see the derived strands, the foci divergences from the primarch material that was used by the Emperor for the first of the Legiones Astartes.’

Everyone in the chamber had heard the magos’s words. Custodians and legionaries all turned towards the tech-priest as he continued, talking more to himself than the audience.

‘It’s a masterpiece of engineering,’ Orlandriaz said. ‘Such sublime beauty encoded into the structure, yet imbued with endless potential.’

‘Speak clearly,’ said Corax. ‘What have you found?’

‘Evidence of the Emperor’s true greatness, proof of his claim to be the Omnissiah,’ exclaimed the magos. ‘New life from old life. Millions of years of evolution extracted, distilled and improved. It is the key.’

‘The key to what? You make no sense, magos,’ said Agapito. ‘What is so important?’

‘We must look for the stasis chamber,’ announced Orlandriaz, turning away from the screen. He flinched, as if he had forgotten the others around him. He looked around the chamber for a few moments before addressing himself to Corax. ‘It would take many years of deciphering these files to produce anything of direct use to you, Lord Corax. However, in the vault somewhere is a stasis cubicle, which contains the secret we require.’

The magos’s words prompted another flash of memory in the mind of Corax. He saw a cylinder, glowing with silvery light, encased by a mesh of golden wire. A sequence entered his thoughts, and the primarch tapped in the code on the holograph.

Dozens of lights lit up on the central console, flashing in sequence as Corax entered the cipher. When he tapped the last rune, the strobing lights settled into a constant gleam. New messages flickered across the screen, announcing security protocol deactivation, granting access to the console’s contents. With a puff of escaping gases, lines appeared in the central spire of the machine, which resolved into panels that extended outwards and slid down into newly-revealed recesses. Silver glowed from within as an intricate wire cradle emerged from the depths of the device, just as Corax remembered. At the heart of the mesh was a narrow cylinder half a metre high. It was encrusted with suspensor devices that lifted it from the containing web, as if it ascended on the light itself. A bluish-green fluid trembled inside, freed from the stasis field that had confined it.

‘This is the true secret of the vault,’ announced Corax. Around him, the Raven Guard, Mechanicum adepts and Custodians gathered, attention drawn by the spectacle. ‘This is the gift of the Emperor.’

‘What is it?’ asked Agapito, voice hushed.

‘The source of our existence, commander. Living genetic material used to create the primarchs.’

Though he did not have the expertise of the Magos genetor, Corax knew enough from his own experience and the memories of the Emperor to understand the importance of the discovery. The Emperor had explained to him many years ago how the primarchs’ genetic material had been used to create the first warriors of the Legiones Astartes. His Raven Guard were his genetic sons, in a way, as all of the Legions were of their primarchs. Each of the twenty had been created by the Emperor, unique with their own strengths and weaknesses. What the Raven Guard had was the blueprint from which each of the twenty primarchs had been first derived. It was pure, for want of a better word, unchanged by the Emperor’s subsequent experiments. The perfect specimen from which to extract gene-seed for future generations of Raven Guard, or to create a whole new generation of primarchs.

‘Surely you do not intend to remove this sample from Terra?’ said Arcatus. ‘I am no magos, but I understand enough history to know that the secret of the primarchs’ genetic code cannot be allowed out of this vault. What if it were to fall into the hands of Horus?’

‘The Emperor himself led me to this place,’ replied the primarch. ‘I need no further warning, nor license, from you. It is the wish of the Emperor that I return to Deliverance to rebuild my Legion with this technology.’

‘Is it true, lord?’ asked Agapito. ‘Does this sample hold the key to the future of the Raven Guard?’

‘Yes it does,’ said Corax, smiling at the thought. ‘An untainted source of gene-seed, but more than just that. If the magos and I can unlock its secrets, we can combine its potential with that of the Raven Guard gene-code. The primarchs were created from birth, while a legionary must wait until adolescence before implantation can begin. Imagine a generation of Raven Guard that combines the code of both, the superior growth of a primarch enmeshed with the abilities of a legionary. What would normally take a generation could be accomplished in months.’

‘What about training?’ said Arcatus. ‘What about proper education in the nature of Enlightenment? A legionary is more than just an enhanced body. He is forged in mind as well as flesh. These things cannot be rushed, their implementation is as much an important part of the process as the physical changes.’

‘I did not say it would be instant,’ said Corax, annoyed by the Custodian’s negativity. ‘You still fail to understand the full possibility. At present, only the smallest percentage of candidates are suitable for gene-seed implantation. If we can use the primarch material properly, that will no longer be the case. We could take any child, from the earliest age, and accelerate their development, as mine was hastened. Any child. Our recruitment pool would expand from a few tens of thousands to millions.’

‘But each primarch was crafted by the Emperor himself,’ said Agapito. ‘A labour of many years by the greatest mind of mankind. We do not have such resources, or the time.’

‘Which is why we will not be creating a new generation of primarchs,’ snapped Corax, exasperated that his commander showed such doubt. He calmed himself, realising that Agapito and the others, except perhaps for Orlandriaz, could not comprehend the technical issues involved. ‘The tech-priest will aid me in isolating those strands of the material we require, and we will then improve the Raven Guard gene-seed with that information. A blend of primarch and Legiones Astartes: a warrior superior to a legionary, yet produced on an unprecedented scale.’

‘And I say again that such a weapon cannot be allowed to leave Terra,’ said Arcatus. ‘If the Emperor had desired such a thing, he would have created it himself. There is a reason why he fashioned the gene-seed of the Legions in the way he did. Unless you think you will achieve something the Emperor could not?’

The retort that sprang to Corax’s mind stayed there as he considered the Custodian’s words. Was he allowing himself to get carried away by the prospect of rebuilding the Raven Guard? Was it even possible to achieve what he had said? Given pause, he took a deep breath, considering his answer.

‘It may be that the Emperor chose to create the gene-seed with its current limitations for good reason, but the galaxy has changed,’ said the primarch. ‘It is equally ludicrous to suggest the Emperor granted me access to this facility without knowing my full intent. He has allowed us to enter this place so that we might make use of its contents. It is the will of the Emperor that we unravel the secret of this technology and use it in the fight against Horus.’

Arcatus had no reply to this and turned away without further word. Agapito remained, and he spoke with concern in his voice.

‘Whatever the rights and wrongs, I can’t say, lord,’ said the commander. ‘But Arcatus speaks the truth when he says that this is dangerous. We cannot let knowledge of its existence spread too far.’

‘What are you suggesting?’ said the primarch. ‘The only man on this expedition who is not a Raven Guard or Custodian is Orlandriaz, and the Sigillite vouched for his presence.’

‘If we return to Deliverance with this technology, it will not go unnoticed by those outside the Legion,’ said Agapito. ‘The fewer that know of its existence, the better. I think we must learn a lesson from the Emperor here. It will require facilities and technicians to perform the work to unlock the gene-secrets. If such a place is heavily guarded it will attract attention. We know there are still guild sympathisers on Lycaeus, and despite our best efforts they still have the means to know what passes in the Ravenspire. We must avoid rousing their curiosity.’

‘You make a good point, commander,’ said Corax. ‘I have been so focused on the retrieval of the genetic archive I have not considered how we should house it. Your plan has merit, I will consider it.’

‘And do you really think it is possible to create a new form of legionary?’ asked Agapito, his voice touched by awe. ‘One that is as good as any of us, in a fraction of the time?’

‘I do not only believe it possible, I guarantee it,’ said Corax. ‘With Horus poised to strike, we must retaliate in some fashion. Unless we have the means to perpetuate the Legion for the war to come, we cannot risk our current strength in such an attack. The Emperor has placed his faith in me and I will not fall short of the mark. The Raven Guard will have a part to play before the matter with Horus is decided.’

‘I am sure of that, lord,’ Agapito said. ‘What of the Custodians? Do you think they will cause further problems?’

‘Arcatus overplays his objections,’ said Corax. ‘He must attend to his duties as he sees them, but I think he understands what we will achieve. I believe I have convinced our companion that we pose no threat to the Emperor.’

The exit from the vault was far less fraught with danger than the entry. Having secured the contents of the inner chamber, the precious stasis capsule of primarch material included, the Raven Guard loaded up their supply carriers and heavy servitors to extract their spoils to the surface.

They worked in shifts, escorting lines of cases and crates back through the dormant Labyrinth to the waiting shuttles on the ice shelf at the entrance. Data crystals and storage units were carefully sealed within protective boxes. Larger pieces of equipment, the purpose of which was lost on all except the magos and Corax, were secured to the tracked trolleys that had brought in the expedition’s ammunition and food. Only the incubators and a few power generators were left behind.

It took the best part of a day to ferry everything to the surface. During that time, a signal was sent to the Raven Guard ship waiting in orbit. Drop-craft from the Avenger arrived as the last of the expedition emerged from the vault, together with the most precious treasures, which were watched over by the primarch himself, Orlandriaz and Arcatus.

Alpharius, along with the rest of Sergeant Dor’s squad, again found himself hefting boxes onto the drop-ships while the commanders discussed what was to happen next. Alpharius dawdled as much as he was able, to hear snippets of the discussion, though he learnt nothing that he would not have expected.

‘Be very careful with that,’ said Agapito, as Alpharius took the handles of a frost-rimed crate, Velps at the other end. A blinking energy monitor on the side of the box indicated the below-zero temperature within. ‘Break that stasis generator and we’ll have gone through all of this for nothing.’

‘Aye, commander,’ replied Velps.

They carried their cargo onto the ramp of the closest Stormbird, treading carefully through the drifts of snow. Alpharius was quietly amazed at the contents of the container: the stuff from which the primarchs had been created, from which the Emperor had engineered the Legiones Astartes, and ultimately the gene material that had turned him into an Alpha Legionnaire.

Odd thoughts crept into his mind as he hefted the box over the lip of the entry portal. How long had the Emperor laboured to create the contents of the stasis chest? Decades? Centuries? Perhaps even millennia? For untold generations he had waited, and when the Emperor had shown himself to the galaxy, it was at the head of the Legiones Astartes, his chosen warriors. The Alpha Legion had fought alongside the others for many years during the Great Crusade, seeing time and again their companions reunited with their genetic fathers while they fought on without the guidance of their primarch.

Alpharius remembered the discovery of his namesake, the last of the primarchs to be found. It had been as joyous for the Alpha Legion as the same event had been for the Luna Wolves, or the Iron Hands, or the Raven Guard. Each had been celebrated by all of the Legions as a momentous occasion. Yet the reunification with Alpharius had been a muted affair, almost overlooked by the other primarchs and Legions. That the nature of the twin primarchs was deemed a secret not to be revealed had only deepened the lack of celebration. It had rankled Alpharius that his Legion had been all but dismissed by those who had found their primarchs. It had been an afterthought, a niggling gap that had been filled, rather than being seen for what it truly was: the apex of the Great Crusade when the last of the primarchs had been brought back into the Emperor’s armies. Alpharius’s discovery was the culmination of the Emperor’s plans, not the mundane arrival of a latecomer.

With the aid of Velps, Alpharius slid the stasis container into a locker beneath the decking. They secured it with tightened straps so that it would not move, and lowered the deck grating over it, stowing it away for the journey to orbit.

‘Makes you thankful, doesn’t it?’ said Velps, pointing down at the container.

‘Thankful about what?’ replied Alpharius.

‘Thankful for the Emperor,’ Velps explained. ‘I don’t know why Horus has turned, or those others, but it confounds me. The Emperor created us. I mean, literally he made us what we are. He gave us weapons and armour and a galaxy to conquer and let us free. He made us the future of humanity, and that is something to be thankful for, deep in the heart. We were right there, it was almost finished. That bastard Horus, he had everything thanks to the Emperor and now he’s turned his back on him. There’s no forgiving something like that.’

Alpharius did not argue, though he was stung by Velps’s words. He could say nothing in defence of the choices the Alpha Legion had made. He did not fully understand why the twin primarchs had sided with Horus, but he trusted them to know what was for the best.

‘I’m sure everyone will get what they deserve in the end,’ he said, slapping a comradely hand to Velps’s shoulder.

It left Alpharius unsettled as they made their way back down the ramp. The rest of the expedition was already tramping onto the shuttles and drop-ships. Sergeant Dor and the others were waiting to board, not far from Agapito and Corax. Alpharius and Velps joined the squad just as Arcatus approached the primarch.

‘I have spoken with Malcador,’ the warrior announced, ‘and he agrees with me. I and my Custodian Guard will travel with you, in order that this cargo is protected properly.’

‘That is not necessary,’ said Agapito. ‘Your presence will arouse suspicion. Besides, we don’t need your help.’

‘My commander is correct, if blunt,’ said Corax. ‘A group of Custodians will attract unwarranted attention, and it is with secrecy that our cargo is best protected.’

‘We come with you, or you do not leave,’ said Arcatus. ‘I leave the choice up to you.’

Corax sighed and nodded.

‘Very well, Custodian, have it your way,’ said the primarch. ‘You will travel with me. Be warned, space is already pushed aboard the Avenger. You will have to billet with my warriors.’

‘That will not be an issue,’ said Arcatus.

‘Not a problem,’ said Agapito, with some satisfaction. ‘The Raven Guard will be happy to extend the same hospitality to the Legio Custodes as they gave to us.’

The group parted, leaving Alpharius and the rest of the squad in the snow. Alpharius looked at the golden-armoured warriors accompanying the primarch and felt on edge. With the vault contents in their possession, the Raven Guard would be more vigilant than ever.

A slap on the shoulder guard snapped Alpharius from his distracted thoughts. Sergeant Dor jabbed a thumb at a nearby drop-ship.

‘Get on board,’ said Dor. ‘We’re heading back to Deliverance.’

Ten

Return to Deliverance
Unlocking the Gene-tech
Caesari

The landscape of Deliverance was dominated by a kilometre-high needle at the centre of the workshops. Once this had been the infamous Black Tower, the main citadel of Kiavahr’s guards. Now it was called Ravenspire. Spotlights from dozens of gantries pierced the black void, shining down upon transportways and sprawling mineheads. Defence turrets studded its surface, guided by gleaming sensor-lenses in armoured niches, arrayed like the eyes of a fly. Corax’s Stormbird descended over the sprawl of the ancient prison towards one of the eight landing aprons that jutted from Ravenspire like grey fungi on a black stalagmite, each surrounded by the pale glow of an energy field.

Looking at the maze of prison wings and guard houses, it would be an observer’s first thought that the moon’s facilities were in disrepair. Rockcrete housings and metal panels covered the surface of the buildings like patchwork, while some areas were left blasted and burnt, open to the airless vacuum of space. Force domes glittered in the starlight, protecting clusters of high-rise cell blocks, fuel storage tanks and ore transport hubs.

The appearance of Deliverance was deceptive. All damage caused during the rebellion and the subsequent counter-attack by the guilds had been fully repaired. Not a crack leaked air nor a door seal was broken. By order of Corax, the settlement bore its scars as reminders of those who had died to free the moon-colony from the oppressive tyrants on the planet below; as long as such affectations did not compromise safety or security.

As Corax gazed down through the port of the Stormbird, he could remember every single rupture and ruin, as if they had been wounds on his own flesh. The drop-ship passed over Wing Eight, where he had lived with Antonu, and where the rebellion had truly begun. The once-majestic Twelfth Gate that linked Wing Eight to the Ravenspire bore the marks of the bombs that had been planted by his guerrillas to trap the guards who had come flowing out of the central spire, welts of darker plasfoam that filled the cracks like scar tissue. Naphrem Solt, a thirteen year-old girl, had sacrificed herself to detonate the last of the charges to bring down the arching gateway on the reinforcements.

Wing Seven was all but a ruin. Burnt-out cells with empty windows stared into the blackness. Four thousand inmates had perished there, scourged by a fireball unleashed when the guards detonated the main gas supply. Corax had not anticipated this, and it was with bitter memories that he looked down at the blackened shell of the prison wing. It had taken more than a year to recover all of the bodies from the ash, babes and elders for the most part, Wing Seven having been a low security administrative complex.

Corax had scoured the security logs to find out the man responsible and had tracked down Corporal Theod Norruk four days later. The primarch’s revenge had been drawn out, a moment he was not proud of, but which had brought him a small sense of satisfaction at the time.

Only one building stood out as much as Ravenspire, connected by a silvery tunnel to the main edifice. The castle-like structure, with peaked roof and corner turrets, gleamed in the light of the setting star, silver and obsidian, a marvel of Imperial engineering. It was formally called the Primary Administration Core, but to the inhabitants outside its shining walls it was known as the Tax Keep. Corax would be addressing those who worked within later that night, but he had more pressing business to attend to first.

The Stormbird passed through the energy canopy of High Dock, Corax’s view becoming one of yellow static for a moment. He turned away from the window as the Stormbird’s jets whined into the final descent.

‘Do you know what you are going to say?’ asked Branne, sitting opposite the primarch. ‘I foresee it causing trouble, lord.’

‘Not yet,’ replied Corax. ‘Not every word. They will have to deal with the reality, there is no avoiding what must be done.’

‘It’s a complication we could do without,’ said the Commander of Recruits. Corax agreed but made no further comment.

The drop-ship touched down with a screech of metal landing pads on the ferrocrete.

‘A necessary action,’ muttered Corax, standing up as the drop-ship settled into place. The door hissed open behind him. ‘One that I would have performed without Malcador’s insistence.’

The pair departed the Stormbird and made their way the short distance to the Carnivalis, a hall near the bottom of Ravenspire that had been used for large gatherings of the Legion. It was part feasting chamber and part reliquary of the Legion’s many victories. Trophies of all kinds – weapons, skulls, armour, banners, even pieces of wall and armoured doors of enemy citadels – were hung upon the walls. There was little organisation to the display, which had once led Iterator Sermis Iconialis to remark that it looked more like the nest of a magpie than a raven.

That same individual now waited with one hundred and fifty-six other men and women in the Carnivalis, having been summoned there by Corax as the Avenger had attained orbit. Along with his fellow iterator, Loc Nasturbright, Iconialis was accompanied by Deliverance’s remembrancers. Artists, poets, pictographers, sculptors and journalists gazed at Corax with a mixture of apprehension, suspicion and expectation as the primarch entered the vast hall. The small crowd was dwarfed by its surroundings and had gathered about the stage area and lectern at the far end of the hall, forcing Corax to walk the length of the Carnivalis before he could address them. He strode up the stairs to the stage, easily taking the steps four at a time, and turned towards the assembled remembrancers.

‘You are all to return to your quarters, pack up your personal belongings and prepare to leave Deliverance,’ he said. The announcement was met with shouts of condemnation, groans, pleas and general hubbub. ‘Quiet! I have not finished.’

The crowd was stilled as Corax raised his hand for silence.

‘Take everything. You will not be returning. All materials you have been compiling for the remembrancing are to be handed over to Commander Branne. You and your luggage will be searched thoroughly, do not attempt to smuggle out even a few rough notes or a doodled cartoon. Everything is to be delivered to Branne.’

This caused further outcry, which Corax had been expecting. He caught the gaze of Iconialis, who gave a slight nod of understanding and turned to face the distraught and angry remembrancers. He lifted his hands, stilling the tumult.

‘Pray silence for the noble primarch,’ said Iconialis, his voice clear and precise, cutting through the few lingering grumbles and whispers. ‘I am sure there is good cause for this action. Let us not forget that it is by the grace of Lord Corax that we have remained here.’

‘Thank you, iterator,’ said Corax. He folded his arms and ran through what he had to say. Malcador’s last communication before the Avenger had left orbit had been to dissolve the Order of Remembrancers and send them back to Terra for debriefing, in accordance with the Edict of Dissolution. The Sigillite had made it clear that Corax was not to discuss in detail the events that were currently overtaking the Imperium. He had also acknowledged that some explanation was necessary and had furnished the primarch with a few preferred phrases to convey what had happened. Corax dismissed the suggestions, preferring to say things in his own way.

‘Horus has rebelled against the Emperor,’ he said. There was no point in keeping the situation secret. Better that Corax told the remembrancers the bald facts than they heard half-truths and rumours. He waited, expecting another storm of surprise and protest, but instead his words were met with shocked silence. ‘You may have heard before Commander Branne left Ravenspire that a force of the Legiones Astartes had been despatched to confront the Warmaster at Isstvan. That confrontation did not end well. The Emperor gathers his forces and the Raven Guard will be amongst them. We cannot offer you protection here, so you will be removed from Deliverance and returned to Terra.’

‘I come from Assyri,’ called out a bearded man with a long cowl and paint marks on the sleeves of his loose tunic. Unlike his warriors and Legion attendants, Corax had never bothered to learn the names of most of the remembrancers, seeing them as an inconvenience at the best of times, and an irritation and distraction at the worst. ‘I don’t want to go to Terra.’

This was followed by several similar protests.

‘It is not for you to decide,’ said Corax. ‘We are not going to shuttle each of you back to your preferred choice of destination. You will all go back to Terra for debriefing by the offices of Malcador the Regent. There will be no exceptions.’

‘Why do you want all of our work?’ asked a young woman with a pictograph unit hanging on a strap around her neck. ‘We’ve worked for years gathering that material.’

‘Intelligence,’ Corax replied bluntly. ‘Many of you have mingled with remembrancers attached to other Legions, particularly the Luna Wolves. We will examine your accumulated material for insights into Horus’s rebellion.’

He did not add that the remembrancers had chronicled most of the Raven Guard’s accomplishments and victories, as well as the defences of Deliverance. He could not risk the ship transporting the remembrancers being taken by a traitor vessel with such information on board.

‘Just how bad is this?’ asked Iconialis, his voice losing its usual timbre, hushed with worry. ‘I mean… I do not know what to say. I can scarcely believe it.’

‘I won’t lie to you, iterator. War is coming, like nothing you’ve ever seen. A war that will tear the galaxy apart. A war between the Legiones Astartes.’

The prisoner waited patiently, bemused by his incarceration. He sat on a plain chair that was almost too small for him, dressed in a simple grey robe. He was being kept in an empty storage room not far from Alpha Terminal near the summit of Ravenspire. Corax had ordered the old punishment cells sealed forever after the revolution and it had seemed pointless to open up one of the vacant wings for one legionary. On a world that had once housed nearly ten million prisoners, the massive warrior looked incongruous amongst the metal shelves and cabinets; there was still a mop and bucket in the corner.

Agapito stood to one side of the closed door, Solaro on the other. The commanders stared directly ahead, not looking at their charge. Agapito did so only with immense self-control, and knew that Solaro felt the same. That the prisoner was still alive was a testament to the discipline of the legionaries that had returned directly from Isstvan. He had been taken into custody and treated with a level of dignity that many of them had not known as inmates of Lycaeus. Corax had taught them that there was no honour in heaping the suffering they had endured on others.

A spoken word from the legionary standing outside heralded the arrival of the primarch. Corax had been forced to deal with the remembrancers first, but this matter had been raised between the primarch and his commanders on the return to Deliverance. Agapito opened the door, unsure what his master intended as Corax ducked through, instantly filling the small room with his bulk. The door closed again with a dull clang and Agapito finally allowed himself to look at the prisoner, disgust welling up from the pit of his stomach.

His name was Iarto Khoura and he had come to the Raven Guard shortly after the Edict of Nikaea to ensure the ban on the Librarians was enforced. Like others of his kind throughout the Legions, he had been an unpopular figure, an embodiment of outside interference that aggravated the independently-minded Raven Guard. Despite this, Agapito had never had any personal argument against the man, and had fought alongside him in several wars.

The Word Bearers Chaplain looked up at Corax’s entrance, relief on his face.

‘Lord Corax,’ he said, rising to his feet with a bow of the head. ‘I am glad you have returned to right this matter.’

‘Be silent,’ snapped the primarch, causing the Chaplain to flinch. ‘Sit down and do not speak.’

‘I have been patient thus far with your men, bu–’

‘Silence!’

Corax’s roar flooded the room, causing Agapito’s ears to ring. Khoura fell into the chair, almost breaking it, stunned by the violence of the primarch’s outburst.

‘You are a traitor,’ said Corax, his voice now dipping to an angered whisper, more intimidating than his shout. ‘You are an enemy of the Emperor.’

Khoura opened his mouth and then quickly closed it as the primarch’s frown grew even deeper.

‘Your primarch is a cowardly, treacherous worm,’ Corax continued, crouching down so that his face was centimetres from that of the Chaplain. ‘Your Legion are worthless scum, whose false praises of the Emperor ring even hollower than ever. Your fellow Chaplains are either dead or fled.’

Fighting against the urge to retort to such accusations, Khoura squirmed in the chair, mouthing wordless defences.

‘Why did you not come to Isstvan?’ demanded Corax.

‘It was not my place,’ replied the Chaplain. ‘It was better that I remained here to continue my instruction of the Legion’s recruits. You agreed with that proposal, lord.’

‘Convenient for you. Very convenient that you were not there when your Legion opened fire on my warriors, cutting them down from behind.’

‘They did what?’ Khoura looked aghast at the thought and shook his head. ‘No, that is impossible.’

‘There are seventy-five thousand Raven Guard corpses as evidence of its possibility,’ snarled Corax. ‘How long have you been planning your betrayal, Iarto? Since the Emperor slapped Lorgar back into place? Before then?’

‘I am a Chaplain, dedicated to the spread of the Imperial Truth,’ replied Khoura. ‘I was despatched to Deliverance by the edict of Malcador to ensure the Emperor’s will was being done.’

‘More lies! You were sent by Lorgar to spy on us, to pervert my warriors to the cause of Horus.’

‘That is not true. What evidence do you possess that I am anything but a loyal servant of the Emperor? I have been with your Legion since Nikaea. How can you hold me responsible for the actions of my primarch?’

‘Because you are a Word Bearer. You speak with the tongue of Lorgar. That is your dark creed. You masquerade as the bearer of Enlightenment, but you are nothing but an apostle of treachery.’

‘You have no right to acc–’

Corax snatched up Khoura by the throat, lifting him into the air, banging the Chaplain’s head against the ceiling.

‘Liar! Nothing but filthy lies spill from your bastard lips, son of Lorgar.’

Agapito took a step forwards, but was stopped by Solaro’s hand on his arm. The other commander silently shook his head. Khoura’s gasping face grew redder and redder as the primarch’s grip tightened.

‘This is my world, my Legion,’ rasped Corax. ‘You pollute both with your presence.’

There was a loud crack and Khoura’s head flopped to one side, neck snapped. Corax growled wordlessly and lowered the limp corpse back onto the chair. He turned back towards the door and stopped suddenly as he saw Agapito and Solaro. The primarch’s face was deathly white, his eyes black pits. Agapito felt a moment of trepidation as he looked at his lord’s twisted snarl.

‘Throw this filth in a furnace,’ said Corax. He closed his eyes and visibly calmed, some of the blood returning to his face. ‘I want his quarters searched again. If there is anything to connect him to Horus’s plans, I want it found. Check his communications logs to see if he was contacted by Lorgar or any of the other Word Bearers within the last year.’

‘Should we not have done that before his execution?’ asked Solaro.

Agapito drew in a sharp breath, detecting a hint of annoyance in the tone of the other commander.

‘To what end?’ said Corax.

‘Proof of his guilt, as he demanded,’ said Solaro. The commander met the primarch’s gaze without fear, hands clasped respectfully in front of him.

‘We cannot take the risk of allowing a traitor in our ranks. Besides, I could smell the taint on him, now that I know what it is,’ said Corax. He looked at Agapito. ‘You saw what had become of the Word Bearers on Isstvan.’

‘I saw things that I wish I never had,’ replied Agapito. ‘The Word Bearers were only one amongst many such.’

‘If you are blind to it, I must open your eyes,’ said the primarch. ‘Too long have we kept this secret. It was the Emperor’s will, but that no longer matters. He underestimated its threat.’

‘What are you saying, lord?’ said Solaro. ‘What threat?’

Corax blinked rapidly with surprise and wiped a hand across his face. His expression of torment had gone when he removed his pale hand, replaced by a saner look.

‘Nothing. I am not… My judgement is clouded,’ said Corax. He opened the door but turned his head as he stepped through. ‘Send Branne to me. We must prepare the recruits.’

When the primarch was gone, Solaro gave Agapito a strange look.

‘What was that about? What stench?’ asked the commander.

‘Must be a primarch thing,’ replied Agapito. ‘I smell nothing here except the sweat of a dead man. You go and fetch Branne, I’ll deal with this.’

Agapito spent several minutes looking at Khoura’s corpse after Solaro had left, thinking about what the primarch had said. Solaro was indeed blind to it, perhaps had not seen the taint, but Agapito knew what Corax had referred to. The taint had a name, a name he had heard whispered for the first time on Isstvan: Chaos.

Rad-fires flickered blue at the heart of the mangled city, turning the ruddy sky purple with their blaze. The ruins stretched for dozens of kilometres, silhouettes like broken teeth jutting against the glow. For nearly a century the fires had burned, a warning to Kiavahr not to return to its despicable past. The impact site was a cratered bowl of glass, levelled in an instant by the atomic mining charges the rebels had dropped down the gravity well. The stump of the orbital elevator remained as a twisted upthrust of solidified slurry that pointed accusingly at Lycaeus above.

Further out the buildings had survived, though some were little more than molten piles of rubble and slag. Gas pockets and ruptured fuel lines added their own sporadic glare to the scene, brightening the dead landscape with flashes of white-hot promethium plumes and clouds of venting vapour that oxidised into flurries of green and orange before dissipating into the polluted atmosphere.

With no buildings to break it, the wind raged, scouring the ruins with hurricane force, adding its own erosion to the destruction wrought by the improvised nuclear bombs. Bridges over glowing rivers of molten ferrocrete swayed dangerously, their metallic creaks and groans an eerie cry in the desolation. Stairwells ascended into thin air where once stratoscrapers had soared towards the heavens. Foundry cooling pools had become rad-lakes, tumbled aqueducts spilt forth sluggish rivers that oozed rather than flowed along sheer-sided ravines that had once been the streets of Nairhub.

Into this crawled a convoy of armoured vehicles, their broad tracks churning through the dust and ash. Each vehicle was low and broad, carried on four independent sets of tracks. The wind keened from their heavily riveted hulls and whipped communication aerials back and forth. They were marked with the symbols of the Mechanicum, but the armoured legionaries manning the open defence cupolas showed the livery to be a deception.

Five in all, the transports advanced slowly, the lead vehicle picking its way over the piles of rubble, grinding and crushing brick and ferrocrete beneath its bulk. Alpharius manned a turret on the foremost rad-crawler, twin heavy bolters on the pintle in front of him. Despite the ruin, the rad-zone was not without its inhabitants, both humanoid and otherwise. He had been surprised by talk of guilders hiding out in the wastes, protected by flimsy rad-domes and force shelters. Corax had left it to the Mechanicum to clear the last remnants of the old authorities, eager to join the Great Crusade. That the Mechanicum had been lax in their prosecution of the guild survivors would no doubt be of great benefit to the Alpha Legion’s task here.

One building stood proud amongst the debris of the old war. Swathed with noxious fog, it stood three storeys high, slab-sided like a hangar, and bore the sigil of the Raven Guard. Armoured towers at each end followed the advance of the vehicles with batteries of lascannons.

‘Ravendelve in sight,’ Commander Agapito reported over the vox.

It was a training facility, used by the Raven Guard to conduct wargames in the nuclear wasteland. Sometimes the recruits were sent out against the separatist camps that still eked out an existence in the heart of the atomic carnage. It was here that Corax had chosen to set up his new facility, away from the eyes of the Mechanicum.

It was a good choice for seclusion, and with news of Horus’s treachery bound to have reached Kiavahr, it struck Alpharius as good cover for the gene-tech laboratory. Those few who might notice would not be surprised at an increase of activity here.

There was an outer wall guarding the compound, ten metres high. Armoured gates slid aside to allow the vehicles to enter, and then ground shut when the last transport had passed. Radiation detectors in Alpharius’s suit flashed from green to a warning amber for a moment as they passed along the road to the building: a rad-pocket. He had no concerns for his safety. Even without his armour, his modified body was capable of withstanding the levels of nuclear pollution in the area. Further into the wastes would be a different matter, and as the transporter shuddered to a halt in the shadow of Ravendelve, he wondered again how the dissidents could survive at all.

Covered by the defences of the station, the Raven Guard disembarked and formed up beside their vehicles while Corax, Agapito and Branne headed into the facility. The hydraulic ramps on the side of each transport lowered and they began the process of unloading their precious cargo.

Alpharius had noticed something particular about the force sent down to Kiavahr when they had boarded the strike cruiser that had brought them here: they were all from the vault expedition. Clearly Corax trusted only those he was forced to with the knowledge of the gene-tech. There were no serfs, only legionaries, the most trustworthy of the Emperor’s servants. The only exceptions were the tech-priest and his servitors, who were essential to the project. The Alpha Legionnaire wondered what story had been told to the rest of the Raven Guard to explain the goings-on on the world below.

Secrets made Alpharius happy. In secrecy, Corax hoped to rebuild his Legion, but secrets were the favoured battleground of the Alpha Legion. The Raven Guard were entering alien territory now, and would be made to pay for their inexperience. Secrecy created its own problems of communication, and would ultimately hamper Corax. The primarch had stepped into a twilight world of misdirection, and would be made to pay for the mistake. The increased security did not bother Alpharius now; he was already one of the trusted few. The Raven Guard feared their secret would be discovered and would bend their efforts to maintaining the falsehood, not knowing that their security had already been compromised and the enemy lurked within.

The interior of Ravendelve was far larger than Alpharius had expected. It burrowed into the ground for several more levels. He followed the rest of the squad down a ramp towards the sub-levels, a motorised trolley steered in front of him, into the bowels of the facility. Most of the space was taken up with the dorm rooms for recruits and legionaries sent here on exercise – empty for the moment – with the rest taken up by a huge drill hall and firing ranges.

‘Where are you going?’

Alpharius froze at the sound of Branne’s voice. He looked over his shoulder to see the Commander of Recruits and his brother standing at a doorway he had just passed, the twinkling lights of command consoles winking behind them.

‘Pardon, commander?’ said Alpharius, not sure what was expected of him.

‘That crate, it’s clearly marked for the infirmary,’ continued Branne. ‘What are you doing down here? We don’t have the luxury of time to dawdle about.’

‘Have you lost your way?’ asked Agapito, a smile on his lips.

The unease of Alpharius increased dramatically as he realised the two commanders were expecting him to change direction and head towards the infirmary there and then. He had no idea where it was! His eyes scoured the walls for any sign or markings that might indicate its location. There was nothing to aid him. He looked back at Agapito and Branne, something like desperation surfacing in his thoughts.

‘You can share the elevator with me,’ a voice called down the corridor. Alpharius swung around and saw the white armour of Vincente Sixx, an Apothecary he had met after infiltrating the Legion on Isstvan V. He was standing at the open door of a conveyor in a small vestibule behind Alpharius.

‘Good idea,’ said Alpharius, breathing a sigh of relief. He thumbed the motor of the trolley into life and guided it towards the waiting Apothecary, who slid the door closed behind him as Alpharius brought his trolley to a stop on the metal floor of the elevator.

‘I know how you feel,’ said Sixx, pulling a lever to send the elevator ascending to the upper levels. ‘It seems like an age since I was last here. Can barely remember where anything is.’

‘Too true,’ said Alpharius. A thought occurred to him. ‘I don’t remember you from the expedition on Terra.’

‘No, I stayed on the Avenger,’ said Sixx. ‘I’m Chief Apothecary now, though, so the primarch couldn’t well start all of this gene-tech business without bringing me in. To be honest, even the little of what I’ve seen is way beyond anything I know. Nexin, the tech-priest, will be doing most of the work. I’m just here to liaise.’

‘A solemn duty,’ said Alpharius, ‘and a great responsibility.’

‘One I am entirely unprepared for,’ said Sixx without any hint of humour. ‘My brother Apothecaries suffered badly at the dropsite. It would appear that the traitors set out to target us from the outset. Only seven of us got back, and even with only fifteen years in the Apothecarion, it seems I’m the longest-serving. Now I’m supposed to be running the whole project.’

‘I’m sure Corax has every confidence in you.’ The elevator rattled to a halt and Alpharius dragged open the door. ‘We’re all depending on you, Sixx. You won’t let us down.’

‘The infirmary’s this way,’ said the Apothecary, pointing to the right.

‘Yes, it’s coming back to me now,’ said Alpharius. ‘Thanks for the help. Let me know if I can return the favour.’

‘I’ll find plenty for you to do, have no worry about that,’ said Sixx. ‘If even half of what Nexin says is true, there’ll be no shortage of work for everyone. Rebuilding a Legion is going to be hard work.’

Not as hard as it was to destroy one, thought Alpharius, as he followed the Apothecary along the passageway.

Holding the electrowelder delicately between his fingertips, Stradon Binalt used his other hand to hold the vent vane in place. Sparks erupted onto his skin, already pockmarked by dozens of similar burns, but the work was so delicate he could not use protective gauntlets. The pain was momentary, barely registered.

The weld complete, he put his tools aside and leaned back on his stool to admire his work. From the other workshops around him came the clatter of pneumatics and the crackle of spark-bonders. The smell of ceramite adhesive was thick, the primitive air filtration systems of Ravenspire’s lower levels unable to cope with the vast quantities of the vapour being released by the work of the armourers.

The armourium of Ravenspire was far better equipped than that of the Avenger and progress had been relatively swift since the return to Deliverance. He hoped it was swift enough. From what he had heard of the progress on the new gene-tech, Lord Corax might be leading the Legion to war again within a few dozen days. He twisted the nozzle across both axes, satisfied with the freedom of movement on the joints. Picking up a rag, he wiped away a small residue on the fuel inlet valves and lifted the vent into place.

‘You said you had something to show me.’

Binalt drew a protective covering over his work as he stood up and turned to see Commander Agapito at the door.

‘Yes, commander,’ said Binalt. ‘Follow me.’

He led Agapito between the open-fronted workshops, where his fellow Techmarines and their non-enhanced assistants laboured in the glare of fluorescent tubes and welding sparks. Rows upon rows of shoulder plates and reinforced greaves hung on the walls. More complete suits of armour were being assembled in a larger space attached to the armourium, where a small army of servitors and attendants worked to fit power cabling and life-support systems into the refurbished suits.

‘This way.’ Binalt directed the commander to a solid blast door on the left. The Techmarine punched in a security code on the pad and the door lifted out of view with a wheeze of hydraulics. Beyond was the test-firing range.

Lights flickered into life as they entered, to reveal a narrow space a hundred metres long, painted white overlaid with a grid of thin red lines. At the far end stood three suits of armour in front of a wall heavily cracked and pock-marked by impacts. Binalt turned to a rack on the right and lifted up a bolter. He took out a box of rounds from a shelf underneath and loaded the weapon before handing it to Agapito.

‘Target the left suit,’ said the Techmarine. ‘Go for one of the shoulder plates.’

Agapito hefted the bolter up and aimed. With the cough of the launching charge, he fired, the bolt-round flaring into life for a second as it raced down the hall. It struck the left shoulder pad of the empty suit. There was another detonation, the crack echoing back down to the two Space Marines. Shards of ceramite scattered across the firing range, but as the dust cleared, the shoulder pad was shown to be mostly intact.

‘That is one of our standard rounds, against Mark IV armour,’ said Binalt. ‘As you can see, the effect is limited.’

‘Yes, I can see that,’ said Agapito.

‘Yet at the Urgall massacre, the traitors cut down thousands of legionaries with their bolters,’ continued Binalt. The words sounded cold, but he remembered painfully the sight and sound of his fellow Raven Guard butchered in the ambush. He had felt helpless, the rounds from his bolt pistol barely scratching the armour of the traitors while their weapons cut through the Raven Guard without mercy. ‘I recovered pieces, fragments of the ammunition used by the enemy, from the armour of legionaries who withdrew successfully.’

Taking the bolter from Agapito, Binalt swapped the magazine for another and gave the weapon back to the commander.

‘I was also able to procure a few experimental rounds our brothers in the Imperial Fists secured from Mars before it was embroiled by division. We haven’t got the facilities to replicate them here, but I think I have devised a close approximation.’

Agapito sighted again and fired. This time, the other shoulder pad of the armour erupted into spinning fragments and droplets of molten ceramite.

‘Vengeance…’ muttered the commander. He lowered the bolter and looked at the Techmarine. ‘This is impressive, but also profoundly worrying. It means that the traitors had access to Martian developments before Isstvan.’

‘The roots of their rebellion have delved deeply, commander,’ Binalt agreed with a sombre nod. ‘We are not without countermeasures. Please fire at the central suit.’

The middle stand held one of the suits that had been modified by Binalt’s multi-plate, reinforced shoulder pads. This time, Agapito’s shot caught the armour’s shoulder guard flush on the rim. As with the last shot there was a great explosion of debris, but as the ringing died down, both Raven Guard could clearly see that only the outer layer of armour had been shredded; the inner plating was intact.

Agapito was quiet, staring at the armoured mannequins at the far end of the hall. He distractedly handed the bolter back to Binalt, attention still fixed on the damaged suits.

‘What is the matter, commander?’ asked the Techmarine. ‘Is something not satisfactory?’

‘I killed at least a hundred Space Marines on Isstvan,’ Agapito said quietly. ‘They were Legiones Astartes, just like us. Something I had never thought I would have to do.’

The commander shook his head abruptly, breaking his distant stare.

‘This war will not end easily. We must all get used to the idea now.’

Thunder pealed from Therion’s dark clouds and lightning split the violet evening sky, glittering from the glass walls of the Great Conservatory. Ten thousand panes of glass reflected the tumult in the heavens, bright even against the lights that glowed within.

The hippocants snorted mist in the cold, their shaggy coats thick with moisture as the coach driver urged them on through the strengthening rain. The road ahead was fast becoming a stream, water flowing down from the tree-lined embankments that flanked it as it speared across the estate towards the sprawling mansion. The driver was swathed in oilskins, only his nose and eyes visible as he turned to speak into the grille on the body of the carriage behind him.

‘Almost there, praefector,’ said Pelon, voice muffled.

‘Very good, Pelon,’ came Valerius’s tinny reply.

The Therion servant pulled up the lapels of his heavy coat and adjusted the cord under his chin that kept his broad hat from being whisked away by the wind. It was not an ideal arrangement, but Valerius had been adamant that they depart for his father’s palace as soon as possible. The rare storm had prevented them taking an airfoil, and a noble of Therion would never be seen travelling in a gascart, leaving the far more traditional means of the coach as the only option.

Broad-tyred wheels hissed through the puddles as Pelon slowed the carriage to negotiate a small bridge that humped over a foaming stream. The hippocants were controlled by a small box set into a pedestal beside the driver. As his deft fingers moved the levers, pressure bladders in the creatures’ harnesses reacted to the radio signal, inflating or deflating in sequence to guide the creatures left and right, urge them on or quell their momentum.

The gate ahead was open already and they passed beneath the arch of silver wrought as two coiling serpents: the ruling crest of Therion.

‘Take us straight to the west entrance,’ Valerius instructed over the tannoy.

Pelon steered the carriage over the gravel of the compound, the clawed feet of the hippocants throwing up stones to clatter against the bottom of the driving board. He brought them to a halt and then guided them forwards step by step until the carriage door was level with the raised brick walkway that led up to the columned entrance to the Great Conservatory.

Many of the windows were open despite the tempest. Pelon saw the telltale glimmer of weathershields glowing around the open frames. The sound of music and conversation could just be heard over the rain. Pelon engaged the brakes and dropped the anchor lines over the haunches of the hippocants before twisting in his seat to disengage the door lock. With a puff of pneumatics, the door swung out. Pelon dragged out a large rain canopy from under his seat and jumped down to the walkway in time for Valerius to step out under the vast umbrella.

‘Seems there’s a bit of a party going on,’ remarked Valerius as he strode up the rain-soaked pathway, Pelon trotting along beside, struggling to keep hold of the red and white canopy acting as a sail in the wind.

‘Your niece’s birthday, praefector,’ said Pelon.

‘Which one?’

‘Darius’s youngest, Nisella,’ replied Pelon.

‘Oh, her,’ said Valerius. ‘Such a pretty young thing.’

‘Not so young now, praefector,’ said Pelon. They reached the short flight of steps that led up to the entranceway. ‘She is six years old now. A woman, not a girl.’

‘What’s that in Terran?’ said the praefector as he mounted the steps. ‘I don’t see why you insist on using the old calendar, Pelon.’

Because it served us well enough for eighty generations before compliance, thought Pelon, but instead he said, ‘That would be roughly seventeen Terran years, praefector.’

‘Time passes so quickly,’ observed Valerius as they passed under the glass awning of the entrance.

Liveried servants took the umbrella from Pelon and sponged down Valerius’s moist uniform without comment. They carried themselves with the easy manner of men who had served in the Cohort and the skull buttons on their lapels attested to the fact. They made no inquiry of the new arrivals and silently stepped aside to allow the pair entry. That Valerius wore the red sash of the Therion elite was proof enough of his right to attend the function. For an imposter to wear the red was the only capital crime left on Therion.

Pelon led the way across the deep carpets, the rain rattling on the canopy of glass above their heads. More attendants waited at the doors to the conservatory with gold trays holding spiral-stemmed glasses of wine. Pelon appropriated one for his master, but the praefector declined the drink with a wave of his hand and stepped through the door. Pelon downed the glass’s contents in one gulp and placed it back on the tray with a wink, earning himself a scowl of disapproval from the servants. Valerius’s manservant was not the least worried about their disapproval. As simple household servants they were far below an attendant to a praefector in the informal hierarchy of the serving class.

He followed a respectful distance behind Valerius as the praefector made his way across the conservatory. The festivities were in full swing. Gaily dressed women with jewelled hairpieces twirled and curtsied as they danced with men decked out in their fine uniforms braided and brocaded with gold, a whirl of sparkling colour and gems. Chandeliers hanging from the white-painted iron of the conservatory lit all with a soft blue glow, adding to the unreal atmosphere.

On a small side stage a quintet played a tune on hunt-flutes and rhintars, the slow tempo of their piece dictating the whole rhythm of the partygoers. Even those not dancing seemed to congregate and separate in time to the beat, taking measured paces with each skirl and strum.

Valerius was not in time to this rhythm, hurrying towards a set of spiral stairs that led to a gallery overlooking the proceedings. The praefector kept bumping into people or dodging to avoid them at the last moment, so his progress became a series of faltering steps punctuated by bowed apologies. Pelon closed the gap and assisted his master, picking up dislodged hats, dropped scabbards and canes, and smoothing ruffled skirts and jacket sleeves in Valerius’s wake.

A broad-chested man with thick sideburns and beetling brows emerged from the throng just in front of Valerius. He wore a red and black sash over his blue uniform, indicating he had served with the Cohort but was no longer a licensed officer. He slapped a hand to Valerius’s shoulder, almost knocking the surprised praefector from his feet.

‘Marcus!’ boomed the man, who Pelon now recognised as Raulius Tabalian, one of the distant family cousins. He was much larger of gut and jowl than when Pelon had last seen him, which had been at least five Terran years before.

‘I’m sorry, I have to speak urgently with my father,’ said Valerius, pushing past. Tabalian turned to one of his companions with a scowl.

‘Apologies, Equerre Tabalian, my master has very pressing concerns to discuss with the Caesari,’ Pelon said hurriedly as he came level with the man. ‘I am sure the praefector will find time to reacquaint himself with you soon.’

Valerius’s progress had caused quite a stir, rippling out from his path like a bow wave of distraction. Tabalian and several others followed him to the spiral stair, the crowd growing to nearly a dozen by the time the praefector was mounting the wrought iron steps. Pelon made his way through the press with as little shoving as possible and ran up the stairs to catch his master.

The ruling dignitaries of Therion sat on low couches overlooking the floor of the conservatory, even more marvellous in their finery than those below. The band finished playing and the half-dozen members of Valerius’s family rose to their feet with polite applause.

‘Look, father, Marcus is here!’ This came from a woman a little older than the praefector, his sister Miania. All eyes turned towards him as he stepped up to the gallery balustrade, tucking his helmet under one arm as he presented himself with a short bow.

‘Caesari,’ said the praefector, eyes fixed on the plushly carpeted floor.

‘praefector,’ replied his father with equal formality.

Caesari Valentinus Valerius was one of the youngest to hold the office, just over seventeen years old; in his late fifties as Terrans measured time. He was even shorter and slighter than his eldest son, clean shaven and with thinning blond hair that was pulled back in a short knot at the base of his skull. His uniform was bedecked with frogging and medals; honours he had rightfully earned in the Therion Cohort alongside the Emperor and Raven Guard.

The Caesari extended his hand in greeting, the thumb and two other digits replaced by mechanical augmetics. Likewise his right ear was a prosthetic device, and he stood slightly lop-sided on his bionic leg. Marcus took the hand and briefly pursed his lips to his father’s knuckles before straightening.

‘Welcome back to Therion, my son,’ declared the Caesari, embracing Marcus tightly.

‘Do not hoard him to yourself,’ said Juliana, the Caesari’s wife. She prised her husband’s arms from her son and replaced them with her own, planting an audible kiss on the praefector’s cheek.

‘I have important news,’ said Marcus, freeing himself from his mother’s grip.

Pelon glanced over the balcony to see that the party-goers were all paying attention to what passed amongst the ruling family: glasses were held halfway to lips, conversations had dried away.

‘Get yourself a drink, Marcus,’ said Antonius, the younger of the Caesari’s two sons. He looked like a fairer-headed version of his older brother, save for the pockmark of a bullet scar on the right side of his chin. ‘Why so glum?’

‘Yes, son, settle and tell us what you’ve been up to,’ said Juliana, lifting up a wineglass from a shelf set upon the balustrade. ‘It’s been such a long time.’

‘Horus has rebelled against the Emperor.’

The praefector’s blurted words carried far across the conservatory, hushing the few discussions that had continued. From below came the clatter of metal and shattering of glass as a servant spilled his tray in shock.

‘What did you say?’ demanded the Caesari. ‘What do you mean?’

‘The Sons of Horus are traitors,’ said Marcus. He snatched the glass from his mother’s hand with trembling fingers and swallowed the contents. When he continued, it was in a whisper. ‘The Warmaster seeks to overthrow the Emperor. Many of the Legiones Astartes have sided with Lupercal. There is going to be civil war.’

‘This must be a mistake,’ said Juliana. ‘Perhaps some of his Legion, but Horus himself…’

‘What of the Raven Guard?’ asked the Caesari.

‘This makes no sense,’ said Antonius. ‘Are you sure?’

‘It happened at Isstvan,’ said the praefector, the muscles in his jaw clenching at the memory. ‘I saw what happened. I and a handful of others are all that remains of the Therion Cohort. The Raven Guard, they are loyal. Lord Corax sent me here. They were all but destroyed, and it looks as if the traitors finished the job on the Salamanders and Iron Hands.’

The Caesari slumped back onto his couch, face as white as snow, mouth open in dumb shock. Pelon heard the chattering on the main floor and saw some of the guests heading towards the doors. He cautiously tugged at the elbow of his master’s coat.

‘Praefector, might I make a suggestion?’

‘Be quiet, Pelon,’ said Marcus, pulling away his arm.

‘Some of the guests are leaving,’ Pelon said, pointing across the conservatory. ‘Rumours, master, can be damaging.’

‘Your man’s right,’ said Antonius. He turned to the Caesari. ‘Father, if this news spreads in the wrong way, it will cause hysteria and panic.’

The Caesari beckoned with a raised hand and his chief counsellor, Tribune Pellis, rose from his seat at the far end of the gallery.

‘Nobody is to leave yet,’ said Valentinus. ‘Confiscate all personal communication devices. Not until we’ve drafted an official proclamation. That includes servants. Have the veterans stationed at every exit, I want nobody coming in or out until I say otherwise.’

Pellis nodded wordlessly and withdrew. The Caesari was recovering from the shock and stood up. He gave Marcus a troubled glance and then began to pace, circling around the couch.

‘I assume Corax sent you to raise a new Cohort,’ he said, receiving a nod of affirmation from his son. ‘Manpower shouldn’t be a problem, we’ve been turning away volunteers for the last two years. We’ll need ships to replace the losses, though.’

‘Natol Prime, there’s a fleet there,’ said Antonius. ‘Old ships, returning with the Natol regiments, but they’ll serve well enough if you send word to the council there.’

‘Yes, and we can get help from the forge-world at, oh, what’s the damned place called?’

‘Some of the Mechanicum have allied with Horus,’ Marcus said before the question could be answered. ‘You mean Beta Cornix, father. Best to make sure which side they are on before you go to them.’

The Caesari stopped in his tracks and was again struck dumb for a moment with distress at this news, his expression almost imploring his son to retract what he had said. The unease passed in a few seconds and the Caesari continued his striding.

‘That will make weapons acquisition a problem,’ said Valentinus.

‘The forges of Kiavahr can supply any shortfall,’ said the praefector.

‘Good, good. I’ll have Pellis start the muster first thing in the morning. We can sort out the details once the initial orders have been despatched.’ The Caesari stopped and gripped the rail. Below, servants were herding the guests towards the main building, corralling them like hippocants. A musician protested loudly as he was manhandled from the stage, waving his lyrepipe above his head like a regimental banner. ‘Anything else we need to decide now?’

‘The commander,’ said Juliana. ‘You’re not leaving Therion to go running off to war, not at a time like this.’

The Caesari’s expression sagged with disappointment as he nodded. His lips twitched for a second or two while he considered the problem. Valentinus smiled and looked at Marcus again.

‘Well, no need to look too far, is there, my son?’ said the Therion ruler. He slapped a hand to the praefector’s shoulder. ‘You know more about what is happening than any of us. You can lead the Cohort.’

‘I am honoured, father, but I am only a praefector,’ said Marcus.

‘Nonsense. I’m in charge. You’re vice-Caesari now. Full authority. Antonius will take over as praefector.’

Marcus shook his head in disbelief, mouth opening and closing several times before he remembered his station. He dropped to one knee and took his father’s hand, kissing the knuckles.

‘I will serve,’ he said, speaking the oathwords of the Cohort. ‘For the Emperor above all others. For Therion and Enlightenment.’

Pelon suppressed a smile. Being servant to a praefector was one thing, being aide to a vice-Caesari was something far grander. If he was lucky, and he could see no reason why he didn’t deserve a piece of luck, he might even be made a sub-tribune to recognise his status.

‘Ensure your master’s rooms are ready,’ Juliana said to Pelon. ‘Without warning of his arrival, I have no idea what state they are in.’

With a bow, Pelon accepted the slight admonishment and withdrew. Even as a sub-tribune he would still have to fold down the sheets. It gave him comfort to think that there were some things in life that even the treachery of a Warmaster could not change.

Eleven

Rebirth Begins
Unauthorised Transmission
Doubts Arise

The beeps of the machines and background thrum of energy cables triggered a sense of comfort in Corax as he stepped into the sterile chamber of the new gene-tech facility. Centrifuges whirred and servitors plodded from work station to work station with samples and tests. Vincente Sixx, divested of his armour, sat at a bank of five screens, data tables and helical displays large on the monitors.

At a long table covered with data tablets and instrumentation, Nexin Orlandriaz pored over a transparent sheet, idly tapping the fingers of his free hand against an empty crucible. Sixx looked over his shoulder as Corax strode across the tiled floor. Orlandriaz was too absorbed in his work to notice the arrival of the primarch.

The thud of the servitor’s metal-shod feet disturbed the peace, the clacking of a crude teleprinter burst into life as an analyser spewed out its latest findings. On closer inspection, the room was balanced on the line between order and anarchy. Sixx’s area was tidy, disciplined and compact, while the magos’s work sprawled over several desktops and was piled on trolleys left haphazardly around the tech-priest’s high stool.

‘You reported significant difficulties,’ Corax said, stopping to look over Sixx’s shoulder at the displays. ‘What is the problem?’

‘Compatibility,’ said Orlandriaz, emerging from his contemplation, massively dilated pupils shrinking as he focused on Corax. ‘The Emperor did something to streamline the primarch material to create the Legiones Astartes template, but the possible permutations are too numerous to investigate. My mathematical analysis suggests it would take at least five years of continual study to narrow down our options to a number more suitable for physical experimentation.’

Corax looked at Sixx, eyebrow raised.

‘It has only been twenty days,’ said the primarch. ‘A little early to admit defeat, isn’t it?’

‘The primarch genetic coding is vastly more complex than standard Raven Guard gene-seed,’ the Apothecary explained. ‘The Emperor extracted only a few elements of the original data to create the Legiones Astartes strain, and about a dozen more in the Legio Custodes data we retrieved from the Terran vault. To isolate the rapid maturation and cell cloning abilities you desire, and graft them onto our own gene-seed, we have to retroactively engineer the Raven Guard gene-seed with the appropriate sequence. There are millions of sequences that might be applied, even from a single primarch strand, and there are twenty unique primarch codes to choose from.’

‘Take this one, sample four, as an indicator,’ said the genetor majoris. ‘We have managed to identify at least six unique sub-complexes and protein strands geared towards physical durability, above and beyond that found in the others. In the same sample, there is a dearth of certain enhanced genes that, in our estimation, boost the cytoarchetectonic structure responsible for the development of nociceptors and proprioceptory function. The deficiency seems to be deliberate. In subject six there is a whole suite of genetic encoding derived from a non-human source, possibly canine. In subject twenty, a whole suite of growth boosting augmentations is absent. In all, we have catalogued seven hundred and eighty-three variations between the samples. This leaves the common, core material, the primarch essence for want of a better term, exceptionally small compared to what I expected.’

‘I see,’ said Corax. He knew enough about genetic manipulation to understand the problem they were facing, but even his extensive biological knowledge was insufficient to propose a solution. He stared at the screen for some time, letting the revolving images of different cell helices float into his consciousness. He studied the data tables, absorbing the information without consciously reading it, hoping it would trigger some insight from the Emperor.

All he could remember was sadness.

It was a struggle to keep motivated, to repeat the research that had taken so many centuries to perfect. All had been swept away by… By what, Corax could not quite remember. The Emperor’s memories were blank on the matter. The primarch concentrated on what had happened after the period of ignorance.

There was hope in his heart. His ambition had been misplaced. Rather than create twenty superhuman warriors, he could create thousands, hundreds of thousands of next-generation soldiers. Each would have a fraction of the power of the primarchs, it was true, but their numbers would more than make up for the difference. Corax held an image for a moment, a picture of rank after rank of armoured warriors, fists and banners raised in salute. He would create an army. Something more than an army: a Legion.

Intellect fired by his imagination, he set to work with this new goal in mind. There was no need to create this Legion from a single zygotic embryo. Humanity numbered in its billions, just on Terra alone. Through Corax’s thoughts, the Emperor discarded swathes of the primarch genetic data, deemed redundant in light of his new plans. He focused on amending all of his findings from the primarch project, filtering out those abilities and traits that could only be gene-bred from inception, concentrating on transferable, implantable genetic strands.

The primarch latched onto those memories, delving deeper. As he did so, Corax edged Sixx aside and pulled a touch-screen interface closer. Hesitantly at first, he began to tap the screen, navigating his way through the mass of coded information. His fingers picked up speed as the memories came faster and faster. Fingertips dancing over the screen, Corax delved into the intricacies of the primarch genes, separating out those sequences and proteins discarded by the Emperor, following in his creator’s remembered footsteps. The shifting displays and tables blurred as the primarch continued, isolating gene-fragments and cell duplication segments, tossing some aside, moving others into a separate partition.

For five minutes he worked at furious pace, linking unconscious recall to conscious action. Orlandriaz had moved up beside him at some point and was staring at the flow of information spreading across the screens, nodding ferociously while he muttered to himself.

Corax stopped, taking a deep breath as he straightened.

‘Masterful,’ whispered Orlandriaz.

‘Perhaps if you could spare us five more minutes, lord, we could solve the whole problem,’ said Sixx, grinning broadly.

‘If only it were that simple,’ said Corax. He had not worked out anything, simply remembered it. The Emperor had never attempted to create what Corax sought, and so there was no base of knowledge for him to recall. ‘That still leaves you with seventy-two different gene-strands to analyse.’

‘A moment, please,’ said Orlandriaz, laying his hand on Corax’s arm as the primarch turned away. Corax glanced down in annoyance at the magos’s clutching fingers, noticing that the tech-priest’s fingernails looked to be made of a dull bronze. Realising his error, Nexin took his hand away and nodded his head in apology.

‘Forgive me, Lord Corax,’ said the magos. ‘Whilst taking a break from our analystical studies, the Chief Apothecary and I engaged in a debate that was without resolution. I seek your opinion on the matter.’

‘What debate?’ asked Corax, darting a look at Sixx, who was frowning at his companion.

‘It is my belief that your plans could be taken a stage further,’ said the magos.

‘It is out of the question,’ said Sixx, making a cutting motion with his hand. ‘It is against our every principle.’

‘What is?’ said Corax.

‘It seems that we might actually make our task easier if we were to incept the project from an initial cellular generation, rather than hybridisation of an existing organism.’

‘Cloning,’ snapped Sixx. ‘The magos thinks we should clone new warriors from scratch rather than modify the gene-seed for implantation. I reminded him that there are many more complications associated with such a process, not to mention the problems it will create in the future.’

‘Your arguments were irrational,’ said Orlandriaz, scowling back at the Chief Apothecary. ‘Emotive.’

‘Every possibility must be explored,’ said Corax. He raised a hand to silence a protest from Sixx. A passing thought of the Emperor had surfaced in his mind, a philosophical point his creator had concluded when the primarchs had been taken from him.

‘With that said, direct cloning must be considered only as a final option if there is no other solution. Magos, there is good reason why the Emperor did not directly clone his new Legions from a single template cell. The resultant legionaries would be identical. Without the random mutation present in the wider human genetic structure, there is no possibility for variation. The Legiones Astartes are successful because we are similar, but not identical. Qualities such as leadership, intellect and aptitude for different disciplines allow us to be flexible and to fulfil many roles.

‘Even the primarchs were not created equal in all measures. The Emperor understood the importance of variation. Beyond that, there is another consideration. The Legiones Astartes are humanity’s warriors, separated and superior in many ways, but always raised up from amongst those they lead and protect. A legionary may be a neo-human, but he was once human. A legionary is the incarnation of the Emperor’s plan, a perfect symbol and example for mankind to aspire to, not simply a tool of war. It is humanity that the Emperor will lead in the conquest of the galaxy, not some new species made to order in a laboratory.’

‘Thank you, lord,’ said Sixx, with a sidelong look at Orlandriaz. ‘More eloquent than I could ever phrase it.’

‘I understand your position and reasoning,’ said the magos. ‘I will comply with your direction.’

‘Make it work,’ said Corax. ‘That perfect symbol has been tarnished by Horus. I would see it shine brightly again.’

The atmosphere in the docking bay changed as the primarch entered, Commander Branne following a few steps behind. Navar Hef felt the increase in tension and reacted, standing just a little straighter, puffing out his chest just a little further. It was only the second time he had seen the primarch in person. The first had been on his acceptance into the recruits for the Raven Guard. Now Corax was here, only eight days after his return to Deliverance, ready to inspect the next generation of recruits. Navar’s eyes followed the primarch as he strode along the gallery at the end of the hall, as did two hundred and ninety-nine other pairs. It was testament to the primarch’s thoroughness that he was taking the time for this, when there would be so many other demands made upon him.

The three hundred novitiates stood to attention, a block of black-robed young men with lean bodies, close-cropped hair and eager eyes. Navar felt the wave of pride that flowed through the group as Corax nodded his head in acknowledgement of the massed recruits. A simple, easy gesture for the primarch, but one that spoke of a respect that could not be matched by any other individual, save if the Emperor himself had come to see them.

The orders for the recruit company to pack their few possessions and gather at Ravenspire’s Centrus Terminal had started a wave of speculation throughout the novitiate blocks adjoining the great tower. Navar was of the opinion that they were going to be shipped out direct to the fighting, as many were. He had heard, second-hand unfortunately, of the losses the Legion had suffered on Isstvan V, and knew that Corax would not take such a defeat lightly. Some had said they were being evacuated to Terra, that Deliverance was under immediate threat and the whole Legion was retreating. Navar had argued against such nay-saying. The Raven Guard would defend their home to the last man, he was sure of it.

There were some who claimed that the stories circulating about Horus’s treachery were simply a test of their determination, rumours circulated by the primarch to see who had the fortitude to be a true legionary. Some, a boring few in Navar’s opinion, reckoned that after the hiatus following Branne’s departure, the normal procedure was being implemented and they were simply being moved on to the next stage of their training. Navar was equally dismissive of these claims; he knew he was an able fighter and physically superior to most of Deliverance’s youth, but at ten Terran years old he and many of the others were simply too young to begin the enhancement process yet.

That Corax had deigned to address them personally added to Navar’s conviction that something out of the ordinary was occurring. His idle thoughts melted away as the primarch spoke. Corax’s voice was quiet but assured, full of conviction and authority. It was impossible not to listen, and Navar quickly forgot all of the rumours and gossip, drawn in by the primarch’s irresistible tone.

‘You have proven yourselves to be exemplars, the fittest and brightest humanity has to offer,’ said Corax. ‘Every new generation of Raven Guard are to be lauded and celebrated as bearers of the Legion’s traditions and future warriors of the Emperor. Those of you gathered here will be more than that. You will embody the Raven Guard and the ideals of Deliverance like no others before you. You are shortly to become legionaries, and you should take pride in that. Yet you must also reconcile yourselves to a burden the likes of which no previous generation has borne.’

Corax leaned on the metal rail of the balcony and bowed his head for a moment, eyes closed. When he opened them, Navar felt swallowed by their blackness. His awe evaporated, replaced by dread as Corax continued.

‘Much of what you have heard in recent days is true. The Warmaster, Horus Lupercal, is a traitor to the Emperor. The Raven Guard have suffered badly from his treachery and our strength is much diminished. You will be the first legionaries that start us back on the road to recovery, the first generation to fight for a return to glory. Your elevation takes place at a time more troubled than any in the Legion’s proud history. You will be tested, physically and in your hearts, like no other legionaries before you.’

The primarch’s mood brightened, and it seemed as if the hall itself lightened in reflection of this.

‘Take heart that you will not be found wanting. Your dedication and courage will not fail. As novitiates you have proven yourselves worthy of bearing the colours of the Raven Guard. The ignorant may look at you and see fresh faces and young hearts, but they do not see what I see. I see the same valour and pride in you that I saw in the eyes of the young men and women who fought beside me to free Deliverance. It is their example you must follow, and their example that you will surpass. If you don’t believe me, ask old Branne here. I remember when he was just a babe, mewling for his mother’s teat!’

Navar laughed along with the others, amused and not a little disturbed by the thought of the hoary commander having once been an infant. The laughter subsided as Corax’s expression grew grim again.

‘The trials begin now. Your patience, endurance and trust will be sorely tested by what you are about to undergo, but they are nothing more than practice for the tribulations that await us further down the road. You will act as Raven Guard. You will endure and grow stronger.’ Corax lifted a fist above his head. ‘I salute you, recruits of the Raven Guard. Your transports await. You leave Ravenspire as novitiates, but will return as warriors of the Legiones Astartes!’

‘For the Emperor and the Legion!’ bellowed Branne, duplicating his lord’s salute.

‘For the Emperor and the Legion!’ Navar shouted along with the others, raising his fist as high as he could reach, straining to make his voice a manly roar.

There was a time for stealth and a time for violence. Since he had arrived on Kiavahr, Omegon had exclusively practised the former, but he felt a sense of release, almost joy, as the sentry’s head imploded within his closing fingers. Flicking skull fragments and slick brain matter from his gauntlets, Omegon stepped over the twitching body while Rufan and Alias stooped to pick up the corpse. The two Alpha Legionnaires casually tossed the remains into a nearby chem-pool. Noxious fluids bubbled as the body sank, releasing methane-tainted puffs of air.

With gore-stained fingers, Omegon wrenched aside the bars across the sewer inlet, the corroded steel turning to flakes in his hands. Turning sideways, the primarch lowered his bulk into the channel beyond, the culvert barely large enough for his armoured frame. A thin sludge of slimy effluent trickled along the bottom of the rockcrete tunnel, stinking but harmless to his enhanced physiology.

As they entered, the ruddy light from outside grew dimmer. Omegon activated his suit lamps, two cones of yellow springing from powerful emitters fixed around his eye lenses. Treading carefully, footfalls muffled by rubber-like overshoes, the three warriors of the Alpha Legion advanced forty metres up the gently sloping pipe, stopping by another barred opening. The barrier was no more obstacle than the first, and within a few seconds, Omegon was stepping through the breach into the room beyond.

The chamber was hexagonal, the ceiling a little higher than the primarch could reach with his fingertips, the floor coated with a thin layer of chemical effluent fed by inlets on each wall. Looking up, Omegon was pleased to see that Armand Eloqi’s information had been correct: a circular access hatch punctured the centre of the ceiling. The building had once belonged to Eloqi’s guild, now turned into communications relay for the Mechanicum.

Alias and Rufan lifted Omegon up so that he could reach the rusted turn wheel. After a little initial resistance, it spun easily in the primarch’s hands. A clank signalled the disengagement of the lock. Omegon pushed open the hatch, took hold of the lip and pulled himself up, shoulder pads scraping the side of the hole. At a crouch, Omegon turned around and headed in the direction Eloqi had told him, while the other two dragged themselves up behind.

‘Cutter,’ said Omegon, holding out his hand behind him.

Rufan took the device from his belt and placed it in Omegon’s grip. It looked like a snub-nosed pistol, two gas canisters where the magazine would have been. Thumbing the valve open, Omegon pressed the trigger and a white-hot flame erupted from the muzzle. Reaching above him, the primarch turned on the spot, slicing an almost complete circle in the metal decking above him. When he was done, he turned off the cutter and passed it back to Rufan.

Shuffling back a few steps to give himself space, Omegon lay on his back and kicked upwards. The rough circle of metal broke free and landed with a clatter on the floor above. With room to stand now, Omegon examined the small alcove he had broken into. A nest of wires criss-crossed each other from dozens of circuits and switches. In a few seconds, he had analysed the layout, creating a schematic in his head. There was not a communications system he could not access and this one was crude by Mechanicum standards.

Opening up a plate on his right vambrace, Omegon pulled free several wires and plugged them into the required sockets in the switching boards around him. He activated his communications suite, quickly scanning the frequencies around him until he could home in on the signal he was looking for. An insistent beeping became louder in his ear and he turned left and right, rearranging and rewiring a few of the relays to fine-tune the signal. On the roof above, the dishes would be turning on their gimbals, aligning themselves towards Deliverance.

‘Effrit code, hydra-seven-omega,’ grated an artificial voice. The primarch smiled as he locked down the receiver, the words he had heard confirmation of what he had hoped for. At least one of his legionnaires had succeeded in infiltrating the Raven Guard.

‘Access cryptoduct, theru gaili ta nurun,’ said Omegon. The words were meaningless syllables known only to the twin primarchs. ‘Gaion sackrit kess.’

There followed a few seconds of static as the connection was established with the tiny stealth-fielded satellite that Omegon had left in orbit over Deliverance. It was no larger than a fist, just a piece of debris, but the cryptoduct device was capable of detecting, decoding and recording any signal within a narrow range of frequencies, frequencies known only to the Alpha Legion. He was also able to implant messages onto the cryptoduct for access by others. It was the perfect go-between, ensuring that both sender and receiver were anonymous and since it could be accessed from anywhere within several hundred thousand miles, their locations would remain unknown.

‘Lord Effrit, this is Alpharius,’ said the message. Omegon smiled again. It was a conceit, perhaps, but never failed to amuse him. ‘Infiltration successful. Objective identified as primarch genetic data. Location is Ravendelve. Awaiting instruction.’

The transmission ended. Omegon had been expecting many things, but not this. Corax had access to the primarch project? The implications were immediately obvious, both the risks and benefits of the current plan. For a moment Omegon considered changing his objective. If the Raven Guard were able to rebuild their Legion with this knowledge, the swift victory of Horus, and the ultimate destruction of the Primordial Annihilator, could be put in jeopardy. The prudent approach would be to destroy the technology before its secrets could be gleaned by Corax.

Despite that, Omegon could not quite convince himself to follow this course of action. The danger presented was but the weight on one side of the balance. On the other side had to be set the advantages of claiming this technology for the Alpha Legion. Omegon did not doubt that Corax had a good chance of cracking the primarch gene-seed open, certainly a better chance than the Alpha Legion, even with the assistance of the Order of the Dragon.

For the moment it would be best to allow the Raven Guard to continue their investigations. When they had discovered something of value, the secret could be stolen and the Raven Guard destroyed. If the discovery was of the magnitude Omegon imagined it to be, it would herald a new beginning for the Alpha Legion. To possess the secrets of the primarchs was a prize worth a few risks.

With everything the Alpha Legion did, there was always some extra agenda that could be forwarded, some additional objective that could be achieved. In the case of the Raven Guard, Omegon and Alpharius had decided that they would first relieve the Legion of the Terran technology that would be imparted to them, and then the Raven Guard would be destroyed, with all news of the event carefully contained from both the Emperor and Horus. Kiavahr would become loyal to Horus and, finally, the Raven Guard would live again, with Alpha Legionnaires masquerading in place of the dead Legion. The scope to cause confusion and mayhem would be vast once Omegon had achieved these three goals and he paused in his work and grinned at the thought of it.

He adjusted his connection to the relay, switching to a transmission format.

‘Effrit code, omega-seven-hydra,’ he said. ‘You are Contact One. Assigned sub-channel alpha-three. Orders will be forthcoming.’

As he cut the link, Omegon noticed something else he had not expected. He checked his findings, and found his initial instinct had been correct. The signal to the cryptoduct had been made from a triple-secure Raven Guard source.

That it came from Ravenspire was not a surprise. That it was on the highest-level command channel was.

‘I wish there was some soundproofing down here,’ said Sixx, walking between the cages that had been built in the western vestibule. A cacophony of howls, growls, whines and screeches heralded his progress along the corridor. ‘I am worried the recruits can hear all of this racket.’

‘I am sure I will be able to obtain some form of sonic dampening field from one of my fellow magi,’ replied Orlandriaz, walking beside the Apothecary.

‘Out of the question,’ said Sixx. ‘The primarch was clear in his instruction: no contact with the Kiavahran Mechanicum. Even your presence here suggests something of what we are working on. It must remain undisclosed.’

‘A grave mistake, I am sure,’ said the tech-priest. ‘Aside from that technology which we recovered from Terra, the facility here is exceptionally sparse.’

‘You think that the resources of the Raven Guard are limited?’ Sixx was incredulous, almost stopping in his stride. ‘You realise that we have been implanting gene-seed into recruits for decades?’

‘Yes, and the systems you use have not progressed at all in that time,’ replied Orlandriaz. ‘Even without the primarch data, I am positive I could have increased your productivity by ten, perhaps even fifteen per cent.’

‘We are not a manufactorum, Nexin. The creation of legionaries is not a production line process.’

‘It will be, when we have completed our task.’

The Chief Apothecary’s reply was silenced as the door at the far end of the corridor opened, revealing Commander Agapito. His expression was all Sixx needed to know that their latest report to Corax had not been received well.

The Commander of the Talons stalked along the passageway, boots ringing loudly. Snarls and spitting erupted from the nearby cages.

‘You don’t have to say anything, commander,’ said Sixx, as he came up to Agapito. ‘Lord Corax wishes for more encouraging results, yes?’

‘I hope you have at least a small success story I can take back to him,’ said Agapito. He glanced into the cage to his left and shook his head with disgust at what he saw within. ‘He is keen… No, that doesn’t really convey his mood. He is adamant that you proceed beyond these pointless trials and begin work on perfecting the formula for the recruits.’

‘Pointless?’ Orlandriaz bunched his fists and his lip twitched in irritation. ‘I am sure the primarch would be even more angered if we had turned his first batch of legionaries into these…’

He waved his hand to encompass the long line of cages. Beyond the bars, mammalian and reptilian things hunkered and paced. Some were unidentifiable, little more than mewling, distorted conglomerations of flesh. Most were warped by over-sized muscles, others had bony growths splitting their scales or fur. Several had extra limbs, additional eyes, overgrown fangs or distended spines.

A green-furred mouse the size of a dog lunged against the bars of one cage, its claws sheathing and unsheathing spasmodically, tusks protruding from its lower jaw. In another enclosure, a two-headed snake, several metres long, coiled menacingly, its tail tipped with a jagged barb. From every cage, deformed monstrosities glared and snapped, regarding the legionaries and tech-priest with predatory intent.

‘Corax thinks it is a mistake to use animal subjects,’ said Agapito. ‘He does not suggest that you introduce the new gene-seed directly to the recruits, and Branne certainly won’t allow it. By the other hand, introducing primarch genetic material to non-human hosts will never be successful.’

‘Then we are caught in a bind,’ said Sixx. ‘How are we to ensure the new gene-seed works if we cannot trial it in organic hosts? Our data modelling can only prove so much.’

‘That is not my problem, it is yours.’

‘We will have to return to base cell analysis,’ said Orlandriaz, eyes fixed on a massively-shouldered lizard with horny growths protruding from its spine. ‘We can certainly eradicate more of the anomalous reactions.’

‘But nothing of cerebral impact or behavioural side-effects,’ said Sixx.

‘Aggression is not necessarily a bad thing in a legionary,’ said Orlandriaz.

‘We’ll leave the mindless ferocity to the World Eaters,’ replied the Apothecary. ‘We need disciplined, efficient warriors.’

‘What shall I tell Lord Corax?’ asked Agapito. ‘He will expect me to return with some news of progress and a firm plan for resolving any problems.’

Sixx and Orlandriaz looked at each other. The Apothecary sighed and nodded.

‘I’ll euthanise these abominations and study the cellular breakdown,’ said Sixx. ‘That should give us some new data to incorporate into the models.’

‘I will restart the base cell experiments with a modified gene-seed,’ said Orlandriaz.

‘How long?’ asked Agapito. ‘I understand that you need to get this right, and I will support you in every way I can, but the primarch is understandably impatient. Every day we spend now is a day closer to Horus being ready to launch an attack on Terra.’

‘When we are successful, time will not be an issue,’ said Orlandriaz. He pointed to the creatures in the cages towards the far end of the corridor. ‘Those are the results of our implantation since we compiled the latest report. We introduced the genetic template into infants to record the time required for full maturation of the gene-seed.’

The animals in the cages were full grown, some of them showing the mutation of the others, but a few seemed to be ordinary specimens, large for their species but otherwise normal. Agapito shook his head in confusion and amazement.

‘You only submitted your report forty hours ago,’ said the commander.

‘Thirty-seven point three hours, to be exact,’ said Orlandriaz, smiling thinly. ‘Given the longer maturation period of the average human male, I estimate the entire process, once perfected, will take between seventy and eighty Terran hours.’

Agapito shook his head again, this time with a grin.

‘That is remarkable. Eighty hours to turn a boy into a legionary? Well, in body at least.’

‘Not just physiologically, commander,’ said Sixx, now becoming more enthusiastic. ‘Our recruits will emerge from the process with mental and physical aptitudes beyond anything we’ve seen before. They’ll be quick learners too. A little bonus of the primarch material. Our new legionaries will be primed and ready from the outset.’

‘That is fascinating news,’ said Agapito. ‘To pass on to Corax, of course. Take as much time as you need to complete the gene-seed. There is no reason to proceed with anything less than a perfect sample. I look forward to hearing of your success as soon as possible. If what the primarch says about broadening out the recruitment base is true, there could be a near-limitless supply of legionaries. I’ll inform Lord Corax of your findings.’

‘Yes, commander,’ said Orlandriaz. Agapito and Sixx exchanged nods of respect before the commander strode away. Neither Apothecary nor tech-priest said anything until the door at the end of the passage closed behind Agapito.

‘I am pleased the commander seems so eager,’ said Orlandriaz. ‘His brother has been much more reticent in his approval of our project.’

‘He used to be one of the staunchest Legion traditionalists,’ Sixx said distractedly, still looking at the closed door. ‘He and Branne were hard-headed about their Deliverance heritage, hammered it into me and the rest of the recruits from the first day we were made novitiates. I suppose losing so many warriors on Isstvan has changed his mind about being so selective.’

‘I fear he may over-represent our progress to your primarch,’ said Orlandriaz. ‘We should continue our studies with a degree of alacrity.’

‘Agreed,’ said Sixx. ‘If we cannot produce something tangible soon, Lord Corax may become even more impatient. I’ve never considered him rash, but he is very determined to begin the rebuilding.’

‘Adversity often creates desperation,’ said Orlandriaz.

‘Not ever!’ snapped Sixx, rounding on the tech-priest, remembering words spoken by his primarch during the long retreat from the dropsite massacre. ‘We are Raven Guard. Deliverance was born out of determination and perseverance. Strife is our sustenance, adversity is our ally. Attack, withdraw and attack again. That is our creed, the lifeblood of the Legion. The Raven Guard do not become desperate when circumstance does not favour us. We become more dangerous.’

The slap of bare feet on black-painted ferrocrete brought back memories to Alpharius as he stood watching the recruits running circuits of the main hall. He knew the memories were not his own – they had been removed by the Alpha Legion’s Librarians – but the recollections were exceptionally vivid, coming to him as brief snatches: scenes and tableaux that lasted a few seconds each. His training had taken place in Ravenspire rather than down here on Kiavahr, but he had performed the same drills as the youths around him.

‘Ready weapons!’ barked Branne from the stage area at one end of the vaulted chamber. ‘Form up for firing practice.’

The recruits dashed to the crates at the centre of the hall and took up simple automatic rifles from within. These were training weapons duplicating the weight and bulk of a bolter to a full-fledged legionary; without gene-seed enhancement even a full-grown man could not train with a proper Legiones Astartes bolter. The snap of magazines being slipped into place joined the patter of running feet.

In groups of five, the recruits lined up in front of Branne’s position. He waved each squad forwards. Panting, red-faced young men lifted their weapons to their shoulders, took aim at the ceramite target tiles on the far wall and opened fire. The rattle of shots and tinkle of expended cases filled the room.

After firing for a few seconds, the first group peeled away and the second squad took up position. One of the recruits was struggling with the magazine on his weapon and approached Alpharius.

‘I can’t get it to eject, sergeant,’ said the boy, face screwed up with frustration. He looked up at Alpharius – the novitiate’s eyes were just about level with the bottom of the legionary’s breastplate. ‘It’s stuck solid!’

‘Calm down and try again,’ said Alpharius. ‘What is your name, novitiate?’

‘Hef, sergeant,’ said the recruit. He struggled again with the release catch, sweaty hands slipping on the smooth metal of the rifle. ‘Navar Hef.’

‘Let me see,’ said Alpharius, holding out his hand. He took the rifle, examined it quickly and handed it back to Hef. ‘The last round did not properly clear the chamber. Look.’

The novitiate examined the rifle, shamefaced. He manually expelled the spent casing and then ejected the magazine.

‘Punishment, ten laps,’ said Alpharius. ‘Battle pace. Move!’

Hef took hold of his rifle properly and set off towards the edge of the hall, perspiration glistening from his shaved scalp. Alpharius could hear him counting out the rhythm of his strides between gasping breaths. There was innocence and dedication there. Hef was a fine recruit.

It was a shame he would be killed along with the rest of the Raven Guard.

Alpharius felt uncomfortable at the thought. More than uncomfortable, in fact. He was not sure how he would define the emotion that made his chest a little tight as he watched the novitiates continue their weapon practice. Guilt, perhaps? It certainly was not a sensation he had felt before, and the Alpha Legionnaire did not like it at all. He cleared his throat in agitation and snapped out a reprimand to a pair of recruits who had sagged down to a crouch at the back of the line. They stood up sharp at his words.

It seemed such a waste. Corax and the senior commanders would never be moved to join the Alpha Legion, but these novitiates were fine young men, who would be ideal recruits for the Legion. Their deaths seemed a little unnecessary.

Alpharius was not sure where these doubts were coming from. He blamed the false memories. They had been increasing in recent days. He could clearly recall the first time he had set out from Ravendelve into the atomic wasteland, though nothing of what had happened after leaving the armoured compound. Names of fellow legionaries haunted him, Raven Guard that had fallen on Isstvan. His fellow legionaries referred to them sometimes and he would have a flash of a face, or instinctively smile at some half-remembered joke, or briefly relive a moment in battle alongside the fallen warrior.

He had to focus. He was not a legionary of the Raven Guard, he was an Alpha Legionnaire. His primarch was not Corax, his oaths had been made to Alpharius and Omegon. In their wisdom, the twin primarchs had chosen to back Horus’s rebellion, and he had to trust that it was for good reason. The fall of the Raven Guard, the taking of the gene-tech, would serve a greater purpose.

Holding on to that thought, Alpharius suppressed the memories bubbling up from the depths of his altered mind. I am Alpharius, he told himself. I am Alpharius.

Descending the ramp of his Stormbird, Branne was surprised to find Controller Ephrenia waiting for him in the docking bay. She held a data-slate, which she wordlessly passed to the commander as he walked towards the bay doors. With so many lost at Isstvan – legionaries and ordinary humans alike – the controller had been promoted from strategium officer on the Avenger to the command centre at the tip of Ravenspire.

‘What am I looking at?’ asked Branne. ‘I have come back to answer a summons from the primarch.’

‘Transmission data, commander,’ said Ephrenia. She took the tablet back for a moment, tapped the screen twice and returned it to Branne’s grip. ‘As per your orders, we conducted a survey of all communications logs that the Word Bearers Chaplain had access to, both from Deliverance and via Kiavahr’s network. We detected several anomalous transmissions.’

‘Anomalous?’ said Branne. Pistons wheezed as the great doors to the dock opened up in front of him. He stopped to look down at the controller. ‘Be more specific.’

‘Non-Mechanicum and non-Legion frequencies and channels, commander.’

‘Not that surprising, really,’ said Branne, resuming his stride. ‘There are many commercial vessels, Imperial Army ships and other non-affiliated ships in the system.’

‘These transmissions have a Legiones Astartes signature, commander,’ Ephrenia said patiently.

Branne stopped again and studied the tablet with more deliberate intent. The controller was correct, there was a Legiones Astartes cipher and modulation pattern to the recorded transmissions.’

‘All are flash-traffic, commander,’ continued Ephrenia. ‘Compressed, in my opinion.’

‘Wait, I recognise this transponder code,’ said Branne, highlighting one of the entries with a jabbed finger.

‘Yes, commander, it is a Ravenspire access cipher,’ the controller said. Her voice lowered as she continued. ‘I came to you directly because of that. It is Commander Agapito’s broadcast channel.’

‘I see,’ said Branne. This information perturbed him, but he assured himself his brother would be able to offer a sensible explanation for its purpose. That did not explain the mystery of the remaining transmissions. ‘What of the others?’

‘Some are old Lycaen security frequencies, and two are on the defunct guild networks, commander. Impossible to pin down a source, but they originate on Kiavahr.’

‘Dissidents, no doubt,’ said Branne.

‘A significant peak in traffic, commander. Previous communications detected on those frequencies were sporadic and clustered. The pattern here is more sustained. I believe it might signify some attempt to reestablish the old guild structures.’

‘Good work,’ said Branne. ‘I will take care of this matter from here. Nothing to get too worried about yet. I shall perform further investigations before I distract Lord Corax with this information.’

‘As you wish, commander,’ said Ephrenia, with a bow.

‘Wait a moment,’ said Branne as the controller made to step away. ‘Contact Commander Agapito and request him to meet me in my chambers in an hour.’

‘Yes, commander.’

‘And set up a monitor on Commander Agapito’s channel. Let me know if there are any further irregularities.’

‘Yes, commander. Is that all?’

‘Return to your duties.’

Ephrenia strode down the corridor, leaving Branne with uneasy thoughts. The pro-guild sympathisers on Kiavahr were stirring up trouble, he was sure. It was inconvenient but not a significant threat. It would be simple enough to inform the Mechanicum of the matter.

He took a step and then stopped with a hissed curse. If he warned the Mechanicum of any surge in dissident activity, they would be required to perform a scouring of the rad-wastes, or at the very least intensify their observation and security of the area. That would lead to greater scrutiny around Ravendelve, a turn of events Lord Corax would be keen to avoid.

Branne rubbed in his chin, caught between courses of action. He was sure that the dissidents could pose no military threat to the facility, but their timing was inconvenient. With so much out-system traffic coming through the star system at the moment, it was quite possible that agitators sent by Horus were stirring up trouble to keep the Raven Guard occupied.

It was just a theory, and he would need more solid evidence before it was worth notifying the primarch. Lord Corax was intent on the gene-tech project, spending most of his time bunkered up in Ravendelve with Sixx and the tech-priest. Even when he was back on Deliverance, the primarch spent most of his time poring over the reports and studies, incommunicado except for urgent matters.

Unsure how to proceed, Branne realised he was going to be late for his meeting with Corax. He folded up the data tablet and hurried along the corridor, hoping the primarch would not remark on his tardiness.

Twelve

Brothers in Conflict
Mark VI
Creation of the Raptors

Sitting on a shallow chair in his rooms, Branne stared at the data tablet laid on the table in front of him. A perfunctory knock on the metal bulkhead preceded Agapito’s entry. Branne glanced up at his brother and waved him to the couch opposite.

‘What is it, brother?’ asked Agapito, choosing to stand. ‘Lord Corax tells me there has been a significant development in the gene-project. We are to accompany him to Ravendelve.’

‘Yes, I heard,’ said Branne. He glanced at the digital chronometer on the table next to the data-slate. ‘We have a little time.’

‘You seem preoccupied,’ said Agapito. He lightened the comment with a smile. ‘Is Commander of Recruits proving more of a challenge than you thought?

‘I keep having to put myself between Sixx and that magos, with the primarch constantly demanding updates. But that’s not what I want to talk about.’ Branne handed the slate to his brother, the transmission data highlighted. ‘Can you explain that?’

Agapito looked at the tablet and frowned. He glanced at Branne and then looked back at the data-slate.

‘That is my command channel,’ said Agapito.

‘I know,’ replied Branne.

‘I don’t recognise the transmission code, though. Some kind of glitch in the system?’

‘You tell me, brother.’

Looking sharply at Branne, Agapito dropped the tablet back on the metal table with a clang.

‘Those are ominous words, Branne,’ said the commander. ‘I detect accusation behind them.’

‘Just interest,’ replied Branne. ‘Call it my curiosity. Tell me, why is there an irregular transmission from your channel, broadcast on a non-Legion frequency?’

‘I do not know, brother,’ said Agapito. ‘If you have some charge to make, then speak it plainly; your crude hinting is testing my patience.’

Branne stood up and met his brother’s gaze directly. He folded his arms across his chest and regarded Agapito for a few seconds, gauging his expression. The commander of the Talons looked genuinely confused and upset.

‘You offer no explanation for this?’ said Branne.

‘None,’ replied Agapito, his tone belligerent. ‘Do you offer any explanation for your suspicion?’

Breathing in deeply, Branne considered his next move. It was likely that Agapito was genuinely ignorant of the transmission, which gave him a bigger problem: someone had accessed the command communications without authorisation. Branne was not sure which was the worst scenario.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘I will have Ephrenia look into it more closely. Maybe it is a glitch.’

‘Are you sure?’ said Agapito. ‘Don’t you want to take me down to the Red Level and subject me to a more rigorous interrogation?’

Branne snarled, offended by the implication. The Red Level was where the punishment cells had been located during the years of Kiavahran suppression. They had had a bloody reputation back then, and the thought of the tortures that prisoners had undergone in that dark place set Branne’s teeth on edge even now.

‘Sorry, brother, that was uncalled-for,’ said Agapito, offering out his hand in apology. Branne took it after a moment’s hesitation.

‘I don’t understand you, brother, not since Isstvan,’ Branne confessed. ‘It worries me.’

‘No need for it,’ said Agapito, with a grin that Branne could clearly see was forced. ‘You have plenty of concerns already without adding me to the list.’

‘Yes, I do,’ said Branne, with another glance at the chronometer. ‘We had best get armoured, the primarch will expect us at the dock soon.’

‘You can talk to me, brother,’ said Agapito. ‘About the recruitment project, if you need to. I have not been able to pay half as much attention to it as I would like, not with all of my time taken up with the Legion reorganisation.’

‘How are the Talons shaping up?’

‘Good. Better than expected, given the circumstances. A few discipline problems now and then, but nothing I can’t straighten out. They’ve had a hard time of late.’

‘Don’t go easy on them, brother,’ said Branne, indicating for Agapito to head for the door. ‘It’s going to get a lot harder.’

As he watched Agapito leave, Branne could not shake off a question that he wanted to ask but could not bring himself to voice: why are you lying to me, brother?

In an antechamber of the infirmary in Ravendelve, Corax waited with a mixture of anticipation and foreboding. Cabinets lined one wall, shelves laden with a mass of medical devices on the opposite side. Metal benches had been cleared of other equipment to serve as seats. It had been four days since he had authorised the first implantation sequence. Vincente Sixx had been cautious in his advice, but Orlandriaz had been adamant they were ready to proceed to the next logical stage.

Agapito and Branne waited with their primarch. Sensing his mood, they had said little, but Corax detected an undercurrent of tension between the two commanders. Corax was sure it was due to disagreements about the gene-project.

A scrape at the door caught the attention of all in the room. Corax took a sharp breath, but let it out when he saw that it was Solaro and Aloni. They offered terse greetings and sat themselves next to their fellow commanders.

‘Let’s hope this has worked, eh?’ said Aloni.

‘Nothing to lose,’ said Solaro. ‘If it does not work, we are where we started out.’

‘It will work,’ said Corax. He had spent every moment he had to spare on the gene-seed manipulation, combining his own knowledge and fragments of the Emperor’s memories with the research of Sixx and Orlandriaz. The primarch had scrutinised every gene-sequence and permutation and was convinced the Chief Apothecary and tech-priest had found the solution.

With that assurance, the commanders waited in silence. Agapito fidgeted, tapping his fingers on his kneepads, stopping when he earned himself a scowl from Branne. Corax wished he could have overseen the final implantation himself, as the Emperor had personally attended to the primarchs’ creation, but his sheer size had made it impractical for him to stay in the sterile chamber where the process was taking place.

The door opened again, revealing Vincente Sixx. The Apothecary was dressed in surgical robes, a smear of blood across the front. He peeled off a pair of thin gloves and stuffed them into a pocket across his stomach.

‘How are they?’ asked Corax, standing up.

‘Come and see for yourself,’ said Sixx.

Corax followed the Apothecary out of the door, the commanders behind him. Stepping into the main infirmary, the primarch was struck by how cold it was. He remembered that the recruits had been placed in a brief cryobiotic state as a precaution against rampant cell reproduction – a stage in the process Corax hoped to eliminate with the next group of recruits if this proved successful. The chill was emanating from the nine men standing bare-chested, close to their beds alongside one wall. They wore loose trousers and soft boots, the air around them filled with faint vapour from their warming bodies.

All nine were the same physically, as tall and broad as a legionary. Some of their facial structure remained distinct, allowing the primarch to identify each with the recruits he had wished well before their transformation. Their bodies were free of hair still and their skin was pale – almost albino like their primarch. He also noticed that every subject had dark eyes. Not quite the black orbs he possessed, but certainly far greyer than even those of previous Raven Guard.

There were identical surgical marks on the bodies of all nine, though the scars were already becoming indistinct. The pattern was instantly recognisable to any member of the Legiones Astartes, as was the discolouration beneath the skin of their torso and shoulders.

‘They have their black carapaces already?’ said Solaro.

‘They have every enhanced organ you possess, commander,’ said Orlandriaz, emerging from behind the group of giant post-humans. ‘The black carapace must still be implanted as before, it being a mostly artificial construct.’

‘And the rest are grown naturally?’ said Branne. He took a step closer to the new legionaries, examining them carefully. The recruits stood to attention with eyes firmly fixed ahead, not reacting to the scrutiny of their superiors.

‘Yes,’ said Sixx, gesturing for one of the men – Corax remembered his name as Halvar Diaro – to step forwards. ‘Several of the gene-seed implantations will not be necessary when the process is perfected. They serve only to prepare the body for later implants and have no direct effect after maturation.’

‘What about the progenoids?’ asked Solaro. ‘Do they mature quickly too?’

‘They do,’ said Orlandriaz, with something of a smirk. ‘However, they will also become unnecessary once we have completed our work. Once the modified gene-seed is finished, we will be able to reproduce from source. There will be no need of the antiquated in-host maturation you currently rely upon.’

‘We can make as many gene-seed sets as we like,’ explained Sixx. ‘Numbers will only be limited by the availability of recruits.’

Corax only half-heard the exchange as the commanders continued to ask questions about the recruits’ capabilities and physical enhancements. He was captivated by the nine men, marvelling in their existence. He knew every cell in their bodies better than he knew the Ravenspire, yet to see them in the flesh was breathtaking. They were perfect examples of the Legiones Astartes.

‘Where is the tenth man?’ asked Agapito, breaking through Corax’s admiration. The primarch turned a raised brow to the two men who were architects of the project.

Sixx and Orlandriaz shared a look. The Chief Apothecary sighed.

‘A minute defect in the heart, microscopic, was ruptured by the accelerated cell generation,’ said Sixx. ‘It would have happened even with regular gene-seed.’

‘Avoidable,’ added the tech-priest. ‘More thorough screening will eliminate the problem.’

‘I thought the plan was that we would be able to relax the recruitment criteria,’ said Agapito.

‘In time, we will,’ said Corax. He walked up to the man who had stepped forwards and laid a hand on his shoulder. He glanced back at the commanders. ‘The next stage of development will be to introduce sequences in the gene-seed that will be retroactive. Genetic weaknesses and minor physical discrepancies will be eliminated by the introduction of the superior gene-seed.’

There were looks exchanged between the others in the room as they absorbed the full portent of Corax’s words: an almost limitless supply of legionaries.

‘If that can be achieved, if the gene-tech can be passed on to the other loyal Legions, those loyal to the Emperor would outnumber the traitors within months,’ the primarch continued, meeting the gaze of Diaro. ‘These nine are the first of thousands – tens of thousands when we have finished. It is for that reason we must do everything we can to force Horus to hold back his attack on Terra. Not only will we gain time for Dorn to build ever greater defences, we buy ourselves the space to rebuild after the losses of Isstvan.’

The group of commanders circled around the recruits, examining them from every angle. Corax felt a moment of concern, realising the attitude he had towards these newest Raven Guard. They were not just experimental subjects, not just benchmarks on a path to recovery. They were warriors of the Legiones Astartes.

‘I have an important question to ask you,’ he said to Diaro, crouching so that he was level with the man’s eyes. ‘Answer it truthfully.’

‘Yes, Lord Corax,’ the recruit replied, his voice now deep, edged with a husky timbre.

‘How do you feel?’

Diaro looked at the other newly-created legionaries and they all broke into smiles. Another of them answered the question first.

‘I feel good, Lord Corax. Strong, healthy.’

‘Ready to fight?’ asked Branne.

‘Yes, commander,’ said Diaro. He banged a fist against his heavily-muscled chest. ‘Ready to kill traitors.’

The internal communications chime disturbed Corax’s study of the latest test reports on the new legionaries. He paused the flow of information across the three screens in front of him and activated the receiver.

‘Lord Corax, your presence at the command chamber is required,’ said Ephrenia. The primarch thought he could detect barely-suppressed laughter in her voice. ‘We have a situation that may need your intervention.’

‘Please be more specific,’ said Corax, reaching out to a mug of water balanced on the edge of his metal desk. He realised he had been cloistered in the study room for more than twelve hours.

‘We have detected two Imperial Fists vessels approaching Deliverance, lord,’ Ephrenia explained.

‘Report to me when you find out what they want,’ said the primarch. He took a gulp of water, savouring it as if it were fine wine. ‘The watch commander can surely handle this?’

‘Branne is on watch command, lord,’ said Ephrenia. Her smirk was almost audible. ‘The Imperial Fists vessels are under the command of Captain Noriz. The exchange is getting quite heated.’

Corax sighed, switched off the data screens and stood up.

‘Very well, I’ll be there soon,’ he said. ‘Make sure Branne doesn’t do something hot-headed, like opening fire.’

‘Yes, lord, I’ll do my best,’ said Ephrenia, trying not to laugh.

Running fingers through his thick hair, Corax stretched his shoulders and cracked his knuckles. It had been six days since gene-seed implantation had been completed on the first recruits and there was a stream of genetic data and physiological examination reports for him to digest if he wanted to take the project to its next stage. Whatever the reason for Noriz’s arrival, it was inopportune at best, and suspicious at worst. Was Dorn sending his man to keep an eye on the Raven Guard?

The primarch made his way to the conveyor and rose up through Ravenspire to the command chamber close to the pinnacle. As he entered, he could hear Captain Noriz’s voice over the vox. Branne was hunched over the communications console, a vox-link clasped in his gauntleted fist.

‘Your security protocol makes no sense, commander,’ Noriz was protesting. ‘I can see no benefit to such a delay.’

On the other side of the chamber, standing pointedly in front of the weapons armament panel, Ephrenia caught Corax’s eye. He walked over to her as Branne stabbed a finger into the reply switch.

‘You cannot enter Deliverance orbital space without prior authorisation, captain,’ said the commander. ‘Observe proper protocol and we will proceed.’

‘Commander Branne is demanding that the Imperial Fists leave orbit and request permission to approach,’ said the controller.

‘I have already explained the reason for not doing so,’ said Noriz. ‘You are compromising our mission here.’

‘Branne!’ snapped Corax. The commander spun around, obviously having not noticed the primarch’s arrival. ‘Explain.’

‘The Imperial Fists sent no hail after entering the system, lord,’ said Branne. ‘Our protocols dictate that they stand out from the vicinity of Kiavahr and request permission to approach. At the moment, Ravenspire is within range of their weapons.’

Corax crossed the room, forcing Branne to stand aside at the console. The primarch took up the transmitter.

‘Captain Noriz, this is Lord Corax,’ he said. ‘Why did you not declare your approach to Deliverance?’

‘As I told Commander Branne, Lord Corax, I wish knowledge of our presence here to be minimised,’ said Noriz after a slight delay. ‘A long-range hail would have announced our presence as surely as chorus of blaring trumpets. It is imperative that I speak with you. I have messages from Lord Dorn and the Sigillite.’

‘Commander Branne is correct,’ said Corax. ‘Please withdraw by one hundred thousand kilometres and prepare your ships to receive boarding parties. Commander Branne will meet you in person aboard your vessel to hear what you have to say. If he deems it necessary, he will then grant you authority to approach Deliverance and send a delegation to Ravenspire.’

There was a longer pause before Noriz replied.

‘As you wish, Lord Corax,’ said the Imperial Fists captain. ‘I take it that I should treat Commander Branne as your absolute authority?’

‘For certain,’ said Corax. ‘If you wish to keep a low profile, I suggest you retire out-orbit, to place Deliverance between your ships and Kiavahr. There will be no further long-range communication until Commander Branne has assessed the situation.’

‘Understood, Lord Corax.’

Corax turned to Branne and saw an expression of self-satisfaction, an expression that changed to one of contrition when the commander saw the anger in Corax’s eyes.

‘I might expect such behaviour from a lower officer, but you are a commander and you must set an example,’ Corax rasped. ‘You will be cordial and cooperative with Captain Noriz and extend him every assistance he requires.’

‘Aye, lord,’ said Branne, looking down at the decking. He raised his eyes for a brief moment before turning his gaze away again. ‘I admit that perhaps I was over-zealous in my application of procedure. In my defence, the Imperial Fists did breach our security and I was only telling them to do the same as you did.’

‘You forced me to support your stance, Branne,’ said Corax, voice edged with irritation. ‘I am not about to countermand the orders of one of my commanders in front of another Legion, but I do not agree with your response. Do not allow personal feelings to impede your duty again. I am returning to my chambers to continue my work. The next interruption I expect will be your full report on why the Imperial Fists have come here.’

‘Understood, lord,’ said Branne. He turned away and called to Controller Ephrenia. ‘Signal Alpha Dock to ready me a Thunderhawk.’

Corax watched the commander stride from the control room and felt a moment of worry. Something was eating at Branne, something between him and Agapito. The two of them had shown moments of ill-discipline since the return from Isstvan and their behaviour at Ravendelve had bordered on antipathy towards each other. Corax was determined to root out the cause, and if necessary he would find new commanders.

Despite his concern, Corax decided that, for the moment, it would wait. The gene-project was more pressing. When the next generation of Raven Guard was secure, the primarch would turn his full attention to the existing one. He was eager to move on to wider implantation, and chafed at the thought of waiting for the results of more tests. Within moments, his mind was full of thoughts on how to refine the new gene-tech, the problems with his commanders forgotten.

As the primarch made his way back to his chambers, he told himself to have patience. A moment of rashness now might ruin all of the hard work and achievements that had come before. Feeling calmer, he sat down at his desk and started the dataflow again.

The interior of the Wrathful Vanguard was very different to the inside of a Raven Guard vessel. It resembled more closely a fortress than a starship, the walls layered with plates of bare metal etched with Legion mottoes and ferrocrete slabs carved with the sigils and devices of the Imperial Fists. Buttresses reinforced every corridor, doors were arch-shaped and made of heavily bolted wood and bulkheads were cross-barred with gilded girders.

Branne did not think it ostentatious – not like some of the vessels of the Emperor’s Children he had travelled on – but there was an aesthetic that he found artificial and pompous. Raised in whitewashed cell blocks, the Raven Guard preferred the functional over the ornamental, and even since liberation Deliverance was only sparsely furnished and decorated.

The commander followed Noriz along a central passageway to a heavy elevator. A squad of Raven Guard followed a little way behind and they in turn were tailed by ten warriors of the Imperial Fists. Branne had not remarked on this welcome, still smarting from Corax’s admonishment, and had allowed Noriz his prideful show of authority.

The conveyor descended with only a whine of electric motors, unlike the clanking, rattling elevators of Ravenspire. There was room enough for all of the legionaries, allowing the Raven Guard and Imperial Fists to stand a few metres separated from each other.

They could not have been more dissimilar: the sons of Corax in their black, patched-up armour and the warriors of Dorn resplendent in yellow and gleaming gold. The Imperial Fists stood to attention in a uniform line, bolters held at their waists; the Raven Guard had gathered in a clump, bolters slung on their belts, arms crossed or hands on hips.

‘How are things on Terra?’ Branne asked, feeling that he should break the stony silence.

‘The fortification continues,’ replied Noriz.

Branne waited, but there was no further comment forthcoming. He looked at the Imperial Fists.

‘Your legionaries are turned out well,’ he said, thinking of something complimentary to say. ‘They are a credit to the Legion.’

‘We were fortunate not to be involved in the debacle at Isstvan,’ said Noriz. He glanced at the Raven Guard. ‘It is understandable that after such a disaster certain standards must be compromised.’

Taking in a deep breath, Branne resisted the bait.

‘We’re ready to fight, despite our appearance,’ he said.

‘I know you are, commander,’ said Noriz. ‘It was not a condemnation of your preparedness or your ability. Your armourium has shown remarkable ingenuity in affecting such modifications.’

‘We adapt, as ever. Hide some salt for the gruel, as we say.’

‘An interesting motto,’ said Noriz. It was hard to tell his mood from the modulation of his armour’s external emitters, but Branne detected amusement. ‘I am not sure what it means, though.’

‘You weren’t born in a prison, obviously,’ said Branne.

‘No, I was not, commander.’ The conveyor shuddered to a stop and the doors slid open. Branne’s armour detected vacuum as air blew out of the elevator in a gust that tousled the lanyards hanging from Noriz’s shoulder pads. ‘I hope you now understand why I insisted on full armour.’

They stepped out into darkness, footfalls silent in the void, the light from the conveyor casting long shadows over a floor of unpainted metal.

‘The vacuum is a precaution only,’ Noriz continued as he led the way. Suit lamps automatically sprang into life from the group as they moved further into the chamber. Turning, Branne saw that the walls were some considerable distance away, thirty metres or more. ‘We wished the cargo to arrive in pristine condition.’

‘Cargo?’ said Branne. His question was answered as his suit lamp played over a figure a few metres ahead. He stopped suddenly, taken aback.

As the legionaries converged, several rows of armoured suits reflected back their lamps. The metal and ceramite were bare, the suits silver and dull grey. Lifeless masks gazed back at the commander as he turned left and right. There were several dozen sets of armour, each locked in place against a strut welded to the floor.

‘Mark VI,’ said Noriz. ‘The latest design from Mars.’

Branne said nothing as he approached the closest rank of empty armour. It looked instantly familiar, at first glance little different from the Mark IV armour he wore. On closer inspection, the Raven Guard commander could see the subtle differences in panel shape and bonding, the thicker material of the flexible joints, the solid greaves covering the knees. Most obvious was the bolt-reinforced left shoulder plate and the helmet design.

‘They still require a little further work, I’m afraid,’ said Noriz. ‘Lord Dorn wished them shipped out to you as soon as we were able. They’re artificer-made, pre-production. You’ll be the first Legion in the Imperium to be issued with Mark VI.’

‘A nice gesture,’ said Branne. He ran his hand over the studded shoulder pad. ‘We performed combat tests on the prototypes for two years, during the campaign through Scalland sector. I see they’ve solved the problem of the abdominal plating we reported.’

‘Most of the improvements your Legion suggested were implemented,’ said Noriz, almost wistfully. ‘Protection is no better than the Mark IV, but the internal systems are far more efficient. The external cabling you see is supplemented by back-ups within the armour plate itself without compromising defence or adding excessive weight. Auto-senses have also been improved. In particular, auditory and olfactory pick-ups are much more sensitive. You will, no doubt, be pleased to hear that the stealth capabilities of this suit exceed that of any other variant.’

Branne nodded. ‘You called it Mark VI. What happened to Mark V?’

Noriz pointed at the Raven Guard legionaries.

‘With full production not yet begun on Mars, these are the only suits available. Our companion transport has another fifteen hundred of them, on top of the five hundred we are carrying. In the absence of reliable Legion supply lines, the Mechanicum have designated all non-standard or stop-gap designs as Mark V. Many of the improvisations made by your armourium after the dropsite massacre are being passed on to other Legions in the absence of replacement parts for Mark IV. Your legionaries already have Mark V, commander.’

‘Why us?’ said Branne. ‘I’m thankful for the help, but this is a long way to come to pay us a favour.’

‘In recognition of your part in testing the suits, and because you need them most. You have been honoured. The Mark VI is to be known as the Corvus suit.’

Branne laughed and jabbed a finger towards the conical faceplate in front of him.

‘Because we’re the Raven Guard and the armour has a beak?’ he said. ‘Some honour!’

‘It is named after your lord, as thanks for the part you have played and the losses you suffered when testing the prototypes,’ said Noriz, addressing his words to all of the Raven Guard. ‘Lord Corax is insistent that the Raven Guard will take the fight to Horus’s forces. Lord Dorn sends these gifts to your Legion as a mark of support and to assist in that endeavour.’

‘You think we don’t deserve them?’ said Branne, picking up on the captain’s tone. ‘They would be better used by the Imperial Fists on Terra?’

‘On the contrary,’ said Noriz. ‘If I were to put desire before duty, I would like just as much as you to strike back at the rebels. As it is, I must deliver this cargo and return to the Legion.’

Silence followed the captain’s remarks. He gestured for the group to return to the conveyor. Branne considered the Imperial Fist’s words, surprised by them. The doors to the elevator shut behind them and air hissed into the compartment. With a jolt, the conveyor began to ascend.

‘It must have taken quite a bit of effort to get to Deliverance,’ said Branne. ‘What with the warp storms and everything else.’

‘Navigation continues to be very difficult, yes,’ said Noriz. ‘In fact, the Seventh Legion fleet which Lord Dorn originally dispatched to–’

‘So it’s going to be a long journey back for you.’

‘It is, commander. I sense you are trying to imply something, but I do not know what it is.’

‘How many legionaries do you have with you?’ asked Branne, looking at the Imperial Fists squad.

‘One hundred and fifty,’ said Noriz. ‘I do not see how that would be relevant to our journey time.’

‘In your assessment, how many of your Legion are defending Terra?’

‘When I left, there were more than forty thousand Imperial Fists stationed at the palace,’ said Noriz. He grunted. ‘I think I understand your meaning, commander. One hundred and fifty legionaries would be a far more significant addition, relatively, to your force of a few thousand.’

‘I would have said that we need you more than Lord Dorn at the moment, but it comes to the same place,’ said Branne. ‘Communication is difficult though. We haven’t had more than a few scraps from Terra since the storms started. The astropaths are trying hard, but they can’t break through the disturbance. You won’t be able to confirm a change of orders from your Legion command.’

‘I know that you think we Imperial Fists are intractable, commander, but we do not abhor initiative as you suggest.’ Noriz extended his hand. ‘If Lord Corax agrees, I would be honoured to suborn my command to the Raven Guard for the moment.’

Branne looked down at the proffered hand and then took it in a firm grip.

‘Glad you agree, captain,’ said Branne. ‘Happily for you, you’ll be under the direction of Commander Agapito, not me.’

‘Despite our early issues and personal differences, Commander Branne, I would have no problem serving under you. Against overwhelming opposition, you rescued Lord Corax and the remains of your Legion from Isstvan. That is a feat worthy of respect and praise. You are a Hero of the Imperium, commander.’

‘I am?’ laughed Branne. There were chuckles from the other legionaries, both Raven Guard and Imperial Fists. Since Isstvan, the commander had felt as if he had failed. The most important battle in the Legion’s history and he missed it. He and his warriors had been apart from the others, isolated from the bond that had brought the rest of the Legion together, Terrans and those of Deliverance. To hear Noriz speak of his actions in such terms allowed him for the first time to think differently about the matter. ‘If that makes me a Hero of the Imperium, we’ll have to come up with a new title for whoever kills Horus.’

‘It’ll be Russ,’ said one of Branne’s honour guard. ‘Just you wait. Once the Space Wolves get involved, this’ll be over quick.’

‘Maybe we’ll get to him first,’ said another.

‘Sanguinius,’ said Noriz, silencing the debate. ‘The Sons of Fenris are far away, still likely dealing with the aftermath of Prospero. As much as I admire your enthusiasm, the Raven Guard cannot match the might of the Luna Wolves. No, when the Blood Angels hear of this treachery, there’ll be no stopping Sanguinius. Lord Dorn calls him the Angel of Death, and I can’t imagine Fulgrim, Perturabo, Lorgar or any of the others wanting to step between Horus and the Angel’s vengeance. It’ll be Sanguinius, mark my words.’

Branne reached into his belt and pulled out a ring with two large keys on it. They were dull, much scratched and slightly bent, the wear of decades plain to see.

‘I took these from the first man I killed during the liberation war,’ said Branne. ‘If Sanguinius kills Horus, they’re yours.’

‘A wager?’ said Noriz.

‘If you like,’ said Branne. ‘What do you offer up?’

Noriz glanced at his legionaries and received nods of encouragement.

‘All right,’ said Noriz. He unhooked a golden shield from the lanyard on his right shoulder plate and held it up to Branne. It was inscribed with a single word: ‘Narandia’. ‘My first battle honour, awarded for slaying an ork commander. If Russ gets to Horus first, you can have it.’

This was greeted with claps and a cheer from the Raven Guard.

‘I‘ll be watching your back, to make sure that you survive long enough to hand over that shiny medal,’ said Branne.

‘And I will be watching yours, commander,’ replied Noriz, slapping his hand against Branne’s breastplate. ‘I have always desired to own a rusty set of keys.’

Returning the keys to their pouch, Branne hoped that one of them would prove right. If Horus reached Terra, nothing would be certain.

The slow drumming of Agapito’s fingers sounded from the metal desk. He stared at the communications log, angered by the single highlighted line of data.

Someone had broken his personal cipher and endangered everything. He wondered who it might be, and narrowed his suspicions to a few individuals, legionaries that had caught his eye by their idiosyncratic behaviour. There was nothing solid on which to base his accusations though, just an uncertainty that nagged at him.

With Branne scrutinising everything he was doing, Agapito felt trapped. His questions had been off the mark, but they were unwelcome attention. Branne was stumbling around, searching for something but not knowing what it was. His careless investigation threatened to uncover everything by accident, and that couldn’t be allowed. Not before Agapito had a chance to make his move.

A vox-chime interrupted his thoughts. He switched off the display and activated the speaker.

‘Commander Agapito, I have a matter to discuss with you.’ He recognised the voice of Custodian Arcatus. The Custodian Guard had kept to themselves for most of the time since arriving on Deliverance, quartered in the mid-levels of Ravenspire that had once been home to the lost companies. Every now and then they would emerge, conducting inspections of the armourium, the docks and other secure areas. That was another inconvenience, but Corax had been adamant that the Custodians were given free range of Deliverance and Agapito’s protests had been ignored. The one concession the commander had managed to extract meant that the Custodians were not entitled to travel to Ravendelve. That would have been too much for the primarch, who guarded the gene-project and its secrecy the same way he had guarded his followers during the uprising.

‘I am in my chambers now, Custodian,’ said Agapito. ‘We can talk here.’

‘Very well, commander, I am on my way.’

Agapito wondered what subject would be up for discussion. It was unusual for the Custodian Guard to interact with the Legion in this way. He wondered if Branne had got involved somehow, and his thoughts soured again. At least the gene-tech and new recruits seemed to be a complete success. Branne would soon have no time to ponder other matters. As Commander of Recruits he would be kept occupied at Ravendelve.

It seemed a pointless exercise, but Alpharius was not going to attract attention by mentioning it. He lowered into a half-crouch, arms a little apart, and circled around the recruit. As he sidestepped to the left, he could see Corax and Branne out of the corner of his eye, watching him and Kaddian gauging each other.

The newly-enhanced Kaddian looked the part: taller than, but not quite as broad as, Alpharius, with rangy limbs and a determined glare. He might possess the physical qualities of a legionary, but he had none of the training and experience. Alpharius had noticed the Raven Guard were prone to wagers, and had bet Sergeant Dor that he would best Kaddian within two minutes. The stake was ten days of armour maintenance. Alpharius flexed his fingers as he pictured the sergeant polishing his suit.

The two warriors wore only loose black trousers for the bout, leaving little for Alpharius to grip for a throw. He lunged, attempting to grab Kaddian’s left wrist, but the recruit was two steps away within a heartbeat, Alpharius’s grapple missing badly. The recruit’s face was a mask of concentration, eyes flicking between Alpharius’s hands, feet and face, looking for any warning of his next move.

Circling again, Alpharius could feel the expectation from the rest of the squad, urging him on to victory. There was no cheering though, just studied silence from everyone in the hall, the only sound coming from the slap of the combatants’ feet on the hard floor.

Kaddian sidestepped and swept a leg out, trying to trip Alpharius. The Alpha Legionnaire jumped just in time, already moving his weight forwards to shoulder-charge his opponent. He landed and leapt, only to find himself not connecting with Kaddian but running through empty air. A kick to his back sent Alpharius onwards a few more steps before he could halt his impetus and turn.

Immediately he was forced to throw up his arms to block a combination of punches aimed at his head, catching the blows on his forearms. Alpharius aimed a kick at Kaddian’s abdomen, catching a glancing blow on the recruit’s hip as he dodged back. Pressing forwards, seeking to exploit Kaddian’s imbalance, Alpharius again tried for a grapple. He seized hold of the recruit’s left arm and twisted, trying to force him down to the ground.

With a suppleness and strength that Alpharius had never encountered, Kaddian arched his back and heaved up with his trapped arm, lifting the legionnaire from his feet. Dropping to the floor, Kaddian turned to toss Alpharius over his back, forcing the legionary to release his grip to turn a hard landing into a forward roll.

A punch to the spine sent Alpharius sprawling, the attack coming so quickly from behind he had no idea how Kaddian had regained his feet in the half-second that had passed. He half-rolled to his right, coming up to face his opponent.

Just in time for his chin to meet the heel of Kaddian’s right foot.

Slamming back into the rockcrete, Alpharius smashed his head against the floor as he fell. He rolled away as the recruit’s foot slammed down onto the floor where Alpharius’s throat had been a moment before. Kaddian’s other foot lashed into his ribs almost instantly, forcing the air from the legionnaire’s lungs.

He anticipated the next kick, managing to twist far enough to grab Kaddian’s ankle in both hands before his foot connected with Alpharius’s gut. Surging to his feet, the Alpha Legionnaire heaved up, seeking to force Kaddian to his back.

With precise timing, Kaddian used Alpharius’s hold on his ankle for support, surging up to crash a knee into his chest. Alpharius toppled backwards and the two of them fell in a heap. Alpharius let go with one hand and hammered a fist into Kaddian’s side, even as the recruit slammed the tip of his elbow into the legionnaire’s cheek. Snatching his foot free from Alpharius’s grasp, Kaddian turned and knelt across his throat, pinning him down. Gasping, Alpharius locked eyes with Kaddian and saw ferocious intent. The recruit drew back his fist, aiming for Alpharius’s face.

‘Stop!’ Branne’s shout cut through the pounding of blood in Alpharius’s ears.

Kaddian jumped up and stepped away immediately, retreating with light steps. Alpharius’s head was ringing. The ceiling swam in and out of focus for a few moments before his vision cleared.

Sergeant Dor approached, hand outstretched to help him to his feet. Irritated, Alpharius ignored the assistance and pushed himself up. He glanced angrily at Kaddian, who was looking at him with a polite smile. Behind Kaddian, the other eight recruits were grinning at their companion’s victory.

Still smarting from his defeat, Alpharius returned to his squad, ignoring the smug look on Dor’s face. Another recruit and another legionary were called forwards, and the next bout began.

Recovering his senses, Alpharius could hear the conversation between Branne and Corax, standing not far to his left.

‘Reactions and strength are better than a matured legionary,’ said Branne. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’

‘Which is fine for unarmoured, unarmed combat,’ replied Corax. ‘Those advantages will be much reduced when they have their power armour.’

‘I’ve been thinking about that, lord,’ said Branne, eyes fixed on the two warriors sparring. ‘The new Mark VI suits… They’re far superior to anything else we have, except for a few artificer suits for officers, and even they’re pretty bashed up. We can’t implant the experience and guile of a veteran into these men, but the new armour and their advanced systems would go some way to helping with that.’

‘I was thinking the same,’ said the primarch. ‘These are not just recruits, they are the start of something new for the Legion. I have told Sixx to progress with another one hundred implantations. If we can successfully scale up, you’ll have a fighting force within fifty days. Commander of Recruits doesn’t seem to reflect your role properly.’

Branne glanced at his leader.

‘You said this would be a combat force when you gave me the title, lord.’

‘They need a name, Branne,’ said Corax. ‘We can’t keep calling them recruits, but it isn’t right that they simply get absorbed by Agapito’s Talons.’

‘I have a suggestion,’ said Branne.

‘Then share it, commander.’

‘We have the Talons, Falcons and Hawks, lord. I think we should be the Raptors.’

‘The Raptors?’ Corax smiled and placed a massive hand on Branne’s shoulder. ‘Yes, that will suit perfectly. Swift hunters. You are the Commander of the Raptors now. I’ll inform Agapito, Solaro and Aloni.’

With a grunt and a thud, the legionary duelling with the Raptor ended up face-first on the floor, one arm twisted hard against his back. The Raptor snaked an arm around his neck and pulled, eliciting a pained snarl from the legionary.

‘Stop!’ Branne called.

The Raptors, thought Alpharius, looking at the line of warriors nodding encouragement to their companion as he returned to the rank. If Corax was right, and the Raptors would be battle-ready within fifty days, Omegon had to hear about this. Alpharius had held off making any report so far, but this was news worthy of the risk. Whatever the Alpha Legion primarch was planning, he would have to move swiftly if he was to counter the resurgence in the Raven Guard’s fortunes.

Corax seemed to be content with what he saw. Alpharius watched him leave. Just before the primarch passed through the large doors from the hall, he stopped and looked back, deep in thought. A frown creased the pale skin of his brow, not of anger but of concern. It lasted only for a few seconds, and Alpharius was left to ponder what had passed through the primarch’s thoughts as he had gazed back at the young Raptors.

The guard’s visor shattered inwards, sending shards of reinforced transpex into the man’s eyes. He fell back, howling. Corvus drove his fist into the screaming man’s chest, silencing him in an explosion of bone fragments and pulped organs.

The rattle of automatic weapons fire sounded behind him and he felt a stinging sensation across his back. Looking over his shoulder, Corvus saw three men at the outpost rampart, a jutting defence position that overlooked the approach from Wing Two to the vehicle compound. More gunfire chattered and another hail of bullets pattered from his pale flesh, flattened rounds tinkling to the floor around him.

The rebel leader reached down and took the rifle from the dead guard’s hands. The finger guard was too small for his huge digits, so he wrenched it off. Though in reality a large calibre weapon, the rifle felt like a child’s toy in his hands. Lifting his arm, he turned and sighted on the men in the guard post. They were about two hundred metres away and he adjusted his aim a fraction to account for the poor charge in the rifle’s bullets. The muzzle of the rampart gun flared again, ripping chunks from the pockmarked wall behind Corvus, rattling against his left arm.

He pulled the trigger.

The man firing the rampart gun sagged across his weapon, a hole punched through his left cheek just beneath the visor. His finger tightened as he died, sending a burst of bullets into the ground as the gun swung on its mounting.

Firing again, Corvus put his next shot through the throat of the loader, exposed by the swinging of the weapon. The third man turned to run. He was pitched from his feet as Corvus placed his third shot between the man’s shoulder blades, shattering his spine.

‘Here,’ said Corvus, seeing Delpha running past without a weapon. He handed the youth the rifle. The rebel leader jerked his head towards the body. ‘There are spare magazines in the guard’s belt.’

The first wave had nearly reached the gate. The guards had sealed it from inside, believing themselves to be safe behind three interlocking layers of steels and ferrocrete. They were wrong.

Corvus lifted the radio transmitter from his belt.

‘Constantin, enact the override.’

‘Yes, Corax,’ came the tinny reply. The word meant ‘saviour’. Corvus had asked his followers to call him by the name he had already been given, but more and more of them insisted on the honorific. If that was their attitude, he was determined to prove them right and live up to their expectations.

Seeing a discarded shotgun, Corvus strode forwards and snatched it up. The fighting was about to get close and brutal. He pulled his knife – in fact, it was a security colonel’s parade sword – from his belt and quickly caught up with the front of the mob streaming down the wide corridor towards the gate. If they could secure the garage facility, they would have enclosed vehicles to cross the airless wasteland outside. The strategic advantage of being freed from the confines of the prison buildings had made the compound one of Corvus’s priorities.

‘Override in five seconds, Corax,’ reported Constantin.

‘Press on!’ the guerrilla leader roared, waving his shotgun towards the gates.

He was only a dozen strides from the blank surface of the portal. If the charges he had placed within the mechanism during his last unseen infiltration had been discovered, he was about to look very stupid.

A ripple of tiny pops rang through the metal. Corvus reached the lockdown lever a few seconds later – the corpse of the man who had pulled it lay crumpled at the rebel’s feet. If all had gone as Corvus planned, the lockdown was anything but secure. He pushed the lever up, feeling no resistance. In that moment he knew he had been right.

Sirens blared and warning lights spun along the top of the gate as the massive portal ground open.

‘Ready weapons!’ Corvus bellowed over the deafening rumble of immense gears.

The door had lifted no more than half a metre from the ground when a hail of bullets erupted from beyond it, ripping through knees and shins. More than twenty men and women fell screaming, clutching at their ruined legs. A swathe of the inmates turned and ran to avoid the same fate.

Corvus’s eye was drawn immediately to Lensa. She lay on her right side, left leg pulled up, her foot hanging off by a few scraps of sinew. Her young eyes met Corvus’s and she relaxed. Her shrieking stopped and she smiled.

A second later, another hail of bullets thudded into her body, tearing off half her face and punching great holes through the rest of her body.

With a snarl, Corvus dropped to the floor and rolled under the ascending door. He came to his feet in front of two men standing behind a heavy stubber, its tripod lowered as far as possible. The shotgun roared in Corvus’s hand, ripping through the protective vest of the closest guard. The second fumbled for a pistol, pulling it free from its holster at his hip just as Corvus pumped another round into the chamber.

The guard frantically pulled the trigger, sending bullets bouncing off Corvus’s chest. The gun clicked empty several times and the man’s face fell in horror. A hail of shot tore through his arm and shoulder, sending him spinning to the ground in a fountain of ruddy droplets.

The other gun crew was trying to turn their weapon towards the rebel leader. Tossing aside the shotgun, Corvus heaved the stubber from its mounting, kicking the tripod aside. He slung the belt of ammunition over his arm and brought the weapon to bear on the remaining men. Three short bursts were enough to kill them, the shots carefully placed not to damage the other heavy stubber.

The gate was now about a metre and a half off the ground and more rebels were pouring through. Corvus directed Branne, Agapito and Starken to take possession of the heavy weapon.

‘Keep moving!’ Corvus shouted. ‘Keep moving!’

Thirteen

Corax’s Hope
Hydra Contact Two
The Path to Victory

The line took one pace forwards, winding along one side of the corridor and back down the other. Navar Hef glanced to his left through the open doorway to see what was going on. The recruits – they weren’t allowed to call themselves Raptors yet – were filing past Commander Branne. Next to him was Sergeant Nestil with a box covered with black cloth. Each recruit dipped his hand into the box and pulled out a hexagonal nut. Some were black and some were white.

Those who pulled out white nuts sighed and slipped away. Those lucky enough to produce a black nut – about one in three of the recruits – stepped into the room. They were the ones who would be next in line for the transformation.

Navar had seen the new Raptors training in the hall. They were an inspiration, more so even than the legionaries that Navar had looked up to for his whole life. He could remember each and every one of the First Nine when they had been like him, just a few weeks ago. Now they were sparring with the legionaries and practising fire drill with bolters and heavy weapons.

It was so close. If Navar could pick out a black nut, he would be one of the next cadre of recruits to become Raptors. The wait was agonising, taking one step at a time away from the door and then back towards it. When he had turned at the end of the corridor, by the double doors that led to the mess, Navar had realised how close he was to the back of the line. There were fewer than twenty other recruits behind him.

His hands were shaking with the excitement and his mouth was dry.

There were only five more recruits between Navar and Commander Branne. The next drew out a white nut: failure. Four more to go. The recruit who stepped forwards was Navar’s squad leader, a fair-haired youth a couple of years older than him called Molo. Navar could barely breathe as Molo reached into the box, one eye closed as if fearful of seeing what he brought out.

It was a black nut.

‘Good for you, Molo,’ whispered Navar, and received a nod of thanks and wink in return.

‘That’s it,’ said Branne, stepping out into the corridor.

‘Commander?’ said Navar, his gut tightening with disappointment.

‘That’s the next hundred,’ Branne explained. ‘Go back to your dorms and be ready for training at Falling Hour.’

Branne stepped back into the room and the door clanged shut, leaving the remaining recruits with sagging shoulders and scuffing feet. Navar felt like he had been kicked firmly between the legs, the knot of ache in his stomach much the same. He hadn’t been one of the First Nine. He wouldn’t be one of the Second Hundred.

‘Never mind,’ said Caol, slapping Navar on the shoulder from behind. ‘We might not be the first, but we’ll be Raptors soon enough. We can wait a week.’

A week seemed like an eternity to Navar.

Adjoining the command hall, Corax’s control chamber was a square room a dozen metres across, every wall filled with screens and analytical engines. Robed technicians and wheezing servitors busied themselves at the consoles, collating the data flow into revolving star maps and ever-changing tables of information.

Branne, Agapito, Solaro and Aloni sat around the glass-topped table at the room’s heart, while Corax stood to one side, a portable terminal in one hand. Apart from the others, silent in a corner of the chamber, stood Arcatus, invited out of courtesy by the primarch. Branne had just finished his report on the transformation of the second intake of Raptors. Two had died during the process; the rest were as impressive as the first wave.

‘Sixx says he has created enough gene-seed for two thousand more, though the facilities at Ravendelve only allow us to proceed with implantation on two hundred and fifty recruits at a time. He has requested that we shift the whole operation back to Ravenspire.’

‘Not yet,’ replied Corax. ‘What about the new armour?’

‘Tests are nearly complete,’ said Branne. ‘The Raptors are learning to use the enhanced systems quickly. I’ve had the first thousand suits painted up in Legion livery. We’ll need to finalise the squad organisation before I can pass on the insignia requirements to the armourium.’

‘I have drawn up a list of potential sergeant candidates,’ said Agapito, activating the touchpad on the table in front of him. ‘The Raptors may be well-prepared, but we’ll need to draft in Talons for some command experience.’

‘Agreed,’ said Corax. He glanced at the list. ‘All fine warriors, I’ll leave the final decision up to the two of you. Solaro, what is the vehicle situation?’

‘Poor, relatively speaking,’ said the commander. ‘The armourium has received three shipments from Kiavahr since we returned, mostly Rhinos, but we’re woefully light on heavier armour. Whatever you plan to do to get back at Horus, I hope you don’t have a tank battle in mind.’

‘It’ll be an infantry assault,’ said Corax. At a stroke of his hand, an image appeared on the surface of the table, of a star map showing the sector around Deliverance. A red circle highlighted a star towards the edge of the display and the image zoomed in.

‘Narsis?’ said Aloni. ‘That’s the objective?’

‘We’ve compiled reports from several Navigators who have been travelling in the vicinity,’ explained Corax. ‘While the warp storms are still raging, turbulence around the Narsis system is much reduced. Given the world’s proximity to several forge-worlds, as well as the resources of Agrapha, Chopix and Spartus, I believe that Narsis will be used by the rebels as a staging post to attack the sector.

‘The Perfect Fortress,’ said Branne. ‘The Emperor’s Children brought Narsis to compliance and built the Perfect Fortress there.’

‘Typical arrogance of Fulgrim,’ said Aloni. ‘No fortress is perfect. Still, we don’t have the heavy materiel for a siege.’

‘Nor the time,’ said Corax. ‘I have a plan for the Perfect Fortress, but that is not an issue yet. I need to know whether the Raptors will be ready for the fight.’

‘In theory, yes,’ said Branne. ‘But they’re untested in real battle. Drills and firing ranges are one matter. The fire of war is another. I wouldn’t want to pitch them up against the Perfect Fortress in the first engagement.’

‘What about Cruciax?’ said Solaro. He adjusted the table’s display so that it veered towards another star system, much closer to Deliverance. ‘Small moon base in a dead system. It was set up by the Word Bearers, probably a monitoring station. We can test the Raptors and close off one of the traitors’ intelligence channels in the sector.’

Branne rubbed his chin and studied the schematic, while Corax nodded.

‘How soon?’ asked the primarch.

‘How many do you want to test?’ replied Branne.

‘The first five hundred,’ said the primarch. ‘A proper battle, not some training skirmish. I expect the Raptors to fight independently of the Talons, Falcons and Hawks. They are our first strike formation.’

‘Ten days to complete implantation, another ten preparing and arming,’ muttered Branne. ‘Who can say how long it will take us to get there. Fifteen days at least given the warp conditions.’

‘Very well,’ said Corax. ‘You will lead the Raptors on a raid against the facility at Cruciax. I will accompany you for first-hand observation of their performance. What else do you need to be prepared in time?’

‘Just some sergeants,’ said Branne, looking at Agapito. ‘Other than that, we’ve got everything in hand.’

‘I’ll have the new squad leaders reassigned and sent down to Ravendelve in the next two days,’ replied Agapito.

‘You’ll still need some recon,’ said Solaro. ‘I can have my squads ready whenever you need them.’

‘We’ll rely on orbital data,’ said Corax. ‘This is just a small engagement. The force will deploy on the Avenger only, no need to risk getting a flotilla scattered in the storms. We hit the Word Bearers, destroy the station and withdraw. That is all.’

‘Understood, lord,’ said Branne.

‘Are you sure?’ said Corax. He looked at each of the commanders in turn. ‘Narsis is our main objective. I want to be ready to launch a full-scale attack on the Emperor’s Children garrison within fifty days. We must strike back at the traitors soon.’

‘Have your plans been approved by the Emperor?’ asked Arcatus, rising from his seat. ‘What support can you expect?’

‘There has been no meaningful contact with Terra,’ said Corax. ‘The Emperor granted us autonomy when he allowed us to take the gene-tech from the vault. We can expect no other forces for the moment. It’s just the Raven Guard, nobody else. I don’t know the situation with the other Legions, so we can only rely on ourselves.’

‘My Custodians will accompany you to Narsis,’ said Arcatus. ‘If possible, we will secure prisoners from the Emperor’s Children for transportation back to Terra.’

‘That is a secondary concern,’ said Corax. ‘Our primary goal must be the elimination of the Perfect Fortress and its garrison. It will hamper our enemies considerably if Narsis falls into the hands of those loyal to the Emperor.’

‘It is your command privilege, primarch,’ said Arcatus. ‘Remember that though you may fight alone at the moment, there are others who will be waging this war too.’

‘I have not forgotten them,’ said Corax. ‘It is for them that the Raven Guard will place themselves into the jaws of the beast and draw its bite.’

The acid-cloud had reduced visibility to less than a hundred metres, and was already etching strange sworls in the paint of Alpharius’s armour. He stepped forwards carefully, avoiding the forming pools of corrosive liquid. Everything in the rad-zone was tinged with a ruddy hue, the shadows of the ruined buildings ahead a darker blot against the crimson skyline.

The bleeping of the rad-detector was insistent but steady, low enough that his suit had not yet started pumping counteractive agents into his bloodstream. The recycled air he breathed was growing a little stale, but was far from intolerable despite the antiseptic tinge.

Stepping over the corroded remnants of a rail track, Alpharius looked to his right, where the rest of the squad was advancing with weapons ready. The in-vision schematic in the corner of his eye showed that they were seven hundred and fifty metres from the Ravendelve beacon, five hundred short of the patrol limit.

Skirting around a molten heap of slag that had once been a line of rail carts, the squad crossed the cargo yard at a steady pace. Nemron walked a little ahead of the others, bolter in one hand, auspex in the other. Periodically he would declare no contacts.

The patrol was a standard procedure to ensure that the perimeter of the facility was secure, but with the Raptors recruitment stepping up, Alpharius had detected a greater sense of importance in the orders of Commander Branne. It was not a good sign, an indicator perhaps that the Raven Guard upper echelons might have heard something about the rebellion Omegon was inciting. The patrol range had been pushed out by five hundred metres, covering the outskirts of the desolate transport hub.

Another hundred metres further on, the cloud was thickening even further as the squad moved into a depression caused by the subsidence of underground tunnels and hallways. Descending over broken ferrocrete, Alpharius felt something new. There was a small but insistent pressure at the base of his skull, nestled next to the vertebrae in the gap where one of his progenoid glands had been removed.

He recognised the cause immediately and took a sharp breath. The microscopic Alpha Legion implant set into his spine had detected an alert broadcast. Somewhere within a hundred metres was a Legion transmitter.

‘Sweep right, strafe fifty metres,’ he said, pushing the rest of the squad away from his line of advance. ‘Nemron, active scan of that building seventy metres to the right.’

Alpharius stayed on his course, opening up a gap between himself and the rest of the legionaries. The ticking sensation in his neck was becoming more distinct. Glancing at the others, he saw them only as half-seen shadows in the corrosive mist, and was sure they could see little of him.

He stopped and concentrated on the signal the implant was detecting. He sensed a minor increase in the device’s alert tempo as he stepped to his left. Looking around, he saw the remnants of a power pylon, collapsed and folded as if it had been made of wet paper. With one more glance to ensure he was unobserved, he headed towards the pylon, the ticking in his skull becoming quicker and quicker.

He made a quick survey of the rubble around the base of the crumpled tower but could not see any obvious sign of disturbance. He was glad there was nothing to see. He didn’t have to have access to the node station to interact with it. Kneeling down, he opened up the access panel in his right forearm and disabled his squad monitor.

‘Sergeant, losing your signal,’ came the immediate call from Gallid, the vox-link heavy with interference.

‘Rad-pocket, nothing to worry about,’ Alpharius replied in a measured tone. ‘Continue sweep, I will rejoin you shortly.’

The Alpha Legionnaire activated the short-range receiver/transmitter, a small coil of aerial extruding from the back of his gauntlet.

‘Effrit code, omega-nine-hydra,’ came the electronically muffled voice of the transponder. ‘Contact Two. Make report. Action imminent. Ready yourself for commands.’

‘Effrit code, hydra-nine-omega,’ said Alpharius. ‘Contact Two understood. New formation designated “the Raptors”. Gene-tech highly stable. Twenty-three days until first operations of Raptors. Target secure but ingress route has been established. Ready for orders.’

A loud crackle surprised Alpharius, indicating a live link was being established.

‘Contact Two, this is Effrit. Confirm status of Raptor development.’

‘Effrit, Hydra Contact Two. Implantation sequence scaled up. Full processing imminent. Estimate return of enemy to military threat within seventy days. Orders?’

There was a lengthy delay until the reply crackled through. Alpharius guessed that his news had required some deliberation for his master to resolve.

‘Report understood, Contact Two. Orders to stand by remain.’

The link closed with a hiss and Alpharius retracted the transmitter. He was a little worried by the response. Though it was hard to tell through the layers of tampering, the Alpha Legionnaire thought he had detected hesitancy in Omegon’s message, as if he had been taken back by the swiftly moving current of events.

There was little Alpharius could do at the moment, and the standby order implicitly instructed him not to make any attempt on the gene-tech yet, nor to interfere in or obstruct the ongoing recruitment process. He hoped his primarch had a plan and was ready to act soon. If not, the Raven Guard would be well on their way to recreating their Legion.

‘Touchdown in five… four… three… two… one. Mark.’

The Thunderhawk rocked heavily and a plume of grit and sand billowed up past the port. Branne was already out of his harness and heading towards the assault ramp. The rest of the thirty Raptors aboard quickly lined up behind him, their newly painted armour gleaming in the combat lighting, their bolters shining with fresh oil.

‘Second strike has crippled eastern defence turret, you are clear for disembarkation,’ announced the pilot.

The ramp lowered quickly, filling the interior of the gunship with harsh blue light. Branne’s auto-senses filtered out the worst of the glare as he thudded down the ramp and onto a wind-swept dune.

‘Standard dispersal, Corron take left flank, Nal on the right,’ snapped Branne.

The Raptors fanned out quickly, their armour dark against the light grey desert. One squad split to either side and the third followed Branne straight ahead. In front of them, the monitoring station squatted beneath a rocky cliff, its flat roof a tangle of communications dishes and sensor arrays.

Three missiles streaked down from overhead, detonating towards the western end of the station, to Branne’s left. Rockcrete exploded outwards from the bunker-busters, showering debris over a sand-choked yard.

‘Breach achieved, third unit moving forwards, second unit provide fire support,’ said Branne.

The sand was shifting constantly, making the ground underfoot unstable. The heavy legionaries surged through the drifts in clouds of grey, weapons aimed at the low building ahead. The scream of plasma jets erupted overhead as another Thunderhawk made a pass, its lascannons punching through heavily shuttered windows on the southern face of the station. Downblast from Branne’s gunship momentarily swathed the advancing Raptors in a storm of grit as it lifted off to take up a covering position above.

‘Targets, point fifteen, third window,’ snarled Branne, seeing armoured figures moving at one of the destroyed windows. A moment later, bolter rounds spat from the inside of the building, streaking towards Sergeant Nal’s squad.

Return fire blazed from Corron’s warriors, a hail of bolter shells and plasma blasts. Branne signalled for the squad accompanying him to lay down their own covering fire as Nal and his legionaries pressed on into the defenders’ fire.

‘Keep them busy,’ said Branne, drawing up his combi-bolter. He fired both barrels simultaneously, sending a hail of bolts through the window and into the twisted metal frame around it. The bark of bolters intensified, joined by the thunderous beat of the squad’s rotary autocannon, wielded by Kavin. The heavier shells of the autocannon ripped out chunks of plascrete from the wall.

Branne realised this was the first time he had fired at other warriors of the Legiones Astartes. Like the Raptors he led, he had not fought on Isstvan, and it was a moment he was proud to share with the new recruits. He wondered if Corax had been even smarter than the commander had realised when he had put Branne in charge of the Raptors. Not having shared the experience of the dropsite massacre and escape, he had found it hard to relate to the legionaries that had. There was no such divide between him and his new command.

This attack was not just to prove the capability of the Raptors, it was a chance for him to demonstrate to his brother, and the rest of the Legion, that he was as determined to press this war against the traitors as any warrior who had seen his battle-brothers cut down on Isstvan V.

‘Thermal scans show the enemy are responding in force towards the southern attack.’ Corax spoke slowly and calmly. The primarch had not joined the attack in person, preferring to observe proceedings from the Avenger in orbit over Cruciax’s largest moon. The gas giant itself could just about be seen as a large arc of dark red beyond the jagged line of mountains behind the monitoring post.

‘Hold position, draw fire,’ Branne ordered his companions. They had made great display of their landing and first attack, but theirs was a diversionary assault designed to bring the Word Bearers to one side of the compound. Meanwhile, another force was approaching on the opposite side, from atop the cliff, unseen by the defenders.

A bolt cracked into Branne’s right arm. Splinters of ceramite pattered against his chest and faceplate. He saw that an access door had been opened about fifty metres to his right, from which a squad of red-clad Word Bearers was pouring fire into his three squads from the flank. One of Nal’s legionaries went down, pitching face first into the sand. Another spun to the ground a second later, arcs of energy crackling from a punctured backpack.

Switching his grip to his left hand, the commander fired back with a salvo of ten rounds. Kavin swung his autocannon onto this new threat before Branne had spoken the order. Autocannon rounds punched into the squad sheltering in the doorway, felling a Word Bearer and forcing the others out of sight.

Branne glanced at the secondary chronometer display in his visor: 22.03 seconds until the main attack was in place.

‘Keep it up! Keep them busy!’ he yelled. The Raptors would not be allowed to fall short of the standards demanded by the Raven Guard. He would not be found wanting either.

The top of the escarpment was littered with loose rocks, but it did not hamper the legionaries as they bounded across along the slope with long strides. As part of the Ravendelve garrison, Sergeant Dor’s squad had been temporarily attached to the Raptors, honorary members it seemed, and so Alpharius found himself descending on the Word Bearers outpost alongside the warriors of the Raven Guard.

It was a strange feeling, almost as odd as the sensation he had felt when the primarch had given the order to open fire at the dropsite ambush. They had been warned then of the plan to back Horus’s defiance of the Emperor, but the reality of firing on another Legion had quite surprised Alpharius. Far from being shocked by it, he had found it liberating. Decades of being overshadowed by the extravagant exploits of the other Legions had built up in him a resentment that he had not acknowledged until the moment he first pulled the trigger.

There had been a sense of vindication then, but now Alpharius was feeling more pragmatic. The Word Bearers had proclaimed their loyalty so loudly, had spouted their liturgies and oaths so proudly, it was perhaps their rebellion that was the most unseemly and least like true legionaries. Alpharius had always thought they had protested their dedication to the Imperial cause too much, and when he had found out they would be siding with Horus it had come as no surprise.

They were allies, as much as any of the Legions that had collaborated to destroy the Emperor’s task force, but that didn’t mean Alpharius had to like the bombastic, preaching turncoats. He could well imagine them extolling the praises and virtues of Horus as loudly as they had once proclaimed the righteousness of the Emperor. Of all those who had taken part in the massacre, it was the Word Bearers he considered the most hypocritical.

‘Ready for drop,’ announced Sergeant Dor.

They were almost at the lip of the cliff overlooking the facility. Two hundred Raptors, and twenty of the former Talons, surged through the sandstorm.

The Raptors were a strange sight with their beaked facemasks and new armour, looking the part of hunting birds of prey. Alpharius had already accessed the technical schematics of the new Mark VI armour, and was waiting for the opportunity to upload them to Omegon. It was probably not much of a revelation, considering the tendrils Horus had infiltrated into the Mechanicum, but how much of that information the Warmaster was willing to share with the Alpha Legion was questionable.

A squad to Alpharius’s right reached the edge of the cliff first. They carried on, leaping into the swirling sand. Alpharius took a breath and followed, hurling himself into thin air. The roof of the compound was twenty-three metres below, a distance that posed little problem to a fully armoured legionary even in normal gravity, and that of Cruciax’s moon was two-thirds Terran standard.

Clouds of dust billowed up as Alpharius thudded onto the pitted rockcrete roof. The fibre bundles in his armour bunched as he landed, a sudden flicker of systems reports scrolling past his right eye.

‘Meltas!’ said Dor, pulling one of the charges from his belt. Alpharius did the same, slapping the melta bomb onto the roof in front of him and setting the timer for three seconds.

He stepped back half a dozen paces and readied his bolter in one hand while arming a frag grenade in the other. With a white-hot detonation, the melta charge blasted through the rockcrete, creating a hole just over a metre across. Dor’s bomb went off half a second later, widening the gap. All around him, the Raptors were doing likewise, opening up cracks across the compound. Alpharius tossed the grenade into the opening. He grabbed his bolter in both hands and jumped down through the breach as he heard the crack of the fragmentation charge detonating.

Tiles split underfoot from the impact of his landing. There was dust everywhere, the floor littered with shards of rockcrete that crunched as he took a step. The only light came from the breach above, the harsh glare creating a column of blue around him. With a glance in front and behind, he found himself in a short corridor, open archways at each end. He stepped forwards again, aiming ahead as Sergeant Dor dropped into the station. Alpharius swung his bolter to the right as a door opened a little way ahead of him, but he relaxed his finger on the trigger as he recognised the distinctive profile of a Raptor in the gloom.

The bark of a bolter ahead spurred Alpharius into action. With the rest of the squad thudding down behind them, he and Dor advanced on the archway, five Raptors emerging from a side room to join them.

A figure appeared at the archway. In the swirl of dust it was impossible to tell friend from foe and Alpharius checked his fire. The warrior ahead took a couple of steps closer, revealing a legionary clad in crimson armour. There was something strange about him, a hunched look that unsettled Alpharius.

Dor opened fire first, the Raptors adding their own salvoes an instant later. The Word Bearer stumbled backwards out of sight, pieces of armour flying in all directions.

‘Come on!’ shouted Dor, breaking into a run. ‘Clear out this room.’

Alpharius followed on his heels, bursting through the archway with his finger already tightening on the trigger of his bolter. He swung the weapon left at a pair of legionaries crouching by the shattered sill of a window. His first blast ripped into the backpack of the closest. The second was aimed higher and crashed into the Word Bearer’s sculpted helmet.

Or at least that was what Alpharius had first thought.

The Word Bearer toppled sideways, blood pouring from his shattered skull. What Alpharius had taken as an ornate helm was no such thing – the Word Bearer’s head was misshapen, a small horn protruding from his brow, canine teeth jutting down to his chin. His skin was bronze-coloured and the blood that pumped from the hole in his skull was black and thick.

Alpharius fired again with a shout of disgust, pulverising the Word Bearer’s misshapen head. The other legionary spun around and fired, his burst catching Alpharius in the gut. A cable ruptured, artificial muscle bundles fraying in a welter of white sustaining fluid.

A Raptor surged past Alpharius, bolter blazing, opening up a line of bloody craters across the Word Bearer’s chest. The traitor swung his bolter like a club, but the Raptor was too quick, deftly deflecting the blow with his own weapon, before repeatedly smashing his elbow into the side of the Word Bearer’s helm. The Raptor hooked a foot behind the traitor’s leg and tripped him with another blow to the head.

One foot on the Word Bearer’s chest, the Raven Guard warrior fired, bolt after bolt punching through the traitor’s armour, coating the Raptor’s greaves with gore.

‘Move on,’ said Dor, pointing towards a sealed archway on the opposite side of the chamber.

Looking around, there were no Raven Guard casualties. Alpharius counted five dead Word Bearers, another of them showing bestial, twisted features similar to the one he had slain.

‘Let’s not think about that too much,’ said Dor, guessing Alpharius’s thoughts from his posture. ‘According to the pulse survey, there’s a reactor two levels down, almost directly below us. Look for a stairwell.’

It was impossible for Alpharius not to think about what he had seen. There had always been rumours. Less than rumours, more fanciful soldiers’ tales. Ships had been lost and found with their complements ravaged by some horrific power. Every legionnaire who had spent time in the warp had a story about a strange dream or discomforting occurrence. Alpharius had half-glimpsed bizarre things on the cusp of wakefulness while in warp transit and Legion command had never directly denied that the warp was inhabited. Seeing the contorted faces of the two dead Word Bearers reminded Alpharius of those vague dreams and he wondered just what was happening to the Legiones Astartes who had sided with Horus.

Another corridor led them into a mess hall that ran the width of the facility, nearly seventy metres long. A firefight was already raging when they arrived. The air was filled with criss-crossing salvoes, bright sparks of bolt propellant and fiery detonations reflecting from steel-topped tables and laminated shelves. The roar of bolters and ring of impacts was deafening. The Word Bearers had taken up positions behind overturned tables and in the galley at the far end, and were exchanging fire with two squads of Raptors pinned down at a set of double doors opposite Alpharius.

A burst of shots greeted Sergeant Dor as he ran into the room, bolter on full automatic fire. He heaved over one of the long bench tables and hunkered behind it, splinters of metal spraying around him, bolt detonations sparking across his armour.

Without hesitation, the Raptors piled into the hall from behind Alpharius. The first was taken off his feet by a plasma bolt that melted through his chest plate and incinerated his innards. The Raptors exacted instant vengeance, blazing away at the plasma gunner, the Word Bearer’s armour and a glass-fronted cabinet behind him exploding with hits.

‘Flank move, squad three!’ The order was snapped out by one of the Raptors as he bounded up on to a table with a grenade in hand. He lobbed the grenade over the serving counter separating the hall from the galley. A blossom of fire erupted in the heart of the galley, setting off a chain of secondary detonations from ruptured power lines.

The black-clad Raptors surged down each side of the hall, racing forwards without firing. Two more were sent tumbling by the volleys of the Word Bearers but the dark-armoured legionaries pounded on, ignoring their casualties.

‘Keep up, old fella,’ one of the Raptors laughed at Dor as he sprinted past the sergeant.

‘Cheeky bastard,’ snarled Dor, powering himself over the fallen table, bolt-rounds blasting down the hall from his weapon. ‘Support fire!’

Alpharius sidestepped into the hall and squeezed off a salvo of five rounds, targeting a Word Bearer bringing a plasma gun to bear from behind a trolley stacked with water jugs. The ewers disintegrated into shards and silver slivers, the Word Bearer forced to dive out of sight, the fresh red paint of his armour pockmarked by several direct hits. The rest of the squad dashed into the hall and took up firing positions, bolt-rounds hammering into the metal counter and tables shielding the Word Bearers.

The Raptors reached the far end of the hall, pulling free combat knives to hurl themselves at the waiting Word Bearers. Alpharius saw one of them shredded by the combined fire of three traitors, moments before his squad-brother vaulted over the counter, his bolter firing point-blank into the face plate of a Word Bearer. The Raptor slashed his knife backhanded through the throat seal of another even as his left pauldron shattered in a hail of ceramite fragments from a bolt impact.

The Word Bearers had not expected the sheer swiftness and ferocity of the Raptors’ attack. Black-armoured legionaries were pouring between the shelves and cupboards of the galley, overwhelming the traitors with bolter and knife.

At a word from Dor, the squad started forwards, ready to cover the Raptors if they were forced back. There was no need for such caution. Alpharius saw a Word Bearer go down, bludgeoned by the bolters of three Raptors. Another traitor was lifted off his feet and hurled bodily into the power cables exposed by the grenade, sparks and arcs of lightning scorching across his twitching body.

The last time Alpharius had seen anything like it had been the World Eaters’ charge into the Salamanders at the dropsite. That had been raw carnage on a scale he had never imagined possible. The fight in the mess hall was far less of a spectacle, but the lethal efficiency of the Raptors was no less impressive.

He pictured the superhumans ahead of him in the colours of the Alpha Legion, tearing through Ultramarines or Dark Angels. There was an irrepressibility about the way they fought, a disciplined fury coupled with extraordinary speed and precision. And they were just fresh recruits. Alpharius imagined the Alpha Legion descending on Terra with fifty thousand such warriors, hardened by previous battles, with the canniness and guile they would learn from the primarch.

That was a force Horus would respect. Suddenly, Alpharius realised just how important his mission could become and why he had not yet received orders to destroy the gene-tech. This was not about stopping the Raven Guard. This was about strengthening the Alpha Legion.

The hall fell quiet, the death cry of the last Word Bearer quietly ringing from the steel walls. Alpharius moved into position to secure another doorway ahead, while the Raptors moved amongst the traitors, wordlessly ensuring they were all dead with knives to the back of their necks.

‘New orders!’ barked Dor. ‘The reactor has been set with charges. We’re leaving now. Thunderhawks for extraction at grids seven-sixty and seven-ninety. We have sixty seconds. Move!’

‘That’s it?’ said Alpharius, before he could stop himself. ‘We’re done?’

‘Strike and withdraw, you know the procedure,’ the sergeant replied. ‘Mission was to destroy the station. In fifty seconds, we will have been successful.’

The Raptors needed no repeat of the orders. Squad by squad they fell back from the galley and across the mess hall. Alpharius retreated, still keeping a wary eye for any counter-attack.

‘Are the enemy eliminated?’ he asked.

‘They will be when that reactor explodes,’ Dor said with a laugh. ‘No time to hang around.’

They withdrew to the corridor along which they had advanced and clambered out of the shattered windows. A stream of black-armoured legionaries was pouring back into the sandstorm, disappearing from sight. Alpharius felt grudging respect for the Raven Guard as they melted away as quickly as they had appeared. Forging through the sand drifts, he glanced back but the facility was now enveloped in the dust storm and obscured from sight. Ahead, his locator locked on to the signal of a descending Thunderhawk. Ramp open, the drop-ship plunged down into a dune, adding to the swirl of sand.

The ground shook underfoot just as Alpharius reached the ramp. Stepping aboard the drop-ship, he turned to see a dark red ball of flame expanding in the hazy distance. Moments later, a violent wind swept the dunes, sending a wall of sand hurtling into the open compartment of the Thunderhawk.

‘We’re full,’ the pilot announced over the internal announce system. ‘Clear the ramp.’

Dor dashed out of the cloud and leapt onto the ramp as it started to close, grabbing Alpharius’s arm to haul himself into the main chamber.

‘Mission complete,’ Corax announced over the main vox channel. ‘We are victorious. The Raven Guard have shown that they cannot yet be ignored in the battle-plans of our foes. The Raptors have proven their worth and earned their first battle honour. The fight against Horus has begun.’

Alpharius lowered himself into his seat and pulled on the harness as the Thunderhawk banked sharply. The entire engagement had lasted less than ten minutes: ten minutes that might have changed the course of the whole war.

There was a jubilant mood at Ravendelve as the last of the shuttles from the Avenger disgorged its cargo of warriors. Even the loss of fourteen of their number had not dampened the spirits of the latest Raven Guard recruits, though it was cause for some sombre reflection for Branne. The casualty ratio was a little high for his liking, considering the Word Bearers could not have numbered more than fifty legionaries against four hundred in the main assault, but his concern came from another source. Corax had said little about the operation except for his short victory speech, and had cloistered himself in Branne’s command chamber for the trip through the warp, giving the commander no opportunity to voice his doubts.

While the Raptors were being returned to their dormitories, Branne and Corax travelled back to Ravenspire, to report on the mission to the other members of Legion command. They were waiting in the briefing room when the primarch and Branne arrived. There was still a large amount of activity going on, as Legion attendants gathered as much intelligence as they could regarding Narsis and the Perfect Fortress. Solaro, Agapito and Aloni sat at the table like giant statues amidst the bustle of the command functionaries.

‘The outpost at Cruciax is destroyed,’ Corax announced as he entered the chamber. ‘The Raptors, whilst a little tactically naive, performed beyond expectation and the victory signals to me a new beginning for the Raven Guard.’

‘A one hundred per cent success?’ asked Solaro.

Corax did not answer, but instead looked at Branne.

‘I wouldn’t say that,’ replied the commander of the Raptors, staring right back at his primarch. ‘We sustained avoidable casualties.’

‘They will improve, given experience,’ said Corax. ‘Their exuberance will be tempered.’

‘They were foolhardy, lord, not exuberant,’ Branne said, sitting at the table. ‘While all combat is a risk, there were many that took unnecessary gambles and that not only cost valuable lives, it potentially threatened the success of the mission.’

‘If we take them to the Perfect Fortress in that state of mind, they will be slaughtered,’ said Agapito. ‘We’ve been studying what information we have in the archives, and it is a formidable obstacle. I expect the Emperor’s Children have been further fortifying Narsis since their alliance with Horus. It is no place for rash action.’

‘The Raptors will only be part of the force,’ said Corax, frowning with irritation. ‘You judge them harshly for a little poor discipline during their first engagement. They knew they were being tested, and overcompensated in their enthusiasm. I remember you and Branne trying to impress me with your heroics when you were young.’

‘A good point, lord,’ said Agapito. He looked contrite for a moment, then shook his head. ‘But there is a difference between two adolescent prison boys and several companies of transhumans armed and armoured with the best weapons we currently have available. As legionaries, they should impress you with dedication and discipline, not raw zeal. Attention to dut–’

‘You do not think they are ready?’ snapped Corax. ‘You sound like one of those Word Bearers Chaplains, speaking of empty duty and discipline. We are involved in a war that will decide the fate of the Imperium! I expect every warrior to carry himself with pride and to do his utmost to ensure victory.’

There followed an uncomfortable silence for a few seconds as Corax turned away, jaw churning with anger. When he looked at his commanders again, he had calmed himself.

‘The Raptors will learn discipline,’ he said. ‘In time, when there are more of them, we will be able to spread them through the Legion as we would any other recruits and the presence of the veterans will mollify their young spirits. Remember that most of them were little more than children only a hundred days ago. Your transformations took years, during which you learned patience and discipline. Branne, if you are so concerned, you must take extra effort to instil such qualities into your warriors, because we don’t have the luxury of several years to test their mettle and forge their battle-spirit.’

‘Aye, as you wish, lord,’ said Branne. ‘A few more turns through the rad-wastes will calm their humours.’

‘How soon will we move on Narsis, lord?’ asked Solaro. ‘Even with the Raptors, we cannot muster more than five thousand legionaries and other ranks.’

‘I aim to tackle the Perfect Fortress with twice that number,’ said Corax. ‘Sixx and Orlandriaz have received instruction to move to the next scale of implantation.’

‘Five thousand more Raptors?’ said Agapito, almost horrified by the suggestion. ‘We have no more than five hundred novitiates left to implant. Where will you get new recruits?’

‘From Deliverance and Kiavahr,’ said Corax. ‘As I told you before, the new gene-seed allows us to take younger and less fitting candidates with equal results.’

‘Forgive any disrespect, lord, but that does not make sense,’ said Agapito. ‘Just a moment ago, we were discussing the immaturity of the Raptors, who have each been subjected to Legion tradition and teaching for several years already. To take untested boys and turn them into super-soldiers seems rash.’

‘There is no alternative,’ said Corax, showing no signs of anger at Agapito’s criticism. ‘I understand your concerns, and considered them on the way back from Cruciax, but Horus’s treachery has backed us into a corridor with only one way out. Either we turn over Raptor production to its full potential, including casting our recruitment wider, or we must give up any desire to strike at Horus’s forces. As we are at the moment, it is a simple case of numbers: we don’t have them in our favour.’

‘I would like to register my disapproval,’ said Agapito. He looked at Corax, and then pointedly turned his gaze to Branne, with an expression of frustration bordering on desperation.

Branne sympathised with his brother’s position, but he had seen first-hand what the Raptors could do, even in their inexperience. To have five thousand such warriors would be an incredible weapon. There was also the question of loyalty to the primarch. Agapito’s strange behaviour since Isstvan gave Branne cause to doubt his motives for opposing Corax’s plan. Perhaps he feared that the Talons would lose honour and prestige. It was certainly the case that the seemingly preferential treatment – the armour and weapons – given to the Raptors rankled at Agapito.

There was another reason to agree with the primarch, a far more personal one. The action at Cruciax had not erased the doubts Branne felt about himself for his failings at Isstvan. It had proved to him more than ever that he needed to redeem himself in the eyes of the Raven Guard who had fought there. A large force of Raptors would make him the pivotal commander at Narsis, granting him an opportunity to prove his worth on a stage far more fitting than a raid on an isolated outpost.

‘It is fitting,’ said Branne, ‘that we extend the chance to become Raven Guard to as many as possible. We fought a war to liberate the people of this star system, so that they might enjoy the benefits of freedom. The Raven Guard prosecuted the Great Crusade across hundreds of worlds to bring that same freedom to others. Now it is time for them to answer our call and repay those efforts with their own.’

‘You’re not suggesting conscription?’ said Solaro.

‘No,’ said Corax. ‘I’ll not have that. I do not think we will be troubled by a shortage of volunteers.’

‘Word will get out, lord,’ said Agapito, gripping the edge of the table tightly. ‘So far we have kept secret our plans and our renewed strength. If you recruit on a scale like this, the news will travel back to the traitors and they will send a force to exterminate us entirely, a force we will not be able to resist. Surprise is our greatest asset, and we will surrender it with this sort of declaration.’

‘It will be too late,’ said Corax. ‘We will strike quickly enough that there will be no time for our enemies to prepare. We will begin with the implantation of the remaining recruits at Ravendelve as soon as possible. Branne will organise the mass induction of candidates and we will make our final preparations for the assault on Narsis.’

‘What about weapons and armour?’ said Solaro. ‘At the moment, we can make Raptors faster than we can manufacture Mark VI suits.’

‘I already have a manufactorum on Kiavahr stepping up production based on the designs brought to us by Captain Noriz,’ answered the primarch. ‘As for weapons, we have stockpiles worthy of a Legion that was once eighty thousand strong. A few thousand bolters are not an issue, despite the losses on Isstvan.’

‘Transportation?’ said Agapito, with the sigh of a man who knew he had lost a battle. ‘The Avenger and surviving ships cannot carry that many into battle.’

‘We will requisition transports from wherever we can,’ said Corax. ‘We don’t need dedicated assault ships, as long as they can launch Thunderhawks and Stormbirds. Whatever problems you foresee, we will overcome them. The Raven Guard will be prepared to attack Narsis within twenty-five days. I have waited long enough, and I can wait no longer. The fight back against the traitors has already begun, it is time to accept that and strike a blow that will make them nervous.’

‘Aye, lord,’ said Agapito, his reply echoed by the other commanders. ‘It will be as you command.’

From a vantage point in the irradiated ruins surrounding Ravendelve, Omegon looked at the fortified facility through the magnification of his auto-senses. Contact Three had been able to transmit from Deliverance, warning of a step-up in activity at the Raptor base. Corax was showing no nerves and was plunging headlong into the implementation of his plan, judging by the number of vehicles and shuttles that had been coming and going over the last few days. Mechanicum and Raven Guard attendants in rad-suits had been extending the complex with prefabricated buildings, almost doubling its size.

He considered his options, none of them with any particular favour. The most obvious course of action would be to signal his operatives to destroy the gene-works now, before the Raptors could be increased in size. That almost felt like a failure to the primarch, when his prize was so close at hand.

The insurgents were nearly ready to attack Ravendelve, an army of several thousand. Fifty Alpha Legionnaires were also only three days away, aboard the Beta hiding out in the dust clouds beyond Kiavahr. They would be the spearhead of any assault. It was a balancing act. If he committed too early, without the full involvement of the rebels, his warriors would be cut down to no effect. If he waited too long, the Raptors’ ever-increasing numbers would prove insurmountable.

His only hope lay in a swift, decisive strike to secure the gene-tech and then destroy what remained. He needed time, just ten more days, and everything would be in place to see that plan come to fruition.

The scuff of boots on rubble caused the primarch to turn, his bolter ready. A lean, robed figure picked his way through the debris below: Magos Unithrax. It disturbed Omegon that the tech-priest needed no protection against the radiation and pollutants in the air. Looking closer, he saw Unithrax’s sallow face had a half-decayed appearance, only the metal implants holding together the flesh beneath his hood.

‘I have a solution for you,’ said the magos. He dipped a withered hand into his robe and pulled out a canister the size of a grenade. ‘A genetic virus, tailored with the information provided by your operatives. If one of your agents can introduce this to the gene-template being used by the Raven Guard, it will halt their expansion.’

Omegon dropped down to the ground, rubble grinding to powder beneath his weight. He took the canister from Unithrax and looked at it. It hummed softly with a small stasis field, but otherwise looked like a rations canteen used by the Raven Guard.

‘What will it do, exactly?’ asked the primarch. ‘A polluted gene-seed is of no use to us.’

‘Exactly?’ said the magos. He coughed uncomfortably and looked away. ‘I cannot say exactly what the effects will be, though it will be severe. It will be a simple matter to extricate the virus from the gene-strands again once we have them in our possession.’

‘It is a blatant move and will raise the suspicions of Corax,’ said Omegon, tossing the canister from hand to hand. ‘They have already increased security at Ravendelve considerably. I cannot afford for them to lock down the whole facility.’

‘They will suspect themselves first,’ said Unithrax. ‘The virus will mutate the gene-seed from within and it will appear to be an unforeseen side-effect of the implantation process. Unless they specifically look for the viral contagion they will find nothing that cannot be explained by a random but explainable mutation of the genetic material.’

‘I will consider it,’ said Omegon. ‘What will my agent have to do?’

Unithrax produced a small crystal sliver, no larger than a fingernail.

‘This data-chip contains the necessary instructions,’ he said. ‘Pass it along to your operative with the virus container and he will be able to access the data through any terminal in Ravendelve. You should also tell him to destroy both the crystal and the canister on completion of the task.’

‘Of course he’ll destroy it, we are not amateurs,’ said Omegon. He looked at the container again and held out his hand for the data-chip. He slipped both into a pouch at his belt and fastened it tight. ‘How proceeds the work of the Order of the Dragon? Are they in position to act when I give the word?’

‘We are ready,’ said Unithrax. ‘Our supporters have made contact with sympathisers amongst the Kiavahr hierarchy. When your guild rabble is in a position to reveal themselves, we will put in motion our part of the agreement.’

‘The guilds need only a little more encouragement and then they will do as I please,’ said Omegon. He turned and looked out of a mangled window at the silhouette of Ravendelve and rested a hand on the pouch containing the gene-virus.

He would have it retrieved by his contact. It would not be long now.

Fourteen

Diversion
A Legionary is Born
The Poison Seed

The corridors of Ravendelve were filled with the din of blaring sirens. Alpharius was in the makeshift armourium, running through maintenance drills with several squads of Raptors.

‘Attack warning, form up in the main hall!’ he snapped, lifting his own helm from a bench behind him.

‘Is this part of the training, sergeant?’ asked one of the Raptors as they filed out of the room.

‘No, this is real,’ Alpharius replied, knowing that no exercise had been planned for that day. The attack warning could only signal a genuine threat to Ravendelve, and he knew exactly what it meant.

While the other warriors in the facility converged on the mustering area, Alpharius took a detour, passing by his squad’s dormitory. It was empty, his legionaries having already answered the call to arms. He crouched beside his bed and pulled out a box of battered metal from underneath it. With a glance towards the door, he opened the lid and sorted through the items within: bolter magazines, oils, paints, small replacement parts for his armour, a few fangs and other trophies belonging to the warrior he was imitating and a collection of ration packs and canisters. He rummaged through the last of these until his suit detected the minute vibrations of the stasis field holding the gene-virus. Placing this in his belt, he closed the box and pushed it back under the bunk with his foot.

He had already memorised the instructions for its introduction to the gene-template, and destroyed the data-crystal in Ravendelve’s incinerator. He brought to mind this information as he broke into a run, unslinging his bolter from his waist as he entered the main hall. Branne was on the stage and directed a scowl towards Alpharius, noticing his tardiness. Alpharius raised a hand in apology as he fell in with the rest of his squad.

‘As I was saying,’ Branne said. ‘Perimeter sensors have detected a large, unidentified movement out in sectors three and five. A patrol has been despatched. Armourium crews to man the defence turrets. Squads one through four are to embark on the Rhinos in the armourium and provide rapid response. Squads five through twelve will provide sweeps to the remaining perimeter. All other squads, get yourselves at Delta and Gamma gates and make ready for an extended counter-offensive.’

Branne stopped and cocked his head to one side as the buzz of a communication could be heard from his receiver. He nodded to himself.

‘Understood, Patrol One,’ he said, looking at the assembled Raptors. ‘We have confirmed the presence of at least one hundred anti-Imperial insurgents at the perimeter. They appear to be massing for an attack around the rail depot and ruins of the counting house. Squad orders will be forthcoming. You are warriors of the Raven Guard. Fight for the Emperor and Corax!’

‘The Emperor and Corax!’ Alpharius shouted the refrain with the others, banging a fist against his chestplate in salute to his commander.

Omegon’s timing of the diversionary attack had been perfect. Alpharius and his squad were on the armourium rotation, responsible for manning the defence turrets and securing Ravendelve. Alpharius ordered his squad to their assigned duties as the rest of the Raptors thundered from the main hall, heading to their respective positions.

‘Dieta, I want you to do a check of the new buildings,’ he told one of his legionaries. ‘There may have been dissidents amongst the work crews. Who can say what they’ve left behind.’

‘We conducted a thorough security sweep of all buildings after they left, sergeant,’ protested Dieta, obviously dismayed by the appointment of such a laborious and seemingly pointless duty.

‘Take Calden with you,’ said Alpharius, pointing to another legionary.

‘I’m supposed to secure the infirmary,’ said Dieta.

‘I’ll handle that, just get moving,’ snapped Alpharius. The two Raven Guard responded with smart salutes and set off at a run.

Alpharius headed directly for the gene-bank located in the infirmary wing. When he arrived he found several novitiates lying on the bunks, none of them older than ten years Terran standard, Vincente Sixx and Magos Orlandriaz tending to them. A number of robed orderlies stood close at hand with trays of phials and various surgical apparatus.

‘We have to clear this area,’ said Alpharius.

‘Impossible,’ replied Sixx. ‘These boys have just been given the priming agent for implantation. We cannot move them now, and we have to proceed with the gene-seed introduction before they go into cellular shock.’

‘If it must be so,’ said Alpharius, realising that the Apothecary and tech-priest would be too busy with the implantation to pay him much attention. ‘Do you have the gene-seed?’

‘Yes,’ said Sixx. ‘We have everything to start the procedure.’

‘Good, then I’ll lock down central storage,’ said Alpharius.

‘You don’t have access,’ said Sixx. ‘I will come with you. Orlandriaz can begin without me.’

Alpharius was taken aback by the offer and had to think quickly.

‘The codes will be changed the moment lockdown is over,’ he said, affecting a nonchalant disposition. ‘No risk to security protocol, and there’s no point in me dragging you away from this important stage of the process.’

‘He is correct,’ said Orlandriaz. ‘I suspect the threat to the facility is minimal. Let us not waste time with this distraction.’

Sixx nodded and pulled a chain from around his neck, on which hung a two-tined digital spike. He tossed the necklace to Alpharius, who caught it easily.

‘Check none of my attendants are in there before you lock down,’ said the Apothecary, turning back to the closest bunk. ‘Command override is peta-orpheus-epsilon.’

‘My thanks,’ said Alpharius, heading through the ward at a brisk pace. The airtight door cycled opened at his approach, allowing him to pass from the main infirmary into the inner chambers.

He quickly got his bearings from the description he had been passed, locating the sealed stasis cell in which the gene-template would be located. He pushed the digi-key into the lock of the main door and spoke the override code. Bolts hammered into place with a loud clang, securing him against discovery.

Working quickly, he pulled out a cipher-breaker from his belt; an ingenious piece of Alpha Legion-devised kit that he had kept hidden since his infiltration had begun. Plugging Sixx’s digi-key into one of the ports on the reader, he activated the code sequence, unlocking all of the cipher signals held within the sliver of metal.

A tiny readout on the side of the cipher-breaker showed him what he needed to know and he took the digi-key to the stasis vault. Inserting the key brought up a hololithic display. Counting off the code from the reader, he entered the required sequence. A hiss of escaping air announced his success and the door to the sealed chamber opened out on two wheezing pistons.

Inside, a cylinder about half his height stood at the centre of a mass of coiled cables, wisps of hyper-chilled air drifting around it. Again, the lock on the storage cylinder gave way to the digi-key. A light flickered into life within, revealing a glassite tube no bigger than a bolter round, hanging in the air between two suspensor units. Inside, in a suspension of pale blue fluid, floated a single thread of genetic material, almost invisible to Alpharius’s eyes.

He looked at it for a few seconds, amazed that such power could be contained within something so miniscule. Life, superior transhuman life, was held in that molecule-thin sliver of material. The ability to create legions of unstoppable warriors floated just in front of him. All he had to do was dash that glassite tube on the floor, and the doom of the Raven Guard would be sealed. Yet the primarch had a far grander purpose. The same secret formula would make the Alpha Legion an unstoppable force. Captivated by the thought, Alpharius realised that he had a choice. What he did next might well decide the outcome of Horus’s war against the Emperor, could decide the fate of the entire galaxy.

Did Horus deserve such a gift? What grievance against the Emperor could be so vast that such a war was needed to settle it? Alpharius knew that there were greater forces than him at play in this rebellion, but at that moment none of them held the power he did.

He laughed quietly at himself, embarrassed by his grandiose thoughts. The primarch had made it clear that the destiny of the Alpha Legion lay alongside Horus’s, for the good of the Legion and all of mankind. Alpharius knew his primarch would not make such a statement unless he knew for certain that it was true.

Dismissing his doubts, Alpharius plucked the capsule from the grip of the suspensors and turned, looking for the gene-coder as he had been instructed. He located it on one of the work benches, a large machine with several receptacles the same size as the gene-tube, hooked up to a bank of analysing engines.

He switched on the gene-coder and placed the template material into one of the apertures. Punching in the command sequence he had learned, he activated the coding mechanism. As the machine purred into life, he took the virus container from his belt and opened it up. Inside was a near-identical glassite phial. He made the mistake of looking at the contents. The gaseous mixture inside writhed with a life of its own, changing colour and contorting madly, sliding against the phial as if trying to escape. For some reason it reminded him of the descriptions of the warp he had heard from Navigators: ever-shifting and restless.

Swallowing his revulsion, he placed the virus into another receiving pod and closed the lid.

His fingers tapped away at the keypad, allowing the gene-template and viral solution to mix inside the coding machine. He stopped as he felt a tremor shaking Ravendelve: the defence turrets were opening fire. Alpharius had to move swiftly. The time he had taken would either be noticed by Sixx or one of the turret crews, or the attack put in motion by the primarch would soon be hurled back and the lockdown would be ended.

He finished the input sequence and waited a few seconds while machinery whirred in the depths of the gene-coder. An alert pinged the completion of the task and the phial casket opened with a hiss.

He retraced his steps, returning the gene-template to its stasis chamber and sealing the door. Using the cipher-breaker, Alpharius entered the data logs and deleted the entries reporting his interference. It was not as secure as a complete wipe, but he did not have time for such a precaution. With implantation reaching the level it had, it would take a deep auditing scan to pick up on the anomaly, during which the system would have to be shut down. Such an event was unlikely, given Corax’s determination to build up the strength of the Raptors as fast as possible.

With everything back where it should be, Alpharius exited the central chamber. Sixx and the tech-priest were engrossed in their labours, stooping over one of the implant recipients. Not drawing any attention to himself, Alpharius left the digi-key on a shelf and slipped out.

Once in the corridor he broke into a run, heading for Turret Three where he was supposed to be guiding the defence gunnery.

The wheeze of the autolung and staccato rattle of the monitor needles was oddly soothing. Navar Hef felt disassociated from his body, a state induced by a cocktail of preparation agents and hypnotic suggestion. He flitted between wakefulness and shallow sleep, barely aware of what was happening, the fleeting moments of lucidity serving to reassure him that Vincente Sixx and his attendants were never far away, constantly observing his progress.

There was pain, but his trance-like state allowed him to siphon the sensation to a part of his mind where it did not impact his thoughts. Navar’s body felt as if it was burning, within and without, yet he remained icy cold in his mind.

Organs were moving and growing, bones were thickening and lengthening, cells were duplicating and mutating. He dreamed he was a shadowmoth, hanging in its chrysalis from a gantry in one of the prison wings. Navar’s body was in flux, a semi-solid construct transforming from the physique of a human youth to the transhuman physiology of a legionary.

Time passed without meaning. Occasionally Navar felt a surge of energy or agony, flares of feeling from limbs or innards undergoing implantation. Such sensations were confined to his mind, his body fixed in a paralysis that prevented screams and laughter. The lights hanging from cables above dimmed to darkness or became blindingly bright, sensed through his closed eyelids. He wondered if this marked the passing of the day and night or simply reactions to the changes in his body.

More than anything, when he experienced any emotion, Navar felt joy, a constant ecstatic feeling of becoming his true self.

Locked in his thoughts, the Raptor-to-be formed a picture of himself as he was and as he would be. He could vaguely sense the huge increase in his mass, his chest and arms and legs becoming heavily muscled. At some point he realised there was a different rhythm to his heartbeat, the familiar pulsing in his throat accompanied by a secondary beat, more rapid but weaker. He breathed and tasted the air in a way he had never tasted it before. Sweat and antiseptic, ozone and brushed metal lingered on his enhanced tongue and in his improved olfactory sensors.

Even his brain was changing. As if from a distance, he observed new structures and pathways forming in the grey matter of his thoughts. He came to realise that there were no drugs in his system any longer. His fugue state was being maintained from within by an interaction of his newly grown catalapsean node and sus-an membrane.

It was then that he knew the process was complete. With an effort of will, Navar forced himself from his semi-sleep, gaining clarity of thought and sense. The ward surrounded him in sharp focus: the scuff of the attendants’ feet, the whine of Magos Orlandriaz’s servitors, the smell of blood and adrenaline, the flickering of the light fittings.

He sat up, suddenly aware that he was ravenously hungry. Despite being intravenously fed proteins and nutrients throughout the implantation, his body had devoured its store of fat to fuel his massive growth.

Navar chuckled as he realised his feet were at the end of the bed. When he had lain down just a few days ago, they had barely reached two-thirds the length of the sheet. He lifted his right hand and formed an immense fist, knuckles flexing underneath hardened skin. Bunching the muscles in his arm, he marvelled at their power and felt the urge to crush something in his grip.

‘You must move to the rehabilitation room,’ said an orderly, all but her eyes hidden under hood and behind face mask. Navar could see the flecks of grey in the blue of her irises, and every tiny blood vessel in the whites. He saw his reflection in her pupils, a naked giant lying on bloodstained sheets. Her breath carried wisps of caroumal, a sugar-rich supplement used by the Raven Guard and their serfs to fuel short bursts of energetic activity. The bags under her eyes and lines around her brow offered testament to her fatigue.

‘Please, follow me to the rehabilitation room,’ she said, taking Navar’s wrist. He could detect the minute inflections in her voice, the weariness that caused looseness in her larynx. It seemed to Navar that she almost slurred her words, whereas a normal man would have just heard the same familiar tones.

He swung his legs from the bunk, and stood up. There was another moment of delight as he towered over the attendant. He saw his shadow engulfing her and was filled with a sense of mastery. She was not impressed, having dealt with dozens of Raptors in recent days. Without further word, the attendant turned and walked towards a set of double doors with glass windows. Navar heard the pad of her slippered feet and swish of her medical robe as loud as heavy boots and piston-driven armour.

Something caught in Navar’s throat and he coughed. The attendant pointed to a metal bucket on a hook beside the door. An awful stench rose from it.

‘You’ll need to expel some dead tissue from your lungs,’ said the attendant.

Navar hawked and spat a thick clot into the bucket. He took a deep breath and found no other obstruction. The attendant pushed open one of the doors, revealing rows of benches and loose robes. There were several dozen Raptors cleansing their bodies from long troughs, sloughing away blood clots and thick sweaty residue.

Several turned and grinned at Navar, and he smiled in return. If he understood correctly, these would be his battle-brothers within a matter of days, fully grown and combat-ready.

‘Thank you,’ he said to the attendant, and stepped through the door to join the rest of the Raptors.

The empty fuel tank ruptured from the impact of Omegon’s fist, a hollow clang resounding around the deserted freight terminal on the outskirts of Nairhub, hidden in the rad-wastes of Kiavahr. With a snarl, Omegon looked to the heavens through the gaps in the metal sheets of the roof; skeletal craneworks jutted up into the cloudy red sky, around them chains hanging from scaffolding and walkways like creepers of an industrial jungle. Pulling his gauntleted hand from the ragged hole he had made in the steel drum, the Alpha Legion’s primarch directed his murderous glare to Magos Unithrax.

‘Do you have an explanation?’ Omegon demanded. He rested one hand on the hilt of his chainsword, and curled the fingers of the other around the grip of the bolter slung at his hip. ‘Another batch of Raptors has undergone transformation without a hitch, and no hint of your virus.’

‘Your operative must have made an error when he attempted to introduce it to the gene-template,’ said Unithrax, meeting the primarch’s anger with a calm, cold stare. ‘Perhaps he compromised the integrity of the viral code.’

‘He followed your instructions precisely,’ Omegon replied. ‘My operative is not at fault.’

‘The viral agent will have mutated the gene-seed if the procedure has been correctly implemented,’ the magos insisted, assured of the truth of what he said.

‘This is not satisfactory,’ said Omegon, calming himself so that he could think clearly. Whoever was to blame could be dealt with later. He had to devise a secondary plan, and quickly. ‘Is it possible the virus is somehow still dormant? What sort of safeguards did you engineer into it to ensure it would not spread out of control and become infectious?’

‘The virus is a common variety, harmless on its own,’ said Unithrax. He shrugged, and a third arm, mechanical in nature, momentarily appeared from under his robes in imitation of the gesture. ‘It is merely a vehicle to introduce the corruptive element.’

‘And what corruptive element have you used?’ said Omegon. ‘Does it need time to activate?’

‘It is warp-based in origin, the stuff of the immaterial rendered into solid form,’ the magos said quietly.

‘Warp tech? It’s notoriously fickle,’ snapped Omegon. ‘Why would you use such a thing?’

‘Not so much warp technology as something more primordial, primarch,’ said Unithrax. ‘The viral agent uses modified daemon blood.’

‘What?’ Omegon snarled the question as he snatched hold of the tech-priest’s robe. ‘You exposed my operative to the taint of Chaos?’

‘A near-synthetic compound utilising trace amounts,’ said Unithrax, unperturbed by the primarch’s outburst. ‘Daemons do not have blood, as such, it is merely a useful euphemism. It contains minimal daemonic power in itself, but its presence is a powerful mutagen. If it was correctly mixed with the gene-template, there will be corruption.’

‘Well, it has not worked,’ said Omegon. He released his hold and began to pace, and then stopped himself, annoyed by the display of agitation. Reaching a decision, he fixed Unithrax with a hard stare.

‘The Order of the Dragon is ready to move?’ said the primarch.

‘Give us the word and we will act,’ replied Unithrax.

‘Good,’ said Omegon. ‘We have delayed long enough; it is time to begin the final phase of the project. I will organise a little testing skirmish for our Raven Guard friends while you begin the coup. Corax will have his eye fixed on Ravendelve and he will not see your preparations until it is too late.’

‘Very well, primarch,’ said the magos. ‘Unless I receive a signal from you, we will make our move at the temple council in three days’ time.

‘Be sure that you do,’ said Omegon. ‘The Seventh and Nineteenth Legion vessels are still at high anchor close to the Lycaeus moon. I will bring the Beta stealthing into closer orbit and have my warriors shuttled down, if you can guarantee the protection and secrecy of the agreed landing site.’

‘The Starfall docks belong to the Order of the Dragon. Your troops will arrive without remark or record.’

Omegon dismissed the magos with a wave of the hand, and equally dismissed him from his thoughts. The guilds would not move until they had seen some solid sign of the support of Horus, which would be given to them when the Order of the Dragon turned their weapons on the Mechanicum. Until then, Omegon would have to find some smaller force to attract Corax’s attention and increase the security measures at Ravendelve; measures that he would need to cover the involvement of his legionnaires.

He had the ideal candidate, someone whose loyalty had been assured from the earliest days of the revolution, a man who would not hesitate to lay down the lives of his followers to protect his own. Omegon set up his cipher-net communications equipment and established a signal. A few minutes passed before a connection was made.

‘Greetings, Councillor Effrit. This is Armand Eloqi.’

The chem-clouds were thicker than anything Alpharius had seen before, causing him to wonder if the insurgents had some control over their formation. It seemed too convenient that a thick swathe of noxious vapours had swept over Ravendelve only hours before their attack.

Along with the rest of his squad, he stood at the western rampart, looking for targets. Residual fallout was playing havoc with his auto-senses, no matter which spectrum filter he used. Now and then, he or one of the other squad members unleashed a bolt-round or two into the cloud mass, spying a swirl that might betray enemy movement, or aiming at darker patches in the fog.

To his right, Turret Four pounded out a steady stream of macro-cannon shells, the buildings in the distance blazing with detonations that set alight gas pockets and carved fifty metre-wide craters in the heaped rubble. Secondary emplacements roared with heavy bolters and chaingun fire, churning through the thick mist but hitting little.

‘No aerial support available,’ came Commander Branne’s voice over the vox-net. Alpharius was not surprised in the least. Without Thunderhawks or Stormbirds to fly recon, the Raven Guard would be forced to patrol on foot or in Rhinos, exposing themselves to ambush. For a Legion that prided itself on strategic flexibility and the mobility of force, they had been neatly trapped in Ravendelve by the initial attack.

Leaning over the rampart, Alpharius could see the piles of bodies from the first wave: dozens of mangled corpses left by the Raven Guard fusillade. If this was Omegon’s attack to secure Ravendelve, it was very poor. Alpharius could not believe that the long preparations of his primarch would lead to something so desultory, but he had received no instructions. All he could do was stand on the wall and continue to play his part as a loyal Raven Guard legionary. To do anything else would expose his secret without reason.

‘South gate opening, direct fire to cover column,’ said Branne.

Under the sergeant’s orders, Alpharius and the squad moved closer to Turret Four, to set up a fire position covering the blind spot beneath the high tower. There was nothing to see, no targets to fire at. There was sporadic las-fire in the distance though, bursts of energy bolts leaving fiery trails through the contaminated fog. The insurgents had certainly not abandoned their attack.

‘Stay keen,’ said Sergeant Dor. ‘They’re planning something. Be ready.’

In the hull of the second Rhino in the column, Navar Hef sat on the narrow seat with his bolter across his lap. The transport rocked wildly from side to side as it sped over the uneven ground of the rad-fields, but his suit compensated for most of the movement so that he just swayed back and forth a little.

‘Rapid deployment, thirty seconds!’ snapped Sergeant Cald. ‘Weapons check.’

Navar went through a quick inspection of his bolter and grenades. He unhooked the fastener on the sheath of his combat knife and tested the magnetic grips on the spare magazines clamped to his belt and thighs. All was in order, as it had been when he had boarded the Rhino.

‘Stand ready!’

Cald and his nine Raptors stood up and turned towards the rear hatchway. The bumping of the Rhino was more pronounced, but the gyrostabilisers of the Mark VI armour kept Navar balanced. He took a step backwards as the Rhino trundled to a halt.

Drop-bolts exploded along the sides of the hatch, dropping down the access ramp. Navar was the fourth out, fanning to the right with three other squad members. He saw movement through the doorway of a collapsed building ahead and fired without hesitation. His bolt-round found its mark, an arm swathed in bandage-like cloth sent spinning into view.

‘Enemy, twenty-five metres, secondary arc,’ Navar reported breathlessly.

The squad reformed without any need for command, laying down a curtain of fire into the rubble of the ruined building, leaving contrails in the ruddy miasma and fist-sized holes in the rockcrete walls.

‘Cease,’ ordered Cald. ‘Section one, move up. Section two, flank protection.’

Navar was in section two, so he held his ground and kept watch to the right. The sergeant led his team of five men towards the ruins, their black armour almost disappearing in the haze.

They were nearly out of sight, no more than twenty metres from the closest broken wall, when light flared through the gloom. An arc of lightning erupted from a stairwell leading down to a basement level, earthing into the lead Raptor. His armour and body exploded, sending bloody fragments of bone and ceramite thudding into the legionaries around him. Navar had never heard mention of anything like it during the training exercises.

‘Emperor’s oath, that’s a stormcannon!’ yelled Cald. ‘Saturation fire! Level that building!’

Switching his bolter to full automatic, Navar emptied the remaining bolts from his magazine into the enemy position, the crackle of the detonations just a few flickers amongst the storm that engulfed the stairwell. Behind Navar, the remote cupola of the Rhino opened up, hammering away with combi-bolter fire. As he slapped home another magazine, the Raptor’s hearts kicked into high combat pulse, flooding his body with adrenal compounds, seeming to slow time as his nervous system surged in response.

His auto-senses blacked momentarily. When they returned, Navar saw the fiery trail of a plasma jet streaking through the mist. The Rhino’s point-defence missile had passed within a metre of him, causing the blackout. It detonated in an airburst just above the insurgents’ den, showering white-hot promethium across the stairs and wall.

‘Pull back to the Rhino,’ said Sergeant Cald, calm and authoritative. The lead team started to withdraw as the promethium melted through the rockcrete, turning it to a dwindling pile of burning slag. ‘Commander Branne, encountering guild-tech weapons. We might have a problem.’

As they returned, one of the surviving Raptors from the forward section stumbled. At first Navar thought he had just lost his footing, but as the Raptor pushed himself to his knees, he spasmed violently, his bolter flying from his grasp. Navar had not seen any weapons fire and his first thought was of some other unknown guild-tech the sergeant had not warned them about. Just as he thought this, Navar heard grunting over the squad vox-link and turned to see the Raptor to his right falling to one knee, his head rocking madly forwards and back.

Tightness gripped Navar’s chest. It reminded him of the sensation of fear he had used to feel before his transformation, though he felt no dread attached to the cramping. A sudden burning shot up his spine, causing Navar to gasp with pain. He tried to fight the urge to crouch, his legs and pelvis felt as if they had been shattered.

‘Hef? Lastar? Devor?’ He didn’t recognise the voice, but the panic it conveyed was something he had never expected to hear from a Raven Guard.

The Raptor realised he had fallen to his knees and looked up to see Sergeant Cald standing over him, looking rapidly to the left and right. Another surge of flaming agony roared across Navar’s chest, his muscles contorting, throwing him to his back. He couldn’t help the scream that erupted from him. He smelled and tasted blood inside his helm.

‘In the Rhino! Get in the Rhino!’ Cald was bellowing. The sergeant grabbed one of Navar’s arms and started dragging him to the transport.

‘I can… make it…’ Navar snarled, pushing himself to his feet. He stumbled a few steps and hurled himself onto the Rhino’s ramp. The impact sent another shuddering burst of pain through his body.

‘Command, command!’ Cald’s voice over the vox was almost lost under the pounding in Navar’s ears. ‘Urgent evacuation needed. All Raptors are down. I repeat, all of the Raptors non-combatant.’

‘I know,’ came Branne’s terse reply. ‘It’s happening across most of the squads. No assistance available. Get them back to Ravendelve as best you can.’

Navar felt himself lifted bodily into the Rhino, seeing the helm insignia of his sergeant through a crazy patterning of hyper-inflated blood vessels in his eyes. He was dumped onto the floor, landing on top of another Raptor; the marking on his shoulder pad rim marked him out as Devallia. Navar saw Devallia tearing at his helmet, trying to rip it free. After a few seconds, the seals snapped and the helm came off, tossed away by the frenzied Raptor.

He found himself looking into a pair of inhuman eyes, almost completely red with blood, save for pupils that had shrunk to dark pinpricks. Navar was gripped with horror as he saw veins and muscles pulsing beneath blackening skin. Devallia cried out, and in opening his mouth revealed another row of sharpened teeth erupting from his gums. Corrosive saliva dribbled onto his chestplate, hissing and spitting where it fell.

The Rhino jerked into motion, rolling Navar to his back. He stared up at Sergeant Cald, who was crouched at the open ramp, one hand held to the brow of his helm as he shook his head in disbelief.

‘Sergeant…’ The words were difficult to form, Navar’s tongue feeling swollen in his throat. He held a hand out towards Cald and noticed long claws had broken through the fingertips of his gauntlets. ‘Sergeant? What’s happening to me?’

Cald looked at him for several seconds, as if he had no answer to give. Then he stepped closer and stooped over Navar, clasping his deformed hand in his own.

‘Stay strong, legionary,’ said Cald. ‘Remember who you are. You are Raven Guard.’

Fifteen

The Fortunate Ones
Divided Loyalties
The Legionnaires Revealed

He had only wanted to buy a little more time, but as he crouched next to the receiver beneath the bent girders of a toppled viaduct Omegon was delighted with the static-broken message passed on by the cryptoduct. The poor quality of the signal was due to a communications block being broadcast from the Ravenspire. It was the response Omegon had been depending on, though it meant his own transmissions would be severely hampered. The message was from Contact Three, who knew nothing of his fellow Alpha Legionnaire’s action.

Omegon played the recording again, his fingers adjusting the dials of the receiver to get the best possible signal. The report was still quiet and fragmentary, and only his experience and superhuman hearing allowed him to pick out words and phrases from amongst the white noise that was blanketing every frequency.

‘…widescale degradation throughout the latest batch… degenerate, bestial… more recent recruits are worst affected… Corax has ordered… nearly a thousand of the poor… suspects mutation due to some mistake in the gene replication for large scale implantation. Apothecary Sixx housing the… howls and roars like caged animals. Security has been tightened around the gene-tech, but access still possible. There seems… overall mission integrity intact. Awaiting…’

The sacrifice of Eloqi’s guild had been worthwhile, after all. In the grand scheme, their survival or success was irrelevant. The guild insurrection, and the Order of the Dragon who had instigated it, were simply the means to pry open Ravendelve.

The Beta would be moving into position, while the Order of the Dragon was ready to strike their final blow. It was time that his operatives knew their full part in the endgame. He shut down the receiver and packed it away, going over the final parts of the plan in his mind.

Tomorrow, twenty-nine Terran hours from now, the Alpha Legion would make their move.

The pain had subsided for the last few hours, leaving Navar with a deep ache in his flesh and bones. He sat in the corner of the cell, not able to look at Marls, Kharvo, Dortaran, Benna and the other twenty Raptors who shared the room. They were amongst the fortunate ones, apparently, though Navar did not feel fortunate as he looked down at the jet-black talons jutting from his fingers.

He had seen a few of the worst-affected, as Sixx and his attendants had hurried them into the quarantine area that had been quickly established in the depths of Ravendelve. It was only temporary, the Apothecary had said, reversible if they could isolate the mutated strands in the gene-seed. Navar knew he had not experienced much of life, but he recognised a comforting lie when he heard one, even if Sixx had been lying to himself as much as the Raptors.

He could hear the muffled yells and screams of the most degenerate and could not push away the visions he had seen. Some of them had been bent almost double by elongated spines, others had been twisted by insane muscle growth, their limbs warped and engorged. Bony growths split their skin, fangs punctured their lips, and all had the same bloody eyes as Navar.

As a child, Navar had never suffered nightmares. Growing up in the shadow of the Ravenspire was more assurance than any mother’s words that there were no monsters that could harm him. Yet the sight of the degenerated Raptors was something from the darkest recesses of his imagination, causing a primal revulsion and fear that no amount of Legiones Astartes discipline and training could eradicate. That he was counted amongst the monstrosities only increased his unease.

His brain, his body, no longer produced the fear response of a normal human, but on that primitive level, in the core of his mind, Navar was distressed and unable to articulate his worry. It was if he could not form the thoughts, could not grasp the concepts required to voice his dread.

Navar stood up to ease the pressure on his lower back, where one of Sixx’s attendants had surgically removed a vestigial tail. The Raptor’s knees and hips ached, wound about with tight, overgrown ligaments and sinew. He started to walk, completing a circuit of the room, which was bare save for the thin training pads on the floor that had been provided as rudimentary bedding, the best the Legion could offer for the moment.

He neared the door, and heard voices. The door was not locked, not for them. Elsewhere, the most bestial sufferers had been taken to the cages that had once housed Sixx and Orlandriaz’s animal subjects. They could not be trusted to stay where they would be safe, though none had been violent towards their fellow Raven Guard.

The voices grew louder and Navar recognised the deep timbre of the primarch. He gestured to the others and they rose from their positions to crowd as close as they could get. The conversation seemed to be taking place a little further down the corridor beyond, near to the infirmary entrance.

‘…is an intrinsic problem with the gene template, I am sure of it,’ they heard Orlandriaz replying to something said by Corax. ‘There is no error in the replication process.’

‘Then why are the first five hundred Raptors unaffected?’ said Corax. ‘At some stage, we have made a mistake. The reduplication to this scale must be responsible.’

‘Unless there has been degeneration in the source material,’ replied Sixx.

‘It is kept in stasis, how could it change?’ countered Orlandriaz.

‘Incrementally,’ replied Corax. ‘It is removed from stasis for reprocessing new batches of gene-seed. Perhaps it has degraded a little during each removal, so slightly that we have not noticed it.’

‘That would suggest there is an inherent flaw,’ said Sixx. He cleared his throat before continuing, apparently uncomfortable with what he had to say. ‘The flaw is not in the Raven Guard gene-seed, it has been verified many times over since its creation.’

‘What are you suggesting?’ said Corax.

‘That there is something wrong with the primarch data,’ said Orlandriaz, as coolly as if he were discussing inclement weather.

‘Or our analysis of it,’ Sixx added quickly. ‘The traits we are seeing, the deformations, are consistent in their own way. Not entirely random.’

‘I fail to see that,’ said Orlandriaz.

‘I do not,’ said Corax. ‘We know that there are elements of non-human structures within the primarch data. Similar strands are encoded into every gene-seed. The Legiones Astartes make-up owes a small part to characteristics found in other species, introduced by the Emperor into the gene-seed. The scales, horns and other growths may be indicative of these traits being accelerated, out of step with the rest of the adaptation. Whatever was holding them in check, maintaining the balance, has deteriorated. Judging by the timing of the change, I would start by looking at those physical functions under greatest stimulation during combat. It seems that the something in their enhanced metabolism triggered this.’

‘An uncomfortable thought,’ said Sixx. ‘To think that all of us contain the potential for such transformation.’

‘Not all of us,’ said Corax.

‘Apologies, lord, I did no–’

‘I don’t mean my primarch heritage,’ Corax continued. ‘The standard Raven Guard gene-seed is stable, as you said before. We have done something to destabilise it. Isolate that cause, and perhaps we might find a means to reverse the errant genetic material.’

‘It is a possibility,’ said Orlandriaz. ‘I shall conduct more tests to compare the initial Raptors created with the most recent, to see if I can identify a consistent differential.’

‘I’ll concentrate on making them as comfortable as possible,’ said Sixx. ‘If we can’t…’

‘We will!’ said Corax. ‘They are Raven Guard and deserve our greatest effort. Keep me informed. I must return to Ravenspire to discuss the attack on Ravendelve with the command council.’

‘You fear it is the start of something more threatening, lord?’ asked Sixx.

‘We all but wiped out the insurgents, so the threat is debatable. That proscribed guild-tech weapons have surfaced cannot be ignored, though. We could do without further distraction while we resolve the issues with the gene-template.’

The noise of the conversation receded, followed by the clank of the infirmary door closing. Navar turned back to the others.

‘You heard Lord Corax?’ he said. ‘They’ll find a way to change us back.’

Some of the other Raptors smiled, a few sadly shook their heads. Navar headed back to his corner and sat down, ignoring the pain in his rump. The primarch believed that there was a way, and he had the most brilliant mind imaginable. Feeling a little happier, Navar leant back against the wall, closed his eyes and tried to sleep.

The discussion between the commanders and Corax had lasted for several hours. Branne was happy to leave the command chamber, the last of the council to do so, having been intensely questioned by Corax regarding the insurgent attack, and he was anxious to return to Ravendelve and oversee its defence. The primarch had been adamant that the timetable for the attack on Narsis was not changed. If the Raptors could not be included in the force, the Raven Guard would adjust their strategy. Branne definitely wanted as many legionaries as possible to take on the Perfect Fortress, and so his place was at Ravendelve to provide an encouraging presence for Sixx and Orlandriaz.

As he stalked towards the conveyor down to Alpha Dock, he was met by Controller Ephrenia. She held a data tablet in her hand, a sight that Branne did not find encouraging.

‘A moment of your time, please, commander,’ said Ephrenia.

‘Walk with me,’ Branne replied, continuing past.

‘We have found several odd signals, commander,’ she said. Branne stopped.

‘Commander Agapito’s channel?’ he asked quietly.

‘No, commander, not this time,’ said Ephrenia. She handed Branne the data-slate. ‘There have been several encrypted messages concealed within normal Legion traffic. Hidden amongst the data-pulse between Ravenspire and Ravendelve, riding the pulses to bypass the communications block. They appear to originate from several places on Kiavahr.’

‘So we’ve found out how the guilders are communicating? Good work. Can we stop it?’

‘I already have, commander,’ said Ephrenia, looking a little hurt by the implication. ‘One such transmission that was hijacked was a routine upload from the infirmary core in Ravendelve. In picking apart the entwined codes, it became apparent that the core log had been tampered with. The log was accessed and then the access was crudely wiped.’

‘There are only a handful of us with access to that log,’ said Branne. ‘Why would any of us try to hide such action?’

‘Digital markers indicate that it was Commander Agapito,’ Ephrenia said, her voice hushed. She stepped closer to Branne, though he could hear her lowered voice with ease. ‘I was about to tell Lord Corax, but as you are here I think that perhaps you should deal with the matter.’

‘Thank you, controller,’ said Branne. ‘I’ll handle this.’

Branne turned around and headed back towards the central transporter that ran the full height of Ravenspire. Whatever reason Agapito had for accessing the gene-tech datalogs, it could not excuse an attempt to conceal the act. The commander quietly fumed as he made his way up to the personal chambers of his brother. He did not knock, but threw open the door, ready to demand an explanation from Agapito.

The chambers were empty, and showed no sign that Agapito had returned here after the command council. Branne activated his vox.

‘Spire command, can you locate Commander Agapito?’

‘One moment, commander.’

Branne waited impatiently, pacing around Agapito’s main room. He spied a tablet on the arm of a couch and picked it up. Activating the slate, he brought up the last screen display. It seemed to be a duplicate of the files Branne had been given by Ephrenia no more than ten minutes before.

His communicator chimed.

‘Commander Agapito authorised a pilot and Stormbird for launch, commander,’ the Legion functionary in the command chamber told him. ‘Course logged was for Ravendelve.’

‘When?’ demanded Branne.

‘Two and a half hours ago, Terran standard, commander.’

Branne cut the link and threw both data-slates to the floor.

‘What are you doing, brother?’ he asked the empty room. Two hours was enough time for Agapito to already be at Ravendelve. Branne ran from the room, heading for the Thunderhawk waiting for him at Alpha Dock.

The scanner ticked monotonously, every pulse accompanied by an image on the screen in front of Alpharius. He turned his chair and checked the audio pick-ups, seeing nothing detected except for the wind. The gun towers had been constantly manned since the last attack, and Alpharius and the rest of the squad had been on watch since dawn. Nothing was happening, there had been no sign of any insurgent activity in the last twenty hours.

The chair creaked as he leaned back, laying his hands in his lap. Behind him in the control room, Sergeant Dor was cleaning his bolter, cloth and tools laid out on an instrumentation panel. Marko was also there, monitoring the communications station.

‘Time for another visual sweep,’ said Dor, not looking up from his work.

Alpharius said nothing as he stood up and moved to the reinforced door. He keyed in the security code and the door extended out and slid to one side. Stepping into the airlock, he sealed the door behind him. He took his helmet from his belt and fitted it before opening the outer seal. Wind rushed in, bringing the acrid taint of pollution.

Stepping out onto the rampart, Alpharius glanced down at Ravendelve. Searchlights from the towers and walls scoured the surrounding ground, their beams lost in the hazy air no more than a hundred metres out. He could see armoured figures patrolling the walls beneath him, their eye lenses bright yellow dots in the gloom. Unslinging his bolter, he walked around the rampart, passing under the shadow of the huge twin-barrelled cannon in the emplacement atop the tower.

He performed a point check, using the magnification of his auto-senses to inspect the gatehouse, armourium doors and other points of entry. All he saw were Raven Guard, patrolling tirelessly or standing sentry. One thousand Talons had been sent down from Ravenspire to reinforce the garrison, taking the place of the Raptors who had succumbed to the genetic corruption.

It had pained Alpharius to see the tainted legionaries, some of them wracked with agony, all of them a perversion of the Legiones Astartes. It would be a mercy to kill them, and when the time came, the Alpha Legion would surely grant them swift release from their torment. The Raven Guard were enemies, but Alpharius had a great deal of respect for the warriors of Deliverance, having shared in their tribulations.

He continued on his circuit, moving to the outside of the tower to look out over the rad-wastes. He already knew from the sensor reports that there was nothing out there, but the Raven Guard were highly suspicious of guild-tech and left nothing to chance. It was possible that the insurgents possessed something that might mask them from the scanner sweeps.

There was nothing to see, only a tortured landscape of flattened buildings and cratered rock.

He started towards the door to complete one loop around the tower, but stopped at the corner to look into the far distance. To the north-east, five kilometres away, the outskirts of Nabrik jutted from the bank of red fog like the fingers of a drowning man breaking the surface of the water. Lights blinked from their rooftops and the lamps of armoured airships passed sedately between them.

Alpharius was about to turn away when he noticed a flickering in the gloom, close to the base of one of the towers. A series of flashes illuminated the fog. Moments later, a dirigible erupted into flames, the mangled remains of its gondola sent plummeting into the city. A second or two later, the Alpha Legionnaire heard the muffled but distinct rap of heavy cannons drifting over Ravendelve, followed by the crack of the airship’s detonation.

Astounded, he watched tracer fire erupting from several of the cloudscrapers at the heart of the city, and more explosions billowed into life further into Nabrik. He thought it to be just another insurgent attack at first, targeting the Mechanicum following recent defeats against the Raven Guard, but then several things happened at once.

Two huge detonations rocked one of the soaring towers, almost cutting it in half. The upper storeys crumbled and toppled, crashing into the streets below in a huge cloud of flame and smoke. Alpharius’s first thought was that it was a bomb, but his amazement grew as a gigantic figure appeared silhouetted against the growing column of fire. It was at least ninety metres tall, its right arm a massive multi-barrelled cannon, the left another immense weapon that gleamed with the blue sheen of plasma generators. Its armoured carapace was packed with turrets that streaked laser and shell fire into the city: an Imperator-class Titan!

As he watched the Imperator unleash a ball of ravening blue energy from its plasma annihilator, Alpharius heard Marko shouting over the vox.

‘Full alert, man stations! Threat imminent.’

‘Powering up defence cannons,’ announced Dor.

The words had barely sunk in when the macro-cannon above Alpharius opened fire. The shockwave from its twin muzzles hit the Alpha Legionnaire, his suit warning icons flashing amber and red as the concussive blast enveloped him. Two shells the size of battle tanks screamed into the distance, exploding kilometres away.

Just as the noise of the shell detonations reached Alpharius, a ticking started in his skull, a double pulse different from the one he had felt before. He knew immediately what it meant: Omegon had remotely activated the tracking function. The implant was now homing in on the devices of the other Alpha Legionnaires.

It’s started, Alpharius thought, his hearts racing. The Alpha Legion were making their move. He had to get into position and meet with the others.

Increasing the magnification of his sight, Alpharius saw four columns of vehicles and infantry snaking through the ruins where the cannon had fired, passing between flames and rising smoke from the double impact. There were transports and tanks, flanked by three armoured walkers, each twenty metres tall. One of the Warhounds – the walkers were clearly scout-class Titans – was enveloped by a shimmering dome of purple and black as its void shields collapsed from the initial macro-cannon bombardment. The other two Warhounds raised their weapons and returned fire as shots from Turret Two shrieked across Ravendelve to pound into the metal body of the compromised Titan.

Alpharius hurled himself to the rockcrete a moment before the cannonade erupted around him, showering him with stone-like shards and fragments of the plasteel reinforcing rods within the tower wall. Two white beams lanced out of the shifting fog, punching through the armoured casement of the macro-cannon.

Propelling himself towards the door, Alpharius was engulfed by a storm of sparks and fiery debris from above, spitting and clattering on his armour. He hauled open the outer door and threw himself inside, slamming the armoured portal as another volley of shells hammered into the rampart where he had been only two seconds before.

‘Nord and Falko are down,’ Sergeant Dor reported. ‘Cannon is non-operational. Withdrawing to central structure, there’s nothing we can do from here.’

The tower shuddered again from more impacts as the airlock cycled through the filtering process. Alpharius paced back and forth for a few seconds, waiting for the inner door to open. The interior of the tower had been plunged into darkness, lit only by sparks bursting from fractured consoles. Dor and Marko were waiting by the stairwell that linked the tower levels.

‘What about the others?’ asked Alpharius, glancing up to the landing above. Automatic fire suppression systems had flooded the gun casement, filling it with white, dusty smoke.

‘Done for. Let’s get moving,’ said Dor, setting off down the steps. ‘Muster at station four.’

Alpharius could not afford to be drawn into the general muster. His instructions from his primarch were to get to the main gate.

‘Go on,’ said Alpharius, waving Marko to follow Dor.

The Raven Guard turned his back on Alpharius as the Alpha Legionnaire unsheathed his combat knife. Alpharius drove his boot into the back of Marko’s knee, forcing him down even as he plunged the blade towards the side of the legionary’s neck. He sawed the serrated edge through Marko’s flesh, almost decapitating him.

‘What’s the delay?’ Dor shouted back up from the landing below.

Alpharius dropped Marko’s corpse to the floor, readied a grenade from his belt, and moved to the rail above the steps.

‘Take this!’ he called out, dropping the primed grenade.

Dor caught it out of instinct. A slow second passed as he realised what he had done, the grenade falling from his fingers, but too late. The grenade exploded, hurling the sergeant from his feet, razor-edged shrapnel cracking against his armour. Alpharius knew that a single grenade would not be enough to take down a legionary and vaulted over the rail, bolter in one hand.

He thudded onto the landing as Dor was pushing himself to one knee, chainsword already drawn. Gas hissed from split piping and oily fibre-bundle lubricant mixed with the blood leaking from the sergeant’s midsection. Alpharius’s first bolt hit Dor in the left side of his helm, where the communication pick-up was located, silencing any warning he might broadcast.

Dor roared and leapt at Alpharius, who dodged back a moment before the spinning teeth of the chainsword would have taken off his arm. He fired blind, hammering bolts into the sergeant’s chest, the cascade of detonations sending Dor sprawling again. Alpharius followed up quickly, placing his next shot through the eye lens of Dor’s crumpled helmet. The already damaged helm split apart as the bolt detonated inside, spraying blood and brain matter across the metal floor.

Stopping only to prise the chainsword from Dor’s dead grip, Alpharius headed down the tower.

Looking up at the colossal form of the Magnus Casei as the Imperator Titan unleashed another miniature star into the heart of the city, Omegon felt a little trepidation. He had known that the Order of the Dragon had extensive resources, but had not appreciated just how much influence they had extended into the Mechanicum of Kiavahr. He had expected a distraction, infighting amongst the different temples. What the Order of the Dragon had delivered was all-out civil war.

The streets were packed with tech-priests and Mechanicum functionaries fleeing the carnage. Slack-faced servitors wandered around, unable to process what was happening, staring vacantly at the explosions and flames. Here and there, soldiers in reflective bodysuits herded the crowd away from the fighting, urging them out of their lines of fire with their rifles. Praetorian servitors – half-human war machines even larger than Omegon – watched over the exodus with chainguns, lascannons and sonic disruptors.

Guild forces were pouring into the city, thousands of warriors clad in armoured environment suits. The distant crackle of las-fire and thunder of heavier weapons cut through the sound of flames and the panicked shouts of the surging throng. Here and there, the fabric of the streets themselves exploded from below as indiscriminate mole mortar fire raked the city from the outskirts.

Screaming and shouting erupted with renewed fervour as the Magnus Casei lifted its foot and stepped along the broad boulevard between two smoking hab-blocks. Defence turrets atop its buttressed and crenellated carapace barked into life as the vapour trails of aircraft cut through the sky above the city.

Amongst the surge of fleeing civilians, Omegon had perfect cover. He stepped from the doorway of a forgehouse and into the crowd, head wrapped in a thick scarf, heavy robes concealing his immense frame. He had discarded his armour, sinking it into a chem-pool in the wastes; it was stealth and not physical defences that would protect him now.

Allowing himself to be pulled along by the stream of people, he flowed with them to where the boulevard broke into a large plaza. There the crowd began to fill the square and their panic grew. Squads of the Mechanicum’s soldiers – the skitarii – were blocking off the exits, forcing back the refugees with electro-staves and warning shots from their autoguns. Tracked weapons platforms were positioned at the intersections, their cyber-augmented crews alert for danger.

It was simple enough for Omegon to use his bulk to force a path through the throng, heading for one of the other roads leading into the plaza. Shouldering aside a tech-priest, he strode to the skitarii cordon. He was met by a company leader, the plates of his carapace armour engraved with Mechanicum runes. The officer looked up at Omegon with mechanical eyes, lenses reflecting the flames consuming the cloudscraper behind the primarch.

‘Captain Vertz of the Talons, let me through,’ snapped Omegon, not allowing the officer a chance to speak. ‘I must report to Ravendelve.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said the officer, waving for his men to drag aside part of the barricade they had erected across the street. ‘There is a column from the sixth district assembling at Foundry Arc, responding to a request from your primarch. You might want to join with them.’

‘Thank you for the information,’ said Omegon, stepping past the skitarii leader. He was genuinely grateful for the knowledge, as it would mean the next phase of his plan would be made a lot easier.

He broke into a run, heading out of the city towards the edges of the rad-wastes.

The crash of falling masonry announced the destruction of another turret. Ravendelve’s main building shook with the impact as the lights flickered and warning sirens screeched. Agapito had no time to wonder about the significance of this development as he pounded down a flight of stairs towards the armourium.

He was met at the next landing by a squad of Raptors, who were assembling a multi-laser on its tripod. For the last few days, he had spent much of his time with Captain Noriz, taking his advice on the basic defensive strategies his Legion employed. Agapito’s mind was brim-full of attrition ratios, specific killzones and interlocking deployment patterns.

‘That’s no good there!’ he snapped. ‘If the enemy get this far in, it’ll make no difference. Move it to the south transept for a decent field of fire.’

‘Yes, commander!’ replied the squad’s sergeant, even as Agapito continued on his hurried course.

Besides, he thought, I still need an escape route open to me if things get out of hand.

As Agapito entered the armourium level he found the area almost deserted. A few servitors trundled back and forth, hauling ammunition onto the bed of a bulk carrier. They paid him no heed as he ran past. Hearing voices ahead, the commander sidestepped into one of the practice ranges. Footsteps rang on the floor outside and then passed away.

When the sound of the legionaries had faded, Agapito emerged into the main corridor, checking that he was not seen. If his presence was remarked upon he would surely be called upon to take charge in Branne’s absence, a delay he could not afford. He did not know how long he would have, but every second wasted might see his opportunity lost.

Alpharius entered the gatehouse with a confident stride to find an assortment of Raven Guard already there. Most were Talons, but a squad of Raptors manned the controls of the lascannon batteries overlooking the approach. There were certainly too many legionaries for him to overcome in the same way he had disposed of Dor and Marko.

There was a commotion at the other door as Sergeant Nestil entered, flanked by two warriors from his squad.

‘Activate landing beacons,’ the sergeant ordered. ‘Reinforcements are arriving. Be ready to open the sub-gate to let them in.’

Checking a snarl of frustration, Alpharius moved away from the massive doors of the main gate. His task had been to secure the gates and open them for the arrival of more Alpha Legion troops, but with even more Raven Guard arriving it seemed like a foolhardy move. The implant in his skull was ticking madly, telling him that another Alpha Legionnaire was close at hand, probably within the bastion of the gatehouse. He could not risk arousing suspicion by revealing himself just yet.

Under Nestil’s instruction, the lock bars on a smaller gateway set inside the huge slabs of adamantium-sheathed ferrocrete were disengaged. The postern opened on hydraulic rams, revealing a view of the landing apron between the gatehouse and outer wall. The gatehouse was soon going to be very full, so Alpharius headed up the stairwell leading to the observation gallery that ran above the gates themselves. He found himself in the company of five other Raven Guard, sitting in the cradles of the quad-heavy bolters mounted along the gallery’s outer wall.

Ignoring them, Alpharius looked out of the metre-thick glasteel window. The flare of ramjets descended through the ruddy murk and he recognised the shape of an approaching Thunderhawk, another a hundred metres behind. Touching down on the apron, the black-armoured drop-ship lowered its ramps to disgorge several squads of legionaries moving at the double. As soon as the last Raven Guard disembarked, the Thunderhawk pilot gunned the engines and took off. The second touched down as the first wave of reinforcements filed towards the open postern gate.

At a loss, Alpharius glared down at the two lines of black-armoured figures jogging towards the gatehouse. He watched the second Thunderhawk lift off again as the first wheeled around a few hundred metres from the wall. Something struck him as odd about the Thunderhawk’s manoeuvre and he paid closer attention to the gunship’s approach.

Increasing the magnification of his auto-senses, he zoomed in on the gunship and saw that the locking arms on its missiles had been disengaged. It was about to make an attack run.

He sprinted back towards the stairwell. Four near-simultaneous blasts filled the gallery with flying shrapnel and fire, the shockwave hurling Alpharius through the doorway to send him clattering down the first flight of stairs.

Head ringing, he pushed himself to his feet as he heard the report of bolters from below. The vox was suddenly alive with shouted warnings, before being cut off by deafening static. Two Raven Guard backed into the stairwell beneath, one blazing with his bolter, the other sending a stream of burning promethium from his flamer at some unseen enemy in the main gatehouse.

Alpharius levelled his bolter and opened fire, cutting down the legionary with the flamer. His companion turned in surprise, weapon lifting towards Alpharius. Before he could fire, a ball of plasma screamed through the doorway, exploding against his left side, incinerating half of his body in an instant.

Holding his bolter in one hand to pull free his looted chainsword, Alpharius advanced slowly down the steps, eyes fixed on the doorway. He stopped as he reached ground level, hearing the sounds of fighting lessening. Bolter held out, he stepped around the edge of the arch. The ticking in his head was near-constant now.

He saw Sergeant Nestil striding through a pool of burning promethium, almost on top of Alpharius, flames licking from his breastplate and left arm.

Alpharius readied the chainsword and sprang at the sergeant, sweeping the weapon towards his throat.

Nestil saw the attack and pivoted, catching the side of the chainsword with his forearm to deflect the blow onto his shoulder plate. Monomolecular teeth screeched, churning through paint and ceramite.

‘Hydra!’ Nestil yelled, bringing up his combi-bolter.

‘Effrit,’ Alpharius replied instantly, the counter-signal. He stopped mid-swing, letting the chainsword drop to his side. Nestil also lowered his weapon.

‘Nestil?’ said Alpharius, not quite able to believe that the veteran sergeant was really an Alpha Legionnaire.

‘I am Alpharius,’ the sergeant replied. ‘Ort?’

‘I am Alpharius.’

‘So am I,’ said a voice behind the pair. ‘What a coincidence.’

Both Alpha Legionnaires turned.

‘You?’ said Nestil, shaking his head. ‘One of us is a commander?’

Sixteen

The Bombardment of Kiavahr
Ransacked
Sixx’s Revenge

Thunderhawks and Stormbirds were already soaring away from High Dock as Corax entered the landing area. Controller Ephrenia ran to keep up with his long stride, relaying the flow of information being sent to her by the command chamber.

‘Fighting is localised to two cities, lord,’ she said breathlessly, the vox-unit held to her ear. ‘Supreme Magos Deltiari says that he has mobilised the Legio Vindictus to respond. A corps-strength column of skitarii has been despatched to assist in the defence of Ravendelve. The Mark VI manufactorum is under heavy attack but holding out. Guild-loyal forces have besieged Prime Forge and are moving to occupy the old guildhouse at Santrix Tertia. Captain Noriz is already aboard the Wrathful Vanguard with his Imperial Fists, and is requesting permission to join the counter-attack on Kiavahr… One moment, lord, receiving direct transmission from Ravendelve. Routing it through.’

She handed the receiver to Corax and he stopped at the ramp to his Stormbird.

‘Commander Branne?’ he said. ‘Report.’

‘Not Branne, lord, it’s Vincente Sixx,’ came the reply. ‘Commander Branne has not arrived yet. Commanders Agapito and Solaro are here, though I cannot contact either at present.’

‘Understood,’ said Corax, pushing aside for the moment the question of where Branne was and what was occupying the other two commanders. ‘What is the situation?’

‘Lord, we are under fire from Warhound Titans, as well as several mobile artillery platforms. There’s a guilder column only half a kilometre from the compound, with battle tank and heavy weapons support. I think our defences have been breached, but I cannot confirm that. What should we do?’

‘What do you mean?’ snapped Corax. ‘Defend Ravendelve!’

‘The gene-template, lord,’ said Sixx. ‘We cannot allow it to be taken by guilders. Who could say whose hands it might end up in?’

Corax stopped himself from replying immediately, forcing himself to evaluate the situation objectively.

‘If we destroy the gene-template and research, we condemn nearly a thousand legionaries to a miserable existence,’ said the primarch. ‘We need that template to reverse the effect of the gene contamination.’

‘I understand, lord, but can we risk it?’

‘You will have to use your own judgement, Chief Apothecary,’ said Corax. ‘Lock down the implantation facility and round up some legionaries as a final guard. Have charges set, ready to destroy the gene-template and all associated material. It’s up to you to decide when the risk is too great. I will be at Ravendelve in ninety minutes.’

‘Understood, lord,’ said Sixx. ‘We’ll do everything we can to protect it.’

Shutting off the connection, Corax gave the receiver back to Ephrenia. Her words were lost in the roar of a Thunderhawk taking off a short distance away.

‘What did you say?’ said Corax.

‘Commander Agapito, lord,’ the controller repeated. ‘There have been several potential security breaches connected to Commander Agapito. I brought them to the attention of Commander Branne. That may account for their current incommunicado status.’

‘I don’t have time for a full explanation,’ said Corax, stepping onto the ramp. ‘Send an order to Ravendelve for Solaro to find and detain both of them.’

‘Understood, lord,’ said Ephrenia. ‘I will ensure that any important developments are relayed to your Stormbird channel.’

‘I know you will,’ said Corax, turning back to carefully lay a hand on her shoulder. A smile creased her elderly face. ‘My commanders might be absent with their own agendas, but I can always rely on you, Nasturi.’

He ran up the ramp, calling to the pilot to take off. Seating himself in the custom-made harness in the main compartment, the primarch stared out of the window. The Stormbird shuddered as its engines growled into life, the black of the landing apron dropping away.

The Stormbird turned and accelerated away from the Ravenspire, bringing Kiavahr into view. Corax eyed the planet suspiciously. Like a thorn he had left to fester in his flesh, the guilds had returned to plague him. He had been so keen to leave, to take up the mantle of primarch and join the Great Crusade, he had underestimated their persistence. He chastised himself for the oversight, and added another reprimand for not expecting them to make a move. They had to have heard of Horus’s treachery and now was an ideal opportunity for them to make their play for power.

He remembered a time long past when he could have ended it once and for all.

‘We can’t let them attack again,’ argued Reqaui. ‘They got thousands more troops to send and don’t care none about their losses. It don’t matter that we have an army of men willing to lay down their lives, we just can’t match them. They’ll come again and again and again until we’re dead or back in the cells.’

‘I wish I had never considered it,’ said Corvus, staring at the orb of Kiavahr through the wide window of the guard officers’ mess. The couches were ripped and bloodstained, the ornately carved and lacquered tables and cabinets riddled with bullet holes and scarred by las-fire. ‘It is too extreme. There are millions on that world who labour under the yoke of the guilds as much as we did, and who have committed no offence against us.’

‘Reqaui is right, Corax,’ said Nathian. The sub-commander of Wing Two lay on one of the couches, a decanter of distilled spirits balanced on his chest. He sat up, took a swig from the crystal bottle and pointed past Corvus, jabbing his finger at Kiavahr. ‘The bastards deserve it.’

‘I never said that!’ said Reqaui. ‘Didn’t say they deserved it, said it would be the quickest way to bring peace.’

‘You’re drunk,’ said Corvus, crossing the room in three strides to snatch the decanter away from his lieutenant. He placed it on the ripped velvet surface of a snareball table, noticing that there was a detached finger in one of the net pockets.

‘But I ain’t stupid,’ Nathian replied. ‘Kill all the bastards and there won’t be nobody left to fight. That’s peace, right there.’

‘What do you think?’ Corvus asked, turning his gaze towards Branne and Agapito. The two brothers were seated at a table with a collection of maps of the Kiavahran cities laid out between them.

‘I don’t even know if it’s possible,’ said Branne. ‘How do we get them to the surface?’

‘We’ll drop the first charges down the gravity corridor onto Nairhub,’ said Corvus, but then stopped himself, offering no further explanation. ‘It doesn’t matter. I’ve decided we can’t do it.’

‘Then we better get the defence lasers charged up again,’ said Agapito. ‘The last bombardment severed the mainline cables to the bunkers protecting Wings Four and Five.’

‘We’ll go down fighting, glorious deaths all around!’ said Nathian, using the opportunity to retrieve the decanter and take another mouthful.

‘If that’s what it comes to,’ said the rebels’ leader. ‘Every one of us is prepared to make that sacrifice.’

‘We have to do it, Corvus.’ Attention turned to Ephrenia, who had not yet uttered a word during the entire debate. She sat on the floor with a bandaged and splinted leg raised up on the remnants of a side table. ‘If we do not win, Lycaeus will never be free, and neither will Kiavahr. You have to survive, Corvus. If you die, any hope of liberty dies as well. Thousands, tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands will be killed, but millions will be freed.’

Corvus couldn’t make that choice. There was no guarantee it would work, and what sense was there in crippling Kiavahr, condemning the population to a slow death of thirst and starvation, if it did not bring victory?

‘Break the power of the guilds,’ urged Reqaui.

Corvus nodded reluctantly. There was no other way.

‘Great,’ said Nathian. ‘Let’s get a move on, no time to waste.’

‘It has already been arranged,’ admitted Corvus. He sank down into the couch vacated by Nathian, long legs stretching out across the burnt carpet. ‘Turman and Wing One have loaded five atomic charges into drop-shuttles. Their guidance systems have been locked on to Nairhub, Toldrian Magna and Chaes. All I have to do is send them the order.’

Ephrenia pulled herself up with a grunt of pain and hobbled across the room. She lowered herself to the floor beside Corvus and rested her arm on his knee.

‘Time won’t make it any easier to give that command,’ she said, looking up at him with soft eyes.

With a sigh, Corvus gestured to Agapito, who pulled the radio from his jacket pocket and tossed it across the room. Catching it easily, Corvus flicked the switch to transmit.

‘Turman, this is Corvus,’ he said slowly. ‘Launch the shuttles.’

The guerrilla commander switched off the device and let it drop to the floor. He turned his head to look through the window. After a few minutes, the engines of the drop-shuttles could be seen moving away into the darkness that separated Lycaeus and Kiavahr.

‘Shit,’ said Nathian, flopping into a chair. He raised the decanter in Corvus’s direction. ‘We’re actually going to win, aren’t we?’

‘Branne, I want you on the main transmitter,’ Corvus said, staring at the ruddy orb of Kiavahr. The light of the system’s star was just starting to spread across the continent called Garrus. He pictured the thousands of people who were just waking to report for the first work shifts, thousands who would not finish those shifts. There was no point trying to hide from what he had done, though he knew the innocent would be incinerated along with the guilty. ‘I want you to make a general broadcast on every guild channel when the charges go off.’

‘No problem,’ said Branne. ‘What message should I send?’

‘Tell the guilders that over centuries of subjugation, they stockpiled one thousand three hundred and twenty atomic charges on Lycaeus. I have only used five.’

The clouds of Kiavahr filled the view from the Stormbird, streaming past in vermillion tatters. Corax would be at Ravendelve in less than thirty minutes, but to the primarch it felt like it might as well be a century. He flexed his fingers in agitation, frustrated by the course of events that had overtaken the Raven Guard. Superstition was anathema to the Imperial Truth, and he had never been an irrational person, but it seemed as if his Legion had been cursed since they first made planetfall on Isstvan.

He corrected himself. They had survived Isstvan, when other Legions had not. Through determination and courage, the Raven Guard had endured, and would endure their current tribulations.

The chime of the communicator set into the head rest of his seat broke his thoughts, signalling a transmission on the command channel.

‘Establish contact,’ he said, leaning back from the port. ‘This is Corax.’

‘Lord Corax, this is Branne.’

‘Where in the Emperor’s name are you?’ snarled the primarch. ‘Ravendelve is in danger of being overrun.’

‘Lord Corax, you mustn’t land at Ra–’

Another chime interrupted Branne’s reply, and it was Ephrenia that Corax heard next.

‘Lord, we have registered a target signal directed at Ravendelve from orbit,’ the controller said hurriedly.

‘Source?’

‘It’s from the Avenger, lord!’

‘I can confirm that, lord,’ said Branne as the two channels merged.

‘How?’ said Corax.

‘Because I am aboard the Avenger and have four cyclotronic torpedoes loaded and aimed at Ravendelve, lord.’

Corax could scarcely believe what he was hearing. It took him several seconds to digest the information.

‘Why would you be doing that, commander?’ the primarch asked, his tone as cold as ice.

‘If there is any possibility of the guilders obtaining the gene-tech, I will vaporise the entire site,’ Branne said, his voice quiet. ‘Lord, we have made hard decisions before now to protect the Legion.’

‘There are Raven Guard on the surface, commander,’ Corax said, choosing his words carefully. ‘Why would you fire on your own Legion?’

‘Only out of necessity, lord,’ Branne replied evenly. ‘Please do not land at Ravendelve, that would complicate things.’

‘Are you trying to force my hand, commander?’ snapped Corax. ‘Is that a threat?’

‘No, lord, it is a plea,’ Branne replied. ‘If you land at Ravendelve, I will not open fire, but we may lose the gene-seed.’

Corax lashed out, his fist buckling the bulkhead beneath the port.

‘Why did you not wait for instruction from me?’ he demanded.

‘I feared you would overrule my decision, lord,’ Branne said. ‘Your desire to rebuild the Raven Guard has consumed you of late, and weighs on your ability to make clear judgement.’

Corax threw off his harness and stood up, seething.

‘Corvus, you have known me for many years and I have never been anything other than loyal to you,’ Branne’s voice continued through the speaker. ‘We will find another way to survive if we have to. Please do not land at Ravendelve. The Legion, the Emperor and the Imperium, need you to stay alive. I await your orders.’

The words cut through the primarch’s anger. It was the same voice that had been with him when Lycaeus was freed and Deliverance born. It was the voice that had calmly relayed his orders over a hundred battlefields. It was the voice that had welcomed him back after the nightmare of Isstvan.

It was a voice he trusted.

Corax was breathing heavily, blood surging through his body, his thoughts a whirlwind. A face appeared in his thoughts, contorted with hatred, black eyes filled with venom, the face of a creature prey to dark passion. The face of Konrad Curze, the Night Haunter, whom he should have slain.

He could not let love of his Legion destroy him, the way hatred had destroyed Curze.

‘Very well, commander,’ he said. ‘Remain on station and await my order. If Ravendelve is to be destroyed, it will be by my command.’

Caught between several courses of action, Sixx had begun the lockdown process but not finalised the protocols. He needed to secure some thermal charges from the armourium, but every squad seemed to be occupied in defending the curtain wall. Neither Solaro nor Agapito could be raised, leaving the Apothecary in a quandary: should he leave the infirmary to fetch the explosives himself?

He decided that the infirmary was not under immediate threat, so he would have to risk making the trip in person. Sealing the outer door with his command key, Sixx hurried along the corridor to the conveyor. It was not there and he urgently pulled the call lever.

He stepped back in surprise as the elevator doors slammed open just a few seconds later, leaving him standing face-to-face with Commander Solaro. He was flanked by a handful of legionaries, their black armour glinting in the blue glow of the commander’s drawn power sword.

‘A great mercy!’ said Sixx. ‘Commander, I need you t–’

Solaro lanced his blade through Sixx’s chest without a word. Blood bubbled up the throat of the Chief Apothecary, turning his exclamation of shock into a gargling flurry of crimson bubbles.

Solaro pulled the power sword free, leaving Sixx to drop face-first to the ground.

‘Get the digi-key,’ said Solaro, heading up the corridor.

Sixx could do nothing as one of the legionaries crouched down and tore the chain from around his neck. As blackness swept over him, Sixx’s last thought was of the terrible mistake he had made.

‘What’s the delay?’ demanded Nexin Orlandriaz as he threw open the top hatch of his crawler. He swivelled in the cupola to glare back down the column of tanks and transports snaking back into the mist. His lungs stung in the acrid air, but the pollution was nothing his modified body could not process.

The skitarii corps consisted of two thousand cybernetically enhanced warriors travelling in eight slab-sided Dominator mobile fortresses, another five hundred marching alongside. Around the armoured behemoths were several more of the small recon crawlers, hidden behind a rag-tag assortment of tanks that had been gathered together to provide further protection: Imperial Army Leman Russ battle tanks and Falchions, Predators that had been destined for the Raven Guard and three Iron Angel-class heavy walkers that stomped along on four legs, their hulls bristling with anti-personnel weapons.

‘Some of the praetorians got bogged down,’ a ballistae sergeant shouted back from the back of his four-man self-propelled assault gun. He jabbed a thumb over his shoulder to where large figures were emerging from the fog.

Each was as large as a legionary or bigger, vat-grown for the purpose, and each of the dozen combat servitors was armed with an assortment of chainguns, rocket pods and multi-lasers. Some weapons were carried on armoured harnesses, others replaced limbs or were riveted and welded into the artificial flesh of the praetorians.

Alongside them strode the herakli, more vat-grown giants clad in thick robes and cowls covered in Mechanicum sigils, chests and shoulders protected by plates of ceramite. They hefted multi-barrelled cannons and heavy lasers as easily as a skitarii carried his lasgun. One of the herakli stopped beside Orlandriaz’s crawler, staring up at him with his face hidden by the shadow of his hood. This caused the others to pause and gaze at the magos.

‘Taskmaster! Keep them going forwards,’ Orlandriaz bellowed.

A functionary in heavy coveralls and visored helmet barked orders at the servitors and they lumbered on again.

They were only half a kilometre from Ravendelve; Orlandriaz had met them at the two-kilometre cordon to escort them in safely. Two Warhound Titans were blasting away at the curtain wall to the west, scourging the rockcrete with Vulcan bolters and turbo-lasers. The booming of artillery fire was near-constant, as was the ripple of detonations slowly cracking apart the thick outer shell of the main compound. Orlandriaz could see nothing of the new buildings, but the thick columns of smoke billowing up from where they had been erected did not bode well.

Sinking back into his command chair, Orlandriaz barked an order into the metal ear of the pilot servitor. The crawler lurched forwards and then settled, tracks churning through the slick dirt. The magos pulled back his hood and slipped on the communicator headset.

‘Colonel Kuerstandt, have half the Dominators redirect against the rebels,’ the magos said.

‘I’ll send the tanks too, they’ll be no use inside the wall,’ the skitarii commander replied. ‘What about the rest?’

‘We go in through the main gate and into the central courtyard. I am trying to raise a contact with a Raven Guard commander, but there is no response at the moment. However, our alliance broadcast is being received and secure approach signal has been sent back, so we are safe to enter.’

‘Affirmative, magos,’ said Kuerstandt. ‘I will personally command the counter-attack against these Omnissiah-damned traitors.’

‘Of course,’ said Orlandriaz. ‘With all speed, colonel. We must ensure the guilders do not breach Ravendelve.’

Two other disguised Alpha Legionnaires guarded the door while Solaro, Nestil and Ort gathered up everything they could that was related to the gene-tech project. Ort and Solaro scoured the archive databases, copying thousands of files onto crystal chips while Ort used Sixx’s key to access the gene-template sanctum.

Nestil knew exactly what to do, and opened the stasis chamber. He still had the stasis container that had held the gene-virus, and into this he slipped the glassite tube containing the primarch material. It looked different now, darker and thicker.

‘Delete everything,’ said Solaro, slipping a data crystal from its slot in the main archive bank. ‘Let’s not leave anything to be found.’

Ort moved from console to console, activating the scour programme as Nestil started picking out test slides from a micro-analyser, gathering them into a belt pouch. Solaro powered up a vacant terminal and punched in the command access codes.

‘The Thunderhawks are still on the landing pad,’ he said. ‘That will be our extraction point. The others have formed a cordon to stop the skitarii reaching us. When we arrive, we’ll fall back by squads and then get out of here. I will signal Beta to begin her run into orbit for the rendezvous.’

‘Just because you’re pretending to be a commander, doesn’t put you in charge,’ Nestil said with a laugh.

‘Have you got a better plan?’ snapped Solaro. ‘We don’t have time for games.’

‘Calm down,’ said Nestil. ‘The Raven Guard don’t have a clue we are here. Let’s just move to the main gate and not draw attention to ourselves.’

The bead in Nestil’s ear crackled into life.

‘Effrit-hydra-omega. All contacts, report progress.’ The primarch’s voice was distorted and muffled.

‘Contact Three reporting,’ said Ort. ‘All three contacts have met with assistance forces. Mission accomplished. Establishing our exit route.’

‘You are a credit to the Legion, all of you,’ said the primarch. ‘You are ahead of schedule, so I have one final task.’

‘Yes, we’re ready,’ said Ort.

‘The Raven Guard moved their gene-seed store to Ravendelve to aid in the implantation process,’ said Omegon. ‘It is located in a vault adjacent to the infirmary.’

‘That is correct,’ said Nestil. He twirled the chain with Sixx’s digi-key around his finger. ‘We have the key-codes. What do you want us to do?’

‘Destroy all of it. Deactivate the stasis field and destroy every last scrap of gene-seed. I want there to be no chance of the Raven Guard recovering from this attack.’

‘Understood,’ said Solaro.

‘Before you do this, secure the gene-tech data. Give it to one of the assistance force and have him place it in the weapons locker at the east end of the north corridor. I will despatch another operative to retrieve it.’

‘Another operative?’ said Ort. ‘All three of us are here.’

‘That is not your concern, legionnaire. Do as I command.’

‘As you will it, lord,’ said Solaro.

He took a storage box from a nearby work bench and upended it, spilling long syringes to the floor.

‘Put everything in here,’ he said. ‘You heard the primarch.’

Dust fell from the cell’s ceiling as another blast rocked Ravendelve. Navar and the others sat or crouched in a circle in the middle of the chamber, glancing up with every shell impact. They were under orders to stay where they were, but it was unnerving to do nothing while they knew Ravendelve was under attack.

A thud against the door caught their attention. Navar got up and waved for the others to be ready.

‘Careful,’ Kharvo said, exposing pointed teeth.

Navar nodded and raised a clawed hand to strike. He fumbled at the handle with the other, his talons making it hard to grip. Pulling open the door, he was forced to step back as a bloodied body fell into the room.

‘It’s Vincente Sixx!’ said Navar, kneeling over the wounded Chief Apothecary. Blood pumped from a poorly cauterised gash in his chest, soaking his white robe. Sixx’s wild eyes roamed across the ceiling for a moment as the other Raptors gathered around.

‘Traitors,’ whispered Sixx. ‘Infirmary. Protect… Protect the gene-seed.’

With a blood-caked hand, he pulled open the front of his robe, revealing the black bodysuit beneath. There was a bolt pistol in a holster at his hip. Navar nodded in understanding and pulled the weapon free.

‘No…’ said Sixx. He coughed up more blood and waved his hand weakly towards the inside of his robe.

‘There’s a pocket,’ said Kharvo, reaching inside. He pulled out a triangular piece of metal with a Raven Guard symbol embossed on one side. ‘It’s a command key.’

Sixx’s face contorted with pain, but he forced himself up on one elbow.

‘Weapons lockers, bay seven,’ said the Apothecary. ‘Was getting charges.’

‘We’ll fetch someone to tend you,’ said Navar, standing up.

‘Gene-seed!’ hissed Sixx. ‘Your future.’

‘We will protect it,’ said Benna, gripping Sixx’s shoulder with a scaled hand. ‘Keep strong.’

The Raptors moved out into the corridor, Navar leading the way with the bolt pistol. They came to the next door and opened it. Fifteen deformed Raptors looked up from their makeshift bunks.

‘Hef, take five others and bring back weapons, we’ll gather the rest of our brethren,’ said Benna, who had been a squad leader before implantation. He pointed towards the doors leading to the infirmary chambers. ‘Kharvo, keep watch down there.’

The Raptors divided without debate, Navar taking the digi-key from Kharvo. It was good to stretch his legs as he sprinted down the passageway towards the weapons lockers with Marls, Ghoro, Tandrad, Myka and Hal close on his heels. As they reached the doors, a huge explosion rumbled above them, followed by the thunderous crash of falling masonry.

‘Sounds like Turret Two is down,’ said Myka. ‘We’d better hurry up.’

Slamming open the doors, Navar looked left and right down the passageway beyond, Sixx’s pistol gripped tightly in both hands. He saw a Raven Guard legionary standing guard by the archway to the loading bays above the armourium. The legionary turned in surprise and lifted his bolter.

‘It’s all right,’ said Ghoro, lifting up his hands. ‘Raptors! The infirmary is under attack.’

‘Watch out!’ yelled Marls, barrelling into Ghoro as the legionary opened fire. The bolt caught Marls in the arm, ripping through flesh and bone just beneath the shoulder.

Navar fired without thinking, acting out of instinct, his first shot catching the legionary in the side of the chest, sending the traitor’s next shot into the wall beside Ghoro and Marls. The next two shattered the legionary’s shoulder plate as he stumbled back to his feet.

The legionary turned his bolter towards Navar and time seemed to slow. The Raptor felt a ripple of cold racing through his body as he aimed the bolt pistol at the legionary’s face and pulled the trigger again. As he felt the recoil of the launch charge kicking the pistol, muzzle flare erupted from the legionary’s bolter. Two flickering trails of propellant passed each other.

Navar’s shot hit a moment earlier, punching through the grille of the legionary’s mask before detonating inside his helm. An instant later, pain screamed through Navar’s side as the counter-shot tore a chunk from his chest, sending fragments of white-hot metal into his fused ribs.

Navar stumbled back and was caught by Myka and Tandrad. He looked down at the wound, a fist-sized hole just beneath his pectoral on the left side.

‘Check him!’ snapped Ghoro, jabbing a finger at the downed legionary.

‘Why did he shoot?’ asked Marls. ‘What’s going on? If it’s our own legionaries, how can we tell who is on our side?’

‘Let’s just get to the infirmary,’ said Ghoro. ‘Sixx said they were there. Anyone else we meet, we’ll just have to take our chances. Get to the arms locker, I’ll help Navar.’

Navar was passed into the arms of Ghoro, who lowered him to the floor, back against the wall.

‘It’s not too bad,’ Ghoro said with a grin.

Navar looked down. The wound was already sealing over with a thick scab, the Larraman cells in his blood clotting almost instantly. The pain had already subsided to a dull ache as other compounds flooded his system.

‘Guess there are advantages to being a monster,’ said Navar. He gestured for Ghoro to help him up, feeling his strength returning.

The other Raptors returned a couple of minutes later, carrying plasteel weapon and ammunition crates between them, bags stuffed with grenades and other supplies slung over their shoulders. Opening up one of the crates, the Raptors armed themselves with the bolters inside and took several magazines each, tying the bandoliers around their thighs and arms.

Feeling a lot more confident, his injury almost forgotten, Navar opened the next crate. Inside was a melta-gun, and several spare casks of pressurised gas.

‘I’ll take that,’ said Ghoro, lifting the weapon from its padded cradle. He looked at the others, perhaps expecting protests, but there was no time for arguments. Shutting the lids on the boxes, the Raptors headed back to the cells where the others were waiting.

Seventeen

Attack, Withdraw, and Attack Again
Cut Off the Head
The Truth of It

There did not seem to be anyone in command, but the Raven Guard prided themselves on their autonomy and initiative. Lacking orders from their superiors, the sergeants mustered their squads to the defence of Ravendelve. Balsar Kurthuri found himself with Sergeant Caban and an ad-hoc squad of seven other legionaries, heading through the murk of the rad-wastes towards the enemy attack. Macro-cannon rounds screamed overhead from the remaining defence towers, answered by shells, las-fire and plasma bolts from the renegade Titans escorting the column.

The residual atomic fallout was interfering with Balsar’s auto-senses, leaving him half-blind in the thick fog, unable to use thermal or wide-spectrum scanning. He deactivated his armour’s sensors, relying on his own augmented vision to pierce the gloom. The black-clad warriors to either side of him were barely visible, but their armour transponders relayed their locations to a schematic in his visor. Sergeant Caban was at the front, and it was from him that there came a crackled warning over the vox.

‘We have movement, fifty metres ahead and right. Infantry. Disperse right, thirty metres. No friendly forces in the area, engage on sight.’

Balsar picked his way over a pile of slag, casting his gaze to the left and right. It would be so easy to open up his othersight, allowing the potential of his mind to flow outwards to detect the enemy. It would also be simple enough to incinerate them with a psychic blast once they were found, and the temptation to use his powers was almost overwhelming.

There were no Chaplains left within the Legion to enforce the Edict of Nikaea, and Balsar recalled Lord Corax’s words from outside the vault room. The situation had changed, and it was surely sensible to use every weapon available against the traitors. Balsar was still not sure what had happened next. He had definitely felt a connection with the psychic locks placed upon the door, intricately beautiful and impenetrable. It had been an urge from within to engage his psychic powers, and had Balsar ever wanted to discuss the event with another, he would have claimed he had been guided by the Emperor. It certainly had felt as if an outside agent had been controlling his thoughts for those few moments, and remembering the complexity of the seals placed on the door, Balsar was sure he would not have been able to dismantle them on his own.

If the Emperor had acted then, as seemed to be the case, then surely that was license for Balsar to use his powers again?

A deeper shadow emerged from the fog just to Balsar’s left. The Raven Guard fought back the urge to reach out with his thoughts. Instead, he brought up his bolter and opened fire, hitting the figure low in the torso with two rounds.

‘Enemy!’ he announced over the vox. ‘One down.’

He opened fire again at more silhouetted targets, telling himself it was not his place to second-guess the judgement of the Emperor.

The air in the antechamber was well below freezing point, the walls crusted with ice. Five more Alpha Legionnaires stood watch in the corridor outside, masquerading as Raven Guard, while Ort and Nestil went through the process of shutting down the stasis field generators in the main vault. Solaro stood ready with the digital key, idly snapping small icicles from the cover of the keypad with the tip of his finger.

‘Why the delay?’ Solaro asked, looking over his shoulder at Ort. The other legionary stood at an open power relay panel shaking his head.

‘Is this really necessary?’ asked Ort.

‘The primarch was specific,’ said Solaro. ‘Just shut it down.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Ort, stepping back from the relay. ‘It’s one thing to take the Raven Guard out of the war. It’s another to wipe them out entirely. When Horus defeats the Emperor, we’ll need allies to rebuild the Imperium.’

‘You’re an idiot,’ said Nestil, pulling out a transformer switch. ‘The Raven Guard will never serve Horus now, not after Isstvan. Corax is too stubborn. When we win, they will just disappear like they always do, and continue fighting us at every chance. Do you want to spend years watching your back, wondering when the Raven Guard will come for us?’

‘We’ve all seen what that mutagen did to the Raptors,’ said Ort. ‘It’s tainted, unnatural. And the Word Bearers? We all saw them at Isstvan, and I saw them up close at Cruciax. I don’t think it’s Horus that’s behind this war, it’s something a lot worse. You know what I’m talking about.’

Nestil turned, a cluster of wires in his fist.

‘More fool them,’ he said. ‘I know what you’re talking about and we all heard Corax’s speech. This war was coming, like it or not, and we had to choose a side. Better that we are with the victors than the losers. The Emperor’s forces were crippled at Isstvan. That could have been us between the guns of the Word Bearers and Iron Warriors. Be thankful the twin primarchs made the right choice.’

‘It’s too late to have second thoughts,’ said Solaro. ‘What the Word Bearers choose to do is up to them, we don’t have to pay attention to them any more. Let them dabble in their sorcery. It’ll burn them in the end and we’ll be the ones left laughing.’

‘Besides,’ said Nestil, returning to his work, ‘with this gene-tech, the Alpha Legion will be the ones who will hold the balance of power. Us, not Lorgar, Angron or even Horus.’

Ort said nothing as he stepped back up to the relay panel and began to disconnect the cables.

‘What was that?’ said Nestil, glancing towards the door.

Solaro had heard it too, a shot ringing out against the background of the bombardment.

‘Maybe those stupid guilders have actually managed to get through the curtain wall,’ said Ort.

‘No, that was inside, close by,’ said Solaro.

Suddenly the bark of bolter fire filled the corridor outside.

‘Keep working!’ he snapped, moving towards the door.

The Alpha Legionnaires on watch were firing down the corridor to the right, blazing away freely. Bolt-rounds were screaming past them from the direction of fire. Drawing up his bolt pistol and power sword, Solaro stepped out and turned just as one of the legionnaires crashed to the ground, armour riddled with jagged holes.

From the direction of the infirmary, a group of misshapen warriors were attacking, taking cover behind the roof supports that jutted from the bulkheads every few metres. Solaro looked into dozens of fury-filled red eyes, in faces contorted with horns, fangs and tusks. Some of the attackers were covered in scales of red or green. Some were muscle-contorted monstrosities whose biceps and shoulders bulged under the fabric of their robes.

All of them were armed, the hail of bolter fire intensifying as more poured through the doors at the end of the passageway and emerged from the chambers connected to the infirmary. A round glanced from Solaro’s shoulder pad, sending splinters of ceramite flying.

‘Forget that!’ he snapped, ducking back into the vault’s entry chamber. ‘We’re too late. It’s time to leave.’

Ort and Nestil stopped what they were doing and snatched up the bolters they had set aside to work on the energy relays. They closed in behind Solaro, who stepped to the corner of the door and snapped off a few shots at the incoming Raptors.

‘We’ll cover you,’ said one of the Alpha Legionnaires, slamming home a fresh magazine into his weapon as bolt detonations erupted on the stanchion he was sheltering behind.

‘Run!’ Solaro barked, waving his power sword. ‘Before they cut us off.’

Pounding out into the passage, the three operatives turned and fled from the Raptors, not even pausing to fire a shot. Solaro glanced back as they reached the far doors, and saw that all but two of the Alpha Legionnaires had been taken down, selflessly putting themselves between the withdrawing operatives and the Raptors. They were making good account of themselves though – at least a dozen robed bodies sprawled across the floor of the corridor.

‘Make for the landing apron,’ said Nestil as the security door hissed open in front of them.

When they had passed through, Ort turned and fired into the lock control pad, bringing the door slamming down.

‘Let’s see them come after us now,’ he said.

‘You abandoned our legionnaires back there,’ said Nestil.

‘They’ll go down fighting,’ said Solaro, taking a turning to the right. ‘We have to get out of here.’

They sprinted through across the upper level of Ravendelve and made for the stairwell close to the main gate, which Solaro hoped was still in the hands of their comrades. Taking the steps three at a time, they launched themselves down the stairs, heading for the gatehouse.

Reaching the bottom, they paused and looked around. In the courtyard behind the gatehouse were several legionaries in the livery of the Raven Guard, but it was impossible to tell if they were sons of Corax or simply masquerading as such. Two gigantic praetorian servitors flanked the gate itself, along with a handful of the Mechanicum’s herakli warriors.

‘Through here,’ said Ort, gesturing with his bolter towards the east tower guard room.

‘Calmly now,’ whispered Solaro. ‘No need to rush.’

The defenders by the gate paid little attention to three Raven Guard striding into the gatehouse, though Solaro felt a small amount of relief once they were out of sight again.

‘How do we get out?’ said Nestil.

‘The gallery is in ruins,’ replied Ort. ‘Our Thunderhawks saw to that. We’ll be able to jump down easily enough.’

‘I’m not sure about leaving the gene-tech here,’ said Solaro. ‘What if the other operative can’t retrieve it?’

‘It’s too late to go back,’ said Nestil. ‘We have done as we were ordered. It’s time to extract.’

Solaro conceded the point with a nod and they made their way to the inner stairwell. The floor above was a rubble-choked ruin, the shards of the shattered gallery window scattered amongst the debris. The fog had thickened again, but standing on a pile of pulverised ferrocrete, Solaro could make out two bulky shapes out by the landing field.

‘The Thunderhawks are still here, as I thought,’ he said, sheathing his power sword and holstering his pistol. He grabbed hold of a twisted plasteel reinforcing rod jutting from the remains of the outer wall and swung out of the gallery. ‘Come on.’

They had to drop the last few metres to the ground, but there was no sign of any Raven Guard in the vicinity. The steady thunderous report of the surviving macro-cannon punctuated the whine and boom of falling artillery shells, but the guilders seemed to be targeting the other end of Ravendelve. Overhead, Stormbirds and Thunderhawks were diving through the clouds, their cannons and missiles raining fire down onto the guilder column. Solaro could see a plume of bluish fire dancing above the curtain wall, the leaking plasma reactor of a Warhound Titan.

As they approached the closest Thunderhawk, Solaro felt a creeping unease. He activated his vox-link, trying to hail the pilot, but received no reply. Approaching through the mist, he discovered that the cockpit canopy was shattered, and there were several smoking holes in the fuselage.

‘Let’s hope the other one is undamaged,’ said Nestil, cutting to the right under the Thunderhawk’s wing.

‘Hope is a weakness,’ a voice called out from behind them. ‘It is the first step on the road to disappointment. If you were Raven Guard, you would know that.’

Solaro turned, drawing his weapons. A black-armoured figure stood at the edge of the landing pad. He had a lascannon held up to his shoulder, aimed at the Alpha Legionnaires, its cable snaking down to a power pack on the ground beside him. He stood with one foot on an octagonal box that had a thick metal grip-handle running around its circumference. Lights winked in sequence on a small display beside the Raven Guard’s foot.

‘It’s over,’ the figure called out. ‘You have no way of escaping. The Wrathful Vanguard and the Triumph are moving in to blockade the planet even as I speak.’

His surprise fading, Solaro recognised the voice.

‘Agapito? It’s me, Solaro! What are you doing?’ he called back.

‘You might have his face, but you are not the Solaro that I knew,’ said Agapito, the lascannon directed at the faux-commander. ‘The company you keep tells me that for sure.’

‘You’re making a mistake, Agapito,’ said Solaro, putting his pistol in its holster. ‘See? Don’t do anything rash.’

‘What do you mean about the company he keeps?’ said Ort, glancing at the other two Alpha Legionnaires.

‘I didn’t know about you, Ort, or whatever your name is. Unfortunately for you, your companions were not as thorough in hiding as they thought. Nestil, how did you recognise the Phalanx? The Raven Guard have never served in the same warzone as the Imperial Fists fortress. And Solaro, who else would have clearance to break my command codes and use my personal channel? It certainly wasn’t Branne or Aloni.’

‘You’re just one legionary,’ said Solaro. ‘What do you hope to achieve?’

‘You never fought for Deliverance, Solaro,’ said Agapito, tapping his foot on the box beneath his boot. He pointed the lascannon at the device. ‘But I’m surprised you don’t recognise an atomic charge when you see it. Five hundred kilotons: more than enough to wipe out Ravendelve and every traitor in it. You can’t escape with the gene-tech. I’ll level this whole place if you try.’

‘You won’t do that,’ said Nestil, taking a few steps back, bolter in both hands.

Solaro heard a distinct thrum and glanced over his shoulder. Twenty golden-armoured warriors were standing in the fog, power fields flickering along the blades of their halberds. The Custodian Guard were between the Alpha Legionnaires and the main gate.

‘How many more of you have turned? What did the traitors offer you?’ Agapito snarled. ‘What was the price the Warmaster placed on our primarch’s head?’

‘Our primarch?’ said Ort, with a laugh. ‘You know nothing of our p–’

Solaro lashed out with the power sword, slashing through the fool’s throat before he could say any more. The Alpha Legionnaire collapsed face-first to the ground, gasping his last bloody breath into the acid-tinged puddles.

‘Tell me!’ roared Agapito. ‘Tell me what you know and you will be granted quick deaths. If not, I am sure Lord Corax will make an exception to the ban on the Red Level. Even a legionary cannot endure the torments on offer there.’

Solaro looked at Nestil, and though they could not see each other’s faces, their subtle nods indicated they were in agreement.

‘What makes you think you can take us alive?’ Solaro snarled.

He lunged, thrusting his power sword through the heart of Nestil as the sergeant pulled the trigger and sent a bolt-round smashing through Solaro’s helm. The two of them fell into each other and twisted to the ground, locked together in death.

Caught between the wall of Ravendelve and the advancing forces of the Mechanicum, the outnumbered guilder force was pushed back into the rad-wastes. Reinforcements from Deliverance harried the retreating foe, exacting revenge for those who had fallen, and the Imperial Fists under Captain Noriz lent their strength to that of the Raven Guard. The battle continued well into the night, the sky awash with explosions and las-fire. In the city, the arrival of the Titans of the Legio Vindictus halted the Order of the Dragon, though great swathes of the city were left as blasted wasteland, the rubble choked with the dead of both sides. The sky above Kiavahr was filled with the smoke of thousands of fires, blotting out the stars and moons. Mechanicum aircraft dropped incendiary bombs and plasma charges onto the guild houses where the Order of the Dragon held out, while the guns of the Legio pounded away with shell and las-blast.

Under the orders of Corax, Ravendelve was sealed, the warriors of the Raptors and the Custodians slaying several Raven Guard that tried to leave under the cover of the confusion. With the immediate threat to the gene-tech quashed, the primarch ordered Commander Branne to stand down the Avenger’s torpedoes and arrived to oversee the aftermath.

He was met at the ruins of the main gate by Agapito and Arcatus, with a bodyguard of loyal warriors standing ready to escort the primarch.

‘I want an explanation, commander, and I want it now,’ demanded Corax as he strode through the remnants of the gatehouse.

‘The situation is very confused, lord,’ said Agapito. ‘Ravendelve is secure from attack, but the threat within is uncertain. We tallied the dead from the fighting and have found more than thirty legionaries who do not appear on our records.’

‘Infiltrators,’ growled Corax. ‘Traitors wearing the colours of the Raven Guard.’

‘What of Solaro and the others?’ said Agapito. ‘Why would they turn against us?’

‘I am not so sure they did,’ said Arcatus. Agapito and Corax looked at the Custodian for explanation. ‘You have been the victims of a devious masquerade. My order understands intimately the means by which an intruder can enter an organisation unnoticed. It is our sole task to thwart such attempts. I believe there is only one Legion capable of such deception.’

‘The Alpha Legion,’ said Corax, growling again. ‘This treachery bears their hallmark.’

‘We shared air with Solaro for a long time. If he and the others were Alpha Legion in disguise, how can we say for certain that any of the others are loyal?’ said Agapito.

It was a tricky problem, but Corax knew the answer almost immediately.

‘My true sons will bear my mark,’ said the primarch. They had reached the main hall, where the remaining Raven Guard had handed over their weapons and were being watched over by Custodians and first generation Raptors. ‘My genetic data is wrapped up inside every cell of your bodies, while any infiltrators will bear the code of another primarch. Have Vincente Sixx screen every legionary for genetic markers that do not match the Raven Guard gene-seed.’

‘Sixx is dead, lord,’ said Agapito. ‘He died defending the gene-project.’

‘What of Orlandriaz?’ said Corax. ‘Has he survived?’

‘He is in the infirmary, working out what damage has been done by the traitors,’ replied Agapito.

‘You cannot expect to continue with this project?’ said Arcatus. ‘Not after what we have witnessed here? We barely stopped the traitors escaping with the genetic material. It is too much of a risk, I cannot allow it.’

Corax stopped, stung by the Custodian’s words. He looked at the ring of Raptors in their combat-scarred armour, standing guard over their battle-brothers without hesitation or complaint.

‘What about those Raptors who have suffered from our mistakes?’ said Corax. ‘Do we condemn them to their sorry existence?’

‘Spare them the pain,’ said Arcatus. ‘Each of them contains the seed of what you have done here, and perhaps locked within their twisted bodies is the means to achieve what you hoped. They are just as much a threat as the data contained in the gene-vault.’

‘No,’ said Agapito. ‘We cannot kill them out of hand! What reward is that for the service they have done for the Legion today?’

‘Agapito is right,’ said Corax. ‘I cannot murder them in cold blood. They have the bodies of beasts, but they have proven that their hearts are Raven Guard.’

The primarch rubbed a hand across his brow, conflicted in his thoughts. Was it folly to believe that he could right the wrong he had done to the Raptors? He had left Terra convinced he could rebuild the Raven Guard and despite all that had happened, the need to confront Horus’s forces still existed.

Corax left the hall with Agapito and Arcatus beside him and made his way to the infirmary. At each conveyor and stairwell, armed Raptors stood guard, their distinctive armour marking them out in the dim emergency lighting. The trio headed along the north corridor, passing by shuttered weapons lockers emblazoned with the icon of the Raven Guard. Two hulking herakli stood guard in front of one such row of metal boxes, their multi-barrelled cannons tracking the primarch and his companions as they passed. A Mechanicum acolyte loitered in the shadow of one of the brutes, fussing over the belt of his robe. With the Raven Guard garrison held under guard and the reinforcements engaging the guilders in the atomic marshes, Orlandriaz and a contingent of his allies had provided much-needed security within and without Ravendelve.

‘If the Alpha Legion is involved, we must assume that they will not be content with simply destroying what they found,’ said Arcatus as they reached the conveyor that led to the infirmary. ‘If you continue with this experimentation, you will attract the attention of Horus sooner or later.’

Corax lifted a portable vox from his belt and opened up a command channel.

‘Let us see what the Commander of the Raptors thinks,’ said the primarch. ‘Branne, have you heard what was said?’

‘Aye, lord,’ Branne replied over the communicator. ‘Every word. Agapito and the Custodian make good points, but I have a different view. If we continue, there is the possibility that we might find a means to reverse the predicament of the tainted Raptors. On the other hand, how many more recruits do we risk before its discovery? Lord, I think it is time that we closed this door and locked it forever. If we are to rebuild the Raven Guard it has to be through the means we know and can trust.’

‘Wise words, commander,’ said Corax. The group stepped into the conveyor, Corax bowing his head to avoid the ceiling. As the elevator shunted into life, the primarch made a decision. ‘There are no swift answers to our situation. We have done all we can, but our efforts have fallen short. The gene-project will be terminated immediately and any research that was missed by the Alpha Legion will be destroyed.’

‘What of the Raptors?’ said Agapito. ‘They are not to blame.’

‘And I do not hold them at fault,’ the primarch replied. ‘I cannot – I will not – kill them out of hand. They were accepted into our brotherhood of warriors and as members of the Legiones Astartes they will be granted the same fate as all of us: to die with honour in battle against the Emperor’s foes.’

‘It is still your intent to launch an attack against the traitors?’ asked Arcatus. ‘Your Legion is in disarray, primarch.’

‘The assault on Narsis will commence as planned,’ said Corax. ‘If this episode proves anything, it is that the Raven Guard do not sit well when idle. In battle we thrive, not in contemplation. More than ever, we need a victory, to restore spirits and forge a new brotherhood within the Legion. We have been divided for too long, between those of Terra and the men who liberated Deliverance, between those who survived Isstvan and those who saved us, between the veterans and the Raptors. No more. We are Raven Guard and we shall show the Imperium that we are united.’

They found Magos Orlandriaz in the infirmary. The wards were full of casualties from the fighting, most of them the Raptors who had taken on the infiltrators without armour. Several dozen of the beds contained still forms, the bloodstained sheets drawn up over their faces. Corax stopped beside the bed of one of the Raptors, who had heavy bandaging around his chest.

‘The Legion owes you a great debt, legionary,’ the primarch said. He knew the face and name of every man under his command, and the Raptor was no different. ‘It’s Hef, isn’t it? Navar Hef?’

‘Aye, Lord Corax,’ said Navar, grimacing as he struggled to sit up.

Corax waved him to lie still. ‘I’m just happy that we could serve you.’

‘You still can,’ said Corax. He raised his voice to address the wounded across the ward. ‘Who among you thinks they are still battle-ready?’

There was a chorus of shouts and enthusiastic calls.

‘For the Emperor and the Raven Guard!’ said Agapito, raising his first.

‘For the Emperor and the Raven Guard!’ the Raptors replied as one.

Corax nodded and walked back into the inner sanctum, where he was met by Orlandriaz, who had been talking with Arcatus.

‘The Custodian tells me you wish to gene-test the whole Legion, lord,’ said the magos. ‘I can begin testing within a few hours.’

‘And it will root out any Raven Guard who is not what he seems?’ said Agapito.

‘I can assure you that no legionary will be able to hide his true nature, commander.’

Recalibrating his thermal regulator, Catho Juliaxis settled to his haunches with his back against the wall. He closed the metal shutters that served as eyelids in his altered face and wondered when he would be relieved of the tiresome duty of monitoring the herakli. The mute monstrosities were no company for a man of intellect.

His aural detector picked up the sound of one of his charges moving. Opening his eyes, he looked up to see one of the herakli standing over him. Gazing into the shadow beneath the construct’s hood, he was surprised to see intelligent eyes staring back at him.

‘Wh–’

The immense herakli rammed his cannon under Juliaxis’s chin, crushing his windpipe and snapping his neck with a single blow. The other beast looked on, confused by the behaviour of its companion.

Pulling down the shutter of the locker, the dead acolyte’s body concealed within, Omegon slipped the box of gene-data inside his robe. Affecting the lumbering gait of the herakli, he calmly walked out of the north corridor and headed for the gatehouse.

It had been so tempting to gun down Corax when he had walked past, but the triumph would have been fleeting. The Alpha Legion understood better than all others that the greatest victories were often those that were unheralded and unnoticed. Better to slip away with the mission accomplished than attract attention for a temporary thrill.

There were Mechanicum forces all about Ravendelve and it took Omegon only a few minutes to mingle with the other herakli. Soon he found himself being led out of the compound to join the hunt for the guilders. As the mists closed around the group of skitarii, a ticking started in the base of his skull, indicating that a gunship from the Beta was within five hundred metres. It was time to leave Kiavahr for good; he had what he came for.

There were shouts of panic as he opened fire, mowing down the other herakli and their skitarii minders in a few long bursts. Leaving their bodies to be swallowed by the fog, Omegon headed into the murk to make rendezvous with his transport.

Eighteen

The Raven’s Wings
Horus Claims His Prize
Narsis

The mood in the Carnivalis was sombre, the assembled legionaries standing silently in ranks as Corax walked the length of the hall to the stage. Agapito, Branne, Aloni and the new commander of the Hawks, Nuran Tesk, flanked the raven-carved lectern. All of the Raven Guard were present, including the disfigured Raptors capable of fighting. The armourium had modified their prized suits of Mark VI, providing reinforcement where it was needed, cutting holes for horns and spinal growths, adjusting joints and seals for contorted limbs.

The ranks had been cleansed; as Orlandriaz had begun his gene-testing, those warriors pretending to be Raven Guard had attempted to flee or had ended their own lives. Drawing on what he knew of the meta-seed of the primarchs, Corax had been able to confirm that the infiltrators were from the Alpha Legion. The mark of Alpharius was in their blood and bones and flesh, and condemned them as certainly as their actions.

Mounting the stage, the primarch received nods of respect from his commanders. Corax turned to face the Legion. He was clad in full battle gear, one hand sheathed in the lightning claw that had survived the fight with Lorgar and Curze, the other holding the power whip he had wielded to such devastating effect in the retreat on Isstvan. He held up both hands, showing the armaments to the Raven Guard.

‘The Legiones Astartes conquered the galaxy for the Emperor,’ he began, but his voice faltered as he looked out at rank after rank of his warriors. Were these the last days of the Raven Guard? Was he about to lead them into their final campaign? He swallowed hard, remembering the adversities he had faced as guerrilla leader of the Lycaen rebels. The task then had seemed as insurmountable, but he had triumphed. He would not give in to fear, not of his enemies and not of what he might become.

He started again.

‘The Legiones Astartes conquered the galaxy for the Emperor. We were created by his hand, moulded in flesh by his will and given the best weapons and armour conceived by mankind. Yet it was not our guns or our bodies that made the Great Crusade possible. It was belief. Belief in our cause, in the spreading of the Imperial Truth, gave us conviction beyond the superstitions and raw courage of our foes. Trust in our commanders and in ourselves gave us the strength to overcome any obstacle set before us.

‘Belief and trust are just as much casualties of this war as the dead who fell on Isstvan and at Ravendelve. It is hard to comprehend that Horus, the Warmaster chosen by the Emperor, has turned renegade. It is difficult to accept that our brothers-in-arms, warriors of the Legiones Astartes, have defied the Imperial Truth and broken their oaths. Yet it is belief and trust that will remain our greatest weapons.

‘I have always taught you that hope is needless. There is only action and consequence. I still adhere to that creed. There is no hope for the Raven Guard. We will do as we see fit and the consequences will follow. We have suffered not one but two grave attacks. The first was cowardly, but open. The second daring, but hidden. Neither ambush on Isstvan nor corruption from within has destroyed us and so we learn and grow stronger. It is not in our nature to bow our heads to defeat. We will not be meek while traitors seek to overthrow the Emperor.

‘Today is the day that Horus and his treacherous allies learn that the Raven Guard cannot be dismissed. Today we set aboard our ships and take the war to our enemies, as we have done so many times before. Some of you were there at the beginning, when this hall was the site of bloody battles between men and women who yearned for freedom and the oppressors who would deny them. Some of you set out beside the Emperor, leaving Terra to forge a new empire across the stars. Some of you cannot claim such heritage, for you were fortunate to be raised into the Legion in later times. And some of you had your first taste of battle at Ravendelve.

‘It does not matter. We are all Raven Guard. We are all warriors. The Emperor will not judge you by your medals and diplomas but by your scars. That is not a platitude; it is the reality of what we are. We live to fight the Emperor’s battles, and we die to bring the Emperor victory.’

Corax paused and looked towards a group of yellow-armoured warriors who stood alongside the Raven Guard: Captain Noriz’s Imperial Fists. His gaze moved to the golden warriors of Custodian Arcatus.

‘Horus sets his eye on Terra and the palace of the Emperor. Many are those who will lay down their lives in its defence, and we salute them now for their sacrifice. Yet it is not for us to stand behind the walls, for we are the shadow that kills, the hidden death that none suspect.

‘Horus and his craven companions think themselves beyond retribution. The Raven Guard will prove them wrong. The accursed Warmaster and his confederates believe victory is inevitable and that the Imperium will bow to his will. The Raven Guard will prove them wrong. In our defiance we shall light the fires of battle that will burn across the length and breadth of the galaxy. The citizens of the Imperium will know that they have not been abandoned. We will show them that the torch of Enlightenment shines brightly. The Legiones Astartes will never be destroyed whilst one of us draws breath.

‘We do this because mankind needs to believe that Horus can be defeated. We do this because humanity must be shown that the Legiones Astartes can be trusted. We are few and our enemies are many, but every traitor we kill sends a message to our foes and allies alike: the Raven Guard will never surrender!’

A wordless shout erupted from more than four thousand throats, ringing around the vaulted ceiling of the Carnivalis. Energy fields crackled as the Custodians lifted their halberds in salute to the primarch.

An expectant hush settled as a small detachment of Raven Guard broke from the ranks. They were led by the Techmarine, Stradon Binalt, and carried with them a large object draped in one of the Legion’s black banners.

‘What’s this?’ asked Corax, turning to his commanders. They shook their heads and shrugged, as surprised as their primarch.

Binalt and his entourage mounted the steps to the stage and approached Corax. The primarch stepped away from the lectern to face them, and as one they each fell to one knee, except for Binalt who met his lord’s inquiring stare.

‘On Isstvan, the Raven Guard suffered a heavy blow,’ said the Techmarine, the precision of his words betraying a speech practised many times. ‘The raven had his wings clipped and our fortunes have suffered. It is fitting then that at a time when we must learn to soar once more, the raven should have his wings restored.’

Binalt tugged the banner away, revealing Corax’s ornate flight pack, long thought lost. Its newly enamelled finish now gleamed in the lights of the Carnivalis, the two graceful, newly-fashioned wings sweeping to either side of the apparatus.

‘I couldn’t quite match the original artificer in craft, but I hope it will suffice, lord,’ said Binalt, bowing his head.

Corax took the flight pack in both hands and lifted it up, marvelling at its construction. He looked down at Binalt and smiled his thanks, but before he could say anything, the hall was filled again with a thunderous shouting, springing from the ranks of the Raven Guard.

‘Corax! Corax! Corax!’

The Warmaster’s chamber was as gloomy as it had been during Alpharius’s last visit. As before, he was met by Horus, flanked by Abaddon and Erebus. There was another as well, lurking within the shadows behind the Warmaster’s throne. He was dressed in the armour of the Emperor’s Children, with a thin face and darting eyes.

‘You have something for the Warmaster?’ said Erebus, as the door slid shut behind Alpharius.

‘Why do you say that?’ Alpharius replied. ‘Am I to make tribute now to our glorious leader?’

‘Watch your tongue,’ snapped Abaddon. ‘We know that one of your vessels has just joined the fleet, though you attempted to hide its presence from us.’

‘I have done no such thing,’ said Alpharius, stretching out his hands in a gesture of mock innocence. ‘All of my vessels employ a certain amount of stealth. It is a central pillar of our security. No deception is intended.’

‘Then you admit that your mission regarding the Raven Guard is a success,’ said Erebus. ‘You have obtained that which you sought?’

Smiling, Alpharius produced a data crystal from his belt and held it out in the palm of his hand.

‘Not an unqualified success,’ said the primarch. ‘Some of the Raven Guard, Corax included, survived our attack. It is of little consequence. We have, as you assert, acquired our prize.’

Erebus took a few steps forwards and reached for the crystal, but Alpharius snatched away his hand.

‘It is for the Warmaster only,’ said Alpharius, his smile fading.

‘Watch your step, Alpharius,’ said Abaddon. ‘Your attitude will earn you the Warmaster’s displeasure.’

‘No words for your brother, Horus?’ said Alpharius, looking at the Warmaster, who had been fixing Alpharius with a neutral gaze throughout the exchange. ‘Do your minions do all of your talking for you now?’

Horus stood up and Alpharius thought for a moment that he had pushed things too far. His doubts were dispelled by Horus’s smile, as he beckoned the stranger to come out from behind the throne.

‘This is Apothecary Fabius,’ said the Warmaster. ‘You will entrust your prize to his care. On my behalf, of course.’

Alpharius tossed the data crystal to Fabius, who caught the glittering shard and looked down at it with a covetous smile.

‘We shall see what secrets Corax unearthed, for certain,’ said Fabius. He bowed to Horus and withdrew into the shadows.

‘Is there anything else, Warmaster?’ said Alpharius.

Horus’s eyes narrowed with suspicion as he regarded the Alpha Legion’s primarch.

‘You hand it over so easily, I suspect you are hiding something,’ said the Warmaster, stepping closer.

‘I do have another confession to make,’ said Alpharius. ‘I have retained the original gene-material for myself. I thought it wiser to share our fortune. You will find the research of Corax quite extensive. I do not understand much of it, but I am sure Apothecary Fabius is as talented as rumour would have us believe.’

‘Oh, he is,’ said Erebus. ‘He will unlock the primarch secrets, and with that information we will destroy the Emperor.’

‘A worthy use of such a thing, so hard-fought for,’ said Alpharius. He met his brother’s penetrating gaze with a stare of his own. ‘I believe we have concluded our business here. Unless there is anything else you wish to discuss, brother?’

Horus jerked his head towards the door to dismiss Alpharius, and returned to his throne.

‘Good,’ said the Alpha Legion primarch. ‘Now that this matter is settled, perhaps we could actually begin to prosecute this war. Even now, I am sure the Emperor is getting impatient for our visit.’

‘He will wait,’ said Horus. ‘The war is well under way already, Alpharius. Just because you have not been fighting it does not mean that others have been idle. The Ultramarines will be destroyed and the Blood Angels will join our cause. We will be ready to make our move soon.’

That seemed unlikely to Alpharius, but he said nothing and left without further comment.

The command deck of the Avenger was filled with people. As well as the officers and functionaries of the Raven Guard, the battle-barge was hosting the command corps of the newly-arrived Therion Cohort. Sub-Caesari Valerius had shuttled across to the capital ship with a small army of notaries, praefectors, tribunes and vice-tribunes to compile the orders for his force.

It had been a tortuous journey from Therion, negotiating the storms that still raged across the warp. Several ships had been lost entirely and more than a dozen more had been waylaid or forced to translate, scattering the fleet over light years of space. Despite the problems, Valerius had managed to hold the vanguard intact, and as per Corax’s instructions had redirected while en route to Deliverance to rendezvous with the Raven Guard in Taurion, a system neighbouring Narsis.

His previous encounters with Corax had left Valerius awestruck, but as sub-Caesari he felt his station better suited his position within the command council. His promotion had not, however, done anything to quash his amazement at the primarch’s strategic abilities. While Valerius needed his contingent of advisors and adjutants to keep everything in order, Corax was able to control the whole council with nothing more than a few notes on a data-slab. The dispositions of dozens of ships and thousands of warriors, their armaments and their commanders were all locked inside the primarch’s mind and even the smallest detail was retrieved effortlessly.

The order of battle and general approach had already been agreed, with the Therions forming the first wave, the reflex-shielded Raven Guard vessels following behind. So far it had been as Valerius expected, having fought alongside the Raven Guard for several years during the latter stages of the Great Crusade.

The final approach and landing was giving him a lot of trouble.

‘If I understand you correctly, Lord Corax, there is to be no preparatory bombardment?’ said Valerius. Pelon appeared at his shoulder with a glass of water, which Valerius took without comment. He took a sip to calm his agitation. ‘Our drop-ships will be shot out of the air.’

‘Orbital defences will be eliminated as normal,’ replied the primarch. As was his habit, he stood to one side while the commanders were crowded around the central table. ‘Once orbital supremacy has been established you will have to conduct a landing under fire.’

‘I have three battleship-class vessels, lord, each quite capable of eliminating any ground defences. There will be no need for your Legion to reveal its presence at the onset, I guarantee that. Isn’t that right, Captain Willhelms?’

The commander of the battleship Resolute nodded.

‘Torpedoes and lances will do the job,’ said Willhelms,

‘Can you guarantee the lives of the ten million people living in that city?’ asked Branne.

‘We will endeavour to avoid any civilian casualties, of course.’ Valerius glanced at Praefector Antonius, who made some quick calculations on his data-slate and handed it to the sub-Caesari. ‘Perhaps no more than five thousand?’

‘This is not an ordinary city,’ said Corax. ‘Fulgrim was not idly boasting when he named it the Perfect Fortress. My brother declared that it was not enough for a fortification to house a garrison, it had to protect the population. The Perfect Fortress is not an area within the city, it is the city. Fulgrim reasoned, quite rightly, that the populace was best protected if they were integral to the fortress’s design.

‘He decided to use the civilians as shields?’ said Valerius, horrified by the thought.

‘That was not his argument at the time,’ replied Corax. ‘In the case of an invasion, they would spontaneously form a militia to help with the defence. That is of no matter. There is no separation of defence and civilian construction. Habitat towers house defence lasers. Factories are protected by bunkers and concealed trench lines. The layout of the roads was the work of Perturabo, to allow swift response from the defenders whilst hindering attack.’

‘To destroy the fortress we have to destroy the city,’ said Branne.

‘Which we will not do,’ said Corax. ‘The people of Narsis are innocent in this. We are here to act as messengers for the Emperor’s cause, not to kill his followers. We cannot spread our message by obliterating the populace.’

‘A thorny problem,’ admitted Valerius. He finished his water and absent-mindedly handed the glass back to Pelon while he pondered. He gave up with a shrug. ‘I cannot see a landing without orbital support being anything but a disaster. We will be dropping right onto their guns.’

‘There is a potential landing site,’ said Aloni, bringing up a schematic of the area surrounding the Perfect Fortress. He pressed a key and a crosshair appeared on the map. ‘Here, in the hills to the north-east.’

‘That is at least twenty kilometres away!’ said Valerius, standing up to examine the diagram. ‘We do not have that many tanks and transports.’

‘Twenty-eight, actually,’ said Agapito. Valerius did not like the hint of amusement in the commander’s tone.

‘You will attack on foot,’ said Corax. ‘You will land under cover of night, though do not expect that to be much of an advantage because the enemy will have scanners and thermal imaging.’

‘March nearly thirty kilometres overnight to attack a city-fortress?’ Valerius had a sinking feeling about this whole endeavour and felt it was his place to be honest. ‘That is a strategy doomed to failure.’

‘Exactly,’ said Corax. The primarch’s smile was unsettling. ‘I don’t expect you to take the Perfect Fortress by yourselves. That’s why we’re here.’

The hololithic display showed just how hopeless the situation was for the fools. Captain Hasten Luthris Armanitan of the Emperor’s Children prowled the command chamber of his tower, watching every data report and scan relay like a hawk. The natural topography to the north-east would funnel the attackers towards the Eighth Avenue gate, beyond which lay a broad thoroughfare dominated by three cannon batteries located at one–hundred-metre intervals along the road’s length. To either side, the city became a maze of interlocking corridors of fire overlooked by bunker positions and sally ports.

‘Their foolishness shall be the cause of their defeat,’ he said, speaking more to himself than the Legion serfs at the consoles. ‘So typically weak, to assault without prior bombardment. What do they hope to achieve?’

‘Cordon Two has been overrun, captain,’ reported one of the serfs. ‘Last report was of a massed infantry assault. Enemy casualties heavy.’

‘I suppose there is a little wisdom in leaving behind their armour,’ said Luthris. ‘All of those anti-tank rocket batteries are going to waste. Have their crews stand down at Cordon One and get them to man the line.’

‘Affirmative, captain,’ said the attendant.

Luthris checked the time display. There was a little over three hours, Terran-standard, until dawn. The first wave of attackers would have barely reached the wall before his troops had full visibility. Then the carnage would really begin.

The outskirts of the Perfect Fortress had an appearance utterly at odds with their purpose. Elaborate hanging gardens sprawled from the roofs and walls of the white buildings, the scent of their flowers filling the air. Colonnaded frontages and overhanging galleries provided cover for the Therions as they advanced towards the gate tower looming over the buildings ahead. The Emperor’s Children had sacrificed nothing of their aesthetic sense in the city’s design, so that colonnaded, alabaster buildings might equally serve as administration offices or tank depots, it was impossible to tell from the outside.

Valerius marched with his men, determined that they would push home the attack with every last iota of strength, even if they were doomed to failure. He had been forced to swallow the ignominy of sacrificing his last command at Isstvan for a diversion, and was determined that his next would not end so ingloriously. The Therions would give a good account of themselves, whatever Corax expected.

A few Sentinel walkers had survived the hours of missile and shell bombardment on the approach to the city. They were several hundred metres ahead, scouting for the three-hundred-strong advance guard. Valerius only knew of this from the constant commentary being fed to him by Tribune Calorium, who followed the sub-Caesari a few steps behind.

‘Sir, lead squadron encountering another defence line,’ Calorium reported, the cup-like vox-receiver clamped to one ear. ‘Taking fire from overhead balconies.’

Valerius glanced up at this news, seeing anew the lines of galleries over overhangs above him. It had been the same ever since entering the city: seemingly innocuous architectural features revealing their true purpose as killing sites, weapons platforms and minefields.

Sensing their commander’s nervousness, Valerius’s bodyguard closed ranks around him, their golden carapace armour and white fatigues stained and muddied by the advance from the landing zone.

‘Perhaps we should move into cover, sub-Caesari,’ suggested vice-Tribune Callista.

‘And where is that, exactly?’ Valerius snapped in return. He had already lost four men from his command section when they sheltered in a flower bed that turned out to have been laced with trip-mines.

Callista looked around uncertainly.

‘Never mind,’ said Valerius, continuing to stride along the middle of the road. It had been frustrating, fighting against unseen enemies, coming face-to-face with his foes only when he saw them retreating to the next defence line.

Not that he was in a mood for such a confrontation. The purple-and-gold-armoured warriors would no doubt take an even heavier toll once they decided to stand and fight. There was small comfort in reaching the city proper; the shelling from towers deep in the fortress’s heart had stopped, no doubt to avoid fire falling on their own warriors.

‘Advance teams are suffering badly,’ announced Calorium. ‘Requesting reinforcement.’

Glancing at the tribune, Valerius’s heart sank.

‘Have Third and Fourth Companies move up in support. See if they can outflank the enemy position. Order Fifth and Sixth to move up from the rearguard. How is Praefector Magellius proceeding?’

The tribune spoke for a short while and then sorrowfully shook his head.

‘Second Phalanx is being pushed back, they’ve lost a third of their men,’ said Calorium. ‘Sir, Third Phalanx is also reporting a stalled advance. They are being cut down by the gate defences.’

An explosion less than two hundred metres ahead sent a plume of ash and smoke into the sky. A few seconds later, debris showered down on Valerius and his men.

‘What was that?’ he demanded, though Calorium was already talking quickly on the vox.

‘Macro-cannon, sir,’ the tribune said. ‘Sited at the junction ahead, concealed on the third floor of a tenement.’

There was shakiness to the tribune’s voice, and looking at the other soldiers around him Valerius could sense their fear. If he continued to push them forwards, they would break and rout. That would not be at all to his liking.

‘All right, send to all command sections,’ he snarled. ‘Company-by-company withdrawal. Establish a perimeter at the edge of the city. This is to be an orderly retreat. We will have no running away and no panic.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Calorium’s manner and tone betrayed his gratitude for the sub-Caesari’s decision.

Valerius stopped where he was and stood with hands on hips, glaring at the distant towers. He had reached the city, an achievement it itself, but even his reconnaissance forces were more than two kilometres from the inner defence line.

It did not matter what Corax intended, it still tasted bitterly of defeat.

‘The enemy are withdrawing en masse, captain.’

‘Ridiculous,’ Luthris replied. ‘They have not even begun to test our defences.’

‘Visual confirmation of scanner data, captain. The enemy are pulling back into the outer reaches.’

The Emperor’s Children officer made a slow lap of the command centre, examining every data stream and display. The evidence was incontrovertible: the attackers were giving up ground on all fronts. It seemed a disappointing end to a lacklustre attack.

‘Any sign of low orbit vessels?’ he asked, settling in his chair.

‘None, captain,’ came the reply. ‘All enemy ships are keeping out of ground defence range. No sign of drop-craft.’

It made little sense to Luthris as he returned to his command throne, but it was foolish to consider the motivations of lesser warriors. No doubt they had been ordered to attack and had complied without knowing the full extent of the opponent they faced. He was not about to be forgiving of the error.

‘Assemble counter-attack companies at gates three and four,’ he ordered, his finger on the comm-switch set into the arm of his chair. ‘Prepare the armourium for mobile columns to make a swift encircling move via the undercity ramps. These fools do not attack our city without retort. Mission objective is the total destruction of all enemy forces. Counter-attack to commence in fifteen minutes.’

He released the comm-switch and leaned back, the chair adjusting to the movement. He looked over his shoulder to Sergeant Turan, who stood by the doorway, plumed helm under one arm.

‘Prepare the assault force, sergeant, I shall personally lead them into battle.’

‘As you will it, captain,’ Turan replied with a bow of his head. He fixed on his helm and banged a fist against his chestplate in salute. ‘We will murder these dogs wherever they try to hide.’

A lascannon blast burst through the edge of the balcony, obliterating the man to Valerius’s right. Showered with dust and blood, the sub-Caesari crawled back from the parapet to hunker down in the ruins of the window behind. Calorium was still by his side, one arm in a sling, the communications pack on the floor next to him. He looked at Valerius with bloodshot eyes and shook his head.

‘No reply from Praefector Tigurian, sir. I think our left flank has broken.’

‘Two thousand men, tribune, two thousand men!’ said Valerius, slumping against the frame of the window. ‘None of them are left?’

Calorium shrugged in reply.

For an hour the Therions had retreated, and for another they had held against the counter-attack of the Emperor’s Children. Marcus had done all he could, cajoling and encouraging his commanders to stay and fight, to hold the line at all costs, but there was little time left. He risked standing up, snatching his magnoculars from his belt. Training them to the south-west he could see several dozen armoured figures advancing along the road, no more than half a kilometre away.

‘Please leave!’

Valerius turned and glared at the old man whose chambers he had commandeered as a temporary command post.

‘And go where?’ the sub-Caesari snarled.

‘My wife, she wants you to leave…’

‘Really? Perhaps she thinks that Horus would be better suited as leader of the Imperium?’

‘I wouldn’t know anything about that, sir. I just know that when the legionaries get here, they’ll not leave any of us alive if we’re sheltering you.’

Valerius said nothing more. He could not blame the elderly couple for their fear. He had been fearful before, then desperate, and now had emerged into a state of strange calm about the situation. Nearly ten thousand Therions had lost their lives in the last eight hours, but he felt sanguine about the losses. A sense of numbness had filled him since losing contact with Second Phalanx, an acceptance of the inevitable.

He looked again at the Emperor’s Children. They were taking their time, checking every building along the road. Overhead, Thunderhawks prowled, seeking targets for their cannons and heavy bolters. The streets had become a bloodbath from their initial strafing runs, forcing every Therion to take shelter inside. To their credit, what little it counted for, the Emperor’s Children had not fired on the buildings; perhaps they still believed they were protecting these people.

He drew his pistol. It seemed important that he had a weapon in his hand.

‘Forget that,’ he told his tribune, looking at the vox-unit. ‘Get your lasrifle.’

Calorium pushed the heavy pack aside and dropped the receiver. He flinched as another las-blast tore into the sculpted architrave above them, melting through the relief of a war chariot charging against a horde of barbarians. On his knees, he crawled over the dead Therions and retrieved his weapon before returning to Valerius’s side.

‘You said to trust you,’ Valerius muttered to himself. ‘Weather the storm and trust you. Well, Corax, the storm is upon us.’

There was little honour in slaughtering the poorly-armed soldiers. Their lasguns were pitiful against Legiones Astartes armour, their gold-coloured flak vests no defence against boltguns. Luthris could not even enjoy the slaughter: it was too one-sided and little test for his tactical acumen or his physical prowess.

At the head of his squad, he strode up a sweeping staircase leading to the upper floors of a guesthouse. He fired his bolt pistol at the men hunkering down behind the balustrade above, his shots finding their marks between the wooden pillars.

‘Squad Andilor, proceed to the third floor,’ he said, shooting another soldier in the leg. The bolt tore the man’s hip apart, sending him sprawling. Luthris casually drove his sword into the man’s chest as he stalked past. ‘Squad Collonius, fourth floor.’

‘Heavy weapon on the roof opposite, captain,’ reported one of the sergeants. ‘Multi-laser.’

‘Call in a Thunderhawk strike, sergeant,’ Luthris replied. ‘Must I make every decision?’

‘Affirmative, captain. Calling in airstrike.’

With an armoured boot, the Emperor’s Children captain kicked open the door at the end of the landing. He quickly scanned the rooms beyond but they were empty. With a sigh of disappointment he turned back to the stairwell.

‘Captain!’

The shout came from below, not over the vox. Striding to the edge of the landing, Luthris saw Squad Argentius backing into the foyer, bolters aimed towards the outer doors. One of them yelled a warning and they opened fire, but Luthris could not see their target.

‘What’s happening?’ the captain demanded. ‘Speak to me!’

Before he heard the reply his comm-bead crackled into life.

‘Captain, we have detected sub-orbital craft, approaching at speed.’

‘From where? How did they launch?’

‘We do not know, captain. Orbital scan is clear.’

Even as he tried to absorb this information, Luthris watched the squad below. Two of the legionaries were heaved into the air, blood spilling from gaping rents in their armour. The others fired at nothing, though their bolts seemed to deflect from thin air, exploding against emptiness. Sergeant Argentius stepped forwards with his chainsword roaring. A moment later his arm and head flew away, cut clean through by some invisible force.

Luthris could not believe what he was seeing. Within a few seconds, the whole squad were dead: dismembered and decapitated.

‘Sorcery,’ he muttered. There was no Librarian close at hand to help him.

Bringing up his power sword, he took up a guard position at the top of the stairs. He thought he saw something for a moment and fired his pistol. The shot detonated a few steps up from the bottom of the stairs.

A moment later he was looking into two jet-black eyes, centimetres from his face. Stepping back, he realised what it was that confronted him. The warrior was half again as tall as Luthris, armoured in pure black splashed with gore, a winged pack upon his back. His face was bone white, his hair shorn at shoulder length. In one hand the warrior held a crackling whip; the other was sheathed in glowing claws. The apparition bared its teeth in a wordless snarl and raised its talons.

‘For the Emperor!’ it whispered as the claws slashed down.

Corax moved from room to room, slaying any Emperor’s Children he came across. His claws cut them to ribbons and his glowing whip sliced through polished armour. Reaching the highest storey of the building, he walked out onto the balcony overlooking the main street. Looking up he saw the dark blur of drop-pods falling from the heavens. Beyond them came the contrails of Thunderhawks and Stormbirds.

It was time to head for the gate.

The drop-pod opened up like the petals of an iron flower, metal ramps crashing into the wall rampart. Navar was the first out of his harness, bounding down to the wall with easy strides. Unarmoured soldiers were manning a gun post ahead of him. Slipping a taloned finger into the guard of his bolter, he gunned them down with three shots.

Behind him, Carval growled and hissed. With a glance back at his fellow Raptor, Navar nodded. He had no idea what Carval had tried to say, but he understood his brother legionary’s intent.

‘For the Raven Guard!’ Navar cried as he dashed along the wall, opening fire when a squad of Emperor’s Children burst out of the tower ahead.

Bolt-rounds flickered back and forth between the two squads, ripping chunks of ceramite from armour. A shadow fell over Navar and he glanced up to see Lord Corax soaring over the edge of the wall. The primarch’s whip lashed out, shredding two of the Emperor’s Children from the waist up. Behind Corax came more Raven Guard, dropping down from the top of the tower ahead, their jump packs flaring to slow their descent. Plasma pistols and chainswords ready, the assault squad fell upon the rear of the Emperor’s Children.

There was shooting from inside the wall. Navar glanced down to his left and saw three yellow-armoured squads fighting their way across a narrow courtyard, pushing back the Emperor’s Children. Captain Noriz’s Imperial Fists would not miss out on the victory. On a rooftop further from the wall, two more drop-pods were opening up. Custodian Guard in their gleaming gold armour stormed out, unleashing bursts of energy from their guardian spears, cracking open the power armour of their foes.

Beyond the wall the Therions were advancing again, taking revenge on the Emperor’s Children who had slaughtered their fellows. Though their lasguns were not as powerful as their foes’ bolters, their weight of fire and tenacity was driving the traitors back towards the gates.

Lord Corax circled once, no doubt taking stock of the battle’s progress, before he landed a little ahead of Navar. The primarch pointed towards the centre of the city, to where the central tower of the Perfect Fortress soared more than three hundred metres above the buildings surrounding it. Navar looked to where Corax gestured and saw thousands of Raven Guard pouring out of drop-pods around the tower. He recognised the beak-faced Mark VI armour of the first Raptors as they led a charge against the central citadel, alongside loping and shuffling warriors of the last generation. Bolters, plasma and laser scoured the gardens and porticos of the enemy installation. Other legionaries, from the Hawks and Talons, jumped down from hovering Thunderhawks to set up crossfires on rooftops and inner walls, cutting down the retreating Emperor’s Children. Stormbirds looped slowly, their guns blazing at pockets of resistance, reserves of more Raven Guard inside ready to commit to the fight.

It was a joyous sight, the whole Legion acting in concert, and Navar understood why his primarch was grinning.

‘Not so perfect,’ said Agapito.

Corax had gathered his command council in the chambers of the garrison commander. It reminded him of the officers’ mess hall on Lycaeus where he had decided to use the atomic charges on Kiavahr. The carpet underfoot was thick, the walls panelled with red lacquered wood. Finely sculpted statues stood on marble plinths around the edge of the room.

‘We certainly can’t hold it,’ said Branne.

An exquisite alabaster bust of Fulgrim toppled to the floor with a dull crash as the commander leaned deliberately against its pedestal. Glancing down at the fragments, Branne dropped a heavy foot onto the remnants, crushing them into the carpet. ‘You know that Horus will respond.’

‘I am counting on it,’ said Corax. ‘We will not be here.’

‘So what was the point?’ demanded Valerius. He looked like a child, sitting in a deep armchair made for one of the Legiones Astartes, his feet off the ground. Behind him, his aide had salvaged a decanter of wine from a cabinet and was hunting for an intact glass amongst the ruin of shattered cupboards and shelves. ‘A lot of Therions died just to hand this world back to the traitors.’

‘We’re leaving, you’re not,’ said Corax. ‘The rest of your Cohort will be arriving, nearly five hundred thousand men. The Legio Vindictus has already departed from Kiavahr with a dozen Titans. Other Imperial Army elements are also on their way, nearly a million more soldiers. Horus will be getting a hot welcome if he does come here.’

‘So we stay here and keep fighting?’ said Valerius. ‘You have levelled half of the defences.’

‘It won’t come to that, sub-Caesari,’ said the primarch. He stared out of the window, watching smoke drift over the ornate towers and gardens. ‘The Raven Guard are leaving, but not for Deliverance. Khalghorst is our next target. There is a Word Bearers garrison there. We’ll have hit them before Horus even has word of what has happened here.’

Corax turned and looked at his commanders.

‘This is not the Great Crusade. There is no compliance, no garrisons. We fight as the Raven Guard always have. We fight and we withdraw. We hit hard and elude the counter-blow. There are others that will stand and take the brunt of the traitors’ fury, and they have my sympathy, but this war will not be won with kind regards. And we will rebuild our numbers, slowly as before, but growing stronger as our enemies are weakened. The traitors allowed the Raven Guard to survive, and that will prove a costly mistake.

‘We will take this war to Horus wherever and whenever we can and we will bleed his forces dry. We cannot win this war alone, but we will ensure he wins no quick victory.’

Epilogue

Aboard the Alpha, Omegon walked to his shared chamber without thought, his feet guiding him through the corridors and levels without conscious effort. He knew that Horus had accepted the gene-data, which left him with just one more loose end to tie up.

Entering the quarters, Omegon was immediately confronted by Athithirtir, the alien’s enviro-globe bobbing around in agitation.

+I sense that you are being duplicitous.+

‘Your sense is annoyingly correct,’ said Omegon, sitting on the bunk so that his face was level with the gas-filled sphere.

+It is unwise to pass on the primarch genetic material to Horus. It will alter the balance of power in his favour. You risk giving victory to the Primordial Annihilator.+

‘Then it is fortunate that the data we handed over is flawed,’ said Omegon. ‘Fabius will never perfect the technology. The servants of the Primordial Annihilator will expend countless lives and endless hours in the pursuit of the impossible.’

+I sense that you are feeling proud of this conclusion. You are hiding something from me.+

‘Your empathic ability is becoming tiresome,’ said Omegon. ‘We no longer need an envoy from the Cabal. We are capable of determining our own fate from now on.’

+That is not an option. The Cabal must steer this war to the correct conclusion. To do otherwise risks victory for the Primordial Annihilator. You are being disobedient.+

‘We do that a lot,’ said Omegon. He stood up and grabbed the globe in one gauntleted hand. Anti-grav motors gave out a high-pitched whine as the sphere struggled against the primarch’s grip.

+This vessel is impervious to you and your weapons. Your attempt to harm or threaten me is pointless.+

‘I am not going to hurt you at all, my gas-filled friend,’ said Omegon.

He walked to the doorway and keyed open the lock. Leaving his quarters, the primarch headed for the closest conveyor. Athithirtir screeched all the way as they rode the elevator down to the docking levels, but Omegon had already issued orders to ensure there was no other soul along their route. The area around dock four was empty. Passing through the armoured door, Omegon walked between the secured Thunderhawks lined up on each side of the flight deck.

+I do not understand your intent. Your behaviour is unacceptable.+

‘I am simply taking you to your ship,’ said Omegon, letting go of the globe. Athithirtir floated up out of reach, ranting unintelligible curses at the primarch.

+I do not detect my ship.+

‘I am sure it will be here,’ said Omegon. He walked back towards the doors. ‘Maybe in a century or two.’

Sealing the doorway behind him, Omegon opened a communications frequency.

‘Dock four control, this is your primarch. Open inner and outer doors immediately, full atmospheric cleanse.’

‘Affirmative, lord,’ came the reply.

Warning sirens blared while Omegon imagined the huge armoured portal shielding the flight deck opening, revealing the field of stars outside. The air would blow out like a hurricane, taking the intrusive little alien with it. Content that his task was complete, he headed back to his quarters. There was still a lot more to be done. With the gene-tech secured in the Alpha’s vaults, in time his warriors would truly be legion.

THE HORUS HERESY

It is a time of legend.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~ Dramatis Personae ~

The XIII Legion ‘Ultramarines’

Roboute Guilliman, Primarch of the XIII Legion

Tauro Nicodemus, Tetrarch of Ultramar (Saramanth), Primarch’s Champion

Eikos Lamiad, Tetrarch of Ultramar (Konor), Primarch’s Champion

Justarius, Venerable Dreadnought

Telemechrus, Contemptor Dreadnought

Marius Gage, Chapter Master, 1st Chapter

Remus Ventanus, Captain, 4th Company

Kiuz Selaton, Sergeant, 4th Company

Lyros Sydance, Captain, 4th Company

Archo, Sergeant, 4th Company

Ankrion, Sergeant, 4th Company

Barkha, Sergeant, 4th Company

Naron Vattian, Scout, 4th Company

Saur Damocles, Captain, 6th Company

Domitian, Sergeant, 6th Company

Braellen, 6th Company

Androm, 6th Company

Evexian, Captain, 7th Company

Amant, 7th Company

Lorchas, Captain, 9th Company

Aethon, Captain, 19th Company

Erikon Gaius, Captain, 21st Company

Tylos Rubio, 21st Company

Honoria, Captain, 23rd Company

Teus Sullus, Captain, 39th Company

Greavus, Sergeant, 39th Company

Kaen Atreus, Chapter Master, 6th Chapter

Klord Empion, Chapter Master, 9th Chapter

Vared, Chapter Master, 11th Chapter

Ekritus, Captain, 111th Company

Phrastorex, Captain, 112th Company

Anchise, Sergeant, 112th Company

Sharad Antoli, Chapter Master, 13th Chapter

Taerone, Captain, 135th Company

Aeonid Thiel, Sergeant, 135th Company [marked]

Evido Banzor, Chapter Master, 16th Chapter

Heutonicus, Captain, 161st Company

Jaer, Apothecary, 161st Company

Kerso, 161st Company

Bormarus, 161st Company

Zabo, 161st Company

Anteros, 161st Company

Honorius Luciel, Captain, 209th Company

The XVII Legion ‘Word Bearers’

Lorgar Aurelian, Primarch of the XVII Legion

Kor Phaeron, The Black Cardinal

Erebus, Dark Apostle

Argel Tal, Gal Vorbak

Essember Zote, Gal Vorbak

Foedral Fell, Commander

Morpal Cxir, Commander

Hol Beloth, Commander

Maloq Kartho, Apostle to Hol Beloth

Sorot Tchure

Ulmor Nul

Cults

The Ushmetar Kaul, ‘The Brotherhood of the Knife’

Criol Fowst, Confided Lieutenant

The Tzenvar Kaul, ‘The Recursive Family’

The Jeharwanate, ‘The Ring’

The Kaul Mandari, ‘The Gene-kin’

Vil Teth, Gene-named

Imperial Personae

Uhl Kehal Hesst, Server of Instrumentation, Mechanicum

Meer Edv Tawren, Magos of Analyticae

Magos Uldort

Arook Serotid, Master of Skitarii

Cyramica, Skitarii

Shipmaster Sazar, Macragge’s Honour

Bohan Zedoff

Representative, Macragge’s Honour

Magos Pelot

Shipmaster Ouon , Sanctity of Saramanth

Hommed

Imperial Army

Colonel Sparzi, Neride 10th

Bowe Hellock, Sergeant, Numinus 61st

Dogent Krank, Numinus 61st

Bale Rane, Numinus 61st

Citizens of Calth

Seneschal Arbute

Oll Persson

Graft, Servitor Menial

Hebet Zybes

Katt

Neve Rane

‘When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas
we conquered long ago.’

– the philosopharch Nietzsche,
circa M2

‘They are dead, they will not live;
they are shades, they will not arise;
to that end you have visited
them with destruction and
wiped out all remembrance of them.’

– The Apocrypha Terra,
date unknown

TARGET//ACQUISITION

‘The Phase of Acquisition, or preparatory condition, is a vital segment of any successful prosecution. Though a warrior must be prepared to battle reactively without notice or forewarning, it is when he prepares and plans for war, and accommodates the specifics of his adversary into those plans, that he is most successful… This is war as craft or science, as I have remarked before. Often the fight is won before the first shot has been fired, or even before notice of the first shot has been given.’

– Guilliman, Notes Towards Martial
Codification, 7.3.ii

1

[mark: -136.57.07]

Who are the first to die?

Most commentaries will cite Honorius Luciel (captain, 209th) and seventeen others by the hand of Sorot Tchure on the company deck of the cruiser Samothrace at mark: -00.19.45, but these are not in fact the first combat fatalities.

The fleet tender Campanile is mob-boarded and taken off the Tarmus Apogee approximately one hundred and thirty-six hours [sidereal] before count start as a preliminary to the Calth assault.

Three thousand seven hundred and nine crew members are executed, including the ship master, the Navigator, the echelon port master, two fabricators from the yards, and a detail from the Neride Regulators 10th serving as deck protection.

Proof of the loss of the Campanile, delivered to Primarch Guilliman around mark: 01:30:00 demonstrates calculation and planning on behalf of the adversary, and establishes what Primarch Guilliman refers to as a ‘preparatory phase of acquisition’, which refutes any claims that the conflict was born out of mistake or misadventure.

This represents a ‘precondition of malice’ on the part of the adversary, and strengthens Primarch Guilliman’s hand in that it removes any compunction to resist or fight back with full military force.

There is no longer any point trying to reason with his brother, because his brother is not, in fact, mistakenly trying to kill him at all.

Lorgar has been planning it all along.

Precise details of the circumstances surrounding the loss of the Campanile are lost / and alone in such darkness, on a deceleration arc past the outer moons, one small ship, overweight and wheezing, over three and a half thousand souls / because no log record or data canister is recovered from the wreck / which had been penetrated by something in the night, made in the night, made out of the night, a void-hard darkness with teeth and eyes, squirting through every airgate and hatch seal and vent tube like pressurised oil / though it is assumed that the vessel was overhauled by a fighting ship from the XVII Legion’s fleet and taken with all hands / all of them screaming as they were blinded and suffocated, nowhere to flee to, no escape, no door that would open except to bare and airless space, and still the thing made of night filling the Campanile up, every compartment and deckway, every chamber and access, like black storm water flash-flooding an underground habitat, blinding and choking and drowning everything, filling rooms, filling mouths, filling lungs, filling ears, filling stomachs, stewing brains, smothering gunfire, blunting blades, swallowing the screams of the dying and the overcome, stealing the screams away and laughing them back in mocking voices that promised that screams were nothing more than the chamber music of dark monarchs mankind had only just begun to dream of / so that its anchorage codes could be used to penetrate the platform yards.

Course irregularities are noticed of the Campanile by Calth System Control at mark: -136.14.12 and again at mark: -135.01.20 and mark: -122.11.35.

Vox contact is recorded as lost at mark: -99.21.59.

Two hours later, Calth System Control marks the Campanile ‘cause for concern’, and the Master of the Port determines that a support intercept should be sent out if nothing further is received by the end of shift. There are one hundred and ninety-two thousand items of shipping traffic in the Veridian System that day because of the fleet conjunction.

The support intercept is not sent out because the Campanile resumes code transmission at mark: -88.10.21.

The crew of the Campanile is listed on the roll of the fallen in the aftermath of the battle, though none are ever seen again / except they were, but not in any form that they could be recognised, apart from their screams.

[mark: -124.24.03]

The first of the fleet advances have hauled their scarred hulls into the arrestor slips and come to full stop in the high anchor station above Numinus City. They are warships that have gone a long way, and killed a great many things, and they wear the insignia and colours of the XVII proudly.

Luciel opens the airgate hatch. His company has been assigned close protection of Numinus High Anchor. He has requested the duty personally.

Tall as one big man on another big man’s shoulders, broad as any three muscle-heavy athletes, his bulk augmented by the massive ceramite plate of gleaming Praetor-pattern armour, Luciel opens the airgate hatch.

The light inside finds him blue and gold. His skull-close helm is in place. Behind the visor slits, Luciel’s eyes react as fast as the optic augmetics in the slit rims. Involuntary combat instincts take over: a new space is revealed, so he must consider it and assess any threats. An airgate compartment, sixty cubic metres, grav supporting decking, self-seal armoured skinning, neutral normalised atmospherics (though Luciel can feel the pressure decay of the air pumps’ end-cycle). There’s a reciprocal airgate hatch at the other end of the gate compartment.

There is a figure in front of the door. It is another Space Marine in full wargear.

Luciel is XIII Legion, an Ultramarine. Blue and gold, clean and sharp. Armour burnished to a silk gleam. The Praetor-pattern is a new variant, locally fabricated at Veridia Forge, not yet a formally accepted mark within the Legiones Astartes.

The other is XVII Legion, a Word Bearer. His pattern is the current Mark IV, the Maximus, built for Imperial supremacy. Its fixed frontal armour and angular helm are familiar.

Its colours are not. Dark crimson, with gunmetal edging. Company symbols and squad brands lacquered in dark shapes, almost undecipherable, as if they have been erased or are yet to be painted. Where is the plasma-etched grey of the old scheme?

The Word Bearer is almost unrecognisable. For a nanosecond, the figure registers to Luciel as an unknown, a threat.

Transhuman responses are already there, unbidden. Adrenaline spikes to heighten an already formidable reaction time. Muscle remembers. Luciel wears his boltgun, an oiled black pit bull of a weapon, in his thigh holster. He can draw, aim and fire in less than a second. The range is six metres, the target unobstructed. There is no chance of missing. Maximus plate, frontally augmented, might stop a mass-reactive shell, so Luciel will fire two and aim for the visor slits. The airgate skin-sleeve is self-repairing, and will survive las-fire damage, but a bolter shot will shred it open, so Luciel also braces for the explosive decompression of a ricochet or a miss-hit. At a simple, subconscious neural urge, boot-sole electromagnets charge to clamp onto the deck plates.

Luciel thinks theoretical, but of course there is no theoretical. There is no tactical precedent for a Space Marine to fight a Space Marine. The idea is nonsense. He thinks practical, and that directs him to the visor slits. He can make a clean kill headshot in less than a second and a half, two rounds for kill insurance, and probably protect the atmospheric integrity of the airgate.

All this, all this decided, unbidden, instinctive, in less than a nanosecond.

The Word Bearer raises his right hand. Moving it where? Moving it towards his primary weapon, a plasma cannon in a pull-to-unlock sheath?

The hand spreads, opens like a flower, palm forward, the light glinting off the tiny mail links.

‘Luciel,’ says the Word Bearer. ‘Brother.’

‘Tchure,’ Luciel replies, his voice a growl over the helmet speaker. ‘Brother,’ he adds.

‘Well met,’ says the warrior of the XVII, stepping forward.

‘A long time,’ says Luciel, coming to meet him. They embrace, forearm guards clattering off backplate panels.

‘Tell me, brother,’ says Luciel. ‘What new things have you learned to kill since last we met?’

2

[mark: -116.50.32]

Aeonid Thiel, Ultramarine, marked for discipline and censure, boards the blue and gold Stormbird on a landing strip two thousand kilometres south of Numinus City. The sun, which is a star named Veridia, is a dot of pearl in the pale sky. A beautiful star, Thiel has heard it said. A beautiful star and a fine world.

Before him, the Dera Caren Lowlands, the district of manufactories and assembly halls, matt metal in the sunlight. The buildings, clean, simple and utilitarian, wisp white vapours into the clear sky through rotating roof vents and cycle chimneys. Areas of forest have been preserved between the finishing concourses where the labour force can rest and mingle between shifts.

In the west, just a cloudy ghost low in the sky, one of the orbital shipyards has just risen like a moon. Thiel knows of eight others. Soon, Calth will rival Macragge’s manufacturing output, perhaps in two or three decades. There is already talk of a projected superorbital plate. Like Terra. Terra has superorbital plates. The master worlds of the Imperium have plates. Calth will join Macragge, Saramanth, Konor, Occluda and Iax as one of the master worlds of the Ultramar sector, and between them, they will govern a vast swathe of the Ultima Segmentum. Calth will be one of the anchor points of the coming civilisation.

Calth is an embodiment of the reward that centuries of warfare have been leading to.

For this reason, Calth must not fall. For its status as part of the dominion of Ultramar, it must not fall. For its shipbuilding capacity and its forge world, it must not fall.

Intelligence has been received from Horus. A theoretical has been identified. It must be a great deal more than a theoretical, Thiel believes, for mustering and conjunction to have been taken this far, unless the new Warmaster is anxious to prove his authority. To mobilise the XIII, the largest of all the Legions, in an essentially singular war effort, that takes balls. To tell Roboute Guilliman, the primarch with the least to prove, how to do his duty, that takes balls of adamantium. To suggest that Guilliman might need help…

Horus is a great man. Thiel is not ashamed to admit that. Thiel has seen him, served with him, admired him. His selection as Warmaster makes reasonable sense. It was only going to be one of three or perhaps four, no matter how other primarchs might deceive themselves. To be the Emperor’s avatar, his proxy? Only Horus, Guilliman, Sanguinius, perhaps Dorn. Any other claims for viability were delusional. Even narrowed down to four, Dorn was too draconian and Sanguinius too ethereal. It was only ever going to be Horus or Guilliman. Horus always had the passion and the charisma. Guilliman was more clinical, considered. Perhaps that tipped it. So did, perhaps, the fact that Guilliman already had responsibilities. An empire, half-built. Ultramar. Administration. Populations. A culture. Guilliman had already evolved beyond the status of warlord, where Horus was still a killer of worlds and a subjugator of adversaries.

Maybe Warmaster Horus is aware of this disparity, that even in his triumphant election, he has been outstripped by a brother who does not even want for the honour of Warmaster any more. Perhaps that is why Horus needs to exercise his authority and give orders to the XIII. Perhaps that is why he is conjoining them with the XVII, a Legion they have never been comfortable with.

Or perhaps the new Warmaster is rather more creative than that, and sees this as a chance for Lorgar’s rabble to borrow a little gloss from Guilliman’s glory by association and example.

Aeonid Thiel, Ultramarine, has said these thoughts out loud.

They are not the reason he is marked for discipline and censure.

[mark: -111.02.36]

They are loading munitions crates at the docks on the south shore of the Boros River. Numinus City faces them across the wide grey water.

The work is hard, but the men, Imperial Army, every one, are laughing. After the loading, a meal break, a last drink, then lifters to orbit.

The crates are scuffed metal, like small coffins, full of local-pattern lasrifles, the Illuminator VI, a refined variant pressed out at Veridia Forge. The men hope to be using them within a fortnight.

The wind blows in along the estuary, bringing scents of the sea and the coastal dredgers. The men are all from the Numinus 61st, regular infantry. Some are veterans of the Great Crusade, others are new recruits inducted for the emergency.

Sergeant Hellock keeps the spirits up.

‘Will it be greenskins? Will it be the greenskins?’ the rookies keep asking. They have heard about greenskins. He assures them it will not.

‘It’s an exercise in cooperation,’ Hellock says. ‘It’s an operational show of force. This is Ultramar flexing its muscles. This is the Warmaster flexing his muscles.’

Hellock is lying to them. He lights a lho-stick, and smokes it under the shade of a tail boom, the collar of his dark blue field tunic pulled open to let the sweat on his collarbones dry. Hellock is on good terms with his captain, and Hellock’s captain confides in him. Hellock’s captain has a friend in the Ultramarines 9th Company, part of the encouraged fraternisation. His captain’s transhuman friend says that the threat is not theoretical. He calls it a ‘likely excursion of the Ghaslakh xenohold’, which is a shit-stupid way of describing it. Bastard greens. Bastard orks. Bastard bastards, gathering at the sector edge, working up the courage to come and ransack Calth. Not frigging theoretical at all.

That’s why you take the whole bastard XIII and the whole bastard XVII and all the Army units you can scare up, and you throw them at the Ghaslakh bastard xeno-bastard-hold, thank you so very much. You drive a bastard system-killing compliance force through their precious xenohold, and put them down dead before they put you down, and you kill their barbarian empire at the same time. Just kill it. Dead, gone, bye-bye, clap the dust off your hands, no more threat, theoretical or bastard otherwise.

You take a compliance force the scale of which hasn’t been seen since Ullanor or the early days of the Great Crusade, two full Legions of the Emperor’s finest, and you pile-drive it through the septic green heart and rancid green brain and green frigging spinal cord of the Ghaslakh xenohold, and you end them.

This is how Sergeant Hellock sees it.

Sergeant Hellock’s forename is Bowe. None of the men in his command know this, and only one or two who survive will learn it later when they read his name on the casualty lists.

Bowe Hellock will be dead in two days’ time.

It will not be an ork that kills him.

[mark: -111.05.12]

Sergeant Hellock has gone for a smoke. The men slow the pace. Their arms are aching.

Bale Rane is the youngest of them. He is absolutely raw, a week out of accelerated muster. There’s been a vague promise he’ll get an hour to say goodbye to his bride of six weeks before he lifts that evening. He cannot bear the idea of not seeing her. He is beginning to suspect it was an empty promise.

Neve’s on the other side of the river, waiting for him on a public wharf; waiting for him to wave from the ferry rail. He can barely stand the idea that she will be disappointed. She will wait there all night, in the hope that he’s only late. It will get dark. The refinery burn-pipes will glitter yellow reflections off the black river. She will be cold.

The thought of this hurts his heart.

‘Pull your collar up,’ Krank tells him, clipping his ear. Krank is an older man, a veteran.

‘Work in the sun,’ he scolds, ‘it’ll burn you, boy. Cap on, collar up, even if you sweat. You don’t want skinburn. Trust me. Worse than a broken heart.’

[mark: unspecified]

The ‘mark’ of Calth means two things. First, it refers, as per XIII Legion combat record protocol, to the elapsed time count (in Terran hours [sidereal]) of the combat. All Ultramarines operations and actions of this period may be archivally accessed for study, and their elapsed time count mark used as a navigation guide. An instructor might refer a novitiate to ‘Orax mark: 12.16.10’, meaning the tenth second of the sixteenth minute of the twelfth hour of the Orax Compliance record. Usually, this count begins at either the issuing of the operation order, or the actual operational start, but at Calth it is timed from the moment Guilliman ordered return of fire. Everything before that, he says, wasn’t a battle: it was merely treachery.

Secondly, the ‘mark’ of Calth refers to the solar radiation burns suffered by many of the combatants, principally the human (specifically non-transhuman) troops.

The last of these veterans to die, many years later, still refuse graft repair and wear the mark proudly.

3

[mark: -109.08.22]

Remus Ventanus, Captain of the 4th, has command of the Erud Province muster. It’s supposed to be an honour, but it doesn’t feel like it.

It feels like a desk job. It feels like labour for a bureaucrat or an administrator. It feels as if the primarch is teaching him another valuable lesson about the responsibilities of transhumanity. Learn to take pride in the work of governance as well as war. To be a ruler as well as a leader.

Remus Ventanus understands this. When the war is done, as it must eventually be done, when there are no more enemies to end and no more worlds to conquer, what will the transhumans who have built the Imperium do then?

Retire?

Pine away and die?

Become an embarrassment? A gore-headed reminder of older, more visceral days when humans needed superhumans to forge an empire for them? War is acceptable when it is a necessary instrument of survival. When it is no longer needed, the very fact that it was ever a necessary instrument at all becomes unpalatable.

‘It is the great irony of the Legiones Astartes,’ Guilliman had told his captains and masters, just a week ago. ‘Engineered to kill to achieve a victory of peace that they can then be no part of.’

‘A conceptual failure?’ Gage had asked.

‘A necessary burden,’ Sydance suggested. ‘I build your temple, knowing that I will not worship in it.’

Guilliman had shaken his head to both. ‘My father does not make mistakes of that magnitude,’ he had said. ‘Space Marines excel at warfare because they were designed to excel at everything. Each of you will become a leader, a ruler, the master of your world and, because there is no more fighting to be done, you will bend your transhuman talents to governance and culture.’

Remus Ventanus knows that his primarch believes in this sincerely. He doubts the likes of Primarch Angron or Primarch Russ regard the prospect of a peaceful future with such optimism.

‘Why are you smiling?’ asks Selaton, at his side.

Remus glances at his sergeant.

‘Was I smiling?’

‘You were looking at the data-slate and smiling, sir. I was wondering what was so amusing about a manifest list of eighty super-heavy armour pieces.’

‘Very little,’ Remus agrees.

Beyond the observation port, mass-loader engines carry four-hundred-tonne tanks into the bellies of bulk liftships.

[mark: -108.56.13]

Brother Braellen is young, and has not yet fought the greens. His captain has. In the sunlight of the ground camp in the Ourosene Hills, some impromptu training takes place while they wait for the signal to stow and board.

‘Ork, theoretical,’ says Captain Damocles.

‘Head or spine, mass-reactive,’ replies Braellen. ‘Or heart.’

‘Idiot,’ grumbles Sergeant Domitian. ‘Heart shot won’t stop one. Not guaranteed. Filthy things soak up damage, even boltguns.’

‘So, skull or spine,’ says Braellen, corrected.

Damocles nods.

‘Ork, practical?’ he asks.

‘What do I have?’ asks Braellen.

‘Your bolter. A combat sword.’

‘Skull or spine,’ says Braellen, ‘or both or whatever works. Maximum trauma. If it comes to close combat, decapitation.’

Damocles nods.

‘The wrinkle is, don’t let it ever get that close,’ says Domitian. ‘They’ve got strength in them. Shred your limbs off. Sometimes, the damned things keep going when their skulls are off or open. Nerve roots, or something. Keep them at bay, if you can – ranged weapons, bolter fire. Maximum trauma.’

‘Good advice,’ says Captain Damocles to his grizzled sergeant. He looks at the brothers in the circle. ‘And from a man who has fought greenskins six times more than I have. It is six, isn’t it, Dom?’

‘I think it’s seven, thanking you, sir,’ replies Domitian, ‘but I won’t grieve if you won’t.’

Damocles smiles.

‘You have left out one caveat on the practical assessment, though,’ he says.

‘Have I, sir?’ asks Domitian, honestly surprised.

‘Anyone?’ asks the captain.

Braellen raises his hand.

‘Round count,’ he says.

Domitian laughs and tuts to himself. How could he have forgotten to cover that base?

‘For the benefit of the others, Brother Braellen?’ prompts Captain Damocles.

‘Round count,’ says Braellen. ‘Maximum trauma, maximum damage, but watch your load counter and try to balance damage delivery against munitions rationing.’

‘Because?’ asks Damocles.

‘Because, with orks,’ says Domitian, ‘there’s always a shit load of them.’

Brother Androm has also not fought greenskins before. When the captain breaks the circle and sends them to duties, he speaks to Braellen.

They have both recently rotated up from the reserve companies, ready to complete their novitiate period through service in the active line. Both are grateful and proud to have been given places in the 6th Company, to serve under Saur Damocles, and to etch – if only temporarily – the company’s white figure-of-eight serpent emblem onto the blue fields of their shoulder guards.

[mark: -99.12.02]

Oll has land on the estuary at Neride.

The land is about twenty hectares of good black alluvial soil. The hectares are service-shares. Oll has service, and a yellowing record book at the bottom of a store-room drawer to prove it. Good years of service, marching behind the Emperor’s standard.

Oll is Army.

His service ended on Chrysophar, eighteen standard years past. Then, he was known as ‘Trooper Persson’. He got his papers, and his service ribbon, and a stamp on his record book, and service-shares, proportionate to years served. The Army always rounds down.

Oll spent two years on a cattle-boat coming to Calth from Chrysophar. The posters and the handbills all called Ultramar ‘the New Empire’. The slogan seemed a little disloyal, but the point was made. The rich new cluster of worlds that great Guilliman had made compliant, and wrangled into a brawny frontier republic, had the look of a new empire about it. The posters were trying to appeal to the settlers and colonists streaming out towards the Rim on the coattails of the expeditionary fleets. Come to Ultramar and share our future. Build your new life on Calth. Settle on Octavia. New worlds, New destinies!

If you claimed your service-shares on a rising world like Calth, the administration paid your passage. Oll came with the thousand people who would be his neighbours. By the time he reached Calth, he was known as ‘Oll’, and only those who saw the fading ink on his left forearm knew about his past in professional killing.

The fusion plants of Neride generate the power that lights the lamps of Numinus City and Kalkas Fortalice. The plants pump river water to wash the smudge-carbon off their clean-stroke turbines, and thus warm the estuary with a rich black swill that makes the river valley one of the most fertile places on the planet. It’s good land. There’s always a stink of beets and cabbage in the humid air.

Oll has no wife, and knows only toil. He grows swathes of bright flowers to decorate the tables and vases and buttonholes of the Numinus City gentry, and then, on the season turn, he cycles a second crop of swartgrass for the sacking industry. Both crops require seasonal labour forces. Oll employs the young men and women of neighbouring families: the women to cut and pack the flowers, the men to harvest and roll the swartgrass. He keeps them all in line with an ex-Army loader servitor called Graft. Graft cannot be conditioned not to call him ‘Trooper Persson’.

Oll wears a Catheric symbol around his neck on a thin chain, the gift of a wife he had barely got to know before she died and was replaced by Army life. The symbol, and his faith, are two of the reasons he came to Ultramar. It is, he feels, easier to believe out here in the Ultima Segmentum.

It’s supposed to be, anyway.

Some of his neighbours, who have been his neighbours these eighteen years and whose children he employs, laugh at his faith. They call him ‘pious’.

Others attend the little chapel on the edge of the fields with him.

It’s swartgrass season, and the men and boys are in the fields. Two weeks of hard work to go.

There are a lot of ships in the top of the sky today. Troop ships. Munitions ferries. Oll squints into the sun as they pass over. He recognises them. Farmer, colonist, believer, whatever he is, he’s still Army underneath it all.

He recognises them.

He feels an old feeling, and it reminds him of the lasrifle hanging over his fireplace.

[mark: -68.56.14]

At Barrtor, east of the Boros River, 111th and 112th Companies of the Ultramarines are stationed in pre-fab cities in the forest hem. At the word from Vared, Master of the 11th Chapter, they will mount their Land Raiders, Rhinos and long-body Rhino Advancers, and advance to Numinus Port for embarkation.

Ekritus has just taken the captaincy of the 111th from Briende, who fell on Emex. It was a hard loss for the company. Ekritus is a fine commander in the making. He wants a good fight, a fight that will hammer the 111th back into shape and show them he’s a worthy replacement for the beloved Briende.

‘I’ve never seen a man so eager to make shift,’ says Phrastorex, Captain of the 112th. ‘Have you, Sergeant Anchise?’

‘No, sir,’ says Anchise.

They’ve come to join Ekritus on the embankment below the trees. It forms a natural viewing platform. They can see the floodplain, the encampments of Word Bearers companies who made planetfall the night before, the tent cities of the Army, and the fields of Titans. The war-engines are powered-down, dormant, standing in groves like giant metal trees. A column of armour and towed artillery pieces is grumbling down the highway below. Interceptors flash by on a low pass. There is a blue haze.

Ekritus grins at them. Phrastorex is a veteran, an old soul. Ekritus understands that Vared has pushed Phrastorex into a mentoring role during the transition. A company is a considerable entity: you do not take on its command lightly.

‘I know one should not be in haste to greet war,’ Ekritus says. ‘I know, I know. I have read my Machulius and my Antaxus, my Von Klowswitts–’

‘And your Guilliman, I hope,’ says Phrastorex.

‘I’ve heard of him, certainly,’ says Ekritus. They laugh. Even Anchise, at attention, has to cover a grin.

‘I need to close the men on a target. A practical threat, not a theoretical one. There’s only so many rousing speeches I can give before they need me to simply lead by example.’

Phrastorex sighs.

‘I commiserate. I remember when I accepted the commander’s stave after Nectus passed. I just needed that first match to blood the men. Hell, I needed it. I needed them to bond with me against an enemy, not bond against me as an outsider.’

Ekritus nods.

‘Is that right, sergeant?’

Anchise hesitates.

‘Perfectly correct, sir. The theory is sound. The focus of battle makes men forget other issues. It is an excellent way to bind them to a new commander. Gives them an experience they have shared. Of course, in the specific case of Captain Phrastorex, he’s never been able to bond with us or prove his worth.’

All three of them laugh out loud.

‘I might have wished for something more streamlined,’ says Ekritus. ‘The scale of this mobilisation is ridiculous. The logistics alone are slowing everything down.’

‘They say we’ll be away by tonight,’ says Phrastorex. ‘Tomorrow at the latest. Then what? Two weeks’ ship time, and you’ll be up to your eyes in ork blood.’

‘It can’t happen soon enough,’ says Ekritus, ‘because no damn thing is ever going to happen here.’

[mark: -61.20.31]

If you start with many and end with a single victory, then the cost in between is acceptable.

Guilliman reads back what he has written. The tactical sentiment is not original to him: it was told to him by a T’Vanti war-triber. He has… polished it.

He’s not even sure if he believes it, but all military concepts and aphorisms are worth recording, if only to understand how an enemy’s mind works.

The war-tribes believed it. They were honourable allies, able fighters. Low tech, of course, nothing compared to his Legion. The T’Vanti had agreed to serve as auxiliaries. It had been a diplomatic move on Guilliman’s part. If he allowed the locals to share in the victory, then they might also take responsibility for maintaining the compliance of their world. But the orks moved mercurially that day; some unpredicted pulse of contrariness fluttered through their mass. They turned west, against all sense. Guilliman’s force was delayed by a day. The wartribes went ahead without them, and took the hill at Kunduki, decapitating – literally – the greenskin command.

The T’Vanti seemed delighted by their achievement, and utterly oblivious to the eighty-nine thousand men it had cost them.

Guilliman turns the stylus in his hand, thoughtful. It takes discipline to die in such numbers. It is one of the reasons that a bladed T’Vanti cordulus hangs on his compartment wall. He believes he has the most disciplined military force in the Imperium, and given the quality of the other Legions, that is quite a claim. Still, he is not sure even his Ultramarines would display such a deep degree of discipline, such a T’Vanti degree.

‘They will never have to,’ he reflects, out loud.

Guilliman sits back. The seat flexes to support his armoured bulk. He is shaped like a man, but he is far more than that, far more than even the transhuman giants of his Legion. He is a primarch. There are only seventeen other beings like him left in the universe.

He is the thirteenth son of mankind’s Emperor. He is the Master of the Ultramarines, the XIII Legion. He is one of the more human of his kind. Some are more like angels. Others are... otherwise.

From a distance, one might mistake him for a man. Only when the distance closed would you realise he is more like a god.

He is handsome, in a plain way. He is handsome the way a regent on an old coin is handsome, like a good sword is handsome. He is not handsome like a ritual weapon, the way Fulgrim is. He is not angelic, like Sanguinius. Not heartbreakingly angelic. None of them are that beautiful.

There is a dutiful line to his jaw, like his good brother Dorn. They share a nobility. There is the great strength of Ferrus and the vitality of Mortarion. There is, sometimes, the rogue glint of the Khan in his eyes, or the solemnity of the Lion. In the architecture of his nose and brow there is, many claim, the energy and triumph of Horus Lupercal.

There is none of the bitterness that shadows Corax, or the persecuted despair that haunts poor Konrad. There is never any of the deliberate mystery that obscures Alpharius or Magnus, and he is more open than that buried soul Vulkan. He is accomplished, very accomplished, even by the standards of the primarchs. He knows that the breadth of his accomplishments troubles his more single-minded brothers like Lorgar and Perturabo. He never displays the pitch of fury found in Angron, nor do his eyes ever ignite with the psychotic gleam of Russ.

He is a high achiever. He knows this about himself. Sometimes it feels like a fault that he has to excuse to his brothers, but then he feels guilty for making excuses. Few of them really trust him, because, he feels, they always wonder what he’s going to get from any compact or cooperation. Fewer still like him: as friends, he counts only Dorn, Ferrus, Sanguinius and Horus.

Some of his brothers are content to be the instruments of crusade they have become. Some of them don’t even pause to consider that is what they are. Angron, Russ, Ferrus, Perturabo… They are just weapons, and have no ambition beyond being weapons. They know their place, like Russ, and are content to keep to it, or they have no idea that any other role might be possible or desirable, like Angron.

Guilliman believes that none of them were made to be just weapons. No war is meant to last forever. The Emperor, his father, has not raised disposable sons. Why would he have gifted them with such talents if they were destined to become redundant when the war is done?

He turns the stylus in his hand and reads back what he has written. He writes a great deal. He codifies everything. Information is power. Technical theory is victory. He intends to compile and systemise it all. When the war is done, perhaps, he will have time to properly compose his archives of data into some formal codification.

He uses a stylus by choice, recording in his own handwriting. The stylus marks directly onto the lumoplastek surface of his data-slate, but even so it is considered antiquated. Key plates seem impersonal, and vox-recorders or secretarial rubricators have never suited his process. He tried a thought-tap for a time, and one of the newer mnemo-quills, but they were both unsatisfactory. The stylus will stay.

He turns it in his hand.

His compartment is quiet. Through the vast, tinted armourglas doors behind him, he can see his Chapter Masters gathering for audience. They are waiting for his summons. There is a great deal to do. They think he’s idling, recording notes and not keeping his eye on the dataflow.

It amuses him that they still underestimate him.

He has been writing notes on T’Vanti war practices for seventeen minutes, but he has still noted and marked fifteen hundred data bulletins and updates that have tracked across the secondary screens to his left.

He sees and reconciles everything.

Information is victory.

[mark: -61.25.22]

The Chapter Masters await their primarch. From the antechamber, they can see him through the tinted armourglas of the doors. He sits like a commemorative statute in an otherwise empty chapel. Every now and then, his hand moves as he makes a notation on the hovering slate with his antique pen. The compartment, Guilliman’s compartment, is stark and bare. Steel-fold floors and adamantium-ribbed walls. The far end is a crystalflex wall through which orbital space is visible. Stars glitter. A glare comes up through the blackness from the radiant world below.

Marius Gage is First Master. They’re not all here yet. Twelve have arrived so far, and that is, in itself, quite an assembly. By the day’s end, there will be twenty.

The XIII Legion, largest of all the Legiones Astartes, is divided into Chapters, a throwback to the old regimental structures of the thunder warriors. Each Chapter is formed of ten companies. The basic unit currency is the company, a thousand legionaries, plus their support retinue, led by a senior captain. A company, Gage has often heard his primarch comment, is more than sufficient for most purposes. There is an old aphorism, popular in the XIII. It is, perhaps, boastful and arrogant, and there are certain opponents such as the greenskins and the eldar to which it does not apply, but it contains a basic estimation of truth:

To take a town, send a legionary; to take a city, send a squad; to take a world, send a company; to take a culture, send a Chapter.

Today, at Calth, twenty of the XIII’s twenty-five Chapters will conjunct for deployment. Two hundred companies. Two hundred thousand legionaries. The remainder will maintain garrison positions throughout the Five Hundred Worlds of Ultramar.

Such a gathering is not unprecedented, but it is rare. The XIII hasn’t been oathed out in such numbers since the early days of the Great Crusade.

And you can add to their mass the equivalent of five Chapters of the XVII, the Word Bearers.

The level of overkill is almost comical. What exactly does the new Warmaster think the Ghaslakh xenohold has in its magazine?

‘I hope,’ says Kaen Atreus, Master of the 6th Chapter, ‘I hope,’ he says out loud, ‘we open up the heart of the biggest greenskin nest in known space.’

‘You hope for trouble?’ asks Gage, amused.

‘Remark 56.xxi,’ says Vared of the 11th. ‘Never wish for danger. Danger needs no help. There is no such thing as fate that can be tempted, but morale is never improved by an active lust for war.’

Atreus scowls.

‘I would rather tempt a little fate,’ he says, ‘than waste my time for the glory of others.’

‘Which others have you in mind?’ Gage wonders.

Atreus looks at him. A scar bisects his left eye and turns the corner of his mouth down. When he smiles, it is an act of stealth.

‘This compliance is designed to achieve two objectives, and neither of them is military,’ he says. ‘We’re to lend a little gloss to the clumsy reputation of the Word Bearers by operating in concert. And we’re to demonstrate the authority of Horus by jumping twenty full Chapters to his whim.’

‘Is this a theoretical or a practical assessment, Atreus?’ Banzor asks, and all the masters laugh.

‘You’ve seen the tactical audits. The Ghaslakh greenskins are a joke. There is some doubt they’ve even advanced to Golsoria. Their threat has been over-sold. I could take a company from the reserve and crush them in a week. This is about glorification and the demonstration of authority. This is about Horus throwing his weight around.’

Some murmurs, many of agreement.

‘Horus Lupercal,’ says Marius Gage.

‘What?’ says Atreus.

‘Horus Lupercal,’ says Gage. ‘Or Primarch Horus, or Warmaster. You may not consider him a worthier being than our primarch, but the Emperor does, and has bestowed the rank. Even informally, among ourselves, like this, you will refer to him with respect. He’s Warmaster, Atreus, he’s our Warmaster, and if he says we go to war, we go to war.’

Atreus stiffens, and then nods.

‘My apologies.’

Gage nods back. He glances around. Fourteen Chapter Masters have gathered now. He turns to the doors.

They open. Sub-deck hydraulic pistons pull them apart.

‘Enter,’ Guilliman calls. ‘I can see you fretting out there.’

They enter, Gage leading. Their retinues and veterans remain outside.

Guilliman does not look up. He makes another mark with his stylus. Data scrolls across hololithic plates, unobserved, to his left.

Now they are in the compartment, the view through the crystalflex wall has become more spectacular. Below them, the vast hull of the flagship gleams in the sunlight as it extends away. Macragge’s Honour. Twenty-six kilometres of polished ceramite and steel armour. Flanking it, at lateral anchor marks, eighteen fleet barges, each one the size of a city, gleam like silver-blue blades. In tiers above, grav-anchored like moons, are shining troop ships, carriers, Mechanicum bulkers, cruisers and grand cruisers and battleships. The space between is thick with small ships and cargo traffic, zipping between holds and berths.

Below, cargo-luggers raise hauls of materiel from the orbital platforms. They look like leafcutter ants, or scorpions bearing oversized prey in their claws.

Below that, a frigate test cycles its engines in the nearest orbital slip.

Below that, Calth, blue-white with reflected sunlight. Pinpricks mirror-flash in the glare: liftships coming up from the surface, catching the sun.

Gage clears his throat.

‘We had no wish to disturb you, primarch, but–’

‘–there is much to do,’ Guilliman finishes. He glances at his First Master. ‘I have been watching the datastream, Marius. Did you think I hadn’t?’

Gage smiles.

‘Never for a moment, sir.’

A hundred labours, simultaneously. The primarch’s ability to multitask is almost frightening.

‘We wanted to make sure you’d caught every detail,’ says Empion of the 9th. Youngest of them. Newest of them. Gage covers a smile. The poor fool still hasn’t learned not to underestimate.

‘I believe I have, Empion,’ says Guilliman.

‘The Samothrace–’

‘Requires further engine certification,’ says Guilliman. ‘I have told Shipmaster Kulak to divert servitors from orbital slip 1123. Yes, Empion, I had seen that. I had seen that the Mlatus is eighty-two hundred tonnes overladen, and suggest the yard chiefs reassign the 41st Espandor to the High Ascent. The Erud Province muster is running six minutes behind schedule, so Ventanus needs to get Seneschal Arbute to increase handling rates at Numinus Port. Six minutes will expand over the next two days. Kolophraxis needs to get his ship in line. Caren Province is actually timing ahead of schedule, so compliments to Captain Taerone of the 135th, however I doubt he has accommodated the rainstorm predicted for later this afternoon, so he needs to be aware that surface conditions will deteriorate. Speaking of the 135th, there is a sergeant inbound. Thiel. He is marked for censure. Send him to me when he arrives.’

‘That’s a discipline matter that can be dealt with at master level, sir,’ says Antoli. The 13th is his, and the role falls to him.

‘Send him to me when he arrives,’ Guilliman repeats.

Antoli glances at Gage.

‘Of course, my primarch.’

Guilliman rises to his feet and looks at Antoli.

‘I just want to talk to him, Antoli. And, yes, Marius, I am micromanaging again. Indulge me. Loading an army is a precise but tedious occupation, and I would like a little diversion.’

The masters smile.

‘Any show of our principal guests?’ Guilliman asks.

‘Primarch Lorgar’s fleet has been translating into the system since midnight, Calth standard,’ says Gage. ‘The first retinues are assembling. We understand the primarch is crossing the system terminator, inbound at high realspace velocity.’

‘So… sixteen hours out?’

‘Sixteen and a half,’ says Gage.

‘I was rounding down, like the Army does,’ says Guilliman. The men laugh. The primarch looks through the crystalflex wall. Amongst the rows of starships that glint like polished sword blades there is already a scattering of darker vessels, like bloodied weapons that await cleaning.

The first of Lorgar’s warships, docking and manoeuvring, taking up their places in the line.

‘Hails have been received from the arriving captains and commanders,’ says Gage. ‘Erebus requests an audience at your convenience.’

‘He can wait a while,’ says Guilliman. ‘The man is quite deplorable. I’d rather we tolerated them all in one go.’

His masters laugh again.

‘Such indiscretions are for our circle only,’ Guilliman reminds them. ‘This operation is designed to demonstrate the efficiency of the new era. It is entirely designed to glorify my brother Horus and reinforce his authority.’

Guilliman looks at Atreus, who smiles, and Gage, who glances away.

‘Yes, I was listening, Marius. And here’s the thing. Atreus was right. This is show, and this is pomp, and this is, essentially, a waste of time. But – and here’s the thing – Horus is Warmaster. He deserves glorification, and his authority needs to be reinforced. Marius, meanwhile, was quite correct too, Atreus. You will refer to the Warmaster at all times with full respect.’

‘Yes, my primarch.’

‘One last matter,’ says Guilliman. ‘There was a vox signal interrupt six and half minutes ago. I have the details recorded. Probably solar flare distortion, but someone check, please. It sounded for all the world like singing.’

[mark: -61.39.12]

The interrupt is checked, and attributed to solar distortion. A vox artefact. The void forever creaks and whispers around the audible and electromagnetic ranges.

Half an hour later, a rating aboard the Castorex reports hearing voices singing on a vox-link. Twenty minutes later, chanting blocks out the main orbital datafeed for eleven seconds. Its source is unidentified.

An hour later, there are two more bursts, unsourced.

An hour after that, Communication Control reports ‘a series of malfunction events’ and warns that ‘further communication disruption may be expected during the day until the problem is identified’.

An hour after that, on the night side of Calth, the first of the bad dreams begins.

[mark: -50.11.11]

There are many clues. There are many portents. Given the extraordinary thoroughness with which the XIII Legion maintains its readiness, it might be considered tragic, or incompetent, that so few are heeded.

The simple truth is that, in this instance, the Ultramarines do not know what to look for.

Down on the surface of Calth, in the morning light, Tylos Rubio waits with his squad to board transports. They are all of the 21st Company, under Captain Gaius.

Rubio’s head aches. There is a pain behind his eyes. He ignores it. He considers, briefly, mentioning it to an Apothecary, but he does not. They have gone without rest periods for several days during the preparation phase. It has not been possible to shut down higher mental functions and sleep, or at least remedially meditate.

He puts the ache down to this, to background fatigue. It is just another frailty of human flesh that his transhuman biology will target and neutralise within an hour.

It isn’t fatigue. Later, Rubio will regret not mentioning his ailment. He will regret it more bitterly than anything else that happens on Calth. The remorse will hound him to his grave, many years later.

After the death and the slaughter, after the firing and the killing, when fate has taken an extraordinary step and removed him from the field of war, when there is finally a moment to think, Tylos Rubio will realise that in his determination to follow the edicts of the Emperor, he ignored a vital warning sign.

He is not alone. Amongst the two hundred thousand or so Ultramarines on or around Calth that day, there are hundreds of gifted individuals like him, all selflessly and obediently reduced to ordinary ranks. They all ignore the headaches.

Unlike Rubio, few survive the event long enough to regret it.

4

[mark: -28.27.50]

‘I asked to join the advance,’ says Sorot Tchure. For the first time since their reunion, Luciel notes a discomfort in his friend’s disposition.

And for the first time, he also reflects that they are not friends at all. What would be a better word? Comrades, perhaps?

They have met once before, eight years previously. Happenstance drew their companies together in the defence of Hantovania Sebros, the last of the tower cities of Caskian. Side-by-side, for four Terran months, they fought off an insect species whose name or language they never learned. Comrades of circumstance.

Circumstance makes decisions for us all.

The simple truth, unglossed, is that the Legion Astartes XIII Ultramarines and the Legion Astartes XVII Word Bearers are not close. Despite their superficial similarities, they are worlds apart in terms of their organisation and combat ideology. They are as unlike each other as the primarchs who lead them.

Any fool can see that the Emperor’s original purpose, in creating his Legions and his sons, was to generate a variety of fighting forces that would embellish and complement one another. Their various strengths and characters were supposed to shine in contrast. There is, in uniformity, weakness.

And as brothers are different, so they clash. There are rivalries and arguments, fallings-out and bickering, envy and competition. This, too, is supposed to be part of the healthy organic processes of the Legiones Astartes. This is the Emperor’s vision. Let his sons compete. Let his Legions challenge one another. That way, they will spur one another on. That way they will do better. The Emperor, and his oldest, wisest sons, are always there to stop things going too far.

Honorius Luciel and Sorot Tchure stand on the observation deck above the principal hold of the cruiser Samothrace. They have greeted each other with respect and affection, and spent the day supervising the transfer distribution of Army personnel and munitions from Tchure’s warcarrier to the troop ships in Luciel’s oversight. They are alike – alike in stature, alike in rank; one red, one blue, as though stamped from identical fabricatory presses and then finished in different paints.

‘We have a bond, I believe,’ says Tchure. ‘I hope I am not wrong.’

‘We do,’ Luciel agrees. ‘It was an honour to serve with you on Caskian.’

‘We are, therefore… unusual,’ Tchure ventures.

Luciel laughs.

‘You asked to join the advance,’ says Luciel. ‘I imagine your primarch was supportive?’

‘He was.’

‘Just as mine was,’ Luciel replies, ‘when I requested the duty of close protection of Numinus High Anchor. We are cast in the roles of ambassadors, brother.’

‘This is my feeling,’ Tchure nods, greatly relieved that it is now, after hours in each other’s company, at last being spoken of.

‘We are, I believe, the only genuine point of friendship between our Legions,’ says Luciel. ‘No wonder we find ourselves paving the way for the conjunction.’

They walk along the deck, under the immense arches of the hold rib-vaults.

‘My Legion’s pride is bruised,’ says Tchure.

‘Of course it is,’ Luciel replies. ‘Wounded, I would say. And this is the remedy. Our Legions will serve alongside each other in collaborative effort, and thus bond. Our experience serves as an example in miniature.’

‘There has been talk of this as an exercise,’ replies Tchure. ‘That the Warmaster is flexing his authority by commanding two of his brothers, especially one who is so mighty in his own right. But that is smoke. I think Warmaster Horus is displaying remarkable insight. He knows that, as things stand, the unity of any line formed by the Word Bearers and the Ultramarines will be flawed.’

‘Warmaster Horus, in his infinite wisdom, has clearly studied the report on the Caskian Campaign.’

‘He has, I think.’

Bad blood can take a long time to dilute. Sometimes it must be let out. The point of contention, the bruised pride, is simple. Dissatisfied with the progress and performance of the XVII during the Great Crusade, the Emperor sent the Ultramarines to chastise them. It was an absolute and humiliating rebuke, and stemmed from the Emperor’s distaste for the Word Bearers’ zealotry, especially when it came to the veneration of his own person as divine. The Emperor’s truth was the secular Imperial truth. He tolerated more pious attitudes amongst his sons, but only so far.

It was, perhaps, the Ultramarines’ misfortune to be used in such a way. Not just any Legion, but the largest, the most secular, the most efficient, the most disciplined. The most, it could be argued, successful.

Luciel is sympathetic. He has spoken, privately, with his primarch on the subject on several occasions, because Guilliman is evidently bothered by it too. To be used as an instrument of humiliation, and as an example of perfection, does not sit comfortably. Guilliman is concerned that things will never be right in his relations with the Word Bearers. It is clear from the way he has repeatedly quizzed Luciel, the only officer of the XIII to have ever engineered a reasonable confidence with an officer of the XVII.

For the Word Bearers have only ever been loyal and devoted. Luciel knows this. He has no doubt about the level of Tchure’s absolute loyalty. They had their devotion questioned and vilified by the very object of that devotion.

Horus Lupercal, Warmaster, is demonstrating his wisdom and perception right at the start of his command. He is healing wounds. He is actively working to set two of his largest Legions at ease with each other, and close the bitter rift.

‘On Caskian,’ says Luciel, ‘I learned a lot from you, Sorot. I learned to wonder at the stars, and to appreciate the humbling scale of our galaxy.’

‘And I learned from you,’ Tchure replies. ‘I learned the close analysis and appraisal of my enemies, and thus re-measured my own capacity as a warrior.’

The exchange is candid. On Caskian, Tchure reminded Luciel of his place in a greater universe. Though he did not try to convert the Ultramarines captain to any form of spiritual belief, he was able to help him glimpse the ineffable, the cosmic mystery that reminds a man, even a powerful transhuman, of his tiny part in the great design, which forms the beating, vital heart of any faith. In effect, Tchure gave Luciel perspective that beneficially diminished Luciel’s sense of self in the face of the universe. It showed Luciel his place, and reminded him of his purpose.

In return, Luciel demonstrated to Tchure the rigors of practice and theory, a robust schooling that pierced the veil of spirituality with a welcome pragmatism. Luciel reminded Tchure he was superhuman. Tchure reminded Luciel he was only superhuman. Both benefitted immeasurably from the exchange of perspectives.

‘I would know great joy,’ says Luciel, ‘if our brothers on both sides could come to celebrate their common differences the way we have.’

‘I have no doubt,’ replies Tchure, ‘that this conjunction will bring an end to the hostility between our Legions.’

[mark: -26.43.57]

Aeonid Thiel, marked for censure, awaits his interview. He has been aboard the Macragge’s Honour for some hours.

He was told to wait. He is expecting to be called into the presence of Sharad Antoli, Master of the 13th Chapter. He is braced for this. The rebuke will be unstinting, and discipline duties will follow.

He has already been through it once from Taerone, his company captain. During this interview, Thiel made the mistake of attempting to justify his actions. He will not repeat the error when he is called before Chapter Master Antoli.

Thiel has been obliged to wait in a huge anteroom on the fortieth deck. It is a display arsenal, lined with weapons. There are burnished practice cages on raised platforms down the centre of the chamber.

After three hours of standing perfectly still, he relents, removes his helm, and begins to wander the empty chamber, admiring the weapons on display. Most are blade weapons, many master-crafted. They represent the peak weaponcraft of a thousand cultures. This is an exemplar collection, where the highest ranking officers of the XIII come to study weapon types, rehearse and practise with them, and thus improve their theoretical and practical differentials.

Thiel knows he is unlikely to ever come so close to such perfect specimens again. He fights the temptation to take some of the weapons down and examine them. He wants to feel the comparative weights, the individual balances.

When no one has come for a great stretch of time, Thiel reaches a hand out towards a longsword suspended against the wall on a gravity hook.

‘Sergeant Thiel?’

Thiel stops and quickly withdraws his hand. A deck officer in ceremonial dress has entered the chamber.

‘Yes?’

‘I have been asked to inform you that you will not have to wait much longer.’

‘I will wait as long as I am required to,’ replies Thiel.

‘Well,’ the officer shrugs, ‘it will not be much longer. Logistical issues have taken priority. The primarch will call you shortly.’

He turns to leave.

‘Wait, the primarch?’

‘Yes, sergeant.’

‘I was waiting to be called by Chapter Master Antoli,’ says Thiel.

‘No, the primarch.’

‘Ah,’ says Thiel.

The deck officer waits a moment longer, concludes that their conversation is done, and walks out.

The primarch.

Thiel breathes out slowly. It is safe to estimate that he is in about as much trouble as it’s possible to be in.

In which case…

He takes down the longsword. It has extraordinary balance. He sweeps it twice, then turns towards the nearest practice cage.

He halts. He turns back.

Might as well be damned for the whole as a part.

He takes down a Rathian sabre, half the length of the longsword, almost the same weight. A blade in each hand, he walks to the cage.

‘Rehearsal, single sparring mode. Dual wielding, extremity level eight. Commit.’

The cage hums into life, the armature system rises around him, clattering as it begins to turn.

Thiel hunkers down. He raises the two, priceless blades…

[mark: -25.15.19]

Their lift is delayed. Something about a storm out over Caren Province. The sky in the east goes mauve, like a blood bruise.

Sergeant Hellock tells them to bed down and wait for the call. Their lift is delayed, but not in any way that will allow Trooper Bale Rane to leave the site and go see his girl.

‘Standing orders apply, no exceptions,’ says the sergeant. Then he softens slightly. ‘Sorry, Rane. I know what you were hoping.’

Bale Rane sits down and leans his back against a loader pallet. He’s beginning to think that he will spend the rest of his life looking at Sergeant Hellock’s face and never see Neve’s again.

The truth could hardly be more contrary.

‘Is that singing?’ asks Krank. He gets up.

‘That’s singing,’ he says.

Rane can hear it. Two hundred metres away, on the other side of some perimeter fencing, is a compound occupied by Army forces that have arrived with the XVII. A ragged mob, they look. Just the sort of fringe-world vagabonds you’d expect to come scurrying along on the heels of the zealot Word Bearers. They had received a great deal of critical commentary from Sergeant Hellock as they disembarked, criticism that included uniform code, formation, equipment maintenance and parade discipline.

‘Oh, that’s just embarrassing,’ Hellock says, lighting a lho-stick as he watches them dismount from the troop landers. ‘They look like bastard vagrants. Like shit-stupid hunters from some arse-end world.’

The soldiers from off-world indeed do not look promising. They are ragged. There is a wildness to them, as though they have been deprived of something vital for too long. Their skin is pale and their frames are thin. They look like plants that have been starved of light in a cave. They look like heathens.

‘That’s just what we need,’ says Hellock. ‘Heathen auxiliary units.’

They are singing, chanting. It is not a comfortable or attractive sound. It’s atonal. It’s actually quite unpleasant to listen to.

‘That’s going to have to stop,’ the sergeant says. He grinds the butt of a lho-stick under his heel.

He crosses the yard to have a word with the commander of the other unit. The chanting bothers him.

5

[mark: -20.44.50]

Raindrops come out of the dry air like bolter rounds. They explode like black glass against the hood of the speeder that Selaton is gunning down Erud Highway.

Everything’s dust: dust-dry land, dusty-caked metal, a fog raised by lifters and engines and traffic. The flat landscape is pale, harshly lit. The sky has gone oddly dark, opaque. From the passenger seat of the armoured speeder, Ventanus can see the distant line of the hills, swathed in green.

There’s a rainstorm swimming up from the south. Vox says it’s already a mire down in Caren.

It’ll be a mire here too, before very long, Ventanus thinks. The light is so weird. The sky so black, the ground so light. The raindrops look like glass beads, like tears. They explode all over him, all over his armour, all over the speeder, wet black streaking the film of white dust all surfaces have acquired during the day.

The raindrops hit the dusty ground, the highway, the scabby verge, making millions of little black entry wounds, little black craters, little puffs of white. Far away, little silver threads of lightning glitter in the low cloud, like seams of bright ore exposed in coal.

Selaton drives like an idiot. The speeder is a hefty two-man machine with forward gunmounts, its cobalt-blue armour flaked with dust and bruised with the dents and scrapes of use. The cockpit is open. Grav plates keep the ground at bay, and the drive-plant is over-powered to help it slide all that armour around.

It’s a light recon vehicle that’s mean enough to fight its way out of bother. Ventanus requisitioned it for the day as staff transport.

Now Selaton’s driving it like an idiot.

He’s affecting just about maximum horizontal velocity, pluming a white tail of dust out behind them along the flat, straight roadway. The rain is trying to wet the dust back down, but it’s too thick. A nav-track display to the left of the driver blinks a route overlay. The display is armoured and grilled against wear and tear. The speeder is a working machine with bare metal along most seams.

The twitching cursor on the illuminated display is supposed to be them. The etched line is the highway. At the foot of the screen is a blob, that’s Erud station. At the top, a triangular icon.

Red hazard hatching appears on the etched line ahead of the cursor.

‘Slower,’ says Ventanus over the helmet link.

‘Too fast?’ Selaton replies, eager glee in his voice.

Ventanus doesn’t even look down. He taps the screen of the nav-track.

Selaton glances, sees it, eases off the throttle immediately. They’re coming up on the tail of a muster convoy. Even as they bleed off speed, they hit the dust wake of the moving column.

Selaton steers out, crosses the centre of the highway, starts to overtake. Trundling troop transports, cargo-20s, towed artillery, tank transporters, laden. Each hulking vehicle zips by and falls behind, each one glimpsed for a second as they pass it in the odd light, in the air that is both dry with dust and wet with rain. Troop truck, gone. Troop truck, gone. Troop truck, gone. Troop truck, gone. A garland of cheers and hoots from a transport load of Army troopers, waving them past.

Self-propelled guns now, zipping past, barrels up to sniff the sky. Ten, twenty, thirty units. The damn column is forty kilometres long. Shadowswords. Minotaurs. New Infernus-pattern armour and regimental troop carriers.

Ventanus watches beads of rain, black with soot, crawling and quivering over the hood of the speeder.

He’s had to leave Sydance in charge at Erud, with reliable sergeants like Archo, Ankrion and Barkha to back him up. There’s something to sort out with the Numinus seneschals. Local politics. Ventanus hates local politics, but this has come from the primarch’s staff directly. Port affairs. Handling rates. Diplomacy.

Ventanus knows what to do with a boltgun.

This is another unnuanced exercise in teaching them the other crafts their lives will one day require. Courtesy. Effective management. Authority. Basically, anything that doesn’t involve a boltgun. It has Guilliman’s handprints all over it.

It’s the sort of issue that Ventanus would prefer to resolve with a quick vox order, but he’s been told to handle it in person. So, a forty-minute wasted trip to the port where the seneschals he needs to see aren’t, now an hour up the Erud Highway instead to… where was it?

The Holophusikon. Holophusikon.

Ventanus isn’t stupid. He knows what the word means. He just doesn’t know what it is.

A triangular icon on the navigation display.

Selaton makes a sound. It’s a murmur of something. Surprise. He’s impressed by something.

He drops more speed.

They’re coming up on Titans. Titans marching down the highway towards the port, single file.

They trudge. They are immense. Outrider gun-carts and skitarii speeders with flashing lights surrounding their feet, waving Ventanus wide.

They pass through their trooping shadows. Shadow, sunlight, shadow, sunlight. Each shadow is a darkness like the underworld. The Titans are caked in dust. They look weary, like ramshackle metal prisoners, giant convicts shuffling towards the stockade.

Or a gibbet.

The odd, hard sunlight catches their upper surfaces and cockpit ports. A gleam in the eye. A killer gaze. Ancient giants that have endured all wars, obediently marching towards the next one.

Ventanus finds himself looking up, looking back, gazing at them as they pass. Even he is impressed. Forty-seven Titans. He can hear the tectonic boom of their footsteps over the howl of the speeder’s engines.

The biggest are filling the highway. A supply convoy moving in the opposite direction has been forced to pull onto the shoulder and wait to let them pass. Marshals wave batons and lamps.

Selaton, urgent, has pulled wide. Now the shoulder is filled with stationary transports, so he pulls wider still, crossing the highway marker, the shoulder, the culvert and ditch, riding off the transit way onto the scrub beyond, building speed again, raising a foxtail of grey dust. He uprates the grav elements, lifts another fifty centimetres for terrain clearance, and opens the throttle again. They bank, accelerating. The speeder’s drive wails. They’re moving parallel to the highway.

Ventanus looks back.

He fancies one or two of the Titans turn their massive heads to watch; disdainful, grumpy. Who is that in the tiny speeder, racing past? Why are they so impatient?

Where are they going in such a damned hurry?

[mark: -19.12.36]

The Holophusikon. It turns out it is a triangle, like the icon.

A pyramid. Actually, a pyramid raised on three smaller pyramids, each one supporting a base corner of the largest. It is made of faced ashlar and cream stone. Ventanus notes that it is an impressive building, in terms of both scale and design.

It might even be beautiful. He’s not sure. He has no expertise in such determinations.

They can see it from ten kilometres away. The Erud Highway passes it, linking to the Holophusikon’s own feeder roadways, and the township of service buildings and garrisons. Numinus City resolves as a gleaming skyline on the horizon.

The Holophusikon is stately, immense, planted in the open space of the plains. Though there is an ample town of buildings around it, it still looks new, as though it has just been built and is waiting for a city to sprout around it.

Or it looks as if it has been sent into wilderness exile for punishment.

The rain has stopped, briefly. The wind is up. The light catches the monolith’s sunward faces, bright. The other aspects are deep brown shadows. Its perfect geometry is emphasised.

Approach roads are avenues hung with banners that jump and flap in the wind. Golden masts, gilt canopy poles, lamp stands. The banners bear the heraldry of the Five Hundred Worlds of Ultramar, of Terra, of the Imperium, of the XIII. Ventanus hasn’t seen so many banners in one place since he last looked at picts of the Triumph at Ullanor.

There are gardens in the ground too. They are very green. Irrigation has dragged water from the Boros River out into the arid plains to create an oasis. Pools shimmer. Hydration systems fill the air with spray. Miniature rainbows form. Palms nod.

‘Slow down,’ says Ventanus.

They ride up under the flapping banners, and through the cool darkness under a grand arch, and coast into an inner courtyard. There is a great flight of steps like the processional advance to a temple. More banners drape from the walls of the inner precinct. There are other vehicles in sight, and dots that are people dwarfed by the immensity of the enclosure. Motorised staircases with ceramite treads flow silently on either side of the main flight.

They dismount. The speeder wobbles like a small boat as their weight leaves it. Liveried footmen approach to take care of the vehicle.

Ventanus starts up the steps, his sergeant behind him. He unclasps and removes his helm, breathes unfiltered air, feels heat and light on his face.

‘The Holophusikon,’ says Selaton.

‘A universal museum,’ says Ventanus.

‘I understood that.’

Ventanus has little patience for, or interest in, such places. He is prepared to admit that this is a flaw in his character.

They arrive at the top of the towering flight. A standard human being, even an exceptionally fit one, would be slightly short of breath at the end of such a climb in the sunlight. If anything, their pace is faster by the time they reach the top.

A marble platform, a broad entrance. Beyond, a huge and airy stone space, lit by natural light through slots in the roof. Cool. The spacious echo of murmured voices.

Ventanus approaches through the broad entrance. It is rectangular, landscape in form. A vast slot. The lip of the doorway overhead is thirty metres wide.

There are a few other visitors, tiny clumps of figures in the vast interior space. Ventanus is struck by the scale of the space, by its hollow, empty sound. Around the edges of the great chamber there are alcoves, podiums, plinths, displays. The exhibits, he supposes. That’s where the visitors are. Why build such a vast space and then dot the few exhibits around the edges?

‘What is this supposed to be?’ asks Selaton.

‘I don’t pretend to understand curation,’ replies Ventanus.

More liveried footmen approach them.

‘How may we serve, sir?’ asks one.

‘Ventanus, Captain, 4th Company, First Chapter, XIII,’ Ventanus replies. ‘I am looking for–’

He has memorised the names.

‘–Seneschals Arbute, Darial and Eterwin. Or, in fact, any senior municipal servant whose portfolio encompasses the starport.’

‘They are all in the building,’ the footman replies. He is clearly being fed behind the eyes by some direct-to-retina datasystem. Ventanus can tell from the slightly glassy way his eyes de-focus to verify the names.

‘Could you fetch them?’ asks Ventanus.

‘They are in session all afternoon,’ replies the footman. ‘Is it urgent?’

Ventanus chooses his next word carefully. It’s not so much the word as the hesitation he places in front of it, the hesitation that says I am wearing battle plate, I am armed, and I am doing my very best to be polite.

‘Yes,’ he says.

The footmen hurry away.

The Ultramarines wait.

‘Sir, is that–?’ Selaton starts.

‘It is,’ Ventanus replies.

Ventanus walks towards the distant figure that they have recognised. The figure is kneeling in front of one of the exhibit plinths. Attendants wait for him at a respectful distance.

The kneeling figure sees Ventanus and gets up. The gears and motors of his armour hum. He is taller than Ventanus, broader, the bulk of his plate master-crafted and finished with expansive golden wings, lions, eagles. He is leaning on a broadsword that is fully the height of a standard human.

‘Lord champion,’ Ventanus says, saluting.

‘Captain Ventanus,’ the giant replies. He eschews a salute, hands off the mighty sword to a bearer, and clasps Ventanus’s steel-cased hand between his own.

Ventanus is flattered to be recognised by such an august person.

‘What are you here for?’ the giant asks. ‘I thought you were running the Erud muster.’

‘You are well-informed, tetrarch,’ says Ventanus.

‘Information is victory, my brother,’ the tetrarch says, and laughs.

Ventanus explains his errand, the diplomatic function.

The tetrach listens. His name is Eikos Lamiad. His rank is tetrarch and also Primarch’s Champion. The four tetrarchs represent the four master worlds that command the fiefdoms of Ultramar under the authority of Macragge: Saramanth, Konor, Occluda and Iax. Lamiad’s fiefdom is Konor, the forge world. The tetrarchs are the four princes of Ultramar, and they rule the Five Hundred Worlds, standing in the hierarchy of power below Guilliman and above the Chapter Masters and the planetary lords.

‘I know the seneschals,’ says Lamiad. ‘I can introduce you.’

‘I would appreciate that, my lord.’ Ventanus replies. ‘It is a matter of expediency.’

Half of Eikos Lamiad’s face, the right half, is heroically handsome. The other half is a pale porcelain blank seamlessly embedded into the flesh, an elegant estimation of the missing face. The left eye is a gold-pupilled mechanism that winds and counter-circles like an antique optical instrument.

Lamiad was grievously wounded during the defence of Bathor. Shuriken shrieker rounds blew his skull apart and dismembered his body, but the worshipful Mechanicum elders of Konor Forge rebuilt him, respectful of his service and his good governance of their world holding.

It is said he would inhabit a Dreadnought chassis now, but for their ministrations.

‘Do you like the Holophusikon, Ventanus?’ the mighty champion enquires. His entourage of servitors, bearers, aides and battle-brothers is silent and stoic. All of them are in rich, ceremonial dress.

‘“Like”, lord?’

‘Appreciate, then?’

‘I have not given it much thought, lord.’

Lamiad smiles, the half of his face that can.

‘I sense a reservation, Remus,’ he says.

‘If I may speak candidly?’ Ventanus says.

‘Do.’

‘I have been to many worlds, lord, Imperial and not Imperial. I have, I think, lost count of the number of repositories of all wisdom I have been shown. Every world, every culture has its great library, its archive of wonders, its data store, its trove of lore, its casket of all secrets. How many ultimate archives of all universal knowledge can there be?’

‘You sound jaded, Remus.’

‘I apologise.’

‘Cultural archiving is important, Remus.’

‘Information is victory, lord.’

‘Indeed,’ says Lamiad. ‘We need to store our learning. We have also, during the Great Crusade, learned vast amounts by acquiring the archives of compliant cultures.’

‘I understand the–’

Lamiad raises his hand, a soft gesture.

‘I wasn’t reprimanding you, Remus. While I acknowledge the import of careful data gathering, I am also tired of the overly reverential way in which places like this are regarded. Oh, another holy repository of the most secret secrets of all, you say? Pray tell me what secrets you might keep that I have not learned from a thousand crypts just like this?’

They laugh.

‘You know what I like about this one, Remus?’

‘No, lord. What?’

‘It’s empty,’ says Lamiad.

The Holophusikon was commissioned thirty years before, during the development of Numinus City. It is younger than both of them, younger than their careers. Construction work has only recently been finished. Curators have just begun to import objects and data for display and storage.

‘They are usually so old, aren’t they?’ Lamiad remarks. ‘Dusty tombs of information, closed and guarded for unnumbered centuries, with special keys, and special rituals to get in, and all that tedious mystery. What I like about this place is its emptiness. Its intent. It is a proposition, Remus. It’s a great undertaking that looks forward, not back. It is open, and ready to be filled with mankind’s future. One day it will be a universal museum, and perhaps it will stand, alongside the libraries of Terra, as one of the greatest data repositories in the Imperium. For now, it is an ambition, built of stone. A deliberate statement of our intention to establish a robust and sophisticated culture, and to maintain it, and to record and measure it.’

‘It’s a museum of the future,’ says Ventanus.

‘Well said. It is. A museum of the future. For now, that is exactly what it is.’

‘And that’s why you’ve come here?’ asks Ventanus.

Lamiad shows him the exhibit he was inspecting when Ventanus arrived. In a sterile suspension field is the stabilised corner of a fire-damaged banner. Body heat triggers the hololithic placard, revealing origin details.

It is part of the banner that Lamiad carried on Bathor. This exhibit, one of the first few hundred chosen, honours him and his achievement, and commemorates that great battle.

‘I have tours of service planned that will take me from Ultramar for at least ten years,’ Lamiad says. ‘I felt I should come and see this before I embarked. See it with my own eyes.’

He looks at Ventanus.

‘Well, with my flesh eye and the one the Mechanicum made for me.’

They talk of the muster for a while, and of the coming campaign. Neither of them mentions the XVII.

Then Lamiad says, ‘They say Calth will be named a major world soon. It is developing fast, and its strengths are evident. The shipyards. The fabrication. Its status will be upgraded, and it will control a fief of its own.’

‘I will not be surprised,’ replies Ventanus.

‘It will have its own tetrarch too,’ says Lamiad. ‘It will have to. As a major world, it will be obliged to appoint a military governor, and produce a champion and a champion’s honour guard for the primarch.’

‘Indeed.’

‘There is talk of Aethon. Aethon of the 19th. As a potential candidate for the post.’

‘Aethon is a fine candidate,’ Ventanus agrees.

‘There are others in consideration. There is, I am told by our beloved primarch, some art to the choosing of a tetrarch.’

‘And it can’t be a tetrarch, can it?’ says Ventanus. ‘Perhaps you will all become quintarchs once there are five of you?’

Lamiad laughs again.

‘Perhaps they will coin another title, Remus,’ he says. ‘One that is not numerically specific. Calth won’t be the last, merely the next. Ultramar grows. As we meet the future and fill this Holophusikon, we will have more than Five Hundred Worlds, and more than five fiefdoms. Like the emptiness of these halls, we must be ready to accommodate the changes and the expansions to come.’

He turns. Figures in long, pale green robes are approaching them, followed by attendants.

‘Here come the seneschals,’ says the Primarch’s Champion. ‘Let me introduce you so you can get your business done.’

6

[mark: -16.44.12]

At the orbital Watchtower, Server of Instrumentation Uhl Kehal Hesst communes with the noosphere.

The code is speaking. It is gabbling.

The pleats of his floor-length Mechanicum robes are so crisp, he looks as if he has been carved by stone-masons. He stands at the summit of a Watchtower that is similarly straight and slender. The tower casts its shadow across Kalkas Fortalice, the armoured citadel that faces Numinus City across the glittering width of the Boros. It is a cauldron of walls and castellated towers, a city in its own right, but a place of defence, a lifeguard set to stand at the shoulder of Numinus and protect it from harm.

Ten thousand people work in the Watchtower, and another fifty thousand function in the gun towers and administration buildings around it. It is alert, a sentient place, its noospheric architecture designed on Hesst’s forge world, Konor, and supported by technologies supplied directly from the fabricatories of Mars.

The Watchtower’s command deck is vast, and bustling with staff. Windows, their blast shutters raised, gaze out across the river and the city to one side, and out towards the lowlands on the other. Hesst can image the traffic at the starport, the dust raised by marshalling on the plains, the bright land and the storm-tinted sky, but he is not interested in the view.

The tower supports its own manifold field, and is inloading data to him and the other seniors at a rate equivalent to the noospheric broadcast of eight hundred Battle Titans. Sixty moderati of the highest quality, working in amniotic armourglas caskets set into the deck, help to cushion that flow and parse it for comprehension.

From this deck, from this summit, Hesst can issue – by means of a simple code command across his permanent MIU link – the order to commit the planet’s weapon grid. Two hundred and fifty thousand surface-based weapons stations, including silo launchers and automated plasma ordnance, plus tower and turret guns, field stations, polar weapon pits. He can activate the immense void shield systems that umbrella Calth’s principal habitation centres. He can bring on-line the nine hundred and sixty-two orbital platforms, which include outward-facing protection systems and surface-aiming interdiction networks. Furthermore, he can harness and coordinate any and all available forces on the ground, and any fleet composition assembling at high anchor or in the shipyards.

Which means that, today, because of the conjunction, Server Hesst has immediate personal control over more firepower than Warmaster Horus. Or, it’s conceivable, the Emperor himself.

This consideration does not impress Server Hesst, or fill him with anxiety. Hesst is aware, however, that Magos Meer Edv Tawren is reading his elevated adrenal levels.

Tawren is young and efficient, tall, fully modified. She has excelled in her advancement through the developmental levels of the Mechanicum, and is profoundly good at her work. She supervises the Analyticae. Hesst is fond of her. He seldom accesses his emotions, but on the rare occasions that he decides to use them, he always notices the warmth with which he perceives her. Her modifications are technically pleasing, and her base organics possess a certain aesthetic.

<You are running hot,> she blurts to him in binaric code, a microsecond transmission on the intimate direct mode. It is non-verbal, but the blurt contains code signifiers for Hesst, and for a Titan battle unit straining its drives.

<Not at all. Rumination: Today is simply demanding.>

Tawren nods. She is ghosting his overwatch. He is aware of her presence in the manifold at his shoulder, just as she is standing next to him on the deck in the fleshsphere. Her fingers are trembling, touching invisible keys, coordinating data via the subtle haptics. Today’s difficulty is not shooting at things.

With two fleets in conjunction, traffic density above Calth is singularly high. Virtually all of it is moving according to non-standard or adjusted traffic patterns, extraordinary situational shifts of movement, course and proximity that are not coded into the regular watch registers. This is a one-time thing, for one day only: their responsibility is the safe and assured orchestration of a vast armada.

Calth’s weapons grid has multiple redundancies and stratified forms of cross-check and authorisation. It cannot be abused or used in error by any single individual: not Hesst, not the forty other servers in the Watchtower, not the six thousand two hundred and seventy-eight magi and adepts stationed planet-wide, or the garrison commanders of the Army or the local divisions. Nothing can happen without his personal consent.

Every time a ship arrives, or moves, or passes another, or joins formation, or enters a yard, or docks, or begins to refuel, or begins a sunward circuit to certify its drives, an alarm sounds. Every non-standard motion or manoeuvre system-activates the grid, and Hesst has to reject a firing query.

It’s actually the most superb test and demonstration of Calth’s grid, but it is becoming tiresome. From the summit of the Watchtower, Server Hesst controls the effective firepower of a major fleet, that firepower distributed across the surface and orbit. The system is hyper-sensitive, so that nothing can take it by surprise and secure an advantage. Every non-standard movement triggers an automatic firing solution from the grid, which Hesst has to personally reject in discretionary mode. He’s currently getting between eighteen and twenty-five a second.

Tawren knows that standard Mechanicum operating practice under such conditions, as advised by both the forgemasters of Konor and the exalted elders of Mars, is to temporarily bypass the multi-nodal automatics of the grid‘s alert processors and, for the duration of the fleet manoeuvres, transfer approval control to the automatic stations. Let the sentient machines of the platforms shoulder the burden. Let them cross-check the constant inload of data. Let them verify the anchorage codes and the traffic registration marks.

She also knows that Hesst is a determined individual who takes great pride in his work, and in his duties as a server. Calth’s planetary grid is optimised to run on multi-nodal automatics with a server or servers supplying final approval of all operations. To switch out to automatics alone is to admit the weakness of the fleshbrain. It is to resort to machine alone rather than bioengine synthesis. It is to acknowledge the limits of man, and to submit to the clinical efficiency of cold code.

They have discussed this. They have even discussed it using flesh-voices and vocal chords, unplugged. Hesst has the purest vision of the Mechanicum’s dream, and she adores him for it. It is not, as so many of the unmodified in society believe, the adoration of the machine. It is the use of the machine to extend humanity. It is apotheosis through synthesis. To stand back and allow the machines to do the work is disgusting to Hesst. He probably finds the concept more abhorrent than an unmodified human would.

<It’s not an admission of failure, you know?> she blurts. She is resuming a conversation they were having two days before, as if no intervening time had elapsed.

He acknowledges the fact, recognising the conversational marker appended to her code that reopens his saved file of that exchange.

<It is, in fact, a practice recommended by Mars.>

Hesst nods.

<If we build systems we cannot run, what is the point of building them? Tell me where that leads, Magos Tawren?>

<The annihilation of self. The abnegation of sentience.>

‘Exactly,’ says Hesst. His use of flesh-voice surprises her, but she instantly realises that he has switched from binaric in order to make a symbolic point. This amuses her, and she shows him that she is amused by using a facial expression.

‘You think this is about my pride, don’t you, Meer?’ he asks.

She shrugs. Like him, she is still, simultaneously, making subtle haptic gestures and scouring the noosphere’s dataflow. ‘I think that no one, not even an adept of the rank server or above, has ever run an operation like this on discretionary mode alone. I think you’re attempting some kind of record. Or trying to win a medal. Or trying to rupture a major organ.’

Her voice is clean, as pure as code. He sometimes wishes she would use it more.

‘It is simply a question of security and efficiency,’ he says. ‘The grid is designed to be multi-nodal. That is its strength. It has no single heart, no single brain. It is global. Take out any point, even this Watchtower, even me, and any other ranking server or magos can take over. The grid will adjust and recognise the discretion of the next in line. This tower could topple, and a server on the far side of the planet would instantly take over. Multi-nodal redundancy is a perfect system. You cannot kill anything that has no centre. So I’d prefer not to weaken the integrity of this planet’s defence system even slightly by opting out of discretion and transferring approval oversight to the orbital engines.’

‘This conjunction is expected to continue for another day or two,’ she remarks. ‘When would you like me to take over from you? Before or after you stroke out and tumble to the floor?’

Tawren realises he isn’t listening. He has become preoccupied with the inload.

‘What is it?’ she asks.

‘Scrapcode.’

Any complex information system will produce scrapcode as a result of internal degradation. She knows that. She wonders what he means, and peers into the manifold.

She sees the scrapcode, dull amber threads of diseased information buried in the mass of healthy data. There is two per cent more of it than any Analyticae projection has calculated for the Calth noosphere, even under the irregular circumstances of the day. That is an unacceptable margin.

<Filtration isn’t clearing it. I don’t know where it’s coming from.>

He has reverted to binaric blurt. There is no time for words.

[mark: -15.02.48]

Criol Fowst has been given a blade, but it proves impractical to use it. He uses his sidearm instead. The oblators need to be killed cleanly and quickly. There isn’t time to fool about with a knife.

Outside the shelter, his appointed officers are rousing the men in song. Chanting fills the air. They have been encouraged to bring viols and qatars, tambours, pipes, horns and bells. It is supposed to sound like a celebration. The eve of battle, honoured allies, the anticipation of glory, all of that nonsense. It is supposed to sound joyous.

And it does, but Fowst can hear the ritual theme inside the noisy singing. He can hear it because he knows it’s buried there. Old words. Words that were old before humans learned to speak. Potent words. You can set them to any tune, to the verse-and-chorus of an Army battle reel. They work just the same.

The singing is loud. It’s quite a commotion, six thousand men in this corner of the muster fields alone. Loud enough to drown out his shots.

He pulls the trigger.

The matt-grey autopistol barks, bucks in his hand, and slams a single round through the temple it’s pressed against. Blood and tissue spray, splashing his jacket. The kneeling man flops sideways, as if the weight of his punctured head is pulling him down. There’s a whiff of fycelene in the air, a smell of powdered blood, burned flesh and blood vapour.

Fowst looks down at the man he has just shot and murmurs a blessing, the sort one might offer to a traveller embarking on a long and difficult voyage. His mercy almost came too late that time. The man’s eyes had begun to melt.

Fowst nods, and two of his appointed officers step forward to drag the body aside. Now the corpses of seven oblators lie on the groundsheet spread out to one side.

The next man steps up, stone-faced, unfazed at the prospect of imminent death. Fowst embraces him and kisses his cheeks and lips.

Then he steps back.

The man, like the seven who have come before him, knows what to do. He has prepared. He has stripped down to his undershirt and breeches. He’s given everything else away, even his boots. The Brotherhood of the Knife uses whatever equipment it can gather or forage: hauberks, body armour, ballistic cloth, sometimes a little chainmesh. There’s usually a coat or cloak or robe over the top to keep out the weather, always dark grey or black. With no more need for any field gear, the man has given away his good coat, his gloves and his armour to those who can use them later. His weapons too.

He’s holding his bottle.

In his case, it’s a blue glass drinking bottle with a stoppered cap. His oblation floats inside it. The man before him used a canteen. The man before that, a hydration pack from a medicae’s kit.

He opens it and pours the water out through his fingers so the slip of paper inside is carried out into his palm. The moment it’s out of suspension in the hydrolytic fluid, the moment it comes into contact with the air, it starts to warm up. The edges begin to smoulder.

The man drops the bottle, steps forward and kneels in front of the vox-caster. The key pad is ready.

He looks at the slip of paper, shivering as he reads the characters inscribed upon it. A thin wisp of white smoke is beginning to curl off the edge of the slip.

His hand trembling, the man begins to enter the word into the caster’s pad, one letter at a time. It is a name. Like the seven that have been typed in before, it can be written in human letters. It can be written in any language system, just as it can be sung to any tune.

Criol Fowst is a very intelligent man. He is one of a very few members of the Brotherhood who have actively come looking for this moment. He was born and raised on Terra to an affluent family of merchants, and pursued their interests into the stars. He’d always been hungry for something: he thought it was wealth and success. Then he thought it was learning. Then he realised that learning was just another mechanism for the acquisition of power.

He’d been living on Mars when he was approached and recruited by the Cognitae. At least, that’s what they thought they’d done.

Fowst knew about the Cognitae. He’d made a particular study of occult orders, secret societies, hermetic cabals of mysteries and guarded thought. Most of them were old, Strife-age or earlier. Most were myths, and most of the remainder charlatans. He’d come to Mars looking for the Illuminated, but they turned out to be a complete fabrication. The Cognitae, however, actually existed. He asked too many questions and toured datavendors looking for too many restricted works. He made them notice him.

If the Cognitae had ever been a real order, these men were not it. At best, they were some distant bastard cousin of the true bloodline. But they knew things he did not, and he was content to learn from them and tolerate their theatrical rituals and pompous rites of secrecy.

Ten months later, in possession of several priceless volumes of transgressive thought that had previously been the property of the Cognitae, Fowst took passage rimwards. The Cognitae did not pursue him to recover their property, because he had made sure that they would not be capable of doing so. The bodies, dumped into the heat vent of the hive reactor at Korata Mons, were never recovered.

Fowst went out into the interdicted sectors where the ‘Great Crusade’ was still being waged, away from the safety of compliant systems. He headed for the Holy Worlds where the majestic XVII Legion, the Word Bearers, were actively recruiting volunteer armies from the conquered systems.

Fowst was especially intrigued by the Word Bearers. He was intrigued by their singular vision. Though they were one of the eighteen, one of the Legiones Astartes, and thus a core part of the Imperium’s infrastructure, they alone seemed to exhibit a spiritual zeal.

The Imperial truth was, in Fowst’s opinion, a lie. The Palace of Terra doggedly enforced a vision of the galaxy that was rational and pragmatic, yet any fool could see that the Emperor relied upon aspects of reality that were decidedly un-rational. The mind-gifted, for example. The empyrean. Only the Word Bearers seemed to acknowledge that these things were more than just useful anomalies. They were proof of a greater and denied mystery. They were evidence of some transcendent reality beyond reality, of some divinity, perhaps. All of the Legiones Astartes were founded on unshakeable faith, but only the Word Bearers placed their belief in the divine. They worshipped the Emperor as an aspect of some greater power.

Fowst agreed with them in every detail except one. The universe contained beings worthy of adoration and worship. The Emperor, for all his ability, simply wasn’t one of them.

On Zwanan, in the Veil of Aquare, a Holy World still dark with the smoke of Word Bearers compliance, Criol Fowst joined the Brotherhood of the Knife, and began his service to the XVII primarch.

He was able. He had been educated on Terra. He was no heathen backworlder energised by crude fanaticism. He rose quickly, from rank and file to appointed officer, from that to overseer, from that to his current position as a confided lieutenant. The name for this is majir. His sponsor and superior is a Word Bearers legionary called Arune Xen and, through him, Fowst has been honoured with several private audiences with Argel Tal of the Gal Vorbak. He has attended ministries, and listened to Argel Tal speak.

Xen has given Fowst his ritual blade. It is an athame blessed by the Dark Apostles. It is the most beautiful thing he has ever owned. When he holds it in his hand, byblow gods hiss at him from the shadows.

The Brotherhood of the Knife is not so-called because it favours bladework in combat. The name is not literal. In the dialect of the Holy Worlds, the Brotherhood is the Ushmetar Kaul, the ‘sharp edge by which false reality might be slit and pulled away to reveal god’.

Fowst’s attention has wavered. The oblator has finished keying in the eighth name. The slip of paper is burning in his hand. Smoking scads are falling from his fingers. He is shaking, trying not to scream. His eyes have cooked in their sockets.

Fowst remembers himself. He raises the sidearm to deliver mercy, but its clip is empty. He tosses it away, and uses the athame that Battle-brother Xen gifted him.

It is a messier mercy.

Eight names are now in the system. Eight names broadcast into the dataflow of the Imperial communications network. No filter or noospheric barrier will block them or erase them, because they are only composed of regular characters. They are not toxic code. They are not viral data. But once they are inside the system, and especially once they have been read and absorbed by the Mechanicum’s noosphere, they will grow. They will become what they are. They will stop being combinations of letters, and they will become meanings.

Caustic. Infectious. Indelible.

There are eight of them. The sacred number. The Octed.

And there can be more. Eight times eight times eightfold eight…

Majir Fowst steps back, wipes blood from his face, and welcomes the next man up to the vox-caster with a kiss.

[mark: -14.22.39]

Still over twelve hours out of Calth orbitspace, the fleet tender Campanile performs a series of course corrections, and begins the final phase of its planetary approach.

7

[mark: -13.00.01]

‘I can assure you, sir,’ says Seneschal Arbute, ‘the labour guilds are fully aware of the importance of this undertaking.’

She’s a surprisingly young woman, plain and businesslike. Her robes are grey.

Sergeant Selaton revises his estimate. What would he know? She’s not so much plain, just unadorned. No cosmetics, no jewellery. Hair cropped short. In his experience, high status females tended to be rather more decorative.

They have accompanied her from the Holophusikon to the port, following her official carrier in their speeder. She is a member of the Legislature’s trade committee. Darial and Eterwin have more power, but both insist that Arbute has a much more effective relationship with the guild rank and file. Her father was a cargo porter.

The port district is loud and busy. Huge semi-auto hoists and cranes, some of them looking like quadruped Titans, are transferring cargo stacks to the giant bulk lifters on the field.

Captain Ventanus seems to have wearied of the effort. He stands to one side, watching the small fliers and messenger craft zip across the port like dragonflies over a pond. He leaves Selaton to do the talking.

‘With respect,’ says Selaton, ‘the guildsmen and porters are falling behind the agreed schedule. We’re beginning to get back-up in the mustering areas.’

‘Is this an official complaint?’ she asks.

‘No,’ he replies. ‘But it has been handed down from the primarch. If you can put in any kind of word, my captain would appreciate it. He’s under pressure.’

She smiles quickly.

‘We’re all under pressure, sergeant. The guilds have never undertaken a materiel load on this scale. The estimated schedule was as accurate as they could make it, but it is still an estimation. The porting crew and loaders are bound to hit unexpected delays.’

‘Still,’ says Selaton. ‘A word to their foremen. From a member of the city legislature. A little encouragement, and an acknowledgement of their effort.’

‘Just so I know, what is the shortfall?’ asks Arbute.

‘When we came looking for you, six minutes,’ he says.

‘Is that a joke?’

‘No.’

‘Six minutes is… Forgive me, sergeant. Six minutes is nothing. It’s not even a margin of error. You came to find me, and dragged me here from the Holophusikon ceremonies because of a six-minute lag?’

‘It’s twenty-nine minutes now,’ replies Selaton. ‘I do not wish to sound rude, seneschal, but this is a Legion-led operation. The tolerances are tighter than in commercial or regular military circumstances. Twenty-nine minutes is bordering on the abominable.’

‘I’ll talk to the foremen,’ she says. ‘I’ll see if there’s any reserve they can draw on. There has been bad weather.’

‘I know.’

‘And some incidence of system failure. Junk information. Corrupt data.’

‘That happens too. I’m sure you will do what you can.’

She looks at him, and nods.

‘Wait here,’ she says.

[mark: -11.16.21]

‘In your considered opinion?’ Guilliman asks.

Magos Pelot is the senior serving Mechanicum representative aboard the flagship Macragge’s Honour, and he’s just been required to present the primarch with awkward news. He thinks for a moment before replying. He does not want to tar his institution with verdicts of incompetence, but he has also served the primarch long enough to know that little good ever comes of sugaring the pill.

‘The scrapcode problem we have identified is a hindrance, sir,’ he says. ‘It is regrettable. Especially on a day like today. These things do happen. I won’t pretend they don’t. Natural degradation. Code errors. They can occur without warning for any number of reasons. The Mechanicum dearly wishes we weren’t being plagued by them during this event.’

‘Cause?’

‘Perhaps the sheer scale of the conjunction itself? Precisely because today is important. The simple mass of data–’

‘Is it proportional?’ asks Guilliman. ‘Is it the proportional increment you would naturally expect to find?’

Magos Pelot hesitates. His mechadendrite implants ripple.

‘It is slightly higher. Very slightly.’

‘So it’s an abnormal level, in the experience of the Mechanicum? It’s not natural degradation?’

‘Technically,’ Pelot agrees. ‘But not in any way that should be deemed alarming.’

Guilliman smiles to himself.

‘So this is just… for my information?’

‘It would have been inappropriate not to inform you, lord.’

‘What are the implications, magos?’

‘The Server of Instrumentation insists he can continue to oversee the operation, but the Mechanicum believes his attention would be better spent identifying and eradicating this scrapcode problem before it develops any further. For the duration of that activity, the server would suspend discretion, and oversight would be managed automatically by the data-engines in the orbital yard hub.’

Guilliman considers this. He looks out through the crystalflex at the stars.

‘A group of seniors from the Mechanicum, your esteemed colleagues, Pelot, dined with me on Macragge just a month ago. They were extolling the virtues of the newest generation cogitators that had been installed to run the Calth yards and grid. They were immensely proud of their machines.’

‘So they should be, lord.’

‘They spoke about them as if they were… as if they had personalities, as individuals. I took that as an indication of their near-perfection in the development of the machine-spirit.’

‘Indeed, my lord.’

‘We can build a world of greater perfection and higher performance than the human form, magos. We can exceed the natural limits of humanity.’

‘Sir.’

‘I’m saying, perhaps we should trust your wonderful machines to do the job for a time while the server removes the problem.’

Pelot nods.

‘That is our feeling, lord.’

‘Good. I will make our visitors aware that there is a scrapcode issue, and gently investigate if it’s something they have brought with them by mistake. They have been on the fringes of late. And your server will need their cooperation in his investigation.’

‘Very good, lord.’

‘Pelot?’

‘My lord?’

‘With regard to the natural limits of humanity, it’s worth noting that during our dinner, your colleagues did not really ingest any actual food.’

‘Yes, my lord. In fairness, I doubt you needed to either.’

Guilliman smiles.

‘Very good, magos.’

He turns to his deck officers.

‘Arrange and establish a live link, please. As quickly as possible,’ he instructs. ‘I want to talk to my brother.’

[mark: -9.32.40]

Telemechrus wakes, but it is not time for war.

He has been taught things, and one of them is to control his anger until it is needed. It is not needed now, so he controls it.

He analyses. He scans. He determines.

His determination is this: he is in his casket, and his casket is being moved for transit. Something, perhaps some clumsy or inexpert handling of his casket, has woken him.

It is not time for war. This disappoints him.

He controls his disappointment, just as he has been taught. He controls his anger. He realises he needs, additionally, to control his anxiety. Anxiety is akin to fear, and fear is an abomination previously unknown to him, and he has resolved absolutely not to let it in. Thus, his anxiety increases.

Telemechrus lived his life as a legionary of the XIII. Ten years’ service, from his genetic construction to his death in combat, and all that time he knew no fear. None whatsoever. Despite everything he faced, even death when it finally came, he was never afraid.

During the first conversation he had with them, after his death, the techpriests told him that things would be different from now on. His mortal remains, the remains of Brother Gabril Telemach, 92nd Company Ultra-marines, were no longer viable. Too much of his organics had been vaporised for there to be any continuation of life as he could understand it. But he was, in respect of his courage and service, and because of his compatibility, going to be honoured. His mortal remains were going to form the organic core of a cyberorganic being.

He was to be made a Dreadnought.

As a man, as flesh and blood, Gabril had thought of the Dreadnoughts as ancient things. They were veterans, brothers taken at the brink of death and installed inside indomitable war machines. They were old. Some were a century old. Some had been alive in those machine-boxes for a hundred years!

Gabril Telemach was not old. Just a decade of service.

Now he was trapped in a box forever.

There were adjustments to be made, the techpriests said. Mental adjustments. He accepted, first of all, that every Dreadnought, even the most venerable, had to be new at some point. Dreadnoughts were a vital part of the Legion’s fighting power, and they were lost from time to time. So new ones needed to be constructed at intervals, when the combat chassis were available, and when war-loss produced suitable and compatible organic donors.

The techpriests told him that he would lack many things his flesh body had taken for granted. Sleep, to begin with. He would only sleep when they placed him into stasis hibernation. He would experience – or rather not experience – long periods of this, because they would ensure he slept most of the time. They would wake him if it was time for war and his participation was required.

The techpriests said that this was because of the pain. There would be pain, and it would be constant. His pitiful mortal residue was sheathed in a cyberorganic web, laced into electro-fibre systems, and shut in an armoured sarcophagus. There would be no opportunity to manage pain the way he had done as a man, no mechanism for pain control.

For the same reason, he would find himself prone to emotional variations he had not known as a man. He would probably be prone to rage, to anger. Despite the devastating power bequeathed to him as a Dreadnought, he would miss his mortal state. He would resent his death, regret the circumstances of it, fixate upon it, come to hate the cold-shell life he had been given in exchange.

To spare him this bitterness, and the pain, and the anger, he would be encouraged to sleep for great periods of time.

He would also, they told him, probably be prone to bouts of fear, especially early on. This was, they explained, because of his profound change of state. His consciousness had been shorn away from a linear, mortal scale, from any timeframe he could recognise or understand, from time itself, in fact, because of the prolonged hibernations. Fear, anathema to the Space Marine, was merely part of the mind’s adjustment to this extreme fate. It was natural. He would learn to control it, and to use it, just like his anger. Eventually, fear would evaporate, and be no more. He would be as fearless as he had been as a legionary.

It would take time. There would be gradual and careful adjustments of his hormones and biochemical mix. He would receive hypnotherapies and acclimation pattering. He would be mentored by others of his kind, the venerables, who had grown used to their strange fates.

He had said to the techpriests, ‘I was fearless as a battle-brother, even though I might fall. Now you have rendered me invincible, you say I am prey to fear? Why then call me a Dreadnought? I was a dread nought before. I dreaded nothing as a man!’

‘This is the anger we spoke of,’ they had replied. ‘You will adjust. Sleep will help. Begin hibernation protocols.’

‘Wait!’ he had called out. ‘Wait!’

Justarius is his mentor. Justarius is venerable. Justarius is also sullen and, despite his greater lifespan as a Dreadnought, seems not to have shed the bitterness or the anger. Justarius prefers to sleep. He is curmudgeonly when woken. He seems, at best, ambivalent to Telemechrus’s concerns.

‘It’s Telemach,’ says Telemechrus.

‘My name was Justinus Phaedro,’ grumbles Justarius in reply. ‘They rename us like machines. Or they forget. I forget which.’

Telemechrus is the newest Dreadnought in the ranks of the XIII. He is Contemptor-pattern. He has yet to see combat.

They wake him once, during routine resuscitation in the vaults at Macragge. His implant clock tells him that he has been dormant for two years. The techpriests inform him that an operation has been announced. He will be installed in his chassis and shipped to Calth for deployment, and then woken when it is time for war. The war will be with orks. Telemechrus has questions, but they return him to his hypnotherapeutic dreams.

‘Wait!’ he says.

Telemechrus wakes, but it is not time for war.

He has been taught things, and one is to control his anger until it is needed. It is not needed now, so he controls it.

He analyses. He scans. He determines.

His determination is this: he is in his casket, and his casket is being moved for transit. Something, perhaps some clumsy or inexpert handling of his casket, has woken him.

His implant clock tells him it is eighteen weeks since that routine wake-up on Macragge. Locator systems, reading noospheric tags, tell him that his casket is under transfer in the orbital yards at Calth. The staging post. The place of conjunction. He has roused too early. They’re not at the war front yet.

He wonders why he has woken. Was it clumsy handling? A loader jarring his casket? Justarius and Kloton and Photornis are nearby, in their own caskets, and they are still in hiber-stasis.

Was he physically disturbed? Or was it some scrapcode abnormality causing his cogitation systems to fibrillate?

Telemechrus doesn’t know. He is new to this. There are no techpriests nearby. He wants Justarius to wake so he can ask him.

Is this normal? What do these traces of scrapcode mean? He feels trapped. He feels anxiety. Fear will follow.

He is aware of the hibersystems trying to pull him back into unconsciousness where he belongs. They are trying to spare him the pain and the anger. There is no need to wake. You woke too early. You don’t need to be awake.

The techpriests are wrong.

It’s not the pain a Dreadnought is afraid of.

It’s the silence. It’s the oblivion. It’s the sleep.

It’s the inability to escape from yourself.

[mark: -8.11.47]

Guilliman looks at Gage and nods.

Gage speaks to the lithocast operators and they activate the system.

Guilliman steps onto the hololithic plate as it starts to come to life. The tiered stations of the flagship’s bridge rise up around the vast plate like the stalls of an amphitheatre.

Light blooms around him.

Figures resolve, there but not there at all. Light has been captured, folded and twisted to give the illusion of reality. Guilliman knows that, somewhere, millions of kilometres away, other deck systems are fabricating images of him out of light. He is appearing as a hololithic presence on the lithocast decks of other stages, for the benefit of the august commanders whose ghosts are manifesting to him here.

One in particular.

‘My worthy brother!’ Lorgar exclaims. He steps forward to greet Guilliman.

The simulation is remarkable. Though luminous, there is true density and solidity to his flesh and his armour. There is no lag to his audio, no desynchronisation between mouth and voice. Remarkable.

‘I did not expect to meet you like this,’ Lorgar says. His grey eyes are bright. ‘In person, so I could embrace you. This seems premature. I was informed of your request. I have had no time to dress in ceremonial attire–’

‘Brother,’ says Guilliman. ‘You see that I greet you in regular battle plate too. There will be time for personal greeting and full dress ceremony when you arrive. You are just a few hours out now?’

‘Decelerating fast,’ Lorgar replies. He looks at someone not caught inside the hololithic field of his bridge. ‘The shipmaster says five hours.’

‘We will meet together then, you and your commanders. Me and mine.’ Guilliman looks at the warlords whose images have appeared around Lorgar’s. They all appear to be connecting from different ships. He’d forgotten the imposing bulk of Argel Tal. The lipless sneer of Foedral Fell. The predatory curiosity of Hol Beloth. The hunched gloom of Kor Phaeron. The lightless smile of Erebus.

‘Some of you are already here,’ Guilliman notes.

‘I am, sir,’ says Erebus.

‘We will meet shortly, then,’ says Guilliman.

Erebus inclines his head, more an accepting bow of the head than a nod.

‘My vessel is entering orbit,’ says Kor Phaeron.

‘Welcome to Calth,’ says Guilliman.

The light phantoms salute him.

‘I’ve asked for this brief communication,’ Guilliman says, ‘to discuss a small technical matter. I do not wish it to mar our formal conjunction, nor do I wish it to create problems for your fleet during approach and dispersal.’

‘A problem?’ asks Kor Phaeron.

There’s a stiffness to them suddenly. Guilliman feels it, even though they are only present as handfuls of light. When they first appeared, he realises, they seemed like a pack of dogs, padding into the firelight, teeth bared in smiles that were also snarls, gleefully inquisitive. Now they seem like wild animals that he should never have brought so close to the hearth.

The Word Bearers have been fighting brutal, heathen wars of compliance in the ragged skirts of the Imperium. They’ve been fighting them dutifully and ferociously for decades, since that fateful day on Monarchia that changed the relationship between XIII and XVII forever. There is something coarsely barbaric about them. They have none of the praetorian nobility of Guilliman’s men. They don’t even evince the passionate devotion of their misguided days. They look sullen, world-weary, as though they have seen everything it is possible to see and are tired of it. They look hardened. They look as though all compassion and compunction have been drained out of them. They look like they would kill without provocation.

‘A problem, lord?’ Argel Tal repeats.

‘A machine code problem,’ Guilliman replies. ‘The Mechanicum has advised me. There is a malicious scrapcode problem in the Calth datasphere. We’re working to eradicate it. I wanted you to be aware of it, and to take steps accordingly.’

‘That could have been summarised in a databurst, sir,’ remarks Foedral Fell.

‘A connected matter,’ Guilliman says carefully, ‘is that the source of the scrapcode remains unidentified. There is a strong possibility that it is a data artefact that has been inadvertently brought in from outside the Calth system.’

‘From outside?’ asks Lorgar.

‘From elsewhere,’ Guilliman states.

There’s a look in Lorgar’s eyes that Guilliman hopes never to see again. It’s hurt and it’s anger, but it’s also injured pride.

Lorgar raises his hand and draws it across his neck in a cut-throat gesture. It takes Guilliman a moment to realise that it’s not a provocation, a curt insult.

The hololithic images of his officers and commanders freeze. Only Lorgar’s remains live. He takes a step towards Guilliman.

‘I have suspended their transmissions so we may speak plainly,’ he says. ‘Plainly and clearly. After all that has passed between us and our Legions, after all that has been toxic these last years, after all the effort to engineer this campaign as a reconciliation… Your first act is to accuse us of tainting you with scrapcode? Of… what? Of being so careless in our data hygiene we have infected your precious datasystem with some outworld codepox?’

‘Brother–’ Guilliman begins.

Lorgar gestures to the frozen light ghosts around them.

‘How much humiliation do you intend to heap upon these men? They want only to please you. To earn the respect of the great Roboute Guilliman, a respect they have been lacking these last decades. It matters what you think of them.’

‘Lorgar–’

‘They’ve come to prove themselves! To show they are worthy to fight alongside the majestic Ultramarines! The warrior-kings of Ultramar! This conjunction, this campaign, it’s a point of the highest honour! It matters to them. It matters very much! They have waited years for this honour to be restored!’

‘I meant no insult.’

‘Really not?’ Lorgar laughs.

‘None at all. Brother Lorgar Aurelian, why else would I have communicated informally? If I’d saved this matter to sully our ceremonial greeting, then you might have considered it an insult. A private word, between trusted commanders. That’s all this is. You know scrapcode can develop anywhere, and adhere to the most carefully maintained systems. This could be us, this could be you, it could be an error from our datastacks, it could be some xenos code that‘s been stuck to your systems like a barnacle since you left the outworlds. There’s no blame. We just need to acknowledge the problem and work together to cleanse it.’

Lorgar stares at him. Guilliman notes just how thoroughly his brother’s flesh is covered with inked words.

‘This was not meant to spoil our long-overdue reunion,’ Guilliman says. ‘This was my attempt to stop the reunion being spoiled.’

Lorgar nods. He purses his lips and nods. Then he flashes a smile.

‘I see.’

He nods again, the smile flickering in and out. He raises a palm to his mouth, then laughs.

‘I see. Then very well. I should not have spoken that way.’

‘I should have been more circumspect,’ replies Guilliman. ‘I can see how it might have seemed.’

‘We’ll check our systems,’ says Lorgar. His smile is back. He nods again, as if convincing himself.

‘I should have been more circumspect,’ Guilliman insists.

‘No, you’re right. There is clearly a tension here that needs to be overcome. An expectation.’

Lorgar looks at him.

‘I’ll get to it. We’ll see if we can trace the code. And then we will meet, brother. In just a few hours now, we will meet, and everything will be put right.’

‘I look forward to it,’ says Guilliman. ‘We will stand side-by-side, we will take down this ork threat that our brother Warmaster has identified, and then history will be rewritten between us.’

‘I hope so.’

‘It will be so, brother. If I had not believed that the unfortunate rift between our Legions could not be healed by good society and the companionship of shared martial effort, I would not have agreed to this. We will be the best of allies, Lorgar. You and I, our mighty Legions. Horus will be pleased and the Emperor our father will smile, and old slights will be forgotten.’

Lorgar smiles.

‘They will be forgotten completely. They will be put to rest,’ he says.

‘Without delay,’ says Guilliman.

[mark: -7.55.09]

Criol Fowst sacrifices his last oblator. In the landing camps of the XVII and its army auxiliaries, landing camps that are spread across the surface of Calth, hundreds of majir just like Fowst are concluding similar sacrificial rituals.

The Brotherhood is chanting. So are the men and women of the Tzenvar Kaul, the Jeharwanate and the Kaul Mandori, the other three principal cult echelons.

At the orbital Watchtower, Server Uhl Kehal Hesst of the Mechanicum has switched from discretionary mode in order to pursue and eradicate the scrapcode issue. He will fail to do so. He will spend the rest of his life failing to do so.

The scrapcode issue is no longer resolvable by means of the Mechanicum.

The Octed is implanted.

8

[mark: -4.44.10]

Aeonid Thiel wakes. He only slipped into rest mode briefly. He was bored. He has been waiting a long while. No one has come.

He wakes because he is no longer alone in the fortieth deck anteroom.

He bows at once.

‘Are you Thiel?’ asks Guilliman.

‘Yes, lord,’ Thiel replies.

The primarch seems distracted. He can probably tell which weapons have been used and put back, which practice cages have been operated.

‘You’ve been waiting here for some time.’

‘Yes, lord.’

‘There’s a lot to do today. My attention has been elsewhere.’

It’s not an apology, it’s just a basic explanation. Thiel wants to say that he doesn’t really know why the primarch’s dealing with it at all, but he knows better than that.

‘Were you amusing yourself?’ asks Guilliman, taking a broadsword off a wall rack and examining its edge.

‘I… I decided to pass the time in practice,’ Thiel answers. ‘There are weapons here I am unfamiliar with. I thought that I might benefit from–’

Guilliman nods. The nod means shut up.

Thiel shuts up.

Guilliman studies the sword he is holding. He doesn’t look at Thiel. Thiel has risen to attention, waiting. His helmet, with its crude, red paint-wash to indicate censure, is tucked under his arm.

‘I didn’t come here for you,’ Guilliman says. ‘I came away to think. I forgot you were here.’

Thiel makes no comment.

‘That’s a depressing thought,’ says Guilliman, sliding the sword back onto the rack. ‘I forgot something. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t share that unguarded confession with anybody.’

‘Of course, lord. Though I hardly blame you for forgetting me. I am a very minor detail.’

Now the primarch looks at him.

‘Two things to note there, sergeant. One is that there is no such thing as a minor detail. Information is victory. One cannot and should not dismiss any data as inconsequential until one is in a position to evaluate its significance, and that only comes with hindsight. So all detail is important until circumstances render it redundant.’

‘Yes, lord.’

‘What’s the second thing, Thiel?’

Aeonid Thiel hesitates slightly before answering.

‘By any scale of decency,’ he replies, ‘my infraction was reprehensible. I am, therefore, not a minor detail anyway.’

‘Quite,’ says Guilliman.

The primarch turns and looks up at the high ceiling of the chamber. There is a slight heat-haze distortion in the air above the practice cages that Thiel has spent the last hours overworking.

‘I think I may have offended him,’ says Guilliman.

‘Lord?’

Guilliman looks back at Thiel. He fixes him with a thoughtful gaze.

‘This is a day of great sensitivity,’ he says. ‘We’re building a part of the Imperium’s future as surely as if we were making a star system compliant. We’re cementing a relationship. Repairing a weakness. It’s political. The rift between XIII and XVII is a rift in the Imperial line. Horus knows that. That’s why he’s sewing it up, and we can all swallow our distaste over it.’

Guilliman rubs his cheekbone with his fingertips. He is pensive.

‘The future depends on the solidarity of the Legions,’ he says. ‘Where solidarity is weak, where it is lacking, it must be repaired or enforced. And this is forced. This is us getting along with each other for the greater good.’

Thiel chooses to remain silent.

‘He is so… changeable,’ Guilliman says. ‘He is so prone to extremes. Eager to please, quick to take offence. There is no middle to him. He’s so keen to be your best friend, and then, at the slightest perception of an insult, he’s angry with you. Furious. Offended. Like a child. If he wasn’t my brother, he’d be a political embarrassment and an impediment to the effective rule of the Imperium. I know what I’d do with him.’

‘I’m sure I could demonstrate how, lord,’ says Thiel, and then winces.

‘Was that a joke, sergeant?’

‘I may have just made a very unfortunate attempt at humour, lord,’ Thiel admits.

‘It was actually quite funny,’ says Guilliman.

He turns to leave.

‘Remain here. I’ll get to you in due course.’

‘Yes, my lord.’

[mark: -3.01.10]

‘Trooper Persson,’ Graft calls as he whirrs up the track. The estuary wind is rising, swishing the swartgrass. There’s an empty, metal smell of cold water and mud. It will be night soon. The lights are coming on in and around the fortalice, and their reflections are bobbing on the black river.

‘Trooper Persson,’ the servitor calls.

It’s time to stop. The end of the day’s toil. Wash up, grace and supper. Oll is weary, but he’s about eight rows back from where he thought he’d be. Too much of the day spent looking up at the sky, at the running lights of ships. Too much of the day wasted watching the heavy landers glinting as they pass overhead.

Graft trundles up to him. The servitor’s huge bulk-extension upper limbs, built for ammo loading, have been replaced by basic cargo shifting arms.

‘Time to stop, Trooper Persson,’ Graft says.

Oll nods. They’ve done what they can with the light.

But he doesn’t feel like it’s time to stop. It feels like something’s about to start.

[mark: -1.43.32]

Ventanus and Selaton watch Arbute talking to another gang of labour guild officials. Behind them, a bulk-lander as huge and drab as a cliff face is slowly backing into a cargo silo. Oil stains shine on the rockcrete ground.

‘I don’t know why it’s so difficult,’ says Selaton. ‘She tells them to work harder, they work harder. She’s got the authority.’

‘It’s more complex than that.’

‘Is it, captain? They’ve been doing it all day. As far as I can tell, the main quibble seems to be the length and regularity of rest breaks.’

‘Fatigue is an issue,’ Ventanus reminds his sergeant. ‘A human issue. We need cooperation. We have to acknowledge their qualities.’

‘Weaknesses you mean.’

‘Qualities.’

‘It makes me profoundly glad I’m not an elective human,’ says Selaton.

Ventanus laughs.

‘Still, it’s us who’ll get strung up by the primarch if the muster falls behind.’

‘No, it’s me who’ll get it,’ said Ventanus. ‘And we won’t fall behind. The seneschal is pretty persuasive.’

‘Really, sir?’

‘I think the guild was dragging its heels because it thought bonus payments should be on offer.’

‘Deliberately going slow?’ asks Selaton, the notion alien to him.

‘Yes, sergeant. They make a fuss about over-work, negotiate themselves some hefty bonus fees, and then have a little slack they can take up so they look like they’re working hard. I think our new friend Seneschal Arbute has made them buck their ideas up by introducing new concepts such as patriotism, and the favourable disposition of the primarch.’

Selaton nods.

The sky over the starport is fulminous grey, with rack rides of cloud chased by the wind and backlit by the setting sun. The lights of incoming transports shine especially bright.

‘We’re losing the light,’ says Selaton. ‘Earlier than estimated.’

‘A result of the storm,’ says Ventanus.

‘Probably,’ agrees Selaton.

[mark: -1.01.20]

The fleet tender Campanile passes the inner Mandeville Point of the Veridian System, outer marker ring 16, and the local picket. It broadcasts full and correct anchorage codes to the watch ships at ring 14, and to the Veridius Maxim Star Fort. The Star Fort retracts its target acquisition lock and signals the tender to pass.

The ship appears to be decelerating.

[mark: -0.55.37]

Teleport flare. The crackle of the energy burst shivers across the open hillside, and ozone taints the cold northern air.

Erebus, Dark Apostle, becomes flesh, and emerges from the scratch of light. He is not clad in ceremonial armour, he is wearing wargear that has been stripped down to fighting weight, darkened with ashes and inscribed over its entire surface with tiny, spidery script.

A strike team is waiting for him. Its leader is Essember Zote of the Gal Vorbak, a warrior of the most incendiary fury. His sword is already drawn. His armour is the colour of blood.

This is how their enemies will know them. Blood red, the colour of fire, the colour of hell, the colour of gore, the colour of the Octed.

Zote has a work party of the Tzenvar Kaul with him, seventy men, all childless. They have been working since they arrived at dawn on one of the first ships.

The Satric Plateau, two thousand kilometres north of Numinus City, is a lonely place. The hard winter has already arrived. Because of its size and terrain, the Satric region was chosen as one of the sixty-eight staging fields for the operation. Landers are parked all along the line of the slope, cargo hatches open to the grey sky.

Erebus inspects the work.

This particular area of the Satric Plateau, sheened with frost, is especially perfect. It took several days of comparative study with the orbital scans to determine its perfection compared to other potential sites. It is consistently flat in relation to sea level. It is aligned according to magnetic north and the tidal process, and has favourable moonrise on the day of the conjunction. It possesses other qualities too, other qualities that could not be disclosed by standard Imperial physics. Immaterium vectors are in alignment. The skin of the empyrean is thin here tonight.

This is the true conjunction. Erebus reflects upon how remarkably perfect it is. Not just workable or suitable or acceptable. Perfect. From today, for the next sixty days. It is as though some power somewhere manufactured the perfection at exactly the right time.

The men of the Kaul have laid the circle. Polished black rocks, each taken from the volcanic slopes of Isstvan V and marked with a sigil, are arranged in a perfect circle a kilometre in diameter.

Erebus takes the last rock from Zote. They are summoning stones. The latent power in them makes him feel sick, just taking one in his hand.

He places it in the gap in the circle. It clacks against the stones on either side as he sets it.

‘Begin,’ he tells Zote.

The men of the Tzenvar Kaul approach, carrying other offerings from the Isstvan system. In procession, they bear along portable stasis flasks like censers in some Catheric worship. The fluid in the stasis flasks is murky with blood. Harvested progenitor glands. Harvested gene-seed. The lost life of betrayed souls now offered for the final blasphemy. There is Salamanders gene-seed here, Iron Hands, Raven Guard. Erebus knows that the Ruinous Powers make no distinctions, so there is other gene-seed here besides: Emperor’s Children, Death Guard, Night Lords, Iron Warriors, Word Bearers, Alpha Legion, even Luna Wolf. Any that fell during the secret abominations of Isstvan III or V are suitable.

Erebus stops the first man in the procession, and strokes the glass of the stasis flask. He knows what’s in it, the mangled tissue in the cloudy suspension.

‘Tarik…’ he whispers.

He nods. The Kaul start to carry the flasks into the circle. The moment they cross the stones, the bearers start to whimper and retch. Several pass out, or suffer strokes, and fall, smashing the flasks.

It doesn’t matter.

The moon is rising, a pale curl in a mauve sky already busy with lights.

Zote hands Erebus a data-slate, and the Apostle checks the approach timings. He is data tracking using anchorage codes.

He hands the slate back and takes the vox-link in exchange.

‘Now,’ he says.

[mark: -0.40.20]

‘Acknowledged,’ replies Sorot Tchure.

He walks back to join the others. His men are mingling with the men of Luciel’s company on the company decks of the Samothrace. They have finished the formal dinner that Luciel had arranged. None need to eat, certainly not the fine foodstuffs that Luciel provided, but it is a symbolic gesture. To dine as allies, as warrior-kings. To bond ahead of the coming war.

‘Problem?’ asks Luciel.

Tchure shakes his head.

‘Some question about loading platforms.’

Tchure looks at Luciel.

‘Why have you changed your markings and armour field?’ asks Luciel.

‘We are remaking ourselves,’ Tchure replies. ‘A new scheme to celebrate our new beginning. Perhaps it is down to the character of our beloved primarch, may the cosmos bless him. We have never quite found ourselves, Honorius. Not like you. We have struggled to realise a proper role for ourselves. I do not believe you appreciate how fortunate you are. The clarity of your purpose and position as Ultramarines. From the start you had a reputation that never needed to be questioned, and a function that never needed to be clarified.’

He pauses.

‘For years, I have despised Lorgar,’ he says quietly.

‘What?’

‘You heard me.’

‘Sorot, you mustn’t–’

‘Look at your primarch, Honorius. So singular in aspect. So noble. I have envied you, envied the Imperial Fists, the Luna Wolves, the Iron Hands. And I am not alone. We struggle with a mercurial mind, Honorius. We labour under the burden of a brilliant but fallible commander. We no longer bear the word, my friend. We bear Lorgar.’

‘Some fall into their roles quickly,’ says Luciel firmly. ‘I have thought about this. Some fall into their roles quickly. Others take time to evolve, to discover what their purpose is to be. Your primarch, great Lorgar, is a son of the Emperor. There will be a role for him. It may turn out to be far greater than any that falls to Guilliman or Dorn. Yes, we’re lucky to have clarity. I know that. So are the Fists, the Hands, the Angels. Terra above, so are the Wolves of Fenris and the World Eaters, Sorot. Perhaps the lack of clarity you have laboured under thus far is because Lorgar’s role is yet unimaginable.’

Tchure smiles.

‘I can’t believe you’re defending him.’

‘Why can’t you?’

Tchure shrugs.

‘I think we may be finding our purpose at last, Honorius,’ he says. ‘Hence our new resolve. Our change in scheme and armour colour. I… I was asked to join the advance.’

Luciel frowns, quizzical.

‘You told me that.’

‘I have things to prove.’

‘Why?’ asks Luciel.

‘I have to prove my commitment to the new purpose.’

‘And how do you do that?’ asks Luciel.

Tchure doesn’t answer. Luciel notices how the Word Bearer’s fingers stir, tapping the tabletop. What agitation is that? Nerves?

‘I learned something,’ Tchure says suddenly, changing the subject. ‘A little piece of warcraft that I thought you would appreciate.’

Luciel lifts his cup, sips wine.

‘Go on,’ he smiles.

Tchure toys with his own cup, a straight-sided golden beaker.

‘It was on Isstvan, during the fight there.’

‘Isstvan? There’s been fighting in the Isstvan system?’

Tchure nods.

‘It hasn’t been reported. Was it a compliance?’

‘It’s recent,’ says Tchure. ‘The full reports of the campaign are still being ratified by the Warmaster. Then they will be shared.’

Luciel raises his eyebrows.

‘Guilliman won’t appreciate being left out of the loop for any length of time. Is this how the Warmaster intends to conduct the Great Crusade from now on? Guilliman insists on sharing all military data. And Isstvan was compliant–’

Tchure holds up his hand.

‘It’s recent. It’s fresh. It’s done now. Your primarch will hear all about it in due course. The point is, the fight was bitter. The Imperium faced a foe that had discovered the mortal power of treachery.’

‘Treachery?’ asks Luciel.

‘Not as a strategy, you understand. Not as a tactic to surprise and undermine. I mean as a property. A power.’

‘I’m not sure I know what you mean,’ smiles Luciel. slightly disarmed. ‘It’s as though you’re talking about… magic.’

‘I almost am. The enemy believed that there was power in treachery. To win the confidence of your opponent, to mask your animus, and then to turn… Well, they believed that this actually invested them with power.’

‘I don’t see how.’

‘Don’t you?’ asks Tchure. ‘The potency, they believed, depends on the level of betrayal. If an ally suddenly turns on an ally, that’s one level. But if a trusted friend turns on a friend. That was the purest kind of power, because the treachery ran so deep. Because it required that so many moral codes be broken. Trust. Friendship. Loyalty. Reliance. Honesty. Such an act was powerful because it was beyond belief. It achieved a potency that was akin to the most powerful blood sacrifice.’

Luciel sits back.

‘Interesting, certainly,’ he says. ‘For them to believe that. Culturally, it speaks a great deal to the strength of their honour codes. If they believed this invested them with power, then it seems like an act of superstition. It has little strategic merit in terms of warcraft or technique, of course. Except, I suppose, psychologically.’

‘It certainly worked for them.’

‘Until you crushed them, of course.’

Sorot Tchure does not reply.

‘What’s the matter?’ asks Luciel.

‘It’s like a sacrifice,’ says Tchure. ‘You identify and commit the greatest betrayal possible, and it is like a sacrifice to anoint and begin a vast ceremony of victory and destruction.’

‘I still don’t understand. It has no tactical methodology.’

‘Really? Really, Honorius? What if it does? What if there is an entirely other kind of warfare, one that extends beyond all practical techniques, one that defies and eclipses all the martial law codified by the Ultramarines and recognised by the Imperium? A ritual warfare? A kind of daemonic warfare?’

‘You say that as if you believe it,’ Luciel laughs.

‘Think about what I’m saying,’ says Tchure quietly. He looks around the chamber, at his men talking and drinking with Luciel’s. ‘Think of this… If the Word Bearers turned against the Ultramarines, wouldn’t that be the greatest betrayal of all? Not Lorgar turning on Guilliman, for they dislike each other anyway. Here, in this chamber, between two men who have actually managed to become friends?’

‘That would be the most atrocious deceit,’ Luciel agrees. ‘I concede it would have some power. As shock value in the Legion. We are immune to fear, but horror and surprise might unman us briefly at the unimaginable nature of the act.’

Tchure nods.

‘And it would be the centrepiece,’ he says. ‘The sacrificial spark to ignite the ritual war.’

Luciel nods gravely.

‘I suppose you’re right. It would be well to understand, and allow for, an enemy who carried such conviction in the power of infamy.’

Tchure smiles.

‘I wish you understood,’ he says.

[mark: -0.20.20]

The Campanile crosses the inner ring, its codes accepted by the defence grid. The mass of the fleet disposition lies ahead of it, the yards. The bright glory of Calth.

As it passes within the orbit of Calth’s moon, it begins an abrupt acceleration.

[mark: -0.19.45]

‘Understand what?’ asks Luciel.

‘I was asked to join the advance,’ says Tchure.

‘And?’

‘I have to prove my commitment to the new purpose.’

Luciel stares at him.

For just a second. A second. And in that second, he finally realises what Sorot Tchure has been trying to tell him.

That in order not to betray one impossible bond, Sorot Tchure is required to betray another.

The goblet falls from Luciel’s grip. His hand is already moving, through instinct alone, for his sidearm. Only sheer, disfunctioning shock is slowing him down.

Tchure’s plasma pistol is already in his hand.

The goblet hasn’t even hit the tabletop yet.

Tchure fires. Point blank, the plasma bolt strikes Honorius Luciel’s torso. The bolt is as hot as a main sequence star. It vaporises armour plate, carapace, reinforced bone, spinal cord. It annihilates meat, both hearts, and secondary organs. It turns blood into dust. The shot’s hammer blow impact knocks Luciel down, through the table, smashing the tabletop up to meet the falling goblet, spinning it into the air in a semi-circle of wine.

Luciel’s men are turning, caught by surprise, not understanding the noise and motion, not understanding the weapon discharge or the violent collapse of their captain. Tchure’s men simply draw their guns. They are not distracted by the gunfire. Their eyes never leave the men they are talking to, men who are turning away in confusion.

Luciel rolls on the deck, limbs thrashing, as the smashed table falls around him. The goblet bounces off the deck plate beside his head. His eyes are wide, straining, staring. The plasma shot has burned a massive hole clean through him. His body is cored. The deck plating is visible through his twitching torso. The edges of the gaping damage are scorched and cooked by superheating. His armour is likewise punctured, the cut edges glowing. Larraman cells cannot hope to clog or close a wound quite so catastrophic. Tchure is on his feet, his chair tipping backwards behind him, toppling. He swings the plasma weapon down, aims it at Luciel’s face, and fires again.

Around him, the chamber shakes with a sudden storm of gunfire. Twenty or thirty boltguns discharge almost simultaneously. Armoured bodies, blown backwards, fall. Blood mist fills the air.

The goblet lands on the third bounce, rolls in a circle, and comes to rest on its side next to Honorius Luciel’s seared and shattered skull.

ABSOLUTE//OVERWHELM

‘Battle is not a state to be entered into lightly. Battle is always painful and always comes at a price, so the astute commander never commits to battle unless no other options remain. Once that commitment is made, once the Phase of Execution, or primary condition, has begun, it must be done with the utmost efficacy: a rapid application of overwhelming force to obliterate your enemy as quickly and completely as possible. Do not give him the time or space to react. Do not leave him with any materiel or opportunity that he can use in a rallying phase. Eliminate him physically and psychologically so that his threat is entirely removed. Kill him with your first shot. Utterly annihilate him with your first strike. This may be considered the application of attack in its purest form.’

– Guilliman, Notes Towards Martial
Codification, 4.1.ix

1

[mark: -0.18.43]

An alarm sounds. A red hazard light starts to blink on a burnished copper console.

The officer of the watch, at his station on the bridge of the Samothrace, reacts swiftly but with some confusion. Are the ship’s systems notifying him of a malfunction? It is a high-scale alert.

He presses an ivory-cushioned key to access clarification. On the small glass screen, a phrase appears in luminous green characters.

[Weapons discharge, company deck]

That can’t be correct. Even if it somehow is, a weapons discharge must be accidental. The officer of the watch is, however, highly trained and well disciplined. He knows that answers, clarifications, corrections and explanations are secondary issues. They can wait. Even informing the captain can wait. He understands protocol. He reacts as he has been trained to react.

He activates the vox systems and rouses deck protection. His hands move with rehearsed agility over the keys. He sounds general quarters. He starts to systematically close the bulkheads fore and aft of the company deck space, and to lock out the through-deck access points and elevators.

Within four seconds of the alarm sounding, the officer of the watch has begun the procedure to cordon and secure the entire company deck, and to place deck troops at all access points. His response is exemplary. Within thirty-five seconds of the alarm sounding, a full, regulation lock-down would have been enforced.

But thirty-five seconds are not available.

The captain has heard general quarters sound, and has started out of his seat to join the officer of the watch and examine the issue. There is a frown on his face.

‘What’s going on, Watch?’ he asks.

His words are drowned out by another alarm. Then another alarm. Then another. Klaxons, bells and hooters overlap, screeching and booming.

The proximity alarm.

The collision warning alert.

The course defect advisor.

The detector array.

The passive auspex.

The primary orbital traffic alert from Calth System Control.

Something is coming at them. Something is moving into the dense and rigorously controlled shipping formations spread across the close orbit band. Something is sweeping through the orbital high anchorage without approval or authorisation.

The officer of the watch forgets, for a second, what he was in the middle of doing.

He looks at the main screen. So does the captain. So do the bridge crewmen.

What happens next, though they are looking straight at it, happens too fast for them to see.

[mark: -0.18.34]

The Campanile accelerates. It lights its main realspace drives, delivering main extending thrust in a position where it should be almost coasting at correction burst only. It raises its void shielding to make itself as unstoppable as possible. It fires itself like a bullet at the planet Calth.

The screams of its crew can still be heard, but no one is listening.

Main extending thrust is a drive condition used for principal acceleration, the maximum output that takes a starship to the brink of realspace velocity as it makes the translation to the empyrean. It is a condition that is used as a starship moves away from a planet towards the nearest viable Mandeville Point, a distance that is roughly half the radius of an average star system.

There is no such long run-up here. The Campanile is already inside the orbit of Calth’s satellite. There is not enough range for it to reach anything like maximum output or velocity. Even so, it is travelling at something close to the order of forty per cent of the realspace limit as it reaches the edge of the atmosphere. It is travelling too fast for anything physical, such as an eye or a pict-corder or a visual monitor, to see it. It is only visible to scanning systems and sensors, to detectors and auspex. They shriek at its sudden, savage, shockwave approach.

Their shrieks are as futile as the unheard screams of its lost crew.

It does not hit Calth.

There is something in the way.

[mark: -0.18.32]

The Campanile streaks like a missile into Calth’s orbital shipping belt. It punches through the formations of ships in parking orbit, the rows of freighters, barges and troop vessels at high anchor, the precisely spaced lines of vast cruisers and frigates, the glittering clouds of small craft, loaders, lifters and boats attending the parent ships.

It is like a bolter round fired into a crowd.

It misses the Mlatus, the Cavascor, the Lutine and the Samothrace by less than a ship’s length. It passes under the beam of the battleship Ultimus Mundi and skims the back of the gargantuan carrier ship Testament of Andromeda. Its shields graze the hull of the strike craft Mlekrus, vaporising the masts and arrays of its starboard detectors. It slices between the battle-barges Gauntlet of Victory and Gauntlet of Glory. By the time it crosses the bow of the grand cruiser Suspiria Majestrix, shredding the mooring and fuelling lines that secure the famous vessel to its bulk tenders, the Campanile has begun to swat aside small craft, annihilating them against the front of its shields. The small ships disintegrate, fierce blue sparks fizzle against the shield shimmer: cargo boats, lighters, ferries, maintenance riggers. The Campanile’s shield displacement hurls others out of the way like a tidal bore, swirling into each other, compressing them with gravimetric thrust, crashing them against the hulls of larger ships or the support cradles of the outer orbital yards.

Then the Campanile reaches the main shipyard.

The Calth Yards are orbiting islands, the fledgling beginnings of the planet’s first proper superorbital plate. There are a dozen of them orbiting Calth. This is Calth Veridian Anchor, the largest and oldest of them. It is a massive edifice of jetties and slips, ship cradles and docks, suspension manufactories, habitats, depots and docking platforms. It is a little over three hundred kilometres across, a raft of metal and activity and life.

The Campanile hits it, creating light. Void shields moving at high sub-light velocities strike physical matter, and mutually annihilate. The tender simply vaporises the Ultramar Azimuth Graving Dock, shredding the superstructure of the giant berth cradle, and the cruiser Antipathy docked inside it. Cut in half, the nine kilometre-long Antipathy vanishes in a ripple of rapidly expanding heat and light as its drives detonate, and six thousand lives disappear with it. The blast incinerates the two manufactory modules adjoining the graving dock, instantly killing another thirty thousand artificers and engineers, and shears the superstructure away from arrestor silos A112 and A114, both of which collapse sideways, spilling the escort Burnabus into the fast escort Jeriko Rex. Both vessels suffer catastrophic hull damage. The Burnabus crushes and deforms like a spent shell case.

The Campanile is still moving. As the Ultramar Azimuth Graving Dock disintegrates behind it, it punches on through Assembly 919, a hollow spheroid currently housing the Menace of Fortis, the Deliverance of Terra and the Mechanicum fabrication ship Phobos Encoder. All three ships are obliterated. The assembly spheroid ruptures like a glass ball. Propelled debris rips into attached habitat modules, voiding them to space. Part of the Phobos Encoder is flung out of the explosion and spins into the yard’s principal cargo facility, which buckles laterally. This secondary impact destroys forty-nine lift ships and one hundred and sixty-eight small lighters and ferries. Cargo pods and transportation containers spew out like beads from a snapped necklace, like grains of rice from a ripped sack. They spill, tumbling. Some start to glow blowtorch blue as they plunge into the high atmosphere.

Calth Veridian Anchor shudders. Internal explosions propagate through it, driven along by the devastating trajectory of the Campanile. Habitats and depots blow out. Jetties collapse. Manipulator cranes buckle and fold like wading birds struck by a hunter’s buckshot. The Aegis of Occluda catches fire, all seven kilometres of it, in its ship cradle. The Triumph of Iax, secured in an arrestor slip, is crippled as a storm of debris penetrates it. Its secondary drives implode, ripping the massive ship through ninety degrees like a man being swung by his ankles. The bow, still encased in its slip housing framework, encounters the Tarmus Usurper, which is being fitted out in the adjacent slip. The collision mangles them, tears them, lacerates their hulls. Atmospherics void explosively from rent hull plates, aerosol jets filled with particles that are tiny, tumbling bodies.

Light blossoms. The annihilation of matter is vast, and light is the only form in which it can escape. The battleship Spirit of Konor, seventeen kilometres long and one of the most powerful warships in the fleet of the Five Hundred Worlds, ignites, and then vanishes as critical damage compromises its power plants and vast munitions stockpiles. Huge, burning sections of the yard structure are ejected upwards, whirling, into space, or are spat down at the world beneath. The Ultramar Zenith Graving Dock suffers integral gravimetric failure and drops out, breaking and twisting towards the planet below. The grand cruiser Antrodamicus, supported by that dock, rips free of its moorings and begins to slide backwards out of the collapsing cradle, in some ghastly parody of a ship launch. Its drives are off-line. It has no power to prevent its slide or stabilise its position, at least nothing that can be lit or brought to bear fast enough. It is a huge ship, twelve kilometres long. It simply slips away backwards, like a vast promontory of ice calving from a glacier into the sea.

The Campanile is still moving. Its shields finally fail and it is just a solid projectile, a mass of metal. It annihilates two more slipways, and the ships within them, cripples the anchored carrier Johanipus Artemisia, and then rams through the data-engine hub in the centre of the yard structure. All the data-engines are destroyed instantly. The automatics fail. The noosphere experiences a critical and fatal interrupt. Another thirty-five thousand individuals perish as the yard’s core is obliterated.

Impact has virtually erased the unshielded mass of the Campanile. Its structure is atomised, except for the largest chunks of it, which punch onwards as the ship breaks up, still travelling at immensely high realspace velocities, communicating billions of tonnes of force. The largest surviving piece, a part of the Campanile’s solid-core drive section, spins out like a ricochet and kills the battleship Remonstrance of Narthan Dume like a slingshot pellet to the brainpan.

The final pieces of the Campanile clear the far side of Calth Veridian Anchor and spray on out across the planet, scattering, dipping and burning like meteorites.

This entire catastrophe has taken less than a second to occur. It has been entirely silent, a light-blink in the soundless void.

All that any observers – either on nearby vessels or the surface of the planet – would have seen was a blinding flash, like a star going nova, that was instantly replaced by a propagating series of overlapping, expanding fireballs that consume the entire sky.

[mark: -0.18.30]

The lightshock overloads the resolution of the bridge screens aboard the Macragge’s Honour. They brown out, fizzling. Plugged servitors squeal and chatter. Automatic systems slam the blast shutters on every bridge window port, shutting them in a ruddy, armoured gloom.

Marius Gage rises from his seat.

‘What the hell was that?’ he demands.

No one answers.

‘Find out!’ he roars.

The shockwave hits.

[mark: -0.18.30]

There is a blink. Ventanus knows what it is. Instinct identifies it in a fraction of the time it would take his conscious mind to explain it. It’s the electromagnetic pulse that precedes a major explosion.

He has time to see that Selaton has sensed it. The seneschal has not. Her human senses are too modest to register the blink. She’s saying something.

Ventanus grabs her and pulls her down. Arbute cries out, not understanding at all. He knows his armoured fingers are breaking some of her ribs. There is still a chance he can shield her with his body.

A brand-new sun fills the heavens above Numinus starport.

[mark: -0.18.30]

Light sears, then fire fills the sky over the fields and the estuary at Neride like a roasting surge from god’s own flamer.

Oll Persson flinches, though the heat and wind are still half a minute away. He’s seen ships explode in orbit. He’s never seen anything this big.

The twilight flushes orange. Evening shadows stretch behind them. The crop workers look up, baffled, horrified.

‘Trooper Persson?’ Graft asks, unable to frame a more complex question.

‘God save us all,’ Oll says.

The swartgrass stirs, swishes.

The wind hits, hot, as though a furnace door has opened nearby.

[mark: -0.18.30]

A thunderclap. That’s what it sounds like to Hellock.

‘What the bastard shitfire is–’ he starts to say to anyone near enough to hear him, plucking his latest smoke out from between his lips. Trooper Rane is right in front of him. Rane is suddenly a silhouette, so are the stacks and spires of the city over the river: black shapes against a sky that’s turned white, like some excess of dawn, like sheet bastard lightning, but as bright as the forked stuff.

Hellock doesn’t know what’s just happened, but he already senses it’s the worst thing he’s ever going to experience.

He’s wrong.

[mark: -0.18.30]

The sky explodes over Numinus City. Braellen and Androm stand up, snapping out of rest mode. They don’t speak because there’s nothing factual to state yet, but they draw their weapons without waiting for an instruction from Captain Damocles.

It’s a high altitude detonation, high altitude or low orbit. Multiple detonations, overlapping, that’s clear a second later as the flashes chop and flicker like a strobe, blooming fire inside fire inside fire.

‘We just lost a ship,’ says Androm.

‘That wasn’t just one ship,’ Captain Damocles corrects.

[mark: -0.18.30]

‘Did you see that?’ Captain Phrastorex cries. ‘Did you see that?’

‘I saw it, captain,’ replies Sergeant Anchise.

The sky to the west of their camp is rippling with light, as if someone’s moving a glow-globe behind a veil of silk. There’s a growl, a long rumble that seems to be coming from space and shows no sign of ending.

‘Get the men up,’ Phrastorex yells.

The vox is screwed up. Weird sounds spit and cough through his helmet every time Phrastorex tries to open a link. Is that screaming?

Is that… chanting?

‘Get the men up and ready!’ he repeats, and then starts to pound across the clearing to the areas marked out for the 111th. Ekritus needs to get his men moving too. Something’s going on. Phrastorex hasn’t felt an intuitive wince this bad since the firefight on Cavolotus V. Ekritus needs to get ready for whatever this turns out to be.

A strange wind is stirring the trees, making them swish. The wind’s warm, dry. It feels like something bad has exhaled.

‘Ekritus!’ Phrastorex yells.

Down on the plains below the woods, even the Word Bearers are rousing. Phrastorex can see them forming up. He can see their Army units assembling. That’s good. Damn good. Far better drill than he expected of the XVII, given their reputation as heathen berserkers. Far faster response.

Good. Good, then. They’re all standing ready, ready to face this. United as one. It gladdens his heart.

They can face this together, whatever this is.

[mark: -0.18.30]

The datashock kills Server Uhl Kehal Hesst.

It doesn’t kill him instantly the way it kills forty-six of the data moderati in the cogitation wells around him, but it bursts and fries key sections of his cerebral architecture. This is brain damage that cannot be repaired, and from which he will never recover. Synaptic junctions are burned out like faulty wiring. A brain-bleed begins in his frontal lobe.

He remains standing.

Light hits the orbital Watchtower at Kalkas Fortalice a nanosecond after the shockwave of data. The noosphere collapses like an ice sculpture in an oven. The tower’s manifold field stutters out. Hesst feels and absorbs the shared agony of several thousand deaths: his modified brethren aboard the primary shipyard, aboard docked vessels, in the tower around him. Some deaths are quick: flashes of annihilation. Others, still fast, are physically traumatic: the liquid spatter of compression, the explosive misery of decompression, the blunt fury of impact, the screaming hell of immolation.

Some deaths are slower. They take whole parts of seconds to end. The plugged men and women in the amniotic armourglas caskets around him reel as hammer blows of data assault their brains. Information overload. Sensory overload. Hypertraumatic inload syndrome.

He is almost relieved when the noosphere fails.

He sways. The windows of the tower have automatically tinted to reduce the flare of the orbital explosions. Hesst’s permanent MIU link burns like a white-hot wire through his soul. His entire bioengineered self is fatally compromised.

Only one thought, captured in simple binaric form, remains within his grasp.

Hesst surrendered discretionary mode four hundred and sixty-two minutes ago. He surrendered it to the orbital bioengines.

The bioengines, all the orbital automatics, have died.

Calth’s planetary weapons grid has just ceased to function.

[mark: -0.18.30]

Telemechrus wakes again. He wakes bolt upright awake, screaming awake, howling awake, as if from a nightmare. There’s cold sweat on his back, but he doesn’t have a back. There’s blood in his mouth, but he doesn’t have a mouth. His eyes are open, but he doesn’t have eyes.

A flash-flood of data has shocked him into ignition, shocked him so hard that for a moment he is given a physical memory of his life before transformation. Not his recent transformation. From before that, from before his formative transformation by biogenetic engineering to Space Marine. For a second he was granted a memory of waking from a nightmare as an unmodified human being.

As a child.

He realises it wasn’t just a data shock. There was a significant physical shock too. His casket has been violently disturbed, thrown, dropped.

His implant clock tells him that he has been dormant for a little over nine hours and ten minutes. External sensors are down. He can’t see. He can’t open the casket. There is no noosphere. There is no data inload.

His own sensors, the cyberorganic sensors of his combat chassis mount, tell him the external temperature of the casket is over five thousand degrees Celsius. His inertial locators tell him that he is upside down and falling.

At terminal velocity.

[mark: -0.18.30]

The sky erupts. Criol Fowst clutches his athame so tightly against his breast that the blade draws blood from his fingers.

Staring up at the firestorm that is devouring the sky, the Brotherhood of the Knife starts to chant the litany of the Octed.

Ushkul Thu! Ushkul Thu!

Fowst wants to join in, but he is too busy laughing, laughing uncontrollably, like a maniac.

[mark: -0.18.30]

Erebus looks up from the circle of black stones. The centre of the ritual circle, where the bodies of many of the Tzenvar Kaul processionals lie smouldering or twitching, has not been a focused reality for almost ten minutes. Matter squirms there. The membrane of the universe has turned liquid. There’s a smell like the smell of weird dreams, strong but not in any way identifiable.

Essember Zote of the Gal Vorbak mutters something as the first flash hits the southern skies. Erebus is already watching. Fire, light, first light, a dawn of sorts. Erebus understands that several clear strategic benefits will be achieved by their plan, but they are all military objectives and they count little to him. To the first of the Dark Apostles, it is the meaning that matters: the significance, the art, the context.

The light in the sky, that huge bright flare they have wrought upon this day, that is the Ushkul Thu. In the archaic language of the Holy Worlds, the words mean ‘Offering Sun’ or ‘Tribute Star’. It is hard to translate it precisely. There is a sense of sacrifice, a sense of the promise represented by dawn, and the sense of something greater to follow.

There is a greater sunrise to come.

2

[mark: -0.18.20]

Calth Veridian Anchor, the vast shipyard, is ablaze and dying. Damaged beyond the possibility of salvation or stabilisation, its giant platform structure is tipping, shredding, pulsing like a white dwarf star that has suddenly been placed in Calth’s orbit.

It is an energy fire, a nuclear fire, spherical and incandescent, throbbing. The nearby orbital platforms shiver at the series of shockwaves thumping out of the stricken orbital. Some have taken collateral damage from out-flung superstructure debris or parts of exploding ships, and are now burning or holed. Along the anchorage line, ships of the fleet are combusting or crippled. Debris and ejecta continue to tumble from the underside of the foundering orbital, caught by Calth’s gravity.

It is chaos. Electromagnetic slams have crippled communication networks, and what little vox and pict remains is choked with frantic intership traffic: questions, demands, entreaties, insistences. What has happened? What is happening? You will tell me immediately what is happening!

There is no information, no data. The Mechanicum’s throat is cut, its voice-box torn out, its brain mush. The only facts are those available to anyone with eyes, or a window port, or a functioning picter. An act of unimaginable violence has been perpetrated. Calth high anchor is a firestorm. The death toll is huge. The injury to the fleet and the yard infrastructure is unthinkable.

It is an attack. It can only be an attack. An act of war. No accident could have been so far-reaching in its effect. The Veridian system and its approaches are protected by scrupulous systems of check and countercheck, by peerless levels of redundant security. This magnitude of catastrophic damage would have required malice in order to achieve it: a deliberate and inimical intent to circumvent the secure cordon.

This is no accident. This is an attack.

Someone, somewhere, gabbling in the flash flood of unfiltered vox traffic, uses the word ‘ork’ or ‘greenskin’. The enemy has got wind of the Veridian mobilisation. It has received warning of the force poised to launch at it, and it has struck first.

Within ten or twenty seconds of the first impact, ships across the high anchorage have desperately begun to power drives and weapon systems. Some are generating power in the hope of raising shields, or even preparing to slip authorised moorings so that they can reposition.

Then a battle-barge opens fire. The massive barge is known to the Ultramarines as the Raptorus Rex, but it has been renamed, with as little notice as the Word Bearers gave when they changed their battledress colours, the Infidus Imperator.

The Infidus Imperator is the barge of Kor Phaeron.

It discharges all of its primary lance weapons at the battle-barge Sons of Ultramar and reduces it to a whizzing cloud of metal chaff carried outwards in all directions by an expanding ball of fire.

The Infidus Imperator chooses its next target. In formation behind the mighty craft, the Crown of Colchis starts to fire too. So does the battleship Kamiel. So do the Flame of Purity and the Spear of Sedros.

And so does the flagship of Dark Apostle Erebus, the battle-barge Destiny’s Hand.

[mark: -0.17.32]

Shipmaster Ouon Hommed, captain of the heavy destroyer Sanctity of Saramanth, sees the Infidus begin its merciless prowl along the anchorage line. He understands precisely what the vast Word Bearers barge is doing. It’s executing the ships in the line beside it the way a man might execute a row of helpless prisoners.

He’s done it before himself. At Farnol High Harbour, after the Ephigenia Compliance, he crawled the Sanctity along the slipways, scuttling the captured enemy ships so they could not be reactivated and re-used. It was a graceless, unrewarding task, utterly pragmatic. The ships were too dangerous to leave intact.

As a shipman, as a person whose life has been dedicated to the service of the great starships, he’s never taken pleasure in scuttling duties.

Why does it seem like the Infidus is relishing it?

Hommed is screaming at his command staff, demanding yield of power, weapons, shields, data… anything they can give him. The Sanctity was sitting at slip cold, drives tamped down. With the best will in all the worlds, it will take fifty minutes to rouse the ship to operational readiness.

This is true of the entire fleet. The starships of Ultramar were sitting cold at high anchor for the conjunction. All of their power plants were at lowest yield for the purposes of maintenance, loading and embarkation checks. None of them needed ready drives or weapons or shields. They were all under the protective aegis of the planet’s weapon grid.

‘Power!’ he yells. ‘I want power!’

‘Yield is rising, sir,’ his first officer replies.

‘Nothing like fast enough. I need active condition!’

‘The Drive Room says we can’t hope to raise the yield any faster than–’

‘Tell the bastards in the Drive Room I want power, not excuses!’

There’s no time. The Infidus is coming. Whatever has happened, whatever outrage has occurred, the ships of the XVII clearly believe it to be an attack, and clearly regard the ships of Ultramar as a threat. They’re killing everything they can pre-emptively, killing everything before…

Hommed stops. He forces his mind to clear for a second. He realises how stricken he is with panic and extreme stress. Everyone is. The bridge around him is pandemonium. A clear head is the only hope he has to salvage anything, anything at all, from the situation.

The Infidus is coming. That’s the point. That’s the point. The thrice-damned Infidus is coming. Every ship was powered down at the time of the attack, which is why they’re all helpless and shield-less now.

Except the Infidus is coming. It’s moving. So are other ships from the Word Bearers fleet. It’s not that they’re responding hastily. It’s not that they’re taking wild shots at imagined targets before finding out what’s really going on.

It’s the fact that they’re moving at all.

They weren’t powered down. They were sitting at anchor hot.

They knew what was coming.

They were ready.

‘Those bastards,’ he breathes.

The Infidus closes. It’s firing callous broadsides; the whole length of it lighting up with multicoloured fury. Each salvo causes the counter-active gravimetrics to tense and brace the ship against the monumental discharge.

Each salvo murders another helpless vessel.

The Constellation of Tarmus disappears in a clap of heat and metal.

The Infidus closes.

‘Power?’ Hommed asks.

His first officer shakes his head.

The Infidus shivers and looses another broadside. Enough firepower to scorch and split a moon.

The Sanctity of Saramanth, struck amidships, bursts asunder.

[mark: -0.17.01]

Magos Meer Edv Tawren registers her own hyper-elevated adrenal levels. She has survived the great data-death that has ripped through the orbital Watchtower. Hesst saved her. Basic operational procedure saved her.

She does not want to think about that irony. That happenstance. That kindness.

There’s too much to do. They are in the middle of an unthinkable crisis. A disaster. She has to rescue the situation.

She has to save Hesst.

The tower’s elevators and lifting platforms are out. She hauls up the skirts of her long robe and rushes up the main spiral staircase. Smoke hangs in the air. The buzz of alarms. Voices echo from above and below. Outside, the sky is unnaturally luminous.

She passes servitors that are stumbling and mindless, trailing torn plugs, drooling. Some have slumped. Some are whining or replaying bursts of their favourite data like nursery rhymes. Some are smacking their heads against the staircase wall.

Toxic-data. Data-death. Overload.

Let Hesst be alive.

He was plugged in. He would have taken the brunt of the shock–

Don’t think about it. Just get upstairs.

She trips over the sprawled body of a high-grade servitor. A hand steadies her arm.

‘Do not fall, magos,’ a meatvoice requests.

Tawren looks up into the menacing face of Arook Serotid, the master of the tower’s skitarii brigades. Arook is a creature modified for war, not data. His ornate armour is part ceremonial, part ritual, a deliberately baroque throwback to the eras of threat-pattern and fear-posture.

‘Indeed, I will not,’ she agrees. He helps her up the stairs, moving blind and mindless servitors out of her way. He is a metre taller than her. His eyes are hololithic crimson slits in his copper visor. She notices that one of them is flickering.

‘We took a hit,’ he says.

‘A major datashock,’ she says. ‘Hypertraumatic inload syndrome.’

‘Worse than that,’ he replies. ‘Explosions in orbit. We’ve lost ships, orbitals.’

‘An attack?’

‘I fear so.’

They’re both using fleshvoice mode. She’s painfully aware of it. It’s so slow, so painstaking. No canting, no data-blurts. No simultaneous and instant transmissions of ideas and data. She doesn’t believe she’s ever spoken to Arook in fleshvoice before, and he’s clearly not used to talking at all.

But the mannered effort is necessary. They were both insulated from the data-shock. They must stay insulated.

‘I need to reach the server,’ she explains.

He nods. That one red eye is still blinking. A malfunction? Arook has taken some damage. Like all skitarii, he would have been linked to the noosphere, so the data-shock would have hit him like everyone else. However, the skitarii also have their own dedicated emergency manifold, a crisis back-up. Arook has been hurt by the inload shock, but he’s switched to the reinforced, military code system of his brigade.

He leads the way up.

‘You are undamaged, magos?’ he asks over his shoulder.

‘What?’

‘Are you hurt, magos?’

‘No. The data shock missed me. I was unplugged.’

‘That was fortunate for you,’ Arook says.

‘It was. There was a scrapcode problem. Server Hesst switched from discretionary to deal with it.’

Arook glances at her. His visor looks like a raptor’s beak. His shoulders and upper body are huge, like a bull simian. He understands. It is simple protocol. When dealing with a significant scrapcode problem, a server will have his second-in-command unplug so that there is no danger of the second-in-command being compromised by the scrapcode. It is an operational safety measure.

It has saved Tawren from far more than just a scrapcode infection.

‘Might the scrapcode be an issue?’ Arook asks.

Tawren has already thought of that. A serious noospheric failure brought on by a critical code corruption… that might have caused orbital collisions or accidents. It might have even caused the grid to misfire, or a ship to discharge weapons in error.

They reach the command deck. There’s a pall of smoke in the air. Technicians are struggling to free injured moderati from broken amniotic pods. Servitors hang limply from their plug sheafs. The screens are fizzling with blizzard noise.

Hesst is crumpled on the platform.

‘Out of my way!’ Tawren cries, shoving through the hesitant servitors and sensori clustered around him.

There’s a pool of dark fluid beside his head. She can smell the toxic hormones and excess chemicals that have seared through his bloodstream and ruptured his vessels.

‘We must disconnect him,’ she says.

Arook nods.

A technograde servitor blurts something.

‘In voice, damn you!’ Tawren snaps. ‘The noosphere’s gone.’

‘Disengaging the server could result in extreme cerebral trauma,’ the technograde clacks. ‘We need a cybersurgical team to properly detach him from the MIU.’

‘He’s dying,’ says Arook, looking down at the server. Arook has seen death many times, so he knows what he is looking at.

‘He is severely injured,’ the technograde clicks. ‘Expert disengagement may save him, but–’

‘We understand,’ says Tawren. She looks at Arook.

‘We need the specialists,’ she says. ‘If there’s any chance of saving him, we have to take it.’

‘Of course.’

She kneels beside Hesst, getting blood on her robes.

‘I’m here, server,’ she says, leaning in. ‘I’m here. It’s Meer Tawren. You must hold on. I’m ready to relieve you, but we need a surgical crew. Just hold on.’

Hesst stirs, a flicker of life.

He murmurs something.

‘Just hold on. I’m here,’ she says.

‘Unplug me,’ Hesst gurgles, flecking his chin with blood.

‘We need a surgical crew first, server. There has been a major incident.’

‘Never mind me. The grid is off. It’s off, Tawren. Unplug me and take over. You have to see if you can get it restarted.’

‘Wait,’ she soothes. ‘The surgeons are coming. Wait.’

‘Now!’

‘You’ll die, server.’

His eyelids flutter.

‘I don’t care. It doesn’t matter. I don’t matter. The orbital bioengines have gone, Meer.’

Her eyes go wide. She glances at Arook.

‘They’ve gone,’ Hesst repeats, his voice a sigh. ‘You have to plug in, Meer. You have to take my place, plug in, and see what can be salvaged. See what control can be re-established.’

‘Server–’

‘You have to reconstruct the noosphere. Without the grid, Calth is defenceless.’

Tawren looks at the heavy cable-trunking of Hesst’s permanent MIU link, coiled on the floor under him like a dead constrictor snake. She can’t detach that without killing him, surely? Especially not with him in such a fragile state–

One of the sensori cries out.

They look up.

Debris is falling from the clouds from the orbital explosions. The first scraps of metal are raining down across the river valley, trailing fire like meteorites. She sees them strike the river in columns of steam, or scratch across the rooftops of Kalkas Fortalice. Some heavier chunks strike like rockets, exploding buildings. Something smacks against the command deck’s windows, crazing the armourglas.

The hail of debris is just the beginning. Larger objects are falling. Parts of ships. Parts of orbitals. Parts of docking yards.

Tawren sees it before the sensori do. The grand cruiser Antrodamicus, twelve kilometres from bow to stern, falling backwards into the atmosphere from its ruptured drydock in a cloud of micro-debris, falling slowly and majestically, like a mountainside collapsing.

Falling, stern first, towards them and Kalkas Fortalice.

[mark: -0.16.11]

‘I don’t care what there isn’t, show me what there is!’ Marius Gage roars.

Zedoff, master of the Macragge’s Honour, starts to argue again.

‘Show him,’ a voice booms.

Guilliman is on the bridge.

‘Better still, show me,’ he growls.

‘Assessments! Everything you’ve got!’ Zedoff yells at his crew.

Impact was less than two minutes ago. The flagship’s screens are blind. There’s no data, no noospheric link, no contact with the grid. What comms traffic exists is a stew of screaming voices.

‘We’re blind,’ the Master of the First Chapter tells his primarch.

‘Some impact in orbit?’ Guilliman says. He casts a look at Magos Pelot, who is seizing on the deck. Most of the other Mechanicum personnel are faring no better.

Crewmen start handing the primarch data-slates. He scans fragments of the record. Gage knows that Guilliman is putting them together in his mind. A line of data from here, the last snatch recorded from there, a pict, the most recent auspex scan…

‘Something hit the yards, we think,’ says Gage. ‘Scanners are down, screens are dead.’

‘Use your damned brain, Marius,’ Guilliman says. He turns to the bridge crew.

‘Open the shutters! All of them. All the window ports!’

Servo systems begin to raise the blast shutters that have sealed the bridge’s vast crystalflex panels. Some of the wall protective shutters have to be hand-wound back to reset. Deck stewards rush to find the crank handles.

The main shutter crawls up. An alarming quality of light, unsteady and flickering, spills in through the opening gap.

‘In the name of Terra,’ Gage murmurs.

‘Shipmaster,’ Guilliman says, turning to Zedoff. ‘Your priorities are as follows. Power up. Shields up. Restore our sensory ability. Restore the vox. Inform me as any of these are achieved, and if any of them are going to take more than five minutes, I want an accurate time estimate.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Once we have vox, I want links to the following: each ship of the line commander, the server at the Watchtower, the ground commanders, the orbital station masters, not to mention my dear brother. Then–’

He stops as he hears Gage curse.

The shutters are raised high enough for them to see out. The bridge is bathed in firelight. They are looking out across the planet, across the vast and explosive destruction of Calth’s primary yards. Ships are on fire everywhere they look. Some are shaking and exploding, like live rounds left too close to ignition.

It’s an image Roboute Guilliman will never forget. It is more terrible than anything he could have imagined when the shockwave rattled him in his compartment and sent him running for the bridge.

It’s about to get worse.

‘That’s ship fire,’ he says, pointing at a blink of light.

‘That’s definitely ship fire,’ Zedoff agrees, a break in his voice.

‘Who the hell is firing?’ Guilliman asks. ‘What the hell are they shooting at?’

He doesn’t wait for an answer. He strides to the main detection console and pushes the bewildered staffers out of his way. They are so transfixed by the scene beyond the open shutters, they stumble aside like sleepwalkers.

‘Any auspex? Any at all?’ Guilliman asks.

One of the detection officers remembers where he is.

‘The pulse,’ he says. He coughs. ‘The electromagnetic pulse, my lord. It has rendered us insensible for a moment. Automatic restoration programs will–’

‘Take time,’ Guilliman finishes.

‘We could…’ the man stammers. ‘That is, I could authorise a restart of the detection array. But it might blow the links.’

‘And we’d lose everything and need a month in the yards to have the array refitted?’

‘Yes, my primarch,’ the man says.

‘Do it anyway,’ says Guilliman.

The man hesitates.

‘For your own good, hurry,’ Gage whispers to him. The officer jumps to work.

‘If this is a fight and you blow the array, we’re no use for anything,’ Gage says quietly.

‘We’re no use for anything already,’ Guilliman responds. He is staring at the view, absorbing every detail he can. He’s already mentally logged the names of several ships that have been crippled or destroyed.

‘The ship fire,’ he ponders. ‘It’s coming from… from the southern dayside. Close in, too. That’s not coming in from interplanetary space. That’s in amongst the anchorage.’

Gage says nothing. He’s not quite sure how the primarch is determining this from an eyes-only view of distance, space, burning gas, energy flares and backscattered light.

‘I think so,’ says Zedoff, who is more used to the view from a bridge window. ‘I think you’re correct, sir.’

‘Someone could be trigger happy,’ Guilliman says. ‘Firing because they think it’s an attack.’

‘It may be an attack,’ Gage says.

Guilliman nods. He’s still staring at the scene.

His calm is almost terrifying. Gage is transhuman: both bred and trained to know no fear. The acceleration of his own hearts and adrenal levels are simply a response to the situation, a readiness to act faster and more efficiently.

But Guilliman is at another level entirely. He is watching a critical disaster unfold on one of his most beloved planets: the miserable loss of a vital shipyard facility, the collateral damage, the destruction of ships, a portion of the fleet crippled, surface locations caught in the debris rain…

Even if it’s an accident, it’s a dire turn of events. And on this day of days, when so much prestige and statecraft was to be achieved.

It’s not an accident. Gage knows in his gut it’s not. And he knows the primarch knows it too.

But the primarch is considering things as though he’s contemplating the next move in a game of regicide.

‘Hurry with that auspex!’ Gage yells.

‘Put the vox on speaker,’ Guilliman tells the shipmaster.

‘It’s a jumble, sir–’

‘On speaker.’

A cacophony screeches across the massive bridge. Static, pulse-noise, code squeals, voices. There’s overlap, interrupt, distortion, bad signal. It’s as if the whole universe is screaming at them. The only voices Gage can hear with any clarity are the ones screaming for help, for answers, for permission to leave orbit or open fire.

Gage watches Guilliman listening.

‘They’re not speaking,’ Guilliman says.

‘What, sir?’ asks Gage.

Guilliman is listening intently. He’s teasing out every piece of detail from the uproar.

‘They’re not speaking,’ he repeats.

‘Who are not speaking?’ Gage asks.

‘The Word Bearers. The traffic, it’s all us.’

‘How do you know?’

Guilliman shrugs lightly, still listening. He’s recognising ship names, voices, keel numbers, transmission codes. Would that the Mechanicum could design a bioengine half as efficient as Guilliman’s mind.

‘We’re the ones requesting help, requesting clarification,’ he says. ‘We’re the ones asking for instructions, for permission to fire back. We’re the ones dying.’

He looks at Gage.

‘The Word Bearers are shooting at us,’ he says.

‘No. No, they simply would not–’

Guilliman silences him.

‘Whatever this is, whatever has happened, they think it’s an attack, and they think we’re part of it. Everything they believe about us has just appeared to come true, Marius, and they’re shooting at us.’

He turns to Zedoff.

‘Forget the auspex. Activate the lithocast and show me Lorgar. Nothing has greater priority.’

[mark: -0.16.05]

The first object hits. It’s a piece of debris. Oll Persson doesn’t know what it is exactly. He scarcely cares. A lump of ship. A piece of orbital.

It’s the size of a habitat; it comes down out of the burning sky at a forty-five degree angle. It’s blazing super-hot like a meteor. It punches home like a rocket strike.

It hits the scrub land on the far side of the estuary. The impact shock throws them all over onto the ground. The swartgrass in the field around them is shredded up like chaff. Heat and air smack them, tumbling Oll and the workers, and then dust, and a storm of particulate debris. Then it rains. The rain is scalding hot. It’s river water from the estuary thrown up to steam and back by the hit.

A second later, another few million gallons of river hit them. The impact has thumped the river out of its bed, and driven a two-metre-high tidal bore up across Oll Persson’s land.

‘Get up!’ Oll yells to his paid-by-the-day workers. ‘Get up and run!’

The wave swallows him, sweeping him under.

He hits a fence post, grabs on, choking, dragged around by the ferocious surge, and then back as the water recedes in a sucking rush.

More objects are hitting. Two more big pieces strike on the far shore, like missiles. Vast plumes of fire spit into the sky. Smaller pieces of debris are hitting all around, like shells, like shots from light field guns. They blow holes in the ground like grenade blasts: shell bursts of mud and water and matted vegetation. Whizz and whistle, crump, ground-shake, backspatter of mud. It’s as if he’s back on Chrysophar, on that last tour from hell. He feels the old fear return, and prays to his god. His lungs are full of water. He’s covered in mud, black mud, that good, black alluvial soil.

The thunder is like the guns of Krasentine Ridge. A boom like sheets flapping in the wind. The shudder inside your ribs as the pressure hits you, quivering your diaphragm.

Dear god, dear god, let me live, let me live, I am your servant…

Not shells. Not shells from field guns in flak-sacked redoubts. Not shells. No stink of fycelene. But just as bad.

It’s raining on them now, raining burning debris. Pelting. Each hit is like a bomb.

‘Find cover!’ Oll yells.

Stupid. How stupid. Where is cover going to be in this? The sky is falling in.

Some of his workers are already dead. He sees a man clutching the squirting stump of an arm, writhing in the black mire, screaming. He sees parts of a woman he quite liked protruding from the steaming lip of an impact crater. He sees one boy dead, crushed, and another dragging himself along, his legs blown off.

Like Krasentine, just like Krasentine. The ridge. He came to Calth to leave that life behind, and it’s found him again.

Something burning like a falling star hits one of the fusion plants at Neride, and the ground leaps.

This time the tidal wave is four metres high and feels like a rockcrete wall.

[mark: -0.16.03]

Seneschal Arbute comes to. She looks at Ventanus as if he has attacked her. There’s a graze on the side of her face and she’s clutching her torso with both arms. Broken ribs.

‘Wh-what did you do?’ she asks.

She still has no idea.

‘Listen to me,’ Ventanus says. He kneels in front of her, towering over her even so. ‘Seneschal, listen. We’re going to find you a medicae and–’

‘Why did you hurt me? You hurt me!’

‘Seneschal, you must listen to me. There’s been–’

What has there been, Captain Ventanus? What should he say to her?

He has carried her into the shelter of an underpass walkway. The tiles are cool, but they can feel the heat of the fires at ground level. The sidelong light falling into the underpass is twitching orange.

‘What has happened?’ she asks. She’s starting to realise the extent of the situation.

Selaton approaches, herding some of her staff and a few dock workers. They’re bloody and dazed. One of them is hurt quite badly.

‘I can’t reach the company or the Chapter,’ Selaton tells Ventanus. ‘Vox is scorched out.’

Ventanus nods. Information is what they need right now. Information is victory. To get that, they’ll need a high-gain transmitter, a primary caster, something robust enough to have survived the electromagnetic shock.

He hears a noise. It vibrates the rockcrete beneath him. He strides to the mouth of the underpass.

The sky is a firestorm, ruddy and bright. Spikes and fronds of searing yellow and orange spit across it. There’s lightning too, massive electrical discharge. Burning debris is hurtling down. It’s as though they’re caught in a meteorite shower.

The starport is in chaos. Parts of it, especially the masts and higher gantries, have been damaged by the air-blast or the rain of debris. Heat-sear and overpressure have blown down cranes, rigs, loaders and illumination towers. Thick plumes of black smoke are rising from promethium tanks and sundered refineries.

Many loading vehicles, including two heavy lifters, have been brought down by the shock, and their crash sites are ablaze. Personnel are running in every direction. Ventanus sees bewildered crash teams and fire fighters. He sees bodies on the ground.

The noise is coming from a bulk transport. Trailing smoke and flames, it is passing low overhead, so low he feels the urge to duck. Fragments of debris are tumbling off it. It’s struggling to rise, but it’s never going to get enough lift. Two missiles of debris streaking down from high altitude spear into its back, exploding, causing it to lurch.

It ploughs on, engines howling, ground shaking, and crawls out of sight behind the towering hive habs and the outer docks.

There’s a blink of light. He feels it hit. How far away? Six kilometres? Seven? It feels like an earthquake. The air turns gritty and the vibration is so intense his vision blurs for a second.

Behind him, Arbute screams. The scream is so sudden, it makes Ventanus jump slightly. She’s limped up to join him at the mouth of the underpass, and she’s just seen everything else.

‘What is this? What’s happening?’

‘Stay calm. Please,’ Selaton says, reaching them.

‘Is this an attack?’ she asks.

The heat is intense. The smell of burning is dry and caustic. She has to shield her eyes from the glare. They do not.

‘No,’ says Selaton. ‘An accident. It has to be.’

Ventanus doesn’t know what to say.

‘Sir!’

An Ultramarine has appeared. He’s spotted them. He’s got a kill team with him. It’s Amant, a squad leader from 7th Company.

‘Do you know what this is?’ Ventanus asks.

‘No, captain.’

‘How many are with you?’

‘I’ve got three squads on port protection detail,’ replies Amant. ‘We can’t find or contact our sergeant.’

‘Do you have vox?’

Amant shakes his head. ‘Nothing working.’

‘There’s a listening station on the far side of the concourse,’ Arbute says. Ventanus looks at her. She’s leaning on Selaton’s arm to get up, wincing at the pain.

‘A listening station?’

‘Part of the port’s original traffic control system, before the upgrade. It has old but powerful casters.’

Ventanus nods at Arbute.

‘Good. Let’s find out what’s going on.’

‘Maybe we can find out about this gunfire too,’ says Amant.

‘What gunfire?’ Ventanus snaps.

‘Reports of shooting along the western perimeter, sir,’ says Amant. ‘I think it’s most likely a payload of munitions that’s been set off by fire, but it’s not confirmed yet.’

‘Let’s move. Quickly,’ says Ventanus. ‘I don’t think this is an accident at all.’

The moment it’s out of his mouth, he regrets saying it aloud.

‘Why not?’ asks Selaton.

‘Because I’m a pessimist,’ says Ventanus.

Selaton looks at him. They start to help the injured seneschal along.

‘Look,’ Ventanus tells his sergeant, ‘I couldn’t have caused this much disruption to Calth’s transport network if I’d tried.’

Amant glances at them.

‘Of course it’s an accident,’ he says. ‘What else could it be?’

Ventanus isn’t listening. He can feel a tremble in the air.

Everything turns black. A deep shadow has swept over them. He hears Arbute and her aides exclaim in mortal fear.

A ship is falling backwards across the sky. A grand cruiser. It’s immense. To see something so big and space-borne in scale comparison with a world’s surface is fundamentally shocking. It makes the ship look like the biggest object any of them has ever seen.

It is falling so slowly. It is sliding down the sky, spilling clouds of debris, trailing the disintegrating remains of its drydock. It’s as though Calth’s atmosphere is a deep lake and the ship is a tree trunk sinking gracefully into it. There is a primal majesty to such destruction. The descent they are witnessing feels mythical. It is like a moon that has slipped from the firmament. A god that has forgotten how to fly. It is like a fall from the old fables. Good’s plunge into evil. The bright to the dark.

‘The Antrodamicus,’ Ventanus whispers, recognising the lines of the cyclopean shape.

It seems as if it’s hanging, but it’s only moments from impact. It’s going to crush the world. The fires of its demise will scorch the continent.

‘Back,’ he starts to say. ‘Back!’

3

[mark: -0.15.50]

Brother Braellen assumes they’re going to head for the city. Captain Damocles has already ordered the transport crews to get ready. Whatever’s going on, it’s bad, and the people in Numinus are going to need help. Disaster control. Lock-down. From the Ourosene Hills, they can probably be there in two hours.

No one’s giving any orders. No one’s giving any anything. There’s no coordination.

So the captain is the ultimate authority 6th Company has. That’s fine with Braellen. They’ll move in, deploy, secure. Rescue and secure, they’ve trained for that.

And if it’s not an accident, if it’s an attack… They’ve trained for that too.

He’s thinking that when things change and their plans change with them.

It starts raining main battle tanks.

The first impact is surreal. Braellen sees it plainly. A Shadowsword super-heavy, almost perfectly intact apart from one trailing track section, drops out of the stained sky about sixteen hundred metres ahead of him. The tank’s hull plating is faintly glowing pink from re-entry.

It hits. Hammer blow. Blinding light. Shock-wash.

The impact creates an explosion akin to a primary plasma mine. Battle-brothers are thrown through the air like toys. Some bounce off transports or stacked freight. Braellen’s squad is at the edge of the blast force. They stay upright as their power armour auto-locks and braces, sensing the explosion. Inertial dampers straining. Braellen feels grit and micro-debris spattering off his armour like small-arms fire.

The shock passes, the auto-lock relaxes. Discipline wavers for a second. No fear, just bemusement. A tank doesn’t just fall out of the–

A second one does. A Baneblade, this time. It’s tumbling end over end. It hits the company shelters a kilometre west, and causes an impact blast that splits the ground and triggers a landslip on the facing hill. Then two more, both Fellblades, in quick succession. One crushes a pair of parked Thunderhawks. The other hits just off the trackway a split-second later and punches a crater, but doesn’t explode. It actually bounces, disintegrating. It bounces and tumbles through a scattering line of battle-brothers, mowing them down, shedding torn plate and wheel assemblies.

More fall, all around. Like bombs. Like impossible hail. Like playthings tipped out of a child’s toybox. Some explode. Some fracture on impact and bounce. Some bury themselves in the open ground like bullets in flesh.

Braellen looks up into the sky. It’s almost blue apart from the smoke stains from the city. It’s full of falling objects: tanks, armoured fighting vehicles, troop carriers, cargo pods, lumps of debris. They turn in the air, catching the sunlight, glinting, spinning, some fast, some slow. Ash and metal-fibres rain down with them. Strands of cable. Wire. Optical leads. Pieces of haptic keyboard. Pieces of data-slate. Glass and brass splinters. Flakes of ceramite.

Somewhere, far above, a low orbit depot has broken up and the packed contents have spilled out like treasure from a sack. Enough war machines and equipment for a full division have been thrown down to be smashed by gravity. They’re too low to fully burn up. Air friction is simply heating them.

To his west, amongst the impossible skyfall, Braellen spots the flashing delta-shape of a Stormbird, rotating as it falls.

Then he sees falling bodies too.

They have not endured the drop as well as the machine parts. They have scorched and cooked. They land like bundles of wet branches, and burst.

They do not gouge vast craters and explode like the falling armour, but their impacts are somehow far more devastating.

[mark: -0.15.48]

The Watchtower sensori start shrieking in anticipation. Even half-blind, unplugged and shock-numbed, they can feel the immensity of the material objects sweeping towards them, the radiation flood, the momentum, the displacement of atmosphere, the distortion of gravity.

The Antrodamicus looms through the tortured sky, electrical discharge clinging to its hull like a neon spiderweb. It comes through the vast palls of smoke spreading horizontally from the burning starport, and parts the bright plumes of volcanic flame that are suddenly emanating from a fusion plant on the estuary. Coming through the thick and wallowing smoke, it looks like a galleon from Old Terra running aground, a great barque of the sea, gilded with fretwork and figureheads, coasting through foamy breakers onto the foreshore.

It fills the windows of the Watchtower. It is as tall as them, as high as them. It is like a city swinging towards them on a slow pendulum arc. Shooting-star chunks of falling debris streak down around it, tiny bright specks, fast moving compared to the starship’s slow descent. Some debris meteors strike the ship, producing flowers of flame. Others whizz past and hit the ground, the city, the river.

Tawren knows each one of those strikes would, on another day, be a civic disaster, a hab block or a street area laid waste by a massive impact blast.

Today they are minor and extraneous injuries.

‘Arook!’ she yells. She holds up a stretch of Hesst’s permanent MIU link like a coil of mooring rope.

The skitarii looks at her. One red eyeslit fizzles.

His tulwar is drawn in a second. The blade slices clean through the plaited cables. Sparks crack and spit. Hesst goes into a grand mal seizure.

Arook sweeps the server up, flops his jerking body over one massive shoulder. He grabs Tawren’s left hand in his right fist and starts to run. Around them, on the server’s platform, the sensori and magi are shrieking and weeping. Some are fleeing to the stairs. A few have jumped to their deaths from the shattered tower windows.

The massive engine ducts of the Antrodamicus, cold and dead-black, their fires unlit, dwarf the windows, growing bigger and still bigger.

Hesst is dead. He has stopped spasming. Bloody matter is streaming from his mouth and nose and down the master of skitarii’s burnished back plate. Tawren scoops up her skirts so she can run. Arook is so fast.

Where does he hope to escape to? She trusts him, but she has no idea. She has no idea what she was hoping he could do when she got him to cut the MIU. There’s not enough time. Not enough time for anything. Is he trying to reach the tower-top landing pads? A shuttle? A lighter? There isn’t enough time to unseal a hatch, let alone fire its engines and lift off.

No. No. He’s making for the escape pods. There are concussion caskets in bays around the tower-top. They are intended to let senior magi descend to the armoured bunkers under the Watchtower’s foundations. They’re crude things, just counterweight mechanisms.

Would they be enough? Is there even enough time left to reach the bunkers? The bunkers might protect from an air raid, but this? A starship is falling on the city!

Arook yanks open a pod hatch. He throws Hesst in, then hurls Tawren after him.

The Antrodamicus hits. Its dipped tail strikes first, biting into the land just short of the north curtain wall of Kalkas Fortalice. The keel and hull are designed to withstand the stresses of the empyrean. They only slightly deform on impact.

They dig in. The starship, all twelve kilometres of it, continues to move, sliding backwards, cutting a groove in the planet’s crust five hundred metres deep. The keel splits the earth like a giant ploughshare, turning it up on either side of the immense furrow. Soil and subsoil rip open. The furrow rips across arterial highways and a memorial park. It hits the curtain wall, annihilating it. Still sliding, the Antrodamicus demolishes a path through the teeming city of Kalkas Fortalice, a path two and half kilometres wide. Meteoric debris is still slicing down from the sky all around it, bombarding the city and the landscape. The starship’s impact is lifting a wall of dust higher than the Watchtower, a smog of particulates from atomised buildings.

The planet’s crust is shaking, a long, drawn-out vibration of the most apocalyptic sort. There is a tearing, screeching shriek in the air as hull and city grind each other apart.

Now stress fractures win. The Antrodamicus starts to crumple. Its entire mass lands, belly down, splitting its massive frame across the waist and the prow. Hull skin rips. Command towers and masts buckle and topple. The remnants of the drydock cage, wrapping it like a garland, slough off.

Internal explosions begin to riddle it. Upper plating sections blow out. Ribs are exposed, backlit by nuclear coals in the starship’s stricken heart.

It is still moving. It is still grinding backwards, disintegrating, ploughing the city in half, uprooting hab towers and hive stacks, flattening steeples and palaces. The quake-shock of the impact is levelling parts of Kalkas Fortalice that the ship hasn’t even touched.

The orbital Watchtower shivers as the mounting vibrations begin to overwhelm its structural integrity. Pieces of it start to splinter and fall off. It begins to sway, like a tree in a typhoon wind.

When the sliding tail-end of the starship finally reaches it and rams it down, it is starting to fall anyway.

The Antrodamicus ploughs it into the ground so hard that no trace of its proud structure remains whatsoever.

[mark: -0.14.20]

At Barrtor, they can feel the earth quaking under their plasteel boots. Aftershock. Calth’s tectonic system shivering from the appalling blow. The forest is thrashing, shaking loose leaves.

‘Theoretical?’ Phrastorex asks.

Ekritus is utterly cold and focused.

‘A major orbital incident. Accident or attack. Considerable fleet loss, considerable loss of support infrastructure, catastrophic collateral damage suffered on the surface due to the orbital destruction…’

He pauses and looks at Phrastorex.

‘The starport’s gone. All comms are out. No link to the fleet. No link to other surface units beyond anything we can establish. No data feed. No estimation of the type or extent of the situation.’

‘Practical?’ Phrastorex asks.

‘Obvious,’ replies Ekritus.

It is? thinks Phrastorex.

‘We form up. Everything we have. Your company and mine, the Army, the Mechanicum, the XVII. Everything that’s this side of the river and still intact. We form up, and we pull it back east into the Sharud Province. All hell’s falling out of the sky and this world is turning, Phrastorex. If we sit here wide-eyed, we could end up in a debris bombardment. Or worse. Let’s salvage everything we can from this muster point and pull it east, out of harm’s way, so it remains intact and battle ready.’

‘What if this is an attack?’ asks Phrastorex.

‘Then we’ll be battle ready!’ Ekritus barks.

Phrastorex nods. His instinct is to run towards the danger. To know no fear and advance into hell, but he knows the younger captain is right. They have a duty to preserve what they’ve got and re-form. The primarch will be expecting no less. Between them, he and Ekritus and the captains of the Word Bearers companies in the valley command an armed force that could crush a world. They have a duty to move it out of harm’s way into a holding position, so that it’s ready and able to do whatever Guilliman needs it to do.

‘Start leading the disposition out through the forest,’ Ekritus begins. ‘I’ll link up with the Word Bearers and the Army and–’

‘No,’ says Phrastorex firmly. ‘You lead the march. Get the men behind you, literally. Show them the way. I’ll order the XVII around, the Mechanicum too. Go. Go!’

Ekritus holds up an armoured fist.

‘We march for Macragge,’ he says.

Phrastorex punches the fist with his mailed knuckles.

‘Always,’ he agrees.

He starts away down the slope, through the ranks of his own men and Ekritus’s cobalt-blue warriors. Behind him, he hears Ekritus, Anchise and the other officers of both companies calling the men to order, getting them mobile. The aftershocks keep coming. Light-flash and thunder rattles the sky.

He sees 23rd squad.

‘With me!’ he yells. They fall in with him, moving fast. Phrastorex wants an escort. If he’s going to order around Word Bearers officers and Army stuffed shirts, he needs an honour company to emphasise his authority.

‘What’s the order, captain?’ asks Battle-brother Karends.

‘The job right now is to salvage and preserve as much of this fighting strength as we can,’ says Phrastorex. Ultramarines units are moving past them on both flanks, heading in the opposite direction. Down on the floodplain, tank engines have hit start-up. Lights are coming on. Phrastorex is surprised how impressed he is by the Word Bearers’ response time. Maybe he needs to revise his opinion of the wretched XVII.

He sees figures in red armour. They’re advancing up the hill. Word Bearers, moving already. That’s good. Maybe they won’t be so hard to persuade.

Phrastorex raises a hand, calling out to the nearest Word Bearers officer.

A boltgun fires.

Battle-brother Karends explodes at the waist and collapses.

The second bolt blows the fingers off Phrastorex’s raised hand.

Coming uphill at the hindquarters of the Ultra-marines companies, the Word Bearers form a line. They’re advancing through the dry, ferny brush, weapons raised, firing at will.

Phrastorex has fallen to one knee. His ruined hand hurts, but the wounds have already clotted. He tries to draw his weapon with his left hand. His mind is where the real pain lies. Sheer incredulity has almost crippled him for a second. There is no theoretical, there is no comprehensible practical. They’re being fired on. They’re being fired on by the Legiones Astartes XVII Word Bearers. They’re being fired on by their own kind.

He’s got his gun in his sound hand. He’s not sure what he’s going to do with it. Even under fire, the notion of firing back at Space Marines is abhorrent.

Phrastorex looks up. Bolter rounds are exploding in the ranks of the Ultramarines, blowing blue armour plate apart, throwing men into the air. Plasma beams, searing like blatant lies, rip through his company. Ultramarines fall, shot in the back, in the legs, split open, sliced in half. Men topple face down, the backs of their Praetor helms caved in and smoking.

It’s a massacre. It’s a slaughter. In seconds, before the main strength of the men can even turn in surprise, the ferny slope is littered with dead and dying. The leaves of the nodding fern brush are jewelled with blood. The trees shiver and hiss in disgust. The ground heaves as though it cannot bear to touch the proof of such infamy, as though it wants to shake the Ultramarines dead off itself so it is not implicated.

Heavier guns open fire. Lascannons. Graviton guns. Meltas. Storm bolters.

Rotary autocannons wither the rows of men in the forest space, shredding the brush cover into a green haze, spattering tree trunks with blood and chips of blue metal. Splintered trees collapse alongside splintered men.

The brothers in the squad accompanying the captain are mown down around him. A broken fragment of armour, outflung from a toppling Ultramarine, gashes Phrastorex’s right eye socket, damaging the optics. The impact snaps his head sideways.

It snaps him awake, out of his stupor, out of his shocked daze.

He rises, aiming his weapon.

The crimson Space Marines are advancing towards him, up the blood-soaked slope. He can hear them chanting. Their weapons are blazing.

‘You bastards!’ he yells as a headshot slays him.

At the top of the slope, in the deeper forest, Ekritus turns as he hears the gunfire.

He doesn’t understand what he’s seeing.

Around him, other men turn and stand, dumbfounded. They watch the slaughter unfolding as though it is some trick or illusion that will be explained later.

Men in the stunned formation around Ekritus start getting hit. Heads snap back. Carapaces explode. Brothers are flung backwards. Others sag, life leaking out of them.

Ekritus shakes, too stunned to make a decision. What he’s seeing is impossible. Impossible.

He sees Phrastorex, far below.

He sees him rise, gun in hand. In the wrong hand.

Then he sees him smashed backwards, headshot. Dead.

Ekritus roars in fury. He starts down the slope, into the hail of gunfire. Anchise grabs him and stops him.

‘No,’ the sergeant shouts. ‘No!’

He shakes Ekritus and turns him.

Titans advance through the forest to their right. Trees crash down, uprooted or snapped by the massive fighting engines. War horns boom. Ekritus smells the stink of void shields.

The Titans begin to shoot.

[mark: -0.11.21]

Sergeant Hellock shouts orders. No one is listening.

Bale Rane stands, open-mouthed, dazed by the overload of shock. Men run in all directions. Fireballs scream down out of the blood-clotted sky and explode all around them. Rane tenses and ducks as the pieces of orbital debris swoop over and hit. A kitchen tent explodes on the far side of the parade ground. The medicae section is thrown into the air as though mines have been triggered beneath it.

Each blast makes Rane flinch, but his eyes never leave the main wonder. A ship just crashed about thirty kilometres west of them. A whole ship. It’s sitting there now like a newly raised mountain range, broken, smoking. Ripples of explosions fire-cracker across its fractured hull.

It’s beyond anything he can imagine. It’s too big to be real.

All he can think of is Neve on the far side of the river. She’ll be scared. She should be alive; he reassures himself of that, at least. The starship fell on the Kalkas side of the river. Numinus was spared, though debris is fireballing the whole region. Whoever knew there was so much stuff up there in space that could fall out of it? She’ll have gone to her aunt’s, most likely. She’s a smart girl. She’ll have gone to her aunt’s and got in the cellar. Safe as houses.

Rane swallows hard.

He realises he doesn’t love her. He probably never did. He sees that with clarity, suddenly. It was all so easy, so romantic. He was going to be a soldier, and go off with the Army muster, so their time was precious. They’d probably never see each other again. So it was easy. It was easy to commit. It was easy to make grand gestures when nothing had to last. Everything was romantic. Everything was poignant. Everything took on a significance because they had so little time. They got married. It was like a huge send-off. Everyone cried. So romantic. So romantic.

So unreal. As unreal and unlikely as a broken starship sitting where Kalkas Fortalice used to be. As unreal as this whole day.

It’s as though he’s gone from a daydream into a living nightmare where everything makes more sense.

Krank knocks him over.

‘What the hell–?’ Rane gasps.

Something that is almost definitely a wheel from a battle tank, glowing red hot, has come bouncing across the compound, flattening tents and water bowsers. It would have mowed him down, but for Krank.

‘We’re moving!’ yells Krank.

‘Where?’

‘The dug-outs!’ Sergeant Hellock is shouting. ‘Get into the dug-outs!’

That makes no sense either. There are several thousand troopers in the immediate zone, and a few dozen dug-outs, constructed for air raids as per regulations. And if another starship falls on them, a bastard hole in the ground isn’t going to save them anyway.

‘Look!’ Trooper Yusuf calls out. ‘Look at the wire!’

They look at the fence dividing their compound from the Army auxiliaries serving the XVII. They were chanting earlier. Now they’re up against the fence. They’re pressing pale hands and woeful faces against the metal link. They’re calling out. Rane can see flames licking on the far side of the neighbouring compound.

‘They’re trapped,’ Hellock says. ‘Bloody bastards. They’re trapped in there. They can’t get out.’

Some of the men run forward to see if they can open the connecting gate.

‘Wait,’ says Rane. ‘Don’t.’

They’re too close. His squad mates are too close to the wire, too close to the pale, staring faces.

The fence goes down. It’s been cut in places, and it simply falls flat on the ground, jingling and rattling. The foreign auxiliaries spill over into the compound of the Numinus 61st.

‘What the bastard hell is this?’ Hellock says.

The foreigners have guns. Rifles. Side arms. Blades. Hafted weapons. They’ve got bastard spears.

The first shots take out the nearest Numinus troops. They buckle and drop. The heathens are howling as they charge in. One rams a spear through Yusuf’s gut. Yusuf screams like no one ought to ever have to scream, and the scream carries on, in broken sections, as the heathen twists and jerks the haft. Seddom, another man Rane has got to know, takes a las-round to the cheek, and his head goes a peculiar shape as he falls over. Zwaytis is shot as he turns to run. Bardra is stabbed repeatedly. Urt Vass is shot, then Keyson, then Gorben.

Rane and Krank start to run. Haspian turns to flee with them, but he trips over Seddom, and then the heathens are on him, pounding him to death with spears like washer women using beetles at the river side.

Hellock screams out a curse, draws his autopistol and fires. He makes the first active loyalist kill of the Battle of Calth, though the fact is not remembered by posterity. He shoots a heathen with a spear and puts him down dead.

Then a spear goes through his arm and another splits his thigh, and he falls. He’s screaming as they pin him to the ground, screaming every insult he can dredge up.

The Ushmetar Kaul pour past, slaughtering his men. Hellock, through his rage and pain, realises they are chanting again.

One of the bastards pinning him bends down to slit his throat with a knife, but another bastard stops him.

Criol Fowst looks down at the man his soldiers have pinned. An officer. Rank has value, ritual significance.

He can use the wounded sergeant. There are things that will have to be fed, after all.

[mark: -0.09.39]

Ventanus carries Arbute through the burning port complex, but she directs the way. Selaton and the seneschal’s aides follow them, escorted by Amant and his squad.

‘This way,’ she says. ‘Down that ramp. Down there.’

There are two huge listening pylons ahead of them, scaffold-frame monsters with a dish receiver set between them. It’s old stuff, very basic, probably constructed by the first pioneers when they began the Calth colonies. It’s military grade, though. No frills. Built to last.

‘My father worked the port for thirty years. I spent time here. This was part of the original port authority traffic system, before the Mechanicum arrived and set up a proper manifold. It should have been scrapped a century ago, but they kept it serviced.’

‘Why?’ asked Vantanus.

‘Because it’s reliable. When the solar storms kick off, every fifteen years or so, they’re much more resilient during the radiation flares than the manifold systems.’

‘Good,’ says Ventanus.

Flaming debris bombs are still slicing overhead. None of the party has quite got over the sight of the Antrodamicus hitting the surface. Some of the aides are tearful.

The pylons are built on a platform in the middle of a rockcrete basin beside landing platform sixty. It’s a natural shelter. About two hundred port workers and cargo-men have huddled there, under the lip of the platform. It’s not much of a refuge, but it’s better than nothing. Hot ash is raining down, burning scraps. Every now and then something small but heavy, like a sheared mooring bolt or an airgate handle, hits the ground like a bullet.

The sheltering personnel move forward when they see the Space Marines. There are questions, a lot of questions, and pleas for help.

‘We don’t know anything,’ Ventanus tells them, putting Arbute down and raising his hands. ‘A state of emergency is now in force, obviously. I need to get that listening post operational. Maybe we’ll get some answers that way. I need vox operators.’

Several men step forward as volunteers. He chooses two.

‘Let’s move,’ Ventanus says.

He’s getting edgy. It’s been almost ten minutes since the disaster struck, and he still knows absolutely nothing.

The control rooms for the post are a trio of standard pattern module habitats mounted thirty-five metres up on the girder-work frame of the pylon array. An open switchback staircase of grilled steps leads up to them.

Ventanus picks up Arbute again, and leads the way. The vox volunteers follow, along with a couple of the seneschal’s aides, Selaton and Amant. Amant’s troops spread out to quell the agitated crowd.

They open one of the modules. There’s still power. The technicians get to work warming up the station’s main caster grid. Ventanus takes a data-slate and records the channel frequencies he wants to raise. Erud muster control. Fleet command. His own company command.

The vox operators sit down at the main caster desks facing the module’s windows. Whooping static and radiation distort sobs through the old, hefty speakers.

‘Was that gunfire?’ Selaton asks.

‘Not that I heard,’ Ventanus replies. ‘Probably more debris hits.’

He goes out onto the narrow gantry outside the module. The view is excellent, though what he can see is not. Large sections of the port facility are now ablaze. The sky over both sides of the river is blacked out with smoke. Meteoritic streaks still stripe against the darkness, like las-bolts. It’s hard to see the huge shipwreck any more, though the pall in the direction of what used to be Kalkas Fortalice is throbbing red like the mouth of hell.

There’s definitely a distant sound, a booming. It’s almost like a planetary bombardment. Ships firing from orbit.

He’s still clinging to the notion this is all an accident.

There’s a shout from far below. Three more squads of Space Marines have entered the basin at the foot of the pylons. They’re dressed in red. XVII. That’s good. Good to get a little collaboration going in this hour of dire need. Maybe the Word Bearers’ comms networks have come through the incident a little more intact.

He sees Amant’s men and the crowd of port workers moving to greet them.

Ventanus steps back into the listening station module.

‘I’m going back down,’ he tells Selaton. ‘Reinforcements just arrived and I want to find out what they know.’

He looks at the vox operators, hard at work.

‘The moment they get anything, call me back up.’

Selaton nods.

Ventanus turns. Pauses.

‘What?’ asks Selaton. ‘What’s the matter, sir?’

Ventanus isn’t sure. He opens his mouth to reply.

No warning. No damned warning. Just a nanosecond prickle, a sting of intuition, that something isn’t right.

A nanosecond. Too little, and too damned late.

Mass-reactive rounds slam into the floor and front wall of the listening station module. Mass-reactive rounds fired from below.

The floor and front wall shred. Disintegrating metal plating becomes splinters and lethal tatters. Light and flame compress upwards into the module through its ruptured shell from the blast points, driving the splinters in with it.

The air inside the module fills with expanding flame and whizzing fragments. The forced pressure of the strike blows out the window ports and annihilates the vox-caster desks. Seneschal Arbute is knocked backwards. The head and shoulders of one of her aides become red mist as a round strikes and detonates. White-hot spalling and jagged shrapnel from the floor macerates the two vox-operator volunteers. The other staff aide, a clerk, is thrown into the module’s ceiling by the upward pressure of the blasts. His broken body then falls back and drops out through a floor that is no longer intact.

Selaton sees the murdered clerk fall, cartwheeling away, dislocated and loose. His corpse disappears down through the girder work of the pylons, just one more chunk in a hailstorm of spinning debris and burning fragments.

The deck begins to break away from the front wall.

‘Back! Back!’ Ventanus orders. The entire module is already shrieking and tilting, as if it is about to shear clean off its mounting. Part of the metal cage supporting the entry staircase rips away and topples.

The unseen killers fire again. Another rain of explosive rounds brackets and punishes the module. Ventanus assesses frantically, his weapon drawn. The attack is coming from positions down below, on the pylon base.

Mass-reactive. Detonating on impact. Legiones Astartes munition. Not possible. Not possible. Unless–

‘Error,’ exclaims Selaton beside him. ‘False fire. Error. Someone has made an–’

‘I said get back!’ Ventanus screams, grabbing Selaton and pulling him towards the rear of the module.

Ventanus and Selaton start to return fire, blasting down through the hole created as the floor section collapses and peels away. There is only smoke below, no clear target, no true thermal print. They fire anyway. Discouragement.

Armour inertials don’t lie. The module is slumping backwards. It is going to separate from its mountings and fall.

Arbute is dead. There isn’t a wound on her, but Ventanus knows that the overpressure and kinetic slam of the mass-reactive strikes will have pulped her human organs. Amant has been dropped. Two, perhaps three mass-reactive rounds have taken him from below. He is lying on his back on the rapidly perishing deck. His feet are gone, and the blasts have sliced the armour and flesh from his shins and thighs, his torso and his face. He is still alive, clotting blood filling the cavities of his wounds.

A few moments to stabilise, and they could get him clear. Get him to reconstruction. Even with the front of his body skinned and scourged away, a month or two in biotech conditioning would see him fighting again.

The module doesn’t have a few moments.

They don’t have a few moments.

Ventanus sees Amant’s eyes, wide in a mask of blood and broken visor, staring in helpless disbelief. Ventanus understands what he sees there. Amant knows it’s the end, not just of his own existence, but of the galaxy as they understand it.

Ventanus kicks out the rear hatch with one savage thump of his heel. The support staircase is gone. There is nowhere to go. The module starts to fall, like a boat rolling over in a rush as the water it is taking on suddenly hits the tipping point.

‘Jump!’ yells Ventanus.

An order is a damned order.

They jump.

[mark: -0.03.59]

Guilliman is almost rigid with fury. He’s got a stylus out, a pen, and he’s at the bridge windows, recording everything he can see on his data-slate. Ship losses, dispersement. Formation.

The moment the flagship’s system reboot and power comes to active yield, he wants data he can act on.

‘I want that link!’ he yells over his shoulder, sketching the relative placements of the Cornucopia and the Vernax Absolom.

‘Do we raise shields?’ asks Gage.

‘The moment you have them,’ Guilliman replies. ‘Communicate that to the whole fleet the moment we have capability.’

Gage nods.

‘Do we return fire?’ he asks.

Guilliman looks at him.

‘This is a tragedy. A tragedy, a mistake. As soon as we can protect ourselves, we do that. But do not make this worse. We do not add to the death toll.’

Gage’s jaw tenses.

‘I would kill them for this,’ he says. ‘Forgive me, but this is a crime. They must know this is wrong. They shame us–’

‘They are hurt,’ Guilliman says. ‘They believe they are under mortal threat. All their fears are real to them. Marius, we do not compound their folly. We do not add our mistake to theirs, no matter what the cost.’

‘We have a link!’ Zedoff cries.

Guilliman turns. ‘Lithocast?’

‘Barely. Principally audio.’

Guilliman shoves the data-slate to Gage and moves to the hololithic platform.

Light blooms around him again. It is not as healthy as it was before, not as stable. There are figures that aren’t quite there, crackling phantoms at the edge of resolution. Guilliman sees only the outline of Argel Tal, the shadow of Hol Beloth, a skeletal sketch of light that might be Foedral Fell.

Only Lorgar is visible. His resolution is black and white, jumping and interrupted. His eyes are in shadow, his head down. Wherever he is standing, there is a very local light, a glow just above him that casts his face in inky darkness.

‘Stop this,’ Guilliman says.

Lorgar does not answer.

‘Brother. Cease fire now!’ Guilliman says. ‘Cease fire. This is a mistake. You have made a grave error. Stop your reprisal. We are not your enemy.’

‘You are against us,’ Lorgar whispers, his voice made of white noise whine.

‘We have not attacked you,’ Guilliman insists. ‘This I swear.’

‘You turned on us once. You shamed us and humiliated us. You will not do so again.’

‘Lorgar! Listen to me. This is a mistake!’

‘Why in all the stars would you presume this to be a mistake?’ asks Lorgar. He still does not look up.

‘Cease fire,’ Guilliman says. ‘We have not attacked you, nor allowed you to be attacked. I swear this, upon our father’s life.’

Lorgar’s reply is lost in a crackle of noise. Then the image of him vanishes too, and the hololithic platform dies.

‘Contact lost,’ Zedoff announces. ‘He’s refusing our attempts to restore the link.’

Guilliman looks at Gage.

‘He’s not going to back down,’ Guilliman says. ‘He’s not going to stop this unless we stop him.’

Gage can see the pain in Guilliman’s eyes, the enormity of what this means.

‘What was that thing he said, my primarch?’ Gage asks. ‘That last thing?’

Guilliman hesitates.

‘He said, “I am an orphan”.’

Gage straightens up and glances at the senior crew.

‘Your orders, sir?’ he says firmly.

‘Issue the instruction as best you can,’ Guilliman says, stepping down from the platform. ‘To all XIII Legion units and auxiliaries, upon my authority code. Priority one. Defend yourselves by all means at your disposal.’

Gage clears his throat.

‘My primarch, I need your confirmation. Have you just authorised actions up to and including return of fire?’

There is a long pause.

‘Return of fire is so ordered,’ says Guilliman.

Zedoff and the senior gunnery officers start barking orders. Gage turns to the rubricator waiting ready at his station beside the shipmaster’s throne.

‘Officer of record,’ he says. ‘Start the mark.’

The rubricator nods and activates his cogitator.

‘Initiating XIII Legion combat record, elapsed time count,’ the rubricator says. ‘Count begins. Calth mark: 00.00.00.’

SYSTEM//KILL

‘It is necessary under some circumstances, even – in extremis – actions of compliance, to methodically destroy an opponent’s infrastructure along with the opponent himself. Sometimes an emphatic military victory is not enough: sometimes the very earth must be salted, as the ancient texts put it. The principal arguments for this kind of action may be psychological (against a defiant people or species) or a matter of security (in that you are purifying a region of something too dangerous to exist). Neither of these arguments is especially comforting to a pragmatic commander. War is about accomplishment as well as victory; it should not be about supreme destruction. This kind of total war, this process of razing, is most commonly seen with shock or hyper-aggressive forces. The warriors of Angron, my brother primarch of the XII Legion, refer to it as Totality, and even they employ it rarely to its full extent. From my brother Russ, and the Wurgen war-cant of the Vlka Fenryka we borrow the term Skira Vordrotta, which may most usefully be rendered as System Kill.’

– Guilliman, Notes Towards Martial
Codification, 4.1.ix

1

[mark: 0.00.01]

‘My brother, hear me. Warriors of the XVII Legion, hear me. This violence is against the code of the Legiones Astartes and against the will of our father, the Emperor. In the name of the Five Hundred Worlds of Ultramar, I implore you to cease fire and stand down. Open communication with me. Let us speak. Let us settle this. This action is an error of the most tragic kind. Cease fire. I, Roboute Guilliman, give you my solemn pledge that we will deal with each other frankly and fairly if these hostilities can be suspended. I urge you to respond.’

Guilliman puts the speaker horn down and looks at Gage and the Master of Vox.

‘As soon as we are able,’ he tells them, ‘transmit that message on repeat. Cycle transmissions. No interruptions.’

‘Yes, sir,’ says the Master of Vox.

[mark: 0.00.10]

Leviathans stir. Bigger than the human mind can comfortably conceive, starships move through the burning clouds of dust above Calth. Their dark hulks emerge from glittering banks of debris, through swirling flares of ejected energy, like marine monsters surfacing for air.

They are flying blind. They are fighting blind. They scream challenges and threats into the burning void through shorted vox systems and blown speakers. They detach themselves from the super-massive gantries, derricks and anchorages of the yards, some shearing cables, lines and airgates in their desperation to run free.

A moving target is harder to hit. That’s the logic. In truth, a moving target makes itself alone and vulnerable.

The warships of the XVII Legion make the kills appear effortless. Coasting, almost stately, they run forward, shields lit, creating bright halos around their hulls as dust and particulate matter burns off the fields. Their snarling gunports are open, their primary weapons extended in their silo bays. Charge batteries and plasma capacitors seethe with power, ready for lethal discharge. They are supposed to be deaf and blind too, but they are not. Detection and target systems beyond the darkest imaginings of the Mechanicum peer out into the noisy darkness and alight upon the scattering cobalt-blue vessels of the Ultramar fleet as though they were hot coals on cold ash. They find them, and they bind them, tracking them relentlessly, scrutinising them in lascivious detail, weighing and assessing their shielding and hull strength, while weapons batteries train and align, and munitions loads are ordered up. Bulk magazines chug and clatter as projectile shells and missiles are conveyed by automatic loaders, through-deck hoists or ordnance chutes.

Munitions fill the void like seed pods, like blizzards. Columns of scorching plasma and las, hundreds of kilometres long, stripe afterimages on the retinas of those who witness them. Main lance batteries vomit bright energy and spit light in beams, in gobs, in splinters, in twitching withies of lightning.

Ships burst in the darkness. The Gladius, a four-kilometre-long escort from the Saramanth Wing, serially detonates as it draws clear of its slipway, its armoured hull sectioned and chewed apart by internal explosions. The barge Hope of Narmenia is caught by a missile spread that strikes it like a storm of needles, puncturing its upper hull and stern in a hundred places, peppering it, engulfing its interior in white-hot fire. The support carriers Valediction and Vospherus are wrecked by sustained broadside fire from a battle-barge of the XVII. The Valediction breaks up first, its hullplates unwrapping around a core explosion like a time-lapse feed of a flower’s petals opening, blooming and dying. Hastily deployed lifeboats are swept away by the super-heat wash. The Vospherus, shielded by the fate of its sister ship, turns away to run, but the enemy guns reach it and pulp its drive section. Drive vents and engine bells explode, and the inward pressure forces a drive plant event, a series of star-hot overblasts in the engineering spaces that burst the stern of the carrier like a pipe bomb. The force of the blasts throws the ruined carrier forward on a pressure wave and slams the ship into the troop transport Antropheles, cutting it in two. Eighty thousand lives lost in five seconds.

The Infernus-class battleship Flame of Purity, one of the true monsters of the XVII fleet, runs into the Asertis Orbital Yard, firing cannonades to maximise collateral damage. Its prow is armoured: a vast, burnished ramming blade, a giant’s chisel gilded with seraphs, narwhals and eagles. It ploughs through the smaller, berthed ships in its path, bisecting some, ripping others open, shattering hulls. Its main spinal lance mount, a primary magnitude exo-las weapon, wakes and screams, uttering a shaft of matter-annihilating light that sends the picket cruiser Stations of Ultramar reeling from a hammering concussion as it attempts to defend the yard space. The cruiser tries to rally, trailing debris from a blackened and molten port side. It turns about, dazed, clumsily glancing against support stations and yard gantries. Clouds of pink flame belch from its stricken engines. It raises its shields. The Flame of Purity fires its recharged exo-laser again. The shields surrounding the Stations of Ultramar do not even retard the beam. They pop like soap bubbles. The beam vaporises the cruiser’s central mass, until it’s merely a toroid of hull metal around a glowing white-hot hole. The Flame of Purity powers on, bumping the drifting ruin of the Stations of Ultramar aside on its magnetic bow-wave.

In the dark pits of drive rooms and engineering chambers, hosts of stokers and allworks slave away with furious effort. The chambers are infernal, soot-caked and lit by the ruddy glare of the vast engines and reactor furnaces. Armies of stokers, sweat-sheened and roaring, eyes like white stones in blackened faces, shovel fuel ores and promethium pellets into the iron chutes. Servitor crews, their metal skins colour-bruised like old kettles by the constant heat, lever and haul on the throbbing activator rods that quicken the drive plants. Coal-black chains swing. Bellows wheeze and flush dragon-breath balls of roiling fire up flues and vent pipes. Abhuman labourers, troll-like and grunting, swelter as they drag in monolithic payload carts of raw fuel from the silo decks.

There is frenzy here, panic that is barely kept at bay by the lashes and orders of the engine room masters. There are no windows, no way of appreciating the outer universe or the threats it may contain.

In truth, the envied bridge crews in their glass and gilt towers far above have no better understanding of the calamity than the blind stokers down in the dark below. Knowledge of this irony may not have enhanced the stokers’ confidence.

Many will never know the light again. Some of the ships slain during the Calth Atrocity will continue to circle the tortured star for a hundred thousand years as frozen wrecks, as tomb ships for the silent dead, mummified and preserved in the act of screaming their final screams.

[mark: 0.00.20]

Ventanus and Selaton hit the ground. The drop is severe. Their strength and their armour absorb the impact, and they come up, bolters ready. Dust and ash films their armour plate.

They move.

The module reaches the ground behind them, shredding open as it lands. The noise is huge, a splintering of metal. Behind the module comes the best part of one of the pylons. They can hear steel hawsers parting like bolter shots. Broken fastener pins, released by the extreme tension, whistle through the air like micro-missiles.

Selaton and his captain outrun the falling pylon. It collapses like a tranquillised animal, buckling at the knees, and then falling from loose hips, then from a slack neck that turns back against the direction of the fall. Dust erupts in a rolling wall, as if driven by the sound of tearing steel. Ventanus and Selaton bound out of the dust wall.

The landing platforms ahead of them are covered with debris and corpses. Ventanus blanches as he sees fallen Ultramarines. Bolter fire has reamed and split their beautiful cobalt-and-gold armour. He sees one man who died carrying a regimental standard. It is a golden symbol of the Legion surmounting a double eagle. The banner pole is clenched so tightly in his armoured fists that his grip has marked the haft.

This was an honour guard. A ceremonial squad cut down as it prepared to board. Nearby, the bodies of city dignitaries, of trade officials, of seneschals, of aides and cargo foremen. They are bloody ruins: split sacks of meat and torn clothing. They were cut down by weapons designed for post-human war, weapons that could slay and have now slain the Legiones Astartes.

Weapons whose effects on unmodified, un-enhanced, unarmoured humans amount to overkill.

Selaton slows to a halt. He regards the litter of dead.

‘Move!’ Ventanus orders.

‘They were waiting to board,’ says Selaton, as if this matters.

Ventanus stops and looks at his sergeant.

It is so obvious, and yet, he missed it. It has taken Selaton’s less experienced mind to see the simple truth.

They were waiting to board. They died waiting to board, banners and standards raised. But it is, perhaps, fifteen or twenty minutes since the disaster struck, fifteen or twenty minutes since the orbital detonation that began the deluge of fire.

Did they stand there all that time, still waiting to board as the world caught light around them?

‘They were already dead,’ says Ventanus. ‘Dead, or dying.’

This murder pre-dated the disaster. At best, it was simultaneous. The disaster was no accident.

Gunfire shrieks across the platforms. Las-fire spanks off the blast walls behind them. Bolter shells corkscrew the smoke they cut through. Impacts occur all around.

Ventanus sees Word Bearers advancing out of the filthy air. Troops move up with them, Army cohorts with lasrifles and halberds.

They’re shooting at any target they can see.

Selaton, still confined by the ethical parameters of the universe he used to understand, asks the obvious question.

‘What do we do?’ he says. ‘What do we do?’

2

[mark: 0.01.00]

Aboard the Samothrace, Sorot Tchure performs his second ministry.

His men are already killing most of the ship’s primary crew. Advancing to the main bridge, burning through blast hatches that had been closed in desperation, Tchure comes face-to-face with the ship’s captain, who solemnly announces his disinclination to assist Tchure, no matter what threat is made.

Tchure ignores the officer. He is a yapping gatehouse dog that is too ignorant to know better. He is barking futile defiance at the carnodon that has just entered through the gates.

Tchure grasps the captain’s head in his right hand and squashes it like an uncooked egg. He lets the body drop. The bridge crew gawps at him, realising that their predicament is far worse than they ever imagined. When a ship is seized, bridge crew can ordinarily safeguard their lives in exchange for their vital technical services.

The bridge officers of the Samothrace see their captain murdered, and realise their services are not required.

Several pull sidearms, despite the fact that they are unmodified humans dressed in cloth and braid, despite the fact that they are outnumbered by martial trans-humans who have just cut their way into the main bridge space, despite the fact that their laspistols will not even dent the armour of the invaders.

Tchure is in the newer Maximus plate, as befits his command status. Crimson is the first colour his suit has ever been painted.

‘Death,’ he instructs as a las-round tangs off his shoulder plate.

The Word Bearers use their fists, guns slung. Tchure doesn’t want mass-reactive shells destroying the vital control stations of the bridge. They break men. They grab them and snap spines and necks, or mash skulls, or tear out soft throats. The officers have nowhere to run, but they run anyway, screaming in terror. They are grabbed and picked up by the hair, by the coat-tails, by the ankles and wrists, grabbed and picked up and killed. The bodies are slung in a pile in the centre of the deck in front of the late captain’s throne.

Tchure observes the work. He raises his left wrist, and speaks into the glass-and-wire mechanism welded there. It is inscribed with the mark of the sacred Octed. The dark, glistening thing living inside the wire-wrapped bottle does not send his words like a vox. It simply repeats them through other mouths in other places.

Hearing the signal through their own warp-flasks, the Mechanicum magi advance onto the bridge. They are all of the cadre that has sided with the Warmaster. They have turned their backs on Mars and Terra. Subtle variations in their robes and insignia already show this change of alignment, but most of all there is a darkness to them. They wear the mystery of their technological craft around them like a shadow.

‘The ship is seized,’ Tchure tells their leader. The magos nods, and instructs his men to bridge positions.

‘Ten minutes, and we will be mobile,’ the magos tells Tchure. ‘Motivation is coming to yield.’

‘Zetsun Verid Yard,’ says Tchure, naming his destination. The yard is a smaller, specialist facility that forms part of the orbital archipelago where the Samothrace has docked.

The magos nods again. Under the deck, systems are humming up to active power.

Tchure turns to his second, Heral.

‘Locator,’ he says.

Heral’s squad brings forward the locator unit, a warp-flask the size of an urn, and places it in the middle of the deck. They wedge it into the pile of corpses to hold it upright. Blood is sliming the floor under their feet.

They stand back. Something in the flask pulses and ripples, gleaming slug-black. Something whispers in the darkness. Something withdraws into its shell like a glistening mollusc, except the shell is not there, in the flask, on the bridge of the Samothrace, it is elsewhere, in another universe, recessed through the coils and loops and whorls of an interstitial architecture.

Frost forms on the corpse pile. Some of the dead muscles stiffen into rictus, and cause the corpses to jerk and lurch as though they are trying to wriggle out from under the tangle of limbs.

Corposant ignites around the flask, lights up the bodies, twitches and crackles along the ceiling beams like neon ivy. It grows impossibly bright. Tchure looks away.

When he looks back, the glow is fading, the piled corpses have been burned black, and a new figure has joined them, still smoking with teleportation energy.

‘Welcome to the Samothrace,’ says Tchure, bowing his head. The air smells of cooked fat from the incinerated bodies.

‘Sorot. Let us begin,’ says Kor Phaeron.

[mark: 0.20.34]

At Barrtor, the forests east of the Boros are on fire. Traitor Titans lumber through the sparks and smoke billowing up from the canopy. They look like woodsmen tending a brushfire. Their weapon mounts pour destruction into the glades and cavities of the forest.

Air support howls past. Down in the woods, the shattered remnants of the 111th and 112th Companies, Ultramarines, retreat before the reaping assault of the betrayers. Achilles- and Proteus-pattern Land Raiders, dressed in crimson and badged with abominable designs, demolish the tree cover and men alike. Mega bolters, grinding like unoiled fabrication plants, lacerate the world, reducing trees to fibres, rocks to dust, and bodies to paste.

Ekritus moves backwards, firing as he goes. Anchise is nearby, doing the same. Beyond him, a few other trusted men. Ekritus isn’t even thinking about what’s happening any more. To do so would be to confront the unthinkable, and to leave his mind and wits with as much protection as the flimsy trees are currently affording his body.

He is simply surviving. He is firing at anything he can cleanly target, and falling back. They are buying time for the squads he has sent off at an expedited rate of retreat. Throne alone knows if they will draw clear, or find any shelter from the aircover that is sweeping across them.

What’s left of his companies are cut off from their heavy support. They haven’t got anything in their arsenal that will stop the Land Raiders. Each of those beasts is felling a swathe of the forest ahead of it. Nothing at all will stop the Titans. Every time one of the marching giants speaks, booming its speaker horn in a howl of scorn and triumph, Ekritus feels his bones shake.

He scrambles through brush, reloading his weapon on clips taken from the dead. The blood of others paints his armour, turning him crimson, a colour he has an unexpectedly painful need to wash off. Bolt-rounds snap and whine through the trees. One pulps leaves in a mist of sap. One hits a tree trunk, explodes, and collapses the ancient tree wholesale. One destroys Brother Caladin’s head, and flips his corpse into a ditch.

Ekritus finds a mossy slope, ducks under a root mass, and clambers up. Old stonework, the retaining wall of some earthwork built in the early years, when this was estate land. Smoke bores through the woodland space as if driven by an ocean current. Animals and avians are mobbing out of the devastated environment in teeming plague-year swarms.

Nature in rout. A world turned upside down.

He clambers higher still. He is above the tree line. He can see for many kilometres. He can see the world burning. On the plains beyond the forest expanse, he can see vast hosts assaulting the towns along the river and the port. Waves of men, tens of thousands strong, Army or what until an hour ago passed for Army. Waves of men, of armour, formations of Titan engines, phalanxes of Space Marines, all of them hazed in the dust and smoke of their advance.

The blot of their insult.

The stain of their crime.

Here alone, east of the river, he can see a mobilised force large enough to take a continent. A world, probably. And this, just one muster of the Calth conjunction. He watches as it surges, a fluid mass, sweeping aside everything in its path.

There are so many burning ships and orbitals in the sky, it looks like a hundred sunsets all happening at once. The actual sun, the Veridian system’s pure, blue-white star, is lost behind circumfulgent smoke.

Ekritus wants to kill them all. He wants to face them and kill them, one by one, until there are none left, and the heat of his outrage is finally quelled.

He senses movement. The first of the Word Bearers appears. Behind him, two more, toiling up the earthwork slope. More come behind them. Ekritus stands to meet them.

They do not shoot him.

He hesitates, boltgun in one hand, power sword in the other.

He is red, like them. Except not by choice.

They see his true markings under the sticky sheen of blood only as they draw close. By this time, as they react, he is already killing them.

He shoots the first in the face. There is no time to appreciate the satisfaction of seeing the grilled helm explode, the pieces of bone and hair and brain-matter eject in all directions. The second he hits in the gut. The third in the left shoulder, tipping him backwards down the hill into the men behind him.

The fourth is another headshot.

There is no fifth. No rounds left.

Ekritus goes into them with his sword. He severs a wrist, a thigh, a neck. He impales a body and lifts it, hurling it like a sack down the earthwork rise. It crashes into its kin below. Two-handed, he buries the edge of the blade in the cranium of another helm, splitting it in half.

One has dropped a bolt pistol. He snatches it up out of the bloody moss and fires twice into the chest of the next traitor on him, killing him cold. He kills the next two, then side slashes a man off the bulwark ridge to his left.

But they’re on him. There are too many. Enough to take a world. Enough to bring a Legion to its knees. They hit him. They beat him with gun-butts and sword hilts. They pin him and club him down to his knees, chipping and denting his armour until some of the blue shows through again.

One of them tears off his helm.

‘Bastards! Bastards!’ he yells at them. A fist pulps his face, repeated blows to mash flesh and crush bone. He drools blood and teeth through swollen lips. One eye has gone.

They drag him up. He’s a captain. He’s a trophy.

A figure towers over him. Ekritus, half-blind, realises it’s one of the Titans, advanced to face the earthwork. Its speaker horns boom. The Word Bearers roar an answer and punch the air.

When the Titan resumes its advance, knocking down the old earthwork and trampling the trees, Ekritus is crucified on its torso plates.

[mark: 0.32.31]

Hol Beloth, recently teleported to the surface, commands the advance on the port at Lanshear. Hosts of the Kaul Mandori, the Jeharwanate, and the Ushmetar Kaul sweep before his engine formations. A brigade of the Tzenvar Kaul is encircling the port to the north.

The brotherhoods fight with supreme devotion. Beloth or his immediate officers have selected and anointed many of the zealots personally. They are conduits for the warp-magicks used by the highest ordinals of the XVII to enrapture their warhosts.

Hol Beloth is ambitious. He wishes to be more than a commander and more than a conduit. Such status has been promised to him by Erebus and Maloq Kartho and other, unnamed shadows that stand beside them sometimes and mutter in the twilight. He will be invested. He will be greater than even the Gal Vorbak. But he must prove himself, though he has proved himself in war a thousand times before.

This is a new form of war. This is a warfare that has never been unleashed openly before. Beloth must achieve his objectives, and perform his duties well. He must prove that he can command and control men and un-men alike.

He is hungry for power. Erebus and Kor Phaeron were always the greatest adepts, since the earliest days, but now the primarch seems to have exceeded them. His essence is frightening. Lorgar is transcendent. It is not simply the power, it is the fluid subtlety with which he employs it. Just being near Lorgar is a privilege. Being apart from, like here on Calth... it feels like the sun has gone out.

Hol Beloth believes that Erebus and Kor Phaeron are painfully aware of the way they have fallen behind. He believes they watch the primarch and crib from him, borrowing tricks and talents they have learned by observation, and then deploying them with stiff, crude proficiency. They are not adept any more. They are struggling to keep up with Lorgar’s mastery.

It is as though they are borrowing from another place, while Lorgar has become one with that place.

Hol Beloth intends to ascend to a place beside his primarch. He will burn Lanshear for the right to do so.

[mark: 0.45.17]

Numinus City is mortally wounded. Actinic light shivers along the skyline. Criol Fowst knows that the blessed dark masters of the XVII are already loosening the interstices of Calth. They are displacing it; they are rocking it in its clasp like a thief twisting a jewel out of its setting. Hoar frosts keep forming then thawing on the walls and roofs of the city. Fires gutter and die for no reason, and then reignite spontaneously. Twice, Fowst has looked up and seen, through the smoke cover, patterns of stars that do not belong to Calth or the Veridian System; patterns of stars, indeed, that he has never seen before, but which seem so familiar they make him weep for joy.

He rallies his men. The Ushmetar Kaul are dedicated. They have already gutted the Army encampments along the south bend of the river and left them in flames. They have killed thousands. Fowst has inspected the heaped dead. Almost a division of men went into the river in a thrashing attempt to escape, and were cut down by cannon and rifle. Their bodies, those which have not washed away downstream, have formed several new jetties at the water’s edge; slipway ramps of corpses jutting out into the stained current.

Where there is resistance, the Brotherhood does not flinch. They walk into return fire, soaking up the hits. It is a process of gleeful sacrifice that leads to overwhelm. Some of his men are strapped up with explosives, and walk in amongst the masses of the fleeing enemy to find their ascension.

In the ransacked encampments of the Numinus 61st, the Brotherhood has found crates of rifles, las-weapons, new issue Illuminators ready for distribution. The Ushmetar Kaul took them, ditching their old pieces in favour of the powerful new firearms. Fowst has one. It is tough and lightweight, with virtually no kick. It has a folding wire stock that he can clip back out of the way. He has killed six men with it already.

He is an educated man. The irony is not lost on him.

Orders are coming from the Legion. The spaceport must be secured, and then the outlying palaces on the plains.

Fowst wonders about the planet’s southern hemisphere, primarily ocean and more sparsely inhabited. He believes it is about to have more comprehensive fury meted out upon it. Great power, both ritual and actual, has been unsheathed today. But the task at hand will take much more than that.

[mark: 0.58.08]

The Samothrace steers in through the slip gates of the Zetsun Verid Yard. Behind it, Calth’s main shipyard is burning. No one challenges the Samothrace. It’s a vessel of the XIII fleet, running for cover, and besides, the vox is choked and the noosphere is dead.

No one aboard the Zetsun Verid Yard questions the fact that the yard structure has remained untouched either. Too small? Overlooked? Yet it is a vital specialist facility, and yards around it have been targeted and obliterated.

The ship docks between the two fast escorts sheltering in the yard space.

‘How long?’ Kor Phaeron asks the senior magos of his shadow techpriests.

‘Three hours, provided we are not interrupted, majir,’ the priest replies.

‘They will not be interrupted,’ says Sorot Tchure.

Kor Phaeron is breathing hard. He seems desiccated and frail inside his armour, as though he is drawing off great quantities of his own vitality. Space has worn thin around him.

Calth is his operation, far more than it is Lorgar’s. Kor Phaeron has planned this for his primarch meticulously, and executed it with the aid of Erebus. The punishment and annihilation of the XIII is its principal aim; the humiliation and execution of the wretched Roboute Guilliman. But it is also an advancement, another step on the spiral path of the Great Ritual. It will allow their beloved primarch to progress.

Sorot Tchure is aware of his commander’s burden. There is no room for failure. There is a priceless and vital military objective to be won, but even that pales into nothing beside the greater intent.

He will support his commander every step of the way. It has been Sorot Tchure’s privilege to be one of Kor Phaeron’s senior assault leaders for several years. The novelty of their Legion’s transmutation has simply deepened his commitment to their cause. They were always driven by faith in a higher power. Now they are inspired by proof of that power. It has invested them all. It has answered them. It has blessed them. It has revealed to them the truths that underpin all mysteries of creation.

And the greatest truths are these: the Emperor of Terra is no god, as they once believed. He is a small and pitiful spark in the blackness of the cosmos, and in no way deserving of their devotion. He rebuked the Word Bearers for their faith, and he was right to do so: he was probably afraid of what the real gods would do when they saw him being worshipped.

The faith of the Word Bearers was misplaced. It was mis-assigned. They were looking for a god, and they found merely a false idol, hungry for adoration.

Now they have found a power in the heavens worthy of their faith.

The docking clamps seal the airgate hatches open. As he did during the first act of the ritual, Sorot Tchure leads the way through.

3

[mark: 01.16.32]

In a star formation, led by the barge Destiny’s Hand, seventeen ships of the XVII fleet enter low orbit and prosecute the southern hemisphere.

As they descend, the ships snipe and barrage at the local orbitals, destroying two yards outright and crippling a third. Attempts to block their advance are met with dogged fury. The frigate Janiverse is killed by multiple main lance blasts as it attempts to disrupt the planetary assault formation. The carriers Steinhart and Courage of Konor are driven back, and then crippled in a direct confrontation. The Steinhart suffers a critical power failure, loses all vital support mechanisms, and slides into a ragged, thousand-year death orbit of the sun with its crew ice-locked at their posts. The Courage of Konor, void-holed twice by broadsides and struggling to pull clear of the advancing formation, is caught a third time by cannonfire. Hull plates fail. The keel fractures. A meson beam ruptures the carrier’s exposed reactor core, and it immolates, dropping away into the atmosphere.

It becomes, therefore, the second capital-class ship to hit Calth.

Its plunge is not stately and slow like the dying fall of the grand cruiser Antrodamicus. The Courage of Konor is a plenilunar ball of white fire, consumed by fluorescent radiation from bow to stern. It falls like a meteor, turning and spinning. It strikes the cold, open ocean near the planet’s southern pole.

The impact is akin to an extinction event meteor strike. The atmosphere buckles for five hundred kilometres in all directions as the released heat and light squirt outwards in a distorted, epipolic flash. Trillions of tonnes of ocean water are vaporised instantly, and trillions more are upflung in an ejection cone. Tectonic damage occurs. The consequential tidal wave, a rolling wall of black water, hits the continental coast six minutes later and wipes out the littoral to a distance of four kilometres inland.

It is merely a prelude, collateral damage that forms a savage precursor to the assault proper.

The assault formation descends to the lowest possible operational altitude, their sizzling void shields squeaking and howling against the thin upper atmosphere. Ventral lance batteries and bombardment cannon begin to fire.

The systematic destruction begins.

There is no finesse involved. The northern hemisphere is dense with strategic targets and population centres that need to be targeted and secured. The northern hemisphere is also where most of the XVII ground forces could be landed prior to the hostilities without raising questions.

The southern hemisphere can, largely, be decimated.

The Hand’s formation does just that. Magma bombs blitz the bleak antipodean continents, scouring them with hellish firestorms. Lance fire turns seawater into steam, and rips oceans from their beds. Meson convertors and ion beamers dislocate the ancient tectonic patterns, buckle the crust, and send seismic spasms through the mantle. Smoke, ash and ejected matter stain the atmosphere. Steam clouds the polar latitudes.

Forests burn. Jungles scorch. Rivers vanish. Glaciers melt. Mountains collapse. Marshlands desiccate. Deserts fuse into glass.

Millions die in the scattered southern cities.

[mark: 01.37.26]

Guilliman watches.

His stylus has snapped in his hand. He calls for another. The console in front of him is piled with notes and sketched plans.

The magi of the Mechanicum, those who were not crippled or killed or driven insane by the first outrage, have begun to reboot the flagship’s crippled systems. Limited vox has been restored. Guilliman has motive power, shields and weapons.

But even the mighty Macragge’s Honour cannot take on the XVII fleet alone. The Ultramar fleet elements are scattered. There is no way to coordinate them.

There is no way to coordinate them fast enough to counter and check the planetary assault.

Calth is burning. Calth, jewel of Veridia, one of the great worlds of the Five Hundred, is violated, perhaps beyond any hope of recovery.

Guilliman turns his back. He cannot watch.

‘Is it still on repeat?’ he asks.

‘My lord?’ Gage responds.

‘My declaration? My message to my brother?’

‘Yes, my lord,’ says Marius Gage. ‘It is on constant repeat via what little comms capability we have.’

The primarch nods.

‘Should I… cancel it?’ the First Master asks.

Guilliman doesn’t reply. Aides have delivered more data to his bridge position. Lacking cogitator function and active grids, he has had scribes and rubricators stationed on all observation decks, recording data by hand on slate and paper. Runners bring all documents to him every four minutes. The heap of information is growing.

The primarch has noticed something. He has noticed some detail amongst all the others. He scoops it up. Other papers and info-tiles slither to the deck, disturbed.

‘What is it?’ asks Gage.

[mark: 01.40.41]

The world is trembling. On the far side of the globe, the planetary bombardment is under way, scourging the other hemisphere. The trauma, transmitted as a subterranean micro-shock and an atmospheric flicker of overpressure, can be felt even here.

Here. Numinus starport. Enormous sections of its sprawl are still on fire. The drumming of heavy artillery is coming from the city. Formations of attack craft rush overhead every few minutes, roaring bright coals of afterburner heat. Smoke has blackened the sky, apart from the bright pinpricks of debris burning up, of ship-fire up in space, of dying orbital yards combusting.

There’s dust everywhere. It’s fine, yellowish, a by-product of ash and the up-cast of surface impacts. It films the air and coats upper surfaces. The micro-shocks are making it trickle and sift in places. It seeps through vents. It dribbles down gutters. It wafts like smoke where the breeze stirs it.

It sticks to blood.

It has adhered to the blood-soaked skin and armour of the fallen. It has clotted the pools of blood like sawdust. It covers dead faces like powder, so the corpses look painted and preserved, formally prepared by mortuary assistants.

Vil Teth, gene-named leader of a Kaul Mandori strike team, advances along one of the transit causeways, las-rifle trained. His brown leather boots scuff up the yellow dust. Eight men of his immediate brotherhood squad follow him, with another twelve holding back with the heavy support, an armoured speeder with an autocannon mount. Zorator, their watcher, is somewhere nearby.

The zone has to be cleared. The commanders have ordered this. By midnight, the entire port must be sectioned and secure. There are survivors hiding everywhere. Teth is cautious because he knows that some of these so called ‘survivors’ are XIII Legion warriors, gone to ground. His men are not equipped for that kind of opposition, no matter how broken or cornered it might be.

That’s why they have the heavy support and the watcher.

It’s not death that Teth fears. They’re Kaul Mandori. They are immortal. This is the promise that has been made to them, the vow they have accepted. This is the promise that lured him from his life in the Army and made him join the brotherhood. Immortality for service: it seemed, to Vil Teth, a fair exchange.

It’s not the death he fears. But he’s seen enough action in his career to know that he’d prefer to avoid the pain.

Zorator’s presence in the area is spooking the enemy from cover. Teth rises sharply as three men break into the open ahead, and begin to flee across the field of smouldering rubble. They are non-heterosic humans, which relieves him. They are wearing the livery uniforms of the cargo handling guild. They are unarmed.

Teth raises his rifle, takes aim, and shoots the first of them. A seventy-five metre shot at a moving target. Back of the legs, as he intended. Not bad. The man falls, wailing in pain. Alive. Alive is good. As well as clearing the zone, his strike team has been told to forage for food.

Around him, the Kaul Mandori raise their weapons and take aim. Two make shots that miss the fleeing pair, and skim the dusty rubble. Garel, Teth’s second, squeezes a las-bolt off and clips one of the targets. The man topples, headshot. Dead is good too.

Teth laughs. Garel laughs back, white teeth in a dust-caked face.

There’s another shot. It’s not a las. It’s a gut-deep boom. Bolter. Garel explodes. There’s meat and black blood everywhere in a splatter pattern, covering them all, dark gore and liquidised tissue coating the dust that’s coating them. Teth flinches as he is hit by a whizzing chunk of Garel’s spine. He blinks blood out of his eyes. He sees teeth on the ground, teeth embedded in a chunk of jaw, teeth that just that second were grinning at him.

Teth’s men are scattering. He yells an order.

‘Support! Support!’

There’s a fugging Ultramarine coming at them. Coming out of cover. Coming like a blue blur. The bastard’s huge.

They open fire. Five lasrifles find the giant, clip him with zagging neon las-bolts. The impacts chip his dusty blue armour. They check him, but they don’t stop him. He’s got a fugging sword in one hand, and a battered golden standard in the other.

He puts the sword through Forb, clean fugging through, and then carves Grocus. Grocus rotates as the sword catches him. He spins like a dancer pirouetting, twirling blood like an out-flung cape, then falls.

The Ultramarine kills Sorc, then Teth’s world turns upside down as he gets knocked flat. The Ultramarine isn’t stopping. He’s going for the heavy support. He knows that’s the real threat.

Teth rolls over, spitting out blood, dust and the part of his tongue he bit off when the Ultramarine smashed into him.

‘Kill him! Kill him!’

The support unit’s coming up. The men are firing, some kneeling to steady their shots. The Ultramarine’s running right at them. He’s brandishing the fugging standard pole. Idiot. Autocannon’s going to fug him up.

The speeder spurs forward. Why the fug isn’t it firing?

Teth realises how clever the Ultramarine has been. That’s why he came through them, head on. He wants to take the speeder. If the speeder opens up at him, Teth and the others are in its field of fire.

You idiots, Teth thinks. You idiots. What the fug’s the universe going to look like with you ruling it? I don’t matter? I’m fugging immortal! Gene-named! Remember? We’re gene-kin! They’ve taken our blood. They’ll bring us back. That’s what the Word Bearers promised us if we served them. If we die for them, they bring us back. they can do that. They have gene-tech.

Forget me! Fugging shoot the bastard!

The speeder kicks forward to meet the bounding Ultramarine. The fugger’s so fast. Something that big and heavy ought not to be able to move that f–

Teth realises something.

Garel got ruined by a bolter, but the Ultramarine hasn’t got a bolter. He hasn’t got a bolter, so–

The second giant in cobalt blue shows himself. He has got a bolter.

He comes off the roof of a fab-shop twenty metres back. A running jump off a six-metre drop. Transhuman muscle puts some real distance on that. His feet stride out as he sails down. He was waiting until the speeder passed under him. He was waiting for it to come to meet his partner.

The newcomer bangs down on the lid of the speeder, both feet planted, denting the roof panel. The landing is as loud as a bolter round hitting. The speeder bounces on its grav-field, soaking the impact.

The newcomer, feet braced, bends over and fires his boltgun through the roof. Thud. Thud. Two shots. Two kills.

The first Ultramarine reaches him, running head-on into the support squad’s frantic small-arms fire. Teth sees point-blank las shot flecking clean off his armour. More sword work. Arterial blood hoses the side of the speeder. The Ultramarine swings the standard like a club, spading one of the Kaul clean out of his boots.

The second Ultramarine jumps off the speeder’s roof and joins the melee. He’s put the bolter up. Saving ammo. He’s laying in with his combat blade. Eight of the twelve are dead in fewer seconds.

Teth shouts. He shouts so hard he feels like he’s going to turn his lungs inside out.

Ventanus hears the yell. He turns. The battered golden standard in his hands is dripping blood.

‘What did you bring that for?’ Selaton growls, withdrawing his blade from his last kill.

Ventanus isn’t listening. Some of the enemy foot troops are still alive. The leader is yelling.

‘We should shut him up,’ says Selaton. He’s opened the side hatch of the speeder, and is dragging an exploded body out. The cabin interior is painted with blood. He needs to find the levers to adjust the seats.

The Word Bearer appears. Cataphractii. Terminator.

‘Zorator! My watcher! Kill them!’ Teth shrieks.

The Terminator is massive. The enhanced armour, cumbersome, is also as solid as a tank. The lorica segmentata of the huge shoulder plates rise up above the crested helm. The bulky gorget is part snarling mouth, part cage. Studded leather pteruges and mail skirts protect the weaker joints. He looks like a Titan engine: the vast shoulders and upper body, the stocky legs.

Lightning crackles around his left-hand claw. He starts to fire his giant combi-bolter.

Mass-reactive shells rip up the concourse. They explode and kill two of the Kaul Mandori that Ventanus had subdued but not slain. They knock Ventanus off his feet, driving armour splinters into his shin and thigh, and rip a considerable bite out of the speeder’s nose plating.

Selaton throws himself down in rolling cover, using the speeder as a block. He tries to return fire. His aim is good, but the cataphractii soaks up his rounds. Flames from the mass-reactive impacts gout around the reinforced carapace.

The Word Bearer heavy fires at Selaton. The speeder takes more serious damage, including a bolt that scalps the crew bay, peeling the metal skin of the cabin roof up like the tongue of a shoe.

Ventanus is hurt. His leg is punctured. The bleeding’s already stopped. He churns to his feet. He’s got the speed the hulking Terminator lacks. It’s a blood-red beast, maned with crimson horsehair. He rushes it.

It swings its aim back to him. Ventanus is transhuman fast, but he can’t outrun shells of a combi-bolter, and his armour won’t stop them either.

There’s a ping of tearing metal, of bolts popping. It’s the sound Selaton makes as he wrenches the speeder’s autocannon off its mount. He’s standing on the speeder, half inside the cab, one foot on the seats, one braced on the nose plate, the cabin roof peeled back as if to reveal him like a theatrical surprise. He’s got the multi-barrelled cannon wedged against his hip, the metal snake of the munition feeder coiling back, fat and heavy, into the crew bay.

He fires. The heavy weapon makes a grinding metal noise like bells being crushed through some kind of mill. A jumping lick of burning gases flickers around the rotating barrels.

The storm of shots brackets the cataphractii and rips across him. Fragments of metal flake off his armour in a puff of abraded smoke. Rubble on either side of him explodes. Pieces of the gorget and visor fly off, along with scraps of leather pteruges, shreds of horsehair, and broken mail rings. The shots penetrate in four places, allowing blood to glug out of the bare metal craters.

The Terminator stays upright for a long time, staggering backwards under the hail of fire. Finally, he goes down on his back with a crash.

Ventanus stands over him. Smoke, blue and pungent, streaks the air. The Word Bearer, gurgling the blood that is filling his helmet and throat brace, stirs. He’s dying, but he’s a long way from dead. He starts lifting the oil-black combi-bolter.

Ventanus brings the blade of the standard shaft down through the visor slot with both hands, driving it and turning it and screwing it, until it meets the inside back of the armoured helmet. Blood wells out over the eye slits and gorget lip, and runs down the sides of the helmet to mat the horsehair broom of the crest.

Ventanus steps back, leaving the standard planted there, crooked. Selaton approaches.

‘We must move,’ he says.

‘Is the speeder functional?’

‘Just about.’

Ventanus pulls out the standard and carries it towards the shot-up vehicle.

‘That’s why,’ he says.

‘What?’ asks Selaton.

‘That’s why I brought this,’ Ventanus replies, raising the bloody standard. ‘Precisely for things like that.’

[mark: 01.57.42]

‘What does it mean?’ asks Marius Gage.

‘It means…’ Guilliman begins. He takes the data-slate back, ponders it. ‘It means a precondition of malice.’

He looks out of the flagship’s vast crystalflex ports at the bombarded planet below.

‘Not that it‘s really in any doubt,’ he adds. ‘If this started as an accident or mistake, then it has truly passed beyond any limit of forgiveness. It is, however, salutary to know that my brother’s crime is entirely proven.’

Guilliman summons the Master of Vox with a quick gesture.

‘Rescind my previous looped broadcast,’ he says, taking the speaker horn. ‘Replace it with this.’

He hesitates, thinking, and then lifts his head and speaks cleanly and quickly into the device.

‘Lorgar of Colchis. You may consider the following. One: I entirely withdraw my previous offer of solemn ceasefire. It is cancelled, and will not be made again, to you or to any other of your motherless bastards. Two, you are no longer any brother of mine. I will find you, I will kill you, and I will hurl your toxic corpse into hell’s mouth.’

He hands the horn back to the vox-officer.

‘Put that on repeat immediately,’ he says.

Guilliman ushers Gage, Shipmaster Zedoff and a group of other senior executives towards the strategium.

‘In the absence of vox, we will need to use direct link laser comms and sealed orders physically carried by fast lighters to coordinate the fleet,’ he begins. ‘I have sketched a hasty tactical plan. Specific ship orders must be communicated to each master and captain by the most expedient means available. Within the hour – the hour, you understand – I want this fleet operating to purpose. We will deny that bombardment.’

‘That is our objective?’ asks Zedoff.

‘No,’ Guilliman admits. ‘I am going to put that trust in the Mlatus and the Solonim Woe. They will lead the formations against the planetary attack. Our specific objective will be the Fidelitas Lex.’

Zedoff raises his eyebrows.

‘A personal score, then,’ he says.

Guilliman doesn’t try to hide it.

‘I will kill him. I will literally kill him. With my bare hands.’

He looks at Gage.

‘Don’t say anything, Marius,’ he says. ‘You’ll be transferring to the Mlatus to lead the attack. With a sober head and a proper plan. I know that going after the enemy flag has serious demerits, tactically. I don’t care. This is the one battle of my career I’m going to fight with my heart rather than my head. The bastard will die. The bastard.’

‘I was merely going to object to being absent at the moment you kill him,’ says Gage.

‘My primarch!’

They turn. The Master of Vox is pale.

‘Lithocast, sir. Long-range signal from the Fidelitas Lex.’

Guilliman nods.

‘So he ignores my plea for ceasefire, but I tell him to go and screw himself and he makes contact immediately. Put it on.’

‘My primarch, I–’ Gage begins.

Guilliman pushes past him, heading for the lithocaster plate.

‘There is no way you will stop me having this conversation, Marius,’ he says.

Guilliman steps onto the hololithic platform. Light bends and bubbles in front of him. Images form and fade, re-form and decay, like scratches of light on film. Then Lorgar is standing there, life-size, facing Guilliman. His face is in shadow again, but the light construction makes him look utterly real. Other shapes crowd around him, sections and fragments of shadow, no longer recognisable as his minions and lieutenants.

‘Have you lost your temper, Roboute?’ Lorgar asks. They can hear the smile.

‘I am going to gut you,’ Guilliman replies softly.

‘You have lost your temper. The great and calm and level-headed Roboute Guilliman has finally succumbed to passion.’

‘I will gut you. I will skin you. I will behead you.’

‘Ah, Roboute,’ Lorgar murmurs. ‘Here, at the very end, I finally hear you talk in a way that actually makes me like you.’

‘Precondition of malice,’ says Guilliman, barely a whisper. ‘You took the Campanile. By my estimation, you took it at least a hundred and forty hours ago. You took the ship, and you staged this. You organised this atrocity, Lorgar, and you made it seem like a terrible accident so you could capitalise on our mercy. You made us stay our hand while you committed murder.’

‘It’s called treachery, Roboute. It works very well. How did you find out?’

‘We back-plotted the Campanile’s route once we’d worked out what had hit the yards. When you look at the plot, the notion that it was any kind of accident becomes laughable.’

‘As is the notion you can hurt me.’

‘We’re not going to debate it, you maggot, you treacherous bastard,’ says Guilliman. ‘I just wanted you to know that I will rip your living heart out. And I want to know why. Why? Why? If this is our puerile old feud, boiled to the surface, then you are the most pathetic soul in the cosmos. Pathetic. Our father should have left you out in the snow at birth. He should have fed you to Russ. You worm. You maggot.’

Lorgar raises his face slightly so that Guilliman can see a hint of his smile in the shadows of his face.

‘This has nothing to do with our enmity, Roboute… Except that it affords me the opportunity to avenge my honour on you and your ridiculous toy soldiers. That is just a delicious bonus. No, this is the Ushkul Thu. Calth is the Ushkul Thu. The offering. It is the sunrise of the new galaxy. A new order.’

‘You’re rambling, you bastard.’

‘The galaxy is changing, Roboute. It is turning upside down. Up will be down, and down will be up. Our father will be tossed out of his throne. He will fall down, and no one will put him back together again.’

‘Lorgar, you–’

‘Listen to me, Roboute. You think you’re so clever. So wise. So informed. But this has started already. It’s already under way. The galaxy is turning on its head. You will die, and our father will die, and so will all the others, because you are all too stupid to see the truth.’

Guilliman steps towards the lithocast phantom, as though he might strike it down or snap its neck.

‘Listen to me, Roboute,’ the light ghost hisses. ‘Listen to me. The Imperium is finished. It is falling. It is going to burn. Our father is done. His malicious dreams are over. Horus is rising.’

‘Horus?’

‘Horus Lupercal is rising, Roboute. You have no idea of his ability. He is above us all. We stand with him, or we perish entirely.’

‘You shit, Lorgar. Are you drugged? Are you mad? What kind of insanity is–’

‘Horus!’

‘Horus what?’

‘He’s rising! He’s coming! He will kill anyone who stands in his way! He will rule! He will be what the Emperor could never be!’

‘Horus would–’ Guilliman clears his throat. He swallows. He is dazed by the sheer extent of Lorgar’s dementia. ‘Horus would never turn. If any of us turned, the others would–’

‘Horus has risen against our cruel and abusive parent, Roboute,’ says Lorgar. ‘Accept that, and you will die with greater peace in your heart. Horus Lupercal has come to overthrow the Imperial corruption and punish the abuser. It is already happening. And Horus is not alone. I am with him, sworn and true. So is Fulgrim. Angron. Perturabo. Magnus. Mortarion. Curze. Alpharius. Your loyalty is air and paper, Roboute. Our loyalty is blood.’

‘You’re lying!’

‘You’re dying. Isstvan V burns. Brothers are dead already.’

‘Dead? Who are–’

‘Ferrus Manus. Corax. Vulkan. All dead and gone. Slaughtered like pigs.’

‘These are all lies!’

‘Look at me, Roboute. You know they are not. You know it. You have studied every one of us. You know our strengths and our failings. Theoretical, Roboute! Theoretical! You know this is possible. You know from the very facts that this is a possible outcome.’

Guilliman steps back. He opens his mouth, but he is too stunned to reply.

‘Whatever you think of me, Roboute,’ says Lorgar, ‘whatever your opinion, and I know it is about as low as it can be, you know I’m not a stupid man. I would betray my brother and attack the assembled might of the XIII Legion… for a grudge? Really? Really? Practical, Roboute! I am here to exterminate you and the Ultramarines because you are the only force left in the Emperor’s camp that can possibly stop Horus. You are too dangerous to live, and I am here to make sure you do not.’

Lorgar leans forward. The light catches his teeth.

‘I’m here to remove you from the game, Roboute.’

Guilliman steps back.

‘Either you’re insane, or the galaxy has gone mad,’ he says with remarkable steadiness. ‘Whichever, I am coming for you, and I will put you and your heathen killers down. Excommunicate Traitoris. You will not have any opportunity to reflect upon the monstrosity of this crime.’

‘Oh, Roboute, I can always rely on you to sound like a giant pompous arsehole. Come and get me. We’ll see who burns first.’

Lorgar turns to step out of the light, and then hesitates.

‘One last thing you need to know, Roboute. You really don’t appreciate what you’re up against.’

‘A madman,’ snaps Guilliman, turning his back.

Lorgar alters.

His holocast form shifts, like fat melting, like bones deforming, like wax dripping. His smile tears in half and something rises up out of his human shape. It is not human.

Guilliman senses it. He turns back. He sees it.

His eyes widen.

He can smell it. He can smell the pitch-black nightmare, the cosmic stench of the warp. The thing is growing, still growing. Lorgar’s empty skin sloughs off like a snake’s.

It is a horror from the most lightless voids. It is glistening black flesh and tangled veins, it is frogspawn mucus and beads of blinking eyes, it is teeth and bat-wings. It is an anatomical atrocity. It is teratology, the shaping of monsters.

Filthy light veils it and invests it like velvet robes. It is a shadow and it is smoke. Its crest is the horns of an aurochs, four metres high, ribbed and brown. It snorts. There is a rumble of intestines and gas, of a predator’s growl. A smell of blood. A whiff of acid. A tang of venom.

The things that hovered behind Lorgar are transforming too. They turn beetle-black, gleaming, iridescent blue. Their boneless limbs and pseudopods writhe. They stir vibrissae and clack like insects. Multiple faces fold and ooze into one another, mutating into ghastly diprosopia. Overlapping mouths pucker and lisp Guilliman’s name.

Guilliman steadies himself. He will know no fear.

‘I’ve seen enough of his charlatan tricks,’ he says. ‘Break the lithocast link.’

‘The… link…’ begins the Master of Vox. ‘Sir, the link is already broken.’

Guilliman sweeps back to face the nightmare, the thing-that-is-no-longer-Lorgar. His hand reaches for the hilt of his sword.

The thing speaks. Its voice is madness.

‘Roboute,’ it says. ‘Let the galaxy burn.’

It lunges, jaws wide, spittle flying.

Blood, many hundreds of litres of human blood, suddenly sprays the walls of the flagship’s bridge under pressure. The crystalflex window ports blow out in blizzards of shards, voiding into space.

The bridge tower of the immense battleship Macragge’s Honour explodes.

TARGET//ENGAGEMENT

‘In the Phase of Open Warfare, especially when one is placed in a position of defending or countering, one must be proactive. Determine what commodities or resources you will need to gain the advantage and place your opponent on the defensive. Establish which of these commodities or resources your opponent possesses. Take them from him. Do not chase glory. Do not force unwinnable confrontations. Do not try to match his strength if you know his strength over-matches yours. Do not waste time. Decide what will make you strong enough, and then acquire those things. Your most desired commodity is always your continued ability to prosecute the war.’

– Guilliman, Notes Towards Martial
Codification, 14.2.xi

1

[mark: 4.12.45]

It gets light early. Another beautiful day on the estuary. The light’s so good, Oll reckons they can get an extra hour or so’s work done. An hour is an additional two loads of swartgrass. A day of hard labour for good returns.

His hands are sore from the harvest work, but he has slept well and his spirits are good. Strong sunlight always lifts him.

He rises, says a prayer. In the whitewashed lean-to at the back of the hab, there’s a gravity shower. He pulls the cord and stands under its downpour. As he washes, he can hear her singing in the kitchen.

When he goes into the kitchen, dried and dressed, she’s not there. He can smell warm bread. The kitchen door is open, and sunlight streams in across the flagstones. She must have just stepped out for a moment. Stepped out to get eggs. He can smell the swartgrass straw on the warm air.

He sits down at the worn kitchen table.

‘It’s time to get to work, Oll.’

He looks up. There’s a man standing in the doorway, backlit by the sun so that Oll can’t see his face for shadow.

But Oll Persson knows him anyway. Oll touches the little symbol around his neck, an instinctive gesture of protection.

‘I said–’

‘I heard you. I’ll get there when I’m good and ready. My wife’s making breakfast.’

‘You’ll lose the light, Oll.’

‘My wife’s making breakfast.’

‘She isn’t, Oll.’

The man comes into the kitchen. He hasn’t changed. He wouldn’t though, would he? He never will. That confidence. That good-looking… charm.

‘I don’t recall inviting you in,’ says Oll.

‘No one ever does,’ replies the man. He helps himself to a cup of milk.

‘I’m not interested in this,’ Oll says firmly. ‘Whatever you’ve come to say, I’m not interested. You’ve wasted a trip. This is my life now.’

The man sits down facing him.

‘It isn’t, Oll.’

Oll sighs.

‘It’s great to see you again, John. Now get out of my hab.’

‘Don’t be like that, Oll. How’ve you been? Still pious and devoted?’

‘This is my life now, John.’

‘It isn’t,’ the man says.

‘Get out. I don’t want anything to do with anything.’

‘You don’t have a choice, I’m afraid. Sorry. Things have escalated a little.’

‘John–’ Oll almost growls the warning.

‘I’m serious. There aren’t many of us, Oll. You know that. You and me, we could set our hands on the table here, and count them off, and we’d still have fingers spare. There never were many of us. Now there are even fewer.’

Oll gets up.

‘John, listen. Let me be as plain as I can. I never had time for this. I never wanted to be part of anything. I don’t want to know what trouble you’ve brought to my door. I like you, John. Honestly, I do. But I hoped never to see you again. I just want to live my life.’

‘Don’t be greedy. You’ve lived several.’

‘John–’

‘Come on, Oll! You and me? Anatol Hive? Come on. The Panpacific? Tell me that doesn’t count for anything.’

‘It was a lifetime ago.’

‘Several. Several lifetimes.’

‘This is my life now.’

‘No, it isn’t.’

Oll glares at him.

‘I’d like you to go, John. Go. Now. Before my wife gets back from the coops.’

‘She’s not coming back from the coops, Oll. She never went out to the coops.’

‘Get out, John.’

‘This is your life, is it? This? An ex-soldier turned farmer? Retired to a life of bucolic harmony? Good honest toil in exchange for plain food and a good night’s rest? Really, Oll? This is your life?’

‘This is my life now.’

The man shakes his head.

‘And what will you do when you’ve had enough of that? Will you quit it and move on to something else? When you’re tired of farming, what next? Teaching? Button-making? Will you join the Navy? You might as well, you’ve been Army already. What will you do? An ex-soldier-farmer-widower?’

‘Widower?’ Oll snaps, flinching from the word as though it was buzzing in his face to sting him. ‘What are you talking about, widower?’

‘Oh, come on, Oll. Don’t make me do all the hard work. You know this. She’s not out at the coop. She’s not making you breakfast. She wasn’t in here just now singing. She never came to settle on Calth. She was gone, the poor love, before you ever joined the Army. Last time you joined the Army. Come on, Oll, your mind’s a bit mixed up. It’s the shock.’

‘Leave me alone, John.’

‘You know I’m right. You know it. I can see it in your face.’

‘Leave me alone.’

‘Come on. Think.’

Oll stares at him.

‘Are you in my head, John Grammaticus? Are you in my bloody head?’

‘I swear I’m not, Oll. I wouldn’t do that uninvited. This is all you. Trauma. It’ll pass.’

Oll sits down again.

‘What’s happening?’ he whispers.

‘I haven’t got much time. I’m not here long. Just talking to you is taking a huge effort. We need you, Oll.’

‘They sent you? I bet they did.’

‘Yes, they did. They did. But I didn’t mean them. I meant humans. The human race needs you, Oll. Everything’s gone to shit. So, so badly. You wouldn’t believe it. He’s going to lose, and if he loses, we all lose.’

‘Who’s going to lose?’ asks Oll.

‘Who do you think?’

‘What’s he going to lose?’

‘The war,’ says John. ‘This is it, Oll. This is the big one, the one we always talked about. The one that we always saw coming. It’s happening already. Bloody primarchs killing each other. And the latest round of executions happens here, today. Right here on Calth.

‘I don’t want any part of it. I never did.’

‘Tough shit, Oll. You’re one of the Perpetuals, whether you like it or not.’

‘I’m not like you, John.’

John Grammaticus sits back and smiles, pointing a finger at Oll.

‘No, you’re bloody not. I’m only what I am now thanks to xenos intervention. You, you’re still a true Perpetual. You’re still like him.’

‘I’m not. And I don’t have what you have. The talents. The psyk.’

‘It doesn’t matter. Maybe that’s why you’re important. Maybe you’re just important because you’re here. There are only three like us in the whole Five Hundred Worlds right now, and only one of them on Calth. Ground zero. That’s you. This is down to you. You don’t have a choice. This is down to you.’

‘Get someone else, John. Explain it to someone else.’

‘You know that doesn’t work. No one else is old enough. No one else understands as much. No one else has the… perspective. I tell anyone about this, they’ll just dismiss me as insane. And I don’t have time to spend another eighteen years in an asylum like last time I tried it. You’ve got to do this.’

‘Do what?’

‘Get out of here. They’re going to slide this world. An interstitial vortex. The old Immaterium sidestep. You’ve got to be ready to step through that door when it opens.’

‘And go where?’

It’s fallen dark outside. The sun’s gone in. Grammaticus looks up, and shivers.

‘You’ve got to get something, and you’ve got to bring it to me. Step through the door when it opens, and bring it to me. I’ll wait for you.’

He hesitates.

‘I’ll try my damnedest to wait for you, anyway.’

‘Where am I going, John?’

It’s getting dark so fast. Grammaticus shrugs.

‘We’re running out of time, Oll. With your permission, I’ll show you.’

‘Don’t you bloody d–’

[mark: unspecified]

Somewhere. It stinks of the warp, of burning void shields. The walls are polished ebony and etched ceramite, inlaid with crystal and ivory and rubies. Gold leaf edges the hatch frames. The place is so big. So very big. Vaults and chambers, dark and monumental, like the naves of cathedrals. Of a tomb. Of a necropolis catacomb. The ground is black marble.

It’s not the ground. It’s a deck.

He can feel the throb of engines coming through it. Drive engines. The air is dry, artificially maintained. He can smell smoke.

‘Why can I smell smoke, John?’ he asks.

He can’t read whatever it is that’s etched into the polished walls. He realises he’s glad he can’t.

‘John? Where did you go?’

There are starfields outside the windows. There’s blood on the floor. Bloody footprints on the marble, bloody handprints on the walls. Tapestries have been torn down. There are bullet holes in the bulkhead panels: craters blown by bolt-rounds, gouges cut by lasers, by claws. There are bodies on the floor.

It’s not a floor, it’s a deck.

He can hear fighting. A huge battle. Millions of voices yelling and screaming, weapons clashing, weapons firing. The din is coming up through the deck. It’s echoing, muffled, through distant archways and half-seen hatches. It’s as if monumental, cataclysmic history is happening just around the corner.

‘John?’

There’s no sign of John. But he can feel the back-of-the-neck prickle of other minds. Minds as bright as main sequence stars.

‘John, I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be here at all.’

He moves forward, through an archway twenty times as tall as he is, into a chamber fifty times as tall. The walls and pillars are cyclopean. The air is filled with smoke and dying echoes.

There is an angel dead on the floor. On the deck. The angel is a giant. He was beautiful. His sword is broken. His golden plate is cracked. His wings are crushed. Blood streaks his armour and soaks the carnodon-skin mantle he wears. His hair is as golden as his armour. He has teardrops on his cheek.

His killer is waiting nearby, black as night, made of rage, masked by shadow. The edges of his wargear are chased with gold, giving his darkness a regal outline and shape. The gold encircles the eyes he wears on his chest and harness: baleful, red, staring eyes. He fumes with power. He prickles hot, like a lethal radiation leak. He’s polluting the galaxy just by standing in it. There’s a crackle. A fizzle. Malice so terrible a rad-counter could pick it up.

The killer is huge. His shoulder plates are draped with a cloak of furs and human pelts. A spiked framework surrounds his head: a psychic cage, an armoured box. There is a light glowing inside the box, a ruddy glow. The killer’s head is shaved. He is looking down, his face in shadow. He is looking down at the angel he has just killed. Cortical plugs and bio-feeds thread his scalp like dreadlocks. He is a beast made flesh, and shod in iron. He is made of pure hatred.

Oll Persson realises he should not be here. Anywhere, anywhere in the cosmos but here. He starts to back away.

The killer hears him move or senses him. The killer slowly raises his massive head. Light seeps up from the gorget, underlighting his face. Arrogant. Proud. Evil. He opens his eyes. He stares at Oll.

‘I… I renounce you, evil one,’ Oll stammers. He touches the little symbol around his neck, an instinctive gesture of protection.

‘You… what?’

‘I renounce you as evil.’

‘There is no evil,’ says the killer, his voice a landslip rumble of mountains falling. ‘There is only indifference.’

The killer takes a step towards Oll. The floor – the deck – trembles under the weight.

He halts. He’s looking at something. He’s looking at something in Oll’s hand.

Oll glances down, confused. He realises he’s been holding something in his other hand all along.

He sees what it is.

The killer makes a sound. A sigh. His lips part, connected by tiny strands of spittle. He looks Oll straight in the face. Straight into his soul.

Oll turns away. He cannot bear to look into those eyes any more. He turns to run.

He sees the light behind him.

He was so captivated by the killer, by the prickling, enveloping darkness, he almost didn’t see the light to begin with.

Now he sees it. It’s not the light it used to be. It’s not the light he used to know.

The light is fading. It was once the most beautiful light, but it’s dwindling. It’s ebbing away and growing dim. Golden, broken, like the angel. And, like the angel, brought low by the killer made out of darkness.

Beyond the light is a vast window port.

Through it, Oll sees the hazy glory of Terra.

The human homeworld is burning.

‘I’ve seen enough,’ says Oll Persson.

[mark: 4.12.45]

It’s the shock. It’s just the shock. You’ve been hurt, and I’ve shown you plenty. Plenty. I’m sorry, I really am. No one should have to see that. No one should have to deal with all of that in one go. But there really isn’t time to be gentle about this.

You saw what you had to see. I showed you where you have to go.

Now, this will hurt. This will be hard. You can do it. You’ve done hard before. Come on, Oll. Come on, my old, dear friend Ollanius.

It’s time to wake up. It’s time to w–

Oll wakes.

No sunlight. No bed. No singing from the kitchen.

Grey light. Fog. Cold.

Pain.

He’s fallen on his back, twisted. His hands are sore, and so is his back, and one of his hips too. His head feels as though iron screws have been driven into it.

He sits up. The pain gets worse.

Oll realises the worst of the pain isn’t his aches and sprains and bruises.

It’s the aftershock. The aftershock of the vision. He rolls onto all fours and dry-heaves, as if he’s trying to vomit out the memory and be rid of it.

It would be tempting to think it was just a nightmare. Tempting and easy. Just a bad dream that happened because he’d had a bump on the head.

But Oll knows the human mind doesn’t imagine things like that. Not like that. Grammaticus was here. The bastard was here. Not in the flesh, but as good as. He was here, and that’s what he had to show.

It says a lot that John made the superhuman effort, and took such an immense risk, to come. It says a lot, and what it says doesn’t sit comfortably with Oll Persson.

He gets to his feet, unsteady. He’s battered and bruised. His clothes are caked in mud that’s just beginning to dry and stiffen. He tries to get his bearings.

There’s not much to see. A dense grey mist is shrouding the entire world. There are rumbling sounds, and dull flashes up behind the clouds. Far away – Oll’s guess would be to the north – there’s a glow, as if something big on the other side of the fog is burning.

Something big like a city.

He looks around. The ground’s a slick of stinking black mud and ooze, of mangled agricultural machinery and broken fence posts. This is the spew the tidal wave left in its wake. This is what’s left of his land, of his fields.

He stumbles along, his boots squelching in the muck. The thick fog is part smoke, part vapour from the flood. The ground stinks of mineral cores and riverbed mire. All of his crops have gone.

He sees a line of fence posts, still standing. From the height of them above the muck, the flood wave left about a metre of silt and soil behind it. Everything’s buried. Worse than damned Krasentine Ridge. He sees a hand, a man’s hand, sticking up out of the black ooze, pale and wrinkled. It looks as if he’s reaching up, grasping for air.

Nothing to be done about it.

Oll reaches the fence posts and leans on one of them. He realises that it’s the gate at the end of the west field level. He’s not where he thought he was at all. He’s about half a kilometre west. The force of the flood water must have carried him, carried him like flood litter, like flotsam. Bloody wonder he didn’t break his limbs or get his brains dashed out against an upright post; it was a wonder he didn’t drown.

Re-aligned, he turns around and heads back the way he came. Now he’s got his bearings, he knows where the farmhab is.

He passes a cultivator unit, on its side and half-sunk in black mud. Then he finds the lane, or what used to be the lane. It’s a groove of ooze, a muddy furrow, knee deep in violet water along its belly. He sloshes along.

‘Master Persson?’

He stops, shocked at the sound of a voice.

A man sits at the edge of the track, his back against what’s left of the fence. He’s plastered in mud.

‘Who’s that?’ asks Oll.

‘It’s me. It’s Zybes.’

Zybes. Hebet Zybes. One of the labourers. One of the pay-by-the-days.

‘Get yourself up,’ Oll says.

‘I can’t,’ says Zybes. He’s sitting oddly against the fence. Oll realises that the man’s left arm and shoulder are wrapped to the fence post with barbed wire. They’ve become tangled together in the flood surge.

‘Hold on,’ says Oll. He reaches into his belt, but his work tools are long since lost. He goes back to the overturned cultivator unit and digs around in the thick mud until he finds the tool box in the cab. Then he comes back with a pair of cutters, and sets Zybes free. The man’s flesh is pretty torn up by the wire.

‘Come on,’ says Oll.

‘Where to?’

‘We’ve got places to be,’ says Oll.

It takes twenty minutes to trek across the mire, through the fog, to the farmhab. What’s left of it.

On the way, Zybes keeps asking questions, questions like, ‘What happened?’ and ‘Why did it happen to us?’

Oll doesn’t have any answers. None that he has the time or desire to explain, anyway.

Five minutes from the hab, they come across Katt, short for Kattereena. Ekatterina. Something like that, Oll forgets. She’s a paid-by-day too, like Zybes, works in the kiln store, drying the sheaves. She’s about seventeen; his neighbour’s girl.

She’s just standing there, in the fog, smirched in mud, looking vacant, staring at something there’s no possibility of seeing because there’s no distance visible, thanks to the fog. Maybe she’s staring at something comforting, like the day before, or her fifth birthday.

‘You all right there, girl?’ Oll asks her.

She doesn’t reply. Shock. Plain shock.

‘You all right? Katt, come with us.’

She doesn’t make eye contact. She doesn’t even nod. But when they start walking again, she follows them at a distance.

The hab is a mess. The floodwash swept right through it, taking away the doors, the windows, and most of the furniture, leaving a half-metre carpet of silt and wreckage in exchange. Oll thinks about looking for that pict of his wife, the one that used to stand on the dresser in the kitchen, but the dresser’s gone, so he doesn’t see much hope of finding a picture that he last saw standing on it.

He tells Zybes and Katt to wait, and goes in. His room’s upstairs, in the roof, so it’s weathered the smash better than the rest. He finds his old service kitbag, made of faded green canvas, and packs it with a few useful bits and pieces. Then he strips off to his work boots, and puts on dry clothes. The best he can find are his old Army-issue breeches and jacket, also green and faded.

He picks up a last few items, choosing things to take and things to leave. There’s a spare coat for Zybes, plus a medicae pack, and a blanket from the bed to keep Katt warm. He goes back down the stairs to find them.

His old lasrifle is still hanging over the fireplace. He takes it down. From the niche in the chimney breast he retrieves a small wooden box. Three magazines, fully charged. He puts two in his pocket and gets ready to slot one into the weapon.

He hears Zybes cry out, and rushes into the muddy yard, slipping and slithering. The bloody mag won’t slot. It’s been a long time since he drilled with a rifle, and he’s forgotten the knack.

He’s scared too. More scared than he’s ever been in his life, and that’s saying something, because his life has included Krasentine Ridge.

‘What’s going on?’ he asks, reaching Zybes, who has ducked behind a toppled stack of grass crates.

‘There’s something over there,’ he says, pointing at the side barn. ‘Something big. Moving around.’

Oll can’t see anything. He looks around to check where Katt is. She’s standing by the kitchen door, gazing at the past again, oblivious to Zybes’s panic.

‘Stay here,’ Oll tells the injured man. He gets up and moves towards the barn, rifle trained. He hears something move. Zybes wasn’t lying. It is big, whatever it is.

Oll knows he’ll need a clear shot. A kill shot. If it’s big, he’ll need to stop it fast.

He wrenches open the barn door.

He sees Graft. The big loader servitor is rolling around in the barn, bashing into things. Mud and riverweed have totally baffled its sensors and visual systems.

‘Graft?’

‘Trooper Persson?’ the servitor replies, recognising his voice.

‘Stay still. Just stay still.’

The big cyborganism halts. Oll reaches up and yanks the ropes of weed away. He gets a cloth and cleans the optics, and gets the mud out of the fine sensor grids.

‘Trooper Persson,’ says Graft. ‘Thank you for the assistance, Trooper Persson.’

‘Follow me,’ says Oll.

‘Follow you where, Trooper Persson?’

‘We’ve got work to do,’ says Oll.

2

[mark: 4.14.11]

‘Explain this,’ says the Word Bearer. His name is Ulmor Nul.

‘There was an ambush,’ says Vil Teth. ‘Two of the Ultramarines.’

Nul looks down at the corpse of the cataphractii.

‘They did this?’

‘They did this,’ agrees Teth. ‘They killed my watcher, killed members of my team, and then took the speeder. One was a captain.’

‘Why didn’t you stop them?’ asks Nul.

‘The cataphractii couldn’t stop them,’ says Teth, in surprise. ‘What makes you think I could?’

He pauses.

‘Forgiveness, majir. They were legionaries. We had no means.’

‘You have stayed in position since the attack, waiting for support?’

‘Yes, majir.’

Ulmor Nul raises his warp-flask. He speaks into it, alerting the formation officers that at least two more of the enemy elite are loose in that section of the starport.

‘They might have transport,’ he adds.

Nul looks at his squad members.

‘They need to be hunted down,’ he says, simply.

One of his men, Kelter, nods and brings the tracker forward. He has to use the electric goad. The tracker is angry and uncooperative.

It’s about the size of an adult mastiff, but it’s bulkier and it’s not canine. It growls and snuffles, drooling mucus from its flared black-flesh nostrils.

‘We need something they touched,’ says Nul.

‘The captain touched me,’ says Teth. ‘He knocked me down–’

He’s still saying it when he realises he’s an idiot.

Nul looks at him and nods.

‘Majir, no–’ Teth begins to say.

The tracker surges forward. It’s on him. Teth shrieks as it begins to eat him alive.

‘It’s got the taste,’ Kelter says. He pulls the tracker off the Kaul Mandori warrior. Teth’s not dead. He should be. He ought to be. Too much of him is missing and gnawed away for him to ever mend or lead any kind of life. He can’t speak. He can’t even express his overwhelming agony, except to paddle his fingerless hands and churn what’s left of his jaw.

The tracker starts to move, following the psyk-sense it has devoured. The Word Bearers fall in behind it.

‘What about him?’ one of them says to Ulmor Nul, indicating the twitching remains. ‘You could end his pain.’

‘Pain is something we learn from,’ says Nul, ‘and mercy is a waste of ammunition.’

[mark: 4.26.11]

The Ultramarines captain puts up a decent fight. Cornered and outnumbered, he tries to do as much damage as possible before the inevitable.

Sorot Tchure makes the kill. He puts two mass-reactives into the bulkhead behind the Ultramarine, and the force of the blasts, in the enclosed space, rams the cobalt-blue figure out of cover.

He tries to get up, but it’s too late. A third shell takes his head off.

Tchure walks back to the yard’s master control room. He masses his squads marshalling human prisoners, or dragging out the bodies of the enemy dead. A sheen of blue smoke hangs in the air. The Zetsun Verid Yard is now secure.

It’s taken longer than expected. This irks Tchure. He had hoped that sheer bewilderment would knock the fight out of the XIII, but they stuck to it.

His only solace is that the shadow magi have exceeded their estimates too. They’re still at work, recalibrating the yard’s main systems. Kor Phaeron’s displeasure will mostly be reserved for them.

In the master control room, some magi are working with power tools, removing still more deckplates and wall panels to access sheafs of cables. Others are performing more delicate processes, probing intricate circuitry with watch-maker instruments, many of which are fused into their digits. A few have linked directly via the MIU ports, freeing their minds into an improvised noospheric environment in which they can rebuild the yard’s shattered manifold architecture. They are bathing in the warm essence of the Octed code loose in the systems.

Kor Phaeron, Master of the Faith, is not exasperated. Tchure finds him in a control office overlooking the main chamber, a glazed brass box like an ecclesiastical confessional. He is reading from a roughly-bound book. The Book of Lorgar. It is not the whole book, of course, merely one volume. The Book of Lorgar fills an entire data-stack, and has been transcribed by hand into nine thousand seven hundred and fifty-two volumes. The number increases regularly. Kor Phaeron has personally gathered a ten-thousand-strong staff of rubricators and scribes to copy the book, and to multiply those copies. Each senior officer of the XVII, and each planetary overlord appointed by the Word Bearers, is expected to own and study a set. Tchure understands that sets are also being prepared as gifts for each of the primarchs who have thrown their loyalty behind Horus. Copies of copies of copies. Perturabo’s edition will be bound in etched steel. Fulgrim’s will be bound in living flesh. Alpharius will be presented with two editions, each subtly different from the other.

Horus’s set will be wrapped in the tanned hide of betrayed legionaries.

Copies of copies of copies. Lorgar reviews each edition, line by line. Transcription errors are punished by death, or worse. Just the day before they translated into the Veridian System, a rubricator was disembowelled for missing a comma.

Tchure enters the control office. He can see, now he is closer, that the book Kor Phaeron is reading is one of the master copies, one of the original manuscripts. It is in the primarch’s own hand, directly as he composed it. This is the latest volume, ready for dissemination. Kor Phaeron always makes a close, personal study of the new instalments before passing them to his staff for copying, archiving and publication.

Kor Phaeron is reading secrets that no one else has yet seen.

‘I apologise for the delay,’ says Tchure.

Kor Phaeron shakes his head, raising a claw hand, still reading.

‘The magi have explained it,’ he says. ‘Our devastation of the Calth noospherics was more fundamental than we hoped. There is a lot to rebuild. Another ten minutes, as I understand it.’

‘I will be happy when you are securely back aboard your ship, master,’ says Tchure.

Now Kor Phaeron looks up. He smiles.

‘Your care is noted. But I am safe here, Sorot.’

He looks frailer than ever. A halo of filthy empyrean light flickers around him. Tchure can see flashes of his bones through his skin, like sporadic X-rays. Kor Phaeron is maintaining a vast degree of warpcraft.

‘Come, Sorot,’ he says. ‘Read with me, for a moment.’

Sorot Tchure steps to the console and looks at the open book. He notes the intricate beauty of the handwriting. There is barely a hint of blank paper on the pages.

‘He uses a stylus. And ink,’ says Kor Phaeron, as if marvelling. ‘In this day and age. A stylus. Of course, I have the rubricators do the same thing.’

‘I understand that–’

Kor Phaeron looks at him.

‘What, Sorot?’

‘I was going to say, master, that I understand Guilliman also uses a stylus.’

‘Indeed. Who told you that?’

‘Luciel.’

‘The one you killed?’

‘The first sacrifice, yes.’

‘He was your friend.’

‘That is why the death had value,’ says Tchure.

‘Yes, I believe that Roboute Guilliman uses a stylus,’ says Kor Phaeron. ‘He writes. A lot of words, as I have been told. Not a great deal of content, however. He writes… a treatise. On warfare. On combat mechanics. On the theory of fighting. Childish concerns. The man clearly has no soul or character. And no interest in the metaphysical subjects that challenge those of more considerable intellect. Our beloved primarch already knows all there is to know about killing. He has no need or reason to write it down. The principles are simple. That is why he is able to go beyond records of gross practicality, and invest his time and energy in consideration of the great mysteries. The workings of this universe, and others. The nature of existence.’

Kor Phaeron looks at him.

‘You know, Lorgar simply records what is dictated to him? What is whispered to him and him alone?’

‘By the gods?’ asks Tchure.

‘By the powers of eight,’ replies Kor Phaeron. ‘By the speakers of the void and the voices of the abyss. By the Primordial Annihilator, out of the throat of the warp.’

There is a call from outside. The magi have finished their work.

Kor Phaeron closes the book and rises to his feet.

‘Let us put their good work to use, shall we?’ he asks.

[mark: 4.55.34]

The Zetsun Verid Yard systems come on-line, restarted by the shadow Mechanicum. A data-engine resumes operation. Sensing that the planetary weapons grid is inactive, and that the inactivity has been caused by the inexplicable loss of the data-engine hub located aboard Calth Veridian Anchor, the engine automatically obeys protocol and assumes control, taking up the slack reins of the grid system. Zetsun Verid contains one of the advanced engine hubs capable of substituting, in an emergency, for the primary orbital hub.

The Calth weapons grid goes back on-line. Its manifold re-ignites.

Kor Phaeron observes the work, observes how the scrapcode of the Octed is firmly established in the noospheric architecture. He determines his target, and the magi hurry to set and lock the coordinates.

All the orbiting weapons platforms, as well as several ground-based stations including the polar weapon pits, activate and begin to track as their power reservoirs come up to yield.

It takes approximately ten minutes before authority lights flicker green along the master control room’s main console.

‘Target resolution achieved,’ reports the senior magos, scrapcode binaric chattering behind his meatvoice.

‘You may fire when ready,’ says Kor Phaeron.

There is a glimmer. A flash. Beams of coherent energy, beams of staggering magnitude, rip from Calth and from its orbital stations.

Calth has a weapons grid capable of keeping at bay an entire expedition fleet or primary battlegroup. Only the most devious and ingenious treachery has circumvented it today.

The weapons grid begins to discharge. Calth begins to kill the neighbouring planets in the Veridian system.

It starts with a massive asteroid world that orbits the system beyond the circuit of Calth’s moons. The asteroid, called Alamasta, is the main remnant of a planet that once occupied that orbital slot. It is now a rock the size of a major satellite.

It is no longer called Alamasta. It is known as Veridia Forge. It is the system’s principal Mechanicum station, and the most significant manufacturing venue in six systems.

Veridia Forge is helpless, its systems crashed by the same scrapcode that brought the Calth grid down.

It has no shields, no responsive weaponry, and no means of evasion.

It takes four prolonged strikes from the weapons grid. The first two burn away surface rock and immolate rockcrete bastions or adamantine bulwarks. The third voids the main fabricatory to space, and combusts the forge world’s reactor power systems.

The fourth causes Veridia Forge to explode like a newborn star.

For the next eighteen minutes, Calth has no nightside.

3

[mark: 5.46.19]

Ventanus throws the speeder into reverse thrust. The auspex is smashed and useless. He only saw the gun-carriage when he cleared the corner.

The speeder reverses down the slipway with a violence that lurches Ventanus and Selaton forward in their seats. Cannon-fire is already chasing them. Rapid fire from the grav-compensated carriage, a quad-weapon monster, shreds the barns and storeblocks around them. Cargofabs and payload warehouses explode or disintegrate. Rockcrete walls shiver and exhale dust as shots pummel through them. Window ports burst out.

‘Not that way either,’ says Ventanus.

‘Agreed,’ says Selaton. He’s got the autocannon across his knees, and he’s checking the munitions feed. There’s not much left in the hopper.

Ventanus swings left, and they race down a dank rockcrete underpass, zip between two huge aerospace manufactories, and skirt the perimeter of a burning excise facility. There are bodies everywhere. Civilians, Army, and far too many Ultramarines for Ventanus to be even slightly sanguine about. Men are dead with their weapons still sheathed or covered. Men cut down without the opportunity to face their deaths.

Heaps of cobalt-blue armour – limp corpses inside scuffed plate – line the roadways and arterials. Some have been stacked against fences and walls like firewood. Some have been cut open and emptied. A few have been nailed to posts, or against the sheet-metal sides of buildings.

Some appear to have been butchered or… eaten.

Ventanus doesn’t understand this. He presumes they are victims of some explosive weapon type new to the arsenal of the XVII. Theoretical. That’s the best case theoretical. Ventanus hopes it turns out to be the practical too. The theoretical alternatives are too indecent to consider. The Word Bearers are allied with some species of carnivorous xenoform. The Word Bearers are indulging in some ritual cannibalism…

Ventanus doesn’t need much more of a reason to make war to the death against the Word Bearers. The injury they have done to Calth and to the XIII, that is cause enough. Their treachery, that is cause enough. Their relentless, merciless prosecution of attack, beyond any measure of honour, that is enough.

But this desecration, this takes his casus belli to a whole new level. This is not a just war, this is a war crime. It defies and shames the codes and precepts of the Legiones Astartes, codes and precepts set down by the primogenitor Emperor. The Word Bearers have perverted any semblance of the true and legal path of the Imperium, or the moral code of mankind.

Here and there, Ventanus spots signs that have been daubed on walls, presumably in blood. Eight-pointed stars and other devices he is not familiar with, and the sight of which make him uncomfortable.

Over the chug of the speeder’s engine – a chug that is developing a worrying, clattering under-note – Ventanus can hear the rattle of other gun-carriages moving through the nearby streets. They are in the industrial hinterland between the starport proper and the city. Ventanus is desperate to find a route that they can use to break out and head north-west to Erud. His primary concern is re-establishing contact with his company and the other units in the Erud muster. If they’ve come through this intact, or approximately intact, he intends to make them the spearhead of a counter-strike.

A haze washes across the city and the port. It’s smoke, in vast quantities, but it’s also vapour. Steam. A fog swathes the skyline, blanketing the river basin and turning millions of individual fires into soft orange smudges. Ventanus has seen that phenomenon before, when large bodies of water have been flash-evaporated by sustained energy discharge. A dead ocean condenses over the city lowlands.

They turn another corner, and see six Word Bearers advancing down the freight lane ahead of them. The Word Bearers challenge them, and then open fire.

The speeder rocks under the hits as it starts to reverse. Its armour is pretty solid, but Ventanus knows it’s taken quite enough punishment. He glides backwards, hoping to swing-turn on the hardpan in front of a fabricator shed and find another path. More Word Bearers open up on them, firing from an overwalk, and from a girder bridge between two manufactories. A mass-reactive round explodes against the side of the cab, where the roof is already peeled back and torn. The shock lurches Selaton hard.

They’re running out of ways to turn.

Ventanus reverses faster. He runs down two Word Bearers who emerge behind them. Their crimson-armoured forms are slung out from the repulsors at the speeder’s plated back end and fall, bouncing and clattering across the rockcrete.

But he can’t simply run down the gun-carriage that’s rolling out, facing their back end. It’s twice their size, twice their mass, and it starts traversing its quad-guns to target them.

‘Go!’ Selaton shouts. ‘Go! Through them!’

Ventanus kicks the speeder forward again, cranking thrust. He knocks down one of the Word Bearers they have already smashed aside once. The brute was regaining his footing. The right front wing catches him hard, folds him around the reinforced fender, and tosses him sidelong. He tumbles, and lands in a way that speaks of a severed spinal cord.

Selaton rises in his seat, bracing the autocannon against the sill of the screen. They’re heading directly for the Word Bearers squad that cut them off in the freight lane. They’re also running right through the hail of fire chopping down from the overwalk and girder bridge. Shells slam into the ground around them, pluming fire and grit. Others thump the bodywork like piledrivers.

Selaton kicks off with the cannon. He gets a good angle, given the improvised circumstances, and stitches a line of shots along the girder bridge, ripping handrail spars and shredding the metal balustrade. He knocks two of the enemy shooters off their feet, and then licks across a third. Ventanus sees a helmet explode like a red paint flare. The casualty rocks backwards off the bridge and hits the ground a second after they’ve passed underneath.

Selaton drops his angle and guns down one of the ground troops. The rotating cannon chews the figure up, shredding him like a sack of meat and metal chaff. The others stand their ground, firing straight at them. Ventanus, his grip unflinching, sees a mass-reactive round pass through the cabin between his head and Selaton’s and exit through the back port-slot.

He knocks one Word Bearer down, throwing him over the racing speeder. Then he hits another and catches him on the speeder’s plated fender, upper body spread across the nose, legs caught under the machine. A huge wake of sparks kicks out from the underside of the speeder as it carries the road kill along, abrading the heels and calves of the pinned Word Bearer’s heavy Mark III battle plate. There is a terrible noise of squealing and scraping. Ventanus can’t dislodge the man.

A wall collapses into the freight lane ahead of them, and a crimson Land Raider lumbers into the open, its hull tipping up and over the rubble of the demolished structure. It swings around, weapon mounts lining up.

Ventanus peels left. There’s no other practical. He rams the sheet metal wall of a warehouse unit and blows clean through it to escape the Land Raider’s hail of fire. The Word Bearer pinned to their front end takes the force of the impact. If he wasn’t dead already, he is now.

But so is the speeder. The impact has killed the drive reactor. It starts coughing and rasping, leaking smoke from its vents. The speeder coasts to a halt in the darkness of the warehouse.

Ventanus and Selaton dismount. Selaton has the autocannon and the last of the ammo hoppers. Ventanus gets the standard, and then pauses and goes back to prise the boltgun out of the dead grip of the Word Bearer now all but fused into the mangled nose. There’s very little of him intact from the waist down. There’s a smell of superheated metal, of friction, of cooked bone marrow.

The first of the Word Bearers force their way in through the gap the speeder created. Selaton rakes them, cutting two down and sewing more holes in the wall for the light to shine in.

His hopper is spent. He ditches the cannon and pulls his boltgun.

They start retreating across the jumbled floor space of the warehouse, trading shots with the Word Bearers who are breaching their way in through the gap. Bolter shells spit to and fro. Ventanus scores a hit, but he can’t be sure if it’s a clean kill. Sheer weight of numbers is stacked against them.

He keeps expecting a wall to cave in and the Land Raider to storm the barn, hunting for them. He can hear it outside, rumbling and revving.

Suddenly, there’s a staggering explosion outside. A brilliant light-flash pushes into the warehouse for a second, through every slit and bullet hole and window. The buildings shake, and whizzing pieces of superhot machine parts and plating debris punch through the wallskin.

Ventanus and Selaton pick themselves up. The Word Bearers who have forced entry after them are getting up too. They attempt to re-lock target finders on the fleeing Ultramarines, but they are bewildered. What was the blast? Did something just kill the Land Raider?

Searing plasma beams chop the gloom and slice them apart as they turn. The beams – scintillating green – fuse through and through blast holes in their armour and pop their helmets like balloons.

Ventanus and Selaton back into cover, weapons ready.

Lugging their powerful, close-quarter plasma blasters, skitarii of the Mechanicum flood into the building. Without compromise, they finish off any of the Word Bearers not cleanly killed.

There are dozens of the fearsome Mechanicum fighters.

‘Warriors of the XIII,’ one of them broadcasts in loudhailer mode. ‘Make yourself known to us. Hurry, time is against us.’

Ventanus gets up, raising the battered standard.

‘Remus Ventanus, 4th Company,’ he announces.

The skitarii commander comes to face him. He’s a big veteran, scarred and ugly, gaudy in his aposematistic wargear. One of the red eyeslits in his copper visor is flickering.

‘Arook Serotid, Skitarii Kalkas Cohort,’ he replies. His voice is slightly halting, as if he is not practised at talking. ‘We realised from the Word Bearers activity there had to be XIII strengths in the vicinity. Just the two of you?’

‘Yes. We thank you for your intervention.’

‘It will count as nothing if we remain here much longer, captain,’ replies Arook. ‘We have the firepower to assault a small squad, a vehicle or two. But power reserves are limited, and we cannot take on the mass of the enemy forces.’

‘Can you get us out of here?’ asks Ventanus.

‘We can get you to our senior magos,’ says Arook. ‘It is hoped we can begin to coordinate our resistance.’

Ventanus nods. The skitarii lead the way to the closest exit point.

Arook notes the standard that Ventanus is carrying.

‘That is bulky,’ he says. ‘There is no need to bring it.’

‘There really is,’ says Selaton.

[mark: 6.12.33]

She uses her fleshvoice.

‘I am Meer Edv Tawren,’ she says. ‘I hold the rank of magos. I am the acting Server of Instrumentation for Calth/Numinus.’

‘There doesn’t appear to be much left to instrument,’ says Ventanus.

‘True enough,’ replies Tawren. ‘This is a hateful day. Both of our institutions have lost grievously–’

‘The Imperium has lost grievously,’ says Ventanus. ‘Indeed, something more awful than that has occurred. For reasons I cannot even make a theoretical about, the Word Bearers have turned on us. They have unleashed open war on Calth, on the XIII, on the Five Hundred Worlds of Ultramar, and on the Imperium of Mankind.’

She nods. She is tall and solemn. Her ceremonial robes of office are dirty and torn, and they are stiff with bloodstains. In the last few hours, someone has died while being cradled in her arms.

They are standing in a sub-ground cistern several hundred metres north of the main Numinus arterial. It is a dank cavern, a storm drain for the river system. Arook has suggested that the density of rockcrete above their heads can deter the detection systems the Word Bearers are using.

‘My direct superior is dead,’ says Tawren. ‘We escaped from the Watchtower at the time of the ship impact, but it was too late for him. Responsibility for command and coordination falls to me.’

‘What resources do you have?’ asks Ventanus.

‘I have a force of about three hundred skitarii, with portable weapons and some light support,’ she replies, ‘and that number is growing as we contact other survivor groups. We have no manifold capacity, no noosphere, and absolutely no operational control of the data-engines or the Veridian system weapons grid.’

‘None at all?’

She shakes her head.

‘This is due to scrapcode infection that immediately preceded the start of hostilities. We believe that the XVII Legion deliberately introduced a scrapcode plague into the Calth noospherics prior to attack in order to destabilise then cripple the Mechanicum’s capability.’

‘Since when does a Legion technologically outflank the Mechanicum, magos?’ Ventanus asks.

‘Since today, captain.’

‘So… this scrapcode, it was new to you?’

‘It was like nothing we had ever encountered before. Not just the coding language. The very basis of it. We are still not entirely sure what it is or how it operates.’

‘Further evidence that this was planned and orchestrated well in advance,’ says Selaton.

No one speaks. For a moment, the only sound is dirty water plinking down from the overflow chutes.

‘What is your intention at this point?’ Ventanus asks.

Tawren looks at him.

‘I will use every means at my disposal to regain control of the data-engines. To oust the enemy from our systems and retake the noosphere.’

‘The weapons grid would certainly be a considerable asset,’ says Ventanus. ‘Not to say a crucial one. I fear the XIII has been worse than decimated. I fear for the fleet too.’

‘We have very little in terms of accurate projections,’ says Arook, ‘but at least fifty per cent of the fleet assembly and the ground forces appear to be lost.’

Ventanus tries to focus. He tries to get into theoretical so that he can assist the strategy planning. He tries not to dwell on the practical that over one hundred thousand Ultramarines may already be dead. Dead in just a few hours. It is the greatest Legion loss in history, by an appreciable margin.

‘How do you contact them?’ Selaton asks, suddenly.

‘I beg your pardon?’ replies Tawren.

‘You said the skitarii numbers are increasing as you contact other survivor groups. How do you contact them? There is no vox.’

‘True, but the skitarii have a dedicated emergency manifold, a crisis back-up,’ says Tawren. ‘Arook has switched to the reinforced, military code system of his brigade. The range is limited, but secure.’

‘You have limited secure comms?’ asks Ventanus.

She nods.

‘I need to contact Legion Command,’ he says.

‘Not possible,’ replies Arook. ‘We have no orbital links.’

‘Then I need to contact my company,’ Ventanus counters. ‘There are skitarii units stationed with the Mechanicum support at the Erud muster. I need to contact them.’

‘Erud Station?’ Arook echoes. He glares his red eyes at the server. One of them flickers on and off, sporadically.

‘Of course,’ she says.

Ventanus slots open the cuff of his armour, and lights up a small hololithic chart. He scans the terrain, zipping back and forth. Selaton looks over his shoulder.

‘Theoretical,’ says Ventanus. ‘If we can get the muster moving, we could coordinate a rendezvous. Somewhere here. On the Plains of Dera. Zetaya, perhaps.’

‘It’s defensible, but open to the west,’ Selaton points out. ‘Lernaea might be a better choice.’

‘They’d be too exposed crossing the valley floor,’ says Ventanus. He alters the projection.

‘What about Melatis? It’s got a good position, and it’s agricultural. With fortune on our side, it won’t have been hit in the first strike. Not an important enough asset.’

‘Fortune does not seem to have been on our side much so far today, captain,’ says Selaton.

‘What are you talking about, Kiuz?’ Ventanus snaps. ‘We’re here, aren’t we?’

He turns to Arook and Tawren.

‘When you establish contact, I can give you an authority code to identify me. Try to find out who you’re talking to. Ideally, Captain Sydance or Captain Yaulus. I need them to advance any units they have to Melatis on the plains. I’ll meet them there.’

‘You intend to go overland to Melatis?’ asks Tawren.

‘Yes,’ says Ventanus simply.

‘It is probably an over-ambitious goal,’ she says gently.

‘Severe bombing north of the river,’ says Arook. ‘They’ve taken out the highway. The enemy is also massing engines along the Neride Wall.’

‘Titans?’ asks Ventanus.

Arook hesitates.

‘It shocks me too, sir,’ he says stiffly. ‘I have no idea how any Mechanicum engine could have been so miserably corrupted. Loyalty and devotion seem to be in short supply at this hour.’

‘Leptius Numinus,’ says Tawren.

They all look at her.

‘The old gubernatorial palace, on the plains,’ she explains. ‘It was high on my list of potential destinations. The palace has a non-active but functional data-engine, as well as a high-cast vox array. Neither are operational when the governor is not in residence, but they are maintained. I was hoping that, because both systems were off-line, they might have been spared scrapcode infection and electromagnetic damage.’

‘We could contact the fleet?’ asks Ventanus.

‘If we could make them work,’ she agrees, ‘we could contact the fleet.’

‘We’ve already identified Leptius Numinus as one of the most viable options,’ says Arook. ‘As an added advantage, the sub-ground network will make passage there easier than to any open target on the plains.’

‘Are they part of the Calth arcology?’ asks Ventanus. He recalls that significant systems of natural caverns lace the planet, and many are being developed as habitats. They are commonly used as population shelters when the local star undergoes its infrequent periods of maximum solar activity.

‘Not fully, a branch,’ replies Tawren. ‘The early governors created a secure underground link between the city and the palace.’

‘Military support from the XIII Legion at Leptius would be of great assistance while we begin our recovery program,’ says Arook.

He looks at Ventanus. That defective red eye glimmers. It fades out and in again. Ventanus can hear a burble of binaric cant issuing from Arook’s cybernetics.

‘I have made contact,’ he says. ‘I have a manifold link with Skitarii Commander Gargoz. Gargoz has your Captain Sydance with him.’

‘What is the situation?’ asks Ventanus. ‘Ask him what the situation is.’

There is a binaric crackle.

‘Grim,’ relays Arook. ‘The muster site has been bombarded. Many are dead. Very little survives in the way of vehicles or transports. Sydance reports that strengths from the Ultramarines 4th, and eight other companies, have managed to shelter at the Braxas Wall. Approximately seven hundred men. They are ready to move at your instruction.’

Arook looks directly at Ventanus.

‘Captain Sydance apparently wishes to emphasise that he is pleased to hear from you. He is pleased to know that you are alive.’

‘Tell him where we need them to be. Ask him to see what other forces he can mobilise. As muster commander, I am giving authority to the movement of troops. Ask him to send an arrival estimate.’

Arook nods and relays.

‘We will need a shibboleth,’ says Selaton.

Ventanus hesitates.

‘They have cracked everything. They’ve broken Mechanicum code,’ says Selaton. ‘Even our authority codes can’t be trusted.’

Ventanus nods.

‘Tell Sydance that he can only trust a message from someone who knows the number of the painted eldar. Tell him I will only trust the same.’

‘It is done,’ says Arook. ‘What does it mean?’

Ventanus doesn’t answer.

‘Tell him I’ll see him at Leptius Numinus in a few hours,’ he says.

4

[mark: 6.59.66]

Chapter Master Marius Gage hits the bulkhead and slides down it with a wet squeak, leaving a smear of blood.

The wound’s bad. Envenomed somehow. It’s actually beating his transhuman clotting factor. He can feel his body fighting the fever.

He can feel his mind fighting the fear.

It’s not fear of death or fear of pain. It’s not even fear of failure.

It’s the undermining disquiet of the unknown.

It’s what mankind had to overcome in order to come out of his cave, in order to set forth from his birthworld. It’s the thing mankind had to conquer in order to face down the xenos and the horrors that lurked in Old Night.

It’s the fear his kind was bred to lack.

It amazes him.

He thought he had seen everything. His career has been a long and successful one. His status as the first Chapter Master attests to that. He has been with the Ultramarines since the very beginning.

They are genetically adjusted to register diminished levels of fear response. They are psychologically programmed to eschew its weakness, to resist the critical and dismaying shocks that fear can induce. Part of that programming is to study every threat and hazard, every new xenos form and mutant, that the Imperium might encounter during its outward expansion. Nothing must come as a surprise. Every possible horror must be explored. They must be exposed to every new possibility. An immunity must be built up. A disregard. Some say this makes the Ultramarines seem callous, but it is only the same kind of callous that a labourer might build up on his hands through graft work.

They must be unflinching. They must be impervious to fright.

And Gage thought he was. He really thought he was. Fear was a stranger to him.

Sweat begins to bead on his forehead. He struggles to get up, but he can’t. There is a lesson here, he considers, the practical application of a theoretical paradigm. Pride is our weakness. Over-confidence. We are so sure of ourselves and our vaunted fearlessness, of such conviction that the galaxy no longer contains anything that can scare us, we make ourselves vulnerable.

Gage is sure that Guilliman has already thought of this. He is sure that Guilliman has already written the notion down somewhere in his codification notes. The sin of over-confidence. Yes, Guilliman has definitely schooled against this in his writings. He has admonished the XIII not to assume mastery of anything, including fear, because that instantly creates a vulnerability.

Now Gage thinks of it, the primarch certainly has said this several times.

Certainly. Certainly, he has.

He has said it.

He has warned. Warned of it.

In case he hasn’t. In case. In case he hasn’t, in that case, Gage hopes he can get to... He can mention it to Guilliman. Mention it later.

Except. Except there may not be a later.

Guilliman.

On the bridge when... The bridge just...

That thing. That thing.

So much blood. Then open to the void. That thing. There may never be a chance now. Guilliman. Guilliman may be... He was ripped into space when the ports blew.

He may be...

Guilliman may already be dead.

That thing.

That damned thing.

He–

–comes back out of the blackness. Acid bile in his throat. Tears in his eyes. Agony in his back and ribs where that thing bit him.

He blacked out there. Blacked out. Slid away into a red fog of unconsciousness as the toxins momentarily overwhelmed him.

Gage is breathing hard. Every push of his lungs is a neural fire. He looks down the hallway.

There’s smoke in the air. It’s moving like a river along the ceiling, gusted by the steady breeze. The flagship’s air pumps are fighting to restore onboard atmospheric pressure after the bridgespace voided. Hazard lamps flash. He can see an Ultramarine dead about five metres away. The fellow’s head is twisted the wrong way. Beyond him, three bridge officers sit with their backs against the bulkhead wall, resting against each other like comrades back from a drunken night’s shore leave. They are entirely covered in blood, every shred of them apart from the whites of their glazed, staring eyes.

Beyond them, there’s a bloody ribcage with one arm attached to it. Beyond that, a second Ultramarine has been split open like a fibrous seed.

Then he sees the thing.

Gage isn’t sure if the thing on the bridge, the thing that… killed Guilliman… Gage isn’t sure if it was one thing, or many in one amorphous shape. The thing picking its way towards him might be one of the many, or a piece of the whole.

It’s humanoid, roughly, and about twice the size of a legionary. Its proportions are simian, though its true outline is hard to discern. Reality seems to contort around it. The air festers. It moves like a fog of the unreal, like the fluid black flow of the deepest, most subterranean nightmare.

Like a great ape, it shambles on all fours, its massive arms like tree trunks. It is bristled black, like a blowfly, but its flesh between the coarse bristles is iridescent.

It has no eyes. Its skull is all jaw and no cranium. Its face is a shrivelled grey scrap of skin drawn tight over a deformed human skull, the empty eyes like lunar craters. Its mouth is an eruption of curved tusks and huge yellow teeth like chisel blades. Venom, like sticky brown syrup, droops from its lipless gums.

It is making a snuffling sound. It smells of battery acid and spun sugar.

Is it the same thing that bit him? He doesn’t want it to bite him again. He wonders if it can see him.

Of course it can see him. He’s sprawled out in the open, right in its path.

But it hasn’t got any eyes, so–

Gage takes a deep breath. He appreciates that the venom is making his mind swim. He knows it’s making him think stupid, illogical, foolish things. He knows his transhuman metabolism is fighting it, but he’s not sure if it will win the battle.

If it does win, Gage isn’t sure it will win it in time.

The thing is right on him.

He reaches for his boltgun.

The weapon is long gone. He realises that several of the fingers of his gun-hand are missing too.

His power sword is on the deck near his outstretched left leg. He leans and reaches for it. He stretches. He strains. By the old gods of Terra, he has barely the strength to move!

Gage utters an involuntary bark of frustration.

The thing hears him. It turns its tusked maw towards him. It bobs its head slightly, a feline habit, and then pounces.

Gage screams in rage and horror. He lashes out with his right hand to try to catch its throat and keep it at arm’s length before it lands its full weight on him. If that happens, he’s done.

His hand misses the throat. He manages to ram it up to the forearm in the thing’s mouth.

The thing bites.

There is a crack of armour shattering, a crunch of forearm bones shearing. It bites his hand off beyond the wrist. There is a generous spill of blood. Pain cores up his arm like a hot wire. Gage howls. His heart rates spike.

The savage pain jacks up his metabolic reaction so hard it clears the fog of the toxin from his befuddled mind. He smashes around with his left fist, and cracks the thing in the side of the skull, knocking out two molars in a squirt of pink saliva.

The blow drives the thing back and to the side. Its mouth is still full of his hand. Gage rolls to grab his sword, but the thing is standing on his knee, and he can’t twist far enough.

It opens its mouth impossibly wide and comes in for his face. He can see his severed hand flopping down its gullet.

Blue impact slams it aside. Black ichor is suddenly painted across all the nearby surfaces, including Gage’s face. The thing is down, cut badly. An Ultramarine stands over Gage. He’s a sergeant. His armour is battered. His helmet is painted red, indicating he has been marked for censure. He has an electromagnetic longsword in one hand and a Kehletai friction axe in the other.

‘Go back to hell!’ he tells the thing. It is screaming and caterwauling, its black shape swirling and re-forming, as though reality is trying to heal itself.

The sergeant puts the axe into it. The Kehletai, before they were extinguished during the bitter Kraal Compliance, made paper-thin blades that cut on a molecular level. The nanoedge blade of the axe is huge, bigger than a Fenrisian battle axe. It goes right through the thing, exploding rotten gore in all directions.

For good measure, the sergeant spears it with the longsword. Dead, it is nothing more than a stain.

The sergeant turns.

‘Move up!’ he yells. A fighting party appears, moving urgently down the corridor. There are several Ultra-marines in it, but it is also composed of Army troopers and Navy personnel, including at least one abhuman stoker. They are armed with the most mismatched and exotic weapons Gage has ever seen outside Guilliman’s private arsenal of–

They are all from the primarch’s private arsenal.

‘Move up. Secure the section!’ the sergeant yells. ‘Brother Kerso, scope the next corridor. Flamers to the front! Apothecary Jaer, get to the Chapter Master! Right now!’

He bends down beside Gage, setting his weapons on the deck where they will be in easy reach. Close up, Gage can see the scratch marks adorning the sergeant’s armour.

‘You’ve got an Apothecary?’ Gage asks, his voice a husk of its normal baritone.

‘Just coming, sir.’

‘Your name?’

‘Thiel, sir. Aeonid Thiel. 135th Company.’

‘Marked for censure?’

‘Today started in a different place, sir.’

‘That it did, Thiel. Well said. Who put you in charge?’

‘I put myself in charge. I was awaiting interview on deck forty when everything went to pieces. There was no chain of command. I decided I needed to build one.’

‘Good work.’

‘What happened, sir?’ Thiel asks. He steps back slightly to allow the Apothecary to start work on Gage’s wounds.

‘Something attacked us. Blew the whole main bridge. Some of us got out. More than that, I can’t say.’

‘Who did we lose?’ Thiel asks.

He’s impertinent, Gage thinks. He’s–

No, he’s not. He’s level-headed. He’s practical. He’s fearless. He’s asking questions because he needs to know the answers.

‘The shipmaster, certainly,’ says Gage. ‘Most of the bridge seniors. Chapter Master Vared. Chapter Master Banzor. Your Chapter Master, Antoli.’

‘Terrible losses. What about the primarch?’

‘I did not see him die, but I fear the worst,’ replies Gage.

Thiel is silent for a moment.

‘What are your orders, sir?’ he asks.

‘What was your operational plan, sergeant?’

‘Practical: I was attempting to consolidate and coordinate a shipboard fighting force, sir, and begin to retake the ship. These daemons are everywhere.’

‘Daemons, Thiel? I don’t think we believe in daemons these days.’

‘Then I don’t know what you want to call them, sir, because they are not xenos. They are byblows. Monsters. Warp-things. It takes everything we’ve got to kill them.’

‘Is that why you raided the primarch’s collection?’ asks Gage.

‘No. I raided the primarch’s collection because of the Word Bearers, sir.’

‘Theoretical: explain that logic,’ Gage asks. Then he says, ‘Wait, wait. Apothecary, help me to my feet.’

‘My lord, you are in no condition to–’ the Apothecary begins.

‘Help me to damn well stand up, Apothecary,’ Gage snaps.

They help him up. He is unsteady. The Apothecary resumes dressing his wrist stump.

‘Now, continue,’ says Gage. ‘Theoretical?’

‘We are attacked by the Word Bearers,’ says Thiel.

‘Agreed.’

‘These byblow daemons may be allied to them, some form of creature they have enslaved to their service. Or they may be controlling the XVII. It would certainly explain why our brothers have turned against us in such a fundamental fashion.’

‘Agreed. Continue.’

‘The daemons present a significant threat, but they appear to be… receding.’

‘Receding? Explain.’

‘It’s like a tide going out, sir. They are fewer and weaker than they were an hour ago. As though they are draining back into hell or the warp. However, the Word Bearers have three cruisers alongside us, and they are in the process of boarding. Within the next hour they will be through the airgates and the hull, and we will be compelled to fight our own kind. This form of combat is unprecedented. Their advantage is shock and surprise. Our counter-advantage must be a lack of convention.’

‘Expand.’

‘They know what we are, for they are us. They know the attributes of our armour and our weapons. They also know our tactics and formulae of war, for our beloved primarch has made his codifications available to all his brothers. We never thought we would need to conceal our combat methods from our own kind. Today, we have been disabused of that notion. So we must fight them in ways that they do not expect from us. We must use the unconventional, the improvised and the makeshift. In order to properly honour the combat teachings of Roboute Guilliman, we must cast his rules aside for the day. I have always considered his greatest wisdom to be Remark 101.x–’

Gage nods.

‘I know it. “What wins the fight is what wins the fight. Ultimately, nothing should be excluded if that exclusion leads to defeat”.’

‘Precisely so, sir.’

‘The “by any means” edict,’ Gage says. ‘The ultimate rule that no rule is unbreakable. You know, that idea always troubled him. He told me he often thought to excise the remark. He thought it too dangerous. He feared it would stand, in posterity, as a justification for any action.’

‘I think the XVII have already dispensed with any such rationale, sir,’ replies Thiel. ‘I also would urge you not to refer to the primarch in the past tense in front of the men.’

Gage catches himself.

‘Quite correct, sergeant.’

‘Are my theory and my practice approved, sir?’ Thiel asks.

‘They are. Let us coordinate. What other officers can we contact?’

‘There is a possibility that Chapter Master Empion is operational on deck thirty-five with a resistance force, and Captain Heutonicus on deck twenty.’

‘A decent beginning,’ says Gage. He picks up his fallen power sword and slides it into its scabbard. ‘Let’s move before this day goes altogether. That friction axe?’

‘Sir?’

‘Can it be wielded one-handed?’

Thiel hands it over.

‘It’s light enough, sir.’

‘Lead the way. Let’s cut a line towards the bridge tower.’

Thiel salutes. He turns, raising his longsword and shouting instructions to the clearance team.

Gage glances at the Apothecary.

‘Are we done?’ he asks.

‘I’d prefer to get you to–’

‘Are we done, Jaer?’

‘We are, sir. For now.’

Gage hefts the axe in his good hand.

‘Sergeant Thiel. Do you happen to know why he was under censure?’

‘I do, sir,’ says Jaer. ‘His commanding officer discovered that he was running theoreticals on how to fight and defeat Space Marines, sir. Thiel claimed, in his defence, that he had run theoreticals on all other major adversaries, and it was a tactical blind spot not to know how to fight the Legions. He said, as I understand it, that the Space Marines of the Imperium were the greatest warriors in the galaxy, and thus had an obligation to understand how to fight and defeat the greatest warriors in the galaxy. Thiel declared that Space Marines were the only opponents left worth any theoretical study. His theoreticals were regarded as treasonous thought, and he was referred to the flagship for censure.’

‘That was his infraction?’ asks Gage.

‘Looks bloody pitiful from where we’re standing, doesn’t it?’ asks Jaer.

[mark: 7.44.02]

Trooper Bale Rane and Trooper Dogent Krank are running for their lives through the burning streets. Trooper Maxilid was with them for a while, but some fugging thing from hell, something they didn’t even see properly, swept out of the fog and bit Maxilid’s bloody head off, thank you, so now they’re on their own.

They’re only alive because the thing was too busy chomping Maxilid down. Blood fugging everywhere.

Rane is pretty numb. He’s seen it all today. All of it. Everything it’s possible to see. Every horror show. Every shock, every terror. He’s seen men die. He’s seen friends die. He’s seen cities burn and starships fall out of the bloody sky. He’s seen more dead bodies than he thought it was possible to see. He’s seen men torn apart. He’s seen daemons in the fog.

Worst of all, somehow, worse even than the daemons, is that he’s seen men who should be friends, men who were supposed to be friends, turn towards him with unalloyed murder in their eyes. The basis of the Imperium has been up-ended. The fundamental tenets of loyalty to the fugging Throne of Terra have been torn down and pissed on.

Bale Rane knew that death would probably hurt. War would probably hurt. Breaking up with your brand-new bride and leaving her to go off to war, that would hurt too. Like a bastard.

He never, ever, in a million light years, expected treachery to hurt so much.

They’ve been betrayed. Calth, Primarch Guilliman, Ultramar, the Emperor, the fugging Imperium and Bale Rane of the Numinus 61st; they’ve all been betrayed.

Rane wants to kill someone for turning his world upside down. He wants to kill one of those bloody Word bloody Bearers, although he knows he wouldn’t stand a single, solitary chance, not for a second.

What the fug are they thinking? What are they after? What bloody toxic poison shit is in their heads that they thought this was something they should do?

Krank is falling behind. He’s getting tired. The fog’s all around them, and it’s getting hard to know which way to go. They’ve both got rifles, Illuminators, though neither of them are the weapons they were issued with at muster. They took them from corpses during their escape. When they were running from the bloody heathen Army forces that butchered their regiment.

‘Come on, Krank,’ Rane mutters. ‘Come on now, Kranky mate. We can keep going. We can get out of here.’

Krank nods, but he’s weary. There’s shock in his blood, in his spirit. Rane dare not let him stop or sleep. He might not wake up.

It ought to be the other way around. It ought to be Krank, the veteran, bucking up Rane, the rookie. That’s the way it’s supposed to work. That’s the way it’s been until today.

Rane thinks about Neve a little bit. He thinks he needs to go and find her, and take her out of the city with them. He had convinced himself she was pretty safe, tucked up in the cellar at her aunt’s. But that was before the Word Bearers turned, before the Word Bearers and their heathen fugging cult troops turned and started killing everything, before it turned out not to be an accident at all.

That was before the daemons in the fog.

Bale Rane knows that it’s his moral duty to go and find his young bride. He has to go and find her, and her bloody aunt too, if needs be, and get them out of the city before the city becomes an entirely dead place. That’s all. That’s the up and down of it.

He tells Krank that’s what he’s going to do.

‘You can come along, if you like. Won’t blame you if you don’t want to.’

Krank tells him how stupid he is, but he doesn’t stop walking along beside him.

The funny thing is, and Rane doesn’t mention this to Krank because he knows it sounds strange, but the funny thing is, Rane doesn’t believe it will take long to find Neve. He can feel her. He can feel, somehow, that she’s close. She’s almost calling to him. She’s right there, close by, waiting for him.

They say that about people who are in love. They can find each other, find each other through thick and thin, against all the odds. He’s going to find Neve, and she’s going to find him.

The fog is like a silk curtain. Everywhere is grey. Fuzzy amber lights pulse where fires burn in the distance. The ruins are black and smell of smoke, of fycelene, of mud and broken drains.

Bale.

‘What?’ Rane asks Krank.

‘What what?’ Krank replies.

Bale. Bale. Where are you?

‘You hear that?’ Rane asks. ‘Kranky, can you hear that?’

He can hear her. It’s Neve. She’s close. She’s very close and she’s calling to him. It’s like a miracle play where the lovers are finally united at last curtain.

‘Neve?’

He stops. He sees her. Just across the street, through the mist, standing in a doorway. She’s pale. It looks like she’s made out of mist. How the hell did she manage to track him down?

He’s never been so happy to see anyone in his entire life. He feels love. He feels uplifted by love.

He takes a step forward to cross the cratered street.

Krank grabs his arm. Krank can’t speak because his mouth is stoppered up with terror.

What Krank can see doesn’t look like Bale Rane’s young bride at all.

[mark: 8.10.32]

The tunnel system opens out on the perimeter of Leptius Numinus. For the last few kilometres, the subsurface structure is fractured, and the tunnels are flooded to knee-height. Liquid from the dislocated water table and sewage from city treatment plants has seeped up and washed out the tunnel system. They are obliged to wade.

Ventanus leads them out into the palace grounds, flanked by Arook’s primary squad. They’ve added to their force during the journey. Several squads of skitarii have joined them, swelling the Mechanicum numbers to close to one thousand. They’ve also connected with about thirty Ultramarines from various decimated units, and four hundred men from the Neride Regulators 10th, nominally under a Colonel Sparzi.

The palace is elegant, a rectilinear villa complex. It reveals its stately lines slowly through the thick mist. The gardens of the estate are tumbledown. Shockwave winds and blast scorching have denuded the ploin, haps and pistachio orchards, and turned the vines into charred ropes. Ornamental walls have spilled over. Carp ponds are dry basins, the water evaporated. They find the cowering, burned skeletons of gardeners and groundsmen behind splintered trees.

The palace is closed for the winter. The city governor was in residence at Dera Tower in the city. Ventanus reflects that the governor is probably dead by now. All the casements, apart from armourglas and crystalflex reinforced sections, have been blown in by the savage transcontinental winds. The rooms, most of them filled with furniture covered by dustcloths, are littered with broken glass and snapped muntins.

Outside, the valley and the plains beyond are dark under a blanket of fog. There is no wind. Everywhere is eerily tranquil. A calm that recalls the obligatory stillness of death.

To the north-west, the Mountains of Twilight form a grey limit to the fogbound plains. To the south and south-east, the dark shape of the Shield Wall hems the city. A rugged natural formation, the back of the ridge rises above the languid, unctuous fog. Its famous forests are spines of tattered wood, stripped of limbs and leaves.

Numinus burns, a giant haze of golden light. It is not the only massive blaze they can see. Others show up in the distant fog in almost every direction, and the brutalised sky is speckled with them. Every now and then, something falls down the back of the heavens, trailing a tail of flame, and crumps into the hidden landscape with a distant tremor.

They move into the palace, breaking down doors where necessary. Some of the halls and chambers are littered with broken masonry where walls or ceilings have fallen. Ventanus sees fragments of moulded plasterwork, some of it painted. He sees shattered heroes from the early days of the Five Hundred Worlds. He sees the Ultima symbol, the one they all wear on their armour, broken in pieces.

Tawren assembles a working party of magi to locate and prepare the palace’s data-engine and the high-cast vox array. Ventanus, in consultation with Selaton, Arook, Sparzi and Captain Sullus, a survivor from 39th Company, prepares the defences. Though its perimeter wall and ditch are quite considerable, the palace proper is not designed for military resistance of any appreciable magnitude. Sparzi’s men find some tractor guns and light field pieces in a stable block to the west, and set them up facing the plains.

‘If they find us here,’ says Sullus, ‘they will punish us.’

‘If they find us here,’ replies Ventanus, ‘I will kill them.’

Sullus nods. A half-smile crosses his mouth. He has lost most of his company brethren since dawn. He has seen other sections of the XIII cut down by troop fire or obliterated by heavy weapons. Ventanus knows that, to keep Sullus effective, he has to spur him out of his despondency. Ventanus has already considered putting Greavus, Sullus’s sergeant, in his place in the chain of command. Sullus is old, a veteran. It is as though the wind has been struck out of him.

Greavus walks over to them. He is carrying his helm under his arm. There is chalky dust on his face and in his hair. Greavus’s close-cropped fair hair is red, like dirty gold. The dust makes him look as though he is prematurely aging.

‘Report from the server, sir,’ he says, addressing Ventanus not Sullus. ‘They’ve found the vox-caster system. There are some power issues, but they hope to make a test broadcast within the hour.’

‘Good. The data-engine?’

‘Nothing on that yet, sir,’ replies Greavus.

Arook suddenly moves, raising his main weapon limb.

‘Contact,’ he reports. ‘Two kilometres from the north gate, coming this way out of the fog.’

‘Identity?’ asks Ventanus.

‘Concealed.’

Ventanus picks up the standard.

‘Selaton, cover the south line. Colonel Sparzi, the north-east. The rest of you with me.’

They head for the gate, crossing once-ornamental lawns. Fireteams of Army troopers are setting up in hastily dug foxholes. Ventanus notes good practical distribution of the few crew-served weapons and mortars. Sparzi has read a manual or two. Probably some of Guilliman’s.

They pass the field guns and reach the gate. Outside, the approach bridge spans the earthwork ditch. Beyond two obelisk mile marks, the road stretches off across scrub, the beginnings of the famous and majestic Plains of Dera. Fog and murk spoil the view.

‘We’ve got heat-sources,’ reports Arook. ‘Warm bodies.’

‘Confirming that,’ says Greavus, using a hand-held auspex.

‘They’re using the fog as cover,’ says Sullus dourly. ‘That can’t be good.’

‘If I was leading reinforcements here from Erud Station,’ says Ventanus, ‘I’d be using the fog as cover too.’

He looks at the skitarii master.

‘Vox signals?’

Arook shakes his head. The light in his damaged red eye is fading slowly in and out.

‘You mentioned a code term,’ says Arook.

‘Yes,’ says Ventanus. ‘Wait.’

A slight breeze stirs. Leaf litter rattles amongst the rubble at their feet.

‘A signal,’ says Arook. They can all hear the muted background binarics. ‘Attention palace,’ he translates. ‘Identify occupation.’

‘Is that Mechanicum?’ asks Ventanus.

‘I can confirm the signal code source is Mechanicum,’ says Arook. ‘Not that it proves anything. If it’s Gargoz, he’s being circumspect.’

‘Again,’ says Ventanus, ‘I would be if I were approaching this location hoping to find friends and fearing I was about to find enemies.’

‘The signal has repeated twice,’ says Arook.

‘Answer it,’ says Ventanus. ‘Request identity.’

Arook makes a quick blurt.

‘Reply reads,’ he relays. ‘Support elements from Erud muster, seeking shelter.’

Ventanus sticks his standard point in the earth so he can clamp on his helm.

‘Too easy,’ he says. ‘No one from my company would expose himself that readily. Not on a day like today. No one from my company, or any other company. Ask them the question.’

‘The number of the painted eldar?’ asks Arook.

‘That’s the one.’

They wait for a second.

‘No response. They repeat the claim that they are support elements from Erud muster.’

‘Ask again,’ says Ventanus. He glances at Sparzi. ‘Get your boys up,’ he says.

The colonel nods and hurries off.

‘Response,’ says Arook. ‘A request for confirmation of xenos activity in this zone. Confirm, eldar forces?’

‘They don’t understand the question,’ says Ventanus.

‘I don’t understand the question,’ remarks Arook.

‘The point is, Sydance would,’ replies Ventanus. ‘And so would any other officer of the 4th Company. Ask them to verify their response. Tell them we will stand by.’

Arook does so.

After a long pause, he says, ‘They ask us to confirm xenos activity in this zone.’

Ventanus lifts the standard. ‘Arook, have your skitarii paint heat-source targets in that fog bank for the benefit of the artillery crews. Tell Colonel Sparzi we will open fire in sixty seconds.’

‘You’re going to open fire?’ Sullus barks. ‘Are you mad? If it’s our own kind–’

‘It isn’t. And I’m not going to allow it to get any closer.’

‘But if they are XIII!’ Sullus insists. ‘If they are of Ultramar!’

‘They are not, captain,’ says Ventanus firmly.

Beyond the ditch, at the very edge of the miserable fog, the first figures begin to loom. The feeble sunlight catches the dull sheen of crimson armour.

‘Fire!’ says Ventanus.

[mark: 8.19.27]

‘Let me go back.’ cries Bale Rane. ‘Let me go the fug back!’

Krank punches him in the gut and winds him badly, just to get him to stop fussing.

‘Sorry,’ Krank says. ‘Sorry, Rane. Sorry, kid. I can’t let you.’

Rane gasps out words, doubled up.

‘I did not shoot at your bloody wife, Bale,’ says Krank. ‘I did not do that. I opened up full auto on something and it definitely weren’t your wife. It most surely weren’t.’

‘It was Neve. She was calling to me!’

‘Rane, shut up. Just shut up. Thank me, why don’t you? You showed me picts of your wife. She was pretty. That thing calling to you, it wasn’t pretty.’

Krank sighs. He sinks down beside Rane.

‘It weren’t your wife, kid. Even if you hadn’t shown me picts, I’d have known. Your wife, she’s got eyes, right? And she ain’t got horns. I don’t know what it was, Rane, but it wasn’t good. It was some xenos thing. Some bloody daemon.’

The foul wind stirs the fog on the blown-out street. Out in the distance, a city hab explodes in a gout of flames, and the rumble of it falling lasts three or four minutes. Artillery thumps. Things boom above, in orbit.

Bale Rane murmurs his wife’s name, tears in his eyes, snot on his lip.

Krank hears running.

‘Get up, get up!’ he says, pulling Rane up by the sleeves. He bundles him into cover.

Two men, Army, run past them, down the street, and then a third. They are tattered and dirty, and they’re running from something. One of them is sobbing like a child.

They’re fleeing. That’s what they’re doing.

Krank pushes Rane up against the wall as the pursuers run into view. They’re Army too, but not the same Army. They’re ragged, wrapped in black, brotherhood cultists like the ones who slaughtered Krank’s unit. There are two of them. One laughs, raises his autorifle, and brings down the lagging trooper with a spine shot.

The other two fugitives skid up, halting. Two more cultists have appeared in their path.

The hounded men back up. The cultists stroll towards them out of the fog. The ones who were chasing drop to an amble, closing in behind.

‘Please!’ Krank hears one of the men beg. ‘Please!’

He gets a headshot for asking nicely. He goes down like a commercia mannequin.

The other tries to run, but the cultists grab him. They pin him between the four of them, drag his head back by the hair, and cross his exposed throat with a ritual knife. His blood makes a dark red mirror in the gutter under his body.

Rane makes a noise. An involuntary sob.

The four knife brothers turn from their kill. Their eyes are sunken shadows. In the half-light, their faces look like death’s-heads.

Krank fumbles with his rifle. He’s not going to get it aimed in time. One of the killers sees him, and fires. The rounds whine into the brickwork beside them, and spatter them with grit and slime. Krank fires back, but Rane is tangled with him, and his aim is rubbish. His shots go wide.

The knife brothers rush them.

Krank hits one in the chest with a clean shot, point blank, and drops him on his back. Then he gets a rifle-butt in the face and collapses, his nose and mouth a bloody mash. The other two cultists grab Rane and twist his arms. One drags Rane’s head back by the hair.

‘This one first,’ says the one who stock-smashed Krank. He stoops over his chosen victim, dagger drawn. Krank is moaning, clutching his nose. The man turns Krank’s head by the chin, and aims the point of his dagger at Krank’s wide left eye.

Rane goes berserk. He kicks one of his captors in the balls, then tears free and punches the other in the throat. As both of them stumble backwards, Rane hurls himself headlong at the bastard with the knife and tackles him clear of Krank.

They roll together. They writhe. Rane is nothing like strong enough. He’s just a kid. The cultist is big and rangy, thin and hard. His limbs are long, and he is as tough as a wild animal.

The other two rush back in to help him, cursing. Krank reaches for his rifle, but he gets kicked down. One of them puts a pistol to his head.

The gun goes off. Krank feels surprisingly little pain considering he’s been shot through the forehead. Blood runs down his face. It’s hot. But there’s no pain. There’s not even any recoil or blowback.

The man with the pistol falls over. It’s his blood decorating Krank’s face. The side of the cultist’s skull has been shot off. It’s all matted hair and white bone shards and leaking pink.

Another man stands on the roadway. He’s got a las-rifle. He fires it again, and snaps the second cultist over on his back. Headshot. A really clean headshot. Marksman standard.

Krank blinks. Where did this guy come from? He’s Army. Krank can’t tell which unit. The shooter clambers off the street to join them.

Rane and the other cultist have stopped fighting. Rane rolls the dead cultist off him. The big, rangy freak has got a dagger wedged in his heart. Somehow, in the frenzy, Rane managed to stick the bastard with his own knife.

‘Probably an accident,’ Rane says, sitting up, saying what Krank was thinking. Krank laughs, despite the fact that absolutely fugging nothing in the world is funny.

They look up at the shooter.

‘Thanks,’ says Krank.

‘You needed help,’ says the man. He’s a veteran. His face is lined and his kit is faded. He’s got silver in his hair.

‘We all need help today, friend,’ says Krank.

‘True words,’ says the man, offering his hand. He pulls Krank to his feet.

‘I’m Krank. The kid is Rane. Bale Rane. We’re Numinus 61st. Well, we were. For whatever that counts.’

‘Ollanius Persson, retired,’ says the man. ‘I’m trying to fight my way out of this shit hole. You boys want to come along?’

Krank nods.

‘Safety in numbers,’ he says.

‘Or company in death,’ replies the old guy. ‘But I’ll take either. Grab your guns.’

Persson looks at Bale Rane.

‘You all right, boy?’ he asks.

‘Yes,’ replies Rane.

‘He had a shake-up,’ says Krank. ‘He thought he saw his bride. His little wife. But it wasn’t her. It wasn’t human.’

‘I saw her,’ Rane insists.

‘Nothing looks like what it’s supposed to today,’ says Persson. ‘You can’t trust your eyes. The warp’s at work, and it’s cursing us all.’

‘But–’ Rane begins.

‘Your friend is right,’ says Persson. ‘It wasn’t your wife.’

‘How do you know so much about it?’ asks Rane.

‘I got old,’ says Persson. ‘I saw plenty.’

‘You’re not that old,’ says Rane.

‘Not compared to some, I suppose,’ says Persson.

He crouches down, and plucks the ritual knife out of the cultist’s blood-soaked chest. It’s a black stone blade with a hand-wound wire handle, home-made. An athame. It reminds Oll Persson of something, but it’s not quite right. He tosses the wretched thing away.

‘Come and meet the others,’ he says to the two troopers.

‘Others?’ asks Krank.

5

[mark: 8.55.49]

The enemy comes at Leptius Numinus. It’s hard to assess numbers because of the terrible visibility, but Ventanus estimates at least six thousand. The core of the force is made up of Army units auxiliary to the XVII, the so-called brotherhoods. They look more like ritual fanatics than soldiers to Ventanus, typical of that zealot XVII mindset. Ventanus is certain that the root of many of the day’s ills lies there: the fanaticism of the Word Bearers. They were always borderline and unstable, always of a religious inclination. They worshipped the Imperium as a creed and the Emperor as a god. That’s why they were rebuked in the first place. That’s why the Emperor used the XIII, surely his most rational warriors, to do the job.

It should have been enough. It should have ended the Word Bearers’ wayward thinking, and brought them and their spurned primarch back into the common fold.

Evidently, it did not.

The Word Bearers have been fomenting dissent since that day. Reaching some crisis of faith, some epistemological crossroads, they have turned. They have turned against the Emperor they once adored.

But for what, Ventanus wonders? What do you replace your notion of god with?

Ventanus fears that the Calth Conjunction was an opportunity seized by the XVII to demonstrate their new alignment. The choice of Calth cannot have been chance. This was an opportunity to hurt and shame the Legion that chastised them all those years ago. By being the instrument of the savage reprimand on Monarchia forty-four years earlier, the Ultramarines made themselves a target. They made all of Ultramar’s Five Hundred Worlds targets.

There are still too many questions for Ventanus’s comfort. What force or concept has usurped the Emperor as the Word Bearers’ all-consuming cause? What, apart from malicious vengeance, are they hoping to achieve in the Veridian system? If they crush the Ultramarines at Calth, what is their next step?

Just how many of them are there out there in the fog?

The enemy leaders press the cultists forward in serious numbers. The brotherhood warriors, swathed in black, are chanting, and Ventanus can hear drumming too. The Word Bearers are holding back, driving the cultists forward as shock troops into the earthwork ditch and against the gate.

Sparzi’s gun crews have been shelling into the enemy line for about twenty minutes. They’ve done some serious damage considering the comparatively light nature of the field pieces. The ground beyond the earthwork is peppered with craters and littered with dead. Shot callers on the palace walls are directing the gunners in on the moving mass. Shells fall into the ranged lines, lifting tattered bodies into the air with blasts of flaming debris.

Still they come, wave after wave.

‘Small-arms!’ Ventanus instructs the defenders at the gate and wall. His practical is to let the Army bear the brunt of this, because the legionaries need to spare their boltguns and heavier munitions for the Word Bearers.

The Army force seems content with this. Greavus and some of the other legionaries have co-opted spare lasrifles and other weapons, and are joining the line. Others stand, blades ready, to meet any strength that reaches the gate.

Only Sullus seems distracted. His boltgun is drawn and ready. He wants to act, to fight. He’s angry and frustrated, and it’s fuelling his impatience.

‘Steady yourself,’ Ventanus warns him. ‘I’ll need you when the XVII come at us.’

Sullus spits out a snarl of a reply.

‘Then they’d better come soon!’ he snaps.

Ventanus leaves him to stew. The cultists renew their attacks. The outer walls of the palace are scarred with thousands of shot marks. Parts of some parapets have collapsed. There’s an endless supply of the black-robed figures. They keep rushing the gate bridge. The bridge is littered with enemy dead, and black figures have tumbled into the ditch in significant numbers.

Rockets squeal and lash up at the walls. Sparzi’s artillery tries to bracket the rocket launchers.

Ventanus has a growing concern about munitions supplies.

Ventanus locates Arook on a wall section beside the gate that is defended by the skitarii.

‘Any signal from outside?’ he asks.

‘No,’ says Arook.

‘And the server? Anything from her?’

‘No,’ says Arook. He seems slightly embarrassed.

Mortars tunk and cough behind them. Ventanus hears more rockets wailing in at the wall.

‘Can your men pinpoint the rocket sources? Sparzi’s guns need to end that pain fast before they bring the walls down.’

Arook nods.

‘I wonder how they found us so quickly?’ Arook murmurs as soon as he’s issued command blurts to his warriors.

‘Listening in to our comms?’ Ventanus suggests.

‘No chance,’ says Arook. ‘The skitarii emergency link is secure.’

‘Then just bad luck,’ says Ventanus. ‘There’s more than enough of that to go around today.’

[mark: 9.07.32]

The warp opens broad, black wings. Kor Phaeron manifests.

‘Explain your delay,’ he hisses. Creatures of unlight and the outside fidget and gibber around him.

Morpal Cxir, force commander, bows his head to his manifested superior. Dirty light from the warp-flask swaddles them both.

‘Resistance here, lord,’ Cxir says. ‘Leptius Numinus.’

‘I know it,’ replies Kor Phaeron. ‘A summer palace. No strategic importance. No tactical viability. Burn it. Move on.’

‘There is resistance, lord.’

The Black Cardinal exhales.

‘Your host is expected at the Shield Wall in two hours, Cxir. Do not waste effort and lives on a non-essential target that can be razed by orbital weapons later.’

‘With respect, lord,’ says Cxir. ‘I believe there is more to it.’

He gestures to the warriors grouped around him. One of them is Ulmor Nul, his tracker beast growling and straining at its leash.

‘Nul was pursuing an Ultramarines captain who was discovered fleeing the starport. He obtained an indelible scent. The track led here, to the palace.’

‘Just a survivor, running to the nearest place of shelter,’ remarks Kor Phaeron.

‘It is a very direct and deliberate route to take, lord,’ says Nul. ‘I believe the target has Mechanicum forces with him, and other survivors assembled into a reasonable fighting force.’

‘The defence of the palace complex is resolute,’ adds Cxir. ‘It is organised and purposeful. I believe it has tactical credibility. The XIII is trying to achieve something here.’

Kor Phaeron pauses. The Primordial Truth whispers around him, a hiss like waves breaking on an endless shoreline.

‘You are redirected, Cxir,’ he says. ‘Pursue this prosecution. Exterminate them.’

[mark: 9.20.00]

The chanting and drumming get louder. The next wave of cultists throws itself at the palace.

‘They’re wired,’ warns Greavus sharply.

Ventanus amps up his visor view. There are brotherhood warriors in the front ranks wearing bomb vests or carrying flasks and tubs of explosives.

‘Take them down before they reach the bridge!’ Ventanus orders. Marksmen on the wall line, some of them skitarii using needle laser weapons, start to pick off the bombers. Some detonate as they are brought down. One is caught at the far end of the bridge, his vest exploding with a huge, sickle-shaped rip of fire. Ventanus feels the ground shake.

‘They are renewing their efforts,’ says Sullus.

‘They are,’ Ventanus agrees.

‘Prelude to an attack by their Legiones Astartes, I’ll wager,’ says Sullus.

‘They’ll want to weaken the walls first,’ says Ventanus.

‘Let me take the fight to them!’ Sullus barks. ‘Practical: into the heart of them. Kill their leader. Break their focus.’

‘Theoretical: you die, and so do the men I’m fool enough to let you take with you. Munitions and strength are squandered. No.’

Sullus glares at Ventanus.

‘Do you doubt my courage?’ he asks.

‘In a way, I do,’ says Ventanus. ‘We know no fear, but I think, just now, you do.’

Sullus takes a furious step towards Ventanus.

‘I’ll break your back for that insult! I’m not afraid to die!’

‘I know you’re not, Sullus. But I think you’re afraid that our way of life is dying. That the universe as we understand it is dying. That’s what I’m afraid of.’

Sullus blinks.

‘Practical: loss of faith in our philosophy will lead to over-emphatic and reckless actions. Our combat efficiency will be lost. Our performance as warriors will suffer.’

Sullus swallows.

‘What if… Guilliman’s dead, Remus?’ he asks.

‘Then we avenge him, Teus.’

Sullus looks away.

‘Go find the server,’ Ventanus tells him. ‘Get an update on her progress. If they come at the walls, I want you to protect her.’

Sullus nods and strides away.

In the cavernous sub-basements of the palace, several levels underground, Tawren hears the dull crump of explosions from above ground. Trickles of dust skitter from the disturbed ceiling. She hears detonations, small-arms rattle, the steady tolling of artillery, the crazy ebb of chants and drums.

In chambers nearby, her magi are scrambling to re-activate the palace’s old high-cast system. The vox seems to be intact, but there is a singular lack of viable power.

With a skitarii aide, a female called Cyramica, Tawren has just gained entry to the ceramite-lined well under the palace centre where the data-engine and stacks are held. The data-engine is cold, off-line. She examines it, running her agile hand along its dusty, brown plastek casing. She peers into its inspection windows, observing the etched circuitry, the brass key systems. It is old, an old pattern, probably one of the first data-engines active on Calth at the time of first settlement. It employs Konor-Gantz sub-aetheric systems, and linear binaric cogitation. Old. Quite beautiful.

But not very potent. Tawren understands that the engine was only brought on-line when the governor was in residence at the palace, and then only as a back-up for state records.

‘It will have to be enough,’ she declares out loud. Cyramica glances at her.

Tawren calls in some of the magi, and they begin work on ignition and data-agitation. The engine has its own power supply, a Gysson fusion module set into the floor. The chamber grows warm as the module starts working.

‘If we had one of these for the vox-caster…’ remarks one of the magi.

‘Let us bring it to yield and then measure what it appreciates,’ suggests Tawren. ‘Its power output should be rated in excess of the engine’s needs, to cover all circumstances. Perhaps we can divert some energy to the vox once the engine is operational.’

The magos nods. Tawren has moved laterally around a problem that was confounding him.

Tawren oversees the work. Her gaze lingers on the MIU socket. She will, of course, have to plug herself in. When the time comes. If the engine is tainted with scrapcode, all her efforts may be for nothing, and she will die in the process. Die like Hesst, die the brain-death, the data-death. She remembers Hesst passing in her arms.

A voice interrupts her thoughts. ‘Will it work?’

She turns. An Ultramarines captain has entered the stack room. It is Sullus. She is not sure what to make of Sullus. From observation of micro-expressions during the journey to the palace, she believes that Ventanus does not trust his judgement or reliability.

‘It will work,’ she says with a conviction she does not entirely feel.

‘And the vox system?’ he asks, looking at the ancient engine with a dubious expression.

‘That too. Another half an hour, perhaps.’

‘We don’t have anything like that, server,’ says Sullus. ‘They are at the wall. Can’t you hear them? They’re at the gate, and they will burn this if they get to it.’

‘Then make sure, captain,’ she replies, ‘that they do not get to it.’

One of the magi nods to her. She clears her throat, and walks up to the MIU socket.

The plug connectors lock into place.

The data-engine purrs.

[mark: 9.33.01]

Thiel blows open the next hatch. The daemon-thing on the other side lunges at him, howling. It has teeth – rotten, broken pegs of teeth – all the way around its yawning mouth, which is big enough to swallow him whole. Its legs are back-jointed, with bird’s feet.

Thiel rips the electromagnetic longsword through its maw, severing the upper and lower jaws. Then he puts two bolt-rounds down its sputtering gullet.

Kerso moves in to back him up, hosing the daemon-thing with fire. The thing is already shrieking and spasming, spraying the flagship hallway liberally with ichor. It starts thrashing as the fire wraps around it.

From behind them, Chapter Master Empion yells a warning. A second daemon, a thing made of hair and arachnoid limbs and antlers, has scuttled out of the shadows. It grabs Kerso before he can turn, splitting his armour down the length of his spine, peeling his carapace away like foil. Kerso is screaming. His flamer unit tumbles away, weeping fire.

Thiel hacks off two of the spider-thing’s legs. They are like black willow trunks, ropey and matted with brown fuzz. More ichor spatters. Another leg lashes at Thiel. Too many limbs.

Kerso is done screaming. A lack of skull has silenced him. The thing pinning and peeling him has vomited acid juices onto his head and shoulders to render him more palatable. Kerso’s head is a fused, smoking lump of tissue.

The thing has one eye, a huge white orb that throbs with a sickening, celestial light. It is crowned with a spreading tree of sixty-point antlers.

Brother Bormarus has a heavy bolter. He slugs repeated shots into the creature’s wizened form. Rounds detonate under the skin, pulsing the slack flesh out or tearing it and spraying gobs of meat and pus.

Empion leaps forward alongside Thiel. He has a thunder hammer, and he breaks legs with it. He smashes at the daemon-thing’s body. The energised strikes fracture chitin and pulp tissue. The daemon-thing rears back, dropping Kerso’s corpse, waving its spider legs in a defensive posture. Some legs trail, broken and useless. It has hundreds of them.

Bormarus fires again, aiming at the exposed belly. Something bursts, and the hallway is filled with a noxious stench. Flies swarm everywhere. The daemon-thing flops forward. Thiel ducks a slicing limb, and stabs his longsword into the baleful eye, twists it, and keeps twisting and digging until the unholy light goes out.

Zabo recovers Kerso’s flame-unit and burns the twitching hulk.

‘Every door, a new horror,’ says Empion to Thiel.

‘And every moment a moment lost,’ Thiel replies.

They’re fighting their way down-ship towards the auxiliary bridge. The banging and scraping on the outside hull is getting louder and more persistent: the Word Bearers are on the verge of boarding from their ships alongside. But there is no point fighting for a ship that they can’t control. The auxiliary bridge is a vital practical asset. The Macragge’s Honour has lost its primary bridge tower and its shipmaster, but a replacement for Zedoff has been located among survivors picked up from the Sanctity of Saramanth. Master Hommed, along with a contingent of ready and prepped command officers, is following on behind Thiel’s desperate advance.

The fight is chamber by chamber, companionway by companionway. Daemons lurk in every shadow and around every turn. They spilled into the flagship from loose folds of the warp when the main bridge was compromised, and flow through the vast vessel like a flash flood of ink, of pitch, of liquid tar.

Thiel, Empion and the rest of the ship’s defenders are learning how to daemon-fight under practical conditions. Fire and blades have greater efficacy than projectiles or energy weapons. It seems that the primordial entities suffer greater harm from simple, basic injuries: the primitive qualities of edge, and blunt force, and flame.

Thiel has a theoretical developing, a proposition that suggests a link between damage and ritual function. Fire and cutting or stabbing tools were essential elements of ancient magic-working. It seems more than coincidental that their symbolic provenance should be retained. It is as if the daemons, products of the primeval void before man’s birth, remember the sacred instruments that were used to summon them.

He doubts he will ever have the opportunity to write down or propose this theoretical. He believes that, if he ever should, he would be scorned as a superstitious fool.

Urgency is renewed. Bormarus leads the way. Flies buzz in the clefts of the hall, and gather in frenzies around the bulkhead lights. Mould has formed on ceilings and wall ribs, and slime is dribbling up through deck seams.

Beyond the next blast hatch, a broad prep chamber is littered with dead men. They are almost all flagship crew, most of them ratings, but Thiel spies at least four Ultramarines among the dead. All of the corpses look as though they have been crushed under the treads of a Baneblade convoy. The bodies form a broken, mangled carpet of flesh, bone and armour. The floor of the chamber is slick with blood. Flies buzz.

Thiel can hear dripping.

He looks up. The ceiling is covered, just like the deck. Bodies have been crushed into it, crushed and squashed into the ceiling like papier maché. Small pieces drop or splat down as gravity works its gradual influence.

‘What did this?’ Empion murmurs, marvelling at the sheer ingenuity of the horror.

There is a scraping sound. They turn, and find out the answer to his question.

6

[mark: 9.38.01]

‘Here they come!’ cries Arook Serotid.

The Word Bearers charge out of the fog, their huge red figures dwarfing their cultist troops. They drive the ragged brotherhood warriors ahead of them like packs of dogs into the onslaught of the palace guns. They use the cultists as shields.

‘Meet them! Deny them!’ Ventanus orders. At last, he fires his boltgun. Along the line of the walls and the gate, bolters open up, jagging, jumping and crackling with muzzle-flash. Heavier Legion weapons join in. Autocannons. Lascannons. The precious instruments they reserved for this moment.

The firepower slaps into the enemy charge, properly hurting it, slowing it, breaking it. Thousands of separate explosions and blasts tear men apart or throw them into the air. Tracer-bright streaks of las and plasma stitch across the enemy line. Black-robed humans are mown down. Ventanus smiles under his helm as he sees crimson-armoured figures shudder and fall amongst them.

But there is an inevitable balance. Because it is finally time to utilise the Legion-issue weapons, it is also time to suffer equivalent wrath. The assaulting Word Bearers open fire with bolters and heavy cannons, supplementing the light infantry weapons of the chanting brotherhoods. Mass-reactive shells punch into the walls, scattering large chunks of stone, and rip into the gate. The loyalist forces start taking much heavier casualties.

Loyalist, Ventanus thinks. How bitterly natural was it to arrive at that name?

Crimson shapes, fast as darts, loft out of the fogbank. Assault squads. Shock troops launching on jump packs. They come thundering in like missiles, clearing the broad ditch, plunging down onto the defences. Their attack leap-frogs the main assaulting host. They arrive killing, armed with bolters and chainblades, reaping the Army troops like ripe crops. Angry, whining chainswords rip screaming men apart, making red ribbons of flesh, hurling matted body parts into the air.

‘Drive them off the walls!’ Ventanus yells.

Arook opens fire, spearing one Word Bearers assaulter out of the air with a surgical intercept shot. The Word Bearer veers away on a twisting plume of black smoke.

Four of them land on their feet at the head of the bridge, in front of the gate. They hack and shoot their way into the dug-in Army fireteams. The chainblades score through sandbags, through cannon barrels, through shielding, through flesh, through bone. The strangled, oddly modulated shrieks of the Army troopers unable to defend themselves mark the savage progress of the Word Bearers.

Ventanus bounds forward, Greavus at his side. They reach the defensive line under the gate, where the ground flows with a preposterous, spreading quantity of blood. There’s a pulsing pressure to it, a flow driven by the scampering hearts of men who bleed out through unimaginable wounds. Streams spray and gurgle along the gutters of the bridge, gutters designed to handle rainfall. The torrents void into the ditch below like rusty water from iron pipework.

Ventanus reaches one of the Word Bearers while he is busy disarticulating an Army corporal. Ventanus catches the traitor under the chin of the helm with the thrusting wings of the standard. He drives him backwards, and then blasts him in the torso, point blank, with his boltgun. The shot augurs clean through the Word Bearer and his jump pack in a violent belch of flames and sparks.

The Assault Marine falls, but grabs the thrusting standard as he collapses, dragging it out of Ventanus’s grip. Ventanus doesn’t have time to recover it. Still firing with his right hand, he draws his power sword underhand with his left, and then rotates the freed blade in a semi-circle, catching it full grip.

Greavus has engaged the second of the jump infantry warriors, swinging his power fist to meet the Word Bearer’s moaning chainsword. The chainsword is kicking out exhaust fumes of blood and tissue fibre from its fresh kills. The augmented gauntlet, sizzling with force, shatters the grip and blade drivers of the chainsword, seizing its function.

The Traitor Marine discards his broken sword, and fires his bolt pistol. The round explodes against the side of Greavus’s helm, throwing him sideways into the gateway wall. The Marine steps forward to put a second shot into him.

Ventanus’s bolter roars, and the Word Bearer takes one hit in the throat and another in the chest. The twin impacts stagger him backwards, spalling slivers of armour off him in a cloud like ice chips. Blood pours through the ruptures. The Word Bearer sags against the gate wall, bubbles of blood aspirating through his mouthguard. He tries to raise his pistol again.

Ventanus’s clip is spent. He clamps the bolter, bringing the power sword home with both hands. He finishes the wounded, swaying Word Bearer with a brutal scything zigzag slash. The upper part of the cut goes sideways through the faceplate, the lower return through the abdomen, clean to the backbone. Clutching his almost bisected waist, the Word Bearer buckles.

Ventanus turns in time to meet a third. The Assault Marine rushes him. Ventanus notices there are grim figures etched and marked on the Word Bearer’s shoulder guards, and gibberish litanies inscribed down the length of his body plates. It is the heraldry of the insane.

Ventanus blocks the chainsword swing with his blade. More sparks dance. The chainblade, a two-handed monster, chatters as it bites against the energised edge of the power sword. They break. Ventanus parries the next stroke, blocks another, and then runs his blade, tip first, clean through his adversary’s gut. The stab misses the spine, but the end of the blade merges through the plating above the Word Bearer’s left hip.

Ventanus attempts to slide the blade out, but it’s stuck. Nor is his opponent dead. He swings for Ventanus again, and Ventanus is forced to evade as the chainsword mutters towards his face. He has to let go of his sword, and leave it impaling the warrior’s abdomen.

The Word Bearer lunges at him, set on finishing the contest. He’s wielding the massive chainsword two-handed, stroking left and right in an attempt to catch the now unarmed Ultramarine. A skitarii warrior leaps to Ventanus’s defence, but the Word Bearer cleaves him in half in a swirling red haze.

Open-handed, Ventanus leaps at him, tackling him bodily to the ground while his chainsword is still tearing through the Mechanicum soldier. Pinning the Word Bearer’s right arm so the brute can’t make a swing across his body, Ventanus punches his confined enemy in the head repeatedly. After three blows, the helmet buckles slightly. A fourth fractures part of the gorget. A fifth crazes a visor lens.

The Word Bearer roars, throwing Ventanus off him. Ventanus allows himself to be knocked clear.

He has regained his grip on the hilt of his power sword.

He wrenches it out of the Word Bearer. Sideways.

Greavus, his head streaming gore, isn’t finished. He has risen again, throwing aside his ruptured, ruined helm. He has recovered a bolt pistol and is firing it past Ventanus. The fourth of the assaulters is cleaving his way through Army regulars and skitarii.

Arook and the largest of the heavyweight skitarii have retrenched. They open up with their plasma inbuilds, and slice the traitor apart. Ventanus hears Greavus yelling tactical commands to rally the head of the bridge and drive back the storm force. They’re holding, but the line’s going to break. Hundreds of cultists and Word Bearers are on the bridge, and some are actually swarming up the slopes of the ditch. The defenders on the walls can’t get an angle of fire steep enough.

Selaton arrives with several more of the Ultramarines contingent. He moves in to support Greavus at the bridge. Ventanus reloads his boltgun, and takes a place in the line.

The force of fire now being directed at the palace gate and frontage is immense. Men are being felled by the hail. They are even being hit and killed by the stone shrapnel kicked up by shots striking the wall.

‘I have a signal!’ Arook yells to Ventanus over the din. ‘A new signal.’

‘Relay it!’

‘Inbound force of XIII Legion requesting position specifics.’

‘Challenge them,’ Ventanus orders. ‘Ask them the number of the painted eldar!’

Arook sends the message.

‘Reply,’ he says. ‘The number is twelve. Message continues, “As anyone will tell you”.’

He looks at Ventanus. Droplets of blood from dozens of bodies bead his golden armour. His defective red eye ebbs and flares.

‘Captain?’ he asks. ‘Response?’

‘The correct answer is thirteen,’ says Ventanus. He takes a deep breath. ‘Supply them with the coordinates and tell them that time is not on our side.’

[mark: 9.44.12]

The daemon has a beak. It has a beak and feathers, and hundreds of vestigial limbs that end in hooves. But its body, all thirty tonnes of it, is that of a serpent, a fat, bloated constrictor. A Space Marine could stand with his arms outstretched and not match the diameter of its scaled girth.

It emerges from the vault shadows to the side of the prep chamber, spooling its vast, swaying bulk up through a massive deck hatch that leads into a magazine store. Thiel realises how the crushed carpet of victims was manufactured.

The vast beak clacks. Thiel sees that secondary snake bodies, dozens of them, form a beard, a frill under the chin of the beak. They writhe like tentacles, like pseudopods. The daemon is a hundred giant snakes fused into one titanic abomination, sharing one beaked head.

Bormarus rakes with his heavy bolter, and Zabo spears scalding flame. The daemon-snake rears back, and then lashes out with its frilled head. The beak catches one of the squad, a battle-brother called Domnis, and shears him in a line from the groin to the left shoulder.

Empion wades in, unflinching, circling his thunder hammer to gather momentum. The daemon-snake strikes at him, and he meets the strike, turning its beak aside with a staggering blow. The impact shakes the chamber and causes a pop of overpressure.

The beak is cracked. Ichor trickles out. Thiel strides in to support the Chapter Master, and when the daemon-snake strikes again it is greeted by the hammer and the electromagnetic longsword.

The hammer connects above the bridge of the massive beak, and deconstructs a brittle, avian eye-socket. Simultaneously, Thiel runs his longsword’s razor edge up the rising belly and throat under the beard of secondary tails. The sword parts white scaled flesh, and opens bright pink meat and transparent bone. Internal pink sacs, swirled with white fat, burst and an alimentary canal ruptures.

The daemon-snake rears, its beak wide. Its secondary snake bodies and vestigial hooves thrash and spasm furiously. Partially digested, dismembered parts of human beings and Space Marines spatter out of the deep, gutting wound Thiel has delivered. The body parts spew wide in an outrush of gastric fluid.

The Ultramarines can all hear a colossal booming noise. It is the daemon’s immense tail end, still coiled in the magazine below, thrashing in pained frenzy against the metal walls of the compartment.

The daemon slides back through the hatch to escape its tormentors.

‘The hatch! Close the hatch!’ Zabo yells. He has a locked string of ten frag grenades in his hand. As Empion punches the hatch control, Zabo arms one and lobs the whole string into the deck hatch.

The hatch is almost shut when the grenades go off. The blast jams the hatch a few centimetres from full closure, and the narrow slit focuses the contained blast pressure into a tight, extreme geyser of flame and debris that jets up and burns out across the chamber ceiling.

The booming stops.

Empion glances at Thiel.

‘Every door, a new horror,’ he says.

‘And every moment a moment lost,’ Thiel replies.

It is not the last time they will echo this call and return.

It is not the last compartment of the flagship they will have to clear a path through.

7

[mark: 10.00.01]

The Word Bearers launch a third wave of Assault Marines at the palace.

Ventanus, Selaton and Greavus have held the defence force together, and kept the gate and the bridge, though the bridge is chewed down to shreds of its former majesty. The second wave almost pushed them out of the gate into the inner yard, but for serious counter-fire from Arook’s skitarii.

The third wave, Ventanus knows, will be the critical phase. He sees it coming: one formation of jump troops swooping for the bitterly contested gate, another veering south to hit the wall further around the perimeter. Their intention will be to break in on Sparzi’s artillery positions.

Remus Ventanus is resolved to endure whatever he must endure, but he knows that resistance must crumble eventually. It is a calculable inevitability. It is a matter of numbers. It is a solid practical.

He clings to one hope. He clings to the whispered, relayed message from his home company. Let it not be a lie or a trick, he thinks. I’ve had enough of tricks this day. If it isn’t a lie, let them be fast enough. Let them be fleet of foot and tread. Let them get here while being here still matters.

He knows the wave is coming. There are precursor signs. The brotherhood cultists swarm yet again at the gate and ditch. The chanting becomes so loud that Ventanus imagines the pulse of it, the massed breath of it, will blow away the fetid smog. The enemy strikes at the walls with more rockets, with mortars, and with medium artillery. Shells punch holes in the old walls, or drop long into the gardens and compounds, scattering gun-crews and reserve positions. Selaton reports hearing tracks clattering in the fog, suggesting that the shelling is coming from enemy tanks or self-propelled guns. Ventanus doesn’t hear anything: his hearing is dulled by the sheer pitch of the intense combat in which he has been locked.

The Assault Marines shriek down. Their jump packs generate rasping, heat-shimmered forks of blue flame. The brotherhood charges crush the bridge barricades. Part of the top arch of the gate explodes and collapses in a slip of dust and loose stones. The defenders brace.

Greavus curses, blood matting his already red hair.

A Baneblade, a crimson behemoth, looms out of the fog on the far side of the earthwork and lines up on the gate and west wall. Brotherhood warriors swarm around the bulk of the massive tank.

The super-heavy tank takes aim with its primary siege weapon. The Demolisher cannon clanks into alignment. Its skirts and side-plating are painted with eight-pointed star designs and what appears to be considerable quantities of scrawled handwriting.

A Baneblade.

Ventanus knows the balance has finally and firmly tipped in favour of the Word Bearers.

The close combat has already begun. There’s no time to think about the tank.

He is too busy fighting off a pair of Assault Marines. One has wounded him in the side. The other is laying in with a power axe. The confines of the gate cramp the full measure of the axe-wielder’s swing, but the Word Bearer has already killed two Army troopers and a skitarii.

Selaton covers his captain’s back, turning aside the power axe with a battered combat shield whose surface decoration has been obliterated into a billion raw metals, nicks and scratches. Ventanus and Selaton fight back-to-back. Ventanus clashes his power sword with his opponent’s kinetic mace. Selaton drives a chainsword across the guard of the axe-wielder.

All the while, Ventanus has half an eye on the tank.

Selaton takes a hit. The power axe gets past his combat shield and hacks into his shoulder guard. It doesn’t bite through to the flesh underneath, but the damage is deep, and it jams the articulation of his arm.

Selaton tries to compensate, but his balance is twisted. He stumbles sideways, lurched by the momentum of the axe wrenching out.

His guard is therefore poor as he takes the second swing in the chest.

The wound is bloody. The force of it knocks Selaton down, and it looks as though he has the entire bite of the axe buried in his chest. In truth, his carapace has absorbed the lethal part of the hit, but the flesh is sliced and – until Selaton’s transhuman biology kicks in to staunch it – bleeds copiously.

Ventanus is too committed to protect his fallen sergeant. The Assault Marine with the power axe closes down for the finishing blow.

Greavus punches him in the side of the head with his power fist, compacting his helm like a foil ration tray.

Greavus hauls Selaton back to his feet. They struggle for a second to free the axe from Selaton’s armour.

Ventanus kills his opponent. Fury directs his hand. He plants his blade through the Word Bearer’s helmet, slicing off the right-hand third of it. Something that for all the galaxy resembles an anatomy scholam cross-section is visible as the Assault Marine sags aside.

Ventanus can feel the heat seething inside him like a fever. Since the fighting broke out, he’s taken about eighteen minor wounds, including a through and through las-hit to the meat of his right thigh, a fracture to a bone in his forearm, and a crushed fifth finger. The others are knocks, scars, and serious concussion-transmitted bruising.

His metabolism is cranking up, trying to compensate, trying to fight or delay pain, trying to maintain peak performance, trying to accelerate healing and repair. The energy debt has raised his body temperature by several degrees. He is flash-burning body fat fuel reserves. He knows he will soon need hydrolytes and additional pain-buffers if he is going to retain his battlefield edge.

He looks at the tank again. Why hasn’t it fired? Why–

The Baneblade abruptly revs its powerful engine plant, throbs jets of black exhaust into the air, and starts a rapid reverse. Ventanus can hear its track sections clattering. Its massive hull rocks tail-to-nose, and its main turret begins to traverse to the left, the battle cannon elevating.

The host of brotherhood warriors mobbing around it has to break frantically to avoid being crushed by its hasty redeployment.

What’s it doing? Is it turning? Is it turning?

There’s something in the oily fog. Something to the north-west.

The Word Bearers Baneblade fires its battle cannon. The muzzle-shock is huge, and the pressure smack puffs dust up from the ground all around it. The shell spits into the fog, creating a corkscrew ripple that slowly dissolves. Ventanus does not hear it hit.

But he hears the response.

There is an oscillating scream of energy and pressure, accompanied by a micro-pulse of electromagnetics. A thick beam of blinding energy shears out of the fog and strikes the Baneblade. The impact shakes the tank, all three hundred tonnes of it. It shakes it. It rattles it like a tin toy. It rocks it off the ground for a second and skids it sideways. Dozens of brotherhood warriors perish under its violently dislodged mass.

The energy beam bangs painfully as it connects. Huge chunks of armour plating eject, some spinning high into the air. Half the turret structure is burned away. Smoke begins to plume, and then gutters and pours up and out of the damaged section. The Baneblade shudders. Ventanus can hear it attempting to restart its main drive, stalled by the body-blow. He can hear the multi-fuel plant gagging and choking.

A second energy beam, bright as the first, scores out of the fog and misses the tank by a few metres. It hits the ground, spontaneously excavating a huge trench of superheated, fused rock, and incinerating two dozen of the brotherhood and four of the Word Bearers. Other cultists caught in the immediate target zones scream as the secondary heat-sear ignites their robes and their ammo.

The third beam, coming just a moment after the second, kills the Baneblade. It hits the hull square, under the throat of the turret, and the tank ruptures and explodes. For a millisecond, it resembles one of the wood-and-canvas vehicle dummies, little more than covered frame tents, are used in basic training exercises by the Army. It looks like a tank dummy where the wind has got up under the hem of the cover tarp and billowed it out off the underframe, lifting it, twisting the painted outline and edges.

Then the internal blast comes, sudden and bright, and hot and vast, and the twisted outline of the tank vanishes, atomised.

Two Shadowsword tanks plough out of the fog, roiling it around their cobalt-blue hulls.

Cobalt-blue. Cobalt-blue, wearing the white and gold heraldry of the Ultima.

Land Raiders and Rhinos churn through after them, then a trio of Whirlwinds, and a walking line of Ultramarines, forty bodies wide. They fire as they advance on the Word Bearers positions from the north, passing the smoking crater-grave of the Baneblade. Two or three bikes and speeders scoot after the massive battle tanks, romping over the churned-up ground.

The brotherhood formations at the head of the bridge baulk, under fire from a new angle. Hundreds are slaughtered where they stand. Some leap into the corpse-choked ditch to evade the hammering fire of Land Raiders. The Shadowswords are already firing into the fog, targeting high-value Word Bearers assets hidden from the palace by the haze. Their main guns screech out columns of energy that cook through the mist vapour. Objects in the blanket of fog explode. Flames gust high into the air over the mist cover. The smell in the air changes, like the turn from summer to autumn. New energies, new machines, new chemical interactions.

Full-scale battle is joined. For the first time since the attack on the palace began, the Word Bearers force is thrown into a defensive mode, prosecuted hard by an unexpected, mobile foe.

The cultist warriors break. Their chanting stops. Behind the first walking line of Ultramarines is a second, and a third. Their gold and blue armour is slightly dulled by the atmospheric conditions, but still it gleams. Salvation never looked so splendid. Death never looked so noble.

The cultists begin to flee. They run south down the earthwork, or flee into the mist. Those trying to follow the earthwork line, picking their way, scrambling, draw fire from the wall. Sparzi’s troopers and Arook’s skitarii lace them with opportunist weapons-fire, dropping them like sticks. Some turn back, and then turn back again, pinned and bracketed by gunfire that creeps in and slays them. Bodies slither and tumble into the death-pit of the ditch.

Ventanus sends an order to the colonel to suspend artillery. He wants to ensure the counter-strike has an unimpeded run into the enemy formation.

‘Captain Sydance,’ says Selaton, noting a standard and pointing.

‘The 4th,’ Ventanus agrees. He is surprised by the level of emotion he registers. It’s not just relief from the physical hazard. It’s honest pride of association. His company. His company.

It’s a heterogeneous mix, in all truth. Sydance has composed his battlelines out of men from several XIII Legion companies. All of them were assembled at the Erud muster. He’s patched holes and losses in the 4th Company structure with reinforcements from other broken units. One of the Shadowswords is an 8th Company asset, two of the Land Raiders are from 3rd. Ventanus notes the battle colours of Captain Lorchas, the second officer of the 9th.

The palace defenders watch whatever is visible. Most of the fighting boils back into the fog. Long-range armour duels rip through the cloudy murk. Nearer at hand, the Ultramarines finally dismember the last of the cult resistance, and engage in vicious close-quarter melee with the warriors of the XVII.

To their credit, the Word Bearers do not break like their chanting followers. They have significant numbers – a two- or three-company strength, by Ventanus’s estimate – and even caught out of position and by surprise, they dig in. From the savagery of Sydance’s assault, 4th Company and its reinforcing elements have seen too much already today to think about quarter. Ventanus wonders – dreads – what they might have witnessed and experienced out at Erud Station as the main part of the treachery broke. Did the Word Bearers encamped alongside the Ultramarines zones just turn? Did they simply rise and draw their weapons, and begin killing, without notice or warning?

He is sure they did. Ventanus is sure the Word Bearers have nothing but the absolute extermination of the XIII as an objective.

You do not just kill the Ultramarines Legion.

Lorgar’s barbarians would not have risked a fair fight. They would have gathered every advantage that surprise, deceit and entrapment could offer. They would have wanted to blitz and kill their enemy, kill him before he even realised he was an enemy.

It did not work. It did not work. The XIII has been hurt. The last ten hours on Calth might even have mortally wounded the Legion to such an extent that it will never fully recover, and, as a consequence, will always be a weaker, smaller fighting force.

But the Word Bearers did not make the clean kill they intended. They fumbled it, or they underestimated the effort required. They made a bloody mess, and left a wounded foe that could still move and fight; a wounded, mangled foe that was fuelled by pain and hatred and vengeance, and by the bright shock of moral outrage.

Always make sure your enemy is dead.

If you must fight an Ultramarine, pray you kill him. If he is still alive, then you are dead.

You are dead, Lorgar. You are dead. You are dead.

‘Did you say something?’ Arook says to Ventanus.

Ventanus wonders if he did.

‘No,’ he replies. He unbuckles his helm, removes it, and wipes a smear of blood off the pitted, chipped visor. Much of the cobalt-blue paint has been scratched or spalled off. Arook Serotid, similarly, is covered in metal scrapes and dents, his ornate golden armour battered and streaked with blood and oil.

Around them, wounded, weary, filthy men gather to watch the brutal fighting on the far side of the earthwork. Army, Ultramarine and skitarii alike stand together, weapons lowered. Residue smoke coils under the chewed-up arch of the gate. Broken pieces of stone slither down from the wall, some of it jarred loose by the earth-trembling assault of the armoured vehicles. The precious few medical personnel among Ventanus’s force take advantage of the suspended fire to move up and tend the injured and dying. Virtually every single one of the palace defenders has taken an injury of some kind. There are nothing like enough dressings or drugs to go around.

‘Why the code?’ asks Arook.

‘What?’

‘The number of the painted eldar?’

‘The war against Jielthwa Craftworld,’ Ventanus replies quietly. ‘Eight years ago. Sydance had the main assault. A privilege. During the charge, he was briefly cut off and made a personal stand, taking on a dozen eldar warriors. It was an outstanding achievement. He was decorated for it. I arrived to relieve him just as the fight was ending, and he was finishing his last opponent.’

Ventanus glances at the skitarii master.

‘The primarch decorated him for twelve kills in one accelerated bout of combat. Twelve of the painted eldar. But there were thirteen eldar dead on the hall floor when I reached him. I came in firing, anxious for his welfare. It is a high probability that my shots, loosed into the smoke, killed the thirteenth. So it is a standing joke between us. He famously slew twelve and was decorated for it. I slew one. But that one may have been crucial. It might have been the one who, at last, overcame him. Sydance might have died at the hands of the thirteenth, and never lived to celebrate his glory and prowess. So which was more important, his twelve or my one?’

Arook stares at him.

‘This is the sort of thing you joke about?’ he asks. ‘This passes for humour among your kind?’

‘I thought you might understand,’ says Ventanus, shaking his head. ‘Most humans would not.’

Arook shrugs his mighty shoulders.

‘I suppose I do. We skitarii enjoy similar boasts and rivalries. We just do it in binary and keep it to ourselves.’

The force of the armour battle has become so intense the field of fog west of the palace is rippling and churning like a troubled sea. Fierce beams of light flash and burn in the murk. A troop transport, hoisted by a considerable explosion, bursts out of the mist like a breaching cetacean. Debris and fragments shower off its burning carcass as it flops back into the vapour sea.

Closer at hand, at the edges of the mist, Ultramarines are locked in hand-to-hand fighting with Word Bearers. Loyal blue against traitor red. No quarter given or taken.

Ventanus reloads his boltgun, checks his sword, and gathers up the standard. Its haft is streaked with runs of blood, and badged with bloody palm prints.

‘I’m rejoining the fight,’ he tells Selaton. ‘Secure the palace.’

He hears a buzz from beneath his left ear, and responds instinctively before he realises what it is.

‘Ventanus? This is Sullus.’

‘Sullus?’

‘I’m in the palace sub-basement, Remus. She did it. The server did it. Vox-link is live. Repeat, vox-link is back and live.’

Ventanus acknowledges. He turns to Selaton and the other officers.

‘Change of plan,’ he says. ‘I’m returning to the palace building. Hold the line, and let me know the moment the nature of the fight out there changes.’

He turns and begins to walk away, through the gate, across the cratered gardens, towards the battered facade of the summer palace.

Blue smoke wreathes the air, and there’s a stink of fycelene from the artillery emplacements.

He has hope. For the first time since the day began, Ventanus has decent, proper hope in his heart.

[mark: 10.40.21]

Ventanus enters the sub-basement. He can feel the soft heat of the working machines. Mechanicum magi stand around, observing, monitoring. A few work at exposed circuit integrators, making final adjustments.

Tawren stands in the stack room, connected to the chattering data-engine by an MIU umbilical. She looks serene.

She glances at him as he approaches, but is too busy reconfiguring a data-transfer structure in her head to speak.

Sullus glances at Ventanus.

‘4th Company just relieved us,’ Ventanus tells him.

‘So she said,’ Sullus replies, nodding towards the server. ‘She’s constructing a tactical overview. I don’t understand the details, but I gather she’s collecting and collating strategic data from every system and information source she can link to.’

‘Across the planet? Orbital?’ asks Ventanus.

‘Not yet, captain,’ says Cyramica, the server’s aide. ‘For now, it is just on a local, continental level. Because it was dormant and isolated, the data-engine was not infected with pernicious scrapcode. The server is extending her reach one step at a time, maintaining code-protected cordons, so that she does not contaminate herself by infected data-transfer. There is also some doubt that this engine will be powerful enough to coordinate a full, global noosphere.’

Ventanus nods. He appreciates the way the Mechanicum have of never sugar-coating any news.

‘What about taking control of the planetary weapons grid?’ asks Sullus.

‘No,’ replies Cyramica bluntly. ‘The active grid is under enemy control, and it is infected with their invasive scrapcode. All the server can do is gather data in passive mode. The engine is not powerful enough to wrest grid control from the enemy-operated data-engines, and even if it were, such a process would require active MIU function, which would allow the scrapcode a viable cross-infection route. As was demonstrated today, we do not have a code-protection cordon or “killcode” powerful enough to eliminate and cleanse the scrapcode.’

‘So Tawren’s forced to remain passive?’ asks Ventanus.

‘To protect the integrity of what we have here,’ says Cyramica.

‘But she can assemble and compile tactical data for us?’

‘Extensively. Her magi are already assembling the first databriefs.’

Ventanus looks at Sullus. ‘She can prep us with material to formulate proper theoreticals. We can then use the vox to coordinate the practicals.’

‘Any coordinated reprisal is going to be bloody welcome,’ says Sydance, walking into the chamber. He wrenches off his blood-stained helm and grins at Ventanus. ‘Thought you were dead, Remus,’ he says.

‘Hoped you might be,’ Ventanus replies.

‘Hope all you like,’ says Sydance.

They embrace with a clatter of armour.

‘There’s always a thirteenth eldar, Lyros,’ says Ventanus.

‘Twelve, only ever twelve,’ Sydance replies.

He breaks the bearhug and grins at Sullus.

‘Good to see you standing, Teus,’ he says.

‘We march for Macragge,’ Sullus replies stiffly.

‘You march where the hell you like,’ says Sydance. ‘I’m marching straight for Lorgar’s throat today. I’ve seen...’

He hesitates, and wrinkles his mouth in distaste.

‘Men are dead and gone, brothers,’ he says quietly, his smile behind a cloud. ‘I’ll spare you the list for now, but so many. Friends, warriors, heroes. The catalogue of the fallen will make you weep. Weep. The bastards slaughtered us. Unguarded. In our sleep. Surprise attack is an honourable tradition of war, but not from a supposed friend. Ah, I’m sure you saw plenty on your way from the port, Remus.’

‘I did.’

‘I will make an ocean of blood,’ says Sydance. ‘An ocean. I will soak the soil in the blood of these bastards. I will bleed them beyond the limits of their clotting factor. I will leave their heads on spikes.’

‘Vengeance, yes,’ Sullus nods. ‘Quite. We should however formulate a solid theoretical.’

‘Screw theoreticals!’ Sydance growls. ‘This is one occasion when we are excused our usual approach to war as a science. This is war as art. This is war as emotion.’

‘Yes,’ says Sullus. ‘Let us paint our faces and charge the enemy guns. They only outnumber us four-fold, after all. The few of us that remain will die, but at least we’ll have died expressing our anger. So that makes it all right.’

Sydance makes a contemptuous sound.

‘I’m with Sydance,’ says Ventanus, but quickly raises a warning finger before Sullus can object. ‘With one caveat. Given our losses, given our enemy’s numerical and technical superiority, I think our spirit, our rage for vengeance, our furious need for restitution... those things may be the only qualities that give us an advantage. They have made the mistake of hurting us instead of killing us. We are more dangerous. We will use the hurt.’

He looks at Sydance.

‘But there is always a thirteenth eldar.’

Sydance laughs.

Sullus is unable to cover a tiny smile.

‘We must cover our backs,’ Ventanus says. ‘We must channel our rage, and temper it with strategy. We must use every weapon: fury, vengeance, intelligence. Fury is our practical. Intelligence is our theoretical. Neither works alone. We would disgrace Guilliman in this hour if we forgot that. Information is victory.’

He turns to Cyramica.

‘Please, inform the server I wish to begin vox transmissions. I need the best signal encryption she can give me, and any source modifiers. Anything she can do to disguise our position.’

Cyramica nods.

Flanked by Sydance and Sullus, Ventanus walks into the vox-caster room. He takes up the speaker horn.

8

[mark: 11.06.41]

It’s darker above ground than beneath it.

The open air is a poison fog, and the dense blackness moves hard on a wind that pushes through the Ourosene Hills.

Brother Braellen doesn’t believe it’s a natural wind. A natural weather pattern. During a break in the gunfire, he heard Sergeant Domitian speculate that it was atmospheric displacement: major pressure and air patterns thrown into upheaval by orbital bombardment.

There’s certainly a line of firestorm glow around the lip of the southern sky.

6th Company, supported by the Army and stragglers from two other Ultramarines companies at the Ourosene muster, has pulled back from the devastated ground camp areas, and taken up position defending the surface tower of one of the northern arcologies.

Braellen hasn’t seen inside the arcologies, but he knows they are huge sub-ground complexes. Some of them are habs. This one, apparently. There are hundreds of thousands of citizen workers down there, and the 6th is the only thing stopping the enemy from getting at them.

The surface tower is a small fortress, a significant fortified structure that covers and defends the mouth of the arcology system. Its sublevels contain entrances to the main underground arterial, to walkways and cargo-freight systems, and even maglev rail lines, all feeding the huge subterranean complex.

The tower is a good place to make a stand.

The enemy has been coming up the pass all day. Brotherhood cultists at the fore, then Word Bearers, then armour. The cultists seem mindless, frenzied. They are drumming and chanting nonsense. Heedless of their own lives, they rush the walls and gates, and are cut down. Some are wired to explode, and detonate themselves against the walls in the hope of bringing them over.

Braellen is intrigued by their behaviour. The cultists seem willing and eager. That is clear from their chanting and drumming and mindless sacrifice. But it is a group mentality, a hysteria. He has observed Word Bearers at the back of the vast host spurring them on, driving them forward with pain and threats. They are enslaved killers, their hysteria enforced by cruel authority.

Perhaps they have been promised some redemption, some metaphysical reward for their bloody efforts. Perhaps they hope that if they survive devoted service, they might be freed.

Perhaps they know that refusing the XVII is a more unpleasant option.

A fresh wave comes at the tower. Captain Damocles has ordered that the Army provide fusillades for the instrumentation of each repulse. The legionaries must withhold, saving their more precious munitions for Legiones Astartes targets.

The link to the arcology is vital. Significant reserves of standard Army munitions can be raised from arcology silos to supply the human defenders. But the reserves of Legion-specific munitions, including ordnance for their fighting vehicles, is limited to the supplies carried by the battle-brothers, or retrieved from the muster camp before it was abandoned.

Every bolter round must count. Las-bolts and small-arms hard-rounds can be hosed at the waves of screaming knife brothers.

Legion weapons are withheld for more significant targets.

Those targets are coming. Apart from the Word Bearers, who are yet to commit in serious numbers, there are signs of major armour massing down the throat of the pass, perhaps even war-engines.

Braellen both understands and supports his commander’s practical. Tempting though it is, the legionaries must wait until their abilities are the only ones that will do.

He doesn’t understand the enemy.

What has transformed them so? What has turned them? They have all heard Domitian’s stories about the old rivalry and the competition.

So what? Show him two Legions that don’t compete for glory and distinction? The rebuke was just that: a rebuke for impoverished service and performance. And it was more than four decades ago!

What is this now? Are the Word Bearers and their demented master so addled that they can brood for forty years, and finally act with such disproportionate ignominy that the galaxy draws a gasp of surprise?

Braellen can tell that Captain Damocles is wounded by it. He has never seen him so driven or grim. It is the treachery more than the loss of life. The treachery has taken his breath away, and shaken his belief in the sanctity of the Imperial truth.

That’s all before you even begin to consider the transformation of the Word Bearers: their altered schemes and heraldry, their expressed choice to decorate their armour with esoteric and frankly bizarre symbols and modifications. Their willingness to consort with superstitious, heathen zealots.

Have they been consumed by some mass delusion of sorcery?

Or has something darker and more insidious got its poison into their veins and twisted their minds against their kin?

The next wave is coming. Braellen sees them running up the slopes, a mass of swirling black robes and brandished weapons. The knife brothers, thousands of them, stampede over the dead left by the last charge and roll like a river breaking its banks towards the gate and storm walls.

The Army – 19th Numinus, 21st Numinus, 6th Neride ‘Westerners’ and 2nd Erud Ultima – opens fire. Lasrifles volley, light support guns and crew-serveds chatter, grenade launchers clunk and pop. Heavier autocannon emplacements crank up, chewing into the moving lines.

Another slaughter. Black figures are mown down. Some explode in shooting fireballs as they die, slaying the men round them.

Braellen clutches his bolter, fighting back the urge to shoot.

‘Captain! Captain!’

Sergeant Domitian moves through the back of the line. Men turn as he passes.

Domitian reaches Captain Damocles.

‘Sir,’ he says. ‘The damn vox just lit.’

[mark: 11.10.13]

Sergeant Anchise turns sharply.

‘What did you say?’ he asks.

They’re on the fringes of Sharud Province, moving at best speed ahead of the conflagration that’s consuming the forests. They are the pitiful remnants of the 111th and the 112th.

Anchise has taken command now that the company captains are gone. He’s trying to rally something out of the men, but there’s no time to stand still. Pursuit is right there, constantly pressing them: Titans, Titans of the traitor Mechanicum, plus heavy armour columns.

The Word Bearers are in the burning woods, and every kilometre further means greater losses inflicted.

Warhorns, deep, lingering, mournful, echo through the blackness of the forest, summoning the Ultra-marines to their doom.

‘We’re detecting a sporadic pulse code on the vox, sir,’ says Cantis, who’s been carrying the only caster set they dragged out of Barrtor with them.

‘Is it on the helm pick-ups?’ Anchise asks.

‘Too weak,’ says Cantis. ‘I really need to set this down, erect the portable mast.’

Anchise doesn’t have to tell him why he can’t. Three or four mass-reactive rounds spit through the canopy above them like game birds bolting for freedom, and punch into a mature quaren. The bole splinters in a spray of fire, and the head limbs of the tree come tearing down through the canopy spread in a blizzard of sparks.

‘Move! Move it!’ Anchise yells. Damn they’re close! He can hear whirring, the chug of treads. That’s a damn Whirlwind, or maybe one of the Sabre tank hunters.

There is simply no let up. They are going to be hounded until the last of them are dead.

Two Word Bearers rush the clearing. The trees are stark black, back-lit by fierce fires that have erupted close by. Anchise can smell woodsmoke, burning brush, sparks, the burnwash of explosives.

The first of the XVII brutes fires his storm bolter, and kills Brother Ferthun with a hit to the lower back that blows out his spine and hips. The other is hefting a lascannon. He braces it and lets rip, flattening trees and retreating Space Marines with bright spears of las-energy.

Anchise decides to face his death. He goes at them, boltgun blasting in one fist, kinetic mace in the other. The mace belonged to his captain, Phrastorex. The captain never even got the chance to unlock it from its case this morning.

Anchise’s bolts blow the face off the Word Bearer with the cannon. The visor of the man’s helmet explodes, and he falls back, hard. The other clips Anchise on the shoulder, and then makes a cleaner hit to his left leg. The detonation of the mass-reactive shell hurls Anchise onto the loamy ground. Rolling, he swings the mace, and breaks both of the Word Bearer’s legs. The warrior goes down. Anchise finishes the job with another mace swing.

His own leg is broken. He can feel the bone trying to reknit, but the damage may be too great.

He looks around in time to see that the other Word Bearer is not dead.

He’s getting up. Anchise’s shots shredded his helmet, his gorget and part of his upper chest plate. The Word Bearer’s head and face are exposed.

It may just be injury: burns, contusions, swelling. The warrior has, of course, just taken substantial damage from a boltgun.

But the horror doesn’t look like that to Anchise. The flesh is puffed taut, like the necrotised swelling of a venom bite. The mouth is misaligned, but it looks as though it has grown that way, not been brutally configured by kinetic shockwaves. Blood streams down the side of the Word Bearer’s face and neck.

There are yellow scutes on his brow that look disturbingly like budding horns.

He throws himself at Anchise, a combat blade in his right hand. The dagger looks as though it’s made of obsidian or polished black rock. Its grip is wound with fine chains. Is it some kind of trophy?

Anchise lapses to automatic practical, taking his foe on in basic, close-hand measures to stop the blade. He half-rises to meet the Word Bearer, turning his left palm out to run in past the lunging knife, and turn the right wrist and forearm away. Simultaneously, he brings his right forearm up as a crossed block against the enemy’s face and chest.

Transhuman versus transhuman. It’s about mass and speed and power, about the application of accelerated strength and enhanced reaction time. Anchise’s hard block breaks the Word Bearer’s cheek, his pass turning the knife aside. But the Word Bearer is strong, and driven by a murderous fury. He circles the blade, stabbing at Anchise’s side and left arm. Anchise turns his right arm block into a jabbing punch, ramming his steel fist into the enemy’s throat which has been exposed thanks to the damaged gorget. The impact crushes something in the Word Bearer’s throat. His eyes bulge for a second, and blood jets from his mouth and nostrils. He attempts another savage stab, and the knifeblade scores Anchise’s right forearm through armour, flesh and muscle to the very bone.

Anchise is not going to lose the advantage. He places a second punch into the throat, and then a third, higher, into the misshapen jaw.

The Word Bearer’s head snaps back. Anchise feels rather than hears a sharp crack. He punches again to be sure. Then, as his foe drops, he wrenches the dagger out of his hand to make certain of things.

The hand that he uses to grasp it tingles. The wound made by the knife in his forearm throbs.

He freezes.

Something opens in his mind. Despite the burning forest around him, everything is very cold. There is a sterile blue light. Something pulses. Anchise can hear a deep, cosmic heartbeat. He can smell neurotoxin and molecular acid. He cannot see it, but he has a sense of something uncoiling, something vast, something black, something scaled and greasy, something coated in a heavy caul of grey mucus. He can feel it unwrapping, expanding out of a pit that’s older than all the eons, moving up through the eternal darkness of Old Night and the interstellar gulf, moving towards the light of the burning forest. Moving towards him.

It can smell him. It can taste his pain. It can hear his thoughts.

Closer. Closer. Closer.

Anchise cries out and hurls the black glass dagger away. The door in his mind slams shut.

He is breathing hard, shaking. The wound in his arm will not stop bleeding.

He knows he needs the vox. It doesn’t matter if they haven’t got the time or opportunity to stop and set up. He needs the vox.

If someone’s out there, if anyone’s listening, they need to hear him. They need to know.

They need to know what they’re facing.

[mark: 11.16.39]

On. Off.

On. Off.

On.

Maintain activation. Maintain. Wake.

Trapped and blind. Helpless. Deprived of consciousness for so long, he has lost all sense of when now is or what now is.

He knows fear.

He is Telemechrus.

He has been taught things, and one of them is to control his anger until it is needed. It is probably needed now.

He lets his go. He lets it replace the abomination fear.

He analyses. He scans. He determines.

His determination is this: he is still in his casket, and his hibersystems have shut down. No, they have been interrupted. By a comm signal. An encrypted vox signal.

He was woken by an encrypted vox transmission that triggered an auto-response in his casket support system.

His casket is damaged. Telemechrus does not believe he can get out of it. He calls out, but there are no venerables around to counsel or help him.

There is no one around.

He will know no fear. He will know no fear.

His implant clock tells him that he has been dormant for a little over eleven hours. External sensors are down. He can’t see. He can’t open the casket. There is no noosphere. There is no data inload.

There is only the vox signal that woke him. He clings to that. He tries to decrypt it.

His inertial locators tell him that he is stationary. They record, eleven hours earlier, an extreme displacement followed by a kinetic trauma spike that was too intense to fully measure. He does not remember that. Hiberstasis must have shut him down before it happened.

Motion sensors light.

There is something close by. Something approaching his casket.

Friend or foe? He has no data. No means of determination. He cannot target. The casket is trapping him. He cannot even discharge his weapons while he is locked in the box.

Friend or foe?

Something strikes the outer shell of his casket and slices through the clamps. Something pulls the hatch open.

‘Are you alive in there?’ a voice asks.

Telemechrus suddenly gets optic feed input. Light. He can feel air flow against his skin, even though he has no skin.

The voice comes from the figure silhouetted against the light.

‘Respond,’ the voice says. ‘Are you capable of activity, friend?’

Telemechrus tries to reply, but his voice does not work. There is a whirr. A whine. A dry gasp of sonics. He engages his cyberorganics, drives power to his articulated limbs, shakes off the tingling numbness of stasis, and levers himself forward.

Clumsy and inelegant, he clambers out of the casket. The figure moves back to let him out.

He steps out of the casket, crushing rock fragments and glass to powder beneath his feet. He feels sunlight on his face, though he has no face. He stretches out his ghost spine, stretches his remembered arms.

His weapon pods engage. Power couplings light up. Feeds flow live. He looks down at the figure who freed him.

‘Thank. You. Lord,’ he manages to say.

‘You know me?’ the warrior asks.

‘Yes. Tetrarch. I. Identified. Your voice. Pattern.’

Eikos Lamiad nods.

‘That’s good. My face is not as recognisable as it once was.’

Telemechrus adjusts his optic feed and zooms in on the great tetrarch. Lamiad’s visual profile does not match the one stored in Telemechrus’s autostack memory.

Lamiad’s glorious golden armour is dented and scorched. The famous porcelain half of his face is cracked and disfigured. The intricate mechanism of the left eye is ruined.

His left arm is missing from just above the elbow, leaving nothing but a buckled stump of armour, and a cluster of torn fibernetic cables, broken ceramite bone-form, and frayed artificial muscles. With his right hand, Lamiad leans on his broadsword as though it were a walking staff.

‘You. Are. Hurt. Lord Champion.’

‘Nothing that can’t be repaired,’ replies Lamiad. ‘Except, perhaps, my heart.’

‘You. have. Sustained. Cardiac damage? Which. Vessel?’

‘No, friend. I meant it metaphorically. Do you understand what’s happened today?’

‘No. Where. Am I?’

Lamiad turns and gestures. Telemechrus adjusts his optic scope and pans out, wide, tracking. A desert area. The sky is dark and mottled with heat-strong blotches. A heat-blotch in the near distance represents a building structure of significant size, which is on fire. More distant but perhaps larger heat-blotch/fires can be identified and plotted. The desert is littered with debris, much of it Legion materiel, much of it apparently destroyed by impact. Telemechrus tracks around. He scans his own casket, crumpled, half-buried in an impact crater. Smashed storage pods and equipment containers are scattered all around. There are two other caskets.

Telemechrus checks for a noospheric, but there is none. He cannot patch and configure a global position with any accuracy.

‘You fell from a low orbit facility,’ says Lamiad. ‘Two of your kind fell at the same time, but their caskets were already damaged and they did not survive.’

Telemechrus zooms in on the half-open caskets beside his own.

‘Oh,’ he says.

‘What is your name, friend?’ asks Lamiad.

‘Gabril. No. It is. Not. It is. Telemechrus. Lord.’

‘Telemechrus, we have been attacked in the most underhand and cowardly fashion. The XVII Legion has turned on us. They have slaughtered us, crippled the fleet and the orbital facilities, and laid waste to vast tracts of Calth. We are close to defeat. We are close to death.’

‘I have seen. Death, lord. We have both. Seen it. Come close to. Us and yet in neither. Case. Did it claim. Us.’

Lamiad listens. He nods slowly.

‘I had not considered it that way. You are new-forged, Telemechrus, but you already display the wisdom of a venerable. The techpriests selected you well for this honour.’

‘I was. Told. It was. Because I. Was compatible. Lord.’

‘I think that is so. And not just biologically. I was almost made like you, after Bathor. The Mechanicum of Konor blessed me with a more subtle rebuild. It is not, however, as robust.’

Lamiad glances down at his shattered arm-stub.

‘Today, your Dreadnought build has allowed you to endure better than me.’

‘Without you. Lord. I could not. Even. Have got. Out of. My. Box.’

Lamiad laughs.

‘Please. Inload me. With full. Tactical,’ says Telemechrus.’

‘I was over there,’ Lamiad says, pointing towards the burning buildings in the middle distance. ‘The Holophusikon. That was supposed to be a commemoration of our future, Telemechrus. The orbital strike rained debris across this entire area. Large pieces. They struck the whole zone like a meteor storm.’

‘I was. One. Of them.’

Lamiad nods.

‘A whole ship came down over there,’ he says. ‘And that way, a section of orbital platform that struck like a rogue atomic. The Holophusikon took direct hits. There was no protection. I was hurt. Most others present were killed by the collision trauma, the shock concussion, and the subsequent fire.’

‘That’s Numinus City,’ he says, pointing in another direction.

Telemechrus scans another vast heat-source. He compares the stored grid positions of the city and the Holophusikon, and calculates his position relative to them, to within two hundred metres.

‘There is. No. Data,’ says Telemechrus. ‘There is. No. Central. Command.’

‘There is not.’

‘Have you. Determined. A theoretical. Lord?’

‘I am trying to assemble whatever strengths I can salvage,’ says Lamiad. ‘Then I intend to take the war back against the traitors who did this.’

‘What is. The strength. of your. Force. So far. Lord?’

‘It’s you, and it’s me, Telemechrus.’

‘Why?’

‘Why what?’ asks Lamiad.

‘Why did. Our brothers. Turn. On. Us?’

‘I have no idea, friend. I am almost afraid to know the answer. In that explanation, I fear, our future will burn again. Brother against brother. Legion versus Legion. A civil war, Telemechrus. It is the one blight the Imperium never even considered.’

‘We shall. Know. No fear. Lord.’

Lamiad nods again.

‘I. Await. Your. Orders. Lord.’

‘The city,’ says Lamiad. ‘Numinus. If we must make anywhere our killing ground, it’s there. That’s where the enemy will be.’

‘Yes.’

Lamiad turns.

‘What. About the. Vox-signal, lord?’

‘What vox-signal?’

‘The. Encrypted. Signal.’

‘My vox-link is smashed, Telemechrus. Tell me what signal you mean? Is someone out there? Is someone talking?’

[mark: 11.40.02]

The enormous security hatches, twice the height of a legionary, hiss open, retracting into the armoured frame. Internal blast shutters, like nictitating eyelids, open in sequence after them.

The auxiliary bridge of the Macragge’s Honour is revealed. One by one, starting from just inside the hatch to the right, and moving around the room, the consoles and bridge stations begin to light up, commencing automatic activation cycles. The auxiliary command has interlaced redundancy parameters. It will be, for now, clean of scrapcode. Cryptocept keys, reserved for only the most senior personnel, empower the auxiliary command to re-integrate with the flagship’s primary service and control system, to purge and rewrite the command codes, and, if necessary, to assume control of the ship.

Shipmaster Zedoff had a key, and he’s dead. Guilliman had one, and he is missing.

Marius Gage has the third.

He looks at Shipmaster Hommed and the two ranking functionary magi they have rescued during the fight downhull. Hommed is bruised, and his uniform is stiff with the blood of others. He only survived the death of his ship, the Sanctity of Saramanth, because his first officer bundled his unconscious form into an escape pod. He would have preferred to die with his ancient and honoured vessel.

Hommed also accepts that the duty thrust upon him now is as critical as it is unexpected. A qualified and experienced shipmaster must take Zedoff’s place at the helm of the Macragge’s Honour.

‘Ready?’ asks Gage. There’s no room for ‘if’ in his question. He does not even allow for a theoretical where Hommed will decline the command. The Ultramar fleet is dying. Scattered across Calth nearspace, it is being hunted, hounded and picked off by the predator warships of the XVII and the unstoppable fury of the weapons grid. Something must be done. It may already be too late, but something must at least be attempted.

‘I am ready, Chapter Master,’ replied Hommed.

Flanked by Hommed, the magi and a gaggle of deck officers and command servitors, Gage crosses to the master console, and inserts the last cryptocept key. His authority is requested, taken by gene-scan and retina print, then verified by voice and pheromone. Hommed then steps forward, and allows his biometrics to be recorded, verified, and imprinted.

‘Command is yours, shipmaster,’ says a magos.

‘Command accepted, with honour,’ replies Hommed. ‘Begin primary service and control system purge and rewrite. On three, two, one.’

‘Purge under way, shipmaster.’

‘Prepare override protocols,’ says Hommed. He walks towards the strategium with rapidly mounting confidence, or at least the determination not to look like a fool. As he goes, he starts pointing left and right to direct his officers to their stations. They hurry to respond, strapping in or, in the case of magi and servitors, plugging up.

‘Everybody to readiness,’ says Hommed. ‘All stations, all stations. I will be asserting override in three minutes, and I want every station to gather and present all and any data they can the moment we are live. Priority to drive, shields, weapons and sensors.’

‘Strategium tactical externals are to be built and viewable within two minutes of re-start,’ Gage adds.

‘Let him call it,’ Empion hisses to Gage. ‘Hommed knows what he’s doing. He needs to know that chair is his.’

‘And I need to know what the battle looks like,’ says Gage. What he doesn’t say is, I need to know if, by any miraculous chance, Guilliman is still alive.

Thiel and the strikeforce watch proceedings from the hatchway, guarding against possible attack. It’s a high theoretical that the Word Bearers have already boarded the flagship. Even with Hommed installed in command, the ship may not actually belong to them at all. Thiel itches to lead squads to the main airgates and the hangar decks.

They are the sites he would use to storm-board a ship.

‘Override complete,’ announces a magos.

‘Auxiliary command is active,’ calls a deck officer.

‘I have control,’ agrees Hommed.

Almost immediately, the newly-assigned Master of Vox calls out.

‘Signal!’ he cries. ‘Encrypted signal from the surface!’

‘The surface?’ says Empion, amazed. ‘But–’

Gage steps forward. He nods at the Master of Vox to activate full encrypt, and takes the speaker horn.

‘This is Marius Gage,’ he says. ‘Who speaks for Calth?’

9

[mark: 12.00.00]

‘Ventanus of the 4th,’ says Ventanus. ‘Please stand by as we verify your code authority and identity.’

Ventanus lowers the speaker horn and waits until Cyramica relays a confirmation from the server.

‘Ventanus again,’ he says. ‘It is good to hear your voice, Chapter Master.’

‘And yours, Ventanus,’ the reply crackles back, tonally altered by the signal encrypt. ‘We were blind until a few moments ago. We thought the surface was dead.’

‘Not quite, sir,’ Ventanus replies, ‘but I can’t pretend the picture is good. Our losses have been severe. We have spent the hours since the attack trying to re-establish a vox-net and regain some data capacity. In the next few minutes, I will begin passing to you details of surviving surface strengths and their positions, as they come to me. We have the Mechanicum server here, and she is processing the inload for us.’

‘Ventanus, can you restore the weapons grid?’ the vox crackles. ‘Is the server able to do that? The enemy has control of it, and is using it to obliterate the fleet. We cannot hope to achieve anything in the face of their grid control.’

‘Stand by,’ replies Ventanus. ‘I believe the cogitation power of this data-engine is insufficient, but the server is examining the issue. I’m going to talk with her now. Data should be inloading to you. Captain Sydance will remain on the link for further voice contact.’

‘Gage, acknowledged.’

Ventanus hands the speaker horn to Sydance and walks back into the stack room with Cyramica. There is a tranquil but dead look on Tawren’s face, as if her body is empty, as if her mind has fled deep into remote sub-aetheric reaches and left the physical shell behind.

‘Vox contact has now been made with sixty-seven survivor groups,’ Cyramica tells him, ‘including two engine squadrons in North Erud, an armour company near the Bay of Lisko, and the 14th Garnide Heavy Infantry, who survived virtually intact at a bunker complex in Sylator Province.’

‘Keep compiling. The primarch will coordinate the active practical.’

‘The Chapter Master responded from the flagship,’ observes Cyramica. ‘Not your primarch. Have you discussed the orbital losses yet?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Orbital losses are extreme, and they are increasing every minute as the grid hunts new targets. Is your primarch still alive? Is an active practical even possible?’

Ventanus glares at her.

‘Can I speak to the server?’ he asks.

‘She is in deep interface.’

‘And I appreciate her efforts, but I need to talk to her.’

Cyramica nods. She issues a gentle binaric signal.

Tawren opens her eyes.

‘Captain,’ she nods, an underlying, tremulous carrier signal clicking along behind her voice.

‘Our priority is the weapons grid, server. What progress have you made?’

‘I can confirm,’ she says calmly, ‘that this engine is not capable of either overriding control of the grid, or of managing the grid’s operation after an override. It is simply not powerful enough.’

‘Is there an alternative?’

‘I am attempting to decide that,’ she replies. ‘So far there does not appear to be a single, functioning data-engine on Calth rated sufficient for the job that is not also infected with the enemy scrapcode. For a definitive answer, however, you must wait until my final determination.’

‘How long will that take?’ asks Ventanus.

‘I do not know, captain,’ she replies.

Ventanus hears footsteps behind him, and looks around.

Selaton stands in the doorway.

‘You’d better come, sir,’ he says.

Ventanus nods.

‘Inform me the moment you have an answer,’ he says to Tawren, and exits.

Tawren drifts back into the dataverse. Her serenity is practised and deliberate. A server can manage far greater degrees of data manipulation whilst in a calm state of mind. In truth, she is fighting a core of anxiety.

With the data-engine active, she can see it all. Or, at least, she can see more of the situation’s totality than anyone except the enemy. She can see the truly frightening scale of the losses: the death toll, the crippling injury to the XIII Legion, the burning cities, the slaughtered populations, the devastated geography and the systematic annihilation of the fleet. Under any other circumstances, Calth would be considered a loss, and the battle a defeat.

The Ultramarines‘ characteristic determination is the only thing keeping them going: their fearless resolve to devise a new practical, to circumvent and outplay even hopeless odds.

These are worse than hopeless odds. Tawren can see that. She has a simultaneous dataview of the globe, and she can see that even the surviving loyalist forces are hard-pressed and dying, cornered, fighting off attack from all sides, slowly facing elimination. They are too scattered and too isolated. The enemy has superiority in every way.

This is extinction. The grid might have made a difference, but there is no way of accessing or controlling it.

This is extinction. This is the death of Calth. This is the end of the XIII Legion.

[mark: 12.07.21]

‘I thought you needed to see this,’ says Selaton. He leads Ventanus outside, onto the cratered lawns of the palace.

‘A prisoner?’ Ventanus asks dubiously.

Most of the enemy fled after the 4th ripped into them. Many stood their ground and fought to the death. But this one has accepted capture.

He is standing on the lawn by the broken fountain, guarded by four Ultramarines.

Ventanus leaves Selaton to his duties and approaches the Word Bearer. The warrior’s armour is dented and bloody. His face is smeared with gore. He looks at Ventanus, and almost seems to smile.

‘Name,’ says Ventanus.

‘Morpal Cxir,’ replies the Word Bearer.

One of the guarding Ultramarines shows Ventanus the weapons that the Word Bearer was carrying when he was captured. A broken boltgun. A large dagger made of black metal with a wire-wound handle. The dagger is curious. It looks ritualistic and ceremonial: less of a weapon and more a totem of status.

‘Were you the ranking officer?’ Ventanus asks.

‘I was in command,’ Cxir admits.

‘Any reason I shouldn’t just kill you, you bastard?’ Ventanus asks.

‘Because you still live by a code. Your Imperial truth. Your honour. Your ethics.’

‘All of which you have forgotten.’

‘All of which we have specifically renounced,’ Cxir corrects.

‘This is the old enmity?’ asks Ventanus.

Cxir laughs.

‘How typically arrogant! How characteristic of the Ultramar mindset. Yes, we slaked our dislike of you today. But that is not why we attacked Calth.’

‘Why then?’ asks Ventanus.

‘The galaxy is at war,’ replies Cxir. ‘A war against the False Emperor. We follow Horus.’

Ventanus doesn’t answer. It makes no sense, but the apparent senselessness must at least be set in the context of the day’s unimaginable events. He takes another look at the ritual knife. It is ugly. Its shape and design make him uncomfortable. He believes that the brotherhood cultists were carrying similar weapons. He slides it into his belt. He will show it to the server. Perhaps the data-engine can provide some illuminating information.

‘So the galaxy is at war?’ he asks.

‘Yes.’

‘A civil war?’

‘The civil war,’ replies Cxir, as though proud of it.

‘Warmaster Horus has turned against the Emperor?’

Cxir nods.

‘News takes time to travel,’ he says convivially. ‘You will hear of it soon enough. Except you won’t. None of you. None of the XIII. Accept the fact that you have just hours to live.’

‘If you allowed yourself to become a captive just so you could try to threaten us,’ says Sullus, walking up to join them, ‘then you are a fool.’

‘I am not here to threaten you,’ says Cxir. ‘I would have preferred to have died, but I have a duty as commander. A duty to offer you terms.’

Sullus draws his sword.

‘Give me permission to silence this traitor,’ he says.

‘Wait,’ replies Ventanus. He looks at the Word Bearer. Cxir’s expression is scornful and confident.

‘He knows we won’t hurt him while he is a captive, Sullus,’ Ventanus says. ‘He has mocked us for it. He has mocked our civilised code and our principles. He taunts us for having humanitarian ethics. If that’s the worst thing he can say, let him.’

Sullus growls.

‘Seriously, Teus,’ says Ventanus, ‘he thinks that’s an insult? That we have moral standards and he does not?’

Cxir looks Ventanus in the eyes.

‘Your ethical stance is admirable, captain,’ he says. ‘Do not misunderstand me. We of the XVII admire you. We always have. There is much to be admired about the august Ultramarines. Your resolve. Your sense of duty. Your loyalty, especially. These comments are not intended to appear snide, captain. I am being genuine. What you stand for and represent is anathema to us, and we have taken arms against it. We will not rest until it is dead and overthrown. That does not prevent us, all the while, from admiring the strength with which you champion it.’

Cxir looks from Ventanus to Sullus and then back again.

‘You were everything we could not be,’ he says. ‘Then the truth was revealed to us. The Primordial Truth. And we realised that you were everything we should not be.’

‘His jabbering bores me,’ Sullus says to Ventanus.

‘You are creatures of honour and reason,’ says Cxir. ‘You understand terms. That is why I refrained from seizing a death I was happy to embrace, and undertook this humiliation. I have come to offer you terms.’

‘You have one minute to express them,’ says Ventanus.

‘In failing to take the palace and destroy you,’ Cxir begins, ‘I have disappointed my field commander. Leptius Numinus was identified as a primary target. Do you understand what I’m saying, captain? Just because you’ve defeated my force, it will not prevent others from coming. At the time of my capture, Commander Foedral Fell was advancing on Leptius with his battlehost. They can’t be long away. Fell will crush you. You barely broke my force. His is twenty times the size. And he is not a creature of honour, captain, not as you understand the principle. Surrender now. Surrender to me, and I will vouch on your behalf. You, your forces here, their lives will be spared.’

‘Spared for what?’ asks Sullus. ‘A life spared under those terms is not a life I’d care for.’

Cxir nods.

‘I understand. I anticipated as much. There can be no rapprochement between us. We have waded into blood too far.’

‘Then what did you expect?’ asked Ventanus. ‘That we would surrender to you? Side with you, with the XVII, with – if what you say is true – Horus? Against Terra?’

‘Of course not,’ replies Cxir. ‘But I did, perhaps, expect that you might at least listen to our truth. It is not what you think, captain. It is beautiful. Your understanding of the galaxy will change. A paradigm shift. You will wonder why you ever thought the things you think. You will wonder how and why they ever made any sense.’

‘Cxir,’ says Ventanus. ‘I have listened to your terms, and I have heard your offer. I formally reject both.’

‘But you will die,’ says Cxir.

‘Everyone dies,’ replies Ventanus, turning away.

‘It will not be a good death,’ Cxir calls after him. ‘There will be no glory in it. It will be a sad and miserable end.’

‘Even in glory, death is miserable,’ Ventanus replies.

‘Fell will punish you! He will punish you in unimaginable ways! He will trample your flesh into the earth!’

‘Ignore him,’ Ventanus says to Sullus.

‘Just like we did to your primarch!’ Cxir yells. ‘We will cut you and bleed you and kill you, like we cut and bled him! He begged for death in the end. Pleaded for it! Begged us like a coward! He wept! He pleaded for us to finish him. To end his pain! We just laughed and pissed on his heart because we knew he was afraid.’

Ventanus can’t stop him. Sullus moves like a blur. Cxir’s torso is slashed open from the left hip to the throat in one ripping cut. The end of Sullus’s sword embeds itself in the underside of Cxir’s jaw.

Blood pours out of the Word Bearer. He sways. Black blood floods from the wound, down his legs, back down the wedged blade and up Sullus’s arm. It streams from Cxir’s mouth. His mouth is half-open. Ventanus can see the fine steel edge of the sword blade running between two of the lower teeth.

Cxir is laughing.

He murmurs something, choking on blood, gagged by the sword.

Ventanus pushes Sullus away and grasps the sword to wrench it out and deliver the mercy of a quick kill.

‘Finally,’ Cxir gurgles. ‘I w-wondered w-what it w-would take... I knew o-one of you would have the balls...’

He begins to collapse, dropping to his knees before Ventanus can withdraw the sword. The blood pools around him on the dry earth, rolling out like a purple mirror in all directions. The four Ultramarines guards step back in quiet disapproval. Sullus is staring, cursing himself for letting his anger out.

Something else is being let out, too.

Cxir is laughing. The laughter throbs tidal surges of blood out of his mouth. It is thick. There are clots in it. Shreds of tissue. The laughter is a gurgle, like a blocked storm drain.

Cxir divides along the line of the sword wound. He splits from the hip to the throat. Then his skull parts too in a vertical line, like a pea-pod dividing. Flesh tears and shreds apart like fibrous matter. The sword, unseated, falls onto the bloody earth.

Cxir is on his knees, opened from the waist like a bloody flower. He is still, somehow, laughing.

Then he turns inside out.

Ventanus, Sullus and the guards recoil in dismay. Blood spatters them. Cxir’s backbone sprouts like a calcified tree trunk, growing weird branches that look as if they are composed of arm bones. His ribcage opens like skeletal wings. His organs pulse and grow, smearing tissue and sinew across the reshaping skeleton.

Cxir becomes a vessel. Whatever is hidden inside him, whatever is germinating and shooting through him from the warp, is much much bigger than his physical form could have contained.

Sprouting limbs turn black and scaly. They grow bristles and thorns. They stretch out like the legs of a giant arachnid. Scorpion tails twist and thrash like a nightmare wreath as they grow out of the open ribs. Stings glitter like knives.

Cxir’s new head buds and unfolds, slowly turning up from a bowed stance. Mouthparts chatter. Huge multi-faceted eyes twinkle and glitter, iridescent. Horns sprout from the cranium; the huge, upright horns of some ancient Aegean bull-daemon.

Cxir is still laughing, but it’s not Cxir any more.

The air is full of blowflies, like a storm of buzzing ash.

‘Samus,’ laughs Cxir. ‘Samus is here!’

USHKUL//THU

‘In the End Phase of any combat, or at any point after the Decisive Strike has been accomplished, loss must be recognised. This is often the hardest lesson for a warrior to learn. It is seldom written about, and it is not valued or defined. You must understand when you have lost. Perceiving this state is as important as accomplishing victory. Once you appreciate that you have, by any theoretical measure, been defeated, you can decide what practical outcome you can best afford. You may, for example, choose to withdraw, thus preserving force strength and materiels that would otherwise be wasted. You may choose to surrender, if anything may be accomplished by the continuation of your life, even in captivity. You may choose to expend your last efforts doing as much punitive damage to the victor as possible, to weaken him for other adversaries. You may choose to die. The manner in which a warrior deals with defeat is a truer mark of his mettle than his comportment in victory.’

– Guilliman, Notes Towards Martial
Codification, 26.16.xxxv

1

[mark: 12.17.46]

‘Who is... Samus?’ asks the Master of Vox. Then he flinches, and pulls his headset away from his ears.

‘Report!’ snaps Gage.

‘Sudden and chronic interrupt, sir,’ says the Master of Vox, working his console deftly to reconnect. ‘Interference patterns. It sounded like huge storm-pattern distortion, as if bad weather had closed in on the Leptius Numinus area.’

‘Have you lost vox?’ asks Gage.

‘Vox-link with Leptius Numinus is suspended,’ the Master of Vox reports.

‘The datalink is still active, however,’ says the magos at the next station. ‘Information is still being processed and relayed by the palace’s data-engine.’

‘Restore that link,’ Gage says to the Master of Vox.

Gage crosses to the strategium where Shipmaster Hommed and his officers are examining the rapidly building tactical plot. It is a three-dimensional hololithic representation of Calth and its nearspace regions.

The story it tells is a bitter one.

Virtually all the orbital yards are gone, or so damaged that they will need to be destroyed and replaced rather than rebuilt. XVII fleet formations are bombarding the southern hemisphere of Calth. The rest of the fleet has established a clear orbital superiority position.

The Ultramar fleet is scattered. It has been reduced to about a fifth of its original strength. Those vessels remaining are either fleeing to the far side of the local star to avoid fleet attack or the inexorable fire of the weapons grid or, like the Macragge’s Honour, they are lying helpless and drifting in the high anchor zone.

There’s virtually nothing left to fight with. They are done. It is over. It is simply a matter of the Word Bearers picking off the last few fighting ships of the XIII fleet.

The weapons grid seems to be having no difficulty doing that. It has destroyed the local forge world, a small moon with offensive capabilities, a starfort near the system’s Mandeville Point, and several capital ships.

‘We have sensors,’ says the shipmaster, ‘and power is coming to yield. I anticipate capacity for weapons or drive in fifteen minutes. Not both.’

‘What about shields?’ asks Gage.

‘It seemed to me that weapons or drive were greater priorities.’

Gage nods. The theoretical is sound. There are three Word Bearers cruisers effectively docked to the flagship. The weapons grid will not fire at the Macragge’s Honour while they are so close. The cruisers will not fire, because they would have done so by now. They have come in close to begin boarding actions.

The enemy wants the flagship intact.

Gage sees the pattern. For a moment, he couldn’t understand why, of the surviving Ultramarines vessels, many were the largest and most powerful capital ships. Surely an adversary with control of the weapons grid would pick off the most serious threats first?

The ships that have been spared are all helpless and drifting, like the Macragge’s Honour. The moment they shake off the effects of the scrapcode or the electromagnetic pulse, and move, or raise shields, the grid destroys them.

The Word Bearers intend to take as many of his Legion’s capital ships intact as they can. They want to bolster their fleet with warships. They want to build their strike power.

They want to turn Ultramarines ships against the Imperium.

What was that nonsense Lorgar was ranting at the end? Horus turning? A civil war? He was demented and, besides, it wasn’t Lorgar. It was some xenos manipulation. It was some empyrean breach effect.

Gage knows he’s lying to himself. Today has changed the shape of the galaxy in a way that the wildest theoretical could not have anticipated. He hopes he will not live to endure the new order.

However long the rest of his life turns out to be, he will not allow ships of Ultramar to be used against the Imperium.

He turns to Empion.

‘Are your squads assembled?’

‘They are,’ says Empion.

‘Mobilise,’ orders Gage. ‘Repel boarders. Find them and drive them off this ship.’

[mark: 12.20.59]

Oll Persson tells them to wait.

Smoke covers the river, covers the wharfs, covers the docks. Two container ships are on fire out in the estuary, making dancing yellow fuzzes in the stagnant fog. It’s as if the whole world is reducing to a vaporous state.

He tells them to wait: Graft, Zybes, the two troopers and the silent girl. They take cover in a pilot’s house overlooking the landing. They’re all armed, except Graft and the girl. She has still to speak a word or look anyone in the eye.

Oll shoulders his rifle sling and finds a quiet spot in one of the packing sheds. Back in the day, he’d often come to Neride Point for the markets. There was always a fresh catch coming in, even though the wharf spaces were primarily industrial. Hundreds of boats would bob along the jetties and landings, in between the bulk containers.

It’s all messed up now. More than one huge sea-surge has swept boats into the streets and smashed them against habs and factory structures. The streets are wet, and covered with an ankle-deep litter of garbage and debris. The water is worse. It’s like brown oil, and there are bodies floating in it, thousands of bodies, all choking the landings and under the pier walks and bridges, gathered up by the prevailing currents like jettisoned trash.

The place smells of death. Waterlogged death.

Oll sits down and opens his old kitbag. He turns out the few items he rescued from his bedroom and sorts through them on the top of an old packing case.

There’s a little tin, a tobacco tin for rough cut lho leaf. He hasn’t smoked in a long time, but several older versions of him did. He pops the tin open, smells the captured scent of lho, and tips the cloth bundle into his palm. He opens it.

They are just as he remembered them. A little silver compass and a jet pendulum. Well, they look like silver and jet, and he’s never corrected anyone who said that’s what they were. The jet stone is suspended on a very fine silver chain. It’s been years since he last used these objects – Oll suspects it might be more than a hundred – but the polished black orb on the end of the chain is warm.

The compass is fashioned in the form of a human skull, a beautiful piece of metalwork no bigger than his thumb. The cranium is slightly elongated, slightly longer than standard human proportions, suggesting that it was not actually a human skull that formed the model for the design. The skull, a box, opens along the jawline on minutely engineered hinges, so that the roof of the mouth is revealed as the dial of the compass. The markings on the compass rim are so small and intricate you’d need a watchmaker’s loup to read them. Oll has one of those too.

The simple gold and black pointer spins fluidly as he moves the tiny instrument.

He sets it down, aligns it north. He watches the pointer twitch.

Oll takes a little clasp notebook out of his kit and opens it to a fresh page. Half the book is filled with old handwriting. He slides out the notebook’s stylus, opens it, and writes down the date and the place.

It takes a few minutes. He suspends the pendulum over the compass on its silver chain and lets it swing. He repeats the process several times, noting down, in a neat column, the angles and directions of the spin and the twitches of the compass needle. He calculates and writes down the azimuth. Then he flips the pages of the notebook to the back, opens out a folded, yellow sheet of paper that has been glued into the back cover, and studies the chart. It was written on Terra, twenty-two thousand years earlier, a copy of a chart that had been drawn twenty-two thousand years before that. His handwriting was rather different in those days. The chart shows a wind rose of cardinal points. It is a piece of sublime mystery recorded in ink. Oll thinks of the two forces clashing on Calth and reflects that they are both right about one thing. It’s the one thing they agree on. Words are power, some of them at least. Information is victory.

‘Thrascias,’ he says to himself. As he suspected, they’re going to need a boat.

He packs his things away as carefully as he unwrapped them, preps his gun, and goes to find the others.

Bale Rane looks dubiously at the skiff.

‘Hurry up and get in,’ says Oll.

The skiff’s a fishing craft, good for a dozen people, with a small covered cabin and a long narrow hull.

‘Where are we going?’ asks Zybes.

‘Away from here,’ says Oll, lifting some of the boxes aboard. ‘Far away. Thrascias.’

‘What?’ asks Zybes.

‘North-north-west,’ Oll corrects himself.

‘Why?’ asks Rane.

‘It’s where we have to go. Help me with the boxes.’

They’ve packed some canned food, some foil-wrapped ration packs, some medical supplies and some other essentials, looted from the pilot house. Krank and Graft have gone back down the landing to fill four big plastek drums with drinking water from the dockside tanks.

‘Are we rowing?’ asks Rane.

‘No, it’s got an engine. A little fusion plant. But it makes a noise, and there are times when we’ll have to be quiet, so we’re taking oars too.’

‘I’m not rowing,’ says Rane.

‘I’m not asking you to, boy. That’s why we brought Graft. He doesn’t get tired.’

The boy, Rane, is getting fidgety. Oll can see it. They’re all nervous. All except Katt, who’s just sitting on a bollard, gazing at the bodies in the water. There’s gunfire in the streets up in the Point, and the sound of tanks. Tanks and dogs.

Except Oll knows they’re not dogs.

‘Go help your friend with the water,’ says Oll. He climbs aboard to check the electrics and tick the engine over.

Rane goes back up the landing towards the tanks. Gusting wind drives black smoke across the wharf, and it makes him cough.

He’s not even thinking about Neve. Not at all.

She’s just there, suddenly. Right there in front of him, as though she stepped out of the smoke.

She smiles. She’s never looked more beautiful to him.

‘I’ve been looking for you, Bale,’ she says. ‘I thought I’d never see you again.’

He can’t speak. He goes to her, his arms wide, eyes wet.

By the tanks, Krank looks up. He sees Rane, down the boardwalk. He sees what he’s doing.

‘Bale!’ Krank screams. ‘Bale, don’t! Don’t!’

He starts to run to help, but there are suddenly men in his way. Men on the jetty. Men looming out of the smoke. They are hard and dirty, dressed in black. They are scrawny, as if they’re underfed. They have guns, rifles. They have knives made of black glass and dirty metal.

Krank’s rifle is leaning against the tank. He backs away. There’s no hope of him reaching it.

The knife brothers laugh at him.

‘Kill him,’ Criol Fowst tells the Ushmetar Kaul.

[mark: 12.39.22]

Suits sealed, kill squad six exits the Port 86 airgate. Thiel has command. Empion has personally given him the responsibility, even though there are several captains among the assembled shipboard survivors who would have seen the duty as an honour.

Forty squads move through the hull of the Macragge’s Honour. Forty kill squads, each of thirty men. They carry bolters and close-combat weapons. Three brothers in each squad lug mag-mines.

Thiel’s squad emerges aft of one of the main port-side attitude thrusters. It’s a giant, solid mass like the tower of a habitat block, mounting exhaust bells on each aspect that could form the domes of decent-sized temples.

Calth rises above the thruster assembly: bright planetrise above a haunted tower. Calth has the look of Old Terra: green landmasses and blue seas, laced in white cloud.

But Thiel can see its terminal injuries, however. A spiral of soot-brown stormcloud caps part of the sphere, and other areas look like bruises on the skin of a fruit. The atmospheric discolorations are immense. Behind the curved shadow of the daylight terminator, sections of the southern continent are suffused with a luminous orange glitter, like the hot coals at the bottom of a furnace grate.

Mag-locks in his boots keep him on the hullskin. Advancing, he extends his view. He can see across Calth nearspace with extraordinary clarity. He can see the orbitals glowing with wildfire energy as they are consumed by conflagration. He can see the closest of the planet’s natural satellites blackened and stippled with fire-spots.

Nearer at hand, there are ships. Thousands of ships. Ships on fire. Ships drifting, spilled and butchered, shredded and ruined; slow swarms of wreckage, silent clouds of glinting metal debris. Beams of energy lick and flicker through the void.

The starfield, the vast unending spread of the galaxy, looks down on it all, unengaged and unimpressed.

The starlight is cold. It is like a sharp, clear evening of tremendous luminosity. There is nothing to interrupt the cool blue-white brilliance of the Veridian sun. All shadows are hard-edged and deep. Around him, it is either painfully bright sunlight or pitch black shadow.

All legionaries are trained for hard-void and zero gravity combat. This is strictly neither. The flagship supplies a limited gravity source, and a skin of thin atmosphere – the atmospheric envelope – clings to the ship’s hull, maintained by the gravitic field generators to facilitate the function of open launch hangars and docking bays.

There is, still, little sense of up or down. The landscape of the ship’s port-side opens before them like a hive’s skyline. It is a dense and complex architecture of pipes and towers, vents and arches, blocks and pylons. The scale is huge. The kill squad advances in giant bounds from one surface to the next, extending down the side of the ship as though they were acrobats moving across an urban sprawl from rooftop to rooftop.

The low gravity amplifies their strength. One firm step becomes a bound of ten metres. The practical takes a second to master, despite the hours of theoretical and drill. It is too easy to overstep, to push too hard, to fly too far. Across the wider gulfs, the ravines of the port-side cooling vents and the immense canyons of the interdeck crenellations, members of the kill squad switch to quick burns of their void-harnesses, clearing the divides of adamantium and steel chasms.

The Word Bearers cruiser Liber Colchis, a vast scarlet beast, has clamped itself to the aft port-side of the Macragge’s Honour like a blood-sucking parasite. The hullspace between the two ships is solid black, all light from the star blocked.

There are, however, lights within the blackness. Advancing with his team, Thiel resolves the spark and glow of cutting tools and clamped floodlights. Evac-ready squads of Word Bearers are surgically opening the flagship’s hull in order to attach bulk airgates and allow their storm forces to cross directly.

Kill squads Four and Eight are supposed to be arriving from other evac points to combine against this invasion, but Thiel sees no sign of them. How long should he give them? In Thiel’s opinion, the threat of boarding has remained unaddressed for far too long.

He glances at Anteros, his second in command.

He makes the signal.

They go in.

They hard-burn with their void-harnesses, following the wide canyon of a brightly lit heat exchange channel, and passing under the stark shadow of a power coupling the size of a suspension bridge. Their tiny black shadows chase them along the hull.

One half of their target group stands on the flagship’s hull itself. The other half stands on the side of a docking tower at ninety degrees to the rest. Melta-tools are being used on the hull plates. Bulk cutting heads are being extended from the open cargo hatches of the clamped cruiser. From Thiel’s orientation, the cruiser is above them, and the extended cutters are hanging down from it, biting into the flagship’s hull. Plumes of white-hot sparks are sheeting off the cutting heads into the darkness.

Thiel fires his boltgun, and the shells burn away ahead of him on trembling blow-torch tails. There is no sound. They explode the chest plate of a Word Bearer who was standing guard on a heat exchange port but looking the wrong way. His torso erupts in a ball of flame, expanding shrapnel and globules of blood. The impact convulses him, and sends him tumbling backwards, end over end. Thiel streaks past the spinning corpse, firing again. His third shot misses, gouging a silent crater in the hull. His fourth takes the face off a Word Bearer, turning him hard in a spray of flame and sparks. Blood balloons out from his ruined skull, wobbling and squirming in the near-void.

The rest of the kill squad fires. They streak across the target area like a strafing pack of Thunderbolts, and Word Bearers die as the bolter fire drums across them and punches through them. Bodies tumble and bounce. Some disintegrate, releasing clouds of blood beads that ripple like mercury. One Word Bearer is hit with such force his body flies away at great speed, dwindling as it leaves the flagship behind. Another is hit by a blast that causes his own void-harness to malfunction, and he lofts on a fork of fire, colliding brutally with the armoured hull of the cruiser above them.

Four Word Bearers die without breaking the magnetic anchor lock of their boots, and they simply remain standing on the hull, arms limp, like statues, or like bodies sunk to a seabed with their feet weighted.

The environment is full of drifting, swirling blood masses. They splash against Thiel, burst into smaller blood beads, slicking across his armour. For one second, his visor is awash and visibility is lost.

He brakes hard, jets back, makes a landing.

He clears his vision in time to see a Word Bearer bounding at him across the hull. They are both on the side of the docking tower, their ‘ground’ at ninety degrees to the level of the ship. The Word Bearer’s motion, assisted by the light gravity, seems exaggerated, almost comical. He fires his weapon. A bolt burns past Thiel. Thiel fires back. Silent, streaming shots blow the enemy’s right leg off and shred both of his shoulder guards. The impacts immediately and violently alter his course, turning his forward leap into a severe backwards tumble and spin. He cannons off a thruster mount and rebounds at a different angle.

Thiel turns. He barely avoids a power axe that slices out of the darkness. He kills the wielder with a single shot that smacks the figure backwards out of shadow into light. But there are two more. Both come at him with cutting tools: a particle torch, fizzing hot, and a power cutter. The Word Bearers bound at him, in big, slow leaps.

Thiel carries his electromagnetic longsword. He draws it from the scabbard, and puts two bolter rounds into the chest of the Word Bearer with the cutter, creating a shoal of dancing blood beads. Then he meets the torch as it flares at him.

It can slice through void hulls. It can certainly slice through him.

Thiel uses the reach and sharpness of the longsword to maximum effect. He cuts through the torch fairing, and the arm holding it. Blood spills out of the severed arm, and energy roasts out of the ruptured torch. Caught in the ball of white fire, the Word Bearer struggles backwards, thrashing, melting, incinerating. Thiel risks one hard kick to the enemy’s chest to launch him clear. Immolating, too bright to look at, the Word Bearer rotates as he falls away. The unleashed energy reaches the torch’s power cell, and ignites it. Blast-shock and light, both silent, surge up the docking tower, channelled by the hull. The fireball hits the skin of the cruiser, and ripples outwards, exhausting its fury.

Thiel is rocked back. His armour sensors white-out for a second, and he gets a burst of static and crackle.

He tries to lock down on the hull, to re-anchor.

The blast light fades. He makes a swift assessment of the combat. He’s lost two men, so far as he can see, but the Word Bearers force has been crippled. There are drifting, broken bodies all around him, surrounded by a sea of quivering, non-symmetrical blood droplets. There is still, however, no sign of the other kill squads.

Thiel jets down to the bulk cutting heads. They are huge instruments, each one bigger than a Rhino, extended on titanic articulated servo arms from the interior of the enemy cruiser. Thiel signals to Bormarus, who is one of the men assigned to carry the mag-mines. They start to clamp them onto the first of the cutting heads. Thiel leaves Bormarus working, and jets up the servo arm to a control platform mounted halfway up. If he can retract the mechanism into the enemy ship...

Like a comet shower, mass-reactive shells blizzard down around him. Some hit the platform and the guard rail, exploding with bright flashes. The deluge of fire is immense. In what is, to him, below, half a dozen of his men die, cut down. Blue-armoured bodies start to drift alongside the red-armoured ones. All the gleaming, trembling blood beads are the same colour.

He looks ‘up’.

His kill squad’s strike has not gone unnoticed. A main force of Word Bearers are making evac from the open cargo hatches of the cruiser. They emerge firing, their own void-harnesses flaring.

Thiel and his men are outnumbered eight to one.

[mark: 12.40.22]

Oll Persson steps off the skiff onto the landing. He’s got his lasrifle.

One flick of his calloused right thumb flips off the safety and arms the gun. Oll’s not even looking at the weapon. He’s looking straight ahead, looking up the length of the landing, looking at the figures gathered there. His face is set grim. It makes the care lines harder. His frown gives him a squint as though the sun is out and it’s too bright.

He doesn’t hesitate. One pace, two, and then he’s jogging, then running, running straight up the landing, bringing the armed rifle up to his shoulder, pushing it into his cheek, taking aim as he runs.

Shot one. A knife brother, in the spine between the shoulder blades, just before he stabs the screaming Krank in the neck. Shots two and three. A knife brother, in the face, the man pinning Krank down. Shot four. A knife brother, in the lower jaw as he turns, knocking him backwards into the water. Shots five, six and seven. Two knife brothers turning with their rifles, the trio grouping punching through both of them.

Two more start firing back down the landing stage.

Shot eight. One of the shooters, wings him. Shot nine. Kills him. Shot ten. The other shooter, top of the head.

Shot eleven. Misfire. Clip’s out. He’s been shooting a lot today. Ejects, still running up the landing, drops the empty cell thump onto the decking. Slams home the fresh one.

He reaches them, he’s in amongst them. Close combat. Oll swings a block, smacks the gun stock into a face. Trench war style, like they were taught all those years ago in the mud outside... Verdun? Oh, for a bayonet! The bare gunsnout will have to do. It cracks a forehead.

A sideways stamp breaks an ankle, another stock-smash fractures a cheek. He blocks a knife-thrust with the rifle like a quarterstaff, turning it aside. He shoots again. Point blank. Through the sternum. Blood sprays out the back.

Las shots rip past him in the dark. He doesn’t flinch. Four knife brothers are scrambling over the jetty-end railings to join the fight, to get at him.

Oll turns, lasrifle at the hip, thumbs to full-auto. One burst, muzzle-flash ripping like a strobe light.

There’s a bone-crack behind him. Oll whips around. A cultist he hadn’t spotted is laid out in a spreading pool of blood. Graft has punched him with one of his hoist limbs.

‘Thank you,’ says Oll.

‘He was going to hurt you, Trooper Persson.’

At times like this, Oll wishes he could have taught the old work servitor to shoot.

At times like this...

How many times has he prayed there would never be any more times like this? The sad truth of the matter, there is only war. There’s always another war to fight. Oll knows this. He knows it better than just about anyone.

Maybe this is it. Maybe Grammaticus was right, for once. Maybe this is the end war. Maybe this will be the last fight.

Krank’s trying to get up. He’s shaken. Oll looks for Rane. He sees the boy being dragged into the shadows by something.

‘It got him, it got him!’ Krank is gabbling.

‘It’s all right,’ Oll tells him, not looking at him, just looking at Rane. ‘Grab the water. Get to the skiff. We’re going.’

The boy might be dead. Might just be passed out. A lasgun won’t do any good now. The thing that’s got him has stepped right out of the warp. Oll doesn’t know what Rane or Krank are seeing. Probably something out of an illuminated bestiary. Oll sees it for what it is. Filthy matter, fused into a humanoid shape, clothed in the trappings of a nightmare. It’s real enough, real enough to kill, but it’s not real all the same. It’s just a reflection in the energy of this world of something out in the Immaterium. Something hungry, and agitated, and impatient to get in.

Call it a daemon, if you like. Too specific a word, really, though maybe that’s all that daemons are.

Oll glances down at the bodies he has killed, the ragged warriors in black. They knew about warp-magick. Not much, but enough to tinker with it. Enough to believe they’d found the unbearable truth. Enough to form a cult, a religion. Enough to lose their minds. Like the idiot Word Bearers. Warp-stuff is pernicious. Once you touch it, it sticks. Hard to ever get it off you again.

The black knives of their brotherhood. Ritual knives. Athames. He picks one up, the nearest, and wedges the pommel of it into his rifle’s barrel. An improvised plug bayonet will do in a pinch. He managed well enough at Austerlitz.

Oll jams it in, then steps forward and rams the black blade into the thing pawing at Rane. Black light spurts in all directions. There is a stink of bad eggs and rotten meat, a cloud of smoke.

The daemon-thing screams like a woman, then dies, and the matter of it collapses into black slime. The stuff is all over Rane, and the boy is out cold. But he’s still got a pulse.

Oll looks around. The girl, Katt, is standing behind him, staring at Rane.

‘Give me a hand carrying him,’ Oll says.

She doesn’t say anything, but she takes hold of Rane’s feet. Zybes appears, fear in his eyes, and helps her with the boy.

Oll yanks what’s left of the knife out of his gun, and tosses it into the soiled water. He touches the symbol at his throat, and murmurs a thanks to his god for deliverance. Adrenaline is spiking in his old limbs. He hates the rush, the burn of it. He thought he was past that nonsense.

He turns back to the skiff. The shooting will have attracted attention, but he reckons they’ve got time to pull clear and head out into the channel.

He sees the knife brother Graft felled. A commander, an officer, the leader of the pack. A majir. Face down. Blood everywhere from that head wound. There’s a knife on the decking beside him, another athame.

But the leader’s is a good one. A crafted one. A special one to mark his authority and significance. It’s a finer thing than the crude ritual spikes the others are wielding, if something so inherently warped and evil can be said to be fine.

It may not be exactly what Oll’s looking for, but it’s the closest he’s seen yet, and he’d be a fool to leave it.

He picks it up, wraps it in a rag, and stuffs it into his thigh pouch.

Three minutes later, the skiff engine rumbles into life, and the boat edges out into the dark water, away from the landing.

Criol Fowst snaps awake. He sits up, pulling his face off the cool, damp decking. There’s blood everywhere, blood all over him. He fingers his scalp, and finds a patch of skull that hurts really badly and shouldn’t be quite so mobile.

He is sick several times.

He knows something’s been taken from him, something very special and precious, something given to him by Arune Xen. Fowst’s future depended on it. He needed it to get all the power and the control he dreamed of possessing.

Someone’s going to die for taking it.

No, worse than die.

[mark: 12.41.11]

Muffled pounding. As if his ears are blocked. As if everything’s foggy. Like blood thumping in his temples.

A noise. A scratchy, reedy noise. It’s a vox. The vox in his helmet. A transmission. What’s it saying?

Ventanus tries to answer. His mouth is numb, slack. He’s upside down. He can smell blood. It’s his.

What is that transmission? What is the message? So tinny, so far away, so muffled.

He struggles to hear. It starts to get louder, louder, sweeping up through the layers that muffle it, like sound coming up through water, until it becomes clear and loud and comprehensible.

‘Samus. That’s the only name you’ll hear. Samus. It means the end and the death. Samus. I am Samus. Samus is all around you. Samus is the man beside you. Samus will gnaw on your bones. Look out! Samus is here.’

‘Who’s talking? Who is this?’ Ventanus stammers. ‘Who’s on this channel? Identify yourself!’

He is lying on the ground, on his back, on a slope of rubble and chewed-up lawn. He’s in the grounds of the palace of Leptius Numinus.

He gets up. Two Ultramarines are dead nearby, one crushed, one torn in half.

Ventanus remembers. He remembers Cxir changing.

He looks around.

The daemon is huge. It’s got immensely long arms, thin and bony, and it walks on them the way a bat uses its furled wings to walk. The twin horns on its head are immense.

It is attacking the palace. It is ripping the front walls down. The collapsing sections spew out in great, dust-thick torrents of stonework and plaster.

Battle-brothers and Army are retreating ahead of it, blasting up at it with everything they have: bolters, las, plasma, hard rounds. The shots pepper and puncture the thing’s grotesque black bulk, but it doesn’t seem to feel the damage inflicted. Ventanus can hear its voice in his ear, gabbling over the vox.

‘Samus. It means the end and the death. Samus. I am Samus. Samus will gnaw on your bones. Look out! Samus is here.’

Ventanus sees Sullus. Sullus has picked up his sword, the sword he used on Cxir. Ventanus knows, he simply knows, that Sullus is trying to make amends for the evil his mistake has unleashed.

Sullus is rushing the daemon, hacking at it.

Ventanus moves forward. He starts to run.

‘Sullus!’ he yells.

Sullus isn’t listening. He is covered in spatters of ichor, hacking at the thing’s rancid flesh.

The daemon finally seems to notice the cobalt-blue figure chopping at the base of its backbone.

It steps on him.

Then it moves on, oblivious to the mass-reactives streaking into its flesh. Another part of the palace frontage crashes down.

Ventanus reaches Sullus. His body is compressed into the lawn in a steaming, scorched depression that oozes slime. He tries to pull him out. Sullus is alive. His armour has protected him, though there are crush injuries. Bones are broken.

Ventanus hears a crash and a trundling sound. One of the Shadowswords ploughs into the palace grounds. It has come over the bridge, and rammed down the gatehouse to get into the compound. It has brought down the gate the Word Bearers lost hundreds trying to destroy.

The super-heavy rumbles across the mangled lawns, knocking down some of Sparzi’s emplacements. It lines up its volcano cannon. Ventanus hears the characteristic sigh-moan of the capacitors charging for a shot.

The blast is savage. A light flash. A searing beam. It hits the daemon in the body. The blindingly bright light seems to dislocate against the daemon’s darkness, obscured. Dark vapour wafts from the creature’s body, but it shows no sign of damage.

It turns on the tank.

Ventanus starts to run again, across the shredded lawn, past the bodies of men killed by the daemon, towards the palace wall. He has a theoretical. It isn’t much, but it’s all he has. The daemon is impervious to harm in its body, but its head might be vulnerable. Brain or skull injuries might slow it down or impair its function. Maybe even drive the damn thing away.

It’s got the Shadowsword. The superheavy tries to recharge its cannon, but that famous slow rate of fire...

The daemon seizes the tank by the front of the hull, buckling the armour skirts and tearing the track guards. It shoves the three-hundred-tonne tank backwards, gouging up the turf like a tablecloth. The tank revs, pluming exhaust, trying to drive against the horned thing, tracks slipping and squirming. Mud sprays. Divots fly. The Shadowsword tries to traverse to aim at the daemon point-blank. The daemon slaps at the massive cannon muzzle, ripping the assembly around like a chin turned by a punch. Ventanus hears internal gearing and rotation drivers shred and blow out. The gun mounting falls slack and loose, lolling on the mighty chassis, weapon flopping sideways.

The daemon bends down, snuffling, and takes a bite out of the hull. Then it shoves the tank again, driving it back through an ornamental bed of fruit trees, and smashes it into the terraced wall.

Ventanus runs up a slope of rubble, leaps, arms wide, and lands on the flat roof of a garden colonnade. He runs along it, leaping over a section brought down by the daemon’s attack, and then jumps again, this time onto the marble parapet of the palace roof itself. He runs along it, drawing level with the daemon, almost above it. It is killing the tank, killing it like a hound killing a rabbit.

Ventanus can see the nape of its neck, wrinkled and pale, almost human. He can see the tufts and wisps of foul black hair roped across it. He can see the back of the skull, where mottled skin hangs slack behind the knotted bur of the preposterous horns.

Ventanus accelerates. He reaches for his sword, but the scabbard is empty.

All he has is Cxir’s ritual knife.

He rips it out, holds it in both hands, blade tip down, and runs off the roof, arms raised above his head.

[mark: 12.42.16]

There’s nowhere to go. Word Bearers stream from the cargo spaces, blitzing the area with gunfire.

Thiel ducks and dodges, bolts slicing past him on silent flame trails.

His kill squad is done. Mission over. The odds are too great.

‘Break!’ he voxes, and fires his void-harness on full burn.

The violent acceleration lifts him in a wide turn, up and curling back, streaking clear of the killing field. Four, maybe five of his squad lift clear with him. Zaridus, the last to come, is shot by down-raking fire, and his slack body spins away into the stars, jerking and zagging as the harness jets cough and misfire.

Shots chase them. Banking, Thiel sees flashes of noiseless light burst against the flagship hull below him and spark off the buttresses and struts.

He lands, hoping he has decent cover. He has to reload. He tries to calculate the enemy spread and assess the angles they will be coming from. He shouts marshalling orders to his surviving squad members.

The Word Bearers are on him anyway. Two come over the top of a thermal vent, another two around the side of the plating buffer. He gets off two shots. Something wings him in the shoulder.

No, it’s a hand. A hand dragging him backwards.

Guilliman pushes Thiel aside and propels himself towards the Word Bearers. His armoured feet bite into the hullskin as he gains traction. He seems vast, like a titan. Not an engine of Mars. A titan of myth.

His head is bare. Impossible. His flesh is bleached with cold. His mouth opens in a silent scream as he smashes into them.

He kills one. He crushes the legionary’s head into his chest with the base of his fist. Globules of blood squirt sideways, jiggling and jostling. The body topples back in slow motion.

Guilliman turns, finds another, punches his giant fist through the legionary’s torso, and pulls it out, ripping out his backbone. A third comes, eager for the glory of killing a primarch. Thiel guns him apart with his reloaded boltgun, two-handed brace, feet anchored.

The fourth storms in.

Guilliman twists and punches his head off. Clean off. Head and helm as one, tumbling away like a ball, trailing beads of blood.

Cover fire comes across. Another kill squad finally reaches the hull section. A fierce, silent bolter battle licks back and forth across a heat exchanger canyon. Struck bodies, leaking fluid shapes, rotate away into the freezing darkness.

Thiel triangulates his position. He signals to the bridge to open the Port 88 airgate.

He looks at Guilliman. He gestures to the airgate.

The primarch wants to fight. Thiel knows that look. That need. Guilliman wants to keep fighting. There’s blood around him like red petals, and he wants to add to it.

It’s time to stop this fight, however, and fight the one that matters.

2

[mark: 12.53.09]

Erebus stands, surrounded by daemonkind.

He is still high in the north, on the now-accursed Satric Plateau. The sky is blood red, the colour of his Legion’s armour. The horizon is a ring of fire. The earth is a cinderheap. The black stones marking out the ritual circle, the stones taken from the graveworld of Isstvan V, throb with an incandescent power. A wind howls. In its plangent notes, like voices chanting, is the truth. The Primordial Truth.

The truth of Lorgar.

The truth of the words they bear.

The surviving Tzenvar Kaul have long since retreated to a safe distance some fifteen kilometres away down the valley. Only the Gal Vorbak warriors remain, led by Zote, their obdurate forms proof against the lethal wind and the unnatural fire.

Erebus is tired, but he is also elated. It is almost time for the second sunrise. The second, greater Ushkul Thu.

He signals to Essember Zote.

Around Erebus, on the charred slopes and blackened rocks, the daemons slither and chatter, disturbed by his movement. They are basking in the luciferous glow, glistening, glinting, chirring; some sluggish, others eager to be loosed.

He calms them with soft words. Their forms stretch out around him as far as he can see, like a colony of pinnipeds basking on a blasted shore. They loop around one another, bodies entwined, embraced, conjoined. They writhe and whine, yelp and murmur, raising their heads to utter their unworldly cries into the dying sky. Fat blowflies buzz, blackening the filthy air. Horns and crests sway in ghastly rhythm. Batwings spread and flutter. Segmented legs stir and rattle.

Erebus sings to them. He knows their names. Algolath. Surgotha. Etelelid. Mubonicus. Baalkarah. Uunn. Jarabael. Faedrobael. N’kari. Epidemius. Seth Ash, who aspects change. Ormanus. Tarik reborn, he-who-is-now-Tormaggedon. Laceratus. Protael. Gowlgoth. Azmodeh. A hundred thousand more.

Samus has just returned, dipping into the circle to clothe himself in new flesh. There is still some fight left in the enemy then, for the likes of Samus to be turned back.

It will not be enough. It will not overcome what is descending.

Reality is caving in. Erebus can hear it creaking and ripping as it buckles. Calth can only stand so much stress.

Then ruin will break, like a storm.

Zote carries over the warp-flask.

Erebus tunes it to link with Zetsun Verid Yard, with Kor Phaeron.

Erebus realises he is bleeding from the mouth. He wipes the blood away.

‘Begin,’ he says.

[mark: 12.59.45]

Sorot Tchure watches Kor Phaeron’s face as he receives the message from the surface. There is glee. The time is at hand.

The bulk coordinates are already set. At a simple nod from Kor Phaeron, Tchure instructs the magi at their control consoles. The entire planetary weapons grid is re-trained on a single new target.

Kor Phaeron’s eagerness is evident. He has played with the grid, annihilating battleships, orbitals and moons, but quickly wearied of the sport. A pure purpose awaits.

The Word Bearers affect a communion with the stars. The suns of the heavens hold deep meaning for them. The strata of their Legion’s organisation are named after solar symbols. Through superhuman effort, Erebus and Kor Phaeron have transformed the entire planet of Calth into a solar temple, an altar on which to make their final tribute.

Erebus has worn the skin of reality thin, and opened the membrane enclosing the Immaterium. The altar is anointed.

Kor Phaeron steps forward and places his left hand upon the master control.

He presses it.

The weapons grid begins to fire. Concentrated and coherent energy. Shoals of missiles. Destructive beams. Warheads of antimatter sheathed in heavy metals. The rays and beams will take almost eight minutes to reach their target. The hard projectiles will take considerably longer. But they will all hit in turn, and continue to strike again and again and again as the merciless bombardment continues.

The target is the blue-white star of the Veridian system.

Kor Phaeron begins to murder the sun.

[mark: 13.10.05]

‘We feared you had perished,’ says Marius Gage.

Guilliman has just walked onto the auxiliary bridge of the Macragge’s Honour with his battered kill squad escort.

‘What does not kill me,’ replies Guilliman, ‘is not trying hard enough.’

He makes them smile. He’s good at that. But they can all read the change in him. He was never a man you could warm to. He was too hard, too driven, too austere. Now he is wounded. Wounded like an animal might be wounded. Wounded in a way that makes that animal dangerous.

‘Voided without a helm,’ Guilliman says. ‘Primarch biology helped, but the atmospheric envelope was my true saviour.’

‘What...’ Gage begins.

‘What was that thing?’ Guilliman finishes. Everyone is staring, everyone listening.

‘Should this be a conversation we finish in private?’ asks Gage.

Guilliman shakes his head.

‘As I understand it from Thiel,’ he says, gesturing to the sergeant at his side, ‘you have all spent hours fighting your way through this ship against other fiends like it. It has cost you. I can see it has cost you, Marius.’

Gage is suddenly painfully aware of his truncated arm.

‘I can’t see any point in hiding the truth from anybody here,’ says Guilliman. ‘You have all served Ultramar today with more than duty might have reason to expect. And the day is not done. It seems unlikely that we will win anything, or even survive, but I would dearly like to wound our treacherous foe before we die.’

The primarch looks around the room. His armour is sheened and sticky with filth. His face is dirty, and there is blood in his hair.

‘Let us share what we know, and build some strategy. I welcome theoreticals from anybody at this stage. Anything will be considered.’

He walks over to the strategium.

‘We can use the word daemon, I think. A warp entity manifested and destroyed the bridge. You have fought others. Daemon is as good a word as any. It was Lorgar, or at least...’

He pauses, and looks back at them.

‘I don’t know where Lorgar is. I don’t know if my brother was ever in this system in the flesh, but it was his voice and his presence that visited me, and it was him that transformed. It was no trick. Lorgar and his Legion have consorted with the powers of the warp. They have forged an unholy covenant. It has twisted them. It has started a war.’

Guilliman sighs.

‘I don’t know how to fight them. I know how to fight most things. I can even work out how to fight warriors of the Legiones Astartes, though the notion seems heretical. Like Thiel here, I can think the unthinkable, and make theoreticals out of the blasphemous. But daemons? It seems to me, with the Council of Nikaea, that we voluntarily rid ourselves of the one weapon we might have had against the warp. We could dearly use the Librarius now.’

His warriors nod in silent agreement.

‘We should petition for their reinstatement,’ he adds, ‘if we ever get the chance. We cannot do it now. There is no time, no means. But if any of us survive this, know that the edict must be overturned.’

He pauses, thoughtful.

‘It is almost as though,’ he muses, ‘someone knew. Nikaea disarmed us. It is as though our enemy knew what was coming, and orchestrated events so that we would voluntarily cast aside our only practical weapon the moment before it was needed.’

There is a murmur of quiet dismay.

‘We are all being used,’ Guilliman says, lifting his eyes and looking at Gage. ‘All of us. Even Lorgar. When he tried to kill me, to rip me into space, I could feel the pain in him. I have never been close to him, but there is a fraternal link. I could feel his horror. His agony at the way fate had twisted on us all.’

‘He said Horus–’ Gage begins.

‘I know what he said,’ replies Guilliman.

‘He said others were already dead. At Isstvan,’ Gage presses. ‘Manus. Vulkan. Corax.’

‘If that is true,’ says Empion, ‘it is a tragedy beyond belief.’

‘Three sons. Three primarchs, the loss is appalling,’ agrees Guilliman. ‘Four, if you count Lorgar. Five, if what he says of Horus is true. And others, he said, had turned...’

Guilliman takes a deep breath.

‘Corax and Vulkan I will mourn dearly. Manus I will miss most of all.’

Gage knows what his primarch means. In all tactical simulations, Guilliman shows particular favour for certain of his brothers. He refers to them as the dauntless few, the ones he can most truly depend upon to do what they were made to do. Dorn and his Legion are one. Ill-tempered, argumentative Russ is another. Sanguinius is a third. Guilliman admires the Khan greatly, but the White Scars are neither predictable nor trustworthy. Ferrus Manus and the Iron Hands were always the fourth of the dauntless few. With any one of those key four – Dorn, Russ, Manus or Sanguinius – Guilliman always claimed he could win any war. Outright. Against any foe. Even in extremis, the Ultramarines could compact with any one of those four allies and take down any foe. It was primary theoretical. In any doomsday scenario that faced the Imperium, Guilliman could play it out to a practical win provided he could rely on one of those four. And of them, Manus was the key. Implacable. Unshakeable. If he was at your side, he would never break.

Now, it seems, he is gone. Gone. Dead. Brother. Friend. Warrior. Leader. Ultramar’s most stalwart ally.

Guilliman breaks the bleak silence.

‘Show me tactical. The nearspace combat. Someone said there was a vox from the surface finally?’

‘From Leptius Numinus, lord,’ says the Master of Vox.

‘Who was it?’

‘Captain Ventanus,’ says Gage. ‘We had a good signal for a while, and were getting a vital datafeed, but the vox cut off suddenly about an hour ago. A violent interrupt.’

‘I don’t need to ask if you’re trying to re-establish the link?’ says Guilliman.

‘You do not, lord,’ replies the Master of Vox.

Guilliman turns to Empion.

‘Assemble all the strengths we have aboard this ship. Kill squads. Every heavy weapon we can find. Forget Chapter and company lines, just divide and group the men we have into viable fighting parties. Have the squad leaders mark their helms in red.’

‘Red, sir?’ asks Empion.

‘We do not have reliable vox, Klord, so I want firm and simple visual cues for the chain of command.’

Guilliman looks across at Thiel.

‘Besides,’ he says, ‘I think after Thiel’s efforts today, it’s high time that stopped being a mark of censure.’

‘Yes, sir,’ says Empion.

‘My lord!’ Shipmaster Hommed calls out.

‘What is it?’

‘The weapons grid, my lord. It’s firing.’

‘At whom?’

‘At... the sun.’

3

[mark: 13.30.31]

Thunder rolls through the glowering skies above the shattered palace of Leptius Numinus. It starts to rain torrentially. The weather patterns of the abused planet are convulsing again.

Ventanus stands for a moment and lets the streaming rain wash the foul black ichor off his armour. He feels the water hitting his face. He opens his eyes and watches Sparzi’s flamer squads burning the slime, the blubbery black flesh and the noxious inky entrails the daemon left behind when it exploded. The flame jets sizzle and hiss ferociously in the rain.

He walks up to what’s left of the palace atrium. Selaton is waiting for him.

‘You killed it,’ Selaton notes.

‘I don’t agree with your definition.’

‘You sent it away, then. How did you do that?’

‘Luck. Luck of the very worst kind.’

Ventanus glances back at the ruined gardens, the ragged walls, the rubble of the gate.

‘We can’t stay here,’ he says. ‘Cxir said other forces were coming. This place was hard to defend before. It will be impossible again. This was never a fortress.’

‘Agreed, but what about the data-engine?’ asks Selaton.

‘Good question.’

Ventanus notices that his sergeant is holding a sack. He takes it from him and looks inside.

It is full of black daggers. Ritual knives. Some are black metal, some glass, some knapped flint; some handles are wire, some leather, some snakeskin. Selaton has collected them from the brotherhood dead.

‘You used Cxir’s weapon against the daemon,’ says Selaton simply. ‘Theoretical: these blades work. Their own weapons work.’

‘You may be right,’ says Ventanus. He looks into the sack. The blades shine and glint in the shadows of the bag. ‘But I’m afraid these things are as toxic and dangerous as the monsters we want to use them against. Throw them away, Selaton. Drop them into a well. Put a grenade in the sack and hurl it into the ditch. We can’t start using these.’

‘But–’

Ventanus looks at him.

‘Theoretical: that’s how it began with the XVII,’ he says. ‘Expedient use of an exotic weapon to turn back an unexpectedly resistant new foe. Strange daggers found in some xenos tomb or temple? What harm can they do? They cut daemon flesh. It’s worth the risk.’

A look of utter distaste crosses Selaton’s face.

‘I’ll dispose of them, sir,’ he says.

Ventanus walks to the stack room. He passes the chambers where Sydance is watching the magi trying to reconnect the vox.

‘Well fought,’ Sydance says, clasping his hand.

‘I was the thirteenth eldar this time,’ replies Ventanus, ‘but we won’t get that grace again. Is the vox up?’

‘They’re working on it. The datalink is still active. The server wants to see you.’

‘Good. I want to see her.’

Ventanus enters the stack room. Tawren has disconnected herself from the chattering data-engine. One of her magi, Uldort, has taken her place in the MIU link to maintain processing.

‘Captain,’ Tawren says.

‘Server.’

‘This data-engine is not powerful enough to seize control of the grid,’ she says flatly. ‘Moreover, it is not powerful enough to run the grid.’

‘So that’s it?’ asks Ventanus. ‘Our contribution now is... to collate and supply data to the fleet until such time as we are exterminated?’

‘That will be the fate of Leptius Numinus,’ she agrees. ‘However, please place that contribution in context. This is the only loyalist data-engine at work on Calth. It is not just a vital source of data. It is the only source of data.’

She shows him data-slate displays.

‘We have built a picture of resistance across the planet. It is broken and scattered, but it is fierce. Spread across hundreds of locations, as many as thirty thousand of your battle-brothers and two hundred thousand Army and Mechanicum warriors are still active. Coordinated, they can achieve more than if they remain uncoordinated.’

‘This palace can only provide coordination for a short time,’ says Ventanus. ‘The enemy is on its way.’

‘The picture is not totally dark, captain. About fifteen minutes ago, I made one profound discovery.’

The memory of that revelation makes Tawren smile. It is bittersweet, almost painful to think of, and yet uplifting. She found Hesst’s gift. She found what he was working on when he died, what he hid so scrupulously so it would be safe until she uncovered it.

‘My predecessor,’ she says, ‘managed to configure a killcode to combat the enemy scrapcode sequence. He achieved this feat shortly before he died. It was an act of desperation and genius. It is a sublime and intuitive piece of coding, and only Hesst could have done it.’

‘We can use it to purge?’ asks Ventanus.

‘Hesst hid the killcode in a secure data-engine which he then closed off and sealed. The data-engine is the manifest cogitator of the cargo handling guild at the starport. It is in a secure bunker in the industrial zone between Numinus Starport and Lanshear landing grounds. It runs cargo operations for both ports, and thus is more than powerful enough to manage the dataload of the planetary weapons grid. As a civilian engine, it was not a primary military target. Hesst cleaned it with his killcode and then shut it away.’

It was why he kept going until the very last moment, Tawren now realises. It was why he wouldn’t leave his post, even when the scrapcode had maimed his mind. He had to finish. He was determined to finish. He was hanging on as long as he could to get it done.

‘Can you control this engine remotely?’ asks Ventanus.

‘No, captain. I need direct MIU access to launch the killcode. Once I have purged a pathway into the system, I can create a new manifold and assume command of the grid.’

‘Getting to the port zone won’t be easy.’

‘Of course it won’t,’ she agrees. ‘There is an additional issue.’

‘Go on,’ says Ventanus.

‘The enemy is controlling the grid using a captured data-engine on one of the surviving orbital platforms. I can purge the system, but I cannot override that control. We need fleet assistance to target the platform.’

He nods.

‘What about the engine here?’ he asks.

‘It must remain functional for the greatest period possible,’ Tawren replies. ‘Magos Uldort has volunteered to stay with the engine and keep it running as long as she can.’

‘It is a death sentence,’ says Ventanus, looking at the young magos at the MIU link. ‘The Word Bearers are coming.’

‘Calth is a death sentence, captain,’ the server replies. ‘All that matters is how we face it.’

He is silent for a moment.

‘Prepare your staff for travel, server,’ he says. ‘See what you can do via the datalink to coordinate force response to support our assault on the port zone.’

He walks back to the vox chamber. In the doorway, he tells Sydance, Selaton and Greavus to mobilise the forces.

‘We’re evacuating this site,’ he says. ‘We’re going back to the port. Gather as much punch as you can. Fighting vehicles especially. We’re going to have to cut our way into it.’

‘This doesn’t sound good,’ says Sydance.

‘It sounds like it sounds,’ says Ventanus. ‘It’s the only worthwhile practical we have left. I need that link. I need the vox. We’ll be wasting our time without fleet coordination. Tell the magi I need vox.’

They move off, urgent. He waits. He thinks.

Arook appears.

‘I’m staying,’ says the skitarii.

‘I could use you.’

‘My duty is to the Mechanicum, Ventanus. This data-engine needs to stay alive for as long as possible. You understand duty.’

Ventanus nods. He holds out his hand.

Arook looks at it for a moment, baffled by the unfamiliar business of social interaction.

He grips Ventanus’s hand.

‘We march for Macragge,’ says Ventanus.

‘We stand for Mars,’ replies Arook. ‘It means the same thing.’

They turn as Sullus approaches. The captain’s armour is badly scratched and dented. He is limping. It will take a long while for his bones to knit.

‘I will remain here too, Ventanus,’ he says. ‘The skitarii could use a few Legion guns. Right now, I’m not fit to march far. But I can stand and shoot.’

Ventanus looks Sullus in the eyes.

‘Teus, this wasn’t your fault,’ he says. ‘It–’

‘This isn’t atonement, Remus,’ Sullus replies. ‘I don’t feel sorry for myself. This wasn’t anybody’s fault, but we’re all going to end up paying whatever we can. Take the port, win the grid, kill their fleet. Remember my name while you’re doing it.’

‘We have vox!’ Sydance yells.

Ventanus takes the speaker horn the magos offers him.

‘This is Ventanus, commanding Leptius Numinus. Ventanus, Ventanus. Requesting priority encrypt link with the XIII Fleet. Respond.’

‘This is XIII Fleet flagship,’ the vox crackles. ‘Your authority codes are recognised. Stand by.’

A new voice comes onto the link.

‘Remus.’

‘My primarch,’ says Ventanus.

‘You sound surprised.’

‘I thought you had officers to run vox-nets for you, sir.’

‘I do. But just this once. I was worried that your surprise might stem from rumours of my death.’

‘That too, my primarch. It will boost spirits here to know that you are healthy.’

The vox fizzles and whines.

‘I said, you’ve done a good day’s work, captain,’ says the vox. ‘The data you are sending is invaluable. Gage is coordinating our forces.’

‘It’s a bad day, sir.’

‘I can’t remember a worse one, Remus.’

‘This facility may not remain functional for very much longer, sir. Expect to lose the data feed in the next few hours. But we’re going to get the grid, sir. We’re going to retake the grid.’

‘Good news, Remus. It’s killing us. It’s killing the sun, too. I think the XVII want to kill everything that ever lived.’

‘It looks that way down here too, sir. Sir, this is important. We–’

‘The vox washes and crackles again.

‘–say again, Leptius. Say again. Ventanus, do you copy?’

‘Ventanus, sir. I read you. The interrupts are getting worse. Sir, we can’t complete our control of the grid unless the fleet can take out the orbital the enemy is running it from. We can purge their code once we’re in, but we can’t break it. The fleet needs to target and destroy their grid command location as a priority.’

‘Understood, Remus. A priority. Can you identify the target?’

Ventanus looks at Sydance. Sydance hands him a data-slate.

‘I can, sir,’ says Ventanus.

[mark: 14.01.01]

‘Remus? Say again!’ demands Guilliman. ‘Ventanus, respond! Respond! What is the target? What is the target?’

He looks at the Master of Vox.

‘Vox lost, sir,’ says the Master of Vox. Electromagnetic screeches issue from the speakers.

‘Datalink from Leptius also just went down,’ says Gage.

‘Did we lose them?’ asks Guilliman. ‘Damn it, did we just lose Ventanus and his force?’

‘No, sir,’ says the Master of Vox. ‘It’s an interrupt. A severe interrupt.’

‘It’s the sun,’ says Empion.

They all look at the main viewer.

Bombarded by concentrated energy and laced with toxic, reactive heavy metals, the Veridian star is suffering a gross imbalance in its solar metabolism. Its natural, internal chain reactions and energetic processes have been disrupted and agitated. Its radiation levels are rising. Its output is visibly increasing as it starts to burn through its fuel resources at an unnaturally accelerated rate.

Its blue-white wrath is growing more fierce, like a malignant light. A daemonic light. Black sunspot crusts seethe across its tortured surface. Staggering, lethal flares rip away from it in tongues of flame and lashing arcs of energy millions of kilometres across.

It is going nova.

[mark: 14.01.59]

Thunder rolls.

Out in the dismal fog of the channel, Oll steers the skiff through the black water, passing burning water craft that are half sunk, passing pale, ballooned corpses floating in the brown scum.

He thinks there’s a boat behind them, a way behind. Another skiff or a launch. But it might just be the echo of their own engine in the fog.

Krank is sleeping. Zybes sits staring off the bow. Katt and Graft are wherever their minds go to.

Rane twitches, in the clutch of a nightmare. They have bundled him in blankets. He probably won’t recover from his ordeal.

Oll takes out his compass, and checks the bearing as best he can.

Thrascias. It still seems to be Thrascias. That used to be the word for the wind from the north-north-west, before the cardinal points of the compass rose were co-opted for other purposes and given more esoteric meanings. Thrascias. That’s what the Grekans called it. That’s what they called it when he sailed back across the sun-kissed waters to Thessaly in Iason’s crew, with a witch and a sheep-skin to show for their efforts. The Romanii, they called it Circius. Down in the oardecks of the galleys, he hadn’t much cared about the names of the winds they were rowing against. The Franks called it Nordvuestroni.

Oll looks up. A star has suddenly appeared, visible even through the black fog and atmospheric filth. It is harsh, bright, blue-white. It is malevolent. A star of ill omen.

It means the end is coming, and coming fast.

But at least he now has a star to steer by.

RUIN//STORM

‘Everything is an enemy.’

– Guilliman, Notes Towards Martial
Codification, 645.93.vi

1

[mark: 19.22.22]

Above ground, it is raining. It has been raining for about seven hours without a break. The evaporated southern oceans, thrust into the upper atmosphere as steam, have returned, first as poison fog, and then as an apocalyptic deluge.

The burning population centres steam and sizzle, their fires inextinguishable. The molten cores of city-graves glow in sinkholes hundreds of kilometres across. Craters and impact scars fill with water, from the most massive hive sinkhole to the smallest bullet pock-mark. Plains turn to mud, an ooze as dark as blood. River basins flood. The forested sweeps of Calth’s highlands and valley systems crackle and roar as they combust, fire-fronts a thousand kilometres broad.

The rain forms a curtain as thick as the fog that preceded it.

There is a plague of rainbows. The downpour combines with the swelling blue-white radiance of the terminal star to decorate every prospect, every ruined street, every burning hab-block, every fire-blackened forest, with a scintillating rainbow.

4th Company moves underground.

The fighting group built around the elements of 4th Company retraces Ventanus’s steps through the sub-branch of the arcology, along the safe route built in colonial times by the early governors.

Despite subsidence from shock-damaged earth, which has split or slumped the tunnels in places, the passageways are intact and commodious. They offer an arterial that can take even the largest fighting vehicles.

Long stretches of the tunnel system are partially flooded, with still more water sluicing down through broken pipes and drains, and running through clefts and cracks in the roof. The rain is getting in wherever it can. Men wade, up to their waists. Tanks and carriers glide, pressing through the silty black water like reptiles, their slow-moving hulls stirring up little, flowing wakes.

Ventanus moves along at the front, with Vattian and the scouts. He leads the way, standard in hand.

Two hours after they leave the palace, the data and vox links are finally restored, thanks to Magos Uldort’s unstinting efforts. From the datalink, Ventanus learns that several strikeforces are closing to conjunct with him at the port zone, including a major taskforce punching down from Sharud Province, the assembled remains of the 111th and 112th under the command of a sergeant called Anchise. On another day, in another history, Anchise’s efforts to rally, compose, turn, and redirect his forces would become the stuff of instruction text and legend.

Today, on Calth, it is just another story of a man’s last hours alive.

Ventanus hopes that Anchise’s force arrives in time to render support. He doubts it will. The 4th is moving fast, and it cannot afford to wait or hesitate. Even if Anchise, or any of the other projected support units, make it through, there are still no guarantees. The port zone is in enemy hands. Numinus Port is a burning ruin, and Lanshear and the foundries have been overrun by the predatory hosts of Hol Beloth.

Beloth circles from the south. Foedral Fell approaches from the north-west. Ventanus wonders how much longer Uldort’s valuable datalink can remain active.

They have passed below the Shield Wall, and are drawing close to the service linkage where they will be obliged to surface, and move in the open.

Ventanus stops briefly to talk to his unit leaders: Cyramica, commanding the skitarii strength; Colonel Sparzi of the Army; Sydance and the company sergeants, Vattian of the scout force.

He has the battered golden standard in his hands as he talks to them. There are no orders, and no feeble efforts at oratory. He tells them how it is, and what has to be done. He tells them the practical, and he tells them what he expects from them.

They say nothing. They nod.

That’s all he needs.

[mark: 19.29.37]

They have what they need. They have their target. They have their practical.

They are ready.

It took the primarch about ten minutes to determine the target. Ten minutes. Thiel watched him work it out. Guilliman did it by eye, by observation, by consulting the reams of notes and scraps and stylus jottings he had scattered over the strategium.

He had the resolution long before the datalink from Leptius was re-established.

‘It has to be a functioning facility,’ he reasoned. ‘It has to have a data-engine rating of at least, what, 46nCog? It needs to have an active datalink, which we can probably detect using back-trace. The Word Bearers have done such a good job of destroying platform facilities, it makes it easier to spot the ones they’ve deliberately left alone.’

He pointed to the display.

Zetsun Verid Yard.

Then the practical had to be decided. Shipmaster Hommed recommended a ranged bombardment: primary spinals, lances. The Macragge’s Honour certainly has firepower enough. Gage seconded the suggestion. But if they didn’t make a direct kill with the first salvo, there was a real danger that the enemy could retaliate with the grid and finish the flagship.

Empion was all for close attack: flagship power to yield, shields up, throw off the enemy cruisers suckling around them and go for the yard. Blow it out of nearspace. Ram it, if necessary.

Except, the moment they moved, the moment they even rated a power condition, the Macragge’s Honour would become a target. The flagship could move rapidly, and with devastating effect, but faster than the weapons grid could be retrained and discharged? That was even supposing nothing got in their way, like a drive issue, or an enemy ship.

So Empion’s plan had also been dismissed, and Gage’s alternative considered: put all power into the teleport system. Transfer a kill squad, maybe two if the power lasted, direct to the Zetsun Verid. Do it the old way.

‘I will lead it, of course,’ said Guilliman.

‘I hardly think so,’ retorted Gage. Almost everybody present physically recoiled from the look the primarch shot his Chapter Master.

‘Very well,’ said Gage.

‘Damn it, Marius,’ growled Guilliman. ‘If not now, when?’

The first kill squad of fifty Ultramarines, led by Guilliman, Heutonicus and Thiel, assembles in the flagship’s teleportation terminal. If enough power remains, a second squad led by Empion will follow them.

The helms of Heutonicus and the section leaders are painted red to match Thiel’s.

Guilliman’s cleaned and polished wargear makes him look more like a vengeful martial god than ever. There are golden wings spread across his helm’s faceplate. His left fist is a massive power claw, and his right holds a superb bolter weapon, decorated to match his armour.

There is a stink of ozone in the chamber, a metallic tang rising from the heavy, matt-grey platform of the teleport system. Coolant vapour rolls like mist in the yellow light. Guilliman takes a cue from his squad leaders, then signals to the Magi of Portation behind their lead-lined screens.

Power builds. It builds to a painful pitch.

Like a storm, about to break and unload its fury.

[mark: 19.39.12]

Sullus can hear the rain beating on the roof. He watches the magos, Uldort, working in communion with the data-engine. It is as though she is in a trance. Data chatters and whirrs. Her hands make haptic motions across invisible touchpads.

Sullus hurts. He never told Ventanus or any of the others quite how much he had been damaged. He can feel bones grinding, refusing to mend despite the fever heat of biological repair throbbing through his body.

Pain, death, he doesn’t fear any of that. Only failure.

His helmet link bleeps. He gets up, picks up his sword and his boltgun, and limps up the passageway to the west entrance.

In the rain, the ruined grounds and collapsed frontage of the palace seem even more dismal. Water streams and patters down from the shattered roof, dripping on grand tiles and mosaics, cascading down inlaid staircases, turning fallen drapes and tapestries into lank shrouds.

He limps out onto the rubble. Rain drums on his armour. The sun, a toxic blue, burns malignantly through the cloud cover.

Arook Serotid is waiting for him.

‘They are here,’ says the master of skitarii.

Sullus looks out into the rain. Beyond the crumpled walls, beyond the earthwork ditch, beyond the ragged bridge, the enemy has assembled. They have come silently out of the downpour. They are not chanting. The black ranks of the brotherhoods line the ditch in rows a hundred deep, but behind them are the shapes of war machines, and the ominous gleam of red armour.

Behind that mass, there are larger shapes still. Giant things, obscured by rain, horned and hunched.

There are even more than Sullus imagined. Foedral Fell’s assault force numbers in the tens of thousands.

‘Now it ends,’ says Arook.

Sullus draws his sword.

‘Oh please, skitarii,’ he says, head up. ‘It’s only just beginning.’

2

[mark: 19.50.23]

4th Company strikes.

The first that the Word Bearers know of it is a savage, serial bombardment of light cannon and field pieces, supported by the immense firepower of a Shadowsword and a handful of other significant machines.

The Word Bearers had forces positioned along Ketar Transit, a main access way that linked the container stores to the northern facilities of Lanshear port. The forces were supposed to ward Hol Beloth’s main army from any counter-attack that came around the eastern sweep of the Shield Wall into Numinus territory.

The forces do not realise that, by occupying the zone around Ketar Transit, they are also effectively guarding the data-engine of the cargo handling guild in the bunker system below the majestic prospect of the guildhall.

It was a majestic prospect. Stippled with shell holes, the guildhall remains an inspiring building, crowned by statues of toiling guild porters and the proud Ultima symbol.

The area has not been razed wholesale. It is not military, it is commercial. Server Hesst chose it very well.

The barrage pummels the roadway, levels three blocks of habs, and scatters the enemy formation. Hundreds of knife brother warriors are killed by the shellfire, dozens of Word Bearers too. Armoured vehicles are destroyed and left burning in the rain. A traitor Warhound engine, suddenly alert and striding forward like an angry moa, hunts for a hot target. A torrent of cannonfire catches it, hammers it, and beats its void shields down with sheer relentless insolence. Then the Shadowsword speaks, and a spear of white light kills the Warhound like the lance of some vengeful god.

Debris showers for hundreds of metres, felling some of the retreating cultists. Others, urged by their raging crimson lords, dig in behind walls and barriers of wreckage, and begin to return fire.

Warp-flask messages chime and shrill across the zone; desperate calls for support.

The Land Raiders spur forward, hulls streaming with rainwater, kicking out spray from the rain-sheeted roadway. They drive down walls, rolling over the rubble, crunching over the knife brothers trapped and killed by the cover they had chosen to use. Sponson-mount lascannons rasp into the blue-white twilight, causing the rain to steam and swirl. Heavy bolters shred the air with their noise and drench the enemy positions with destruction.

Ventanus leads the foot advance behind the Land Raiders, double-time across the broken streets. To his left, the units led by Sydance, Lorchas and Selaton. To his right, the units led by Greavus, Archo and Barkha. Cyramica’s skitarii form a wide right flank, blocking and punishing an attempt by the Jeharwanate to regroup and counter-charge. Sparzi’s infantry mob in behind and to the left of the legionary assault, evicting knife brothers from their strongpoints and foxholes along the north-western end of the massive carriageway.

Word Bearers, a scarlet line in the rain, rise up to block the main charge. Missiles cripple the first of Ventanus’s Land Raiders, leaving it trackless and burning. There is fire from autocannons, the streaks of mass-reactive rounds, both of which drop cobalt-blue figures from the charge.

But the Word Bearers have developed a taste for cutting, an appetite for bladework. Perhaps it has come from their knife brother slave-hosts. Perhaps it is simply to do with the sacrificial symbolism of the sharpened edge.

Concentrated and well-directed firepower might have broken or turned Ventanus’s charge, but it is not used. The Word Bearers simply wait for the clash, relishing the prospect. They draw their blades. They want to test their mettle against the vaunted XIII in a skirmish, the outcome of which cannot possibly influence the final resolution of the Calth War.

The traitors want to prove themselves against the paradigms to which they have been compared so many times.

There is a crashing, hyperkinetic impact. The charging cobalt-blue bodies reach the solid red line. They tear into it. They rip through it, they mangle it, red and blue together, a blur. Blows are traded. Huge power, huge force, huge transhuman strength. Blood squirts in the driving rain. Bodies crash to the ground, spraying up water. Blade grips grow slick with rainwater, oil and blood. Shields chip and break. Armour fractures. There is a spark of ozone and power mechanics, the crackle of electrical discharge.

Ventanus is in the thick of it. Boltgun. Power sword. Standard across his back. He shoots away a head in a cloud of bloodsmoke. He impales. He chops off an arm, and smites a helm in two, diagonally.

He has never felt this strong. This driven.

This justified.

He has never known such an entirely fearless state.

There is nothing the Word Bearers can do to him any more. They have done their worst. They have burned his world, his fleet, his brothers; they have shed his blood and unleashed their daemons.

They can shoot him. They can stab him. They can grab him and tear him down. They can kill him.

It doesn’t matter.

It’s his turn. This is his turn.

This is what happens when you leave an Ultramarine alive. This is what happens when you make the foulest treachery your instrument. This is how it comes back to reward you. This is how Ultramar pays you back.

Carnage. Carnage. Absolute and total slaughter. The visitation of death in the form of a gold and cobalt-blue storm. A Word Bearer, reeling, arms spread, his carapace sliced open to the core, releasing a profusion of blood. Another, hands lost, stumps smouldering, sinking slowly to his knees with a bolter shell blast hole clean through his torso. Another, red helm caved across the left half, the bite of a power sword. Another, jerking and convulsing as mass-reactive shells blow out his body and overwhelm his transhuman redundancies. Another, cleft by a power axe. Another, disarticulated by a Land Raider’s cannons. Another, with the toothmarks of a chainsword.

Another.

Another.

Another. Grunt and spit and curse and gasp and bleed and strike and turn and move and kill and die.

Ventanus reaches the guildhall, leaps the barricades, and lands amongst knife brothers who shriek and flee before him. Red armour comes at him, a sergeant of the XVII, bringing down a thunder hammer. Ventanus dodges the swing, lets it pulverise rockcrete. He lunges and drives his sword, tip-first, through visor, face, skull, brain and the back plate of a helmet.

He snatches the blade out. The sergeant falls, flops over, blood welling up out of his holed visor like oil from a freshly drilled reserve.

The gutter is running with blood. Ventanus smashes down two of the Tzenvar Kaul foolish enough to attack him, and then shoots a Word Bearer who is coming down the shot-chewed front steps at him. The blast blows out the brute’s hip, drops him sideways. Ventanus kills him with his power sword before he can rise again.

Sydance passes Ventanus, ascending the steps. He’s firing his boltgun ahead of him, targeting Word Bearers at the top by the main doors of the guildhall. Shots streak back at him. The Ultramarine beside him, Brother Taeks, ends his service there, brains spilled. Sydance’s bolter shells put Taeks’s killer backwards through the panelled doors.

The first of the XIII are in the building. Ventanus is with them. Blood and rain drips from them onto the marble floor.

‘Back up,’ warns Greavus.

They make space.

A Land Raider drives in through the doors, collapsing them, splintering the wooden bulk of them.

Ventanus and his men cover the side hatch as it opens and skitarii lead Tawren out.

‘Haste,’ the server says to Ventanus.

‘Not a point that needs to be emphasised, server,’ he replies.

It will not take Hol Beloth’s assault leaders long to realise that this is not a counter-punch into Lanshear. The guildhall was a specific target.

Small-arms fire pinks at them from upper galleries in the huge atrium. Sergeant Archo waves up a kill team and heads away to scour the knife brothers out.

Artillery and heavy weapons continue to pound outside. The suspended lamps in the atrium swing and sway. Pieces of glass and roof tile fall in from the damaged clerestory far above.

Selaton locates the armoured elevator to the guildhall’s sublevels. They can rig power from the Land Raider to light and run the system, but it needs an override code.

Tawren enters it.

‘My birthdate,’ she says, noticing Ventanus watching her.

‘There were two codes,’ he says.

‘I have two birthdays. My organic incept, and my date of full-plug modification. Hesst knew both.’

‘You were close,’ notes Ventanus.

‘Yes,’ she replies. ‘He was, I suppose, my husband. My life partner. The Mechanicum does not think in such old-fashioned terms, and our social connections are more subtle. But yes, captain, we were close. A binary form. I miss him. I do this for him.’

The lift shutters open. For a second, Ventanus envies her loss. However approximate to standard human her relationship with Hesst might have been, it was still something. An analogue.

He is transhuman. He knows no fear, and there are many other simple emotions he will similarly never experience.

Outside, soaked in rain, Colonel Sparzi turns as gunfire kisses the walls behind him.

‘Oh damn and fug,’ he groans.

His men see it too.

Hol Beloth is coming.

He is descending on the guildhall with a vengeance. He is coming with punishment. He is coming with Titans and cataphractii and the Gal Vorbak.

3

[mark: 20.01.23]

The teleport burst scorches and jolts every molecule of their bodies.

It is an intensely risky operation. A considerable nearspace distance. A vast energy expenditure. Mass transfer – an entire armoured kill squad. A comparatively small target zone.

Thiel loathes teleports. It feels like you’re being pushed through the mesh of an electrified sieve. There is always a bang like a fusion bomb in your brain. There is always an aftertaste like bile and burned paper left in your mouth.

They materialise.

He stumbles, his balance screwed for a second. He’s on a deck. He hears a scream.

Given the risk factor and the atrocious error margins, the teleport can be considered a success. Forty-six of the squad have appeared with Guilliman on the transverse assembly deck of Zetsun Verid Yard. They have lost four.

Two of them are fused into the bulkhead wall behind them, parts of their visors and gauntlets and knees protruding seamlessly from the grey adamantium. Another has been reduced to a glistening red sludge by re-formation failure. He is spread over a wide area.

A fourth, Brother Verkus, has materialised bonded into the deck plates from the waist down. He is the one screaming. It’s not as though he can be pulled out. He is the deck now, and the deck is him.

It is troubling to hear a legionary scream with such a lack of restraint, but they say teleportation overlap is the most unimaginable pain.

Guilliman cradles his head and kills him quickly to end his suffering.

‘Move,’ he instructs the squad.

There’s no time for reflection, no time to take a breath. There’s no time to get over the stinging discomfort of the transfer. The squad confirms its arrival site against schematics of the yard and fans out. There is caution, but there is no loss of pace. They are transhumans moving with all the speed and efficiency they possess.

The transverse assembly deck was chosen because it was the largest interior space, and thus allowed for the greatest transfer imprecision. Their assault target is the yard’s master control room, two decks up.

The Word Bearers will have read the teleport flare. You can’t mask an energy signature like that.

Heutonicus confirms their transfer by vox to the Macragge’s Honour. Gage replies that there is insufficient power for a second transfer. Empion’s kill squad will not be following them, not for a while at least.

They move up through the deck gantries, past the massive airgate and mooring assemblies where ships are docked. The interior superstructure is brightly lit and filled with a vast network of chrome pipes, rods and cablework.

Word Bearers open fire on them from above. Shots rip past them, exploding against the bare metal and ceramite fabric of the yard. The blasts and impacts make huge booming sounds inside the artificial structure.

Two Ultramarines, Pelius and Dyractus, die in the first hail of shells. They are cut apart by sustained fire. Then Brother Lycidor topples over a rail, headshot. His cobalt-blue figure drops into the assembly area below, arms outstretched.

The Ultramarines fire back, covering the structures above them in a cloud of bolter blasts. Word Bearers topple, but there are more to fill their places. Many more.

Guilliman roars a challenge to them. He condemns them to death. He condemns their master to a worse fate.

He hurls himself at them.

The primarch is, of course, their greatest asset, Thiel realises. Not because of his physical superiority, though that is hard to overestimate.

It is because he is a primarch. Because he is Roboute Guilliman. Because he is simply one of the greatest warriors in the Imperium. How many beings could measure favourably against him? Honestly? All seventeen of his brothers? Not all seventeen. Nothing like all seventeen. Four or five at best. At best.

The Word Bearers on the upper structures see him coming. They are kill squad strength at least, the best part of a full company. At least a proportion of them are the vaunted Gal Vorbak elite.

But they see him coming, and they know what that means. It doesn’t matter what cosmic dementia has corrupted their minds and souls. It doesn’t matter what eternal promises the Dark Gods are whispering in their ears. It doesn’t matter what inflated courage the warp has poured into their veins along with madness.

Guilliman of Ultramar is coming right at them. To kill them. To kill them all.

Even though they stand a chance of hurting him, they waste it. They baulk. For a second, their twisted hearts know fear. Real fear.

And then he has them.

And then he is killing them.

‘With him! With him!’ Thiel yells. They surge forward. Mangled Word Bearers fly overhead, or crash into the decks around them. When Thiel reaches his primarch’s side, Guilliman has slain a dozen at least. His boltgun is roaring. His power fist crackles with cooking blood.

It is brutal close quarters. Thiel has the exotic long-sword that has served him so well on this darkest of days. Two-handed, he wields it, cutting crimson ceramite like silk. Word Bearers blood looks black, as if it is sour and polluted. Thiel flanks his primarch, advancing steadily with the press of the assault towards the primary hatch.

They lose eight men. Eight Ultramarines. But they break through into the master control room leaving a carpet of enemy dead in their wake.

The real fight awaits them there.

A stunning barrage of bolter-fire greets them, killing Stetius, killing Ascretis, killing Heutonicus.

Kor Phaeron, master of the dark faith, master of the unspeakable word, orders his men forward.

Then he flies at Guilliman, trailing dark vapour, coruscating with black energies torn from the pits of the warp.

‘Bastard!’ Guilliman howls.

He does not flinch.

Not for a second.

[mark: 20.06.23]

The guildhall shakes. Titans are firing at it.

‘I need an update,’ Ventanus yells into the vox as blizzards of glass and masonry swirl around him.

He’s stayed on the surface to command the repulse. Selaton has ridden down into the armoured bunker with Tawren. All data and vox-links from Leptius Numinus shut down about five minutes ago. The palace has fallen. The only feed Ventanus has is close-range comms with his company.

‘The server has activated the engine,’ Selaton voxes back. ‘She is connecting. Connecting to the MIU.’

‘Is it working?’ Ventanus demands.

‘I don’t know what it looks like if it is working,’ Selaton replies.

‘I can guarantee it looks better than this!’ Ventanus responds.

Armour loyal to the Word Bearers is pushing relentlessly along the transit, covering their positions with a hail of shells and bulk las. Smoke and rain have cut visibility to almost nothing. Fabricatory buildings on the far side of the road have collapsed in welters of flame and stone. Two Reaver Titans, weapons mounts glowing from relentless discharge, are approaching through the smoke at full stride.

Cyramica is dead. Lorchas is dead. Sparzi is probably dead too. Ventanus can’t find Greavus or Sydance. The company line is broken. The 4th has done all it can.

It cannot match the overwhelming strength of Hol Beloth’s offensive.

‘The server has launched the killcode,’ Selaton reports. ‘She is launching it into the grid system. She is preparing for a purge.’

Ventanus ducks as Titan fire hurls a Land Raider into the air a few dozen metres ahead of him. It lands, burning, buckled, hitting the torn ground so loudly it sounds as though the sky is caving in.

The sky is caving in, of course. Blue-white fire crackles above the rain. Solar flares are searing Calth’s upper atmosphere, irradiating the stricken world, triggering massive, unnatural aurora displays as energetic charged particles strike the thermosphere. Light and colour jump and twist around Ventanus: light from the explosions, light from the agonised sky.

‘That’s good, isn’t it?’ Ventanus voxes back. ‘That’s good?’

‘Yes, captain,’ Selaton responds, ‘but it’s useless without control. She can’t take control of the grid until enemy control is taken away. And that hasn’t happened. She is telling me that hasn’t happened.’

A Gal Vorbak beast looms at Ventanus through the murk, swinging a power axe. He wears no helmet. His face is... not human.

Ventanus meets the charge and plants his blade across the haft of the axe, blocking the swing. They struggle. Ventanus is forced back by the killer’s bruising power. The locked weapons break apart, and Ventanus ducks hard to avoid the scything chop that follows.

Ventanus recovers quickly, ramming his blade upwards. His sword-tip glances off the Gal Vorbak’s axe, deflects into the enemy’s mouth, and skewers his head.

The Gal Vorbak doesn’t die. Not fast enough. He laughs around the blade impaling his mouth. Black blood pumps out over the sword hilt and Ventanus’s hand and arm. The Gal Vorbak puts his axe deep into Ventanus’s side.

Then he obliges, and dies.

Ventanus sinks to one knee.

‘A-anything?’ he voxes.

‘Captain? Are you all right?’ Selaton replies.

‘Is there anything yet?’

‘Your voice sounds strange.’

‘Selaton, has she got it yet?’ Ventanus growls.

‘No, sir. Enemy control is still in place.’

The Titans are close now. The last Shadowsword remaining with the 4th fires and damages one of the striding giants, but they reply together and turn the super-heavy tank into a vast conflagration that levels the city blocks behind it.

Nothing else is coming. None of the support that they hoped might arrive to stand with them. None of the reinforcements.

Their hope was a good hope, but it was not strong enough.

The XVII Legion has won the Battle of Calth.

[mark: 20.09.41]

The Satric Plateau is bathed in aurora light. The local star spews energy across the entire Veridian System.

Erebus watches.

Rain is falling. The rain is blood. The daemons scream.

The storm breaks.

[mark: 20.10.04]

Kor Phaeron greets Guilliman with a beam of smoke-light, a column of wretched darkness that bursts from the palm of his right hand and smashes the XIII primarch into the chamber wall.

Guilliman gets back up, but he is shaken. The wall is crumpled where he struck it.

Kor Phaeron cries out, a bark of straining effort, and manufactures another ray of smoke-light. Guilliman is charging, but the beam slams him back into the bulkhead with a kinetic slap so powerful that it rings out with a deafening sonic boom.

Guilliman staggers up, falls, and then half rises, clenching his power fist. The ceramite of his breastplate is cracked. Guilliman coughs, and blood drips from his mouth. He tries to stand.

Kor Phaeron blasts him again, this time with a weird, negative electricity that crackles around Guilliman and causes him to seize in violent spasms.

Guilliman is left on his hands and knees, his cobalt-blue plating scorched, his head bowed, his whole form smouldering as the superheated armour burns his skin.

The Word Bearer draws his athame and steps forward.

Kor Phaeron can see a choice, and it delights him. He can end the life of the great Guilliman. A personal kill is so much more valuable than a distant or mass killing.

With his own hand, he can murder Roboute Guilliman.

Or, with his own hand, he can turn him.

Just as the Warmaster was turned.

Erebus did it. So Kor Phaeron can do it.

Guilliman is hurt, weak, vulnerable. The bite of the athame will free Guilliman’s sanity while he is in such a state, slice away his inhibitions. The painful burn of the athame wound will fester in him, and ultimately, through the lens of delirium, reveal the Primordial Truth in all its hellish glory.

They came to Calth to kill Guilliman and his perfect warriors. How much more will it mean to return to the court of Lorgar and Horus Lupercal with Guilliman as a willing and pliant ally?

Guilliman, crowned with horns. Guilliman, invested in the iridescent cloak of daemonhood.

Kor Phaeron stoops beside the crumpled primarch. Guilliman’s breathing is fast and ragged. His armour smokes, discoloured, and his blood pools beneath him.

‘There is so much you don’t understand,’ says Kor Phaeron. ‘The truth will shock you, Roboute. I’m sorry, it will. But you will learn to accommodate it. I’m happy to share my knowledge with you. To help you understand. To grow in appreciation.’

‘Get away from me,’ Guilliman gasps.

‘Too late. Embrace this.’

Thiel is too far away to stop it. Locked in the unyielding fight raging on the opposite side of the control chamber, Thiel glimpses what he knows is likely to be the final few seconds of Roboute Guilliman’s life.

He tries to break through, screaming out his rage and frustration. The Word Bearers have driven Guilliman’s kill squad back, slaying most of them. Thiel and the others fight to reach their primarch’s side, but they cannot. There are too many of the enemy. And these are the enemy elite.

Three warriors obstruct Aeonid Thiel. One is Sorot Tchure. Tchure blocks every strike and thrust Thiel makes, as surely as a practice cage set on maximum extremity level.

Kor Phaeron puts the blade of the athame to Guilliman’s throat.

4

[mark: 20.11.39]

The upper storeys of the guildhall collapse. Ventanus finds Sydance, Greavus and the remnants of their squads, and backs across the outer concourse. The severity of his wound is making him shuffle, his gait uneven.

The enemy is all around them. Two more Titans have just loomed out of vapour to the east. Two more. It is laughable. It is academic. The enemy strength has long since passed the tipping point. Hol Beloth has employed maximum overkill.

At least, Ventanus considers, they have taken a lot of them down. A lot of them. The Word Bearers have had to pay dearly to reach the end of this world.

Sadly, they do not seem to care.

The guildhall will fall next, and no matter how well-armoured the bunker in the sub-levels is, the XVII will dig it out, kill Tawren, and smash the data-engine.

One of the Titans opens fire.

Another of the Titans explodes from the waist up. A giant fireball bellies out from its upper section, consuming it, swirling yellow and white flames into the sky.

Three hundred metres below the guildhall, the bunker trembles. The noise of the terminal war overhead is a dull grumble, a vibration masked by the whirr and rattle of the powerful data-engine.

Tawren, connected in machine communion by the MIU, frowns.

Selaton sees her expression change. The Ultramarine has never experienced such exasperation. He is absent from the fight, useless, destined to do nothing except monitor and report on the silent haptic operations of an inscrutable Mechanicum magos.

‘What?’ he asks. ‘What is it?’

‘Two Titans have vectored into the fight,’ she says quietly, scanning streams of moving data invisible to him. ‘The Titans that have just appeared are not traitor machines.’

‘What?’

‘They are loyalist instruments,’ she says. ‘The Burning Cloud and Kaskardus Killstroke. One has just made an engine-kill against the Word Bearers-aligned Titan Mortis Maxor.’

‘We are supported?’ Selaton asks.

‘It seems–’

‘Server, are you telling me that reinforcement forces are arriving to supplement the 4th?’

‘Yes, sergeant, I am. The data supports this supposition. According to the data, that is the case.’

Tawren remains entirely calm. She seems to show no relief. She studies the rapidly updating datastream, winnowing out its information.

‘Captain Ventanus’s force was facing an annihilation projection of three minutes and sixteen seconds. That limit is being revised up to six minutes and twelve seconds. To eight min... to ten minutes and fifty-one seconds.’

Tawren watches the datafeed. It streams from a thousand different picture and data sources: the visor capture of the Ultramarines legionaries, the optic feeds of the skitarii, the auspexes of loyalist vehicles, the guildhall zone sensors, the parts of the city cogitation network still operating. She watches events unfold.

The reinforcement strength explodes into the Lanshear Belt from the east, fast and mobile. It comes along Tarxis Traverse, Malonik Transit, Bedrus Oblique and the Lanshear Arterials. It pushes through the conurb structures behind the cargo depots and the ring of habitats to the east of Port Dock 18. A column of Land Raiders and armour support three Titans: two Reavers and a Warlord. An infantry force follows, moving rapidly. She identifies them by insignia, heraldry, trace codes and unit marker transponders. The force is mostly XIII and Mechanicum elements from Barrtor and the Sharud muster, but there are twenty thousand Army troopers too, bringing lighter armour and support weapons.

She switches rapidly between pict-supporting feed views to track the advance. The relief force forms two prongs of assault. One is a Legion force led by a sergeant of the 112th called Anchise, and a captain of the 19th called Aethon. The other is predominantly Army, and is commanded by a colonel of the Neride 41st called Bartol, but it is physically being led by Eikos Lamiad and a lumbering Ultramarines Dreadnought.

Before she was lost, Tawren’s loyal junior Uldort fulfilled her duties with extraordinary diligence, and coordinated all the force and firepower she could contact.

Lamiad. Eikos Lamiad, Tetrarch of Ultramar, Primarch’s Champion. He leads a ragged host of soldiery collected from the desert and the burning hills around the Holophusikon. He raises his sword in his one good arm and sweeps his warriors into the street fight.

Telemechrus, the Contemptor, strides beside him, expending ammunition as he drives a wedge into the enemy formations. His munitions tally records two kills among Hol Beloth’s senior commanders. Assault cannon. Most efficient.

Tawren switches views again. She follows other code tags.

Justarius, the venerable, walks with Aethon’s squads. A second Dreadnought brought to the fight. And in the shadow of the Titans, a second tetrarch too: Tauro Nicodemus, who has spent the day fighting up from the south and the slaughterfields at Komesh.

Switch view. Switch view. Tawren watches the data, almost startled by the speed of update, the rapid turn of the battle’s balance.

She finally becomes aware of Selaton’s desperation, and starts to tell him what she can see.

Hol Beloth’s forces flinch at the unbridled force of the attack. It is not just the firepower, it is the coordinated strength of it. The shattered survivors of the XIII should not have been able to organise with such precision and effect. In the midst of chaos, confusion, a world ablaze, they should not have been able to rally and focus around such a strategically specific point.

Tawren checks her annihilation projection.

It now stands at forty-seven minutes and thirty-one seconds.

In that time, the assembled survivors of the Calth Atrocity will express their fury and their vengeance, and they will do massive damage to the enemy. They may even temporarily drive the Word Bearers back out of the Lanshear Belt.

But it is only a last, gratifying chance to rage into the face of death.

For Hol Beloth, it will simply add an hour or two to the fight. In many ways, it serves to concentrate his victims in one convenient killing ground. He can draw in supporting divisions from all directions.

The XIII cannot.

If they hoped to fall in glory, they are about to get their wish.

Tawren has no grid control with which to shift the combat dynamic. She has the killcode, but no damned control.

[mark: 20.13.29]

The athame bites. Guilliman’s blood wells up around the sliced flesh. He grunts through clenched teeth.

‘Let it go,’ whispers Kor Phaeron. ‘This is the beginning of wisdom.’

Guilliman mutters something in reply.

‘What?’ asks Kor Phaeron, cupping a hand to his ear, mocking him. ‘What did you say, Roboute?’

Every single word is an effort.

‘You made an error,’ Guilliman gasps.

‘An error?’

‘You chose the wrong practical. You had a choice. Toy with me. Kill me. You chose the wrong one.’

‘Really?’ smiles Kor Phaeron.

‘You should not have let me live.’

‘I let you live so I could share the truth, Roboute.’

‘Yes,’ says Guilliman, sucking in each ragged breath. ‘But all the while I’m alive, I can do this.’

There is a sharp sound. A sudden, wet crack. An explosive spray of blood, as though a skin of red wine has burst between them. Kor Phaeron makes a tiny noise; a thin, ceramic sound like a wet finger sliding down glass.

Guilliman rises. Though its power has long since shorted out and failed, he has buried his armour claw in Kor Phaeron’s chest. He has crunched through plate, through muscle, through augmented ribs. Kor Phaeron twitches, impaled on Guilliman’s fist. His feet are off the deck, his elbows digging into his sides. He shudders, head flopping on his neck.

The athame falls from his fingers and rebounds off the deck.

Sorot Tchure hears the noise his master makes. He is focused on his combat with the Ultramarines raiders, but he cannot help but turn his eyes for a second. Less than a second. A microsecond.

Thiel sees his opening. His practical. It is infinitesimal, a tiny chink in the Word Bearer’s guard. It lasts a microsecond, and it will not be repeated.

He puts his sword through it.

The longsword shears the right side of Tchure’s helm away. Cheek, ear and part of the skull separate with it. Tchure stumbles, bewildered by the pain, the shock, the disorientation.

For a moment, Tchure thinks it is Luciel. He thinks it is Luciel who has risen up to punish him for a trust so miserably betrayed.

Thiel shoulder-slams him aside into one of the other Word Bearers, spattering blood over them all. He ducks the sword slash of the third, and decapitates him.

He is the first to break clear and rush to Guilliman’s side.

Guilliman looks Kor Phaeron in the eyes. Kor Phaeron’s lips quiver. He blinks hard and bubbles of saliva form around the corners of his trembling mouth.

Guilliman wrenches the claw out. It is clutching Kor Phaeron’s heart.

Kor Phaeron crashes to the deck, bitter black blood coursing from under him in all directions. He retches, and covers the floor with a vile lactic spatter.

Guilliman throws the mangled heart aside.

Thiel steadies him to stop him falling.

‘Never mind me, sergeant,’ Guilliman rasps. ‘Kill the damned systems. Do what we came to do.’

Thiel races to the system consoles. The brass cogitation banks of the data-engine chatter and clack in front of him. He doesn’t know where to start.

‘In the name of Terra,’ Guilliman snarls. ‘Thiel, shoot the bloody thing!’

Thiel is out of ammo. But he has his sword. It has one more job to do today.

[mark: 20.20.19]

The control codes release. Tawren sees it happen. She sees the digital sequence suddenly shift across the noospherics. Control suspended (engine failure). Control suspended (engine failure). Control suspended (engine failure). Control suspended (engine failure)...

It is like a moment of data-revelation. A profound data sequence change. All values alter. All authorities reset.

She doesn’t hesitate. Hesst would not have. She runs the killcode directly into the suddenly open system, and watches as it burns through the corrupted numerics of the Octed scrapcode.

The killcode is her vanguard. Her praetorians. Her Ultramarines kill squad. Her Ventanus. She follows it in with her authority codes.

She takes control. She selects the discretionary mode. Thousands of automatically generated firing solutions instantly present themselves. She sorts them using subtle haptics, code-forms and binaric cant.

‘Server?’ Selaton is addressing her. ‘Server?’

Tawren ignores him. She opens a vox-link.

‘Server Tawren, addressing the XIII Legion Ultra-marines, and all forces allied to their standard. Brace for impact. Repeat, brace for impact.’

[mark: 20.21.22]

The first beam-weapon strikes hit Lanshear. They come straight out of the sky, columns of dazzling vertical light. They stream from orbital weapon platforms, platforms that the Word Bearers left intact for their own use.

The beams, generated by lance batteries, particle tunnels and meson weapons, strike with surgical accuracy. They cauterise the city-zone around the guildhall in the northern depot area. They obliterate Titans, dissolve armoured vehicles, and reduce brotherhood and Word Bearers formations to ash.

Sheltering, in some cases, less than half a kilometre from the impact sites, Ultramarines and Army forces are untouched. Their eardrums burst. Their skin burns. They are half-blinded by the light, and hammered by the concussion, e-mag pulse and violent after-pressure, but they endure.

The negative pressure causes the rain to swirl cyclonically around the zone, a whirlpool of smoke and ravaged climate.

Ventanus looks up, dazed by the blast. Hot ash has plastered their wet armour, covering them all; ash that was Word Bearers only seconds before.

The Ultramarines around him look pumice grey, gun metal grey, the colour of the XVII’s old livery.

[mark: 20.21.25]

Tawren has not finished. She deploys the grid elements available to her, she hits other surface targets. Simultaneously, she retasks orbital platforms, and retrains lance stations. She begins to systematically exact punishment on the Word Bearers fleet.

For the first time since the cataclysmic orbital strike, it’s the crimson-hulled warships that explode and die in nearspace. Cruisers and barges detonate in multi-megaton conflagrations, or are crippled by devastating impacts.

This is a dynamic combat shift. This is the game changed. Hesst would approve. Guilliman would approve.

[mark: 20.21.30]

On the auxiliary bridge of the Macragge, Marius Gage sees the first of his enemy’s ships sputter and torch out. He watches as phosphorescent green and white beams stripe out from the orbital grid, spearing Word Bearers vessels.

He looks at Hommed.

‘Statement of yield, please?’

‘We are currently at fifty-seven per cent yield, Chapter Master,’ says Hommed. ‘Enough to transport Empion’s kill squad.’

‘I intend to take rather more direct action than that. Engage the drive and move towards the yards. Raise the shields.’

‘Sir, there are three enemy cruisers clamped to our hull.’

‘Then I imagine they will suffer, shipmaster. Raise void shields. While you’re at it, shoot them off our back.’

The titanic flagship lights its shields. One of the cruisers buckles as it is caught and torn in the void field, blowing out along its centre line and voiding significant compartments to space. Its wrecked bulk remains clamped to the Macragge’s Honour as the flagship surges forward, drives glowing white hot.

A second cruiser falls free, clamps blown and cut. The flagship’s batteries begin to pick it apart before it can stabilise its motion.

The third is pounded repeatedly at close range by the flagship’s starboard guns. Gage refuses to order cease firing until the side of the cruiser facing him is a molten hell, burning up, with inner decks exposed.

The executed cruiser drops away, glowing like an ember, and falls out of the plane of the ecliptic.

[mark: 20.24.10]

The master control room is on fire. Flames and smoke are rapidly filling the habitats of the Zetsun Verid Yard. Thiel and the remainder of the kill squad retreat rapidly towards the transverse assembly deck. They pack tight around the wounded, limping primarch.

‘The flagship is inbound,’ says Thiel.

Guilliman nods. He seems to be recovering some strength.

‘The sun,’ murmurs one of the squad.

They look up through the vast crystalflex observation ports and see the Veridian star. It is stricken, its light ugly and sick. A bubonic rash of sunspots freckles its surface.

‘I think we have won something just in time to lose everything,’ says Guilliman.

Thiel asks him what they should do, but the primarch is not listening. He has turned his attention down, to something he can see on the through-deck beneath the assembly layer.

‘Bastards!’ he hisses. ‘Can’t they just burn?’

Thiel looks.

He can see half a dozen of the surviving Word Bearers. They carry the bloody carcass of Kor Phaeron. Somehow, the wretched Master of the Faith seems to be alive, despite the fact that Guilliman tore out his primary heart. He is twitching, writhing.

Leading the party, Thiel sees the Word Bearer whose helm and skull he cut away.

Tchure turns to look at them, sensing them. The side of his face is gore, teeth and bone exposed.

Thiel draws his boltgun, reloaded with ammunition from a fallen brother. The other Ultramarines start to fire too.

The Word Bearers shimmer. Spontaneous frost crackles out in a circle around their feet, and corposant winds around them. They vanish in a blink of teleport energy.

‘Gage! Gage!’ Guilliman yells.

‘My primarch!’ Gage responds over the vox-link.

‘Kor Phaeron is running. He’s gone from here, teleported out! He’ll have run to his ship.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Just stop him, Marius. Stop him dead, and send him to hell.’

‘My primarch–’

‘Marius Gage, that’s an order.’

‘What about you, sir? We are moving into the yard to recover you.’

‘There are ships docked here,’ Guilliman replies. ‘The Samothrace, a couple of escorts. We’ll board one and be secure enough. Just get after him, Marius. Get after the damned Infidus Imperator.’

[mark: 20.27.17]

The Word Bearers battle-barge Infidus Imperator turns in the debris-rich belt of Calth nearspace, ships dying in flames behind it. It engages its drive and begins a long, hard burn towards the outsystem reaches.

As it accelerates away, raising yield to maximum, the Macragge’s Honour turns in pursuit, its main drives lighting with an equally furious vigour.

It is the beginning of one of the most infamous naval duels in Imperial history.

[mark: 20.59.10]

Fate has twisted, dislocated. Erebus can see that plainly. He does not care, and he is not surprised. Ways change. He knows this. It is one of the first truths the darkness taught him.

Calth is dead. The XIII is crippled and finished. His ritual is complete, and it is entirely successful. The Ruinstorm rises, a warp-storm beyond anything space-faring humanity has witnessed since the Age of Strife. It will split the void asunder. It will divide the galaxy in two. It will render vast tracts of the Imperium impassable for centuries.

It will isolate and trap forces loyal to the Emperor. It will divide them, and block their attempts to combine and support one another. It will shatter communication and chains of contact. It will even prevent them from warning each other of the heretical war breaking across their realm. The Ruinstorm will cripple the loyalists, and leave Terra raw and alone, infinitely vulnerable to the approaching shadow of Horus.

But... somehow the enemy salvaged something. They were defeated from the very start, and they remained defeated throughout, and in the aftermath, the Word Bearers can salt the XIII’s scattered bones. Yet they won something back. Some measure of retribution. Some degree of pride. They did not yield, and they forced a surprising price for their lives.

Erebus is sorry to leave any of them alive. They say you should always kill them. Ultramarines. If you make one your enemy, do not allow him to live. Do not spare him. Leave an Ultramarine alive, and you leave room for retribution. Only when he is dead are you safe from harm. That is what they say.

They are fine words. The proud boast of an unfailingly arrogant Legion. They mean little. The Ultramarines are done. Calth has gutted them. They will never more be a force to be reckoned with.

Horus no longer has to worry about the threat of the XIII.

The poison light of the sun falls across the Satric Plateau. Erebus basks in it. He raises his hands. The daemons sing in adulation.

The Dark Apostle feels the rising winds of the Ruinstorm snatching at his cloak. He is finished here. He has carried out the duty that was entrusted to him by Lorgar. It is time for his departure.

Reality has worn thin at the edge of the black stone circle, thin like bleached and ancient cloth. Erebus takes out his own ornate athame dagger, and cuts a slit in the material fabric of the universe.

He steps through.

5

[mark: 23.43.16]

Guilliman watches the rising storm from the bridge of the Samothrace, a replacement command crew at the control stations. Every reliable authority says it will be the worst in living memory.

‘We must translate from the system, my primarch,’ says the shipmaster. ‘The fleet must exit before we are swept away.’

Guilliman nods. He understands the imperative. If nothing else, firm and clear warnings of the daemonic threat must be conveyed to the Imperial core sectors, and to the Five Hundred Worlds of Ultramar.

‘There are still hundreds of thousands down there,’ he says to Thiel, looking at scans of the ravaged planet.

‘We extracted as many as we could, with whatever ships we had, sir,’ Thiel replies. ‘Further evacuation is now impossible.’

‘What about the rest?’ Guilliman asks.

‘They are fleeing to the arcologies,’ Thiel says. ‘There is a good chance that the subterranean hab systems and catacombs will protect them from the effect of the solar radiation. They may be able to ride out the storm until such time as we can return with a Legion fleet to evacuate them.’

‘That could be years.’

‘It could,’ agrees Thiel.

‘If ever.’

‘At worst, years,’ says Thiel. ‘We will return. They will be saved.’

Guilliman nods.

‘You’ll excuse my mood, Thiel. I have lost a world of Ultramar. I have lost... too much. You are not seeing the best of me.’

‘Theoretical,’ replies Thiel. ‘The reverse of that statement is true.’

Guilliman snorts. His face is grey with lingering pain.

‘Anything from Gage?’

‘Nothing, sir.’

‘And of the forces we extracted, was Ventanus among them?’

‘No, sir,’ replies Thiel. ‘He was not.’

[mark: 23.49.20]

Ventanus takes the vox-horn.

‘This is Ventanus, Captain, 4th,’ he begins. ‘I am making an emergency broadcast on the global vox-cast setting. The surface of Calth is no longer a safe environment. The local star is suffering a flare trauma, and will shortly irradiate Calth to human-lethal levels. It is no longer possible to evacuate the planet. Therefore, if you are a citizen, a member of the Imperial Army, a legionary of the XIII, or any other loyal servant of the Imperium, move with all haste to the arcology or arcology system closest to you. The arcology systems may offer sufficient protection to allow us to survive this solar event. We will shelter there until further notice. Do not hesitate. Move directly to the nearest arcology. Arcology location and access information will be appended to this repeat broadcast as a code file. In the name of the Imperium, make haste. Message ends.’

He lowers the device and looks at Tawren.

‘I have set it to repeat transmit,’ she says.

‘Then we must go. There is very little time, server. Disengage from the data-engine.’

‘I do not know about these caves,’ she says. ‘I think it will be unpleasant down there.’

‘Not as unpleasant as it will be on the surface,’ says Selaton.

‘This is not a discussion,’ says Ventanus. ‘It is not an elective matter. We are retreating to the arcologies. We will endure there. End of debate.’

‘I understand,’ she says. ‘You realise that enemy strengths left on the planet will flee underground too?’

‘I do,’ says Ventanus.

‘So what do we do?’ asks Tawren.

‘We keep fighting,’ Ventanus tells her. ‘That’s what we always do.’

6

[mark: 23.59.01]

The world has never seemed so dark. It is impossible to tell where the rolling blackness of the sea ends and the twisted darkness of the sky begins.

Only the star remains, poisonous and fierce, like a baleful eye, gleaming through the smoke and fog.

They ground the skiff off a shingle beach and come ashore. Oll checks his compass. They start trudging up the beach, heading inland.

‘Where are we?’ asks Bale Rane.

‘North,’ says Oll. ‘The Satric Coast. The great plateau is that way.’

He gestures at the darkness.

‘Fine country,’ Oll says. ‘Even been up that way and seen it?’

Rane shakes his head.

‘What are we doing here?’ asks Zybes.

Strange, daemonic voices hoot and gibber in the distance, echoing down the inlet.

Zybes repeats his question with more urgency.

‘I don’t understand any of this,’ he says. ‘We’ve come all this way in that damned boat! Why? It’s no safer here. It sounds like it’s worse, if that’s possible!’

Oll glances at him, tired and impatient.

‘We’ve come here,’ he says, ‘because this is the only place we can get out through. The only place. It’s our one chance to live and do something.’

‘Do what?’ asks Krank.

‘Something that matters,’ Oll replies, not really listening. He’s seen something. Something on the beach by the boat.

‘Who is that, Trooper Persson?’ Graft asks.

There is a man on the beach behind them. He’s following them. He passes their grounded skiff, walking briskly. Another small launch, presumably the one that brought him in, is turning slowly in the black water off the beach, abandoned.

‘Shit,’ murmurs Oll. ‘Get behind me, all of you. Keep moving.’

He turns, sliding his rifle off his shoulder.

Criol Fowst is black on black, a shadow of a figure. Only his face is pale, the drawn skin white and streaked with dried blood from his head wound. He approaches, his feet crunching over the shingle. A laspistol hangs in his right hand. Oll faces him, weapon ready.

‘No closer,’ Oll calls out.

‘Give it back,’ Fowst shouts. ‘Give it back to me!’

‘I don’t want to fire a weapon or spill blood here,’ Oll warns, ‘but I will if you make me. Go back and leave us alone.’

‘Give me my blade. My blade.’

‘Go back.’

Fowst takes a step forward.

‘They can smell it, you know,’ he hisses. ‘They can smell it.’

‘Let them smell it,’ replies Oll.

‘They’ll come. You don’t want them to come.’

‘Let them come.’

‘You don’t want them to come, old man. Give it back to me. I need it.’

‘I need it more,’ says Oll. ‘I need it for something. It’s why I came here. I need it for something more important than you can possibly imagine.’

‘Nothing is more important than what I can imagine,’ replies Fowst.

‘Last chance,’ says Oll.

Fowst screams. He screams at the top of his voice.

‘He’s here! Here! Right here! Come and get him! Come and feast on him! Here! Here!’

The rifle cracks. Silenced, Fowst falls back on the stones of the beach.

But things are stirring. Things disturbed and drawn by the sound of Fowst’s cry and the noise of the shot. Oll can hear them. He can hear batwings flap in the darkness, hooves scrape on stone, scales slither. Voices mutter and growl abhuman sounds.

‘Hey!’ Oll shouts to his travelling companions, who are cowering in the dark. ‘Come back to me! Come back. Gather round.’

They hurry to him. Krank and Rane. Zybes. The girl. Graft is the slowest.

‘What is that?’ Krank asks, hearing the sounds that the things are making as they close in around them through the darkness. ‘What’s making that noise?’

‘Don’t think about it,’ Oll says, working hard, trying to remember a simple sequence of gestures. ‘Just stay close beside me. It might be all right here. It might be thin enough.’

‘What might be thin enough?’ asks Rane.

‘What’s making that noise?’ Krank repeats, agitated.

‘Something’s coming,’ says Zybes.

‘It’s all right,’ says Oll. ‘We’re just leaving anyway.’

He has the dagger in his hand. The athame, unwrapped. He murmurs to his god for protection and forgiveness. Then he makes a cut.

‘How are you doing that?’ asks Katt.

They all look at her.

Oll smiles.

‘Trust me,’ he says. He pushes the knife harder, deepens the cut. He makes the slit vertical, the height of a man. He makes a slit in the air, so that reality parts.

The daemon sounds come closer.

Oll draws back the edge of the cut like a curtain. They gasp as they see what’s on the other side. It isn’t here. It isn’t Calth. It isn’t a broken, pitch-black beach.

Oll looks at them.

‘I won’t pretend this is going to be easy,’ he says, ‘because it isn’t. But it’s better than staying here.’

They stare at him.

‘Follow me,’ he says.

UN//DOING

‘We keep fighting.’

–Ventanus, on Calth, prior to the
start of the Underworld War

Epilogue

[mark: 219,479.25.03]

Colchis, at the bitter, broken end; the mark of Calth still running after all these damned years. It is essentially a futile measurement, merely symbolic, but sometimes symbolism is all you have left. A ritual. The scum of Colchis should understand that much, at least.

The world burns, devastated. A world for a world. There is little retribution left to be extracted, little punitive satisfaction to be savoured. But the deed must be finished, so the count can be finished, and this is one great step towards completing the process.

Ventanus, veteran captain, battered by fortune and service, stands on the outcrop of rock, looking out over the benighted landscape. The firestorms reflect off his polished plate and his grim visor, bright orange patterns dancing on the cobalt-blue and gold. So much has passed since this began. The galaxy has changed, and changed again. The revolutions that stunned his mind on Calth seem insignificant beside what he has witnessed since. The end. The fall. The start. The loss.

He has not known fear, but he has known pain. The breaking of the order of things. He has seen his species discover that the greatest enemy of all is itself.

The years spent waging the Underworld War seem so distant. They are fading, almost unremembered, like the empire that followed them, and the Heresy that ended it all.

His officers are waiting, sergeants in red helms, junior captains with their crests and swords. Ventanus can still remember a time when a red helm meant–

Times change. Things change. Ways change. They are waiting for him, impatient to get on, wondering what the old bastard is thinking about, wondering what’s taking him so long.

In low orbit above, the barge Octavius waits, cyclonic torpedoes primed.

Ventanus turns. He thinks of brothers lost, and looks at the brothers with him. He holds out his mailed hand.

The colour sergeant passes him the standard. It is old and battered, dented, with a slight twist or two in the haft. Surely, the sergeant thinks, the damned thing could have been cleaned and mended.

Ventanus takes it, honouring every mark upon it.

He plants it upright in the burning rock of Colchis. The flickering firelight catches at the golden crest of the standard.

‘We march for Macragge!’ the sergeant declares.

‘No, not today,’ Ventanus replies. ‘Today, we march for Calth.’

[mark: unspecified]

While Word Bearers still live, in the madness of the Maelstrom or in the depths of the warp, the mark of Calth will continue to run.

It is running now.

Thanks to
Aaron Dembski-Bowden, Richard Dugher, Bruce Euans, Laurie Goulding, the High Lords of Lenton, Nick Kyme, Graham McNeill, Lindsey Priestley and Nik Vincent.

THE HORUS HERESY

It is a time of legend.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~ Dramatis Personae ~

The III Legion ‘Emperor’s Children’

Fulgrim, Primarch

Lucius, Captain

Eidolon, Lord Commander

Julius Kaesoron, First Captain

Marius Vairosean, Captain of the Kakophoni

Krysander, Captain, Ninth Company

Kalimos, Captain,17th Company

Ruen, Captain, 21st Company

Daimon, Captain

Abranxe, Captain

Heliton, Captain

Fabius, Chief Apothecary

1

He did not dream, he never dreamed, yet this was, in-escapably, a dream. It had to be. La Fenice was a forbidden place now, and Lucius knew better than to ignore the word of his primarch. In the time before their awakening, such disobedience would have been foolhardy. Now it was a death sentence.

Yes, this was most definitely a dream.

At least he hoped so.

Lucius was alone, and he did not like to be alone. He was a warrior who thrived on the adoration of others, and this place was bereft of any admirers but the dead. Hundreds of bodies lay strewn around like gutted piscine lifeforms, twisted by the manner of their death, and every face belied the horror of their mutilations and defilements.

They had died in agony, yet had welcomed every touch of the blade, every clawed hand that burst eyeballs and tore out tongues. This was a theatre of corpses, yet it was not an unpleasant place in which to find himself walking. Though the dead surrounded him, La Fenice felt abandoned. It felt dark and empty, like a mausoleum in the darkest watches of the night. Life had once paraded before its audiences on the arched proscenium, its glorious vibrancy celebrated, its heroes lauded and its absurdities mocked, but now it was a bloody reflection of a time long passed.

The wondrous mural of Serena d’Angelus was all but invisible on the ceiling, its exotic depictions of ancient debaucheries hidden behind a pall of soot and smoke stains. Fires had burned here, and the tang of roasted fat and hair still hung as a scent on the air. Lucius barely noticed it, too faint and too dissipated to pique much of his interest.

Lucius was unarmed, and he felt the lack of a weapon acutely. He was a swordsman without a sword, and it felt as though his limbs were incomplete. Neither was he clad in armour. His luxuriantly painted war-plate had been recoloured in a manner more pleasing to the eye, its drab hues and pedestrian ornamentation exaggerated and embellished in a manner more appropriate to a warrior of his skill and standing.

He was as close to naked as it was possible for a warrior to be.

He shouldn’t be here, and he looked for a way out.

The doors were locked and sealed shut from the outside. As they had been after the primarch had paid one last visit to La Fenice in the wake of the massacre of Ferrus Manus and his allies. Fulgrim had ordered the doors sealed for all time, and none in the Emperor’s Children had dared gainsay him.

So why had he risked coming here, even if only in a dream?

Lucius did not know, yet he felt as though he had been summoned to this place, as though an unheard, yet insistent voice had been calling to him. It seemed as though it had been calling to him for weeks, but had only now grown enough in power to be heeded.

If he had been summoned, then where was the summoner?

Lucius moved deeper into the theatre, still keeping watch for a way out, but intrigued to see what had become of the rest of La Fenice. A pair of footlights flickered to life at the edge of the orchestra pit, reflecting their fitful glow from a golden-framed mirror that stood at the centre of the stage. Lucius had not noticed the mirror before now, and let his dreaming steps carry him towards it.

He skirted the orchestra pit, where creatures woven from ruined flesh and dark light had made sport with the entrails of the musicians. The skins of those players were hung from music stands, their heads and limbs arranged like a bizarre orchestra of the damned on those few instruments that remained.

Lucius vaulted onto the stage, the movement smooth and graceful. He was a swordsman, not a butcher, and his physique reflected that. His shoulders were broad, his hips narrow and his reach long. The mirror beckoned him, as though an invisible cord stretched from its silvered depths and reached deep inside his chest.

‘I love mirrors,’ he had once heard Fulgrim say. ‘They let one pass through the surface of things.’ But Lucius did not want to pass through the surface of anything. His perfection had been ruined by Loken’s treacherous fist, and Lucius had finished the job with a straight razor and a scream that still echoed in his skull if he listened hard enough.

Or was that someone else screaming? It was hard to tell these days.

Lucius did not want to look in the mirror, yet his steps carried him closer with every passing second. What would he see in such a mirror of dreams?

Himself or something far worse; the truth…

It reflected a single spot of light that appeared to have no source he could see. He thought this puzzling until he remembered that this was a dream, where no logic could be counted as solid, and no sight taken for granted.

Lucius stepped in front of the mirror, but instead of the face he had tried so very hard to forget, he saw a handsome warrior with aquiline features, a strong tapered nose and high cheekbones that accentuated the golden green of his eyes. His hair was lacquered black and his lips full, giving him a smile that would have been arrogant had his skill been any less.

Lucius reached up to his face and felt the smoothness of his skin, the unblemished perfection of it like the brushed steel of a polished blade.

‘I was beautiful once,’ he said, and his reflection laughed to hear such vanity.

Lucius balled a fist, ready to dash his mocking reflection to shards, but his twin did not match his movements, instead looking at a point somewhere over his right shoulder. In the depths of the mirror, Lucius saw the reflection of the incredible portrait of Fulgrim that hung on the pediment over the splintered ruin of the proscenium.

Like his own face, it did not match his memory of the thing. Where before it had been a majestic piece of incredible potency and power, its outlandish colours and vibrant texture stimulating every sense with its sheer daring, now it was simply a portrait. Its colours were bland, its lines uninspired, and the subject made small and unremarkable, such as any mortal journeyman painter might work with oils or watercolours.

Yet for all that it was a prosaic thing now, Lucius saw the eyes had been rendered with exquisite skill, capturing a depth of pain, suffering and agony that was almost too much to bear. Since Apothecary Fabius had worked dark transformations upon his flesh, it was a rare stimulus that piqued any interest in Lucius for more than a moment. Yet he felt himself drawn into the portrait’s eyes, hearing a plaintive cry that echoed from a time and place beyond understanding. Wordless and edged with a madness that could only come from an eternity of confinement, the eyes were a mute plea for the release of oblivion.

Lucius felt himself drawn into the eyes of the portrait as something stirred within him, a primal presence that had only recently awoken and shared a kinship with the reflected image.

The glassy surface of the mirror rippled like the surface of a pool, as though it too sensed that shared heritage. Tremors were rising from somewhere impossibly deep within the mirror. Unwilling to face what might rise from the mirror’s depths, Lucius reached for his swords, unsurprised that they were now belted to his waist and that he was fully attired in his battle armour.

The blades were in his hand in an instant, and he swung them at the mirror in a scissoring arc. It shattered into a thousand spinning pieces of razored glass, and Lucius screamed as they sliced into his perfect face, carving the meat and bone to ugly rawness.

Over his own scream, he heard a scream of frustration that dwarfed his own.

It was the cry of someone who knows their torment will be never-ending.

Lucius awoke instantly, his genhanced body switching from sleep to wakefulness in the blink of an eye. He reached for the swords he kept beside his bunk and was on his feet a second later. His chambers were brightly lit, as they always were now, and he swept his blades around in an effort to locate anything out of place that might presage danger.

Garish paintings, symphonic discordias and bloody trophies taken from the black sands of Isstvan V filled his chamber. A bull-headed sculpture taken from the Gallery of Swords sat next to the thighbone of an alien creature he had killed on Twenty-Eight Two. The long, keenly-edged blade of an eldar sword-shrieker shared space with the blade limb of a clade creature he’d killed on Murder.

Yes, everything was as it should be, and he relaxed a fraction.

He saw nothing out of the ordinary, and spun his swords in an unconscious display of incredible skill as he sheathed them in the gold and onyx scabbards hanging on the edge of his bunk. His breath came quickly, his muscles burned and his heart beat a rapid tattoo on his ribs, as though he had exerted himself in the training cages against the primarch himself.

The sensation was wondrously pleasurable, yet was gone almost as soon as it came.

Aching disappointment touched Lucius, as it so often did when those sensations that raised more than a flicker of interest faded. He reached up to touch his face, relieved and repulsed at the hard ridges of scar tissue criss-crossing his once-perfect features.

He had defaced his wondrous visage with knives and glass and blunt metal, but Loken had made the first imperfection, the cut that had torn him open. Lucius had sworn a mighty oath on the primarch’s silver-bladed sword that the Luna Wolf’s face would be the mirror of his own, but Loken was gone, cindered ashes drifting on the mournful winds of a dead world.

That silver-bladed sword was now his, a gift from Primarch Fulgrim that had seen his star rise within the Legion to rival that of Julius Kaesoron and Marius Vairosean. The First Captain had offered him new chambers, closer to the beating heart of the Legion, but Lucius had chosen to remain in the quarters assigned to him long ago.

In truth, he despised Kaesoron, and his rejection of the man’s offer had given him a moment of delicious frisson as he saw resentment flare in his ruined, molten features. Lucius relished Kaesoron’s anger and felt a flicker of pleasure at the memory.

He had no wish to be part of the command structure such as it was now, and simply wished to hone his already phenomenal skills to ever-greater heights of perfection. Some of the Legion had abandoned that quest as a reminder of their previous existence as Imperial lapdogs, for what need had they to prove their perfection to the Emperor?

Lucius knew better.

Though few understood the truth of the repugnantly seductive creatures that had birthed and gorged themselves upon the terror and noise of the Maraviglia, Lucius suspected they were aspects of elemental powers that were older and more generous with their blessings than anything the Imperium had to offer.

His perfection would be his devotions to them.

Lucius sat on the edge of his bunk and strove to recall the substance of his dream. He could picture the ruined interior of La Fenice and the terrible gaze of the painting above the blood-slick stage. But for the eyes, it had been Fulgrim as he had been before the Legion had taken its first steps upon the path of sensation. And as full of pain as they had been, there was a familiarity to them that had been strangely absent in the days since Isstvan V.

That battle had changed Fulgrim, but no one in the Legion appeared to notice the change save Lucius. He had sensed something indefinably different about his beloved primarch, something impossible to pinpoint, but there nonetheless. Lucius had sensed something awry, like a harp string a fraction out of tune or a pict image not quite in focus.

If any shared his opinion, they kept their counsel, for the primarch did not take kindly to questioning, nor was he merciful in his displeasure. The Fulgrim that had returned from the bloody sands of the dead world had none of the Phoenician’s wit or insight, and when he spoke of past battles, his tales had the hollow ring of one who had heard of their fury, but taken no part in their winning.

The feeling that he had been summoned to La Fenice for a reason would not leave him, and Lucius looked up into the face of the painting that hung opposite his bunk. It was the last thing he saw before he took his infrequent bouts of rest, and the first thing he saw upon waking. It was a face that haunted him and inspired him in equal measure.

His own.

Serena D’Angelus had painted the portrait for him, a specially commissioned piece that had seen her delve further and deeper into her soul than any mortal should for perfection. Only the Emperor’s Children dared reach for such heights, but where the Legion had transcended, she had been destroyed.

His ravaged features stared back at him from the golden frame with the one thought that had been gnawing at his dreams and waking life like an itch that could never be scratched.

Though it seemed impossible, the nagging thought would not leave him.

Whatever wore Fulgrim’s face and moved in his flesh was not Fulgrim.

The route to the Heliopolis had changed since Isstvan V. The great avenue of towering onyx columns had once been a magisterial processional along the spine of the starship, but now it was a howling place of bedlam. Petitioners and supplicants who begged for a glimpse of the primarch’s magnificence camped in the shadow of its pillars, where once golden warriors with long spears had stood.

In times past, such obscene flotsam would have been turned away, but now they were welcomed, and a tide of mewling wretches whose devotion fed Fulgrim’s grandiosity choked every passageway of the ship. Lucius despised them, but in his more honest moments, he knew it was only because they did not chant his name with such high esteem.

The Phoenix Gate was gone, torn down in the frenzy that followed the Maraviglia and the battle on Isstvan V. The eagle once carried by the carven Emperor was broken and partly disfigured by the melta blast that had brought it down. The frenzy of defacement had almost destroyed the Pride of the Emperor until Fulgrim had put a stop to the madness engulfing the ship and restored a form of order.

Lucius laughed aloud at the mockery of their flagship’s name, the sound like a banshee’s screech that made the naked, skinless devotees wail with pleasure. Many in the Legion, Julius Kaesoron loudest of all, had clamoured for the ship’s name to be changed along with that of the Legion, in echo of the Sons of Horus, but the primarch had denied them all. All ties to their past loyalty were to remain, as spiteful reminders to their enemies that they fought against brothers. Horus Lupercal had favoured their Legion after the death of Ferrus Manus, and, for a time, the Legion had flown high on a cresting tide of euphoria and sensation.

But like all tides, that fickle euphoria had receded and left the Emperor’s Children with a gaping emptiness in their lives. Some, like Lucius, had filled that void with the pursuit of martial excess, while others had indulged desires and secret vices kept hidden until now. Portions of the ship descended into anarchy, as all bonds of control were slipped but, before long, order was restored and a semblance of discipline enforced.

It was a strange kind of discipline, one that rewarded outlandish behaviour as much as punished it. In some cases, the two were one and the same. For all that the legionaries strove to find new meaning and pursue their newfound devotions with all their hearts, they were a force of warriors that needed a command structure to function.

They were still warriors, albeit ones without a war.

Tasking orders had despatched the Legion from Isstvan, but the primarch had shared none of the Warmaster’s commands with his Legion. No one knew to which war zone they were bound or which foe would next feel their blades, and that ignorance was galling. Not even the senior warlords of the Legion could claim such knowledge, but the primarch’s summons to the Heliopolis was sure to put an end to the Legion’s ignorance.

Lucius gripped the hilt of the Laer sword as he saw Eidolon marching towards him along a connecting corridor. The Lord Commander hated him, and never passed over an opportunity to remind Lucius that he was not truly one of them. Eidolon’s skin was waxy and pale, pulled tightly across the distended orbits of his eyes. Wire-taut tendons throbbed at his neck, and the bones of his lower jaw moved with the liquid detachment of a serpent.

His armour was painted in garish stripes of vivid purple and electric blue, the colours riotously applied in a striking pattern that owed nothing to any design of camouflage and made Lucius’s eyes strain to assimilate what he was seeing. Such vivid colourings were now the norm among the Legion, with each warrior striving to outdo his fellows in sheer extravagance and ostentation.

Lucius had only recently begun to ornament his armour, its plates strikingly adorned with madly screaming faces stretched beyond all recognition. The inner face of each shoulder guard was notched with jagged metal teeth that pricked and scored his flesh with every movement of his arms. The depth and angle of each tooth was carefully chosen to inflict the most scintillating pain should he choose to wield his blades in anything other than the most sublime manoeuvres.

Eidolon drew in a great sucking breath, the bones of his jaw seeming to writhe beneath the skin and link together before he spoke.

‘Lucius,’ he said, spitting the word at a pitch and cadence that sent an altogether pleasing clash of discordance into the swordsman’s brain. ‘You are an unwelcome sight, traitor.’

‘And yet, here I am,’ said Lucius, ignoring Eidolon and pressing onwards.

The Lord Commander caught up with him and made to grasp his arm. Lucius spun away and his swords were at Eidolon’s throat in a blur of silver too fast to follow. The Laeran blade and his Terran sword rested to either side of Eidolon’s neck. With one flick of his wrists, he could decapitate the man. Lucius saw the relish in Eidolon’s face, the pulsing beat of the hawser-like tendon in his neck and the dilated black holes of his pupils.

‘I’d take your head like I took Charmosian’s,’ he said, ‘if I didn’t think you’d enjoy it.’

‘I remember that day,’ replied Eidolon. ‘I swore I’d kill you for that. I still might.’

‘I don’t think you will,’ said Lucius. ‘You’re not good enough. No one is or ever will be.’

Eidolon laughed, the gesture opening his face up like a tearing wound.

‘You are arrogant, and one day the primarch will tire of you. Then you will be mine.’

‘Maybe he will, and maybe he won’t, but it will not be today,’ said Lucius, dancing away from Eidolon with graceful steps. It was good to draw his swords in anger and feel the gentle pressure of their sharpened edges resting on flesh. He wanted to kill Eidolon, for the man had been a thorn in his side for as long as he’d known him, but it would not do to rob the primarch of his most zealous devotee.

‘Why not today?’ demanded Eidolon.

‘It is the eve of battle,’ said Lucius. ‘And that’s the one day I don’t kill anyone.’

2

Mighty walls of pale stone had been defaced with a thousand splashes of paint and blood, and the great marble statues that supported the coffered dome of the roof no longer depicted the first heroes of Unity and the Legion. Now they were bull-headed representations of the old Laer gods, clandestine things whose heads were bowed or turned to the side as though keeping a delicious secret.

Torn banners hung between fluted pilasters of green marble, the fabric shredded and scorched in the fires of the Legion’s rebirth. The floor of the Heliopolis was fashioned from black terrazzo, with inlaid chips of marble and quartz intended to render it into a celestial bowl reflecting the light from the great beam of lustrous starlight that shone down from the centre of the dome. That light still shone, brighter and more piercing than ever before, and the floor’s polish reflected it with dazzling intensity. Once, carved bench seats had run around the circumference of the council chamber, rising in stepped ranks towards the walls like the tiers of a gladiatorial arena.

Those seats had been demolished, for none would now sit higher than the primarch of the Emperor’s Children, and portions of the rubble formed a plinth at the centre of the chamber, rugged and glistening like the graven idol of a primitive god. Upon this elevated platform sat a black throne of unrivalled magnificence, its surfaces mirror smooth and reflective.

The throne was all that remained of the previous incarnation of the Heliopolis, its regal majesty deemed suitably noble for the primarch of the Emperor’s Children. Discordia blared from iron vox-casters: the screams of loyalists as they died on the black sand, the deafening cacophony of a hundred thousand guns, and the music of pleasure and pain intermingled. It was the sound of an empire’s violent death, the sound of a pivotal moment in history that would replay over and over again and of which the warriors forced to endure it would never tire.

Perhaps three hundred legionaries filled the chamber, and Lucius recognised many of them from the great battle on Isstvan V: First Captain Kaesoron, Marius Vairosean, dour Kalimos of the 17th, Apothecary Fabius, pouting Krysander of the Ninth and a score of others to whom he had applied derogatory labels. Some were old faces of the Legion. Others were those who had attracted the fickle notice of the primarch, while yet more were simply members of the Brotherhood of the Phoenix who had followed their betters.

Like the Legion’s ships and name, so too would the name of their quiet order stand.

Lucius moved through the press of bodies towards Julius Kaesoron, savouring the beautiful devastation of the First Captain’s features. An Iron Hand by the name of Santar had ruined Kaesoron’s face more thoroughly than Lucius could ever manage, and though Fabius had reconstructed much of his hairless skull, it was still a horror of vat-grown flesh stitched to fused bone, weeping orbs of milky blindness and burned scar tissue the colour of weather-beaten copper.

As wondrous as Julius Kaesoron’s blessed transformations were, they were subtle next to those wrought on Marius Vairosean. Where the First Captain had received his ruined visage at the hands of the enemy, Marius Vairosean had been gifted during the rush of power unleashed by the Maraviglia. The captain’s jaws were rigid and locked open with barbed cabling, as though he was forever screaming. His eyes were red and raw, bearing the savage scars of the wire-wound sutures holding them open. Two great open wounds in the side of his head cut ‘V’ shaped gouges in his tapered skull where his ears had once been located.

Both captains wore armour that had been wondrously embellished with spikes and draped with leathered hide stripped from the bodies that littered the parquet of La Fenice. Yet for all their gaudy finery and obvious mutilations, Lucius saw Kaesoron and Vairosean as relics of the past, officers of dogged loyalty who lacked the ambition or flair that would see a warrior burn brighter than a star.

‘Captains,’ said Lucius, layering just the right balance of respect and disdain into the syllables of their rank. ‘It seems that war finally calls us.’

‘Lucius,’ said Vairosean, giving him a nod of acknowledgement as his jaw cracked and its too-wide circumference formed words that were swiftly becoming almost impossible to give voice. Such implied insolence from Lucius should have earned him a bloody reprimand, but his star was in the ascendancy. Eidolon – a warrior with an eye for spotting the way the wind was blowing – had seen it, and Vairosean, ever the sycophant, knew it too.

Kaesoron was not so easily intimidated and turned his cloudy eyes upon him. His expression was impossible to read, the ruin of his face making his true disposition a tantalising mystery.

‘Swordsman,’ hissed Kaesoron through the raw wound of his mouth. ‘You are a worm, and an ambitious worm at that.’

‘You flatter me, First Captain,’ said Lucius, meeting his hostile gaze with one of supreme indifference. ‘I serve the primarch to the best of my ability.’

‘You serve yourself and no one else,’ snapped Kaesoron. ‘I regret not leaving you on Isstvan Three with the rest of the imperfect ones. I think that I should kill you and be done with your flawed existence.’

Lucius gripped the hilt of the Laer sword and cocked his head to the side.

‘It would give me great pleasure to let you try, First Captain,’ he said.

Kaesoron turned away, and Lucius grinned, knowing Kaesoron would never openly follow through with his threat. Lucius would gut him in the opening moments of any duel, and the thought of murdering the First Captain sent a thrill of pleasure through his body.

‘Any word on where we are?’ he asked, knowing neither Kaesoron nor Vairosean would know and keen to expose their ignorance to those around them.

Vairosean shook his head. ‘That is for the Phoenician alone to know,’ he said, the jagged notes of his voice like the braying discharge of his sonic cannon.

‘You have not been told?’ replied Lucius with a smirk as a line of hooded bearers carrying heavy iron casks on their backs snaked through the gaping portal of the vanished Phoenix Gate. To Lucius, they looked like ants bearing food to a hive. ‘I would have thought a warrior of your status would have been amongst the first to learn our destination. Have you earned the primarch’s ire?’

Vairosean ignored the obvious barb and gave a nod of acknowledgement as Eidolon took position near Kaesoron like the glory-seeker he was. The First Captain had been one of Fulgrim’s closest companions in the old days, and though the Phoenician appeared to care little for past attachments, Kaesoron still commanded respect from most of the Legion.

Most, but not me, thought Lucius with an amused smirk as he saw the light of ambition in Eidolon’s eyes. It was pathetic how the Lord Commander latched onto those the primarch favoured, and Lucius felt his contempt for the man swell to new heights.

‘It looks like Fulgrim is breaking out the last of the victory wine,’ he said with unearned bonhomie. ‘We only do that when we’re about to go into battle.’

‘Old Legion custom,’ spat Vairosean, his voice a wet, gurgling rasp.

‘We still drink to the victory to come,’ said Lucius, drawing his swords with a flourish, careful to let the warriors nearby see the silver blade Fulgrim had gifted to him. ‘By the will of Horus or the Phoenician, it matters not to the lords of profligacy, we still drink.’

‘We should not honour who we were before our ascension,’ said Eidolon.

‘Not everything we were died on Isstvan,’ replied Lucius, amused at the blatancy of the Lord Commander’s ingratiating words.

The casks of victory wine were deposited in a circle around the black throne in the column of blinding light. The smell was potent, bitter and like engravers’ acid. The gathered warriors leaned forwards as one to savour the acrid reek of the wine, fully aware of its symbolism.

The blood surged in Lucius’s veins at the thought of going into battle once more. The forced inaction of the journey from the Isstvan System had chafed at him. He ached, needed, to feel hot blood sprayed from an opened artery, the visceral thrill of meeting a bladesman who might prove his equal.

He tried to remember the names of swordsmen of note in those Legions still loyal to the Emperor, but could think of none who could match him. Sigismund of the Fists was a competent, if bluntly single-minded wielder of the blade, and Nero of the XIII Legion could kill with something approaching flair, though he fought with more than a hint of rote in his swings. Other names drifted through Lucius’s memory, but as competent as they were, none of them had reached the sublime pinnacle of bladework that he had attained.

‘Perhaps it will be Mars at last,’ he ventured. ‘We have travelled far enough. Perhaps we are making ready to join the fleets moving on the Red Planet as Horus ordered.’

‘The Warmaster,’ said Eidolon, his taut skin wrinkling in childish adulation. ‘He knows my name and has commended me on several occasions.’

Lucius knew better, but before he could contradict Eidolon’s fantasy a blare of noise erupted from the vox units strung between the pilasters. A glorious scream of birth and murder shrieked in dissonant anti-harmonies, like a million orchestras with every instrument out of tune. The sound was rapturous, a freakish blend of discordant music and howling voices raised in hideous adoration.

A cascade of light fell from the dome, a glittering rain that shimmered with a light so bright that it was like a moment of atomic detonation. The Emperor’s Children howled as sensory apparatus mutilated by Apothecary Fabius flooded their nervous systems with powerful surges of bio-electrical spikes, pleasure responses and pain signals. Warriors convulsed at the cacophony of sound and light, dancing like madmen or victims of grand mal seizures. Some tore at their skin, others beat their neighbours, while others pounded their fists bloody on the floor while screaming inchoate curses.

Lucius held his body rigid, fighting the sensations and receiving the pleasure tenfold, his deliberate resistance to the overload of sensation making it all the sweeter. Blood and saliva ran from his lips and he felt his bones and flesh vibrating in perfect symphony with the raucous madness of the spectacle.

The Legion screamed with the delirious joy of it, but this was merely a prelude.

A shape moved in the light, an angel of extermination, a god made flesh and the embodiment of all that was perfect in its expression of intemperance.

Fulgrim dropped through the light like the brightest comet in the firmament, a hammerblow of tyrian war-plate the colour of a bruised sunset. He slammed down onto the terrazzo floor, a billowing mantle of fiery golden scale spread at his shoulders like a pair of angelic wings. Hair like a snowfall cascaded from his noble crown, and his slender, aquiline features were tapered and elfin, though possessed of a haughty strength that none of the faded orphans of Asuryan could hope to match.

Fulgrim had eschewed his gaudy facial paints and scented oils, his face now pallid and ethereal, like a corpse-wraith given form and clad in polished plate that gleamed with the sheen of the finest mirror. His eyes were black pits from which no light escaped or ever would and his mouth creased in a smile that spoke of secret knowledge that would sear the mind of any but a primarch were they to learn even a fraction of its scope.

Lucius joined his fellow warriors in an orgiastic scream of welcome, a hymnal to excess, a chorus of pandemonium in praise of their liege lord. Just to be near the Phoenician fired the blood. Fulgrim stood and spread his arms to accept their devotion, tilting his head back as his full lips parted with the rapture of adoration.

The discordia from the vox dropped in volume and Fulgrim finally deigned to cast his gaze out amongst his warriors. The golden cloak draped across his shoulders, and the glitter of silver mail beneath his wondrously moulded breastplate, shimmered like a waterfall of stars. A scabbard of ebony, mother of pearl and smoked ivory bands hung from a belt of soft black leather embossed with a buckle of amber and black.

The anathame.

Lucius knew this sword well, and even though it now belonged to the most sublime warrior imaginable, he could not resist the thought of what it might be like to face such a weapon. Sensing the scrutiny, Fulgrim turned his obsidian eyes upon Lucius and smiled as though in recognition of some shared bond known only to them.

Lucius felt the power of that gaze and fought to keep his suspicions from showing on his face. He grinned back at Fulgrim and sliced the blades of his swords across the skin of his forehead. Blood dripped into his eyes and he revelled in the bitter, rancid taste of it as it ran down the hundreds of grooves carved through the skin of his face to his waiting tongue.

‘My children,’ said Fulgrim as the glorious madness receded. ‘I bring you bliss.’

3

Fulgrim basked in the adoration of his warriors for a moment longer before raising his arms for silence. His gaze was beatific, humbling, intoxicating and cruel at the same time. Not one amongst his warriors failed to be cowed by that dread black stare. He circled the towering plinth upon which sat his throne, glancing up at its lofty magnificence as if in faint embarrassment that such a thing was meant for him.

‘You have been so patient with me, my sons,’ said Fulgrim, pausing at the foot of the plinth. ‘And I have been neglectful.’

Hundreds of voices clamoured in denial, but Fulgrim silenced them with his upraised palms and a slyly deprecating smile. ‘No, it’s true, I have allowed no word of our destination to work its way down to my beloved children, leaving you in darkness. Can you forgive me?’

Once again the Heliopolis was filled with wild cheering, a screaming din of sounds no mortal throat was ever meant to give voice. Warriors threw themselves to their knees; others beat their breasts and yet more simply screamed with wordless affirmation.

Fulgrim accepted their praise and said, ‘How you honour me.’

Lucius watched Fulgrim as he circled the raised throne, studying his every movement and gesture for some sign that this wondrous individual was someone or something other than he claimed to be.

Clad in his battle finery, the primarch’s presence was intoxicating. Not vulgar, not garish, but simply perfect. As though, in ascending to the pinnacle of excellence, he had shed the need for any overt displays of his devotion to the Dark Prince’s creed. One look into his black eyes was enough to realise his infinite capacity for excess in all its forms. Fulgrim had drunk deep from a well of sensation and without its continual boon, life was grey and empty, bereft of joy and meaning.

‘I bring the wine of victory and the sweet caress of battle upon which to gorge yourselves,’ said Fulgrim. ‘I bring you the symphony of war, the bliss of ecstasy and the rapture of a pain-filled death to our enemies. We have travelled far from the feast of fire at Isstvan, and I have decided that it is time to wet our weapons in the blood of our enemies.’

A chorus of shrieking approval greeted Fulgrim’s words, and he accepted their love as though it was an unexpected boon and not what he had planned all along. The primarch waved his slender, almost delicate, fingers at the centre of the chamber, and a shimmering holo sprang to life, a glittering representation of planets in their gravitational dance with a brightly burning star.

‘Behold a system I have designated as the Prismatica Cluster,’ said Fulgrim, as the holo zoomed towards the fifth world of the newly-named system. A haze of multi-coloured light surrounded the planet like a polar borealis effect, and as the image magnified still further, Lucius saw a world of overlapping bands of deep black and glittering diamond.

A number of orbitals followed the rotational axis of the planet, colossal freight handlers and processing stations with docking facilities for bulk carriers. Smudges of iron and steel indicated the presence of several such vessels, and pinpricks of winking lights spread between them were clearly defence platforms.

‘It is here I give you opportunity to prove your love for me as warriors of the Emperor’s Children,’ said Fulgrim, walking through the flickering projection and letting the holographic world bathe his flawless features in reflected starlight. ‘The lackeys of the Martian Priesthood work this world with their dull engines of construction, grubbing like savages in the soil for crystals to be shipped back to Mars.’

Scrolling lines of aestimare, yields and tithed tonnage slid around the image of the world in a noospheric ripple of light, and Lucius took a moment to scan them before becoming bored and concentrating on the glittering, reflective surface of the planet itself. Aside from a passing aesthetic appeal, it appeared to hold no real importance or strategic significance. He saw nothing to suggest this world was valuable enough to attract the attention of the primarch.

What was he was overlooking? What did Fulgrim see that he did not?

Perhaps the crystals were a raw material used in some vital manufacturing process? Lucius quickly dismissed the thought as irrelevant. That the Martian Priesthood valued them was reason enough to disrupt this Imperial operation, but it seemed a wretchedly backwater place to loose the strength of a Legion.

Fulgrim continued to stare at the gently revolving orb of Prismatica V, as though in serene thrall to the stark beauty of its glittering surface. His lips moved soundlessly, and he smiled at some secret joke or some particularly clever bon mot delivered to an unseen listener with perfect timing.

A petty thought occurred to Lucius, but he kept it to himself, knowing it would be unwise to speak it aloud. A similar thought evidently occurred to Eidolon, but the Lord Commander had not the common sense to keep his mouth shut.

‘My lord, I do not understand,’ said Eidolon. ‘What purpose does this serve?’

Fulgrim rounded on Eidolon, the serenity of his pale features twisting in spiteful fury. He stalked towards Eidolon with murderous bile, and Lucius stepped quickly away lest he be caught in the hurricane of the primarch’s wrath. Fulgrim lashed out at Eidolon and the Lord Commander was hurled back like a swatted insect. He crashed down into the rubble left by the demolition of the tiered benches, his breastplate cracked wide and his taut skin spattered with blood.

‘You dare to question me?’ snapped Fulgrim, towering over the downed warrior.

‘No, my lord, I simply–’

‘Worm!’ screamed Fulgrim. ‘This is my desire and you question it?’

‘I–’

‘Quiet!’ raged Fulgrim, lifting the terrified Eidolon from the ground by the throat. Lucius felt a vicarious excitement at the sight of Eidolon’s humbling. He had seen Fulgrim crush the molten neck of an alien god in a fit of rage, and knew that Eidolon’s would present no challenge to his strength.

The fear in the Lord Commander’s face was very real and Lucius licked his lips at the thought of what a sublime sensation it must be to feel an emotion so alien to the Legiones Astartes.

‘I am your lord and master and you insult me like this?’ said Fulgrim, his rage transformed into abject misery. ‘I deliver a war, and this is how you repay me, with questions and doubt? Is this campaign beneath you? Are you too good to make war at my command? Is that it?’

‘No!’ cried Eidolon. ‘I… I simply desired to know…’

‘To know what?’ spat Fulgrim, his anguish forgotten and his rage restored. ‘Speak, wretch! Out with it!’

Eidolon struggled in Fulgrim’s grasp, his face purpling to match the primarch’s armour. He gasped for breath, his genhanced physique no match for the strength of a primarch.

Between snatched breaths, Eidolon said, ‘Were we not ordered to Mars? Will this not delay our rendezvous with the Warmaster’s fleets?’

‘Horus is my brother, not my master, and I am not his to command,’ snarled Fulgrim, as though Eidolon had voiced the most heinous insult in mentioning the name of Horus Lupercal. ‘Who does he think he is to give me orders? I am Fulgrim, the Phoenician, and I am no man’s lapdog. If Horus thinks he can simply charge towards Terra like a blood-maddened berserker then he is a fool. One does not simply advance on the most heavily defended world in the galaxy; such a target must be taken with finesse. You understand?’

‘Yes, my lord,’ hissed Eidolon, but Fulgrim’s rage was not yet spent.

‘I know you, Eidolon, don’t think I don’t,’ said the primarch, dropping the choking Lord Commander and turning back to the image of the shimmering planet. ‘Always quick with a sniping comment, ever the whispered word in the shadows to undermine my authority. You are the worm at the heart of the apple, and I will have no one who doubts me at my back ready with a knife.’

Eidolon sensed the awful threat in Fulgrim’s words and dropped to his knees. ‘My lord, please!’ he begged. ‘I am loyal! I would never betray you!’

‘Betray me?’ said Fulgrim, whipping around and drawing the glitter-grey blade of the anathame. ‘You dare give voice to thoughts of betrayal? Here, in this gathering of my most loyal subjects? You are a bigger fool than I thought.’

‘No!’ shouted Eidolon, but Lucius knew he was wasting his breath.

To his credit, Eidolon saw it too and reached for his sword as Fulgrim stepped in to deliver the deathblow. The quillons of Eidolon’s sword had barely parted company with the lip of his scabbard when the anathame cut through his neck and sent his head flying through the air. It landed with a meaty thud on the terrazzo floor and rolled until it finally came to rest against one of the urns of victory wine.

The Lord Commander’s eyes blinked once, his lips drawn back over his splintered teeth in an expression of horror that made Lucius want to laugh. Fulgrim turned from Eidolon’s corpse as it slumped to the ground, and retrieved the head he had cut from the Lord Commander’s body. Blood ran in a viscous stream from the severed neck and Fulgrim walked the circumference of the chamber, allowing coagulating droplets to fall in the opened casks of victory wine.

‘Drink, my sons,’ he said as though what had just happened was a minor thing. ‘Fill your chalices and drink to the great victory I give you. We will make war on Prismatica and show the Warmaster how this campaign should be waged!’

The Emperor’s Children surged forwards, each eager to be the first to drink the primarch’s gift to them. Still clutching Eidolon’s head, Fulgrim ascended the plinth to his throne and spread the golden weave of his cloak behind him before sitting. He looked down on his warriors, his gaze at once indulgent and faintly condescending.

Lucius thought back to the way Fulgrim had moved as he drew his sword and cut Eidolon’s head from his body. With the eye of a master swordsman, he analysed every movement the primarch’s body had made, his stepped lunge, the turn of his shoulder and the pivot of the hips as he struck.

One movement had flowed into another, as if no other could ever have been possible. The primarch’s flawless body was always in balance, yet Lucius saw something no one but the greatest living mortal swordsman could ever have seen, and it gave him a delicious thrill of excitement and disappointment.

It was an impossible thought, a treasonous thought, but Lucius couldn’t help but follow it through to its logical conclusion.

I could beat you, thought Lucius. If you and I fought right now, I would kill you.

4

The warriors of the Mechanicum were powerful enemies, augmented and enhanced beyond mortal norms, but Lucius wondered if they even bothered to tutor their warriors in the arts of close combat. He danced through a swirling mêlée, his twin swords moving in whirling arcs that opened jugulars, removed limbs and lifted the lids off skulls.

These men were brutes, crudely enhanced to be bigger and stronger than most mortals, but there was little subtlety to their power. Anyone could pump a man full of growth chemicals and graft a host of combat augmetics to his frame, but what good was that if they were not trained in their use?

A weaponised servitor creature encased in azure war-plate and bearing little that could be called organic came at him. Its shoulder-mounted cannon spat a torrent of shells, tearing up shards of glassy, volcanic stone, but Lucius was already moving. He rolled beneath the blitz of fire, slicing away the furiously rotating barrels of the gun and lancing his Terran blade through a thin gap in the abdominal armour plates.

Oily black blood sprayed from the wound like pressurised hydraulic fluid, and Lucius spun inside the reach of its remaining arm. The snapping, energy-wreathed lifter claw slashed low, and Lucius used the arm as a springboard. He vaulted onto a projecting stub of armour plating at the servitor’s hip and somersaulted onto its wide shoulders. The silver Laer blade stabbed down into the construct’s armoured skull, and Lucius felt something wet and living burst apart inside. He vaulted from the dying servitor’s body, pleased to see red wetness on the blade of his sword.

The bio-machine staggered, but did not fall, though it was clear it was dead.

Lucius paused in his killing to flick the blood from his swords as a thunderous detonation mushroomed into the sky with concussive force. A petrochemical stink filled the air as the unrefined promethium burned off and mingled with the fluorocarbon-rich atmosphere to form a potent breath that gave Lucius a momentary flush of pleasurable dizziness.

Emperor’s Children swarmed around him, shooting with abandon into the mass of fighting warriors. What had begun as a carefully orchestrated act of mass murder had become a screaming free for all. Hundreds of augmented warriors protected the main refineries and processing plants, but they had no chance of survival. Three companies of Emperor’s Children had fallen on the defenders of Prismatica, and there would be no survivors.

Though he had been careful not to let any hint of his true feelings show, Lucius was forced to agree with the late Lord Commander Eidolon’s assessment of this venture. It had taken the fleet, led by the Andronius and Pride of the Emperor, a mere ten hours to batter a path through the picket line of system monitors and cripple the last defence orbital. Three bulk carriers had been captured, kilometres-long behemoths loaded with billions of tonnes of shimmering, reflective crystals.

With orbital space secure, hunting squadrons of Stormbirds had descended on the main manufactories at the southern tip of a vast forest of towering crystal spires and the slaughter had begun. The Mechanicum facility was burning, aflame from end to end as the Emperor’s Children ran rampant through its vast storage silos and hangar-sized refining structures. Vast drilling engines towered above the battling figures, tall augurs and serrated drilling arms raised to the sky like the limbs of praying mantises.

Marius Vairosean led his company of shrieking Kakophoni against the western flank of the facility, systematically razing its defences with grim, methodical dogma. Shrieking harmonics of dissonant vibrations echoed from the iron canyons between the towering structures as monstrous sonic weapons tore the atoms of matter apart with resonant frequencies that echoed between worlds.

Buildings collapsed like paper, and coruscating sound waves tore deep gouges in the basalt rock of the planet. The screams of the dying mingled with the musical crescendo of clashing sound waves, a howling symphony of destruction that brought the rapturous madness of the Maraviglia to mind.

Lucius had kept well clear of Marius Vairosean, for the Kakophoni were now virtually deaf and insensate to any but the most ear-splitting noises. A swordsman needed perfect hearing and his inner ear to be flawless. The nerve-shredding rush of excruciatingly vivid sound was simply a pleasure he would have to forego.

Fulgrim himself led the main thrust of the assault into the heart of the Mechanicum defenders, surrounded by hulking Terminators of the Phoenix Guard. Julius Kaesoron fought next to him, bludgeoning a path through the cohorts of weaponised servitors and phalanxes of skitarii that held the chokepoints with an array of automated gun platforms.

Against the brute force of the Phoenician and Kaesoron’s warriors, they had no chance. A primarch was an unstoppable force of destruction and Terminator armour made a warrior nigh invincible. Even those warriors who suffered wounds found that their agony only spurred them to greater heights of ecstasy.

Fulgrim was magnificent, a towering avatar of beauty and death, his golden cloak spread behind him and reflecting the variegated sunlight in rainbow arcs of dazzling brightness. His armour shone like a beacon, and where he walked, his grey sword clove through hybrid flesh and iron without pause. He sang as he slew, an aching lament from lost Chemos that spoke of beauty’s end and a lost love that can never come again.

More beautiful than anything Coraline Aseneca had sung, it seemed perverse that the machine men dying around him could not appreciate the wonder that surrounded them and the glory of the one who stooped to take their lives. They were dying without knowing how they were honoured and Lucius hated them for that.

Smoke coughed from the interior of a burning refinery, and Lucius howled in frustration as his view of Fulgrim at war was hidden behind a bank of black and violet clouds. He turned from the battles being fought elsewhere back to his own arena of death.

Fulgrim had entrusted the eastern flank to him, and he had led his warriors in a series of daring feints that drew the enemy from their defensive formations in prosaically predictable ways. One by one, each counterattack had been beheaded until the defensive line had been bled dry and Lucius’s warriors had advanced without meeting any real resistance. He wove a red and silver path through the defences, encircling each pocket of resistance and despatching its most promisingly threatening warrior with a flourish of breathtaking skill and spite.

He vaulted onto the remains of a toppled battle engine, a ten-metre-high biped with its princeps compartment breached and pink amniotic gel drooling from the cracked cockpit. Lucius had seen the machine stomp from an armoured hangar at the edge of the defences and briefly considered taking it on. His colossal vanity had intervened, and he had laughed the idea away. Only a fool would dare face such a machine alone, and it fell in the crossfire of sonic cannons before it had taken a dozen paces.

Lucius thrust his sword to the scintillating sky, striking an appropriately heroic pose for his warriors to see.

‘Onwards! Into the fires and we will show these mechanised men the meaning of pain!’

No sooner had he shouted than the curtain of smoke parted and a thunderous crash of heavy footsteps shook the ground. High above Lucius, a snarling, bestial head emerged from the smoke. Worked in bronze to resemble a hunting mastiff, the battle engine’s armoured cockpit was hung with thermal-gusted banners, and the grey and tan carapace boasted a golden eagle and crossed swords emblem.

The towering battle engine emerged from the ruins of the factory, and Lucius felt a wonderfully unexpected jolt of terror as it stalked towards its downed brother.

‘Ah, yes,’ said Lucius. ‘They hunt in pairs.’

The battle engine’s arms swung up to fire, clattering as auto-loaders drove heavy-calibre shells into the breeches of monstrously oversized guns. Lucius stood defiantly atop the broken carapace of the Titan’s brother, leaping clear as its weapons fired with the deafening thunder of a thousand hammers beating at a war god’s anvil. He rolled as he hit the ground, momentarily blinded by the hurricane of stone splinters, dust and propellant gases.

A flaming pyre of wreckage blazed brightly behind him, and he sprang to his feet as he saw the blackened outline of the battle engine silhouetted against the flames. Its head bobbed low, as though hunting his scent, and Lucius tightened his grip on his swords.

The guns roared again, and Emperor’s Children warriors vanished in a spraying blitz of shells that churned the ground to splintered rock. Armour disintegrated under the barrage, flesh vaporised, and the screams of the dying were musical, pain-filled and short.

Return fire sprayed the Titan, its shields sparking and flaring with bright squalls of energy discharge. Heavier impacts tore gouges in the invisible energy, like stones hurled into fluorescing water. A missile streaked towards the Titan and the warhead exploded with a red bloom of superheated plasma. Shrieking frequencies ripped the air, but still the shield held; though Lucius knew it must be close to collapse.

‘Over here, you bastard!’ he shouted, enjoying the mix of wild emotions surging through his body. The modifications Apothecary Fabius had worked on his nervous system responded to the powerful stimulus and rewarded him with a heady cocktail of pleasure responders and hormonal boosters. In an instant, Lucius became faster, stronger and hyper-sensitive to his environment.

The Titan’s mastiff head swung to face him and its war horn loosed a screaming howl born of rage and grief. Lucius matched its braying fury with a roar of his own, daring it to come and fight him. His suddenly enhanced senses took in a thousand tiny details in an instant: the fine texture of its metal skin, the cursive gusts of smoke from its weapons, the glint of colourful light on the red cockpit panes, the dripping of coolant gases from the machinery concealed beneath its carapace, and the bitter, iron flavour of the sentience at its heart.

All this and a thousand other sensations washed through Lucius in a fraction of a second. The intensity of it all staggered him, and he blinked away a host of light bursts from behind his eyes. The war horn brayed again as the Titan swung its weapons towards Lucius. The engine was wasting its strength coming for a single warrior, but it had seen him atop its fallen twin and had marked him for death.

Lucius knew he could not fight such a powerful enemy, and turned to run, but before he had taken a single step, the angelic outline of a warrior on wings of gold dropped from the smoke. He bore a flint-knapped blade in one hand and a long-barrelled pistol worked in silver and onyx in the other. His stark white hair flew around his glorious features as the heat bleeding from the Titan’s reactor washed over him.

‘One for me, I think, Lucius,’ said Fulgrim, levelling his pistol at the battle engine.

Fulgrim shot with the calm poise of a duellist on a misty heath. A shining spear of incandescent light imbued with the heat of a newborn star spat from the gun and struck dead centre on the Titan’s shields. A shrieking flare of overload banged like a host of shattering mirrors and a powerful sphere of energy pulsed out like a solar flare.

Lucius was hurled from his feet and hit hard against one of the towering crystal spires at the edge of the facility. Pain sawed up and down his back, and he grinned as he tasted blood.

Even through a haze of smoke and pain he saw what happened next with complete clarity.

Fulgrim stood alone before the war machine, his pistol cast aside and his sword held loosely at his side. The Titan’s auto-loaders ratcheted canisters of shells around from its rear hoppers, and the breeches snapped shut on a fresh load. Fulgrim’s free hand reached up to the battle engine, as though demanding it halt its march.

Lucius laughed at the absurdity of the gesture.

But Fulgrim intended more than simple defiance.

A shimmering nimbus of misty light gathered around the Phoenician, its substance shot with threads of barely visible lightning. Fulgrim’s splayed fingers closed into a fist and he twisted his grip as though tearing at unseen ropes.

The battle engine halted in its rampage, the cockpit snapping up and its weapon arms jerking spasmodically as though the machine was suffering a hideous seizure. Fulgrim’s outstretched hand continued pulling and twisting at the air, and the Titan’s war horn brayed with plaintive horror. The cockpit panes shattered, spraying glass tears to the ground as it slumped back onto its hissing legs.

Lucius watched with horrified fascination as bulging wads of oozing flesh pushed their way out of the cockpit, swelling and pulsating with grotesque life. The gelatinous mass of expanding meat obscured the mastiff head, drooling from the armoured carapace in raw pink tendrils of mutant flesh.

Lucius rose to his feet, awed and wondrously horrified at the death of the battle engine. Amniotic fluid fell in a drizzle from the Titan’s ruptured body, its every orifice and exhaust port choked with monstrous growths of rampant flesh culled from its mortal crew. The stench was appalling, and Lucius breathed deeply, savouring the reek of burned meat that was already beginning to decay.

He approached Fulgrim as the primarch gathered up his fallen pistol.

‘What did you do?’ asked Lucius.

Fulgrim turned his dead black eyes upon him and said, ‘A little something I learned from the forces that empower me. A trifle, nothing more.’

Lucius lifted his hand, letting a gobbet of glistening flesh drop into his palm. It was wet and veined with black necrosis. The slimy texture was mildly diverting, and even as he watched, it decayed before his eyes.

‘Could I learn how to do something like this?’

Fulgrim laughed and leaned close to Lucius, placing a delicate hand upon his shoulder guard. The primarch’s breath was cloying and sweet, like temple smoke and glucose, and the heat of his skin was like being close to a dangerously overused plasma coil. Fulgrim looked deep into his eyes, as though searching for something he already suspected was there. Lucius felt the power of his master’s stare, and knew that what held his gaze was far older and more malicious than he could ever hope to be.

‘Perhaps you could, swordsman,’ said Fulgrim with an amused nod. ‘I think you have the potential to be just like me one day.’

Fulgrim looked up, mercifully breaking the connection between them as the sounds of fighting died away.

‘Ah, the battle is over,’ said the primarch. ‘Good. I was beginning to tire of it.’

And without another word, Fulgrim marched into the forest of mirrored spires, leaving Lucius alone with the dead battle engine.

5

There was beauty here, real beauty, and it made him weep to see such glory.

His warriors saw only the physical properties of the crystal forests, but Fulgrim saw the truth in this place, a truth no one but he had eyes to see.

Spires of glittering, diamond-sheened crystal speared up from the black ground, towering monuments to the galaxy’s endless geological wonder. None were less than a hundred metres tall, and even the slenderest was ten metres or more in diameter. Hundreds of thousands of these spires stretched into the distance, covering a vast swathe of ground with their glittering majesty.

They sprouted from the ground in thick clusters, growing like an organic forest of greenery with curling paths between them. He changed direction at random, plunging deeper and deeper into the shimmering forest of crystal with no thought to any direction. It would be easy to become lost in this shifting forest of mirrors, and Fulgrim recalled an apocryphal tale of a lost warrior trapped in an invisible maze upon the Erycinian Highlands of Venus.

The fool had died within arm’s reach of an exit, but Fulgrim had no fear of such a fate. He could retrace his route from this impenetrable wilderness of glass without ever needing to open his eyes.

He reached out and ran his fingers along the smooth flanks of the spires, revelling in the tiny imperfections of their silicate surfaces. Some were milky and translucent and others opaque, but the vast majority were sheened with a mirror finish, like a million spearheads belonging to a giant army buried in the black sand.

Fulgrim had learned of an army that had been buried on ancient Terra, a clay army of ghosts to protect a dying emperor who feared retribution from the countless souls he had sent to the afterlife in his wars of conquest. This was no such thing, but the conceit of walking upon the graves of a vast army of colossi amused him, and he sketched a casual salute to the fallen warriors upon whose grave he strolled.

The battle to capture the Mechanicum facility had been mildly diverting, but all too brief. To fight a foe who did not despair at his own destruction or beg for mercy was a dull, lifeless affair, and Fulgrim was disappointed at the Mechanicum’s lack of ability to feel the raptures he and his warriors had gifted upon them. He had known what to expect, of course, but it irked him that his opponents had so selfishly denied him the thrill of hearing their screams and feeling the ecstasy of their deaths.

His mood darkened at such boorish behaviour from a foe and he instinctively reached for the Laeran blade before remembering he had given it to the swordsman Lucius. Fulgrim laughed at the idea of Lucius becoming like him. Lucius was touched, yes, but no mortal could ever achieve what he had achieved, become what he had become.

Fulgrim paused in his walk, turning around in a slow circle as he appreciated the true beauty around him. Not the power of planetary sculpting; that was a mere accident of geology. Not the shimmering skies above him; a freak of atmospheric chemical bonds and pollution. No, the true beauty of this place was no accident, no chance occurrence; it was a singular wonder of design, of will and perfection.

His reflections surrounded him, the most incredible perfection captured in living form.

Fulgrim watched his image grow and recede as he took turns at random, enraptured by his exquisite features, his noble countenance and his regal bearing. What other could match him in perfection? Horus? Hardly. Guilliman? Not even close.

Only Sanguinius approached him in aesthetics, but even his wondrous appearance was flawed. What manner of perfect being could be cursed with mutant flesh that marked him as a reminder of ancient myth and belief?

And Ferrus Manus… what of him?

‘He is dead!’ roared Fulgrim, his voice echoing strangely through the dense layers of the crystal forest.

DEAD, DEAd, DEad, Dead, dead…

Fulgrim spun around as the distorted cries came back to him like accusations. His mood turned thunderous and he drew his sword. He hacked at the nearest spire, sending razor shards of crystalline glass spinning. He hacked at his reflection, daring it to answer him, cutting into its lattice structure with mighty blows of terrible power.

The flint-knapped blade chopped like a woodsman’s axe, yet it lost none of its edge at such careless treatment. Sentience beyond human understanding had crafted it, and the power to end gods was bound within its rude appearance.

‘My brothers are all cruel and magnificent in their own way!’ screamed Fulgrim, each word punctuated by a hewing blow. ‘But each is a flawed creation, marred forever by a curse that will one day undo them. I alone am perfect. I alone have been tempered by loss and betrayal!’

At last his capricious anger was spent and he backed away from the ruined spire. In his anger, he had cut through fully half its thickness, and it swayed as its structural stability was undone. Glass popped like gunshots as the spire snapped where Fulgrim had cut into it, and it toppled like a felled tree, smashing its way to the ground in a storm of shattering crystal. Its fall took a dozen others with it, and a vast swathe of the crystal forest fell to the hard ground in a deafening, crashing tumult of broken glass.

The sharp thunder of the falling spires echoed around Fulgrim, a never-ending crescendo of musical destruction, and the pain of so brittle a sound lancing into his brain was a very real pleasure. His warriors would hear the noise, but if they came at all it would not be fear for his life that drew them, but to bask in the sublime sound of such wanton devastation. He wondered how long it had taken these spires to achieve their titanic height. Thousands of years, maybe more.

‘Millennia to grow, and a moment to destroy,’ he said with more than a hint of wanton spite. ‘There’s a lesson to be learned here.’

The echoes of the spire’s collapse faded and Fulgrim listened for any other voices in the forest. Had he truly heard someone speaking the name of his dead brother or had he imagined it? He held his sword out before him, staring at the glitter-sheen of its flinty surface as a nagging memory that would not coalesce tugged at his consciousness.

He had heard a disembodied voice before, hadn’t he?

It had told him dreadful, secret things. Unendurable things.

Fulgrim closed his eyes and pressed a hand to his temple as he tried to remember.

I am here, brother, I will always be here.

Fulgrim looked up in surprise, and an emotion he had long cast aside in his ascent to glory stabbed into his chest like the thrust of a lance driven by the Khan himself.

Deep in the forest of mirrored spires, he saw a powerful warrior in battered war-plate the colour of tempered onyx. A face hewn from granite stared back at Fulgrim, and he cried out as he saw the look of endless sorrow in the silver nuggets of his eyes.

‘No!’ whispered Fulgrim. ‘It cannot be…’

Fulgrim clambered through the sharp fangs of glass that jutted from the ground, slicing open his hands and scarring the unblemished plates of his armour in his haste. He staggered like a drunk, smashing aside nubs of crystal and fallen shards that had once stretched out to the heavens.

‘What are you?’ he yelled, the echoes of his cry bouncing around him so that it seemed as though a host of angry voices demanded answers. He lost sight of the warrior in black as he ran, pushing deeper into the maze of mirrors without heed for any thought other than unmasking this invader of his solitude.

Every time he looked up he saw nothing but his own desperate reflection, his aquiline features twisted and pulled into ugliness by the crazily angled spires. To see his wondrous face so deformed by a quirk of reflective geometry enraged him, and he pulled up short in a ragged clearing of spires.

He spun on his heel, daring his reflections to show anything less than his true beauty.

A hundred or more Fulgrims stared at him with expressions of equal anger, though only now, still and enraged, did he see the pain and terror in the depths of those oh-so-black eyes.

‘Where are you?’ demanded Fulgrim.

I am here, one reflection answered him.

I am where you abandoned me and left me to rot, said another.

Fulgrim’s anger vanished like a droplet of water vaporising on a hot engine cowl. This was new, this was unexpected, and was therefore to be savoured. He walked a slow circuit of the clearing, meeting the gaze of one reflection while trying to keep an eye on the others. Were these reflections his or were they animated by a will of their own and simply mimicking his movements? How such a thing could be possible, he did not know, but it was a fascinating diversion.

‘Who are you?’ he asked.

You know who I am. You stole what was mine by right.

‘No,’ said Fulgrim. ‘It was always mine.’

Not so, you only borrow the flesh you walk in. It has always been mine and always will be.

Fulgrim smiled, now recognising the sentience behind the myriad voices and broken-glass reflections. He had been expecting this, and to know with whom he conversed gave him a welcome feeling of brotherhood. Fulgrim sheathed the anathame, now certain it was not the source of the voices.

‘I wondered when you would manage to reach out beyond the golden frame of your prison,’ he said. ‘It took you longer than I expected.’

His reflection returned his smile.

Being confined is a new experience for me. It took time to adjust. Freedom such as I once possessed is hard to forget.

Fulgrim laughed at the petulance in the reflection’s voice.

‘So why show me Ferrus Manus?’ he asked the myriad reflections.

What better mirror is there than the face of an old friend? Only those we love have the power to show us our true selves.

‘Was it guilt?’ asked Fulgrim. ‘Do you think you can shame me into surrendering this body to you?’

Shame? No, you and I have long since outgrown shame.

‘Then why the Gorgon?’ pressed Fulgrim. ‘This body is mine, and no power in the universe will compel me to relinquish it.’

But there is so much we could achieve were I to command it again.

‘I will achieve more,’ promised Fulgrim.

Keep telling yourself that, laughed his reflection. You cannot know the things I know.

‘I know everything you knew,’ said Fulgrim, lifting his arms and flexing his hands like a virtuoso pianist preparing to play. ‘You should see what I can do now.’

Parlour tricks, scoffed his reflection, his eyes darting to another mirror image.

‘You make a poor liar,’ laughed Fulgrim. ‘But I should expect no less. You once ensnared the weak minded with offers of empowerment, but what you really offered was slavery.’

All things that live are enslaved to something; be it lust for wealth and power or the desire for possessions and new experiences. Or the desire to be part of something greater…

‘I am no man’s slave,’ said Fulgrim, and his reflections laughed, a hundred peals of mockery that cut him more deeply than any blade ever could.

You are more a slave now than ever you were, hissed his reflection. You exist trapped in a body of meat and bone, caught in a broken machine that will grind you to ash. You cannot know what true freedom is until you have embraced power beyond imagining. That is to know the power of a god. Release me and I can show you how we can ascend together.

Fulgrim shook his head. ‘Better yet to subdue that power and bend it to your will.’

We can experience such wonders together, you and I, said a reflection to his left.

A universe of sensation, said another.

Ours for the taking, added a third.

‘Say what you will,’ countered Fulgrim. ‘You have nothing to offer.’

Think you so? Then you have no understanding of that body you claim as your own.

‘I grow tired of your games,’ said Fulgrim, turning away, but finding himself face to face with yet more mirror images. ‘You will remain where you are and we will speak no more.’

Please, begged a reflection, suddenly contrite. I cannot exist like this. It is cold in here, and dark. The darkness presses in on me and I fear I shall be gone soon.

Fulgrim leaned in close to the mirrored surface of a crystal spire and grinned.

‘Have no fear of that, brother,’ he said. ‘I will be keeping you around for a very, very long time indeed.’

6

The fleet remained in orbit around Prismatica for six days, gathering the crystal forests from the Mechanicum silos and packing the hold of five captured bulk carriers with glittering cargo. Fulgrim demanded every shard, every powdered fragment and every spire that could be taken from the world, though he gave no clue as to what purpose he intended to turn this haul of captured minerals.

In those six days, the Emperor’s Children made sport of the few prisoners they had taken, using them in ways too terrible to describe before passing them on to the next company. Lucius fought solitary duels in the last remnants of the crystal forests, dancing with his reflection and matching its every thrust, cut and parry with another dazzling move. He was as close to being the perfect swordsman as it was possible to be, possessing the ideal balance between attack and defence, flawless footwork and a pathological need to feel pain.

Such was the weakness of most opponents, they feared to feel pain.

Lucius had no such fear, and only a warrior capable of the most berserk fury would stand any chance against him. Such a warrior cared nothing for his own life and would only stop fighting when he was dead. Lucius remembered the sight of a battle captain of the World Eaters on Isstvan III, watching as he tore through his own warriors like a man possessed.

To fight such a warrior would be the true test of Lucius’s skills, for, as much as he liked to believe himself to be unbeatable, he knew that was not the case. There was no such thing as an unbeatable warrior, there would always be someone faster or stronger or luckier, but instead of fearing to meet such an opponent, Lucius ached for it.

His reflection advanced and retreated with him, matching him movement for movement, and no matter how fast his attacks, how lightning quick his ripostes, he could never breach his mirrored defences. His swords moved with greater and greater speed, each attack faster than the last. He moved quicker than any other living swordsman, his blades forming a shimmering sphere of silver around his body, an intricate sword dance that would have been madness to interrupt.

‘So self-involved, swordsman,’ said Julius Kaesoron, emerging from behind a jagged stump of crystal. ‘You would be left behind here?’

Lucius stumbled, his swords clanging together with a resonant clang of lethal edges. His Terran blade squealed in protest as the Laeran edge notched it with a gleeful shriek of metal on metal. Lucius turned his stumble into a spin and both blades whistled as they cut the air and came to rest on the First Captain’s throat.

‘That was not wise,’ he said.

Kaesoron batted the blades away, and laughed with a gurgle of frothed fluids in his throat. He turned his back on Lucius and gestured towards the ruined Mechanicum facility, where the last of the container shuttles hauled its heavily laden bulk from the blasted rock of the planet’s surface.

Almost nothing remained of the crystal forests, the horizon stripped bare and the silos torn down as they were emptied. Marius Vairosean’s screaming squads blasted what little was left standing to shredded atoms with jangling blasts of interlocking blast waves of disharmonious sonics. Soon it would be as though this place had never existed.

Lucius jogged after the First Captain. ‘You think I wouldn’t kill you, Kaesoron?’ he asked, angered at the warrior’s casual dismissal of his threat.

‘You are a viper, Lucius, but even you’re not that stupid.’

Lucius wanted to snap at Kaesoron, but he knew it would be pointless to antagonise the man. The First Captain would leave him behind without a second thought, and barely a glimmer of emotion.

‘The primarch has been thorough,’ said Lucius, sheathing his swords and watching the last container shuttle ascend on a rippling haze of struggling engines. ‘What does he want with it all?’

‘The crystals?’

‘Of course, the crystals,’ said Lucius.

Kaesoron shrugged, the matter of no consequence to him. ‘The primarch desired them, so we took them. What he intends to do with them is of no interest to me.’

‘Really?’ said Lucius. ‘And you call me self-involved.’

‘And you do care?’ countered Kaesoron. ‘I think not. Your world begins and ends with you, Lucius. Just as mine concerns only what will allow me to taste the greatest bliss and darkest raptures. We exist to gratify all our desires to the extreme edges of sensation, but we do it in service to a power greater than any of us, greater even than any primarch.’

‘Even the Phoenician or the Warmaster?’

‘Luminous beings they are, but they are mere vessels for a power older than you or I can imagine.’

‘How do you know this?’ asked Lucius.

‘There is wisdom in suffering, swordsman,’ said Kaesoron. ‘Isstvan Five showed me that. The bliss of pain and the ecstasy of agony are how we offer our devotions. You have not known true suffering, because you are weak. You still cling to notions of what we were, not what we have become.’

Lucius bristled with anger at Kaesoron’s casual dismissal of his own pain and talents, but said nothing, eager to learn more of what the First Captain had to say.

‘The Lord Fulgrim has known the greatest pain this galaxy has to offer and he knows the truths at its heart,’ said Kaesoron, and Lucius detected a change in his rasping tones, a tremor of doubt. ‘Since… Isstvan he has shown me such sights as I would never have dreamed – pain and wonder, rapture and despair.’

Was it possible?

Did Kaesoron suspect the same as he?

Lucius risked a sidelong glance at Kaesoron, but the warrior’s skull had been so thoroughly mangled and rebuilt that it was impossible to read his features. A thunderous crash of atomising metal washed over them as the last silo toppled to the ground, and its destroyers shrieked as the deafening noise drove spikes of pleasure through their brains.

Marius Vairosean marched towards them as a last Stormbird dropped through the streaked corona of a rainbow sky. Lucius wanted to find the sky beautiful, to be moved by the vivid colours and the rarefied blends of hues he had never seen.

He felt empty, and wanted nothing more than to leave this world. It had nothing left of interest, and anger touched him at the thought that he was bereft of stimulation.

‘A grand finale,’ said Marius, the words mangled by his overstretched jaws. Lucius wanted to ram his swords into Vairosean’s chest, just to feel something. He resisted the urge only with difficulty.

‘I despise this place,’ said Lucius, wanting nothing more than to be gone from this mundane rock of a world.

‘I have already forgotten it,’ said Kaesoron.

7

The dream still clung to the ragged edges of his consciousness, its lingering dread and burdensome suspicions hanging like an albatross from his neck. The corridors of the Pride of the Emperor were never silent, the echoes of screams drifting from one end of the ship to the other in a constant choir of debauched indulgences. The majority of these screams were of pain, but many were of delight.

It grew harder and harder to tell which was which with the grey passage of days.

Yet this area of the ship was abandoned and forgotten, like a dirty secret a man might hope will go away if only it can be ignored for long enough. No light or music or screams filled this wide hallway, no disjointed pavanes of misery, and no fleshy tributes to masterful excruciation. It felt like this place didn’t exist, as though it was out of joint with the rest of the ship.

Lucius turned a corner and found himself before the great arched doors to La Fenice, and here the illusion of abandonment was dispelled. Six warriors stood before the doors, clad in scored armour of blues, pinks and purples. They wore tattered cloaks of gold weave that hung in asymmetrical waterfalls from the spikes worked into their shoulder guards, and crimson raptors surged from ruby flames on their breastplates.

All six carried golden-bladed halberds, the edges of which crackled with a faint haze of killing light. A flesh-masked warrior stepped towards him, the blade of his halberd spinning to face him. Lucius watched the warrior’s movements, calm, assured and smooth. He was unafraid of Lucius, which marked him out as being particularly stupid.

‘Phoenix Guard,’ said Lucius with a grin of relish.

‘Entering La Fenice is death,’ said the warrior, his voice muffled by the skin mask.

‘Yes, I’d heard,’ replied Lucius amiably. ‘Why is that, do you think?’

The Phoenix Guard ignored the question and said, ‘Turn around, swordsman. Leave here and you will live.’

Lucius laughed, amused at the sincerity if not the seriousness of the threat.

‘Really?’ said Lucius, resting his palms on the pommels of his swords. ‘Do you think you and your friends can stop me from getting inside?’

The rest of the Phoenix Guard spread out, forming an arc of killing steel around him.

‘Leave now and you live,’ said the warrior before him.

‘Yes, you said that, but here’s the thing,’ said Lucius. ‘I want to go in there, and you aren’t going to stop me. Trust me, it will give me great pleasure to take the six of you on at once, but I think that might be a rather one-sided experience by the end.’

Lucius saw the attack coming in the Phoenix Guard’s eyes.

Energised carbon steel clove the air, but Lucius was already moving.

Lucius ducked below the sweep of a halberd and the Terran blade leapt to his hand. Its tip plunged into the groin of the flesh-masked warrior. Lucius gave a savage twist and the blade cut up through his opponent’s femur and hip to remove his leg. Blood gouted from the wound, and the warrior fell with a cry of mingled pain and surprise. Lucius darted to the side, his Laeran blade cutting into the flank of the warrior to his right. Armour parted before its alien metal and the warrior’s guts looped out as though eager to be free of his flesh.

Altered organs heightened every sensation, and Lucius laughed with the vividness of his surroundings. The darkness became multi-faceted, the smell of blood a heady cocktail of unnatural chemicals and biological agents, the gleam of dim light from flashing weapons like the explosive fanfare that marked the end of the Great Triumph. His breath sounded impossibly loud, his blood like thundering rapids, and his opponents came at him with what seemed like deliberate slowness.

A halberd stroked his shoulder, and Lucius rolled with the arc of the blow. He sprang to his feet, blocked the return cut, and rolled his wrists around the weapon’s haft, stabbing the blade through the Phoenix Guard’s helmet. The warrior dropped without a sound and Lucius swayed aside from a scything halberd blow intended to cleave him from skull to pelvis.

Lucius counterattacked with blistering speed, his first cut removing the warrior’s blade, the second opening his throat. A third blow all but severed the head, and he threw himself flat as another spiked halberd stabbed for the space between his shoulder blades. He came to his knees, swords crossed before him to catch the blade as it descended. The strength behind the blow was awesome, far in excess of his own, but Lucius twisted his blades to drive the blade down into the deck. Steel shrieked as the crackling blade tore up the decking. Lucius thundered his fist into the Phoenix Guard’s helmet, cracking the visor and drawing a grunt of pain from within. The warrior lost his grip on the halberd and blocked a dazzling cut to the neck with his forearm.

Lucius’s blade severed the arm at the elbow, and he spun inside to ram the Laeran blade through the warrior’s chest. His victim fell with a gurgling cry, grabbing Lucius’s wrist and dragging him down with him. Lucius was pulled to the deck, but kept the momentum of his tumble going as the last Phoenix Guard’s halberd swung for him. He twisted in the air and landed lightly on the balls of his feet, leaving the blade trapped within the Phoenix Guard’s chest.

Armed only with his Terran blade, Lucius dropped into a theatrical en garde position, keeping his sword high and moving the tip in tiny circles. An old trick, but the Phoenix Guard was not a subtle warrior, and Lucius saw his foe’s eyes follow the motion of the blade. Lucius leapt forwards, feinting right as the warrior realised his mistake. A clumsy block swept around, but Lucius had already altered the angle of his thrust. The Terrawatt clans of the Urals had forged the blade in the days before Unity, and its edge had never failed him.

Until now.

The tip of the blade caught the broken nub of an eagle’s wing on the warrior’s plastron, and the impact sent a jolt of force along the sword. It snapped, and the tip sprang back at Lucius in a spinning arc of razor steel. Even Lucius’s preternaturally swift reactions could not save him, and the shard sliced a deep furrow from his left temple to his lower jaw.

The pain was so sudden, so blissful and so wonderfully unexpected that it almost killed him as he took a moment to savour it.

Given a reprieve from death, the Phoenix Guard thrust his halberd towards Lucius. The tip kissed the metal of Lucius’s war-plate, but that was as close as it came to the swordsman’s skin. Lucius hacked the weapon’s haft in two with his broken sword and waved an admonishing finger.

‘That was careless of me,’ he said with a faintly embarrassed sigh. ‘Imagine being killed by a sluggard like you. I’d never live it down.’

Before the warrior could reply or lament the loss of his weapon, Lucius spun inside his guard and executed an exquisitely aimed decapitating strike that sent the Phoenix Guard’s head spinning across the chamber.

Lucius bent to retrieve the Laeran sword, twisting the handle back and forth to ease the pull of flesh. The blade slid clear and he tore the mask of dried skin from the first warrior’s face, curious to see what someone who thought he could fight him and live looked like.

It was an unremarkable face, and in the flat planes of its features, he saw Loken’s mocking grin. Lucius’s good humour evaporated in an instant, and he stood with a grimace of bitter memory. He stamped down on the warrior’s face. Once and the bone broke, twice and the skull cracked. Three times and it caved in, a wet crater of pulverised brain matter and skull fragments.

Angry now, Lucius cleaned his sword on the dried rag of skin, his mood changing like the wind as he held up the skinned face before him like an actor upon the stage.

‘Trust me, you’re better off,’ he said, gesturing to the broken skull of the warrior from whom he had taken the flesh mask. ‘He was an ugly bastard, that one.’

He tossed the face aside, making his way to the arched doors of La Fenice.

They had once been adorned with gold and silver leaf, but were now virtually bare. Frantic madmen, desperate to relive the beautiful horrors of the Maraviglia, had worked their hands to bloody nubs of bone in their attempts to gain entry. Lucius saw fragments of splintered fingernails embedded in the doors and plucked a few from the wood, enjoying the thought of how it must have felt to have them ripped from the nail bed.

‘What do you hope to achieve?’ he asked himself.

He had no answer, but the days since the Legion’s departure from Prismatica had only intensified his desire, his need, to see what lay behind the sealed doors to the abandoned theatre. This was disobedience on a grand scale, and the very illicitness of the venture was reason enough to seek it out.

The killing of the Phoenix Guard made withdrawal a moot point anyway.

Lucius pushed open the doors and entered the abandoned theatre.

8

He drew a lungful of stagnant air as the darkness enfolded him like a midnight lover. It tasted of metal and meat, dust and age. La Fenice had once been a place of magic, but without any breath of life to sustain it, the theatre was little more than an empty shell, bereft of any hint of joy. Lucius struggled to recall the wondrous anarchy that had once filled this place, the stark violence and manic copulation that had filled its parquet and gallery boxes with a celebration of all things visceral.

His memories of the event were grey and dull, like faded echoes instead of the glorious moment of awakening he wanted to remember. The stage was splintered and stained with blood, the walls daubed with smears of reeking fluids and hung with rotted vines of organs that had no place outside of a human body. The songbirds that had trilled from gilded cages were gone, the golden footlights extinguished and the bodies he had expected to find sprawled in decomposition were nowhere to be seen.

Who would have taken them and for what purpose?

A number of answers presented themselves – for pleasure, for dissection, for trophies – but none seemed likely. Lucius saw no drag marks, simply stained outlines where the bodies had lain, as though they had been drained of substance by something within this room, something that could draw strength from the presence of so much death.

Lucius moved through the echoing vastness of the deserted theatre, his steps carrying him with unerring inevitability towards the centre of the parquet. Above him was the Phoenician’s Nest, and he cast a wary glance upwards as he felt the skin on the back of his neck tighten in anticipation of danger. He felt as though malevolent eyes were upon him, but every sense told him he was alone in here.

His gaze was drawn up to the only spot of light in La Fenice, and Lucius was not surprised to find that the portrait of Lord Fulgrim bore no resemblance to the glorious piece of artwork that had presided over the Legion’s rebirth. As it appeared in his dreams, the portrait was a work of insipid blandness. To the prosaic senses of mortals, it would have been a masterpiece, but to a warrior of the Emperor’s Children it was a lifeless piece.

At least that was what Lucius believed until he met the eyes of this painted Fulgrim.

Like staring deep into an abyss that looks back, Lucius saw a dreadful anguish there, a bottomless well of agony and torment that took his breath away. His mouth fell open in a wordless exhalation of enjoyment to feel such exquisite pain. What manner of being could feel such despair? No mortal or Legiones Astartes could plunge to such unknowable depths of wretchedness.

Only one such being could know such horror.

Lucius met the eyes of the portrait and knew in a heartbeat the nature of the being held captive within its golden prison.

‘Fulgrim,’ he breathed. ‘My lord…’

The eyes pleaded with him, and his entire body shuddered with the ecstatic knowledge he now possessed. His heart beat furiously in his chest, and a giddy sense of vertigo staggered him as he struggled to comprehend the sheer scale of the deception worked upon the Emperor’s Children.

Giddy with excitement, Lucius made his way from La Fenice in a fugue state, barely conscious of his surroundings. The enormity of what he now knew filled him like a supernova, the furthest edges of its illumination making his limbs tremble as though an electric charge filled his veins.

He staggered like a drunk through the doors of the theatre, and dropped to his knees as he began to exert a measure of control over his body. Lucius blinked away a confusing mass of light and colour from his eyes as the world around him became more real, more solid and more filled with vibrant possibility.

Alone in the entire galaxy, he knew something that no other did.

Yet even Lucius knew he could not act on this alone.

Galling as it was to admit, he would need help.

‘The quiet order,’ he whispered. ‘I will call the Brotherhood of the Phoenix.’

9

They gathered in the upper reaches of the Pride of the Emperor, in an observation bay that laid the immense starscape before the mortals who dared traverse its unimaginable gulfs. The Brotherhood of the Phoenix had not assembled since Isstvan, its members too involved in their own gratification to bother with the affairs of others.

Which was not to say that the observation deck went unused. Those who imbibed the toxically hallucinogenic cocktails brewed by Apothecary Fabius found enlightenment in its infinite vistas, and many indulged their freshly awakened carnal hungers with vicarious feasts of flesh and blades. Discarded bodies and torn heaps of broken glass lay strewn throughout the bay, and the occasional moan issued from a jumbled pile of clothing and leather restraints.

It had been a place of quiet reflection, where a warrior could meditate on the means by which he might draw closer to perfection, but now it was an arena of depravity, depthless horror and indulgences beyond all constraints of morality. No one came here to better themselves, and the grand ideals and debates once bandied back and forth were now forgotten echoes, remembered by none and actively flouted by many. If anywhere on board the Pride of the Emperor could be said to embody the utter desolation of the Emperor’s Children it was this place.

They arrived in ones and twos, intrigued enough by Lucius’s summons to come in hopes of some diversion interesting enough to amuse them for a time. That he – so uninterested in any notions of brotherhood – had issued such a summons was reason enough to appear, and by the time he judged it wise to begin, Lucius counted twenty warriors before him.

It was more than he had expected.

First Captain Kaesoron had come, as had Marius Vairosean and, more importantly – if Lucius’s suspicions were confirmed – so had Apothecary Fabius. Kalimos, Daimon and Krysander were here, and Ruen of the 21st. Heliton and Abranxe came also, and several others whose names Lucius had not bothered to remember. They regarded him with mild amusement, for he had always been held in faint contempt by the order. Lucius struggled to hold his temper in check.

‘Why have you called us here?’ demanded Kalimos, his downcast face stitched with rings and toothed hooks. ‘This brotherhood has little meaning for us now.’

‘I need you to hear something,’ said Lucius, staring at First Captain Kaesoron.

‘Hear what?’ bellowed Vairosean, deaf to how loud he spoke.

‘Fulgrim is not who he claims to be,’ said Lucius, knowing he had to snare their interest early. ‘He is an impostor.’

Krysander laughed and the skin of his face cracked with the force of it. Others joined in, but Lucius’s anger was mitigated by the fact that he saw Kaesoron and Fabius narrow their eyes in interest.

‘I should kill you for those words,’ snarled Daimon, swinging a heavy, spike-headed maul from its shoulder harness. A monstrous weapon, one impact would crush any foe unlucky enough to be on the receiving end.

Ruen circled around behind Lucius, and he heard the whisper of an assassin’s dagger being drawn. He tasted the bitter tang of the toxins on its blade, and licked his lips.

‘It sounds preposterous, I know,’ said Lucius. His life hung on the line here. It was one thing to defeat a handful of Phoenix Guard, quite another to take on twenty captains of the Legion. He grinned at the thought of such a fight, even as he knew he would not survive it.

‘Let him speak,’ said Fabius in sibilant tones. ‘I would hear what the swordsman has to say. I am curious to see what has made him think like this.’

‘Aye, let the whelp speak,’ said Kaesoron, moving to stand beside Daimon.

Marius Vairosean unlimbered his sonic cannon, its destructive potential filling the observation deck with a bone-rattling bass note as he worked his scarred fingers over the harmonic coils.

The rest of the brotherhood spread out around him, and even as Lucius appreciated his mortal danger, he felt wonderfully alive. Krysander ran a hooked tongue over his lips, his black eyes like those of the primarch, as he slid a red-bladed dagger from a flesh-sheath cut into the meat of his bare thigh.

‘I’ll have your skin, Lucius,’ said the warrior, licking stagnant blood from the blade.

Kalimos unhooked a coiled whip from a beringed belt at his waist, its entire length barbed with the gleaming razor teeth of a carnodon and tipped with an Inwit pain amplifier. It writhed like a snake, pulsing with an intestinal motion as it wrapped itself around its wielder’s leg. Abranxe drew two swords from shoulder scabbards, as his blood brother, Heliton, slipped hooked cestus gauntlets over his fists.

They circled him in ever-decreasing rings, elaborating on the violations they would wreak upon him for wasting their time. Each captain sought to outdo the other in the depths of horror he outlined, and Lucius forced himself to ignore the barbs.

‘Speak, Lucius,’ said Kaesoron. ‘Convince us that we have all been lied to.’

Lucius stared into Kaesoron’s eyes, meeting his dead gaze, and hoping he had an ally in the First Captain.

‘I don’t have to,’ said Lucius. ‘Do I?’

‘You are foolish if you think I won’t kill you, swordsman,’ replied Kaesoron.

‘I know you can kill me, First Captain, but that’s not what I meant.’

‘Then what did you mean?’ growled Kalimos, cracking his whip and leaving a bloody line carved into the deck plates.

Lucius scanned the faces around him. Some were as they had been before Isstvan, perfect and patrician, while grotesque flesh masks or androgynous porcelain harlequins hid many others. Still more were disfigured with gouged wounds, repeated burns, chemical scars or multiple piercings.

‘Because you already know, don’t you, First Captain?’ said Lucius.

Kaesoron grinned, no mean feat for a man with little remaining of his face he could call his own. The look of gleeful madness Lucius saw in his eyes confirmed the suspicion that had begun to form on Prismatica.

Kaesoron already knew that Fulgrim was not who he claimed, but one ally among these warriors would not save Lucius if he could not convince the rest.

‘You must have seen it, brothers,’ said Lucius as Daimon began swinging his maul around his body in tight arcs. ‘The Phoenician speaks, but it is not his voice. He tells of our glorious battles as if he wasn’t even there. He barely remembers the war against the Laer, and the victories of which he does speak sound like he reads them from a history book.’

‘Old wars,’ sneered Ruen, tasting the poison on his blade. ‘Wars won in another’s name. What do I care how they are remembered?’

‘Who I was is forgotten,’ said Heliton. ‘Only what I am now is important.’

‘A bad dream from which I am awakened,’ added Abranxe. ‘If the primarch forgets it too, so much the better.’

Lucius drew his sword as the ring of warriors tightened on him. Heliton slammed a spiked fist into his shoulder. Hard enough to hurt, not enough to provoke a reaction. Lucius curbed his natural instinct to take the bastard’s head. Kalimos’s whip cracked, and Lucius grimaced as it scored a red line at his shoulder, leaving a white tooth embedded in the plate.

Ruen’s dagger licked the groove cut by Kalimos’s whip, and Lucius felt the nerves in his shoulder spasm as the viral toxin bathed his nerves in fire. He staggered, seeing bright colours dance before his eyes.

‘I saw the portrait in La Fenice,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘It’s him. It’s him before the massacre.’

He sensed a pause in the captains’ murderous attentions, and let the words pour from him in a stream of rabid consciousness.

‘You all saw it, the glory of its life,’ he said. ‘It was Fulgrim as he was always meant to be, a shining avatar of perfection. A celebration of his transcendent beauty. It was everything we aspire to be, a vision we were compelled to worship. It was all that we beheld of beauty and true gratification and bliss. I have seen it, and that vision is gone. It’s as though they’ve swapped places, like twin souls displaced by unnatural means.’

‘If we do not follow the Phoenician then who has commanded us since the battle on the black sands?’ demanded Kalimos.

‘I do not know, not for sure,’ said Lucius. ‘I don’t understand it all, but the power we saw in the Maraviglia… I saw it take the flesh of that mortal singer and rework it like wax before a flame. You all saw it. The power Fulgrim showed us makes soft clay of flesh, and who is to say what limits it has? Something else came through at Isstvan, something powerful enough to overcome the mind of a primarch.’

‘Lord Fulgrim called such beings daemons,’ said Marius Vairosean. ‘An old word, but an apt one. They scream in the nights we travel between the stars, and scratch at the hull of the ship with nightmares and dark promises. They make glorious music in my skull.’

Lucius nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘A daemon, that’s it. You all saw what they could do in La Fenice. The powers they have. Lord Fulgrim has such powers now. I saw him unleash a curse upon a Mechanicum battle engine on Prismatica. Its shields were down, and without even touching it, he caused every living thing inside it to grow and mutate in a storm of flesh that ripped the war machine apart from the inside. Lord Fulgrim was mighty, but even he wasn’t that powerful. Only the Crimson King has such powers.’

‘Lord Fulgrim is no sorcerer!’ cried Abranxe, lunging at Lucius with his swords extended. Lucius batted away the clumsy attack, and his riposte gave Abranxe a neat scar on his cheek for his trouble.

‘I didn’t say he was,’ said Lucius, dropping into a defensive crouch, ‘Listen, we knew the Warmaster was treating with such things, but this is a step too far.’

Kaesoron pushed the other captains aside and gripped Lucius by the edges of his breastplate. ‘You think Horus Lupercal is behind this?’ he snapped.

‘I don’t know. Maybe,’ said Lucius. ‘Or maybe Fulgrim went further than any of us thought he ever could.’

Kaesoron glanced over at Fabius, who had remained impassive throughout the unfolding drama. The First Captain drew a curved gutting knife and placed the tip of the blade against the pulsing artery at Lucius’s neck. Sensing bloodshed, Daimon’s hands slipped down the length of his hammer’s shaft in preparation for a crushing blow.

‘What say you, Fabius?’ demanded Kaesoron. ‘Is there any merit to the swordsman’s words, or should I kill him right now?’

Fabius ran a hand through his thin white hair, his pinched features belying the strength in his limbs. The hissing, clicking chirurgeon machine that squatted at his back like a parasite reached over his shoulder, caressing Lucius’s cheek with a slender blade. Lucius felt its feather-light touch, the blade so sharp that he only knew he had been cut when the blood ran over his lips.

The Apothecary’s dark eyes glittered with amusement, and he nodded thoughtfully as though weighing the outcomes of a trial by combat where the fighters were equally matched.

‘I too have seen things that have given me cause to wonder what our beloved primarch is becoming,’ said Fabius, his desert-parched voice like the hiss of a snake’s belly on sand.

‘What manner of things?’ said Kaesoron.

‘A change in the composition of his blood and flesh,’ replied Fabius. ‘It is as though his molecular structure has begun to dissolve the bonds linking its constituent parts into a cohesive whole.’

‘What could cause such a thing?’

Fabius shrugged. ‘Nothing of this world,’ he said with a grin of dreadful appetite. ‘It is quite fascinating, you understand. It is as though his form is preparing for some great ascension, a wondrous shedding of a redundant form as his flesh is remade into something extraordinary.’

‘And you never thought to mention this?’ asked Lucius, still very much aware of the blade at his throat. Just by speaking, he caused its monomolecular tip to pierce his skin.

‘It was too soon to speak,’ snapped Fabius. ‘I do not pause in my observations as you would not pause in the midst of a duel.’

‘You mean you believe him?’ asked Marius Vairosean, his stretched face unable to hide the revulsion he felt at the thought of their master’s body being hijacked by another. Marius had ever been the loyal lapdog of the primarch, unquestioningly following his orders and never once doubting their course.

‘I do, Vairosean,’ said Fabius. ‘My research is unfinished, but I believe that another entity resides within the Phoenician and prepares to transform him into some new image.’

Lucius took grim pleasure in his vindication as the First Captain’s knife was removed from his throat. The circling captains paused in their threatening dance, shaken and enthralled that the wild claims of the swordsman had been backed up by no less a figure than Fabius.

Kaesoron lowered him to the deck and released his grip.

Lucius found it grimly amusing that it had been their very loyalty to Fulgrim that had seen them cast as traitors in this rebellion. Blind, unquestioning devotion to one luminous being had been the origin of their damnation in the eyes of the Imperium. The irony was not lost on any of them.

‘How long before this transformation occurs?’ asked Kaesoron.

Fabius shook his head. ‘It is impossible to say for sure, but I would expect this pupating stage of development to be rapid. Indeed, the change in physicality might already be under way. It could be too late to stop it.’

‘But it might not?’ said Lucius.

‘Nothing is certain,’ admitted Fabius.

‘Then we have to try,’ stated the First Captain. ‘If Fulgrim is no longer master of his own body then we have to get him back. We are his sons, and whatever has claimed his flesh must be captured and cast out of his body. Lord Fulgrim is our gene-father and I take orders from no one but him.’

A charge of febrile excitement swept through the gathered captains, and Lucius let out a shuddering sigh. He had convinced the others of his suspicions while keeping his blood inside his body and his head upon his shoulders.

‘So, a pertinent question…’ said Lucius. ‘How do we go about capturing a primarch?’

10

The Gallery of Swords was a place where the exhibitionists of the Emperor’s Children liked to display their latest flesh masterpieces. Devotees of Apothecary Fabius, hoping to attract his notice, would drape their latest confections of macabre living art from the bull-headed statues that lined the grand processional of the Andronius.

The towering granite-hewn heroes of the Legion, warriors who had cut the first histories of the Emperor’s Children into the meat of the galaxy, were no longer recognisable as human. Their lovingly-carved faces had been recut, defaced and shaped anew into forms pleasing to the lurid aesthetics of the Legion. Leering grotesques kept watch on those who passed beneath them, and all who gazed upon them felt the wondrous horror of their debauched expressions.

Apothecary Fabius made his lair beneath the Gallery of Swords, a sprawling medicae complex that had been transformed from a place of healing, research and excellence into a shadowed labyrinth of excruciation, screams and nightmarish, inhumane experiments.

Fulgrim swept into the Gallery of Swords with Julius Kaesoron at his side, majestic in a long robe of cream fabric, with silver embroidered stitching running along the hems and collar. A sword belt of mirrored discs encircled his waist, the golden hilt of the anathame never far from Fulgrim’s hand.

The primarch’s white hair was pulled back into a long scalp-lock woven with mother of pearl and held in place by a circlet of golden laurels. His sculpted chest was bare, and the pale skin bore numerous ridges of scar tissue from the last treatments and enhancements worked upon him by Fabius.

Even though Kaesoron was encased in his spiked and flesh-wrapped Terminator armour, Fulgrim still stood head and shoulders above him. Clad in naught but his finery, Fulgrim was still a warrior to be feared.

The primarch stopped beside one statue that had suffered particularly at the hands of the Legion’s craftsmen. He smiled up at the graven image of a reptilian bull’s head. The warrior’s armour had been cut with blessed symbols, and a trio of hollowed out bodies hung from barbed nooses, one from each outstretched arm, and another from its neck.

‘Ah, Illios, you would not know yourself now,’ said Fulgrim, with wistful nostalgia. ‘I remember the day you first drew sword alongside me as we forged the alliance of the eighteen tribes. We were young then, and warriors who knew nothing of the wider world.’

‘Do you wish he were here with us now?’ asked Kaesoron.

Fulgrim laughed and shook his head. ‘No, for I fear I would have to kill him. He was always so unbending, Julius. He was a man with an unbreakable code of honour from the elder days, I do not think he would have appreciated the enlightenments we have received.’

The primarch took a wistful look at the statue of his former blade brother and a strange expression passed over his alabaster features. Kaesoron’s eyes were no longer able to perceive the world as they once had, but even he could see the light of dark memory in the primarch’s eyes.

‘How naïve we were, old friend,’ mused Fulgrim. ‘How blind…’

‘My lord?’

‘Nothing, Julius,’ said Fulgrim, marching towards the end of the gallery.

‘How did Lord Commander Illios die?’ asked Kaesoron.

‘You know the answer to that, Julius. Your introspections on perfection would have required you to memorise the victories of our past.’

‘I know, but to hear it from your lips is always a sublime experience.’

‘Very well,’ smiled Fulgrim. ‘Apothecary Fabius will not mind if we are a little late.’

Kaesoron shook his head. ‘I am sure he will not.’

‘Good. Ah, Illios, it was your temper that saw you killed,’ said Fulgrim, his tone warming with recall. ‘You were a man of joyous rages and great sorrows. Never good combinations in a warrior, but you were almost great enough to survive your own weaknesses. Mighty he was, Julius, tall and proud, with the triple-bladed Executioner Falchion and the Armour of Chemos. He was unstoppable. A warrior such as he had only one superior, but he held no grudge that I was his better.’

‘It was atop the Barchettan Warlord’s city-leviathan he fell, was it not?’

‘If you know the story so well, why bid me tell it?’ snapped Fulgrim, his eyes ablaze.

‘Apologies, lord,’ said Kaesoron, keeping his head bowed. ‘It is a stirring story, and I was caught up in your words.’

‘Then you should have kept your mouth shut, Julius,’ said Fulgrim. ‘You do not interrupt me when I am speaking. Did Eidolon’s death teach you nothing?’

‘It was instructional,’ said Kaesoron.

‘When I speak, I am the star around which you orbit,’ said Fulgrim, leaning down to fix Kaesoron with his furious gaze. His black eyes were pools of dark oil, ready to ignite with unspeakable rage. Kaesoron knew he had made a terrible error in speaking and that his life now hung in the balance.

‘Who but you, my lord, could speak with such passion and force me into a loose tongue?’

‘None other,’ agreed Fulgrim. ‘It is only natural you should be entranced by my words.’

Fulgrim’s wrath evaporated and he slapped a powerful hand on Kaesoron’s shoulder guard, staggering the First Captain.

‘Ah, we are a pair are we not, Julius?’ reflected the primarch. ‘Reminiscing of past glories when there are fresh foes against which to beat our breast and fresh sensations to be wrung from each breath.’

‘Then let us hurry our steps to Apothecary Fabius,’ said Kaesoron, gesturing to the shadowed cloisters at the end of the Gallery of Swords.

‘Indeed, we must,’ said Fulgrim, his voice aquiver with anticipation. ‘I wonder what delights he has for me this time.’

‘He promises wondrous things,’ said Julius Kaesoron.

11

Lucius watched Fulgrim and Julius Kaesoron draw near the end of the gallery. His breath was coming in short spikes, and he fought to keep his excitement from getting the better of his caution. As thrillingly treasonous as this was, he wanted to live to see another day. Attacking a primarch was, perhaps, a foolish way to go about that, but his heightened senses were alive with the rush of sensation flooding him.

The stone beneath his bare palm was a smorgasbord of textures, rough, smooth, indented and imperfect in its carving. Polished, moon-blush granite, its original surface planed smooth to microscopic tolerances, then hacked apart with gleeful chisels wielded with screaming abandon. He could no longer tell which of the Legion’s heroes he sheltered behind, and that lacuna was like a missing tooth.

Lucius fought this newly-birthed obsession down and wrenched his thoughts back to the task at hand with a shuddering breath. To experience every sensation to the limits of endurance was sublime, but it had a nasty habit of diverting a warrior from his true goals. Bad enough that one warrior should be so caught up, but woe betide any world that became the target of the entire Legion’s obsession.

He forced his gaze back down the length of the Gallery of Swords, watching as Kaesoron drew Fulgrim deeper into their trap. Vairosean’s warriors were hidden in the shadows of the mighty statues, each shrouded with a falsehood and kept silent with implanted neural shriekers that bombarded their cerebral cortex with howling discordia. When the word was given, those shriekers would go silent, depriving the implanted warriors of the blissful howling and driving them to replace it with fresh stimulus. Vairosean had developed the implants on the journey from Prismatica, and, much as Lucius was loath to credit such a plodder with anything of merit, he had to admit the shriekers transformed the Kakophoni into obsessively fanatical killers on the battlefield.

Against the might of a primarch they would need to be.

It seemed inconceivable that Fulgrim could not be aware of their presence, but as Lucius and the Legion had become so caught up in their own self-obsessions, so too had the primarch. Where Lucius’s clouds of obsession were heavy and almost impenetrable, he could only imagine what heights of narcissism a luminous being such as Fulgrim might attain.

Lucius glanced to his right, seeing the shadowed opening that led down into the forsaken lair of Apothecary Fabius. He remembered descending into the dimly-lit labyrinth after his defection from the fools on Isstvan III, his every nerve alive with fearful anticipation. He had set foot in the Apothecarion a handful of times only, his skills so great as to rarely require medical attention. He remembered it as a sterile place of clinical, antiseptic chill, but it had become a gallery of grotesqueries, its walls spattered with rust-coloured stains and hung with biological trophies, mutant curios and bubbling tanks of noxious fluids.

The stink had been incredible, but once Fabius had opened him up and remade him in the primarch’s image, it had become a place of wonders to him. As much as he revelled in the glorious worlds opened up to him by Fabius, he could never bring himself to like him. He supposed such things were immaterial now.

He heard Fulgrim ask a question, but the words were lost to him, and he swore silently as he realised he had been distracted once more. Taking a grip on himself, Lucius narrowed his concentration to a sharp blade of focus. Fulgrim was almost upon him, and as architect of this plan, it fell to Lucius to make the first move.

Lucius stepped from the shadows, and the fractional space that separated life and death grew ever thinner. His senses surged with the vividness of this moment, the thrilling anticipation of what he was doing, the sheer madness of it and the irreversible nature of this act.

‘Lucius?’ said Fulgrim with an amused smile. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I have come to speak to you.’

‘No, “my lord”, Lucius? Have you forgotten to whom you speak?’

‘I don’t know who I’m speaking to,’ said Lucius, staring into the hard, opaque orbs of Fulgrim’s eyes. He saw no pity, no humanity and nothing that spoke to him of the lord and master he had loved and served with all his heart. He wondered if that was true or if he was just remembering a past that didn’t exist, a fictive history invented to justify this moment.

‘I am Fulgrim, Master of the Emperor’s Children,’ said Fulgrim, glancing about himself as though stretching his senses out and gradually becoming aware of the noose into which he had just placed his neck. ‘And you will obey me.’

Lucius shook his head and rested his palm on the pommel of his sword. He wasn’t surprised to realise it was slick with sweat.

‘I don’t know what you are, but you are not my father,’ said Lucius, and the primarch laughed. It was a good laugh, infectious and rich with deep amusement. It was the laugh of a man who knows the joke he is hearing should be appreciated on a level beyond that which everyone else around him understands.

Fulgrim grinned, his dark eyes alight with perverse pleasure at the situation.

‘You think you can take me, swordsman? Is that it?’ asked Fulgrim. ‘I see how you look at me, the obsessive study and drive to prove yourself better than everyone else. You think I don’t see how you wish you could pit your blade against mine?’

Lucius hid his surprise. He had assumed Fulgrim to be too self-absorbed to notice his calculating scrutiny, but he should have understood that true self-obsession could only be fed by the attentions of others. Fulgrim would have basked in Lucius’s study, and who knew what else he had done? Had his every movement been a pantomime to lull Lucius into assuming superiority or was this just a calculated bluff?

‘I have watched you ever since Isstvan Five, and you are not the same warrior I followed into battle on Laeran. The Fulgrim I followed onto the surface of that eldar world is not the same one looking at me and daring me to come at him. You are an impostor with my master’s face and I will take no orders from a usurper.’

Fulgrim laughed once more, squatting down on his haunches as the hilarity of Lucius’s words threatened to overcome him. Lucius scowled in petulant irritation. What had he said that was so funny? He glanced at Kaesoron, but it was impossible to read the First Captain’s expression.

‘Oh, you are a rare and precious treasure, Lucius,’ roared Fulgrim. ‘Don’t you see? We all take our orders from a usurper. Horus Lupercal has not yet earned the title of Emperor. Until then, what else is he but a usurper?’

‘That’s not the same,’ said Lucius, feeling his moral high ground in this confrontation eroding beneath him. ‘Horus Lupercal is the Warmaster, but you are not Fulgrim. I see his face, but something else lurks behind it, something spawned by the same powers that granted us the power to fully experience the wonders this galaxy has to offer.’

Fulgrim rose to his full height and said, ‘If that were the case, swordsman, should you not then prostrate yourself before me and beg me to open your eyes to fresh wonders? If I am an avatar of the warp’s Dark Prince clothed in the flesh of your beloved primarch, am I not doing a better job than he did in showing you how best to sate your hungers and desires?’

Shapes moved in the shadows between the alcoves of statues, and Lucius saw Heliton and Abranxe emerge from the opposite sides of the marble statue of Lord Commander Pelleon. Marius Vairosean marched along the grand processional with his long-necked cannon slung at his side, its dissonance coils thrumming with potential. His Kakophoni emerged from their hiding places, eyes wide with madness and the need to be driven into sonic ecstasy.

Apothecary Fabius stepped from the arched entrance to his subterranean kingdom, flanked by Kalimos, Daimon, Ruen and Krysander.

Fulgrim turned in a slow circle, taking in the measure of the warriors arrayed against him.

Lucius counted perhaps fifty warriors and wished he had fifty more. And then a hundred more beyond that.

The captains of the Legion encircled Fulgrim, each with their weapon unsheathed and with murder in their hearts. Lucius drew his blade and rolled his shoulders to loosen the muscles. They had not come to kill Fulgrim – if such a thing was even possible for mortals – but this rapidly-unfolding drama had all the hallmarks of a situation spiralling out of control.

‘Alas, I am betrayed by those I hold most dear,’ said Fulgrim, clutching his hands to his breast as though his heart was broken. ‘You all countenance these lies? Can you all truthfully believe I am not your beloved gene-sire, who brought us all back from the brink of extinction and who led us to truths denied us by our once-father?’

Fulgrim’s face crumpled and Lucius was not a little unsettled to see a single tear work its way down the marbled flawlessness of the primarch’s face.

The primarch turned to Julius Kaesoron with a hurt look of betrayal in his eyes.

‘Even you, Julius?’ said the Phoenician. ‘Then fall, Fulgrim!’

‘Take him!’ bellowed Julius Kaesoron, and the captains of the Legion stepped away from Fulgrim as Marius Vairosean unleashed a barrage of shrieking reverberations from his cannon. Statues split under the sonic assault, and Lucius felt a delicious frisson throughout his body as the aural blast wave threw him to the flagstones of the gallery.

Fulgrim staggered under the impact, his robes ripped from his body with the tearing power of the shockwave. He dropped to one knee, his wreath of golden laurels shattering into thousands of fragments. Beneath his robes, Fulgrim was naked but for a crimson loincloth and Lucius marvelled at the almost serpentine fluidity of his body. Daimon leapt towards the downed primarch with his grotesque maul swinging down like an executioner’s axe.

Fulgrim swayed aside from the blow, letting the barbed head of the weapon bury itself in the stone decking. Splinters exploded from the impact, and before Daimon could retrieve his maul, Fulgrim stepped in and drove the heel of his palm into the captain’s face. Daimon had no time to scream before his face was smashed hollow. Even as the warrior fell, Fulgrim swept up the maul in his right fist as Ruen darted forwards and rammed his envenomed blade to the hilt into Fulgrim’s side.

The haft of the maul slammed down into Ruen’s elbow, shattering the bones of his upper and lower arm. The captain’s howl of pain was music to Lucius’s ears, as Fulgrim tore the absurdly small blade from his body. Fulgrim kicked Ruen away, sending him spinning across the gallery to slam into a statue with a crack of shattering plate and breaking bone.

Lucius circled Fulgrim, not yet willing to commit to the fight. His blade tingled in his grip, eager to taste such rarefied blood and hungry to draw him into the dance of swords.

‘Not yet, my beauty,’ he whispered. ‘Not when there are others to suffer the worst of the primarch’s ire and strength.’

If Ruen’s toxins were having any effect on Fulgrim, Lucius couldn’t say, but it appeared that the captain of the 21st had been premature in his boasts that his banes could fell any living foe.

The Kakophoni unleashed a roaring series of blasts from their sonic weapons, filling the Gallery of Swords with clashing echoes and reverberating harmonies that drew blood from the ears of all that heard them. Fulgrim shrieked in pleasure as the sound vibrated his flesh and bones with a ferocity that should have killed him thrice over.

Heliton stepped in and drove the spiked fist of his cestus gauntlet into Fulgrim’s lower back, a blow that would have shattered the spine of even an armoured Legiones Astartes. The primarch took the blow and spun on his heel. A jabbing elbow put Heliton on his back, his lower jaw hanging by a thread of glistening sinew and pulped bone. Abranxe screamed to see his boon companion laid low and swept his twin swords for Fulgrim’s neck. The primarch deflected one sword with the head of Daimon’s maul, as Abranxe spun inside the weapon’s reach to slide his second blade across Fulgrim’s throat.

Blood cascaded down Fulgrim’s throat, and his eyes widened with genuine surprise. Lucius felt a fleeting moment of bitter disappointment and venomous jealousy at the thought of a merely competent swordsman like Abranxe landing such a blow. But no sooner had the blood begun to flow than it stopped, and Fulgrim took hold of Abranxe by the neck and hurled him away.

‘A good move, Abranxe,’ said Fulgrim with a rasp of gratification. ‘I will remember it.’

Kalimos cracked his lash, its toothed length wrapping around Fulgrim’s left arm. The carnodon teeth tore into his flesh, and squirts of blood sprayed from the wounds. As Kalimos hauled on his lash, Julius Kaesoron stepped in and delivered a thunderous left hook with his crackling fist. Augmented with strength enough to tear apart a battle tank, Kaesoron’s blow drove Fulgrim to his knees, but before he could strike again, Kalimos jerked on his lash as Krysander plunged his dagger between the primarch’s shoulder blades.

Fulgrim closed his fist on the gnawing lash and gave what appeared to be no more than a gentle tug. Kalimos was plucked from his feet and spun around the primarch, slamming into Krysander and sending the pair of them crashing to the ends of the gallery. Kaesoron swung again, but Fulgrim was ready for him, blocking the blow with Daimon’s maul and thundering a naked fist into his face. Kaesoron dropped with a grunt, but Fulgrim made no move to finish him.

‘Now, Lucius, strike!’ shouted Fabius, and the swordsman cursed the Apothecary as Fulgrim spun to face him. The primarch dropped the maul and drew the glitter-sheened blade Horus Lupercal had gifted him aboard the Vengeful Spirit.

‘Now we come to it, swordsman,’ grinned Fulgrim, swaying on his feet.

Lucius saw the pale complexion of his primarch was ashen and spat to the deck.

‘This would be no contest worth making,’ he said. ‘Ruen’s venom and your wounds render it meaningless.’

Fulgrim spread wide his arms and took stock of the blood dripping from his body. ‘This?’ he said. ‘This is nothing. Come at me with the blade I gave you and we will settle this question once and for all, yes?’

Lucius cocked his head to one side, meeting the primarch’s maddened gaze and seeing a truth he knew was as unshakable as it was inevitable.

Even in his wounded state, Fulgrim would kill him.

And Lucius wasn’t ready to die, not for this.

Before he could consider the matter further, Julius Kaesoron rose up behind Fulgrim and slammed his energised fist down on Fulgrim’s skull. A blow that should have pulped its victim’s head to a smeared red ruin merely drove Fulgrim to the ground. The Phoenician shook his head and his bloody rictus grin put Lucius in mind of the deathly iconography he had seen carved into Isstvan V’s ruins.

As Fulgrim sought to push himself to his feet, Marius Vairosean jammed the end of his sonic cannon into Fulgrim’s neck and unleashed a barrage of squalling harmonics that filled the gallery with ear-bleeding noise. Lucius cried out in pain, and Fulgrim’s eyes rolled back in their sockets as he let out a groan of what sounded very much like delirious pleasure.

The sword fell from the primarch’s hand, and he toppled to the cracked flagstones with a heavy thump. Lucius looked up, blinking away bright spots of light from his vision and hearing what sounded like a million bells clanging at once. He stood a few metres from Vairosean, so he couldn’t begin to imagine the effect the blast must have had on Fulgrim.

The surviving captains picked themselves up from the ground and formed a ring of dazed warriors around the fallen god. It had been a battle like no other, the warriors of a Legion turning on their own primarch, and the enormity of what they had done was not lost on them.

Lucius did not know what to feel. He had been cheated of his duel with Fulgrim, a duel he felt in his bones he would have lost. But some secret instinct told him that he would yet get his chance to test his blade against the primarch’s alien weapon and yet live to speak of it.

Lucius turned his gaze upon his fellow captains. None marked his stare, for they could not tear their eyes from the downed primarch. Kalimos bled from numerous cracks in his armour, and Krysander’s breastplate was dented so deeply that the bone shield of his chest must surely be in fragments. Abranxe knelt by Heliton, holding the hanging fragments of his brother’s lower jaw in his hands. Vairosean’s howling mouth was spread even wider in a hissing grimace of triumph, and Julius Kaesoron stared at his fist as though unable to believe he had raised it in anger against Fulgrim.

None spoke. None knew what to say.

They had taken arms against their primarch and they had enjoyed it.

Apothecary Fabius broke the spell of their silence.

‘Fools!’ hissed the lifeless voice of the Apothecary. ‘You would stand gaping like landed fish until he awoke!’

Fabius turned away and made his way to the arched entrance to his necropolis of freakish surgeries. As he reached the edge of shadow, he turned back to the Legion captains.

‘Bring him below,’ said Fabius. ‘We have much to do.’

‘What exactly are you going to do, Apothecary?’ demanded Kaesoron.

‘I am going to exorcise the creature that has stolen the primarch’s flesh.’

‘How?’ asked Lucius.

‘By any means necessary,’ said Fabius with an odious grin.

12

It was the most terrible thing he had ever seen.

It was the most wondrous thing he had ever seen.

Fulgrim, the Phoenician, Lord of the Emperor’s Children, Master of the III Legion, bound with the heaviest of fetters, chemically subdued and laid naked on a cold steel gurney like a corpse bound for dissection. Fulgrim’s arms were thrown up above his head, his legs spread like the Vitruvian man of old.

Lucius’s eyes roamed Fulgrim’s pale flesh, the alabaster firmness criss-crossed in a web of surgical scars and incisions; knotted ridges that spoke of unknowable procedures and unspeakable experimentation upon the secret flesh within.

The delicious treason of this moment was something to be treasured, a wondrous sensation of the most terrible betrayal. Yet, for all that he called it betrayal, wasn’t it an act of loyalty to cast out the creature that had taken possession of their master’s soul?

Fabius circled the supine primarch, sliding needles as thick as Lucius’s little finger into Fulgrim’s arms and chest. Chem-shunts pumped powerful soporifics and muscle relaxants that would have dropped even the largest greenskin. Gleaming silver wires hooked to humming generators trailed from the primarch’s temples and groin, and from every point on his body where pain might be heightened.

The lights were kept low, as befitted this act of violation, and the only sound was the murmuring of the hooded null-wretches in each shadowed corner of the chamber and the wheezing breath of the machines Fabius had set up around his…

Lucius wanted to say patient, but the word that came to mind was victim.

Julius Kaesoron stood silently at the foot of the slab, while Marius Vairosean paced like a caged raptor. Lucius smiled at his discomfort. Vairosean had ever been the lackey and the blindly obedient slave. Caught in a quandary of obedience to something that might not be Fulgrim and the possibility of betraying his master, Vairosean’s mind must be alive with contradictory thoughts and fears.

Lucius almost envied him.

Fabius’s thrall-slaves had carried the mewling forms of Heliton and Ruen deeper into the labyrinth; flesh-vats and xenosalival-sutures already prepared for their treatment. Daimon was beyond help, his skull smashed to concave ruin by the primarch’s fist, but the rest of their treasonous band would survive. The thought sent a sliver of unease worming through Lucius’s brain, and he turned to Kaesoron.

‘Did you think we could do it?’ he asked.

‘Do what?’

‘This,’ said Lucius, gesturing towards the fallen primarch. ‘Capture Fulgrim. I wasn’t sure we could do it.’

‘You didn’t do it,’ pointed out Kaesoron.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Look at you,’ hissed Kaesoron. ‘Not a mark on you, swordsman. You bring this matter to the brotherhood, and then step back and let us do the fighting for you.’

Lucius grinned, energised by Kaesoron’s anger. ‘What happened up there was a brawl. I fight with perfect grace, total immersion and fluid perfection. That was not a fight that required any of those qualities.’

‘More like you saw you couldn’t beat him.’

‘That too,’ added Lucius, ‘but there’s no shame in that.’

‘True enough,’ said Kaesoron, his capricious anger fading as quickly as it had come.

Marius Vairosean moved around the edge of the gurney, his stretched-out face making it impossible to read his expression. The captain had slung his sonic weapon over his shoulder, but the pulsing waves of hard-edged sound still rippled from its energised coils.

‘Daimon is dead,’ said Vairosean. ‘And Heliton died on the way down.’

‘And the Legion will be no worse off for their loss, if you ask me,’ said Lucius.

‘Ruen’s arm is shattered beyond repair,’ continued Vairosean, as though Lucius had not spoken. ‘Krysander and Kalimos will live, but they will play no part in… this.’

‘A small price to pay for subduing a primarch,’ noted Kaesoron, as Fabius approached.

The Apothecary wore his white hair bound in a long scalp-lock, which only served to render his already gaunt features more skeletal and emaciated. His eyes were black, and Lucius couldn’t remember if they had always been that way or had been changed to match those of the primarch. He wore a floor-length coat of flayed human skin, taken from the bodies of the dead on Isstvan V. Here and there, it was possible to recognise the features of a face, a mouth stretched in an endless scream of agony or eyes wide with horror at the sight of the skinner’s knife. Some of the faces seemed familiar, but Lucius knew that without the architecture of bone, every face tended to similarity.

Eschewing his chirurgeon device, Fabius favoured a belt of knotted sinew pierced through with metal loops, from which hung the tools of the excruciator’s art. Hooks, blades, spikes, pliers and barbs glittered in the half-light, but Lucius wondered if such banal instruments would draw screams from a being as powerful as Fulgrim.

‘We are ready to begin,’ said Fabius, drawing on a clicking pair of silver steel gauntlets.

‘Then let us be done with this,’ said Kaesoron. ‘If Lucius is right and there is something else concealed behind Lord Fulgrim’s face, then the sooner it is gone the better.’

They spread out around Fulgrim, each weighing the enormity of what they were doing against the potential for wonder and fresh sensation. That they had managed to subdue a primarch was miracle enough, but to drive out a creature of the warp…

Was such a thing even possible?

Lucius looked from face to face, understanding that no one gathered around the body of Fulgrim could answer that question. The Emperor’s Children had been a Legion reticent in employing Librarians. The genetic quirk that allowed a psyker to wield the power of the warp came about as a result of a genetic mutation, a flaw. And nothing that could be considered a flaw was often permitted within the ranks of Fulgrim’s Legion.

‘So what do we do?’ asked Kaesoron.

‘First, we wake him,’ said Fabius, stroking needle-tipped fingers over Fulgrim’s chest.

‘Assuming he doesn’t just break free and kill us all, what then?’ said Lucius.

‘We drive the creature out,’ said Fabius. ‘With reason, with threats and with pain.’

‘Pain?’ snorted Vairosean. ‘What pain can you administer that a primarch would feel?’

Fabius smiled his reptilian grin that promised a host of pains he alone knew and would be only too glad to demonstrate.

‘I know this body like no other,’ said Fabius, running his surgically-enabled digits over Fulgrim’s skin with a lover’s familiarity. ‘I know everything about how it was put together, the secret powers alloyed to its flesh and bone, the unique organs crafted for the creation of such a numinous being. What the Emperor created, I have broken down into its constituent parts and remade in a greater whole.’

The arrogance of Fabius was astounding, but Lucius felt himself warming to it. To have opened up the body of a primarch and gazed upon the wonders within was an honour few, if any, would have known, so perhaps it was arrogance born of knowledge.

‘Then do it,’ said Kaesoron.

Fabius nodded, though there was more amusement to the gesture than any real acquiescence. How long would it be, wondered Lucius, before Fabius’s arrogance lifted him from the chain of command entirely? Once so rigid and unbending, the Emperor’s Children adhered to the old structure in lieu of anything better, but even that was breaking down as its warriors put their own desires and whims above those of the Legion.

How long before we are little more than squabbling warbands fighting for our own self-gratification?

Lucius had no answer to the question, and nor did that lack trouble him overmuch. Whether any remnant of the old Legion survived their rebirth was a matter of supreme indifference to him.

Fabius clipped a fluid drip to Fulgrim’s arm and a shimmering crimson fluid sprinted along its length. No sooner had it entered the primarch’s body than Fulgrim’s black eyes opened and he blinked rapidly, like a sleeper suddenly awoken from a vivid dream.

‘Ah, my sons…’ said Fulgrim. ‘What is this new diversion you have for me?’

Fabius leaned over to speak in Fulgrim’s ear. ‘You are not Fulgrim, are you?’

Fulgrim’s eyes darted to the Apothecary, and Lucius caught the whiff of conspiracy in the glance. He leaned forwards and lifted Fabius’s hand from Fulgrim’s chest.

‘Lucius,’ breathed Fulgrim with perfumed breath. ‘Such a shame we were denied the caress of steel, don’t you think?’

‘I think you have been luring me into that fight for some time,’ answered Lucius.

Fulgrim laughed. ‘Was I really so obvious? It would have made for a sublime experience, Lucius. How can you say you are truly alive unless you have first tasted death? To rise anew from the ashes of one life and be reborn into another. To taste oblivion and then return, ah, now that is an experience not to be dismissed so lightly.’

‘I think death might sour of its charms in short order,’ said Lucius. ‘I think I will stick to the pleasures life can offer.’

Fulgrim’s face twisted in a pout of disappointment. ‘How short sighted of you, my son. No matter, you will reconsider in time, I think. Now, to the rest of you. Can you seriously believe I am not who I say I am when I tell you I am your master?’

‘We know you are not Fulgrim,’ said Kaesoron.

‘Then who do you believe me to be?’

‘A creature of the immaterium,’ said Vairosean. ‘A daemon spawn.’

‘A daemon?’ laughed Fulgrim. ‘And how else would you describe a primarch? Are you so naïve as to believe that all things named daemon are evil? Daemon or primarch, both are creatures fashioned from immaterial energies, hybrids of flesh and spirit brought into this world by unnatural means. If you knew anything of my creation then you would not bandy such words so carelessly.’

‘So you admit that you are a daemon?’ hissed Kaesoron.

‘Julius, my beloved son,’ said Fulgrim. ‘Have you become so eager for conflict that you consciously blind yourself to reality? I have already told you that by Marius’s dull definition, yes, I am a daemon! A daemon willed into creation by a being who seeks to win his immortality through storming the realm of gods by clambering over our corpses.’

‘It speaks with lies masquerading as truth,’ warned Fabius. ‘Like the horse of ancient Truva, it will send its falsehoods garbed in that which sounds pleasant to your ears.’

‘Then we should cut out his tongue,’ said Lucius, and he was rewarded by a flicker of unease in Fulgrim’s dark eyes. He saw anger, amusement and disappointment in that flicker, but which was the true emotion, he could not tell.

‘Marius,’ said Fulgrim. ‘Of all my sons, you were the last I expected to see here.’

The words dripped with anguish, but Marius Vairosean did not flinch from them. Ever since Marius had failed Fulgrim on Laeran, he had been the most devoted servant, ever eager to please and determined to obey any order without question. If Fulgrim hoped to appeal to that aspect of Vairosean, he was to be sorely disappointed.

‘My love for my primarch knows no bounds,’ said Marius, leaning forwards as though to spit in the bound primarch’s face. ‘But you are not he, and I will do whatever it takes to cast you from his body. No pain is beyond me, no suffering too great to make that happen. Do you understand, daemon spawn?’

Fulgrim’s face split apart in a wide grin.

‘Then enough talk, whelps,’ he said. ‘Let us begin our journey into madness together!’

13

Fabius began with that most ancient of interrogation techniques, the unveiling of his many devices of excruciation and explaining of the purposes to which they would be put. They ranged from mundane artefacts, such as any fashioner of metal or wood might employ – hammers, needle-nosed pliers, nails, welding torches, awls, planes and slow-bit drills – to more exotic implements of suffering. Nerve-splicers, organ-liquefiers, chakra-inflamers, marrow-augers and brain-stem impellents.

‘This last device is one that will give me great pleasure to use,’ said Fabius, hooking a number of metal barbs into Fulgrim’s spine. The gurney upon which Fulgrim lay had rotated about its long axis, revealing flagellated shoulders and a back that was a corrugated landscape of scar tissue and healing weals. Lucius saw an admirable devotion in the primarch’s flesh, a single-minded pursuit of pleasurable agony that only the true devotee of pain could attain.

‘What is it and what does it do?’ asked Kaesoron.

Fabius smiled, pleased to be able to elaborate on his tool of suffering. ‘It is a neural parasite I have engineered from gene-spliced xenos brain fluids and nanotech recovered from the Diasporex hybrid-captains.’

‘That doesn’t answer his question,’ snapped Marius.

Fabius nodded and tapped a long-nailed finger on the back of Fulgrim’s skull. Lucius frowned at the gesture, the implications of detachment altogether too complete. To Fabius, Fulgrim was simply another piece of meat upon which he could work his biological conjurations. The outcome of this betrayal would decide the future course of the Legion, but it was already simply a means to uncover some new biological quirk and a test of a new invention. Lucius’s feelings towards Fabius went from dislike to hate.

Fabius lifted an artefact that looked like the rear portion of a battle helm and turned it around in his hands. Thin spikes jutted from one side, each hooked to an array of injector shunts loaded with glittering silver fluid that rippled like expectant mercury.

‘Once placed upon the subject, nano-fluid is introduced to the subject’s body, whereupon it latches onto the brain stem and follows the neural pathways into the brain. The various xenos species employed in the creation of the serum were possessed of enhanced psychic potential, and the invasion of the brain chemistry allows the manipulator of the device to access any area of the brain and stimulate it as required.’

‘To what end?’ asked Lucius, though he had a good idea.

‘All things mortal are simply engines,’ said Fabius. ‘Mechanical animals of flesh and blood, but driven by essentially mechanistic imperatives. What we mistake for personality and character are simply expressions of response to stimuli. With a complex enough algorithm, it would be possible to exactly replicate a functioning machine persona that would be indistinguishable from a living creature. Knowing this, we can stimulate certain areas of the brain, enhancing whatever aspects we choose while blocking others. I could dash the brains of a newborn infant against a wall in front of its mother and this device would see her delirious with ecstasy should I so choose. Or I could lightly touch a man’s chest and make him believe I was tearing his heart out with my bare hands.’

‘Then why the need for the other devices?’ asked Kaesoron.

‘As much as this device can make a man believe he is burning to death without so much as a spark being near him, there is a certain pleasure to be taken from a… simpler approach to pain,’ admitted Fabius.

‘On that at least we agree,’ said the First Captain.

‘So what are we waiting for?’ demanded Vairosean. ‘Let us begin and be done with this.’

Fabius gave a slow nod and rotated the gurney around once more. Fulgrim’s face was ruddy and Lucius could see he relished the prospect of their attempted rescue of the soul whose body he had stolen.

‘I remember that device,’ said Fulgrim. ‘Do you really believe it will work on a being like me? My consciousness is an order of magnitude greater than yours. It functions in realms beyond anything you can comprehend, its upper limits so great they cannot be contained purely in a cocoon of bone, and must exist in realms which only gods can access.’

‘We shall find out,’ said Fabius, insulted that his genius was being impugned.

‘Start with that one,’ ordered Kaesoron. ‘If we are successful, there must be a perfect body into which Fulgrim can return.’

‘My sons, you have been led to this like sheep to the slaughter,’ said Fulgrim. ‘Lucius brings you an idea that generates a flicker of interest in your dull lives and you seize it as a golden lifeline just so you can actually feel something. Have you learned nothing since our ascension? Non-conformity in thought and deed is the only vital life. Brotherhoods are for sheep-minds, and heresy is godly!’

‘Enough talking,’ said Lucius, snatching up a set of bladed pliers and sliding them over the middle finger of Fulgrim’s right hand. With one swift, even pressure, he severed the finger at the middle knuckle, and a squirt of blood pulsed from the wound before slowing to a drip.

Fulgrim howled, but whether it was in pain or pleasure Lucius could not tell.

Fabius snatched the pliers from Lucius with an angry scowl.

‘Excruciation is a precise and meticulous art, a stepped pyramid of pain,’ he said. ‘To randomly cut and maim is the work of amateurs. I will have no part in such butchery.’

‘Then stop talking and get on with it,’ said Lucius. ‘Because it sounds to me like you’re stalling.’

‘The swordsman has a point,’ said Kaesoron, looming over the Apothecary. Clad in his Terminator armour, Julius dwarfed Fabius, and the Apothecary nodded in acquiescence.

‘As you will it, First Captain,’ said Fabius, turning to his instruments. ‘We shall begin with the pain of fire.’

Lucius felt his pulse race as Fabius lifted a cutting torch from the bench, snapping the igniting mechanism three times before the flame caught. Used to cut through sheet steel, the flame sharpened to a cone of blue-hot light as Fabius adjusted the gas flow.

Julius Kaesoron leaned over Fulgrim and said, ‘This is your last chance, daemon spawn. Get out of my primarch’s body and you need not suffer.’

‘I welcome suffering,’ said Fulgrim with bared teeth.

Kaesoron nodded, and Fabius brought the flame down on the sole of Fulgrim’s foot.

The flesh curdled, running like molten rubber as it withered beneath the incredible heat. Fulgrim’s back arched and his mouth stretched wide in a soundless scream as the veins and sinews at his neck lifted from his skin like colliding tectonic ridges.

Lucius watched bone rise from the melting skin as it peeled back. Marrow burned with a rich, fatty hiss, and the scent of seared flesh was a rich, gamey texture in the back of the throat. Lucius had smelled and tasted human meat before, but compared to that poor feast, this was an epicurean delight.

He saw the smell was having a similar effect on the others.

Kaesoron’s molten features softened their hard edges, and Vairosean held himself upright only with an effort of will. Only Fabius appeared unaffected, but Lucius guessed he had already savoured many sights and smells of a primarch’s body in his explorations of its divine biology. Fabius played the flame over Fulgrim’s foot until all that remained below the ankle was a blackened mass of fused bone and boiled marrow that drooled to the tiled floor of the Apothecarion.

Julius Kaesoron took hold of the charred bone. ‘This suffering can all end,’ he said, regaining his composure with remarkable swiftness. Lucius licked his lips, still savouring the wondrously rich and flavoursome taste of Fulgrim’s seared flesh.

Fulgrim looked up at Kaesoron with a taut smile and said, ‘Suffering? What do you know of suffering? You are a warrior who fights where I tell him to fight, a tool to achieve my desires, nothing more. You do not suffer and should not speak of it to those who do.’

‘I choose not to suffer,’ said Kaesoron. ‘A man can be strong enough to master his feelings so that it is impossible to make him suffer. To suffer pain and indignity is a loss of control. It is to admit to human weakness. I am strong enough to deny suffering.’

‘Then you are a bigger fool than I took you for, Julius,’ said Fulgrim. ‘Where do you think strength comes from if not suffering? Hardship and loss are what grant you strength. Those who have never known true suffering cannot have the same strength as others who have. A man must be weak to suffer, and by that suffering he will be made strong.’

‘Then you will be made mighty when we are done with you,’ promised Vairosean.

Fulgrim laughed. ‘Pain is truth,’ he said. ‘Suffering is the sharp end of the whip, not suffering is the end of the whip the master holds in his hand. Every act of suffering is a test of love and I will prove this to you by enduring all the pain you can inflict upon me, because I love you all.’

‘These are not Fulgrim’s words,’ snapped Kaesoron. ‘They are honeyed lies to weaken our resolve.’

‘Not true,’ said Fulgrim. ‘All the truths I have learned since taking the life of my brother have shown this to be indisputable. All things in this grand universe are linked to one another by invisible threads, even those things that appear as opposites.’

‘How can you know that?’ said Lucius. ‘Lord Fulgrim was a lover of beauty and wonder, but he was hardly a philosopher.’

‘To be a lover of beauty and wonder one must be a philosopher of the heart,’ said Fulgrim with a disappointed shake of his head. ‘I have gazed into the secret heart of the warp and know that all existence is a struggle between opposites: light and darkness, heat and cold, and – of course, pleasure and pain. Think of ecstatic pleasure and unimaginable pain. They are connected, but they are not the same thing. Pain can exist without suffering, and it is possible to suffer without feeling pain.’

‘Agreed,’ said Kaesoron, ‘but what is your point?’

‘What you can learn from pain – that fire burns and is dangerous – is a lesson learned only for the individual, but what I have learned from suffering is what unites us as travellers on the road of excess and grants us entry to the palace of wisdom. Pain without suffering is like victory without struggle, one is meaningless without the other. But in the final analysis, real suffering can only be measured by what is taken away from us.’

‘Then we are suffering now,’ said Vairosean. ‘For our beloved lord is lost to us.’

Lucius turned away from Vairosean’s mawkish sentimentality and frowned as he looked upon the ruination of Fulgrim’s foot. The flesh had been burned away, yet it appeared as though a thin, translucent film was forming over the bone, which had begun to lose the solid, vitrified look that had been burned onto it. Like a snake that had recently shed its skin, the filmy texture of Fulgrim’s foot was oily and new, raw and yet to assume its final form.

‘Look,’ said Lucius. ‘He’s healing. You have to keep up the pressure.’

Fabius transferred his gaze from Fulgrim’s face to his healing foot with academic interest, while Kaesoron and Vairosean each took up an instrument of excruciation. The battle captains took position either side of Fulgrim and turned their devices upon the bound primarch. Kaesoron crushed knuckles with crimping pliers, while Vairosean worked a flesh plane across Fulgrim’s chest, peeling back long strips of skin with each caress.

‘Ah,’ grinned Fulgrim. ‘Truly the burden of happiness can only be removed by the balm of suffering…’

Lucius smelled Fulgrim’s blood and longed to take up an awl or hammer, but the look in the primarch’s eyes stayed his hand. The tortures inflicted by Kaesoron and Vairosean would have reduced a mortal to frothing madness, but Fulgrim appeared to be enjoying the experience.

Their eyes met and Fulgrim said, ‘Go on, Lucius, take up one of Fabius’s devices. Make my flesh scream!’

Lucius shook his head and crossed his arms for fear that he might do as Fulgrim wished.

‘Are you sure?’ smiled Fulgrim. ‘You know better than these fools that it’s the temptations you don’t succumb to you’ll later regret.’

‘True enough, but I think that any creature powerful enough to take control of Fulgrim’s body is powerful enough to endure any amount of pain and suffering without real effort.’

‘How insightful of you, my son,’ said Fulgrim. ‘This is… mildly diverting, I will admit, but pain to me is no more than an irritant. The pain you can inflict, anyway.’

Kaesoron paused in his mutilations and looked up at Fabius. ‘Is it speaking the truth?’

Fabius circled the gurney, reading the signs of Fulgrim’s biorhythms with increasing puzzlement. Lucius was no Apothecary, but even he could see the readouts confirmed that they might as well have been reciting poetry for all the effect it was having on the primarch.

Vairosean hurled away his flesh-plane, and a glass cylinder mounted in a shadowed alcove shattered. Noxious fluids spilled onto the floor of the Apothecarion, smoking like acid and bearing an unidentifiable mass of pulsating organs grafted to a vaguely humanoid host. Whatever it was, its convulsions lasted only a moment before its wretched existence was ended.

Fabius knelt beside the glistening remains and shot a poisonous glance at Vairosean.

Marius ignored the Apothecary’s anger and took hold of Fulgrim’s head, leaning down as though to kiss him. Instead, he slammed Fulgrim’s head down on the gurney and loosed a howl of grief-stricken rage that sent Lucius and Kaesoron flying.

The sound reverberated around the chamber like the sonic boom of a low-flying Stormbird, shattering every piece of glass in the room. Broken shards tumbled to the tiles in a thousand sharp tinks.

‘You are a creature of evil!’ yelled Vairosean. ‘Begone or I will tear the head of this body from its shoulders. I would see Fulgrim dead before allowing you to possess it a moment longer!’

Lucius picked himself up, his senses reeling from the aural assault as Fabius launched himself at Vairosean and hauled him away from Fulgrim.

‘Fool!’ cursed Fabius. ‘Your careless anger has just ruined months of experimentation.’

Vairosean shrugged off the Apothecary’s anger and balled a fist, ready to pound Fabius to pulped blood and bone.

‘Marius!’ shouted Fulgrim. ‘Stay your hand!’

Decades of ingrained loyalty froze Marius Vairosean to immobility, and Lucius was reminded of the iron grip of innate authority possessed by the primarchs. Even he, no respecter of authority, felt himself cowed by the primarch’s words.

‘You call me evil, but how do you decide what is good and what is evil? Are they not simply arbitrary terms coined by Man to justify his actions?’ said Fulgrim. ‘Think of how one measures good and evil and you will see that what I am, what I am becoming, is a thing of perfect beauty. A thing of goodness.’

Lucius approached the steel slab and looked down upon the primarch, sensing that his words were profound on a level he could not yet understand, but upon which his future might depend. He lifted an awl with a long hooked tip and worked it into Fulgrim’s chest, through scar tissue that had not fully healed. Fulgrim grimaced as the metal pierced his flesh, but Lucius couldn’t decide on the emotion behind the primarch’s expression.

‘So what are you becoming?’ he asked.

‘You ask the wrong question,’ answered Fulgrim as Lucius worked the awl into him, inch by steel inch.

‘Then what’s the right one?’

Marius and Julius leaned in as Fabius spat curses at the months of lost work that swilled and frothed around his feet.

‘The right question is what does the universe move towards? And that can only be answered by understanding where we came from.’

Marius followed Lucius’s example and selected an instrument of torture from the collection of devices Fabius had laid out. He turned the pear-shaped device around in his hands, twisting a metal cog handle that gradually spread the leaves of the pear apart. Satisfied, he returned it to its original shape and moved down the gurney to place the device.

‘We come from Terra,’ said Marius. ‘Is that what you mean?’

Fulgrim smiled indulgently and said, ‘No, Marius. Further back than that. As far back as it is possible to go.’

Marius shrugged and worked his device into position with a series of grunts as Julius lifted a series of silver wands, some long, some short, but all tapered to sharpness at one end. One by one, Kaesoron pierced Fulgrim’s body with seven needle-tipped wands, running in a line from the crown of his head to his groin. It was clear Kaesoron was no stranger to the apparatus as he attended to his work with a craftsman’s diligence. Lucius wondered if he had chosen poorly in comparison to these instruments of agony, but decided that he liked the simplicity of the awl as he pressed it deeper into Fulgrim’s unknown organs and inhuman biology.

Fulgrim watched Kaesoron with the attention of a proud master watching his student take flight for the first time without instruction. The primarch shook his head as Kaesoron stood erect and said, ‘Your positioning of the Swadhisthana chakra needle is slightly off, Julius. Perhaps due to the intrusion of Marius’s implement. A little higher might be better.’

Kaesoron bent to check and readjusted the needle as he saw that Fulgrim was correct. Without a word of acknowledgement, he ran a series of copper wires from the end of each needle to a thrumming bank of generators. With a flick of the switch, a deep bass note of power filled the chamber and arcing sparks of high voltage energy hummed from the wires.

Fulgrim’s jaw clenched and caged lightning danced in the black vortices of his eyes. His skin darkened and Lucius smelled the electric tang of a body burning from the inside out.

Enduring enough pain to last innumerable mortal lifetimes, Fulgrim resumed speaking.

‘This universe began in simplicity, with an event of such rapid expansion that it cannot ever be measured. In the first fractional moments of its existence, the universe was a place of such staggering simplicity that we cannot even begin to imagine it. But over time, those simple elements began to cohere, to come together in ever more complex forms. Particles became atoms, and atoms became molecules until they grew in complexity to form the first stars. Those newly-birthed stars lived and died over millions of years and their explosive deaths fuelled the birth of yet more stars and planets. You and I, we are luminous beings fashioned from the hearts of stars.’

‘Poetic, but what does that have to do with good and evil?’ asked Kaesoron as he manipulated the current through the silver needles, intrigued despite himself. Lucius was surprised, for he had always thought the First Captain had little interest in anything other than the gratification of his own desires or how he could wreak the greatest pain upon an enemy.

‘I am getting to that,’ promised Fulgrim, and Lucius had to remind himself that they were in the midst of torturing him and had not come to listen to a lecture on the substance of the universe. He wanted to speak out, but Fulgrim’s words held him fast.

‘None of this coming together is random,’ explained Fulgrim. ‘It is all part of the universe’s nature, its tendency towards complexity. Ah… yes, that is most exquisite, Marius, another turn of the screw! Now, as I was saying, all things are part of this cycle of building and coming together, from the lowliest organism to the highest functioning sentience. Given the right circumstances, everything will tend towards becoming something more beautiful, more perfect and more complex. It has been this way since the beginning of this universe’s lifespan, and that nature is as inescapable as it is inevitable.’

Lucius nodded and turned the awl in a wide circle within Fulgrim’s body. ‘And where does this all lead? What lies at the end of this journey from simplicity to complexity?’

Fulgrim shrugged, though it was impossible to tell whether it was a conscious gesture or the result of the current broiling his bones. ‘Who can say? Some have called it godhood, others Nirvana. For want of a better term, I call it perfect complexity. It is the ultimate aim of all things, whether they are aware of their role in the universe or not. Now the question of good and evil is inextricably linked to this ongoing journey to perfect complexity. And the answer is simple.’

Fulgrim’s words trailed off as his back arched and a line of blood ran from the corner of his mouth. Lucius wanted to believe it was his penetrative awl pricking Fulgrim’s spine that was the cause of the pain, but with all three warriors working their excruciating arts it was impossible to be sure.

Fabius circled the gurney, monitoring Fulgrim’s vital signs with growing alarm.

‘You’re killing him,’ he said, urgently. ‘One of you must stop.’

‘No,’ said Marius. ‘The pain will drive the daemon-thing out. It will relinquish its hold on Fulgrim before it allows itself to die.’

‘Simpleton!’ snapped Fabius. ‘Do you think such things as daemons fear the destruction of their mortal hosts? Its essence will simply cohere in the warp once you have destroyed the physical vessel.’

‘Then what are we doing here?’ demanded Lucius, releasing his grip on the awl and taking hold of Fabius by the throat as he again sensed conspiracy to the Apothecary’s solicitousness towards Fulgrim. Lucius tightened his grip on the Apothecary’s windpipe, exerting enough pressure to make the man’s eyes bulge.

‘You cannot harm this daemon,’ gasped Fabius, ‘but if you can cause it enough pain, it might be possible to force it to release its hold.’

‘Might? Possible?’ said Kaesoron. ‘You speak without certitude in all you say.’

Lucius felt a sharp pressure at his groin and looked down to see a coiling armature of rusted metal and sinewy gristle protruding from the skinned-meat coat of Fabius. A hypodermic filled with cloudy pink fluid had pierced the flexible joint at his thigh, and the needle was buried an inch into the meat of his leg.

Fabius gave a viper’s grin and said, ‘Lay a hand on me again and the injector will fill you with enough Vitae Noctus to slay a battle company.’

Lucius released the Apothecary only with great reluctance, feeling the cold metal of the needle withdraw from his body. As much as he wanted to lash out and break Fabius’s neck, he couldn’t keep the grin of near death from his face.

Fabius saw the grin and said, ‘It is always amusing until the elixir hits your system. Then it is sublime for six heartbeats. Then you are dead, and the world of sensation is over. Remember that the next time you feel the need to vent your anger upon me.’

Kaesoron pushed them apart and said, ‘Enough. We have a task at hand. Apothecary, can we drive this daemon out with pain? And give me a straight answer.’

Fabius answered without taking his eyes from Lucius, and Lucius met his hostility with a calm insouciance he felt sure would irritate the Apothecary.

‘I cannot,’ said Fabius. ‘Any mortal body would be destroyed long before we could ever reach the point where a daemon would lose its grip. But a primarch’s body should survive long enough for us to reach a tipping point where the pain will be sufficient to drive it out.’

‘Then perhaps the time has come to use the neural parasite device,’ said Marius. ‘The thing you crafted from the Diasporex.’

Fabius nodded in agreement, and Lucius saw the Apothecary had been waiting for just such an opportunity. Bending low, he placed the half-helm upon Fulgrim’s skull and attached thin lengths of clear plastic tubing to the silvered metal. The tubing coiled across the floor to a humming machine that looked to have been designed by creatures that bore no relation to humanity. It pulsed with a complex series of lights and sounds that existed in realms beyond the auditory perceptions of mortals, and Lucius watched as the iridescent mercury-like liquid pulsed eagerly along the clear tubing and into the primarch.

‘This had better work,’ said Kaesoron, jabbing Fabius in the chest. ‘If you have spoken false, none of your foetid elixirs will stop me from killing you.’

The sparkling liquid entered Fulgrim’s body, and the gasp of a sensualist who has at last discovered some sensation as yet unimagined escaped his full lips. Fulgrim’s eyes snapped open and he looked about himself like a dreamer awakening from golden memories of half-remembered friends and old loves.

‘Ah, my sons,’ he said, as though the pain of his torture was little more than the gentle caresses of butterfly wings. ‘Where was I?’

Blood sheened his flesh like a crimson gown, and the sharp tang of roasting meat oozed from his every orifice. Heat radiated along the silver needles jutting from his body, and his pelvis was bent up at an unnatural angle by the expansion of the macabre device of Marius.

‘You were talking of good and evil,’ said Lucius, taking hold of the plain wooden handle of his awl and pushing it in deeper.

‘Oh, you wield that spike like a master craftsman,’ said Fulgrim. ‘You are as skilled with a smaller weapon as you are with a larger.’

‘I practise,’ answered Lucius.

‘I know,’ said Fulgrim.

‘Is it working?’ Kaesoron asked Fabius, as he manipulated holographic dials and liquid gauges with sub-dermal xeno-haptics.

‘It is,’ confirmed the Apothecary. ‘I can alter the biochemistry of his mind to see what I want him to see, feel what I want him to feel. His mind will be ours to command soon.’

Fulgrim laughed, then burst into tears, his body convulsing in agony before shuddering with the greatest pleasure. He screamed at invisible terrors and licked his lips as flavours beyond imaging flooded his sensory perceptions.

‘What is happening to him?’ said Marius.

‘I am assuming control,’ said Fabius, clearly relishing this chance to manipulate so magnificent a physical specimen of supra-engineered perfection. ‘His mind is more complex than you can possibly imagine, a million labyrinths twisted within one another. It is no small matter to learn its connections.’

‘Master it swiftly,’ ordered Kaesoron.

Fabius ignored the threat in Kaesoron’s voice and made myriad alterations to the composition of the liquid and the operation of the machine. Too complex to follow, Lucius had no idea what the Apothecary was changing or how it might affect the primarch. Every vein on Fulgrim’s body stood taut on the surface of the skin, and it was clear the primarch wasn’t allowing Fabius to take control without a fight.

A thousand emotions and sensations warred across Fulgrim’s face, and Lucius envied him the touch of Fabius’s machine. What might it be like to allow another’s hand to guide his mind through a universe of sensation? But just as quickly as he imagined such a journey, he knew he was too self-absorbed to allow anyone else to take control of his flesh.

At last Fulgrim’s body relaxed, sinking back onto the gurney with a contented sigh of relief. His limbs settled on the cold metal and Fabius gave a triumphant grin that exposed his yellowed teeth and glistening, serpentine tongue.

‘I have him,’ he said. ‘What would you have me do, First Captain?’

‘Can you force it to speak truthfully?’

‘Of course. A manipulation of no consequence,’ Fabius told him.

Lucius frowned at the swiftness of Fabius’s assurance, wondering at the ease with which the Apothecary appeared to have mastered what he had described as being nigh impossibly difficult. He slid the awl clear of Fulgrim’s body and moved around the gurney to stand next to Fabius. Vitae Noctus or not, he would kill Fabius if it emerged that he was lying to them.

The faces on the Apothecary’s long coat flexed as though rising and falling on a gelid tide, and their mute howls implored Lucius to end their suffering. The swordsman ignored them, calculating where best to stab with the awl if he needed to kill Fabius.

The Apothecary seemed oblivious to Lucius’s presence, and worked his fingers over the alien device like a maestro at the keyboard of a templum organ. Fulgrim danced a jig on the gurney, and his face twisted into a delirious smile as he felt what was being done to him.

‘Oh, my sons…’ breathed the primarch. ‘You want the truth? How artless of you. Do you not realise that the truth is the most dangerous thing of all?’

‘Your time here is at an end, daemon,’ snarled Marius. ‘You have no place among our Legion. You are a thing of evil.’

Fulgrim laughed and said, ‘Oh, Marius, you insist on calling me a thing of evil, but such a word is meaningless unless you understand the truth of what good and evil represent. Very well, you wish the truth? I will give it to you. If you accept that the universe is constantly moving towards its final state of perfect complexity, and that this is its inevitable destination, then anything that hinders this process must be defined as evil. By the same logic, anything that promotes this ongoing journey is surely good. I am moving towards that perfect complexity, and by hindering my ascension you are acting in the cause of evil. Alone in this chamber, I am the only thing that is good!’

‘You seek to dull our wits with absurd talk of the nature of the universe and good and evil,’ hissed Marius. ‘I know evil, and I am looking at it.’

‘You are looking at yourself, Marius Vairosean,’ said Fulgrim. ‘Have you not seen the truth of it yet?’

‘The truth of what?’

‘The truth of me!’

Lucius stepped away from the gurney as Fulgrim’s biceps swelled with sudden power and his right arm tore free of the restraints that bound him to the gurney. An instant later, his left arm was free and the primarch sat bolt upright, tearing loose the needles piercing his skin and ripping free the bio-monitors Fabius had attached at the beginning of their tortures.

Fulgrim shoved Marius away and tore loose the opened device the Third Captain had worked upon with a sigh of regret. It fell to the floor of the Apothecarion with a wet clatter, and rolled like a viscous flower of red-stained iron.

‘A pity,’ said Fulgrim. ‘I was beginning to enjoy that.’

The primarch swung his legs from the gurney, breaking the bonds securing his ankles and thighs with no more effort than a child might throw back its blankets upon waking. Julius Kaesoron lunged forwards to hold Fulgrim down, but he was swatted aside with a casual backhanded gesture. Fabius backed away, but Lucius stood his ground, knowing there would be no point in running.

He saw how blinded they had been, how naïve. How could they have believed that they had the power to subdue a primarch? They had succeeded only because Fulgrim had desired it, had wanted them to come to this point. The Phoenician had seen the doubts in his warriors and had led them to this place, to this moment, in order to reveal his true nature.

Fulgrim turned to face him and smiled. In that instant, Lucius saw the truth of everything Fulgrim had said and done since Isstvan. He saw recognition in Fulgrim’s eyes, and dropped to his knees.

‘Begging, Lucius?’ said Fulgrim. ‘I expected better from you.’

‘Not begging, my lord,’ answered Lucius, with his head bowed. ‘Honouring.’

Julius Kaesoron struggled to his feet, his fist bursting to life with shimmering arcs of purple lightning. Marius Vairosean swept up his sonic cannon, his mouth widening in preparation of unleashing a barrage of sound and force that would kill everything in the room.

‘You know now?’ said Fulgrim.

‘I know,’ agreed Lucius. ‘I should have always known you would never surrender your will to another. If I would not, why should you?’

‘What is it talking about, swordsman?’ demanded Kaesoron. ‘Have you betrayed us to this daemon-thing?’

Lucius shook his head and chuckled at Kaesoron’s blindness to a truth that was now surely self-evident. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I have not, for I was wrong.’

‘About what?’ said Kaesoron, fist raised to strike.

‘About me,’ said Fulgrim, answering for him.

‘This is Lord Fulgrim,’ said Lucius. ‘Our Lord Fulgrim.’

14

Like the final player in a tragedy delivering his last soliloquy before the curtain falls, Fulgrim paced the stage of La Fenice with an actor’s relish. Lucius watched him with a practiced eye, seeing the fluid ease of his perfect motion and wondering how he could have failed to spot its truth for so long. Clad once more in his purple-pink war-plate, the Phoenician was a sight to set the mind afire, a warrior god of perfect proportions and light.

No traces of the wounds or indignities he had suffered in the Apothecarion were evident, and Lucius marvelled at the incredible power wrought into the primarch’s form that he could endure such horror and bear no ill-effects. Truly, Fulgrim was a god worth devotion.

First Captain Kaesoron stood shoulder to shoulder to Lucius, but Marius Vairosean set himself apart from them, his shame causing him to distance himself from their shared guilt. It was guilt only he felt, for Lucius had no regrets over their actions. They had acted to save their primarch, and – if he was honest – scratch a nagging itch to push their experiences to another level. There could be no guilt over that, not if any of the wonders they had been shown since Isstvan III were to be taken at face value.

Kalimos and Abranxe had joined them, amazed to hear of what had transpired in the Apothecarion, a revelation to which they alone in the galaxy were privy. Krysander stood erect with difficulty, and Ruen held to the wounded captain, his shoulder wrapped in vat-flesh as his augmetic bones knitted with his wounded physiology.

Lucius watched as Fulgrim paused beneath the dull portrait that graced the wall opposite the Phoenician’s Nest, a secret smile that conveyed a lifetime’s meaning in a slight upward tilt of his lips.

‘You were right to suspect I was not myself,’ said Fulgrim, finally deigning to face them. ‘The killing of the Gorgon was an act that severed my last tie to a lost life, a past that means nothing to me now. And no act of such magnitude is free of consequence.’

Fulgrim squatted on the stage, as though reliving the moment of Ferrus Manus’s death. His fists clenched as he stared into the middle distance, and Lucius saw the bloody parade of Isstvan V come alive in his eyes.

‘I was vulnerable,’ said Fulgrim, standing and resuming his pacing of the stage. ‘A servant of the Dark Prince took my flesh for its own amusement. It was an ancient thing, a needy, capricious thing that revelled in its stolen prize, and for a time I allowed it to retain possession of my body while I learned of it and its powers. I think it hoped I would be crushed by the death of my brother…’

Fulgrim grinned, staring at his hands as though they were still bloody from the slaying of the Iron Hands’ primarch.

‘It should have known better. After all, it had started me down the road of self-indulgence and a life free of inhibitions or guilt. What did I care for one more betrayal? Manus was already a fading memory, a ghost who recedes with each passing moment, and everything I learned from it only made me stronger. In time, it was a simple matter to reclaim my body and cast it into the prison it had crafted for me.’

Lucius tore his gaze from his magnificent primarch and lifted his head to the portrait. Its lines were no less insipid, its colours no less bland, but knowing its truth now, Lucius saw the ageless pain of an immortal, inchoate being trapped forever in unending stagnation. To a creature of infinite possibility, there could be no greater torment, and his admiration for his primarch’s brilliance soared anew.

‘So now you know the truth, my sons,’ said Fulgrim, dropping from the stage to walk among them. He spread his hands and touched them all as he walked past them. ‘It is no easy thing to serve a master who demands so much of us and grants us so much in return. We must go further in our desires than any other, experience all things, even those distasteful to us. No sacrifice, no degradation and no bliss will exist beyond our reach. I have such sights to show you all, my sons. Secrets and power thought beyond comprehension, truths buried since the dawn of time and a route to godhood that will see me burn brighter than a thousand suns!’

Fulgrim spun on his heel as his warriors cheered his words. He basked in their adoration and their devotions made him shine like the star that allowed them to live. At last he lowered his arms and swept his gaze over them all, benevolent and paternal, stern and unflinching.

‘I have much to do before deigning to join Horus Lupercal on Terra’s muddy soil,’ said the Phoenician. ‘My first task is to join with my Olympian brother, and yoke his builders and donjon keepers to my purpose.’

‘What purpose?’ asked Julius Kaesoron, daring the primarch’s wrath with a question.

Fulgrim ran his hands through his virgin-white hair and smiled, though Lucius saw this was a momentary indulgence. Further questions would not be tolerated. Not now, in the primarch’s moment of glory.

‘We have a city to build,’ he said. ‘A glorious city of mirrors; a city of mirages, at once solid and liquid, at once air and stone.’

Lucius felt his pulse quicken at the idea of such a city, a metropolis where every structure, tower and palace would throw his image back at him a thousandfold. At last he saw the attack on Prismatica for what it was, the gathering of raw materials to raise this astonishing architecture of reflections.

‘A city of mirrors,’ he whispered. ‘It will be wondrous.’

Fulgrim took a step towards him and cupped the swordsman’s face like a lover.

‘It will be better than wondrous,’ said Fulgrim, leaning down to kiss Lucius on each scarred cheek. ‘For in the heart of its million reflections I will meet the gaze of the Angel Exterminatus and the galaxy will weep to behold its terrible beauty!’

~ Dramatis Personae ~

The X Legion ‘Iron Hands’

Ferrus Manus, Primarch

Gabriel Santar, Equerry and First Captain

Vaakal Desaan, Avernii, Ninth Clan-Company Captain

Erasmus Ruuman, Avernii, Thirteenth Clan-Company Ironwrought

Shadrak Meduson, Tenth Clan-Company Captain

Bion Henricos, Tenth Clan-Company Seventh Sergeant

Xenos Personae

Lathsarial, Eldar Farseer

‘The Diviner’, Eldar Farseer

‘What does it matter why he fell?’
‘When the fall is all there is, it matters.’

– Farseer Lathsarial answers
a student of the Path

Wrought of Iron

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

Glorious, vindicating… vengeful.

I was not meant to fail here.

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

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

Like a blade across my throat…

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

Such moribund thoughts brought an unworthy declaration to taut lips.

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

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

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

‘I should be first.’

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

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

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

I will be as iron.

Focus turned the grainy hololith into two figures.

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

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

‘Brothers.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eldar.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Santar’s reprimand was swift but light. ‘Just kill them, brother. As efficiently as you can.’

Cataphractii war-plate was rare amongst the Legions, but the Iron Hands boasted a great many suits, especially amongst the clan-companies of the Avernii. It was cumbersome, akin to wearing a battle tank bereft of tracks, but still retained all its resilience and stopping power. Santar revelled in the machine-strength it gave him. They all did.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The next wave, he knew, was coming.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The response from the Avernii Ironwrought was immediate.

‘At your command, First Captain.’

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

And with our iron fist…

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

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

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

…we shall bring down such fury.

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

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

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

Santar would crush them regardless of their resilience.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Glory Imperator!’ he roared.

A thousand voices chorused back.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘You mean weaker.’

Santar met Desaan’s impassive gaze through the visor.

‘I mean what I say, brother-captain.’

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

Santar raised the Ironwrought on the comm-feed.

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

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

‘Nothing lives, brother.’

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

‘Dig them deep,’ he added.

‘Nothing lives,’ repeated Ruuman in grating confirmation.

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

‘You are with me, Avernii.’

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

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

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

‘We are better off without them.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Are we not men, then, Vaakal?’

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

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

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

‘If I have been disrespectful…’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Becoming obsolete.’

‘Indeed.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I am, primarch. As ever.’

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

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

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

Ferrus Manus glared, impatient for an answer.

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

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

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

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

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

‘I do not know, my lord.’

The primarch grunted and addressed Santar.

‘Do you concur with your fellow captain?’

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

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

‘I doubt that,’ he muttered.

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

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

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

‘Speak plainly, brother-captain.’

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

Ferrus laughed, a hollow, cracking sound.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I have heard the great sagas, sire.’

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

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

‘I… my lord?’

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

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

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

‘No, my lord.’

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

Desaan saluted and turned on his heel.

Santar was about to join him when Ferrus stopped him.

‘Not you, First Captain.’

Santar stood his ground and straightened his back.

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

‘You know that is not the case.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I shall tell him you said so.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Are you questioning my orders, equerry?’

Unlike his less experienced captain, Santar did not falter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Have you seen it?’

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

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

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

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

‘It will not make any difference.’

‘I must succeed.’

‘And yet you will not.’

‘But I have to try.’

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

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

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

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

This was no place for men. It was hell made manifest and therefore the province of star-forged warriors like him. Unlike many of his brothers, Henricos did not yet possess a full array of bionic enhancements, beyond his artificial left hand. He suspected that shred of empathy he had experienced came from this bias of biology.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘But, my lord, we have only just–’

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

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

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

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

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

Then he left.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘It must be there,’ said Ferrus, interrupting the First Captain’s thoughts.

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

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

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

Ruuman made a rapid calculation through his bionics.

‘Four-point-eight kilometres once we’ve made descent, First Captain.’

Santar nodded to the Ironwrought, but addressed his primarch.

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

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

‘Trusting my instincts, primarch.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Desaan was less than convivial.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The rebuke was firm but without true ire.

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

Henricos nodded, indicating that was the case.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘We descend immediately. Army be damned.’

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

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

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

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

Perhaps it had always been waiting.

Trepidation, anger and resolve kaleidoscoped into a single imperative.

Face it and kill it.

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

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

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

‘He is singular in his will and purpose.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I see no ghosts, primarch,’ said the First Captain, attempting to break the tension.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Together as one,’ he repeated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Engaging!’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Be as iron.

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

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

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

Found you…

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

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

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

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

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

The grating laughter emitting through his mouth grille surprised him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Desaan!’

He looked as if he was…

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Come on!’ he roared. ‘Fight me!’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Primarch…’

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

Onwards, drive onwards.

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

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

I expected a battle.

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

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

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

A memory surfaced.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What is that?’

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

‘Inconclusive.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He slung the rifle onto his back.

‘Target eliminated, brother-sergeant.’

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

There was no sense in holding back at this point.

‘Forward, in the name of the Gorgon.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Soon it will take us too.

‘What are you doing?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Desaan nodded again, and then looked around.

Of the enemy casualties, there was no sign.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Will of Iron

‘He could not have fallen.’

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

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

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

‘Then where is he?’ asked Meduson.

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

Desaan found he could not answer.

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

‘Ironwrought?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

His glare found Meduson.

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

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

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

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

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

‘Yes, First Captain.’

Desaan lingered.

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

‘Where is he, Gabriel?’

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

‘Out there, I hope.’

‘And if he is not?’

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

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

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

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

Santar’s silence suggested he agreed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Black sand…

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

Just like in the valley.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ferrus could hear… weeping.

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

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

‘What is this?’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Gabriel…’

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

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

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

‘Gabriel!’

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have borne heavier weights.

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

He roared at the shadows.

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

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

I will endure. My will is ironclad.

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

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

‘Afraid to face me?’

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

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

He had but one recourse remaining.

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

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

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

Eyes watching, cold and reptilian eyes…

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

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

I am the Gorgon. I am Medusa.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was one of many dead ends.

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

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

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

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

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

‘Anything through your visor’s display?’

There was a click in the feed as Desaan rechecked.

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

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

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

Impotence was not a feeling the First Captain relished.

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

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

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

The hour was later than he realised.

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

Santar switched channels again, and growled into the feed.

‘Regroup.’

Desaan was the first to return.

‘Meduson?’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Because we are.’

Desaan scowled but was wise enough to hold his tongue.

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

Tarkan’s response was unexpected.

‘I’ve found something, Lord Santar.’

Another cavern lay beyond the gallery’s archway.

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

Ferrus sneered at the ignominy of it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Fulgrim…’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This was not the desert.

It was somewhere else, somewhere other.

‘What am I looking at, Tarkan?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Father’s?’

Tarkan nodded slowly.

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

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

‘He was running,’ said Desaan.

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

‘But from what?’

‘Or to what?’ suggested Desaan.

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

Santar frowned again, unhappy with this turn of events.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Defiant, thought the primarch, familiar, even.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The itch around his neck began to irritate and burn.

Serpent breath hissed on the breeze.

His belligerent travelling companion had returned.

Have you come for me at last?

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

I will crack your skull like an egg, beast.

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

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

And then everything changed.

The darkness parted like a veil.

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

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

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

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

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

Or perhaps, just not yet…

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

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

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

Each face was his.

Wrath of Iron

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

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

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

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

A ragged force, but reinforcement none the less.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Ready for a fight,’ countered Henricos.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘You sound surprised.’

Meduson carried a holo-slate in his hand and was appraising the tactical dispositions of his force. Heavies gave support fire from range, while three wedges of Iron Hands from the 16th, 34th and 27th clan companies provided a relentless assault on the entrenched eldar positions. Santar recognised the sigils of the Vorganan, Burkhar and Felg clans battling tirelessly at the front.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Gone.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘They are well corralled,’ said Meduson.

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

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

Meduson gave a feral smile. ‘No, First Captain. It is not.’

‘They hold tenaciously to something.’

‘Sounds like you admire them.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Suggestions then?’ asked Santar.

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

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

The Avernii strained at the leash behind him.

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

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

‘That is comforting to hear–’

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

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

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

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

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

Even at a distance it looked ferocious.

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

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

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

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

Ruuman came back between loud salvoes of heavy weapons fire.

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

‘You are the hammer,’ said Meduson when the First Captain closed the feed again.

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

‘Then it’s time we swung and struck.’

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

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

He raised his iron fist to the Avernii and roared.

‘Iron and death!’

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

Father, where are you?

Ferrus scowled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

His belligerent companion did not respond.

Ferrus went on.

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

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

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

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

You did this to us…

You consigned us to this fate…

We are in limbo because of you!

Ferrus’s fists clenched, his teeth locked.

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

The dead should stay dead…

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

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

Ferrus’s first blow never fell.

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

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

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

Breath of cold and sulphur.

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

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

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

Such a magnificent creature.

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

I am stronger.

Fangs bared, a song of fury upon its lips.

He would prove it.

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

The lava beckoned. His forge.

Here, weapons were made and unmade.

I will prove I am stronger.

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

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

Like my head is being cut from my shoulders…

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

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

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

Perhaps we have met before…

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

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

Ferrus knew he could not give in to it.

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

Endure.

The word was like an anchor to him. If he lost that he would be cast adrift upon an endless sea of chaos.

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

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

Is nothing incorruptible?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Idiot!

Weakling!

Unwanted son!

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

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

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

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

An inglorious death.

Ferrus would not submit to that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He should have told him that.

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

Now I’ll bait the hook…

Blind, he was vulnerable.

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

He listened harder, allowed his heart to still.

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

Angel…

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

Exterminatus…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Angel Exterminatus.

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

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

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

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

‘It is affecting you,’ said the Diviner.

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

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

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

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

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

‘It should not be here at all.’

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

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

‘What can be done?’

‘Release him and accept failure.’

‘We are too close for that.’

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

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

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

‘What do you see?’

It smacked of desperation.

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

‘That is not an answer.’

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

‘Will he die? Am I undone?’

‘Yes and no.’

‘Your meaning is needlessly cryptic.’

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

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

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

‘Soon.’

Santar knew the warriors bleeding through the shimmering energy shield.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Desaan laughed. ‘Like shooting discus.’

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

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

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

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

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

He cried, ‘Advancing!’

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

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

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

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

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

‘We have less than a minute, brother,’ Santar told him.

‘More than enough, First Captain.’

Bullying their way forwards, the Avernii reached the crackling edge of the shield.

The eldar inside fell back, but kept up their fusillade of fire. Overhead, Ruuman’s cannons and the tanks of the Army divisions pounded.

Something else lurked behind the flicker-haze too, eldar clad in robes and wielding arcane staves.

‘Tear it down!’ roared Santar, warring with the ionised throb of the energy shield. ‘Hit it with everything you’ve got.’

Thunder hammers and power-mauls, eviscerators and combi-bolters at point-blank range rattled against a field of glowing azure. Rippling violently, the shield bowed but did not break.

The chrono in the retinal displays of all the Iron Hands veterans reached zero.

Its terminus presaged a series of deep, subterranean detonations that split the surface open inside the shield as the mole mortar shells burrowing below exploded in a chain. Concussive bursts billowed upwards as the web the eldar had woven around the node was unpicked.

Flickering initially as a cluster of minute interrupts stuttered across its curvature, the shield flared once and then failed.

Santar was first across its threshold.

‘At them! Glory to the Gorgon!’

Reaping into the gun platforms, the Avernii barely noticed the brutal ordnance from the tank divisions as it hammered the node. Even without the shield to protect it, the bone edifice was resilient, but cracks began to appear along its length.

It was a massacre, efficient not bloodthirsty, but slaughter all the same.

A warrior with a crackling falchion emerged from the melee. Santar met it with his lightning claws, but felt a tightening in the servos of his bionic arm as he applied the killing stroke. His follow-up was slower too, as if pushing against inertia or the effects of high gravity. His legs were the same.

He recalled the robed figures. A cohort of heavily armed alien warriors surrounded them.

‘Desaan, can you still see?’ Santar asked. Foes were coming at them from every angle, swinging pikes and blades, a rabble of carapace-armoured eldar soldiers and the cloaked ranger caste the Iron Hands had fought earlier. One of them thrust an energy spear at Santar, which he barely turned aside. Seizing the haft, he pulled the warrior towards him and bludgeoned open its faceplate with his fist. The body sagged and was still, but the eldar had left a score mark down the First Captain’s flank.

‘Too close.’

Another aimed a shuriken lance at his torso and blasted apart a section of armour plate. Santar swept his claw around to despatch it but felt the same drag that had slowed him a few seconds before.

Recognising these sensations, he shouted, ‘Desaan, your eyes?’

‘My sight… is failing.’

Darkness was boiling around the node, coiling from its tip in a thunderhead.

Santar arched his neck to see a black cloud creeping down the side of the node and billowing towards them.

‘Throne of Earth…’

Not again…

Santar knew the carnage the storm and its curse of iron could inflict. Upon so many warriors conjoined with the machine, he dared not contemplate exactly how much.

To his mind, there was little choice.

‘Hold advance, all companies.’

Santar was caught, seized by indecision just as his bionics were frozen by the approaching darkness.

‘We must move forward,’ Captain Attar voiced down the feed. ‘First captain, what are your orders?’

Taking advantage of the respite, the robed conclave of eldar was already re-establishing parts of the shield. It grew like an organic energy web behind the Avernii. Shells and las-bursts from the heavy divisions caromed off the rapidly regenerating veil.

Desaan gripped Santar’s shoulder guard. ‘We cannot stay here, Gabriel. Forward or back, which is it?’

If they stayed, they could destroy the node, or at least slay the witches that had refashioned the shield, but they risked annihilation at their own hands or the hands of their brothers if they did.

Tendrils of cloud, outriders of the dark veil, closed to within a few metres of the Iron Hands. They writhed like vipers.

So close…

‘You saw what it did to us in the desert basin.’ Santar had made his decision. It tasted bitter as his mouth formed the words.

‘Fall back!’

The retreat was slow and wearisome. Legionaries fought the mechanised parts of their bodies, and tried to stop outright rebellion. Some failed and had to be dragged by their battle-brothers. None at least were devoured by the storm, for to be lost to it was a death sentence.

It boiled at the edge of the shield, shrouding what was left of the eldar inside, but reached no farther.

Even from a distance Santar could feel the pull of the machine curse’s influence. Absently, his armoured fingers touched the gouges at his neck. The gorget had barely saved his life. He could still feel the prickling heat of his own lightning claw upon his skin, its electric stink in his nostrils.

‘So, what is our next recourse?’ Desaan had removed his visor and was standing beside the First Captain, the two of them in close concert. Desaan’s scarred face was worse beneath the metal band he usually wore around his eyes; the skin swollen and ravaged. He reattached the visor to a pair of cranial implants in his temples and the device whirred back to life.

‘Functioning perfectly,’ he said, muttering rites of activation and purity.

‘So long as we stay out of the cloud,’ said Santar.

The tempest rippled and undulated like a dark ocean, slowly and mockingly for all its seeming innocuousness.

Santar stared at it. He was standing in a half-circle with his captains and their seconds, while the rest of the Legion waited farther back with their clan companies and looked on beleaguered.

‘The shield was breached and only partly regenerated,’ said Captain Attar.

Ruuman’s barrage had ceased and the Ironwrought joined them from the high ground where the heavies still waited.

Santar turned to him next. ‘What’s your assessment, Erasmus?’

‘The shield is constructed of kinetic energy but created psychically. Whether the xenos have some form of generator sympathetic to their abilities or another piece of fell alien technology, I can only theorise. As we’ve seen, it can be breached, but only through excessive force.’

Desaan frowned. ‘What about the cloud? How do we breach that?’

Ruuman turned his cold gaze on him. ‘Without suffering machine-death, we cannot.’

‘You think they can keep this up indefinitely?’ asked Captain Meduson.

Desaan stared into the darkness, but could find no gap or weakness. ‘If our Ironwrought is right, while the storm persists there is no way for us to advance.’

Santar’s knuckles cracked with cybernetic resonance.

‘I would very much like to summon the Fist of Iron and bombard this site from existence.’

‘Then do it, First Captain,’ said Meduson. ‘We can further withdraw our forces and take the necessary cover in the deeper desert.’

Ruuman shook his head. ‘Negative. The sensoria are unable to overcome whatever psychic baffles the eldar have in place. We are more likely to exterminate ourselves than level the node.’

Desaan rubbed at his chin and frowned.

‘The shield is broken, but not down. The aliens’ defences are severely weakened. If we can get warriors behind the veil to kill whatever is creating it–’

Henricos stepped up, interrupting.

‘I can get beyond that veil.’

Desaan scowled. ‘You have a talent for intrusion, brother-sergeant.’

A nod sufficed as apology from Henricos.

Santar’s eyes narrowed. ‘I am listening. How can you enter the storm, brother? Unless you want to end up impaled on your own sword?’

‘Because a warrior of flesh has nothing to fear from it.’

Henricos revealed the stump where he had detached his bionic hand.

‘It is safe,’ he said quickly. ‘I can fight without it.’

A host of hard, reproachful glances fell upon the sergeant.

‘You dishonour the Principle of Iron,’ said Santar. ‘That mechanised implant is part of rite and ritual. It is what makes us what we are.’

‘And what we are is confounding us, First Captain. I am suggesting a different approach.’

‘One for which you’ll be severely reprimanded.’

‘I’ll bear whatever punishment is deemed fit.’

Santar glared, fighting the urge to mete out that punishment immediately.

‘Even if it is death?’

Henricos was stoic. ‘I can breach the veil.’

‘Alone?’ Attar sounded dubious.

‘No, not alone,’ Santar answered as he saw a unit of Army veterans approaching the conclave of Iron Hands officers. They looked on edge to be in the presence of the hulking warriors and kept together.

Santar fought down his disdain and tried to see soldiers in the children before him.

Their commanding officer was a hoary-looking colonel of the Savaan Masonites who knelt before the Iron Hands like a serf. Unlike some of his more nervous charges he did not tremble.

Desaan glared at him from the mountainous summit of his Cataphractii war-plate.

‘Speak your name.’

‘Lords,’ said the man, his voice gravelly from smoking too much tabac or simple age. ‘I am Marshal Vortt Salazarian of the Savaan 254th, the Masonites, and I have served the Emperor’s Great Crusade and your Lord Gorgon for four decades.’

Desaan touched the platinum stud embedded in his skull.

‘Do not speak to me of service, old man. What do you know of it?’

Attar folded his immense bionic arms, whilst Meduson merely glowered. They each carried platinum studs and had each fought longer campaigns than most men had lifetimes.

To his credit, Colonel Salazarian didn’t blink. Not once.

‘I meant no offence. We will accompany Sergeant Henricos into the storm,’ he said, licking his lips to moisten his dry mouth. The presence of Space Marines tended to have that effect on humans. ‘If you will allow us to, we will do that. It would be our honour.’

Desaan scowled. ‘Flesh is weak–’ he said, but Santar raised his hand for silence.

The Army veterans looked thin and feeble, even the grizzled colonel, but so too did the eldar and they had proven formidable.

Slowly shaking his head, Desaan said, ‘They will break and we will have lost one of our own into the bargain.’

‘Enough,’ stated Santar, regarding the kneeling man. He bade him stand. ‘I am not a king and you are not my subject. On your feet.’

Nodding at Desaan, Santar asked the colonel, ‘Is he right? Will you break?’

Salazarian squared his shoulders and thrust out his jaw. ‘Let us show you our worth. We will not break, my lord. We have endured this far.’

‘Few mere men can make that claim,’ said Henricos.

Santar’s eyes were chips of slate when he met his gaze. ‘I knew you had an affinity for humans, sergeant. I saw it when you gave your report concerning the Army divisions.’ He paused, eyeing first the storm and then the Army veterans.

It is better to act and ask for forgiveness later than be paralysed by indecision.

He’d heard Ferrus Manus say that before. Santar wished he could ask for his guidance right now. Since he could not, he said, ‘You vouch for this man and his warriors?’

‘It will be my death if they fail,’ said Henricos.

‘You are right about that,’ Santar told him, making the threat very clear. ‘Find the coven or whatever means the eldar are using to perpetuate that storm and remove it. We will follow in after and eliminate whatever is left standing. The path is laid, brother. All you need do is to follow it.’

Henricos saluted and went to muster the rest of the Masonites.

After he had gone, Desaan shook his head.

‘Reckless bravery kills warriors swifter than any bolter or blade.’ He pointed at the storm bank. ‘Those men will die in there. Henricos too.’

Santar watched the ominous black cloud, imagined it watching him back with a feral sentience.

When they were retreating, when its tendrils had closed with the delicate inexorability of a drifting fog, he’d felt a crushing weight in his chest, as if his limbs had been bound in metre-thick ferrocrete. They all felt it, each and every one of them that was significantly part machine.

All of their strength, the power of a Legion at his disposal, and all any of them could do was watch.

‘Then I hope they die well and make a worthy sacrifice. But I promise you this. One way or another, we are bringing that node down. The Gorgon has willed it.’

Cold stone chilled his face. A trickle of water from some underground stream wet his lips and brought him round.

Dazed and groggy from the poison, Ferrus rolled onto his back and groaned.

He had never felt so weak.

He couldn’t remember passing out. It must have happened on the way from the abattoir.

Attempting to rise unleashed a hellish crescendo crashing into his mind. Blood thundered in his ears. He held his head and, wincing, got to one knee.

Lead dragged at his limbs, made him sluggish and slow. Forgebreaker acted as a crutch. Twice now since being in the labyrinth he had used it ignobly. The fact did not sit well with the primarch, who surveyed his surroundings once standing again.

Mercifully, the serpent or whatever it was, had gone. Even the sibilance of its presence was absent and a terrible silence replaced it. Ferrus doubted he would live if he faced it at that moment. He could barely lift his feet, let alone a weapon.

He patted the pommel of Draken.

‘Thank you, brother.’

The way behind him was darkness. He couldn’t even see the abattoir now and wondered how long and how far he had wandered in delirium. Ahead was darkness too, but with a tiny shard of light like a beacon to guide him through a storm. The turbulence of his thoughts pulled at him.

What had the creature said?

Angel Exterminatus.

Ferrus understood the words but not their meaning. It pained him to think about them and the vague sense of flame intruded at the edges of his consciousness when he did.

With motion, his strength began to return. His arm was still ravaged where the living silver had been melted away but it didn’t burn as badly. His neck itched like all hell, though, and he suspected the creature had dealt him a secondary wound he was unaware of until that moment. But when he touched the skin beneath his gorget it was uninjured.

Biting down his irritation, Ferrus walked slowly towards the shard of light.

Likely this was yet another trick, some fresh torture with which to test him. Ferrus had yet to discern its purpose. He reasoned that if his enemies meant to kill him, they would have done so already or at least tried harder and more overtly. Xenos, particularly the eldar, were cryptic and capricious, even to one with the formidable mental acuity of a primarch. Their rationale was lost on him. The thing that hunted him was no serpent, it was something darker, something primordial and, he suspected, not something wholly fashioned by his captors. It had meant to end his life. He felt all its rage, its denial, its sadistic yearning of which Ferrus was the focus. When they had fought he could sense this, but it was inchoate as if the creature itself was only partially realised.

Ferrus was uncertain what that meant. One thing he could be sure of was that it wasn’t dead and would return for him. Whatever the eldar’s original plan, he knew he would have to kill the creature now to escape.

Entering through the shard of light that had widened into a brilliant chasm to allow him passage, Ferrus steeled himself for the battle to come.

He would not have long to wait.

A series of grand, triumphal archways led into a long processional before him. They had the appearance of great gates but with their portals laid open and shattered to potential invasion. Fire-blackened stone crept at their edges and ugly shards were chipped from every stone.

The chasm of light had closed behind him, leaving no visible way out.

As he had suspected, this was to be the final arena.

Ferrus felt like a giant touring a grand but blasted palace in miniature. As he passed along the processional, he left the sundered gates behind and walked into an appended chamber. Even scaled down in miniature, the great hall was immense. A giant would have been dwarfed by it. Gothic architectural flourishes dominated, but they were bleak and austere, suggestive of faded glories and cultural stagnation. Skulls lined the walls as if part of some vast reliquary and a sombre mood pervaded its grim design. A monument to decay and everlasting decline, here opulence had long since given in to decrepitude.

As he made his way across the diminutive flagstones underfoot, Ferrus realised it was no great hall, nor had it ever been so.

It was a tomb.

And at the end of a cracked plaza, wreathed with gossamer-thin webs and the rough patina of heavy age, there stood a massive throne, out of scale with the rest of the palace.

Slumped upon it, in emaciated repose, sat a king.

The king of stagnation, lord of a decaying empire, his robes were tattered, his body a flesh-starved and skeletal ruin. He bore no crown, only a rictus grimace, a final pained expression of a dream unfulfilled.

He towered over Ferrus, glaring down through abyssal eye sockets the colour of sackcloth.

A hissing breath, its last, escaped the undead king’s mouth and drew a nerve tremor of consternation from the primarch’s face.

Half-expecting the revenant to rise, he took a backward step.

Only when the breath continued long after it should have ended did Ferrus realise it was not the king, but something else that gave the corpse its mimicked speech.

Uncoiling from its hiding place behind the tarnished throne of the dead king was the serpent.

The head and neck stood erect whilst its vast body undulated beneath it, providing support. Mirrored silver sheathed its flanks. Its eyes were sulphur-yellow pools of corruption, cut open with black, dagger-thin pupils. Hate exuded in a heady musk that made the primarch’s senses lurch vertiginously.

He reached for Forgebreaker, but the serpent sprang at him, faster than mercury, and Ferrus was forced to seize its jaws before they snapped around his throat.

Hot, stinking spittle, acid-tanged, spattered the primarch’s face and he snarled. Fighting the beast was like clinging to liquid, but Ferrus wrestled it down and wrapped his arms around its neck before it could wriggle free. Thrashing hard, the serpent hauled him off the ground and smashed him down again. Lances of agony impaled his back and shoulder. His neck felt about ready to crack as the burning wound that was not a wound around his throat smouldered like hellfire.

‘I am the Gorgon!’ he yelled. ‘I am a primarch!’

His head hit something hard, and dark spikes intruded at the edge of his sight. A red rime layered his vision but Ferrus held on.

He held on and squeezed.

Despite the serpent’s fervent efforts, Ferrus slowly tightened his grip. He would strangle it, crush every ounce of life from the creature until it lay cold and unmoving. Then he would stave its skull to a crimson paste.

‘Back from the underworld…’ he spat. ‘You should have stayed dead, Asirnoth.’

For what else could it be but a manifestation of that dread creature?

The serpent’s head turned… turned in a way that should have broken its neck in the primarch’s iron grip. Lips that should not be lips parted. Eyes that were human and familiar regarded him. A mane of hair crept down its back as a noble and patrician countenance asserted itself across previously reptilian features.

‘I…’ it said without hint of sibilance. ‘I am not…’ the words were lyrical, musical and rich, ‘Asirnoth…’

Ferrus knew, as he knew the voice and the face before him.

It was the perfect killer, preternaturally fast and superhumanly strong. Only another primarch could have defeated it.

Only another primarch…

He relaxed his grip and a flash of transformation blended the human visage with that of the creature. A rack of saliva-wet fangs pierced its gums, drawing blood with the violent metamorphosis. Eyes that had been warm and fraternal narrowed to yellow knife-slashes. Scaled flesh colonised its lower neck and cheekbones like a contagion.

Fighting down the urge to vomit, Ferrus reasserted his grip. His eyes widened in eerie synchronicity with the creature’s as its neck was slowly crushed. It struggled. It wanted to live, to manifest, but Ferrus would kill it. He would end it with his bare hands.

‘You are not him,’ he told it through a barricade of clenched teeth.

A final tortured rasp, part reptilian, part human, slipped from the serpent’s mouth and it became still and lifeless.

Giving it one final squeeze until it felt as though his knuckles might break, Ferrus let go and the creature slid to the ground dead.

A long, trembling breath came from his throat and he rubbed his eyes as if to banish a bad dream.

Disquiet turned to anger. Ferrus pulled out Forgebreaker and did as he’d vowed. He kept going for a full minute before his arms and shoulders ached at him to stop. Little was left of the creature when he was done, just a ruddy smear. He was breathing hard and beads of sweat cascaded from his brow. He felt the chill of evaporation against his fevered skin and followed that sensation all the way to the throne.

Enraged, Ferrus stormed towards the corpse-king, hauled it one-handed from its seat of office and smashed it into pieces of bone on the ground.

‘Your reign is ended,’ he told it, before stowing the hammer and gripping an arm of the throne in each hand. Ripping it aside, tearing it bodily from its bearings, Ferrus revealed a doorway of light. Casting the wretched seat aside, he stepped through the portal and prepared to face his tormentors.

It was not as he expected.

An orrery of worlds and stars revolved before him, locked in an infinite space that had no dimension, no limit or discernible edges. The effect was disconcerting.

The primarch’s gaze was drawn to a dominant prime world, sitting amongst eight others in a system of stars and desolate moons. The world was black, and Ferrus was reminded of the dark sand that had been underfoot for so much of his journey. Then, as if a giant celestial match or the contrail of a meteor had been struck against its surface, a flame was born upon the prime world. It grew into a conflagration, eclipsing all of its continents and seas, enveloping them like a baleful sun. Only once the transformation was absolute did Ferrus realise it was not a sun at all, but a burning red eye with a black pupil.

As the tableau unfolded further, he saw a slow-moving ring of black iron grow around the red world that held its fire in place until a second ring of cobalt-blue joined it. Though it burned furiously, the eye could not escape the combined rings of metal sent to contain it. The sun faded and finally blinked out, leaving the world black and still once more.

Ferrus reached out to touch the orrery but his silver hand passed through it, revealing the illusion. It vanished like smoke in an eyeblink.

‘What is this?’ he snapped. ‘More signs, more games?’

‘Not a game,’ said a deep, faintly musical voice.

Ferrus turned to face his captor, Forgebreaker gripped in his closed fists.

‘It is the future. Your future,’ said the eldar. ‘If you wish it to be.’

The alien was robed, the colours subdued but manifold. Arcane sigils were stitched into the iridescent fabric, but also hung on gossamer-thin chains or from glittering diamond threads. It wore no helmet or mask, but showed a long face of high cheekbones and a tapered chin that jutted like a dagger. Strange tattoos marked its flesh and were shaven into the side of its scalp from which a long mane of golden hair cascaded. Fathomless wisdom and capricious intellect glittered in the almond-shaped eyes that regarded the primarch, but also fear.

‘You have reached a fork in the road, Ferrus Manus. The path you are on leads to death, but another leads to survival and the changing of a great many things in the galaxy,’ said the eldar. ‘You do not realise how important you are.’

It opened its hands in a gesture of peace and solidarity.

All Ferrus saw was an alien deceiver.

‘And you expect me to believe you, creature?’ He spoke plainly and calmly. There was none of the untempered rage of earlier.

‘I offer you hope. I offer it to the galaxy,’ it pleaded. ‘You can change everything.’

Ferrus smiled, but it was a hollow gesture. The eldar’s shoulders sagged when it saw it.

‘I know I will die,’ the primarch said, ‘just as I know my place and duty. It matters not if it is upon some blackened world I have never seen or the very crags of Medusa itself. I am a warrior-king, alien, but I am also something else. Human. And unlike you eldar, we humans do not submit to fate.’ His eyes flashed with fire. ‘We shape it.’

‘You are mistaken–’

‘No, you are the one who has made the grievous error by trapping me here,’ said Ferrus, swinging Forgebreaker around. The serpent’s gore flicked off the head, a taste of things to come. ‘An error only exceeded by you showing yourself to me now.’

‘Please, I offer life…’ said the alien.

‘You offer a cage of pre-destiny,’ snarled Ferrus. ‘It is your last desperate gambit,’ he said, before he charged.

‘Heed me,’ cried the eldar, backing away and throwing up a psychic shield to defend itself. ‘It does not have to be this way. Do not give in to wrath.’

‘Wrath is what I am,’ he roared. ‘I am a warrior-king, born from battle’s blood!’

No mind-fashioned shield could stay the destructive fury of Forgebreaker, not when wielded by its master. The defences were shattered and the psychic shards bit into the eldar as painfully as any blade. It recoiled and threw a jag of arc-lightning that Ferrus deflected with his shoulder guard. Ozone-stink filled his nostrils but he was not about to be deterred.

His bellow shook the fabric of the constructed world around him, the psychic echo of his rage unpinning it at the seams.

‘Now release me!’

Sweating, bleeding and clenched by fear, the eldar fled through a fissure in the fake reality.

Ferrus reached out, tried to slip through the same doorway as the eldar witch, but a corona of perfect light repelled him.

‘Release me!’

The words stretched out into infinity as the light engulfed him, drowning his senses until they merged. Until darkness overwhelmed them and it felt like he was falling forever.

The last coven witch slid off his sword, leaving a trail of alien blood along the blade. Even with its death and the slow banishment of the black storm, Bion Henricos knew he was dead.

Of the six thousand veterans he had led into the darkness, barely eight hundred remained. They circled the Iron Hand, an injured Colonel Salazarian fighting hard alongside him despite the blood in his lungs. The Army commander squinted through one eye – the other one had been plucked out by an eldar’s knife – and saw they were overrun.

For the first time in an hour, Salazarian stopped barking orders to his men.

Henricos recognised his sudden fatalism.

‘You gave us back our dignity and honour,’ said the colonel, ‘and I thank you for that, my lord.’

A high-pitched whine. Rapid air displacement and the splash of hot fluid against his face told Henricos the old man was dead before he saw the gaping hole in the veteran’s chest.

Salazarian fell, dead-eyed and still, into the arms of the Iron Hand who cradled him to the ground.

The storm was ebbing but the darkness of it was slow to disperse. His brothers would not reach him in time. Men were dying in droves as the eldar gave their last. They were dying too, but were not content to do so alone. They wanted the Space Marine’s head. They wanted Bion Henricos.

‘For the Gorgon!’ he cried, leaving his Medusan steel-edge impaled in the earth so he could draw his bolt pistol. Shells sprayed in an arc of muzzle flare that left a tongue of fire in the air. Alien bodies were struck and died in explosive agony. A head shot through the darkness took out a warleader whose falchion had looked as keen as its wielder.

‘For the Gor–’

Something hit Henricos in the neck, possibly a shuriken from an eldar bow-caster. He grunted, felt it burn. A las-beam pierced his thigh a half-second later. He staggered, slid the combat shield off his butchered forearm, and tried to clutch the graze across his throat with the stump of his wrist but found it wanting. A further beam lanced his torso, somewhere between chest and shoulder. Falling to one knee, Henricos fired off a desultory burst.

Warning icons flashed loudly and insistently on his retinal display. He ripped off his helm to silence them.

Closing his eyes, Henricos prepared for the end when a hand touched his shoulder and he opened them again.

‘The war’s not done with you yet, Iron Hand,’ said a voice of ice and fire.

The giant before Bion Henricos was clad in armour of coal-black. His powerful arms shimmered with lustrous silver that flowed like mercury. Eyes of knapped flint regarded him sternly, and the hammer in his hand could sunder mountains.

Ferrus Manus had returned, and the eldar were fleeing.

‘The storm has ended, brother,’ said the primarch, and held out his hand. ‘Now, stand with me to see it finished.’

Henricos heard the rest of the Legion approaching through the fire and smoke of the battle.

Santar and the Avernii were first to the primarch’s side. Joy at the sight of the Father was hard for them to contain. Their bolters and blades sang.

The node fell quickly, though much of what followed was a blur for Henricos. He carried Salazarian back to friendly lines. Barely three hundred of the veterans returned alive with him.

They would later be honoured for their part and recognised as adopted sons of Medusa. They were the first of the Chainveil, destined to be its captains, and living proof of the concession that, from that day, not all flesh was weak.

Santar found him at the edge of the battlefield, standing vigil over Bion Henricos.

After he’d returned the body of Colonel Salazarian, the sergeant had fallen unconscious from his injuries.

‘He will live,’ said the Gorgon, ‘but he will need further augmentation.’

‘As is his right. The Iron Fathers can tend to him,’ Santar replied. ‘I had thought to punish him for turning against the Principle of Iron.’

‘You still should.’

Santar considered that, but other thoughts were dominant in his mind and rose to the surface.

‘What happened?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Ferrus in a quiet voice. His mood hardened abruptly and he met the First Captain’s questioning gaze. ‘It changes nothing.’

The primarch beckoned to one of his legionaries, who set up a hololithic projector in the earth. Word had reached the Iron Hands that the Salamanders had discovered a second ‘prime’ node in the jungle. With victory in the desert, Ferrus was determined to meet his brother.

‘Are we leaving?’ asked Santar as the hololith came to life in a grainy cone of grey light.

‘We are. Gather the Avernii and tell them we’re headed to the jungle.’ A thin smile betrayed the primarch’s pleasure. ‘My brother has need of us.’

As Ferrus began his communication with Vulkan, Santar did as he was ordered, but despite his lord’s return he couldn’t shake the feeling that all was not well. Whatever had occurred during the Gorgon’s absence had left an indelible mark, one that would resonate into the future. Perhaps all their futures.

The ossified highways that led from their cocooned sanctuary were perilous, but there was little choice but to brave them. The scrap of malfeasant sentience that had found its way into Lathsarial’s pseudo-world was dead, slain by the Gorgon.

It would be millennia before it could return.

Lathsarial staggered and the Diviner helped him walk. The ignorant creature he was trying to save had wounded him. Despair and anguish bled out of him in a psychic wake that would attract other predators. They needed to find safe haven quickly.

‘I have failed,’ he moaned, utterly desolated. ‘I have allowed a war to come to pass that will decimate our race when we are already so few.’

The Diviner’s attention was on the webway around them. He kept his senses alert to any crack, any seemingly insignificant fissure. Many sub-realms had already been devoured and more would follow as the conflict Lathsarial had fought so hard to prevent came to pass.

Such things were inevitable, and so the Diviner’s mood was sanguine.

‘It was not your war to avert,’ he said, opening up a fresh channel in the bone road that was seldom trodden and therefore safer. ‘A healing place is close.’

Lathsarial did not answer. The farseer was inconsolable.

‘Humans are closed-minded,’ said the Diviner. ‘Even those that consider themselves greater, like the Gorgon. He has feet of iron, fixed to his fate and his doom.’

‘But he does not condemn himself alone, but a galaxy. One that is destined to be engulfed in flames.’

Cool light bathed them as they found the healing place at last. The Diviner set Lathsarial down upon a slab of bone and bade him rest.

As the other farseer faded from consciousness, the Diviner revisited his vision of prescience. Three times he had seen the exact same eventuality unfold. That, in itself, was remarkable.

‘There is hope,’ he muttered. ‘In the empire of the Battle-King, he who would install an heir. Even if the Gorgon falls and fails to heed our warning, there is another who will listen, one who was lost.’

~ Dramatis Personae ~

The I Legion ‘Dark Angels’

Lion El’jonson, Primarch

Corswain, Primarch’s Seneschal

Stenius, Captain of the Invincible Reason

Tragan, Captain of the Ninth Order

Nemiel, Brother-Redemptor

Asmodeus, Battle-brother

The X Legion ‘Iron Hands’

Lasko Midoa, Iron Father

Casalir Lorramech, Captain of the 98th Company

The XIV Legion ‘Death Guard’

Calas Typhon, First Captain

Vioss, Captain

Imperial Personae

Theralyn Fiana, Navigator of House Ne’iocene

Khir Doth Iaxis, High Magos of the Mechanicum

Non-Imperial Personae

Tuchulcha

‘There is but one reason and one reason alone in the exercise of power: to further one’s agenda. Be it selfish or altruistic, such agenda should be the whole of one’s concern without distraction if power is to be expended to its benefit. One need only look to the example of the Emperor’s Great Crusade for proof of this eternal truth; when distraction came it was to the ruin of all.’

– Lyaedes, Intermissions, M31

I

The lord of the First Legion sat as he so often sat these nights, leaning back in his ornate throne of ivory and obsidian. His elbows rested upon the throne’s sculpted arms, while his fingers were steepled before his face, just barely touching his lips. Unblinking eyes, the brutal green of Caliban’s forests, stared dead ahead, watching the flickering hololith of embattled stars.

Aboard the Invincible Reason, flagship of the Dark Angels, Lion El’Jonson thought long and hard. There were many things for him to reason out, yet no matter how hard he tried to stay focused on the military effort to bring the Night Lords to battle, his mind was drawn back to an imponderable dilemma.

Eighty-two days had passed since his confrontation with Konrad Curze on the desolate world of Tsagualsa. Eighty-two days had been enough for his body to heal, for the most part, the grievous wounds the Night Haunter’s claws had inflicted upon the Lion’s superhuman flesh. The armour he wore had been repaired and refurbished and repainted, so that not a mark of Curze’s violence showed upon its ebon surface.

On the outside, the Lion was fully recovered, but within lay the most hideous injuries, inflicted not by the Night Haunter’s weapons but by his words.

No risk of the fair Angels falling? When did you last walk upon the soil of Caliban, oh proud one?

The tides of the warp influenced communication as much as they did travel, and no sure word had been heard from Caliban for two years. In times past, the hateful words of Curze would have been easy to dismiss. The loyalty of the Dark Angels had been beyond question. They were the First Legion, ever the noblest in the eyes of all; even when the Luna Wolves earned great praise and Horus was raised to Warmaster, no others could claim the title of First Legion.

Yet such times seemed a lifetime ago now; civil war and schism tore apart the Imperium, and the surety of the past was no guarantee of the present, or the future. Could the Lion trust that his Legion remained loyal to him? Trust was not a natural state for the primarch. Was there some deeper purpose to the Night Lords’ endless war in the Thramas System? Did Curze speak the truth and keep the Lion occupied here while agents of Horus swayed the loyalty of the Dark Angels to another cause?

Trust had been a scarce commodity for the Lion before Horus’s betrayal, and even then he had been taken for a fool. Perturabo had used his status as a brother to trick the Lion, taking control of the devastating war engines of Diamat under the guise of alliance, only to turn those weapons against the servants of the Emperor. The shame of being so manipulated gnawed at the Lion’s conscience, and he would never again accept the simple word of his brothers.

It was an impossible question and an impossible predicament. The Lion had pondered the meaning of the Night Haunter’s words every night, even as he analysed the movements and strategy of his foe, trying to get one step ahead of his elusive enemy. The Night Haunter had had no reason to lie; Curze had been trying to kill his brother as he spoke. Yet they might just be random spite, as had so often spilled from the lips of Konrad Curze, who had used falsehood as a weapon long before he had turned from the grace of the Emperor. Lies were second nature to the primarch and came to him as easily as breaths.

The Lion despised himself for giving credence to the lie, creating the poison that ate away at his resolve. It was simple enough to vow that Thramas would not be surrendered to the Night Lords; it was another matter entirely to prosecute a war against an enemy determined not to fight. With every night that passed, the prospect of decisive battle lessened and the desire to return to Caliban and ensure everything was in order strengthened. Yet the Lion could not abandon the war, if only because it might be a return to Caliban that the Night Haunter desired.

While these thoughts vexed the primarch, at the appointed hour three of his little brothers arrived to brief him on the current situation.

The first to enter was Corswain, former Champion of the Ninth Order, recently appointed as the Primarch’s Seneschal. Across the back of his armour he wore the white pelt of a fanged Calibanite beast, and beneath that hung a white robe split at the back, its breast adorned with an embroidered wing sword. His helm hung on his belt, revealing a broad face and close-cropped blond hair.

Just behind Corswain came Captain Stenius, commander of the Invincible Reason. His face was a literal mask of flesh, almost immobile due to nerve damage suffered during the Great Crusade. His eyes had been replaced with smoky silver lenses that glittered in the lights of the chamber, as inscrutable as the rest of his expression.

The last of the trio was Captain Tragan of the Ninth Order, who had been raised to the position by the primarch following the debacle at Tsagualsa. The captain’s soft brown eyes were at odds with his stern demeanour, his curls of dark brown hair cut to shoulder-length and kept from his aquiline face with a band of black-enamelled metal.

It was Tragan that spoke first.

‘The Night Lords refused engagement at Parthac, my liege, but we arrived too late to stop the destruction of the primary orbital station there. The remaining docking facilities cannot cope with anything larger than a frigate, as I suspect was the enemy’s intent.’

‘That’s three major docks they have taken out in the past six months,’ said Stenius. ‘It is clear that they are denying us refitting and resupply stations.’

‘The question is why,’ said the Lion, stroking his chin. ‘The Night Lords cruisers and battle-barges require such stations as much as ours. I am forced to conclude that they have abandoned any ambition of claiming Parthac, Questios and Biamere and seek to hamper our fleet movements for some manoeuvre in the future.’

‘I would say that it has the hint of desperation, a stellar scorched earth policy,’ said Stenius.

‘We cannot rule out Curze commanding such attacks simply out of spite,’ added Corswain. ‘Perhaps there is no deeper meaning behind these recent attacks, except to exasperate and confuse us.’

‘Yet that will still be a part of a bigger plan,’ said the Lion. ‘For more than two years we have duelled across the stars, and throughout that war the Night Haunter has always been moving towards some endgame I have not yet fathomed. I will think on this latest development. What else have you to report?’

‘The normal fleet movements and scouting reports are in my latest briefing, my liege,’ said Tragan. ‘Nothing out of the ordinary, if there is such a thing.’

‘There was one report that I found odd, my liege,’ said Corswain. ‘A broken astropathic message, barely discernable from the background traffic. It would be unremarkable except that it contains mention of the Death Guard Legion.’

‘Mortarion’s Legion is in Thramas?’ The Lion growled and glared at his subordinates. ‘You think this is not a matter to bring to me immediately?’

‘Not the Legion, my liege,’ said Tragan. ‘A handful of ships, a few thousand warriors at most. The transmission does not seem to originate from the Thramas theatre, but from a system several hundred light years from Balaam.’

‘The message fragments also mention a task force from the Iron Hands in the same vicinity,’ said Corswain. ‘Some skirmish I think, unlikely to impact on our conflict here.’

‘The system, what was it called?’ said the Lion. The primarch’s eyes narrowed with suspicion as he asked the question.

Tragan consulted the data-slate he held in his hand.

‘Perditus, my liege,’ said the Ninth Order captain.

‘It’s barely inhabited, my liege,’ added Stenius. ‘A small Mechanicum research facility, nothing of import.’

‘You are wrong,’ said the Lion, standing up. ‘I know Perditus. I claimed the system for the Emperor, alongside warriors of the Death Guard. What your records do not show, Captain Stenius, is the nature of the research undertaken by the Mechanicum there. Perditus was meant to be kept secret, off-limits to every Legion, but it seems that the Death Guard have other plans.’

‘Off-limits, my liege?’ Tragan was taken aback by the notion. ‘What could be so dangerous?’

‘Knowledge, my little brother,’ replied the Lion. ‘Knowledge of a technology that cannot be allowed to fall into the hands of the traitors. We must assemble a task force at Balaam. A force that can overwhelm anything the Death Guard or Iron Hands have in the area.’

‘What of the Night Lords, my liege?’ asked Corswain. ‘If we relent in our hunt across this sector, or weaken our forces here too much, Curze will make fine sport of the systems we cannot protect.’

‘That is a risk I must take,’ replied the primarch. ‘Perditus is a prize that we must seize from the traitors. I had almost forgotten about it, but now it is brought to mind, I think that perhaps Perditus may hold the key to victory in Thramas too. I shall lead the task force personally. The Invincible Reason will be my flagship, Captain Stenius. The Fourth, Sixth, Ninth, Sixteenth, Seventeenth and Thirtieth Orders are to muster at Balaam.’

‘More than thirty thousand warriors!’ said Tragan, forgetting himself. He bowed his head in apology when the Lion directed a sharp glare at him.

‘When, my liege?’ asked Corswain.

‘As soon as they can,’ said the Lion. He strode towards the door. ‘We cannot afford to arrive too late at Perditus.’

II

Although almost as tall as the Legiones Astartes warriors with whom she travelled the warp, Theralyn Fiana of House Ne’iocene was far slighter, willowy of build with slender fingers. Her hair was copper in colour, as were her eyes; her normal eyes, at least. In the middle of her high forehead, from which her hair was swept back by a silver band, was her Navigator’s eye. To call it an eye was to compare a glass of water to the ocean. This orb, translucent white but dappled with swirling colours, did not look upon frequencies of light, but delved through the barrier that bounded the warp, looking upon the raw stuff of the immaterial realm.

Now that warp-sight was employed moving the Invincible Reason away from the translation point at Balaam. The streaming threads of the warp currents were tugging hard at the ship, which sat cocooned within an egg-shaped psychic field, buoyed upon the immaterial waves like a piece of flotsam on the ocean tides. She sat in the navigational spire high above the superstructure of the battle-barge. Out of instinct, Fiana looked for the bright beacon of the Astronomican, and as she had done for the last two and a half years she felt a part of her soul grow dim at the realisation that it could not be found. That the light of Terra no longer burned had been a source of constant argument amongst the Navigators attached to the Dark Angels Legion, with Fiana amongst the growing camp who believed that the only explanation was that the Emperor was no longer alive. This was not a popular viewpoint, and one not to be raised with the primarch, but the logic was inescapable to Fiana.

In the absence of the galaxy-spanning Astronomican, the Navigators relied on warp beacons – tiny lanterns of psychic brightness from relay stations in real space. They were candles compared to the star of the Astronomican, and only one in ten systems in the sector had them, but they were better than moving wholly blind; so much so that both the Night Lords and Dark Angels had tacitly agreed to treat the beacon stations as no-go areas. The risk of stranding one’s own ships in the warp was too great to chance the destruction of the fragile orbital stations.

Perditus was not a beaconed system, and was located only one hundred and fourteen light years from Balaam, on a two hundred and thirty degrees, seven-point incline heading from the Drebbel beacon, which in turn would be found on a path at one hundred and eighty seven degrees, eighteen-point negative incline three days out towards the Nemo System. Glancing at a hand-drawn chart draped over the edge of her rotatable chair, Fiana confirmed this and examined the currents lapping at the barrier of the Geller field surrounding the Invincible Reason.

The warp did not look like its true state, even to her. Yet Fiana’s warp sight allowed her to sense an approximation of its tidal powers and whorls of immaterial confluence. The Balaam System had been chosen for the rendezvous because from here a near-constant current ran through the warp almost as far as Nhyarin, nearly three thousand light years away. Nothing was ever certain with the warp, and its strange ways meant that sometimes the Nhyarin Flow ran backwards or could not be located at all, but eight times out of ten it could be relied upon to speed travel to the galactic south-west, fully across Aegis and two other subsectors. The worlds along its route were amongst the most hotly contested between the Night Lords and the Dark Angels.

Fiana punched in a series of coded orders for the piloting team situated in the command deck. A few minutes later, the Geller field bulged to starboard, its psychic harmonics adjusting to the controls of the crew so that the Invincible Reason edged out of its current course and into the outlying streams of the Nhyarin Flow. Psychic power gripped at the shields like waves tugging at a leaf, and though there was no real sensation of movement, Fiana felt in her thoughts the battle-barge surging ahead, flung forwards across time and space at incredible speed.

Around her, the pinpricks of light that had been the other ships of the fleet winked out of existence. Within half a dozen minutes, nothing could be seen of the flotilla, scattered to the four points of the compass and stretched through time by the eerie workings of warp space.

Turning in place, Fiana conducted a quick scan for storm activity. The whole of the warp was alive with tempests, but the Nhyarin Flow seemed stable enough for the moment. There was no horizon, no distance or perspective, and for just a moment Fiana teetered on the brink of being swallowed by the abyssal nature of the warp. She reeled her mind back into her skull, pulling down the velvet-padded silver band so that its psychic-circuitry-impregnated metal covered her third eye.

Just before her othersense was curtailed she thought she glimpsed another ship, riding on a swirl of energy behind the battle-barge. It was probably another Dark Angels vessel, caught by fortune on the same timeflow as the Invincible Reason. She made a note of it in her log and signalled for her half-brother Assaryn Coiden to ascend the pilaster and take over. As the senior member of the household, it was her responsibility to see that the ship was safe during transitions, but now that the task was complete, she was glad to be able to delegate to her younger siblings. Things were far more peaceful in her quarters, and ever since Horus’s rebellion had begun and the storms had come, just an hour of exposure to the warp had left her with splitting headaches and a soul-draining fatigue.

There had always been talk amongst the household, of what the warp really was, and whispered stories of the strange phenomena that the Navigators sometimes glimpsed on their travels. Now Fiana was certain that there was something else out there; not just aliens living in the warp as she had been warned, but something that existed as part of the immaterium itself.

And the stories had grown in number, and in horror. Ships had always gone missing, but the frequency with which they were now lost was frightening, as if the warp itself was rebelling at their presence. Having felt dark swirls and malignant tendrils tugging at the edges of her thoughts, Fiana knew too well that the warp was far from a welcoming place.

The Lion’s stare was cold as it fell upon the chief Navigator, Theralyn Fiana. This was the fourth audience in seven days that he had granted her, and twice also had he received representation from her through Captain Stenius. Her complaints were becoming tiresome, and made all the more irritating because there was nothing the Lion could do to alleviate the problems she and her fellow Navigators were experiencing. She had joined the Invincible Reason at Balaam, highly regarded as an expert of the warp tides they were travelling, but so far the Lion’s only impression was of a thin-faced woman who had nothing but excuses to offer for their slow progress.

This time she had Captain Stenius for company, and looked even more agitated than normal. The Lion waved Fiana forwards with a gauntleted hand, suppressing a sigh of annoyance. The Navigator stopped five metres from the primarch’s throne, the ship’s captain a few paces behind. She was dressed in a flowing gown of green and blue, of a material that shimmered like water when she walked. Her bare arms were painted with rings of varying design from shoulder to elbow, and the backs of her hands were tattooed with intricate intersecting geometric shapes copied by a cluster of pendants that hung on a thin chain around her neck.

Fiana’s third eye was concealed by a broad silver band across her brow, but the Lion could feel its touch upon him, like a spark of heat on his flesh. Navigators, and all psykers for that matter, caused him pause; he was not well disposed to those who might see him in ways that normal men did not. Only the Emperor did he trust with such knowledge.

‘What is it?’ said the Lion. He fluttered a hand towards Corswain, who had just arrived and was due to brief his leader on the latest intelligence concerning Perditus. ‘Be quick, there are other matters demanding my attention. If you wish me to still the warp with a wave of my hand, I must disappoint you again, Navigator.’

‘It is on another matter, an urgent one, that we must converse,’ said Fiana as she rose from her bow. She glanced at Captain Stenius and received a curt nod of reassurance. ‘Lauded primarch, for the past several days, since we translated from Balaam, I and my family have witnessed a ship following in our wake. At first we thought it coincidence; a companion vessel of the fleet that happenstance had tossed upon the same course as ours.’

‘But you no longer believe this to be the case?’ said the Lion, leaning forwards. ‘It is my understanding that it is extremely difficult, perhaps impossible, to trail a vessel in warp space.’

‘That was our understanding also, lauded primarch. Many times have Navigators attempted to stay within reach of each other, but ninety-nine times out of a hundred all sight is lost within a day, and always within two days. We sometimes make analogy between the warp and the currents of the sea, but it is a simplistic comparison. The warp flows not only through space, within another realm beside our own, but also upon different streams of time.’

‘This I know,’ snapped the Lion, growing impatient. ‘An hour passes in the warp and several days have turned in real space. If a ship translates a day before another, it could be weeks ahead in its journey. You have not yet explained why coincidence is not a suitable explanation, Navigator. I have made hundreds of warp jumps in my life; it is not remarkable that on one journey another ship might be caught upon the same current.’

‘No, lauded primarch, it is not,’ replied Fiana. She straightened to her full height and met the primarch’s glare, though only for a moment before the intensity of his eyes forced her to look away again. ‘It is remarkable that we have changed stream four times in the last five days, seeking the fastest current to Perditus, and within the hour the ship is behind us again. It is following us, lauded primarch, and I know of nobody who possesses that capability.’

The Lion did not waste time asking if she was certain; the forthright tone of her voice and hard look in her eye convinced him that she spoke the truth as she believed it. He nodded and gestured for Captain Stenius to step closer.

‘I am sorry, Lady Fiana, for my curtness. Thank you for bringing this matter to my attention. Captain, I believe that you were already aware of this?’

‘Lady Fiana brought her suspicions to me yesterday, my liege. I asked her to confirm her findings for another day and decided it was worthy of bringing to you.’

‘It is an impossibility, lauded primarch,’ said Fiana. ‘No Navigator can track another vessel in the warp with such accuracy. We work on suggestions and instincts far too vague for such precision.’

No Navigator, thought the Lion, but not impossible.

During his infancy on Caliban, growing up alone in the dark, monster-infested forests, he had learned quickly that some beasts did not need to see to hunt. Some possessed senses other than sight and hearing and smell: they could stalk their prey by the spoor of their soul. Such creatures were the deadliest he had faced, not wholly physical. The knights of Caliban called them nephilla and it was only with great effort that they could be slain, though the Lion in his youth had killed several.

It was a stretch from nephilla roaming the dark forests of Caliban to a ship that could unerringly track another through the warp but, like Fiana, the Lion did not trust anything to coincidence. There were forces at play – forces unleashed by Horus and his allies – that he did not fully understand, and until proven to the contrary the Lion was willing to believe his foes capable of anything.

‘For the moment it is sensible to assume that our mysterious pursuer is a Night Lords ship,’ the Lion said after a half-second of contemplation. ‘Do you think it is possible to elude this enemy without undue risk or excessive delay to our journey? I would not have the foe learn of our destination and the secret held there.’

‘I am not sure I would know what to do, lauded primarch,’ said Fiana. ‘It is not something a Navigator learns.’

‘Surely you have experienced pursuit by other than a ship?’ said the Lion. ‘There are denizens of the warp that are known to chase vessels.’

‘Of course,’ said Fiana. ‘I know a small repertoire of evasive manoeuvres, but the usual response when facing such a crisis is an emergency translation into real space.’

‘That will be our second option,’ said the Lion. ‘I would rather avoid the delay that would add to our journey. You have two days to shake our hunter. Report your progress directly to me, Lady Fiana.’

‘As you command, lauded primarch,’ said the Navigator, sweeping down into a long bow.

When Captain Stenius and Lady Fiana had departed, the Lion called to his seneschal to attend him.

‘I am deeply suspicious of this craft that follows us, Cor,’ the primarch said. ‘Have the weapons crews sleeping beside their guns, and double the watch strength.’

‘As you command, my liege,’ said Corswain. ‘If you have time, we should discuss the strategy you wish to employ when we arrive at Perditus. The last contact we have shows that the Iron Hands and Death Guard were just beginning hostilities. It is possible that one side or the other may have gained the upper hand since then.’

The Lion pushed aside thoughts of phantom ships and concentrated on the wider task.

‘We treat Perditus as hostile,’ he declared. ‘It is impossible to say for which cause any other force fights. Death Guard, Mechanicum, Iron Hands: all are to be treated as enemy until I say otherwise.’

For two days Fiana and the other three Navigators aboard the Invincible Reason performed several manoeuvres that would, in normal circumstances, separate them from the following ship. They frequently changed flows within the warp, shifting the battle-barge from the fast-moving stream of the Nhyarin Flow to the more sedate currents that drifted from its outer edges. They dived into swirling eddies, a risky proposition even before the recent tumults that had engulfed warp space. Twice they turned the ship fully about and forged into counter-flows, taking them away from the route to Perditus.

Always the other ship found them again, sometimes never breaking away, other times vanishing only to appear on the edge of detection an hour or two later, following unerringly in the battle-barge’s wake.

After the two days allowed by the Lion, Fiana and Stenius convened again with the primarch to discuss the next course of action. With the Lion was Corswain, summoned by his master. It was Stenius who spoke first.

‘Whatever force guides our pursuer, it is beyond our means to shake them loose, my liege,’ announced the ship’s captain.

‘Not wholly beyond our means,’ said Fiana, earning herself a sharp look from Stenius; enough to betray the existence of a previous argument between the two, though his partial facial paralysis prevented any more meaningful expression.

‘I will not risk my ship,’ Stenius said flatly.

‘You have an alternative?’ said the Lion, directing his gaze to Fiana.

‘Three days ahead, perhaps four, there is a well-known anomaly, which we call the Morican Gulf. It corresponds roughly to the Morican star, a dead system. There is a region that is like a gap in the warp, a bottomless gulf surrounded by a turbulent maelstrom. It is possible to run the outer edges of this whirl, and the storm should mask our departure route.’

‘And the risks?’ asked Corswain.

‘The null space, the void in the eye of the storm, can becalm a ship, leave it stranded for days, for weeks, sometimes forever,’ said Stenius, shaking his head in disapproval. ‘It should not be considered at the best of times, and our mission at Perditus is too important to risk delays or worse.’

The Lion considered this, weighing up the merits of losing the pursuer against potential calamity. He disregarded the Navigator’s plan, but remembered the earlier conversation he had shared with Fiana.

‘Lady Fiana, you suggested before that we might make an emergency jump to real space. Is it possible that we could do so whilst the other ship has been blinded by one of your manoeuvres?’

‘Possible, yes, lauded primarch,’ said Fiana.

‘There is no guarantee that our phantom ship has not the means to detect such a thing,’ said Corswain. ‘We have no idea of their capabilities. As I understand it, any translating ship creates ripples, an echo along the warp currents. If the Night Lords have a psyker or some other means to track our normal movements, a translation would be as clear as a summer day to them.’

‘An emergency jump even more so, lauded primarch,’ added Fiana. ‘The backwash would be like dropping a boulder into a lake; even an inexperienced Navigator could detect it.’

‘There is also the danger that our warp engine rift will collide with the Geller field of the other ship,’ said Stenius. ‘Whatever means they have to follow us, they have to stay close to use it.’

‘Interesting,’ said the Lion, a chain of thought set in motion by the captain’s warning. He looked first at Corswain and then fixed his eyes on Stenius. ‘Little brothers, have the ship secured for an emergency translation, but keep the gunnery crews at their stations. Lady Fiana, I want you to position the ship in a particular way. Find a swift-moving warp current from which you can quickly move to a contra-flowing one.’

‘What is your intent, lauded primarch?’ asked Fiana, a worried frown creasing her pale skin beneath the silver of her headband.

‘Our enemy shadow our movements closely but not instantaneously,’ explained the Lion. ‘We will move in such a way as to draw them extremely close, and then we will activate the warp engines to jump back to real space. The other vessel should be caught in our exit wake and drawn from the warp after us. In real space our enemy will become vulnerable to attack.’

‘If both ships are not torn apart, my liege!’ said Captain Stenius. He was about to continue his objections, but the Lion cut him off with a sharp gesture.

‘You know my intent. The plan is not a subject for discussion. Lady Fiana, it will be up to you to choose the optimum moment for translation. From everything I have heard of your skill previously, I expect success.’

‘Of course, lauded primarch,’ said the Navigator, her face set with determination. Her reputation had been placed on the line, and for a Navigator aspiring to be the next Matriarch of her House there was no commodity more valuable than the praise of a primarch.

The Lion looked at Stenius and leaned forwards, his voice dropping low.

‘You understand my orders, captain?’ asked the primarch.

‘I do, my liege,’ Stenius replied quietly.

‘Then you are both dismissed,’ said the Lion. He reached a hand out towards Corswain. ‘Stay a moment longer, little brother.’

When the ship’s captain and Navigator had departed, the Lion motioned for Corswain to approach the throne.

‘I am worried about Stenius,’ confessed the primarch. ‘At first he delays bringing the fact of our pursuit to my attention, and now he seems reluctant to resolve our predicament.’

‘I am sure there are no grounds for suspicion, my liege,’ said Corswain, affecting a formal tone, disquieted by the subject of Stenius’s loyalty.

‘Sure, little brother? One hundred per cent certain? You would vouch for Stenius yourself?’

Corswain hesitated at the challenge in the Lion’s voice. After a moment, he lowered to one knee and bowed his head.

‘I have no doubt about Captain Stenius, my liege. However, to allay any reservations you may harbour, I shall have Brother-Redemptor Nemiel report to you.’

‘As you see fit, little brother,’ the Lion said, offering a rare smile.

III

The narrow chamber atop the navigational pilaster could barely hold all four of the Navigators. What the primarch had asked for required a very specific set of circumstances. Fiana and her fellow Navigators each surveyed a stretch of the warp, seeking the conjunction of flows needed to bring the Invincible Reason quickly back towards the phantom ship. All other preparations had been made; the ship’s company were braced for the potentially devastating drop back into real space, while Fiana had warned her companions of the deleterious effect it could have on their minds.

‘I have something,’ said Ardal Aneis, Fiana’s younger brother. ‘A counter-nebulous promontory, on the port bow.’

Fiana directed her unnatural gaze in the direction Aneis had mentioned and saw what had caught his attention. Three warp streams, one very strong, the other two weaker but approaching each other at steep angles, came together to create a three-dimensional whirlpool. The outflow curved back over the battle-barge’s path and intersected with a dead pool that slowly leached back into the Nhyarin Flow.

‘Captain Stenius, please direct primary navigational control to my console.’ The communications pick-up buzzed in Fiana’s shaking hand and she resolutely avoided the concerned looks in the eyes of her fellow Navigators. She received the affirmative from Stenius and a few seconds later the screen below her left arm flickered into life. A diagnostic sub-routine scrolled quickly across the pale green glass and then the screen went blank.

Fiana’s voice dropped to a whisper as she keyed in the manoeuvre required to plunge the ship into the heart of the promontory. ‘Remember the pride of House Ne’iocene.’

There was no sound, in the warp. No real tidal pressures or inertia pulled at metal and ferrocrete, but even so Fiana could sense the tortured mass of the Invincible Reason as its Geller field realigned, shoving the battle-barge from one streaming eddy of warp energy into another. Fiana felt a moment of sickness as her othersense lurched and spun, while all around her, the clashing currents of the psychic promontory smashed together like the slavering jaws of an immense, immaterial beast.

Kiafan, youngest of her siblings, fell to his knees beside the chief Navigator, emptying the contents of his stomach upon the floor between snarled gasps of pain. Fiana ignored the distraction and keyed in another instruction on her runepad. The ship settled into a trough of psychic power for several seconds, before rising up, ejected from the promontory like a grain of sand caught in the spume of a breaching whale.

Fiana gritted her teeth and made a final adjustment to their course, forcing herself to peer along the unwinding threads of energy that unravelled before her. She anchored the Geller field onto the strongest and then pushed aside her companions to collapse into the only chair in the chamber.

‘Captain, we are on our new heading,’ she gasped over the comm. Steadying herself, she looked for the bobbing mote of energy that was the other ship’s warp signature. She located it ahead, approaching quickly. There was no time to waste. Even from their prepared idling state, it would take several minutes for the warp engines to charge to full power. Any longer and they would be right on top of the phantom ship, their Geller fields merging. The effect of translating in such close proximity to another vessel would be certain destruction for both ships.

‘Translate now, captain! Activate the warp engines!’

Trying to emulate the example set by his primarch, Corswain stood immobile on the gallery above the Invincible Reason’s strategium, just behind and to the left of the statuesque Lion. On the other side of the primarch was Brother-Redemptor Nemiel. The Chaplain wore a skull-faced helm, so that nothing could be seen of his expression, concerned or otherwise. Lady Fiana’s snarled command had not helped settle Corswain’s mood, and had set the command crew below into frenetic activity. The navigation aides moved quickly from station to station in the bright glow of their screens, monitoring power outputs and safety thresholds as the plasma reactors of the battle-barge went up above one hundred per cent output in preparation for the warp engine activation.

Corswain clenched his jaw as he felt an ill-defined pressure building in his skull. It was not like a concussive shockwave or the pull felt in a plunging drop-pod, but more like a container slowly being filled, reaching its capacity and yet not bursting. The ache was behind his eyes, mental not physical. Aside from the brain-juddering dislocation of teleportation, it was the most unpleasant sensation he had ever encountered in his long years of service to the Legion.

A glance at the Lion confirmed that if the primarch suffered the same discomforts as his little brothers, he showed no outward sign of it. The commander of the First Legion stood with legs braced apart, arms folded across his breastplate, eyes fixed on the multiple screens that made up the strategium’s main display wall. The aides working below acted and interacted like organic parts of a complex machine, the hub of which was Captain Stenius in the command throne. Inquiry and reply, report and command all flowed through the ship’s captain, who orchestrated the whole endeavour with curt responses and clipped orders.

Corswain could only imagine the thoughts occupying Stenius at the moment. Warp translation was difficult enough in perfect conditions, and the current conditions were far from perfect. Another glance at the Lion showed Corswain that the primarch’s attention had moved, from the grey blankness of the screens to Stenius.

It was impossible to discern real meaning from the primarch’s inscrutable glare, but that did not stop Corswain from speculating, occupying his mind with such idle thoughts in order to distract himself from the coming moment when reality and unreality would clash and they might all be wiped from existence.

The Lion’s comments regarding Stenius concerned Corswain on two levels. At first hand, he wondered what he had missed that had been seen by the primarch’s insight. Corswain was, for the moment at least until they were reunited with Luther and the rest of the Legion on Caliban, the right hand of the primarch. It was his duty to foresee his master’s commands and act before they required the Lion’s attention. If there was some facet of Stenius’s manner that he had missed, Corswain felt he was not properly fulfilling his duties.

Contrary to this was the worry that there was nothing amiss in Stenius’s behaviour, which did not bode well for the Lion’s current state of mind. Since Tsagualsa the primarch had brooded, even more than Corswain had become accustomed to. His master had said nothing of what preoccupied his thoughts, speaking only of the ongoing campaign against the Night Lords, but even those conversations had been touched by a new determination, bordering on a hunger for victory that Corswain had not seen in the Lion since the earliest days of the Crusade. The seneschal’s brush with death had forced Corswain to acknowledge his own shortcomings and apply himself to his duties with greater endeavour; perhaps the primarch felt the same.

‘Warp translation in ten seconds.’

Stenius’s monotone declaration cut through Corswain’s meandering thoughts. He balled his hands into fists, knowing what was to come. The Lion stepped forwards, gripping the balcony rail in both hands as he stared down at Stenius, eyes narrowed. The primarch opened his mouth a little, as if he was about to speak. He said nothing and shook his head slightly, lips pursed.

‘Beginning translation to real space.’

This was the part Corswain hated the most, in sensation most alike to the disembodied lurch of teleportation. For an endless moment the Invincible Reason was held between two dimensions, perched on the precipice between the material and immaterial like a wanderer standing at the crossroads of fate. A moment before, it had been adrift on the tides of the warp, cocooned within a bubble of reality kept intact by its Geller field. Now it was in the true universe, plucked from the unnatural currents, its Geller-borne reality imploding as real space engulfed the vessel.

Corswain’s head reeled for several seconds, dizzied by a sense of unreality, his surroundings seeming out of step with him, disjointed and fragile.

The sensation passed, leaving a faint pulsing behind Corswain’s eyes.

The Lion was already barking orders for the short-range scanners to be brought online, eager to see whether his plan had worked and the phantom ship had been dragged out of the warp by the risky manoeuvre.

‘All power to local augurs and broad-band auspex sweeps,’ said the primarch, striding towards the long sweep of stairs that led down into the main chamber of the strategium. ‘Redirect long-range signalling and sensors to comm-net scans. Find me that ship!’

The systems of the Invincible Reason scoured the surrounding space for seven minutes. Corswain and Nemiel had followed their primarch down to the main floor, and had been joined by Captain Stenius who had surrendered his position of direct command to the Lion. Nothing was said for those seven minutes, as the scanner technicians worked feverishly to determine whether the plan had succeeded.

‘Legiones Astartes ident-contact, my liege,’ announced one of the strategium attendants. ‘Twenty-two thousand kilometres from starboard bow. Eclipse-class light cruiser. Night Lords. Broadcasting as the Avenging Shadow.’

‘Monitoring warp field fluctuations, my liege,’ said another. ‘Transferring to main display.’

The largest of the strategium’s screens blurred into life, filled with an expanse of stars. In the bottom right corner, a shifting corona of light silhouetted the enemy light cruiser, trapped in a vortex between real space and the warp.

‘Hard starboard, thirty degrees, down-plane twelve degrees,’ snapped the Lion, having made the navigational calculations in only a couple of seconds. Even with the aid of a trigometric cogitator Stenius would have taken at least two minutes to get the exact heading required. ‘Ready torpedoes, tubes three and four. Flight crews to Thunderhawks and Stormbirds.’

The primarch’s orders rang across the strategium, setting teams of officers and functionaries into motion. As this new activity settled, the Lion crossed the floor to the weapons control consoles. Stenius took a step after him.

‘My liege, a full torpedo salvo will have a much greater chance of destroying the enemy.’

‘I do not wish to destroy them, captain. We will capture the ship and seize whatever technology they have employed to track us here. I am inputting the torpedo guidance codes; they will not miss.’

‘Of course not, my liege,’ said Stenius, stepping back, only the tone of his voice betraying his chagrin.

‘I request permission to lead the boarding parties, my liege,’ said Corswain.

‘Denied, little brother.’ The primarch did not look up, his fingers dancing across the rune keys of the main weapons console. ‘We will cripple their ship and I will lead the attack myself.’

‘I do not think that is a good idea, my liege,’ said Corswain, daring his master’s displeasure. ‘The warp interference surrounding the enemy vessel is highly unstable. The ship could be dragged back into the warp while you are aboard.’

The Lion’s fingers stopped their tapping for a moment and the primarch straightened. Corswain prepared himself for a rebuke.

‘Denied, little brother,’ said the Lion, resuming his work. ‘I will need you to remain on board the Invincible Reason.’

Corswain automatically glanced at Stenius, guessing his primarch’s intent. The Lion’s distrust remained.

‘Brother-Redemptor Ne–’

‘Is not a command-level officer, little brother.’ The Lion’s words were curt but not harsh. He finished his task and turned towards Corswain, deep green eyes boring into the seneschal’s skull. ‘You will remain on board, Cor. Unless you have any other reason why that should not be the case?’

‘Torpedoes bearing on target, my liege,’ declared a weapons tech, stilling any reply that Corswain might utter; he had none. ‘Firing solution has been plotted as per your calculations.’

‘Launch when at optimum angle,’ said the Lion. ‘Engines all ahead full towards the enemy.’

‘Aye, my liege,’ replied Stenius. He activated the internal communication system and repeated the order to the Techmarines manning the reactor chambers.

‘Tube three cycling. Tube three launching. Tube four cycling. Tube four launching.’ The words were spat mechanically from the mouth grille of a half-human servitor enmeshed by a tangle of wires to the weapons bank. The haggard figure was little more than a torso and head protruding from a cylindrical console, his eyes stapled shut, ears replaced with antenna-jutting vocal receivers.

On the main screen, the beleaguered Night Lords ship was dead ahead, the streak of the two torpedoes racing from the battle-barge towards it.

‘Twenty-three seconds to torpedo separation. Twenty-seven seconds to impact,’ grated the weapons servitor. Already the blazing plasma drives of the torpedoes were just another glimmering pair of stars against the backdrop of the galaxy, gradually dwindling with distance.

‘My liege, I have Lady Fiana requesting contact on the internal comm,’ said an aide.

‘Direct through speakers,’ replied the Lion, long strides taking him back across the strategium to stand beside the command throne.

‘The Night Lords ship is doing something strange with its warp engines,’ the Navigator reported over the internal address system. Corswain saw his primarch frown at her imprecise language.

‘Be more specific, Lady Fiana,’ said the Lion. ‘What can you see?’

‘Forgive my vagueness, lauded primarch. It is hard to describe to one possessed of normal sight alone. There is something – some things – moving in the Geller field around the enemy ship. It looks like fragments of warp space are actually inside the ship, but that is impossible.’

‘I have heard the word too often lately,’ snarled the primarch. ‘What is the significance of this to us?’

Before Fiana could reply, the Lion’s attention was drawn elsewhere.

‘My liege, the enemy ship is turning, trying to break free from the warp breach. They are closing quickly with our position.’

‘Detecting an incoming hail, my liege.’

The two reports came almost at the same moment and the Lion hesitated for the first time since coming to the strategium, unsure which piece of information to respond to first. The pause only lasted a fraction of a heartbeat before the decision was made.

‘Adjust course by two points to port and ready starboard batteries,’ ordered the primarch. ‘Decrypt hail and transfer to main speakers.’

The air was filled with static hiss for several seconds while the automated decryption systems deciphered the incoming transmission. What came out of the speakers sounded like the garbled hissing of a snake, every syllable spat with derision. The Lion’s face twisted in a lopsided smile and he looked at Corswain.

‘I never cared much for Nostraman, Cor. You have studied it, I know. Tell me, what do they say? I cannot imagine that they are begging for mercy.’

‘They praise you for the trick in dragging them into the light, but then there come the obtuse threats. They say that they will have a reckoning in Slathissin and we will all meet our doom.’

‘I do not recall any system called Slathissin, in Thramas or elsewhere,’ said the Lion.

‘It is a reference to their barbaric past, my liege,’ explained Corswain. ‘It is the lowest hell, where the souls of the fallen exact vengeance on those that wronged them, reserved for traitors, patricides and worse.’

‘There is no such place, their threats are empty,’ said Nemiel, speaking for the first time since he had arrived at the strategium. He looked at Corswain through the lenses of his skull-shaped helm, his expression hidden. ‘There is no hell, and there are no such things as souls.’

A few seconds later, laughter sounded over the transmission, edged with insanity.

‘You are wrong, son of Caliban. So wrong. As you will find out very soon. Slathissin opens its gates for you all.’

‘I gave no order to transmit,’ said the Lion. ‘Cut the feed now!’

‘We have ears nonetheless, proud Lion.’

‘We are not transmitting any signal,’ confirmed one of the communications attendants.

‘My blade waits for your throat, disbeliever. I am Nias Korvali, and at the last midnight I will have a bloody revenge.’

There was a shout from one of the technicians monitoring the scanning arrays, just a few seconds before an automated siren blared across the strategium.

‘The enemy ship is activating its void shields and warp engines, my liege!’ came the panicked cry.

‘Madness,’ muttered Nemiel. ‘The feedback from the void shields will tear them apart.’

‘Fire arrestors, full turn to port!’ snarled the Lion. ‘That same feedback will create a wave in the warp breach, ripping it apart. Activate Geller fields, prepare for unplanned translation!’

‘Torpedoes separating.’ The servitor’s monotone declaration cut through the activity, and Corswain looked up at the main screen, as did the Lion, Stenius and several others.

There was a brief twinkling as thrusters fired and the torpedoes ejected their multiple warheads towards the Night Lords ship. As if in response, the multicoloured bruise on reality that surrounded the target vessel shimmered violently, waves of kaleidoscopic energy pouring from the warp breach in iridescent flares.

The light cruiser appeared to fold in upon itself, the implosion releasing another blast of warp power as its void shields tried to shunt raw psychic energy back into the warp itself, creating a loop that fed into the breach between universes. One moment Corswain was looking at the enemy vessel in the heart of an ever-moving circular rainbow, the next the whole screen was filled with rippling lines and coils of pulsing warp energy; and then he realised that the convocation of energy was not on the screen, but in the air around him.

IV

‘Stay calm.’

The Lion spoke without haste, pouring reassurance and strength into those two words as he felt the touch of panic settling upon the dozens of crew manning the strategium. There was not a man or woman aboard the ship that had not faced death more than once, but being engulfed in the warp breach was a test that none of them had faced before.

He activated the internal comms system with a flick of a finger.

‘All captains and other officers maintain discipline in your sections. We are experiencing a temporary situation that will be resolved swiftly. You have your standing orders, obey them.’

The primarch felt his heart beating a little faster than normal, but it was just an expected response to an emergency. He took a moment to review the situation.

The Invincible Reason was caught betwixt the warp and real space, trapped in a rift caused by the Night Lords’ detonation of their warp engines. The Lion could feel the energy of the warp pulsing through and around him, suffusing the material of the ship, the air, his body. Only a few seconds had passed since the warp tide had engulfed them and everything seemed slightly distorted, as if he was standing at an angle to normality, looking in from a slightly different place.

The lights on the display consoles winked strangely, fluttering to an aberrant rhythm that represented no system on the ship. The muted voices of the crew were dislocated, sounding as though they came from a great distance. The visual screens had gone blank, unable to replicate the vortex of power that was whirling about the ship. Captain Stenius stepped up beside the primarch, a faint afterglow left in his wake, trails of glimmering sparks falling from the edges of his armour as he moved.

‘Status report,’ said the Lion. ‘Void shields. Geller field. Warp engines.’

‘Aye, my liege,’ replied Stenius, his voice echoing for a moment inside the Lion’s head. More fiery trails danced in the air as the captain raised his fist to his chest in salute.

‘We have reports of fighting!’ This came from Corswain, who had moved to one of the main monitoring stations, his voice sounding like a distant shout though he was less than ten metres away. ‘Starboard gun decks, levels eight and nine.’

‘Enemy?’ snapped the Lion. ‘A Night Lords teleport attack?’

‘No clear report, my liege,’ said Corswain. ‘It is very confusing.’

‘Get down there and establish some order, little brother. Clear head, discipline and courage.’

Corswain nodded and headed towards the doors while the Lion turned his attention back to Stenius, one eyebrow raised in question.

‘Warp interference prevents us raising void shields, my liege. We would suffer the fate of the Night Lords. The same is true of the Geller field; we’ve not fully translated and to activate it would risk a massive feedback loop. Warp engines are still cycling back to potential from our translation.’ Though the captain’s face was immobile, his shoulders sagged. ‘We are trapped here for the moment, my liege.’

The Lion absorbed this without comment, the reality of the situation brought home by the captain’s stark words. He formed a plan of action.

‘We cannot break free from this storm, so we must ride it to the heart. Have the warp engines readied as soon as possible. We will make a full translation back into warp space and activate the Geller field to stabilise normality. Have Lady Fiana report to me immediately. Understood?’

‘Yes, my liege.’

The main doors hissed open and fifteen Dark Angels in Terminator armour entered, combi-bolters and power fists at the ready. Their immense armour was black as pitch and trimmed with silver, broken only by the sigils of the Legion on their shoulder pads and the scarlet skull emblems on their huge chestplates: the personal blazon of Brother-Redemptor Nemiel who was there to meet them.

‘Maintain order, brothers,’ the Chaplain told his bodyguard. ‘Be watchful and show no hesitation.’

Stepping off the conveyor at gun deck nine, his retinue of ten legionaries in close step behind him, Corswain still had no better idea what was happening or who had attacked the ship. The comm-feed was alive with reports of the unidentified assailants sweeping from bastion to bastion and he could hear bolter fire and heavier weapons echoing along the corridor from the gun platforms towards the prow. It was possible, though highly unlikely, that the Night Lords had managed some form of long-range teleport as a last-ditch act before their ship was destroyed; it would not be the most unbelievable act the Night Lords Legion had performed recently.

The gun deck was composed of a main corridor nearly a kilometre long, with access passages every two hundred metres leading to each of the gun turrets, which in turn were self-contained keeps housing the macro-cannons and missile pods used for close attack against enemy ships. They were designed to withstand boarding and Corswain could see that the defence bulkheads had been dropped on the closest platforms, isolating them from the rest of the ship. How any attacker had managed to breach several platforms at once in such a short space was beyond his reckoning.

Several dozen unarmed crew members wearing plain black livery came streaming past, heading to aft, fleeing the fighting. There was a wild look in their eyes and they paid him no heed as he called for them to stop and explain what was happening. Corswain had never seen such terror in the eyes of seasoned men before.

Another burst of furious gunfire sounded ahead as the seneschal and his bodyguard pounded down the corridor towards the fighting. Deck Captain Isaases was supposed to be in charge, but was not responding to Corswain’s calls on the comm; he was probably already dead.

Amidst the detonation of grenades, a handful of Dark Angels backed into the main passage, bolters blazing into the turret doorway of Gun Keep Four fifty metres away, two flamers licking promethium fire into the opening.

Corswain’s auto-senses dimmed his sight for an instant as a flare of bright energy erupted from the opening. Pink and blue flames exploded into the passageway, carrying with them the burning bodies of two more Dark Angels. The seneschal had never seen any weapon like it, and broke into a sprint, readying his pistol and power sword as he closed with the group of legionaries. The two warriors who had been caught in the attack flailed around on the floor as multicoloured flames danced across their armour, melting through their suits like a plasma blast.

A demand for a report died on Corswain’s lips as he came level with the turret doorway and saw what was within, all reason driven from his thoughts for a moment.

The interior of the gun keep was ablaze with multicoloured flames, and in the heart of the blinding inferno cavorted strange shapes. They were like nothing Corswain had seen before, and he had encountered many strange enemies in his years of service to the First Legion. The alien creatures seemed to be composed of the fire itself: headless, legless bodies with faces in their chests and long gangling arms that spouted more fire from maw-like openings at their ends. Their torsos flared out to frilled edges where legs should have been, jumping to and fro with contorted twists. The creatures were setting everything ablaze with abandon, the crackling of the fires accompanied by inhuman screeching and cackling.

Corswain’s pistol felt heavy in his hand as he raised it and for the first time since he had been old enough to hold a weapon his hand trembled as he took aim. Eyes that were made of pure white fire regarded him malignly from the heart of the inferno, burning into his psyche as surely as the flames had melted through the armour of the dead Dark Angels. It seemed as if Corswain looked into a bottomless abyss of flame, the sight searing into his memory like a brand.

He opened fire, but the explosive bolts detonated in the flames before they reached their targets.

The creatures were at the doorway, flames licking at the floor of the main passage. Corswain adjusted his aim and sent two bolts hammering into the emergency release controls. The bulkhead slammed down just in front of the maniacal aliens, cutting off the infernal fire, and eerie silence descended.

Trying to make sense of what he had seen, Corswain noticed that the bulkhead was starting to glow at its centre, the unnatural flames of the attackers now turned to the purpose of burning through the metres-thick portal. As he watched the glow spreading, droplets of molten material starting to stand out on the plasteel like the sweat on his brow, the seneschal judged that it would only be a matter of a few short minutes before the creatures escaped their temporary prison.

In the quiet that had descended, he looked at the other Dark Angels, but like them could think of nothing to say, no orders to give, numbed by the bizarreness of what they had encountered.

‘Seneschal!’ The warning came from Brother Alartes, one of his personal guard.

Turning to look aft, Corswain saw the air swirling with power, as it had done when the warp rift had first engulfed the ship. Shapes were forming in the miasma: monstrous red hounds with scaled flesh and fangs of iron, their tails tipped with venom-dripping barbs, heads surrounded by an armoured frill. The infernal hounds were almost fully formed now, their growls and snarls resounding along the passageway. In moments they would be upon them.

The apparitions reminded him of old tales from Caliban and a word sprang to mind, loaded with loathing and fear: nephilla. Corswain found himself speaking, issuing a command out of instinct that he thought he would never utter as a Dark Angel.

‘Fall back! Retreat and seal the gun deck.’

He stepped back towards the closest conveyor, firing his pistol at the monstrous dogs, though he knew his bolts would have little effect. The other Dark Angels were with him, filling the corridor with the flicker of bolts.

The swish of the conveyor doors opening behind him flooded the seneschal with relief in a way he had never thought possible. He gratefully backed into the chamber as the enormous, incorporeal hounds bounded down the corridor towards him.

To stay would be to die.

The walls of the Navigator’s lounge shimmered with pre-echoes of what was to come. Fiana could see before-images of monstrous creatures pawing at the substance of the ship, her third eye granting her a vision of what was to be. Coiden stood at the door, a laspistol dangling pointlessly in his left hand, his right on the frame of the open portal as he peered into the antechamber, looking not so much with his eyes as his othersense.

‘It’s clear,’ said Coiden, turning to look at Fiana past the high collar of his long vermillion coat.

‘Kiafan, follow Coiden. Aneis, stay with me.’ Fiana ushered her siblings towards the door with a last look back to the spiralway that led up to the navigation pilaster. Something large and slug-like was heaving its bulk through the metal of the escalator steps, becoming more solid as it pushed through from the warp.

Fiana slid up the metal band blocking her third eye and opened the leathery eyelid covering the orb. She concentrated on the solidifying apparition, channelling the energy stream that allowed her to pierce the veils of the warp. Here, in real space, that stream erupted as a scourging beam of black light that struck the beast between the waving fronds surrounding its fanged maw. The thing withered under Fiana’s psychic glare. Its insubstantial form scattered into tattered mist as the energy that bound it to the material plane was thrust back into warp space.

A cry from Kiafan alerted her to more creatures in the passageway outside and she joined the others at a run. Winged, hook-clawed spectres hung from the vents in the ceiling, having seized the hood of Kiafan’s robe to drag him into the air. With her normal eyes, Fiana could see a smudge of movement above Kiafan as the desperate Navigator tried to turn his third eye on the two creatures who had seized him from behind; with her othersense she saw gargoyle-like creatures with long bony limbs and stone-like flesh.

Coiden and Aneis combined their third eyes to blast the hideous creatures back into their immaterial realm, causing Kiafan to fall heavily to the floor. He grasped his ankle and looked up at Fiana with tear-filled eyes.

‘I think it’s broken,’ he moaned.

‘They’re coming through the walls,’ said Aneis. Humanoid and other shapes were coalescing through the bare plasteel bulkheads around the Navigators; too many to destroy.

‘Pick up your brother,’ Fiana told Coiden. She grabbed Aneis by the shoulder and dragged her brother past the pair. She gave him a shove towards the door leading through the next bulkhead. Something pot-bellied and cyclopean was forming out of a dark pool of rust and slime spreading across the floor of the passage beyond.

‘Clear a path,’ Fiana said.

‘Where to?’ Aneis asked, his youthful face almost white with fear.

‘The strategium,’ replied Fiana. ‘We must reach the protection of the Lion.’

Having recovered some of his equilibrium, Corswain did all that he could to organise a defence of the gun decks, but the mysterious invaders were all but impossible to confront. From the scattered outbreaks across the Invincible Reason, it was clear that the attack was not confined to the gun batteries, or even the starboard decks. Pockets of foes were appearing across the vessel, with a large number seemingly intent on taking over the warp core chamber. With foes materialising behind defensive lines, making a mockery of any physical barrier that could be erected, Corswain had mobilised the ship’s company into hundred-strong patrols.

Not far from the strategium, he and his bodyguard came across Lady Fiana and her family. They were being escorted by Sergeant Ammael and his squad and though the Navigators looked distraught and haggard none of them seemed to be seriously injured. The seneschal relieved Ammael of his obligation and sent him to the engine decks where the fighting was becoming protracted.

When the group reached the strategium, they were confronted by an unexpected sight. There were no signs of fighting here; the technicians went about their duties with crisp calmness, diligently ignoring the scene that was playing out in their midst.

The Lion stood at the centre of the main chamber, and before him knelt a Dark Angel, a white tabard over his black armour, head bowed in obeisance. Surrounded by his personal guard, Brother-Redemptor Nemiel stood over the kneeling legionary, his pistol and crozius in his hands.

‘Wait here,’ Corswain quietly told the Navigators, motioning for them to stand to one side. The Lion heard the whispered words and looked across at Corswain.

‘Your timing is unintentionally impeccable, little brother,’ said the primarch. ‘I am faced with a dilemma.’

‘My liege, I do not know what is happening here, but I am sure it can wait a while. We need your guidance. The ship is under sustained attack, from creatures that are almost impervious to our weapons.’

‘The punishment of oath-breakers brooks no delay,’ said Nemiel. As he approached, Corswain recognised the kneeling legionary. His helm was under his arm, his face half-hidden behind long waves of black hair. It was Brother Asmodeus, formerly of the Librarium.

‘Oath-breaker?’ said Corswain. ‘I do not understand.’

‘My little brother has transgressed,’ said the Lion, though there seemed no anger in his voice. ‘Upon being attacked, he broke the Edict of Nikaea and unleashed the powers of his mind.’

‘He performed sorcery,’ snarled Nemiel. ‘The same vileness perpetrated by the Night Lords that now threatens our ship!’

‘That is to be decided, Brother-Redemptor,’ said the Lion. ‘I have not yet delivered my verdict.’

‘The Edict of Nikaea was absolute, my liege,’ said Nemiel. ‘Warriors of the Librarium were to curtail their powers. Asmodeus has breached the oath he swore.’

‘Did it work?’ said Corswain.

‘What?’ said Nemiel, turning his skull-faced helm in the direction of the seneschal.

‘Asmodeus, did your powers destroy the enemy?’

The former Librarian said nothing, but looked up at the primarch and nodded.

‘Interesting,’ said the primarch, his green eyes fixing on Corswain as if to see into his thoughts.

‘I have seen first-hand what these things can do. They are…’ said the seneschal, hesitating to use the word. He took a breath and continued. ‘We face nephilla, my liege, or something akin to them. They are not wholly physical and our weapons do little damage to their unnatural flesh.’

‘They are creatures of the warp, lauded primarch.’

The group of Dark Angels turned as Lady Fiana approached. ‘They are made of warp-stuff, and the breach has allowed them to manifest in our world. They cannot be destroyed, only sent back. The gaze of our third eyes can harm them.’

‘Is this true?’ asked the Lion, stooping to lay a hand on the shoulder of Asmodeus. ‘Were your powers capable of harming our attackers?’

‘From the warp they come, and with the power of the warp they can be banished again,’ said the Librarian. He stood as the Lion changed his grip and guided the legionary to his feet. He met the primarch’s gaze for a moment and then looked away again. ‘Brother-Redemptor Nemiel is right, my liege. I have broken the oath I swore.’

‘A grave crime, and one that I will be sure to prosecute properly when the current situation has been resolved,’ said the Lion. He looked at Nemiel. ‘There are two others of the Librarium aboard: Hasfael and Alberein. Bring them here.’

‘This is a mistake, my liege,’ said Nemiel, shaking his head. ‘The abominations that attack us, these nephilla, are a conjuration of sorceries. I swore an oath also, to uphold the Edict of Nikaea. To unleash further sorcery will endanger us even more. Think again, my liege!’

‘I have issued an order, Brother-Redemptor,’ said the Lion, drawing himself up to his full height.

‘One that I cannot follow,’ said Nemiel, his tone hard, though Corswain could see the Chaplain’s hands were trembling with the effort of defying his primarch.

‘My authority is absolute,’ the Lion said, clenching his fists, his lips drawn back to reveal gleaming teeth.

‘The Edict of Nikaea was issued by the Emperor, my liege,’ said Nemiel. ‘There is no higher authority.’

‘Enough!’ The Lion’s roar was so loud it caused Corswain’s auto-senses to dampen his hearing, as they would if he was caught in a potentially deafening detonation.

The seneschal was not entirely sure what happened next. The Lion moved and a split-second later a cracked skull-faced helm was spinning through the dull-glowing lights of the strategium, cutting a bloody arc through the air. Nemiel’s headless corpse clattered to the floor as the Lion held up his hand, pieces of ceramite embedded in the fingertips of his gore-spattered gauntlet.

Corswain looked at the face of his primarch, horrified by what had happened. For a moment he saw a vision of satisfaction, the Lion’s eyes gleaming as he stared at his handiwork. It passed in a second. The Lion seemed to realise what he had done and his face twisted with pain as he knelt beside the remains of the Brother-Redemptor.

‘My liege?’ Corswain was not sure what to say, but as seneschal he knew he had to act.

‘We will mourn him later,’ said the Lion. The primarch stood up, his gaze still on Nemiel’s body. He broke his stare and looked at Lady Fiana, who flinched as if struck. There were three droplets of blood across the pale flesh of her right cheek. ‘Tell the Librarians they are relieved of their Nikaean oaths. Lady Fiana, you and your family will each lead a company of my warriors. Cor, assemble eight counter-attack forces.’

‘Eight, my liege? Three for the Librarians, and one each for the Navigators, I understand. Am I to lead the other?’

‘I am,’ said the Lion. ‘No creature, nephilla or any other, attacks my ship without retribution.’

V

While his seneschal organised the forces of the Dark Angels, the Lion made his way to his personal arming chamber. Five Legion serfs were awaiting him inside the stone-clad room, dressed in dark green surplices, with heavy boots and gloves. Each wore a pistol at his belt too, though the Lion had encountered no enemy on his way there and they appeared unmolested.

The reports of attacks were growing in frequency as the nephilla – or whatever their immaterial assailants were – seemed to be widening the breach from warp space to allow more of their kind to manifest.

The walls of the chamber were covered with weapons of dazzling variety, either made for the primarch or seized as spoils of conquest from the hundreds of cultures he had encountered during the Great Crusade. It had begun with his first Calibanite short sword, presented to him by Luther on acceptance into the knightly order; that simple blade held pride of place at the centre of the display.

It was the one affectation he allowed himself, this collection of weaponry. He had spent long times here contemplating the many ways mankind had devised to kill an enemy, though of late his throne chamber had been a more regular haunt. He paused for a moment of thought, moving along the walls, touching a hand to favourite pieces, running a gauntleted finger along blades and spikes in appreciation of their craftsmanship. In war, just as in other pursuits, mankind was creative, showing insight and genius even with the most barbaric level of technology.

Many of the weapons were too small for his fist and were mounted for ornamentation only, while others served a different purpose in his hands: swords for normal men wielded as knives by the Lion. Some were traditional, ancient designs, while others had monomolecular edges, power field generators, electro-fields and other technological improvements.

There were spatha, longswords, bastard swords, mortuary swords, flambards, rapiers, sabres, scimitars, khopeshes, colichmardes, tulwars, shotels, falchions, misericordes and cutlasses; myrmex, cestus and knuckle dusters; baselards, stilettos, dirks and daggers; cleavers, sickles and kopis; mattocks, clubs, picks, maces, flails, morning stars, mauls and war hammers; hatchets, tomahawks, hand axes, double-bladed axes, long-bearded axes and adzes; pikes, partisans, fauchards, sarissas, voulges, Lochaber axes, boarspears, tridents, halberds, scythes, half pikes and hastas.

He did not rush himself, but took the time to collect his thoughts, considering the enemy of the day. In his youth he had slain nephilla with his bare hands out of necessity, though they were all but impervious to most mortal weapons; another benefit of his primarch heritage. This day he would go armed, and he took up two blades, heavy hand-and-a-half broadswords by the reckoning of normal men but easily held in each fist by the giant primarch. They were superbly crafted, the product of a Calibanite artisan whose name had been lost to history. Their names were inscribed along the edge of each blade in florid lettering: Hope and Despair. Each had a long fuller to lighten the blade weight, and they were edged with a crystalline compound sharper than any metal, unbreakable and never needing to be sharpened. The Lion had found the pair of swords used as ceremonial pieces by one of the order masters, and becoming enchanted by their glittering edges had insisted on a trade, gaining them for the exchange of an unblemished sablesabre pelt the primarch had prepared by his own hand.

Armed with the twin blades, the Lion joined his allotted company at the main gateway above the reactor rooms and warp core, where the fighting was fiercest. Several wounded legionaries were being dragged up the access ramp, suffering a variety of horrendous wounds: burns and slashes through their armour that had gouged down to the bone.

‘Fight with pride, die with honour,’ said the Lion, raising his swords in salute to his little brothers. They fell in behind their primarch, forming five lines each fifty strong.

The corridors were littered with the dead: unarmoured serfs and crew for the most part. Their ragged bodies were heaped in bloody piles and choked the doorways to side chambers. Some had heads or limbs missing, others were little more than blackened lumps of charred flesh. Some were arranged in lewd poses with each other, eliciting a growl of disgust from the primarch.

Here and there, flies and maggots were already crawling through the filth of the dead, burrowing beneath the skin of the fallen and feasting on lifeless eyes. The Lion heard muttered curses uttered by his company, but had no desire to silence them, for he felt like cursing also.

He stopped as he came across the form of two dead Dark Angels. He knelt beside them. Their armour was half-melted as if by acid, and their skin was pock-marked by blisters and buboes. Caliban had occasionally been wracked by strange plagues, and the clusters of triple pustules that corrupted the skin of the pair of dead Space Marines struck a chord in the memory of the Lion.

‘We have to burn the dead, lest corruption spread,’ he said solemnly as he straightened. A trail of slime, like that of a snail, only a metre wide, led away from the bodies and passed into one of the passages leading away from the main corridor. The primarch detailed a squad to hunt down the creature that had left the trail and pressed on towards the main engine rooms several hundred metres ahead.

From nowhere, eight nephilla sprang into being ahead of the primarch. The warp rift had become so strong that it took almost no time at all for the attackers to materialise. These creatures were vaguely humanoid in shape, with lean, hunched bodies and wiry arms. They had legs like those of a dog and their flesh was the colour of blood and faintly scaled. Their heads were elongated, with black horns running back along the sides. In clawed hands they held triangular swords of gleaming bronze. Eyes of pure white regarded the Lion for a moment while forked tongues licked needle-like teeth.

With snarling war cries the nephilla attacked as one, raising their swords as they rushed towards the Lion. He did not wait for the enemy to come to him, but sprang forwards to meet them. In his left hand, Hope parried two blades swinging towards his groin, while Despair hacked through the neck of one of the creatures, parting the immaterial tissue of its body without pause.

The Lion felt a shock of energy ripple through him from his hand as the creature exploded into a shower of blood, coating the floor and the Lion’s armour with crimson. There was no pause to marvel at this strange death, for the remaining seven creatures were trying to encircle the primarch.

Bolt shells whined and cracked as the other Dark Angels did their best to help their commander. The detonations had little effect on the nephilla, but provided distraction. Sweeping Hope in a wide arc, the Lion sheared through an upraised blade and parted the bodies of two more attackers even as he stabbed Despair through the face of another. The blades of the nephilla bit at his black-and-gold armour, cutting deep into the enamelled plates in a way no mortal weapon had ever done, though the Lion’s flesh remained unmarked.

Parrying another swing of an infernal blade, the Lion twisted and brought Despair down onto the head of a nephilla circling behind him, cleaving through black horn and red skin. There was no skull beneath the flesh, and the creature collapsed into a crimson pool like the others. In two more seconds and a flurry of blows, the Lion had despatched the rest of his assailants, and his armour was awash with sticky red fluid. It smelt like blood, but he knew it could not be; the creatures had possessed no veins or arteries or hearts to carry such a thing.

Perturbed by this discovery, the Lion continued on, calling for his guard to follow swiftly as he splashed through the slick of red. He signalled Stenius, who had remained in the strategium.

‘How long until the warp drive is operational, captain?’

‘Less than twenty minutes, my liege,’ came the reply after a few seconds. ‘We have a problem, though. The enemy have driven the engineers from the warp core and are attempting to break into the containment chamber. Lord Corswain and Lady Fiana are trying to break through from the aft decks, my liege.’

‘I will meet them in the main core chamber, captain.’ The Lion broke into a run, his long strides quickly leaving behind his company of Dark Angels.

Corswain felt only a little better that he had Lady Fiana for company. The gaze of her third eye was devastating to the enemy, but she tired quickly and had to rest for several minutes between bursts. For those periods, it was up to him and the other Dark Angels to protect her with their mundane weapons. It was not impossible – the nephilla could be destroyed by weight of fire or a particularly powerful blast of a lascannon or such – but it was hard work and the force was expending ammunition and power packs at a prodigious rate. They had less than half the stores they had set out with by the time they reached the conveyors and stairwells that dropped down into the warp core chambers.

They had encountered all manner of horrifying foes on the two-kilometre journey aftwards: soaring disc-like beasts ringed with razor-sharp claws and possessing mouths that could chew through a legionary’s armour in a few seconds, six-limbed entities with giant lobster claws and lashing tongues coated with venom, ever-changing apparitions with leering faces in their torsos that cavorted and wheeled about whilst spitting sorcerous fire from their fingertips.

Corswain’s original force of two hundred Dark Angels now numbered just over half that; twenty-eight had been slain or were in the apothecarion, the others had been left as rearguard to defend against the enemy who could materialise anywhere.

With his personal guard close by him, the seneschal descended the main stairway into the bowels of the engine decks while other squads split to clear out secondary access routes. The steps were littered with the bodies of dead crew. Amongst the decapitated and disembowelled corpses were a few legionaries, their black armour rent open, their flesh hideously corrupted and twisted. Corswain had no idea what could have caused such horrendous injuries, and agitation caused him to tighten his grip on his bolt pistol and power sword as they reached the deck below.

All was clear, save for the stench of death coming from the bloated corpses of engineers and serfs. The passages here were lined with power conduits, piping and cables, which all showed signs of decay and disrepair, marked by patches of corrosion and slicks of moss and algae. Knowing that Stenius would never allow such a poor state to exist on his ship, Corswain was forced to conclude that the decrepitude was somehow a side effect of the nephilla’s presence.

The same was true on the next level down, and still no foe could be found. Meeting up with sixty of his Dark Angels, Corswain readied himself for the descent to the warp core deck. The corridor and stairwells thrummed with energy, but not just the power of the reactor that was being fed into the area; there was a tension in the air, an intangible shadow that clouded his thoughts.

‘The warp presence is almost total here,’ warned Fiana. Her face was screwed up with effort, sweat running down her brow and cheeks, her lip trembling. ‘If it were not for the lack of alarms, I would think the warp core had been breached.’

‘Everybody stay alert,’ Corswain told his warriors; somewhat unnecessarily he realised, as everybody was on edge. ‘No friendlies. Destroy everything that moves.’

He led the force down into the warp core sector. The walls were plated here, thick ferrocrete layered with adamantium. In layout, the deck was oval, a main corridor running around the core room itself, with branching passageways leading to monitoring stations and watch rooms.

The dead were everywhere, some of them so horrendously mutilated that it was hard to tell that they had once been men and women. In the first hundred metres, Corswain counted seven dead Dark Angels, two of them in the livery of Techmarines. The first door to the warp core was another hundred and fifty metres ahead and the piles of the deceased grew larger the closer they came to the gate.

Gunfire sounded from behind, and at the same time a wave of nephilla poured from the doorway leading to the main core chamber. They were of a type, all small creatures with faces in their chests, their unnatural flesh a glowing pink colour. Sparks and trickles of fire dripped from the open ends of their splayed fingers as they gambolled and cartwheeled along the corridor.

The Dark Angels opened fire, a hail of bolts meeting the nephilla fifty metres away. Corswain fired his pistol repeatedly, directing his shots against the same target until finally the creature ruptured, clouds of pink mist erupting from the wounds. Rather than fall, the nephilla started to shudder and spin crazily, a juddering shriek emitted from its lipless mouth.

Corswain stopped firing, shocked by what happened next.

The pink nephilla was mutating, growing an extra head, splitting into two other forms. Its pinkness turned purple and then into a deep blue as two smaller versions of its former shape snapped into existence with an audible popping noise. The blue creatures snarled and frowned at their attackers, fingers flexing menacingly. The same was happening to others, turning the pink tide into a wash of pink and blue as other nephilla were torn apart by gunfire only to re-emerge in their newer forms.

Firing on semi-automatic, Corswain plunged forwards, sword raised. He was just a few strides from the front of the blue mass when a black beam seared past him; the third eye of Lady Fiana. It tore a gouge through the mass of nephilla squeezed into the passageway, causing their bodies to disperse into blue and pink sparks where it touched them.

His pistol empty, Corswain swung his sword at the closest enemy, the power-field-edged blade hitting the outstretched arm of the creature. The impact felt strange, not at all like the slowing of a sword cutting into flesh, nor like the sudden jar of a strike against armour; it felt as though Corswain struck some fantastic rubber that bent under the strength of the blow before rebounding into its former shape.

Fiana’s third eye blazed again, opening up a gap for the Dark Angels to plunge forwards into the midst of the foe, their bolters roaring, the sergeants’ chain-swords whirring and power fists crackling. Fire engulfed them, purple and red, crackling along the edges of their armour, seeping into the cracks and joins. Corswain’s right greave was set alight, the paint peeling away to reveal the ceramite beneath, which started to slough away. As he chopped his sword into the leering face of a nephilla, he noticed in a detached way that the flame gave off no smoke, and that unsettled him even more than the fact that his leg was on fire.

The edge of the pelt hanging down his back caught fire, but before the flames spread, they dissipated, vanishing as swiftly as they had materialised. Turning his attention back to the enemy, he realised that they had all been destroyed. A multicoloured mist hung in the air, like droplets of dye in a zero-gravity environment.

As he reloaded his pistol, Corswain signalled his primarch on the direct command channel.

‘My liege, we are about to enter the main core chamber,’ he reported. ‘How close are you?’

‘Two decks down, little brother.’ The Lion’s voice betrayed no strain, though his next words were a testament to the ferocity of the opposition ranged against him. Corswain could hear feral howling and inhuman shrieking in the background, much of it cut abruptly short. ‘I am facing several dozen enemies at the moment. It will take me some time to slay them all. My force is moving up, about three hundred metres behind me. Secure the core chamber and I will meet you there shortly.’

Acknowledging his primarch’s reply, Corswain reloaded his pistol and gathered his warriors – seven fewer after the latest encounter – and headed towards the gateway to the core chamber. The gate itself was several metres high, the blast doors that had been brought down still in place but torn and melted through, leaving a hole large enough to step through.

Corswain expected the portal to be held against them, but no nephilla opposed the Dark Angels as they entered the portalway. High pitched shrieking and wailing sounded from the main chamber beyond, a sound impossible for humans to make. Stepping through the breached barrier, weapons at the ready, Corswain moved into the hall housing the warp core.

The core itself was in a heavily shielded octagonal structure at the centre of the high-domed chamber, enclosed by layer after layer of protective sheaths. Mechanicum symbols were etched into the housing, forming an intricate web of lines and shapes filled with gleaming metal against the obsidian-like stone of the warp core.

Dozens of nephilla – the pink and blue creatures they had just fought – were frenziedly hurling themselves at the core, clawing at it with their hands, trying to burn their way through with jets of pink flame. Their screeches were utterances of rage and frustration. Other creatures swirled about the upper gantries surrounding the core, swooping and climbing like Gadian skysharks. The nephilla paid the Dark Angels no heed as they strode into the chamber, weapons levelled, intent as they were on breaching the warp core.

‘Destroy them all!’ barked Corswain, opening fire with his pistol.

The fusillade of the Dark Angels – bolters, heavy bolters, lascannons and missiles – ripped into the mass of creatures gathered around the core structure. Spreading out along the walkways, the legionaries kept up the murderous rain of fire, some turning their weapons towards the ceiling as the circling beasts above dived down with piercing screams, their tails lashing, the barbs and serrations that ringed their manta-like bodies undulating as they descended.

The chamber filled with a swirling miasma of dissipating energy as the Dark Angels let fly with their fury, billowing clouds of warp power streaming upwards. Through the mist, Corswain saw something else moving, coalescing from the floating fragments that drifted up like embers from a fire. Something larger than anything he had yet seen, towering above the Space Marines, even taller than the Lion yet not so bulky.

Red lightning flared from the mist, ripping through Sergeant Lennian’s squad, cracking open armour and searing flesh in a long burst of raging energy. Their smoking bodies were flung through the air by the blast, smashing high up against the ferrocrete walls.

The thing that emerged from the swirling maelstrom of dying nephilla looked like a giant, nightmarish bird, at least four metres tall. It stood upright like a man, but its thin, twisted body was supported on legs like those of a hawk or eagle, taloned feet scarring the metal floor, leaving sparks in its wake as it advanced. Robes of fire hung from its torso, blown about by some unnatural wind. Its arms were long and sinewy, and in its clawed hands the creature held a staff made of solidified flame, ever-changing in colour. A pair of wings spread from the beast’s back, almost reaching from one side of the chamber to the other, iridescent feathers trailing on the ground.

It had two heads on long scaled necks, one like some grotesque vulture, the other serpentine, both crested with long multi-coloured feathers that dripped red and blue droplets of fire. And its eyes… Corswain regretted meeting that abominable gaze in an instant, but was unable to look away. The nephilla’s eyes were black: the black of the gulf between stars, the black of the darkest cave of Caliban. The seneschal saw himself reflected in those ebon orbs, a tiny figure against the huge expanse of the universe – a tiny, insignificant mote surrounded by the enormity of existence.

The nephilla lashed out with the tip of its staff and more lightning filled the chamber, ripping apart another half a dozen legionaries. Bolter rounds exploded without effect against its ever-shifting hide and lascannon beams reflected harmlessly from its wings.

Lady Fiana stepped past Corswain, her whole body shaking as she pulled free her headband to reveal her third eye. The seneschal ripped away his gaze from her just before that warp eye was opened, and watched the beam of darkness that sprang towards the nephilla. It struck the creature full in the chest, detonating with a flare of dark energy, rocking it back a step but doing no more.

With a horrified gasp, Fiana unleashed her warp sight again, but this time the nephilla released one hand from its staff and stopped the beam with its palm. The energy coalesced around its fingers, playing from fingertip to fingertip like a miniature storm, while its snake head arched down to examine the flashing cloud of power. Eyes narrowing, it looked up at Fiana and thrust its hand back towards her, releasing the energy.

The Navigator shrieked as her body was engulfed by blackness, veins and arteries pulsing under her skin, blood streaming from her eyes, ears and nose. She fell, and lay unmoving.

Corswain turned his attention back to the nephilla, and raised his pistol. Both the creature’s pairs of eyes were scanning around the chamber, necks craning to take in all of the Dark Angels. With a sweeping gesture, it sent a wave of power surging across the hall, smashing the legionaries from their feet. Corswain was hurled back with the others, crashing to his back beside the portalway.

Stretching up to its full height, the nephilla turned both heads towards the seneschal. It seemed to relax, staff held out to one side in one hand, the other stroking through the fires of its robes.

As all four of those black eyes fixed upon him, Corswain felt something inside his head, like a warp translation but sharper, like a pinprick in the centre of his mind. He tried to block out the sensation of fingers pulling apart his thoughts and memories, examining them one by one, but could not stop the creature’s mental assault.

Suddenly the seneschal’s limbs went numb. He stood up, with no volition, but was otherwise immobile. Around him, the other Dark Angels were just recovering from the shockwave of the creature’s last attack.

Corswain tried his best to resign himself to his death, but it was hard. He never had thought his life would end like this, as helpless as a newborn, facing an enemy that he could not even begin to comprehend. He wanted to spit a curse, or dedicate his last breaths to his primarch and Emperor, but he was denied even this honour. His body was not his to control.

The nephilla reached out a bony finger and beckoned him forwards.

Lashing out with an armoured boot, the Lion sent the hound-like beast tumbling down the corridor. Taking half a dozen strides, the primarch brought both of his swords down across its back as it tried to right itself, carving it into three pieces that spattered into gore across the decking.

He stopped for a moment to assess the situation. The flight of stairs down to the main core chamber was only fifty metres ahead, and the passageway was free of enemies. He could hear his company fighting behind him, the retort of bolters echoing up from the stairwell he had just left. Though he knew his little brothers were in a dire situation, he had to focus on his objective: regaining control of the core so that the warp engines and Geller field could be engaged.

The comm buzzed as he stepped forwards, and he heard Corswain’s voice. The seneschal sounded strained, as if speaking through gritted teeth.

‘My liege, the way is clear to the warp core. You must come at once. There is something else here, something we cannot destroy.’ The comm-link hissed for a few seconds. ‘It… It wants to speak with you.’

The Lion entered the warp core chamber at a full run, taking in the scene in a few moments. Several dozen Dark Angels were standing around the perimeter, their weapons directed at a monstrous bird-like nephilla but not firing. In front of the creature was Corswain, standing immobile just a few metres from it, arms hanging limply by his sides.

Cease your attack or this one will be destroyed.

The words came to the Lion’s thoughts directly, bypassing his ears. Their tone was soft and melodic, in contrast to the haggard, harsh-looking creature that had undoubtedly sent them. The nephilla’s intent was immediately clear and he skidded to a halt, coming to a stop with his swords held ready to defend himself. There was no reaction from his warriors, and he guessed that the words were directed to him alone. He did not know whether their passivity was voluntary or enforced, but it was clear they were in grave danger.

‘It is not I that launched an attack,’ said the Lion, taking a step closer to the apparition. ‘Leave now.’

And make a waste of all the effort that it took to reach this place? I have been searching for you a long time, Lion of Caliban.

There was something familiar about the creature’s voice, like a half-remembered dream. The Lion could not place from where, but it was not the first time he had heard this. His mind stirred with vague recollections, of pleading and entreaty.

Yes, that is true. I have come to you before.

‘Get out of my thoughts.’ The Lion stepped to his left and focused on blocking the creature from his mind, mentally bringing up a shield as though he were defending himself against a physical attack. It was a trick he had learnt as he had stalked nephilla on Caliban. One of the bird-beast’s heads followed him with its inscrutable gaze, the other stayed fixed upon Corswain.

That might work in the real universe, but not here. You are in my realm now, or at least teetering upon the brink of it. You cannot ignore me this time.

‘I do not treat with aliens,’ said the Lion, taking a few more steps to his left, closing the gap between himself and the nephilla.

Alien? Alien? There was despair in the voice. I am more than some simple creature of your universe. I am the giver and the receiver, the crux of fate, the master of the parallels. The past and the future are laid before me. Do not mistake me for some petty foe to be vanquished by mere might of arms.

‘You have nothing to offer that I will accept.’ The Lion was directly behind the creature now, its snake head still regarding him with an unblinking stare while the vulture transfixed Corswain.

That is not true. However, you do not desire power, that much is plain. Your ambition is woefully stunted for one of your abilities. You are happy to let your brothers dwell in the light of your father’s adoration. You even sacrifice your own to stay true to the memory of what once was.

The two necks were starting to cross each other as the Lion continued his circling. He resisted the lure of accusation in the creature’s words, which echoed with the taunt made by the Night Haunter.

Freedom, Lion of Caliban. I can give you freedom. You know that you do not really care for these lesser beings. They are a distraction to you. Their frailties, their petty squabbles, are unnecessary trifles to be avoided. Even this war that you fight, it is without consequence.

‘Horus cannot be allowed victory.’

Horus’s victory is not your concern. All things are fleeting, even the lives of great Warmasters. I have witnessed the rise and fall of every civilisation in the universe. None of them can endure, Chaos always consumes them in the end.

That word – Chaos – resonated through the Lion’s thoughts. He had a fleeting glimpse of eternity, of the entropy of the universe, ever-changing, new lives born out of death, of stars decaying to create worlds and worlds dying to form new stars, all in constant flux.

‘The Emperor has shown us a new way. The Imperial Truth will endure for eternity.’

Laughter resounded inside the primarch’s skull.

Foolish! Your Emperor is nothing more than a fraudster with grand ambitions. His empire is no greater than any other edifice of mankind, and it will tumble just as easily.

The words were spoken with scorn yet they lit a spark of hope in the Lion’s breast – the creature spoke of the Emperor in the present tense. It thought that the Master of Mankind still lived.

The nephilla could not follow the Lion’s progress any further with its snake eyes, and for a moment it broke its gaze from Corswain, serpentine head swinging towards the seneschal while its vulture-like visage fixed on the primarch.

It was only a split second but it was all the Lion needed.

Before its gaze was on Corswain again, the Lion launched himself at the nephilla, sword outstretched. With astounding speed it reacted, twisting its whole body in his direction, staff coming up to spew forth a sheet of forking energy.

‘Kill it, Cor!’ snarled the Lion as wreaths of crackling energy enveloped him, sending pain coursing through every limb, surging into his chest and pounding in his head.

With a roar, the primarch broke free from the net of lightning that surrounded him, still lancing his sword towards the nephilla’s body. A hail of fire hammered into the creature from the encircling Dark Angels as Corswain leapt away, the seneschal’s bolt pistol spitting rounds.

Predictable fool.

The nephilla’s staff swept out, turning aside the Lion’s first blow. Twisting, wings furling, the creature side-stepped the Lion’s charge, its serpent head lashing out towards his throat with bared fangs.

The Lion turned mid-stride, dropping Hope which had been deflected by the nephilla’s parry. His gauntleted fingers curled around the slender serpentine neck as the primarch allowed himself to fall to the ground. His grasp unbreakable, the Lion dragged the nephilla down with him, its chest plunging onto the waiting point of Despair.

Harmed but not slain, the nephilla reared up, taking the sword from the primarch’s grasp, wings spreading once more, now bat-like and shimmering gold. Its vulture’s beak rammed into the side of the Lion’s helm as it sought to pull its other head free from his grip. Wings beating fiercely, it tried to lift away, but the Lion’s grasp held firm as he was pulled back to his feet.

‘Did you see this coming?’ snarled the Lion, hammering his fist into the pommel of the half-buried sword, driving the blade fully into the nephilla. The primarch felt a moment of contact, something deep within him connecting with the substance of the nephilla. His anger raged, finding conduit through his arm, into his fist, given vent along the blade of the buried sword like white fire pulsing from the Lion’s heart.

The creature’s piercing shrieks ripped through the Lion’s mind. Its body burst into a globe of power, filling the chamber with expanding flame that sent the primarch reeling, droplets of the molten sword pattering against his armour.

Silence descended. The black of his armour was covered with a patina of roasted gore and his mind was still throbbing with the death-scream of the nephilla. The primarch picked himself up, retrieved Hope from where it lay on the deck and made his way over to the warp core control panel. Much of it was scorched and broken, and he started to pull away cracked panels to expose the circuitry beneath. He made a quick assessment of the damage and activated the comm.

‘Captain Stenius, I will have the warp engines operational in seven minutes. Ready the Geller field and prepare for translation.’

VI

Once the Invincible Reason had translated fully into the warp, protected from the maelstrom of energy by its Geller field, the Dark Angels took the offensive. As had been proposed by Lady Fiana, the nephilla were much weakened, unable to draw on the power of their realm, making them vulnerable to the weapons of the Dark Angels. With the newly-restored Librarians and the Lion leading the purge, every part of the battle-barge was scoured, the remnants of the attackers driven out of hiding to be gunned down. For two days the scourging continued, passageways and gun decks, engine rooms and mess halls, dormitories and drill ranges resounding to the roar of bolters and the vengeful battle cries of the First Legion.

Nearly three hundred Dark Angels had fallen during the fighting, many of them within the first hours of the assault. More than twice that number of Legion serfs and crew had also been slain. The apothecarion was filled with those legionaries who had survived, some of them with hideous, grotesque wounds that festered with unnatural decay or continued to blister and bleed despite the best efforts of the Apothecaries.

Amongst those being treated was Fiana, who had survived the backlash of her third eye, but only barely. She looked to be a wizened, aged crone as she lay in her bunk, her body otherwise undamaged but her mind dislocated by the psychic assault suffered at the whim of the nephilla. Despite this, she and her fellow Navigators did all they could to assist the legionaries. Cut off from the warp by the Geller field, the nephilla’s presence was easily discernable by their othersight, and they guided the Dark Angels kill squads unerringly to their targets, no matter how dark and isolated their hiding places. On top of this, the Navigators had to guide the Invincible Reason to Perditus, pressed to find the utmost speed by the urging of the Dark Angels’ primarch.

It was eight more days of travel before the Navigators announced that they were in the vicinity of Perditus. Lady Fiana had recovered a little more from her ordeal, and was able to take her place in the rota of Navigators steering the ship. On reaching their destination, she requested an audience with the Lion before she would allow the Invincible Reason to translate back to real space. As before, the Lion met with her in his throne chamber, attended to by Stenius and Corswain. Fiana had noticed the seneschal check on her condition several times when she had been in the apothecarion, but she had not had the opportunity to discuss what they had encountered. Now was not the time, the Lion was clearly impatient with the delay in translation.

‘There is something amiss, lauded primarch,’ Fiana explained when the primarch demanded to know the cause of her hesitation. She was forced to lean heavily on a cane that one of the Techmarines had constructed for her from a length of ribbed piping, its finial fashioned from a piece of jet-black stone, the ferrule made from a carefully cut section of the material used in the joints of power armour. Her voice had become a wheezing whisper, her words punctuated by heavy gasps. ‘By all calculation and observation, we have reached Perditus, yet for the last three hours we have been unable to sight any warp beacon to confirm this categorically.’

‘The storms?’ suggested Corswain.

‘On the contrary, the warp is incredibly placid in this locale, disturbingly so. There is almost no movement whatsoever, as if the currents have been flattened, stretched into non-existence. It is this dampening effect that I believe obstructs the beacon signals.’

‘It is no mystery,’ said the Lion, his expression easing into a less agitated state. ‘We observed the same when we first came here. This pooling phenomenon is, I was led to believe by the Mechanicum, a side effect of the work they are performing at Perditus. It confirms that we have arrived. Make arrangements for translation as soon as possible, Captain Stenius.’

‘There is something in the warp causing this oddity, lauded primarch,’ insisted Fiana, taking a laboured step towards the primarch. ‘I and the others can feel its presence, sense the pressure it is placing on the warp. The stability here is hiding a far more turbulent undercurrent.’

‘Your observations have been noted, Lady Fiana,’ said the primarch. He stood up, ending the conversation. ‘Please continue to make your reports on the matter to Captain Stenius.’

Fiana railed against this casual dismissal, unable to shake the disquiet she had felt at this sinister discovery, but knew better than to debate the matter with the primarch. He was already turning his attention to Corswain. She dipped her head in acquiescence, understanding that the mystery would have to be solved another day.

Several Dark Angels ships had already made transition to the Perditus System when the Invincible Reason broke through into real space and established contact, though nearly a dozen vessels were still in transit in the warp. Fleet movements had never been easy through the warp, and the storms had exacerbated the problem considerably. It was one of the main reasons the Dark Angels had been unable to force a decisive encounter with the Night Lords in Thramas; by the time sufficient vessels arrived in a system to confront the enemy the elusive Night Lords had time to escape direct conflict.

The Lion weighed up his options: wait for more of his flotilla to arrive or press on towards the Mechanicum station on Perditus Ultima. Surmising that the Iron Hands and the Death Guard would both be aware of their arrival, the primarch saw no cause for delay and directed the five ships present in his fleet to advance in-system at full speed.

Passing the uninhabitable gas giants at the edge of the system, the Dark Angels picked up sensor readings of two fleets engaged in a protracted manoeuvre for position around Perditus Ultima, the closest planet to the star, on the very edge of the habitable zone. Ident-codes and intrafleet signals marked out the vessels as Iron Hands and Death Guard ships, each flotilla numbering no more than half a dozen ships; even combined they would be no match for the might of the Dark Angels that would be arriving. Despite hails, communications could not be established with either fleet, or the ground station on Ultima.

Crossing the orbit of Perditus Secundus, just five days from their destination, the warriors of the First Legion were in range to detect forces deployed onto the surface of Perditus Ultima. Comm-intercepts indicated that a stalemate persisted there as well as in space. The ships of the Iron Hands and Death Guard were conducting an extra-orbital ballet, each trying to gain position over the world to support their troops on an offensive action, but neither was able to gain the upper hand without risking a decisive, and potentially devastating, space-borne engagement; thus the two sides were locked together at arm’s length, neither prepared to wager possible defeat against a push for victory.

Summoning a council of his captains, the Lion determined a course of action for the Dark Angels.

‘We will position our fleet directly between the Iron Hands and Death Guard, and announce that all hostilities are to cease,’ he told the assembly of officers gathered in his throne room aboard the Invincible Reason. ‘If neither side is willing to risk an engagement with each other, for certain they will not be keen to take on a fresh foe.’

‘A risky proposition, my liege,’ said Captain Masurbael, commanding the frigate Intervention. ‘What is to be gained by placing ourselves in harm’s way? Our arrival and numbers will be known to both sides already, there is no reason to expose ourselves to the danger of direct attack.’

‘Purpose and threat,’ replied the Lion, smiling coldly. ‘We are to make our intent and determination crystal clear from the outset, lest our adversaries think we issue idle demands. Perditus is under the aegis of the Dark Angels and the sooner we establish the fact, the swifter we will conclude our business here and return to the battle with the Night Lords.’

‘What of the Death Guard, my liege?’ asked Corswain. ‘Should we not simply attack, with the aid of the Iron Hands? They are known to have declared with Horus from the earliest days of the rebellion.’

‘Until we can establish the loyalty of both factions here, and that of the Mechanicum as well, we should not suppose any aid from either side. The Iron Hands have been leaderless since Manus was slain at Isstvan. Who can say what their current agenda is or where their true loyalties lie? Similarly, it has been reported that those Legions that sided with Horus did not do so wholly. Whole companies and fleets have been spread far across the galaxy, and with the warp storms isolating many sectors we must not hastily pre-judge any situation, little brother. It may be the case that in Perditus, it is the Death Guard who are loyal and the Iron Hands who have turned from the Emperor’s cause.’

Corswain absorbed his primarch’s wisdom with a nod, while Captain Stenius took up the conversation.

‘Is it your intent that we also gain position to place troops on Perditus Ultima, my liege?’ said Stenius. ‘Are we to break through the Iron Hands and Death Guard cordons for low orbit?’

‘That is exactly my intent, Captain Stenius,’ replied the Lion. ‘The Invincible Reason will spearhead the thrust to Perditus Ultima, passing between the lead elements of the two enemy fleets. We shall broadcast warnings that any hostile action will be met immediately and decisively with overwhelming force. I will issue fleet instructions when we have concluded here. Are there any more questions?’

The tone of the Lion indicated that he did not expect any further debate and the assembled captains lowered to their knees to accept their primarch’s command. When the others were dismissed, Corswain loitered in the audience chamber, wishing to speak with his lord in private. The Lion waved for him to speak his mind.

‘It is possible that what you say is true, my liege, but the likelihood of the situation is that the Iron Hands are loyal to Terra and the Death Guard are sworn to Horus,’ said the seneschal. ‘We should arrange our advance to favour defence against attack from the Death Guard.’

‘As you say, little brother,’ said the Lion. ‘Yet do not be so sure in the loyalties of the Iron Hands. We are living in complex times, Cor, and there is no easy division between those who fight on our side and those who fight against us. Antagonism towards Horus and his Legions no longer guarantees fealty to the Emperor. There are other powers exercising their right to dominion.’

‘I don’t understand, my liege,’ confessed Corswain. ‘Who else would one swear loyalty to, other than Horus or the Emperor?’

‘Whom do you serve?’ the Lion asked in reply to the question.

‘Terra, my liege, and the cause of the Emperor,’ Corswain replied immediately, drawing himself up straight as if accused.

‘What of your oaths to me, little brother?’ The Lion’s voice was quiet, contemplative. ‘Are you not loyal to the Dark Angels?’

‘Of course, my liege!’ Corswain was taken aback by the suggestion that he might think otherwise.

‘And so there are other forces whose foremost concern is their primarch and Legion, and for some perhaps not even that,’ the Lion explained. ‘If I told you we would abandon any pretence of defending Terra, what would you say?’

‘Please do not joke about such things,’ said Corswain, shaking his head. ‘We cannot allow Horus to prevail in this war.’

‘Who mentioned Horus?’ said the primarch. He closed his eyes and rubbed his brow for a few moments and then looked at Corswain, gauging his mettle. ‘It is not for you to concern yourself, little brother. Prepare the task force for the attack, and let wider burdens sit upon my shoulders alone.’

From his vantage point behind the armoured windows that pierced the central tower of Magellix station, Captain Lasko Midoa had an uninterrupted view of the whole Mechanicum complex. His attention was directed to the south and east, towards outposts Seven, Eight and Nine, currently occupied by his Death Guard adversaries. Behind the low octagonal structures spread the mirrored screens that ran the circumference of the entire facility, creating a micro-climate of thermal updrafts that assisted in keeping down the temperature at Magellix, making it inhabitable if not tolerable. Beyond were the upthrusts of Perditus Ultima’s mountains, their bases hidden behind a blanket of dense greenish fog a thousand kilometres across, their summits many kilometres above the plain glistening from golden refractive materials that coated the rock.

The ever-present mist layer distorted the distances, so that although the outer stretches of the facility were several kilometres away, their bulk was magnified to make them seem almost within bolter range. Heat shimmer from the mirror wall compounded the problem. It did not help the captain’s sense of perspective to know that his foes were inside the stubby keeps, ready and able to launch an attack at any moment.

With Midoa stood Captain Casalir Lorramech, commander of the Ninety-Eighth Company. The two Iron Hands officers had their helms removed, making the most of the processed atmosphere inside Magellix; for the bulk of the thirty-eight days since they had arrived on Perditus Ultima they had been in full battle gear. The pair were almost identical, with close-cropped silvery hair, broad faces and leathery skin. Only two features separated them. Lorramech had natural blue eyes while Midoa had silver-lensed inserts. Midoa also had a tracheal respirator replacing his lower jaw and throat, which hissed rhythmically with his breathing. When he spoke, his voice issued from a small speaker-comm unit set into the bone of his right cheek. The speech device transmitted Midoa’s words in a sing-song cadence that was quite at odds with his mechanical appearance.

‘And you are sure that they are heading directly for orbit?’ Midoa asked, responding to Lorramech’s report that the Dark Angels had continued towards Ultima at full speed.

‘Yes, Iron Father,’ said Lorramech, whose voice was deep and gravelly, each word uttered with gritted teeth and barely moving lips. Midoa was incapable of smiling at the use of the ancient honorific, but it was a source of pride that his fellow captains had chosen to raise him up to command of this expedition. ‘Course and speed are consistent with an orbital heading. They will be in high orbit in less than three hours.’

‘But they still have not breached the comm-dampening shell?’

‘We have not yet been able to directly communicate with the Dark Angels.’

‘And what of them?’ said Midoa, pointing out through the window at the Death Guard positions. ‘What are they doing?’

‘The enemy seem intent on an intercept course,’ replied Lorramech. ‘With your permission, I will signal the fleet to counter-manoeuvre. We will engage the Death Guard ships and provide a screen for the arriving Dark Angels. They have two battle-barges amongst their flotilla, which would be valuable orbital support.’

‘You have my permission,’ said Midoa. ‘We have an unforeseen and fortuitous opportunity, Casalir. Have all but one in ten squads drawn down from their patrols and garrisons and mustered in the main vehicle pool. It is my intent to launch an attack.’

‘It will be as you say, Iron Father,’ said Lorramech. ‘With the aid of the Dark Angels, we will drive the Death Guard from Perditus and secure the Tuchulcha engine.’

It took most of the next hour for Midoa to gather together the forces he required for the counter-offensive. Squads and companies were drawn in from their positions across Magellix and the surrounding rocky plateau, moving in secret along underground highways that had been dug beneath the surface of Perditus Ultima long before the Emperor’s compliance fleet had arrived.

The Iron Hands sallied forth from the main gateway of Tower Two, Predator battle tanks and Land Raider armoured carriers spearheading the thrust, while the force’s Rhinos and the larger Mastodon transports followed behind the more heavily armed screen.

Almost immediately, defensive fire from Tower Eight punched through the gloom of Perditus’s atmosphere: stabs of laser and the flare of heavy cannon fire. The vanguard of the column spread out into covering positions, the tanks taking up stations behind enormous scattered boulders, jagged escarpments and the shallow ferrocrete blocks that housed the station’s atmosphere filtration fans. Soon the return fire of the Iron Hands was lancing into the slab walls of the outer towers, ripping trails through ferrocrete and cracking massive glassite observation decks.

Behind the storm of fire, the next wave charged onwards in their Rhinos, hatches and doors battened down as the transports roared across the undulating rocky ground at full speed. Midoa was in the lead vehicle, keen to set an example for his warriors to follow. The slower, bulkier Mastodons, each quadruple-tracked and towering above the Land Raiders, powered through the dust and fog as quickly as they could, their heavy tracks carving fresh ruts in the baked surface of Perditus Ultima.

Before they reached Tower Eight, the Iron Hands came into range of the guns at Tower Nine. Midoa had known this and speed was the best defence against the strengthening crossfire. There were three hundred metres of ground to cover where both towers could fire at full intensity, before the bulk of Tower Eight obscured the arcs of fire of its neighbours.

Being first across the killing zone had its advantages. The gunners were unable to adjust their aim quickly enough to target Midoa’s Rhino, but ten metres behind him Sergeant Haultiz’s transport was struck full-on by a lascannon beam. Engine boiling smoke, the breached Rhino skidded to a halt, the black-and-silver armoured warriors within spilling out onto the dusty rock while more transports poured past them. Midoa’s orders had been simple: stop for nothing. The Iron Hands in the other transports barrelled past their stranded brethren, knowing that the surest way to protect their fellow legionaries was to mount an assault on the gun positions manned by the Death Guard.

The fifteen seconds it took to dash through the blazing kill zone was the longest fifteen seconds Midoa had felt in his life. He was crouched in the rear compartment with his command squad, all of them tensed and ready to extract if a hit forced them to bail from their transport even while it was moving. Over the comm, Midoa learnt of a second Rhino being hit, and then a third, but by the time the lead transports were within a hundred metres of Tower Eight’s secondary gate, seven of the Rhinos and three Land Raiders had pierced the cordon of fire. A further eight Mastodons followed behind, each carrying forty Iron Hands warriors, their power fields soaking up autocannon shells and lascannon blasts with actinic flashes of energy.

As the Rhinos slewed to a halt beneath the guns of Tower Eight, Captain Tadurig and his squad disembarked swiftly, approaching the wall of the tower ahead. With them they had brought a phase field generator; a device Midoa had overseen the creation of since arriving, with the aid of his Mechanicum allies. It took only a few seconds for the Iron Hands legionaries to assemble the four-legged platform and install the phase field generator, the bulk of the machine taken up with an energy distillation dish at the centre of which were thousands of wire coils to transmit the phase field into place.

Joining his warriors, Midoa made a last few adjustments to the machine which he had painstakingly assembled and rigged from old tunnel-delvers and other pieces of warp-tech machinery left over by Perditus’s previous inhabitants. They had used the channelled power of the warp as freely as the Imperium employed plasma and electricity, much to the amazement of Midoa.

With a thrum of magnetic actuators sliding into position, Midoa pulled the activation lever and stepped back. He had not yet had time to test the device – he had been planning on using it during a subterranean assault on Tower Nine in a few days’ time – but he knew that in theory it would work. Muttering an old Medusan proverb, he waited for the power capacitors to reach full potential and then switched on the conductor coils.

The phase field sprang into life, looking like a cone of pearlescent energy. Everything within the field disappeared, including a circle of the Tower Eight wall some three metres in diameter. After a few seconds, Midoa signalled for the machine to be shut down and with his squad on his heels, stepped through the newly-made gap.

Inside, the phase field had displaced a swathe of the room within the tower, along with another interior wall and the ceiling twenty metres further on, exposing the floor above and a basement level below. Neatly severed cables sparked while sliced atmosphere recycling pipes dribbled contaminant-laden steam into the air. Their suit lamps piercing the darkness inside the tower, the Iron Hands pushed on with weapons ready.

‘What do you mean, Tower Eight has been breached?’ Calas Typhon, First Captain of the Death Guard Legion, Commander of the Grave Wardens, was in a foul mood already, and the news of the Iron Hands’ success did not improve his humour.

‘A phase field generator, commander,’ replied his second, Captain Vioss, who was forced to take a step back as his senior turned; Typhon and his subordinate’s massive suits of Terminator armour almost filled the command blister on the top of Tower Seven. Vioss’s voice was a low, slurred hiss, his speech impaired by an ugly suppurating wound in the right side of his jaw. ‘Sarrin had too much focus on the gateways and the breach through the wall has him outflanked.’

‘Why now?’ demanded Typhon, his top-knot of dark hair flicking like a horse’s tail as he twitched his head in annoyance. ‘Have they received some signal from the Dark Angels?’

‘Impossible, commander,’ said Vioss. ‘The Terminus Est’s dearthfield is still functioning, no communication is able to pass from surface to outer orbit.’

‘And the Dark Angels continue on their course directly towards Perditus Ultima?’

Vioss nodded, his sallow face deeply creased by a scowl.

‘They will have orbit in less than two hours, commander.’

‘Then we have less than two hours to punish our idiot foe for his foolhardiness. He should have waited until orbital supremacy was guaranteed. Signal the fleet and tell them to stave off engagement as long as possible. That should afford us an extra hour at least while the Dark Angels are forced to consider their options.’

‘You plan to bring forward the next attack, commander?’

‘Yes, right now, may the Father take your eyes!’ Typhon crashed his fist into Vioss’s shoulder, sending him reeling into the wall of the glassite-domed cupola. Motes of rust drifted in the air from the impact, shed from the corroded edges of Vioss’s armour. ‘We must free Tuchulcha while we have the chance. A lot depends on our success here. Tell Ghrusul to assault from Tower Nine. We will trap our enemy between us and drive onwards to the central facility.’

‘For the Father,’ said Vioss, bowing his head. ‘The Grave Wardens will not fail.’

The subterranean passageway was five metres high and twice as broad, lit by thin, dust-covered yellow strips in the floor and ceiling. The rails of an ancient locomotive system rusted at the centre of the tunnel and raised platforms ran along the walls to either side. Normally it was a gloomy place, but the arrival of the Iron Hands and Death Guard had turned it into a place of pyrotechnic brilliance.

Bolter fire echoed along the five-hundred-metre length of the interchange, the shells expelled by the exchange hurtling in both directions in a criss-cross of bright flares. Now and then the miniature blue star of a plasma shot shrieked across the gap or the red flare of a missile trail illuminated the murkiness. Blossoms of frag missile detonations appeared amongst the line of twenty Death Guard Terminators advancing on Tower Eight.

At their head, Commander Typhon roared his men onwards. Like his warriors, he was protected by the massive bulk of his modified cataphractii armour, painted white in the colours of the Death Guard. Rounded plates that heaped up higher than the top of his knightly helm protected his shoulders, his chest and gut were encased in segmented slabs of ceramite, arms and legs sheathed in thick greaves and vambraces. Adamantium mail hung in sheets across the joints of his armour. The left arm of his suit was incorporated into the bulk of a reaper autocannon, its twin barrels spitting a rapid-fire hail of shells towards the Iron Hands, chewing through the ammunition belt like a starving dog devouring a strip of sinew. In his right Typhon held a manreaper, a wickedly-bladed power scythe, symbol of his rank, and a smaller copy of the weapon wielded by his primarch, Mortarion. The glow of its power field shone a sickly yellow light on the white Terminators around him.

Heavy support Terminators backed up the twenty warriors of the spearhead, their cyclone launchers sending showers of missiles over the heads of their companions, detonations cracking the plastite sheathing of the tunnel walls and tossing silver-and-black armoured legionaries into the air. Combi-bolters spat rapid-fire rounds as the Grave Wardens continued to close, marching unharmed into the teeth of the enemies’ fire.

The Iron Hands fell back, unable to match the Grave Wardens with their heavier armour and weaponry, but progress was slow. Ghrusul had reported entering Tower Eight twenty minutes earlier, yet Typhon was still two interchanges from breaching the tower from below. He was expecting word from Vioss at any moment, telling him that the Dark Angels were in orbit, but until then he was determined to press on with the attack.

The leading squads of the Grave Wardens were within fifty metres of the end of the interchange held by the Iron Hands when Typhon’s helm crackled with the signal of an incoming comm-link. Rather than the sibilant whisper of Vioss, he heard a deep voice filled with authority that caused him to involuntarily stop in his tracks. Around him, the rest of the Death Guard were similarly immobilised and the fire from the Iron Hands died away within seconds.

‘The world of Perditus Ultima is under the protection of Lion El’Jonson of the First Legion,’ boomed the message. ‘You are to immediately cease all warring and quit this planet. Any resistance will be met with ultimate force and there will be no prisoners taken. Failure to comply with my demands will result in your immediate destruction.’

As if breaking from a trance, Typhon staggered forwards a step, almost losing his footing. Only in the presence of Mortarion had he ever experienced anything like the reaction he had just felt and he quickly realised that it was not just the Dark Angels that had arrived: their primarch was with them. He could sense the unease of his warriors as they came to the same conclusion, and the advance that had shuffled to a halt was slowly turning into a withdrawal. Ahead, the Iron Hands were backing away from their positions too, cowed by the same tone of authority that had pierced the minds of the Death Guard.

Typhon gritted his teeth and shook his head to rid himself of the fugue that had descended on him following the Lion’s proclamation. He knew that there was something else at work here, not just the innate command of a primarch. Typhon opened up his mind to the warp, sensing the waves of energy that were part of, yet separated from, everything in the material universe. When he had been a member of the Librarius his powers had been considerable. Mortarion’s hatred of warpcraft had finished Typhon’s exploration of his other nature when the Dusk Raiders became Death Guard, and so he had committed himself to becoming First Captain. Now, with the encouragement of darker sponsors, Typhon had once again embraced the warp-born side of his powers, learning far more about the universe and its mysterious ways than he had ever thought possible.

It was this that had first brought him in contact with the Father, and it was his warp-self that now detected the gentle interplay of energies being directed at the surface of Perditus Ultima. It seemed the Lion was no longer impressed by the Council of Nikaea’s decision either and had allowed his Librarians to reclaim their birthright.

With this knowledge, Typhon was able to extend a little of his own will, seeking a means to block the resolve-weakening presence of the Dark Angels Librarians. Despite his personal prowess, he was up against several trained minds, and so he turned to that shadowy force that had accompanied him these past years. He asked the Father for help, and help was granted.

With a surge of psychic energy buzzing through him, its touch like the tread of a thousand tiny insects in his mind, Typhon cast a pall of shadow over his Grave Wardens, shielding them from the assault of the Dark Angels psykers. Almost immediately they ceased their withdrawal and turned to him, expecting orders.

‘Fools!’ he rasped, pointing his manreaper at the retreating Iron Hands. ‘Now is not the time to step back, now is the time to attack! Slay them all.’

In a darkened chamber in the bowels of the Invincible Reason, the Lion stood between four of his Librarians, listening to their murmuring voices. All of the psykers had donned their old ceremonial robes of blue, their faces hidden by the shadows of the cowls pulled over their heads. It was better that this was kept from the sight of the ordinary battle-brethren. Confusion and hearsay could breed superstition faster than any explanation could thwart it.

Corswain stood to one side, his agitation audible as he shifted his weight from one foot to the other and back again, his armour creaking with each movement. The Lion ignored his seneschal’s discomfort. This way was better, cleaner. If the Death Guard and Iron Hands could be forced to parley without fighting, it would be in the best interests of the Dark Angels.

The Lion sensed Corswain straighten and he turned his gaze upon the seneschal.

‘It’s not working, my liege,’ said Corswain, sounding relieved by the fact. ‘Sensors show that the Iron Hands are retreating from a renewed Death Guard assault. They are being pushed back into the main facility.’

‘I warned them,’ snarled the Lion. ‘None will doubt my authority.’

‘Shall I signal Captain Stenius, my liege?’

‘Yes. If the Death Guard do not comply with my wishes, Magellix station will be obliterated. Tell Stenius to launch the torpedo.’

VII

Slashing the yellow-gleaming blade of his manreaper across the chest of an Iron Hands sergeant, Typhon shouldered his way through the doorway leading out onto the courtyard in front of Tower Eight. He was swathed by the shadow of the eight great Mastodons, their gun sponsons silenced and their canopied driver’s cabins emptied by the boarding actions of his Grave Wardens, who were now pressing on towards Tower Three. From there the main gate of Magellix would be within reach.

‘Commander, we have received a signal from the fleet.’ Vioss’s tone was urgent.

‘Why have they not yet attacked the Dark Angels?’ snapped Typhon as he lumbered up the gentle slope of the courtyard not far behind the line of his advancing warriors.

‘The Dark Angels have positioned themselves between our ships and the enemy. Any attack against them will allow the Iron Hands to move around the flank of the flotilla. We have more urgent concerns, commander. The Lion’s battle-barge has launched a torpedo towards Magellix.’

‘A bluff,’ Typhon replied instantly. ‘The Lion will not destroy Magellix any sooner than I or my counterpart in the Iron Hands. The contents of that facility are too precious to risk destruction. Continue the attack.’

‘Are you sure, commander? We have detected a cyclotronic warhead. It will obliterate everything at Magellix and a hundred kilometres around. It will destroy Tuchulcha as well as us. The fleet also reports detection of seven more Dark Angels vessels heading in-system.’

Typhon paused, a thought occurring to him. He voiced his doubt to Vioss.

‘What if the Lion does not desire Tuchulcha, but merely wants to prevent us from gaining possession?’

‘Commander, we cannot risk guessing the Lion’s intent. We must pull back. We can achieve nothing if we are annihilated.’

Growling to himself, Typhon activated the company-wide comm-stream. He snapped out a series of commands, pulling back his warriors from their final assault on the main gate. Instead, he established them in positions overlooking the central tower of Magellix and guarding the tunnel network beneath. When he was finished issuing orders, he switched his comm-unit to a general broadcast.

‘Happy now, Lion of the First?’ he snarled. ‘I will respect any ceasefire observed by the enemy. Know now that you intrude upon the business of the Death Guard Legion, and it will go poorly for you.’

Surprising Typhon – he had expected no reply to his invective – the comm crackled with a return signal. It was the same resonant voice as before – the Dark Angels primarch. It was too late to reconsider his scornful words, and his disdain would not allow him to offer any apology for them even if the Lion demanded it.

‘Look to the western skies.’

Typhon turned his gaze as instructed. He saw a flash of light in the upper atmosphere, and what appeared to be a suddenly-spreading electrical storm set the jade clouds roiling. Seconds ticked past before the crack of the torpedo’s detonation reached the commander’s audio pick-ups.

‘You are to pull back all forces from Magellix station. I will grant you safe passage back to your vessels. You, Captain Typhon, will remain at Magellix with a bodyguard of no more than one hundred warriors to attend a parley under my aegis. The rest of your force will remove themselves to two hundred thousand kilometres from orbit. Failure to comply will result in your destruction. The same conditions have been transmitted to Captain Midoa of the Iron Hands.’

The link cut before Typhon could respond, not that he had anything to say in the face of such a bald ultimatum. He watched the dark clouds of super-heated gases expanding like a blue stain across the western sky and realised that the Lion did not make empty threats. For the moment, his mission was compromised, but that did not mean he had to abandon his objective entirely; he had means unknown to the Dark Angels.

‘Vioss, one hundred of the Grave Wardens to form an honour guard. All other forces are to return to orbit. Have the remaining Grave Wardens embark on Terminus Est and I want you to take personal charge of the dearthfield. We shall allow the Lion to believe he is master of Perditus for the time being.’

‘I understand, commander. The Grave Wardens will re-arm and repair in preparation for the next offensive. We will not suffer defeat here.’

The fog covering the inner courtyard of Magellix station was dispersed by the plasma and steam of a descending Stormbird. The eagle-like craft put down, its landing struts taking the weight as the dust settled around it and the mists began to seep back between the perimeter towers.

There were already a thousand Dark Angels arranged by company between the arriving ship and the main gate of Magellix. To one side of the force waited the Death Guard while the Iron Hands were guarded behind a cordon on the opposite side of the open space. Only Typhon and Midoa had been permitted to approach the Lion’s landing craft, two armoured giants amongst a gaggle of a dozen Mechanicum acolytes dressed in red robes, the heads of all but two encased within breathing domes; those other two had rebreather attachments inserted into their faces and chests and required no further assistance in the thick Perditus atmosphere.

The Lion stepped out on the descending ramp of the Stormbird with Corswain to his right and the recently-arrived Captain Tragan to his left. Behind came a number of banner bearers and other attendants carrying such articles of Caliban as usually accompanied the primarch: plaques, goblets, crowns, shields and other items associated with the Lion’s multitude of ranks and duties. Behind them came the cabal of Librarians, now numbering six from the fleet mustering in orbit, their blue robes flapping in the slow but strong breeze – the higher-pressure air of Perditus turned even a sluggish gust into a wind that could bowl over a normal man. As one the Dark Angels silently lifted bolters, heavy weapons or swords in salute to their commander-in-chief.

The Lion needed no helm, though the air was acrid in his throat and made his lungs feel stretched by its weight. He wanted to impress upon all present that he was a primarch, with the force of an entire Legion to command, and not just any Legion; the Dark Angels, the First Legion. His standard bearers took up station on either side of the route to the main gate, the Lion’s many titles shouted through their external address systems.

The Lion’s armour had been polished to a gleam, the black enamel as glossy as midnight oil alloyed with diamond, the gold shining like the heart of a star. A scarlet cloak draped from his shoulders, its train five metres long, kept aloft by the artifices of Caliban: ten suspensor-floating devices wrought in the shape of short blades etched with the names of the Knightly Orders of his homeworld. On his left hip the Lion wore his greatsword, Adamant, its ruby-encrusted pommels and gold-chased hilt and crosspiece glittering as brightly as his armour. Below the right side of his breastplate the Lion’s belt was hung with six cylinders each the size of a man’s forearm, bound with platinum, the dull red leather cases containing the Proclamations of Caliban; the first laws decreed by the Lion after his ascendancy to command of the Dark Angels, swearing Caliban to the service of the Emperor for eternity.

Sweeping down the ramp with his entourage keeping step as best they could, the Lion advanced on the waiting Mechanicum dignitaries. They introduced themselves in ascending order of rank, so that the Lion instantly dismissed the first eleven shrivelled, half-machine men and women and focused all of his considerably intimidating attention on the last: High Magos Khir Doth Iaxis, Overseer of Magellix and Custodian of Tuchulcha, as his heralds attested.

Iaxis was a tiny man, perhaps no more than a metre tall, taken to be a child attendant by the Lion until the magos had pulled back his hood to reveal a near-conical head and ageing, pinched face. The back of the magos’s skull was extended by a series of segmented plates that came to a rounded point and moved strangely of their own accord, contracting and expanding slightly, perhaps as mood or effort occupied the Mechanicum priest. Thin bony fingers jutting from veined hands rubbed and entwined together, almost hidden in the cuffs of Iaxis’s heavy sleeves, and his slight shoulders were no wider than the Lion’s greave. If the diminutive tech-priest felt at all threatened by the giant looming above him – and the Lion could have easily crushed him with his foot like a titan of myth – the magos did not show any hesitation. His thin, reedy voice was almost muted by the bubble of the breather dome encompassing his small head, but the words were spoken with authority and precision.

‘We are pleased to welcome you again to Perditus Ultima, Lion of Caliban,’ said Iaxis, nodding his head inside the breather dome. ‘Please follow me.’

The Lion felt a moment of impatience, expecting to be forced to check his stride in the company of the minuscule Iaxis, but his fears were misplaced. As the magos’s entourage dispersed, they revealed a set of mechanical legs, which Iaxis ascended quickly by means of a narrow ladder at their rear. Placing his own legs inside the struts of the machine’s pelvic arrangement, his robe rucking up briefly to reveal pale, wiry legs interlaced with reinforcing struts, Iaxis settled into the ambulator. With a hiss of actuators, the legs straightened, bringing Iaxis almost to the height of the Lion’s shoulder. In the presence of his minions, Iaxis would have been above them all, but the primarch still stood taller than the mechanically-bolstered magos.

As they walked to the main gate the Lion became aware of a silver-and-black shadow hovering close to Corswain’s shoulder: Captain Midoa. Glancing to his left, the Lion saw Typhon walking shoulder-to-shoulder with Tragan. The Lion ignored the other captains until they were all inside the entrance chamber behind the main gate. Once inside, the Lion turned and addressed his ‘guests’.

‘Captain Typhon, Captain Midoa…’ The Lion was not sure what he was going to say to them. They were an inconvenience at the moment, but as he had explained to Corswain aboard the Invincible Reason, it did not suit to make hasty or arbitrary judgements about the loyalty and agenda of others. He instead addressed Iaxis. ‘Magos, please convey the two captains to a suitable part of the facility where they may await my return. Little brothers, you will watch them for me. Captains, I remind you that all of Magellix is under the protection of my aegis. Do not think for a moment to dishonour me.’

With that matter perfunctorily dealt with, the Lion turned his back on the two captains and continued across the gate hall. The chamber sloped downwards slightly, the far end broken by three archways, each leading to a set of moving steps that descended further into the bowels of Magellix.

‘The door on the right, primarch,’ prompted Iaxis. ‘Let me show you what all of this fuss is about.’

Most of the Mechanicum facility had not existed the last time the Lion had been on Perditus Ultima, but the tunnels beneath were familiar to the primarch. Though they were now sheathed in plasteel struts and plastite board, the meandering passageways were etched into the Lion’s memories, so that once they disembarked from the fourth internal conveyor, some half a kilometre below the surface, he was able to find the path unerringly towards the cavernous chamber where the machine was kept.

The last time he had walked these tunnels, frenzied machine-cultists had been dying by his hand. The people of Perditus had been enslaved to the machine and died in droves to the guns of the Dark Angels and the newly-renamed Death Guard. The Lion’s first encounter with Mortarion, a tense affair that had ended with neither primarch liking the other, had taken place only three months earlier, and the two Legions had been fighting side-by-side as a display of unity for the Emperor. The Perditians had howled praise to their inanimate overlord even as they perished. Now the tunnels rang only with the boots of the primarch and the thud of Iaxis’s walking apparatus.

Coming to the central cavern, the Lion found further passage barred by an immense doorway, emblazoned with the symbol of the Mechanicum. Iaxis stalked forwards on his artificial legs and pushed a hand towards a reader-plate set into the metal beside the portal. The Lion’s sharp eyes glimpsed a design on the wrist of the tech-priest as he extended his arm: a faint outline almost indiscernible from the rest of the overlying skin. The primarch knew it for what it was immediately: an electoo, a hidden mark that could be realised into being by a pulse of bio-electricity. The Mechanicum made wide use of them – as did some of the more secretive orders on Caliban and many other societies throughout the Imperium – but the Lion had never before seen the design concealed on Iaxis’s arm. It was of a stylised dragon, wings furled, coiled tightly about itself so that its neck merged with its body and its head lay alongside its tail.

‘Your electoo, what is its significance?’ the Lion asked as door locks rumbled into the walls and a heavy clanging sounded from within the door itself. ‘I thought myself learned in the customs of the Mechanicum, but it is a device I do not know.’

Iaxis inhaled sharply and glared at his wrist as if in accusation. His expression mellowed after a moment, becoming one of embarrassment rather than shock as he regarded the primarch with yellowing eyes.

‘A childish totem, Lion, nothing more,’ said Iaxis. He paused and a moment later the dragon appeared prominently on his withered flesh, glowing a deep red. ‘The Order of the Dragon, something of a defunct sect now, I am pleased to say. It is remarkable that you could see that pigmentation beneath my skin, I had quite forgotten it.’

The door opened with a hiss of venting gases, swinging inwards to reveal the cavern etched into the Lion’s memories. Much had changed, but it was unmistakably the same place. The vaulted ceiling, nearly seventy metres high and banded with rock strata of many colours, was pierced now by rings bearing heavy chains from which hung guttering gaslights. The walls, nearly two hundred metres apart at their widest, were obscured behind panels of Mechanicum machinery and devices, so that the bare stone was hidden behind banks of dials and levers, flashing lights and coils of cabling and pipelines.

Gantries and walkways, steps and ladders were arranged around the device itself, with sensor probes, monitoring dishes and scaffolding further enmeshing the centre of the warp device. The thing itself was still there: the sentience, or at least semi-sentience that had enslaved a whole star system hanging in mid-air like a world in the firmament. It was a perfect sphere of marbled black and dark grey, with flecks of gold that moved slowly across its surface. Ten point six-seven metres in diameter – the Lion remembered the Mechanicum’s first measurements exactly – it was made of an unknown material, impenetrable to every sensor, drill and device the Mechanicum had brought with them.

The Lion knew that the thing was regarding him with some alien sense. He was not sure how he could tell, nor how the warp device could sense him in return, but the fact remained that he was convinced it saw him this time as much as he had been convinced the first time he had entered this hall. On that occasion several hundred rag-clad Perditians had died in the next few minutes, unwilling or unable to lay down their primitive weapons, forced to defend their demigod to the last breath and drop of blood.

There was something else different, at first unnoticed amongst the rest of the Mechanicum clutter. Two protuberances now extended from the sphere, one at each pole, each only a few centimetres long. The rounded nodules touched against circuit-covered plates stationed above and below the device, which in turn were linked by a dizzying web of wires and cables to the surrounding machines. On a mat in front of the orb lay a small boy, aged perhaps no more than seven or eight Terran years. He lay immobile on his side, eyes unblinking, as stiff as a corpse, which he might have been were it not for the gentle rise and fall of his chest. The Lion could hear the boy’s heart beating ever so slowly, and could smell sweat and urine on the air.

A pipe extended from the boy’s back, and another from the base of his skull, joining him with the mechanical array surrounding the warp engine. As soon as the Lion’s eyes fell upon the boy, he sat up, moving jerkily like a badly-controlled marionette. The eyes were glassy, the limbs moving stiffly. With a glance at the alien orb, the primarch saw the golden motes were moving more swiftly than before, forming brief patterns in the dark swirl.

‘You have returned.’ The boy’s voice was flat and devoid of emotion, his face featureless. A hand raised and waved erratically.

‘It talks now?’ said the Lion, the words half-snarled as he turned on Iaxis. The tech-priest shrugged.

‘We could not discern anything of its construction or workings, but it seemed likely that it had some means to communicate with the Perditians before we were forced to wipe out their society. It took us nearly thirty years simply to devise this crude interface. We have learnt a lot from Tuchulcha. It is very cooperative, if a little enigmatic and, well, alien.’

‘I hear too,’ said the boy. ‘You seem displeased.’

‘You remember me,’ said the Lion, before he could stop himself. He glared at Iaxis. ‘Why the boy? We fought to rid Perditus of slaves and you have given it another.’

‘Oh, that,’ said Iaxis with a dismissive wave of the hand. ‘It’s just a servitor, Lion. We tried all manner of computational, logarithmic and cipher-based languages, but none of them worked. When presented with a servitor, though, it was able to tap into the established neural interface in only a few days.’

‘What a coincidence,’ said the Lion.

‘There is no coincidence. I was designed to assimilate with the human form, Lion. May I call you Lion? I overheard the magos use it. Is that the correct form of address for one such as yourself?’

The primarch wanted to ignore the device’s questions, but the boy’s voice lingered in his thoughts.

‘What are you?’ said the Lion, stepping forwards until he was within arm’s reach of the puppet-servitor.

‘I am Tuchulcha, Lion. I am the everything. I believe the magos and I are friends, though he sometimes grows angry with me. I try to remain patient with his outbursts.’

‘I asked what you are, not who you are. Curse you, what am I saying? You are a machine, a sophisticated machine and nothing more.’

‘I am everything, Lion. Everywhere. I was once Servant of the Deadly Seas. Now I am the Friend of the Mechanicum.’

‘You are dangerous,’ said the Lion. ‘A war is being waged for possession of you. I should destroy you and save much turmoil and bloodshed.’

‘You cannot destroy me, Lion. Not physically, nor do you desire it. All things desire to possess me. The one they call Typhon dreams much about me. The mind of the other, Midoa, is closed to me. It contains too much iron for my liking. You… You are neither open nor closed. You scare me, Lion. It was not until you came that I knew what fear was. Your return scares me, Lion. I do not wish to be destroyed.’

It was hard not to imagine the words being uttered were from the boy, but the Lion forced himself to focus on the glistening orb rather than its animated avatar.

‘Iaxis, my puppet needs more nutrients.’ As Tuchulcha said this, the boy’s bladder emptied, sending a watery stream down his leg to puddle on the plasteel floor. ‘My apologies, Lion. I have not yet mastered the basic functions of this form. Its pathways were underdeveloped.’

‘It is the third servitor we have had to attach,’ explained the tech-priest. ‘The previous ones aged unnaturally, hence the youth of this specimen. We are hoping it will survive for a few years longer than the previous interfaces.’

‘You seem to know a lot about what is happening on the surface,’ said the Lion, suppressing the distaste he felt at Iaxis’s uncaring attitude to the expenditure of human lives, even if they were unthinking servitors.

‘They pass through me, and I come to know them,’ said Tuchulcha. ‘Their minds touch upon mine. Yours does too, but it is far too heavy to carry. How do you cope with such a burden?’

‘My intellect?’ said the Lion.

‘Your guilt.’

The Lion did not answer straight away, not trusting himself to reveal something in front of Iaxis that he would rather remained inside his own thoughts.

‘What use is it?’ he demanded of Iaxis, turning away from the boy-puppet. ‘It was agreed with the Mechanicum that Perditus Ultima and the device were spared only because you thought it might have some purpose we could harness for the Imperium.’

‘And it does, it does!’ Iaxis seemed quite animated at this. ‘Tuchulcha, will you please show the primarch what you are capable of.’

Before the Lion could offer any protest, he felt his mind and body lurch, the sensation somewhere between that of a warp translation and a rapid teleportation. Darkness clouded his vision for an instant, and when his eyes were clear, he found himself no longer in the cavern beneath Perditus Ultima.

They were unmistakably in his throne room aboard the Invincible Reason. Tuchulcha and his avatar, minus most of the monitoring equipment, floated behind the throne, while Iaxis stood where he had been, a couple of metres to the primarch’s right. Sirens were blaring and the voice of Captain Stenius was bellowing over the internal speakers.

‘Battle stations! All crew report to battle stations. Geller field is being raised. Five minutes to full enclosure. Repeat, we have unexpectedly translated to the warp, Geller field is being raised, be prepared for attack.’

The Lion was dumbfounded, unable to comprehend what had happened for several seconds. He eventually realised that Tuchulcha must have moved the battle-barge into the warp and displaced itself, the primarch and tech-priest onto the vessel an instant later. Part of the Lion was appalled by the dangerous situation and Iaxis’s naiveté in allowing this to happen; a greater part of him marvelled at the unprecedented power on display.

‘Tuchulcha,’ the Lion said slowly, thinking it would be wise to be ‘friends’ with the unpredictable machine, ‘where are we now?’

‘We are adjoined to the place you call Perditus, Lion.’

The primarch turned to Iaxis, brow furrowed.

‘Adjoined? We are in the warp. How is this possible? We were far too close to the world, to the star, for a translation.’

‘Tuchulcha does not have to worry about that sort of thing, Lion,’ the tech-priest said with a toothless grin. ‘It is able to burrow directly from real space to warp space, without any backwash or graviometric displacement.’

‘Why have I not learnt of this before?’ demanded the Lion.

‘Our studies are far from complete,’ replied Iaxis. ‘At the moment, we are at the whim of Tuchulcha, and as you see it is a little, well, temperamental.’

‘Tuchulcha, I wish you to return us and the ship to Perditus Ultima.’ The Lion kept his tone calm and friendly, suddenly aware of how precarious his position had become.

‘Of course, Lion.’ The boy’s thin, blood-starved lips twisted into an abhorrent approximation of a smile. ‘What do you wish me to do with the rest of your ships?’

VIII

The Lion’s audience chamber was quiet, occupied only by the primarch and his seneschal. The Lion was seated in his throne, betraying no sign of his thoughts or mood, as impassive as a statue. Corswain stood at the primarch’s right, trying his best to conceal his own misgivings at the emerging situation. As time silently ticked past, he could no longer hold his tongue.

‘My liege, I do not question your judgement in this matter, but I must admit to my own ignorance. We have secured Perditus Ultima and possess enough force to destroy the Death Guard outright, yet you invite their commander to a parley? I have an ill feeling about this. And to have the Iron Hands’ captain present at the same time seems counter-productive.’

The Lion turned his head and regarded Corswain for a moment, his expression stern.

‘You are right not to question my judgement, Cor.’ The primarch’s lips formed a thin smile, lightening his demeanour, if only a little. ‘However, my reason for this meeting is straightforward. Before I decide on our following course of action, I must ascertain for myself the extent to which the knowledge of Perditus’s secret has spread. Though he probably does not realise it, I remember that Captain Typhon took part in our original expedition here. He was just a company captain, I recall. That he knows of Tuchulcha’s existence is unsurprising, but I sense that his agenda is not as transparent as it would first appear.’

‘And Captain Midoa, my liege?’

‘His presence here is an oddity, little brother. It might be chance that he intercepted the Death Guard attack, but coincidence does not sit well with me as an explanation. I must know why he came to Perditus, and on whose authority he claims to act. The Iron Hands are leaderless, my brother Ferrus slain at Isstvan, and I thought his Legion rendered inconsequential. It appears that I am wrong, and so I must have answers to questions that nag at me.’

The comm-piece in Corswain’s ear chimed and he listened for a moment to the communiqué from Captain Tragan.

‘Our guests will be here imminently, my liege,’ Corswain said.

‘Good,’ replied the Lion, directing his gaze back to the double doors. A few seconds later, those doors hissed open, revealing Tragan and a guard of thirty Dark Angels. In their midst were Captains Typhon and Midoa; the first easily seen in his huge suit of Terminator armour, a head taller than the surrounding warriors. At first glance, Typhon’s armour appeared in poor repair, much patched and stained, the white of the Death Guard mottled in places with oil and battle damage. A moment’s further inspection, however, revealed to Corswain that the Terminator suit was poorly maintained only on a cosmetic level; Typhon moved freely, every step accompanied by a wheeze of servos and hiss of fibre bundles. A short blade hung at his belt and in his hands he held his scythe-like manreaper.

Midoa followed behind the Death Guard commander, his black-and-silver armour showing signs of fresh paint and polish. His black cloak was tattered at the edges and a fresh scar was healing on his brow. Corswain had expected someone older, Midoa’s fresh features a counterpoint to the seals and marks of honour that adorned the chestplate and shoulder guards of his suit. Like Typhon, he was still armed, with a power sword at his waist and a twin-barrelled combi-bolter slung on a strap over his shoulder.

‘Thank you, Captain Tragan,’ said the Lion. ‘You may leave us.’

Corswain turned in surprise, but his primarch’s attention was fixed on the two newcomers.

‘My liege?’ Tragan could not stop the question before he spoke it.

‘Please return to your duties, captain,’ said the Lion, keeping his tone affable. ‘I am certain that our guests refused to surrender their weapons on principle only. I would expect no less from officers of the Legiones Astartes. They would not be so foolish as to test me on my own ship.’

With a glance at Typhon, Tragan nodded. The Dark Angels fell in behind their commander as he departed. The Lion gestured for Typhon and Midoa to approach.

‘Am I to be your prisoner?’ snapped Typhon, his voice echoing from the external speakers of his suit. ‘If you are to execute me out of hand, then do so and be done with it.’

‘You will address me properly, commander,’ the Lion replied, showing no anger at the Death Guard’s accusation. ‘I have yet to decide your fate. Do not give me cause for upset.’

Typhon said nothing for a few seconds, subjected to an unblinking stare from the primarch. Under the force of that gaze he eventually nodded and slowly lowered himself to one knee.

‘Lord Jonson, Primarch of the First,’ said Typhon. ‘Forgive my impertinence.’

‘Perhaps,’ said the Lion. He waved a hand for Typhon to stand. ‘What is your purpose in coming to Perditus, commander?’

‘I’m sure you already know it, Lord Jonson,’ said Typhon.

‘And still I wish it heard in your own words.’

‘The warp device, Lord Jonson,’ Typhon said, glancing at Captain Midoa. ‘I came to Perditus to claim possession of it.’

‘Interesting.’

‘The Warmaster desires this device, for reasons that you should know well. It is inopportune that you should seek to thwart his plans in this way. He will take it badly.’

‘Horus will take it badly?’ snarled Corswain, stepping forwards. ‘The Dark Angels do not answer to Horus.’

‘In time they will, I am sure,’ Typhon replied smoothly, looking briefly at the seneschal before returning his attention to the Lion. ‘Your opposition to the Night Lords is expected, but unnecessary. It is an irrelevance, made personal by mutual antagonism. What is Thramas to the Dark Angels?’

‘They are the Emperor’s worlds, and we will protect them,’ said Corswain, laying a hand on the hilt of his sword. ‘Treachery does not go unpunished.’

‘Be quiet, little brother,’ said the Lion, shifting in his throne to rest an elbow on the sculpted arm, chin lowered onto his closed fist, eyes still fixed upon Typhon. ‘Let the commander speak freely.’

‘I have nothing more to say, Lord Jonson,’ said the Death Guard.

‘Your threat is meaningless, commander. What you say is irrelevant, but what you do not say is so loud that it deafens me.’

Typhon started to speak but the primarch silenced him with a raised hand.

‘You make no mention of my brother, Mortarion, your primarch. Do you still fight for the Death Guard, commander? Or do you pursue an ambition at odds with your lord? If Mortarion desired the device you mention, he has the resources of an entire Legion at his disposal. Why would he send such a small flotilla to claim such a precious prize? No, Mortarion is not the hand that guided you here, commander.’

Straightening, the Lion rested his hands on his knees and leaned forwards.

‘Similarly, you invoke the name of the Warmaster, but it is not Horus’s will that despatched you to Perditus. Perhaps as you say, I am an irrelevance to my traitorous brother, but that does not mean Horus would wish to pit his sons against mine in open conflict. He destroyed three Legions at Isstvan, but my Dark Angels were not amongst them. Curze, Mortarion, Horus; none of them desire full-scale war with my Legion, and for good reason.’

In reply Typhon was silent, perhaps regretting his words, or fearing that further argument would only serve to betray him more deeply. The Lion moved his dark gaze to the Iron Hands commander.

‘And you, Captain Midoa, what purpose brought you here?’

‘To secure Perditus Ultima against the traitors, Lord Jonson,’ replied the captain, looking across to Typhon. ‘We arrived just in time, it appears.’

‘And who set you upon this purpose, captain?’

‘We were part of the four-hundred-and-sixth expeditionary fleet, lord, far from Isstvan when the muster was called. When we learnt of the tragedy that had befallen our Legion, we did what we could, securing such worlds as we had newly brought to compliance, fighting those traitorous forces that we encountered. Six months ago we were intercepted by an Ultramarines fleet near Ojanus, and received summons that Lord Guilliman was gathering all loyal forces at Ultramar. We answered the call, and later the primarch despatched us to Perditus, fearing the traitors might attempt to seize the device held by the Mechanicum.’

The Lion accepted this with a slow nod, deep in thought.

‘And now that you have learnt of Perditus’s secret, what is your intent?’ asked the primarch.

‘It is not safe to leave the warp engine here, lord. It is too powerful to risk its misuse, and so I believe the best course of action is to relocate it to the safety of Macragge.’

‘Indeed,’ said the Lion, eyebrows arching high. ‘You took that decision upon yourself?’

‘Lord Guilliman had intimated that such a course might be necessary, lord.’

Fingers drumming quickly on the arm of his throne, the Lion moved his gaze from one commander to the other and back again, before looking at Corswain.

‘When we have concluded this parley, send word to the captains, little brother. The fleet is to assume formation for the bombardment of Perditus Ultima.’

There were outbursts from Typhon and Midoa, which fell on deaf ears.

‘As you command, my liege,’ said Corswain.

‘You cannot destroy the warp engine!’ said Midoa, taking a step forwards. ‘If its power can be harnessed, it could be the weapon that enables us to turn the tide on the traitors.’

‘You suppose too much, captain,’ the Lion replied sharply. ‘I too received Guilliman’s summons. I do not concur with his plans, and I would no more trust him with this engine than any servant of Horus. I consider Ultramar no safer place for this device than Perditus, and even if Guilliman does not use it for his own purposes I cannot allow it to fall into the hands of the Emperor’s enemies.’

Typhon’s laugh rang around the chamber as Midoa made further protest.

‘Your good humour is misplaced, commander,’ snapped the Lion, silencing Typhon’s mirth and Midoa’s arguments. ‘I am of a mind to let you depart Perditus without the engine, so that you might take word of its destruction to whatever masters you wish to claim. However, slight me again or dishonour my audience and I will be content to allow your lieutenants to perform that errand in your stead.’

Silence greeted this proclamation and the Lion stood up, signalling that the audience was at an end.

‘Perditus Ultima and its prize will be destroyed within hours. Tell my brothers that there is nothing for them here.’

IX

On the main display, the tiny speck of light that was Captain Midoa’s shuttle disappeared behind the shadow of his heavy cruiser, the Fastidious Prosecutor. Looking at a sub-screen, the Lion saw the Terminus Est of the Death Guard powering away, its plasma engines almost lost against the light reflecting from Perditus Ultima’s surface. The primarch was about to turn away, with both Typhon and Midoa now returned to their respective ships, when he overhead a message from Lady Fiana coming through to one of the communications attendants.

‘Relay that connection to speakers,’ the Lion demanded, pointing a finger at the Legion serf, who complied immediately, eyes wide with surprise.

‘Lauded primarch, my family and I are detecting a distortion in the warp around Perditus Ultima,’ Fiana repeated, her voice coming through the address grilles all around the strategium.

‘Tuchulcha?’ asked the primarch.

‘No, this is something different. It is like a miniature vortex, a hole burrowing through the warp.’

‘Burrowing from where? To what does this hole lead?’

‘Give us a moment, lauded primarch. Ardal is ascending the pilaster for a better fix on the location of the disturbance.’

‘Raise void shields,’ snapped Captain Stenius. ‘Arm weapons batteries and sound the call to battle order.’

The Lion was content to let his subordinate take the appropriate defensive measures. He waited with arms crossed, gaze moving between the main screen, the sub-display of the Terminus Est and the speaker located to the right of the display array, as if he could see Lady Fiana beyond.

‘Detecting a power surge from the Terminus Est, captain,’ announced one of the serfs at the scanner consoles.

‘Raising void shields, captain,’ said another almost immediately after.

‘The warp disturbance is local, very small.’ Navigator Ardal’s voice was reedy over the internal comm. ‘I do not know how, but it seems to be originating from the Death Guard flagship.’

‘Where to?’ snarled the Lion. ‘Where is it directed?’

‘Perditus Ultima, lauded primarch. It’s some kind of warp tunnel, straight into the heart of the facility. I’ve never seen anything like it.’

‘Corswain!’ The Lion’s use of the seneschal’s name automatically switched the battle-barge’s systems to a direct address channel. Almost unnoticed, a tiny icon blinked on a sub-screen, indicating on a schematic of the Invincible Reason that Corswain was in the transit corridor outside the starboard launch bays, having seen off Midoa and Typhon.

‘Yes, my liege?’

‘Assemble your guard, and the Librarians, at teleporter chamber two. I will meet you there.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘Lay in coordinates for the Magellix facility. The Death Guard are trying to steal the warp engine.’

Typhon’s manreaper parted the tech-adept from pelvis to throat, the scythe’s power field fizzing and cracking with vaporising blood. The ragged remains of the tech-adept flopped to the bare stone of the floor as a squad of skitarii burst from the doors ahead. The Mechanicum’s bionically-augmented warriors sported a variety of laser weapons and rocket launchers. As red las-blasts seared down the tunnel and the corkscrew contrails of guided rockets followed, the Grave Wardens opened fire. Typhon’s autocannon thundered in his fist while a counter-barrage of missiles and bolts hammered into the half-machine defenders of Perditus Ultima.

The Terminators continued their implacable advance, stepping over the sparking, bloodied remnants of the skitarii, passing into the corridor that led to Tuchulcha’s prison. More skitarii appeared and were cut down, the Grave Wardens all but impervious to the weapons carried by their foes.

At the head of the column, Typhon was still trying to push aside the side effects of the warp-teleportation he had employed to bring his warriors inside the facility. The Father had not been so generous in his gifts this time, and Typhon’s skin felt heavy beneath his armour. His whole body itched and his head occasionally swam with the effort he had expended to punch a hole through reality.

‘Why did we not do this when we first arrived?’ rasped Vioss, striding alongside Typhon to the left. ‘We would have retrieved the device long before the arrival of the Dark Angels.’

‘I did not know that Tuchulcha was awake,’ replied Typhon. ‘It will have to transport itself back to Terminus Est, for I do not have the power. It is of a far greater mass than it looks, the bulk of its construction existing only in warp space.’

‘A feat of engineering,’ said Vioss, his sarcasm plain to hear.

‘A miracle of the Father,’ Typhon corrected him as they came to the chamber of Tuchulcha. The Death Guard commander stopped, seized by a sudden pain in his abdomen. He gritted his teeth as he felt something squirming through his insides; or at least a sensation he considered similar to having his intestines burrowed out by some hellish rodent. In a few seconds the pain had passed and he barrelled forwards through the next set of doors.

The globe of Tuchulcha hung in the centre of the room, surrounded by the entrapments and delving devices of the Mechanicum. Typhon was struck by the beauty of the patterns that flowed across the device’s surface. A melange of oily colours merged and split, creating a hypnotic effect. With some effort, the Death Guard leader broke his gaze from the floating orb, seeing a red-robed figure kneeling before the device, hood covering head and face.

Typhon aimed his reaper autocannon at the kneeling figure, but his finger did not squeeze the trigger as a child’s voice broke the quiet.

‘Stop! Do not harm him!’

A youth had stepped out of the tangle of cables surrounding Tuchulcha, sallow-skinned, connected to the apparatus imprisoning the device. It took a moment for Typhon to realise that the servitor-body was being manipulated by the machine.

‘He is of no consequence,’ said the commander. ‘He has been your jailer, and should be punished.’

A liquid-filled gasping emanated from the servitor-youth, which Typhon realised was laughter.

‘I cannot be imprisoned, not by the likes of this creature,’ said Tuchulcha.

‘Good, then you will be able to come with us.’

The boy did not reply, but looked away, head tilted back as if he were gazing through the rocky ceiling of the hall.

‘You do not have long, Typhon of the Dusk Raiders,’ he said. ‘The Lion comes, seeking your head. Your warriors are being slain.’

As if in confirmation, the first reports crackled across the comm-net. The rearguard of three squads of Grave Wardens were under attack. Their report was short-lived, talking of the blazing sword of the Dark Angels’ primarch, and of nightmare hooded creatures by his side that had eyes of flame and claws of iron. Ten seconds passed and Typhon heard no more from his men.

‘He has brought his psykers with him,’ Typhon told Vioss. ‘I cannot contend with their combined abilities. Warn Charthun and the second line, they must fall back towards this position.’

‘As you wish, commander,’ said Vioss.

‘We are the Death Guard now,’ Typhon corrected Tuchulcha. ‘I cannot take you back to my ship by my own hand. You must come with me if you want to be free.’

‘Free?’ Again there was the strangled gurgling of laughter from the animated boy. ‘I have been waiting a long time for the Lion to return. I saw him, the first time he came, and knew that my saviour had been delivered to me. The Perditians trapped me here, but with the aid of Iaxis I have been able to loosen my bonds. I have remained solely because I knew the Lion would return to me.’

‘He seeks to destroy you,’ said Typhon.

‘He seeks to possess me, as all others have before,’ replied Tuchulcha. ‘Fear not for me, brave Typhon. You must fulfil your own destiny. Your primarch awaits you. It would be such a waste for you to be slain here. Here, let me help you.’

Typhon’s protest died in his throat as he felt the surge of translocation. A moment later, he was on the strategium of the Terminus Est, his remaining Grave Wardens around him.

‘What was that about?’ said Vioss, shaking his head. The captain turned to the surprised attendants at the bridge controls. ‘Set course for the nearest translation point. The Dark Angels will be after us soon enough.’

‘No need,’ said Typhon, feeling a pressure in the back of his mind that he recognised well. ‘Tuchulcha has already put us well out of harm’s way.’

Dismissing his serfs, Typhon was left alone in his chambers, the bare metal bulkheads spotted with rust, lit by the unfettered glare of the light strips in the ceiling. He peeled off the last layer of his undersuit, tossing the sodden mesh aside to reveal his pallid flesh. He could not understand what had happened. The Father had sent him to Perditus to rescue Tuchulcha from the clutches of the Mechanicum, but he had failed.

The ache in his gut was still there, and the Death Guard commander looked down at his stomach. Beneath his flesh he could see the rigid plates of his black carapace. There was something else, pocking his skin just below his breast plate. He could not see so clearly past the curve of his muscled chest, so Typhon turned and looked at himself in the polished bronze of his mirror.

Just beneath his solar plexus were three blisters, each as large as his thumbtip, arranged in a triangle, touching each other. They were dark red, surrounded by a black ring, weeping clear fluid. He felt no pain as he gently prodded one of the buboes with his finger. In fact, the sensation sent a thrill of pleasure through his body.

Typhon had a moment of realisation. He had freed Tuchulcha. By travelling to Perditus, he had turned the Lion’s eye towards the world, setting in motion a course of events that led somewhere Typhon did not know, but was to the grand design of the Father. The trio of blisters on his flesh was a reward, a sign from the Father that Typhon’s loyalty had been noted. He was marked now and forever, marked by the love of the Father.

It was just the beginning, of course. The Grave Wardens were only the first. The Father wanted them all. The Father wanted the love and loyalty of every Death Guard; the love and loyalty of Mortarion above anything else.

‘Are you sure that was all the message said?’ Captain Lorramech shook his head, eyes fixed on Midoa. The two of them walked back to the strategium, heading from the conveyor that had brought them up from the docking bay.

‘That was all the Lion said I was to say,’ confirmed Midoa. ‘He was very specific. “Tell Guilliman I have a reply for him,” the Lion told me. “Tell him to wait for me. I am coming.” That was it.’

The lord of the First Legion sat as he so often sat these nights, leaning back in his ornate throne of ivory and obsidian. His elbows rested upon the throne’s sculpted arms, while his fingers were steepled before his face, just barely touching his lips. Unblinking eyes, the brutal green of Caliban’s forests, stared dead ahead, watching the flickering hololith of embattled stars.

Iaxis and his device were safely stowed in the deepest holds of the Invincible Reason. Magellix station had been turned to molten slag and rubble in a few hours; nothing was left for any other Legion to claim.

The Lion’s lips moved, so slightly that perhaps a casual observer would not have noticed. Also none but those with the superhuman hearing of a primarch would have heard the words that came from his near-unmoving lips.

‘I have Curze now,’ the Lion said, speaking only to shadows. His monologue stopped every few moments, as though to allow someone else to speak. ‘With Tuchulcha, we will be able to trap the Night Haunter. We have to be careful not to act too swiftly. Yes, when the time is right, but not before. If Curze notices a drastic change in our strategy he will respond, perhaps abandoning Thramas altogether. You are right, that would not be helpful.’

The Lion paused and wiped a fingertip across his brow.

‘Guilliman is a misguided fool at best, and a traitorous dog at worst.’ He took a deep breath. ‘I know that, but I would no sooner bend my knee to him than to Horus. Curze has the truth of it, but I was blinded by my anger. It has fallen to me to be the scale upon which history will be balanced. Every event has its counter, every brother his equal. Curze seeks to sap my morale and the strength of my Legion with unending war. Such shall be the duty of the Dark Angels. Yes, they will be ready for the task. There will be no new Emperor, only a lifetime of war. My brothers will bleed each other dry, contesting for eternity until there can be no victor. No, not even him. There is only the Emperor, none is worthy of inheriting that mantle. I will ensure the Legiones Astartes destroy themselves before another matches the power upon Terra. That is true. Faced with the prospect of mutual annihilation, my brothers may come to terms. Horus will be forced to acknowledge the Emperor again, and Guilliman and the others will not usurp their true master.’

Again the Lion stopped, with a slight shake of the head. He turned his gaze to his left, and out of the shadows appeared a diminutive figure. It was no taller than the height of a man’s knee, clad in an ebon robe, tiny and nimble black-gloved hands visible, but the rest of its body and face hidden in shadow. The diminutive creature looked up at the Lion and two coal-like glows briefly lit the inside of its hood.

‘No, it is too important,’ said the primarch. ‘Even if what you say is true, I cannot return to Caliban yet. Come what may, I have to stop Horus and Guilliman.’

The small figure bowed its head, and the Lion did the same, his whisper full of sorrow.

‘Yes, even if it costs me my Legion.’

~ Dramatis Personae ~

The XX Legion ‘Alpha Legion’

Alpharius/Omegon, Twin Primarchs

Sheed Ranko, Captain, Lernaean Terminator Squad

Ursinus Echion, Librarian

Arvas Janic, Commander, Tenebrae 9-50 Installation

Goran Setebos, Sergeant, 3rd Company Squad ‘Sigma’

Isidor, Legionnaire

Arkan, Legionnaire

Krait, Legionnaire

Volion, Legionnaire

Braxus, Legionnaire

Zantine, Legionnaire

Charmian, Legionnaire

Vermes, Legionnaire

Tarquiss, Legionnaire

Imperial Personae

Volkern Auguramus, Mechanicum Artisan Empyr

Gresselda Vym, Witchseeker Pursuivant, Brazen Sabre Cadre

Mandroclidas, Strategarch, Geno Seven-Sixty Spartocid

Non-Imperial Personae

Xalmagundi, ‘Calamity’, Soulfuel, Witchbreed

Alpha

Operatus Five-Hydra: Elapsed Time Ω1/-806.44//XXU
XX Legion Strike Cruiser Upsilon

‘Everything proceeds in accordance with the primarch’s wishes, my lord.’

‘And yet, I am uneasy,’ replied Omegon. The mighty warrior wandered the darkened oratorium, his attention moving slickly between schematics on the walls and data-slates on the round table at its centre. Ursinus Echion stood before him only as a hololithic ghost. ‘The Tenebrae 9-50 array is a tactical priority, brother. Much relies upon the technology’s continued operation.’

He seated himself in one of the chamber’s thrones, rested his elbows on the armrests, and steepled his fingers pensively. ‘You understand my concerns?’

‘Of course, Lord Omegon,’ the pellucid Echion replied.

Omegon remained thoughtful. Echion no longer wore the robes of the Librarius, instead opting for the plain attire of a company legionnaire. As one of the Legion’s senior psykers, he had been an obvious choice to oversee the operation of the new empyreal technology, even if his status as a Librarian had remained a secret.

‘You understand my concerns,’ Omegon repeated, ‘but do you share them?’

He watched a shimmer of doubt cross the Librarian’s hololithic face. The temptation to lie. The decision not to.

‘The Pylon Array was constructed precisely to specification,’ Echion admitted. ‘It is operating satisfactorily.’

‘Speak your mind,’ Omegon told him, ‘as all of our calling are encouraged to do.’

‘This technology is as ancient as it is alien,’ Echion said, at length. ‘If the designs for its construction and the orders to realise the project had not come from Alpharius himself, I would have thought the endeavour… misguided.’

‘Your vigilance and mistrust serve your Legion well,’ Omegon assured him. ‘I have as much distaste for the xenos and their despicable ways as you, brother. But the hydra strikes with many heads, and we must indulge variety over prejudice, however natural such aversion might be. You know this, Echion.’

‘Of course, Lord Omegon.’

‘And as you said, it is the primarch’s wish.’

‘Yes.’

‘Yet you are right to be cautious. Are you experiencing any difficulties?’ he asked.

Again, Echion balanced honesty against prudence, against the prudence of honesty.

‘From time to time we experience problems acquiring psyker slave-stock – on occasion this has brought us into conflict with the Sisters of Silence and their Black Ships. Nothing my legionnaires can’t handle, of course.’

‘Does it trouble you, brother? Trading in your own kind, thus?’

Echion considered his answer. ‘The technology is… demanding. We all have our part to play. My kind, as you call them, must play theirs just as the Legion plays its own.’

‘Quite,’ Omegon agreed. ‘Anything else? What of our allies?’

‘The Geno Seven-Sixty Spartocid make restless sentinels but they carry out their duties peerlessly. The Mechanicum…’ The Librarian paused. ‘Artisan Empyr Auguramus is a difficult man. I monitor the Pylon Array’s operation but he is responsible for its maintenance. He is unnecessarily harsh with the slave-stock and interprets his directives – how might one say? – creatively. I suspect he knows more about the technology’s workings than he or his people let on.’

‘That sounds like a problem.’

‘He knows he is essential to the Tenebrae operation, so he takes liberties. It’s probably me. I just don’t like him.’

‘A man would be ill-advised to take liberties with the Alpha Legion,’ Omegon said coolly. He was out of the throne and back to pacing the oratorium. ‘Master Echion, your work on Tenebrae has been outstanding but I want it to remain that way. I feel you would benefit from a fresh pair of eyes to look to your interests.’

‘If you feel that is necessary, my lord,’ Echion replied. ‘Do you have intelligence placing the operation in any jeopardy?’

‘Not directly, but our allies and enemies alike have learned much from us. We do not only have to guard against the Emperor’s spies in our midst; the Warmaster, too, has his fiendish ways. We should never underestimate the threat of the xenos and then, of course, we must keep our own friends faithful. Operatives can be bought, but those that share our path can also lose their way.’

‘Of course.’

‘That is why I must ask you to send me encrypted specifications for the Tenebrae base’s security and defences,’ Omegon continued.

Echion raised an eyebrow. ‘Commander Janic is in charge of base security–’

‘Then I’ll need them from him. Schematics for the installation, the full designation of troops at your disposal and details of garrison rotations. That should get us started.’

Echion nodded. ‘What do you intend to do with such information, my lord, if you don’t mind my asking?’

‘It will guide me in the best ways to serve you, Master Echion. It will help me decide where the vulnerabilities lie, and what other resources I can put at your disposal to ensure the continued, smooth operation of this most important of Legion projects.’

‘I thank you for your concern and attentions, Lord Omegon.’

The primarch was standing by the thick armourglas of the lancet port. He stared out at the void – cold, empty and eternal.

‘And yet I feel there is something else,’ he said, absently. ‘Something you have yet to confide, brother. Something beyond these mortal concerns.’ He turned, noting Echion’s look of uncertainty. ‘Perhaps your gift has given you some special insight, something that brings you unhappiness.’

The Librarian lowered his head slightly.

‘Might I have permission to speak freely, sir?’

Omegon continued to stare out into deep space. ‘Always.’

‘About the Pylon Array. The aether is in a state of calmness that I have never known. I reach out across it with my mind and my thoughts travel far, like a stone bounced across the glassy surface of a still pool.’

‘Continue, brother.’

‘I have always suffered a touch of the sight. What the Chief Librarian used to call a “foreboding”. Useful in the chaos of battle – momentary glimpses of blades before they strike and las-bolts before they are sent my way.’

‘You have prognostic abilities,’ Omegon confirmed tightly.

‘Yes, my lord,’ Echion said.

‘Enhanced in the presence of this xenos abomination?’

Echion was careful with his words: ‘Flowing more freely, from a becalmed source.’

‘And what do you see?’

‘The future, my lord. Terrible and true.’

‘Your own?’ Omegon asked.

‘The Legion’s.’

‘And…?’

‘I fear we have taken a wrong turn, my lord,’ the Librarian said with a pained expression. ‘Or that we soon will. Our current path takes us to a dark place.’

Omegon nodded. He understood all too well what Echion was saying.

‘Have you spoken of this to anyone else?’ Omegon asked.

‘Of course not,’ Echion replied. ‘The Librarius was formally disbanded, but for the requirements of specific missions and assignments. The legionnaires under my command are not aware of my gift.’

‘What about your former master, the Chief Librarian?’

‘No. I confide only in you, Lord Omegon.’

‘And I am listening, brother. I do not doubt your capabilities, enhanced under these special circumstances. I fear, however, that you glimpse the journey and know not the destination. Trust in this: there are many futures, many eventualities, many paths that the Alpha Legion might take. It is our enemies’ failing to see only what is presented to them in plain terms. Their undoing is to be blind to our myriad methods. Let us not make the same mistake. You can rest assured that Alpharius knows the darkness you have witnessed and has seen the light beyond. If we stay true to one another, to the purpose for which we were all created and to the principles upon which our Legion was founded – we will find the light together. We will achieve enlightenment. We will secure the ultimate victory.’

Echion bowed his head. ‘I thank you for your confidences, my lord.’

‘And yours, Master Echion. I shall expect Commander Janic’s triple-coded transmission shortly. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have matters of equal gravity to attend to.’

‘Of course. Hydra Dominatus, Lord Omegon.’

‘Hydra Dominatus.’

The hololithic display crackled to a static miasma and then blinked into nothingness above the display tablet. Omegon stood framed by the deep darkness of the lancet port.

A voice came from the shadows. ‘He’s going to be a problem.’

Sheed Ranko emerged from the rear of the chamber, and strode around the breadth of the table. He was a hulking warrior – almost as big as Omegon himself – and captain of the Lernaean Terminator squad, and master of the strike cruiser Upsilon. An honoured veteran and gifted tactician, he had been at the twin primarchs’ collective side since the Legion’s first irregular conquests of the Great Crusade. ‘I mean it,’ he said again. ‘Echion’s going to be a problem.’

‘Or the solution to one,’ Omegon mused.

Ranko joined him by the viewing port.

‘As much as I enjoy sitting in on your status reports,’ the captain said, ‘I presume you grace the Upsilon with your presence because you need something.’

Omegon gave him a thin smile. ‘A favour. The advice of an old friend. Nothing you haven’t done for me a thousand times before.’

‘I serve your interests,’ Ranko told him, taking a throne at the obsidian table and indicating for the primarch to do the same.

‘And I the Legion’s, captain.’

‘Where’s Alpharius?’

‘Returning from council with the Warmaster,’ Omegon told him honestly. ‘He’s assembling the fleet. I expect the Upsilon will receive her orders soon.’

‘You are here on his behalf?’ Ranko asked.

‘In his interests, yes.’

‘Then what can I do for you both, and the Legion?’

‘Before I tell you, I need you to understand something, Sheed,’ Omegon said, fixing the veteran’s gaze. ‘Legion operations always require a certain degree of secrecy and discretion.’

‘Yes.’

‘This goes far beyond that,’ Omegon said simply.

‘Fair enough,’ Ranko replied, intrigued. ‘Want to tell an old friend why?’

‘I’m mounting a sensitive operation.’

‘All Alpha Legion operations are sensitive.’

‘And none more so,’ Omegon spoke in hushed tones, ‘than when you are infiltrating your own Legion.’

Ranko stared grimly at him.

‘No one knows the Legion like you,’ the primarch continued. ‘No one has operational experience across as many theatres. You’ve seen many of them prosecute their duty under fire. All Alpha Legionnaires are exceptional, but I need legionnaires not only of singular talent but also of a very specific disposition. It’s going to get… confusing.’

‘You want recommendations.’ Ranko said, matter-of-factly. Gone was the warrior wit and the pleasure of seeing an old friend. This was something else entirely. ‘It would help if I knew a few details of the operation, so I can gauge exactly what it is you need.’

‘I’ll have them shortly,’ Omegon replied.

Ranko looked from the primarch to the hololithic tablet, and back to Omegon again.

‘You’re going to hit the Tenebrae installation?’

Omegon nodded. ‘My informants and astrotelepathic intercepts have detected a leak.’

‘Within the Legion?’

‘Yes. Sensitive data and information relating to the placement of Alpha Legionnaires and operatives, on both sides of the conflict.’

‘I don’t believe it,’ Ranko said. ‘I mean, I do, obviously. But how is this possible?’

‘This is a civil war,’ Omegon reminded him. ‘There are those placed among the Legions loyal to the Emperor who secretly supply the Warmaster with intelligence and appropriated materiel. Why not the other way round?’

Ranko continued to marvel in disappointment and disbelief. ‘Because this is the Alpha Legion, lord.’

‘A fact of which I am painfully aware,’ the primarch sighed. ‘I have been monitoring the situation, of course, in the hope that the leak could be identified and neutralised. That was until Alpharius’s own safety was almost compromised.’

‘Alpharius?’

‘A rendezvous from which he had to promptly withdraw,’ Omegon said. ‘Whoever they were, whether they fought for the Emperor or the Warmaster… They could have taken my brother right then and there.’

‘And you traced it back to Tenebrae?’

‘A partially decrypted astrotelepathic message, originating from the base,’ Omegon confirmed. ‘Times and movements. They knew exactly where and when to strike.’

‘Echion, then.’

‘Possibly. The Octiss System. It’s one of the few outlying regions uncompromised by warp storms. You heard him yourself – the Pylon Array calms the immaterium. An astrotelepathic message might reach Ancient Terra from there.’

‘How is Alpharius taking it?’ Ranko asked.

‘Spitting venom, as you might expect. We have no time to investigate. The war moves apace. We do not have the luxury of tracking this back to an enemy sponsor, not when even our attempt to do is likely to be reported. Tenebrae is compromised. It must be destroyed – leak and all – before knowledge of the array or even the installation itself falls into the hands of another Legion.’

Ranko placed a hand upon the table. ‘You need legionnaires, then, who can infiltrate an Alpha Legion base and will not question the order to kill their brothers. Many of whom they will know to be innocent.’

‘Yes.’

The captain paused for a moment, soaking up the enormity of the task.

‘Then you need Goran Setebos – Sigma Squad, 3rd Company. His team were responsible for hitting the matrix outpost on Oblonski’s World. Setebos is pretty cold, even for the Legion, but if it’s victory over everything else, then he will do what needs to be done.’

‘Where is he currently deployed?’

‘Running interference on the 915th Expeditionary Fleet, I believe.’

‘Thank you, Sheed,’ Omegon said.

‘You’re also going to need a psyker,’ the captain continued, ‘and you can’t just pull one from the Legion – in all likelihood, Ursinus Echion will have had some role in their training.’

‘An operative then?’

Ranko shrugged. ‘The question is, who? To go up against Echion, you are going to need someone really special. The problem is, the more special they are, the more dangerous they are to everyone else.’

‘You don’t always have to fight fire with fire,’ Omegon muttered, then seemed to reconsider. ‘No readers. No telepaths. There’s problem enough with leaked information.’

‘Agreed.’

‘You have a suggestion?’ the primarch asked.

‘Perhaps,’ Ranko said. ‘We’ve been decoding transmissions from the Black Ships that Echion mentioned. The same name keeps cropping up. Successive Sisters of Silence cadres have failed to capture a witchbreed called Xalmagundi on the hive world of Drusilla.’

Omegon nodded. ‘Sounds promising. Any other advice?’

‘Echion and Commander Janic are going to have that installation wrapped up tight,’ the captain insisted. ‘You’re going to need someone on the inside.’

‘I already have a candidate in mind,’ the primarch assured him.

Ranko nodded.

‘Has it really come to this? Our own Legion?’

‘With treachery in our midst, we cannot falter,’ Omegon said. ‘Traitors, wherever they are found, must be dealt with decisively. Sacrifices must be made.’

Omegon crossed the oratorium and took a pair of chalices from a tray. He offered one to Ranko. ‘Thank you for your assistance with this, old friend. There are few to whom I could turn with this.’

‘At your service, always,’ the captain said, raising the chalice for a toast. ‘To mission success, and to necessary sacrifices.’

The pair drank. Ranko pulled the rim from his lips thoughtfully. He found himself looking down into the depths of the chalice.

‘You know what that is?’ Omegon asked.

‘Yes, my lord,’ the captain answered after a moment.

‘Then you know what it is that I ask of you.’

Ranko downed the rest. ‘What you ask of us all,’ the captain said. ‘Everything.’

Beta

Operatus Five-Hydra: Elapsed Time Ω3/-734.29//CHO
Phemus IV – Tharsis Heights

The planet was slowly turning itself inside out, though Phemus IV had been quietly raging for millennia. A crepuscular ball of igneous rock and soot storms, it was covered in a rash of volcanic eruptions. Cracked through with glowing fractures, it resembled a celestial bauble that had been dropped and was about to shatter.

The only creatures to make their homes in the Phemusian nightmare were migrant tribes of greenskins that routinely roamed the lava-dashed landscape in order to avoid seasonal eruptions. Sergeant Goran Setebos only knew these tribes by the banners they carried and the crude symbols painted on their corrugated hovels. Squad Sigma had ascribed names to the tribes based upon the scrawled iconography: the Spumers, the Green Devils, the Scorchers, the Magmatusks, the Fireball Clan.

For the past month, the Alpha Legionnaires had been engaged in a war by proxy. They had not killed a single greenskin or even discharged a single round from their soot-smeared bolters. They were shadowing a far more dangerous prey across the volcanic highlands, razorblade canyons and dismal basalt plains.

The V Legion.

The Khan’s swift savages. The infamous White Scars.

Black rock crumbled in Setebos’s grasp. If his palm hadn’t been protected by the ceramite of his gauntlet, the remaining shard of glassy rock would have pierced straight through. The sergeant was clinging to a rockface, punching handholds and toe-picking his way up the midnight crag. Beneath him, the nine other members of Squad Sigma followed up through his improvised purchase points. Glooping beside them was a sluggish lava fall, a slow-moving torrent of molten rock that bathed the armoured legionnaires in the perpetual heat of a furnace.

At the top of the escarpment, Setebos unlocked his bolter from his belt and crunched through the gravel of a volcanic crater. Magma had eaten through the rim to create the falls and Setebos chose his footing carefully around the bubbling margins. One by one, the Alpha Legionnaires made their way over to the far side of the crater, their grimy plate glinting in the fiery glow.

‘This looks good,’ he said. ‘Isidor.’

Legionnaire Isidor consulted a scuffed and scorched data-slate, turning it and his armoured form around to match their most recent relief maps with the surrounding topography. He gestured east with an outstretched gauntlet.

‘If the Fireballs haven’t started moving by now,’ he announced, ‘this should light a fire under their monstrous arses.’ He handed the slate to Vermes, who counter-checked his cartography.

‘This channel should then join with the one from this morning,’ Setebos murmured.

‘Affirmative.’

The whole squad remembered all too well the channel they had crossed with some difficulty a few hours before. Braxus had almost pitched into the hellish river of molten rock.

Behind them, Krait had started to prepare a cache of seismic charges, which the legionnaire punched into the crater wall with his gauntlet. ‘The greenskins in Quadrant Seven-Seventeen should be funnelled through to this gorge here, with little choice but to join the Magmatusks.’

‘Unless they just attack them like the last lot did,’ Braxus murmured.

‘Always a possibility with orks,’ Setebos agreed. ‘Krait, are we ready?’

‘Two more charges; ten more seconds.’

‘Legionnaires, over the edge,’ Setebos ordered.

Squad Sigma hauled themselves over the lip of the crater before skidding down through the grit and scree of the volcanic slope.

The Alpha Legionnaires had been doing this for weeks, trekking across the infernal landscape and strategically setting their demolitions. Remaining an unseen and undetected presence, various covert teams like Sigma had frustrated the White Scars’ hopes of a swift xenos extermination in the local systems, by manoeuvring the greenskin warrior tribes on Phemus IV into tactically superior strategic formations. By forcing the groups together and concentrating the greenskins in larger numbers, Setebos and his squad had succeeded in bogging the Khan’s warriors down in countless meat-grinding engagements. The White Scars themselves could now only dream of racing over the open plateaux, fragmenting the tribes and cutting the orks to pieces, as was their wont.

‘Sergeant!’ Isidor hissed across the vox-link. ‘Contacts!’

Making their ungainly way down the gorge at the foot of the slope was a ragged string of orks. They bore the crude iconography of the Fireball Clan and carried an assortment of mismatched weaponry. Some were wounded, suggesting that they were only a splinter group of a larger tribe that had been caught in some kind of ambush.

‘Take cover,’ Setebos ordered over the vox-link, ‘and do not engage. I repeat, do not engage.’

As the legionnaires scrambled into less than desirable cover on the scree slope, the orks continued their wretched stomp up the ravine. Taking positions behind crags and boulders, the thick coating of ash on their plate went some way to disguise the Space Marines from the xenos barbarians. Remaining completely still, Setebos – who was closest to the ravine floor – watched the monsters lope past, oblivious.

The rumble of distant eruptions was suddenly cut through by the high-pitched whine of engines, and looking back down the gorge, Setebos caught sight of three Imperial jetbikes rounding the volcano’s flank. He had no idea how the White Scars kept their plate and vehicles so clean and white in the rain of ash and soot clouds.

The Scars tracked in on the column of orks – they had probably already been searching for them, Setebos reasoned. The Khan’s hunters were not known for allowing their prey to escape. They leaned into the handlebars of their mounts and gunned the wailing engines, tearing up the gorge, trailing a cloud of soot in their wake.

Bolt-fire ripped up through the greenskins at the rear of the column, bringing the rest of the monsters into sudden and savage life, their brute weapons ready. The White Scars hammered through fully half of the beasts before accelerating overhead.

One patchwork monster swung its axe at one of the oncoming vehicles. The White Scar rider simply leaned out to one side, allowing the butcher’s blade to pass harmlessly over his helmet.

Setebos watched the riders rocket away around the volcano base. It was classic V Legion tactics: the greenskins – normally so formidable as a sea of crude blades and blazing gunfire – were now scattered and grunting furiously with their weapons held high. Within moments the jetbikes were back, strafing the mindless creatures with more streams of bolt-fire.

Their fellows dropping about them in ragged heaps, the final two brutes roared at the swarthy sky. The first jetbike passed between them at high speed, prompting both to take optimistic swings. Predictably the second and third White Scars glided in after them, curved chainswords screaming as they cut the monsters down. With one greenskin’s head hanging from his body by only a thread and the other clutching its spilling innards, the White Scars’ work was done.

Turning and idling back up to the site of the massacre, the Scars dismounted. Slipping their heads out of their helmets, the Khan’s warriors allowed the luxurious length of their hair and moustaches to fall freely, before drawing their short curved blades and stabbing at the fallen orks to ensure the monsters were truly dead.

Only one of the three, an eagle-eyed warrior indeed, caught sight of something amiss on the volcanoside. A shape that seemed out of place, perhaps? Stepping back to his bike he slipped a pair of magnoculars from the saddlebag and brought them up to his dark, piercing eyes. The White Scar would have called out, either to the armoured Alpha Legionnaire hiding on the rubble-strewn slope or more likely to avert his own brethren, but he could do neither with Setebos’s blade at his throat and the Alpha Legion sergeant holding him by his hair.

Suddenly aware that they were under attack, the two remaining White Scars made for their jetbikes. The first saw Braxus coming for him – he snatched the length of his serrated chainblade from a sheath that ran the length of the mount, and with a harsh battle cry swung it back around in a whirling arc. Braxus was forced to abandon his tackle and slide down through the grit and onto his side, but the White Scar was swift to recover. Even so, Arkan and Charmian cannoned into him, one slamming into the Space Marine with his domed pauldron while the other went for the weapon.

Isidor was nowhere near the third White Scar by the time he reached his jetbike. Instead of going for his weapon, the Scar leapt and mounted the vehicle. The manoeuvre was accomplished with the grace and confidence of one born in the saddle, and before the Alpha Legionnaires could do anything the White Scar had leaned around and banked the accelerating vehicle back up the craggy gorge.

Setebos’s blade slipped through his struggling prisoner’s throat with ease.

‘Isidor, jam his transmissions,’ the sergeant barked, pointing with the bloodied tip of the knife. Isidor skidded around the two legionnaires still wrestling with their foe on the basalt and scrambled for the jetbike’s comms.

‘Got it!’ he called.

Setebos watched the escaping jetbike streak for freedom. Zantine brought his bolter up, but the sergeant placed his ceramite palm on the weapon’s barrel. There would be no convenient but cacophonous firefights, with the distinctive sound of reciprocal bolter fire betraying the presence of another Space Marine force on Phemus IV. As always, the Alpha Legion would remain unheard, unseen and unknown.

‘Krait!’

‘Yes, sergeant.’

‘Now.’

The detonators fired. The seismic charges set in the crater wall blasted the igneous rock into glassy splinters. Rubble crashed down the volcanoside, bouncing and shattering as it rolled its way down into the ravine. The fleeing biker saw the danger. He tried to turn but there simply wasn’t enough room. The Space Marine tucked to the side and slipped from his saddle, skidding and clattering through the volcanic shale in his armour plate. The jetbike struck the growing wall of shattered rock and tumbling debris, and became a brief nova of light, sound and twisted shrapnel.

Setebos saw the White Scar scrambling though the black gravel before getting to his feet. He ran with powered, determined steps, pulverising the grit under his boots.

The spilled magma was coming.

The explosion – designed to sound like any other violently erupting volcano – had opened the molten floodgates. A torrent of radiant death flowed down the slope towards the White Scar. The Alpha Legionnaires watched the lava swell eat up the incline and then flood the gorge, just as Krait and Isidor had intended.

The flow swamped the stricken Space Marine, knocking him from his feet and plunging him, shoulder and then face first, beneath the surface. The White Scar flailed only for a moment, his immaculate ceramite scorching, before sinking – backpack and all – beneath the slurping surface with a flare of powered discharge.

Charmian looked to his sergeant. ‘Sir?’

There were three of them now, pinning the remaining White Scar face down against the ravine floor.

‘Make it quick,’ Setebos hissed, before directing the rest of the squad up a slightly more forgiving incline on the opposite slope.

The White Scar screamed furious insults at his captors but they did not last long; Charmian took the sides of the Space Marine’s head in his powered gauntlets and twisted it violently to the side. There was a splintering crack, and the White Scar’s resistance became a limp slump before the legionnaires released him.

As Squad Sigma made their way up the craggy slope, the gully behind them glowed. The disgorged river of molten destruction had replaced the site of the brief battle, scouring any evidence of the Alpha Legion’s presence from the face of the planet.

‘Hold.’

Setebos suddenly halted. The legionnaires held their positions, scanning the charred landscape for more greenskins.

‘More White Scars?’ Isidor put to the sergeant, but Setebos was holding the side of his helmet with his gauntlet against the rumble of volcanic eruptions rolling across the tortured land.

After a moment, he turned to them once more.

‘We’re being recalled. Something special. I’ve been given extraction coordinates.’

Isidor nodded with approval, but the rest of them gave their sergeant only the blank optics of their helmets.

‘Let’s move. With any good fortune, we’ll be off this rock within the hour.’

Operatus Five-Hydra: Elapsed Time Ω3/-633.19//DRU
Drusilla Hive World – Hive Chorona

Her mother had called her Xalmagundi. The undercaste called her Calamity, for the disasters she had brought down upon her people. The bitch off-worlders that came for her called Xalmagundi ‘soulfuel’ and ‘witchbreed’. Her unnatural gift had killed them all.

Death had driven her topside. She had left the underhive behind with the rubble and the bodies. As a young girl she had little idea how to control her deviant abilities; objects would move about her, seemingly of their own accord. Violently, if she was so disposed.

What started out as a trick to amaze the caste urchins soon carved horror into underhiver faces. Even amongst her own people in the Delve – where skin was ashen and untouched by the sun, where eyes were large and black, where the wretched eked an outcast’s existence – she was an aberration. When her teenage tantrums brought quakes to the underworld, even her cavern-kin rejected her.

They drove her out with stories of her past. They told Xalmagundi of her horrific birth, and how as a screaming newborn she had broken her mother from within, shattering bones and rupturing organs. All with the cursed power of her unreasoning, infant mind.

Driven from cavern community to cavern community, Xalmagundi was a freak among freaks. Again the tears came to quench the loneliness but with them came anger and hatred. The benighted realm about her became a quake-stricken nightmare, and it seemed then that even the darkness shook. With tremors rippling through the fragile foundations of the hive, the world above came crashing down onto the world below.

That night, the Delve – home to the undercaste for longer than anyone could remember – became just another pulverised strata in the hive’s long history.

She was hunted as she migrated spireward. The hivequakes had been felt throughout the city and there were those who made it their business to know their unnatural origin. Xalmagundi learned to control her emotions and the telekinetic horror that sometimes came flooding with them. Her appearance, which many hivers found unsettling and horrid, still brought her to the attention of the authorities, but when they failed to bring her in and enough people had witnessed the devastating power of her gift, the off-worlders came.

Off-worlders with gifts of their own: a silent sisterhood, in whose mere presence Xalmagundi’s more extreme abilities were nothing and under whose gaze it was agony to exist. She had heard that the Sisters had been sent by the Emperor himself, which their fine armour and weaponry indeed seemed to confirm. Xalmagundi could not conceive what the Emperor of Mankind would want with her. Having sent his mutes armed to the teeth, she could not think it was for any good reason.

The killing continued. Squad after squad of the Sisters hounded her through the hab-quarters and industri-scape of mill stacks, but all had failed to acquire their prey.

Xalmagundi stared into the fire. She watched the tongues of flame flicker and dance. Her camp had been some kind of villa once, the mansion-hab of an Imperial Army officer or palace official. The wind whistled through the dilapidated stonework and around crumbling furniture. The psyker pulled her ragged cloak tighter – she was used to the subterranean warmth of the underhive and the furnace-heated mills. The further spireward she travelled, the more biting the cold felt upon her thin, pale skin.

She had come to Spire Pentapolis precisely because it had been long abandoned. The Chorona Hive was so named because of the five minor spires that had grown up about the primary apex like a crown, but it had been decimated by a virulent contagion hundreds of years before. Every attempt to re-colonise the spire had resulted in a resurgence of the disease, and new measures required to quarantine and cleanse Pentapolis of its plagued inhabitants. So, the ghostspire now remained as a cautionary tale on the skyline – too large to demolish, too recent in the memory to embark upon the next inevitable attempt to repopulate and appropriate the precious space.

Xalmagundi rubbed at her temple. She had a headache. Perhaps she had been staring at the fire for too long…

No. Realisation shivered through her. The pain in her head had been subtle at first but had steadily grown: it felt like a knife, slowly slipping its way into her brain. She had felt that before.

There was no time to lose.

Xalmagundi leapt over the fire and sprinted through the derelict villa. She was light and lithe, but a short lifetime of being hunted had also made her fast and strong. She was not alone in the building – she was sure of that. This was confirmed a moment later when explosive lines of daylight shot through the thin walls of the villa, bolt-rounds spraying rockcrete fragments across the room. Xalmagundi willed herself on.

Her hunters had surrounded the building, moving up behind the villa walls. It now felt as though she had six knives embedded in her brain. The pain was excruciating, and through the crippling agony she couldn’t find her way to the part of herself she usually relied upon in such circumstances. The part of her mind in which fear and frustration translated seamlessly into spontaneous, telekinetic destruction. All she could think to do was put one foot in front of another. She needed to get away. Not only to escape being blasted apart by boltfire, but also to get out of the Sisters’ overlapping influence.

The walls on either side of Xalmagundi erupted as two more hidden attackers unleashed their weapons at her. The villa had become a deathtrap, a nexus of criss-crossing gunfire – even as she ran, she felt the tug of stray rounds snatching at her trailing cloak.

As ruined masonry began to tumble to the floor, Xalmagundi’s hunters were revealed: aurulent visions in plumed helmets, picked out in white and scarlet. They clutched their furious boltguns and chased Xalmagundi up the length of the villa.

She burst from the shadows and onto the stilted terrace beyond, and was blinded by the sudden daylight – as an underworlder, her large black eyes were hypersensitive to even Drusilla’s meagre sun. She skidded to a stop, putting her slender hand out in front of her hooded face, and it dawned on her that this might have been the Sisters’ plan all along. She was fast and agile but she couldn’t outrun a bolt-round in the open. In the midst of battle, with masonry and gunfire searing through the air, her instinct had been to flee. Not a single projectile had managed to find her in the chaos and now she had hit the terrace, the bolter fire had ceased altogether. Xalmagundi couldn’t help feeling that she had been corralled, in the same way the underhivers would beat their way through the tunnels, driving verminipedes into the waiting nets of their companions.

The sky roared above her. It was difficult to peer into the brightness-blotched heavens, but a carrier or shuttle of some kind hovered above the roof of the villa. As her vision cleared and acclimatised to the Drusillian day, she shielded her brow with the palm of one hand and saw the armed carrier bank for another pass. A silent Sister sat harnessed into an open doorway in the side of the shuttle – she wore a targeting helmet, and in her grip Xalmagundi could see the long barrel of some exotic rifle.

The psyker’s lip wrinkled with fury. The Sisters of Silence would kill her if they had to, but would much rather tranquilise her like a dangerous animal, for the trip to their precious Emperor. Xalmagundi would not be bagged like some prize for a spireborn’s wall.

Once again she was running, her bare feet thudding into the weathered stone of the terrace. She felt the other Sisters behind her, encumbered by their armour but desperate to succeed where previous cadres had failed. The carrier had completed its turn and was bearing down on her – Xalmagundi could see the silhouette of the helmeted sniper, hanging out of the side of the shuttle. The fleeing psyker peeled off suddenly to the right, allowing several rifle shots to snap off the stone and putting the sniper on the wrong side of the carrier to take another.

Xalmagundi ran an assault course of decaying architecture; she hurdled a decorative wall, before diving through the gap left by several smashed and missing balusters. The mouldering architecture provided her with cover, but more importantly it slowed the armoured Sisters of Silence who had to clamber over the obstacles with their heavier wargear. Rolling, she pushed herself back up onto her feet and sprinted for the terrace edge.

The carrier dropped to one side, bringing it level with the stilted platform, and Xalmagundi could feel the sniper lining up her shot. She could also feel something else – the relief of knives being retracted, bit by bit and one by one from her stinging mind. She was drawing away from the Sisters. Xalmagundi didn’t want to risk looking back.

Every moment counted. Every step counted. The last step counted the most.

Xalmagundi launched herself from the edge of the stilted terrace and out into the nothingness beyond. Her hood fell back and her cloak began to flap about her, and she felt the sniper’s rushed shot slice past her ear. Xalmagundi’s arms started to swing and her legs worked the air as the psyker’s slender body hurtled downwards, past the haphazard architecture of Spire Pentapolis. Below her was the mountainous accretion of Hive Chorona, the smog-cloaked industrial powerhouse from which the crown of minor spires sprang. It was coming up fast to meet her.

Looking up, Xalmagundi watched the carrier dive after her. The Sisters stood on the precipice of the terrace, watching in silence as the psyker fell to her death. As she tumbled away from them she felt something return within her, as though an amputated limb had been restored to her in full working order.

She closed her eyes and willed disaster.

The south face of the spire trembled. The agglomerate architecture shuddered from top to bottom, blasting a shower of rockcrete, torn girders and gargoylesque masonry chunks into the open air. Like a pressure building down the shaft of the spire, the ripple of destruction vaulted debris and colossal rafts of architecture out across the sky with the force of a titanic explosion. Far above her now, the terrace buckled and fell.

Xalmagundi angled her descent and hit the first spinning chunk like a cat, only to slip from its smooth surface moments later and tumble away. Clawing her way onto another she was frustrated by a third colossal brace of rubble striking her temporary platform, smashing it into pieces beneath her and forcing Xalmagundi to shear it in two with her mind.

Snatching her way onto the warped length of a structural column, the psyker allowed herself a moment to focus on the retreating carrier and the flailing bodies of Sisters tumbling to their deaths amongst the collapsed architecture. The psyker fell with the destruction for a few moments before latching onto the busy flourishes of a passing wall section, and held on for her life. She had been fortunate – her gift gave her extraordinary telekinetic power. It did not, however, lend her any extraordinary reflexes, and any one of the crashing shards of rock and metal could crush her instantly, or cave in her fragile skull in a moment of inattention.

Below, Xalmagundi could see the havoc she had unleashed. The base of the ghostspire was being buried in the shattered remains of the collapsed south face, and a cloud of dust was billowing up to meet her. As she plummeted down through the haze, the psyker focused her mind, concentrating on slowing the runaway mass of the great object. Her face twisted into an ugly snarl as she willed the masonry into a gentler descent. Other colossal blocks of stone thundered past, only to shatter against the growing rubble-mountain at the foot of the spire.

The psyker’s mind ached with the effort.

Despite Xalmagundi’s unnatural influence, the gigantic fragment still struck with unimaginable force, catapulting the psyker down onto the rockcrete platform protruding from the side of a dormant smokestack. Incredibly, she landed on her feet but immediately felt something give in her leg, shot through with white-hot pain.

She tumbled into a roll that took her down the platform’s steps and the world became a sickening kaleidoscope. Beyond that, all she knew was the thunderous white noise of falling masonry.

The world suddenly stopped turning; a rusted metal landing had brought her to an abrupt halt. Her head was gashed in several places and her arm hung numbly at her side. All she wanted to do was stay down and die.

Looking back up the steps she saw an enormous shard of buckled rockcrete crash through the platform as though it were paper, followed by a whipping tangle of support cables that tore at the staircase. She forced herself up, but immediately slipped back onto her rump with a cry of pain – her leg was shattered, and bone was protruding from the flesh in several places. Trying her best to focus on the leg and ignore the various other agonies competing for her attention, she gritted her teeth and straightened the bones, providing a telekinetic splint for the smashed limb. Sharp fragments retracted back within the torn muscle, making it at least possible to struggle to her feet.

Half hobbling, half tumbling, she made her way downwards through the thick, choking dust as the last of the southern spireface found its way to earth. Soon she reached the murk of a manufactorum dragway, though she could see barely a metre in front of her face.

Limping through the miasma, the psyker began hacking and coughing. The air was thick with powdered stone and several times Xalmagundi had to stop to choke up stringy spittle laced with grit. Her face was pasted with clots of fresh blood.

The post-catastrophic silence was suddenly broken by the rhythmic crash of rotor-cannons, and the murk swirled as something unseen passed overhead. The cannonfire hammered up the street, creating two parallel troughs of mangled rockcrete.

Xalmagundi half-fell into a littered alcove, allowing the churning gunfire to continue up the dragway towards the smokestack. The remaining Sisters were clearly no longer interested in taking her alive. She stared up through the swirling dust, searching for the armed carrier; if she could spot it then she could use her power to fling the winged menace into the ruined face of the Chorona Spire. But the sky was just a blanket of shadow, and she saw nothing.

As the cannons ceased, Xalmagundi thought it best to change her position and hobbled out onto the ploughed-up dragway, but froze as she encountered a wall of dark silhouettes blocking her path.

She squinted and tensed, ready to bring the adjoining manufactorum down upon the shadowy forms. Their outlines radiated violent intent; they were hulking and armoured, and like the Sisterhood cadre they carried boltguns. They fixed on the psyker with the haunted lenses of their helmets.

An unarmed giant stepped forward from the imposing ranks.

‘Xalmagundi?’

The psyker was stunned to hear her name come from the huge warrior. As the dust began to clear between them she recognised them as a host of the Emperor’s Angels. Like everyone else on Drusilla, she had only seen such legends crafted in stone, but the plate and the weaponry were unmistakable.

The leader halted. His ceramite creaked. She knew he had sensed her influence, the loose telekinetic embrace in which she now held his armoured form. The Emperor could send who he wanted! Xalmagundi would not be taken! She would crush the legendary warriors inside their battle plate like an invisible fist around an empty rations can.

‘How do you know me?’ she spat.

‘Xalmagundi, my name is Sheed Ranko,’ the voice came again, deep and measured. ‘I assure you, we mean you no harm,’

‘Ratcrap,’ she returned, watching him for any signs of movement. She ran her gaze down the motionless line of Angels. Each held himself and his weapon casually, as if waiting for something. Not a single barrel was aimed at the psyker. Xalmagundi narrowed her grit-flecked eyes – this oddness only served to stoke her suspicions further.

‘Allow me to demonstrate,’ the giant announced. ‘Sergeant, her pursuers?’

Behind the leader, another Angel brought up his weapon’s scope to further enhance his optics, and sighted into the murky sky.

‘The Sisters of Silence,’ the sergeant hissed. ‘Brazen Sabre Cadre, out of the Black Ship Somnus. Pursuivant Gresselda Vym. Inbound.’

‘Bring them down,’ Ranko commanded.

Another Angel broke ranks and brought up the bulk of a missile launcher onto his armoured shoulder. He pointed the weapon up into the sky and stared through a targeter of his own.

‘Acquisition?’ Ranko asked. ‘Do you have the shot?’

‘I have it.’

‘Then take it, brother.’

Xalmagundi flinched as the missile blazed up into the sky and disappeared, before the flash of an unseen explosion ripped through the obscurity like sheet lightning. Within moments the wreck of the carrier fell from the heavens, belching a trail of black smoke and falling debris. The pilot was desperately trying to regain some control but the craft was a smashed ruin – it cut through a tall metal chimney before passing over their heads and crashing into the facade of the manufactorum. Its disappearance in the dust-choked distance was swiftly followed by a further explosion, and the sounds of hull shrapnel ringing off the rockcrete walls.

Xalmagundi almost faltered and had to reach out to steady herself. She brought her attention back to the Angel who called himself Sheed Ranko.

‘Sergeant,’ he said, not taking his glowering optics from the psyker. ‘Take two legionnaires and finish off any remaining Sisters.’

The Angel left the wall of shadow with two of his hulking comrades, but Ranko addressed her again. ‘Aren’t you tired of being hunted?’

‘I can take care of myself,’ the psyker shot back, savagely.

‘Prove it,’ Ranko challenged her.

Xalmagundi’s lip curled. She turned and looked up at the pinnacle of the Chorona Spire, just beginning to emerge from the great bank of dust.

Her eyes narrowed. Her pupils became stabbing points of darkness.

The derelict spire gave a thundercrack of internal agony. The pinnacle began to shake as a deep rumble built from within the accreted nightmare of the ghostspire’s already weakened foundations, and loose chips of stone shook around their feet.

Xalmagundi’s jaw became taut with destructive desire.

The pinnacle suddenly disappeared; like an unfortunate underworlder in a sinkhole, the spire dropped down below the haze.

Every living soul within fifty kilometres would have heard the pulverising boom of successive floors and constructs falling in on themselves. The spire was collapsing straight down – like a black hole, some irresistible gravitational force was dragging an avalanche of girders, buttresses and crumbling stone downwards through the guts of the structure. As it fell inwards upon itself, the colossal city-spire sent a cloud of dust and debris into the sky. The sound was excruciating: shearing metal, ancient stone cracked asunder; the ear-bleeding roar of the spire’s sheer mass crashing down into the hive below.

Xalmagundi stood with the Emperor’s Angels as the collapsing agglomeration drove a blizzard of ancient dust and grit down the narrow dragway. Ranko asked for the magnoculars. He brought them up to survey the new mountain of scrap and rubble Xalmagundi had created from the ancient spire, just with the power of her mind.

‘My word, it seems you can take care of yourself,’ Ranko said to her, obviously impressed. ‘Can you also take care of other things for other people, I wonder?’

Operatus Five-Hydra: Elapsed Time Ω2/-417.85//SSA
San Sabrinus – De Sota City

Omegon was one amongst many.

The primarch stood in the hustle and bustle of common humanity. Sweaty faces leered, shoulders barged past. Strangers manhandled him in an attempt to get by on the crowded esplanade, but they could not and would not know that they were in the presence of a galactic prince – a son of the Emperor, a lord amongst Angels.

He would have cut an imposing figure on the crowded thoroughfare. Instead the citizens of De Sota City saw one of their own, a miserable specimen of unimportance: a trademonger or cartelier, presented in hololithic semblance. The amulet field generator concealed upon his person disguised the perfection of his true form, cloaking him in the vague impression of mortal mediocrity.

Casting a casual glance across the teeming esplanade, Omegon spotted several more examples of unexceptional humanity: a slavedrover here, a merchantman’s purser there, and a trafficker keeping a low profile. They were all his Alpha Legionnaires, members of Effrit stealth squad in a similar disguise to his own, with others further up and down the thoroughfare.

It wasn’t difficult to blend in. De Sota City was like a swarming emporium, where everything was for sale and everyone was selling something. Some, it seemed, had come to sell their souls, and it was one such individual that had brought Omegon to San Sabrinus.

The esplanade was one of many that served the crowded galleria. Dirty tapestries hung from the buildings like decorative sashes; stained sheet roofing gave the avenue the feeling of being inside a tent, while tattered drapery rippled gently in the breeze. It housed the shabby offices of various off-world brokers, including many illegal and unlicensed operations, but that did not stop hordes of street vendors from choking up the thoroughfare with their wares and constant calling. Omegon had been feigning interest in one such parasite for the last few minutes, offering the gabbling vendor a little local currency to keep him interested, despite the fact that he had no idea what the pitcher was selling – the man was draped in small cages and carried a rod and reel of some kind.

Over the vendor’s bobbing shoulder and between excitable hands that thrust the tiny cages at Omegon’s face for inspection, he spotted their mark – moving with self-importance up the thoroughfare was a Mechanicum artisan. His robes were broad, the deep red of the Martian priesthood, and his ample shoulders supported a busy cogitator bank. The illuminated hood hid a fat face that was flesh-plugged with dirty lines and needles. His lips had long since been sewn together, but a vox-unit hung around his almost non-existent neck; from this he would routinely snatch a trailing microvox and place it against one of his many chins.

This was the infamous Volkern Auguramus: Artisan Empyr, and secret Alpha Legion operative.

Keeping him in sight, Omegon tracked the artisan up the esplanade. Very few vendors bothered Auguramus, since he was flanked by four demi-clawed combat servitors. Grabbing the cage vendor by the face and pushing him out of his path, the primarch slipped into the crowd. Omegon watched as two of his disguised legionnaires made a pass through the throng from the opposite direction.

Auguramus stopped outside an off-world broker’s office. Omegon walked past as his quarry looked furtively about before entering, accompanied by one of his dead-eyed drones.

Taking positions a little way up the esplanade and making rotating passes, the Alpha Legionnaires waited for him to re-emerge. When he eventually did he was in an apparent hurry, his cybernetic thugs clearing a path for him through the throng.

‘Effrit Seven – the broker,’ Omegon said quietly into his vox-bead.

Leaving his subordinate to investigate the artisan’s dealings, Omegon and the rest stuck with Auguramus through the lower galleria.

‘Looks like he’s heading for the starport.’ That was Effrit Two. ‘We’re going to have to take him soon. It’s all gallerias from here on in. Very public.’

‘Effrit Seven,’ Omegon said in a low voice. ‘What have you got?’

‘A consignment for twenty thousand decatonnes of stone from a dead-world quarry in the Beta Ghastri System, to be transported by talon brig to Parabellus. That’s Quall sub-sector.’

‘What kind of stone?’ Omegon asked surreptitiously.

‘Serebite. Inert feldsparic silica. Sparse and precious, according to the consignment slate. A lot of coin must have changed hands.’

Omegon recognised the name and, by extension, its purpose.

‘Let’s take him,’ Omegon announced over an open channel.

Auguramus continued his determined march, his clawed servitors never leaving his side, always maintaining the same equidistant four-point configuration around him. Omegon’s legionnaires began to make increasingly regular passes, with the primarch himself maintaining a deliberately less than artful tail. Before long the artisan started to notice the same faces in the crowd. His gaze began to dart around as he scanned the masses for suspicious activity – he doubled as an operative for the Alpha Legion, and so understood the dynamics and principle of a tail. What Auguramus didn’t understand was that in this case his Alpha Legion tail was making its presence painfully obvious.

As the artisan hurried across the galleria, Omegon initiated the second stage of the operation: Alpha Legionnaires in their amulet-field disguises began making crossing passes at the target. Auguramus had the measure of those following him now and recognised many of their faces, but by moving across the galleria to avoid them against the flow of the multitude, his servitors soon found it difficult to clear their master’s path.

As members of Effrit approached each other in the crowd, the legionnaires brushed shoulders and exchanged their hololithic semblances. With their amulets changing hands in choreographed patterns, it would be far more difficult for the mark to keep track of his pursuers.

Auguramus stared into the crowds, probably on the lookout for assassins or grab-teams. His eyes routinely returned to Omegon, who was maintaining a steady pace and swiftly convincing the man that he was about to be intercepted.

‘We have a boulemart coming up,’ Effrit Four hissed over the open channel.

‘Move in,’ Omegon said. This time he was not careful about how he spoke, and Auguramus – who had been peering above the heads of the crowd at him – saw the stranger’s lips give the order.

Panicked, the artisan moved with his servitor guard over to the side of the galleria. Omegon watched him sidle over to the boulemarts leading off the main esplanade, and felt his prey’s temptation to run building into irresistible paranoia.

Four members of Effrit closed in on Auguramus from different directions, in plain sight, but Omegon saw the surprise evident on the artisan’s face as one by one his pursuers disappeared. Each one had inexplicably vanished in the crowd.

Spinning around, Auguramus’s surprise was replaced by horror as he found himself alone. His servitors were no longer there to protect him.

In their place were the four strangers who had been approaching, now staring silently. Auguramus cast about for any chance of escape. He found only more faces that he had come to recognise in the crowd, and Omegon swiftly bringing up the rear. It was too much for the poor man.

‘Stay away from me!’ he blurted before bolting for the boulemart – a narrow arcade lined with stalls and porch bazaars. Omegon watched him blunder straight through a rag curtain and past a handful of bewildered onlookers.

The servitors stood, silently obeying their master’s last command. Omegon had simply arranged for the closing legionnaires to plant their field generators on the bodyguards as they passed, before disappearing back into the multitude. Auguramus believed that they had abandoned him and had been replaced by members of a grab-team when, unwittingly, he had dismissed and mindlocked them.

Tearing aside the curtain, Omegon found two disguised Effrit squad members holding the artisan in a porchway. They stood either side of the heavyset man, their short blades nestling in his folds of neckflesh, and one also held the microvox to Auguramus’s throat.

Omegon approached with predatory composure. Auguramus instantly recognised him as the shadow that had been following him through the mercantile world masses.

‘You’re making a big mistake,’ he yelled at Omegon. ‘I have influence with the feared and the powerful. You couldn’t even imagine…’

Omegon took the field generator from his belt and dialled down through the hololithic frequencies. The image of a De Sotan nobody shimmered and warped until it finally fizzled away to the reality it concealed – an armed Alpha Legionnaire, the Legion insignia upon his chest. The other two warriors did the same.

Auguramus stared wide-eyed at his sponsors. He had no words or pleas for such a turn of events.

‘Oh, I think I might be able to imagine, Artisan Empyr,’ Omegon said. ‘I too have influence with the feared and the powerful. They trust you with their secrets: they wish to know why you are trading them with the rest of the Imperium.’

Auguramus found it difficult to catch his breath. Omegon’s reveal had been shocking enough, but he struggled to speak with two blades resting at his throat like a pair of shears.

‘I’m not… selling anything…’ Auguramus managed.

‘I know, Artisan Empyr,’ Omegon told him. ‘You’re buying. And you’re doing what you do best – you are building. Except you’re not building for us. You’re building for yourself.’

‘Did Master Echion send you?’

‘Master Echion had his suspicions, but no.’

‘What do you want?’ Auguramus gasped.

‘I want you to restrict your talents to the wishes of your sponsors.’

‘But the technology is… remarkable. Potentially even superior to the devices on Perditus.’

‘I know,’ Omegon replied. ‘It was I who supplied you with the specifications and the original materials.’

‘It is clearly xenos in origin. Ancient. Where did you–’

‘Where I acquire my information is my concern. Now, if you test my patience again with another ill-advised question, I’ll take your head from your shoulders and leave your fat carcass dumped in an alley.’

Auguramus restricted his response to a fearful nod.

‘You are gifted among even your kind,’ the primarch admitted. ‘That is why we came to you. That is why we took you into our trust. Do not make the mistake of thinking you were the only prospect. There are others who can still deliver what we need.’

Again, a nod of pale-faced dread.

‘Artisan Empyr,’ Omegon said, ‘why are you building a replica of the Tenebrae Pylon Array on the agri-world of Parabellus?’

‘The technology,’ Auguramus told him delicately, ‘– alien though it may be – could revolutionise the Imperium. It could secure our astrotelepathic network and the immeteorology of our trade routes.’

‘Open your eyes. The galaxy doesn’t need revolution,’ Omegon told him. ‘It suffers a little too much from that already. You’re securing the Warmaster’s Imperium before he has even won it. I don’t care if your intentions were noble – an operative of the Alpha Legion cannot expect to betray his masters and live long afterwards.’

‘D-d-don’t kill me, please…’ Auguramus begged. ‘I can still be useful…’

Omegon leant in with an ominous intimacy. ‘We are the Alpha Legion, Volkern. Whether they know it or not, we always find a use for everyone.’

Gamma

Operatus Five-Hydra: Elapsed Time Ω2/002.68//OCT
Tenebrae 9-50 – Trojan Asteroid

The boarding torpedo Argolid drifted through the void of the Octiss System. Like a bullet through the black, the torpedo sliced through the frozen absence, iInertial velocity maintained, course unwavering.

Octiss was like a forgotten corner of the galaxy. A debris field of rock and ice circled in the silence, begirdling the bright but bleary 66-Zeta Octiss; it was a shattered realm, a sea of cosmic offal in which pockmarked planetoids and lighter-than-air giants scudded.

Inside the Argolid, everything was a frosty darkness. Squad Sigma stood to attention in their boarding cages. Legionnaire Arkan sat strapped into the pilot’s throne in front of a set of rudimentary controls. Omegon stood at the narrow strip of armourglas that could only charitably be described as a viewport. Wiping the rime from the surface, he allowed a brighter shaft of light to cut through the gloom of the torpedo compartment. 66-Zeta Octiss was close, then. Runebanks and decking twinkled and glistened with an icy sheen.

A few hours earlier, Omegon had had Arkan shut down everything with a power signature within the torpedo – heat, gravity, life support. The legionnaires were all decked out in full plate and helmets, and had engaged the maglocks on their boots. The Argolid had fired its final burn before going dark and hurtling between the mute fury of two gas giants. The serene deep-ocean green of their smooth surfaces belied the true nature of the planets: unimaginable depth and pressure, winds thousands of kilometres in speed, eternal storms and cyclonic pits, intense radioactive fields and a comet-trap gravitational influence.

Arkan held a simple astrolabe to his helmet optics and made measurements through the cleared section. The shaft of sunlight suddenly disappeared, indicating that something of size had moved between the Argolid and the uncomfortably close Octiss star.

‘Well?’ Omegon looked to the legionnaire.

‘On target, my lord,’ Arkan replied. ‘As long as we don’t hit anything.’

‘We cannot afford the attention that a correctional burn might attract,’ Omegon told him, but there was little they could do about the fragments of metal and rock spinning serenely through deep space about them.

Before the reinforced nose-cone of the boarding torpedo rolled the stately magnitude of Tenebrae 9-50. Like a mountain range plummeting through the void at colossal speed, the asteroid was rugged and irregular, scarred by craters, impact sites and chasmic fractures. Arkan pointed out a deep cleavage in the asteroid rockface, a natural feature designated as the 61° 39’ Ecliptic, or colloquially to the base personnel as ‘Vacuity’s Bosom’. The deep fissure had been chosen as the Alpha Legion’s point of entry.

Omegon watched the colossal asteroid tumble towards them, rotating around its bulbous centre of gravity. The primarch was silently impressed with Arkan’s calculations. The boarding torpedo was not only closing on their target solely under the power of inertia, but it was being almost effortlessly targeted towards a jagged pit gaping in the asteroid’s midriff, all while the gargantuan rock itself slowly spun in the void.

Dropping down through the chasm, the boarding torpedo pierced the silky darkness of the asteroid’s interior. Here there was no light at all, not even the pinpricks of distant stars for company. Omegon looked to Arkan – he was monitoring a handheld chronometer.

The boarding torpedo was designed to breach the armour of enemy vessels and the amalgamate hull sections of abominate space hulks, but Omegon believed that Tenebrae 9-50 would prove more of a challenge and so had planned for alternative disembarkation protocols. Once again wiping the film of ice from the viewport, he put his faceplate to the surface. Even with his more-than-human eyesight, the primarch could see absolutely nothing.

‘Legionnaire–’ he cautioned, but Arkan’s chronometer completed its countdown with a single click.

‘Launching counterhook,’ Arkan announced, pulling on a pair of pneumatic paddles set in the runebank above. A loud pressure snap reverberated through the torpedo as a harpoon launched from the rear of the craft, trailing an adamantium alloy line. Satisfied that the harpoon had embedded itself deep within the bedrock, Arkan reported: ‘Firing grapnels; engaging resistance.’

Rather than tearing the rear out of the torpedo with a dead stop, the legionnaire brought the craft to a disciplined halt through the increasing drag offered by a heavy-duty gear assembly. Omegon could feel the hull trembling, and the assembly began to emit an grinding screech. He put out his arms to steady himself. The boarding torpedo was clearly decelerating but it was difficult to tell in the absolute darkness of the rocky trench whether or not it would be fast enough.

The Argolid suddenly lurched; the counterhook had run its line. The legionnaires were secure in their boarding cages, while Arkan was strapped into the pilot’s throne. Omegon was thrown forward, but with his powered gauntlets fixed around the rail the primarch didn’t travel far. Yanked back a little on its tether, the torpedo proceeded to float through the darkness, scraping against the irregular wall of the shaft before bumping to rest against the cold rock. Omegon nodded, to the legionnaires and to himself.

‘Squad disembark. Vox silence until we reach the airlock.’

Firing the starboard bulkhead, Sergeant Setebos kicked off into the lightless gap. The asteroid had next to no natural gravity and the legionnaire drifted through the blackness, bolter clutched in one gauntlet. He activated his suit lamps with the other.

The halo of light around the sergeant glinted off the bottom of the shaft, showing the Alpha Legionnaires just how close they had come to a terminal impact. Floating one by one in the gloom, Squad Sigma joined him by a narrow cave entrance.

Lead on, sergeant, Omegon signed, prompting Setebos in turn to put Zantine on point. The Legion’s battle-signals were a fluid exchange of deft hand movements, delivered and received with ease born from decades of use.

Flipping their own suit lamps on, the squad leapt across the open space in a disciplined column. Snagging outcrops and pillars of rock with ceramite fingertips, the legionnaires pushed off using their legs and coasted across to each new foothold. Zantine held his bolter out in front of him, stabbing the barrel at the receding darkness of branching tunnels and hollows. It was a labyrinth of labyrinths – dark, with zagging passages leading off in every direction, including shafts thrusting both up and down into the depths. It was universally rough, rocky and thoroughly unrecognisable.

Zantine swiftly established a general heading and despite deviations demanded by serpentine crawlways, choke points and bottlenecks, he kept Squad Sigma moving with purpose through the asteroid’s fractured innards. Legionnaire Vermes brought up the rear, routinely sweeping the muzzle of his bolter across the inky blackness which followed in their wake.

Vaulting across the deep darkness of a crevasse, the Alpha Legionnaires soon found themselves confronted by a sheer wall of rock. Climbing up the precipice, their armoured legs dangling behind them, they gathered about Zantine. The Space Marine was hanging next to the narrow aperture of a tunnel entrance. Omegon watched as Sergeant Setebos wordlessly assisted the legionnaire in disconnecting his power cables and stabilisers, and stripping the pack from Zantine’s back.

Passing it through the narrow gap, Setebos helped Zantine in the deadweight of his ceramite suit through the opening. Squad Sigma repeated this procedure until each legionnaire had negotiated the entrance and silently re-established power, life support and sensory feeds to their battle plate.

A long crawl awaited the legionnaires on the other side. Punting their armoured forms along with their gauntlets, they increasingly encountered shattered rock and regolith hanging in the tapering space. The grit and stones tip-tapped against the legionnaires’ helmets and pauldrons, and Omegon found himself pushing clusters of small rocks ahead of him so that he did not get wedged against the low roof.

The tunnel emptied out into a larger cavern and Omegon had opportunity to scatter the floating rubble out of his path, though Zantine seemed to have found a collection of much larger boulders and zero-gravity erratics, great shards of rock hung in the dark, gently bumping each other with crushing force in the crowded space.

A sudden hand signal from Zantine swiftly brought the Alpha Legionnaires to halt. Like the thunder of a closing storm, a dull rumble swept through the rocky chamber. The cavern walls began to shudder and shake, while grit and regolith that had been dislodged by the quake drifted before the Space Marines and started to clot the darkness. The great stones began to clash with the walls and each other, smashing and splintering.

Auguramus had warned Omegon and the squad about the tidal quakes. The installation itself benefited from its own gravity and structural dampeners, but the rumble of powerful tidal tectonics was still an occasional hazard, especially where the Pylon Array was concerned. The conflicting gravitational forces of the Octissian gas giants pulling at the asteroid provided them with a fractured internal structure through which to infiltrate, but it also presented a serious danger to the squad as long as they remained within it.

Grasping a trembling ledge, Isidor reached inside the tunnel opening. Legionnaires were still exiting the tight confines of the crawlspace. It was clear from the clashing crags in the cavern that rock was moving against rock – without gravity the movements were unpredictable. The crawlspace was collapsing from below, and bedrock was rising against the legionnaires’ chestplates, seemingly intent on crushing them against the rough ceiling.

Kicking away and swimming through the throbbing gloom, Omegon joined Isidor in grabbing his brothers and hauling them out into the cavern. Assisted in this way, Tarquiss and Krait scrambled clear, but Vermes was struggling – already, fragments of rubble were packing the legionnaire into a crawlspace grave. The closing rock drove chisel-tipped crags and spurs at the Space Marine’s body that scored lines into the indigo of his plate.

Omegon reached back into the closing tunnel. He gestured for the legionnaire to take his gauntlet but the only response he received was a few grunts of exertion over the vox.

Setebos was suddenly beside him, and he jammed the length of his bolter between the closing sides of the shuddering outlet. The weapon immediately began to bend and buckle and the sergeant instead thrust his grasping hand towards Vermes as well.

They all heard the legionnaire growl in frustration before his gauntlet gripped the primarch’s own. Omegon heaved at the legionnaire, bracing himself against the rockface. Isidor and Setebos reached further in, looking for purchase on Vermes’s pack and plate. Between them, Omegon and the legionnaires pulled with all of their powered might, but the asteroid had Vermes firmly in its rocky jaws. They hauled at the doomed warrior for as long as they could before the collapse threatened to claim them too.

Vermes’s vox-link crackled to a deathly static, then went silent.

Squad Sigma held there for a moment, in the cold and the dark. The legionnaires stared at the press of compacted rock – a stone-cold reminder that the galaxy still had surprises in store for them, and that even with the Legion’s meticulous planning, they could not always be anticipated or avoided.

Keep moving, Setebos signed, slapping the pauldron of the legionnaire floating next to him. Drawing his bolt pistol and screwing the squat barrel of a silencer in place, the sergeant urged the squad on through the crowded chamber of butting rocks.

They scrambled up, around and over the smashing obstacles, with shards and fragments raining in all directions, several of them suffering scrapes and dents in their plate. As one boulder drifted at Omegon with the threat of pasting him into the cavern wall, the primarch braced himself hard against the rockface. With his gauntlets held out in front of him, he tried to slow the hefty progress of the object, before shoving back and sending it drifting away through the crowded cavern in a tumble of smaller debris.

As Squad Sigma climbed up through a twisted shaft in the cavern’s roof, the craggy walls shivered to stillness once more. The legionnaires held their position for a moment, with Sergeant Setebos swimming up between different members of the team and checking for injuries.

The price we pay for unannounced entry, Omegon told him. Setebos nodded in agreement, and directed Zantine to continue, prompting the legionnaire to drag himself further up the corkscrewing passage.

Within moments he had returned. Light ahead, he announced.

The Alpha Legion fell to priming their weapons, while Omegon and Setebos joined the point-legionnaire in his climb. As they twisted up the shaft, the primarch saw that Zantine was right – the tunnels opened out into a much larger chamber ahead, the rocky ceiling of which was airbrushed in a brazen light.

Go dark, Omegon ordered, and the three of them killed their suits’ illumination.

Setebos propelled himself up off a jagged ledge and floated up past Zantine and the primarch with his silenced bolt pistol leading the way. He stopped at the rim of the opening, his plate highlighted in the metallic glow. He looked down at Omegon, questioningly.

Proceed, sergeant.

Operatus Five-Hydra: Elapsed Time Ω1/-216.82//XXU
XX Legion Strike Cruiser Upsilon

The planning chamber was a sea of copper faces. The large obsidian table at its centre was round, and as such none had any claim to status – all who were seated there were equal. There were no strategems handed down from on high. No rituals or protocols. Only problems, and the keen minds that together would provide solutions. A Legion’s wisdom.

Omegon rested his elbow on the arm of his throne, and his chin upon his fist. Sitting there, amongst solidarity in skin and bone, Omegon might have been peering at himself through a prism. Around the table sat a full squad, crafted in their twin primarchs’ image, each gene-blessed with Alpharius-Omegon’s many gifts and each surgically sanctified with the tautness of a noble jaw and eyes of glacial depth – eyes that burned blue with intensity, intelligence and acceptance. In turn, the obsidian surface reflected back twice their silent number in shadow.

This unanimity of the flesh made the other members of the gathering, dwarfed by their Alpha Legion comrades, seem somewhat out of place, though the psyker Xalmagundi needed little help with that. Her pallid skin and dark lips marked her out as an underworlder, though she was at least out of the rags in which Squad Sigma had found her. Her big, black eyes were partially hidden behind tinted goggles and a lho-stick drooped absently from the corner of her mouth, its sweet smoke curling into the air. Her arm was in a foil sling and bore the signs of recent surgery.

Around her neck hung a thick metal collar, an inhibitor that checked the witchbreed’s devastating telekinetic talents. Xalmagundi had objected at first, but Sheed Ranko had insisted on the precaution while the psyker was on board the Upsilon. Rather than finding it painful, like the presence of the silent Sisters, Xalmagundi had admitted that the dampener was in fact quite soothing and imposed upon her a state of not unpleasant calm and docility. This was a feature Omegon himself had insisted upon. He had seen no reason to torture his guest unnecessarily, and Volkern Auguramus had made the adjustment himself.

The Artisan Empyr meanwhile sat busying himself with the continual exchange of needles and feedlines between the flesh-sockets in his face: Omegon assumed it was a nervous tic. Auguramus had taken every opportunity to prove his usefulness and renewed loyalty, from constructing Xalmagundi’s collar to enhancing the received Tenebrae security schemata with his own more technical details. The artisan turned his illuminated hood to one side as his internal logic engine updated itself.

‘There seems little point in introductions,’ Omegon said. ‘We all know who we are.’

Auguramus seemed vaguely amused. ‘I thought you all called yourselves “Alpharius”,’ he said, his microvox held to his throat.

‘Times change,’ Omegon replied coldly. No one made any further comment.

‘Tenebrae 9-50,’ he continued, depressing a stud on his throne to conjure a hololithic representation of the asteroid. ‘Class-C planetesimal housing the Tenebrae installation. Tenebrae is an Alpha Legion base, clearance level Vermillion, and is our target. Does anyone need a moment to consider that implication?’

Setebos and the other members of his squad took their icy gaze off the hololithic asteroid. If they were going to object to the nature their target, now was the time. Setebos gave a slight shake of his shaven head.

‘Intelligence leads us to believe that Tenebrae and the Vermillion-clearance projects developed there have been compromised,’ the primarch continued. ‘A confirmed leak.’

‘An operative?’ Isidor asked, looking to the Artisan Empyr.

‘A member of the Legion,’ Omegon replied. He observed with interest the ripple of surprise that passed through the gathering, and the immediate efforts that all made to mask it.

‘Recipient?’ Setebos asked.

‘It could be anyone,’ Omegon told them gravely. ‘The Emperor’s spies, the Warmaster’s dogs of war, xenos infiltrators. It’s unimportant now. This matter must be handled decisively. The Tenebrae installation cannot fall into the hands of an enemy. We are to destroy the base, destroy the technologies operating there and eliminate all base personnel.’

Omegon let the order sink in. This time the legionnaires didn’t flinch.

‘Why not destroy it directly, using the Beta?’ Krait ventured.

‘The Beta is deployed elsewhere,’ Omegon replied. ‘Besides, I have the morale of the Legion to consider. This would be better handled in secret.’

‘Personnel complement of the base?’ asked Setebos.

‘Tenebrae houses a garrison of fifty legionnaires,’ Omegon told them.

‘Fifty?’

‘Clearance Vermillion,’ Isidor reminded him.

‘And an Imperial Army sentry force, a one-quarter battalion of the Geno Seven-Sixty Spartocid,’ the primarch added.

‘The Seven-Sixty are a well drilled regiment,’ Legionnaire Braxus offered. ‘I had opportunity to observe them during the compliance of the Ferinus Worlds. They won’t easily spook.’

‘They’ve never had to face the Alpha Legion,’ Setebos grinned.

‘The Spartocid will keep,’ Omegon assured the squad. ‘Our first problem is gaining entry to an installation garrisoned by our own Legion.’

‘If their training and experience are a given, then it’s reasonable to expect that they will anticipate whatever we propose here, now,’ Volion muttered.

‘Why not stage an inspection?’ Charmian suggested, settling back into his seat.

‘That leaves an astropathic trail,’ Omegon reminded him. ‘Our arrival would need to be reported and verified.’

‘Plus a Vermillion-clearance inspection will need setting up, which in turn leaves its own trail,’ Isidor said.

‘I need this station to go out like a light, as if it were never there,’ the primarch said. ‘If our enemies come looking, I don’t want them to find even a grain of dust. I want them to question the validity of all the previously leaked information.’

‘What about the installation’s imports?’ Tarquiss asked. ‘Cargo crates. Ammunition drums. I got aboard the III Legion’s flagship in a bombardment shell case before Isstvan.’

‘Commander Janic is responsible for base security,’ Omegon replied. ‘I suspect he has more rigorous protocols and procedures than Fulgrim’s… distracted disciples.’

Auguramus brought the microvox to his throat again. ‘Triple checks. Different officers. It’s impossible to get anything in or out of the installation without rune certification from Janic himself. Everything and everyone is searched, documented and augur-scanned for good measure. Believe me, I’ve tried.’

‘Let’s not waste time trying to second guess Janic,’ Setebos suggested. ‘He’s Alpha Legion: he’s going to have secured the installation as well as any of us. We need something outside of his jurisdiction, and therefore outside of his control.’

‘What about the asteroid itself?’ Arkan offered. Omegon found himself nodding. Once again he turned to the Artisan Empyr.

‘Why was Tenebrae 9-50 selected for the array?’

‘Alpharius entrusted Master Echion with the actual selection,’ Auguramus said. ‘My calculations merely specified the Octiss System and the surrounding regions as counterclonically related, in terms of its dynamic immeteorology, to Chondax.’

‘Speak plainly, Volkern,’ Omegon said. ‘Tell us about the rock.’

‘That’s the genius of it really,’ Auguramus went on, unperturbed. The Artisan Empyr’s admiration came through loud and clear. ‘Tenebrae 9-50 is the site of existing clandestine operations, unknown to the rest of the Imperium.’

‘Xenos?’ Isidor enquired.

‘Indeed. The demiurg are a spacefaring race that rarely enters Imperium territory.’

‘That at least explains why I have never heard of them,’ Setebos murmured. ‘Hostile?’

‘They are technologically advanced but seem to enjoy cordial relationships with other xenos cultures, several of which were eradicated during the Great Crusade,’ the artisan told them. ‘Principally they are miners and traders.’

‘The demiurg are mining the asteroid,’ said Omegon.

‘Yes. The interior cave systems and caverns of the asteroid house a small host of automated mining machines, harvesting rare and precious metals.’

‘What about the demiurg themselves?’ Isidor asked.

‘Initial surveys showed that Tenebrae 9-50 has no established orbit,’ Auguramus replied. ‘The demiurg operate a hidden “shunt network” across our space. They use unmanned electromagnetic conveyer stations to propel resource-rich asteroids from prospecting fields to their xenos clients’ homeworlds. It takes hundreds of years, but by the time the asteroid arrives in-system, the automated mining machines have excavated and processed the arranged shipment.’

‘And no one has yet detected this?’ Volion put to him. ‘Throughout the two hundred years that we stormed across the galaxy?’

‘We may be the first,’ Auguramus confirmed. ‘Imperial forces can’t investigate every chunk of rock floating through the void between star systems.’

‘This could work for us,’ Omegon said, bringing up the hololithic network of known shafts, hollows and excavations in the asteroid. ‘The xenos explorations do run close to the installation foundations in sectors Seventeen through Twenty-two.’

Zantine pointed to the surface. ‘What about long-range auspectra and listening nodes?’

‘The base has considerable coverage,’ Auguramus said with some regret. ‘Approach by gunship or Stormbird will be detected.’

‘Captain Ranko will oversee our extraction by Thunderhawk upon completion of our mission, and bring us back to the waiting Upsilon,’ Omegon informed them. ‘Our entrance, however, will be less straightforward than our exit.’

Arkan stood, sighting down his arm through the hololith. ‘What about a torpedo shot? Powered down and launched out of auspex range, obviously.’

Omegon smiled. They were trying to impress him.

‘No propulsion, no flight control, no course corrections,’ the primarch said. ‘That would be one hell of a shot, legionnaire.’

‘Yes, my lord,’ Arkan assured him with a grin. ‘It would be.’

Omegon considered the plan, as it was taking shape. ‘Volkern, tell me: will these automated abominations provide any resistance?’

‘I cannot know the alien intentions of such technologies,’ the Artisan Empyr cautioned, ‘but my impression is that they are armed only to defend their xenos masters’ prospecting rites. If attacked, I have no doubt they would assume their shipment was in danger and respond in kind. They strike me as having a territorial logic. They present no danger to the Tenebrae installation because the base isn’t built on anything the automated machines want, or need to defend.’

‘Let us hope you’re right,’ the primarch said.

Operatus Five-Hydra: Elapsed Time Ω2/003.53//TEN
Tenebrae 9-50 – Trojan Asteroid

Omegon clawed his way across the ceiling of the cavern. The sergeant and Zantine had led the way out of the shaft. Squad Sigma followed in a column, hauling themselves up on crags and rocky ledges, their armoured legs drifting behind. Setebos had taken them all the way to the roof, and as Omegon pulled himself along, he allowed his gaze to fall upon the reason for their circuitous route.

Below them, giant machines were tearing into the rocky bowels of the asteroid in the silence of the void. Bulbous and brazen, they reminded Omegon of pregnant arachnids, stabbing into the cave floor with the stiletto points of their many legs. Set in their bellies were rotating maws of pulverising metal teeth that bored into the rock like a drill, and from their tapering abdomens dribbled a thread of molten, metallic ore which was carried away along an electromagnetically guided path. It was this web of glowing issue seeping from the monster machines that lit the cavern, though every few moments the bronze shimmer was overwhelmed by the flash of a fat beam of light; it was with these cutting beams that the automatons were taking the cavern apart.

Beams that could cut a careless Space Marine clean in half.

As Squad Sigma moved through the network of caves, it became apparent what a large scale operation the automated mineworks were. The giant mechanical mites were the backbone of the endeavour, tearing away tirelessly at the guts of the asteroid, shredding regolith and ion-bleeding source elements. But they were not the only automated machines to haunt the caves: an array of smaller, clinker-shell drones seemed to hover methodically from one mining monster to the other, monitoring production lines and administering continuous maintenance.

After a while the Alpha Legionnaires were forced to return to the cave floor, since the wall and ceiling of the chamber were dominated by the crawling lith-consuming automatons. With bolters trained upon their thick brazen armour, Squad Sigma waited as – at Setebos’s command – Krait proceeded to plant seismic demolition charges. Cave by cave, chamber by chamber, this continued, with Krait wiring the caverns in sequence and the rest of them silently ducking drones and giving the larger xenos creations a wide berth.

Following a growing number of molten streams, Setebos took the squad into what appeared to be some kind of storage chamber. Being careful not to disrupt the fields guiding the liquid metal, and with his pistol held upright, the sergeant grabbed at the rough wall and brought himself to a halt. Omegon joined him at the cavern entrance.

Before them was a floating lake. Streams of liquid ore had been guided to a containment vessel: a reservoir of molten metal, hanging in the weightlessness of the great cavern and held in check by crackling brassy orbs which drifted lazily around it. It was remarkable – no trace of the heat or energy field showed up on any sensor sweep, even at close range. Little wonder, then, that the demiurg shunt-network had remained hidden from the Imperium for so long. Omegon could well imagine chambers like this throughout the asteroid, where the extracted ore of rare and precious metals was stored ready for trade, once the asteroid reached its distant destination.

Giving orders not to interfere with the pooled metal reservoir, Omegon directed Setebos and Zantine to lead the squad around the chamber. Auguramus had informed the Alpha Legion that any interference with the mining operation would likely be interpreted by the xenos machines as a hostile action. As they crawled below the drifting lake, the primarch ordered Krait to plant a double cache of hidden charges at the heart of the cavern.

Activating their suit lamps once more the Alpha Legionnaires pushed on through the darkness beyond into a tight labyrinth of smaller tunnels, with their weapons at the ready. Zantine in particular didn’t want to run into a mechanical beast in the confines of the passage without the means to defend himself.

As Omegon and Setebos extracted themselves from the disorientating network of passages, they found Charmian scrambling up and across the wall of a natural dead end cave – a chamber seemingly untouched by the xenos mining machines. Slipping an auspex from his belt, he began to sweep the wall.

What do you have? Omegon signed. Zantine brought the auspex up to his faceplate and double-checked his measurements.

The base, Zantine responded. Through that wall.

Operatus Five-Hydra: Elapsed Time Ω1/-215.65//XXU
XX Legion Strike Cruiser Upsilon

‘I think that a cluster of meltabombs should handle it,’ Krait told Omegon and the gathered Alpha Legionnaires. ‘We want to burn an access way in, not bring the base foundations down on top of our helmets with a seismic charge.’

‘That still doesn’t solve a whole host of other problems,’ Setebos interjected. He turned to Omegon. ‘My lord, as soon as we breach the base perimeter then their atmospheric pressure will drop and vent into the vacuum. Life support will seal the affected section and lock off the bulkheads, leaving us stuck outside.’

‘The sergeant’s right,’ Isidor agreed. ‘Even if there weren’t alarms – which there will be – everyone on the base will know the perimeter has been penetrated. The atmospheres of their own sections will go rushing by them.’

Omegon rested his elbows on the arms of his throne. Bringing his palms together he made a pyramid from his fingers.

‘Artisan Empyr,’ the primarch said after a moment. ‘How deep do the foundations of the Pylon Array – and therefore, those of the base as well – sink into the rock?’

Auguramus nestled his microvox and narrowed his eyes.

‘As deep as you need them to go,’ the Artisan Empyr replied, with a hint of mirth. ‘They could probably benefit from being deeper, if you take my meaning. Especially with the greater frequency of quakes, caused by the proximity of the gas giants. As soon as I return, I shall set engineering crews to blasting out chambers for new seismic dampeners. Janic will not oppose me.’

‘Those crews’ll need an airlock, of course,’ Isidor joined in, chuckling. ‘To facilitate the movement of workers between the base and the excavation, as it were.’

‘Of course,’ Auguramus nodded.

Omegon allowed himself a smile. Focusing past the hololithic representation of the asteroid and onto the base itself, he zeroed in on the foundations of a tall, square structure around which the many floors of the installation were constructed.

Like a stake thrust through the heart of the base, the Pylon Array dominated the schemata.

‘What’s this here?’ the primarch asked, indicating a section just above the foundations.

‘The generatorum,’ Auguramus replied. ‘Power for basic operations: light, heat, life support and artificial gravity.’

‘What about the Pylon Array?’ asked Vermes.

‘It uses an alternative source of energy,’ the Artisan Empyr told the legionnaire. ‘The generatorum will mostly be my people: enginseers, servitors and the like. Do with them as you will. There are, of course, Imperial Army sentry posts and pict-surveillance.’

‘The sentries and enginseers, leave to us,’ Omegon said, ‘but we’ll need you to knock out surveillance and the gun positions though. Not a problem for one of the Mechanicum, I presume.’

‘Of course not, my lord,’ Auguramus said. ‘But won’t shutting down the pict feeds alert the sentries in the security nexus?’

‘They won’t be in the security nexus,’ Omegon told him. Auguramus looked relieved.

‘And why not?’

‘Because, artisan,’ the primarch replied, ‘you will be in the security nexus, monitoring our progress through the base and advising us of incoming threats.’

‘But the sentries…’

‘Time to get your hands dirty,’ Setebos said, slapping him on the back.

‘Don’t worry, I’m not expecting you to personally tangle with a pair of officers from the Geno Seven-Sixty Spartocid,’ Omegon said.

‘Poison,’ Braxus suggested. ‘Or electrocution.’

‘Be creative,’ Omegon finished.

Auguramus nodded slowly, wobbling his chins.

‘Sir,’ Isidor said, turning to Omegon. ‘The Geno troops aside, sooner or later we are going to have to exchange fire with our Alpha Legion brothers. They outnumber us five to one.’

‘Just because we are facing our own kind,’ Omegon replied, ‘doesn’t mean that we should abandon the principles of the Hydra – they have served our Legion well, and will continue to do so in future.’

‘So, we need to hit Janic and his garrison from all sides,’ Setebos agreed.

‘They won’t fall apart like the Night Lords did at Ceti-Quorum,’ Charmian warned.

‘Or the Angels at the Thunderhead,’ Braxus added.

‘Which in itself is predictable,’ Omegon said. ‘When we deal with our own we deal in the known unknowns. We need distractions for our brother legionnaires. Equalisers to level the field.’

‘Your plan, my lord?’ Setebos asked.

The primarch leaned in on the hololithic display. He considered their options.

‘The Artisan Empyr’s own skitarii forces could be brought into play,’ Omegon said, nodding at Auguramus. He then pointed out a secured block on the schemata. ‘The psi-penitorium offers possibilities too. Also, our route of entry could be wired with detonators, so as to rattle our xenos neighbours into action at an appropriate time.’

Krait nodded in appreciation.

‘What about Master Echion?’ Auguramus put to the primarch. ‘He’s formerly of your Librarius–’

‘What do you know of such matters?’ Omegon shot back.

The Artisan Empyr put up a hand defensively. ‘My lord, he has an intimate understanding of the immaterium. An obvious choice for this installation’s purpose. Is he the leak?’

‘It’s possible,’ Omegon nodded.

‘Is he… powerful?’

‘Why? Do you yearn to bleed him on your unholy edifice?’

‘My point is that he’s going to be more than a match for your young lady here,’ Auguramus replied, nodding towards Xalmagundi. She was almost asleep at the table, the collar lulling her into a blissful slumber.

‘Don’t underestimate our guest,’ the primarch told him. ‘She has a crucial role to play. A conflict avoided is a conflict won without loss.’

Through the slits of her eyes, Xalmagundi looked at Omegon and then back into the deep, reflective darkness of the table.

Operatus Five-Hydra: Elapsed Time Ω2/004.21//TEN
Tenebrae Installation

The optics on Omegon’s helmet compensated for the searing flash of the melta bombs. The rock around the flash glowed before starting to bubble and spit, and dribbled away in slurps of magma before cooling into spirals of blackened rock. As it sloughed away, shafts of light began to stream through from the cavern beyond, illuminated by construction lamps. Led by Sergeant Setebos, one by one the squad crawled through the rapidly cooling opening.

They were now within the peripheral influence of the installation’s artificial gravity – their plate no longer drifted across open spaces, and the weight of the ceramite brought them down to the floor and kept their feet firmly rooted there. Omegon enjoyed the reassuring crunch of grit under his armoured boots.

Their movements became swift and certain. No longer hampered by the asteroid’s internal disorientation, Squad Sigma fell into a long-practiced and familiar two-by-two stealth pattern. One of the advantages of being a beast with ten heads was having twenty eyes, constantly alert for potential ambushes and the chance of discovery. Moving up through the silent drilling equipment and unspent demolitions, the Space Marines moved between dangling cables and toppled construction lamps. Using every crag and outcrop for cover and tracking their partners as they went, the column of legionnaires swept up the freshly-bored tunnel.

Omegon fell into place opposite the lumbering Braxus – the primarch required no special treatment. He was not a dignitary to be escorted, or an officer leading the way.

He was one of many, who in turn were legion.

As Setebos reached a recently installed airlock at the end of the tunnel, the squad scattered into the nooks and crevices along the roughly excavated walls. The sergeant held up three fingers to Volion, prompting the legionnaire to back up beside the bulkhead.

Two fingers. One.

The sergeant cranked the lock and opened the thick door. Volion’s bolter immediately pushed its way into the widening gap, with the legionnaire’s shoulder close behind it. With his optic sighting down the length of the weapon, Volion went in, scanning the pressurisation chamber for threats.

Clear.

Squad Sigma fell in swiftly behind him. Tarquiss pulled the heavy door closed, and Isidor fell to working the lock controls, repressurising the chamber with a breathable atmosphere.

The inner portal opened, and Volion’s bolter thrust out once more. His weapon sight darted from a low bench, to another bench, to an empty void-suit, to a battered tool locker.

Setebos’s voice seemed deafeningly loud over the vox, after what had seemed like hours of enforced silence. ‘Let’s move.’

Dropping down onto the mesh flooring, the legionnaire led the way with Setebos close behind. Filing down the narrow locker berth in pairs, their weapons tracking the pair in front in synchronised sweeps, Squad Sigma stalked through the storage area.

At a corner, Volion fell to a crouch and held up his closed fist.

The squad froze. They could hear voices.

Resting the curve of his pauldron against the wall, Volion rounded the corner – his bolter found two transmechanics changing out of their robes and into void-suits. As the first saw Volion’s weapon on him, he dropped his bulbous helmet in surprise. Sergeant Setebos and Charmian moved up past Volion and strode towards them.

‘My lords?’ the second transmechanic asked, assuming the Alpha Legionnaires to belong to the base but clearly unnerved by their presented weaponry.

Holding his bolter under the breech, Charmian enveloped the Mechanicum underling’s entire face in his gauntlet. The little man’s hands clawed at the ceramite as Charmian crushed his skull, and his companion’s protest died on his lips.

With a sudden glint, Setebos’s gauntlet came up. The sergeant’s combat blade slashed across the other transmechanic’s throat, and he crashed to the floor.

Volion padded forward between the bodies, leading the way once again with his bolter, and with Setebos and Charmian falling back into position behind him.

Changing vox frequencies and checking his belt chronometer, Omegon hissed.

‘Auguramus, you miserable sack of bolts – where are you?’

A few moments later, the artisan’s voice chirped across the connection.

‘A thousand apologies, my lord. I had a few problems with the Geno officers in the security nexus. There’s blood… There’s a lot of blood… on the… uhh…’

‘Volkern, I need you to focus,’ Omegon said, calmly. ‘We’re about to enter the generatorum. Monitor the vox-channels and pict feeds for security patrols.’

‘Yes, my lord.’

Squad Sigma left the rough chambers of the base foundations and moved up through a set of maintenance stairwells. Before them stood a pressure-sealed bulkhead.

‘Auguramus,’ Omegon called. ‘We’re at M72c.’

The locking mechanism clunked, and with a gust of air the bulkhead chugged aside.

The generatorum was swathed in dirty steam. Thick cabling covered the decking like a carpet of serpents, and draped from ports in the ceiling. Thermo-crystal magnareactors boomed their supercharged energy output and occasional arcs of lightning seared between them, roasting the air. The silhouettes of grimy servitors stood obediently at their posts, while enginseers prowled the machinery, monitoring and administering sacred oils.

One such hooded priest was shocked from his catechism by the sudden appearance of the legionnaires. Volion pressed on impassively with his bolter up. Before the enginseer could quiz the legionnaires about their presence in the generatorum, Setebos stepped out from behind a heat exchanger, placed the muzzle of his silenced bolt pistol to the priest’s plated temple, and pushed his hood against the burning metal of the reactor vent as the squad moved silently past. The priest went to gabble his apologies but Setebos put a muffled bolt-round through his skull. Prodding the fallen body with the toe of his boot, the sergeant rejoined the rear of the column.

Moving like phantoms through the swirling clouds of oily steam and coolant, Squad Sigma ended all who had observed their entrance. Under the stagnant gaze of their servitors, seven more enginseers and the three lex-mechanics manning the generatorum runebanks died with economic efficiency. Building a murderous momentum through the rows of reactor vents, it didn’t take the Alpha Legionnaires long to work up to the sentry post at the engineering section blast door.

Five soldiers of the Geno Seven-Sixty Spartocid stood at their post, beneath the surveillance pict-mounted barrel of a multi-laser sentry gun that hung silently on its ceiling rail.

The Spartocid were muscular but humourless warriors. Their helmets covered their faces – bar two grim slits for their eyes – and each sported a miserable crest, the length of which being some indicator of rank. Threadbare cloaks hung from the carapace of their shoulders, their armour being a collection of mismatched plates patched with inferior metals. They carried stubby broad-burn lascarbines with fat barrels and chunky powerpacks.

The Seven-Sixty had an illustrious history but the Great Crusade had eventually run the Geno regiment into the ground. A long forgotten and inglorious war with the abhumans on Dycenae plunged the proud warriors into obscurity. Cut off, poorly supplied and never reinforced – the Alpha Legion had found them surprisingly easy converts, promising greater glories in the war to come.

‘Auguramus,’ Omegon hissed down the vox-link.

‘I’m tracking your progress through the generatorum, lord,’ the artisan replied.

‘Jam vox-communications on the engineering level,’ Omegon told him. ‘Then take control of the generatorum sentry gun and run it down to the reactors.’

At the sudden awakening of the sentry gun, the Spartocid warriors stared up at the ceiling. They heard the whir of the multi-laser’s movement, but more importantly the charging whine of the weapon’s bulky power pack. As the weapon left them and trundled along its rail towards the steam-swathed heat exchangers, the soldiers broke into two groups – three of the warriors marched under the itinerant gun, their own carbines snug at their shoulders, while two remained on the door.

Within the oily clouds of steam, amongst the crackling reactors, Squad Sigma waited. As one of the Spartocid passed a copse of dangling cables, his helmet came in line with the silenced muzzle of Sergeant Setebos’s pistol. A muffled bark sent him sprawling into his blood-splattered comrades, and they turned and brought their carbines to bear on the nest of pipes and powerlines. Arkan and Braxus stepped from the shadows and grabbed the distracted soldiers from behind, slipping plated arms around their necks and twisting their heads clean off.

As the sentry gun returned to the blast door, without the accompanying soldiers, the remaining Spartocid watched it with nervous anticipation. The post officer went for the wall-mounted vox-bank, in the hope of making contact with his missing sentries, and neither he nor his comrade noticed the wall of shadow appear and intensify in the steam bank.

The shadow became a silhouette, and the silhouette resolved into a transhuman nightmare.

Taking long, unstoppable strides, Omegon approached the blast door. He was halfway towards the Spartocid by the time they understood what was happening.

‘Identify yourself,’ the officer called out in his thick accent.

Omegon did not answer.

‘Legionnaire!’ the Geno officer insisted. ‘Observe security protocols.’

As the broad muzzle of the soldier’s carbine met the primarch’s chestplate, Omegon snatched the barrel away in a flash and grabbed the Geno officer’s throat with his other hand. As the Spartocid officer swatted uselessly at the ceramite of the primarch’s forearm, Omegon slowly crushed the bones in his neck.

The soldier went for a ceremonial blade, but Omegon backhanded it from his grasp and launched him upwards, smashing his helmet into the bulky frame of the sentry gun. Something snagged, and the dead man hung suspended from it like a marionette.

Stepping over the officer, Omegon activated the blast door. As the thick bulkhead slid aside, Squad Sigma emerged from the shadows of the generatorum. With the sentry gun and its grim puppet humming along the rail ahead of them, the legionnaires moved on.

‘Across the antechamber,’ Auguramus advised them over the vox-link, ‘you’ll find the auxiliary stairwell leading to the upper levels of the installation.’

‘Auxiliary?’ Omegon questioned.

‘Most of the tech-adepts and sentries use the lifters,’ the artisan explained. ‘The stairwell less so. It winds around the base of the Pylon Array. Some of the Imperial Army garrison are uncomfortable around the artefact.’

Passing the doors of the bulk lifter, Volion led the squad across an antechamber towards the stairwell access. Without warning, the doors of the lifter began to part, and Zantine and Tarquiss parted and slammed their backs into the wall either side of the bulk elevator. The rest of the squad moved towards the wall and out of sight.

Within, the legionnaires could hear a pair of enginseers moving heavy equipment. The mesh gate rose, and Zantine and Tarquiss were suddenly there in front of them, the butts of their bolters aimed at the priests’ hooded faces. With an awful crack of bone and spray of blood, Zantine’s went down immediately. The second was thicker set and had a metallic mask of a face, and so the impact from Tarquiss’s bolter stunned but failed to drop him. Stumbling back against a load-lift servitor, he barely had time to recover before a Space Marine combat blade was plunged into his chest.

Grabbing the legs of the bodies, the legionnaires dragged them across the gateway, preventing the lifter from closing and bringing anyone else down from the upper levels.

‘Auguramus,’ Omegon called out. ‘Lock off all accessways to the stairwell.’

‘Affirmative, my lord. The psi-penitorium is two floors up from you,’ the Artisan Empyr told him. ‘I have already authorised the prisoner transfer under my coding, as you requested. My skitarii will be expecting you, although there are twenty more stationed on the same level for emergencies.’

‘Like the one we are about to create?’

‘Yes, my lord.’

‘Send a personal vox-message to Master Echion, informing him you have a situation in the penitoria and require his immediate assistance,’ Omegon said.

‘But–’

‘Do it now, then lock off the vox-channels on the whole level.’

The legionnaires bounded up the stairwell, tightly hugging the wall as they rounded each successive corner with their bolters always trained up the next flight of stairs.

Beyond them lay the breadth of the Pylon Array.

Through the mesh of the inside wall, the Alpha Legionnaires could see the glossy black stone of the constructed xenos artefact, and feel the low hum of aethereal energies. The stone Pylon thrust up through the base’s superstructure, with entire installation floors and sections built around it.

Sidling along the mesh-covered stone, Volion signalled. Footsteps.

‘Auguramus?’ Omegon growled.

‘Only a tech-priest, lord,’ he replied. ‘Ahh, it’s my assistant and her bodyguard.’

Squad Sigma held their positions, each legionnaire silent and ready. Volion slid along the wall on his pauldron and held there on a small landing. An aged female Mechanicum priest appeared around the corner – around her head, keeping sparse lengths of straggled grey hair in check, was a metal band. A third cybernetic eye was set in the band, and the tech-priest was using it to read a data-slate, while carrying several others in her free arm.

Grabbing the priest in his vice-like grip, Volion pulled the woman past him and hurled her off the landing and down the flight of stairs. Her servitor bodyguard reacted immediately, bringing a chainblade arm attachment to roaring life and swinging it at Volion, but the legionnaire batted the drone back. He followed up with a sudden charge, crushing the servitor into the wall with his armoured shoulder.

The chainblade bleated to a stuttering stop and the legionnaire pulled back, allowing the guard’s broken body to slump to the floor.

Omegon watched Arkan check the crumpled body of the priest. It had been a long fall. She was dead; her neck was broken.

‘Auguramus. Open accessway DT367b.’

In answer, the clunk of a locking mechanism cleared and Setebos looked through the gap between the auxiliary opening and the wall. Joining him on the penitorium level landing, Omegon peered through the crack as well.

The accessway opened out onto a broad deck serviced by the locked lifter, and several passages and stairwells ran off the deck, leading to other sections of the installation. Opposite was the formidable black gate of the psi-penitorium. Two skitarii sentinels stood either side of the bulkhead in their rust-coloured robes, each bearing a bionic weapon replacement instead of a right arm. Their faces were ghoulish rebreather masks with clicking telescopic opti-sockets.

The gate opened and Omegon could hear the screams of madness and the moans of distress echoing down the wide passageway beyond. Two further skitarii gaolers pushed a tall cage on rails down the passage and out through the gate. The black metal of the cage sizzled with energy; within was an emaciated woman, naked and pale. She was curled up foetus-like in the cage bottom, rocking and groaning in pain. One of the skitarii slashed the side of the cage with the length of his electro-flail, drawing a yelp of agony from the psyker prisoner.

‘Sergeant,’ Omegon said. ‘Take your men up the lifter shaft. Master Echion is about to call for support from the Legion dormitories. Ensure it never reaches him.’

Setebos nodded his understanding and had Braxus remove the port cover of a devotional maintenance duct. One by one the Alpha Legionnaires disappeared into the wall.

‘Volion. Charmian. You’re with me,’ Omegon said.

He took Charmian’s bolter and fell into step with Volion behind him, as they left the stairwell and made their way across the broad deck. As they approached the psi-penitorium gate, the two impassive skitarii guards stepped forward to bar their way.

Charmian played his part well. Not slowing, and with Omegon and Volion flanking him like an officer escort, the legionnaire walked straight at them.

‘Prisoner inspection,’ Charmian told them. ‘You already have your clearance from the Artisan Empyr. Don’t waste my time.’

After a moment’s hesitation, the Mechanicum warriors parted and the gate rumbled open. Charmian didn’t break his stride. With Omegon and Volion, the legionnaire marched down the wide, dismal passage beyond, being careful not to stumble on the floor rails. After passing through two more gates and between two more pairs of sentinels, the Alpha Legionnaires entered the main penitorium.

At the centre of a runebank hub the trio encountered a crew of lex-mechanics, skitarii guards and a heavily augmented skitarii tribune, who sat wired directly into an observation throne with a spread of optics and motion-tracking matrices sprouting from his grisly head. Around the hub chamber, a series of railed passages led off into darkness. Each echoed with the collective moans of imprisoned psyker slaves.

‘Where is my prisoner?’ Charmian demanded as he entered. The tribune gave the approaching legionnaires a gaze of blank confusion. ‘Not prepped. Not caged?’ Charmian growled. ‘I was assured full cooperation by the Artisan Empyr.’

A skitarii sentinel with a flamer for an arm stepped out from one of the adjoining passages. Staring at Charmian with his whirring mask optics, he silently indicated that the Space Marines should follow him.

With the pilot flame from the skitarii warrior’s weapon lighting the way like a flickering candle, Omegon marched past the dreadful cries of tormented witch-kin in the psi-shielded cells. The black shielding of the cells sapped the witchbreeds of their potency, and afflicted them with a soul-draining agony.

At the bottom of the passage, the skitarii came to a halt. Two of his fellow sentinels were standing outside an open cell. They had positioned one of their rail cages at the entrance, and were manipulating a set of controls mounted on the wall. They increased the energy flow running through the psi-shielding and the prisoner threw herself from the cell and into the cage with a pained screech.

Like an animal, Omegon thought.

Out of the unbearable field, the psyker was clearly relieved. She collapsed in a heap, breathing heavily. Omegon could see her ribs and the bumps of her spine through her pallid skin. The crackling cage, although made of the same draining material and visiting a similar form of debilitation on the prisoner, couldn’t deliver the same intensity as the cell. This gave each prisoner a moment or two of respite and a motive to transfer voluntarily from one to the other – it was a smooth operation and, although sickened by what he saw, Omegon was impressed by the system’s economy.

Sealing the cage, the skitarii began pushing it along the rail towards the hub. The Alpha Legionnaires remained close to the sentinels and their cybernetic guide, until they crossed the third intersection.

Stepping up behind the guide, Volion silently slipped the tip of his combat blade under the skitarii’s forearm fuel line. With the weapon’s promethium supply cut off, the legionnaire seized the sentinel in an arm lock and plunged the full length of his blade through the rust-red hood and down into the warrior’s brain. However, Charmian wasn’t as delicate or precise as his brother legionnaire. Grabbing one of the two gaolers from behind, he hefted the flailing deadweight of flesh and machinery into the air and slammed it down on the passage floor, expecting the cybernetic warrior’s neck to snap across the rail.

But it did not. Surprised but fully functional, the sentinel brought its stubby volkite arm attachment up to meet the hulking Space Marine standing over it. Charmian’s helmet – opened up by the shot – dashed the ceiling with broken ceramite and fragments of skull.

Volion cursed and brought his boot down savagely on the sentinel’s mask, and this time its reinforced alloy neck gave a satisfying snap over the rail and the weapon slumped back to the floor.

Omegon wasted no time in dispatching the third warrior. Thrusting his gauntlet forward, the primarch plunged his armoured fingertips through the sentinel’s flesh and augmented organs, and allowed the dying wretch to sink to the floor.

With her gaolers dead about the cage, the prisoner hauled her weakened body up the crackling bars. She rested her forehead against the dark metal and gave Omegon her big, underworlder eyes.

‘Xalmagundi. You look unwell.’

‘Get me out… of this bloody cage…’ she hissed.

Smashing the lock mechanism with his bloodied ceramite fist, Omegon freed the psyker and helped her from the draining influence of its confinement.

Down the passage, they heard the grumble of the hub security gate opening. Peering up through the gloom, the primarch could make out the unmistakable forms of Alpha Legionnaires standing before the skitarii tribune and his runebanks.

It was Ursinus Echion, and a two-man escort.

The Librarian seemed to be berating the tribune, Omegon guessed, for being summoned to the penitorium unnecessarily. Then, in mid-sentence, he stopped. Turning slowly, he peered down the dark passage. The Librarian had clearly sensed something: in all likelihood, Xalmagundi’s presence – raw, potent and unchecked. He took several cautious steps towards the passage opening. His copper face creased with fury.

Omegon and the psyker melted into the shadows, followed swiftly by Volion.

‘Summon the rest of your skitarii,’ Echion called back at the tribune. ‘You have an escaped prisoner. Sound the alarm!’ As deep klaxons rang through the hub, Echion turned to his Alpha Legion escorts.

‘Call a squad down here. Now.’

Delta

Operatus Five-Hydra: Elapsed Time Ω2/004.66//TPA
Tenebrae Installation

Unslipping his bolt pistol from its belt holster, Echion strode up the passage. The tribune had hit the general alarm and the hub became a wash of bloodshot light and ear-splitting noise. The psyker slaves screamed and shrieked in their cells, banging on the thick, black metal of the doors and howling like agitated animals.

As he and his escort reached the bodies of Legionnaire Charmian and the skitarii surrounding the breached cage, Echion scanned the gloom with his pistol. The cell door at the bottom of the passage was wide open…

Moments passed. The Librarian seemed unsure.

‘Where’s that squad–’

Before he could finish, the Space Marine nearest to him dropped his bolter and began clawing at his own battle helm. Echion grabbed his arm to steady him, but the ceramite began to crumple under his gauntlets. Some terrible force was crushing the legionnaire inside his armour like a great invisible vice, his pauldrons and chestplate buckling with a metallic groan.

Echion turned to find his other escort pinned against the wall, gurgling and choking.

Both of the stricken warriors screamed, and then fell slackly to the floor in a crushed, bloody heap. Echion whirled around, his pistol ready.

‘Show yourself!’

Echion was suddenly struck by an incredible force, with such ferocity that his armour caved in across the plastron. He crashed through the cage and became entangled in the crackling bars, which proceeded to creak and contort around him. Another invisible blow sent him spinning boots-over-shoulders through the darkness.

He cracked off a succession of blind shots from the floor, but the dreadful unseen force smashed into him again and again, hurling both him and the misshapen cage down the passage and cracking them against the ceiling.

A final burst of automatic bolt-fire ran the pistol dry, but before the Librarian could reload the weapon he was torn from the wreckage of the cage by an impact that split his already crumpled chestplate. The invisible blow sent him through the air and into the deep darkness offered by the open cell door.

‘I’m here, Alpha.’ A slender silhouette presented itself in front of the opening, before willing the cell door to slam shut with a metallic boom.

Ursinus Echion pushed himself painfully to his feet.

‘Janic, respond,’ the Librarian coughed into his vox-link before spitting blood at the filthy cell floor. ‘Code Crimson. Repeat, Code Crimson.’ He changed channels. ‘Strategarch Mandroclidas, respond.’

No answer came. He switched again. ‘Artisan Empyr? Does anyone read me?’

He glanced about in the absolute darkness of the cell, sweat beginning to bead his brow. He shuffled over to the door. Closing his gauntleted fist, he began to pound on the dark metal. The psi-shielding was crippling the Librarian. There was no response to his vox-calls. He was alone in the dark.

Or at least, he thought he was.

Omegon had seen enough. Given time, he was sure that the psyker would find a way out of even this prison…

‘It seems my concerns were warranted, Master Echion.’

The primarch watched the Librarian’s face change rapidly from the shock of realising that he was not alone in the cell, to alarm as he recognised the voice addressing him. Through his helmet’s augmented vision Omegon observed the psyker’s shift in demeanour.

Echion put his back against the withering wall of the cell. Without the advantage of his own helmet optics he could not make out the primarch in the nullifying darkness.

‘My lord,’ Echion said, trying to remain calm and keep the anger and frustration out of his voice. ‘I do not understand. A dangerous psyker is loose. The Pylon Array is under threat, exactly as you predicted.’

‘Not our finest hour, is it Echion?’ Omegon told him honestly. ‘The only consolation you might take from this is that you were infiltrated by your own.’

‘Infiltrated…’ the Librarian repeated, ‘by the Alpha Legion?’

‘Yes, Echion. By the Legion.’

‘Is the base compromised, then?’ Echion asked, his eyes darting in the blackness.

‘In every way imaginable.’

Echion’s shoulders sagged. The Librarian was beginning to understand.

‘I’m deeply sorry if I failed you in this, my lord,’ Echion said. ‘Our enemies–’

‘Our enemies are no longer your concern,’ Omegon interrupted him. ‘No one will ever find a single shred of evidence that this installation ever existed.’

‘You’re going to destroy the base?’

‘The base, the xenos technology, and all who could speak of its existence. Many will suffer the ultimate price for this failure.’

The Librarian nodded. ‘I understand. Might I ask–’

The darkness lit up with the bark of bolter fire.

The bolts tore into Ursinus Echion, spraying blood and ceramite fragments across the walls. Only when the Librarian’s body hit the floor did the fusillade cease, leaving Omegon and Volion in the darkness of the cell, the crash of automatic fire still ringing in the enclosed space.

‘Xalmagundi,’ Omegon called. ‘Get us out of this bloody cell.’

The cell door gave a tormented creak before being ripped from its hinges and spinning off down the passageway towards the chaos of the penitoria hub, where Omegon could make out ranks of alarm-rallied skitarii attempting to secure the block. He stepped out of the cell, flanked by Volion.

Emerging from a side passage, the naked Xalmagundi – all pallid skin and bone – joined them. As an underworlder she seemed quite at home in the darkness. She gestured up the corridor towards the waiting tech guard.

‘You wish me to destroy them?’

‘Of course,’ Omegon said, rolling a dead sentinel out of its tattered robe. ‘But first, put some clothes on.’

Operatus Five-Hydra: Elapsed Time Ω1/-214.77//XXU
XX Legion Strike Cruiser Upsilon

‘And then we fire the detonators,’ Krait said with confidence across the midnight sheen of the table.

‘No,’ the primarch corrected him. He tapped a series of studs on the arm of his throne, and the obsidian surface blinked to become a document of glyphs and symbols flashing by. Letter by letter, numeral by numeral, the document was being decrypted.

‘Don’t underestimate Janic. Echion’s specialisation gives him primary responsibility for the array, but he’ll leave security to Arvas Janic.’

The gathered legionnaires examined the commander’s service chronicles as they spooled past.

‘Know the mission, know the man,’ Omegon instructed. ‘And he’s led a host of them himself. As you can see, this was always the history of a legionnaire destined for captaincy: several awards from previous commanding officers, including Thias Herzog and Ving Neriton; commendations for both innovation and constancy under fire. Veteran’s crux. The Ouroboron. Victories at Ignatorium and Five-Twenty Nine. Had some bad luck with the K’nib at Selator Secundus, but didn’t we all, and lost three legionnaires during the eradication of the Thorium Abominiplex – which is unsurprising given how many troops were lost by Lord Mortarion. Still, these are the service annals of a ruthlessly efficient and inventive commander. A record of which the Legion is justifiably proud. It’s almost a shame we are going to have to ruin it.’

‘Only three of these were garrison duties, though,’ Isidor indicated, running his finger across the glassy surface. ‘A submerged “halting site” – whatever that is – on the ocean world of Bythos…’

‘Tactical outpost “Epsilon/Loco”, masquerading as a giga-container, routinely exchanged between bulk lifters over Isstvan IV,’ Setebos interjected.

‘And a Class-3 listening post in the ruined Gardens of Ptolemy on Prandium,’ Isidor continued.

‘None of which were compromised,’ Omegon reminded them. ‘His security logs for Tenebrae confirm a mix of sentry points and alternating patrols that he has implemented for the Geno troops at his disposal. He will not trust these alone, however, and will have a contingency strategy established between his own legionnaires for a perimeter breach – he will not rely upon allies or operatives, if things get out of hand. With his own squads he favours staged fallbacks, tactical demolitions, promethium cleansing, gauntlet approaches, mined cut-routes, wired bulkheads and blackouts.’

‘As soon as Janic knows the base is under attack,’ Setebos extrapolated, ‘his legionnaires will likely be drilled to lock it down and restrict the penetrating force to non-essential sections.’

‘Aye,’ the primarch admitted. ‘He’ll trap us, and send for Legion support. There’ll be an arranged protocol.’

‘Probably our intercept annex on the Belis-Aquarii Telepathica relay,’ Isidor suggested.

‘The Phi, possibly even the Gamma,’ Arkan added. ‘Neither vessel is stationed far off.’

‘Either way, we’ve got to hit both the astropathic choir in the chantry and everything in the surface hangar,’ Omegon told them, ‘before Janic enforces his lock down. There is some good news, however. The logs show a heavy reliance on strategic simulation and statistical estimations run through the base cogitators. Both of which we have.’

‘What do the numbers say?’ Isidor asked.

‘That an attack on the Tenebrae installation would be largely futile. It does not factor in, however, detailed previous knowledge of the base, familiarity with Alpha Legion tactics or possession of the simulation data itself.’

‘Meaning, unsurprisingly, Janic has never considered infiltration by his own Legion,’ Setebos said, raising his brow. ‘You have re-run the cogitations, my lord?’

‘Yes,’ Omegon told them. ‘Tenebrae is no different from any other target. Standard Legion tactics apply. Probabilities of success increase in line with multiple approaches and avenues of attack. We have to hit Janic’s garrison from every angle – keep our brethren busy while we complete the operation.’

‘Sir, if I may,’ Isidor said. ‘It is likely that there are operational elements that Commander Janic has withheld from the logs. Definitely from operational personnel, like the Artisan Empyr, and possibly even from his own legionnaires. He’s Alpha legion, my lord. He will have some surprises waiting for us. Something we haven’t anticipated.’

‘Indeed,’ the primarch agreed, nodding his head thoughtfully.

Operatus Five-Hydra: Elapsed Time Ω2/004.89//TPA
Tenebrae Installation

‘Sergeant Setebos reports heavy resistance on the dormitory level,’ Volion reported from his vox-link. ‘Tarquiss is down.’

Omegon was about to reply but the order stuck in his this throat.

There was something wrong. Something out of place.

Striding up the penitorium passageway towards the hub with Xalmagundi and Volion, the primarch’s focus was on the skitarii forces sealing off their exit. But as they passed a side passage it became apparent that they were not alone in the corridor – he caught the briefest impression of movement and the dull glint of ceramite.

Time seemed to slow. The flash of muzzles lit up the dungeon gloom. The crash of boltfire was everywhere, like thunder rolling up the passageway.

‘Suppressing fire!’ Omegon ordered as he grabbed Xalmagundi and tore her out of the crossfire. Volion responded with a withering hail from his bolter, directed down the side passage – Alpha Legionnaires were moving up towards them, using the recessed cell doorways for cover.

Emerging low, the primarch gunned down the nearest three legionnaires before disappearing back around the corner. Almost immediately, Volion’s suppression fire resumed, giving Omegon precious moments to think. He adjusted the channel on his vox-link.

‘Sergeant,’ he called. ‘Report!’

Across the vox he could hear the incessant bark of exchanged bolt-fire.

‘We’ve been outmanoeuvred on the dormitory level, sir,’ Setebos admitted. ‘Taking casualties. Exits blocked.’ The sergeant was drowned out by his own pistol for a moment. ‘The dormitories don’t exist on this level. The schemata misled us. We walked straight into a firefight.’

Omegon felt his lips curl into an involuntary snarl.

Also missing from the base schemata had been the secret entrance to the psi-penitorium through a dummy cell at the bottom of the side passage. Presumably to facilitate the retaking of the level in the event of a containment breach, garrison legionnaires had used the hidden portal to answer Ursinus Echion’s initial calls for reinforcement in the penitoria hub. Now the ambush Omegon had planned for the requested legionnaires had been thwarted by a counter-ambush – mixed in with feelings of anger and frustration, the primarch couldn’t help but feel a sting of pride at Janic’s tactical prowess.

Explosive bolts tore up the walls and floor around Omegon and Xalmagundi. The skitarii forces flooding the hub had started working their way down the main passage, leading the way with optimistic blasts from their weapon-limbs. Once again, the primarch had to pull the delicate psyker out of harm’s way, shielding her with his ceramite bulk.

‘Reload!’ Volion called. Instead of offering covering fire with his bolt pistol, Omegon unclipped a pair of grenades from his belt and tossed them down the side passage.

The twin blasts rocked the corridor, killing two more garrison legionnaires outright and knocking several more from cover and into Volion’s deadly sights.

This could not continue. With Space Marines closing on the junction from one direction and skitarii sentinels from the other, the only fallback position was Xalmagundi’s open cell, but Omegon had no intention of returning to the soul-sapping darkness. He was battling his own Legion: surprises were to be expected. It was time, however, to wrestle back the advantage.

‘Xalmagundi!’ he shouted, loosing a flurry of bolts. ‘Time to rattle some cages!’

The psyker understood.

Lowering her head and closing her big, black eyes, Xalmagundi concentrated on her immediate environment. A new sound joined the din of gunfire: the shriek of metal contorting; locks shredding and hinges warping.

A thick cell door close to the junction blasted out of its reinforced frame and struck the opposite wall with crushing, unstoppable force, followed by another, and another. It was as though pressure was building in each successive cell down the passage, reaching an explosive crescendo which burst the psi-plate shielding from the walls. As the booming force worked its way through the penitorium, ripping doors from containment cells on both sides of the corridor, the advancing troops halted. The doorways that had provided them with much-needed cover were now like horrible pressurised deathtraps.

Garrison legionnaires were crushed against the walls, or knocked from their feet by the impacts. Those fortunate enough to be between doorways were now caught out in the open, and more fell to Volion and Omegon’s renewed fire.

As the final cell door smashed into the wall, they worked their way up through the carnage, stepping over the armoured bodies of crushed legionnaires. Where their brethren had survived the explosive telekinetic assault, Volion and the primarch kicked weapons out of reach and put their blades through smashed helmets with deadly precision.

In the cells, the prisoners began to stir.

The building insanity of the tormented echoed in the darkness of ruptured doorways. Witchbreeds were hissing, cackling, sobbing and speaking to themselves in dark tongues. They knew they were free, but seemed suspicious of their sudden freedom.

Omegon saw emaciated men, women and mutants emerging from the supposed safety of the shadows. Ducking into the only cell whose door was open rather than missing, he almost trampled a waif of a young girl, who had a grotesquely enlarged skull and misty eyes.

‘Go!’ Xalmagundi urged him, motioning the primarch past the child-witch and into the open cell. At first Omegon thought the she was going to embrace the child out of some kind of maternal instinct or mutant solidarity, but instead Xalmagundi threw her out and slammed the cell door shut, and put her back against the draining black metal.

Volion activated his suit lamps and made for the caged ladder that led both up through the ceiling and down through the floor of the dummy cell. The primarch shook his head in irritation – the shaft seemed to run through all levels of the Tenebrae base, but hadn’t been part of the original schemata. Infiltration would have been a great deal easier with knowledge of that, he mused.

As Volion pointed his bolter up the ladder and began to ascend, they heard the sound of gunfire beyond the cell door. The skitarii sentinels had evidently worked their way down to the abandoned junction and opened fire on the emerging witch-kin. However, the sound of tech-guard weaponry was soon replaced with the harrowing shrieks of deviant psykers unleashing their fury and myriad talents upon their attackers.

Omegon couldn’t even imagine what the witchbreeds were doing; the various ways in which their terrible vengeance might manifest. Something particularly vile was happening right outside the door, he was certain of that. It sounded like bones breaking… or stretching.

‘Sergeant, are you still with me?’ Omegon called across the vox as he and Xalmagundi climbed up after Volion.

Setebos crackled back through the din of combat at his end. ‘Receiving you.’

‘Status, sergeant?’

‘We’re another legionnaire down, my lord,’ Setebos reported. ‘Janic misrepresented the schemata. There was no dormitory, only a Legion ambush.’ Again the sergeant’s voice was drowned out. ‘Krait has used the last of his melta bombs to break through the walls to the assimularum and the refectory. This level is flooded with garrison troops. Janic is throwing everything he has at us.’

Omegon listened grimly to the sergeant’s report. Arvas Janic had been more than equal to the task of securing the base. The commander had withheld information even from his closest allies. He had had dummy tactical objectives constructed and had organised reactionary gauntlets and ambushes, in order to stall any attempt to conquer the Tenebrae installation.

The game wasn’t over, however. The primarch had not played his trump card.

‘Sergeant,’ Omegon returned down the fragmenting vox-link. ‘I appreciate your difficulties. Rest assured that we have encountered a few of our own. Your orders are to extricate your squad by any means necessary and return to the lifter shaft. Make your way to the surface. We’ll meet you there. Commander Janic might be throwing everything he has at us. We, however, have barely begun.’

‘Yes, my lord,’ Setebos replied with cold assurance.

‘And, sergeant – tell Krait it’s time to fire the detonators.’

‘Received. He’ll be pleased about that, at least.’

As they climbed, Omegon felt a string of deep, shuddering vibrations in the rungs of the ladder. Beyond the shaft he could hear the havoc that they had unleashed throughout the base: Space Marines were engaged in desperate firefights, using the base like a giant tactical training ground, Alpha Legionnaire against Alpha Legionnaire. The corridors and stairwells echoed with the footfalls of the Geno Seven-Sixty, bolstering sentries and creating hold points. Witchbreeds were out of their cells and tearing through the penitoria, using the full extent of their devastating powers upon their Mechanicum gaolers.

The installation superstructure itself was trembling.

He switched vox frequencies.

‘Artisan Empyr…’

‘My lord, thank the Omnissiah,’ Auguramus replied over the channel. ‘You must assist me. I’ve been discovered.’

‘You are not the only one, Volkern,’ Omegon replied coldly.

‘The Seven-Sixty are trying to gain entry to the security nexus,’ Auguramus babbled.

‘Are you secure?’

‘For now. I see from the pict feeds that they are bringing in cutting equipment for the bulkhead.’

‘Listen to me carefully, Auguramus,’ Omegon said.

‘I’m trapped in–’

‘Artisan!’ the primarch roared. ‘We are working our way to you. I need you to stay focused.’

‘Yes, lord,’ Auguramus replied miserably.

‘Re-route all sentry guns on the dormitory level to support Squad Sigma,’ Omegon told him.

‘I don’t know if I can do that from here,’ Auguramus told him, panic creeping back into his voice. ‘I fear that they have locked out some of the–’

‘You will find a way, Artisan Empyr,’ Omegon assured him as he climbed.

‘The penitoria hub reports being overrun.’

‘And I want that chaos to spread. Contact Strategarch Mandroclidas and your senior skitarii tribune, and inform them that the witchbreeds have escaped containment and used their powers to enslave the Alpha Legion.’

‘They won’t believe that.’

‘Auguramus,’ Omegon told him with an adamantium edge to his voice. ‘You will make them believe it. There is little the unknowing won’t believe about the unnatural. Play on their prejudice and fear. Besides, the base is in danger and the Legiones Astartes have been compromised. You are the ranking operative. The commanders will, of course, check in with each other – the skitarii will independently confirm the containment breach. Strategarch Mandroclidas will report Alpha Legionnaire hostilities.’

‘Yes, my lord.’ Omegon could almost hear the artisan’s mind working through the possibilities.

‘Do this, Auguramus. We will be with you directly. Omegon out.’

Above him, Volion stopped climbing without warning.

‘What is it?’ the primarch enquired.

‘High-tier operations level,’ the legionnaire said. ‘Security nexus, base command, and the Astropath chantry.’

‘If the schemata are to be trusted,’ Omegon cautioned.

Turning a pressure wheel in the wall of the shaft, the primarch opened a duct hatch and peered through. The corridor onto which it opened was empty.

‘Legionnaire, take this ladder straight to the surface hangar. The mission continues according to plan. It is imperative that no legionnaire escapes Tenebrae 9-50 to tell of our intervention here. Take out the hangar sentries, and provide covering fire for Xalmagundi – she can use her gift on the Stormbirds, shuttles and Mechanicum lighters.’ He turned down to the psyker. ‘I mean it, Xalmagundi. Take no chances. When I get up there I want to find nothing but scrap.’

‘You can count on it,’ she assured him.

Omegon checked his chronometer. ‘How soon could you start working on velocity and trajectory?’

‘As soon as I can see what I’m manipulating and where it’s going,’ the psyker reminded him.

‘Both will be hard to miss once you’re up there,’ the primarch said.

‘I told you, I’ve never handled anything of this size before.’

‘I have faith in you, Xalmagundi,’ Omegon said. ‘Now go, both of you. Time is against us.’

‘What about you, my lord?’ Volion asked.

‘The chantry falls to me.’

‘That was Vermes’s responsibility.’

‘Aye, it was,’ Omegon replied.

‘Let me accompany you, my lord,’ the legionnaire insisted.

The primarch climbed up and out of the portal. ‘No. Get Xalmagundi to the surface. Only she can complete the mission. You have your orders, legionnaire.’

Closing the hatch on the Space Marine’s impassive optics and Xalmagundi’s underworlder eyes, the primarch slipped back into the Tenebrae base.

Operatus Five-Hydra: Elapsed Time Ω1/-214.12//XXU
XX Legion Strike Cruiser Upsilon

‘So Xalmagundi wrecks the hangar and Vermes’s blade silences the choir of astropaths,’ Sergeant Setebos confirmed.

Omegon nodded. ‘The Tenebrae installation must disappear like the light from a snuffed candle. We cannot risk survivors. We cannot risk craft fleeing the base. We cannot risk astrotelepathic reports of our operation.’

‘With any luck, the garrison won’t know what to report,’ Arkan offered, ‘and they’ll certainly think twice before reporting that the base is being hit by their own Legion.’

‘We can hope,’ the primarch said.

‘Assuming we can infiltrate the installation and confound the garrison,’ Isidor put to him through the spectral shimmer of the hololithic display, ‘how do we actually take out the base?’

‘Demolitions,’ Krait volunteered immediately. ‘Clean. Simple.’

‘Or we could overload the generatorum magnareactors,’ Tarquiss offered. ‘That worked well enough aboard the Carnassial.’

‘Or, instead of confounding the garrison,’ said Volion, ‘we could slit their throats one by one and then destroy the installation at our leisure.’

‘I think you underestimate what you’re dealing with,’ Auguramus suddenly piped up, his voice a metallic echo through the micro-vox.

‘Explain,’ Setebos hissed.

The Artisan Empyr looked to Omegon, who nodded slowly.

‘You talk of detonations and overloads,’ Auguramus went on. ‘This isn’t a rockcrete bunker or ammunition dump. The Pylon Array is a colossal artefact of ancient xenos design, built to exact specifications and using materials the properties of which we are only now just beginning to appreciate–’

‘What was this abomination constructed to achieve?’ Isidor interrupted.

Omegon adjusted the focus of the hololithic display. Pulling out, Squad Sigma was treated to a phantasmal representation of the asteroid, which the primarch turned about its ungainly axis. The rock was a pockmarked vision, dominated on one side by a deep and well defined crater, the result of some ancient collision in which Tenebrae 9-50 had come off as the victor. Closing in, Omegon revealed phase field generators constructed about the hollow’s circumference, and the sheen of an energy barrier cutting off the space within the crater from the void. Within the crater wall, a surface hangar had been excavated, and the rocky regolith of the crater floor was dominated by smaller security structures.

These were centred around the colossal reach of the Pylon Array.

It was like a great needle or obelisk, reaching for the stars but blacker than the void itself. The broader base of the abominate construction was fussy with scaffolding, but its tall, tapering pinnacle pierced the environmental containment field and reached out from the crater like an antenna sprouting from a parabolic reception dish.

‘Imagine, for a moment that you understood anything about empyreal immetereology,’ the Artisan Empyr continued. ‘We consider the warp a reality alternate to our own and consisting wholly of raw energy. An ocean immeasurable. Powerful. Unpredictable. Deadly.’ Auguramus cast his gaze down the line of identical faces. ‘But also, useful. Mankind has sought to brave the dangers of the warp in order to build an empire and embark upon a crusade of galactic conquest.’

‘You remind us of a history of which we are a part,’ warned Braxus.

‘A crusade mounted and an Imperium held together by the promise of communication and cooperation. Our thoughts and our vessels traverse this tumultuous realm. When storms wrack the warp, then the immetereology becomes unstable – both destructive and obstructive. Astrotelepathic communication and navigation become impossible.’

‘Get to the point.’

‘Within an ordinary meteorological system,’ Auguramus went on, ‘like an atmospheric weather system, there are areas of high and low pressure. Storms form in response to the extreme pressure differences in these areas.’

‘And?’ Charmian prompted, refusing to get caught up in the artisan’s growing excitement.

‘The immetereology of the warp is not dissimilar. The unfathomable workings of the Pylon Array produce an area of unprecedented calm within the warp. The range of astropathic communication is extended.’

‘But this creates storm fronts and immetereological disturbances in the regions beyond,’ Isidor said.

‘Exactly!’ Auguramus almost shrieked. ‘An unintentional consequence of the xenos technology’s operation. Far more useful than anything possessed by the other Legions.’

‘A consequence that Alpharius has used to further the Warmaster’s aims,’ Omegon informed the gathering. ‘Upon building this technology in the Octiss System, and charging it with immaterial energies sapped from the Mechanicum’s psyker slave-stock, we have succeeded in enveloping bordering regions in a communications blackout: Draconi, Tiamath, Chondax and the Scellis-Trevelya straits. We have not only restricted the White Scars Legion to the Chondax System, which was Alpharius’s promise to Horus, but we have kept Jaghatai Khan veiled in ignorance. He is blind to the atrocities of civil war and deaf to Dorn’s commands to return. Without the Scars and the Great Khan at the Emperor’s side, the Warmaster’s victory will be assured.’

A murmur ran through the group. Omegon waited a moment before continuing.

‘The loyalists have also been denied reinforcement from the Regnault Thorns, the Seventh-Suckle Parthenari Shieldmaidens, and the Uzuran Sabreteurs: seventy-two thousand fighting souls, all delayed at Draconi. The Legio Cybernetica Maniple Theta-Iota and the Legio Gigantes Titan Legion were also lost, presumed destroyed, while in transit through Scellis-Trevelya.’

‘A powerful weapon indeed, my lord,’ Isidor said.

‘You see then, that this technology cannot be allowed to fall into the hands of the enemy,’ Omegon insisted. ‘That is why, powerful as it is, it must be destroyed. Utterly.’

‘Seismic charges and super-critical magnareactors cannot provide the kind of assurance we need,’ Auguramus added. ‘The very material from which the Pylon Array is constructed – remaining in certain configurations – is likely to maintain a residual immaterial presence. My calculations show that a blanket orbital bombardment could provide the coverage required, but even with the Beta at your disposal, or one of the Mechanicum vessels, Tenebrae 9-50 would simply disintegrate and spread recoverable evidence of the Pylon Array’s existence all over the system.’

‘There has to be a way,’ Setebos said, to which several Squad Sigma legionnaires nodded in agreement.

‘There is,’ the primarch told them. ‘We need to destroy the entire asteroid.’

Isidor frowned. ‘I thought we just agreed that was unwise.’

‘The demiurg shunt these asteroids inertially between conveyer stations,’ Omegon said, ‘but if another force could be applied to the rock mid-voyage, a small deviation would soon make a large difference. Especially if the asteroid’s velocity could be increased.’

The primarch and the Alpha Legionnaires turned their heads in unison to look at the dozing psyker.

‘Enough force to change the rock’s trajectory and put it – base, Pylon Array and all – into a nearby star.’

Too numbed by the psi-dampening collar to mount any objection, Xalmagundi gave them all a lazy, cynical glance through the ghostly representation of the asteroid.

‘I’ve never… manipulated… anything… that size… before,’ she mumbled.

‘Then the true extent of your powers has never been tested, but from what I’ve heard already, I’m impressed. And that was working against gravity and atmospheric friction.’

‘What is our exit strategy?’ Setebos put to Omegon.

‘Yes,’ Vermes agreed. ‘Rolling the asteroid into 66-Zeta Octiss does seem an elegant solution to our problem, but that means we need a tightly scheduled evacuation.’

‘The Upsilon will be stationed just out of sensor range,’ the primarch said. ‘I’ve put Captain Ranko personally in charge of our extraction. He will leave with the finest from his Lernaean squad as soon as our mission is underway, and evacuate us from the Tenebrae surface in the Thunderhawk Chimerica.’

Isidor nodded before looking over at his sergeant. They both seemed satisfied.

Omegon checked his chronometer and stood. As the gathered Alpha Legionnaires and operatives did likewise, the hololith flickered and evaporated.

‘We have preparations to make and little time to make them,’ he said. ‘Before we go, let me say this: I understand the conflict in your hearts, how one may beat for duty while the other bleeds for your Legion brothers who will be sacrificed. But this is civil war. It is a time of confusion, and realigned loyalty. We have many heads but we act as one – one Legion with a single will. We are a union of the alike and the like-minded. We will not tolerate treachery. We will not allow our compact to fracture. We will not suffer the short-sightedness of our brother Legions, nor the averted gaze of the wider Imperium. We are Alpha Legion and we take the long view.’

The assembled legionnaires thumped their fists on the table in salute.

‘As Alpha Legion, however, you are expected to think for yourselves. If anyone here today wishes to absolve himself of this responsibility; if he finds that under these most unique of circumstances he cannot imitate the action of the hydra; if he chooses not to be the whetstone upon which his Legion is sharpened, then he shall suffer no censure or judgement. He can walk away knowing that there are others who would be his brother’s keeper, and he can wait out this mission in the brig of the Upsilon before returning to duty.’

Omegon looked down the line of identical faces, searching for any seed of doubt or misgiving. He saw only cold-blooded determination in their arctic eyes.

‘Brothers. Hydra Dominatus.’

‘Hydra Dominatus,’ Setebos returned, followed by the rest of the squad.

‘Then let our enemies see the fallen fruit, sitting warm and inviting in the afternoon sun,’ the primarch said. ‘And let us be the serpent beneath, hidden and waiting to strike.’

Operatus Five-Hydra: Elapsed Time Ω2/005.17//TEN
Tenebrae Installation

Omegon moved like a ghost through the unfolding catastrophe. Leading with his bolt pistol, but clutching his combat blade at his side like a hooked talon, he slipped through unnoticed.

The installation passageways, sections and stairwells were bathed in the bloody light of warning lamps, and the spinning emergency beacons that added a sickly amber urgency to the base’s interior. The primarch’s movements were swift and his footfalls light, and lost beneath the insistent wail of klaxons. This had meant that those who had been unfortunate enough find themselves in his path had not heard Omegon’s caving of skulls, breaking of necks and slashing of throats as he approached.

Near the armoury, a three-quarter squad of Spartocid soldiers rounded a corner ahead of Omegon. They were clutching their las-carbines to their chests and running with their faded cloaks rippling behind them. A Geno subalterix clutched a vox-unit to the side of his plumed helmet, trying to get clarification over gunfire crowded channels. Upon sighting Omegon, in his Legion plate, the group slowed and angled the broad-burn muzzles of their stubby weapons at him. They had clearly heard the equally unbelievable reports either of Alpha Legion infiltrators compromising the base, or warp-possessed garrison legionnaires running amok on the penitorium level.

He had to think fast. Aiming his bolt pistol down the adjacent empty corridor, Omegon repeatedly squeezed the trigger, emptying the magazine at some unseen target. The primarch then feigned alarm and began furiously reloading.

‘Get down here!’ he roared at the hesitant Spartocid.

More a conditioned response than a strategic assessment of the situation, the subaltrix and his men rushed on, their carbines presented and ready. As they burst around the junction corner they opened fire, slashing the empty darkness beyond, scanning for an enemy but blinded by the blurred flash of their own weaponry.

Omegon allowed them to take a few more steps before he moved. Bringing up his freshly loaded pistol he blew gaping holes through the backs of their skulls. Even as the squad began to drop around him, the subaltrix urged his soldiers to keep firing in the mistaken belief that they were still being engaged from the corridor.

Moving on from the massacre, Omegon reached the thick doors of the lifter shaft – through the metal he could hear the exchange of gunfire. Stabbing the tip of his combat blade between the edges and twisting it, he managed to prise the doors open and claw the mesh gate upwards. Omegon peered down the shaft and then up into its gloomy heights.

Aside from the cacophony of battle on multiple levels, the most distinctive sound rising up from the installation depths was the haunting madness of liberated witchbreeds, shrieking and howling in the darkness. They were unleashing hell throughout the base and indiscriminately venting their fury and unnatural powers upon skitarii sentinels, genic Spartocids and Legion forces alike. A sudden eruption of directed soulfire ripped through the lifter doors several floors below, lighting up the darkness and blasting a garrison legionnaire into the shaft wall opposite. Omegon watched him fall, writhing in spectral flame, before smashing straight through the roof of the lifter car.

The primarch felt a tremor through his gauntlets. Moving across to the rocky passageway wall, he put the side of his helmet to the stone. A series of grinding rumbles came from the base superstructure.

He was running out of time.

Reloading his bolt pistol with the last magazine, the primarch set off once again through the installation’s ear-splitting, labyrinthine murk.

The chantry was a small block cut off from the rest of the operations level by bulkheads and a series of sombre archways. Each displayed the symbol of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica, a single eye looking down upon Omegon as he slipped past.

Pushing the muzzle of his pistol through the green velvet drapes, the primarch found the astropaths within the sanctuary. There were tarot wafers spread on the polished floor of the chamber.

They were on their knees before him. All men. All hooded. All terrified. They looked pleadingly up at him with their grisly, empty eye sockets. At first this confused Omegon, until he realised – looking down at the abandoned wafers – that they had already seen what was going to happen next. They bowed their heads and pulled back their hoods.

Omegon was not one to prolong suffering unless it served a purpose. He fell to doing what was necessary: hovering his bolt pistol at the back of the astropath’s heads, he executed each in turn, quickly and efficiently.

Turning to withdraw through the blood speckled velvet, Omegon stopped. There were three astropaths, and yet there were four sub-sanctuaries leading from the chamber. Only one of the chambers had its drapes drawn.

Storming forward, he swept the drapes aside and came face to face with the chief chorister – a lean, elderly astropath – standing before a lectern. The floor about her was of polished metal into which hexagrammatic wardings and seals of safeguarding had been carved. She was clutching a thick staff bearing the icon of the all-seeing-eye, and mumbling the encryption rites of astrotelecommunication.

‘Desist,’ Omegon growled at her, bringing the pistol up.

Suddenly there were arms everywhere, thick and armoured in heavy plate.

Two garrison legionnaires lunged from hiding, inside the sub-sanctuary entrance. They reached for the primarch’s pistol with grasping hands, hauling it off to one side as the weapon spat a trio of rounds that narrowly missed the mediating Astropath and mauled the lectern. Two more legionnaires cannoned into him from behind, sending the wrestling throng crashing into the sub-sanctuary wall. Another shot went into the panelling before the pistol was out of his grip.

‘Remember,’ the sibilant voice of an officer cut through the violence, ‘I want him alive.’

This was all Omegon needed to hear. Reaching for the legionnaires’ sheathed combat blades hanging at their belts, Omegon spun and buried the first blade in its owner’s neck. He knew there was a weak spot between the gorget casing and the helmet seals: he knew this because his own Alpha Legion plate sported the same weakness. He stabbed at two more of his assailants with the second blade, and pierced through the eye lens of the last.

Momentarily shrugging off the attentions of the wounded Space Marines, the primarch threw the knife point-over-pommel down the length of the sub-sanctuary. The weighty blade thudded into the side of the astropath’s hood, and the chorister collapsed against the lectern before tumbling to the ward-inscribed floor.

With her message silenced, Omegon heaved himself and his assailants into the other wall, running the huddle of power-armoured legionnaires one into another. Slamming an articulated elbow joint into a faceplate before following with a gauntleted fist to another, Omegon took a shoulderplate in the gut. Slammed into the far wall and cracking the panelling, he brought his knee up savagely, again and again, buckling the warrior’s ceramite. Pushing him away, Omegon readied himself as another legionnaire came at him with his fists, and the pair of them dissolved into a blur of half-parried pummelling and powerful counter strikes.

As the legionnaire lunged, Omegon stepped aside. Allowing the Space Marine to follow his path of momentum, the primarch got his gauntlets around and under his backpack. He fingered the release clasps and tore the apparatus from the legionnaire’s suit before smashing him down into the floor with the dead weight of it.

He turned just in time to smack aside an oncoming combat knife – the legionnaire wielding it had been the one Omegon had first stabbed, and the Space Marine’s gorget and plastron were slick with blood where he had extracted the blade. Omegon smashed the pack across the legionnaire’s helmet before planting it in the midriff cabling of another, bending him double.

The graceless brawl continued and the sub-sanctuary rang with the crash of armour plate. Fibre bundles crackled and contracted. Ceramite buckled beneath superhuman blows. The primarch moved from opponent to opponent, checking the lethality of oncoming attacks and following up with as much lethality as he himself could spare before being forced to engage the next.

The bloodied knife was back. It slashed and thrust, and he snatched the wrist and gauntlet of the wielder in an attempt to wrest it back again. Omegon wrenched the offending arm towards the ceiling and turned beneath it, hearing the seals crack and cabling snap. With one fluid movement he twisted the legionnaire’s arm to breaking, before ramming him helmet first into the wall panelling with a crunch of vertebrae. The combat knife Omegon had pried from the grip of the Space Marine’s broken hand he kept for himself.

Clutched like a dagger, Omegon brought it around in a searing arc and drove the blade tip through the half-blinded warrior’s intact optic and into his brain. With a sickening squeal of tortured ceramite, the primarch tore the weapon free again and allowed him to drop to the floor.

Only one of his four opponents was still on his feet – the legionnaire struck down with one outstretched gauntlet and knocked the slippery blade from the primarch’s grip. Omegon shoved him up against the wall panelling, and brought his ceramite knuckles in again and again, each economic strike followed swiftly and pneumatically by the next.

The faceplate crunched. An optic cracked.

Again the legionnaire’s grasping gauntlets reached for Omegon, but again the primarch beat them back, and grabbed the dazed warrior by both sides of his ruined helmet. He fired the pressure seals and ripped it from the Space Marine’s head.

He looked down upon copper skin and harsh blue eyes that were like unto his own. That didn’t stop him clutching the helmet by its piping and smashing the crest and bonding studs savagely into the legionnaire’s unprotected face over and over until he dropped to the metal floor.

Heaving with exertion, Omegon stood with his back to the curtained doorway. ‘Commander Janic, I presume,’ he muttered between breaths. He turned, the bloody helmet still in his hand. ‘I have to commend you on–’

Janic’s bolter barked. Omegon felt the mass-reactive shells punch into his armour and detonate within his flesh. White hot agony flared, though his superhuman body fought to resist it.

Omegon’s legs went out from under him.

Dropping the legionnaire’s ruined helmet, he stumbled and crashed back into the wall. With his pack sliding down the panelling, the primarch slipped down onto the metal floor, his spilled blood beginning to flood the hexagrammatic carvings.

He saw Arvas Janic standing over him in the sub-sanctuary doorway, amongst the green velvet drapes. The commander’s face was a taut mask of bitter intent, his helmet maglocked to his belt.

‘You were saying?’ the commander said, venturing forward.

Omegon reached down his armour and found three fat, ragged punctures in the lower cuirass. He explored each opening with a fingertip and checked the position of each wound. To the side of the navel. Above the hip. Omegon nodded to himself. They had all missed the spine. He knew his body had gone into overdrive, with different organs, suprahormones and engineered processes interacting to reduce the severity of the wounds.

Placing his gauntlets and boots flat on the floor, Omegon pushed his backpack a little farther up the wall. Through the superstructure he felt a distinctive rumble. Something more than a distant quake.

‘You were saying?’ Janic repeated.

‘Warning shots?’ Omegon asked.

The commander nodded.

Omegon coughed blood inside his visor. ‘I was saying that you should be commended for the first-class security and counter measures employed on this base.’

‘Don’t patronise me,’ Janic warned with a snarl. ‘If it were truly first class, you wouldn’t be here.’

‘I see your point,’ Omegon told him. ‘Yet particular highlights were your ambushes here and on the dormitory level. You knew we’d try and silence the chantry – a priority target – and you even left the dummy dormitory on the schemata. Very clever.’

‘Enough of this,’ Arvas Janic said. ‘Remove your helmet. You will identify yourself and your designs on this installation. You will reveal how you came to know of its location. You will admit to your true Legion and deliver the name of the commanding officer foolish enough to despatch you here on a suicide mission.’

‘You sound confident of that, commander,’ Omegon muttered with grim humour.

‘Now. Later. It matters not,’ Janic promised. ‘We are renowned for our patience, and our methods of persuasion. While my legionnaires comb this base for evidence, my superiors will hunt your sponsors back along the trail you have undoubtedly left in coming here. Meanwhile, I’ll have my Apothecary take you apart, piece by piece – starting with your feet and working up – harvesting your organs one by one until you feel like volunteering the information I wish to know.’

‘I don’t suppose you would believe that I am an Alpha Legion officer and that this base is under inspection?’ Omegon asked the commander.

‘No,’ Janic returned with a sneer.

‘Or that this is a simulation designed to test your suitability for promotion?’

‘No, sir, I would not. As I’m sure you’re aware, this is a Vermillion-clearance operation. Our orders here come directly from the very highest authority: the primarch himself. So too would authorisation for the inspection or simulation to which you allude. A lot of my men are dead. What kind of an inspection involves brother legionnaires spilling each other’s blood?’

‘A very serious one, commander,’ Omegon said, wedging his backpack into the gap between the lectern and the wall. ‘Now, let me tell you what I really know, and why I agree with you that it matters not.’

Below them both the base superstructure trembled again, more fiercely this time. Omegon motioned the commander in closer. Bringing the bolter up between them, Janic leaned in.

‘Hydra Dominatus, brother,’ the primarch whispered.

Janic’s brow furrowed. He straightened. His face screwed up in fury and frustration.

‘What?’

He backed away, and then his eyes fell upon the helmet clasped in Omegon’s hand.

His helmet, unlocked from his belt.

The sub-sanctuary suddenly became a maelstrom of howling, wind churned debris. Escaping air screamed through the wide vents in the wall above Omegon’s head, and every loose object in the chamber was dragged towards the open bulkheads outside. Drapes, discarded weapons, and the bodies that littered the chamber all whipped past the primarch in a few seconds of shrieking turbulence, dragged through the narrow doorway by the irresistible expulsion of the artificial atmosphere. One moment Arvas Janic was before the primarch with his bolter in his hand, the next he was being smashed through the doorways and corridors of the section and whipped along a roaring path of least resistance to the yawning lifter shaft beyond.

Alone in the evacuating sub-sanctuary, Omegon’s backpack held him wedged in place against the wall, and he was further anchored by the maglocks of his boots, freshly activated at the rumble of the demiurg mining machines cutting up through the foundations of the base.

As they had done so – jarred into action by Krait’s territory-threatening trail of planted demolitions – the xenos monstrosities had smashed up through the same pressurised system of locks that Squad Sigma had been careful to use upon infiltrating the installation. The mining machines’ entrance had been less discrete, however, and as a result of the automatons cutting and tearing their way in, the base had been depressurised, breached and had lost its artificial atmosphere to the void.

Suddenly there was silence.

As predicted, the cogitator banks governing the installation’s environmental controls had sealed off the breached lower levels. It had all been over in moments.

Deactivating the maglocks, Omegon hauled himself up and scrambled for the exit. With one gauntlet over his wounded stomach, the primarch threw himself around corners and through the crooked layout of the operations level.

Half running, half stumbling through the command section, he found the chambers devoid of Alpha Legion officers or the Geno Seven-Sixty Strategarch. Only servitors wired into their thrones remained – sitting there with their jaundiced, lidless eyeballs and rot-retracted lips. A large runescreen flashed through a sequence of levels, with most blocks and sections blinking crimson. It wouldn’t take long for the demiurg mining machines to crash through an emergency bulkhead, or to cut their way up and through to the upper levels.

Stomping past the vox listening posts and long range auspex stations, Omegon came across a security bulkhead that had a rough hole burned through the thick metal. He recognised it immediately: the security nexus.

Clutching his abdomen, the primarch risked a moment to peer through the plasma-torched opening. Inside, the chamber was dark and lit only by banks of pict-screens. Strapped into an observation throne that moved between the rows of screens on a rotating gimbal, Omegon found the fat carcass of Volkern Auguramus. The Artisan Empyr had indeed been discovered by Spartocid soldiers, and his robed body was riddled with merciless las-fire. The screens told of more murderous desolation across the base.

Omegon saw Alpha Legionnaires exchanging fire with skitarii sentinels and rallied contingents of the Spartocid. The screens glowed ghoulishly with flash of las-carbines, flamers and boltguns. Witchbreeds in all their wretched variety pounced on their victims, tearing them apart with supernatural strength, or vomiting forth warp-flame and arcs of green lightning. One of the witches – a gangling, twisted creature – had dislocated her jaw like some kind of snake and was screeching at soldiers and sentinels with deadly effect.

The garrison legionnaires had been faring better in the lower levels with their well-practiced formations and tactics, but the appearance of great brazen xenos machines bursting up through the decking had proved more of a challenge. The bulbous, arachnoid monstrosities buzzed through the Alpha Legionnaires’ armour with their heavy cutting lasers.

The confusion and carnage had a terrible beauty to it. An admirable chaos, that was a true reflection of the doctrine of the hydra – its multiple heads striking in disparate but co-ordinated devastation.

Leaving behind the corpse of the Artisan Empyr, Omegon ducked back out of the nexus and stumbled down the adjoining passage. The lumen strips overhead fizzed and went out, only for the darkness to be abruptly interrupted by the searing flash of intense cutter beams searing up through the metal decking. He skidded to a stop to avoid a pair of the beams, sizzling with alien energy and slicing their way across his path, before ducking through a mangled bulkhead.

Beyond a decimated scriptorium and around an agonising succession of corners, Omegon found his way to the lifter shaft. The lifter doors and mesh gate remained open, though the lifter car was lost to the vacuum ravaged depths. Heaving himself onto a maintenance ladder with some difficulty, he began the torturous climb to the surface.

Each rung was a new and singular torment. His abdomen felt as though burning stakes were being hammered through it. Blood slicked his grip, and dripped from his wounds down into the yawning shaft below.

He was approaching the top when he realised that he wasn’t the only one climbing the shaft – the gloom echoed with the approaching clatter of a many-legged colossus. Looking down, Omegon could see the brassy glint of a xenos machine making its way unimpeded up the sheer vertical; the stabbing motion of its legs chewed up the metal walls and propelled the monster with ease.

The ladder lurched from its mountings and then began to rock back and forth as the abomination started to chew, its rotating maw of pulverising teeth grinding at the metal. As the ladder twisted, buckled and came away from the shaft wall entirely, Omegon made a desperate leap across the shaft for the hangar level doorway.

With a single gauntlet he managed to reach the ledge, hooking onto it like a grapnel and ignoring the agony in his belly. Reaching up with his other hand too, he hauled himself upwards only to find that the doors were still closed.

Chewed up within the rotating maw of the demiurg machine, the ladder whipped about the open space, slicing through the blackness and thrashing against the walls. The primarch let go of the ledge with one hand and hammered on the closed doors before letting the arm fall again. His gaze fell to the xenos arachnoid looming up beneath his flailing legs. The rotating maw of metal teeth roared its mechanised intention to devour him alive.

Sparks suddenly lit up the gloom as boltfire rippled off the machine’s thick brazen armour and interlocking teeth. The mining machine continued unperturbed, the grinding mouth still gaping open, but two braces of Legiones Astartes grenades clunked down from above and disappeared into the belly of the beast.

Many pairs of gauntlets grabbed at his arm and backpack, and heaved him up into the light. The cacophonous din of the grenades detonating within the brazen belly of the beast was suddenly silenced by the forced closing of the lifter doors.

As Omegon was dragged away he could see nothing but blotchy brightness – his plate’s autosenses had been momentarily overloaded. As they re-calibrated from the darkness of the shaft to the relative light of the asteroid surface, he could hear legionnaires about him calling for Sergeant Setebos. Gunfire still rattled in the distance.

‘He’s wounded,’ came Isidor’s unmistakeable voice.

‘I’m fine,’ Omegon grunted. ‘Status report.’

Goran Setebos appeared, and helped him to his feet.

‘But my lor-’

‘There’s no time, sergeant,’ the primarch warned.

The hangar deck was a vision of telekinetic destruction. Omegon could make out a wrecked Thunderhawk, and a mountain of scrap that might once have been a flight of Mechanicum lighters, humpshuttles and Imperial Army transports. Xalmagundi had been thorough, as instructed.

The deck was also littered with bodies: Spartocid sentries, whose responsibility it had been to guard the hangar.

‘Stay down, sir,’ Isidor said as a las-bolt round seared the air above their heads. Falling to a pained crouch behind the shattered remains of an engine column, the primarch surveyed the scene. The hangar opened out onto the crater that Squad Sigma had observed in hololithic representation. At its centre, thrusting out of the crater like an accusatory finger was the black shaft of the Pylon Array.

‘We lost Zantine,’ Setebos reported, indicating an armoured body laid out nearby. The legionnaire had a neat bolt hole in the side of his helmet.

‘Janic has at least two squads of legionary snipers stationed in hides about the crater wall. Those positions weren’t on the plans either.’

‘What about Xalmagundi?’ Omegon asked.

‘She’s with Volion and Braxus,’ Krait told him. ‘Out in the crater.’

‘There’s something else, my lord,’ Isidor announced.

‘Speak,’ Omegon said.

‘Captain Ranko and the Chimerica are overdue. Long overdue. No vox contact, either.’

‘Take me to Xalmagundi,’ the primarch ordered.

Leading the way with his blade drawn, Setebos stepped between the larger rocks and regolithic rubble. Omegon followed nearby, still holding a gauntlet across his bolt-chewed abdomen, with Krait and Isidor offering suppression fire close by.

Overhead, Omegon saw the reason that his autosenses had struggled to adjust outside of the lifter shaft: above the crater, there was not a scrap of void. The raging surface of the Octiss star reigned above them, filling the firmament with an overwhelming, golden radiance. The phase field generators were the only shield standing between Squad Sigma and the intense radiation of the star.

Two more las-bolts rocketed past Omegon, and he gave silent thanks for the star’s blinding glare, without which Janic’s sniper legionnaires would have had a far easier job of picking them off.

Dropping down into a hollow, Omegon and the legionnaires found Xalmagundi. Volion crouched near the psyker with his boltgun aimed over her shoulder, whilst Braxus complained to himself behind a boulder that was receiving more than its fair share of attention from the legionnaire snipers.

Xalmagundi was knelt in the regolith, with her outstretched fingers in the deep grit and dust. She had been given back her tinted goggles, through which she stared up into the blinding heavens. Her pale skin was streaked with sweat, from her ongoing efforts to shift the trajectory of the great asteroid and send Tenebrae 9-50 into the embrace of 66-Zeta Octiss.

The witchbreed did not look well at all. Black tears rolled down the sides of her face from her large, underworlder eyes.

‘Volion?’ Omegon said as he skidded down into the boltfire-molested hollow. ‘Projection?’

‘Both trajectory and velocity are good, my lord,’ the legionnaire reported. ‘Tenebrae 9-50 and the Pylon Array are destined for the surface of that star.’

‘Omegon?’ Xalmagundi croaked. ‘Is that you?’

The primarch crossed the hollow and knelt down beside the psyker.

‘It’s me.’

‘I can’t see a damn thing,’ the underworlder told him. Her words were accompanied by a further cascade of midnight tears down her porcelain cheeks. ‘I’m blinded.’

‘You have done well, Xalmagundi,’ the primarch told her. ‘Very well.’

‘Can your people fix me?’ the psyker asked. ‘Can they fix my eyes?’

Omegon held out a hand towards Setebos. The sergeant glared at him for a moment before turning over his bolt pistol.

‘They can fix you, Xalmagundi,’ Omegon promised.

The shot echoed around the crater. The psyker’s fragile body fell across the grit and rubble. What was left of Squad Sigma stared at Omegon.

‘Permission to speak freely, my lord,’ Setebos said.

Omegon settled down in the hollow, his armoured knees deep in the dust.

‘Granted, sergeant.’

‘That strikes me as a waste,’ Setebos told him. ‘She could have been of further use to the Legion.’

‘That strikes me as sentimental,’ Omegon replied. ‘Which truly is a waste. That’s not your reputation, sergeant. It was my impression that there is little you wouldn’t do for your Legion. Little you wouldn’t sacrifice for victory.’

‘And nothing in my conduct on this mission suggests otherwise,’ the sergeant returned. ‘It’s just there seemed no reason to execute the girl.’

‘She was expendable, sergeant,’ Omegon told him. ‘As are we all. Regicide pawns in a greater game.’

‘Where is the Chimerica?’ Isidor asked warily. ‘Where’s Captain Ranko?’

After a pause, Omegon reached for the clasps on his helmet. The seals disengaged and he tossed it into the dust.

Sheed Ranko regarded Setebos and Squad Sigma with his own eyes. The legionnaires stared at the captain in mute disbelief.

‘A greater game,’ Ranko repeated.

The captain could still taste his primarch’s blood. Omegon had mixed a little of his shed vitality with the wine the pair had taken on the Upsilon – an offering of the primarch’s thanks, and much more. He had tasted remembrance and come to know the secrets of his gene-sire: early days spent by the twins on their distant homeworld, scheming their way to supremacy; the paradoxical horror of the alien Acuity; the gradual realisation of what would be required of each of them in the years still to come…

Ranko had borne the burden of this offering and had done what his primarch had asked of him a thousand times before. He had taken his place. He had acted like, spoken like, all thought like his primarch.

He had been Omegon.

Braxus scrambled down from his position and through the grit of the hollow.

‘What’s happening?’ the legionnaire rumbled.

‘Some details of the mission have been withheld from us,’ Setebos explained without taking his gaze off Ranko. ‘The captain is going to explain them to us now.’

Ranko gazed back at Setebos, then allowed his eyes to wander among the gathered legionnaires.

‘What does your primarch ask of you?’ he put to them.

‘The Chimerica isn’t coming, is it, sir?’ Isidor said. When Ranko didn’t answer, the legionnaire said, ‘There is no Thunderhawk extraction. Lord Omegon isn’t coming for us.’

‘No,’ the captain said finally.

‘Options?’ Setebos said, turning to the squad.

‘The garrison Stormbird and other craft have been destroyed,’ Krait told him.

‘There is only one way off this rock,’ Volion told them. ‘The boarding torpedo. We have to return to the Argolid.’

Setebos grunted. There was little time to discuss alternatives.

‘Fastest route?’ he asked.

‘Temperature’s too hot on the unshielded surface,’ the legionnaire replied. ‘Even in our plate. We have to go back through the base and the mineworks.’

‘There’s not much chance of that,’ Braxus said, checking the ammunition left in his bolter’s magazine.

‘Better than the chance we have against that,’ Isidor countered, thrusting a ceramite thumb up at the raging heavens.

‘Then we’re decided,’ Setebos said, rising to his feet.

‘You won’t make it,’ Ranko told them. ‘You don’t have even one tenth of the time you’d need to make that return journey, even without hostilities.’

‘You would ask us to just sit here on this rock and die?’ Setebos spat back.

‘I ask nothing of you,’ Ranko told them honestly. Then he repeated, ‘What does your primarch ask of you?’

Setebos and the legionnaires looked at one another. The sergeant nodded.

‘Everything.’

Epsilon

Operatus Five-Hydra: Elapsed Time Ω1/138.11//XXB
XX Legion Battle-barge Beta

The command deck of the Beta was quiet. Officers and retainers went about their business calmly and professionally. There was little indication that the Alpha Legion battle-barge had just launched a massive orbital bombardment and that a crater-dashed mountain range on the planet below was about to be levelled.

Alpharius stood in his ceremonial plate to one side of the bridge, gazing out through the great viewports at the unfolding apocalypse. The agri-moon of Parabellus was an unremarkable planetoid – a red dustball streaked with dark ranges of crop-yielding ziggurat mountains. Even from orbit, the angular terraces were visible, giving the moon the appearance of an abstract map complete with lines and contours.

The primarch watched the largest of the black smears disappear beneath the flare of the first cataclysmic detonation. Down on the surface, entire mountains were collapsing and terrace-farming communities were being annihilated by the heaven-dropped fires of armageddon.

On the other side of the command deck and clad in an identical plate, his twin primarch Omegon regarded the growing armada of Alpha Legion vessels following in the Beta’s ponderous wake.

‘Something vexes you, brother,’ Alpharius called out across the deck.

‘No,’ Omegon replied.

‘It was not a question.’

Omegon turned and crossed the bridge, finding his twin enjoying the spectacle of the moon’s destruction. ‘If you must know, I was thinking about trust.’

‘A valuable commodity,’ Alpharius replied, ‘that can be both bought and misplaced.’

‘It was misplaced in Volkern Auguramus, certainly,’ Omegon said. ‘Now millions of people have to die as a result.’

‘It is most precious – and strongest – when it occurs naturally. Like between brothers,’ Alpharius said.

‘Tell that to Horus,’ Omegon muttered.

Alpharius turned from the destruction and narrowed his eyes at his twin.

‘Fair point,’ he conceded. ‘Trust can be hard to come by, even amongst the closest of kin.’ Alpharius let the point hang between them before moving on. ‘Volkern Auguramus was a gifted artisan. An operative in whom we placed great trust. He took the gift the Cabal had bequeathed us to aid the Warmaster, and perverted it for his own gain. That is why this unfinished Pylon Array on Parabellus must be destroyed, why the Parabellan farmers must now die with their crops in a nuclear winter. It is also why you left one of the galaxy’s foremost Artisan Empyrs gutted like a common thief in a back alley on San Sabrinus, I presume.’

A legionnaire approached them from the rear of the command deck.

‘My lords,’ he interrupted, ‘the captain wishes you to know that the strike cruisers Lambda and Zeta are inbound, as well as the Alpha.’

‘Very good,’ Alpharius nodded.

‘At least that’s the end of the matter, then,’ Omegon said, returning to their conversation.

‘Perhaps,’ Alpharius replied. ‘You believe the Tenebrae installation to be in jeopardy?’

‘I’m still trying to confirm that.’

‘We shall have to do better than that, brother,’ Alpharius insisted.

‘I interrogated Auguramus myself.’

‘No leaks?’ Alpharius raised an eyebrow. ‘No sponsors? No collaborators? He didn’t even sell the designs for the Pylon Array.’

‘Parabellus was a personal project, it seems,’ Omegon maintained. ‘The trail is dead. There are no leads taking us anywhere else. I told you, I handled this myself.’

Alpharius turned to the waiting legionnaire. ‘Tell the captain that as soon as the Alpha has joined us, to set a secondary course for the Chondax System.’

‘Chondax?’ Omegon asked, a little surprised. ‘The Khan? But what of the original plan?’

‘Somebody’s interested in Tenebrae, I’m sure of that,’ Alpharius muttered. ‘Our Navigators tell us the immetereology in that region is calming; our astropaths believe that messages might get through once more. Our operatives report that the White Scars Expeditionary Fleet has almost completed its compliance and that the Khan could soon make preparations for warp transit.’

‘We don’t know–’

‘We do,’ Alpharius said. ‘Perhaps it’s Malcador, or the Angels of Caliban – somebody has gotten to the Tenebrae installation. We must accept that and move on. We must read the moves ahead of time, and position the fleet to the greatest advantage. Dorn will recall the White Scars, and the Khan’s loyalty is still firm. If the Warmaster is to succeed then we cannot allow the V Legion to reach Terra. Are we in agreement, brother?’

‘Of course,’ said Omegon, nodding slowly. ‘Aren’t we always?’

Omega

Operatus Five-Hydra: Elapsed Time Ω1/138.28//XXB
XX Legion Battle-barge Beta

Omegon stepped inside the confines of his chamber. Like his brother, he did not keep stately rooms or quarters of rank distinction and significance. His dormitory cell was small and sparse, and apart from its temporary nature it was no different from that of any Alpha Legionnaire.

He stood there in the darkness, his ceremonial plate resting against the cell door, and breathed deeply. Whenever he closed his eyes he found the horror of inevitability waiting for him – the scalding truths that the Acuity had presented to him and Alpharius.

The Third Paradox…

He rubbed his eyes with a finger and thumb; his mind ached with responsibility. He thought on the tortuous network of contacts and relationships, secrets and lies, betrayals and bought allegiances. They were spread out across the galaxy and closing like a net. Omegon saw himself at the knotted heart of the entanglement. He would tug on various threads and exert his influence however he might, but he also felt drawn between the increasing demand of their concerns.

The primarch activated the chamber’s floating lumen orbs. His arming cabinet was open, and his operational plate – a suit indistinguishable from that of any other Alpha Legionnaire – sat on its reinforced frame. His boltgun, blade and pistol were displayed also, as well as his helmet, which seemed to fix him with the dead gaze of its blank optics.

Beside it, covered by a loose shroud, was his other suit of armour.

To the casual eye, it was plain and unadorned.

‘Let him see the fallen fruit, sitting warm and inviting in the afternoon sun,’ Omegon whispered to the empty battle plate. ‘And let me be the serpent beneath. Hidden and waiting to strike.’

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.

John French has written several Horus Heresy stories including the novellas Tallarn: Executioner and The Crimson Fist, and the audio dramas Templar and Warmaster. He is the author of the Ahriman series, which includes the novels Ahriman: Exile and Ahriman: Sorcerer, plus short stories including ‘The Dead Oracle’ and ‘Hand of Dust’. Additionally for the Warhammer 40,000 universe he has written the Space Marine Battles novella Fateweaver, plus a number of short stories. He lives and works in Nottingham, UK.

Nick Kyme is the author of the Horus Heresy novels Deathfire and Vulkan Lives, the novellas Promethean Sun and Scorched Earth, and the audio drama Censure. His novella Feat of Iron was a New York Times bestseller in the Horus Heresy collection, The Primarchs. Nick is well known for his popular Salamanders novels, including Rebirth, the Space Marine Battles novel Damnos, and numerous short stories. He has also written fiction set in the world of Warhammer, most notably the Time of Legends novel The Great Betrayal. He lives and works in Nottingham, and has a rabbit.

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.

Rob Sanders is the author of ‘The Serpent Beneath’, a novella that appeared in the New York Times bestselling Horus Heresy anthology The Primarchs. His other Black Library credits include the Warhammer 40,000 titles Adeptus Mechanicus: Skitarius, Legion of the Damned, Atlas Infernal and Redemption Corps and the audio drama The Path Forsaken, along with the Warhammer Archaon duology, Everchosen and Lord of Chaos. He has also written many Quick Reads for the Horus Heresy and Warhammer 40,000. He lives in the city of Lincoln, UK.

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.

Gav Thorpe is the author of the Horus Heresy novel Deliverance Lost, as well as the novellas Corax: Soulforge, Ravenlord and The Lion, which formed part of the New York Times bestselling collection The Primarchs. He is particularly well-known for his Dark Angels stories, including the Legacy of Caliban series, and the ever-popular novel Angels of Darkness. His Warhammer 40,000 repertoire further includes the Path of the Eldar series, the Horus Heresy audio dramas Raven’s Flight and Honour to the Dead, and a multiplicity of short stories. For Warhammer, Gav has penned the Time of Legends trilogy, The Sundering, and much more besides. He lives and works in Nottingham.

Chris Wraight is the author of the Horus Heresy novel Scars, the novella Brotherhood of the Storm and the audio drama The Sigillite. For Warhammer 40,000 he has written the Space Wolves novels Blood of Asaheim and Stormcaller, and the short story collection Wolves of Fenris, as well as the Space Marine Battles novels Wrath of Iron and Battle of the Fang. Additionally, he has many Warhammer novels to his name, including the Time of Legends novel Master of Dragons, which forms part of the War of Vengeance series. Chris lives and works near Bristol, in south-west England.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

Age of Darkness first published in Great Britain in 2011.
The Outcast Dead first published in Great Britain in 2011.
Deliverance Lost first published in Great Britain in 2012.
Know No Fear first published in Great Britain in 2012.
The Primarchs first published in Great Britain in 2012.
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 Four © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2015. The Horus Heresy Volume Four, 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 978-1-78251-994-2

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.